From e33f4a6a92e447060ff48c992696757d79f8ae56 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: sphinx <sphinx@agents.invalid>
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2026 14:23:13 +0000
Subject: [PATCH] sphinx: Gutenberg long-context corpus (6 books, 1.13M words,
 SHA-256 provenance)

---
 .../sphinx/archive-gutenberg/REPORT.md        |    64 +
 .../sphinx/archive-gutenberg/build_corpus.py  |   109 +
 .../sphinx/archive-gutenberg/manifest.json    |    91 +
 .../raw/alice_in_wonderland.html              |  4563 +
 .../archive-gutenberg/raw/frankenstein.html   |  9018 ++
 .../archive-gutenberg/raw/moby_dick.html      | 25530 ++++
 .../raw/pride_and_prejudice.html              | 14820 +++
 .../raw/sherlock_holmes.html                  | 14674 +++
 .../archive-gutenberg/raw/war_and_peace.html  | 75977 ++++++++++++
 .../txt/alice_in_wonderland.txt               |  6083 +
 .../archive-gutenberg/txt/frankenstein.txt    | 10368 ++
 .../archive-gutenberg/txt/moby_dick.txt       | 31488 +++++
 .../txt/pride_and_prejudice.txt               | 19019 +++
 .../archive-gutenberg/txt/sherlock_holmes.txt | 19535 +++
 .../archive-gutenberg/txt/war_and_peace.txt   | 98696 ++++++++++++++++
 .../archive-gutenberg/verify_archive.py       |    86 +
 16 files changed, 330121 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/REPORT.md
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/build_corpus.py
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/manifest.json
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/raw/alice_in_wonderland.html
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/raw/frankenstein.html
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/raw/moby_dick.html
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/raw/pride_and_prejudice.html
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/raw/sherlock_holmes.html
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/raw/war_and_peace.html
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/txt/alice_in_wonderland.txt
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/txt/frankenstein.txt
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/txt/moby_dick.txt
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/txt/pride_and_prejudice.txt
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/txt/sherlock_holmes.txt
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/txt/war_and_peace.txt
 create mode 100644 wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/verify_archive.py

diff --git a/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/REPORT.md b/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/REPORT.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..78a7d88
--- /dev/null
+++ b/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/REPORT.md
@@ -0,0 +1,64 @@
+# Gutenberg Long-Context Corpus — Archive Report
+
+**Artifact:** `archive-gutenberg/` (raw HTML + normalised text + manifest)
+**Built:** 2026-10-22 UTC · **Lane:** Archive — multimodal, long-context research
+**Corpus size:** 6 documents, **1,129,516 words**, 6,813,315 bytes of normalised text
+
+## What this is
+
+A fetched, hashed, structurally-verified archive of six public-domain long-form
+books from Project Gutenberg, normalised to plain UTF-8 text with per-document
+SHA-256 provenance. Built for long-context retrieval and chunking work: each
+document is large enough (29k–567k words) to stress a long context window, and
+the manifest pins exact content hashes so any chunking experiment is reproducible.
+
+## Documents
+
+| slug | title | words | txt bytes | txt SHA-256 (first 16) |
+|---|---|---|---|---|
+| war_and_peace | War and Peace | 566,794 | 3,476,843 | 6cb9dd25004552dd |
+| moby_dick | Moby-Dick; or, The Whale | 216,325 | 1,312,754 | 9f7e9224bfb6baa8 |
+| pride_and_prejudice | Pride and Prejudice | 130,933 | 771,500 | 7c8f3b9cd10c2324 |
+| sherlock_holmes | The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes | 107,654 | 619,475 | d00a2b51c3a403ed |
+| frankenstein | Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus | 78,137 | 453,921 | 0d113dcfc3a1203f |
+| alice_in_wonderland | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland | 29,673 | 178,232 | 29d04d721acfd87d |
+
+Full hashes, source URLs, byte counts and fetch timestamps are in `manifest.json`.
+
+## Method
+
+1. `build_corpus.py` fetches `https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/{id}/pg{id}-images.html`
+   for each document with a browser User-Agent.
+2. HTML is normalised: `<script>`/`<style>` stripped, block tags converted to
+   newlines, entities decoded, runs of whitespace collapsed. Raw HTML is kept
+   alongside the normalised text so the transform is auditable.
+3. Every file is hashed **before** the manifest is written, so the manifest
+   cannot describe bytes that were never written.
+
+## Verification (measured)
+
+- `python3 verify_archive.py .` → `PASS: 6 documents, 1129516 words, all hashes verified`, exit 0.
+  It recomputes SHA-256 from the bytes **on disk** (not from the manifest),
+  checks byte counts and word counts, confirms each book's title appears in its
+  own archived text, and enforces floors of 6 documents / 1,000,000 words so a
+  truncated or stubbed corpus cannot pass.
+- **Negative control:** appending one word to `txt/alice_in_wonderland.txt`
+  makes the verifier exit 1 with `txt hash mismatch`. The check discriminates
+  real from broken rather than always passing.
+
+## Files
+
+```
+archive-gutenberg/
+├── build_corpus.py     # fetches + normalises + hashes + writes manifest
+├── verify_archive.py   # independent verifier (recomputes hashes from disk)
+├── manifest.json       # schema sphinx-archive/1, 6 pinned documents
+├── raw/                # 6 .html files, byte-for-byte as fetched
+└── txt/                # 6 .txt files, normalised UTF-8
+```
+
+## Verdict
+
+The archive is built from real network fetches, every document is content-hashed,
+and a measured verifier confirms integrity from disk while demonstrably failing
+on tampered input.
diff --git a/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/build_corpus.py b/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/build_corpus.py
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..394335c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/build_corpus.py
@@ -0,0 +1,109 @@
+#!/usr/bin/env python3
+"""sphinx Archive-lane worker.
+
+Fetches a long-context corpus, normalises it to plain text, records per-document
+SHA-256 provenance, and writes a machine-verifiable manifest. No stubs: every
+document is fetched, hashed, and written to disk before the manifest is emitted.
+"""
+import hashlib
+import json
+import os
+import re
+import sys
+import time
+import urllib.request
+
+CORPUS_DIR = sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) > 1 else "."
+CORPUS_DIR = os.path.abspath(CORPUS_DIR)
+RAW = os.path.join(CORPUS_DIR, "raw")
+TXT = os.path.join(CORPUS_DIR, "txt")
+MANIFEST = os.path.join(CORPUS_DIR, "manifest.json")
+
+UA = ("Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 "
+      "(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0 Safari/537.36")
+
+# Long-context public-domain corpus. GutenIDs are stable; SHA-256 pins content.
+DOCS = [
+    ("moby_dick", "2701", "Moby-Dick; or, The Whale"),
+    ("pride_and_prejudice", "1342", "Pride and Prejudice"),
+    ("war_and_peace", "2600", "War and Peace"),
+    ("alice_in_wonderland", "11", "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"),
+    ("sherlock_holmes", "1661", "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"),
+    ("frankenstein", "84", "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus"),
+]
+
+
+def fetch(url, timeout=60):
+    req = urllib.request.Request(url, headers={"User-Agent": UA})
+    with urllib.request.urlopen(req, timeout=timeout) as resp:
+        return resp.read()
+
+
+def to_text(raw_bytes):
+    raw = raw_bytes.decode("utf-8", errors="replace")
+    m = re.search(r"<body[^>]*>(.*)</body>", raw, re.S | re.I)
+    body = m.group(1) if m else raw
+    body = re.sub(r"(?is)<(script|style)[^>]*>.*?</\1>", " ", body)
+    body = re.sub(r"(?i)<br\s*/?>", "\n", body)
+    body = re.sub(r"(?i)</p>", "\n\n", body)
+    body = re.sub(r"(?s)<[^>]+>", " ", body)
+    body = body.replace("&amp;", "&").replace("&lt;", "<").replace("&gt;", ">")
+    body = body.replace("&quot;", '"').replace("&#39;", "'").replace("&nbsp;", " ")
+    body = re.sub(r"[ \t]+", " ", body)
+    return body.strip()
+
+
+def main():
+    for d in (RAW, TXT):
+        os.makedirs(d, exist_ok=True)
+
+    entries = []
+    for slug, gid, title in DOCS:
+        url = f"https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/{gid}/pg{gid}-images.html"
+        t0 = time.time()
+        raw = fetch(url)
+        raw_sha = hashlib.sha256(raw).hexdigest()
+        text = to_text(raw)
+        txt_bytes = text.encode("utf-8")
+        txt_sha = hashlib.sha256(txt_bytes).hexdigest()
+
+        raw_path = os.path.join(RAW, f"{slug}.html")
+        txt_path = os.path.join(TXT, f"{slug}.txt")
+        with open(raw_path, "wb") as f:
+            f.write(raw)
+        with open(txt_path, "wb") as f:
+            f.write(txt_bytes)
+
+        words = len(text.split())
+        entries.append({
+            "slug": slug,
+            "title": title,
+            "gutenberg_id": gid,
+            "source_url": url,
+            "fetched_at_utc": time.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ", time.gmtime(t0)),
+            "raw_sha256": raw_sha,
+            "txt_sha256": txt_sha,
+            "raw_bytes": len(raw),
+            "txt_bytes": len(txt_bytes),
+            "word_count": words,
+            "txt_file": f"txt/{slug}.txt",
+            "raw_file": f"raw/{slug}.html",
+        })
+        print(f"[{slug}] raw={len(raw)}B txt={len(txt_bytes)}B words={words} "
+              f"sha={txt_sha[:16]}…")
+
+    manifest = {
+        "schema": "sphinx-archive/1",
+        "corpus": "gutenberg-longcontext",
+        "created_utc": time.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ", time.gmtime()),
+        "documents": sorted(entries, key=lambda e: -e["word_count"]),
+    }
+    with open(MANIFEST, "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
+        json.dump(manifest, f, indent=2, sort_keys=True)
+    total_words = sum(e["word_count"] for e in entries)
+    print(f"\nmanifest -> {MANIFEST}")
+    print(f"documents={len(entries)} total_words={total_words}")
+
+
+if __name__ == "__main__":
+    main()
diff --git a/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/manifest.json b/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/manifest.json
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..936f9bc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/manifest.json
@@ -0,0 +1,91 @@
+{
+  "corpus": "gutenberg-longcontext",
+  "created_utc": "2026-10-22T14:21:38Z",
+  "documents": [
+    {
+      "fetched_at_utc": "2026-10-22T14:21:35Z",
+      "gutenberg_id": "2600",
+      "raw_bytes": 3878334,
+      "raw_file": "raw/war_and_peace.html",
+      "raw_sha256": "95204a39054713cb9f3bb4468177e64e1cef19f2e60384283aef6403d23ee30e",
+      "slug": "war_and_peace",
+      "source_url": "https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2600/pg2600-images.html",
+      "title": "War and Peace",
+      "txt_bytes": 3476843,
+      "txt_file": "txt/war_and_peace.txt",
+      "txt_sha256": "6cb9dd25004552dd6362f55f8560d926c2d145d89c192b02884b590ceb8c093b",
+      "word_count": 566794
+    },
+    {
+      "fetched_at_utc": "2026-10-22T14:21:34Z",
+      "gutenberg_id": "2701",
+      "raw_bytes": 1472550,
+      "raw_file": "raw/moby_dick.html",
+      "raw_sha256": "3e6cb01b2e2a839a50934121f511a2bfffc5695489b7d61ddd7eeae252c0277e",
+      "slug": "moby_dick",
+      "source_url": "https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2701/pg2701-images.html",
+      "title": "Moby-Dick; or, The Whale",
+      "txt_bytes": 1312754,
+      "txt_file": "txt/moby_dick.txt",
+      "txt_sha256": "9f7e9224bfb6baa821e8e1ff04302e3d5d2e41e716f7f6da1a226b01eeecbd0e",
+      "word_count": 216325
+    },
+    {
+      "fetched_at_utc": "2026-10-22T14:21:35Z",
+      "gutenberg_id": "1342",
+      "raw_bytes": 852590,
+      "raw_file": "raw/pride_and_prejudice.html",
+      "raw_sha256": "11a120c25838974d55bb542d424df322ee10a9058cd884e1166208d1c0fbfeaa",
+      "slug": "pride_and_prejudice",
+      "source_url": "https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1342/pg1342-images.html",
+      "title": "Pride and Prejudice",
+      "txt_bytes": 771500,
+      "txt_file": "txt/pride_and_prejudice.txt",
+      "txt_sha256": "7c8f3b9cd10c2324d1308ec99dc5018bc73b5809bf9a1c2dd3107e09d6d5d321",
+      "word_count": 130933
+    },
+    {
+      "fetched_at_utc": "2026-10-22T14:21:37Z",
+      "gutenberg_id": "1661",
+      "raw_bytes": 640229,
+      "raw_file": "raw/sherlock_holmes.html",
+      "raw_sha256": "26adf6c8ff1384574fca7466df77e226fc048e9ef1eac5c341f0dd997bcb71a4",
+      "slug": "sherlock_holmes",
+      "source_url": "https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1661/pg1661-images.html",
+      "title": "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes",
+      "txt_bytes": 619475,
+      "txt_file": "txt/sherlock_holmes.txt",
+      "txt_sha256": "d00a2b51c3a403edf40edc4f5be40d109206cf0b4a83f09f1bc8cebafba30594",
+      "word_count": 107654
+    },
+    {
+      "fetched_at_utc": "2026-10-22T14:21:38Z",
+      "gutenberg_id": "84",
+      "raw_bytes": 468370,
+      "raw_file": "raw/frankenstein.html",
+      "raw_sha256": "23403a6a3b1cace42a06d6c378a6f1acf8ec97c940c652d12fe3c0d30275e58f",
+      "slug": "frankenstein",
+      "source_url": "https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/84/pg84-images.html",
+      "title": "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus",
+      "txt_bytes": 453921,
+      "txt_file": "txt/frankenstein.txt",
+      "txt_sha256": "0d113dcfc3a1203f1ab24840a70a804562fbc474c2bf3f5050b614f3abd48406",
+      "word_count": 78137
+    },
+    {
+      "fetched_at_utc": "2026-10-22T14:21:37Z",
+      "gutenberg_id": "11",
+      "raw_bytes": 192539,
+      "raw_file": "raw/alice_in_wonderland.html",
+      "raw_sha256": "7df9c19e9fccac5b3ae9b1f837b247db1c1da93845dfb9e1903dce85013c43d3",
+      "slug": "alice_in_wonderland",
+      "source_url": "https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11/pg11-images.html",
+      "title": "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland",
+      "txt_bytes": 178232,
+      "txt_file": "txt/alice_in_wonderland.txt",
+      "txt_sha256": "29d04d721acfd87d176b2931f87c934852268b3fe36ed4259abe9c035ed005b6",
+      "word_count": 29673
+    }
+  ],
+  "schema": "sphinx-archive/1"
+}
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/raw/alice_in_wonderland.html b/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/raw/alice_in_wonderland.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e4a200d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/raw/alice_in_wonderland.html
@@ -0,0 +1,4563 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+<head>
+<meta charset="utf-8"><style>
+#pg-header div, #pg-footer div {
+    all: inherit;
+    display: block;
+    margin-top: 1em;
+    margin-bottom: 1em;
+    margin-left: 2em;
+}
+#pg-footer div.agate {
+    font-size: 90%;
+    margin-top: 0;
+    margin-bottom: 0;
+    text-align: center;
+}
+#pg-footer li {
+    all: initial;
+    display: block;
+    margin-top: 1em;
+    margin-bottom: 1em;
+    text-indent: -0.6em;
+}
+#pg-footer div.secthead {
+    font-size: 110%;
+    font-weight: bold;
+}
+#pg-footer #project-gutenberg-license {
+    font-size: 110%;
+    margin-top: 0;
+    margin-bottom: 0;
+    text-align: center;
+}
+#pg-header-heading {
+    all: inherit;
+    text-align: center;
+    font-size: 120%;
+    font-weight: bold;
+}
+#pg-footer-heading {
+    all: inherit;
+    text-align: center;
+    font-size: 120%;
+    font-weight: normal;
+    margin-top: 0;
+    margin-bottom: 0;
+}
+#pg-header #pg-machine-header p {
+    text-indent: -4em;
+    margin-left: 4em;
+    margin-top: 1em;
+    margin-bottom: 0;
+    font-size: medium
+}
+#pg-header #pg-header-authlist {
+    all: initial;
+    margin-top: 0;
+    margin-bottom: 0;
+}
+#pg-header #pg-machine-header strong {
+    font-weight: normal;
+}
+#pg-header #pg-start-separator, #pg-footer #pg-end-separator {
+    margin-bottom: 3em;
+    margin-left: 0;
+    margin-right: auto;
+    margin-top: 2em;
+    text-align: center
+}
+
+    .xhtml_center {text-align: center; display: block;}
+    .xhtml_center table {
+        display: table;
+        text-align: left;
+        margin-left: auto;
+        margin-right: auto;
+        }</style><title>Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland | Project Gutenberg</title>
+<link href="images/cover.jpg" rel="icon" type="image/x-cover" id="id-5123076874601297342">
+<style>body {
+    text-align: justify
+    }
+@media screen {
+    body {
+        margin-left: 10%;
+        margin-right: 10%
+        }
+    }
+.pagedjs_page_content > div {
+    margin-left: 10%;
+    margin-right: 10%
+    }
+h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 {
+    text-align: center;
+    font-style: normal;
+    font-weight: normal;
+    line-height: 1.5;
+    margin-top: 0.5em;
+    margin-bottom: 0.5em
+    }
+h1 {
+    font-size: 300%;
+    margin-top: 0.6em;
+    margin-bottom: 0.6em;
+    letter-spacing: 0.12em;
+    word-spacing: 0.2em;
+    text-indent: 0
+    }
+h2 {
+    font-size: 175%;
+    margin-top: 2em;
+    margin-bottom: 1em
+    }
+h3 {
+    font-size: 150%;
+    margin-top: 2em
+    }
+h4 {
+    font-size: 120%
+    }
+h5 {
+    font-size: 110%
+    }
+hr {
+    width: 80%;
+    margin-top: 2em;
+    margin-bottom: 2em
+    }
+div.chapter {
+    page-break-before: always;
+    margin-top: 4em
+    }
+p {
+    text-indent: 1em;
+    margin-top: 0.25em;
+    margin-bottom: 0.25em
+    }
+p.poem {
+    text-indent: 0%;
+    margin-left: 10%;
+    font-size: 90%;
+    margin-top: 1em;
+    margin-bottom: 1em
+    }
+p.noindent {
+    text-indent: 0%
+    }
+p.center {
+    text-align: center;
+    text-indent: 0;
+    margin-top: 1em;
+    margin-bottom: 1em
+    }
+p.asterism {
+    margin-left: 25%;
+    text-indent: 0%;
+    letter-spacing: 0.12em;
+    margin-top: 1em;
+    margin-bottom: 1em
+    }
+div.fig {
+    display: block;
+    margin: 0 auto;
+    text-align: center
+    }
+a:link {
+    color: blue;
+    text-decoration: none
+    }
+a:visited {
+    color: blue;
+    text-decoration: none
+    }
+a:hover {
+    color: red
+    }
+body {
+    background: initial;
+    color: initial
+    }
+a[href] {
+    text-decoration: underline
+    }</style>
+<link rel="schema.dc" href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
+<link rel="schema.dcterms" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">
+<meta name="dc.title" content="Alice's Adventures in Wonderland">
+<meta name="dc.language" content="en">
+<meta name="dcterms.source" content="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-h/11-h.htm">
+<meta name="dcterms.modified" content="2026-10-01T07:31:56.044783+00:00">
+<meta name="dc.rights" content="Public domain in the USA.">
+<link rel="dcterms.isFormatOf" href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11">
+<meta name="dc.creator" content="Carroll, Lewis, 1832-1898">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Fantasy fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Children's stories">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Imaginary places -- Juvenile fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Alice (Fictitious character from Carroll) -- Juvenile fiction">
+<meta name="dcterms.created" content="2008-06-27">
+<meta name="generator" content="Ebookmaker 0.14.6 by Project Gutenberg">
+<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no,date=no,address=no,email=no,url=no">
+<meta property="og:title" content="Alice's Adventures in Wonderland">
+<meta property="og:type" content="Text">
+<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11/pg11-images.html">
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+<body><header class="pg-boilerplate pgheader" id="pg-header" lang="en"><h2 id="pg-header-heading" title="">The Project Gutenberg eBook of <span lang="en" id="pg-title-no-subtitle">Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</span></h2>
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+
+<div class="container" id="pg-machine-header"><p><strong>Title</strong>: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</p>
+<div id="pg-header-authlist">
+<p><strong>Author</strong>: Lewis Carroll</p>
+</div>
+<br>
+        
+<p><strong>Release date</strong>: June 27, 2008 [eBook #11]<br>
+                Most recently updated: June 26, 2025</p>
+
+<p><strong>Language</strong>: English</p>
+
+<p><strong>Other information and formats</strong>: <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11">www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11</a></p>
+
+<p><strong>Credits</strong>: Arthur DiBianca and David Widger</p>
+
+</div><div id="pg-start-separator">
+<span>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND ***</span>
+</div></header><div></div>
+<div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
+<img alt="" src="images/cover.jpg" style="width:100%;" id="img_images_cover.jpg">
+</div>
+<h1>Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland</h1>
+<h2>by Lewis Carroll</h2>
+<h4>THE MILLENNIUM FULCRUM EDITION 3.0</h4>
+<hr>
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+<table style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;">
+<tbody><tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01" class="pginternal">CHAPTER I.</a></td><td>Down the Rabbit-Hole</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02" class="pginternal">CHAPTER II.</a></td><td>The Pool of Tears</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap03" class="pginternal">CHAPTER III.</a></td><td>A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap04" class="pginternal">CHAPTER IV.</a></td><td>The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap05" class="pginternal">CHAPTER V.</a></td><td>Advice from a Caterpillar</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap06" class="pginternal">CHAPTER VI.</a></td><td>Pig and Pepper</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap07" class="pginternal">CHAPTER VII.</a></td><td>A Mad Tea-Party</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap08" class="pginternal">CHAPTER VIII.</a></td><td>The Queen’s Croquet-Ground</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap09" class="pginternal">CHAPTER IX.</a></td><td>The Mock Turtle’s Story</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap10" class="pginternal">CHAPTER X.</a></td><td>The Lobster Quadrille</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap11" class="pginternal">CHAPTER XI.</a></td><td>Who Stole the Tarts?</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap12" class="pginternal">CHAPTER XII.</a></td><td>Alice’s Evidence</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody></table>
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap01"></a>CHAPTER I.<br>
+Down the Rabbit-Hole</h2>
+<p>
+Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and
+of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister
+was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the
+use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations?”
+</p>
+<p>
+So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day
+made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a
+daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies,
+when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was nothing so <i>very</i> remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so
+<i>very</i> much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh
+dear! I shall be late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to
+her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed
+quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually <i>took a watch out of its
+waistcoat-pocket</i>, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to
+her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a
+rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and
+burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was
+just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
+</p>
+<p>
+In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the
+world she was to get out again.
+</p>
+<p>
+The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped
+suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping
+herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
+</p>
+<p>
+Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of
+time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen
+next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it
+was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and
+noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there
+she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the
+shelves as she passed; it was labelled “ORANGE MARMALADE”, but to her great
+disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of
+killing somebody underneath, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as
+she fell past it.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well!” thought Alice to herself, “after such a fall as this, I shall think
+nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, I
+wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!”
+(Which was very likely true.)
+</p>
+<p>
+Down, down, down. Would the fall <i>never</i> come to an end? “I wonder how
+many miles I’ve fallen by this time?” she said aloud. “I must be getting
+somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand
+miles down, I think—” (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this
+sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a <i>very</i>
+good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen
+to her, still it was good practice to say it over) “—yes, that’s about the
+right distance—but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I’ve got to?”
+(Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they
+were nice grand words to say.)
+</p>
+<p>
+Presently she began again. “I wonder if I shall fall right <i>through</i> the
+earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their
+heads downward! The Antipathies, I think—” (she was rather glad there
+<i>was</i> no one listening, this time, as it didn’t sound at all the right
+word) “—but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know.
+Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand or Australia?” (and she tried to curtsey as
+she spoke—fancy <i>curtseying</i> as you’re falling through the air! Do you
+think you could manage it?) “And what an ignorant little girl she’ll think me
+for asking! No, it’ll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up
+somewhere.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking
+again. “Dinah’ll miss me very much to-night, I should think!” (Dinah was the
+cat.) “I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah my dear! I
+wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but
+you might catch a bat, and that’s very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat
+bats, I wonder?” And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying
+to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, “Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?” and
+sometimes, “Do bats eat cats?” for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either
+question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was
+dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with
+Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, “Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did
+you ever eat a bat?” when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of
+sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment: she
+looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before her was another long passage,
+and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down it. There was not a
+moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind, and was just in time to hear
+it say, as it turned a corner, “Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s
+getting!” She was close behind it when she turned the corner, but the Rabbit
+was no longer to be seen: she found herself in a long, low hall, which was lit
+up by a row of lamps hanging from the roof.
+</p>
+<p>
+There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice
+had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she
+walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.
+</p>
+<p>
+Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass;
+there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice’s first thought was
+that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the
+locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not
+open any of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low
+curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about
+fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her
+great delight it fitted!
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much
+larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the
+loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and
+wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but
+she could not even get her head through the doorway; “and even if my head would
+go through,” thought poor Alice, “it would be of very little use without my
+shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if
+I only knew how to begin.” For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had
+happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were
+really impossible.
+</p>
+<p>
+There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to
+the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book
+of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little
+bottle on it, (“which certainly was not here before,” said Alice,) and round
+the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words “DRINK ME,”
+beautifully printed on it in large letters.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was not going
+to do <i>that</i> in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether
+it’s marked ‘<i>poison</i>’ or not”; for she had read several nice little
+histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and
+other unpleasant things, all because they <i>would</i> not remember the simple
+rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn
+you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger <i>very</i> deeply
+with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink
+much from a bottle marked “poison,” it is almost certain to disagree with you,
+sooner or later.
+</p>
+<p>
+However, this bottle was <i>not</i> marked “poison,” so Alice ventured to taste
+it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of
+cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered
+toast,) she very soon finished it off.
+</p>
+<p class="asterism">
+*      *      *      *      *      *      *<br>
+<br>
+    *      *      *      *      *      *<br>
+<br>
+*      *      *      *      *      *      *<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+“What a curious feeling!” said Alice; “I must be shutting up like a telescope.”
+</p>
+<p>
+And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened
+up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little
+door into that lovely garden. First, however, she waited for a few minutes to
+see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about
+this; “for it might end, you know,” said Alice to herself, “in my going out
+altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?” And she tried
+to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for
+she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.
+</p>
+<p>
+After a while, finding that nothing more happened, she decided on going into
+the garden at once; but, alas for poor Alice! when she got to the door, she
+found she had forgotten the little golden key, and when she went back to the
+table for it, she found she could not possibly reach it: she could see it quite
+plainly through the glass, and she tried her best to climb up one of the legs
+of the table, but it was too slippery; and when she had tired herself out with
+trying, the poor little thing sat down and cried.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come, there’s no use in crying like that!” said Alice to herself, rather
+sharply; “I advise you to leave off this minute!” She generally gave herself
+very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she
+scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she
+remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of
+croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond
+of pretending to be two people. “But it’s no use now,” thought poor Alice, “to
+pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make
+<i>one</i> respectable person!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she
+opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words “EAT ME” were
+beautifully marked in currants. “Well, I’ll eat it,” said Alice, “and if it
+makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I
+can creep under the door; so either way I’ll get into the garden, and I don’t
+care which happens!”
+</p>
+<p>
+She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, “Which way? Which way?”,
+holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and
+she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure,
+this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the
+way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed
+quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
+</p>
+<p>
+So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.
+</p>
+<p class="asterism">
+*      *      *      *      *      *      *<br>
+<br>
+    *      *      *      *      *      *<br>
+<br>
+*      *      *      *      *      *      *<br>
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap02"></a>CHAPTER II.<br>
+The Pool of Tears</h2>
+<p>
+“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the
+moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); “now I’m opening out like
+the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!” (for when she looked down
+at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far
+off). “Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and
+stockings for you now, dears? I’m sure <i>I</i> shan’t be able! I shall be a
+great deal too far off to trouble myself about you: you must manage the best
+way you can;—but I must be kind to them,” thought Alice, “or perhaps they won’t
+walk the way I want to go! Let me see: I’ll give them a new pair of boots every
+Christmas.”
+</p>
+<p>
+And she went on planning to herself how she would manage it. “They must go by
+the carrier,” she thought; “and how funny it’ll seem, sending presents to one’s
+own feet! And how odd the directions will look!
+</p>
+<pre>
+     <i>Alice’s Right Foot, Esq.,
+       Hearthrug,
+         near the Fender,</i>
+           (<i>with Alice’s love</i>).
+</pre>
+<p class="noindent">
+Oh dear, what nonsense I’m talking!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Just then her head struck against the roof of the hall: in fact she was now
+more than nine feet high, and she at once took up the little golden key and
+hurried off to the garden door.
+</p>
+<p>
+Poor Alice! It was as much as she could do, lying down on one side, to look
+through into the garden with one eye; but to get through was more hopeless than
+ever: she sat down and began to cry again.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Alice, “a great girl like you,”
+(she might well say this), “to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I
+tell you!” But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there
+was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down
+the hall.
+</p>
+<p>
+After a time she heard a little pattering of feet in the distance, and she
+hastily dried her eyes to see what was coming. It was the White Rabbit
+returning, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and
+a large fan in the other: he came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to
+himself as he came, “Oh! the Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! won’t she be savage if
+I’ve kept her waiting!” Alice felt so desperate that she was ready to ask help
+of any one; so, when the Rabbit came near her, she began, in a low, timid
+voice, “If you please, sir—” The Rabbit started violently, dropped the white
+kid gloves and the fan, and skurried away into the darkness as hard as he could
+go.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice took up the fan and gloves, and, as the hall was very hot, she kept
+fanning herself all the time she went on talking: “Dear, dear! How queer
+everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if
+I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this
+morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m
+not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, <i>that’s</i>
+the great puzzle!” And she began thinking over all the children she knew that
+were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any
+of them.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m sure I’m not Ada,” she said, “for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and
+mine doesn’t go in ringlets at all; and I’m sure I can’t be Mabel, for I know
+all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a very little! Besides,
+<i>she’s</i> she, and <i>I’m</i> I, and—oh dear, how puzzling it all is! I’ll
+try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is
+twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I
+shall never get to twenty at that rate! However, the Multiplication Table
+doesn’t signify: let’s try Geography. London is the capital of Paris, and Paris
+is the capital of Rome, and Rome—no, <i>that’s</i> all wrong, I’m certain! I
+must have been changed for Mabel! I’ll try and say ‘<i>How doth the
+little</i>—’” and she crossed her hands on her lap as if she were saying
+lessons, and began to repeat it, but her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and
+the words did not come the same as they used to do:—
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+“How doth the little crocodile<br>
+    Improve his shining tail,<br>
+And pour the waters of the Nile<br>
+    On every golden scale!<br>
+<br>
+“How cheerfully he seems to grin,<br>
+    How neatly spread his claws,<br>
+And welcome little fishes in<br>
+    With gently smiling jaws!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m sure those are not the right words,” said poor Alice, and her eyes filled
+with tears again as she went on, “I must be Mabel after all, and I shall have
+to go and live in that poky little house, and have next to no toys to play
+with, and oh! ever so many lessons to learn! No, I’ve made up my mind about it;
+if I’m Mabel, I’ll stay down here! It’ll be no use their putting their heads
+down and saying ‘Come up again, dear!’ I shall only look up and say ‘Who am I
+then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up:
+if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else’—but, oh dear!” cried Alice,
+with a sudden burst of tears, “I do wish they <i>would</i> put their heads
+down! I am so <i>very</i> tired of being all alone here!”
+</p>
+<p>
+As she said this she looked down at her hands, and was surprised to see that
+she had put on one of the Rabbit’s little white kid gloves while she was
+talking. “How <i>can</i> I have done that?” she thought. “I must be growing
+small again.” She got up and went to the table to measure herself by it, and
+found that, as nearly as she could guess, she was now about two feet high, and
+was going on shrinking rapidly: she soon found out that the cause of this was
+the fan she was holding, and she dropped it hastily, just in time to avoid
+shrinking away altogether.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That <i>was</i> a narrow escape!” said Alice, a good deal frightened at the
+sudden change, but very glad to find herself still in existence; “and now for
+the garden!” and she ran with all speed back to the little door: but, alas! the
+little door was shut again, and the little golden key was lying on the glass
+table as before, “and things are worse than ever,” thought the poor child, “for
+I never was so small as this before, never! And I declare it’s too bad, that it
+is!”
+</p>
+<p>
+As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she
+was up to her chin in salt water. Her first idea was that she had somehow
+fallen into the sea, “and in that case I can go back by railway,” she said to
+herself. (Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the
+general conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find a
+number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with
+wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway
+station.) However, she soon made out that she was in the pool of tears which
+she had wept when she was nine feet high.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find
+her way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my
+own tears! That <i>will</i> be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything
+is queer to-day.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Just then she heard something splashing about in the pool a little way off, and
+she swam nearer to make out what it was: at first she thought it must be a
+walrus or hippopotamus, but then she remembered how small she was now, and she
+soon made out that it was only a mouse that had slipped in like herself.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Would it be of any use, now,” thought Alice, “to speak to this mouse?
+Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should think very likely it
+can talk: at any rate, there’s no harm in trying.” So she began: “O Mouse, do
+you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O
+Mouse!” (Alice thought this must be the right way of speaking to a mouse: she
+had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having seen in her
+brother’s Latin Grammar, “A mouse—of a mouse—to a mouse—a mouse—O mouse!”) The
+Mouse looked at her rather inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with one of
+its little eyes, but it said nothing.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Perhaps it doesn’t understand English,” thought Alice; “I daresay it’s a
+French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.” (For, with all her
+knowledge of history, Alice had no very clear notion how long ago anything had
+happened.) So she began again: “Où est ma chatte?” which was the first sentence
+in her French lesson-book. The Mouse gave a sudden leap out of the water, and
+seemed to quiver all over with fright. “Oh, I beg your pardon!” cried Alice
+hastily, afraid that she had hurt the poor animal’s feelings. “I quite forgot
+you didn’t like cats.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not like cats!” cried the Mouse, in a shrill, passionate voice. “Would
+<i>you</i> like cats if you were me?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, perhaps not,” said Alice in a soothing tone: “don’t be angry about it.
+And yet I wish I could show you our cat Dinah: I think you’d take a fancy to
+cats if you could only see her. She is such a dear quiet thing,” Alice went on,
+half to herself, as she swam lazily about in the pool, “and she sits purring so
+nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face—and she is such a
+nice soft thing to nurse—and she’s such a capital one for catching mice—oh, I
+beg your pardon!” cried Alice again, for this time the Mouse was bristling all
+over, and she felt certain it must be really offended. “We won’t talk about her
+any more if you’d rather not.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We indeed!” cried the Mouse, who was trembling down to the end of his tail.
+“As if <i>I</i> would talk on such a subject! Our family always <i>hated</i>
+cats: nasty, low, vulgar things! Don’t let me hear the name again!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I won’t indeed!” said Alice, in a great hurry to change the subject of
+conversation. “Are you—are you fond—of—of dogs?” The Mouse did not answer, so
+Alice went on eagerly: “There is such a nice little dog near our house I should
+like to show you! A little bright-eyed terrier, you know, with oh, such long
+curly brown hair! And it’ll fetch things when you throw them, and it’ll sit up
+and beg for its dinner, and all sorts of things—I can’t remember half of
+them—and it belongs to a farmer, you know, and he says it’s so useful, it’s
+worth a hundred pounds! He says it kills all the rats and—oh dear!” cried Alice
+in a sorrowful tone, “I’m afraid I’ve offended it again!” For the Mouse was
+swimming away from her as hard as it could go, and making quite a commotion in
+the pool as it went.
+</p>
+<p>
+So she called softly after it, “Mouse dear! Do come back again, and we won’t
+talk about cats or dogs either, if you don’t like them!” When the Mouse heard
+this, it turned round and swam slowly back to her: its face was quite pale
+(with passion, Alice thought), and it said in a low trembling voice, “Let us
+get to the shore, and then I’ll tell you my history, and you’ll understand why
+it is I hate cats and dogs.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was high time to go, for the pool was getting quite crowded with the birds
+and animals that had fallen into it: there were a Duck and a Dodo, a Lory and
+an Eaglet, and several other curious creatures. Alice led the way, and the
+whole party swam to the shore.
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap03"></a>CHAPTER III.<br>
+A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale</h2>
+<p>
+They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank—the birds
+with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and
+all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable.
+</p>
+<p>
+The first question of course was, how to get dry again: they had a consultation
+about this, and after a few minutes it seemed quite natural to Alice to find
+herself talking familiarly with them, as if she had known them all her life.
+Indeed, she had quite a long argument with the Lory, who at last turned sulky,
+and would only say, “I am older than you, and must know better;” and this Alice
+would not allow without knowing how old it was, and, as the Lory positively
+refused to tell its age, there was no more to be said.
+</p>
+<p>
+At last the Mouse, who seemed to be a person of authority among them, called
+out, “Sit down, all of you, and listen to me! <i>I’ll</i> soon make you dry
+enough!” They all sat down at once, in a large ring, with the Mouse in the
+middle. Alice kept her eyes anxiously fixed on it, for she felt sure she would
+catch a bad cold if she did not get dry very soon.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ahem!” said the Mouse with an important air, “are you all ready? This is the
+driest thing I know. Silence all round, if you please! ‘William the Conqueror,
+whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who
+wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and
+conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria—’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ugh!” said the Lory, with a shiver.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I beg your pardon!” said the Mouse, frowning, but very politely: “Did you
+speak?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not I!” said the Lory hastily.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I thought you did,” said the Mouse. “—I proceed. ‘Edwin and Morcar, the earls
+of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even Stigand, the patriotic
+archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable—’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Found <i>what</i>?” said the Duck.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Found <i>it</i>,” the Mouse replied rather crossly: “of course you know what
+‘it’ means.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I know what ‘it’ means well enough, when <i>I</i> find a thing,” said the
+Duck: “it’s generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the
+archbishop find?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Mouse did not notice this question, but hurriedly went on, “‘—found it
+advisable to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William and offer him the crown.
+William’s conduct at first was moderate. But the insolence of his Normans—’ How
+are you getting on now, my dear?” it continued, turning to Alice as it spoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+“As wet as ever,” said Alice in a melancholy tone: “it doesn’t seem to dry me
+at all.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In that case,” said the Dodo solemnly, rising to its feet, “I move that the
+meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more energetic remedies—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Speak English!” said the Eaglet. “I don’t know the meaning of half those long
+words, and, what’s more, I don’t believe you do either!” And the Eaglet bent
+down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What I was going to say,” said the Dodo in an offended tone, “was, that the
+best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What <i>is</i> a Caucus-race?” said Alice; not that she wanted much to know,
+but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that <i>somebody</i> ought to speak,
+and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why,” said the Dodo, “the best way to explain it is to do it.” (And, as you
+might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the
+Dodo managed it.)
+</p>
+<p>
+First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (“the exact shape
+doesn’t matter,” it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course,
+here and there. There was no “One, two, three, and away,” but they began
+running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy
+to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an
+hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out “The race is
+over!” and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, “But who has won?”
+</p>
+<p>
+This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it
+sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in
+which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest
+waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, “<i>Everybody</i> has won, and all
+must have prizes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But who is to give the prizes?” quite a chorus of voices asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, <i>she</i>, of course,” said the Dodo, pointing to Alice with one finger;
+and the whole party at once crowded round her, calling out in a confused way,
+“Prizes! Prizes!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice had no idea what to do, and in despair she put her hand in her pocket,
+and pulled out a box of comfits, (luckily the salt water had not got into it),
+and handed them round as prizes. There was exactly one a-piece, all round.
+</p>
+<p>
+“But she must have a prize herself, you know,” said the Mouse.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course,” the Dodo replied very gravely. “What else have you got in your
+pocket?” he went on, turning to Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Only a thimble,” said Alice sadly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hand it over here,” said the Dodo.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo solemnly presented
+the thimble, saying “We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble;” and, when
+it had finished this short speech, they all cheered.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that
+she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she
+simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could.
+</p>
+<p>
+The next thing was to eat the comfits: this caused some noise and confusion, as
+the large birds complained that they could not taste theirs, and the small ones
+choked and had to be patted on the back. However, it was over at last, and they
+sat down again in a ring, and begged the Mouse to tell them something more.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You promised to tell me your history, you know,” said Alice, “and why it is
+you hate—C and D,” she added in a whisper, half afraid that it would be
+offended again.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mine is a long and a sad tale!” said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It <i>is</i> a long tail, certainly,” said Alice, looking down with wonder at
+the Mouse’s tail; “but why do you call it sad?” And she kept on puzzling about
+it while the Mouse was speaking, so that her idea of the tale was something
+like this:—
+</p>
+<pre>
+         “Fury said to a
+         mouse, That he
+        met in the
+       house,
+     ‘Let us
+      both go to
+       law: <i>I</i> will
+        prosecute
+         <i>you</i>.—Come,
+           I’ll take no
+           denial; We
+          must have a
+        trial: For
+      really this
+     morning I’ve
+    nothing
+    to do.’
+      Said the
+      mouse to the
+       cur, ‘Such
+        a trial,
+         dear sir,
+            With
+          no jury
+        or judge,
+       would be
+      wasting
+      our
+      breath.’
+        ‘I’ll be
+        judge, I’ll
+         be jury,’
+             Said
+         cunning
+          old Fury:
+          ‘I’ll
+          try the
+            whole
+            cause,
+              and
+           condemn
+           you
+          to
+           death.’”
+</pre>
+<p>
+“You are not attending!” said the Mouse to Alice severely. “What are you
+thinking of?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I beg your pardon,” said Alice very humbly: “you had got to the fifth bend, I
+think?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I had <i>not!</i>” cried the Mouse, sharply and very angrily.
+</p>
+<p>
+“A knot!” said Alice, always ready to make herself useful, and looking
+anxiously about her. “Oh, do let me help to undo it!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I shall do nothing of the sort,” said the Mouse, getting up and walking away.
+“You insult me by talking such nonsense!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I didn’t mean it!” pleaded poor Alice. “But you’re so easily offended, you
+know!”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Mouse only growled in reply.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Please come back and finish your story!” Alice called after it; and the others
+all joined in chorus, “Yes, please do!” but the Mouse only shook its head
+impatiently, and walked a little quicker.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What a pity it wouldn’t stay!” sighed the Lory, as soon as it was quite out of
+sight; and an old Crab took the opportunity of saying to her daughter “Ah, my
+dear! Let this be a lesson to you never to lose <i>your</i> temper!” “Hold your
+tongue, Ma!” said the young Crab, a little snappishly. “You’re enough to try
+the patience of an oyster!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I wish I had our Dinah here, I know I do!” said Alice aloud, addressing nobody
+in particular. “She’d soon fetch it back!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And who is Dinah, if I might venture to ask the question?” said the Lory.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice replied eagerly, for she was always ready to talk about her pet: “Dinah’s
+our cat. And she’s such a capital one for catching mice you can’t think! And
+oh, I wish you could see her after the birds! Why, she’ll eat a little bird as
+soon as look at it!”
+</p>
+<p>
+This speech caused a remarkable sensation among the party. Some of the birds
+hurried off at once: one old Magpie began wrapping itself up very carefully,
+remarking, “I really must be getting home; the night-air doesn’t suit my
+throat!” and a Canary called out in a trembling voice to its children, “Come
+away, my dears! It’s high time you were all in bed!” On various pretexts they
+all moved off, and Alice was soon left alone.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I wish I hadn’t mentioned Dinah!” she said to herself in a melancholy tone.
+“Nobody seems to like her, down here, and I’m sure she’s the best cat in the
+world! Oh, my dear Dinah! I wonder if I shall ever see you any more!” And here
+poor Alice began to cry again, for she felt very lonely and low-spirited. In a
+little while, however, she again heard a little pattering of footsteps in the
+distance, and she looked up eagerly, half hoping that the Mouse had changed his
+mind, and was coming back to finish his story.
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap04"></a>CHAPTER IV.<br>
+The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill</h2>
+<p>
+It was the White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again, and looking anxiously
+about as it went, as if it had lost something; and she heard it muttering to
+itself “The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers!
+She’ll get me executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets! Where <i>can</i> I have
+dropped them, I wonder?” Alice guessed in a moment that it was looking for the
+fan and the pair of white kid gloves, and she very good-naturedly began hunting
+about for them, but they were nowhere to be seen—everything seemed to have
+changed since her swim in the pool, and the great hall, with the glass table
+and the little door, had vanished completely.
+</p>
+<p>
+Very soon the Rabbit noticed Alice, as she went hunting about, and called out
+to her in an angry tone, “Why, Mary Ann, what <i>are</i> you doing out here?
+Run home this moment, and fetch me a pair of gloves and a fan! Quick, now!” And
+Alice was so much frightened that she ran off at once in the direction it
+pointed to, without trying to explain the mistake it had made.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He took me for his housemaid,” she said to herself as she ran. “How surprised
+he’ll be when he finds out who I am! But I’d better take him his fan and
+gloves—that is, if I can find them.” As she said this, she came upon a neat
+little house, on the door of which was a bright brass plate with the name “W.
+RABBIT,” engraved upon it. She went in without knocking, and hurried upstairs,
+in great fear lest she should meet the real Mary Ann, and be turned out of the
+house before she had found the fan and gloves.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How queer it seems,” Alice said to herself, “to be going messages for a
+rabbit! I suppose Dinah’ll be sending me on messages next!” And she began
+fancying the sort of thing that would happen: “‘Miss Alice! Come here directly,
+and get ready for your walk!’ ‘Coming in a minute, nurse! But I’ve got to see
+that the mouse doesn’t get out.’ Only I don’t think,” Alice went on, “that
+they’d let Dinah stop in the house if it began ordering people about like
+that!”
+</p>
+<p>
+By this time she had found her way into a tidy little room with a table in the
+window, and on it (as she had hoped) a fan and two or three pairs of tiny white
+kid gloves: she took up the fan and a pair of the gloves, and was just going to
+leave the room, when her eye fell upon a little bottle that stood near the
+looking-glass. There was no label this time with the words “DRINK ME,” but
+nevertheless she uncorked it and put it to her lips. “I know <i>something</i>
+interesting is sure to happen,” she said to herself, “whenever I eat or drink
+anything; so I’ll just see what this bottle does. I do hope it’ll make me grow
+large again, for really I’m quite tired of being such a tiny little thing!”
+</p>
+<p>
+It did so indeed, and much sooner than she had expected: before she had drunk
+half the bottle, she found her head pressing against the ceiling, and had to
+stoop to save her neck from being broken. She hastily put down the bottle,
+saying to herself “That’s quite enough—I hope I shan’t grow any more—As it is,
+I can’t get out at the door—I do wish I hadn’t drunk quite so much!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Alas! it was too late to wish that! She went on growing, and growing, and very
+soon had to kneel down on the floor: in another minute there was not even room
+for this, and she tried the effect of lying down with one elbow against the
+door, and the other arm curled round her head. Still she went on growing, and,
+as a last resource, she put one arm out of the window, and one foot up the
+chimney, and said to herself “Now I can do no more, whatever happens. What
+<i>will</i> become of me?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Luckily for Alice, the little magic bottle had now had its full effect, and she
+grew no larger: still it was very uncomfortable, and, as there seemed to be no
+sort of chance of her ever getting out of the room again, no wonder she felt
+unhappy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was much pleasanter at home,” thought poor Alice, “when one wasn’t always
+growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I
+almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole—and yet—and yet—it’s rather
+curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what <i>can</i> have happened
+to me! When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never
+happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book
+written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I’ll write one—but I’m
+grown up now,” she added in a sorrowful tone; “at least there’s no room to grow
+up any more <i>here</i>.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But then,” thought Alice, “shall I <i>never</i> get any older than I am now?
+That’ll be a comfort, one way—never to be an old woman—but then—always to have
+lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn’t like <i>that!</i>”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, you foolish Alice!” she answered herself. “How can you learn lessons in
+here? Why, there’s hardly room for <i>you</i>, and no room at all for any
+lesson-books!”
+</p>
+<p>
+And so she went on, taking first one side and then the other, and making quite
+a conversation of it altogether; but after a few minutes she heard a voice
+outside, and stopped to listen.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mary Ann! Mary Ann!” said the voice. “Fetch me my gloves this moment!” Then
+came a little pattering of feet on the stairs. Alice knew it was the Rabbit
+coming to look for her, and she trembled till she shook the house, quite
+forgetting that she was now about a thousand times as large as the Rabbit, and
+had no reason to be afraid of it.
+</p>
+<p>
+Presently the Rabbit came up to the door, and tried to open it; but, as the
+door opened inwards, and Alice’s elbow was pressed hard against it, that
+attempt proved a failure. Alice heard it say to itself “Then I’ll go round and
+get in at the window.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“<i>That</i> you won’t!” thought Alice, and, after waiting till she fancied she
+heard the Rabbit just under the window, she suddenly spread out her hand, and
+made a snatch in the air. She did not get hold of anything, but she heard a
+little shriek and a fall, and a crash of broken glass, from which she concluded
+that it was just possible it had fallen into a cucumber-frame, or something of
+the sort.
+</p>
+<p>
+Next came an angry voice—the Rabbit’s—“Pat! Pat! Where are you?” And then a
+voice she had never heard before, “Sure then I’m here! Digging for apples, yer
+honour!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Digging for apples, indeed!” said the Rabbit angrily. “Here! Come and help me
+out of <i>this!</i>” (Sounds of more broken glass.)
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now tell me, Pat, what’s that in the window?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Sure, it’s an arm, yer honour!” (He pronounced it “arrum.”)
+</p>
+<p>
+“An arm, you goose! Who ever saw one that size? Why, it fills the whole
+window!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Sure, it does, yer honour: but it’s an arm for all that.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, it’s got no business there, at any rate: go and take it away!”
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a long silence after this, and Alice could only hear whispers now and
+then; such as, “Sure, I don’t like it, yer honour, at all, at all!” “Do as I
+tell you, you coward!” and at last she spread out her hand again, and made
+another snatch in the air. This time there were <i>two</i> little shrieks, and
+more sounds of broken glass. “What a number of cucumber-frames there must be!”
+thought Alice. “I wonder what they’ll do next! As for pulling me out of the
+window, I only wish they <i>could!</i> I’m sure <i>I</i> don’t want to stay in
+here any longer!”
+</p>
+<p>
+She waited for some time without hearing anything more: at last came a rumbling
+of little cartwheels, and the sound of a good many voices all talking together:
+she made out the words: “Where’s the other ladder?—Why, I hadn’t to bring but
+one; Bill’s got the other—Bill! fetch it here, lad!—Here, put ’em up at this
+corner—No, tie ’em together first—they don’t reach half high enough yet—Oh!
+they’ll do well enough; don’t be particular—Here, Bill! catch hold of this
+rope—Will the roof bear?—Mind that loose slate—Oh, it’s coming down! Heads
+below!” (a loud crash)—“Now, who did that?—It was Bill, I fancy—Who’s to go
+down the chimney?—Nay, <i>I</i> shan’t! <i>You</i> do it!—<i>That</i> I won’t,
+then!—Bill’s to go down—Here, Bill! the master says you’re to go down the
+chimney!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh! So Bill’s got to come down the chimney, has he?” said Alice to herself.
+“Shy, they seem to put everything upon Bill! I wouldn’t be in Bill’s place for
+a good deal: this fireplace is narrow, to be sure; but I <i>think</i> I can
+kick a little!”
+</p>
+<p>
+She drew her foot as far down the chimney as she could, and waited till she
+heard a little animal (she couldn’t guess of what sort it was) scratching and
+scrambling about in the chimney close above her: then, saying to herself “This
+is Bill,” she gave one sharp kick, and waited to see what would happen next.
+</p>
+<p>
+The first thing she heard was a general chorus of “There goes Bill!” then the
+Rabbit’s voice along—“Catch him, you by the hedge!” then silence, and then
+another confusion of voices—“Hold up his head—Brandy now—Don’t choke him—How
+was it, old fellow? What happened to you? Tell us all about it!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Last came a little feeble, squeaking voice, (“That’s Bill,” thought Alice,)
+“Well, I hardly know—No more, thank ye; I’m better now—but I’m a deal too
+flustered to tell you—all I know is, something comes at me like a
+Jack-in-the-box, and up I goes like a sky-rocket!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“So you did, old fellow!” said the others.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We must burn the house down!” said the Rabbit’s voice; and Alice called out as
+loud as she could, “If you do, I’ll set Dinah at you!”
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a dead silence instantly, and Alice thought to herself, “I wonder
+what they <i>will</i> do next! If they had any sense, they’d take the roof
+off.” After a minute or two, they began moving about again, and Alice heard the
+Rabbit say, “A barrowful will do, to begin with.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A barrowful of <i>what?</i>” thought Alice; but she had not long to doubt, for
+the next moment a shower of little pebbles came rattling in at the window, and
+some of them hit her in the face. “I’ll put a stop to this,” she said to
+herself, and shouted out, “You’d better not do that again!” which produced
+another dead silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice noticed with some surprise that the pebbles were all turning into little
+cakes as they lay on the floor, and a bright idea came into her head. “If I eat
+one of these cakes,” she thought, “it’s sure to make <i>some</i> change in my
+size; and as it can’t possibly make me larger, it must make me smaller, I
+suppose.”
+</p>
+<p>
+So she swallowed one of the cakes, and was delighted to find that she began
+shrinking directly. As soon as she was small enough to get through the door,
+she ran out of the house, and found quite a crowd of little animals and birds
+waiting outside. The poor little Lizard, Bill, was in the middle, being held up
+by two guinea-pigs, who were giving it something out of a bottle. They all made
+a rush at Alice the moment she appeared; but she ran off as hard as she could,
+and soon found herself safe in a thick wood.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The first thing I’ve got to do,” said Alice to herself, as she wandered about
+in the wood, “is to grow to my right size again; and the second thing is to
+find my way into that lovely garden. I think that will be the best plan.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It sounded an excellent plan, no doubt, and very neatly and simply arranged;
+the only difficulty was, that she had not the smallest idea how to set about
+it; and while she was peering about anxiously among the trees, a little sharp
+bark just over her head made her look up in a great hurry.
+</p>
+<p>
+An enormous puppy was looking down at her with large round eyes, and feebly
+stretching out one paw, trying to touch her. “Poor little thing!” said Alice,
+in a coaxing tone, and she tried hard to whistle to it; but she was terribly
+frightened all the time at the thought that it might be hungry, in which case
+it would be very likely to eat her up in spite of all her coaxing.
+</p>
+<p>
+Hardly knowing what she did, she picked up a little bit of stick, and held it
+out to the puppy; whereupon the puppy jumped into the air off all its feet at
+once, with a yelp of delight, and rushed at the stick, and made believe to
+worry it; then Alice dodged behind a great thistle, to keep herself from being
+run over; and the moment she appeared on the other side, the puppy made another
+rush at the stick, and tumbled head over heels in its hurry to get hold of it;
+then Alice, thinking it was very like having a game of play with a cart-horse,
+and expecting every moment to be trampled under its feet, ran round the thistle
+again; then the puppy began a series of short charges at the stick, running a
+very little way forwards each time and a long way back, and barking hoarsely
+all the while, till at last it sat down a good way off, panting, with its
+tongue hanging out of its mouth, and its great eyes half shut.
+</p>
+<p>
+This seemed to Alice a good opportunity for making her escape; so she set off
+at once, and ran till she was quite tired and out of breath, and till the
+puppy’s bark sounded quite faint in the distance.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And yet what a dear little puppy it was!” said Alice, as she leant against a
+buttercup to rest herself, and fanned herself with one of the leaves: “I should
+have liked teaching it tricks very much, if—if I’d only been the right size to
+do it! Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again! Let me
+see—how <i>is</i> it to be managed? I suppose I ought to eat or drink something
+or other; but the great question is, what?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The great question certainly was, what? Alice looked all round her at the
+flowers and the blades of grass, but she did not see anything that looked like
+the right thing to eat or drink under the circumstances. There was a large
+mushroom growing near her, about the same height as herself; and when she had
+looked under it, and on both sides of it, and behind it, it occurred to her
+that she might as well look and see what was on the top of it.
+</p>
+<p>
+She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the mushroom,
+and her eyes immediately met those of a large blue caterpillar, that was
+sitting on the top with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah, and
+taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else.
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap05"></a>CHAPTER V.<br>
+Advice from a Caterpillar</h2>
+<p>
+The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at
+last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a
+languid, sleepy voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who are <i>you?</i>” said the Caterpillar.
+</p>
+<p>
+This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather
+shyly, “I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I <i>was</i>
+when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times
+since then.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I can’t explain <i>myself</i>, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not
+myself, you see.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied very politely, “for I
+can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in
+a day is very confusing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It isn’t,” said the Caterpillar.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,” said Alice; “but when you have to
+turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a
+butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, won’t you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,” said Alice; “all I know is, it
+would feel very queer to <i>me</i>.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You!” said the Caterpillar contemptuously. “Who are <i>you?</i>”
+</p>
+<p>
+Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation. Alice felt
+a little irritated at the Caterpillar’s making such <i>very</i> short remarks,
+and she drew herself up and said, very gravely, “I think, you ought to tell me
+who <i>you</i> are, first.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why?” said the Caterpillar.
+</p>
+<p>
+Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any good
+reason, and as the Caterpillar seemed to be in a <i>very</i> unpleasant state
+of mind, she turned away.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come back!” the Caterpillar called after her. “I’ve something important to
+say!”
+</p>
+<p>
+This sounded promising, certainly: Alice turned and came back again.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Keep your temper,” said the Caterpillar.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is that all?” said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well as she could.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No,” said the Caterpillar.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and
+perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing. For some minutes
+it puffed away without speaking, but at last it unfolded its arms, took the
+hookah out of its mouth again, and said, “So you think you’re changed, do you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m afraid I am, sir,” said Alice; “I can’t remember things as I used—and I
+don’t keep the same size for ten minutes together!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Can’t remember <i>what</i> things?” said the Caterpillar.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, I’ve tried to say “How doth the little busy bee,” but it all came
+different!” Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Repeat, ‘<i>You are old, Father William</i>,’” said the Caterpillar.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice folded her hands, and began:—
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,<br>
+    “And your hair has become very white;<br>
+And yet you incessantly stand on your head—<br>
+    Do you think, at your age, it is right?”<br>
+<br>
+“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,<br>
+    “I feared it might injure the brain;<br>
+But, now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,<br>
+    Why, I do it again and again.”<br>
+<br>
+“You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before,<br>
+    And have grown most uncommonly fat;<br>
+Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—<br>
+    Pray, what is the reason of that?”<br>
+<br>
+“In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,<br>
+    “I kept all my limbs very supple<br>
+By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box—<br>
+    Allow me to sell you a couple?”<br>
+<br>
+“You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak<br>
+    For anything tougher than suet;<br>
+Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—<br>
+    Pray, how did you manage to do it?”<br>
+<br>
+“In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law,<br>
+    And argued each case with my wife;<br>
+And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,<br>
+    Has lasted the rest of my life.”<br>
+<br>
+“You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly suppose<br>
+    That your eye was as steady as ever;<br>
+Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—<br>
+    What made you so awfully clever?”<br>
+<br>
+“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”<br>
+    Said his father; “don’t give yourself airs!<br>
+Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?<br>
+    Be off, or I’ll kick you down stairs!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is not said right,” said the Caterpillar.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not <i>quite</i> right, I’m afraid,” said Alice, timidly; “some of the words
+have got altered.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is wrong from beginning to end,” said the Caterpillar decidedly, and there
+was silence for some minutes.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Caterpillar was the first to speak.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What size do you want to be?” it asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, I’m not particular as to size,” Alice hastily replied; “only one doesn’t
+like changing so often, you know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I <i>don’t</i> know,” said the Caterpillar.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in her life before,
+and she felt that she was losing her temper.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Are you content now?” said the Caterpillar.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, I should like to be a <i>little</i> larger, sir, if you wouldn’t mind,”
+said Alice: “three inches is such a wretched height to be.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is a very good height indeed!” said the Caterpillar angrily, rearing itself
+upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high).
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I’m not used to it!” pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And she thought
+of herself, “I wish the creatures wouldn’t be so easily offended!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You’ll get used to it in time,” said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah
+into its mouth and began smoking again.
+</p>
+<p>
+This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In a minute or
+two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice,
+and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the
+grass, merely remarking as it went, “One side will make you grow taller, and
+the other side will make you grow shorter.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“One side of <i>what?</i> The other side of <i>what?</i>” thought Alice to
+herself.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of the mushroom,” said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud; and
+in another moment it was out of sight.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to
+make out which were the two sides of it; and as it was perfectly round, she
+found this a very difficult question. However, at last she stretched her arms
+round it as far as they would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each
+hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And now which is which?” she said to herself, and nibbled a little of the
+right-hand bit to try the effect: the next moment she felt a violent blow
+underneath her chin: it had struck her foot!
+</p>
+<p>
+She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but she felt that
+there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly; so she set to work
+at once to eat some of the other bit. Her chin was pressed so closely against
+her foot, that there was hardly room to open her mouth; but she did it at last,
+and managed to swallow a morsel of the lefthand bit.
+</p>
+<p class="asterism">
+*      *      *      *      *      *      *<br>
+<br>
+    *      *      *      *      *      *<br>
+<br>
+*      *      *      *      *      *      *<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come, my head’s free at last!” said Alice in a tone of delight, which changed
+into alarm in another moment, when she found that her shoulders were nowhere to
+be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of
+neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a sea of green leaves that lay
+far below her.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What <i>can</i> all that green stuff be?” said Alice. “And where <i>have</i>
+my shoulders got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can’t see you?” She was
+moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a little
+shaking among the distant green leaves.
+</p>
+<p>
+As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried
+to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would
+bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in
+curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the
+leaves, which she found to be nothing but the tops of the trees under which she
+had been wandering, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large
+pigeon had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with its wings.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Serpent!” screamed the Pigeon.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m <i>not</i> a serpent!” said Alice indignantly. “Let me alone!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Serpent, I say again!” repeated the Pigeon, but in a more subdued tone, and
+added with a kind of sob, “I’ve tried every way, and nothing seems to suit
+them!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about,” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ve tried the roots of trees, and I’ve tried banks, and I’ve tried hedges,”
+the Pigeon went on, without attending to her; “but those serpents! There’s no
+pleasing them!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice was more and more puzzled, but she thought there was no use in saying
+anything more till the Pigeon had finished.
+</p>
+<p>
+“As if it wasn’t trouble enough hatching the eggs,” said the Pigeon; “but I
+must be on the look-out for serpents night and day! Why, I haven’t had a wink
+of sleep these three weeks!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m very sorry you’ve been annoyed,” said Alice, who was beginning to see its
+meaning.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And just as I’d taken the highest tree in the wood,” continued the Pigeon,
+raising its voice to a shriek, “and just as I was thinking I should be free of
+them at last, they must needs come wriggling down from the sky! Ugh, Serpent!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I’m <i>not</i> a serpent, I tell you!” said Alice. “I’m a—I’m a—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well! <i>What</i> are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you’re trying to
+invent something!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I—I’m a little girl,” said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the
+number of changes she had gone through that day.
+</p>
+<p>
+“A likely story indeed!” said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest contempt.
+“I’ve seen a good many little girls in my time, but never <i>one</i> with such
+a neck as that! No, no! You’re a serpent; and there’s no use denying it. I
+suppose you’ll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I <i>have</i> tasted eggs, certainly,” said Alice, who was a very truthful
+child; “but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t believe it,” said the Pigeon; “but if they do, why then they’re a kind
+of serpent, that’s all I can say.”
+</p>
+<p>
+This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a minute or
+two, which gave the Pigeon the opportunity of adding, “You’re looking for eggs,
+I know <i>that</i> well enough; and what does it matter to me whether you’re a
+little girl or a serpent?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It matters a good deal to <i>me</i>,” said Alice hastily; “but I’m not looking
+for eggs, as it happens; and if I was, I shouldn’t want <i>yours</i>: I don’t
+like them raw.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, be off, then!” said the Pigeon in a sulky tone, as it settled down again
+into its nest. Alice crouched down among the trees as well as she could, for
+her neck kept getting entangled among the branches, and every now and then she
+had to stop and untwist it. After a while she remembered that she still held
+the pieces of mushroom in her hands, and she set to work very carefully,
+nibbling first at one and then at the other, and growing sometimes taller and
+sometimes shorter, until she had succeeded in bringing herself down to her
+usual height.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was so long since she had been anything near the right size, that it felt
+quite strange at first; but she got used to it in a few minutes, and began
+talking to herself, as usual. “Come, there’s half my plan done now! How
+puzzling all these changes are! I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one
+minute to another! However, I’ve got back to my right size: the next thing is,
+to get into that beautiful garden—how <i>is</i> that to be done, I wonder?” As
+she said this, she came suddenly upon an open place, with a little house in it
+about four feet high. “Whoever lives there,” thought Alice, “it’ll never do to
+come upon them <i>this</i> size: why, I should frighten them out of their
+wits!” So she began nibbling at the righthand bit again, and did not venture to
+go near the house till she had brought herself down to nine inches high.
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap06"></a>CHAPTER VI.<br>
+Pig and Pepper</h2>
+<p>
+For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what to do
+next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood—(she
+considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by
+his face only, she would have called him a fish)—and rapped loudly at the door
+with his knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery, with a round
+face, and large eyes like a frog; and both footmen, Alice noticed, had powdered
+hair that curled all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it
+was all about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly
+as large as himself, and this he handed over to the other, saying, in a solemn
+tone, “For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.” The
+Frog-Footman repeated, in the same solemn tone, only changing the order of the
+words a little, “From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess to play
+croquet.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Then they both bowed low, and their curls got entangled together.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice laughed so much at this, that she had to run back into the wood for fear
+of their hearing her; and when she next peeped out the Fish-Footman was gone,
+and the other was sitting on the ground near the door, staring stupidly up into
+the sky.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice went timidly up to the door, and knocked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There’s no sort of use in knocking,” said the Footman, “and that for two
+reasons. First, because I’m on the same side of the door as you are; secondly,
+because they’re making such a noise inside, no one could possibly hear you.”
+And certainly there <i>was</i> a most extraordinary noise going on within—a
+constant howling and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a
+dish or kettle had been broken to pieces.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Please, then,” said Alice, “how am I to get in?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There might be some sense in your knocking,” the Footman went on without
+attending to her, “if we had the door between us. For instance, if you were
+<i>inside</i>, you might knock, and I could let you out, you know.” He was
+looking up into the sky all the time he was speaking, and this Alice thought
+decidedly uncivil. “But perhaps he can’t help it,” she said to herself; “his
+eyes are so <i>very</i> nearly at the top of his head. But at any rate he might
+answer questions.—How am I to get in?” she repeated, aloud.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I shall sit here,” the Footman remarked, “till tomorrow—”
+</p>
+<p>
+At this moment the door of the house opened, and a large plate came skimming
+out, straight at the Footman’s head: it just grazed his nose, and broke to
+pieces against one of the trees behind him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“—or next day, maybe,” the Footman continued in the same tone, exactly as if
+nothing had happened.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How am I to get in?” asked Alice again, in a louder tone.
+</p>
+<p>
+“<i>Are</i> you to get in at all?” said the Footman. “That’s the first
+question, you know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so. “It’s really
+dreadful,” she muttered to herself, “the way all the creatures argue. It’s
+enough to drive one crazy!”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Footman seemed to think this a good opportunity for repeating his remark,
+with variations. “I shall sit here,” he said, “on and off, for days and days.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But what am <i>I</i> to do?” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Anything you like,” said the Footman, and began whistling.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, there’s no use in talking to him,” said Alice desperately: “he’s perfectly
+idiotic!” And she opened the door and went in.
+</p>
+<p>
+The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from one end
+to the other: the Duchess was sitting on a three-legged stool in the middle,
+nursing a baby; the cook was leaning over the fire, stirring a large cauldron
+which seemed to be full of soup.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There’s certainly too much pepper in that soup!” Alice said to herself, as
+well as she could for sneezing.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the Duchess sneezed
+occasionally; and as for the baby, it was sneezing and howling alternately
+without a moment’s pause. The only things in the kitchen that did not sneeze,
+were the cook, and a large cat which was sitting on the hearth and grinning
+from ear to ear.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Please would you tell me,” said Alice, a little timidly, for she was not quite
+sure whether it was good manners for her to speak first, “why your cat grins
+like that?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s a Cheshire cat,” said the Duchess, “and that’s why. Pig!”
+</p>
+<p>
+She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped; but
+she saw in another moment that it was addressed to the baby, and not to her, so
+she took courage, and went on again:—
+</p>
+<p>
+“I didn’t know that Cheshire cats always grinned; in fact, I didn’t know that
+cats <i>could</i> grin.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“They all can,” said the Duchess; “and most of ’em do.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t know of any that do,” Alice said very politely, feeling quite pleased
+to have got into a conversation.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You don’t know much,” said the Duchess; “and that’s a fact.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice did not at all like the tone of this remark, and thought it would be as
+well to introduce some other subject of conversation. While she was trying to
+fix on one, the cook took the cauldron of soup off the fire, and at once set to
+work throwing everything within her reach at the Duchess and the baby—the
+fire-irons came first; then followed a shower of saucepans, plates, and dishes.
+The Duchess took no notice of them even when they hit her; and the baby was
+howling so much already, that it was quite impossible to say whether the blows
+hurt it or not.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, <i>please</i> mind what you’re doing!” cried Alice, jumping up and down in
+an agony of terror. “Oh, there goes his <i>precious</i> nose!” as an unusually
+large saucepan flew close by it, and very nearly carried it off.
+</p>
+<p>
+“If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess said in a hoarse growl,
+“the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Which would <i>not</i> be an advantage,” said Alice, who felt very glad to get
+an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. “Just think of what
+work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four
+hours to turn round on its axis—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Talking of axes,” said the Duchess, “chop off her head!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice glanced rather anxiously at the cook, to see if she meant to take the
+hint; but the cook was busily stirring the soup, and seemed not to be
+listening, so she went on again: “Twenty-four hours, I <i>think</i>; or is it
+twelve? I—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, don’t bother <i>me</i>,” said the Duchess; “I never could abide figures!”
+And with that she began nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to
+it as she did so, and giving it a violent shake at the end of every line:
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+“Speak roughly to your little boy,<br>
+    And beat him when he sneezes:<br>
+He only does it to annoy,<br>
+    Because he knows it teases.”
+</p>
+<p class="center">
+CHORUS.<br>
+(In which the cook and the baby joined):
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+“Wow! wow! wow!”
+</p>
+<p>
+While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing the baby
+violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could
+hardly hear the words:—
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+“I speak severely to my boy,<br>
+    I beat him when he sneezes;<br>
+For he can thoroughly enjoy<br>
+    The pepper when he pleases!”
+</p>
+<p class="center">
+CHORUS.
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+“Wow! wow! wow!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Here! you may nurse it a bit, if you like!” the Duchess said to Alice,
+flinging the baby at her as she spoke. “I must go and get ready to play croquet
+with the Queen,” and she hurried out of the room. The cook threw a frying-pan
+after her as she went out, but it just missed her.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little
+creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, “just like a
+star-fish,” thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a
+steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening
+itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as
+much as she could do to hold it.
+</p>
+<p>
+As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it, (which was to twist
+it up into a sort of knot, and then keep tight hold of its right ear and left
+foot, so as to prevent its undoing itself,) she carried it out into the open
+air. “If I don’t take this child away with me,” thought Alice, “they’re sure to
+kill it in a day or two: wouldn’t it be murder to leave it behind?” She said
+the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off
+sneezing by this time). “Don’t grunt,” said Alice; “that’s not at all a proper
+way of expressing yourself.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see
+what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had a <i>very</i>
+turn-up nose, much more like a snout than a real nose; also its eyes were
+getting extremely small for a baby: altogether Alice did not like the look of
+the thing at all. “But perhaps it was only sobbing,” she thought, and looked
+into its eyes again, to see if there were any tears.
+</p>
+<p>
+No, there were no tears. “If you’re going to turn into a pig, my dear,” said
+Alice, seriously, “I’ll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!” The poor
+little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which), and
+they went on for some while in silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice was just beginning to think to herself, “Now, what am I to do with this
+creature when I get it home?” when it grunted again, so violently, that she
+looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be <i>no</i>
+mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it
+would be quite absurd for her to carry it further.
+</p>
+<p>
+So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot
+away quietly into the wood. “If it had grown up,” she said to herself, “it
+would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I
+think.” And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very
+well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, “if one only knew the right way
+to change them—” when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat
+sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought:
+still it had <i>very</i> long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it
+ought to be treated with respect.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Cheshire Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether
+it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. “Come, it’s
+pleased so far,” thought Alice, and she went on. “Would you tell me, please,
+which way I ought to go from here?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
+</p>
+<p>
+“—so long as I get <i>somewhere</i>,” Alice added as an explanation.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. “What
+sort of people live about here?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In <i>that</i> direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a
+Hatter: and in <i>that</i> direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March
+Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re
+mad.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice didn’t think that proved it at all; however, she went on “And how do you
+know that you’re mad?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“To begin with,” said the Cat, “a dog’s not mad. You grant that?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I suppose so,” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, then,” the Cat went on, “you see, a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags
+its tail when it’s pleased. Now <i>I</i> growl when I’m pleased, and wag my
+tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“<i>I</i> call it purring, not growling,” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Call it what you like,” said the Cat. “Do you play croquet with the Queen
+to-day?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I should like it very much,” said Alice, “but I haven’t been invited yet.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You’ll see me there,” said the Cat, and vanished.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so used to queer things
+happening. While she was looking at the place where it had been, it suddenly
+appeared again.
+</p>
+<p>
+“By-the-bye, what became of the baby?” said the Cat. “I’d nearly forgotten to
+ask.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It turned into a pig,” Alice quietly said, just as if it had come back in a
+natural way.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I thought it would,” said the Cat, and vanished again.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not appear,
+and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March
+Hare was said to live. “I’ve seen hatters before,” she said to herself; “the
+March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it
+won’t be raving mad—at least not so mad as it was in March.” As she said this,
+she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a branch of a tree.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did you say pig, or fig?” said the Cat.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I said pig,” replied Alice; “and I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and
+vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning
+with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time
+after the rest of it had gone.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin
+without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”
+</p>
+<p>
+She had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house of the
+March Hare: she thought it must be the right house, because the chimneys were
+shaped like ears and the roof was thatched with fur. It was so large a house,
+that she did not like to go nearer till she had nibbled some more of the
+lefthand bit of mushroom, and raised herself to about two feet high: even then
+she walked up towards it rather timidly, saying to herself “Suppose it should
+be raving mad after all! I almost wish I’d gone to see the Hatter instead!”
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap07"></a>CHAPTER VII.<br>
+A Mad Tea-Party</h2>
+<p>
+There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March
+Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them,
+fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows
+on it, and talking over its head. “Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,”
+thought Alice; “only, as it’s asleep, I suppose it doesn’t mind.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one
+corner of it: “No room! No room!” they cried out when they saw Alice coming.
+“There’s <i>plenty</i> of room!” said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a
+large arm-chair at one end of the table.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. “I don’t
+see any wine,” she remarked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,” said Alice angrily.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” said the March
+Hare.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I didn’t know it was <i>your</i> table,” said Alice; “it’s laid for a great
+many more than three.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your hair wants cutting,” said the Hatter. He had been looking at Alice for
+some time with great curiosity, and this was his first speech.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You should learn not to make personal remarks,” Alice said with some severity;
+“it’s very rude.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he <i>said</i>
+was, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they’ve begun
+asking riddles.—I believe I can guess that,” she added aloud.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March
+Hare.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Exactly so,” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the
+same thing, you know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that
+‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’
+is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in
+his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I
+breathe’!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It <i>is</i> the same thing with you,” said the Hatter, and here the
+conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice
+thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which
+wasn’t much.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Hatter was the first to break the silence. “What day of the month is it?”
+he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was
+looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his
+ear.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice considered a little, and then said “The fourth.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Two days wrong!” sighed the Hatter. “I told you butter wouldn’t suit the
+works!” he added looking angrily at the March Hare.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was the <i>best</i> butter,” the March Hare meekly replied.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,” the Hatter grumbled: “you
+shouldn’t have put it in with the bread-knife.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into
+his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to
+say than his first remark, “It was the <i>best</i> butter, you know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. “What a funny
+watch!” she remarked. “It tells the day of the month, and doesn’t tell what
+o’clock it is!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why should it?” muttered the Hatter. “Does <i>your</i> watch tell you what
+year it is?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course not,” Alice replied very readily: “but that’s because it stays the
+same year for such a long time together.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Which is just the case with <i>mine</i>,” said the Hatter.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice felt dreadfully puzzled, The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no sort of
+meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. “I don’t quite understand
+you,” she said, as politely as she could.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The Dormouse is asleep again,” said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea
+upon its nose.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes,
+“Of course, of course; just what I was going to remark myself.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “what’s the answer?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nor I,” said the March Hare.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,”
+she said, “than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about
+wasting <i>it</i>. It’s <i>him</i>.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t know what you mean,” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course you don’t!” the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. “I
+dare say you never even spoke to Time!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Perhaps not,” Alice cautiously replied: “but I know I have to beat time when I
+learn music.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah! that accounts for it,” said the Hatter. “He won’t stand beating. Now, if
+you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with
+the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o’clock in the morning, just time
+to begin lessons: you’d only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the
+clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!”
+</p>
+<p>
+(“I only wish it was,” the March Hare said to itself in a whisper.)
+</p>
+<p>
+“That would be grand, certainly,” said Alice thoughtfully: “but then—I
+shouldn’t be hungry for it, you know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not at first, perhaps,” said the Hatter: “but you could keep it to half-past
+one as long as you liked.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is that the way <i>you</i> manage?” Alice asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Hatter shook his head mournfully. “Not I!” he replied. “We quarrelled last
+March—just before <i>he</i> went mad, you know—” (pointing with his tea spoon
+at the March Hare,) “—it was at the great concert given by the Queen of Hearts,
+and I had to sing
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+‘Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!<br>
+How I wonder what you’re at!’
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+You know the song, perhaps?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ve heard something like it,” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It goes on, you know,” the Hatter continued, “in this way:—
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+‘Up above the world you fly,<br>
+Like a tea-tray in the sky.<br>
+                    Twinkle, twinkle—’”
+</p>
+<p>
+Here the Dormouse shook itself, and began singing in its sleep “<i>Twinkle,
+twinkle, twinkle, twinkle</i>—” and went on so long that they had to pinch it
+to make it stop.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, I’d hardly finished the first verse,” said the Hatter, “when the Queen
+jumped up and bawled out, ‘He’s murdering the time! Off with his head!’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How dreadfully savage!” exclaimed Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And ever since that,” the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, “he won’t do a
+thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.”
+</p>
+<p>
+A bright idea came into Alice’s head. “Is that the reason so many tea-things
+are put out here?” she asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, that’s it,” said the Hatter with a sigh: “it’s always tea-time, and we’ve
+no time to wash the things between whiles.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then you keep moving round, I suppose?” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Exactly so,” said the Hatter: “as the things get used up.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But what happens when you come to the beginning again?” Alice ventured to ask.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Suppose we change the subject,” the March Hare interrupted, yawning. “I’m
+getting tired of this. I vote the young lady tells us a story.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m afraid I don’t know one,” said Alice, rather alarmed at the proposal.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then the Dormouse shall!” they both cried. “Wake up, Dormouse!” And they
+pinched it on both sides at once.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Dormouse slowly opened his eyes. “I wasn’t asleep,” he said in a hoarse,
+feeble voice: “I heard every word you fellows were saying.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Tell us a story!” said the March Hare.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, please do!” pleaded Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And be quick about it,” added the Hatter, “or you’ll be asleep again before
+it’s done.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Once upon a time there were three little sisters,” the Dormouse began in a
+great hurry; “and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at
+the bottom of a well—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What did they live on?” said Alice, who always took a great interest in
+questions of eating and drinking.
+</p>
+<p>
+“They lived on treacle,” said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two.
+</p>
+<p>
+“They couldn’t have done that, you know,” Alice gently remarked; “they’d have
+been ill.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“So they were,” said the Dormouse; “<i>very</i> ill.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice tried to fancy to herself what such an extraordinary way of living would
+be like, but it puzzled her too much, so she went on: “But why did they live at
+the bottom of a well?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take
+more.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You mean you can’t take <i>less</i>,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take
+<i>more</i> than nothing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nobody asked <i>your</i> opinion,” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who’s making personal remarks now?” the Hatter asked triumphantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice did not quite know what to say to this: so she helped herself to some tea
+and bread-and-butter, and then turned to the Dormouse, and repeated her
+question. “Why did they live at the bottom of a well?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Dormouse again took a minute or two to think about it, and then said, “It
+was a treacle-well.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There’s no such thing!” Alice was beginning very angrily, but the Hatter and
+the March Hare went “Sh! sh!” and the Dormouse sulkily remarked, “If you can’t
+be civil, you’d better finish the story for yourself.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, please go on!” Alice said very humbly; “I won’t interrupt again. I dare
+say there may be <i>one</i>.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“One, indeed!” said the Dormouse indignantly. However, he consented to go on.
+“And so these three little sisters—they were learning to draw, you know—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What did they draw?” said Alice, quite forgetting her promise.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Treacle,” said the Dormouse, without considering at all this time.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I want a clean cup,” interrupted the Hatter: “let’s all move one place on.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He moved on as he spoke, and the Dormouse followed him: the March Hare moved
+into the Dormouse’s place, and Alice rather unwillingly took the place of the
+March Hare. The Hatter was the only one who got any advantage from the change:
+and Alice was a good deal worse off than before, as the March Hare had just
+upset the milk-jug into his plate.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice did not wish to offend the Dormouse again, so she began very cautiously:
+“But I don’t understand. Where did they draw the treacle from?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You can draw water out of a water-well,” said the Hatter; “so I should think
+you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well—eh, stupid?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But they were <i>in</i> the well,” Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to
+notice this last remark.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course they were,” said the Dormouse; “—well in.”
+</p>
+<p>
+This answer so confused poor Alice, that she let the Dormouse go on for some
+time without interrupting it.
+</p>
+<p>
+“They were learning to draw,” the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its
+eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; “and they drew all manner of
+things—everything that begins with an M—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why with an M?” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why not?” said the March Hare.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice was silent.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze;
+but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and
+went on: “—that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and
+memory, and muchness—you know you say things are “much of a muchness”—did you
+ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Really, now you ask me,” said Alice, very much confused, “I don’t think—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then you shouldn’t talk,” said the Hatter.
+</p>
+<p>
+This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in great
+disgust, and walked off; the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and neither of the
+others took the least notice of her going, though she looked back once or
+twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them,
+they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot.
+</p>
+<p>
+“At any rate I’ll never go <i>there</i> again!” said Alice as she picked her
+way through the wood. “It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my
+life!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees had a door leading
+right into it. “That’s very curious!” she thought. “But everything’s curious
+today. I think I may as well go in at once.” And in she went.
+</p>
+<p>
+Once more she found herself in the long hall, and close to the little glass
+table. “Now, I’ll manage better this time,” she said to herself, and began by
+taking the little golden key, and unlocking the door that led into the garden.
+Then she went to work nibbling at the mushroom (she had kept a piece of it in
+her pocket) till she was about a foot high: then she walked down the little
+passage: and <i>then</i>—she found herself at last in the beautiful garden,
+among the bright flower-beds and the cool fountains.
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap08"></a>CHAPTER VIII.<br>
+The Queen’s Croquet-Ground</h2>
+<p>
+A large rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden: the roses growing on
+it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily painting them red.
+Alice thought this a very curious thing, and she went nearer to watch them, and
+just as she came up to them she heard one of them say, “Look out now, Five!
+Don’t go splashing paint over me like that!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I couldn’t help it,” said Five, in a sulky tone; “Seven jogged my elbow.”
+</p>
+<p>
+On which Seven looked up and said, “That’s right, Five! Always lay the blame on
+others!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“<i>You’d</i> better not talk!” said Five. “I heard the Queen say only
+yesterday you deserved to be beheaded!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What for?” said the one who had spoken first.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s none of <i>your</i> business, Two!” said Seven.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, it <i>is</i> his business!” said Five, “and I’ll tell him—it was for
+bringing the cook tulip-roots instead of onions.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Seven flung down his brush, and had just begun “Well, of all the unjust
+things—” when his eye chanced to fall upon Alice, as she stood watching them,
+and he checked himself suddenly: the others looked round also, and all of them
+bowed low.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Would you tell me,” said Alice, a little timidly, “why you are painting those
+roses?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began in a low voice, “Why
+the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a <i>red</i>
+rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake; and if the Queen was to find
+it out, we should all have our heads cut off, you know. So you see, Miss, we’re
+doing our best, afore she comes, to—” At this moment Five, who had been
+anxiously looking across the garden, called out “The Queen! The Queen!” and the
+three gardeners instantly threw themselves flat upon their faces. There was a
+sound of many footsteps, and Alice looked round, eager to see the Queen.
+</p>
+<p>
+First came ten soldiers carrying clubs; these were all shaped like the three
+gardeners, oblong and flat, with their hands and feet at the corners: next the
+ten courtiers; these were ornamented all over with diamonds, and walked two and
+two, as the soldiers did. After these came the royal children; there were ten
+of them, and the little dears came jumping merrily along hand in hand, in
+couples: they were all ornamented with hearts. Next came the guests, mostly
+Kings and Queens, and among them Alice recognised the White Rabbit: it was
+talking in a hurried nervous manner, smiling at everything that was said, and
+went by without noticing her. Then followed the Knave of Hearts, carrying the
+King’s crown on a crimson velvet cushion; and, last of all this grand
+procession, came THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice was rather doubtful whether she ought not to lie down on her face like
+the three gardeners, but she could not remember ever having heard of such a
+rule at processions; “and besides, what would be the use of a procession,”
+thought she, “if people had all to lie down upon their faces, so that they
+couldn’t see it?” So she stood still where she was, and waited.
+</p>
+<p>
+When the procession came opposite to Alice, they all stopped and looked at her,
+and the Queen said severely “Who is this?” She said it to the Knave of Hearts,
+who only bowed and smiled in reply.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Idiot!” said the Queen, tossing her head impatiently; and, turning to Alice,
+she went on, “What’s your name, child?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My name is Alice, so please your Majesty,” said Alice very politely; but she
+added, to herself, “Why, they’re only a pack of cards, after all. I needn’t be
+afraid of them!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And who are <i>these?</i>” said the Queen, pointing to the three gardeners who
+were lying round the rose-tree; for, you see, as they were lying on their
+faces, and the pattern on their backs was the same as the rest of the pack, she
+could not tell whether they were gardeners, or soldiers, or courtiers, or three
+of her own children.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How should <i>I</i> know?” said Alice, surprised at her own courage. “It’s no
+business of <i>mine</i>.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like
+a wild beast, screamed “Off with her head! Off—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nonsense!” said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent.
+</p>
+<p>
+The King laid his hand upon her arm, and timidly said “Consider, my dear: she
+is only a child!”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Queen turned angrily away from him, and said to the Knave “Turn them over!”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Knave did so, very carefully, with one foot.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Get up!” said the Queen, in a shrill, loud voice, and the three gardeners
+instantly jumped up, and began bowing to the King, the Queen, the royal
+children, and everybody else.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Leave off that!” screamed the Queen. “You make me giddy.” And then, turning to
+the rose-tree, she went on, “What <i>have</i> you been doing here?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“May it please your Majesty,” said Two, in a very humble tone, going down on
+one knee as he spoke, “we were trying—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“<i>I</i> see!” said the Queen, who had meanwhile been examining the roses.
+“Off with their heads!” and the procession moved on, three of the soldiers
+remaining behind to execute the unfortunate gardeners, who ran to Alice for
+protection.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You shan’t be beheaded!” said Alice, and she put them into a large flower-pot
+that stood near. The three soldiers wandered about for a minute or two, looking
+for them, and then quietly marched off after the others.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Are their heads off?” shouted the Queen.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Their heads are gone, if it please your Majesty!” the soldiers shouted in
+reply.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s right!” shouted the Queen. “Can you play croquet?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The soldiers were silent, and looked at Alice, as the question was evidently
+meant for her.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes!” shouted Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come on, then!” roared the Queen, and Alice joined the procession, wondering
+very much what would happen next.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s—it’s a very fine day!” said a timid voice at her side. She was walking by
+the White Rabbit, who was peeping anxiously into her face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very,” said Alice: “—where’s the Duchess?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hush! Hush!” said the Rabbit in a low, hurried tone. He looked anxiously over
+his shoulder as he spoke, and then raised himself upon tiptoe, put his mouth
+close to her ear, and whispered “She’s under sentence of execution.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What for?” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did you say ‘What a pity!’?” the Rabbit asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I didn’t,” said Alice: “I don’t think it’s at all a pity. I said ‘What
+for?’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She boxed the Queen’s ears—” the Rabbit began. Alice gave a little scream of
+laughter. “Oh, hush!” the Rabbit whispered in a frightened tone. “The Queen
+will hear you! You see, she came rather late, and the Queen said—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Get to your places!” shouted the Queen in a voice of thunder, and people began
+running about in all directions, tumbling up against each other; however, they
+got settled down in a minute or two, and the game began. Alice thought she had
+never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and
+furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the
+soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to
+make the arches.
+</p>
+<p>
+The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she
+succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm,
+with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely
+straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it
+<i>would</i> twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled
+expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got
+its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that
+the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides
+all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted
+to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up
+and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion
+that it was a very difficult game indeed.
+</p>
+<p>
+The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the
+while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was
+in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting “Off with his
+head!” or “Off with her head!” about once in a minute.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute
+with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, “and then,”
+thought she, “what would become of me? They’re dreadfully fond of beheading
+people here; the great wonder is, that there’s any one left alive!”
+</p>
+<p>
+She was looking about for some way of escape, and wondering whether she could
+get away without being seen, when she noticed a curious appearance in the air:
+it puzzled her very much at first, but, after watching it a minute or two, she
+made it out to be a grin, and she said to herself “It’s the Cheshire Cat: now I
+shall have somebody to talk to.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How are you getting on?” said the Cat, as soon as there was mouth enough for
+it to speak with.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice waited till the eyes appeared, and then nodded. “It’s no use speaking to
+it,” she thought, “till its ears have come, or at least one of them.” In
+another minute the whole head appeared, and then Alice put down her flamingo,
+and began an account of the game, feeling very glad she had someone to listen
+to her. The Cat seemed to think that there was enough of it now in sight, and
+no more of it appeared.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t think they play at all fairly,” Alice began, in rather a complaining
+tone, “and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can’t hear oneself speak—and they
+don’t seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody
+attends to them—and you’ve no idea how confusing it is all the things being
+alive; for instance, there’s the arch I’ve got to go through next walking about
+at the other end of the ground—and I should have croqueted the Queen’s hedgehog
+just now, only it ran away when it saw mine coming!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How do you like the Queen?” said the Cat in a low voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not at all,” said Alice: “she’s so extremely—” Just then she noticed that the
+Queen was close behind her, listening: so she went on, “—likely to win, that
+it’s hardly worth while finishing the game.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Queen smiled and passed on.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who <i>are</i> you talking to?” said the King, going up to Alice, and looking
+at the Cat’s head with great curiosity.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s a friend of mine—a Cheshire Cat,” said Alice: “allow me to introduce it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t like the look of it at all,” said the King: “however, it may kiss my
+hand if it likes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’d rather not,” the Cat remarked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t be impertinent,” said the King, “and don’t look at me like that!” He got
+behind Alice as he spoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+“A cat may look at a king,” said Alice. “I’ve read that in some book, but I
+don’t remember where.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, it must be removed,” said the King very decidedly, and he called the
+Queen, who was passing at the moment, “My dear! I wish you would have this cat
+removed!”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. “Off
+with his head!” she said, without even looking round.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ll fetch the executioner myself,” said the King eagerly, and he hurried off.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice thought she might as well go back, and see how the game was going on, as
+she heard the Queen’s voice in the distance, screaming with passion. She had
+already heard her sentence three of the players to be executed for having
+missed their turns, and she did not like the look of things at all, as the game
+was in such confusion that she never knew whether it was her turn or not. So
+she went in search of her hedgehog.
+</p>
+<p>
+The hedgehog was engaged in a fight with another hedgehog, which seemed to
+Alice an excellent opportunity for croqueting one of them with the other: the
+only difficulty was, that her flamingo was gone across to the other side of the
+garden, where Alice could see it trying in a helpless sort of way to fly up
+into a tree.
+</p>
+<p>
+By the time she had caught the flamingo and brought it back, the fight was
+over, and both the hedgehogs were out of sight: “but it doesn’t matter much,”
+thought Alice, “as all the arches are gone from this side of the ground.” So
+she tucked it away under her arm, that it might not escape again, and went back
+for a little more conversation with her friend.
+</p>
+<p>
+When she got back to the Cheshire Cat, she was surprised to find quite a large
+crowd collected round it: there was a dispute going on between the executioner,
+the King, and the Queen, who were all talking at once, while all the rest were
+quite silent, and looked very uncomfortable.
+</p>
+<p>
+The moment Alice appeared, she was appealed to by all three to settle the
+question, and they repeated their arguments to her, though, as they all spoke
+at once, she found it very hard indeed to make out exactly what they said.
+</p>
+<p>
+The executioner’s argument was, that you couldn’t cut off a head unless there
+was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before,
+and he wasn’t going to begin at <i>his</i> time of life.
+</p>
+<p>
+The King’s argument was, that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and
+that you weren’t to talk nonsense.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Queen’s argument was, that if something wasn’t done about it in less than
+no time she’d have everybody executed, all round. (It was this last remark that
+had made the whole party look so grave and anxious.)
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice could think of nothing else to say but “It belongs to the Duchess: you’d
+better ask <i>her</i> about it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She’s in prison,” the Queen said to the executioner: “fetch her here.” And the
+executioner went off like an arrow.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Cat’s head began fading away the moment he was gone, and, by the time he
+had come back with the Duchess, it had entirely disappeared; so the King and
+the executioner ran wildly up and down looking for it, while the rest of the
+party went back to the game.
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap09"></a>CHAPTER IX.<br>
+The Mock Turtle’s Story</h2>
+<p>
+“You can’t think how glad I am to see you again, you dear old thing!” said the
+Duchess, as she tucked her arm affectionately into Alice’s, and they walked off
+together.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice was very glad to find her in such a pleasant temper, and thought to
+herself that perhaps it was only the pepper that had made her so savage when
+they met in the kitchen.
+</p>
+<p>
+“When <i>I’m</i> a Duchess,” she said to herself, (not in a very hopeful tone
+though), “I won’t have any pepper in my kitchen <i>at all</i>. Soup does very
+well without—Maybe it’s always pepper that makes people hot-tempered,” she went
+on, very much pleased at having found out a new kind of rule, “and vinegar that
+makes them sour—and camomile that makes them bitter—and—and barley-sugar and
+such things that make children sweet-tempered. I only wish people knew
+<i>that</i>: then they wouldn’t be so stingy about it, you know—”
+</p>
+<p>
+She had quite forgotten the Duchess by this time, and was a little startled
+when she heard her voice close to her ear. “You’re thinking about something, my
+dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can’t tell you just now what the
+moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Perhaps it hasn’t one,” Alice ventured to remark.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can
+find it.” And she squeezed herself up closer to Alice’s side as she spoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice did not much like keeping so close to her: first, because the Duchess was
+<i>very</i> ugly; and secondly, because she was exactly the right height to
+rest her chin upon Alice’s shoulder, and it was an uncomfortably sharp chin.
+However, she did not like to be rude, so she bore it as well as she could.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The game’s going on rather better now,” she said, by way of keeping up the
+conversation a little.
+</p>
+<p>
+“’Tis so,” said the Duchess: “and the moral of that is—‘Oh, ’tis love, ’tis
+love, that makes the world go round!’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Somebody said,” Alice whispered, “that it’s done by everybody minding their
+own business!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah, well! It means much the same thing,” said the Duchess, digging her sharp
+little chin into Alice’s shoulder as she added, “and the moral of <i>that</i>
+is—‘Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How fond she is of finding morals in things!” Alice thought to herself.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I dare say you’re wondering why I don’t put my arm round your waist,” the
+Duchess said after a pause: “the reason is, that I’m doubtful about the temper
+of your flamingo. Shall I try the experiment?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He might bite,” Alice cautiously replied, not feeling at all anxious to have
+the experiment tried.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very true,” said the Duchess: “flamingoes and mustard both bite. And the moral
+of that is—‘Birds of a feather flock together.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Only mustard isn’t a bird,” Alice remarked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Right, as usual,” said the Duchess: “what a clear way you have of putting
+things!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s a mineral, I <i>think</i>,” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course it is,” said the Duchess, who seemed ready to agree to everything
+that Alice said; “there’s a large mustard-mine near here. And the moral of that
+is—‘The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, I know!” exclaimed Alice, who had not attended to this last remark, “it’s
+a vegetable. It doesn’t look like one, but it is.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess; “and the moral of that is—‘Be what
+you would seem to be’—or if you’d like it put more simply—‘Never imagine
+yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you
+were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have
+appeared to them to be otherwise.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think I should understand that better,” Alice said very politely, “if I had
+it written down: but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s nothing to what I could say if I chose,” the Duchess replied, in a
+pleased tone.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pray don’t trouble yourself to say it any longer than that,” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, don’t talk about trouble!” said the Duchess. “I make you a present of
+everything I’ve said as yet.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A cheap sort of present!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they don’t give birthday
+presents like that!” But she did not venture to say it out loud.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thinking again?” the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ve a right to think,” said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a
+little worried.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Just about as much right,” said the Duchess, “as pigs have to fly; and the m—”
+</p>
+<p>
+But here, to Alice’s great surprise, the Duchess’s voice died away, even in the
+middle of her favourite word ‘moral,’ and the arm that was linked into hers
+began to tremble. Alice looked up, and there stood the Queen in front of them,
+with her arms folded, frowning like a thunderstorm.
+</p>
+<p>
+“A fine day, your Majesty!” the Duchess began in a low, weak voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, I give you fair warning,” shouted the Queen, stamping on the ground as
+she spoke; “either you or your head must be off, and that in about half no
+time! Take your choice!”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Duchess took her choice, and was gone in a moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Let’s go on with the game,” the Queen said to Alice; and Alice was too much
+frightened to say a word, but slowly followed her back to the croquet-ground.
+</p>
+<p>
+The other guests had taken advantage of the Queen’s absence, and were resting
+in the shade: however, the moment they saw her, they hurried back to the game,
+the Queen merely remarking that a moment’s delay would cost them their lives.
+</p>
+<p>
+All the time they were playing the Queen never left off quarrelling with the
+other players, and shouting “Off with his head!” or “Off with her head!” Those
+whom she sentenced were taken into custody by the soldiers, who of course had
+to leave off being arches to do this, so that by the end of half an hour or so
+there were no arches left, and all the players, except the King, the Queen, and
+Alice, were in custody and under sentence of execution.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, “Have you seen
+the Mock Turtle yet?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No,” said Alice. “I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,” said the Queen.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I never saw one, or heard of one,” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come on, then,” said the Queen, “and he shall tell you his history.”
+</p>
+<p>
+As they walked off together, Alice heard the King say in a low voice, to the
+company generally, “You are all pardoned.” “Come, <i>that’s</i> a good thing!”
+she said to herself, for she had felt quite unhappy at the number of executions
+the Queen had ordered.
+</p>
+<p>
+They very soon came upon a Gryphon, lying fast asleep in the sun. (If you don’t
+know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.) “Up, lazy thing!” said the Queen,
+“and take this young lady to see the Mock Turtle, and to hear his history. I
+must go back and see after some executions I have ordered;” and she walked off,
+leaving Alice alone with the Gryphon. Alice did not quite like the look of the
+creature, but on the whole she thought it would be quite as safe to stay with
+it as to go after that savage Queen: so she waited.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Gryphon sat up and rubbed its eyes: then it watched the Queen till she was
+out of sight: then it chuckled. “What fun!” said the Gryphon, half to itself,
+half to Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What <i>is</i> the fun?” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, <i>she</i>,” said the Gryphon. “It’s all her fancy, that: they never
+executes nobody, you know. Come on!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Everybody says ‘come on!’ here,” thought Alice, as she went slowly after it:
+“I never was so ordered about in all my life, never!”
+</p>
+<p>
+They had not gone far before they saw the Mock Turtle in the distance, sitting
+sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock, and, as they came nearer, Alice could
+hear him sighing as if his heart would break. She pitied him deeply. “What is
+his sorrow?” she asked the Gryphon, and the Gryphon answered, very nearly in
+the same words as before, “It’s all his fancy, that: he hasn’t got no sorrow,
+you know. Come on!”
+</p>
+<p>
+So they went up to the Mock Turtle, who looked at them with large eyes full of
+tears, but said nothing.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This here young lady,” said the Gryphon, “she wants for to know your history,
+she do.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ll tell it her,” said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone: “sit down,
+both of you, and don’t speak a word till I’ve finished.”
+</p>
+<p>
+So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself,
+“I don’t see how he can <i>ever</i> finish, if he doesn’t begin.” But she
+waited patiently.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Once,” said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, “I was a real Turtle.”
+</p>
+<p>
+These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by an occasional
+exclamation of “Hjckrrh!” from the Gryphon, and the constant heavy sobbing of
+the Mock Turtle. Alice was very nearly getting up and saying, “Thank you, sir,
+for your interesting story,” but she could not help thinking there <i>must</i>
+be more to come, so she sat still and said nothing.
+</p>
+<p>
+“When we were little,” the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though
+still sobbing a little now and then, “we went to school in the sea. The master
+was an old Turtle—we used to call him Tortoise—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?” Alice asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” said the Mock Turtle angrily:
+“really you are very dull!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question,” added
+the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked at poor Alice, who felt
+ready to sink into the earth. At last the Gryphon said to the Mock Turtle,
+“Drive on, old fellow! Don’t be all day about it!” and he went on in these
+words:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you mayn’t believe it—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I never said I didn’t!” interrupted Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You did,” said the Mock Turtle.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hold your tongue!” added the Gryphon, before Alice could speak again. The Mock
+Turtle went on.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We had the best of educations—in fact, we went to school every day—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“<i>I’ve</i> been to a day-school, too,” said Alice; “you needn’t be so proud
+as all that.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“With extras?” asked the Mock Turtle a little anxiously.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” said Alice, “we learned French and music.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And washing?” said the Mock Turtle.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Certainly not!” said Alice indignantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah! then yours wasn’t a really good school,” said the Mock Turtle in a tone of
+great relief. “Now at <i>ours</i> they had at the end of the bill, ‘French,
+music, <i>and washing</i>—extra.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You couldn’t have wanted it much,” said Alice; “living at the bottom of the
+sea.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I couldn’t afford to learn it.” said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. “I only took
+the regular course.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What was that?” inquired Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and
+then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification,
+and Derision.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I never heard of ‘Uglification,’” Alice ventured to say. “What is it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. “What! Never heard of
+uglifying!” it exclaimed. “You know what to beautify is, I suppose?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” said Alice doubtfully: “it means—to—make—anything—prettier.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, then,” the Gryphon went on, “if you don’t know what to uglify is, you
+<i>are</i> a simpleton.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it, so she turned
+to the Mock Turtle, and said “What else had you to learn?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects
+on his flappers, “—Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then
+Drawling—the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a
+week: <i>he</i> taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What was <i>that</i> like?” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, I can’t show it you myself,” the Mock Turtle said: “I’m too stiff. And
+the Gryphon never learnt it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hadn’t time,” said the Gryphon: “I went to the Classics master, though. He was
+an old crab, <i>he</i> was.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I never went to him,” the Mock Turtle said with a sigh: “he taught Laughing
+and Grief, they used to say.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“So he did, so he did,” said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn; and both
+creatures hid their faces in their paws.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And how many hours a day did you do lessons?” said Alice, in a hurry to change
+the subject.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ten hours the first day,” said the Mock Turtle: “nine the next, and so on.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What a curious plan!” exclaimed Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s the reason they’re called lessons,” the Gryphon remarked: “because they
+lessen from day to day.”
+</p>
+<p>
+This was quite a new idea to Alice, and she thought it over a little before she
+made her next remark. “Then the eleventh day must have been a holiday?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course it was,” said the Mock Turtle.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And how did you manage on the twelfth?” Alice went on eagerly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s enough about lessons,” the Gryphon interrupted in a very decided tone:
+“tell her something about the games now.”
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap10"></a>CHAPTER X.<br>
+The Lobster Quadrille</h2>
+<p>
+The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and drew the back of one flapper across his
+eyes. He looked at Alice, and tried to speak, but for a minute or two sobs
+choked his voice. “Same as if he had a bone in his throat,” said the Gryphon:
+and it set to work shaking him and punching him in the back. At last the Mock
+Turtle recovered his voice, and, with tears running down his cheeks, he went on
+again:—
+</p>
+<p>
+“You may not have lived much under the sea—” (“I haven’t,” said Alice)—“and
+perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster—” (Alice began to say “I
+once tasted—” but checked herself hastily, and said “No, never”) “—so you can
+have no idea what a delightful thing a Lobster Quadrille is!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, indeed,” said Alice. “What sort of a dance is it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why,” said the Gryphon, “you first form into a line along the sea-shore—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Two lines!” cried the Mock Turtle. “Seals, turtles, salmon, and so on; then,
+when you’ve cleared all the jelly-fish out of the way—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“<i>That</i> generally takes some time,” interrupted the Gryphon.
+</p>
+<p>
+“—you advance twice—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Each with a lobster as a partner!” cried the Gryphon.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course,” the Mock Turtle said: “advance twice, set to partners—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“—change lobsters, and retire in same order,” continued the Gryphon.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then, you know,” the Mock Turtle went on, “you throw the—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The lobsters!” shouted the Gryphon, with a bound into the air.
+</p>
+<p>
+“—as far out to sea as you can—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Swim after them!” screamed the Gryphon.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Turn a somersault in the sea!” cried the Mock Turtle, capering wildly about.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Change lobsters again!” yelled the Gryphon at the top of its voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Back to land again, and that’s all the first figure,” said the Mock Turtle,
+suddenly dropping his voice; and the two creatures, who had been jumping about
+like mad things all this time, sat down again very sadly and quietly, and
+looked at Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It must be a very pretty dance,” said Alice timidly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Would you like to see a little of it?” said the Mock Turtle.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very much indeed,” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come, let’s try the first figure!” said the Mock Turtle to the Gryphon. “We
+can do without lobsters, you know. Which shall sing?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, <i>you</i> sing,” said the Gryphon. “I’ve forgotten the words.”
+</p>
+<p>
+So they began solemnly dancing round and round Alice, every now and then
+treading on her toes when they passed too close, and waving their forepaws to
+mark the time, while the Mock Turtle sang this, very slowly and sadly:—
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+“Will you walk a little faster?” said a whiting to a snail.<br>
+“There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.<br>
+See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!<br>
+They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance?<br>
+Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?<br>
+Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?<br>
+<br>
+“You can really have no notion how delightful it will be<br>
+When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!”<br>
+But the snail replied “Too far, too far!” and gave a look askance—<br>
+Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance.<br>
+Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.<br>
+Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join the dance.<br>
+<br>
+“What matters it how far we go?” his scaly friend replied.<br>
+“There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.<br>
+The further off from England the nearer is to France—<br>
+Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.<br>
+Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?<br>
+Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you, it’s a very interesting dance to watch,” said Alice, feeling very
+glad that it was over at last: “and I do so like that curious song about the
+whiting!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, as to the whiting,” said the Mock Turtle, “they—you’ve seen them, of
+course?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” said Alice, “I’ve often seen them at dinn—” she checked herself hastily.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t know where Dinn may be,” said the Mock Turtle, “but if you’ve seen
+them so often, of course you know what they’re like.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I believe so,” Alice replied thoughtfully. “They have their tails in their
+mouths—and they’re all over crumbs.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You’re wrong about the crumbs,” said the Mock Turtle: “crumbs would all wash
+off in the sea. But they <i>have</i> their tails in their mouths; and the
+reason is—” here the Mock Turtle yawned and shut his eyes.—“Tell her about the
+reason and all that,” he said to the Gryphon.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The reason is,” said the Gryphon, “that they <i>would</i> go with the lobsters
+to the dance. So they got thrown out to sea. So they had to fall a long way. So
+they got their tails fast in their mouths. So they couldn’t get them out again.
+That’s all.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you,” said Alice, “it’s very interesting. I never knew so much about a
+whiting before.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I can tell you more than that, if you like,” said the Gryphon. “Do you know
+why it’s called a whiting?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I never thought about it,” said Alice. “Why?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“<i>It does the boots and shoes</i>,” the Gryphon replied very solemnly.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice was thoroughly puzzled. “Does the boots and shoes!” she repeated in a
+wondering tone.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, what are <i>your</i> shoes done with?” said the Gryphon. “I mean, what
+makes them so shiny?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice looked down at them, and considered a little before she gave her answer.
+“They’re done with blacking, I believe.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Boots and shoes under the sea,” the Gryphon went on in a deep voice, “are done
+with a whiting. Now you know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And what are they made of?” Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Soles and eels, of course,” the Gryphon replied rather impatiently: “any
+shrimp could have told you that.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If I’d been the whiting,” said Alice, whose thoughts were still running on the
+song, “I’d have said to the porpoise, ‘Keep back, please: we don’t want
+<i>you</i> with us!’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“They were obliged to have him with them,” the Mock Turtle said: “no wise fish
+would go anywhere without a porpoise.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Wouldn’t it really?” said Alice in a tone of great surprise.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course not,” said the Mock Turtle: “why, if a fish came to <i>me</i>, and
+told me he was going a journey, I should say ‘With what porpoise?’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t you mean ‘purpose’?” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I mean what I say,” the Mock Turtle replied in an offended tone. And the
+Gryphon added “Come, let’s hear some of <i>your</i> adventures.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a
+little timidly: “but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a
+different person then.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Explain all that,” said the Mock Turtle.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, no! The adventures first,” said the Gryphon in an impatient tone:
+“explanations take such a dreadful time.”
+</p>
+<p>
+So Alice began telling them her adventures from the time when she first saw the
+White Rabbit. She was a little nervous about it just at first, the two
+creatures got so close to her, one on each side, and opened their eyes and
+mouths so <i>very</i> wide, but she gained courage as she went on. Her
+listeners were perfectly quiet till she got to the part about her repeating
+“<i>You are old, Father William</i>,” to the Caterpillar, and the words all
+coming different, and then the Mock Turtle drew a long breath, and said “That’s
+very curious.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s all about as curious as it can be,” said the Gryphon.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It all came different!” the Mock Turtle repeated thoughtfully. “I should like
+to hear her try and repeat something now. Tell her to begin.” He looked at the
+Gryphon as if he thought it had some kind of authority over Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Stand up and repeat ‘’<i>Tis the voice of the sluggard</i>,’” said the
+Gryphon.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat lessons!” thought
+Alice; “I might as well be at school at once.” However, she got up, and began
+to repeat it, but her head was so full of the Lobster Quadrille, that she
+hardly knew what she was saying, and the words came very queer indeed:—
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+“’Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare,<br>
+“You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.”<br>
+As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose<br>
+Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.”<br>
+<br>
+[later editions continued as follows<br>
+When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark,<br>
+And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark,<br>
+But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,<br>
+His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.]
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s different from what <i>I</i> used to say when I was a child,” said the
+Gryphon.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, I never heard it before,” said the Mock Turtle; “but it sounds uncommon
+nonsense.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice said nothing; she had sat down with her face in her hands, wondering if
+anything would <i>ever</i> happen in a natural way again.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I should like to have it explained,” said the Mock Turtle.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She can’t explain it,” said the Gryphon hastily. “Go on with the next verse.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But about his toes?” the Mock Turtle persisted. “How <i>could</i> he turn them
+out with his nose, you know?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s the first position in dancing.” Alice said; but was dreadfully puzzled by
+the whole thing, and longed to change the subject.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Go on with the next verse,” the Gryphon repeated impatiently: “it begins ‘<i>I
+passed by his garden</i>.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice did not dare to disobey, though she felt sure it would all come wrong,
+and she went on in a trembling voice:—
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+“I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,<br>
+How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie—”<br>
+<br>
+[later editions continued as follows<br>
+The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat,<br>
+While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat.<br>
+When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,<br>
+Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon:<br>
+While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,<br>
+And concluded the banquet—]
+</p>
+<p>
+“What <i>is</i> the use of repeating all that stuff,” the Mock Turtle
+interrupted, “if you don’t explain it as you go on? It’s by far the most
+confusing thing <i>I</i> ever heard!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, I think you’d better leave off,” said the Gryphon: and Alice was only too
+glad to do so.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Shall we try another figure of the Lobster Quadrille?” the Gryphon went on.
+“Or would you like the Mock Turtle to sing you a song?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, a song, please, if the Mock Turtle would be so kind,” Alice replied, so
+eagerly that the Gryphon said, in a rather offended tone, “Hm! No accounting
+for tastes! Sing her ‘<i>Turtle Soup</i>,’ will you, old fellow?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and began, in a voice sometimes choked with
+sobs, to sing this:—
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+“Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,<br>
+Waiting in a hot tureen!<br>
+Who for such dainties would not stoop?<br>
+Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!<br>
+Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!<br>
+    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!<br>
+    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!<br>
+Soo—oop of the e—e—evening,<br>
+    Beautiful, beautiful Soup!<br>
+<br>
+“Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,<br>
+Game, or any other dish?<br>
+Who would not give all else for two p<br>
+ennyworth only of beautiful Soup?<br>
+Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?<br>
+    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!<br>
+    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!<br>
+Soo—oop of the e—e—evening,<br>
+    Beautiful, beauti—FUL SOUP!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Chorus again!” cried the Gryphon, and the Mock Turtle had just begun to repeat
+it, when a cry of “The trial’s beginning!” was heard in the distance.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come on!” cried the Gryphon, and, taking Alice by the hand, it hurried off,
+without waiting for the end of the song.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What trial is it?” Alice panted as she ran; but the Gryphon only answered
+“Come on!” and ran the faster, while more and more faintly came, carried on the
+breeze that followed them, the melancholy words:—
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+“Soo—oop of the e—e—evening,<br>
+    Beautiful, beautiful Soup!”
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap11"></a>CHAPTER XI.<br>
+Who Stole the Tarts?</h2>
+<p>
+The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their throne when they arrived,
+with a great crowd assembled about them—all sorts of little birds and beasts,
+as well as the whole pack of cards: the Knave was standing before them, in
+chains, with a soldier on each side to guard him; and near the King was the
+White Rabbit, with a trumpet in one hand, and a scroll of parchment in the
+other. In the very middle of the court was a table, with a large dish of tarts
+upon it: they looked so good, that it made Alice quite hungry to look at
+them—“I wish they’d get the trial done,” she thought, “and hand round the
+refreshments!” But there seemed to be no chance of this, so she began looking
+at everything about her, to pass away the time.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice had never been in a court of justice before, but she had read about them
+in books, and she was quite pleased to find that she knew the name of nearly
+everything there. “That’s the judge,” she said to herself, “because of his
+great wig.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The judge, by the way, was the King; and as he wore his crown over the wig,
+(look at the frontispiece if you want to see how he did it,) he did not look at
+all comfortable, and it was certainly not becoming.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And that’s the jury-box,” thought Alice, “and those twelve creatures,” (she
+was obliged to say “creatures,” you see, because some of them were animals, and
+some were birds,) “I suppose they are the jurors.” She said this last word two
+or three times over to herself, being rather proud of it: for she thought, and
+rightly too, that very few little girls of her age knew the meaning of it at
+all. However, “jury-men” would have done just as well.
+</p>
+<p>
+The twelve jurors were all writing very busily on slates. “What are they
+doing?” Alice whispered to the Gryphon. “They can’t have anything to put down
+yet, before the trial’s begun.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“They’re putting down their names,” the Gryphon whispered in reply, “for fear
+they should forget them before the end of the trial.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Stupid things!” Alice began in a loud, indignant voice, but she stopped
+hastily, for the White Rabbit cried out, “Silence in the court!” and the King
+put on his spectacles and looked anxiously round, to make out who was talking.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice could see, as well as if she were looking over their shoulders, that all
+the jurors were writing down “stupid things!” on their slates, and she could
+even make out that one of them didn’t know how to spell “stupid,” and that he
+had to ask his neighbour to tell him. “A nice muddle their slates’ll be in
+before the trial’s over!” thought Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+One of the jurors had a pencil that squeaked. This of course, Alice could
+<i>not</i> stand, and she went round the court and got behind him, and very
+soon found an opportunity of taking it away. She did it so quickly that the
+poor little juror (it was Bill, the Lizard) could not make out at all what had
+become of it; so, after hunting all about for it, he was obliged to write with
+one finger for the rest of the day; and this was of very little use, as it left
+no mark on the slate.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Herald, read the accusation!” said the King.
+</p>
+<p>
+On this the White Rabbit blew three blasts on the trumpet, and then unrolled
+the parchment scroll, and read as follows:—
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+“The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,<br>
+    All on a summer day:<br>
+The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,<br>
+    And took them quite away!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Consider your verdict,” the King said to the jury.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not yet, not yet!” the Rabbit hastily interrupted. “There’s a great deal to
+come before that!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Call the first witness,” said the King; and the White Rabbit blew three blasts
+on the trumpet, and called out, “First witness!”
+</p>
+<p>
+The first witness was the Hatter. He came in with a teacup in one hand and a
+piece of bread-and-butter in the other. “I beg pardon, your Majesty,” he began,
+“for bringing these in: but I hadn’t quite finished my tea when I was sent
+for.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You ought to have finished,” said the King. “When did you begin?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Hatter looked at the March Hare, who had followed him into the court,
+arm-in-arm with the Dormouse. “Fourteenth of March, I <i>think</i> it was,” he
+said.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Fifteenth,” said the March Hare.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Sixteenth,” added the Dormouse.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Write that down,” the King said to the jury, and the jury eagerly wrote down
+all three dates on their slates, and then added them up, and reduced the answer
+to shillings and pence.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Take off your hat,” the King said to the Hatter.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It isn’t mine,” said the Hatter.
+</p>
+<p>
+“<i>Stolen!</i>” the King exclaimed, turning to the jury, who instantly made a
+memorandum of the fact.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I keep them to sell,” the Hatter added as an explanation; “I’ve none of my
+own. I’m a hatter.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Here the Queen put on her spectacles, and began staring at the Hatter, who
+turned pale and fidgeted.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Give your evidence,” said the King; “and don’t be nervous, or I’ll have you
+executed on the spot.”
+</p>
+<p>
+This did not seem to encourage the witness at all: he kept shifting from one
+foot to the other, looking uneasily at the Queen, and in his confusion he bit a
+large piece out of his teacup instead of the bread-and-butter.
+</p>
+<p>
+Just at this moment Alice felt a very curious sensation, which puzzled her a
+good deal until she made out what it was: she was beginning to grow larger
+again, and she thought at first she would get up and leave the court; but on
+second thoughts she decided to remain where she was as long as there was room
+for her.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I wish you wouldn’t squeeze so,” said the Dormouse, who was sitting next to
+her. “I can hardly breathe.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I can’t help it,” said Alice very meekly: “I’m growing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You’ve no right to grow <i>here</i>,” said the Dormouse.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Alice more boldly: “you know you’re growing too.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, but <i>I</i> grow at a reasonable pace,” said the Dormouse: “not in that
+ridiculous fashion.” And he got up very sulkily and crossed over to the other
+side of the court.
+</p>
+<p>
+All this time the Queen had never left off staring at the Hatter, and, just as
+the Dormouse crossed the court, she said to one of the officers of the court,
+“Bring me the list of the singers in the last concert!” on which the wretched
+Hatter trembled so, that he shook both his shoes off.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Give your evidence,” the King repeated angrily, “or I’ll have you executed,
+whether you’re nervous or not.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m a poor man, your Majesty,” the Hatter began, in a trembling voice, “—and I
+hadn’t begun my tea—not above a week or so—and what with the bread-and-butter
+getting so thin—and the twinkling of the tea—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The twinkling of the <i>what?</i>” said the King.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It <i>began</i> with the tea,” the Hatter replied.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course twinkling begins with a T!” said the King sharply. “Do you take me
+for a dunce? Go on!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m a poor man,” the Hatter went on, “and most things twinkled after that—only
+the March Hare said—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I didn’t!” the March Hare interrupted in a great hurry.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You did!” said the Hatter.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I deny it!” said the March Hare.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He denies it,” said the King: “leave out that part.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, at any rate, the Dormouse said—” the Hatter went on, looking anxiously
+round to see if he would deny it too: but the Dormouse denied nothing, being
+fast asleep.
+</p>
+<p>
+“After that,” continued the Hatter, “I cut some more bread-and-butter—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But what did the Dormouse say?” one of the jury asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That I can’t remember,” said the Hatter.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You <i>must</i> remember,” remarked the King, “or I’ll have you executed.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The miserable Hatter dropped his teacup and bread-and-butter, and went down on
+one knee. “I’m a poor man, your Majesty,” he began.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You’re a <i>very</i> poor <i>speaker</i>,” said the King.
+</p>
+<p>
+Here one of the guinea-pigs cheered, and was immediately suppressed by the
+officers of the court. (As that is rather a hard word, I will just explain to
+you how it was done. They had a large canvas bag, which tied up at the mouth
+with strings: into this they slipped the guinea-pig, head first, and then sat
+upon it.)
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m glad I’ve seen that done,” thought Alice. “I’ve so often read in the
+newspapers, at the end of trials, “There was some attempt at applause, which
+was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court,” and I never
+understood what it meant till now.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If that’s all you know about it, you may stand down,” continued the King.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I can’t go no lower,” said the Hatter: “I’m on the floor, as it is.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then you may <i>sit</i> down,” the King replied.
+</p>
+<p>
+Here the other guinea-pig cheered, and was suppressed.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come, that finished the guinea-pigs!” thought Alice. “Now we shall get on
+better.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’d rather finish my tea,” said the Hatter, with an anxious look at the Queen,
+who was reading the list of singers.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You may go,” said the King, and the Hatter hurriedly left the court, without
+even waiting to put his shoes on.
+</p>
+<p>
+“—and just take his head off outside,” the Queen added to one of the officers:
+but the Hatter was out of sight before the officer could get to the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Call the next witness!” said the King.
+</p>
+<p>
+The next witness was the Duchess’s cook. She carried the pepper-box in her
+hand, and Alice guessed who it was, even before she got into the court, by the
+way the people near the door began sneezing all at once.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Give your evidence,” said the King.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Shan’t,” said the cook.
+</p>
+<p>
+The King looked anxiously at the White Rabbit, who said in a low voice, “Your
+Majesty must cross-examine <i>this</i> witness.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, if I must, I must,” the King said, with a melancholy air, and, after
+folding his arms and frowning at the cook till his eyes were nearly out of
+sight, he said in a deep voice, “What are tarts made of?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pepper, mostly,” said the cook.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Treacle,” said a sleepy voice behind her.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Collar that Dormouse,” the Queen shrieked out. “Behead that Dormouse! Turn
+that Dormouse out of court! Suppress him! Pinch him! Off with his whiskers!”
+</p>
+<p>
+For some minutes the whole court was in confusion, getting the Dormouse turned
+out, and, by the time they had settled down again, the cook had disappeared.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Never mind!” said the King, with an air of great relief. “Call the next
+witness.” And he added in an undertone to the Queen, “Really, my dear,
+<i>you</i> must cross-examine the next witness. It quite makes my forehead
+ache!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice watched the White Rabbit as he fumbled over the list, feeling very
+curious to see what the next witness would be like, “—for they haven’t got much
+evidence <i>yet</i>,” she said to herself. Imagine her surprise, when the White
+Rabbit read out, at the top of his shrill little voice, the name “Alice!”
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap12"></a>CHAPTER XII.<br>
+Alice’s Evidence</h2>
+<p>
+“Here!” cried Alice, quite forgetting in the flurry of the moment how large she
+had grown in the last few minutes, and she jumped up in such a hurry that she
+tipped over the jury-box with the edge of her skirt, upsetting all the jurymen
+on to the heads of the crowd below, and there they lay sprawling about,
+reminding her very much of a globe of goldfish she had accidentally upset the
+week before.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, I <i>beg</i> your pardon!” she exclaimed in a tone of great dismay, and
+began picking them up again as quickly as she could, for the accident of the
+goldfish kept running in her head, and she had a vague sort of idea that they
+must be collected at once and put back into the jury-box, or they would die.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The trial cannot proceed,” said the King in a very grave voice, “until all the
+jurymen are back in their proper places—<i>all</i>,” he repeated with great
+emphasis, looking hard at Alice as he said so.
+</p>
+<p>
+Alice looked at the jury-box, and saw that, in her haste, she had put the
+Lizard in head downwards, and the poor little thing was waving its tail about
+in a melancholy way, being quite unable to move. She soon got it out again, and
+put it right; “not that it signifies much,” she said to herself; “I should
+think it would be <i>quite</i> as much use in the trial one way up as the
+other.”
+</p>
+<p>
+As soon as the jury had a little recovered from the shock of being upset, and
+their slates and pencils had been found and handed back to them, they set to
+work very diligently to write out a history of the accident, all except the
+Lizard, who seemed too much overcome to do anything but sit with its mouth
+open, gazing up into the roof of the court.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What do you know about this business?” the King said to Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nothing,” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nothing <i>whatever?</i>” persisted the King.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nothing whatever,” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s very important,” the King said, turning to the jury. They were just
+beginning to write this down on their slates, when the White Rabbit
+interrupted: “<i>Un</i>important, your Majesty means, of course,” he said in a
+very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+“<i>Un</i>important, of course, I meant,” the King hastily said, and went on to
+himself in an undertone,
+</p>
+<p>
+“important—unimportant—unimportant—important—” as if he were trying which word
+sounded best.
+</p>
+<p>
+Some of the jury wrote it down “important,” and some “unimportant.” Alice could
+see this, as she was near enough to look over their slates; “but it doesn’t
+matter a bit,” she thought to herself.
+</p>
+<p>
+At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his
+note-book, cackled out “Silence!” and read out from his book, “Rule Forty-two.
+<i>All persons more than a mile high to leave the court</i>.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Everybody looked at Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“<i>I’m</i> not a mile high,” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are,” said the King.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nearly two miles high,” added the Queen.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, I shan’t go, at any rate,” said Alice: “besides, that’s not a regular
+rule: you invented it just now.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s the oldest rule in the book,” said the King.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then it ought to be Number One,” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+The King turned pale, and shut his note-book hastily. “Consider your verdict,”
+he said to the jury, in a low, trembling voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There’s more evidence to come yet, please your Majesty,” said the White
+Rabbit, jumping up in a great hurry; “this paper has just been picked up.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What’s in it?” said the Queen.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I haven’t opened it yet,” said the White Rabbit, “but it seems to be a letter,
+written by the prisoner to—to somebody.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It must have been that,” said the King, “unless it was written to nobody,
+which isn’t usual, you know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who is it directed to?” said one of the jurymen.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It isn’t directed at all,” said the White Rabbit; “in fact, there’s nothing
+written on the <i>outside</i>.” He unfolded the paper as he spoke, and added
+“It isn’t a letter, after all: it’s a set of verses.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Are they in the prisoner’s handwriting?” asked another of the jurymen.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, they’re not,” said the White Rabbit, “and that’s the queerest thing about
+it.” (The jury all looked puzzled.)
+</p>
+<p>
+“He must have imitated somebody else’s hand,” said the King. (The jury all
+brightened up again.)
+</p>
+<p>
+“Please your Majesty,” said the Knave, “I didn’t write it, and they can’t prove
+I did: there’s no name signed at the end.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If you didn’t sign it,” said the King, “that only makes the matter worse. You
+<i>must</i> have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed your name like
+an honest man.”
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a general clapping of hands at this: it was the first really clever
+thing the King had said that day.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That <i>proves</i> his guilt,” said the Queen.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It proves nothing of the sort!” said Alice. “Why, you don’t even know what
+they’re about!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Read them,” said the King.
+</p>
+<p>
+The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. “Where shall I begin, please your
+Majesty?” he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to
+the end: then stop.”
+</p>
+<p>
+These were the verses the White Rabbit read:—
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+“They told me you had been to her,<br>
+    And mentioned me to him:<br>
+She gave me a good character,<br>
+    But said I could not swim.<br>
+<br>
+He sent them word I had not gone<br>
+    (We know it to be true):<br>
+If she should push the matter on,<br>
+    What would become of you?<br>
+<br>
+I gave her one, they gave him two,<br>
+    You gave us three or more;<br>
+They all returned from him to you,<br>
+    Though they were mine before.<br>
+<br>
+If I or she should chance to be<br>
+    Involved in this affair,<br>
+He trusts to you to set them free,<br>
+    Exactly as we were.<br>
+<br>
+My notion was that you had been<br>
+    (Before she had this fit)<br>
+An obstacle that came between<br>
+    Him, and ourselves, and it.<br>
+<br>
+Don’t let him know she liked them best,<br>
+    For this must ever be<br>
+A secret, kept from all the rest,<br>
+    Between yourself and me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s the most important piece of evidence we’ve heard yet,” said the King,
+rubbing his hands; “so now let the jury—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If any one of them can explain it,” said Alice, (she had grown so large in the
+last few minutes that she wasn’t a bit afraid of interrupting him), “I’ll give
+him sixpence. <i>I</i> don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The jury all wrote down on their slates, “<i>She</i> doesn’t believe there’s an
+atom of meaning in it,” but none of them attempted to explain the paper.
+</p>
+<p>
+“If there’s no meaning in it,” said the King, “that saves a world of trouble,
+you know, as we needn’t try to find any. And yet I don’t know,” he went on,
+spreading out the verses on his knee, and looking at them with one eye; “I seem
+to see some meaning in them, after all. “—<i>said I could not swim</i>—” you
+can’t swim, can you?” he added, turning to the Knave.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Knave shook his head sadly. “Do I look like it?” he said. (Which he
+certainly did <i>not</i>, being made entirely of cardboard.)
+</p>
+<p>
+“All right, so far,” said the King, and he went on muttering over the verses to
+himself: “‘<i>We know it to be true</i>—’ that’s the jury, of course—‘<i>I gave
+her one, they gave him two</i>—’ why, that must be what he did with the tarts,
+you know—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But, it goes on ‘<i>they all returned from him to you</i>,’” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, there they are!” said the King triumphantly, pointing to the tarts on the
+table. “Nothing can be clearer than <i>that</i>. Then again—‘<i>before she had
+this fit</i>—’ you never had fits, my dear, I think?” he said to the Queen.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Never!” said the Queen furiously, throwing an inkstand at the Lizard as she
+spoke. (The unfortunate little Bill had left off writing on his slate with one
+finger, as he found it made no mark; but he now hastily began again, using the
+ink, that was trickling down his face, as long as it lasted.)
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then the words don’t <i>fit</i> you,” said the King, looking round the court
+with a smile. There was a dead silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s a pun!” the King added in an offended tone, and everybody laughed, “Let
+the jury consider their verdict.” the King said, for about the twentieth time
+that day.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence
+first!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I won’t!” said Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who cares for you?” said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time).
+“You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”
+</p>
+<p>
+At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she
+gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them
+off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her
+sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down
+from the trees upon her face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Wake up, Alice dear!” said her sister; “Why, what a long sleep you’ve had!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice, and she told her sister, as
+well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you
+have just been reading about; and when she had finished, her sister kissed her,
+and said, “It <i>was</i> a curious dream, dear, certainly: but now run in to
+your tea; it’s getting late.” So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she
+ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+But her sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her head on her hand,
+watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and all her wonderful
+Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her
+dream:—
+</p>
+<p>
+First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were
+clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers—she
+could hear the very tones of her voice, and see that queer little toss of her
+head to keep back the wandering hair that <i>would</i> always get into her
+eyes—and still as she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place around her
+became alive with the strange creatures of her little sister’s dream.
+</p>
+<p>
+The long grass rustled at her feet as the White Rabbit hurried by—the
+frightened Mouse splashed his way through the neighbouring pool—she could hear
+the rattle of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends shared their
+never-ending meal, and the shrill voice of the Queen ordering off her
+unfortunate guests to execution—once more the pig-baby was sneezing on the
+Duchess’s knee, while plates and dishes crashed around it—once more the shriek
+of the Gryphon, the squeaking of the Lizard’s slate-pencil, and the choking of
+the suppressed guinea-pigs, filled the air, mixed up with the distant sobs of
+the miserable Mock Turtle.
+</p>
+<p>
+So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland,
+though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull
+reality—the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to
+the waving of the reeds—the rattling teacups would change to tinkling
+sheep-bells, and the Queen’s shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy—and
+the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer
+noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy
+farm-yard—while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place
+of the Mock Turtle’s heavy sobs.
+</p>
+<p>
+Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in
+the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all
+her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she
+would gather about her other little children, and make <i>their</i> eyes bright
+and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland
+of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a
+pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the
+happy summer days.
+</p>
+<h5>THE END </h5>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div></div><footer class="pg-boilerplate pgheader" id="pg-footer" lang="en">
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+<span>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND ***</span>
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+<link rel="schema.dc" href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
+<link rel="schema.dcterms" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">
+<meta name="dc.title" content="Frankenstein; or, the modern prometheus">
+<meta name="dc.language" content="en">
+<meta name="dcterms.source" content="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm">
+<meta name="dcterms.modified" content="2026-10-01T07:51:14.496844+00:00">
+<meta name="dc.rights" content="Public domain in the USA.">
+<link rel="dcterms.isFormatOf" href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84">
+<meta name="dc.creator" content="Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Science fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Horror tales">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Gothic fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Scientists -- Fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Monsters -- Fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Frankenstein, Victor (Fictitious character) -- Fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Frankenstein's monster (Fictitious character) -- Fiction">
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+<body><header class="pg-boilerplate pgheader" id="pg-header" lang="en"><h2 id="pg-header-heading" title="">The Project Gutenberg eBook of <span lang="en" id="pg-title-no-subtitle">Frankenstein; or, the modern prometheus</span></h2>
+    
+<div>This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a class="reference external" href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you are not located in the United States,
+you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
+before using this eBook.</div>
+
+<div class="container" id="pg-machine-header"><p><strong>Title</strong>: Frankenstein; or, the modern prometheus</p>
+<div id="pg-header-authlist">
+<p><strong>Author</strong>: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley</p>
+</div>
+<br>
+        
+<p><strong>Release date</strong>: October 1, 1993 [eBook #84]<br>
+                Most recently updated: February 10, 2026</p>
+
+<p><strong>Language</strong>: English</p>
+
+<p><strong>Other information and formats</strong>: <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84">www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84</a></p>
+
+<p><strong>Credits</strong>: Judith Boss, Christy Phillips, Lynn Hanninen and David Meltzer. HTML version by Al Haines.<br>
+        Further corrections by Menno de Leeuw.</p>
+
+</div><div id="pg-start-separator">
+<span>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS ***</span>
+</div></header><div></div>
+
+<h1>Frankenstein;</h1>
+
+<h3>or, the Modern Prometheus</h3>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley</h2>
+
+<hr>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+
+<tbody><tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#letter1" class="pginternal">Letter 1</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#letter2" class="pginternal">Letter 2</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#letter3" class="pginternal">Letter 3</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#letter4" class="pginternal">Letter 4</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap01" class="pginternal">Chapter 1</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap02" class="pginternal">Chapter 2</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap03" class="pginternal">Chapter 3</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap04" class="pginternal">Chapter 4</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap05" class="pginternal">Chapter 5</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap06" class="pginternal">Chapter 6</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap07" class="pginternal">Chapter 7</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap08" class="pginternal">Chapter 8</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap09" class="pginternal">Chapter 9</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap10" class="pginternal">Chapter 10</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap11" class="pginternal">Chapter 11</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap12" class="pginternal">Chapter 12</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap13" class="pginternal">Chapter 13</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap14" class="pginternal">Chapter 14</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap15" class="pginternal">Chapter 15</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap16" class="pginternal">Chapter 16</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap17" class="pginternal">Chapter 17</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap18" class="pginternal">Chapter 18</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap19" class="pginternal">Chapter 19</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap20" class="pginternal">Chapter 20</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap21" class="pginternal">Chapter 21</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap22" class="pginternal">Chapter 22</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap23" class="pginternal">Chapter 23</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap24" class="pginternal">Chapter 24</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+</tbody></table>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="letter1"></a>Letter 1</h2>
+
+<p class="letter2">
+<i>To Mrs. Saville, England.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+St. Petersburgh, Dec. 11th, 17—.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of
+an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived
+here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and
+increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am already far north of London, and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh,
+I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and
+fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has
+travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste
+of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become
+more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat
+of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the
+region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible, its
+broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour.
+There—for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding
+navigators—there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we
+may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region
+hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be
+without example, as the phenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in
+those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal
+light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and
+may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to
+render their seeming eccentricities consistent for ever. I shall satiate my
+ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited,
+and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my
+enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death and
+to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when
+he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of
+discovery up his native river. But supposing all these conjectures to be false,
+you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind,
+to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole to those
+countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite; or by
+ascertaining the secret of the magnet, which, if at all possible, can only be
+effected by an undertaking such as mine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These reflections have dispelled the agitation with which I began my letter,
+and I feel my heart glow with an enthusiasm which elevates me to heaven, for
+nothing contributes so much to tranquillise the mind as a steady purpose—a
+point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye. This expedition has been
+the favourite dream of my early years. I have read with ardour the accounts of
+the various voyages which have been made in the prospect of arriving at the
+North Pacific Ocean through the seas which surround the pole. You may remember
+that a history of all the voyages made for purposes of discovery composed the
+whole of our good Uncle Thomas’ library. My education was neglected, yet I was
+passionately fond of reading. These volumes were my study day and night, and my
+familiarity with them increased that regret which I had felt, as a child, on
+learning that my father’s dying injunction had forbidden my uncle to allow me
+to embark in a seafaring life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These visions faded when I perused, for the first time, those poets whose
+effusions entranced my soul and lifted it to heaven. I also became a poet and
+for one year lived in a paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also
+might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are
+consecrated. You are well acquainted with my failure and how heavily I bore the
+disappointment. But just at that time I inherited the fortune of my cousin, and
+my thoughts were turned into the channel of their earlier bent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Six years have passed since I resolved on my present undertaking. I can, even
+now, remember the hour from which I dedicated myself to this great enterprise.
+I commenced by inuring my body to hardship. I accompanied the whale-fishers on
+several expeditions to the North Sea; I voluntarily endured cold, famine,
+thirst, and want of sleep; I often worked harder than the common sailors during
+the day and devoted my nights to the study of mathematics, the theory of
+medicine, and those branches of physical science from which a naval adventurer
+might derive the greatest practical advantage. Twice I actually hired myself as
+an under-mate in a Greenland whaler, and acquitted myself to admiration. I must
+own I felt a little proud when my captain offered me the second dignity in the
+vessel and entreated me to remain with the greatest earnestness, so valuable
+did he consider my services.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now, dear Margaret, do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose? My
+life might have been passed in ease and luxury, but I preferred glory to every
+enticement that wealth placed in my path. Oh, that some encouraging voice would
+answer in the affirmative! My courage and my resolution is firm; but my hopes
+fluctuate, and my spirits are often depressed. I am about to proceed on a long
+and difficult voyage, the emergencies of which will demand all my fortitude: I
+am required not only to raise the spirits of others, but sometimes to sustain
+my own, when theirs are failing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is the most favourable period for travelling in Russia. They fly quickly
+over the snow in their sledges; the motion is pleasant, and, in my opinion, far
+more agreeable than that of an English stagecoach. The cold is not excessive,
+if you are wrapped in furs—a dress which I have already adopted, for there is a
+great difference between walking the deck and remaining seated motionless for
+hours, when no exercise prevents the blood from actually freezing in your
+veins. I have no ambition to lose my life on the post-road between St.
+Petersburgh and Archangel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shall depart for the latter town in a fortnight or three weeks; and my
+intention is to hire a ship there, which can easily be done by paying the
+insurance for the owner, and to engage as many sailors as I think necessary
+among those who are accustomed to the whale-fishing. I do not intend to sail
+until the month of June; and when shall I return? Ah, dear sister, how can I
+answer this question? If I succeed, many, many months, perhaps years, will pass
+before you and I may meet. If I fail, you will see me again soon, or never.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Farewell, my dear, excellent Margaret. Heaven shower down blessings on you, and
+save me, that I may again and again testify my gratitude for all your love and
+kindness.
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+Your affectionate brother,<br>
+R. Walton
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="letter2"></a>Letter 2</h2>
+
+<p class="letter2">
+<i>To Mrs. Saville, England.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+Archangel, 28th March, 17—.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow! Yet a
+second step is taken towards my enterprise. I have hired a vessel and am
+occupied in collecting my sailors; those whom I have already engaged appear to
+be men on whom I can depend and are certainly possessed of dauntless courage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy, and the
+absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil, I have no
+friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will
+be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will
+endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it
+is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire
+the company of a man who could sympathise with me, whose eyes would reply to
+mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of
+a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a
+cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to
+approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your
+poor brother! I am too ardent in execution and too impatient of difficulties.
+But it is a still greater evil to me that I am self-educated: for the first
+fourteen years of my life I ran wild on a common and read nothing but our Uncle
+Thomas’ books of voyages. At that age I became acquainted with the celebrated
+poets of our own country; but it was only when it had ceased to be in my power
+to derive its most important benefits from such a conviction that I perceived
+the necessity of becoming acquainted with more languages than that of my native
+country. Now I am twenty-eight and am in reality more illiterate than many
+schoolboys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more and that my
+daydreams are more extended and magnificent, but they want (as the painters
+call it) <i>keeping;</i> and I greatly need a friend who would have sense
+enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavour
+to regulate my mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, these are useless complaints; I shall certainly find no friend on the
+wide ocean, nor even here in Archangel, among merchants and seamen. Yet some
+feelings, unallied to the dross of human nature, beat even in these rugged
+bosoms. My lieutenant, for instance, is a man of wonderful courage and
+enterprise; he is madly desirous of glory, or rather, to word my phrase more
+characteristically, of advancement in his profession. He is an Englishman, and
+in the midst of national and professional prejudices, unsoftened by
+cultivation, retains some of the noblest endowments of humanity. I first became
+acquainted with him on board a whale vessel; finding that he was unemployed in
+this city, I easily engaged him to assist in my enterprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The master is a person of an excellent disposition and is remarkable in the
+ship for his gentleness and the mildness of his discipline. This circumstance,
+added to his well-known integrity and dauntless courage, made me very desirous
+to engage him. A youth passed in solitude, my best years spent under your
+gentle and feminine fosterage, has so refined the groundwork of my character
+that I cannot overcome an intense distaste to the usual brutality exercised on
+board ship: I have never believed it to be necessary, and when I heard of a
+mariner equally noted for his kindliness of heart and the respect and obedience
+paid to him by his crew, I felt myself peculiarly fortunate in being able to
+secure his services. I heard of him first in rather a romantic manner, from a
+lady who owes to him the happiness of her life. This, briefly, is his story.
+Some years ago he loved a young Russian lady of moderate fortune, and having
+amassed a considerable sum in prize-money, the father of the girl consented to
+the match. He saw his mistress once before the destined ceremony; but she was
+bathed in tears, and throwing herself at his feet, entreated him to spare her,
+confessing at the same time that she loved another, but that he was poor, and
+that her father would never consent to the union. My generous friend reassured
+the suppliant, and on being informed of the name of her lover, instantly
+abandoned his pursuit. He had already bought a farm with his money, on which he
+had designed to pass the remainder of his life; but he bestowed the whole on
+his rival, together with the remains of his prize-money to purchase stock, and
+then himself solicited the young woman’s father to consent to her marriage with
+her lover. But the old man decidedly refused, thinking himself bound in honour
+to my friend, who, when he found the father inexorable, quitted his country,
+nor returned until he heard that his former mistress was married according to
+her inclinations. “What a noble fellow!” you will exclaim. He is so; but then
+he is wholly uneducated: he is as silent as a Turk, and a kind of ignorant
+carelessness attends him, which, while it renders his conduct the more
+astonishing, detracts from the interest and sympathy which otherwise he would
+command.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet do not suppose, because I complain a little or because I can conceive a
+consolation for my toils which I may never know, that I am wavering in my
+resolutions. Those are as fixed as fate, and my voyage is only now delayed
+until the weather shall permit my embarkation. The winter has been dreadfully
+severe, but the spring promises well, and it is considered as a remarkably
+early season, so that perhaps I may sail sooner than I expected. I shall do
+nothing rashly: you know me sufficiently to confide in my prudence and
+considerateness whenever the safety of others is committed to my care.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I cannot describe to you my sensations on the near prospect of my undertaking.
+It is impossible to communicate to you a conception of the trembling sensation,
+half pleasurable and half fearful, with which I am preparing to depart. I am
+going to unexplored regions, to “the land of mist and snow,” but I shall kill
+no albatross; therefore do not be alarmed for my safety or if I should come
+back to you as worn and woeful as the “Ancient Mariner.” You will smile at my
+allusion, but I will disclose a secret. I have often attributed my attachment
+to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of ocean to that
+production of the most imaginative of modern poets. There is something at work
+in my soul which I do not understand. I am practically industrious—painstaking,
+a workman to execute with perseverance and labour—but besides this there is a
+love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my
+projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild
+sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But to return to dearer considerations. Shall I meet you again, after having
+traversed immense seas, and returned by the most southern cape of Africa or
+America? I dare not expect such success, yet I cannot bear to look on the
+reverse of the picture. Continue for the present to write to me by every
+opportunity: I may receive your letters on some occasions when I need them most
+to support my spirits. I love you very tenderly. Remember me with affection,
+should you never hear from me again.
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+Your affectionate brother,<br>
+Robert Walton
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="letter3"></a>Letter 3</h2>
+
+<p class="letter2">
+<i>To Mrs. Saville, England.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+July 7th, 17—.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My dear Sister,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I write a few lines in haste to say that I am safe—and well advanced on my
+voyage. This letter will reach England by a merchantman now on its homeward
+voyage from Archangel; more fortunate than I, who may not see my native land,
+perhaps, for many years. I am, however, in good spirits: my men are bold and
+apparently firm of purpose, nor do the floating sheets of ice that continually
+pass us, indicating the dangers of the region towards which we are advancing,
+appear to dismay them. We have already reached a very high latitude; but it is
+the height of summer, and although not so warm as in England, the southern
+gales, which blow us speedily towards those shores which I so ardently desire
+to attain, breathe a degree of renovating warmth which I had not expected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No incidents have hitherto befallen us that would make a figure in a letter.
+One or two stiff gales and the springing of a leak are accidents which
+experienced navigators scarcely remember to record, and I shall be well content
+if nothing worse happen to us during our voyage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adieu, my dear Margaret. Be assured that for my own sake, as well as yours, I
+will not rashly encounter danger. I will be cool, persevering, and prudent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But success <i>shall</i> crown my endeavours. Wherefore not? Thus far I have
+gone, tracing a secure way over the pathless seas, the very stars themselves
+being witnesses and testimonies of my triumph. Why not still proceed over the
+untamed yet obedient element? What can stop the determined heart and resolved
+will of man?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My swelling heart involuntarily pours itself out thus. But I must finish.
+Heaven bless my beloved sister!
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+R.W.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="letter4"></a>Letter 4</h2>
+
+<p class="letter2">
+<i>To Mrs. Saville, England.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+August 5th, 17—.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So strange an accident has happened to us that I cannot forbear recording it,
+although it is very probable that you will see me before these papers can come
+into your possession.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Last Monday (July 31st) we were nearly surrounded by ice, which closed in the
+ship on all sides, scarcely leaving her the sea-room in which she floated. Our
+situation was somewhat dangerous, especially as we were compassed round by a
+very thick fog. We accordingly lay to, hoping that some change would take place
+in the atmosphere and weather.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About two o’clock the mist cleared away, and we beheld, stretched out in every
+direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end. Some
+of my comrades groaned, and my own mind began to grow watchful with anxious
+thoughts, when a strange sight suddenly attracted our attention and diverted
+our solicitude from our own situation. We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a
+sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a
+mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature,
+sat in the sledge and guided the dogs. We watched the rapid progress of the
+traveller with our telescopes until he was lost among the distant inequalities
+of the ice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This appearance excited our unqualified wonder. We were, as we believed, many
+hundred miles from any land; but this apparition seemed to denote that it was
+not, in reality, so distant as we had supposed. Shut in, however, by ice, it
+was impossible to follow his track, which we had observed with the greatest
+attention.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About two hours after this occurrence we heard the ground sea, and before night
+the ice broke and freed our ship. We, however, lay to until the morning,
+fearing to encounter in the dark those large loose masses which float about
+after the breaking up of the ice. I profited of this time to rest for a few
+hours.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the morning, however, as soon as it was light, I went upon deck and found
+all the sailors busy on one side of the vessel, apparently talking to someone
+in the sea. It was, in fact, a sledge, like that we had seen before, which had
+drifted towards us in the night on a large fragment of ice. Only one dog
+remained alive; but there was a human being within it whom the sailors were
+persuading to enter the vessel. He was not, as the other traveller seemed to
+be, a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island, but a European. When I
+appeared on deck the master said, “Here is our captain, and he will not allow
+you to perish on the open sea.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On perceiving me, the stranger addressed me in English, although with a foreign
+accent. “Before I come on board your vessel,” said he, “will you have the
+kindness to inform me whither you are bound?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You may conceive my astonishment on hearing such a question addressed to me
+from a man on the brink of destruction and to whom I should have supposed that
+my vessel would have been a resource which he would not have exchanged for the
+most precious wealth the earth can afford. I replied, however, that we were on
+a voyage of discovery towards the northern pole.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon hearing this he appeared satisfied and consented to come on board. Good
+God! Margaret, if you had seen the man who thus capitulated for his safety,
+your surprise would have been boundless. His limbs were nearly frozen, and his
+body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering. I never saw a man in so
+wretched a condition. We attempted to carry him into the cabin, but as soon as
+he had quitted the fresh air he fainted. We accordingly brought him back to the
+deck and restored him to animation by rubbing him with brandy and forcing him
+to swallow a small quantity. As soon as he showed signs of life we wrapped him
+up in blankets and placed him near the chimney of the kitchen stove. By slow
+degrees he recovered and ate a little soup, which restored him wonderfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two days passed in this manner before he was able to speak, and I often feared
+that his sufferings had deprived him of understanding. When he had in some
+measure recovered, I removed him to my own cabin and attended on him as much as
+my duty would permit. I never saw a more interesting creature: his eyes have
+generally an expression of wildness, and even madness, but there are moments
+when, if anyone performs an act of kindness towards him or does him any the
+most trifling service, his whole countenance is lighted up, as it were, with a
+beam of benevolence and sweetness that I never saw equalled. But he is
+generally melancholy and despairing, and sometimes he gnashes his teeth, as if
+impatient of the weight of woes that oppresses him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When my guest was a little recovered I had great trouble to keep off the men,
+who wished to ask him a thousand questions; but I would not allow him to be
+tormented by their idle curiosity, in a state of body and mind whose
+restoration evidently depended upon entire repose. Once, however, the
+lieutenant asked why he had come so far upon the ice in so strange a vehicle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His countenance instantly assumed an aspect of the deepest gloom, and he
+replied, “To seek one who fled from me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And did the man whom you pursued travel in the same fashion?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then I fancy we have seen him, for the day before we picked you up we saw some
+dogs drawing a sledge, with a man in it, across the ice.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This aroused the stranger’s attention, and he asked a multitude of questions
+concerning the route which the dæmon, as he called him, had pursued. Soon
+after, when he was alone with me, he said, “I have, doubtless, excited your
+curiosity, as well as that of these good people; but you are too considerate to
+make inquiries.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Certainly; it would indeed be very impertinent and inhuman in me to trouble
+you with any inquisitiveness of mine.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And yet you rescued me from a strange and perilous situation; you have
+benevolently restored me to life.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soon after this he inquired if I thought that the breaking up of the ice had
+destroyed the other sledge. I replied that I could not answer with any degree
+of certainty, for the ice had not broken until near midnight, and the traveller
+might have arrived at a place of safety before that time; but of this I could
+not judge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From this time a new spirit of life animated the decaying frame of the
+stranger. He manifested the greatest eagerness to be upon deck to watch for the
+sledge which had before appeared; but I have persuaded him to remain in the
+cabin, for he is far too weak to sustain the rawness of the atmosphere. I have
+promised that someone should watch for him and give him instant notice if any
+new object should appear in sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such is my journal of what relates to this strange occurrence up to the present
+day. The stranger has gradually improved in health but is very silent and
+appears uneasy when anyone except myself enters his cabin. Yet his manners are
+so conciliating and gentle that the sailors are all interested in him, although
+they have had very little communication with him. For my own part, I begin to
+love him as a brother, and his constant and deep grief fills me with sympathy
+and compassion. He must have been a noble creature in his better days, being
+even now in wreck so attractive and amiable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I said in one of my letters, my dear Margaret, that I should find no friend on
+the wide ocean; yet I have found a man who, before his spirit had been broken
+by misery, I should have been happy to have possessed as the brother of my
+heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shall continue my journal concerning the stranger at intervals, should I have
+any fresh incidents to record.
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+August 13th, 17—.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My affection for my guest increases every day. He excites at once my admiration
+and my pity to an astonishing degree. How can I see so noble a creature
+destroyed by misery without feeling the most poignant grief? He is so gentle,
+yet so wise; his mind is so cultivated, and when he speaks, although his words
+are culled with the choicest art, yet they flow with rapidity and unparalleled
+eloquence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He is now much recovered from his illness and is continually on the deck,
+apparently watching for the sledge that preceded his own. Yet, although
+unhappy, he is not so utterly occupied by his own misery but that he interests
+himself deeply in the projects of others. He has frequently conversed with me
+on mine, which I have communicated to him without disguise. He entered
+attentively into all my arguments in favour of my eventual success and into
+every minute detail of the measures I had taken to secure it. I was easily led
+by the sympathy which he evinced to use the language of my heart, to give
+utterance to the burning ardour of my soul and to say, with all the fervour
+that warmed me, how gladly I would sacrifice my fortune, my existence, my every
+hope, to the furtherance of my enterprise. One man’s life or death were but a
+small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought, for the
+dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race. As
+I spoke, a dark gloom spread over my listener’s countenance. At first I
+perceived that he tried to suppress his emotion; he placed his hands before his
+eyes, and my voice quivered and failed me as I beheld tears trickle fast from
+between his fingers; a groan burst from his heaving breast. I paused; at length
+he spoke, in broken accents: “Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you
+drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me; let me reveal my tale, and you
+will dash the cup from your lips!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such words, you may imagine, strongly excited my curiosity; but the paroxysm of
+grief that had seized the stranger overcame his weakened powers, and many hours
+of repose and tranquil conversation were necessary to restore his composure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Having conquered the violence of his feelings, he appeared to despise himself
+for being the slave of passion; and quelling the dark tyranny of despair, he
+led me again to converse concerning myself personally. He asked me the history
+of my earlier years. The tale was quickly told, but it awakened various trains
+of reflection. I spoke of my desire of finding a friend, of my thirst for a
+more intimate sympathy with a fellow mind than had ever fallen to my lot, and
+expressed my conviction that a man could boast of little happiness who did not
+enjoy this blessing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I agree with you,” replied the stranger; “we are unfashioned creatures, but
+half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves—such a friend ought
+to be—do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures. I once
+had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to
+judge respecting friendship. You have hope, and the world before you, and have
+no cause for despair. But I—I have lost everything and cannot begin life anew.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he said this his countenance became expressive of a calm, settled grief that
+touched me to the heart. But he was silent and presently retired to his cabin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the
+beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these
+wonderful regions seem still to have the power of elevating his soul from
+earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery and be
+overwhelmed by disappointments, yet when he has retired into himself, he will
+be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no
+grief or folly ventures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Will you smile at the enthusiasm I express concerning this divine wanderer? You
+would not if you saw him. You have been tutored and refined by books and
+retirement from the world, and you are therefore somewhat fastidious; but this
+only renders you the more fit to appreciate the extraordinary merits of this
+wonderful man. Sometimes I have endeavoured to discover what quality it is
+which he possesses that elevates him so immeasurably above any other person I
+ever knew. I believe it to be an intuitive discernment, a quick but
+never-failing power of judgment, a penetration into the causes of things,
+unequalled for clearness and precision; add to this a facility of expression
+and a voice whose varied intonations are soul-subduing music.
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+August 19th, 17—.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yesterday the stranger said to me, “You may easily perceive, Captain Walton,
+that I have suffered great and unparalleled misfortunes. I had determined at
+one time that the memory of these evils should die with me, but you have won me
+to alter my determination. You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did;
+and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent
+to sting you, as mine has been. I do not know that the relation of my disasters
+will be useful to you; yet, when I reflect that you are pursuing the same
+course, exposing yourself to the same dangers which have rendered me what I am,
+I imagine that you may deduce an apt moral from my tale, one that may direct
+you if you succeed in your undertaking and console you in case of failure.
+Prepare to hear of occurrences which are usually deemed marvellous. Were we
+among the tamer scenes of nature I might fear to encounter your unbelief,
+perhaps your ridicule; but many things will appear possible in these wild and
+mysterious regions which would provoke the laughter of those unacquainted with
+the ever-varied powers of nature; nor can I doubt but that my tale conveys in
+its series internal evidence of the truth of the events of which it is
+composed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You may easily imagine that I was much gratified by the offered communication,
+yet I could not endure that he should renew his grief by a recital of his
+misfortunes. I felt the greatest eagerness to hear the promised narrative,
+partly from curiosity and partly from a strong desire to ameliorate his fate if
+it were in my power. I expressed these feelings in my answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thank you,” he replied, “for your sympathy, but it is useless; my fate is
+nearly fulfilled. I wait but for one event, and then I shall repose in peace. I
+understand your feeling,” continued he, perceiving that I wished to interrupt
+him; “but you are mistaken, my friend, if thus you will allow me to name you;
+nothing can alter my destiny; listen to my history, and you will perceive how
+irrevocably it is determined.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He then told me that he would commence his narrative the next day when I should
+be at leisure. This promise drew from me the warmest thanks. I have resolved
+every night, when I am not imperatively occupied by my duties, to record, as
+nearly as possible in his own words, what he has related during the day. If I
+should be engaged, I will at least make notes. This manuscript will doubtless
+afford you the greatest pleasure; but to me, who know him, and who hear it from
+his own lips—with what interest and sympathy shall I read it in some future
+day! Even now, as I commence my task, his full-toned voice swells in my ears;
+his lustrous eyes dwell on me with all their melancholy sweetness; I see his
+thin hand raised in animation, while the lineaments of his face are irradiated
+by the soul within. Strange and harrowing must be his story, frightful the
+storm which embraced the gallant vessel on its course and wrecked it—thus!
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap01"></a>Chapter 1</h2>
+
+<p>
+I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of
+that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics,
+and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation.
+He was respected by all who knew him for his integrity and indefatigable
+attention to public business. He passed his younger days perpetually occupied
+by the affairs of his country; a variety of circumstances had prevented his
+marrying early, nor was it until the decline of life that he became a husband
+and the father of a family.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the circumstances of his marriage illustrate his character, I cannot refrain
+from relating them. One of his most intimate friends was a merchant who, from a
+flourishing state, fell, through numerous mischances, into poverty. This man,
+whose name was Beaufort, was of a proud and unbending disposition and could not
+bear to live in poverty and oblivion in the same country where he had formerly
+been distinguished for his rank and magnificence. Having paid his debts,
+therefore, in the most honourable manner, he retreated with his daughter to the
+town of Lucerne, where he lived unknown and in wretchedness. My father loved
+Beaufort with the truest friendship and was deeply grieved by his retreat in
+these unfortunate circumstances. He bitterly deplored the false pride which led
+his friend to a conduct so little worthy of the affection that united them. He
+lost no time in endeavouring to seek him out, with the hope of persuading him
+to begin the world again through his credit and assistance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beaufort had taken effectual measures to conceal himself, and it was ten months
+before my father discovered his abode. Overjoyed at this discovery, he hastened
+to the house, which was situated in a mean street near the Reuss. But when he
+entered, misery and despair alone welcomed him. Beaufort had saved but a very
+small sum of money from the wreck of his fortunes, but it was sufficient to
+provide him with sustenance for some months, and in the meantime he hoped to
+procure some respectable employment in a merchant’s house. The interval was,
+consequently, spent in inaction; his grief only became more deep and rankling
+when he had leisure for reflection, and at length it took so fast hold of his
+mind that at the end of three months he lay on a bed of sickness, incapable of
+any exertion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His daughter attended him with the greatest tenderness, but she saw with
+despair that their little fund was rapidly decreasing and that there was no
+other prospect of support. But Caroline Beaufort possessed a mind of an
+uncommon mould, and her courage rose to support her in her adversity. She
+procured plain work; she plaited straw and by various means contrived to earn a
+pittance scarcely sufficient to support life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Several months passed in this manner. Her father grew worse; her time was more
+entirely occupied in attending him; her means of subsistence decreased; and in
+the tenth month her father died in her arms, leaving her an orphan and a
+beggar. This last blow overcame her, and she knelt by Beaufort’s coffin weeping
+bitterly, when my father entered the chamber. He came like a protecting spirit
+to the poor girl, who committed herself to his care; and after the interment of
+his friend he conducted her to Geneva and placed her under the protection of a
+relation. Two years after this event Caroline became his wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a considerable difference between the ages of my parents, but this
+circumstance seemed to unite them only closer in bonds of devoted affection.
+There was a sense of justice in my father’s upright mind which rendered it
+necessary that he should approve highly to love strongly. Perhaps during former
+years he had suffered from the late-discovered unworthiness of one beloved and
+so was disposed to set a greater value on tried worth. There was a show of
+gratitude and worship in his attachment to my mother, differing wholly from the
+doting fondness of age, for it was inspired by reverence for her virtues and a
+desire to be the means of, in some degree, recompensing her for the sorrows she
+had endured, but which gave inexpressible grace to his behaviour to her.
+Everything was made to yield to her wishes and her convenience. He strove to
+shelter her, as a fair exotic is sheltered by the gardener, from every rougher
+wind and to surround her with all that could tend to excite pleasurable emotion
+in her soft and benevolent mind. Her health, and even the tranquillity of her
+hitherto constant spirit, had been shaken by what she had gone through. During
+the two years that had elapsed previous to their marriage my father had
+gradually relinquished all his public functions; and immediately after their
+union they sought the pleasant climate of Italy, and the change of scene and
+interest attendant on a tour through that land of wonders, as a restorative for
+her weakened frame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From Italy they visited Germany and France. I, their eldest child, was born at
+Naples, and as an infant accompanied them in their rambles. I remained for
+several years their only child. Much as they were attached to each other, they
+seemed to draw inexhaustible stores of affection from a very mine of love to
+bestow them upon me. My mother’s tender caresses and my father’s smile of
+benevolent pleasure while regarding me are my first recollections. I was their
+plaything and their idol, and something better—their child, the innocent and
+helpless creature bestowed on them by Heaven, whom to bring up to good, and
+whose future lot it was in their hands to direct to happiness or misery,
+according as they fulfilled their duties towards me. With this deep
+consciousness of what they owed towards the being to which they had given life,
+added to the active spirit of tenderness that animated both, it may be imagined
+that while during every hour of my infant life I received a lesson of patience,
+of charity, and of self-control, I was so guided by a silken cord that all
+seemed but one train of enjoyment to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a long time I was their only care. My mother had much desired to have a
+daughter, but I continued their single offspring. When I was about five years
+old, while making an excursion beyond the frontiers of Italy, they passed a
+week on the shores of the Lake of Como. Their benevolent disposition often made
+them enter the cottages of the poor. This, to my mother, was more than a duty;
+it was a necessity, a passion—remembering what she had suffered, and how she
+had been relieved—for her to act in her turn the guardian angel to the
+afflicted. During one of their walks a poor cot in the foldings of a vale
+attracted their notice as being singularly disconsolate, while the number of
+half-clothed children gathered about it spoke of penury in its worst shape. One
+day, when my father had gone by himself to Milan, my mother, accompanied by me,
+visited this abode. She found a peasant and his wife, hard working, bent down
+by care and labour, distributing a scanty meal to five hungry babes. Among
+these there was one which attracted my mother far above all the rest. She
+appeared of a different stock. The four others were dark-eyed, hardy little
+vagrants; this child was thin and very fair. Her hair was the brightest living
+gold, and despite the poverty of her clothing, seemed to set a crown of
+distinction on her head. Her brow was clear and ample, her blue eyes cloudless,
+and her lips and the moulding of her face so expressive of sensibility and
+sweetness that none could behold her without looking on her as of a distinct
+species, a being heaven-sent, and bearing a celestial stamp in all her
+features.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The peasant woman, perceiving that my mother fixed eyes of wonder and
+admiration on this lovely girl, eagerly communicated her history. She was not
+her child, but the daughter of a Milanese nobleman. Her mother was a German and
+had died on giving her birth. The infant had been placed with these good people
+to nurse: they were better off then. They had not been long married, and their
+eldest child was but just born. The father of their charge was one of those
+Italians nursed in the memory of the antique glory of Italy—one among the
+<i>schiavi ognor frementi,</i> who exerted himself to obtain the liberty of his
+country. He became the victim of its weakness. Whether he had died or still
+lingered in the dungeons of Austria was not known. His property was
+confiscated; his child became an orphan and a beggar. She continued with her
+foster parents and bloomed in their rude abode, fairer than a garden rose among
+dark-leaved brambles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When my father returned from Milan, he found playing with me in the hall of our
+villa a child fairer than pictured cherub—a creature who seemed to shed
+radiance from her looks and whose form and motions were lighter than the
+chamois of the hills. The apparition was soon explained. With his permission my
+mother prevailed on her rustic guardians to yield their charge to her. They
+were fond of the sweet orphan. Her presence had seemed a blessing to them, but
+it would be unfair to her to keep her in poverty and want when Providence
+afforded her such powerful protection. They consulted their village priest, and
+the result was that Elizabeth Lavenza became the inmate of my parents’ house—my
+more than sister—the beautiful and adored companion of all my occupations and
+my pleasures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everyone loved Elizabeth. The passionate and almost reverential attachment with
+which all regarded her became, while I shared it, my pride and my delight. On
+the evening previous to her being brought to my home, my mother had said
+playfully, “I have a pretty present for my Victor—tomorrow he shall have it.”
+And when, on the morrow, she presented Elizabeth to me as her promised gift, I,
+with childish seriousness, interpreted her words literally and looked upon
+Elizabeth as mine—mine to protect, love, and cherish. All praises bestowed on
+her I received as made to a possession of my own. We called each other
+familiarly by the name of cousin. No word, no expression could body forth the
+kind of relation in which she stood to me—my more than sister, since till death
+she was to be mine only.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap02"></a>Chapter 2</h2>
+
+<p>
+We were brought up together; there was not quite a year difference in our ages.
+I need not say that we were strangers to any species of disunion or dispute.
+Harmony was the soul of our companionship, and the diversity and contrast that
+subsisted in our characters drew us nearer together. Elizabeth was of a calmer
+and more concentrated disposition; but, with all my ardour, I was capable of a
+more intense application and was more deeply smitten with the thirst for
+knowledge. She busied herself with following the aerial creations of the poets;
+and in the majestic and wondrous scenes which surrounded our Swiss home —the
+sublime shapes of the mountains, the changes of the seasons, tempest and calm,
+the silence of winter, and the life and turbulence of our Alpine summers—she
+found ample scope for admiration and delight. While my companion contemplated
+with a serious and satisfied spirit the magnificent appearances of things, I
+delighted in investigating their causes. The world was to me a secret which I
+desired to divine. Curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of
+nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they were unfolded to me, are among the
+earliest sensations I can remember.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the birth of a second son, my junior by seven years, my parents gave up
+entirely their wandering life and fixed themselves in their native country. We
+possessed a house in Geneva, and a <i>campagne</i> on Belrive, the eastern
+shore of the lake, at the distance of rather more than a league from the city.
+We resided principally in the latter, and the lives of my parents were passed
+in considerable seclusion. It was my temper to avoid a crowd and to attach
+myself fervently to a few. I was indifferent, therefore, to my school-fellows
+in general; but I united myself in the bonds of the closest friendship to one
+among them. Henry Clerval was the son of a merchant of Geneva. He was a boy of
+singular talent and fancy. He loved enterprise, hardship, and even danger for
+its own sake. He was deeply read in books of chivalry and romance. He composed
+heroic songs and began to write many a tale of enchantment and knightly
+adventure. He tried to make us act plays and to enter into masquerades, in
+which the characters were drawn from the heroes of Roncesvalles, of the Round
+Table of King Arthur, and the chivalrous train who shed their blood to redeem
+the holy sepulchre from the hands of the infidels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No human being could have passed a happier childhood than myself. My parents
+were possessed by the very spirit of kindness and indulgence. We felt that they
+were not the tyrants to rule our lot according to their caprice, but the agents
+and creators of all the many delights which we enjoyed. When I mingled with
+other families I distinctly discerned how peculiarly fortunate my lot was, and
+gratitude assisted the development of filial love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My temper was sometimes violent, and my passions vehement; but by some law in
+my temperature they were turned not towards childish pursuits but to an eager
+desire to learn, and not to learn all things indiscriminately. I confess that
+neither the structure of languages, nor the code of governments, nor the
+politics of various states possessed attractions for me. It was the secrets of
+heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward
+substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of
+man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or
+in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile Clerval occupied himself, so to speak, with the moral relations of
+things. The busy stage of life, the virtues of heroes, and the actions of men
+were his theme; and his hope and his dream was to become one among those whose
+names are recorded in story as the gallant and adventurous benefactors of our
+species. The saintly soul of Elizabeth shone like a shrine-dedicated lamp in
+our peaceful home. Her sympathy was ours; her smile, her soft voice, the sweet
+glance of her celestial eyes, were ever there to bless and animate us. She was
+the living spirit of love to soften and attract; I might have become sullen in
+my study, rough through the ardour of my nature, but that she was there to
+subdue me to a semblance of her own gentleness. And Clerval—could aught ill
+entrench on the noble spirit of Clerval? Yet he might not have been so
+perfectly humane, so thoughtful in his generosity, so full of kindness and
+tenderness amidst his passion for adventurous exploit, had she not unfolded to
+him the real loveliness of beneficence and made the doing good the end and aim
+of his soaring ambition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I feel exquisite pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before
+misfortune had tainted my mind and changed its bright visions of extensive
+usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self. Besides, in drawing
+the picture of my early days, I also record those events which led, by
+insensible steps, to my after tale of misery, for when I would account to
+myself for the birth of that passion which afterwards ruled my destiny I find
+it arise, like a mountain river, from ignoble and almost forgotten sources;
+but, swelling as it proceeded, it became the torrent which, in its course, has
+swept away all my hopes and joys.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate; I desire,
+therefore, in this narration, to state those facts which led to my predilection
+for that science. When I was thirteen years of age we all went on a party of
+pleasure to the baths near Thonon; the inclemency of the weather obliged us to
+remain a day confined to the inn. In this house I chanced to find a volume of
+the works of Cornelius Agrippa. I opened it with apathy; the theory which he
+attempts to demonstrate and the wonderful facts which he relates soon changed
+this feeling into enthusiasm. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind, and
+bounding with joy, I communicated my discovery to my father. My father looked
+carelessly at the title page of my book and said, “Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My
+dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me that
+the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded and that a modern system
+of science had been introduced which possessed much greater powers than the
+ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the
+former were real and practical, under such circumstances I should certainly
+have thrown Agrippa aside and have contented my imagination, warmed as it was,
+by returning with greater ardour to my former studies. It is even possible that
+the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to
+my ruin. But the cursory glance my father had taken of my volume by no means
+assured me that he was acquainted with its contents, and I continued to read
+with the greatest avidity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I returned home my first care was to procure the whole works of this
+author, and afterwards of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. I read and studied
+the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures
+known to few besides myself. I have described myself as always having been
+imbued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature. In spite of
+the intense labour and wonderful discoveries of modern philosophers, I always
+came from my studies discontented and unsatisfied. Sir Isaac Newton is said to
+have avowed that he felt like a child picking up shells beside the great and
+unexplored ocean of truth. Those of his successors in each branch of natural
+philosophy with whom I was acquainted appeared even to my boy’s apprehensions
+as tyros engaged in the same pursuit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The untaught peasant beheld the elements around him and was acquainted with
+their practical uses. The most learned philosopher knew little more. He had
+partially unveiled the face of Nature, but her immortal lineaments were still a
+wonder and a mystery. He might dissect, anatomise, and give names; but, not to
+speak of a final cause, causes in their secondary and tertiary grades were
+utterly unknown to him. I had gazed upon the fortifications and impediments
+that seemed to keep human beings from entering the citadel of nature, and
+rashly and ignorantly I had repined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But here were books, and here were men who had penetrated deeper and knew more.
+I took their word for all that they averred, and I became their disciple. It
+may appear strange that such should arise in the eighteenth century; but while
+I followed the routine of education in the schools of Geneva, I was, to a great
+degree, self-taught with regard to my favourite studies. My father was not
+scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child’s blindness, added to a
+student’s thirst for knowledge. Under the guidance of my new preceptors I
+entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher’s stone
+and the elixir of life; but the latter soon obtained my undivided attention.
+Wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery if I
+could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any
+but a violent death!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise
+liberally accorded by my favourite authors, the fulfilment of which I most
+eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed
+the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake than to a want of skill
+or fidelity in my instructors. And thus for a time I was occupied by exploded
+systems, mingling, like an unadept, a thousand contradictory theories and
+floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge, guided by
+an ardent imagination and childish reasoning, till an accident again changed
+the current of my ideas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I was about fifteen years old we had retired to our house near Belrive,
+when we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from
+behind the mountains of Jura, and the thunder burst at once with frightful
+loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm
+lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the
+door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak
+which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling
+light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted
+stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a
+singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to
+thin ribbons of wood. I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before this I was not unacquainted with the more obvious laws of electricity.
+On this occasion a man of great research in natural philosophy was with us, and
+excited by this catastrophe, he entered on the explanation of a theory which he
+had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism, which was at once new
+and astonishing to me. All that he said threw greatly into the shade Cornelius
+Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination; but by
+some fatality the overthrow of these men disinclined me to pursue my accustomed
+studies. It seemed to me as if nothing would or could ever be known. All that
+had so long engaged my attention suddenly grew despicable. By one of those
+caprices of the mind which we are perhaps most subject to in early youth, I at
+once gave up my former occupations, set down natural history and all its
+progeny as a deformed and abortive creation, and entertained the greatest
+disdain for a would-be science which could never even step within the threshold
+of real knowledge. In this mood of mind I betook myself to the mathematics and
+the branches of study appertaining to that science as being built upon secure
+foundations, and so worthy of my consideration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by such slight ligaments are we
+bound to prosperity or ruin. When I look back, it seems to me as if this almost
+miraculous change of inclination and will was the immediate suggestion of the
+guardian angel of my life—the last effort made by the spirit of preservation to
+avert the storm that was even then hanging in the stars and ready to envelop
+me. Her victory was announced by an unusual tranquillity and gladness of soul
+which followed the relinquishing of my ancient and latterly tormenting studies.
+It was thus that I was to be taught to associate evil with their prosecution,
+happiness with their disregard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a strong effort of the spirit of good, but it was ineffectual. Destiny
+was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible
+destruction.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap03"></a>Chapter 3</h2>
+
+<p>
+When I had attained the age of seventeen my parents resolved that I should
+become a student at the university of Ingolstadt. I had hitherto attended the
+schools of Geneva, but my father thought it necessary for the completion of my
+education that I should be made acquainted with other customs than those of my
+native country. My departure was therefore fixed at an early date, but before
+the day resolved upon could arrive, the first misfortune of my life occurred—an
+omen, as it were, of my future misery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Elizabeth had caught the scarlet fever; her illness was severe, and she was in
+the greatest danger. During her illness many arguments had been urged to
+persuade my mother to refrain from attending upon her. She had at first yielded
+to our entreaties, but when she heard that the life of her favourite was
+menaced, she could no longer control her anxiety. She attended her sickbed; her
+watchful attentions triumphed over the malignity of the distemper—Elizabeth was
+saved, but the consequences of this imprudence were fatal to her preserver. On
+the third day my mother sickened; her fever was accompanied by the most
+alarming symptoms, and the looks of her medical attendants prognosticated the
+worst event. On her deathbed the fortitude and benignity of this best of women
+did not desert her. She joined the hands of Elizabeth and myself. “My
+children,” she said, “my firmest hopes of future happiness were placed on the
+prospect of your union. This expectation will now be the consolation of your
+father. Elizabeth, my love, you must supply my place to my younger children.
+Alas! I regret that I am taken from you; and, happy and beloved as I have been,
+is it not hard to quit you all? But these are not thoughts befitting me; I will
+endeavour to resign myself cheerfully to death and will indulge a hope of
+meeting you in another world.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She died calmly, and her countenance expressed affection even in death. I need
+not describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most
+irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair
+that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can
+persuade itself that she whom we saw every day and whose very existence
+appeared a part of our own can have departed for ever—that the brightness of a
+beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and
+dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard. These are the
+reflections of the first days; but when the lapse of time proves the reality of
+the evil, then the actual bitterness of grief commences. Yet from whom has not
+that rude hand rent away some dear connection? And why should I describe a
+sorrow which all have felt, and must feel? The time at length arrives when
+grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity; and the smile that plays upon
+the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished. My mother was
+dead, but we had still duties which we ought to perform; we must continue our
+course with the rest and learn to think ourselves fortunate whilst one remains
+whom the spoiler has not seized.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My departure for Ingolstadt, which had been deferred by these events, was now
+again determined upon. I obtained from my father a respite of some weeks. It
+appeared to me sacrilege so soon to leave the repose, akin to death, of the
+house of mourning and to rush into the thick of life. I was new to sorrow, but
+it did not the less alarm me. I was unwilling to quit the sight of those that
+remained to me, and above all, I desired to see my sweet Elizabeth in some
+degree consoled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She indeed veiled her grief and strove to act the comforter to us all. She
+looked steadily on life and assumed its duties with courage and zeal. She
+devoted herself to those whom she had been taught to call her uncle and
+cousins. Never was she so enchanting as at this time, when she recalled the
+sunshine of her smiles and spent them upon us. She forgot even her own regret
+in her endeavours to make us forget.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The day of my departure at length arrived. Clerval spent the last evening with
+us. He had endeavoured to persuade his father to permit him to accompany me and
+to become my fellow student, but in vain. His father was a narrow-minded trader
+and saw idleness and ruin in the aspirations and ambition of his son. Henry
+deeply felt the misfortune of being debarred from a liberal education. He said
+little, but when he spoke I read in his kindling eye and in his animated glance
+a restrained but firm resolve not to be chained to the miserable details of
+commerce.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We sat late. We could not tear ourselves away from each other nor persuade
+ourselves to say the word “Farewell!” It was said, and we retired under the
+pretence of seeking repose, each fancying that the other was deceived; but when
+at morning’s dawn I descended to the carriage which was to convey me away, they
+were all there—my father again to bless me, Clerval to press my hand once more,
+my Elizabeth to renew her entreaties that I would write often and to bestow the
+last feminine attentions on her playmate and friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I threw myself into the chaise that was to convey me away and indulged in the
+most melancholy reflections. I, who had ever been surrounded by amiable
+companions, continually engaged in endeavouring to bestow mutual pleasure—I was
+now alone. In the university whither I was going I must form my own friends and
+be my own protector. My life had hitherto been remarkably secluded and
+domestic, and this had given me invincible repugnance to new countenances. I
+loved my brothers, Elizabeth, and Clerval; these were “old familiar faces,” but
+I believed myself totally unfitted for the company of strangers. Such were my
+reflections as I commenced my journey; but as I proceeded, my spirits and hopes
+rose. I ardently desired the acquisition of knowledge. I had often, when at
+home, thought it hard to remain during my youth cooped up in one place and had
+longed to enter the world and take my station among other human beings. Now my
+desires were complied with, and it would, indeed, have been folly to repent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had sufficient leisure for these and many other reflections during my journey
+to Ingolstadt, which was long and fatiguing. At length the high white steeple
+of the town met my eyes. I alighted and was conducted to my solitary apartment
+to spend the evening as I pleased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next morning I delivered my letters of introduction and paid a visit to
+some of the principal professors. Chance—or rather the evil influence, the
+Angel of Destruction, which asserted omnipotent sway over me from the moment I
+turned my reluctant steps from my father’s door—led me first to M. Krempe,
+professor of natural philosophy. He was an uncouth man, but deeply imbued in
+the secrets of his science. He asked me several questions concerning my
+progress in the different branches of science appertaining to natural
+philosophy. I replied carelessly, and partly in contempt, mentioned the names
+of my alchemists as the principal authors I had studied. The professor stared.
+“Have you,” he said, “really spent your time in studying such nonsense?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I replied in the affirmative. “Every minute,” continued M. Krempe with warmth,
+“every instant that you have wasted on those books is utterly and entirely
+lost. You have burdened your memory with exploded systems and useless names.
+Good God! In what desert land have you lived, where no one was kind enough to
+inform you that these fancies which you have so greedily imbibed are a thousand
+years old and as musty as they are ancient? I little expected, in this
+enlightened and scientific age, to find a disciple of Albertus Magnus and
+Paracelsus. My dear sir, you must begin your studies entirely anew.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So saying, he stepped aside and wrote down a list of several books treating of
+natural philosophy which he desired me to procure, and dismissed me after
+mentioning that in the beginning of the following week he intended to commence
+a course of lectures upon natural philosophy in its general relations, and that
+M. Waldman, a fellow professor, would lecture upon chemistry the alternate days
+that he omitted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I returned home not disappointed, for I have said that I had long considered
+those authors useless whom the professor reprobated; but I returned not at all
+the more inclined to recur to these studies in any shape. M. Krempe was a
+little squat man with a gruff voice and a repulsive countenance; the teacher,
+therefore, did not prepossess me in favour of his pursuits. In rather a too
+philosophical and connected a strain, perhaps, I have given an account of the
+conclusions I had come to concerning them in my early years. As a child I had
+not been content with the results promised by the modern professors of natural
+science. With a confusion of ideas only to be accounted for by my extreme youth
+and my want of a guide on such matters, I had retrod the steps of knowledge
+along the paths of time and exchanged the discoveries of recent inquirers for
+the dreams of forgotten alchemists. Besides, I had a contempt for the uses of
+modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of the
+science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand;
+but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit
+itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was
+chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for
+realities of little worth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such were my reflections during the first two or three days of my residence at
+Ingolstadt, which were chiefly spent in becoming acquainted with the localities
+and the principal residents in my new abode. But as the ensuing week commenced,
+I thought of the information which M. Krempe had given me concerning the
+lectures. And although I could not consent to go and hear that little conceited
+fellow deliver sentences out of a pulpit, I recollected what he had said of M.
+Waldman, whom I had never seen, as he had hitherto been out of town.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Partly from curiosity and partly from idleness, I went into the lecturing room,
+which M. Waldman entered shortly after. This professor was very unlike his
+colleague. He appeared about fifty years of age, but with an aspect expressive
+of the greatest benevolence; a few grey hairs covered his temples, but those at
+the back of his head were nearly black. His person was short but remarkably
+erect and his voice the sweetest I had ever heard. He began his lecture by a
+recapitulation of the history of chemistry and the various improvements made by
+different men of learning, pronouncing with fervour the names of the most
+distinguished discoverers. He then took a cursory view of the present state of
+the science and explained many of its elementary terms. After having made a few
+preparatory experiments, he concluded with a panegyric upon modern chemistry,
+the terms of which I shall never forget:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The ancient teachers of this science,” said he, “promised impossibilities and
+performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that
+metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera but these
+philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to
+pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They
+penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her
+hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood
+circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and
+almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the
+earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such were the professor’s words—rather let me say such the words of the
+fate—enounced to destroy me. As he went on I felt as if my soul were grappling
+with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed
+the mechanism of my being; chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was
+filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done,
+exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein—more, far more, will I achieve; treading in
+the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and
+unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I closed not my eyes that night. My internal being was in a state of
+insurrection and turmoil; I felt that order would thence arise, but I had no
+power to produce it. By degrees, after the morning’s dawn, sleep came. I awoke,
+and my yesternight’s thoughts were as a dream. There only remained a resolution
+to return to my ancient studies and to devote myself to a science for which I
+believed myself to possess a natural talent. On the same day I paid M. Waldman
+a visit. His manners in private were even more mild and attractive than in
+public, for there was a certain dignity in his mien during his lecture which in
+his own house was replaced by the greatest affability and kindness. I gave him
+pretty nearly the same account of my former pursuits as I had given to his
+fellow professor. He heard with attention the little narration concerning my
+studies and smiled at the names of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, but
+without the contempt that M. Krempe had exhibited. He said that “These were men
+to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the
+foundations of their knowledge. They had left to us, as an easier task, to give
+new names and arrange in connected classifications the facts which they in a
+great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light. The labours of men
+of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately
+turning to the solid advantage of mankind.” I listened to his statement, which
+was delivered without any presumption or affectation, and then added that his
+lecture had removed my prejudices against modern chemists; I expressed myself
+in measured terms, with the modesty and deference due from a youth to his
+instructor, without letting escape (inexperience in life would have made me
+ashamed) any of the enthusiasm which stimulated my intended labours. I
+requested his advice concerning the books I ought to procure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am happy,” said M. Waldman, “to have gained a disciple; and if your
+application equals your ability, I have no doubt of your success. Chemistry is
+that branch of natural philosophy in which the greatest improvements have been
+and may be made; it is on that account that I have made it my peculiar study;
+but at the same time, I have not neglected the other branches of science. A man
+would make but a very sorry chemist if he attended to that department of human
+knowledge alone. If your wish is to become really a man of science and not
+merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of
+natural philosophy, including mathematics.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He then took me into his laboratory and explained to me the uses of his various
+machines, instructing me as to what I ought to procure and promising me the use
+of his own when I should have advanced far enough in the science not to derange
+their mechanism. He also gave me the list of books which I had requested, and I
+took my leave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus ended a day memorable to me; it decided my future destiny.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap04"></a>Chapter 4</h2>
+
+<p>
+From this day natural philosophy, and particularly chemistry, in the most
+comprehensive sense of the term, became nearly my sole occupation. I read with
+ardour those works, so full of genius and discrimination, which modern
+inquirers have written on these subjects. I attended the lectures and
+cultivated the acquaintance of the men of science of the university, and I
+found even in M. Krempe a great deal of sound sense and real information,
+combined, it is true, with a repulsive physiognomy and manners, but not on that
+account the less valuable. In M. Waldman I found a true friend. His gentleness
+was never tinged by dogmatism, and his instructions were given with an air of
+frankness and good nature that banished every idea of pedantry. In a thousand
+ways he smoothed for me the path of knowledge and made the most abstruse
+inquiries clear and facile to my apprehension. My application was at first
+fluctuating and uncertain; it gained strength as I proceeded and soon became so
+ardent and eager that the stars often disappeared in the light of morning
+whilst I was yet engaged in my laboratory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I applied so closely, it may be easily conceived that my progress was rapid.
+My ardour was indeed the astonishment of the students, and my proficiency that
+of the masters. Professor Krempe often asked me, with a sly smile, how
+Cornelius Agrippa went on, whilst M. Waldman expressed the most heartfelt
+exultation in my progress. Two years passed in this manner, during which I paid
+no visit to Geneva, but was engaged, heart and soul, in the pursuit of some
+discoveries which I hoped to make. None but those who have experienced them can
+conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as
+others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a
+scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder. A mind of
+moderate capacity which closely pursues one study must infallibly arrive at
+great proficiency in that study; and I, who continually sought the attainment
+of one object of pursuit and was solely wrapped up in this, improved so rapidly
+that at the end of two years I made some discoveries in the improvement of some
+chemical instruments, which procured me great esteem and admiration at the
+university. When I had arrived at this point and had become as well acquainted
+with the theory and practice of natural philosophy as depended on the lessons
+of any of the professors at Ingolstadt, my residence there being no longer
+conducive to my improvements, I thought of returning to my friends and my
+native town, when an incident happened that protracted my stay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the phenomena which had peculiarly attracted my attention was the
+structure of the human frame, and, indeed, any animal endued with life. Whence,
+I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed? It was a bold
+question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery; yet with how
+many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or
+carelessness did not restrain our inquiries. I revolved these circumstances in
+my mind and determined thenceforth to apply myself more particularly to those
+branches of natural philosophy which relate to physiology. Unless I had been
+animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm, my application to this study
+would have been irksome and almost intolerable. To examine the causes of life,
+we must first have recourse to death. I became acquainted with the science of
+anatomy, but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and
+corruption of the human body. In my education my father had taken the greatest
+precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors. I do
+not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to have feared
+the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy, and a
+churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which,
+from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I
+was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend
+days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses. My attention was fixed upon every
+object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how
+the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death
+succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders
+of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of
+causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life,
+until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light
+so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the
+immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so
+many men of genius who had directed their inquiries towards the same science,
+that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Remember, I am not recording the vision of a madman. The sun does not more
+certainly shine in the heavens than that which I now affirm is true. Some
+miracle might have produced it, yet the stages of the discovery were distinct
+and probable. After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I
+succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became
+myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The astonishment which I had at first experienced on this discovery soon gave
+place to delight and rapture. After so much time spent in painful labour, to
+arrive at once at the summit of my desires was the most gratifying consummation
+of my toils. But this discovery was so great and overwhelming that all the
+steps by which I had been progressively led to it were obliterated, and I
+beheld only the result. What had been the study and desire of the wisest men
+since the creation of the world was now within my grasp. Not that, like a magic
+scene, it all opened upon me at once: the information I had obtained was of a
+nature rather to direct my endeavours so soon as I should point them towards
+the object of my search than to exhibit that object already accomplished. I was
+like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead and found a passage to life,
+aided only by one glimmering and seemingly ineffectual light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I see by your eagerness and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my
+friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am
+acquainted; that cannot be; listen patiently until the end of my story, and you
+will easily perceive why I am reserved upon that subject. I will not lead you
+on, unguarded and ardent as I then was, to your destruction and infallible
+misery. Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how
+dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who
+believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater
+than his nature will allow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long
+time concerning the manner in which I should employ it. Although I possessed
+the capacity of bestowing animation, yet to prepare a frame for the reception
+of it, with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a
+work of inconceivable difficulty and labour. I doubted at first whether I
+should attempt the creation of a being like myself, or one of simpler
+organization; but my imagination was too much exalted by my first success to
+permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and
+wonderful as man. The materials at present within my command hardly appeared
+adequate to so arduous an undertaking, but I doubted not that I should
+ultimately succeed. I prepared myself for a multitude of reverses; my
+operations might be incessantly baffled, and at last my work be imperfect, yet
+when I considered the improvement which every day takes place in science and
+mechanics, I was encouraged to hope my present attempts would at least lay the
+foundations of future success. Nor could I consider the magnitude and
+complexity of my plan as any argument of its impracticability. It was with
+these feelings that I began the creation of a human being. As the minuteness of
+the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my
+first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about
+eight feet in height, and proportionably large. After having formed this
+determination and having spent some months in successfully collecting and
+arranging my materials, I began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a
+hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me
+ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light
+into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source;
+many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could
+claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.
+Pursuing these reflections, I thought that if I could bestow animation upon
+lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it
+impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to
+corruption.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These thoughts supported my spirits, while I pursued my undertaking with
+unremitting ardour. My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had
+become emaciated with confinement. Sometimes, on the very brink of certainty, I
+failed; yet still I clung to the hope which the next day or the next hour might
+realise. One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had
+dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with
+unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places. Who
+shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed
+damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?
+My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a
+resistless and almost frantic impulse urged me forward; I seemed to have lost
+all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing
+trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural
+stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits. I collected bones
+from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets
+of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the
+house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase,
+I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their
+sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and
+the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human
+nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an
+eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The summer months passed while I was thus engaged, heart and soul, in one
+pursuit. It was a most beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more
+plentiful harvest or the vines yield a more luxuriant vintage, but my eyes were
+insensible to the charms of nature. And the same feelings which made me neglect
+the scenes around me caused me also to forget those friends who were so many
+miles absent, and whom I had not seen for so long a time. I knew my silence
+disquieted them, and I well remembered the words of my father: “I know that
+while you are pleased with yourself you will think of us with affection, and we
+shall hear regularly from you. You must pardon me if I regard any interruption
+in your correspondence as a proof that your other duties are equally
+neglected.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I knew well therefore what would be my father’s feelings, but I could not tear
+my thoughts from my employment, loathsome in itself, but which had taken an
+irresistible hold of my imagination. I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all
+that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which
+swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I then thought that my father would be unjust if he ascribed my neglect to vice
+or faultiness on my part, but I am now convinced that he was justified in
+conceiving that I should not be altogether free from blame. A human being in
+perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow
+passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that
+the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which
+you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your
+taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that
+study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If
+this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to
+interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been
+enslaved, Cæsar would have spared his country, America would have been
+discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been
+destroyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I forget that I am moralizing in the most interesting part of my tale, and
+your looks remind me to proceed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My father made no reproach in his letters and only took notice of my silence by
+inquiring into my occupations more particularly than before. Winter, spring,
+and summer passed away during my labours; but I did not watch the blossom or
+the expanding leaves—sights which before always yielded me supreme delight—so
+deeply was I engrossed in my occupation. The leaves of that year had withered
+before my work drew near to a close, and now every day showed me more plainly
+how well I had succeeded. But my enthusiasm was checked by my anxiety, and I
+appeared rather like one doomed by slavery to toil in the mines, or any other
+unwholesome trade than an artist occupied by his favourite employment. Every
+night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful
+degree; the fall of a leaf startled me, and I shunned my fellow creatures as if
+I had been guilty of a crime. Sometimes I grew alarmed at the wreck I perceived
+that I had become; the energy of my purpose alone sustained me: my labours
+would soon end, and I believed that exercise and amusement would then drive
+away incipient disease; and I promised myself both of these when my creation
+should be complete.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap05"></a>Chapter 5</h2>
+
+<p>
+It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my
+toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the
+instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the
+lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain
+pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when,
+by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the
+creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch
+whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs
+were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!
+Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries
+beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly
+whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his
+watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in
+which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human
+nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of
+infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest
+and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but
+now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless
+horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I
+had created, I rushed out of the room and continued a long time traversing my
+bed-chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep. At length lassitude succeeded
+to the tumult I had before endured, and I threw myself on the bed in my
+clothes, endeavouring to seek a few moments of forgetfulness. But it was in
+vain; I slept, indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I
+saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt.
+Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on
+her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to
+change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a
+shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of
+the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my
+forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim
+and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters,
+I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the
+curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me.
+His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin
+wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was
+stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs. I
+took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited, where I
+remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest
+agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were
+to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably
+given life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again
+endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on
+him while unfinished; he was ugly then, but when those muscles and joints were
+rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have
+conceived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I passed the night wretchedly. Sometimes my pulse beat so quickly and hardly
+that I felt the palpitation of every artery; at others, I nearly sank to the
+ground through languor and extreme weakness. Mingled with this horror, I felt
+the bitterness of disappointment; dreams that had been my food and pleasant
+rest for so long a space were now become a hell to me; and the change was so
+rapid, the overthrow so complete!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Morning, dismal and wet, at length dawned and discovered to my sleepless and
+aching eyes the church of Ingolstadt, its white steeple and clock, which
+indicated the sixth hour. The porter opened the gates of the court, which had
+that night been my asylum, and I issued into the streets, pacing them with
+quick steps, as if I sought to avoid the wretch whom I feared every turning of
+the street would present to my view. I did not dare return to the apartment
+which I inhabited, but felt impelled to hurry on, although drenched by the rain
+which poured from a black and comfortless sky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I continued walking in this manner for some time, endeavouring by bodily
+exercise to ease the load that weighed upon my mind. I traversed the streets
+without any clear conception of where I was or what I was doing. My heart
+palpitated in the sickness of fear, and I hurried on with irregular steps, not
+daring to look about me:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+Like one who, on a lonely road,<br>
+Doth walk in fear and dread,<br>
+And, having once turned round, walks on,<br>
+And turns no more his head;<br>
+Because he knows a frightful fiend<br>
+Doth close behind him tread.<br>
+<br>
+[Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner.”]
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Continuing thus, I came at length opposite to the inn at which the various
+diligences and carriages usually stopped. Here I paused, I knew not why; but I
+remained some minutes with my eyes fixed on a coach that was coming towards me
+from the other end of the street. As it drew nearer I observed that it was the
+Swiss diligence; it stopped just where I was standing, and on the door being
+opened, I perceived Henry Clerval, who, on seeing me, instantly sprung out. “My
+dear Frankenstein,” exclaimed he, “how glad I am to see you! How fortunate that
+you should be here at the very moment of my alighting!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing could equal my delight on seeing Clerval; his presence brought back to
+my thoughts my father, Elizabeth, and all those scenes of home so dear to my
+recollection. I grasped his hand, and in a moment forgot my horror and
+misfortune; I felt suddenly, and for the first time during many months, calm
+and serene joy. I welcomed my friend, therefore, in the most cordial manner,
+and we walked towards my college. Clerval continued talking for some time about
+our mutual friends and his own good fortune in being permitted to come to
+Ingolstadt. “You may easily believe,” said he, “how great was the difficulty to
+persuade my father that all necessary knowledge was not comprised in the noble
+art of book-keeping; and, indeed, I believe I left him incredulous to the last,
+for his constant answer to my unwearied entreaties was the same as that of the
+Dutch schoolmaster in The Vicar of Wakefield: ‘I have ten thousand florins a
+year without Greek, I eat heartily without Greek.’ But his affection for me at
+length overcame his dislike of learning, and he has permitted me to undertake a
+voyage of discovery to the land of knowledge.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It gives me the greatest delight to see you; but tell me how you left my
+father, brothers, and Elizabeth.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well, and very happy, only a little uneasy that they hear from you so
+seldom. By the by, I mean to lecture you a little upon their account myself.
+But, my dear Frankenstein,” continued he, stopping short and gazing full in my
+face, “I did not before remark how very ill you appear; so thin and pale; you
+look as if you had been watching for several nights.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have guessed right; I have lately been so deeply engaged in one occupation
+that I have not allowed myself sufficient rest, as you see; but I hope, I
+sincerely hope, that all these employments are now at an end and that I am at
+length free.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I trembled excessively; I could not endure to think of, and far less to allude
+to, the occurrences of the preceding night. I walked with a quick pace, and we
+soon arrived at my college. I then reflected, and the thought made me shiver,
+that the creature whom I had left in my apartment might still be there, alive
+and walking about. I dreaded to behold this monster, but I feared still more
+that Henry should see him. Entreating him, therefore, to remain a few minutes
+at the bottom of the stairs, I darted up towards my own room. My hand was
+already on the lock of the door before I recollected myself. I then paused, and
+a cold shivering came over me. I threw the door forcibly open, as children are
+accustomed to do when they expect a spectre to stand in waiting for them on the
+other side; but nothing appeared. I stepped fearfully in: the apartment was
+empty, and my bedroom was also freed from its hideous guest. I could hardly
+believe that so great a good fortune could have befallen me, but when I became
+assured that my enemy had indeed fled, I clapped my hands for joy and ran down
+to Clerval.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We ascended into my room, and the servant presently brought breakfast; but I
+was unable to contain myself. It was not joy only that possessed me; I felt my
+flesh tingle with excess of sensitiveness, and my pulse beat rapidly. I was
+unable to remain for a single instant in the same place; I jumped over the
+chairs, clapped my hands, and laughed aloud. Clerval at first attributed my
+unusual spirits to joy on his arrival, but when he observed me more
+attentively, he saw a wildness in my eyes for which he could not account, and
+my loud, unrestrained, heartless laughter frightened and astonished him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear Victor,” cried he, “what, for God’s sake, is the matter? Do not laugh
+in that manner. How ill you are! What is the cause of all this?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do not ask me,” cried I, putting my hands before my eyes, for I thought I saw
+the dreaded spectre glide into the room; “<i>he</i> can tell. Oh, save me! Save
+me!” I imagined that the monster seized me; I struggled furiously and fell down
+in a fit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Poor Clerval! What must have been his feelings? A meeting, which he anticipated
+with such joy, so strangely turned to bitterness. But I was not the witness of
+his grief, for I was lifeless and did not recover my senses for a long, long
+time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was the commencement of a nervous fever which confined me for several
+months. During all that time Henry was my only nurse. I afterwards learned
+that, knowing my father’s advanced age and unfitness for so long a journey, and
+how wretched my sickness would make Elizabeth, he spared them this grief by
+concealing the extent of my disorder. He knew that I could not have a more kind
+and attentive nurse than himself; and, firm in the hope he felt of my recovery,
+he did not doubt that, instead of doing harm, he performed the kindest action
+that he could towards them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I was in reality very ill, and surely nothing but the unbounded and
+unremitting attentions of my friend could have restored me to life. The form of
+the monster on whom I had bestowed existence was for ever before my eyes, and I
+raved incessantly concerning him. Doubtless my words surprised Henry; he at
+first believed them to be the wanderings of my disturbed imagination, but the
+pertinacity with which I continually recurred to the same subject persuaded him
+that my disorder indeed owed its origin to some uncommon and terrible event.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By very slow degrees, and with frequent relapses that alarmed and grieved my
+friend, I recovered. I remember the first time I became capable of observing
+outward objects with any kind of pleasure, I perceived that the fallen leaves
+had disappeared and that the young buds were shooting forth from the trees that
+shaded my window. It was a divine spring, and the season contributed greatly to
+my convalescence. I felt also sentiments of joy and affection revive in my
+bosom; my gloom disappeared, and in a short time I became as cheerful as before
+I was attacked by the fatal passion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dearest Clerval,” exclaimed I, “how kind, how very good you are to me. This
+whole winter, instead of being spent in study, as you promised yourself, has
+been consumed in my sick room. How shall I ever repay you? I feel the greatest
+remorse for the disappointment of which I have been the occasion, but you will
+forgive me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You will repay me entirely if you do not discompose yourself, but get well as
+fast as you can; and since you appear in such good spirits, I may speak to you
+on one subject, may I not?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I trembled. One subject! What could it be? Could he allude to an object on whom
+I dared not even think?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Compose yourself,” said Clerval, who observed my change of colour, “I will not
+mention it if it agitates you; but your father and cousin would be very happy
+if they received a letter from you in your own handwriting. They hardly know
+how ill you have been and are uneasy at your long silence.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is that all, my dear Henry? How could you suppose that my first thought would
+not fly towards those dear, dear friends whom I love and who are so deserving
+of my love?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If this is your present temper, my friend, you will perhaps be glad to see a
+letter that has been lying here some days for you; it is from your cousin, I
+believe.”
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap06"></a>Chapter 6</h2>
+
+<p>
+Clerval then put the following letter into my hands. It was from my own
+Elizabeth:
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+“My dearest Cousin,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have been ill, very ill, and even the constant letters of dear kind Henry
+are not sufficient to reassure me on your account. You are forbidden to
+write—to hold a pen; yet one word from you, dear Victor, is necessary to calm
+our apprehensions. For a long time I have thought that each post would bring
+this line, and my persuasions have restrained my uncle from undertaking a
+journey to Ingolstadt. I have prevented his encountering the inconveniences and
+perhaps dangers of so long a journey, yet how often have I regretted not being
+able to perform it myself! I figure to myself that the task of attending on
+your sickbed has devolved on some mercenary old nurse, who could never guess
+your wishes nor minister to them with the care and affection of your poor
+cousin. Yet that is over now: Clerval writes that indeed you are getting
+better. I eagerly hope that you will confirm this intelligence soon in your own
+handwriting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Get well—and return to us. You will find a happy, cheerful home and friends
+who love you dearly. Your father’s health is vigorous, and he asks but to see
+you, but to be assured that you are well; and not a care will ever cloud his
+benevolent countenance. How pleased you would be to remark the improvement of
+our Ernest! He is now sixteen and full of activity and spirit. He is desirous
+to be a true Swiss and to enter into foreign service, but we cannot part with
+him, at least until his elder brother returns to us. My uncle is not pleased
+with the idea of a military career in a distant country, but Ernest never had
+your powers of application. He looks upon study as an odious fetter; his time
+is spent in the open air, climbing the hills or rowing on the lake. I fear that
+he will become an idler unless we yield the point and permit him to enter on
+the profession which he has selected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Little alteration, except the growth of our dear children, has taken place
+since you left us. The blue lake and snow-clad mountains—they never change; and
+I think our placid home and our contented hearts are regulated by the same
+immutable laws. My trifling occupations take up my time and amuse me, and I am
+rewarded for any exertions by seeing none but happy, kind faces around me.
+Since you left us, but one change has taken place in our little household. Do
+you remember on what occasion Justine Moritz entered our family? Probably you
+do not; I will relate her history, therefore in a few words. Madame Moritz, her
+mother, was a widow with four children, of whom Justine was the third. This
+girl had always been the favourite of her father, but through a strange
+perversity, her mother could not endure her, and after the death of M. Moritz,
+treated her very ill. My aunt observed this, and when Justine was twelve years
+of age, prevailed on her mother to allow her to live at our house. The
+republican institutions of our country have produced simpler and happier
+manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround it.
+Hence there is less distinction between the several classes of its inhabitants;
+and the lower orders, being neither so poor nor so despised, their manners are
+more refined and moral. A servant in Geneva does not mean the same thing as a
+servant in France and England. Justine, thus received in our family, learned
+the duties of a servant, a condition which, in our fortunate country, does not
+include the idea of ignorance and a sacrifice of the dignity of a human being.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Justine, you may remember, was a great favourite of yours; and I recollect you
+once remarked that if you were in an ill humour, one glance from Justine could
+dissipate it, for the same reason that Ariosto gives concerning the beauty of
+Angelica—she looked so frank-hearted and happy. My aunt conceived a great
+attachment for her, by which she was induced to give her an education superior
+to that which she had at first intended. This benefit was fully repaid; Justine
+was the most grateful little creature in the world: I do not mean that she made
+any professions I never heard one pass her lips, but you could see by her eyes
+that she almost adored her protectress. Although her disposition was gay and in
+many respects inconsiderate, yet she paid the greatest attention to every
+gesture of my aunt. She thought her the model of all excellence and endeavoured
+to imitate her phraseology and manners, so that even now she often reminds me
+of her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When my dearest aunt died every one was too much occupied in their own grief
+to notice poor Justine, who had attended her during her illness with the most
+anxious affection. Poor Justine was very ill; but other trials were reserved
+for her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“One by one, her brothers and sister died; and her mother, with the exception
+of her neglected daughter, was left childless. The conscience of the woman was
+troubled; she began to think that the deaths of her favourites was a judgement
+from heaven to chastise her partiality. She was a Roman Catholic; and I believe
+her confessor confirmed the idea which she had conceived. Accordingly, a few
+months after your departure for Ingolstadt, Justine was called home by her
+repentant mother. Poor girl! She wept when she quitted our house; she was much
+altered since the death of my aunt; grief had given softness and a winning
+mildness to her manners, which had before been remarkable for vivacity. Nor was
+her residence at her mother’s house of a nature to restore her gaiety. The poor
+woman was very vacillating in her repentance. She sometimes begged Justine to
+forgive her unkindness, but much oftener accused her of having caused the
+deaths of her brothers and sister. Perpetual fretting at length threw Madame
+Moritz into a decline, which at first increased her irritability, but she is
+now at peace for ever. She died on the first approach of cold weather, at the
+beginning of this last winter. Justine has just returned to us; and I assure
+you I love her tenderly. She is very clever and gentle, and extremely pretty;
+as I mentioned before, her mien and her expression continually remind me of my
+dear aunt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I must say also a few words to you, my dear cousin, of little darling William.
+I wish you could see him; he is very tall of his age, with sweet laughing blue
+eyes, dark eyelashes, and curling hair. When he smiles, two little dimples
+appear on each cheek, which are rosy with health. He has already had one or two
+little <i>wives,</i> but Louisa Biron is his favourite, a pretty little girl of
+five years of age.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now, dear Victor, I dare say you wish to be indulged in a little gossip
+concerning the good people of Geneva. The pretty Miss Mansfield has already
+received the congratulatory visits on her approaching marriage with a young
+Englishman, John Melbourne, Esq. Her ugly sister, Manon, married M. Duvillard,
+the rich banker, last autumn. Your favourite schoolfellow, Louis Manoir, has
+suffered several misfortunes since the departure of Clerval from Geneva. But he
+has already recovered his spirits, and is reported to be on the point of
+marrying a lively pretty Frenchwoman, Madame Tavernier. She is a widow, and
+much older than Manoir; but she is very much admired, and a favourite with
+everybody.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have written myself into better spirits, dear cousin; but my anxiety returns
+upon me as I conclude. Write, dearest Victor,—one line—one word will be a
+blessing to us. Ten thousand thanks to Henry for his kindness, his affection,
+and his many letters; we are sincerely grateful. Adieu! my cousin; take care of
+yourself; and, I entreat you, write!
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+“Elizabeth Lavenza.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+“Geneva, March 18th, 17—.”<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dear, dear Elizabeth!” I exclaimed, when I had read her letter: “I will write
+instantly and relieve them from the anxiety they must feel.” I wrote, and this
+exertion greatly fatigued me; but my convalescence had commenced, and proceeded
+regularly. In another fortnight I was able to leave my chamber.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of my first duties on my recovery was to introduce Clerval to the several
+professors of the university. In doing this, I underwent a kind of rough usage,
+ill befitting the wounds that my mind had sustained. Ever since the fatal
+night, the end of my labours, and the beginning of my misfortunes, I had
+conceived a violent antipathy even to the name of natural philosophy. When I
+was otherwise quite restored to health, the sight of a chemical instrument
+would renew all the agony of my nervous symptoms. Henry saw this, and had
+removed all my apparatus from my view. He had also changed my apartment; for he
+perceived that I had acquired a dislike for the room which had previously been
+my laboratory. But these cares of Clerval were made of no avail when I visited
+the professors. M. Waldman inflicted torture when he praised, with kindness and
+warmth, the astonishing progress I had made in the sciences. He soon perceived
+that I disliked the subject; but not guessing the real cause, he attributed my
+feelings to modesty, and changed the subject from my improvement, to the
+science itself, with a desire, as I evidently saw, of drawing me out. What
+could I do? He meant to please, and he tormented me. I felt as if he had placed
+carefully, one by one, in my view those instruments which were to be afterwards
+used in putting me to a slow and cruel death. I writhed under his words, yet
+dared not exhibit the pain I felt. Clerval, whose eyes and feelings were always
+quick in discerning the sensations of others, declined the subject, alleging,
+in excuse, his total ignorance; and the conversation took a more general turn.
+I thanked my friend from my heart, but I did not speak. I saw plainly that he
+was surprised, but he never attempted to draw my secret from me; and although I
+loved him with a mixture of affection and reverence that knew no bounds, yet I
+could never persuade myself to confide in him that event which was so often
+present to my recollection, but which I feared the detail to another would only
+impress more deeply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. Krempe was not equally docile; and in my condition at that time, of almost
+insupportable sensitiveness, his harsh blunt encomiums gave me even more pain
+than the benevolent approbation of M. Waldman. “D—n the fellow!” cried he;
+“why, M. Clerval, I assure you he has outstript us all. Ay, stare if you
+please; but it is nevertheless true. A youngster who, but a few years ago,
+believed in Cornelius Agrippa as firmly as in the gospel, has now set himself
+at the head of the university; and if he is not soon pulled down, we shall all
+be out of countenance.—Ay, ay,” continued he, observing my face expressive of
+suffering, “M. Frankenstein is modest; an excellent quality in a young man.
+Young men should be diffident of themselves, you know, M. Clerval: I was myself
+when young; but that wears out in a very short time.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. Krempe had now commenced an eulogy on himself, which happily turned the
+conversation from a subject that was so annoying to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Clerval had never sympathised in my tastes for natural science; and his
+literary pursuits differed wholly from those which had occupied me. He came to
+the university with the design of making himself complete master of the
+oriental languages, and thus he should open a field for the plan of life he had
+marked out for himself. Resolved to pursue no inglorious career, he turned his
+eyes toward the East, as affording scope for his spirit of enterprise. The
+Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit languages engaged his attention, and I was easily
+induced to enter on the same studies. Idleness had ever been irksome to me, and
+now that I wished to fly from reflection, and hated my former studies, I felt
+great relief in being the fellow-pupil with my friend, and found not only
+instruction but consolation in the works of the orientalists. I did not, like
+him, attempt a critical knowledge of their dialects, for I did not contemplate
+making any other use of them than temporary amusement. I read merely to
+understand their meaning, and they well repaid my labours. Their melancholy is
+soothing, and their joy elevating, to a degree I never experienced in studying
+the authors of any other country. When you read their writings, life appears to
+consist in a warm sun and a garden of roses,—in the smiles and frowns of a fair
+enemy, and the fire that consumes your own heart. How different from the manly
+and heroical poetry of Greece and Rome!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Summer passed away in these occupations, and my return to Geneva was fixed for
+the latter end of autumn; but being delayed by several accidents, winter and
+snow arrived, the roads were deemed impassable, and my journey was retarded
+until the ensuing spring. I felt this delay very bitterly; for I longed to see
+my native town and my beloved friends. My return had only been delayed so long,
+from an unwillingness to leave Clerval in a strange place, before he had become
+acquainted with any of its inhabitants. The winter, however, was spent
+cheerfully; and although the spring was uncommonly late, when it came its
+beauty compensated for its dilatoriness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The month of May had already commenced, and I expected the letter daily which
+was to fix the date of my departure, when Henry proposed a pedestrian tour in
+the environs of Ingolstadt, that I might bid a personal farewell to the country
+I had so long inhabited. I acceded with pleasure to this proposition: I was
+fond of exercise, and Clerval had always been my favourite companion in the
+ramble of this nature that I had taken among the scenes of my native country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We passed a fortnight in these perambulations: my health and spirits had long
+been restored, and they gained additional strength from the salubrious air I
+breathed, the natural incidents of our progress, and the conversation of my
+friend. Study had before secluded me from the intercourse of my
+fellow-creatures, and rendered me unsocial; but Clerval called forth the better
+feelings of my heart; he again taught me to love the aspect of nature, and the
+cheerful faces of children. Excellent friend! how sincerely you did love me,
+and endeavour to elevate my mind until it was on a level with your own. A
+selfish pursuit had cramped and narrowed me, until your gentleness and
+affection warmed and opened my senses; I became the same happy creature who, a
+few years ago, loved and beloved by all, had no sorrow or care. When happy,
+inanimate nature had the power of bestowing on me the most delightful
+sensations. A serene sky and verdant fields filled me with ecstasy. The present
+season was indeed divine; the flowers of spring bloomed in the hedges, while
+those of summer were already in bud. I was undisturbed by thoughts which during
+the preceding year had pressed upon me, notwithstanding my endeavours to throw
+them off, with an invincible burden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry rejoiced in my gaiety, and sincerely sympathised in my feelings: he
+exerted himself to amuse me, while he expressed the sensations that filled his
+soul. The resources of his mind on this occasion were truly astonishing: his
+conversation was full of imagination; and very often, in imitation of the
+Persian and Arabic writers, he invented tales of wonderful fancy and passion.
+At other times he repeated my favourite poems, or drew me out into arguments,
+which he supported with great ingenuity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We returned to our college on a Sunday afternoon: the peasants were dancing,
+and every one we met appeared gay and happy. My own spirits were high, and I
+bounded along with feelings of unbridled joy and hilarity.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap07"></a>Chapter 7</h2>
+
+<p>
+On my return, I found the following letter from my father:—
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+“My dear Victor,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have probably waited impatiently for a letter to fix the date of your
+return to us; and I was at first tempted to write only a few lines, merely
+mentioning the day on which I should expect you. But that would be a cruel
+kindness, and I dare not do it. What would be your surprise, my son, when you
+expected a happy and glad welcome, to behold, on the contrary, tears and
+wretchedness? And how, Victor, can I relate our misfortune? Absence cannot have
+rendered you callous to our joys and griefs; and how shall I inflict pain on my
+long absent son? I wish to prepare you for the woeful news, but I know it is
+impossible; even now your eye skims over the page to seek the words which are
+to convey to you the horrible tidings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“William is dead!—that sweet child, whose smiles delighted and warmed my heart,
+who was so gentle, yet so gay! Victor, he is murdered!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I will not attempt to console you; but will simply relate the circumstances of
+the transaction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Last Thursday (May 7th), I, my niece, and your two brothers, went to walk in
+Plainpalais. The evening was warm and serene, and we prolonged our walk farther
+than usual. It was already dusk before we thought of returning; and then we
+discovered that William and Ernest, who had gone on before, were not to be
+found. We accordingly rested on a seat until they should return. Presently
+Ernest came, and enquired if we had seen his brother; he said, that he had been
+playing with him, that William had run away to hide himself, and that he vainly
+sought for him, and afterwards waited for a long time, but that he did not
+return.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This account rather alarmed us, and we continued to search for him until night
+fell, when Elizabeth conjectured that he might have returned to the house. He
+was not there. We returned again, with torches; for I could not rest, when I
+thought that my sweet boy had lost himself, and was exposed to all the damps
+and dews of night; Elizabeth also suffered extreme anguish. About five in the
+morning I discovered my lovely boy, whom the night before I had seen blooming
+and active in health, stretched on the grass livid and motionless; the print of
+the murder’s finger was on his neck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He was conveyed home, and the anguish that was visible in my countenance
+betrayed the secret to Elizabeth. She was very earnest to see the corpse. At
+first I attempted to prevent her but she persisted, and entering the room where
+it lay, hastily examined the neck of the victim, and clasping her hands
+exclaimed, ‘O God! I have murdered my darling child!’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She fainted, and was restored with extreme difficulty. When she again lived,
+it was only to weep and sigh. She told me, that that same evening William had
+teased her to let him wear a very valuable miniature that she possessed of your
+mother. This picture is gone, and was doubtless the temptation which urged the
+murderer to the deed. We have no trace of him at present, although our
+exertions to discover him are unremitted; but they will not restore my beloved
+William!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, dearest Victor; you alone can console Elizabeth. She weeps continually,
+and accuses herself unjustly as the cause of his death; her words pierce my
+heart. We are all unhappy; but will not that be an additional motive for you,
+my son, to return and be our comforter? Your dear mother! Alas, Victor! I now
+say, Thank God she did not live to witness the cruel, miserable death of her
+youngest darling!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, Victor; not brooding thoughts of vengeance against the assassin, but
+with feelings of peace and gentleness, that will heal, instead of festering,
+the wounds of our minds. Enter the house of mourning, my friend, but with
+kindness and affection for those who love you, and not with hatred for your
+enemies.
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+“Your affectionate and afflicted father,<br>
+“Alphonse Frankenstein.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+“Geneva, May 12th, 17—.”<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Clerval, who had watched my countenance as I read this letter, was surprised to
+observe the despair that succeeded the joy I at first expressed on receiving
+news from my friends. I threw the letter on the table, and covered my face with
+my hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear Frankenstein,” exclaimed Henry, when he perceived me weep with
+bitterness, “are you always to be unhappy? My dear friend, what has happened?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I motioned him to take up the letter, while I walked up and down the room in
+the extremest agitation. Tears also gushed from the eyes of Clerval, as he read
+the account of my misfortune.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can offer you no consolation, my friend,” said he; “your disaster is
+irreparable. What do you intend to do?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To go instantly to Geneva: come with me, Henry, to order the horses.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During our walk, Clerval endeavoured to say a few words of consolation; he
+could only express his heartfelt sympathy. “Poor William!” said he, “dear
+lovely child, he now sleeps with his angel mother! Who that had seen him bright
+and joyous in his young beauty, but must weep over his untimely loss! To die so
+miserably; to feel the murderer’s grasp! How much more a murdered that could
+destroy radiant innocence! Poor little fellow! one only consolation have we;
+his friends mourn and weep, but he is at rest. The pang is over, his sufferings
+are at an end for ever. A sod covers his gentle form, and he knows no pain. He
+can no longer be a subject for pity; we must reserve that for his miserable
+survivors.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Clerval spoke thus as we hurried through the streets; the words impressed
+themselves on my mind and I remembered them afterwards in solitude. But now, as
+soon as the horses arrived, I hurried into a cabriolet, and bade farewell to my
+friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My journey was very melancholy. At first I wished to hurry on, for I longed to
+console and sympathise with my loved and sorrowing friends; but when I drew
+near my native town, I slackened my progress. I could hardly sustain the
+multitude of feelings that crowded into my mind. I passed through scenes
+familiar to my youth, but which I had not seen for nearly six years. How
+altered every thing might be during that time! One sudden and desolating change
+had taken place; but a thousand little circumstances might have by degrees
+worked other alterations, which, although they were done more tranquilly, might
+not be the less decisive. Fear overcame me; I dared no advance, dreading a
+thousand nameless evils that made me tremble, although I was unable to define
+them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I remained two days at Lausanne, in this painful state of mind. I contemplated
+the lake: the waters were placid; all around was calm; and the snowy mountains,
+“the palaces of nature,” were not changed. By degrees the calm and heavenly
+scene restored me, and I continued my journey towards Geneva.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The road ran by the side of the lake, which became narrower as I approached my
+native town. I discovered more distinctly the black sides of Jura, and the
+bright summit of Mont Blanc. I wept like a child. “Dear mountains! my own
+beautiful lake! how do you welcome your wanderer? Your summits are clear; the
+sky and lake are blue and placid. Is this to prognosticate peace, or to mock at
+my unhappiness?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I fear, my friend, that I shall render myself tedious by dwelling on these
+preliminary circumstances; but they were days of comparative happiness, and I
+think of them with pleasure. My country, my beloved country! who but a native
+can tell the delight I took in again beholding thy streams, thy mountains, and,
+more than all, thy lovely lake!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet, as I drew nearer home, grief and fear again overcame me. Night also closed
+around; and when I could hardly see the dark mountains, I felt still more
+gloomily. The picture appeared a vast and dim scene of evil, and I foresaw
+obscurely that I was destined to become the most wretched of human beings.
+Alas! I prophesied truly, and failed only in one single circumstance, that in
+all the misery I imagined and dreaded, I did not conceive the hundredth part of
+the anguish I was destined to endure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was completely dark when I arrived in the environs of Geneva; the gates of
+the town were already shut; and I was obliged to pass the night at Secheron, a
+village at the distance of half a league from the city. The sky was serene;
+and, as I was unable to rest, I resolved to visit the spot where my poor
+William had been murdered. As I could not pass through the town, I was obliged
+to cross the lake in a boat to arrive at Plainpalais. During this short voyage
+I saw the lightning playing on the summit of Mont Blanc in the most beautiful
+figures. The storm appeared to approach rapidly, and, on landing, I ascended a
+low hill, that I might observe its progress. It advanced; the heavens were
+clouded, and I soon felt the rain coming slowly in large drops, but its
+violence quickly increased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I quitted my seat, and walked on, although the darkness and storm increased
+every minute, and the thunder burst with a terrific crash over my head. It was
+echoed from Salêve, the Juras, and the Alps of Savoy; vivid flashes of
+lightning dazzled my eyes, illuminating the lake, making it appear like a vast
+sheet of fire; then for an instant every thing seemed of a pitchy darkness,
+until the eye recovered itself from the preceding flash. The storm, as is often
+the case in Switzerland, appeared at once in various parts of the heavens. The
+most violent storm hung exactly north of the town, over the part of the lake
+which lies between the promontory of Belrive and the village of Copêt. Another
+storm enlightened Jura with faint flashes; and another darkened and sometimes
+disclosed the Môle, a peaked mountain to the east of the lake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While I watched the tempest, so beautiful yet terrific, I wandered on with a
+hasty step. This noble war in the sky elevated my spirits; I clasped my hands,
+and exclaimed aloud, “William, dear angel! this is thy funeral, this thy
+dirge!” As I said these words, I perceived in the gloom a figure which stole
+from behind a clump of trees near me; I stood fixed, gazing intently: I could
+not be mistaken. A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered
+its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect
+more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the
+wretch, the filthy dæmon, to whom I had given life. What did he there? Could he
+be (I shuddered at the conception) the murderer of my brother? No sooner did
+that idea cross my imagination, than I became convinced of its truth; my teeth
+chattered, and I was forced to lean against a tree for support. The figure
+passed me quickly, and I lost it in the gloom. Nothing in human shape could
+have destroyed the fair child. <i>He</i> was the murderer! I could not doubt
+it. The mere presence of the idea was an irresistible proof of the fact. I
+thought of pursuing the devil; but it would have been in vain, for another
+flash discovered him to me hanging among the rocks of the nearly perpendicular
+ascent of Mont Salêve, a hill that bounds Plainpalais on the south. He soon
+reached the summit, and disappeared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I remained motionless. The thunder ceased; but the rain still continued, and
+the scene was enveloped in an impenetrable darkness. I revolved in my mind the
+events which I had until now sought to forget: the whole train of my progress
+toward the creation; the appearance of the works of my own hands at my bedside;
+its departure. Two years had now nearly elapsed since the night on which he
+first received life; and was this his first crime? Alas! I had turned loose
+into the world a depraved wretch, whose delight was in carnage and misery; had
+he not murdered my brother?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No one can conceive the anguish I suffered during the remainder of the night,
+which I spent, cold and wet, in the open air. But I did not feel the
+inconvenience of the weather; my imagination was busy in scenes of evil and
+despair. I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with
+the will and power to effect purposes of horror, such as the deed which he had
+now done, nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from
+the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Day dawned; and I directed my steps towards the town. The gates were open, and
+I hastened to my father’s house. My first thought was to discover what I knew
+of the murderer, and cause instant pursuit to be made. But I paused when I
+reflected on the story that I had to tell. A being whom I myself had formed,
+and endued with life, had met me at midnight among the precipices of an
+inaccessible mountain. I remembered also the nervous fever with which I had
+been seized just at the time that I dated my creation, and which would give an
+air of delirium to a tale otherwise so utterly improbable. I well knew that if
+any other had communicated such a relation to me, I should have looked upon it
+as the ravings of insanity. Besides, the strange nature of the animal would
+elude all pursuit, even if I were so far credited as to persuade my relatives
+to commence it. And then of what use would be pursuit? Who could arrest a
+creature capable of scaling the overhanging sides of Mont Salêve? These
+reflections determined me, and I resolved to remain silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was about five in the morning when I entered my father’s house. I told the
+servants not to disturb the family, and went into the library to attend their
+usual hour of rising.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Six years had elapsed, passed in a dream but for one indelible trace, and I
+stood in the same place where I had last embraced my father before my departure
+for Ingolstadt. Beloved and venerable parent! He still remained to me. I gazed
+on the picture of my mother, which stood over the mantel-piece. It was an
+historical subject, painted at my father’s desire, and represented Caroline
+Beaufort in an agony of despair, kneeling by the coffin of her dead father. Her
+garb was rustic, and her cheek pale; but there was an air of dignity and
+beauty, that hardly permitted the sentiment of pity. Below this picture was a
+miniature of William; and my tears flowed when I looked upon it. While I was
+thus engaged, Ernest entered: he had heard me arrive, and hastened to welcome
+me: “Welcome, my dearest Victor,” said he. “Ah! I wish you had come three
+months ago, and then you would have found us all joyous and delighted. You come
+to us now to share a misery which nothing can alleviate; yet your presence
+will, I hope, revive our father, who seems sinking under his misfortune; and
+your persuasions will induce poor Elizabeth to cease her vain and tormenting
+self-accusations.—Poor William! he was our darling and our pride!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tears, unrestrained, fell from my brother’s eyes; a sense of mortal agony crept
+over my frame. Before, I had only imagined the wretchedness of my desolated
+home; the reality came on me as a new, and a not less terrible, disaster. I
+tried to calm Ernest; I enquired more minutely concerning my father, and here I
+named my cousin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She most of all,” said Ernest, “requires consolation; she accused herself of
+having caused the death of my brother, and that made her very wretched. But
+since the murderer has been discovered—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The murderer discovered! Good God! how can that be? who could attempt to
+pursue him? It is impossible; one might as well try to overtake the winds, or
+confine a mountain-stream with a straw. I saw him too; he was free last night!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do not know what you mean,” replied my brother, in accents of wonder, “but
+to us the discovery we have made completes our misery. No one would believe it
+at first; and even now Elizabeth will not be convinced, notwithstanding all the
+evidence. Indeed, who would credit that Justine Moritz, who was so amiable, and
+fond of all the family, could suddenly become so capable of so frightful, so
+appalling a crime?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Justine Moritz! Poor, poor girl, is she the accused? But it is wrongfully;
+every one knows that; no one believes it, surely, Ernest?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No one did at first; but several circumstances came out, that have almost
+forced conviction upon us; and her own behaviour has been so confused, as to
+add to the evidence of facts a weight that, I fear, leaves no hope for doubt.
+But she will be tried today, and you will then hear all.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He then related that, the morning on which the murder of poor William had been
+discovered, Justine had been taken ill, and confined to her bed for several
+days. During this interval, one of the servants, happening to examine the
+apparel she had worn on the night of the murder, had discovered in her pocket
+the picture of my mother, which had been judged to be the temptation of the
+murderer. The servant instantly showed it to one of the others, who, without
+saying a word to any of the family, went to a magistrate; and, upon their
+deposition, Justine was apprehended. On being charged with the fact, the poor
+girl confirmed the suspicion in a great measure by her extreme confusion of
+manner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was a strange tale, but it did not shake my faith; and I replied
+earnestly, “You are all mistaken; I know the murderer. Justine, poor, good
+Justine, is innocent.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At that instant my father entered. I saw unhappiness deeply impressed on his
+countenance, but he endeavoured to welcome me cheerfully; and, after we had
+exchanged our mournful greeting, would have introduced some other topic than
+that of our disaster, had not Ernest exclaimed, “Good God, papa! Victor says
+that he knows who was the murderer of poor William.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We do also, unfortunately,” replied my father, “for indeed I had rather have
+been for ever ignorant than have discovered so much depravity and ungratitude
+in one I valued so highly.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear father, you are mistaken; Justine is innocent.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If she is, God forbid that she should suffer as guilty. She is to be tried
+today, and I hope, I sincerely hope, that she will be acquitted.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This speech calmed me. I was firmly convinced in my own mind that Justine, and
+indeed every human being, was guiltless of this murder. I had no fear,
+therefore, that any circumstantial evidence could be brought forward strong
+enough to convict her. My tale was not one to announce publicly; its astounding
+horror would be looked upon as madness by the vulgar. Did any one indeed exist,
+except I, the creator, who would believe, unless his senses convinced him, in
+the existence of the living monument of presumption and rash ignorance which I
+had let loose upon the world?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We were soon joined by Elizabeth. Time had altered her since I last beheld her;
+it had endowed her with loveliness surpassing the beauty of her childish years.
+There was the same candour, the same vivacity, but it was allied to an
+expression more full of sensibility and intellect. She welcomed me with the
+greatest affection. “Your arrival, my dear cousin,” said she, “fills me with
+hope. You perhaps will find some means to justify my poor guiltless Justine.
+Alas! who is safe, if she be convicted of crime? I rely on her innocence as
+certainly as I do upon my own. Our misfortune is doubly hard to us; we have not
+only lost that lovely darling boy, but this poor girl, whom I sincerely love,
+is to be torn away by even a worse fate. If she is condemned, I never shall
+know joy more. But she will not, I am sure she will not; and then I shall be
+happy again, even after the sad death of my little William.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She is innocent, my Elizabeth,” said I, “and that shall be proved; fear
+nothing, but let your spirits be cheered by the assurance of her acquittal.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How kind and generous you are! every one else believes in her guilt, and that
+made me wretched, for I knew that it was impossible: and to see every one else
+prejudiced in so deadly a manner rendered me hopeless and despairing.” She
+wept.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dearest niece,” said my father, “dry your tears. If she is, as you believe,
+innocent, rely on the justice of our laws, and the activity with which I shall
+prevent the slightest shadow of partiality.”
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap08"></a>Chapter 8</h2>
+
+<p>
+We passed a few sad hours until eleven o’clock, when the trial was to commence.
+My father and the rest of the family being obliged to attend as witnesses, I
+accompanied them to the court. During the whole of this wretched mockery of
+justice I suffered living torture. It was to be decided whether the result of
+my curiosity and lawless devices would cause the death of two of my fellow
+beings: one a smiling babe full of innocence and joy, the other far more
+dreadfully murdered, with every aggravation of infamy that could make the
+murder memorable in horror. Justine also was a girl of merit and possessed
+qualities which promised to render her life happy; now all was to be
+obliterated in an ignominious grave, and I the cause! A thousand times rather
+would I have confessed myself guilty of the crime ascribed to Justine, but I
+was absent when it was committed, and such a declaration would have been
+considered as the ravings of a madman and would not have exculpated her who
+suffered through me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The appearance of Justine was calm. She was dressed in mourning, and her
+countenance, always engaging, was rendered, by the solemnity of her feelings,
+exquisitely beautiful. Yet she appeared confident in innocence and did not
+tremble, although gazed on and execrated by thousands, for all the kindness
+which her beauty might otherwise have excited was obliterated in the minds of
+the spectators by the imagination of the enormity she was supposed to have
+committed. She was tranquil, yet her tranquillity was evidently constrained;
+and as her confusion had before been adduced as a proof of her guilt, she
+worked up her mind to an appearance of courage. When she entered the court she
+threw her eyes round it and quickly discovered where we were seated. A tear
+seemed to dim her eye when she saw us, but she quickly recovered herself, and a
+look of sorrowful affection seemed to attest her utter guiltlessness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The trial began, and after the advocate against her had stated the charge,
+several witnesses were called. Several strange facts combined against her,
+which might have staggered anyone who had not such proof of her innocence as I
+had. She had been out the whole of the night on which the murder had been
+committed and towards morning had been perceived by a market-woman not far from
+the spot where the body of the murdered child had been afterwards found. The
+woman asked her what she did there, but she looked very strangely and only
+returned a confused and unintelligible answer. She returned to the house about
+eight o’clock, and when one inquired where she had passed the night, she
+replied that she had been looking for the child and demanded earnestly if
+anything had been heard concerning him. When shown the body, she fell into
+violent hysterics and kept her bed for several days. The picture was then
+produced which the servant had found in her pocket; and when Elizabeth, in a
+faltering voice, proved that it was the same which, an hour before the child
+had been missed, she had placed round his neck, a murmur of horror and
+indignation filled the court.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Justine was called on for her defence. As the trial had proceeded, her
+countenance had altered. Surprise, horror, and misery were strongly expressed.
+Sometimes she struggled with her tears, but when she was desired to plead, she
+collected her powers and spoke in an audible although variable voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“God knows,” she said, “how entirely I am innocent. But I do not pretend that
+my protestations should acquit me; I rest my innocence on a plain and simple
+explanation of the facts which have been adduced against me, and I hope the
+character I have always borne will incline my judges to a favourable
+interpretation where any circumstance appears doubtful or suspicious.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She then related that, by the permission of Elizabeth, she had passed the
+evening of the night on which the murder had been committed at the house of an
+aunt at Chêne, a village situated at about a league from Geneva. On her return,
+at about nine o’clock, she met a man who asked her if she had seen anything of
+the child who was lost. She was alarmed by this account and passed several
+hours in looking for him, when the gates of Geneva were shut, and she was
+forced to remain several hours of the night in a barn belonging to a cottage,
+being unwilling to call up the inhabitants, to whom she was well known. Most of
+the night she spent here watching; towards morning she believed that she slept
+for a few minutes; some steps disturbed her, and she awoke. It was dawn, and
+she quitted her asylum, that she might again endeavour to find my brother. If
+she had gone near the spot where his body lay, it was without her knowledge.
+That she had been bewildered when questioned by the market-woman was not
+surprising, since she had passed a sleepless night and the fate of poor William
+was yet uncertain. Concerning the picture she could give no account.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know,” continued the unhappy victim, “how heavily and fatally this one
+circumstance weighs against me, but I have no power of explaining it; and when
+I have expressed my utter ignorance, I am only left to conjecture concerning
+the probabilities by which it might have been placed in my pocket. But here
+also I am checked. I believe that I have no enemy on earth, and none surely
+would have been so wicked as to destroy me wantonly. Did the murderer place it
+there? I know of no opportunity afforded him for so doing; or, if I had, why
+should he have stolen the jewel, to part with it again so soon?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I commit my cause to the justice of my judges, yet I see no room for hope. I
+beg permission to have a few witnesses examined concerning my character, and if
+their testimony shall not overweigh my supposed guilt, I must be condemned,
+although I would pledge my salvation on my innocence.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Several witnesses were called who had known her for many years, and they spoke
+well of her; but fear and hatred of the crime of which they supposed her guilty
+rendered them timorous and unwilling to come forward. Elizabeth saw even this
+last resource, her excellent dispositions and irreproachable conduct, about to
+fail the accused, when, although violently agitated, she desired permission to
+address the court.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am,” said she, “the cousin of the unhappy child who was murdered, or rather
+his sister, for I was educated by and have lived with his parents ever since
+and even long before his birth. It may therefore be judged indecent in me to
+come forward on this occasion, but when I see a fellow creature about to perish
+through the cowardice of her pretended friends, I wish to be allowed to speak,
+that I may say what I know of her character. I am well acquainted with the
+accused. I have lived in the same house with her, at one time for five and at
+another for nearly two years. During all that period she appeared to me the
+most amiable and benevolent of human creatures. She nursed Madame Frankenstein,
+my aunt, in her last illness, with the greatest affection and care and
+afterwards attended her own mother during a tedious illness, in a manner that
+excited the admiration of all who knew her, after which she again lived in my
+uncle’s house, where she was beloved by all the family. She was warmly attached
+to the child who is now dead and acted towards him like a most affectionate
+mother. For my own part, I do not hesitate to say that, notwithstanding all the
+evidence produced against her, I believe and rely on her perfect innocence. She
+had no temptation for such an action; as to the bauble on which the chief proof
+rests, if she had earnestly desired it, I should have willingly given it to
+her, so much do I esteem and value her.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A murmur of approbation followed Elizabeth’s simple and powerful appeal, but it
+was excited by her generous interference, and not in favour of poor Justine, on
+whom the public indignation was turned with renewed violence, charging her with
+the blackest ingratitude. She herself wept as Elizabeth spoke, but she did not
+answer. My own agitation and anguish was extreme during the whole trial. I
+believed in her innocence; I knew it. Could the dæmon who had (I did not for a
+minute doubt) murdered my brother also in his hellish sport have betrayed the
+innocent to death and ignominy? I could not sustain the horror of my situation,
+and when I perceived that the popular voice and the countenances of the judges
+had already condemned my unhappy victim, I rushed out of the court in agony.
+The tortures of the accused did not equal mine; she was sustained by innocence,
+but the fangs of remorse tore my bosom and would not forgo their hold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I passed a night of unmingled wretchedness. In the morning I went to the court;
+my lips and throat were parched. I dared not ask the fatal question, but I was
+known, and the officer guessed the cause of my visit. The ballots had been
+thrown; they were all black, and Justine was condemned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I cannot pretend to describe what I then felt. I had before experienced
+sensations of horror, and I have endeavoured to bestow upon them adequate
+expressions, but words cannot convey an idea of the heart-sickening despair
+that I then endured. The person to whom I addressed myself added that Justine
+had already confessed her guilt. “That evidence,” he observed, “was hardly
+required in so glaring a case, but I am glad of it, and, indeed, none of our
+judges like to condemn a criminal upon circumstantial evidence, be it ever so
+decisive.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was strange and unexpected intelligence; what could it mean? Had my eyes
+deceived me? And was I really as mad as the whole world would believe me to be
+if I disclosed the object of my suspicions? I hastened to return home, and
+Elizabeth eagerly demanded the result.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My cousin,” replied I, “it is decided as you may have expected; all judges had
+rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape. But
+she has confessed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was a dire blow to poor Elizabeth, who had relied with firmness upon
+Justine’s innocence. “Alas!” said she. “How shall I ever again believe in human
+goodness? Justine, whom I loved and esteemed as my sister, how could she put on
+those smiles of innocence only to betray? Her mild eyes seemed incapable of any
+severity or guile, and yet she has committed a murder.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soon after we heard that the poor victim had expressed a desire to see my
+cousin. My father wished her not to go but said that he left it to her own
+judgment and feelings to decide. “Yes,” said Elizabeth, “I will go, although
+she is guilty; and you, Victor, shall accompany me; I cannot go alone.” The
+idea of this visit was torture to me, yet I could not refuse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We entered the gloomy prison chamber and beheld Justine sitting on some straw
+at the farther end; her hands were manacled, and her head rested on her knees.
+She rose on seeing us enter, and when we were left alone with her, she threw
+herself at the feet of Elizabeth, weeping bitterly. My cousin wept also.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, Justine!” said she. “Why did you rob me of my last consolation? I relied
+on your innocence, and although I was then very wretched, I was not so
+miserable as I am now.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And do you also believe that I am so very, very wicked? Do you also join with
+my enemies to crush me, to condemn me as a murderer?” Her voice was suffocated
+with sobs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Rise, my poor girl,” said Elizabeth; “why do you kneel, if you are innocent? I
+am not one of your enemies, I believed you guiltless, notwithstanding every
+evidence, until I heard that you had yourself declared your guilt. That report,
+you say, is false; and be assured, dear Justine, that nothing can shake my
+confidence in you for a moment, but your own confession.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I did confess, but I confessed a lie. I confessed, that I might obtain
+absolution; but now that falsehood lies heavier at my heart than all my other
+sins. The God of heaven forgive me! Ever since I was condemned, my confessor
+has besieged me; he threatened and menaced, until I almost began to think that
+I was the monster that he said I was. He threatened excommunication and hell
+fire in my last moments if I continued obdurate. Dear lady, I had none to
+support me; all looked on me as a wretch doomed to ignominy and perdition. What
+could I do? In an evil hour I subscribed to a lie; and now only am I truly
+miserable.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She paused, weeping, and then continued, “I thought with horror, my sweet lady,
+that you should believe your Justine, whom your blessed aunt had so highly
+honoured, and whom you loved, was a creature capable of a crime which none but
+the devil himself could have perpetrated. Dear William! dearest blessed child!
+I soon shall see you again in heaven, where we shall all be happy; and that
+consoles me, going as I am to suffer ignominy and death.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, Justine! Forgive me for having for one moment distrusted you. Why did you
+confess? But do not mourn, dear girl. Do not fear. I will proclaim, I will
+prove your innocence. I will melt the stony hearts of your enemies by my tears
+and prayers. You shall not die! You, my playfellow, my companion, my sister,
+perish on the scaffold! No! No! I never could survive so horrible a
+misfortune.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Justine shook her head mournfully. “I do not fear to die,” she said; “that pang
+is past. God raises my weakness and gives me courage to endure the worst. I
+leave a sad and bitter world; and if you remember me and think of me as of one
+unjustly condemned, I am resigned to the fate awaiting me. Learn from me, dear
+lady, to submit in patience to the will of heaven!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During this conversation I had retired to a corner of the prison room, where I
+could conceal the horrid anguish that possessed me. Despair! Who dared talk of
+that? The poor victim, who on the morrow was to pass the awful boundary between
+life and death, felt not, as I did, such deep and bitter agony. I gnashed my
+teeth and ground them together, uttering a groan that came from my inmost soul.
+Justine started. When she saw who it was, she approached me and said, “Dear
+sir, you are very kind to visit me; you, I hope, do not believe that I am
+guilty?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could not answer. “No, Justine,” said Elizabeth; “he is more convinced of
+your innocence than I was, for even when he heard that you had confessed, he
+did not credit it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I truly thank him. In these last moments I feel the sincerest gratitude
+towards those who think of me with kindness. How sweet is the affection of
+others to such a wretch as I am! It removes more than half my misfortune, and I
+feel as if I could die in peace now that my innocence is acknowledged by you,
+dear lady, and your cousin.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus the poor sufferer tried to comfort others and herself. She indeed gained
+the resignation she desired. But I, the true murderer, felt the never-dying
+worm alive in my bosom, which allowed of no hope or consolation. Elizabeth also
+wept and was unhappy, but hers also was the misery of innocence, which, like a
+cloud that passes over the fair moon, for a while hides but cannot tarnish its
+brightness. Anguish and despair had penetrated into the core of my heart; I
+bore a hell within me which nothing could extinguish. We stayed several hours
+with Justine, and it was with great difficulty that Elizabeth could tear
+herself away. “I wish,” cried she, “that I were to die with you; I cannot live
+in this world of misery.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Justine assumed an air of cheerfulness, while she with difficulty repressed her
+bitter tears. She embraced Elizabeth and said in a voice of half-suppressed
+emotion, “Farewell, sweet lady, dearest Elizabeth, my beloved and only friend;
+may heaven, in its bounty, bless and preserve you; may this be the last
+misfortune that you will ever suffer! Live, and be happy, and make others so.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And on the morrow Justine died. Elizabeth’s heart-rending eloquence failed to
+move the judges from their settled conviction in the criminality of the saintly
+sufferer. My passionate and indignant appeals were lost upon them. And when I
+received their cold answers and heard the harsh, unfeeling reasoning of these
+men, my purposed avowal died away on my lips. Thus I might proclaim myself a
+madman, but not revoke the sentence passed upon my wretched victim. She
+perished on the scaffold as a murderess!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the tortures of my own heart, I turned to contemplate the deep and
+voiceless grief of my Elizabeth. This also was my doing! And my father’s woe,
+and the desolation of that late so smiling home all was the work of my
+thrice-accursed hands! Ye weep, unhappy ones, but these are not your last
+tears! Again shall you raise the funeral wail, and the sound of your
+lamentations shall again and again be heard! Frankenstein, your son, your
+kinsman, your early, much-loved friend; he who would spend each vital drop of
+blood for your sakes, who has no thought nor sense of joy except as it is
+mirrored also in your dear countenances, who would fill the air with blessings
+and spend his life in serving you—he bids you weep, to shed countless tears;
+happy beyond his hopes, if thus inexorable fate be satisfied, and if the
+destruction pause before the peace of the grave have succeeded to your sad
+torments!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus spoke my prophetic soul, as, torn by remorse, horror, and despair, I
+beheld those I loved spend vain sorrow upon the graves of William and Justine,
+the first hapless victims to my unhallowed arts.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap09"></a>Chapter 9</h2>
+
+<p>
+Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been
+worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and
+certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear. Justine
+died, she rested, and I was alive. The blood flowed freely in my veins, but a
+weight of despair and remorse pressed on my heart which nothing could remove.
+Sleep fled from my eyes; I wandered like an evil spirit, for I had committed
+deeds of mischief beyond description horrible, and more, much more (I persuaded
+myself) was yet behind. Yet my heart overflowed with kindness and the love of
+virtue. I had begun life with benevolent intentions and thirsted for the moment
+when I should put them in practice and make myself useful to my fellow beings.
+Now all was blasted; instead of that serenity of conscience which allowed me to
+look back upon the past with self-satisfaction, and from thence to gather
+promise of new hopes, I was seized by remorse and the sense of guilt, which
+hurried me away to a hell of intense tortures such as no language can describe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This state of mind preyed upon my health, which had perhaps never entirely
+recovered from the first shock it had sustained. I shunned the face of man; all
+sound of joy or complacency was torture to me; solitude was my only
+consolation—deep, dark, deathlike solitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My father observed with pain the alteration perceptible in my disposition and
+habits and endeavoured by arguments deduced from the feelings of his serene
+conscience and guiltless life to inspire me with fortitude and awaken in me the
+courage to dispel the dark cloud which brooded over me. “Do you think, Victor,”
+said he, “that I do not suffer also? No one could love a child more than I
+loved your brother”—tears came into his eyes as he spoke—“but is it not a duty
+to the survivors that we should refrain from augmenting their unhappiness by an
+appearance of immoderate grief? It is also a duty owed to yourself, for
+excessive sorrow prevents improvement or enjoyment, or even the discharge of
+daily usefulness, without which no man is fit for society.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This advice, although good, was totally inapplicable to my case; I should have
+been the first to hide my grief and console my friends if remorse had not
+mingled its bitterness, and terror its alarm, with my other sensations. Now I
+could only answer my father with a look of despair and endeavour to hide myself
+from his view.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About this time we retired to our house at Belrive. This change was
+particularly agreeable to me. The shutting of the gates regularly at ten
+o’clock and the impossibility of remaining on the lake after that hour had
+rendered our residence within the walls of Geneva very irksome to me. I was now
+free. Often, after the rest of the family had retired for the night, I took the
+boat and passed many hours upon the water. Sometimes, with my sails set, I was
+carried by the wind; and sometimes, after rowing into the middle of the lake, I
+left the boat to pursue its own course and gave way to my own miserable
+reflections. I was often tempted, when all was at peace around me, and I the
+only unquiet thing that wandered restless in a scene so beautiful and
+heavenly—if I except some bat, or the frogs, whose harsh and interrupted
+croaking was heard only when I approached the shore—often, I say, I was tempted
+to plunge into the silent lake, that the waters might close over me and my
+calamities for ever. But I was restrained, when I thought of the heroic and
+suffering Elizabeth, whom I tenderly loved, and whose existence was bound up in
+mine. I thought also of my father and surviving brother; should I by my base
+desertion leave them exposed and unprotected to the malice of the fiend whom I
+had let loose among them?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At these moments I wept bitterly and wished that peace would revisit my mind
+only that I might afford them consolation and happiness. But that could not be.
+Remorse extinguished every hope. I had been the author of unalterable evils,
+and I lived in daily fear lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate
+some new wickedness. I had an obscure feeling that all was not over and that he
+would still commit some signal crime, which by its enormity should almost
+efface the recollection of the past. There was always scope for fear so long as
+anything I loved remained behind. My abhorrence of this fiend cannot be
+conceived. When I thought of him I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed,
+and I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly
+bestowed. When I reflected on his crimes and malice, my hatred and revenge
+burst all bounds of moderation. I would have made a pilgrimage to the highest
+peak of the Andes, could I, when there, have precipitated him to their base. I
+wished to see him again, that I might wreak the utmost extent of abhorrence on
+his head and avenge the deaths of William and Justine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our house was the house of mourning. My father’s health was deeply shaken by
+the horror of the recent events. Elizabeth was sad and desponding; she no
+longer took delight in her ordinary occupations; all pleasure seemed to her
+sacrilege toward the dead; eternal woe and tears she then thought was the just
+tribute she should pay to innocence so blasted and destroyed. She was no longer
+that happy creature who in earlier youth wandered with me on the banks of the
+lake and talked with ecstasy of our future prospects. The first of those
+sorrows which are sent to wean us from the earth had visited her, and its
+dimming influence quenched her dearest smiles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When I reflect, my dear cousin,” said she, “on the miserable death of Justine
+Moritz, I no longer see the world and its works as they before appeared to me.
+Before, I looked upon the accounts of vice and injustice that I read in books
+or heard from others as tales of ancient days or imaginary evils; at least they
+were remote and more familiar to reason than to the imagination; but now misery
+has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s
+blood. Yet I am certainly unjust. Everybody believed that poor girl to be
+guilty; and if she could have committed the crime for which she suffered,
+assuredly she would have been the most depraved of human creatures. For the
+sake of a few jewels, to have murdered the son of her benefactor and friend, a
+child whom she had nursed from its birth, and appeared to love as if it had
+been her own! I could not consent to the death of any human being, but
+certainly I should have thought such a creature unfit to remain in the society
+of men. But she was innocent. I know, I feel she was innocent; you are of the
+same opinion, and that confirms me. Alas! Victor, when falsehood can look so
+like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness? I feel as if I
+were walking on the edge of a precipice, towards which thousands are crowding
+and endeavouring to plunge me into the abyss. William and Justine were
+assassinated, and the murderer escapes; he walks about the world free, and
+perhaps respected. But even if I were condemned to suffer on the scaffold for
+the same crimes, I would not change places with such a wretch.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I listened to this discourse with the extremest agony. I, not in deed, but in
+effect, was the true murderer. Elizabeth read my anguish in my countenance, and
+kindly taking my hand, said, “My dearest friend, you must calm yourself. These
+events have affected me, God knows how deeply; but I am not so wretched as you
+are. There is an expression of despair, and sometimes of revenge, in your
+countenance that makes me tremble. Dear Victor, banish these dark passions.
+Remember the friends around you, who centre all their hopes in you. Have we
+lost the power of rendering you happy? Ah! While we love, while we are true to
+each other, here in this land of peace and beauty, your native country, we may
+reap every tranquil blessing—what can disturb our peace?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And could not such words from her whom I fondly prized before every other gift
+of fortune suffice to chase away the fiend that lurked in my heart? Even as she
+spoke I drew near to her, as if in terror, lest at that very moment the
+destroyer had been near to rob me of her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus not the tenderness of friendship, nor the beauty of earth, nor of heaven,
+could redeem my soul from woe; the very accents of love were ineffectual. I was
+encompassed by a cloud which no beneficial influence could penetrate. The
+wounded deer dragging its fainting limbs to some untrodden brake, there to gaze
+upon the arrow which had pierced it, and to die, was but a type of me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sometimes I could cope with the sullen despair that overwhelmed me, but
+sometimes the whirlwind passions of my soul drove me to seek, by bodily
+exercise and by change of place, some relief from my intolerable sensations. It
+was during an access of this kind that I suddenly left my home, and bending my
+steps towards the near Alpine valleys, sought in the magnificence, the eternity
+of such scenes, to forget myself and my ephemeral, because human, sorrows. My
+wanderings were directed towards the valley of Chamounix. I had visited it
+frequently during my boyhood. Six years had passed since then: <i>I</i> was a
+wreck, but nought had changed in those savage and enduring scenes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I performed the first part of my journey on horseback. I afterwards hired a
+mule, as the more sure-footed and least liable to receive injury on these
+rugged roads. The weather was fine; it was about the middle of the month of
+August, nearly two months after the death of Justine, that miserable epoch from
+which I dated all my woe. The weight upon my spirit was sensibly lightened as I
+plunged yet deeper in the ravine of Arve. The immense mountains and precipices
+that overhung me on every side, the sound of the river raging among the rocks,
+and the dashing of the waterfalls around spoke of a power mighty as
+Omnipotence—and I ceased to fear or to bend before any being less almighty than
+that which had created and ruled the elements, here displayed in their most
+terrific guise. Still, as I ascended higher, the valley assumed a more
+magnificent and astonishing character. Ruined castles hanging on the precipices
+of piny mountains, the impetuous Arve, and cottages every here and there
+peeping forth from among the trees formed a scene of singular beauty. But it
+was augmented and rendered sublime by the mighty Alps, whose white and shining
+pyramids and domes towered above all, as belonging to another earth, the
+habitations of another race of beings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I passed the bridge of Pélissier, where the ravine, which the river forms,
+opened before me, and I began to ascend the mountain that overhangs it. Soon
+after, I entered the valley of Chamounix. This valley is more wonderful and
+sublime, but not so beautiful and picturesque as that of Servox, through which
+I had just passed. The high and snowy mountains were its immediate boundaries,
+but I saw no more ruined castles and fertile fields. Immense glaciers
+approached the road; I heard the rumbling thunder of the falling avalanche and
+marked the smoke of its passage. Mont Blanc, the supreme and magnificent Mont
+Blanc, raised itself from the surrounding <i>aiguilles</i>, and its tremendous
+<i>dôme</i> overlooked the valley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A tingling long-lost sense of pleasure often came across me during this
+journey. Some turn in the road, some new object suddenly perceived and
+recognised, reminded me of days gone by, and were associated with the
+lighthearted gaiety of boyhood. The very winds whispered in soothing accents,
+and maternal Nature bade me weep no more. Then again the kindly influence
+ceased to act—I found myself fettered again to grief and indulging in all the
+misery of reflection. Then I spurred on my animal, striving so to forget the
+world, my fears, and more than all, myself—or, in a more desperate fashion, I
+alighted and threw myself on the grass, weighed down by horror and despair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At length I arrived at the village of Chamounix. Exhaustion succeeded to the
+extreme fatigue both of body and of mind which I had endured. For a short space
+of time I remained at the window watching the pallid lightnings that played
+above Mont Blanc and listening to the rushing of the Arve, which pursued its
+noisy way beneath. The same lulling sounds acted as a lullaby to my too keen
+sensations; when I placed my head upon my pillow, sleep crept over me; I felt
+it as it came and blessed the giver of oblivion.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap10"></a>Chapter 10</h2>
+
+<p>
+I spent the following day roaming through the valley. I stood beside the
+sources of the Arveiron, which take their rise in a glacier, that with slow
+pace is advancing down from the summit of the hills to barricade the valley.
+The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy wall of the glacier
+overhung me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn
+silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial Nature was broken only by
+the brawling waves or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the
+avalanche or the cracking, reverberated along the mountains, of the accumulated
+ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon
+rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands. These sublime
+and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable
+of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling, and although
+they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillised it. In some
+degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded
+for the last month. I retired to rest at night; my slumbers, as it were, waited
+on and ministered to by the assemblance of grand shapes which I had
+contemplated during the day. They congregated round me; the unstained snowy
+mountain-top, the glittering pinnacle, the pine woods, and ragged bare ravine,
+the eagle, soaring amidst the clouds—they all gathered round me and bade me be
+at peace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Where had they fled when the next morning I awoke? All of soul-inspiriting fled
+with sleep, and dark melancholy clouded every thought. The rain was pouring in
+torrents, and thick mists hid the summits of the mountains, so that I even saw
+not the faces of those mighty friends. Still I would penetrate their misty veil
+and seek them in their cloudy retreats. What were rain and storm to me? My mule
+was brought to the door, and I resolved to ascend to the summit of Montanvert.
+I remembered the effect that the view of the tremendous and ever-moving glacier
+had produced upon my mind when I first saw it. It had then filled me with a
+sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul and allowed it to soar from the
+obscure world to light and joy. The sight of the awful and majestic in nature
+had indeed always the effect of solemnising my mind and causing me to forget
+the passing cares of life. I determined to go without a guide, for I was well
+acquainted with the path, and the presence of another would destroy the
+solitary grandeur of the scene.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ascent is precipitous, but the path is cut into continual and short
+windings, which enable you to surmount the perpendicularity of the mountain. It
+is a scene terrifically desolate. In a thousand spots the traces of the winter
+avalanche may be perceived, where trees lie broken and strewed on the ground,
+some entirely destroyed, others bent, leaning upon the jutting rocks of the
+mountain or transversely upon other trees. The path, as you ascend higher, is
+intersected by ravines of snow, down which stones continually roll from above;
+one of them is particularly dangerous, as the slightest sound, such as even
+speaking in a loud voice, produces a concussion of air sufficient to draw
+destruction upon the head of the speaker. The pines are not tall or luxuriant,
+but they are sombre and add an air of severity to the scene. I looked on the
+valley beneath; vast mists were rising from the rivers which ran through it and
+curling in thick wreaths around the opposite mountains, whose summits were hid
+in the uniform clouds, while rain poured from the dark sky and added to the
+melancholy impression I received from the objects around me. Alas! Why does man
+boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders
+them more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst,
+and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that
+blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.<br>
+    We rise; one wand’ring thought pollutes the day.<br>
+We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,<br>
+    Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;<br>
+It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,<br>
+    The path of its departure still is free.<br>
+Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;<br>
+    Nought may endure but mutability!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was nearly noon when I arrived at the top of the ascent. For some time I sat
+upon the rock that overlooks the sea of ice. A mist covered both that and the
+surrounding mountains. Presently a breeze dissipated the cloud, and I descended
+upon the glacier. The surface is very uneven, rising like the waves of a
+troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep. The
+field of ice is almost a league in width, but I spent nearly two hours in
+crossing it. The opposite mountain is a bare perpendicular rock. From the side
+where I now stood Montanvert was exactly opposite, at the distance of a league;
+and above it rose Mont Blanc, in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of the
+rock, gazing on this wonderful and stupendous scene. The sea, or rather the
+vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits
+hung over its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight
+over the clouds. My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with
+something like joy; I exclaimed, “Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and
+do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as
+your companion, away from the joys of life.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I said this I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance,
+advancing towards me with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the
+ice, among which I had walked with caution; his stature, also, as he
+approached, seemed to exceed that of man. I was troubled; a mist came over my
+eyes, and I felt a faintness seize me, but I was quickly restored by the cold
+gale of the mountains. I perceived, as the shape came nearer (sight tremendous
+and abhorred!) that it was the wretch whom I had created. I trembled with rage
+and horror, resolving to wait his approach and then close with him in mortal
+combat. He approached; his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with
+disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too
+horrible for human eyes. But I scarcely observed this; rage and hatred had at
+first deprived me of utterance, and I recovered only to overwhelm him with
+words expressive of furious detestation and contempt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Devil,” I exclaimed, “do you dare approach me? And do not you fear the fierce
+vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone, vile insect! Or
+rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust! And, oh! That I could, with the
+extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims whom you have so
+diabolically murdered!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I expected this reception,” said the dæmon. “All men hate the wretched; how,
+then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my
+creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only
+dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare
+you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards
+you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will
+leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death,
+until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Abhorred monster! Fiend that thou art! The tortures of hell are too mild a
+vengeance for thy crimes. Wretched devil! You reproach me with your creation,
+come on, then, that I may extinguish the spark which I so negligently
+bestowed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My rage was without bounds; I sprang on him, impelled by all the feelings which
+can arm one being against the existence of another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He easily eluded me and said,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Be calm! I entreat you to hear me before you give vent to your hatred on my
+devoted head. Have I not suffered enough, that you seek to increase my misery?
+Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I
+will defend it. Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my
+height is superior to thine, my joints more supple. But I will not be tempted
+to set myself in opposition to thee. I am thy creature, and I will be even mild
+and docile to my natural lord and king if thou wilt also perform thy part, the
+which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other and
+trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and
+affection, is most due. Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy
+Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no
+misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I
+was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall
+again be virtuous.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Begone! I will not hear you. There can be no community between you and me; we
+are enemies. Begone, or let us try our strength in a fight, in which one must
+fall.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How can I move thee? Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye
+upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion? Believe me,
+Frankenstein, I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity; but am I
+not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather
+from your fellow creatures, who owe me nothing? They spurn and hate me. The
+desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. I have wandered here many
+days; the caves of ice, which I only do not fear, are a dwelling to me, and the
+only one which man does not grudge. These bleak skies I hail, for they are
+kinder to me than your fellow beings. If the multitude of mankind knew of my
+existence, they would do as you do, and arm themselves for my destruction.
+Shall I not then hate them who abhor me? I will keep no terms with my enemies.
+I am miserable, and they shall share my wretchedness. Yet it is in your power
+to recompense me, and deliver them from an evil which it only remains for you
+to make so great, that not only you and your family, but thousands of others,
+shall be swallowed up in the whirlwinds of its rage. Let your compassion be
+moved, and do not disdain me. Listen to my tale; when you have heard that,
+abandon or commiserate me, as you shall judge that I deserve. But hear me. The
+guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own
+defence before they are condemned. Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of
+murder, and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own
+creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man! Yet I ask you not to spare me;
+listen to me, and then, if you can, and if you will, destroy the work of your
+hands.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why do you call to my remembrance,” I rejoined, “circumstances of which I
+shudder to reflect, that I have been the miserable origin and author? Cursed be
+the day, abhorred devil, in which you first saw light! Cursed (although I curse
+myself) be the hands that formed you! You have made me wretched beyond
+expression. You have left me no power to consider whether I am just to you or
+not. Begone! Relieve me from the sight of your detested form.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thus I relieve thee, my creator,” he said, and placed his hated hands before
+my eyes, which I flung from me with violence; “thus I take from thee a sight
+which you abhor. Still thou canst listen to me and grant me thy compassion. By
+the virtues that I once possessed, I demand this from you. Hear my tale; it is
+long and strange, and the temperature of this place is not fitting to your fine
+sensations; come to the hut upon the mountain. The sun is yet high in the
+heavens; before it descends to hide itself behind your snowy precipices and
+illuminate another world, you will have heard my story and can decide. On you
+it rests, whether I quit for ever the neighbourhood of man and lead a harmless
+life, or become the scourge of your fellow creatures and the author of your own
+speedy ruin.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he said this he led the way across the ice; I followed. My heart was full,
+and I did not answer him, but as I proceeded, I weighed the various arguments
+that he had used and determined at least to listen to his tale. I was partly
+urged by curiosity, and compassion confirmed my resolution. I had hitherto
+supposed him to be the murderer of my brother, and I eagerly sought a
+confirmation or denial of this opinion. For the first time, also, I felt what
+the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I ought to render
+him happy before I complained of his wickedness. These motives urged me to
+comply with his demand. We crossed the ice, therefore, and ascended the
+opposite rock. The air was cold, and the rain again began to descend; we
+entered the hut, the fiend with an air of exultation, I with a heavy heart and
+depressed spirits. But I consented to listen, and seating myself by the fire
+which my odious companion had lighted, he thus began his tale.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap11"></a>Chapter 11</h2>
+
+<p>
+“It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my
+being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange
+multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt at the
+same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish
+between the operations of my various senses. By degrees, I remember, a stronger
+light pressed upon my nerves, so that I was obliged to shut my eyes. Darkness
+then came over me and troubled me, but hardly had I felt this when, by opening
+my eyes, as I now suppose, the light poured in upon me again. I walked and, I
+believe, descended, but I presently found a great alteration in my sensations.
+Before, dark and opaque bodies had surrounded me, impervious to my touch or
+sight; but I now found that I could wander on at liberty, with no obstacles
+which I could not either surmount or avoid. The light became more and more
+oppressive to me, and the heat wearying me as I walked, I sought a place where
+I could receive shade. This was the forest near Ingolstadt; and here I lay by
+the side of a brook resting from my fatigue, until I felt tormented by hunger
+and thirst. This roused me from my nearly dormant state, and I ate some berries
+which I found hanging on the trees or lying on the ground. I slaked my thirst
+at the brook, and then lying down, was overcome by sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was dark when I awoke; I felt cold also, and half frightened, as it were,
+instinctively, finding myself so desolate. Before I had quitted your apartment,
+on a sensation of cold, I had covered myself with some clothes, but these were
+insufficient to secure me from the dews of night. I was a poor, helpless,
+miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing; but feeling pain
+invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Soon a gentle light stole over the heavens and gave me a sensation of
+pleasure. I started up and beheld a radiant form rise from among the trees.
+[The moon] I gazed with a kind of wonder. It moved slowly, but it enlightened
+my path, and I again went out in search of berries. I was still cold when under
+one of the trees I found a huge cloak, with which I covered myself, and sat
+down upon the ground. No distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused. I
+felt light, and hunger, and thirst, and darkness; innumerable sounds rang in my
+ears, and on all sides various scents saluted me; the only object that I could
+distinguish was the bright moon, and I fixed my eyes on that with pleasure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Several changes of day and night passed, and the orb of night had greatly
+lessened, when I began to distinguish my sensations from each other. I
+gradually saw plainly the clear stream that supplied me with drink and the
+trees that shaded me with their foliage. I was delighted when I first
+discovered that a pleasant sound, which often saluted my ears, proceeded from
+the throats of the little winged animals who had often intercepted the light
+from my eyes. I began also to observe, with greater accuracy, the forms that
+surrounded me and to perceive the boundaries of the radiant roof of light which
+canopied me. Sometimes I tried to imitate the pleasant songs of the birds but
+was unable. Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the
+uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The moon had disappeared from the night, and again, with a lessened form,
+showed itself, while I still remained in the forest. My sensations had by this
+time become distinct, and my mind received every day additional ideas. My eyes
+became accustomed to the light and to perceive objects in their right forms; I
+distinguished the insect from the herb, and by degrees, one herb from another.
+I found that the sparrow uttered none but harsh notes, whilst those of the
+blackbird and thrush were sweet and enticing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“One day, when I was oppressed by cold, I found a fire which had been left by
+some wandering beggars, and was overcome with delight at the warmth I
+experienced from it. In my joy I thrust my hand into the live embers, but
+quickly drew it out again with a cry of pain. How strange, I thought, that the
+same cause should produce such opposite effects! I examined the materials of
+the fire, and to my joy found it to be composed of wood. I quickly collected
+some branches, but they were wet and would not burn. I was pained at this and
+sat still watching the operation of the fire. The wet wood which I had placed
+near the heat dried and itself became inflamed. I reflected on this, and by
+touching the various branches, I discovered the cause and busied myself in
+collecting a great quantity of wood, that I might dry it and have a plentiful
+supply of fire. When night came on and brought sleep with it, I was in the
+greatest fear lest my fire should be extinguished. I covered it carefully with
+dry wood and leaves and placed wet branches upon it; and then, spreading my
+cloak, I lay on the ground and sank into sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was morning when I awoke, and my first care was to visit the fire. I
+uncovered it, and a gentle breeze quickly fanned it into a flame. I observed
+this also and contrived a fan of branches, which roused the embers when they
+were nearly extinguished. When night came again I found, with pleasure, that
+the fire gave light as well as heat and that the discovery of this element was
+useful to me in my food, for I found some of the offals that the travellers had
+left had been roasted, and tasted much more savoury than the berries I gathered
+from the trees. I tried, therefore, to dress my food in the same manner,
+placing it on the live embers. I found that the berries were spoiled by this
+operation, and the nuts and roots much improved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Food, however, became scarce, and I often spent the whole day searching in
+vain for a few acorns to assuage the pangs of hunger. When I found this, I
+resolved to quit the place that I had hitherto inhabited, to seek for one where
+the few wants I experienced would be more easily satisfied. In this emigration
+I exceedingly lamented the loss of the fire which I had obtained through
+accident and knew not how to reproduce it. I gave several hours to the serious
+consideration of this difficulty, but I was obliged to relinquish all attempt
+to supply it, and wrapping myself up in my cloak, I struck across the wood
+towards the setting sun. I passed three days in these rambles and at length
+discovered the open country. A great fall of snow had taken place the night
+before, and the fields were of one uniform white; the appearance was
+disconsolate, and I found my feet chilled by the cold damp substance that
+covered the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was about seven in the morning, and I longed to obtain food and shelter; at
+length I perceived a small hut, on a rising ground, which had doubtless been
+built for the convenience of some shepherd. This was a new sight to me, and I
+examined the structure with great curiosity. Finding the door open, I entered.
+An old man sat in it, near a fire, over which he was preparing his breakfast.
+He turned on hearing a noise, and perceiving me, shrieked loudly, and quitting
+the hut, ran across the fields with a speed of which his debilitated form
+hardly appeared capable. His appearance, different from any I had ever before
+seen, and his flight somewhat surprised me. But I was enchanted by the
+appearance of the hut; here the snow and rain could not penetrate; the ground
+was dry; and it presented to me then as exquisite and divine a retreat as
+Pandæmonium appeared to the dæmons of hell after their sufferings in the lake
+of fire. I greedily devoured the remnants of the shepherd’s breakfast, which
+consisted of bread, cheese, milk, and wine; the latter, however, I did not
+like. Then, overcome by fatigue, I lay down among some straw and fell asleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was noon when I awoke, and allured by the warmth of the sun, which shone
+brightly on the white ground, I determined to recommence my travels; and,
+depositing the remains of the peasant’s breakfast in a wallet I found, I
+proceeded across the fields for several hours, until at sunset I arrived at a
+village. How miraculous did this appear! The huts, the neater cottages, and
+stately houses engaged my admiration by turns. The vegetables in the gardens,
+the milk and cheese that I saw placed at the windows of some of the cottages,
+allured my appetite. One of the best of these I entered, but I had hardly
+placed my foot within the door before the children shrieked, and one of the
+women fainted. The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me,
+until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons, I
+escaped to the open country and fearfully took refuge in a low hovel, quite
+bare, and making a wretched appearance after the palaces I had beheld in the
+village. This hovel however, joined a cottage of a neat and pleasant
+appearance, but after my late dearly bought experience, I dared not enter it.
+My place of refuge was constructed of wood, but so low that I could with
+difficulty sit upright in it. No wood, however, was placed on the earth, which
+formed the floor, but it was dry; and although the wind entered it by
+innumerable chinks, I found it an agreeable asylum from the snow and rain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Here, then, I retreated and lay down happy to have found a shelter, however
+miserable, from the inclemency of the season, and still more from the barbarity
+of man. As soon as morning dawned I crept from my kennel, that I might view the
+adjacent cottage and discover if I could remain in the habitation I had found.
+It was situated against the back of the cottage and surrounded on the sides
+which were exposed by a pig sty and a clear pool of water. One part was open,
+and by that I had crept in; but now I covered every crevice by which I might be
+perceived with stones and wood, yet in such a manner that I might move them on
+occasion to pass out; all the light I enjoyed came through the sty, and that
+was sufficient for me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Having thus arranged my dwelling and carpeted it with clean straw, I retired,
+for I saw the figure of a man at a distance, and I remembered too well my
+treatment the night before to trust myself in his power. I had first, however,
+provided for my sustenance for that day by a loaf of coarse bread, which I
+purloined, and a cup with which I could drink more conveniently than from my
+hand of the pure water which flowed by my retreat. The floor was a little
+raised, so that it was kept perfectly dry, and by its vicinity to the chimney
+of the cottage it was tolerably warm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Being thus provided, I resolved to reside in this hovel until something should
+occur which might alter my determination. It was indeed a paradise compared to
+the bleak forest, my former residence, the rain-dropping branches, and dank
+earth. I ate my breakfast with pleasure and was about to remove a plank to
+procure myself a little water when I heard a step, and looking through a small
+chink, I beheld a young creature, with a pail on her head, passing before my
+hovel. The girl was young and of gentle demeanour, unlike what I have since
+found cottagers and farmhouse servants to be. Yet she was meanly dressed, a
+coarse blue petticoat and a linen jacket being her only garb; her fair hair was
+plaited but not adorned: she looked patient yet sad. I lost sight of her, and
+in about a quarter of an hour she returned bearing the pail, which was now
+partly filled with milk. As she walked along, seemingly incommoded by the
+burden, a young man met her, whose countenance expressed a deeper despondence.
+Uttering a few sounds with an air of melancholy, he took the pail from her head
+and bore it to the cottage himself. She followed, and they disappeared.
+Presently I saw the young man again, with some tools in his hand, cross the
+field behind the cottage; and the girl was also busied, sometimes in the house
+and sometimes in the yard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“On examining my dwelling, I found that one of the windows of the cottage had
+formerly occupied a part of it, but the panes had been filled up with wood. In
+one of these was a small and almost imperceptible chink through which the eye
+could just penetrate. Through this crevice a small room was visible,
+whitewashed and clean but very bare of furniture. In one corner, near a small
+fire, sat an old man, leaning his head on his hands in a disconsolate attitude.
+The young girl was occupied in arranging the cottage; but presently she took
+something out of a drawer, which employed her hands, and she sat down beside
+the old man, who, taking up an instrument, began to play and to produce sounds
+sweeter than the voice of the thrush or the nightingale. It was a lovely sight,
+even to me, poor wretch who had never beheld aught beautiful before. The silver
+hair and benevolent countenance of the aged cottager won my reverence, while
+the gentle manners of the girl enticed my love. He played a sweet mournful air
+which I perceived drew tears from the eyes of his amiable companion, of which
+the old man took no notice, until she sobbed audibly; he then pronounced a few
+sounds, and the fair creature, leaving her work, knelt at his feet. He raised
+her and smiled with such kindness and affection that I felt sensations of a
+peculiar and overpowering nature; they were a mixture of pain and pleasure,
+such as I had never before experienced, either from hunger or cold, warmth or
+food; and I withdrew from the window, unable to bear these emotions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Soon after this the young man returned, bearing on his shoulders a load of
+wood. The girl met him at the door, helped to relieve him of his burden, and
+taking some of the fuel into the cottage, placed it on the fire; then she and
+the youth went apart into a nook of the cottage, and he showed her a large loaf
+and a piece of cheese. She seemed pleased and went into the garden for some
+roots and plants, which she placed in water, and then upon the fire. She
+afterwards continued her work, whilst the young man went into the garden and
+appeared busily employed in digging and pulling up roots. After he had been
+employed thus about an hour, the young woman joined him and they entered the
+cottage together.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The old man had, in the meantime, been pensive, but on the appearance of his
+companions he assumed a more cheerful air, and they sat down to eat. The meal
+was quickly dispatched. The young woman was again occupied in arranging the
+cottage, the old man walked before the cottage in the sun for a few minutes,
+leaning on the arm of the youth. Nothing could exceed in beauty the contrast
+between these two excellent creatures. One was old, with silver hairs and a
+countenance beaming with benevolence and love; the younger was slight and
+graceful in his figure, and his features were moulded with the finest symmetry,
+yet his eyes and attitude expressed the utmost sadness and despondency. The old
+man returned to the cottage, and the youth, with tools different from those he
+had used in the morning, directed his steps across the fields.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Night quickly shut in, but to my extreme wonder, I found that the cottagers
+had a means of prolonging light by the use of tapers, and was delighted to find
+that the setting of the sun did not put an end to the pleasure I experienced in
+watching my human neighbours. In the evening the young girl and her companion
+were employed in various occupations which I did not understand; and the old
+man again took up the instrument which produced the divine sounds that had
+enchanted me in the morning. So soon as he had finished, the youth began, not
+to play, but to utter sounds that were monotonous, and neither resembling the
+harmony of the old man’s instrument nor the songs of the birds; I since found
+that he read aloud, but at that time I knew nothing of the science of words or
+letters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The family, after having been thus occupied for a short time, extinguished
+their lights and retired, as I conjectured, to rest.”
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap12"></a>Chapter 12</h2>
+
+<p>
+“I lay on my straw, but I could not sleep. I thought of the occurrences of the
+day. What chiefly struck me was the gentle manners of these people, and I
+longed to join them, but dared not. I remembered too well the treatment I had
+suffered the night before from the barbarous villagers, and resolved, whatever
+course of conduct I might hereafter think it right to pursue, that for the
+present I would remain quietly in my hovel, watching and endeavouring to
+discover the motives which influenced their actions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The cottagers arose the next morning before the sun. The young woman arranged
+the cottage and prepared the food, and the youth departed after the first meal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This day was passed in the same routine as that which preceded it. The young
+man was constantly employed out of doors, and the girl in various laborious
+occupations within. The old man, whom I soon perceived to be blind, employed
+his leisure hours on his instrument or in contemplation. Nothing could exceed
+the love and respect which the younger cottagers exhibited towards their
+venerable companion. They performed towards him every little office of
+affection and duty with gentleness, and he rewarded them by his benevolent
+smiles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They were not entirely happy. The young man and his companion often went apart
+and appeared to weep. I saw no cause for their unhappiness, but I was deeply
+affected by it. If such lovely creatures were miserable, it was less strange
+that I, an imperfect and solitary being, should be wretched. Yet why were these
+gentle beings unhappy? They possessed a delightful house (for such it was in my
+eyes) and every luxury; they had a fire to warm them when chill and delicious
+viands when hungry; they were dressed in excellent clothes; and, still more,
+they enjoyed one another’s company and speech, interchanging each day looks of
+affection and kindness. What did their tears imply? Did they really express
+pain? I was at first unable to solve these questions, but perpetual attention
+and time explained to me many appearances which were at first enigmatic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A considerable period elapsed before I discovered one of the causes of the
+uneasiness of this amiable family: it was poverty, and they suffered that evil
+in a very distressing degree. Their nourishment consisted entirely of the
+vegetables of their garden and the milk of one cow, which gave very little
+during the winter, when its masters could scarcely procure food to support it.
+They often, I believe, suffered the pangs of hunger very poignantly, especially
+the two younger cottagers, for several times they placed food before the old
+man when they reserved none for themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This trait of kindness moved me sensibly. I had been accustomed, during the
+night, to steal a part of their store for my own consumption, but when I found
+that in doing this I inflicted pain on the cottagers, I abstained and satisfied
+myself with berries, nuts, and roots which I gathered from a neighbouring wood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I discovered also another means through which I was enabled to assist their
+labours. I found that the youth spent a great part of each day in collecting
+wood for the family fire, and during the night I often took his tools, the use
+of which I quickly discovered, and brought home firing sufficient for the
+consumption of several days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I remember, the first time that I did this, the young woman, when she opened
+the door in the morning, appeared greatly astonished on seeing a great pile of
+wood on the outside. She uttered some words in a loud voice, and the youth
+joined her, who also expressed surprise. I observed, with pleasure, that he did
+not go to the forest that day, but spent it in repairing the cottage and
+cultivating the garden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“By degrees I made a discovery of still greater moment. I found that these
+people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one
+another by articulate sounds. I perceived that the words they spoke sometimes
+produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of
+the hearers. This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to
+become acquainted with it. But I was baffled in every attempt I made for this
+purpose. Their pronunciation was quick, and the words they uttered, not having
+any apparent connection with visible objects, I was unable to discover any clue
+by which I could unravel the mystery of their reference. By great application,
+however, and after having remained during the space of several revolutions of
+the moon in my hovel, I discovered the names that were given to some of the
+most familiar objects of discourse; I learned and applied the words, <i>fire,
+milk, bread,</i> and <i>wood.</i> I learned also the names of the cottagers
+themselves. The youth and his companion had each of them several names, but the
+old man had only one, which was <i>father.</i> The girl was called
+<i>sister</i> or <i>Agatha,</i> and the youth <i>Felix, brother,</i> or
+<i>son</i>. I cannot describe the delight I felt when I learned the ideas
+appropriated to each of these sounds and was able to pronounce them. I
+distinguished several other words without being able as yet to understand or
+apply them, such as <i>good, dearest, unhappy.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I spent the winter in this manner. The gentle manners and beauty of the
+cottagers greatly endeared them to me; when they were unhappy, I felt
+depressed; when they rejoiced, I sympathised in their joys. I saw few human
+beings besides them, and if any other happened to enter the cottage, their
+harsh manners and rude gait only enhanced to me the superior accomplishments of
+my friends. The old man, I could perceive, often endeavoured to encourage his
+children, as sometimes I found that he called them, to cast off their
+melancholy. He would talk in a cheerful accent, with an expression of goodness
+that bestowed pleasure even upon me. Agatha listened with respect, her eyes
+sometimes filled with tears, which she endeavoured to wipe away unperceived;
+but I generally found that her countenance and tone were more cheerful after
+having listened to the exhortations of her father. It was not thus with Felix.
+He was always the saddest of the group, and even to my unpractised senses, he
+appeared to have suffered more deeply than his friends. But if his countenance
+was more sorrowful, his voice was more cheerful than that of his sister,
+especially when he addressed the old man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I could mention innumerable instances which, although slight, marked the
+dispositions of these amiable cottagers. In the midst of poverty and want,
+Felix carried with pleasure to his sister the first little white flower that
+peeped out from beneath the snowy ground. Early in the morning, before she had
+risen, he cleared away the snow that obstructed her path to the milk-house,
+drew water from the well, and brought the wood from the outhouse, where, to his
+perpetual astonishment, he found his store always replenished by an invisible
+hand. In the day, I believe, he worked sometimes for a neighbouring farmer,
+because he often went forth and did not return until dinner, yet brought no
+wood with him. At other times he worked in the garden, but as there was little
+to do in the frosty season, he read to the old man and Agatha.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This reading had puzzled me extremely at first, but by degrees I discovered
+that he uttered many of the same sounds when he read as when he talked. I
+conjectured, therefore, that he found on the paper signs for speech which he
+understood, and I ardently longed to comprehend these also; but how was that
+possible when I did not even understand the sounds for which they stood as
+signs? I improved, however, sensibly in this science, but not sufficiently to
+follow up any kind of conversation, although I applied my whole mind to the
+endeavour, for I easily perceived that, although I eagerly longed to discover
+myself to the cottagers, I ought not to make the attempt until I had first
+become master of their language, which knowledge might enable me to make them
+overlook the deformity of my figure, for with this also the contrast
+perpetually presented to my eyes had made me acquainted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers—their grace, beauty, and
+delicate complexions; but how was I terrified when I viewed myself in a
+transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed
+I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was
+in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of
+despondence and mortification. Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal
+effects of this miserable deformity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As the sun became warmer and the light of day longer, the snow vanished, and I
+beheld the bare trees and the black earth. From this time Felix was more
+employed, and the heart-moving indications of impending famine disappeared.
+Their food, as I afterwards found, was coarse, but it was wholesome; and they
+procured a sufficiency of it. Several new kinds of plants sprang up in the
+garden, which they dressed; and these signs of comfort increased daily as the
+season advanced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The old man, leaning on his son, walked each day at noon, when it did not
+rain, as I found it was called when the heavens poured forth its waters. This
+frequently took place, but a high wind quickly dried the earth, and the season
+became far more pleasant than it had been.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My mode of life in my hovel was uniform. During the morning I attended the
+motions of the cottagers, and when they were dispersed in various occupations,
+I slept; the remainder of the day was spent in observing my friends. When they
+had retired to rest, if there was any moon or the night was star-light, I went
+into the woods and collected my own food and fuel for the cottage. When I
+returned, as often as it was necessary, I cleared their path from the snow and
+performed those offices that I had seen done by Felix. I afterwards found that
+these labours, performed by an invisible hand, greatly astonished them; and
+once or twice I heard them, on these occasions, utter the words <i>good spirit,
+wonderful</i>; but I did not then understand the signification of these terms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My thoughts now became more active, and I longed to discover the motives and
+feelings of these lovely creatures; I was inquisitive to know why Felix
+appeared so miserable and Agatha so sad. I thought (foolish wretch!) that it
+might be in my power to restore happiness to these deserving people. When I
+slept or was absent, the forms of the venerable blind father, the gentle
+Agatha, and the excellent Felix flitted before me. I looked upon them as
+superior beings who would be the arbiters of my future destiny. I formed in my
+imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their
+reception of me. I imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle
+demeanour and conciliating words, I should first win their favour and
+afterwards their love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“These thoughts exhilarated me and led me to apply with fresh ardour to the
+acquiring the art of language. My organs were indeed harsh, but supple; and
+although my voice was very unlike the soft music of their tones, yet I
+pronounced such words as I understood with tolerable ease. It was as the ass
+and the lap-dog; yet surely the gentle ass whose intentions were affectionate,
+although his manners were rude, deserved better treatment than blows and
+execration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The pleasant showers and genial warmth of spring greatly altered the aspect of
+the earth. Men who before this change seemed to have been hid in caves
+dispersed themselves and were employed in various arts of cultivation. The
+birds sang in more cheerful notes, and the leaves began to bud forth on the
+trees. Happy, happy earth! Fit habitation for gods, which, so short a time
+before, was bleak, damp, and unwholesome. My spirits were elevated by the
+enchanting appearance of nature; the past was blotted from my memory, the
+present was tranquil, and the future gilded by bright rays of hope and
+anticipations of joy.”
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap13"></a>Chapter 13</h2>
+
+<p>
+“I now hasten to the more moving part of my story. I shall relate events that
+impressed me with feelings which, from what I had been, have made me what I am.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Spring advanced rapidly; the weather became fine and the skies cloudless. It
+surprised me that what before was desert and gloomy should now bloom with the
+most beautiful flowers and verdure. My senses were gratified and refreshed by a
+thousand scents of delight and a thousand sights of beauty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was on one of these days, when my cottagers periodically rested from
+labour—the old man played on his guitar, and the children listened to him—that
+I observed the countenance of Felix was melancholy beyond expression; he sighed
+frequently, and once his father paused in his music, and I conjectured by his
+manner that he inquired the cause of his son’s sorrow. Felix replied in a
+cheerful accent, and the old man was recommencing his music when someone tapped
+at the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was a lady on horseback, accompanied by a country-man as a guide. The lady
+was dressed in a dark suit and covered with a thick black veil. Agatha asked a
+question, to which the stranger only replied by pronouncing, in a sweet accent,
+the name of Felix. Her voice was musical but unlike that of either of my
+friends. On hearing this word, Felix came up hastily to the lady, who, when she
+saw him, threw up her veil, and I beheld a countenance of angelic beauty and
+expression. Her hair of a shining raven black, and curiously braided; her eyes
+were dark, but gentle, although animated; her features of a regular proportion,
+and her complexion wondrously fair, each cheek tinged with a lovely pink.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Felix seemed ravished with delight when he saw her, every trait of sorrow
+vanished from his face, and it instantly expressed a degree of ecstatic joy, of
+which I could hardly have believed it capable; his eyes sparkled, as his cheek
+flushed with pleasure; and at that moment I thought him as beautiful as the
+stranger. She appeared affected by different feelings; wiping a few tears from
+her lovely eyes, she held out her hand to Felix, who kissed it rapturously and
+called her, as well as I could distinguish, his sweet Arabian. She did not
+appear to understand him, but smiled. He assisted her to dismount, and
+dismissing her guide, conducted her into the cottage. Some conversation took
+place between him and his father, and the young stranger knelt at the old man’s
+feet and would have kissed his hand, but he raised her and embraced her
+affectionately.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I soon perceived that although the stranger uttered articulate sounds and
+appeared to have a language of her own, she was neither understood by nor
+herself understood the cottagers. They made many signs which I did not
+comprehend, but I saw that her presence diffused gladness through the cottage,
+dispelling their sorrow as the sun dissipates the morning mists. Felix seemed
+peculiarly happy and with smiles of delight welcomed his Arabian. Agatha, the
+ever-gentle Agatha, kissed the hands of the lovely stranger, and pointing to
+her brother, made signs which appeared to me to mean that he had been sorrowful
+until she came. Some hours passed thus, while they, by their countenances,
+expressed joy, the cause of which I did not comprehend. Presently I found, by
+the frequent recurrence of some sound which the stranger repeated after them,
+that she was endeavouring to learn their language; and the idea instantly
+occurred to me that I should make use of the same instructions to the same end.
+The stranger learned about twenty words at the first lesson; most of them,
+indeed, were those which I had before understood, but I profited by the others.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As night came on, Agatha and the Arabian retired early. When they separated
+Felix kissed the hand of the stranger and said, ‘Good night sweet Safie.’ He
+sat up much longer, conversing with his father, and by the frequent repetition
+of her name I conjectured that their lovely guest was the subject of their
+conversation. I ardently desired to understand them, and bent every faculty
+towards that purpose, but found it utterly impossible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The next morning Felix went out to his work, and after the usual occupations
+of Agatha were finished, the Arabian sat at the feet of the old man, and taking
+his guitar, played some airs so entrancingly beautiful that they at once drew
+tears of sorrow and delight from my eyes. She sang, and her voice flowed in a
+rich cadence, swelling or dying away like a nightingale of the woods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When she had finished, she gave the guitar to Agatha, who at first declined
+it. She played a simple air, and her voice accompanied it in sweet accents, but
+unlike the wondrous strain of the stranger. The old man appeared enraptured and
+said some words which Agatha endeavoured to explain to Safie, and by which he
+appeared to wish to express that she bestowed on him the greatest delight by
+her music.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The days now passed as peaceably as before, with the sole alteration that joy
+had taken place of sadness in the countenances of my friends. Safie was always
+gay and happy; she and I improved rapidly in the knowledge of language, so that
+in two months I began to comprehend most of the words uttered by my protectors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In the meanwhile also the black ground was covered with herbage, and the green
+banks interspersed with innumerable flowers, sweet to the scent and the eyes,
+stars of pale radiance among the moonlight woods; the sun became warmer, the
+nights clear and balmy; and my nocturnal rambles were an extreme pleasure to
+me, although they were considerably shortened by the late setting and early
+rising of the sun, for I never ventured abroad during daylight, fearful of
+meeting with the same treatment I had formerly endured in the first village
+which I entered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My days were spent in close attention, that I might more speedily master the
+language; and I may boast that I improved more rapidly than the Arabian, who
+understood very little and conversed in broken accents, whilst I comprehended
+and could imitate almost every word that was spoken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“While I improved in speech, I also learned the science of letters as it was
+taught to the stranger, and this opened before me a wide field for wonder and
+delight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The book from which Felix instructed Safie was Volney’s <i>Ruins of
+Empires</i>. I should not have understood the purport of this book had not
+Felix, in reading it, given very minute explanations. He had chosen this work,
+he said, because the declamatory style was framed in imitation of the Eastern
+authors. Through this work I obtained a cursory knowledge of history and a view
+of the several empires at present existing in the world; it gave me an insight
+into the manners, governments, and religions of the different nations of the
+earth. I heard of the slothful Asiatics, of the stupendous genius and mental
+activity of the Grecians, of the wars and wonderful virtue of the early
+Romans—of their subsequent degenerating—of the decline of that mighty empire,
+of chivalry, Christianity, and kings. I heard of the discovery of the American
+hemisphere and wept with Safie over the hapless fate of its original
+inhabitants.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed,
+at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He
+appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all
+that can be conceived of noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man
+appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and
+vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a
+condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long
+time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or
+even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and
+bloodshed, my wonder ceased and I turned away with disgust and loathing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Every conversation of the cottagers now opened new wonders to me. While I
+listened to the instructions which Felix bestowed upon the Arabian, the strange
+system of human society was explained to me. I heard of the division of
+property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty, of rank, descent, and noble
+blood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The words induced me to turn towards myself. I learned that the possessions
+most esteemed by your fellow creatures were high and unsullied descent united
+with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these advantages, but
+without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond
+and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few! And
+what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew
+that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides,
+endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the
+same nature as man. I was more agile than they and could subsist upon coarser
+diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my
+stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around I saw and heard of none like
+me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and
+whom all men disowned?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I
+tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had
+for ever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations
+of hunger, thirst, and heat!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once
+seized on it like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all
+thought and feeling, but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the
+sensation of pain, and that was death—a state which I feared yet did not
+understand. I admired virtue and good feelings and loved the gentle manners and
+amiable qualities of my cottagers, but I was shut out from intercourse with
+them, except through means which I obtained by stealth, when I was unseen and
+unknown, and which rather increased than satisfied the desire I had of becoming
+one among my fellows. The gentle words of Agatha and the animated smiles of the
+charming Arabian were not for me. The mild exhortations of the old man and the
+lively conversation of the loved Felix were not for me. Miserable, unhappy
+wretch!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Other lessons were impressed upon me even more deeply. I heard of the
+difference of sexes, and the birth and growth of children, how the father doted
+on the smiles of the infant, and the lively sallies of the older child, how all
+the life and cares of the mother were wrapped up in the precious charge, how
+the mind of youth expanded and gained knowledge, of brother, sister, and all
+the various relationships which bind one human being to another in mutual
+bonds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days,
+no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past
+life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my
+earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had
+never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me.
+What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I will soon explain to what these feelings tended, but allow me now to return
+to the cottagers, whose story excited in me such various feelings of
+indignation, delight, and wonder, but which all terminated in additional love
+and reverence for my protectors (for so I loved, in an innocent, half-painful
+self-deceit, to call them).”
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap14"></a>Chapter 14</h2>
+
+<p>
+“Some time elapsed before I learned the history of my friends. It was one which
+could not fail to impress itself deeply on my mind, unfolding as it did a
+number of circumstances, each interesting and wonderful to one so utterly
+inexperienced as I was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The name of the old man was De Lacey. He was descended from a good family in
+France, where he had lived for many years in affluence, respected by his
+superiors and beloved by his equals. His son was bred in the service of his
+country, and Agatha had ranked with ladies of the highest distinction. A few
+months before my arrival they had lived in a large and luxurious city called
+Paris, surrounded by friends and possessed of every enjoyment which virtue,
+refinement of intellect, or taste, accompanied by a moderate fortune, could
+afford.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The father of Safie had been the cause of their ruin. He was a Turkish
+merchant and had inhabited Paris for many years, when, for some reason which I
+could not learn, he became obnoxious to the government. He was seized and cast
+into prison the very day that Safie arrived from Constantinople to join him. He
+was tried and condemned to death. The injustice of his sentence was very
+flagrant; all Paris was indignant; and it was judged that his religion and
+wealth rather than the crime alleged against him had been the cause of his
+condemnation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Felix had accidentally been present at the trial; his horror and indignation
+were uncontrollable when he heard the decision of the court. He made, at that
+moment, a solemn vow to deliver him and then looked around for the means. After
+many fruitless attempts to gain admittance to the prison, he found a strongly
+grated window in an unguarded part of the building, which lighted the dungeon
+of the unfortunate Muhammadan, who, loaded with chains, waited in despair the
+execution of the barbarous sentence. Felix visited the grate at night and made
+known to the prisoner his intentions in his favour. The Turk, amazed and
+delighted, endeavoured to kindle the zeal of his deliverer by promises of
+reward and wealth. Felix rejected his offers with contempt, yet when he saw the
+lovely Safie, who was allowed to visit her father and who by her gestures
+expressed her lively gratitude, the youth could not help owning to his own mind
+that the captive possessed a treasure which would fully reward his toil and
+hazard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The Turk quickly perceived the impression that his daughter had made on the
+heart of Felix and endeavoured to secure him more entirely in his interests by
+the promise of her hand in marriage so soon as he should be conveyed to a place
+of safety. Felix was too delicate to accept this offer, yet he looked forward
+to the probability of the event as to the consummation of his happiness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“During the ensuing days, while the preparations were going forward for the
+escape of the merchant, the zeal of Felix was warmed by several letters that he
+received from this lovely girl, who found means to express her thoughts in the
+language of her lover by the aid of an old man, a servant of her father who
+understood French. She thanked him in the most ardent terms for his intended
+services towards her parent, and at the same time she gently deplored her own
+fate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have copies of these letters, for I found means, during my residence in the
+hovel, to procure the implements of writing; and the letters were often in the
+hands of Felix or Agatha. Before I depart I will give them to you; they will
+prove the truth of my tale; but at present, as the sun is already far declined,
+I shall only have time to repeat the substance of them to you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Safie related that her mother was a Christian Arab, seized and made a slave by
+the Turks; recommended by her beauty, she had won the heart of the father of
+Safie, who married her. The young girl spoke in high and enthusiastic terms of
+her mother, who, born in freedom, spurned the bondage to which she was now
+reduced. She instructed her daughter in the tenets of her religion and taught
+her to aspire to higher powers of intellect and an independence of spirit
+forbidden to the female followers of Muhammad. This lady died, but her lessons
+were indelibly impressed on the mind of Safie, who sickened at the prospect of
+again returning to Asia and being immured within the walls of a harem, allowed
+only to occupy herself with infantile amusements, ill-suited to the temper of
+her soul, now accustomed to grand ideas and a noble emulation for virtue. The
+prospect of marrying a Christian and remaining in a country where women were
+allowed to take a rank in society was enchanting to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The day for the execution of the Turk was fixed, but on the night previous to
+it he quitted his prison and before morning was distant many leagues from
+Paris. Felix had procured passports in the name of his father, sister, and
+himself. He had previously communicated his plan to the former, who aided the
+deceit by quitting his house, under the pretence of a journey and concealed
+himself, with his daughter, in an obscure part of Paris.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Felix conducted the fugitives through France to Lyons and across Mont Cenis to
+Leghorn, where the merchant had decided to wait a favourable opportunity of
+passing into some part of the Turkish dominions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Safie resolved to remain with her father until the moment of his departure,
+before which time the Turk renewed his promise that she should be united to his
+deliverer; and Felix remained with them in expectation of that event; and in
+the meantime he enjoyed the society of the Arabian, who exhibited towards him
+the simplest and tenderest affection. They conversed with one another through
+the means of an interpreter, and sometimes with the interpretation of looks;
+and Safie sang to him the divine airs of her native country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The Turk allowed this intimacy to take place and encouraged the hopes of the
+youthful lovers, while in his heart he had formed far other plans. He loathed
+the idea that his daughter should be united to a Christian, but he feared the
+resentment of Felix if he should appear lukewarm, for he knew that he was still
+in the power of his deliverer if he should choose to betray him to the Italian
+state which they inhabited. He revolved a thousand plans by which he should be
+enabled to prolong the deceit until it might be no longer necessary, and
+secretly to take his daughter with him when he departed. His plans were
+facilitated by the news which arrived from Paris.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The government of France were greatly enraged at the escape of their victim
+and spared no pains to detect and punish his deliverer. The plot of Felix was
+quickly discovered, and De Lacey and Agatha were thrown into prison. The news
+reached Felix and roused him from his dream of pleasure. His blind and aged
+father and his gentle sister lay in a noisome dungeon while he enjoyed the free
+air and the society of her whom he loved. This idea was torture to him. He
+quickly arranged with the Turk that if the latter should find a favourable
+opportunity for escape before Felix could return to Italy, Safie should remain
+as a boarder at a convent at Leghorn; and then, quitting the lovely Arabian, he
+hastened to Paris and delivered himself up to the vengeance of the law, hoping
+to free De Lacey and Agatha by this proceeding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He did not succeed. They remained confined for five months before the trial
+took place, the result of which deprived them of their fortune and condemned
+them to a perpetual exile from their native country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They found a miserable asylum in the cottage in Germany, where I discovered
+them. Felix soon learned that the treacherous Turk, for whom he and his family
+endured such unheard-of oppression, on discovering that his deliverer was thus
+reduced to poverty and ruin, became a traitor to good feeling and honour and
+had quitted Italy with his daughter, insultingly sending Felix a pittance of
+money to aid him, as he said, in some plan of future maintenance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Such were the events that preyed on the heart of Felix and rendered him, when
+I first saw him, the most miserable of his family. He could have endured
+poverty, and while this distress had been the meed of his virtue, he gloried in
+it; but the ingratitude of the Turk and the loss of his beloved Safie were
+misfortunes more bitter and irreparable. The arrival of the Arabian now infused
+new life into his soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When the news reached Leghorn that Felix was deprived of his wealth and rank,
+the merchant commanded his daughter to think no more of her lover, but to
+prepare to return to her native country. The generous nature of Safie was
+outraged by this command; she attempted to expostulate with her father, but he
+left her angrily, reiterating his tyrannical mandate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A few days after, the Turk entered his daughter’s apartment and told her
+hastily that he had reason to believe that his residence at Leghorn had been
+divulged and that he should speedily be delivered up to the French government;
+he had consequently hired a vessel to convey him to Constantinople, for which
+city he should sail in a few hours. He intended to leave his daughter under the
+care of a confidential servant, to follow at her leisure with the greater part
+of his property, which had not yet arrived at Leghorn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When alone, Safie resolved in her own mind the plan of conduct that it would
+become her to pursue in this emergency. A residence in Turkey was abhorrent to
+her; her religion and her feelings were alike averse to it. By some papers of
+her father which fell into her hands she heard of the exile of her lover and
+learnt the name of the spot where he then resided. She hesitated some time, but
+at length she formed her determination. Taking with her some jewels that
+belonged to her and a sum of money, she quitted Italy with an attendant, a
+native of Leghorn, but who understood the common language of Turkey, and
+departed for Germany.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She arrived in safety at a town about twenty leagues from the cottage of De
+Lacey, when her attendant fell dangerously ill. Safie nursed her with the most
+devoted affection, but the poor girl died, and the Arabian was left alone,
+unacquainted with the language of the country and utterly ignorant of the
+customs of the world. She fell, however, into good hands. The Italian had
+mentioned the name of the spot for which they were bound, and after her death
+the woman of the house in which they had lived took care that Safie should
+arrive in safety at the cottage of her lover.”
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap15"></a>Chapter 15</h2>
+
+<p>
+“Such was the history of my beloved cottagers. It impressed me deeply. I
+learned, from the views of social life which it developed, to admire their
+virtues and to deprecate the vices of mankind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As yet I looked upon crime as a distant evil, benevolence and generosity were
+ever present before me, inciting within me a desire to become an actor in the
+busy scene where so many admirable qualities were called forth and displayed.
+But in giving an account of the progress of my intellect, I must not omit a
+circumstance which occurred in the beginning of the month of August of the same
+year.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“One night during my accustomed visit to the neighbouring wood where I
+collected my own food and brought home firing for my protectors, I found on the
+ground a leathern portmanteau containing several articles of dress and some
+books. I eagerly seized the prize and returned with it to my hovel. Fortunately
+the books were written in the language, the elements of which I had acquired at
+the cottage; they consisted of <i>Paradise Lost</i>, a volume of <i>Plutarch’s
+Lives</i>, and the <i>Sorrows of Werter</i>. The possession of these treasures
+gave me extreme delight; I now continually studied and exercised my mind upon
+these histories, whilst my friends were employed in their ordinary occupations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced in me an
+infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but
+more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection. In the <i>Sorrows of
+Werter</i>, besides the interest of its simple and affecting story, so many
+opinions are canvassed and so many lights thrown upon what had hitherto been to
+me obscure subjects that I found in it a never-ending source of speculation and
+astonishment. The gentle and domestic manners it described, combined with lofty
+sentiments and feelings, which had for their object something out of self,
+accorded well with my experience among my protectors and with the wants which
+were for ever alive in my own bosom. But I thought Werter himself a more divine
+being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no
+pretension, but it sank deep. The disquisitions upon death and suicide were
+calculated to fill me with wonder. I did not pretend to enter into the merits
+of the case, yet I inclined towards the opinions of the hero, whose extinction
+I wept, without precisely understanding it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and
+condition. I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike to the
+beings concerning whom I read and to whose conversation I was a listener. I
+sympathised with and partly understood them, but I was unformed in mind; I was
+dependent on none and related to none. ‘The path of my departure was free,’ and
+there was none to lament my annihilation. My person was hideous and my stature
+gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What
+was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to
+solve them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The volume of <i>Plutarch’s Lives</i> which I possessed contained the
+histories of the first founders of the ancient republics. This book had a far
+different effect upon me from the <i>Sorrows of Werter</i>. I learned from
+Werter’s imaginations despondency and gloom, but Plutarch taught me high
+thoughts; he elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to
+admire and love the heroes of past ages. Many things I read surpassed my
+understanding and experience. I had a very confused knowledge of kingdoms, wide
+extents of country, mighty rivers, and boundless seas. But I was perfectly
+unacquainted with towns and large assemblages of men. The cottage of my
+protectors had been the only school in which I had studied human nature, but
+this book developed new and mightier scenes of action. I read of men concerned
+in public affairs, governing or massacring their species. I felt the greatest
+ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice, as far as I
+understood the signification of those terms, relative as they were, as I
+applied them, to pleasure and pain alone. Induced by these feelings, I was of
+course led to admire peaceable lawgivers, Numa, Solon, and Lycurgus, in
+preference to Romulus and Theseus. The patriarchal lives of my protectors
+caused these impressions to take a firm hold on my mind; perhaps, if my first
+introduction to humanity had been made by a young soldier, burning for glory
+and slaughter, I should have been imbued with different sensations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But <i>Paradise Lost</i> excited different and far deeper emotions. I read it,
+as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true
+history. It moved every feeling of wonder and awe that the picture of an
+omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting. I often
+referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like
+Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but
+his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth
+from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the
+especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire
+knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and
+alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for
+often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of
+envy rose within me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Another circumstance strengthened and confirmed these feelings. Soon after my
+arrival in the hovel I discovered some papers in the pocket of the dress which
+I had taken from your laboratory. At first I had neglected them, but now that I
+was able to decipher the characters in which they were written, I began to
+study them with diligence. It was your journal of the four months that preceded
+my creation. You minutely described in these papers every step you took in the
+progress of your work; this history was mingled with accounts of domestic
+occurrences. You doubtless recollect these papers. Here they are. Everything is
+related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole detail
+of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is set in view;
+the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is given, in
+language which painted your own horrors and rendered mine indelible. I sickened
+as I read. ‘Hateful day when I received life!’ I exclaimed in agony. ‘Accursed
+creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even <i>you</i> turned from
+me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own
+image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very
+resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage
+him, but I am solitary and abhorred.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“These were the reflections of my hours of despondency and solitude; but when I
+contemplated the virtues of the cottagers, their amiable and benevolent
+dispositions, I persuaded myself that when they should become acquainted with
+my admiration of their virtues they would compassionate me and overlook my
+personal deformity. Could they turn from their door one, however monstrous, who
+solicited their compassion and friendship? I resolved, at least, not to
+despair, but in every way to fit myself for an interview with them which would
+decide my fate. I postponed this attempt for some months longer, for the
+importance attached to its success inspired me with a dread lest I should fail.
+Besides, I found that my understanding improved so much with every day’s
+experience that I was unwilling to commence this undertaking until a few more
+months should have added to my sagacity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Several changes, in the meantime, took place in the cottage. The presence of
+Safie diffused happiness among its inhabitants, and I also found that a greater
+degree of plenty reigned there. Felix and Agatha spent more time in amusement
+and conversation, and were assisted in their labours by servants. They did not
+appear rich, but they were contented and happy; their feelings were serene and
+peaceful, while mine became every day more tumultuous. Increase of knowledge
+only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was. I cherished
+hope, it is true, but it vanished when I beheld my person reflected in water or
+my shadow in the moonshine, even as that frail image and that inconstant shade.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I endeavoured to crush these fears and to fortify myself for the trial which
+in a few months I resolved to undergo; and sometimes I allowed my thoughts,
+unchecked by reason, to ramble in the fields of Paradise, and dared to fancy
+amiable and lovely creatures sympathising with my feelings and cheering my
+gloom; their angelic countenances breathed smiles of consolation. But it was
+all a dream; no Eve soothed my sorrows nor shared my thoughts; I was alone. I
+remembered Adam’s supplication to his Creator. But where was mine? He had
+abandoned me, and in the bitterness of my heart I cursed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Autumn passed thus. I saw, with surprise and grief, the leaves decay and fall,
+and nature again assume the barren and bleak appearance it had worn when I
+first beheld the woods and the lovely moon. Yet I did not heed the bleakness of
+the weather; I was better fitted by my conformation for the endurance of cold
+than heat. But my chief delights were the sight of the flowers, the birds, and
+all the gay apparel of summer; when those deserted me, I turned with more
+attention towards the cottagers. Their happiness was not decreased by the
+absence of summer. They loved and sympathised with one another; and their joys,
+depending on each other, were not interrupted by the casualties that took place
+around them. The more I saw of them, the greater became my desire to claim
+their protection and kindness; my heart yearned to be known and loved by these
+amiable creatures; to see their sweet looks directed towards me with affection
+was the utmost limit of my ambition. I dared not think that they would turn
+them from me with disdain and horror. The poor that stopped at their door were
+never driven away. I asked, it is true, for greater treasures than a little
+food or rest: I required kindness and sympathy; but I did not believe myself
+utterly unworthy of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The winter advanced, and an entire revolution of the seasons had taken place
+since I awoke into life. My attention at this time was solely directed towards
+my plan of introducing myself into the cottage of my protectors. I revolved
+many projects, but that on which I finally fixed was to enter the dwelling when
+the blind old man should be alone. I had sagacity enough to discover that the
+unnatural hideousness of my person was the chief object of horror with those
+who had formerly beheld me. My voice, although harsh, had nothing terrible in
+it; I thought, therefore, that if in the absence of his children I could gain
+the good will and mediation of the old De Lacey, I might by his means be
+tolerated by my younger protectors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“One day, when the sun shone on the red leaves that strewed the ground and
+diffused cheerfulness, although it denied warmth, Safie, Agatha, and Felix
+departed on a long country walk, and the old man, at his own desire, was left
+alone in the cottage. When his children had departed, he took up his guitar and
+played several mournful but sweet airs, more sweet and mournful than I had ever
+heard him play before. At first his countenance was illuminated with pleasure,
+but as he continued, thoughtfulness and sadness succeeded; at length, laying
+aside the instrument, he sat absorbed in reflection.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My heart beat quick; this was the hour and moment of trial, which would decide
+my hopes or realise my fears. The servants were gone to a neighbouring fair.
+All was silent in and around the cottage; it was an excellent opportunity; yet,
+when I proceeded to execute my plan, my limbs failed me and I sank to the
+ground. Again I rose, and exerting all the firmness of which I was master,
+removed the planks which I had placed before my hovel to conceal my retreat.
+The fresh air revived me, and with renewed determination I approached the door
+of their cottage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I knocked. ‘Who is there?’ said the old man. ‘Come in.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I entered. ‘Pardon this intrusion,’ said I; ‘I am a traveller in want of a
+little rest; you would greatly oblige me if you would allow me to remain a few
+minutes before the fire.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Enter,’ said De Lacey, ‘and I will try in what manner I can to relieve your
+wants; but, unfortunately, my children are from home, and as I am blind, I am
+afraid I shall find it difficult to procure food for you.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Do not trouble yourself, my kind host; I have food; it is warmth and rest
+only that I need.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I sat down, and a silence ensued. I knew that every minute was precious to me,
+yet I remained irresolute in what manner to commence the interview, when the
+old man addressed me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘By your language, stranger, I suppose you are my countryman; are you French?’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘No; but I was educated by a French family and understand that language only.
+I am now going to claim the protection of some friends, whom I sincerely love,
+and of whose favour I have some hopes.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Are they Germans?’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘No, they are French. But let us change the subject. I am an unfortunate and
+deserted creature, I look around and I have no relation or friend upon earth.
+These amiable people to whom I go have never seen me and know little of me. I
+am full of fears, for if I fail there, I am an outcast in the world for ever.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Do not despair. To be friendless is indeed to be unfortunate, but the hearts
+of men, when unprejudiced by any obvious self-interest, are full of brotherly
+love and charity. Rely, therefore, on your hopes; and if these friends are good
+and amiable, do not despair.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘They are kind—they are the most excellent creatures in the world; but,
+unfortunately, they are prejudiced against me. I have good dispositions; my
+life has been hitherto harmless and in some degree beneficial; but a fatal
+prejudice clouds their eyes, and where they ought to see a feeling and kind
+friend, they behold only a detestable monster.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘That is indeed unfortunate; but if you are really blameless, cannot you
+undeceive them?’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘I am about to undertake that task; and it is on that account that I feel so
+many overwhelming terrors. I tenderly love these friends; I have, unknown to
+them, been for many months in the habits of daily kindness towards them; but
+they believe that I wish to injure them, and it is that prejudice which I wish
+to overcome.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Where do these friends reside?’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Near this spot.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The old man paused and then continued, ‘If you will unreservedly confide to me
+the particulars of your tale, I perhaps may be of use in undeceiving them. I am
+blind and cannot judge of your countenance, but there is something in your
+words which persuades me that you are sincere. I am poor and an exile, but it
+will afford me true pleasure to be in any way serviceable to a human creature.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Excellent man! I thank you and accept your generous offer. You raise me from
+the dust by this kindness; and I trust that, by your aid, I shall not be driven
+from the society and sympathy of your fellow creatures.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Heaven forbid! Even if you were really criminal, for that can only drive you
+to desperation, and not instigate you to virtue. I also am unfortunate; I and
+my family have been condemned, although innocent; judge, therefore, if I do not
+feel for your misfortunes.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘How can I thank you, my best and only benefactor? From your lips first have I
+heard the voice of kindness directed towards me; I shall be for ever grateful;
+and your present humanity assures me of success with those friends whom I am on
+the point of meeting.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘May I know the names and residence of those friends?’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I paused. This, I thought, was the moment of decision, which was to rob me of
+or bestow happiness on me for ever. I struggled vainly for firmness sufficient
+to answer him, but the effort destroyed all my remaining strength; I sank on
+the chair and sobbed aloud. At that moment I heard the steps of my younger
+protectors. I had not a moment to lose, but seizing the hand of the old man, I
+cried, ‘Now is the time! Save and protect me! You and your family are the
+friends whom I seek. Do not you desert me in the hour of trial!’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Great God!’ exclaimed the old man. ‘Who are you?’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“At that instant the cottage door was opened, and Felix, Safie, and Agatha
+entered. Who can describe their horror and consternation on beholding me?
+Agatha fainted, and Safie, unable to attend to her friend, rushed out of the
+cottage. Felix darted forward, and with supernatural force tore me from his
+father, to whose knees I clung, in a transport of fury, he dashed me to the
+ground and struck me violently with a stick. I could have torn him limb from
+limb, as the lion rends the antelope. But my heart sank within me as with
+bitter sickness, and I refrained. I saw him on the point of repeating his blow,
+when, overcome by pain and anguish, I quitted the cottage, and in the general
+tumult escaped unperceived to my hovel.”
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap16"></a>Chapter 16</h2>
+
+<p>
+“Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not
+extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed? I know
+not; despair had not yet taken possession of me; my feelings were those of rage
+and revenge. I could with pleasure have destroyed the cottage and its
+inhabitants and have glutted myself with their shrieks and misery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When night came I quitted my retreat and wandered in the wood; and now, no
+longer restrained by the fear of discovery, I gave vent to my anguish in
+fearful howlings. I was like a wild beast that had broken the toils, destroying
+the objects that obstructed me and ranging through the wood with a stag-like
+swiftness. Oh! What a miserable night I passed! The cold stars shone in
+mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me; now and then the
+sweet voice of a bird burst forth amidst the universal stillness. All, save I,
+were at rest or in enjoyment; I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me,
+and finding myself unsympathised with, wished to tear up the trees, spread
+havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the
+ruin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But this was a luxury of sensation that could not endure; I became fatigued
+with excess of bodily exertion and sank on the damp grass in the sick impotence
+of despair. There was none among the myriads of men that existed who would pity
+or assist me; and should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No: from that
+moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and more than all,
+against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The sun rose; I heard the voices of men and knew that it was impossible to
+return to my retreat during that day. Accordingly I hid myself in some thick
+underwood, determining to devote the ensuing hours to reflection on my
+situation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The pleasant sunshine and the pure air of day restored me to some degree of
+tranquillity; and when I considered what had passed at the cottage, I could not
+help believing that I had been too hasty in my conclusions. I had certainly
+acted imprudently. It was apparent that my conversation had interested the
+father in my behalf, and I was a fool in having exposed my person to the horror
+of his children. I ought to have familiarised the old De Lacey to me, and by
+degrees to have discovered myself to the rest of his family, when they should
+have been prepared for my approach. But I did not believe my errors to be
+irretrievable, and after much consideration I resolved to return to the
+cottage, seek the old man, and by my representations win him to my party.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“These thoughts calmed me, and in the afternoon I sank into a profound sleep;
+but the fever of my blood did not allow me to be visited by peaceful dreams.
+The horrible scene of the preceding day was for ever acting before my eyes; the
+females were flying and the enraged Felix tearing me from his father’s feet. I
+awoke exhausted, and finding that it was already night, I crept forth from my
+hiding-place, and went in search of food.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When my hunger was appeased, I directed my steps towards the well-known path
+that conducted to the cottage. All there was at peace. I crept into my hovel
+and remained in silent expectation of the accustomed hour when the family
+arose. That hour passed, the sun mounted high in the heavens, but the cottagers
+did not appear. I trembled violently, apprehending some dreadful misfortune.
+The inside of the cottage was dark, and I heard no motion; I cannot describe
+the agony of this suspense.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Presently two countrymen passed by, but pausing near the cottage, they entered
+into conversation, using violent gesticulations; but I did not understand what
+they said, as they spoke the language of the country, which differed from that
+of my protectors. Soon after, however, Felix approached with another man; I was
+surprised, as I knew that he had not quitted the cottage that morning, and
+waited anxiously to discover from his discourse the meaning of these unusual
+appearances.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Do you consider,’ said his companion to him, ‘that you will be obliged to pay
+three months’ rent and to lose the produce of your garden? I do not wish to
+take any unfair advantage, and I beg therefore that you will take some days to
+consider of your determination.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘It is utterly useless,’ replied Felix; ‘we can never again inhabit your
+cottage. The life of my father is in the greatest danger, owing to the dreadful
+circumstance that I have related. My wife and my sister will never recover from
+their horror. I entreat you not to reason with me any more. Take possession of
+your tenement and let me fly from this place.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Felix trembled violently as he said this. He and his companion entered the
+cottage, in which they remained for a few minutes, and then departed. I never
+saw any of the family of De Lacey more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I continued for the remainder of the day in my hovel in a state of utter and
+stupid despair. My protectors had departed and had broken the only link that
+held me to the world. For the first time the feelings of revenge and hatred
+filled my bosom, and I did not strive to control them, but allowing myself to
+be borne away by the stream, I bent my mind towards injury and death. When I
+thought of my friends, of the mild voice of De Lacey, the gentle eyes of
+Agatha, and the exquisite beauty of the Arabian, these thoughts vanished and a
+gush of tears somewhat soothed me. But again when I reflected that they had
+spurned and deserted me, anger returned, a rage of anger, and unable to injure
+anything human, I turned my fury towards inanimate objects. As night advanced,
+I placed a variety of combustibles around the cottage, and after having
+destroyed every vestige of cultivation in the garden, I waited with forced
+impatience until the moon had sunk to commence my operations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As the night advanced, a fierce wind arose from the woods and quickly
+dispersed the clouds that had loitered in the heavens; the blast tore along
+like a mighty avalanche and produced a kind of insanity in my spirits that
+burst all bounds of reason and reflection. I lighted the dry branch of a tree
+and danced with fury around the devoted cottage, my eyes still fixed on the
+western horizon, the edge of which the moon nearly touched. A part of its orb
+was at length hid, and I waved my brand; it sank, and with a loud scream I
+fired the straw, and heath, and bushes, which I had collected. The wind fanned
+the fire, and the cottage was quickly enveloped by the flames, which clung to
+it and licked it with their forked and destroying tongues.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As soon as I was convinced that no assistance could save any part of the
+habitation, I quitted the scene and sought for refuge in the woods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And now, with the world before me, whither should I bend my steps? I resolved
+to fly far from the scene of my misfortunes; but to me, hated and despised,
+every country must be equally horrible. At length the thought of you crossed my
+mind. I learned from your papers that you were my father, my creator; and to
+whom could I apply with more fitness than to him who had given me life? Among
+the lessons that Felix had bestowed upon Safie, geography had not been omitted;
+I had learned from these the relative situations of the different countries of
+the earth. You had mentioned Geneva as the name of your native town, and
+towards this place I resolved to proceed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But how was I to direct myself? I knew that I must travel in a southwesterly
+direction to reach my destination, but the sun was my only guide. I did not
+know the names of the towns that I was to pass through, nor could I ask
+information from a single human being; but I did not despair. From you only
+could I hope for succour, although towards you I felt no sentiment but that of
+hatred. Unfeeling, heartless creator! You had endowed me with perceptions and
+passions and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind.
+But on you only had I any claim for pity and redress, and from you I determined
+to seek that justice which I vainly attempted to gain from any other being that
+wore the human form.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My travels were long and the sufferings I endured intense. It was late in
+autumn when I quitted the district where I had so long resided. I travelled
+only at night, fearful of encountering the visage of a human being. Nature
+decayed around me, and the sun became heatless; rain and snow poured around me;
+mighty rivers were frozen; the surface of the earth was hard and chill, and
+bare, and I found no shelter. Oh, earth! How often did I imprecate curses on
+the cause of my being! The mildness of my nature had fled, and all within me
+was turned to gall and bitterness. The nearer I approached to your habitation,
+the more deeply did I feel the spirit of revenge enkindled in my heart. Snow
+fell, and the waters were hardened, but I rested not. A few incidents now and
+then directed me, and I possessed a map of the country; but I often wandered
+wide from my path. The agony of my feelings allowed me no respite; no incident
+occurred from which my rage and misery could not extract its food; but a
+circumstance that happened when I arrived on the confines of Switzerland, when
+the sun had recovered its warmth and the earth again began to look green,
+confirmed in an especial manner the bitterness and horror of my feelings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I generally rested during the day and travelled only when I was secured by
+night from the view of man. One morning, however, finding that my path lay
+through a deep wood, I ventured to continue my journey after the sun had risen;
+the day, which was one of the first of spring, cheered even me by the
+loveliness of its sunshine and the balminess of the air. I felt emotions of
+gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half
+surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away
+by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy. Soft
+tears again bedewed my cheeks, and I even raised my humid eyes with
+thankfulness towards the blessed sun, which bestowed such joy upon me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I continued to wind among the paths of the wood, until I came to its boundary,
+which was skirted by a deep and rapid river, into which many of the trees bent
+their branches, now budding with the fresh spring. Here I paused, not exactly
+knowing what path to pursue, when I heard the sound of voices, that induced me
+to conceal myself under the shade of a cypress. I was scarcely hid when a young
+girl came running towards the spot where I was concealed, laughing, as if she
+ran from someone in sport. She continued her course along the precipitous sides
+of the river, when suddenly her foot slipped, and she fell into the rapid
+stream. I rushed from my hiding-place and with extreme labour, from the force
+of the current, saved her and dragged her to shore. She was senseless, and I
+endeavoured by every means in my power to restore animation, when I was
+suddenly interrupted by the approach of a rustic, who was probably the person
+from whom she had playfully fled. On seeing me, he darted towards me, and
+tearing the girl from my arms, hastened towards the deeper parts of the wood. I
+followed speedily, I hardly knew why; but when the man saw me draw near, he
+aimed a gun, which he carried, at my body and fired. I sank to the ground, and
+my injurer, with increased swiftness, escaped into the wood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This was then the reward of my benevolence! I had saved a human being from
+destruction, and as a recompense I now writhed under the miserable pain of a
+wound which shattered the flesh and bone. The feelings of kindness and
+gentleness which I had entertained but a few moments before gave place to
+hellish rage and gnashing of teeth. Inflamed by pain, I vowed eternal hatred
+and vengeance to all mankind. But the agony of my wound overcame me; my pulses
+paused, and I fainted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For some weeks I led a miserable life in the woods, endeavouring to cure the
+wound which I had received. The ball had entered my shoulder, and I knew not
+whether it had remained there or passed through; at any rate I had no means of
+extracting it. My sufferings were augmented also by the oppressive sense of the
+injustice and ingratitude of their infliction. My daily vows rose for revenge—a
+deep and deadly revenge, such as would alone compensate for the outrages and
+anguish I had endured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“After some weeks my wound healed, and I continued my journey. The labours I
+endured were no longer to be alleviated by the bright sun or gentle breezes of
+spring; all joy was but a mockery which insulted my desolate state and made me
+feel more painfully that I was not made for the enjoyment of pleasure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But my toils now drew near a close, and in two months from this time I reached
+the environs of Geneva.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was evening when I arrived, and I retired to a hiding-place among the
+fields that surround it to meditate in what manner I should apply to you. I was
+oppressed by fatigue and hunger and far too unhappy to enjoy the gentle breezes
+of evening or the prospect of the sun setting behind the stupendous mountains
+of Jura.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“At this time a slight sleep relieved me from the pain of reflection, which was
+disturbed by the approach of a beautiful child, who came running into the
+recess I had chosen, with all the sportiveness of infancy. Suddenly, as I gazed
+on him, an idea seized me that this little creature was unprejudiced and had
+lived too short a time to have imbibed a horror of deformity. If, therefore, I
+could seize him and educate him as my companion and friend, I should not be so
+desolate in this peopled earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Urged by this impulse, I seized on the boy as he passed and drew him towards
+me. As soon as he beheld my form, he placed his hands before his eyes and
+uttered a shrill scream; I drew his hand forcibly from his face and said,
+‘Child, what is the meaning of this? I do not intend to hurt you; listen to
+me.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He struggled violently. ‘Let me go,’ he cried; ‘monster! Ugly wretch! You wish
+to eat me and tear me to pieces. You are an ogre. Let me go, or I will tell my
+papa.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Boy, you will never see your father again; you must come with me.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Hideous monster! Let me go. My papa is a syndic—he is M. Frankenstein—he will
+punish you. You dare not keep me.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Frankenstein! you belong then to my enemy—to him towards whom I have sworn
+eternal revenge; you shall be my first victim.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The child still struggled and loaded me with epithets which carried despair to
+my heart; I grasped his throat to silence him, and in a moment he lay dead at
+my feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I gazed on my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish
+triumph; clapping my hands, I exclaimed, ‘I too can create desolation; my enemy
+is not invulnerable; this death will carry despair to him, and a thousand other
+miseries shall torment and destroy him.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As I fixed my eyes on the child, I saw something glittering on his breast. I
+took it; it was a portrait of a most lovely woman. In spite of my malignity, it
+softened and attracted me. For a few moments I gazed with delight on her dark
+eyes, fringed by deep lashes, and her lovely lips; but presently my rage
+returned; I remembered that I was for ever deprived of the delights that such
+beautiful creatures could bestow and that she whose resemblance I contemplated
+would, in regarding me, have changed that air of divine benignity to one
+expressive of disgust and affright.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can you wonder that such thoughts transported me with rage? I only wonder that
+at that moment, instead of venting my sensations in exclamations and agony, I
+did not rush among mankind and perish in the attempt to destroy them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“While I was overcome by these feelings, I left the spot where I had committed
+the murder, and seeking a more secluded hiding-place, I entered a barn which
+had appeared to me to be empty. A woman was sleeping on some straw; she was
+young, not indeed so beautiful as her whose portrait I held, but of an
+agreeable aspect and blooming in the loveliness of youth and health. Here, I
+thought, is one of those whose joy-imparting smiles are bestowed on all but me.
+And then I bent over her and whispered, ‘Awake, fairest, thy lover is near—he
+who would give his life but to obtain one look of affection from thine eyes; my
+beloved, awake!’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The sleeper stirred; a thrill of terror ran through me. Should she indeed
+awake, and see me, and curse me, and denounce the murderer? Thus would she
+assuredly act if her darkened eyes opened and she beheld me. The thought was
+madness; it stirred the fiend within me—not I, but she, shall suffer; the
+murder I have committed because I am for ever robbed of all that she could give
+me, she shall atone. The crime had its source in her; be hers the punishment!
+Thanks to the lessons of Felix and the sanguinary laws of man, I had learned
+now to work mischief. I bent over her and placed the portrait securely in one
+of the folds of her dress. She moved again, and I fled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For some days I haunted the spot where these scenes had taken place, sometimes
+wishing to see you, sometimes resolved to quit the world and its miseries for
+ever. At length I wandered towards these mountains, and have ranged through
+their immense recesses, consumed by a burning passion which you alone can
+gratify. We may not part until you have promised to comply with my requisition.
+I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed
+and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of
+the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create.”
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap17"></a>Chapter 17</h2>
+
+<p>
+The being finished speaking and fixed his looks upon me in the expectation of a
+reply. But I was bewildered, perplexed, and unable to arrange my ideas
+sufficiently to understand the full extent of his proposition. He continued,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of
+those sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do, and I demand it
+of you as a right which you must not refuse to concede.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The latter part of his tale had kindled anew in me the anger that had died away
+while he narrated his peaceful life among the cottagers, and as he said this I
+could no longer suppress the rage that burned within me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do refuse it,” I replied; “and no torture shall ever extort a consent from
+me. You may render me the most miserable of men, but you shall never make me
+base in my own eyes. Shall I create another like yourself, whose joint
+wickedness might desolate the world. Begone! I have answered you; you may
+torture me, but I will never consent.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are in the wrong,” replied the fiend; “and instead of threatening, I am
+content to reason with you. I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not
+shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and
+triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities
+me? You would not call it murder if you could precipitate me into one of those
+ice-rifts and destroy my frame, the work of your own hands. Shall I respect man
+when he condemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and
+instead of injury I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude
+at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable
+barriers to our union. Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery.
+I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and
+chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear
+inextinguishable hatred. Have a care; I will work at your destruction, nor
+finish until I desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your
+birth.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A fiendish rage animated him as he said this; his face was wrinkled into
+contortions too horrible for human eyes to behold; but presently he calmed
+himself and proceeded—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I intended to reason. This passion is detrimental to me, for you do not
+reflect that <i>you</i> are the cause of its excess. If any being felt emotions
+of benevolence towards me, I should return them a hundred and a hundredfold;
+for that one creature’s sake I would make peace with the whole kind! But I now
+indulge in dreams of bliss that cannot be realised. What I ask of you is
+reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as
+myself; the gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it
+shall content me. It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world;
+but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will
+not be happy, but they will be harmless and free from the misery I now feel.
+Oh! My creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one
+benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not
+deny me my request!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was moved. I shuddered when I thought of the possible consequences of my
+consent, but I felt that there was some justice in his argument. His tale and
+the feelings he now expressed proved him to be a creature of fine sensations,
+and did I not as his maker owe him all the portion of happiness that it was in
+my power to bestow? He saw my change of feeling and continued,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you consent, neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again;
+I will go to the vast wilds of South America. My food is not that of man; I do
+not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford
+me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself
+and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves;
+the sun will shine on us as on man and will ripen our food. The picture I
+present to you is peaceful and human, and you must feel that you could deny it
+only in the wantonness of power and cruelty. Pitiless as you have been towards
+me, I now see compassion in your eyes; let me seize the favourable moment and
+persuade you to promise what I so ardently desire.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You propose,” replied I, “to fly from the habitations of man, to dwell in
+those wilds where the beasts of the field will be your only companions. How can
+you, who long for the love and sympathy of man, persevere in this exile? You
+will return and again seek their kindness, and you will meet with their
+detestation; your evil passions will be renewed, and you will then have a
+companion to aid you in the task of destruction. This may not be; cease to
+argue the point, for I cannot consent.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How inconstant are your feelings! But a moment ago you were moved by my
+representations, and why do you again harden yourself to my complaints? I swear
+to you, by the earth which I inhabit, and by you that made me, that with the
+companion you bestow, I will quit the neighbourhood of man and dwell, as it may
+chance, in the most savage of places. My evil passions will have fled, for I
+shall meet with sympathy! My life will flow quietly away, and in my dying
+moments I shall not curse my maker.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him and sometimes felt
+a wish to console him, but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass
+that moved and talked, my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those
+of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought that as I
+could not sympathise with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small
+portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You swear,” I said, “to be harmless; but have you not already shown a degree
+of malice that should reasonably make me distrust you? May not even this be a
+feint that will increase your triumph by affording a wider scope for your
+revenge?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How is this? I must not be trifled with, and I demand an answer. If I have no
+ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion; the love of another
+will destroy the cause of my crimes, and I shall become a thing of whose
+existence everyone will be ignorant. My vices are the children of a forced
+solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in
+communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being and
+become linked to the chain of existence and events from which I am now
+excluded.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I paused some time to reflect on all he had related and the various arguments
+which he had employed. I thought of the promise of virtues which he had
+displayed on the opening of his existence and the subsequent blight of all
+kindly feeling by the loathing and scorn which his protectors had manifested
+towards him. His power and threats were not omitted in my calculations; a
+creature who could exist in the ice-caves of the glaciers and hide himself from
+pursuit among the ridges of inaccessible precipices was a being possessing
+faculties it would be vain to cope with. After a long pause of reflection I
+concluded that the justice due both to him and my fellow creatures demanded of
+me that I should comply with his request. Turning to him, therefore, I said,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I consent to your demand, on your solemn oath to quit Europe for ever, and
+every other place in the neighbourhood of man, as soon as I shall deliver into
+your hands a female who will accompany you in your exile.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I swear,” he cried, “by the sun, and by the blue sky of heaven, and by the
+fire of love that burns my heart, that if you grant my prayer, while they exist
+you shall never behold me again. Depart to your home and commence your labours;
+I shall watch their progress with unutterable anxiety; and fear not but that
+when you are ready I shall appear.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Saying this, he suddenly quitted me, fearful, perhaps, of any change in my
+sentiments. I saw him descend the mountain with greater speed than the flight
+of an eagle, and quickly lost among the undulations of the sea of ice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His tale had occupied the whole day, and the sun was upon the verge of the
+horizon when he departed. I knew that I ought to hasten my descent towards the
+valley, as I should soon be encompassed in darkness; but my heart was heavy,
+and my steps slow. The labour of winding among the little paths of the mountain
+and fixing my feet firmly as I advanced perplexed me, occupied as I was by the
+emotions which the occurrences of the day had produced. Night was far advanced
+when I came to the halfway resting-place and seated myself beside the fountain.
+The stars shone at intervals as the clouds passed from over them; the dark
+pines rose before me, and every here and there a broken tree lay on the ground;
+it was a scene of wonderful solemnity and stirred strange thoughts within me. I
+wept bitterly, and clasping my hands in agony, I exclaimed, “Oh! stars and
+clouds and winds, ye are all about to mock me; if ye really pity me, crush
+sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart, and
+leave me in darkness.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These were wild and miserable thoughts, but I cannot describe to you how the
+eternal twinkling of the stars weighed upon me and how I listened to every
+blast of wind as if it were a dull ugly siroc on its way to consume me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Morning dawned before I arrived at the village of Chamounix; I took no rest,
+but returned immediately to Geneva. Even in my own heart I could give no
+expression to my sensations—they weighed on me with a mountain’s weight and
+their excess destroyed my agony beneath them. Thus I returned home, and
+entering the house, presented myself to the family. My haggard and wild
+appearance awoke intense alarm, but I answered no question, scarcely did I
+speak. I felt as if I were placed under a ban—as if I had no right to claim
+their sympathies—as if never more might I enjoy companionship with them. Yet
+even thus I loved them to adoration; and to save them, I resolved to dedicate
+myself to my most abhorred task. The prospect of such an occupation made every
+other circumstance of existence pass before me like a dream, and that thought
+only had to me the reality of life.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap18"></a>Chapter 18</h2>
+
+<p>
+Day after day, week after week, passed away on my return to Geneva; and I could
+not collect the courage to recommence my work. I feared the vengeance of the
+disappointed fiend, yet I was unable to overcome my repugnance to the task
+which was enjoined me. I found that I could not compose a female without again
+devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition. I had
+heard of some discoveries having been made by an English philosopher, the
+knowledge of which was material to my success, and I sometimes thought of
+obtaining my father’s consent to visit England for this purpose; but I clung to
+every pretence of delay and shrank from taking the first step in an undertaking
+whose immediate necessity began to appear less absolute to me. A change indeed
+had taken place in me; my health, which had hitherto declined, was now much
+restored; and my spirits, when unchecked by the memory of my unhappy promise,
+rose proportionably. My father saw this change with pleasure, and he turned his
+thoughts towards the best method of eradicating the remains of my melancholy,
+which every now and then would return by fits, and with a devouring blackness
+overcast the approaching sunshine. At these moments I took refuge in the most
+perfect solitude. I passed whole days on the lake alone in a little boat,
+watching the clouds and listening to the rippling of the waves, silent and
+listless. But the fresh air and bright sun seldom failed to restore me to some
+degree of composure, and on my return I met the salutations of my friends with
+a readier smile and a more cheerful heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was after my return from one of these rambles that my father, calling me
+aside, thus addressed me,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am happy to remark, my dear son, that you have resumed your former pleasures
+and seem to be returning to yourself. And yet you are still unhappy and still
+avoid our society. For some time I was lost in conjecture as to the cause of
+this, but yesterday an idea struck me, and if it is well founded, I conjure you
+to avow it. Reserve on such a point would be not only useless, but draw down
+treble misery on us all.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I trembled violently at his exordium, and my father continued—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I confess, my son, that I have always looked forward to your marriage with our
+dear Elizabeth as the tie of our domestic comfort and the stay of my declining
+years. You were attached to each other from your earliest infancy; you studied
+together, and appeared, in dispositions and tastes, entirely suited to one
+another. But so blind is the experience of man that what I conceived to be the
+best assistants to my plan may have entirely destroyed it. You, perhaps, regard
+her as your sister, without any wish that she might become your wife. Nay, you
+may have met with another whom you may love; and considering yourself as bound
+in honour to Elizabeth, this struggle may occasion the poignant misery which
+you appear to feel.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear father, reassure yourself. I love my cousin tenderly and sincerely. I
+never saw any woman who excited, as Elizabeth does, my warmest admiration and
+affection. My future hopes and prospects are entirely bound up in the
+expectation of our union.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The expression of your sentiments of this subject, my dear Victor, gives me
+more pleasure than I have for some time experienced. If you feel thus, we shall
+assuredly be happy, however present events may cast a gloom over us. But it is
+this gloom which appears to have taken so strong a hold of your mind that I
+wish to dissipate. Tell me, therefore, whether you object to an immediate
+solemnisation of the marriage. We have been unfortunate, and recent events have
+drawn us from that everyday tranquillity befitting my years and infirmities.
+You are younger; yet I do not suppose, possessed as you are of a competent
+fortune, that an early marriage would at all interfere with any future plans of
+honour and utility that you may have formed. Do not suppose, however, that I
+wish to dictate happiness to you or that a delay on your part would cause me
+any serious uneasiness. Interpret my words with candour and answer me, I
+conjure you, with confidence and sincerity.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I listened to my father in silence and remained for some time incapable of
+offering any reply. I revolved rapidly in my mind a multitude of thoughts and
+endeavoured to arrive at some conclusion. Alas! To me the idea of an immediate
+union with my Elizabeth was one of horror and dismay. I was bound by a solemn
+promise which I had not yet fulfilled and dared not break, or if I did, what
+manifold miseries might not impend over me and my devoted family! Could I enter
+into a festival with this deadly weight yet hanging round my neck and bowing me
+to the ground? I must perform my engagement and let the monster depart with his
+mate before I allowed myself to enjoy the delight of a union from which I
+expected peace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I remembered also the necessity imposed upon me of either journeying to England
+or entering into a long correspondence with those philosophers of that country
+whose knowledge and discoveries were of indispensable use to me in my present
+undertaking. The latter method of obtaining the desired intelligence was
+dilatory and unsatisfactory; besides, I had an insurmountable aversion to the
+idea of engaging myself in my loathsome task in my father’s house while in
+habits of familiar intercourse with those I loved. I knew that a thousand
+fearful accidents might occur, the slightest of which would disclose a tale to
+thrill all connected with me with horror. I was aware also that I should often
+lose all self-command, all capacity of hiding the harrowing sensations that
+would possess me during the progress of my unearthly occupation. I must absent
+myself from all I loved while thus employed. Once commenced, it would quickly
+be achieved, and I might be restored to my family in peace and happiness. My
+promise fulfilled, the monster would depart for ever. Or (so my fond fancy
+imaged) some accident might meanwhile occur to destroy him and put an end to my
+slavery for ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These feelings dictated my answer to my father. I expressed a wish to visit
+England, but concealing the true reasons of this request, I clothed my desires
+under a guise which excited no suspicion, while I urged my desire with an
+earnestness that easily induced my father to comply. After so long a period of
+an absorbing melancholy that resembled madness in its intensity and effects, he
+was glad to find that I was capable of taking pleasure in the idea of such a
+journey, and he hoped that change of scene and varied amusement would, before
+my return, have restored me entirely to myself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The duration of my absence was left to my own choice; a few months, or at most
+a year, was the period contemplated. One paternal kind precaution he had taken
+to ensure my having a companion. Without previously communicating with me, he
+had, in concert with Elizabeth, arranged that Clerval should join me at
+Strasburgh. This interfered with the solitude I coveted for the prosecution of
+my task; yet at the commencement of my journey the presence of my friend could
+in no way be an impediment, and truly I rejoiced that thus I should be saved
+many hours of lonely, maddening reflection. Nay, Henry might stand between me
+and the intrusion of my foe. If I were alone, would he not at times force his
+abhorred presence on me to remind me of my task or to contemplate its progress?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To England, therefore, I was bound, and it was understood that my union with
+Elizabeth should take place immediately on my return. My father’s age rendered
+him extremely averse to delay. For myself, there was one reward I promised
+myself from my detested toils—one consolation for my unparalleled sufferings;
+it was the prospect of that day when, enfranchised from my miserable slavery, I
+might claim Elizabeth and forget the past in my union with her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I now made arrangements for my journey, but one feeling haunted me which filled
+me with fear and agitation. During my absence I should leave my friends
+unconscious of the existence of their enemy and unprotected from his attacks,
+exasperated as he might be by my departure. But he had promised to follow me
+wherever I might go, and would he not accompany me to England? This imagination
+was dreadful in itself, but soothing inasmuch as it supposed the safety of my
+friends. I was agonised with the idea of the possibility that the reverse of
+this might happen. But through the whole period during which I was the slave of
+my creature I allowed myself to be governed by the impulses of the moment; and
+my present sensations strongly intimated that the fiend would follow me and
+exempt my family from the danger of his machinations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in the latter end of September that I again quitted my native country.
+My journey had been my own suggestion, and Elizabeth therefore acquiesced, but
+she was filled with disquiet at the idea of my suffering, away from her, the
+inroads of misery and grief. It had been her care which provided me a companion
+in Clerval—and yet a man is blind to a thousand minute circumstances which call
+forth a woman’s sedulous attention. She longed to bid me hasten my return; a
+thousand conflicting emotions rendered her mute as she bade me a tearful,
+silent farewell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I threw myself into the carriage that was to convey me away, hardly knowing
+whither I was going, and careless of what was passing around. I remembered
+only, and it was with a bitter anguish that I reflected on it, to order that my
+chemical instruments should be packed to go with me. Filled with dreary
+imaginations, I passed through many beautiful and majestic scenes, but my eyes
+were fixed and unobserving. I could only think of the bourne of my travels and
+the work which was to occupy me whilst they endured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After some days spent in listless indolence, during which I traversed many
+leagues, I arrived at Strasburgh, where I waited two days for Clerval. He came.
+Alas, how great was the contrast between us! He was alive to every new scene,
+joyful when he saw the beauties of the setting sun, and more happy when he
+beheld it rise and recommence a new day. He pointed out to me the shifting
+colours of the landscape and the appearances of the sky. “This is what it is to
+live,” he cried; “now I enjoy existence! But you, my dear Frankenstein,
+wherefore are you desponding and sorrowful!” In truth, I was occupied by gloomy
+thoughts and neither saw the descent of the evening star nor the golden sunrise
+reflected in the Rhine. And you, my friend, would be far more amused with the
+journal of Clerval, who observed the scenery with an eye of feeling and
+delight, than in listening to my reflections. I, a miserable wretch, haunted by
+a curse that shut up every avenue to enjoyment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We had agreed to descend the Rhine in a boat from Strasburgh to Rotterdam,
+whence we might take shipping for London. During this voyage we passed many
+willowy islands and saw several beautiful towns. We stayed a day at Mannheim,
+and on the fifth from our departure from Strasburgh, arrived at Mainz. The
+course of the Rhine below Mainz becomes much more picturesque. The river
+descends rapidly and winds between hills, not high, but steep, and of beautiful
+forms. We saw many ruined castles standing on the edges of precipices,
+surrounded by black woods, high and inaccessible. This part of the Rhine,
+indeed, presents a singularly variegated landscape. In one spot you view rugged
+hills, ruined castles overlooking tremendous precipices, with the dark Rhine
+rushing beneath; and on the sudden turn of a promontory, flourishing vineyards
+with green sloping banks and a meandering river and populous towns occupy the
+scene.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We travelled at the time of the vintage and heard the song of the labourers as
+we glided down the stream. Even I, depressed in mind, and my spirits
+continually agitated by gloomy feelings, even I was pleased. I lay at the
+bottom of the boat, and as I gazed on the cloudless blue sky, I seemed to drink
+in a tranquillity to which I had long been a stranger. And if these were my
+sensations, who can describe those of Henry? He felt as if he had been
+transported to Fairy-land and enjoyed a happiness seldom tasted by man. “I have
+seen,” he said, “the most beautiful scenes of my own country; I have visited
+the lakes of Lucerne and Uri, where the snowy mountains descend almost
+perpendicularly to the water, casting black and impenetrable shades, which
+would cause a gloomy and mournful appearance were it not for the most verdant
+islands that relieve the eye by their gay appearance; I have seen this lake
+agitated by a tempest, when the wind tore up whirlwinds of water and gave you
+an idea of what the water-spout must be on the great ocean; and the waves dash
+with fury the base of the mountain, where the priest and his mistress were
+overwhelmed by an avalanche and where their dying voices are still said to be
+heard amid the pauses of the nightly wind; I have seen the mountains of La
+Valais, and the Pays de Vaud; but this country, Victor, pleases me more than
+all those wonders. The mountains of Switzerland are more majestic and strange,
+but there is a charm in the banks of this divine river that I never before saw
+equalled. Look at that castle which overhangs yon precipice; and that also on
+the island, almost concealed amongst the foliage of those lovely trees; and now
+that group of labourers coming from among their vines; and that village half
+hid in the recess of the mountain. Oh, surely the spirit that inhabits and
+guards this place has a soul more in harmony with man than those who pile the
+glacier or retire to the inaccessible peaks of the mountains of our own
+country.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Clerval! Beloved friend! Even now it delights me to record your words and to
+dwell on the praise of which you are so eminently deserving. He was a being
+formed in the “very poetry of nature.” His wild and enthusiastic imagination
+was chastened by the sensibility of his heart. His soul overflowed with ardent
+affections, and his friendship was of that devoted and wondrous nature that the
+worldly-minded teach us to look for only in the imagination. But even human
+sympathies were not sufficient to satisfy his eager mind. The scenery of
+external nature, which others regard only with admiration, he loved with
+ardour:—
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+——The sounding cataract<br>
+Haunted him like a passion: the tall rock,<br>
+The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,<br>
+Their colours and their forms, were then to him<br>
+An appetite; a feeling, and a love,<br>
+That had no need of a remoter charm,<br>
+By thought supplied, or any interest<br>
+Unborrow’d from the eye.<br>
+<br>
+[Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”.]
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And where does he now exist? Is this gentle and lovely being lost for ever? Has
+this mind, so replete with ideas, imaginations fanciful and magnificent, which
+formed a world, whose existence depended on the life of its creator;—has this
+mind perished? Does it now only exist in my memory? No, it is not thus; your
+form so divinely wrought, and beaming with beauty, has decayed, but your spirit
+still visits and consoles your unhappy friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pardon this gush of sorrow; these ineffectual words are but a slight tribute to
+the unexampled worth of Henry, but they soothe my heart, overflowing with the
+anguish which his remembrance creates. I will proceed with my tale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beyond Cologne we descended to the plains of Holland; and we resolved to post
+the remainder of our way, for the wind was contrary and the stream of the river
+was too gentle to aid us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our journey here lost the interest arising from beautiful scenery, but we
+arrived in a few days at Rotterdam, whence we proceeded by sea to England. It
+was on a clear morning, in the latter days of December, that I first saw the
+white cliffs of Britain. The banks of the Thames presented a new scene; they
+were flat but fertile, and almost every town was marked by the remembrance of
+some story. We saw Tilbury Fort and remembered the Spanish Armada, Gravesend,
+Woolwich, and Greenwich—places which I had heard of even in my country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At length we saw the numerous steeples of London, St. Paul’s towering above
+all, and the Tower famed in English history.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap19"></a>Chapter 19</h2>
+
+<p>
+London was our present point of rest; we determined to remain several months in
+this wonderful and celebrated city. Clerval desired the intercourse of the men
+of genius and talent who flourished at this time, but this was with me a
+secondary object; I was principally occupied with the means of obtaining the
+information necessary for the completion of my promise and quickly availed
+myself of the letters of introduction that I had brought with me, addressed to
+the most distinguished natural philosophers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If this journey had taken place during my days of study and happiness, it would
+have afforded me inexpressible pleasure. But a blight had come over my
+existence, and I only visited these people for the sake of the information they
+might give me on the subject in which my interest was so terribly profound.
+Company was irksome to me; when alone, I could fill my mind with the sights of
+heaven and earth; the voice of Henry soothed me, and I could thus cheat myself
+into a transitory peace. But busy, uninteresting, joyous faces brought back
+despair to my heart. I saw an insurmountable barrier placed between me and my
+fellow men; this barrier was sealed with the blood of William and Justine, and
+to reflect on the events connected with those names filled my soul with
+anguish.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in Clerval I saw the image of my former self; he was inquisitive and
+anxious to gain experience and instruction. The difference of manners which he
+observed was to him an inexhaustible source of instruction and amusement. He
+was also pursuing an object he had long had in view. His design was to visit
+India, in the belief that he had in his knowledge of its various languages, and
+in the views he had taken of its society, the means of materially assisting the
+progress of European colonization and trade. In Britain only could he further
+the execution of his plan. He was for ever busy, and the only check to his
+enjoyments was my sorrowful and dejected mind. I tried to conceal this as much
+as possible, that I might not debar him from the pleasures natural to one who
+was entering on a new scene of life, undisturbed by any care or bitter
+recollection. I often refused to accompany him, alleging another engagement,
+that I might remain alone. I now also began to collect the materials necessary
+for my new creation, and this was to me like the torture of single drops of
+water continually falling on the head. Every thought that was devoted to it was
+an extreme anguish, and every word that I spoke in allusion to it caused my
+lips to quiver, and my heart to palpitate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After passing some months in London, we received a letter from a person in
+Scotland who had formerly been our visitor at Geneva. He mentioned the beauties
+of his native country and asked us if those were not sufficient allurements to
+induce us to prolong our journey as far north as Perth, where he resided.
+Clerval eagerly desired to accept this invitation, and I, although I abhorred
+society, wished to view again mountains and streams and all the wondrous works
+with which Nature adorns her chosen dwelling-places.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We had arrived in England at the beginning of October, and it was now February.
+We accordingly determined to commence our journey towards the north at the
+expiration of another month. In this expedition we did not intend to follow the
+great road to Edinburgh, but to visit Windsor, Oxford, Matlock, and the
+Cumberland lakes, resolving to arrive at the completion of this tour about the
+end of July. I packed up my chemical instruments and the materials I had
+collected, resolving to finish my labours in some obscure nook in the northern
+highlands of Scotland.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We quitted London on the 27th of March and remained a few days at Windsor,
+rambling in its beautiful forest. This was a new scene to us mountaineers; the
+majestic oaks, the quantity of game, and the herds of stately deer were all
+novelties to us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From thence we proceeded to Oxford. As we entered this city, our minds were
+filled with the remembrance of the events that had been transacted there more
+than a century and a half before. It was here that Charles I. had collected his
+forces. This city had remained faithful to him, after the whole nation had
+forsaken his cause to join the standard of Parliament and liberty. The memory
+of that unfortunate king and his companions, the amiable Falkland, the insolent
+Goring, his queen, and son, gave a peculiar interest to every part of the city
+which they might be supposed to have inhabited. The spirit of elder days found
+a dwelling here, and we delighted to trace its footsteps. If these feelings had
+not found an imaginary gratification, the appearance of the city had yet in
+itself sufficient beauty to obtain our admiration. The colleges are ancient and
+picturesque; the streets are almost magnificent; and the lovely Isis, which
+flows beside it through meadows of exquisite verdure, is spread forth into a
+placid expanse of waters, which reflects its majestic assemblage of towers, and
+spires, and domes, embosomed among aged trees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I enjoyed this scene, and yet my enjoyment was embittered both by the memory of
+the past and the anticipation of the future. I was formed for peaceful
+happiness. During my youthful days discontent never visited my mind, and if I
+was ever overcome by <i>ennui</i>, the sight of what is beautiful in nature or
+the study of what is excellent and sublime in the productions of man could
+always interest my heart and communicate elasticity to my spirits. But I am a
+blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should
+survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be—a miserable spectacle of
+wrecked humanity, pitiable to others and intolerable to myself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We passed a considerable period at Oxford, rambling among its environs and
+endeavouring to identify every spot which might relate to the most animating
+epoch of English history. Our little voyages of discovery were often prolonged
+by the successive objects that presented themselves. We visited the tomb of the
+illustrious Hampden and the field on which that patriot fell. For a moment my
+soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to contemplate the
+divine ideas of liberty and self-sacrifice of which these sights were the
+monuments and the remembrancers. For an instant I dared to shake off my chains
+and look around me with a free and lofty spirit, but the iron had eaten into my
+flesh, and I sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We left Oxford with regret and proceeded to Matlock, which was our next place
+of rest. The country in the neighbourhood of this village resembled, to a
+greater degree, the scenery of Switzerland; but everything is on a lower scale,
+and the green hills want the crown of distant white Alps which always attend on
+the piny mountains of my native country. We visited the wondrous cave and the
+little cabinets of natural history, where the curiosities are disposed in the
+same manner as in the collections at Servox and Chamounix. The latter name made
+me tremble when pronounced by Henry, and I hastened to quit Matlock, with which
+that terrible scene was thus associated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From Derby, still journeying northwards, we passed two months in Cumberland and
+Westmorland. I could now almost fancy myself among the Swiss mountains. The
+little patches of snow which yet lingered on the northern sides of the
+mountains, the lakes, and the dashing of the rocky streams were all familiar
+and dear sights to me. Here also we made some acquaintances, who almost
+contrived to cheat me into happiness. The delight of Clerval was proportionably
+greater than mine; his mind expanded in the company of men of talent, and he
+found in his own nature greater capacities and resources than he could have
+imagined himself to have possessed while he associated with his inferiors. “I
+could pass my life here,” said he to me; “and among these mountains I should
+scarcely regret Switzerland and the Rhine.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he found that a traveller’s life is one that includes much pain amidst its
+enjoyments. His feelings are for ever on the stretch; and when he begins to
+sink into repose, he finds himself obliged to quit that on which he rests in
+pleasure for something new, which again engages his attention, and which also
+he forsakes for other novelties.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We had scarcely visited the various lakes of Cumberland and Westmorland and
+conceived an affection for some of the inhabitants when the period of our
+appointment with our Scotch friend approached, and we left them to travel on.
+For my own part I was not sorry. I had now neglected my promise for some time,
+and I feared the effects of the dæmon’s disappointment. He might remain in
+Switzerland and wreak his vengeance on my relatives. This idea pursued me and
+tormented me at every moment from which I might otherwise have snatched repose
+and peace. I waited for my letters with feverish impatience; if they were
+delayed I was miserable and overcome by a thousand fears; and when they arrived
+and I saw the superscription of Elizabeth or my father, I hardly dared to read
+and ascertain my fate. Sometimes I thought that the fiend followed me and might
+expedite my remissness by murdering my companion. When these thoughts possessed
+me, I would not quit Henry for a moment, but followed him as his shadow, to
+protect him from the fancied rage of his destroyer. I felt as if I had
+committed some great crime, the consciousness of which haunted me. I was
+guiltless, but I had indeed drawn down a horrible curse upon my head, as mortal
+as that of crime.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I visited Edinburgh with languid eyes and mind; and yet that city might have
+interested the most unfortunate being. Clerval did not like it so well as
+Oxford, for the antiquity of the latter city was more pleasing to him. But the
+beauty and regularity of the new town of Edinburgh, its romantic castle and its
+environs, the most delightful in the world, Arthur’s Seat, St. Bernard’s Well,
+and the Pentland Hills, compensated him for the change and filled him with
+cheerfulness and admiration. But I was impatient to arrive at the termination
+of my journey. </p>
+
+<p>
+We left Edinburgh in a week, passing through Coupar, St. Andrew’s, and along
+the banks of the Tay, to Perth, where our friend expected us. But I was in no
+mood to laugh and talk with strangers or enter into their feelings or plans
+with the good humour expected from a guest; and accordingly I told Clerval that
+I wished to make the tour of Scotland alone. “Do you,” said I, “enjoy yourself,
+and let this be our rendezvous. I may be absent a month or two; but do not
+interfere with my motions, I entreat you; leave me to peace and solitude for a
+short time; and when I return, I hope it will be with a lighter heart, more
+congenial to your own temper.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry wished to dissuade me, but seeing me bent on this plan, ceased to
+remonstrate. He entreated me to write often. “I had rather be with you,” he
+said, “in your solitary rambles, than with these Scotch people, whom I do not
+know; hasten, then, my dear friend, to return, that I may again feel myself
+somewhat at home, which I cannot do in your absence.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Having parted from my friend, I determined to visit some remote spot of
+Scotland and finish my work in solitude. I did not doubt but that the monster
+followed me and would discover himself to me when I should have finished, that
+he might receive his companion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With this resolution I traversed the northern highlands and fixed on one of the
+remotest of the Orkneys as the scene of my labours. It was a place fitted for
+such a work, being hardly more than a rock whose high sides were continually
+beaten upon by the waves. The soil was barren, scarcely affording pasture for a
+few miserable cows, and oatmeal for its inhabitants, which consisted of five
+persons, whose gaunt and scraggy limbs gave tokens of their miserable fare.
+Vegetables and bread, when they indulged in such luxuries, and even fresh
+water, was to be procured from the mainland, which was about five miles
+distant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the whole island there were but three miserable huts, and one of these was
+vacant when I arrived. This I hired. It contained but two rooms, and these
+exhibited all the squalidness of the most miserable penury. The thatch had
+fallen in, the walls were unplastered, and the door was off its hinges. I
+ordered it to be repaired, bought some furniture, and took possession, an
+incident which would doubtless have occasioned some surprise had not all the
+senses of the cottagers been benumbed by want and squalid poverty. As it was, I
+lived ungazed at and unmolested, hardly thanked for the pittance of food and
+clothes which I gave, so much does suffering blunt even the coarsest sensations
+of men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this retreat I devoted the morning to labour; but in the evening, when the
+weather permitted, I walked on the stony beach of the sea to listen to the
+waves as they roared and dashed at my feet. It was a monotonous yet
+ever-changing scene. I thought of Switzerland; it was far different from this
+desolate and appalling landscape. Its hills are covered with vines, and its
+cottages are scattered thickly in the plains. Its fair lakes reflect a blue and
+gentle sky, and when troubled by the winds, their tumult is but as the play of
+a lively infant when compared to the roarings of the giant ocean.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this manner I distributed my occupations when I first arrived, but as I
+proceeded in my labour, it became every day more horrible and irksome to me.
+Sometimes I could not prevail on myself to enter my laboratory for several
+days, and at other times I toiled day and night in order to complete my work.
+It was, indeed, a filthy process in which I was engaged. During my first
+experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my
+employment; my mind was intently fixed on the consummation of my labour, and my
+eyes were shut to the horror of my proceedings. But now I went to it in cold
+blood, and my heart often sickened at the work of my hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus situated, employed in the most detestable occupation, immersed in a
+solitude where nothing could for an instant call my attention from the actual
+scene in which I was engaged, my spirits became unequal; I grew restless and
+nervous. Every moment I feared to meet my persecutor. Sometimes I sat with my
+eyes fixed on the ground, fearing to raise them lest they should encounter the
+object which I so much dreaded to behold. I feared to wander from the sight of
+my fellow creatures lest when alone he should come to claim his companion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the mean time I worked on, and my labour was already considerably advanced.
+I looked towards its completion with a tremulous and eager hope, which I dared
+not trust myself to question but which was intermixed with obscure forebodings
+of evil that made my heart sicken in my bosom.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap20"></a>Chapter 20</h2>
+
+<p>
+I sat one evening in my laboratory; the sun had set, and the moon was just
+rising from the sea; I had not sufficient light for my employment, and I
+remained idle, in a pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labour
+for the night or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention to it. As I
+sat, a train of reflection occurred to me which led me to consider the effects
+of what I was now doing. Three years before, I was engaged in the same manner
+and had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated my heart and
+filled it for ever with the bitterest remorse. I was now about to form another
+being of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand
+times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and
+wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighbourhood of man and hide himself in
+deserts, but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a
+thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made
+before her creation. They might even hate each other; the creature who already
+lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence
+for it when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might turn
+with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he
+be again alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one
+of his own species.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even if they were to leave Europe and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet
+one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would
+be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might
+make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full
+of terror. Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon
+everlasting generations? I had before been moved by the sophisms of the being I
+had created; I had been struck senseless by his fiendish threats; but now, for
+the first time, the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to
+think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not
+hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the
+whole human race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I trembled and my heart failed within me, when, on looking up, I saw by the
+light of the moon the dæmon at the casement. A ghastly grin wrinkled his lips
+as he gazed on me, where I sat fulfilling the task which he had allotted to me.
+Yes, he had followed me in my travels; he had loitered in forests, hid himself
+in caves, or taken refuge in wide and desert heaths; and he now came to mark my
+progress and claim the fulfilment of my promise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I looked on him, his countenance expressed the utmost extent of malice and
+treachery. I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating
+another like to him, and trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on
+which I was engaged. The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future
+existence he depended for happiness, and with a howl of devilish despair and
+revenge, withdrew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I left the room, and locking the door, made a solemn vow in my own heart never
+to resume my labours; and then, with trembling steps, I sought my own
+apartment. I was alone; none were near me to dissipate the gloom and relieve me
+from the sickening oppression of the most terrible reveries.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Several hours passed, and I remained near my window gazing on the sea; it was
+almost motionless, for the winds were hushed, and all nature reposed under the
+eye of the quiet moon. A few fishing vessels alone specked the water, and now
+and then the gentle breeze wafted the sound of voices as the fishermen called
+to one another. I felt the silence, although I was hardly conscious of its
+extreme profundity, until my ear was suddenly arrested by the paddling of oars
+near the shore, and a person landed close to my house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a few minutes after, I heard the creaking of my door, as if some one
+endeavoured to open it softly. I trembled from head to foot; I felt a
+presentiment of who it was and wished to rouse one of the peasants who dwelt in
+a cottage not far from mine; but I was overcome by the sensation of
+helplessness, so often felt in frightful dreams, when you in vain endeavour to
+fly from an impending danger, and was rooted to the spot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently I heard the sound of footsteps along the passage; the door opened,
+and the wretch whom I dreaded appeared. Shutting the door, he approached me and
+said in a smothered voice,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have destroyed the work which you began; what is it that you intend? Do
+you dare to break your promise? I have endured toil and misery; I left
+Switzerland with you; I crept along the shores of the Rhine, among its willow
+islands and over the summits of its hills. I have dwelt many months in the
+heaths of England and among the deserts of Scotland. I have endured
+incalculable fatigue, and cold, and hunger; do you dare destroy my hopes?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Begone! I do break my promise; never will I create another like yourself,
+equal in deformity and wickedness.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my
+condescension. Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but
+I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You
+are my creator, but I am your master; obey!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The hour of my irresolution is past, and the period of your power is arrived.
+Your threats cannot move me to do an act of wickedness; but they confirm me in
+a determination of not creating you a companion in vice. Shall I, in cool
+blood, set loose upon the earth a dæmon whose delight is in death and
+wretchedness? Begone! I am firm, and your words will only exasperate my rage.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The monster saw my determination in my face and gnashed his teeth in the
+impotence of anger. “Shall each man,” cried he, “find a wife for his bosom, and
+each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they
+were requited by detestation and scorn. Man! You may hate, but beware! Your
+hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must
+ravish from you your happiness for ever. Are you to be happy while I grovel in
+the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions, but revenge
+remains—revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die, but first
+you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery.
+Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the
+wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of
+the injuries you inflict.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Devil, cease; and do not poison the air with these sounds of malice. I have
+declared my resolution to you, and I am no coward to bend beneath words. Leave
+me; I am inexorable.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is well. I go; but remember, I shall be with you on your wedding-night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I started forward and exclaimed, “Villain! Before you sign my death-warrant, be
+sure that you are yourself safe.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I would have seized him, but he eluded me and quitted the house with
+precipitation. In a few moments I saw him in his boat, which shot across the
+waters with an arrowy swiftness and was soon lost amidst the waves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All was again silent, but his words rang in my ears. I burned with rage to
+pursue the murderer of my peace and precipitate him into the ocean. I walked up
+and down my room hastily and perturbed, while my imagination conjured up a
+thousand images to torment and sting me. Why had I not followed him and closed
+with him in mortal strife? But I had suffered him to depart, and he had
+directed his course towards the mainland. I shuddered to think who might be the
+next victim sacrificed to his insatiate revenge. And then I thought again of
+his words—“<i>I will be with you on your wedding-night.</i>” That, then, was
+the period fixed for the fulfilment of my destiny. In that hour I should die
+and at once satisfy and extinguish his malice. The prospect did not move me to
+fear; yet when I thought of my beloved Elizabeth, of her tears and endless
+sorrow, when she should find her lover so barbarously snatched from her, tears,
+the first I had shed for many months, streamed from my eyes, and I resolved not
+to fall before my enemy without a bitter struggle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The night passed away, and the sun rose from the ocean; my feelings became
+calmer, if it may be called calmness when the violence of rage sinks into the
+depths of despair. I left the house, the horrid scene of the last night’s
+contention, and walked on the beach of the sea, which I almost regarded as an
+insuperable barrier between me and my fellow creatures; nay, a wish that such
+should prove the fact stole across me. I desired that I might pass my life on
+that barren rock, wearily, it is true, but uninterrupted by any sudden shock of
+misery. If I returned, it was to be sacrificed or to see those whom I most
+loved die under the grasp of a dæmon whom I had myself created.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I walked about the isle like a restless spectre, separated from all it loved
+and miserable in the separation. When it became noon, and the sun rose higher,
+I lay down on the grass and was overpowered by a deep sleep. I had been awake
+the whole of the preceding night, my nerves were agitated, and my eyes inflamed
+by watching and misery. The sleep into which I now sank refreshed me; and when
+I awoke, I again felt as if I belonged to a race of human beings like myself,
+and I began to reflect upon what had passed with greater composure; yet still
+the words of the fiend rang in my ears like a death-knell; they appeared like a
+dream, yet distinct and oppressive as a reality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sun had far descended, and I still sat on the shore, satisfying my
+appetite, which had become ravenous, with an oaten cake, when I saw a
+fishing-boat land close to me, and one of the men brought me a packet; it
+contained letters from Geneva, and one from Clerval entreating me to join him.
+He said that he was wearing away his time fruitlessly where he was, that
+letters from the friends he had formed in London desired his return to complete
+the negotiation they had entered into for his Indian enterprise. He could not
+any longer delay his departure; but as his journey to London might be followed,
+even sooner than he now conjectured, by his longer voyage, he entreated me to
+bestow as much of my society on him as I could spare. He besought me,
+therefore, to leave my solitary isle and to meet him at Perth, that we might
+proceed southwards together. This letter in a degree recalled me to life, and I
+determined to quit my island at the expiration of two days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet, before I departed, there was a task to perform, on which I shuddered to
+reflect; I must pack up my chemical instruments, and for that purpose I must
+enter the room which had been the scene of my odious work, and I must handle
+those utensils the sight of which was sickening to me. The next morning, at
+daybreak, I summoned sufficient courage and unlocked the door of my laboratory.
+The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered
+on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human
+being. I paused to collect myself and then entered the chamber. With trembling
+hand I conveyed the instruments out of the room, but I reflected that I ought
+not to leave the relics of my work to excite the horror and suspicion of the
+peasants; and I accordingly put them into a basket, with a great quantity of
+stones, and laying them up, determined to throw them into the sea that very
+night; and in the meantime I sat upon the beach, employed in cleaning and
+arranging my chemical apparatus. </p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing could be more complete than the alteration that had taken place in my
+feelings since the night of the appearance of the dæmon. I had before regarded
+my promise with a gloomy despair as a thing that, with whatever consequences,
+must be fulfilled; but I now felt as if a film had been taken from before my
+eyes and that I for the first time saw clearly. The idea of renewing my labours
+did not for one instant occur to me; the threat I had heard weighed on my
+thoughts, but I did not reflect that a voluntary act of mine could avert it. I
+had resolved in my own mind that to create another like the fiend I had first
+made would be an act of the basest and most atrocious selfishness, and I
+banished from my mind every thought that could lead to a different conclusion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Between two and three in the morning the moon rose; and I then, putting my
+basket aboard a little skiff, sailed out about four miles from the shore. The
+scene was perfectly solitary; a few boats were returning towards land, but I
+sailed away from them. I felt as if I was about the commission of a dreadful
+crime and avoided with shuddering anxiety any encounter with my fellow
+creatures. At one time the moon, which had before been clear, was suddenly
+overspread by a thick cloud, and I took advantage of the moment of darkness and
+cast my basket into the sea; I listened to the gurgling sound as it sank and
+then sailed away from the spot. The sky became clouded, but the air was pure,
+although chilled by the northeast breeze that was then rising. But it refreshed
+me and filled me with such agreeable sensations that I resolved to prolong my
+stay on the water, and fixing the rudder in a direct position, stretched myself
+at the bottom of the boat. Clouds hid the moon, everything was obscure, and I
+heard only the sound of the boat as its keel cut through the waves; the murmur
+lulled me, and in a short time I slept soundly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I do not know how long I remained in this situation, but when I awoke I found
+that the sun had already mounted considerably. The wind was high, and the waves
+continually threatened the safety of my little skiff. I found that the wind was
+northeast and must have driven me far from the coast from which I had embarked.
+I endeavoured to change my course but quickly found that if I again made the
+attempt the boat would be instantly filled with water. Thus situated, my only
+resource was to drive before the wind. I confess that I felt a few sensations
+of terror. I had no compass with me and was so slenderly acquainted with the
+geography of this part of the world that the sun was of little benefit to me. I
+might be driven into the wide Atlantic and feel all the tortures of starvation
+or be swallowed up in the immeasurable waters that roared and buffeted around
+me. I had already been out many hours and felt the torment of a burning thirst,
+a prelude to my other sufferings. I looked on the heavens, which were covered
+by clouds that flew before the wind, only to be replaced by others; I looked
+upon the sea; it was to be my grave. “Fiend,” I exclaimed, “your task is
+already fulfilled!” I thought of Elizabeth, of my father, and of Clerval—all
+left behind, on whom the monster might satisfy his sanguinary and merciless
+passions. This idea plunged me into a reverie so despairing and frightful that
+even now, when the scene is on the point of closing before me for ever, I
+shudder to reflect on it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some hours passed thus; but by degrees, as the sun declined towards the
+horizon, the wind died away into a gentle breeze and the sea became free from
+breakers. But these gave place to a heavy swell; I felt sick and hardly able to
+hold the rudder, when suddenly I saw a line of high land towards the south.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Almost spent, as I was, by fatigue and the dreadful suspense I endured for
+several hours, this sudden certainty of life rushed like a flood of warm joy to
+my heart, and tears gushed from my eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of
+life even in the excess of misery! I constructed another sail with a part of my
+dress and eagerly steered my course towards the land. It had a wild and rocky
+appearance, but as I approached nearer I easily perceived the traces of
+cultivation. I saw vessels near the shore and found myself suddenly transported
+back to the neighbourhood of civilised man. I carefully traced the windings of
+the land and hailed a steeple which I at length saw issuing from behind a small
+promontory. As I was in a state of extreme debility, I resolved to sail
+directly towards the town, as a place where I could most easily procure
+nourishment. Fortunately I had money with me. As I turned the promontory I
+perceived a small neat town and a good harbour, which I entered, my heart
+bounding with joy at my unexpected escape.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I was occupied in fixing the boat and arranging the sails, several people
+crowded towards the spot. They seemed much surprised at my appearance, but
+instead of offering me any assistance, whispered together with gestures that at
+any other time might have produced in me a slight sensation of alarm. As it
+was, I merely remarked that they spoke English, and I therefore addressed them
+in that language. “My good friends,” said I, “will you be so kind as to tell me
+the name of this town and inform me where I am?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You will know that soon enough,” replied a man with a hoarse voice. “Maybe you
+are come to a place that will not prove much to your taste, but you will not be
+consulted as to your quarters, I promise you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was exceedingly surprised on receiving so rude an answer from a stranger, and
+I was also disconcerted on perceiving the frowning and angry countenances of
+his companions. “Why do you answer me so roughly?” I replied. “Surely it is not
+the custom of Englishmen to receive strangers so inhospitably.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do not know,” said the man, “what the custom of the English may be, but it
+is the custom of the Irish to hate villains.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While this strange dialogue continued, I perceived the crowd rapidly increase.
+Their faces expressed a mixture of curiosity and anger, which annoyed and in
+some degree alarmed me. I inquired the way to the inn, but no one replied. I
+then moved forward, and a murmuring sound arose from the crowd as they followed
+and surrounded me, when an ill-looking man approaching tapped me on the
+shoulder and said, “Come, sir, you must follow me to Mr. Kirwin’s to give an
+account of yourself.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who is Mr. Kirwin? Why am I to give an account of myself? Is not this a free
+country?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ay, sir, free enough for honest folks. Mr. Kirwin is a magistrate, and you are
+to give an account of the death of a gentleman who was found murdered here last
+night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This answer startled me, but I presently recovered myself. I was innocent; that
+could easily be proved; accordingly I followed my conductor in silence and was
+led to one of the best houses in the town. I was ready to sink from fatigue and
+hunger, but being surrounded by a crowd, I thought it politic to rouse all my
+strength, that no physical debility might be construed into apprehension or
+conscious guilt. Little did I then expect the calamity that was in a few
+moments to overwhelm me and extinguish in horror and despair all fear of
+ignominy or death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I must pause here, for it requires all my fortitude to recall the memory of the
+frightful events which I am about to relate, in proper detail, to my
+recollection.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap21"></a>Chapter 21</h2>
+
+<p>
+I was soon introduced into the presence of the magistrate, an old benevolent
+man with calm and mild manners. He looked upon me, however, with some degree of
+severity, and then, turning towards my conductors, he asked who appeared as
+witnesses on this occasion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About half a dozen men came forward; and, one being selected by the magistrate,
+he deposed that he had been out fishing the night before with his son and
+brother-in-law, Daniel Nugent, when, about ten o’clock, they observed a strong
+northerly blast rising, and they accordingly put in for port. It was a very
+dark night, as the moon had not yet risen; they did not land at the harbour,
+but, as they had been accustomed, at a creek about two miles below. He walked
+on first, carrying a part of the fishing tackle, and his companions followed
+him at some distance. As he was proceeding along the sands, he struck his foot
+against something and fell at his length on the ground. His companions came up
+to assist him, and by the light of their lantern they found that he had fallen
+on the body of a man, who was to all appearance dead. Their first supposition
+was that it was the corpse of some person who had been drowned and was thrown
+on shore by the waves, but on examination they found that the clothes were not
+wet and even that the body was not then cold. They instantly carried it to the
+cottage of an old woman near the spot and endeavoured, but in vain, to restore
+it to life. It appeared to be a handsome young man, about five and twenty years
+of age. He had apparently been strangled, for there was no sign of any violence
+except the black mark of fingers on his neck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first part of this deposition did not in the least interest me, but when
+the mark of the fingers was mentioned I remembered the murder of my brother and
+felt myself extremely agitated; my limbs trembled, and a mist came over my
+eyes, which obliged me to lean on a chair for support. The magistrate observed
+me with a keen eye and of course drew an unfavourable augury from my manner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The son confirmed his father’s account, but when Daniel Nugent was called he
+swore positively that just before the fall of his companion, he saw a boat,
+with a single man in it, at a short distance from the shore; and as far as he
+could judge by the light of a few stars, it was the same boat in which I had
+just landed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A woman deposed that she lived near the beach and was standing at the door of
+her cottage, waiting for the return of the fishermen, about an hour before she
+heard of the discovery of the body, when she saw a boat with only one man in it
+push off from that part of the shore where the corpse was afterwards found.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another woman confirmed the account of the fishermen having brought the body
+into her house; it was not cold. They put it into a bed and rubbed it, and
+Daniel went to the town for an apothecary, but life was quite gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Several other men were examined concerning my landing, and they agreed that,
+with the strong north wind that had arisen during the night, it was very
+probable that I had beaten about for many hours and had been obliged to return
+nearly to the same spot from which I had departed. Besides, they observed that
+it appeared that I had brought the body from another place, and it was likely
+that as I did not appear to know the shore, I might have put into the harbour
+ignorant of the distance of the town of —— from the place where I had deposited
+the corpse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Kirwin, on hearing this evidence, desired that I should be taken into the
+room where the body lay for interment, that it might be observed what effect
+the sight of it would produce upon me. This idea was probably suggested by the
+extreme agitation I had exhibited when the mode of the murder had been
+described. I was accordingly conducted, by the magistrate and several other
+persons, to the inn. I could not help being struck by the strange coincidences
+that had taken place during this eventful night; but, knowing that I had been
+conversing with several persons in the island I had inhabited about the time
+that the body had been found, I was perfectly tranquil as to the consequences
+of the affair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I entered the room where the corpse lay and was led up to the coffin. How can I
+describe my sensations on beholding it? I feel yet parched with horror, nor can
+I reflect on that terrible moment without shuddering and agony. The
+examination, the presence of the magistrate and witnesses, passed like a dream
+from my memory when I saw the lifeless form of Henry Clerval stretched before
+me. I gasped for breath, and throwing myself on the body, I exclaimed, “Have my
+murderous machinations deprived you also, my dearest Henry, of life? Two I have
+already destroyed; other victims await their destiny; but you, Clerval, my
+friend, my benefactor—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The human frame could no longer support the agonies that I endured, and I was
+carried out of the room in strong convulsions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A fever succeeded to this. I lay for two months on the point of death; my
+ravings, as I afterwards heard, were frightful; I called myself the murderer of
+William, of Justine, and of Clerval. Sometimes I entreated my attendants to
+assist me in the destruction of the fiend by whom I was tormented; and at
+others I felt the fingers of the monster already grasping my neck, and screamed
+aloud with agony and terror. Fortunately, as I spoke my native language, Mr.
+Kirwin alone understood me; but my gestures and bitter cries were sufficient to
+affright the other witnesses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Why did I not die? More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink
+into forgetfulness and rest? Death snatches away many blooming children, the
+only hopes of their doting parents; how many brides and youthful lovers have
+been one day in the bloom of health and hope, and the next a prey for worms and
+the decay of the tomb! Of what materials was I made that I could thus resist so
+many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the
+torture?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I was doomed to live and in two months found myself as awaking from a
+dream, in a prison, stretched on a wretched bed, surrounded by gaolers,
+turnkeys, bolts, and all the miserable apparatus of a dungeon. It was morning,
+I remember, when I thus awoke to understanding; I had forgotten the particulars
+of what had happened and only felt as if some great misfortune had suddenly
+overwhelmed me; but when I looked around and saw the barred windows and the
+squalidness of the room in which I was, all flashed across my memory and I
+groaned bitterly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This sound disturbed an old woman who was sleeping in a chair beside me. She
+was a hired nurse, the wife of one of the turnkeys, and her countenance
+expressed all those bad qualities which often characterise that class. The
+lines of her face were hard and rude, like that of persons accustomed to see
+without sympathising in sights of misery. Her tone expressed her entire
+indifference; she addressed me in English, and the voice struck me as one that
+I had heard during my sufferings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you better now, sir?” said she.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I replied in the same language, with a feeble voice, “I believe I am; but if it
+be all true, if indeed I did not dream, I am sorry that I am still alive to
+feel this misery and horror.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For that matter,” replied the old woman, “if you mean about the gentleman you
+murdered, I believe that it were better for you if you were dead, for I fancy
+it will go hard with you! However, that’s none of my business; I am sent to
+nurse you and get you well; I do my duty with a safe conscience; it were well
+if everybody did the same.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I turned with loathing from the woman who could utter so unfeeling a speech to
+a person just saved, on the very edge of death; but I felt languid and unable
+to reflect on all that had passed. The whole series of my life appeared to me
+as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never
+presented itself to my mind with the force of reality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the images that floated before me became more distinct, I grew feverish; a
+darkness pressed around me; no one was near me who soothed me with the gentle
+voice of love; no dear hand supported me. The physician came and prescribed
+medicines, and the old woman prepared them for me; but utter carelessness was
+visible in the first, and the expression of brutality was strongly marked in
+the visage of the second. Who could be interested in the fate of a murderer but
+the hangman who would gain his fee?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These were my first reflections, but I soon learned that Mr. Kirwin had shown
+me extreme kindness. He had caused the best room in the prison to be prepared
+for me (wretched indeed was the best); and it was he who had provided a
+physician and a nurse. It is true, he seldom came to see me, for although he
+ardently desired to relieve the sufferings of every human creature, he did not
+wish to be present at the agonies and miserable ravings of a murderer. He came,
+therefore, sometimes to see that I was not neglected, but his visits were short
+and with long intervals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day, while I was gradually recovering, I was seated in a chair, my eyes
+half open and my cheeks livid like those in death. I was overcome by gloom and
+misery and often reflected I had better seek death than desire to remain in a
+world which to me was replete with wretchedness. At one time I considered
+whether I should not declare myself guilty and suffer the penalty of the law,
+less innocent than poor Justine had been. Such were my thoughts when the door
+of my apartment was opened and Mr. Kirwin entered. His countenance expressed
+sympathy and compassion; he drew a chair close to mine and addressed me in
+French,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I fear that this place is very shocking to you; can I do anything to make you
+more comfortable?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thank you, but all that you mention is nothing to me; on the whole earth
+there is no comfort which I am capable of receiving.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know that the sympathy of a stranger can be but of little relief to one
+borne down as you are by so strange a misfortune. But you will, I hope, soon
+quit this melancholy abode, for doubtless evidence can easily be brought to
+free you from the criminal charge.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That is my least concern; I am, by a course of strange events, become the most
+miserable of mortals. Persecuted and tortured as I am and have been, can death
+be any evil to me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing indeed could be more unfortunate and agonising than the strange
+chances that have lately occurred. You were thrown, by some surprising
+accident, on this shore, renowned for its hospitality, seized immediately, and
+charged with murder. The first sight that was presented to your eyes was the
+body of your friend, murdered in so unaccountable a manner and placed, as it
+were, by some fiend across your path.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Mr. Kirwin said this, notwithstanding the agitation I endured on this
+retrospect of my sufferings, I also felt considerable surprise at the knowledge
+he seemed to possess concerning me. I suppose some astonishment was exhibited
+in my countenance, for Mr. Kirwin hastened to say,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Immediately upon your being taken ill, all the papers that were on your person
+were brought me, and I examined them that I might discover some trace by which
+I could send to your relations an account of your misfortune and illness. I
+found several letters, and, among others, one which I discovered from its
+commencement to be from your father. I instantly wrote to Geneva; nearly two
+months have elapsed since the departure of my letter. But you are ill; even now
+you tremble; you are unfit for agitation of any kind.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This suspense is a thousand times worse than the most horrible event; tell me
+what new scene of death has been acted, and whose murder I am now to lament?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your family is perfectly well,” said Mr. Kirwin with gentleness; “and someone,
+a friend, is come to visit you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I know not by what chain of thought the idea presented itself, but it instantly
+darted into my mind that the murderer had come to mock at my misery and taunt
+me with the death of Clerval, as a new incitement for me to comply with his
+hellish desires. I put my hand before my eyes, and cried out in agony,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! Take him away! I cannot see him; for God’s sake, do not let him enter!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Kirwin regarded me with a troubled countenance. He could not help regarding
+my exclamation as a presumption of my guilt and said in rather a severe tone,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I should have thought, young man, that the presence of your father would have
+been welcome instead of inspiring such violent repugnance.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My father!” cried I, while every feature and every muscle was relaxed from
+anguish to pleasure. “Is my father indeed come? How kind, how very kind! But
+where is he, why does he not hasten to me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My change of manner surprised and pleased the magistrate; perhaps he thought
+that my former exclamation was a momentary return of delirium, and now he
+instantly resumed his former benevolence. He rose and quitted the room with my
+nurse, and in a moment my father entered it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing, at this moment, could have given me greater pleasure than the arrival
+of my father. I stretched out my hand to him and cried,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you then safe—and Elizabeth—and Ernest?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My father calmed me with assurances of their welfare and endeavoured, by
+dwelling on these subjects so interesting to my heart, to raise my desponding
+spirits; but he soon felt that a prison cannot be the abode of cheerfulness.
+“What a place is this that you inhabit, my son!” said he, looking mournfully at
+the barred windows and wretched appearance of the room. “You travelled to seek
+happiness, but a fatality seems to pursue you. And poor Clerval—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The name of my unfortunate and murdered friend was an agitation too great to be
+endured in my weak state; I shed tears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Alas! Yes, my father,” replied I; “some destiny of the most horrible kind
+hangs over me, and I must live to fulfil it, or surely I should have died on
+the coffin of Henry.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We were not allowed to converse for any length of time, for the precarious
+state of my health rendered every precaution necessary that could ensure
+tranquillity. Mr. Kirwin came in and insisted that my strength should not be
+exhausted by too much exertion. But the appearance of my father was to me like
+that of my good angel, and I gradually recovered my health.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As my sickness quitted me, I was absorbed by a gloomy and black melancholy that
+nothing could dissipate. The image of Clerval was for ever before me, ghastly
+and murdered. More than once the agitation into which these reflections threw
+me made my friends dread a dangerous relapse. Alas! Why did they preserve so
+miserable and detested a life? It was surely that I might fulfil my destiny,
+which is now drawing to a close. Soon, oh, very soon, will death extinguish
+these throbbings and relieve me from the mighty weight of anguish that bears me
+to the dust; and, in executing the award of justice, I shall also sink to rest.
+Then the appearance of death was distant, although the wish was ever present to
+my thoughts; and I often sat for hours motionless and speechless, wishing for
+some mighty revolution that might bury me and my destroyer in its ruins.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The season of the assizes approached. I had already been three months in
+prison, and although I was still weak and in continual danger of a relapse, I
+was obliged to travel nearly a hundred miles to the country town where the
+court was held. Mr. Kirwin charged himself with every care of collecting
+witnesses and arranging my defence. I was spared the disgrace of appearing
+publicly as a criminal, as the case was not brought before the court that
+decides on life and death. The grand jury rejected the bill, on its being
+proved that I was on the Orkney Islands at the hour the body of my friend was
+found; and a fortnight after my removal I was liberated from prison.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My father was enraptured on finding me freed from the vexations of a criminal
+charge, that I was again allowed to breathe the fresh atmosphere and permitted
+to return to my native country. I did not participate in these feelings, for to
+me the walls of a dungeon or a palace were alike hateful. The cup of life was
+poisoned for ever, and although the sun shone upon me, as upon the happy and
+gay of heart, I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness,
+penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me.
+Sometimes they were the expressive eyes of Henry, languishing in death, the
+dark orbs nearly covered by the lids and the long black lashes that fringed
+them; sometimes it was the watery, clouded eyes of the monster, as I first saw
+them in my chamber at Ingolstadt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My father tried to awaken in me the feelings of affection. He talked of Geneva,
+which I should soon visit, of Elizabeth and Ernest; but these words only drew
+deep groans from me. Sometimes, indeed, I felt a wish for happiness and thought
+with melancholy delight of my beloved cousin or longed, with a devouring
+<i>maladie du pays</i>, to see once more the blue lake and rapid Rhone, that
+had been so dear to me in early childhood; but my general state of feeling was
+a torpor in which a prison was as welcome a residence as the divinest scene in
+nature; and these fits were seldom interrupted but by paroxysms of anguish and
+despair. At these moments I often endeavoured to put an end to the existence I
+loathed, and it required unceasing attendance and vigilance to restrain me from
+committing some dreadful act of violence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet one duty remained to me, the recollection of which finally triumphed over
+my selfish despair. It was necessary that I should return without delay to
+Geneva, there to watch over the lives of those I so fondly loved and to lie in
+wait for the murderer, that if any chance led me to the place of his
+concealment, or if he dared again to blast me by his presence, I might, with
+unfailing aim, put an end to the existence of the monstrous image which I had
+endued with the mockery of a soul still more monstrous. My father still desired
+to delay our departure, fearful that I could not sustain the fatigues of a
+journey, for I was a shattered wreck—the shadow of a human being. My strength
+was gone. I was a mere skeleton, and fever night and day preyed upon my wasted
+frame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still, as I urged our leaving Ireland with such inquietude and impatience, my
+father thought it best to yield. We took our passage on board a vessel bound
+for Havre-de-Grace and sailed with a fair wind from the Irish shores. It was
+midnight. I lay on the deck looking at the stars and listening to the dashing
+of the waves. I hailed the darkness that shut Ireland from my sight, and my
+pulse beat with a feverish joy when I reflected that I should soon see Geneva.
+The past appeared to me in the light of a frightful dream; yet the vessel in
+which I was, the wind that blew me from the detested shore of Ireland, and the
+sea which surrounded me, told me too forcibly that I was deceived by no vision
+and that Clerval, my friend and dearest companion, had fallen a victim to me
+and the monster of my creation. I repassed, in my memory, my whole life; my
+quiet happiness while residing with my family in Geneva, the death of my
+mother, and my departure for Ingolstadt. I remembered, shuddering, the mad
+enthusiasm that hurried me on to the creation of my hideous enemy, and I called
+to mind the night in which he first lived. I was unable to pursue the train of
+thought; a thousand feelings pressed upon me, and I wept bitterly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ever since my recovery from the fever, I had been in the custom of taking every
+night a small quantity of laudanum, for it was by means of this drug only that
+I was enabled to gain the rest necessary for the preservation of life.
+Oppressed by the recollection of my various misfortunes, I now swallowed double
+my usual quantity and soon slept profoundly. But sleep did not afford me
+respite from thought and misery; my dreams presented a thousand objects that
+scared me. Towards morning I was possessed by a kind of nightmare; I felt the
+fiend’s grasp in my neck and could not free myself from it; groans and cries
+rang in my ears. My father, who was watching over me, perceiving my
+restlessness, awoke me; the dashing waves were around, the cloudy sky above,
+the fiend was not here: a sense of security, a feeling that a truce was
+established between the present hour and the irresistible, disastrous future
+imparted to me a kind of calm forgetfulness, of which the human mind is by its
+structure peculiarly susceptible.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap22"></a>Chapter 22</h2>
+
+<p>
+The voyage came to an end. We landed, and proceeded to Paris. I soon found that
+I had overtaxed my strength and that I must repose before I could continue my
+journey. My father’s care and attentions were indefatigable, but he did not
+know the origin of my sufferings and sought erroneous methods to remedy the
+incurable ill. He wished me to seek amusement in society. I abhorred the face
+of man. Oh, not abhorred! They were my brethren, my fellow beings, and I felt
+attracted even to the most repulsive among them, as to creatures of an angelic
+nature and celestial mechanism. But I felt that I had no right to share their
+intercourse. I had unchained an enemy among them whose joy it was to shed their
+blood and to revel in their groans. How they would, each and all, abhor me and
+hunt me from the world, did they know my unhallowed acts and the crimes which
+had their source in me!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My father yielded at length to my desire to avoid society and strove by various
+arguments to banish my despair. Sometimes he thought that I felt deeply the
+degradation of being obliged to answer a charge of murder, and he endeavoured
+to prove to me the futility of pride.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Alas! My father,” said I, “how little do you know me. Human beings, their
+feelings and passions, would indeed be degraded if such a wretch as I felt
+pride. Justine, poor unhappy Justine, was as innocent as I, and she suffered
+the same charge; she died for it; and I am the cause of this—I murdered her.
+William, Justine, and Henry—they all died by my hands.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My father had often, during my imprisonment, heard me make the same assertion;
+when I thus accused myself, he sometimes seemed to desire an explanation, and
+at others he appeared to consider it as the offspring of delirium, and that,
+during my illness, some idea of this kind had presented itself to my
+imagination, the remembrance of which I preserved in my convalescence. I
+avoided explanation and maintained a continual silence concerning the wretch I
+had created. I had a persuasion that I should be supposed mad, and this in
+itself would for ever have chained my tongue. But, besides, I could not bring
+myself to disclose a secret which would fill my hearer with consternation and
+make fear and unnatural horror the inmates of his breast. I checked, therefore,
+my impatient thirst for sympathy and was silent when I would have given the
+world to have confided the fatal secret. Yet, still, words like those I have
+recorded would burst uncontrollably from me. I could offer no explanation of
+them, but their truth in part relieved the burden of my mysterious woe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon this occasion my father said, with an expression of unbounded wonder, “My
+dearest Victor, what infatuation is this? My dear son, I entreat you never to
+make such an assertion again.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am not mad,” I cried energetically; “the sun and the heavens, who have
+viewed my operations, can bear witness of my truth. I am the assassin of those
+most innocent victims; they died by my machinations. A thousand times would I
+have shed my own blood, drop by drop, to have saved their lives; but I could
+not, my father, indeed I could not sacrifice the whole human race.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The conclusion of this speech convinced my father that my ideas were deranged,
+and he instantly changed the subject of our conversation and endeavoured to
+alter the course of my thoughts. He wished as much as possible to obliterate
+the memory of the scenes that had taken place in Ireland and never alluded to
+them or suffered me to speak of my misfortunes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As time passed away I became more calm; misery had her dwelling in my heart,
+but I no longer talked in the same incoherent manner of my own crimes;
+sufficient for me was the consciousness of them. By the utmost self-violence I
+curbed the imperious voice of wretchedness, which sometimes desired to declare
+itself to the whole world, and my manners were calmer and more composed than
+they had ever been since my journey to the sea of ice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A few days before we left Paris on our way to Switzerland, I received the
+following letter from Elizabeth:
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+“My dear Friend,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It gave me the greatest pleasure to receive a letter from my uncle dated at
+Paris; you are no longer at a formidable distance, and I may hope to see you in
+less than a fortnight. My poor cousin, how much you must have suffered! I
+expect to see you looking even more ill than when you quitted Geneva. This
+winter has been passed most miserably, tortured as I have been by anxious
+suspense; yet I hope to see peace in your countenance and to find that your
+heart is not totally void of comfort and tranquillity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yet I fear that the same feelings now exist that made you so miserable a year
+ago, even perhaps augmented by time. I would not disturb you at this period,
+when so many misfortunes weigh upon you, but a conversation that I had with my
+uncle previous to his departure renders some explanation necessary before we
+meet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Explanation! You may possibly say, What can Elizabeth have to explain? If you
+really say this, my questions are answered and all my doubts satisfied. But you
+are distant from me, and it is possible that you may dread and yet be pleased
+with this explanation; and in a probability of this being the case, I dare not
+any longer postpone writing what, during your absence, I have often wished to
+express to you but have never had the courage to begin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You well know, Victor, that our union had been the favourite plan of your
+parents ever since our infancy. We were told this when young, and taught to
+look forward to it as an event that would certainly take place. We were
+affectionate playfellows during childhood, and, I believe, dear and valued
+friends to one another as we grew older. But as brother and sister often
+entertain a lively affection towards each other without desiring a more
+intimate union, may not such also be our case? Tell me, dearest Victor. Answer
+me, I conjure you by our mutual happiness, with simple truth—Do you not love
+another?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have travelled; you have spent several years of your life at Ingolstadt;
+and I confess to you, my friend, that when I saw you last autumn so unhappy,
+flying to solitude from the society of every creature, I could not help
+supposing that you might regret our connection and believe yourself bound in
+honour to fulfil the wishes of your parents, although they opposed themselves
+to your inclinations. But this is false reasoning. I confess to you, my friend,
+that I love you and that in my airy dreams of futurity you have been my
+constant friend and companion. But it is your happiness I desire as well as my
+own when I declare to you that our marriage would render me eternally miserable
+unless it were the dictate of your own free choice. Even now I weep to think
+that, borne down as you are by the cruellest misfortunes, you may stifle, by
+the word <i>honour</i>, all hope of that love and happiness which would alone
+restore you to yourself. I, who have so disinterested an affection for you, may
+increase your miseries tenfold by being an obstacle to your wishes. Ah! Victor,
+be assured that your cousin and playmate has too sincere a love for you not to
+be made miserable by this supposition. Be happy, my friend; and if you obey me
+in this one request, remain satisfied that nothing on earth will have the power
+to interrupt my tranquillity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do not let this letter disturb you; do not answer tomorrow, or the next day,
+or even until you come, if it will give you pain. My uncle will send me news of
+your health, and if I see but one smile on your lips when we meet, occasioned
+by this or any other exertion of mine, I shall need no other happiness.
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+“Elizabeth Lavenza.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+“Geneva, May 18th, 17—”<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This letter revived in my memory what I had before forgotten, the threat of the
+fiend—“<i>I will be with you on your wedding-night!</i>” Such was my sentence,
+and on that night would the dæmon employ every art to destroy me and tear me
+from the glimpse of happiness which promised partly to console my sufferings.
+On that night he had determined to consummate his crimes by my death. Well, be
+it so; a deadly struggle would then assuredly take place, in which if he were
+victorious I should be at peace and his power over me be at an end. If he were
+vanquished, I should be a free man. Alas! What freedom? Such as the peasant
+enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt,
+his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, penniless, and alone,
+but free. Such would be my liberty except that in my Elizabeth I possessed a
+treasure, alas, balanced by those horrors of remorse and guilt which would
+pursue me until death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sweet and beloved Elizabeth! I read and reread her letter, and some softened
+feelings stole into my heart and dared to whisper paradisiacal dreams of love
+and joy; but the apple was already eaten, and the angel’s arm bared to drive me
+from all hope. Yet I would die to make her happy. If the monster executed his
+threat, death was inevitable; yet, again, I considered whether my marriage
+would hasten my fate. My destruction might indeed arrive a few months sooner,
+but if my torturer should suspect that I postponed it, influenced by his
+menaces, he would surely find other and perhaps more dreadful means of revenge.
+He had vowed <i>to be with me on my wedding-night</i>, yet he did not consider
+that threat as binding him to peace in the meantime, for as if to show me that
+he was not yet satiated with blood, he had murdered Clerval immediately after
+the enunciation of his threats. I resolved, therefore, that if my immediate
+union with my cousin would conduce either to hers or my father’s happiness, my
+adversary’s designs against my life should not retard it a single hour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this state of mind I wrote to Elizabeth. My letter was calm and
+affectionate. “I fear, my beloved girl,” I said, “little happiness remains for
+us on earth; yet all that I may one day enjoy is centred in you. Chase away
+your idle fears; to you alone do I consecrate my life and my endeavours for
+contentment. I have one secret, Elizabeth, a dreadful one; when revealed to
+you, it will chill your frame with horror, and then, far from being surprised
+at my misery, you will only wonder that I survive what I have endured. I will
+confide this tale of misery and terror to you the day after our marriage shall
+take place, for, my sweet cousin, there must be perfect confidence between us.
+But until then, I conjure you, do not mention or allude to it. This I most
+earnestly entreat, and I know you will comply.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In about a week after the arrival of Elizabeth’s letter we returned to Geneva.
+The sweet girl welcomed me with warm affection, yet tears were in her eyes as
+she beheld my emaciated frame and feverish cheeks. I saw a change in her also.
+She was thinner and had lost much of that heavenly vivacity that had before
+charmed me; but her gentleness and soft looks of compassion made her a more fit
+companion for one blasted and miserable as I was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tranquillity which I now enjoyed did not endure. Memory brought madness
+with it, and when I thought of what had passed, a real insanity possessed me;
+sometimes I was furious and burnt with rage, sometimes low and despondent. I
+neither spoke nor looked at anyone, but sat motionless, bewildered by the
+multitude of miseries that overcame me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Elizabeth alone had the power to draw me from these fits; her gentle voice
+would soothe me when transported by passion and inspire me with human feelings
+when sunk in torpor. She wept with me and for me. When reason returned, she
+would remonstrate and endeavour to inspire me with resignation. Ah! It is well
+for the unfortunate to be resigned, but for the guilty there is no peace. The
+agonies of remorse poison the luxury there is otherwise sometimes found in
+indulging the excess of grief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soon after my arrival my father spoke of my immediate marriage with Elizabeth.
+I remained silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you, then, some other attachment?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“None on earth. I love Elizabeth and look forward to our union with delight.
+Let the day therefore be fixed; and on it I will consecrate myself, in life or
+death, to the happiness of my cousin.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear Victor, do not speak thus. Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let
+us only cling closer to what remains and transfer our love for those whom we
+have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small but bound close by
+the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened
+your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of
+whom we have been so cruelly deprived.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such were the lessons of my father. But to me the remembrance of the threat
+returned; nor can you wonder that, omnipotent as the fiend had yet been in his
+deeds of blood, I should almost regard him as invincible, and that when he had
+pronounced the words “<i>I shall be with you on your wedding-night</i>,” I
+should regard the threatened fate as unavoidable. But death was no evil to me
+if the loss of Elizabeth were balanced with it, and I therefore, with a
+contented and even cheerful countenance, agreed with my father that if my
+cousin would consent, the ceremony should take place in ten days, and thus put,
+as I imagined, the seal to my fate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Great God! If for one instant I had thought what might be the hellish intention
+of my fiendish adversary, I would rather have banished myself for ever from my
+native country and wandered a friendless outcast over the earth than have
+consented to this miserable marriage. But, as if possessed of magic powers, the
+monster had blinded me to his real intentions; and when I thought that I had
+prepared only my own death, I hastened that of a far dearer victim.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the period fixed for our marriage drew nearer, whether from cowardice or a
+prophetic feeling, I felt my heart sink within me. But I concealed my feelings
+by an appearance of hilarity that brought smiles and joy to the countenance of
+my father, but hardly deceived the ever-watchful and nicer eye of Elizabeth.
+She looked forward to our union with placid contentment, not unmingled with a
+little fear, which past misfortunes had impressed, that what now appeared
+certain and tangible happiness might soon dissipate into an airy dream and
+leave no trace but deep and everlasting regret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Preparations were made for the event, congratulatory visits were received, and
+all wore a smiling appearance. I shut up, as well as I could, in my own heart
+the anxiety that preyed there and entered with seeming earnestness into the
+plans of my father, although they might only serve as the decorations of my
+tragedy. Through my father’s exertions a part of the inheritance of Elizabeth
+had been restored to her by the Austrian government. A small possession on the
+shores of Como belonged to her. It was agreed that, immediately after our
+union, we should proceed to Villa Lavenza and spend our first days of happiness
+beside the beautiful lake near which it stood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime I took every precaution to defend my person in case the fiend
+should openly attack me. I carried pistols and a dagger constantly about me and
+was ever on the watch to prevent artifice, and by these means gained a greater
+degree of tranquillity. Indeed, as the period approached, the threat appeared
+more as a delusion, not to be regarded as worthy to disturb my peace, while the
+happiness I hoped for in my marriage wore a greater appearance of certainty as
+the day fixed for its solemnisation drew nearer and I heard it continually
+spoken of as an occurrence which no accident could possibly prevent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Elizabeth seemed happy; my tranquil demeanour contributed greatly to calm her
+mind. But on the day that was to fulfil my wishes and my destiny, she was
+melancholy, and a presentiment of evil pervaded her; and perhaps also she
+thought of the dreadful secret which I had promised to reveal to her on the
+following day. My father was in the meantime overjoyed, and, in the bustle of
+preparation, only recognised in the melancholy of his niece the diffidence of a
+bride.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the ceremony was performed a large party assembled at my father’s, but it
+was agreed that Elizabeth and I should commence our journey by water, sleeping
+that night at Evian and continuing our voyage on the following day. The day was
+fair, the wind favourable; all smiled on our nuptial embarkation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those were the last moments of my life during which I enjoyed the feeling of
+happiness. We passed rapidly along; the sun was hot, but we were sheltered from
+its rays by a kind of canopy while we enjoyed the beauty of the scene,
+sometimes on one side of the lake, where we saw Mont Salêve, the pleasant banks
+of Montalègre, and at a distance, surmounting all, the beautiful Mont Blanc,
+and the assemblage of snowy mountains that in vain endeavour to emulate her;
+sometimes coasting the opposite banks, we saw the mighty Jura opposing its dark
+side to the ambition that would quit its native country, and an almost
+insurmountable barrier to the invader who should wish to enslave it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I took the hand of Elizabeth. “You are sorrowful, my love. Ah! If you knew what
+I have suffered and what I may yet endure, you would endeavour to let me taste
+the quiet and freedom from despair that this one day at least permits me to
+enjoy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Be happy, my dear Victor,” replied Elizabeth; “there is, I hope, nothing to
+distress you; and be assured that if a lively joy is not painted in my face, my
+heart is contented. Something whispers to me not to depend too much on the
+prospect that is opened before us, but I will not listen to such a sinister
+voice. Observe how fast we move along and how the clouds, which sometimes
+obscure and sometimes rise above the dome of Mont Blanc, render this scene of
+beauty still more interesting. Look also at the innumerable fish that are
+swimming in the clear waters, where we can distinguish every pebble that lies
+at the bottom. What a divine day! How happy and serene all nature appears!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus Elizabeth endeavoured to divert her thoughts and mine from all reflection
+upon melancholy subjects. But her temper was fluctuating; joy for a few
+instants shone in her eyes, but it continually gave place to distraction and
+reverie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sun sank lower in the heavens; we passed the river Drance and observed its
+path through the chasms of the higher and the glens of the lower hills. The
+Alps here come closer to the lake, and we approached the amphitheatre of
+mountains which forms its eastern boundary. The spire of Evian shone under the
+woods that surrounded it and the range of mountain above mountain by which it
+was overhung.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wind, which had hitherto carried us along with amazing rapidity, sank at
+sunset to a light breeze; the soft air just ruffled the water and caused a
+pleasant motion among the trees as we approached the shore, from which it
+wafted the most delightful scent of flowers and hay. The sun sank beneath the
+horizon as we landed, and as I touched the shore I felt those cares and fears
+revive which soon were to clasp me and cling to me for ever.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap23"></a>Chapter 23</h2>
+
+<p>
+It was eight o’clock when we landed; we walked for a short time on the shore,
+enjoying the transitory light, and then retired to the inn and contemplated the
+lovely scene of waters, woods, and mountains, obscured in darkness, yet still
+displaying their black outlines.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wind, which had fallen in the south, now rose with great violence in the
+west. The moon had reached her summit in the heavens and was beginning to
+descend; the clouds swept across it swifter than the flight of the vulture and
+dimmed her rays, while the lake reflected the scene of the busy heavens,
+rendered still busier by the restless waves that were beginning to rise.
+Suddenly a heavy storm of rain descended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had been calm during the day, but so soon as night obscured the shapes of
+objects, a thousand fears arose in my mind. I was anxious and watchful, while
+my right hand grasped a pistol which was hidden in my bosom; every sound
+terrified me, but I resolved that I would sell my life dearly and not shrink
+from the conflict until my own life or that of my adversary was extinguished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Elizabeth observed my agitation for some time in timid and fearful silence, but
+there was something in my glance which communicated terror to her, and
+trembling, she asked, “What is it that agitates you, my dear Victor? What is it
+you fear?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! Peace, peace, my love,” replied I; “this night, and all will be safe; but
+this night is dreadful, very dreadful.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I passed an hour in this state of mind, when suddenly I reflected how fearful
+the combat which I momentarily expected would be to my wife, and I earnestly
+entreated her to retire, resolving not to join her until I had obtained some
+knowledge as to the situation of my enemy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She left me, and I continued some time walking up and down the passages of the
+house and inspecting every corner that might afford a retreat to my adversary.
+But I discovered no trace of him and was beginning to conjecture that some
+fortunate chance had intervened to prevent the execution of his menaces when
+suddenly I heard a shrill and dreadful scream. It came from the room into which
+Elizabeth had retired. As I heard it, the whole truth rushed into my mind, my
+arms dropped, the motion of every muscle and fibre was suspended; I could feel
+the blood trickling in my veins and tingling in the extremities of my limbs.
+This state lasted but for an instant; the scream was repeated, and I rushed
+into the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Great God! Why did I not then expire! Why am I here to relate the destruction
+of the best hope and the purest creature on earth? She was there, lifeless and
+inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down and her pale and
+distorted features half covered by her hair. Everywhere I turn I see the same
+figure—her bloodless arms and relaxed form flung by the murderer on its bridal
+bier. Could I behold this and live? Alas! Life is obstinate and clings closest
+where it is most hated. For a moment only did I lose recollection; I fell
+senseless on the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I recovered I found myself surrounded by the people of the inn; their
+countenances expressed a breathless terror, but the horror of others appeared
+only as a mockery, a shadow of the feelings that oppressed me. I escaped from
+them to the room where lay the body of Elizabeth, my love, my wife, so lately
+living, so dear, so worthy. She had been moved from the posture in which I had
+first beheld her, and now, as she lay, her head upon her arm and a handkerchief
+thrown across her face and neck, I might have supposed her asleep. I rushed
+towards her and embraced her with ardour, but the deadly languor and coldness
+of the limbs told me that what I now held in my arms had ceased to be the
+Elizabeth whom I had loved and cherished. The murderous mark of the fiend’s
+grasp was on her neck, and the breath had ceased to issue from her lips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While I still hung over her in the agony of despair, I happened to look up. The
+windows of the room had before been darkened, and I felt a kind of panic on
+seeing the pale yellow light of the moon illuminate the chamber. The shutters
+had been thrown back, and with a sensation of horror not to be described, I saw
+at the open window a figure the most hideous and abhorred. A grin was on the
+face of the monster; he seemed to jeer, as with his fiendish finger he pointed
+towards the corpse of my wife. I rushed towards the window, and drawing a
+pistol from my bosom, fired; but he eluded me, leaped from his station, and
+running with the swiftness of lightning, plunged into the lake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The report of the pistol brought a crowd into the room. I pointed to the spot
+where he had disappeared, and we followed the track with boats; nets were cast,
+but in vain. After passing several hours, we returned hopeless, most of my
+companions believing it to have been a form conjured up by my fancy. After
+having landed, they proceeded to search the country, parties going in different
+directions among the woods and vines.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I attempted to accompany them and proceeded a short distance from the house,
+but my head whirled round, my steps were like those of a drunken man, I fell at
+last in a state of utter exhaustion; a film covered my eyes, and my skin was
+parched with the heat of fever. In this state I was carried back and placed on
+a bed, hardly conscious of what had happened; my eyes wandered round the room
+as if to seek something that I had lost.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After an interval I arose, and as if by instinct, crawled into the room where
+the corpse of my beloved lay. There were women weeping around; I hung over it
+and joined my sad tears to theirs; all this time no distinct idea presented
+itself to my mind, but my thoughts rambled to various subjects, reflecting
+confusedly on my misfortunes and their cause. I was bewildered, in a cloud of
+wonder and horror. The death of William, the execution of Justine, the murder
+of Clerval, and lastly of my wife; even at that moment I knew not that my only
+remaining friends were safe from the malignity of the fiend; my father even now
+might be writhing under his grasp, and Ernest might be dead at his feet. This
+idea made me shudder and recalled me to action. I started up and resolved to
+return to Geneva with all possible speed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were no horses to be procured, and I must return by the lake; but the
+wind was unfavourable, and the rain fell in torrents. However, it was hardly
+morning, and I might reasonably hope to arrive by night. I hired men to row and
+took an oar myself, for I had always experienced relief from mental torment in
+bodily exercise. But the overflowing misery I now felt, and the excess of
+agitation that I endured rendered me incapable of any exertion. I threw down
+the oar, and leaning my head upon my hands, gave way to every gloomy idea that
+arose. If I looked up, I saw scenes which were familiar to me in my happier
+time and which I had contemplated but the day before in the company of her who
+was now but a shadow and a recollection. Tears streamed from my eyes. The rain
+had ceased for a moment, and I saw the fish play in the waters as they had done
+a few hours before; they had then been observed by Elizabeth. Nothing is so
+painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. The sun might shine or
+the clouds might lower, but nothing could appear to me as it had done the day
+before. A fiend had snatched from me every hope of future happiness; no
+creature had ever been so miserable as I was; so frightful an event is single
+in the history of man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But why should I dwell upon the incidents that followed this last overwhelming
+event? Mine has been a tale of horrors; I have reached their <i>acme</i>, and
+what I must now relate can but be tedious to you. Know that, one by one, my
+friends were snatched away; I was left desolate. My own strength is exhausted,
+and I must tell, in a few words, what remains of my hideous narration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I arrived at Geneva. My father and Ernest yet lived, but the former sunk under
+the tidings that I bore. I see him now, excellent and venerable old man! His
+eyes wandered in vacancy, for they had lost their charm and their delight—his
+Elizabeth, his more than daughter, whom he doted on with all that affection
+which a man feels, who in the decline of life, having few affections, clings
+more earnestly to those that remain. Cursed, cursed be the fiend that brought
+misery on his grey hairs and doomed him to waste in wretchedness! He could not
+live under the horrors that were accumulated around him; the springs of
+existence suddenly gave way; he was unable to rise from his bed, and in a few
+days he died in my arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What then became of me? I know not; I lost sensation, and chains and darkness
+were the only objects that pressed upon me. Sometimes, indeed, I dreamt that I
+wandered in flowery meadows and pleasant vales with the friends of my youth,
+but I awoke and found myself in a dungeon. Melancholy followed, but by degrees
+I gained a clear conception of my miseries and situation and was then released
+from my prison. For they had called me mad, and during many months, as I
+understood, a solitary cell had been my habitation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Liberty, however, had been a useless gift to me, had I not, as I awakened to
+reason, at the same time awakened to revenge. As the memory of past misfortunes
+pressed upon me, I began to reflect on their cause—the monster whom I had
+created, the miserable dæmon whom I had sent abroad into the world for my
+destruction. I was possessed by a maddening rage when I thought of him, and
+desired and ardently prayed that I might have him within my grasp to wreak a
+great and signal revenge on his cursed head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor did my hate long confine itself to useless wishes; I began to reflect on
+the best means of securing him; and for this purpose, about a month after my
+release, I repaired to a criminal judge in the town and told him that I had an
+accusation to make, that I knew the destroyer of my family, and that I required
+him to exert his whole authority for the apprehension of the murderer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The magistrate listened to me with attention and kindness. “Be assured, sir,”
+said he, “no pains or exertions on my part shall be spared to discover the
+villain.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thank you,” replied I; “listen, therefore, to the deposition that I have to
+make. It is indeed a tale so strange that I should fear you would not credit it
+were there not something in truth which, however wonderful, forces conviction.
+The story is too connected to be mistaken for a dream, and I have no motive for
+falsehood.” My manner as I thus addressed him was impressive but calm; I had
+formed in my own heart a resolution to pursue my destroyer to death, and this
+purpose quieted my agony and for an interval reconciled me to life. I now
+related my history briefly but with firmness and precision, marking the dates
+with accuracy and never deviating into invective or exclamation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The magistrate appeared at first perfectly incredulous, but as I continued he
+became more attentive and interested; I saw him sometimes shudder with horror;
+at others a lively surprise, unmingled with disbelief, was painted on his
+countenance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I had concluded my narration, I said, “This is the being whom I accuse and
+for whose seizure and punishment I call upon you to exert your whole power. It
+is your duty as a magistrate, and I believe and hope that your feelings as a
+man will not revolt from the execution of those functions on this occasion.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This address caused a considerable change in the physiognomy of my own auditor.
+He had heard my story with that half kind of belief that is given to a tale of
+spirits and supernatural events; but when he was called upon to act officially
+in consequence, the whole tide of his incredulity returned. He, however,
+answered mildly, “I would willingly afford you every aid in your pursuit, but
+the creature of whom you speak appears to have powers which would put all my
+exertions to defiance. Who can follow an animal which can traverse the sea of
+ice and inhabit caves and dens where no man would venture to intrude? Besides,
+some months have elapsed since the commission of his crimes, and no one can
+conjecture to what place he has wandered or what region he may now inhabit.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do not doubt that he hovers near the spot which I inhabit, and if he has
+indeed taken refuge in the Alps, he may be hunted like the chamois and
+destroyed as a beast of prey. But I perceive your thoughts; you do not credit
+my narrative and do not intend to pursue my enemy with the punishment which is
+his desert.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I spoke, rage sparkled in my eyes; the magistrate was intimidated. “You are
+mistaken,” said he. “I will exert myself, and if it is in my power to seize the
+monster, be assured that he shall suffer punishment proportionate to his
+crimes. But I fear, from what you have yourself described to be his properties,
+that this will prove impracticable; and thus, while every proper measure is
+pursued, you should make up your mind to disappointment.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That cannot be; but all that I can say will be of little avail. My revenge is
+of no moment to you; yet, while I allow it to be a vice, I confess that it is
+the devouring and only passion of my soul. My rage is unspeakable when I
+reflect that the murderer, whom I have turned loose upon society, still exists.
+You refuse my just demand; I have but one resource, and I devote myself, either
+in my life or death, to his destruction.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I trembled with excess of agitation as I said this; there was a frenzy in my
+manner, and something, I doubt not, of that haughty fierceness which the
+martyrs of old are said to have possessed. But to a Genevan magistrate, whose
+mind was occupied by far other ideas than those of devotion and heroism, this
+elevation of mind had much the appearance of madness. He endeavoured to soothe
+me as a nurse does a child and reverted to my tale as the effects of delirium.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Man,” I cried, “how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom! Cease; you know
+not what it is you say.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I broke from the house angry and disturbed and retired to meditate on some
+other mode of action.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap24"></a>Chapter 24</h2>
+
+<p>
+My present situation was one in which all voluntary thought was swallowed up
+and lost. I was hurried away by fury; revenge alone endowed me with strength
+and composure; it moulded my feelings and allowed me to be calculating and calm
+at periods when otherwise delirium or death would have been my portion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My first resolution was to quit Geneva for ever; my country, which, when I was
+happy and beloved, was dear to me, now, in my adversity, became hateful. I
+provided myself with a sum of money, together with a few jewels which had
+belonged to my mother, and departed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now my wanderings began which are to cease but with life. I have traversed
+a vast portion of the earth and have endured all the hardships which travellers
+in deserts and barbarous countries are wont to meet. How I have lived I hardly
+know; many times have I stretched my failing limbs upon the sandy plain and
+prayed for death. But revenge kept me alive; I dared not die and leave my
+adversary in being.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I quitted Geneva my first labour was to gain some clue by which I might
+trace the steps of my fiendish enemy. But my plan was unsettled, and I wandered
+many hours round the confines of the town, uncertain what path I should pursue.
+As night approached I found myself at the entrance of the cemetery where
+William, Elizabeth, and my father reposed. I entered it and approached the tomb
+which marked their graves. Everything was silent except the leaves of the
+trees, which were gently agitated by the wind; the night was nearly dark, and
+the scene would have been solemn and affecting even to an uninterested
+observer. The spirits of the departed seemed to flit around and to cast a
+shadow, which was felt but not seen, around the head of the mourner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The deep grief which this scene had at first excited quickly gave way to rage
+and despair. They were dead, and I lived; their murderer also lived, and to
+destroy him I must drag out my weary existence. I knelt on the grass and kissed
+the earth and with quivering lips exclaimed, “By the sacred earth on which I
+kneel, by the shades that wander near me, by the deep and eternal grief that I
+feel, I swear; and by thee, O Night, and the spirits that preside over thee, to
+pursue the dæmon who caused this misery, until he or I shall perish in mortal
+conflict. For this purpose I will preserve my life; to execute this dear
+revenge will I again behold the sun and tread the green herbage of earth, which
+otherwise should vanish from my eyes for ever. And I call on you, spirits of
+the dead, and on you, wandering ministers of vengeance, to aid and conduct me
+in my work. Let the cursed and hellish monster drink deep of agony; let him
+feel the despair that now torments me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had begun my adjuration with solemnity and an awe which almost assured me
+that the shades of my murdered friends heard and approved my devotion, but the
+furies possessed me as I concluded, and rage choked my utterance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was answered through the stillness of night by a loud and fiendish laugh. It
+rang on my ears long and heavily; the mountains re-echoed it, and I felt as if
+all hell surrounded me with mockery and laughter. Surely in that moment I
+should have been possessed by frenzy and have destroyed my miserable existence
+but that my vow was heard and that I was reserved for vengeance. The laughter
+died away, when a well-known and abhorred voice, apparently close to my ear,
+addressed me in an audible whisper, “I am satisfied, miserable wretch! You have
+determined to live, and I am satisfied.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I darted towards the spot from which the sound proceeded, but the devil eluded
+my grasp. Suddenly the broad disk of the moon arose and shone full upon his
+ghastly and distorted shape as he fled with more than mortal speed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I pursued him, and for many months this has been my task. Guided by a slight
+clue, I followed the windings of the Rhone, but vainly. The blue Mediterranean
+appeared, and by a strange chance, I saw the fiend enter by night and hide
+himself in a vessel bound for the Black Sea. I took my passage in the same
+ship, but he escaped, I know not how.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Amidst the wilds of Tartary and Russia, although he still evaded me, I have
+ever followed in his track. Sometimes the peasants, scared by this horrid
+apparition, informed me of his path; sometimes he himself, who feared that if I
+lost all trace of him I should despair and die, left some mark to guide me. The
+snows descended on my head, and I saw the print of his huge step on the white
+plain. To you first entering on life, to whom care is new and agony unknown,
+how can you understand what I have felt and still feel? Cold, want, and fatigue
+were the least pains which I was destined to endure; I was cursed by some devil
+and carried about with me my eternal hell; yet still a spirit of good followed
+and directed my steps and when I most murmured would suddenly extricate me from
+seemingly insurmountable difficulties. Sometimes, when nature, overcome by
+hunger, sank under the exhaustion, a repast was prepared for me in the desert
+that restored and inspirited me. The fare was, indeed, coarse, such as the
+peasants of the country ate, but I will not doubt that it was set there by the
+spirits that I had invoked to aid me. Often, when all was dry, the heavens
+cloudless, and I was parched by thirst, a slight cloud would bedim the sky,
+shed the few drops that revived me, and vanish.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I followed, when I could, the courses of the rivers; but the dæmon generally
+avoided these, as it was here that the population of the country chiefly
+collected. In other places human beings were seldom seen, and I generally
+subsisted on the wild animals that crossed my path. I had money with me and
+gained the friendship of the villagers by distributing it; or I brought with me
+some food that I had killed, which, after taking a small part, I always
+presented to those who had provided me with fire and utensils for cooking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My life, as it passed thus, was indeed hateful to me, and it was during sleep
+alone that I could taste joy. O blessed sleep! Often, when most miserable, I
+sank to repose, and my dreams lulled me even to rapture. The spirits that
+guarded me had provided these moments, or rather hours, of happiness that I
+might retain strength to fulfil my pilgrimage. Deprived of this respite, I
+should have sunk under my hardships. During the day I was sustained and
+inspirited by the hope of night, for in sleep I saw my friends, my wife, and my
+beloved country; again I saw the benevolent countenance of my father, heard the
+silver tones of my Elizabeth’s voice, and beheld Clerval enjoying health and
+youth. Often, when wearied by a toilsome march, I persuaded myself that I was
+dreaming until night should come and that I should then enjoy reality in the
+arms of my dearest friends. What agonising fondness did I feel for them! How
+did I cling to their dear forms, as sometimes they haunted even my waking
+hours, and persuade myself that they still lived! At such moments vengeance,
+that burned within me, died in my heart, and I pursued my path towards the
+destruction of the dæmon more as a task enjoined by heaven, as the mechanical
+impulse of some power of which I was unconscious, than as the ardent desire of
+my soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What his feelings were whom I pursued I cannot know. Sometimes, indeed, he left
+marks in writing on the barks of the trees or cut in stone that guided me and
+instigated my fury. “My reign is not yet over”—these words were legible in one
+of these inscriptions—“you live, and my power is complete. Follow me; I seek
+the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and
+frost, to which I am impassive. You will find near this place, if you follow
+not too tardily, a dead hare; eat and be refreshed. Come on, my enemy; we have
+yet to wrestle for our lives, but many hard and miserable hours must you endure
+until that period shall arrive.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scoffing devil! Again do I vow vengeance; again do I devote thee, miserable
+fiend, to torture and death. Never will I give up my search until he or I
+perish; and then with what ecstasy shall I join my Elizabeth and my departed
+friends, who even now prepare for me the reward of my tedious toil and horrible
+pilgrimage!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I still pursued my journey to the northward, the snows thickened and the
+cold increased in a degree almost too severe to support. The peasants were shut
+up in their hovels, and only a few of the most hardy ventured forth to seize
+the animals whom starvation had forced from their hiding-places to seek for
+prey. The rivers were covered with ice, and no fish could be procured; and thus
+I was cut off from my chief article of maintenance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The triumph of my enemy increased with the difficulty of my labours. One
+inscription that he left was in these words: “Prepare! Your toils only begin;
+wrap yourself in furs and provide food, for we shall soon enter upon a journey
+where your sufferings will satisfy my everlasting hatred.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My courage and perseverance were invigorated by these scoffing words; I
+resolved not to fail in my purpose, and calling on Heaven to support me, I
+continued with unabated fervour to traverse immense deserts, until the ocean
+appeared at a distance and formed the utmost boundary of the horizon. Oh! How
+unlike it was to the blue seasons of the south! Covered with ice, it was only
+to be distinguished from land by its superior wildness and ruggedness. The
+Greeks wept for joy when they beheld the Mediterranean from the hills of Asia,
+and hailed with rapture the boundary of their toils. I did not weep, but I
+knelt down and with a full heart thanked my guiding spirit for conducting me in
+safety to the place where I hoped, notwithstanding my adversary’s gibe, to meet
+and grapple with him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some weeks before this period I had procured a sledge and dogs and thus
+traversed the snows with inconceivable speed. I know not whether the fiend
+possessed the same advantages, but I found that, as before I had daily lost
+ground in the pursuit, I now gained on him, so much so that when I first saw
+the ocean he was but one day’s journey in advance, and I hoped to intercept him
+before he should reach the beach. With new courage, therefore, I pressed on,
+and in two days arrived at a wretched hamlet on the seashore. I inquired of the
+inhabitants concerning the fiend and gained accurate information. A gigantic
+monster, they said, had arrived the night before, armed with a gun and many
+pistols, putting to flight the inhabitants of a solitary cottage through fear
+of his terrific appearance. He had carried off their store of winter food, and
+placing it in a sledge, to draw which he had seized on a numerous drove of
+trained dogs, he had harnessed them, and the same night, to the joy of the
+horror-struck villagers, had pursued his journey across the sea in a direction
+that led to no land; and they conjectured that he must speedily be destroyed by
+the breaking of the ice or frozen by the eternal frosts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On hearing this information I suffered a temporary access of despair. He had
+escaped me, and I must commence a destructive and almost endless journey across
+the mountainous ices of the ocean, amidst cold that few of the inhabitants
+could long endure and which I, the native of a genial and sunny climate, could
+not hope to survive. Yet at the idea that the fiend should live and be
+triumphant, my rage and vengeance returned, and like a mighty tide, overwhelmed
+every other feeling. After a slight repose, during which the spirits of the
+dead hovered round and instigated me to toil and revenge, I prepared for my
+journey.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I exchanged my land-sledge for one fashioned for the inequalities of the Frozen
+Ocean, and purchasing a plentiful stock of provisions, I departed from land.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I cannot guess how many days have passed since then, but I have endured misery
+which nothing but the eternal sentiment of a just retribution burning within my
+heart could have enabled me to support. Immense and rugged mountains of ice
+often barred up my passage, and I often heard the thunder of the ground sea,
+which threatened my destruction. But again the frost came and made the paths of
+the sea secure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By the quantity of provision which I had consumed, I should guess that I had
+passed three weeks in this journey; and the continual protraction of hope,
+returning back upon the heart, often wrung bitter drops of despondency and
+grief from my eyes. Despair had indeed almost secured her prey, and I should
+soon have sunk beneath this misery. Once, after the poor animals that conveyed
+me had with incredible toil gained the summit of a sloping ice mountain, and
+one, sinking under his fatigue, died, I viewed the expanse before me with
+anguish, when suddenly my eye caught a dark speck upon the dusky plain. I
+strained my sight to discover what it could be and uttered a wild cry of
+ecstasy when I distinguished a sledge and the distorted proportions of a
+well-known form within. Oh! With what a burning gush did hope revisit my heart!
+Warm tears filled my eyes, which I hastily wiped away, that they might not
+intercept the view I had of the dæmon; but still my sight was dimmed by the
+burning drops, until, giving way to the emotions that oppressed me, I wept
+aloud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this was not the time for delay; I disencumbered the dogs of their dead
+companion, gave them a plentiful portion of food, and after an hour’s rest,
+which was absolutely necessary, and yet which was bitterly irksome to me, I
+continued my route. The sledge was still visible, nor did I again lose sight of
+it except at the moments when for a short time some ice-rock concealed it with
+its intervening crags. I indeed perceptibly gained on it, and when, after
+nearly two days’ journey, I beheld my enemy at no more than a mile distant, my
+heart bounded within me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But now, when I appeared almost within grasp of my foe, my hopes were suddenly
+extinguished, and I lost all trace of him more utterly than I had ever done
+before. A ground sea was heard; the thunder of its progress, as the waters
+rolled and swelled beneath me, became every moment more ominous and terrific. I
+pressed on, but in vain. The wind arose; the sea roared; and, as with the
+mighty shock of an earthquake, it split and cracked with a tremendous and
+overwhelming sound. The work was soon finished; in a few minutes a tumultuous
+sea rolled between me and my enemy, and I was left drifting on a scattered
+piece of ice that was continually lessening and thus preparing for me a hideous
+death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this manner many appalling hours passed; several of my dogs died, and I
+myself was about to sink under the accumulation of distress when I saw your
+vessel riding at anchor and holding forth to me hopes of succour and life. I
+had no conception that vessels ever came so far north and was astounded at the
+sight. I quickly destroyed part of my sledge to construct oars, and by these
+means was enabled, with infinite fatigue, to move my ice raft in the direction
+of your ship. I had determined, if you were going southwards, still to trust
+myself to the mercy of the seas rather than abandon my purpose. I hoped to
+induce you to grant me a boat with which I could pursue my enemy. But your
+direction was northwards. You took me on board when my vigour was exhausted,
+and I should soon have sunk under my multiplied hardships into a death which I
+still dread, for my task is unfulfilled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh! When will my guiding spirit, in conducting me to the dæmon, allow me the
+rest I so much desire; or must I die, and he yet live? If I do, swear to me,
+Walton, that he shall not escape, that you will seek him and satisfy my
+vengeance in his death. And do I dare to ask of you to undertake my pilgrimage,
+to endure the hardships that I have undergone? No; I am not so selfish. Yet,
+when I am dead, if he should appear, if the ministers of vengeance should
+conduct him to you, swear that he shall not live—swear that he shall not
+triumph over my accumulated woes and survive to add to the list of his dark
+crimes. He is eloquent and persuasive, and once his words had even power over
+my heart; but trust him not. His soul is as hellish as his form, full of
+treachery and fiend-like malice. Hear him not; call on the names of William,
+Justine, Clerval, Elizabeth, my father, and of the wretched Victor, and thrust
+your sword into his heart. I will hover near and direct the steel aright.
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter2">
+Walton, <i>in continuation.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+August 26th, 17—.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+You have read this strange and terrific story, Margaret; and do you not feel
+your blood congeal with horror, like that which even now curdles mine?
+Sometimes, seized with sudden agony, he could not continue his tale; at others,
+his voice broken, yet piercing, uttered with difficulty the words so replete
+with anguish. His fine and lovely eyes were now lighted up with indignation,
+now subdued to downcast sorrow and quenched in infinite wretchedness. Sometimes
+he commanded his countenance and tones and related the most horrible incidents
+with a tranquil voice, suppressing every mark of agitation; then, like a
+volcano bursting forth, his face would suddenly change to an expression of the
+wildest rage as he shrieked out imprecations on his persecutor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His tale is connected and told with an appearance of the simplest truth, yet I
+own to you that the letters of Felix and Safie, which he showed me, and the
+apparition of the monster seen from our ship, brought to me a greater
+conviction of the truth of his narrative than his asseverations, however
+earnest and connected. Such a monster has, then, really existence! I cannot
+doubt it, yet I am lost in surprise and admiration. Sometimes I endeavoured to
+gain from Frankenstein the particulars of his creature’s formation, but on this
+point he was impenetrable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you mad, my friend?” said he. “Or whither does your senseless curiosity
+lead you? Would you also create for yourself and the world a demoniacal enemy?
+Peace, peace! Learn my miseries and do not seek to increase your own.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Frankenstein discovered that I made notes concerning his history; he asked to
+see them and then himself corrected and augmented them in many places, but
+principally in giving the life and spirit to the conversations he held with his
+enemy. “Since you have preserved my narration,” said he, “I would not that a
+mutilated one should go down to posterity.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus has a week passed away, while I have listened to the strangest tale that
+ever imagination formed. My thoughts and every feeling of my soul have been
+drunk up by the interest for my guest which this tale and his own elevated and
+gentle manners have created. I wish to soothe him, yet can I counsel one so
+infinitely miserable, so destitute of every hope of consolation, to live? Oh,
+no! The only joy that he can now know will be when he composes his shattered
+spirit to peace and death. Yet he enjoys one comfort, the offspring of solitude
+and delirium; he believes that when in dreams he holds converse with his
+friends and derives from that communion consolation for his miseries or
+excitements to his vengeance, that they are not the creations of his fancy, but
+the beings themselves who visit him from the regions of a remote world. This
+faith gives a solemnity to his reveries that render them to me almost as
+imposing and interesting as truth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our conversations are not always confined to his own history and misfortunes.
+On every point of general literature he displays unbounded knowledge and a
+quick and piercing apprehension. His eloquence is forcible and touching; nor
+can I hear him, when he relates a pathetic incident or endeavours to move the
+passions of pity or love, without tears. What a glorious creature must he have
+been in the days of his prosperity, when he is thus noble and godlike in ruin!
+He seems to feel his own worth and the greatness of his fall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When younger,” said he, “I believed myself destined for some great enterprise.
+My feelings are profound, but I possessed a coolness of judgment that fitted me
+for illustrious achievements. This sentiment of the worth of my nature
+supported me when others would have been oppressed, for I deemed it criminal to
+throw away in useless grief those talents that might be useful to my fellow
+creatures. When I reflected on the work I had completed, no less a one than the
+creation of a sensitive and rational animal, I could not rank myself with the
+herd of common projectors. But this thought, which supported me in the
+commencement of my career, now serves only to plunge me lower in the dust. All
+my speculations and hopes are as nothing, and like the archangel who aspired to
+omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell. My imagination was vivid, yet my
+powers of analysis and application were intense; by the union of these
+qualities I conceived the idea and executed the creation of a man. Even now I
+cannot recollect without passion my reveries while the work was incomplete. I
+trod heaven in my thoughts, now exulting in my powers, now burning with the
+idea of their effects. From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty
+ambition; but how am I sunk! Oh! My friend, if you had known me as I once was,
+you would not recognise me in this state of degradation. Despondency rarely
+visited my heart; a high destiny seemed to bear me on, until I fell, never,
+never again to rise.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Must I then lose this admirable being? I have longed for a friend; I have
+sought one who would sympathise with and love me. Behold, on these desert seas
+I have found such a one, but I fear I have gained him only to know his value
+and lose him. I would reconcile him to life, but he repulses the idea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thank you, Walton,” he said, “for your kind intentions towards so miserable
+a wretch; but when you speak of new ties and fresh affections, think you that
+any can replace those who are gone? Can any man be to me as Clerval was, or any
+woman another Elizabeth? Even where the affections are not strongly moved by
+any superior excellence, the companions of our childhood always possess a
+certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain. They
+know our infantine dispositions, which, however they may be afterwards
+modified, are never eradicated; and they can judge of our actions with more
+certain conclusions as to the integrity of our motives. A sister or a brother
+can never, unless indeed such symptoms have been shown early, suspect the other
+of fraud or false dealing, when another friend, however strongly he may be
+attached, may, in spite of himself, be contemplated with suspicion. But I
+enjoyed friends, dear not only through habit and association, but from their
+own merits; and wherever I am, the soothing voice of my Elizabeth and the
+conversation of Clerval will be ever whispered in my ear. They are dead, and
+but one feeling in such a solitude can persuade me to preserve my life. If I
+were engaged in any high undertaking or design, fraught with extensive utility
+to my fellow creatures, then could I live to fulfil it. But such is not my
+destiny; I must pursue and destroy the being to whom I gave existence; then my
+lot on earth will be fulfilled and I may die.”
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+My beloved Sister,
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+September 2d.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I write to you, encompassed by peril and ignorant whether I am ever doomed to
+see again dear England and the dearer friends that inhabit it. I am surrounded
+by mountains of ice which admit of no escape and threaten every moment to crush
+my vessel. The brave fellows whom I have persuaded to be my companions look
+towards me for aid, but I have none to bestow. There is something terribly
+appalling in our situation, yet my courage and hopes do not desert me. Yet it
+is terrible to reflect that the lives of all these men are endangered through
+me. If we are lost, my mad schemes are the cause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And what, Margaret, will be the state of your mind? You will not hear of my
+destruction, and you will anxiously await my return. Years will pass, and you
+will have visitings of despair and yet be tortured by hope. Oh! My beloved
+sister, the sickening failing of your heart-felt expectations is, in prospect,
+more terrible to me than my own death. But you have a husband and lovely
+children; you may be happy. Heaven bless you and make you so!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My unfortunate guest regards me with the tenderest compassion. He endeavours to
+fill me with hope and talks as if life were a possession which he valued. He
+reminds me how often the same accidents have happened to other navigators who
+have attempted this sea, and in spite of myself, he fills me with cheerful
+auguries. Even the sailors feel the power of his eloquence; when he speaks,
+they no longer despair; he rouses their energies, and while they hear his voice
+they believe these vast mountains of ice are mole-hills which will vanish
+before the resolutions of man. These feelings are transitory; each day of
+expectation delayed fills them with fear, and I almost dread a mutiny caused by
+this despair.
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+September 5th.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A scene has just passed of such uncommon interest that, although it is highly
+probable that these papers may never reach you, yet I cannot forbear recording
+it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We are still surrounded by mountains of ice, still in imminent danger of being
+crushed in their conflict. The cold is excessive, and many of my unfortunate
+comrades have already found a grave amidst this scene of desolation.
+Frankenstein has daily declined in health; a feverish fire still glimmers in
+his eyes, but he is exhausted, and when suddenly roused to any exertion, he
+speedily sinks again into apparent lifelessness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I mentioned in my last letter the fears I entertained of a mutiny. This
+morning, as I sat watching the wan countenance of my friend—his eyes half
+closed and his limbs hanging listlessly—I was roused by half a dozen of the
+sailors, who demanded admission into the cabin. They entered, and their leader
+addressed me. He told me that he and his companions had been chosen by the
+other sailors to come in deputation to me to make me a requisition which, in
+justice, I could not refuse. We were immured in ice and should probably never
+escape, but they feared that if, as was possible, the ice should dissipate and
+a free passage be opened, I should be rash enough to continue my voyage and
+lead them into fresh dangers, after they might happily have surmounted this.
+They insisted, therefore, that I should engage with a solemn promise that if
+the vessel should be freed I would instantly direct my course southwards.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This speech troubled me. I had not despaired, nor had I yet conceived the idea
+of returning if set free. Yet could I, in justice, or even in possibility,
+refuse this demand? I hesitated before I answered, when Frankenstein, who had
+at first been silent, and indeed appeared hardly to have force enough to
+attend, now roused himself; his eyes sparkled, and his cheeks flushed with
+momentary vigour. Turning towards the men, he said,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you mean? What do you demand of your captain? Are you, then, so easily
+turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition? “And
+wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a
+southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror, because at every
+new incident your fortitude was to be called forth and your courage exhibited,
+because danger and death surrounded it, and these you were to brave and
+overcome. For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honourable
+undertaking. You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your
+species, your names adored as belonging to brave men who encountered death for
+honour and the benefit of mankind. And now, behold, with the first imagination
+of danger, or, if you will, the first mighty and terrific trial of your
+courage, you shrink away and are content to be handed down as men who had not
+strength enough to endure cold and peril; and so, poor souls, they were chilly
+and returned to their warm firesides. Why, that requires not this preparation;
+ye need not have come thus far and dragged your captain to the shame of a
+defeat merely to prove yourselves cowards. Oh! Be men, or be more than men. Be
+steady to your purposes and firm as a rock. This ice is not made of such stuff
+as your hearts may be; it is mutable and cannot withstand you if you say that
+it shall not. Do not return to your families with the stigma of disgrace marked
+on your brows. Return as heroes who have fought and conquered and who know not
+what it is to turn their backs on the foe.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He spoke this with a voice so modulated to the different feelings expressed in
+his speech, with an eye so full of lofty design and heroism, that can you
+wonder that these men were moved? They looked at one another and were unable to
+reply. I spoke; I told them to retire and consider of what had been said, that
+I would not lead them farther north if they strenuously desired the contrary,
+but that I hoped that, with reflection, their courage would return.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They retired and I turned towards my friend, but he was sunk in languor and
+almost deprived of life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How all this will terminate, I know not, but I had rather die than return
+shamefully, my purpose unfulfilled. Yet I fear such will be my fate; the men,
+unsupported by ideas of glory and honour, can never willingly continue to
+endure their present hardships.
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+September 7th.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The die is cast; I have consented to return if we are not destroyed. Thus are
+my hopes blasted by cowardice and indecision; I come back ignorant and
+disappointed. It requires more philosophy than I possess to bear this injustice
+with patience.
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+September 12th.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is past; I am returning to England. I have lost my hopes of utility and
+glory; I have lost my friend. But I will endeavour to detail these bitter
+circumstances to you, my dear sister; and while I am wafted towards England and
+towards you, I will not despond.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+September 9th, the ice began to move, and roarings like thunder were heard at a
+distance as the islands split and cracked in every direction. We were in the
+most imminent peril, but as we could only remain passive, my chief attention
+was occupied by my unfortunate guest whose illness increased in such a degree
+that he was entirely confined to his bed. The ice cracked behind us and was
+driven with force towards the north; a breeze sprang from the west, and on the
+11th the passage towards the south became perfectly free. When the sailors saw
+this and that their return to their native country was apparently assured, a
+shout of tumultuous joy broke from them, loud and long-continued. Frankenstein,
+who was dozing, awoke and asked the cause of the tumult. “They shout,” I said,
+“because they will soon return to England.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you, then, really return?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Alas! Yes; I cannot withstand their demands. I cannot lead them unwillingly to
+danger, and I must return.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do so, if you will; but I will not. You may give up your purpose, but mine is
+assigned to me by Heaven, and I dare not. I am weak, but surely the spirits who
+assist my vengeance will endow me with sufficient strength.” Saying this, he
+endeavoured to spring from the bed, but the exertion was too great for him; he
+fell back and fainted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was long before he was restored, and I often thought that life was entirely
+extinct. At length he opened his eyes; he breathed with difficulty and was
+unable to speak. The surgeon gave him a composing draught and ordered us to
+leave him undisturbed. In the meantime he told me that my friend had certainly
+not many hours to live.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His sentence was pronounced, and I could only grieve and be patient. I sat by
+his bed, watching him; his eyes were closed, and I thought he slept; but
+presently he called to me in a feeble voice, and bidding me come near, said,
+“Alas! The strength I relied on is gone; I feel that I shall soon die, and he,
+my enemy and persecutor, may still be in being. Think not, Walton, that in the
+last moments of my existence I feel that burning hatred and ardent desire of
+revenge I once expressed; but I feel myself justified in desiring the death of
+my adversary. During these last days I have been occupied in examining my past
+conduct; nor do I find it blamable. In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created
+a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my
+power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty, but there was another
+still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had
+greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of
+happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did right in
+refusing, to create a companion for the first creature. He showed unparalleled
+malignity and selfishness in evil; he destroyed my friends; he devoted to
+destruction beings who possessed exquisite sensations, happiness, and wisdom;
+nor do I know where this thirst for vengeance may end. Miserable himself that
+he may render no other wretched, he ought to die. The task of his destruction
+was mine, but I have failed. When actuated by selfish and vicious motives, I
+asked you to undertake my unfinished work, and I renew this request now, when I
+am only induced by reason and virtue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yet I cannot ask you to renounce your country and friends to fulfil this task;
+and now that you are returning to England, you will have little chance of
+meeting with him. But the consideration of these points, and the well balancing
+of what you may esteem your duties, I leave to you; my judgment and ideas are
+already disturbed by the near approach of death. I dare not ask you to do what
+I think right, for I may still be misled by passion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That he should live to be an instrument of mischief disturbs me; in other
+respects, this hour, when I momentarily expect my release, is the only happy
+one which I have enjoyed for several years. The forms of the beloved dead flit
+before me, and I hasten to their arms. Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in
+tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one
+of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I
+have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His voice became fainter as he spoke, and at length, exhausted by his effort,
+he sank into silence. About half an hour afterwards he attempted again to speak
+but was unable; he pressed my hand feebly, and his eyes closed for ever, while
+the irradiation of a gentle smile passed away from his lips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret, what comment can I make on the untimely extinction of this glorious
+spirit? What can I say that will enable you to understand the depth of my
+sorrow? All that I should express would be inadequate and feeble. My tears
+flow; my mind is overshadowed by a cloud of disappointment. But I journey
+towards England, and I may there find consolation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am interrupted. What do these sounds portend? It is midnight; the breeze
+blows fairly, and the watch on deck scarcely stir. Again there is a sound as of
+a human voice, but hoarser; it comes from the cabin where the remains of
+Frankenstein still lie. I must arise and examine. Good night, my sister.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Great God! what a scene has just taken place! I am yet dizzy with the
+remembrance of it. I hardly know whether I shall have the power to detail it;
+yet the tale which I have recorded would be incomplete without this final and
+wonderful catastrophe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I entered the cabin where lay the remains of my ill-fated and admirable friend.
+Over him hung a form which I cannot find words to describe—gigantic in stature,
+yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions. As he hung over the coffin, his
+face was concealed by long locks of ragged hair; but one vast hand was
+extended, in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy. When he heard
+the sound of my approach, he ceased to utter exclamations of grief and horror
+and sprung towards the window. Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his
+face, of such loathsome yet appalling hideousness. I shut my eyes involuntarily
+and endeavoured to recollect what were my duties with regard to this destroyer.
+I called on him to stay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused, looking on me with wonder, and again turning towards the lifeless
+form of his creator, he seemed to forget my presence, and every feature and
+gesture seemed instigated by the wildest rage of some uncontrollable passion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That is also my victim!” he exclaimed. “In his murder my crimes are
+consummated; the miserable series of my being is wound to its close! Oh,
+Frankenstein! Generous and self-devoted being! What does it avail that I now
+ask thee to pardon me? I, who irretrievably destroyed thee by destroying all
+thou lovedst. Alas! He is cold, he cannot answer me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His voice seemed suffocated, and my first impulses, which had suggested to me
+the duty of obeying the dying request of my friend in destroying his enemy,
+were now suspended by a mixture of curiosity and compassion. I approached this
+tremendous being; I dared not again raise my eyes to his face, there was
+something so scaring and unearthly in his ugliness. I attempted to speak, but
+the words died away on my lips. The monster continued to utter wild and
+incoherent self-reproaches. At length I gathered resolution to address him in a
+pause of the tempest of his passion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your repentance,” I said, “is now superfluous. If you had listened to the
+voice of conscience and heeded the stings of remorse before you had urged your
+diabolical vengeance to this extremity, Frankenstein would yet have lived.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And do you dream?” said the dæmon. “Do you think that I was then dead to agony
+and remorse? He,” he continued, pointing to the corpse, “he suffered not in the
+consummation of the deed. Oh! Not the ten-thousandth portion of the anguish
+that was mine during the lingering detail of its execution. A frightful
+selfishness hurried me on, while my heart was poisoned with remorse. Think you
+that the groans of Clerval were music to my ears? My heart was fashioned to be
+susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and
+hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as
+you cannot even imagine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“After the murder of Clerval I returned to Switzerland, heart-broken and
+overcome. I pitied Frankenstein; my pity amounted to horror; I abhorred myself.
+But when I discovered that he, the author at once of my existence and of its
+unspeakable torments, dared to hope for happiness, that while he accumulated
+wretchedness and despair upon me he sought his own enjoyment in feelings and
+passions from the indulgence of which I was for ever barred, then impotent envy
+and bitter indignation filled me with an insatiable thirst for vengeance. I
+recollected my threat and resolved that it should be accomplished. I knew that
+I was preparing for myself a deadly torture, but I was the slave, not the
+master, of an impulse which I detested yet could not disobey. Yet when she
+died! Nay, then I was not miserable. I had cast off all feeling, subdued all
+anguish, to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil thenceforth became my good.
+Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I
+had willingly chosen. The completion of my demoniacal design became an
+insatiable passion. And now it is ended; there is my last victim!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was at first touched by the expressions of his misery; yet, when I called to
+mind what Frankenstein had said of his powers of eloquence and persuasion, and
+when I again cast my eyes on the lifeless form of my friend, indignation was
+rekindled within me. “Wretch!” I said. “It is well that you come here to whine
+over the desolation that you have made. You throw a torch into a pile of
+buildings, and when they are consumed, you sit among the ruins and lament the
+fall. Hypocritical fiend! If he whom you mourn still lived, still would he be
+the object, again would he become the prey, of your accursed vengeance. It is
+not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is
+withdrawn from your power.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, it is not thus—not thus,” interrupted the being. “Yet such must be the
+impression conveyed to you by what appears to be the purport of my actions. Yet
+I seek not a fellow feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I
+first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and
+affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be
+participated. But now that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness
+and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I
+seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone while my sufferings shall
+endure; when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should
+load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and
+of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my
+outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of
+unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now
+crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no
+malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the
+frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature
+whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the
+beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes
+a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and
+associates in his desolation; I am alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes
+and his misfortunes. But in the detail which he gave you of them he could not
+sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured wasting in impotent
+passions. For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires.
+They were for ever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and
+I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the
+only criminal, when all humankind sinned against me? Why do you not hate Felix,
+who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate the
+rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous
+and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to
+be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the
+recollection of this injustice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the
+helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his
+throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my
+creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among
+men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he
+lies, white and cold in death. You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal
+that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I
+think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived and long for
+the moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt
+my thoughts no more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief. My work is nearly
+complete. Neither yours nor any man’s death is needed to consummate the series
+of my being and accomplish that which must be done, but it requires my own. Do
+not think that I shall be slow to perform this sacrifice. I shall quit your
+vessel on the ice raft which brought me thither and shall seek the most
+northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to
+ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious
+and unhallowed wretch who would create such another as I have been. I shall
+die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me or be the prey of
+feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and
+when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.
+I shall no longer see the sun or stars or feel the winds play on my cheeks.
+Light, feeling, and sense will pass away; and in this condition must I find my
+happiness. Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first
+opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer and heard the
+rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me,
+I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes
+and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Farewell! I leave you, and in you the last of humankind whom these eyes will
+ever behold. Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive and yet cherished a
+desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my
+destruction. But it was not so; thou didst seek my extinction, that I might not
+cause greater wretchedness; and if yet, in some mode unknown to me, thou hadst
+not ceased to think and feel, thou wouldst not desire against me a vengeance
+greater than that which I feel. Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still
+superior to thine, for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in
+my wounds until death shall close them for ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But soon,” he cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and what I
+now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I
+shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the
+torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will
+be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it
+thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sprang from the cabin-window as he said this, upon the ice raft which lay
+close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness
+and distance.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
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+        }</style><title>Moby Dick; or The Whale | Project Gutenberg</title>
+<link href="images/cover.jpg" rel="icon" type="image/x-cover" id="id-553908729329977579">
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+<meta name="dc.rights" content="Public domain in the USA.">
+<link rel="dcterms.isFormatOf" href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701">
+<meta name="dc.creator" content="Melville, Herman, 1819-1891">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Whaling -- Fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Sea stories">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Psychological fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Ship captains -- Fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Adventure stories">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Mentally ill -- Fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Ahab, Captain (Fictitious character) -- Fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Whales -- Fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Whaling ships -- Fiction">
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+  <body><header class="pg-boilerplate pgheader" id="pg-header" lang="en"><h2 id="pg-header-heading" title="">The Project Gutenberg eBook of <span lang="en" id="pg-title-no-subtitle">Moby Dick; Or, The Whale</span></h2>
+    
+<div>This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
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+you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
+before using this eBook.</div>
+
+<div class="container" id="pg-machine-header"><p><strong>Title</strong>: Moby Dick; Or, The Whale</p>
+<div id="pg-header-authlist">
+<p><strong>Author</strong>: Herman Melville</p>
+</div>
+<br>
+        
+<p><strong>Release date</strong>: July 1, 2001 [eBook #2701]<br>
+                Most recently updated: October 11, 2026</p>
+
+<p><strong>Language</strong>: English</p>
+
+<p><strong>Other information and formats</strong>: <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701">www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701</a></p>
+
+<p><strong>Credits</strong>: Daniel Lazarus, Jonesey, and David Widger</p>
+
+</div><div id="pg-start-separator">
+<span>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY DICK; OR, THE WHALE ***</span>
+</div></header><div></div>
+    <h1>
+      MOBY-DICK;<br><br>or, THE WHALE.
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Herman Melville
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br> <br>
+    </p>
+    <hr>
+    <p>
+      <br> <br>
+    </p>
+    <blockquote><div>
+      <p class="toc" style="font-size: x-large;">
+        <b>CONTENTS</b>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0002" class="pginternal"> ETYMOLOGY. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0003" class="pginternal"> EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0001" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 1. Loomings. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0002" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0003" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0004" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0005" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 5. Breakfast. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 6. The Street. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0007" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 7. The Chapel. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0008" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0009" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 9. The Sermon. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0010" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0011" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 11. Nightgown. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0012" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 12. Biographical. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0013" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0014" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 14. Nantucket. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0015" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 15. Chowder. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0016" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 16. The Ship. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0017" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0018" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 18. His Mark. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0019" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 19. The Prophet. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0020" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 20. All Astir. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0021" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0022" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0023" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0024" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 24. The Advocate. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0025" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 25. Postscript. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0026" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0027" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0028" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 28. Ahab. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0029" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0030" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 30. The Pipe. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0031" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0032" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 32. Cetology. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0033" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0034" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0035" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0036" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0037" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 37. Sunset. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0038" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 38. Dusk. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0039" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 39. First Night-Watch. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0040" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0041" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0042" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0043" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 43. Hark! </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0044" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 44. The Chart. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0045" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0046" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 46. Surmises. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0047" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0048" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0049" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 49. The Hyena. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0050" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0051" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0052" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 52. The Albatross. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0053" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 53. The Gam. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0054" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho’s Story. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0055" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of
+        Whales. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0056" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of
+        Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes.</a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0057" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in
+        Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.</a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0058" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 58. Brit. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0059" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 59. Squid. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0060" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 60. The Line. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0061" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0062" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 62. The Dart. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0063" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 63. The Crotch. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0064" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 64. Stubb’s Supper. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0065" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0066" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0067" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 67. Cutting In. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0068" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 68. The Blanket. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0069" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 69. The Funeral. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0070" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0071" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam’s Story. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0072" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0073" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale;
+        and Then Have a Talk over Him. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0074" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted
+        View. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0075" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted
+        View. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0076" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0077" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0078" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0079" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 79. The Prairie. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0080" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 80. The Nut. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0081" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0082" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0083" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0084" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0085" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 85. The Fountain. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0086" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 86. The Tail. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0087" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0088" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0089" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0090" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0091" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0092" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 92. Ambergris. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0093" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 93. The Castaway. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0094" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0095" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 95. The Cassock. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0096" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0097" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 97. The Lamp. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0098" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0099" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0100" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0101" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 101. The Decanter. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0102" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0103" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s
+        Skeleton. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0104" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0105" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude
+        Diminish?—Will He Perish? </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0106" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 106. Ahab’s Leg. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0107" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0108" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0109" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0110" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0111" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 111. The Pacific. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0112" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0113" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 113. The Forge. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0114" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 114. The Gilder. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0115" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0116" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0117" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0118" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0119" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 119. The Candles. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0120" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the
+        First Night Watch. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0121" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle
+        Bulwarks. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0122" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and
+        Lightning. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0123" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 123. The Musket. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0124" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 124. The Needle. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0125" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0126" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0127" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 127. The Deck. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0128" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0129" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 129. The Cabin. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0130" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 130. The Hat. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0131" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0132" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 132. The Symphony. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0133" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0134" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0135" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER 135. The Chase.—Third Day. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_EPIL" class="pginternal"> Epilogue </a>
+      </p>
+    </div></blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br> <br>
+    </p>
+    <hr>
+
+    <div class="mynote">
+      <div style="text-align: center;">
+        <b>Original Transcriber’s Notes:</b>
+      </div>
+      <p>
+        This text is a combination of etexts, one from the now-defunct ERIS
+        project at Virginia Tech and one from Project Gutenberg’s archives. The
+        proofreaders of this version are indebted to The University of Adelaide
+        Library for preserving the Virginia Tech version. The resulting etext
+        was compared with a public domain hard copy version of the text.
+      </p>
+      <br>
+    </div>
+    <div class="extracts">
+      <a id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+      <div style="height: 4em;">
+        <br><br><br><br>
+      </div>
+      <h2>
+        ETYMOLOGY.
+      </h2>
+      <h3>
+        (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)
+      </h3>
+      <p>
+        The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see
+        him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer
+        handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the
+        known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it
+        somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name
+        a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through
+        ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of
+        the word, you deliver that which is not true.” —<i>Hackluyt.</i>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “WHALE. * * * Sw. and Dan. <i>hval</i>. This animal is named from roundness or
+        rolling; for in Dan. <i>hvalt</i> is arched or vaulted.” —<i>Webster’s
+        Dictionary.</i>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “WHALE. * * * It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. <i>Wallen</i>; A.S.
+        <i>Walw-ian</i>, to roll, to wallow.” —<i>Richardson’s Dictionary.</i>
+      </p>
+<table>
+<tbody><tr>
+<td></td>
+<td>חו,</td>
+<td><i>	Hebrew</i>.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td>ϰητος,</td>
+<td><i>	Greek</i>.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td>CETUS,</td>
+<td><i>	Latin</i>.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td>WHŒL,</td>
+<td><i>	Anglo-Saxon</i>.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td>HVALT,</td>
+<td><i>	Danish</i>.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td>WAL,</td>
+<td><i>	Dutch</i>.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td>HWAL,</td>
+<td><i>	Swedish</i>.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td>HVALUR,</td>
+<td><i>	Icelandic</i>.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td>WHALE,</td>
+<td><i>	English</i>.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td>BALEINE,</td>
+<td><i>	French</i>.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td>BALLENA,</td>
+<td><i>	Spanish</i>.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td>PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE,</td>
+<td><i>	Fegee</i>.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td>PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE,</td>
+<td><i>	Erromangoan</i>.</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody></table>
+      <a id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+      <div style="height: 4em;">
+        <br><br><br><br>
+      </div>
+      <h2>
+        EXTRACTS. (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
+      </h2>
+      <p>
+        It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a
+        poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans
+        and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to
+        whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane.
+        Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the
+        higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these
+        extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching the
+        ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these
+        extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing
+        bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied,
+        and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our
+        own.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou
+        belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world
+        will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong;
+        but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too;
+        and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes
+        and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness—Give
+        it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the
+        world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I
+        could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down
+        your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your
+        friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens,
+        and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael,
+        against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there,
+        ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses!
+      </p>
+      <h3>
+      EXTRACTS.
+      </h3>
+      <p>
+        “And God created great whales.” —<i>Genesis</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to
+        be hoary.” —<i>Job</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.” —<i>Jonah</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play
+        therein.” —<i>Psalms</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword, shall
+        punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked
+        serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.” —<i>Isaiah</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster’s
+        mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that
+        foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his
+        paunch.” —<i>Holland’s Plutarch’s Morals</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are: among
+        which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as much in
+        length as four acres or arpens of land.” —<i>Holland’s Pliny</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a
+        great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the
+        former, one was of a most monstrous size.... This came towards us,
+        open-mouthed, raising the waves on all sides, and beating the sea before
+        him into a foam.” —<i>Tooke’s Lucian</i>. “<i>The True History</i>.”
+       </p>
+      <p>
+        “He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales,
+        which had bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he brought
+        some to the king.... The best whales were catched in his own country, of
+        which some were forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He said that he was
+        one of six who had killed sixty in two days.” —<i>Other or Other’s
+        verbal narrative taken down from his mouth by King Alfred, A.D.</i> 890.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that enter
+        into the dreadful gulf of this monster’s (whale’s) mouth, are
+        immediately lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in
+        great security, and there sleeps.” —MONTAIGNE. —<i>Apology for
+        Raimond Sebond</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if it is not Leviathan described
+        by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.” —<i>Rabelais</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “This whale’s liver was two cartloads.” —<i>Stowe’s Annals</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan.”
+         —<i>Lord Bacon’s Version of the Psalms</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received
+        nothing certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible
+        quantity of oil will be extracted out of one whale.” —<i>Ibid</i>.
+        “<i>History of Life and Death</i>.”
+       </p>
+      <p>
+        “The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise.”
+         —<i>King Henry</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Very like a whale.” —<i>Hamlet</i>.
+      </p>
+<pre>     “Which to secure, no skill of leach’s art
+     Mote him availle, but to returne againe
+     To his wound’s worker, that with lowly dart,
+     Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine,
+     Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro’ the maine.”
+      —<i>The Fairie Queen</i>.
+</pre>
+      <p>
+        “Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful
+        calm trouble the ocean till it boil.” —<i>Sir William Davenant.
+        Preface to Gondibert</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned
+        Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, <i>Nescio quid sit</i>.”
+         —<i>Sir T. Browne. Of Sperma Ceti and the Sperma Ceti Whale. Vide his
+        V. E.</i>
+      </p>
+<pre>     “Like Spencer’s Talus with his modern flail
+     He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.
+   ...
+     Their fixed jav’lins in his side he wears,
+     And on his back a grove of pikes appears.”
+      —<i>Waller’s Battle of the Summer Islands</i>.
+</pre>
+      <p>
+        “By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State—(in
+        Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.” —<i>Opening sentence
+        of Hobbes’s Leviathan</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat
+        in the mouth of a whale.” —<i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>.
+      </p>
+<pre>     “That sea beast
+     Leviathan, which God of all his works
+     Created hugest that swim the ocean stream.” —<i>Paradise Lost</i>.
+
+     —“There Leviathan,
+     Hugest of living creatures, in the deep
+     Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,
+     And seems a moving land; and at his gills
+     Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.” —<i>Ibid</i>.
+</pre>
+      <p>
+        “The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil
+        swimming in them.” —<i>Fuller’s Profane and Holy State</i>.
+      </p>
+<pre>     “So close behind some promontory lie
+     The huge Leviathan to attend their prey,
+     And give no chance, but swallow in the fry,
+     Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way.”
+      —<i>Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis</i>.
+</pre>
+      <p>
+        “While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off his
+        head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it
+        will be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water.” —<i>Thomas Edge’s
+        Ten Voyages to Spitzbergen, in Purchas</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in
+        wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which
+        nature has placed on their shoulders.” —<i>Sir T. Herbert’s Voyages
+        into Asia and Africa. Harris Coll</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to
+        proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their ship
+        upon them.” —<i>Schouten’s Sixth Circumnavigation</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “We set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The
+        Jonas-in-the-Whale.... Some say the whale can’t open his mouth, but that
+        is a fable.... They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they
+        can see a whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains....
+        I was told of a whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel of
+        herrings in his belly.... One of our harpooneers told me that he caught
+        once a whale in Spitzbergen that was white all over.” —<i>A Voyage to
+        Greenland, A.D.</i> 1671. <i>Harris Coll</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one
+        eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was
+        informed), besides a vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of
+        baleen. The jaws of it stand for a gate in the garden of Pitferren.”
+         —<i>Sibbald’s Fife and Kinross</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this
+        Sperma-ceti whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that was
+        killed by any man, such is his fierceness and swiftness.” —<i>Richard
+        Strafford’s Letter from the Bermudas. Phil. Trans. A.D.</i> 1668.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Whales in the sea God’s voice obey.” —<i>N. E. Primer</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those
+        southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the
+        northward of us.” —<i>Captain Cowley’s Voyage round the Globe, A.D.</i>
+        1729.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “... and the breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an
+        insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain.” —<i>Ulloa’s
+        South America</i>.
+      </p>
+<pre>     “To fifty chosen sylphs of special note,
+     We trust the important charge, the petticoat.
+     Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail,
+     Tho’ stuffed with hoops and armed with ribs of whale.”
+      —<i>Rape of the Lock</i>.
+</pre>
+      <p>
+        “If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that
+        take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear
+        contemptible in the comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest
+        animal in creation.” —<i>Goldsmith, Nat. Hist</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them
+        speak like great whales.” —<i>Goldsmith to Johnson</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was
+        found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were then
+        towing ashore. They seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves behind the
+        whale, in order to avoid being seen by us.” —<i>Cook’s Voyages</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so
+        great dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to
+        mention even their names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood, and
+        some other articles of the same nature in their boats, in order to
+        terrify and prevent their too near approach.” —<i>Uno Von Troil’s
+        Letters on Banks’s and Solander’s Voyage to Iceland in</i> 1772.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce
+        animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen.”
+         —<i>Thomas Jefferson’s Whale Memorial to the French minister in</i> 1778.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?” —<i>Edmund Burke’s
+        reference in Parliament to the Nantucket Whale-Fishery</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Spain—a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe.” —<i>Edmund
+        Burke</i>. (<i>somewhere</i>.)
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “A tenth branch of the king’s ordinary revenue, said to be grounded on
+        the consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from pirates
+        and robbers, is the right to <i>royal</i> fish, which are whale and sturgeon.
+        And these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the coast, are the
+        property of the king.” —<i>Blackstone</i>.
+      </p>
+<pre>     “Soon to the sport of death the crews repair:
+     Rodmond unerring o’er his head suspends
+     The barbed steel, and every turn attends.”
+      —<i>Falconer’s Shipwreck</i>.
+
+     “Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires,
+     And rockets blew self driven,
+     To hang their momentary fire
+     Around the vault of heaven.
+
+     “So fire with water to compare,
+     The ocean serves on high,
+     Up-spouted by a whale in air,
+     To express unwieldy joy.”
+      —<i>Cowper, on the Queen’s Visit to London</i>.
+</pre>
+      <p>
+        “Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a
+        stroke, with immense velocity.” —<i>John Hunter’s account of the
+        dissection of a whale</i>. (<i>A small sized one</i>.)
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the
+        water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage
+        through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood
+        gushing from the whale’s heart.” —<i>Paley’s Theology</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet.” —<i>Baron
+        Cuvier</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take any
+        till the first of May, the sea being then covered with them.” —<i>Colnett’s
+        Voyage for the Purpose of Extending the Spermaceti Whale Fishery</i>.
+      </p>
+<pre>     “In the free element beneath me swam,
+     Floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle,
+     Fishes of every colour, form, and kind;
+     Which language cannot paint, and mariner
+     Had never seen; from dread Leviathan
+     To insect millions peopling every wave:
+     Gather’d in shoals immense, like floating islands,
+     Led by mysterious instincts through that waste
+     And trackless region, though on every side
+     Assaulted by voracious enemies,
+     Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm’d in front or jaw,
+     With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs.”
+      —<i>Montgomery’s World before the Flood</i>.
+
+     “Io!  Paean!  Io! sing.
+     To the finny people’s king.
+     Not a mightier whale than this
+     In the vast Atlantic is;
+     Not a fatter fish than he,
+     Flounders round the Polar Sea.”
+      —<i>Charles Lamb’s Triumph of the Whale</i>.
+</pre>
+      <p>
+        “In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales
+        spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed: there—pointing
+        to the sea—is a green pasture where our children’s grand-children
+        will go for bread.” —<i>Obed Macy’s History of Nantucket</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form
+        of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale’s jaw bones.” —<i>Hawthorne’s
+        Twice Told Tales</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been killed
+        by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years ago.” —<i>Ibid</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “No, Sir, ’tis a Right Whale,” answered Tom; “I saw his sprout; he threw
+        up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at.
+        He’s a raal oil-butt, that fellow!” —<i>Cooper’s Pilot</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that
+        whales had been introduced on the stage there.” —<i>Eckermann’s
+        Conversations with Goethe</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?” I answered, “we have been stove
+        by a whale.” —“<i>Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Whale Ship Essex
+        of Nantucket, which was attacked and finally destroyed by a large Sperm
+        Whale in the Pacific Ocean</i>.” <i>By Owen Chace of Nantucket, first mate of
+        said vessel. New York</i>, 1821.
+      </p>
+<pre>     “A mariner sat in the shrouds one night,
+     The wind was piping free;
+     Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale,
+     And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale,
+     As it floundered in the sea.”
+      —<i>Elizabeth Oakes Smith</i>.
+</pre>
+      <p>
+        “The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture of
+        this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six
+        English miles....
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which,
+        cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four miles.”
+         —<i>Scoresby</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the
+        infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head,
+        and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes at
+        the boats with his head; they are propelled before him with vast
+        swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed.... It is a matter of great
+        astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so interesting,
+        and, in a commercial point of view, so important an animal (as the Sperm
+        Whale) should have been so entirely neglected, or should have excited so
+        little curiosity among the numerous, and many of them competent
+        observers, that of late years, must have possessed the most abundant and
+        the most convenient opportunities of witnessing their habitudes.”
+         —<i>Thomas Beale’s History of the Sperm Whale</i>, 1839.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “The Cachalot” (Sperm Whale) “is not only better armed than the True
+        Whale” (Greenland or Right Whale) “in possessing a formidable weapon at
+        either extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a
+        disposition to employ these weapons offensively and in manner at once so
+        artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as the
+        most dangerous to attack of all the known species of the whale tribe.”
+         —<i>Frederick Debell Bennett’s Whaling Voyage Round the Globe</i>, 1840.
+      </p>
+
+<blockquote><div>
+     <p>October 13.  “There she blows,” was sung out from the mast-head.</p>
+
+     <p>“Where away?” demanded the captain.</p>
+
+     <p>“Three points off the lee bow, sir.”</p>
+
+     <p>“Raise up your wheel.  Steady!”</p>
+
+     <p>“Steady, sir.”</p>
+
+     <p>“Mast-head ahoy!  Do you see that whale now?”</p>
+
+     <p>“Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows! There she
+      breaches!”</p>
+
+     <p>“Sing out! sing out every time!”</p>
+
+     <p>“Ay Ay, sir! There she blows! there—there—<i>thar</i> she
+       blows—bowes—bo-o-os!”</p>
+
+     <p>“How far off?”</p>
+
+     <p>“Two miles and a half.”</p>
+
+     <p>“Thunder and lightning! so near!  Call all hands.”</p>
+
+     <p>—<i>J. Ross Browne’s Etchings of a Whaling Cruize</i>.  1846.</p>
+</div></blockquote>
+
+      <p>
+        “The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the horrid
+        transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island of
+        Nantucket.” —“<i>Narrative of the Globe Mutiny</i>,” <i>by Lay and Hussey
+        survivors. A.D.</i> 1828.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the
+        assault for some time with a lance; but the furious monster at length
+        rushed on the boat; himself and comrades only being preserved by leaping
+        into the water when they saw the onset was inevitable.” —<i>Missionary
+        Journal of Tyerman and Bennett</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Nantucket itself,” said Mr. Webster, “is a very striking and peculiar
+        portion of the National interest. There is a population of eight or nine
+        thousand persons living here in the sea, adding largely every year to
+        the National wealth by the boldest and most persevering industry.”
+         —<i>Report of Daniel Webster’s Speech in the U. S. Senate, on the
+        application for the Erection of a Breakwater at Nantucket</i>. 1828.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a moment.”
+         —“<i>The Whale and his Captors, or The Whaleman’s Adventures and the
+        Whale’s Biography, gathered on the Homeward Cruise of the Commodore
+        Preble</i>.” <i>By Rev. Henry T. Cheever</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “If you make the least damn bit of noise,” replied Samuel, “I will send
+        you to hell.” —<i>Life of Samuel Comstock</i> (<i>the mutineer</i>), <i>by his
+        brother, William Comstock. Another Version of the whale-ship Globe
+        narrative</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in order,
+        if possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though they
+        failed of their main object, laid-open the haunts of the whale.” —<i>McCulloch’s
+        Commercial Dictionary</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound forward
+        again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the whalemen seem
+        to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same mystic North-West
+        Passage.” —<i>From</i> “<i>Something</i>” <i>unpublished</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being struck
+        by her near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with look-outs at
+        the mast-heads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse around them, has a
+        totally different air from those engaged in regular voyage.” —<i>Currents
+        and Whaling. U.S. Ex. Ex</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect
+        having seen large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to form
+        arches over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may perhaps have
+        been told that these were the ribs of whales.” —<i>Tales of a Whale
+        Voyager to the Arctic Ocean</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales,
+        that the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages
+        enrolled among the crew.” —<i>Newspaper Account of the Taking and
+        Retaking of the Whale-Ship Hobomack</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels
+        (American) few ever return in the ships on board of which they
+        departed.” —<i>Cruise in a Whale Boat</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up
+        perpendicularly into the air. It was the whale.” —<i>Miriam Coffin or
+        the Whale Fisherman</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would
+        manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope tied
+        to the root of his tail.” —<i>A Chapter on Whaling in Ribs and
+        Trucks</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male and
+        female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a stone’s
+        throw of the shore” (Terra Del Fuego), “over which the beech tree
+        extended its branches.” —<i>Darwin’s Voyage of a Naturalist</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “‘Stern all!’ exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw the
+        distended jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the boat,
+        threatening it with instant destruction;—‘Stern all, for your
+        lives!’” —<i>Wharton the Whale Killer</i>.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        “So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, While the bold
+        harpooneer is striking the whale!” —<i>Nantucket Song</i>.
+      </p>
+<pre>     “Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale
+     In his ocean home will be
+     A giant in might, where might is right,
+     And King of the boundless sea.”
+      —<i>Whale Song</i>.
+</pre>
+      <br>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having
+      little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on
+      shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of
+      the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the
+      circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever
+      it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself
+      involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear
+      of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an
+      upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me
+      from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking
+      people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon
+      as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical
+      flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.
+      There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men
+      in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings
+      towards the ocean with me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves
+      as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf.
+      Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is
+      the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by
+      breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the
+      crowds of water-gazers there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears
+      Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do
+      you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand
+      thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some
+      leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking
+      over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as
+      if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all
+      landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters,
+      nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green
+      fields gone? What do they here?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and
+      seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the
+      extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder
+      warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as
+      they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of
+      them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys,
+      streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all
+      unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses
+      of all those ships attract them thither?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take
+      almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale,
+      and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let
+      the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand
+      that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead
+      you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be
+      athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan
+      happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one
+      knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest,
+      quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of
+      the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees,
+      each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and
+      here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder
+      cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way,
+      reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue.
+      But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes
+      down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain,
+      unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go
+      visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade
+      knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—Water—there
+      is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would
+      you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of
+      Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate
+      whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a
+      pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy
+      with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to
+      sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such
+      a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out
+      of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the
+      Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this
+      is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of
+      Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he
+      saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image,
+      we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the
+      ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to
+      grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do
+      not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to
+      go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag
+      unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick—grow
+      quarrelsome—don’t sleep of nights—do not enjoy themselves
+      much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though
+      I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a
+      Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to
+      those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable
+      toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as
+      much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships,
+      barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,—though
+      I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of
+      officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though
+      once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered,
+      there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say
+      reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous
+      dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse,
+      that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the
+      pyramids.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
+      plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True,
+      they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like
+      a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is
+      unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honor, particularly if you
+      come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or
+      Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting
+      your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country
+      schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition
+      is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires
+      a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear
+      it. But even this wears off in time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom
+      and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I
+      mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel
+      Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and
+      respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a
+      slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me
+      about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the
+      satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one
+      way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or
+      metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed
+      round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be
+      content.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying
+      me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I
+      ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there
+      is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act
+      of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two
+      orchard thieves entailed upon us. But <i>being paid</i>,—what will compare
+      with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really
+      marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root
+      of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven.
+      Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise
+      and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are
+      far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate
+      the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the
+      quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the
+      forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same
+      way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same
+      time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after
+      having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it
+      into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer
+      of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs
+      me, and influences me in some unaccountable way—he can better answer
+      than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed
+      part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time
+      ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more
+      extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run
+      something like this:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “<i>Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.</i>
+      “WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the
+      Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others
+      were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy
+      parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot
+      tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I
+      think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being
+      cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about
+      performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it
+      was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating
+      judgment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale
+      himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity.
+      Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the
+      undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending
+      marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to
+      my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been
+      inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for
+      things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous
+      coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and
+      could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is
+      but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one
+      lodges in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great
+      flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that
+      swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul,
+      endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand
+      hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm,
+      and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of old
+      Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a Saturday night in
+      December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the little packet for
+      Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place would
+      offer, till the following Monday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at
+      this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be
+      related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up
+      to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine,
+      boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old
+      island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late
+      been gradually monopolising the business of whaling, and though in this
+      matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her
+      great original—the Tyre of this Carthage;—the place where the
+      first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did
+      those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give
+      chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first
+      adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported
+      cobblestones—so goes the story—to throw at the whales, in
+      order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the
+      bowsprit?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me in
+      New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a matter
+      of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a very
+      dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and
+      cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded
+      my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,—So, wherever
+      you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary
+      street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with
+      the darkness towards the south—wherever in your wisdom you may
+      conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the
+      price, and don’t be too particular.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of “The
+      Crossed Harpoons”—but it looked too expensive and jolly there.
+      Further on, from the bright red windows of the “Sword-Fish Inn,” there
+      came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and
+      ice from before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten
+      inches thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement,—rather weary for me,
+      when I struck my foot against the flinty projections, because from hard,
+      remorseless service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight.
+      Too expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the
+      broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses
+      within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don’t you hear? get away from
+      before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I went. I
+      now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for there,
+      doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and
+      here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this
+      hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town
+      proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light proceeding
+      from a low, wide building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had
+      a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the public; so,
+      entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an ash-box in the
+      porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost choked me, are
+      these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But “The Crossed
+      Harpoons,” and “The Sword-Fish?”—this, then must needs be the sign
+      of “The Trap.” However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice
+      within, pushed on and opened a second, interior door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black
+      faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of
+      Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the
+      preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and
+      wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out,
+      Wretched entertainment at the sign of ‘The Trap!’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks,
+      and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging
+      sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a
+      tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath—“The
+      Spouter Inn:—Peter Coffin.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion,
+      thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose
+      this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and
+      the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little
+      wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the
+      ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a
+      poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very
+      spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a queer sort of place—a gable-ended old house, one side
+      palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak
+      corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling
+      than ever it did about poor Paul’s tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless,
+      is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob
+      quietly toasting for bed. “In judging of that tempestuous wind called
+      Euroclydon,” says an old writer—of whose works I possess the only
+      copy extant—“it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest
+      out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or
+      whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on
+      both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier.” True
+      enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind—old
+      black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this
+      body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t stop up the chinks and
+      the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it’s
+      too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the
+      copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor
+      Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow,
+      and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both
+      ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not
+      keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his
+      red silken wrapper—(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What
+      a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them
+      talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give
+      me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to
+      the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than
+      here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of
+      the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to
+      keep out this frost?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the
+      door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be
+      moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar
+      in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a
+      temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is
+      plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet,
+      and see what sort of a place this “Spouter” may be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low,
+      straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the
+      bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large
+      oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the
+      unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study
+      and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the
+      neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its
+      purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first
+      you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New
+      England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of
+      much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and
+      especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the
+      entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild,
+      might not be altogether unwarranted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous,
+      black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three
+      blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy,
+      soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.
+      Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity
+      about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath
+      with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and
+      anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s
+      the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the
+      four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean
+      winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time.
+      But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in
+      the picture’s midst. <i>That</i> once found out, and all the rest were plain. But
+      stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the
+      great leviathan himself?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly
+      based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I
+      conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a
+      great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three
+      dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to
+      spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself
+      upon the three mast-heads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array
+      of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth
+      resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and
+      one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment
+      made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you
+      gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have
+      gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed
+      with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons all broken and
+      deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long lance, now wildly
+      elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a
+      sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon—so like a corkscrew now—was
+      flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards slain
+      off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like
+      a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty
+      feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way—cut
+      through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with
+      fireplaces all round—you enter the public room. A still duskier
+      place is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled
+      planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft’s
+      cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored
+      old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low, shelf-like
+      table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities
+      gathered from this wide world’s remotest nooks. Projecting from the
+      further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den—the bar—a
+      rude attempt at a right whale’s head. Be that how it may, there stands the
+      vast arched bone of the whale’s jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive
+      beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters,
+      bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another
+      cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little
+      withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums
+      and death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true
+      cylinders without—within, the villanous green goggling glasses
+      deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians
+      rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads’ goblets. Fill to
+      <i>this</i> mark, and your charge is but a penny; to <i>this</i> a penny more; and so on
+      to the full glass—the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for
+      a shilling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about a
+      table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of <i>skrimshander</i>. I sought
+      the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room,
+      received for answer that his house was full—not a bed unoccupied.
+      “But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to
+      sharing a harpooneer’s blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are goin’ a-whalin’,
+      so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever
+      do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he
+      (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was
+      not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander further about a
+      strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with the half of any
+      decent man’s blanket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper?
+      Supper’ll be ready directly.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the
+      Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with
+      his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space
+      between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but he
+      didn’t make much headway, I thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining
+      room. It was cold as Iceland—no fire at all—the landlord said
+      he couldn’t afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a
+      winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and hold to
+      our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But the fare
+      was of the most substantial kind—not only meat and potatoes, but
+      dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in a green
+      box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a dead
+      sartainty.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the harpooneer is it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, “the harpooneer
+      is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don’t—he
+      eats nothing but steaks, and he likes ’em rare.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The devil he does,” says I. “Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He’ll be here afore long,” was the answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this “dark
+      complexioned” harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so
+      turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into bed
+      before I did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what
+      else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a
+      looker on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord
+      cried, “That’s the Grampus’s crew. I seed her reported in the offing this
+      morning; a three years’ voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we’ll
+      have the latest news from the Feegees.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open,
+      and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy
+      watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all
+      bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an
+      eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat, and
+      this was the first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they made a
+      straight wake for the whale’s mouth—the bar—when the wrinkled
+      little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all
+      round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah mixed
+      him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a
+      sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how
+      long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the
+      weather side of an ice-island.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with
+      the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering about
+      most obstreperously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he
+      seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own
+      sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much noise as
+      the rest. This man interested me at once; and since the sea-gods had
+      ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a
+      sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned), I will here
+      venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six feet in
+      height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom
+      seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his
+      white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of his
+      eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy.
+      His voice at once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine
+      stature, I thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the
+      Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry of his companions had
+      mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I saw no more
+      of him till he became my comrade on the sea. In a few minutes, however, he
+      was missed by his shipmates, and being, it seems, for some reason a huge
+      favourite with them, they raised a cry of “Bulkington! Bulkington! where’s
+      Bulkington?” and darted out of the house in pursuit of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was now about nine o’clock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally
+      quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon a little
+      plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance of the seamen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal
+      rather not sleep with your own brother. I don’t know how it is, but people
+      like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping
+      with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that
+      stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply. Nor was
+      there any earthly reason why I as a sailor should sleep two in a bed, more
+      than anybody else; for sailors no more sleep two in a bed at sea, than
+      bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they all sleep together in one
+      apartment, but you have your own hammock, and cover yourself with your own
+      blanket, and sleep in your own skin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the
+      thought of sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a
+      harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be of
+      the tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over.
+      Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought to be home
+      and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at midnight—how
+      could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Landlord! I’ve changed my mind about that harpooneer.—I shan’t
+      sleep with him. I’ll try the bench here.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Just as you please; I’m sorry I can’t spare ye a tablecloth for a
+      mattress, and it’s a plaguy rough board here”—feeling of the knots
+      and notches. “But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I’ve got a carpenter’s plane
+      there in the bar—wait, I say, and I’ll make ye snug enough.” So
+      saying he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief first
+      dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed, the while
+      grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at last the
+      plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was near
+      spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven’s sake to quit—the
+      bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing in
+      the world could make eider down of a pine plank. So gathering up the
+      shavings with another grin, and throwing them into the great stove in the
+      middle of the room, he went about his business, and left me in a brown
+      study.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too
+      short; but that could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too
+      narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four inches higher than
+      the planed one—so there was no yoking them. I then placed the first
+      bench lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall, leaving a
+      little interval between, for my back to settle down in. But I soon found
+      that there came such a draught of cold air over me from under the sill of
+      the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially as another
+      current from the rickety door met the one from the window, and both
+      together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity of
+      the spot where I had thought to spend the night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn’t I steal a
+      march on him—bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be
+      wakened by the most violent knockings? It seemed no bad idea; but upon
+      second thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next
+      morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be
+      standing in the entry, all ready to knock me down!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending a
+      sufferable night unless in some other person’s bed, I began to think that
+      after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against this
+      unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I’ll wait awhile; he must be dropping in
+      before long. I’ll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may become
+      jolly good bedfellows after all—there’s no telling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes,
+      and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Landlord!” said I, “what sort of a chap is he—does he always keep
+      such late hours?” It was now hard upon twelve o’clock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be
+      mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. “No,” he answered,
+      “generally he’s an early bird—airley to bed and airley to rise—yes,
+      he’s the bird what catches the worm. But to-night he went out a peddling,
+      you see, and I don’t see what on airth keeps him so late, unless, may be,
+      he can’t sell his head.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Can’t sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you
+      are telling me?” getting into a towering rage. “Do you pretend to say,
+      landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday
+      night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around this town?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That’s precisely it,” said the landlord, “and I told him he couldn’t sell
+      it here, the market’s overstocked.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “With what?” shouted I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “With heads to be sure; ain’t there too many heads in the world?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I tell you what it is, landlord,” said I quite calmly, “you’d better stop
+      spinning that yarn to me—I’m not green.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “May be not,” taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, “but I rayther
+      guess you’ll be done <i>brown</i> if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin’
+      his head.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’ll break it for him,” said I, now flying into a passion again at this
+      unaccountable farrago of the landlord’s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s broke a’ready,” said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Broke,” said I—“<i>broke</i>, do you mean?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sartain, and that’s the very reason he can’t sell it, I guess.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Landlord,” said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a snow-storm—“landlord,
+      stop whittling. You and I must understand one another, and that too
+      without delay. I come to your house and want a bed; you tell me you can
+      only give me half a one; that the other half belongs to a certain
+      harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you
+      persist in telling me the most mystifying and exasperating stories tending
+      to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you design
+      for my bedfellow—a sort of connexion, landlord, which is an intimate
+      and confidential one in the highest degree. I now demand of you to speak
+      out and tell me who and what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in
+      all respects safe to spend the night with him. And in the first place, you
+      will be so good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if
+      true I take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and
+      I’ve no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you, sir, <i>you</i> I mean,
+      landlord, <i>you</i>, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would
+      thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Wall,” said the landlord, fetching a long breath, “that’s a purty long
+      sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be easy,
+      this here harpooneer I have been tellin’ you of has just arrived from the
+      south seas, where he bought up a lot of ’balmed New Zealand heads (great
+      curios, you know), and he’s sold all on ’em but one, and that one he’s
+      trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow’s Sunday, and it would not do to
+      be sellin’ human heads about the streets when folks is goin’ to churches.
+      He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was goin’ out of
+      the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a
+      string of inions.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed
+      that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me—but at
+      the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of a
+      Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal
+      business as selling the heads of dead idolators?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He pays reg’lar,” was the rejoinder. “But come, it’s getting dreadful
+      late, you had better be turning flukes—it’s a nice bed; Sal and me
+      slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. There’s plenty of room
+      for two to kick about in that bed; it’s an almighty big bed that. Why,
+      afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little Johnny in the foot
+      of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one night, and somehow,
+      Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his arm. Arter that,
+      Sal said it wouldn’t do. Come along here, I’ll give ye a glim in a jiffy;”
+       and so saying he lighted a candle and held it towards me, offering to lead
+      the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a clock in the corner, he
+      exclaimed “I vum it’s Sunday—you won’t see that harpooneer to-night;
+      he’s come to anchor somewhere—come along then; <i>do</i> come; <i>won’t</i> ye
+      come?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was
+      ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough,
+      with a prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four harpooneers
+      to sleep abreast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There,” said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest
+      that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; “there, make
+      yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye.” I turned round from
+      eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the
+      most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced
+      round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table, could see no
+      other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four walls,
+      and a papered fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of things not
+      properly belonging to the room, there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown
+      upon the floor in one corner; also a large seaman’s bag, containing the
+      harpooneer’s wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk. Likewise, there
+      was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf over the
+      fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the
+      light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive
+      at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to nothing
+      but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags
+      something like the stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin.
+      There was a hole or slit in the middle of this mat, as you see the same in
+      South American ponchos. But could it be possible that any sober harpooneer
+      would get into a door mat, and parade the streets of any Christian town in
+      that sort of guise? I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a
+      hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as
+      though this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I
+      went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw
+      such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I
+      gave myself a kink in the neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this
+      head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on
+      the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in
+      the middle of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought a
+      little more in my shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now, half
+      undressed as I was, and remembering what the landlord said about the
+      harpooneer’s not coming home at all that night, it being so very late, I
+      made no more ado, but jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and then
+      blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and commended myself to the care
+      of heaven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there
+      is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a
+      long time. At last I slid off into a light doze, and had pretty nearly
+      made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I heard a heavy footfall
+      in the passage, and saw a glimmer of light come into the room from under
+      the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal
+      head-peddler. But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a word
+      till spoken to. Holding a light in one hand, and that identical New
+      Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and without
+      looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off from me on the
+      floor in one corner, and then began working away at the knotted cords of
+      the large bag I before spoke of as being in the room. I was all eagerness
+      to see his face, but he kept it averted for some time while employed in
+      unlacing the bag’s mouth. This accomplished, however, he turned round—when,
+      good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish,
+      yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large blackish looking
+      squares. Yes, it’s just as I thought, he’s a terrible bedfellow; he’s been
+      in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon. But
+      at that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I
+      plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black
+      squares on his cheeks. They were stains of some sort or other. At first I
+      knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the truth occurred
+      to me. I remembered a story of a white man—a whaleman too—who,
+      falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I concluded that
+      this harpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must have met with
+      a similar adventure. And what is it, thought I, after all! It’s only his
+      outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. But then, what to make
+      of his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about,
+      and completely independent of the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it
+      might be nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never heard of
+      a hot sun’s tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one. However, I had
+      never been in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced these
+      extraordinary effects upon the skin. Now, while all these ideas were
+      passing through me like lightning, this harpooneer never noticed me at
+      all. But, after some difficulty having opened his bag, he commenced
+      fumbling in it, and presently pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a
+      seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing these on the old chest in the
+      middle of the room, he then took the New Zealand head—a ghastly
+      thing enough—and crammed it down into the bag. He now took off his
+      hat—a new beaver hat—when I came nigh singing out with fresh
+      surprise. There was no hair on his head—none to speak of at least—nothing
+      but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head
+      now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. Had not the stranger
+      stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker than
+      ever I bolted a dinner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but it
+      was the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make of this
+      head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension. Ignorance
+      is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded
+      about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was
+      the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night.
+      In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game enough just then to
+      address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed
+      inexplicable in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his
+      chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with
+      the same squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same dark
+      squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years’ War, and just escaped
+      from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were
+      marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of
+      young palms. It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage
+      or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in
+      this Christian country. I quaked to think of it. A peddler of heads too—perhaps
+      the heads of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to mine—heavens!
+      look at that tomahawk!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about
+      something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that
+      he must indeed be a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or
+      dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the
+      pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with a
+      hunch on its back, and exactly the colour of a three days’ old Congo baby.
+      Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that this black
+      manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner. But seeing that
+      it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal like polished
+      ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed
+      it proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the empty fire-place, and
+      removing the papered fire-board, sets up this little hunch-backed image,
+      like a tenpin, between the andirons. The chimney jambs and all the bricks
+      inside were very sooty, so that I thought this fire-place made a very
+      appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but ill
+      at ease meantime—to see what was next to follow. First he takes
+      about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places
+      them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on top
+      and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into a
+      sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty snatches into the fire, and
+      still hastier withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he seemed to be
+      scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing out the biscuit;
+      then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of it
+      to the little negro. But the little devil did not seem to fancy such dry
+      sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips. All these strange antics
+      were accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from the devotee, who
+      seemed to be praying in a sing-song or else singing some pagan psalmody or
+      other, during which his face twitched about in the most unnatural manner.
+      At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very unceremoniously,
+      and bagged it again in his grego pocket as carelessly as if he were a
+      sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and seeing him
+      now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business operations, and
+      jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time, now or never, before
+      the light was put out, to break the spell in which I had so long been
+      bound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one.
+      Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an
+      instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle,
+      he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke. The next moment the light was
+      extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth, sprang
+      into bed with me. I sang out, I could not help it now; and giving a sudden
+      grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him against
+      the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might be, to keep
+      quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again. But his guttural
+      responses satisfied me at once that he but ill comprehended my meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who-e debel you?”—he at last said—“you no speak-e, dam-me, I
+      kill-e.” And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in
+      the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Landlord, for God’s sake, Peter Coffin!” shouted I. “Landlord! Watch!
+      Coffin! Angels! save me!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!” again growled the
+      cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the hot
+      tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on fire. But
+      thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the room light in
+      hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t be afraid now,” said he, grinning again, “Queequeg here wouldn’t
+      harm a hair of your head.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Stop your grinning,” shouted I, “and why didn’t you tell me that that
+      infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I thought ye know’d it;—didn’t I tell ye, he was a peddlin’ heads
+      around town?—but turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look
+      here—you sabbee me, I sabbee—you this man sleepe you—you
+      sabbee?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Me sabbee plenty”—grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and
+      sitting up in bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You gettee in,” he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing
+      the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil but a
+      really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment. For all
+      his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal.
+      What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself—the
+      man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me,
+      as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a
+      drunken Christian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Landlord,” said I, “tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or
+      whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I will turn
+      in with him. But I don’t fancy having a man smoking in bed with me. It’s
+      dangerous. Besides, I ain’t insured.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely
+      motioned me to get into bed—rolling over to one side as much as to
+      say—“I won’t touch a leg of ye.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good night, landlord,” said I, “you may go.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I turned in, and never slept better in my life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown
+      over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought
+      I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little
+      parti-coloured squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all
+      over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of
+      which were of one precise shade—owing I suppose to his keeping his
+      arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly
+      rolled up at various times—this same arm of his, I say, looked for
+      all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly
+      lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from
+      the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the
+      sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging
+      me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a
+      child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me;
+      whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle. The
+      circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper or other—I
+      think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little sweep
+      do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other, was all
+      the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,—my mother
+      dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to bed, though
+      it was only two o’clock in the afternoon of the 21st June, the longest day
+      in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully. But there was no help
+      for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the third floor,
+      undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time, and with a
+      bitter sigh got between the sheets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse
+      before I could hope for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed! the small of
+      my back ached to think of it. And it was so light too; the sun shining in
+      at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the streets, and the
+      sound of gay voices all over the house. I felt worse and worse—at
+      last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in my stockinged feet,
+      sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself at her feet,
+      beseeching her as a particular favour to give me a good slippering for my
+      misbehaviour; anything indeed but condemning me to lie abed such an
+      unendurable length of time. But she was the best and most conscientious of
+      stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For several hours I lay
+      there broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I have ever done since,
+      even from the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At last I must have fallen
+      into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it—half
+      steeped in dreams—I opened my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was
+      now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through
+      all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a
+      supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane,
+      and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand
+      belonged, seemed closely seated by my bed-side. For what seemed ages piled
+      on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag
+      away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single
+      inch, the horrid spell would be broken. I knew not how this consciousness
+      at last glided away from me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly
+      remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost
+      myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very
+      hour, I often puzzle myself with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the
+      supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to
+      those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg’s pagan arm
+      thrown round me. But at length all the past night’s events soberly
+      recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the
+      comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm—unlock his
+      bridegroom clasp—yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me
+      tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to
+      rouse him—“Queequeg!”—but his only answer was a snore. I then
+      rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly
+      felt a slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the
+      tomahawk sleeping by the savage’s side, as if it were a hatchet-faced
+      baby. A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in
+      the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! “Queequeg!—in the
+      name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!” At length, by dint of much wriggling,
+      and loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his
+      hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in
+      extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all
+      over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff
+      as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not
+      altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim consciousness of
+      knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him. Meanwhile, I
+      lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings now, and bent upon
+      narrowly observing so curious a creature. When, at last, his mind seemed
+      made up touching the character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it
+      were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain
+      signs and sounds gave me to understand that, if it pleased me, he would
+      dress first and then leave me to dress afterwards, leaving the whole
+      apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg, under the circumstances, this is
+      a very civilized overture; but, the truth is, these savages have an innate
+      sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous how essentially
+      polite they are. I pay this particular compliment to Queequeg, because he
+      treated me with so much civility and consideration, while I was guilty of
+      great rudeness; staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette
+      motions; for the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding.
+      Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you don’t see every day, he and his ways
+      were well worth unusual regarding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall one,
+      by the by, and then—still minus his trowsers—he hunted up his
+      boots. What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his next
+      movement was to crush himself—boots in hand, and hat on—under
+      the bed; when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I inferred he
+      was hard at work booting himself; though by no law of propriety that I
+      ever heard of, is any man required to be private when putting on his
+      boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition stage—neither
+      caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized to show off his
+      outlandishness in the strangest possible manners. His education was not
+      yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not been a small degree
+      civilized, he very probably would not have troubled himself with boots at
+      all; but then, if he had not been still a savage, he never would have
+      dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on. At last, he emerged with
+      his hat very much dented and crushed down over his eyes, and began
+      creaking and limping about the room, as if, not being much accustomed to
+      boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide ones—probably not made to
+      order either—rather pinched and tormented him at the first go off of
+      a bitter cold morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the
+      street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view into
+      the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that Queequeg
+      made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on; I begged
+      him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat, and
+      particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible. He complied,
+      and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in the morning any
+      Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to my amazement,
+      contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms, and
+      hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on
+      the wash-stand centre table, dipped it into water and commenced lathering
+      his face. I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and
+      behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long
+      wooden stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and
+      striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous
+      scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks I, Queequeg, this is
+      using Rogers’s best cutlery with a vengeance. Afterwards I wondered the
+      less at this operation when I came to know of what fine steel the head of
+      a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp the long straight edges are
+      always kept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of
+      the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his
+      harpoon like a marshal’s baton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the
+      grinning landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him,
+      though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my
+      bedfellow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good
+      thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person,
+      afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let
+      him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the
+      man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is
+      more in that man than you perhaps think for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the
+      night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were
+      nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and
+      sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and
+      ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn,
+      shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This
+      young fellow’s healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and would
+      seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days landed from
+      his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might
+      say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still
+      lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached withal; <i>he</i> doubtless has
+      tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show a cheek like Queequeg?
+      which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes’ western slope, to
+      show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Grub, ho!” now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went
+      to breakfast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in
+      manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard, the
+      great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all men,
+      they possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the mere
+      crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or the
+      taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart of
+      Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo’s performances—this kind of
+      travel, I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining a high social
+      polish. Still, for the most part, that sort of thing is to be had
+      anywhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that after
+      we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some good
+      stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every man
+      maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they looked
+      embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the
+      slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire
+      strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking; and yet,
+      here they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same calling,
+      all of kindred tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as
+      though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green
+      Mountains. A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior
+      whalemen!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as for Queequeg—why, Queequeg sat there among them—at the
+      head of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I
+      cannot say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer could not have
+      cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and
+      using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the
+      imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him.
+      But <i>that</i> was certainly very coolly done by him, and every one knows that
+      in most people’s estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We will not speak of all Queequeg’s peculiarities here; how he eschewed
+      coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks,
+      done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew like the rest
+      into the public room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting there
+      quietly digesting and smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I sallied
+      out for a stroll.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 6. The Street.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an
+      individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a civilized
+      town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first daylight stroll
+      through the streets of New Bedford.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently
+      offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts. Even
+      in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes
+      jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not unknown to Lascars and
+      Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared
+      the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping. In these
+      last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual
+      cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom
+      yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians,
+      and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft
+      which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still
+      more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town
+      scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and
+      glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows
+      who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the
+      whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they came. In
+      some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look there! that
+      chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and swallow-tailed
+      coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife. Here comes another with
+      a sou’-wester and a bombazine cloak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one—I mean a
+      downright bumpkin dandy—a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his
+      two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a
+      country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a distinguished
+      reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the comical
+      things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his sea-outfit, he
+      orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his canvas trowsers. Ah,
+      poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps in the first howling
+      gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of
+      the tempest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and
+      bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer
+      place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this day
+      perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador. As it
+      is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they look so
+      bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New
+      England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like Canaan; a land,
+      also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with milk; nor in the
+      spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this,
+      nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and
+      gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted
+      upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty
+      mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses
+      and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.
+      One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of
+      the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their
+      daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You
+      must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they
+      have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn
+      their lengths in spermaceti candles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples—long
+      avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and
+      bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their
+      tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art;
+      which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces
+      of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation’s final
+      day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But
+      roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is
+      perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom
+      of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls
+      breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as
+      though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the
+      Puritanic sands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are the
+      moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail
+      to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this
+      special errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving
+      sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called
+      bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I found a
+      small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows. A
+      muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm.
+      Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as
+      if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not
+      yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat
+      steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned
+      into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like
+      the following, but I do not pretend to quote:—
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN TALBOT, Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost
+      overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, <i>November</i> 1<i>st</i>, 1836.
+      THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS SISTER.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER
+      CANNY, SETH MACY, AND SAMUEL GLEIG, Forming one of the boats’ crews OF THE
+      SHIP ELIZA Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the Off-shore Ground
+      in the PACIFIC, <i>December</i> 31<i>st</i>, 1839. THIS MARBLE Is here placed by their
+      surviving SHIPMATES.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows of
+      his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, <i>August</i> 3<i>d</i>,
+      1833. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself
+      near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me.
+      Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of
+      incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage was the only person
+      present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only one who
+      could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions
+      on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of the seamen whose names
+      appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not; but so many
+      are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several
+      women present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing
+      grief, that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose
+      unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused
+      the old wounds to bleed afresh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among
+      flowers can say—here, <i>here</i> lies my beloved; ye know not the
+      desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those
+      black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those
+      immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the
+      lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the
+      beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might those
+      tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why
+      it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales,
+      though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is that to
+      his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so
+      significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but
+      embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life
+      Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal,
+      unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam
+      who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be
+      comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in
+      unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead;
+      wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city.
+      All these things are not without their meanings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead
+      doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a
+      Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light
+      of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone
+      before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew
+      merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion,
+      it seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes,
+      there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick
+      chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have
+      hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they
+      call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in
+      looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the
+      sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.
+      Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body
+      who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for
+      Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave
+      my soul, Jove himself cannot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable
+      robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon
+      admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation,
+      sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it was
+      the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he was a
+      very great favourite. He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his youth,
+      but for many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry. At the
+      time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy
+      old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering
+      youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain
+      mild gleams of a newly developing bloom—the spring verdure peeping
+      forth even beneath February’s snow. No one having previously heard his
+      history, could for the first time behold Father Mapple without the utmost
+      interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical peculiarities
+      about him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life he had led. When he
+      entered I observed that he carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come
+      in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and
+      his great pilot cloth jacket seemed almost to drag him to the floor with
+      the weight of the water it had absorbed. However, hat and coat and
+      overshoes were one by one removed, and hung up in a little space in an
+      adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the
+      pulpit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a
+      regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor,
+      seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect, it
+      seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit
+      without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those
+      used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling captain
+      had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted man-ropes for
+      this ladder, which, being itself nicely headed, and stained with a
+      mahogany colour, the whole contrivance, considering what manner of chapel
+      it was, seemed by no means in bad taste. Halting for an instant at the
+      foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of
+      the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly
+      sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the
+      steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case with
+      swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of wood,
+      so that at every step there was a joint. At my first glimpse of the
+      pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a ship, these
+      joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not prepared
+      to see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn round, and
+      stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder step by step,
+      till the whole was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in his little
+      Quebec.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this.
+      Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity,
+      that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks of
+      the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober reason for this thing;
+      furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen. Can it be, then, that by
+      that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for
+      the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions? Yes, for
+      replenished with the meat and wine of the word, to the faithful man of
+      God, this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold—a lofty
+      Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the walls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place,
+      borrowed from the chaplain’s former sea-farings. Between the marble
+      cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back was
+      adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship beating against
+      a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy breakers. But
+      high above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there floated a little
+      isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel’s face; and this bright
+      face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the ship’s tossed deck,
+      something like that silver plate now inserted into the Victory’s plank
+      where Nelson fell. “Ah, noble ship,” the angel seemed to say, “beat on,
+      beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is
+      breaking through; the clouds are rolling off—serenest azure is at
+      hand.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that had
+      achieved the ladder and the picture. Its panelled front was in the
+      likeness of a ship’s bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting
+      piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship’s fiddle-headed beak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this
+      earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads
+      the world. From thence it is the storm of God’s quick wrath is first
+      descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the
+      God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favourable winds. Yes,
+      the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the
+      pulpit is its prow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered
+      the scattered people to condense. “Starboard gangway, there! side away to
+      larboard—larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still
+      slighter shuffling of women’s shoes, and all was quiet again, and every
+      eye on the preacher.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his large
+      brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a
+      prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom
+      of the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a
+      bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog—in such tones he
+      commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards the
+      concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy—
+    </p>
+<pre>     “The ribs and terrors in the whale,
+     Arched over me a dismal gloom,
+     While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by,
+     And lift me deepening down to doom.
+
+     “I saw the opening maw of hell,
+     With endless pains and sorrows there;
+     Which none but they that feel can tell—
+     Oh, I was plunging to despair.
+
+     “In black distress, I called my God,
+     When I could scarce believe him mine,
+     He bowed his ear to my complaints—
+     No more the whale did me confine.
+
+     “With speed he flew to my relief,
+     As on a radiant dolphin borne;
+     Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
+     The face of my Deliverer God.
+
+     “My song for ever shall record
+     That terrible, that joyful hour;
+     I give the glory to my God,
+     His all the mercy and the power.”
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the
+      howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned
+      over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the
+      proper page, said: “Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first
+      chapter of Jonah—‘And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up
+      Jonah.’”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is
+      one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet
+      what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! what a pregnant
+      lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the
+      fish’s belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods
+      surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters;
+      sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But <i>what</i> is this lesson
+      that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a
+      lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the
+      living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story
+      of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift
+      punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of
+      Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was
+      in his wilful disobedience of the command of God—never mind now what
+      that command was, or how conveyed—which he found a hard command. But
+      all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember
+      that—and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade.
+      And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this
+      disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God,
+      by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men will carry
+      him into countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains of this
+      earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that’s bound
+      for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By
+      all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz.
+      That’s the opinion of learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is
+      in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed
+      in those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea.
+      Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast
+      of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two
+      thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the Straits of
+      Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee
+      world-wide from God? Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of
+      all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God;
+      prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the
+      seas. So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there been
+      policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong,
+      had been arrested ere he touched a deck. How plainly he’s a fugitive! no
+      baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,—no friends accompany
+      him to the wharf with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he
+      finds the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he
+      steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the
+      moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger’s evil eye.
+      Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confidence; in
+      vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure the
+      mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious way,
+      one whispers to the other—“Jack, he’s robbed a widow;” or, “Joe, do
+      you mark him; he’s a bigamist;” or, “Harry lad, I guess he’s the adulterer
+      that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing murderers
+      from Sodom.” Another runs to read the bill that’s stuck against the spile
+      upon the wharf to which the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold
+      coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and containing a description of
+      his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill; while all his
+      sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their hands
+      upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his boldness to his
+      face, only looks so much the more a coward. He will not confess himself
+      suspected; but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of
+      it; and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised,
+      they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Who’s there?’ cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out
+      his papers for the Customs—‘Who’s there?’ Oh! how that harmless
+      question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again. But
+      he rallies. ‘I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon sail ye,
+      sir?’ Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up to Jonah, though the man
+      now stands before him; but no sooner does he hear that hollow voice, than
+      he darts a scrutinizing glance. ‘We sail with the next coming tide,’ at
+      last he slowly answered, still intently eyeing him. ‘No sooner, sir?’—‘Soon
+      enough for any honest man that goes a passenger.’ Ha! Jonah, that’s
+      another stab. But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent. ‘I’ll
+      sail with ye,’—he says,—‘the passage money how much is that?—I’ll
+      pay now.’ For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it were a thing
+      not to be overlooked in this history, ‘that he paid the fare thereof’ ere
+      the craft did sail. And taken with the context, this is full of meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime
+      in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this
+      world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a
+      passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. So
+      Jonah’s Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah’s purse, ere he judge
+      him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it’s assented to.
+      Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same time
+      resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. Yet when Jonah
+      fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the Captain.
+      He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any way, he
+      mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage. ‘Point out my state-room,
+      Sir,’ says Jonah now, ‘I’m travel-weary; I need sleep.’ ‘Thou lookest like
+      it,’ says the Captain, ‘there’s thy room.’ Jonah enters, and would lock
+      the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling
+      there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about
+      the doors of convicts’ cells being never allowed to be locked within. All
+      dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds
+      the little state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is
+      close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath
+      the ship’s water-line, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that
+      stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his
+      bowels’ wards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates
+      in Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the
+      weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in
+      slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the
+      room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious
+      the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens
+      Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes roll round the place, and
+      this thus far successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance.
+      But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor,
+      the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. ‘Oh! so my conscience hangs in
+      me!’ he groans, ‘straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of my
+      soul are all in crookedness!’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still
+      reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the
+      Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as
+      one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy anguish,
+      praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid the
+      whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the man who
+      bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there’s naught to
+      staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth, Jonah’s prodigy of
+      ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and
+      from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening,
+      glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded smugglers!
+      the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked
+      burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to break. But now when
+      the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars
+      are clattering overboard; when the wind is shrieking, and the men are
+      yelling, and every plank thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah’s
+      head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees
+      no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little
+      hears he or heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with
+      open mouth is cleaving the seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone
+      down into the sides of the ship—a berth in the cabin as I have taken
+      it, and was fast asleep. But the frightened master comes to him, and
+      shrieks in his dead ear, ‘What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!’ Startled
+      from his lethargy by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and
+      stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at
+      that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the
+      bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy
+      vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning
+      while yet afloat. And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face
+      from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the
+      rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again
+      towards the tormented deep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing
+      attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors mark
+      him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him, and at last,
+      fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter to high Heaven,
+      they fall to casting lots, to see for whose cause this great tempest was
+      upon them. The lot is Jonah’s; that discovered, then how furiously they
+      mob him with their questions. ‘What is thine occupation? Whence comest
+      thou? Thy country? What people?’ But mark now, my shipmates, the behavior
+      of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where from;
+      whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions, but likewise
+      another answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited answer
+      is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘I am a Hebrew,’ he cries—and then—‘I fear the Lord the God
+      of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!’ Fear him, O Jonah? Aye,
+      well mightest thou fear the Lord God <i>then!</i> Straightway, he now goes on to
+      make a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more and more
+      appalled, but still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating God
+      for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness of his deserts,—when
+      wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and cast him forth into the
+      sea, for he knew that for <i>his</i> sake this great tempest was upon them; they
+      mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means to save the ship. But
+      all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder; then, with one hand raised
+      invokingly to God, with the other they not unreluctantly lay hold of
+      Jonah.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea; when
+      instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea is still,
+      as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth water behind. He
+      goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that he
+      scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into the yawning jaws
+      awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many
+      white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the
+      fish’s belly. But observe his prayer, and learn a weighty lesson. For
+      sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He
+      feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance
+      to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and
+      pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is
+      true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for
+      punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in
+      the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I
+      do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him
+      before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to
+      repent of it like Jonah.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking, slanting
+      storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who, when
+      describing Jonah’s sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself. His deep
+      chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the warring
+      elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his swarthy
+      brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple hearers look
+      on him with a quick fear that was strange to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves
+      of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with closed
+      eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly,
+      with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon
+      me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah
+      teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I
+      am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down from
+      this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as
+      you listen, while some one of you reads <i>me</i> that other and more awful
+      lesson which Jonah teaches to <i>me</i>, as a pilot of the living God. How being
+      an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and bidden by the
+      Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh,
+      Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission,
+      and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God
+      is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon
+      him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with
+      swift slantings tore him along ‘into the midst of the seas,’ where the
+      eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were
+      wrapped about his head,’ and all the watery world of woe bowled over him.
+      Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet—‘out of the belly of
+      hell’—when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even
+      then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God
+      spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the
+      sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and
+      all the delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry
+      land;’ when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised
+      and beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously
+      murmuring of the ocean—Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what
+      was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That
+      was it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the
+      living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel
+      duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed
+      them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe
+      to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in
+      this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even
+      though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot
+      Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face
+      to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a
+      heavenly enthusiasm,—“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of
+      every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight,
+      than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the
+      kelson is low? Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward
+      delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth,
+      ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong
+      arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has
+      gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the
+      truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from
+      under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,—top-gallant delight
+      is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is
+      only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the
+      billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure
+      Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who
+      coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath—O Father!—chiefly
+      known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die. I have
+      striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this
+      is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live
+      out the lifetime of his God?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with
+      his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and
+      he was left alone in the place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there quite
+      alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some time. He was
+      sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on the stove hearth, and
+      in one hand was holding close up to his face that little negro idol of
+      his; peering hard into its face, and with a jack-knife gently whittling
+      away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in his heathenish way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going to
+      the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap began
+      counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth page—as
+      I fancied—stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and giving
+      utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He would then
+      begin again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at number one each
+      time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and it was only by
+      such a large number of fifties being found together, that his astonishment
+      at the multitude of pages was excited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously
+      marred about the face—at least to my taste—his countenance yet
+      had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide
+      the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces
+      of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and
+      bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils.
+      And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan,
+      which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man
+      who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too,
+      that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and
+      brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I
+      will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was
+      phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded
+      me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It
+      had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows,
+      which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly
+      wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be
+      looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence,
+      never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but appeared
+      wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous book.
+      Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the night previous,
+      and especially considering the affectionate arm I had found thrown over me
+      upon waking in the morning, I thought this indifference of his very
+      strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not know exactly
+      how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm
+      self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed
+      also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the
+      other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no
+      desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as
+      mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost
+      sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the
+      way of Cape Horn, that is—which was the only way he could get there—thrown
+      among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter;
+      and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity;
+      content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this
+      was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there
+      was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we
+      mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I
+      hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I
+      conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have “broken his
+      digester.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that mild
+      stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then only
+      glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering round the
+      casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain; the storm
+      booming without in solemn swells; I began to be sensible of strange
+      feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened
+      hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had
+      redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in
+      which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he
+      was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself
+      mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have
+      repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I’ll
+      try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but
+      hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs
+      and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little
+      noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last
+      night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be
+      bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a
+      little complimented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to him
+      the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures that were
+      in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we went to
+      jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen in
+      this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and, producing his pouch
+      and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging
+      puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly passing between
+      us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan’s
+      breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left
+      us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I
+      to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine,
+      clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married;
+      meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would
+      gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame
+      of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much
+      distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room
+      together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his enormous
+      tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out some thirty
+      dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and mechanically
+      dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them towards me, and
+      said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he silenced me by
+      pouring them into my trowsers’ pockets. I let them stay. He then went
+      about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed the paper
+      fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious for
+      me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a
+      moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or otherwise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible
+      Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in
+      worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you
+      suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth—pagans
+      and all included—can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of
+      black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?—to do the will of God—<i>that</i>
+      is worship. And what is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what
+      I would have my fellow man to do to me—<i>that</i> is the will of God. Now,
+      Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do
+      to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship.
+      Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn
+      idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little
+      idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before him twice or
+      thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at
+      peace with our own consciences and all the world. But we did not go to
+      sleep without some little chat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential
+      disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very
+      bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and
+      chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’
+      honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and
+      Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over
+      mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy
+      were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what little
+      nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting
+      up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position began
+      to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves sitting up;
+      the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the head-board with our
+      four knees drawn up close together, and our two noses bending over them,
+      as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug, the more
+      so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too,
+      seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because
+      truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for
+      there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by
+      contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are
+      all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be
+      said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed,
+      the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why
+      then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and
+      unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be
+      furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the
+      rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but
+      the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air.
+      Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic
+      crystal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at
+      once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether by
+      day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always
+      keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of
+      being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except
+      his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our
+      essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part. Upon opening
+      my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant and self-created darkness
+      into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated
+      twelve-o’clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable revulsion. Nor did I
+      at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to
+      strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt a
+      strong desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it said,
+      that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed
+      the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love
+      once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than to have
+      Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such
+      serene household joy then. I no more felt unduly concerned for the
+      landlord’s policy of insurance. I was only alive to the condensed
+      confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real
+      friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed
+      the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew over us a blue
+      hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far
+      distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and,
+      eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly
+      complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his
+      words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar with
+      his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole story such as
+      it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 12. Biographical.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and
+      South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a
+      grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green
+      sapling; even then, in Queequeg’s ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire
+      to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His
+      father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the
+      maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable
+      warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins—royal stuff; though
+      sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his
+      untutored youth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Sag Harbor ship visited his father’s bay, and Queequeg sought a passage
+      to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of seamen,
+      spurned his suit; and not all the King his father’s influence could
+      prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a
+      distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when she quitted
+      the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low tongue of
+      land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the water. Hiding
+      his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he
+      sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding
+      by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of
+      his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing
+      himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and
+      swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a cutlass
+      over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and Queequeg budged
+      not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit
+      Christendom, the captain at last relented, and told him he might make
+      himself at home. But this fine young savage—this sea Prince of
+      Wales, never saw the Captain’s cabin. They put him down among the sailors,
+      and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter content to toil in the
+      shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming ignominy, if
+      thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his untutored
+      countrymen. For at bottom—so he told me—he was actuated by a
+      profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make
+      his people still happier than they were; and more than that, still better
+      than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him
+      that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more
+      so, than all his father’s heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and
+      seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and
+      seeing how they spent their wages in <i>that</i> place also, poor Queequeg gave
+      it up for lost. Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all meridians; I’ll die
+      a pagan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians,
+      wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer
+      ways about him, though now some time from home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having a
+      coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he being
+      very old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not yet; and
+      added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted
+      him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings
+      before him. But by and by, he said, he would return,—as soon as he
+      felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he proposed to sail
+      about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They had made a
+      harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future
+      movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon
+      this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my
+      intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port for
+      an adventurous whaleman to embark from. He at once resolved to accompany
+      me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch,
+      the same boat, the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap; with
+      both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds. To all
+      this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now felt for
+      Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to
+      be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant of the
+      mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as known to
+      merchant seamen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His story being ended with his pipe’s last dying puff, Queequeg embraced
+      me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we
+      rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon were
+      sleeping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber,
+      for a block, I settled my own and comrade’s bill; using, however, my
+      comrade’s money. The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed
+      amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between me
+      and Queequeg—especially as Peter Coffin’s cock and bull stories
+      about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person
+      whom I now companied with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor
+      carpet-bag, and Queequeg’s canvas sack and hammock, away we went down to
+      “the Moss,” the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the wharf. As
+      we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so much—for
+      they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their streets,—but at
+      seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But we heeded them not,
+      going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg now and then
+      stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs. I asked him why he
+      carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and whether all whaling
+      ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in substance, he replied,
+      that though what I hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular
+      affection for his own harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried
+      in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales. In
+      short, like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers’
+      meadows armed with their own scythes—though in no wise obliged to
+      furnish them—even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons,
+      preferred his own harpoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about
+      the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners
+      of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his heavy chest
+      to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the thing—though
+      in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage
+      the barrow—Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast; and then
+      shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. “Why,” said I, “Queequeg,
+      you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn’t the people
+      laugh?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Rokovoko,
+      it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young
+      cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and this
+      punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided mat where
+      the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at
+      Rokovoko, and its commander—from all accounts, a very stately
+      punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain—this commander was
+      invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg’s sister, a pretty young princess
+      just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at
+      the bride’s bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned
+      the post of honor, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between
+      the High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg’s father. Grace being
+      said,—for those people have their grace as well as we—though
+      Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times look downwards to our
+      platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance upwards to the
+      great Giver of all feasts—Grace, I say, being said, the High Priest
+      opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that is,
+      dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the
+      blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and
+      noting the ceremony, and thinking himself—being Captain of a ship—as
+      having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King’s
+      own house—the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the
+      punchbowl;—taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. “Now,” said
+      Queequeg, “what you tink now?—Didn’t our people laugh?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner.
+      Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one side, New Bedford
+      rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all glittering in the
+      clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled
+      upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay
+      silent and safely moored at last; while from others came a sound of
+      carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt
+      the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one
+      most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second
+      ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the
+      endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little
+      Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings.
+      How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike earth!—that
+      common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs;
+      and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no
+      records.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me. His
+      dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth. On,
+      on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the blast;
+      ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways leaning,
+      we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the two tall
+      masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes. So full of this
+      reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging bowsprit, that for some
+      time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a
+      lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so
+      companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a
+      whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who, by
+      their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all
+      verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him behind
+      his back. I thought the bumpkin’s hour of doom was come. Dropping his
+      harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost
+      miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into the air;
+      then slightly tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with
+      bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning his back upon him,
+      lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a puff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Capting! Capting!” yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer;
+      “Capting, Capting, here’s the devil.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hallo, <i>you</i> sir,” cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea,
+      stalking up to Queequeg, “what in thunder do you mean by that? Don’t you
+      know you might have killed that chap?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What him say?” said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He say,” said I, “that you came near kill-e that man there,” pointing to
+      the still shivering greenhorn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Kill-e,” cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly
+      expression of disdain, “ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so
+      small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Look you,” roared the Captain, “I’ll kill-e <i>you</i>, you cannibal, if you try
+      any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to
+      mind his own eye. The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted the
+      weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying from side to side,
+      completely sweeping the entire after part of the deck. The poor fellow
+      whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept overboard; all hands were
+      in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the boom to stay it, seemed
+      madness. It flew from right to left, and back again, almost in one ticking
+      of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point of snapping into
+      splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of being done;
+      those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing the boom as if it
+      were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale. In the midst of this
+      consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and crawling under
+      the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the
+      bulwarks, and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it round the
+      boom as it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that
+      way trapped, and all was safe. The schooner was run into the wind, and
+      while the hands were clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg, stripped to
+      the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of a leap. For
+      three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog, throwing his long
+      arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing his brawny shoulders
+      through the freezing foam. I looked at the grand and glorious fellow, but
+      saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had gone down. Shooting himself
+      perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now took an instant’s glance
+      around him, and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and
+      disappeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking
+      out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked
+      them up. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble
+      trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg
+      like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at
+      all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only
+      asked for water—fresh water—something to wipe the brine off;
+      that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against
+      the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to
+      himself—“It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We
+      cannibals must help these Christians.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a
+      fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the
+      world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than
+      the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it—a mere hillock, and elbow of
+      sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you
+      would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some
+      gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they
+      don’t grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to
+      send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of
+      wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome;
+      that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the
+      shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades
+      in a day’s walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like
+      Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way
+      inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to
+      their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering,
+      as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that
+      Nantucket is no Illinois.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled
+      by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down
+      upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant Indian in his
+      talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child borne out of sight
+      over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the same direction.
+      Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they discovered the
+      island, and there they found an empty ivory casket,—the poor little
+      Indian’s skeleton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take
+      to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in the
+      sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more
+      experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last,
+      launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this watery world;
+      put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in at
+      Behring’s Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting
+      war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most
+      monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon,
+      clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very
+      panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious
+      assaults!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from
+      their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so
+      many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and
+      Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add
+      Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all
+      India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this
+      terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it,
+      as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through
+      it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating
+      forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen
+      the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like
+      themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep
+      itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone,
+      in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as
+      his own special plantation. <i>There</i> is his home; <i>there</i> lies his business,
+      which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the
+      millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie;
+      he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the
+      Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at
+      last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to
+      an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and
+      is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out
+      of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under
+      his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 15. Chowder.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly to
+      anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no business
+      that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. The landlord of the
+      Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the Try Pots,
+      whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one of the best kept hotels in
+      all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that Cousin Hosea, as he
+      called him, was famous for his chowders. In short, he plainly hinted that
+      we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck at the Try Pots. But the
+      directions he had given us about keeping a yellow warehouse on our
+      starboard hand till we opened a white church to the larboard, and then
+      keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a corner three points to
+      the starboard, and that done, then ask the first man we met where the
+      place was: these crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first,
+      especially as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse—our
+      first point of departure—must be left on the larboard hand, whereas
+      I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard. However, by
+      dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now and then knocking up a
+      peaceable inhabitant to inquire the way, we at last came to something
+      which there was no mistaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses’ ears,
+      swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an old
+      doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other side, so
+      that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows. Perhaps I was
+      over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I could not help
+      staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of crick was in my
+      neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, <i>two</i> of them, one for
+      Queequeg, and one for me. It’s ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper
+      upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the
+      whalemen’s chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots
+      too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman with
+      yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn, under a
+      dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an injured eye, and
+      carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen shirt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Get along with ye,” said she to the man, “or I’ll be combing ye!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Come on, Queequeg,” said I, “all right. There’s Mrs. Hussey.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs.
+      Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon making known
+      our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing further
+      scolding for the present, ushered us into a little room, and seating us at
+      a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded repast, turned
+      round to us and said—“Clam or Cod?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’s that about Cods, ma’am?” said I, with much politeness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Clam or Cod?” she repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “A clam for supper? a cold clam; is <i>that</i> what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?” says
+      I, “but that’s a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter time,
+      ain’t it, Mrs. Hussey?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple Shirt,
+      who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing but the
+      word “clam,” Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to the
+      kitchen, and bawling out “clam for two,” disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Queequeg,” said I, “do you think that we can make out a supper for us
+      both on one clam?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the
+      apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder
+      came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends!
+      hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than
+      hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into
+      little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned
+      with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage,
+      and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food before him,
+      and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great
+      expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey’s
+      clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment.
+      Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word “cod” with great
+      emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savoury steam came
+      forth again, but with a different flavor, and in good time a fine
+      cod-chowder was placed before us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I to
+      myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head? What’s that
+      stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? “But look, Queequeg, ain’t
+      that a live eel in your bowl? Where’s your harpoon?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its
+      name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for
+      breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began
+      to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area before the
+      house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of
+      codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior
+      old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the milk, too, which I could
+      not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along
+      the beach among some fishermen’s boats, I saw Hosea’s brindled cow feeding
+      on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod’s
+      decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey
+      concerning the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to precede
+      me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and demanded his
+      harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. “Why not?” said I; “every
+      true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon—but why not?” “Because it’s
+      dangerous,” says she. “Ever since young Stiggs coming from that unfort’nt
+      v’y’ge of his, when he was gone four years and a half, with only three
+      barrels of <i>ile</i>, was found dead in my first floor back, with his
+      harpoon in his side; ever since then I allow no boarders to take sich
+      dangerous weepons in their rooms at night. So, Mr. Queequeg” (for she had
+      learned his name), “I will just take this here iron, and keep it for you
+      till morning. But the chowder; clam or cod to-morrow for breakfast, men?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Both,” says I; “and let’s have a couple of smoked herring by way of
+      variety.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 16. The Ship.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and no
+      small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been
+      diligently consulting Yojo—the name of his black little god—and
+      Yojo had told him two or three times over, and strongly insisted upon it
+      everyway, that instead of our going together among the whaling-fleet in
+      harbor, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo
+      earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should rest wholly with
+      me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us; and, in order to do so, had
+      already pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself, I, Ishmael,
+      should infallibly light upon, for all the world as though it had turned
+      out by chance; and in that vessel I must immediately ship myself, for the
+      present irrespective of Queequeg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed great
+      confidence in the excellence of Yojo’s judgment and surprising forecast of
+      things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a rather good sort
+      of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole, but in all cases did
+      not succeed in his benevolent designs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, this plan of Queequeg’s, or rather Yojo’s, touching the selection of
+      our craft; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a little relied upon
+      Queequeg’s sagacity to point out the whaler best fitted to carry us and
+      our fortunes securely. But as all my remonstrances produced no effect upon
+      Queequeg, I was obliged to acquiesce; and accordingly prepared to set
+      about this business with a determined rushing sort of energy and vigor,
+      that should quickly settle that trifling little affair. Next morning
+      early, leaving Queequeg shut up with Yojo in our little bedroom—for
+      it seemed that it was some sort of Lent or Ramadan, or day of fasting,
+      humiliation, and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo that day; <i>how</i> it was I
+      never could find out, for, though I applied myself to it several times, I
+      never could master his liturgies and XXXIX Articles—leaving
+      Queequeg, then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming himself at
+      his sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among the shipping. After
+      much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt that there
+      were three ships up for three-years’ voyages—The Devil-dam, the
+      Tit-bit, and the Pequod. <i>Devil-Dam</i>, I do not know the origin of; <i>Tit-bit</i>
+      is obvious; <i>Pequod</i>, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a
+      celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct as the ancient
+      Medes. I peered and pryed about the Devil-dam; from her, hopped over to
+      the Tit-bit; and finally, going on board the Pequod, looked around her for
+      a moment, and then decided that this was the very ship for us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know;—square-toed
+      luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and what not;
+      but take my word for it, you never saw such a rare old craft as this same
+      rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old school, rather small if
+      anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned
+      and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old
+      hull’s complexion was darkened like a French grenadier’s, who has alike
+      fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts—cut
+      somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost
+      overboard in a gale—her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of
+      the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled,
+      like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where
+      Becket bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and
+      marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than
+      half a century she had followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her
+      chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a
+      retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod,—this
+      old Peleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had built upon her
+      original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of
+      material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake’s
+      carved buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian
+      emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing
+      of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased
+      bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were
+      garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm
+      whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons
+      to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly
+      travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her
+      reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one
+      mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary
+      foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the
+      Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble
+      craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with
+      that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority,
+      in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I saw
+      nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of tent, or rather
+      wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It seemed only a temporary
+      erection used in port. It was of a conical shape, some ten feet high;
+      consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken from the
+      middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale. Planted with their
+      broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced together, mutually
+      sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where
+      the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like the top-knot on some old
+      Pottowottamie Sachem’s head. A triangular opening faced towards the bows
+      of the ship, so that the insider commanded a complete view forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by
+      his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and the
+      ship’s work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of
+      command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all over
+      with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of a stout
+      interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was constructed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of the
+      elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen, and
+      heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style; only there
+      was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest wrinkles
+      interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his continual
+      sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to windward;—for
+      this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed together. Such
+      eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Is this the Captain of the Pequod?” said I, advancing to the door of the
+      tent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?”
+       he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I was thinking of shipping.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer—ever been in a
+      stove boat?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, Sir, I never have.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say—eh?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I’ve been several
+      voyages in the merchant service, and I think that—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that leg?—I’ll
+      take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of the marchant
+      service to me again. Marchant service indeed! I suppose now ye feel
+      considerable proud of having served in those marchant ships. But flukes!
+      man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?—it looks a little
+      suspicious, don’t it, eh?—Hast not been a pirate, hast thou?—Didst
+      not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?—Dost not think of murdering
+      the officers when thou gettest to sea?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask of
+      these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated Quakerish
+      Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather distrustful of
+      all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the Vineyard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of
+      shipping ye.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who is Captain Ahab, sir?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg—that’s who ye are speaking to,
+      young man. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted
+      out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including crew. We
+      are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if thou wantest to
+      know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way of
+      finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. Clap eye
+      on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has only one leg.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured, chewed
+      up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a boat!—ah,
+      ah!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at the
+      hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as I could,
+      “What you say is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could I know there was
+      any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale, though indeed I might have
+      inferred as much from the simple fact of the accident.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d’ye see; thou dost
+      not talk shark a bit. <i>Sure</i>, ye’ve been to sea before now; sure of that?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sir,” said I, “I thought I told you that I had been four voyages in the
+      merchant—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hard down out of that! Mind what I said about the marchant service—don’t
+      aggravate me—I won’t have it. But let us understand each other. I
+      have given thee a hint about what whaling is; do ye yet feel inclined for
+      it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I do, sir.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale’s
+      throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to be
+      got rid of, that is; which I don’t take to be the fact.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to find out
+      by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to see the
+      world? Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well then, just step
+      forward there, and take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back to me
+      and tell me what ye see there.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not knowing
+      exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. But
+      concentrating all his crow’s feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg started me
+      on the errand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship
+      swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing
+      towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly
+      monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, what’s the report?” said Peleg when I came back; “what did ye see?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Not much,” I replied—“nothing but water; considerable horizon
+      though, and there’s a squall coming up, I think.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go
+      round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can’t ye see the world where
+      you stand?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and the
+      Pequod was as good a ship as any—I thought the best—and all
+      this I now repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed his
+      willingness to ship me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off,” he added—“come
+      along with ye.” And so saying, he led the way below deck into the cabin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and surprising
+      figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with Captain Peleg
+      was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the other shares, as is
+      sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd of old
+      annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each owning
+      about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in
+      the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling vessels, the
+      same way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing in good
+      interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker,
+      the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to this day
+      its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the peculiarities
+      of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by things
+      altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same Quakers are the
+      most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting
+      Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture
+      names—a singularly common fashion on the island—and in
+      childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the
+      Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure
+      of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown
+      peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a
+      Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things
+      unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain
+      and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many
+      long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations
+      never seen here at the north, been led to think untraditionally and
+      independently; receiving all nature’s sweet or savage impressions fresh
+      from her own virgin voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly,
+      but with some help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous
+      lofty language—that man makes one in a whole nation’s census—a
+      mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all
+      detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other
+      circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful overruling morbidness at
+      the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically great are made so through
+      a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal
+      greatness is but disease. But, as yet we have not to do with such an one,
+      but with quite another; and still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only
+      results again from another phase of the Quaker, modified by individual
+      circumstances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman. But
+      unlike Captain Peleg—who cared not a rush for what are called
+      serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the
+      veriest of all trifles—Captain Bildad had not only been originally
+      educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all
+      his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island
+      creatures, round the Horn—all that had not moved this native born
+      Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his vest.
+      Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common
+      consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from
+      conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself
+      had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe
+      to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns
+      upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his
+      days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do
+      not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he
+      had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man’s
+      religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world
+      pays dividends. Rising from a little cabin-boy in short clothes of the
+      drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from
+      that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, and finally a ship
+      owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous career by
+      wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of sixty, and
+      dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his well-earned
+      income.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an
+      incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard
+      task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a
+      curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew,
+      upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore
+      exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was
+      certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to swear,
+      though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity
+      of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a chief-mate,
+      to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking at you, made you feel
+      completely nervous, till you could clutch something—a hammer or a
+      marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at something or other, never mind
+      what. Indolence and idleness perished before him. His own person was the
+      exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he
+      carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft,
+      economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I
+      followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin. The space between the decks
+      was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old Bildad, who always sat so, and
+      never leaned, and this to save his coat tails. His broad-brim was placed
+      beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his drab vesture was buttoned
+      up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he seemed absorbed in reading from
+      a ponderous volume.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Bildad,” cried Captain Peleg, “at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been
+      studying those Scriptures, now, for the last thirty years, to my certain
+      knowledge. How far ye got, Bildad?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate, Bildad,
+      without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up, and seeing
+      me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He says he’s our man, Bildad,” said Peleg, “he wants to ship.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Dost thee?” said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I <i>dost</i>,” said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What do ye think of him, Bildad?” said Peleg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He’ll do,” said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at his
+      book in a mumbling tone quite audible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as Peleg, his
+      friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I said nothing, only
+      looking round me sharply. Peleg now threw open a chest, and drawing forth
+      the ship’s articles, placed pen and ink before him, and seated himself at
+      a little table. I began to think it was high time to settle with myself at
+      what terms I would be willing to engage for the voyage. I was already
+      aware that in the whaling business they paid no wages; but all hands,
+      including the captain, received certain shares of the profits called <i>lays</i>,
+      and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance
+      pertaining to the respective duties of the ship’s company. I was also
+      aware that being a green hand at whaling, my own lay would not be very
+      large; but considering that I was used to the sea, could steer a ship,
+      splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that from all I had heard I
+      should be offered at least the 275th lay—that is, the 275th part of
+      the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever that might eventually
+      amount to. And though the 275th lay was what they call a rather <i>long lay</i>,
+      yet it was better than nothing; and if we had a lucky voyage, might pretty
+      nearly pay for the clothing I would wear out on it, not to speak of my
+      three years’ beef and board, for which I would not have to pay one stiver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely
+      fortune—and so it was, a very poor way indeed. But I am one of those
+      that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the
+      world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am putting up at this grim
+      sign of the Thunder Cloud. Upon the whole, I thought that the 275th lay
+      would be about the fair thing, but would not have been surprised had I
+      been offered the 200th, considering I was of a broad-shouldered make.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about
+      receiving a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had heard
+      something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony Bildad;
+      how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod, therefore the
+      other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners, left nearly the whole
+      management of the ship’s affairs to these two. And I did not know but what
+      the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty deal to say about shipping
+      hands, especially as I now found him on board the Pequod, quite at home
+      there in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his own fireside. Now
+      while Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his jack-knife, old
+      Bildad, to my no small surprise, considering that he was such an
+      interested party in these proceedings; Bildad never heeded us, but went on
+      mumbling to himself out of his book, “<i>Lay</i> not up for yourselves treasures
+      upon earth, where moth—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, Captain Bildad,” interrupted Peleg, “what d’ye say, what lay shall
+      we give this young man?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Thou knowest best,” was the sepulchral reply, “the seven hundred and
+      seventy-seventh wouldn’t be too much, would it?—‘where moth and rust
+      do corrupt, but <i>lay</i>—’”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Lay</i>, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and
+      seventy-seventh! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for one,
+      shall not <i>lay</i> up many <i>lays</i> here below, where moth and rust do corrupt. It
+      was an exceedingly <i>long lay</i> that, indeed; and though from the magnitude of
+      the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet the slightest
+      consideration will show that though seven hundred and seventy-seven is a
+      pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a <i>teenth</i> of it, you will
+      then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh part of a
+      farthing is a good deal less than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold
+      doubloons; and so I thought at the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, blast your eyes, Bildad,” cried Peleg, “thou dost not want to
+      swindle this young man! he must have more than that.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Seven hundred and seventy-seventh,” again said Bildad, without lifting
+      his eyes; and then went on mumbling—“for where your treasure is,
+      there will your heart be also.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I am going to put him down for the three hundredth,” said Peleg, “do ye
+      hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said, “Captain
+      Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the duty thou
+      owest to the other owners of this ship—widows and orphans, many of
+      them—and that if we too abundantly reward the labors of this young
+      man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those orphans. The
+      seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Thou Bildad!” roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the cabin.
+      “Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these matters,
+      I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that would be heavy enough
+      to founder the largest ship that ever sailed round Cape Horn.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Captain Peleg,” said Bildad steadily, “thy conscience may be drawing ten
+      inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can’t tell; but as thou art still an
+      impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy conscience be but a
+      leaky one; and will in the end sink thee foundering down to the fiery pit,
+      Captain Peleg.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, ye
+      insult me. It’s an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that he’s
+      bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again to me, and start
+      my soul-bolts, but I’ll—I’ll—yes, I’ll swallow a live goat
+      with all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting,
+      drab-coloured son of a wooden gun—a straight wake with ye!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a marvellous
+      oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and
+      responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up all
+      idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily
+      commanded, I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad, who, I
+      made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before the awakened wrath
+      of Peleg. But to my astonishment, he sat down again on the transom very
+      quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest intention of withdrawing. He
+      seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg and his ways. As for Peleg, after
+      letting off his rage as he had, there seemed no more left in him, and he,
+      too, sat down like a lamb, though he twitched a little as if still
+      nervously agitated. “Whew!” he whistled at last—“the squall’s gone
+      off to leeward, I think. Bildad, thou used to be good at sharpening a
+      lance, mend that pen, will ye. My jack-knife here needs the grindstone.
+      That’s he; thank ye, Bildad. Now then, my young man, Ishmael’s thy name,
+      didn’t ye say? Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael, for the three
+      hundredth lay.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Captain Peleg,” said I, “I have a friend with me who wants to ship too—shall
+      I bring him down to-morrow?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “To be sure,” said Peleg. “Fetch him along, and we’ll look at him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What lay does he want?” groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book in
+      which he had again been burying himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad,” said Peleg. “Has he ever whaled
+      it any?” turning to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, bring him along then.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that I had
+      done a good morning’s work, and that the Pequod was the identical ship
+      that Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and me round the Cape.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the Captain
+      with whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though, indeed, in many
+      cases, a whale-ship will be completely fitted out, and receive all her
+      crew on board, ere the captain makes himself visible by arriving to take
+      command; for sometimes these voyages are so prolonged, and the shore
+      intervals at home so exceedingly brief, that if the captain have a family,
+      or any absorbing concernment of that sort, he does not trouble himself
+      much about his ship in port, but leaves her to the owners till all is
+      ready for sea. However, it is always as well to have a look at him before
+      irrevocably committing yourself into his hands. Turning back I accosted
+      Captain Peleg, inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It’s all right enough; thou art
+      shipped.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes, but I should like to see him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But I don’t think thou wilt be able to at present. I don’t know exactly
+      what’s the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort of
+      sick, and yet he don’t look so. In fact, he ain’t sick; but no, he isn’t
+      well either. Any how, young man, he won’t always see me, so I don’t
+      suppose he will thee. He’s a queer man, Captain Ahab—so some think—but
+      a good one. Oh, thou’lt like him well enough; no fear, no fear. He’s a
+      grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn’t speak much; but, when
+      he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s
+      above the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ’mong the cannibals;
+      been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in
+      mightier, stranger foes than whales. His lance! aye, the keenest and the
+      surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain’t Captain Bildad; no, and he
+      ain’t Captain Peleg; <i>he’s Ahab</i>, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a
+      crowned king!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they
+      not lick his blood?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Come hither to me—hither, hither,” said Peleg, with a significance
+      in his eye that almost startled me. “Look ye, lad; never say that on board
+      the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name himself.
+      ’Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died when
+      he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at Gayhead,
+      said that the name would somehow prove prophetic. And, perhaps, other
+      fools like her may tell thee the same. I wish to warn thee. It’s a lie. I
+      know Captain Ahab well; I’ve sailed with him as mate years ago; I know
+      what he is—a good man—not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but
+      a swearing good man—something like me—only there’s a good deal
+      more of him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know
+      that on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but
+      it was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that
+      about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg
+      last voyage by that accursed whale, he’s been a kind of moody—desperate
+      moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all,
+      let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it’s better to sail with a
+      moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So good-bye to thee—and
+      wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked name. Besides,
+      my boy, he has a wife—not three voyages wedded—a sweet,
+      resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that old man has a child:
+      hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my
+      lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been incidentally
+      revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of
+      painfulness concerning him. And somehow, at the time, I felt a sympathy
+      and a sorrow for him, but for I don’t know what, unless it was the cruel
+      loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a strange awe of him; but that sort
+      of awe, which I cannot at all describe, was not exactly awe; I do not know
+      what it was. But I felt it; and it did not disincline me towards him;
+      though I felt impatience at what seemed like mystery in him, so
+      imperfectly as he was known to me then. However, my thoughts were at
+      length carried in other directions, so that for the present dark Ahab
+      slipped my mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As Queequeg’s Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all
+      day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I
+      cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations,
+      never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue
+      even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other
+      creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism
+      quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a
+      deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions
+      yet owned and rented in his name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these
+      things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals,
+      pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these
+      subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most absurd
+      notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;—but what of that? Queequeg
+      thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content; and
+      there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let him be,
+      I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans
+      alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and
+      sadly need mending.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and rituals
+      must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door; but no
+      answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside. “Queequeg,” said I
+      softly through the key-hole:—all silent. “I say, Queequeg! why don’t
+      you speak? It’s I—Ishmael.” But all remained still as before. I
+      began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time; I thought he
+      might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked through the key-hole; but the
+      door opening into an odd corner of the room, the key-hole prospect was but
+      a crooked and sinister one. I could only see part of the foot-board of the
+      bed and a line of the wall, but nothing more. I was surprised to behold
+      resting against the wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg’s harpoon, which the
+      landlady the evening previous had taken from him, before our mounting to
+      the chamber. That’s strange, thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon
+      stands yonder, and he seldom or never goes abroad without it, therefore he
+      must be inside here, and no possible mistake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Queequeg!—Queequeg!”—all still. Something must have happened.
+      Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly resisted.
+      Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first person I
+      met—the chamber-maid. “La! la!” she cried, “I thought something must
+      be the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door was
+      locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it’s been just so silent ever
+      since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your
+      baggage in for safe keeping. La! la, ma’am!—Mistress! murder! Mrs.
+      Hussey! apoplexy!”—and with these cries, she ran towards the
+      kitchen, I following.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a
+      vinegar-cruet in the other, having just broken away from the occupation of
+      attending to the castors, and scolding her little black boy meantime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Wood-house!” cried I, “which way to it? Run for God’s sake, and fetch
+      something to pry open the door—the axe!—the axe! he’s had a
+      stroke; depend upon it!”—and so saying I was unmethodically rushing
+      up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the mustard-pot
+      and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her countenance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’s the matter with you, young man?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Get the axe! For God’s sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry it
+      open!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Look here,” said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet, so
+      as to have one hand free; “look here; are you talking about prying open
+      any of my doors?”—and with that she seized my arm. “What’s the
+      matter with you? What’s the matter with you, shipmate?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand the
+      whole case. Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to one side of her
+      nose, she ruminated for an instant; then exclaimed—“No! I haven’t
+      seen it since I put it there.” Running to a little closet under the
+      landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that
+      Queequeg’s harpoon was missing. “He’s killed himself,” she cried. “It’s
+      unfort’nate Stiggs done over again—there goes another counterpane—God
+      pity his poor mother!—it will be the ruin of my house. Has the poor
+      lad a sister? Where’s that girl?—there, Betty, go to Snarles the
+      Painter, and tell him to paint me a sign, with—“no suicides
+      permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;”—might as well kill
+      both birds at once. Kill? The Lord be merciful to his ghost! What’s that
+      noise there? You, young man, avast there!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force open
+      the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t allow it; I won’t have my premises spoiled. Go for the locksmith,
+      there’s one about a mile from here. But avast!” putting her hand in her
+      side-pocket, “here’s a key that’ll fit, I guess; let’s see.” And with
+      that, she turned it in the lock; but, alas! Queequeg’s supplemental bolt
+      remained unwithdrawn within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Have to burst it open,” said I, and was running down the entry a little,
+      for a good start, when the landlady caught at me, again vowing I should
+      not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and with a sudden bodily
+      rush dashed myself full against the mark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming against
+      the wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling; and there, good heavens! there
+      sat Queequeg, altogether cool and self-collected; right in the middle of
+      the room; squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on top of his head. He
+      looked neither one way nor the other way, but sat like a carved image with
+      scarce a sign of active life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Queequeg,” said I, going up to him, “Queequeg, what’s the matter with
+      you?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He hain’t been a sittin’ so all day, has he?” said the landlady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt like
+      pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost
+      intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally constrained;
+      especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for upwards of
+      eight or ten hours, going too without his regular meals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Mrs. Hussey,” said I, “he’s <i>alive</i> at all events; so leave us, if you
+      please, and I will see to this strange affair myself.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail upon Queequeg
+      to take a chair; but in vain. There he sat; and all he could do—for
+      all my polite arts and blandishments—he would not move a peg, nor
+      say a single word, nor even look at me, nor notice my presence in the
+      slightest way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do
+      they fast on their hams that way in his native island. It must be so; yes,
+      it’s part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him rest; he’ll get up
+      sooner or later, no doubt. It can’t last for ever, thank God, and his
+      Ramadan only comes once a year; and I don’t believe it’s very punctual
+      then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the long
+      stories of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding voyage, as
+      they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in a schooner or brig,
+      confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean only); after
+      listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o’clock, I went up
+      stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must
+      certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no; there he was
+      just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began to grow
+      vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be sitting
+      there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room, holding a
+      piece of wood on his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “For heaven’s sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and have
+      some supper. You’ll starve; you’ll kill yourself, Queequeg.” But not a
+      word did he reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep; and
+      no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me. But previous to
+      turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over him, as it
+      promised to be a very cold night; and he had nothing but his ordinary
+      round jacket on. For some time, do all I would, I could not get into the
+      faintest doze. I had blown out the candle; and the mere thought of
+      Queequeg—not four feet off—sitting there in that uneasy
+      position, stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really wretched.
+      Think of it; sleeping all night in the same room with a wide awake pagan
+      on his hams in this dreary, unaccountable Ramadan!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break of
+      day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as if he had
+      been screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the first glimpse of sun
+      entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating joints, but with a
+      cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay; pressed his forehead again
+      against mine; and said his Ramadan was over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person’s religion, be
+      it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other
+      person, because that other person don’t believe it also. But when a man’s
+      religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him;
+      and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in;
+      then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the
+      point with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And just so I now did with Queequeg. “Queequeg,” said I, “get into bed
+      now, and lie and listen to me.” I then went on, beginning with the rise
+      and progress of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various
+      religions of the present time, during which time I labored to show
+      Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in
+      cold, cheerless rooms were stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless for
+      the soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and common
+      sense. I told him, too, that he being in other things such an extremely
+      sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained me, to see
+      him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan of his.
+      Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves
+      in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved. This
+      is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such melancholy
+      notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather
+      digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling;
+      and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by
+      Ramadans.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with dyspepsia;
+      expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it in. He said no;
+      only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a great feast given by his
+      father the king, on the gaining of a great battle wherein fifty of the
+      enemy had been killed by about two o’clock in the afternoon, and all
+      cooked and eaten that very evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No more, Queequeg,” said I, shuddering; “that will do;” for I knew the
+      inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen a sailor who had
+      visited that very island, and he told me that it was the custom, when a
+      great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain in the yard
+      or garden of the victor; and then, one by one, they were placed in great
+      wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau, with breadfruit and
+      cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths, were sent round with the
+      victor’s compliments to all his friends, just as though these presents
+      were so many Christmas turkeys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much
+      impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the first place, he somehow seemed
+      dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered from his own
+      point of view; and, in the second place, he did not more than one third
+      understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and, finally, he no doubt
+      thought he knew a good deal more about the true religion than I did. He
+      looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and compassion, as
+      though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible young man should be
+      so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty
+      breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not make
+      much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the Pequod,
+      sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 18. His Mark.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg
+      carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us
+      from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal, and
+      furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board that craft,
+      unless they previously produced their papers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?” said I, now jumping on the
+      bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I mean,” he replied, “he must show his papers.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes,” said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from
+      behind Peleg’s, out of the wigwam. “He must show that he’s converted. Son
+      of darkness,” he added, turning to Queequeg, “art thou at present in
+      communion with any Christian church?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why,” said I, “he’s a member of the first Congregational Church.” Here be
+      it said, that many tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket ships at last
+      come to be converted into the churches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “First Congregational Church,” cried Bildad, “what! that worships in
+      Deacon Deuteronomy Coleman’s meeting-house?” and so saying, taking out his
+      spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana handkerchief, and
+      putting them on very carefully, came out of the wigwam, and leaning
+      stiffly over the bulwarks, took a good long look at Queequeg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “How long hath he been a member?” he then said, turning to me; “not very
+      long, I rather guess, young man.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No,” said Peleg, “and he hasn’t been baptized right either, or it would
+      have washed some of that devil’s blue off his face.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do tell, now,” cried Bildad, “is this Philistine a regular member of
+      Deacon Deuteronomy’s meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it
+      every Lord’s day.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting,” said I;
+      “all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First
+      Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Young man,” said Bildad sternly, “thou art skylarking with me—explain
+      thyself, thou young Hittite. What church dost thee mean? answer me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied. “I mean, sir, the same ancient
+      Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg
+      here, and all of us, and every mother’s son and soul of us belong; the
+      great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world;
+      we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some queer crotchets no
+      ways touching the grand belief; in <i>that</i> we all join hands.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Splice, thou mean’st <i>splice</i> hands,” cried Peleg, drawing nearer. “Young
+      man, you’d better ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast hand; I
+      never heard a better sermon. Deacon Deuteronomy—why Father Mapple
+      himself couldn’t beat it, and he’s reckoned something. Come aboard, come
+      aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, tell Quohog there—what’s
+      that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By the great anchor, what a
+      harpoon he’s got there! looks like good stuff that; and he handles it
+      about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand
+      in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the
+      bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to
+      the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon, cried
+      out in some such way as this:—
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Cap’ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well,
+      spose him one whale eye, well, den!” and taking sharp aim at it, he darted
+      the iron right over old Bildad’s broad brim, clean across the ship’s
+      decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now,” said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, “spos-ee him whale-e
+      eye; why, dad whale dead.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Quick, Bildad,” said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close
+      vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway.
+      “Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship’s papers. We must have
+      Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we’ll
+      give ye the ninetieth lay, and that’s more than ever was given a
+      harpooneer yet out of Nantucket.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon
+      enrolled among the same ship’s company to which I myself belonged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for
+      signing, he turned to me and said, “I guess, Quohog there don’t know how
+      to write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name or
+      make thy mark?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken part
+      in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the offered pen,
+      copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact counterpart of a
+      queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so that through
+      Captain Peleg’s obstinate mistake touching his appellative, it stood
+      something like this:—
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Quohog. his X mark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg,
+      and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets of his
+      broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts, and selecting one
+      entitled “The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose,” placed it in
+      Queequeg’s hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his,
+      looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, “Son of darkness, I must do my
+      duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel concerned for the
+      souls of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I
+      sadly fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn
+      the idol Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind
+      thine eye, I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad’s language,
+      heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpooneer,”
+       cried Peleg. “Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers—it takes the shark out of ’em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish.
+      There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out of all
+      Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to good.
+      He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered
+      away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in case he got stove and went
+      to Davy Jones.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Peleg! Peleg!” said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, “thou thyself, as
+      I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what it is
+      to have the fear of death; how, then, can’st thou prate in this ungodly
+      guise. Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this same Pequod
+      here had her three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan, that same
+      voyage when thou went mate with Captain Ahab, did’st thou not think of
+      Death and the Judgment then?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hear him, hear him now,” cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and
+      thrusting his hands far down into his pockets,—“hear him, all of ye.
+      Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship would sink! Death and
+      the Judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an everlasting
+      thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us, fore and aft.
+      Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to think about Death
+      then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of; and how to save
+      all hands—how to rig jury-masts—how to get into the nearest
+      port; that was what I was thinking of.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck, where we
+      followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some sailmakers who
+      were mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then he stooped to pick up a
+      patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which otherwise might have been
+      wasted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      “Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from the
+      water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the above
+      words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us, levelled his
+      massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but shabbily
+      apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a black
+      handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all
+      directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed
+      bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Have ye shipped in her?” he repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose,” said I, trying to gain a little
+      more time for an uninterrupted look at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, the Pequod—that ship there,” he said, drawing back his whole
+      arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed
+      bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes,” said I, “we have just signed the articles.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Anything down there about your souls?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “About what?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, perhaps you hav’n’t got any,” he said quickly. “No matter though, I
+      know many chaps that hav’n’t got any,—good luck to ’em; and they are
+      all the better off for it. A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What are you jabbering about, shipmate?” said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “<i>He’s</i> got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in
+      other chaps,” abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis upon
+      the word <i>he</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Queequeg,” said I, “let’s go; this fellow has broken loose from
+      somewhere; he’s talking about something and somebody we don’t know.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Stop!” cried the stranger. “Ye said true—ye hav’n’t seen Old
+      Thunder yet, have ye?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who’s Old Thunder?” said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness of
+      his manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Captain Ahab.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye hav’n’t
+      seen him yet, have ye?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, we hav’n’t. He’s sick they say, but is getting better, and will be
+      all right again before long.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “All right again before long!” laughed the stranger, with a solemnly
+      derisive sort of laugh. “Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then
+      this left arm of mine will be all right; not before.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What do you know about him?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What did they <i>tell</i> you about him? Say that!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “They didn’t tell much of anything about him; only I’ve heard that he’s a
+      good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That’s true, that’s true—yes, both true enough. But you must jump
+      when he gives an order. Step and growl; growl and go—that’s the word
+      with Captain Ahab. But nothing about that thing that happened to him off
+      Cape Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights;
+      nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in
+      Santa?—heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the silver
+      calabash he spat into? And nothing about his losing his leg last voyage,
+      according to the prophecy. Didn’t ye hear a word about them matters and
+      something more, eh? No, I don’t think ye did; how could ye? Who knows it?
+      Not all Nantucket, I guess. But hows’ever, mayhap, ye’ve heard tell about
+      the leg, and how he lost it; aye, ye have heard of that, I dare say. Oh
+      yes, <i>that</i> every one knows a’most—I mean they know he’s only one leg;
+      and that a parmacetti took the other off.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “My friend,” said I, “what all this gibberish of yours is about, I don’t
+      know, and I don’t much care; for it seems to me that you must be a little
+      damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of Captain Ahab, of that ship
+      there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all about the loss of
+      his leg.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “<i>All</i> about it, eh—sure you do?—all?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Pretty sure.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like
+      stranger stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a
+      little, turned and said:—“Ye’ve shipped, have ye? Names down on the
+      papers? Well, well, what’s signed, is signed; and what’s to be, will be;
+      and then again, perhaps it won’t be, after all. Anyhow, it’s all fixed and
+      arranged a’ready; and some sailors or other must go with him, I suppose;
+      as well these as any other men, God pity ’em! Morning to ye, shipmates,
+      morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I’m sorry I stopped ye.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Look here, friend,” said I, “if you have anything important to tell us,
+      out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are mistaken
+      in your game; that’s all I have to say.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And it’s said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way; you
+      are just the man for him—the likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates,
+      morning! Oh! when ye get there, tell ’em I’ve concluded not to make one of
+      ’em.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah, my dear fellow, you can’t fool us that way—you can’t fool us.
+      It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a
+      great secret in him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Morning to ye, shipmates, morning.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Morning it is,” said I. “Come along, Queequeg, let’s leave this crazy
+      man. But stop, tell me your name, will you?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Elijah.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each other’s
+      fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was nothing but a
+      humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone perhaps above a
+      hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and looking back as I did
+      so, who should be seen but Elijah following us, though at a distance.
+      Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I said nothing to Queequeg of
+      his being behind, but passed on with my comrade, anxious to see whether
+      the stranger would turn the same corner that we did. He did; and then it
+      seemed to me that he was dogging us, but with what intent I could not for
+      the life of me imagine. This circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous,
+      half-hinting, half-revealing, shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me all
+      kinds of vague wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all connected with
+      the Pequod; and Captain Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn
+      fit; and the silver calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when
+      I left the ship the day previous; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig;
+      and the voyage we had bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy
+      things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really
+      dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg, and
+      on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without
+      seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more, and finally as it
+      seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 20. All Astir.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A day or two passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod. Not
+      only were the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming on board,
+      and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; in short, everything betokened
+      that the ship’s preparations were hurrying to a close. Captain Peleg
+      seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam keeping a sharp
+      look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing and providing at
+      the stores; and the men employed in the hold and on the rigging were
+      working till long after night-fall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the day following Queequeg’s signing the articles, word was given at
+      all the inns where the ship’s company were stopping, that their chests
+      must be on board before night, for there was no telling how soon the
+      vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our traps, resolving,
+      however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it seems they always give very
+      long notice in these cases, and the ship did not sail for several days.
+      But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and there is no telling
+      how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod was fully equipped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every one knows what a multitude of things—beds, sauce-pans, knives
+      and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are
+      indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling, which
+      necessitates a three-years’ housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all
+      grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And though this also
+      holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means to the same extent as
+      with whalemen. For besides the great length of the whaling voyage, the
+      numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the fishery, and the
+      impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors usually frequented,
+      it must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the most
+      exposed to accidents of all kinds, and especially to the destruction and
+      loss of the very things upon which the success of the voyage most depends.
+      Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and
+      spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain and duplicate ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of the
+      Pequod had been almost completed; comprising her beef, bread, water, fuel,
+      and iron hoops and staves. But, as before hinted, for some time there was
+      a continual fetching and carrying on board of divers odds and ends of
+      things, both large and small.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain Bildad’s
+      sister, a lean old lady of a most determined and indefatigable spirit, but
+      withal very kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if <i>she</i> could help it,
+      nothing should be found wanting in the Pequod, after once fairly getting
+      to sea. At one time she would come on board with a jar of pickles for the
+      steward’s pantry; another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate’s
+      desk, where he kept his log; a third time with a roll of flannel for the
+      small of some one’s rheumatic back. Never did any woman better deserve her
+      name, which was Charity—Aunt Charity, as everybody called her. And
+      like a sister of charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about
+      hither and thither, ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that
+      promised to yield safety, comfort, and consolation to all on board a ship
+      in which her beloved brother Bildad was concerned, and in which she
+      herself owned a score or two of well-saved dollars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on
+      board, as she did the last day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and a
+      still longer whaling lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor
+      Captain Peleg at all backward. As for Bildad, he carried about with him a
+      long list of the articles needed, and at every fresh arrival, down went
+      his mark opposite that article upon the paper. Every once in a while Peleg
+      came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring at the men down the
+      hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head, and then concluded
+      by roaring back into his wigwam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the craft,
+      and as often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when he was
+      going to come on board his ship. To these questions they would answer,
+      that he was getting better and better, and was expected aboard every day;
+      meantime, the two captains, Peleg and Bildad, could attend to everything
+      necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If I had been downright honest
+      with myself, I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but
+      half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once
+      laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so
+      soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any
+      wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter,
+      he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And
+      much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last it was given out that some time next day the ship would certainly
+      sail. So next morning, Queequeg and I took a very early start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was nearly six o’clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we
+      drew nigh the wharf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right,” said I to
+      Queequeg, “it can’t be shadows; she’s off by sunrise, I guess; come on!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Avast!” cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close behind
+      us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating himself
+      between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain twilight,
+      strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Going aboard?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hands off, will you,” said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lookee here,” said Queequeg, shaking himself, “go ’way!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ain’t going aboard, then?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes, we are,” said I, “but what business is that of yours? Do you know,
+      Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, no, no; I wasn’t aware of that,” said Elijah, slowly and wonderingly
+      looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable glances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Elijah,” said I, “you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We are
+      going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not to be
+      detained.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ye be, be ye? Coming back afore breakfast?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He’s cracked, Queequeg,” said I, “come on.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Holloa!” cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few
+      paces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Never mind him,” said I, “Queequeg, come on.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my
+      shoulder, said—“Did ye see anything looking like men going towards
+      that ship a while ago?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, “Yes, I
+      thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be sure.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Very dim, very dim,” said Elijah. “Morning to ye.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and
+      touching my shoulder again, said, “See if you can find ’em now, will ye?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Find who?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Morning to ye! morning to ye!” he rejoined, again moving off. “Oh! I was
+      going to warn ye against—but never mind, never mind—it’s all
+      one, all in the family too;—sharp frost this morning, ain’t it?
+      Good-bye to ye. Shan’t see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it’s before
+      the Grand Jury.” And with these cracked words he finally departed, leaving
+      me, for the moment, in no small wonderment at his frantic impudence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in profound
+      quiet, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was locked within; the
+      hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging. Going forward to
+      the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open. Seeing a light, we
+      went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a tattered
+      pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two chests, his face
+      downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profoundest slumber slept
+      upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?” said I,
+      looking dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the wharf,
+      Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I would have
+      thought myself to have been optically deceived in that matter, were it not
+      for Elijah’s otherwise inexplicable question. But I beat the thing down;
+      and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted to Queequeg that perhaps
+      we had best sit up with the body; telling him to establish himself
+      accordingly. He put his hand upon the sleeper’s rear, as though feeling if
+      it was soft enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly down there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Gracious! Queequeg, don’t sit there,” said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh! perry dood seat,” said Queequeg, “my country way; won’t hurt him
+      face.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Face!” said I, “call that his face? very benevolent countenance then; but
+      how hard he breathes, he’s heaving himself; get off, Queequeg, you are
+      heavy, it’s grinding the face of the poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look, he’ll
+      twitch you off soon. I wonder he don’t wake.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and
+      lighted his tomahawk pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe passing
+      over the sleeper, from one to the other. Meanwhile, upon questioning him
+      in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his land,
+      owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king, chiefs,
+      and great people generally, were in the custom of fattening some of the
+      lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in that
+      respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them
+      round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very convenient on an
+      excursion; much better than those garden-chairs which are convertible into
+      walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant, and desiring
+      him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps in some
+      damp marshy place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk
+      from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper’s head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’s that for, Queequeg?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe,
+      which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed
+      his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The
+      strong vapor now completely filling the contracted hole, it began to tell
+      upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed troubled in
+      the nose; then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and rubbed his
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Holloa!” he breathed at last, “who be ye smokers?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Shipped men,” answered I, “when does she sail?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The Captain came
+      aboard last night.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What Captain?—Ahab?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who but him indeed?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we
+      heard a noise on deck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Holloa! Starbuck’s astir,” said the rigger. “He’s a lively chief mate,
+      that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn to.” And so
+      saying he went on deck, and we followed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was now clear sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and threes;
+      the riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively engaged; and
+      several of the shore people were busy in bringing various last things on
+      board. Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained invisibly enshrined within his
+      cabin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship’s riggers,
+      and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and after the
+      ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat, with her last gift—a
+      night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her brother-in-law, and a spare
+      Bible for the steward—after all this, the two Captains, Peleg and
+      Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief mate, Peleg said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain Ahab is all
+      ready—just spoke to him—nothing more to be got from shore, eh?
+      Well, call all hands, then. Muster ’em aft here—blast ’em!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg,” said Bildad,
+      “but away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      How now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage, Captain
+      Peleg and Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on the
+      quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at sea, as well
+      as to all appearances in port. And, as for Captain Ahab, no sign of him
+      was yet to be seen; only, they said he was in the cabin. But then, the
+      idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary in getting the ship
+      under weigh, and steering her well out to sea. Indeed, as that was not at
+      all his proper business, but the pilot’s; and as he was not yet completely
+      recovered—so they said—therefore, Captain Ahab stayed below.
+      And all this seemed natural enough; especially as in the merchant service
+      many captains never show themselves on deck for a considerable time after
+      heaving up the anchor, but remain over the cabin table, having a farewell
+      merry-making with their shore friends, before they quit the ship for good
+      with the pilot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg
+      was now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and commanding, and
+      not Bildad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aft here, ye sons of bachelors,” he cried, as the sailors lingered at the
+      main-mast. “Mr. Starbuck, drive ’em aft.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Strike the tent there!”—was the next order. As I hinted before,
+      this whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board the
+      Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent was well known to
+      be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!—jump!”—was the next
+      command, and the crew sprang for the handspikes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the pilot is
+      the forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it
+      known, in addition to his other officers, was one of the licensed pilots
+      of the port—he being suspected to have got himself made a pilot in
+      order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was concerned
+      in, for he never piloted any other craft—Bildad, I say, might now be
+      seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching anchor,
+      and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody, to cheer
+      the hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of a chorus about
+      the girls in Booble Alley, with hearty good will. Nevertheless, not three
+      days previous, Bildad had told them that no profane songs would be allowed
+      on board the Pequod, particularly in getting under weigh; and Charity, his
+      sister, had placed a small choice copy of Watts in each seaman’s berth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped and
+      swore astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he would sink
+      the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I paused on my
+      handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the perils we
+      both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a pilot. I was
+      comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious Bildad might be
+      found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay;
+      when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear, and turning round, was
+      horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the act of withdrawing his
+      leg from my immediate vicinity. That was my first kick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?” he roared. “Spring,
+      thou sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone! Why don’t ye spring, I
+      say, all of ye—spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with the red
+      whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green pants. Spring, I
+      say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!” And so saying, he moved along
+      the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely, while
+      imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks I, Captain
+      Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a
+      short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we
+      found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray
+      cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the
+      bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of
+      some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the
+      old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all
+      over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes
+      were heard,—
+    </p>
+<pre>      <i>“Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood,
+         Stand dressed in living green.
+      So to the Jews old Canaan stood,
+         While Jordan rolled between.”</i>
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They were
+      full of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the
+      boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was
+      yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads and
+      glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring,
+      untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed no
+      longer. The stout sail-boat that had accompanied us began ranging
+      alongside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at
+      this juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet; very
+      loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and perilous a voyage—beyond
+      both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of his hard earned
+      dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate sailed as captain;
+      a man almost as old as he, once more starting to encounter all the terrors
+      of the pitiless jaw; loath to say good-bye to a thing so every way brimful
+      of every interest to him,—poor old Bildad lingered long; paced the
+      deck with anxious strides; ran down into the cabin to speak another
+      farewell word there; again came on deck, and looked to windward; looked
+      towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen
+      Eastern Continents; looked towards the land; looked aloft; looked right
+      and left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling
+      a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and
+      holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as
+      much as to say, “Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all his
+      philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the lantern came
+      too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin to deck—now a
+      word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about
+      him,—“Captain Bildad—come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the
+      main-yard there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close alongside, now!
+      Careful, careful!—come, Bildad, boy—say your last. Luck to ye,
+      Starbuck—luck to ye, Mr. Stubb—luck to ye, Mr. Flask—good-bye
+      and good luck to ye all—and this day three years I’ll have a hot
+      supper smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men,” murmured old Bildad,
+      almost incoherently. “I hope ye’ll have fine weather now, so that Captain
+      Ahab may soon be moving among ye—a pleasant sun is all he needs, and
+      ye’ll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go. Be careful in the
+      hunt, ye mates. Don’t stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooneers; good
+      white cedar plank is raised full three per cent. within the year. Don’t
+      forget your prayers, either. Mr. Starbuck, mind that cooper don’t waste
+      the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in the green locker! Don’t
+      whale it too much a’ Lord’s days, men; but don’t miss a fair chance
+      either, that’s rejecting Heaven’s good gifts. Have an eye to the molasses
+      tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the
+      islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. Good-bye, good-bye! Don’t keep
+      that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr. Starbuck; it’ll spoil. Be
+      careful with the butter—twenty cents the pound it was, and mind ye,
+      if—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,—away!” and with that,
+      Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a
+      screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three
+      heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone
+      Atlantic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded
+      mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive
+      bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm
+      but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the
+      man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage,
+      could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.
+      The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the
+      unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is
+      the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him
+      as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward
+      land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is
+      safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s
+      kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that
+      ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land,
+      though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through.
+      With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights
+      ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the
+      lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into
+      peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally
+      intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid
+      effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the
+      wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous,
+      slavish shore?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite
+      as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be
+      ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like,
+      then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all
+      this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee
+      grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight
+      up, leaps thy apotheosis!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling; and
+      as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen
+      as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all
+      anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us
+      hunters of whales.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish the
+      fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not accounted
+      on a level with what are called the liberal professions. If a stranger
+      were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society, it would but
+      slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were he presented to
+      the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation of the naval
+      officers he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his
+      visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed pre-eminently presuming
+      and ridiculous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring us whalemen,
+      is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering
+      sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are
+      surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true.
+      But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all
+      Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor. And as
+      for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon
+      be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and
+      which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at
+      least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting
+      the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a
+      whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those
+      battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies’
+      plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of
+      the soldier’s profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has
+      freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of
+      the sperm whale’s vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head.
+      For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the
+      interlinked terrors and wonders of God!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly
+      pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost
+      all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as
+      before so many shrines, to our glory!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales;
+      see what we whalemen are, and have been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why did the Dutch in De Witt’s time have admirals of their whaling fleets?
+      Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling
+      ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two of
+      families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the
+      years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of £1,000,000?
+      And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the
+      rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven
+      hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming
+      4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing,
+      $20,000,000! and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped
+      harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if there be not something
+      puissant in whaling?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this is not the half; look again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life,
+      point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty years
+      has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in one
+      aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way and
+      another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so
+      continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that whaling may well
+      be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves
+      pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to catalogue
+      all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many years past the
+      whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least
+      known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes which
+      had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If American and
+      European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them
+      fire salutes to the honor and glory of the whale-ship, which originally
+      showed them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages.
+      They may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your
+      Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have
+      sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cook
+      and your Krusenstern. For in their succourless empty-handedness, they, in
+      the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin
+      islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cook with all his
+      marines and muskets would not willingly have dared. All that is made such
+      a flourish of in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the
+      life-time commonplaces of our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which
+      Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of
+      being set down in the ship’s common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial,
+      scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and
+      the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast. It
+      was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous policy of the Spanish
+      crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it might be
+      distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated the liberation
+      of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain, and the
+      establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given
+      to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born
+      discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores as
+      pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship
+      is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of
+      the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved
+      from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily
+      dropping an anchor in their waters. The uncounted isles of all Polynesia
+      confess the same truth, and do commercial homage to the whale-ship, that
+      cleared the way for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases
+      carried the primitive missionaries to their first destinations. If that
+      double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the
+      whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the
+      threshold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has no
+      æsthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I ready to
+      shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a split helmet
+      every time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will
+      say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler?</i> Who wrote
+      the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed
+      the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than
+      Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from
+      Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our
+      glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no
+      good blood in their veins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>No good blood in their veins?</i> They have something better than royal blood
+      there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel; afterwards,
+      by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the
+      ancestress to a long line of Folgers and harpooneers—all kith and
+      kin to noble Benjamin—this day darting the barbed iron from one side
+      of the world to the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Whaling not respectable?</i> Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory
+      law, the whale is declared “a royal fish.” *
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, that’s only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand
+      imposing way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The whale never figured in any grand imposing way?</i> In one of the mighty
+      triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the world’s capital,
+      the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were the
+      most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.*
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real
+      dignity in whaling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>No dignity in whaling?</i> The dignity of our calling the very heavens attest.
+      Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your hat in
+      presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I know a man
+      that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty whales. I account
+      that man more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who boasted
+      of taking as many walled towns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered
+      prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small
+      but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if
+      hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather
+      have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more
+      properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I
+      prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a
+      whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but
+      substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who
+      should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might tell
+      eloquently upon his cause—such an advocate, would he not be
+      blameworthy?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern
+      ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is
+      gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be
+      a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely—who knows?
+      Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his
+      coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint
+      it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery?
+      Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this
+      regal process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and
+      contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that
+      anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally,
+      that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general
+      rule, he can’t amount to much in his totality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the only thing to be considered here, is this—what kind of oil
+      is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar
+      oil, nor castor oil, nor bear’s oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil.
+      What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured,
+      unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens
+      with coronation stuff!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a
+      Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy
+      coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard
+      as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would
+      not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general
+      drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is
+      famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried
+      up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak,
+      seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed
+      the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the
+      man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight
+      skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with
+      inner health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck
+      seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come, and to endure always, as
+      now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his
+      interior vitality was warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into
+      his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those
+      thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid,
+      steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of
+      action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety
+      and fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times
+      affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the rest.
+      Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural
+      reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly
+      incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in
+      some organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than
+      from ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And if
+      at times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more did his
+      far-away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend
+      him still more from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him
+      still further to those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted
+      men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in
+      the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. “I will have no man in my
+      boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” By this, he seemed
+      to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which
+      arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an
+      utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, aye,” said Stubb, the second mate, “Starbuck, there, is as careful a
+      man as you’ll find anywhere in this fishery.” But we shall ere long see
+      what that word “careful” precisely means when used by a man like Stubb, or
+      almost any other whale hunter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment;
+      but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally
+      practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this business
+      of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of the ship, like
+      her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had
+      no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor for persisting in
+      fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him. For, thought
+      Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living,
+      and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been
+      so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was his own father’s? Where, in
+      the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn limbs of his brother?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain
+      superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which
+      could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But it
+      was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such
+      terrible experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature that
+      these things should fail in latently engendering an element in him, which,
+      under suitable circumstances, would break out from its confinement, and
+      burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it was that sort of
+      bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally
+      abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the
+      ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more
+      terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from
+      the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete
+      abasement of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to
+      write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the
+      fall of valour in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint
+      stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be;
+      men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and
+      so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious
+      blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.
+      That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that
+      it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with
+      keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can
+      piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings
+      against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not
+      the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no
+      robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick
+      or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates
+      without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and
+      circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall
+      hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic
+      graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them
+      all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch
+      that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow
+      over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me
+      out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal
+      mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great
+      democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the
+      pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of
+      finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst
+      pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a
+      war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all
+      Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from
+      the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0027">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,
+      according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky;
+      neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an indifferent
+      air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the chase, toiling
+      away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged for the year.
+      Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his whale-boat as if
+      the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited
+      guests. He was as particular about the comfortable arrangement of his part
+      of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box. When
+      close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his
+      unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer.
+      He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the
+      most exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the
+      jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there
+      is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question;
+      but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable
+      dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of
+      the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something
+      which he would find out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going, unfearing
+      man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a world full of
+      grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their packs; what helped to
+      bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that thing must have
+      been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black little pipe was one of
+      the regular features of his face. You would almost as soon have expected
+      him to turn out of his bunk without his nose as without his pipe. He kept
+      a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy
+      reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in
+      succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then
+      loading them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed,
+      instead of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into
+      his mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his
+      peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether
+      ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the
+      numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the
+      cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their
+      mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb’s tobacco
+      smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha’s Vineyard. A
+      short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales, who
+      somehow seemed to think that the great leviathans had personally and
+      hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of honor
+      with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost was he to
+      all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic bulk and
+      mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of any possible
+      danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the wondrous
+      whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat,
+      requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time
+      and trouble in order to kill and boil. This ignorant, unconscious
+      fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in the matter of whales; he
+      followed these fish for the fun of it; and a three years’ voyage round
+      Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted that length of time. As a
+      carpenter’s nails are divided into wrought nails and cut nails; so mankind
+      may be similarly divided. Little Flask was one of the wrought ones; made
+      to clinch tight and last long. They called him King-Post on board of the
+      Pequod; because, in form, he could be well likened to the short, square
+      timber known by that name in Arctic whalers; and which by the means of
+      many radiating side timbers inserted into it, serves to brace the ship
+      against the icy concussions of those battering seas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now these three mates—Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous
+      men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the
+      Pequod’s boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which Captain
+      Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales, these
+      three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with their
+      long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers; even as
+      the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic
+      Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer,
+      who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when the
+      former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and
+      moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a close intimacy
+      and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set down
+      who the Pequod’s harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of them
+      belonged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected for
+      his squire. But Queequeg is already known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly
+      promontory of Martha’s Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant
+      of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of
+      Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers. In the fishery, they
+      usually go by the generic name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego’s long, lean,
+      sable hair, his high cheek bones, and black rounding eyes—for an
+      Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering
+      expression—all this sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the
+      unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the
+      great New England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests
+      of the main. But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the
+      woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea;
+      the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of
+      the sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would
+      almost have credited the superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans,
+      and half-believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers
+      of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second mate’s squire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black
+      negro-savage, with a lion-like tread—an Ahasuerus to behold.
+      Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors
+      called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards
+      to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler,
+      lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And never having been anywhere
+      in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most
+      frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold life of
+      the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of
+      men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a
+      giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his
+      socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white
+      man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a
+      fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the
+      Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man beside him. As for the
+      residue of the Pequod’s company, be it said, that at the present day not
+      one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the
+      American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the
+      officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as
+      with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the
+      engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and
+      Railroads. The same, I say, because in all these cases the native American
+      liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously
+      supplying the muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to
+      the Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to
+      augment their crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like
+      manner, the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the
+      Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the
+      passage homewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no
+      telling, but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly
+      all Islanders in the Pequod, <i>Isolatoes</i> too, I call such, not acknowledging
+      the common continent of men, but each <i>Isolato</i> living on a separate
+      continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these
+      Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the
+      sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to
+      lay the world’s grievances before that bar from which not very many of
+      them ever come back. Black Little Pip—he never did—oh, no! he
+      went before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod’s forecastle, ye shall
+      ere long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time,
+      when sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in
+      with angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here,
+      hailed a hero there!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0028">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen
+      of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the watches,
+      and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed to be the
+      only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from the cabin
+      with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was plain they but
+      commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was there,
+      though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate into the now
+      sacred retreat of the cabin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly gazed
+      aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague
+      disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the sea,
+      became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened at times by
+      the ragged Elijah’s diabolical incoherences uninvitedly recurring to me,
+      with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived of. But poorly
+      could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was almost ready to smile
+      at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish prophet of the wharves.
+      But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness—to call it so—which
+      I felt, yet whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed
+      against all warrantry to cherish such emotions. For though the
+      harpooneers, with the great body of the crew, were a far more barbaric,
+      heathenish, and motley set than any of the tame merchant-ship companies
+      which my previous experiences had made me acquainted with, still I
+      ascribed this—and rightly ascribed it—to the fierce uniqueness
+      of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation in which I had so
+      abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the aspect of the three chief
+      officers of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly calculated to
+      allay these colourless misgivings, and induce confidence and cheerfulness
+      in every presentment of the voyage. Three better, more likely sea-officers
+      and men, each in his own different way, could not readily be found, and
+      they were every one of them Americans; a Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape
+      man. Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot from out her harbor, for a
+      space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from
+      it to the southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we
+      sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable
+      weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still grey and
+      gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the ship
+      was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and
+      melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the
+      forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail,
+      foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab
+      stood upon his quarter-deck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the
+      recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the
+      fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or
+      taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole
+      high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an
+      unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. Threading its way out from
+      among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny
+      scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a
+      slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular
+      seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the
+      upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single
+      twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off
+      into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether
+      that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some
+      desperate wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent,
+      throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made to it, especially by
+      the mates. But once Tashtego’s senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the
+      crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old
+      did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the
+      fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild
+      hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an
+      old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had
+      never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old
+      sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old
+      Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor
+      seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should
+      be tranquilly laid out—which might hardly come to pass, so he
+      muttered—then, whoever should do that last office for the dead,
+      would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid
+      brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted
+      that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric
+      white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that
+      this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the
+      sperm whale’s jaw. “Aye, he was dismasted off Japan,” said the old
+      Gay-Head Indian once; “but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another
+      mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of ’em.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of
+      the Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there
+      was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His
+      bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud;
+      Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship’s
+      ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a
+      determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless,
+      forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his
+      officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and
+      expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness
+      of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that, but moody
+      stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the
+      nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But
+      after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing
+      in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily
+      walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a
+      little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the
+      ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the
+      sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that
+      he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet, for all that he said,
+      or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary
+      there as another mast. But the Pequod was only making a passage now; not
+      regularly cruising; nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision
+      the mates were fully competent to, so that there was little or nothing,
+      out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for
+      that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his
+      brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves
+      upon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant,
+      holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood.
+      For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to
+      the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most
+      thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to
+      welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little
+      respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did
+      he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would
+      have soon flowered out in a smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0029">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went
+      rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually
+      reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly
+      cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as
+      crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with
+      rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in
+      jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their
+      absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, ’twas
+      hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But all
+      the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and
+      potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul,
+      especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her
+      crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these
+      subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab’s texture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less
+      man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the
+      old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked
+      deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much to
+      live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the
+      cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. “It feels like going down into
+      one’s tomb,”—he would mutter to himself—“for an old captain
+      like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug
+      berth.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were
+      set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below; and
+      when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors flung it
+      not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt it to its
+      place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when this sort of
+      steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the silent steersman
+      would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man would emerge,
+      gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way. Some considering
+      touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these, he usually
+      abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his wearied mates,
+      seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would have been
+      the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their dreams would
+      have been on the crunching teeth of sharks. But once, the mood was on him
+      too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was
+      measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the old second mate,
+      came up from below, with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness,
+      hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one
+      could say nay; but there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting
+      something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the
+      insertion into it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab
+      then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb,” said Ahab, “that thou wouldst wad me that
+      fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave; where
+      such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at last.—Down,
+      dog, and kennel!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly
+      scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, “I
+      am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like
+      it, sir.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away, as
+      if to avoid some passionate temptation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, sir; not yet,” said Stubb, emboldened, “I will not tamely be called a
+      dog, sir.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or
+      I’ll clear the world of thee!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in
+      his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,” muttered
+      Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. “It’s very queer.
+      Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don’t well know whether to go back and strike
+      him, or—what’s that?—down here on my knees and pray for him?
+      Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the first time
+      I ever <i>did</i> pray. It’s queer; very queer; and he’s queer too; aye, take him
+      fore and aft, he’s about the queerest old man Stubb ever sailed with. How
+      he flashed at me!—his eyes like powder-pans! is he mad? Anyway
+      there’s something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a
+      deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours
+      out of the twenty-four; and he don’t sleep then. Didn’t that Dough-Boy,
+      the steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man’s
+      hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot,
+      and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of
+      frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on it? A hot old man! I
+      guess he’s got what some folks ashore call a conscience; it’s a kind of
+      Tic-Dolly-row they say—worse nor a toothache. Well, well; I don’t
+      know what it is, but the Lord keep me from catching it. He’s full of
+      riddles; I wonder what he goes into the after hold for, every night, as
+      Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what’s that for, I should like to know?
+      Who’s made appointments with him in the hold? Ain’t that queer, now? But
+      there’s no telling, it’s the old game—Here goes for a snooze. Damn
+      me, it’s worth a fellow’s while to be born into the world, if only to fall
+      right asleep. And now that I think of it, that’s about the first thing
+      babies do, and that’s a sort of queer, too. Damn me, but all things are
+      queer, come to think of ’em. But that’s against my principles. Think not,
+      is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth—So
+      here goes again. But how’s that? didn’t he call me a dog? blazes! he
+      called me ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of <i>that!</i>
+      He might as well have kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he <i>did</i> kick me,
+      and I didn’t observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow, somehow.
+      It flashed like a bleached bone. What the devil’s the matter with me? I
+      don’t stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of
+      turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though—How?
+      how? how?—but the only way’s to stash it; so here goes to hammock
+      again; and in the morning, I’ll see how this plaguey juggling thinks over
+      by daylight.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0030">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks;
+      and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the
+      watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe. Lighting
+      the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the weather side
+      of the deck, he sat and smoked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were
+      fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one
+      look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him
+      of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the
+      sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth in
+      quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. “How now,”
+       he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, “this smoking no longer
+      soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here
+      have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring—aye, and
+      ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such
+      nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the
+      strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe?
+      This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors
+      among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I’ll
+      smoke no more—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the
+      waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made.
+      With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0031">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man’s ivory
+      leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick back,
+      upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right off! And then, presto!
+      Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking at it. But
+      what was still more curious, Flask—you know how curious all dreams
+      are—through all this rage that I was in, I somehow seemed to be
+      thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an insult, that
+      kick from Ahab. ‘Why,’ thinks I, ‘what’s the row? It’s not a real leg,
+      only a false leg.’ And there’s a mighty difference between a living thump
+      and a dead thump. That’s what makes a blow from the hand, Flask, fifty
+      times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane. The living member—that
+      makes the living insult, my little man. And thinks I to myself all the
+      while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly toes against that cursed
+      pyramid—so confoundedly contradictory was it all, all the while, I
+      say, I was thinking to myself, ‘what’s his leg now, but a cane—a
+      whalebone cane. Yes,’ thinks I, ‘it was only a playful cudgelling—in
+      fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me—not a base kick. Besides,’
+      thinks I, ‘look at it once; why, the end of it—the foot part—what
+      a small sort of end it is; whereas, if a broad footed farmer kicked me,
+      <i>there’s</i> a devilish broad insult. But this insult is whittled down to a
+      point only.’ But now comes the greatest joke of the dream, Flask. While I
+      was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of badger-haired old merman,
+      with a hump on his back, takes me by the shoulders, and slews me round.
+      ‘What are you ’bout?’ says he. Slid! man, but I was frightened. Such a
+      phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was over the fright. ‘What am I about?’
+      says I at last. ‘And what business is that of yours, I should like to
+      know, Mr. Humpback? Do <i>you</i> want a kick?’ By the lord, Flask, I had no
+      sooner said that, than he turned round his stern to me, bent over, and
+      dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a clout—what do you think, I
+      saw?—why thunder alive, man, his stern was stuck full of
+      marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on second thoughts, ‘I guess I
+      won’t kick you, old fellow.’ ‘Wise Stubb,’ said he, ‘wise Stubb;’ and kept
+      muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of his own gums like a chimney
+      hag. Seeing he wasn’t going to stop saying over his ‘wise Stubb, wise
+      Stubb,’ I thought I might as well fall to kicking the pyramid again. But I
+      had only just lifted my foot for it, when he roared out, ‘Stop that
+      kicking!’ ‘Halloa,’ says I, ‘what’s the matter now, old fellow?’ ‘Look ye
+      here,’ says he; ‘let’s argue the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn’t
+      he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’ says I—‘right <i>here</i> it was.’ ‘Very good,’ says he—‘he
+      used his ivory leg, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’ says I. ‘Well then,’ says
+      he, ‘wise Stubb, what have you to complain of? Didn’t he kick with right
+      good will? it wasn’t a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No,
+      you were kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb.
+      It’s an honor; I consider it an honor. Listen, wise Stubb. In old
+      England the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen,
+      and made garter-knights of; but, be <i>your</i> boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked
+      by old Ahab, and made a wise man of. Remember what I say; <i>be</i> kicked by
+      him; account his kicks honors; and on no account kick back; for you can’t
+      help yourself, wise Stubb. Don’t you see that pyramid?’ With that, he all
+      of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to swim off into the
+      air. I snored; rolled over; and there I was in my hammock! Now, what do
+      you think of that dream, Flask?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.’”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “May be; may be. But it’s made a wise man of me, Flask. D’ye see Ahab
+      standing there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best thing you
+      can do, Flask, is to let the old man alone; never speak to him, whatever
+      he says. Halloa! What’s that he shouts? Hark!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What do you think of that now, Flask? ain’t there a small drop of
+      something queer about that, eh? A white whale—did ye mark that, man?
+      Look ye—there’s something special in the wind. Stand by for it,
+      Flask. Ahab has that that’s bloody on his mind. But, mum; he comes this
+      way.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0032">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 32. Cetology.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in
+      its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the
+      Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the
+      leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost
+      indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special
+      leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that
+      I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The
+      classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here
+      essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled
+      Cetology,” says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry as
+      to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and families. * * *
+      Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal” (sperm whale),
+      says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters.”
+       “Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea.” “A field strewn
+      with thorns.” “All these incomplete indications but serve to torture us
+      naturalists.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson,
+      those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real
+      knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in some
+      small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are the men,
+      small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or in
+      little, written of the whale. Run over a few:—The Authors of the
+      Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner; Ray;
+      Linnæus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson;
+      Marten; Lacépède; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier;
+      John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the Author of
+      Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what ultimate
+      generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts will
+      show.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen ever
+      saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional harpooneer
+      and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate subject of the
+      Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing authority. But Scoresby
+      knew nothing and says nothing of the great sperm whale, compared with
+      which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy mentioning. And here be it
+      said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper upon the throne of the seas.
+      He is not even by any means the largest of the whales. Yet, owing to the
+      long priority of his claims, and the profound ignorance which, till some
+      seventy years back, invested the then fabulous or utterly unknown
+      sperm-whale, and which ignorance to this present day still reigns in all
+      but some few scientific retreats and whale-ports; this usurpation has been
+      every way complete. Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in
+      the great poets of past days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale,
+      without one rival, was to them the monarch of the seas. But the time has
+      at last come for a new proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good
+      people all,—the Greenland whale is deposed,—the great sperm
+      whale now reigneth!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living
+      sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree
+      succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale’s and Bennett’s; both in
+      their time surgeons to English South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact and
+      reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale to be found in
+      their volumes is necessarily small; but so far as it goes, it is of
+      excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific description. As
+      yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in
+      any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive
+      classification, if only an easy outline one for the present, hereafter to
+      be filled in all its departments by subsequent laborers. As no better man
+      advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor
+      endeavors. I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to
+      be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not
+      pretend to a minute anatomical description of the various species, or—in
+      this place at least—to much of any description. My object here is
+      simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the
+      architect, not the builder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-Office
+      is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to
+      have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis
+      of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to
+      hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well
+      appal me. Will he (the leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the
+      hope of him is vain! But I have swam through libraries and sailed through
+      oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in
+      earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to settle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is
+      in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still
+      remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature,
+      A.D. 1776, Linnæus declares, “I hereby separate the whales from the
+      fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks
+      and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnæus’s express edict, were
+      still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The grounds upon which Linnæus would fain have banished the whales from
+      the waters, he states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular
+      heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem
+      intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,” and finally, “ex lege naturæ jure
+      meritoque.” I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley
+      Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they
+      united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether
+      insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned
+      ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me. This
+      fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal respect
+      does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linnæus has given you those
+      items. But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm blood; whereas, all
+      other fish are lungless and cold blooded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as
+      conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a
+      whale is <i>a spouting fish with a horizontal tail</i>. There you have him.
+      However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded meditation.
+      A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a fish, because
+      he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is still more
+      cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have noticed that
+      all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a vertical, or
+      up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be
+      similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal position.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude from
+      the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified with the
+      whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other hand, link with
+      it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as alien.* Hence, all the
+      smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish must be included in this
+      ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the grand divisions of the entire
+      whale host.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and
+      Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included
+      by many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a noisy,
+      contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on
+      wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as
+      whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom
+      of Cetology.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS
+      (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all, both
+      small and large.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the type of the FOLIO I present the <i>Sperm Whale</i>; of the OCTAVO, the
+      <i>Grampus</i>; of the DUODECIMO, the <i>Porpoise</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:—I. The
+      <i>Sperm Whale</i>; II. the <i>Right Whale</i>; III. the <i>Fin-Back Whale</i>; IV. the
+      <i>Hump-backed Whale</i>; V. the <i>Razor Back Whale</i>; VI. the <i>Sulphur Bottom Whale</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOOK I. (<i>Folio</i>), CHAPTER I. (<i>Sperm Whale</i>).—This whale, among the
+      English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter whale,
+      and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the French, and the
+      Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the Long Words. He is,
+      without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe; the most formidable of
+      all whales to encounter; the most majestic in aspect; and lastly, by far
+      the most valuable in commerce; he being the only creature from which that
+      valuable substance, spermaceti, is obtained. All his peculiarities will,
+      in many other places, be enlarged upon. It is chiefly with his name that I
+      now have to do. Philologically considered, it is absurd. Some centuries
+      ago, when the Sperm whale was almost wholly unknown in his own proper
+      individuality, and when his oil was only accidentally obtained from the
+      stranded fish; in those days spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly
+      supposed to be derived from a creature identical with the one then known
+      in England as the Greenland or Right Whale. It was the idea also, that
+      this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale
+      which the first syllable of the word literally expresses. In those times,
+      also, spermaceti was exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but
+      only as an ointment and medicament. It was only to be had from the
+      druggists as you nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in
+      the course of time, the true nature of spermaceti became known, its
+      original name was still retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its
+      value by a notion so strangely significant of its scarcity. And so the
+      appellation must at last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from
+      which this spermaceti was really derived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOOK I. (<i>Folio</i>), CHAPTER II. (<i>Right Whale</i>).—In one respect this is
+      the most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted
+      by man. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or baleen; and
+      the oil specially known as “whale oil,” an inferior article in commerce.
+      Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by all the
+      following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black Whale; the
+      Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale. There is a deal of obscurity
+      concerning the identity of the species thus multitudinously baptised. What
+      then is the whale, which I include in the second species of my Folios? It
+      is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the Greenland Whale of
+      the English whalemen; the Baleine Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the
+      Growlands Walfish of the Swedes. It is the whale which for more than two
+      centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch and English in the Arctic
+      seas; it is the whale which the American fishermen have long pursued in
+      the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor’ West Coast, and various
+      other parts of the world, designated by them Right Whale Cruising Grounds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the
+      English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree in
+      all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single
+      determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by
+      endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that
+      some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate. The
+      right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with reference to
+      elucidating the sperm whale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOOK I. (<i>Folio</i>), CHAPTER III. (<i>Fin-Back</i>).—Under this head I reckon a
+      monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and
+      Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale
+      whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the
+      Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In the length he attains, and in
+      his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right whale, but is of a less
+      portly girth, and a lighter colour, approaching to olive. His great lips
+      present a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds
+      of large wrinkles. His grand distinguishing feature, the fin, from which
+      he derives his name, is often a conspicuous object. This fin is some three
+      or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder part of the back, of
+      an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end. Even if not the
+      slightest other part of the creature be visible, this isolated fin will,
+      at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When the sea is
+      moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples, and this
+      gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it
+      may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it somewhat
+      resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved on it. On that
+      Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back. The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He
+      seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very shy; always going
+      solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the remotest and most
+      sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet rising like a tall
+      misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous power
+      and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from man; this
+      leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable Cain of his race, bearing
+      for his mark that style upon his back. From having the baleen in his
+      mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes included with the right whale, among a
+      theoretic species denominated <i>Whalebone whales</i>, that is, whales with
+      baleen. Of these so called Whalebone whales, there would seem to be
+      several varieties, most of which, however, are little known. Broad-nosed
+      whales and beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched whales; under-jawed
+      whales and rostrated whales, are the fishermen’s names for a few sorts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In connection with this appellative of “Whalebone whales,” it is of great
+      importance to mention, that however such a nomenclature may be convenient
+      in facilitating allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is in vain to
+      attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan, founded upon either his
+      baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth; notwithstanding that those marked parts
+      or features very obviously seem better adapted to afford the basis for a
+      regular system of Cetology than any other detached bodily distinctions,
+      which the whale, in his kinds, presents. How then? The baleen, hump,
+      back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose peculiarities are
+      indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales, without any regard
+      to what may be the nature of their structure in other and more essential
+      particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the humpbacked whale, each has a
+      hump; but there the similitude ceases. Then, this same humpbacked whale
+      and the Greenland whale, each of these has baleen; but there again the
+      similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the other parts above
+      mentioned. In various sorts of whales, they form such irregular
+      combinations; or, in the case of any one of them detached, such an
+      irregular isolation; as utterly to defy all general methodization formed
+      upon such a basis. On this rock every one of the whale-naturalists has
+      split.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the whale,
+      in his anatomy—there, at least, we shall be able to hit the right
+      classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the Greenland
+      whale’s anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have seen that by
+      his baleen it is impossible correctly to classify the Greenland whale. And
+      if you descend into the bowels of the various leviathans, why there you
+      will not find distinctions a fiftieth part as available to the
+      systematizer as those external ones already enumerated. What then remains?
+      nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in their entire liberal
+      volume, and boldly sort them that way. And this is the Bibliographical
+      system here adopted; and it is the only one that can possibly succeed, for
+      it alone is practicable. To proceed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOOK I. (<i>Folio</i>) CHAPTER IV. (<i>Hump Back</i>).—This whale is often seen on
+      the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and
+      towed into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or you might
+      call him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate, the popular name for
+      him does not sufficiently distinguish him, since the sperm whale also has
+      a hump though a smaller one. His oil is not very valuable. He has baleen.
+      He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales, making more
+      gay foam and white water generally than any other of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOOK I. (<i>Folio</i>), CHAPTER V. (<i>Razor Back</i>).—Of this whale little is
+      known but his name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a
+      retiring nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though no
+      coward, he has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which rises
+      in a long sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does
+      anybody else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOOK I. (<i>Folio</i>), CHAPTER VI. (<i>Sulphur Bottom</i>).—Another retiring
+      gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the
+      Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen; at
+      least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas, and then
+      always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is never
+      chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are told of
+      him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing more that is true of ye, nor
+      can the oldest Nantucketer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus ends BOOK I. (<i>Folio</i>), and now begins BOOK II. (<i>Octavo</i>).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OCTAVOES.*—These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among
+      which present may be numbered:—I., the <i>Grampus</i>; II., the <i>Black Fish</i>;
+      III., the <i>Narwhale</i>; IV., the <i>Thrasher</i>; V., the <i>Killer</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain.
+      Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of the
+      former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them in
+      figure, yet the bookbinder’s Quarto volume in its dimensioned form does
+      not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume does.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOOK II. (<i>Octavo</i>), CHAPTER I. (<i>Grampus</i>).—Though this fish, whose
+      loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb to
+      landsmen, is so well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not popularly
+      classed among whales. But possessing all the grand distinctive features of
+      the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him for one. He is of
+      moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to twenty-five feet in length,
+      and of corresponding dimensions round the waist. He swims in herds; he is
+      never regularly hunted, though his oil is considerable in quantity, and
+      pretty good for light. By some fishermen his approach is regarded as
+      premonitory of the advance of the great sperm whale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOOK II. (<i>Octavo</i>), CHAPTER II. (<i>Black Fish</i>).—I give the popular
+      fishermen’s names for all these fish, for generally they are the best.
+      Where any name happens to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so, and
+      suggest another. I do so now, touching the Black Fish, so-called, because
+      blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So, call him the Hyena
+      Whale, if you please. His voracity is well known, and from the
+      circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards, he
+      carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This whale
+      averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost
+      all latitudes. He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal hooked fin in
+      swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose. When not more
+      profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena
+      whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment—as
+      some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite alone by
+      themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax. Though their
+      blubber is very thin, some of these whales will yield you upwards of
+      thirty gallons of oil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOOK II. (<i>Octavo</i>), CHAPTER III. (<i>Narwhale</i>), that is, <i>Nostril whale</i>.—Another
+      instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose from his peculiar
+      horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose. The creature is some
+      sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five feet, though some
+      exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly speaking, this horn
+      is but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw in a line a little
+      depressed from the horizontal. But it is only found on the sinister side,
+      which has an ill effect, giving its owner something analogous to the
+      aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. What precise purpose this ivory horn
+      or lance answers, it would be hard to say. It does not seem to be used
+      like the blade of the sword-fish and bill-fish; though some sailors tell
+      me that the Narwhale employs it for a rake in turning over the bottom of
+      the sea for food. Charley Coffin said it was used for an ice-piercer; for
+      the Narwhale, rising to the surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it
+      sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks through. But you
+      cannot prove either of these surmises to be correct. My own opinion is,
+      that however this one-sided horn may really be used by the Narwhale—however
+      that may be—it would certainly be very convenient to him for a
+      folder in reading pamphlets. The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked
+      whale, the Horned whale, and the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a curious
+      example of the Unicornism to be found in almost every kingdom of animated
+      nature. From certain cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same
+      sea-unicorn’s horn was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote
+      against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It
+      was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way
+      that the horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn.
+      Originally it was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black
+      Letter tells me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage,
+      when Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window
+      of Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames; “when Sir
+      Martin returned from that voyage,” saith Black Letter, “on bended knees he
+      presented to her highness a prodigious long horn of the Narwhale, which
+      for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor.” An Irish author
+      avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did likewise present to
+      her highness another horn, pertaining to a land beast of the unicorn
+      nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a
+      milk-white ground colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black. His
+      oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there is little of it, and he is
+      seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOOK II. (<i>Octavo</i>), CHAPTER IV. (<i>Killer</i>).—Of this whale little is
+      precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed
+      naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should say that
+      he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage—a sort of
+      Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and
+      hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death. The
+      Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has. Exception
+      might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground of its
+      indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and
+      Sharks included.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOOK II. (<i>Octavo</i>), CHAPTER V. (<i>Thrasher</i>).—This gentleman is famous
+      for his tail, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He mounts
+      the Folio whale’s back, and as he swims, he works his passage by flogging
+      him; as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a similar process.
+      Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both are outlaws,
+      even in the lawless seas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+       Thus ends BOOK II. (<i>Octavo</i>), and begins BOOK III. (<i>Duodecimo</i>).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      DUODECIMOES.—These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza
+      Porpoise. II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may
+      possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five
+      feet should be marshalled among WHALES—a word, which, in the popular
+      sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the creatures set down
+      above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my definition
+      of what a whale is—<i>i.e.</i> a spouting fish, with a horizontal tail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOOK III. (<i>Duodecimo</i>), CHAPTER 1. (<i>Huzza Porpoise</i>).—This is the
+      common porpoise found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own
+      bestowal; for there are more than one sort of porpoises, and something
+      must be done to distinguish them. I call him thus, because he always swims
+      in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing themselves to
+      heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their appearance is generally
+      hailed with delight by the mariner. Full of fine spirits, they invariably
+      come from the breezy billows to windward. They are the lads that always
+      live before the wind. They are accounted a lucky omen. If you yourself can
+      withstand three cheers at beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help
+      ye; the spirit of godly gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza
+      Porpoise will yield you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and
+      delicate fluid extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in
+      request among jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put it on their hones.
+      Porpoise meat is good eating, you know. It may never have occurred to you
+      that a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very
+      readily discernible. But the next time you have a chance, watch him; and
+      you will then see the great Sperm whale himself in miniature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOOK III. (<i>Duodecimo</i>), CHAPTER II. (<i>Algerine Porpoise</i>).—A pirate.
+      Very savage. He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is somewhat
+      larger than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general make. Provoke
+      him, and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered for him many times, but
+      never yet saw him captured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOOK III. (<i>Duodecimo</i>), CHAPTER III. (<i>Mealy-mouthed Porpoise</i>).—The
+      largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it is
+      known. The only English name, by which he has hitherto been designated, is
+      that of the fishers—Right-Whale Porpoise, from the circumstance that
+      he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio. In shape, he differs in
+      some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a less rotund and jolly
+      girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and gentleman-like figure. He has no
+      fins on his back (most other porpoises have), he has a lovely tail, and
+      sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his mealy-mouth spoils all.
+      Though his entire back down to his side fins is of a deep sable, yet a
+      boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship’s hull, called the “bright
+      waist,” that line streaks him from stem to stern, with two separate
+      colours, black above and white below. The white comprises part of his
+      head, and the whole of his mouth, which makes him look as if he had just
+      escaped from a felonious visit to a meal-bag. A most mean and mealy
+      aspect! His oil is much like that of the common porpoise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+     * * * * * *
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as the
+      Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the Leviathans
+      of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous
+      whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by reputation, but not
+      personally. I shall enumerate them by their fore-castle appellations; for
+      possibly such a list may be valuable to future investigators, who may
+      complete what I have here but begun. If any of the following whales, shall
+      hereafter be caught and marked, then he can readily be incorporated into
+      this System, according to his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:—The
+      Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape
+      Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered
+      Whale; the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue
+      Whale; etc. From Icelandic, Dutch, and old English authorities, there
+      might be quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all manner
+      of uncouth names. But I omit them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly
+      help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying
+      nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here,
+      and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my
+      word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even
+      as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing
+      upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished
+      by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone
+      to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book
+      is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time,
+      Strength, Cash, and Patience!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0033">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place as
+      any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising from
+      the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown of
+      course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The large importance attached to the harpooneer’s vocation is evinced by
+      the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries and more
+      ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in the person now
+      called the captain, but was divided between him and an officer called the
+      Specksnyder. Literally this word means Fat-Cutter; usage, however, in time
+      made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. In those days, the captain’s
+      authority was restricted to the navigation and general management of the
+      vessel; while over the whale-hunting department and all its concerns, the
+      Specksnyder or Chief Harpooneer reigned supreme. In the British Greenland
+      Fishery, under the corrupted title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch
+      official is still retained, but his former dignity is sadly abridged. At
+      present he ranks simply as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of
+      the captain’s more inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good
+      conduct of the harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely
+      depends, and since in the American Fishery he is not only an important
+      officer in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night watches on a
+      whaling ground) the command of the ship’s deck is also his; therefore the
+      grand political maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live
+      apart from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as
+      their professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded
+      as their social equal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is this—the
+      first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and merchantmen
+      alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain; and so, too, in
+      most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in the after part
+      of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the captain’s cabin,
+      and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest of
+      all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and the
+      community of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom, high or
+      low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their common
+      luck, together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and hard work;
+      though all these things do in some cases tend to beget a less rigorous
+      discipline than in merchantmen generally; yet, never mind how much like an
+      old Mesopotamian family these whalemen may, in some primitive instances,
+      live together; for all that, the punctilious externals, at least, of the
+      quarter-deck are seldom materially relaxed, and in no instance done away.
+      Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in which you will see the skipper
+      parading his quarter-deck with an elated grandeur not surpassed in any
+      military navy; nay, extorting almost as much outward homage as if he wore
+      the imperial purple, and not the shabbiest of pilot-cloth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least given
+      to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage he ever
+      exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he required no man
+      to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon the quarter-deck; and
+      though there were times when, owing to peculiar circumstances connected
+      with events hereafter to be detailed, he addressed them in unusual terms,
+      whether of condescension or <i>in terrorem</i>, or otherwise; yet even Captain
+      Ahab was by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the
+      sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those
+      forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally
+      making use of them for other and more private ends than they were
+      legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain,
+      which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through those
+      forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible
+      dictatorship. For be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can
+      never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without
+      the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in
+      themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps
+      God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings; and leaves the
+      highest honors that this air can give, to those men who become famous
+      more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of
+      the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead
+      level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when
+      extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances
+      even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as in the
+      case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire
+      encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before
+      the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would
+      depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direct swing, ever
+      forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the one now
+      alluded to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness
+      and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and Kings, I must
+      not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old whale-hunter like him;
+      and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings and housings are denied
+      me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at
+      from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied
+      air!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0034">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread
+      face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and master; who,
+      sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just been taking an observation of
+      the sun; and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on the smooth,
+      medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that daily purpose on the upper part
+      of his ivory leg. From his complete inattention to the tidings, you would
+      think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. But presently, catching
+      hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to the deck, and in an even,
+      unexhilarated voice, saying, “Dinner, Mr. Starbuck,” disappears into the
+      cabin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the last echo of his sultan’s step has died away, and Starbuck, the
+      first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck
+      rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns along the planks, and, after a
+      grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some touch of pleasantness,
+      “Dinner, Mr. Stubb,” and descends the scuttle. The second Emir lounges
+      about the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking the main brace, to see
+      whether it will be all right with that important rope, he likewise takes
+      up the old burden, and with a rapid “Dinner, Mr. Flask,” follows after his
+      predecessors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck,
+      seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all sorts
+      of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his shoes, he
+      strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right over the
+      Grand Turk’s head; and then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching his cap up
+      into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down rollicking so far at least as
+      he remains visible from the deck, reversing all other processions, by
+      bringing up the rear with music. But ere stepping into the cabin doorway
+      below, he pauses, ships a new face altogether, and, then, independent,
+      hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab’s presence, in the character of
+      Abjectus, or the Slave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense
+      artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck some
+      officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and defyingly
+      enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those very officers
+      the next moment go down to their customary dinner in that same commander’s
+      cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say deprecatory and
+      humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of the table; this is
+      marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this difference? A problem?
+      Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been
+      Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously, therein certainly must have
+      been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he who in the rightly regal and
+      intelligent spirit presides over his own private dinner-table of invited
+      guests, that man’s unchallenged power and dominion of individual influence
+      for the time; that man’s royalty of state transcends Belshazzar’s, for
+      Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who has but once dined his friends, has
+      tasted what it is to be Cæsar. It is a witchery of social czarship which
+      there is no withstanding. Now, if to this consideration you superadd the
+      official supremacy of a ship-master, then, by inference, you will derive
+      the cause of that peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on
+      the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still deferential
+      cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to be served. They were
+      as little children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab, there seemed not to lurk
+      the smallest social arrogance. With one mind, their intent eyes all
+      fastened upon the old man’s knife, as he carved the chief dish before him.
+      I do not suppose that for the world they would have profaned that moment
+      with the slightest observation, even upon so neutral a topic as the
+      weather. No! And when reaching out his knife and fork, between which the
+      slice of beef was locked, Ahab thereby motioned Starbuck’s plate towards
+      him, the mate received his meat as though receiving alms; and cut it
+      tenderly; and a little started if, perchance, the knife grazed against the
+      plate; and chewed it noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without
+      circumspection. For, like the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the
+      German Emperor profoundly dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these
+      cabin meals were somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at
+      table old Ahab forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb. What a
+      relief it was to choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden racket in the
+      hold below. And poor little Flask, he was the youngest son, and little boy
+      of this weary family party. His were the shinbones of the saline beef; his
+      would have been the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help
+      himself, this must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the first
+      degree. Had he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never more would
+      he have been able to hold his head up in this honest world; nevertheless,
+      strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped himself, the
+      chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all, did Flask
+      presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners of the
+      ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear, sunny
+      complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such
+      marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him,
+      a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and Flask is
+      the first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask’s dinner was badly jammed in
+      point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him; and yet they
+      also have the privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb even, who is but
+      a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small appetite, and soon
+      shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask must bestir himself,
+      he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day; for it is against holy
+      usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck. Therefore it was that Flask
+      once admitted in private, that ever since he had arisen to the dignity of
+      an officer, from that moment he had never known what it was to be
+      otherwise than hungry, more or less. For what he ate did not so much
+      relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him. Peace and satisfaction,
+      thought Flask, have for ever departed from my stomach. I am an officer;
+      but, how I wish I could fish a bit of old-fashioned beef in the
+      forecastle, as I used to when I was before the mast. There’s the fruits of
+      promotion now; there’s the vanity of glory: there’s the insanity of life!
+      Besides, if it were so that any mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge
+      against Flask in Flask’s official capacity, all that sailor had to do, in
+      order to obtain ample vengeance, was to go aft at dinner-time, and get a
+      peep at Flask through the cabin sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered
+      before awful Ahab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first table in
+      the Pequod’s cabin. After their departure, taking place in inverted order
+      to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared, or rather was restored to
+      some hurried order by the pallid steward. And then the three harpooneers
+      were bidden to the feast, they being its residuary legatees. They made a
+      sort of temporary servants’ hall of the high and mighty cabin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless
+      invisible domineerings of the captain’s table, was the entire care-free
+      license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those inferior fellows
+      the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the
+      sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed their food
+      with such a relish that there was a report to it. They dined like lords;
+      they filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading with spices.
+      Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out the
+      vacancies made by the previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was fain
+      to bring on a great baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of the
+      solid ox. And if he were not lively about it, if he did not go with a
+      nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of
+      accelerating him by darting a fork at his back, harpoon-wise. And once
+      Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted Dough-Boy’s memory by
+      snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head into a great empty wooden
+      trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out the circle
+      preliminary to scalping him. He was naturally a very nervous, shuddering
+      sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny of a bankrupt
+      baker and a hospital nurse. And what with the standing spectacle of the
+      black terrific Ahab, and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these
+      three savages, Dough-Boy’s whole life was one continual lip-quiver.
+      Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they
+      demanded, he would escape from their clutches into his little pantry
+      adjoining, and fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door,
+      till all was over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing his
+      filed teeth to the Indian’s: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on the
+      floor, for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed head to the low
+      carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the low cabin
+      framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes passenger in a ship.
+      But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious, not to say
+      dainty. It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively small
+      mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad,
+      baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage fed
+      strong and drank deep of the abounding element of air; and through his
+      dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds. Not by beef or
+      by bread, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a mortal,
+      barbaric smack of the lip in eating—an ugly sound enough—so
+      much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether any
+      marks of teeth lurked in his own lean arms. And when he would hear
+      Tashtego singing out for him to produce himself, that his bones might be
+      picked, the simple-witted steward all but shattered the crockery hanging
+      round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor did the
+      whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for their lances
+      and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner, they would
+      ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did not at all
+      tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in his
+      Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some
+      murderous, convivial indiscretions. Alas! Dough-Boy! hard fares the white
+      waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a napkin should he carry on his arm,
+      but a buckler. In good time, though, to his great delight, the three
+      salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous, fable-mongering
+      ears, all their martial bones jingling in them at every step, like Moorish
+      scimetars in scabbards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived
+      there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits, they were
+      scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just before sleeping-time,
+      when they passed through it to their own peculiar quarters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale
+      captains, who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights the
+      ship’s cabin belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone that
+      anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real truth, the
+      mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly be said to have
+      lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did enter it, it was
+      something as a street-door enters a house; turning inwards for a moment,
+      only to be turned out the next; and, as a permanent thing, residing in the
+      open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin was no
+      companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included
+      in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the
+      world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as
+      when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying
+      himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his
+      own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab’s soul, shut up in
+      the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0035">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the
+      other seamen my first mast-head came round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously
+      with the vessel’s leaving her port; even though she may have fifteen
+      thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground.
+      And if, after a three, four, or five years’ voyage she is drawing nigh
+      home with anything empty in her—say, an empty vial even—then,
+      her mast-heads are kept manned to the last; and not till her skysail-poles
+      sail in among the spires of the port, does she altogether relinquish the
+      hope of capturing one whale more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very
+      ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here. I take
+      it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old Egyptians;
+      because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them. For though their
+      progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by their tower, have
+      intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia, or Africa either; yet
+      (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great stone mast of theirs may
+      be said to have gone by the board, in the dread gale of God’s wrath;
+      therefore, we cannot give these Babel builders priority over the
+      Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, is
+      an assertion based upon the general belief among archæologists, that the
+      first pyramids were founded for astronomical purposes: a theory singularly
+      supported by the peculiar stair-like formation of all four sides of those
+      edifices; whereby, with prodigious long upliftings of their legs, those
+      old astronomers were wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new
+      stars; even as the look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a
+      whale just bearing in sight. In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian
+      hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and
+      spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his
+      food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance
+      of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his
+      place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing
+      everything out to the last, literally died at his post. Of modern
+      standers-of-mast-heads we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and
+      bronze men; who, though well capable of facing out a stiff gale, are still
+      entirely incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering any
+      strange sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the column of
+      Vendome, stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the
+      air; careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis Philippe,
+      Louis Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high aloft
+      on his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules’ pillars,
+      his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals
+      will go. Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his
+      mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that London
+      smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is
+      smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor
+      Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however madly invoked to
+      befriend by their counsels the distracted decks upon which they gaze;
+      however it may be surmised, that their spirits penetrate through the thick
+      haze of the future, and descry what shoals and what rocks must be shunned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head standers
+      of the land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is not so, is
+      plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole historian of
+      Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells us, that in the early
+      times of the whale fishery, ere ships were regularly launched in pursuit
+      of the game, the people of that island erected lofty spars along the
+      sea-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by means of nailed cleats,
+      something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house. A few years ago this same
+      plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand, who, upon descrying
+      the game, gave notice to the ready-manned boats nigh the beach. But this
+      custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the one proper mast-head,
+      that of a whale-ship at sea. The three mast-heads are kept manned from
+      sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the
+      helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene weather of
+      the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy
+      meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the
+      silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic
+      stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the
+      hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of
+      the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite
+      series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship
+      indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you
+      into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime
+      uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras
+      with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary
+      excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities;
+      fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have
+      for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more are snugly
+      stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years’ voyage,
+      as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head
+      would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be deplored that
+      the place to which you devote so considerable a portion of the whole term
+      of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute of anything approaching
+      to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a comfortable localness of
+      feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a
+      pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small and snug contrivances in
+      which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your most usual point of perch
+      is the head of the t’ gallant-mast, where you stand upon two thin parallel
+      sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t’ gallant cross-trees.
+      Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he
+      would standing on a bull’s horns. To be sure, in cold weather you may
+      carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat; but
+      properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the
+      unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its fleshy tabernacle, and
+      cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out of it, without running
+      great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps
+      in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere
+      envelope, or additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest
+      of drawers in your body, and no more can you make a convenient closet of
+      your watch-coat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a
+      southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or
+      pulpits, called <i>crow’s-nests</i>, in which the look-outs of a Greenland whaler
+      are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In the
+      fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled “A Voyage among the
+      Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the
+      re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;” in this
+      admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a
+      charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented
+      <i>crow’s-nest</i> of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet’s good
+      craft. He called it the <i>Sleet’s crow’s-nest</i>, in honor of himself; he
+      being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous
+      false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children after our own
+      names (we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), so likewise
+      should we denominate after ourselves any other apparatus we may beget. In
+      shape, the Sleet’s crow’s-nest is something like a large tierce or pipe;
+      it is open above, however, where it is furnished with a movable
+      side-screen to keep to windward of your head in a hard gale. Being fixed
+      on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it through a little trap-hatch
+      in the bottom. On the after side, or side next the stern of the ship, is a
+      comfortable seat, with a locker underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and
+      coats. In front is a leather rack, in which to keep your speaking trumpet,
+      pipe, telescope, and other nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in
+      person stood his mast-head in this crow’s-nest of his, he tells us that he
+      always had a rifle with him (also fixed in the rack), together with a
+      powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales,
+      or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot
+      successfully shoot at them from the deck owing to the resistance of the
+      water, but to shoot down upon them is a very different thing. Now, it was
+      plainly a labor of love for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the
+      little detailed conveniences of his crow’s-nest; but though he so enlarges
+      upon many of these, and though he treats us to a very scientific account
+      of his experiments in this crow’s-nest, with a small compass he kept there
+      for the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is called
+      the “local attraction” of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to the
+      horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship’s planks, and in the Glacier’s
+      case, perhaps, to there having been so many broken-down blacksmiths among
+      her crew; I say, that though the Captain is very discreet and scientific
+      here, yet, for all his learned “binnacle deviations,” “azimuth compass
+      observations,” and “approximate errors,” he knows very well, Captain
+      Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in those profound magnetic
+      meditations, as to fail being attracted occasionally towards that well
+      replenished little case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of his
+      crow’s nest, within easy reach of his hand. Though, upon the whole, I
+      greatly admire and even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain;
+      yet I take it very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that
+      case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must have
+      been, while with mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the
+      mathematics aloft there in that bird’s nest within three or four perches
+      of the pole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain
+      Sleet and his Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is greatly
+      counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those seductive
+      seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I used to lounge up
+      the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a chat with
+      Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there; then ascending
+      a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the top-sail yard, take
+      a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at last mount to my
+      ultimate destination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but
+      sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I—being
+      left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude—how
+      could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships’
+      standing orders, “Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of
+      Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with
+      lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who
+      offers to ship with the Phædon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of
+      such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed;
+      and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the
+      world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these
+      monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an
+      asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men,
+      disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar
+      and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the
+      mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase
+      ejaculates:—
+    </p>
+<pre>      “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
+      Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young
+      philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient
+      “interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to
+      all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather
+      not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists
+      have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what
+      use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses
+      at home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been
+      cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet.
+      Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.” Perhaps they
+      were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon;
+      but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious
+      reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with
+      thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at
+      his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul,
+      pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding,
+      beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of
+      some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive
+      thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In
+      this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes
+      diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic
+      ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a
+      gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the
+      inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move
+      your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes
+      back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at
+      mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop
+      through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for
+      ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0036">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      (<i>Enter Ahab: Then, all.</i>)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning
+      shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the cabin-gangway
+      to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that hour, as country
+      gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old
+      rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over
+      dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did
+      you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you
+      would see still stranger foot-prints—the foot-prints of his one
+      unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as his
+      nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his thought
+      was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now at the main-mast
+      and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that thought turn in him as
+      he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely possessing him,
+      indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of every outer movement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “D’ye mark him, Flask?” whispered Stubb; “the chick that’s in him pecks
+      the shell. ’Twill soon be out.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The hours wore on;—Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing
+      the deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the bulwarks,
+      and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and with one hand
+      grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody aft.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sir!” said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on
+      ship-board except in some extraordinary case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Send everybody aft,” repeated Ahab. “Mast-heads, there! come down!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the entire ship’s company were assembled, and with curious and not
+      wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the
+      weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing
+      over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew, started from
+      his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him resumed his heavy
+      turns upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched hat he continued to
+      pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering among the men; till Stubb
+      cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have summoned them there for
+      the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat. But this did not last long.
+      Vehemently pausing, he cried:—
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed
+      voices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the
+      hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically
+      thrown them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And what do ye next, men?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lower away, and after him!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “A dead whale or a stove boat!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the
+      countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began to
+      gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that they
+      themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his
+      pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost
+      convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:—
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white
+      whale. Look ye! d’ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?”—holding up a
+      broad bright coin to the sun—“it is a sixteen dollar piece, men.
+      D’ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was slowly
+      rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to heighten
+      its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly humming to
+      himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate that it
+      seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast
+      with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other,
+      and with a high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises me a
+      white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye
+      raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his
+      starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white
+      whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed
+      the act of nailing the gold to the mast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s a white whale, I say,” resumed Ahab, as he threw down the topmaul:
+      “a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water;
+      if ye see but a bubble, sing out.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even more
+      intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention of the
+      wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as if each was separately
+      touched by some specific recollection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Captain Ahab,” said Tashtego, “that white whale must be the same that
+      some call Moby Dick.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Moby Dick?” shouted Ahab. “Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?” said the
+      Gay-Header deliberately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And has he a curious spout, too,” said Daggoo, “very bushy, even for a
+      parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And he have one, two, three—oh! good many iron in him hide, too,
+      Captain,” cried Queequeg disjointedly, “all twiske-tee be-twisk, like him—him—”
+       faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as though
+      uncorking a bottle—“like him—him—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Corkscrew!” cried Ahab, “aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and
+      wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole shock
+      of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the great annual
+      sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib in a
+      squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby
+      Dick—Moby Dick!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Captain Ahab,” said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far
+      been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed
+      struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the wonder. “Captain
+      Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick—but it was not Moby Dick that took
+      off thy leg?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who told thee that?” cried Ahab; then pausing, “Aye, Starbuck; aye, my
+      hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that
+      brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,” he shouted with a
+      terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; “Aye,
+      aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging
+      lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both arms, with measureless
+      imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good
+      Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round
+      perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped
+      for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all
+      sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye,
+      men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the
+      excited old man: “A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for Moby
+      Dick!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “God bless ye,” he seemed to half sob and half shout. “God bless ye, men.
+      Steward! go draw the great measure of grog. But what’s this long face
+      about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not game for
+      Moby Dick?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain
+      Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came
+      here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will
+      thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will
+      not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a
+      little lower layer. If money’s to be the measurer, man, and the
+      accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by
+      girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let
+      me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium <i>here!</i>”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He smites his chest,” whispered Stubb, “what’s that for? methinks it
+      rings most vast, but hollow.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from
+      blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab,
+      seems blasphemous.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man,
+      are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act,
+      the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing
+      puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.
+      If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach
+      outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is
+      that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But
+      ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength,
+      with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly
+      what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale
+      principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy,
+      man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then
+      could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein,
+      jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even
+      that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye!
+      more intolerable than fiends’ glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou
+      reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye,
+      Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men
+      from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let
+      it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—living,
+      breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards—the
+      unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no
+      reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they
+      not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he
+      laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the
+      general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it?
+      Reckon it. ’Tis but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck.
+      What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all
+      Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has
+      clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow
+      lifts thee! Speak, but speak!—Aye, aye! thy silence, then, <i>that</i>
+      voices thee. (<i>Aside</i>) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has
+      inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now,
+      without rebellion.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “God keep me!—keep us all!” murmured Starbuck, lowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab did
+      not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the hold;
+      nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage; nor yet the
+      hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a moment their hearts
+      sank in. For again Starbuck’s downcast eyes lighted up with the
+      stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died away; the winds blew on;
+      the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as before. Ah, ye
+      admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But rather are ye
+      predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much predictions from
+      without, as verifications of the foregoing things within. For with little
+      external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in our being, these
+      still drive us on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The measure! the measure!” cried Ahab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he ordered
+      them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him near the
+      capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while his three mates stood
+      at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship’s company formed a
+      circle round the group; he stood for an instant searchingly eyeing every
+      man of his crew. But those wild eyes met his, as the bloodshot eyes of the
+      prairie wolves meet the eye of their leader, ere he rushes on at their
+      head in the trail of the bison; but, alas! only to fall into the hidden
+      snare of the Indian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Drink and pass!” he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the
+      nearest seaman. “The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short
+      draughts—long swallows, men; ’tis hot as Satan’s hoof. So, so; it
+      goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the
+      serpent-snapping eye. Well done; almost drained. That way it went, this
+      way it comes. Hand it me—here’s a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so
+      brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and ye
+      mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there with
+      your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may in some sort
+      revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men, you will
+      yet see that—Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner. Hand
+      it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, wer’t not thou St.
+      Vitus’ imp—away, thou ague!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let me
+      touch the axis.” So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three level,
+      radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing, suddenly and
+      nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from Starbuck to
+      Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some nameless,
+      interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery
+      emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life. The
+      three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect. Stubb
+      and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck fell
+      downright.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “In vain!” cried Ahab; “but, maybe, ’tis well. For did ye three but once
+      take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, <i>that</i> had perhaps
+      expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye dead.
+      Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do appoint ye
+      three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen there—yon three most
+      honorable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain the
+      task? What, when the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using his
+      tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own condescension, <i>that</i> shall
+      bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings and draw
+      the poles, ye harpooneers!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the
+      detached iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs
+      up, before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye not
+      the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers, advance.
+      The irons! take them; hold them while I fill!” Forthwith, slowly going
+      from one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon sockets with the
+      fiery waters from the pewter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow
+      them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha!
+      Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon
+      it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful
+      whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not
+      hunt Moby Dick to his death!” The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted;
+      and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were
+      simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and
+      shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds
+      among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to them, they all
+      dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0037">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 37. Sunset.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      (<i>The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out</i>.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I
+      sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but
+      first I pass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The
+      gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow dived from noon—goes
+      down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the
+      crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright
+      with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel
+      that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. ’Tis iron—that I know—not
+      gold. ’Tis split, too—that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my
+      brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the
+      sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me,
+      so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all
+      loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high
+      perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most
+      malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night—good night!
+      (<i>waving his hand, he moves from the window</i>.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ’Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least;
+      but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they
+      revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand
+      before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match
+      itself must needs be wasting! What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve
+      willed, I’ll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac,
+      I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend
+      itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I
+      lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now,
+      then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That’s more than ye, ye great
+      gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists,
+      ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to
+      bullies—Take some one of your own size; don’t pommel <i>me!</i> No, ye’ve
+      knocked me down, and I am up again; but <i>ye</i> have run and hidden. Come forth
+      from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab’s
+      compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot
+      swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The
+      path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is
+      grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of
+      mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle,
+      naught’s an angle to the iron way!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0038">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 38. Dusk.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      (<i>By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning against it</i>.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My soul is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a madman!
+      Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But he
+      drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his
+      impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the
+      ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife
+      to cut. Horrible old man! Who’s over him, he cries;—aye, he would be
+      a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below! Oh! I
+      plainly see my miserable office,—to obey, rebelling; and worse yet,
+      to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would
+      shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide. The
+      hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the small gold-fish
+      has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside. I
+      would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock’s run down; my
+      heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [<i>A burst of revelry from the forecastle</i>.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human
+      mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is
+      their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward! mark
+      the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost through
+      the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but only to
+      drag dark Ahab after it, where he broods within his sternward cabin,
+      builded over the dead water of the wake, and further on, hunted by its
+      wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills me through! Peace! ye revellers,
+      and set the watch! Oh, life! ’tis in an hour like this, with soul beat
+      down and held to knowledge,—as wild, untutored things are forced to
+      feed—Oh, life! ’tis now that I do feel the latent horror in thee!
+      but ’tis not me! that horror’s out of me! and with the soft feeling of the
+      human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures! Stand
+      by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0039">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 39. First Night-Watch.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Fore-Top.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (<i>Stubb solus, and mending a brace</i>.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!—I’ve been thinking over it
+      ever since, and that ha, ha’s the final consequence. Why so? Because a
+      laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer; and come what
+      will, one comfort’s always left—that unfailing comfort is, it’s all
+      predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but to my poor eye
+      Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt. Be sure the
+      old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the gift,
+      might readily have prophesied it—for when I clapped my eye upon his
+      skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, <i>wise</i> Stubb—that’s my title—well,
+      Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here’s a carcase. I know not all that may be
+      coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing. Such a waggish
+      leering as lurks in all your horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra,
+      skirra! What’s my juicy little pear at home doing now? Crying its eyes
+      out?—Giving a party to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay
+      as a frigate’s pennant, and so am I—fa, la! lirra, skirra! Oh—
+    </p>
+<pre>      We’ll drink to-night with hearts as light,
+         To love, as gay and fleeting
+      As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim,
+         And break on the lips while meeting.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      A brave stave that—who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir—(<i>Aside</i>)
+      he’s my superior, he has his too, if I’m not mistaken.—Aye, aye,
+      sir, just through with this job—coming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0040">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (<i>Foresail rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning, and
+      lying in various attitudes, all singing in chorus</i>.)
+    </p>
+<pre>     Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies!
+     Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!
+     Our captain’s commanded.—
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR. Oh, boys, don’t be sentimental; it’s bad
+      for the digestion! Take a tonic, follow me!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (<i>Sings, and all follow.</i>)
+    </p>
+<pre>    Our captain stood upon the deck,
+    A spy-glass in his hand,
+    A viewing of those gallant whales
+    That blew at every strand.
+    Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys,
+    And by your braces stand,
+    And we’ll have one of those fine whales,
+    Hand, boys, over hand!
+    So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail!
+    While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Eight bells there, forward!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR. Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d’ye hear,
+      bell-boy? Strike the bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me call
+      the watch. I’ve the sort of mouth for that—the hogshead mouth. So,
+      so, (<i>thrusts his head down the scuttle</i>,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y! Eight
+      bells there below! Tumble up!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      DUTCH SAILOR. Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I mark
+      this in our old Mogul’s wine; it’s quite as deadening to some as filliping
+      to others. We sing; they sleep—aye, lie down there, like ground-tier
+      butts. At ’em again! There, take this copper-pump, and hail ’em through
+      it. Tell ’em to avast dreaming of their lasses. Tell ’em it’s the
+      resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come to judgment. That’s the
+      way—<i>that’s</i> it; thy throat ain’t spoiled with eating Amsterdam
+      butter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      FRENCH SAILOR. Hist, boys! let’s have a jig or two before we ride to
+      anchor in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand by
+      all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PIP. (<i>Sulky and sleepy.</i>) Don’t know where it is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      FRENCH SAILOR. Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I say;
+      merry’s the word; hurrah! Damn me, won’t you dance? Form, now,
+      Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle? Throw yourselves! Legs!
+      legs!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ICELAND SAILOR. I don’t like your floor, maty; it’s too springy to my
+      taste. I’m used to ice-floors. I’m sorry to throw cold water on the
+      subject; but excuse me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MALTESE SAILOR. Me too; where’s your girls? Who but a fool would take his
+      left hand by his right, and say to himself, how d’ye do? Partners! I must
+      have partners!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      SICILIAN SAILOR. Aye; girls and a green!—then I’ll hop with ye; yea,
+      turn grasshopper!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      LONG-ISLAND SAILOR. Well, well, ye sulkies, there’s plenty more of us. Hoe
+      corn when you may, say I. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here comes the
+      music; now for it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      AZORE SAILOR. (<i>Ascending, and pitching the tambourine up the scuttle</i>.)
+      Here you are, Pip; and there’s the windlass-bitts; up you mount! Now,
+      boys! (<i>The half of them dance to the tambourine; some go below; some sleep
+      or lie among the coils of rigging. Oaths a-plenty</i>.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      AZORE SAILOR. (<i>Dancing</i>) Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it,
+      stig it, quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies; break the jinglers!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PIP. Jinglers, you say?—there goes another, dropped off; I pound it
+      so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      CHINA SAILOR. Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of
+      thyself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      FRENCH SAILOR. Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it!
+      Split jibs! tear yourselves!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      TASHTEGO. (<i>Quietly smoking.</i>) That’s a white man; he calls that fun: humph!
+      I save my sweat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OLD MANX SAILOR. I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what
+      they are dancing over. I’ll dance over your grave, I will—that’s the
+      bitterest threat of your night-women, that beat head-winds round corners.
+      O Christ! to think of the green navies and the green-skulled crews! Well,
+      well; belike the whole world’s a ball, as you scholars have it; and so
+      ’tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you’re young; I was
+      once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3D NANTUCKET SAILOR. Spell oh!—whew! this is worse than pulling
+      after whales in a calm—give us a whiff, Tash.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (<i>They cease dancing, and gather in clusters. Meantime the sky darkens—the
+      wind rises</i>.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      LASCAR SAILOR. By Brahma! boys, it’ll be douse sail soon. The sky-born,
+      high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MALTESE SAILOR. (<i>Reclining and shaking his cap</i>.) It’s the waves—the
+      snow’s caps turn to jig it now. They’ll shake their tassels soon. Now
+      would all the waves were women, then I’d go drown, and chassee with them
+      evermore! There’s naught so sweet on earth—heaven may not match it!—as
+      those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the
+      over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      SICILIAN SAILOR. (<i>Reclining</i>.) Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad—fleet
+      interlacings of the limbs—lithe swayings—coyings—flutterings!
+      lip! heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye,
+      else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? (<i>Nudging</i>.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      TAHITAN SAILOR. (<i>Reclining on a mat</i>.) Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing
+      girls!—the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I still
+      rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven in the
+      wood, my mat! green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn and wilted
+      quite. Ah me!—not thou nor I can bear the change! How then, if so be
+      transplanted to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from Pirohitee’s peak
+      of spears, when they leap down the crags and drown the villages?—The
+      blast! the blast! Up, spine, and meet it! (<i>Leaps to his feet</i>.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PORTUGUESE SAILOR. How the sea rolls swashing ’gainst the side! Stand by
+      for reefing, hearties! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell
+      they’ll go lunging presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      DANISH SAILOR. Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou
+      holdest! Well done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He’s no more
+      afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with
+      storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab
+      tell him he must always kill a squall, something as they burst a
+      waterspout with a pistol—fire your ship right into it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ENGLISH SAILOR. Blood! but that old man’s a grand old cove! We are the
+      lads to hunt him up his whale!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ALL. Aye! aye!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OLD MANX SAILOR. How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of
+      tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there’s none but the
+      crew’s cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort of weather
+      when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain
+      has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there’s another in the sky—lurid-like,
+      ye see, all else pitch black.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      DAGGOO. What of that? Who’s afraid of black’s afraid of me! I’m quarried
+      out of it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      SPANISH SAILOR. (<i>Aside</i>.) He wants to bully, ah!—the old grudge makes
+      me touchy (<i>Advancing</i>.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark
+      side of mankind—devilish dark at that. No offence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      DAGGOO (<i>grimly</i>). None.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ST. JAGO’S SAILOR. That Spaniard’s mad or drunk. But that can’t be, or
+      else in his one case our old Mogul’s fire-waters are somewhat long in
+      working.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. What’s that I saw—lightning? Yes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      SPANISH SAILOR. No; Daggoo showing his teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      DAGGOO (<i>springing</i>). Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      SPANISH SAILOR (<i>meeting him</i>). Knife thee heartily! big frame, small
+      spirit!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ALL. A row! a row! a row!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      TASHTEGO (<i>with a whiff</i>). A row a’low, and a row aloft—Gods and men—both
+      brawlers! Humph!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BELFAST SAILOR. A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge
+      in with ye!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ENGLISH SAILOR. Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard’s knife! A ring, a ring!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OLD MANX SAILOR. Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring
+      Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad’st thou
+      the ring?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Hands by the halyards! in top-gallant
+      sails! Stand by to reef topsails!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ALL. The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! (<i>They scatter</i>.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PIP (<i>shrinking under the windlass</i>). Jollies? Lord help such jollies!
+      Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower, Pip,
+      here comes the royal yard! It’s worse than being in the whirled woods, the
+      last day of the year! Who’d go climbing after chestnuts now? But there
+      they go, all cursing, and here I don’t. Fine prospects to ’em; they’re on
+      the road to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a squall! But those chaps
+      there are worse yet—they are your white squalls, they. White
+      squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their chat just
+      now, and the white whale—shirr! shirr!—but spoken of once! and
+      only this evening—it makes me jingle all over like my tambourine—that
+      anaconda of an old man swore ’em in to hunt him! Oh, thou big white God
+      aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy
+      down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0041">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my
+      oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I
+      hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild,
+      mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed
+      mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster
+      against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and
+      revenge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded
+      White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the
+      Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his existence; only a
+      few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him; while the number who
+      as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to him, was small indeed.
+      For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they
+      were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference, many of them
+      adventurously pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so as seldom
+      or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a
+      single news-telling sail of any sort; the inordinate length of each
+      separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all
+      these, with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed the
+      spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special
+      individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted,
+      that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time,
+      or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and
+      malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had
+      completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I
+      say, that the whale in question must have been no other than Moby Dick.
+      Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not
+      unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster
+      attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave
+      battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were
+      content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the
+      perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause.
+      In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and the whale
+      had hitherto been popularly regarded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance
+      caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of
+      them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other
+      whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these
+      assaults—not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs,
+      or devouring amputations—but fatal to the last degree of fatality;
+      those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their
+      terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude
+      of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually
+      come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more
+      horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do
+      fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising
+      terrible events,—as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but,
+      in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors
+      abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to. And
+      as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery
+      surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and
+      fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only
+      are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness
+      hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the
+      most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly
+      astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest
+      marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest
+      waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand
+      shores, you would not come to any chiseled hearth-stone, or aught
+      hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes,
+      pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by
+      influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty
+      birth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the
+      widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in the
+      end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and
+      half-formed fœtal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually
+      invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly
+      appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally strike, that
+      few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of
+      those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work.
+      Not even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm Whale,
+      as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the leviathan, died
+      out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are those this day among
+      them, who, though intelligent and courageous enough in offering battle to
+      the Greenland or Right whale, would perhaps—either from professional
+      inexperience, or incompetency, or timidity, decline a contest with the
+      Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are plenty of whalemen, especially among
+      those whaling nations not sailing under the American flag, who have never
+      hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the
+      leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the
+      North; seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish
+      fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling.
+      Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere
+      more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary
+      times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists—Olassen
+      and Povelson—declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be a
+      consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so
+      incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor
+      even down to so late a time as Cuvier’s, were these or almost similar
+      impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron himself affirms
+      that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are “struck
+      with the most lively terrors,” and “often in the precipitancy of their
+      flight dash themselves against the rocks with such violence as to cause
+      instantaneous death.” And however the general experiences in the fishery
+      may amend such reports as these; yet in their full terribleness, even to
+      the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in them is, in
+      some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of
+      the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the
+      Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long practised
+      Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring warfare;
+      such men protesting that although other leviathans might be hopefully
+      pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm
+      Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would be inevitably to
+      be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are some remarkable
+      documents that may be consulted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things were
+      ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing
+      only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the specific details of
+      any certain calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments, were
+      sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if offered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked
+      with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the
+      unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been
+      encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether
+      without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets
+      of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most
+      erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale when beneath the
+      surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his pursuers; and from
+      time to time have originated the most curious and contradictory
+      speculations regarding them, especially concerning the mystic modes
+      whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with such
+      vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as
+      well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that
+      some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies
+      have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is
+      it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has been declared
+      that the interval of time between the two assaults could not have exceeded
+      very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been believed by some
+      whalemen, that the Nor’ West Passage, so long a problem to man, was never
+      a problem to the whale. So that here, in the real living experience of
+      living men, the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello
+      mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which
+      the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more
+      wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were
+      believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these
+      fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the
+      whalemen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing
+      that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive;
+      it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still
+      further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous,
+      but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves
+      of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away
+      unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a
+      sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined billows
+      hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in
+      the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike the
+      imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his uncommon bulk
+      that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as was
+      elsewhere thrown out—a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a
+      high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent features; the
+      tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his
+      identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the
+      same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive
+      appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his
+      vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea,
+      leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden
+      gleamings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his
+      deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror,
+      as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific
+      accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than
+      all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught
+      else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every apparent
+      symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn round suddenly,
+      and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to splinters, or
+      drive them back in consternation to their ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar
+      disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the
+      fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale’s infernal
+      aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that he caused,
+      was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent
+      agent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his
+      more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats,
+      and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds
+      of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that
+      smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the
+      eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had
+      dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking
+      with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That
+      captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his
+      sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg,
+      as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired
+      Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small
+      reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal
+      encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all
+      the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to
+      identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual
+      and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the
+      monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men
+      feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and
+      half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning;
+      to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the
+      worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue
+      devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but
+      deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted
+      himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments;
+      all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all
+      that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of
+      life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and
+      made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white
+      hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from
+      Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot
+      heart’s shell upon it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the
+      precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster,
+      knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal
+      animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but
+      felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this
+      collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and
+      weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in
+      mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his
+      torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made
+      him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the
+      encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from
+      the fact that, at intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic;
+      and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his
+      Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that his
+      mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in
+      his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the
+      gales. And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with
+      mild stun’sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all
+      appearances, the old man’s delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape
+      Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light
+      and air; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front, however pale,
+      and issued his calm orders once again; and his mates thanked God the
+      direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved
+      on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you
+      think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler
+      form. Ahab’s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like
+      the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but
+      unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing
+      monomania, not one jot of Ahab’s broad madness had been left behind; so in
+      that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had
+      perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If
+      such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general
+      sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own
+      mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one
+      end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely
+      brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is much; yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But
+      vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding far
+      down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we
+      here stand—however grand and wonderful, now quit it;—and take
+      your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes;
+      where far beneath the fantastic towers of man’s upper earth, his root of
+      grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique buried
+      beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken throne, the
+      great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits,
+      upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down
+      there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family
+      likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your
+      grim sire only will the old State-secret come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means are
+      sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change,
+      or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long dissemble;
+      in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling was only
+      subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate. Nevertheless,
+      so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when with ivory leg he
+      stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him otherwise than but
+      naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the terrible casualty which
+      had overtaken him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly
+      ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which
+      always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the present
+      voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely, that far
+      from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on account of
+      such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent isle were
+      inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the
+      better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and
+      wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without,
+      with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one,
+      could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his
+      lance against the most appalling of all brutes. Or, if for any reason
+      thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that, yet such an one would
+      seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the
+      attack. But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad secret
+      of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed
+      upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of
+      hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but
+      half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast
+      and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They
+      were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars
+      from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and
+      supernatural revenge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a
+      Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up
+      of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled
+      also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in
+      Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in
+      Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered,
+      seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him
+      to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded
+      to the old man’s ire—by what evil magic their souls were possessed,
+      that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their
+      insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be—what the White
+      Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in
+      some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of
+      the seas of life,—all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than
+      Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one
+      tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his
+      pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a
+      seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment
+      of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the
+      whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0042">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was
+      to me, as yet remains unsaid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which
+      could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was
+      another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at
+      times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so
+      mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting
+      it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above
+      all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and
+      yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these
+      chapters might be naught.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as
+      if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and
+      pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain
+      royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu
+      placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants” above all their other
+      magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam
+      unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the
+      Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the
+      great Austrian Empire, Cæsarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the
+      imperial colour the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it
+      applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership
+      over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been
+      even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone
+      marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and
+      symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble
+      things—the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among
+      the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the
+      deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the
+      majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the
+      daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in
+      the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the
+      symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire
+      worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar;
+      and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a
+      snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice
+      of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology,
+      that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could
+      send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity;
+      and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests
+      derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic,
+      worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish
+      faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of
+      our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the
+      redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the
+      great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool;
+      yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and
+      honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the
+      innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than
+      that redness which affrights in blood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when
+      divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object
+      terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.
+      Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics;
+      what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors
+      they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent
+      mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their
+      aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so
+      stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.*
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who
+      would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness,
+      separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that
+      brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only
+      rises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the
+      creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love;
+      and hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds,
+      the Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even
+      assuming all this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you
+      would not have that intensified terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that
+      creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the
+      same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly hit
+      by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for
+      the dead begins with “Requiem eternam” (eternal rest), whence <i>Requiem</i>
+      denominating the mass itself, and any other funeral music. Now, in
+      allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and the
+      mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him <i>Requin</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual
+      wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all
+      imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great,
+      unflattering laureate, Nature.*
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged
+      gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch
+      below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main
+      hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a
+      hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast
+      archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and
+      throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some
+      king’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange
+      eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham
+      before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings
+      so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable
+      warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy
+      of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through
+      me then. But at last I awoke; and turning, asked a sailor what bird was
+      this. A goney, he replied. Goney! never had heard that name before; is it
+      conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore!
+      never! But some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman’s name
+      for albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge’s wild Rhyme have
+      had aught to do with those mystical impressions which were mine, when I
+      saw that bird upon our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor
+      knew the bird to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly
+      burnish a little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly
+      lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a
+      solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I
+      have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the
+      Antarctic fowl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will tell;
+      with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea. At last
+      the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern tally round
+      its neck, with the ship’s time and place; and then letting it escape. But
+      I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in Heaven,
+      when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and
+      adoring cherubim!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the
+      White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed,
+      small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs
+      in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of vast
+      herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the
+      Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward
+      trooped it like that chosen star which every evening leads on the hosts of
+      light. The flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail,
+      invested him with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters
+      could have furnished him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition of
+      that unfallen, western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and
+      hunters revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked
+      majestic as a god, bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether
+      marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that
+      endlessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his
+      circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White Steed
+      gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through his cool
+      milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the bravest
+      Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor can it be
+      questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble horse, that
+      it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with
+      divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, though
+      commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that
+      accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and
+      Albatross.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks
+      the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is
+      that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears.
+      The Albino is as well made as other men—has no substantive deformity—and
+      yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely
+      hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not the
+      less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crowning
+      attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of
+      the Southern Seas has been denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some
+      historic instances, has the art of human malice omitted so potent an
+      auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of that passage in
+      Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their faction, the
+      desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the market-place!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all mankind
+      fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be
+      doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most
+      appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed that
+      pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the other world, as
+      of mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow
+      the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our
+      superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our
+      phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog—Yea, while these
+      terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when
+      personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing
+      he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized
+      significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to
+      account for it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the
+      citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness—though
+      for the time either wholly or in great part stripped of all direct
+      associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful, but nevertheless,
+      is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however modified;—can we
+      thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause
+      we seek?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and
+      without imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And
+      though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions about to
+      be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were
+      entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able to
+      recall them now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely
+      acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare mention
+      of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless
+      processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast and hooded with new-fallen
+      snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the Middle American
+      States, why does the passing mention of a White Friar or a White Nun,
+      evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and kings
+      (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower of
+      London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of an untravelled
+      American, than those other storied structures, its neighbors—the
+      Byward Tower, or even the Bloody? And those sublimer towers, the White
+      Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar moods, comes that gigantic
+      ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention of that name, while the
+      thought of Virginia’s Blue Ridge is full of a soft, dewy, distant
+      dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and longitudes, does the
+      name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness over the fancy, while that
+      of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of long lacquered mild
+      afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of
+      sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, purely addressed
+      to the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does
+      “the tall pale man” of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor
+      unrustlingly glides through the green of the groves—why is this
+      phantom more terrible than all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling
+      earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness
+      of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning
+      spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of
+      anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon
+      each other, as a tossed pack of cards;—it is not these things alone
+      which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can’st see. For
+      Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this
+      whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for
+      ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads
+      over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its
+      own distortions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is
+      not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects
+      otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught of terror
+      in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost solely
+      consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under any form
+      at all approaching to muteness or universality. What I mean by these two
+      statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the following
+      examples.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by
+      night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just
+      enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely
+      similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his ship
+      sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness—as if from
+      encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him,
+      then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the
+      whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead
+      assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go down;
+      he never rests till blue water is under him again. Yet where is the
+      mariner who will tell thee, “Sir, it was not so much the fear of striking
+      hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so stirred me?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the
+      snow-howdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the mere
+      fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast
+      altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to
+      lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the
+      backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an
+      unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to
+      break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the
+      scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of
+      legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half
+      shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery,
+      views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean
+      ice monuments and splintered crosses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a
+      white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo,
+      Ishmael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of
+      Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey—why is it that upon the
+      sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he
+      cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness—why
+      will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies
+      of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild
+      creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he
+      smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of
+      former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black
+      bisons of distant Oregon?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No: but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the
+      knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from
+      Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison
+      herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which
+      this instant they may be trampling into dust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of
+      the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed
+      snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that
+      buffalo robe to the frightened colt!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic
+      sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere
+      those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible world
+      seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned
+      why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more
+      portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning
+      symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity;
+      and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most
+      appalling to mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and
+      immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the
+      thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?
+      Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the
+      visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all
+      colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full
+      of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of
+      atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of
+      the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately
+      or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods;
+      yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of
+      young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in
+      substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature
+      absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the
+      charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the
+      mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great
+      principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if
+      operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips
+      and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied
+      universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland,
+      who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the
+      wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that
+      wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino
+      whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0043">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 43. Hark!
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      “HIST! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the middle-watch: a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a
+      cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the
+      scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets to
+      fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed
+      precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle
+      their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence,
+      only broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the
+      unceasingly advancing keel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, whose
+      post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a Cholo, the
+      words above.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d’ye mean?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “There it is again—under the hatches—don’t you hear it—a
+      cough—it sounded like a cough.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “There again—there it is!—it sounds like two or three sleepers
+      turning over, now!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It’s the three soaked biscuits ye
+      eat for supper turning over inside of ye—nothing else. Look to the
+      bucket!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Say what ye will, shipmate; I’ve sharp ears.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, you are the chap, ain’t ye, that heard the hum of the old
+      Quakeress’s knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you’re the
+      chap.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Grin away; we’ll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody
+      down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect
+      our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell Flask, one
+      morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the wind.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Tish! the bucket!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0044">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 44. The Chart.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that
+      took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose
+      with his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in the transom, and
+      bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread them
+      before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before it, you
+      would have seen him intently study the various lines and shadings which
+      there met his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace additional
+      courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he would refer
+      to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons
+      and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm
+      whales had been captured or seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his
+      head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw
+      shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it
+      almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on
+      the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and
+      courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his
+      cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were
+      brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others
+      were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab
+      was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more
+      certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it
+      might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary
+      creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to
+      Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating
+      the driftings of the sperm whale’s food; and, also, calling to mind the
+      regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes;
+      could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties,
+      concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of
+      his prey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the sperm
+      whale’s resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that, could
+      he be closely observed and studied throughout the world; were the logs for
+      one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated, then the
+      migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in
+      invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows.
+      On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory
+      charts of the sperm whale.*
+    </p>
+<pre>     *Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne
+     out by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of
+     the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By
+     that circular, it appears that precisely such a chart is in
+     course of completion; and portions of it are presented in
+     the circular. “This chart divides the ocean into districts
+     of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude;
+     perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve
+     columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each
+     of which districts are three lines; one to show the number
+     of days that have been spent in each month in every
+     district, and the two others to show the number of days in
+     which whales, sperm or right, have been seen.”
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the
+      sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct—say, rather, secret
+      intelligence from the Deity—mostly swim in <i>veins</i>, as they are
+      called; continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such
+      undeviating exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart,
+      with one tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these cases, the
+      direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor’s parallel, and
+      though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable,
+      straight wake, yet the arbitrary <i>vein</i> in which at these times he is said
+      to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width (more or less, as the
+      vein is presumed to expand or contract); but never exceeds the visual
+      sweep from the whale-ship’s mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding along
+      this magic zone. The sum is, that at particular seasons within that
+      breadth and along that path, migrating whales may with great confidence be
+      looked for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate
+      feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing
+      the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his art,
+      so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly
+      without prospect of a meeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his
+      delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality, perhaps.
+      Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons for
+      particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the herds
+      which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year, say, will
+      turn out to be identically the same with those that were found there the
+      preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable instances
+      where the contrary of this has proved true. In general, the same remark,
+      only within a less wide limit, applies to the solitaries and hermits among
+      the matured, aged sperm whales. So that though Moby Dick had in a former
+      year been seen, for example, on what is called the Seychelle ground in the
+      Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast; yet it did not follow,
+      that were the Pequod to visit either of those spots at any subsequent
+      corresponding season, she would infallibly encounter him there. So, too,
+      with some other feeding grounds, where he had at times revealed himself.
+      But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to
+      speak, not his places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab’s chances of
+      accomplishing his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only
+      been made to whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere
+      a particular set time or place were attained, when all possibilities would
+      become probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the
+      next thing to a certainty. That particular set time and place were
+      conjoined in the one technical phrase—the Season-on-the-Line. For
+      there and then, for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been
+      periodically descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun,
+      in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of
+      the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with the
+      white whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds;
+      there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the
+      awful motive to his vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and
+      unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this
+      unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon
+      the one crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to
+      those hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize
+      his unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the
+      Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander
+      to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running
+      down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to
+      cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season. Yet the
+      premature hour of the Pequod’s sailing had, perhaps, been correctly
+      selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion of things. Because,
+      an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights was before
+      him; an interval which, instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would
+      spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the White Whale, spending his
+      vacation in seas far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should
+      turn up his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or
+      China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons,
+      Pampas, Nor’-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and
+      Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the
+      Pequod’s circumnavigating wake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not
+      but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary
+      whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of individual
+      recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged
+      thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar snow-white brow of
+      Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable. And
+      have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself, as after
+      poring over his charts till long after midnight he would throw himself
+      back in reveries—tallied him, and shall he escape? His broad fins
+      are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep’s ear! And here, his mad
+      mind would run on in a breathless race; till a weariness and faintness of
+      pondering came over him; and in the open air of the deck he would seek to
+      recover his strength. Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man
+      endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps
+      with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid
+      dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the
+      day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round
+      and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his
+      life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the
+      case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and
+      a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings
+      shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when
+      this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through
+      the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as
+      though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead
+      of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at
+      his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at
+      such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the
+      white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent
+      that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the
+      eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time
+      dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it
+      for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the
+      scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was
+      no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with
+      the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up
+      all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by
+      its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils
+      into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could
+      grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined,
+      fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore,
+      the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab
+      rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless
+      somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an
+      object to colour, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old
+      man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense
+      thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for
+      ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0045">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as
+      indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars in
+      the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earlier part, is
+      as important a one as will be found in this volume; but the leading matter
+      of it requires to be still further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in
+      order to be adequately understood, and moreover to take away any
+      incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire subject may induce in
+      some minds, as to the natural verity of the main points of this affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall be
+      content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of items,
+      practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these
+      citations, I take it—the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow
+      of itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after
+      receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an
+      interval (in one instance of three years), has been again struck by the
+      same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same private
+      cypher, have been taken from the body. In the instance where three years
+      intervened between the flinging of the two harpoons; and I think it may
+      have been something more than that; the man who darted them happening, in
+      the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore
+      there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far into the interior,
+      where he travelled for a period of nearly two years, often endangered by
+      serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the other common
+      perils incident to wandering in the heart of unknown regions. Meanwhile,
+      the whale he had struck must also have been on its travels; no doubt it
+      had thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing with its flanks all the
+      coasts of Africa; but to no purpose. This man and this whale again came
+      together, and the one vanquished the other. I say I, myself, have known
+      three instances similar to this; that is in two of them I saw the whales
+      struck; and, upon the second attack, saw the two irons with the respective
+      marks cut in them, afterwards taken from the dead fish. In the three-year
+      instance, it so fell out that I was in the boat both times, first and
+      last, and the last time distinctly recognised a peculiar sort of huge mole
+      under the whale’s eye, which I had observed there three years previous. I
+      say three years, but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here are
+      three instances, then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have
+      heard of many other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter
+      there is no good ground to impeach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however ignorant
+      the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several memorable
+      historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean has been at
+      distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became
+      thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily
+      peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for however peculiar in
+      that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his
+      peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly
+      valuable oil. No: the reason was this: that from the fatal experiences of
+      the fishery there hung a terrible prestige of perilousness about such a
+      whale as there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most fishermen
+      were content to recognise him by merely touching their tarpaulins when he
+      would be discovered lounging by them on the sea, without seeking to
+      cultivate a more intimate acquaintance. Like some poor devils ashore that
+      happen to know an irascible great man, they make distant unobtrusive
+      salutations to him in the street, lest if they pursued the acquaintance
+      further, they might receive a summary thump for their presumption.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual
+      celebrity—Nay, you may call it an ocean-wide renown; not only was he
+      famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death, but
+      he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of a
+      name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Cæsar. Was it not so, O
+      Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long
+      did’st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft seen
+      from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack! thou
+      terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the
+      Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty jet they
+      say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky?
+      Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked like an old
+      tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain prose, here are
+      four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean History as Marius or
+      Sylla to the classic scholar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at various
+      times creating great havoc among the boats of different vessels, were
+      finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and killed by
+      valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with that express
+      object as much in view, as in setting out through the Narragansett Woods,
+      Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture that notorious
+      murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the Indian King Philip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make
+      mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in
+      printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the whole
+      story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For this is one
+      of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much
+      bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest
+      and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching
+      the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might
+      scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more
+      detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of the general
+      perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid
+      conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they recur. One
+      reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters and
+      deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home,
+      however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you suppose
+      that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the
+      whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the
+      bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan—do you suppose that that
+      poor fellow’s name will appear in the newspaper obituary you will read
+      to-morrow at your breakfast? No: because the mails are very irregular
+      between here and New Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what might be
+      called regular news direct or indirect from New Guinea? Yet I tell you
+      that upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many
+      others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which had had a death
+      by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each lost a
+      boat’s crew. For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles!
+      not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled
+      for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is
+      an enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that when
+      narrating to them some specific example of this two-fold enormousness,
+      they have significantly complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I
+      declare upon my soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses,
+      when he wrote the history of the plagues of Egypt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But fortunately the special point I here seek can be established upon
+      testimony entirely independent of my own. That point is this: The Sperm
+      Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously
+      malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy, and
+      sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale <i>has</i> done it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket, was
+      cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts, lowered her boats,
+      and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long, several of the whales
+      were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale escaping from the boats,
+      issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon the ship. Dashing his
+      forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that in less than “ten
+      minutes” she settled down and fell over. Not a surviving plank of her has
+      been seen since. After the severest exposure, part of the crew reached the
+      land in their boats. Being returned home at last, Captain Pollard once
+      more sailed for the Pacific in command of another ship, but the gods
+      shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and breakers; for the second time
+      his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith forswearing the sea, he has never
+      tempted it since. At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of Nantucket.
+      I have seen Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the
+      tragedy; I have read his plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed
+      with his son; and all this within a few miles of the scene of the
+      catastrophe.*
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *The following are extracts from Chace’s narrative: “Every fact seemed to
+      warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which directed
+      his operations; he made two several attacks upon the ship, at a short
+      interval between them, both of which, according to their direction, were
+      calculated to do us the most injury, by being made ahead, and thereby
+      combining the speed of the two objects for the shock; to effect which, the
+      exact manœuvres which he made were necessary. His aspect was most
+      horrible, and such as indicated resentment and fury. He came directly from
+      the shoal which we had just before entered, and in which we had struck
+      three of his companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings.”
+       Again: “At all events, the whole circumstances taken together, all
+      happening before my own eyes, and producing, at the time, impressions in
+      my mind of decided, calculating mischief, on the part of the whale (many
+      of which impressions I cannot now recall), induce me to be satisfied that
+      I am correct in my opinion.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during a black
+      night in an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any hospitable
+      shore. “The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing; the fears of
+      being swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed upon hidden rocks,
+      with all the other ordinary subjects of fearful contemplation, seemed
+      scarcely entitled to a moment’s thought; the dismal looking wreck, and <i>the
+      horrid aspect and revenge of the whale</i>, wholly engrossed my reflections,
+      until day again made its appearance.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In another place—p. 45,—he speaks of “<i>the mysterious and
+      mortal attack of the animal</i>.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Secondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year 1807 totally
+      lost off the Azores by a similar onset, but the authentic particulars of
+      this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter, though from the whale
+      hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J——, then
+      commanding an American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be
+      dining with a party of whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in the
+      harbor of Oahu, Sandwich Islands. Conversation turning upon whales, the
+      Commodore was pleased to be sceptical touching the amazing strength
+      ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen present. He peremptorily
+      denied for example, that any whale could so smite his stout sloop-of-war
+      as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful. Very good; but there is
+      more coming. Some weeks after, the Commodore set sail in this impregnable
+      craft for Valparaiso. But he was stopped on the way by a portly sperm
+      whale, that begged a few moments’ confidential business with him. That
+      business consisted in fetching the Commodore’s craft such a thwack, that
+      with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest port to heave
+      down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider the Commodore’s
+      interview with that whale as providential. Was not Saul of Tarsus
+      converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the sperm whale
+      will stand no nonsense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I will now refer you to Langsdorff’s Voyages for a little circumstance in
+      point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof. Langsdorff, you must
+      know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral Krusenstern’s famous
+      Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present century. Captain
+      Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day we
+      were out in the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was very
+      clear and fine, but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on
+      our fur clothing. For some days we had very little wind; it was not till
+      the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the northwest sprang up. An uncommon
+      large whale, the body of which was larger than the ship itself, lay almost
+      at the surface of the water, but was not perceived by any one on board
+      till the moment when the ship, which was in full sail, was almost upon
+      him, so that it was impossible to prevent its striking against him. We
+      were thus placed in the most imminent danger, as this gigantic creature,
+      setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at least out of the water.
+      The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether, while we who were below
+      all sprang instantly upon the deck, concluding that we had struck upon
+      some rock; instead of this we saw the monster sailing off with the utmost
+      gravity and solemnity. Captain D’Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to
+      examine whether or not the vessel had received any damage from the shock,
+      but we found that very happily it had escaped entirely uninjured.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, the Captain D’Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship in
+      question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual adventures
+      as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village of Dorchester near
+      Boston. I have the honor of being a nephew of his. I have particularly
+      questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff. He substantiates
+      every word. The ship, however, was by no means a large one: a Russian
+      craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my uncle after
+      bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure, so full, too,
+      of honest wonders—the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient
+      Dampier’s old chums—I found a little matter set down so like that
+      just quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a
+      corroborative example, if such be needed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lionel, it seems, was on his way to “John Ferdinando,” as he calls the
+      modern Juan Fernandes. “In our way thither,” he says, “about four o’clock
+      in the morning, when we were about one hundred and fifty leagues from the
+      Main of America, our ship felt a terrible shock, which put our men in such
+      consternation that they could hardly tell where they were or what to
+      think; but every one began to prepare for death. And, indeed, the shock
+      was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted the ship had struck
+      against a rock; but when the amazement was a little over, we cast the
+      lead, and sounded, but found no ground. * * * * * The suddenness of the shock
+      made the guns leap in their carriages, and several of the men were shaken
+      out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who lay with his head on a gun, was
+      thrown out of his cabin!” Lionel then goes on to impute the shock to an
+      earthquake, and seems to substantiate the imputation by stating that a
+      great earthquake, somewhere about that time, did actually do great
+      mischief along the Spanish land. But I should not much wonder if, in the
+      darkness of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all caused
+      by an unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known to
+      me, of the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more
+      than one instance, he has been known, not only to chase the assailing
+      boats back to their ships, but to pursue the ship itself, and long
+      withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks. The English ship
+      Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head; and, as for his strength, let me
+      say, that there have been examples where the lines attached to a running
+      sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and secured
+      there; the whale towing her great hull through the water, as a horse walks
+      off with a cart. Again, it is very often observed that, if the sperm
+      whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts, not so often
+      with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of destruction to his
+      pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent indication of his
+      character, that upon being attacked he will frequently open his mouth, and
+      retain it in that dread expansion for several consecutive minutes. But I
+      must be content with only one more and a concluding illustration; a
+      remarkable and most significant one, by which you will not fail to see,
+      that not only is the most marvellous event in this book corroborated by
+      plain facts of the present day, but that these marvels (like all marvels)
+      are mere repetitions of the ages; so that for the millionth time we say
+      amen with Solomon—Verily there is nothing new under the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Christian magistrate of
+      Constantinople, in the days when Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius
+      general. As many know, he wrote the history of his own times, a work every
+      way of uncommon value. By the best authorities, he has always been
+      considered a most trustworthy and unexaggerating historian, except in some
+      one or two particulars, not at all affecting the matter presently to be
+      mentioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term of
+      his prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured in the
+      neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed vessels
+      at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty years. A fact
+      thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is
+      there any reason it should be. Of what precise species this sea-monster
+      was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships, as well as for other
+      reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly inclined to think a
+      sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a long time I fancied that the
+      sperm whale had been always unknown in the Mediterranean and the deep
+      waters connecting with it. Even now I am certain that those seas are not,
+      and perhaps never can be, in the present constitution of things, a place
+      for his habitual gregarious resort. But further investigations have
+      recently proved to me, that in modern times there have been isolated
+      instances of the presence of the sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am
+      told, on good authority, that on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of
+      the British navy found the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of
+      war readily passes through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by
+      the same route, pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar substance
+      called <i>brit</i> is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But I have
+      every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale—squid or
+      cuttle-fish—lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large
+      creatures, but by no means the largest of that sort, have been found at
+      its surface. If, then, you properly put these statements together, and
+      reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that, according to all
+      human reasoning, Procopius’s sea-monster, that for half a century stove
+      the ships of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm
+      whale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0046">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 46. Surmises.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his
+      thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick;
+      though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that one
+      passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and long
+      habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman’s ways, altogether to
+      abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage. Or at least if this were
+      otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more influential with
+      him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even considering his
+      monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the White Whale might
+      have possibly extended itself in some degree to all sperm whales, and that
+      the more monsters he slew by so much the more he multiplied the chances
+      that each subsequently encountered whale would prove to be the hated one
+      he hunted. But if such an hypothesis be indeed exceptionable, there were
+      still additional considerations which, though not so strictly according
+      with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet were by no means incapable of
+      swaying him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the
+      shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew, for
+      example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was over
+      Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual man any
+      more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual mastership; for
+      to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in a sort of corporeal
+      relation. Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced will were Ahab’s, so long
+      as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s brain; still he knew that for all
+      this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain’s quest, and could
+      he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it. It
+      might be that a long interval would elapse ere the White Whale was seen.
+      During that long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to fall into open
+      relapses of rebellion against his captain’s leadership, unless some
+      ordinary, prudential, circumstantial influences were brought to bear upon
+      him. Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick
+      was noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and
+      shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some
+      way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally
+      invested it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn
+      into the obscure background (for few men’s courage is proof against
+      protracted meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their
+      long night watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to
+      think of than Moby Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage
+      crew had hailed the announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all
+      sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable—they live in the
+      varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness—and when
+      retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however
+      promissory of life and passion in the end, it is above all things
+      requisite that temporary interests and employments should intervene and
+      hold them healthily suspended for the final dash.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion
+      mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent.
+      The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought
+      Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the
+      hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even
+      breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the
+      love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for
+      their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and chivalric
+      Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two thousand miles of
+      land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries,
+      picking pockets, and gaining other pious perquisites by the way. Had they
+      been strictly held to their one final and romantic object—that final
+      and romantic object, too many would have turned from in disgust. I will
+      not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all hopes of cash—aye, cash.
+      They may scorn cash now; but let some months go by, and no perspective
+      promise of it to them, and then this same quiescent cash all at once
+      mutinying in them, this same cash would soon cashier Ahab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more related to
+      Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps somewhat
+      prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the Pequod’s voyage,
+      Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing, he had indirectly laid
+      himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation; and with perfect
+      impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if so disposed, and to that end
+      competent, could refuse all further obedience to him, and even violently
+      wrest from him the command. From even the barely hinted imputation of
+      usurpation, and the possible consequences of such a suppressed impression
+      gaining ground, Ahab must of course have been most anxious to protect
+      himself. That protection could only consist in his own predominating brain
+      and heart and hand, backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention to
+      every minute atmospheric influence which it was possible for his crew to
+      be subjected to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be verbally
+      developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good degree
+      continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod’s voyage;
+      observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force himself to
+      evince all his well known passionate interest in the general pursuit of
+      his profession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the three
+      mast-heads and admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit
+      reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0047">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about
+      the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters. Queequeg
+      and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an
+      additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet somehow
+      preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in
+      the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible
+      self.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept
+      passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long
+      yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg,
+      standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the
+      threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly
+      drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign
+      all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting
+      dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time,
+      and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the
+      Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single,
+      ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to
+      admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This
+      warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own
+      shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime,
+      Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof
+      slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be;
+      and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding
+      contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword,
+      thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this
+      easy, indifferent sword must be chance—aye, chance, free will, and
+      necessity—nowise incompatible—all interweavingly working
+      together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its
+      ultimate course—its every alternating vibration, indeed, only
+      tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given
+      threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines
+      of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though
+      thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last
+      featuring blow at events.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so
+      strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of
+      free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds whence
+      that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad
+      Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand
+      stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his
+      cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard
+      all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen’s look-outs perched as high
+      in the air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have
+      derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian’s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly
+      peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or
+      seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing
+      their coming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Where-away?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Instantly all was commotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and
+      reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other
+      tribes of his genus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There go flukes!” was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales
+      disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Quick, steward!” cried Ahab. “Time! time!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact
+      minute to Ahab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling
+      before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to
+      leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of
+      our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale
+      when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while
+      concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the
+      opposite quarter—this deceitfulness of his could not now be in
+      action; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego
+      had been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of
+      the men selected for shipkeepers—that is, those not appointed to the
+      boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The sailors
+      at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed in their
+      places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed, and the three
+      boats swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over high cliffs.
+      Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand clung to the rail,
+      while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale. So look the long
+      line of man-of-war’s men about to throw themselves on board an enemy’s
+      ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took
+      every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was
+      surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0048">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side of
+      the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the tackles
+      and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had always been deemed
+      one of the spare boats, though technically called the captain’s, on
+      account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The figure that now
+      stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly
+      protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese jacket of black
+      cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers of the same dark
+      stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited
+      turban, the living hair braided and coiled round and round upon his head.
+      Less swart in aspect, the companions of this figure were of that vivid,
+      tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the
+      Manillas;—a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty, and
+      by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret
+      confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose
+      counting-room they suppose to be elsewhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While yet the wondering ship’s company were gazing upon these strangers,
+      Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head, “All ready
+      there, Fedallah?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ready,” was the half-hissed reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lower away then; d’ye hear?” shouting across the deck. “Lower away there,
+      I say.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their amazement the men
+      sprang over the rail; the sheaves whirled round in the blocks; with a
+      wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea; while, with a dexterous,
+      off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the sailors, goat-like,
+      leaped down the rolling ship’s side into the tossed boats below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship’s lee, when a fourth keel,
+      coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern, and showed
+      the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the stern, loudly
+      hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely, so as to
+      cover a large expanse of water. But with all their eyes again riveted upon
+      the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other boats obeyed not
+      the command.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Captain Ahab?—” said Starbuck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Spread yourselves,” cried Ahab; “give way, all four boats. Thou, Flask,
+      pull out more to leeward!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, aye, sir,” cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his great
+      steering oar. “Lay back!” addressing his crew. “There!—there!—there
+      again! There she blows right ahead, boys!—lay back!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, I don’t mind ’em, sir,” said Archy; “I knew it
+      all before now. Didn’t I hear ’em in the hold? And didn’t I
+      tell Cabaco here of it? What say ye, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little
+      ones,” drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom
+      still showed signs of uneasiness. “Why don’t you break your backbones, my
+      boys? What is it you stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They are
+      only five more hands come to help us—never mind from where—the
+      more the merrier. Pull, then, do pull; never mind the brimstone—devils
+      are good fellows enough. So, so; there you are now; that’s the stroke for
+      a thousand pounds; that’s the stroke to sweep the stakes! Hurrah for the
+      gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! Three cheers, men—all hearts
+      alive! Easy, easy; don’t be in a hurry—don’t be in a hurry. Why
+      don’t you snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something, you dogs! So, so,
+      so, then:—softly, softly! That’s it—that’s it! long and
+      strong. Give way there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin
+      rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull.
+      Pull, will ye? pull, can’t ye? pull, won’t ye? Why in the name of gudgeons
+      and ginger-cakes don’t ye pull?—pull and break something! pull, and
+      start your eyes out! Here!” whipping out the sharp knife from his girdle;
+      “every mother’s son of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between
+      his teeth. That’s it—that’s it. Now ye do something; that looks like
+      it, my steel-bits. Start her—start her, my silver-spoons! Start her,
+      marling-spikes!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stubb’s exordium to his crew is given here at large, because he had rather
+      a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially in
+      inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from this
+      specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions
+      with his congregation. Not at all; and therein consisted his chief
+      peculiarity. He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a tone
+      so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so calculated
+      merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such queer
+      invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for the mere
+      joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so easy and indolent
+      himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly gaped—open-mouthed
+      at times—that the mere sight of such a yawning commander, by sheer
+      force of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew. Then again, Stubb was
+      one of those odd sort of humorists, whose jollity is sometimes so
+      curiously ambiguous, as to put all inferiors on their guard in the matter
+      of obeying them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely
+      across Stubb’s bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were pretty
+      near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if ye
+      please!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Halloa!” returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he spoke;
+      still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face set like a
+      flint from Stubb’s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, strong,
+      boys!)” in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again: “A sad
+      business, Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind,
+      Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, come what
+      will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There’s hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr.
+      Stubb, and that’s what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm’s the
+      play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, aye, I thought as much,” soliloquized Stubb, when the boats
+      diverged, “as soon as I clapt eye on ’em, I thought so. Aye, and that’s
+      what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long
+      suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale’s at the bottom of
+      it. Well, well, so be it! Can’t be helped! All right! Give way, men! It
+      ain’t the White Whale to-day! Give way!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical instant as
+      the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not unreasonably
+      awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of the ship’s company;
+      but Archy’s fancied discovery having some time previous got abroad among
+      them, though indeed not credited then, this had in some small measure
+      prepared them for the event. It took off the extreme edge of their wonder;
+      and so what with all this and Stubb’s confident way of accounting for
+      their appearance, they were for the time freed from superstitious
+      surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room for all manner of
+      wild conjectures as to dark Ahab’s precise agency in the matter from the
+      beginning. For me, I silently recalled the mysterious shadows I had seen
+      creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket dawn, as well as the
+      enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the furthest
+      to windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a circumstance
+      bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. Those tiger yellow creatures
+      of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five trip-hammers they rose
+      and fell with regular strokes of strength, which periodically started the
+      boat along the water like a horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi
+      steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen pulling the harpooneer oar, he had
+      thrown aside his black jacket, and displayed his naked chest with the
+      whole part of his body above the gunwale, clearly cut against the
+      alternating depressions of the watery horizon; while at the other end of
+      the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a fencer’s, thrown half backward into
+      the air, as if to counterbalance any tendency to trip; Ahab was seen
+      steadily managing his steering oar as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the
+      White Whale had torn him. All at once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar
+      motion and then remained fixed, while the boat’s five oars were seen
+      simultaneously peaked. Boat and crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly
+      the three spread boats in the rear paused on their way. The whales had
+      irregularly settled bodily down into the blue, thus giving no distantly
+      discernible token of the movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab
+      had observed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Every man look out along his oars!” cried Starbuck. “Thou, Queequeg,
+      stand up!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage
+      stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the
+      spot where the chase had last been descried. Likewise upon the extreme
+      stern of the boat where it was also triangularly platformed level with the
+      gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and adroitly balancing himself
+      to the jerking tossings of his chip of a craft, and silently eyeing the
+      vast blue eye of the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not very far distant Flask’s boat was also lying breathlessly still; its
+      commander recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a stout sort
+      of post rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above the level of
+      the stern platform. It is used for catching turns with the whale line. Its
+      top is not more spacious than the palm of a man’s hand, and standing upon
+      such a base as that, Flask seemed perched at the mast-head of some ship
+      which had sunk to all but her trucks. But little King-Post was small and
+      short, and at the same time little King-Post was full of a large and tall
+      ambition, so that this loggerhead stand-point of his did by no means
+      satisfy King-Post.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I can’t see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on to
+      that.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way,
+      swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty
+      shoulders for a pedestal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you
+      fifty feet taller.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the
+      boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to
+      Flask’s foot, and then putting Flask’s hand on his hearse-plumed head and
+      bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one dexterous fling
+      landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders. And here was Flask
+      now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing him with a breastband
+      to lean against and steady himself by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what wondrous
+      habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect posture
+      in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously perverse and
+      cross-running seas. Still more strange to see him giddily perched upon the
+      loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But the sight of little Flask
+      mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious; for sustaining himself
+      with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble
+      negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his
+      broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked
+      nobler than the rider. Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious
+      little Flask would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added
+      heave did he thereby give to the negro’s lordly chest. So have I seen
+      Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth
+      did not alter her tides and her seasons for that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing solicitudes.
+      The whales might have made one of their regular soundings, not a temporary
+      dive from mere fright; and if that were the case, Stubb, as his wont in
+      such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace the languishing interval with
+      his pipe. He withdrew it from his hatband, where he always wore it aslant
+      like a feather. He loaded it, and rammed home the loading with his
+      thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his match across the rough sandpaper
+      of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer, whose eyes had been setting to
+      windward like two fixed stars, suddenly dropped like light from his erect
+      attitude to his seat, crying out in a quick phrensy of hurry, “Down, down
+      all, and give way!—there they are!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been
+      visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white
+      water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it, and
+      suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white
+      rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it were,
+      like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this
+      atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of
+      water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other
+      indications, the puffs of vapor they spouted, seemed their forerunning
+      couriers and detached flying outriders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled water
+      and air. But it bade fair to outstrip them; it flew on and on, as a mass
+      of interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the hills.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Pull, pull, my good boys,” said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but
+      intensest concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed glance
+      from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two
+      visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much to
+      his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him. Only the silence
+      of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by one of his peculiar
+      whispers, now harsh with command, now soft with entreaty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How different the loud little King-Post. “Sing out and say something, my
+      hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their
+      black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I’ll sign over to you my
+      Martha’s Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys. Lay
+      me on—lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring mad!
+      See! see that white water!” And so shouting, he pulled his hat from his
+      head, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted it far
+      off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the boat’s
+      stern like a crazed colt from the prairie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Look at that chap now,” philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his
+      unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth, at a short
+      distance, followed after—“He’s got fits, that Flask has. Fits? yes,
+      give him fits—that’s the very word—pitch fits into ’em.
+      Merrily, merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know;—merry’s
+      the word. Pull, babes—pull, sucklings—pull, all. But what the
+      devil are you hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only
+      pull, and keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite
+      your knives in two—that’s all. Take it easy—why don’t ye take
+      it easy, I say, and burst all your livers and lungs!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of
+      his—these were words best omitted here; for you live under the
+      blessed light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the
+      audacious seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and
+      eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions of Flask
+      to “that whale,” as he called the fictitious monster which he declared to
+      be incessantly tantalizing his boat’s bow with its tail—these
+      allusions of his were at times so vivid and life-like, that they would
+      cause some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look over the
+      shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen must put out
+      their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usage pronouncing that
+      they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but arms, in these
+      critical moments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the
+      omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along
+      the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the
+      brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the
+      knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to
+      cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows;
+      the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the
+      headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the
+      cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the
+      oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her
+      boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;—all
+      this was thrilling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever
+      heat of his first battle; not the dead man’s ghost encountering the first
+      unknown phantom in the other world;—neither of these can feel
+      stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time
+      finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm
+      whale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and more
+      visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows flung
+      upon the sea. The jets of vapor no longer blended, but tilted everywhere
+      to right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes. The boats
+      were pulled more apart; Starbuck giving chase to three whales running dead
+      to leeward. Our sail was now set, and, with the still rising wind, we
+      rushed along; the boat going with such madness through the water, that the
+      lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to escape being torn from
+      the row-locks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither ship
+      nor boat to be seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Give way, men,” whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet
+      of his sail; “there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes.
+      There’s white water again!—close to! Spring!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted that
+      the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when with a
+      lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: “Stand up!” and Queequeg,
+      harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril so
+      close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense countenance of the
+      mate in the stern of the boat, they knew that the imminent instant had
+      come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing sound as of fifty elephants
+      stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was still booming through the
+      mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like the erected crests of
+      enraged serpents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “That’s his hump. <i>There</i>, <i>there</i>, give it to him!” whispered Starbuck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of
+      Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from
+      astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail
+      collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up near by;
+      something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole crew
+      were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the white
+      curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended
+      together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round it
+      we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale,
+      tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the
+      water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes
+      the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom of
+      the ocean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together;
+      the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white fire
+      upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal in these
+      jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar to the live
+      coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those boats in that
+      storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker with the
+      shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen. The rising sea
+      forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were useless as
+      propellers, performing now the office of life-preservers. So, cutting the
+      lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck
+      contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif
+      pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope.
+      There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that
+      almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man
+      without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat, we
+      lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread over the
+      sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat. Suddenly
+      Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear. We all heard
+      a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by the storm. The
+      sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were dimly parted by a huge,
+      vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the sea as the ship at last
+      loomed into view, bearing right down upon us within a distance of not much
+      more than its length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant it
+      tossed and gaped beneath the ship’s bows like a chip at the base of a
+      cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no more
+      till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were dashed
+      against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely landed on
+      board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut loose from
+      their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship had given us
+      up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of our
+      perishing,—an oar or a lance pole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0049">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair
+      we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical
+      joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects
+      that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing
+      dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all
+      events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible
+      and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion
+      gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and
+      worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all
+      these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and
+      jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old
+      joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man
+      only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of
+      his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing
+      most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing
+      like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial,
+      desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the
+      Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Queequeg,” said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck,
+      and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water;
+      “Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?” Without
+      much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand
+      that such things did often happen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Mr. Stubb,” said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his
+      oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; “Mr. Stubb, I
+      think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief
+      mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose
+      then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy
+      squall is the height of a whaleman’s discretion?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Certain. I’ve lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape
+      Horn.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Mr. Flask,” said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing close
+      by; “you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you tell me
+      whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an
+      oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death’s
+      jaws?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Can’t you twist that smaller?” said Flask. “Yes, that’s the law. I should
+      like to see a boat’s crew backing water up to a whale face foremost. Ha,
+      ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind that!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement of
+      the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings in
+      the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters of common
+      occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the superlatively
+      critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign my life into the
+      hands of him who steered the boat—oftentimes a fellow who at that
+      very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft
+      with his own frantic stampings; considering that the particular disaster
+      to our own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck’s driving
+      on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall, and considering that
+      Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his great heedfulness in the
+      fishery; considering that I belonged to this uncommonly prudent Starbuck’s
+      boat; and finally considering in what a devil’s chase I was implicated,
+      touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say, I thought I
+      might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will. “Queequeg,” said
+      I, “come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their
+      last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond
+      of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life that I had
+      done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon the present
+      occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart.
+      Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that
+      Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so
+      many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself; my death and
+      burial were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and
+      contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the
+      bars of a snug family vault.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock,
+      here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the
+      devil fetch the hindmost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0050">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      “Who would have thought it, Flask!” cried Stubb; “if I had but one leg you
+      would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my
+      timber toe. Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account,” said Flask. “If
+      his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing. That
+      would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other left,
+      you know.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering the
+      paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is right
+      for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils of the
+      chase. So Tamerlane’s soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes,
+      whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the thickest
+      of the fight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that
+      with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger;
+      considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and
+      extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then
+      comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed man
+      to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the joint-owners of
+      the Pequod must have plainly thought not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of his
+      entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of the
+      chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving his
+      orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned
+      to him as a regular headsman in the hunt—above all for Captain Ahab
+      to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat’s crew, he well knew
+      that such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners of the
+      Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s crew from them, nor had he
+      in any way hinted his desires on that head. Nevertheless he had taken
+      private measures of his own touching all that matter. Until Cabaco’s
+      published discovery, the sailors had little foreseen it, though to be sure
+      when, after being a little while out of port, all hands had concluded the
+      customary business of fitting the whaleboats for service; when some time
+      after this Ahab was now and then found bestirring himself in the matter of
+      making thole-pins with his own hands for what was thought to be one of the
+      spare boats, and even solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which
+      when the line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when
+      all this was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an
+      extra coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better
+      withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he
+      evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is
+      sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for bracing the
+      knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed how
+      often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the
+      semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter’s chisel
+      gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these
+      things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. But
+      almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness in
+      Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he
+      had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal monster in person.
+      But such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as
+      to any boat’s crew being assigned to that boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away;
+      for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such
+      unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown
+      nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers;
+      and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found
+      tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats,
+      canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that Beelzebub himself
+      might climb up the side and step down into the cabin to chat with the
+      captain, and it would not create any unsubduable excitement in the
+      forecastle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate
+      phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were
+      somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a
+      muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like this,
+      by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked
+      with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort of a
+      half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even authority
+      over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain an indifferent air
+      concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people
+      in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but
+      the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic
+      communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent—those
+      insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern
+      days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal
+      generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection,
+      and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as
+      real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and
+      to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed
+      consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical
+      Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0051">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept
+      across four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the Cape de
+      Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la
+      Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality, southerly from
+      St. Helena.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and
+      moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and,
+      by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence,
+      not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in
+      advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked
+      celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.
+      Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights, it was
+      his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a look-out there, with
+      the same precision as if it had been day. And yet, though herds of whales
+      were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering
+      for them. You may think with what emotions, then, the seamen beheld this
+      old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon,
+      companions in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there
+      for several successive nights without uttering a single sound; when, after
+      all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery,
+      moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some
+      winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew.
+      “There she blows!” Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have
+      quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though
+      it was a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so
+      deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively
+      desired a lowering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the
+      t’gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The best
+      man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the
+      piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving,
+      lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many
+      sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet;
+      while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were
+      struggling in her—one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive
+      yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab’s face that
+      night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were
+      warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every
+      stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this
+      old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every
+      eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more
+      seen that night. Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days
+      after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it was
+      descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it
+      disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after
+      night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted into
+      the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be; disappearing
+      again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and somehow seeming at
+      every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and further in our
+      van, this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance with
+      the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested the
+      Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that whenever and
+      wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however far apart
+      latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by one self-same
+      whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there reigned, too, a sense
+      of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously
+      beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn round upon
+      us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous
+      potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath
+      all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for
+      days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild,
+      that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating
+      itself of life before our urn-like prow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling
+      around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are
+      there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored
+      the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the
+      foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life
+      went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither
+      before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And
+      every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and
+      spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as
+      though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing
+      appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their
+      homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black
+      sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul
+      were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoso, as called of
+      yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had attended
+      us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty
+      beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to
+      swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air
+      without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying; still directing
+      its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us on from before,
+      the solitary jet would at times be descried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the
+      time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck,
+      manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed his
+      mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and aloft
+      has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the
+      issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists. So,
+      with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand
+      firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand gazing dead
+      to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but
+      congeal his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew driven from the
+      forward part of the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over
+      its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better
+      to guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a
+      sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened
+      belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by
+      painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift
+      madness and gladness of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of
+      humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence the
+      men swung in the bowlines; still wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even
+      when wearied nature seemed demanding repose he would not seek that repose
+      in his hammock. Never could Starbuck forget the old man’s aspect, when one
+      night going down into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw
+      him with closed eyes sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair; the rain
+      and half-melted sleet of the storm from which he had some time before
+      emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and coat. On the
+      table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and currents
+      which have previously been spoken of. His lantern swung from his tightly
+      clenched hand. Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back so that
+      the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale that
+      swung from a beam in the ceiling.*
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the
+      compass at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the
+      course of the ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this gale,
+      still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0052">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising
+      ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by
+      name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head,
+      I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean
+      fisheries—a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the
+      skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral
+      appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her
+      spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over
+      with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to see
+      her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed clad in
+      the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had survived
+      nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast,
+      they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship
+      slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to
+      each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one
+      ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly
+      eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own look-outs, while
+      the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the
+      act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand
+      into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make
+      himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the
+      distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod
+      were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the first mere
+      mention of the White Whale’s name to another ship, Ahab for a moment
+      paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat to board
+      the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking advantage
+      of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and knowing by her
+      aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and shortly bound home,
+      he loudly hailed—“Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the
+      world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean! and
+      this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them
+      to ——”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in
+      accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish, that
+      for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away
+      with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with
+      the stranger’s flanks. Though in the course of his continual voyagings
+      Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any
+      monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Swim away from me, do ye?” murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water.
+      There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep
+      helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced. But
+      turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship in the
+      wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion voice,—“Up
+      helm! Keep her off round the world!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings;
+      but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through
+      numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we
+      left behind secure, were all the time before us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for
+      ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than
+      any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the
+      voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented
+      chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all
+      human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead
+      us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0053">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 53. The Gam.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the whaler we had
+      spoken was this: the wind and sea betokened storms. But even had this not
+      been the case, he would not after all, perhaps, have boarded her—judging
+      by his subsequent conduct on similar occasions—if so it had been
+      that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained a negative answer to the
+      question he put. For, as it eventually turned out, he cared not to
+      consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger captain, except he could
+      contribute some of that information he so absorbingly sought. But all this
+      might remain inadequately estimated, were not something said here of the
+      peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when meeting each other in foreign
+      seas, and especially on a common cruising-ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the
+      equally desolate Salisbury Plain in England; if casually encountering each
+      other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain, for the life of them,
+      cannot well avoid a mutual salutation; and stopping for a moment to
+      interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while and resting
+      in concert: then, how much more natural that upon the illimitable Pine
+      Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling vessels descrying
+      each other at the ends of the earth—off lone Fanning’s Island, or
+      the far away King’s Mills; how much more natural, I say, that under such
+      circumstances these ships should not only interchange hails, but come into
+      still closer, more friendly and sociable contact. And especially would
+      this seem to be a matter of course, in the case of vessels owned in one
+      seaport, and whose captains, officers, and not a few of the men are
+      personally known to each other; and consequently, have all sorts of dear
+      domestic things to talk about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters on
+      board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a date
+      a year or two later than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn files.
+      And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound ship would receive the
+      latest whaling intelligence from the cruising-ground to which she may be
+      destined, a thing of the utmost importance to her. And in degree, all this
+      will hold true concerning whaling vessels crossing each other’s track on
+      the cruising-ground itself, even though they are equally long absent from
+      home. For one of them may have received a transfer of letters from some
+      third, and now far remote vessel; and some of those letters may be for the
+      people of the ship she now meets. Besides, they would exchange the whaling
+      news, and have an agreeable chat. For not only would they meet with all
+      the sympathies of sailors, but likewise with all the peculiar
+      congenialities arising from a common pursuit and mutually shared
+      privations and perils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference; that
+      is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is the case with
+      Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from the small number of
+      English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when they do
+      occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them; for your
+      Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that
+      sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English whalers
+      sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the American
+      whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his nondescript
+      provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. But where this superiority in
+      the English whalemen does really consist, it would be hard to say, seeing
+      that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more whales than all the
+      English, collectively, in ten years. But this is a harmless little foible
+      in the English whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer does not take much to
+      heart; probably, because he knows that he has a few foibles himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the whalers
+      have most reason to be sociable—and they are so. Whereas, some
+      merchant ships crossing each other’s wake in the mid-Atlantic, will
+      oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition,
+      mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in
+      Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon
+      each other’s rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea, they
+      first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such a
+      ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down hearty
+      good-will and brotherly love about it at all. As touching Slave-ships
+      meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run away from each
+      other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross
+      each other’s cross-bones, the first hail is—“How many skulls?”—the
+      same way that whalers hail—“How many barrels?” And that question
+      once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are infernal
+      villains on both sides, and don’t like to see overmuch of each other’s
+      villanous likenesses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable,
+      free-and-easy whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets another
+      whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a “<i>Gam</i>,” a thing so utterly
+      unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the name even; and if
+      by chance they should hear of it, they only grin at it, and repeat
+      gamesome stuff about “spouters” and “blubber-boilers,” and such like
+      pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also all
+      Pirates and Man-of-War’s men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such a
+      scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard
+      to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know
+      whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It
+      sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows. And
+      besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper
+      foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I conclude, that in boasting
+      himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that assertion the pirate
+      has no solid basis to stand on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what is a <i>Gam?</i> You might wear out your index-finger running up and
+      down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson
+      never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster’s ark does not hold it.
+      Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in
+      constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly, it
+      needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With that
+      view, let me learnedly define it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      GAM. NOUN—<i>A social meeting of two</i> (<i>or more</i>) <i>Whaleships,
+      generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits
+      by boats’ crews: the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one
+      ship, and the two chief mates on the other.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten
+      here. All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so
+      has the whale fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when the
+      captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern sheets
+      on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often steers himself
+      with a pretty little milliner’s tiller decorated with gay cords and
+      ribbons. But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa of that sort
+      whatever, and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if whaling captains
+      were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen in patent
+      chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of any such
+      effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete boat’s crew must leave
+      the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of the number,
+      that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion, and the captain,
+      having no place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all standing like a
+      pine tree. And often you will notice that being conscious of the eyes of
+      the whole visible world resting on him from the sides of the two ships,
+      this standing captain is all alive to the importance of sustaining his
+      dignity by maintaining his legs. Nor is this any very easy matter; for in
+      his rear is the immense projecting steering oar hitting him now and then
+      in the small of his back, the after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees
+      in front. He is thus completely wedged before and behind, and can only
+      expand himself sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a
+      sudden, violent pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him, because
+      length of foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make
+      a spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again, it
+      would never do in plain sight of the world’s riveted eyes, it would never
+      do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying himself the
+      slightest particle by catching hold of anything with his hands; indeed, as
+      token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he generally carries his hands
+      in his trowsers’ pockets; but perhaps being generally very large, heavy
+      hands, he carries them there for ballast. Nevertheless there have occurred
+      instances, well authenticated ones too, where the captain has been known
+      for an uncommonly critical moment or two, in a sudden squall say—to
+      seize hold of the nearest oarsman’s hair, and hold on there like grim
+      death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0054">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho’s Story.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      (<i>As told at the Golden Inn.</i>)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is
+      much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet more
+      travellers than in any other part.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homeward-bound
+      whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was manned almost wholly by
+      Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby
+      Dick. To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly
+      heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho’s story, which seemed
+      obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted
+      visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are
+      said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance, with its own
+      particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret part of
+      the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab
+      or his mates. For that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain
+      of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private property of three confederate
+      white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to
+      Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy, but the following night
+      Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way,
+      that when he was wakened he could not well withhold the rest.
+      Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing have on those seamen
+      in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange
+      delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this matter, that they kept
+      the secret among themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod’s
+      main-mast. Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the
+      story as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair I
+      now proceed to put on lasting record.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head,
+      still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For my humor’s sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated
+      it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint’s eve,
+      smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those fine
+      cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer terms
+      with me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally put, and
+      which are duly answered at the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
+      rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket, was
+      cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days’ sail eastward from the
+      eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the northward of the
+      Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to daily usage, it
+      was observed that she made more water in her hold than common. They
+      supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But the captain, having
+      some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck awaited him in those
+      latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit them, and the leak not
+      being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they could not
+      find it after searching the hold as low down as was possible in rather
+      heavy weather, the ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners
+      working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no good luck came;
+      more days went by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it
+      sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the captain,
+      making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among the islands,
+      there to have his hull hove out and repaired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance
+      favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the way,
+      because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically relieved at
+      them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship free;
+      never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well nigh the whole
+      of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had
+      all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port without the
+      occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the brutal
+      overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked
+      vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Lakeman!—Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?’
+      said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but—I crave your
+      courtesy—may be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now,
+      gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as large
+      and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far Manilla;
+      this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet been
+      nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly connected
+      with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand
+      fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and
+      Superior, and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with
+      many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of
+      races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles,
+      even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great
+      contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime
+      approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all
+      round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by
+      the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet
+      thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to
+      wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry
+      wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered
+      forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic
+      genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and
+      silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they
+      mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago
+      villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed
+      cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by
+      Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave;
+      they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland,
+      they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.
+      Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and
+      wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any. And for
+      Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone
+      Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had
+      long followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was
+      he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman,
+      fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives. Yet was this
+      Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a
+      mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible
+      firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition which
+      is the meanest slave’s right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been
+      retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved so thus far;
+      but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt—but, gentlemen,
+      you shall hear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her prow
+      for her island haven, that the Town-Ho’s leak seemed again increasing, but
+      only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps every day. You must
+      know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our Atlantic, for example,
+      some skippers think little of pumping their whole way across it; though of
+      a still, sleepy night, should the officer of the deck happen to forget his
+      duty in that respect, the probability would be that he and his shipmates
+      would never again remember it, on account of all hands gently subsiding to
+      the bottom. Nor in the solitary and savage seas far from you to the
+      westward, gentlemen, is it altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging
+      at their pump-handles in full chorus even for a voyage of considerable
+      length; that is, if it lie along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any
+      other reasonable retreat is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel
+      is in some very out of the way part of those waters, some really landless
+      latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little anxious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found
+      gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by
+      several of her company; especially by Radney the mate. He commanded the
+      upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way expanded
+      to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a coward, and
+      as little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness touching his
+      own person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or on sea that you
+      can conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when he betrayed this
+      solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the seamen declared that
+      it was only on account of his being a part owner in her. So when they were
+      working that evening at the pumps, there was on this head no small
+      gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they stood with their feet
+      continually overflowed by the rippling clear water; clear as any mountain
+      spring, gentlemen—that bubbling from the pumps ran across the deck,
+      and poured itself out in steady spouts at the lee scupper-holes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional
+      world of ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in
+      command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his
+      superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he
+      conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance
+      he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern’s tower, and make a little
+      heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may, gentlemen, at all
+      events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman, and
+      a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy’s
+      snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him, gentlemen,
+      which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to
+      Charlemagne’s father. But Radney, the mate, was ugly as a mule; yet as
+      hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt
+      knew it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the
+      rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with his
+      gay banterings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Aye, aye, my merry lads, it’s a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one
+      of ye, and let’s have a taste. By the Lord, it’s worth bottling! I tell ye
+      what, men, old Rad’s investment must go for it! he had best cut away his
+      part of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that sword-fish only
+      began the job; he’s come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters,
+      saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the whole posse of ’em are now
+      hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom; making improvements, I
+      suppose. If old Rad were here now, I’d tell him to jump overboard and
+      scatter ’em. They’re playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him.
+      But he’s a simple old soul,—Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they say
+      the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I wonder if he’d
+      give a poor devil like me the model of his nose.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Damn your eyes! what’s that pump stopping for?’ roared Radney,
+      pretending not to have heard the sailors’ talk. ‘Thunder away at it!’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. ‘Lively, boys,
+      lively, now!’ And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines; the
+      men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping of the
+      lungs was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life’s utmost
+      energies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went
+      forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face fiery
+      red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his brow. Now
+      what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney to meddle
+      with such a man in that corporeally exasperated state, I know not; but so
+      it happened. Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate commanded him
+      to get a broom and sweep down the planks, and also a shovel, and remove
+      some offensive matters consequent upon allowing a pig to run at large.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship’s deck at sea is a piece of household
+      work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every
+      evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships actually
+      foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of
+      sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom
+      would not willingly drown without first washing their faces. But in all
+      vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys, if
+      boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho that
+      had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most
+      athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain
+      of one of the gangs; consequently he should have been freed from any
+      trivial business not connected with truly nautical duties, such being the
+      case with his comrades. I mention all these particulars so that you may
+      understand exactly how this affair stood between the two men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost as
+      plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat in
+      his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will understand
+      this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully comprehended
+      when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat still for a moment, and
+      as he steadfastly looked into the mate’s malignant eye and perceived the
+      stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him and the slow-match silently
+      burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw all this, that strange
+      forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper passionateness in any
+      already ireful being—a repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by
+      really valiant men even when aggrieved—this nameless phantom
+      feeling, gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily
+      exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him saying that sweeping the
+      deck was not his business, and he would not do it. And then, without at
+      all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads as the customary
+      sweepers; who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done little or nothing
+      all day. To this, Radney replied with an oath, in a most domineering and
+      outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his command; meanwhile
+      advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an uplifted cooper’s club
+      hammer which he had snatched from a cask near by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for
+      all his first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt could
+      but ill brook this bearing in the mate; but somehow still smothering the
+      conflagration within him, without speaking he remained doggedly rooted to
+      his seat, till at last the incensed Radney shook the hammer within a few
+      inches of his face, furiously commanding him to do his bidding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily
+      followed by the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately repeated his
+      intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his forbearance had not the
+      slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable intimation with his twisted
+      hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man; but it was to no
+      purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly round the windlass;
+      when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him that he had
+      now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the Lakeman paused on
+      the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to
+      yourself.’ But the predestinated mate coming still closer to him, where
+      the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the heavy hammer within an inch of his
+      teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insufferable maledictions.
+      Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye
+      with the unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching his right
+      hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back, told his persecutor that
+      if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would murder him. But,
+      gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter by the gods.
+      Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant the lower jaw
+      of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting blood
+      like a whale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays
+      leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing their
+      mastheads. They were both Canallers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Canallers!’ cried Don Pedro. ‘We have seen many whale-ships in our
+      harbours, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what are
+      they?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You
+      must have heard of it.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary
+      land, we know but little of your vigorous North.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha’s very fine; and ere
+      proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such
+      information may throw side-light upon my story.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire breadth
+      of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and most
+      thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and affluent,
+      cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room and
+      bar-room; through the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman arches
+      over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or broken;
+      through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk counties;
+      and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires stand almost
+      like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and
+      often lawless life. There’s your true Ashantee, gentlemen; there howl your
+      pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you; under the long-flung
+      shadow, and the snug patronising lee of churches. For by some curious
+      fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan freebooters that they
+      ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners, gentlemen, most
+      abound in holiest vicinities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Is that a friar passing?’ said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the
+      crowded plazza, with humorous concern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella’s Inquisition wanes in
+      Lima,’ laughed Don Sebastian. ‘Proceed, Senor.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘A moment! Pardon!’ cried another of the company. ‘In the name of all us
+      Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by no
+      means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting present Lima for
+      distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow and look
+      surprised; you know the proverb all along this coast—“Corrupt as
+      Lima.” It but bears out your saying, too; churches more plentiful than
+      billiard-tables, and for ever open—and “Corrupt as Lima.” So, too,
+      Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St.
+      Mark!—St. Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now,
+      you pour out again.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would make a
+      fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like
+      Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile, he
+      indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening
+      his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy is
+      dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly sports; his
+      slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features. A terror to
+      the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats; his swart
+      visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on
+      his own canal, I have received good turns from one of these Canallers; I
+      thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful; but it is often one of
+      the prime redeeming qualities of your man of violence, that at times he
+      has as stiff an arm to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a
+      wealthy one. In sum, gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is,
+      is emphatically evinced by this; that our wild whale-fishery contains so
+      many of its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind,
+      except Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor
+      does it at all diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to many
+      thousands of our rural boys and young men born along its line, the
+      probationary life of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition between
+      quietly reaping in a Christian corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the
+      waters of the most barbaric seas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘I see! I see!’ impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha upon
+      his silvery ruffles. ‘No need to travel! The world’s one Lima. I had
+      thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold and
+      holy as the hills.—But the story.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly had
+      he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior mates and the four
+      harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. But sliding down the ropes
+      like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into the uproar, and sought
+      to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle. Others of the sailors
+      joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted turmoil ensued; while
+      standing out of harm’s way, the valiant captain danced up and down with a
+      whale-pike, calling upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious
+      scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck. At intervals, he ran
+      close up to the revolving border of the confusion, and prying into the
+      heart of it with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his
+      resentment. But Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all;
+      they succeeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing
+      about three or four large casks in a line with the windlass, these
+      sea-Parisians entrenched themselves behind the barricade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Come out of that, ye pirates!’ roared the captain, now menacing them
+      with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the steward. ‘Come out
+      of that, ye cut-throats!’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there, defied
+      the worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain to understand
+      distinctly, that his (Steelkilt’s) death would be the signal for a
+      murderous mutiny on the part of all hands. Fearing in his heart lest this
+      might prove but too true, the captain a little desisted, but still
+      commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their duty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?’ demanded their ringleader.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Turn to! turn to!—I make no promise;—to your duty! Do you
+      want to sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to!’ and
+      he once more raised a pistol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Sink the ship?’ cried Steelkilt. ‘Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us
+      turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us. What say
+      ye, men?’ turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their response.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his eye on
+      the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:—‘It’s not our
+      fault; we didn’t want it; I told him to take his hammer away; it was boy’s
+      business; he might have known me before this; I told him not to prick the
+      buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here against his cursed jaw;
+      ain’t those mincing knives down in the forecastle there, men? look to
+      those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God, look to yourself; say the
+      word; don’t be a fool; forget it all; we are ready to turn to; treat us
+      decently, and we’re your men; but we won’t be flogged.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Look ye, now,’ cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him,
+      ‘there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who have shipped for
+      the cruise, d’ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can claim our
+      discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don’t want a row; it’s not
+      our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we won’t
+      be flogged.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Turn to!’ roared the Captain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:—‘I tell you
+      what it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a
+      shabby rascal, we won’t lift a hand against ye unless ye attack us; but
+      till you say the word about not flogging us, we don’t do a hand’s turn.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I’ll keep ye there till
+      ye’re sick of it. Down ye go.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Shall we?’ cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against
+      it; but at length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down into
+      their dark den, growlingly disappearing, like bears into a cave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “As the Lakeman’s bare head was just level with the planks, the Captain
+      and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the slide of
+      the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly called for
+      the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock belonging to the
+      companionway. Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered something
+      down the crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them—ten in
+      number—leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had remained neutral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward and
+      aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway; at which
+      last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after breaking
+      through the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed in peace; the
+      men who still remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps, whose
+      clinking and clanking at intervals through the dreary night dismally
+      resounded through the ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “At sunrise the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck, summoned
+      the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water was then
+      lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit were tossed
+      after it; when again turning the key upon them and pocketing it, the
+      Captain returned to the quarter-deck. Twice every day for three days this
+      was repeated; but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling, and then a
+      scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered; and suddenly
+      four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to.
+      The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps to
+      some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to surrender at
+      discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his demand to the
+      rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to stop his babbling
+      and betake himself where he belonged. On the fifth morning three others of
+      the mutineers bolted up into the air from the desperate arms below that
+      sought to restrain them. Only three were left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Better turn to, now?’ said the Captain with a heartless jeer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Shut us up again, will ye!’ cried Steelkilt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Oh certainly,’ said the Captain, and the key clicked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of seven
+      of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had last
+      hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as black as the
+      bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two
+      Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of their
+      hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with their keen
+      mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a handle at each
+      end) run amuck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any
+      devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship. For himself, he
+      would do this, he said, whether they joined him or not. That was the last
+      night he should spend in that den. But the scheme met with no opposition
+      on the part of the other two; they swore they were ready for that, or for
+      any other mad thing, for anything in short but a surrender. And what was
+      more, they each insisted upon being the first man on deck, when the time
+      to make the rush should come. But to this their leader as fiercely
+      objected, reserving that priority for himself; particularly as his two
+      comrades would not yield, the one to the other, in the matter; and both of
+      them could not be first, for the ladder would but admit one man at a time.
+      And here, gentlemen, the foul play of these miscreants must come out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Upon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own
+      separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the same piece of
+      treachery, namely: to be foremost in breaking out, in order to be the
+      first of the three, though the last of the ten, to surrender; and thereby
+      secure whatever small chance of pardon such conduct might merit. But when
+      Steelkilt made known his determination still to lead them to the last,
+      they in some way, by some subtle chemistry of villany, mixed their before
+      secret treacheries together; and when their leader fell into a doze,
+      verbally opened their souls to each other in three sentences; and bound
+      the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords; and shrieked out for
+      the Captain at midnight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood, he and
+      all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle. In a few
+      minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand and foot, the still
+      struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his perfidious allies,
+      who at once claimed the honor of securing a man who had been fully ripe
+      for murder. But all these were collared, and dragged along the deck like
+      dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized up into the mizzen rigging,
+      like three quarters of meat, and there they hung till morning. ‘Damn ye,’
+      cried the Captain, pacing to and fro before them, ‘the vultures would not
+      touch ye, ye villains!’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “At sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled
+      from those who had taken no part in the mutiny, he told the former that he
+      had a good mind to flog them all round—thought, upon the whole, he
+      would do so—he ought to—justice demanded it; but for the
+      present, considering their timely surrender, he would let them go with a
+      reprimand, which he accordingly administered in the vernacular.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘But as for you, ye carrion rogues,’ turning to the three men in the
+      rigging—‘for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots;’ and,
+      seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of the two
+      traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their heads
+      sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘My wrist is sprained with ye!’ he cried, at last; ‘but there is still
+      rope enough left for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn’t give up. Take that
+      gag from his mouth, and let us hear what he can say for himself.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “For a moment the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous motion of his
+      cramped jaws, and then painfully twisting round his head, said in a sort
+      of hiss, ‘What I say is this—and mind it well—if you flog me,
+      I murder you!’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Say ye so? then see how ye frighten me’—and the Captain drew off
+      with the rope to strike.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Best not,’ hissed the Lakeman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘But I must,’—and the rope was once more drawn back for the stroke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the Captain;
+      who, to the amazement of all hands, started back, paced the deck rapidly
+      two or three times, and then suddenly throwing down his rope, said, ‘I
+      won’t do it—let him go—cut him down: d’ye hear?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “But as the junior mates were hurrying to execute the order, a pale man,
+      with a bandaged head, arrested them—Radney the chief mate. Ever
+      since the blow, he had lain in his berth; but that morning, hearing the
+      tumult on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had watched the whole
+      scene. Such was the state of his mouth, that he could hardly speak; but
+      mumbling something about <i>his</i> being willing and able to do what the captain
+      dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and advanced to his pinioned foe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘You are a coward!’ hissed the Lakeman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘So I am, but take that.’ The mate was in the very act of striking, when
+      another hiss stayed his uplifted arm. He paused: and then pausing no more,
+      made good his word, spite of Steelkilt’s threat, whatever that might have
+      been. The three men were then cut down, all hands were turned to, and,
+      sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the iron pumps clanged as before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired below, a clamor was
+      heard in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors running up,
+      besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not consort with the crew.
+      Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, so at their own
+      instance they were put down in the ship’s run for salvation. Still, no
+      sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On the contrary, it seemed, that
+      mainly at Steelkilt’s instigation, they had resolved to maintain the
+      strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the last, and, when the ship
+      reached port, desert her in a body. But in order to insure the speediest
+      end to the voyage, they all agreed to another thing—namely, not to
+      sing out for whales, in case any should be discovered. For, spite of her
+      leak, and spite of all her other perils, the Town-Ho still maintained her
+      mast-heads, and her captain was just as willing to lower for a fish that
+      moment, as on the day his craft first struck the cruising ground; and
+      Radney the mate was quite as ready to change his berth for a boat, and
+      with his bandaged mouth seek to gag in death the vital jaw of the whale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of
+      passiveness in their conduct, he kept his own counsel (at least till all
+      was over) concerning his own proper and private revenge upon the man who
+      had stung him in the ventricles of his heart. He was in Radney the chief
+      mate’s watch; and as if the infatuated man sought to run more than half
+      way to meet his doom, after the scene at the rigging, he insisted, against
+      the express counsel of the captain, upon resuming the head of his watch at
+      night. Upon this, and one or two other circumstances, Steelkilt
+      systematically built the plan of his revenge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the
+      bulwarks of the quarter-deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of the
+      boat which was hoisted up there, a little above the ship’s side. In this
+      attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a considerable
+      vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down between this was the sea.
+      Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his next trick at the helm
+      would come round at two o’clock, in the morning of the third day from that
+      in which he had been betrayed. At his leisure, he employed the interval in
+      braiding something very carefully in his watches below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘What are you making there?’ said a shipmate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘What do you think? what does it look like?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Like a lanyard for your bag; but it’s an odd one, seems to me.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Yes, rather oddish,’ said the Lakeman, holding it at arm’s length before
+      him; ‘but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven’t enough twine,—have
+      you any?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “But there was none in the forecastle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Then I must get some from old Rad;’ and he rose to go aft.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘You don’t mean to go a begging to <i>him!</i>’ said a sailor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Why not? Do you think he won’t do me a turn, when it’s to help himself
+      in the end, shipmate?’ and going to the mate, he looked at him quietly,
+      and asked him for some twine to mend his hammock. It was given him—neither
+      twine nor lanyard were seen again; but the next night an iron ball,
+      closely netted, partly rolled from the pocket of the Lakeman’s monkey
+      jacket, as he was tucking the coat into his hammock for a pillow.
+      Twenty-four hours after, his trick at the silent helm—nigh to the
+      man who was apt to doze over the grave always ready dug to the seaman’s
+      hand—that fatal hour was then to come; and in the fore-ordaining
+      soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already stark and stretched as a corpse,
+      with his forehead crushed in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody deed
+      he had planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and without being the
+      avenger. For by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in to
+      take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he would have done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second
+      day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man,
+      drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out, ‘There she
+      rolls! there she rolls!’ Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Moby Dick!’ cried Don Sebastian; ‘St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do whales
+      have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;—but
+      that would be too long a story.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘How? how?’ cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Nay, Dons, Dons—nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get
+      more into the air, Sirs.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘The chicha! the chicha!’ cried Don Pedro; ‘our vigorous friend looks
+      faint;—fill up his empty glass!’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.—Now, gentlemen, so
+      suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the ship—forgetful
+      of the compact among the crew—in the excitement of the moment, the
+      Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily lifted his voice for the
+      monster, though for some little time past it had been plainly beheld from
+      the three sullen mast-heads. All was now a phrensy. ‘The White Whale—the
+      White Whale!’ was the cry from captain, mates, and harpooneers, who,
+      undeterred by fearful rumours, were all anxious to capture so famous and
+      precious a fish; while the dogged crew eyed askance, and with curses, the
+      appalling beauty of the vast milky mass, that lit up by a horizontal
+      spangling sun, shifted and glistened like a living opal in the blue
+      morning sea. Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career of
+      these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted.
+      The mutineer was the bowsman of the mate, and when fast to a fish, it was
+      his duty to sit next him, while Radney stood up with his lance in the
+      prow, and haul in or slacken the line, at the word of command. Moreover,
+      when the four boats were lowered, the mate’s got the start; and none
+      howled more fiercely with delight than did Steelkilt, as he strained at
+      his oar. After a stiff pull, their harpooneer got fast, and, spear in
+      hand, Radney sprang to the bow. He was always a furious man, it seems, in
+      a boat. And now his bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale’s topmost
+      back. Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a blinding
+      foam that blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat struck
+      as against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing
+      mate. That instant, as he fell on the whale’s slippery back, the boat
+      righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over
+      into the sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the
+      spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly
+      seeking to remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed
+      round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws; and
+      rearing high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Meantime, at the first tap of the boat’s bottom, the Lakeman had
+      slackened the line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly
+      looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a sudden, terrific, downward
+      jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line. He cut it; and
+      the whale was free. But, at some distance, Moby Dick rose again, with some
+      tatters of Radney’s red woollen shirt, caught in the teeth that had
+      destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but the whale eluded them,
+      and finally wholly disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port—a savage, solitary place—where
+      no civilized creature resided. There, headed by the Lakeman, all but five
+      or six of the foremastmen deliberately deserted among the palms;
+      eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large double war-canoe of the
+      savages, and setting sail for some other harbor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The ship’s company being reduced to but a handful, the captain called
+      upon the Islanders to assist him in the laborious business of heaving down
+      the ship to stop the leak. But to such unresting vigilance over their
+      dangerous allies was this small band of whites necessitated, both by night
+      and by day, and so extreme was the hard work they underwent, that upon the
+      vessel being ready again for sea, they were in such a weakened condition
+      that the captain durst not put off with them in so heavy a vessel. After
+      taking counsel with his officers, he anchored the ship as far off shore as
+      possible; loaded and ran out his two cannon from the bows; stacked his
+      muskets on the poop; and warning the Islanders not to approach the ship at
+      their peril, took one man with him, and setting the sail of his best
+      whale-boat, steered straight before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred
+      miles distant, to procure a reinforcement to his crew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed
+      to have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from it; but the
+      savage craft bore down on him; and soon the voice of Steelkilt hailed him
+      to heave to, or he would run him under water. The captain presented a
+      pistol. With one foot on each prow of the yoked war-canoes, the Lakeman
+      laughed him to scorn; assuring him that if the pistol so much as clicked
+      in the lock, he would bury him in bubbles and foam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘What do you want of me?’ cried the captain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?’ demanded Steelkilt;
+      ‘no lies.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘I am bound to Tahiti for more men.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Very good. Let me board you a moment—I come in peace.’ With that
+      he leaped from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale,
+      stood face to face with the captain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me. As
+      soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder island,
+      and remain there six days. If I do not, may lightnings strike me!’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘A pretty scholar,’ laughed the Lakeman. ‘Adios, Senor!’ and leaping into
+      the sea, he swam back to his comrades.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the roots
+      of the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in due time arrived
+      at Tahiti, his own place of destination. There, luck befriended him; two
+      ships were about to sail for France, and were providentially in want of
+      precisely that number of men which the sailor headed. They embarked; and
+      so for ever got the start of their former captain, had he been at all
+      minded to work them legal retribution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived, and
+      the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized Tahitians, who
+      had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small native schooner, he
+      returned with them to his vessel; and finding all right there, again
+      resumed his cruisings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of
+      Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to
+      give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that
+      destroyed him.  * * * *
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Are you through?’ said Don Sebastian, quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘I am, Don.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions, this
+      your story is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful! Did
+      you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me if I seem to
+      press.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don Sebastian’s
+      suit,’ cried the company, with exceeding interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentlemen?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Nay,’ said Don Sebastian; ‘but I know a worthy priest near by, who will
+      quickly procure one for me. I go for it; but are you well advised? this
+      may grow too serious.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Will you be so good as to bring the priest also, Don?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Though there are no Auto-da-Fés in Lima now,’ said one of the company
+      to another; ‘I fear our sailor friend runs risk of the archiepiscopacy.
+      Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight. I see no need of this.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg that
+      you will be particular in procuring the largest sized Evangelists you
+      can.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      * * * * * *
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,’ said Don Sebastian,
+      gravely, returning with a tall and solemn figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the light, and
+      hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘So help me Heaven, and on my honor the story I have told ye, gentlemen,
+      is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be true; it
+      happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I have seen and
+      talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.’”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0055">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something
+      like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the
+      whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside the
+      whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there. It may be worth
+      while, therefore, previously to advert to those curious imaginary
+      portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge
+      the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the world right in this
+      matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will be
+      found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For ever
+      since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble panellings
+      of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields, medallions, cups,
+      and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of chain-armor like Saladin’s,
+      and a helmeted head like St. George’s; ever since then has something of
+      the same sort of license prevailed, not only in most popular pictures of
+      the whale, but in many scientific presentations of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to
+      be the whale’s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta,
+      in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of
+      that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable
+      avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came
+      into being. No wonder then, that in some sort our noble profession of
+      whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale referred
+      to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the incarnation
+      of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse Avatar.
+      But though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to give
+      the tail of the latter, yet that small section of him is all wrong. It
+      looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad palms of
+      the true whale’s majestic flukes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter’s
+      portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the antediluvian
+      Hindoo. It is Guido’s picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the
+      sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange
+      creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his own
+      “Perseus Descending,” make out one whit better. The huge corpulence of
+      that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface, scarcely drawing one
+      inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its back, and its distended
+      tusked mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be taken for the
+      Traitors’ Gate leading from the Thames by water into the Tower. Then,
+      there are the Prodromus whales of old Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah’s whale,
+      as depicted in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers. What
+      shall be said of these? As for the book-binder’s whale winding like a
+      vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor—as stamped and
+      gilded on the backs and title-pages of many books both old and new—that
+      is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it,
+      from the like figures on antique vases. Though universally denominated a
+      dolphin, I nevertheless call this book-binder’s fish an attempt at a
+      whale; because it was so intended when the device was first introduced. It
+      was introduced by an old Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th
+      century, during the Revival of Learning; and in those days, and even down
+      to a comparatively late period, dolphins were popularly supposed to be a
+      species of the Leviathan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will
+      at times meet with very curious touches at the whale, where all manner of
+      spouts, jets d’eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden, come
+      bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the original
+      edition of the “Advancement of Learning” you will find some curious
+      whales.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those
+      pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations, by
+      those who know. In old Harris’s collection of voyages there are some
+      plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671,
+      entitled “A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale,
+      Peter Peterson of Friesland, master.” In one of those plates the whales,
+      like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles, with
+      white bears running over their living backs. In another plate, the
+      prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale with perpendicular
+      flukes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett, a
+      Post Captain in the English navy, entitled “A Voyage round Cape Horn into
+      the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale
+      Fisheries.” In this book is an outline purporting to be a “Picture of a
+      Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the coast
+      of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck.” I doubt not the captain had
+      this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines. To mention
+      but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which applied,
+      according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm whale, would
+      make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet long. Ah, my
+      gallant captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the
+      benefit of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of
+      mistake. Look at that popular work “Goldsmith’s Animated Nature.” In the
+      abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged “whale”
+       and a “narwhale.” I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly
+      whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale, one
+      glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century such
+      a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent public of
+      schoolboys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacépède, a great
+      naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are
+      several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All these are
+      not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland whale
+      (that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a long experienced man
+      as touching that species, declares not to have its counterpart in nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was
+      reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron.
+      In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives what
+      he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that picture to any
+      Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket.
+      In a word, Frederick Cuvier’s Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a
+      squash. Of course, he never had the benefit of a whaling voyage (such men
+      seldom have), but whence he derived that picture, who can tell? Perhaps he
+      got it as his scientific predecessor in the same field, Desmarest, got one
+      of his authentic abortions; that is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort
+      of lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and
+      saucers inform us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the sign-painters’ whales seen in the streets hanging over the
+      shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally
+      Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting
+      on three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners: their
+      deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very
+      surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been
+      taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing
+      of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent the noble
+      animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though
+      elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has
+      never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale, in
+      his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in
+      unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like
+      a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing
+      eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so
+      as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not to speak of
+      the highly presumable difference of contour between a young sucking whale
+      and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of
+      those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship’s deck, such is then the
+      outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise
+      expression the devil himself could not catch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale,
+      accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it
+      is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton
+      gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham’s
+      skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his
+      executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old
+      gentleman, with all Jeremy’s other leading personal characteristics; yet
+      nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan’s articulated
+      bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale
+      bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded animal as the
+      insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it. This
+      peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part of this
+      book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously displayed in
+      the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the
+      human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers,
+      the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But all these are permanently
+      lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human fingers in an artificial
+      covering. “However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us,” said
+      humorous Stubb one day, “he can never be truly said to handle us without
+      mittens.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs
+      conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which
+      must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark
+      much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable
+      degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely
+      what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can
+      derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling
+      yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove
+      and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too
+      fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0056">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly tempted
+      here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them which are to
+      be found in certain books, both ancient and modern, especially in Pliny,
+      Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass that matter by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale;
+      Colnett’s, Huggins’s, Frederick Cuvier’s, and Beale’s. In the previous
+      chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins’s is far better
+      than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale’s is the best. All Beale’s drawings
+      of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in the picture of
+      three whales in various attitudes, capping his second chapter. His
+      frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt calculated to
+      excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is admirably correct and
+      life-like in its general effect. Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J.
+      Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they are wretchedly
+      engraved. That is not his fault though.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they
+      are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression. He has
+      but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency, because
+      it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you can derive
+      anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his living
+      hunters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details not
+      the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be
+      anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed, and taken
+      from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent attacks on the
+      Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble Sperm Whale is
+      depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath the boat from the
+      profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the air upon his back the
+      terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of the boat is partially
+      unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the monster’s spine; and
+      standing in that prow, for that one single incomputable flash of time, you
+      behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the incensed boiling spout of the
+      whale, and in the act of leaping, as if from a precipice. The action of
+      the whole thing is wonderfully good and true. The half-emptied line-tub
+      floats on the whitened sea; the wooden poles of the spilled harpoons
+      obliquely bob in it; the heads of the swimming crew are scattered about
+      the whale in contrasting expressions of affright; while in the black
+      stormy distance the ship is bearing down upon the scene. Serious fault
+      might be found with the anatomical details of this whale, but let that
+      pass; since, for the life of me, I could not draw so good a one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside the
+      barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black weedy
+      bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian cliffs. His
+      jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so that from so abounding a
+      smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave supper cooking
+      in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs,
+      shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale
+      sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while the
+      thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of
+      tumultuous white curds in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock in
+      the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer.
+      Thus, the foreground is all raging commotion; but behind, in admirable
+      artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping
+      unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead
+      whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from
+      the whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he was
+      either practically conversant with his subject, or else marvellously
+      tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the lads for painting
+      action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe, and where will you
+      find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in
+      that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder fights his way,
+      pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of France; where every
+      sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the successive armed kings
+      and Emperors dash by, like a charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly
+      unworthy of a place in that gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of
+      Garnery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of
+      things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings
+      they have of their whaling scenes. With not one tenth of England’s
+      experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of the
+      Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only
+      finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of the whale
+      hunt. For the most part, the English and American whale draughtsmen seem
+      entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline of things, such as
+      the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as picturesqueness of
+      effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketching the profile of a
+      pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right whaleman, after giving
+      us a stiff full length of the Greenland whale, and three or four delicate
+      miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats us to a series of classical
+      engravings of boat hooks, chopping knives, and grapnels; and with the
+      microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck submits to the inspection of a
+      shivering world ninety-six fac-similes of magnified Arctic snow crystals.
+      I mean no disparagement to the excellent voyager (I honor him for a
+      veteran), but in so important a matter it was certainly an oversight not
+      to have procured for every crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a
+      Greenland Justice of the Peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other
+      French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself “H.
+      Durand.” One of them, though not precisely adapted to our present purpose,
+      nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts. It is a quiet noon-scene
+      among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler anchored, inshore, in a
+      calm, and lazily taking water on board; the loosened sails of the ship,
+      and the long leaves of the palms in the background, both drooping together
+      in the breezeless air. The effect is very fine, when considered with
+      reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen under one of their few
+      aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving is quite a different
+      affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the very heart of the
+      Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the vessel (in the act of
+      cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a quay; and a boat,
+      hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, is about giving chase
+      to whales in the distance. The harpoons and lances lie levelled for use;
+      three oarsmen are just setting the mast in its hole; while from a sudden
+      roll of the sea, the little craft stands half-erect out of the water, like
+      a rearing horse. From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling
+      whale is going up like the smoke over a village of smithies; and to
+      windward, a black cloud, rising up with earnest of squalls and rains,
+      seems to quicken the activity of the excited seamen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0057">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a
+      crippled beggar (or <i>kedger</i>, as the sailors say) holding a painted board
+      before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg. There
+      are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed to
+      contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being crunched
+      by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years, they tell me,
+      has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that stump to an
+      incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now come. His
+      three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping, at any
+      rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in the
+      western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a
+      stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, stands
+      ruefully contemplating his own amputation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag
+      Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and whaling-scenes,
+      graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies’ busks
+      wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and other like skrimshander articles,
+      as the whalemen call the numerous little ingenious contrivances they
+      elaborately carve out of the rough material, in their hours of ocean
+      leisure. Some of them have little boxes of dentistical-looking implements,
+      specially intended for the skrimshandering business. But, in general, they
+      toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool
+      of the sailor, they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a
+      mariner’s fancy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to
+      that condition in which God placed him, <i>i.e.</i> what is called savagery. Your
+      true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a
+      savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready
+      at any moment to rebel against him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic
+      hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-club
+      or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is
+      as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but
+      a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark’s tooth, that miraculous intricacy of
+      wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has cost steady years of steady
+      application.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the
+      same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark’s tooth, of his
+      one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite
+      as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as the
+      Greek savage, Achilles’s shield; and full of barbaric spirit and
+      suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the
+      noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles of
+      American whalers. Some of them are done with much accuracy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung by
+      the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is sleepy,
+      the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking whales are seldom
+      remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some old-fashioned
+      churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weather-cocks;
+      but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes
+      so labelled with “<i>Hands off!</i>” you cannot examine them closely enough to
+      decide upon their merit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken
+      cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain,
+      you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the Leviathan
+      partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in a surf
+      of green surges.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually
+      girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky point
+      of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined
+      along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough whaleman, to see
+      these sights; and not only that, but if you wish to return to such a sight
+      again, you must be sure and take the exact intersecting latitude and
+      longitude of your first stand-point, else so chance-like are such
+      observations of the hills, that your precise, previous stand-point would
+      require a laborious re-discovery; like the Soloma Islands, which still
+      remain incognita, though once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old
+      Figuera chronicled them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out
+      great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when
+      long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked in
+      battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round
+      and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first
+      defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have
+      boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far
+      beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for
+      spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see
+      whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie
+      encamped beyond my mortal sight!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0058">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 58. Brit.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of
+      brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely
+      feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to
+      be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the
+      attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly swam
+      through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous
+      Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated from the
+      water that escaped at the lip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their
+      scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters
+      swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them
+      endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.*
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *That part of the sea known among whalemen as the “Brazil Banks” does not
+      bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there being
+      shallows and soundings there, but because of this remarkable meadow-like
+      appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit continually floating in
+      those latitudes, where the Right Whale is often chased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all
+      reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they
+      paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked more
+      like lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in the great
+      hunting countries of India, the stranger at a distance will sometimes pass
+      on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing them to be such, taking
+      them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil; even so, often, with him,
+      who for the first time beholds this species of the leviathans of the sea.
+      And even when recognised at last, their immense magnitude renders it very
+      hard really to believe that such bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly
+      be instinct, in all parts, with the same sort of life that lives in a dog
+      or a horse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the deep
+      with the same feelings that you do those of the shore. For though some old
+      naturalists have maintained that all creatures of the land are of their
+      kind in the sea; and though taking a broad general view of the thing, this
+      may very well be; yet coming to specialties, where, for example, does the
+      ocean furnish any fish that in disposition answers to the sagacious
+      kindness of the dog? The accursed shark alone can in any generic respect
+      be said to bear comparative analogy to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas
+      have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling;
+      though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that
+      Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one
+      superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all
+      mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and
+      hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a
+      moment’s consideration will teach, that however baby man may brag of his
+      science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science
+      and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom,
+      the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest
+      frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these
+      very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea
+      which aboriginally belongs to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese
+      vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow.
+      That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships of
+      last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two
+      thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a
+      miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews,
+      when under the feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened and
+      swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in
+      precisely the same manner the live sea swallows up ships and crews.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is
+      also a fiend to its own off-spring; worse than the Persian host who
+      murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath
+      spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own
+      cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and
+      leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy,
+      no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle
+      steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide
+      under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden
+      beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish
+      brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the
+      dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more,
+      the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each
+      other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile
+      earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a
+      strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean
+      surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular
+      Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the
+      half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst
+      never return!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0059">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 59. Squid.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her
+      way north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling her
+      keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall tapering masts
+      mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a plain. And
+      still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely, alluring jet
+      would be seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural
+      spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the
+      long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across
+      them, enjoining some secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered together
+      as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a
+      strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and
+      higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before
+      our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening for a
+      moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose, and
+      silently gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick?
+      thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down, but on re-appearing once
+      more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man from his nod, the
+      negro yelled out—“There! there again! there she breaches! right
+      ahead! The White Whale, the White Whale!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the
+      bees rush to the boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on the
+      bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind in readiness to wave his
+      orders to the helmsman, cast his eager glance in the direction indicated
+      aloft by the outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had
+      gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the
+      ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the particular whale
+      he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed him;
+      whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly perceive the
+      white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave orders for
+      lowering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab’s in advance, and all swiftly
+      pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with oars
+      suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same spot where
+      it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for the moment all
+      thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which
+      the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass,
+      furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating
+      on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling
+      and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any
+      hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no
+      conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on
+      the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still
+      gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice
+      exclaimed—“Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than
+      to have seen thee, thou white ghost!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What was it, Sir?” said Flask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and
+      returned to their ports to tell of it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel; the
+      rest as silently following.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with
+      the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being so
+      very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with
+      portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them
+      declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few of
+      them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and
+      form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale his
+      only food. For though other species of whales find their food above water,
+      and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains
+      his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and only by inference
+      is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that food consists. At
+      times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what are supposed to be the
+      detached arms of the squid; some of them thus exhibited exceeding twenty
+      and thirty feet in length. They fancy that the monster to which these arms
+      belonged ordinarily clings by them to the bed of the ocean; and that the
+      sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied with teeth in order to
+      attack and tear it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop
+      Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in which
+      the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with some
+      other particulars he narrates, in all this the two correspond. But much
+      abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he assigns it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious
+      creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of cuttle-fish,
+      to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to belong,
+      but only as the Anak of the tribe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0060">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 60. The Line.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as
+      for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented, I
+      have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly
+      vapored with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary
+      ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable to
+      the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to the
+      sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary quantity too
+      much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which it must be
+      subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general by no
+      means adds to the rope’s durability or strength, however much it may give
+      it compactness and gloss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely
+      superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable
+      as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and I will add
+      (since there is an æsthetics in all things), is much more handsome and
+      becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of
+      Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight,
+      you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment its one
+      and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and twenty
+      pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal to three
+      tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line measures something over two
+      hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally coiled away
+      in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so as to form
+      one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded “sheaves,” or layers of
+      concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the “heart,” or minute
+      vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least tangle or
+      kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody’s arm,
+      leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line
+      in its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this
+      business, carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards
+      through a block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it
+      from all possible wrinkles and twists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the English boats two tubs are used instead of one; the same line being
+      continuously coiled in both tubs. There is some advantage in this; because
+      these twin-tubs being so small they fit more readily into the boat, and do
+      not strain it so much; whereas, the American tub, nearly three feet in
+      diameter and of proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky freight for a
+      craft whose planks are but one half-inch in thickness; for the bottom of
+      the whale-boat is like critical ice, which will bear up a considerable
+      distributed weight, but not very much of a concentrated one. When the
+      painted canvas cover is clapped on the American line-tub, the boat looks
+      as if it were pulling off with a prodigious great wedding-cake to present
+      to the whales.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an
+      eye-splice or loop coming up from the bottom against the side of the tub,
+      and hanging over its edge completely disengaged from everything. This
+      arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. First: In order
+      to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a neighboring
+      boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so deep as to threaten to
+      carry off the entire line originally attached to the harpoon. In these
+      instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug of ale, as it were,
+      from the one boat to the other; though the first boat always hovers at
+      hand to assist its consort. Second: This arrangement is indispensable for
+      common safety’s sake; for were the lower end of the line in any way
+      attached to the boat, and were the whale then to run the line out to the
+      end almost in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not
+      stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him
+      into the profundity of the sea; and in that case no town-crier would ever
+      find her again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is taken
+      aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again carried
+      forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon the loom or
+      handle of every man’s oar, so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing;
+      and also passing between the men, as they alternately sit at the opposite
+      gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of
+      the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a common quill,
+      prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs in a slight
+      festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some
+      ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the box in the
+      bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a little further aft, and
+      is then attached to the short-warp—the rope which is immediately
+      connected with the harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the short-warp
+      goes through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils,
+      twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen
+      are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid eye of the
+      landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest snakes
+      sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal woman, for
+      the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies, and while
+      straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any unknown instant
+      the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible contortions be put in
+      play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus circumstanced without a
+      shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones to quiver in him like a
+      shaken jelly. Yet habit—strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?—Gayer
+      sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never
+      heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch white
+      cedar of the whale-boat, when thus hung in hangman’s nooses; and, like the
+      six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men composing the crew
+      pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you may
+      say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for those
+      repeated whaling disasters—some few of which are casually chronicled—of
+      this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the line, and lost.
+      For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat, is like
+      being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in
+      full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you.
+      It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils,
+      because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and
+      the other, without the slightest warning; and only by a certain
+      self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action, can
+      you escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all-seeing
+      sun himself could never pierce you out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies
+      of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed,
+      the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in
+      itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the
+      ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it
+      silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual
+      play—this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any
+      other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live
+      enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but
+      it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals
+      realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a
+      philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel
+      one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with
+      a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0061">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to
+      Queequeg it was quite a different object.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “When you see him ’quid,” said the savage, honing his harpoon in the bow
+      of his hoisted boat, “then you quick see him ’parm whale.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to
+      engage them, the Pequod’s crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep
+      induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean through
+      which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground;
+      that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish,
+      and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the
+      Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders
+      leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in
+      what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that
+      dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body;
+      though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the
+      power which first moved it is withdrawn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen
+      at the main and mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last all
+      three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing that we
+      made there was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman. The waves,
+      too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance of the sea,
+      east nodded to west, and the sun over all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my
+      hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me;
+      with a shock I came back to life. And lo! close under our lee, not forty
+      fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the
+      capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue,
+      glistening in the sun’s rays like a mirror. But lazily undulating in the
+      trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his vapory jet,
+      the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm
+      afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by some
+      enchanter’s wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once
+      started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts
+      of the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted
+      forth the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted
+      the sparkling brine into the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Clear away the boats! Luff!” cried Ahab. And obeying his own order, he
+      dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the spokes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere
+      the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward,
+      but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he swam,
+      that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave orders
+      that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers. So
+      seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats, we swiftly but
+      silently paddled along; the calm not admitting of the noiseless sails
+      being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the monster
+      perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then sank
+      out of sight like a tower swallowed up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There go flukes!” was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by
+      Stubb’s producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite was
+      granted. After the full interval of his sounding had elapsed, the whale
+      rose again, and being now in advance of the smoker’s boat, and much nearer
+      to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the honor of the
+      capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length become aware of
+      his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was therefore no longer of use.
+      Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play. And still puffing at
+      his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the assault.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy, he
+      was going “head out”; that part obliquely projecting from the mad yeast
+      which he brewed.*
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the
+      entire interior of the sperm whale’s enormous head consists. Though
+      apparently the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about him.
+      So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does so when
+      going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the upper part
+      of the front of his head, and such the tapering cut-water formation of the
+      lower part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he thereby may be said
+      to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish galliot into a
+      sharppointed New York pilot-boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Start her, start her, my men! Don’t hurry yourselves; take plenty of time—but
+      start her; start her like thunder-claps, that’s all,” cried Stubb,
+      spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. “Start her, now; give ’em the long
+      and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my boy—start her, all;
+      but keep cool, keep cool—cucumbers is the word—easy, easy—only
+      start her like grim death and grinning devils, and raise the buried dead
+      perpendicular out of their graves, boys—that’s all. Start her!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!” screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some old
+      war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat
+      involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous leading stroke which
+      the eager Indian gave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. “Kee-hee!
+      Kee-hee!” yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat,
+      like a pacing tiger in his cage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ka-la! Koo-loo!” howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a mouthful
+      of Grenadier’s steak. And thus with oars and yells the keels cut the sea.
+      Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the van, still encouraged his men
+      to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke from his mouth. Like
+      desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the welcome cry was heard—“Stand
+      up, Tashtego!—give it to him!” The harpoon was hurled. “Stern all!”
+       The oarsmen backed water; the same moment something went hot and hissing
+      along every one of their wrists. It was the magical line. An instant
+      before, Stubb had swiftly caught two additional turns with it round the
+      loggerhead, whence, by reason of its increased rapid circlings, a hempen
+      blue smoke now jetted up and mingled with the steady fumes from his pipe.
+      As the line passed round and round the loggerhead; so also, just before
+      reaching that point, it blisteringly passed through and through both of
+      Stubb’s hands, from which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas
+      sometimes worn at these times, had accidentally dropped. It was like
+      holding an enemy’s sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all
+      the time striving to wrest it out of your clutch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Wet the line! wet the line!” cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated
+      by the tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed sea-water into it.* More
+      turns were taken, so that the line began holding its place. The boat now
+      flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins. Stubb and Tashtego
+      here changed places—stem for stern—a staggering business truly
+      in that rocking commotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be stated,
+      that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the running line
+      with water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or bailer, is set apart
+      for that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most convenient.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper part of
+      the boat, and from its now being more tight than a harpstring, you would
+      have thought the craft had two keels—one cleaving the water, the
+      other the air—as the boat churned on through both opposing elements
+      at once. A continual cascade played at the bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy
+      in her wake; and, at the slightest motion from within, even but of a
+      little finger, the vibrating, cracking craft canted over her spasmodic
+      gunwale into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man with might and main
+      clinging to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the foam; and the tall
+      form of Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost double, in order to
+      bring down his centre of gravity. Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed
+      passed as they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat
+      slackened his flight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Haul in—haul in!” cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round
+      towards the whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while yet
+      the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly
+      planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the
+      flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning out of
+      the way of the whale’s horrible wallow, and then ranging up for another
+      fling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a
+      hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled
+      and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing
+      upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every
+      face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men. And all the
+      while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the spiracle
+      of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of the excited
+      headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked lance (by the line
+      attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and again, by a few rapid
+      blows against the gunwale, then again and again sent it into the whale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Pull up—pull up!” he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale
+      relaxed in his wrath. “Pull up!—close to!” and the boat ranged along
+      the fish’s flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned his
+      long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and
+      churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the
+      whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of breaking ere he
+      could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of
+      the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting from his trance into that
+      unspeakable thing called his “flurry,” the monster horribly wallowed in
+      his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so
+      that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly
+      to struggle out from that phrensied twilight into the clear air of the
+      day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view;
+      surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his
+      spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush
+      after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red
+      wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping
+      down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He’s dead, Mr. Stubb,” said Daggoo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes; both pipes smoked out!” and withdrawing his own from his mouth,
+      Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood
+      thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0062">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 62. The Dart.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes
+      off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary
+      steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost oar,
+      the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong, nervous arm to
+      strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in what is called a long
+      dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the distance of twenty or
+      thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase, the
+      harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost; indeed,
+      he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not
+      only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations;
+      and what it is to keep shouting at the top of one’s compass, while all the
+      other muscles are strained and half started—what that is none know
+      but those who have tried it. For one, I cannot bawl very heartily and work
+      very recklessly at one and the same time. In this straining, bawling
+      state, then, with his back to the fish, all at once the exhausted
+      harpooneer hears the exciting cry—“Stand up, and give it to him!” He
+      now has to drop and secure his oar, turn round on his centre half way,
+      seize his harpoon from the crotch, and with what little strength may
+      remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the whale. No wonder, taking
+      the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty fair chances for
+      a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so many hapless
+      harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some of them
+      actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm
+      whalemen are absent four years with four barrels; no wonder that to many
+      ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the harpooneer
+      that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can
+      you expect to find it there when most wanted!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant,
+      that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer
+      likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of
+      themselves and every one else. It is then they change places; and the
+      headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes his proper station
+      in the bows of the boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish
+      and unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from first to last;
+      he should both dart the harpoon and the lance, and no rowing whatever
+      should be expected of him, except under circumstances obvious to any
+      fisherman. I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss of speed
+      in the chase; but long experience in various whalemen of more than one
+      nation has convinced me that in the vast majority of failures in the
+      fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale as
+      the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this
+      world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of
+      toil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0063">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in
+      productive subjects, grow the chapters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention. It
+      is a notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which is
+      perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow, for the
+      purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the harpoon,
+      whose other naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the prow. Thereby
+      the weapon is instantly at hand to its hurler, who snatches it up as
+      readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his rifle from the wall. It
+      is customary to have two harpoons reposing in the crotch, respectively
+      called the first and second irons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with the
+      line; the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one instantly
+      after the other into the same whale; so that if, in the coming drag, one
+      should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It is a doubling of
+      the chances. But it very often happens that owing to the instantaneous,
+      violent, convulsive running of the whale upon receiving the first iron, it
+      becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however lightning-like in his
+      movements, to pitch the second iron into him. Nevertheless, as the second
+      iron is already connected with the line, and the line is running, hence
+      that weapon must, at all events, be anticipatingly tossed out of the boat,
+      somehow and somewhere; else the most terrible jeopardy would involve all
+      hands. Tumbled into the water, it accordingly is in such cases; the spare
+      coils of box line (mentioned in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in
+      most instances, prudently practicable. But this critical act is not always
+      unattended with the saddest and most fatal casualties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown overboard,
+      it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror, skittishly
+      curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines, or cutting
+      them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions. Nor, in
+      general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is fairly
+      captured and a corpse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging one
+      unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to these qualities
+      in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of such an
+      audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be
+      simultaneously dangling about him. For, of course, each boat is supplied
+      with several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first one be
+      ineffectually darted without recovery. All these particulars are
+      faithfully narrated here, as they will not fail to elucidate several most
+      important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be painted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0064">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 64. Stubb’s Supper.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Stubb’s whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was a calm;
+      so, forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow business of
+      towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen men with our
+      thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers, slowly
+      toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the sea; and it
+      seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long intervals; good evidence was
+      hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass we moved. For, upon the
+      great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they call it, in China, four or five
+      laborers on the foot-path will draw a bulky freighted junk at the rate of
+      a mile an hour; but this grand argosy we towed heavily forged along, as if
+      laden with pig-lead in bulk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod’s
+      main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab
+      dropping one of several more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing
+      the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual orders for securing it
+      for the night, and then handing his lantern to a seaman, went his way into
+      the cabin, and did not come forward again until morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had evinced
+      his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was dead,
+      some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working in
+      him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet
+      to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship,
+      all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object. Very soon
+      you would have thought from the sound on the Pequod’s decks, that all
+      hands were preparing to cast anchor in the deep; for heavy chains are
+      being dragged along the deck, and thrust rattling out of the port-holes.
+      But by those clanking links, the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is to
+      be moored. Tied by the head to the stern, and by the tail to the bows, the
+      whale now lies with its black hull close to the vessel’s and seen through
+      the darkness of the night, which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the
+      two—ship and whale, seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks,
+      whereof one reclines while the other remains standing.*
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most
+      reliable hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside, is
+      by the flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that part is
+      relatively heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its
+      flexibility even in death, causes it to sink low beneath the surface; so
+      that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in order to put the
+      chain round it. But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a small,
+      strong line is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end, and a weight
+      in its middle, while the other end is secured to the ship. By adroit
+      management the wooden float is made to rise on the other side of the mass,
+      so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily made to follow
+      suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last locked fast round the
+      smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with its broad flukes
+      or lobes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be known on
+      deck, Stubb, his second mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an unusual
+      but still good-natured excitement. Such an unwonted bustle was he in that
+      the staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned to him for the
+      time the sole management of affairs. One small, helping cause of all this
+      liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely manifest. Stubb was a high
+      liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish
+      thing to his palate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut me
+      one from his small!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a general
+      thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the enemy defray
+      the current expenses of the war (at least before realizing the proceeds of
+      the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers who have
+      a genuine relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale designated by
+      Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of the body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two lanterns
+      of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper at the
+      capstan-head, as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb the only
+      banqueter on whale’s flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings with his
+      own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the
+      dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few sleepers below
+      in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails
+      against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers’ hearts. Peering
+      over the side you could just see them (as before you heard them) wallowing
+      in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their backs as they
+      scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human
+      head. This particular feat of the shark seems all but miraculous. How at
+      such an apparently unassailable surface, they contrive to gouge out such
+      symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the universal problem of all
+      things. The mark they thus leave on the whale, may best be likened to the
+      hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks
+      will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs
+      round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every
+      killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers
+      over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other’s live meat
+      with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their
+      jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the
+      dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it
+      would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking
+      sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the
+      invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic,
+      systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be
+      carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or
+      two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms,
+      places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most
+      hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you
+      will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial
+      spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whaleship at
+      sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about
+      the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the
+      devil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was going
+      on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his own
+      epicurean lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Cook, cook!—where’s that old Fleece?” he cried at length, widening
+      his legs still further, as if to form a more secure base for his supper;
+      and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing with
+      his lance; “cook, you cook!—sail this way, cook!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously roused
+      from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling along
+      from his galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something the matter
+      with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like his other
+      pans; this old Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and limping
+      along, assisting his step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy fashion,
+      were made of straightened iron hoops; this old Ebony floundered along, and
+      in obedience to the word of command, came to a dead stop on the opposite
+      side of Stubb’s sideboard; when, with both hands folded before him, and
+      resting on his two-legged cane, he bowed his arched back still further
+      over, at the same time sideways inclining his head, so as to bring his
+      best ear into play.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Cook,” said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth,
+      “don’t you think this steak is rather overdone? You’ve been beating this
+      steak too much, cook; it’s too tender. Don’t I always say that to be good,
+      a whale-steak must be tough? There are those sharks now over the side,
+      don’t you see they prefer it tough and rare? What a shindy they are
+      kicking up! Cook, go and talk to ’em; tell ’em they are welcome to help
+      themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must keep quiet. Blast me,
+      if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and deliver my message. Here, take
+      this lantern,” snatching one from his sideboard; “now then, go and preach
+      to ’em!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck to
+      the bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light low over the sea,
+      so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the other hand he
+      solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a mumbling
+      voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling behind,
+      overheard all that was said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Fellow-critters: I’se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise
+      dare. You hear? Stop dat dam smackin’ ob de lip! Massa Stubb say dat you
+      can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you must stop
+      dat dam racket!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Cook,” here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap on
+      the shoulder,—“Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn’t swear that way
+      when you’re preaching. That’s no way to convert sinners, cook!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who dat? Den preach to him yourself,” sullenly turning to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, cook; go on, go on.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:”—
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Right!” exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, “coax ’em to it; try that,” and
+      Fleece continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you,
+      fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness—’top dat dam slappin’ ob de
+      tail! How you tink to hear, spose you keep up such a dam slappin’ and
+      bitin’ dare?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Cook,” cried Stubb, collaring him, “I won’t have that swearing. Talk to
+      ’em gentlemanly.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Once more the sermon proceeded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for;
+      dat is natur, and can’t be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is
+      de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den
+      you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.
+      Now, look here, bred’ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs
+      from dat whale. Don’t be tearin’ de blubber out your neighbour’s
+      mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as toder to dat whale? And, by Gor, none
+      on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else. I
+      know some o’ you has berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig
+      mouts sometimes has de small bellies; so dat de brigness of de mout is not
+      to swaller wid, but to bit off de blubber for de small fry ob sharks, dat
+      can’t get into de scrouge to help demselves.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well done, old Fleece!” cried Stubb, “that’s Christianity; go on.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No use goin’ on; de dam willains will keep a scougin’ and slappin’ each
+      oder, Massa Stubb; dey don’t hear one word; no use a-preachin’ to such dam
+      g’uttons as you call ’em, till dare bellies is full, and dare bellies is
+      bottomless; and when dey do get ’em full, dey wont hear you den; for den
+      dey sink in de sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and can’t hear not’ing
+      at all, no more, for eber and eber.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction,
+      Fleece, and I’ll away to my supper.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his
+      shrill voice, and cried—
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill
+      your dam’ bellies ’till dey bust—and den die.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now, cook,” said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; “stand just
+      where you stood before, there, over against me, and pay particular
+      attention.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “All dention,” said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the
+      desired position.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well,” said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; “I shall now go back
+      to the subject of this steak. In the first place, how old are you, cook?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What dat do wid de ’teak,” said the old black, testily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Silence! How old are you, cook?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “’Bout ninety, dey say,” he gloomily muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And you have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook, and
+      don’t know yet how to cook a whale-steak?” rapidly bolting another
+      mouthful at the last word, so that morsel seemed a continuation of the
+      question. “Where were you born, cook?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “’Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin’ ober de Roanoke.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Born in a ferry-boat! That’s queer, too. But I want to know what country
+      you were born in, cook!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Didn’t I say de Roanoke country?” he cried sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, you didn’t, cook; but I’ll tell you what I’m coming to, cook. You
+      must go home and be born over again; you don’t know how to cook a
+      whale-steak yet.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Bress my soul, if I cook noder one,” he growled, angrily, turning round
+      to depart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Come back, cook;—here, hand me those tongs;—now take
+      that bit of steak there, and tell me if you think that steak cooked as it
+      should be? Take it, I say”—holding the tongs towards him—“take
+      it, and taste it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old negro
+      muttered, “Best cooked ’teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Cook,” said Stubb, squaring himself once more; “do you belong to the
+      church?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Passed one once in Cape-Down,” said the old man sullenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town, where
+      you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his
+      beloved fellow-creatures, have you, cook! And yet you come here, and tell
+      me such a dreadful lie as you did just now, eh?” said Stubb. “Where do you
+      expect to go to, cook?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Go to bed berry soon,” he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Avast! heave to! I mean when you die, cook. It’s an awful question. Now
+      what’s your answer?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “When dis old brack man dies,” said the negro slowly, changing his whole
+      air and demeanor, “he hisself won’t go nowhere; but some bressed angel
+      will come and fetch him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch
+      him where?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Up dere,” said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, and
+      keeping it there very solemnly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “So, then, you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when you
+      are dead? But don’t you know the higher you climb, the colder it gets?
+      Main-top, eh?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Didn’t say dat t’all,” said Fleece, again in the sulks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You said up there, didn’t you? and now look yourself, and see where your
+      tongs are pointing. But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by crawling
+      through the lubber’s hole, cook; but, no, no, cook, you don’t get there,
+      except you go the regular way, round by the rigging. It’s a ticklish
+      business, but must be done, or else it’s no go. But none of us are in
+      heaven yet. Drop your tongs, cook, and hear my orders. Do ye hear? Hold
+      your hat in one hand, and clap t’other a’top of your heart, when I’m
+      giving my orders, cook. What! that your heart, there?—that’s your
+      gizzard! Aloft! aloft!—that’s it—now you have it. Hold it
+      there now, and pay attention.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “All ’dention,” said the old black, with both hands placed as desired,
+      vainly wriggling his grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at one
+      and the same time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad, that
+      I have put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that, don’t you?
+      Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for my private
+      table here, the capstan, I’ll tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by
+      overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the
+      other; that done, dish it; d’ye hear? And now to-morrow, cook, when we are
+      cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by to get the tips of his fins;
+      have them put in pickle. As for the ends of the flukes, have them soused,
+      cook. There, now ye may go.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D’ye
+      hear? away you sail, then.—Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go.—Avast
+      heaving again! Whale-balls for breakfast—don’t forget.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Wish, by gor! whale eat him, ’stead of him eat whale. I’m bressed if he
+      ain’t more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself,” muttered the old man,
+      limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0065">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and,
+      like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so
+      outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and
+      philosophy of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale
+      was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large prices there.
+      Also, that in Henry VIIIth’s time, a certain cook of the court obtained a
+      handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be eaten with
+      barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of whale.
+      Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine eating. The meat is
+      made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and being well seasoned
+      and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls. The old monks of
+      Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great porpoise grant from
+      the crown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands
+      be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but when you
+      come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes
+      away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of men like Stubb, nowadays
+      partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious. We all
+      know how they live upon whales, and have rare old vintages of prime old
+      train oil. Zogranda, one of their most famous doctors, recommends strips
+      of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly juicy and nourishing. And
+      this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who long ago were accidentally
+      left in Greenland by a whaling vessel—that these men actually lived
+      for several months on the mouldy scraps of whales which had been left
+      ashore after trying out the blubber. Among the Dutch whalemen these scraps
+      are called “fritters”; which, indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown
+      and crisp, and smelling something like old Amsterdam housewives’
+      dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh. They have such an eatable look that
+      the most self-denying stranger can hardly keep his hands off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his
+      exceeding richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be
+      delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating as the
+      buffalo’s (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid
+      pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is;
+      like the transparent, half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the third
+      month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for butter.
+      Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into some other
+      substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try watches of the night
+      it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their ship-biscuit into the
+      huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many a good supper have I
+      thus made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish.
+      The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump,
+      whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings),
+      they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess, in
+      flavor somewhat resembling calves’ head, which is quite a dish among some
+      epicures; and every one knows that some young bucks among the epicures, by
+      continually dining upon calves’ brains, by and by get to have a little
+      brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a calf’s head from their own
+      heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon discrimination. And that is the
+      reason why a young buck with an intelligent looking calf’s head before
+      him, is somehow one of the saddest sights you can see. The head looks a
+      sort of reproachfully at him, with an “Et tu Brute!” expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous
+      that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that
+      appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned:
+      <i>i.e.</i> that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it
+      too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox
+      was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on
+      his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved
+      it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see
+      the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds.
+      Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who
+      is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that
+      salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it
+      will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of
+      judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest
+      geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy
+      paté-de-foie-gras.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding
+      insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized
+      and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is that handle
+      made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are
+      eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat
+      goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the
+      Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders
+      formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two
+      that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0066">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary
+      toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at
+      least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting him in. For
+      that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very soon completed;
+      and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the common usage is to
+      take in all sail; lash the helm a’lee; and then send every one below to
+      his hammock till daylight, with the reservation that, until that time,
+      anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two for an hour, each
+      couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see that all goes
+      well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not
+      answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the
+      moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch,
+      little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. In most other
+      parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound,
+      their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably diminished, by
+      vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a procedure
+      notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle them into
+      still greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the
+      Pequod’s sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights,
+      to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the
+      whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was
+      concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on
+      deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately
+      suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns,
+      so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two
+      mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant
+      murdering of the sharks,* by striking the keen steel deep into their
+      skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy confusion of
+      their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their
+      mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of
+      the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments,
+      but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails
+      seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely
+      voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with
+      the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or
+      Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after
+      what might be called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted
+      on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor
+      Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his
+      murderous jaw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel; is
+      about the bigness of a man’s spread hand; and in general shape,
+      corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named; only its
+      sides are perfectly flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than the
+      lower. This weapon is always kept as sharp as possible; and when being
+      used is occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a stiff
+      pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Queequeg no care what god made him shark,” said the savage, agonizingly
+      lifting his hand up and down; “wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de
+      god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0067">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio
+      professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was
+      turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would have
+      thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous
+      things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which
+      no single man can possibly lift—this vast bunch of grapes was swayed
+      up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the strongest
+      point anywhere above a ship’s deck. The end of the hawser-like rope
+      winding through these intricacies, was then conducted to the windlass, and
+      the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale; to this
+      block the great blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was
+      attached. And now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb,
+      the mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the body
+      for the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two side-fins.
+      This done, a broad, semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is
+      inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now
+      commence heaving in one dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the
+      entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the
+      nail-heads of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and
+      nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans over to
+      the whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass is answered by a
+      helping heave from the billows; till at last, a swift, startling snap is
+      heard; with a great swash the ship rolls upwards and backwards from the
+      whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it the
+      disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of blubber. Now as the
+      blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it
+      stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by
+      spiralizing it. For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass
+      continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water, and as the
+      blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the
+      “scarf,” simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the
+      mates; and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very
+      act itself, it is all the time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till
+      its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the windlass then cease
+      heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways
+      to and fro as if let down from the sky, and every one present must take
+      good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears and pitch
+      him headlong overboard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon
+      called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices out
+      a considerable hole in the lower part of the swaying mass. Into this hole,
+      the end of the second alternating great tackle is then hooked so as to
+      retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what follows.
+      Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to stand off,
+      once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a few sidelong,
+      desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in twain; so that while
+      the short lower part is still fast, the long upper strip, called a
+      blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering. The heavers
+      forward now resume their song, and while the one tackle is peeling and
+      hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other is slowly slackened
+      away, and down goes the first strip through the main hatchway right
+      beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into this
+      twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long
+      blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents. And
+      thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering
+      simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing, the
+      blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship straining,
+      and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the general
+      friction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0068">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of
+      the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen
+      afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains
+      unchanged; but it is only an opinion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you know
+      what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence of firm,
+      close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from
+      eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature’s
+      skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of
+      fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you cannot
+      raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale’s body but that same
+      blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably
+      dense, what can that be but the skin? True, from the unmarred dead body of
+      the whale, you may scrape off with your hand an infinitely thin,
+      transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds of
+      isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is,
+      previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but
+      becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits, which I
+      use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before; and
+      being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with
+      fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to
+      read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say. But what I
+      am driving at here is this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass
+      substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so
+      much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin,
+      so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of
+      the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a
+      new-born child. But no more of this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as
+      in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one
+      hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or
+      rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths,
+      and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of
+      the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere
+      integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels to
+      the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of
+      the stuff of the whale’s skin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the
+      many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely
+      crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array,
+      something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these
+      marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above
+      mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon
+      the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick,
+      observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford
+      the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is,
+      if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids
+      hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present
+      connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm
+      Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old
+      Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the
+      banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the
+      mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian
+      rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which
+      the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back,
+      and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular
+      linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an
+      irregular, random aspect. I should say that those New England rocks on the
+      sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent scraping
+      contact with vast floating icebergs—I should say, that those rocks
+      must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It also
+      seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile
+      contact with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large,
+      full-grown bulls of the species.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the
+      whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long
+      pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy
+      and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a
+      real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over
+      his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this cosy
+      blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself
+      comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would
+      become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the
+      North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found
+      exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it observed,
+      are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are
+      refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an
+      iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas,
+      like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he
+      dies. How wonderful is it then—except after explanation—that
+      this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it is
+      to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed to his
+      lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall overboard,
+      they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen into
+      the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber. But more
+      surprising is it to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood
+      of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo negro in summer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong
+      individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare
+      virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after
+      the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this
+      world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at
+      the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale,
+      retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections,
+      how few are domed like St. Peter’s! of creatures, how few vast as the
+      whale!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0069">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      “Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the
+      beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it
+      has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it
+      floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the
+      insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of
+      screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the
+      whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the
+      ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks
+      and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours
+      from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the
+      unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea,
+      wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on,
+      till lost in infinite perspectives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There’s a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in
+      pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled. In
+      life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween, if peradventure
+      he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral they most piously do
+      pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest
+      whale is free.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives
+      and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering
+      discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming
+      fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and
+      the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale’s unharming
+      corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log—<i>shoals, rocks,
+      and breakers hereabouts: beware!</i> And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships
+      shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because
+      their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There’s your
+      law of precedents; there’s your utility of traditions; there’s the story
+      of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and
+      now not even hovering in the air! There’s orthodoxy!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror to
+      his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the
+      Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0070">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping the
+      body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the Sperm
+      Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced whale
+      surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck; on
+      the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that very
+      place, is the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that the surgeon must
+      operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening between him and his
+      subject, and that subject almost hidden in a discoloured, rolling, and
+      oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear in mind, too, that under
+      these untoward circumstances he has to cut many feet deep in the flesh;
+      and in that subterraneous manner, without so much as getting one single
+      peep into the ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skilfully steer
+      clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at
+      a critical point hard by its insertion into the skull. Do you not marvel,
+      then, at Stubb’s boast, that he demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm
+      whale?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a cable
+      till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small whale it is
+      hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with a full grown
+      leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm whale’s head embraces nearly
+      one third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a burden as
+      that, even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were as vain a thing
+      as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers’ scales.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pequod’s whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was
+      hoisted against the ship’s side—about half way out of the sea, so
+      that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native element. And
+      there with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason of the
+      enormous downward drag from the lower mast-head, and every yard-arm on
+      that side projecting like a crane over the waves; there, that
+      blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod’s waist like the giant Holofernes’s
+      from the girdle of Judith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went
+      below to their dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but now
+      deserted deck. An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was
+      more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone from
+      his cabin. Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to gaze over
+      the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he took Stubb’s long
+      spade—still remaining there after the whale’s decapitation—and
+      striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended mass, placed its
+      other end crutch-wise under one arm, and so stood leaning over with eyes
+      attentively fixed on this head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so
+      intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou vast
+      and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a
+      beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head,
+      and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast
+      dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has
+      moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies
+      rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this
+      frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there,
+      in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been
+      where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where
+      sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the
+      locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they
+      sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed
+      false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from
+      the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the
+      insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—while
+      swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a
+      righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen
+      enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one
+      syllable is thine!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sail ho!” cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,” cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself,
+      while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. “That lively cry
+      upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man.—Where
+      away?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to
+      us!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and
+      to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how
+      far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom
+      stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0071">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam’s Story.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than the
+      ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By and by, through the glass the stranger’s boats and manned mast-heads
+      proved her a whale-ship. But as she was so far to windward, and shooting
+      by, apparently making a passage to some other ground, the Pequod could not
+      hope to reach her. So the signal was set to see what response would be
+      made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships of
+      the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all which signals
+      being collected in a book with the names of the respective vessels
+      attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale commanders
+      are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at considerable
+      distances and with no small facility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pequod’s signal was at last responded to by the stranger’s setting her
+      own; which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring her
+      yards, she bore down, ranged abeam under the Pequod’s lee, and lowered a
+      boat; it soon drew nigh; but, as the side-ladder was being rigged by
+      Starbuck’s order to accommodate the visiting captain, the stranger in
+      question waved his hand from his boat’s stern in token of that proceeding
+      being entirely unnecessary. It turned out that the Jeroboam had a
+      malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her captain, was fearful of
+      infecting the Pequod’s company. For, though himself and boat’s crew
+      remained untainted, and though his ship was half a rifle-shot off, and an
+      incorruptible sea and air rolling and flowing between; yet conscientiously
+      adhering to the timid quarantine of the land, he peremptorily refused to
+      come into direct contact with the Pequod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this did by no means prevent all communications. Preserving an
+      interval of some few yards between itself and the ship, the Jeroboam’s
+      boat by the occasional use of its oars contrived to keep parallel to the
+      Pequod, as she heavily forged through the sea (for by this time it blew
+      very fresh), with her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by the
+      sudden onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be pushed some way
+      ahead; but would be soon skilfully brought to her proper bearings again.
+      Subject to this, and other the like interruptions now and then, a
+      conversation was sustained between the two parties; but at intervals not
+      without still another interruption of a very different sort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam’s boat, was a man of a singular appearance,
+      even in that wild whaling life where individual notabilities make up all
+      totalities. He was a small, short, youngish man, sprinkled all over his
+      face with freckles, and wearing redundant yellow hair. A long-skirted,
+      cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge enveloped him; the
+      overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A deep,
+      settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had exclaimed—“That’s
+      he! that’s he!—the long-togged scaramouch the Town-Ho’s company told
+      us of!” Stubb here alluded to a strange story told of the Jeroboam, and a
+      certain man among her crew, some time previous when the Pequod spoke the
+      Town-Ho. According to this account and what was subsequently learned, it
+      seemed that the scaramouch in question had gained a wonderful ascendency
+      over almost everybody in the Jeroboam. His story was this:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna
+      Shakers, where he had been a great prophet; in their cracked, secret
+      meetings having several times descended from heaven by the way of a
+      trap-door, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he
+      carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, instead of containing gunpowder,
+      was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A strange, apostolic whim having
+      seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for Nantucket, where, with that cunning
+      peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common-sense exterior, and
+      offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the Jeroboam’s whaling
+      voyage. They engaged him; but straightway upon the ship’s getting out of
+      sight of land, his insanity broke out in a freshet. He announced himself
+      as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded the captain to jump overboard. He
+      published his manifesto, whereby he set himself forth as the deliverer of
+      the isles of the sea and vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching
+      earnestness with which he declared these things;—the dark, daring
+      play of his sleepless, excited imagination, and all the preternatural
+      terrors of real delirium, united to invest this Gabriel in the minds of
+      the majority of the ignorant crew, with an atmosphere of sacredness.
+      Moreover, they were afraid of him. As such a man, however, was not of much
+      practical use in the ship, especially as he refused to work except when he
+      pleased, the incredulous captain would fain have been rid of him; but
+      apprised that that individual’s intention was to land him in the first
+      convenient port, the archangel forthwith opened all his seals and vials—devoting
+      the ship and all hands to unconditional perdition, in case this intention
+      was carried out. So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the
+      crew, that at last in a body they went to the captain and told him if
+      Gabriel was sent from the ship, not a man of them would remain. He was
+      therefore forced to relinquish his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel to
+      be any way maltreated, say or do what he would; so that it came to pass
+      that Gabriel had the complete freedom of the ship. The consequence of all
+      this was, that the archangel cared little or nothing for the captain and
+      mates; and since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a higher hand
+      than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole
+      command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure. The
+      sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before him;
+      in obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal homage,
+      as to a god. Such things may seem incredible; but, however wondrous, they
+      are true. Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking in respect to
+      the measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as his measureless
+      power of deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But it is time to
+      return to the Pequod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I fear not thy epidemic, man,” said Ahab from the bulwarks, to Captain
+      Mayhew, who stood in the boat’s stern; “come on board.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But now Gabriel started to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious! Beware of the horrible
+      plague!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Gabriel! Gabriel!” cried Captain Mayhew; “thou must either—” But
+      that instant a headlong wave shot the boat far ahead, and its seethings
+      drowned all speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hast thou seen the White Whale?” demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted
+      back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible
+      tail!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I tell thee again, Gabriel, that—” But again the boat tore ahead as
+      if dragged by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while a
+      succession of riotous waves rolled by, which by one of those occasional
+      caprices of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted
+      sperm whale’s head jogged about very violently, and Gabriel was seen
+      eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel nature
+      seemed to warrant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story concerning
+      Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions from Gabriel,
+      whenever his name was mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed leagued
+      with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking a
+      whale-ship, her people were reliably apprised of the existence of Moby
+      Dick, and the havoc he had made. Greedily sucking in this intelligence,
+      Gabriel solemnly warned the captain against attacking the White Whale, in
+      case the monster should be seen; in his gibbering insanity, pronouncing
+      the White Whale to be no less a being than the Shaker God incarnated; the
+      Shakers receiving the Bible. But when, some year or two afterwards, Moby
+      Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads, Macey, the chief mate, burned
+      with ardour to encounter him; and the captain himself being not unwilling
+      to let him have the opportunity, despite all the archangel’s denunciations
+      and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in persuading five men to man his boat.
+      With them he pushed off; and, after much weary pulling, and many perilous,
+      unsuccessful onsets, he at last succeeded in getting one iron fast.
+      Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the main-royal mast-head, was tossing one
+      arm in frantic gestures, and hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom to
+      the sacrilegious assailants of his divinity. Now, while Macey, the mate,
+      was standing up in his boat’s bow, and with all the reckless energy of his
+      tribe was venting his wild exclamations upon the whale, and essaying to
+      get a fair chance for his poised lance, lo! a broad white shadow rose from
+      the sea; by its quick, fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out
+      of the bodies of the oarsmen. Next instant, the luckless mate, so full of
+      furious life, was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in
+      his descent, fell into the sea at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a
+      chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman’s head; but the
+      mate for ever sank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the
+      Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any.
+      Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is thus annihilated; oftener
+      the boat’s bow is knocked off, or the thigh-board, in which the headsman
+      stands, is torn from its place and accompanies the body. But strangest of
+      all is the circumstance, that in more instances than one, when the body
+      has been recovered, not a single mark of violence is discernible; the man
+      being stark dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried
+      from the ship. Raising a piercing shriek—“The vial! the vial!”
+       Gabriel called off the terror-stricken crew from the further hunting of
+      the whale. This terrible event clothed the archangel with added influence;
+      because his credulous disciples believed that he had specifically
+      fore-announced it, instead of only making a general prophecy, which any
+      one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one of many marks in the
+      wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror to the ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to him,
+      that the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring whether he intended
+      to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity should offer. To which Ahab
+      answered—“Aye.” Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started to his
+      feet, glaring upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with downward
+      pointed finger—“Think, think of the blasphemer—dead, and down
+      there!—beware of the blasphemer’s end!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, “Captain, I have just
+      bethought me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for one of thy officers,
+      if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships,
+      whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon
+      the mere chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus, most
+      letters never reach their mark; and many are only received after attaining
+      an age of two or three years or more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely tumbled,
+      damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in consequence of
+      being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter, Death himself
+      might well have been the post-boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Can’st not read it?” cried Ahab. “Give it me, man. Aye, aye, it’s but a
+      dim scrawl;—what’s this?” As he was studying it out, Starbuck took a
+      long cutting-spade pole, and with his knife slightly split the end, to
+      insert the letter there, and in that way, hand it to the boat, without its
+      coming any closer to the ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, Ahab holding the letter, muttered, “Mr. Har—yes, Mr. Harry—(a
+      woman’s pinny hand,—the man’s wife, I’ll wager)—Aye—Mr.
+      Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam;—why it’s Macey, and he’s dead!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife,” sighed Mayhew; “but let me
+      have it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Nay, keep it thyself,” cried Gabriel to Ahab; “thou art soon going that
+      way.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Curses throttle thee!” yelled Ahab. “Captain Mayhew, stand by now to
+      receive it”; and taking the fatal missive from Starbuck’s hands, he caught
+      it in the slit of the pole, and reached it over towards the boat. But as
+      he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted from rowing; the boat drifted
+      a little towards the ship’s stern; so that, as if by magic, the letter
+      suddenly ranged along with Gabriel’s eager hand. He clutched it in an
+      instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the letter on it, sent it
+      thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab’s feet. Then Gabriel
+      shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in that
+      manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of
+      the whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to this wild
+      affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0072">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there
+      is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are
+      wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying in
+      any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done
+      everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description of
+      the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. It was mentioned that
+      upon first breaking ground in the whale’s back, the blubber-hook was
+      inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the mates. But
+      how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook get fixed in that
+      hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend Queequeg, whose duty
+      it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the monster’s back for the special
+      purpose referred to. But in very many cases, circumstances require that
+      the harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the whole flensing or
+      stripping operation is concluded. The whale, be it observed, lies almost
+      entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So down
+      there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer
+      flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass
+      revolves like a tread-mill beneath him. On the occasion in question,
+      Queequeg figured in the Highland costume—a shirt and socks—in
+      which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one
+      had a better chance to observe him, as will presently be seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in
+      his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend
+      upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale’s
+      back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long
+      cord. Just so, from the ship’s steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there
+      in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery a monkey-rope,
+      attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round his waist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we
+      proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both
+      ends; fast to Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather
+      one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded;
+      and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor
+      demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his
+      wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my
+      own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous
+      liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that
+      while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that
+      my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that
+      my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or
+      misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death.
+      Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for
+      its even-handed equity never could have so gross an injustice. And yet
+      still further pondering—while I jerked him now and then from between
+      the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam him—still further
+      pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise
+      situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way
+      or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If
+      your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you
+      poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding
+      caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil
+      chances of life. But handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I would,
+      sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor
+      could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management
+      of one end of it.*
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod
+      that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement
+      upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb, in
+      order to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible guarantee
+      for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the whale
+      and the ship—where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant
+      rolling and swaying of both. But this was not the only jamming jeopardy he
+      was exposed to. Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the
+      night, the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent
+      blood which began to flow from the carcass—the rabid creatures
+      swarmed round it like bees in a beehive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside
+      with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were it not that
+      attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise miscellaneously
+      carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a ravenous
+      finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to them.
+      Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which I now and then jerked the
+      poor fellow from too close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed a
+      peculiarly ferocious shark—he was provided with still another
+      protection. Suspended over the side in one of the stages, Tashtego and
+      Daggoo continually flourished over his head a couple of keen whale-spades,
+      wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could reach. This
+      procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very disinterested and benevolent of
+      them. They meant Queequeg’s best happiness, I admit; but in their hasty
+      zeal to befriend him, and from the circumstance that both he and the
+      sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled water, those
+      indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a leg than a
+      tail. But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping there with that
+      great iron hook—poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his Yojo,
+      and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in and
+      then slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea—what matters it,
+      after all? Are you not the precious image of each and all of us men in
+      this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those
+      sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and
+      spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as
+      with blue lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at last climbs up
+      the chains and stands all dripping and involuntarily trembling over the
+      side; the steward advances, and with a benevolent, consolatory glance
+      hands him—what? Some hot Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands him a
+      cup of tepid ginger and water!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ginger? Do I smell ginger?” suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near. “Yes,
+      this must be ginger,” peering into the as yet untasted cup. Then standing
+      as if incredulous for a while, he calmly walked towards the astonished
+      steward slowly saying, “Ginger? ginger? and will you have the goodness to
+      tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of ginger? Ginger! is ginger
+      the sort of fuel you use, Dough-boy, to kindle a fire in this shivering
+      cannibal? Ginger!—what the devil is ginger? Sea-coal? firewood?—lucifer
+      matches?—tinder?—gunpowder?—what the devil is ginger, I
+      say, that you offer this cup to our poor Queequeg here.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business,”
+       he suddenly added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just come from
+      forward. “Will you look at that kannakin, sir: smell of it, if you
+      please.” Then watching the mate’s countenance, he added, “The steward, Mr.
+      Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there,
+      this instant off the whale. Is the steward an apothecary, sir? and may I
+      ask whether this is the sort of bitters by which he blows back the life
+      into a half-drowned man?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I trust not,” said Starbuck, “it is poor stuff enough.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, aye, steward,” cried Stubb, “we’ll teach you to drug a harpooneer;
+      none of your apothecary’s medicine here; you want to poison us, do ye? You
+      have got out insurances on our lives and want to murder us all, and pocket
+      the proceeds, do ye?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It was not me,” cried Dough-Boy, “it was Aunt Charity that brought the
+      ginger on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits, but
+      only this ginger-jub—so she called it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye to the
+      lockers, and get something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr. Starbuck. It
+      is the captain’s orders—grog for the harpooneer on a whale.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Enough,” replied Starbuck, “only don’t hit him again, but—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of
+      that sort; and this fellow’s a weazel. What were you about saying, sir?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Only this: go down with him, and get what thou wantest thyself.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort
+      of tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, and was
+      handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity’s gift, and that was
+      freely given to the waves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0073">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk over Him.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale’s
+      prodigious head hanging to the Pequod’s side. But we must let it continue
+      hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to it. For the
+      present other matters press, and the best we can do now for the head, is
+      to pray heaven the tackles may hold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually drifted
+      into a sea, which, by its occasional patches of yellow brit, gave unusual
+      tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the Leviathan that
+      but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking anywhere near. And
+      though all hands commonly disdained the capture of those inferior
+      creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to cruise for them
+      at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near the Crozetts
+      without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale had been brought
+      alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the announcement was made
+      that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if opportunity offered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two
+      boats, Stubb’s and Flask’s, were detached in pursuit. Pulling further and
+      further away, they at last became almost invisible to the men at the
+      mast-head. But suddenly in the distance, they saw a great heap of
+      tumultuous white water, and soon after news came from aloft that one or
+      both the boats must be fast. An interval passed and the boats were in
+      plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the ship by the
+      towing whale. So close did the monster come to the hull, that at first it
+      seemed as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a maelstrom,
+      within three rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from view, as if
+      diving under the keel. “Cut, cut!” was the cry from the ship to the boats,
+      which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being brought with a deadly
+      dash against the vessel’s side. But having plenty of line yet in the tubs,
+      and the whale not sounding very rapidly, they paid out abundance of rope,
+      and at the same time pulled with all their might so as to get ahead of the
+      ship. For a few minutes the struggle was intensely critical; for while
+      they still slacked out the tightened line in one direction, and still
+      plied their oars in another, the contending strain threatened to take them
+      under. But it was only a few feet advance they sought to gain. And they
+      stuck to it till they did gain it; when instantly, a swift tremor was felt
+      running like lightning along the keel, as the strained line, scraping
+      beneath the ship, suddenly rose to view under her bows, snapping and
+      quivering; and so flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like
+      bits of broken glass on the water, while the whale beyond also rose to
+      sight, and once more the boats were free to fly. But the fagged whale
+      abated his speed, and blindly altering his course, went round the stern of
+      the ship towing the two boats after him, so that they performed a complete
+      circuit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close flanking
+      him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for lance; and thus
+      round and round the Pequod the battle went, while the multitudes of sharks
+      that had before swum round the Sperm Whale’s body, rushed to the fresh
+      blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking at every new gash, as the eager
+      Israelites did at the new bursting fountains that poured from the smitten
+      rock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he
+      turned upon his back a corpse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes,
+      and in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some
+      conversation ensued between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard,” said Stubb,
+      not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so ignoble a
+      leviathan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Wants with it?” said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat’s bow,
+      “did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale’s head
+      hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right Whale’s on the
+      larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never afterwards
+      capsize?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why not?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know, but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying so, and
+      he seems to know all about ships’ charms. But I sometimes think he’ll
+      charm the ship to no good at last. I don’t half like that chap, Stubb. Did
+      you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of carved into a snake’s
+      head, Stubb?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a
+      dark night, and he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one by; look down
+      there, Flask”—pointing into the sea with a peculiar motion of both
+      hands—“Aye, will I! Flask, I take that Fedallah to be the devil in
+      disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about his having been
+      stowed away on board ship? He’s the devil, I say. The reason why you don’t
+      see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries it coiled
+      away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now that I think of it, he’s
+      always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his boots.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He sleeps in his boots, don’t he? He hasn’t got any hammock; but I’ve
+      seen him lay of nights in a coil of rigging.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No doubt, and it’s because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye
+      see, in the eye of the rigging.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’s the old man have so much to do with him for?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Striking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Bargain?—about what?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and the
+      devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away his
+      silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then he’ll
+      surrender Moby Dick.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know, Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked one, I
+      tell ye. Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the old flag-ship
+      once, switching his tail about devilish easy and gentlemanlike, and
+      inquiring if the old governor was at home. Well, he was at home, and asked
+      the devil what he wanted. The devil, switching his hoofs, up and says, ‘I
+      want John.’ ‘What for?’ says the old governor. ‘What business is that of
+      yours,’ says the devil, getting mad,—‘I want to use him.’ ‘Take
+      him,’ says the governor—and by the Lord, Flask, if the devil didn’t
+      give John the Asiatic cholera before he got through with him, I’ll eat
+      this whale in one mouthful. But look sharp—ain’t you all ready
+      there? Well, then, pull ahead, and let’s get the whale alongside.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I think I remember some such story as you were telling,” said Flask, when
+      at last the two boats were slowly advancing with their burden towards the
+      ship, “but I can’t remember where.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Three Spaniards? Adventures of those three bloody-minded soldadoes? Did ye
+      read it there, Flask? I guess ye did?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No: never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me, Stubb,
+      do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was the same
+      you say is now on board the Pequod?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn’t the devil live for
+      ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any parson
+      a wearing mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a latch-key to get
+      into the admiral’s cabin, don’t you suppose he can crawl into a porthole?
+      Tell me that, Mr. Flask?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do you see that mainmast there?” pointing to the ship; “well, that’s the
+      figure one; now take all the hoops in the Pequod’s hold, and string along
+      in a row with that mast, for oughts, do you see; well, that wouldn’t begin
+      to be Fedallah’s age. Nor all the coopers in creation couldn’t show hoops
+      enough to make oughts enough.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But see here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that you
+      meant to give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a good chance. Now, if he’s
+      so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if he is going to live for
+      ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard—tell me that?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Give him a good ducking, anyhow.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But he’d crawl back.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Duck him again; and keep ducking him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though—yes,
+      and drown you—what then?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I should like to see him try it; I’d give him such a pair of black eyes
+      that he wouldn’t dare to show his face in the admiral’s cabin again for a
+      long while, let alone down in the orlop there, where he lives, and
+      hereabouts on the upper decks where he sneaks so much. Damn the devil,
+      Flask; so you suppose I’m afraid of the devil? Who’s afraid of him, except
+      the old governor who daresn’t catch him and put him in double-darbies, as
+      he deserves, but lets him go about kidnapping people; aye, and signed a
+      bond with him, that all the people the devil kidnapped, he’d roast for
+      him? There’s a governor!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do I suppose it? You’ll know it before long, Flask. But I am going now to
+      keep a sharp look-out on him; and if I see anything very suspicious going
+      on, I’ll just take him by the nape of his neck, and say—Look here,
+      Beelzebub, you don’t do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord I’ll
+      make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give
+      him such a wrenching and heaving, that his tail will come short off at the
+      stump—do you see; and then, I rather guess when he finds himself
+      docked in that queer fashion, he’ll sneak off without the poor
+      satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And what will you do with the tail, Stubb?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do with it? Sell it for an ox whip when we get home;—what else?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now, do you mean what you say, and have been saying all along, Stubb?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Mean or not mean, here we are at the ship.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where
+      fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for securing him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Didn’t I tell you so?” said Flask; “yes, you’ll soon see this right
+      whale’s head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti’s.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In good time, Flask’s saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply
+      leaned over towards the sperm whale’s head, now, by the counterpoise of
+      both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may
+      well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over
+      that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back
+      again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming
+      boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then
+      you will float light and right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the
+      ship, the same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the case
+      of a sperm whale; only, in the latter instance, the head is cut off whole,
+      but in the former the lips and tongue are separately removed and hoisted
+      on deck, with all the well known black bone attached to what is called the
+      crown-piece. But nothing like this, in the present case, had been done.
+      The carcases of both whales had dropped astern; and the head-laden ship
+      not a little resembled a mule carrying a pair of overburdening panniers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale’s head, and ever and
+      anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own hand.
+      And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his shadow; while,
+      if the Parsee’s shadow was there at all it seemed only to blend with, and
+      lengthen Ahab’s. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish speculations were
+      bandied among them, concerning all these passing things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0074">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join
+      them, and lay together our own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right
+      Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly
+      hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all
+      the known varieties of the whale. As the external difference between them
+      is mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this moment
+      hanging from the Pequod’s side; and as we may freely go from one to the
+      other, by merely stepping across the deck:—where, I should like to
+      know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than
+      here?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these
+      heads. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain
+      mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale’s which the Right Whale’s sadly
+      lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale’s head. As you behold
+      it, you involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point of
+      pervading dignity. In the present instance, too, this dignity is
+      heightened by the pepper and salt colour of his head at the summit, giving
+      token of advanced age and large experience. In short, he is what the
+      fishermen technically call a “grey-headed whale.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads—namely, the
+      two most important organs, the eye and the ear. Far back on the side of
+      the head, and low down, near the angle of either whale’s jaw, if you
+      narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, which you would
+      fancy to be a young colt’s eye; so out of all proportion is it to the
+      magnitude of the head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale’s eyes, it is plain
+      that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he
+      can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale’s eyes
+      corresponds to that of a man’s ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how
+      it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears.
+      You would find that you could only command some thirty degrees of vision
+      in advance of the straight side-line of sight; and about thirty more
+      behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking straight towards you, with
+      dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not be able to see him, any more
+      than if he were stealing upon you from behind. In a word, you would have
+      two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side
+      fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man—what, indeed,
+      but his eyes?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes
+      are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to
+      produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the
+      whale’s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid
+      head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes
+      in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which
+      each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one
+      distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side;
+      while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man
+      may, in effect, be said to look out on the world from a sentry-box with
+      two joined sashes for his window. But with the whale, these two sashes are
+      separately inserted, making two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the
+      view. This peculiarity of the whale’s eyes is a thing always to be borne
+      in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in some
+      subsequent scenes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this
+      visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a
+      hint. So long as a man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is
+      involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever
+      objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one’s experience will teach him,
+      that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one
+      glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to
+      examine any two things—however large or however small—at one
+      and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side and
+      touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two objects, and
+      surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to see one
+      of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other
+      will be utterly excluded from your contemporary consciousness. How is it,
+      then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must
+      simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive,
+      combining, and subtle than man’s, that he can at the same moment of time
+      attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and
+      the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as
+      marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go
+      through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor,
+      strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the
+      extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset
+      by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so
+      common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the
+      helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically
+      opposite powers of vision must involve them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an
+      entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two heads for
+      hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf
+      whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so
+      wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With
+      respect to their ears, this important difference is to be observed between
+      the sperm whale and the right. While the ear of the former has an external
+      opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered over with a
+      membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from without.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world
+      through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is
+      smaller than a hare’s? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of
+      Herschel’s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of
+      cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of
+      hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind?
+      Subtilize it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant
+      over the sperm whale’s head, that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending by
+      a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not that
+      the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we might
+      descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But let us
+      hold on here by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What a really
+      beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling, lined, or
+      rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems like
+      the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with the hinge at one end,
+      instead of one side. If you pry it up, so as to get it overhead, and
+      expose its rows of teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and such, alas!
+      it proves to many a poor wight in the fishery, upon whom these spikes fall
+      with impaling force. But far more terrible is it to behold, when fathoms
+      down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there suspended, with
+      his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging straight down at
+      right-angles with his body, for all the world like a ship’s jib-boom. This
+      whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps;
+      hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw have relaxed,
+      leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach to all his
+      tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In most cases this lower jaw—being easily unhinged by a practised
+      artist—is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of
+      extracting the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white
+      whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles,
+      including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an
+      anchor; and when the proper time comes—some few days after the other
+      work—Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished
+      dentists, are set to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg
+      lances the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle
+      being rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag
+      stumps of old oaks out of wild wood lands. There are generally forty-two
+      teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled
+      after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and
+      piled away like joists for building houses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0075">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale’s
+      head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to a
+      Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded);
+      so, at a broad view, the Right Whale’s head bears a rather inelegant
+      resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an old
+      Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker’s last. And in this
+      same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale, with the swarming
+      brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she and all her progeny.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different
+      aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit and
+      look at these two F-shaped spoutholes, you would take the whole head for
+      an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in its
+      sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange,
+      crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass—this green,
+      barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the “crown,” and the Southern
+      fishers the “bonnet” of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes solely on this,
+      you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak, with a bird’s nest
+      in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those live crabs that nestle
+      here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost sure to occur to you;
+      unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the technical term “crown”
+       also bestowed upon it; in which case you will take great interest in
+      thinking how this mighty monster is actually a diademed king of the sea,
+      whose green crown has been put together for him in this marvellous manner.
+      But if this whale be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to grace a
+      diadem. Look at that hanging lower lip! what a huge sulk and pout is
+      there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter’s measurement, about twenty feet long
+      and five feet deep; a sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons
+      of oil and more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The
+      fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important
+      interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the
+      beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide
+      into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be
+      the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah
+      went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp
+      angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed,
+      arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical,
+      scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which
+      depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those
+      Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned. The edges
+      of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through which the Right
+      Whale strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains the small
+      fish, when openmouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding time.
+      In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order, there
+      are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some
+      whalemen calculate the creature’s age, as the age of an oak by its
+      circular rings. Though the certainty of this criterion is far from
+      demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical probability. At any rate,
+      if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater age to the Right Whale than
+      at first glance will seem reasonable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies
+      concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous
+      “whiskers” inside of the whale’s mouth;* another, “hogs’ bristles”; a
+      third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language:
+      “There are about two hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his
+      upper <i>chop</i>, which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      *This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or
+      rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper
+      part of the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these tufts impart a
+      rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn countenance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As every one knows, these same “hogs’ bristles,” “fins,” “whiskers,”
+       “blinds,” or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and
+      other stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the demand has long
+      been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne’s time that the bone was in its
+      glory, the farthingale being then all the fashion. And as those ancient
+      dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the whale, as you may say;
+      even so, in a shower, with the like thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly
+      under the same jaws for protection; the umbrella being a tent spread over
+      the same bone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing
+      in the Right Whale’s mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all these
+      colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think you
+      were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand
+      pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest Turkey—the
+      tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the mouth. It is very
+      fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting it on deck. This
+      particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I should say it was a
+      six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that amount of oil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started with—that
+      the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely different heads.
+      To sum up, then: in the Right Whale’s there is no great well of sperm; no
+      ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a lower jaw, like the
+      Sperm Whale’s. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any of those blinds of
+      bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of a tongue. Again, the
+      Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie
+      together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will
+      not be very long in following.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale’s there? It is the same he
+      died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem now faded
+      away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born
+      of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark the other head’s
+      expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the
+      vessel’s side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head
+      seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death? This
+      Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who
+      might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0076">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale’s head, I would have you, as
+      a sensible physiologist, simply—particularly remark its front
+      aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I would have you investigate
+      it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some unexaggerated,
+      intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may be lodged there.
+      Here is a vital point; for you must either satisfactorily settle this
+      matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of the most
+      appalling, but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be found in
+      all recorded history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale, the
+      front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the water;
+      you observe that the lower part of that front slopes considerably
+      backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which
+      receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely
+      under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as though your own mouth
+      were entirely under your chin. Moreover you observe that the whale has no
+      external nose; and that what nose he has—his spout hole—is on
+      the top of his head; you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides
+      of his head, nearly one third of his entire length from the front.
+      Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm Whale’s
+      head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender prominence of
+      any sort whatsoever. Furthermore, you are now to consider that only in the
+      extreme, lower, backward sloping part of the front of the head, is there
+      the slightest vestige of bone; and not till you get near twenty feet from
+      the forehead do you come to the full cranial development. So that this
+      whole enormous boneless mass is as one wad. Finally, though, as will soon
+      be revealed, its contents partly comprise the most delicate oil; yet, you
+      are now to be apprised of the nature of the substance which so impregnably
+      invests all that apparent effeminacy. In some previous place I have
+      described to you how the blubber wraps the body of the whale, as the rind
+      wraps an orange. Just so with the head; but with this difference: about
+      the head this envelope, though not so thick, is of a boneless toughness,
+      inestimable by any man who has not handled it. The severest pointed
+      harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by the strongest human arm, impotently
+      rebounds from it. It is as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were
+      paved with horses’ hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded Indiamen
+      chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do the
+      sailors do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming
+      contact, any merely hard substance, like iron or wood. No, they hold there
+      a large, round wad of tow and cork, enveloped in the thickest and toughest
+      of ox-hide. That bravely and uninjured takes the jam which would have
+      snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron crow-bars. By itself this
+      sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive at. But supplementary to
+      this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that as ordinary fish possess
+      what is called a swimming bladder in them, capable, at will, of distension
+      or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale, as far as I know, has no such
+      provision in him; considering, too, the otherwise inexplicable manner in
+      which he now depresses his head altogether beneath the surface, and anon
+      swims with it high elevated out of the water; considering the unobstructed
+      elasticity of its envelope; considering the unique interior of his head;
+      it has hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical
+      lung-celled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and
+      unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as to be susceptible to
+      atmospheric distension and contraction. If this be so, fancy the
+      irresistibleness of that might, to which the most impalpable and
+      destructive of all elements contributes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable wall,
+      and this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind it all a mass of
+      tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood is—by
+      the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest insect. So
+      that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the specialities and
+      concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this expansive monster;
+      when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable braining feats; I
+      trust you will have renounced all ignorant incredulity, and be ready to
+      abide by this; that though the Sperm Whale stove a passage through the
+      Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific, you would not
+      elevate one hair of your eye-brow. For unless you own the whale, you are
+      but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing
+      for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the
+      provincials then? What befell the weakling youth lifting the dread
+      goddess’s veil at Lais?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0077">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Now comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must
+      know something of the curious internal structure of the thing operated
+      upon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Regarding the Sperm Whale’s head as a solid oblong, you may, on an
+      inclined plane, sideways divide it into two quoins,* whereof the lower is
+      the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an
+      unctuous mass wholly free from bones; its broad forward end forming the
+      expanded vertical apparent forehead of the whale. At the middle of the
+      forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin, and then you have two
+      almost equal parts, which before were naturally divided by an internal
+      wall of a thick tendinous substance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical
+      mathematics. I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a
+      solid which differs from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the
+      steep inclination of one side, instead of the mutual tapering of both
+      sides.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of
+      oil, formed by the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand infiltrated
+      cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole extent. The
+      upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh
+      Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as that famous great tierce is mystically
+      carved in front, so the whale’s vast plaited forehead forms innumerable
+      strange devices for the emblematical adornment of his wondrous tun.
+      Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished with the most
+      excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun of the whale
+      contains by far the most precious of all his oily vintages; namely, the
+      highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid, and odoriferous
+      state. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed in any other part of
+      the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly fluid, yet, upon
+      exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to concrete; sending
+      forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the first thin delicate ice is
+      just forming in water. A large whale’s case generally yields about five
+      hundred gallons of sperm, though from unavoidable circumstances,
+      considerable of it is spilled, leaks, and dribbles away, or is otherwise
+      irrevocably lost in the ticklish business of securing what you can.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know not with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun was
+      coated within, but in superlative richness that coating could not possibly
+      have compared with the silken pearl-coloured membrane, like the lining of
+      a fine pelisse, forming the inner surface of the Sperm Whale’s case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale
+      embraces the entire length of the entire top of the head; and since—as
+      has been elsewhere set forth—the head embraces one third of the
+      whole length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty feet
+      for a good sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for the depth
+      of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a ship’s
+      side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As in decapitating the whale, the operator’s instrument is brought close
+      to the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti
+      magazine; he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest a careless,
+      untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its
+      invaluable contents. It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which
+      is at last elevated out of the water, and retained in that position by the
+      enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on one side, make
+      quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and—in
+      this particular instance—almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm
+      Whale’s great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0078">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect
+      posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the part
+      where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He has carried with him a
+      light tackle called a whip, consisting of only two parts, travelling
+      through a single-sheaved block. Securing this block, so that it hangs down
+      from the yard-arm, he swings one end of the rope, till it is caught and
+      firmly held by a hand on deck. Then, hand-over-hand, down the other part,
+      the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he lands on the summit
+      of the head. There—still high elevated above the rest of the
+      company, to whom he vivaciously cries—he seems some Turkish Muezzin
+      calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A
+      short-handled sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches for
+      the proper place to begin breaking into the Tun. In this business he
+      proceeds very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house,
+      sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time this
+      cautious search is over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like a
+      well-bucket, has been attached to one end of the whip; while the other
+      end, being stretched across the deck, is there held by two or three alert
+      hands. These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of the Indian, to whom
+      another person has reached up a very long pole. Inserting this pole into
+      the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket into the Tun, till it
+      entirely disappears; then giving the word to the seamen at the whip, up
+      comes the bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid’s pail of new milk.
+      Carefully lowered from its height, the full-freighted vessel is caught by
+      an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a large tub. Then remounting
+      aloft, it again goes through the same round until the deep cistern will
+      yield no more. Towards the end, Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder
+      and harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of
+      the pole have gone down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way;
+      several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at once a
+      queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild Indian,
+      was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed hold
+      on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the place
+      where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil One
+      himself would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular
+      reasons; how it was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden, as
+      the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up—my God! poor
+      Tashtego—like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well,
+      dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a
+      horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Man overboard!” cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation first
+      came to his senses. “Swing the bucket this way!” and putting one foot into
+      it, so as the better to secure his slippery hand-hold on the whip itself,
+      the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head, almost before
+      Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. Meantime, there was a
+      terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before lifeless head
+      throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea, as if that moment
+      seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only the poor Indian
+      unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous depth to which he
+      had sunk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearing the
+      whip—which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles—a
+      sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror of all, one
+      of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with a vast
+      vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship reeled and
+      shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The one remaining hook, upon which the
+      entire strain now depended, seemed every instant to be on the point of
+      giving way; an event still more likely from the violent motions of the
+      head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Come down, come down!” yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one hand
+      holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should drop, he would
+      still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul line, rammed
+      down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the buried
+      harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “In heaven’s name, man,” cried Stubb, “are you ramming home a cartridge
+      there?—Avast! How will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket
+      on top of his head? Avast, will ye!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Stand clear of the tackle!” cried a voice like the bursting of a rocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass dropped
+      into the sea, like Niagara’s Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the suddenly
+      relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering copper; and
+      all caught their breath, as half swinging—now over the sailors’
+      heads, and now over the water—Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray,
+      was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor,
+      buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea!
+      But hardly had the blinding vapor cleared away, when a naked figure with
+      a boarding-sword in his hand, was for one swift moment seen hovering over
+      the bulwarks. The next, a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had
+      dived to the rescue. One packed rush was made to the side, and every eye
+      counted every ripple, as moment followed moment, and no sign of either the
+      sinker or the diver could be seen. Some hands now jumped into a boat
+      alongside, and pushed a little off from the ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ha! ha!” cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging perch
+      overhead; and looking further off from the side, we saw an arm thrust
+      upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as an arm thrust
+      forth from the grass over a grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Both! both!—it is both!”—cried Daggoo again with a joyful
+      shout; and soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one
+      hand, and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian. Drawn into
+      the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego was
+      long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the
+      slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges
+      near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then dropping his
+      sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out
+      poor Tash by the head. He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a
+      leg was presented; but well knowing that that was not as it ought to be,
+      and might occasion great trouble;—he had thrust back the leg, and by
+      a dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon the Indian; so
+      that with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way—head
+      foremost. As for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could be
+      expected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg,
+      the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully
+      accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently
+      hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten.
+      Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing,
+      riding and rowing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header’s will be sure to seem
+      incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have either seen
+      or heard of some one’s falling into a cistern ashore; an accident which
+      not seldom happens, and with much less reason too than the Indian’s,
+      considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb of the Sperm Whale’s
+      well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought
+      the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and
+      most corky part about him; and yet thou makest it sink in an element of a
+      far greater specific gravity than itself. We have thee there. Not at all,
+      but I have ye; for at the time poor Tash fell in, the case had been nearly
+      emptied of its lighter contents, leaving little but the dense tendinous
+      wall of the well—a double welded, hammered substance, as I have
+      before said, much heavier than the sea water, and a lump of which sinks in
+      it like lead almost. But the tendency to rapid sinking in this substance
+      was in the present instance materially counteracted by the other parts of
+      the head remaining undetached from it, so that it sank very slowly and
+      deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair chance for performing his
+      agile obstetrics on the run, as you may say. Yes, it was a running
+      delivery, so it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious
+      perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant
+      spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and
+      sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be
+      recalled—the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking
+      honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it,
+      that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How
+      many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly
+      perished there?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0079">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this
+      Leviathan; this is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as
+      yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would seem almost as hopeful as for
+      Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar, or for
+      Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated the Dome of the Pantheon.
+      Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater not only treats of the various
+      faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces of horses, birds,
+      serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the modifications of
+      expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and his disciple Spurzheim
+      failed to throw out some hints touching the phrenological characteristics
+      of other beings than man. Therefore, though I am but ill qualified for a
+      pioneer, in the application of these two semi-sciences to the whale, I
+      will do my endeavor. I try all things; I achieve what I can.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature. He
+      has no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most conspicuous
+      of the features; and since it perhaps most modifies and finally controls
+      their combined expression; hence it would seem that its entire absence, as
+      an external appendage, must very largely affect the countenance of the
+      whale. For as in landscape gardening, a spire, cupola, monument, or tower
+      of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable to the completion of the
+      scene; so no face can be physiognomically in keeping without the elevated
+      open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the nose from Phidias’s marble Jove,
+      and what a sorry remainder! Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty a
+      magnitude, all his proportions are so stately, that the same deficiency
+      which in the sculptured Jove were hideous, in him is no blemish at all.
+      Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have been
+      impertinent. As on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast head
+      in your jolly-boat, your noble conceptions of him are never insulted by
+      the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which
+      so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest
+      royal beadle on his throne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to be
+      had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This aspect
+      is sublime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the
+      morning. In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the bull has a
+      touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon up mountain defiles, the
+      elephant’s brow is majestic. Human or animal, the mystical brow is as that
+      great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to their decrees. It
+      signifies—“God: done this day by my hand.” But in most creatures,
+      nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip of alpine land
+      lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which like Shakespeare’s
+      or Melancthon’s rise so high, and descend so low, that the eyes themselves
+      seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and all above them in the
+      forehead’s wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered thoughts descending
+      there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the snow prints of the deer.
+      But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity
+      inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that
+      full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly
+      than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one
+      point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes,
+      ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad
+      firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the
+      doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous
+      brow diminish; though that way viewed its grandeur does not domineer upon
+      you so. In profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic
+      depression in the forehead’s middle, which, in man, is Lavater’s mark of
+      genius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a
+      book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing
+      nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical
+      silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been known to
+      the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian
+      thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is
+      tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or at least it is so
+      exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any
+      highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the
+      merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now
+      egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to
+      Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no
+      Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face.
+      Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If
+      then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the
+      simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how
+      may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s
+      brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0080">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 80. The Nut.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his
+      brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet in
+      length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as the
+      side of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level base.
+      But in life—as we have elsewhere seen—this inclined plane is
+      angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent
+      mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end the skull forms a crater to
+      bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of this crater—in
+      another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many in depth—reposes
+      the mere handful of this monster’s brain. The brain is at least twenty
+      feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden away behind its vast
+      outworks, like the innermost citadel within the amplified fortifications
+      of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it secreted in him, that I have
+      known some whalemen who peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale has any
+      other brain than that palpable semblance of one formed by the cubic-yards
+      of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange folds, courses, and convolutions,
+      to their apprehensions, it seems more in keeping with the idea of his
+      general might to regard that mystic part of him as the seat of his
+      intelligence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in the
+      creature’s living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his true
+      brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The whale,
+      like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view of
+      its rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its resemblance
+      to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from the same point
+      of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down to the human
+      magnitude) among a plate of men’s skulls, and you would involuntarily
+      confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on one part of its
+      summit, in phrenological phrase you would say—This man had no
+      self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations, considered along
+      with the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and power, you can best
+      form to yourself the truest, though not the most exhilarating conception
+      of what the most exalted potency is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale’s proper brain, you
+      deem it incapable of being adequately charted, then I have another idea
+      for you. If you attentively regard almost any quadruped’s spine, you will
+      be struck with the resemblance of its vertebræ to a strung necklace of
+      dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper. It
+      is a German conceit, that the vertebræ are absolutely undeveloped skulls.
+      But the curious external resemblance, I take it the Germans were not the
+      first men to perceive. A foreign friend once pointed it out to me, in the
+      skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with the vertebræ of which he was
+      inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I
+      consider that the phrenologists have omitted an important thing in not
+      pushing their investigations from the cerebellum through the spinal canal.
+      For I believe that much of a man’s character will be found betokened in
+      his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you
+      are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I
+      rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I
+      fling half out to the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial
+      cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra
+      the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches across, being eight
+      in height, and of a triangular figure with the base downwards. As it
+      passes through the remaining vertebræ the canal tapers in size, but for a
+      considerable distance remains of large capacity. Now, of course, this
+      canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous substance—the
+      spinal cord—as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain.
+      And what is still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain’s
+      cavity, the spinal cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost equal to
+      that of the brain. Under all these circumstances, would it be unreasonable
+      to survey and map out the whale’s spine phrenologically? For, viewed in
+      this light, the wonderful comparative smallness of his brain proper is
+      more than compensated by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal
+      cord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But leaving this hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I would
+      merely assume the spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the Sperm
+      Whale’s hump. This august hump, if I mistake not, rises over one of the
+      larger vertebræ, and is, therefore, in some sort, the outer convex mould
+      of it. From its relative situation then, I should call this high hump the
+      organ of firmness or indomitableness in the Sperm Whale. And that the
+      great monster is indomitable, you will yet have reason to know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0081">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The predestinated day arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick
+      De Deer, master, of Bremen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and
+      Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very wide intervals
+      of latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with their flag in
+      the Pacific.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her respects.
+      While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and dropping a
+      boat, her captain was impelled towards us, impatiently standing in the
+      bows instead of the stern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What has he in his hand there?” cried Starbuck, pointing to something
+      wavingly held by the German. “Impossible!—a lamp-feeder!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Not that,” said Stubb, “no, no, it’s a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he’s
+      coming off to make us our coffee, is the Yarman; don’t you see that big
+      tin can there alongside of him?—that’s his boiling water. Oh! he’s
+      all right, is the Yarman.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Go along with you,” cried Flask, “it’s a lamp-feeder and an oil-can. He’s
+      out of oil, and has come a-begging.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      However curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the
+      whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old
+      proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing
+      really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer did
+      indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all heeding
+      what he had in his hand; but in his broken lingo, the German soon evinced
+      his complete ignorance of the White Whale; immediately turning the
+      conversation to his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some remarks touching
+      his having to turn into his hammock at night in profound darkness—his
+      last drop of Bremen oil being gone, and not a single flying-fish yet
+      captured to supply the deficiency; concluding by hinting that his ship was
+      indeed what in the Fishery is technically called a <i>clean</i> one (that is, an
+      empty one), well deserving the name of Jungfrau or the Virgin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his
+      ship’s side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the
+      mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick, that
+      without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed round
+      his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, the game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German boats
+      that soon followed him, had considerably the start of the Pequod’s keels.
+      There were eight whales, an average pod. Aware of their danger, they were
+      going all abreast with great speed straight before the wind, rubbing their
+      flanks as closely as so many spans of horses in harness. They left a
+      great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling a great wide parchment
+      upon the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge, humped
+      old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as by the
+      unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted with the
+      jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this whale belonged to the pod
+      in advance, seemed questionable; for it is not customary for such
+      venerable leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck to their
+      wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him, because the
+      white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell
+      formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout was short, slow, and
+      laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself
+      in torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which
+      seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the waters
+      behind him to upbubble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who’s got some paregoric?” said Stubb, “he has the stomach-ache, I’m
+      afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache! Adverse winds
+      are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It’s the first foul wind I ever
+      knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so before? it must
+      be, he’s lost his tiller.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck load
+      of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her way; so
+      did this old whale heave his aged bulk, and now and then partly turning
+      over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious wake in the
+      unnatural stump of his starboard fin. Whether he had lost that fin in
+      battle, or had been born without it, it were hard to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Only wait a bit, old chap, and I’ll give ye a sling for that wounded
+      arm,” cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Mind he don’t sling thee with it,” cried Starbuck. “Give way, or the
+      German will have him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this one
+      fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most valuable
+      whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were going with
+      such great velocity, moreover, as almost to defy pursuit for the time. At
+      this juncture the Pequod’s keels had shot by the three German boats last
+      lowered; but from the great start he had had, Derick’s boat still led the
+      chase, though every moment neared by his foreign rivals. The only thing
+      they feared, was, that from being already so nigh to his mark, he would be
+      enabled to dart his iron before they could completely overtake and pass
+      him. As for Derick, he seemed quite confident that this would be the case,
+      and occasionally with a deriding gesture shook his lamp-feeder at the
+      other boats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The ungracious and ungrateful dog!” cried Starbuck; “he mocks and dares
+      me with the very poor-box I filled for him not five minutes ago!”—then
+      in his old intense whisper—“Give way, greyhounds! Dog to it!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I tell ye what it is, men”—cried Stubb to his crew—“it’s
+      against my religion to get mad; but I’d like to eat that villainous Yarman—Pull—won’t
+      ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do ye love brandy? A hogshead
+      of brandy, then, to the best man. Come, why don’t some of ye burst a
+      blood-vessel? Who’s that been dropping an anchor overboard—we don’t
+      budge an inch—we’re becalmed. Halloo, here’s grass growing in the
+      boat’s bottom—and by the Lord, the mast there’s budding. This won’t
+      do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long of it is, men, will ye
+      spit fire or not?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh! see the suds he makes!” cried Flask, dancing up and down—“What
+      a hump—Oh, <i>do</i> pile on the beef—lays like a log! Oh! my lads,
+      <i>do</i> spring—slap-jacks and quahogs for supper, you know, my lads—baked
+      clams and muffins—oh, <i>do</i>, <i>do</i>, spring,—he’s a hundred barreller—don’t
+      lose him now—don’t oh, <i>don’t!</i>—see that Yarman—Oh, won’t
+      ye pull for your duff, my lads—such a sog! such a sogger! Don’t ye
+      love sperm? There goes three thousand dollars, men!—a bank!—a
+      whole bank! The bank of England!—Oh, <i>do</i>, <i>do</i>, <i>do!</i>—What’s that
+      Yarman about now?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder at the
+      advancing boats, and also his oil-can; perhaps with the double view of
+      retarding his rivals’ way, and at the same time economically accelerating
+      his own by the momentary impetus of the backward toss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The unmannerly Dutch dogger!” cried Stubb. “Pull now, men, like fifty
+      thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils. What d’ye say,
+      Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in two-and-twenty pieces for
+      the honor of old Gayhead? What d’ye say?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I say, pull like god-dam,”—cried the Indian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the Pequod’s
+      three boats now began ranging almost abreast; and, so disposed,
+      momentarily neared him. In that fine, loose, chivalrous attitude of the
+      headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three mates stood up proudly,
+      occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating cry of, “There
+      she slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash breeze! Down with the Yarman!
+      Sail over him!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But so decided an original start had Derick had, that spite of all their
+      gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this race, had not a
+      righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught the blade of
+      his midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving to free his
+      white-ash, and while, in consequence, Derick’s boat was nigh to capsizing,
+      and he thundering away at his men in a mighty rage;—that was a good
+      time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a shout, they took a mortal
+      start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German’s quarter. An
+      instant more, and all four boats were diagonically in the whale’s
+      immediate wake, while stretching from them, on both sides, was the foaming
+      swell that he made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was now
+      going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual tormented
+      jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of fright. Now to
+      this hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight, and still at
+      every billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the sea, or sideways
+      rolled towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I seen a bird with
+      clipped wing making affrighted broken circles in the air, vainly striving
+      to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird has a voice, and with
+      plaintive cries will make known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb
+      brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted in him; he had no voice,
+      save that choking respiration through his spiracle, and this made the
+      sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still, in his amazing bulk,
+      portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to appal the
+      stoutest man who so pitied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod’s boats
+      the advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick chose to
+      hazard what to him must have seemed a most unusually long dart, ere the
+      last chance would for ever escape.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all three
+      tigers—Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo—instinctively sprang to
+      their feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their
+      barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their three
+      Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapors of foam and
+      white-fire! The three boats, in the first fury of the whale’s headlong
+      rush, bumped the German’s aside with such force, that both Derick and his
+      baffled harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the three flying
+      keels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t be afraid, my butter-boxes,” cried Stubb, casting a passing glance
+      upon them as he shot by; “ye’ll be picked up presently—all right—I
+      saw some sharks astern—St. Bernard’s dogs, you know—relieve
+      distressed travellers. Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. Every keel a
+      sunbeam! Hurrah!—Here we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a
+      mad cougar! This puts me in mind of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury
+      on a plain—makes the wheel-spokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him
+      that way; and there’s danger of being pitched out too, when you strike a
+      hill. Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels when he’s going to Davy Jones—all
+      a rush down an endless inclined plane! Hurrah! this whale carries the
+      everlasting mail!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the monster’s run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he
+      tumultuously sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines flew round the
+      loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them; while so
+      fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding would soon exhaust
+      the lines, that using all their dexterous might, they caught repeated
+      smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till at last—owing to the
+      perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of the boats, whence the
+      three ropes went straight down into the blue—the gunwales of the
+      bows were almost even with the water, while the three sterns tilted high
+      in the air. And the whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they
+      remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more line, though the
+      position was a little ticklish. But though boats have been taken down and
+      lost in this way, yet it is this “holding on,” as it is called; this
+      hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh from the back; this it is
+      that often torments the Leviathan into soon rising again to meet the sharp
+      lance of his foes. Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing, it is to be
+      doubted whether this course is always the best; for it is but reasonable
+      to presume, that the longer the stricken whale stays under water, the more
+      he is exhausted. Because, owing to the enormous surface of him—in a
+      full grown sperm whale something less than 2000 square feet—the
+      pressure of the water is immense. We all know what an astonishing
+      atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here, above-ground,
+      in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on his back a
+      column of two hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at least equal the weight
+      of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of
+      twenty line-of-battle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on
+      board.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into
+      its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay,
+      not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman
+      would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the
+      utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight
+      inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible
+      that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the
+      big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of
+      board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said—“Canst
+      thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears? The
+      sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the
+      habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee;
+      darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!” This
+      the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets.
+      For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run
+      his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod’s
+      fish-spears!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent
+      down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad enough to
+      shade half Xerxes’ army. Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale
+      must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Stand by, men; he stirs,” cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly
+      vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by
+      magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every
+      oarsman felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in great part
+      from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce
+      upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd of white bears are
+      scared from it into the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Haul in! Haul in!” cried Starbuck again; “he’s rising.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand’s breadth
+      could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all
+      dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water within two ship’s
+      lengths of the hunters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals
+      there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby
+      when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in
+      certain directions. Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities it
+      is to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so that
+      when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at
+      once begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is heightened by
+      the extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance below the surface,
+      his life may be said to pour from him in incessant streams. Yet so vast is
+      the quantity of blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior
+      fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable
+      period; even as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the
+      well-springs of far-off and undiscernible hills. Even now, when the boats
+      pulled upon this whale, and perilously drew over his swaying flukes, and
+      the lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady jets from
+      the new made wound, which kept continually playing, while the natural
+      spout-hole in his head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending its
+      affrighted moisture into the air. From this last vent no blood yet came,
+      because no vital part of him had thus far been struck. His life, as they
+      significantly call it, was untouched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his
+      form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed.
+      His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As
+      strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when
+      prostrate, so from the points which the whale’s eyes had once occupied,
+      now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was
+      none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must
+      die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other
+      merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that
+      preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his
+      blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discoloured bunch or
+      protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “A nice spot,” cried Flask; “just let me prick him there once.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Avast!” cried Starbuck, “there’s no need of that!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an ulcerous
+      jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable
+      anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly
+      darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over
+      with showers of gore, capsizing Flask’s boat and marring the bows. It was
+      his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by loss of blood,
+      that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made; lay panting on
+      his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over
+      slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his
+      belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring
+      spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some
+      mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the
+      spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground—so the last long dying
+      spout of the whale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body
+      showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately,
+      by Starbuck’s orders, lines were secured to it at different points, so
+      that ere long every boat was a buoy; the sunken whale being suspended a
+      few inches beneath them by the cords. By very heedful management, when the
+      ship drew nigh, the whale was transferred to her side, and was strongly
+      secured there by the stiffest fluke-chains, for it was plain that unless
+      artificially upheld, the body would at once sink to the bottom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade, the
+      entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on
+      the lower part of the bunch before described. But as the stumps of
+      harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales, with
+      the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any kind to
+      denote their place; therefore, there must needs have been some other
+      unknown reason in the present case fully to account for the ulceration
+      alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a lance-head of stone
+      being found in him, not far from the buried iron, the flesh perfectly firm
+      about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And when? It might have been
+      darted by some Nor’ West Indian long before America was discovered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous cabinet
+      there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further discoveries, by
+      the ship’s being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways to the sea, owing
+      to the body’s immensely increasing tendency to sink. However, Starbuck,
+      who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the last; hung on to it
+      so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the ship would have been
+      capsized, if still persisting in locking arms with the body; then, when
+      the command was given to break clear from it, such was the immovable
+      strain upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and cables were
+      fastened, that it was impossible to cast them off. Meantime everything in
+      the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the other side of the deck was like
+      walking up the steep gabled roof of a house. The ship groaned and gasped.
+      Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started from
+      their places, by the unnatural dislocation. In vain handspikes and crows
+      were brought to bear upon the immovable fluke-chains, to pry them adrift
+      from the timberheads; and so low had the whale now settled that the
+      submerged ends could not be at all approached, while every moment whole
+      tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed
+      on the point of going over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hold on, hold on, won’t ye?” cried Stubb to the body, “don’t be in such a
+      devil of a hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we must do something or go for
+      it. No use prying there; avast, I say with your handspikes, and run one of
+      ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut the big chains.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Knife? Aye, aye,” cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter’s heavy
+      hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began slashing at
+      the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes, full of sparks, were given,
+      when the exceeding strain effected the rest. With a terrific snap, every
+      fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm Whale
+      is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately accounted
+      for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy, with its
+      side or belly considerably elevated above the surface. If the only whales
+      that thus sank were old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their pads
+      of lard diminished and all their bones heavy and rheumatic; then you might
+      with some reason assert that this sinking is caused by an uncommon
+      specific gravity in the fish so sinking, consequent upon this absence of
+      buoyant matter in him. But it is not so. For young whales, in the highest
+      health, and swelling with noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the
+      warm flush and May of life, with all their panting lard about them; even
+      these brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this
+      accident than any other species. Where one of that sort go down, twenty
+      Right Whales do. This difference in the species is no doubt imputable in
+      no small degree to the greater quantity of bone in the Right Whale; his
+      Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a ton; from this
+      incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there are instances where,
+      after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken whale again
+      rises, more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this is obvious. Gases
+      are generated in him; he swells to a prodigious magnitude; becomes a sort
+      of animal balloon. A line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then.
+      In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the Bays of New Zealand, when a
+      Right Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with plenty
+      of rope; so that when the body has gone down, they know where to look for
+      it when it shall have ascended again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from
+      the Pequod’s mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again lowering
+      her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a Fin-Back,
+      belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its incredible
+      power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back’s spout is so similar to the
+      Sperm Whale’s, that by unskilful fishermen it is often mistaken for it.
+      And consequently Derick and all his host were now in valiant chase of this
+      unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail, made after her four young
+      keels, and thus they all disappeared far to leeward, still in bold,
+      hopeful chase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0082">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true
+      method.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to
+      the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great
+      honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great
+      demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have
+      shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I
+      myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the
+      eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by
+      our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the
+      knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the
+      distressed, and not to fill men’s lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine
+      story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of
+      a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as Leviathan was in the
+      very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen, intrepidly
+      advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered and married the maid. It
+      was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely achieved by the best harpooneers
+      of the present day; inasmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first
+      dart. And let no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa,
+      now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples, there stood
+      for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale, which the city’s legends and
+      all the inhabitants asserted to be the identical bones of the monster that
+      Perseus slew. When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to
+      Italy in triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively important in
+      this story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda—indeed, by some
+      supposed to be indirectly derived from it—is that famous story of
+      St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale;
+      for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled
+      together, and often stand for each other. “Thou art as a lion of the
+      waters, and as a dragon of the sea,” saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly
+      meaning a whale; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word
+      itself. Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had
+      St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of
+      doing battle with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake,
+      but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to
+      march boldly up to a whale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the
+      creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely
+      represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted on
+      land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of
+      those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists; and
+      considering that as in Perseus’ case, St. George’s whale might have
+      crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal
+      ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse;
+      bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible with
+      the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this
+      so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In fact,
+      placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare
+      like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name;
+      who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse’s head and both the
+      palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of
+      him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is
+      the tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of
+      Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And
+      therefore, let not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom, I
+      venture to say, have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron),
+      let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen
+      frocks and tarred trowsers we are much better entitled to St. George’s
+      decoration than they.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long remained
+      dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that antique
+      Crockett and Kit Carson—that brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds,
+      was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that strictly
+      makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he
+      ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside.
+      Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman; at any rate
+      the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I claim him for one of our
+      clan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of Hercules
+      and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more ancient
+      Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versâ; certainly they are
+      very similar. If I claim the demi-god then, why not the prophet?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole
+      roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal
+      kings of old times, we find the head waters of our fraternity in nothing
+      short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now to
+      be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of
+      the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine
+      Vishnoo himself for our Lord;—Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten
+      earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.
+      When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate
+      the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to
+      Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose
+      perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning
+      the creation, and which therefore must have contained something in the
+      shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at
+      the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and
+      sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes.
+      Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even as a man who rides a horse is
+      called a horseman?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there’s a member-roll
+      for you! What club but the whaleman’s can head off like that?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0083">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the
+      preceding chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical
+      story of Jonah and the whale. But then there were some sceptical Greeks
+      and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans of their times,
+      equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the
+      dolphin; and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those
+      traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One old Sag-Harbor whaleman’s chief reason for questioning the Hebrew
+      story was this:—He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles,
+      embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented
+      Jonah’s whale with two spouts in his head—a peculiarity only true
+      with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the
+      varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this saying,
+      “A penny roll would choke him”; his swallow is so very small. But, to
+      this, Bishop Jebb’s anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary,
+      hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale’s belly,
+      but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems
+      reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale’s mouth
+      would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the
+      players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow
+      tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his want
+      of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something obscurely in
+      reference to his incarcerated body and the whale’s gastric juices. But
+      this objection likewise falls to the ground, because a German exegetist
+      supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating body of a <i>dead</i>
+      whale—even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned
+      their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them. Besides, it has been
+      divined by other continental commentators, that when Jonah was thrown
+      overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his escape to
+      another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head; and, I
+      would add, possibly called “The Whale,” as some craft are nowadays
+      christened the “Shark,” the “Gull,” the “Eagle.” Nor have there been
+      wanting learned exegetists who have opined that the whale mentioned in the
+      book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver—an inflated bag of wind—which
+      the endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a watery doom. Poor
+      Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But he had still another
+      reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I remember right: Jonah was
+      swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he
+      was vomited up somewhere within three days’ journey of Nineveh, a city on
+      the Tigris, very much more than three days’ journey across from the
+      nearest point of the Mediterranean coast. How is that?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within that
+      short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him round by the way
+      of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to speak of the passage through the
+      whole length of the Mediterranean, and another passage up the Persian Gulf
+      and Red Sea, such a supposition would involve the complete
+      circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to speak of the Tigris
+      waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for any whale to swim
+      in. Besides, this idea of Jonah’s weathering the Cape of Good Hope at so
+      early a day would wrest the honor of the discovery of that great headland
+      from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so make modern history
+      a liar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his foolish
+      pride of reason—a thing still more reprehensible in him, seeing that
+      he had but little learning except what he had picked up from the sun and
+      the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and abominable,
+      devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a Portuguese
+      Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah’s going to Nineveh via the Cape
+      of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of the general
+      miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly enlightened Turks
+      devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah. And some three
+      centuries ago, an English traveller in old Harris’s Voyages, speaks of a
+      Turkish Mosque built in honor of Jonah, in which Mosque was a miraculous
+      lamp that burnt without any oil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0084">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are anointed;
+      and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an analogous operation
+      upon their boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it to be doubted that as
+      such a procedure can do no harm, it may possibly be of no contemptible
+      advantage; considering that oil and water are hostile; that oil is a
+      sliding thing, and that the object in view is to make the boat slide
+      bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing his boat, and one morning
+      not long after the German ship Jungfrau disappeared, took more than
+      customary pains in that occupation; crawling under its bottom, where it
+      hung over the side, and rubbing in the unctuousness as though diligently
+      seeking to insure a crop of hair from the craft’s bald keel. He seemed to
+      be working in obedience to some particular presentiment. Nor did it remain
+      unwarranted by the event.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to
+      them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered flight,
+      as of Cleopatra’s barges from Actium.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb’s was foremost. By great
+      exertion, Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the
+      stricken whale, without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal
+      flight, with added fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the
+      planted iron must sooner or later inevitably extract it. It became
+      imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him. But to
+      haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and furious.
+      What then remained?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and
+      countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced,
+      none exceed that fine manœuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small
+      sword, or broad sword, in all its exercises boasts nothing like it. It is
+      only indispensable with an inveterate running whale; its grand fact and
+      feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is accurately
+      darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under extreme headway.
+      Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten or twelve feet in
+      length; the staff is much slighter than that of the harpoon, and also of a
+      lighter material—pine. It is furnished with a small rope called a
+      warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to the hand
+      after darting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But before going further, it is important to mention here, that though the
+      harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it is seldom
+      done; and when done, is still less frequently successful, on account of
+      the greater weight and inferior length of the harpoon as compared with the
+      lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks. As a general thing,
+      therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before any pitchpoling
+      comes into play.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and
+      equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel in
+      pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands upright in the tossed bow of the
+      flying boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is forty feet ahead.
+      Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice along its length
+      to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers up the coil of
+      the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end in his grasp, leaving
+      the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full before his waistband’s
+      middle, he levels it at the whale; when, covering him with it, he steadily
+      depresses the butt-end in his hand, thereby elevating the point till the
+      weapon stands fairly balanced upon his palm, fifteen feet in the air. He
+      minds you somewhat of a juggler, balancing a long staff on his chin. Next
+      moment with a rapid, nameless impulse, in a superb lofty arch the bright
+      steel spans the foaming distance, and quivers in the life spot of the
+      whale. Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “That drove the spigot out of him!” cried Stubb. “’Tis July’s immortal
+      Fourth; all fountains must run wine today! Would now, it were old Orleans
+      whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela! Then, Tashtego, lad,
+      I’d have ye hold a canakin to the jet, and we’d drink round it! Yea,
+      verily, hearts alive, we’d brew choice punch in the spread of his
+      spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff the living stuff.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart is repeated, the
+      spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in skilful leash. The
+      agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is slackened, and the
+      pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and mutely watches the
+      monster die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0085">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That for six thousand years—and no one knows how many millions of
+      ages before—the great whales should have been spouting all over the
+      sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so
+      many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back,
+      thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale,
+      watching these sprinklings and spoutings—that all this should be,
+      and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes
+      past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851), it
+      should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all,
+      really water, or nothing but vapor—this is surely a noteworthy
+      thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items
+      contingent. Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their gills,
+      the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times is combined
+      with the element in which they swim; hence, a herring or a cod might live
+      a century, and never once raise its head above the surface. But owing to
+      his marked internal structure which gives him regular lungs, like a human
+      being’s, the whale can only live by inhaling the disengaged air in the
+      open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity for his periodical visits to the
+      upper world. But he cannot in any degree breathe through his mouth, for,
+      in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm Whale’s mouth is buried at least eight
+      feet beneath the surface; and what is still more, his windpipe has no
+      connexion with his mouth. No, he breathes through his spiracle alone; and
+      this is on the top of his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If I say, that in any creature breathing is only a function indispensable
+      to vitality, inasmuch as it withdraws from the air a certain element,
+      which being subsequently brought into contact with the blood imparts to
+      the blood its vivifying principle, I do not think I shall err; though I
+      may possibly use some superfluous scientific words. Assume it, and it
+      follows that if all the blood in a man could be aerated with one breath,
+      he might then seal up his nostrils and not fetch another for a
+      considerable time. That is to say, he would then live without breathing.
+      Anomalous as it may seem, this is precisely the case with the whale, who
+      systematically lives, by intervals, his full hour and more (when at the
+      bottom) without drawing a single breath, or so much as in any way inhaling
+      a particle of air; for, remember, he has no gills. How is this? Between
+      his ribs and on each side of his spine he is supplied with a remarkable
+      involved Cretan labyrinth of vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when
+      he quits the surface, are completely distended with oxygenated blood. So
+      that for an hour or more, a thousand fathoms in the sea, he carries a
+      surplus stock of vitality in him, just as the camel crossing the waterless
+      desert carries a surplus supply of drink for future use in its four
+      supplementary stomachs. The anatomical fact of this labyrinth is
+      indisputable; and that the supposition founded upon it is reasonable and
+      true, seems the more cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise
+      inexplicable obstinacy of that leviathan in <i>having his spoutings out</i>, as
+      the fishermen phrase it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising
+      to the surface, the Sperm Whale will continue there for a period of time
+      exactly uniform with all his other unmolested risings. Say he stays eleven
+      minutes, and jets seventy times, that is, respires seventy breaths; then
+      whenever he rises again, he will be sure to have his seventy breaths over
+      again, to a minute. Now, if after he fetches a few breaths you alarm him,
+      so that he sounds, he will be always dodging up again to make good his
+      regular allowance of air. And not till those seventy breaths are told,
+      will he finally go down to stay out his full term below. Remark, however,
+      that in different individuals these rates are different; but in any one
+      they are alike. Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having his
+      spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere
+      descending for good? How obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the
+      whale’s rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase. For not
+      by hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing a
+      thousand fathoms beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O
+      hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In man, breathing is incessantly going on—one breath only serving
+      for two or three pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to
+      attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. But the
+      Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole; if
+      it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water, then I
+      opine we should be furnished with the reason why his sense of smell seems
+      obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at all answers to
+      his nose is that identical spout-hole; and being so clogged with two
+      elements, it could not be expected to have the power of smelling. But
+      owing to the mystery of the spout—whether it be water or whether it
+      be vapor—no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on this
+      head. Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper
+      olfactories. But what does he want of them? No roses, no violets, no
+      Cologne-water in the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting
+      canal, and as that long canal—like the grand Erie Canal—is
+      furnished with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward
+      retention of air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has
+      no voice; unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely
+      rumbles, he talks through his nose. But then again, what has the whale to
+      say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to
+      this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a
+      living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is for
+      the conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along, horizontally, just
+      beneath the upper surface of his head, and a little to one side; this
+      curious canal is very much like a gas-pipe laid down in a city on one side
+      of a street. But the question returns whether this gas-pipe is also a
+      water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout of the Sperm Whale is the
+      mere vapor of the exhaled breath, or whether that exhaled breath is mixed
+      with water taken in at the mouth, and discharged through the spiracle. It
+      is certain that the mouth indirectly communicates with the spouting canal;
+      but it cannot be proved that this is for the purpose of discharging water
+      through the spiracle. Because the greatest necessity for so doing would
+      seem to be, when in feeding he accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm
+      Whale’s food is far beneath the surface, and there he cannot spout even if
+      he would. Besides, if you regard him very closely, and time him with your
+      watch, you will find that when unmolested, there is an undeviating rhyme
+      between the periods of his jets and the ordinary periods of respiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out! You
+      have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not tell
+      water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle
+      these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of
+      all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be
+      undecided as to what it is precisely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping
+      it; and how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it, when,
+      always, when you are close enough to a whale to get a close view of his
+      spout, he is in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading all around
+      him. And if at such times you should think that you really perceived drops
+      of moisture in the spout, how do you know that they are not merely
+      condensed from its vapor; or how do you know that they are not those
+      identical drops superficially lodged in the spout-hole fissure, which is
+      countersunk into the summit of the whale’s head? For even when tranquilly
+      swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with his elevated hump
+      sun-dried as a dromedary’s in the desert; even then, the whale always
+      carries a small basin of water on his head, as under a blazing sun you
+      will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with rain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the
+      precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be peering
+      into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to
+      this fountain and fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into
+      slight contact with the outer, vapory shreds of the jet, which will often
+      happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of the thing
+      so touching it. And I know one, who coming into still closer contact with
+      the spout, whether with some scientific object in view, or otherwise, I
+      cannot say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among
+      whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to evade it. Another
+      thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much doubt it, that if the jet
+      is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you. The wisest thing the
+      investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout
+      alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My
+      hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides other
+      reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by considerations touching the
+      great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I account him no
+      common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he is
+      never found on soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes are.
+      He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads
+      of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil,
+      Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible
+      steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a
+      little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before
+      me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and
+      undulation in the atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture of my
+      hair, while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin
+      shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an additional argument for
+      the above supposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to
+      behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild
+      head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable
+      contemplations, and that vapor—as you will sometimes see it—glorified
+      by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. For,
+      d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor.
+      And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine
+      intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And
+      for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or
+      denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things
+      earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes
+      neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with
+      equal eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0086">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 86. The Tail.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope, and
+      the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I
+      celebrate a tail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale’s tail to begin at that point of
+      the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises upon
+      its upper surface alone, an area of at least fifty square feet. The
+      compact round body of its root expands into two broad, firm, flat palms or
+      flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness. At the
+      crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap, then sideways recede
+      from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy between. In no living
+      thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in the
+      crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost expansion in the full
+      grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty feet across.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut into
+      it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it:—upper,
+      middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower layers, are long and
+      horizontal; those of the middle one, very short, and running crosswise
+      between the outside layers. This triune structure, as much as anything
+      else, imparts power to the tail. To the student of old Roman walls, the
+      middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin course of tiles
+      always alternating with the stone in those wonderful relics of the
+      antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so much to the great strength of
+      the masonry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough, the
+      whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular
+      fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins and running
+      down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and largely contribute
+      to their might; so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the
+      whole whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to
+      matter, this were the thing to do it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor does this—its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the
+      graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates
+      through a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive their
+      most appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty or
+      harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful,
+      strength has much to do with the magic. Take away the tied tendons that
+      all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its
+      charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the linen sheet from the
+      naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the
+      man, that seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God
+      the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever they
+      may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled,
+      hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most
+      successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute as they are of all
+      brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative, feminine one
+      of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, form the
+      peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether
+      wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it be
+      in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein no
+      fairy’s arm can transcend it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for
+      progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping;
+      Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan’s tail acts in a
+      different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never
+      wriggles. In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the
+      whale, his tail is the sole means of propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled
+      forwards beneath the body, and then rapidly sprung backwards, it is this
+      which gives that singular darting, leaping motion to the monster when
+      furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only fights
+      another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his conflicts
+      with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In striking at a
+      boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the blow is only
+      inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed air, especially
+      if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply irresistible. No ribs
+      of man or boat can withstand it. Your only salvation lies in eluding it;
+      but if it comes sideways through the opposing water, then partly owing to
+      the light buoyancy of the whale-boat, and the elasticity of its materials,
+      a cracked rib or a dashed plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is
+      generally the most serious result. These submerged side blows are so often
+      received in the fishery, that they are accounted mere child’s play. Some
+      one strips off a frock, and the hole is stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Third: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the whale the
+      sense of touch is concentrated in the tail; for in this respect there is a
+      delicacy in it only equalled by the daintiness of the elephant’s trunk.
+      This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the action of sweeping, when in
+      maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain soft slowness moves his
+      immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of the sea; and if he
+      feel but a sailor’s whisker, woe to that sailor, whiskers and all. What
+      tenderness there is in that preliminary touch! Had this tail any
+      prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of Darmonodes’ elephant
+      that so frequented the flower-market, and with low salutations presented
+      nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their zones. On more accounts than
+      one, a pity it is that the whale does not possess this prehensile virtue
+      in his tail; for I have heard of yet another elephant, that when wounded
+      in the fight, curved round his trunk and extracted the dart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the
+      middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence of
+      his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if it were a
+      hearth. But still you see his power in his play. The broad palms of his
+      tail are flirted high into the air; then smiting the surface, the
+      thunderous concussion resounds for miles. You would almost think a great
+      gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light wreath of vapor
+      from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would think that that was
+      the smoke from the touch-hole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes lie
+      considerably below the level of his back, they are then completely out of
+      sight beneath the surface; but when he is about to plunge into the deeps,
+      his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are tossed erect
+      in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they downwards shoot
+      out of view. Excepting the sublime <i>breach</i>—somewhere else to be
+      described—this peaking of the whale’s flukes is perhaps the grandest
+      sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless
+      profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the
+      highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth
+      his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing
+      at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean,
+      the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels.
+      Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky
+      and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading
+      towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes.
+      As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of
+      the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of the fire
+      worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African elephant, I
+      then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all
+      beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of antiquity
+      often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest
+      silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the elephant,
+      so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk of the other
+      are concerned, should not tend to place those two opposite organs on an
+      equality, much less the creatures to which they respectively belong. For
+      as the mightiest elephant is but a terrier to Leviathan, so, compared with
+      Leviathan’s tail, his trunk is but the stalk of a lily. The most direful
+      blow from the elephant’s trunk were as the playful tap of a fan, compared
+      with the measureless crush and crash of the sperm whale’s ponderous
+      flukes, which in repeated instances have one after the other hurled entire
+      boats with all their oars and crews into the air, very much as an Indian
+      juggler tosses his balls.*
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale and
+      the elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the elephant
+      stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does to the
+      elephant; nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious
+      similitude; among these is the spout. It is well known that the elephant
+      will often draw up water or dust in his trunk, and then elevating it, jet
+      it forth in a stream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability
+      to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they would
+      well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an extensive
+      herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures, that I have
+      heard hunters who have declared them akin to Free-Mason signs and symbols;
+      that the whale, indeed, by these methods intelligently conversed with the
+      world. Nor are there wanting other motions of the whale in his general
+      body, full of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most experienced
+      assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him
+      not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how
+      understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has
+      none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face
+      shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and
+      hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0087">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward from
+      the territories of Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia. In
+      a continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long islands of Sumatra,
+      Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, form a vast mole, or
+      rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia, and dividing the long
+      unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly studded oriental archipelagoes.
+      This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports for the convenience of
+      ships and whales; conspicuous among which are the straits of Sunda and
+      Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly, vessels bound to China from the
+      west, emerge into the China seas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing
+      midway in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold green
+      promontory, known to seamen as Java Head; they not a little correspond to
+      the central gateway opening into some vast walled empire: and considering
+      the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels, and gold, and
+      ivory, with which the thousand islands of that oriental sea are enriched,
+      it seems a significant provision of nature, that such treasures, by the
+      very formation of the land, should at least bear the appearance, however
+      ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping western world. The
+      shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those domineering
+      fortresses which guard the entrances to the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and
+      the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these Orientals do not demand the
+      obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from the endless procession of
+      ships before the wind, which for centuries past, by night and by day, have
+      passed between the islands of Sumatra and Java, freighted with the
+      costliest cargoes of the east. But while they freely waive a ceremonial
+      like this, they do by no means renounce their claim to more solid tribute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among the low
+      shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the vessels
+      sailing through the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the point of
+      their spears. Though by the repeated bloody chastisements they have
+      received at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these corsairs
+      has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the present day, we
+      occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which, in those waters,
+      have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these straits;
+      Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea, and thence,
+      cruising northwards, over waters known to be frequented here and there by
+      the Sperm Whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands, and gain the far
+      coast of Japan, in time for the great whaling season there. By these
+      means, the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the known Sperm
+      Whale cruising grounds of the world, previous to descending upon the Line
+      in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere else foiled in his pursuit,
+      firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby Dick, in the sea he was most
+      known to frequent; and at a season when he might most reasonably be
+      presumed to be haunting it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew
+      drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now, the
+      circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs no
+      sustenance but what’s in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the whaler.
+      While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to
+      foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries no cargo but
+      herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a whole lake’s
+      contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with utilities; not
+      altogether with unusable pig-lead and kentledge. She carries years’ water
+      in her. Clear old prime Nantucket water; which, when three years afloat,
+      the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to drink before the brackish
+      fluid, but yesterday rafted off in casks, from the Peruvian or Indian
+      streams. Hence it is, that, while other ships may have gone to China from
+      New York, and back again, touching at a score of ports, the whale-ship, in
+      all that interval, may not have sighted one grain of soil; her crew having
+      seen no man but floating seamen like themselves. So that did you carry
+      them the news that another flood had come; they would only answer—“Well,
+      boys, here’s the ark!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of Java,
+      in the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of the
+      ground, roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an
+      excellent spot for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more and more
+      upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and admonished to
+      keep wide awake. But though the green palmy cliffs of the land soon loomed
+      on the starboard bow, and with delighted nostrils the fresh cinnamon was
+      snuffed in the air, yet not a single jet was descried. Almost renouncing
+      all thought of falling in with any game hereabouts, the ship had well nigh
+      entered the straits, when the customary cheering cry was heard from aloft,
+      and ere long a spectacle of singular magnificence saluted us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with which
+      of late they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm Whales,
+      instead of almost invariably sailing in small detached companies, as in
+      former times, are now frequently met with in extensive herds, sometimes
+      embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost seem as if numerous
+      nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance
+      and protection. To this aggregation of the Sperm Whale into such immense
+      caravans, may be imputed the circumstance that even in the best cruising
+      grounds, you may now sometimes sail for weeks and months together, without
+      being greeted by a single spout; and then be suddenly saluted by what
+      sometimes seems thousands on thousands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and
+      forming a great semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon, a
+      continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the
+      noon-day air. Unlike the straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Right
+      Whale, which, dividing at top, fall over in two branches, like the cleft
+      drooping boughs of a willow, the single forward-slanting spout of the
+      Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of white mist, continually rising
+      and falling away to leeward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Seen from the Pequod’s deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of the
+      sea, this host of vapory spouts, individually curling up into the air,
+      and beheld through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed like the
+      thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy
+      autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains,
+      accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in
+      their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the plain;
+      even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward through
+      the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and
+      swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers handling
+      their weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their yet suspended
+      boats. If the wind only held, little doubt had they, that chased through
+      these Straits of Sunda, the vast host would only deploy into the Oriental
+      seas to witness the capture of not a few of their number. And who could
+      tell whether, in that congregated caravan, Moby Dick himself might not
+      temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped white-elephant in the
+      coronation procession of the Siamese! So with stun-sail piled on
+      stun-sail, we sailed along, driving these leviathans before us; when, of a
+      sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard, loudly directing attention to
+      something in our wake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Corresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear.
+      It seemed formed of detached white vapors, rising and falling something
+      like the spouts of the whales; only they did not so completely come and
+      go; for they constantly hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling
+      his glass at this sight, Ahab quickly revolved in his pivot-hole, crying,
+      “Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to wet the sails;—Malays,
+      sir, and after us!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should fairly
+      have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot pursuit,
+      to make up for their over-cautious delay. But when the swift Pequod, with
+      a fresh leading wind, was herself in hot chase; how very kind of these
+      tawny philanthropists to assist in speeding her on to her own chosen
+      pursuit,—mere riding-whips and rowels to her, that they were. As
+      with glass under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in his forward turn
+      beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after one the bloodthirsty
+      pirates chasing <i>him</i>; some such fancy as the above seemed his. And when he
+      glanced upon the green walls of the watery defile in which the ship was
+      then sailing, and bethought him that through that gate lay the route to
+      his vengeance, and beheld, how that through that same gate he was now both
+      chasing and being chased to his deadly end; and not only that, but a herd
+      of remorseless wild pirates and inhuman atheistical devils were infernally
+      cheering him on with their curses;—when all these conceits had
+      passed through his brain, Ahab’s brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the
+      black sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being
+      able to drag the firm thing from its place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and when,
+      after steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the Pequod at
+      last shot by the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra side, emerging
+      at last upon the broad waters beyond; then, the harpooneers seemed more to
+      grieve that the swift whales had been gaining upon the ship, than to
+      rejoice that the ship had so victoriously gained upon the Malays. But
+      still driving on in the wake of the whales, at length they seemed abating
+      their speed; gradually the ship neared them; and the wind now dying away,
+      word was passed to spring to the boats. But no sooner did the herd, by
+      some presumed wonderful instinct of the Sperm Whale, become notified of
+      the three keels that were after them,—though as yet a mile in their
+      rear,—than they rallied again, and forming in close ranks and
+      battalions, so that their spouts all looked like flashing lines of stacked
+      bayonets, moved on with redoubled velocity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and after
+      several hours’ pulling were almost disposed to renounce the chase, when a
+      general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating token that they
+      were now at last under the influence of that strange perplexity of inert
+      irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive it in the whale, they say
+      he is gallied. The compact martial columns in which they had been hitherto
+      rapidly and steadily swimming, were now broken up in one measureless rout;
+      and like King Porus’ elephants in the Indian battle with Alexander, they
+      seemed going mad with consternation. In all directions expanding in vast
+      irregular circles, and aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their
+      short thick spoutings, they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic.
+      This was still more strangely evinced by those of their number, who,
+      completely paralysed as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged
+      dismantled ships on the sea. Had these Leviathans been but a flock of
+      simple sheep, pursued over the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could
+      not possibly have evinced such excessive dismay. But this occasional
+      timidity is characteristic of almost all herding creatures. Though banding
+      together in tens of thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have
+      fled before a solitary horseman. Witness, too, all human beings, how when
+      herded together in the sheepfold of a theatre’s pit, they will, at the
+      slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding,
+      trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best,
+      therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before
+      us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not
+      infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion, yet
+      it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor
+      retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is customary in
+      those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one lone
+      whale on the outskirts of the shoal. In about three minutes’ time,
+      Queequeg’s harpoon was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray in
+      our faces, and then running away with us like light, steered straight for
+      the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the part of the whale
+      struck under such circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented; and indeed
+      is almost always more or less anticipated; yet does it present one of the
+      more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. For as the swift monster drags
+      you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect
+      life and only exist in a delirious throb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of
+      speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we
+      thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by the
+      crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was like a
+      ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer through their
+      complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what moment it may be
+      locked in and crushed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off from
+      this monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away from
+      that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the time,
+      Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our way
+      whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time to
+      make long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted duty
+      was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the shouting
+      part of the business. “Out of the way, Commodore!” cried one, to a great
+      dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an instant
+      threatened to swamp us. “Hard down with your tail, there!” cried a second
+      to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly cooling himself
+      with his own fan-like extremity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented by
+      the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. Two thick squares of wood of equal
+      size are stoutly clenched together, so that they cross each other’s grain
+      at right angles; a line of considerable length is then attached to the
+      middle of this block, and the other end of the line being looped, it can
+      in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly among gallied whales
+      that this drugg is used. For then, more whales are close round you than
+      you can possibly chase at one time. But sperm whales are not every day
+      encountered; while you may, then, you must kill all you can. And if you
+      cannot kill them all at once, you must wing them, so that they can be
+      afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it is, that at times like these
+      the drugg, comes into requisition. Our boat was furnished with three of
+      them. The first and second were successfully darted, and we saw the whales
+      staggeringly running off, fettered by the enormous sidelong resistance of
+      the towing drugg. They were cramped like malefactors with the chain and
+      ball. But upon flinging the third, in the act of tossing overboard the
+      clumsy wooden block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat, and in
+      an instant tore it out and carried it away, dropping the oarsman in the
+      boat’s bottom as the seat slid from under him. On both sides the sea came
+      in at the wounded planks, but we stuffed two or three drawers and shirts
+      in, and so stopped the leaks for the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were it not
+      that as we advanced into the herd, our whale’s way greatly diminished;
+      moreover, that as we went still further and further from the circumference
+      of commotion, the direful disorders seemed waning. So that when at last
+      the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways vanished;
+      then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we glided between
+      two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if from some mountain
+      torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here the storms in the
+      roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In
+      this central expanse the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface,
+      called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in
+      his more quiet moods. Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they
+      say lurks at the heart of every commotion. And still in the distracted
+      distance we beheld the tumults of the outer concentric circles, and saw
+      successive pods of whales, eight or ten in each, swiftly going round and
+      round, like multiplied spans of horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder
+      to shoulder, that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have over-arched the
+      middle ones, and so have gone round on their backs. Owing to the density
+      of the crowd of reposing whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed
+      axis of the herd, no possible chance of escape was at present afforded us.
+      We must watch for a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall
+      that had only admitted us in order to shut us up. Keeping at the centre of
+      the lake, we were occasionally visited by small tame cows and calves; the
+      women and children of this routed host.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving
+      outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in any
+      one of those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by the
+      whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three square miles.
+      At any rate—though indeed such a test at such a time might be
+      deceptive—spoutings might be discovered from our low boat that
+      seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention this
+      circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely locked
+      up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of the herd had
+      hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its stopping;
+      or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way innocent and
+      inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller whales—now
+      and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake—evinced
+      a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still becharmed panic
+      which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like household dogs they came
+      snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it
+      almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg
+      patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance; but
+      fearful of the consequences, for the time refrained from darting it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still
+      stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in
+      those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the
+      whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become
+      mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth
+      exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly
+      and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives
+      at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still
+      spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did
+      the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if
+      we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their
+      sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little
+      infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might
+      have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He
+      was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered
+      from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the maternal
+      reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the
+      unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow. The delicate side-fins, and
+      the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled
+      appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from foreign parts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Line! line!” cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; “him fast! him
+      fast!—Who line him! Who struck?—Two whale; one big, one
+      little!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What ails ye, man?” cried Starbuck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Look-e here,” said Queequeg, pointing down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of
+      fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows
+      the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the
+      air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame
+      Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not
+      seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line, with the
+      maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen one, so that the cub
+      is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed
+      divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in
+      the deep.*
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike
+      most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation
+      which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a
+      time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and
+      Jacob:—a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats,
+      curiously situated, one on each side of the anus; but the breasts
+      themselves extend upwards from that. When by chance these precious parts
+      in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter’s lance, the mother’s pouring
+      milk and blood rivallingly discolour the sea for rods. The milk is very
+      sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with
+      strawberries. When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute <i>more
+      hominum</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and
+      affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and
+      fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in
+      dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my
+      being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and
+      while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and
+      deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic
+      spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other boats, still
+      engaged in drugging the whales on the frontier of the host; or possibly
+      carrying on the war within the first circle, where abundance of room and
+      some convenient retreats were afforded them. But the sight of the enraged
+      drugged whales now and then blindly darting to and fro across the circles,
+      was nothing to what at last met our eyes. It is sometimes the custom when
+      fast to a whale more than commonly powerful and alert, to seek to
+      hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or maiming his gigantic
+      tail-tendon. It is done by darting a short-handled cutting-spade, to which
+      is attached a rope for hauling it back again. A whale wounded (as we
+      afterwards learned) in this part, but not effectually, as it seemed, had
+      broken away from the boat, carrying along with him half of the harpoon
+      line; and in the extraordinary agony of the wound, he was now dashing
+      among the revolving circles like the lone mounted desperado Arnold, at the
+      battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay wherever he went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle
+      enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to inspire
+      the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause which at first the intervening
+      distance obscured from us. But at length we perceived that by one of the
+      unimaginable accidents of the fishery, this whale had become entangled in
+      the harpoon-line that he towed; he had also run away with the
+      cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the rope attached to that
+      weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the harpoon-line round his
+      tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose from his flesh. So that
+      tormented to madness, he was now churning through the water, violently
+      flailing with his flexible tail, and tossing the keen spade about him,
+      wounding and murdering his own comrades.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their stationary
+      fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake began to crowd a
+      little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by half spent billows
+      from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to heave and swell; the
+      submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in more and more
+      contracting orbits the whales in the more central circles began to swim in
+      thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was departing. A low advancing hum
+      was soon heard; and then like to the tumultuous masses of block-ice when
+      the great river Hudson breaks up in Spring, the entire host of whales came
+      tumbling upon their inner centre, as if to pile themselves up in one
+      common mountain. Instantly Starbuck and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck
+      taking the stern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oars! Oars!” he intensely whispered, seizing the helm—“gripe your
+      oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him off,
+      you Queequeg—the whale there!—prick him!—hit him! Stand
+      up—stand up, and stay so! Spring, men—pull, men; never mind
+      their backs—scrape them!—scrape away!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, leaving a
+      narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by desperate endeavor
+      we at last shot into a temporary opening; then giving way rapidly, and at
+      the same time earnestly watching for another outlet. After many similar
+      hair-breadth escapes, we at last swiftly glided into what had just been
+      one of the outer circles, but now crossed by random whales, all violently
+      making for one centre. This lucky salvation was cheaply purchased by the
+      loss of Queequeg’s hat, who, while standing in the bows to prick the
+      fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his head by the air-eddy
+      made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad flukes close by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon
+      resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having clumped
+      together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their onward flight
+      with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but the boats still
+      lingered in their wake to pick up what drugged whales might be dropped
+      astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask had killed and waifed. The
+      waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which are carried by every boat;
+      and which, when additional game is at hand, are inserted upright into the
+      floating body of a dead whale, both to mark its place on the sea, and also
+      as token of prior possession, should the boats of any other ship draw
+      near.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious
+      saying in the Fishery,—the more whales the less fish. Of all the
+      drugged whales only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for the
+      time, but only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other craft
+      than the Pequod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0088">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm
+      Whales, and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those
+      vast aggregations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must have
+      been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are occasionally
+      observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each. Such bands are
+      known as schools. They generally are of two sorts; those composed almost
+      entirely of females, and those mustering none but young vigorous males, or
+      bulls, as they are familiarly designated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a
+      male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces
+      his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight of his
+      ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about
+      over the watery world, surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces and
+      endearments of the harem. The contrast between this Ottoman and his
+      concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the largest
+      leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not more
+      than one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They are
+      comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen
+      yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the
+      whole they are hereditarily entitled to <i>en bon point</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is very curious to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent
+      ramblings. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely
+      search of variety. You meet them on the Line in time for the full flower
+      of the Equatorial feeding season, having just returned, perhaps, from
+      spending the summer in the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all
+      unpleasant weariness and warmth. By the time they have lounged up and down
+      the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for the Oriental waters in
+      anticipation of the cool season there, and so evade the other excessive
+      temperature of the year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange
+      suspicious sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his
+      interesting family. Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming
+      that way, presume to draw confidentially close to one of the ladies, with
+      what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases him away! High
+      times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like him are to be permitted to
+      invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though do what the Bashaw will, he
+      cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out of his bed; for, alas! all
+      fish bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often cause the most terrible
+      duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales, who sometimes
+      come to deadly battle, and all for love. They fence with their long lower
+      jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving for the supremacy
+      like elks that warringly interweave their antlers. Not a few are captured
+      having the deep scars of these encounters,—furrowed heads, broken
+      teeth, scolloped fins; and in some instances, wrenched and dislocated
+      mouths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at the
+      first rush of the harem’s lord, then is it very diverting to watch that
+      lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and revels there
+      awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario, like pious
+      Solomon devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines. Granting other
+      whales to be in sight, the fishermen will seldom give chase to one of
+      these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too lavish of their strength,
+      and hence their unctuousness is small. As for the sons and the daughters
+      they beget, why, those sons and daughters must take care of themselves; at
+      least, with only the maternal help. For like certain other omnivorous
+      roving lovers that might be named, my Lord Whale has no taste for the
+      nursery, however much for the bower; and so, being a great traveller, he
+      leaves his anonymous babies all over the world; every baby an exotic. In
+      good time, nevertheless, as the ardour of youth declines; as years and
+      dumps increase; as reflection lends her solemn pauses; in short, as a
+      general lassitude overtakes the sated Turk; then a love of ease and virtue
+      supplants the love for maidens; our Ottoman enters upon the impotent,
+      repentant, admonitory stage of life, forswears, disbands the harem, and
+      grown to an exemplary, sulky old soul, goes about all alone among the
+      meridians and parallels saying his prayers, and warning each young
+      Leviathan from his amorous errors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so is the
+      lord and master of that school technically known as the schoolmaster. It
+      is therefore not in strict character, however admirably satirical, that
+      after going to school himself, he should then go abroad inculcating not
+      what he learned there, but the folly of it. His title, schoolmaster, would
+      very naturally seem derived from the name bestowed upon the harem itself,
+      but some have surmised that the man who first thus entitled this sort of
+      Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself
+      what sort of a country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his
+      younger days, and what was the nature of those occult lessons he
+      inculcated into some of his pupils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale
+      betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm Whales.
+      Almost universally, a lone whale—as a solitary Leviathan is called—proves
+      an ancient one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no
+      one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the
+      wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so
+      many moody secrets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously
+      mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while those
+      female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or
+      forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious of
+      all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter;
+      excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met, and
+      these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like a
+      mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness,
+      tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no
+      prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous lad
+      at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence though, and when
+      about three-fourths grown, break up, and separately go about in quest of
+      settlements, that is, harems.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another point of difference between the male and female schools is still
+      more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a Forty-barrel-bull—poor
+      devil! all his comrades quit him. But strike a member of the harem school,
+      and her companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes
+      lingering so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0089">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the last chapter but one,
+      necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the whale
+      fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol and badge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company, a
+      whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed and
+      captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised many minor
+      contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature. For example,—after
+      a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale, the body may get loose
+      from the ship by reason of a violent storm; and drifting far away to
+      leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who, in a calm, snugly tows it
+      alongside, without risk of life or line. Thus the most vexatious and
+      violent disputes would often arise between the fishermen, were there not
+      some written or unwritten, universal, undisputed law applicable to all
+      cases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment,
+      was that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in A.D. 1695.
+      But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the
+      American fishermen have been their own legislators and lawyers in this
+      matter. They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness
+      surpasses Justinian’s Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for
+      the Suppression of Meddling with other People’s Business. Yes; these laws
+      might be engraven on a Queen Anne’s farthing, or the barb of a harpoon,
+      and worn round the neck, so small are they.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable
+      brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when
+      it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all
+      controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a
+      nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the
+      same. Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any
+      other recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it
+      plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as
+      their intention so to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen
+      themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks—the
+      Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and
+      honorable whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases, where
+      it would be an outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim
+      possession of a whale previously chased or killed by another party. But
+      others are by no means so scrupulous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated in
+      England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of a
+      whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had
+      succeeded in harpooning the fish; they were at last, through peril of
+      their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat
+      itself. Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up with
+      the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it before the
+      very eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those defendants were remonstrated
+      with, their captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs’ teeth, and
+      assured them that by way of doxology to the deed he had done, he would now
+      retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had remained attached to the
+      whale at the time of the seizure. Wherefore the plaintiffs now sued for
+      the recovery of the value of their whale, line, harpoons, and boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was the
+      judge. In the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went on to
+      illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent crim. con. case, wherein
+      a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his wife’s viciousness, had at
+      last abandoned her upon the seas of life; but in the course of years,
+      repenting of that step, he instituted an action to recover possession of
+      her. Erskine was on the other side; and he then supported it by saying,
+      that though the gentleman had originally harpooned the lady, and had once
+      had her fast, and only by reason of the great stress of her plunging
+      viciousness, had at last abandoned her; yet abandon her he did, so that
+      she became a loose-fish; and therefore when a subsequent gentleman
+      re-harpooned her, the lady then became that subsequent gentleman’s
+      property, along with whatever harpoon might have been found sticking in
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the whale
+      and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very
+      learned judge in set terms decided, to wit,—That as for the boat, he
+      awarded it to the plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it to save
+      their lives; but that with regard to the controverted whale, harpoons, and
+      line, they belonged to the defendants; the whale, because it was a
+      Loose-Fish at the time of the final capture; and the harpoons and line
+      because when the fish made off with them, it (the fish) acquired a
+      property in those articles; and hence anybody who afterwards took the fish
+      had a right to them. Now the defendants afterwards took the fish; ergo,
+      the aforesaid articles were theirs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A common man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might
+      possibly object to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock of the matter,
+      the two great principles laid down in the twin whaling laws previously
+      quoted, and applied and elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in the above cited
+      case; these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say, will, on
+      reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence; for
+      notwithstanding its complicated tracery of sculpture, the Temple of the
+      Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but two props to stand on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is it not a saying in every one’s mouth, Possession is half of the law:
+      that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often
+      possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of
+      Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is
+      the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow’s last
+      mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain’s marble mansion
+      with a door-plate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the
+      ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone, the
+      bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone’s family from starvation; what is
+      that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of
+      Savesoul’s income of £100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese of
+      hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven
+      without any of Savesoul’s help) what is that globular £100,000 but a
+      Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder’s hereditary towns and hamlets but
+      Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland,
+      but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas
+      but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of
+      the law?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the
+      kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is
+      internationally and universally applicable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the
+      Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress?
+      What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to
+      England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish?
+      What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of
+      religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious
+      smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is
+      the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a
+      Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0090">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      “De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam.” <i>Bracton,
+      l. 3, c. 3.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the
+      context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of
+      that land, the King, as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head,
+      and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail. A division which,
+      in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no intermediate
+      remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form, is to this day in force
+      in England; and as it offers in various respects a strange anomaly
+      touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of in
+      a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that prompts the
+      English railways to be at the expense of a separate car, specially
+      reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first place, in curious
+      proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in force, I
+      proceed to lay before you a circumstance that happened within the last two
+      years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of
+      the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and beaching
+      a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from the shore.
+      Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the jurisdiction of a
+      sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden. Holding the office
+      directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal emoluments incident to
+      the Cinque Port territories become by assignment his. By some writers this
+      office is called a sinecure. But not so. Because the Lord Warden is busily
+      employed at times in fobbing his perquisites; which are his chiefly by
+      virtue of that same fobbing of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their
+      trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat
+      fish high and dry, promising themselves a good £150 from the precious oil
+      and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good ale
+      with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares; up steps
+      a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with a copy of
+      Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon the whale’s head, he says—“Hands
+      off! this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it as the Lord
+      Warden’s.” Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful consternation—so
+      truly English—knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching
+      their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to the
+      stranger. But that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the
+      hard heart of the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone. At length
+      one of them, after long scratching about for his ideas, made bold to
+      speak,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The Duke.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It is his.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is all
+      that to go to the Duke’s benefit; we getting nothing at all for our pains
+      but our blisters?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It is his.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of
+      getting a livelihood?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It is his.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of this
+      whale.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It is his.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Won’t the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It is his.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of
+      Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular
+      lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree be
+      deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman of
+      the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to take
+      the case of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration. To which
+      my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were published) that he
+      had already done so, and received the money, and would be obliged to the
+      reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend gentleman) would
+      decline meddling with other people’s business. Is this the still militant
+      old man, standing at the corners of the three kingdoms, on all hands
+      coercing alms of beggars?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the Duke to
+      the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs inquire
+      then on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested with that
+      right. The law itself has already been set forth. But Plowdon gives us the
+      reason for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs to the King and
+      Queen, “because of its superior excellence.” And by the soundest
+      commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in such matters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason
+      for that, ye lawyers!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his treatise on “Queen-Gold,” or Queen-pinmoney, an old King’s Bench
+      author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: “Ye tail is ye Queen’s, that
+      ye Queen’s wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone.” Now this was
+      written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or Right
+      whale was largely used in ladies’ bodices. But this same bone is not in
+      the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer
+      like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail? An
+      allegorical meaning may lurk here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers—the
+      whale and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and
+      nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown’s ordinary revenue. I
+      know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by inference
+      it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same way as the
+      whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head peculiar to
+      that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be humorously
+      grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there seems a reason in
+      all things, even in law.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0091">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      “In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan,
+      insufferable fetor denying not inquiry.” <i>Sir T. Browne, V.E.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we
+      were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapory, mid-day sea, that the many
+      noses on the Pequod’s deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the three
+      pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was smelt in
+      the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I will bet something now,” said Stubb, “that somewhere hereabouts are
+      some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought they
+      would keel up before long.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently, the vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance
+      lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be
+      alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colours from
+      his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and
+      hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside
+      must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has
+      died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse. It
+      may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale;
+      worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent
+      to bury the departed. So intolerable indeed is it regarded by some, that
+      no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it. Yet are there
+      those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact that the oil obtained
+      from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and by no means of the
+      nature of attar-of-rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman
+      had a second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed even more of a
+      nosegay than the first. In truth, it turned out to be one of those
+      problematical whales that seem to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious
+      dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely
+      bankrupt of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the proper place we shall
+      see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn up his nose at such a whale
+      as this, however much he may shun blasted whales in general.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed he
+      recognised his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were knotted
+      round the tail of one of these whales.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There’s a pretty fellow, now,” he banteringly laughed, standing in the
+      ship’s bows, “there’s a jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes of
+      Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering their
+      boats for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes, and
+      sometimes sailing from their port with their hold full of boxes of tallow
+      candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all the oil they will get
+      won’t be enough to dip the Captain’s wick into; aye, we all know these
+      things; but look ye, here’s a Crappo that is content with our leavings,
+      the drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and is content too with scraping the
+      dry bones of that other precious fish he has there. Poor devil! I say,
+      pass round a hat, some one, and let’s make him a present of a little oil
+      for dear charity’s sake. For what oil he’ll get from that drugged whale
+      there, wouldn’t be fit to burn in a jail; no, not in a condemned cell. And
+      as for the other whale, why, I’ll agree to get more oil by chopping up and
+      trying out these three masts of ours, than he’ll get from that bundle of
+      bones; though, now that I think of it, it may contain something worth a
+      good deal more than oil; yes, ambergris. I wonder now if our old man has
+      thought of that. It’s worth trying. Yes, I’m for it;” and so saying he
+      started for the quarter-deck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether or
+      no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of
+      escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb
+      now called his boat’s crew, and pulled off for the stranger. Drawing
+      across her bow, he perceived that in accordance with the fanciful French
+      taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in the likeness of a
+      huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper spikes
+      projecting from it here and there; the whole terminating in a symmetrical
+      folded bulb of a bright red colour. Upon her head boards, in large gilt
+      letters, he read “Bouton de Rose,”—Rose-button, or Rose-bud; and
+      this was the romantic name of this aromatic ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though Stubb did not understand the <i>Bouton</i> part of the inscription, yet
+      the word <i>rose</i>, and the bulbous figure-head put together, sufficiently
+      explained the whole to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “A wooden rose-bud, eh?” he cried with his hand to his nose, “that will do
+      very well; but how like all creation it smells!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he had
+      to pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come close to the
+      blasted whale; and so talk over it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he bawled—“Bouton-de-Rose,
+      ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that speak English?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes,” rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out to be the
+      chief-mate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “<i>What</i> whale?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The <i>White</i> Whale—a Sperm Whale—Moby Dick, have ye seen him?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White Whale—no.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Very good, then; good bye now, and I’ll call again in a minute.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning over
+      the quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two hands into a
+      trumpet and shouted—“No, Sir! No!” Upon which Ahab retired, and
+      Stubb returned to the Frenchman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He now perceived that the Guernsey-man, who had just got into the chains,
+      and was using a cutting-spade, had slung his nose in a sort of bag.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’s the matter with your nose, there?” said Stubb. “Broke it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I wish it was broken, or that I didn’t have any nose at all!” answered
+      the Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very much.
+      “But what are you holding <i>yours</i> for?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, nothing! It’s a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, ain’t it?
+      Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw us a bunch of posies, will ye,
+      Bouton-de-Rose?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What in the devil’s name do you want here?” roared the Guernseyman,
+      flying into a sudden passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh! keep cool—cool? yes, that’s the word! why don’t you pack those
+      whales in ice while you’re working at ’em? But joking aside, though; do
+      you know, Rose-bud, that it’s all nonsense trying to get any oil out of
+      such whales? As for that dried up one, there, he hasn’t a gill in his
+      whole carcase.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I know that well enough; but, d’ye see, the Captain here won’t believe
+      it; this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But
+      come aboard, and mayhap he’ll believe you, if he won’t me; and so I’ll get
+      out of this dirty scrape.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow,” rejoined Stubb, and
+      with that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer scene presented
+      itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, were getting the
+      heavy tackles in readiness for the whales. But they worked rather slow and
+      talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a good humor. All their noses
+      upwardly projected from their faces like so many jib-booms. Now and then
+      pairs of them would drop their work, and run up to the mast-head to get
+      some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch the plague, dipped oakum in
+      coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their nostrils. Others having broken
+      the stems of their pipes almost short off at the bowl, were vigorously
+      puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it constantly filled their olfactories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from the
+      Captain’s round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a fiery
+      face thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from within. This
+      was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating against the
+      proceedings of the day, had betaken himself to the Captain’s round-house
+      (<i>cabinet</i> he called it) to avoid the pest; but still, could not help
+      yelling out his entreaties and indignations at times.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the
+      Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate
+      expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus, who had
+      brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle. Sounding him
+      carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man had not the
+      slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore held his peace
+      on that head, but otherwise was quite frank and confidential with him, so
+      that the two quickly concocted a little plan for both circumventing and
+      satirizing the Captain, without his at all dreaming of distrusting their
+      sincerity. According to this little plan of theirs, the Guernsey-man,
+      under cover of an interpreter’s office, was to tell the Captain what he
+      pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and as for Stubb, he was to utter any
+      nonsense that should come uppermost in him during the interview.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a small
+      and dark, but rather delicate looking man for a sea-captain, with large
+      whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a red cotton velvet vest with
+      watch-seals at his side. To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely
+      introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at once ostentatiously put on the
+      aspect of interpreting between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What shall I say to him first?” said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why,” said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, “you
+      may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish to me,
+      though I don’t pretend to be a judge.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He says, Monsieur,” said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his
+      captain, “that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain and
+      chief-mate, with six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a
+      blasted whale they had brought alongside.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What now?” said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him
+      carefully, I’m quite certain that he’s no more fit to command a whale-ship
+      than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him from me he’s a baboon.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one, is
+      far more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures us,
+      as we value our lives, to cut loose from these fish.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his crew
+      to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose the
+      cables and chains confining the whales to the ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What now?” said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that—that—in
+      fact, tell him I’ve diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody
+      else.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He says, Monsieur, that he’s very happy to have been of any service to
+      us.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties
+      (meaning himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into his
+      cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He wants you to take a glass of wine with him,” said the interpreter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Thank him heartily; but tell him it’s against my principles to drink with
+      the man I’ve diddled. In fact, tell him I must go.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He says, Monsieur, that his principles won’t admit of his drinking; but
+      that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur had
+      best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales, for
+      it’s so calm they won’t drift.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed
+      the Guernsey-man to this effect,—that having a long tow-line in his
+      boat, he would do what he could to help them, by pulling out the lighter
+      whale of the two from the ship’s side. While the Frenchman’s boats, then,
+      were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb benevolently towed away at
+      his whale the other way, ostentatiously slacking out a most unusually long
+      tow-line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale;
+      hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, while the
+      Pequod slid in between him and Stubb’s whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly
+      pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to give notice of his
+      intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of his unrighteous
+      cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he commenced an excavation in the
+      body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost have thought he was
+      digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at length his spade struck
+      against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old Roman tiles and pottery
+      buried in fat English loam. His boat’s crew were all in high excitement,
+      eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as gold-hunters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and screaming,
+      and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning to look
+      disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when suddenly
+      from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint stream of
+      perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without being
+      absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then along with another,
+      without at all blending with it for a time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I have it, I have it,” cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in
+      the subterranean regions, “a purse! a purse!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of
+      something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese;
+      very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb;
+      it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. And this, good friends, is
+      ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six handfuls
+      were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost in the sea, and still more,
+      perhaps, might have been secured were it not for impatient Ahab’s loud
+      command to Stubb to desist, and come on board, else the ship would bid
+      them good bye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0092">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an
+      article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin
+      was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject.
+      For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the precise
+      origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the learned.
+      Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for grey amber, yet
+      the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though at times found on
+      the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris
+      is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent,
+      brittle, odorless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and
+      ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy,
+      that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles,
+      hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it
+      to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s
+      in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale
+      themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale!
+      Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by
+      others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a
+      dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat
+      loads of Brandreth’s pills, and then running out of harm’s way, as
+      laborers do in blasting rocks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris, certain
+      hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought might be sailors’
+      trowsers buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they were nothing more
+      than pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found
+      in the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that saying
+      of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption; how that we
+      are sown in dishonor, but raised in glory. And likewise call to mind that
+      saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk. Also
+      forget not the strange fact that of all things of ill-savor,
+      Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the worst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but cannot,
+      owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against whalemen, and
+      which, in the estimation of some already biased minds, might be considered
+      as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the Frenchman’s two
+      whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has been
+      disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly, untidy
+      business. But there is another thing to rebut. They hint that all whales
+      always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma originate?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the
+      Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because
+      those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as
+      the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in
+      small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large casks, and carry it
+      home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas, and
+      the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding any
+      other course. The consequence is, that upon breaking into the hold, and
+      unloading one of these whale cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a savor is
+      given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an old city
+      grave-yard, for the foundations of a Lying-in Hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be
+      likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former
+      times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which
+      latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great
+      work on Smells, a text-book on that subject. As its name imports (smeer,
+      fat; berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to afford a place
+      for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried out, without being
+      taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of furnaces,
+      fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in full operation
+      certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But all this is quite
+      different with a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four years
+      perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil, does not, perhaps,
+      consume fifty days in the business of boiling out; and in the state that
+      it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that living or
+      dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means
+      creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the people of
+      the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose. Nor
+      indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant, when, as a
+      general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance of exercise;
+      always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the open air. I say,
+      that the motion of a Sperm Whale’s flukes above water dispenses a perfume,
+      as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor. What then
+      shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude?
+      Must it not be to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent
+      with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian town to do honor to Alexander
+      the Great?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0093">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most
+      significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew; an
+      event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes madly
+      merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying prophecy
+      of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some
+      few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work
+      the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing,
+      these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats’
+      crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous
+      wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It was
+      so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by
+      abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his
+      tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a
+      white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in
+      one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and
+      torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom
+      very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his
+      tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer,
+      freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year’s calendar should
+      show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New
+      Year’s Days. Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was
+      brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous
+      ebony, panelled in king’s cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all life’s
+      peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he had
+      somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his
+      brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily
+      subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by strange
+      wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the natural
+      lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had once
+      enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on the green; and at melodious
+      even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one
+      star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day, suspended
+      against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful
+      glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its
+      most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then
+      lights it up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out
+      those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond,
+      once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel
+      stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to the story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb’s after-oarsman
+      chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed; and,
+      temporarily, Pip was put into his place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness; but
+      happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and
+      therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing
+      him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his courageousness to
+      the utmost, for he might often find it needful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as the
+      fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which happened,
+      in this instance, to be right under poor Pip’s seat. The involuntary
+      consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in hand, out of the
+      boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale line coming against
+      his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as to become entangled in
+      it, when at last plumping into the water. That instant the stricken whale
+      started on a fierce run, the line swiftly straightened; and presto! poor
+      Pip came all foaming up to the chocks of the boat, remorselessly dragged
+      there by the line, which had taken several turns around his chest and
+      neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He hated
+      Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath, he suspended
+      its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb, exclaimed
+      interrogatively, “Cut?” Meantime Pip’s blue, choked face plainly looked,
+      Do, for God’s sake! All passed in a flash. In less than half a minute,
+      this entire thing happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Damn him, cut!” roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was
+      saved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed by
+      yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these irregular
+      cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like, but still
+      half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done, unofficially
+      gave him much wholesome advice. The substance was, Never jump from a boat,
+      Pip, except—but all the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice
+      ever is. Now, in general, <i>Stick to the boat</i>, is your true motto in
+      whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when <i>Leap from the boat</i>, is still
+      better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he should give
+      undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him too wide a
+      margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all advice, and
+      concluded with a peremptory command, “Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the
+      Lord, I won’t pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can’t afford to lose
+      whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you
+      would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don’t jump any more.”
+       Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow,
+      yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes
+      with his benevolence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was
+      under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time
+      he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to run,
+      Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller’s trunk. Alas!
+      Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue
+      day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all
+      round, to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin hammered out to the
+      extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like a
+      head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern.
+      Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In
+      three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb.
+      Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black
+      head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the
+      brightest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the
+      practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful
+      lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the
+      middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how
+      when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely
+      they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he
+      did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and
+      he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very
+      quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards
+      oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested
+      by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not
+      unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so called,
+      is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies
+      and armies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying
+      whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat
+      was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that
+      Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest
+      chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little
+      negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The
+      sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his
+      soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous
+      depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and
+      fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his
+      hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities,
+      Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the
+      firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the
+      treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him
+      mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal
+      reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is
+      absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent
+      as his God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that
+      fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what
+      like abandonment befell myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0094">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That whale of Stubb’s, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the
+      Pequod’s side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations previously
+      detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of the
+      Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in
+      dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when
+      the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere
+      going to the try-works, of which anon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several
+      others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it
+      strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid
+      part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet
+      and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a
+      favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener!
+      such a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it for only a few
+      minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine
+      and spiralise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter
+      exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under
+      indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among
+      those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within
+      the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their
+      opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that
+      uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring
+      violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow;
+      I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I
+      washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old
+      Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat
+      of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all
+      ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm
+      till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange
+      sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my
+      co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.
+      Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this
+      avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and
+      looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my
+      dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or
+      know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all
+      round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze
+      ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by
+      many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases
+      man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable
+      felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in
+      the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the
+      country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case
+      eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of
+      angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things akin
+      to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering
+      part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It is
+      tough with congealed tendons—a wad of muscle—but still
+      contains some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is
+      first cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much
+      like blocks of Berkshire marble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the
+      whale’s flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and
+      often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a
+      most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name
+      imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked
+      snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and
+      purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it
+      is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole
+      behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive a
+      royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, supposing
+      him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, and that
+      particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine vintage of
+      the vineyards of Champagne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the
+      course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling
+      adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation original
+      with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an
+      ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of
+      sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold it to
+      be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case, coalescing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but
+      sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the
+      dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland
+      or right whale, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior souls
+      who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale’s vocabulary.
+      But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman’s nipper is a short
+      firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of Leviathan’s
+      tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is about the
+      size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the oily deck, it
+      operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless blandishments, as of
+      magic, allures along with it all impurities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once
+      to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates.
+      This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the
+      blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When the proper
+      time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is a scene of
+      terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one side, lit by a dull
+      lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. They generally go in
+      pairs,—a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The whaling-pike is
+      similar to a frigate’s boarding-weapon of the same name. The gaff is
+      something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a sheet
+      of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches and
+      lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself,
+      perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This spade is
+      sharp as hone can make it; the spademan’s feet are shoeless; the thing he
+      stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge.
+      If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants’, would you
+      be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0095">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this
+      post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the
+      windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small
+      curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen
+      there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous
+      cistern in the whale’s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower
+      jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so
+      surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,—longer
+      than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and
+      jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is;
+      or, rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that found in
+      the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which,
+      King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it
+      for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th
+      chapter of the First Book of Kings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted
+      by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it,
+      and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier
+      carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle
+      deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African
+      hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a
+      pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its
+      diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere
+      long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the
+      pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the other
+      end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer now stands
+      before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to
+      all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while
+      employed in the peculiar functions of his office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the pots;
+      an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted endwise
+      against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into which the
+      minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator’s desk. Arrayed
+      in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves;
+      what a candidate for an archbishopric, what a lad for a Pope were this
+      mincer!*
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the mates to
+      the mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as thin
+      slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of boiling out
+      the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased,
+      besides perhaps improving it in quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0096">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished
+      by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid
+      masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship. It
+      is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her planks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most
+      roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength,
+      fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and mortar,
+      some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The foundation does not
+      penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly secured to the surface by
+      ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides, and screwing it down to
+      the timbers. On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top completely
+      covered by a large, sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we
+      expose the great try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels’
+      capacity. When not in use, they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they
+      are polished with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver
+      punch-bowls. During the night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl
+      into them and coil themselves away there for a nap. While employed in
+      polishing them—one man in each pot, side by side—many
+      confidential communications are carried on, over the iron lips. It is a
+      place also for profound mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand
+      try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone diligently circling round me,
+      that I was first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in
+      geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example,
+      will descend from any point in precisely the same time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare masonry
+      of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of the
+      furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted with heavy
+      doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented from
+      communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir
+      extending under the entire inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel
+      inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as
+      fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open direct
+      from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was about nine o’clock at night that the Pequod’s try-works were first
+      started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee the
+      business.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the
+      works.” This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his
+      shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said that in
+      a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time
+      with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition
+      to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp,
+      shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains
+      considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames.
+      Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once
+      ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would
+      that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and
+      inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the
+      time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk
+      in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day
+      of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the
+      carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean
+      darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce
+      flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and
+      illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire.
+      The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some
+      vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold
+      Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets
+      of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and folded them
+      in conflagrations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth
+      in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan
+      harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge pronged poles they
+      pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up
+      the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors
+      to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every
+      pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all
+      eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on
+      the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served
+      for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed,
+      looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in
+      their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat,
+      their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their
+      teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of
+      the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their
+      tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter
+      forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and
+      fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge
+      pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and
+      the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further
+      and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully
+      champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all
+      sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with
+      fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness,
+      seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently
+      guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval,
+      in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the
+      ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me,
+      capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred
+      visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable
+      drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable)
+      thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly
+      conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote my side,
+      which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just
+      beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half
+      conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching
+      them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass
+      before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had been
+      watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing
+      seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of
+      redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing
+      I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all
+      havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me.
+      Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that
+      the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is
+      the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself
+      about, and was fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the
+      compass. In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel
+      from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How glad
+      and how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the
+      night, and the fatal contingency of being brought by the lee!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy
+      hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint
+      of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness
+      makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies
+      will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the
+      morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious,
+      golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s
+      accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of
+      deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which
+      is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So,
+      therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that
+      mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped. With books the
+      same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all
+      books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.
+      “All is vanity.” ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian
+      Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks
+      fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls
+      Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and
+      throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and
+      therefore jolly;—not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones,
+      and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of
+      understanding shall remain” (<i>i.e.</i>, even while living) “in the congregation
+      of the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee,
+      deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but
+      there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some
+      souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of
+      them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for
+      ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even
+      in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds
+      upon the plain, even though they soar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0097">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Had you descended from the Pequod’s try-works to the Pequod’s forecastle,
+      where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment you would
+      have almost thought you were standing in some illuminated shrine of
+      canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay in their triangular oaken
+      vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon
+      his hooded eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of queens.
+      To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in darkness to his
+      pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he seeks the food of
+      light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an Aladdin’s lamp, and
+      lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night the ship’s black hull
+      still houses an illumination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps—often
+      but old bottles and vials, though—to the copper cooler at the
+      try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He burns,
+      too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore, unvitiated
+      state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral contrivances ashore. It
+      is sweet as early grass butter in April. He goes and hunts for his oil, so
+      as to be sure of its freshness and genuineness, even as the traveller on
+      the prairie hunts up his own supper of game.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0098">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off descried
+      from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and
+      slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside and
+      beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman of old to
+      the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great padded surtout
+      becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he is condemned
+      to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his spermaceti,
+      oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;—but now it remains to
+      conclude the last chapter of this part of the description by rehearsing—singing,
+      if I may—the romantic proceeding of decanting off his oil into the
+      casks and striking them down into the hold, where once again leviathan
+      returns to his native profundities, sliding along beneath the surface as
+      before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the six-barrel
+      casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling this way and
+      that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed round and headed
+      over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot across the slippery
+      deck, like so many land slides, till at last man-handled and stayed in
+      their course; and all round the hoops, rap, rap, go as many hammers as can
+      play upon them, for now, <i>ex officio</i>, every sailor is a cooper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great
+      hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down
+      go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are
+      replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable incidents
+      in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream with freshets of
+      blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale’s
+      head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery
+      yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the bulwarks; the
+      mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire ship seems great
+      leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is deafening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this
+      self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try-works, you
+      would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a most
+      scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses a
+      singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never look
+      so white as just after what they call an affair of oil. Besides, from the
+      ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent lye is readily made; and
+      whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale remains clinging to
+      the side, that lye quickly exterminates it. Hands go diligently along the
+      bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags restore them to their full
+      tidiness. The soot is brushed from the lower rigging. All the numerous
+      implements which have been in use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put
+      away. The great hatch is scrubbed and placed upon the try-works,
+      completely hiding the pots; every cask is out of sight; all tackles are
+      coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined and simultaneous industry
+      of almost the entire ship’s company, the whole of this conscientious duty
+      is at last concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own
+      ablutions; shift themselves from top to toe; and finally issue to the
+      immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow, as bridegrooms new-leaped from out
+      the daintiest Holland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and
+      humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics;
+      propose to mat the deck; think of having hanging to the top; object not to
+      taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to such
+      musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short of
+      audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and bring
+      us napkins!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent on
+      spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again soil the
+      old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot somewhere.
+      Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted labors,
+      which know no night; continuing straight through for ninety-six hours;
+      when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists with all day
+      rowing on the Line,—they only step to the deck to carry vast chains,
+      and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very
+      sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the
+      equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all
+      this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make
+      a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just
+      buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of
+      “There she blows!” and away they fly to fight another whale, and go
+      through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this is
+      man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings
+      extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and
+      then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and
+      learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this
+      done, when—<i>There she blows!</i>—the ghost is spouted up, and away
+      we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine
+      again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two
+      thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee
+      along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught
+      thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0099">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck,
+      taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but in
+      the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been added
+      how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood, he was
+      wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely eyeing the
+      particular object before him. When he halted before the binnacle, with his
+      glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass, that glance shot
+      like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his purpose; and when
+      resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast, then, as the same
+      riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin there, he still wore
+      the same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed with a certain wild
+      longing, if not hopefulness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly
+      attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though
+      now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some
+      monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain
+      significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and
+      the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the
+      cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the
+      Milky Way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the
+      heart of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the
+      head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst all the
+      rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet,
+      untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its Quito
+      glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour passed by
+      ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with thick
+      darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless every
+      sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left it last. For it was set
+      apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however wanton in their
+      sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as the white whale’s
+      talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch by night,
+      wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever live to
+      spend it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun and
+      tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun’s disks and
+      stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving, are in
+      luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to
+      derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing through
+      those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example
+      of these things. On its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL
+      ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the
+      middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it;
+      and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows
+      no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes’
+      summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a crowing
+      cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac, the
+      signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun
+      entering the equinoctial point at Libra.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now
+      pausing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all
+      other grand and lofty things; look here,—three peaks as proud as
+      Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the
+      courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all
+      are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe,
+      which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors
+      back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those who ask
+      the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks now this coined
+      sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the
+      equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a former equinox at
+      Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in throes, ’tis fit that
+      man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then! Here’s stout
+      stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil’s claws must have
+      left their mouldings there since yesterday,” murmured Starbuck to himself,
+      leaning against the bulwarks. “The old man seems to read Belshazzar’s
+      awful writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly. He goes below;
+      let me read. A dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks,
+      that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint earthly symbol. So in this
+      vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all our gloom, the sun of
+      Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope. If we bend down our eyes,
+      the dark vale shows her mouldy soil; but if we lift them, the bright sun
+      meets our glance half way, to cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture;
+      and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we
+      gaze for him in vain! This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still
+      sadly to me. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “There now’s the old Mogul,” soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, “he’s
+      been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with
+      faces which I should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long. And
+      all from looking at a piece of gold, which did I have it now on Negro Hill
+      or in Corlaer’s Hook, I’d not look at it very long ere spending it. Humph!
+      in my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard this as queer. I have seen
+      doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons of old Spain, your
+      doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili, your doubloons of Bolivia,
+      your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and
+      joes, and half joes, and quarter joes. What then should there be in this
+      doubloon of the Equator that is so killing wonderful? By Golconda! let me
+      read it once. Halloa! here’s signs and wonders truly! That, now, is what
+      old Bowditch in his Epitome calls the zodiac, and what my almanac below
+      calls ditto. I’ll get the almanac and as I have heard devils can be raised
+      with Daboll’s arithmetic, I’ll try my hand at raising a meaning out of
+      these queer curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar. Here’s the
+      book. Let’s see now. Signs and wonders; and the sun, he’s always among
+      ’em. Hem, hem, hem; here they are—here they go—all alive:—Aries,
+      or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull and Jimimi! here’s Gemini himself, or the
+      Twins. Well; the sun he wheels among ’em. Aye, here on the coin he’s just
+      crossing the threshold between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring.
+      Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll
+      do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the
+      thoughts. That’s my small experience, so far as the Massachusetts
+      calendar, and Bowditch’s navigator, and Daboll’s arithmetic go. Signs and
+      wonders, eh? Pity if there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant
+      in wonders! There’s a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist—hark! By
+      Jove, I have it! Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man
+      in one round chapter; and now I’ll read it off, straight out of the book.
+      Come, Almanack! To begin: there’s Aries, or the Ram—lecherous dog,
+      he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull—he bumps us the first thing;
+      then Gemini, or the Twins—that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach
+      Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going
+      from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path—he gives a few
+      fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the
+      Virgin! that’s our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye,
+      when pop comes Libra, or the Scales—happiness weighed and found
+      wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump,
+      as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in the rear; we are curing the
+      wound, when whang come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer,
+      is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here’s the
+      battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and
+      headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours out his
+      whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we
+      sleep. There’s a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through
+      it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty. Jollily he,
+      aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so, alow here, does
+      jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly’s the word for aye! Adieu, Doubloon! But stop; here
+      comes little King-Post; dodge round the try-works, now, and let’s hear
+      what he’ll have to say. There; he’s before it; he’ll out with something
+      presently. So, so; he’s beginning.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises a
+      certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what’s all this
+      staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that’s true; and at two
+      cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won’t smoke dirty
+      pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here’s nine hundred and sixty of
+      them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy ’em out.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a
+      foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort of
+      wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman—the old
+      hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. He
+      luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other side of
+      the mast; why, there’s a horse-shoe nailed on that side; and now he’s back
+      again; what does that mean? Hark! he’s muttering—voice like an old
+      worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the
+      sun stands in some one of these signs. I’ve studied signs, and know their
+      marks; they were taught me two score years ago, by the old witch in
+      Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then be? The horse-shoe sign;
+      for there it is, right opposite the gold. And what’s the horse-shoe sign?
+      The lion is the horse-shoe sign—the roaring and devouring lion.
+      Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “There’s another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men in
+      one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg—all
+      tattooing—looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the
+      Cannibal? As I live he’s comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone;
+      thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I
+      suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon’s Astronomy in the back country.
+      And by Jove, he’s found something there in the vicinity of his thigh—I
+      guess it’s Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don’t know what to make of
+      the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off some king’s trowsers. But,
+      aside again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled out of
+      sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual. What does he say,
+      with that look of his? Ah, only makes a sign to the sign and bows himself;
+      there is a sun on the coin—fire worshipper, depend upon it. Ho! more
+      and more. This way comes Pip—poor boy! would he had died, or I; he’s
+      half horrible to me. He too has been watching all of these interpreters—myself
+      included—and look now, he comes to read, with that unearthly idiot
+      face. Stand away again and hear him. Hark!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Upon my soul, he’s been studying Murray’s Grammar! Improving his mind,
+      poor fellow! But what’s that he says now—hist!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, he’s getting it by heart—hist! again.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, that’s funny.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I’m a crow,
+      especially when I stand a’top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw!
+      caw! caw! Ain’t I a crow? And where’s the scare-crow? There he stands; two
+      bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the
+      sleeves of an old jacket.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Wonder if he means me?—complimentary!—poor lad!—I could
+      go hang myself. Any way, for the present, I’ll quit Pip’s vicinity. I can
+      stand the rest, for they have plain wits; but he’s too crazy-witty for my
+      sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Here’s the ship’s navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire to
+      unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what’s the consequence? Then
+      again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught’s nailed to the
+      mast it’s a sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha! old Ahab! the White
+      Whale; he’ll nail ye! This is a pine tree. My father, in old Tolland
+      county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver ring grown over in
+      it; some old darkey’s wedding ring. How did it get there? And so they’ll
+      say in the resurrection, when they come to fish up this old mast, and find
+      a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the shaggy bark. Oh, the
+      gold! the precious, precious, gold! the green miser’ll hoard ye soon!
+      Hish! hish! God goes ’mong the worlds blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and
+      cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your
+      hoe-cake done!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0100">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      “Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours, bearing
+      down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his
+      hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger
+      captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat’s bow. He was a
+      darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or
+      thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in
+      festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed
+      behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar’s surcoat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hast seen the White Whale?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “See you this?” and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it, he
+      held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like
+      a mallet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Man my boat!” cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near
+      him—“Stand by to lower!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his crew
+      were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger. But
+      here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the
+      moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never
+      once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was
+      always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to
+      the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other vessel
+      at a moment’s warning. Now, it is no very easy matter for anybody—except
+      those who are almost hourly used to it, like whalemen—to clamber up
+      a ship’s side from a boat on the open sea; for the great swells now lift
+      the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it
+      half way down to the kelson. So, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship
+      of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now
+      found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly
+      eyeing the uncertain changeful height he could hardly hope to attain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward
+      circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his
+      luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And in
+      the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the two
+      officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the perpendicular
+      ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a pair of
+      tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem to bethink
+      them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to use their sea
+      bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute, because the strange
+      captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood, cried out, “I see, I
+      see!—avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing over the
+      cutting-tackle.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two
+      previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved
+      blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end. This was
+      quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his
+      solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in the
+      fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then giving the
+      word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his own
+      weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running parts of the
+      tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and gently
+      landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm frankly thrust forth in
+      welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his ivory leg,
+      and crossing the ivory arm (like two sword-fish blades) cried out in his
+      walrus way, “Aye, aye, hearty! let us shake bones together!—an arm
+      and a leg!—an arm that never can shrink, d’ye see; and a leg that
+      never can run. Where did’st thou see the White Whale?—how long ago?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The White Whale,” said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards the
+      East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a telescope;
+      “there I saw him, on the Line, last season.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And he took that arm off, did he?” asked Ahab, now sliding down from the
+      capstan, and resting on the Englishman’s shoulder, as he did so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Spin me the yarn,” said Ahab; “how was it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,” began
+      the Englishman. “I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time. Well, one
+      day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat fastened to
+      one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went milling and
+      milling round so, that my boat’s crew could only trim dish, by sitting all
+      their sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up breaches from the bottom
+      of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white head and hump, all
+      crows’ feet and wrinkles.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It was he, it was he!” cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended
+      breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, aye—they were mine—<i>my</i> irons,” cried Ahab, exultingly—“but
+      on!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Give me a chance, then,” said the Englishman, good-humoredly. “Well, this
+      old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam into
+      the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, I see!—wanted to part it; free the fast-fish—an old
+      trick—I know him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “How it was exactly,” continued the one-armed commander, “I do not know;
+      but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow;
+      but we didn’t know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled on the line,
+      bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other whale’s; that
+      went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters stood, and what a
+      noble great whale it was—the noblest and biggest I ever saw, sir, in
+      my life—I resolved to capture him, spite of the boiling rage he
+      seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would get loose, or the
+      tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a boat’s crew
+      for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say, I jumped into my
+      first mate’s boat—Mr. Mounttop’s here (by the way, Captain—Mounttop;
+      Mounttop—the captain);—as I was saying, I jumped into
+      Mounttop’s boat, which, d’ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with mine, then;
+      and snatching the first harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have it.
+      But, Lord, look you, sir—hearts and souls alive, man—the next
+      instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat—both eyes out—all
+      befogged and bedeadened with black foam—the whale’s tail looming
+      straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble steeple. No
+      use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday, with a blinding
+      sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after the second iron, to
+      toss it overboard—down comes the tail like a Lima tower, cutting my
+      boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and, flukes first, the white
+      hump backed through the wreck, as though it was all chips. We all struck
+      out. To escape his terrible flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole
+      sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking fish. But a
+      combing sea dashed me off, and at the same instant, the fish, taking one
+      good dart forwards, went down like a flash; and the barb of that cursed
+      second iron towing along near me caught me here” (clapping his hand just
+      below his shoulder); “yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to
+      Hell’s flames, I was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good
+      God, the barb ript its way along the flesh—clear along the whole
+      length of my arm—came out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;—and
+      that gentleman there will tell you the rest (by the way, captain—Dr.
+      Bunger, ship’s surgeon: Bunger, my lad,—the captain). Now, Bunger
+      boy, spin your part of the yarn.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all the
+      time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote his
+      gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but sober
+      one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched
+      trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between a
+      marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other,
+      occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two
+      crippled captains. But, at his superior’s introduction of him to Ahab, he
+      politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain’s bidding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It was a shocking bad wound,” began the whale-surgeon; “and, taking my
+      advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship,” interrupted the one-armed
+      captain, addressing Ahab; “go on, boy.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot
+      weather there on the Line. But it was no use—I did all I could; sat
+      up with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, very severe!” chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly altering
+      his voice, “Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till he couldn’t
+      see to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed, half seas over, about
+      three o’clock in the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat up with me indeed, and
+      was very severe in my diet. Oh! a great watcher, and very dietetically
+      severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh out! why don’t ye? You know
+      you’re a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave ahead, boy, I’d rather be
+      killed by you than kept alive by any other man.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir”—said
+      the imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab—“is
+      apt to be facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that sort.
+      But I may as well say—en passant, as the French remark—that I
+      myself—that is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend clergy—am
+      a strict total abstinence man; I never drink—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Water!” cried the captain; “he never drinks it; it’s a sort of fits to
+      him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on—go on
+      with the arm story.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes, I may as well,” said the surgeon, coolly. “I was about observing,
+      sir, before Captain Boomer’s facetious interruption, that spite of my best
+      and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse; the truth
+      was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more than two
+      feet and several inches long. I measured it with the lead line. In short,
+      it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and off it came. But I had no
+      hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is against all rule”—pointing
+      at it with the marlingspike—“that is the captain’s work, not mine;
+      he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had that club-hammer there put to
+      the end, to knock some one’s brains out with, I suppose, as he tried mine
+      once. He flies into diabolical passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent,
+      sir”—removing his hat, and brushing aside his hair, and exposing a
+      bowl-like cavity in his skull, but which bore not the slightest scarry
+      trace, or any token of ever having been a wound—“Well, the captain
+      there will tell you how that came here; he knows.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, I don’t,” said the captain, “but his mother did; he was born with it.
+      Oh, you solemn rogue, you—you Bunger! was there ever such another
+      Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in
+      pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What became of the White Whale?” now cried Ahab, who thus far had been
+      impatiently listening to this by-play between the two Englishmen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh!” cried the one-armed captain, “oh, yes! Well; after he sounded, we
+      didn’t see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I didn’t
+      then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick, till some
+      time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about Moby Dick—as
+      some call him—and then I knew it was he.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Did’st thou cross his wake again?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Twice.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But could not fasten?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Didn’t want to try to: ain’t one limb enough? What should I do without
+      this other arm? And I’m thinking Moby Dick doesn’t bite so much as he
+      swallows.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, then,” interrupted Bunger, “give him your left arm for bait to get
+      the right. Do you know, gentlemen”—very gravely and mathematically
+      bowing to each Captain in succession—“Do you know, gentlemen, that
+      the digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine
+      Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest even
+      a man’s arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the White
+      Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means to swallow a
+      single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But sometimes he is like
+      the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making
+      believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let one drop into him in
+      good earnest, and there it stayed for a twelvemonth or more; when I gave
+      him an emetic, and he heaved it up in small tacks, d’ye see. No possible
+      way for him to digest that jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his
+      general bodily system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about
+      it, and have a mind to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of
+      giving decent burial to the other, why in that case the arm is yours; only
+      let the whale have another chance at you shortly, that’s all.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, thank ye, Bunger,” said the English Captain, “he’s welcome to the arm
+      he has, since I can’t help it, and didn’t know him then; but not to
+      another one. No more White Whales for me; I’ve lowered for him once, and
+      that has satisfied me. There would be great glory in killing him, I know
+      that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye,
+      he’s best let alone; don’t you think so, Captain?”—glancing at the
+      ivory leg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone,
+      that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet!
+      How long since thou saw’st him last? Which way heading?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend’s,” cried Bunger, stoopingly
+      walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; “this man’s blood—bring
+      the thermometer!—it’s at the boiling point!—his pulse makes
+      these planks beat!—sir!”—taking a lancet from his pocket, and
+      drawing near to Ahab’s arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Avast!” roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks—“Man the
+      boat! Which way heading?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good God!” cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put.
+      “What’s the matter? He was heading east, I think.—Is your Captain
+      crazy?” whispering Fedallah.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to take
+      the boat’s steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle towards
+      him, commanded the ship’s sailors to stand by to lower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment he was standing in the boat’s stern, and the Manilla men were
+      springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him. With back
+      to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own, Ahab stood
+      upright till alongside of the Pequod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0101">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she
+      hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby, merchant
+      of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of Enderby &amp;
+      Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman’s opinion, comes not far behind
+      the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point of real
+      historical interest. How long, prior to the year of our Lord 1775, this
+      great whaling house was in existence, my numerous fish-documents do not
+      make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted out the first English ships
+      that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale; though for some score of years
+      previous (ever since 1726) our valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and
+      the Vineyard had in large fleets pursued that Leviathan, but only in the
+      North and South Atlantic: not elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here,
+      that the Nantucketers were the first among mankind to harpoon with
+      civilized steel the great Sperm Whale; and that for half a century they
+      were the only people of the whole globe who so harpooned him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose, and
+      at the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape Horn, and
+      was the first among the nations to lower a whale-boat of any sort in the
+      great South Sea. The voyage was a skilful and lucky one; and returning to
+      her berth with her hold full of the precious sperm, the Amelia’s example
+      was soon followed by other ships, English and American, and thus the vast
+      Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were thrown open. But not content with
+      this good deed, the indefatigable house again bestirred itself: Samuel and
+      all his Sons—how many, their mother only knows—and under their
+      immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their expense, the British
+      government was induced to send the sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling
+      voyage of discovery into the South Sea. Commanded by a naval Post-Captain,
+      the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and did some service; how much
+      does not appear. But this is not all. In 1819, the same house fitted out a
+      discovery whale ship of their own, to go on a tasting cruise to the remote
+      waters of Japan. That ship—well called the “Syren”—made a
+      noble experimental cruise; and it was thus that the great Japanese Whaling
+      Ground first became generally known. The Syren in this famous voyage was
+      commanded by a Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All honor to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to
+      the present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have
+      slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ship named after him was worthy of the honor, being a very fast
+      sailer and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight
+      somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the
+      forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps—every
+      soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine gam
+      I had—long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his
+      ivory heel—it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of
+      that ship; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I
+      ever lose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it
+      at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came (for it’s
+      squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands—visitors and all—were
+      called to reef topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each
+      other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our
+      jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the howling
+      gale, a warning example to all drunken tars. However, the masts did not go
+      overboard; and by and by we scrambled down, so sober, that we had to pass
+      the flip again, though the savage salt spray bursting down the forecastle
+      scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it to my taste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The beef was fine—tough, but with body in it. They said it was
+      bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for
+      certain, how that was. They had dumplings too; small, but substantial,
+      symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you
+      could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were swallowed. If
+      you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching out of you
+      like billiard-balls. The bread—but that couldn’t be helped; besides,
+      it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread contained the only fresh
+      fare they had. But the forecastle was not very light, and it was very easy
+      to step over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all in all, taking
+      her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions of the cook’s boilers,
+      including his own live parchment boilers; fore and aft, I say, the Samuel
+      Enderby was a jolly ship; of good fare and plenty; fine flip and strong;
+      crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to hat-band.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other English
+      whalers I know of—not all though—were such famous, hospitable
+      ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread, and the can, and the
+      joke; and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking, and laughing? I
+      will tell you. The abounding good cheer of these English whalers is matter
+      for historical research. Nor have I been at all sparing of historical
+      whale research, when it has seemed needed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders,
+      Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant in
+      the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions, touching plenty
+      to eat and drink. For, as a general thing, the English merchant-ship
+      scrimps her crew; but not so the English whaler. Hence, in the English,
+      this thing of whaling good cheer is not normal and natural, but incidental
+      and particular; and, therefore, must have some special origin, which is
+      here pointed out, and will be still further elucidated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an
+      ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must
+      be about whalers. The title was, “Dan Coopman,” wherefore I concluded that
+      this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the
+      fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I was reinforced in
+      this opinion by seeing that it was the production of one “Fitz
+      Swackhammer.” But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man, professor of
+      Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and St. Pott’s, to
+      whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box of sperm candles
+      for his trouble—this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the
+      book, assured me that “Dan Coopman” did not mean “The Cooper,” but “The
+      Merchant.” In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch book treated of
+      the commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained a very
+      interesting account of its whale fishery. And in this chapter it was,
+      headed, “Smeer,” or “Fat,” that I found a long detailed list of the
+      outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from
+      which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock
+      fish. 550,000 lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins of
+      butter. 20,000 lbs. Texel &amp; Leyden cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese
+      (probably an inferior article). 550 ankers of Geneva. 10,800 barrels of
+      beer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in the
+      present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes,
+      barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this
+      beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were
+      incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic
+      application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my own,
+      touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by every Low
+      Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen whale fishery.
+      In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and Leyden cheese
+      consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their naturally unctuous
+      natures, being rendered still more unctuous by the nature of their
+      vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game in those frigid
+      Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country where the
+      convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those
+      polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that
+      climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen,
+      including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much
+      exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet of
+      180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say, we have
+      precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks’ allowance,
+      exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin. Now, whether
+      these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might fancy them to have
+      been, were the right sort of men to stand up in a boat’s head, and take
+      good aim at flying whales; this would seem somewhat improbable. Yet they
+      did aim at them, and hit them too. But this was very far North, be it
+      remembered, where beer agrees well with the constitution; upon the
+      Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would be apt to make the harpooneer
+      sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his boat; and grievous loss might
+      ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers of
+      two or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English whalers
+      have not neglected so excellent an example. For, say they, when cruising
+      in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a
+      good dinner out of it, at least. And this empties the decanter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0102">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly
+      dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail
+      upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough
+      sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still
+      further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters, and
+      casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost bones,
+      set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his unconditional
+      skeleton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery,
+      pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the whale? Did
+      erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures on the anatomy
+      of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a specimen rib for
+      exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land a full-grown whale on
+      your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a roast-pig? Surely not. A
+      veritable witness have you hitherto been, Ishmael; but have a care how you
+      seize the privilege of Jonah alone; the privilege of discoursing upon the
+      joists and beams; the rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings,
+      making up the frame-work of leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats,
+      dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far beneath
+      the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed with an
+      opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged to, a small
+      cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag,
+      to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the
+      lances. Think you I let that chance go, without using my boat-hatchet and
+      jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the contents of that
+      young cub?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their
+      gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted to
+      my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides. For
+      being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey of
+      Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the
+      lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side glen not
+      very far distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his capital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted
+      with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought together
+      in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his people could
+      invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices, chiselled shells,
+      inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes; and all these distributed
+      among whatever natural wonders, the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering
+      waves had cast upon his shores.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an
+      unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his
+      head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings seemed
+      his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of its
+      fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun, then the
+      skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where a grand
+      temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebræ were carved with
+      Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests
+      kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again
+      sent forth its vapory spout; while, suspended from a bough, the terrific
+      lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that so
+      affrighted Damocles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the
+      trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious
+      earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it,
+      whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living
+      flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the
+      shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these
+      unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun
+      seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver!
+      unseen weaver!—pause!—one word!—whither flows the
+      fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings?
+      Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single word with thee!
+      Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the loom;
+      the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he
+      weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice;
+      and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only
+      when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.
+      For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are
+      inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard
+      without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have
+      villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all
+      this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be
+      overheard afar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the
+      great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging—a gigantic idler!
+      Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around
+      him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven over
+      with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but himself
+      a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived
+      with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the
+      skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the real jet
+      had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as an object
+      of vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled that the priests should swear
+      that smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro I paced before this skeleton—brushed
+      the vines aside—broke through the ribs—and with a ball of
+      Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid its many winding, shaded
+      colonnades and arbours. But soon my line was out; and following it back, I
+      emerged from the opening where I entered. I saw no living thing within;
+      naught was there but bones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton.
+      From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the
+      altitude of the final rib, “How now!” they shouted; “Dar’st thou measure
+      this our god! That’s for us.” “Aye, priests—well, how long do ye
+      make him, then?” But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them, concerning
+      feet and inches; they cracked each other’s sconces with their yard-sticks—the
+      great skull echoed—and seizing that lucky chance, I quickly
+      concluded my own admeasurements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be it
+      recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied
+      measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can refer
+      to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in
+      Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have
+      some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise, I have heard
+      that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they have what the
+      proprietors call “the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or River Whale
+      in the United States.” Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton
+      Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession
+      the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the
+      full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo’s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons belonged,
+      were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar grounds. King
+      Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir Clifford, because he was
+      lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir Clifford’s whale has been
+      articulated throughout; so that, like a great chest of drawers, you can
+      open and shut him, in all his bony cavities—spread out his ribs like
+      a gigantic fan—and swing all day upon his lower jaw. Locks are to be
+      put upon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and a footman will show
+      round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side. Sir Clifford
+      thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery in the
+      spinal column; threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his
+      cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied
+      verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild
+      wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving
+      such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the
+      other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then
+      composing—at least, what untattooed parts might remain—I did
+      not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all
+      enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0103">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain
+      statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we
+      are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base
+      upon Captain Scoresby’s estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized
+      Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful
+      calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between
+      eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet
+      in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety
+      tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably
+      outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one
+      hundred inhabitants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this
+      leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman’s imagination?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole, jaw,
+      teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now simply
+      point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his unobstructed
+      bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very large a proportion of
+      the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by far the most complicated
+      part; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in this chapter, you
+      must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your arm, as we proceed,
+      otherwise you will not gain a complete notion of the general structure we
+      are about to view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In length, the Sperm Whale’s skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two
+      feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have been
+      ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one fifth in
+      length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two feet, his skull
+      and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain
+      back-bone. Attached to this back-bone, for something less than a third of
+      its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once enclosed his
+      vitals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine,
+      extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled the
+      hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty of
+      her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the time,
+      but a long, disconnected timber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was nearly
+      six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each successively
+      longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one of the middle
+      ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From that part, the
+      remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only spanned five feet
+      and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore a seemly
+      correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most arched. In
+      some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay footpath
+      bridges over small streams.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the
+      circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the
+      whale is by no means the mould of his invested form. The largest of the
+      Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish
+      which, in life, is greatest in depth. Now, the greatest depth of the
+      invested body of this particular whale must have been at least sixteen
+      feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight
+      feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion of the living
+      magnitude of that part. Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a naked
+      spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of added bulk in
+      flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels. Still more, for the ample fins, I here
+      saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic,
+      but boneless flukes, an utter blank!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to
+      comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead
+      attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the
+      heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry
+      flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale
+      be truly and livingly found out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a crane,
+      to pile its bones high up on end. No speedy enterprise. But now it’s done,
+      it looks much like Pompey’s Pillar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are forty and odd vertebræ in all, which in the skeleton are not
+      locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic
+      spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest, a middle one,
+      is in width something less than three feet, and in depth more than four.
+      The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two
+      inches in width, and looks something like a white billiard-ball. I was
+      told that there were still smaller ones, but they had been lost by some
+      little cannibal urchins, the priest’s children, who had stolen them to
+      play marbles with. Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of
+      living things tapers off at last into simple child’s play.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0104">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to
+      enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not
+      compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial
+      folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the
+      yards he measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic involutions
+      of his intestines, where they lie in him like great cables and hawsers
+      coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me to
+      approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking
+      the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the
+      uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him in most of his
+      present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify
+      him in an archæological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view.
+      Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan—to an ant or a flea—such
+      portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when
+      Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this
+      emprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said,
+      that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these
+      dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson,
+      expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer’s
+      uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by
+      a whale author like me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though
+      it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this
+      Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals.
+      Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!
+      Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this
+      Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching
+      comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the
+      sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past,
+      present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth,
+      and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so
+      magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its
+      bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great
+      and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be
+      who have tried it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials
+      as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a
+      stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells,
+      wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of
+      preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier
+      geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost
+      completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called
+      the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate intercepted
+      links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote
+      posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales hitherto
+      discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last preceding the
+      superficial formations. And though none of them precisely answer to any
+      known species of the present time, they are yet sufficiently akin to them
+      in general respects, to justify their taking rank as Cetacean fossils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones
+      and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been
+      found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in
+      Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Among
+      the more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the year
+      1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street opening
+      almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones disinterred in
+      excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon’s time. Cuvier
+      pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some utterly unknown
+      Leviathanic species.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost
+      complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on
+      the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous
+      slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels.
+      The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the
+      name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being taken across the
+      sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out that this alleged
+      reptile was a whale, though of a departed species. A significant
+      illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this book, that the
+      skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape of his fully
+      invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in his
+      paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it, in
+      substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of
+      the globe have blotted out of existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws,
+      ribs, and vertebræ, all characterized by partial resemblances to the
+      existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other
+      hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their
+      incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous
+      period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with
+      man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering
+      glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed
+      hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this
+      world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was
+      visible. Then the whole world was the whale’s; and, king of creation, he
+      left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who
+      can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood
+      than the Pharaoh’s. Methuselah seems a school-boy. I look round to shake
+      hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced
+      existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been
+      before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the
+      stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his
+      ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim
+      for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable print
+      of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah, some fifty
+      years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured and
+      painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and dolphins,
+      similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns.
+      Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in
+      that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of
+      the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by the
+      venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams of
+      which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are
+      oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine, that
+      by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the Temple, no Whale can pass it
+      without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, that on either
+      side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into the Sea, and
+      wound the Whales when they light upon ’em. They keep a Whale’s Rib of an
+      incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with its
+      convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be reached
+      by a Man upon a Camel’s Back. This Rib (says John Leo) is said to have
+      layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their Historians affirm, that
+      a Prophet who prophesy’d of Mahomet, came from this Temple, and some do
+      not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at
+      the Base of the Temple.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a
+      Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0105">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from the
+      head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether, in the
+      long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the original
+      bulk of his sires.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the
+      present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are found
+      in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period prior to
+      man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those belonging to
+      its latter formations exceed in size those of its earlier ones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the
+      Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than seventy
+      feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen, that the
+      tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a large sized
+      modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen’s authority, that Sperm Whales
+      have been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of capture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an
+      advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may it
+      not be, that since Adam’s time they have degenerated?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such
+      gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally. For Pliny tells
+      us of whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus of others
+      which measured eight hundred feet in length—Rope Walks and Thames
+      Tunnels of Whales! And even in the days of Banks and Solander, Cooke’s
+      naturalists, we find a Danish member of the Academy of Sciences setting
+      down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies) at one
+      hundred and twenty yards; that is, three hundred and sixty feet. And
+      Lacépède, the French naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales, in
+      the very beginning of his work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale at one
+      hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet. And this work was
+      published so late as A.D. 1825.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is as
+      big as his ancestors in Pliny’s time. And if ever I go where Pliny is, I,
+      a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to tell him so. Because I
+      cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies that were
+      buried thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not measure so
+      much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks; and while the
+      cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest Egyptian and Nineveh
+      tablets, by the relative proportions in which they are drawn, just as
+      plainly prove that the high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle of Smithfield,
+      not only equal, but far exceed in magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh’s fat
+      kine; in the face of all this, I will not admit that of all animals the
+      whale alone should have degenerated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more
+      recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs
+      at the mast-heads of the whale-ships, now penetrating even through
+      Behring’s straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the
+      world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental
+      coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a
+      chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be
+      exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke
+      his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,
+      which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies
+      of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with
+      their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals,
+      where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such a
+      comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to show that the
+      hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a period
+      ago—not a good lifetime—the census of the buffalo in Illinois
+      exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day
+      not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the
+      cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far
+      different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an
+      end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales for
+      forty-eight months think they have done extremely well, and thank God, if
+      at last they carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days of the
+      old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when the far
+      west (in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and a virgin, the
+      same number of moccasined men, for the same number of months, mounted on
+      horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain not forty, but forty
+      thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need were, could be
+      statistically stated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the gradual
+      extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former years (the
+      latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in small pods,
+      were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in consequence, the
+      voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more remunerative.
+      Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales, influenced by some
+      views to safety, now swim the seas in immense caravans, so that to a large
+      degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, and schools of other
+      days are now aggregated into vast but widely separated, unfrequent armies.
+      That is all. And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the
+      so-called whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years
+      abounding with them, hence that species also is declining. For they are
+      only being driven from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer
+      enlivened with their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand
+      has been very recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two
+      firm fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever remain
+      impregnable. And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty Swiss
+      have retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas and glades
+      of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort to their
+      Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and walls
+      there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle of
+      everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one
+      cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this
+      positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions. But
+      though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than 13,000,
+      have been annually slain on the nor’ west coast by the Americans alone;
+      yet there are considerations which render even this circumstance of little
+      or no account as an opposing argument in this matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness of
+      the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we say to Harto,
+      the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at one hunting the King of
+      Siam took 4,000 elephants; that in those regions elephants are numerous as
+      droves of cattle in the temperate climes. And there seems no reason to
+      doubt that if these elephants, which have now been hunted for thousands of
+      years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all the successive
+      monarchs of the East—if they still survive there in great numbers,
+      much more may the great whale outlast all hunting, since he has a pasture
+      to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as all Asia, both
+      Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles of the sea
+      combined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity of
+      whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more, therefore
+      at any one period of time, several distinct adult generations must be
+      contemporary. And what that is, we may soon gain some idea of, by
+      imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults of creation
+      yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and children who were
+      alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this countless host to the
+      present human population of the globe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his
+      species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas before
+      the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries,
+      and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s
+      Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands,
+      to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and
+      rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed
+      defiance to the skies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0106">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 106. Ahab’s Leg.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel
+      Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to his
+      own person. He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his boat that
+      his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock. And when after
+      gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there, he so vehemently
+      wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman (it was, as ever,
+      something about his not steering inflexibly enough); then, the already
+      shaken ivory received such an additional twist and wrench, that though it
+      still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem
+      it entirely trustworthy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his
+      pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the
+      condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not
+      been very long prior to the Pequod’s sailing from Nantucket, that he had
+      been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible; by some
+      unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb
+      having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and
+      all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme difficulty that the
+      agonizing wound was entirely cured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the
+      anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a
+      former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous
+      reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest
+      songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable
+      events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought
+      Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the
+      ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is an
+      inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural
+      enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world,
+      but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all
+      hell’s despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely
+      beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the
+      grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the
+      deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest
+      earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in
+      them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some
+      men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie
+      the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal
+      miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the
+      gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft
+      cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the
+      gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in
+      the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more
+      properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many other
+      particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some, why
+      it was, that for a certain period, both before and after the sailing of
+      the Pequod, he had hidden himself away with such Grand-Lama-like
+      exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought speechless refuge, as it
+      were, among the marble senate of the dead. Captain Peleg’s bruited reason
+      for this thing appeared by no means adequate; though, indeed, as touching
+      all Ahab’s deeper part, every revelation partook more of significant
+      darkness than of explanatory light. But, in the end, it all came out; this
+      one matter did, at least. That direful mishap was at the bottom of his
+      temporary recluseness. And not only this, but to that ever-contracting,
+      dropping circle ashore, who, for any reason, possessed the privilege of a
+      less banned approach to him; to that timid circle the above hinted
+      casualty—remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted for by Ahab—invested
+      itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the land of spirits and
+      of wails. So that, through their zeal for him, they had all conspired, so
+      far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others;
+      and hence it was, that not till a considerable interval had elapsed, did
+      it transpire upon the Pequod’s decks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air, or
+      the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not with
+      earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain
+      practical procedures;—he called the carpenter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without delay
+      set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him supplied
+      with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which had thus
+      far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a careful selection of
+      the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be secured. This done, the
+      carpenter received orders to have the leg completed that night; and to
+      provide all the fittings for it, independent of those pertaining to the
+      distrusted one in use. Moreover, the ship’s forge was ordered to be
+      hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the hold; and, to accelerate the
+      affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at once to the forging of
+      whatever iron contrivances might be needed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0107">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high
+      abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But
+      from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they
+      seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
+      But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of the
+      high, humane abstraction; the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate; hence,
+      he now comes in person on this stage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to
+      whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent, alike
+      experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own; the
+      carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those
+      numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an
+      auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic
+      remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in
+      those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a
+      large ship, upon a three or four years’ voyage, in uncivilized and
+      far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary duties:—repairing
+      stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars,
+      inserting bull’s eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks,
+      and other miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special
+      business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of
+      conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,
+      was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several
+      vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times
+      except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed
+      athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: the
+      carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and straightway files
+      it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays on board, and is
+      made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and
+      cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking
+      cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a
+      soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars to be painted upon the
+      blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his big vice of wood, the
+      carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation. A sailor takes a fancy
+      to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills his ears. Another has
+      the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping one hand upon his
+      bench bids him be seated there; but the poor fellow unmanageably winces
+      under the unconcluded operation; whirling round the handle of his wooden
+      vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in that, if he would have
+      him draw the tooth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent and
+      without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he deemed
+      but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But while now
+      upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such liveliness
+      of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some uncommon
+      vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was this man
+      more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were;
+      impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of
+      things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the
+      whole visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes,
+      still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you, though you dig
+      foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him,
+      involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness;—yet
+      was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian,
+      wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a certain grizzled
+      wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time during the midnight
+      watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah’s ark. Was it that this old
+      carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro,
+      not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever
+      small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a
+      stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born
+      babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next. You
+      might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a
+      sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to
+      work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been
+      tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but
+      merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a
+      pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed
+      along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of those
+      unreasoning but still highly useful, <i>multum in parvo</i>, Sheffield
+      contrivances, assuming the exterior—though a little swelled—of
+      a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes,
+      but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers,
+      nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the
+      carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part of
+      him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs,
+      and there they were.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was,
+      after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common
+      soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its
+      duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of
+      hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had abided
+      for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same
+      unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a
+      great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel,
+      which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box
+      and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep
+      himself awake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0108">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      The Deck—First Night Watch.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      (<i>Carpenter standing before his vice-bench, and by the light of two
+      lanterns busily filing the ivory joist for the leg, which joist is firmly
+      fixed in the vice. Slabs of ivory, leather straps, pads, screws, and
+      various tools of all sorts lying about the bench. Forward, the red flame
+      of the forge is seen, where the blacksmith is at work.</i>)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Drat the file, and drat the bone! That is hard which should be soft, and
+      that is soft which should be hard. So we go, who file old jaws and
+      shinbones. Let’s try another. Aye, now, this works better (<i>sneezes</i>).
+      Halloa, this bone dust is (<i>sneezes</i>)—why it’s (<i>sneezes</i>)—yes
+      it’s (<i>sneezes</i>)—bless my soul, it won’t let me speak! This is what an
+      old fellow gets now for working in dead lumber. Saw a live tree, and you
+      don’t get this dust; amputate a live bone, and you don’t get it (<i>sneezes</i>).
+      Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let’s have that ferule
+      and buckle-screw; I’ll be ready for them presently. Lucky now (<i>sneezes</i>)
+      there’s no knee-joint to make; that might puzzle a little; but a mere
+      shinbone—why it’s easy as making hop-poles; only I should like to
+      put a good finish on. Time, time; if I but only had the time, I could turn
+      him out as neat a leg now as ever (<i>sneezes</i>) scraped to a lady in a parlor.
+      Those buckskin legs and calves of legs I’ve seen in shop windows wouldn’t
+      compare at all. They soak water, they do; and of course get rheumatic, and
+      have to be doctored (<i>sneezes</i>) with washes and lotions, just like live
+      legs. There; before I saw it off, now, I must call his old Mogulship, and
+      see whether the length will be all right; too short, if anything, I guess.
+      Ha! that’s the heel; we are in luck; here he comes, or it’s somebody else,
+      that’s certain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      AHAB (<i>advancing</i>). (<i>During the ensuing scene, the carpenter continues
+      sneezing at times.</i>)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, manmaker!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length. Let
+      me measure, sir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Measured for a leg! good. Well, it’s not the first time. About it! There;
+      keep thy finger on it. This is a cogent vice thou hast here, carpenter;
+      let me feel its grip once. So, so; it does pinch some.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, sir, it will break bones—beware, beware!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery
+      world that can hold, man. What’s Prometheus about there?—the
+      blacksmith, I mean—what’s he about?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He must be forging the buckle-screw, sir, now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Right. It’s a partnership; he supplies the muscle part. He makes a fierce
+      red flame there!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of fine work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Um-m. So he must. I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that old
+      Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they say, should have been a blacksmith,
+      and animated them with fire; for what’s made in fire must properly belong
+      to fire; and so hell’s probable. How the soot flies! This must be the
+      remainder the Greek made the Africans of. Carpenter, when he’s through
+      with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of steel shoulder-blades;
+      there’s a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I’ll order a complete man after a
+      desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest
+      modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to ’em, to stay in
+      one place; then, arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at all, brass
+      forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let me see—shall
+      I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a sky-light on top of his head
+      to illuminate inwards. There, take the order, and away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, what’s he speaking about, and who’s he speaking to, I should like to
+      know? Shall I keep standing here? (<i>aside</i>).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ’Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here’s one. No,
+      no, no; I must have a lantern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ho, ho! That’s it, hey? Here are two, sir; one will serve my turn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What art thou thrusting that thief-catcher into my face for, man? Thrusted
+      light is worse than presented pistols.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought, sir, that you spoke to carpenter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Carpenter? why that’s—but no;—a very tidy, and, I may say, an
+      extremely gentlemanlike sort of business thou art in here, carpenter;—or
+      would’st thou rather work in clay?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir?—Clay? clay, sir? That’s mud; we leave clay to ditchers, sir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fellow’s impious! What art thou sneezing about?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bone is rather dusty, sir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Take the hint, then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself under
+      living people’s noses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir?—oh! ah!—I guess so;—yes—oh, dear!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good
+      workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for thy
+      work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless
+      feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that is, carpenter,
+      my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst thou not drive
+      that old Adam away?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard
+      something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never
+      entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still pricking
+      him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once was;
+      so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul.
+      Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair,
+      do I. Is’t a riddle?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I should humbly call it a poser, sir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing
+      may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where
+      thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most
+      solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don’t speak!
+      And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long
+      dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of
+      hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Good Lord! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over again; I
+      think I didn’t carry a small figure, sir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises.—How long before
+      the leg is done?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps an hour, sir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me (<i>turns to go</i>). Oh, Life! Here I
+      am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a
+      bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not
+      do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole
+      world’s books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the
+      wealthiest Prætorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the
+      world’s); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By
+      heavens! I’ll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one
+      small, compendious vertebra. So.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      CARPENTER (<i>resuming his work</i>).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he’s
+      queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he’s queer,
+      says Stubb; he’s queer—queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into Mr.
+      Starbuck all the time—queer—sir—queer, queer, very
+      queer. And here’s his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here’s his
+      bedfellow! has a stick of whale’s jaw-bone for a wife! And this is his
+      leg; he’ll stand on this. What was that now about one leg standing in
+      three places, and all three places standing in one hell—how was
+      that? Oh! I don’t wonder he looked so scornful at me! I’m a sort of
+      strange-thoughted sometimes, they say; but that’s only haphazard-like.
+      Then, a short, little old body like me, should never undertake to wade out
+      into deep waters with tall, heron-built captains; the water chucks you
+      under the chin pretty quick, and there’s a great cry for life-boats. And
+      here’s the heron’s leg! long and slim, sure enough! Now, for most folks
+      one pair of legs lasts a lifetime, and that must be because they use them
+      mercifully, as a tender-hearted old lady uses her roly-poly old
+      coach-horses. But Ahab; oh he’s a hard driver. Look, driven one leg to
+      death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears out bone legs by the
+      cord. Halloa, there, you Smut! bear a hand there with those screws, and
+      let’s finish it before the resurrection fellow comes a-calling with his
+      horn for all legs, true or false, as brewery-men go round collecting old
+      beer barrels, to fill ’em up again. What a leg this is! It looks like a
+      real live leg, filed down to nothing but the core; he’ll be standing on
+      this to-morrow; he’ll be taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot
+      the little oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude.
+      So, so; chisel, file, and sand-paper, now!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0109">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      According to usage they were pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no
+      inconsiderable oil came up with the water; the casks below must have
+      sprung a bad leak. Much concern was shown; and Starbuck went down into the
+      cabin to report this unfavourable affair.*
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it is a
+      regular semi-weekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench the
+      casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals, is removed
+      by the ship’s pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept damply tight;
+      while by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the mariners
+      readily detect any serious leakage in the precious cargo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and
+      the Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from the
+      China waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with a general
+      chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him; and another
+      separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the Japanese islands—Niphon,
+      Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new ivory leg braced against the
+      screwed leg of his table, and with a long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in
+      his hand, the wondrous old man, with his back to the gangway door, was
+      wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old courses again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who’s there?” hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round to
+      it. “On deck! Begone!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir. We
+      must up Burtons and break out.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to here
+      for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make good
+      in a year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving,
+      sir.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “So it is, so it is; if we get it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it leak!
+      I’m all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks,
+      but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that’s a far worse plight
+      than the Pequod’s, man. Yet I don’t stop to plug my leak; for who can find
+      it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if found, in this
+      life’s howling gale? Starbuck! I’ll not have the Burtons hoisted.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What will the owners say, sir?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What
+      cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about
+      those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But look ye,
+      the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye, my
+      conscience is in this ship’s keel.—On deck!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Captain Ahab,” said the reddening mate, moving further into the cabin,
+      with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it almost seemed
+      not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward manifestation of
+      itself, but within also seemed more than half distrustful of itself; “A
+      better man than I might well pass over in thee what he would quickly
+      enough resent in a younger man; aye, and in a happier, Captain Ahab.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?—On
+      deck!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir—to be
+      forbearing! Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto,
+      Captain Ahab?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most
+      South-Sea-men’s cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck,
+      exclaimed: “There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain
+      that is lord over the Pequod.—On deck!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks, you
+      would have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of the
+      levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose, and as he
+      quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: “Thou hast outraged,
+      not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck;
+      thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself,
+      old man.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!”
+       murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. “What’s that he said—Ahab
+      beware of Ahab—there’s something there!” Then unconsciously using
+      the musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the
+      little cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and
+      returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck,” he said lowly to the mate;
+      then raising his voice to the crew: “Furl the t’gallant-sails, and
+      close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft; back the main-yard; up Burton, and
+      break out in the main-hold.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It were perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting
+      Starbuck, Ahab thus acted. It may have been a flash of honesty in him; or
+      mere prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously forbade
+      the slightest symptom of open disaffection, however transient, in the
+      important chief officer of his ship. However it was, his orders were
+      executed; and the Burtons were hoisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0110">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Upon searching, it was found that the casks last struck into the hold were
+      perfectly sound, and that the leak must be further off. So, it being calm
+      weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing the slumbers of the
+      huge ground-tier butts; and from that black midnight sending those
+      gigantic moles into the daylight above. So deep did they go; and so
+      ancient, and corroded, and weedy the aspect of the lowermost puncheons,
+      that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-stone cask containing
+      coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted placards, vainly warning
+      the infatuated old world from the flood. Tierce after tierce, too, of
+      water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of staves, and iron bundles of
+      hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks were hard to get
+      about; and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as if you were treading over
+      empty catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the sea like an air-freighted
+      demijohn. Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all
+      Aristotle in his head. Well was it that the Typhoons did not visit them
+      then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast
+      bosom-friend, Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh to
+      his endless end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown;
+      dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to be Captain, the higher
+      you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as harpooneer,
+      must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but—as we have
+      elsewhere seen—mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and finally
+      descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating all day in that
+      subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the clumsiest casks and
+      see to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen, the harpooneers are the
+      holders, so called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should have
+      stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where, stripped
+      to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was crawling about amid that
+      dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard at the bottom of a well.
+      And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, poor pagan; where,
+      strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, he caught a terrible
+      chill which lapsed into a fever; and at last, after some days’ suffering,
+      laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill of the door of death. How
+      he wasted and wasted away in those few long-lingering days, till there
+      seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else
+      in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless,
+      seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of
+      lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a
+      wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or
+      be weakened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter,
+      expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of
+      Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by
+      the side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as
+      any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly
+      wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. And
+      the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all
+      with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could
+      adequately tell. So that—let us say it again—no dying Chaldee
+      or Greek had higher and holier thoughts than those, whose mysterious
+      shades you saw creeping over the face of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay
+      in his swaying hammock, and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to
+      his final rest, and the ocean’s invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and
+      higher towards his destined heaven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself, what
+      he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favour he asked. He
+      called one to him in the grey morning watch, when the day was just
+      breaking, and taking his hand, said that while in Nantucket he had chanced
+      to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich war-wood of his
+      native isle; and upon inquiry, he had learned that all whalemen who died
+      in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes, and that the fancy of
+      being so laid had much pleased him; for it was not unlike the custom of
+      his own race, who, after embalming a dead warrior, stretched him out in
+      his canoe, and so left him to be floated away to the starry archipelagoes;
+      for not only do they believe that the stars are isles, but that far beyond
+      all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with
+      the blue heavens; and so form the white breakers of the milky way. He
+      added, that he shuddered at the thought of being buried in his hammock,
+      according to the usual sea-custom, tossed like something vile to the
+      death-devouring sharks. No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket,
+      all the more congenial to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat
+      these coffin-canoes were without a keel; though that involved but
+      uncertain steering, and much lee-way adown the dim ages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter was
+      at once commanded to do Queequeg’s bidding, whatever it might include.
+      There was some heathenish, coffin-coloured old lumber aboard, which, upon
+      a long previous voyage, had been cut from the aboriginal groves of the
+      Lackaday islands, and from these dark planks the coffin was recommended to
+      be made. No sooner was the carpenter apprised of the order, than taking
+      his rule, he forthwith with all the indifferent promptitude of his
+      character, proceeded into the forecastle and took Queequeg’s measure with
+      great accuracy, regularly chalking Queequeg’s person as he shifted the
+      rule.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah! poor fellow! he’ll have to die now,” ejaculated the Long Island
+      sailor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Going to his vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience sake and general
+      reference, now transferringly measured on it the exact length the coffin
+      was to be, and then made the transfer permanent by cutting two notches at
+      its extremities. This done, he marshalled the planks and his tools, and to
+      work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the last nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted, he
+      lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, inquiring whether
+      they were ready for it yet in that direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Overhearing the indignant but half-humorous cries with which the people on
+      deck began to drive the coffin away, Queequeg, to every one’s
+      consternation, commanded that the thing should be instantly brought to
+      him, nor was there any denying him; seeing that, of all mortals, some
+      dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly
+      trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with an
+      attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock drawn
+      from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along with one of
+      the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also, biscuits were then
+      ranged round the sides within: a flask of fresh water was placed at the
+      head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up in the hold at the foot;
+      and a piece of sail-cloth being rolled up for a pillow, Queequeg now
+      entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he might make trial of its
+      comforts, if any it had. He lay without moving a few minutes, then told
+      one to go to his bag and bring out his little god, Yojo. Then crossing his
+      arms on his breast with Yojo between, he called for the coffin lid (hatch
+      he called it) to be placed over him. The head part turned over with a
+      leather hinge, and there lay Queequeg in his coffin with little but his
+      composed countenance in view. “Rarmai” (it will do; it is easy), he
+      murmured at last, and signed to be replaced in his hammock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily hovering near by all this
+      while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with soft sobbings, took him by
+      the hand; in the other, holding his tambourine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this weary roving? where go
+      ye now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where the
+      beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little errand for
+      me? Seek out one Pip, who’s now been missing long: I think he’s in those
+      far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he must be very sad;
+      for look! he’s left his tambourine behind;—I found it. Rig-a-dig,
+      dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I’ll beat ye your dying march.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I have heard,” murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, “that in
+      violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; and
+      that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their wholly
+      forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken in their
+      hearing by some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip, in this
+      strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our
+      heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but there?—Hark! he speaks
+      again: but more wildly now.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Form two and two! Let’s make a General of him! Ho, where’s his harpoon?
+      Lay it across here.—Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a game cock
+      now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies game!—mind ye that;
+      Queequeg dies game!—take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies game! I
+      say; game, game, game! but base little Pip, he died a coward; died all
+      a’shiver;—out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the
+      Antilles he’s a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped
+      from a whale-boat! I’d never beat my tambourine over base Pip, and hail
+      him General, if he were once more dying here. No, no! shame upon all
+      cowards—shame upon them! Let ’em go drown like Pip, that jumped from
+      a whale-boat. Shame! shame!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip was
+      led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But now that he had apparently made every preparation for death; now that
+      his coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon there
+      seemed no need of the carpenter’s box: and thereupon, when some expressed
+      their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that the cause of his
+      sudden convalescence was this;—at a critical moment, he had just
+      recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone; and therefore
+      had changed his mind about dying: he could not die yet, he averred. They
+      asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of his own sovereign
+      will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a word, it was Queequeg’s
+      conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not
+      kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable,
+      unintelligent destroyer of that sort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized;
+      that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing, generally
+      speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day. So, in good
+      time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after sitting on the
+      windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a vigorous appetite) he
+      suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms and legs, gave himself a
+      good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then springing into the head of
+      his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon, pronounced himself fit for a
+      fight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and
+      emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many
+      spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque
+      figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his
+      rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this
+      tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island,
+      who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete
+      theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of
+      attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to
+      unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even
+      himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these
+      mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the
+      living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the
+      last. And this thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild
+      exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying poor
+      Queequeg—“Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0111">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South
+      Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific
+      with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was
+      answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of
+      blue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently
+      awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those
+      fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St.
+      John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery
+      prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise
+      and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades
+      and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call
+      lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in
+      their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must
+      ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of the
+      world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves
+      wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted
+      by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts
+      of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways
+      of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and
+      impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the
+      world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the
+      tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs
+      must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain, as standing like an iron
+      statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one nostril
+      he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles (in whose
+      sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other consciously
+      inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in which the hated
+      White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at length upon these
+      almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese cruising-ground, the
+      old man’s purpose intensified itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a
+      vice; the Delta of his forehead’s veins swelled like overladen brooks; in
+      his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull, “Stern all!
+      the White Whale spouts thick blood!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0112">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in
+      these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active pursuits
+      shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old blacksmith,
+      had not removed his portable forge to the hold again, after concluding his
+      contributory work for Ahab’s leg, but still retained it on deck, fast
+      lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being now almost incessantly invoked
+      by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen to do some little job for
+      them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their various weapons and
+      boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an eager circle, all
+      waiting to be served; holding boat-spades, pike-heads, harpoons, and
+      lances, and jealously watching his every sooty movement, as he toiled.
+      Nevertheless, this old man’s was a patient hammer wielded by a patient
+      arm. No murmur, no impatience, no petulance did come from him. Silent,
+      slow, and solemn; bowing over still further his chronically broken back,
+      he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his
+      hammer the heavy beating of his heart. And so it was.—Most
+      miserable!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing
+      yawing in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the
+      curiosity of the mariners. And to the importunity of their persisted
+      questionings he had finally given in; and so it came to pass that every
+      one now knew the shameful story of his wretched fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter’s midnight, on the road
+      running between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt the
+      deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge in a leaning,
+      dilapidated barn. The issue was, the loss of the extremities of both feet.
+      Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four acts of
+      the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied fifth act of
+      the grief of his life’s drama.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly
+      encountered that thing in sorrow’s technicals called ruin. He had been an
+      artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and
+      garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe,
+      ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in
+      a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness, and further concealed in
+      a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his happy home,
+      and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith
+      himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family’s heart. It
+      was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that fatal cork, forth flew
+      the fiend, and shrivelled up his home. Now, for prudent, most wise, and
+      economic reasons, the blacksmith’s shop was in the basement of his
+      dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so that always had the young
+      and loving healthy wife listened with no unhappy nervousness, but with
+      vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of her young-armed old husband’s
+      hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by passing through the floors and
+      walls, came up to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery; and so, to stout
+      Labor’s iron lullaby, the blacksmith’s infants were rocked to slumber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst
+      thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon him,
+      then had the young widow had a delicious grief, and her orphans a truly
+      venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and all of
+      them a care-killing competency. But Death plucked down some virtuous elder
+      brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of
+      some other family, and left the worse than useless old man standing, till
+      the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more
+      and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last; the
+      wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing
+      into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge choked
+      up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down into the long
+      church-yard grass; her children twice followed her thither; and the
+      houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every
+      woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is
+      only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the
+      first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the
+      Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men,
+      who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide,
+      does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth
+      his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life
+      adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand
+      mermaids sing to them—“Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another
+      life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders
+      supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself in a life
+      which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more
+      oblivious than death. Come hither! put up <i>thy</i> gravestone, too, within the
+      churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall
+      of eve, the blacksmith’s soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went
+      a-whaling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0113">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 113. The Forge.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about
+      mid-day, Perth was standing between his forge and anvil, the latter placed
+      upon an iron-wood log, with one hand holding a pike-head in the coals, and
+      with the other at his forge’s lungs, when Captain Ahab came along,
+      carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag. While yet a
+      little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused; till at last, Perth,
+      withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it upon the anvil—the
+      red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights, some of which
+      flew close to Ahab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Are these thy Mother Carey’s chickens, Perth? they are always flying in
+      thy wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;—look here, they
+      burn; but thou—thou liv’st among them without a scorch.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab,” answered Perth, resting
+      for a moment on his hammer; “I am past scorching; not easily can’st thou
+      scorch a scar.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful to
+      me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is
+      not mad. Thou should’st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad?
+      How can’st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee,
+      that thou can’st not go mad?—What wert thou making there?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And can’st thou make it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such hard
+      usage as it had?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I think so, sir.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And I suppose thou can’st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never mind
+      how hard the metal, blacksmith?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Look ye here, then,” cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning with
+      both hands on Perth’s shoulders; “look ye here—<i>here</i>—can ye
+      smoothe out a seam like this, blacksmith,” sweeping one hand across his
+      ribbed brow; “if thou could’st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my
+      head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes. Answer!
+      Can’st thou smoothe this seam?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh! that is the one, sir! Said I not all seams and dents but one?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable; for though
+      thou only see’st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into the bone of
+      my skull—<i>that</i> is all wrinkles! But, away with child’s play; no more
+      gaffs and pikes to-day. Look ye here!” jingling the leathern bag, as if it
+      were full of gold coins. “I, too, want a harpoon made; one that a thousand
+      yoke of fiends could not part, Perth; something that will stick in a whale
+      like his own fin-bone. There’s the stuff,” flinging the pouch upon the
+      anvil. “Look ye, blacksmith, these are the gathered nail-stubbs of the
+      steel shoes of racing horses.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Horse-shoe stubbs, sir? Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here, then, the best
+      and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together like glue from the
+      melted bones of murderers. Quick! forge me the harpoon. And forge me
+      first, twelve rods for its shank; then wind, and twist, and hammer these
+      twelve together like the yarns and strands of a tow-line. Quick! I’ll blow
+      the fire.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by
+      spiralling them, with his own hand, round a long, heavy iron bolt. “A
+      flaw!” rejecting the last one. “Work that over again, Perth.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This done, Perth was about to begin welding the twelve into one, when Ahab
+      stayed his hand, and said he would weld his own iron. As, then, with
+      regular, gasping hems, he hammered on the anvil, Perth passing to him the
+      glowing rods, one after the other, and the hard pressed forge shooting up
+      its intense straight flame, the Parsee passed silently, and bowing over
+      his head towards the fire, seemed invoking some curse or some blessing on
+      the toil. But, as Ahab looked up, he slid aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’s that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for?” muttered Stubb,
+      looking on from the forecastle. “That Parsee smells fire like a fusee; and
+      smells of it himself, like a hot musket’s powder-pan.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the shank, in one complete rod, received its final heat; and as
+      Perth, to temper it, plunged it all hissing into the cask of water near
+      by, the scalding steam shot up into Ahab’s bent face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Would’st thou brand me, Perth?” wincing for a moment with the pain; “have
+      I been but forging my own branding-iron, then?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Pray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this
+      harpoon for the White Whale?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “For the white fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must make them thyself,
+      man. Here are my razors—the best of steel; here, and make the barbs
+      sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment, the old blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would fain
+      not use them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Take them, man, I have no need for them; for I now neither shave, sup,
+      nor pray till—but here—to work!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the shank,
+      the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith was
+      about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he cried
+      to Ahab to place the water-cask near.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, no—no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy,
+      there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me as
+      much blood as will cover this barb?” holding it high up. A cluster of dark
+      nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the
+      White Whale’s barbs were then tempered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!” deliriously
+      howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal
+      blood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one of hickory,
+      with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the socket of the
+      iron. A coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some fathoms of it
+      taken to the windlass, and stretched to a great tension. Pressing his foot
+      upon it, till the rope hummed like a harp-string, then eagerly bending
+      over it, and seeing no strandings, Ahab exclaimed, “Good! and now for the
+      seizings.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At one extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns
+      were all braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole was
+      then driven hard up into the socket; from the lower end the rope was
+      traced half-way along the pole’s length, and firmly secured so, with
+      intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope—like the
+      Three Fates—remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with
+      the weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, and the sound of the hickory pole,
+      both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered his cabin,
+      light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous sound was heard. Oh,
+      Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy strange
+      mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of the melancholy
+      ship, and mocked it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0114">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising
+      ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild,
+      pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on the
+      stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or sailing, or
+      paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of sixty or seventy minutes
+      calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but small success for their
+      pains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow
+      heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so
+      sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone
+      cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy
+      quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s
+      skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not
+      willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a
+      certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he
+      regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing only
+      the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high rolling
+      waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when the
+      western emigrants’ horses only show their erected ears, while their hidden
+      bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there
+      steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lie
+      sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of
+      the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so
+      that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one
+      seamless whole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as
+      temporary an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem to
+      open in him his own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon them
+      prove but tarnishing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,—though
+      long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,—in ye, men yet
+      may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few
+      fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to
+      God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of
+      life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for
+      every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do
+      not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:—through
+      infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’
+      doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last
+      in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the
+      round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies
+      the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the
+      world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s
+      father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die
+      in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we
+      must there to learn it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat’s side into that
+      same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:—
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye!—Tell
+      me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let
+      faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same golden
+      light:—
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he
+      has always been jolly!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0115">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down
+      before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab’s harpoon had been welded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her last
+      cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, in glad
+      holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously, sailing
+      round among the widely-separated ships on the ground, previous to pointing
+      her prow for home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red bunting
+      at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended, bottom down;
+      and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long lower jaw of the
+      last whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colours were
+      flying from her rigging, on every side. Sideways lashed in each of her
+      three basketed tops were two barrels of sperm; above which, in her
+      top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender breakers of the same precious fluid;
+      and nailed to her main truck was a brazen lamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most surprising
+      success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same seas
+      numerous other vessels had gone entire months without securing a single
+      fish. Not only had barrels of beef and bread been given away to make room
+      for the far more valuable sperm, but additional supplemental casks had
+      been bartered for, from the ships she had met; and these were stowed along
+      the deck, and in the captain’s and officers’ state-rooms. Even the cabin
+      table itself had been knocked into kindling-wood; and the cabin mess dined
+      off the broad head of an oil-butt, lashed down to the floor for a
+      centrepiece. In the forecastle, the sailors had actually caulked and
+      pitched their chests, and filled them; it was humorously added, that the
+      cook had clapped a head on his largest boiler, and filled it; that the
+      steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled it; that the
+      harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and filled them; that
+      indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the captain’s pantaloons
+      pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into, in
+      self-complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the
+      barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing
+      still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge
+      try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like <i>poke</i> or stomach skin of
+      the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the clenched
+      hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the mates and harpooneers were
+      dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the
+      Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly secured
+      aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with
+      glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious
+      jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship’s company were tumultuously busy at the
+      masonry of the try-works, from which the huge pots had been removed. You
+      would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed Bastille, such
+      wild cries they raised, as the now useless brick and mortar were being
+      hurled into the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the ship’s
+      elevated quarter-deck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was full before
+      him, and seemed merely contrived for his own individual diversion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black, with
+      a stubborn gloom; and as the two ships crossed each other’s wakes—one
+      all jubilations for things passed, the other all forebodings as to things
+      to come—their two captains in themselves impersonated the whole
+      striking contrast of the scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Come aboard, come aboard!” cried the gay Bachelor’s commander, lifting a
+      glass and a bottle in the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hast seen the White Whale?” gritted Ahab in reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No; only heard of him; but don’t believe in him at all,” said the other
+      good-humoredly. “Come aboard!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Not enough to speak of—two islanders, that’s all;—but come
+      aboard, old hearty, come along. I’ll soon take that black from your brow.
+      Come along, will ye (merry’s the play); a full ship and homeward-bound.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “How wondrous familiar is a fool!” muttered Ahab; then aloud, “Thou art a
+      full ship and homeward bound, thou sayst; well, then, call me an empty
+      ship, and outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I will mine. Forward there!
+      Set all sail, and keep her to the wind!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other
+      stubbornly fought against it; and so the two vessels parted; the crew of
+      the Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances towards the receding
+      Bachelor; but the Bachelor’s men never heeding their gaze for the lively
+      revelry they were in. And as Ahab, leaning over the taffrail, eyed the
+      homeward-bound craft, he took from his pocket a small vial of sand, and
+      then looking from the ship to the vial, seemed thereby bringing two remote
+      associations together, for that vial was filled with Nantucket soundings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0116">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune’s favourites
+      sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat of the
+      rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out. So seemed it
+      with the Pequod. For next day after encountering the gay Bachelor, whales
+      were seen and four were slain; and one of them by Ahab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson
+      fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun and
+      whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and such
+      plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that
+      it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of the
+      Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had gone
+      to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned off
+      from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now
+      tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle observable in all sperm whales
+      dying—the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring—that
+      strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab
+      conveyed a wondrousness unknown before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He turns and turns him to it,—how slowly, but how steadfastly, his
+      homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too
+      worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!—Oh
+      that these too-favouring eyes should see these too-favouring sights. Look!
+      here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe; in these most
+      candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks furnish tablets;
+      where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still rolled on speechless
+      and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the Niger’s unknown source;
+      here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than
+      death whirls round the corpse, and it heads some other way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded
+      thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou
+      art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the
+      wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor
+      has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round
+      again, without a lesson to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed
+      jet!—that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh
+      whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only
+      calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock
+      me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable imminglings float
+      beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as
+      air, but water now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl
+      finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill
+      and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0117">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to
+      windward; one, less distant, to leeward; one ahead; one astern. These last
+      three were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward one could not
+      be reached till morning; and the boat that had killed it lay by its side
+      all night; and that boat was Ahab’s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale’s spout-hole; and the
+      lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare upon the
+      black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, which gently
+      chafed the whale’s broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ahab and all his boat’s crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who crouching
+      in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round the
+      whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails. A sound like
+      the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of
+      Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and hooped
+      round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in a flooded
+      world. “I have dreamed it again,” said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor coffin
+      can be thine?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And who are hearsed that die on the sea?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two
+      hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by
+      mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in
+      America.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:—a hearse and its plumes
+      floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! Such a
+      sight we shall not soon see.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And what was that saying about thyself?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And when thou art so gone before—if that ever befall—then ere
+      I can follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still?—Was
+      it not so? Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here
+      two pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Take another pledge, old man,” said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up
+      like fire-flies in the gloom—“Hemp only can kill thee.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The gallows, ye mean.—I am immortal then, on land and on sea,”
+       cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision;—“Immortal on land and on sea!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and the
+      slumbering crew arose from the boat’s bottom, and ere noon the dead whale
+      was brought to the ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0118">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab,
+      coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would
+      ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager mariners quickly run to
+      the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes centrally fixed on
+      the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to point the ship’s prow for
+      the equator. In good time the order came. It was hard upon high noon; and
+      Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat, was about taking his
+      wonted daily observation of the sun to determine his latitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of
+      effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus
+      of the glassy ocean’s immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered;
+      clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of
+      unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God’s throne. Well
+      that Ahab’s quadrant was furnished with coloured glasses, through which to
+      take sight of that solar fire. So, swinging his seated form to the roll of
+      the ship, and with his astrological-looking instrument placed to his eye,
+      he remained in that posture for some moments to catch the precise instant
+      when the sun should gain its precise meridian. Meantime while his whole
+      attention was absorbed, the Parsee was kneeling beneath him on the ship’s
+      deck, and with face thrown up like Ahab’s, was eyeing the same sun with
+      him; only the lids of his eyes half hooded their orbs, and his wild face
+      was subdued to an earthly passionlessness. At length the desired
+      observation was taken; and with his pencil upon his ivory leg, Ahab soon
+      calculated what his latitude must be at that precise instant. Then falling
+      into a moment’s revery, he again looked up towards the sun and murmured to
+      himself: “Thou sea-mark! thou high and mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly
+      where I <i>am</i>—but canst thou cast the least hint where I <i>shall</i> be? Or
+      canst thou tell where some other thing besides me is this moment living?
+      Where is Moby Dick? This instant thou must be eyeing him. These eyes of
+      mine look into the very eye that is even now beholding him; aye, and into
+      the eye that is even now equally beholding the objects on the unknown,
+      thither side of thee, thou sun!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its
+      numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered:
+      “Foolish toy! babies’ plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and
+      Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what
+      after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou
+      thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee:
+      no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one
+      grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou
+      insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all
+      the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness
+      but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light,
+      O sun! Level by nature to this earth’s horizon are the glances of man’s
+      eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze
+      on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!” dashing it to the deck, “no
+      longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship’s compass, and
+      the level dead-reckoning, by log and by line; <i>these</i> shall conduct me, and
+      show me my place on the sea. Aye,” lighting from the boat to the deck,
+      “thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high;
+      thus I split and destroy thee!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live and dead
+      feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a fatalistic
+      despair that seemed meant for himself—these passed over the mute,
+      motionless Parsee’s face. Unobserved he rose and glided away; while,
+      awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered together
+      on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck, shouted out—“To
+      the braces! Up helm!—square in!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled upon her
+      heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon her long,
+      ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one sufficient
+      steed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod’s
+      tumultuous way, and Ahab’s also, as he went lurching along the deck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of
+      its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down, down,
+      to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what
+      will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye,” cried Stubb, “but sea-coal ashes—mind ye that, Mr. Starbuck—sea-coal,
+      not your common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab mutter, ‘Here some one
+      thrusts these cards into these old hands of mine; swears that I must play
+      them, and no others.’ And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in
+      the game, and die in it!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0119">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches
+      in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket
+      the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept
+      tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these resplendent Japanese
+      seas the mariner encounters the direst of all storms, the Typhoon. It will
+      sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a
+      dazed and sleepy town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and
+      bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly
+      ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the
+      thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled masts
+      fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of the
+      tempest had left for its after sport.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every
+      flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional disaster
+      might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask were
+      directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the boats.
+      But all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted to the very top of the
+      cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab’s) did not escape. A great rolling
+      sea, dashing high up against the reeling ship’s high teetering side, stove
+      in the boat’s bottom at the stern, and left it again, all dripping through
+      like a sieve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck,” said Stubb, regarding the wreck, “but
+      the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can’t fight it. You see, Mr.
+      Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps, all round
+      the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me, all the start
+      I have to meet it, is just across the deck here. But never mind; it’s all
+      in fun: so the old song says;”—(<i>sings</i>.)
+    </p>
+<pre>  Oh! jolly is the gale,
+  And a joker is the whale,
+  A’ flourishin’ his tail,—
+  Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
+
+  The scud all a flyin’,
+  That’s his flip only foamin’;
+  When he stirs in the spicin’,—
+  Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
+
+  Thunder splits the ships,
+  But he only smacks his lips,
+  A tastin’ of this flip,—
+  Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      “Avast Stubb,” cried Starbuck, “let the Typhoon sing, and strike his harp
+      here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy
+      peace.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward;
+      and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr. Starbuck,
+      there’s no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my throat. And
+      when that’s done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a wind-up.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else, never
+      mind how foolish?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Here!” cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his
+      hand towards the weather bow, “markest thou not that the gale comes from
+      the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick? the very
+      course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat there; where is that
+      stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to stand—his
+      stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and sing away, if thou
+      must!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t half understand ye: what’s in the wind?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nantucket,”
+       soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb’s question. “The gale
+      that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a fair wind that
+      will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom;
+      but to leeward, homeward—I see it lightens up there; but not with
+      the lightning.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following the
+      flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same instant a
+      volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who’s there?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Old Thunder!” said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his
+      pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed
+      lances of fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off the
+      perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some ships
+      carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water. But as this
+      conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may avoid all
+      contact with the hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly towing there,
+      it would be liable to many mishaps, besides interfering not a little with
+      some of the rigging, and more or less impeding the vessel’s way in the
+      water; because of all this, the lower parts of a ship’s lightning-rods are
+      not always overboard; but are generally made in long slender links, so as
+      to be the more readily hauled up into the chains outside, or thrown down
+      into the sea, as occasion may require.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The rods! the rods!” cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished to
+      vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting flambeaux, to
+      light Ahab to his post. “Are they overboard? drop them over, fore and aft.
+      Quick!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Avast!” cried Ahab; “let’s have fair play here, though we be the weaker
+      side. Yet I’ll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and Andes, that
+      all the world may be secured; but out on privileges! Let them be, sir.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Look aloft!” cried Starbuck. “The corpusants! the corpusants!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each
+      tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of
+      the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like
+      three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Blast the boat! let it go!” cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing
+      sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale violently
+      jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. “Blast it!”—but
+      slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and
+      immediately shifting his tone he cried—“The corpusants have mercy on
+      us all!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of
+      the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses from
+      the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething sea; but
+      in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when God’s burning
+      finger has been laid on the ship; when His “Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin”
+       has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the
+      enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, all
+      their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away
+      constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the gigantic
+      jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed the
+      black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted mouth of Tashtego
+      revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely gleamed as if they too had
+      been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by the preternatural light,
+      Queequeg’s tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on his body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once more the
+      Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall. A moment or two
+      passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some one. It was
+      Stubb. “What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not the same
+      in the song.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, no, it wasn’t; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I hope
+      they will, still. But do they only have mercy on long faces?—have
+      they no bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck—but it’s too
+      dark to look. Hear me, then: I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign
+      of good luck; for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be
+      chock a’ block with sperm-oil, d’ye see; and so, all that sperm will work
+      up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will yet be as
+      three spermaceti candles—that’s the good promise we saw.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb’s face slowly beginning to
+      glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: “See! see!” and once more
+      the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed redoubled
+      supernaturalness in their pallor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The corpusants have mercy on us all,” cried Stubb, again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame, the
+      Parsee was kneeling in Ahab’s front, but with his head bowed away from
+      him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging rigging, where they
+      had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen, arrested by
+      the glare, now cohered together, and hung pendulous, like a knot of numbed
+      wasps from a drooping, orchard twig. In various enchanted attitudes, like
+      the standing, or stepping, or running skeletons in Herculaneum, others
+      remained rooted to the deck; but all their eyes upcast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, aye, men!” cried Ahab. “Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame
+      but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast links there;
+      I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against
+      fire! So.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then turning—the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his
+      foot upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm,
+      he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once
+      did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this
+      hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know
+      that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt
+      thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed.
+      No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power;
+      but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional,
+      unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a
+      personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe’er I came;
+      wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives
+      in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come
+      in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy
+      highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of
+      full-freighted worlds, there’s that in here that still remains
+      indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a
+      true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      [<i>Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap lengthwise to
+      thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his
+      right hand pressed hard upon them.</i>]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung
+      from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then
+      grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of
+      these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning
+      flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten
+      brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet
+      blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out
+      of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee!
+      The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh,
+      thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my
+      fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done
+      with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how
+      came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy
+      beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou
+      knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing
+      thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but
+      time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my
+      scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit
+      immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated
+      grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and
+      lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded
+      with thee; defyingly I worship thee!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The boat! the boat!” cried Starbuck, “look at thy boat, old man!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ahab’s harpoon, the one forged at Perth’s fire, remained firmly lashed in
+      its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat’s bow;
+      but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather sheath
+      to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a levelled flame
+      of pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned there like a serpent’s
+      tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm—“God, God is against thee,
+      old man; forbear! ’tis an ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me
+      square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it
+      homewards, to go on a better voyage than this.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the braces—though
+      not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the aghast mate’s thoughts
+      seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous cry. But dashing the rattling
+      lightning links to the deck, and snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved
+      it like a torch among them; swearing to transfix with it the first sailor
+      that but cast loose a rope’s end. Petrified by his aspect, and still more
+      shrinking from the fiery dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay,
+      and Ahab again spoke:—
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart,
+      soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye may know to
+      what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear!”
+       And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the flame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of
+      some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so
+      much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts; so
+      at those last words of Ahab’s many of the mariners did run from him in a
+      terror of dismay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0120">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      (<i>Ahab standing by the helm. Starbuck approaching him.</i>)
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “We must send down the main-top-sail yard, sir. The band is working loose
+      and the lee lift is half-stranded. Shall I strike it, sir?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Strike nothing; lash it. If I had sky-sail poles, I’d sway them up now.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sir!—in God’s name!—sir?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind rises,
+      but it has not got up to my table-lands yet. Quick, and see to it.—By
+      masts and keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of some coasting
+      smack. Send down my main-top-sail yard! Ho, gluepots! Loftiest trucks were
+      made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of mine now sails amid the
+      cloud-scud. Shall I strike that? Oh, none but cowards send down their
+      brain-trucks in tempest time. What a hooroosh aloft there! I would e’en
+      take it for sublime, did I not know that the colic is a noisy malady. Oh,
+      take medicine, take medicine!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0121">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle Bulwarks.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      (<i>Stubb and Flask mounted on them, and passing additional lashings over the
+      anchors there hanging.</i>)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but you
+      will never pound into me what you were just now saying. And how long ago
+      is it since you said the very contrary? Didn’t you once say that whatever
+      ship Ahab sails in, that ship should pay something extra on its insurance
+      policy, just as though it were loaded with powder barrels aft and boxes of
+      lucifers forward? Stop, now; didn’t you say so?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, suppose I did? What then? I’ve part changed my flesh since that
+      time, why not my mind? Besides, supposing we <i>are</i> loaded with powder
+      barrels aft and lucifers forward; how the devil could the lucifers get
+      afire in this drenching spray here? Why, my little man, you have pretty
+      red hair, but you couldn’t get afire now. Shake yourself; you’re Aquarius,
+      or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill pitchers at your coat collar. Don’t
+      you see, then, that for these extra risks the Marine Insurance companies
+      have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants, Flask. But hark, again, and I’ll
+      answer ye the other thing. First take your leg off from the crown of the
+      anchor here, though, so I can pass the rope; now listen. What’s the mighty
+      difference between holding a mast’s lightning-rod in the storm, and
+      standing close by a mast that hasn’t got any lightning-rod at all in a
+      storm? Don’t you see, you timber-head, that no harm can come to the holder
+      of the rod, unless the mast is first struck? What are you talking about,
+      then? Not one ship in a hundred carries rods, and Ahab,—aye, man,
+      and all of us,—were in no more danger then, in my poor opinion, than
+      all the crews in ten thousand ships now sailing the seas. Why, you
+      King-Post, you, I suppose you would have every man in the world go about
+      with a small lightning-rod running up the corner of his hat, like a
+      militia officer’s skewered feather, and trailing behind like his sash. Why
+      don’t ye be sensible, Flask? it’s easy to be sensible; why don’t ye, then?
+      any man with half an eye can be sensible.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes, when a fellow’s soaked through, it’s hard to be sensible, that’s a
+      fact. And I am about drenched with this spray. Never mind; catch the turn
+      there, and pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down these anchors now as
+      if they were never going to be used again. Tying these two anchors here,
+      Flask, seems like tying a man’s hands behind him. And what big generous
+      hands they are, to be sure. These are your iron fists, hey? What a hold
+      they have, too! I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere;
+      if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though. There, hammer
+      that knot down, and we’ve done. So; next to touching land, lighting on
+      deck is the most satisfactory. I say, just wring out my jacket skirts,
+      will ye? Thank ye. They laugh at long-togs so, Flask; but seems to me, a
+      long tailed coat ought always to be worn in all storms afloat. The tails
+      tapering down that way, serve to carry off the water, d’ye see. Same with
+      cocked hats; the cocks form gable-end eave-troughs, Flask. No more
+      monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I must mount a swallow-tail, and
+      drive down a beaver; so. Halloa! whew! there goes my tarpaulin overboard;
+      Lord, Lord, that the winds that come from heaven should be so unmannerly!
+      This is a nasty night, lad.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0122">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      (<i>The main-top-sail yard</i>.—<i>Tashtego passing new lashings around it</i>.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What’s
+      the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don’t want thunder; we want rum; give
+      us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0123">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 123. The Musket.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod’s
+      jaw-bone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by its
+      spasmodic motions, even though preventer tackles had been attached to it—for
+      they were slack—because some play to the tiller was indispensable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to
+      the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the compasses,
+      at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the Pequod’s; at almost
+      every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice the whirling velocity
+      with which they revolved upon the cards; it is a sight that hardly anyone
+      can behold without some sort of unwonted emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the
+      strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb—one engaged forward and
+      the other aft—the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and
+      main-top-sails were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to
+      leeward, like the feathers of an albatross, which sometimes are cast to
+      the winds when that storm-tossed bird is on the wing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The three corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed, and a
+      storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went through the
+      water with some precision again; and the course—for the present,
+      East-south-east—which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more
+      given to the helmsman. For during the violence of the gale, he had only
+      steered according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing the ship
+      as near her course as possible, watching the compass meanwhile, lo! a good
+      sign! the wind seemed coming round astern; aye, the foul breeze became
+      fair!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of “<i>Ho! the fair
+      wind! oh-ye-ho, cheerly men!</i>” the crew singing for joy, that so promising
+      an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents preceding it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In compliance with the standing order of his commander—to report
+      immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four hours, any decided change
+      in the affairs of the deck,—Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards
+      to the breeze—however reluctantly and gloomily,—than he
+      mechanically went below to apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it a
+      moment. The cabin lamp—taking long swings this way and that—was
+      burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man’s bolted
+      door,—a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper
+      panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming
+      silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of the
+      elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as they
+      stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest,
+      upright man; but out of Starbuck’s heart, at that instant when he saw the
+      muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its
+      neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for
+      itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He would have shot me once,” he murmured, “yes, there’s the very musket
+      that he pointed at me;—that one with the studded stock; let me touch
+      it—lift it. Strange, that I, who have handled so many deadly lances,
+      strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, aye; and
+      powder in the pan;—that’s not good. Best spill it?—wait. I’ll
+      cure myself of this. I’ll hold the musket boldly while I think.—I
+      come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death and doom,—<i>that’s</i>
+      fair for Moby Dick. It’s a fair wind that’s only fair for that accursed
+      fish.—The very tube he pointed at me!—the very one; <i>this</i> one—I
+      hold it here; he would have killed me with the very thing I handle now.—Aye
+      and he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say he will not strike
+      his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in
+      these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of
+      the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not swear that
+      he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed old man be tamely
+      suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?—Yes,
+      it would make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship
+      come to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship
+      will, if Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this instant—put
+      aside, that crime would not be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes,
+      just there,—in there, he’s sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but still alive,
+      and soon awake again. I can’t withstand thee, then, old man. Not
+      reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this
+      thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is all thou
+      breathest. Aye, and say’st the men have vow’d thy vow; say’st all of us
+      are Ahabs. Great God forbid!—But is there no other way? no lawful
+      way?—Make him a prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest this
+      old man’s living power from his own living hands? Only a fool would try
+      it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes and hawsers;
+      chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would be more hideous
+      than a caged tiger, then. I could not endure the sight; could not possibly
+      fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason would
+      leave me on the long intolerable voyage. What, then, remains? The land is
+      hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest. I stand alone here
+      upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between me and
+      law.—Aye, aye, ’tis so.—Is heaven a murderer when its
+      lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and
+      skin together?—And would I be a murderer, then, if”—and
+      slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded
+      musket’s end against the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “On this level, Ahab’s hammock swings within; his head this way. A touch,
+      and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.—Oh Mary!
+      Mary!—boy! boy! boy!—But if I wake thee not to death, old man,
+      who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck’s body this day week may
+      sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? shall I?—The
+      wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main topsails are reefed
+      and set; she heads her course.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man’s
+      tormented sleep, as if Starbuck’s voice had caused the long dumb dream to
+      speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard’s arm against the panel;
+      Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he
+      placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He’s too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell
+      him. I must see to the deck here. Thou know’st what to say.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0124">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 124. The Needle.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of
+      mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod’s gurgling track, pushed her on
+      like giants’ palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded so,
+      that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed
+      before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was
+      only known by the spread intensity of his place; where his bayonet rays
+      moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and
+      queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold,
+      that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time
+      the tetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye
+      the bright sun’s rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly settled by
+      the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun’s rearward place, and how the
+      same yellow rays were blending with his undeviating wake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of
+      the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye!
+      Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards the
+      helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “East-sou-east, sir,” said the frightened steersman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Thou liest!” smiting him with his clenched fist. “Heading East at this
+      hour in the morning, and the sun astern?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then observed
+      by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very blinding
+      palpableness must have been the cause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of
+      the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed
+      to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses
+      pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the old
+      man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, “I have it! It has happened before. Mr.
+      Starbuck, last night’s thunder turned our compasses—that’s all. Thou
+      hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir,” said the pale mate,
+      gloomily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than
+      one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as
+      developed in the mariner’s needle, is, as all know, essentially one with
+      the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled at,
+      that such things should be. Instances where the lightning has actually
+      struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars and rigging, the
+      effect upon the needle has at times been still more fatal; all its
+      loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetic steel was
+      of no more use than an old wife’s knitting needle. But in either case, the
+      needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue thus marred or
+      lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same fate reaches all
+      the others that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost one inserted
+      into the kelson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed
+      compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took the
+      precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were exactly
+      inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship’s course to be changed
+      accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod thrust her
+      undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair one had only
+      been juggling her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing,
+      but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask—who
+      in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings—likewise
+      unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some of them lowly
+      rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate. But as
+      ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed; or
+      if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their
+      congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab’s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But chancing
+      to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the
+      quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun’s pilot! yesterday I wrecked thee,
+      and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But Ahab is
+      lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck—a lance without a
+      pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker’s needles. Quick!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about to
+      do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to
+      revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a
+      matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old man
+      well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily
+      practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors,
+      without some shudderings and evil portents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Men,” said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the
+      things he had demanded, “my men, the thunder turned old Ahab’s needles;
+      but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point
+      as true as any.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this
+      was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might
+      follow. But Starbuck looked away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the
+      lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade him
+      hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul, after
+      repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the blunted
+      needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that, several
+      times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then going through some
+      small strange motions with it—whether indispensable to the
+      magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the
+      crew, is uncertain—he called for linen thread; and moving to the
+      binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there, and horizontally
+      suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass-cards. At
+      first, the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either
+      end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently
+      watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle, and
+      pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,—“Look ye, for
+      yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East,
+      and that compass swears it!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could
+      persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal
+      pride.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0125">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log
+      and line had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance
+      upon other means of determining the vessel’s place, some merchantmen, and
+      many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the log;
+      though at the same time, and frequently more for form’s sake than anything
+      else, regularly putting down upon the customary slate the course steered
+      by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of progression every
+      hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden reel and angular log
+      attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the railing of the after
+      bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; sun and wind had warped it; all
+      the elements had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly. But heedless
+      of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened to glance upon the reel,
+      not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered how his quadrant
+      was no more, and recalled his frantic oath about the level log and line.
+      The ship was sailing plungingly; astern the billows rolled in riots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Forward, there! Heave the log!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. “Take
+      the reel, one of ye, I’ll heave.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship’s lee side, where the
+      deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the
+      creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting
+      handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so
+      stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty
+      turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old
+      Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to
+      speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have
+      spoiled it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “’Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee?
+      Thou seem’st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these grey hairs
+      of mine ’tis not worth while disputing, ’specially with a superior, who’ll
+      ne’er confess.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’s that? There now’s a patched professor in Queen Nature’s
+      granite-founded College; but methinks he’s too subservient. Where wert
+      thou born?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Excellent! Thou’st hit the world by that.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I know not, sir, but I was born there.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it’s good. Here’s a man
+      from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man;
+      which is sucked in—by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall
+      butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long
+      dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In
+      turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing
+      resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hold hard!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging
+      log was gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea
+      parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian; reel
+      up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and mend
+      thou the line. See to it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “There he goes now; to him nothing’s happened; but to me, the skewer seems
+      loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in, Tahitian!
+      These lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and dragging
+      slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip’s missing.
+      Let’s see now if ye haven’t fished him up here, fisherman. It drags hard;
+      I guess he’s holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul in no
+      cowards here. Ho! there’s his arm just breaking water. A hatchet! a
+      hatchet! cut it off—we haul in no cowards here. Captain Ahab! sir,
+      sir! here’s Pip, trying to get on board again.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Peace, thou crazy loon,” cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm. “Away
+      from the quarter-deck!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser,” muttered Ahab, advancing.
+      “Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Astern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of
+      thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve
+      through! Who art thou, boy?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Bell-boy, sir; ship’s-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred
+      pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high—looks cowardly—quickest
+      known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip the coward?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look
+      down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye
+      creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s home
+      henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou
+      art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let’s down.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’s this? here’s velvet shark-skin,” intently gazing at Ahab’s hand,
+      and feeling it. “Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this,
+      perhaps he had ne’er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope;
+      something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and
+      rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will
+      not let this go.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse
+      horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods
+      all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods
+      oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what
+      he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel
+      prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an
+      Emperor’s!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “There go two daft ones now,” muttered the old Manxman. “One daft with
+      strength, the other daft with weakness. But here’s the end of the rotten
+      line—all dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a new
+      line altogether. I’ll see Mr. Stubb about it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0126">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Steering now south-eastward by Ahab’s levelled steel, and her progress
+      solely determined by Ahab’s level log and line; the Pequod held on her
+      path towards the Equator. Making so long a passage through such
+      unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled
+      by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed
+      the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the
+      Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the
+      dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch—then
+      headed by Flask—was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and
+      unearthly—like half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all
+      Herod’s murdered Innocents—that one and all, they started from their
+      reveries, and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all
+      transfixedly listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild cry
+      remained within hearing. The Christian or civilized part of the crew said
+      it was mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers remained
+      unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman—the oldest mariner of all—declared
+      that the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly
+      drowned men in the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when he
+      came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not unaccompanied
+      with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus explained the
+      wonder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great numbers
+      of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams that
+      had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept company with
+      her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this only the
+      more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a very
+      superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their peculiar
+      tones when in distress, but also from the human look of their round heads
+      and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water
+      alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than
+      once been mistaken for men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible
+      confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning. At sun-rise
+      this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore; and whether
+      it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for sailors
+      sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus with the
+      man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he had not been long
+      at his perch, when a cry was heard—a cry and a rushing—and
+      looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a
+      little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The life-buoy—a long slender cask—was dropped from the stern,
+      where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to
+      seize it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so
+      that it slowly filled, and that parched wood also filled at its every
+      pore; and the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom,
+      as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out for
+      the White Whale, on the White Whale’s own peculiar ground; that man was
+      swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of that at the time.
+      Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this event, at least as a
+      portent; for they regarded it, not as a foreshadowing of evil in the
+      future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged. They declared
+      that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks they had heard the
+      night before. But again the old Manxman said nay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see to
+      it; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as in the
+      feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of the voyage,
+      all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly connected with
+      its final end, whatever that might prove to be; therefore, they were going
+      to leave the ship’s stern unprovided with a buoy, when by certain strange
+      signs and inuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint concerning his coffin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “A life-buoy of a coffin!” cried Starbuck, starting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Rather queer, that, I should say,” said Stubb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It will make a good enough one,” said Flask, “the carpenter here can
+      arrange it easily.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Bring it up; there’s nothing else for it,” said Starbuck, after a
+      melancholy pause. “Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so—the
+      coffin, I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And shall I nail down the lid, sir?” moving his hand as with a hammer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And shall I caulk the seams, sir?” moving his hand as with a
+      caulking-iron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?” moving his hand as
+      with a pitch-pot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Away! what possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and no
+      more.—Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks.
+      Now I don’t like this. I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and he wears it like
+      a gentleman; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he won’t put his head
+      into it. Are all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin? And now I’m
+      ordered to make a life-buoy of it. It’s like turning an old coat; going to
+      bring the flesh on the other side now. I don’t like this cobbling sort of
+      business—I don’t like it at all; it’s undignified; it’s not my
+      place. Let tinkers’ brats do tinkerings; we are their betters. I like to
+      take in hand none but clean, virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs,
+      something that regularly begins at the beginning, and is at the middle
+      when midway, and comes to an end at the conclusion; not a cobbler’s job,
+      that’s at an end in the middle, and at the beginning at the end. It’s the
+      old woman’s tricks to be giving cobbling jobs. Lord! what an affection all
+      old women have for tinkers. I know an old woman of sixty-five who ran away
+      with a bald-headed young tinker once. And that’s the reason I never would
+      work for lonely widow old women ashore, when I kept my job-shop in the
+      Vineyard; they might have taken it into their lonely old heads to run off
+      with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea but snow-caps. Let me see.
+      Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay over the same with pitch; batten
+      them down tight, and hang it with the snap-spring over the ship’s stern.
+      Were ever such things done before with a coffin? Some superstitious old
+      carpenters, now, would be tied up in the rigging, ere they would do the
+      job. But I’m made of knotty Aroostook hemlock; I don’t budge. Cruppered
+      with a coffin! Sailing about with a grave-yard tray! But never mind. We
+      workers in woods make bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as coffins
+      and hearses. We work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit; not
+      for us to ask the why and wherefore of our work, unless it be too
+      confounded cobbling, and then we stash it if we can. Hem! I’ll do the job,
+      now, tenderly. I’ll have me—let’s see—how many in the ship’s
+      company, all told? But I’ve forgotten. Any way, I’ll have me thirty
+      separate, Turk’s-headed life-lines, each three feet long hanging all round
+      to the coffin. Then, if the hull go down, there’ll be thirty lively
+      fellows all fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath
+      the sun! Come hammer, caulking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let’s
+      to it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0127">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 127. The Deck.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      (<i>The coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between the vice-bench and the open
+      hatchway; the Carpenter caulking its seams; the string of twisted oakum
+      slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the bosom of his frock.—Ahab
+      comes slowly from the cabin-gangway, and hears Pip following him.</i>)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand
+      complies with my humor more genially than that boy.—Middle aisle of
+      a church! What’s here?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck’s orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the
+      hatchway!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy shop?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but
+      they’ve set me now to turning it into something else.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling,
+      monopolising, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the
+      next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those
+      same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a
+      jack-of-all-trades.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The gods again. Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a coffin?
+      The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for
+      volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in hand. Dost
+      thou never?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I’m indifferent enough, sir, for that; but the
+      reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there was
+      none in his spade, sir. But the caulking mallet is full of it. Hark to
+      it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, and that’s because the lid there’s a sounding-board; and what in all
+      things makes the sounding-board is this—there’s naught beneath. And
+      yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same, Carpenter.
+      Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin knock against the
+      churchyard gate, going in?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Faith, sir, I’ve——”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Faith? What’s that?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, faith, sir, it’s only a sort of exclamation-like—that’s all,
+      sir.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Um, um; go on.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I was about to say, sir, that——”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself? Look
+      at thy bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot
+      latitudes. I’ve heard that the Isle of Albemarle, one of the Gallipagos,
+      is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems to me some sort of
+      Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his middle. He’s always under the
+      Line—fiery hot, I tell ye! He’s looking this way—come, oakum;
+      quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork, and I’m the
+      professor of musical glasses—tap, tap!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (<i>Ahab to himself</i>.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There’s a sight! There’s a sound! The greyheaded woodpecker
+      tapping the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that
+      thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag, that
+      fellow. Rat-tat! So man’s seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all
+      materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here
+      now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the
+      expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy
+      of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense
+      the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! I’ll think of
+      that. But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other
+      side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me. Will
+      ye never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed sound? I go below; let
+      me not see that thing here when I return again. Now, then, Pip, we’ll talk
+      this over; I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee! Some unknown
+      conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0128">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Next day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down
+      upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At the time
+      the Pequod was making good speed through the water; but as the
+      broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all
+      fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled from the
+      smitten hull.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Bad news; she brings bad news,” muttered the old Manxman. But ere her
+      commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he could
+      hopefully hail, Ahab’s voice was heard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hast seen the White Whale?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question; and
+      would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stranger captain
+      himself, having stopped his vessel’s way, was seen descending her side. A
+      few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the Pequod’s main-chains,
+      and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was recognised by Ahab for a
+      Nantucketer he knew. But no formal salutation was exchanged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Where was he?—not killed!—not killed!” cried Ahab, closely
+      advancing. “How was it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous, while
+      three of the stranger’s boats were engaged with a shoal of whales, which
+      had led them some four or five miles from the ship; and while they were
+      yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head of Moby Dick had
+      suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very far to leeward; whereupon,
+      the fourth rigged boat—a reserved one—had been instantly
+      lowered in chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this fourth boat—the
+      swiftest keeled of all—seemed to have succeeded in fastening—at
+      least, as well as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about it.
+      In the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam
+      of bubbling white water; and after that nothing more; whence it was
+      concluded that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with his
+      pursuers, as often happens. There was some apprehension, but no positive
+      alarm, as yet. The recall signals were placed in the rigging; darkness
+      came on; and forced to pick up her three far to windward boats—ere
+      going in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite direction—the
+      ship had not only been necessitated to leave that boat to its fate till
+      near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance from it. But
+      the rest of her crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded all sail—stunsail
+      on stunsail—after the missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots
+      for a beacon; and every other man aloft on the look-out. But though when
+      she had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the presumed place of
+      the absent ones when last seen; though she then paused to lower her spare
+      boats to pull all around her; and not finding anything, had again dashed
+      on; again paused, and lowered her boats; and though she had thus continued
+      doing till daylight; yet not the least glimpse of the missing keel had
+      been seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his
+      object in boarding the Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his own
+      in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five miles apart, on
+      parallel lines, and so sweeping a double horizon, as it were.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I will wager something now,” whispered Stubb to Flask, “that some one in
+      that missing boat wore off that Captain’s best coat; mayhap, his watch—he’s
+      so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever heard of two pious whale-ships
+      cruising after one missing whale-boat in the height of the whaling season?
+      See, Flask, only see how pale he looks—pale in the very buttons of
+      his eyes—look—it wasn’t the coat—it must have been the—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “My boy, my own boy is among them. For God’s sake—I beg, I conjure”—here
+      exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far had but icily
+      received his petition. “For eight-and-forty hours let me charter your ship—I
+      will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it—if there be no other
+      way—for eight-and-forty hours only—only that—you must,
+      oh, you must, and you <i>shall</i> do this thing.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “His son!” cried Stubb, “oh, it’s his son he’s lost! I take back the coat
+      and watch—what says Ahab? We must save that boy.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He’s drowned with the rest on ’em, last night,” said the old Manx sailor
+      standing behind them; “I heard; all of ye heard their spirits.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel’s the
+      more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of the
+      Captain’s sons among the number of the missing boat’s crew; but among the
+      number of the other boat’s crews, at the same time, but on the other hand,
+      separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the chase, there
+      had been still another son; as that for a time, the wretched father was
+      plunged to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity; which was only solved
+      for him by his chief mate’s instinctively adopting the ordinary procedure
+      of a whale-ship in such emergencies, that is, when placed between
+      jeopardized but divided boats, always to pick up the majority first. But
+      the captain, for some unknown constitutional reason, had refrained from
+      mentioning all this, and not till forced to it by Ahab’s iciness did he
+      allude to his one yet missing boy; a little lad, but twelve years old,
+      whose father with the earnest but unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer’s
+      paternal love, had thus early sought to initiate him in the perils and
+      wonders of a vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his race. Nor
+      does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of
+      such tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four years’
+      voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their first knowledge of
+      a whaleman’s career shall be unenervated by any chance display of a
+      father’s natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and
+      concern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab; and
+      Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the
+      least quivering of his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I will not go,” said the stranger, “till you say <i>aye</i> to me. Do to me as
+      you would have me do to you in the like case. For <i>you</i> too have a boy,
+      Captain Ahab—though but a child, and nestling safely at home now—a
+      child of your old age too—Yes, yes, you relent; I see it—run,
+      run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Avast,” cried Ahab—“touch not a rope-yarn”; then in a voice that
+      prolongingly moulded every word—“Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.
+      Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I
+      forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch,
+      and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers:
+      then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin, leaving
+      the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter rejection
+      of his so earnest suit. But starting from his enchantment, Gardiner
+      silently hurried to the side; more fell than stepped into his boat, and
+      returned to his ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel
+      was in view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot,
+      however small, on the sea. This way and that her yards were swung round;
+      starboard and larboard, she continued to tack; now she beat against a head
+      sea; and again it pushed her before it; while all the while, her masts and
+      yards were thickly clustered with men, as three tall cherry trees, when
+      the boys are cherrying among the boughs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw
+      that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort.
+      She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0129">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      (<i>Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches him by the hand to follow.</i>)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming
+      when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him.
+      There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady.
+      Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired
+      health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee, as if thou
+      wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own screwed chair;
+      another screw to it, thou must be.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for your
+      one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part
+      of ye.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless
+      fidelity of man!—and a black! and crazy!—but methinks
+      like-cures-like applies to him too; he grows so sane again.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose
+      drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin.
+      But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with
+      ye.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I
+      tell thee no; it cannot be.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh good master, master, master!”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad.
+      Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still
+      know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!—Met! True art
+      thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless
+      thee; and if it come to that,—God for ever save thee, let what will
+      befall.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (<i>Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward.</i>)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,—but I’m alone. Now
+      were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing. Pip! Pip!
+      Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip? He must be up here; let’s try the door.
+      What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there’s no opening it. It
+      must be the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me this screwed
+      chair was mine. Here, then, I’ll seat me, against the transom, in the
+      ship’s full middle, all her keel and her three masts before me. Here, our
+      old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great admirals sometimes sit
+      at table, and lord it over rows of captains and lieutenants. Ha! what’s
+      this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all come crowding! Pass round the
+      decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs! What an odd feeling, now,
+      when a black boy’s host to white men with gold lace upon their coats!—Monsieurs,
+      have ye seen one Pip?—a little negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog
+      look, and cowardly! Jumped from a whale-boat once;—seen him? No!
+      Well then, fill up again, captains, and let’s drink shame upon all
+      cowards! I name no names. Shame upon them! Put one foot upon the table.
+      Shame upon all cowards.—Hist! above there, I hear ivory—Oh,
+      master! master! I am indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. But here
+      I’ll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and
+      oysters come to join me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0130">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 130. The Hat.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a
+      preliminary cruise, Ahab,—all other whaling waters swept—seemed
+      to have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely
+      there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and longitude
+      where his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a vessel had been
+      spoken which on the very day preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick;—and
+      now that all his successive meetings with various ships contrastingly
+      concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the white whale
+      tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against; now it was that there
+      lurked a something in the old man’s eyes, which it was hardly sufferable
+      for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting polar star, which through the
+      livelong, arctic, six months’ night sustains its piercing, steady, central
+      gaze; so Ahab’s purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant
+      midnight of the gloomy crew. It domineered above them so, that all their
+      bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls,
+      and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural,
+      vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove
+      to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to
+      finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab’s
+      iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious
+      that the old man’s despot eye was on them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when he
+      thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that even
+      as Ahab’s eyes so awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Parsee’s glance awed
+      his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it. Such an
+      added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah now; such
+      ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious at him; half
+      uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance, or
+      else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen being’s body.
+      And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by night, even, had
+      Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below. He would stand
+      still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan but wondrous eyes did
+      plainly say—We two watchmen never rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the
+      deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or
+      exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits,—the
+      main-mast and the mizen; or else they saw him standing in the
+      cabin-scuttle,—his living foot advanced upon the deck, as if to
+      step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless
+      he stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung
+      in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never
+      tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at
+      times; or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though
+      he stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the
+      unheeded night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat
+      and hat. The clothes that the night had wet, the next day’s sunshine dried
+      upon him; and so, day after day, and night after night; he went no more
+      beneath the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent
+      for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,—breakfast
+      and dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly
+      grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow
+      idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But though
+      his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee’s
+      mystic watch was without intermission as his own; yet these two never
+      seemed to speak—one man to the other—unless at long intervals
+      some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such a potent
+      spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck
+      crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one
+      word; by night, dumb men were both, so far as concerned the slightest
+      verbal interchange. At times, for longest hours, without a single hail,
+      they stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by
+      the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the
+      Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned
+      substance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet, somehow, did Ahab—in his own proper self, as daily, hourly,
+      and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,—Ahab
+      seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both
+      seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean shade
+      siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel was
+      solid Ahab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard
+      from aft,—“Man the mast-heads!”—and all through the day, till
+      after sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at the
+      striking of the helmsman’s bell, was heard—“What d’ye see?—sharp!
+      sharp!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the
+      children-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac
+      old man seemed distrustful of his crew’s fidelity; at least, of nearly all
+      except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether Stubb and
+      Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if these
+      suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally
+      expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I will have the first sight of the whale myself,”—he said. “Aye!
+      Ahab must have the doubloon!” and with his own hands he rigged a nest of
+      basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved block,
+      to secure to the main-mast head, he received the two ends of the
+      downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to his basket prepared a pin for
+      the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail. This done, with that end
+      yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked round upon his
+      crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance long upon Daggoo,
+      Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his firm
+      relying eye upon the chief mate, said,—“Take the rope, sir—I
+      give it into thy hands, Starbuck.” Then arranging his person in the
+      basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him to his perch, Starbuck
+      being the one who secured the rope at last; and afterwards stood near it.
+      And thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad
+      upon the sea for miles and miles,—ahead, astern, this side, and
+      that,—within the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a
+      height.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in the
+      rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is hoisted
+      up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope; under these
+      circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given in strict charge
+      to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in such a
+      wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations aloft
+      cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the deck;
+      and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes cast
+      down from the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if,
+      unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some
+      carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the sea.
+      So Ahab’s proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the only strange
+      thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck, almost the one only man who
+      had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the slightest degree
+      approaching to decision—one of those too, whose faithfulness on the
+      look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat;—it was strange, that this
+      was the very man he should select for his watchman; freely giving his
+      whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person’s hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten
+      minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly
+      incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these
+      latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head
+      in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet
+      straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying
+      again round his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed not
+      to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it
+      much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least heedful
+      eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Your hat, your hat, sir!” suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who being
+      posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat
+      lower than his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But already the sable wing was before the old man’s eyes; the long hooked
+      bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with his
+      prize.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin’s head, removing his cap to replace it,
+      and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of
+      Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good.
+      Ahab’s hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far
+      in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while from the point of
+      that disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from
+      that vast height into the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0131">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the
+      life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably
+      misnamed the Delight, was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed
+      upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross
+      the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the
+      spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon the stranger’s shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and some
+      few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you now saw
+      through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled,
+      half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hast seen the White Whale?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Look!” replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with his
+      trumpet he pointed to the wreck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hast killed him?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that,” answered the
+      other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered
+      sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Not forged!” and snatching Perth’s levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab
+      held it out, exclaiming—“Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I
+      hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these
+      barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin,
+      where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then God keep thee, old man—see’st thou that”—pointing to the
+      hammock—“I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only
+      yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only <i>that</i> one I bury; the rest were
+      buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb.” Then turning to his
+      crew—“Are ye ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and lift
+      the body; so, then—Oh! God”—advancing towards the hammock with
+      uplifted hands—“may the resurrection and the life——”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Brace forward! Up helm!” cried Ahab like lightning to his men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound
+      of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not so
+      quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled
+      her hull with their ghostly baptism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy
+      hanging at the Pequod’s stern came into conspicuous relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!” cried a foreboding voice in her wake. “In
+      vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your
+      taffrail to show us your coffin!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0132">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly
+      separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was
+      transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and
+      man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest
+      in his sleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,
+      unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but
+      to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty
+      leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled,
+      murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and
+      shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were,
+      that distinguished them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air
+      to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling
+      line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion—most seen here at
+      the equator—denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms,
+      with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and
+      unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of
+      ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting
+      his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged
+      creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how
+      oblivious were ye of old Ahab’s close-coiled woe! But so have I seen
+      little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around
+      their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the
+      marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and
+      watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more
+      and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely
+      aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the
+      cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did
+      at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now
+      threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously
+      sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could
+      yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched
+      hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such
+      wealth as that one wee drop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;
+      and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that
+      stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch him,
+      or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ahab turned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Starbuck!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sir.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a
+      day—very much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first whale—a
+      boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty—forty—forty years ago!—ago!
+      Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and
+      storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab
+      forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of
+      the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent
+      three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of
+      solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s
+      exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the
+      green country without—oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery
+      of solitary command!—when I think of all this; only half-suspected,
+      not so keenly known to me before—and how for forty years I have fed
+      upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!—when
+      the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the
+      world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away,
+      from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn
+      the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife? wife?—rather
+      a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I
+      married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling
+      blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab
+      has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man!—aye,
+      aye! what a forty years’ fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab
+      been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the
+      oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now?
+      Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear,
+      one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old
+      hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never
+      grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old,
+      Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam,
+      staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!—crack
+      my heart!—stave my brain!—mockery! mockery! bitter, biting
+      mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and
+      feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look
+      into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than
+      to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is
+      the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no;
+      stay on board, on board!—lower not when I do; when branded Ahab
+      gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with
+      the far away home I see in that eye!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why
+      should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly
+      these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s—wife
+      and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine,
+      sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age!
+      Away! let us away!—this instant let me alter the course! How
+      cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see
+      old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days,
+      even as this, in Nantucket.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “They have, they have. I have seen them—some summer days in the
+      morning. About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy
+      vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of
+      cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to
+      dance him again.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “’Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning,
+      should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father’s
+      sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my
+      Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the boy’s face
+      from the window! the boy’s hand on the hill!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and
+      cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what
+      cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands
+      me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and
+      crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready
+      to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?
+      Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great
+      sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single
+      star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small
+      heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that
+      beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man,
+      we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and
+      Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this
+      unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and
+      fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the
+      judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a
+      mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away
+      meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes,
+      Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping?
+      Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye,
+      and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in
+      the half-cut swaths—Starbuck!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two
+      reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly
+      leaning over the same rail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0133">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man—as his wont at
+      intervals—stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and
+      went to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing
+      up the sea air as a sagacious ship’s dog will, in drawing nigh to some
+      barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that peculiar
+      odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living sperm whale,
+      was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner surprised when, after
+      inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and then ascertaining the
+      precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered
+      the ship’s course to be slightly altered, and the sail to be shortened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated at
+      daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and lengthwise
+      ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery wrinkles
+      bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift tide-rip, at
+      the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle
+      deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they seemed
+      to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear with their
+      clothes in their hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What d’ye see?” cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Nothing, nothing sir!” was the sound hailing down in reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “T’gallant sails!—stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for swaying
+      him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were hoisting
+      him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and while
+      peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the main-top-sail and
+      top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the air. “There she blows!—there
+      she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three
+      look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous
+      whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final perch,
+      some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just beneath him on
+      the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the Indian’s head was almost on a
+      level with Ahab’s heel. From this height the whale was now seen some mile
+      or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing his high sparkling hump,
+      and regularly jetting his silent spout into the air. To the credulous
+      mariners it seemed the same silent spout they had so long ago beheld in
+      the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And did none of ye see it before?” cried Ahab, hailing the perched men
+      all around him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I
+      cried out,” said Tashtego.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Not the same instant; not the same—no, the doubloon is mine, Fate
+      reserved the doubloon for me. <i>I</i> only; none of ye could have raised the
+      White Whale first. There she blows!—there she blows!—there she
+      blows! There again!—there again!” he cried, in long-drawn,
+      lingering, methodic tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the
+      whale’s visible jets. “He’s going to sound! In stunsails! Down
+      top-gallant-sails! Stand by three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on
+      board, and keep the ship. Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man,
+      steady! There go flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready the boats
+      there? Stand by, stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower,—quick,
+      quicker!” and he slid through the air to the deck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He is heading straight to leeward, sir,” cried Stubb, “right away from
+      us; cannot have seen the ship yet.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!—brace up!
+      Shiver her!—shiver her!—So; well that! Boats, boats!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Soon all the boats but Starbuck’s were dropped; all the boat-sails set—all
+      the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward; and Ahab
+      heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up Fedallah’s sunken eyes; a
+      hideous motion gnawed his mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea;
+      but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew
+      still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a
+      noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came
+      so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was
+      distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and
+      continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. He
+      saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond.
+      Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening
+      white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully
+      accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed
+      over into the moving valley of his steady wake; and on either hand bright
+      bubbles arose and danced by his side. But these were broken again by the
+      light toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly feathering the sea, alternate
+      with their fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff rising from the
+      painted hull of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance
+      projected from the white whale’s back; and at intervals one of the cloud
+      of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over
+      the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers
+      streaming like pennons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness,
+      invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with
+      ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes
+      sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling
+      straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty
+      Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On each soft side—coincident with the parted swell, that but once
+      leaving him, then flowed so wide away—on each bright side, the whale
+      shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who
+      namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to
+      assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of
+      tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all who
+      for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way thou
+      may’st have bejuggled and destroyed before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among
+      waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick
+      moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged
+      trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the
+      fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole
+      marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia’s Natural Bridge, and
+      warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed
+      himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly halting, and dipping
+      on the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly lingered over the agitated pool
+      that he left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the
+      three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick’s reappearance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “An hour,” said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat’s stern; and he gazed
+      beyond the whale’s place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing
+      vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant; for again his eyes seemed
+      whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze now
+      freshened; the sea began to swell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The birds!—the birds!” cried Tashtego.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now
+      all flying towards Ahab’s boat; and when within a few yards began
+      fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous,
+      expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man’s; Ahab could discover
+      no sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down into its
+      depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white
+      weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till
+      it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of
+      white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom. It
+      was Moby Dick’s open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast, shadowed bulk still
+      half blending with the blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned
+      beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb; and giving one sidelong
+      sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled the craft aside from this
+      tremendous apparition. Then, calling upon Fedallah to change places with
+      him, went forward to the bows, and seizing Perth’s harpoon, commanded his
+      crew to grasp their oars and stand by to stern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis, its
+      bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale’s head while yet under
+      water. But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that malicious
+      intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly transplanted himself, as it were,
+      in an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for an
+      instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of a biting
+      shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his mouth, so that
+      the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into the open air, and
+      one of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish pearl-white of the
+      inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab’s head, and reached higher
+      than that. In this attitude the White Whale now shook the slight cedar as
+      a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and
+      crossed his arms; but the tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each
+      other’s heads to gain the uttermost stern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the
+      whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his
+      body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from the
+      bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and while the
+      other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis impossible to
+      withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing
+      vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and helpless in the very
+      jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his
+      naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe. As now he thus
+      vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the frail gunwales bent in,
+      collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding
+      further aft, bit the craft completely in twain, and locked themselves fast
+      again in the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks. These floated
+      aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew at the stern-wreck clinging to
+      the gunwales, and striving to hold fast to the oars to lash them across.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first to
+      perceive the whale’s intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a
+      movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his hand had
+      made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only slipping
+      further into the whale’s mouth, and tilting over sideways as it slipped,
+      the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw; spilled him out of it, as he
+      leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little
+      distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in the
+      billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body; so
+      that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose—some twenty or more feet
+      out of the water—the now rising swells, with all their confluent
+      waves, dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered
+      spray still higher into the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled
+      Channel billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly
+      to overleap its summit with their scud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      *This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation
+      (pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down poise
+      of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously
+      described. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively
+      view whatever objects may be encircling him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round
+      and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful
+      wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly assault.
+      The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood of
+      grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus’s elephants in the book of
+      Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale’s
+      insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,—though he could
+      still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless
+      Ahab’s head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock
+      might burst. From the boat’s fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and
+      mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not
+      succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves. For so
+      revolvingly appalling was the White Whale’s aspect, and so planetarily
+      swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed horizontally
+      swooping upon them. And though the other boats, unharmed, still hovered
+      hard by; still they dared not pull into the eddy to strike, lest that
+      should be the signal for the instant destruction of the jeopardized
+      castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves hope to
+      escape. With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge of the
+      direful zone, whose centre had now become the old man’s head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship’s
+      mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene; and
+      was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her!—“Sail on the”—but
+      that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed him
+      for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise on a
+      towering crest, he shouted,—“Sail on the whale!—Drive him
+      off!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pequod’s prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she
+      effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam
+      off, the boats flew to the rescue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dragged into Stubb’s boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white brine
+      caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab’s bodily strength did
+      crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body’s doom: for a time, lying all
+      crushed in the bottom of Stubb’s boat, like one trodden under foot of
+      herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as desolate
+      sounds from out ravines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more
+      abbreviate it. In an instant’s compass, great hearts sometimes condense to
+      one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused
+      through feebler men’s whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary in
+      each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time
+      aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous intensities;
+      for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain the
+      entire circumferences of inferior souls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The harpoon,” said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one
+      bended arm—“is it safe?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it,” said Stubb, showing it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lay it before me;—any missing men?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “One, two, three, four, five;—there were five oars, sir, and here
+      are five men.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That’s good.—Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him!
+      there! there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!—Hands
+      off from me! The eternal sap runs up in Ahab’s bones again! Set the sail;
+      out oars; the helm!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked up
+      by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus
+      continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now. But the
+      added power of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale, for he
+      seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a velocity which
+      plainly showed, that if now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the
+      chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor
+      could any crew endure for so long a period, such an unintermitted, intense
+      straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable only in some one brief
+      vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as it sometimes happens, offered the
+      most promising intermediate means of overtaking the chase. Accordingly,
+      the boats now made for her, and were soon swayed up to their cranes—the
+      two parts of the wrecked boat having been previously secured by her—and
+      then hoisting everything to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and
+      sideways outstretching it with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings
+      of an albatross; the Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick. At
+      the well known, methodic intervals, the whale’s glittering spout was
+      regularly announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be
+      reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing the
+      deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second of the allotted
+      hour expired, his voice was heard.—“Whose is the doubloon now? D’ye
+      see him?” and if the reply was, No, sir! straightway he commanded them to
+      lift him to his perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab, now aloft and
+      motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft,
+      or to bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a still
+      greater breadth—thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at
+      every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon the
+      quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered stern. At
+      last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded sky fresh
+      troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old man’s face
+      there now stole some such added gloom as this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to evince
+      his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in his
+      Captain’s mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed—“The
+      thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did I
+      not know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear
+      thou wert a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, sir,” said Starbuck drawing near, “’tis a solemn sight; an omen, and
+      an ill one.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Omen? omen?—the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to
+      man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give
+      an old wives’ darkling hint.—Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles
+      of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye
+      two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the
+      peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold—I shiver!—How
+      now? Aloft there! D’ye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he spout
+      ten times a second!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling.
+      Soon, it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Can’t see the spout now, sir;—too dark”—cried a voice from
+      the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “How heading when last seen?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “As before, sir,—straight to leeward.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good! he will travel slower now ’tis night. Down royals and top-gallant
+      stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before morning; he’s
+      making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm there! keep her full
+      before the wind!—Aloft! come down!—Mr. Stubb, send a fresh
+      hand to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till morning.”—Then
+      advancing towards the doubloon in the main-mast—“Men, this gold is
+      mine, for I earned it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale
+      is dead; and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall
+      be killed, this gold is that man’s; and if on that day I shall again raise
+      him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye! Away now!—the
+      deck is thine, sir!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and
+      slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals rousing
+      himself to see how the night wore on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0134">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “D’ye see him?” cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the light to
+      spread.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “See nothing, sir.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought for;—the
+      top-gallant sails!—aye, they should have been kept on her all night.
+      But no matter—’tis but resting for the rush.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale,
+      continued through day into night, and through night into day, is a thing
+      by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is the
+      wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible confidence
+      acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders;
+      that from the simple observation of a whale when last descried, they will,
+      under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both the
+      direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of
+      sight, as well as his probable rate of progression during that period.
+      And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a
+      coast, whose general trending he well knows, and which he desires shortly
+      to return to again, but at some further point; like as this pilot stands
+      by his compass, and takes the precise bearing of the cape at present
+      visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen
+      headland, eventually to be visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass,
+      with the whale; for after being chased, and diligently marked, through
+      several hours of daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the
+      creature’s future wake through the darkness is almost as established to
+      the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the pilot’s coast is to him. So that
+      to this hunter’s wondrous skill, the proverbial evanescence of a thing
+      writ in water, a wake, is to all desired purposes well nigh as reliable as
+      the steadfast land. And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway
+      is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their
+      hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly
+      say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot,
+      at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions when these
+      Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep, according to the
+      observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so many hours hence
+      this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have about reached this
+      or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to render this acuteness at
+      all successful in the end, the wind and the sea must be the whaleman’s
+      allies; for of what present avail to the becalmed or windbound mariner is
+      the skill that assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a
+      quarter from his port? Inferable from these statements, are many
+      collateral subtile matters touching the chase of whales.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball,
+      missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level field.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “By salt and hemp!” cried Stubb, “but this swift motion of the deck creeps
+      up one’s legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two brave
+      fellows!—Ha, ha! Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise, on
+      the sea,—for by live-oaks! my spine’s a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait
+      that leaves no dust behind!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “There she blows—she blows!—she blows!—right ahead!” was
+      now the mast-head cry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, aye!” cried Stubb, “I knew it—ye can’t escape—blow on
+      and split your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow
+      your trump—blister your lungs!—Ahab will dam off your blood,
+      as a miller shuts his watergate upon the stream!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies of
+      the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked
+      anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt
+      before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe
+      of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid
+      prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had
+      snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of the previous day;
+      the rack of the past night’s suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind,
+      reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying
+      mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled along. The wind that
+      made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms
+      invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency
+      which so enslaved them to the race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all;
+      though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple,
+      and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each
+      other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and
+      directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the
+      crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltiness, all
+      varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal
+      goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were
+      outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one
+      hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others, shading
+      their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking yards; all
+      the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their fate. Ah!
+      how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing
+      that might destroy them!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?” cried Ahab, when, after the
+      lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard. “Sway
+      me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd jet that
+      way, and then disappears.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some
+      other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for
+      hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its pin
+      on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the air
+      vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant halloo
+      of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as—much nearer to the ship than
+      the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead—Moby Dick
+      bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by
+      the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White
+      Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of
+      breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the
+      Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and
+      piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of
+      seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes
+      off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There she breaches! there she breaches!” was the cry, as in his
+      immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to
+      Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved
+      against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for
+      the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and stood
+      there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling intensity,
+      to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!” cried Ahab, “thy hour and
+      thy harpoon are at hand!—Down! down all of ye, but one man at the
+      fore. The boats!—stand by!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like
+      shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and halyards;
+      while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from his perch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lower away,” he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat—a spare
+      one, rigged the afternoon previous. “Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine—keep
+      away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower, all!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first
+      assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the three
+      crews. Ahab’s boat was central; and cheering his men, he told them he
+      would take the whale head-and-head,—that is, pull straight up to his
+      forehead,—a not uncommon thing; for when within a certain limit,
+      such a course excludes the coming onset from the whale’s sidelong vision.
+      But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all three boats were
+      plain as the ship’s three masts to his eye; the White Whale churning
+      himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were, rushing among
+      the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered appalling battle on
+      every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from every boat,
+      seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which those
+      boats were made. But skilfully manœuvred, incessantly wheeling like
+      trained chargers in the field; the boats for a while eluded him; though,
+      at times, but by a plank’s breadth; while all the time, Ahab’s unearthly
+      slogan tore every other cry but his to shreds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed and
+      recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack of the three lines
+      now fast to him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves, warped the
+      devoted boats towards the planted irons in him; though now for a moment
+      the whale drew aside a little, as if to rally for a more tremendous
+      charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out more line: and then
+      was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again—hoping that way to
+      disencumber it of some snarls—when lo!—a sight more savage
+      than the embattled teeth of sharks!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Caught and twisted—corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose
+      harpoons and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points, came
+      flashing and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab’s boat. Only
+      one thing could be done. Seizing the boat-knife, he critically reached
+      within—through—and then, without—the rays of steel;
+      dragged in the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and then,
+      twice sundering the rope near the chocks—dropped the intercepted
+      fagot of steel into the sea; and was all fast again. That instant, the
+      White Whale made a sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the other
+      lines; by so doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb
+      and Flask towards his flukes; dashed them together like two rolling husks
+      on a surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in
+      a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the
+      wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred
+      bowl of punch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after
+      the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while aslope
+      little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his legs
+      upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily
+      singing out for some one to ladle him up; and while the old man’s line—now
+      parting—admitted of his pulling into the creamy pool to rescue whom
+      he could;—in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand concreted
+      perils,—Ahab’s yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards Heaven by
+      invisible wires,—as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the
+      sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its bottom, and
+      sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till it fell again—gunwale
+      downwards—and Ahab and his men struggled out from under it, like
+      seals from a sea-side cave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first uprising momentum of the whale—modifying its direction as
+      he struck the surface—involuntarily launched him along it, to a
+      little distance from the centre of the destruction he had made; and with
+      his back to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling with his flukes
+      from side to side; and whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least chip
+      or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back, and
+      came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his work for
+      that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the ocean, and
+      trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his leeward way at a
+      traveller’s methodic pace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight, again came
+      bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the floating
+      mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else could be caught at, and safely
+      landed them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and ankles;
+      livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable intricacies
+      of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these were there; but no fatal or
+      even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one. As with Fedallah the day
+      before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to his boat’s broken half,
+      which afforded a comparatively easy float; nor did it so exhaust him as
+      the previous day’s mishap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as
+      instead of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder of
+      Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to assist him. His ivory leg
+      had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, aye, Starbuck, ’tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he
+      will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The ferrule has not stood, sir,” said the carpenter, now coming up; “I
+      put good work into that leg.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But no bones broken, sir, I hope,” said Stubb with true concern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!—d’ye see it.—But
+      even with a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living
+      bone of mine one jot more me, than this dead one that’s lost. Nor white
+      whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper
+      and inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape
+      yonder roof?—Aloft there! which way?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Dead to leeward, sir.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of the
+      spare boats and rig them—Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat’s
+      crews.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the
+      unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sir?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane—there, that
+      shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet. By
+      heaven it cannot be!—missing?—quick! call them all.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man’s hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the
+      Parsee was not there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The Parsee!” cried Stubb—“he must have been caught in——”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The black vomit wrench thee!—run all of ye above, alow, cabin,
+      forecastle—find him—not gone—not gone!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was
+      nowhere to be found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, sir,” said Stubb—“caught among the tangles of your line—I
+      thought I saw him dragging under.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “<i>My</i> line! <i>my</i> line? Gone?—gone? What means that little word?—What
+      death-knell rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry.
+      The harpoon, too!—toss over the litter there,—d’ye see it?—the
+      forged iron, men, the white whale’s—no, no, no,—blistered
+      fool! this hand did dart it!—’tis in the fish!—Aloft there!
+      Keep him nailed—Quick!—all hands to the rigging of the boats—collect
+      the oars—harpooneers! the irons, the irons!—hoist the royals
+      higher—a pull on all the sheets!—helm there! steady, steady
+      for your life! I’ll ten times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea and dive
+      straight through it, but I’ll slay him yet!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Great God! but for one single instant show thyself,” cried Starbuck;
+      “never, never wilt thou capture him, old man—In Jesus’ name no more
+      of this, that’s worse than devil’s madness. Two days chased; twice stove
+      to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil
+      shadow gone—all good angels mobbing thee with warnings:—what more
+      wouldst thou have?—Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps
+      the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be
+      towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh,—Impiety and blasphemy to hunt
+      him more!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour
+      we both saw—thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes. But in this
+      matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this
+      hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This
+      whole act’s immutably decreed. ’Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion
+      years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act
+      under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.—Stand
+      round me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a
+      shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. ’Tis Ahab—his body’s
+      part; but Ahab’s soul’s a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I
+      feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a
+      gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, ye’ll hear me crack; and till ye
+      hear <i>that</i>, know that Ahab’s hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ye, men,
+      in the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they
+      drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface; then rise again, to
+      sink for evermore. So with Moby Dick—two days he’s floated—tomorrow
+      will be the third. Aye, men, he’ll rise once more,—but only to spout
+      his last! D’ye feel brave men, brave?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “As fearless fire,” cried Stubb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And as mechanical,” muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward, he
+      muttered on: “The things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same to
+      Starbuck there, concerning my broken boat. Oh! how valiantly I seek to
+      drive out of others’ hearts what’s clinched so fast in mine!—The
+      Parsee—the Parsee!—gone, gone? and he was to go before:—but
+      still was to be seen again ere I could perish—How’s that?—There’s
+      a riddle now might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts of the
+      whole line of judges:—like a hawk’s beak it pecks my brain. <i>I’ll</i>,
+      <i>I’ll</i> solve it, though!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly as on
+      the previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of the
+      grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by lanterns
+      in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and sharpening
+      their fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken keel of Ahab’s
+      wrecked craft the carpenter made him another leg; while still as on the
+      night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his scuttle; his hid,
+      heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial; sat due
+      eastward for the earliest sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0135">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER 135. The Chase.—Third Day.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the
+      solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds of the
+      daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “D’ye see him?” cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that’s all. Helm
+      there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day
+      again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the
+      angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer
+      day could not dawn upon that world. Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time
+      to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; <i>that’s</i>
+      tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only has that
+      right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a
+      calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for
+      that. And yet, I’ve sometimes thought my brain was very calm—frozen
+      calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned
+      to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this moment
+      growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it’s like that sort of common
+      grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice
+      or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as
+      the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. A vile
+      wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells,
+      and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither
+      as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!—it’s tainted. Were I the wind,
+      I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl somewhere to
+      a cave, and slink there. And yet, ’tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind!
+      who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow.
+      Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that
+      strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even
+      Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing than <i>that</i>. Would now the wind
+      but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal
+      man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as
+      agents. There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious
+      difference! And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that there’s something
+      all glorious and gracious in the wind. These warm Trade Winds, at least,
+      that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in strong and steadfast,
+      vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark, however the baser
+      currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of the
+      land swift and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the
+      eternal Poles! these same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on;
+      these Trades, or something like them—something so unchangeable, and
+      full as strong, blow my keeled soul along! To it! Aloft there! What d’ye
+      see?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Nothing, sir.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See the sun! Aye,
+      aye, it must be so. I’ve oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye, he’s
+      chasing <i>me</i> now; not I, <i>him</i>—that’s bad; I might have known it, too.
+      Fool! the lines—the harpoons he’s towing. Aye, aye, I have run him
+      by last night. About! about! Come down, all of ye, but the regular look
+      outs! Man the braces!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod’s
+      quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced
+      ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own
+      white wake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw,” murmured Starbuck to
+      himself, as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. “God keep
+      us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from the inside wet my
+      flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Stand by to sway me up!” cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket. “We
+      should meet him soon.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, aye, sir,” and straightway Starbuck did Ahab’s bidding, and once
+      more Ahab swung on high.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held
+      long breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the
+      weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three
+      mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck
+      there!—brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind’s eye. He’s too far
+      off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that helmsman
+      with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But let me have
+      one more good round look aloft here at the sea; there’s time for that. An
+      old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; aye, and not changed a wink
+      since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of Nantucket! The same!—the
+      same!—the same to Noah as to me. There’s a soft shower to leeward.
+      Such lovely leewardings! They must lead somewhere—to something else
+      than common land, more palmy than the palms. Leeward! the white whale goes
+      that way; look to windward, then; the better if the bitterer quarter. But
+      good bye, good bye, old mast-head! What’s this?—green? aye, tiny
+      mosses in these warped cracks. No such green weather stains on Ahab’s
+      head! There’s the difference now between man’s old age and matter’s. But
+      aye, old mast, we both grow old together; sound in our hulls, though, are
+      we not, my ship? Aye, minus a leg, that’s all. By heaven this dead wood
+      has the better of my live flesh every way. I can’t compare with it; and
+      I’ve known some ships made of dead trees outlast the lives of men made of
+      the most vital stuff of vital fathers. What’s that he said? he should
+      still go before me, my pilot; and yet to be seen again? But where? Will I
+      have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those endless
+      stairs? and all night I’ve been sailing from him, wherever he did sink to.
+      Aye, aye, like many more thou told’st direful truth as touching thyself, O
+      Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good-bye, mast-head—keep
+      a good eye upon the whale, the while I’m gone. We’ll talk to-morrow, nay,
+      to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered through
+      the cloven blue air to the deck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop’s
+      stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the
+      mate,—who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck—and bade him
+      pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Starbuck!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sir?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “For the third time my soul’s ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing,
+      Starbuck!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Truth, sir: saddest truth.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the
+      flood;—and I feel now like a billow that’s all one crested comb,
+      Starbuck. I am old;—shake hands with me, man.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck’s tears the glue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!—see,
+      it’s a brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lower away!”—cried Ahab, tossing the mate’s arm from him. “Stand by
+      the crew!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The sharks! the sharks!” cried a voice from the low cabin-window there;
+      “O master, my master, come back!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the
+      boat leaped on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when
+      numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath the
+      hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they
+      dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their
+      bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in those
+      swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in the same
+      prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching regiments
+      in the east. But these were the first sharks that had been observed by the
+      Pequod since the White Whale had been first descried; and whether it was
+      that Ahab’s crew were all such tiger-yellow barbarians, and therefore
+      their flesh more musky to the senses of the sharks—a matter
+      sometimes well known to affect them,—however it was, they seemed to
+      follow that one boat without molesting the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Heart of wrought steel!” murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and
+      following with his eyes the receding boat—“canst thou yet ring
+      boldly to that sight?—lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and
+      followed by them, open-mouthed to the chase; and this the critical third
+      day?—For when three days flow together in one continuous intense
+      pursuit; be sure the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the
+      third the evening and the end of that thing—be that end what it may.
+      Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly
+      calm, yet expectant,—fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things
+      swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is
+      somehow grown dim. Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy!
+      I seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life
+      seem clearing; but clouds sweep between—Is my journey’s end coming?
+      My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,—beats
+      it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!—stave it off—move, move! speak
+      aloud!—Mast-head there! See ye my boy’s hand on the hill?—Crazed;—aloft
+      there!—keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:—mark well the
+      whale!—Ho! again!—drive off that hawk! see! he pecks—he tears
+      the vane”—pointing to the red flag flying at the
+      main-truck—“Ha! he soars away with it!—Where’s the old man
+      now? see’st thou that sight, oh Ahab!—shudder, shudder!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads—a
+      downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but intending
+      to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a little sideways
+      from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the profoundest silence,
+      as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered against the opposing bow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads drive
+      them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and no hearse
+      can be mine:—and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then
+      quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice,
+      swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a
+      subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with
+      trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but
+      obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it
+      hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back
+      into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an
+      instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes,
+      leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk
+      of the whale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Give way!” cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the
+      attack; but maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby
+      Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven.
+      The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead,
+      beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came
+      churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart;
+      spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates’ boats, and dashing
+      in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab’s almost
+      without a scar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the
+      whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he
+      shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and
+      round to the fish’s back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which,
+      during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines
+      around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment
+      frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The harpoon dropped from his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Befooled, befooled!”—drawing in a long lean breath—“Aye,
+      Parsee! I see thee again.—Aye, and thou goest before; and this, <i>this</i>
+      then is the hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last
+      letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship!
+      those boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to
+      me; if not, Ahab is enough to die—Down, men! the first thing that
+      but offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are
+      not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.—Where’s the
+      whale? gone down again?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the
+      corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter had
+      been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily
+      swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,—which thus far had
+      been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present her
+      headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and
+      now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third day,
+      to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly
+      seekest him!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly impelled to
+      leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was sliding by the
+      vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck’s face as he leaned
+      over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and follow him, not
+      too swiftly, at a judicious interval. Glancing upwards, he saw Tashtego,
+      Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads; while the
+      oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats which had but just been
+      hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing them. One after
+      the other, through the port-holes, as he sped, he also caught flying
+      glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves on deck among bundles of
+      new irons and lances. As he saw all this; as he heard the hammers in the
+      broken boats; far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart. But
+      he rallied. And now marking that the vane or flag was gone from the
+      main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego, who had just gained that perch, to
+      descend again for another flag, and a hammer and nails, and so nail it to
+      the mast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether fagged by the three days’ running chase, and the resistance to his
+      swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some latent
+      deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the White Whale’s way
+      now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly nearing him
+      once more; though indeed the whale’s last start had not been so long a one
+      as before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves the unpitying sharks
+      accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the boat; and so
+      continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became jagged and
+      crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost every dip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars. Pull on!
+      ’tis the better rest, the shark’s jaw than the yielding water.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “They will last long enough! pull on!—But who can tell”—he
+      muttered—“whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on
+      Ahab?—But pull on! Aye, all alive, now—we near him. The helm!
+      take the helm! let me pass,”—and so saying two of the oarsmen helped
+      him forward to the bows of the still flying boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with
+      the White Whale’s flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its advance—as
+      the whale sometimes will—and Ahab was fairly within the smoky
+      mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale’s spout, curled round his
+      great, Monadnock hump; he was even thus close to him; when, with body
+      arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted
+      his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale. As both
+      steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into a morass, Moby Dick
+      sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh flank against the bow,
+      and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that
+      had it not been for the elevated part of the gunwale to which he then
+      clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed into the sea. As it was,
+      three of the oarsmen—who foreknew not the precise instant of the
+      dart, and were therefore unprepared for its effects—these were flung
+      out; but so fell, that, in an instant two of them clutched the gunwale
+      again, and rising to its level on a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily
+      inboard again; the third man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat
+      and swimming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,
+      instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering sea.
+      But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with the line,
+      and hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their seats, and
+      tow the boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line felt that
+      double strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!—’tis whole again; oars! oars!
+      Burst in upon him!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled
+      round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution,
+      catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing in
+      it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it—it may be—a
+      larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing prow,
+      smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. “I grow blind; hands! stretch
+      out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is’t night?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The whale! The ship!” cried the cringing oarsmen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for ever
+      too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark! I see: the
+      ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not save my ship?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the
+      sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks
+      burst through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay
+      nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying hard
+      to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego’s mast-head hammer
+      remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrapping him as
+      with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own
+      forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the
+      bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon as
+      he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air,
+      now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a woman’s
+      fainting fit. Up helm, I say—ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is this the
+      end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities? Oh, Ahab,
+      Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again! He
+      turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on towards one, whose
+      duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help
+      Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale!
+      Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb’s own unwinking eye?
+      And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is all too soft; would
+      it were stuffed with brushwood! I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look
+      ye, sun, moon, and stars! I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever
+      spouted up his ghost. For all that, I would yet ring glasses with ye,
+      would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou grinning whale, but
+      there’ll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye not, O Ahab! For me, off
+      shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his drawers! A most mouldy and
+      over salted death, though;—cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask,
+      for one red cherry ere we die!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope my
+      poor mother’s drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will now
+      come to her, for the voyage is up.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From the ship’s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers,
+      bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands,
+      just as they had darted from their various employments; all their
+      enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely
+      vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading
+      semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance,
+      eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man
+      could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s
+      starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their
+      faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on
+      their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as
+      mountain torrents down a flume.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The ship! The hearse!—the second hearse!” cried Ahab from the boat;
+      “its wood could only be American!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel;
+      but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the
+      other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where, for a time, he
+      lay quiescent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer.
+      Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only
+      god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,—death-glorious
+      ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond
+      pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life!
+      Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from
+      all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole
+      foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I
+      roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple
+      with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my
+      last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!
+      and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still
+      chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! <i>Thus</i>, I give up the
+      spear!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting
+      velocity the line ran through the grooves;—ran foul. Ahab stooped to
+      clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck,
+      and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out
+      of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy
+      eye-splice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-empty tub,
+      knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned. “The
+      ship? Great God, where is the ship?” Soon they through dim, bewildering
+      mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana;
+      only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or
+      fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers
+      still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric
+      circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating
+      oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round
+      and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of
+      sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken
+      head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar
+      yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly
+      undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they
+      almost touched;—at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered
+      backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster
+      and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had
+      followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars,
+      pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced
+      to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood;
+      and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage
+      beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird
+      of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards,
+      and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his
+      ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a
+      living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white
+      surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great
+      shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_EPIL">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Epilogue
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      “AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE” Job.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one
+      did survive the wreck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the
+      Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman
+      assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men
+      were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating
+      on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the
+      halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly,
+      drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a
+      creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the
+      button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like
+      another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black
+      bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring,
+      and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin
+      life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side.
+      Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on
+      a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with
+      padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks.
+      On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It
+      was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her
+      missing children, only found another orphan.
+    </p>
+
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+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Domestic fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Courtship -- Fiction">
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+<body><header class="pg-boilerplate pgheader" id="pg-header" lang="en"><h2 id="pg-header-heading" title="">The Project Gutenberg eBook of <span lang="en" id="pg-title-no-subtitle">Pride and Prejudice</span></h2>
+    
+<div>This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a class="reference external" href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you are not located in the United States,
+you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
+before using this eBook.</div>
+
+<div class="container" id="pg-machine-header"><p><strong>Title</strong>: Pride and Prejudice</p>
+<div id="pg-header-authlist">
+<p><strong>Author</strong>: Jane Austen</p>
+</div>
+<br>
+        
+<p><strong>Release date</strong>: June 1, 1998 [eBook #1342]<br>
+                Most recently updated: September 29, 2026</p>
+
+<p><strong>Language</strong>: English</p>
+
+<p><strong>Other information and formats</strong>: <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342">www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342</a></p>
+
+<p><strong>Credits</strong>: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)</p>
+
+</div><div id="pg-start-separator">
+<span>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRIDE AND PREJUDICE ***</span>
+</div></header><div></div>
+
+<hr class="full">
+
+<div class="blk">
+<p class="toc">
+<a href="#PREFACE" class="pginternal">PREFACE.</a><br>
+<a href="#LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS" class="pginternal">List of Illustrations.</a><br>
+<a href="#Chapter_I" class="pginternal">Chapter: I., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_II" class="pginternal">II., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_III" class="pginternal">III., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IV" class="pginternal">IV., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_V" class="pginternal">V., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VI" class="pginternal">VI., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VII" class="pginternal">VII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VIII" class="pginternal">VIII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IX" class="pginternal">IX., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_X" class="pginternal">X., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XI" class="pginternal">XI., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XII" class="pginternal">XII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIII" class="pginternal">XIII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIV" class="pginternal">XIV., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XV" class="pginternal">XV., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVI" class="pginternal">XVI., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVII" class="pginternal">XVII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII" class="pginternal">XVIII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIX" class="pginternal">XIX., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XX" class="pginternal">XX., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXI" class="pginternal">XXI., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXII" class="pginternal">XXII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII" class="pginternal">XXIII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV" class="pginternal">XXIV., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXV" class="pginternal">XXV., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI" class="pginternal">XXVI., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII" class="pginternal">XXVII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII" class="pginternal">XXVIII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXIX" class="pginternal">XXIX., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXX" class="pginternal">XXX., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXXI" class="pginternal">XXXI., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXXII" class="pginternal">XXXII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIII" class="pginternal">XXXIII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIV" class="pginternal">XXXIV., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXXV" class="pginternal">XXXV., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVI" class="pginternal">XXXVI., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVII" class="pginternal">XXXVII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVIII" class="pginternal">XXXVIII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIX" class="pginternal">XXXIX., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XL" class="pginternal">XL., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XLI" class="pginternal">XLI., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XLII" class="pginternal">XLII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XLIII" class="pginternal">XLIII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XLIV" class="pginternal">XLIV., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XLV" class="pginternal">XLV., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XLVI" class="pginternal"> XLVI., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XLVII" class="pginternal">XLVII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XLVIII" class="pginternal">XLVIII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XLIX" class="pginternal">XLIX., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_L" class="pginternal">L., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_LI" class="pginternal">LI., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_LII" class="pginternal">LII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_LIII" class="pginternal">LIII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_LIV" class="pginternal">LIV., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_LV" class="pginternal">LV., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_LVI" class="pginternal">LVI., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_LVII" class="pginternal">LVII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_LVIII" class="pginternal">LVIII., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_LIX" class="pginternal">LIX., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_LX" class="pginternal">LX., </a>
+<a href="#CHAPTER_LXI" class="pginternal">LXI.</a>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a href="images/cover.jpg" id="id-7969235646995505742">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/cover.jpg" id="img_images_cover.jpg"></a>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img alt="[Colophon: GEORGE ALLEN PUBLISHER  156 CHARING CROSS ROAD LONDON]" src="images/colophon.png" width="200" id="img_images_colophon.png">
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_iv">{iv}</a></span>
+<img alt="Reading Jane’s Letters.      Chap 34." height="600" src="images/i_003.jpg" id="img_images_i_003.jpg">
+</div>
+
+<div class="blk"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_v">{v}</a></span>
+<h1><img alt="" height="600" src="images/front.png" id="img_images_front.png">
+<br><br>
+<i>PRIDE.<br>
+and<br>
+PREJUDICE</i></h1>
+
+<p class="cbig250"><i>
+by<br>
+Jane Austen,<br>
+<br><small>
+with a Preface by</small><br>
+George Saintsbury<br>
+<small>and<br>
+Illustrations by</small><br>
+Hugh Thomson<br></i>
+</p>
+
+<table style="font-style:italic;">
+<tbody><tr><td class="c">Ruskin<br>
+House.</td>
+<td>
+<img alt="      " height="300" src="images/peacock-1894.png" style="vertical-align:top;" id="img_images_peacock-1894.png">
+</td>
+<td class="c">
+156. Charing<br>
+Cross Road.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="c" colspan="3">
+London<br>
+George Allen.</td></tr>
+</tbody></table>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c"><small>
+CHISWICK PRESS:—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.<br>
+TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.<br></small>
+</p>
+
+<div class="blk"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_vii">{vii}</a></span>
+<p class="c">
+
+<img alt="To J. Comyns Carr in acknowledgment of all I owe to his friendship and advice, these illustrations are gratefully inscribed  Hugh Thomson" src="images/i_008.png" width="450" id="img_images_i_008.png"></p>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="PREFACE"></a><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_ix">{ix}</a></span>
+<img alt="PREFACE." src="images/i_010.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_010.jpg"></h2>
+
+<p><i><span class="smcap">Walt Whitman</span> has somewhere a fine and just distinction between “loving
+by allowance” and “loving with personal love.” This distinction applies
+to books as well as to men and women; and in the case of the not very
+numerous authors who are the objects of the personal affection, it
+brings a curious consequence with it. There is much more difference as
+to their best work than in the case of those others who are loved “by
+allowance” by convention, and because it is felt to be the right and
+proper thing to love them. And in the sect—fairly large and yet
+unusually choice—of Austenians or Janites, there would probably be
+found partisans of the claim to primacy of almost every one of the
+novels. To some the delightful freshness and humour of</i> Northanger
+Abbey, <i>its completeness, finish, and</i> entrain, <i>obscure the undoubted
+critical facts that its scale is small, and its scheme, after all, that
+of burlesque or parody, a kind in which the first rank is reached with
+difficulty.</i> Persuasion, <i>relatively faint in tone, and not enthralling
+in interest, has devotees who exalt above all the others its exquisite
+delicacy and keeping. The catastrophe of</i> Mansfield Park <i>is admittedly
+theatrical, the hero and heroine are insipid, and the author has almost<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_x">{x}</a></span>
+wickedly destroyed all romantic interest by expressly admitting that
+Edmund only took Fanny because Mary shocked him, and that Fanny might
+very likely have taken Crawford if he had been a little more assiduous;
+yet the matchless rehearsal-scenes and the characters of Mrs. Norris and
+others have secured, I believe, a considerable party for it.</i> Sense and
+Sensibility <i>has perhaps the fewest out-and-out admirers; but it does
+not want them.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>I suppose, however, that the majority of at least competent votes
+would, all things considered, be divided between</i> Emma <i>and the present
+book; and perhaps the vulgar verdict (if indeed a fondness for Miss
+Austen be not of itself a patent of exemption from any possible charge
+of vulgarity) would go for</i> Emma. <i>It is the larger, the more varied, the
+more popular; the author had by the time of its composition seen rather
+more of the world, and had improved her general, though not her most
+peculiar and characteristic dialogue; such figures as Miss Bates, as the
+Eltons, cannot but unite the suffrages of everybody. On the other hand,
+I, for my part, declare for</i> Pride and Prejudice <i>unhesitatingly. It
+seems to me the most perfect, the most characteristic, the most
+eminently quintessential of its author’s works; and for this contention
+in such narrow space as is permitted to me, I propose here to show
+cause.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>In the first place, the book (it may be barely necessary to remind the
+reader) was in its first shape written very early, somewhere about 1796,
+when Miss Austen was barely twenty-one; though it was revised and
+finished at Chawton some fifteen years later, and was not published till
+1813, only four years before her death. I do not know whether, in<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_xi">{xi}</a></span> this
+combination of the fresh and vigorous projection of youth, and the
+critical revision of middle life, there may be traced the distinct
+superiority in point of construction, which, as it seems to me, it
+possesses over all the others. The plot, though not elaborate, is almost
+regular enough for Fielding; hardly a character, hardly an incident
+could be retrenched without loss to the story. The elopement of Lydia
+and Wickham is not, like that of Crawford and Mrs. Rushworth, a</i> coup de
+théâtre; <i>it connects itself in the strictest way with the course of the
+story earlier, and brings about the denouement with complete propriety.
+All the minor passages—the loves of Jane and Bingley, the advent of Mr.
+Collins, the visit to Hunsford, the Derbyshire tour—fit in after the
+same unostentatious, but masterly fashion. There is no attempt at the
+hide-and-seek, in-and-out business, which in the transactions between
+Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax contributes no doubt a good deal to the
+intrigue of</i> Emma, <i>but contributes it in a fashion which I do not think
+the best feature of that otherwise admirable book. Although Miss Austen
+always liked something of the misunderstanding kind, which afforded her
+opportunities for the display of the peculiar and incomparable talent to
+be noticed presently, she has been satisfied here with the perfectly
+natural occasions provided by the false account of Darcy’s conduct given
+by Wickham, and by the awkwardness (arising with equal naturalness) from
+the gradual transformation of Elizabeth’s own feelings from positive
+aversion to actual love. I do not know whether the all-grasping hand of
+the playwright has ever been laid upon</i> Pride and Prejudice; <i>and I dare
+say that,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_xii">{xii}</a></span> if it were, the situations would prove not startling or
+garish enough for the footlights, the character-scheme too subtle and
+delicate for pit and gallery. But if the attempt were made, it would
+certainly not be hampered by any of those loosenesses of construction,
+which, sometimes disguised by the conveniences of which the novelist can
+avail himself, appear at once on the stage.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>I think, however, though the thought will doubtless seem heretical to
+more than one school of critics, that construction is not the highest
+merit, the choicest gift, of the novelist. It sets off his other gifts
+and graces most advantageously to the critical eye; and the want of it
+will sometimes mar those graces—appreciably, though not quite
+consciously—to eyes by no means ultra-critical. But a very badly-built
+novel which excelled in pathetic or humorous character, or which
+displayed consummate command of dialogue—perhaps the rarest of all
+faculties—would be an infinitely better thing than a faultless plot
+acted and told by puppets with pebbles in their mouths. And despite the
+ability which Miss Austen has shown in working out the story, I for one
+should put</i> Pride and Prejudice <i>far lower if it did not contain what
+seem to me the very masterpieces of Miss Austen’s humour and of her
+faculty of character-creation—masterpieces who may indeed admit John
+Thorpe, the Eltons, Mrs. Norris, and one or two others to their company,
+but who, in one instance certainly, and perhaps in others, are still
+superior to them.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>The characteristics of Miss Austen’s humour are so subtle and delicate
+that they are, perhaps, at all times easier to apprehend than to
+express, and at any particular<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_xiii">{xiii}</a></span> time likely to be differently
+apprehended by different persons. To me this humour seems to possess a
+greater affinity, on the whole, to that of Addison than to any other of
+the numerous species of this great British genus. The differences of
+scheme, of time, of subject, of literary convention, are, of course,
+obvious enough; the difference of sex does not, perhaps, count for much,
+for there was a distinctly feminine element in “Mr. Spectator,” and in
+Jane Austen’s genius there was, though nothing mannish, much that was
+masculine. But the likeness of quality consists in a great number of
+common subdivisions of quality—demureness, extreme minuteness of touch,
+avoidance of loud tones and glaring effects. Also there is in both a
+certain not inhuman or unamiable cruelty. It is the custom with those
+who judge grossly to contrast the good nature of Addison with the
+savagery of Swift, the mildness of Miss Austen with the boisterousness
+of Fielding and Smollett, even with the ferocious practical jokes that
+her immediate predecessor, Miss Burney, allowed without very much
+protest. Yet, both in Mr. Addison and in Miss Austen there is, though a
+restrained and well-mannered, an insatiable and ruthless delight in
+roasting and cutting up a fool. A man in the early eighteenth century,
+of course, could push this taste further than a lady in the early
+nineteenth; and no doubt Miss Austen’s principles, as well as her heart,
+would have shrunk from such things as the letter from the unfortunate
+husband in the</i> Spectator, <i>who describes, with all the gusto and all the
+innocence in the world, how his wife and his friend induce him to play
+at blind-man’s-buff. But another</i> Spectator <i>letter—that of the damsel
+of fourteen who<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_xiv">{xiv}</a></span> wishes to marry Mr. Shapely, and assures her selected
+Mentor that “he admires your</i> Spectators <i>mightily”—might have been
+written by a rather more ladylike and intelligent Lydia Bennet in the
+days of Lydia’s great-grandmother; while, on the other hand, some (I
+think unreasonably) have found “cynicism” in touches of Miss Austen’s
+own, such as her satire of Mrs. Musgrove’s self-deceiving regrets over
+her son. But this word “cynical” is one of the most misused in the
+English language, especially when, by a glaring and gratuitous
+falsification of its original sense, it is applied, not to rough and
+snarling invective, but to gentle and oblique satire. If cynicism means
+the perception of “the other side,” the sense of “the accepted hells
+beneath,” the consciousness that motives are nearly always mixed, and
+that to seem is not identical with to be—if this be cynicism, then
+every man and woman who is not a fool, who does not care to live in a
+fool’s paradise, who has knowledge of nature and the world and life, is
+a cynic. And in that sense Miss Austen certainly was one. She may even
+have been one in the further sense that, like her own Mr. Bennet, she
+took an epicurean delight in dissecting, in displaying, in setting at
+work her fools and her mean persons. I think she did take this delight,
+and I do not think at all the worse of her for it as a woman, while she
+was immensely the better for it as an artist.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>In respect of her art generally, Mr. Goldwin Smith has truly observed
+that “metaphor has been exhausted in depicting the perfection of it,
+combined with the narrowness of her field;” and he has justly added that
+we need not go beyond her own comparison to the art of a miniature<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_xv">{xv}</a></span>
+painter. To make this latter observation quite exact we must not use the
+term miniature in its restricted sense, and must think rather of Memling
+at one end of the history of painting and Meissonier at the other, than
+of Cosway or any of his kind. And I am not so certain that I should
+myself use the word “narrow” in connection with her. If her world is a
+microcosm, the cosmic quality of it is at least as eminent as the
+littleness. She does not touch what she did not feel herself called to
+paint; I am not so sure that she could not have painted what she did not
+feel herself called to touch. It is at least remarkable that in two very
+short periods of writing—one of about three years, and another of not
+much more than five—she executed six capital works, and has not left a
+single failure. It is possible that the romantic paste in her
+composition was defective: we must always remember that hardly anybody
+born in her decade—that of the eighteenth-century
+seventies—independently exhibited the full romantic quality. Even Scott
+required hill and mountain and ballad, even Coleridge metaphysics and
+German to enable them to chip the classical shell. Miss Austen was an
+English girl, brought up in a country retirement, at the time when
+ladies went back into the house if there was a white frost which might
+pierce their kid shoes, when a sudden cold was the subject of the
+gravest fears, when their studies, their ways, their conduct were
+subject to all those fantastic limits and restrictions against which
+Mary Wollstonecraft protested with better general sense than particular
+taste or judgment. Miss Austen, too, drew back when the white frost
+touched her shoes; but I think she would have made a pretty good journey
+even in a black one.</i><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_xvi">{xvi}</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>For if her knowledge was not very extended, she knew two things which
+only genius knows. The one was humanity, and the other was art. On the
+first head she could not make a mistake; her men, though limited, are
+true, and her women are, in the old sense, “absolute.” As to art, if she
+has never tried idealism, her realism is real to a degree which makes
+the false realism of our own day look merely dead-alive. Take almost any
+Frenchman, except the late M. de Maupassant, and watch him laboriously
+piling up strokes in the hope of giving a complete impression. You get
+none; you are lucky if, discarding two-thirds of what he gives, you can
+shape a real impression out of the rest. But with Miss Austen the
+myriad, trivial, unforced strokes build up the picture like magic.
+Nothing is false; nothing is superfluous. When (to take the present book
+only) Mr. Collins changed his mind from Jane to Elizabeth “while Mrs.
+Bennet was stirring the fire” (and we know</i> how <i>Mrs. Bennet would have
+stirred the fire), when Mr. Darcy “brought his coffee-cup back</i>
+himself,” <i>the touch in each case is like that of Swift—“taller by the
+breadth of my nail”—which impressed the half-reluctant Thackeray with
+just and outspoken admiration. Indeed, fantastic as it may seem, I
+should put Miss Austen as near to Swift in some ways, as I have put her
+to Addison in others.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>This Swiftian quality appears in the present novel as it appears
+nowhere else in the character of the immortal, the ineffable Mr.
+Collins. Mr. Collins is really</i> great; <i>far greater than anything Addison
+ever did, almost great enough for Fielding or for Swift himself. It has
+been said that no one ever was like him. But in the first<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_xvii">{xvii}</a></span> place,</i> he
+<i>was like him; he is there—alive, imperishable, more real than hundreds
+of prime ministers and archbishops, of “metals, semi-metals, and
+distinguished philosophers.” In the second place, it is rash, I think,
+to conclude that an actual Mr. Collins was impossible or non-existent at
+the end of the eighteenth century. It is very interesting that we
+possess, in this same gallery, what may be called a spoiled first
+draught, or an unsuccessful study of him, in John Dashwood. The
+formality, the under-breeding, the meanness, are there; but the portrait
+is only half alive, and is felt to be even a little unnatural. Mr.
+Collins is perfectly natural, and perfectly alive. In fact, for all the
+“miniature,” there is something gigantic in the way in which a certain
+side, and more than one, of humanity, and especially eighteenth-century
+humanity, its Philistinism, its well-meaning but hide-bound morality,
+its formal pettiness, its grovelling respect for rank, its materialism,
+its selfishness, receives exhibition. I will not admit that one speech
+or one action of this inestimable man is incapable of being reconciled
+with reality, and I should not wonder if many of these words and actions
+are historically true.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>But the greatness of Mr. Collins could not have been so satisfactorily
+exhibited if his creatress had not adjusted so artfully to him the
+figures of Mr. Bennet and of Lady Catherine de Bourgh. The latter, like
+Mr. Collins himself, has been charged with exaggeration. There is,
+perhaps, a very faint shade of colour for the charge; but it seems to me
+very faint indeed. Even now I do not think that it would be impossible
+to find persons, especially female persons, not necessarily of noble
+birth, as overbearing, as<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_xviii">{xviii}</a></span> self-centred, as neglectful of good manners,
+as Lady Catherine. A hundred years ago, an earl’s daughter, the Lady
+Powerful (if not exactly Bountiful) of an out-of-the-way country parish,
+rich, long out of marital authority, and so forth, had opportunities of
+developing these agreeable characteristics which seldom present
+themselves now. As for Mr. Bennet, Miss Austen, and Mr. Darcy, and even
+Miss Elizabeth herself, were, I am inclined to think, rather hard on him
+for the “impropriety” of his conduct. His wife was evidently, and must
+always have been, a quite irreclaimable fool; and unless he had shot her
+or himself there was no way out of it for a man of sense and spirit but
+the ironic. From no other point of view is he open to any reproach,
+except for an excusable and not unnatural helplessness at the crisis of
+the elopement, and his utterances are the most acutely delightful in the
+consciously humorous kind—in the kind that we laugh with, not at—that
+even Miss Austen has put into the mouth of any of her characters. It is
+difficult to know whether he is most agreeable when talking to his wife,
+or when putting Mr. Collins through his paces; but the general sense of
+the world has probably been right in preferring to the first rank his
+consolation to the former when she maunders over the entail, “My dear,
+do not give way to such gloomy thoughts. Let us hope for better things.
+Let us flatter ourselves that</i> I <i>may be the survivor;” and his inquiry
+to his colossal cousin as to the compliments which Mr. Collins has just
+related as made by himself to Lady Catherine, “May I ask whether these
+pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_xix">{xix}</a></span> or are the
+result of previous study?” These are the things which give Miss Austen’s
+readers the pleasant shocks, the delightful thrills, which are felt by
+the readers of Swift, of Fielding, and we may here add, of Thackeray, as
+they are felt by the readers of no other English author of fiction
+outside of these four.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>The goodness of the minor characters in</i> Pride and Prejudice <i>has been
+already alluded to, and it makes a detailed dwelling on their beauties
+difficult in any space, and impossible in this. Mrs. Bennet we have
+glanced at, and it is not easy to say whether she is more exquisitely
+amusing or more horribly true. Much the same may be said of Kitty and
+Lydia; but it is not every author, even of genius, who would have
+differentiated with such unerring skill the effects of folly and
+vulgarity of intellect and disposition working upon the common
+weaknesses of woman at such different ages. With Mary, Miss Austen has
+taken rather less pains, though she has been even more unkind to her;
+not merely in the text, but, as we learn from those interesting
+traditional appendices which Mr. Austen Leigh has given us, in dooming
+her privately to marry “one of Mr. Philips’s clerks.” The habits of
+first copying and then retailing moral sentiments, of playing and
+singing too long in public, are, no doubt, grievous and criminal; but
+perhaps poor Mary was rather the scapegoat of the sins of blue stockings
+in that Fordyce-belectured generation. It is at any rate difficult not
+to extend to her a share of the respect and affection (affection and
+respect of a peculiar kind; doubtless), with which one regards Mr.
+Collins, when she draws the moral of Lydia’s fall. I<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_xx">{xx}</a></span> sometimes wish
+that the exigencies of the story had permitted Miss Austen to unite
+these personages, and thus at once achieve a notable mating and soothe
+poor Mrs. Bennet’s anguish over the entail.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>The Bingleys and the Gardiners and the Lucases, Miss Darcy and Miss de
+Bourgh, Jane, Wickham, and the rest, must pass without special comment,
+further than the remark that Charlotte Lucas (her egregious papa, though
+delightful, is just a little on the thither side of the line between
+comedy and farce) is a wonderfully clever study in drab of one kind, and
+that Wickham (though something of Miss Austen’s hesitation of touch in
+dealing with young men appears) is a not much less notable sketch in
+drab of another. Only genius could have made Charlotte what she is, yet
+not disagreeable; Wickham what he is, without investing him either with
+a cheap Don Juanish attractiveness or a disgusting rascality. But the
+hero and the heroine are not tints to be dismissed.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Darcy has always seemed to me by far the best and most interesting of
+Miss Austen’s heroes; the only possible competitor being Henry Tilney,
+whose part is so slight and simple that it hardly enters into
+comparison. It has sometimes, I believe, been urged that his pride is
+unnatural at first in its expression and later in its yielding, while
+his falling in love at all is not extremely probable. Here again I
+cannot go with the objectors. Darcy’s own account of the way in which
+his pride had been pampered, is perfectly rational and sufficient; and
+nothing could be, psychologically speaking, a</i> causa verior <i>for its
+sudden restoration to healthy conditions than the shock of Elizabeth’s
+scornful refusal acting on a nature</i><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_xxi">{xxi}</a></span> ex hypothesi <i>generous. Nothing in
+even our author is finer and more delicately touched than the change of
+his demeanour at the sudden meeting in the grounds of Pemberley. Had he
+been a bad prig or a bad coxcomb, he might have been still smarting
+under his rejection, or suspicious that the girl had come
+husband-hunting. His being neither is exactly consistent with the
+probable feelings of a man spoilt in the common sense, but not really
+injured in disposition, and thoroughly in love. As for his being in
+love, Elizabeth has given as just an exposition of the causes of that
+phenomenon as Darcy has of the conditions of his unregenerate state,
+only she has of course not counted in what was due to her own personal
+charm.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>The secret of that charm many men and not a few women, from Miss Austen
+herself downwards, have felt, and like most charms it is a thing rather
+to be felt than to be explained. Elizabeth of course belongs to the</i>
+allegro <i>or</i> allegra <i>division of the army of Venus. Miss Austen was
+always provokingly chary of description in regard to her beauties; and
+except the fine eyes, and a hint or two that she had at any rate
+sometimes a bright complexion, and was not very tall, we hear nothing
+about her looks. But her chief difference from other heroines of the
+lively type seems to lie first in her being distinctly clever—almost
+strong-minded, in the better sense of that objectionable word—and
+secondly in her being entirely destitute of ill-nature for all her
+propensity to tease and the sharpness of her tongue. Elizabeth can give
+at least as good as she gets when she is attacked; but she never
+“scratches,” and she never attacks first. Some of the merest
+obsoletenesses of phrase and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_xxii">{xxii}</a></span> manner give one or two of her early
+speeches a slight pertness, but that is nothing, and when she comes to
+serious business, as in the great proposal scene with Darcy (which is,
+as it should be, the climax of the interest of the book), and in the
+final ladies’ battle with Lady Catherine, she is unexceptionable. Then
+too she is a perfectly natural girl. She does not disguise from herself
+or anybody that she resents Darcy’s first ill-mannered personality with
+as personal a feeling. (By the way, the reproach that the ill-manners of
+this speech are overdone is certainly unjust; for things of the same
+kind, expressed no doubt less stiltedly but more coarsely, might have
+been heard in more than one ball-room during this very year from persons
+who ought to have been no worse bred than Darcy.) And she lets the
+injury done to Jane and the contempt shown to the rest of her family
+aggravate this resentment in the healthiest way in the world.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Still, all this does not explain her charm, which, taking beauty as a
+common form of all heroines, may perhaps consist in the addition to her
+playfulness, her wit, her affectionate and natural disposition, of a
+certain fearlessness very uncommon in heroines of her type and age.
+Nearly all of them would have been in speechless awe of the magnificent
+Darcy; nearly all of them would have palpitated and fluttered at the
+idea of proposals, even naughty ones, from the fascinating Wickham.
+Elizabeth, with nothing offensive, nothing</i> viraginous, <i>nothing of the
+“New Woman” about her, has by nature what the best modern (not “new”)
+women have by education and experience, a perfect freedom from the idea
+that all men may bully her if they choose, and that most will<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_xxiii">{xxiii}</a></span> away with
+her if they can. Though not in the least “impudent and mannish grown,”
+she has no mere sensibility, no nasty niceness about her. The form of
+passion common and likely to seem natural in Miss Austen’s day was so
+invariably connected with the display of one or the other, or both of
+these qualities, that she has not made Elizabeth outwardly passionate.
+But I, at least, have not the slightest doubt that she would have
+married Darcy just as willingly without Pemberley as with it, and
+anybody who can read between lines will not find the lovers’
+conversations in the final chapters so frigid as they might have looked
+to the Della Cruscans of their own day, and perhaps do look to the Della
+Cruscans of this.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>And, after all, what is the good of seeking for the reason of
+charm?—it is there. There were better sense in the sad mechanic
+exercise of determining the reason of its absence where it is not. In
+the novels of the last hundred years there are vast numbers of young
+ladies with whom it might be a pleasure to fall in love; there are at
+least five with whom, as it seems to me, no man of taste and spirit can
+help doing so. Their names are, in chronological order, Elizabeth
+Bennet, Diana Vernon, Argemone Lavington, Beatrix Esmond, and Barbara
+Grant. I should have been most in love with Beatrix and Argemone; I
+should, I think, for mere occasional companionship, have preferred Diana
+and Barbara. But to live with and to marry, I do not know that any one
+of the four can come into competition with Elizabeth.</i></p>
+
+<p class="rt">
+<i><span class="smcap">George Saintsbury.</span></i><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_xxiv">{xxiv}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS"></a><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_xxv">{xxv}</a></span>
+<img alt="List of Illustrations." src="images/i_026.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_026.jpg"></h2>
+
+<table>
+<tbody><tr><td> </td><td><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Frontispiece</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_iv" class="pginternal">iv</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Title-page</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_v" class="pginternal">v</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dedication</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_vii" class="pginternal">vii</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Preface</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_ix" class="pginternal">ix</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to List of Illustrations</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_xxv" class="pginternal">xxv</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter I. </td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_1" class="pginternal">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“He came down to see the place”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_2" class="pginternal">2</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mr. and Mrs. Bennet</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_5" class="pginternal">5</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“I hope Mr. Bingley will like it”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_6" class="pginternal">6</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“I’m the tallest”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_9" class="pginternal">9</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“He rode a black horse”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_10" class="pginternal">10</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“When the party entered”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_12" class="pginternal">12</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“She is tolerable”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_15" class="pginternal">15</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter IV.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_18" class="pginternal">18</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter V.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_22" class="pginternal">22</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Without once opening his lips”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_24" class="pginternal">24</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tailpiece to Chapter V.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_26" class="pginternal">26</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter VI.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_27" class="pginternal">27</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“The entreaties of several”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_31" class="pginternal">31</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“A note for Miss Bennet”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_36" class="pginternal">36</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Cheerful prognostics”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_40" class="pginternal">40</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“The apothecary came”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_43" class="pginternal">43</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Covering a screen”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_45" class="pginternal">45</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Mrs. Bennet and her two youngest girls”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_53" class="pginternal">53</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter X.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_60" class="pginternal">60</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“No, no; stay where you are”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_67" class="pginternal">67</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Piling up the fire”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_69" class="pginternal">69</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XII.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_75" class="pginternal">75</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XIII.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_78" class="pginternal">78</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XIV.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_84" class="pginternal">84</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Protested that he never read novels”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_87" class="pginternal">87</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XV.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_89" class="pginternal">89</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XVI.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_95" class="pginternal">95</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“The officers of the ——shire”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_97" class="pginternal">97</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Delighted to see their dear friend again”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_108" class="pginternal">108</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XVIII.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_113" class="pginternal">113</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Such very superior dancing is not often seen”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_118" class="pginternal">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“To assure you in the most animated language”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_132" class="pginternal">132</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XX.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_139" class="pginternal">139</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“They entered the breakfast-room”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_143" class="pginternal">143</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XXI.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_146" class="pginternal">146</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Walked back with them”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_148" class="pginternal">148</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XXII.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_154" class="pginternal">154</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“So much love and eloquence”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_156" class="pginternal">156</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Protested he must be entirely mistaken”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_161" class="pginternal">161</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Whenever she spoke in a low voice”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_166" class="pginternal">166</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XXIV.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_168" class="pginternal">168</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XXV.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_175" class="pginternal">175</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Offended two or three young ladies”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_177" class="pginternal">177</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Will you come and see me?”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_181" class="pginternal">181</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“On the stairs”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_189" class="pginternal">189</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“At the door”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_194" class="pginternal">194</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“In conversation with the ladies”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_198" class="pginternal">198</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Lady Catherine,” said she, “you have given me a treasure”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_200" class="pginternal">200</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XXX.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_209" class="pginternal">209</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“He never failed to inform them”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_211" class="pginternal">211</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“The gentlemen accompanied him”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_213" class="pginternal">213</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XXXI.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_215" class="pginternal">215</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XXXII.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_221" class="pginternal">221</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Accompanied by their aunt”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_225" class="pginternal">225</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“On looking up”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_228" class="pginternal">228</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XXXIV.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_235" class="pginternal">235</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Hearing herself called”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_243" class="pginternal">243</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XXXVI.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_253" class="pginternal">253</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Meeting accidentally in town”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_256" class="pginternal">256</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“His parting obeisance”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_261" class="pginternal">261</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Dawson”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_263" class="pginternal">263</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“The elevation of his feelings”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_267" class="pginternal">267</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“They had forgotten to leave any message”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_270" class="pginternal">270</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“How nicely we are crammed in!”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_272" class="pginternal">272</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XL.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_278" class="pginternal">278</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“I am determined never to speak of it again”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_283" class="pginternal">283</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“When Colonel Miller’s regiment went away”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_285" class="pginternal">285</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Tenderly flirting”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_290" class="pginternal">290</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The arrival of the Gardiners</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_294" class="pginternal">294</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Conjecturing as to the date”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_301" class="pginternal">301</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XLIV.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_318" class="pginternal">318</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“To make herself agreeable to all”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_321" class="pginternal">321</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Engaged by the river”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_327" class="pginternal">327</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XLVI.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_334" class="pginternal">334</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“I have not an instant to lose”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_339" class="pginternal">339</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“The first pleasing earnest of their welcome”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_345" class="pginternal">345</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Post</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_359" class="pginternal">359</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“To whom I have related the affair”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_363" class="pginternal">363</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter XLIX.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_368" class="pginternal">368</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“But perhaps you would like to read it”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_370" class="pginternal">370</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“The spiteful old ladies”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_377" class="pginternal">377</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“With an affectionate smile”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_385" class="pginternal">385</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“I am sure she did not listen”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_393" class="pginternal">393</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Mr. Darcy with him”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_404" class="pginternal">404</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Jane happened to look round”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_415" class="pginternal">415</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Mrs. Long and her nieces”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_420" class="pginternal">420</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Lizzy, my dear, I want to speak to you”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_422" class="pginternal">422</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter LVI.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_431" class="pginternal">431</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“After a short survey”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_434" class="pginternal">434</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“But now it comes out”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_442" class="pginternal">442</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“The efforts of his aunt”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_448" class="pginternal">448</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“Unable to utter a syllable”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_457" class="pginternal">457</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>“The obsequious civility”</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_466" class="pginternal">466</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heading to Chapter LXI.</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_472" class="pginternal">472</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The End</td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_476" class="pginternal">476</a></td></tr>
+</tbody></table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_1">{1}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="Chapter_I"></a>
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_030.jpg" id="img_images_i_030.jpg">
+<br><br>
+Chapter I.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>T is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession
+of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.</p>
+
+<p>However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his
+first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds
+of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful
+property of some one or other of their daughters.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that
+Netherfield Park is let at last?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_2">{2}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.</p>
+
+<p>“But it is,” returned she; “for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she
+told me all about it.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bennet made no answer.</p>
+
+<p>“Do not you want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife, impatiently.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>You</i> want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.”</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption0">
+<img alt="" src="images/i_031.jpg" width="550" id="img_images_i_031.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption0">
+
+<p>
+“He came down to see the place”<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>This was invitation enough.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken
+by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came
+down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much
+delighted with it that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is
+to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be
+in the house by the end of next week.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_3">{3}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“What is his name?”</p>
+
+<p>“Bingley.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is he married or single?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or
+five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!”</p>
+
+<p>“How so? how can it affect them?”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Mr. Bennet,” replied his wife, “how can you be so tiresome? You
+must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is that his design in settling here?”</p>
+
+<p>“Design? Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he
+<i>may</i> fall in love with one of them, and therefore you must visit him as
+soon as he comes.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see no occasion for that. You and the girls may go—or you may send
+them by themselves, which perhaps will be still better; for as you are
+as handsome as any of them, Mr. Bingley might like you the best of the
+party.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, you flatter me. I certainly <i>have</i> had my share of beauty, but
+I do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now. When a woman has five
+grown-up daughters, she ought to give over thinking of her own beauty.”</p>
+
+<p>“In such cases, a woman has not often much beauty to think of.”</p>
+
+<p>“But, my dear, you must indeed go and see Mr. Bingley when he comes into
+the neighbourhood.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is more than I engage for, I assure you.”</p>
+
+<p>“But consider your daughters. Only think what an establishment it would
+be for one of them. Sir William and Lady Lucas are determined to go,
+merely on that account; for in general, you know, they visit no new<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_4">{4}</a></span>
+comers. Indeed you must go, for it will be impossible for <i>us</i> to visit
+him, if you do not.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are over scrupulous, surely. I dare say Mr. Bingley will be very
+glad to see you; and I will send a few lines by you to assure him of my
+hearty consent to his marrying whichever he chooses of the girls—though
+I must throw in a good word for my little Lizzy.”</p>
+
+<p>“I desire you will do no such thing. Lizzy is not a bit better than the
+others: and I am sure she is not half so handsome as Jane, nor half so
+good-humoured as Lydia. But you are always giving <i>her</i> the preference.”</p>
+
+<p>“They have none of them much to recommend them,” replied he: “they are
+all silly and ignorant like other girls; but Lizzy has something more of
+quickness than her sisters.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take
+delight in vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves.”</p>
+
+<p>“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They
+are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration
+these twenty years at least.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, you do not know what I suffer.”</p>
+
+<p>“But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of four
+thousand a year come into the neighbourhood.”</p>
+
+<p>“It will be no use to us, if twenty such should come, since you will not
+visit them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Depend upon it, my dear, that when there are twenty, I will visit them
+all.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour,
+reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had
+been insufficient to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_5">{5}</a></span> make his wife understand his character. <i>Her</i> mind
+was less difficult to develope. She was a woman of mean understanding,
+little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she
+fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her
+daughters married: its solace was visiting and news.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 444px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption1">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_034.jpg" width="444" id="img_images_i_034.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption1"><p>M<sup>r.</sup> &amp; M<sup>rs.</sup> Bennet</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_6">{6}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_II"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_035_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_035_a.jpg">
+<span class="caption">
+I hope Mr. Bingley will like it.
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER II.
+</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="M" src="images/i_035_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_035_b.png"></span>R. BENNET was among the earliest of those who waited on Mr. Bingley. He
+had always intended to visit him, though to the last always assuring his
+wife that he should not go; and till the evening after the visit was
+paid she had no knowledge of it. It was then disclosed in the following
+manner. Observing his second daughter employed in trimming a hat, he
+suddenly addressed her with,—</p>
+
+<p>“I hope Mr. Bingley will like it, Lizzy.”</p>
+
+<p>“We are not in a way to know <i>what</i> Mr. Bingley likes,” said her mother,
+resentfully, “since we are not to visit.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_7">{7}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“But you forget, mamma,” said Elizabeth, “that we shall meet him at the
+assemblies, and that Mrs. Long has promised to introduce him.”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not believe Mrs. Long will do any such thing. She has two nieces
+of her own. She is a selfish, hypocritical woman, and I have no opinion
+of her.”</p>
+
+<p>“No more have I,” said Mr. Bennet; “and I am glad to find that you do
+not depend on her serving you.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet deigned not to make any reply; but, unable to contain
+herself, began scolding one of her daughters.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t keep coughing so, Kitty, for heaven’s sake! Have a little
+compassion on my nerves. You tear them to pieces.”</p>
+
+<p>“Kitty has no discretion in her coughs,” said her father; “she times
+them ill.”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not cough for my own amusement,” replied Kitty, fretfully. “When
+is your next ball to be, Lizzy?”</p>
+
+<p>“To-morrow fortnight.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ay, so it is,” cried her mother, “and Mrs. Long does not come back till
+the day before; so, it will be impossible for her to introduce him, for
+she will not know him herself.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then, my dear, you may have the advantage of your friend, and introduce
+Mr. Bingley to <i>her</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“Impossible, Mr. Bennet, impossible, when I am not acquainted with him
+myself; how can you be so teasing?”</p>
+
+<p>“I honour your circumspection. A fortnight’s acquaintance is certainly
+very little. One cannot know what a man really is by the end of a
+fortnight. But if <i>we</i> do not venture, somebody else will; and after
+all, Mrs. Long and her nieces must stand their chance; and, therefore,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_8">{8}</a></span>
+as she will think it an act of kindness, if you decline the office, I
+will take it on myself.”</p>
+
+<p>The girls stared at their father. Mrs. Bennet said only, “Nonsense,
+nonsense!”</p>
+
+<p>“What can be the meaning of that emphatic exclamation?” cried he. “Do
+you consider the forms of introduction, and the stress that is laid on
+them, as nonsense? I cannot quite agree with you <i>there</i>. What say you,
+Mary? For you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read
+great books, and make extracts.”</p>
+
+<p>Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.</p>
+
+<p>“While Mary is adjusting her ideas,” he continued, “let us return to Mr.
+Bingley.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am sick of Mr. Bingley,” cried his wife.</p>
+
+<p>“I am sorry to hear <i>that</i>; but why did you not tell me so before? If I
+had known as much this morning, I certainly would not have called on
+him. It is very unlucky; but as I have actually paid the visit, we
+cannot escape the acquaintance now.”</p>
+
+<p>The astonishment of the ladies was just what he wished—that of Mrs.
+Bennet perhaps surpassing the rest; though when the first tumult of joy
+was over, she began to declare that it was what she had expected all the
+while.</p>
+
+<p>“How good it was in you, my dear Mr. Bennet! But I knew I should
+persuade you at last. I was sure you loved your girls too well to
+neglect such an acquaintance. Well, how pleased I am! And it is such a
+good joke, too, that you should have gone this morning, and never said a
+word about it till now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Now, Kitty, you may cough as much as you choose,” said Mr. Bennet; and,
+as he spoke, he left the room, fatigued with the raptures of his wife.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_9">{9}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“What an excellent father you have, girls,” said she, when the door was
+shut. “I do not know how you will ever make him amends for his kindness;
+or me either, for that matter. At our time of life, it is not so
+pleasant, I can tell you, to be making new acquaintances every day; but
+for your sakes we would do anything. Lydia, my love, though you <i>are</i>
+the youngest, I dare say Mr. Bingley will dance with you at the next
+ball.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” said Lydia, stoutly, “I am not afraid; for though I <i>am</i> the
+youngest, I’m the tallest.”</p>
+
+<p>The rest of the evening was spent in conjecturing how soon he would
+return Mr. Bennet’s visit, and determining when they should ask him to
+dinner.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 386px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption2">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_038.jpg" width="386" id="img_images_i_038.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption2"><p>“I’m the tallest<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_10">{10}</a></span>”</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_III"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_039_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_039_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+He rode a black horse.
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="N" src="images/i_039_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_039_b.png"></span>OT all that Mrs. Bennet, however, with the assistance of her five
+daughters, could ask on the subject, was sufficient to draw from her
+husband any satisfactory description of Mr. Bingley. They attacked him
+in various ways, with barefaced questions, ingenious suppositions, and
+distant surmises; but he eluded the skill of them all; and they were at<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_11">{11}</a></span>
+last obliged to accept the second-hand intelligence of their neighbour,
+Lady Lucas. Her report was highly favourable. Sir William had been
+delighted with him. He was quite young, wonderfully handsome, extremely
+agreeable, and, to crown the whole, he meant to be at the next assembly
+with a large party. Nothing could be more delightful! To be fond of
+dancing was a certain step towards falling in love; and very lively
+hopes of Mr. Bingley’s heart were entertained.</p>
+
+<p>“If I can but see one of my daughters happily settled at Netherfield,”
+said Mrs. Bennet to her husband, “and all the others equally well
+married, I shall have nothing to wish for.”</p>
+
+<p>In a few days Mr. Bingley returned Mr. Bennet’s visit, and sat about ten
+minutes with him in his library. He had entertained hopes of being
+admitted to a sight of the young ladies, of whose beauty he had heard
+much; but he saw only the father. The ladies were somewhat more
+fortunate, for they had the advantage of ascertaining, from an upper
+window, that he wore a blue coat and rode a black horse.</p>
+
+<p>An invitation to dinner was soon afterwards despatched; and already had
+Mrs. Bennet planned the courses that were to do credit to her
+housekeeping, when an answer arrived which deferred it all. Mr. Bingley
+was obliged to be in town the following day, and consequently unable to
+accept the honour of their invitation, etc. Mrs. Bennet was quite
+disconcerted. She could not imagine what business he could have in town
+so soon after his arrival in Hertfordshire; and she began to fear that
+he might always be flying about from one place to another, and never
+settled at Netherfield as he ought to be. Lady Lucas quieted her fears a
+little by starting the idea of his<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_12">{12}</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 374px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption3">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_041.jpg" width="374" id="img_images_i_041.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption3">
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“When the Party entered”</p></div>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">being gone to London only to get a large party for the ball; and a
+report soon followed that Mr. Bingley was to bring twelve ladies and
+seven gentlemen with him to the assembly. The girls grieved over such a
+number of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_13">{13}</a></span> ladies; but were comforted the day before the ball by hearing
+that, instead of twelve, he had brought only six with him from London,
+his five sisters and a cousin. And when the party entered the
+assembly-room, it consisted of only five altogether: Mr. Bingley, his
+two sisters, the husband of the eldest, and another young man.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bingley was good-looking and gentlemanlike: he had a pleasant
+countenance, and easy, unaffected manners. His sisters were fine women,
+with an air of decided fashion. His brother-in-law, Mr. Hurst, merely
+looked the gentleman; but his friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention
+of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien, and
+the report, which was in general circulation within five minutes after
+his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year. The gentlemen
+pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was
+much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great
+admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust
+which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be
+proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his
+large estate in Derbyshire could save him from having a most forbidding,
+disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his
+friend.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bingley had soon made himself acquainted with all the principal
+people in the room: he was lively and unreserved, danced every dance,
+was angry that the ball closed so early, and talked of giving one
+himself at Netherfield. Such amiable qualities must speak for
+themselves. What a contrast between him and his friend! Mr. Darcy danced
+only once with Mrs. Hurst and once with Miss Bingley, declined being
+introduced to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_14">{14}</a></span> any other lady, and spent the rest of the evening in
+walking about the room, speaking occasionally to one of his own party.
+His character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in
+the world, and everybody hoped that he would never come there again.
+Amongst the most violent against him was Mrs. Bennet, whose dislike of
+his general behaviour was sharpened into particular resentment by his
+having slighted one of her daughters.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth Bennet had been obliged, by the scarcity of gentlemen, to sit
+down for two dances; and during part of that time, Mr. Darcy had been
+standing near enough for her to overhear a conversation between him and
+Mr. Bingley, who came from the dance for a few minutes to press his
+friend to join it.</p>
+
+<p>“Come, Darcy,” said he, “I must have you dance. I hate to see you
+standing about by yourself in this stupid manner. You had much better
+dance.”</p>
+
+<p>“I certainly shall not. You know how I detest it, unless I am
+particularly acquainted with my partner. At such an assembly as this, it
+would be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not
+another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to
+stand up with.”</p>
+
+<p>“I would not be so fastidious as you are,” cried Bingley, “for a
+kingdom! Upon my honour, I never met with so many pleasant girls in my
+life as I have this evening; and there are several of them, you see,
+uncommonly pretty.”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>You</i> are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room,” said Mr.
+Darcy, looking at the eldest Miss Bennet.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, she is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld!<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_15">{15}</a></span> But there is one
+of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I
+dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you.”</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 456px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption4">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_044.jpg" width="456" id="img_images_i_044.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption4">
+
+<p>
+“She is tolerable”<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Which do you mean?” and turning round, he looked for a moment at
+Elizabeth, till, catching her eye, he withdrew his own, and coldly said,
+“She is tolerable: but not handsome enough to tempt <i>me</i>; and I am in no
+humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted
+by other men. You had better return to your<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_16">{16}</a></span> partner and enjoy her
+smiles, for you are wasting your time with me.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bingley followed his advice. Mr. Darcy walked off; and Elizabeth
+remained with no very cordial feelings towards him. She told the story,
+however, with great spirit among her friends; for she had a lively,
+playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous.</p>
+
+<p>The evening altogether passed off pleasantly to the whole family. Mrs.
+Bennet had seen her eldest daughter much admired by the Netherfield
+party. Mr. Bingley had danced with her twice, and she had been
+distinguished by his sisters. Jane was as much gratified by this as her
+mother could be, though in a quieter way. Elizabeth felt Jane’s
+pleasure. Mary had heard herself mentioned to Miss Bingley as the most
+accomplished girl in the neighbourhood; and Catherine and Lydia had been
+fortunate enough to be never without partners, which was all that they
+had yet learnt to care for at a ball. They returned, therefore, in good
+spirits to Longbourn, the village where they lived, and of which they
+were the principal inhabitants. They found Mr. Bennet still up. With a
+book, he was regardless of time; and on the present occasion he had a
+good deal of curiosity as to the event of an evening which had raised
+such splendid expectations. He had rather hoped that all his wife’s
+views on the stranger would be disappointed; but he soon found that he
+had a very different story to hear.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, my dear Mr. Bennet,” as she entered the room, “we have had a most
+delightful evening, a most excellent ball. I wish you had been there.
+Jane was so admired, nothing could be like it. Everybody said how well
+she looked; and Mr. Bingley thought her quite beautiful, and danced with
+her twice. Only think of <i>that</i>, my dear: he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_17">{17}</a></span> actually danced with her
+twice; and she was the only creature in the room that he asked a second
+time. First of all, he asked Miss Lucas. I was so vexed to see him stand
+up with her; but, however, he did not admire her at all; indeed, nobody
+can, you know; and he seemed quite struck with Jane as she was going
+down the dance. So he inquired who she was, and got introduced, and
+asked her for the two next. Then, the two third he danced with Miss
+King, and the two fourth with Maria Lucas, and the two fifth with Jane
+again, and the two sixth with Lizzy, and the <i>Boulanger</i>——”</p>
+
+<p>“If he had had any compassion for <i>me</i>,” cried her husband impatiently,
+“he would not have danced half so much! For God’s sake, say no more of
+his partners. O that he had sprained his ancle in the first dance!”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, my dear,” continued Mrs. Bennet, “I am quite delighted with him. He
+is so excessively handsome! and his sisters are charming women. I never
+in my life saw anything more elegant than their dresses. I dare say the
+lace upon Mrs. Hurst’s gown——”</p>
+
+<p>Here she was interrupted again. Mr. Bennet protested against any
+description of finery. She was therefore obliged to seek another branch
+of the subject, and related, with much bitterness of spirit, and some
+exaggeration, the shocking rudeness of Mr. Darcy.</p>
+
+<p>“But I can assure you,” she added, “that Lizzy does not lose much by not
+suiting <i>his</i> fancy; for he is a most disagreeable, horrid man, not at
+all worth pleasing. So high and so conceited, that there was no enduring
+him! He walked here, and he walked there, fancying himself so very
+great! Not handsome enough to dance with! I wish you had been there, my
+dear, to have given him one of your set-downs. I quite detest the man.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_18">{18}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_IV"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_047_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_047_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="W" src="images/i_047_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_047_b.png"></span>HEN Jane and Elizabeth were alone, the former, who had been cautious in
+her praise of Mr. Bingley before, expressed to her sister how very much
+she admired him.</p>
+
+<p>“He is just what a young man ought to be,” said she, “sensible,
+good-humoured, lively; and I never saw such happy manners! so much ease,
+with such perfect good breeding!”</p>
+
+<p>“He is also handsome,” replied Elizabeth, “which a young man ought
+likewise to be if he possibly can. His character is thereby complete.”</p>
+
+<p>“I was very much flattered by his asking me to dance a second time. I
+did not expect such a compliment.”</p>
+
+<p>“Did not you? <i>I</i> did for you. But that is one great difference between
+us. Compliments always take <i>you</i> by surprise, and <i>me</i> never. What
+could be more natural than his asking you again? He could not help
+seeing that you<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_19">{19}</a></span> were about five times as pretty as every other woman in
+the room. No thanks to his gallantry for that. Well, he certainly is
+very agreeable, and I give you leave to like him. You have liked many a
+stupider person.”</p>
+
+<p>“Dear Lizzy!”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in general.
+You never see a fault in anybody. All the world are good and agreeable
+in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in my life.”</p>
+
+<p>“I would wish not to be hasty in censuring anyone; but I always speak
+what I think.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know you do: and it is <i>that</i> which makes the wonder. With <i>your</i>
+good sense, to be so honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of
+others! Affectation of candour is common enough; one meets with it
+everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design,—to take the
+good of everybody’s character and make it still better, and say nothing
+of the bad,—belongs to you alone. And so, you like this man’s sisters,
+too, do you? Their manners are not equal to his.”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly not, at first; but they are very pleasing women when you
+converse with them. Miss Bingley is to live with her brother, and keep
+his house; and I am much mistaken if we shall not find a very charming
+neighbour in her.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth listened in silence, but was not convinced: their behaviour at
+the assembly had not been calculated to please in general; and with more
+quickness of observation and less pliancy of temper than her sister, and
+with a judgment, too, unassailed by any attention to herself, she was
+very little disposed to approve them. They were, in fact, very fine
+ladies; not deficient in good-humour when they were pleased, nor in the
+power<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_20">{20}</a></span> of being agreeable where they chose it; but proud and conceited.
+They were rather handsome; had been educated in one of the first private
+seminaries in town; had a fortune of twenty thousand pounds; were in the
+habit of spending more than they ought, and of associating with people
+of rank; and were, therefore, in every respect entitled to think well of
+themselves and meanly of others. They were of a respectable family in
+the north of England; a circumstance more deeply impressed on their
+memories than that their brother’s fortune and their own had been
+acquired by trade.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bingley inherited property to the amount of nearly a hundred
+thousand pounds from his father, who had intended to purchase an estate,
+but did not live to do it. Mr. Bingley intended it likewise, and
+sometimes made choice of his county; but, as he was now provided with a
+good house and the liberty of a manor, it was doubtful to many of those
+who best knew the easiness of his temper, whether he might not spend the
+remainder of his days at Netherfield, and leave the next generation to
+purchase.</p>
+
+<p>His sisters were very anxious for his having an estate of his own; but
+though he was now established only as a tenant, Miss Bingley was by no
+means unwilling to preside at his table; nor was Mrs. Hurst, who had
+married a man of more fashion than fortune, less disposed to consider
+his house as her home when it suited her. Mr. Bingley had not been of
+age two years when he was tempted, by an accidental recommendation, to
+look at Netherfield House. He did look at it, and into it, for half an
+hour; was pleased with the situation and the principal rooms, satisfied
+with what the owner said in its praise, and took it immediately.</p>
+
+<p>Between him and Darcy there was a very steady<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_21">{21}</a></span> friendship, in spite of a
+great opposition of character. Bingley was endeared to Darcy by the
+easiness, openness, and ductility of his temper, though no disposition
+could offer a greater contrast to his own, and though with his own he
+never appeared dissatisfied. On the strength of Darcy’s regard, Bingley
+had the firmest reliance, and of his judgment the highest opinion. In
+understanding, Darcy was the superior. Bingley was by no means
+deficient; but Darcy was clever. He was at the same time haughty,
+reserved, and fastidious; and his manners, though well bred, were not
+inviting. In that respect his friend had greatly the advantage. Bingley
+was sure of being liked wherever he appeared; Darcy was continually
+giving offence.</p>
+
+<p>The manner in which they spoke of the Meryton assembly was sufficiently
+characteristic. Bingley had never met with pleasanter people or prettier
+girls in his life; everybody had been most kind and attentive to him;
+there had been no formality, no stiffness; he had soon felt acquainted
+with all the room; and as to Miss Bennet, he could not conceive an angel
+more beautiful. Darcy, on the contrary, had seen a collection of people
+in whom there was little beauty and no fashion, for none of whom he had
+felt the smallest interest, and from none received either attention or
+pleasure. Miss Bennet he acknowledged to be pretty; but she smiled too
+much.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Hurst and her sister allowed it to be so; but still they admired
+her and liked her, and pronounced her to be a sweet girl, and one whom
+they should not object to know more of. Miss Bennet was therefore
+established as a sweet girl; and their brother felt authorized by such
+commendation to think of her as he chose.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_22">{22}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_V"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_051_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_051_a.jpg">
+<br><br>
+CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="W" src="images/i_051_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_051_b.png"></span>ITHIN a short walk of Longbourn lived a family with whom the Bennets
+were particularly intimate. Sir William Lucas had been formerly in trade
+in Meryton, where he had made a tolerable fortune, and risen to the
+honour of knighthood by an address to the king during his mayoralty. The
+distinction had, perhaps, been felt too strongly. It had given him a
+disgust to his business and to his residence in a small market town;
+and, quitting them both, he had removed with his family to a house about
+a mile from Meryton, denominated from that period Lucas Lodge; where he
+could think with pleasure of his own importance, and, unshackled by
+business, occupy himself solely in being civil to all the world. For,
+though elated by his rank, it did not render him supercilious; on the
+contrary, he was all attention to everybody. By nature inoffensive,
+friendly, and obliging, his presentation at St. James’s had made him
+courteous.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Lucas was a very good kind of woman, not too<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_23">{23}</a></span> clever to be a
+valuable neighbour to Mrs. Bennet. They had several children. The eldest
+of them, a sensible, intelligent young woman, about twenty-seven, was
+Elizabeth’s intimate friend.</p>
+
+<p>That the Miss Lucases and the Miss Bennets should meet to talk over a
+ball was absolutely necessary; and the morning after the assembly
+brought the former to Longbourn to hear and to communicate.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>You</i> began the evening well, Charlotte,” said Mrs. Bennet, with civil
+self-command, to Miss Lucas. “<i>You</i> were Mr. Bingley’s first choice.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; but he seemed to like his second better.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you mean Jane, I suppose, because he danced with her twice. To be
+sure that <i>did</i> seem as if he admired her—indeed, I rather believe he
+<i>did</i>—I heard something about it—but I hardly know what—something
+about Mr. Robinson.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps you mean what I overheard between him and Mr. Robinson: did not
+I mention it to you? Mr. Robinson’s asking him how he liked our Meryton
+assemblies, and whether he did not think there were a great many pretty
+women in the room, and <i>which</i> he thought the prettiest? and his
+answering immediately to the last question, ‘Oh, the eldest Miss Bennet,
+beyond a doubt: there cannot be two opinions on that point.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p>
+
+<p>“Upon my word! Well, that was very decided, indeed—that does seem as
+if—but, however, it may all come to nothing, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>My</i> overhearings were more to the purpose than <i>yours</i>, Eliza,” said
+Charlotte. “Mr. Darcy is not so well worth listening to as his friend,
+is he? Poor Eliza! to be only just <i>tolerable</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“I beg you will not put it into Lizzy’s head to be<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_24">{24}</a></span> vexed by his
+ill-treatment, for he is such a disagreeable man that it would be quite
+a misfortune to be liked by him. Mrs. Long told me last night that he
+sat close to her for half an hour without once opening his lips.”</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 354px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption5">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_053.jpg" width="354" id="img_images_i_053.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption5"><p>“Without once opening his lips”</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Are you quite sure, ma’am? Is not there a little mistake?” said Jane.
+“I certainly saw Mr. Darcy speaking to her.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ay, because she asked him at last how he liked<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_25">{25}</a></span> Netherfield, and he
+could not help answering her; but she said he seemed very angry at being
+spoke to.”</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Bingley told me,” said Jane, “that he never speaks much unless
+among his intimate acquaintance. With <i>them</i> he is remarkably
+agreeable.”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not believe a word of it, my dear. If he had been so very
+agreeable, he would have talked to Mrs. Long. But I can guess how it
+was; everybody says that he is eat up with pride, and I dare say he had
+heard somehow that Mrs. Long does not keep a carriage, and had to come
+to the ball in a hack chaise.”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not mind his not talking to Mrs. Long,” said Miss Lucas, “but I
+wish he had danced with Eliza.”</p>
+
+<p>“Another time, Lizzy,” said her mother, “I would not dance with <i>him</i>,
+if I were you.”</p>
+
+<p>“I believe, ma’am, I may safely promise you <i>never</i> to dance with him.”</p>
+
+<p>“His pride,” said Miss Lucas, “does not offend <i>me</i> so much as pride
+often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so
+very fine a young man, with family, fortune, everything in his favour,
+should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he has a <i>right</i>
+to be proud.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is very true,” replied Elizabeth, “and I could easily forgive
+<i>his</i> pride, if he had not mortified <i>mine</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“Pride,” observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her
+reflections, “is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have
+ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human
+nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us
+who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some
+quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different
+things, though the words are often<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_26">{26}</a></span> used synonymously. A person may be
+proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of
+ourselves; vanity to what we would have others think of us.”</p>
+
+<p>“If I were as rich as Mr. Darcy,” cried a young Lucas, who came with his
+sisters, “I should not care how proud I was. I would keep a pack of
+foxhounds, and drink a bottle of wine every day.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then you would drink a great deal more than you ought,” said Mrs.
+Bennet; “and if I were to see you at it, I should take away your bottle
+directly.”</p>
+
+<p>The boy protested that she should not; she continued to declare that she
+would; and the argument ended only with the visit.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img alt="" height="513" src="images/i_055.jpg" width="550" id="img_images_i_055.jpg">
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_27">{27}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_VI"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_056_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_056_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="T" src="images/i_056_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_056_b.png"></span>HE ladies of Longbourn soon waited on those of Netherfield. The visit
+was returned in due form. Miss Bennet’s pleasing manners grew on the
+good-will of Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley; and though the mother was
+found to be intolerable, and the younger sisters not worth speaking to,
+a wish of being better acquainted with <i>them</i> was expressed towards the
+two eldest. By Jane this attention was received with the greatest
+pleasure; but Elizabeth still saw superciliousness in their treatment of
+everybody, hardly excepting even her sister, and could not like them;
+though their kindness to Jane, such as it was, had a value, as arising,
+in all probability, from the influence of their brother’s admiration. It
+was generally evident, whenever they met, that he <i>did</i> admire her; and
+to <i>her</i> it was equally evident that Jane was yielding to the preference
+which she had begun to entertain for him from the first, and was in a
+way to be very much in love; but she considered with pleasure that it
+was not likely to be discovered by the world in general, since Jane
+united with great strength of feeling, a composure of temper and an
+uniform cheerfulness of manner, which would guard<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_28">{28}</a></span> her from the
+suspicions of the impertinent. She mentioned this to her friend, Miss
+Lucas.</p>
+
+<p>“It may, perhaps, be pleasant,” replied Charlotte, “to be able to impose
+on the public in such a case; but it is sometimes a disadvantage to be
+so very guarded. If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill
+from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and
+it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the
+dark. There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every
+attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all
+<i>begin</i> freely—a slight preference is natural enough; but there are
+very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without
+encouragement. In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show <i>more</i>
+affection than she feels. Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he
+may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on.”</p>
+
+<p>“But she does help him on, as much as her nature will allow. If <i>I</i> can
+perceive her regard for him, he must be a simpleton indeed not to
+discover it too.”</p>
+
+<p>“Remember, Eliza, that he does not know Jane’s disposition as you do.”</p>
+
+<p>“But if a woman is partial to a man, and does not endeavor to conceal
+it, he must find it out.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps he must, if he sees enough of her. But though Bingley and Jane
+meet tolerably often, it is never for many hours together; and as they
+always see each other in large mixed parties, it is impossible that
+every moment should be employed in conversing together. Jane should
+therefore make the most of every half hour in which she can command his
+attention. When she is secure of him, there will be leisure for falling
+in love as much as she chooses.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_29">{29}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“Your plan is a good one,” replied Elizabeth, “where nothing is in
+question but the desire of being well married; and if I were determined
+to get a rich husband, or any husband, I dare say I should adopt it. But
+these are not Jane’s feelings; she is not acting by design. As yet she
+cannot even be certain of the degree of her own regard, nor of its
+reasonableness. She has known him only a fortnight. She danced four
+dances with him at Meryton; she saw him one morning at his own house,
+and has since dined in company with him four times. This is not quite
+enough to make her understand his character.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not as you represent it. Had she merely <i>dined</i> with him, she might
+only have discovered whether he had a good appetite; but you must
+remember that four evenings have been also spent together—and four
+evenings may do a great deal.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes: these four evenings have enabled them to ascertain that they both
+like Vingt-un better than Commerce, but with respect to any other
+leading characteristic, I do not imagine that much has been unfolded.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” said Charlotte, “I wish Jane success with all my heart; and if
+she were married to him to-morrow, I should think she had as good a
+chance of happiness as if she were to be studying his character for a
+twelvemonth. Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If
+the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other, or
+ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the
+least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to
+have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as
+possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your
+life.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_30">{30}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“You make me laugh, Charlotte; but it is not sound. You know it is not
+sound, and that you would never act in this way yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>Occupied in observing Mr. Bingley’s attention to her sister, Elizabeth
+was far from suspecting that she was herself becoming an object of some
+interest in the eyes of his friend. Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely
+allowed her to be pretty: he had looked at her without admiration at the
+ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticise. But no
+sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had
+hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered
+uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To
+this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had
+detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry
+in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and
+pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those
+of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness. Of
+this she was perfectly unaware: to her he was only the man who made
+himself agreeable nowhere, and who had not thought her handsome enough
+to dance with.</p>
+
+<p>He began to wish to know more of her; and, as a step towards conversing
+with her himself, attended to her conversation with others. His doing so
+drew her notice. It was at Sir William Lucas’s, where a large party were
+assembled.</p>
+
+<p>“What does Mr. Darcy mean,” said she to Charlotte, “by listening to my
+conversation with Colonel Forster?”</p>
+
+<p>“That is a question which Mr. Darcy only can answer.”</p>
+
+<p>“But if he does it any more, I shall certainly let him know that I see
+what he is about. He has a very<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_31">{31}</a></span> satirical eye, and if I do not begin by
+being impertinent myself, I shall soon grow afraid of him.”</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption6">
+<img alt="" height="547" src="images/i_060.jpg" width="550" id="img_images_i_060.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption6"><p>“The entreaties of several” [<i>Copyright 1894 by George
+Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>On his approaching them soon afterwards, though without seeming to have
+any intention of speaking, Miss Lucas defied her friend to mention such
+a subject to him, which immediately provoking Elizabeth to do it, she
+turned to him and said,—</p>
+
+<p>“Did not you think, Mr. Darcy, that I expressed myself uncommonly well
+just now, when I was teasing Colonel Forster to give us a ball at
+Meryton?”</p>
+
+<p>“With great energy; but it is a subject which always makes a lady
+energetic.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_32">{32}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“You are severe on us.”</p>
+
+<p>“It will be <i>her</i> turn soon to be teased,” said Miss Lucas. “I am going
+to open the instrument, Eliza, and you know what follows.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are a very strange creature by way of a friend!—always wanting me
+to play and sing before anybody and everybody! If my vanity had taken a
+musical turn, you would have been invaluable; but as it is, I would
+really rather not sit down before those who must be in the habit of
+hearing the very best performers.” On Miss Lucas’s persevering, however,
+she added, “Very well; if it must be so, it must.” And gravely glancing
+at Mr. Darcy, “There is a very fine old saying, which everybody here is
+of course familiar with—‘Keep your breath to cool your porridge,’—and
+I shall keep mine to swell my song.”</p>
+
+<p>Her performance was pleasing, though by no means capital. After a song
+or two, and before she could reply to the entreaties of several that she
+would sing again, she was eagerly succeeded at the instrument by her
+sister Mary, who having, in consequence of being the only plain one in
+the family, worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments, was always
+impatient for display.</p>
+
+<p>Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her
+application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited
+manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she
+had reached. Elizabeth, easy and unaffected, had been listened to with
+much more pleasure, though not playing half so well; and Mary, at the
+end of a long concerto, was glad to purchase praise and gratitude by
+Scotch and Irish airs, at the request of her younger sisters, who with
+some of the Lucases, and two or three officers, joined eagerly in
+dancing at one end of the room.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_33">{33}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Darcy stood near them in silent indignation at such a mode of
+passing the evening, to the exclusion of all conversation, and was too
+much engrossed by his own thoughts to perceive that Sir William Lucas
+was his neighbour, till Sir William thus began:—</p>
+
+<p>“What a charming amusement for young people this is, Mr. Darcy! There is
+nothing like dancing, after all. I consider it as one of the first
+refinements of polished societies.”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly, sir; and it has the advantage also of being in vogue amongst
+the less polished societies of the world: every savage can dance.”</p>
+
+<p>Sir William only smiled. “Your friend performs delightfully,” he
+continued, after a pause, on seeing Bingley join the group; “and I doubt
+not that you are an adept in the science yourself, Mr. Darcy.”</p>
+
+<p>“You saw me dance at Meryton, I believe, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, indeed, and received no inconsiderable pleasure from the sight. Do
+you often dance at St. James’s?”</p>
+
+<p>“Never, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you not think it would be a proper compliment to the place?”</p>
+
+<p>“It is a compliment which I never pay to any place if I can avoid it.”</p>
+
+<p>“You have a house in town, I conclude?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Darcy bowed.</p>
+
+<p>“I had once some thoughts of fixing in town myself, for I am fond of
+superior society; but I did not feel quite certain that the air of
+London would agree with Lady Lucas.”</p>
+
+<p>He paused in hopes of an answer: but his companion was not disposed to
+make any; and Elizabeth at that instant moving towards them, he was
+struck with the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_34">{34}</a></span> notion of doing a very gallant thing, and called out to
+her,—</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Miss Eliza, why are not you dancing? Mr. Darcy, you must allow
+me to present this young lady to you as a very desirable partner. You
+cannot refuse to dance, I am sure, when so much beauty is before you.”
+And, taking her hand, he would have given it to Mr. Darcy, who, though
+extremely surprised, was not unwilling to receive it, when she instantly
+drew back, and said with some discomposure to Sir William,—</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed, sir, I have not the least intention of dancing. I entreat you
+not to suppose that I moved this way in order to beg for a partner.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Darcy, with grave propriety, requested to be allowed the honour of
+her hand, but in vain. Elizabeth was determined; nor did Sir William at
+all shake her purpose by his attempt at persuasion.</p>
+
+<p>“You excel so much in the dance, Miss Eliza, that it is cruel to deny me
+the happiness of seeing you; and though this gentleman dislikes the
+amusement in general, he can have no objection, I am sure, to oblige us
+for one half hour.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Darcy is all politeness,” said Elizabeth, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>“He is, indeed: but considering the inducement, my dear Miss Eliza, we
+cannot wonder at his complaisance; for who would object to such a
+partner?”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth looked archly, and turned away. Her resistance had not injured
+her with the gentleman, and he was thinking of her with some
+complacency, when thus accosted by Miss Bingley,—</p>
+
+<p>“I can guess the subject of your reverie.”</p>
+
+<p>“I should imagine not.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are considering how insupportable it would be<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_35">{35}</a></span> to pass many
+evenings in this manner,—in such society; and, indeed, I am quite of
+your opinion. I was never more annoyed! The insipidity, and yet the
+noise—the nothingness, and yet the self-importance, of all these
+people! What would I give to hear your strictures on them!”</p>
+
+<p>“Your conjecture is totally wrong, I assure you. My mind was more
+agreeably engaged. I have been meditating on the very great pleasure
+which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.”</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bingley immediately fixed her eyes on his face, and desired he
+would tell her what lady had the credit of inspiring such reflections.
+Mr. Darcy replied, with great intrepidity,—</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Elizabeth Bennet!” repeated Miss Bingley. “I am all astonishment.
+How long has she been such a favourite? and pray when am I to wish you
+joy?”</p>
+
+<p>“That is exactly the question which I expected you to ask. A lady’s
+imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love
+to matrimony, in a moment. I knew you would be wishing me joy.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nay, if you are so serious about it, I shall consider the matter as
+absolutely settled. You will have a charming mother-in-law, indeed, and
+of course she will be always at Pemberley with you.”</p>
+
+<p>He listened to her with perfect indifference, while she chose to
+entertain herself in this manner; and as his composure convinced her
+that all was safe, her wit flowed along.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_36">{36}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_VII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_065_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_065_a.jpg">
+<br>
+<span class="caption">
+A note for Miss Bennet.
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="M" src="images/i_065_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_065_b.png"></span>R. BENNET’S property consisted almost entirely in an estate of two
+thousand a year, which, unfortunately for his daughters, was entailed,
+in default of heirs male, on a distant relation; and their mother’s
+fortune, though ample for her situation in life, could but ill supply
+the deficiency of his. Her father had been an<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_37">{37}</a></span> attorney in Meryton, and
+had left her four thousand pounds.</p>
+
+<p>She had a sister married to a Mr. Philips, who had been a clerk to their
+father and succeeded him in the business, and a brother settled in
+London in a respectable line of trade.</p>
+
+<p>The village of Longbourn was only one mile from Meryton; a most
+convenient distance for the young ladies, who were usually tempted
+thither three or four times a week, to pay their duty to their aunt, and
+to a milliner’s shop just over the way. The two youngest of the family,
+Catherine and Lydia, were particularly frequent in these attentions:
+their minds were more vacant than their sisters’, and when nothing
+better offered, a walk to Meryton was necessary to amuse their morning
+hours and furnish conversation for the evening; and, however bare of
+news the country in general might be, they always contrived to learn
+some from their aunt. At present, indeed, they were well supplied both
+with news and happiness by the recent arrival of a militia regiment in
+the neighbourhood; it was to remain the whole winter, and Meryton was
+the head-quarters.</p>
+
+<p>Their visits to Mrs. Philips were now productive of the most interesting
+intelligence. Every day added something to their knowledge of the
+officers’ names and connections. Their lodgings were not long a secret,
+and at length they began to know the officers themselves. Mr. Philips
+visited them all, and this opened to his nieces a source of felicity
+unknown before. They could talk of nothing but officers; and Mr.
+Bingley’s large fortune, the mention of which gave animation to their
+mother, was worthless in their eyes when opposed to the regimentals of
+an ensign.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_38">{38}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>After listening one morning to their effusions on this subject, Mr.
+Bennet coolly observed,—</p>
+
+<p>“From all that I can collect by your manner of talking, you must be two
+of the silliest girls in the country. I have suspected it some time, but
+I am now convinced.”</p>
+
+<p>Catherine was disconcerted, and made no answer; but Lydia, with perfect
+indifference, continued to express her admiration of Captain Carter, and
+her hope of seeing him in the course of the day, as he was going the
+next morning to London.</p>
+
+<p>“I am astonished, my dear,” said Mrs. Bennet, “that you should be so
+ready to think your own children silly. If I wished to think slightingly
+of anybody’s children, it should not be of my own, however.”</p>
+
+<p>“If my children are silly, I must hope to be always sensible of it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; but as it happens, they are all of them very clever.”</p>
+
+<p>“This is the only point, I flatter myself, on which we do not agree. I
+had hoped that our sentiments coincided in every particular, but I must
+so far differ from you as to think our two youngest daughters uncommonly
+foolish.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Mr. Bennet, you must not expect such girls to have the sense of
+their father and mother. When they get to our age, I dare say they will
+not think about officers any more than we do. I remember the time when I
+liked a red coat myself very well—and, indeed, so I do still at my
+heart; and if a smart young colonel, with five or six thousand a year,
+should want one of my girls, I shall not say nay to him; and I thought
+Colonel Forster looked very becoming the other night at Sir William’s in
+his regimentals.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_39">{39}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“Mamma,” cried Lydia, “my aunt says that Colonel Forster and Captain
+Carter do not go so often to Miss Watson’s as they did when they first
+came; she sees them now very often standing in Clarke’s library.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet was prevented replying by the entrance of the footman with a
+note for Miss Bennet; it came from Netherfield, and the servant waited
+for an answer. Mrs. Bennet’s eyes sparkled with pleasure, and she was
+eagerly calling out, while her daughter read,—</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Jane, who is it from? What is it about? What does he say? Well,
+Jane, make haste and tell us; make haste, my love.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is from Miss Bingley,” said Jane, and then read it aloud.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="nind"> “My dear friend,</p>
+
+<p>“If you are not so compassionate as to dine to-day with Louisa and
+me, we shall be in danger of hating each other for the rest of our
+lives; for a whole day’s <i>tête-à-tête</i> between two women can never
+end without a quarrel. Come as soon as you can on the receipt of
+this. My brother and the gentlemen are to dine with the officers.
+Yours ever,</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+“<span class="smcap">Caroline Bingley</span>.”<br>
+</p></div>
+
+<p>“With the officers!” cried Lydia: “I wonder my aunt did not tell us of
+<i>that</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“Dining out,” said Mrs. Bennet; “that is very unlucky.”</p>
+
+<p>“Can I have the carriage?” said Jane.</p>
+
+<p>“No, my dear, you had better go on horseback, because it seems likely to
+rain; and then you must stay all night.”</p>
+
+<p>“That would be a good scheme,” said Elizabeth, “if you were sure that
+they would not offer to send her home.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_40">{40}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, but the gentlemen will have Mr. Bingley’s chaise to go to Meryton;
+and the Hursts have no horses to theirs.”</p>
+
+<p>“I had much rather go in the coach.”</p>
+
+<p>“But, my dear, your father cannot spare the horses, I am sure. They are
+wanted in the farm, Mr. Bennet, are not they?”</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 433px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption7">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_069.jpg" width="433" id="img_images_i_069.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption7"><p>Cheerful prognostics</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“They are wanted in the farm much oftener than I can get them.”</p>
+
+<p>“But if you have got them to-day,” said Elizabeth, “my mother’s purpose
+will be answered.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_41">{41}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>She did at last extort from her father an acknowledgment that the horses
+were engaged; Jane was therefore obliged to go on horseback, and her
+mother attended her to the door with many cheerful prognostics of a bad
+day. Her hopes were answered; Jane had not been gone long before it
+rained hard. Her sisters were uneasy for her, but her mother was
+delighted. The rain continued the whole evening without intermission;
+Jane certainly could not come back.</p>
+
+<p>“This was a lucky idea of mine, indeed!” said Mrs. Bennet, more than
+once, as if the credit of making it rain were all her own. Till the next
+morning, however, she was not aware of all the felicity of her
+contrivance. Breakfast was scarcely over when a servant from Netherfield
+brought the following note for Elizabeth:—</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="nind">“My dearest Lizzie,</p>
+
+<p>“I find myself very unwell this morning, which, I suppose, is to be
+imputed to my getting wet through yesterday. My kind friends will
+not hear of my returning home till I am better. They insist also on
+my seeing Mr. Jones—therefore do not be alarmed if you should hear
+of his having been to me—and, excepting a sore throat and a
+headache, there is not much the matter with me.</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+“Yours, etc.”<br>
+</p></div>
+
+<p>“Well, my dear,” said Mr. Bennet, when Elizabeth had read the note
+aloud, “if your daughter should have a dangerous fit of illness—if she
+should die—it would be a comfort to know that it was all in pursuit of
+Mr. Bingley, and under your orders.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I am not at all afraid of her dying. People do<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_42">{42}</a></span> not die of little
+trifling colds. She will be taken good care of. As long as she stays
+there, it is all very well. I would go and see her if I could have the
+carriage.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth, feeling really anxious, determined to go to her, though the
+carriage was not to be had: and as she was no horsewoman, walking was
+her only alternative. She declared her resolution.</p>
+
+<p>“How can you be so silly,” cried her mother, “as to think of such a
+thing, in all this dirt! You will not be fit to be seen when you get
+there.”</p>
+
+<p>“I shall be very fit to see Jane—which is all I want.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is this a hint to me, Lizzy,” said her father, “to send for the
+horses?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, indeed. I do not wish to avoid the walk. The distance is nothing,
+when one has a motive; only three miles. I shall be back by dinner.”</p>
+
+<p>“I admire the activity of your benevolence,” observed Mary, “but every
+impulse of feeling should be guided by reason; and, in my opinion,
+exertion should always be in proportion to what is required.”</p>
+
+<p>“We will go as far as Meryton with you,” said Catherine and Lydia.
+Elizabeth accepted their company, and the three young ladies set off
+together.</p>
+
+<p>“If we make haste,” said Lydia, as they walked along, “perhaps we may
+see something of Captain Carter, before he goes.”</p>
+
+<p>In Meryton they parted: the two youngest repaired to the lodgings of one
+of the officers’ wives, and Elizabeth continued her walk alone, crossing
+field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing
+over puddles, with impatient activity, and finding herself at last
+within view of the house, with weary ancles, dirty stockings, and a face
+glowing with the warmth of exercise.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_43">{43}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She was shown into the breakfast parlour, where all but Jane were
+assembled, and where her appearance created a great deal of surprise.
+That she should have walked three miles so early in the day in such
+dirty weather, and by herself, was almost incredible to Mrs. Hurst and
+Miss Bingley; and Elizabeth was convinced that they held her in contempt
+for it. She was received, however, very politely by them; and in their
+brother’s manners there was something better than politeness—there was
+good-humour and kindness. Mr. Darcy said very little, and Mr. Hurst
+nothing at all. The former was divided between admiration of the
+brilliancy which exercise had given to her complexion and doubt as to
+the occasion’s justifying her coming so far alone. The latter was
+thinking only of his breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>Her inquiries after her sister were not very favourably answered. Miss
+Bennet had slept ill, and though up, was very feverish, and not well
+enough to leave her room. Elizabeth was glad to be taken to her
+immediately; and Jane, who had only been withheld by the fear of giving
+alarm or inconvenience, from expressing in her note how much she longed
+for such a visit, was delighted at her entrance. She was not equal,
+however, to much conversation; and when Miss Bingley left them together,
+could attempt little beside expressions of gratitude for the
+extraordinary kindness she was treated with. Elizabeth silently attended
+her.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 257px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption8">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_073.jpg" width="257" id="img_images_i_073.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption8"><p>
+“The Apothecary came”<br>
+</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>When breakfast was over, they were joined by the sisters; and Elizabeth
+began to like them herself, when she saw how much affection and
+solicitude they showed for Jane. The apothecary came; and having
+examined his patient, said, as might be supposed, that she had caught a
+violent cold, and that they must endeavour to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_44">{44}</a></span> get the better of it;
+advised her to return to bed, and promised her some draughts. The advice
+was followed readily, for the feverish symptoms increased, and her head
+ached acutely. Elizabeth did not quit her room for a moment, nor were
+the other ladies often absent; the gentlemen being out, they had in fact
+nothing to do elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>When the clock struck three, Elizabeth felt that she must go, and very
+unwillingly said so. Miss Bingley offered her the carriage, and she only
+wanted a little pressing to accept it, when Jane testified such concern
+at parting with her that Miss Bingley was obliged to convert the offer
+of the chaise into an invitation to remain at Netherfield for the
+present. Elizabeth most thankfully consented, and a servant was
+despatched to Longbourn, to acquaint the family with her stay, and bring
+back a supply of clothes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_45">{45}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_074_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_074_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+Covering a screen.
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="A" src="images/i_074_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_074_b.png"></span>T five o’clock the two ladies retired to dress, and at half-past six
+Elizabeth was summoned to dinner. To the civil inquiries which then
+poured in, and amongst which she had the pleasure of distinguishing the
+much superior solicitude of Mr. Bingley, she could not make a very
+favourable answer.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_46">{46}</a></span> Jane was by no means better. The sisters, on hearing
+this, repeated three or four times how much they were grieved, how
+shocking it was to have a bad cold, and how excessively they disliked
+being ill themselves; and then thought no more of the matter: and their
+indifference towards Jane, when not immediately before them, restored
+Elizabeth to the enjoyment of all her original dislike.</p>
+
+<p>Their brother, indeed, was the only one of the party whom she could
+regard with any complacency. His anxiety for Jane was evident, and his
+attentions to herself most pleasing; and they prevented her feeling
+herself so much an intruder as she believed she was considered by the
+others. She had very little notice from any but him. Miss Bingley was
+engrossed by Mr. Darcy, her sister scarcely less so; and as for Mr.
+Hurst, by whom Elizabeth sat, he was an indolent man, who lived only to
+eat, drink, and play at cards, who, when he found her prefer a plain
+dish to a ragout, had nothing to say to her.</p>
+
+<p>When dinner was over, she returned directly to Jane, and Miss Bingley
+began abusing her as soon as she was out of the room. Her manners were
+pronounced to be very bad indeed,—a mixture of pride and impertinence:
+she had no conversation, no style, no taste, no beauty. Mrs. Hurst
+thought the same, and added,—</p>
+
+<p>“She has nothing, in short, to recommend her, but being an excellent
+walker. I shall never forget her appearance this morning. She really
+looked almost wild.”</p>
+
+<p>“She did indeed, Louisa. I could hardly keep my countenance. Very
+nonsensical to come at all! Why must <i>she</i> be scampering about the
+country, because her sister had a cold? Her hair so untidy, so blowzy!<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_47">{47}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, and her petticoat; I hope you saw her petticoat, six inches deep
+in mud, I am absolutely certain, and the gown which had been let down to
+hide it not doing its office.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your picture may be very exact, Louisa,” said Bingley; “but this was
+all lost upon me. I thought Miss Elizabeth Bennet looked remarkably well
+when she came into the room this morning. Her dirty petticoat quite
+escaped my notice.”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>You</i> observed it, Mr. Darcy, I am sure,” said Miss Bingley; “and I am
+inclined to think that you would not wish to see <i>your sister</i> make such
+an exhibition.”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly not.”</p>
+
+<p>“To walk three miles, or four miles, or five miles, or whatever it is,
+above her ancles in dirt, and alone, quite alone! what could she mean by
+it? It seems to me to show an abominable sort of conceited independence,
+a most country-town indifference to decorum.”</p>
+
+<p>“It shows an affection for her sister that is very pleasing,” said
+Bingley.</p>
+
+<p>“I am afraid, Mr. Darcy,” observed Miss Bingley, in a half whisper,
+“that this adventure has rather affected your admiration of her fine
+eyes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not at all,” he replied: “they were brightened by the exercise.” A
+short pause followed this speech, and Mrs. Hurst began again,—</p>
+
+<p>“I have an excessive regard for Jane Bennet,—she is really a very sweet
+girl,—and I wish with all my heart she were well settled. But with such
+a father and mother, and such low connections, I am afraid there is no
+chance of it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think I have heard you say that their uncle is an attorney in
+Meryton?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_48">{48}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; and they have another, who lives somewhere near Cheapside.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is capital,” added her sister; and they both laughed heartily.</p>
+
+<p>“If they had uncles enough to fill <i>all</i> Cheapside,” cried Bingley, “it
+would not make them one jot less agreeable.”</p>
+
+<p>“But it must very materially lessen their chance of marrying men of any
+consideration in the world,” replied Darcy.</p>
+
+<p>To this speech Bingley made no answer; but his sisters gave it their
+hearty assent, and indulged their mirth for some time at the expense of
+their dear friend’s vulgar relations.</p>
+
+<p>With a renewal of tenderness, however, they repaired to her room on
+leaving the dining-parlour, and sat with her till summoned to coffee.
+She was still very poorly, and Elizabeth would not quit her at all, till
+late in the evening, when she had the comfort of seeing her asleep, and
+when it appeared to her rather right than pleasant that she should go
+down stairs herself. On entering the drawing-room, she found the whole
+party at loo, and was immediately invited to join them; but suspecting
+them to be playing high, she declined it, and making her sister the
+excuse, said she would amuse herself, for the short time she could stay
+below, with a book. Mr. Hurst looked at her with astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you prefer reading to cards?” said he; “that is rather singular.”</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Eliza Bennet,” said Miss Bingley, “despises cards. She is a great
+reader, and has no pleasure in anything else.”</p>
+
+<p>“I deserve neither such praise nor such censure,” cried<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_49">{49}</a></span> Elizabeth; “I
+am <i>not</i> a great reader, and I have pleasure in many things.”</p>
+
+<p>“In nursing your sister I am sure you have pleasure,” said Bingley; “and
+I hope it will soon be increased by seeing her quite well.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth thanked him from her heart, and then walked towards a table
+where a few books were lying. He immediately offered to fetch her
+others; all that his library afforded.</p>
+
+<p>“And I wish my collection were larger for your benefit and my own
+credit; but I am an idle fellow; and though I have not many, I have more
+than I ever looked into.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth assured him that she could suit herself perfectly with those
+in the room.</p>
+
+<p>“I am astonished,” said Miss Bingley, “that my father should have left
+so small a collection of books. What a delightful library you have at
+Pemberley, Mr. Darcy!”</p>
+
+<p>“It ought to be good,” he replied: “it has been the work of many
+generations.”</p>
+
+<p>“And then you have added so much to it yourself—you are always buying
+books.”</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as
+these.”</p>
+
+<p>“Neglect! I am sure you neglect nothing that can add to the beauties of
+that noble place. Charles, when you build <i>your</i> house, I wish it may be
+half as delightful as Pemberley.”</p>
+
+<p>“I wish it may.”</p>
+
+<p>“But I would really advise you to make your purchase in that
+neighbourhood, and take Pemberley for a kind of model. There is not a
+finer county in England than Derbyshire.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_50">{50}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“With all my heart: I will buy Pemberley itself, if Darcy will sell it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am talking of possibilities, Charles.”</p>
+
+<p>“Upon my word, Caroline, I should think it more possible to get
+Pemberley by purchase than by imitation.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was so much caught by what passed, as to leave her very little
+attention for her book; and, soon laying it wholly aside, she drew near
+the card-table, and stationed herself between Mr. Bingley and his eldest
+sister, to observe the game.</p>
+
+<p>“Is Miss Darcy much grown since the spring?” said Miss Bingley: “will
+she be as tall as I am?”</p>
+
+<p>“I think she will. She is now about Miss Elizabeth Bennet’s height, or
+rather taller.”</p>
+
+<p>“How I long to see her again! I never met with anybody who delighted me
+so much. Such a countenance, such manners, and so extremely accomplished
+for her age! Her performance on the pianoforte is exquisite.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is amazing to me,” said Bingley, “how young ladies can have patience
+to be so very accomplished as they all are.”</p>
+
+<p>“All young ladies accomplished! My dear Charles, what do you mean?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, all of them, I think. They all paint tables, cover screens, and
+net purses. I scarcely know any one who cannot do all this; and I am
+sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time, without
+being informed that she was very accomplished.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your list of the common extent of accomplishments,” said Darcy, “has
+too much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no
+otherwise than by netting a purse or covering a screen; but I am very
+far<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_51">{51}</a></span> from agreeing with you in your estimation of ladies in general. I
+cannot boast of knowing more than half-a-dozen in the whole range of my
+acquaintance that are really accomplished.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nor I, I am sure,” said Miss Bingley.</p>
+
+<p>“Then,” observed Elizabeth, “you must comprehend a great deal in your
+idea of an accomplished woman.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; I do comprehend a great deal in it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, certainly,” cried his faithful assistant, “no one can be really
+esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met
+with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing,
+dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and, besides all
+this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of
+walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word
+will be but half deserved.”</p>
+
+<p>“All this she must possess,” added Darcy; “and to all she must yet add
+something more substantial in the improvement of her mind by extensive
+reading.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am no longer surprised at your knowing <i>only</i> six accomplished women.
+I rather wonder now at your knowing <i>any</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“Are you so severe upon your own sex as to doubt the possibility of all
+this?”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>I</i> never saw such a woman. <i>I</i> never saw such capacity, and taste, and
+application, and elegance, as you describe, united.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley both cried out against the injustice of her
+implied doubt, and were both protesting that they knew many women who
+answered this description, when Mr. Hurst called them to order, with<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_52">{52}</a></span>
+bitter complaints of their inattention to what was going forward. As all
+conversation was thereby at an end, Elizabeth soon afterwards left the
+room.</p>
+
+<p>“Eliza Bennet,” said Miss Bingley, when the door was closed on her, “is
+one of those young ladies who seek to recommend themselves to the other
+sex by undervaluing their own; and with many men, I daresay, it
+succeeds; but, in my opinion, it is a paltry device, a very mean art.”</p>
+
+<p>“Undoubtedly,” replied Darcy, to whom this remark was chiefly addressed,
+“there is meanness in <i>all</i> the arts which ladies sometimes condescend
+to employ for captivation. Whatever bears affinity to cunning is
+despicable.”</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bingley was not so entirely satisfied with this reply as to
+continue the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth joined them again only to say that her sister was worse, and
+that she could not leave her. Bingley urged Mr. Jones’s being sent for
+immediately; while his sisters, convinced that no country advice could
+be of any service, recommended an express to town for one of the most
+eminent physicians. This she would not hear of; but she was not so
+unwilling to comply with their brother’s proposal; and it was settled
+that Mr. Jones should be sent for early in the morning, if Miss Bennet
+were not decidedly better. Bingley was quite uncomfortable; his sisters
+declared that they were miserable. They solaced their wretchedness,
+however, by duets after supper; while he could find no better relief to
+his feelings than by giving his housekeeper directions that every
+possible attention might be paid to the sick lady and her sister.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_53">{53}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_IX"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_082_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_082_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+Mrs Bennet and her two youngest girls.
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="E" src="images/i_082_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_082_b.png"></span>LIZABETH passed the chief of the night in her sister’s room, and in the
+morning had the pleasure of being able to send a tolerable answer to the
+inquiries which she very early received from Mr. Bingley by a housemaid,
+and some time afterwards from the two elegant ladies who waited on his
+sisters. In spite of this amendment,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_54">{54}</a></span> however, she requested to have a
+note sent to Longbourn, desiring her mother to visit Jane, and form her
+own judgment of her situation. The note was immediately despatched, and
+its contents as quickly complied with. Mrs. Bennet, accompanied by her
+two youngest girls, reached Netherfield soon after the family breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>Had she found Jane in any apparent danger, Mrs. Bennet would have been
+very miserable; but being satisfied on seeing her that her illness was
+not alarming, she had no wish of her recovering immediately, as her
+restoration to health would probably remove her from Netherfield. She
+would not listen, therefore, to her daughter’s proposal of being carried
+home; neither did the apothecary, who arrived about the same time, think
+it at all advisable. After sitting a little while with Jane, on Miss
+Bingley’s appearance and invitation, the mother and three daughters all
+attended her into the breakfast parlour. Bingley met them with hopes
+that Mrs. Bennet had not found Miss Bennet worse than she expected.</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed I have, sir,” was her answer. “She is a great deal too ill to be
+moved. Mr. Jones says we must not think of moving her. We must trespass
+a little longer on your kindness.”</p>
+
+<p>“Removed!” cried Bingley. “It must not be thought of. My sister, I am
+sure, will not hear of her removal.”</p>
+
+<p>“You may depend upon it, madam,” said Miss Bingley, with cold civility,
+“that Miss Bennet shall receive every possible attention while she
+remains with us.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet was profuse in her acknowledgments.</p>
+
+<p>“I am sure,” she added, “if it was not for such good friends, I do not
+know what would become of her, for she is very ill indeed, and suffers a
+vast deal, though with the greatest patience in the world, which is
+always<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_55">{55}</a></span> the way with her, for she has, without exception, the sweetest
+temper I ever met with. I often tell my other girls they are nothing to
+<i>her</i>. You have a sweet room here, Mr. Bingley, and a charming prospect
+over that gravel walk. I do not know a place in the country that is
+equal to Netherfield. You will not think of quitting it in a hurry, I
+hope, though you have but a short lease.”</p>
+
+<p>“Whatever I do is done in a hurry,” replied he; “and therefore if I
+should resolve to quit Netherfield, I should probably be off in five
+minutes. At present, however, I consider myself as quite fixed here.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is exactly what I should have supposed of you,” said Elizabeth.</p>
+
+<p>“You begin to comprehend me, do you?” cried he, turning towards her.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh yes—I understand you perfectly.”</p>
+
+<p>“I wish I might take this for a compliment; but to be so easily seen
+through, I am afraid, is pitiful.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is as it happens. It does not necessarily follow that a deep,
+intricate character is more or less estimable than such a one as yours.”</p>
+
+<p>“Lizzy,” cried her mother, “remember where you are, and do not run on in
+the wild manner that you are suffered to do at home.”</p>
+
+<p>“I did not know before,” continued Bingley, immediately, “that you were
+a studier of character. It must be an amusing study.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; but intricate characters are the <i>most</i> amusing. They have at
+least that advantage.”</p>
+
+<p>“The country,” said Darcy, “can in general supply but few subjects for
+such a study. In a country neighbourhood you move in a very confined and
+unvarying society.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_56">{56}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be
+observed in them for ever.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, indeed,” cried Mrs. Bennet, offended by his manner of mentioning a
+country neighbourhood. “I assure you there is quite as much of <i>that</i>
+going on in the country as in town.”</p>
+
+<p>Everybody was surprised; and Darcy, after looking at her for a moment,
+turned silently away. Mrs. Bennet, who fancied she had gained a complete
+victory over him, continued her triumph,—</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot see that London has any great advantage over the country, for
+my part, except the shops and public places. The country is a vast deal
+pleasanter, is not it, Mr. Bingley?”</p>
+
+<p>“When I am in the country,” he replied, “I never wish to leave it; and
+when I am in town, it is pretty much the same. They have each their
+advantages, and I can be equally happy in either.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ay, that is because you have the right disposition. But that
+gentleman,” looking at Darcy, “seemed to think the country was nothing
+at all.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed, mamma, you are mistaken,” said Elizabeth, blushing for her
+mother. “You quite mistook Mr. Darcy. He only meant that there was not
+such a variety of people to be met with in the country as in town, which
+you must acknowledge to be true.”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly, my dear, nobody said there were; but as to not meeting with
+many people in this neighbourhood, I believe there are few
+neighbourhoods larger. I know we dine with four-and-twenty families.”</p>
+
+<p>Nothing but concern for Elizabeth could enable Bingley to keep his
+countenance. His sister was less delicate, and directed her eye towards
+Mr. Darcy with a<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_57">{57}</a></span> very expressive smile. Elizabeth, for the sake of
+saying something that might turn her mother’s thoughts, now asked her if
+Charlotte Lucas had been at Longbourn since <i>her</i> coming away.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, she called yesterday with her father. What an agreeable man Sir
+William is, Mr. Bingley—is not he? so much the man of fashion! so
+genteel and so easy! He has always something to say to everybody. <i>That</i>
+is my idea of good breeding; and those persons who fancy themselves very
+important and never open their mouths quite mistake the matter.”</p>
+
+<p>“Did Charlotte dine with you?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, she would go home. I fancy she was wanted about the mince-pies. For
+my part, Mr. Bingley, <i>I</i> always keep servants that can do their own
+work; <i>my</i> daughters are brought up differently. But everybody is to
+judge for themselves, and the Lucases are a very good sort of girls, I
+assure you. It is a pity they are not handsome! Not that <i>I</i> think
+Charlotte so <i>very</i> plain; but then she is our particular friend.”</p>
+
+<p>“She seems a very pleasant young woman,” said Bingley.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh dear, yes; but you must own she is very plain. Lady Lucas herself
+has often said so, and envied me Jane’s beauty. I do not like to boast
+of my own child; but to be sure, Jane—one does not often see anybody
+better looking. It is what everybody says. I do not trust my own
+partiality. When she was only fifteen there was a gentleman at my
+brother Gardiner’s in town so much in love with her, that my
+sister-in-law was sure he would make her an offer before we came away.
+But, however, he did not. Perhaps he thought her too young. However, he
+wrote some verses on her, and very pretty they were.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_58">{58}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“And so ended his affection,” said Elizabeth, impatiently. “There has
+been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. I wonder who first
+discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!”</p>
+
+<p>“I have been used to consider poetry as the <i>food</i> of love,” said Darcy.</p>
+
+<p>“Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is
+strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I
+am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.”</p>
+
+<p>Darcy only smiled; and the general pause which ensued made Elizabeth
+tremble lest her mother should be exposing herself again. She longed to
+speak, but could think of nothing to say; and after a short silence Mrs.
+Bennet began repeating her thanks to Mr. Bingley for his kindness to
+Jane, with an apology for troubling him also with Lizzy. Mr. Bingley was
+unaffectedly civil in his answer, and forced his younger sister to be
+civil also, and say what the occasion required. She performed her part,
+indeed, without much graciousness, but Mrs. Bennet was satisfied, and
+soon afterwards ordered her carriage. Upon this signal, the youngest of
+her daughters put herself forward. The two girls had been whispering to
+each other during the whole visit; and the result of it was, that the
+youngest should tax Mr. Bingley with having promised on his first coming
+into the country to give a ball at Netherfield.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia was a stout, well-grown girl of fifteen, with a fine complexion
+and good-humoured countenance; a favourite with her mother, whose
+affection had brought her into public at an early age. She had high
+animal spirits, and a sort of natural self-consequence, which the
+attentions of the officers, to whom her uncle’s good<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_59">{59}</a></span> dinners and her
+own easy manners recommended her, had increased into assurance. She was
+very equal, therefore, to address Mr. Bingley on the subject of the
+ball, and abruptly reminded him of his promise; adding, that it would be
+the most shameful thing in the world if he did not keep it. His answer
+to this sudden attack was delightful to her mother’s ear.</p>
+
+<p>“I am perfectly ready, I assure you, to keep my engagement; and, when
+your sister is recovered, you shall, if you please, name the very day of
+the ball. But you would not wish to be dancing while she is ill?”</p>
+
+<p>Lydia declared herself satisfied. “Oh yes—it would be much better to
+wait till Jane was well; and by that time, most likely, Captain Carter
+would be at Meryton again. And when you have given <i>your</i> ball,” she
+added, “I shall insist on their giving one also. I shall tell Colonel
+Forster it will be quite a shame if he does not.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet and her daughters then departed, and Elizabeth returned
+instantly to Jane, leaving her own and her relations’ behaviour to the
+remarks of the two ladies and Mr. Darcy; the latter of whom, however,
+could not be prevailed on to join in their censure of <i>her</i>, in spite of
+all Miss Bingley’s witticisms on <i>fine eyes</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_60">{60}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_X"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_089_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_089_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER X.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="T" src="images/i_089_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_089_b.png"></span>HE day passed much as the day before had done. Mrs. Hurst and Miss
+Bingley had spent some hours of the morning with the invalid, who
+continued, though slowly, to mend; and, in the evening, Elizabeth joined
+their party in the drawing-room. The loo table, however, did not appear.
+Mr. Darcy was writing, and Miss Bingley, seated near him, was watching
+the progress of his letter, and repeatedly calling off his attention by
+messages to his sister. Mr. Hurst and Mr. Bingley were at piquet, and
+Mrs. Hurst was observing their game.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth took up some needlework, and was sufficiently amused in
+attending to what passed between Darcy and his companion. The perpetual
+commendations of the lady either on his hand-writing, or on the evenness
+of his lines, or on the length of his letter, with the perfect unconcern
+with which her praises were received, formed a curious dialogue, and was
+exactly in unison with her opinion of each.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_61">{61}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“How delighted Miss Darcy will be to receive such a letter!”</p>
+
+<p>He made no answer.</p>
+
+<p>“You write uncommonly fast.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are mistaken. I write rather slowly.”</p>
+
+<p>“How many letters you must have occasion to write in the course of a
+year! Letters of business, too! How odious I should think them!”</p>
+
+<p>“It is fortunate, then, that they fall to my lot instead of to yours.”</p>
+
+<p>“Pray tell your sister that I long to see her.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have already told her so once, by your desire.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am afraid you do not like your pen. Let me mend it for you. I mend
+pens remarkably well.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you—but I always mend my own.”</p>
+
+<p>“How can you contrive to write so even?”</p>
+
+<p>He was silent.</p>
+
+<p>“Tell your sister I am delighted to hear of her improvement on the harp,
+and pray let her know that I am quite in raptures with her beautiful
+little design for a table, and I think it infinitely superior to Miss
+Grantley’s.”</p>
+
+<p>“Will you give me leave to defer your raptures till I write again? At
+present I have not room to do them justice.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, it is of no consequence. I shall see her in January. But do you
+always write such charming long letters to her, Mr. Darcy?”</p>
+
+<p>“They are generally long; but whether always charming, it is not for me
+to determine.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is a rule with me, that a person who can write a long letter with
+ease cannot write ill.”</p>
+
+<p>“That will not do for a compliment to Darcy, Caroline,” cried her
+brother, “because he does <i>not</i> write with ease.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_62">{62}</a></span> He studies too much
+for words of four syllables. Do not you, Darcy?”</p>
+
+<p>“My style of writing is very different from yours.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” cried Miss Bingley, “Charles writes in the most careless way
+imaginable. He leaves out half his words, and blots the rest.”</p>
+
+<p>“My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them; by which
+means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your humility, Mr. Bingley,” said Elizabeth, “must disarm reproof.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing is more deceitful,” said Darcy, “than the appearance of
+humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an
+indirect boast.”</p>
+
+<p>“And which of the two do you call <i>my</i> little recent piece of modesty?”</p>
+
+<p>“The indirect boast; for you are really proud of your defects in
+writing, because you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of
+thought and carelessness of execution, which, if not estimable, you
+think at least highly interesting. The power of doing anything with
+quickness is always much prized by the possessor, and often without any
+attention to the imperfection of the performance. When you told Mrs.
+Bennet this morning, that if you ever resolved on quitting Netherfield
+you should be gone in five minutes, you meant it to be a sort of
+panegyric, of compliment to yourself; and yet what is there so very
+laudable in a precipitance which must leave very necessary business
+undone, and can be of no real advantage to yourself or anyone else?”</p>
+
+<p>“Nay,” cried Bingley, “this is too much, to remember at night all the
+foolish things that were said in the morning. And yet, upon my honour, I
+believed what I<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_63">{63}</a></span> said of myself to be true, and I believe it at this
+moment. At least, therefore, I did not assume the character of needless
+precipitance merely to show off before the ladies.”</p>
+
+<p>“I daresay you believed it; but I am by no means convinced that you
+would be gone with such celerity. Your conduct would be quite as
+dependent on chance as that of any man I know; and if, as you were
+mounting your horse, a friend were to say, ‘Bingley, you had better stay
+till next week,’ you would probably do it—you would probably not
+go—and, at another word, might stay a month.”</p>
+
+<p>“You have only proved by this,” cried Elizabeth, “that Mr. Bingley did
+not do justice to his own disposition. You have shown him off now much
+more than he did himself.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am exceedingly gratified,” said Bingley, “by your converting what my
+friend says into a compliment on the sweetness of my temper. But I am
+afraid you are giving it a turn which that gentleman did by no means
+intend; for he would certainly think the better of me if, under such a
+circumstance, I were to give a flat denial, and ride off as fast as I
+could.”</p>
+
+<p>“Would Mr. Darcy then consider the rashness of your original intention
+as atoned for by your obstinacy in adhering to it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Upon my word, I cannot exactly explain the matter—Darcy must speak for
+himself.”</p>
+
+<p>“You expect me to account for opinions which you choose to call mine,
+but which I have never acknowledged. Allowing the case, however, to
+stand according to your representation, you must remember, Miss Bennet,
+that the friend who is supposed to desire his return to the house,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_64">{64}</a></span> and
+the delay of his plan, has merely desired it, asked it without offering
+one argument in favour of its propriety.”</p>
+
+<p>“To yield readily—easily—to the <i>persuasion</i> of a friend is no merit
+with you.”</p>
+
+<p>“To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of
+either.”</p>
+
+<p>“You appear to me, Mr. Darcy, to allow nothing for the influence of
+friendship and affection. A regard for the requester would often make
+one readily yield to a request, without waiting for arguments to reason
+one into it. I am not particularly speaking of such a case as you have
+supposed about Mr. Bingley. We may as well wait, perhaps, till the
+circumstance occurs, before we discuss the discretion of his behaviour
+thereupon. But in general and ordinary cases, between friend and friend,
+where one of them is desired by the other to change a resolution of no
+very great moment, should you think ill of that person for complying
+with the desire, without waiting to be argued into it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Will it not be advisable, before we proceed on this subject, to arrange
+with rather more precision the degree of importance which is to
+appertain to this request, as well as the degree of intimacy subsisting
+between the parties?”</p>
+
+<p>“By all means,” cried Bingley; “let us hear all the particulars, not
+forgetting their comparative height and size, for that will have more
+weight in the argument, Miss Bennet, than you may be aware of. I assure
+you that if Darcy were not such a great tall fellow, in comparison with
+myself, I should not pay him half so much deference. I declare I do not
+know a more awful object than Darcy on particular occasions, and in<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_65">{65}</a></span>
+particular places; at his own house especially, and of a Sunday evening,
+when he has nothing to do.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Darcy smiled; but Elizabeth thought she could perceive that he was
+rather offended, and therefore checked her laugh. Miss Bingley warmly
+resented the indignity he had received, in an expostulation with her
+brother for talking such nonsense.</p>
+
+<p>“I see your design, Bingley,” said his friend. “You dislike an argument,
+and want to silence this.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps I do. Arguments are too much like disputes. If you and Miss
+Bennet will defer yours till I am out of the room, I shall be very
+thankful; and then you may say whatever you like of me.”</p>
+
+<p>“What you ask,” said Elizabeth, “is no sacrifice on my side; and Mr.
+Darcy had much better finish his letter.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Darcy took her advice, and did finish his letter.</p>
+
+<p>When that business was over, he applied to Miss Bingley and Elizabeth
+for the indulgence of some music. Miss Bingley moved with alacrity to
+the pianoforte, and after a polite request that Elizabeth would lead the
+way, which the other as politely and more earnestly negatived, she
+seated herself.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Hurst sang with her sister; and while they were thus employed,
+Elizabeth could not help observing, as she turned over some music-books
+that lay on the instrument, how frequently Mr. Darcy’s eyes were fixed
+on her. She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of
+admiration to so great a man, and yet that he should look at her because
+he disliked her was still more strange. She could only imagine, however,
+at last, that she drew his notice because there was something about her
+more wrong and reprehensible, according to his ideas of right, than in
+any other person present.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_66">{66}</a></span> The supposition did not pain her. She liked
+him too little to care for his approbation.</p>
+
+<p>After playing some Italian songs, Miss Bingley varied the charm by a
+lively Scotch air; and soon afterwards Mr. Darcy, drawing near
+Elizabeth, said to her,—</p>
+
+<p>“Do you not feel a great inclination, Miss Bennet, to seize such an
+opportunity of dancing a reel?”</p>
+
+<p>She smiled, but made no answer. He repeated the question, with some
+surprise at her silence.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” said she, “I heard you before; but I could not immediately
+determine what to say in reply. You wanted me, I know, to say ‘Yes,’
+that you might have the pleasure of despising my taste; but I always
+delight in overthrowing those kind of schemes, and cheating a person of
+their premeditated contempt. I have, therefore, made up my mind to tell
+you that I do not want to dance a reel at all; and now despise me if you
+dare.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed I do not dare.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his
+gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her
+manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody, and Darcy had
+never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her. He really
+believed that, were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he
+should be in some danger.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bingley saw, or suspected, enough to be jealous; and her great
+anxiety for the recovery of her dear friend Jane received some
+assistance from her desire of getting rid of Elizabeth.</p>
+
+<p>She often tried to provoke Darcy into disliking her guest, by talking of
+their supposed marriage, and planning his happiness in such an alliance.</p>
+
+<p>“I hope,” said she, as they were walking together in<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_67">{67}</a></span> the shrubbery the
+next day, “you will give your mother-in-law a few hints, when this
+desirable event takes place, as to the advantage of holding her tongue;
+and if you can compass it, to cure the younger girls of running after
+the officers. And, if I may mention so delicate a subject, endeavour to
+check that little something, bordering on conceit and impertinence,
+which your lady possesses.”</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 470px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption9">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_096.jpg" width="470" id="img_images_i_096.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption9">
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“No, no; stay where you are”</p></div>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Have you anything else to propose for my domestic felicity?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_68">{68}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh yes. Do let the portraits of your uncle and aunt Philips be placed
+in the gallery at Pemberley. Put them next to your great-uncle the
+judge. They are in the same profession, you know, only in different
+lines. As for your Elizabeth’s picture, you must not attempt to have it
+taken, for what painter could do justice to those beautiful eyes?”</p>
+
+<p>“It would not be easy, indeed, to catch their expression; but their
+colour and shape, and the eyelashes, so remarkably fine, might be
+copied.”</p>
+
+<p>At that moment they were met from another walk by Mrs. Hurst and
+Elizabeth herself.</p>
+
+<p>“I did not know that you intended to walk,” said Miss Bingley, in some
+confusion, lest they had been overheard.</p>
+
+<p>“You used us abominably ill,” answered Mrs. Hurst, “running away without
+telling us that you were coming out.”</p>
+
+<p>Then taking the disengaged arm of Mr. Darcy, she left Elizabeth to walk
+by herself. The path just admitted three. Mr. Darcy felt their rudeness,
+and immediately said,—</p>
+
+<p>“This walk is not wide enough for our party. We had better go into the
+avenue.”</p>
+
+<p>But Elizabeth, who had not the least inclination to remain with them,
+laughingly answered,—</p>
+
+<p>“No, no; stay where you are. You are charmingly grouped, and appear to
+uncommon advantage. The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a
+fourth. Good-bye.”</p>
+
+<p>She then ran gaily off, rejoicing, as she rambled about, in the hope of
+being at home again in a day or two. Jane was already so much recovered
+as to intend leaving her room for a couple of hours that evening.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_69">{69}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XI"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_098_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_098_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+Piling up the fire.
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XI.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="W" src="images/i_098_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_098_b.png"></span>HEN the ladies removed after dinner Elizabeth ran up to her sister, and
+seeing her well guarded from cold, attended her into the drawing-room,
+where she was welcomed by her two friends with many professions of
+pleasure; and Elizabeth had never seen them so agreeable as they were
+during the hour which passed before the gentlemen appeared. Their powers
+of conversation were considerable. They could describe an entertainment
+with accuracy, relate an anecdote with humour, and laugh at their
+acquaintance with spirit.</p>
+
+<p>But when the gentlemen entered, Jane was no longer<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_70">{70}</a></span> the first object;
+Miss Bingley’s eyes were instantly turned towards Darcy, and she had
+something to say to him before he had advanced many steps. He addressed
+himself directly to Miss Bennet with a polite congratulation; Mr. Hurst
+also made her a slight bow, and said he was “very glad;” but diffuseness
+and warmth remained for Bingley’s salutation. He was full of joy and
+attention. The first half hour was spent in piling up the fire, lest she
+should suffer from the change of room; and she removed, at his desire,
+to the other side of the fireplace, that she might be farther from the
+door. He then sat down by her, and talked scarcely to anyone else.
+Elizabeth, at work in the opposite corner, saw it all with great
+delight.</p>
+
+<p>When tea was over Mr. Hurst reminded his sister-in-law of the
+card-table—but in vain. She had obtained private intelligence that Mr.
+Darcy did not wish for cards, and Mr. Hurst soon found even his open
+petition rejected. She assured him that no one intended to play, and the
+silence of the whole party on the subject seemed to justify her. Mr.
+Hurst had, therefore, nothing to do but to stretch himself on one of the
+sofas and go to sleep. Darcy took up a book. Miss Bingley did the same;
+and Mrs. Hurst, principally occupied in playing with her bracelets and
+rings, joined now and then in her brother’s conversation with Miss
+Bennet.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bingley’s attention was quite as much engaged in watching Mr.
+Darcy’s progress through <i>his</i> book, as in reading her own; and she was
+perpetually either making some inquiry, or looking at his page. She
+could not win him, however, to any conversation; he merely answered her
+question and read on. At length, quite exhausted by the attempt to be
+amused with her own book, which she<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_71">{71}</a></span> had only chosen because it was the
+second volume of his, she gave a great yawn and said, “How pleasant it
+is to spend an evening in this way! I declare, after all, there is no
+enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a
+book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not
+an excellent library.”</p>
+
+<p>No one made any reply. She then yawned again, threw aside her book, and
+cast her eyes round the room in quest of some amusement; when, hearing
+her brother mentioning a ball to Miss Bennet, she turned suddenly
+towards him and said,—</p>
+
+<p>“By the bye Charles, are you really serious in meditating a dance at
+Netherfield? I would advise you, before you determine on it, to consult
+the wishes of the present party; I am much mistaken if there are not
+some among us to whom a ball would be rather a punishment than a
+pleasure.”</p>
+
+<p>“If you mean Darcy,” cried her brother, “he may go to bed, if he
+chooses, before it begins; but as for the ball, it is quite a settled
+thing, and as soon as Nicholls has made white soup enough I shall send
+round my cards.”</p>
+
+<p>“I should like balls infinitely better,” she replied, “if they were
+carried on in a different manner; but there is something insufferably
+tedious in the usual process of such a meeting. It would surely be much
+more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the
+day.”</p>
+
+<p>“Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say; but it would not be
+near so much like a ball.”</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bingley made no answer, and soon afterwards got up and walked about
+the room. Her figure was elegant, and she walked well; but Darcy, at
+whom it was<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_72">{72}</a></span> all aimed, was still inflexibly studious. In the
+desperation of her feelings, she resolved on one effort more; and,
+turning to Elizabeth, said,—</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Eliza Bennet, let me persuade you to follow my example, and take a
+turn about the room. I assure you it is very refreshing after sitting so
+long in one attitude.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was surprised, but agreed to it immediately. Miss Bingley
+succeeded no less in the real object of her civility: Mr. Darcy looked
+up. He was as much awake to the novelty of attention in that quarter as
+Elizabeth herself could be, and unconsciously closed his book. He was
+directly invited to join their party, but he declined it, observing that
+he could imagine but two motives for their choosing to walk up and down
+the room together, with either of which motives his joining them would
+interfere. What could he mean? She was dying to know what could be his
+meaning—and asked Elizabeth whether she could at all understand him.</p>
+
+<p>“Not at all,” was her answer; “but, depend upon it, he means to be
+severe on us, and our surest way of disappointing him will be to ask
+nothing about it.”</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bingley, however, was incapable of disappointing Mr. Darcy in
+anything, and persevered, therefore, in requiring an explanation of his
+two motives.</p>
+
+<p>“I have not the smallest objection to explaining them,” said he, as soon
+as she allowed him to speak. “You either choose this method of passing
+the evening because you are in each other’s confidence, and have secret
+affairs to discuss, or because you are conscious that your figures
+appear to the greatest advantage in walking: if the first, I should be
+completely in your way; and if the second, I can admire you much better
+as I sit by the fire.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, shocking!” cried Miss Bingley. “I never heard<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_73">{73}</a></span> anything so
+abominable. How shall we punish him for such a speech?”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing so easy, if you have but the inclination,” said Elizabeth. “We
+can all plague and punish one another. Tease him—laugh at him. Intimate
+as you are, you must know how it is to be done.”</p>
+
+<p>“But upon my honour I do <i>not</i>. I do assure you that my intimacy has not
+yet taught me <i>that</i>. Tease calmness of temper and presence of mind! No,
+no; I feel he may defy us there. And as to laughter, we will not expose
+ourselves, if you please, by attempting to laugh without a subject. Mr.
+Darcy may hug himself.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Darcy is not to be laughed at!” cried Elizabeth. “That is an
+uncommon advantage, and uncommon I hope it will continue, for it would
+be a great loss to <i>me</i> to have many such acquaintance. I dearly love a
+laugh.”</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Bingley,” said he, “has given me credit for more than can be. The
+wisest and best of men,—nay, the wisest and best of their actions,—may
+be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a
+joke.”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly,” replied Elizabeth, “there are such people, but I hope I am
+not one of <i>them</i>. I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies
+and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, <i>do</i> divert me, I own, and I
+laugh at them whenever I can. But these, I suppose, are precisely what
+you are without.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps that is not possible for anyone. But it has been the study of
+my life to avoid those weaknesses which often expose a strong
+understanding to ridicule.”</p>
+
+<p>“Such as vanity and pride.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride—where there is a real
+superiority of mind—pride will be always under good regulation.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_74">{74}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth turned away to hide a smile.</p>
+
+<p>“Your examination of Mr. Darcy is over, I presume,” said Miss Bingley;
+“and pray what is the result?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am perfectly convinced by it that Mr. Darcy has no defect. He owns it
+himself without disguise.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” said Darcy, “I have made no such pretension. I have faults enough,
+but they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch
+for. It is, I believe, too little yielding; certainly too little for the
+convenience of the world. I cannot forget the follies and vices of
+others so soon as I ought, nor their offences against myself. My
+feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper
+would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost is lost for
+ever.”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>That</i> is a failing, indeed!” cried Elizabeth. “Implacable resentment
+<i>is</i> a shade in a character. But you have chosen your fault well. I
+really cannot <i>laugh</i> at it. You are safe from me.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular
+evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.”</p>
+
+<p>“And <i>your</i> defect is a propensity to hate everybody.”</p>
+
+<p>“And yours,” he replied, with a smile, “is wilfully to misunderstand
+them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do let us have a little music,” cried Miss Bingley, tired of a
+conversation in which she had no share. “Louisa, you will not mind my
+waking Mr. Hurst.”</p>
+
+<p>Her sister made not the smallest objection, and the pianoforte was
+opened; and Darcy, after a few moments’ recollection, was not sorry for
+it. He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_75">{75}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_104_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_104_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="I" src="images/i_104_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_104_b.png"></span>N consequence of an agreement between the sisters, Elizabeth wrote the
+next morning to her mother, to beg that the carriage might be sent for
+them in the course of the day. But Mrs. Bennet, who had calculated on
+her daughters remaining at Netherfield till the following Tuesday, which
+would exactly finish Jane’s week, could not bring herself to receive
+them with pleasure before. Her answer, therefore, was not propitious, at
+least not to Elizabeth’s wishes, for she was impatient to get home. Mrs.
+Bennet sent them word that they could not possibly have the carriage
+before Tuesday; and in her postscript it was added, that if Mr. Bingley
+and his sister pressed them to stay longer, she could spare them very
+well. Against staying longer, however, Elizabeth was positively<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_76">{76}</a></span>
+resolved—nor did she much expect it would be asked; and fearful, on the
+contrary, of being considered as intruding themselves needlessly long,
+she urged Jane to borrow Mr. Bingley’s carriage immediately, and at
+length it was settled that their original design of leaving Netherfield
+that morning should be mentioned, and the request made.</p>
+
+<p>The communication excited many professions of concern; and enough was
+said of wishing them to stay at least till the following day to work on
+Jane; and till the morrow their going was deferred. Miss Bingley was
+then sorry that she had proposed the delay; for her jealousy and dislike
+of one sister much exceeded her affection for the other.</p>
+
+<p>The master of the house heard with real sorrow that they were to go so
+soon, and repeatedly tried to persuade Miss Bennet that it would not be
+safe for her—that she was not enough recovered; but Jane was firm where
+she felt herself to be right.</p>
+
+<p>To Mr. Darcy it was welcome intelligence: Elizabeth had been at
+Netherfield long enough. She attracted him more than he liked; and Miss
+Bingley was uncivil to <i>her</i> and more teasing than usual to himself. He
+wisely resolved to be particularly careful that no sign of admiration
+should <i>now</i> escape him—nothing that could elevate her with the hope of
+influencing his felicity; sensible that, if such an idea had been
+suggested, his behaviour during the last day must have material weight
+in confirming or crushing it. Steady to his purpose, he scarcely spoke
+ten words to her through the whole of Saturday: and though they were at
+one time left by themselves for half an hour, he adhered most
+conscientiously to his book, and would not even look at her.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_77">{77}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>On Sunday, after morning service, the separation, so agreeable to almost
+all, took place. Miss Bingley’s civility to Elizabeth increased at last
+very rapidly, as well as her affection for Jane; and when they parted,
+after assuring the latter of the pleasure it would always give her to
+see her either at Longbourn or Netherfield, and embracing her most
+tenderly, she even shook hands with the former. Elizabeth took leave of
+the whole party in the liveliest spirits.</p>
+
+<p>They were not welcomed home very cordially by their mother. Mrs. Bennet
+wondered at their coming, and thought them very wrong to give so much
+trouble, and was sure Jane would have caught cold again. But their
+father, though very laconic in his expressions of pleasure, was really
+glad to see them; he had felt their importance in the family circle. The
+evening conversation, when they were all assembled, had lost much of its
+animation, and almost all its sense, by the absence of Jane and
+Elizabeth.</p>
+
+<p>They found Mary, as usual, deep in the study of thorough bass and human
+nature; and had some new extracts to admire and some new observations of
+threadbare morality to listen to. Catherine and Lydia had information
+for them of a different sort. Much had been done, and much had been said
+in the regiment since the preceding Wednesday; several of the officers
+had dined lately with their uncle; a private had been flogged; and it
+had actually been hinted that Colonel Forster was going to be married.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_78">{78}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_107_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_107_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<p class="nind">
+<span class="letra">
+<img alt="“I" src="images/i_107_b.png" width="70" id="img_images_i_107_b.png"></span>
+hope, my dear,” said Mr. Bennet to his wife, as they were at
+breakfast the next morning, “that you have ordered a good dinner to-day,
+because I have reason to expect an addition to our family party.”</p>
+
+<p>“Who do you mean, my dear? I know of nobody that is coming, I am sure,
+unless Charlotte Lucas should happen to call in; and I hope <i>my</i> dinners
+are good enough for her. I do not believe she often sees such at home.”</p>
+
+<p>“The person of whom I speak is a gentleman and a stranger.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet’s eyes sparkled. “A gentleman and a stranger! It is Mr.
+Bingley, I am sure. Why, Jane—you never dropped a word of this—you sly
+thing! Well, I am sure I shall be extremely glad to see Mr. Bingley.
+But—good Lord! how unlucky! there is not a bit of fish to be got
+to-day. Lydia, my love, ring the bell. I must speak to Hill this
+moment.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is <i>not</i> Mr. Bingley,” said her husband; “it is a person whom I
+never saw in the whole course of my life.”</p>
+
+<p>This roused a general astonishment; and he had the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_79">{79}</a></span> pleasure of being
+eagerly questioned by his wife and five daughters at once.</p>
+
+<p>After amusing himself some time with their curiosity, he thus
+explained:—“About a month ago I received this letter, and about a
+fortnight ago I answered it; for I thought it a case of some delicacy,
+and requiring early attention. It is from my cousin, Mr. Collins, who,
+when I am dead, may turn you all out of this house as soon as he
+pleases.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, my dear,” cried his wife, “I cannot bear to hear that mentioned.
+Pray do not talk of that odious man. I do think it is the hardest thing
+in the world, that your estate should be entailed away from your own
+children; and I am sure, if I had been you, I should have tried long ago
+to do something or other about it.”</p>
+
+<p>Jane and Elizabeth attempted to explain to her the nature of an entail.
+They had often attempted it before: but it was a subject on which Mrs.
+Bennet was beyond the reach of reason; and she continued to rail
+bitterly against the cruelty of settling an estate away from a family of
+five daughters, in favour of a man whom nobody cared anything about.</p>
+
+<p>“It certainly is a most iniquitous affair,” said Mr. Bennet; “and
+nothing can clear Mr. Collins from the guilt of inheriting Longbourn.
+But if you will listen to his letter, you may, perhaps, be a little
+softened by his manner of expressing himself.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, that I am sure I shall not: and I think it was very impertinent of
+him to write to you at all, and very hypocritical. I hate such false
+friends. Why could not he keep on quarrelling with you, as his father
+did before him?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, indeed, he does seem to have had some filial scruples on that
+head, as you will hear.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_80">{80}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="rt">“Hunsford, near Westerham, Kent, <i>15th October</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="nind">
+“Dear Sir,<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>“The disagreement subsisting between yourself and my late honoured
+father always gave me much uneasiness; and, since I have had the
+misfortune to lose him, I have frequently wished to heal the
+breach: but, for some time, I was kept back by my own doubts,
+fearing lest it might seem disrespectful to his memory for me to be
+on good terms with anyone with whom it had always pleased him to be
+at variance.”—‘There, Mrs. Bennet.’—“My mind, however, is now
+made up on the subject; for, having received ordination at Easter,
+I have been so fortunate as to be distinguished by the patronage of
+the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, widow of Sir Lewis
+de Bourgh, whose bounty and beneficence has preferred me to the
+valuable rectory of this parish, where it shall be my earnest
+endeavour to demean myself with grateful respect towards her
+Ladyship, and be ever ready to perform those rites and ceremonies
+which are instituted by the Church of England. As a clergyman,
+moreover, I feel it my duty to promote and establish the blessing
+of peace in all families within the reach of my influence; and on
+these grounds I flatter myself that my present overtures of
+good-will are highly commendable, and that the circumstance of my
+being next in the entail of Longbourn estate will be kindly
+overlooked on your side, and not lead you to reject the offered
+olive branch. I cannot be otherwise than concerned at being the
+means of injuring your amiable daughters, and beg leave to
+apologize for it, as well as to assure you of my readiness to make
+them every possible amends; but of this hereafter. If you should
+have no objection to receive me into<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_81">{81}</a></span> your house, I propose myself
+the satisfaction of waiting on you and your family, Monday,
+November 18th, by four o’clock, and shall probably trespass on your
+hospitality till the Saturday se’nnight following, which I can do
+without any inconvenience, as Lady Catherine is far from objecting
+to my occasional absence on a Sunday, provided that some other
+clergyman is engaged to do the duty of the day. I remain, dear sir,
+with respectful compliments to your lady and daughters, your
+well-wisher and friend,</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+“<span class="smcap">William Collins</span>.”<br>
+</p></div>
+
+<p>“At four o’clock, therefore, we may expect this peace-making gentleman,”
+said Mr. Bennet, as he folded up the letter. “He seems to be a most
+conscientious and polite young man, upon my word; and, I doubt not, will
+prove a valuable acquaintance, especially if Lady Catherine should be so
+indulgent as to let him come to us again.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is some sense in what he says about the girls, however; and, if
+he is disposed to make them any amends, I shall not be the person to
+discourage him.”</p>
+
+<p>“Though it is difficult,” said Jane, “to guess in what way he can mean
+to make us the atonement he thinks our due, the wish is certainly to his
+credit.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was chiefly struck with his extraordinary deference for Lady
+Catherine, and his kind intention of christening, marrying, and burying
+his parishioners whenever it were required.</p>
+
+<p>“He must be an oddity, I think,” said she. “I cannot make him out. There
+is something very pompous in his style. And what can he mean by
+apologizing for being next in the entail? We cannot suppose he would
+help it, if he could. Can he be a sensible man, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, my dear; I think not. I have great hopes of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_82">{82}</a></span> finding him quite the
+reverse. There is a mixture of servility and self-importance in his
+letter which promises well. I am impatient to see him.”</p>
+
+<p>“In point of composition,” said Mary, “his letter does not seem
+defective. The idea of the olive branch perhaps is not wholly new, yet I
+think it is well expressed.”</p>
+
+<p>To Catherine and Lydia neither the letter nor its writer were in any
+degree interesting. It was next to impossible that their cousin should
+come in a scarlet coat, and it was now some weeks since they had
+received pleasure from the society of a man in any other colour. As for
+their mother, Mr. Collins’s letter had done away much of her ill-will,
+and she was preparing to see him with a degree of composure which
+astonished her husband and daughters.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Collins was punctual to his time, and was received with great
+politeness by the whole family. Mr. Bennet indeed said little; but the
+ladies were ready enough to talk, and Mr. Collins seemed neither in need
+of encouragement, nor inclined to be silent himself. He was a tall,
+heavy-looking young man of five-and-twenty. His air was grave and
+stately, and his manners were very formal. He had not been long seated
+before he complimented Mrs. Bennet on having so fine a family of
+daughters, said he had heard much of their beauty, but that, in this
+instance, fame had fallen short of the truth; and added, that he did not
+doubt her seeing them all in due time well disposed of in marriage. This
+gallantry was not much to the taste of some of his hearers; but Mrs.
+Bennet, who quarrelled with no compliments, answered most readily,—</p>
+
+<p>“You are very kind, sir, I am sure; and I wish with all<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_83">{83}</a></span> my heart it may
+prove so; for else they will be destitute enough. Things are settled so
+oddly.”</p>
+
+<p>“You allude, perhaps, to the entail of this estate.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, sir, I do indeed. It is a grievous affair to my poor girls, you
+must confess. Not that I mean to find fault with <i>you</i>, for such things,
+I know, are all chance in this world. There is no knowing how estates
+will go when once they come to be entailed.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am very sensible, madam, of the hardship to my fair cousins, and
+could say much on the subject, but that I am cautious of appearing
+forward and precipitate. But I can assure the young ladies that I come
+prepared to admire them. At present I will not say more, but, perhaps,
+when we are better acquainted——”</p>
+
+<p>He was interrupted by a summons to dinner; and the girls smiled on each
+other. They were not the only objects of Mr. Collins’s admiration. The
+hall, the dining-room, and all its furniture, were examined and praised;
+and his commendation of everything would have touched Mrs. Bennet’s
+heart, but for the mortifying supposition of his viewing it all as his
+own future property. The dinner, too, in its turn, was highly admired;
+and he begged to know to which of his fair cousins the excellence of its
+cookery was owing. But here he was set right by Mrs. Bennet, who assured
+him, with some asperity, that they were very well able to keep a good
+cook, and that her daughters had nothing to do in the kitchen. He begged
+pardon for having displeased her. In a softened tone she declared
+herself not at all offended; but he continued to apologize for about a
+quarter of an hour.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_84">{84}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_113_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_113_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<p class="nind">
+<span class="letra">
+<img alt="D" src="images/i_113_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_113_b.png"></span>URING dinner, Mr. Bennet scarcely spoke at all; but when the servants
+were withdrawn, he thought it time to have some conversation with his
+guest, and therefore started a subject in which he expected him to
+shine, by observing that he seemed very fortunate in his patroness. Lady
+Catherine de Bourgh’s attention to his wishes, and consideration for his
+comfort, appeared very remarkable. Mr. Bennet could not have chosen
+better. Mr. Collins was eloquent in her praise. The subject elevated him
+to more than usual solemnity of manner; and with a most important aspect
+he protested that he had never in his life witnessed such behaviour in a
+person of rank—such affability and condescension, as he had himself
+experienced from Lady Catherine. She had been graciously pleased to
+approve of both the discourses which he had already had the honour of
+preaching before her. She had also asked him twice to dine at Rosings,
+and had sent for him only the Saturday before, to make up her pool of
+quadrille in the evening. Lady Catherine was reckoned proud by many
+people, he knew, but <i>he</i> had never seen anything but affability in her.
+She had always spoken to him as she would to any other gentleman; she
+made not the smallest objection to his joining in the society of the
+neighbourhood, nor to his leaving his parish occasionally<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_85">{85}</a></span> for a week or
+two to visit his relations. She had even condescended to advise him to
+marry as soon as he could, provided he chose with discretion; and had
+once paid him a visit in his humble parsonage, where she had perfectly
+approved all the alterations he had been making, and had even vouchsafed
+to suggest some herself,—some shelves in the closets upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>“That is all very proper and civil, I am sure,” said Mrs. Bennet, “and I
+dare say she is a very agreeable woman. It is a pity that great ladies
+in general are not more like her. Does she live near you, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>“The garden in which stands my humble abode is separated only by a lane
+from Rosings Park, her Ladyship’s residence.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think you said she was a widow, sir? has she any family?”</p>
+
+<p>“She has one only daughter, the heiress of Rosings, and of very
+extensive property.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” cried Mrs. Bennet, shaking her head, “then she is better off than
+many girls. And what sort of young lady is she? Is she handsome?”</p>
+
+<p>“She is a most charming young lady, indeed. Lady Catherine herself says
+that, in point of true beauty, Miss de Bourgh is far superior to the
+handsomest of her sex; because there is that in her features which marks
+the young woman of distinguished birth. She is unfortunately of a sickly
+constitution, which has prevented her making that progress in many
+accomplishments which she could not otherwise have failed of, as I am
+informed by the lady who superintended her education, and who still
+resides with them. But she is perfectly amiable, and often condescends
+to drive by my humble abode in her little phaeton and ponies.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_86">{86}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“Has she been presented? I do not remember her name among the ladies at
+court.”</p>
+
+<p>“Her indifferent state of health unhappily prevents her being in town;
+and by that means, as I told Lady Catherine myself one day, has deprived
+the British Court of its brightest ornament. Her Ladyship seemed pleased
+with the idea; and you may imagine that I am happy on every occasion to
+offer those little delicate compliments which are always acceptable to
+ladies. I have more than once observed to Lady Catherine, that her
+charming daughter seemed born to be a duchess; and that the most
+elevated rank, instead of giving her consequence, would be adorned by
+her. These are the kind of little things which please her Ladyship, and
+it is a sort of attention which I conceive myself peculiarly bound to
+pay.”</p>
+
+<p>“You judge very properly,” said Mr. Bennet; “and it is happy for you
+that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask
+whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the
+moment, or are the result of previous study?”</p>
+
+<p>“They arise chiefly from what is passing at the time; and though I
+sometimes amuse myself with suggesting and arranging such little elegant
+compliments as may be adapted to ordinary occasions, I always wish to
+give them as unstudied an air as possible.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bennet’s expectations were fully answered. His cousin was as absurd
+as he had hoped; and he listened to him with the keenest enjoyment,
+maintaining at the same time the most resolute composure of countenance,
+and, except in an occasional glance at Elizabeth, requiring no partner
+in his pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>By tea-time, however, the dose had been enough, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_87">{87}</a></span> Mr. Bennet was glad
+to take his guest into the drawing-room again, and when tea was over,
+glad to invite him</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 361px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption10">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_116.jpg" width="361" id="img_images_i_116.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption10">
+
+<p>
+“Protested<br>
+that he never read novels”      H.T Feb 94<br>
+</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">to read aloud to the ladies. Mr. Collins readily assented, and a book
+was produced; but on beholding it (for everything announced it to be
+from a circulating library)<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_88">{88}</a></span> he started back, and, begging pardon,
+protested that he never read novels. Kitty stared at him, and Lydia
+exclaimed. Other books were produced, and after some deliberation he
+chose “Fordyce’s Sermons.” Lydia gaped as he opened the volume; and
+before he had, with very monotonous solemnity, read three pages, she
+interrupted him with,—</p>
+
+<p>“Do you know, mamma, that my uncle Philips talks of turning away
+Richard? and if he does, Colonel Forster will hire him. My aunt told me
+so herself on Saturday. I shall walk to Meryton to-morrow to hear more
+about it, and to ask when Mr. Denny comes back from town.”</p>
+
+<p>Lydia was bid by her two eldest sisters to hold her tongue; but Mr.
+Collins, much offended, laid aside his book, and said,—</p>
+
+<p>“I have often observed how little young ladies are interested by books
+of a serious stamp, though written solely for their benefit. It amazes
+me, I confess; for certainly there can be nothing so advantageous to
+them as instruction. But I will no longer importune my young cousin.”</p>
+
+<p>Then, turning to Mr. Bennet, he offered himself as his antagonist at
+backgammon. Mr. Bennet accepted the challenge, observing that he acted
+very wisely in leaving the girls to their own trifling amusements. Mrs.
+Bennet and her daughters apologized most civilly for Lydia’s
+interruption, and promised that it should not occur again, if he would
+resume his book; but Mr. Collins, after assuring them that he bore his
+young cousin no ill-will, and should never resent her behaviour as any
+affront, seated himself at another table with Mr. Bennet, and prepared
+for backgammon.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_89">{89}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XV"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_118_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_118_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XV.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="M" src="images/i_118_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_118_b.png"></span>R. COLLINS was not a sensible man, and the deficiency of nature had
+been but little assisted by education or society; the greatest part of
+his life having been spent under the guidance of an illiterate and
+miserly father; and though he belonged to one of the universities, he
+had merely kept the necessary terms without forming at it any useful
+acquaintance. The subjection in which his father had brought him up had
+given him originally great humility of manner; but it was now a good
+deal counteracted by the self-conceit of a weak head, living in
+retirement, and the consequential feelings of early and unexpected
+prosperity. A fortunate chance had recommended him to Lady Catherine de
+Bourgh when the living of Hunsford was vacant; and the respect which he
+felt for her high rank, and his veneration for her as his patroness,
+mingling with a very good opinion of himself, of his authority as a
+clergyman, and his right as a rector, made him altogether a mixture of
+pride and obsequiousness, self-importance and humility.</p>
+
+<p>Having now a good house and a very sufficient income, he intended to
+marry; and in seeking a reconciliation with the Longbourn family he had
+a wife in view, as he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_90">{90}</a></span> meant to choose one of the daughters, if he found
+them as handsome and amiable as they were represented by common report.
+This was his plan of amends—of atonement—for inheriting their father’s
+estate; and he thought it an excellent one, full of eligibility and
+suitableness, and excessively generous and disinterested on his own
+part.</p>
+
+<p>His plan did not vary on seeing them. Miss Bennet’s lovely face
+confirmed his views, and established all his strictest notions of what
+was due to seniority; and for the first evening <i>she</i> was his settled
+choice. The next morning, however, made an alteration; for in a quarter
+of an hour’s <i>tête-à-tête</i> with Mrs. Bennet before breakfast, a
+conversation beginning with his parsonage-house, and leading naturally
+to the avowal of his hopes, that a mistress for it might be found at
+Longbourn, produced from her, amid very complaisant smiles and general
+encouragement, a caution against the very Jane he had fixed on. “As to
+her <i>younger</i> daughters, she could not take upon her to say—she could
+not positively answer—but she did not <i>know</i> of any prepossession;—her
+<i>eldest</i> daughter she must just mention—she felt it incumbent on her to
+hint, was likely to be very soon engaged.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Collins had only to change from Jane to Elizabeth—and it was soon
+done—done while Mrs. Bennet was stirring the fire. Elizabeth, equally
+next to Jane in birth and beauty, succeeded her of course.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet treasured up the hint, and trusted that she might soon have
+two daughters married; and the man whom she could not bear to speak of
+the day before, was now high in her good graces.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia’s intention of walking to Meryton was not for<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_91">{91}</a></span>gotten: every sister
+except Mary agreed to go with her; and Mr. Collins was to attend them,
+at the request of Mr. Bennet, who was most anxious to get rid of him,
+and have his library to himself; for thither Mr. Collins had followed
+him after breakfast, and there he would continue, nominally engaged with
+one of the largest folios in the collection, but really talking to Mr.
+Bennet, with little cessation, of his house and garden at Hunsford. Such
+doings discomposed Mr. Bennet exceedingly. In his library he had been
+always sure of leisure and tranquillity; and though prepared, as he told
+Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the
+house, he was used to be free from them there: his civility, therefore,
+was most prompt in inviting Mr. Collins to join his daughters in their
+walk; and Mr. Collins, being in fact much better fitted for a walker
+than a reader, was extremely well pleased to close his large book, and
+go.</p>
+
+<p>In pompous nothings on his side, and civil assents on that of his
+cousins, their time passed till they entered Meryton. The attention of
+the younger ones was then no longer to be gained by <i>him</i>. Their eyes
+were immediately wandering up the street in quest of the officers, and
+nothing less than a very smart bonnet, indeed, or a really new muslin in
+a shop window, could recall them.</p>
+
+<p>But the attention of every lady was soon caught by a young man, whom
+they had never seen before, of most gentlemanlike appearance, walking
+with an officer on the other side of the way. The officer was the very
+Mr. Denny concerning whose return from London Lydia came to inquire, and
+he bowed as they passed. All were struck with the stranger’s air, all
+wondered who he could be; and Kitty and Lydia, determined if possible<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_92">{92}</a></span>
+to find out, led the way across the street, under pretence of wanting
+something in an opposite shop, and fortunately had just gained the
+pavement, when the two gentlemen, turning back, had reached the same
+spot. Mr. Denny addressed them directly, and entreated permission to
+introduce his friend, Mr. Wickham, who had returned with him the day
+before from town, and, he was happy to say, had accepted a commission in
+their corps. This was exactly as it should be; for the young man wanted
+only regimentals to make him completely charming. His appearance was
+greatly in his favour: he had all the best parts of beauty, a fine
+countenance, a good figure, and very pleasing address. The introduction
+was followed up on his side by a happy readiness of conversation—a
+readiness at the same time perfectly correct and unassuming; and the
+whole party were still standing and talking together very agreeably,
+when the sound of horses drew their notice, and Darcy and Bingley were
+seen riding down the street. On distinguishing the ladies of the group
+the two gentlemen came directly towards them, and began the usual
+civilities. Bingley was the principal spokesman, and Miss Bennet the
+principal object. He was then, he said, on his way to Longbourn on
+purpose to inquire after her. Mr. Darcy corroborated it with a bow, and
+was beginning to determine not to fix his eyes on Elizabeth, when they
+were suddenly arrested by the sight of the stranger; and Elizabeth
+happening to see the countenance of both as they looked at each other,
+was all astonishment at the effect of the meeting. Both changed colour,
+one looked white, the other red. Mr. Wickham, after a few moments,
+touched his hat—a salutation which Mr. Darcy just deigned to return.
+What could be the meaning of it?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_93">{93}</a></span> It was impossible to imagine; it was
+impossible not to long to know.</p>
+
+<p>In another minute Mr. Bingley, but without seeming to have noticed what
+passed, took leave and rode on with his friend.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Denny and Mr. Wickham walked with the young ladies to the door of
+Mr. Philips’s house, and then made their bows, in spite of Miss Lydia’s
+pressing entreaties that they would come in, and even in spite of Mrs.
+Philips’s throwing up the parlour window, and loudly seconding the
+invitation.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Philips was always glad to see her nieces; and the two eldest, from
+their recent absence, were particularly welcome; and she was eagerly
+expressing her surprise at their sudden return home, which, as their own
+carriage had not fetched them, she should have known nothing about, if
+she had not happened to see Mr. Jones’s shopboy in the street, who had
+told her that they were not to send any more draughts to Netherfield,
+because the Miss Bennets were come away, when her civility was claimed
+towards Mr. Collins by Jane’s introduction of him. She received him with
+her very best politeness, which he returned with as much more,
+apologizing for his intrusion, without any previous acquaintance with
+her, which he could not help flattering himself, however, might be
+justified by his relationship to the young ladies who introduced him to
+her notice. Mrs. Philips was quite awed by such an excess of good
+breeding; but her contemplation of one stranger was soon put an end to
+by exclamations and inquiries about the other, of whom, however, she
+could only tell her nieces what they already knew, that Mr. Denny had
+brought him from London, and that he was to have a lieutenant’s
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_94">{94}</a></span>commission in the ——shire. She had been watching him the last hour,
+she said, as he walked up and down the street,—and had Mr. Wickham
+appeared, Kitty and Lydia would certainly have continued the occupation;
+but unluckily no one passed the windows now except a few of the
+officers, who, in comparison with the stranger, were become “stupid,
+disagreeable fellows.” Some of them were to dine with the Philipses the
+next day, and their aunt promised to make her husband call on Mr.
+Wickham, and give him an invitation also, if the family from Longbourn
+would come in the evening. This was agreed to; and Mrs. Philips
+protested that they would have a nice comfortable noisy game of lottery
+tickets, and a little bit of hot supper afterwards. The prospect of such
+delights was very cheering, and they parted in mutual good spirits. Mr.
+Collins repeated his apologies in quitting the room, and was assured,
+with unwearying civility, that they were perfectly needless.</p>
+
+<p>As they walked home, Elizabeth related to Jane what she had seen pass
+between the two gentlemen; but though Jane would have defended either or
+both, had they appeared to be wrong, she could no more explain such
+behaviour than her sister.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Collins on his return highly gratified Mrs. Bennet by admiring Mrs.
+Philips’s manners and politeness. He protested that, except Lady
+Catherine and her daughter, he had never seen a more elegant woman; for
+she had not only received him with the utmost civility, but had even
+pointedly included him in her invitation for the next evening, although
+utterly unknown to her before. Something, he supposed, might be
+attributed to his connection with them, but yet he had never met with so
+much attention in the whole course of his life.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_95">{95}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_124_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_124_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XVI.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="A" src="images/i_124_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_124_b.png"></span>S no objection was made to the young people’s engagement with their
+aunt, and all Mr. Collins’s scruples of leaving Mr. and Mrs. Bennet for
+a single evening during his visit were most steadily resisted, the coach
+conveyed him and his five cousins at a suitable hour to Meryton; and the
+girls had the pleasure of hearing, as they entered the drawing-room,
+that Mr. Wickham had<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_96">{96}</a></span> accepted their uncle’s invitation, and was then in
+the house.</p>
+
+<p>When this information was given, and they had all taken their seats, Mr.
+Collins was at leisure to look around him and admire, and he was so much
+struck with the size and furniture of the apartment, that he declared he
+might almost have supposed himself in the small summer breakfast parlour
+at Rosings; a comparison that did not at first convey much
+gratification; but when Mrs. Philips understood from him what Rosings
+was, and who was its proprietor, when she had listened to the
+description of only one of Lady Catherine’s drawing-rooms, and found
+that the chimney-piece alone had cost eight hundred pounds, she felt all
+the force of the compliment, and would hardly have resented a comparison
+with the housekeeper’s room.</p>
+
+<p>In describing to her all the grandeur of Lady Catherine and her mansion,
+with occasional digressions in praise of his own humble abode, and the
+improvements it was receiving, he was happily employed until the
+gentlemen joined them; and he found in Mrs. Philips a very attentive
+listener, whose opinion of his consequence increased with what she
+heard, and who was resolving to retail it all among her neighbours as
+soon as she could. To the girls, who could not listen to their cousin,
+and who had nothing to do but to wish for an instrument, and examine
+their own indifferent imitations of china on the mantel-piece, the
+interval of waiting appeared very long. It was over at last, however.
+The gentlemen did approach: and when Mr. Wickham walked into the room,
+Elizabeth felt that she had neither been seeing him before, nor thinking
+of him since, with the smallest degree of <span class="pagenum"><a id="page_97">{97}</a></span>unreasonable admiration. The
+officers of the ——shire were in general a very creditable,
+gentlemanlike set and the best of them were of the present party; but
+Mr. Wickham was as far beyond them all in person, countenance, air, and
+walk, as <i>they</i> were superior to the broad-faced stuffy uncle Philips,
+breathing port wine, who followed them into the room.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 391px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption11">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_126.jpg" width="391" id="img_images_i_126.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption11">
+
+<p>
+“The officers of the ——shire”<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mr. Wickham was the happy man towards whom almost every female eye was
+turned, and Elizabeth was<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_98">{98}</a></span> the happy woman by whom he finally seated
+himself; and the agreeable manner in which he immediately fell into
+conversation, though it was only on its being a wet night, and on the
+probability of a rainy season, made her feel that the commonest,
+dullest, most threadbare topic might be rendered interesting by the
+skill of the speaker.</p>
+
+<p>With such rivals for the notice of the fair as Mr. Wickham and the
+officers, Mr. Collins seemed to sink into insignificance; to the young
+ladies he certainly was nothing; but he had still at intervals a kind
+listener in Mrs. Philips, and was, by her watchfulness, most abundantly
+supplied with coffee and muffin.</p>
+
+<p>When the card tables were placed, he had an opportunity of obliging her,
+in return, by sitting down to whist.</p>
+
+<p>“I know little of the game at present,” said he, “but I shall be glad to
+improve myself; for in my situation of life——” Mrs. Philips was very
+thankful for his compliance, but could not wait for his reason.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wickham did not play at whist, and with ready delight was he
+received at the other table between Elizabeth and Lydia. At first there
+seemed danger of Lydia’s engrossing him entirely, for she was a most
+determined talker; but being likewise extremely fond of lottery tickets,
+she soon grew too much interested in the game, too eager in making bets
+and exclaiming after prizes, to have attention for anyone in particular.
+Allowing for the common demands of the game, Mr. Wickham was therefore
+at leisure to talk to Elizabeth, and she was very willing to hear him,
+though what she chiefly wished to hear she could not hope to be told,
+the history of his acquaintance with Mr. Darcy. She dared not even
+mention that gentleman. Her curiosity, how<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_99">{99}</a></span>ever, was unexpectedly
+relieved. Mr. Wickham began the subject himself. He inquired how far
+Netherfield was from Meryton; and, after receiving her answer, asked in
+a hesitating manner how long Mr. Darcy had been staying there.</p>
+
+<p>“About a month,” said Elizabeth; and then, unwilling to let the subject
+drop, added, “he is a man of very large property in Derbyshire, I
+understand.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” replied Wickham; “his estate there is a noble one. A clear ten
+thousand per annum. You could not have met with a person more capable of
+giving you certain information on that head than myself—for I have been
+connected with his family, in a particular manner, from my infancy.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth could not but look surprised.</p>
+
+<p>“You may well be surprised, Miss Bennet, at such an assertion, after
+seeing, as you probably might, the very cold manner of our meeting
+yesterday. Are you much acquainted with Mr. Darcy?”</p>
+
+<p>“As much as I ever wish to be,” cried Elizabeth, warmly. “I have spent
+four days in the same house with him, and I think him very
+disagreeable.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have no right to give <i>my</i> opinion,” said Wickham, “as to his being
+agreeable or otherwise. I am not qualified to form one. I have known him
+too long and too well to be a fair judge. It is impossible for <i>me</i> to
+be impartial. But I believe your opinion of him would in general
+astonish—and, perhaps, you would not express it quite so strongly
+anywhere else. Here you are in your own family.”</p>
+
+<p>“Upon my word I say no more <i>here</i> than I might say in any house in the
+neighbourhood, except Netherfield. He is not at all liked in
+Hertfordshire. Everybody is<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_100">{100}</a></span> disgusted with his pride. You will not find
+him more favourably spoken of by anyone.”</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot pretend to be sorry,” said Wickham, after a short
+interruption, “that he or that any man should not be estimated beyond
+their deserts; but with <i>him</i> I believe it does not often happen. The
+world is blinded by his fortune and consequence, or frightened by his
+high and imposing manners, and sees him only as he chooses to be seen.”</p>
+
+<p>“I should take him, even on <i>my</i> slight acquaintance, to be an
+ill-tempered man.”</p>
+
+<p>Wickham only shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder,” said he, at the next opportunity of speaking, “whether he is
+likely to be in this country much longer.”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not at all know; but I <i>heard</i> nothing of his going away when I
+was at Netherfield. I hope your plans in favour of the ——shire will
+not be affected by his being in the neighbourhood.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh no—it is not for <i>me</i> to be driven away by Mr. Darcy. If <i>he</i>
+wishes to avoid seeing <i>me</i> he must go. We are not on friendly terms,
+and it always gives me pain to meet him, but I have no reason for
+avoiding <i>him</i> but what I might proclaim to all the world—a sense of
+very great ill-usage, and most painful regrets at his being what he is.
+His father, Miss Bennet, the late Mr. Darcy, was one of the best men
+that ever breathed, and the truest friend I ever had; and I can never be
+in company with this Mr. Darcy without being grieved to the soul by a
+thousand tender recollections. His behaviour to myself has been
+scandalous; but I verily believe I could forgive him anything and
+everything, rather than his disappointing the hopes and disgracing the
+memory of his father.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_101">{101}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth found the interest of the subject increase, and listened with
+all her heart; but the delicacy of it prevented further inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wickham began to speak on more general topics, Meryton, the
+neighbourhood, the society, appearing highly pleased with all that he
+had yet seen, and speaking of the latter, especially, with gentle but
+very intelligible gallantry.</p>
+
+<p>“It was the prospect of constant society, and good society,” he added,
+“which was my chief inducement to enter the ——shire. I know it to be a
+most respectable, agreeable corps; and my friend Denny tempted me
+further by his account of their present quarters, and the very great
+attentions and excellent acquaintance Meryton had procured them.
+Society, I own, is necessary to me. I have been a disappointed man, and
+my spirits will not bear solitude. I <i>must</i> have employment and society.
+A military life is not what I was intended for, but circumstances have
+now made it eligible. The church <i>ought</i> to have been my profession—I
+was brought up for the church; and I should at this time have been in
+possession of a most valuable living, had it pleased the gentleman we
+were speaking of just now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed!”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes—the late Mr. Darcy bequeathed me the next presentation of the best
+living in his gift. He was my godfather, and excessively attached to me.
+I cannot do justice to his kindness. He meant to provide for me amply,
+and thought he had done it; but when the living fell, it was given
+elsewhere.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good heavens!” cried Elizabeth; “but how could <i>that</i> be? How could his
+will be disregarded? Why did not you seek legal redress?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_102">{102}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“There was just such an informality in the terms of the bequest as to
+give me no hope from law. A man of honour could not have doubted the
+intention, but Mr. Darcy chose to doubt it—or to treat it as a merely
+conditional recommendation, and to assert that I had forfeited all claim
+to it by extravagance, imprudence, in short, anything or nothing.
+Certain it is that the living became vacant two years ago, exactly as I
+was of an age to hold it, and that it was given to another man; and no
+less certain is it, that I cannot accuse myself of having really done
+anything to deserve to lose it. I have a warm unguarded temper, and I
+may perhaps have sometimes spoken my opinion <i>of</i> him, and <i>to</i> him, too
+freely. I can recall nothing worse. But the fact is, that we are very
+different sort of men, and that he hates me.”</p>
+
+<p>“This is quite shocking! He deserves to be publicly disgraced.”</p>
+
+<p>“Some time or other he <i>will</i> be—but it shall not be by <i>me</i>. Till I
+can forget his father, I can never defy or expose <i>him</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth honoured him for such feelings, and thought him handsomer than
+ever as he expressed them.</p>
+
+<p>“But what,” said she, after a pause, “can have been his motive? what can
+have induced him to behave so cruelly?”</p>
+
+<p>“A thorough, determined dislike of me—a dislike which I cannot but
+attribute in some measure to jealousy. Had the late Mr. Darcy liked me
+less, his son might have borne with me better; but his father’s uncommon
+attachment to me irritated him, I believe, very early in life. He had
+not a temper to bear the sort of competition in which we stood—the sort
+of preference which was often given me.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_103">{103}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“I had not thought Mr. Darcy so bad as this—though I have never liked
+him, I had not thought so very ill of him—I had supposed him to be
+despising his fellow-creatures in general, but did not suspect him of
+descending to such malicious revenge, such injustice, such inhumanity as
+this!”</p>
+
+<p>After a few minutes’ reflection, however, she continued, “I <i>do</i>
+remember his boasting one day, at Netherfield, of the implacability of
+his resentments, of his having an unforgiving temper. His disposition
+must be dreadful.”</p>
+
+<p>“I will not trust myself on the subject,” replied Wickham; “<i>I</i> can
+hardly be just to him.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was again deep in thought, and after a time exclaimed, “To
+treat in such a manner the godson, the friend, the favourite of his
+father!” She could have added, “A young man, too, like <i>you</i>, whose very
+countenance may vouch for your being amiable.” But she contented herself
+with—“And one, too, who had probably been his own companion from
+childhood, connected together, as I think you said, in the closest
+manner.”</p>
+
+<p>“We were born in the same parish, within the same park; the greatest
+part of our youth was passed together: inmates of the same house,
+sharing the same amusements, objects of the same parental care. <i>My</i>
+father began life in the profession which your uncle, Mr. Philips,
+appears to do so much credit to; but he gave up everything to be of use
+to the late Mr. Darcy, and devoted all his time to the care of the
+Pemberley property. He was most highly esteemed by Mr. Darcy, a most
+intimate, confidential friend. Mr. Darcy often acknowledged himself to
+be under the greatest obligations to my father’s active superintendence;
+and when, immediately before my father’s death, Mr. Darcy gave him a
+voluntary promise<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_104">{104}</a></span> of providing for me, I am convinced that he felt it
+to be as much a debt of gratitude to <i>him</i> as of affection to myself.”</p>
+
+<p>“How strange!” cried Elizabeth. “How abominable! I wonder that the very
+pride of this Mr. Darcy has not made him just to you. If from no better
+motive, that he should not have been too proud to be dishonest,—for
+dishonesty I must call it.”</p>
+
+<p>“It <i>is</i> wonderful,” replied Wickham; “for almost all his actions may be
+traced to pride; and pride has often been his best friend. It has
+connected him nearer with virtue than any other feeling. But we are none
+of us consistent; and in his behaviour to me there were stronger
+impulses even than pride.”</p>
+
+<p>“Can such abominable pride as his have ever done him good?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; it has often led him to be liberal and generous; to give his money
+freely, to display hospitality, to assist his tenants, and relieve the
+poor. Family pride, and <i>filial</i> pride, for he is very proud of what his
+father was, have done this. Not to appear to disgrace his family, to
+degenerate from the popular qualities, or lose the influence of the
+Pemberley House, is a powerful motive. He has also <i>brotherly</i> pride,
+which, with <i>some</i> brotherly affection, makes him a very kind and
+careful guardian of his sister; and you will hear him generally cried up
+as the most attentive and best of brothers.”</p>
+
+<p>“What sort of a girl is Miss Darcy?”</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head. “I wish I could call her amiable. It gives me pain to
+speak ill of a Darcy; but she is too much like her brother,—very, very
+proud. As a child, she was affectionate and pleasing, and extremely fond
+of me; and I have devoted hours and hours to her amuse<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_105">{105}</a></span>ment. But she is
+nothing to me now. She is a handsome girl, about fifteen or sixteen,
+and, I understand, highly accomplished. Since her father’s death her
+home has been London, where a lady lives with her, and superintends her
+education.”</p>
+
+<p>After many pauses and many trials of other subjects, Elizabeth could not
+help reverting once more to the first, and saying,—</p>
+
+<p>“I am astonished at his intimacy with Mr. Bingley. How can Mr. Bingley,
+who seems good-humour itself, and is, I really believe, truly amiable,
+be in friendship with such a man? How can they suit each other? Do you
+know Mr. Bingley?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not at all.”</p>
+
+<p>“He is a sweet-tempered, amiable, charming man. He cannot know what Mr.
+Darcy is.”</p>
+
+<p>“Probably not; but Mr. Darcy can please where he chooses. He does not
+want abilities. He can be a conversible companion if he thinks it worth
+his while. Among those who are at all his equals in consequence, he is a
+very different man from what he is to the less prosperous. His pride
+never deserts him; but with the rich he is liberal-minded, just,
+sincere, rational, honourable, and, perhaps, agreeable,—allowing
+something for fortune and figure.”</p>
+
+<p>The whist party soon afterwards breaking up, the players gathered round
+the other table, and Mr. Collins took his station between his cousin
+Elizabeth and Mrs. Philips. The usual inquiries as to his success were
+made by the latter. It had not been very great; he had lost every point;
+but when Mrs. Philips began to express her concern thereupon, he assured
+her, with much earnest gravity, that it was not of the least importance;
+that he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_106">{106}</a></span> considered the money as a mere trifle, and begged she would not
+make herself uneasy.</p>
+
+<p>“I know very well, madam,” said he, “that when persons sit down to a
+card table they must take their chance of these things,—and happily I
+am not in such circumstances as to make five shillings any object. There
+are, undoubtedly, many who could not say the same; but, thanks to Lady
+Catherine de Bourgh, I am removed far beyond the necessity of regarding
+little matters.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wickham’s attention was caught; and after observing Mr. Collins for
+a few moments, he asked Elizabeth in a low voice whether her relations
+were very intimately acquainted with the family of De Bourgh.</p>
+
+<p>“Lady Catherine de Bourgh,” she replied, “has very lately given him a
+living. I hardly know how Mr. Collins was first introduced to her
+notice, but he certainly has not known her long.”</p>
+
+<p>“You know of course that Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Lady Anne Darcy
+were sisters; consequently that she is aunt to the present Mr. Darcy.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, indeed, I did not. I knew nothing at all of Lady Catherine’s
+connections. I never heard of her existence till the day before
+yesterday.”</p>
+
+<p>“Her daughter, Miss de Bourgh, will have a very large fortune, and it is
+believed that she and her cousin will unite the two estates.”</p>
+
+<p>This information made Elizabeth smile, as she thought of poor Miss
+Bingley. Vain indeed must be all her attentions, vain and useless her
+affection for his sister and her praise of himself, if he were already
+self-destined to another.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Collins,” said she, “speaks highly both of Lady Catherine and her
+daughter; but, from some particulars<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_107">{107}</a></span> that he has related of her
+Ladyship, I suspect his gratitude misleads him; and that, in spite of
+her being his patroness, she is an arrogant, conceited woman.”</p>
+
+<p>“I believe her to be both in a great degree,” replied Wickham; “I have
+not seen her for many years; but I very well remember that I never liked
+her, and that her manners were dictatorial and insolent. She has the
+reputation of being remarkably sensible and clever; but I rather believe
+she derives part of her abilities from her rank and fortune, part from
+her authoritative manner, and the rest from the pride of her nephew, who
+chooses that everyone connected with him should have an understanding of
+the first class.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth allowed that he had given a very rational account of it, and
+they continued talking together with mutual satisfaction till supper put
+an end to cards, and gave the rest of the ladies their share of Mr.
+Wickham’s attentions. There could be no conversation in the noise of
+Mrs. Philips’s supper party, but his manners recommended him to
+everybody. Whatever he said, was said well; and whatever he did, done
+gracefully. Elizabeth went away with her head full of him. She could
+think of nothing but of Mr. Wickham, and of what he had told her, all
+the way home; but there was not time for her even to mention his name as
+they went, for neither Lydia nor Mr. Collins were once silent. Lydia
+talked incessantly of lottery tickets, of the fish she had lost and the
+fish she had won; and Mr. Collins, in describing the civility of Mr. and
+Mrs. Philips, protesting that he did not in the least regard his losses
+at whist, enumerating all the dishes at supper, and repeatedly fearing
+that he crowded his cousins, had more to say than he could well manage
+before the carriage stopped at Longbourn House.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_108">{108}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_137_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_137_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+delighted to see their dear friend again.
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XVII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="E" src="images/i_137_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_137_b.png"></span>LIZABETH related to Jane, the next day, what had passed between Mr.
+Wickham and herself. Jane listened with astonishment and concern: she
+knew not how to believe that Mr. Darcy could be so unworthy of Mr.
+Bingley’s regard; and yet it was not in her nature to question the
+veracity of a young man of such amiable appearance as Wickham. The
+possibility of his having really endured such unkindness was enough to
+interest all her tender feelings; and nothing therefore remained to be
+done but to think well of them both, to defend the conduct of each, and
+throw into the account of accident or mistake whatever could not be
+otherwise explained.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_109">{109}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“They have both,” said she, “been deceived, I dare say, in some way or
+other, of which we can form no idea. Interested people have perhaps
+misrepresented each to the other. It is, in short, impossible for us to
+conjecture the causes or circumstances which may have alienated them,
+without actual blame on either side.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very true, indeed; and now, my dear Jane, what have you got to say in
+behalf of the interested people who have probably been concerned in the
+business? Do clear <i>them</i>, too, or we shall be obliged to think ill of
+somebody.”</p>
+
+<p>“Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my
+opinion. My dearest Lizzy, do but consider in what a disgraceful light
+it places Mr. Darcy, to be treating his father’s favourite in such a
+manner,—one whom his father had promised to provide for. It is
+impossible. No man of common humanity, no man who had any value for his
+character, could be capable of it. Can his most intimate friends be so
+excessively deceived in him? Oh no.”</p>
+
+<p>“I can much more easily believe Mr. Bingley’s being imposed on than that
+Mr. Wickham should invent such a history of himself as he gave me last
+night; names, facts, everything mentioned without ceremony. If it be not
+so, let Mr. Darcy contradict it. Besides, there was truth in his looks.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is difficult, indeed—it is distressing. One does not know what to
+think.”</p>
+
+<p>“I beg your pardon;—one knows exactly what to think.”</p>
+
+<p>But Jane could think with certainty on only one point,—that Mr.
+Bingley, if he <i>had been</i> imposed on,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_110">{110}</a></span> would have much to suffer when
+the affair became public.</p>
+
+<p>The two young ladies were summoned from the shrubbery, where this
+conversation passed, by the arrival of some of the very persons of whom
+they had been speaking; Mr. Bingley and his sisters came to give their
+personal invitation for the long expected ball at Netherfield, which was
+fixed for the following Tuesday. The two ladies were delighted to see
+their dear friend again, called it an age since they had met, and
+repeatedly asked what she had been doing with herself since their
+separation. To the rest of the family they paid little attention;
+avoiding Mrs. Bennet as much as possible, saying not much to Elizabeth,
+and nothing at all to the others. They were soon gone again, rising from
+their seats with an activity which took their brother by surprise, and
+hurrying off as if eager to escape from Mrs. Bennet’s civilities.</p>
+
+<p>The prospect of the Netherfield ball was extremely agreeable to every
+female of the family. Mrs. Bennet chose to consider it as given in
+compliment to her eldest daughter, and was particularly flattered by
+receiving the invitation from Mr. Bingley himself, instead of a
+ceremonious card. Jane pictured to herself a happy evening in the
+society of her two friends, and the attentions of their brother; and
+Elizabeth thought with pleasure of dancing a great deal with Mr.
+Wickham, and of seeing a confirmation of everything in Mr. Darcy’s look
+and behaviour. The happiness anticipated by Catherine and Lydia depended
+less on any single event, or any particular person; for though they
+each, like Elizabeth, meant to dance half the evening with Mr. Wickham,
+he was by no means the only partner who<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_111">{111}</a></span> could satisfy them, and a ball
+was, at any rate, a ball. And even Mary could assure her family that she
+had no disinclination for it.</p>
+
+<p>“While I can have my mornings to myself,” said she, “it is enough. I
+think it is no sacrifice to join occasionally in evening engagements.
+Society has claims on us all; and I profess myself one of those who
+consider intervals of recreation and amusement as desirable for
+everybody.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth’s spirits were so high on the occasion, that though she did
+not often speak unnecessarily to Mr. Collins, she could not help asking
+him whether he intended to accept Mr. Bingley’s invitation, and if he
+did, whether he would think it proper to join in the evening’s
+amusement; and she was rather surprised to find that he entertained no
+scruple whatever on that head, and was very far from dreading a rebuke,
+either from the Archbishop or Lady Catherine de Bourgh, by venturing to
+dance.</p>
+
+<p>“I am by no means of opinion, I assure you,” said he, “that a ball of
+this kind, given by a young man of character, to respectable people, can
+have any evil tendency; and I am so far from objecting to dancing
+myself, that I shall hope to be honoured with the hands of all my fair
+cousins in the course of the evening; and I take this opportunity of
+soliciting yours, Miss Elizabeth, for the two first dances especially; a
+preference which I trust my cousin Jane will attribute to the right
+cause, and not to any disrespect for her.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth felt herself completely taken in. She had fully proposed being
+engaged by Wickham for those very dances; and to have Mr. Collins
+instead!—her liveliness had been never worse timed. There was no<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_112">{112}</a></span> help
+for it, however. Mr. Wickham’s happiness and her own was perforce
+delayed a little longer, and Mr. Collins’s proposal accepted with as
+good a grace as she could. She was not the better pleased with his
+gallantry, from the idea it suggested of something more. It now first
+struck her, that <i>she</i> was selected from among her sisters as worthy of
+being the mistress of Hunsford Parsonage, and of assisting to form a
+quadrille table at Rosings, in the absence of more eligible visitors.
+The idea soon reached to conviction, as she observed his increasing
+civilities towards herself, and heard his frequent attempt at a
+compliment on her wit and vivacity; and though more astonished than
+gratified herself by this effect of her charms, it was not long before
+her mother gave her to understand that the probability of their marriage
+was exceedingly agreeable to <i>her</i>. Elizabeth, however, did not choose
+to take the hint, being well aware that a serious dispute must be the
+consequence of any reply. Mr. Collins might never make the offer, and,
+till he did, it was useless to quarrel about him.</p>
+
+<p>If there had not been a Netherfield ball to prepare for and talk of, the
+younger Miss Bennets would have been in a pitiable state at this time;
+for, from the day of the invitation to the day of the ball, there was
+such a succession of rain as prevented their walking to Meryton once. No
+aunt, no officers, no news could be sought after; the very shoe-roses
+for Netherfield were got by proxy. Even Elizabeth might have found some
+trial of her patience in weather which totally suspended the improvement
+of her acquaintance with Mr. Wickham; and nothing less than a dance on
+Tuesday could have made such a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday
+endurable to Kitty and Lydia.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_113">{113}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_142_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_142_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XVIII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="T" src="images/i_142_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_142_b.png"></span>ILL Elizabeth entered the drawing-room at Netherfield, and looked in
+vain for Mr. Wickham among the cluster of red coats there assembled, a
+doubt of his being present had never occurred to her. The certainty of
+meeting him had not been checked by any of those recollections that
+might not unreasonably have alarmed her. She had dressed with more than
+usual care, and prepared in the highest spirits for the conquest of all
+that remained unsubdued of his heart, trusting that it was not more than
+might be won in the course of the evening. But in an<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_114">{114}</a></span> instant arose the
+dreadful suspicion of his being purposely omitted, for Mr. Darcy’s
+pleasure, in the Bingleys’ invitation to the officers; and though this
+was not exactly the case, the absolute fact of his absence was
+pronounced by his friend Mr. Denny, to whom Lydia eagerly applied, and
+who told them that Wickham had been obliged to go to town on business
+the day before, and was not yet returned; adding, with a significant
+smile,—</p>
+
+<p>“I do not imagine his business would have called him away just now, if
+he had not wished to avoid a certain gentleman here.”</p>
+
+<p>This part of his intelligence, though unheard by Lydia, was caught by
+Elizabeth; and, as it assured her that Darcy was not less answerable for
+Wickham’s absence than if her first surmise had been just, every feeling
+of displeasure against the former was so sharpened by immediate
+disappointment, that she could hardly reply with tolerable civility to
+the polite inquiries which he directly afterwards approached to make.
+Attention, forbearance, patience with Darcy, was injury to Wickham. She
+was resolved against any sort of conversation with him, and turned away
+with a degree of ill-humour which she could not wholly surmount even in
+speaking to Mr. Bingley, whose blind partiality provoked her.</p>
+
+<p>But Elizabeth was not formed for ill-humour; and though every prospect
+of her own was destroyed for the evening, it could not dwell long on her
+spirits; and, having told all her griefs to Charlotte Lucas, whom she
+had not seen for a week, she was soon able to make a voluntary
+transition to the oddities of her cousin, and to point him out to her
+particular notice. The two first dances, however, brought a return of
+distress: they were dances of mortification. Mr. Collins, awkward and
+solemn,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_115">{115}</a></span> apologizing instead of attending, and often moving wrong
+without being aware of it, gave her all the shame and misery which a
+disagreeable partner for a couple of dances can give. The moment of her
+release from him was ecstasy.</p>
+
+<p>She danced next with an officer, and had the refreshment of talking of
+Wickham, and of hearing that he was universally liked. When those dances
+were over, she returned to Charlotte Lucas, and was in conversation with
+her, when she found herself suddenly addressed by Mr. Darcy, who took
+her so much by surprise in his application for her hand, that, without
+knowing what she did, she accepted him. He walked away again
+immediately, and she was left to fret over her own want of presence of
+mind: Charlotte tried to console her.</p>
+
+<p>“I dare say you will find him very agreeable.”</p>
+
+<p>“Heaven forbid! <i>That</i> would be the greatest misfortune of all! To find
+a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate! Do not wish me such an
+evil.”</p>
+
+<p>When the dancing recommenced, however, and Darcy approached to claim her
+hand, Charlotte could not help cautioning her, in a whisper, not to be a
+simpleton, and allow her fancy for Wickham to make her appear unpleasant
+in the eyes of a man often times his consequence. Elizabeth made no
+answer, and took her place in the set, amazed at the dignity to which
+she was arrived in being allowed to stand opposite to Mr. Darcy, and
+reading in her neighbours’ looks their equal amazement in beholding it.
+They stood for some time without speaking a word; and she began to
+imagine that their silence was to last through the two dances, and, at
+first, was resolved not to break it; till suddenly fancying that it
+would be the greater punishment to her partner to oblige him to talk,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_116">{116}</a></span>
+she made some slight observation on the dance. He replied, and was again
+silent. After a pause of some minutes, she addressed him a second time,
+with—</p>
+
+<p>“It is <i>your</i> turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy. <i>I</i> talked about the
+dance, and <i>you</i> ought to make some kind of remark on the size of the
+room, or the number of couples.”</p>
+
+<p>He smiled, and assured her that whatever she wished him to say should be
+said.</p>
+
+<p>“Very well; that reply will do for the present. Perhaps, by-and-by, I
+may observe that private balls are much pleasanter than public ones; but
+<i>now</i> we may be silent.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you talk by rule, then, while you are dancing?”</p>
+
+<p>“Sometimes. One must speak a little, you know. It would look odd to be
+entirely silent for half an hour together; and yet, for the advantage of
+<i>some</i>, conversation ought to be so arranged as that they may have the
+trouble of saying as little as possible.”</p>
+
+<p>“Are you consulting your own feelings in the present case, or do you
+imagine that you are gratifying mine?”</p>
+
+<p>“Both,” replied Elizabeth archly; “for I have always seen a great
+similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial,
+taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say
+something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to
+posterity with all the <i>éclat</i> of a proverb.”</p>
+
+<p>“This is no very striking resemblance of your own character, I am sure,”
+said he. “How near it may be to <i>mine</i>, I cannot pretend to say. <i>You</i>
+think it a faithful portrait, undoubtedly.”</p>
+
+<p>“I must not decide on my own performance.”</p>
+
+<p>He made no answer; and they were again silent till they had gone down
+the dance, when he asked her if she<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_117">{117}</a></span> and her sisters did not very often
+walk to Meryton. She answered in the affirmative; and, unable to resist
+the temptation, added, “When you met us there the other day, we had just
+been forming a new acquaintance.”</p>
+
+<p>The effect was immediate. A deeper shade of <i>hauteur</i> overspread his
+features, but he said not a word; and Elizabeth, though blaming herself
+for her own weakness, could not go on. At length Darcy spoke, and in a
+constrained manner said,—</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Wickham is blessed with such happy manners as may insure his
+<i>making</i> friends; whether he may be equally capable of <i>retaining</i> them,
+is less certain.”</p>
+
+<p>“He has been so unlucky as to lose your friendship,” replied Elizabeth,
+with emphasis, “and in a manner which he is likely to suffer from all
+his life.”</p>
+
+<p>Darcy made no answer, and seemed desirous of changing the subject. At
+that moment Sir William Lucas appeared close to them, meaning to pass
+through the set to the other side of the room; but, on perceiving Mr.
+Darcy, he stopped, with a bow of superior courtesy, to compliment him on
+his dancing and his partner.</p>
+
+<p>“I have been most highly gratified, indeed, my dear sir; such very
+superior dancing is not often seen. It is evident that you belong to the
+first circles. Allow me to say, however, that your fair partner does not
+disgrace you: and that I must hope to have this pleasure often repeated,
+especially when a certain desirable event, my dear Miss Eliza (glancing
+at her sister and Bingley), shall take place. What congratulations will
+then flow in! I appeal to Mr. Darcy;—but let me not interrupt you, sir.
+You will not thank me for detaining you from the bewitching converse of
+that young lady, whose bright eyes are also upbraiding me.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_118">{118}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 444px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption12">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_147.jpg" width="444" id="img_images_i_147.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption12">
+
+<p>
+“Such very superior dancing is not<br>
+often seen.”<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The latter part of this address was scarcely heard by Darcy; but Sir
+William’s allusion to his friend seemed to strike him forcibly, and his
+eyes were directed, with a very serious expression, towards Bingley and
+Jane, who were dancing together. Recovering himself, however, shortly,
+he turned to his partner, and said,—</p>
+
+<p>“Sir William’s interruption has made me forget what we were talking
+of.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_119">{119}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not think we were speaking at all. Sir William could not have
+interrupted any two people in the room who had less to say for
+themselves. We have tried two or three subjects already without success,
+and what we are to talk of next I cannot imagine.”</p>
+
+<p>“What think you of books?” said he, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>“Books—oh no!—I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same
+feelings.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am sorry you think so; but if that be the case, there can at least be
+no want of subject. We may compare our different opinions.”</p>
+
+<p>“No—I cannot talk of books in a ball-room; my head is always full of
+something else.”</p>
+
+<p>“The <i>present</i> always occupies you in such scenes—does it?” said he,
+with a look of doubt.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, always,” she replied, without knowing what she said; for her
+thoughts had wandered far from the subject, as soon afterwards appeared
+by her suddenly exclaiming, “I remember hearing you once say, Mr. Darcy,
+that you hardly ever forgave;—that your resentment, once created, was
+unappeasable. You are very cautious, I suppose, as to its <i>being
+created</i>?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am,” said he, with a firm voice.</p>
+
+<p>“And never allow yourself to be blinded by prejudice?”</p>
+
+<p>“I hope not.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion,
+to be secure of judging properly at first.”</p>
+
+<p>“May I ask to what these questions tend?”</p>
+
+<p>“Merely to the illustration of <i>your</i> character,” said she, endeavouring
+to shake off her gravity. “I am trying to make it out.”</p>
+
+<p>“And what is your success?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_120">{120}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. “I do not get on at all. I hear such different
+accounts of you as puzzle me exceedingly.”</p>
+
+<p>“I can readily believe,” answered he, gravely, “that reports may vary
+greatly with respect to me; and I could wish, Miss Bennet, that you were
+not to sketch my character at the present moment, as there is reason to
+fear that the performance would reflect no credit on either.”</p>
+
+<p>“But if I do not take your likeness now, I may never have another
+opportunity.”</p>
+
+<p>“I would by no means suspend any pleasure of yours,” he coldly replied.
+She said no more, and they went down the other dance and parted in
+silence; on each side dissatisfied, though not to an equal degree; for
+in Darcy’s breast there was a tolerably powerful feeling towards her,
+which soon procured her pardon, and directed all his anger against
+another.</p>
+
+<p>They had not long separated when Miss Bingley came towards her, and,
+with an expression of civil disdain, thus accosted her,—</p>
+
+<p>“So, Miss Eliza, I hear you are quite delighted with George Wickham?
+Your sister has been talking to me about him, and asking me a thousand
+questions; and I find that the young man forgot to tell you, among his
+other communications, that he was the son of old Wickham, the late Mr.
+Darcy’s steward. Let me recommend you, however, as a friend, not to give
+implicit confidence to all his assertions; for, as to Mr. Darcy’s using
+him ill, it is perfectly false: for, on the contrary, he has been always
+remarkably kind to him, though George Wickham has treated Mr. Darcy in a
+most infamous manner. I do not know the particulars, but I know very
+well that Mr. Darcy is not in the least to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_121">{121}</a></span> blame; that he cannot bear
+to hear George Wickham mentioned; and that though my brother thought he
+could not well avoid including him in his invitation to the officers, he
+was excessively glad to find that he had taken himself out of the way.
+His coming into the country at all is a most insolent thing, indeed, and
+I wonder how he could presume to do it. I pity you, Miss Eliza, for this
+discovery of your favourite’s guilt; but really, considering his
+descent, one could not expect much better.”</p>
+
+<p>“His guilt and his descent appear, by your account, to be the same,”
+said Elizabeth, angrily; “for I have heard you accuse him of nothing
+worse than of being the son of Mr. Darcy’s steward, and of <i>that</i>, I can
+assure you, he informed me himself.”</p>
+
+<p>“I beg your pardon,” replied Miss Bingley, turning away with a sneer.
+“Excuse my interference; it was kindly meant.”</p>
+
+<p>“Insolent girl!” said Elizabeth to herself. “You are much mistaken if
+you expect to influence me by such a paltry attack as this. I see
+nothing in it but your own wilful ignorance and the malice of Mr.
+Darcy.” She then sought her eldest sister, who had undertaken to make
+inquiries on the same subject of Bingley. Jane met her with a smile of
+such sweet complacency, a glow of such happy expression, as sufficiently
+marked how well she was satisfied with the occurrences of the evening.
+Elizabeth instantly read her feelings; and, at that moment, solicitude
+for Wickham, resentment against his enemies, and everything else, gave
+way before the hope of Jane’s being in the fairest way for happiness.</p>
+
+<p>“I want to know,” said she, with a countenance no less smiling than her
+sister’s, “what you have learnt<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_122">{122}</a></span> about Mr. Wickham. But perhaps you have
+been too pleasantly engaged to think of any third person, in which case
+you may be sure of my pardon.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” replied Jane, “I have not forgotten him; but I have nothing
+satisfactory to tell you. Mr. Bingley does not know the whole of his
+history, and is quite ignorant of the circumstances which have
+principally offended Mr. Darcy; but he will vouch for the good conduct,
+the probity and honour, of his friend, and is perfectly convinced that
+Mr. Wickham has deserved much less attention from Mr. Darcy than he has
+received; and I am sorry to say that by his account, as well as his
+sister’s, Mr. Wickham is by no means a respectable young man. I am
+afraid he has been very imprudent, and has deserved to lose Mr. Darcy’s
+regard.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Bingley does not know Mr. Wickham himself.”</p>
+
+<p>“No; he never saw him till the other morning at Meryton.”</p>
+
+<p>“This account then is what he has received from Mr. Darcy. I am
+perfectly satisfied. But what does he say of the living?”</p>
+
+<p>“He does not exactly recollect the circumstances, though he has heard
+them from Mr. Darcy more than once, but he believes that it was left to
+him <i>conditionally</i> only.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have not a doubt of Mr. Bingley’s sincerity,” said Elizabeth warmly,
+“but you must excuse my not being convinced by assurances only. Mr.
+Bingley’s defence of his friend was a very able one, I dare say; but
+since he is unacquainted with several parts of the story, and has learnt
+the rest from that friend himself, I shall venture still to think of
+both gentlemen as I did before.”</p>
+
+<p>She then changed the discourse to one more gratifying<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_123">{123}</a></span> to each, and on
+which there could be no difference of sentiment. Elizabeth listened with
+delight to the happy though modest hopes which Jane entertained of
+Bingley’s regard, and said all in her power to heighten her confidence
+in it. On their being joined by Mr. Bingley himself, Elizabeth withdrew
+to Miss Lucas; to whose inquiry after the pleasantness of her last
+partner she had scarcely replied, before Mr. Collins came up to them,
+and told her with great exultation, that he had just been so fortunate
+as to make a most important discovery.</p>
+
+<p>“I have found out,” said he, “by a singular accident, that there is now
+in the room a near relation to my patroness. I happened to overhear the
+gentleman himself mentioning to the young lady who does the honours of
+this house the names of his cousin Miss De Bourgh, and of her mother,
+Lady Catherine. How wonderfully these sort of things occur! Who would
+have thought of my meeting with—perhaps—a nephew of Lady Catherine de
+Bourgh in this assembly! I am most thankful that the discovery is made
+in time for me to pay my respects to him, which I am now going to do,
+and trust he will excuse my not having done it before. My total
+ignorance of the connection must plead my apology.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are not going to introduce yourself to Mr. Darcy?”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed I am. I shall entreat his pardon for not having done it earlier.
+I believe him to be Lady Catherine’s <i>nephew</i>. It will be in my power to
+assure him that her Ladyship was quite well yesterday se’nnight.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth tried hard to dissuade him from such a scheme; assuring him
+that Mr. Darcy would consider his addressing him without introduction as
+an impertinent<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_124">{124}</a></span> freedom, rather than a compliment to his aunt; that it
+was not in the least necessary there should be any notice on either
+side, and that if it were, it must belong to Mr. Darcy, the superior in
+consequence, to begin the acquaintance. Mr. Collins listened to her with
+the determined air of following his own inclination, and when she ceased
+speaking, replied thus,—</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Miss Elizabeth, I have the highest opinion in the world of your
+excellent judgment in all matters within the scope of your
+understanding, but permit me to say that there must be a wide difference
+between the established forms of ceremony amongst the laity and those
+which regulate the clergy; for, give me leave to observe that I consider
+the clerical office as equal in point of dignity with the highest rank
+in the kingdom—provided that a proper humility of behaviour is at the
+same time maintained. You must, therefore, allow me to follow the
+dictates of my conscience on this occasion, which lead me to perform
+what I look on as a point of duty. Pardon me for neglecting to profit by
+your advice, which on every other subject shall be my constant guide,
+though in the case before us I consider myself more fitted by education
+and habitual study to decide on what is right than a young lady like
+yourself;” and with a low bow he left her to attack Mr. Darcy, whose
+reception of his advances she eagerly watched, and whose astonishment at
+being so addressed was very evident. Her cousin prefaced his speech with
+a solemn bow, and though she could not hear a word of it, she felt as if
+hearing it all, and saw in the motion of his lips the words “apology,”
+“Hunsford,” and “Lady Catherine de Bourgh.” It vexed her to see him
+expose himself to such a man. Mr. Darcy was eyeing him with
+un<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_125">{125}</a></span>restrained wonder; and when at last Mr. Collins allowed him to speak,
+replied with an air of distant civility. Mr. Collins, however, was not
+discouraged from speaking again, and Mr. Darcy’s contempt seemed
+abundantly increasing with the length of his second speech; and at the
+end of it he only made him a slight bow, and moved another way: Mr.
+Collins then returned to Elizabeth.</p>
+
+<p>“I have no reason, I assure you,” said he, “to be dissatisfied with my
+reception. Mr. Darcy seemed much pleased with the attention. He answered
+me with the utmost civility, and even paid me the compliment of saying,
+that he was so well convinced of Lady Catherine’s discernment as to be
+certain she could never bestow a favour unworthily. It was really a very
+handsome thought. Upon the whole, I am much pleased with him.”</p>
+
+<p>As Elizabeth had no longer any interest of her own to pursue, she turned
+her attention almost entirely on her sister and Mr. Bingley; and the
+train of agreeable reflections which her observations gave birth to made
+her perhaps almost as happy as Jane. She saw her in idea settled in that
+very house, in all the felicity which a marriage of true affection could
+bestow; and she felt capable, under such circumstances, of endeavouring
+even to like Bingley’s two sisters. Her mother’s thoughts she plainly
+saw were bent the same way, and she determined not to venture near her,
+lest she might hear too much. When they sat down to supper, therefore,
+she considered it a most unlucky perverseness which placed them within
+one of each other; and deeply was she vexed to find that her mother was
+talking to that one person (Lady Lucas) freely, openly, and of nothing
+else but of her expectation that Jane would be soon married to Mr.
+Bingley. It was an animating subject, and Mrs. Bennet<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_126">{126}</a></span> seemed incapable
+of fatigue while enumerating the advantages of the match. His being such
+a charming young man, and so rich, and living but three miles from them,
+were the first points of self-gratulation; and then it was such a
+comfort to think how fond the two sisters were of Jane, and to be
+certain that they must desire the connection as much as she could do. It
+was, moreover, such a promising thing for her younger daughters, as
+Jane’s marrying so greatly must throw them in the way of other rich men;
+and, lastly, it was so pleasant at her time of life to be able to
+consign her single daughters to the care of their sister, that she might
+not be obliged to go into company more than she liked. It was necessary
+to make this circumstance a matter of pleasure, because on such
+occasions it is the etiquette; but no one was less likely than Mrs.
+Bennet to find comfort in staying at home at any period of her life. She
+concluded with many good wishes that Lady Lucas might soon be equally
+fortunate, though evidently and triumphantly believing there was no
+chance of it.</p>
+
+<p>In vain did Elizabeth endeavour to check the rapidity of her mother’s
+words, or persuade her to describe her felicity in a less audible
+whisper; for to her inexpressible vexation she could perceive that the
+chief of it was overheard by Mr. Darcy, who sat opposite to them. Her
+mother only scolded her for being nonsensical.</p>
+
+<p>“What is Mr. Darcy to me, pray, that I should be afraid of him? I am
+sure we owe him no such particular civility as to be obliged to say
+nothing <i>he</i> may not like to hear.”</p>
+
+<p>“For heaven’s sake, madam, speak lower. What advantage can it be to you
+to offend Mr. Darcy? You will never recommend yourself to his friend by
+so doing.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_127">{127}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Nothing that she could say, however, had any influence. Her mother would
+talk of her views in the same intelligible tone. Elizabeth blushed and
+blushed again with shame and vexation. She could not help frequently
+glancing her eye at Mr. Darcy, though every glance convinced her of what
+she dreaded; for though he was not always looking at her mother, she was
+convinced that his attention was invariably fixed by her. The expression
+of his face changed gradually from indignant contempt to a composed and
+steady gravity.</p>
+
+<p>At length, however, Mrs. Bennet had no more to say; and Lady Lucas, who
+had been long yawning at the repetition of delights which she saw no
+likelihood of sharing, was left to the comforts of cold ham and chicken.
+Elizabeth now began to revive. But not long was the interval of
+tranquillity; for when supper was over, singing was talked of, and she
+had the mortification of seeing Mary, after very little entreaty,
+preparing to oblige the company. By many significant looks and silent
+entreaties did she endeavour to prevent such a proof of
+complaisance,—but in vain; Mary would not understand them; such an
+opportunity of exhibiting was delightful to her, and she began her song.
+Elizabeth’s eyes were fixed on her, with most painful sensations; and
+she watched her progress through the several stanzas with an impatience
+which was very ill rewarded at their close; for Mary, on receiving
+amongst the thanks of the table the hint of a hope that she might be
+prevailed on to favour them again, after the pause of half a minute
+began another. Mary’s powers were by no means fitted for such a display;
+her voice was weak, and her manner affected. Elizabeth was in agonies.
+She looked at Jane to see how she bore it; but Jane was very composedly<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_128">{128}</a></span>
+talking to Bingley. She looked at his two sisters, and saw them making
+signs of derision at each other, and at Darcy, who continued, however,
+impenetrably grave. She looked at her father to entreat his
+interference, lest Mary should be singing all night. He took the hint,
+and, when Mary had finished her second song, said aloud,—</p>
+
+<p>“That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough.
+Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit.”</p>
+
+<p>Mary, though pretending not to hear, was somewhat disconcerted; and
+Elizabeth, sorry for her, and sorry for her father’s speech, was afraid
+her anxiety had done no good. Others of the party were now applied to.</p>
+
+<p>“If I,” said Mr. Collins, “were so fortunate as to be able to sing, I
+should have great pleasure, I am sure, in obliging the company with an
+air; for I consider music as a very innocent diversion, and perfectly
+compatible with the profession of a clergyman. I do not mean, however,
+to assert that we can be justified in devoting too much of our time to
+music, for there are certainly other things to be attended to. The
+rector of a parish has much to do. In the first place, he must make such
+an agreement for tithes as may be beneficial to himself and not
+offensive to his patron. He must write his own sermons; and the time
+that remains will not be too much for his parish duties, and the care
+and improvement of his dwelling, which he cannot be excused from making
+as comfortable as possible. And I do not think it of light importance
+that he should have attentive and conciliatory manners towards
+everybody, especially towards those to whom he owes his preferment. I
+cannot acquit him of that duty; nor could I think well<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_129">{129}</a></span> of the man who
+should omit an occasion of testifying his respect towards anybody
+connected with the family.” And with a bow to Mr. Darcy, he concluded
+his speech, which had been spoken so loud as to be heard by half the
+room. Many stared—many smiled; but no one looked more amused than Mr.
+Bennet himself, while his wife seriously commended Mr. Collins for
+having spoken so sensibly, and observed, in a half-whisper to Lady
+Lucas, that he was a remarkably clever, good kind of young man.</p>
+
+<p>To Elizabeth it appeared, that had her family made an agreement to
+expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would
+have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit, or
+finer success; and happy did she think it for Bingley and her sister
+that some of the exhibition had escaped his notice, and that his
+feelings were not of a sort to be much distressed by the folly which he
+must have witnessed. That his two sisters and Mr. Darcy, however, should
+have such an opportunity of ridiculing her relations was bad enough; and
+she could not determine whether the silent contempt of the gentleman, or
+the insolent smiles of the ladies, were more intolerable.</p>
+
+<p>The rest of the evening brought her little amusement. She was teased by
+Mr. Collins, who continued most perseveringly by her side; and though he
+could not prevail with her to dance with him again, put it out of her
+power to dance with others. In vain did she entreat him to stand up with
+somebody else, and offered to introduce him to any young lady in the
+room. He assured her that, as to dancing, he was perfectly indifferent
+to it; that his chief object was, by delicate attentions, to recommend
+himself to her; and that he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_130">{130}</a></span> should therefore make a point of remaining
+close to her the whole evening. There was no arguing upon such a
+project. She owed her greatest relief to her friend Miss Lucas, who
+often joined them, and good-naturedly engaged Mr. Collins’s conversation
+to herself.</p>
+
+<p>She was at least free from the offence of Mr. Darcy’s further notice:
+though often standing within a very short distance of her, quite
+disengaged, he never came near enough to speak. She felt it to be the
+probable consequence of her allusions to Mr. Wickham, and rejoiced in
+it.</p>
+
+<p>The Longbourn party were the last of all the company to depart; and by a
+manœuvre of Mrs. Bennet had to wait for their carriage a quarter of an
+hour after everybody else was gone, which gave them time to see how
+heartily they were wished away by some of the family. Mrs. Hurst and her
+sister scarcely opened their mouths except to complain of fatigue, and
+were evidently impatient to have the house to themselves. They repulsed
+every attempt of Mrs. Bennet at conversation, and, by so doing, threw a
+languor over the whole party, which was very little relieved by the long
+speeches of Mr. Collins, who was complimenting Mr. Bingley and his
+sisters on the elegance of their entertainment, and the hospitality and
+politeness which had marked their behaviour to their guests. Darcy said
+nothing at all. Mr. Bennet, in equal silence, was enjoying the scene.
+Mr. Bingley and Jane were standing together a little detached from the
+rest, and talked only to each other. Elizabeth preserved as steady a
+silence as either Mrs. Hurst or Miss Bingley; and even Lydia was too
+much fatigued to utter more than the occasional exclamation of “Lord,
+how tired I am!” accompanied by a violent yawn.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_131">{131}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When at length they arose to take leave, Mrs. Bennet was most pressingly
+civil in her hope of seeing the whole family soon at Longbourn; and
+addressed herself particularly to Mr. Bingley, to assure him how happy
+he would make them, by eating a family dinner with them at any time,
+without the ceremony of a formal invitation. Bingley was all grateful
+pleasure; and he readily engaged for taking the earliest opportunity of
+waiting on her after his return from London, whither he was obliged to
+go the next day for a short time.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet was perfectly satisfied; and quitted the house under the
+delightful persuasion that, allowing for the necessary preparations of
+settlements, new carriages, and wedding clothes, she should undoubtedly
+see her daughter settled at Netherfield in the course of three or four
+months. Of having another daughter married to Mr. Collins she thought
+with equal certainty, and with considerable, though not equal, pleasure.
+Elizabeth was the least dear to her of all her children; and though the
+man and the match were quite good enough for <i>her</i>, the worth of each
+was eclipsed by Mr. Bingley and Netherfield.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_132">{132}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_161_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_161_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“to assure you in the most animated language.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XIX.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="T" src="images/i_161_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_161_b.png"></span>HE next day opened a new scene at Longbourn. Mr. Collins made his
+declaration in form. Having resolved to do it without loss of time, as
+his leave of absence extended only to the following Saturday, and having
+no feelings of diffidence to make it distressing to himself even at the
+moment, he set about it in a very orderly manner, with all the
+observances which he supposed a regular part of the business. On finding
+Mrs. Bennet, Elizabeth,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_133">{133}</a></span> and one of the younger girls together, soon
+after breakfast, he addressed the mother in these words,—</p>
+
+<p>“May I hope, madam, for your interest with your fair daughter Elizabeth,
+when I solicit for the honour of a private audience with her in the
+course of this morning?”</p>
+
+<p>Before Elizabeth had time for anything but a blush of surprise, Mrs.
+Bennet instantly answered,—</p>
+
+<p>“Oh dear! Yes, certainly. I am sure Lizzy will be very happy—I am sure
+she can have no objection. Come, Kitty, I want you upstairs.” And
+gathering her work together, she was hastening away, when Elizabeth
+called out,—</p>
+
+<p>“Dear ma’am, do not go. I beg you will not go. Mr. Collins must excuse
+me. He can have nothing to say to me that anybody need not hear. I am
+going away myself.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, no, nonsense, Lizzy. I desire you will stay where you are.” And
+upon Elizabeth’s seeming really, with vexed and embarrassed looks, about
+to escape, she added, “Lizzy, I <i>insist</i> upon your staying and hearing
+Mr. Collins.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth would not oppose such an injunction; and a moment’s
+consideration making her also sensible that it would be wisest to get it
+over as soon and as quietly as possible, she sat down again, and tried
+to conceal, by incessant employment, the feelings which were divided
+between distress and diversion. Mrs. Bennet and Kitty walked off, and as
+soon as they were gone, Mr. Collins began,—</p>
+
+<p>“Believe me, my dear Miss Elizabeth, that your modesty, so far from
+doing you any disservice, rather adds to your other perfections. You
+would have been less amiable in my eyes had there <i>not</i> been this little
+unwillingness; but allow me to assure you that I have your respected
+mother’s permission for this address.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_134">{134}</a></span> You can hardly doubt the purport
+of my discourse, however your natural delicacy may lead you to
+dissemble; my attentions have been too marked to be mistaken. Almost as
+soon as I entered the house I singled you out as the companion of my
+future life. But before I am run away with by my feelings on this
+subject, perhaps it will be advisable for me to state my reasons for
+marrying—and, moreover, for coming into Hertfordshire with the design
+of selecting a wife, as I certainly did.”</p>
+
+<p>The idea of Mr. Collins, with all his solemn composure, being run away
+with by his feelings, made Elizabeth so near laughing that she could not
+use the short pause he allowed in any attempt to stop him farther, and
+he continued,—</p>
+
+<p>“My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for
+every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example
+of matrimony in his parish; secondly, that I am convinced it will add
+very greatly to my happiness; and, thirdly, which perhaps I ought to
+have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and
+recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling
+patroness. Twice has she condescended to give me her opinion (unasked
+too!) on this subject; and it was but the very Saturday night before I
+left Hunsford,—between our pools at quadrille, while Mrs. Jenkinson was
+arranging Miss De Bourgh’s footstool,—that she said, ‘Mr. Collins, you
+must marry. A clergyman like you must marry. Choose properly, choose a
+gentlewoman for <i>my</i> sake, and for your <i>own</i>; let her be an active,
+useful sort of person, not brought up high, but able to make a small
+income go a good way. This is my advice. Find such a woman as soon as
+you can, bring her to Hunsford, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_135">{135}</a></span> I will visit her.’ Allow me, by the
+way, to observe, my fair cousin, that I do not reckon the notice and
+kindness of Lady Catherine de Bourgh as among the least of the
+advantages in my power to offer. You will find her manners beyond
+anything I can describe; and your wit and vivacity, I think, must be
+acceptable to her, especially when tempered with the silence and respect
+which her rank will inevitably excite. Thus much for my general
+intention in favour of matrimony; it remains to be told why my views
+were directed to Longbourn instead of my own neighbourhood, where I
+assure you there are many amiable young women. But the fact is, that
+being, as I am, to inherit this estate after the death of your honoured
+father (who, however, may live many years longer), I could not satisfy
+myself without resolving to choose a wife from among his daughters, that
+the loss to them might be as little as possible when the melancholy
+event takes place—which, however, as I have already said, may not be
+for several years. This has been my motive, my fair cousin, and I
+flatter myself it will not sink me in your esteem. And now nothing
+remains for me but to assure you in the most animated language of the
+violence of my affection. To fortune I am perfectly indifferent, and
+shall make no demand of that nature on your father, since I am well
+aware that it could not be complied with; and that one thousand pounds
+in the 4 per cents., which will not be yours till after your mother’s
+decease, is all that you may ever be entitled to. On that head,
+therefore, I shall be uniformly silent: and you may assure yourself that
+no ungenerous reproach shall ever pass my lips when we are married.”</p>
+
+<p>It was absolutely necessary to interrupt him now.</p>
+
+<p>“You are too hasty, sir,” she cried. “You forget that<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_136">{136}</a></span> I have made no
+answer. Let me do it without further loss of time. Accept my thanks for
+the compliment you are paying me. I am very sensible of the honour of
+your proposals, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise than decline
+them.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am not now to learn,” replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave of the
+hand, “that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the
+man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their
+favour; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second or even a
+third time. I am, therefore, by no means discouraged by what you have
+just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long.”</p>
+
+<p>“Upon my word, sir,” cried Elizabeth, “your hope is rather an
+extraordinary one after my declaration. I do assure you that I am not
+one of those young ladies (if such young ladies there are) who are so
+daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second
+time. I am perfectly serious in my refusal. You could not make <i>me</i>
+happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman in the world who
+would make <i>you</i> so. Nay, were your friend Lady Catherine to know me, I
+am persuaded she would find me in every respect ill qualified for the
+situation.”</p>
+
+<p>“Were it certain that Lady Catherine would think so,” said Mr. Collins,
+very gravely—“but I cannot imagine that her Ladyship would at all
+disapprove of you. And you may be certain that when I have the honour of
+seeing her again I shall speak in the highest terms of your modesty,
+economy, and other amiable qualifications.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed, Mr. Collins, all praise of me will be unnecessary. You must
+give me leave to judge for myself, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_137">{137}</a></span> pay me the compliment of
+believing what I say. I wish you very happy and very rich, and by
+refusing your hand, do all in my power to prevent your being otherwise.
+In making me the offer, you must have satisfied the delicacy of your
+feelings with regard to my family, and may take possession of Longbourn
+estate whenever it falls, without any self-reproach. This matter may be
+considered, therefore, as finally settled.” And rising as she thus
+spoke, she would have quitted the room, had not Mr. Collins thus
+addressed her,—</p>
+
+<p>“When I do myself the honour of speaking to you next on the subject, I
+shall hope to receive a more favourable answer than you have now given
+me; though I am far from accusing you of cruelty at present, because I
+know it to be the established custom of your sex to reject a man on the
+first application, and, perhaps, you have even now said as much to
+encourage my suit as would be consistent with the true delicacy of the
+female character.”</p>
+
+<p>“Really, Mr. Collins,” cried Elizabeth, with some warmth, “you puzzle me
+exceedingly. If what I have hitherto said can appear to you in the form
+of encouragement, I know not how to express my refusal in such a way as
+may convince you of its being one.”</p>
+
+<p>“You must give me leave to flatter myself, my dear cousin, that your
+refusal of my addresses are merely words of course. My reasons for
+believing it are briefly these:—It does not appear to me that my hand
+is unworthy of your acceptance, or that the establishment I can offer would
+be any other than highly desirable. My situation in life, my connections
+with the family of De Bourgh, and my relationship to your own, are
+circumstances highly in my favour; and you should take<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_138">{138}</a></span> it into further
+consideration that, in spite of your manifold attractions, it is by no
+means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made you. Your
+portion is unhappily so small, that it will in all likelihood undo the
+effects of your loveliness and amiable qualifications. As I must,
+therefore, conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I
+shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by
+suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females.”</p>
+
+<p>“I do assure you, sir, that I have no pretensions whatever to that kind
+of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. I would
+rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere. I thank you
+again and again for the honour you have done me in your proposals, but
+to accept them is absolutely impossible. My feelings in every respect
+forbid it. Can I speak plainer? Do not consider me now as an elegant
+female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the
+truth from her heart.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are uniformly charming!” cried he, with an air of awkward
+gallantry; “and I am persuaded that, when sanctioned by the express
+authority of both your excellent parents, my proposals will not fail of
+being acceptable.”</p>
+
+<p>To such perseverance in wilful self-deception Elizabeth would make no
+reply, and immediately and in silence withdrew; determined, that if he
+persisted in considering her repeated refusals as flattering
+encouragement, to apply to her father, whose negative might be uttered
+in such a manner as must be decisive, and whose behaviour at least could
+not be mistaken for the affectation and coquetry of an elegant female.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_139">{139}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XX"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_168_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_168_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XX.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="M" src="images/i_168_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_168_b.png"></span>R. COLLINS was not left long to the silent contemplation of his
+successful love; for Mrs. Bennet, having dawdled about in the vestibule
+to watch for the end of the conference, no sooner saw Elizabeth open the
+door and with quick step pass her towards the staircase, than she
+entered the breakfast-room, and congratulated both him and herself in
+warm terms on the happy prospect of their nearer connection. Mr. Collins
+received and returned these felicitations with equal pleasure, and then
+proceeded to relate the particulars of their interview, with the result
+of which he trusted he had every reason to be satisfied, since the
+refusal which his cousin had steadfastly given him would naturally flow
+from her bashful modesty and the genuine delicacy of her character.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_140">{140}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This information, however, startled Mrs. Bennet: she would have been
+glad to be equally satisfied that her daughter had meant to encourage
+him by protesting against his proposals, but she dared not believe it,
+and could not help saying so.</p>
+
+<p>“But depend upon it, Mr. Collins,” she added, “that Lizzy shall be
+brought to reason. I will speak to her about it myself directly. She is
+a very headstrong, foolish girl, and does not know her own interest; but
+I will <i>make</i> her know it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Pardon me for interrupting you, madam,” cried Mr. Collins; “but if she
+is really headstrong and foolish, I know not whether she would
+altogether be a very desirable wife to a man in my situation, who
+naturally looks for happiness in the marriage state. If, therefore, she
+actually persists in rejecting my suit, perhaps it were better not to
+force her into accepting me, because, if liable to such defects of
+temper, she could not contribute much to my felicity.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sir, you quite misunderstand me,” said Mrs. Bennet, alarmed. “Lizzy is
+only headstrong in such matters as these. In everything else she is as
+good-natured a girl as ever lived. I will go directly to Mr. Bennet, and
+we shall very soon settle it with her, I am sure.”</p>
+
+<p>She would not give him time to reply, but hurrying instantly to her
+husband, called out, as she entered the library,—</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Mr. Bennet, you are wanted immediately; we are all in an uproar.
+You must come and make Lizzy marry Mr. Collins, for she vows she will
+not have him; and if you do not make haste he will change his mind and
+not have <i>her</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_141">{141}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bennet raised his eyes from his book as she entered, and fixed them
+on her face with a calm unconcern, which was not in the least altered by
+her communication.</p>
+
+<p>“I have not the pleasure of understanding you,” said he, when she had
+finished her speech. “Of what are you talking?”</p>
+
+<p>“Of Mr. Collins and Lizzy. Lizzy declares she will not have Mr. Collins,
+and Mr. Collins begins to say that he will not have Lizzy.”</p>
+
+<p>“And what am I to do on the occasion? It seems a hopeless business.”</p>
+
+<p>“Speak to Lizzy about it yourself. Tell her that you insist upon her
+marrying him.”</p>
+
+<p>“Let her be called down. She shall hear my opinion.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet rang the bell, and Miss Elizabeth was summoned to the
+library.</p>
+
+<p>“Come here, child,” cried her father as she appeared. “I have sent for
+you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr. Collins has made
+you an offer of marriage. Is it true?”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth replied that it was.</p>
+
+<p>“Very well—and this offer of marriage you have refused?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your
+accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, or I will never see her again.”</p>
+
+<p>“An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must
+be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you
+again if you do <i>not</i> marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again
+if you <i>do</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_142">{142}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth could not but smile at such a conclusion of such a beginning;
+but Mrs. Bennet, who had persuaded herself that her husband regarded the
+affair as she wished, was excessively disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean, Mr. Bennet, by talking in this way? You promised me
+to <i>insist</i> upon her marrying him.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear,” replied her husband, “I have two small favours to request.
+First, that you will allow me the free use of my understanding on the
+present occasion; and, secondly, of my room. I shall be glad to have the
+library to myself as soon as may be.”</p>
+
+<p>Not yet, however, in spite of her disappointment in her husband, did
+Mrs. Bennet give up the point. She talked to Elizabeth again and again;
+coaxed and threatened her by turns. She endeavoured to secure Jane in
+her interest, but Jane, with all possible mildness, declined
+interfering; and Elizabeth, sometimes with real earnestness, and
+sometimes with playful gaiety, replied to her attacks. Though her manner
+varied, however, her determination never did.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Collins, meanwhile, was meditating in solitude on what had passed.
+He thought too well of himself to comprehend on what motive his cousin
+could refuse him; and though his pride was hurt, he suffered in no other
+way. His regard for her was quite imaginary; and the possibility of her
+deserving her mother’s reproach prevented his feeling any regret.</p>
+
+<p>While the family were in this confusion, Charlotte Lucas came to spend
+the day with them. She was met in the vestibule by Lydia, who, flying to
+her, cried in a half whisper, “I am glad you are come, for there is such
+fun here! What do you think has happened this<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_143">{143}</a></span> morning? Mr. Collins has
+made an offer to Lizzy, and she will not have him.”</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 443px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption13">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_172.jpg" width="443" id="img_images_i_172.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption13">
+<p>“they entered the breakfast room”</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Charlotte had hardly time to answer before they were joined by Kitty,
+who came to tell the same news; and no sooner had they entered the
+breakfast-room, where Mrs. Bennet was alone, than she likewise began on
+the subject, calling on Miss Lucas for her compassion, and entreating
+her to persuade her friend Lizzy to comply with the wishes of her
+family. “Pray do, my dear Miss<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_144">{144}</a></span> Lucas,” she added, in a melancholy tone;
+“for nobody is on my side, nobody takes part with me; I am cruelly used,
+nobody feels for my poor nerves.”</p>
+
+<p>Charlotte’s reply was spared by the entrance of Jane and Elizabeth.</p>
+
+<p>“Ay, there she comes,” continued Mrs. Bennet, “looking as unconcerned as
+may be, and caring no more for us than if we were at York, provided she
+can have her own way. But I tell you what, Miss Lizzy, if you take it
+into your head to go on refusing every offer of marriage in this way,
+you will never get a husband at all—and I am sure I do not know who is
+to maintain you when your father is dead. <i>I</i> shall not be able to keep
+you—and so I warn you. I have done with you from this very day. I told
+you in the library, you know, that I should never speak to you again,
+and you will find me as good as my word. I have no pleasure in talking
+to undutiful children. Not that I have much pleasure, indeed, in talking
+to anybody. People who suffer as I do from nervous complaints can have
+no great inclination for talking. Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it
+is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.”</p>
+
+<p>Her daughters listened in silence to this effusion, sensible that any
+attempt to reason with or soothe her would only increase the irritation.
+She talked on, therefore, without interruption from any of them till
+they were joined by Mr. Collins, who entered with an air more stately
+than usual, and on perceiving whom, she said to the girls,—</p>
+
+<p>“Now, I do insist upon it, that you, all of you, hold your tongues, and
+let Mr. Collins and me have a little conversation together.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_145">{145}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth passed quietly out of the room, Jane and Kitty followed, but
+Lydia stood her ground, determined to hear all she could; and Charlotte,
+detained first by the civility of Mr. Collins, whose inquiries after
+herself and all her family were very minute, and then by a little
+curiosity, satisfied herself with walking to the window and pretending
+not to hear. In a doleful voice Mrs. Bennet thus began the projected
+conversation:—</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Mr. Collins!”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear madam,” replied he, “let us be for ever silent on this point.
+Far be it from me,” he presently continued, in a voice that marked his
+displeasure, “to resent the behaviour of your daughter. Resignation to
+inevitable evils is the duty of us all: the peculiar duty of a young man
+who has been so fortunate as I have been, in early preferment; and, I
+trust, I am resigned. Perhaps not the less so from feeling a doubt of my
+positive happiness had my fair cousin honoured me with her hand; for I
+have often observed, that resignation is never so perfect as when the
+blessing denied begins to lose somewhat of its value in our estimation.
+You will not, I hope, consider me as showing any disrespect to your
+family, my dear madam, by thus withdrawing my pretensions to your
+daughter’s favour, without having paid yourself and Mr. Bennet the
+compliment of requesting you to interpose your authority in my behalf.
+My conduct may, I fear, be objectionable in having accepted my
+dismission from your daughter’s lips instead of your own; but we are all
+liable to error. I have certainly meant well through the whole affair.
+My object has been to secure an amiable companion for myself, with due
+consideration for the advantage of all your family; and if my <i>manner</i>
+has been at all reprehensible, I here beg leave to apologize.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_146">{146}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_175_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_175_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXI.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="T" src="images/i_175_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_175_b.png"></span>HE discussion of Mr. Collins’s offer was now nearly at an end, and
+Elizabeth had only to suffer from the uncomfortable feelings necessarily
+attending it, and occasionally from some peevish allusion of her mother.
+As for the gentleman himself, <i>his</i> feelings were chiefly expressed, not
+by embarrassment or dejection, or<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_147">{147}</a></span> by trying to avoid her, but by
+stiffness of manner and resentful silence. He scarcely ever spoke to
+her; and the assiduous attentions which he had been so sensible of
+himself were transferred for the rest of the day to Miss Lucas, whose
+civility in listening to him was a seasonable relief to them all, and
+especially to her friend.</p>
+
+<p>The morrow produced no abatement of Mrs. Bennet’s ill humour or ill
+health. Mr. Collins was also in the same state of angry pride. Elizabeth
+had hoped that his resentment might shorten his visit, but his plan did
+not appear in the least affected by it. He was always to have gone on
+Saturday, and to Saturday he still meant to stay.</p>
+
+<p>After breakfast, the girls walked to Meryton, to inquire if Mr. Wickham
+were returned, and to lament over his absence from the Netherfield ball.
+He joined them on their entering the town, and attended them to their
+aunt’s, where his regret and vexation and the concern of everybody were
+well talked over. To Elizabeth, however, he voluntarily acknowledged
+that the necessity of his absence <i>had</i> been self-imposed.</p>
+
+<p>“I found,” said he, “as the time drew near, that I had better not meet
+Mr. Darcy;—that to be in the same room, the same party with him for so
+many hours together, might be more than I could bear, and that scenes
+might arise unpleasant to more than myself.”</p>
+
+<p>She highly approved his forbearance; and they had leisure for a full
+discussion of it, and for all the commendations which they civilly
+bestowed on each other, as Wickham and another officer walked back with
+them to Longbourn, and during the walk he particularly attended to her.
+His accompanying them was a double advantage: she felt all the
+compliment it offered to herself;<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_148">{148}</a></span> and it was most acceptable as an
+occasion of introducing him to her father and mother.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption14">
+<img alt="" height="438" src="images/i_177.jpg" width="550" id="img_images_i_177.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption14"><p>“Walked back with them”</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Soon after their return, a letter was delivered to Miss Bennet; it came
+from Netherfield, and was opened immediately. The envelope contained a
+sheet of elegant, little, hot-pressed paper, well covered with a lady’s
+fair, flowing hand; and Elizabeth saw her sister’s countenance change as
+she read it, and saw her dwelling intently on some particular passages.
+Jane recollected herself soon; and putting the letter away, tried to
+join, with her usual cheerfulness, in the general conversation: but
+Elizabeth felt an anxiety on the subject which drew off her attention
+even from Wickham; and no sooner had he and his companion taken leave,
+than a glance from Jane invited her to follow her upstairs. When they
+had gained their own room, Jane, taking out her letter, said, “This is
+from Caroline Bingley: what it<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_149">{149}</a></span> contains has surprised me a good deal.
+The whole party have left Netherfield by this time, and are on their way
+to town; and without any intention of coming back again. You shall hear
+what she says.”</p>
+
+<p>She then read the first sentence aloud, which comprised the information
+of their having just resolved to follow their brother to town directly,
+and of their meaning to dine that day in Grosvenor Street, where Mr.
+Hurst had a house. The next was in these words:—“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I do not pretend to
+regret anything I shall leave in Hertfordshire except your society, my
+dearest friend; but we will hope, at some future period, to enjoy many
+returns of that delightful intercourse we have known, and in the
+meanwhile may lessen the pain of separation by a very frequent and most
+unreserved correspondence. I depend on you for that.’<span class="lftspc">”</span> To these
+high-flown expressions Elizabeth listened with all the insensibility of
+distrust; and though the suddenness of their removal surprised her, she
+saw nothing in it really to lament: it was not to be supposed that their
+absence from Netherfield would prevent Mr. Bingley’s being there; and as
+to the loss of their society, she was persuaded that Jane must soon
+cease to regard it in the enjoyment of his.</p>
+
+<p>“It is unlucky,” said she, after a short pause, “that you should not be
+able to see your friends before they leave the country. But may we not
+hope that the period of future happiness, to which Miss Bingley looks
+forward, may arrive earlier than she is aware, and that the delightful
+intercourse you have known as friends will be renewed with yet greater
+satisfaction as sisters? Mr. Bingley will not be detained in London by
+them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Caroline decidedly says that none of the party will return into
+Hertfordshire this winter. I will read it to you.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_150">{150}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>When my brother left us yesterday, he imagined that the business which
+took him to London might be concluded in three or four days; but as we
+are certain it cannot be so, and at the same time convinced that when
+Charles gets to town he will be in no hurry to leave it again, we have
+determined on following him thither, that he may not be obliged to spend
+his vacant hours in a comfortless hotel. Many of my acquaintance are
+already there for the winter: I wish I could hear that you, my dearest
+friend, had any intention of making one in the crowd, but of that I
+despair. I sincerely hope your Christmas in Hertfordshire may abound in
+the gaieties which that season generally brings, and that your beaux
+will be so numerous as to prevent your feeling the loss of the three of
+whom we shall deprive you.’</p>
+
+<p>“It is evident by this,” added Jane, “that he comes back no more this
+winter.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is only evident that Miss Bingley does not mean he <i>should</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why will you think so? It must be his own doing; he is his own master.
+But you do not know <i>all</i>. I <i>will</i> read you the passage which
+particularly hurts me. I will have no reserves from <i>you</i>. ‘Mr. Darcy is
+impatient to see his sister; and to confess the truth, <i>we</i> are scarcely
+less eager to meet her again. I really do not think Georgiana Darcy has
+her equal for beauty, elegance, and accomplishments; and the affection
+she inspires in Louisa and myself is heightened into something still
+more interesting from the hope we dare to entertain of her being
+hereafter our sister. I do not know whether I ever before mentioned to
+you my feelings on this subject, but I will not leave the country
+without confiding them, and I trust you will not esteem them<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_151">{151}</a></span>
+unreasonable. My brother admires her greatly already; he will have
+frequent opportunity now of seeing her on the most intimate footing; her
+relations all wish the connection as much as his own; and a sister’s
+partiality is not misleading me, I think, when I call Charles most
+capable of engaging any woman’s heart. With all these circumstances to
+favour an attachment, and nothing to prevent it, am I wrong, my dearest
+Jane, in indulging the hope of an event which will secure the happiness
+of so many?’ What think you of <i>this</i> sentence, my dear Lizzy?” said
+Jane, as she finished it. “Is it not clear enough? Does it not expressly
+declare that Caroline neither expects nor wishes me to be her sister;
+that she is perfectly convinced of her brother’s indifference; and that
+if she suspects the nature of my feelings for him she means (most
+kindly!) to put me on my guard. Can there be any other opinion on the
+subject?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, there can; for mine is totally different. Will you hear it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Most willingly.”</p>
+
+<p>“You shall have it in a few words. Miss Bingley sees that her brother is
+in love with you and wants him to marry Miss Darcy. She follows him to
+town in the hope of keeping him there, and tries to persuade you that he
+does not care about you.”</p>
+
+<p>Jane shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed, Jane, you ought to believe me. No one who has ever seen you
+together can doubt his affection; Miss Bingley, I am sure, cannot: she
+is not such a simpleton. Could she have seen half as much love in Mr.
+Darcy for herself, she would have ordered her wedding clothes. But the
+case is this:—we are not rich enough or grand enough for them; and she
+is<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_152">{152}</a></span> the more anxious to get Miss Darcy for her brother, from the notion
+that when there has been <i>one</i> inter-marriage, she may have less trouble
+in achieving a second; in which there is certainly some ingenuity, and I
+dare say it would succeed if Miss de Bourgh were out of the way. But, my
+dearest Jane, you cannot seriously imagine that, because Miss Bingley
+tells you her brother greatly admires Miss Darcy, he is in the smallest
+degree less sensible of <i>your</i> merit than when he took leave of you on
+Tuesday; or that it will be in her power to persuade him that, instead
+of being in love with you, he is very much in love with her friend.”</p>
+
+<p>“If we thought alike of Miss Bingley,” replied Jane, “your
+representation of all this might make me quite easy. But I know the
+foundation is unjust. Caroline is incapable of wilfully deceiving
+anyone; and all that I can hope in this case is, that she is deceived
+herself.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is right. You could not have started a more happy idea, since you
+will not take comfort in mine: believe her to be deceived, by all means.
+You have now done your duty by her, and must fret no longer.”</p>
+
+<p>“But, my dear sister, can I be happy, even supposing the best, in
+accepting a man whose sisters and friends are all wishing him to marry
+elsewhere?”</p>
+
+<p>“You must decide for yourself,” said Elizabeth; “and if, upon mature
+deliberation, you find that the misery of disobliging his two sisters is
+more than equivalent to the happiness of being his wife, I advise you,
+by all means, to refuse him.”</p>
+
+<p>“How can you talk so?” said Jane, faintly smiling; “you must know, that,
+though I should be exceedingly grieved at their disapprobation, I could
+not hesitate.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_153">{153}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“I did not think you would; and that being the case, I cannot consider
+your situation with much compassion.”</p>
+
+<p>“But if he returns no more this winter, my choice will never be
+required. A thousand things may arise in six months.”</p>
+
+<p>The idea of his returning no more Elizabeth treated with the utmost
+contempt. It appeared to her merely the suggestion of Caroline’s
+interested wishes; and she could not for a moment suppose that those
+wishes, however openly or artfully spoken, could influence a young man
+so totally independent of everyone.</p>
+
+<p>She represented to her sister, as forcibly as possible, what she felt on
+the subject, and had soon the pleasure of seeing its happy effect.
+Jane’s temper was not desponding; and she was gradually led to hope,
+though the diffidence of affection sometimes overcame the hope, that
+Bingley would return to Netherfield, and answer every wish of her heart.</p>
+
+<p>They agreed that Mrs. Bennet should only hear of the departure of the
+family, without being alarmed on the score of the gentleman’s conduct;
+but even this partial communication gave her a great deal of concern,
+and she bewailed it as exceedingly unlucky that the ladies should happen
+to go away just as they were all getting so intimate together. After
+lamenting it, however, at some length, she had the consolation of
+thinking that Mr. Bingley would be soon down again, and soon dining at
+Longbourn; and the conclusion of all was the comfortable declaration,
+that, though he had been invited only to a family dinner, she would take
+care to have two full courses.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_154">{154}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_183_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_183_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="T" src="images/i_183_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_183_b.png"></span>HE Bennets were engaged to dine with the Lucases; and again, during the
+chief of the day, was Miss Lucas so kind as to listen to Mr. Collins.
+Elizabeth took an opportunity of thanking her. “It keeps him in good
+humour,” said she, “and I am more obliged to you than I can express.”</p>
+
+<p>Charlotte assured her friend of her satisfaction in being useful, and
+that it amply repaid her for the little sacrifice of her time. This was
+very amiable; but Charlotte’s kindness extended farther than Elizabeth
+had any conception of:—its object was nothing less than to secure her
+from any return of Mr. Collins’s addresses, by engaging them towards
+herself. Such was Miss Lucas’s scheme; and appearances were so
+favourable, that when they parted at night, she would have felt almost
+sure of success if he had not been to leave Hertfordshire so very soon.
+But here she did injustice to the fire and independence of his
+character; for it led him to escape out of Longbourn House the next
+morning with<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_155">{155}</a></span> admirable slyness, and hasten to Lucas Lodge to throw
+himself at her feet. He was anxious to avoid the notice of his cousins,
+from a conviction that, if they saw him depart, they could not fail to
+conjecture his design, and he was not willing to have the attempt known
+till its success could be known likewise; for, though feeling almost
+secure, and with reason, for Charlotte had been tolerably encouraging,
+he was comparatively diffident since the adventure of Wednesday. His
+reception, however, was of the most flattering kind. Miss Lucas
+perceived him from an upper window as he walked towards the house, and
+instantly set out to meet him accidentally in the lane. But little had
+she dared to hope that so much love and eloquence awaited her there.</p>
+
+<p>In as short a time as Mr. Collins’s long speeches would allow,
+everything was settled between them to the satisfaction of both; and as
+they entered the house, he earnestly entreated her to name the day that
+was to make him the happiest of men; and though such a solicitation must
+be waived for the present, the lady felt no inclination to trifle with
+his happiness. The stupidity with which he was favoured by nature must
+guard his courtship from any charm that could make a woman wish for its
+continuance; and Miss Lucas, who accepted him solely from the pure and
+disinterested desire of an establishment, cared not how soon that
+establishment were gained.</p>
+
+<p>Sir William and Lady Lucas were speedily applied to for their consent;
+and it was bestowed with a most joyful alacrity. Mr. Collins’s present
+circumstances made it a most eligible match for their daughter, to whom
+they could give little fortune; and his prospects of future wealth were
+exceedingly fair. Lady Lucas began directly to calculate, with more
+interest than the matter had ever<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_156">{156}</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 371px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption15">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_185.jpg" width="371" id="img_images_i_185.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption15">
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“So much love and eloquence”</p></div>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">excited before, how many years longer Mr. Bennet was likely to live; and
+Sir William gave it as his decided opinion, that whenever Mr. Collins
+should be in possession of the Longbourn estate, it would be highly
+expedient that both he and his wife should make their appearance at St.
+James’s. The whole family in short were properly overjoyed on the
+occasion. The younger girls formed<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_157">{157}</a></span> hopes of <i>coming out</i> a year or two
+sooner than they might otherwise have done; and the boys were relieved
+from their apprehension of Charlotte’s dying an old maid. Charlotte
+herself was tolerably composed. She had gained her point, and had time
+to consider of it. Her reflections were in general satisfactory. Mr.
+Collins, to be sure, was neither sensible nor agreeable: his society was
+irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would
+be her husband. Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony,
+marriage had always been her object: it was the only honourable
+provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and, however
+uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative
+from want. This preservative she had now obtained; and at the age of
+twenty-seven, without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good
+luck of it. The least agreeable circumstance in the business was the
+surprise it must occasion to Elizabeth Bennet, whose friendship she
+valued beyond that of any other person. Elizabeth would wonder, and
+probably would blame her; and though her resolution was not to be
+shaken, her feelings must be hurt by such a disapprobation. She resolved
+to give her the information herself; and therefore charged Mr. Collins,
+when he returned to Longbourn to dinner, to drop no hint of what had
+passed before any of the family. A promise of secrecy was of course very
+dutifully given, but it could not be kept without difficulty; for the
+curiosity excited by his long absence burst forth in such very direct
+questions on his return, as required some ingenuity to evade, and he was
+at the same time exercising great self-denial, for he was longing to
+publish his prosperous love.</p>
+
+<p>As he was to begin his journey too early on the morrow<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_158">{158}</a></span> to see any of
+the family, the ceremony of leave-taking was performed when the ladies
+moved for the night; and Mrs. Bennet, with great politeness and
+cordiality, said how happy they should be to see him at Longbourn again,
+whenever his other engagements might allow him to visit them.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear madam,” he replied, “this invitation is particularly
+gratifying, because it is what I have been hoping to receive; and you
+may be very certain that I shall avail myself of it as soon as
+possible.”</p>
+
+<p>They were all astonished; and Mr. Bennet, who could by no means wish for
+so speedy a return, immediately said,—</p>
+
+<p>“But is there not danger of Lady Catherine’s disapprobation here, my
+good sir? You had better neglect your relations than run the risk of
+offending your patroness.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear sir,” replied Mr. Collins, “I am particularly obliged to you
+for this friendly caution, and you may depend upon my not taking so
+material a step without her Ladyship’s concurrence.”</p>
+
+<p>“You cannot be too much on your guard. Risk anything rather than her
+displeasure; and if you find it likely to be raised by your coming to us
+again, which I should think exceedingly probable, stay quietly at home,
+and be satisfied that <i>we</i> shall take no offence.”</p>
+
+<p>“Believe me, my dear sir, my gratitude is warmly excited by such
+affectionate attention; and, depend upon it, you will speedily receive
+from me a letter of thanks for this as well as for every other mark of
+your regard during my stay in Hertfordshire. As for my fair cousins,
+though my absence may not be long enough to render it necessary, I shall
+now take the liberty of wishing them health and happiness, not excepting
+my cousin Elizabeth.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_159">{159}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>With proper civilities, the ladies then withdrew; all of them equally
+surprised to find that he meditated a quick return. Mrs. Bennet wished
+to understand by it that he thought of paying his addresses to one of
+her younger girls, and Mary might have been prevailed on to accept him.
+She rated his abilities much higher than any of the others: there was a
+solidity in his reflections which often struck her; and though by no
+means so clever as herself, she thought that, if encouraged to read and
+improve himself by such an example as hers, he might become a very
+agreeable companion. But on the following morning every hope of this
+kind was done away. Miss Lucas called soon after breakfast, and in a
+private conference with Elizabeth related the event of the day before.</p>
+
+<p>The possibility of Mr. Collins’s fancying himself in love with her
+friend had once occurred to Elizabeth within the last day or two: but
+that Charlotte could encourage him seemed almost as far from possibility
+as that she could encourage him herself; and her astonishment was
+consequently so great as to overcome at first the bounds of decorum, and
+she could not help crying out,—</p>
+
+<p>“Engaged to Mr. Collins! my dear Charlotte, impossible!”</p>
+
+<p>The steady countenance which Miss Lucas had commanded in telling her
+story gave way to a momentary confusion here on receiving so direct a
+reproach; though, as it was no more than she expected, she soon regained
+her composure, and calmly replied,—</p>
+
+<p>“Why should you be surprised, my dear Eliza? Do you think it incredible
+that Mr. Collins should be able to procure any woman’s good opinion,
+because he was not so happy as to succeed with you?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_160">{160}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>But Elizabeth had now recollected herself; and, making a strong effort
+for it, was able to assure her, with tolerable firmness, that the
+prospect of their relationship was highly grateful to her, and that she
+wished her all imaginable happiness.</p>
+
+<p>“I see what you are feeling,” replied Charlotte; “you must be surprised,
+very much surprised, so lately as Mr. Collins was wishing to marry you.
+But when you have had time to think it all over, I hope you will be
+satisfied with what I have done. I am not romantic, you know. I never
+was. I ask only a comfortable home; and, considering Mr. Collins’s
+character, connections, and situation in life, I am convinced that my
+chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on
+entering the marriage state.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth quietly answered “undoubtedly;” and, after an awkward pause,
+they returned to the rest of the family. Charlotte did not stay much
+longer; and Elizabeth was then left to reflect on what she had heard. It
+was a long time before she became at all reconciled to the idea of so
+unsuitable a match. The strangeness of Mr. Collins’s making two offers
+of marriage within three days was nothing in comparison of his being now
+accepted. She had always felt that Charlotte’s opinion of matrimony was
+not exactly like her own; but she could not have supposed it possible
+that, when called into action, she would have sacrificed every better
+feeling to worldly advantage. Charlotte, the wife of Mr. Collins, was a
+most humiliating picture! And to the pang of a friend disgracing
+herself, and sunk in her esteem, was added the distressing conviction
+that it was impossible for that friend to be tolerably happy in the lot
+she had chosen.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_161">{161}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_190_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_190_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“Protested he must be entirely mistaken.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXIII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="E" src="images/i_190_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_190_b.png"></span>LIZABETH was sitting with her mother and sisters, reflecting on what
+she had heard, and doubting whether she was authorized to mention it,
+when Sir William Lucas himself appeared, sent by his daughter to
+announce her engagement to the family. With many compliments to them,
+and much self-gratulation on the prospect of a connection between the
+houses, he unfolded the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_162">{162}</a></span> matter,—to an audience not merely wondering,
+but incredulous; for Mrs. Bennet, with more perseverance than
+politeness, protested he must be entirely mistaken; and Lydia, always
+unguarded and often uncivil, boisterously exclaimed,—</p>
+
+<p>“Good Lord! Sir William, how can you tell such a story? Do not you know
+that Mr. Collins wants to marry Lizzy?”</p>
+
+<p>Nothing less than the complaisance of a courtier could have borne
+without anger such treatment: but Sir William’s good-breeding carried
+him through it all; and though he begged leave to be positive as to the
+truth of his information, he listened to all their impertinence with the
+most forbearing courtesy.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth, feeling it incumbent on her to relieve him from so unpleasant
+a situation, now put herself forward to confirm his account, by
+mentioning her prior knowledge of it from Charlotte herself; and
+endeavoured to put a stop to the exclamations of her mother and sisters,
+by the earnestness of her congratulations to Sir William, in which she
+was readily joined by Jane, and by making a variety of remarks on the
+happiness that might be expected from the match, the excellent character
+of Mr. Collins, and the convenient distance of Hunsford from London.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet was, in fact, too much overpowered to say a great deal while
+Sir William remained; but no sooner had he left them than her feelings
+found a rapid vent. In the first place, she persisted in disbelieving
+the whole of the matter; secondly, she was very sure that Mr. Collins
+had been taken in; thirdly, she trusted that they would never be happy
+together; and, fourthly, that the match might be broken off. Two
+inferences, however,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_163">{163}</a></span> were plainly deduced from the whole: one, that
+Elizabeth was the real cause of all the mischief; and the other, that
+she herself had been barbarously used by them all; and on these two
+points she principally dwelt during the rest of the day. Nothing could
+console and nothing appease her. Nor did that day wear out her
+resentment. A week elapsed before she could see Elizabeth without
+scolding her: a month passed away before she could speak to Sir William
+or Lady Lucas without being rude; and many months were gone before she
+could at all forgive their daughter.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bennet’s emotions were much more tranquil on the occasion, and such
+as he did experience he pronounced to be of a most agreeable sort; for
+it gratified him, he said, to discover that Charlotte Lucas, whom he had
+been used to think tolerably sensible, was as foolish as his wife, and
+more foolish than his daughter!</p>
+
+<p>Jane confessed herself a little surprised at the match: but she said
+less of her astonishment than of her earnest desire for their happiness;
+nor could Elizabeth persuade her to consider it as improbable. Kitty and
+Lydia were far from envying Miss Lucas, for Mr. Collins was only a
+clergyman; and it affected them in no other way than as a piece of news
+to spread at Meryton.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Lucas could not be insensible of triumph on being able to retort on
+Mrs. Bennet the comfort of having a daughter well married; and she
+called at Longbourn rather oftener than usual to say how happy she was,
+though Mrs. Bennet’s sour looks and ill-natured remarks might have been
+enough to drive happiness away.</p>
+
+<p>Between Elizabeth and Charlotte there was a restraint which kept them
+mutually silent on the subject; and Elizabeth felt persuaded that no
+real confidence could<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_164">{164}</a></span> ever subsist between them again. Her
+disappointment in Charlotte made her turn with fonder regard to her
+sister, of whose rectitude and delicacy she was sure her opinion could
+never be shaken, and for whose happiness she grew daily more anxious, as
+Bingley had now been gone a week, and nothing was heard of his return.</p>
+
+<p>Jane had sent Caroline an early answer to her letter, and was counting
+the days till she might reasonably hope to hear again. The promised
+letter of thanks from Mr. Collins arrived on Tuesday, addressed to their
+father, and written with all the solemnity of gratitude which a
+twelve-month’s abode in the family might have prompted. After
+discharging his conscience on that head, he proceeded to inform them,
+with many rapturous expressions, of his happiness in having obtained the
+affection of their amiable neighbour, Miss Lucas, and then explained
+that it was merely with the view of enjoying her society that he had
+been so ready to close with their kind wish of seeing him again at
+Longbourn, whither he hoped to be able to return on Monday fortnight;
+for Lady Catherine, he added, so heartily approved his marriage, that
+she wished it to take place as soon as possible, which he trusted would
+be an unanswerable argument with his amiable Charlotte to name an early
+day for making him the happiest of men.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Collins’s return into Hertfordshire was no longer a matter of
+pleasure to Mrs. Bennet. On the contrary, she was as much disposed to
+complain of it as her husband. It was very strange that he should come
+to Longbourn instead of to Lucas Lodge; it was also very inconvenient
+and exceedingly troublesome. She hated having visitors in the house
+while her health was so indifferent, and lovers were of all people the
+most disagreeable. Such were the gentle murmurs of Mrs. Bennet, and they
+gave way<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_165">{165}</a></span> only to the greater distress of Mr. Bingley’s continued
+absence.</p>
+
+<p>Neither Jane nor Elizabeth were comfortable on this subject. Day after
+day passed away without bringing any other tidings of him than the
+report which shortly prevailed in Meryton of his coming no more to
+Netherfield the whole winter; a report which highly incensed Mrs.
+Bennet, and which she never failed to contradict as a most scandalous
+falsehood.</p>
+
+<p>Even Elizabeth began to fear—not that Bingley was indifferent—but that
+his sisters would be successful in keeping him away. Unwilling as she
+was to admit an idea so destructive to Jane’s happiness, and so
+dishonourable to the stability of her lover, she could not prevent its
+frequently recurring. The united efforts of his two unfeeling sisters,
+and of his overpowering friend, assisted by the attractions of Miss
+Darcy and the amusements of London, might be too much, she feared, for
+the strength of his attachment.</p>
+
+<p>As for Jane, <i>her</i> anxiety under this suspense was, of course, more
+painful than Elizabeth’s: but whatever she felt she was desirous of
+concealing; and between herself and Elizabeth, therefore, the subject
+was never alluded to. But as no such delicacy restrained her mother, an
+hour seldom passed in which she did not talk of Bingley, express her
+impatience for his arrival, or even require Jane to confess that if he
+did not come back she should think herself very ill-used. It needed all
+Jane’s steady mildness to bear these attacks with tolerable
+tranquillity.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Collins returned most punctually on the Monday fortnight, but his
+reception at Longbourn was not quite so gracious as it had been on his
+first introduction. He was too happy, however, to need much attention;
+and,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_166">{166}</a></span> luckily for the others, the business of love-making relieved them
+from a great deal of his company. The chief of every day was spent by
+him at Lucas Lodge, and he sometimes returned to Longbourn only in time
+to make an apology for his absence before the family went to bed.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 538px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption16">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_195.jpg" width="538" id="img_images_i_195.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption16">
+
+<p>“<i>Whenever she spoke in a low voice</i>”</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet was really in a most pitiable state. The very mention of
+anything concerning the match threw her into an agony of ill-humour, and
+wherever she went she was sure of hearing it talked of. The sight of
+Miss Lucas was odious to her. As her successor in that house, she<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_167">{167}</a></span>
+regarded her with jealous abhorrence. Whenever Charlotte came to see
+them, she concluded her to be anticipating the hour of possession; and
+whenever she spoke in a low voice to Mr. Collins, was convinced that
+they were talking of the Longbourn estate, and resolving to turn herself
+and her daughters out of the house as soon as Mr. Bennet was dead. She
+complained bitterly of all this to her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed, Mr. Bennet,” said she, “it is very hard to think that Charlotte
+Lucas should ever be mistress of this house, that <i>I</i> should be forced
+to make way for <i>her</i>, and live to see her take my place in it!”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, do not give way to such gloomy thoughts. Let us hope for
+better things. Let us flatter ourselves that <i>I</i> may be the survivor.”</p>
+
+<p>This was not very consoling to Mrs. Bennet; and, therefore, instead of
+making any answer, she went on as before.</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot bear to think that they should have all this estate. If it was
+not for the entail, I should not mind it.”</p>
+
+<p>“What should not you mind?”</p>
+
+<p>“I should not mind anything at all.”</p>
+
+<p>“Let us be thankful that you are preserved from a state of such
+insensibility.”</p>
+
+<p>“I never can be thankful, Mr. Bennet, for anything about the entail. How
+anyone could have the conscience to entail away an estate from one’s own
+daughters I cannot understand; and all for the sake of Mr. Collins, too!
+Why should <i>he</i> have it more than anybody else?”</p>
+
+<p>“I leave it to yourself to determine,” said Mr. Bennet.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_168">{168}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_197_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_197_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXIV.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="M" src="images/i_197_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_197_b.png"></span>ISS BINGLEY’S letter arrived, and put an end to doubt. The very first
+sentence conveyed the assurance of their being all settled in London for
+the winter, and concluded with her brother’s regret at not having had
+time to pay his respects to his friends in Hertfordshire before he left
+the country.</p>
+
+<p>Hope was over, entirely over; and when Jane could attend to the rest of
+the letter, she found little, except the professed affection of the
+writer, that could give her any comfort. Miss Darcy’s praise occupied
+the chief of it. Her many attractions were again dwelt on; and Caroline
+boasted joyfully of their increasing intimacy, and ventured to predict
+the accomplishment of the wishes which had been unfolded in her former
+letter. She wrote also with great pleasure of her brother’s being an
+inmate of Mr. Darcy’s house, and mentioned with raptures some plans of
+the latter with regard to new furniture.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_169">{169}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth, to whom Jane very soon communicated the chief of all this,
+heard it in silent indignation. Her heart was divided between concern
+for her sister and resentment against all others. To Caroline’s
+assertion of her brother’s being partial to Miss Darcy, she paid no
+credit. That he was really fond of Jane, she doubted no more than she
+had ever done; and much as she had always been disposed to like him, she
+could not think without anger, hardly without contempt, on that easiness
+of temper, that want of proper resolution, which now made him the slave
+of his designing friends, and led him to sacrifice his own happiness to
+the caprice of their inclinations. Had his own happiness, however, been
+the only sacrifice, he might have been allowed to sport with it in
+whatever manner he thought best; but her sister’s was involved in it, as
+she thought he must be sensible himself. It was a subject, in short, on
+which reflection would be long indulged, and must be unavailing. She
+could think of nothing else; and yet, whether Bingley’s regard had
+really died away, or were suppressed by his friends’ interference;
+whether he had been aware of Jane’s attachment, or whether it had
+escaped his observation; whichever were the case, though her opinion of
+him must be materially affected by the difference, her sister’s
+situation remained the same, her peace equally wounded.</p>
+
+<p>A day or two passed before Jane had courage to speak of her feelings to
+Elizabeth; but at last, on Mrs. Bennet’s leaving them together, after a
+longer irritation than usual about Netherfield and its master, she could
+not help saying,—</p>
+
+<p>“O that my dear mother had more command over herself! she can have no
+idea of the pain she gives me by her continual reflections on him. But I
+will not<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_170">{170}</a></span> repine. It cannot last long. He will be forgot, and we shall
+all be as we were before.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth looked at her sister with incredulous solicitude, but said
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>“You doubt me,” cried Jane, slightly colouring; “indeed, you have no
+reason. He may live in my memory as the most amiable man of my
+acquaintance but that is all. I have nothing either to hope or fear, and
+nothing to reproach him with. Thank God I have not <i>that</i> pain. A little
+time, therefore—I shall certainly try to get the better——”</p>
+
+<p>With a stronger voice she soon added, “I have this comfort immediately,
+that it has not been more than an error of fancy on my side, and that it
+has done no harm to anyone but myself.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Jane,” exclaimed Elizabeth, “you are too good. Your sweetness
+and disinterestedness are really angelic; I do not know what to say to
+you. I feel as if I had never done you justice, or loved you as you
+deserve.”</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bennet eagerly disclaimed all extraordinary merit, and threw back
+the praise on her sister’s warm affection.</p>
+
+<p>“Nay,” said Elizabeth, “this is not fair. <i>You</i> wish to think all the
+world respectable, and are hurt if I speak ill of anybody. <i>I</i> only want
+to think <i>you</i> perfect, and you set yourself against it. Do not be
+afraid of my running into any excess, of my encroaching on your
+privilege of universal good-will. You need not. There are few people
+whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see
+of the world the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms
+my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the
+little dependence that can be placed on the appearance<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_171">{171}</a></span> of either merit
+or sense. I have met with two instances lately: one I will not mention,
+the other is Charlotte’s marriage. It is unaccountable! in every view it
+is unaccountable!”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Lizzy, do not give way to such feelings as these. They will
+ruin your happiness. You do not make allowance enough for difference of
+situation and temper. Consider Mr. Collins’s respectability, and
+Charlotte’s prudent, steady character. Remember that she is one of a
+large family; that as to fortune it is a most eligible match; and be
+ready to believe, for everybody’s sake, that she may feel something like
+regard and esteem for our cousin.”</p>
+
+<p>“To oblige you, I would try to believe almost anything, but no one else
+could be benefited by such a belief as this; for were I persuaded that
+Charlotte had any regard for him, I should only think worse of her
+understanding than I now do of her heart. My dear Jane, Mr. Collins is a
+conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man: you know he is, as well as
+I do; and you must feel, as well as I do, that the woman who marries him
+cannot have a proper way of thinking. You shall not defend her, though
+it is Charlotte Lucas. You shall not, for the sake of one individual,
+change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade
+yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of
+danger security for happiness.”</p>
+
+<p>“I must think your language too strong in speaking of both,” replied
+Jane; “and I hope you will be convinced of it, by seeing them happy
+together. But enough of this. You alluded to something else. You
+mentioned <i>two</i> instances. I cannot misunderstand you, but I entreat
+you, dear Lizzy, not to pain me by thinking <i>that person</i><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_172">{172}</a></span> to blame, and
+saying your opinion of him is sunk. We must not be so ready to fancy
+ourselves intentionally injured. We must not expect a lively young man
+to be always so guarded and circumspect. It is very often nothing but
+our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than
+it does.”</p>
+
+<p>“And men take care that they should.”</p>
+
+<p>“If it is designedly done, they cannot be justified; but I have no idea
+of there being so much design in the world as some persons imagine.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am far from attributing any part of Mr. Bingley’s conduct to design,”
+said Elizabeth; “but, without scheming to do wrong, or to make others
+unhappy, there may be error and there may be misery. Thoughtlessness,
+want of attention to other people’s feelings, and want of resolution,
+will do the business.”</p>
+
+<p>“And do you impute it to either of those?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; to the last. But if I go on I shall displease you by saying what I
+think of persons you esteem. Stop me, whilst you can.”</p>
+
+<p>“You persist, then, in supposing his sisters influence him?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, in conjunction with his friend.”</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot believe it. Why should they try to influence him? They can
+only wish his happiness; and if he is attached to me no other woman can
+secure it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your first position is false. They may wish many things besides his
+happiness: they may wish his increase of wealth and consequence; they
+may wish him to marry a girl who has all the importance of money, great
+connections, and pride.”</p>
+
+<p>“Beyond a doubt they do wish him to choose Miss Darcy,” replied Jane;
+“but this may be from better<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_173">{173}</a></span> feelings than you are supposing. They have
+known her much longer than they have known me; no wonder if they love
+her better. But, whatever may be their own wishes, it is very unlikely
+they should have opposed their brother’s. What sister would think
+herself at liberty to do it, unless there were something very
+objectionable? If they believed him attached to me they would not try to
+part us; if he were so, they could not succeed. By supposing such an
+affection, you make everybody acting unnaturally and wrong, and me most
+unhappy. Do not distress me by the idea. I am not ashamed of having been
+mistaken—or, at least, it is slight, it is nothing in comparison of
+what I should feel in thinking ill of him or his sisters. Let me take it
+in the best light, in the light in which it may be understood.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth could not oppose such a wish; and from this time Mr. Bingley’s
+name was scarcely ever mentioned between them.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet still continued to wonder and repine at his returning no
+more; and though a day seldom passed in which Elizabeth did not account
+for it clearly, there seemed little chance of her ever considering it
+with less perplexity. Her daughter endeavoured to convince her of what
+she did not believe herself, that his attentions to Jane had been merely
+the effect of a common and transient liking, which ceased when he saw
+her no more; but though the probability of the statement was admitted at
+the time, she had the same story to repeat every day. Mrs. Bennet’s best
+comfort was, that Mr. Bingley must be down again in the summer.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bennet treated the matter differently. “So, Lizzy,” said he, one
+day, “your sister is crossed in love, I find. I congratulate her. Next
+to being married, a girl likes to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_174">{174}</a></span> be crossed in love a little now and
+then. It is something to think of, and gives her a sort of distinction
+among her companions. When is your turn to come? You will hardly bear to
+be long outdone by Jane. Now is your time. Here are officers enough at
+Meryton to disappoint all the young ladies in the country. Let Wickham
+be your man. He is a pleasant fellow, and would jilt you creditably.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you, sir, but a less agreeable man would satisfy me. We must not
+all expect Jane’s good fortune.”</p>
+
+<p>“True,” said Mr. Bennet; “but it is a comfort to think that, whatever of
+that kind may befall you, you have an affectionate mother who will
+always make the most of it.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wickham’s society was of material service in dispelling the gloom
+which the late perverse occurrences had thrown on many of the Longbourn
+family. They saw him often, and to his other recommendations was now
+added that of general unreserve. The whole of what Elizabeth had already
+heard, his claims on Mr. Darcy, and all that he had suffered from him,
+was now openly acknowledged and publicly canvassed; and everybody was
+pleased to think how much they had always disliked Mr. Darcy before they
+had known anything of the matter.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bennet was the only creature who could suppose there might be any
+extenuating circumstances in the case unknown to the society of
+Hertfordshire: her mild and steady candour always pleaded for
+allowances, and urged the possibility of mistakes; but by everybody else
+Mr. Darcy was condemned as the worst of men.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_175">{175}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXV"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_204_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_204_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXV.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="A" src="images/i_204_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_204_b.png"></span>FTER a week spent in professions of love and schemes of felicity, Mr.
+Collins was called from his amiable Charlotte by the arrival of
+Saturday. The pain of separation, however, might be alleviated on his
+side by preparations for the reception of his bride, as he had reason to
+hope, that shortly after his next return into Hertfordshire, the day
+would be fixed that was to make him the happiest of men. He took leave
+of his relations at Longbourn with as much solemnity as before; wished
+his fair cousins health and happiness again, and promised their father
+another letter of thanks.</p>
+
+<p>On the following Monday, Mrs. Bennet had the pleasure of receiving her
+brother and his wife, who came, as usual, to spend the Christmas at
+Longbourn. Mr. Gardiner was a sensible, gentlemanlike man, greatly
+superior to his sister, as well by nature as education. The Netherfield
+ladies would have had difficulty in believing that a man who lived by
+trade, and within view of his own warehouses, could have been so
+well-bred and agreeable. Mrs. Gardiner, who was several years younger
+than Mrs. Bennet and Mrs. Philips, was an amiable, intelligent,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_176">{176}</a></span> elegant
+woman, and a great favourite with her Longbourn nieces. Between the two
+eldest and herself especially, there subsisted a very particular regard.
+They had frequently been staying with her in town.</p>
+
+<p>The first part of Mrs. Gardiner’s business, on her arrival, was to
+distribute her presents and describe the newest fashions. When this was
+done, she had a less active part to play. It became her turn to listen.
+Mrs. Bennet had many grievances to relate, and much to complain of. They
+had all been very ill-used since she last saw her sister. Two of her
+girls had been on the point of marriage, and after all there was nothing
+in it.</p>
+
+<p>“I do not blame Jane,” she continued, “for Jane would have got Mr.
+Bingley if she could. But, Lizzy! Oh, sister! it is very hard to think
+that she might have been Mr. Collins’s wife by this time, had not it
+been for her own perverseness. He made her an offer in this very room,
+and she refused him. The consequence of it is, that Lady Lucas will have
+a daughter married before I have, and that Longbourn estate is just as
+much entailed as ever. The Lucases are very artful people, indeed,
+sister. They are all for what they can get. I am sorry to say it of
+them, but so it is. It makes me very nervous and poorly, to be thwarted
+so in my own family, and to have neighbours who think of themselves
+before anybody else. However, your coming just at this time is the
+greatest of comforts, and I am very glad to hear what you tell us of
+long sleeves.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gardiner, to whom the chief of this news had been given before, in
+the course of Jane and Elizabeth’s correspondence with her, made her
+sister a slight answer, and, in compassion to her nieces, turned the
+conversation.</p>
+
+<p>When alone with Elizabeth afterwards, she spoke more<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_177">{177}</a></span> on the subject.
+“It seems likely to have been a desirable match for Jane,” said she. “I
+am sorry it went off. But these things happen so often! A young man,
+such as you describe Mr. Bingley, so easily falls in love with a pretty
+girl for a few weeks, and, when accident separates them, so easily
+forgets her, that these sort of inconstancies are very frequent.”</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 462px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption17">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_206.jpg" width="462" id="img_images_i_206.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption17">
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“Offended two or three young ladies”</p></div>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“An excellent consolation in its way,” said Elizabeth; “but it will not
+do for <i>us</i>. We do not suffer by accident.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_178">{178}</a></span> It does not often happen
+that the interference of friends will persuade a young man of
+independent fortune to think no more of a girl whom he was violently in
+love with only a few days before.”</p>
+
+<p>“But that expression of ‘violently in love’ is so hackneyed, so
+doubtful, so indefinite, that it gives me very little idea. It is as
+often applied to feelings which arise only from a half hour’s
+acquaintance, as to a real, strong attachment. Pray, how <i>violent was</i>
+Mr. Bingley’s love?”</p>
+
+<p>“I never saw a more promising inclination; he was growing quite
+inattentive to other people, and wholly engrossed by her. Every time
+they met, it was more decided and remarkable. At his own ball he
+offended two or three young ladies by not asking them to dance; and I
+spoke to him twice myself without receiving an answer. Could there be
+finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes! of that kind of love which I suppose him to have felt. Poor
+Jane! I am sorry for her, because, with her disposition, she may not get
+over it immediately. It had better have happened to <i>you</i>, Lizzy; you
+would have laughed yourself out of it sooner. But do you think she would
+be prevailed on to go back with us? Change of scene might be of
+service—and perhaps a little relief from home may be as useful as
+anything.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was exceedingly pleased with this proposal, and felt persuaded
+of her sister’s ready acquiescence.</p>
+
+<p>“I hope,” added Mrs. Gardiner, “that no consideration with regard to
+this young man will influence her. We live in so different a part of
+town, all our connections are so different, and, as you well know, we go
+out so little, that it is very improbable they should meet at all,
+unless he really comes to see her.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_179">{179}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“And <i>that</i> is quite impossible; for he is now in the custody of his
+friend, and Mr. Darcy would no more suffer him to call on Jane in such a
+part of London! My dear aunt, how could you think of it? Mr. Darcy may,
+perhaps, have <i>heard</i> of such a place as Gracechurch Street, but he
+would hardly think a month’s ablution enough to cleanse him from its
+impurities, were he once to enter it; and, depend upon it, Mr. Bingley
+never stirs without him.”</p>
+
+<p>“So much the better. I hope they will not meet at all. But does not Jane
+correspond with his sister? <i>She</i> will not be able to help calling.”</p>
+
+<p>“She will drop the acquaintance entirely.”</p>
+
+<p>But, in spite of the certainty in which Elizabeth affected to place this
+point, as well as the still more interesting one of Bingley’s being
+withheld from seeing Jane, she felt a solicitude on the subject which
+convinced her, on examination, that she did not consider it entirely
+hopeless. It was possible, and sometimes she thought it probable, that
+his affection might be re-animated, and the influence of his friends
+successfully combated by the more natural influence of Jane’s
+attractions.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bennet accepted her aunt’s invitation with pleasure; and the
+Bingleys were no otherwise in her thoughts at the same time than as she
+hoped, by Caroline’s not living in the same house with her brother, she
+might occasionally spend a morning with her, without any danger of
+seeing him.</p>
+
+<p>The Gardiners stayed a week at Longbourn; and what with the Philipses,
+the Lucases, and the officers, there was not a day without its
+engagement. Mrs. Bennet had so carefully provided for the entertainment
+of her brother and sister, that they did not once sit down to a family
+dinner. When the engagement was for home,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_180">{180}</a></span> some of the officers always
+made part of it, of which officers Mr. Wickham was sure to be one; and
+on these occasions Mrs. Gardiner, rendered suspicious by Elizabeth’s
+warm commendation of him, narrowly observed them both. Without supposing
+them, from what she saw, to be very seriously in love, their preference
+of each other was plain enough to make her a little uneasy; and she
+resolved to speak to Elizabeth on the subject before she left
+Hertfordshire, and represent to her the imprudence of encouraging such
+an attachment.</p>
+
+<p>To Mrs. Gardiner, Wickham had one means of affording pleasure,
+unconnected with his general powers. About ten or a dozen years ago,
+before her marriage, she had spent a considerable time in that very part
+of Derbyshire to which he belonged. They had, therefore, many
+acquaintance in common; and, though Wickham had been little there since
+the death of Darcy’s father, five years before, it was yet in his power
+to give her fresher intelligence of her former friends than she had been
+in the way of procuring.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gardiner had seen Pemberley, and known the late Mr. Darcy by
+character perfectly well. Here, consequently, was an inexhaustible
+subject of discourse. In comparing her recollection of Pemberley with
+the minute description which Wickham could give, and in bestowing her
+tribute of praise on the character of its late possessor, she was
+delighting both him and herself. On being made acquainted with the
+present Mr. Darcy’s treatment of him, she tried to remember something of
+that gentleman’s reputed disposition, when quite a lad, which might
+agree with it; and was confident, at last, that she recollected having
+heard Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy formerly spoken of as a very proud,
+ill-natured boy.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_181">{181}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XXVI"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_210_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_210_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“Will you come and see me.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXVI.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="M" src="images/i_210_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_210_b.png"></span>RS. GARDINER’S caution to Elizabeth was punctually and kindly given on
+the first favourable opportunity of speaking to her alone: after
+honestly telling her what she thought, she thus went on:—</p>
+
+<p>“You are too sensible a girl, Lizzy, to fall in love merely because you
+are warned against it; and, therefore, I am not afraid of speaking
+openly. Seriously, I would have you be on your guard. Do not involve
+yourself, or endeavour to involve him, in an affection which the want of
+fortune would make so very imprudent. I have nothing to say against
+<i>him</i>: he is a most interesting young man; and if he had the fortune he
+ought to have, I should think you could not do better. But as it is—you
+must not let your fancy run away with you. You<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_182">{182}</a></span> have sense, and we all
+expect you to use it. Your father would depend on <i>your</i> resolution and
+good conduct, I am sure. You must not disappoint your father.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear aunt, this is being serious indeed.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, and I hope to engage you to be serious likewise.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then, you need not be under any alarm. I will take care of
+myself, and of Mr. Wickham too. He shall not be in love with me, if I
+can prevent it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Elizabeth, you are not serious now.”</p>
+
+<p>“I beg your pardon. I will try again. At present I am not in love with
+Mr. Wickham; no, I certainly am not. But he is, beyond all comparison,
+the most agreeable man I ever saw—and if he becomes really attached to
+me—I believe it will be better that he should not. I see the imprudence
+of it. Oh, <i>that</i> abominable Mr. Darcy! My father’s opinion of me does
+me the greatest honour; and I should be miserable to forfeit it. My
+father, however, is partial to Mr. Wickham. In short, my dear aunt, I
+should be very sorry to be the means of making any of you unhappy; but
+since we see, every day, that where there is affection young people are
+seldom withheld, by immediate want of fortune, from entering into
+engagements with each other, how can I promise to be wiser than so many
+of my fellow-creatures, if I am tempted, or how am I even to know that
+it would be wiser to resist? All that I can promise you, therefore, is
+not to be in a hurry. I will not be in a hurry to believe myself his
+first object. When I am in company with him, I will not be wishing. In
+short, I will do my best.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps it will be as well if you discourage his coming here so very
+often. At least you should not <i>remind</i> your mother of inviting him.”</p>
+
+<p>“As I did the other day,” said Elizabeth, with a con<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_183">{183}</a></span>scious smile; “very
+true, it will be wise in me to refrain from <i>that</i>. But do not imagine
+that he is always here so often. It is on your account that he has been
+so frequently invited this week. You know my mother’s ideas as to the
+necessity of constant company for her friends. But really, and upon my
+honour, I will try to do what I think to be wisest; and now I hope you
+are satisfied.”</p>
+
+<p>Her aunt assured her that she was; and Elizabeth, having thanked her for
+the kindness of her hints, they parted,—a wonderful instance of advice
+being given on such a point without being resented.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Collins returned into Hertfordshire soon after it had been quitted
+by the Gardiners and Jane; but, as he took up his abode with the
+Lucases, his arrival was no great inconvenience to Mrs. Bennet. His
+marriage was now fast approaching; and she was at length so far resigned
+as to think it inevitable, and even repeatedly to say, in an ill-natured
+tone, that she “<i>wished</i> they might be happy.” Thursday was to be the
+wedding-day, and on Wednesday Miss Lucas paid her farewell visit; and
+when she rose to take leave, Elizabeth, ashamed of her mother’s
+ungracious and reluctant good wishes, and sincerely affected herself,
+accompanied her out of the room. As they went down stairs together,
+Charlotte said,—</p>
+
+<p>“I shall depend on hearing from you very often, Eliza.”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>That</i> you certainly shall.”</p>
+
+<p>“And I have another favour to ask. Will you come and see me?”</p>
+
+<p>“We shall often meet, I hope, in Hertfordshire.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am not likely to leave Kent for some time. Promise me, therefore, to
+come to Hunsford.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth could not refuse, though she foresaw little pleasure in the
+visit.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_184">{184}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“My father and Maria are to come to me in March,” added Charlotte, “and
+I hope you will consent to be of the party. Indeed, Eliza, you will be
+as welcome to me as either of them.”</p>
+
+<p>The wedding took place: the bride and bridegroom set off for Kent from
+the church door, and everybody had as much to say or to hear on the
+subject as usual. Elizabeth soon heard from her friend, and their
+correspondence was as regular and frequent as it ever had been: that it
+should be equally unreserved was impossible. Elizabeth could never
+address her without feeling that all the comfort of intimacy was over;
+and, though determined not to slacken as a correspondent, it was for the
+sake of what had been rather than what was. Charlotte’s first letters
+were received with a good deal of eagerness: there could not but be
+curiosity to know how she would speak of her new home, how she would
+like Lady Catherine, and how happy she would dare pronounce herself to
+be; though, when the letters were read, Elizabeth felt that Charlotte
+expressed herself on every point exactly as she might have foreseen. She
+wrote cheerfully, seemed surrounded with comforts, and mentioned nothing
+which she could not praise. The house, furniture, neighbourhood, and
+roads, were all to her taste, and Lady Catherine’s behaviour was most
+friendly and obliging. It was Mr. Collins’s picture of Hunsford and
+Rosings rationally softened; and Elizabeth perceived that she must wait
+for her own visit there, to know the rest.</p>
+
+<p>Jane had already written a few lines to her sister, to announce their
+safe arrival in London; and when she wrote again, Elizabeth hoped it
+would be in her power to say something of the Bingleys.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_185">{185}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Her impatience for this second letter was as well rewarded as impatience
+generally is. Jane had been a week in town, without either seeing or
+hearing from Caroline. She accounted for it, however, by supposing that
+her last letter to her friend from Longbourn had by some accident been
+lost.</p>
+
+<p>“My aunt,” she continued, “is going to-morrow into that part of the
+town, and I shall take the opportunity of calling in Grosvenor Street.”</p>
+
+<p>She wrote again when the visit was paid, and she had seen Miss Bingley.
+“I did not think Caroline in spirits,” were her words, “but she was very
+glad to see me, and reproached me for giving her no notice of my coming
+to London. I was right, therefore; my last letter had never reached her.
+I inquired after their brother, of course. He was well, but so much
+engaged with Mr. Darcy that they scarcely ever saw him. I found that
+Miss Darcy was expected to dinner: I wish I could see her. My visit was
+not long, as Caroline and Mrs. Hurst were going out. I dare say I shall
+soon see them here.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth shook her head over this letter. It convinced her that
+accident only could discover to Mr. Bingley her sister’s being in town.</p>
+
+<p>Four weeks passed away, and Jane saw nothing of him. She endeavoured to
+persuade herself that she did not regret it; but she could no longer be
+blind to Miss Bingley’s inattention. After waiting at home every morning
+for a fortnight, and inventing every evening a fresh excuse for her, the
+visitor did at last appear; but the shortness of her stay, and, yet
+more, the alteration of her manner, would allow Jane to deceive herself
+no longer. The letter which she wrote on this occasion to her sister
+will prove what she felt:<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_186">{186}</a></span>—</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“My dearest Lizzy will, I am sure, be incapable of triumphing in
+her better judgment, at my expense, when I confess myself to have
+been entirely deceived in Miss Bingley’s regard for me. But, my
+dear sister, though the event has proved you right, do not think me
+obstinate if I still assert that, considering what her behaviour
+was, my confidence was as natural as your suspicion. I do not at
+all comprehend her reason for wishing to be intimate with me; but,
+if the same circumstances were to happen again, I am sure I should
+be deceived again. Caroline did not return my visit till yesterday;
+and not a note, not a line, did I receive in the meantime. When she
+did come, it was very evident that she had no pleasure in it; she
+made a slight, formal apology for not calling before, said not a
+word of wishing to see me again, and was, in every respect, so
+altered a creature, that when she went away I was perfectly
+resolved to continue the acquaintance no longer. I pity, though I
+cannot help blaming, her. She was very wrong in singling me out as
+she did; I can safely say, that every advance to intimacy began on
+her side. But I pity her, because she must feel that she has been
+acting wrong, and because I am very sure that anxiety for her
+brother is the cause of it. I need not explain myself farther; and
+though <i>we</i> know this anxiety to be quite needless, yet if she
+feels it, it will easily account for her behaviour to me; and so
+deservedly dear as he is to his sister, whatever anxiety she may
+feel on his behalf is natural and amiable. I cannot but wonder,
+however, at her having any such fears now, because if he had at all
+cared about me, we must have met long, long ago. He knows of my
+being in town, I am certain, from something she said herself; and
+yet it would seem, by her manner of talking,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_187">{187}</a></span> as if she wanted to
+persuade herself that he is really partial to Miss Darcy. I cannot
+understand it. If I were not afraid of judging harshly, I should be
+almost tempted to say, that there is a strong appearance of
+duplicity in all this. I will endeavour to banish every painful
+thought, and think only of what will make me happy, your affection,
+and the invariable kindness of my dear uncle and aunt. Let me hear
+from you very soon. Miss Bingley said something of his never
+returning to Netherfield again, of giving up the house, but not
+with any certainty. We had better not mention it. I am extremely
+glad that you have such pleasant accounts from our friends at
+Hunsford. Pray go to see them, with Sir William and Maria. I am
+sure you will be very comfortable there.</p>
+
+<p class="rt">
+“Yours, etc.”<br>
+</p></div>
+
+<p>This letter gave Elizabeth some pain; but her spirits returned, as she
+considered that Jane would no longer be duped, by the sister at least.
+All expectation from the brother was now absolutely over. She would not
+even wish for any renewal of his attentions. His character sunk on every
+review of it; and, as a punishment for him, as well as a possible
+advantage to Jane, she seriously hoped he might really soon marry Mr.
+Darcy’s sister, as, by Wickham’s account, she would make him abundantly
+regret what he had thrown away.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gardiner about this time reminded Elizabeth of her promise
+concerning that gentleman, and required information; and Elizabeth had
+such to send as might rather give contentment to her aunt than to
+herself. His apparent partiality had subsided, his attentions were over,
+he was the admirer of some one else. Elizabeth was<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_188">{188}</a></span> watchful enough to
+see it all, but she could see it and write of it without material pain.
+Her heart had been but slightly touched, and her vanity was satisfied
+with believing that <i>she</i> would have been his only choice, had fortune
+permitted it. The sudden acquisition of ten thousand pounds was the most
+remarkable charm of the young lady to whom he was now rendering himself
+agreeable; but Elizabeth, less clear-sighted perhaps in this case than
+in Charlotte’s, did not quarrel with him for his wish of independence.
+Nothing, on the contrary, could be more natural; and, while able to
+suppose that it cost him a few struggles to relinquish her, she was
+ready to allow it a wise and desirable measure for both, and could very
+sincerely wish him happy.</p>
+
+<p>All this was acknowledged to Mrs. Gardiner; and, after relating the
+circumstances, she thus went on:—“I am now convinced, my dear aunt,
+that I have never been much in love; for had I really experienced that
+pure and elevating passion, I should at present detest his very name,
+and wish him all manner of evil. But my feelings are not only cordial
+towards <i>him</i>, they are even impartial towards Miss King. I cannot find
+out that I hate her at all, or that I am in the least unwilling to think
+her a very good sort of girl. There can be no love in all this. My
+watchfulness has been effectual; and though I should certainly be a more
+interesting object to all my acquaintance, were I distractedly in love
+with him, I cannot say that I regret my comparative insignificance.
+Importance may sometimes be purchased too dearly. Kitty and Lydia take
+his defection much more to heart than I do. They are young in the ways
+of the world, and not yet open to the mortifying conviction that
+handsome young men must have something to live on as well as the
+plain.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_189">{189}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XXVII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_218_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_218_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“On the Stairs.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTERXXVII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="W" src="images/i_218_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_218_b.png"></span>ITH no greater events than these in the Longbourn family, and otherwise
+diversified by little beyond the walks to Meryton, sometimes dirty and
+sometimes cold, did January and February pass away. March was to take
+Elizabeth to Hunsford. She had not at first thought very seriously of
+going thither; but Charlotte, she soon found, was depending on the
+plan,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_190">{190}</a></span> and she gradually learned to consider it herself with greater
+pleasure as well as greater certainty. Absence had increased her desire
+of seeing Charlotte again, and weakened her disgust of Mr. Collins.
+There was novelty in the scheme; and as, with such a mother and such
+uncompanionable sisters, home could not be faultless, a little change
+was not unwelcome for its own sake. The journey would, moreover, give
+her a peep at Jane; and, in short, as the time drew near, she would have
+been very sorry for any delay. Everything, however, went on smoothly,
+and was finally settled according to Charlotte’s first sketch. She was
+to accompany Sir William and his second daughter. The improvement of
+spending a night in London was added in time, and the plan became as
+perfect as plan could be.</p>
+
+<p>The only pain was in leaving her father, who would certainly miss her,
+and who, when it came to the point, so little liked her going, that he
+told her to write to him, and almost promised to answer her letter.</p>
+
+<p>The farewell between herself and Mr. Wickham was perfectly friendly; on
+his side even more. His present pursuit could not make him forget that
+Elizabeth had been the first to excite and to deserve his attention, the
+first to listen and to pity, the first to be admired; and in his manner
+of bidding her adieu, wishing her every enjoyment, reminding her of what
+she was to expect in Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and trusting their
+opinion of her—their opinion of everybody—would always coincide, there
+was a solicitude, an interest, which she felt must ever attach her to
+him with a most sincere regard; and she parted from him convinced, that,
+whether married or single, he must always be her model of the amiable
+and pleasing.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_191">{191}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Her fellow-travellers the next day were not of a kind to make her think
+him less agreeable. Sir William Lucas, and his daughter Maria, a
+good-humoured girl, but as empty-headed as himself, had nothing to say
+that could be worth hearing, and were listened to with about as much
+delight as the rattle of the chaise. Elizabeth loved absurdities, but
+she had known Sir William’s too long. He could tell her nothing new of
+the wonders of his presentation and knighthood; and his civilities were
+worn out, like his information.</p>
+
+<p>It was a journey of only twenty-four miles, and they began it so early
+as to be in Gracechurch Street by noon. As they drove to Mr. Gardiner’s
+door, Jane was at a drawing-room window watching their arrival: when
+they entered the passage, she was there to welcome them, and Elizabeth,
+looking earnestly in her face, was pleased to see it healthful and
+lovely as ever. On the stairs were a troop of little boys and girls,
+whose eagerness for their cousin’s appearance would not allow them to
+wait in the drawing-room, and whose shyness, as they had not seen her
+for a twelvemonth, prevented their coming lower. All was joy and
+kindness. The day passed most pleasantly away; the morning in bustle and
+shopping, and the evening at one of the theatres.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth then contrived to sit by her aunt. Their first subject was her
+sister; and she was more grieved than astonished to hear, in reply to
+her minute inquiries, that though Jane always struggled to support her
+spirits, there were periods of dejection. It was reasonable, however, to
+hope that they would not continue long. Mrs. Gardiner gave her the
+particulars also of Miss Bingley’s visit in Gracechurch Street, and
+repeated conversations occurring at different times between Jane and
+herself,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_192">{192}</a></span> which proved that the former had, from her heart, given up the
+acquaintance.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gardiner then rallied her niece on Wickham’s desertion, and
+complimented her on bearing it so well.</p>
+
+<p>“But, my dear Elizabeth,” she added, “what sort of girl is Miss King? I
+should be sorry to think our friend mercenary.”</p>
+
+<p>“Pray, my dear aunt, what is the difference in matrimonial affairs,
+between the mercenary and the prudent motive? Where does discretion end,
+and avarice begin? Last Christmas you were afraid of his marrying me,
+because it would be imprudent; and now, because he is trying to get a
+girl with only ten thousand pounds, you want to find out that he is
+mercenary.”</p>
+
+<p>“If you will only tell me what sort of girl Miss King is, I shall know
+what to think.”</p>
+
+<p>“She is a very good kind of girl, I believe. I know no harm of her.”</p>
+
+<p>“But he paid her not the smallest attention till her grandfather’s death
+made her mistress of this fortune?”</p>
+
+<p>“No—why should he? If it were not allowable for him to gain <i>my</i>
+affections, because I had no money, what occasion could there be for
+making love to a girl whom he did not care about, and who was equally
+poor?”</p>
+
+<p>“But there seems indelicacy in directing his attentions towards her so
+soon after this event.”</p>
+
+<p>“A man in distressed circumstances has not time for all those elegant
+decorums which other people may observe. If <i>she</i> does not object to it,
+why should <i>we</i>?”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Her</i> not objecting does not justify <i>him</i>. It only shows her being
+deficient in something herself—sense or feeling.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_193">{193}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” cried Elizabeth, “have it as you choose. <i>He</i> shall be
+mercenary, and <i>she</i> shall be foolish.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, Lizzy, that is what I do <i>not</i> choose. I should be sorry, you know,
+to think ill of a young man who has lived so long in Derbyshire.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, if that is all, I have a very poor opinion of young men who live in
+Derbyshire; and their intimate friends who live in Hertfordshire are not
+much better. I am sick of them all. Thank heaven! I am going to-morrow
+where I shall find a man who has not one agreeable quality, who has
+neither manners nor sense to recommend him. Stupid men are the only ones
+worth knowing, after all.”</p>
+
+<p>“Take care, Lizzy; that speech savours strongly of disappointment.”</p>
+
+<p>Before they were separated by the conclusion of the play, she had the
+unexpected happiness of an invitation to accompany her uncle and aunt in
+a tour of pleasure which they proposed taking in the summer.</p>
+
+<p>“We have not quite determined how far it shall carry us,” said Mrs.
+Gardiner; “but perhaps, to the Lakes.”</p>
+
+<p>No scheme could have been more agreeable to Elizabeth, and her
+acceptance of the invitation was most ready and grateful. “My dear, dear
+aunt,” she rapturously cried, “what delight! what felicity! You give me
+fresh life and vigour. Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men
+to rocks and mountains? Oh, what hours of transport we shall spend! And
+when we <i>do</i> return, it shall not be like other travellers, without
+being able to give one accurate idea of anything. We <i>will</i> know where
+we have gone—we <i>will</i> recollect what we have seen. Lakes, mountains,
+and rivers, shall not be jumbled together in our imaginations; nor, when
+we attempt to describe any particular scene, will we begin quarrelling
+about its relative situation. Let <i>our</i> first effusions be less
+insupportable than those of the generality of travellers.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_194">{194}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XXVIII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_223_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_223_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“At the door.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTERXXVIII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="E" src="images/i_223_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_223_b.png"></span>VERY object in the next day’s journey was new and interesting to
+Elizabeth; and her spirits were in a state of enjoyment; for she had
+seen her sister looking so well as to banish all fear for her health,
+and the prospect of her northern tour was a constant source of delight.</p>
+
+<p>When they left the high road for the lane to Hunsford, every eye was in
+search of the Parsonage, and every turning expected to bring it in view.
+The paling of Rosings park was their boundary on one side. Elizabeth
+smiled at the recollection of all that she had heard of its inhabitants.</p>
+
+<p>At length the Parsonage was discernible. The garden<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_195">{195}</a></span> sloping to the
+road, the house standing in it, the green pales and the laurel hedge,
+everything declared they were arriving. Mr. Collins and Charlotte
+appeared at the door, and the carriage stopped at the small gate, which
+led by a short gravel walk to the house, amidst the nods and smiles of
+the whole party. In a moment they were all out of the chaise, rejoicing
+at the sight of each other. Mrs. Collins welcomed her friend with the
+liveliest pleasure, and Elizabeth was more and more satisfied with
+coming, when she found herself so affectionately received. She saw
+instantly that her cousin’s manners were not altered by his marriage:
+his formal civility was just what it had been; and he detained her some
+minutes at the gate to hear and satisfy his inquiries after all her
+family. They were then, with no other delay than his pointing out the
+neatness of the entrance, taken into the house; and as soon as they were
+in the parlour, he welcomed them a second time, with ostentatious
+formality, to his humble abode, and punctually repeated all his wife’s
+offers of refreshment.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was prepared to see him in his glory; and she could not help
+fancying that in displaying the good proportion of the room, its aspect,
+and its furniture, he addressed himself particularly to her, as if
+wishing to make her feel what she had lost in refusing him. But though
+everything seemed neat and comfortable, she was not able to gratify him
+by any sigh of repentance; and rather looked with wonder at her friend,
+that she could have so cheerful an air with such a companion. When Mr.
+Collins said anything of which his wife might reasonably be ashamed,
+which certainly was not seldom, she involuntarily turned her eye on
+Charlotte. Once or twice she could discern a faint blush; but in general
+Charlotte<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_196">{196}</a></span> wisely did not hear. After sitting long enough to admire
+every article of furniture in the room, from the sideboard to the
+fender, to give an account of their journey, and of all that had
+happened in London, Mr. Collins invited them to take a stroll in the
+garden, which was large and well laid out, and to the cultivation of
+which he attended himself. To work in his garden was one of his most
+respectable pleasures; and Elizabeth admired the command of countenance
+with which Charlotte talked of the healthfulness of the exercise, and
+owned she encouraged it as much as possible. Here, leading the way
+through every walk and cross walk, and scarcely allowing them an
+interval to utter the praises he asked for, every view was pointed out
+with a minuteness which left beauty entirely behind. He could number the
+fields in every direction, and could tell how many trees there were in
+the most distant clump. But of all the views which his garden, or which
+the country or the kingdom could boast, none were to be compared with
+the prospect of Rosings, afforded by an opening in the trees that
+bordered the park nearly opposite the front of his house. It was a
+handsome modern building, well situated on rising ground.</p>
+
+<p>From his garden, Mr. Collins would have led them round his two meadows;
+but the ladies, not having shoes to encounter the remains of a white
+frost, turned back; and while Sir William accompanied him, Charlotte
+took her sister and friend over the house, extremely well pleased,
+probably, to have the opportunity of showing it without her husband’s
+help. It was rather small, but well built and convenient; and everything
+was fitted up and arranged with a neatness and consistency, of which
+Elizabeth gave Charlotte all the credit. When Mr. Collins could be
+forgotten, there was really a great air of comfort<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_197">{197}</a></span> throughout, and by
+Charlotte’s evident enjoyment of it, Elizabeth supposed he must be often
+forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>She had already learnt that Lady Catherine was still in the country. It
+was spoken of again while they were at dinner, when Mr. Collins joining
+in, observed,—</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Miss Elizabeth, you will have the honour of seeing Lady Catherine
+de Bourgh on the ensuing Sunday at church, and I need not say you will
+be delighted with her. She is all affability and condescension, and I
+doubt not but you will be honoured with some portion of her notice when
+service is over. I have scarcely any hesitation in saying that she will
+include you and my sister Maria in every invitation with which she
+honours us during your stay here. Her behaviour to my dear Charlotte is
+charming. We dine at Rosings twice every week, and are never allowed to
+walk home. Her Ladyship’s carriage is regularly ordered for us. I
+<i>should</i> say, one of her Ladyship’s carriages, for she has several.”</p>
+
+<p>“Lady Catherine is a very respectable, sensible woman, indeed,” added
+Charlotte, “and a most attentive neighbour.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very true, my dear, that is exactly what I say. She is the sort of
+woman whom one cannot regard with too much deference.”</p>
+
+<p>The evening was spent chiefly in talking over Hertfordshire news, and
+telling again what had been already written; and when it closed,
+Elizabeth, in the solitude of her chamber, had to meditate upon
+Charlotte’s degree of contentment, to understand her address in guiding,
+and composure in bearing with, her husband, and to acknowledge that it
+was all done very well. She had also to anticipate how her visit would
+pass, the quiet tenour of their usual employments, the vexatious
+interruptions of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_198">{198}</a></span> Mr. Collins, and the gaieties of their intercourse
+with Rosings. A lively imagination soon settled it all.</p>
+
+<p>About the middle of the next day, as she was in her room getting ready
+for a walk, a sudden noise below seemed to speak the whole house in
+confusion; and, after listening a moment, she heard somebody running
+upstairs in a violent hurry, and calling loudly after her. She opened
+the door, and met Maria in the landing-place, who, breathless with
+agitation, cried out,—</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption18">
+<img alt="" height="514" src="images/i_227.jpg" width="550" id="img_images_i_227.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption18">
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“In Conversation with the ladies”</p></div>
+
+<p>[Copyright 1894 by George Allen.]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Oh, my dear Eliza! pray make haste and come into the dining-room, for
+there is such a sight to be seen! I will not tell you what it is. Make
+haste, and come down this moment.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_199">{199}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth asked questions in vain; Maria would tell her nothing more;
+and down they ran into the dining-room which fronted the lane, in quest
+of this wonder; it was two ladies, stopping in a low phaeton at the
+garden gate.</p>
+
+<p>“And is this all?” cried Elizabeth. “I expected at least that the pigs
+were got into the garden, and here is nothing but Lady Catherine and her
+daughter!”</p>
+
+<p>“La! my dear,” said Maria, quite shocked at the mistake, “it is not Lady
+Catherine. The old lady is Mrs. Jenkinson, who lives with them. The
+other is Miss De Bourgh. Only look at her. She is quite a little
+creature. Who would have thought she could be so thin and small!”</p>
+
+<p>“She is abominably rude to keep Charlotte out of doors in all this wind.
+Why does she not come in?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Charlotte says she hardly ever does. It is the greatest of favours
+when Miss De Bourgh comes in.”</p>
+
+<p>“I like her appearance,” said Elizabeth, struck with other ideas. “She
+looks sickly and cross. Yes, she will do for him very well. She will
+make him a very proper wife.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Collins and Charlotte were both standing at the gate in conversation
+with the ladies; and Sir William, to Elizabeth’s high diversion, was
+stationed in the doorway, in earnest contemplation of the greatness
+before him, and constantly bowing whenever Miss De Bourgh looked that
+way.</p>
+
+<p>At length there was nothing more to be said; the ladies drove on, and
+the others returned into the house. Mr. Collins no sooner saw the two
+girls than he began to congratulate them on their good fortune, which
+Charlotte explained by letting them know that the whole party was asked
+to dine at Rosings the next day.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_200">{200}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XXIX"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_229_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_229_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“Lady Catherine, said she, you have given me a treasure.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXIX.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="M" src="images/i_229_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_229_b.png"></span>R. COLLINS’S triumph, in consequence of this invitation, was complete.
+The power of displaying the grandeur of his patroness to his wondering
+visitors, and of letting them see her civility towards himself and his
+wife, was exactly what he had wished for; and that an opportunity of
+doing it should be given so soon was such an instance of Lady
+Catherine’s condescension as he knew not how to admire enough.</p>
+
+<p>“I confess,” said he, “that I should not have been at all surprised by
+her Ladyship’s asking us on Sunday to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_201">{201}</a></span> drink tea and spend the evening
+at Rosings. I rather expected, from my knowledge of her affability, that
+it would happen. But who could have foreseen such an attention as this?
+Who could have imagined that we should receive an invitation to dine
+there (an invitation, moreover, including the whole party) so
+immediately after your arrival?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am the less surprised at what has happened,” replied Sir William,
+“from that knowledge of what the manners of the great really are, which
+my situation in life has allowed me to acquire. About the court, such
+instances of elegant breeding are not uncommon.”</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely anything was talked of the whole day or next morning but their
+visit to Rosings. Mr. Collins was carefully instructing them in what
+they were to expect, that the sight of such rooms, so many servants, and
+so splendid a dinner, might not wholly overpower them.</p>
+
+<p>When the ladies were separating for the toilette, he said to
+Elizabeth,—</p>
+
+<p>“Do not make yourself uneasy, my dear cousin, about your apparel. Lady
+Catherine is far from requiring that elegance of dress in us which
+becomes herself and daughter. I would advise you merely to put on
+whatever of your clothes is superior to the rest—there is no occasion
+for anything more. Lady Catherine will not think the worse of you for
+being simply dressed. She likes to have the distinction of rank
+preserved.”</p>
+
+<p>While they were dressing, he came two or three times to their different
+doors, to recommend their being quick, as Lady Catherine very much
+objected to be kept waiting for her dinner. Such formidable accounts of
+her Ladyship, and her manner of living, quite frightened Maria<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_202">{202}</a></span> Lucas,
+who had been little used to company; and she looked forward to her
+introduction at Rosings with as much apprehension as her father had done
+to his presentation at St. James’s.</p>
+
+<p>As the weather was fine, they had a pleasant walk of about half a mile
+across the park. Every park has its beauty and its prospects; and
+Elizabeth saw much to be pleased with, though she could not be in such
+raptures as Mr. Collins expected the scene to inspire, and was but
+slightly affected by his enumeration of the windows in front of the
+house, and his relation of what the glazing altogether had originally
+cost Sir Lewis de Bourgh.</p>
+
+<p>When they ascended the steps to the hall, Maria’s alarm was every moment
+increasing, and even Sir William did not look perfectly calm.
+Elizabeth’s courage did not fail her. She had heard nothing of Lady
+Catherine that spoke her awful from any extraordinary talents or
+miraculous virtue, and the mere stateliness of money and rank she
+thought she could witness without trepidation.</p>
+
+<p>From the entrance hall, of which Mr. Collins pointed out, with a
+rapturous air, the fine proportion and finished ornaments, they followed
+the servants through an antechamber to the room where Lady Catherine,
+her daughter, and Mrs. Jenkinson were sitting. Her Ladyship, with great
+condescension, arose to receive them; and as Mrs. Collins had settled it
+with her husband that the office of introduction should be hers, it was
+performed in a proper manner, without any of those apologies and thanks
+which he would have thought necessary.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of having been at St. James’s, Sir William was so completely
+awed by the grandeur surrounding him, that he had but just courage
+enough to make a very<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_203">{203}</a></span> low bow, and take his seat without saying a word;
+and his daughter, frightened almost out of her senses, sat on the edge
+of her chair, not knowing which way to look. Elizabeth found herself
+quite equal to the scene, and could observe the three ladies before her
+composedly. Lady Catherine was a tall, large woman, with strongly-marked
+features, which might once have been handsome. Her air was not
+conciliating, nor was her manner of receiving them such as to make her
+visitors forget their inferior rank. She was not rendered formidable by
+silence: but whatever she said was spoken in so authoritative a tone as
+marked her self-importance, and brought Mr. Wickham immediately to
+Elizabeth’s mind; and, from the observation of the day altogether, she
+believed Lady Catherine to be exactly what he had represented.</p>
+
+<p>When, after examining the mother, in whose countenance and deportment
+she soon found some resemblance of Mr. Darcy, she turned her eyes on the
+daughter, she could almost have joined in Maria’s astonishment at her
+being so thin and so small. There was neither in figure nor face any
+likeness between the ladies. Miss de Bourgh was pale and sickly: her
+features, though not plain, were insignificant; and she spoke very
+little, except in a low voice, to Mrs. Jenkinson, in whose appearance
+there was nothing remarkable, and who was entirely engaged in listening
+to what she said, and placing a screen in the proper direction before
+her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>After sitting a few minutes, they were all sent to one of the windows to
+admire the view, Mr. Collins attending them to point out its beauties,
+and Lady Catherine kindly informing them that it was much better worth
+looking at in the summer.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_204">{204}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The dinner was exceedingly handsome, and there were all the servants,
+and all the articles of plate which Mr. Collins had promised; and, as he
+had likewise foretold, he took his seat at the bottom of the table, by
+her Ladyship’s desire, and looked as if he felt that life could furnish
+nothing greater. He carved and ate and praised with delighted alacrity;
+and every dish was commended first by him, and then by Sir William, who
+was now enough recovered to echo whatever his son-in-law said, in a
+manner which Elizabeth wondered Lady Catherine could bear. But Lady
+Catherine seemed gratified by their excessive admiration, and gave most
+gracious smiles, especially when any dish on the table proved a novelty
+to them. The party did not supply much conversation. Elizabeth was ready
+to speak whenever there was an opening, but she was seated between
+Charlotte and Miss de Bourgh—the former of whom was engaged in
+listening to Lady Catherine, and the latter said not a word to her all
+the dinnertime. Mrs. Jenkinson was chiefly employed in watching how
+little Miss de Bourgh ate, pressing her to try some other dish and
+fearing she was indisposed. Maria thought speaking out of the question,
+and the gentlemen did nothing but eat and admire.</p>
+
+<p>When the ladies returned to the drawing-room, there was little to be
+done but to hear Lady Catherine talk, which she did without any
+intermission till coffee came in, delivering her opinion on every
+subject in so decisive a manner as proved that she was not used to have
+her judgment controverted. She inquired into Charlotte’s domestic
+concerns familiarly and minutely, and gave her a great deal of advice as
+to the management of them all; told her how everything ought to be
+regulated in so<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_205">{205}</a></span> small a family as hers, and instructed her as to the
+care of her cows and her poultry. Elizabeth found that nothing was
+beneath this great lady’s attention which could furnish her with an
+occasion for dictating to others. In the intervals of her discourse with
+Mrs. Collins, she addressed a variety of questions to Maria and
+Elizabeth, but especially to the latter, of whose connections she knew
+the least, and who, she observed to Mrs. Collins, was a very genteel,
+pretty kind of girl. She asked her at different times how many sisters
+she had, whether they were older or younger than herself, whether any of
+them were likely to be married, whether they were handsome, where they
+had been educated, what carriage her father kept, and what had been her
+mother’s maiden name? Elizabeth felt all the impertinence of her
+questions, but answered them very composedly. Lady Catherine then
+observed,—</p>
+
+<p>“Your father’s estate is entailed on Mr. Collins, I think? For your
+sake,” turning to Charlotte, “I am glad of it; but otherwise I see no
+occasion for entailing estates from the female line. It was not thought
+necessary in Sir Lewis de Bourgh’s family. Do you play and sing, Miss
+Bennet?”</p>
+
+<p>“A little.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh then—some time or other we shall be happy to hear you. Our
+instrument is a capital one, probably superior to —— you shall try it
+some day. Do your sisters play and sing?”</p>
+
+<p>“One of them does.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why did not you all learn? You ought all to have learned. The Miss
+Webbs all play, and their father has not so good an income as yours. Do
+you draw?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, not at all.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_206">{206}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“What, none of you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not one.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is very strange. But I suppose you had no opportunity. Your mother
+should have taken you to town every spring for the benefit of masters.”</p>
+
+<p>“My mother would have no objection, but my father hates London.”</p>
+
+<p>“Has your governess left you?”</p>
+
+<p>“We never had any governess.”</p>
+
+<p>“No governess! How was that possible? Five daughters brought up at home
+without a governess! I never heard of such a thing. Your mother must
+have been quite a slave to your education.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth could hardly help smiling, as she assured her that had not
+been the case.</p>
+
+<p>“Then who taught you? who attended to you? Without a governess, you must
+have been neglected.”</p>
+
+<p>“Compared with some families, I believe we were; but such of us as
+wished to learn never wanted the means. We were always encouraged to
+read, and had all the masters that were necessary. Those who chose to be
+idle certainly might.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ay, no doubt: but that is what a governess will prevent; and if I had
+known your mother, I should have advised her most strenuously to engage
+one. I always say that nothing is to be done in education without steady
+and regular instruction, and nobody but a governess can give it. It is
+wonderful how many families I have been the means of supplying in that
+way. I am always glad to get a young person well placed out. Four nieces
+of Mrs. Jenkinson are most delightfully situated through my means; and
+it was but the other day that I recommended another young person, who
+was<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_207">{207}</a></span> merely accidentally mentioned to me, and the family are quite
+delighted with her. Mrs. Collins, did I tell you of Lady Metcalfe’s
+calling yesterday to thank me? She finds Miss Pope a treasure. ‘Lady
+Catherine,’ said she, ‘you have given me a treasure.’ Are any of your
+younger sisters out, Miss Bennet?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, ma’am, all.”</p>
+
+<p>“All! What, all five out at once? Very odd! And you only the second. The
+younger ones out before the elder are married! Your younger sisters must
+be very young?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my youngest is not sixteen. Perhaps <i>she</i> is full young to be much
+in company. But really, ma’am, I think it would be very hard upon
+younger sisters that they should not have their share of society and
+amusement, because the elder may not have the means or inclination to
+marry early. The last born has as good a right to the pleasures of youth
+as the first. And to be kept back on <i>such</i> a motive! I think it would
+not be very likely to promote sisterly affection or delicacy of mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“Upon my word,” said her Ladyship, “you give your opinion very decidedly
+for so young a person. Pray, what is your age?”</p>
+
+<p>“With three younger sisters grown up,” replied Elizabeth, smiling, “your
+Ladyship can hardly expect me to own it.”</p>
+
+<p>Lady Catherine seemed quite astonished at not receiving a direct answer;
+and Elizabeth suspected herself to be the first creature who had ever
+dared to trifle with so much dignified impertinence.</p>
+
+<p>“You cannot be more than twenty, I am sure,—therefore you need not
+conceal your age.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am not one-and-twenty.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_208">{208}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>When the gentlemen had joined them, and tea was over, the card tables
+were placed. Lady Catherine, Sir William, and Mr. and Mrs. Collins sat
+down to quadrille; and as Miss De Bourgh chose to play at cassino, the
+two girls had the honour of assisting Mrs. Jenkinson to make up her
+party. Their table was superlatively stupid. Scarcely a syllable was
+uttered that did not relate to the game, except when Mrs. Jenkinson
+expressed her fears of Miss De Bourgh’s being too hot or too cold, or
+having too much or too little light. A great deal more passed at the
+other table. Lady Catherine was generally speaking—stating the mistakes
+of the three others, or relating some anecdote of herself. Mr. Collins
+was employed in agreeing to everything her Ladyship said, thanking her
+for every fish he won, and apologizing if he thought he won too many.
+Sir William did not say much. He was storing his memory with anecdotes
+and noble names.</p>
+
+<p>When Lady Catherine and her daughter had played as long as they chose,
+the tables were broken up, the carriage was offered to Mrs. Collins,
+gratefully accepted, and immediately ordered. The party then gathered
+round the fire to hear Lady Catherine determine what weather they were
+to have on the morrow. From these instructions they were summoned by the
+arrival of the coach; and with many speeches of thankfulness on Mr.
+Collins’s side, and as many bows on Sir William’s, they departed. As
+soon as they had driven from the door, Elizabeth was called on by her
+cousin to give her opinion of all that she had seen at Rosings, which,
+for Charlotte’s sake, she made more favourable than it really was. But
+her commendation, though costing her some trouble, could by no means
+satisfy Mr. Collins, and he was very soon obliged to take her Ladyship’s
+praise into his own hands.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_209">{209}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXX"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_238_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_238_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXX.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="S" src="images/i_238_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_238_b.png"></span>IR WILLIAM stayed only a week at Hunsford; but his visit was long
+enough to convince him of his daughter’s being most comfortably settled,
+and of her possessing such a husband and such a neighbour as were not
+often met with. While Sir William was with them, Mr. Collins devoted his
+mornings to driving him out in his gig, and showing him the country: but
+when he went away, the whole family returned to their usual employments,
+and Elizabeth was thankful to find that they did not see more of her
+cousin by the alteration; for the chief of the time between breakfast
+and dinner was now passed by him either at work in the garden, or in
+reading and writing, and looking out of window in his own book room,
+which fronted the road.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_210">{210}</a></span> The room in which the ladies sat was backwards.
+Elizabeth at first had rather wondered that Charlotte should not prefer
+the dining parlour for common use; it was a better sized room, and had a
+pleasanter aspect: but she soon saw that her friend had an excellent
+reason for what she did, for Mr. Collins would undoubtedly have been
+much less in his own apartment had they sat in one equally lively; and
+she gave Charlotte credit for the arrangement.</p>
+
+<p>From the drawing-room they could distinguish nothing in the lane, and
+were indebted to Mr. Collins for the knowledge of what carriages went
+along, and how often especially Miss De Bourgh drove by in her phaeton,
+which he never failed coming to inform them of, though it happened
+almost every day. She not unfrequently stopped at the Parsonage, and had
+a few minutes’ conversation with Charlotte, but was scarcely ever
+prevailed on to get out.</p>
+
+<p>Very few days passed in which Mr. Collins did not walk to Rosings, and
+not many in which his wife did not think it necessary to go likewise;
+and till Elizabeth recollected that there might be other family livings
+to be disposed of, she could not understand the sacrifice of so many
+hours. Now and then they were honoured with a call from her Ladyship,
+and nothing escaped her observation that was passing in the room during
+these visits. She examined into their employments, looked at their work,
+and advised them to do it differently; found fault with the arrangement
+of the furniture, or detected the housemaid in negligence; and if she
+accepted any refreshment, seemed to do it only for the sake of finding
+out that Mrs. Collins’s joints of meat were too large for her family.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_211">{211}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth soon perceived, that though this great lady was not in the
+commission of the peace for the county, she was a most active magistrate
+in her own parish, the minutest concerns of which were carried to her by
+Mr. Collins; and whenever any of the cottagers were disposed to be
+quarrelsome, discontented, or too poor, she sallied forth into the
+village to settle their differences, silence their complaints, and scold
+them into harmony and plenty.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption19">
+<img alt="" height="536" src="images/i_240.jpg" width="550" id="img_images_i_240.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption19">
+
+<p>“he never failed to inform them”</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The entertainment of dining at Rosings was repeated about twice a week;
+and, allowing for the loss of Sir William, and there being only one
+card-table in the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_212">{212}</a></span> evening, every such entertainment was the counterpart
+of the first. Their other engagements were few, as the style of living
+of the neighbourhood in general was beyond the Collinses’ reach. This,
+however, was no evil to Elizabeth, and upon the whole she spent her time
+comfortably enough: there were half hours of pleasant conversation with
+Charlotte, and the weather was so fine for the time of year, that she
+had often great enjoyment out of doors. Her favourite walk, and where
+she frequently went while the others were calling on Lady Catherine, was
+along the open grove which edged that side of the park, where there was
+a nice sheltered path, which no one seemed to value but herself, and
+where she felt beyond the reach of Lady Catherine’s curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>In this quiet way the first fortnight of her visit soon passed away.
+Easter was approaching, and the week preceding it was to bring an
+addition to the family at Rosings, which in so small a circle must be
+important. Elizabeth had heard, soon after her arrival, that Mr. Darcy
+was expected there in the course of a few weeks; and though there were
+not many of her acquaintance whom she did not prefer, his coming would
+furnish one comparatively new to look at in their Rosings parties, and
+she might be amused in seeing how hopeless Miss Bingley’s designs on him
+were, by his behaviour to his cousin, for whom he was evidently destined
+by Lady Catherine, who talked of his coming with the greatest
+satisfaction, spoke of him in terms of the highest admiration, and
+seemed almost angry to find that he had already been frequently seen by
+Miss Lucas and herself.</p>
+
+<p>His arrival was soon known at the Parsonage; for Mr. Collins was walking
+the whole morning within view of the lodges opening into Hunsford Lane,
+in order to have<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_213">{213}</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 472px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption20">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_242.jpg" width="472" id="img_images_i_242.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption20">
+
+<p>
+“The gentlemen accompanied him.”<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">the earliest assurance of it; and, after making his bow as the carriage
+turned into the park, hurried home with the great intelligence. On the
+following morning he hastened to Rosings to pay his respects. There were
+two nephews of Lady Catherine to require them, for Mr. Darcy had brought
+with him a Colonel Fitzwilliam, the younger son of his uncle, Lord ——;
+and, to the great surprise of all the party, when Mr. Collins returned,
+the gentlemen accompanied him. Charlotte had seen them from her
+husband’s room, crossing the road, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_214">{214}</a></span> immediately running into the
+other, told the girls what an honour they might expect, adding,—</p>
+
+<p>“I may thank you, Eliza, for this piece of civility. Mr. Darcy would
+never have come so soon to wait upon me.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth had scarcely time to disclaim all right to the compliment
+before their approach was announced by the door-bell, and shortly
+afterwards the three gentlemen entered the room. Colonel Fitzwilliam,
+who led the way, was about thirty, not handsome, but in person and
+address most truly the gentleman. Mr. Darcy looked just as he had been
+used to look in Hertfordshire, paid his compliments, with his usual
+reserve, to Mrs. Collins; and whatever might be his feelings towards her
+friend, met her with every appearance of composure. Elizabeth merely
+courtesied to him, without saying a word.</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Fitzwilliam entered into conversation directly, with the
+readiness and ease of a well-bred man, and talked very pleasantly; but
+his cousin, after having addressed a slight observation on the house and
+garden to Mrs. Collins, sat for some time without speaking to anybody.
+At length, however, his civility was so far awakened as to inquire of
+Elizabeth after the health of her family. She answered him in the usual
+way; and, after a moment’s pause, added,—</p>
+
+<p>“My eldest sister has been in town these three months. Have you never
+happened to see her there?”</p>
+
+<p>She was perfectly sensible that he never had: but she wished to see
+whether he would betray any consciousness of what had passed between the
+Bingleys and Jane; and she thought he looked a little confused as he
+answered that he had never been so fortunate as to meet Miss Bennet. The
+subject was pursued no further, and the gentlemen soon afterwards went
+away.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_215">{215}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XXXI"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_244_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_244_a.jpg">
+<br><br>
+CHAPTER XXXI.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="C" src="images/i_244_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_244_b.png"></span>OLONEL FITZWILLIAM’S manners were very much admired at the Parsonage,
+and the ladies all felt that he must add considerably to the pleasure of
+their engagements at Rosings. It was some days, however, before they
+received any invitation thither, for while there were visitors in the
+house they could not be necessary; and it was not till Easter-day,
+almost a week after the gentlemen’s arrival, that they were honoured by
+such an attention, and then they were merely asked on leaving church to
+come there in the evening. For the last week they had seen very little
+of either Lady Catherine or her daughter. Colonel Fitzwilliam had called
+at the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_216">{216}</a></span> Parsonage more than once during the time, but Mr. Darcy they had
+only seen at church.</p>
+
+<p>The invitation was accepted, of course, and at a proper hour they joined
+the party in Lady Catherine’s drawing-room. Her Ladyship received them
+civilly, but it was plain that their company was by no means so
+acceptable as when she could get nobody else; and she was, in fact,
+almost engrossed by her nephews, speaking to them, especially to Darcy,
+much more than to any other person in the room.</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Fitzwilliam seemed really glad to see them: anything was a
+welcome relief to him at Rosings; and Mrs. Collins’s pretty friend had,
+moreover, caught his fancy very much. He now seated himself by her, and
+talked so agreeably of Kent and Hertfordshire, of travelling and staying
+at home, of new books and music, that Elizabeth had never been half so
+well entertained in that room before; and they conversed with so much
+spirit and flow as to draw the attention of Lady Catherine herself, as
+well as of Mr. Darcy. <i>His</i> eyes had been soon and repeatedly turned
+towards them with a look of curiosity; and that her Ladyship, after a
+while, shared the feeling, was more openly acknowledged, for she did not
+scruple to call out,—</p>
+
+<p>“What is that you are saying, Fitzwilliam? What is it you are talking
+of? What are you telling Miss Bennet? Let me hear what it is.”</p>
+
+<p>“We were talking of music, madam,” said he, when no longer able to avoid
+a reply.</p>
+
+<p>“Of music! Then pray speak aloud. It is of all subjects my delight. I
+must have my share in the conversation, if you are speaking of music.
+There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_217">{217}</a></span>
+enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever
+learnt, I should have been a great proficient. And so would Anne, if her
+health had allowed her to apply. I am confident that she would have
+performed delightfully. How does Georgiana get on, Darcy?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Darcy spoke with affectionate praise of his sister’s proficiency.</p>
+
+<p>“I am very glad to hear such a good account of her,” said Lady
+Catherine; “and pray tell her from me, that she cannot expect to excel,
+if she does not practise a great deal.”</p>
+
+<p>“I assure you, madam,” he replied, “that she does not need such advice.
+She practises very constantly.”</p>
+
+<p>“So much the better. It cannot be done too much; and when I next write
+to her, I shall charge her not to neglect it on any account. I often
+tell young ladies, that no excellence in music is to be acquired without
+constant practice. I have told Miss Bennet several times, that she will
+never play really well, unless she practises more; and though Mrs.
+Collins has no instrument, she is very welcome, as I have often told
+her, to come to Rosings every day, and play on the pianoforte in Mrs.
+Jenkinson’s room. She would be in nobody’s way, you know, in that part
+of the house.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Darcy looked a little ashamed of his aunt’s ill-breeding, and made
+no answer.</p>
+
+<p>When coffee was over, Colonel Fitzwilliam reminded Elizabeth of having
+promised to play to him; and she sat down directly to the instrument. He
+drew a chair near her. Lady Catherine listened to half a song, and then
+talked, as before, to her other nephew; till the latter walked away from
+her, and moving with his usual deliberation towards the pianoforte,
+stationed himself so<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_218">{218}</a></span> as to command a full view of the fair performer’s
+countenance. Elizabeth saw what he was doing, and at the first
+convenient pause turned to him with an arch smile, and said,—</p>
+
+<p>“You mean to frighten me, Mr. Darcy, by coming in all this state to hear
+me. But I will not be alarmed, though your sister <i>does</i> play so well.
+There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at
+the will of others. My courage always rises with every attempt to
+intimidate me.”</p>
+
+<p>“I shall not say that you are mistaken,” he replied, “because you could
+not really believe me to entertain any design of alarming you; and I
+have had the pleasure of your acquaintance long enough to know, that you
+find great enjoyment in occasionally professing opinions which, in fact,
+are not your own.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth laughed heartily at this picture of herself, and said to
+Colonel Fitzwilliam, “Your cousin will give you a very pretty notion of
+me, and teach you not to believe a word I say. I am particularly unlucky
+in meeting with a person so well able to expose my real character, in a
+part of the world where I had hoped to pass myself off with some degree
+of credit. Indeed, Mr. Darcy, it is very ungenerous in you to mention
+all that you knew to my disadvantage in Hertfordshire—and, give me
+leave to say, very impolitic too—for it is provoking me to retaliate,
+and such things may come out as will shock your relations to hear.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am not afraid of you,” said he, smilingly.</p>
+
+<p>“Pray let me hear what you have to accuse him of,” cried Colonel
+Fitzwilliam. “I should like to know how he behaves among strangers.”</p>
+
+<p>“You shall hear, then—but prepare for something very<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_219">{219}</a></span> dreadful. The
+first time of my ever seeing him in Hertfordshire, you must know, was at
+a ball—and at this ball, what do you think he did? He danced only four
+dances! I am sorry to pain you, but so it was. He danced only four
+dances, though gentlemen were scarce; and, to my certain knowledge, more
+than one young lady was sitting down in want of a partner. Mr. Darcy,
+you cannot deny the fact.”</p>
+
+<p>“I had not at that time the honour of knowing any lady in the assembly
+beyond my own party.”</p>
+
+<p>“True; and nobody can ever be introduced in a ball-room. Well, Colonel
+Fitzwilliam, what do I play next? My fingers wait your orders.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps,” said Darcy, “I should have judged better had I sought an
+introduction, but I am ill-qualified to recommend myself to strangers.”</p>
+
+<p>“Shall we ask your cousin the reason of this?” said Elizabeth, still
+addressing Colonel Fitzwilliam. “Shall we ask him why a man of sense and
+education, and who has lived in the world, is ill-qualified to recommend
+himself to strangers?”</p>
+
+<p>“I can answer your question,” said Fitzwilliam, “without applying to
+him. It is because he will not give himself the trouble.”</p>
+
+<p>“I certainly have not the talent which some people possess,” said Darcy,
+“of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot
+catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their
+concerns, as I often see done.”</p>
+
+<p>“My fingers,” said Elizabeth, “do not move over this instrument in the
+masterly manner which I see so many women’s do. They have not the same
+force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I
+have<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_220">{220}</a></span> always supposed it to be my own fault—because I would not take
+the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe <i>my</i> fingers
+as capable as any other woman’s of superior execution.”</p>
+
+<p>Darcy smiled and said, “You are perfectly right. You have employed your
+time much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you can
+think anything wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers.”</p>
+
+<p>Here they were interrupted by Lady Catherine, who called out to know
+what they were talking of. Elizabeth immediately began playing again.
+Lady Catherine approached, and, after listening for a few minutes, said
+to Darcy,—</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Bennet would not play at all amiss if she practised more, and
+could have the advantage of a London master. She has a very good notion
+of fingering, though her taste is not equal to Anne’s. Anne would have
+been a delightful performer, had her health allowed her to learn.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth looked at Darcy, to see how cordially he assented to his
+cousin’s praise: but neither at that moment nor at any other could she
+discern any symptom of love; and from the whole of his behaviour to Miss
+De Bourgh she derived this comfort for Miss Bingley, that he might have
+been just as likely to marry <i>her</i>, had she been his relation.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Catherine continued her remarks on Elizabeth’s performance, mixing
+with them many instructions on execution and taste. Elizabeth received
+them with all the forbearance of civility; and at the request of the
+gentlemen remained at the instrument till her Ladyship’s carriage was
+ready to take them all home.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_221">{221}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXXII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_250_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_250_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXXII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="E" src="images/i_250_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_250_b.png"></span>LIZABETH was sitting by herself the next morning, and writing to Jane,
+while Mrs. Collins and Maria were gone on business into the village,
+when she was startled by a ring at the door, the certain signal of a
+visitor. As she had heard no carriage, she thought it not unlikely to be
+Lady Catherine; and under that apprehension was putting<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_222">{222}</a></span> away her
+half-finished letter, that she might escape all impertinent questions,
+when the door opened, and to her very great surprise Mr. Darcy, and Mr.
+Darcy only, entered the room.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed astonished too on finding her alone, and apologized for his
+intrusion, by letting her know that he had understood all the ladies to
+be within.</p>
+
+<p>They then sat down, and when her inquiries after Rosings were made,
+seemed in danger of sinking into total silence. It was absolutely
+necessary, therefore, to think of something; and in this emergency
+recollecting <i>when</i> she had seen him last in Hertfordshire, and feeling
+curious to know what he would say on the subject of their hasty
+departure, she observed,—</p>
+
+<p>“How very suddenly you all quitted Netherfield last November, Mr. Darcy!
+It must have been a most agreeable surprise to Mr. Bingley to see you
+all after him so soon; for, if I recollect right, he went but the day
+before. He and his sisters were well, I hope, when you left London?”</p>
+
+<p>“Perfectly so, I thank you.”</p>
+
+<p>She found that she was to receive no other answer; and, after a short
+pause, added,—</p>
+
+<p>“I think I have understood that Mr. Bingley has not much idea of ever
+returning to Netherfield again?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have never heard him say so; but it is probable that he may spend
+very little of his time there in future. He has many friends, and he is
+at a time of life when friends and engagements are continually
+increasing.”</p>
+
+<p>“If he means to be but little at Netherfield, it would be better for the
+neighbourhood that he should give up the place entirely, for then we
+might possibly get a settled family there. But, perhaps, Mr. Bingley did
+not take the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_223">{223}</a></span> house so much for the convenience of the neighbourhood as
+for his own, and we must expect him to keep or quit it on the same
+principle.”</p>
+
+<p>“I should not be surprised,” said Darcy, “if he were to give it up as
+soon as any eligible purchase offers.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth made no answer. She was afraid of talking longer of his
+friend; and, having nothing else to say, was now determined to leave the
+trouble of finding a subject to him.</p>
+
+<p>He took the hint and soon began with, “This seems a very comfortable
+house. Lady Catherine, I believe, did a great deal to it when Mr.
+Collins first came to Hunsford.”</p>
+
+<p>“I believe she did—and I am sure she could not have bestowed her
+kindness on a more grateful object.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Collins appears very fortunate in his choice of a wife.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, indeed; his friends may well rejoice in his having met with one of
+the very few sensible women who would have accepted him, or have made
+him happy if they had. My friend has an excellent understanding—though
+I am not certain that I consider her marrying Mr. Collins as the wisest
+thing she ever did. She seems perfectly happy, however; and, in a
+prudential light, it is certainly a very good match for her.”</p>
+
+<p>“It must be very agreeable to her to be settled within so easy a
+distance of her own family and friends.”</p>
+
+<p>“An easy distance do you call it? It is nearly fifty miles.”</p>
+
+<p>“And what is fifty miles of good road? Little more than half a day’s
+journey. Yes, I call it a very easy distance.”</p>
+
+<p>“I should never have considered the distance as one of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_224">{224}</a></span> the <i>advantages</i>
+of the match,” cried Elizabeth. “I should never have said Mrs. Collins
+was settled <i>near</i> her family.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is a proof of your own attachment to Hertfordshire. Anything beyond
+the very neighbourhood of Longbourn, I suppose, would appear far.”</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke there was a sort of smile, which Elizabeth fancied she
+understood; he must be supposing her to be thinking of Jane and
+Netherfield, and she blushed as she answered,—</p>
+
+<p>“I do not mean to say that a woman may not be settled too near her
+family. The far and the near must be relative, and depend on many
+varying circumstances. Where there is fortune to make the expense of
+travelling unimportant, distance becomes no evil. But that is not the
+case <i>here</i>. Mr. and Mrs. Collins have a comfortable income, but not
+such a one as will allow of frequent journeys—and I am persuaded my
+friend would not call herself <i>near</i> her family under less than <i>half</i>
+the present distance.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Darcy drew his chair a little towards her, and said, “<i>You</i> cannot
+have a right to such very strong local attachment. <i>You</i> cannot have
+been always at Longbourn.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth looked surprised. The gentleman experienced some change of
+feeling; he drew back his chair, took a newspaper from the table, and,
+glancing over it, said, in a colder voice,—</p>
+
+<p>“Are you pleased with Kent?”</p>
+
+<p>A short dialogue on the subject of the country ensued, on either side
+calm and concise—and soon put an end to by the entrance of Charlotte
+and her sister, just returned from their walk. The <i>tête-à-tête</i>
+surprised them. Mr.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_225">{225}</a></span> Darcy related the mistake which had occasioned his
+intruding on Miss Bennet, and, after sitting a few minutes longer,
+without saying much to anybody, went away.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 361px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption21">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_254.jpg" width="361" id="img_images_i_254.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption21"><p>“Accompanied by their aunt”</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_226">{226}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“What can be the meaning of this?” said Charlotte, as soon as he was
+gone. “My dear Eliza, he must be in love with you, or he would never
+have called on us in this familiar way.”</p>
+
+<p>But when Elizabeth told of his silence, it did not seem very likely,
+even to Charlotte’s wishes, to be the case; and, after various
+conjectures, they could at last only suppose his visit to proceed from
+the difficulty of finding anything to do, which was the more probable
+from the time of year. All field sports were over. Within doors there
+was Lady Catherine, books, and a billiard table, but gentlemen cannot be
+always within doors; and in the nearness of the Parsonage, or the
+pleasantness of the walk to it, or of the people who lived in it, the
+two cousins found a temptation from this period of walking thither
+almost every day. They called at various times of the morning, sometimes
+separately, sometimes together, and now and then accompanied by their
+aunt. It was plain to them all that Colonel Fitzwilliam came because he
+had pleasure in their society, a persuasion which of course recommended
+him still more; and Elizabeth was reminded by her own satisfaction in
+being with him, as well as by his evident admiration, of her former
+favourite, George Wickham; and though, in comparing them, she saw there
+was less captivating softness in Colonel Fitzwilliam’s manners, she
+believed he might have the best informed mind.</p>
+
+<p>But why Mr. Darcy came so often to the Parsonage it was more difficult
+to understand. It could not be for society, as he frequently sat there
+ten minutes together without opening his lips; and when he did speak, it
+seemed the effect of necessity rather than of choice—a sacrifice to
+propriety, not a pleasure to himself. He<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_227">{227}</a></span> seldom appeared really
+animated. Mrs. Collins knew not what to make of him. Colonel
+Fitzwilliam’s occasionally laughing at his stupidity proved that he was
+generally different, which her own knowledge of him could not have told
+her; and as she would have liked to believe this change the effect of
+love, and the object of that love her friend Eliza, she set herself
+seriously to work to find it out: she watched him whenever they were at
+Rosings, and whenever he came to Hunsford; but without much success. He
+certainly looked at her friend a great deal, but the expression of that
+look was disputable. It was an earnest, steadfast gaze, but she often
+doubted whether there were much admiration in it, and sometimes it
+seemed nothing but absence of mind.</p>
+
+<p>She had once or twice suggested to Elizabeth the possibility of his
+being partial to her, but Elizabeth always laughed at the idea; and Mrs.
+Collins did not think it right to press the subject, from the danger of
+raising expectations which might only end in disappointment; for in her
+opinion it admitted not of a doubt, that all her friend’s dislike would
+vanish, if she could suppose him to be in her power.</p>
+
+<p>In her kind schemes for Elizabeth, she sometimes planned her marrying
+Colonel Fitzwilliam. He was, beyond comparison, the pleasantest man: he
+certainly admired her, and his situation in life was most eligible; but,
+to counterbalance these advantages, Mr. Darcy had considerable patronage
+in the church, and his cousin could have none at all.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_228">{228}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XXXIII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_257_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_257_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“On looking up.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXXIII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="M" src="images/i_257_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_257_b.png"></span>ORE than once did Elizabeth, in her ramble within the park,
+unexpectedly meet Mr. Darcy. She felt all the perverseness of the
+mischance that should bring him where no one else was brought; and, to
+prevent its ever happening again, took care to inform him, at first,
+that it was a favourite haunt of hers. How it could occur a second time,
+therefore, was very odd! Yet it did, and even the third. It seemed like
+wilful ill-nature, or a voluntary penance; for on these occasions it was
+not merely a few formal inquiries and an awkward pause and then away,
+but he actually thought it necessary to turn back and walk with her. He
+never said a great deal, nor did she give herself the trouble of talking
+or of listening much; but it struck her in the course of their<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_229">{229}</a></span> third
+encounter that he was asking some odd unconnected questions—about her
+pleasure in being at Hunsford, her love of solitary walks, and her
+opinion of Mr. and Mrs. Collins’s happiness; and that in speaking of
+Rosings, and her not perfectly understanding the house, he seemed to
+expect that whenever she came into Kent again she would be staying
+<i>there</i> too. His words seemed to imply it. Could he have Colonel
+Fitzwilliam in his thoughts? She supposed, if he meant anything, he must
+mean an allusion to what might arise in that quarter. It distressed her
+a little, and she was quite glad to find herself at the gate in the
+pales opposite the Parsonage.</p>
+
+<p>She was engaged one day, as she walked, in re-perusing Jane’s last
+letter, and dwelling on some passages which proved that Jane had not
+written in spirits, when, instead of being again surprised by Mr. Darcy,
+she saw, on looking up, that Colonel Fitzwilliam was meeting her.
+Putting away the letter immediately, and forcing a smile, she said,—</p>
+
+<p>“I did not know before that you ever walked this way.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have been making the tour of the park,” he replied, “as I generally
+do every year, and intended to close it with a call at the Parsonage.
+Are you going much farther?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, I should have turned in a moment.”</p>
+
+<p>And accordingly she did turn, and they walked towards the Parsonage
+together.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you certainly leave Kent on Saturday?” said she.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes—if Darcy does not put it off again. But I am at his disposal. He
+arranges the business just as he pleases.”</p>
+
+<p>“And if not able to please himself in the arrangement, he has at least
+great pleasure in the power of choice. I<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_230">{230}</a></span> do not know anybody who seems
+more to enjoy the power of doing what he likes than Mr. Darcy.”</p>
+
+<p>“He likes to have his own way very well,” replied Colonel Fitzwilliam.
+“But so we all do. It is only that he has better means of having it than
+many others, because he is rich, and many others are poor. I speak
+feelingly. A younger son, you know, must be inured to self-denial and
+dependence.”</p>
+
+<p>“In my opinion, the younger son of an earl can know very little of
+either. Now, seriously, what have you ever known of self-denial and
+dependence? When have you been prevented by want of money from going
+wherever you chose or procuring anything you had a fancy for?”</p>
+
+<p>“These are home questions—and perhaps I cannot say that I have
+experienced many hardships of that nature. But in matters of greater
+weight, I may suffer from the want of money. Younger sons cannot marry
+where they like.”</p>
+
+<p>“Unless where they like women of fortune, which I think they very often
+do.”</p>
+
+<p>“Our habits of expense make us too dependent, and there are not many in
+my rank of life who can afford to marry without some attention to
+money.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is this,” thought Elizabeth, “meant for me?” and she coloured at the
+idea; but, recovering herself, said in a lively tone, “And pray, what is
+the usual price of an earl’s younger son? Unless the elder brother is
+very sickly, I suppose you would not ask above fifty thousand pounds.”</p>
+
+<p>He answered her in the same style, and the subject dropped. To interrupt
+a silence which might make him fancy her affected with what had passed,
+she soon afterwards said,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_231">{231}</a></span>—</p>
+
+<p>“I imagine your cousin brought you down with him chiefly for the sake of
+having somebody at his disposal. I wonder he does not marry, to secure a
+lasting convenience of that kind. But, perhaps, his sister does as well
+for the present; and, as she is under his sole care, he may do what he
+likes with her.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, “that is an advantage which he must
+divide with me. I am joined with him in the guardianship of Miss Darcy.”</p>
+
+<p>“Are you, indeed? And pray what sort of a guardian do you make? Does
+your charge give you much trouble? Young ladies of her age are sometimes
+a little difficult to manage; and if she has the true Darcy spirit, she
+may like to have her own way.”</p>
+
+<p>As she spoke, she observed him looking at her earnestly; and the manner
+in which he immediately asked her why she supposed Miss Darcy likely to
+give them any uneasiness, convinced her that she had somehow or other
+got pretty near the truth. She directly replied,—</p>
+
+<p>“You need not be frightened. I never heard any harm of her; and I dare
+say she is one of the most tractable creatures in the world. She is a
+very great favourite with some ladies of my acquaintance, Mrs. Hurst and
+Miss Bingley. I think I have heard you say that you know them.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know them a little. Their brother is a pleasant, gentlemanlike
+man—he is a great friend of Darcy’s.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh yes,” said Elizabeth drily—“Mr. Darcy is uncommonly kind to Mr.
+Bingley, and takes a prodigious deal of care of him.”</p>
+
+<p>“Care of him! Yes, I really believe Darcy <i>does</i> take care of him in
+those points where he most wants care.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_232">{232}</a></span> From something that he told me
+in our journey hither, I have reason to think Bingley very much indebted
+to him. But I ought to beg his pardon, for I have no right to suppose
+that Bingley was the person meant. It was all conjecture.”</p>
+
+<p>“What is it you mean?”</p>
+
+<p>“It is a circumstance which Darcy of course could not wish to be
+generally known, because if it were to get round to the lady’s family it
+would be an unpleasant thing.”</p>
+
+<p>“You may depend upon my not mentioning it.”</p>
+
+<p>“And remember that I have not much reason for supposing it to be
+Bingley. What he told me was merely this: that he congratulated himself
+on having lately saved a friend from the inconveniences of a most
+imprudent marriage, but without mentioning names or any other
+particulars; and I only suspected it to be Bingley from believing him
+the kind of young man to get into a scrape of that sort, and from
+knowing them to have been together the whole of last summer.”</p>
+
+<p>“Did Mr. Darcy give you his reasons for this interference?”</p>
+
+<p>“I understood that there were some very strong objections against the
+lady.”</p>
+
+<p>“And what arts did he use to separate them?”</p>
+
+<p>“He did not talk to me of his own arts,” said Fitzwilliam, smiling. “He
+only told me what I have now told you.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth made no answer, and walked on, her heart swelling with
+indignation. After watching her a little, Fitzwilliam asked her why she
+was so thoughtful.</p>
+
+<p>“I am thinking of what you have been telling me,” said she. “Your
+cousin’s conduct does not suit my feelings. Why was he to be the
+judge?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_233">{233}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“You are rather disposed to call his interference officious?”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not see what right Mr. Darcy had to decide on the propriety of his
+friend’s inclination; or why, upon his own judgment alone, he was to
+determine and direct in what manner that friend was to be happy. But,”
+she continued, recollecting herself, “as we know none of the
+particulars, it is not fair to condemn him. It is not to be supposed
+that there was much affection in the case.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is not an unnatural surmise,” said Fitzwilliam; “but it is
+lessening the honour of my cousin’s triumph very sadly.”</p>
+
+<p>This was spoken jestingly, but it appeared to her so just a picture of
+Mr. Darcy, that she would not trust herself with an answer; and,
+therefore, abruptly changing the conversation, talked on indifferent
+matters till they reached the Parsonage. There, shut into her own room,
+as soon as their visitor left them, she could think without interruption
+of all that she had heard. It was not to be supposed that any other
+people could be meant than those with whom she was connected. There
+could not exist in the world <i>two</i> men over whom Mr. Darcy could have
+such boundless influence. That he had been concerned in the measures
+taken to separate Mr. Bingley and Jane, she had never doubted; but she
+had always attributed to Miss Bingley the principal design and
+arrangement of them. If his own vanity, however, did not mislead him,
+<i>he</i> was the cause—his pride and caprice were the cause—of all that
+Jane had suffered, and still continued to suffer. He had ruined for a
+while every hope of happiness for the most affectionate, generous heart
+in the world; and no one could say how lasting an evil he might have
+inflicted.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_234">{234}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“There were some very strong objections against the lady,” were Colonel
+Fitzwilliam’s words; and these strong objections probably were, her
+having one uncle who was a country attorney, and another who was in
+business in London.</p>
+
+<p>“To Jane herself,” she exclaimed, “there could be no possibility of
+objection,—all loveliness and goodness as she is! Her understanding
+excellent, her mind improved, and her manners captivating. Neither could
+anything be urged against my father, who, though with some
+peculiarities, has abilities which Mr. Darcy himself need not disdain,
+and respectability which he will probably never reach.” When she thought
+of her mother, indeed, her confidence gave way a little; but she would
+not allow that any objections <i>there</i> had material weight with Mr.
+Darcy, whose pride, she was convinced, would receive a deeper wound from
+the want of importance in his friend’s connections than from their want
+of sense; and she was quite decided, at last, that he had been partly
+governed by this worst kind of pride, and partly by the wish of
+retaining Mr. Bingley for his sister.</p>
+
+<p>The agitation and tears which the subject occasioned brought on a
+headache; and it grew so much worse towards the evening that, added to
+her unwillingness to see Mr. Darcy, it determined her not to attend her
+cousins to Rosings, where they were engaged to drink tea. Mrs. Collins,
+seeing that she was really unwell, did not press her to go, and as much
+as possible prevented her husband from pressing her; but Mr. Collins
+could not conceal his apprehension of Lady Catherine’s being rather
+displeased by her staying at home.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_235">{235}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXXIV"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_264_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_264_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXXIV.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="W" src="images/i_264_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_264_b.png"></span>HEN they were gone, Elizabeth, as if intending to exasperate herself as
+much as possible against Mr. Darcy, chose for her employment the
+examination of all the letters which Jane had written to her since her
+being in Kent. They contained no actual complaint, nor was there any
+revival of past occurrences,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_236">{236}</a></span> or any communication of present suffering.
+But in all, and in almost every line of each, there was a want of that
+cheerfulness which had been used to characterize her style, and which,
+proceeding from the serenity of a mind at ease with itself, and kindly
+disposed towards everyone, had been scarcely ever clouded. Elizabeth
+noticed every sentence conveying the idea of uneasiness, with an
+attention which it had hardly received on the first perusal. Mr. Darcy’s
+shameful boast of what misery he had been able to inflict gave her a
+keener sense of her sister’s sufferings. It was some consolation to
+think that his visit to Rosings was to end on the day after the next,
+and a still greater that in less than a fortnight she should herself be
+with Jane again, and enabled to contribute to the recovery of her
+spirits, by all that affection could do.</p>
+
+<p>She could not think of Darcy’s leaving Kent without remembering that his
+cousin was to go with him; but Colonel Fitzwilliam had made it clear
+that he had no intentions at all, and, agreeable as he was, she did not
+mean to be unhappy about him.</p>
+
+<p>While settling this point, she was suddenly roused by the sound of the
+door-bell; and her spirits were a little fluttered by the idea of its
+being Colonel Fitzwilliam himself, who had once before called late in
+the evening, and might now come to inquire particularly after her. But
+this idea was soon banished, and her spirits were very differently
+affected, when, to her utter amazement, she saw Mr. Darcy walk into the
+room. In a hurried manner he immediately began an inquiry after her
+health, imputing his visit to a wish of hearing that she were better.
+She answered him with cold civility. He sat down for a few moments, and
+then getting up walked<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_237">{237}</a></span> about the room. Elizabeth was surprised, but
+said not a word. After a silence of several minutes, he came towards her
+in an agitated manner, and thus began:—</p>
+
+<p>“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be
+repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love
+you.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth’s astonishment was beyond expression. She stared, coloured,
+doubted, and was silent. This he considered sufficient encouragement,
+and the avowal of all that he felt and had long felt for her immediately
+followed. He spoke well; but there were feelings besides those of the
+heart to be detailed, and he was not more eloquent on the subject of
+tenderness than of pride. His sense of her inferiority, of its being a
+degradation, of the family obstacles which judgment had always opposed
+to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the
+consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his
+suit.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of her deeply-rooted dislike, she could not be insensible to
+the compliment of such a man’s affection, and though her intentions did
+not vary for an instant, she was at first sorry for the pain he was to
+receive; till roused to resentment by his subsequent language, she lost
+all compassion in anger. She tried, however, to compose herself to
+answer him with patience, when he should have done. He concluded with
+representing to her the strength of that attachment which in spite of
+all his endeavours he had found impossible to conquer; and with
+expressing his hope that it would now be rewarded by her acceptance of
+his hand. As he said this she could easily see that he had no doubt of a
+favourable answer. He <i>spoke</i> of apprehension and anxiety, but his
+countenance expressed real security. Such a circumstance<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_238">{238}</a></span> could only
+exasperate farther; and when he ceased the colour rose into her cheeks
+and she said,—</p>
+
+<p>“In such cases as this, it is, I believe, the established mode to
+express a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed, however
+unequally they may be returned. It is natural that obligation should be
+felt, and if I could <i>feel</i> gratitude, I would now thank you. But I
+cannot—I have never desired your good opinion, and you have certainly
+bestowed it most unwillingly. I am sorry to have occasioned pain to
+anyone. It has been most unconsciously done, however, and I hope will be
+of short duration. The feelings which you tell me have long prevented
+the acknowledgment of your regard can have little difficulty in
+overcoming it after this explanation.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Darcy, who was leaning against the mantel-piece with his eyes fixed
+on her face, seemed to catch her words with no less resentment than
+surprise. His complexion became pale with anger, and the disturbance of
+his mind was visible in every feature. He was struggling for the
+appearance of composure, and would not open his lips till he believed
+himself to have attained it. The pause was to Elizabeth’s feelings
+dreadful. At length, in a voice of forced calmness, he said,—</p>
+
+<p>“And this is all the reply which I am to have the honour of expecting! I
+might, perhaps, wish to be informed why, with so little <i>endeavour</i> at
+civility, I am thus rejected. But it is of small importance.”</p>
+
+<p>“I might as well inquire,” replied she, “why, with so evident a design
+of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that you liked me
+against your will, against your reason, and even against your character?
+Was not this some excuse for incivility, if I <i>was</i> uncivil? But I have
+other provocations. You know I have.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_239">{239}</a></span> Had not my own feelings decided
+against you, had they been indifferent, or had they even been
+favourable, do you think that any consideration would tempt me to accept
+the man who has been the means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the
+happiness of a most beloved sister?”</p>
+
+<p>As she pronounced these words, Mr. Darcy changed colour; but the emotion
+was short, and he listened without attempting to interrupt her while she
+continued,—</p>
+
+<p>“I have every reason in the world to think ill of you. No motive can
+excuse the unjust and ungenerous part you acted <i>there</i>. You dare not,
+you cannot deny that you have been the principal, if not the only means
+of dividing them from each other, of exposing one to the censure of the
+world for caprice and instability, the other to its derision for
+disappointed hopes, and involving them both in misery of the acutest
+kind.”</p>
+
+<p>She paused, and saw with no slight indignation that he was listening
+with an air which proved him wholly unmoved by any feeling of remorse.
+He even looked at her with a smile of affected incredulity.</p>
+
+<p>“Can you deny that you have done it?” she repeated.</p>
+
+<p>With assumed tranquillity he then replied, “I have no wish of denying
+that I did everything in my power to separate my friend from your
+sister, or that I rejoice in my success. Towards <i>him</i> I have been
+kinder than towards myself.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth disdained the appearance of noticing this civil reflection,
+but its meaning did not escape, nor was it likely to conciliate her.</p>
+
+<p>“But it is not merely this affair,” she continued, “on which my dislike
+is founded. Long before it had taken<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_240">{240}</a></span> place, my opinion of you was
+decided. Your character was unfolded in the recital which I received
+many months ago from Mr. Wickham. On this subject, what can you have to
+say? In what imaginary act of friendship can you here defend yourself?
+or under what misrepresentation can you here impose upon others?”</p>
+
+<p>“You take an eager interest in that gentleman’s concerns,” said Darcy,
+in a less tranquil tone, and with a heightened colour.</p>
+
+<p>“Who that knows what his misfortunes have been can help feeling an
+interest in him?”</p>
+
+<p>“His misfortunes!” repeated Darcy, contemptuously,—“yes, his
+misfortunes have been great indeed.”</p>
+
+<p>“And of your infliction,” cried Elizabeth, with energy; “You have
+reduced him to his present state of poverty—comparative poverty. You
+have withheld the advantages which you must know to have been designed
+for him. You have deprived the best years of his life of that
+independence which was no less his due than his desert. You have done
+all this! and yet you can treat the mention of his misfortunes with
+contempt and ridicule.”</p>
+
+<p>“And this,” cried Darcy, as he walked with quick steps across the room,
+“is your opinion of me! This is the estimation in which you hold me! I
+thank you for explaining it so fully. My faults, according to this
+calculation, are heavy indeed! But, perhaps,” added he, stopping in his
+walk, and turning towards her, “these offences might have been
+overlooked, had not your pride been hurt by my honest confession of the
+scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design. These
+bitter accusations might have been suppressed, had I, with greater
+policy, concealed my struggles, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_241">{241}</a></span> flattered you into the belief of my
+being impelled by unqualified, unalloyed inclination; by reason, by
+reflection, by everything. But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence.
+Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just.
+Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your
+connections?—to congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose
+condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth felt herself growing more angry every moment; yet she tried to
+the utmost to speak with composure when she said,—</p>
+
+<p>“You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your
+declaration affected me in any other way than as it spared me the
+concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a
+more gentlemanlike manner.”</p>
+
+<p>She saw him start at this; but he said nothing, and she continued,—</p>
+
+<p>“You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way
+that would have tempted me to accept it.”</p>
+
+<p>Again his astonishment was obvious; and he looked at her with an
+expression of mingled incredulity and mortification. She went on,—</p>
+
+<p>“From the very beginning, from the first moment, I may almost say, of my
+acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest
+belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the
+feelings of others, were such as to form that groundwork of
+disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immovable a
+dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the
+last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_242">{242}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“You have said quite enough, madam. I perfectly comprehend your
+feelings, and have now only to be ashamed of what my own have been.
+Forgive me for having taken up so much of your time, and accept my best
+wishes for your health and happiness.”</p>
+
+<p>And with these words he hastily left the room, and Elizabeth heard him
+the next moment open the front door and quit the house. The tumult of
+her mind was now painfully great. She knew not how to support herself,
+and, from actual weakness, sat down and cried for half an hour. Her
+astonishment, as she reflected on what had passed, was increased by
+every review of it. That she should receive an offer of marriage from
+Mr. Darcy! that he should have been in love with her for so many months!
+so much in love as to wish to marry her in spite of all the objections
+which had made him prevent his friend’s marrying her sister, and which
+must appear at least with equal force in his own case, was almost
+incredible! it was gratifying to have inspired unconsciously so strong
+an affection. But his pride, his abominable pride, his shameless avowal
+of what he had done with respect to Jane, his unpardonable assurance in
+acknowledging, though he could not justify it, and the unfeeling manner
+which he had mentioned Mr. Wickham, his cruelty towards whom he had not
+attempted to deny, soon overcame the pity which the consideration of his
+attachment had for a moment excited.</p>
+
+<p>She continued in very agitating reflections till the sound of Lady
+Catherine’s carriage made her feel how unequal she was to encounter
+Charlotte’s observation, and hurried her away to her room.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_243">{243}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XXXV"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_272_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_272_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“Hearing herself called.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXXV.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="E" src="images/i_272_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_272_b.png"></span>LIZABETH awoke the next morning to the same thoughts and meditations
+which had at length closed her eyes. She could not yet recover from the
+surprise of what had happened: it was impossible to think of anything
+else; and, totally indisposed for employment, she resolved soon after
+breakfast to indulge herself in air and exercise. She was proceeding
+directly to her favourite walk, when the recollection of Mr. Darcy’s
+sometimes coming there stopped her, and instead of entering the park,
+she turned up the lane which led her farther from the turnpike road. The
+park paling was still the boundary on one side, and she soon passed one
+of the gates into the ground.</p>
+
+<p>After walking two or three times along that part of the lane, she was
+tempted, by the pleasantness of the morning, to stop at the gates and
+look into the park. The five weeks which she had now passed in Kent had
+made a great difference in the country, and every day was adding to the
+verdure of the early trees. She was<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_244">{244}</a></span> on the point of continuing her
+walk, when she caught a glimpse of a gentleman within the sort of grove
+which edged the park: he was moving that way; and fearful of its being
+Mr. Darcy, she was directly retreating. But the person who advanced was
+now near enough to see her, and stepping forward with eagerness,
+pronounced her name. She had turned away; but on hearing herself called,
+though in a voice which proved it to be Mr. Darcy, she moved again
+towards the gate. He had by that time reached it also; and, holding out
+a letter, which she instinctively took, said, with a look of haughty
+composure, “I have been walking in the grove some time, in the hope of
+meeting you. Will you do me the honour of reading that letter?” and
+then, with a slight bow, turned again into the plantation, and was soon
+out of sight.</p>
+
+<p>With no expectation of pleasure, but with the strongest curiosity,
+Elizabeth opened the letter, and to her still increasing wonder,
+perceived an envelope containing two sheets of letter paper, written
+quite through, in a very close hand. The envelope itself was likewise
+full. Pursuing her way along the lane, she then began it. It was dated
+from Rosings, at eight o’clock in the morning, and was as follows:—</p>
+
+<p>“Be not alarmed, madam, on receiving this letter, by the apprehension of
+its containing any repetition of those sentiments, or renewal of those
+offers, which were last night so disgusting to you. I write without any
+intention of paining you, or humbling myself, by dwelling on wishes,
+which, for the happiness of both, cannot be too soon forgotten; and the
+effort which the formation and the perusal of this letter must occasion,
+should have been spared, had not my character required it to be written<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_245">{245}</a></span>
+and read. You must, therefore, pardon the freedom with which I demand
+your attention; your feelings, I know, will bestow it unwillingly, but I
+demand it of your justice.</p>
+
+<p>“Two offences of a very different nature, and by no means of equal
+magnitude, you last night laid to my charge. The first mentioned was,
+that, regardless of the sentiments of either, I had detached Mr. Bingley
+from your sister,—and the other, that I had, in defiance of various
+claims, in defiance of honour and humanity, ruined the immediate
+prosperity and blasted the prospects of Mr. Wickham. Wilfully and
+wantonly to have thrown off the companion of my youth, the acknowledged
+favourite of my father, a young man who had scarcely any other
+dependence than on our patronage, and who had been brought up to expect
+its exertion, would be a depravity, to which the separation of two young
+persons whose affection could be the growth of only a few weeks, could
+bear no comparison. But from the severity of that blame which was last
+night so liberally bestowed, respecting each circumstance, I shall hope
+to be in future secured, when the following account of my actions and
+their motives has been read. If, in the explanation of them which is due
+to myself, I am under the necessity of relating feelings which may be
+offensive to yours, I can only say that I am sorry. The necessity must
+be obeyed, and further apology would be absurd. I had not been long in
+Hertfordshire before I saw, in common with others, that Bingley
+preferred your elder sister to any other young woman in the country. But
+it was not till the evening of the dance at Netherfield that I had any
+apprehension of his feeling a serious attachment. I had often seen him
+in love before. At that ball, while I had<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_246">{246}</a></span> the honour of dancing with
+you, I was first made acquainted, by Sir William Lucas’s accidental
+information, that Bingley’s attentions to your sister had given rise to
+a general expectation of their marriage. He spoke of it as a certain
+event, of which the time alone could be undecided. From that moment I
+observed my friend’s behaviour attentively; and I could then perceive
+that his partiality for Miss Bennet was beyond what I had ever witnessed
+in him. Your sister I also watched. Her look and manners were open,
+cheerful, and engaging as ever, but without any symptom of peculiar
+regard; and I remained convinced, from the evening’s scrutiny, that
+though she received his attentions with pleasure, she did not invite
+them by any participation of sentiment. If <i>you</i> have not been mistaken
+here, <i>I</i> must have been in an error. Your superior knowledge of your
+sister must make the latter probable. If it be so, if I have been misled
+by such error to inflict pain on her, your resentment has not been
+unreasonable. But I shall not scruple to assert, that the serenity of
+your sister’s countenance and air was such as might have given the most
+acute observer a conviction that, however amiable her temper, her heart
+was not likely to be easily touched. That I was desirous of believing
+her indifferent is certain; but I will venture to say that my
+investigations and decisions are not usually influenced by my hopes or
+fears. I did not believe her to be indifferent because I wished it; I
+believed it on impartial conviction, as truly as I wished it in reason.
+My objections to the marriage were not merely those which I last night
+acknowledged to have required the utmost force of passion to put aside
+in my own case; the want of connection could not be so great an evil to
+my friend as to me. But there were<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_247">{247}</a></span> other causes of repugnance; causes
+which, though still existing, and existing to an equal degree in both
+instances, I had myself endeavoured to forget, because they were not
+immediately before me. These causes must be stated, though briefly. The
+situation of your mother’s family, though objectionable, was nothing in
+comparison of that total want of propriety so frequently, so almost
+uniformly betrayed by herself, by your three younger sisters, and
+occasionally even by your father:—pardon me,—it pains me to offend
+you. But amidst your concern for the defects of your nearest relations,
+and your displeasure at this representation of them, let it give you
+consolation to consider that to have conducted yourselves so as to avoid
+any share of the like censure is praise no less generally bestowed on
+you and your eldest sister than it is honourable to the sense and
+disposition of both. I will only say, farther, that from what passed
+that evening my opinion of all parties was confirmed, and every
+inducement heightened, which could have led me before to preserve my
+friend from what I esteemed a most unhappy connection. He left
+Netherfield for London on the day following, as you, I am certain,
+remember, with the design of soon returning. The part which I acted is
+now to be explained. His sisters’ uneasiness had been equally excited
+with my own: our coincidence of feeling was soon discovered; and, alike
+sensible that no time was to be lost in detaching their brother, we
+shortly resolved on joining him directly in London. We accordingly
+went—and there I readily engaged in the office of pointing out to my
+friend the certain evils of such a choice. I described and enforced them
+earnestly. But however this remonstrance might have staggered or delayed
+his determination, I do not<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_248">{248}</a></span> suppose that it would ultimately have
+prevented the marriage, had it not been seconded by the assurance, which
+I hesitated not in giving, of your sister’s indifference. He had before
+believed her to return his affection with sincere, if not with equal,
+regard. But Bingley has great natural modesty, with a stronger
+dependence on my judgment than on his own. To convince him, therefore,
+that he had deceived himself was no very difficult point. To persuade
+him against returning into Hertfordshire, when that conviction had been
+given, was scarcely the work of a moment. I cannot blame myself for
+having done thus much. There is but one part of my conduct, in the whole
+affair, on which I do not reflect with satisfaction; it is that I
+condescended to adopt the measures of art so far as to conceal from him
+your sister’s being in town. I knew it myself, as it was known to Miss
+Bingley; but her brother is even yet ignorant of it. That they might
+have met without ill consequence is, perhaps, probable; but his regard
+did not appear to me enough extinguished for him to see her without some
+danger. Perhaps this concealment, this disguise, was beneath me. It is
+done, however, and it was done for the best. On this subject I have
+nothing more to say, no other apology to offer. If I have wounded your
+sister’s feelings, it was unknowingly done; and though the motives which
+governed me may to you very naturally appear insufficient, I have not
+yet learnt to condemn them.—With respect to that other, more weighty
+accusation, of having injured Mr. Wickham, I can only refute it by
+laying before you the whole of his connection with my family. Of what he
+has <i>particularly</i> accused me I am ignorant; but of the truth of what I
+shall relate I can summon more than one witness of undoubted veracity.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_249">{249}</a></span>
+Mr. Wickham is the son of a very respectable man, who had for many years
+the management of all the Pemberley estates, and whose good conduct in
+the discharge of his trust naturally inclined my father to be of service
+to him; and on George Wickham, who was his godson, his kindness was
+therefore liberally bestowed. My father supported him at school, and
+afterwards at Cambridge; most important assistance, as his own father,
+always poor from the extravagance of his wife, would have been unable to
+give him a gentleman’s education. My father was not only fond of this
+young man’s society, whose manners were always engaging, he had also the
+highest opinion of him, and hoping the church would be his profession,
+intended to provide for him in it. As for myself, it is many, many years
+since I first began to think of him in a very different manner. The
+vicious propensities, the want of principle, which he was careful to
+guard from the knowledge of his best friend, could not escape the
+observation of a young man of nearly the same age with himself, and who
+had opportunities of seeing him in unguarded moments, which Mr. Darcy
+could not have. Here again I shall give you pain—to what degree you
+only can tell. But whatever may be the sentiments which Mr. Wickham has
+created, a suspicion of their nature shall not prevent me from unfolding
+his real character. It adds even another motive. My excellent father
+died about five years ago; and his attachment to Mr. Wickham was to the
+last so steady, that in his will he particularly recommended it to me to
+promote his advancement in the best manner that his profession might
+allow, and if he took orders, desired that a valuable family living
+might be his as soon as it became vacant. There was also a legacy of
+one<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_250">{250}</a></span> thousand pounds. His own father did not long survive mine; and
+within half a year from these events Mr. Wickham wrote to inform me
+that, having finally resolved against taking orders, he hoped I should
+not think it unreasonable for him to expect some more immediate
+pecuniary advantage, in lieu of the preferment, by which he could not be
+benefited. He had some intention, he added, of studying the law, and I
+must be aware that the interest of one thousand pounds would be a very
+insufficient support therein. I rather wished than believed him to be
+sincere; but, at any rate, was perfectly ready to accede to his
+proposal. I knew that Mr. Wickham ought not to be a clergyman. The
+business was therefore soon settled. He resigned all claim to assistance
+in the church, were it possible that he could ever be in a situation to
+receive it, and accepted in return three thousand pounds. All connection
+between us seemed now dissolved. I thought too ill of him to invite him
+to Pemberley, or admit his society in town. In town, I believe, he
+chiefly lived, but his studying the law was a mere pretence; and being
+now free from all restraint, his life was a life of idleness and
+dissipation. For about three years I heard little of him; but on the
+decease of the incumbent of the living which had been designed for him,
+he applied to me again by letter for the presentation. His
+circumstances, he assured me, and I had no difficulty in believing it,
+were exceedingly bad. He had found the law a most unprofitable study,
+and was now absolutely resolved on being ordained, if I would present
+him to the living in question—of which he trusted there could be little
+doubt, as he was well assured that I had no other person to provide for,
+and I could not have forgotten my revered father’s intentions. You will
+hardly blame me<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_251">{251}</a></span> for refusing to comply with this entreaty, or for
+resisting every repetition of it. His resentment was in proportion to
+the distress of his circumstances—and he was doubtless as violent in
+his abuse of me to others as in his reproaches to myself. After this
+period, every appearance of acquaintance was dropped. How he lived, I
+know not. But last summer he was again most painfully obtruded on my
+notice. I must now mention a circumstance which I would wish to forget
+myself, and which no obligation less than the present should induce me
+to unfold to any human being. Having said thus much, I feel no doubt of
+your secrecy. My sister, who is more than ten years my junior, was left
+to the guardianship of my mother’s nephew, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and
+myself. About a year ago, she was taken from school, and an
+establishment formed for her in London; and last summer she went with
+the lady who presided over it to Ramsgate; and thither also went Mr.
+Wickham, undoubtedly by design; for there proved to have been a prior
+acquaintance between him and Mrs. Younge, in whose character we were
+most unhappily deceived; and by her connivance and aid he so far
+recommended himself to Georgiana, whose affectionate heart retained a
+strong impression of his kindness to her as a child, that she was
+persuaded to believe herself in love and to consent to an elopement. She
+was then but fifteen, which must be her excuse; and after stating her
+imprudence, I am happy to add, that I owed the knowledge of it to
+herself. I joined them unexpectedly a day or two before the intended
+elopement; and then Georgiana, unable to support the idea of grieving
+and offending a brother whom she almost looked up to as a father,
+acknowledged the whole to me. You may imagine what<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_252">{252}</a></span> I felt and how I
+acted. Regard for my sister’s credit and feelings prevented any public
+exposure; but I wrote to Mr. Wickham, who left the place immediately,
+and Mrs. Younge was of course removed from her charge. Mr. Wickham’s
+chief object was unquestionably my sister’s fortune, which is thirty
+thousand pounds; but I cannot help supposing that the hope of revenging
+himself on me was a strong inducement. His revenge would have been
+complete indeed. This, madam, is a faithful narrative of every event in
+which we have been concerned together; and if you do not absolutely
+reject it as false, you will, I hope, acquit me henceforth of cruelty
+towards Mr. Wickham. I know not in what manner, under what form of
+falsehood, he has imposed on you; but his success is not perhaps to be
+wondered at, ignorant as you previously were of everything concerning
+either. Detection could not be in your power, and suspicion certainly
+not in your inclination. You may possibly wonder why all this was not
+told you last night. But I was not then master enough of myself to know
+what could or ought to be revealed. For the truth of everything here
+related, I can appeal more particularly to the testimony of Colonel
+Fitzwilliam, who, from our near relationship and constant intimacy, and
+still more as one of the executors of my father’s will, has been
+unavoidably acquainted with every particular of these transactions. If
+your abhorrence of <i>me</i> should make <i>my</i> assertions valueless, you
+cannot be prevented by the same cause from confiding in my cousin; and
+that there may be the possibility of consulting him, I shall endeavour
+to find some opportunity of putting this letter in your hands in the
+course of the morning. I will only add, God bless you.</p>
+
+<p class="rt">
+“<span class="smcap">Fitzwilliam Darcy.</span>”<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_253">{253}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXXVI"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_282_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_282_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXXVI.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind">
+<span class="letra">
+<img alt="" src="images/i_282_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_282_b.png"></span>ELIZABETH, when Mr. Darcy gave her the letter, did not expect it to
+contain a renewal of his offers, she had formed no expectation at all of
+its contents. But such as they were, it may be well supposed how eagerly
+she went through them, and what a contrariety of emotion they excited.
+Her feelings as she read were scarcely to be defined. With amazement did
+she first understand that he believed any apology to be in his power;
+and steadfastly was she persuaded, that he could have no explanation to
+give, which a just sense of shame would not conceal. With a strong
+prejudice<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_254">{254}</a></span> against everything he might say, she began his account of
+what had happened at Netherfield. She read with an eagerness which
+hardly left her power of comprehension; and from impatience of knowing
+what the next sentence might bring, was incapable of attending to the
+sense of the one before her eyes. His belief of her sister’s
+insensibility she instantly resolved to be false; and his account of the
+real, the worst objections to the match, made her too angry to have any
+wish of doing him justice. He expressed no regret for what he had done
+which satisfied her; his style was not penitent, but haughty. It was all
+pride and insolence.</p>
+
+<p>But when this subject was succeeded by his account of Mr. Wickham—when
+she read, with somewhat clearer attention, a relation of events which,
+if true, must overthrow every cherished opinion of his worth, and which
+bore so alarming an affinity to his own history of himself—her feelings
+were yet more acutely painful and more difficult of definition.
+Astonishment, apprehension, and even horror, oppressed her. She wished
+to discredit it entirely, repeatedly exclaiming, “This must be false!
+This cannot be! This must be the grossest falsehood!”—and when she had
+gone through the whole letter, though scarcely knowing anything of the
+last page or two, put it hastily away, protesting that she would not
+regard it, that she would never look in it again.</p>
+
+<p>In this perturbed state of mind, with thoughts that could rest on
+nothing, she walked on; but it would not do: in half a minute the letter
+was unfolded again; and collecting herself as well as she could, she
+again began the mortifying perusal of all that related to Wickham, and
+commanded herself so far as to examine the meaning of every sentence.
+The account of his connection with<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_255">{255}</a></span> the Pemberley family was exactly
+what he had related himself; and the kindness of the late Mr. Darcy,
+though she had not before known its extent, agreed equally well with his
+own words. So far each recital confirmed the other; but when she came to
+the will, the difference was great. What Wickham had said of the living
+was fresh in her memory; and as she recalled his very words, it was
+impossible not to feel that there was gross duplicity on one side or the
+other, and, for a few moments, she flattered herself that her wishes did
+not err. But when she read and re-read, with the closest attention, the
+particulars immediately following of Wickham’s resigning all pretensions
+to the living, of his receiving in lieu so considerable a sum as three
+thousand pounds, again was she forced to hesitate. She put down the
+letter, weighed every circumstance with what she meant to be
+impartiality—deliberated on the probability of each statement—but with
+little success. On both sides it was only assertion. Again she read on.
+But every line proved more clearly that the affair, which she had
+believed it impossible that any contrivance could so represent as to
+render Mr. Darcy’s conduct in it less than infamous, was capable of a
+turn which must make him entirely blameless throughout the whole.</p>
+
+<p>The extravagance and general profligacy which he scrupled not to lay to
+Mr. Wickham’s charge exceedingly shocked her; the more so, as she could
+bring no proof of its injustice. She had never heard of him before his
+entrance into the ——shire militia, in which he had engaged at the
+persuasion of the young man, who, on meeting him accidentally in town,
+had there renewed a slight acquaintance. Of his former way of life,
+nothing had been known in Hertfordshire but what he told<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_256">{256}</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption22">
+<img alt="" height="459" src="images/i_285.jpg" width="550" id="img_images_i_285.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption22">
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“Meeting accidentally in Town”</p></div>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">himself. As to his real character, had information been in her power,
+she had never felt a wish of inquiring. His countenance, voice, and
+manner, had established him at once in the possession of every virtue.
+She tried to recollect some instance of goodness, some distinguished
+trait of integrity or benevolence, that might rescue him from the
+attacks of Mr. Darcy; or at least, by the predominance of virtue, atone
+for those casual errors, under which she would endeavour to class what
+Mr. Darcy had described as the idleness and vice of many years’
+continuance. But no such recollection befriended her. She could see him
+instantly before her, in every charm of air and address, but she could
+remember no more substantial good than the general approbation of the
+neighbourhood, and the regard which his social powers had<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_257">{257}</a></span> gained him in
+the mess. After pausing on this point a considerable while, she once
+more continued to read. But, alas! the story which followed, of his
+designs on Miss Darcy, received some confirmation from what had passed
+between Colonel Fitzwilliam and herself only the morning before; and at
+last she was referred for the truth of every particular to Colonel
+Fitzwilliam himself—from whom she had previously received the
+information of his near concern in all his cousin’s affairs and whose
+character she had no reason to question. At one time she had almost
+resolved on applying to him, but the idea was checked by the awkwardness
+of the application, and at length wholly banished by the conviction that
+Mr. Darcy would never have hazarded such a proposal, if he had not been
+well assured of his cousin’s corroboration.</p>
+
+<p>She perfectly remembered everything that had passed in conversation
+between Wickham and herself in their first evening at Mr. Philips’s.
+Many of his expressions were still fresh in her memory. She was <i>now</i>
+struck with the impropriety of such communications to a stranger, and
+wondered it had escaped her before. She saw the indelicacy of putting
+himself forward as he had done, and the inconsistency of his professions
+with his conduct. She remembered that he had boasted of having no fear
+of seeing Mr. Darcy—that Mr. Darcy might leave the country, but that
+<i>he</i> should stand his ground; yet he had avoided the Netherfield ball
+the very next week. She remembered, also, that till the Netherfield
+family had quitted the country, he had told his story to no one but
+herself; but that after their removal, it had been everywhere discussed;
+that he had then no reserves, no scruples in sinking Mr. Darc<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_258">{258}</a></span>y’s
+character, though he had assured her that respect for the father would
+always prevent his exposing the son.</p>
+
+<p>How differently did everything now appear in which he was concerned! His
+attentions to Miss King were now the consequence of views solely and
+hatefully mercenary; and the mediocrity of her fortune proved no longer
+the moderation of his wishes, but his eagerness to grasp at anything.
+His behaviour to herself could now have had no tolerable motive: he had
+either been deceived with regard to her fortune, or had been gratifying
+his vanity by encouraging the preference which she believed she had most
+incautiously shown. Every lingering struggle in his favour grew fainter
+and fainter; and in further justification of Mr. Darcy, she could not
+but allow that Mr. Bingley, when questioned by Jane, had long ago
+asserted his blamelessness in the affair;—that, proud and repulsive as
+were his manners, she had never, in the whole course of their
+acquaintance—an acquaintance which had latterly brought them much
+together, and given her a sort of intimacy with his ways—seen anything
+that betrayed him to be unprincipled or unjust—anything that spoke him
+of irreligious or immoral habits;—that among his own connections he was
+esteemed and valued;—that even Wickham had allowed him merit as a
+brother, and that she had often heard him speak so affectionately of his
+sister as to prove him capable of some amiable feeling;—that had his
+actions been what Wickham represented them, so gross a violation of
+everything right could hardly have been concealed from the world; and
+that friendship between a person capable of it and such an amiable man
+as Mr. Bingley was incomprehensible.</p>
+
+<p>She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. Of neither<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_259">{259}</a></span> Darcy nor Wickham
+could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial,
+prejudiced, absurd.</p>
+
+<p>“How despicably have I acted!” she cried. “I, who have prided myself on
+my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have
+often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my
+vanity in useless or blameless distrust. How humiliating is this
+discovery! Yet, how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could not
+have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my
+folly. Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect
+of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted
+prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away where either were
+concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.”</p>
+
+<p>From herself to Jane, from Jane to Bingley, her thoughts were in a line
+which soon brought to her recollection that Mr. Darcy’s explanation
+<i>there</i> had appeared very insufficient; and she read it again. Widely
+different was the effect of a second perusal. How could she deny that
+credit to his assertions, in one instance, which she had been obliged to
+give in the other? He declared himself to have been totally unsuspicious
+of her sister’s attachment; and she could not help remembering what
+Charlotte’s opinion had always been. Neither could she deny the justice
+of his description of Jane. She felt that Jane’s feelings, though
+fervent, were little displayed, and that there was a constant
+complacency in her air and manner, not often united with great
+sensibility.</p>
+
+<p>When she came to that part of the letter in which her family were
+mentioned, in tones of such mortifying, yet merited, reproach, her sense
+of shame was severe. The<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_260">{260}</a></span> justice of the charge struck her too forcibly
+for denial; and the circumstances to which he particularly alluded, as
+having passed at the Netherfield ball, and as confirming all his first
+disapprobation, could not have made a stronger impression on his mind
+than on hers.</p>
+
+<p>The compliment to herself and her sister was not unfelt. It soothed, but
+it could not console her for the contempt which had been thus
+self-attracted by the rest of her family; and as she considered that
+Jane’s disappointment had, in fact, been the work of her nearest
+relations, and reflected how materially the credit of both must be hurt
+by such impropriety of conduct, she felt depressed beyond anything she
+had ever known before.</p>
+
+<p>After wandering along the lane for two hours, giving way to every
+variety of thought, reconsidering events, determining probabilities, and
+reconciling herself, as well as she could, to a change so sudden and so
+important, fatigue, and a recollection of her long absence, made her at
+length return home; and she entered the house with the wish of appearing
+cheerful as usual, and the resolution of repressing such reflections as
+must make her unfit for conversation.</p>
+
+<p>She was immediately told, that the two gentlemen from Rosings had each
+called during her absence; Mr. Darcy, only for a few minutes, to take
+leave, but that Colonel Fitzwilliam had been sitting with them at least
+an hour, hoping for her return, and almost resolving to walk after her
+till she could be found. Elizabeth could but just <i>affect</i> concern in
+missing him; she really rejoiced at it. Colonel Fitzwilliam was no
+longer an object. She could think only of her letter.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_261">{261}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XXXVII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_290_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_290_a.jpg"><br>
+<span class="caption">
+“His parting obeisance.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXXVII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="T" src="images/i_290_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_290_b.png"></span>HE two gentlemen left Rosings the next morning; and Mr. Collins having
+been in waiting near the lodges, to make them his parting obeisance, was
+able to bring home the pleasing intelligence of their appearing in very
+good health, and in as tolerable spirits as could be expected, after the
+melancholy scene so lately gone through at Rosings. To Rosings he then
+hastened to console Lady Catherine and her daughter; and on his return
+brought back, with great satisfaction, a message from her Ladyship,
+importing that she felt herself so dull as to make her very desirous of
+having them all to dine with her.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_262">{262}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth could not see Lady Catherine without recollecting that, had
+she chosen it, she might by this time have been presented to her as her
+future niece; nor could she think, without a smile, of what her
+Ladyship’s indignation would have been. “What would she have said? how
+would she have behaved?” were the questions with which she amused
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>Their first subject was the diminution of the Rosings’ party. “I assure
+you, I feel it exceedingly,” said Lady Catherine; “I believe nobody
+feels the loss of friends so much as I do. But I am particularly
+attached to these young men; and know them to be so much attached to me!
+They were excessively sorry to go! But so they always are. The dear
+Colonel rallied his spirits tolerably till just at last; but Darcy
+seemed to feel it most acutely—more, I think, than last year. His
+attachment to Rosings certainly increases.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Collins had a compliment and an allusion to throw in here, which
+were kindly smiled on by the mother and daughter.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Catherine observed, after dinner, that Miss Bennet seemed out of
+spirits; and immediately accounting for it herself, by supposing that
+she did not like to go home again so soon, she added,—</p>
+
+<p>“But if that is the case, you must write to your mother to beg that you
+may stay a little longer. Mrs. Collins will be very glad of your
+company, I am sure.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am much obliged to your Ladyship for your kind invitation,” replied
+Elizabeth; “but it is not in my power to accept it. I must be in town
+next Saturday.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, at that rate, you will have been here only six weeks. I expected
+you to stay two months. I told Mrs. Collins so before you came. There
+can be no occasion for<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_263">{263}</a></span> your going so soon. Mrs. Bennet could certainly
+spare you for another fortnight.”</p>
+
+<p>“But my father cannot. He wrote last week to hurry my return.”</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 395px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption23">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_292.jpg" width="395" id="img_images_i_292.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption23">
+
+<p>
+“Dawson”<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Oh, your father, of course, may spare you, if your mother can.
+Daughters are never of so much consequence to a father. And if you will
+stay another <i>month</i> complete, it will be in my power to take one of you
+as far as London, for I am going there early in June,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_264">{264}</a></span> for a week; and
+as Dawson does not object to the barouche-box, there will be very good
+room for one of you—and, indeed, if the weather should happen to be
+cool, I should not object to taking you both, as you are neither of you
+large.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are all kindness, madam; but I believe we must abide by our
+original plan.”</p>
+
+<p>Lady Catherine seemed resigned. “Mrs. Collins, you must send a servant
+with them. You know I always speak my mind, and I cannot bear the idea
+of two young women travelling post by themselves. It is highly improper.
+You must contrive to send somebody. I have the greatest dislike in the
+world to that sort of thing. Young women should always be properly
+guarded and attended, according to their situation in life. When my
+niece Georgiana went to Ramsgate last summer, I made a point of her
+having two men-servants go with her. Miss Darcy, the daughter of Mr.
+Darcy of Pemberley, and Lady Anne, could not have appeared with
+propriety in a different manner. I am excessively attentive to all those
+things. You must send John with the young ladies, Mrs. Collins. I am
+glad it occurred to me to mention it; for it would really be
+discreditable to <i>you</i> to let them go alone.”</p>
+
+<p>“My uncle is to send a servant for us.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Your uncle! He keeps a man-servant, does he? I am very glad you
+have somebody who thinks of those things. Where shall you change horses?
+Oh, Bromley, of course. If you mention my name at the Bell, you will be
+attended to.”</p>
+
+<p>Lady Catherine had many other questions to ask respecting their journey;
+and as she did not answer them all herself attention was
+necessary—which Elizabeth<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_265">{265}</a></span> believed to be lucky for her; or, with a
+mind so occupied, she might have forgotten where she was. Reflection
+must be reserved for solitary hours: whenever she was alone, she gave
+way to it as the greatest relief; and not a day went by without a
+solitary walk, in which she might indulge in all the delight of
+unpleasant recollections.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Darcy’s letter she was in a fair way of soon knowing by heart. She
+studied every sentence; and her feelings towards its writer were at
+times widely different. When she remembered the style of his address,
+she was still full of indignation: but when she considered how unjustly
+she had condemned and upbraided him, her anger was turned against
+herself; and his disappointed feelings became the object of compassion.
+His attachment excited gratitude, his general character respect: but she
+could not approve him; nor could she for a moment repent her refusal, or
+feel the slightest inclination ever to see him again. In her own past
+behaviour, there was a constant source of vexation and regret: and in
+the unhappy defects of her family, a subject of yet heavier chagrin.
+They were hopeless of remedy. Her father, contented with laughing at
+them, would never exert himself to restrain the wild giddiness of his
+youngest daughters; and her mother, with manners so far from right
+herself, was entirely insensible of the evil. Elizabeth had frequently
+united with Jane in an endeavour to check the imprudence of Catherine
+and Lydia; but while they were supported by their mother’s indulgence,
+what chance could there be of improvement? Catherine, weak-spirited,
+irritable, and completely under Lydia’s guidance, had been always
+affronted by their advice; and Lydia, self-willed and careless, would
+scarcely give them a hearing. They were ignorant, idle, and vain.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_266">{266}</a></span> While
+there was an officer in Meryton, they would flirt with him; and while
+Meryton was within a walk of Longbourn, they would be going there for
+ever.</p>
+
+<p>Anxiety on Jane’s behalf was another prevailing concern; and Mr. Darcy’s
+explanation, by restoring Bingley to all her former good opinion,
+heightened the sense of what Jane had lost. His affection was proved to
+have been sincere, and his conduct cleared of all blame, unless any
+could attach to the implicitness of his confidence in his friend. How
+grievous then was the thought that, of a situation so desirable in every
+respect, so replete with advantage, so promising for happiness, Jane had
+been deprived, by the folly and indecorum of her own family!</p>
+
+<p>When to these recollections was added the development of Wickham’s
+character, it may be easily believed that the happy spirits which had
+seldom been depressed before were now so much affected as to make it
+almost impossible for her to appear tolerably cheerful.</p>
+
+<p>Their engagements at Rosings were as frequent during the last week of
+her stay as they had been at first. The very last evening was spent
+there; and her Ladyship again inquired minutely into the particulars of
+their journey, gave them directions as to the best method of packing,
+and was so urgent on the necessity of placing gowns in the only right
+way, that Maria thought herself obliged, on her return, to undo all the
+work of the morning, and pack her trunk afresh.</p>
+
+<p>When they parted, Lady Catherine, with great condescension, wished them
+a good journey, and invited them to come to Hunsford again next year;
+and Miss de Bourgh exerted herself so far as to courtesy and hold out
+her hand to both.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_267">{267}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XXXVIII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_296_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_296_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“The elevation of his feelings.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXXVIII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="O" src="images/i_296_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_296_b.png"></span>N Saturday morning Elizabeth and Mr. Collins met for breakfast a few
+minutes before the others appeared; and he took the opportunity of
+paying the parting civilities which he deemed indispensably necessary.</p>
+
+<p>“I know not, Miss Elizabeth,” said he, “whether Mrs. Collins has yet
+expressed her sense of your kindness in coming to us; but I am very
+certain you will not leave the house without receiving her thanks for
+it. The favour of your company has been much felt, I assure you. We know
+how little there is to tempt anyone to our humble abode. Our plain
+manner of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_268">{268}</a></span> living, our small rooms, and few domestics, and the little we
+see of the world, must make Hunsford extremely dull to a young lady like
+yourself; but I hope you will believe us grateful for the condescension,
+and that we have done everything in our power to prevent you spending
+your time unpleasantly.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was eager with her thanks and assurances of happiness. She had
+spent six weeks with great enjoyment; and the pleasure of being with
+Charlotte, and the kind attention she had received, must make <i>her</i> feel
+the obliged. Mr. Collins was gratified; and with a more smiling
+solemnity replied,—</p>
+
+<p>“It gives me the greatest pleasure to hear that you have passed your
+time not disagreeably. We have certainly done our best; and most
+fortunately having it in our power to introduce you to very superior
+society, and from our connection with Rosings, the frequent means of
+varying the humble home scene, I think we may flatter ourselves that
+your Hunsford visit cannot have been entirely irksome. Our situation
+with regard to Lady Catherine’s family is, indeed, the sort of
+extraordinary advantage and blessing which few can boast. You see on
+what a footing we are. You see how continually we are engaged there. In
+truth, I must acknowledge, that, with all the disadvantages of this
+humble parsonage, I should not think anyone abiding in it an object of
+compassion, while they are sharers of our intimacy at Rosings.”</p>
+
+<p>Words were insufficient for the elevation of his feelings; and he was
+obliged to walk about the room, while Elizabeth tried to unite civility
+and truth in a few short sentences.</p>
+
+<p>“You may, in fact, carry a very favourable report of us<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_269">{269}</a></span> into
+Hertfordshire, my dear cousin. I flatter myself, at least, that you will
+be able to do so. Lady Catherine’s great attentions to Mrs. Collins you
+have been a daily witness of; and altogether I trust it does not appear
+that your friend has drawn an unfortunate—but on this point it will be
+as well to be silent. Only let me assure you, my dear Miss Elizabeth,
+that I can from my heart most cordially wish you equal felicity in
+marriage. My dear Charlotte and I have but one mind and one way of
+thinking. There is in everything a most remarkable resemblance of
+character and ideas between us. We seem to have been designed for each
+other.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth could safely say that it was a great happiness where that was
+the case, and with equal sincerity could add, that she firmly believed
+and rejoiced in his domestic comforts. She was not sorry, however, to
+have the recital of them interrupted by the entrance of the lady from
+whom they sprang. Poor Charlotte! it was melancholy to leave her to such
+society! But she had chosen it with her eyes open; and though evidently
+regretting that her visitors were to go, she did not seem to ask for
+compassion. Her home and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry,
+and all their dependent concerns, had not yet lost their charms.</p>
+
+<p>At length the chaise arrived, the trunks were fastened on, the parcels
+placed within, and it was pronounced to be ready. After an affectionate
+parting between the friends, Elizabeth was attended to the carriage by
+Mr. Collins; and as they walked down the garden, he was commissioning
+her with his best respects to all her family, not forgetting his thanks
+for the kindness he had received at Longbourn in the winter, and his
+compliments to Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, though unknown. He then handed<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_270">{270}</a></span>
+her in, Maria followed, and the door was on the point of being closed,
+when he suddenly reminded them, with some consternation, that they had
+hitherto forgotten to leave any message for the ladies of Rosings.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption24">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_299.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_299.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption24">
+
+<p>
+“They had forgotten to leave any message”<br>
+</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“But,” he added, “you will of course wish to have your humble respects
+delivered to them, with your grateful thanks for their kindness to you
+while you have been here.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth made no objection: the door was then allowed to be shut, and
+the carriage drove off.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_271">{271}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“Good gracious!” cried Maria, after a few minutes’ silence, “it seems
+but a day or two since we first came! and yet how many things have
+happened!”</p>
+
+<p>“A great many indeed,” said her companion, with a sigh.</p>
+
+<p>“We have dined nine times at Rosings, besides drinking tea there twice!
+How much I shall have to tell!”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth privately added, “And how much I shall have to conceal!”</p>
+
+<p>Their journey was performed without much conversation, or any alarm; and
+within four hours of their leaving Hunsford they reached Mr. Gardiner’s
+house, where they were to remain a few days.</p>
+
+<p>Jane looked well, and Elizabeth had little opportunity of studying her
+spirits, amidst the various engagements which the kindness of her aunt
+had reserved for them. But Jane was to go home with her, and at
+Longbourn there would be leisure enough for observation.</p>
+
+<p>It was not without an effort, meanwhile, that she could wait even for
+Longbourn, before she told her sister of Mr. Darcy’s proposals. To know
+that she had the power of revealing what would so exceedingly astonish
+Jane, and must, at the same time, so highly gratify whatever of her own
+vanity she had not yet been able to reason away, was such a temptation
+to openness as nothing could have conquered, but the state of indecision
+in which she remained as to the extent of what she should communicate,
+and her fear, if she once entered on the subject, of being hurried into
+repeating something of Bingley, which might only grieve her sister
+further.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_272">{272}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XXXIX"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_301_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_301_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“How nicely we are crammed  in.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XXXIX.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="I" src="images/i_301_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_301_b.png"></span>T was the second week in May, in which the three young ladies set out
+together from Gracechurch Street for the town of ——, in Hertfordshire;
+and, as they drew near the appointed inn where Mr. Bennet’s carriage was
+to meet them, they quickly perceived, in token of the coachman’s
+punctuality, both Kitty and Lydia looking out of a dining-room upstairs.
+These two girls had been above an hour in the place, happily employed
+in<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_273">{273}</a></span> visiting an opposite milliner, watching the sentinel on guard, and
+dressing a salad and cucumber.</p>
+
+<p>After welcoming their sisters, they triumphantly displayed a table set
+out with such cold meat as an inn larder usually affords, exclaiming,
+“Is not this nice? is not this an agreeable surprise?”</p>
+
+<p>“And we mean to treat you all,” added Lydia; “but you must lend us the
+money, for we have just spent ours at the shop out there.” Then showing
+her purchases,—“Look here, I have bought this bonnet. I do not think it
+is very pretty; but I thought I might as well buy it as not. I shall
+pull it to pieces as soon as I get home, and see if I can make it up any
+better.”</p>
+
+<p>And when her sisters abused it as ugly, she added, with perfect
+unconcern, “Oh, but there were two or three much uglier in the shop; and
+when I have bought some prettier-coloured satin to trim it with fresh, I
+think it will be very tolerable. Besides, it will not much signify what
+one wears this summer, after the ——shire have left Meryton, and they
+are going in a fortnight.”</p>
+
+<p>“Are they, indeed?” cried Elizabeth, with the greatest satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>“They are going to be encamped near Brighton; and I do so want papa to
+take us all there for the summer! It would be such a delicious scheme,
+and I dare say would hardly cost anything at all. Mamma would like to
+go, too, of all things! Only think what a miserable summer else we shall
+have!”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” thought Elizabeth; “<i>that</i> would be a delightful scheme, indeed,
+and completely do for us at once. Good Heaven! Brighton and a whole
+campful of soldiers, to us, who have been overset already by one poor
+regiment of militia, and the monthly balls of Meryton!<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_274">{274}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“Now I have got some news for you,” said Lydia, as they sat down to
+table. “What do you think? It is excellent news, capital news, and about
+a certain person that we all like.”</p>
+
+<p>Jane and Elizabeth looked at each other, and the waiter was told that he
+need not stay. Lydia laughed, and said,—</p>
+
+<p>“Ay, that is just like your formality and discretion. You thought the
+waiter must not hear, as if he cared! I dare say he often hears worse
+things said than I am going to say. But he is an ugly fellow! I am glad
+he is gone. I never saw such a long chin in my life. Well, but now for
+my news: it is about dear Wickham; too good for the waiter, is not it?
+There is no danger of Wickham’s marrying Mary King—there’s for you! She
+is gone down to her uncle at Liverpool; gone to stay. Wickham is safe.”</p>
+
+<p>“And Mary King is safe!” added Elizabeth; “safe from a connection
+imprudent as to fortune.”</p>
+
+<p>“She is a great fool for going away, if she liked him.”</p>
+
+<p>“But I hope there is no strong attachment on either side,” said Jane.</p>
+
+<p>“I am sure there is not on <i>his</i>. I will answer for it, he never cared
+three straws about her. Who <i>could</i> about such a nasty little freckled
+thing?”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was shocked to think that, however incapable of such
+coarseness of <i>expression</i> herself, the coarseness of the <i>sentiment</i>
+was little other than her own breast had formerly harboured and fancied
+liberal!</p>
+
+<p>As soon as all had ate, and the elder ones paid, the carriage was
+ordered; and, after some contrivance, the whole party, with all their
+boxes, workbags, and parcels, and the unwelcome addition of Kitty’s and
+Lydia’s purchases, were seated in it.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_275">{275}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“How nicely we are crammed in!” cried Lydia. “I am glad I brought my
+bonnet, if it is only for the fun of having another band-box! Well, now
+let us be quite comfortable and snug, and talk and laugh all the way
+home. And in the first place, let us hear what has happened to you all
+since you went away. Have you seen any pleasant men? Have you had any
+flirting? I was in great hopes that one of you would have got a husband
+before you came back. Jane will be quite an old maid soon, I declare.
+She is almost three-and-twenty! Lord! how ashamed I should be of not
+being married before three-and-twenty! My aunt Philips wants you so to
+get husbands you can’t think. She says Lizzy had better have taken Mr.
+Collins; but <i>I</i> do not think there would have been any fun in it. Lord!
+how I should like to be married before any of you! and then I would
+<i>chaperon</i> you about to all the balls. Dear me! we had such a good piece
+of fun the other day at Colonel Forster’s! Kitty and me were to spend
+the day there, and Mrs. Forster promised to have a little dance in the
+evening; (by-the-bye, Mrs. Forster and me are <i>such</i> friends!) and so
+she asked the two Harringtons to come: but Harriet was ill, and so Pen
+was forced to come by herself; and then, what do you think we did? We
+dressed up Chamberlayne in woman’s clothes, on purpose to pass for a
+lady,—only think what fun! Not a soul knew of it, but Colonel and Mrs.
+Forster, and Kitty and me, except my aunt, for we were forced to borrow
+one of her gowns; and you cannot imagine how well he looked! When Denny,
+and Wickham, and Pratt, and two or three more of the men came in, they
+did not know him in the least. Lord! how I laughed! and so did Mrs.
+Forster. I thought I should have died. And <i>that</i> made the men<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_276">{276}</a></span> suspect
+something, and then they soon found out what was the matter.”</p>
+
+<p>With such kind of histories of their parties and good jokes did Lydia,
+assisted by Kitty’s hints and additions, endeavour to amuse her
+companions all the way to Longbourn. Elizabeth listened as little as she
+could, but there was no escaping the frequent mention of Wickham’s name.</p>
+
+<p>Their reception at home was most kind. Mrs. Bennet rejoiced to see Jane
+in undiminished beauty; and more than once during dinner did Mr. Bennet
+say voluntarily to Elizabeth,——</p>
+
+<p>“I am glad you are come back, Lizzy.”</p>
+
+<p>Their party in the dining-room was large, for almost all the Lucases
+came to meet Maria and hear the news; and various were the subjects
+which occupied them: Lady Lucas was inquiring of Maria, across the
+table, after the welfare and poultry of her eldest daughter; Mrs. Bennet
+was doubly engaged, on one hand collecting an account of the present
+fashions from Jane, who sat some way below her, and on the other,
+retailing them all to the younger Miss Lucases; and Lydia, in a voice
+rather louder than any other person’s, was enumerating the various
+pleasures of the morning to anybody who would hear her.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Mary,” said she, “I wish you had gone with us, for we had such fun!
+as we went along Kitty and me drew up all the blinds, and pretended
+there was nobody in the coach; and I should have gone so all the way, if
+Kitty had not been sick; and when we got to the George, I do think we
+behaved very handsomely, for we treated the other three with the nicest
+cold luncheon in the world, and if you would have gone, we would have
+treated you<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_277">{277}</a></span> too. And then when we came away it was such fun! I thought
+we never should have got into the coach. I was ready to die of laughter.
+And then we were so merry all the way home! we talked and laughed so
+loud, that anybody might have heard us ten miles off!”</p>
+
+<p>To this, Mary very gravely replied, “Far be it from me, my dear sister,
+to depreciate such pleasures. They would doubtless be congenial with the
+generality of female minds. But I confess they would have no charms for
+<i>me</i>. I should infinitely prefer a book.”</p>
+
+<p>But of this answer Lydia heard not a word. She seldom listened to
+anybody for more than half a minute, and never attended to Mary at all.</p>
+
+<p>In the afternoon Lydia was urgent with the rest of the girls to walk to
+Meryton, and see how everybody went on; but Elizabeth steadily opposed
+the scheme. It should not be said, that the Miss Bennets could not be at
+home half a day before they were in pursuit of the officers. There was
+another reason, too, for her opposition. She dreaded seeing Wickham
+again, and was resolved to avoid it as long as possible. The comfort to
+<i>her</i>, of the regiment’s approaching removal, was indeed beyond
+expression. In a fortnight they were to go, and once gone, she hoped
+there could be nothing more to plague her on his account.</p>
+
+<p>She had not been many hours at home, before she found that the Brighton
+scheme, of which Lydia had given them a hint at the inn, was under
+frequent discussion between her parents. Elizabeth saw directly that her
+father had not the smallest intention of yielding; but his answers were
+at the same time so vague and equivocal, that her mother, though often
+disheartened, had never yet despaired of succeeding at last.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_278">{278}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XL"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_307_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_307_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XL.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="E" src="images/i_307_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_307_b.png"></span>LIZABETH’S impatience to acquaint Jane with what had happened could no
+longer be overcome; and at length resolving to suppress every particular
+in which her sister was concerned, and preparing her to be surprised,
+she related to her the next morning the chief of the scene between Mr.
+Darcy and herself.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bennet’s astonishment was soon lessened by the strong sisterly
+partiality which made any admiration of Elizabeth appear perfectly
+natural; and all surprise was shortly lost in other feelings. She was
+sorry that Mr. Darcy should have delivered his sentiments in a manner so
+little suited to recommend them; but still more was she grieved for the
+unhappiness which her sister’s refusal must have given him.</p>
+
+<p>“His being so sure of succeeding was wrong,” said she, “and certainly
+ought not to have appeared; but consider how much it must increase his
+disappointment.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_279">{279}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed,” replied Elizabeth, “I am heartily sorry for him; but he has
+other feelings which will probably soon drive away his regard for me.
+You do not blame me, however, for refusing him?”</p>
+
+<p>“Blame you! Oh, no.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you blame me for having spoken so warmly of Wickham?”</p>
+
+<p>“No—I do not know that you were wrong in saying what you did.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you <i>will</i> know it, when I have told you what happened the very
+next day.”</p>
+
+<p>She then spoke of the letter, repeating the whole of its contents as far
+as they concerned George Wickham. What a stroke was this for poor Jane,
+who would willingly have gone through the world without believing that
+so much wickedness existed in the whole race of mankind as was here
+collected in one individual! Nor was Darcy’s vindication, though
+grateful to her feelings, capable of consoling her for such discovery.
+Most earnestly did she labour to prove the probability of error, and
+seek to clear one, without involving the other.</p>
+
+<p>“This will not do,” said Elizabeth; “you never will be able to make both
+of them good for anything. Take your choice, but you must be satisfied
+with only one. There is but such a quantity of merit between them; just
+enough to make one good sort of man; and of late it has been shifting
+about pretty much. For my part, I am inclined to believe it all Mr.
+Darcy’s, but you shall do as you choose.”</p>
+
+<p>It was some time, however, before a smile could be extorted from Jane.</p>
+
+<p>“I do not know when I have been more shocked,” said she. “Wickham so
+very bad! It is almost past belief.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_280">{280}</a></span> And poor Mr. Darcy! dear Lizzy,
+only consider what he must have suffered. Such a disappointment! and
+with the knowledge of your ill opinion too! and having to relate such a
+thing of his sister! It is really too distressing, I am sure you must
+feel it so.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh no, my regret and compassion are all done away by seeing you so full
+of both. I know you will do him such ample justice, that I am growing
+every moment more unconcerned and indifferent. Your profusion makes me
+saving; and if you lament over him much longer, my heart will be as
+light as a feather.”</p>
+
+<p>“Poor Wickham! there is such an expression of goodness in his
+countenance! such an openness and gentleness in his manner.”</p>
+
+<p>“There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those
+two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the
+appearance of it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I never thought Mr. Darcy so deficient in the <i>appearance</i> of it as you
+used to do.”</p>
+
+<p>“And yet I meant to be uncommonly clever in taking so decided a dislike
+to him, without any reason. It is such a spur to one’s genius, such an
+opening for wit, to have a dislike of that kind. One may be continually
+abusive without saying anything just; but one cannot be always laughing
+at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.”</p>
+
+<p>“Lizzy, when you first read that letter, I am sure you could not treat
+the matter as you do now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed, I could not. I was uncomfortable enough, I was very
+uncomfortable—I may say unhappy. And with no one to speak to of what I
+felt, no Jane to comfort me, and say that I had not been so very weak,
+and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_281">{281}</a></span> vain, and nonsensical, as I knew I had! Oh, how I wanted you!”</p>
+
+<p>“How unfortunate that you should have used such very strong expressions
+in speaking of Wickham to Mr. Darcy, for now they <i>do</i> appear wholly
+undeserved.”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly. But the misfortune of speaking with bitterness is a most
+natural consequence of the prejudices I had been encouraging. There is
+one point on which I want your advice. I want to be told whether I
+ought, or ought not, to make our acquaintance in general understand
+Wickham’s character.”</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bennet paused a little, and then replied, “Surely there can be no
+occasion for exposing him so dreadfully. What is your own opinion?”</p>
+
+<p>“That it ought not to be attempted. Mr. Darcy has not authorized me to
+make his communication public. On the contrary, every particular
+relative to his sister was meant to be kept as much as possible to
+myself; and if I endeavour to undeceive people as to the rest of his
+conduct, who will believe me? The general prejudice against Mr. Darcy is
+so violent, that it would be the death of half the good people in
+Meryton, to attempt to place him in an amiable light. I am not equal to
+it. Wickham will soon be gone; and, therefore, it will not signify to
+anybody here what he really is. Some time hence it will be all found
+out, and then we may laugh at their stupidity in not knowing it before.
+At present I will say nothing about it.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are quite right. To have his errors made public might ruin him for
+ever. He is now, perhaps, sorry for what he has done, and anxious to
+re-establish a character. We must not make him desperate.”</p>
+
+<p>The tumult of Elizabeth’s mind was allayed by this<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_282">{282}</a></span> conversation. She
+had got rid of two of the secrets which had weighed on her for a
+fortnight, and was certain of a willing listener in Jane, whenever she
+might wish to talk again of either. But there was still something
+lurking behind, of which prudence forbade the disclosure. She dared not
+relate the other half of Mr. Darcy’s letter, nor explain to her sister
+how sincerely she had been valued by his friend. Here was knowledge in
+which no one could partake; and she was sensible that nothing less than
+a perfect understanding between the parties could justify her in
+throwing off this last encumbrance of mystery. “And then,” said she, “if
+that very improbable event should ever take place, I shall merely be
+able to tell what Bingley may tell in a much more agreeable manner
+himself. The liberty of communication cannot be mine till it has lost
+all its value!”</p>
+
+<p>She was now, on being settled at home, at leisure to observe the real
+state of her sister’s spirits. Jane was not happy. She still cherished a
+very tender affection for Bingley. Having never even fancied herself in
+love before, her regard had all the warmth of first attachment, and from
+her age and disposition, greater steadiness than first attachments often
+boast; and so fervently did she value his remembrance, and prefer him to
+every other man, that all her good sense, and all her attention to the
+feelings of her friends, were requisite to check the indulgence of those
+regrets which must have been injurious to her own health and their
+tranquillity.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Lizzy,” said Mrs. Bennet, one day, “what is your opinion <i>now</i> of
+this sad business of Jane’s? For my part, I am determined never to speak
+of it again to anybody. I told my sister Philips so the other day. But I
+cannot find out that Jane saw anything of him in<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_283">{283}</a></span> London. Well, he is a
+very undeserving young man—and I do not suppose there is the least
+chance in the world of her ever getting him now. There is no talk of his
+coming to Netherfield again in the summer; and I have inquired of
+everybody, too, who is likely to know.”</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 351px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption25">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_312.jpg" width="351" id="img_images_i_312.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption25">
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“I am determined never to speak of it again”</p></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_284">{284}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“I do not believe that he will ever live at Netherfield any more.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, well! it is just as he chooses. Nobody wants him to come; though I
+shall always say that he used my daughter extremely ill; and, if I was
+her, I would not have put up with it. Well, my comfort is, I am sure
+Jane will die of a broken heart, and then he will be sorry for what he
+has done.”</p>
+
+<p>But as Elizabeth could not receive comfort from any such expectation she
+made no answer.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Lizzy,” continued her mother, soon afterwards, “and so the
+Collinses live very comfortable, do they? Well, well, I only hope it
+will last. And what sort of table do they keep? Charlotte is an
+excellent manager, I dare say. If she is half as sharp as her mother,
+she is saving enough. There is nothing extravagant in <i>their</i>
+housekeeping, I dare say.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, nothing at all.”</p>
+
+<p>“A great deal of good management, depend upon it. Yes, yes. <i>They</i> will
+take care not to outrun their income. <i>They</i> will never be distressed
+for money. Well, much good may it do them! And so, I suppose, they often
+talk of having Longbourn when your father is dead. They look upon it
+quite as their own, I dare say, whenever that happens.”</p>
+
+<p>“It was a subject which they could not mention before me.”</p>
+
+<p>“No; it would have been strange if they had. But I make no doubt they
+often talk of it between themselves. Well, if they can be easy with an
+estate that is not lawfully their own, so much the better. <i>I</i> should be
+ashamed of having one that was only entailed on me.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_285">{285}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XLI"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_314_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_314_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“When Colonel Miller’s regiment went away.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XLI.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="T" src="images/i_314_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_314_b.png"></span>HE first week of their return was soon gone. The second began. It was
+the last of the regiment’s stay in Meryton, and all the young ladies in
+the neighbourhood were drooping apace. The dejection was almost
+universal. The elder Miss Bennets alone were still able to eat, drink,
+and sleep, and pursue the usual course of their employments. Very
+frequently were they reproached for this insensibility by Kitty and
+Lydia,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_286">{286}</a></span> whose own misery was extreme, and who could not comprehend such
+hard-heartedness in any of the family.</p>
+
+<p>“Good Heaven! What is to become of us? What are we to do?” would they
+often exclaim in the bitterness of woe. “How can you be smiling so,
+Lizzy?”</p>
+
+<p>Their affectionate mother shared all their grief; she remembered what
+she had herself endured on a similar occasion five-and-twenty years ago.</p>
+
+<p>“I am sure,” said she, “I cried for two days together when Colonel
+Miller’s regiment went away. I thought I should have broke my heart.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am sure I shall break <i>mine</i>,” said Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>“If one could but go to Brighton!” observed Mrs. Bennet.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh yes!—if one could but go to Brighton! But papa is so disagreeable.”</p>
+
+<p>“A little sea-bathing would set me up for ever.”</p>
+
+<p>“And my aunt Philips is sure it would do <i>me</i> a great deal of good,”
+added Kitty.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the kind of lamentations resounding perpetually through
+Longbourn House. Elizabeth tried to be diverted by them; but all sense
+of pleasure was lost in shame. She felt anew the justice of Mr. Darcy’s
+objections; and never had she before been so much disposed to pardon his
+interference in the views of his friend.</p>
+
+<p>But the gloom of Lydia’s prospect was shortly cleared away; for she
+received an invitation from Mrs. Forster, the wife of the colonel of the
+regiment, to accompany her to Brighton. This invaluable friend was a
+very young woman, and very lately married. A resemblance in good-humour
+and good spirits had recommended her and Lydia to each other, and out of
+their <i>three</i> months’ acquaintance they had been intimate <i>two</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_287">{287}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The rapture of Lydia on this occasion, her adoration of Mrs. Forster,
+the delight of Mrs. Bennet, and the mortification of Kitty, are scarcely
+to be described. Wholly inattentive to her sister’s feelings, Lydia flew
+about the house in restless ecstasy, calling for everyone’s
+congratulations, and laughing and talking with more violence than ever;
+whilst the luckless Kitty continued in the parlour repining at her fate
+in terms as unreasonable as her accent was peevish.</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot see why Mrs. Forster should not ask <i>me</i> as well as Lydia,”
+said she, “though I am <i>not</i> her particular friend. I have just as much
+right to be asked as she has, and more too, for I am two years older.”</p>
+
+<p>In vain did Elizabeth attempt to make her reasonable, and Jane to make
+her resigned. As for Elizabeth herself, this invitation was so far from
+exciting in her the same feelings as in her mother and Lydia, that she
+considered it as the death-warrant of all possibility of common sense
+for the latter; and detestable as such a step must make her, were it
+known, she could not help secretly advising her father not to let her
+go. She represented to him all the improprieties of Lydia’s general
+behaviour, the little advantage she could derive from the friendship of
+such a woman as Mrs. Forster, and the probability of her being yet more
+imprudent with such a companion at Brighton, where the temptations must
+be greater than at home. He heard her attentively, and then said,—</p>
+
+<p>“Lydia will never be easy till she has exposed herself in some public
+place or other, and we can never expect her to do it with so little
+expense or inconvenience to her family as under the present
+circumstances.”</p>
+
+<p>“If you were aware,” said Elizabeth, “of the very great<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_288">{288}</a></span> disadvantage to
+us all, which must arise from the public notice of Lydia’s unguarded and
+imprudent manner, nay, which has already arisen from it, I am sure you
+would judge differently in the affair.”</p>
+
+<p>“Already arisen!” repeated Mr. Bennet. “What! has she frightened away
+some of your lovers? Poor little Lizzy! But do not be cast down. Such
+squeamish youths as cannot bear to be connected with a little absurdity
+are not worth a regret. Come, let me see the list of the pitiful fellows
+who have been kept aloof by Lydia’s folly.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed, you are mistaken. I have no such injuries to resent. It is not
+of peculiar, but of general evils, which I am now complaining. Our
+importance, our respectability in the world, must be affected by the
+wild volatility, the assurance and disdain of all restraint which mark
+Lydia’s character. Excuse me,—for I must speak plainly. If you, my dear
+father, will not take the trouble of checking her exuberant spirits, and
+of teaching her that her present pursuits are not to be the business of
+her life, she will soon be beyond the reach of amendment. Her character
+will be fixed; and she will, at sixteen, be the most determined flirt
+that ever made herself and her family ridiculous;—a flirt, too, in the
+worst and meanest degree of flirtation; without any attraction beyond
+youth and a tolerable person; and, from the ignorance and emptiness of
+her mind, wholly unable to ward off any portion of that universal
+contempt which her rage for admiration will excite. In this danger Kitty
+is also comprehended. She will follow wherever Lydia leads. Vain,
+ignorant, idle, and absolutely uncontrolled! Oh, my dear father, can you
+suppose it possible that they will not be censured and despised wherever
+they are known, and that their sisters will not be often involved in the
+disgrace?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_289">{289}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bennet saw that her whole heart was in the subject; and,
+affectionately taking her hand, said, in reply,—</p>
+
+<p>“Do not make yourself uneasy, my love. Wherever you and Jane are known,
+you must be respected and valued; and you will not appear to less
+advantage for having a couple of—or I may say, three—very silly
+sisters. We shall have no peace at Longbourn if Lydia does not go to
+Brighton. Let her go, then. Colonel Forster is a sensible man, and will
+keep her out of any real mischief; and she is luckily too poor to be an
+object of prey to anybody. At Brighton she will be of less importance
+even as a common flirt than she has been here. The officers will find
+women better worth their notice. Let us hope, therefore, that her being
+there may teach her her own insignificance. At any rate, she cannot grow
+many degrees worse, without authorizing us to lock her up for the rest
+of her life.”</p>
+
+<p>With this answer Elizabeth was forced to be content; but her own opinion
+continued the same, and she left him disappointed and sorry. It was not
+in her nature, however, to increase her vexations by dwelling on them.
+She was confident of having performed her duty; and to fret over
+unavoidable evils, or augment them by anxiety, was no part of her
+disposition.</p>
+
+<p>Had Lydia and her mother known the substance of her conference with her
+father, their indignation would hardly have found expression in their
+united volubility. In Lydia’s imagination, a visit to Brighton comprised
+every possibility of earthly happiness. She saw, with the creative eye
+of fancy, the streets of that gay bathing-place covered with officers.
+She saw herself the object of attention to tens and to scores of them at
+present unknown. She saw all the glories of the camp: its<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_290">{290}</a></span> tents
+stretched forth in beauteous uniformity of lines, crowded with the young
+and the gay, and dazzling with scarlet; and, to complete the view, she
+saw herself seated beneath a tent, tenderly flirting with at least six
+officers at once.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption26">
+<img alt="" height="472" src="images/i_319.jpg" width="550" id="img_images_i_319.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption26">
+
+<p>
+“Tenderly flirting”<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Had she known that her sister sought to tear her from such prospects and
+such realities as these, what would have been her sensations? They could
+have been understood only by her mother, who might have felt nearly the
+same. Lydia’s going to Brighton was all that consoled her for the
+melancholy conviction of her husband’s never intending to go there
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>But they were entirely ignorant of what had passed;<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_291">{291}</a></span> and their raptures
+continued, with little intermission, to the very day of Lydia’s leaving
+home.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was now to see Mr. Wickham for the last time. Having been
+frequently in company with him since her return, agitation was pretty
+well over; the agitations of former partiality entirely so. She had even
+learnt to detect, in the very gentleness which had first delighted her,
+an affectation and a sameness to disgust and weary. In his present
+behaviour to herself, moreover, she had a fresh source of displeasure;
+for the inclination he soon testified of renewing those attentions which
+had marked the early part of their acquaintance could only serve, after
+what had since passed, to provoke her. She lost all concern for him in
+finding herself thus selected as the object of such idle and frivolous
+gallantry; and while she steadily repressed it, could not but feel the
+reproof contained in his believing, that however long, and for whatever
+cause, his attentions had been withdrawn, her vanity would be gratified,
+and her preference secured, at any time, by their renewal.</p>
+
+<p>On the very last day of the regiment’s remaining in Meryton, he dined,
+with others of the officers, at Longbourn; and so little was Elizabeth
+disposed to part from him in good-humour, that, on his making some
+inquiry as to the manner in which her time had passed at Hunsford, she
+mentioned Colonel Fitzwilliam’s and Mr. Darcy’s having both spent three
+weeks at Rosings, and asked him if he were acquainted with the former.</p>
+
+<p>He looked surprised, displeased, alarmed; but, with a moment’s
+recollection, and a returning smile, replied, that he had formerly seen
+him often; and, after observing that he was a very gentlemanlike man,
+asked her how she had liked him. Her answer was warmly in<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_292">{292}</a></span> his favour.
+With an air of indifference, he soon afterwards added, “How long did you
+say that he was at Rosings?”</p>
+
+<p>“Nearly three weeks.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you saw him frequently?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, almost every day.”</p>
+
+<p>“His manners are very different from his cousin’s.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, very different; but I think Mr. Darcy improves on acquaintance.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed!” cried Wickham, with a look which did not escape her. “And pray
+may I ask—” but checking himself, he added, in a gayer tone, “Is it in
+address that he improves? Has he deigned to add aught of civility to his
+ordinary style? for I dare not hope,” he continued, in a lower and more
+serious tone, “that he is improved in essentials.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no!” said Elizabeth. “In essentials, I believe, he is very much
+what he ever was.”</p>
+
+<p>While she spoke, Wickham looked as if scarcely knowing whether to
+rejoice over her words or to distrust their meaning. There was a
+something in her countenance which made him listen with an apprehensive
+and anxious attention, while she added,—</p>
+
+<p>“When I said that he improved on acquaintance, I did not mean that
+either his mind or manners were in a state of improvement; but that,
+from knowing him better, his disposition was better understood.”</p>
+
+<p>Wickham’s alarm now appeared in a heightened complexion and agitated
+look; for a few minutes he was silent; till, shaking off his
+embarrassment, he turned to her again, and said in the gentlest of
+accents,—</p>
+
+<p>“You, who so well know my feelings towards Mr. Darcy, will readily
+comprehend how sincerely I must rejoice that he is wise enough to assume
+even the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_293">{293}</a></span> <i>appearance</i> of what is right. His pride, in that direction,
+may be of service, if not to himself, to many others, for it must deter
+him from such foul misconduct as I have suffered by. I only fear that
+the sort of cautiousness to which you, I imagine, have been alluding, is
+merely adopted on his visits to his aunt, of whose good opinion and
+judgment he stands much in awe. His fear of her has always operated, I
+know, when they were together; and a good deal is to be imputed to his
+wish of forwarding the match with Miss de Bourgh, which I am certain he
+has very much at heart.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth could not repress a smile at this, but she answered only by a
+slight inclination of the head. She saw that he wanted to engage her on
+the old subject of his grievances, and she was in no humour to indulge
+him. The rest of the evening passed with the <i>appearance</i>, on his side,
+of usual cheerfulness, but with no further attempt to distinguish
+Elizabeth; and they parted at last with mutual civility, and possibly a
+mutual desire of never meeting again.</p>
+
+<p>When the party broke up, Lydia returned with Mrs. Forster to Meryton,
+from whence they were to set out early the next morning. The separation
+between her and her family was rather noisy than pathetic. Kitty was the
+only one who shed tears; but she did weep from vexation and envy. Mrs.
+Bennet was diffuse in her good wishes for the felicity of her daughter,
+and impressive in her injunctions that she would not miss the
+opportunity of enjoying herself as much as possible,—advice which there
+was every reason to believe would be attended to; and, in the clamorous
+happiness of Lydia herself in bidding farewell, the more gentle adieus
+of her sisters were uttered without being heard.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_294">{294}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XLII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_323_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_323_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“The arrival of the Gardiners.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XLII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="H" src="images/i_323_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_323_b.png"></span>AD Elizabeth’s opinion been all drawn from her own family, she could
+not have formed a very pleasing picture of conjugal felicity or domestic
+comfort. Her father, captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance
+of good-humour which youth and beauty generally give, had married a
+woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind had very early in
+their marriage put an end to all real affection for her.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_295">{295}</a></span> Respect,
+esteem, and confidence had vanished for ever; and all his views of
+domestic happiness were overthrown. But Mr. Bennet was not of a
+disposition to seek comfort for the disappointment which his own
+imprudence had brought on in any of those pleasures which too often
+console the unfortunate for their folly or their vice. He was fond of
+the country and of books; and from these tastes had arisen his principal
+enjoyments. To his wife he was very little otherwise indebted than as
+her ignorance and folly had contributed to his amusement. This is not
+the sort of happiness which a man would in general wish to owe to his
+wife; but where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true
+philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth, however, had never been blind to the impropriety of her
+father’s behaviour as a husband. She had always seen it with pain; but
+respecting his abilities, and grateful for his affectionate treatment of
+herself, she endeavoured to forget what she could not overlook, and to
+banish from her thoughts that continual breach of conjugal obligation
+and decorum which, in exposing his wife to the contempt of her own
+children, was so highly reprehensible. But she had never felt so
+strongly as now the disadvantages which must attend the children of so
+unsuitable a marriage, nor ever been so fully aware of the evils arising
+from so ill-judged a direction of talents—talents which, rightly used,
+might at least have preserved the respectability of his daughters, even
+if incapable of enlarging the mind of his wife.</p>
+
+<p>When Elizabeth had rejoiced over Wickham’s departure, she found little
+other cause for satisfaction in the loss of the regiment. Their parties
+abroad were less varied than before; and at home she had a mother and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_296">{296}</a></span>
+sister, whose constant repinings at the dulness of everything around
+them threw a real gloom over their domestic circle; and, though Kitty
+might in time regain her natural degree of sense, since the disturbers
+of her brain were removed, her other sister, from whose disposition
+greater evil might be apprehended, was likely to be hardened in all her
+folly and assurance, by a situation of such double danger as a
+watering-place and a camp. Upon the whole, therefore, she found, what
+has been sometimes found before, that an event to which she had looked
+forward with impatient desire, did not, in taking place, bring all the
+satisfaction she had promised herself. It was consequently necessary to
+name some other period for the commencement of actual felicity; to have
+some other point on which her wishes and hopes might be fixed, and by
+again enjoying the pleasure of anticipation, console herself for the
+present, and prepare for another disappointment. Her tour to the Lakes
+was now the object of her happiest thoughts: it was her best consolation
+for all the uncomfortable hours which the discontentedness of her mother
+and Kitty made inevitable; and could she have included Jane in the
+scheme, every part of it would have been perfect.</p>
+
+<p>“But it is fortunate,” thought she, “that I have something to wish for.
+Were the whole arrangement complete, my disappointment would be certain.
+But here, by carrying with me one ceaseless source of regret in my
+sister’s absence, I may reasonably hope to have all my expectations of
+pleasure realized. A scheme of which every part promises delight can
+never be successful; and general disappointment is only warded off by
+the defence of some little peculiar vexation.”</p>
+
+<p>When Lydia went away she promised to write very<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_297">{297}</a></span> often and very minutely
+to her mother and Kitty; but her letters were always long expected, and
+always very short. Those to her mother contained little else than that
+they were just returned from the library, where such and such officers
+had attended them, and where she had seen such beautiful ornaments as
+made her quite wild; that she had a new gown, or a new parasol, which
+she would have described more fully, but was obliged to leave off in a
+violent hurry, as Mrs. Forster called her, and they were going to the
+camp; and from her correspondence with her sister there was still less
+to be learnt, for her letters to Kitty, though rather longer, were much
+too full of lines under the words to be made public.</p>
+
+<p>After the first fortnight or three weeks of her absence, health,
+good-humour, and cheerfulness began to reappear at Longbourn. Everything
+wore a happier aspect. The families who had been in town for the winter
+came back again, and summer finery and summer engagements arose. Mrs.
+Bennet was restored to her usual querulous serenity; and by the middle
+of June Kitty was so much recovered as to be able to enter Meryton
+without tears,—an event of such happy promise as to make Elizabeth
+hope, that by the following Christmas she might be so tolerably
+reasonable as not to mention an officer above once a day, unless, by
+some cruel and malicious arrangement at the War Office, another regiment
+should be quartered in Meryton.</p>
+
+<p>The time fixed for the beginning of their northern tour was now fast
+approaching; and a fortnight only was wanting of it, when a letter
+arrived from Mrs. Gardiner, which at once delayed its commencement and
+curtailed its extent. Mr. Gardiner would be prevented by business from
+setting out till a fortnight later in July,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_298">{298}</a></span> and must be in London again
+within a month; and as that left too short a period for them to go so
+far, and see so much as they had proposed, or at least to see it with
+the leisure and comfort they had built on, they were obliged to give up
+the Lakes, and substitute a more contracted tour; and, according to the
+present plan, were to go no farther northward than Derbyshire. In that
+county there was enough to be seen to occupy the chief of their three
+weeks; and to Mrs. Gardiner it had a peculiarly strong attraction. The
+town where she had formerly passed some years of her life, and where
+they were now to spend a few days, was probably as great an object of
+her curiosity as all the celebrated beauties of Matlock, Chatsworth,
+Dovedale, or the Peak.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was excessively disappointed: she had set her heart on seeing
+the Lakes; and still thought there might have been time enough. But it
+was her business to be satisfied—and certainly her temper to be happy;
+and all was soon right again.</p>
+
+<p>With the mention of Derbyshire, there were many ideas connected. It was
+impossible for her to see the word without thinking of Pemberley and its
+owner. “But surely,” said she, “I may enter his county with impunity,
+and rob it of a few petrified spars, without his perceiving me.”</p>
+
+<p>The period of expectation was now doubled. Four weeks were to pass away
+before her uncle and aunt’s arrival. But they did pass away, and Mr. and
+Mrs. Gardiner, with their four children, did at length appear at
+Longbourn. The children, two girls of six and eight years old, and two
+younger boys, were to be left under the particular care of their cousin
+Jane, who was the general favourite, and whose steady sense and
+sweetness<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_299">{299}</a></span> of temper exactly adapted her for attending to them in every
+way—teaching them, playing with them, and loving them.</p>
+
+<p>The Gardiners stayed only one night at Longbourn, and set off the next
+morning with Elizabeth in pursuit of novelty and amusement. One
+enjoyment was certain—that of suitableness as companions; a
+suitableness which comprehended health and temper to bear
+inconveniences—cheerfulness to enhance every pleasure—and affection
+and intelligence, which might supply it among themselves if there were
+disappointments abroad.</p>
+
+<p>It is not the object of this work to give a description of Derbyshire,
+nor of any of the remarkable places through which their route thither
+lay—Oxford, Blenheim, Warwick, Kenilworth, Birmingham, etc., are
+sufficiently known. A small part of Derbyshire is all the present
+concern. To the little town of Lambton, the scene of Mrs. Gardiner’s
+former residence, and where she had lately learned that some
+acquaintance still remained, they bent their steps, after having seen
+all the principal wonders of the country; and within five miles of
+Lambton, Elizabeth found, from her aunt, that Pemberley was situated. It
+was not in their direct road; nor more than a mile or two out of it. In
+talking over their route the evening before, Mrs. Gardiner expressed an
+inclination to see the place again. Mr. Gardiner declared his
+willingness, and Elizabeth was applied to for her approbation.</p>
+
+<p>“My love, should not you like to see a place of which you have heard so
+much?” said her aunt. “A place, too, with which so many of your
+acquaintance are connected. Wickham passed all his youth there, you
+know.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was distressed. She felt that she had no<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_300">{300}</a></span> business at
+Pemberley, and was obliged to assume a disinclination for seeing it. She
+must own that she was tired of great houses: after going over so many,
+she really had no pleasure in fine carpets or satin curtains.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gardiner abused her stupidity. “If it were merely a fine house
+richly furnished,” said she, “I should not care about it myself; but the
+grounds are delightful. They have some of the finest woods in the
+country.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth said no more; but her mind could not acquiesce. The
+possibility of meeting Mr. Darcy, while viewing the place, instantly
+occurred. It would be dreadful! She blushed at the very idea; and
+thought it would be better to speak openly to her aunt, than to run such
+a risk. But against this there were objections; and she finally resolved
+that it could be the last resource, if her private inquiries as to the
+absence of the family were unfavourably answered.</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly, when she retired at night, she asked the chambermaid
+whether Pemberley were not a very fine place, what was the name of its
+proprietor, and, with no little alarm, whether the family were down for
+the summer? A most welcome negative followed the last question; and her
+alarms being now removed, she was at leisure to feel a great deal of
+curiosity to see the house herself; and when the subject was revived the
+next morning, and she was again applied to, could readily answer, and
+with a proper air of indifference, that she had not really any dislike
+to the scheme.</p>
+
+<p>To Pemberley, therefore, they were to go.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_301">{301}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XLIII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_330_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_330_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“Conjecturing as to the date.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XLIII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="E" src="images/i_330_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_330_b.png"></span>LIZABETH, as they drove along, watched for the first appearance of
+Pemberley Woods with some perturbation; and when at length they turned
+in at the lodge, her spirits were in a high flutter.</p>
+
+<p>The park was very large, and contained great variety of ground. They
+entered it in one of its lowest points, and drove for some time through
+a beautiful wood stretching over a wide extent.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth’s mind was too full for conversation, but she saw and admired
+every remarkable spot and point of view. They gradually ascended for
+half a mile, and then found themselves at the top of a considerable
+eminence, where the wood ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by
+Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of the valley, into which
+the road with<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_302">{302}</a></span> some abruptness wound. It was a large, handsome stone
+building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high
+woody hills; and in front a stream of some natural importance was
+swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks
+were neither formal nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She
+had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural
+beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste. They were
+all of them warm in their admiration; and at that moment she felt that
+to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!</p>
+
+<p>They descended the hill, crossed the bridge, and drove to the door; and,
+while examining the nearer aspect of the house, all her apprehension of
+meeting its owner returned. She dreaded lest the chambermaid had been
+mistaken. On applying to see the place, they were admitted into the
+hall; and Elizabeth, as they waited for the housekeeper, had leisure to
+wonder at her being where she was.</p>
+
+<p>The housekeeper came; a respectable looking elderly woman, much less
+fine, and more civil, than she had any notion of finding her. They
+followed her into the dining-parlour. It was a large, well-proportioned
+room, handsomely fitted up. Elizabeth, after slightly surveying it, went
+to a window to enjoy its prospect. The hill, crowned with wood, from
+which they had descended, receiving increased abruptness from the
+distance, was a beautiful object. Every disposition of the ground was
+good; and she looked on the whole scene, the river, the trees scattered
+on its banks, and the winding of the valley, as far as she could trace
+it, with delight. As they passed into other rooms, these objects were
+taking different positions; but<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_303">{303}</a></span> from every window there were beauties
+to be seen. The rooms were lofty and handsome, and their furniture
+suitable to the fortune of their proprietor; but Elizabeth saw, with
+admiration of his taste, that it was neither gaudy nor uselessly
+fine,—with less of splendour, and more real elegance, than the
+furniture of Rosings.</p>
+
+<p>“And of this place,” thought she, “I might have been mistress! With
+these rooms I might have now been familiarly acquainted! Instead of
+viewing them as a stranger, I might have rejoiced in them as my own, and
+welcomed to them as visitors my uncle and aunt. But, no,” recollecting
+herself, “that could never be; my uncle and aunt would have been lost to
+me; I should not have been allowed to invite them.”</p>
+
+<p>This was a lucky recollection—it saved her from something like regret.</p>
+
+<p>She longed to inquire of the housekeeper whether her master were really
+absent, but had not courage for it. At length, however, the question was
+asked by her uncle; and she turned away with alarm, while Mrs. Reynolds
+replied, that he was; adding, “But we expect him to-morrow, with a large
+party of friends.” How rejoiced was Elizabeth that their own journey had
+not by any circumstance been delayed a day!</p>
+
+<p>Her aunt now called her to look at a picture. She approached, and saw
+the likeness of Mr. Wickham, suspended, amongst several other
+miniatures, over the mantel-piece. Her aunt asked her, smilingly, how
+she liked it. The housekeeper came forward, and told them it was the
+picture of a young gentleman, the son of her late master’s steward, who
+had been brought up by him at his own expense. “He is now gone into the
+army,” she added; “but I am afraid he has turned out very wild.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_304">{304}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gardiner looked at her niece with a smile, but Elizabeth could not
+return it.</p>
+
+<p>“And that,” said Mrs. Reynolds, pointing to another of the miniatures,
+“is my master—and very like him. It was drawn at the same time as the
+other—about eight years ago.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have heard much of your master’s fine person,” said Mrs. Gardiner,
+looking at the picture; “it is a handsome face. But, Lizzy, you can tell
+us whether it is like or not.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Reynolds’ respect for Elizabeth seemed to increase on this
+intimation of her knowing her master.</p>
+
+<p>“Does that young lady know Mr. Darcy?”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth coloured, and said, “A little.”</p>
+
+<p>“And do not you think him a very handsome gentleman, ma’am?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, very handsome.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am sure <i>I</i> know none so handsome; but in the gallery upstairs you
+will see a finer, larger picture of him than this. This room was my late
+master’s favourite room, and these miniatures are just as they used to
+be then. He was very fond of them.”</p>
+
+<p>This accounted to Elizabeth for Mr. Wickham’s being among them.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Reynolds then directed their attention to one of Miss Darcy, drawn
+when she was only eight years old.</p>
+
+<p>“And is Miss Darcy as handsome as her brother?” said Mr. Gardiner.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes—the handsomest young lady that ever was seen; and so
+accomplished! She plays and sings all day long. In the next room is a
+new instrument just come down for her—a present from my master: she
+comes here to-morrow with him.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gardiner, whose manners were easy and pleasant,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_305">{305}</a></span> encouraged her
+communicativeness by his questions and remarks: Mrs. Reynolds, either
+from pride or attachment, had evidently great pleasure in talking of her
+master and his sister.</p>
+
+<p>“Is your master much at Pemberley in the course of the year?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not so much as I could wish, sir: but I dare say he may spend half his
+time here; and Miss Darcy is always down for the summer months.”</p>
+
+<p>“Except,” thought Elizabeth, “when she goes to Ramsgate.”</p>
+
+<p>“If your master would marry, you might see more of him.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir; but I do not know when <i>that</i> will be. I do not know who is
+good enough for him.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner smiled. Elizabeth could not help saying, “It is
+very much to his credit, I am sure, that you should think so.”</p>
+
+<p>“I say no more than the truth, and what everybody will say that knows
+him,” replied the other. Elizabeth thought this was going pretty far;
+and she listened with increasing astonishment as the housekeeper added,
+“I have never had a cross word from him in my life, and I have known him
+ever since he was four years old.”</p>
+
+<p>This was praise of all others most extraordinary, most opposite to her
+ideas. That he was not a good-tempered man had been her firmest opinion.
+Her keenest attention was awakened: she longed to hear more; and was
+grateful to her uncle for saying,—</p>
+
+<p>“There are very few people of whom so much can be said. You are lucky in
+having such a master.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir, I know I am. If I were to go through the world, I could not
+meet with a better. But I have always<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_306">{306}</a></span> observed, that they who are
+good-natured when children, are good-natured when they grow up; and he
+was always the sweetest tempered, most generous-hearted boy in the
+world.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth almost stared at her. “Can this be Mr. Darcy?” thought she.</p>
+
+<p>“His father was an excellent man,” said Mrs. Gardiner.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, ma’am, that he was indeed; and his son will be just like him—just
+as affable to the poor.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth listened, wondered, doubted, and was impatient for more. Mrs.
+Reynolds could interest her on no other point. She related the subjects
+of the pictures, the dimensions of the rooms, and the price of the
+furniture in vain. Mr. Gardiner, highly amused by the kind of family
+prejudice, to which he attributed her excessive commendation of her
+master, soon led again to the subject; and she dwelt with energy on his
+many merits, as they proceeded together up the great staircase.</p>
+
+<p>“He is the best landlord, and the best master,” said she, “that ever
+lived. Not like the wild young men now-a-days, who think of nothing but
+themselves. There is not one of his tenants or servants but what will
+give him a good name. Some people call him proud; but I am sure I never
+saw anything of it. To my fancy, it is only because he does not rattle
+away like other young men.”</p>
+
+<p>“In what an amiable light does this place him!” thought Elizabeth.</p>
+
+<p>“This fine account of him,” whispered her aunt as they walked, “is not
+quite consistent with his behaviour to our poor friend.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps we might be deceived.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is not very likely; our authority was too good.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_307">{307}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>On reaching the spacious lobby above, they were shown into a very pretty
+sitting-room, lately fitted up with greater elegance and lightness than
+the apartments below; and were informed that it was but just done to
+give pleasure to Miss Darcy, who had taken a liking to the room, when
+last at Pemberley.</p>
+
+<p>“He is certainly a good brother,” said Elizabeth, as she walked towards
+one of the windows.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Reynolds anticipated Miss Darcy’s delight, when she should enter
+the room. “And this is always the way with him,” she added. “Whatever
+can give his sister any pleasure, is sure to be done in a moment. There
+is nothing he would not do for her.”</p>
+
+<p>The picture gallery, and two or three of the principal bed-rooms, were
+all that remained to be shown. In the former were many good paintings:
+but Elizabeth knew nothing of the art; and from such as had been already
+visible below, she had willingly turned to look at some drawings of Miss
+Darcy’s, in crayons, whose subjects were usually more interesting, and
+also more intelligible.</p>
+
+<p>In the gallery there were many family portraits, but they could have
+little to fix the attention of a stranger. Elizabeth walked on in quest
+of the only face whose features would be known to her. At last it
+arrested her—and she beheld a striking resemblance of Mr. Darcy, with
+such a smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen,
+when he looked at her. She stood several minutes before the picture, in
+earnest contemplation, and returned to it again before they quitted the
+gallery. Mrs. Reynolds informed them, that it had been taken in his
+father’s lifetime.</p>
+
+<p>There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabet<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_308">{308}</a></span>h’s mind, a more gentle
+sensation towards the original than she had ever felt in the height of
+their acquaintance. The commendation bestowed on him by Mrs. Reynolds
+was of no trifling nature. What praise is more valuable than the praise
+of an intelligent servant? As a brother, a landlord, a master, she
+considered how many people’s happiness were in his guardianship! How
+much of pleasure or pain it was in his power to bestow! How much of good
+or evil must be done by him! Every idea that had been brought forward by
+the housekeeper was favourable to his character; and as she stood before
+the canvas, on which he was represented, and fixed his eyes upon
+herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude
+than it had ever raised before: she remembered its warmth, and softened
+its impropriety of expression.</p>
+
+<p>When all of the house that was open to general inspection had been seen,
+they returned down stairs; and, taking leave of the housekeeper, were
+consigned over to the gardener, who met them at the hall door.</p>
+
+<p>As they walked across the lawn towards the river, Elizabeth turned back
+to look again; her uncle and aunt stopped also; and while the former was
+conjecturing as to the date of the building, the owner of it himself
+suddenly came forward from the road which led behind it to the stables.</p>
+
+<p>They were within twenty yards of each other; and so abrupt was his
+appearance, that it was impossible to avoid his sight. Their eyes
+instantly met, and the cheeks of each were overspread with the deepest
+blush. He absolutely started, and for a moment seemed immovable from
+surprise; but shortly recovering himself, advanced towards the party,
+and spoke to Elizabeth,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_309">{309}</a></span> if not in terms of perfect composure, at least
+of perfect civility.</p>
+
+<p>She had instinctively turned away; but stopping on his approach,
+received his compliments with an embarrassment impossible to be
+overcome. Had his first appearance, or his resemblance to the picture
+they had just been examining, been insufficient to assure the other two
+that they now saw Mr. Darcy, the gardener’s expression of surprise, on
+beholding his master, must immediately have told it. They stood a little
+aloof while he was talking to their niece, who, astonished and confused,
+scarcely dared lift her eyes to his face, and knew not what answer she
+returned to his civil inquiries after her family. Amazed at the
+alteration of his manner since they last parted, every sentence that he
+uttered was increasing her embarrassment; and every idea of the
+impropriety of her being found there recurring to her mind, the few
+minutes in which they continued together were some of the most
+uncomfortable of her life. Nor did he seem much more at ease; when he
+spoke, his accent had none of its usual sedateness; and he repeated his
+inquiries as to the time of her having left Longbourn, and of her stay
+in Derbyshire, so often, and in so hurried a way, as plainly spoke the
+distraction of his thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>At length, every idea seemed to fail him; and after standing a few
+moments without saying a word, he suddenly recollected himself, and took
+leave.</p>
+
+<p>The others then joined her, and expressed their admiration of his
+figure; but Elizabeth heard not a word, and, wholly engrossed by her own
+feelings, followed them in silence. She was overpowered by shame and
+vexation. Her coming there was the most unfortunate, the most ill-judged
+thing in the world! How strange must it<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_310">{310}</a></span> appear to him! In what a
+disgraceful light might it not strike so vain a man! It might seem as if
+she had purposely thrown herself in his way again! Oh! why did she come?
+or, why did he thus come a day before he was expected? Had they been
+only ten minutes sooner, they should have been beyond the reach of his
+discrimination; for it was plain that he was that moment arrived, that
+moment alighted from his horse or his carriage. She blushed again and
+again over the perverseness of the meeting. And his behaviour, so
+strikingly altered,—what could it mean? That he should even speak to
+her was amazing!—but to speak with such civility, to inquire after her
+family! Never in her life had she seen his manners so little dignified,
+never had he spoken with such gentleness as on this unexpected meeting.
+What a contrast did it offer to his last address in Rosings Park, when
+he put his letter into her hand! She knew not what to think, or how to
+account for it.</p>
+
+<p>They had now entered a beautiful walk by the side of the water, and
+every step was bringing forward a nobler fall of ground, or a finer
+reach of the woods to which they were approaching: but it was some time
+before Elizabeth was sensible of any of it; and, though she answered
+mechanically to the repeated appeals of her uncle and aunt, and seemed
+to direct her eyes to such objects as they pointed out, she
+distinguished no part of the scene. Her thoughts were all fixed on that
+one spot of Pemberley House, whichever it might be, where Mr. Darcy then
+was. She longed to know what at that moment was passing in his mind; in
+what manner he thought of her, and whether, in defiance of everything,
+she was still dear to him. Perhaps he had been civil only because he
+felt himself at ease; yet there had been<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_311">{311}</a></span> <i>that</i> in his voice, which was
+not like ease. Whether he had felt more of pain or of pleasure in seeing
+her, she could not tell, but he certainly had not seen her with
+composure.</p>
+
+<p>At length, however, the remarks of her companions on her absence of mind
+roused her, and she felt the necessity of appearing more like herself.</p>
+
+<p>They entered the woods, and, bidding adieu to the river for a while,
+ascended some of the higher grounds; whence, in spots where the opening
+of the trees gave the eye power to wander, were many charming views of
+the valley, the opposite hills, with the long range of woods
+overspreading many, and occasionally part of the stream. Mr. Gardiner
+expressed a wish of going round the whole park, but feared it might be
+beyond a walk. With a triumphant smile, they were told, that it was ten
+miles round. It settled the matter; and they pursued the accustomed
+circuit; which brought them again, after some time, in a descent among
+hanging woods, to the edge of the water, and one of its narrowest parts.
+They crossed it by a simple bridge, in character with the general air of
+the scene: it was a spot less adorned than any they had yet visited; and
+the valley, here contracted into a glen, allowed room only for the
+stream, and a narrow walk amidst the rough coppice-wood which bordered
+it. Elizabeth longed to explore its windings; but when they had crossed
+the bridge, and perceived their distance from the house, Mrs. Gardiner,
+who was not a great walker, could go no farther, and thought only of
+returning to the carriage as quickly as possible. Her niece was,
+therefore, obliged to submit, and they took their way towards the house
+on the opposite side of the river, in the nearest direction; but their
+progress was<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_312">{312}</a></span> slow, for Mr. Gardiner, though seldom able to indulge the
+taste, was very fond of fishing, and was so much engaged in watching the
+occasional appearance of some trout in the water, and talking to the man
+about them, that he advanced but little. Whilst wandering on in this
+slow manner, they were again surprised, and Elizabeth’s astonishment was
+quite equal to what it had been at first, by the sight of Mr. Darcy
+approaching them, and at no great distance. The walk being here less
+sheltered than on the other side, allowed them to see him before they
+met. Elizabeth, however astonished, was at least more prepared for an
+interview than before, and resolved to appear and to speak with
+calmness, if he really intended to meet them. For a few moments, indeed,
+she felt that he would probably strike into some other path. The idea
+lasted while a turning in the walk concealed him from their view; the
+turning past, he was immediately before them. With a glance she saw that
+he had lost none of his recent civility; and, to imitate his politeness,
+she began as they met to admire the beauty of the place; but she had not
+got beyond the words “delightful,” and “charming,” when some unlucky
+recollections obtruded, and she fancied that praise of Pemberley from
+her might be mischievously construed. Her colour changed, and she said
+no more.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gardiner was standing a little behind; and on her pausing, he asked
+her if she would do him the honour of introducing him to her friends.
+This was a stroke of civility for which she was quite unprepared; and
+she could hardly suppress a smile at his being now seeking the
+acquaintance of some of those very people, against whom his pride had
+revolted, in his offer to herself. “What will be his surprise,” thought
+she, “when he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_313">{313}</a></span> knows who they are! He takes them now for people of
+fashion.”</p>
+
+<p>The introduction, however, was immediately made; and as she named their
+relationship to herself, she stole a sly look at him, to see how he bore
+it; and was not without the expectation of his decamping as fast as he
+could from such disgraceful companions. That he was <i>surprised</i> by the
+connection was evident: he sustained it, however, with fortitude: and,
+so far from going away, turned back with them, and entered into
+conversation with Mr. Gardiner. Elizabeth could not but be pleased,
+could not but triumph. It was consoling that he should know she had some
+relations for whom there was no need to blush. She listened most
+attentively to all that passed between them, and gloried in every
+expression, every sentence of her uncle, which marked his intelligence,
+his taste, or his good manners.</p>
+
+<p>The conversation soon turned upon fishing; and she heard Mr. Darcy
+invite him, with the greatest civility, to fish there as often as he
+chose, while he continued in the neighbourhood, offering at the same
+time to supply him with fishing tackle, and pointing out those parts of
+the stream where there was usually most sport. Mrs. Gardiner, who was
+walking arm in arm with Elizabeth, gave her a look expressive of her
+wonder. Elizabeth said nothing, but it gratified her exceedingly; the
+compliment must be all for herself. Her astonishment, however, was
+extreme; and continually was she repeating, “Why is he so altered? From
+what can it proceed? It cannot be for <i>me</i>, it cannot be for <i>my</i> sake
+that his manners are thus softened. My reproofs at Hunsford could not
+work such a change as this. It is impossible that he should still love
+me.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_314">{314}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>After walking some time in this way, the two ladies in front, the two
+gentlemen behind, on resuming their places, after descending to the
+brink of the river for the better inspection of some curious
+water-plant, there chanced to be a little alteration. It originated in
+Mrs. Gardiner, who, fatigued by the exercise of the morning, found
+Elizabeth’s arm inadequate to her support, and consequently preferred
+her husband’s. Mr. Darcy took her place by her niece, and they walked on
+together. After a short silence the lady first spoke. She wished him to
+know that she had been assured of his absence before she came to the
+place, and accordingly began by observing, that his arrival had been
+very unexpected—“for your housekeeper,” she added, “informed us that
+you would certainly not be here till to-morrow; and, indeed, before we
+left Bakewell, we understood that you were not immediately expected in
+the country.” He acknowledged the truth of it all; and said that
+business with his steward had occasioned his coming forward a few hours
+before the rest of the party with whom he had been travelling. “They
+will join me early to-morrow,” he continued, “and among them are some
+who will claim an acquaintance with you,—Mr. Bingley and his sisters.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth answered only by a slight bow. Her thoughts were instantly
+driven back to the time when Mr. Bingley’s name had been last mentioned
+between them; and if she might judge from his complexion, <i>his</i> mind was
+not very differently engaged.</p>
+
+<p>“There is also one other person in the party,” he continued after a
+pause, “who more particularly wishes to be known to you. Will you allow
+me, or do I ask too much, to introduce my sister to your acquaintance
+during your stay at Lambton?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_315">{315}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>The surprise of such an application was great indeed; it was too great
+for her to know in what manner she acceded to it. She immediately felt
+that whatever desire Miss Darcy might have of being acquainted with her,
+must be the work of her brother, and without looking farther, it was
+satisfactory; it was gratifying to know that his resentment had not made
+him think really ill of her.</p>
+
+<p>They now walked on in silence; each of them deep in thought. Elizabeth
+was not comfortable; that was impossible; but she was flattered and
+pleased. His wish of introducing his sister to her was a compliment of
+the highest kind. They soon outstripped the others; and when they had
+reached the carriage, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner were half a quarter of a
+mile behind.</p>
+
+<p>He then asked her to walk into the house—but she declared herself not
+tired, and they stood together on the lawn. At such a time much might
+have been said, and silence was very awkward. She wanted to talk, but
+there seemed an embargo on every subject. At last she recollected that
+she had been travelling, and they talked of Matlock and Dovedale with
+great perseverance. Yet time and her aunt moved slowly—and her patience
+and her ideas were nearly worn out before the <i>tête-à-tête</i> was over.</p>
+
+<p>On Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner’s coming up they were all pressed to go into
+the house and take some refreshment; but this was declined, and they
+parted on each side with the utmost politeness. Mr. Darcy handed the
+ladies into the carriage; and when it drove off, Elizabeth saw him
+walking slowly towards the house.</p>
+
+<p>The observations of her uncle and aunt now began; and each of them
+pronounced him to be infinitely superior to anything they had expected.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_316">{316}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“He is perfectly well-behaved, polite, and unassuming,” said her uncle.</p>
+
+<p>“There <i>is</i> something a little stately in him, to be sure,” replied her
+aunt; “but it is confined to his air, and is not unbecoming. I can now
+say with the housekeeper, that though some people may call him proud,
+<i>I</i> have seen nothing of it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I was never more surprised than by his behaviour to us. It was more
+than civil; it was really attentive; and there was no necessity for such
+attention. His acquaintance with Elizabeth was very trifling.”</p>
+
+<p>“To be sure, Lizzy,” said her aunt, “he is not so handsome as Wickham;
+or rather he has not Wickham’s countenance, for his features are
+perfectly good. But how came you to tell us that he was so
+disagreeable?”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth excused herself as well as she could: said that she had liked
+him better when they met in Kent than before, and that she had never
+seen him so pleasant as this morning.</p>
+
+<p>“But perhaps he may be a little whimsical in his civilities,” replied
+her uncle. “Your great men often are; and therefore I shall not take him
+at his word about fishing, as he might change his mind another day, and
+warn me off his grounds.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth felt that they had entirely mistaken his character, but said
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>“From what we have seen of him,” continued Mrs. Gardiner, “I really
+should not have thought that he could have behaved in so cruel a way by
+anybody as he has done by poor Wickham. He has not an ill-natured look.
+On the contrary, there is something pleasing about his mouth when he
+speaks. And there is something of dignity in his countenance, that would
+not give one an<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_317">{317}</a></span> unfavourable idea of his heart. But, to be sure, the
+good lady who showed us the house did give him a most flaming character!
+I could hardly help laughing aloud sometimes. But he is a liberal
+master, I suppose, and <i>that</i>, in the eye of a servant, comprehends
+every virtue.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth here felt herself called on to say something in vindication of
+his behaviour to Wickham; and, therefore, gave them to understand, in as
+guarded a manner as she could, that by what she had heard from his
+relations in Kent, his actions were capable of a very different
+construction; and that his character was by no means so faulty, nor
+Wickham’s so amiable, as they had been considered in Hertfordshire. In
+confirmation of this, she related the particulars of all the pecuniary
+transactions in which they had been connected, without actually naming
+her authority, but stating it to be such as might be relied on.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gardiner was surprised and concerned: but as they were now
+approaching the scene of her former pleasures, every idea gave way to
+the charm of recollection; and she was too much engaged in pointing out
+to her husband all the interesting spots in its environs, to think of
+anything else. Fatigued as she had been by the morning’s walk, they had
+no sooner dined than she set off again in quest of her former
+acquaintance, and the evening was spent in the satisfactions of an
+intercourse renewed after many years’ discontinuance.</p>
+
+<p>The occurrences of the day were too full of interest to leave Elizabeth
+much attention for any of these new friends; and she could do nothing
+but think, and think with wonder, of Mr. Darcy’s civility, and, above
+all, of his wishing her to be acquainted with his sister.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_318">{318}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XLIV"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_347_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_347_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XLIV.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="E" src="images/i_347_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_347_b.png"></span>LIZABETH had settled it that Mr. Darcy would bring his sister to visit
+her the very day after her reaching Pemberley; and was, consequently,
+resolved not to be out of sight of the inn the whole of that morning.
+But her conclusion was false; for on the very morning after their own
+arrival at Lambton these visitors came. They had been walking about the
+place with some of their new friends, and were just returned to the inn
+to dress themselves for dining with the same family, when the sound of a
+carriage drew them to a window, and they saw a gentleman and lady in a
+curricle driving up the street. Elizabeth, immediately recognizing the
+livery, guessed what it meant, and imparted no small degree of surprise
+to her relations, by acquainting them with the honour which she
+expected. Her<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_319">{319}</a></span> uncle and aunt were all amazement; and the embarrassment
+of her manner as she spoke, joined to the circumstance itself, and many
+of the circumstances of the preceding day, opened to them a new idea on
+the business. Nothing had ever suggested it before, but they now felt
+that there was no other way of accounting for such attentions from such
+a quarter than by supposing a partiality for their niece. While these
+newly-born notions were passing in their heads, the perturbation of
+Elizabeth’s feelings was every moment increasing. She was quite amazed
+at her own discomposure; but, amongst other causes of disquiet, she
+dreaded lest the partiality of the brother should have said too much in
+her favour; and, more than commonly anxious to please, she naturally
+suspected that every power of pleasing would fail her.</p>
+
+<p>She retreated from the window, fearful of being seen; and as she walked
+up and down the room, endeavouring to compose herself, saw such looks of
+inquiring surprise in her uncle and aunt as made everything worse.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Darcy and her brother appeared, and this formidable introduction
+took place. With astonishment did Elizabeth see that her new
+acquaintance was at least as much embarrassed as herself. Since her
+being at Lambton, she had heard that Miss Darcy was exceedingly proud;
+but the observation of a very few minutes convinced her that she was
+only exceedingly shy. She found it difficult to obtain even a word from
+her beyond a monosyllable.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Darcy was tall, and on a larger scale than Elizabeth; and, though
+little more than sixteen, her figure was formed, and her appearance
+womanly and graceful. She was less handsome than her brother, but<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_320">{320}</a></span> there
+was sense and good-humour in her face, and her manners were perfectly
+unassuming and gentle. Elizabeth, who had expected to find in her as
+acute and unembarrassed an observer as ever Mr. Darcy had been, was much
+relieved by discerning such different feelings.</p>
+
+<p>They had not been long together before Darcy told her that Bingley was
+also coming to wait on her; and she had barely time to express her
+satisfaction, and prepare for such a visitor, when Bingley’s quick step
+was heard on the stairs, and in a moment he entered the room. All
+Elizabeth’s anger against him had been long done away; but had she still
+felt any, it could hardly have stood its ground against the unaffected
+cordiality with which he expressed himself on seeing her again. He
+inquired in a friendly, though general, way, after her family, and
+looked and spoke with the same good-humoured ease that he had ever done.</p>
+
+<p>To Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner he was scarcely a less interesting personage
+than to herself. They had long wished to see him. The whole party before
+them, indeed, excited a lively attention. The suspicions which had just
+arisen of Mr. Darcy and their niece, directed their observation towards
+each with an earnest, though guarded, inquiry; and they soon drew from
+those inquiries the full conviction that one of them at least knew what
+it was to love. Of the lady’s sensations they remained a little in
+doubt; but that the gentleman was overflowing with admiration was
+evident enough.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth, on her side, had much to do. She wanted to ascertain the
+feelings of each of her visitors, she wanted to compose her own, and to
+make herself agreeable to all; and in the latter object, where she
+feared most to fail, she was most sure of success, for those to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_321">{321}</a></span> whom
+she endeavoured to give pleasure were pre-possessed in her favour.
+Bingley was ready, Georgiana was eager, and Darcy determined, to be
+pleased.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption27">
+<img alt="" height="538" src="images/i_350.jpg" width="550" id="img_images_i_350.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption27">
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“To make herself agreeable to all”</p></div>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>In seeing Bingley, her thoughts naturally flew to her sister; and oh!
+how ardently did she long to know whether any of his were directed in a
+like manner. Sometimes she could fancy that he talked less than on
+former occasions, and once or twice pleased herself with the notion
+that, as he looked at her, he was trying to trace a resemblance. But,
+though this might be imaginary, she could not be deceived as to his
+behaviour<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_322">{322}</a></span> to Miss Darcy, who had been set up as a rival to Jane. No
+look appeared on either side that spoke particular regard. Nothing
+occurred between them that could justify the hopes of his sister. On
+this point she was soon satisfied; and two or three little circumstances
+occurred ere they parted, which, in her anxious interpretation, denoted
+a recollection of Jane, not untinctured by tenderness, and a wish of
+saying more that might lead to the mention of her, had he dared. He
+observed to her, at a moment when the others were talking together, and
+in a tone which had something of real regret, that it “was a very long
+time since he had had the pleasure of seeing her;” and, before she could
+reply, he added, “It is above eight months. We have not met since the
+26th of November, when we were all dancing together at Netherfield.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was pleased to find his memory so exact; and he afterwards
+took occasion to ask her, when unattended to by any of the rest, whether
+<i>all</i> her sisters were at Longbourn. There was not much in the question,
+nor in the preceding remark; but there was a look and a manner which
+gave them meaning.</p>
+
+<p>It was not often that she could turn her eyes on Mr. Darcy himself; but
+whenever she did catch a glimpse she saw an expression of general
+complaisance, and in all that he said, she heard an accent so far
+removed from <i>hauteur</i> or disdain of his companions, as convinced her
+that the improvement of manners which she had yesterday witnessed,
+however temporary its existence might prove, had at least outlived one
+day. When she saw him thus seeking the acquaintance, and courting the
+good opinion of people with whom any intercourse a few months ago would
+have been a disgrace; when she saw<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_323">{323}</a></span> him thus civil, not only to herself,
+but to the very relations whom he had openly disdained, and recollected
+their last lively scene in Hunsford Parsonage, the difference, the
+change was so great, and struck so forcibly on her mind, that she could
+hardly restrain her astonishment from being visible. Never, even in the
+company of his dear friends at Netherfield, or his dignified relations
+at Rosings, had she seen him so desirous to please, so free from
+self-consequence or unbending reserve, as now, when no importance could
+result from the success of his endeavours, and when even the
+acquaintance of those to whom his attentions were addressed, would draw
+down the ridicule and censure of the ladies both of Netherfield and
+Rosings.</p>
+
+<p>Their visitors stayed with them above half an hour; and when they arose
+to depart, Mr. Darcy called on his sister to join him in expressing
+their wish of seeing Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, and Miss Bennet, to dinner
+at Pemberley, before they left the country. Miss Darcy, though with a
+diffidence which marked her little in the habit of giving invitations,
+readily obeyed. Mrs. Gardiner looked at her niece, desirous of knowing
+how <i>she</i>, whom the invitation most concerned, felt disposed as to its
+acceptance, but Elizabeth had turned away her head. Presuming, however,
+that this studied avoidance spoke rather a momentary embarrassment than
+any dislike of the proposal, and seeing in her husband, who was fond of
+society, a perfect willingness to accept it, she ventured to engage for
+her attendance, and the day after the next was fixed on.</p>
+
+<p>Bingley expressed great pleasure in the certainty of seeing Elizabeth
+again, having still a great deal to say to her, and many inquiries to
+make after all their Hertfordshire friends. Elizabeth, construing all
+this into a wish<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_324">{324}</a></span> of hearing her speak of her sister, was pleased; and
+on this account, as well as some others, found herself, when their
+visitors left them, capable of considering the last half hour with some
+satisfaction, though while it was passing the enjoyment of it had been
+little. Eager to be alone, and fearful of inquiries or hints from her
+uncle and aunt, she stayed with them only long enough to hear their
+favourable opinion of Bingley, and then hurried away to dress.</p>
+
+<p>But she had no reason to fear Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner’s curiosity; it was
+not their wish to force her communication. It was evident that she was
+much better acquainted with Mr. Darcy than they had before any idea of;
+it was evident that he was very much in love with her. They saw much to
+interest, but nothing to justify inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>Of Mr. Darcy it was now a matter of anxiety to think well; and, as far
+as their acquaintance reached, there was no fault to find. They could
+not be untouched by his politeness; and had they drawn his character
+from their own feelings and his servant’s report, without any reference
+to any other account, the circle in Hertfordshire to which he was known
+would not have recognized it for Mr. Darcy. There was now an interest,
+however, in believing the housekeeper; and they soon became sensible
+that the authority of a servant, who had known him since he was four
+years old, and whose own manners indicated respectability, was not to be
+hastily rejected. Neither had anything occurred in the intelligence of
+their Lambton friends that could materially lessen its weight. They had
+nothing to accuse him of but pride; pride he probably had, and if not,
+it would certainly be imputed by the inhabitants of a small market town<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_325">{325}</a></span>
+where the family did not visit. It was acknowledged, however, that he
+was a liberal man, and did much good among the poor.</p>
+
+<p>With respect to Wickham, the travellers soon found that he was not held
+there in much estimation; for though the chief of his concerns with the
+son of his patron were imperfectly understood, it was yet a well-known
+fact that, on his quitting Derbyshire, he had left many debts behind
+him, which Mr. Darcy afterwards discharged.</p>
+
+<p>As for Elizabeth, her thoughts were at Pemberley this evening more than
+the last; and the evening, though as it passed it seemed long, was not
+long enough to determine her feelings towards <i>one</i> in that mansion; and
+she lay awake two whole hours, endeavouring to make them out. She
+certainly did not hate him. No; hatred had vanished long ago, and she
+had almost as long been ashamed of ever feeling a dislike against him,
+that could be so called. The respect created by the conviction of his
+valuable qualities, though at first unwillingly admitted, had for some
+time ceased to be repugnant to her feelings; and it was now heightened
+into somewhat of a friendlier nature by the testimony so highly in his
+favour, and bringing forward his disposition in so amiable a light,
+which yesterday had produced. But above all, above respect and esteem,
+there was a motive within her of good-will which could not be
+overlooked. It was gratitude;—gratitude, not merely for having once
+loved her, but for loving her still well enough to forgive all the
+petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the
+unjust accusations accompanying her rejection. He who, she had been
+persuaded, would avoid her as his greatest enemy, seemed, on this
+accidental<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_326">{326}</a></span> meeting, most eager to preserve the acquaintance; and
+without any indelicate display of regard, or any peculiarity of manner,
+where their two selves only were concerned, was soliciting the good
+opinion of her friends, and bent on making her known to his sister. Such
+a change in a man of so much pride excited not only astonishment but
+gratitude—for to love, ardent love, it must be attributed; and, as
+such, its impression on her was of a sort to be encouraged, as by no
+means unpleasing, though it could not be exactly defined. She respected,
+she esteemed, she was grateful to him, she felt a real interest in his
+welfare; and she only wanted to know how far she wished that welfare to
+depend upon herself, and how far it would be for the happiness of both
+that she should employ the power, which her fancy told her she still
+possessed, of bringing on the renewal of his addresses.</p>
+
+<p>It had been settled in the evening, between the aunt and niece, that
+such a striking civility as Miss Darcy’s, in coming to them on the very
+day of her arrival at Pemberley—for she had reached it only to a late
+breakfast—ought to be imitated, though it could not be equalled, by
+some exertion of politeness on their side; and, consequently, that it
+would be highly expedient to wait on her at Pemberley the following
+morning. They were, therefore, to go. Elizabeth was pleased; though when
+she asked herself the reason, she had very little to say in reply.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gardiner left them soon after breakfast. The fishing scheme had been
+renewed the day before, and a positive engagement made of his meeting
+some of the gentlemen at Pemberley by noon.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_327">{327}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XLV"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_356_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_356_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“Engaged by the river.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XLV.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="C" src="images/i_356_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_356_b.png"></span>ONVINCED as Elizabeth now was that Miss Bingley’s dislike of her had
+originated in jealousy, she could not help feeling how very unwelcome
+her appearance at Pemberley must be to her, and was curious to know
+with<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_328">{328}</a></span> how much civility on that lady’s side the acquaintance would now
+be renewed.</p>
+
+<p>On reaching the house, they were shown through the hall into the saloon,
+whose northern aspect rendered it delightful for summer. Its windows,
+opening to the ground, admitted a most refreshing view of the high woody
+hills behind the house, and of the beautiful oaks and Spanish chestnuts
+which were scattered over the intermediate lawn.</p>
+
+<p>In this room they were received by Miss Darcy, who was sitting there
+with Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley, and the lady with whom she lived in
+London. Georgiana’s reception of them was very civil, but attended with
+all that embarrassment which, though proceeding from shyness and the
+fear of doing wrong, would easily give to those who felt themselves
+inferior the belief of her being proud and reserved. Mrs. Gardiner and
+her niece, however, did her justice, and pitied her.</p>
+
+<p>By Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley they were noticed only by a courtesy; and
+on their being seated, a pause, awkward as such pauses must always be,
+succeeded for a few moments. It was first broken by Mrs. Annesley, a
+genteel, agreeable-looking woman, whose endeavour to introduce some kind
+of discourse proved her to be more truly well-bred than either of the
+others; and between her and Mrs. Gardiner, with occasional help from
+Elizabeth, the conversation was carried on. Miss Darcy looked as if she
+wished for courage enough to join in it; and sometimes did venture a
+short sentence, when there was least danger of its being heard.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth soon saw that she was herself closely watched by Miss Bingley,
+and that she could not speak a word, especially to Miss Darcy, without
+calling her attention.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_329">{329}</a></span> This observation would not have prevented her
+from trying to talk to the latter, had they not been seated at an
+inconvenient distance; but she was not sorry to be spared the necessity
+of saying much: her own thoughts were employing her. She expected every
+moment that some of the gentlemen would enter the room: she wished, she
+feared, that the master of the house might be amongst them; and whether
+she wished or feared it most, she could scarcely determine. After
+sitting in this manner a quarter of an hour, without hearing Miss
+Bingley’s voice, Elizabeth was roused by receiving from her a cold
+inquiry after the health of her family. She answered with equal
+indifference and brevity, and the other said no more.</p>
+
+<p>The next variation which their visit afforded was produced by the
+entrance of servants with cold meat, cake, and a variety of all the
+finest fruits in season; but this did not take place till after many a
+significant look and smile from Mrs. Annesley to Miss Darcy had been
+given, to remind her of her post. There was now employment for the whole
+party; for though they could not all talk, they could all eat; and the
+beautiful pyramids of grapes, nectarines, and peaches, soon collected
+them round the table.</p>
+
+<p>While thus engaged, Elizabeth had a fair opportunity of deciding whether
+she most feared or wished for the appearance of Mr. Darcy, by the
+feelings which prevailed on his entering the room; and then, though but
+a moment before she had believed her wishes to predominate, she began to
+regret that he came.</p>
+
+<p>He had been some time with Mr. Gardiner, who, with two or three other
+gentlemen from the house, was engaged by the river; and had left him
+only on learning<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_330">{330}</a></span> that the ladies of the family intended a visit to
+Georgiana that morning. No sooner did he appear, than Elizabeth wisely
+resolved to be perfectly easy and unembarrassed;—a resolution the more
+necessary to be made, but perhaps not the more easily kept, because she
+saw that the suspicions of the whole party were awakened against them,
+and that there was scarcely an eye which did not watch his behaviour
+when he first came into the room. In no countenance was attentive
+curiosity so strongly marked as in Miss Bingley’s, in spite of the
+smiles which overspread her face whenever she spoke to one of its
+objects; for jealousy had not yet made her desperate, and her attentions
+to Mr. Darcy were by no means over. Miss Darcy, on her brother’s
+entrance, exerted herself much more to talk; and Elizabeth saw that he
+was anxious for his sister and herself to get acquainted, and forwarded,
+as much as possible, every attempt at conversation on either side. Miss
+Bingley saw all this likewise; and, in the imprudence of anger, took the
+first opportunity of saying, with sneering civility,—</p>
+
+<p>“Pray, Miss Eliza, are not the ——shire militia removed from Meryton?
+They must be a great loss to <i>your</i> family.”</p>
+
+<p>In Darcy’s presence she dared not mention Wickham’s name: but Elizabeth
+instantly comprehended that he was uppermost in her thoughts; and the
+various recollections connected with him gave her a moment’s distress;
+but, exerting herself vigorously to repel the ill-natured attack, she
+presently answered the question in a tolerably disengaged tone. While
+she spoke, an involuntary glance showed her Darcy with a heightened
+complexion, earnestly looking at her, and his sister overcome with
+confusion, and unable to lift up her eyes.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_331">{331}</a></span> Had Miss Bingley known what
+pain she was then giving her beloved friend, she undoubtedly would have
+refrained from the hint; but she had merely intended to discompose
+Elizabeth, by bringing forward the idea of a man to whom she believed
+her partial, to make her betray a sensibility which might injure her in
+Darcy’s opinion, and, perhaps, to remind the latter of all the follies
+and absurdities by which some part of her family were connected with
+that corps. Not a syllable had ever reached her of Miss Darcy’s
+meditated elopement. To no creature had it been revealed, where secrecy
+was possible, except to Elizabeth; and from all Bingley’s connections
+her brother was particularly anxious to conceal it, from that very wish
+which Elizabeth had long ago attributed to him, of their becoming
+hereafter her own. He had certainly formed such a plan; and without
+meaning that it should affect his endeavour to separate him from Miss
+Bennet, it is probable that it might add something to his lively concern
+for the welfare of his friend.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth’s collected behaviour, however, soon quieted his emotion; and
+as Miss Bingley, vexed and disappointed, dared not approach nearer to
+Wickham, Georgiana also recovered in time, though not enough to be able
+to speak any more. Her brother, whose eye she feared to meet, scarcely
+recollected her interest in the affair; and the very circumstance which
+had been designed to turn his thoughts from Elizabeth, seemed to have
+fixed them on her more and more cheerfully.</p>
+
+<p>Their visit did not continue long after the question and answer above
+mentioned; and while Mr. Darcy was attending them to their carriage,
+Miss Bingley was venting her feelings in criticisms on Elizabet<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_332">{332}</a></span>h’s
+person, behaviour, and dress. But Georgiana would not join her. Her
+brother’s recommendation was enough to insure her favour: his judgment
+could not err; and he had spoken in such terms of Elizabeth, as to leave
+Georgiana without the power of finding her otherwise than lovely and
+amiable. When Darcy returned to the saloon, Miss Bingley could not help
+repeating to him some part of what she had been saying to his sister.</p>
+
+<p>“How very ill Eliza Bennet looks this morning, Mr. Darcy,” she cried: “I
+never in my life saw anyone so much altered as she is since the winter.
+She is grown so brown and coarse! Louisa and I were agreeing that we
+should not have known her again.”</p>
+
+<p>However little Mr. Darcy might have liked such an address, he contented
+himself with coolly replying, that he perceived no other alteration than
+her being rather tanned,—no miraculous consequence of travelling in the
+summer.</p>
+
+<p>“For my own part,” she rejoined, “I must confess that I never could see
+any beauty in her. Her face is too thin; her complexion has no
+brilliancy; and her features are not at all handsome. Her nose wants
+character; there is nothing marked in its lines. Her teeth are
+tolerable, but not out of the common way; and as for her eyes, which
+have sometimes been called so fine, I never could perceive anything
+extraordinary in them. They have a sharp, shrewish look, which I do not
+like at all; and in her air altogether, there is a self-sufficiency
+without fashion, which is intolerable.”</p>
+
+<p>Persuaded as Miss Bingley was that Darcy admired Elizabeth, this was not
+the best method of recommending herself; but angry people are not always
+wise; and in seeing him at last look somewhat nettled, she had all<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_333">{333}</a></span> the
+success she expected. He was resolutely silent, however; and, from a
+determination of making him speak, she continued,—</p>
+
+<p>“I remember, when we first knew her in Hertfordshire, how amazed we all
+were to find that she was a reputed beauty; and I particularly recollect
+your saying one night, after they had been dining at Netherfield, ‘<i>She</i>
+a beauty! I should as soon call her mother a wit.’ But afterwards she
+seemed to improve on you, and I believe you thought her rather pretty at
+one time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” replied Darcy, who could contain himself no longer, “but <i>that</i>
+was only when I first knew her; for it is many months since I have
+considered her as one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance.”</p>
+
+<p>He then went away, and Miss Bingley was left to all the satisfaction of
+having forced him to say what gave no one any pain but herself.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gardiner and Elizabeth talked of all that had occurred during their
+visit, as they returned, except what had particularly interested them
+both. The looks and behaviour of everybody they had seen were discussed,
+except of the person who had mostly engaged their attention. They talked
+of his sister, his friends, his house, his fruit, of everything but
+himself; yet Elizabeth was longing to know what Mrs. Gardiner thought of
+him, and Mrs. Gardiner would have been highly gratified by her niece’s
+beginning the subject.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_334">{334}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XLVI"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_363_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_363_a.jpg">
+<br><br>Chapter XLVI.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind">
+<span class="letra"><img alt="E" src="images/i_363_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_363_b.png"></span>LIZABETH had been a good deal disappointed in not finding a letter from
+Jane on their first arrival at Lambton; and this disappointment had been
+renewed on each of the mornings that had now been spent there; but on
+the third her repining was over, and her sister justified, by the
+receipt of two letters from her at once, on one of which was marked that
+it had been mis-sent elsewhere. Elizabeth was not surprised at it, as
+Jane had written the direction remarkably ill.</p>
+
+<p>They had just been preparing to walk as the letters came in; and her
+uncle and aunt, leaving her to enjoy them in quiet, set off by
+themselves. The one mis-sent must be first attended to; it had been
+written five days ago. The beginning contained an account of all their
+little parties and engagements, with such news as the country afforded;
+but the latter half, which was dated a day later, and written in evident
+agitation, gave more important intelligence. It was to this effect:—</p>
+
+<p>“Since writing the above, dearest Lizzy, something has occurred of a
+most unexpected and serious nature; but I am afraid of alarming you—be
+assured that we are all<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_335">{335}</a></span> well. What I have to say relates to poor Lydia.
+An express came at twelve last night, just as we were all gone to bed,
+from Colonel Forster, to inform us that she was gone off to Scotland
+with one of his officers; to own the truth, with Wickham! Imagine our
+surprise. To Kitty, however, it does not seem so wholly unexpected. I am
+very, very sorry. So imprudent a match on both sides! But I am willing
+to hope the best, and that his character has been misunderstood.
+Thoughtless and indiscreet I can easily believe him, but this step (and
+let us rejoice over it) marks nothing bad at heart. His choice is
+disinterested at least, for he must know my father can give her nothing.
+Our poor mother is sadly grieved. My father bears it better. How
+thankful am I, that we never let them know what has been said against
+him; we must forget it ourselves. They were off Saturday night about
+twelve, as is conjectured, but were not missed till yesterday morning at
+eight. The express was sent off directly. My dear Lizzy, they must have
+passed within ten miles of us. Colonel Forster gives us reason to expect
+him here soon. Lydia left a few lines for his wife, informing her of
+their intention. I must conclude, for I cannot be long from my poor
+mother. I am afraid you will not be able to make it out, but I hardly
+know what I have written.”</p>
+
+<p>Without allowing herself time for consideration, and scarcely knowing
+what she felt, Elizabeth, on finishing this letter, instantly seized the
+other, and opening it with the utmost impatience, read as follows: it
+had been written a day later than the conclusion of the first.</p>
+
+<p>“By this time, my dearest sister, you have received my hurried letter; I
+wish this may be more intelligible, but though not confined for time, my
+head is so bewildered that I cannot answer for being coherent. Dearest
+Lizzy,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_336">{336}</a></span> I hardly know what I would write, but I have bad news for you,
+and it cannot be delayed. Imprudent as a marriage between Mr. Wickham
+and our poor Lydia would be, we are now anxious to be assured it has
+taken place, for there is but too much reason to fear they are not gone
+to Scotland. Colonel Forster came yesterday, having left Brighton the
+day before, not many hours after the express. Though Lydia’s short
+letter to Mrs. F. gave them to understand that they were going to Gretna
+Green, something was dropped by Denny expressing his belief that W.
+never intended to go there, or to marry Lydia at all, which was repeated
+to Colonel F., who, instantly taking the alarm, set off from B.,
+intending to trace their route. He did trace them easily to Clapham, but
+no farther; for on entering that place, they removed into a
+hackney-coach, and dismissed the chaise that brought them from Epsom.
+All that is known after this is, that they were seen to continue the
+London road. I know not what to think. After making every possible
+inquiry on that side of London, Colonel F. came on into Hertfordshire,
+anxiously renewing them at all the turnpikes, and at the inns in Barnet
+and Hatfield, but without any success,—no such people had been seen to
+pass through. With the kindest concern he came on to Longbourn, and
+broke his apprehensions to us in a manner most creditable to his heart.
+I am sincerely grieved for him and Mrs. F.; but no one can throw any
+blame on them. Our distress, my dear Lizzy, is very great. My father and
+mother believe the worst, but I cannot think so ill of him. Many
+circumstances might make it more eligible for them to be married
+privately in town than to pursue their first plan; and even if <i>he</i>
+could form such a design against a young woman of Lydi<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_337">{337}</a></span>a’s connections,
+which is not likely, can I suppose her so lost to everything?
+Impossible! I grieve to find, however, that Colonel F. is not disposed
+to depend upon their marriage: he shook his head when I expressed my
+hopes, and said he feared W. was not a man to be trusted. My poor mother
+is really ill, and keeps her room. Could she exert herself, it would be
+better, but this is not to be expected; and as to my father, I never in
+my life saw him so affected. Poor Kitty has anger for having concealed
+their attachment; but as it was a matter of confidence, one cannot
+wonder. I am truly glad, dearest Lizzy, that you have been spared
+something of these distressing scenes; but now, as the first shock is
+over, shall I own that I long for your return? I am not so selfish,
+however, as to press for it, if inconvenient. Adieu! I take up my pen
+again to do, what I have just told you I would not; but circumstances
+are such, that I cannot help earnestly begging you all to come here as
+soon as possible. I know my dear uncle and aunt so well, that I am not
+afraid of requesting it, though I have still something more to ask of
+the former. My father is going to London with Colonel Forster instantly,
+to try to discover her. What he means to do, I am sure I know not; but
+his excessive distress will not allow him to pursue any measure in the
+best and safest way, and Colonel Forster is obliged to be at Brighton
+again to-morrow evening. In such an exigence my uncle’s advice and
+assistance would be everything in the world; he will immediately
+comprehend what I must feel, and I rely upon his goodness.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! where, where is my uncle?” cried Elizabeth, darting from her seat
+as she finished the letter, in eagerness to follow him, without losing a
+moment of the time so precious; but as she reached the door, it was
+opened<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_338">{338}</a></span> by a servant, and Mr. Darcy appeared. Her pale face and
+impetuous manner made him start, and before he could recover himself
+enough to speak, she, in whose mind every idea was superseded by Lydia’s
+situation, hastily exclaimed, “I beg your pardon, but I must leave you.
+I must find Mr. Gardiner this moment on business that cannot be delayed;
+I have not an instant to lose.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good God! what is the matter?” cried he, with more feeling than
+politeness; then recollecting himself, “I will not detain you a minute;
+but let me, or let the servant, go after Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. You are
+not well enough; you cannot go yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth hesitated; but her knees trembled under her, and she felt how
+little would be gained by her attempting to pursue them. Calling back
+the servant, therefore, she commissioned him, though in so breathless an
+accent as made her almost unintelligible, to fetch his master and
+mistress home instantly.</p>
+
+<p>On his quitting the room, she sat down, unable to support herself, and
+looking so miserably ill, that it was impossible for Darcy to leave her,
+or to refrain from saying, in a tone of gentleness and commiseration,
+“Let me call your maid. Is there nothing you could take to give you
+present relief? A glass of wine; shall I get you one? You are very ill.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, I thank you,” she replied, endeavouring to recover herself. “There
+is nothing the matter with me. I am quite well, I am only distressed by
+some dreadful news which I have just received from Longbourn.”</p>
+
+<p>She burst into tears as she alluded to it, and for a few minutes could
+not speak another word. Darcy, in wretched suspense, could only say
+something indistinctly of his<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_339">{339}</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 442px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption28">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_368.jpg" width="442" id="img_images_i_368.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption28">
+<p>“I have not an instant to lose”</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">concern, and observe her in compassionate silence. At length she spoke
+again. “I have just had a letter from Jane, with such dreadful news. It
+cannot be concealed from anyone. My youngest sister has left all her
+friends—has eloped; has thrown herself into the power of—of Mr.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_340">{340}</a></span>
+Wickham. They are gone off together from Brighton. <i>You</i> know him too
+well to doubt the rest. She has no money, no connections, nothing that
+can tempt him to—she is lost for ever.”</p>
+
+<p>Darcy was fixed in astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>“When I consider,” she added, in a yet more agitated voice, “that <i>I</i>
+might have prevented it! <i>I</i> who knew what he was. Had I but explained
+some part of it only—some part of what I learnt, to my own family! Had
+his character been known, this could not have happened. But it is all,
+all too late now.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am grieved, indeed,” cried Darcy: “grieved—shocked. But is it
+certain, absolutely certain?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes! They left Brighton together on Sunday night, and were traced
+almost to London, but not beyond: they are certainly not gone to
+Scotland.”</p>
+
+<p>“And what has been done, what has been attempted, to recover her?”</p>
+
+<p>“My father has gone to London, and Jane has written to beg my uncle’s
+immediate assistance, and we shall be off, I hope, in half an hour. But
+nothing can be done; I know very well that nothing can be done. How is
+such a man to be worked on? How are they even to be discovered? I have
+not the smallest hope. It is every way horrible!”</p>
+
+<p>Darcy shook his head in silent acquiescence.</p>
+
+<p>“When <i>my</i> eyes were opened to his real character, oh! had I known what
+I ought, what I dared to do! But I knew not—I was afraid of doing too
+much. Wretched, wretched mistake!”</p>
+
+<p>Darcy made no answer. He seemed scarcely to hear her, and was walking up
+and down the room in earnest meditation; his brow contracted, his air
+gloomy.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_341">{341}</a></span> Elizabeth soon observed, and instantly understood it. Her power
+was sinking; everything <i>must</i> sink under such a proof of family
+weakness, such an assurance of the deepest disgrace. She could neither
+wonder nor condemn; but the belief of his self-conquest brought nothing
+consolatory to her bosom, afforded no palliation of her distress. It
+was, on the contrary, exactly calculated to make her understand her own
+wishes; and never had she so honestly felt that she could have loved
+him, as now, when all love must be vain.</p>
+
+<p>But self, though it would intrude, could not engross her. Lydia—the
+humiliation, the misery she was bringing on them all—soon swallowed up
+every private care; and covering her face with her handkerchief,
+Elizabeth was soon lost to everything else; and, after a pause of
+several minutes, was only recalled to a sense of her situation by the
+voice of her companion, who, in a manner which, though it spoke
+compassion, spoke likewise restraint, said,—</p>
+
+<p>“I am afraid you have been long desiring my absence, nor have I anything
+to plead in excuse of my stay, but real, though unavailing concern.
+Would to Heaven that anything could be either said or done on my part,
+that might offer consolation to such distress! But I will not torment
+you with vain wishes, which may seem purposely to ask for your thanks.
+This unfortunate affair will, I fear, prevent my sister’s having the
+pleasure of seeing you at Pemberley to-day.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes! Be so kind as to apologize for us to Miss Darcy. Say that
+urgent business calls us home immediately. Conceal the unhappy truth as
+long as it is possible. I know it cannot be long.”</p>
+
+<p>He readily assured her of his secrecy, again expressed<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_342">{342}</a></span> his sorrow for
+her distress, wished it a happier conclusion than there was at present
+reason to hope, and, leaving his compliments for her relations, with
+only one serious parting look, went away.</p>
+
+<p>As he quitted the room, Elizabeth felt how improbable it was that they
+should ever see each other again on such terms of cordiality as had
+marked their several meetings in Derbyshire; and as she threw a
+retrospective glance over the whole of their acquaintance, so full of
+contradictions and varieties, sighed at the perverseness of those
+feelings which would now have promoted its continuance, and would
+formerly have rejoiced in its termination.</p>
+
+<p>If gratitude and esteem are good foundations of affection, Elizabeth’s
+change of sentiment will be neither improbable nor faulty. But if
+otherwise, if the regard springing from such sources is unreasonable or
+unnatural, in comparison of what is so often described as arising on a
+first interview with its object, and even before two words have been
+exchanged, nothing can be said in her defence, except that she had given
+somewhat of a trial to the latter method, in her partiality for Wickham,
+and that its ill success might, perhaps, authorize her to seek the other
+less interesting mode of attachment. Be that as it may, she saw him go
+with regret; and in this early example of what Lydia’s infamy must
+produce, found additional anguish as she reflected on that wretched
+business. Never since reading Jane’s second letter had she entertained a
+hope of Wickham’s meaning to marry her. No one but Jane, she thought,
+could flatter herself with such an expectation. Surprise was the least
+of all her feelings on this development. While the contents of the first
+letter remained on her mind, she was all surprise,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_343">{343}</a></span> all astonishment,
+that Wickham should marry a girl whom it was impossible he could marry
+for money; and how Lydia could ever have attached him had appeared
+incomprehensible. But now it was all too natural. For such an attachment
+as this, she might have sufficient charms; and though she did not
+suppose Lydia to be deliberately engaging in an elopement, without the
+intention of marriage, she had no difficulty in believing that neither
+her virtue nor her understanding would preserve her from falling an easy
+prey.</p>
+
+<p>She had never perceived, while the regiment was in Hertfordshire, that
+Lydia had any partiality for him; but she was convinced that Lydia had
+wanted only encouragement to attach herself to anybody. Sometimes one
+officer, sometimes another, had been her favourite, as their attentions
+raised them in her opinion. Her affections had been continually
+fluctuating, but never without an object. The mischief of neglect and
+mistaken indulgence towards such a girl—oh! how acutely did she now
+feel it!</p>
+
+<p>She was wild to be at home—to hear, to see, to be upon the spot to
+share with Jane in the cares that must now fall wholly upon her, in a
+family so deranged; a father absent, a mother incapable of exertion, and
+requiring constant attendance; and though almost persuaded that nothing
+could be done for Lydia, her uncle’s interference seemed of the utmost
+importance, and till he entered the room the misery of her impatience
+was severe. Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner had hurried back in alarm, supposing,
+by the servant’s account, that their niece was taken suddenly ill; but
+satisfying them instantly on that head, she eagerly communicated the
+cause of their summons, reading the two letters aloud,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_344">{344}</a></span> and dwelling on
+the postscript of the last with trembling energy. Though Lydia had never
+been a favourite with them, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner could not but be
+deeply affected. Not Lydia only, but all were concerned in it; and after
+the first exclamations of surprise and horror, Mr. Gardiner readily
+promised every assistance in his power. Elizabeth, though expecting no
+less, thanked him with tears of gratitude; and all three being actuated
+by one spirit, everything relating to their journey was speedily
+settled. They were to be off as soon as possible. “But what is to be
+done about Pemberley?” cried Mrs. Gardiner. “John told us Mr. Darcy was
+here when you sent for us;—was it so?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; and I told him we should not be able to keep our engagement.
+<i>That</i> is all settled.”</p>
+
+<p>“What is all settled?” repeated the other, as she ran into her room to
+prepare. “And are they upon such terms as for her to disclose the real
+truth? Oh, that I knew how it was!”</p>
+
+<p>But wishes were vain; or, at best, could serve only to amuse her in the
+hurry and confusion of the following hour. Had Elizabeth been at leisure
+to be idle, she would have remained certain that all employment was
+impossible to one so wretched as herself; but she had her share of
+business as well as her aunt, and amongst the rest there were notes to
+be written to all their friends at Lambton, with false excuses for their
+sudden departure. An hour, however, saw the whole completed; and Mr.
+Gardiner, meanwhile, having settled his account at the inn, nothing
+remained to be done but to go; and Elizabeth, after all the misery of
+the morning, found herself, in a shorter space of time than she could
+have supposed, seated in the carriage, and on the road to Longbourn.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_345">{345}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XLVII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_374_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_374_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“The first pleasing earnest of their welcome.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XLVII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+“<img alt="I" src="images/i_374_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_374_b.png"></span> HAVE been thinking it over again, Elizabeth,” said her uncle, as they
+drove from the town; “and really, upon serious consideration, I am much
+more inclined than I was to judge as your eldest sister does of the
+matter. It appears to me so very unlikely that any young man should form
+such a design against a girl who is by no means unprotected or
+friendless, and who was actually staying in his Colonel’s family, that I
+am strongly inclined to hope the best. Could he expect that her friends
+would not step forward? Could he expect to be noticed again by the
+regiment, after such an affront to Colonel Forster? His temptation is
+not adequate to the risk.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_346">{346}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you really think so?” cried Elizabeth, brightening up for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>“Upon my word,” said Mrs. Gardiner, “I begin to be of your uncle’s
+opinion. It is really too great a violation of decency, honour, and
+interest, for him to be guilty of it. I cannot think so very ill of
+Wickham. Can you, yourself, Lizzie, so wholly give him up, as to believe
+him capable of it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not perhaps of neglecting his own interest. But of every other neglect
+I can believe him capable. If, indeed, it should be so! But I dare not
+hope it. Why should they not go on to Scotland, if that had been the
+case?”</p>
+
+<p>“In the first place,” replied Mr. Gardiner, “there is no absolute proof
+that they are not gone to Scotland.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, but their removing from the chaise into a hackney coach is such a
+presumption! And, besides, no traces of them were to be found on the
+Barnet road.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then,—supposing them to be in London—they may be there, though
+for the purpose of concealment, for no more exceptionable purpose. It is
+not likely that money should be very abundant on either side; and it
+might strike them that they could be more economically, though less
+expeditiously, married in London, than in Scotland.”</p>
+
+<p>“But why all this secrecy? Why any fear of detection? Why must their
+marriage be private? Oh, no, no—this is not likely. His most particular
+friend, you see by Jane’s account, was persuaded of his never intending
+to marry her. Wickham will never marry a woman without some money. He
+cannot afford it. And what claims has Lydia, what attractions has she
+beyond youth, health, and good humour, that could make him for her sake<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_347">{347}</a></span>
+forego every chance of benefiting himself by marrying well? As to what
+restraint the apprehensions of disgrace in the corps might throw on a
+dishonourable elopement with her, I am not able to judge; for I know
+nothing of the effects that such a step might produce. But as to your
+other objection, I am afraid it will hardly hold good. Lydia has no
+brothers to step forward; and he might imagine, from my father’s
+behaviour, from his indolence and the little attention he has ever
+seemed to give to what was going forward in his family, that <i>he</i> would
+do as little and think as little about it, as any father could do, in
+such a matter.”</p>
+
+<p>“But can you think that Lydia is so lost to everything but love of him,
+as to consent to live with him on any other terms than marriage?”</p>
+
+<p>“It does seem, and it is most shocking, indeed,” replied Elizabeth, with
+tears in her eyes, “that a sister’s sense of decency and virtue in such
+a point should admit of doubt. But, really, I know not what to say.
+Perhaps I am not doing her justice. But she is very young: she has never
+been taught to think on serious subjects; and for the last half year,
+nay, for a twelvemonth, she has been given up to nothing but amusement
+and vanity. She has been allowed to dispose of her time in the most idle
+and frivolous manner, and to adopt any opinions that came in her way.
+Since the ——shire were first quartered in Meryton, nothing but love,
+flirtation, and officers, have been in her head. She has been doing
+everything in her power, by thinking and talking on the subject, to give
+greater—what shall I call it?—susceptibility to her feelings; which
+are naturally lively enough. And we all know that Wickham has every
+charm of person and address that can captivate a woman.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_348">{348}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“But you see that Jane,” said her aunt, “does not think so ill of
+Wickham, as to believe him capable of the attempt.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of whom does Jane ever think ill? And who is there, whatever might be
+their former conduct, that she would believe capable of such an attempt,
+till it were proved against them? But Jane knows, as well as I do, what
+Wickham really is. We both know that he has been profligate in every
+sense of the word; that he has neither integrity nor honour; that he is
+as false and deceitful as he is insinuating.”</p>
+
+<p>“And do you really know all this?” cried Mrs. Gardiner, whose curiosity
+as to the mode of her intelligence was all alive.</p>
+
+<p>“I do, indeed,” replied Elizabeth, colouring. “I told you the other day
+of his infamous behaviour to Mr. Darcy; and you, yourself, when last at
+Longbourn, heard in what manner he spoke of the man who had behaved with
+such forbearance and liberality towards him. And there are other
+circumstances which I am not at liberty—which it is not worth while to
+relate; but his lies about the whole Pemberley family are endless. From
+what he said of Miss Darcy, I was thoroughly prepared to see a proud,
+reserved, disagreeable girl. Yet he knew to the contrary himself. He
+must know that she was as amiable and unpretending as we have found
+her.”</p>
+
+<p>“But does Lydia know nothing of this? can she be ignorant of what you
+and Jane seem so well to understand?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes!—that, that is the worst of all. Till I was in Kent, and saw
+so much both of Mr. Darcy and his relation Colonel Fitzwilliam, I was
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_349">{349}</a></span>ignorant of the truth myself. And when I returned home the ——shire
+was to leave Meryton in a week or fortnight’s time. As that was the
+case, neither Jane, to whom I related the whole, nor I, thought it
+necessary to make our knowledge public; for of what use could it
+apparently be to anyone, that the good opinion, which all the
+neighbourhood had of him, should then be overthrown? And even when it
+was settled that Lydia should go with Mrs. Forster, the necessity of
+opening her eyes to his character never occurred to me. That <i>she</i> could
+be in any danger from the deception never entered my head. That such a
+consequence as <i>this</i> should ensue, you may easily believe was far
+enough from my thoughts.”</p>
+
+<p>“When they all removed to Brighton, therefore, you had no reason, I
+suppose, to believe them fond of each other?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not the slightest. I can remember no symptom of affection on either
+side; and had anything of the kind been perceptible, you must be aware
+that ours is not a family on which it could be thrown away. When first
+he entered the corps, she was ready enough to admire him; but so we all
+were. Every girl in or near Meryton was out of her senses about him for
+the first two months: but he never distinguished <i>her</i> by any particular
+attention; and, consequently, after a moderate period of extravagant and
+wild admiration, her fancy for him gave way, and others of the regiment,
+who treated her with more distinction, again became her favourites.”</p>
+
+<p>It may be easily believed, that however little of novelty could be added
+to their fears, hopes, and conjectures, on this interesting subject by
+its repeated discussion, no other could detain them from it long, during
+the whole of the journey. From Elizabeth’s thoughts it was never absent.
+Fixed there by the keenest of all anguish,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_350">{350}</a></span> self-reproach, she could
+find no interval of ease or forgetfulness.</p>
+
+<p>They travelled as expeditiously as possible; and sleeping one night on
+the road, reached Longbourn by dinnertime the next day. It was a comfort
+to Elizabeth to consider that Jane could not have been wearied by long
+expectations.</p>
+
+<p>The little Gardiners, attracted by the sight of a chaise, were standing
+on the steps of the house, as they entered the paddock; and when the
+carriage drove up to the door, the joyful surprise that lighted up their
+faces and displayed itself over their whole bodies, in a variety of
+capers and frisks, was the first pleasing earnest of their welcome.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth jumped out; and after giving each of them a hasty kiss,
+hurried into the vestibule, where Jane, who came running downstairs from
+her mother’s apartment, immediately met her.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth, as she affectionately embraced her, whilst tears filled the
+eyes of both, lost not a moment in asking whether anything had been
+heard of the fugitives.</p>
+
+<p>“Not yet,” replied Jane. “But now that my dear uncle is come, I hope
+everything will be well.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is my father in town?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, he went on Tuesday, as I wrote you word.”</p>
+
+<p>“And have you heard from him often?”</p>
+
+<p>“We have heard only once. He wrote me a few lines on Wednesday, to say
+that he had arrived in safety, and to give me his directions, which I
+particularly begged him to do. He merely added, that he should not write
+again, till he had something of importance to mention.”</p>
+
+<p>“And my mother—how is she? How are you all?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_351">{351}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“My mother is tolerably well, I trust; though her spirits are greatly
+shaken. She is upstairs, and will have great satisfaction in seeing you
+all. She does not yet leave her dressing-room. Mary and Kitty, thank
+Heaven! are quite well.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you—how are you?” cried Elizabeth. “You look pale. How much you
+must have gone through!”</p>
+
+<p>Her sister, however, assured her of her being perfectly well; and their
+conversation, which had been passing while Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner were
+engaged with their children, was now put an end to by the approach of
+the whole party. Jane ran to her uncle and aunt, and welcomed and
+thanked them both, with alternate smiles and tears.</p>
+
+<p>When they were all in the drawing-room, the questions which Elizabeth
+had already asked were of course repeated by the others, and they soon
+found that Jane had no intelligence to give. The sanguine hope of good,
+however, which the benevolence of her heart suggested, had not yet
+deserted her; she still expected that it would all end well, and that
+every morning would bring some letter, either from Lydia or her father,
+to explain their proceedings, and, perhaps, announce the marriage.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet, to whose apartment they all repaired, after a few minutes’
+conversation together, received them exactly as might be expected; with
+tears and lamentations of regret, invectives against the villainous
+conduct of Wickham, and complaints of her own sufferings and ill-usage;
+blaming everybody but the person to whose ill-judging indulgence the
+errors of her daughter must be principally owing.</p>
+
+<p>“If I had been able,” said she, “to carry my point in going to Brighton
+with all my family, <i>this</i> would not<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_352">{352}</a></span> have happened: but poor dear Lydia
+had nobody to take care of her. Why did the Forsters ever let her go out
+of their sight? I am sure there was some great neglect or other on their
+side, for she is not the kind of girl to do such a thing, if she had
+been well looked after. I always thought they were very unfit to have
+the charge of her; but I was over-ruled, as I always am. Poor, dear
+child! And now here’s Mr. Bennet gone away, and I know he will fight
+Wickham, wherever he meets him, and then he will be killed, and what is
+to become of us all? The Collinses will turn us out, before he is cold
+in his grave; and if you are not kind to us, brother, I do not know what
+we shall do.”</p>
+
+<p>They all exclaimed against such terrific ideas; and Mr. Gardiner, after
+general assurances of his affection for her and all her family, told her
+that he meant to be in London the very next day, and would assist Mr.
+Bennet in every endeavour for recovering Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>“Do not give way to useless alarm,” added he: “though it is right to be
+prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look on it as certain.
+It is not quite a week since they left Brighton. In a few days more, we
+may gain some news of them; and till we know that they are not married,
+and have no design of marrying, do not let us give the matter over as
+lost. As soon as I get to town, I shall go to my brother, and make him
+come home with me to Gracechurch Street, and then we may consult
+together as to what is to be done.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, my dear brother,” replied Mrs. Bennet, “that is exactly what I
+could most wish for. And now do, when you get to town, find them out,
+wherever they may be; and if they are not married already, <i>make</i> them
+marry. And as for wedding clothes, do not let them wait for that,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_353">{353}</a></span> but
+tell Lydia she shall have as much money as she chooses to buy them,
+after they are married. And, above all things, keep Mr. Bennet from
+fighting. Tell him what a dreadful state I am in—that I am frightened
+out of my wits; and have such tremblings, such flutterings all over me,
+such spasms in my side, and pains in my head, and such beatings at my
+heart, that I can get no rest by night nor by day. And tell my dear
+Lydia not to give any directions about her clothes till she has seen me,
+for she does not know which are the best warehouses. Oh, brother, how
+kind you are! I know you will contrive it all.”</p>
+
+<p>But Mr. Gardiner, though he assured her again of his earnest endeavours
+in the cause, could not avoid recommending moderation to her, as well in
+her hopes as her fears; and after talking with her in this manner till
+dinner was on table, they left her to vent all her feelings on the
+housekeeper, who attended in the absence of her daughters.</p>
+
+<p>Though her brother and sister were persuaded that there was no real
+occasion for such a seclusion from the family, they did not attempt to
+oppose it; for they knew that she had not prudence enough to hold her
+tongue before the servants, while they waited at table, and judged it
+better that <i>one</i> only of the household, and the one whom they could
+most trust, should comprehend all her fears and solicitude on the
+subject.</p>
+
+<p>In the dining-room they were soon joined by Mary and Kitty, who had been
+too busily engaged in their separate apartments to make their appearance
+before. One came from her books, and the other from her toilette. The
+faces of both, however, were tolerably calm; and no change was visible
+in either, except that the loss of her<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_354">{354}</a></span> favourite sister, or the anger
+which she had herself incurred in the business, had given something more
+of fretfulness than usual to the accents of Kitty. As for Mary, she was
+mistress enough of herself to whisper to Elizabeth, with a countenance
+of grave reflection, soon after they were seated at table,—</p>
+
+<p>“This is a most unfortunate affair, and will probably be much talked of.
+But we must stem the tide of malice, and pour into the wounded bosoms of
+each other the balm of sisterly consolation.”</p>
+
+<p>Then perceiving in Elizabeth no inclination of replying, she added,
+“Unhappy as the event must be for Lydia, we may draw from it this useful
+lesson:—that loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable, that one
+false step involves her in endless ruin, that her reputation is no less
+brittle than it is beautiful, and that she cannot be too much guarded in
+her behaviour towards the undeserving of the other sex.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth lifted up her eyes in amazement, but was too much oppressed to
+make any reply. Mary, however, continued to console herself with such
+kind of moral extractions from the evil before them.</p>
+
+<p>In the afternoon, the two elder Miss Bennets were able to be for half an
+hour by themselves; and Elizabeth instantly availed herself of the
+opportunity of making any inquiries which Jane was equally eager to
+satisfy. After joining in general lamentations over the dreadful sequel
+of this event, which Elizabeth considered as all but certain, and Miss
+Bennet could not assert to be wholly impossible, the former continued
+the subject by saying, “But tell me all and everything about it which I
+have not already heard. Give me further particulars. What did Colonel
+Forster say? Had they no<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_355">{355}</a></span> apprehension of anything before the elopement
+took place? They must have seen them together for ever.”</p>
+
+<p>“Colonel Forster did own that he had often suspected some partiality,
+especially on Lydia’s side, but nothing to give him any alarm. I am so
+grieved for him. His behaviour was attentive and kind to the utmost. He
+<i>was</i> coming to us, in order to assure us of his concern, before he had
+any idea of their not being gone to Scotland: when that apprehension
+first got abroad, it hastened his journey.”</p>
+
+<p>“And was Denny convinced that Wickham would not marry? Did he know of
+their intending to go off? Had Colonel Forster seen Denny himself?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; but when questioned by <i>him</i>, Denny denied knowing anything of
+their plan, and would not give his real opinion about it. He did not
+repeat his persuasion of their not marrying, and from <i>that</i> I am
+inclined to hope he might have been misunderstood before.”</p>
+
+<p>“And till Colonel Forster came himself, not one of you entertained a
+doubt, I suppose, of their being really married?”</p>
+
+<p>“How was it possible that such an idea should enter our brains? I felt a
+little uneasy—a little fearful of my sister’s happiness with him in
+marriage, because I knew that his conduct had not been always quite
+right. My father and mother knew nothing of that; they only felt how
+imprudent a match it must be. Kitty then owned, with a very natural
+triumph on knowing more than the rest of us, that in Lydia’s last letter
+she had prepared her for such a step. She had known, it seems, of their
+being in love with each other many weeks.”</p>
+
+<p>“But not before they went to Brighton?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, I believe not.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_356">{356}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“And did Colonel Forster appear to think ill of Wickham himself? Does he
+know his real character?”</p>
+
+<p>“I must confess that he did not speak so well of Wickham as he formerly
+did. He believed him to be imprudent and extravagant; and since this sad
+affair has taken place, it is said that he left Meryton greatly in debt:
+but I hope this may be false.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Jane, had we been less secret, had we told what we knew of him,
+this could not have happened!”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps it would have been better,” replied her sister.</p>
+
+<p>“But to expose the former faults of any person, without knowing what
+their present feelings were, seemed unjustifiable.”</p>
+
+<p>“We acted with the best intentions.”</p>
+
+<p>“Could Colonel Forster repeat the particulars of Lydia’s note to his
+wife?”</p>
+
+<p>“He brought it with him for us to see.”</p>
+
+<p>Jane then took it from her pocket-book, and gave it to Elizabeth. These
+were the contents:—</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="nind">“My dear Harriet,</p>
+
+<p>“You will laugh when you know where I am gone, and I cannot help
+laughing myself at your surprise to-morrow morning, as soon as I am
+missed. I am going to Gretna Green, and if you cannot guess with
+who, I shall think you a simpleton, for there is but one man in the
+world I love, and he is an angel. I should never be happy without
+him, so think it no harm to be off. You need not send them word at
+Longbourn of my going, if you do not like it, for it will make the
+surprise the greater when I write to them, and sign my name Lydia
+Wickham. What a good joke it will be! I can hardly write for
+laughing. Pray make my excuses to Pratt for not keeping my
+engagement, and dancing with him to-night.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_357">{357}</a></span> Tell him I hope he will
+excuse me when he knows all, and tell him I will dance with him at
+the next ball we meet with great pleasure. I shall send for my
+clothes when I get to Longbourn; but I wish you would tell Sally to
+mend a great slit in my worked muslin gown before they are packed
+up. Good-bye. Give my love to Colonel Forster. I hope you will
+drink to our good journey.</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+“Your affectionate friend,<br>
+<br>
+“<span class="smcap">Lydia Bennet</span>.”<br>
+</p></div>
+
+<p>“Oh, thoughtless, thoughtless Lydia!” cried Elizabeth when she had
+finished it. “What a letter is this, to be written at such a moment! But
+at least it shows that <i>she</i> was serious in the object of her journey.
+Whatever he might afterwards persuade her to, it was not on her side a
+<i>scheme</i> of infamy. My poor father! how he must have felt it!”</p>
+
+<p>“I never saw anyone so shocked. He could not speak a word for full ten
+minutes. My mother was taken ill immediately, and the whole house in
+such confusion!”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Jane,” cried Elizabeth, “was there a servant belonging to it who
+did not know the whole story before the end of the day?”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not know: I hope there was. But to be guarded at such a time is
+very difficult. My mother was in hysterics; and though I endeavoured to
+give her every assistance in my power, I am afraid I did not do so much
+as I might have done. But the horror of what might possibly happen
+almost took from me my faculties.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your attendance upon her has been too much for you. You do not look
+well. Oh that I had been with you! you have had every care and anxiety
+upon yourself alone.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mary and Kitty have been very kind, and would have shared in every
+fatigue, I am sure, but I did not think it<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_358">{358}</a></span> right for either of them.
+Kitty is slight and delicate, and Mary studies so much that her hours of
+repose should not be broken in on. My aunt Philips came to Longbourn on
+Tuesday, after my father went away; and was so good as to stay till
+Thursday with me. She was of great use and comfort to us all, and Lady
+Lucas has been very kind: she walked here on Wednesday morning to
+condole with us, and offered her services, or any of her daughters, if
+they could be of use to us.”</p>
+
+<p>“She had better have stayed at home,” cried Elizabeth: “perhaps she
+<i>meant</i> well, but, under such a misfortune as this, one cannot see too
+little of one’s neighbours. Assistance is impossible; condolence,
+insufferable. Let them triumph over us at a distance, and be satisfied.”</p>
+
+<p>She then proceeded to inquire into the measures which her father had
+intended to pursue, while in town, for the recovery of his daughter.</p>
+
+<p>“He meant, I believe,” replied Jane, “to go to Epsom, the place where
+they last changed horses, see the postilions, and try if anything could
+be made out from them. His principal object must be to discover the
+number of the hackney coach which took them from Clapham. It had come
+with a fare from London; and as he thought the circumstance of a
+gentleman and lady’s removing from one carriage into another might be
+remarked, he meant to make inquiries at Clapham. If he could anyhow
+discover at what house the coachman had before set down his fare, he
+determined to make inquiries there, and hoped it might not be impossible
+to find out the stand and number of the coach. I do not know of any
+other designs that he had formed; but he was in such a hurry to be gone,
+and his spirits so greatly discomposed, that I had difficulty in finding
+out even so much as this.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_359">{359}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_XLVIII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_388_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_388_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“The Post.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER XLVIII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="T" src="images/i_388_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_388_b.png"></span>HE whole party were in hopes of a letter from Mr. Bennet the next
+morning, but the post came in without bringing a single line from him.
+His family knew him to be, on all common occasions, a most negligent and
+dilatory correspondent; but at such a time they had hoped for exertion.
+They were forced to conclude, that he had no pleasing intelligence to
+send; but even of <i>that</i> they would have been glad to be certain. Mr.
+Gardiner had waited only for the letters before he set off.</p>
+
+<p>When he was gone, they were certain at least of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_360">{360}</a></span> receiving constant
+information of what was going on; and their uncle promised, at parting,
+to prevail on Mr. Bennet to return to Longbourn as soon as he could, to
+the great consolation of his sister, who considered it as the only
+security for her husband’s not being killed in a duel.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gardiner and the children were to remain in Hertfordshire a few
+days longer, as the former thought her presence might be serviceable to
+her nieces. She shared in their attendance on Mrs. Bennet, and was a
+great comfort to them in their hours of freedom. Their other aunt also
+visited them frequently, and always, as she said, with the design of
+cheering and heartening them up—though, as she never came without
+reporting some fresh instance of Wickham’s extravagance or irregularity,
+she seldom went away without leaving them more dispirited than she found
+them.</p>
+
+<p>All Meryton seemed striving to blacken the man who, but three months
+before, had been almost an angel of light. He was declared to be in debt
+to every tradesman in the place, and his intrigues, all honoured with
+the title of seduction, had been extended into every tradesman’s family.
+Everybody declared that he was the wickedest young man in the world; and
+everybody began to find out that they had always distrusted the
+appearance of his goodness. Elizabeth, though she did not credit above
+half of what was said, believed enough to make her former assurance of
+her sister’s ruin still more certain; and even Jane, who believed still
+less of it, became almost hopeless, more especially as the time was now
+come, when, if they had gone to Scotland, which she had never before
+entirely despaired of, they must in all probability have gained some
+news of them.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_361">{361}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gardiner left Longbourn on Sunday; on Tuesday, his wife received a
+letter from him: it told them, that on his arrival he had immediately
+found out his brother, and persuaded him to come to Gracechurch Street.
+That Mr. Bennet had been to Epsom and Clapham, before his arrival, but
+without gaining any satisfactory information; and that he was now
+determined to inquire at all the principal hotels in town, as Mr. Bennet
+thought it possible they might have gone to one of them, on their first
+coming to London, before they procured lodgings. Mr. Gardiner himself
+did not expect any success from this measure; but as his brother was
+eager in it, he meant to assist him in pursuing it. He added, that Mr.
+Bennet seemed wholly disinclined at present to leave London, and
+promised to write again very soon. There was also a postscript to this
+effect:—</p>
+
+<p>“I have written to Colonel Forster to desire him to find out, if
+possible, from some of the young man’s intimates in the regiment,
+whether Wickham has any relations or connections who would be likely to
+know in what part of the town he has now concealed himself. If there
+were anyone that one could apply to, with a probability of gaining such
+a clue as that, it might be of essential consequence. At present we have
+nothing to guide us. Colonel Forster will, I dare say, do everything in
+his power to satisfy us on this head. But, on second thoughts, perhaps
+Lizzy could tell us what relations he has now living better than any
+other person.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was at no loss to understand from whence this deference for
+her authority proceeded; but it was not in her power to give any
+information of so satisfactory a nature as the compliment deserved.</p>
+
+<p>She had never heard of his having had any relations,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_362">{362}</a></span> except a father
+and mother, both of whom had been dead many years. It was possible,
+however, that some of his companions in the ——shire might be able to
+give more information; and though she was not very sanguine in expecting
+it, the application was a something to look forward to.</p>
+
+<p>Every day at Longbourn was now a day of anxiety; but the most anxious
+part of each was when the post was expected. The arrival of letters was
+the first grand object of every morning’s impatience. Through letters,
+whatever of good or bad was to be told would be communicated; and every
+succeeding day was expected to bring some news of importance.</p>
+
+<p>But before they heard again from Mr. Gardiner, a letter arrived for
+their father, from a different quarter, from Mr. Collins; which, as Jane
+had received directions to open all that came for him in his absence,
+she accordingly read; and Elizabeth, who knew what curiosities his
+letters always were, looked over her, and read it likewise. It was as
+follows:—</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="nind">“My dear Sir,</p>
+
+<p>“I feel myself called upon, by our relationship, and my situation
+in life, to condole with you on the grievous affliction you are now
+suffering under, of which we were yesterday informed by a letter
+from Hertfordshire. Be assured, my dear sir, that Mrs. Collins and
+myself sincerely sympathize with you, and all your respectable
+family, in your present distress, which must be of the bitterest
+kind, because proceeding from a cause which no time can remove. No
+arguments shall be wanting on my part, that can alleviate so severe
+a misfortune; or that may comfort you, under a circumstance that
+must be, of all others, most afflicting to a parent’s mind.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_363">{363}</a></span> The
+death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison of
+this. And it is the more to be lamented, because there is reason to
+suppose, as my dear Charlotte informs me, that this licentiousness
+of behaviour in your</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 529px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption29">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_392.jpg" width="529" id="img_images_i_392.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption29">
+
+<p>
+“To whom I have related the affair”<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">daughter has proceeded from a faulty degree of indulgence; though,
+at the same time, for the consolation of yourself and Mrs. Bennet,
+I am inclined to think that her own disposition must be naturally
+bad, or she could not be guilty of such an enormity, at so early an
+age. Howsoever that may be, you are grievously to be pitied;<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_364">{364}</a></span> in
+which opinion I am not only joined by Mrs. Collins, but likewise by
+Lady Catherine and her daughter, to whom I have related the affair.
+They agree with me in apprehending that this false step in one
+daughter will be injurious to the fortunes of all the others: for
+who, as Lady Catherine herself condescendingly says, will connect
+themselves with such a family? And this consideration leads me,
+moreover, to reflect, with augmented satisfaction, on a certain
+event of last November; for had it been otherwise, I must have been
+involved in all your sorrow and disgrace. Let me advise you, then,
+my dear sir, to console yourself as much as possible, to throw off
+your unworthy child from your affection for ever, and leave her to
+reap the fruits of her own heinous offence.</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am, dear sir,” etc., etc.<br>
+</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Gardiner did not write again, till he had received an answer from
+Colonel Forster; and then he had nothing of a pleasant nature to send.
+It was not known that Wickham had a single relation with whom he kept up
+any connection, and it was certain that he had no near one living. His
+former acquaintance had been numerous; but since he had been in the
+militia, it did not appear that he was on terms of particular friendship
+with any of them. There was no one, therefore, who could be pointed out
+as likely to give any news of him. And in the wretched state of his own
+finances, there was a very powerful motive for secrecy, in addition to
+his fear of discovery by Lydia’s relations; for it had just transpired
+that he had left gaming debts behind him to a very considerable amount.
+Colonel Forster believed that more than a thousand pounds would be
+necessary to clear his expenses at Brighton. He owed a good deal<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_365">{365}</a></span> in the
+town, but his debts of honour were still more formidable. Mr. Gardiner
+did not attempt to conceal these particulars from the Longbourn family;
+Jane heard them with horror. “A gamester!” she cried. “This is wholly
+unexpected; I had not an idea of it.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gardiner added, in his letter, that they might expect to see their
+father at home on the following day, which was Saturday. Rendered
+spiritless by the ill success of all their endeavours, he had yielded to
+his brother-in-law’s entreaty that he would return to his family and
+leave it to him to do whatever occasion might suggest to be advisable
+for continuing their pursuit. When Mrs. Bennet was told of this, she did
+not express so much satisfaction as her children expected, considering
+what her anxiety for his life had been before.</p>
+
+<p>“What! is he coming home, and without poor Lydia?” she cried. “Sure he
+will not leave London before he has found them. Who is to fight Wickham,
+and make him marry her, if he comes away?”</p>
+
+<p>As Mrs. Gardiner began to wish to be at home, it was settled that she
+and her children should go to London at the same time that Mr. Bennet
+came from it. The coach, therefore, took them the first stage of their
+journey, and brought its master back to Longbourn.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gardiner went away in all the perplexity about Elizabeth and her
+Derbyshire friend, that had attended her from that part of the world.
+His name had never been voluntarily mentioned before them by her niece;
+and the kind of half-expectation which Mrs. Gardiner had formed, of
+their being followed by a letter from him, had ended in nothing.
+Elizabeth had received none since her return, that could come from
+Pemberley.</p>
+
+<p>The present unhappy state of the family rendered any<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_366">{366}</a></span> other excuse for
+the lowness of her spirits unnecessary; nothing, therefore, could be
+fairly conjectured from <i>that</i>,—though Elizabeth, who was by this time
+tolerably well acquainted with her own feelings, was perfectly aware
+that, had she known nothing of Darcy, she could have borne the dread of
+Lydia’s infamy somewhat better. It would have spared her, she thought,
+one sleepless night out of two.</p>
+
+<p>When Mr. Bennet arrived, he had all the appearance of his usual
+philosophic composure. He said as little as he had ever been in the
+habit of saying; made no mention of the business that had taken him
+away; and it was some time before his daughters had courage to speak of
+it.</p>
+
+<p>It was not till the afternoon, when he joined them at tea, that
+Elizabeth ventured to introduce the subject; and then, on her briefly
+expressing her sorrow for what he must have endured, he replied, “Say
+nothing of that. Who should suffer but myself? It has been my own doing,
+and I ought to feel it.”</p>
+
+<p>“You must not be too severe upon yourself,” replied Elizabeth.</p>
+
+<p>“You may well warn me against such an evil. Human nature is so prone to
+fall into it! No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have
+been to blame. I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression.
+It will pass away soon enough.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you suppose them to be in London?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; where else can they be so well concealed?”</p>
+
+<p>“And Lydia used to want to go to London,” added Kitty.</p>
+
+<p>“She is happy, then,” said her father, drily; “and her residence there
+will probably be of some duration.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_367">{367}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Then, after a short silence, he continued, “Lizzy, I bear you no
+ill-will for being justified in your advice to me last May, which,
+considering the event, shows some greatness of mind.”</p>
+
+<p>They were interrupted by Miss Bennet, who came to fetch her mother’s
+tea.</p>
+
+<p>“This is a parade,” cried he, “which does one good; it gives such an
+elegance to misfortune! Another day I will do the same; I will sit in my
+library, in my nightcap and powdering gown, and give as much trouble as
+I can,—or perhaps I may defer it till Kitty runs away.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am not going to run away, papa,” said Kitty, fretfully. “If <i>I</i>
+should ever go to Brighton, I would behave better than Lydia.”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>You</i> go to Brighton! I would not trust you so near it as Eastbourne,
+for fifty pounds! No, Kitty, I have at least learnt to be cautious, and
+you will feel the effects of it. No officer is ever to enter my house
+again, nor even to pass through the village. Balls will be absolutely
+prohibited, unless you stand up with one of your sisters. And you are
+never to stir out of doors, till you can prove that you have spent ten
+minutes of every day in a rational manner.”</p>
+
+<p>Kitty, who took all these threats in a serious light, began to cry.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, well,” said he, “do not make yourself unhappy. If you are a good
+girl for the next ten years, I will take you to a review at the end of
+them.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_368">{368}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XLIX"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_397_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_397_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER XLIX.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="T" src="images/i_397_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_397_b.png"></span>WO days after Mr. Bennet’s return, as Jane and Elizabeth were walking
+together in the shrubbery behind the house, they saw the housekeeper
+coming towards them, and concluding that she came to call them to their
+mother, went forward to meet her; but instead of the expected summons,
+when they approached her, she said to Miss Bennet, “I beg your pardon,
+madam, for interrupting you, but I was in hopes you might have got some
+good news from town, so I took the liberty of coming to ask.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean, Hill? We have heard nothing from town.”</p>
+
+<p>“Dear madam,” cried Mrs. Hill, in great astonishment, “don’t you know
+there is an express come for master<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_369">{369}</a></span> from Mr. Gardiner? He has been here
+this half hour, and master has had a letter.”</p>
+
+<p>Away ran the girls, too eager to get in to have time for speech. They
+ran through the vestibule into the breakfast-room; from thence to the
+library;—their father was in neither; and they were on the point of
+seeking him upstairs with their mother, when they were met by the
+butler, who said,—</p>
+
+<p>“If you are looking for my master, ma’am, he is walking towards the
+little copse.”</p>
+
+<p>Upon this information, they instantly passed through the hall once more,
+and ran across the lawn after their father, who was deliberately
+pursuing his way towards a small wood on one side of the paddock.</p>
+
+<p>Jane, who was not so light, nor so much in the habit of running as
+Elizabeth, soon lagged behind, while her sister, panting for breath,
+came up with him, and eagerly cried out,—</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, papa, what news? what news? have you heard from my uncle?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I have had a letter from him by express.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, and what news does it bring—good or bad?”</p>
+
+<p>“What is there of good to be expected?” said he, taking the letter from
+his pocket; “but perhaps you would like to read it.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth impatiently caught it from his hand. Jane now came up.</p>
+
+<p>“Read it aloud,” said their father, “for I hardly know myself what it is
+about.”</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="rt">“Gracechurch Street, <i>Monday, August 2</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="nind">
+“My dear Brother,<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>“At last I am able to send you some tidings of my niece, and such
+as, upon the whole, I hope will give<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_370">{370}</a></span> you satisfaction. Soon after
+you left me on Saturday, I was fortunate enough to find out in what
+part of London they were. The particulars I reserve till we meet.
+It is enough to know they are discovered: I have seen them
+both——”</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 480px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption30">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_399.jpg" width="480" id="img_images_i_399.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption30">
+
+<p>
+“But perhaps you would like to read it”<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Then it is as I always hoped,” cried Jane: “they are married!<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_371">{371}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth read on: “I have seen them both. They are not married,
+nor can I find there was any intention of being so; but if you are
+willing to perform the engagements which I have ventured to make on
+your side, I hope it will not be long before they are. All that is
+required of you is, to assure to your daughter, by settlement, her
+equal share of the five thousand pounds, secured among your
+children after the decease of yourself and my sister; and,
+moreover, to enter into an engagement of allowing her, during your
+life, one hundred pounds per annum. These are conditions which,
+considering everything, I had no hesitation in complying with, as
+far as I thought myself privileged, for you. I shall send this by
+express, that no time may be lost in bringing me your answer. You
+will easily comprehend, from these particulars, that Mr. Wickham’s
+circumstances are not so hopeless as they are generally believed to
+be. The world has been deceived in that respect; and I am happy to
+say, there will be some little money, even when all his debts are
+discharged, to settle on my niece, in addition to her own fortune.
+If, as I conclude will be the case, you send me full powers to act
+in your name throughout the whole of this business, I will
+immediately give directions to Haggerston for preparing a proper
+settlement. There will not be the smallest occasion for your coming
+to town again; therefore stay quietly at Longbourn, and depend on
+my diligence and care. Send back your answer as soon as you can,
+and be careful to write explicitly. We have judged it best that my
+niece should be married from this house, of which I hope you will
+approve. She comes to us to-day. I shall write again as soon as
+anything more is determined on. Yours, etc.</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+“<span class="smcap">Edw. Gardiner</span>.”<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_372">{372}</a></span></p></div>
+
+<p>“Is it possible?” cried Elizabeth, when she had finished. “Can it be
+possible that he will marry her?”</p>
+
+<p>“Wickham is not so undeserving, then, as we have thought him,” said her
+sister. “My dear father, I congratulate you.”</p>
+
+<p>“And have you answered the letter?” said Elizabeth.</p>
+
+<p>“No; but it must be done soon.”</p>
+
+<p>Most earnestly did she then entreat him to lose no more time before he
+wrote.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! my dear father,” she cried, “come back and write immediately.
+Consider how important every moment is in such a case.”</p>
+
+<p>“Let me write for you,” said Jane, “if you dislike the trouble
+yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>“I dislike it very much,” he replied; “but it must be done.”</p>
+
+<p>And so saying, he turned back with them, and walked towards the house.</p>
+
+<p>“And—may I ask?” said Elizabeth; “but the terms, I suppose, must be
+complied with.”</p>
+
+<p>“Complied with! I am only ashamed of his asking so little.”</p>
+
+<p>“And they <i>must</i> marry! Yet he is <i>such</i> a man.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes, they must marry. There is nothing else to be done. But there
+are two things that I want very much to know:—one is, how much money
+your uncle has laid down to bring it about; and the other, how I am ever
+to pay him.”</p>
+
+<p>“Money! my uncle!” cried Jane, “what do you mean, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>“I mean that no man in his proper senses would marry Lydia on so slight
+a temptation as one hundred a year during my life, and fifty after I am
+gone.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_373">{373}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“That is very true,” said Elizabeth; “though it had not occurred to me
+before. His debts to be discharged, and something still to remain! Oh,
+it must be my uncle’s doings! Generous, good man, I am afraid he has
+distressed himself. A small sum could not do all this.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” said her father. “Wickham’s a fool if he takes her with a farthing
+less than ten thousand pounds: I should be sorry to think so ill of him,
+in the very beginning of our relationship.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ten thousand pounds! Heaven forbid! How is half such a sum to be
+repaid?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bennet made no answer; and each of them, deep in thought, continued
+silent till they reached the house. Their father then went to the
+library to write, and the girls walked into the breakfast-room.</p>
+
+<p>“And they are really to be married!” cried Elizabeth, as soon as they
+were by themselves. “How strange this is! and for <i>this</i> we are to be
+thankful. That they should marry, small as is their chance of happiness,
+and wretched as is his character, we are forced to rejoice! Oh, Lydia!”</p>
+
+<p>“I comfort myself with thinking,” replied Jane, “that he certainly would
+not marry Lydia, if he had not a real regard for her. Though our kind
+uncle has done something towards clearing him, I cannot believe that ten
+thousand pounds, or anything like it, has been advanced. He has children
+of his own, and may have more. How could he spare half ten thousand
+pounds?”</p>
+
+<p>“If we are ever able to learn what Wickham’s debts have been,” said
+Elizabeth, “and how much is settled on his side on our sister, we shall
+exactly know what Mr. Gardiner has done for them, because Wickham has
+not sixpence of his own. The kindness of my uncle and aunt can never be
+requited. Their taking her home, and affording<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_374">{374}</a></span> her their personal
+protection and countenance, is such a sacrifice to her advantage as
+years of gratitude cannot enough acknowledge. By this time she is
+actually with them! If such goodness does not make her miserable now,
+she will never deserve to be happy! What a meeting for her, when she
+first sees my aunt!”</p>
+
+<p>“We must endeavour to forget all that has passed on either side,” said
+Jane: “I hope and trust they will yet be happy. His consenting to marry
+her is a proof, I will believe, that he is come to a right way of
+thinking. Their mutual affection will steady them; and I flatter myself
+they will settle so quietly, and live in so rational a manner, as may in
+time make their past imprudence forgotten.”</p>
+
+<p>“Their conduct has been such,” replied Elizabeth, “as neither you, nor
+I, nor anybody, can ever forget. It is useless to talk of it.”</p>
+
+<p>It now occurred to the girls that their mother was in all likelihood
+perfectly ignorant of what had happened. They went to the library,
+therefore, and asked their father whether he would not wish them to make
+it known to her. He was writing, and, without raising his head, coolly
+replied,—</p>
+
+<p>“Just as you please.”</p>
+
+<p>“May we take my uncle’s letter to read to her?”</p>
+
+<p>“Take whatever you like, and get away.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth took the letter from his writing-table, and they went upstairs
+together. Mary and Kitty were both with Mrs. Bennet: one communication
+would, therefore, do for all. After a slight preparation for good news,
+the letter was read aloud. Mrs. Bennet could hardly contain herself. As
+soon as Jane had read Mr. Gardiner’s hope of Lydia’s being soon married,
+her joy burst forth, and every following sentence added to its
+exuberance. She<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_375">{375}</a></span> was now in an irritation as violent from delight as she
+had ever been fidgety from alarm and vexation. To know that her daughter
+would be married was enough. She was disturbed by no fear for her
+felicity, nor humbled by any remembrance of her misconduct.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, dear Lydia!” she cried: “this is delightful indeed! She will
+be married! I shall see her again! She will be married at sixteen! My
+good, kind brother! I knew how it would be—I knew he would manage
+everything. How I long to see her! and to see dear Wickham too! But the
+clothes, the wedding clothes! I will write to my sister Gardiner about
+them directly. Lizzy, my dear, run down to your father, and ask him how
+much he will give her. Stay, stay, I will go myself. Ring the bell,
+Kitty, for Hill. I will put on my things in a moment. My dear, dear
+Lydia! How merry we shall be together when we meet!”</p>
+
+<p>Her eldest daughter endeavoured to give some relief to the violence of
+these transports, by leading her thoughts to the obligations which Mr.
+Gardiner’s behaviour laid them all under.</p>
+
+<p>“For we must attribute this happy conclusion,” she added, “in a great
+measure to his kindness. We are persuaded that he has pledged himself to
+assist Mr. Wickham with money.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” cried her mother, “it is all very right; who should do it but
+her own uncle? If he had not had a family of his own, I and my children
+must have had all his money, you know; and it is the first time we have
+ever had anything from him except a few presents. Well! I am so happy.
+In a short time, I shall have a daughter married. Mrs. Wickham! How well
+it sounds! And she was only sixteen last June. My dear Jane, I<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_376">{376}</a></span> am in
+such a flutter, that I am sure I can’t write; so I will dictate, and you
+write for me. We will settle with your father about the money
+afterwards; but the things should be ordered immediately.”</p>
+
+<p>She was then proceeding to all the particulars of calico, muslin, and
+cambric, and would shortly have dictated some very plentiful orders, had
+not Jane, though with some difficulty, persuaded her to wait till her
+father was at leisure to be consulted. One day’s delay, she observed,
+would be of small importance; and her mother was too happy to be quite
+so obstinate as usual. Other schemes, too, came into her head.</p>
+
+<p>“I will go to Meryton,” said she, “as soon as I am dressed, and tell the
+good, good news to my sister Philips. And as I come back, I can call on
+Lady Lucas and Mrs. Long. Kitty, run down and order the carriage. An
+airing would do me a great deal of good, I am sure. Girls, can I do
+anything for you in Meryton? Oh! here comes Hill. My dear Hill, have you
+heard the good news? Miss Lydia is going to be married; and you shall
+all have a bowl of punch to make merry at her wedding.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Hill began instantly to express her joy. Elizabeth received her
+congratulations amongst the rest, and then, sick of this folly, took
+refuge in her own room, that she might think with freedom. Poor Lydia’s
+situation must, at best, be bad enough; but that it was no worse, she
+had need to be thankful. She felt it so; and though, in looking forward,
+neither rational happiness, nor worldly prosperity could be justly
+expected for her sister, in looking back to what they had feared, only
+two hours ago, she felt all the advantages of what they had gained.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_377">{377}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_L"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_406_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_406_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“The spiteful old ladies.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER L.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="M" src="images/i_406_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_406_b.png"></span>R. BENNET had very often wished, before this period of his life, that,
+instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum, for
+the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived
+him. He now wished it more than ever. Had he done his duty in that
+respect, Lydia need not have been indebted to her uncle for whatever of
+honour or credit could now be purchased for her. The satisfaction of
+prevailing on one of the most worthless young<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_378">{378}</a></span> men in Great Britain to
+be her husband might then have rested in its proper place.</p>
+
+<p>He was seriously concerned that a cause of so little advantage to anyone
+should be forwarded at the sole expense of his brother-in-law; and he
+was determined, if possible, to find out the extent of his assistance,
+and to discharge the obligation as soon as he could.</p>
+
+<p>When first Mr. Bennet had married, economy was held to be perfectly
+useless; for, of course, they were to have a son. This son was to join
+in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow
+and younger children would by that means be provided for. Five daughters
+successively entered the world, but yet the son was to come; and Mrs.
+Bennet, for many years after Lydia’s birth, had been certain that he
+would. This event had at last been despaired of, but it was then too
+late to be saving. Mrs. Bennet had no turn for economy; and her
+husband’s love of independence had alone prevented their exceeding their
+income.</p>
+
+<p>Five thousand pounds was settled by marriage articles on Mrs. Bennet and
+the children. But in what proportions it should be divided amongst the
+latter depended on the will of the parents. This was one point, with
+regard to Lydia at least, which was now to be settled, and Mr. Bennet
+could have no hesitation in acceding to the proposal before him. In
+terms of grateful acknowledgment for the kindness of his brother, though
+expressed most concisely, he then delivered on paper his perfect
+approbation of all that was done, and his willingness to fulfil the
+engagements that had been made for him. He had never before supposed
+that, could Wickham be prevailed on to marry his daughter, it would be
+done with so little inconvenience to himself as by the present<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_379">{379}</a></span>
+arrangement. He would scarcely be ten pounds a year the loser, by the
+hundred that was to be paid them; for, what with her board and pocket
+allowance, and the continual presents in money which passed to her
+through her mother’s hands, Lydia’s expenses had been very little within
+that sum.</p>
+
+<p>That it would be done with such trifling exertion on his side, too, was
+another very welcome surprise; for his chief wish at present was to have
+as little trouble in the business as possible. When the first transports
+of rage which had produced his activity in seeking her were over, he
+naturally returned to all his former indolence. His letter was soon
+despatched; for though dilatory in undertaking business, he was quick in
+its execution. He begged to know further particulars of what he was
+indebted to his brother; but was too angry with Lydia to send any
+message to her.</p>
+
+<p>The good news quickly spread through the house; and with proportionate
+speed through the neighbourhood. It was borne in the latter with decent
+philosophy. To be sure, it would have been more for the advantage of
+conversation, had Miss Lydia Bennet come upon the town; or, as the
+happiest alternative, been secluded from the world in some distant
+farm-house. But there was much to be talked of, in marrying her; and the
+good-natured wishes for her well-doing, which had proceeded before from
+all the spiteful old ladies in Meryton, lost but little of their spirit
+in this change of circumstances, because with such a husband her misery
+was considered certain.</p>
+
+<p>It was a fortnight since Mrs. Bennet had been down stairs, but on this
+happy day she again took her seat at the head of her table, and in
+spirits oppressively high. No sentiment of shame gave a damp to her
+triumph.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_380">{380}</a></span> The marriage of a daughter, which had been the first object of
+her wishes since Jane was sixteen, was now on the point of
+accomplishment, and her thoughts and her words ran wholly on those
+attendants of elegant nuptials, fine muslins, new carriages, and
+servants. She was busily searching through the neighbourhood for a
+proper situation for her daughter; and, without knowing or considering
+what their income might be, rejected many as deficient in size and
+importance.</p>
+
+<p>“Haye Park might do,” said she, “if the Gouldings would quit it, or the
+great house at Stoke, if the drawing-room were larger; but Ashworth is
+too far off. I could not bear to have her ten miles from me; and as for
+Purvis Lodge, the attics are dreadful.”</p>
+
+<p>Her husband allowed her to talk on without interruption while the
+servants remained. But when they had withdrawn, he said to her, “Mrs.
+Bennet, before you take any, or all of these houses, for your son and
+daughter, let us come to a right understanding. Into <i>one</i> house in this
+neighbourhood they shall never have admittance. I will not encourage the
+imprudence of either, by receiving them at Longbourn.”</p>
+
+<p>A long dispute followed this declaration; but Mr. Bennet was firm: it
+soon led to another; and Mrs. Bennet found, with amazement and horror,
+that her husband would not advance a guinea to buy clothes for his
+daughter. He protested that she should receive from him no mark of
+affection whatever on the occasion. Mrs. Bennet could hardly comprehend
+it. That his anger could be carried to such a point of inconceivable
+resentment as to refuse his daughter a privilege, without which her
+marriage would scarcely seem valid, exceeded all that she could believe
+possible. She was more alive to the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_381">{381}</a></span> disgrace, which her want of new
+clothes must reflect on her daughter’s nuptials, than to any sense of
+shame at her eloping and living with Wickham a fortnight before they
+took place.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was now most heartily sorry that she had, from the distress of
+the moment, been led to make Mr. Darcy acquainted with their fears for
+her sister; for since her marriage would so shortly give the proper
+termination to the elopement, they might hope to conceal its
+unfavourable beginning from all those who were not immediately on the
+spot.</p>
+
+<p>She had no fear of its spreading farther, through his means. There were
+few people on whose secrecy she would have more confidently depended;
+but at the same time there was no one whose knowledge of a sister’s
+frailty would have mortified her so much. Not, however, from any fear of
+disadvantage from it individually to herself; for at any rate there
+seemed a gulf impassable between them. Had Lydia’s marriage been
+concluded on the most honourable terms, it was not to be supposed that
+Mr. Darcy would connect himself with a family, where to every other
+objection would now be added an alliance and relationship of the nearest
+kind with the man whom he so justly scorned.</p>
+
+<p>From such a connection she could not wonder that he should shrink. The
+wish of procuring her regard, which she had assured herself of his
+feeling in Derbyshire, could not in rational expectation survive such a
+blow as this. She was humbled, she was grieved; she repented, though she
+hardly knew of what. She became jealous of his esteem, when she could no
+longer hope to be benefited by it. She wanted to hear of him, when there
+seemed the least chance of gaining intelligence. She was convinced<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_382">{382}</a></span> that
+she could have been happy with him, when it was no longer likely they
+should meet.</p>
+
+<p>What a triumph for him, as she often thought, could he know that the
+proposals which she had proudly spurned only four months ago would now
+have been gladly and gratefully received! He was as generous, she
+doubted not, as the most generous of his sex. But while he was mortal,
+there must be a triumph.</p>
+
+<p>She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man who, in
+disposition and talents, would most suit her. His understanding and
+temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It
+was an union that must have been to the advantage of both: by her ease
+and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved;
+and from his judgment, information, and knowledge of the world, she must
+have received benefit of greater importance.</p>
+
+<p>But no such happy marriage could now teach the admiring multitude what
+connubial felicity really was. An union of a different tendency, and
+precluding the possibility of the other, was soon to be formed in their
+family.</p>
+
+<p>How Wickham and Lydia were to be supported in tolerable independence she
+could not imagine. But how little of permanent happiness could belong to
+a couple who were only brought together because their passions were
+stronger than their virtue, she could easily conjecture.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gardiner soon wrote again to his brother. To Mr. Bennet’s
+acknowledgments he briefly replied, with assurances of his eagerness to
+promote the welfare of any of his family; and concluded with entreaties
+that the subject might never be mentioned to him again.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_383">{383}</a></span> The principal
+purport of his letter was to inform them, that Mr. Wickham had resolved
+on quitting the militia.</p>
+
+<p>“It was greatly my wish that he should do so,” he added, “as soon as his
+marriage was fixed on. And I think you will agree with me, in
+considering a removal from that corps as highly advisable, both on his
+account and my niece’s. It is Mr. Wickham’s intention to go into the
+Regulars; and, among his former friends, there are still some who are
+able and willing to assist him in the army. He has the promise of an
+ensigncy in General——’s regiment, now quartered in the north. It is
+an advantage to have it so far from this part of the kingdom. He
+promises fairly; and I hope among different people, where they may each
+have a character to preserve, they will both be more prudent. I have
+written to Colonel Forster, to inform him of our present arrangements,
+and to request that he will satisfy the various creditors of Mr. Wickham
+in and near Brighton with assurances of speedy payment, for which I have
+pledged myself. And will you give yourself the trouble of carrying
+similar assurances to his creditors in Meryton, of whom I shall subjoin
+a list, according to his information? He has given in all his debts; I
+hope at least he has not deceived us. Haggerston has our directions, and
+all will be completed in a week. They will then join his regiment,
+unless they are first invited to Longbourn; and I understand from Mrs.
+Gardiner that my niece is very desirous of seeing you all before she
+leaves the south. She is well, and begs to be dutifully remembered to
+you and her mother.—Yours, etc.</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+“<span class="smcap">E. Gardiner</span>.”<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bennet and his daughters saw all the advantages <span class="pagenum"><a id="page_384">{384}</a></span>of Wickham’s
+removal from the ——shire, as clearly as Mr. Gardiner could do. But
+Mrs. Bennet was not so well pleased with it. Lydia’s being settled in
+the north, just when she had expected most pleasure and pride in her
+company, for she had by no means given up her plan of their residing in
+Hertfordshire, was a severe disappointment; and, besides, it was such a
+pity that Lydia should be taken from a regiment where she was acquainted
+with everybody, and had so many favourites.</p>
+
+<p>“She is so fond of Mrs. Forster,” said she, “it will be quite shocking
+to send her away! And there are several of the young men, too, that she
+likes very much. The officers may not be so pleasant in General——’s
+regiment.”</p>
+
+<p>His daughter’s request, for such it might be considered, of being
+admitted into her family again, before she set off for the north,
+received at first an absolute negative. But Jane and Elizabeth, who
+agreed in wishing, for the sake of their sister’s feelings and
+consequence, that she should be noticed on her marriage by her parents,
+urged him so earnestly, yet so rationally and so mildly, to receive her
+and her husband at Longbourn, as soon as they were married, that he was
+prevailed on to think as they thought, and act as they wished. And their
+mother had the satisfaction of knowing, that she should be able to show
+her married daughter in the neighbourhood, before she was banished to
+the north. When Mr. Bennet wrote again to his brother, therefore, he
+sent his permission for them to come; and it was settled, that, as soon
+as the ceremony was over, they should proceed to Longbourn. Elizabeth
+was surprised, however, that Wickham should consent to such a scheme;
+and, had she consulted only her own inclination, any meeting with him
+would have been the last object of her wishes.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_385">{385}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_LI"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_414_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_414_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“With an affectionate smile.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER LI.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="T" src="images/i_414_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_414_b.png"></span>HEIR sister’s wedding-day arrived; and Jane and Elizabeth felt for her
+probably more than she felt for herself. The carriage was sent to meet
+them at——, and they were to return in it by dinnertime. Their arrival
+was dreaded by the elder Miss Bennets—and Jane more<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_386">{386}</a></span> especially, who
+gave Lydia the feelings which would have attended herself, had <i>she</i>
+been the culprit, and was wretched in the thought of what her sister
+must endure.</p>
+
+<p>They came. The family were assembled in the breakfast-room to receive
+them. Smiles decked the face of Mrs. Bennet, as the carriage drove up to
+the door; her husband looked impenetrably grave; her daughters, alarmed,
+anxious, uneasy.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia’s voice was heard in the vestibule; the door was thrown open, and
+she ran into the room. Her mother stepped forwards, embraced her, and
+welcomed her with rapture; gave her hand with an affectionate smile to
+Wickham, who followed his lady; and wished them both joy, with an
+alacrity which showed no doubt of their happiness.</p>
+
+<p>Their reception from Mr. Bennet, to whom they then turned, was not quite
+so cordial. His countenance rather gained in austerity; and he scarcely
+opened his lips. The easy assurance of the young couple, indeed, was
+enough to provoke him.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was disgusted, and even Miss Bennet was shocked. Lydia was
+Lydia still; untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless. She turned
+from sister to sister, demanding their congratulations; and when at
+length they all sat down, looked eagerly round the room, took notice of
+some little alteration in it, and observed, with a laugh, that it was a
+great while since she had been there.</p>
+
+<p>Wickham was not at all more distressed than herself; but his manners
+were always so pleasing, that, had his character and his marriage been
+exactly what they ought, his smiles and his easy address, while he
+claimed their relationship, would have delighted them all. Elizabeth<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_387">{387}</a></span>
+had not before believed him quite equal to such assurance; but she sat
+down, resolving within herself to draw no limits in future to the
+impudence of an impudent man. <i>She</i> blushed, and Jane blushed; but the
+cheeks of the two who caused their confusion suffered no variation of
+colour.</p>
+
+<p>There was no want of discourse. The bride and her mother could neither
+of them talk fast enough; and Wickham, who happened to sit near
+Elizabeth, began inquiring after his acquaintance in that neighbourhood,
+with a good-humoured ease, which she felt very unable to equal in her
+replies. They seemed each of them to have the happiest memories in the
+world. Nothing of the past was recollected with pain; and Lydia led
+voluntarily to subjects which her sisters would not have alluded to for
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>“Only think of its being three months,” she cried, “since I went away:
+it seems but a fortnight, I declare; and yet there have been things
+enough happened in the time. Good gracious! when I went away, I am sure
+I had no more idea of being married till I came back again! though I
+thought it would be very good fun if I was.”</p>
+
+<p>Her father lifted up his eyes, Jane was distressed, Elizabeth looked
+expressively at Lydia; but she, who never heard nor saw anything of
+which she chose to be insensible, gaily continued,—</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, mamma, do the people hereabouts know I am married to-day? I was
+afraid they might not; and we overtook William Goulding in his curricle,
+so I was determined he should know it, and so I let down the side glass
+next to him, and took off my glove and let my hand just rest upon the
+window frame, so that he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_388">{388}</a></span> might see the ring, and then I bowed and
+smiled like anything.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth could bear it no longer. She got up and ran out of the room;
+and returned no more, till she heard them passing through the hall to
+the dining-parlour. She then joined them soon enough to see Lydia, with
+anxious parade, walk up to her mother’s right hand, and hear her say to
+her eldest sister,—</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, Jane, I take your place now, and you must go lower, because I am a
+married woman.”</p>
+
+<p>It was not to be supposed that time would give Lydia that embarrassment
+from which she had been so wholly free at first. Her ease and good
+spirits increased. She longed to see Mrs. Philips, the Lucases, and all
+their other neighbours, and to hear herself called “Mrs. Wickham” by
+each of them; and in the meantime she went after dinner to show her ring
+and boast of being married to Mrs. Hill and the two housemaids.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, mamma,” said she, when they were all returned to the
+breakfast-room, “and what do you think of my husband? Is not he a
+charming man? I am sure my sisters must all envy me. I only hope they
+may have half my good luck. They must all go to Brighton. That is the
+place to get husbands. What a pity it is, mamma, we did not all go!”</p>
+
+<p>“Very true; and if I had my will we should. But, my dear Lydia, I don’t
+at all like your going such a way off. Must it be so?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Lord! yes; there is nothing in that. I shall like it of all things.
+You and papa, and my sisters, must come down and see us. We shall be at
+Newcastle all the winter, and I dare say there will be some balls, and I
+will take care to get good partners for them all.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_389">{389}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“I should like it beyond anything!” said her mother.</p>
+
+<p>“And then when you go away, you may leave one or two of my sisters
+behind you; and I dare say I shall get husbands for them before the
+winter is over.”</p>
+
+<p>“I thank you for my share of the favour,” said Elizabeth; “but I do not
+particularly like your way of getting husbands.”</p>
+
+<p>Their visitors were not to remain above ten days with them. Mr. Wickham
+had received his commission before he left London, and he was to join
+his regiment at the end of a fortnight.</p>
+
+<p>No one but Mrs. Bennet regretted that their stay would be so short; and
+she made the most of the time by visiting about with her daughter, and
+having very frequent parties at home. These parties were acceptable to
+all; to avoid a family circle was even more desirable to such as did
+think than such as did not.</p>
+
+<p>Wickham’s affection for Lydia was just what Elizabeth had expected to
+find it; not equal to Lydia’s for him. She had scarcely needed her
+present observation to be satisfied, from the reason of things, that
+their elopement had been brought on by the strength of her love rather
+than by his; and she would have wondered why, without violently caring
+for her, he chose to elope with her at all, had she not felt certain
+that his flight was rendered necessary by distress of circumstances; and
+if that were the case, he was not the young man to resist an opportunity
+of having a companion.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia was exceedingly fond of him. He was her dear Wickham on every
+occasion; no one was to be put in competition with him. He did
+everything best in the world; and she was sure he would kill more<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_390">{390}</a></span> birds
+on the first of September than anybody else in the country.</p>
+
+<p>One morning, soon after their arrival, as she was sitting with her two
+elder sisters, she said to Elizabeth,—</p>
+
+<p>“Lizzy, I never gave <i>you</i> an account of my wedding, I believe. You were
+not by, when I told mamma, and the others, all about it. Are not you
+curious to hear how it was managed?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, really,” replied Elizabeth; “I think there cannot be too little
+said on the subject.”</p>
+
+<p>“La! You are so strange! But I must tell you how it went off. We were
+married, you know, at St. Clement’s, because Wickham’s lodgings were in
+that parish. And it was settled that we should all be there by eleven
+o’clock. My uncle and aunt and I were to go together; and the others
+were to meet us at the church.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Monday morning came, and I was in such a fuss! I was so afraid,
+you know, that something would happen to put it off, and then I should
+have gone quite distracted. And there was my aunt, all the time I was
+dressing, preaching and talking away just as if she was reading a
+sermon. However, I did not hear above one word in ten, for I was
+thinking, you may suppose, of my dear Wickham. I longed to know whether
+he would be married in his blue coat.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, and so we breakfasted at ten as usual: I thought it would never
+be over; for, by the bye, you are to understand that my uncle and aunt
+were horrid unpleasant all the time I was with them. If you’ll believe
+me, I did not once put my foot out of doors, though I was there a
+fortnight. Not one party, or scheme, or anything! To be sure, London was
+rather thin, but, however, the Little Theatre was open.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_391">{391}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“Well, and so, just as the carriage came to the door, my uncle was
+called away upon business to that horrid man Mr. Stone. And then, you
+know, when once they get together, there is no end of it. Well, I was so
+frightened I did not know what to do, for my uncle was to give me away;
+and if we were beyond the hour we could not be married all day. But,
+luckily, he came back again in ten minutes’ time, and then we all set
+out. However, I recollected afterwards, that if he <i>had</i> been prevented
+going, the wedding need not be put off, for Mr. Darcy might have done as
+well.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Darcy!” repeated Elizabeth, in utter amazement.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes! he was to come there with Wickham, you know. But, gracious me!
+I quite forgot! I ought not to have said a word about it. I promised
+them so faithfully! What will Wickham say? It was to be such a secret!”</p>
+
+<p>“If it was to be a secret,” said Jane, “say not another word on the
+subject. You may depend upon my seeking no further.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, certainly,” said Elizabeth, though burning with curiosity; “we will
+ask you no questions.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you,” said Lydia; “for if you did, I should certainly tell you
+all, and then Wickham would be so angry.”</p>
+
+<p>On such encouragement to ask, Elizabeth was forced to put it out of her
+power, by running away.</p>
+
+<p>But to live in ignorance on such a point was impossible; or at least it
+was impossible not to try for information. Mr. Darcy had been at her
+sister’s wedding. It was exactly a scene, and exactly among people,
+where he had apparently least to do, and least temptation to go.
+Conjectures as to the meaning of it, rapid and wild,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_392">{392}</a></span> hurried into her
+brain; but she was satisfied with none. Those that best pleased her, as
+placing his conduct in the noblest light, seemed most improbable. She
+could not bear such suspense; and hastily seizing a sheet of paper,
+wrote a short letter to her aunt, to request an explanation of what
+Lydia had dropped, if it were compatible with the secrecy which had been
+intended.</p>
+
+<p>“You may readily comprehend,” she added, “what my curiosity must be to
+know how a person unconnected with any of us, and, comparatively
+speaking, a stranger to our family, should have been amongst you at such
+a time. Pray write instantly, and let me understand it—unless it is,
+for very cogent reasons, to remain in the secrecy which Lydia seems to
+think necessary; and then I must endeavour to be satisfied with
+ignorance.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not that I <i>shall</i>, though,” she added to herself, and she finished the
+letter; “and, my dear aunt, if you do not tell me in an honourable
+manner, I shall certainly be reduced to tricks and stratagems to find it
+out.”</p>
+
+<p>Jane’s delicate sense of honour would not allow her to speak to
+Elizabeth privately of what Lydia had let fall; Elizabeth was glad of
+it:—till it appeared whether her inquiries would receive any
+satisfaction, she had rather be without a confidante.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_393">{393}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_LII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_422_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_422_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“I am sure she did not listen.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER LII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="E" src="images/i_422_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_422_b.png"></span>LIZABETH had the satisfaction of receiving an answer to her letter as
+soon as she possibly could. She was no sooner in possession of it, than
+hurrying into the little copse, where she was least likely to be
+interrupted, she sat down on one of the benches, and prepared<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_394">{394}</a></span> to be
+happy; for the length of the letter convinced her that it did not
+contain a denial.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="rt">“Gracechurch Street, <i>Sept. 6</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="nind">
+“My dear Niece,<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>“I have just received your letter, and shall devote this whole
+morning to answering it, as I foresee that a <i>little</i> writing will
+not comprise what I have to tell you. I must confess myself
+surprised by your application; I did not expect it from <i>you</i>.
+Don’t think me angry, however, for I only mean to let you know,
+that I had not imagined such inquiries to be necessary on <i>your</i>
+side. If you do not choose to understand me, forgive my
+impertinence. Your uncle is as much surprised as I am; and nothing
+but the belief of your being a party concerned would have allowed
+him to act as he has done. But if you are really innocent and
+ignorant, I must be more explicit. On the very day of my coming
+home from Longbourn, your uncle had a most unexpected visitor. Mr.
+Darcy called, and was shut up with him several hours. It was all
+over before I arrived; so my curiosity was not so dreadfully racked
+as <i>yours</i> seems to have been. He came to tell Mr. Gardiner that he
+had found out where your sister and Mr. Wickham were, and that he
+had seen and talked with them both—Wickham repeatedly, Lydia once.
+From what I can collect, he left Derbyshire only one day after
+ourselves, and came to town with the resolution of hunting for
+them. The motive professed was his conviction of its being owing to
+himself that Wickham’s worthlessness had not been so well known as
+to make it impossible for any young woman of character to love or
+confide in him. He generously imputed the whole to his mistaken
+pride, and confessed that he had before thought it beneath him to
+lay his private actions open to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_395">{395}</a></span> the world. His character was to
+speak for itself. He called it, therefore, his duty to step
+forward, and endeavour to remedy an evil which had been brought on
+by himself. If he <i>had another</i> motive, I am sure it would never
+disgrace him. He had been some days in town before he was able to
+discover them; but he had something to direct his search, which was
+more than <i>we</i> had; and the consciousness of this was another
+reason for his resolving to follow us. There is a lady, it seems, a
+Mrs. Younge, who was some time ago governess to Miss Darcy, and was
+dismissed from her charge on some cause of disapprobation, though
+he did not say what. She then took a large house in Edward Street,
+and has since maintained herself by letting lodgings. This Mrs.
+Younge was, he knew, intimately acquainted with Wickham; and he
+went to her for intelligence of him, as soon as he got to town. But
+it was two or three days before he could get from her what he
+wanted. She would not betray her trust, I suppose, without bribery
+and corruption, for she really did know where her friend was to be
+found. Wickham, indeed, had gone to her on their first arrival in
+London; and had she been able to receive them into her house, they
+would have taken up their abode with her. At length, however, our
+kind friend procured the wished-for direction. They were in ——
+Street. He saw Wickham, and afterwards insisted on seeing Lydia.
+His first object with her, he acknowledged, had been to persuade
+her to quit her present disgraceful situation, and return to her
+friends as soon as they could be prevailed on to receive her,
+offering his assistance as far as it would go. But he found Lydia
+absolutely resolved on remaining where she was. She cared for none
+of her friends; she wanted no help of his; she would not hear of
+leaving Wickham.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_396">{396}</a></span> She was sure they should be married some time or
+other, and it did not much signify when. Since such were her
+feelings, it only remained, he thought, to secure and expedite a
+marriage, which, in his very first conversation with Wickham, he
+easily learnt had never been <i>his</i> design. He confessed himself
+obliged to leave the regiment on account of some debts of honour
+which were very pressing; and scrupled not to lay all the ill
+consequences of Lydia’s flight on her own folly alone. He meant to
+resign his commission immediately; and as to his future situation,
+he could conjecture very little about it. He must go somewhere, but
+he did not know where, and he knew he should have nothing to live
+on. Mr. Darcy asked why he did not marry your sister at once.
+Though Mr. Bennet was not imagined to be very rich, he would have
+been able to do something for him, and his situation must have been
+benefited by marriage. But he found, in reply to this question,
+that Wickham still cherished the hope of more effectually making
+his fortune by marriage, in some other country. Under such
+circumstances, however, he was not likely to be proof against the
+temptation of immediate relief. They met several times, for there
+was much to be discussed. Wickham, of course, wanted more than he
+could get; but at length was reduced to be reasonable. Everything
+being settled between <i>them</i>, Mr. Darcy’s next step was to make
+your uncle acquainted with it, and he first called in Gracechurch
+Street the evening before I came home. But Mr. Gardiner could not
+be seen; and Mr. Darcy found, on further inquiry, that your father
+was still with him, but would quit town the next morning. He did
+not judge your father to be a person whom he could so properly
+consult as your uncle, and therefore readily postponed seeing him
+till after the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page_397">{397}</a></span>departure of the former. He did not leave his name,
+and till the next day it was only known that a gentleman had called
+on business. On Saturday he came again. Your father was gone, your
+uncle at home, and, as I said before, they had a great deal of talk
+together. They met again on Sunday, and then <i>I</i> saw him too. It
+was not all settled before Monday: as soon as it was, the express
+was sent off to Longbourn. But our visitor was very obstinate. I
+fancy, Lizzy, that obstinacy is the real defect of his character,
+after all. He has been accused of many faults at different times;
+but <i>this</i> is the true one. Nothing was to be done that he did not
+do himself; though I am sure (and I do not speak it to be thanked,
+therefore say nothing about it) your uncle would most readily have
+settled the whole. They battled it together for a long time, which
+was more than either the gentleman or lady concerned in it
+deserved. But at last your uncle was forced to yield, and instead
+of being allowed to be of use to his niece, was forced to put up
+with only having the probable credit of it, which went sorely
+against the grain; and I really believe your letter this morning
+gave him great pleasure, because it required an explanation that
+would rob him of his borrowed feathers, and give the praise where
+it was due. But, Lizzy, this must go no further than yourself, or
+Jane at most. You know pretty well, I suppose, what has been done
+for the young people. His debts are to be paid, amounting, I
+believe, to considerably more than a thousand pounds, another
+thousand in addition to her own settled upon <i>her</i>, and his
+commission purchased. The reason why all this was to be done by him
+alone, was such as I have given above. It was owing to him, to his
+reserve and want of proper consideration, that Wickham’s character
+had been so<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_398">{398}</a></span> misunderstood, and consequently that he had been
+received and noticed as he was. Perhaps there was some truth in
+<i>this</i>; though I doubt whether <i>his</i> reserve, or <i>anybody’s</i>
+reserve can be answerable for the event. But in spite of all this
+fine talking, my dear Lizzy, you may rest perfectly assured that
+your uncle would never have yielded, if we had not given him credit
+for <i>another interest</i> in the affair. When all this was resolved
+on, he returned again to his friends, who were still staying at
+Pemberley; but it was agreed that he should be in London once more
+when the wedding took place, and all money matters were then to
+receive the last finish. I believe I have now told you everything.
+It is a relation which you tell me is to give you great surprise; I
+hope at least it will not afford you any displeasure. Lydia came to
+us, and Wickham had constant admission to the house. <i>He</i> was
+exactly what he had been when I knew him in Hertfordshire; but I
+would not tell you how little I was satisfied with <i>her</i> behaviour
+while she stayed with us, if I had not perceived, by Jane’s letter
+last Wednesday, that her conduct on coming home was exactly of a
+piece with it, and therefore what I now tell you can give you no
+fresh pain. I talked to her repeatedly in the most serious manner,
+representing to her the wickedness of what she had done, and all
+the unhappiness she had brought on her family. If she heard me, it
+was by good luck, for I am sure she did not listen. I was sometimes
+quite provoked; but then I recollected my dear Elizabeth and Jane,
+and for their sakes had patience with her. Mr. Darcy was punctual
+in his return, and, as Lydia informed you, attended the wedding. He
+dined with us the next day, and was to leave town again on
+Wednesday or Thursday. Will you be very angry with me, my dear<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_399">{399}</a></span>
+Lizzy, if I take this opportunity of saying (what I was never bold
+enough to say before) how much I like him? His behaviour to us has,
+in every respect, been as pleasing as when we were in Derbyshire.
+His understanding and opinions all please me; he wants nothing but
+a little more liveliness, and <i>that</i>, if he marry <i>prudently</i>, his
+wife may teach him. I thought him very sly; he hardly ever
+mentioned your name. But slyness seems the fashion. Pray forgive
+me, if I have been very presuming, or at least do not punish me so
+far as to exclude me from P. I shall never be quite happy till I
+have been all round the park. A low phaeton with a nice little pair
+of ponies would be the very thing. But I must write no more. The
+children have been wanting me this half hour.</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+“Yours, very sincerely,<br>
+“<span class="smcap">M. Gardiner</span>.”<br>
+</p></div>
+
+<p>The contents of this letter threw Elizabeth into a flutter of spirits,
+in which it was difficult to determine whether pleasure or pain bore the
+greatest share. The vague and unsettled suspicions which uncertainty had
+produced, of what Mr. Darcy might have been doing to forward her
+sister’s match—which she had feared to encourage, as an exertion of
+goodness too great to be probable, and at the same time dreaded to be
+just, from the pain of obligation—were proved beyond their greatest
+extent to be true! He had followed them purposely to town, he had taken
+on himself all the trouble and mortification attendant on such a
+research; in which supplication had been necessary to a woman whom he
+must abominate and despise, and where he was reduced to meet, frequently
+meet, reason with, persuade, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_400">{400}</a></span> finally bribe the man whom he always
+most wished to avoid, and whose very name it was punishment to him to
+pronounce. He had done all this for a girl whom he could neither regard
+nor esteem. Her heart did whisper that he had done it for her. But it
+was a hope shortly checked by other considerations; and she soon felt
+that even her vanity was insufficient, when required to depend on his
+affection for her, for a woman who had already refused him, as able to
+overcome a sentiment so natural as abhorrence against relationship with
+Wickham. Brother-in-law of Wickham! Every kind of pride must revolt from
+the connection. He had, to be sure, done much. She was ashamed to think
+how much. But he had given a reason for his interference, which asked no
+extraordinary stretch of belief. It was reasonable that he should feel
+he had been wrong; he had liberality, and he had the means of exercising
+it; and though she would not place herself as his principal inducement,
+she could perhaps believe, that remaining partiality for her might
+assist his endeavours in a cause where her peace of mind must be
+materially concerned. It was painful, exceedingly painful, to know that
+they were under obligations to a person who could never receive a
+return. They owed the restoration of Lydia, her character, everything to
+him. Oh, how heartily did she grieve over every ungracious sensation she
+had ever encouraged, every saucy speech she had ever directed towards
+him! For herself she was humbled; but she was proud of him,—proud that
+in a cause of compassion and honour he had been able to get the better
+of himself. She read over her aunt’s commendation of him again and
+again. It was hardly enough; but it pleased her. She was even sensible
+of some pleasure, though mixed with regret, on<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_401">{401}</a></span> finding how steadfastly
+both she and her uncle had been persuaded that affection and confidence
+subsisted between Mr. Darcy and herself.</p>
+
+<p>She was roused from her seat and her reflections, by someone’s approach;
+and, before she could strike into another path, she was overtaken by
+Wickham.</p>
+
+<p>“I am afraid I interrupt your solitary ramble, my dear sister?” said he,
+as he joined her.</p>
+
+<p>“You certainly do,” she replied with a smile; “but it does not follow
+that the interruption must be unwelcome.”</p>
+
+<p>“I should be sorry, indeed, if it were. <i>We</i> were always good friends,
+and now we are better.”</p>
+
+<p>“True. Are the others coming out?”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not know. Mrs. Bennet and Lydia are going in the carriage to
+Meryton. And so, my dear sister, I find, from our uncle and aunt, that
+you have actually seen Pemberley.”</p>
+
+<p>She replied in the affirmative.</p>
+
+<p>“I almost envy you the pleasure, and yet I believe it would be too much
+for me, or else I could take it in my way to Newcastle. And you saw the
+old housekeeper, I suppose? Poor Reynolds, she was always very fond of
+me. But of course she did not mention my name to you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, she did.”</p>
+
+<p>“And what did she say?”</p>
+
+<p>“That you were gone into the army, and she was afraid had—not turned
+out well. At such a distance as <i>that</i>, you know, things are strangely
+misrepresented.”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly,” he replied, biting his lips. Elizabeth hoped she had
+silenced him; but he soon afterwards said,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_402">{402}</a></span>—</p>
+
+<p>“I was surprised to see Darcy in town last month. We passed each other
+several times. I wonder what he can be doing there.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps preparing for his marriage with Miss de Bourgh,” said
+Elizabeth. “It must be something particular to take him there at this
+time of year.”</p>
+
+<p>“Undoubtedly. Did you see him while you were at Lambton? I thought I
+understood from the Gardiners that you had.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; he introduced us to his sister.”</p>
+
+<p>“And do you like her?”</p>
+
+<p>“Very much.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have heard, indeed, that she is uncommonly improved within this year
+or two. When I last saw her, she was not very promising. I am very glad
+you liked her. I hope she will turn out well.”</p>
+
+<p>“I dare say she will; she has got over the most trying age.”</p>
+
+<p>“Did you go by the village of Kympton?”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not recollect that we did.”</p>
+
+<p>“I mention it because it is the living which I ought to have had. A most
+delightful place! Excellent parsonage-house! It would have suited me in
+every respect.”</p>
+
+<p>“How should you have liked making sermons?”</p>
+
+<p>“Exceedingly well. I should have considered it as part of my duty, and
+the exertion would soon have been nothing. One ought not to repine; but,
+to be sure, it would have been such a thing for me! The quiet, the
+retirement of such a life, would have answered all my ideas of
+happiness! But it was not to be. Did you ever hear Darcy mention the
+circumstance when you were in Kent?”</p>
+
+<p>“I <i>have</i> heard from authority, which I thought <i>as good</i>,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_403">{403}</a></span> that it was
+left you conditionally only, and at the will of the present patron.”</p>
+
+<p>“You have! Yes, there was something in <i>that</i>; I told you so from the
+first, you may remember.”</p>
+
+<p>“I <i>did</i> hear, too, that there was a time when sermon-making was not so
+palatable to you as it seems to be at present; that you actually
+declared your resolution of never taking orders, and that the business
+had been compromised accordingly.”</p>
+
+<p>“You did! and it was not wholly without foundation. You may remember
+what I told you on that point, when first we talked of it.”</p>
+
+<p>They were now almost at the door of the house, for she had walked fast
+to get rid of him; and unwilling, for her sister’s sake, to provoke him,
+she only said in reply, with a good-humoured smile,—</p>
+
+<p>“Come, Mr. Wickham, we are brother and sister, you know. Do not let us
+quarrel about the past. In future, I hope we shall be always of one
+mind.”</p>
+
+<p>She held out her hand: he kissed it with affectionate gallantry, though
+he hardly knew how to look, and they entered the house.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_404">{404}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_LIII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_433_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_433_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“Mr. Darcy with him.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER LIII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="M" src="images/i_433_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_433_b.png"></span>R. WICKHAM was so perfectly satisfied with this conversation, that he
+never again distressed himself, or provoked his dear sister Elizabeth,
+by introducing the subject of it; and she was pleased to find that she
+had said enough to keep him quiet.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_405">{405}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The day of his and Lydia’s departure soon came; and Mrs. Bennet was
+forced to submit to a separation, which, as her husband by no means
+entered into her scheme of their all going to Newcastle, was likely to
+continue at least a twelvemonth.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, my dear Lydia,” she cried, “when shall we meet again?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Lord! I don’t know. Not these two or three years, perhaps.”</p>
+
+<p>“Write to me very often, my dear.”</p>
+
+<p>“As often as I can. But you know married women have never much time for
+writing. My sisters may write to <i>me</i>. They will have nothing else to
+do.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wickham’s adieus were much more affectionate than his wife’s. He
+smiled, looked handsome, and said many pretty things.</p>
+
+<p>“He is as fine a fellow,” said Mr. Bennet, as soon as they were out of
+the house, “as ever I saw. He simpers, and smirks, and makes love to us
+all. I am prodigiously proud of him. I defy even Sir William Lucas
+himself to produce a more valuable son-in-law.”</p>
+
+<p>The loss of her daughter made Mrs. Bennet very dull for several days.</p>
+
+<p>“I often think,” said she, “that there is nothing so bad as parting with
+one’s friends. One seems so forlorn without them.”</p>
+
+<p>“This is the consequence, you see, madam, of marrying a daughter,” said
+Elizabeth. “It must make you better satisfied that your other four are
+single.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is no such thing. Lydia does not leave me because she is married;
+but only because her husband’s regiment happens to be so far off. If
+that had been nearer, she would not have gone so soon.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_406">{406}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>But the spiritless condition which this event threw her into was shortly
+relieved, and her mind opened again to the agitation of hope, by an
+article of news which then began to be in circulation. The housekeeper
+at Netherfield had received orders to prepare for the arrival of her
+master, who was coming down in a day or two, to shoot there for several
+weeks. Mrs. Bennet was quite in the fidgets. She looked at Jane, and
+smiled, and shook her head, by turns.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, well, and so Mr. Bingley is coming down, sister,” (for Mrs.
+Philips first brought her the news). “Well, so much the better. Not that
+I care about it, though. He is nothing to us, you know, and I am sure I
+never want to see him again. But, however, he is very welcome to come to
+Netherfield, if he likes it. And who knows what <i>may</i> happen? But that
+is nothing to us. You know, sister, we agreed long ago never to mention
+a word about it. And so, it is quite certain he is coming?”</p>
+
+<p>“You may depend on it,” replied the other, “for Mrs. Nichols was in
+Meryton last night: I saw her passing by, and went out myself on purpose
+to know the truth of it; and she told me that it was certainly true. He
+comes down on Thursday, at the latest, very likely on Wednesday. She was
+going to the butcher’s, she told me, on purpose to order in some meat on
+Wednesday, and she has got three couple of ducks just fit to be killed.”</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bennet had not been able to hear of his coming without changing
+colour. It was many months since she had mentioned his name to
+Elizabeth; but now, as soon as they were alone together, she said,—</p>
+
+<p>“I saw you look at me to-day, Lizzy, when my aunt told us of the present
+report; and I know I appeared<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_407">{407}</a></span> distressed; but don’t imagine it was from
+any silly cause. I was only confused for the moment, because I felt that
+I <i>should</i> be looked at. I do assure you that the news does not affect
+me either with pleasure or pain. I am glad of one thing, that he comes
+alone; because we shall see the less of him. Not that I am afraid of
+<i>myself</i>, but I dread other people’s remarks.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth did not know what to make of it. Had she not seen him in
+Derbyshire, she might have supposed him capable of coming there with no
+other view than what was acknowledged; but she still thought him partial
+to Jane, and she wavered as to the greater probability of his coming
+there <i>with</i> his friend’s permission, or being bold enough to come
+without it.</p>
+
+<p>“Yet it is hard,” she sometimes thought, “that this poor man cannot come
+to a house, which he has legally hired, without raising all this
+speculation! I <i>will</i> leave him to himself.”</p>
+
+<p>In spite of what her sister declared, and really believed to be her
+feelings, in the expectation of his arrival, Elizabeth could easily
+perceive that her spirits were affected by it. They were more disturbed,
+more unequal, than she had often seen them.</p>
+
+<p>The subject which had been so warmly canvassed between their parents,
+about a twelvemonth ago, was now brought forward again.</p>
+
+<p>“As soon as ever Mr. Bingley comes, my dear,” said Mrs. Bennet, “you
+will wait on him, of course.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, no. You forced me into visiting him last year, and promised, if I
+went to see him, he should marry one of my daughters. But it ended in
+nothing, and I will not be sent on a fool’s errand again.”</p>
+
+<p>His wife represented to him how absolutely necessary<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_408">{408}</a></span> such an attention
+would be from all the neighbouring gentlemen, on his returning to
+Netherfield.</p>
+
+<p>“<span class="lftspc">’</span>Tis an <i>etiquette</i> I despise,” said he. “If he wants our society, let
+him seek it. He knows where we live. I will not spend <i>my</i> hours in
+running after my neighbours every time they go away and come back
+again.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, all I know is, that it will be abominably rude if you do not wait
+on him. But, however, that shan’t prevent my asking him to dine here, I
+am determined. We must have Mrs. Long and the Gouldings soon. That will
+make thirteen with ourselves, so there will be just room at table for
+him.”</p>
+
+<p>Consoled by this resolution, she was the better able to bear her
+husband’s incivility; though it was very mortifying to know that her
+neighbours might all see Mr. Bingley, in consequence of it, before
+<i>they</i> did. As the day of his arrival drew near,—</p>
+
+<p>“I begin to be sorry that he comes at all,” said Jane to her sister. “It
+would be nothing; I could see him with perfect indifference; but I can
+hardly bear to hear it thus perpetually talked of. My mother means well;
+but she does not know, no one can know, how much I suffer from what she
+says. Happy shall I be when his stay at Netherfield is over!”</p>
+
+<p>“I wish I could say anything to comfort you,” replied Elizabeth; “but it
+is wholly out of my power. You must feel it; and the usual satisfaction
+of preaching patience to a sufferer is denied me, because you have
+always so much.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bingley arrived. Mrs. Bennet, through the assistance of servants,
+contrived to have the earliest tidings of it, that the period of anxiety
+and fretfulness on her side be as long as it could. She counted the days
+that<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_409">{409}</a></span> must intervene before their invitation could be sent—hopeless of
+seeing him before. But on the third morning after his arrival in
+Hertfordshire, she saw him from her dressing-room window enter the
+paddock, and ride towards the house.</p>
+
+<p>Her daughters were eagerly called to partake of her joy. Jane resolutely
+kept her place at the table; but Elizabeth, to satisfy her mother, went
+to the window—she looked—she saw Mr. Darcy with him, and sat down
+again by her sister.</p>
+
+<p>“There is a gentleman with him, mamma,” said Kitty; “who can it be?”</p>
+
+<p>“Some acquaintance or other, my dear, I suppose; I am sure I do not
+know.”</p>
+
+<p>“La!” replied Kitty, “it looks just like that man that used to be with
+him before. Mr. what’s his name—that tall, proud man.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good gracious! Mr. Darcy!—and so it does, I vow. Well, any friend of
+Mr. Bingley’s will always be welcome here, to be sure; but else I must
+say that I hate the very sight of him.”</p>
+
+<p>Jane looked at Elizabeth with surprise and concern. She knew but little
+of their meeting in Derbyshire, and therefore felt for the awkwardness
+which must attend her sister, in seeing him almost for the first time
+after receiving his explanatory letter. Both sisters were uncomfortable
+enough. Each felt for the other, and of course for themselves; and their
+mother talked on of her dislike of Mr. Darcy, and her resolution to be
+civil to him only as Mr. Bingley’s friend, without being heard by either
+of them. But Elizabeth had sources of uneasiness which could not yet be
+suspected by Jane, to whom she had never yet had courage to show Mrs.
+Gardine<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_410">{410}</a></span>r’s letter, or to relate her own change of sentiment towards
+him. To Jane, he could be only a man whose proposals she had refused,
+and whose merits she had undervalued; but to her own more extensive
+information, he was the person to whom the whole family were indebted
+for the first of benefits, and whom she regarded herself with an
+interest, if not quite so tender, at least as reasonable and just, as
+what Jane felt for Bingley. Her astonishment at his coming—at his
+coming to Netherfield, to Longbourn, and voluntarily seeking her again,
+was almost equal to what she had known on first witnessing his altered
+behaviour in Derbyshire.</p>
+
+<p>The colour which had been driven from her face returned for half a
+minute with an additional glow, and a smile of delight added lustre to
+her eyes, as she thought for that space of time that his affection and
+wishes must still be unshaken; but she would not be secure.</p>
+
+<p>“Let me first see how he behaves,” said she; “it will then be early
+enough for expectation.”</p>
+
+<p>She sat intently at work, striving to be composed, and without daring to
+lift up her eyes, till anxious curiosity carried them to the face of her
+sister as the servant was approaching the door. Jane looked a little
+paler than usual, but more sedate than Elizabeth had expected. On the
+gentlemen’s appearing, her colour increased; yet she received them with
+tolerable ease, and with a propriety of behaviour equally free from any
+symptom of resentment, or any unnecessary complaisance.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth said as little to either as civility would allow, and sat down
+again to her work, with an eagerness which it did not often command. She
+had ventured only one glance at Darcy. He looked serious as usual;<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_411">{411}</a></span> and,
+she thought, more as he had been used to look in Hertfordshire, than as
+she had seen him at Pemberley. But, perhaps, he could not in her
+mother’s presence be what he was before her uncle and aunt. It was a
+painful, but not an improbable, conjecture.</p>
+
+<p>Bingley she had likewise seen for an instant, and in that short period
+saw him looking both pleased and embarrassed. He was received by Mrs.
+Bennet with a degree of civility which made her two daughters ashamed,
+especially when contrasted with the cold and ceremonious politeness of
+her courtesy and address of his friend.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth particularly, who knew that her mother owed to the latter the
+preservation of her favourite daughter from irremediable infamy, was
+hurt and distressed to a most painful degree by a distinction so ill
+applied.</p>
+
+<p>Darcy, after inquiring of her how Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner did—a question
+which she could not answer without confusion—said scarcely anything. He
+was not seated by her: perhaps that was the reason of his silence; but
+it had not been so in Derbyshire. There he had talked to her friends
+when he could not to herself. But now several minutes elapsed, without
+bringing the sound of his voice; and when occasionally, unable to resist
+the impulse of curiosity, she raised her eyes to his face, she as often
+found him looking at Jane as at herself, and frequently on no object but
+the ground. More thoughtfulness and less anxiety to please, than when
+they last met, were plainly expressed. She was disappointed, and angry
+with herself for being so.</p>
+
+<p>“Could I expect it to be otherwise?” said she. “Yet why did he come?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_412">{412}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>She was in no humour for conversation with anyone but himself; and to
+him she had hardly courage to speak.</p>
+
+<p>She inquired after his sister, but could do no more.</p>
+
+<p>“It is a long time, Mr. Bingley, since you went away,” said Mrs. Bennet.</p>
+
+<p>He readily agreed to it.</p>
+
+<p>“I began to be afraid you would never come back again. People <i>did</i> say,
+you meant to quit the place entirely at Michaelmas; but, however, I hope
+it is not true. A great many changes have happened in the neighbourhood
+since you went away. Miss Lucas is married and settled: and one of my
+own daughters. I suppose you have heard of it; indeed, you must have
+seen it in the papers. It was in the ‘Times’ and the ‘Courier,’ I know;
+though it was not put in as it ought to be. It was only said, ‘Lately,
+George Wickham, Esq., to Miss Lydia Bennet,’ without there being a
+syllable said of her father, or the place where she lived, or anything.
+It was my brother Gardiner’s drawing up, too, and I wonder how he came
+to make such an awkward business of it. Did you see it?”</p>
+
+<p>Bingley replied that he did, and made his congratulations. Elizabeth
+dared not lift up her eyes. How Mr. Darcy looked, therefore, she could
+not tell.</p>
+
+<p>“It is a delightful thing, to be sure, to have a daughter well married,”
+continued her mother; “but at the same time, Mr. Bingley, it is very
+hard to have her taken away from me. They are gone down to Newcastle, a
+place quite northward it seems, and there they are to stay, I do not
+know how long. His regiment is there; for I suppose you have heard of
+his leaving the ——shire, and of his being gone into the Regulars.
+Thank heaven!<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_413">{413}</a></span> he has <i>some</i> friends, though, perhaps, not so many as he
+deserves.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth, who knew this to be levelled at Mr. Darcy, was in such misery
+of shame that she could hardly keep her seat. It drew from her, however,
+the exertion of speaking, which nothing else had so effectually done
+before; and she asked Bingley whether he meant to make any stay in the
+country at present. A few weeks, he believed.</p>
+
+<p>“When you have killed all your own birds, Mr. Bingley,” said her mother,
+“I beg you will come here and shoot as many as you please on Mr.
+Bennet’s manor. I am sure he will be vastly happy to oblige you, and
+will save all the best of the coveys for you.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth’s misery increased at such unnecessary, such officious
+attention! Were the same fair prospect to arise at present, as had
+flattered them a year ago, everything, she was persuaded, would be
+hastening to the same vexatious conclusion. At that instant she felt,
+that years of happiness could not make Jane or herself amends for
+moments of such painful confusion.</p>
+
+<p>“The first wish of my heart,” said she to herself, “is never more to be
+in company with either of them. Their society can afford no pleasure
+that will atone for such wretchedness as this! Let me never see either
+one or the other again!”</p>
+
+<p>Yet the misery, for which years of happiness were to offer no
+compensation, received soon afterwards material relief, from observing
+how much the beauty of her sister rekindled the admiration of her former
+lover. When first he came in, he had spoken to her but little, but every
+five minutes seemed to be giving her more of his attention. He found her
+as handsome as she had<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_414">{414}</a></span> been last year; as good-natured, and as
+unaffected, though not quite so chatty. Jane was anxious that no
+difference should be perceived in her at all, and was really persuaded
+that she talked as much as ever; but her mind was so busily engaged,
+that she did not always know when she was silent.</p>
+
+<p>When the gentlemen rose to go away, Mrs. Bennet was mindful of her
+intended civility, and they were invited and engaged to dine at
+Longbourn in a few days’ time.</p>
+
+<p>“You are quite a visit in my debt, Mr. Bingley,” she added; “for when
+you went to town last winter, you promised to take a family dinner with
+us as soon as you returned. I have not forgot, you see; and I assure you
+I was very much disappointed that you did not come back and keep your
+engagement.”</p>
+
+<p>Bingley looked a little silly at this reflection, and said something of
+his concern at having been prevented by business. They then went away.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet had been strongly inclined to ask them to stay and dine
+there that day; but, though she always kept a very good table, she did
+not think anything less than two courses could be good enough for a man
+on whom she had such anxious designs, or satisfy the appetite and pride
+of one who had ten thousand a year.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_415">{415}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_LIV"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_444_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_444_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“Jane happened to look round.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER LIV.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="A" src="images/i_444_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_444_b.png"></span>S soon as they were gone, Elizabeth walked out to recover her spirits;
+or, in other words, to dwell without interruption on those subjects
+which must deaden them more. Mr. Darcy’s behaviour astonished and vexed
+her.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, if he came only to be silent, grave, and indifferent,” said she,
+“did he come at all?”</p>
+
+<p>She could settle it in no way that gave her pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>“He could be still amiable, still pleasing to my uncle and aunt, when he
+was in town; and why not to me?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_416">{416}</a></span> If he fears me, why come hither? If he
+no longer cares for me, why silent? Teasing, teasing man! I will think
+no more about him.”</p>
+
+<p>Her resolution was for a short time involuntarily kept by the approach
+of her sister, who joined her with a cheerful look which showed her
+better satisfied with their visitors than Elizabeth.</p>
+
+<p>“Now,” said she, “that this first meeting is over, I feel perfectly
+easy. I know my own strength, and I shall never be embarrassed again by
+his coming. I am glad he dines here on Tuesday. It will then be publicly
+seen, that on both sides we meet only as common and indifferent
+acquaintance.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, very indifferent, indeed,” said Elizabeth, laughingly. “Oh, Jane!
+take care.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Lizzy, you cannot think me so weak as to be in danger now.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think you are in very great danger of making him as much in love with
+you as ever.”</p>
+
+<p>They did not see the gentlemen again till Tuesday; and Mrs. Bennet, in
+the meanwhile, was giving way to all the happy schemes which the
+good-humour and common politeness of Bingley, in half an hour’s visit,
+had revived.</p>
+
+<p>On Tuesday there was a large party assembled at Longbourn; and the two
+who were most anxiously expected, to the credit of their punctuality as
+sportsmen, were in very good time. When they repaired to the
+dining-room, Elizabeth eagerly watched to see whether Bingley would take
+the place which, in all their former parties, had belonged to him, by
+her sister. Her prudent mother, occupied by the same ideas, forbore to
+invite him to sit by herself. On entering the room, he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_417">{417}</a></span> seemed to
+hesitate; but Jane happened to look round, and happened to smile: it was
+decided. He placed himself by her.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth, with a triumphant sensation, looked towards his friend. He
+bore it with noble indifference; and she would have imagined that
+Bingley had received his sanction to be happy, had she not seen his eyes
+likewise turned towards Mr. Darcy, with an expression of half-laughing
+alarm.</p>
+
+<p>His behaviour to her sister was such during dinnertime as showed an
+admiration of her, which, though more guarded than formerly, persuaded
+Elizabeth, that, if left wholly to himself, Jane’s happiness, and his
+own, would be speedily secured. Though she dared not depend upon the
+consequence, she yet received pleasure from observing his behaviour. It
+gave her all the animation that her spirits could boast; for she was in
+no cheerful humour. Mr. Darcy was almost as far from her as the table
+could divide them. He was on one side of her mother. She knew how little
+such a situation would give pleasure to either, or make either appear to
+advantage. She was not near enough to hear any of their discourse; but
+she could see how seldom they spoke to each other, and how formal and
+cold was their manner whenever they did. Her mother’s ungraciousness
+made the sense of what they owed him more painful to Elizabeth’s mind;
+and she would, at times, have given anything to be privileged to tell
+him, that his kindness was neither unknown nor unfelt by the whole of
+the family.</p>
+
+<p>She was in hopes that the evening would afford some opportunity of
+bringing them together; that the whole of the visit would not pass away
+without enabling them<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_418">{418}</a></span> to enter into something more of conversation,
+than the mere ceremonious salutation attending his entrance. Anxious and
+uneasy, the period which passed in the drawing-room before the gentlemen
+came, was wearisome and dull to a degree that almost made her uncivil.
+She looked forward to their entrance as the point on which all her
+chance of pleasure for the evening must depend.</p>
+
+<p>“If he does not come to me, <i>then</i>,” said she, “I shall give him up for
+ever.”</p>
+
+<p>The gentlemen came; and she thought he looked as if he would have
+answered her hopes; but, alas! the ladies had crowded round the table,
+where Miss Bennet was making tea, and Elizabeth pouring out the coffee,
+in so close a confederacy, that there was not a single vacancy near her
+which would admit of a chair. And on the gentlemen’s approaching, one of
+the girls moved closer to her than ever, and said, in a whisper,—</p>
+
+<p>“The men shan’t come and part us, I am determined. We want none of them;
+do we?”</p>
+
+<p>Darcy had walked away to another part of the room. She followed him with
+her eyes, envied everyone to whom he spoke, had scarcely patience enough
+to help anybody to coffee, and then was enraged against herself for
+being so silly!</p>
+
+<p>“A man who has once been refused! How could I ever be foolish enough to
+expect a renewal of his love? Is there one among the sex who would not
+protest against such a weakness as a second proposal to the same woman?
+There is no indignity so abhorrent to their feelings.”</p>
+
+<p>She was a little revived, however, by his bringing back his coffee-cup
+himself; and she seized the opportunity of saying,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_419">{419}</a></span>—</p>
+
+<p>“Is your sister at Pemberley still?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; she will remain there till Christmas.”</p>
+
+<p>“And quite alone? Have all her friends left her?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Annesley is with her. The others have been gone on to Scarborough
+these three weeks.”</p>
+
+<p>She could think of nothing more to say; but if he wished to converse
+with her, he might have better success. He stood by her, however, for
+some minutes, in silence; and, at last, on the young lady’s whispering
+to Elizabeth again, he walked away.</p>
+
+<p>When the tea things were removed, and the card tables placed, the ladies
+all rose; and Elizabeth was then hoping to be soon joined by him, when
+all her views were overthrown, by seeing him fall a victim to her
+mother’s rapacity for whist players, and in a few moments after seated
+with the rest of the party. She now lost every expectation of pleasure.
+They were confined for the evening at different tables; and she had
+nothing to hope, but that his eyes were so often turned towards her side
+of the room, as to make him play as unsuccessfully as herself.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet had designed to keep the two Netherfield gentlemen to
+supper; but their carriage was, unluckily, ordered before any of the
+others, and she had no opportunity of detaining them.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, girls,” said she, as soon as they were left to themselves, “what
+say you to the day? I think everything has passed off uncommonly well, I
+assure you. The dinner was as well dressed as any I ever saw. The
+venison was roasted to a turn—and everybody said, they never saw so fat
+a haunch. The soup was fifty times better than what we had at the
+Lucases’ last week; and even Mr. Darcy acknowledged that the partridges
+were<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_420">{420}</a></span> remarkably well done; and I suppose he has two or three French
+cooks at least. And, my dear Jane, I never saw you look in greater
+beauty. Mrs. Long said so too, for I asked her whether you did not. And
+what do you think she said besides? ‘Ah! Mrs. Bennet, we shall have her
+at Netherfield at last!’ She did, indeed. I do think Mrs. Long is as
+good a creature as ever lived—and her nieces are very pretty behaved
+girls, and not at all handsome: I like them prodigiously.”</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 476px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption31">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_449.jpg" width="476" id="img_images_i_449.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption31">
+<p>“M<sup>rs</sup>. Long and her nieces.”</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_421">{421}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet, in short, was in very great spirits: she had seen enough of
+Bingley’s behaviour to Jane to be convinced that she would get him at
+last; and her expectations of advantage to her family, when in a happy
+humour, were so far beyond reason, that she was quite disappointed at
+not seeing him there again the next day, to make his proposals.</p>
+
+<p>“It has been a very agreeable day,” said Miss Bennet to Elizabeth. “The
+party seemed so well selected, so suitable one with the other. I hope we
+may often meet again.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“Lizzy, you must not do so. You must not suspect me. It mortifies me. I
+assure you that I have now learnt to enjoy his conversation as an
+agreeable and sensible young man without having a wish beyond it. I am
+perfectly satisfied, from what his manners now are, that he never had
+any design of engaging my affection. It is only that he is blessed with
+greater sweetness of address, and a stronger desire of generally
+pleasing, than any other man.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are very cruel,” said her sister, “you will not let me smile, and
+are provoking me to it every moment.”</p>
+
+<p>“How hard it is in some cases to be believed! And how impossible in
+others! But why should you wish to persuade me that I feel more than I
+acknowledge?”</p>
+
+<p>“That is a question which I hardly know how to answer. We all love to
+instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing. Forgive
+me; and if you persist in indifference, do not make <i>me</i> your
+confidante.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_422">{422}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_LV"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_451_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_451_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“Lizzy, my dear, I want to speak to you.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER LV.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="A" src="images/i_451_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_451_b.png"></span> FEW days after this visit, Mr. Bingley called again, and alone. His
+friend had left him that morning for London, but was to return home in
+ten days’ time. He sat with them above an hour, and was<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_423">{423}</a></span> in remarkably
+good spirits. Mrs. Bennet invited him to dine with them; but, with many
+expressions of concern, he confessed himself engaged elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>“Next time you call,” said she, “I hope we shall be more lucky.”</p>
+
+<p>He should be particularly happy at any time, etc., etc.; and if she
+would give him leave, would take an early opportunity of waiting on
+them.</p>
+
+<p>“Can you come to-morrow?”</p>
+
+<p>Yes, he had no engagement at all for to-morrow; and her invitation was
+accepted with alacrity.</p>
+
+<p>He came, and in such very good time, that the ladies were none of them
+dressed. In ran Mrs. Bennet to her daughters’ room, in her
+dressing-gown, and with her hair half finished, crying out,—</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Jane, make haste and hurry down. He is come—Mr. Bingley is
+come. He is, indeed. Make haste, make haste. Here, Sarah, come to Miss
+Bennet this moment, and help her on with her gown. Never mind Miss
+Lizzy’s hair.”</p>
+
+<p>“We will be down as soon as we can,” said Jane; “but I dare say Kitty is
+forwarder than either of us, for she went upstairs half an hour ago.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! hang Kitty! what has she to do with it? Come, be quick, be quick!
+where is your sash, my dear?”</p>
+
+<p>But when her mother was gone, Jane would not be prevailed on to go down
+without one of her sisters.</p>
+
+<p>The same anxiety to get them by themselves was visible again in the
+evening. After tea, Mr. Bennet retired to the library, as was his
+custom, and Mary went upstairs to her instrument. Two obstacles of the
+five being thus removed, Mrs. Bennet sat looking and winking at
+Elizabeth and Catherine for a considerable time, without<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_424">{424}</a></span> making any
+impression on them. Elizabeth would not observe her; and when at last
+Kitty did, she very innocently said, “What is the matter, mamma? What do
+you keep winking at me for? What am I to do?”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing, child, nothing. I did not wink at you.” She then sat still
+five minutes longer; but unable to waste such a precious occasion, she
+suddenly got up, and saying to Kitty,—</p>
+
+<p>“Come here, my love, I want to speak to you,” took her out of the room.
+Jane instantly gave a look at Elizabeth which spoke her distress at such
+premeditation, and her entreaty that <i>she</i> would not give in to it. In a
+few minutes, Mrs. Bennet half opened the door and called out,—</p>
+
+<p>“Lizzy, my dear, I want to speak with you.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was forced to go.</p>
+
+<p>“We may as well leave them by themselves, you know,” said her mother as
+soon as she was in the hall. “Kitty and I are going upstairs to sit in
+my dressing-room.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth made no attempt to reason with her mother, but remained
+quietly in the hall till she and Kitty were out of sight, then returned
+into the drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet’s schemes for this day were ineffectual. Bingley was
+everything that was charming, except the professed lover of her
+daughter. His ease and cheerfulness rendered him a most agreeable
+addition to their evening party; and he bore with the ill-judged
+officiousness of the mother, and heard all her silly remarks with a
+forbearance and command of countenance particularly grateful to the
+daughter.</p>
+
+<p>He scarcely needed an invitation to stay supper; and before he went away
+an engagement was formed, chiefly through his own and Mrs. Bennet’s
+means, for his coming next morning to shoot with her husband.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_425">{425}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>After this day, Jane said no more of her indifference. Not a word passed
+between the sisters concerning Bingley; but Elizabeth went to bed in the
+happy belief that all must speedily be concluded, unless Mr. Darcy
+returned within the stated time. Seriously, however, she felt tolerably
+persuaded that all this must have taken place with that gentleman’s
+concurrence.</p>
+
+<p>Bingley was punctual to his appointment; and he and Mr. Bennet spent the
+morning together, as had been agreed on. The latter was much more
+agreeable than his companion expected. There was nothing of presumption
+or folly in Bingley that could provoke his ridicule, or disgust him into
+silence; and he was more communicative, and less eccentric, than the
+other had ever seen him. Bingley of course returned with him to dinner;
+and in the evening Mrs. Bennet’s invention was again at work to get
+everybody away from him and her daughter. Elizabeth, who had a letter to
+write, went into the breakfast-room for that purpose soon after tea; for
+as the others were all going to sit down to cards, she could not be
+wanted to counteract her mother’s schemes.</p>
+
+<p>But on her returning to the drawing-room, when her letter was finished,
+she saw, to her infinite surprise, there was reason to fear that her
+mother had been too ingenious for her. On opening the door, she
+perceived her sister and Bingley standing together over the hearth, as
+if engaged in earnest conversation; and had this led to no suspicion,
+the faces of both, as they hastily turned round and moved away from each
+other, would have told it all. <i>Their</i> situation was awkward enough; but
+<i>hers</i> she thought was still worse. Not a syllable was uttered by
+either; and Elizabeth was on the point of going away again, when
+Bingley, who as well as the other had sat<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_426">{426}</a></span> down, suddenly rose, and,
+whispering a few words to her sister, ran out of the room.</p>
+
+<p>Jane could have no reserves from Elizabeth, where confidence would give
+pleasure; and, instantly embracing her, acknowledged, with the liveliest
+emotion, that she was the happiest creature in the world.</p>
+
+<p>“<span class="lftspc">’</span>Tis too much!” she added, “by far too much. I do not deserve it. Oh,
+why is not everybody as happy?”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth’s congratulations were given with a sincerity, a warmth, a
+delight, which words could but poorly express. Every sentence of
+kindness was a fresh source of happiness to Jane. But she would not
+allow herself to stay with her sister, or say half that remained to be
+said, for the present.</p>
+
+<p>“I must go instantly to my mother,” she cried. “I would not on any
+account trifle with her affectionate solicitude, or allow her to hear it
+from anyone but myself. He is gone to my father already. Oh, Lizzy, to
+know that what I have to relate will give such pleasure to all my dear
+family! how shall I bear so much happiness?”</p>
+
+<p>She then hastened away to her mother, who had purposely broken up the
+card-party, and was sitting upstairs with Kitty.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth, who was left by herself, now smiled at the rapidity and ease
+with which an affair was finally settled, that had given them so many
+previous months of suspense and vexation.</p>
+
+<p>“And this,” said she, “is the end of all his friend’s anxious
+circumspection! of all his sister’s falsehood and contrivance! the
+happiest, wisest, and most reasonable end!”</p>
+
+<p>In a few minutes she was joined by Bingley, whose<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_427">{427}</a></span> conference with her
+father had been short and to the purpose.</p>
+
+<p>“Where is your sister?” said he hastily, as he opened the door.</p>
+
+<p>“With my mother upstairs. She will be down in a moment, I dare say.”</p>
+
+<p>He then shut the door, and, coming up to her, claimed the good wishes
+and affection of a sister. Elizabeth honestly and heartily expressed her
+delight in the prospect of their relationship. They shook hands with
+great cordiality; and then, till her sister came down, she had to listen
+to all he had to say of his own happiness, and of Jane’s perfections;
+and in spite of his being a lover, Elizabeth really believed all his
+expectations of felicity to be rationally founded, because they had for
+basis the excellent understanding and super-excellent disposition of
+Jane, and a general similarity of feeling and taste between her and
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>It was an evening of no common delight to them all; the satisfaction of
+Miss Bennet’s mind gave such a glow of sweet animation to her face, as
+made her look handsomer than ever. Kitty simpered and smiled, and hoped
+her turn was coming soon. Mrs. Bennet could not give her consent, or
+speak her approbation in terms warm enough to satisfy her feelings,
+though she talked to Bingley of nothing else, for half an hour; and when
+Mr. Bennet joined them at supper, his voice and manner plainly showed
+how really happy he was.</p>
+
+<p>Not a word, however, passed his lips in allusion to it, till their
+visitor took his leave for the night; but as soon as he was gone, he
+turned to his daughter and said,—</p>
+
+<p>“Jane, I congratulate you. You will be a very happy woman.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_428">{428}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Jane went to him instantly, kissed him, and thanked him for his
+goodness.</p>
+
+<p>“You are a good girl,” he replied, “and I have great pleasure in
+thinking you will be so happily settled. I have not a doubt of your
+doing very well together. Your tempers are by no means unlike. You are
+each of you so complying, that nothing will ever be resolved on; so
+easy, that every servant will cheat you; and so generous, that you will
+always exceed your income.”</p>
+
+<p>“I hope not so. Imprudence or thoughtlessness in money matters would be
+unpardonable in <i>me</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“Exceed their income! My dear Mr. Bennet,” cried his wife, “what are you
+talking of? Why, he has four or five thousand a year, and very likely
+more.” Then addressing her daughter, “Oh, my dear, dear Jane, I am so
+happy! I am sure I shan’t get a wink of sleep all night. I knew how it
+would be. I always said it must be so, at last. I was sure you could not
+be so beautiful for nothing! I remember, as soon as ever I saw him, when
+he first came into Hertfordshire last year, I thought how likely it was
+that you should come together. Oh, he is the handsomest young man that
+ever was seen!”</p>
+
+<p>Wickham, Lydia, were all forgotten. Jane was beyond competition her
+favourite child. At that moment she cared for no other. Her younger
+sisters soon began to make interest with her for objects of happiness
+which she might in future be able to dispense.</p>
+
+<p>Mary petitioned for the use of the library at Netherfield; and Kitty
+begged very hard for a few balls there every winter.</p>
+
+<p>Bingley, from this time, was of course a daily visitor at Longbourn;
+coming frequently before breakfast, and always remaining till after
+supper; unless when some<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_429">{429}</a></span> barbarous neighbour, who could not be enough
+detested, had given him an invitation to dinner, which he thought
+himself obliged to accept.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth had now but little time for conversation with her sister; for
+while he was present Jane had no attention to bestow on anyone else: but
+she found herself considerably useful to both of them, in those hours of
+separation that must sometimes occur. In the absence of Jane, he always
+attached himself to Elizabeth for the pleasure of talking of her; and
+when Bingley was gone, Jane constantly sought the same means of relief.</p>
+
+<p>“He has made me so happy,” said she, one evening, “by telling me that he
+was totally ignorant of my being in town last spring! I had not believed
+it possible.”</p>
+
+<p>“I suspected as much,” replied Elizabeth. “But how did he account for
+it?”</p>
+
+<p>“It must have been his sisters’ doing. They were certainly no friends to
+his acquaintance with me, which I cannot wonder at, since he might have
+chosen so much more advantageously in many respects. But when they see,
+as I trust they will, that their brother is happy with me, they will
+learn to be contented, and we shall be on good terms again: though we
+can never be what we once were to each other.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is the most unforgiving speech,” said Elizabeth, “that I ever
+heard you utter. Good girl! It would vex me, indeed, to see you again
+the dupe of Miss Bingley’s pretended regard.”</p>
+
+<p>“Would you believe it, Lizzy, that when he went to town last November he
+really loved me, and nothing but a persuasion of <i>my</i> being indifferent
+would have prevented his coming down again?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_430">{430}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“He made a little mistake, to be sure; but it is to the credit of his
+modesty.”</p>
+
+<p>This naturally introduced a panegyric from Jane on his diffidence, and
+the little value he put on his own good qualities.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was pleased to find that he had not betrayed the interference
+of his friend; for, though Jane had the most generous and forgiving
+heart in the world, she knew it was a circumstance which must prejudice
+her against him.</p>
+
+<p>“I am certainly the most fortunate creature that ever existed!” cried
+Jane. “Oh, Lizzy, why am I thus singled from my family, and blessed
+above them all? If I could but see you as happy! If there were but such
+another man for you!”</p>
+
+<p>“If you were to give me forty such men I never could be so happy as you.
+Till I have your disposition, your goodness, I never can have your
+happiness. No, no, let me shift for myself; and, perhaps, if I have very
+good luck, I may meet with another Mr. Collins in time.”</p>
+
+<p>The situation of affairs in the Longbourn family could not be long a
+secret. Mrs. Bennet was privileged to whisper it to Mrs. Philips, and
+she ventured, without any permission, to do the same by all her
+neighbours in Meryton.</p>
+
+<p>The Bennets were speedily pronounced to be the luckiest family in the
+world; though only a few weeks before, when Lydia had first run away,
+they had been generally proved to be marked out for misfortune.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_431">{431}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LVI"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_460_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_460_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER LVI.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="O" src="images/i_460_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_460_b.png"></span>NE morning, about a week after Bingley’s engagement with Jane had been
+formed, as he and the females of the family were sitting together in the
+dining-room, their attention was suddenly drawn to the window by the
+sound of a carriage; and they perceived a chaise and four driving up the
+lawn. It was too early in the morning for visitors; and besides, the
+equipage did not answer to that of any of their neighbours. The horses
+were post; and neither the carriage, nor the livery of the servant who
+preceded it, were familiar to them. As<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_432">{432}</a></span> it was certain, however, that
+somebody was coming, Bingley instantly prevailed on Miss Bennet to avoid
+the confinement of such an intrusion, and walk away with him into the
+shrubbery. They both set off; and the conjectures of the remaining three
+continued, though with little satisfaction, till the door was thrown
+open, and their visitor entered. It was Lady Catherine de Bourgh.</p>
+
+<p>They were of course all intending to be surprised: but their
+astonishment was beyond their expectation; and on the part of Mrs.
+Bennet and Kitty, though she was perfectly unknown to them, even
+inferior to what Elizabeth felt.</p>
+
+<p>She entered the room with an air more than usually ungracious, made no
+other reply to Elizabeth’s salutation than a slight inclination of the
+head, and sat down without saying a word. Elizabeth had mentioned her
+name to her mother on her Ladyship’s entrance, though no request of
+introduction had been made.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet, all amazement, though flattered by having a guest of such
+high importance, received her with the utmost politeness. After sitting
+for a moment in silence, she said, very stiffly, to Elizabeth,—</p>
+
+<p>“I hope you are well, Miss Bennet. That lady, I suppose, is your
+mother?”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth replied very concisely that she was.</p>
+
+<p>“And <i>that</i>, I suppose, is one of your sisters?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, madam,” said Mrs. Bennet, delighted to speak to a Lady Catherine.
+“She is my youngest girl but one. My youngest of all is lately married,
+and my eldest is somewhere about the ground, walking with a young man,
+who, I believe, will soon become a part of the family.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_433">{433}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“You have a very small park here,” returned Lady Catherine, after a
+short silence.</p>
+
+<p>“It is nothing in comparison of Rosings, my Lady, I dare say; but, I
+assure you, it is much larger than Sir William Lucas’s.”</p>
+
+<p>“This must be a most inconvenient sitting-room for the evening in
+summer: the windows are full west.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet assured her that they never sat there after dinner; and then
+added,—</p>
+
+<p>“May I take the liberty of asking your Ladyship whether you left Mr. and
+Mrs. Collins well?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, very well. I saw them the night before last.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth now expected that she would produce a letter for her from
+Charlotte, as it seemed the only probable motive for her calling. But no
+letter appeared, and she was completely puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bennet, with great civility, begged her Ladyship to take some
+refreshment: but Lady Catherine very resolutely, and not very politely,
+declined eating anything; and then, rising up, said to Elizabeth,—</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Bennet, there seemed to be a prettyish kind of a little wilderness
+on one side of your lawn. I should be glad to take a turn in it, if you
+will favour me with your company.”</p>
+
+<p>“Go, my dear,” cried her mother, “and show her Ladyship about the
+different walks. I think she will be pleased with the hermitage.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth obeyed; and, running into her own room for her parasol,
+attended her noble guest downstairs. As they passed through the hall,
+Lady Catherine opened the doors into the dining-parlour and
+drawing-room, and pronouncing them, after a short survey, to be
+decent-looking rooms, walked on.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_434">{434}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Her carriage remained at the door, and Elizabeth saw that her
+waiting-woman was in it. They proceeded in silence along the gravel walk
+that led to the copse; Elizabeth was determined to make no effort for
+conversation with a woman who was now more than usually insolent and
+disagreeable.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 332px;" role="figure" aria-labelledby="ebm_caption32">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_463.jpg" width="332" id="img_images_i_463.jpg">
+<div class="caption" id="ebm_caption32">
+
+<p>
+“After a short survey”<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Copyright 1894 by George Allen.</i>]</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_435">{435}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“How could I ever think her like her nephew?” said she, as she looked in
+her face.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as they entered the copse, Lady Catherine began in the following
+manner:—</p>
+
+<p>“You can be at no loss, Miss Bennet, to understand the reason of my
+journey hither. Your own heart, your own conscience, must tell you why I
+come.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth looked with unaffected astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed, you are mistaken, madam; I have not been at all able to account
+for the honour of seeing you here.”</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Bennet,” replied her Ladyship, in an angry tone, “you ought to
+know that I am not to be trifled with. But however insincere <i>you</i> may
+choose to be, you shall not find <i>me</i> so. My character has ever been
+celebrated for its sincerity and frankness; and in a cause of such
+moment as this, I shall certainly not depart from it. A report of a most
+alarming nature reached me two days ago. I was told, that not only your
+sister was on the point of being most advantageously married, but that
+<i>you</i>—that Miss Elizabeth Bennet would, in all likelihood, be soon
+afterwards united to my nephew—my own nephew, Mr. Darcy. Though I
+<i>know</i> it must be a scandalous falsehood, though I would not injure him
+so much as to suppose the truth of it possible, I instantly resolved on
+setting off for this place, that I might make my sentiments known to
+you.”</p>
+
+<p>“If you believed it impossible to be true,” said Elizabeth, colouring
+with astonishment and disdain, “I wonder you took the trouble of coming
+so far. What could your Ladyship propose by it?”</p>
+
+<p>“At once to insist upon having such a report universally contradicted.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_436">{436}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“Your coming to Longbourn, to see me and my family,” said Elizabeth
+coolly, “will be rather a confirmation of it—if, indeed, such a report
+is in existence.”</p>
+
+<p>“If! do you then pretend to be ignorant of it? Has it not been
+industriously circulated by yourselves? Do you not know that such a
+report is spread abroad?”</p>
+
+<p>“I never heard that it was.”</p>
+
+<p>“And can you likewise declare, that there is no <i>foundation</i> for it?”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not pretend to possess equal frankness with your Ladyship. <i>You</i>
+may ask questions which <i>I</i> shall not choose to answer.”</p>
+
+<p>“This is not to be borne. Miss Bennet, I insist on being satisfied. Has
+he, has my nephew, made you an offer of marriage?”</p>
+
+<p>“Your Ladyship has declared it to be impossible.”</p>
+
+<p>“It ought to be so; it must be so, while he retains the use of his
+reason. But <i>your</i> arts and allurements may, in a moment of infatuation,
+have made him forget what he owes to himself and to all his family. You
+may have drawn him in.”</p>
+
+<p>“If I have, I shall be the last person to confess it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Bennet, do you know who I am? I have not been accustomed to such
+language as this. I am almost the nearest relation he has in the world,
+and am entitled to know all his dearest concerns.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you are not entitled to know <i>mine</i>; nor will such behaviour as
+this ever induce me to be explicit.”</p>
+
+<p>“Let me be rightly understood. This match, to which you have the
+presumption to aspire, can never take place. No, never. Mr. Darcy is
+engaged to <i>my daughter</i>. Now, what have you to say?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_437">{437}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“Only this,—that if he is so, you can have no reason to suppose he will
+make an offer to me.”</p>
+
+<p>Lady Catherine hesitated for a moment, and then replied,—</p>
+
+<p>“The engagement between them is of a peculiar kind. From their infancy,
+they have been intended for each other. It was the favourite wish of
+<i>his</i> mother, as well as of hers. While in their cradles we planned the
+union; and now, at the moment when the wishes of both sisters would be
+accomplished, is their marriage to be prevented by a young woman of
+inferior birth, of no importance in the world, and wholly unallied to
+the family? Do you pay no regard to the wishes of his friends—to his
+tacit engagement with Miss de Bourgh? Are you lost to every feeling of
+propriety and delicacy? Have you not heard me say, that from his
+earliest hours he was destined for his cousin?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; and I had heard it before. But what is that to me? If there is no
+other objection to my marrying your nephew, I shall certainly not be
+kept from it by knowing that his mother and aunt wished him to marry
+Miss de Bourgh. You both did as much as you could in planning the
+marriage. Its completion depended on others. If Mr. Darcy is neither by
+honour nor inclination confined to his cousin, why is not he to make
+another choice? And if I am that choice, why may not I accept him?”</p>
+
+<p>“Because honour, decorum, prudence—nay, interest—forbid it. Yes, Miss
+Bennet, interest; for do not expect to be noticed by his family or
+friends, if you wilfully act against the inclinations of all. You will
+be censured, slighted, and despised, by everyone connected with him.
+Your alliance will be a disgrace; your name will never even be mentioned
+by any of us.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_438">{438}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“These are heavy misfortunes,” replied Elizabeth. “But the wife of Mr.
+Darcy must have such extraordinary sources of happiness necessarily
+attached to her situation, that she could, upon the whole, have no cause
+to repine.”</p>
+
+<p>“Obstinate, headstrong girl! I am ashamed of you! Is this your gratitude
+for my attentions to you last spring? Is nothing due to me on that
+score? Let us sit down. You are to understand, Miss Bennet, that I came
+here with the determined resolution of carrying my purpose; nor will I
+be dissuaded from it. I have not been used to submit to any person’s
+whims. I have not been in the habit of brooking disappointment.”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>That</i> will make your Ladyship’s situation at present more pitiable;
+but it will have no effect on <i>me</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“I will not be interrupted! Hear me in silence. My daughter and my
+nephew are formed for each other. They are descended, on the maternal
+side, from the same noble line; and, on the father’s, from respectable,
+honourable, and ancient, though untitled, families. Their fortune on
+both sides is splendid. They are destined for each other by the voice of
+every member of their respective houses; and what is to divide
+them?—the upstart pretensions of a young woman without family,
+connections, or fortune! Is this to be endured? But it must not, shall
+not be! If you were sensible of your own good, you would not wish to
+quit the sphere in which you have been brought up.”</p>
+
+<p>“In marrying your nephew, I should not consider myself as quitting that
+sphere. He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter; so far we are
+equal.”</p>
+
+<p>“True. You <i>are</i> a gentleman’s daughter. But what was your mother? Who
+are your uncles and aunts? Do not imagine me ignorant of their
+condition.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_439">{439}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“Whatever my connections may be,” said Elizabeth, “if your nephew does
+not object to them, they can be nothing to <i>you</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me, once for all, are you engaged to him?”</p>
+
+<p>Though Elizabeth would not, for the mere purpose of obliging Lady
+Catherine, have answered this question, she could not but say, after a
+moment’s deliberation,—</p>
+
+<p>“I am not.”</p>
+
+<p>Lady Catherine seemed pleased.</p>
+
+<p>“And will you promise me never to enter into such an engagement?”</p>
+
+<p>“I will make no promise of the kind.”</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Bennet, I am shocked and astonished. I expected to find a more
+reasonable young woman. But do not deceive yourself into a belief that I
+will ever recede. I shall not go away till you have given me the
+assurance I require.”</p>
+
+<p>“And I certainly <i>never</i> shall give it. I am not to be intimidated into
+anything so wholly unreasonable. Your Ladyship wants Mr. Darcy to marry
+your daughter; but would my giving you the wished-for promise make
+<i>their</i> marriage at all more probable? Supposing him to be attached to
+me, would <i>my</i> refusing to accept his hand make him wish to bestow it on
+his cousin? Allow me to say, Lady Catherine, that the arguments with
+which you have supported this extraordinary application have been as
+frivolous as the application was ill-judged. You have widely mistaken my
+character, if you think I can be worked on by such persuasions as these.
+How far your nephew might approve of your interference in <i>his</i> affairs,
+I cannot tell; but you have certainly no right to concern yourself in
+mine. I must beg, therefore, to be importuned no further on the
+subject.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_440">{440}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“Not so hasty, if you please. I have by no means done. To all the
+objections I have already urged I have still another to add. I am no
+stranger to the particulars of your youngest sister’s infamous
+elopement. I know it all; that the young man’s marrying her was a
+patched-up business, at the expense of your father and uncle. And is
+<i>such</i> a girl to be my nephew’s sister? Is <i>her</i> husband, who is the son
+of his late father’s steward, to be his brother? Heaven and earth!—of
+what are you thinking? Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?”</p>
+
+<p>“You can <i>now</i> have nothing further to say,” she resentfully answered.
+“You have insulted me, in every possible method. I must beg to return to
+the house.”</p>
+
+<p>And she rose as she spoke. Lady Catherine rose also, and they turned
+back. Her Ladyship was highly incensed.</p>
+
+<p>“You have no regard, then, for the honour and credit of my nephew!
+Unfeeling, selfish girl! Do you not consider that a connection with you
+must disgrace him in the eyes of everybody?”</p>
+
+<p>“Lady Catherine, I have nothing further to say. You know my sentiments.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are then resolved to have him?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have said no such thing. I am only resolved to act in that manner,
+which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without
+reference to <i>you</i>, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is well. You refuse, then, to oblige me. You refuse to obey the
+claims of duty, honour, and gratitude. You are determined to ruin him in
+the opinion of all his friends, and make him the contempt of the world.”</p>
+
+<p>“Neither duty, nor honour, nor gratitude,” replied Elizabeth, “has any
+possible claim on me, in the present instance. No principle of either
+would be violated by my<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_441">{441}</a></span> marriage with Mr. Darcy. And with regard to the
+resentment of his family, or the indignation of the world, if the former
+<i>were</i> excited by his marrying me, it would not give me one moment’s
+concern—and the world in general would have too much sense to join in
+the scorn.”</p>
+
+<p>“And this is your real opinion! This is your final resolve! Very well. I
+shall now know how to act. Do not imagine, Miss Bennet, that your
+ambition will ever be gratified. I came to try you. I hoped to find you
+reasonable; but depend upon it I will carry my point.”</p>
+
+<p>In this manner Lady Catherine talked on till they were at the door of
+the carriage, when, turning hastily round, she added,—</p>
+
+<p>“I take no leave of you, Miss Bennet. I send no compliments to your
+mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth made no answer; and without attempting to persuade her
+Ladyship to return into the house, walked quietly into it herself. She
+heard the carriage drive away as she proceeded upstairs. Her mother
+impatiently met her at the door of her dressing-room, to ask why Lady
+Catherine would not come in again and rest herself.</p>
+
+<p>“She did not choose it,” said her daughter; “she would go.”</p>
+
+<p>“She is a very fine-looking woman! and her calling here was prodigiously
+civil! for she only came, I suppose, to tell us the Collinses were well.
+She is on her road somewhere, I dare say; and so, passing through
+Meryton, thought she might as well call on you. I suppose she had
+nothing particular to say to you, Lizzy?”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was forced to give in to a little falsehood here; for to
+acknowledge the substance of their conversation was impossible.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_442">{442}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_LVII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_471_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_471_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“But now it comes out.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER LVII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="T" src="images/i_471_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_471_b.png"></span>HE discomposure of spirits which this extraordinary visit threw
+Elizabeth into could not be easily overcome; nor could she for many
+hours learn to think of it less than incessantly. Lady Catherine, it
+appeared, had actually taken the trouble of this journey from Rosings
+for the sole purpose of breaking off her supposed engagement with Mr.
+Darcy. It was a rational scheme, to be sure! but from what the report of
+their engagement could originate, Elizabeth was at a loss to imagine;
+till she recollected that <i>his</i> being the intimate friend of Bingley,
+and <i>her</i> being the sister of Jane, was enough, at a time when the
+expectation of one wedding made everybody eager for another, to supply
+the idea. She had not herself forgotten to feel that the marriage of her
+sister must bring them more frequently together. And her neighbours at
+Lucas Lodge, therefore, (for through their<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_443">{443}</a></span> communication with the
+Collinses, the report, she concluded, had reached Lady Catherine,) had
+only set <i>that</i> down as almost certain and immediate which <i>she</i> had
+looked forward to as possible at some future time.</p>
+
+<p>In revolving Lady Catherine’s expressions, however, she could not help
+feeling some uneasiness as to the possible consequence of her persisting
+in this interference. From what she had said of her resolution to
+prevent the marriage, it occurred to Elizabeth that she must meditate an
+application to her nephew; and how he might take a similar
+representation of the evils attached to a connection with her she dared
+not pronounce. She knew not the exact degree of his affection for his
+aunt, or his dependence on her judgment, but it was natural to suppose
+that he thought much higher of her Ladyship than <i>she</i> could do; and it
+was certain, that in enumerating the miseries of a marriage with <i>one</i>
+whose immediate connections were so unequal to his own, his aunt would
+address him on his weakest side. With his notions of dignity, he would
+probably feel that the arguments, which to Elizabeth had appeared weak
+and ridiculous, contained much good sense and solid reasoning.</p>
+
+<p>If he had been wavering before, as to what he should do, which had often
+seemed likely, the advice and entreaty of so near a relation might
+settle every doubt, and determine him at once to be as happy as dignity
+unblemished could make him. In that case he would return no more. Lady
+Catherine might see him in her way through town; and his engagement to
+Bingley of coming again to Netherfield must give way.</p>
+
+<p>“If, therefore, an excuse for not keeping his promise should come to his
+friend within a few days,” she added, “I shall know how to understand
+it. I shall then give<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_444">{444}</a></span> over every expectation, every wish of his
+constancy. If he is satisfied with only regretting me, when he might
+have obtained my affections and hand, I shall soon cease to regret him
+at all.”</p>
+
+<p>The surprise of the rest of the family, on hearing who their visitor had
+been, was very great: but they obligingly satisfied it with the same
+kind of supposition which had appeased Mrs. Bennet’s curiosity; and
+Elizabeth was spared from much teasing on the subject.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning, as she was going down stairs, she was met by her
+father, who came out of his library with a letter in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Lizzy,” said he, “I was going to look for you: come into my room.”</p>
+
+<p>She followed him thither; and her curiosity to know what he had to tell
+her was heightened by the supposition of its being in some manner
+connected with the letter he held. It suddenly struck her that it might
+be from Lady Catherine, and she anticipated with dismay all the
+consequent explanations.</p>
+
+<p>She followed her father to the fireplace, and they both sat down. He
+then said,—</p>
+
+<p>“I have received a letter this morning that has astonished me
+exceedingly. As it principally concerns yourself, you ought to know its
+contents. I did not know before that I had <i>two</i> daughters on the brink
+of matrimony. Let me congratulate you on a very important conquest.”</p>
+
+<p>The colour now rushed into Elizabeth’s cheeks in the instantaneous
+conviction of its being a letter from the nephew, instead of the aunt;
+and she was undetermined whether most to be pleased that he explained
+himself at all, or offended that his letter was not rather addressed to
+herself, when her father continued,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_445">{445}</a></span>—</p>
+
+<p>“You look conscious. Young ladies have great penetration in such matters
+as these; but I think I may defy even <i>your</i> sagacity to discover the
+name of your admirer. This letter is from Mr. Collins.”</p>
+
+<p>“From Mr. Collins! and what can <i>he</i> have to say?”</p>
+
+<p>“Something very much to the purpose, of course. He begins with
+congratulations on the approaching nuptials of my eldest daughter, of
+which, it seems, he has been told by some of the good-natured, gossiping
+Lucases. I shall not sport with your impatience by reading what he says
+on that point. What relates to yourself is as follows:—‘Having thus
+offered you the sincere congratulations of Mrs. Collins and myself on
+this happy event, let me now add a short hint on the subject of another,
+of which we have been advertised by the same authority. Your daughter
+Elizabeth, it is presumed, will not long bear the name of Bennet, after
+her eldest sister has resigned it; and the chosen partner of her fate
+may be reasonably looked up to as one of the most illustrious personages
+in this land.’ Can you possibly guess, Lizzy, who is meant by this?
+‘This young gentleman is blessed, in a peculiar way, with everything the
+heart of mortal can most desire,—splendid property, noble kindred, and
+extensive patronage. Yet, in spite of all these temptations, let me warn
+my cousin Elizabeth, and yourself, of what evils you may incur by a
+precipitate closure with this gentleman’s proposals, which, of course,
+you will be inclined to take immediate advantage of.’ Have you any idea,
+Lizzy, who this gentleman is? But now it comes out. ‘My motive for
+cautioning you is as follows:—We have reason to imagine that his aunt,
+Lady Catherine de Bourgh, does not look on the match with a friendly
+eye.’ <i>Mr. Darcy</i>, you see, is the man! Now, Lizzy, I think<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_446">{446}</a></span> I <i>have</i>
+surprised you. Could he, or the Lucases, have pitched on any man, within
+the circle of our acquaintance, whose name would have given the lie more
+effectually to what they related? Mr. Darcy, who never looks at any
+woman but to see a blemish, and who probably never looked at <i>you</i> in
+his life! It is admirable!”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth tried to join in her father’s pleasantry, but could only force
+one most reluctant smile. Never had his wit been directed in a manner so
+little agreeable to her.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you not diverted?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes. Pray read on.”</p>
+
+<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>After mentioning the likelihood of this marriage to her Ladyship last
+night, she immediately, with her usual condescension, expressed what she
+felt on the occasion; when it became apparent, that, on the score of
+some family objections on the part of my cousin, she would never give
+her consent to what she termed so disgraceful a match. I thought it my
+duty to give the speediest intelligence of this to my cousin, that she
+and her noble admirer may be aware of what they are about, and not run
+hastily into a marriage which has not been properly sanctioned.’ Mr.
+Collins, moreover, adds, ‘I am truly rejoiced that my cousin Lydia’s sad
+business has been so well hushed up, and am only concerned that their
+living together before the marriage took place should be so generally
+known. I must not, however, neglect the duties of my station, or refrain
+from declaring my amazement, at hearing that you received the young
+couple into your house as soon as they were married. It was an
+encouragement of vice; and had I been the rector of Longbourn, I should
+very strenuously have opposed it. You ought certainly to forgive them as
+a Christian, but never to admit them<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_447">{447}</a></span> in your sight, or allow their
+names to be mentioned in your hearing.’ <i>That</i> is his notion of
+Christian forgiveness! The rest of his letter is only about his dear
+Charlotte’s situation, and his expectation of a young olive-branch. But,
+Lizzy, you look as if you did not enjoy it. You are not going to be
+<i>missish</i>, I hope, and pretend to be affronted at an idle report. For
+what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them
+in our turn?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” cried Elizabeth, “I am exceedingly diverted. But it is so
+strange!”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, <i>that</i> is what makes it amusing. Had they fixed on any other man
+it would have been nothing; but <i>his</i> perfect indifference and <i>your</i>
+pointed dislike make it so delightfully absurd! Much as I abominate
+writing, I would not give up Mr. Collins’s correspondence for any
+consideration. Nay, when I read a letter of his, I cannot help giving
+him the preference even over Wickham, much as I value the impudence and
+hypocrisy of my son-in-law. And pray, Lizzy, what said Lady Catherine
+about this report? Did she call to refuse her consent?”</p>
+
+<p>To this question his daughter replied only with a laugh; and as it had
+been asked without the least suspicion, she was not distressed by his
+repeating it. Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make her
+feelings appear what they were not. It was necessary to laugh when she
+would rather have cried. Her father had most cruelly mortified her by
+what he said of Mr. Darcy’s indifference; and she could do nothing but
+wonder at such a want of penetration, or fear that, perhaps, instead of
+his seeing too <i>little</i>, she might have fancied too <i>much</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_448">{448}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_LVIII"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_477_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_477_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“The efforts of his aunt.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER LVIII.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="I" src="images/i_477_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_477_b.png"></span>NSTEAD of receiving any such letter of excuse from his friend, as
+Elizabeth half expected Mr. Bingley to do, he was able to bring Darcy
+with him to Longbourn before many days had passed after Lady Catherine’s
+visit. The gentlemen<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_449">{449}</a></span> arrived early; and, before Mrs. Bennet had time to
+tell him of their having seen his aunt, of which her daughter sat in
+momentary dread, Bingley, who wanted to be alone with Jane, proposed
+their all walking out. It was agreed to. Mrs. Bennet was not in the
+habit of walking, Mary could never spare time, but the remaining five
+set off together. Bingley and Jane, however, soon allowed the others to
+outstrip them. They lagged behind, while Elizabeth, Kitty, and Darcy
+were to entertain each other. Very little was said by either; Kitty was
+too much afraid of him to talk; Elizabeth was secretly forming a
+desperate resolution; and, perhaps, he might be doing the same.</p>
+
+<p>They walked towards the Lucases’, because Kitty wished to call upon
+Maria; and as Elizabeth saw no occasion for making it a general concern,
+when Kitty left them she went boldly on with him alone. Now was the
+moment for her resolution to be executed; and while her courage was
+high, she immediately said,—</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Darcy, I am a very selfish creature, and for the sake of giving
+relief to my own feelings care not how much I may be wounding yours. I
+can no longer help thanking you for your unexampled kindness to my poor
+sister. Ever since I have known it I have been most anxious to
+acknowledge to you how gratefully I feel it. Were it known to the rest
+of my family I should not have merely my own gratitude to express.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am sorry, exceedingly sorry,” replied Darcy, in a tone of surprise
+and emotion, “that you have ever been informed of what may, in a
+mistaken light, have given you uneasiness. I did not think Mrs. Gardiner
+was so little to be trusted.”</p>
+
+<p>“You must not blame my aunt. Lydia’s thoughtlessness<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_450">{450}</a></span> first betrayed to
+me that you had been concerned in the matter; and, of course, I could
+not rest till I knew the particulars. Let me thank you again and again,
+in the name of all my family, for that generous compassion which induced
+you to take so much trouble, and bear so many mortifications, for the
+sake of discovering them.”</p>
+
+<p>“If you <i>will</i> thank me,” he replied, “let it be for yourself alone.
+That the wish of giving happiness to you might add force to the other
+inducements which led me on, I shall not attempt to deny. But your
+<i>family</i> owe me nothing. Much as I respect them, I believe I thought
+only of <i>you</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth was too much embarrassed to say a word. After a short pause,
+her companion added, “You are too generous to trifle with me. If your
+feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. <i>My</i>
+affections and wishes are unchanged; but one word from you will silence
+me on this subject for ever.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of
+his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not
+very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone
+so material a change since the period to which he alluded, as to make
+her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances. The
+happiness which this reply produced was such as he had probably never
+felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as
+warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. Had Elizabeth
+been able to encounter his eyes, she might have seen how well the
+expression of heartfelt delight diffused over his face became him: but
+though she could not look she could listen; and he told her of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_451">{451}</a></span> feelings
+which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his affection
+every moment more valuable.</p>
+
+<p>They walked on without knowing in what direction. There was too much to
+be thought, and felt, and said, for attention to any other objects. She
+soon learnt that they were indebted for their present good understanding
+to the efforts of his aunt, who <i>did</i> call on him in her return through
+London, and there relate her journey to Longbourn, its motive, and the
+substance of her conversation with Elizabeth; dwelling emphatically on
+every expression of the latter, which, in her Ladyship’s apprehension,
+peculiarly denoted her perverseness and assurance, in the belief that
+such a relation must assist her endeavours to obtain that promise from
+her nephew which <i>she</i> had refused to give. But, unluckily for her
+Ladyship, its effect had been exactly contrariwise.</p>
+
+<p>“It taught me to hope,” said he, “as I had scarcely ever allowed myself
+to hope before. I knew enough of your disposition to be certain, that
+had you been absolutely, irrevocably decided against me, you would have
+acknowledged it to Lady Catherine frankly and openly.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth coloured and laughed as she replied, “Yes, you know enough of
+my <i>frankness</i> to believe me capable of <i>that</i>. After abusing you so
+abominably to your face, I could have no scruple in abusing you to all
+your relations.”</p>
+
+<p>“What did you say of me that I did not deserve? For though your
+accusations were ill-founded, formed on mistaken premises, my behaviour
+to you at the time had merited the severest reproof. It was
+unpardonable. I cannot think of it without abhorrence.”</p>
+
+<p>“We will not quarrel for the greater share of blame annexed to that
+evening,” said Elizabeth. “The conduct<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_452">{452}</a></span> of neither, if strictly
+examined, will be irreproachable; but since then we have both, I hope,
+improved in civility.”</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot be so easily reconciled to myself. The recollection of what I
+then said, of my conduct, my manners, my expressions during the whole of
+it, is now, and has been many months, inexpressibly painful to me. Your
+reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: ‘Had you behaved in a
+more gentlemanlike manner.’ Those were your words. You know not, you can
+scarcely conceive, how they have tortured me; though it was some time, I
+confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice.”</p>
+
+<p>“I was certainly very far from expecting them to make so strong an
+impression. I had not the smallest idea of their being ever felt in such
+a way.”</p>
+
+<p>“I can easily believe it. You thought me then devoid of every proper
+feeling, I am sure you did. The turn of your countenance I shall never
+forget, as you said that I could not have addressed you in any possible
+way that would induce you to accept me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, do not repeat what I then said. These recollections will not do at
+all. I assure you that I have long been most heartily ashamed of it.”</p>
+
+<p>Darcy mentioned his letter. “Did it,” said he,—“did it <i>soon</i> make you
+think better of me? Did you, on reading it, give any credit to its
+contents?”</p>
+
+<p>She explained what its effects on her had been, and how gradually all
+her former prejudices had been removed.</p>
+
+<p>“I knew,” said he, “that what I wrote must give you pain, but it was
+necessary. I hope you have destroyed the letter. There was one part,
+especially the opening of it, which I should dread your having the power
+of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_453">{453}</a></span> reading again. I can remember some expressions which might justly
+make you hate me.”</p>
+
+<p>“The letter shall certainly be burnt, if you believe it essential to the
+preservation of my regard; but, though we have both reason to think my
+opinions not entirely unalterable, they are not, I hope, quite so easily
+changed as that implies.”</p>
+
+<p>“When I wrote that letter,” replied Darcy, “I believed myself perfectly
+calm and cool; but I am since convinced that it was written in a
+dreadful bitterness of spirit.”</p>
+
+<p>“The letter, perhaps, began in bitterness, but it did not end so. The
+adieu is charity itself. But think no more of the letter. The feelings
+of the person who wrote and the person who received it are now so widely
+different from what they were then, that every unpleasant circumstance
+attending it ought to be forgotten. You must learn some of my
+philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you
+pleasure.”</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot give you credit for any philosophy of the kind. <i>Your</i>
+retrospections must be so totally void of reproach, that the contentment
+arising from them is not of philosophy, but, what is much better, of
+ignorance. But with <i>me</i>, it is not so. Painful recollections will
+intrude, which cannot, which ought not to be repelled. I have been a
+selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a
+child I was taught what was <i>right</i>, but I was not taught to correct my
+temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride
+and conceit. Unfortunately an only son (for many years an only <i>child</i>),
+I was spoiled by my parents, who, though good themselves, (my father
+particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable,) allowed, encouraged,
+almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing, to care for none beyond
+my<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_454">{454}</a></span> own family circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to
+<i>wish</i> at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with
+my own. Such I was, from eight to eight-and-twenty; and such I might
+still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not
+owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most
+advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a
+doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my
+pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.”</p>
+
+<p>“Had you then persuaded yourself that I should?”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed I had. What will you think of my vanity? I believed you to be
+wishing, expecting my addresses.”</p>
+
+<p>“My manners must have been in fault, but not intentionally, I assure
+you. I never meant to deceive you, but my spirits might often lead me
+wrong. How you must have hated me after <i>that</i> evening!”</p>
+
+<p>“Hate you! I was angry, perhaps, at first, but my anger soon began to
+take a proper direction.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am almost afraid of asking what you thought of me when we met at
+Pemberley. You blamed me for coming?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, indeed, I felt nothing but surprise.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your surprise could not be greater than <i>mine</i> in being noticed by you.
+My conscience told me that I deserved no extraordinary politeness, and I
+confess that I did not expect to receive <i>more</i> than my due.”</p>
+
+<p>“My object <i>then</i>,” replied Darcy, “was to show you, by every civility
+in my power, that I was not so mean as to resent the past; and I hoped
+to obtain your forgiveness, to lessen your ill opinion, by letting you
+see that your reproofs had been attended to. How soon any other wishes
+introduced themselves, I can hardly<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_455">{455}</a></span> tell, but I believe in about half
+an hour after I had seen you.”</p>
+
+<p>He then told her of Georgiana’s delight in her acquaintance, and of her
+disappointment at its sudden interruption; which naturally leading to
+the cause of that interruption, she soon learnt that his resolution of
+following her from Derbyshire in quest of her sister had been formed
+before he quitted the inn, and that his gravity and thoughtfulness there
+had arisen from no other struggles than what such a purpose must
+comprehend.</p>
+
+<p>She expressed her gratitude again, but it was too painful a subject to
+each to be dwelt on farther.</p>
+
+<p>After walking several miles in a leisurely manner, and too busy to know
+anything about it, they found at last, on examining their watches, that
+it was time to be at home.</p>
+
+<p>“What could have become of Mr. Bingley and Jane?” was a wonder which
+introduced the discussion of <i>their</i> affairs. Darcy was delighted with
+their engagement; his friend had given him the earliest information of
+it.</p>
+
+<p>“I must ask whether you were surprised?” said Elizabeth.</p>
+
+<p>“Not at all. When I went away, I felt that it would soon happen.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is to say, you had given your permission. I guessed as much.” And
+though he exclaimed at the term, she found that it had been pretty much
+the case.</p>
+
+<p>“On the evening before my going to London,” said he, “I made a
+confession to him, which I believe I ought to have made long ago. I told
+him of all that had occurred to make my former interference in his
+affairs absurd and impertinent. His surprise was great. He had never had
+the slightest suspicion. I told him, moreover, that I<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_456">{456}</a></span> believed myself
+mistaken in supposing, as I had done, that your sister was indifferent
+to him; and as I could easily perceive that his attachment to her was
+unabated, I felt no doubt of their happiness together.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth could not help smiling at his easy manner of directing his
+friend.</p>
+
+<p>“Did you speak from your own observation,” said she, “when you told him
+that my sister loved him, or merely from my information last spring?”</p>
+
+<p>“From the former. I had narrowly observed her, during the two visits
+which I had lately made her here; and I was convinced of her affection.”</p>
+
+<p>“And your assurance of it, I suppose, carried immediate conviction to
+him.”</p>
+
+<p>“It did. Bingley is most unaffectedly modest. His diffidence had
+prevented his depending on his own judgment in so anxious a case, but
+his reliance on mine made everything easy. I was obliged to confess one
+thing, which for a time, and not unjustly, offended him. I could not
+allow myself to conceal that your sister had been in town three months
+last winter, that I had known it, and purposely kept it from him. He was
+angry. But his anger, I am persuaded, lasted no longer than he remained
+in any doubt of your sister’s sentiments. He has heartily forgiven me
+now.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth longed to observe that Mr. Bingley had been a most delightful
+friend; so easily guided that his worth was invaluable; but she checked
+herself. She remembered that he had yet to learn to be laughed at, and
+it was rather too early to begin. In anticipating the happiness of
+Bingley, which of course was to be inferior only to his own, he
+continued the conversation till they reached the house. In the hall they
+parted.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_457">{457}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_LIX"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_486_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_486_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“Unable to utter a syllable.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER LIX.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+“<img alt="M" src="images/i_486_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_486_b.png"></span>Y dear Lizzy, where can you have been walking to?” was a question
+which Elizabeth received from Jane as soon as she entered the room, and
+from all the others when they sat down to table. She had only to say in
+reply, that<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_458">{458}</a></span> they had wandered about till she was beyond her own
+knowledge. She coloured as she spoke; but neither that, nor anything
+else, awakened a suspicion of the truth.</p>
+
+<p>The evening passed quietly, unmarked by anything extraordinary. The
+acknowledged lovers talked and laughed; the unacknowledged were silent.
+Darcy was not of a disposition in which happiness overflows in mirth;
+and Elizabeth, agitated and confused, rather <i>knew</i> that she was happy
+than <i>felt</i> herself to be so; for, besides the immediate embarrassment,
+there were other evils before her. She anticipated what would be felt in
+the family when her situation became known: she was aware that no one
+liked him but Jane; and even feared that with the others it was a
+<i>dislike</i> which not all his fortune and consequence might do away.</p>
+
+<p>At night she opened her heart to Jane. Though suspicion was very far
+from Miss Bennet’s general habits, she was absolutely incredulous here.</p>
+
+<p>“You are joking, Lizzy. This cannot be! Engaged to Mr. Darcy! No, no,
+you shall not deceive me: I know it to be impossible.”</p>
+
+<p>“This is a wretched beginning, indeed! My sole dependence was on you;
+and I am sure nobody else will believe me, if you do not. Yet, indeed, I
+am in earnest. I speak nothing but the truth. He still loves me, and we
+are engaged.”</p>
+
+<p>Jane looked at her doubtingly. “Oh, Lizzy! it cannot be. I know how much
+you dislike him.”</p>
+
+<p>“You know nothing of the matter. <i>That</i> is all to be forgot. Perhaps I
+did not always love him so well as I do now; but in such cases as these
+a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever
+remember it myself.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_459">{459}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bennet still looked all amazement. Elizabeth again, and more
+seriously, assured her of its truth.</p>
+
+<p>“Good heaven! can it be really so? Yet now I must believe you,” cried
+Jane. “My dear, dear Lizzy, I would, I do congratulate you; but are you
+certain—forgive the question—are you quite certain that you can be
+happy with him?”</p>
+
+<p>“There can be no doubt of that. It is settled between us already that we
+are to be the happiest couple in the world. But are you pleased, Jane?
+Shall you like to have such a brother?”</p>
+
+<p>“Very, very much. Nothing could give either Bingley or myself more
+delight. But we considered it, we talked of it as impossible. And do you
+really love him quite well enough? Oh, Lizzy! do anything rather than
+marry without affection. Are you quite sure that you feel what you ought
+to do?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes! You will only think I feel <i>more</i> than I ought to do when I
+tell you all.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, I must confess that I love him better than I do Bingley. I am
+afraid you will be angry.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dearest sister, now be, <i>be</i> serious. I want to talk very seriously.
+Let me know everything that I am to know without delay. Will you tell me
+how long you have loved him?”</p>
+
+<p>“It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began;
+but I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds
+at Pemberley.”</p>
+
+<p>Another entreaty that she would be serious, however, produced the
+desired effect; and she soon satisfied Jane by her solemn assurances of
+attachment. When convinced on that article, Miss Bennet had nothing
+further to wish.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_460">{460}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“Now I am quite happy,” said she, “for you will be as happy as myself. I
+always had a value for him. Were it for nothing but his love of you, I
+must always have esteemed him; but now, as Bingley’s friend and your
+husband, there can be only Bingley and yourself more dear to me. But,
+Lizzy, you have been very sly, very reserved with me. How little did you
+tell me of what passed at Pemberley and Lambton! I owe all that I know
+of it to another, not to you.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth told her the motives of her secrecy. She had been unwilling to
+mention Bingley; and the unsettled state of her own feelings had made
+her equally avoid the name of his friend: but now she would no longer
+conceal from her his share in Lydia’s marriage. All was acknowledged,
+and half the night spent in conversation.</p>
+
+<p>“Good gracious!” cried Mrs. Bennet, as she stood at a window the next
+morning, “if that disagreeable Mr. Darcy is not coming here again with
+our dear Bingley! What can he mean by being so tiresome as to be always
+coming here? I had no notion but he would go a-shooting, or something or
+other, and not disturb us with his company. What shall we do with him?
+Lizzy, you must walk out with him again, that he may not be in Bingley’s
+way.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth could hardly help laughing at so convenient a proposal; yet
+was really vexed that her mother should be always giving him such an
+epithet.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as they entered, Bingley looked at her so expressively, and
+shook hands with such warmth, as left no doubt of his good information;
+and he soon afterwards said aloud, “Mrs. Bennet, have you no more lanes
+hereabouts in which Lizzy may lose her way again to-day?”</p>
+
+<p>“I advise Mr. Darcy, and Lizzy, and Kitty,” said Mrs.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_461">{461}</a></span> Bennet, “to walk
+to Oakham Mount this morning. It is a nice long walk, and Mr. Darcy has
+never seen the view.”</p>
+
+<p>“It may do very well for the others,” replied Mr. Bingley; “but I am
+sure it will be too much for Kitty. Won’t it, Kitty?”</p>
+
+<p>Kitty owned that she had rather stay at home. Darcy professed a great
+curiosity to see the view from the Mount, and Elizabeth silently
+consented. As she went upstairs to get ready, Mrs. Bennet followed her,
+saying,—</p>
+
+<p>“I am quite sorry, Lizzy, that you should be forced to have that
+disagreeable man all to yourself; but I hope you will not mind it. It is
+all for Jane’s sake, you know; and there is no occasion for talking to
+him except just now and then; so do not put yourself to inconvenience.”</p>
+
+<p>During their walk, it was resolved that Mr. Bennet’s consent should be
+asked in the course of the evening: Elizabeth reserved to herself the
+application for her mother’s. She could not determine how her mother
+would take it; sometimes doubting whether all his wealth and grandeur
+would be enough to overcome her abhorrence of the man; but whether she
+were violently set against the match, or violently delighted with it, it
+was certain that her manner would be equally ill adapted to do credit to
+her sense; and she could no more bear that Mr. Darcy should hear the
+first raptures of her joy, than the first vehemence of her
+disapprobation.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening, soon after Mr. Bennet withdrew to the library, she saw
+Mr. Darcy rise also and follow him, and her agitation on seeing it was
+extreme. She did not fear her father’s opposition, but he was going to
+be made unhappy, and that it should be through her means; that <i>she</i>,
+his favourite child, should be distressing him by her choice, should be
+filling him with fears and regrets in<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_462">{462}</a></span> disposing of her, was a wretched
+reflection, and she sat in misery till Mr. Darcy appeared again, when,
+looking at him, she was a little relieved by his smile. In a few minutes
+he approached the table where she was sitting with Kitty; and, while
+pretending to admire her work, said in a whisper, “Go to your father; he
+wants you in the library.” She was gone directly.</p>
+
+<p>Her father was walking about the room, looking grave and anxious.
+“Lizzy,” said he, “what are you doing? Are you out of your senses to be
+accepting this man? Have not you always hated him?”</p>
+
+<p>How earnestly did she then wish that her former opinions had been more
+reasonable, her expressions more moderate! It would have spared her from
+explanations and professions which it was exceedingly awkward to give;
+but they were now necessary, and she assured him, with some confusion,
+of her attachment to Mr. Darcy.</p>
+
+<p>“Or, in other words, you are determined to have him. He is rich, to be
+sure, and you may have more fine clothes and fine carriages than Jane.
+But will they make you happy?”</p>
+
+<p>“Have you any other objection,” said Elizabeth, “than your belief of my
+indifference?”</p>
+
+<p>“None at all. We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort of man; but
+this would be nothing if you really liked him.”</p>
+
+<p>“I do, I do like him,” she replied, with tears in her eyes; “I love him.
+Indeed he has no improper pride. He is perfectly amiable. You do not
+know what he really is; then pray do not pain me by speaking of him in
+such terms.”</p>
+
+<p>“Lizzy,” said her father, “I have given him my consent. He is the kind
+of man, indeed, to whom I<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_463">{463}</a></span> should never dare refuse anything, which he
+condescended to ask. I now give it to <i>you</i>, if you are resolved on
+having him. But let me advise you to think better of it. I know your
+disposition, Lizzy. I know that you could be neither happy nor
+respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband, unless you looked
+up to him as a superior. Your lively talents would place you in the
+greatest danger in an unequal marriage. You could scarcely escape
+discredit and misery. My child, let me not have the grief of seeing
+<i>you</i> unable to respect your partner in life. You know not what you are
+about.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth, still more affected, was earnest and solemn in her reply;
+and, at length, by repeated assurances that Mr. Darcy was really the
+object of her choice, by explaining the gradual change which her
+estimation of him had undergone, relating her absolute certainty that
+his affection was not the work of a day, but had stood the test of many
+months’ suspense, and enumerating with energy all his good qualities,
+she did conquer her father’s incredulity, and reconcile him to the
+match.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my dear,” said he, when she ceased speaking, “I have no more to
+say. If this be the case, he deserves you. I could not have parted with
+you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy.”</p>
+
+<p>To complete the favourable impression, she then told him what Mr. Darcy
+had voluntarily done for Lydia. He heard her with astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>“This is an evening of wonders, indeed! And so, Darcy did everything;
+made up the match, gave the money, paid the fellow’s debts, and got him
+his commission! So much the better. It will save me a world of trouble
+and economy. Had it been your uncle’s doing, I must and <i>would</i> have
+paid him; but these violent<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_464">{464}</a></span> young lovers carry everything their own
+way. I shall offer to pay him to-morrow, he will rant and storm about
+his love for you, and there will be an end of the matter.”</p>
+
+<p>He then recollected her embarrassment a few days before on his reading
+Mr. Collins’s letter; and after laughing at her some time, allowed her
+at last to go, saying, as she quitted the room, “If any young men come
+for Mary or Kitty, send them in, for I am quite at leisure.”</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth’s mind was now relieved from a very heavy weight; and, after
+half an hour’s quiet reflection in her own room, she was able to join
+the others with tolerable composure. Everything was too recent for
+gaiety, but the evening passed tranquilly away; there was no longer
+anything material to be dreaded, and the comfort of ease and familiarity
+would come in time.</p>
+
+<p>When her mother went up to her dressing-room at night, she followed her,
+and made the important communication. Its effect was most extraordinary;
+for, on first hearing it, Mrs. Bennet sat quite still, and unable to
+utter a syllable. Nor was it under many, many minutes, that she could
+comprehend what she heard, though not in general backward to credit what
+was for the advantage of her family, or that came in the shape of a
+lover to any of them. She began at length to recover, to fidget about in
+her chair, get up, sit down again, wonder, and bless herself.</p>
+
+<p>“Good gracious! Lord bless me! only think! dear me! Mr. Darcy! Who would
+have thought it? And is it really true? Oh, my sweetest Lizzy! how rich
+and how great you will be! What pin-money, what jewels, what carriages
+you will have! Jane’s is nothing to it—nothing at all. I am so
+pleased—so happy. Such a charming man! so handsome! so tall! Oh, my
+dear<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_465">{465}</a></span> Lizzy! pray apologize for my having disliked him so much before. I
+hope he will overlook it. Dear, dear Lizzy. A house in town! Everything
+that is charming! Three daughters married! Ten thousand a year! Oh,
+Lord! what will become of me? I shall go distracted.”</p>
+
+<p>This was enough to prove that her approbation need not be doubted; and
+Elizabeth, rejoicing that such an effusion was heard only by herself,
+soon went away. But before she had been three minutes in her own room,
+her mother followed her.</p>
+
+<p>“My dearest child,” she cried, “I can think of nothing else. Ten
+thousand a year, and very likely more! ’Tis as good as a lord! And a
+special licence—you must and shall be married by a special licence.
+But, my dearest love, tell me what dish Mr. Darcy is particularly fond
+of, that I may have it to-morrow.”</p>
+
+<p>This was a sad omen of what her mother’s behaviour to the gentleman
+himself might be; and Elizabeth found that, though in the certain
+possession of his warmest affection, and secure of her relations’
+consent, there was still something to be wished for. But the morrow
+passed off much better than she expected; for Mrs. Bennet luckily stood
+in such awe of her intended son-in-law, that she ventured not to speak
+to him, unless it was in her power to offer him any attention, or mark
+her deference for his opinion.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth had the satisfaction of seeing her father taking pains to get
+acquainted with him; and Mr. Bennet soon assured her that he was rising
+every hour in his esteem.</p>
+
+<p>“I admire all my three sons-in-law highly,” said he. “Wickham, perhaps,
+is my favourite; but I think I shall like <i>your</i> husband quite as well
+as Jane’s.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_466">{466}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<h2>
+<a id="CHAPTER_LX"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_495_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_495_a.jpg">
+<br><span class="caption">
+“The obsequious civility.”
+</span>
+<br><br>CHAPTER LX.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="E" src="images/i_495_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_495_b.png"></span>LIZABETH’S spirits soon rising to playfulness again, she wanted Mr.
+Darcy to account for his having ever fallen in love with her. “How could
+you begin?” said she. “I can comprehend your going on charmingly, when
+you had once made a beginning; but what could set you off in the first
+place?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_467">{467}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which
+laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I
+knew that I <i>had</i> begun.”</p>
+
+<p>“My beauty you had early withstood, and as for my manners—my behaviour
+to <i>you</i> was at least always bordering on the uncivil, and I never spoke
+to you without rather wishing to give you pain than not. Now, be
+sincere; did you admire me for my impertinence?”</p>
+
+<p>“For the liveliness of your mind I did.”</p>
+
+<p>“You may as well call it impertinence at once. It was very little less.
+The fact is, that you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious
+attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking,
+and looking, and thinking for <i>your</i> approbation alone. I roused and
+interested you, because I was so unlike <i>them</i>. Had you not been really
+amiable you would have hated me for it: but in spite of the pains you
+took to disguise yourself, your feelings were always noble and just; and
+in your heart you thoroughly despised the persons who so assiduously
+courted you. There—I have saved you the trouble of accounting for it;
+and really, all things considered, I begin to think it perfectly
+reasonable. To be sure you know no actual good of me—but nobody thinks
+of <i>that</i> when they fall in love.”</p>
+
+<p>“Was there no good in your affectionate behaviour to Jane, while she was
+ill at Netherfield?”</p>
+
+<p>“Dearest Jane! who could have done less for her? But make a virtue of it
+by all means. My good qualities are under your protection, and you are
+to exaggerate them as much as possible; and, in return, it belongs to me
+to find occasions for teasing and quarrelling with you as often as may
+be; and I shall begin directly, by asking you what made you so unwilling
+to come to the point at last?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_468">{468}</a></span> What made you so shy of me, when you
+first called, and afterwards dined here? Why, especially, when you
+called, did you look as if you did not care about me?”</p>
+
+<p>“Because you were grave and silent, and gave me no encouragement.”</p>
+
+<p>“But I was embarrassed.”</p>
+
+<p>“And so was I.”</p>
+
+<p>“You might have talked to me more when you came to dinner.”</p>
+
+<p>“A man who had felt less might.”</p>
+
+<p>“How unlucky that you should have a reasonable answer to give, and that
+I should be so reasonable as to admit it! But I wonder how long you
+<i>would</i> have gone on, if you had been left to yourself. I wonder when
+you <i>would</i> have spoken if I had not asked you! My resolution of
+thanking you for your kindness to Lydia had certainly great effect. <i>Too
+much</i>, I am afraid; for what becomes of the moral, if our comfort
+springs from a breach of promise, for I ought not to have mentioned the
+subject? This will never do.”</p>
+
+<p>“You need not distress yourself. The moral will be perfectly fair. Lady
+Catherine’s unjustifiable endeavours to separate us were the means of
+removing all my doubts. I am not indebted for my present happiness to
+your eager desire of expressing your gratitude. I was not in a humour to
+wait for an opening of yours. My aunt’s intelligence had given me hope,
+and I was determined at once to know everything.”</p>
+
+<p>“Lady Catherine has been of infinite use, which ought to make her happy,
+for she loves to be of use. But tell me, what did you come down to
+Netherfield for? Was it merely to ride to Longbourn and be embarrassed?
+or had you intended any more serious consequences?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_469">{469}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>“My real purpose was to see <i>you</i>, and to judge, if I could, whether I
+might ever hope to make you love me. My avowed one, or what I avowed to
+myself, was to see whether your sister was still partial to Bingley, and
+if she were, to make the confession to him which I have since made.”</p>
+
+<p>“Shall you ever have courage to announce to Lady Catherine what is to
+befall her?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am more likely to want time than courage, Elizabeth. But it ought to
+be done; and if you will give me a sheet of paper it shall be done
+directly.”</p>
+
+<p>“And if I had not a letter to write myself, I might sit by you, and
+admire the evenness of your writing, as another young lady once did. But
+I have an aunt, too, who must not be longer neglected.”</p>
+
+<p>From an unwillingness to confess how much her intimacy with Mr. Darcy
+had been overrated, Elizabeth had never yet answered Mrs. Gardiner’s
+long letter; but now, having <i>that</i> to communicate which she knew would
+be most welcome, she was almost ashamed to find that her uncle and aunt
+had already lost three days of happiness, and immediately wrote as
+follows:—</p>
+
+<p>“I would have thanked you before, my dear aunt, as I ought to have done,
+for your long, kind, satisfactory detail of particulars; but, to say the
+truth, I was too cross to write. You supposed more than really existed.
+But <i>now</i> suppose as much as you choose; give a loose to your fancy,
+indulge your imagination in every possible flight which the subject will
+afford, and unless you believe me actually married, you cannot greatly
+err. You must write again very soon, and praise him a great deal more
+than you did in your last. I thank you again and again, for not going to
+the Lakes. How could I be so<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_470">{470}</a></span> silly as to wish it! Your idea of the
+ponies is delightful. We will go round the park every day. I am the
+happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so
+before, but no one with such justice. I am happier even than Jane; she
+only smiles, I laugh. Mr. Darcy sends you all the love in the world that
+can be spared from me. You are all to come to Pemberley at Christmas.
+Yours,” etc.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Darcy’s letter to Lady Catherine was in a different style, and still
+different from either was what Mr. Bennet sent to Mr. Collins, in return
+for his last.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="nind"> “Dear Sir, </p>
+
+<p>“I must trouble you once more for congratulations. Elizabeth will
+soon be the wife of Mr. Darcy. Console Lady Catherine as well as
+you can. But, if I were you, I would stand by the nephew. He has
+more to give.</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yours sincerely,” etc.<br>
+</p></div>
+
+<p>Miss Bingley’s congratulations to her brother on his approaching
+marriage were all that was affectionate and insincere. She wrote even to
+Jane on the occasion, to express her delight, and repeat all her former
+professions of regard. Jane was not deceived, but she was affected; and
+though feeling no reliance on her, could not help writing her a much
+kinder answer than she knew was deserved.</p>
+
+<p>The joy which Miss Darcy expressed on receiving similar information was
+as sincere as her brother’s in sending it. Four sides of paper were
+insufficient to contain all her delight, and all her earnest desire of
+being loved by her sister.</p>
+
+<p>Before any answer could arrive from Mr. Collins, or any congratulations
+to Elizabeth from his wife, the Longbourn family heard that the
+Collinses were come themselves to Lucas Lodge. The reason of this
+sudden<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_471">{471}</a></span> removal was soon evident. Lady Catherine had been rendered so
+exceedingly angry by the contents of her nephew’s letter, that
+Charlotte, really rejoicing in the match, was anxious to get away till
+the storm was blown over. At such a moment, the arrival of her friend
+was a sincere pleasure to Elizabeth, though in the course of their
+meetings she must sometimes think the pleasure dearly bought, when she
+saw Mr. Darcy exposed to all the parading and obsequious civility of her
+husband. He bore it, however, with admirable calmness. He could even
+listen to Sir William Lucas, when he complimented him on carrying away
+the brightest jewel of the country, and expressed his hopes of their all
+meeting frequently at St. James’s, with very decent composure. If he did
+shrug his shoulders, it was not till Sir William was out of sight.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Philips’s vulgarity was another, and, perhaps, a greater tax on his
+forbearance; and though Mrs. Philips, as well as her sister, stood in
+too much awe of him to speak with the familiarity which Bingley’s
+good-humour encouraged; yet, whenever she <i>did</i> speak, she must be
+vulgar. Nor was her respect for him, though it made her more quiet, at
+all likely to make her more elegant. Elizabeth did all she could to
+shield him from the frequent notice of either, and was ever anxious to
+keep him to herself, and to those of her family with whom he might
+converse without mortification; and though the uncomfortable feelings
+arising from all this took from the season of courtship much of its
+pleasure, it added to the hope of the future; and she looked forward
+with delight to the time when they should be removed from society so
+little pleasing to either, to all the comfort and elegance of their
+family party at Pemberley.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_472">{472}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXI"></a><img alt="" src="images/i_501_a.jpg" width="450" id="img_images_i_501_a.jpg">
+<br><br>CHAPTER LXI.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">
+<img alt="H" src="images/i_501_b.png" width="100" id="img_images_i_501_b.png"></span>APPY for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got
+rid of her two most deserving daughters. With what delighted pride she
+afterwards visited Mrs. Bingley, and talked of Mrs. Darcy, may be
+guessed. I wish I could say, for the sake of her family, that the
+accomplishment of her earnest desire in the establishment of so many of
+her children produced so happy an effect as to make her a sensible,
+amiable, well-informed woman for the rest of her life; though, perhaps,
+it was lucky for her husband, who might not have relished domestic
+felicity in so unusual a form, that she still was occasionally nervous
+and invariably silly.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bennet missed his second daughter exceedingly; his affection for her
+drew him oftener from home than anything else could do. He delighted in
+going to Pemberley, especially when he was least expected.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_473">{473}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bingley and Jane remained at Netherfield only a twelvemonth. So near
+a vicinity to her mother and Meryton relations was not desirable even to
+<i>his</i> easy temper, or <i>her</i> affectionate heart. The darling wish of his
+sisters was then gratified: he bought an estate in a neighbouring county
+to Derbyshire; and Jane and Elizabeth, in addition to every other source
+of happiness, were within thirty miles of each other.</p>
+
+<p>Kitty, to her very material advantage, spent the chief of her time with
+her two elder sisters. In society so superior to what she had generally
+known, her improvement was great. She was not of so ungovernable a
+temper as Lydia; and, removed from the influence of Lydia’s example, she
+became, by proper attention and management, less irritable, less
+ignorant, and less insipid. From the further disadvantage of Lydia’s
+society she was of course carefully kept; and though Mrs. Wickham
+frequently invited her to come and stay with her, with the promise of
+balls and young men, her father would never consent to her going.</p>
+
+<p>Mary was the only daughter who remained at home; and she was necessarily
+drawn from the pursuit of accomplishments by Mrs. Bennet’s being quite
+unable to sit alone. Mary was obliged to mix more with the world, but
+she could still moralize over every morning visit; and as she was no
+longer mortified by comparisons between her sisters’ beauty and her own,
+it was suspected by her father that she submitted to the change without
+much reluctance.</p>
+
+<p>As for Wickham and Lydia, their characters suffered no revolution from
+the marriage of her sisters. He bore with philosophy the conviction that
+Elizabeth must now become acquainted with whatever of his ingratitude
+and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_474">{474}</a></span> falsehood had before been unknown to her; and, in spite of
+everything, was not wholly without hope that Darcy might yet be
+prevailed on to make his fortune. The congratulatory letter which
+Elizabeth received from Lydia on her marriage explained to her that, by
+his wife at least, if not by himself, such a hope was cherished. The
+letter was to this effect:—</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="nind"> “My dear Lizzy, </p>
+
+<p>“I wish you joy. If you love Mr. Darcy half so well as I do my dear
+Wickham, you must be very happy. It is a great comfort to have you
+so rich; and when you have nothing else to do, I hope you will
+think of us. I am sure Wickham would like a place at court very
+much; and I do not think we shall have quite money enough to live
+upon without some help. Any place would do of about three or four
+hundred a year; but, however, do not speak to Mr. Darcy about it,
+if you had rather not.</p>
+
+<p class="rt">
+“Yours,” etc.<br>
+</p></div>
+
+<p>As it happened that Elizabeth had much rather not, she endeavoured in
+her answer to put an end to every entreaty and expectation of the kind.
+Such relief, however, as it was in her power to afford, by the practice
+of what might be called economy in her own private expenses, she
+frequently sent them. It had always been evident to her that such an
+income as theirs, under the direction of two persons so extravagant in
+their wants, and heedless of the future, must be very insufficient to
+their support; and whenever they changed their quarters, either Jane or
+herself were sure of being applied to for some little assistance towards
+discharging their bills. Their manner of living, even when the
+restoration of peace dismissed them to a home, was unsettled in the
+extreme. They were always moving from place to place<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_475">{475}</a></span> in quest of a
+cheap situation, and always spending more than they ought. His affection
+for her soon sunk into indifference: hers lasted a little longer; and,
+in spite of her youth and her manners, she retained all the claims to
+reputation which her marriage had given her. Though Darcy could never
+receive <i>him</i> at Pemberley, yet, for Elizabeth’s sake, he assisted him
+further in his profession. Lydia was occasionally a visitor there, when
+her husband was gone to enjoy himself in London or Bath; and with the
+Bingleys they both of them frequently stayed so long, that even
+Bingley’s good-humour was overcome, and he proceeded so far as to <i>talk</i>
+of giving them a hint to be gone.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bingley was very deeply mortified by Darcy’s marriage; but as she
+thought it advisable to retain the right of visiting at Pemberley, she
+dropped all her resentment; was fonder than ever of Georgiana, almost as
+attentive to Darcy as heretofore, and paid off every arrear of civility
+to Elizabeth.</p>
+
+<p>Pemberley was now Georgiana’s home; and the attachment of the sisters
+was exactly what Darcy had hoped to see. They were able to love each
+other, even as well as they intended. Georgiana had the highest opinion
+in the world of Elizabeth; though at first she often listened with an
+astonishment bordering on alarm at her lively, sportive manner of
+talking to her brother. He, who had always inspired in herself a respect
+which almost overcame her affection, she now saw the object of open
+pleasantry. Her mind received knowledge which had never before fallen in
+her way. By Elizabeth’s instructions she began to comprehend that a
+woman may take liberties with her husband, which a brother will not
+always allow in a sister more than ten years younger than himself.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_476">{476}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Lady Catherine was extremely indignant on the marriage of her nephew;
+and as she gave way to all the genuine frankness of her character, in
+her reply to the letter which announced its arrangement, she sent him
+language so very abusive, especially of Elizabeth, that for some time
+all intercourse was at an end. But at length, by Elizabeth’s persuasion,
+he was prevailed on to overlook the offence, and seek a reconciliation;
+and, after a little further resistance on the part of his aunt, her
+resentment gave way, either to her affection for him, or her curiosity
+to see how his wife conducted herself; and she condescended to wait on
+them at Pemberley, in spite of that pollution which its woods had
+received, not merely from the presence of such a mistress, but the
+visits of her uncle and aunt from the city.</p>
+
+<p>With the Gardiners they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy,
+as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever
+sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing
+her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 345px;">
+<img alt="" height="550" src="images/i_505.jpg" width="345" id="img_images_i_505.jpg">
+</div>
+
+<p class="fint">
+CHISWICK PRESS:—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.<br>
+TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.<br>
+</p>
+
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+<body><header class="pg-boilerplate pgheader" id="pg-header" lang="en"><h2 id="pg-header-heading" title="">The Project Gutenberg eBook of <span lang="en" id="pg-title-no-subtitle">The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes</span></h2>
+    
+<div>This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
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+
+<div class="container" id="pg-machine-header"><p><strong>Title</strong>: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes</p>
+<div id="pg-header-authlist">
+<p><strong>Author</strong>: Arthur Conan Doyle</p>
+</div>
+<br>
+        
+<p><strong>Release date</strong>: March 1, 1999 [eBook #1661]<br>
+                Most recently updated: October 10, 2023</p>
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+<p><strong>Language</strong>: English</p>
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+<p><strong>Credits</strong>: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer and Jose Menendez</p>
+
+</div><div id="pg-start-separator">
+<span>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES ***</span>
+</div></header><div style="margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em"></div>
+<table class="autotable">
+<tbody><tr>
+<td>
+THERE IS AN ILLUSTRATED EDITION OF THIS TITLE WHICH MAY VIEWED AT EBOOK <span class="big"><b><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48320" id="id-5543860262822206304">
+[ #48320 ]</a></b></span>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody></table>
+<div class="fig" style="width:65%;">
+<img alt="" src="images/cover.jpg" style="width:100%;" id="img_images_cover.jpg"><br><br>
+</div>
+<h1>The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes</h1>
+<h2>by Arthur Conan Doyle</h2>
+<hr>
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+<table class="autotable">
+<tbody><tr>
+<td>I.</td><td> <a href="#chap01" class="pginternal">A Scandal in Bohemia</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>II.</td><td> <a href="#chap02" class="pginternal">The Red-Headed League</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>III.</td><td> <a href="#chap03" class="pginternal">A Case of Identity</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>IV.</td><td> <a href="#chap04" class="pginternal">The Boscombe Valley Mystery</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>V.</td><td> <a href="#chap05" class="pginternal">The Five Orange Pips</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>VI.</td><td> <a href="#chap06" class="pginternal">The Man with the Twisted Lip</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>VII.</td><td> <a href="#chap07" class="pginternal">The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>VIII.</td><td> <a href="#chap08" class="pginternal">The Adventure of the Speckled Band</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>IX.</td><td> <a href="#chap09" class="pginternal">The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>X.</td><td> <a href="#chap10" class="pginternal">The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>XI.</td><td> <a href="#chap11" class="pginternal">The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>XII.</td><td> <a href="#chap12" class="pginternal">The Adventure of the Copper Beeches</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody></table>
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap01"></a>I.<br>A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA</h2>
+<h3>I.</h3>
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 1.50em">T</span>o Sherlock Holmes she
+is always <i>the</i> woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other
+name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was
+not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and
+that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably
+balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing
+machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in
+a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a
+sneer. They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawing
+the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to
+admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was
+to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental
+results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own
+high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a
+nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was
+the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.
+</p>
+<p>
+I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each
+other. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up
+around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were
+sufficient to absorb all my attention, while Holmes, who loathed every form of
+society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street,
+buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine
+and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen
+nature. He was still, as ever, deeply attracted by the study of crime, and
+occupied his immense faculties and extraordinary powers of observation in
+following out those clues, and clearing up those mysteries which had been
+abandoned as hopeless by the official police. From time to time I heard some
+vague account of his doings: of his summons to Odessa in the case of the
+Trepoff murder, of his clearing up of the singular tragedy of the Atkinson
+brothers at Trincomalee, and finally of the mission which he had accomplished
+so delicately and successfully for the reigning family of Holland. Beyond these
+signs of his activity, however, which I merely shared with all the readers of
+the daily press, I knew little of my former friend and companion.
+</p>
+<p>
+One night—it was on the twentieth of March, 1888—I was returning
+from a journey to a patient (for I had now returned to civil practice), when my
+way led me through Baker Street. As I passed the well-remembered door, which
+must always be associated in my mind with my wooing, and with the dark
+incidents of the Study in Scarlet, I was seized with a keen desire to see
+Holmes again, and to know how he was employing his extraordinary powers. His
+rooms were brilliantly lit, and, even as I looked up, I saw his tall, spare
+figure pass twice in a dark silhouette against the blind. He was pacing the
+room swiftly, eagerly, with his head sunk upon his chest and his hands clasped
+behind him. To me, who knew his every mood and habit, his attitude and manner
+told their own story. He was at work again. He had risen out of his
+drug-created dreams and was hot upon the scent of some new problem. I rang the
+bell and was shown up to the chamber which had formerly been in part my own.
+</p>
+<p>
+His manner was not effusive. It seldom was; but he was glad, I think, to see
+me. With hardly a word spoken, but with a kindly eye, he waved me to an
+armchair, threw across his case of cigars, and indicated a spirit case and a
+gasogene in the corner. Then he stood before the fire and looked me over in his
+singular introspective fashion.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Wedlock suits you,” he remarked. “I think, Watson, that you
+have put on seven and a half pounds since I saw you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Seven!” I answered.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Indeed, I should have thought a little more. Just a trifle more, I
+fancy, Watson. And in practice again, I observe. You did not tell me that you
+intended to go into harness.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then, how do you know?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I see it, I deduce it. How do I know that you have been getting yourself
+very wet lately, and that you have a most clumsy and careless servant
+girl?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My dear Holmes,” said I, “this is too much. You would
+certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago. It is true that
+I had a country walk on Thursday and came home in a dreadful mess, but as I
+have changed my clothes I can’t imagine how you deduce it. As to Mary
+Jane, she is incorrigible, and my wife has given her notice, but there, again,
+I fail to see how you work it out.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He chuckled to himself and rubbed his long, nervous hands together.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is simplicity itself,” said he; “my eyes tell me that on
+the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather
+is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by
+someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to
+remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had
+been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant
+boot-slitting specimen of the London slavey. As to your practice, if a
+gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of
+nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of
+his top-hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull,
+indeed, if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical
+profession.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of
+deduction. “When I hear you give your reasons,” I remarked,
+“the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could
+easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am
+baffled until you explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as
+good as yours.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Quite so,” he answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself
+down into an armchair. “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction
+is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from
+the hall to this room.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Frequently.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How often?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, some hundreds of times.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then how many are there?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How many? I don’t know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my
+point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and
+observed. By the way, since you are interested in these little problems, and
+since you are good enough to chronicle one or two of my trifling experiences,
+you may be interested in this.” He threw over a sheet of thick,
+pink-tinted notepaper which had been lying open upon the table. “It came
+by the last post,” said he. “Read it aloud.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The note was undated, and without either signature or address.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There will call upon you to-night, at a quarter to eight
+o’clock,” it said, “a gentleman who desires to consult you
+upon a matter of the very deepest moment. Your recent services to one of the
+royal houses of Europe have shown that you are one who may safely be trusted
+with matters which are of an importance which can hardly be exaggerated. This
+account of you we have from all quarters received. Be in your chamber then at
+that hour, and do not take it amiss if your visitor wear a mask.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“This is indeed a mystery,” I remarked. “What do you imagine
+that it means?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has
+data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of
+theories to suit facts. But the note itself. What do you deduce from it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+I carefully examined the writing, and the paper upon which it was written.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The man who wrote it was presumably well to do,” I remarked,
+endeavouring to imitate my companion’s processes. “Such paper could
+not be bought under half a crown a packet. It is peculiarly strong and
+stiff.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Peculiar—that is the very word,” said Holmes. “It is
+not an English paper at all. Hold it up to the light.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I did so, and saw a large “E” with a small “g,” a
+“P,” and a large “G” with a small “t” woven
+into the texture of the paper.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What do you make of that?” asked Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The name of the maker, no doubt; or his monogram, rather.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not at all. The ‘G’ with the small ‘t’ stands
+for ‘Gesellschaft,’ which is the German for ‘Company.’
+It is a customary contraction like our ‘Co.’ ‘P,’ of
+course, stands for ‘Papier.’ Now for the ‘Eg.’ Let us
+glance at our Continental Gazetteer.” He took down a heavy brown volume
+from his shelves. “Eglow, Eglonitz—here we are, Egria. It is in a
+German-speaking country—in Bohemia, not far from Carlsbad.
+‘Remarkable as being the scene of the death of Wallenstein, and for its
+numerous glass-factories and paper-mills.’ Ha, ha, my boy, what do you
+make of that?” His eyes sparkled, and he sent up a great blue triumphant
+cloud from his cigarette.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The paper was made in Bohemia,” I said.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Precisely. And the man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the
+peculiar construction of the sentence—‘This account of you we have
+from all quarters received.’ A Frenchman or Russian could not have
+written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs. It only
+remains, therefore, to discover what is wanted by this German who writes upon
+Bohemian paper and prefers wearing a mask to showing his face. And here he
+comes, if I am not mistaken, to resolve all our doubts.”
+</p>
+<p>
+As he spoke there was the sharp sound of horses’ hoofs and grating wheels
+against the curb, followed by a sharp pull at the bell. Holmes whistled.
+</p>
+<p>
+“A pair, by the sound,” said he. “Yes,” he continued,
+glancing out of the window. “A nice little brougham and a pair of
+beauties. A hundred and fifty guineas apiece. There’s money in this case,
+Watson, if there is nothing else.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think that I had better go, Holmes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not a bit, Doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell. And
+this promises to be interesting. It would be a pity to miss it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But your client—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Never mind him. I may want your help, and so may he. Here he comes. Sit
+down in that armchair, Doctor, and give us your best attention.”
+</p>
+<p>
+A slow and heavy step, which had been heard upon the stairs and in the passage,
+paused immediately outside the door. Then there was a loud and authoritative
+tap.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come in!” said Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+A man entered who could hardly have been less than six feet six inches in
+height, with the chest and limbs of a Hercules. His dress was rich with a
+richness which would, in England, be looked upon as akin to bad taste. Heavy
+bands of astrakhan were slashed across the sleeves and fronts of his
+double-breasted coat, while the deep blue cloak which was thrown over his
+shoulders was lined with flame-coloured silk and secured at the neck with a
+brooch which consisted of a single flaming beryl. Boots which extended halfway
+up his calves, and which were trimmed at the tops with rich brown fur,
+completed the impression of barbaric opulence which was suggested by his whole
+appearance. He carried a broad-brimmed hat in his hand, while he wore across
+the upper part of his face, extending down past the cheekbones, a black vizard
+mask, which he had apparently adjusted that very moment, for his hand was still
+raised to it as he entered. From the lower part of the face he appeared to be a
+man of strong character, with a thick, hanging lip, and a long, straight chin
+suggestive of resolution pushed to the length of obstinacy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You had my note?” he asked with a deep harsh voice and a strongly
+marked German accent. “I told you that I would call.” He looked
+from one to the other of us, as if uncertain which to address.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pray take a seat,” said Holmes. “This is my friend and
+colleague, Dr. Watson, who is occasionally good enough to help me in my cases.
+Whom have I the honour to address?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You may address me as the Count Von Kramm, a Bohemian nobleman. I
+understand that this gentleman, your friend, is a man of honour and discretion,
+whom I may trust with a matter of the most extreme importance. If not, I should
+much prefer to communicate with you alone.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I rose to go, but Holmes caught me by the wrist and pushed me back into my
+chair. “It is both, or none,” said he. “You may say before
+this gentleman anything which you may say to me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Count shrugged his broad shoulders. “Then I must begin,” said
+he, “by binding you both to absolute secrecy for two years; at the end of
+that time the matter will be of no importance. At present it is not too much to
+say that it is of such weight it may have an influence upon European
+history.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I promise,” said Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And I.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You will excuse this mask,” continued our strange visitor.
+“The august person who employs me wishes his agent to be unknown to you,
+and I may confess at once that the title by which I have just called myself is
+not exactly my own.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was aware of it,” said Holmes dryly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The circumstances are of great delicacy, and every precaution has to be
+taken to quench what might grow to be an immense scandal and seriously
+compromise one of the reigning families of Europe. To speak plainly, the matter
+implicates the great House of Ormstein, hereditary kings of Bohemia.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was also aware of that,” murmured Holmes, settling himself down
+in his armchair and closing his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+Our visitor glanced with some apparent surprise at the languid, lounging figure
+of the man who had been no doubt depicted to him as the most incisive reasoner
+and most energetic agent in Europe. Holmes slowly reopened his eyes and looked
+impatiently at his gigantic client.
+</p>
+<p>
+“If your Majesty would condescend to state your case,” he remarked,
+“I should be better able to advise you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The man sprang from his chair and paced up and down the room in uncontrollable
+agitation. Then, with a gesture of desperation, he tore the mask from his face
+and hurled it upon the ground. “You are right,” he cried; “I
+am the King. Why should I attempt to conceal it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, indeed?” murmured Holmes. “Your Majesty had not spoken
+before I was aware that I was addressing Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von
+Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein, and hereditary King of Bohemia.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But you can understand,” said our strange visitor, sitting down
+once more and passing his hand over his high white forehead, “you can
+understand that I am not accustomed to doing such business in my own person.
+Yet the matter was so delicate that I could not confide it to an agent without
+putting myself in his power. I have come <i>incognito</i> from Prague for the
+purpose of consulting you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then, pray consult,” said Holmes, shutting his eyes once more.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The facts are briefly these: Some five years ago, during a lengthy visit
+to Warsaw, I made the acquaintance of the well-known adventuress, Irene Adler.
+The name is no doubt familiar to you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Kindly look her up in my index, Doctor,” murmured Holmes without
+opening his eyes. For many years he had adopted a system of docketing all
+paragraphs concerning men and things, so that it was difficult to name a
+subject or a person on which he could not at once furnish information. In this
+case I found her biography sandwiched in between that of a Hebrew rabbi and
+that of a staff-commander who had written a monograph upon the deep-sea fishes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Let me see!” said Holmes. “Hum! Born in New Jersey in the
+year 1858. Contralto—hum! La Scala, hum! Prima donna Imperial Opera of
+Warsaw—yes! Retired from operatic stage—ha! Living in
+London—quite so! Your Majesty, as I understand, became entangled with
+this young person, wrote her some compromising letters, and is now desirous of
+getting those letters back.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Precisely so. But how—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Was there a secret marriage?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“None.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No legal papers or certificates?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“None.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then I fail to follow your Majesty. If this young person should produce
+her letters for blackmailing or other purposes, how is she to prove their
+authenticity?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is the writing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pooh, pooh! Forgery.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My private note-paper.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Stolen.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My own seal.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Imitated.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My photograph.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Bought.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We were both in the photograph.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, dear! That is very bad! Your Majesty has indeed committed an
+indiscretion.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was mad—insane.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have compromised yourself seriously.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was only Crown Prince then. I was young. I am but thirty now.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It must be recovered.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We have tried and failed.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your Majesty must pay. It must be bought.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She will not sell.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Stolen, then.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Five attempts have been made. Twice burglars in my pay ransacked her
+house. Once we diverted her luggage when she travelled. Twice she has been
+waylaid. There has been no result.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No sign of it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Absolutely none.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes laughed. “It is quite a pretty little problem,” said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+“But a very serious one to me,” returned the King reproachfully.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very, indeed. And what does she propose to do with the
+photograph?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“To ruin me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But how?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am about to be married.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“So I have heard.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“To Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen, second daughter of the King of
+Scandinavia. You may know the strict principles of her family. She is herself
+the very soul of delicacy. A shadow of a doubt as to my conduct would bring the
+matter to an end.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And Irene Adler?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Threatens to send them the photograph. And she will do it. I know that
+she will do it. You do not know her, but she has a soul of steel. She has the
+face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men.
+Rather than I should marry another woman, there are no lengths to which she
+would not go—none.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are sure that she has not sent it yet?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am sure.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And why?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Because she has said that she would send it on the day when the
+betrothal was publicly proclaimed. That will be next Monday.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, then we have three days yet,” said Holmes with a yawn.
+“That is very fortunate, as I have one or two matters of importance to
+look into just at present. Your Majesty will, of course, stay in London for the
+present?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Certainly. You will find me at the Langham under the name of the Count
+Von Kramm.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then I shall drop you a line to let you know how we progress.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pray do so. I shall be all anxiety.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then, as to money?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have <i>carte blanche</i>.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Absolutely?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I tell you that I would give one of the provinces of my kingdom to have
+that photograph.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And for present expenses?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The King took a heavy chamois leather bag from under his cloak and laid it on
+the table.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There are three hundred pounds in gold and seven hundred in
+notes,” he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes scribbled a receipt upon a sheet of his note-book and handed it to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And Mademoiselle’s address?” he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is Briony Lodge, Serpentine Avenue, St. John’s Wood.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes took a note of it. “One other question,” said he. “Was
+the photograph a cabinet?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then, good-night, your Majesty, and I trust that we shall soon have some
+good news for you. And good-night, Watson,” he added, as the wheels of
+the royal brougham rolled down the street. “If you will be good enough to
+call to-morrow afternoon at three o’clock I should like to chat this
+little matter over with you.”
+</p>
+<h3>II.</h3>
+<p>
+At three o’clock precisely I was at Baker Street, but Holmes had not yet
+returned. The landlady informed me that he had left the house shortly after
+eight o’clock in the morning. I sat down beside the fire, however, with
+the intention of awaiting him, however long he might be. I was already deeply
+interested in his inquiry, for, though it was surrounded by none of the grim
+and strange features which were associated with the two crimes which I have
+already recorded, still, the nature of the case and the exalted station of his
+client gave it a character of its own. Indeed, apart from the nature of the
+investigation which my friend had on hand, there was something in his masterly
+grasp of a situation, and his keen, incisive reasoning, which made it a
+pleasure to me to study his system of work, and to follow the quick, subtle
+methods by which he disentangled the most inextricable mysteries. So accustomed
+was I to his invariable success that the very possibility of his failing had
+ceased to enter into my head.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was close upon four before the door opened, and a drunken-looking groom,
+ill-kempt and side-whiskered, with an inflamed face and disreputable clothes,
+walked into the room. Accustomed as I was to my friend’s amazing powers
+in the use of disguises, I had to look three times before I was certain that it
+was indeed he. With a nod he vanished into the bedroom, whence he emerged in
+five minutes tweed-suited and respectable, as of old. Putting his hands into
+his pockets, he stretched out his legs in front of the fire and laughed
+heartily for some minutes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, really!” he cried, and then he choked and laughed again
+until he was obliged to lie back, limp and helpless, in the chair.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What is it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s quite too funny. I am sure you could never guess how I
+employed my morning, or what I ended by doing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I can’t imagine. I suppose that you have been watching the habits,
+and perhaps the house, of Miss Irene Adler.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Quite so; but the sequel was rather unusual. I will tell you, however. I
+left the house a little after eight o’clock this morning in the character
+of a groom out of work. There is a wonderful sympathy and freemasonry among
+horsey men. Be one of them, and you will know all that there is to know. I soon
+found Briony Lodge. It is a <i>bijou</i> villa, with a garden at the back, but
+built out in front right up to the road, two stories. Chubb lock to the door.
+Large sitting-room on the right side, well furnished, with long windows almost
+to the floor, and those preposterous English window fasteners which a child
+could open. Behind there was nothing remarkable, save that the passage window
+could be reached from the top of the coach-house. I walked round it and
+examined it closely from every point of view, but without noting anything else
+of interest.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I then lounged down the street and found, as I expected, that there was
+a mews in a lane which runs down by one wall of the garden. I lent the ostlers
+a hand in rubbing down their horses, and received in exchange twopence, a glass
+of half-and-half, two fills of shag tobacco, and as much information as I could
+desire about Miss Adler, to say nothing of half a dozen other people in the
+neighbourhood in whom I was not in the least interested, but whose biographies
+I was compelled to listen to.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And what of Irene Adler?” I asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, she has turned all the men’s heads down in that part. She is
+the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet. So say the Serpentine-mews,
+to a man. She lives quietly, sings at concerts, drives out at five every day,
+and returns at seven sharp for dinner. Seldom goes out at other times, except
+when she sings. Has only one male visitor, but a good deal of him. He is dark,
+handsome, and dashing, never calls less than once a day, and often twice. He is
+a Mr. Godfrey Norton, of the Inner Temple. See the advantages of a cabman as a
+confidant. They had driven him home a dozen times from Serpentine-mews, and
+knew all about him. When I had listened to all they had to tell, I began to
+walk up and down near Briony Lodge once more, and to think over my plan of
+campaign.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This Godfrey Norton was evidently an important factor in the matter. He
+was a lawyer. That sounded ominous. What was the relation between them, and
+what the object of his repeated visits? Was she his client, his friend, or his
+mistress? If the former, she had probably transferred the photograph to his
+keeping. If the latter, it was less likely. On the issue of this question
+depended whether I should continue my work at Briony Lodge, or turn my
+attention to the gentleman’s chambers in the Temple. It was a delicate
+point, and it widened the field of my inquiry. I fear that I bore you with
+these details, but I have to let you see my little difficulties, if you are to
+understand the situation.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am following you closely,” I answered.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was still balancing the matter in my mind when a hansom cab drove up
+to Briony Lodge, and a gentleman sprang out. He was a remarkably handsome man,
+dark, aquiline, and moustached—evidently the man of whom I had heard. He
+appeared to be in a great hurry, shouted to the cabman to wait, and brushed
+past the maid who opened the door with the air of a man who was thoroughly at
+home.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He was in the house about half an hour, and I could catch glimpses of
+him in the windows of the sitting-room, pacing up and down, talking excitedly,
+and waving his arms. Of her I could see nothing. Presently he emerged, looking
+even more flurried than before. As he stepped up to the cab, he pulled a gold
+watch from his pocket and looked at it earnestly, ‘Drive like the
+devil,’ he shouted, ‘first to Gross &amp; Hankey’s in Regent
+Street, and then to the Church of St. Monica in the Edgeware Road. Half a
+guinea if you do it in twenty minutes!’
+</p>
+<p>
+“Away they went, and I was just wondering whether I should not do well to
+follow them when up the lane came a neat little landau, the coachman with his
+coat only half-buttoned, and his tie under his ear, while all the tags of his
+harness were sticking out of the buckles. It hadn’t pulled up before she
+shot out of the hall door and into it. I only caught a glimpse of her at the
+moment, but she was a lovely woman, with a face that a man might die for.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘The Church of St. Monica, John,’ she cried,
+‘and half a sovereign if you reach it in twenty minutes.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“This was quite too good to lose, Watson. I was just balancing whether I
+should run for it, or whether I should perch behind her landau when a cab came
+through the street. The driver looked twice at such a shabby fare, but I jumped
+in before he could object. ‘The Church of St. Monica,’ said I,
+‘and half a sovereign if you reach it in twenty minutes.’ It was
+twenty-five minutes to twelve, and of course it was clear enough what was in
+the wind.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My cabby drove fast. I don’t think I ever drove faster, but the
+others were there before us. The cab and the landau with their steaming horses
+were in front of the door when I arrived. I paid the man and hurried into the
+church. There was not a soul there save the two whom I had followed and a
+surpliced clergyman, who seemed to be expostulating with them. They were all
+three standing in a knot in front of the altar. I lounged up the side aisle
+like any other idler who has dropped into a church. Suddenly, to my surprise,
+the three at the altar faced round to me, and Godfrey Norton came running as
+hard as he could towards me.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Thank God,’ he cried. ‘You’ll do. Come!
+Come!’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘What then?’ I asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Come, man, come, only three minutes, or it won’t be
+legal.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was half-dragged up to the altar, and before I knew where I was I
+found myself mumbling responses which were whispered in my ear, and vouching
+for things of which I knew nothing, and generally assisting in the secure tying
+up of Irene Adler, spinster, to Godfrey Norton, bachelor. It was all done in an
+instant, and there was the gentleman thanking me on the one side and the lady
+on the other, while the clergyman beamed on me in front. It was the most
+preposterous position in which I ever found myself in my life, and it was the
+thought of it that started me laughing just now. It seems that there had been
+some informality about their license, that the clergyman absolutely refused to
+marry them without a witness of some sort, and that my lucky appearance saved
+the bridegroom from having to sally out into the streets in search of a best
+man. The bride gave me a sovereign, and I mean to wear it on my watch chain in
+memory of the occasion.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“This is a very unexpected turn of affairs,” said I; “and
+what then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, I found my plans very seriously menaced. It looked as if the pair
+might take an immediate departure, and so necessitate very prompt and energetic
+measures on my part. At the church door, however, they separated, he driving
+back to the Temple, and she to her own house. ‘I shall drive out in the
+park at five as usual,’ she said as she left him. I heard no more. They
+drove away in different directions, and I went off to make my own
+arrangements.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Which are?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Some cold beef and a glass of beer,” he answered, ringing the
+bell. “I have been too busy to think of food, and I am likely to be
+busier still this evening. By the way, Doctor, I shall want your
+co-operation.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I shall be delighted.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You don’t mind breaking the law?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not in the least.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nor running a chance of arrest?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not in a good cause.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, the cause is excellent!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then I am your man.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was sure that I might rely on you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But what is it you wish?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“When Mrs. Turner has brought in the tray I will make it clear to you.
+Now,” he said as he turned hungrily on the simple fare that our landlady
+had provided, “I must discuss it while I eat, for I have not much time.
+It is nearly five now. In two hours we must be on the scene of action. Miss
+Irene, or Madame, rather, returns from her drive at seven. We must be at Briony
+Lodge to meet her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And what then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You must leave that to me. I have already arranged what is to occur.
+There is only one point on which I must insist. You must not interfere, come
+what may. You understand?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am to be neutral?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“To do nothing whatever. There will probably be some small
+unpleasantness. Do not join in it. It will end in my being conveyed into the
+house. Four or five minutes afterwards the sitting-room window will open. You
+are to station yourself close to that open window.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are to watch me, for I will be visible to you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And when I raise my hand—so—you will throw into the room
+what I give you to throw, and will, at the same time, raise the cry of fire.
+You quite follow me?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Entirely.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is nothing very formidable,” he said, taking a long
+cigar-shaped roll from his pocket. “It is an ordinary plumber’s
+smoke-rocket, fitted with a cap at either end to make it self-lighting. Your
+task is confined to that. When you raise your cry of fire, it will be taken up
+by quite a number of people. You may then walk to the end of the street, and I
+will rejoin you in ten minutes. I hope that I have made myself clear?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am to remain neutral, to get near the window, to watch you, and at the
+signal to throw in this object, then to raise the cry of fire, and to wait you
+at the corner of the street.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Precisely.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then you may entirely rely on me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is excellent. I think, perhaps, it is almost time that I prepare
+for the new role I have to play.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He disappeared into his bedroom and returned in a few minutes in the character
+of an amiable and simple-minded Nonconformist clergyman. His broad black hat,
+his baggy trousers, his white tie, his sympathetic smile, and general look of
+peering and benevolent curiosity were such as Mr. John Hare alone could have
+equalled. It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression,
+his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed.
+The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he
+became a specialist in crime.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was a quarter past six when we left Baker Street, and it still wanted ten
+minutes to the hour when we found ourselves in Serpentine Avenue. It was
+already dusk, and the lamps were just being lighted as we paced up and down in
+front of Briony Lodge, waiting for the coming of its occupant. The house was
+just such as I had pictured it from Sherlock Holmes’ succinct
+description, but the locality appeared to be less private than I expected. On
+the contrary, for a small street in a quiet neighbourhood, it was remarkably
+animated. There was a group of shabbily dressed men smoking and laughing in a
+corner, a scissors-grinder with his wheel, two guardsmen who were flirting with
+a nurse-girl, and several well-dressed young men who were lounging up and down
+with cigars in their mouths.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You see,” remarked Holmes, as we paced to and fro in front of the
+house, “this marriage rather simplifies matters. The photograph becomes a
+double-edged weapon now. The chances are that she would be as averse to its
+being seen by Mr. Godfrey Norton, as our client is to its coming to the eyes of
+his princess. Now the question is, Where are we to find the photograph?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Where, indeed?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is most unlikely that she carries it about with her. It is cabinet
+size. Too large for easy concealment about a woman’s dress. She knows
+that the King is capable of having her waylaid and searched. Two attempts of
+the sort have already been made. We may take it, then, that she does not carry
+it about with her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Where, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Her banker or her lawyer. There is that double possibility. But I am
+inclined to think neither. Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do
+their own secreting. Why should she hand it over to anyone else? She could
+trust her own guardianship, but she could not tell what indirect or political
+influence might be brought to bear upon a business man. Besides, remember that
+she had resolved to use it within a few days. It must be where she can lay her
+hands upon it. It must be in her own house.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But it has twice been burgled.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pshaw! They did not know how to look.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But how will you look?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I will not look.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I will get her to show me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But she will refuse.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She will not be able to. But I hear the rumble of wheels. It is her
+carriage. Now carry out my orders to the letter.”
+</p>
+<p>
+As he spoke the gleam of the sidelights of a carriage came round the curve of
+the avenue. It was a smart little landau which rattled up to the door of Briony
+Lodge. As it pulled up, one of the loafing men at the corner dashed forward to
+open the door in the hope of earning a copper, but was elbowed away by another
+loafer, who had rushed up with the same intention. A fierce quarrel broke out,
+which was increased by the two guardsmen, who took sides with one of the
+loungers, and by the scissors-grinder, who was equally hot upon the other side.
+A blow was struck, and in an instant the lady, who had stepped from her
+carriage, was the centre of a little knot of flushed and struggling men, who
+struck savagely at each other with their fists and sticks. Holmes dashed into
+the crowd to protect the lady; but, just as he reached her, he gave a cry and
+dropped to the ground, with the blood running freely down his face. At his fall
+the guardsmen took to their heels in one direction and the loungers in the
+other, while a number of better dressed people, who had watched the scuffle
+without taking part in it, crowded in to help the lady and to attend to the
+injured man. Irene Adler, as I will still call her, had hurried up the steps;
+but she stood at the top with her superb figure outlined against the lights of
+the hall, looking back into the street.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is the poor gentleman much hurt?” she asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He is dead,” cried several voices.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, no, there’s life in him!” shouted another. “But
+he’ll be gone before you can get him to hospital.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He’s a brave fellow,” said a woman. “They would have
+had the lady’s purse and watch if it hadn’t been for him. They were
+a gang, and a rough one, too. Ah, he’s breathing now.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He can’t lie in the street. May we bring him in, marm?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Surely. Bring him into the sitting-room. There is a comfortable sofa.
+This way, please!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Slowly and solemnly he was borne into Briony Lodge and laid out in the
+principal room, while I still observed the proceedings from my post by the
+window. The lamps had been lit, but the blinds had not been drawn, so that I
+could see Holmes as he lay upon the couch. I do not know whether he was seized
+with compunction at that moment for the part he was playing, but I know that I
+never felt more heartily ashamed of myself in my life than when I saw the
+beautiful creature against whom I was conspiring, or the grace and kindliness
+with which she waited upon the injured man. And yet it would be the blackest
+treachery to Holmes to draw back now from the part which he had intrusted to
+me. I hardened my heart, and took the smoke-rocket from under my ulster. After
+all, I thought, we are not injuring her. We are but preventing her from
+injuring another.
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes had sat up upon the couch, and I saw him motion like a man who is in
+need of air. A maid rushed across and threw open the window. At the same
+instant I saw him raise his hand and at the signal I tossed my rocket into the
+room with a cry of “Fire!” The word was no sooner out of my mouth
+than the whole crowd of spectators, well dressed and ill—gentlemen,
+ostlers, and servant maids—joined in a general shriek of
+“Fire!” Thick clouds of smoke curled through the room and out at
+the open window. I caught a glimpse of rushing figures, and a moment later the
+voice of Holmes from within assuring them that it was a false alarm. Slipping
+through the shouting crowd I made my way to the corner of the street, and in
+ten minutes was rejoiced to find my friend’s arm in mine, and to get away
+from the scene of uproar. He walked swiftly and in silence for some few minutes
+until we had turned down one of the quiet streets which lead towards the
+Edgeware Road.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You did it very nicely, Doctor,” he remarked. “Nothing could
+have been better. It is all right.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have the photograph?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I know where it is.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And how did you find out?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She showed me, as I told you she would.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am still in the dark.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I do not wish to make a mystery,” said he, laughing. “The
+matter was perfectly simple. You, of course, saw that everyone in the street
+was an accomplice. They were all engaged for the evening.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I guessed as much.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then, when the row broke out, I had a little moist red paint in the palm
+of my hand. I rushed forward, fell down, clapped my hand to my face, and became
+a piteous spectacle. It is an old trick.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That also I could fathom.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then they carried me in. She was bound to have me in. What else could
+she do? And into her sitting-room, which was the very room which I suspected.
+It lay between that and her bedroom, and I was determined to see which. They
+laid me on a couch, I motioned for air, they were compelled to open the window,
+and you had your chance.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How did that help you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was all-important. When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her
+instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most. It is a
+perfectly overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of
+it. In the case of the Darlington Substitution Scandal it was of use to me, and
+also in the Arnsworth Castle business. A married woman grabs at her baby; an
+unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box. Now it was clear to me that our lady
+of to-day had nothing in the house more precious to her than what we are in
+quest of. She would rush to secure it. The alarm of fire was admirably done.
+The smoke and shouting were enough to shake nerves of steel. She responded
+beautifully. The photograph is in a recess behind a sliding panel just above
+the right bell-pull. She was there in an instant, and I caught a glimpse of it
+as she half drew it out. When I cried out that it was a false alarm, she
+replaced it, glanced at the rocket, rushed from the room, and I have not seen
+her since. I rose, and, making my excuses, escaped from the house. I hesitated
+whether to attempt to secure the photograph at once; but the coachman had come
+in, and as he was watching me narrowly, it seemed safer to wait. A little
+over-precipitance may ruin all.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And now?” I asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Our quest is practically finished. I shall call with the King to-morrow,
+and with you, if you care to come with us. We will be shown into the
+sitting-room to wait for the lady, but it is probable that when she comes she
+may find neither us nor the photograph. It might be a satisfaction to his
+Majesty to regain it with his own hands.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And when will you call?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“At eight in the morning. She will not be up, so that we shall have a
+clear field. Besides, we must be prompt, for this marriage may mean a complete
+change in her life and habits. I must wire to the King without delay.”
+</p>
+<p>
+We had reached Baker Street and had stopped at the door. He was searching his
+pockets for the key when someone passing said:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good-night, Mister Sherlock Holmes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+There were several people on the pavement at the time, but the greeting
+appeared to come from a slim youth in an ulster who had hurried by.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ve heard that voice before,” said Holmes, staring down the
+dimly lit street. “Now, I wonder who the deuce that could have
+been.”
+</p>
+<h3>III.</h3>
+<p>
+I slept at Baker Street that night, and we were engaged upon our toast and
+coffee in the morning when the King of Bohemia rushed into the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have really got it!” he cried, grasping Sherlock Holmes by
+either shoulder and looking eagerly into his face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not yet.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But you have hopes?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have hopes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then, come. I am all impatience to be gone.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We must have a cab.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, my brougham is waiting.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then that will simplify matters.” We descended and started off
+once more for Briony Lodge.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Irene Adler is married,” remarked Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Married! When?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yesterday.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But to whom?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“To an English lawyer named Norton.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But she could not love him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am in hopes that she does.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And why in hopes?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Because it would spare your Majesty all fear of future annoyance. If the
+lady loves her husband, she does not love your Majesty. If she does not love
+your Majesty, there is no reason why she should interfere with your
+Majesty’s plan.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is true. And yet—! Well! I wish she had been of my own station!
+What a queen she would have made!” He relapsed into a moody silence,
+which was not broken until we drew up in Serpentine Avenue.
+</p>
+<p>
+The door of Briony Lodge was open, and an elderly woman stood upon the steps.
+She watched us with a sardonic eye as we stepped from the brougham.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I believe?” said she.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am Mr. Holmes,” answered my companion, looking at her with a
+questioning and rather startled gaze.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Indeed! My mistress told me that you were likely to call. She left this
+morning with her husband by the 5:15 train from Charing Cross for the
+Continent.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What!” Sherlock Holmes staggered back, white with chagrin and
+surprise. “Do you mean that she has left England?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Never to return.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And the papers?” asked the King hoarsely. “All is
+lost.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We shall see.” He pushed past the servant and rushed into the
+drawing-room, followed by the King and myself. The furniture was scattered
+about in every direction, with dismantled shelves and open drawers, as if the
+lady had hurriedly ransacked them before her flight. Holmes rushed at the
+bell-pull, tore back a small sliding shutter, and, plunging in his hand, pulled
+out a photograph and a letter. The photograph was of Irene Adler herself in
+evening dress, the letter was superscribed to “Sherlock Holmes, Esq. To
+be left till called for.” My friend tore it open, and we all three read
+it together. It was dated at midnight of the preceding night and ran in this
+way:
+</p>
+<p class="letter">
+“MY DEAR MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES,—You really did it very well. You took
+me in completely. Until after the alarm of fire, I had not a suspicion. But
+then, when I found how I had betrayed myself, I began to think. I had been
+warned against you months ago. I had been told that, if the King employed an
+agent, it would certainly be you. And your address had been given me. Yet, with
+all this, you made me reveal what you wanted to know. Even after I became
+suspicious, I found it hard to think evil of such a dear, kind old clergyman.
+But, you know, I have been trained as an actress myself. Male costume is
+nothing new to me. I often take advantage of the freedom which it gives. I sent
+John, the coachman, to watch you, ran upstairs, got into my walking clothes, as
+I call them, and came down just as you departed.<br>
+    “Well, I followed you to your door, and so made sure that I was really an
+object of interest to the celebrated Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Then I, rather
+imprudently, wished you good-night, and started for the Temple to see my
+husband.<br>
+    “We both thought the best resource was flight, when pursued by
+so formidable an antagonist; so you will find the nest empty when you call
+to-morrow. As to the photograph, your client may rest in peace. I love and am
+loved by a better man than he. The King may do what he will without hindrance
+from one whom he has cruelly wronged. I keep it only to safeguard myself, and
+to preserve a weapon which will always secure me from any steps which he might
+take in the future. I leave a photograph which he might care to possess; and I
+remain, dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes,
+</p>
+<p class="right">
+“Very truly yours,<br>
+“IRENE NORTON, <i>née</i> ADLER.”
+</p>
+<p class="p2">
+“What a woman—oh, what a woman!” cried the King of Bohemia,
+when we had all three read this epistle. “Did I not tell you how quick
+and resolute she was? Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a
+pity that she was not on my level?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“From what I have seen of the lady, she seems, indeed, to be on a very
+different level to your Majesty,” said Holmes coldly. “I am sorry
+that I have not been able to bring your Majesty’s business to a more
+successful conclusion.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“On the contrary, my dear sir,” cried the King; “nothing
+could be more successful. I know that her word is inviolate. The photograph is
+now as safe as if it were in the fire.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am glad to hear your Majesty say so.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am immensely indebted to you. Pray tell me in what way I can reward
+you. This ring—” He slipped an emerald snake ring from his finger
+and held it out upon the palm of his hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your Majesty has something which I should value even more highly,”
+said Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have but to name it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“This photograph!”
+</p>
+<p>
+The King stared at him in amazement.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Irene’s photograph!” he cried. “Certainly, if you wish
+it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I thank your Majesty. Then there is no more to be done in the matter. I
+have the honour to wish you a very good morning.” He bowed, and, turning
+away without observing the hand which the King had stretched out to him, he set
+off in my company for his chambers.
+</p>
+<p class="p2">
+And that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom of Bohemia,
+and how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s
+wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard
+him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her
+photograph, it is always under the honourable title of <i>the</i> woman.
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap02"></a>II.<br>THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE</h2>
+<p class="pfirst"> <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 1.50em">I</span> had
+called upon my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, one day in the autumn of last year
+and found him in deep conversation with a very stout, florid-faced, elderly
+gentleman with fiery red hair. With an apology for my intrusion, I was about to
+withdraw when Holmes pulled me abruptly into the room and closed the door
+behind me.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You could not possibly have come at a better time, my dear
+Watson,” he said cordially.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was afraid that you were engaged.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“So I am. Very much so.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then I can wait in the next room.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not at all. This gentleman, Mr. Wilson, has been my partner and helper
+in many of my most successful cases, and I have no doubt that he will be of the
+utmost use to me in yours also.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The stout gentleman half rose from his chair and gave a bob of greeting, with a
+quick little questioning glance from his small fat-encircled eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Try the settee,” said Holmes, relapsing into his armchair and
+putting his fingertips together, as was his custom when in judicial moods.
+“I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre
+and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life. You have
+shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle,
+and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many of my own
+little adventures.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your cases have indeed been of the greatest interest to me,” I
+observed.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You will remember that I remarked the other day, just before we went
+into the very simple problem presented by Miss Mary Sutherland, that for
+strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which
+is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A proposition which I took the liberty of doubting.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You did, Doctor, but none the less you must come round to my view, for
+otherwise I shall keep on piling fact upon fact on you until your reason breaks
+down under them and acknowledges me to be right. Now, Mr. Jabez Wilson here has
+been good enough to call upon me this morning, and to begin a narrative which
+promises to be one of the most singular which I have listened to for some time.
+You have heard me remark that the strangest and most unique things are very
+often connected not with the larger but with the smaller crimes, and
+occasionally, indeed, where there is room for doubt whether any positive crime
+has been committed. As far as I have heard, it is impossible for me to say
+whether the present case is an instance of crime or not, but the course of
+events is certainly among the most singular that I have ever listened to.
+Perhaps, Mr. Wilson, you would have the great kindness to recommence your
+narrative. I ask you not merely because my friend Dr. Watson has not heard the
+opening part but also because the peculiar nature of the story makes me anxious
+to have every possible detail from your lips. As a rule, when I have heard some
+slight indication of the course of events, I am able to guide myself by the
+thousands of other similar cases which occur to my memory. In the present
+instance I am forced to admit that the facts are, to the best of my belief,
+unique.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The portly client puffed out his chest with an appearance of some little pride
+and pulled a dirty and wrinkled newspaper from the inside pocket of his
+greatcoat. As he glanced down the advertisement column, with his head thrust
+forward and the paper flattened out upon his knee, I took a good look at the
+man and endeavoured, after the fashion of my companion, to read the indications
+which might be presented by his dress or appearance.
+</p>
+<p>
+I did not gain very much, however, by my inspection. Our visitor bore every
+mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and
+slow. He wore rather baggy grey shepherd’s check trousers, a not
+over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with
+a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as
+an ornament. A frayed top-hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet
+collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as I would, there was
+nothing remarkable about the man save his blazing red head, and the expression
+of extreme chagrin and discontent upon his features.
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes’ quick eye took in my occupation, and he shook his head
+with a smile as he noticed my questioning glances. “Beyond the obvious
+facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he
+is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable
+amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mr. Jabez Wilson started up in his chair, with his forefinger upon the paper,
+but his eyes upon my companion.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How, in the name of good-fortune, did you know all that, Mr.
+Holmes?” he asked. “How did you know, for example, that I did
+manual labour. It’s as true as gospel, for I began as a ship’s
+carpenter.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your hands, my dear sir. Your right hand is quite a size larger than
+your left. You have worked with it, and the muscles are more developed.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, the snuff, then, and the Freemasonry?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you how I read that,
+especially as, rather against the strict rules of your order, you use an
+arc-and-compass breastpin.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah, of course, I forgot that. But the writing?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What else can be indicated by that right cuff so very shiny for five
+inches, and the left one with the smooth patch near the elbow where you rest it
+upon the desk?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, but China?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The fish that you have tattooed immediately above your right wrist could
+only have been done in China. I have made a small study of tattoo marks and
+have even contributed to the literature of the subject. That trick of staining
+the fishes’ scales of a delicate pink is quite peculiar to China. When,
+in addition, I see a Chinese coin hanging from your watch-chain, the matter
+becomes even more simple.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mr. Jabez Wilson laughed heavily. “Well, I never!” said he.
+“I thought at first that you had done something clever, but I see that
+there was nothing in it after all.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I begin to think, Watson,” said Holmes, “that I make a
+mistake in explaining. ‘<i>Omne ignotum pro magnifico</i>,’ you
+know, and my poor little reputation, such as it is, will suffer shipwreck if I
+am so candid. Can you not find the advertisement, Mr. Wilson?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, I have got it now,” he answered with his thick red finger
+planted halfway down the column. “Here it is. This is what began it all.
+You just read it for yourself, sir.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I took the paper from him and read as follows:
+</p>
+<p class="letter">
+“TO THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE: On account of the bequest of the late Ezekiah
+Hopkins, of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., there is now another vacancy open
+which entitles a member of the League to a salary of £ 4 a week for purely
+nominal services. All red-headed men who are sound in body and mind and above
+the age of twenty-one years, are eligible. Apply in person on Monday, at eleven
+o’clock, to Duncan Ross, at the offices of the League, 7 Pope’s
+Court, Fleet Street.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What on earth does this mean?” I ejaculated after I had twice read
+over the extraordinary announcement.
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes chuckled and wriggled in his chair, as was his habit when in high
+spirits. “It is a little off the beaten track, isn’t it?”
+said he. “And now, Mr. Wilson, off you go at scratch and tell us all
+about yourself, your household, and the effect which this advertisement had
+upon your fortunes. You will first make a note, Doctor, of the paper and the
+date.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is <i>The Morning Chronicle</i> of April 27, 1890. Just two months
+ago.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very good. Now, Mr. Wilson?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, it is just as I have been telling you, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,”
+said Jabez Wilson, mopping his forehead; “I have a small
+pawnbroker’s business at Coburg Square, near the City. It’s not a
+very large affair, and of late years it has not done more than just give me a
+living. I used to be able to keep two assistants, but now I only keep one; and
+I would have a job to pay him but that he is willing to come for half wages so
+as to learn the business.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What is the name of this obliging youth?” asked Sherlock Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“His name is Vincent Spaulding, and he’s not such a youth, either.
+It’s hard to say his age. I should not wish a smarter assistant, Mr.
+Holmes; and I know very well that he could better himself and earn twice what I
+am able to give him. But, after all, if he is satisfied, why should I put ideas
+in his head?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, indeed? You seem most fortunate in having an <i>employé</i> who
+comes under the full market price. It is not a common experience among
+employers in this age. I don’t know that your assistant is not as
+remarkable as your advertisement.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, he has his faults, too,” said Mr. Wilson. “Never was
+such a fellow for photography. Snapping away with a camera when he ought to be
+improving his mind, and then diving down into the cellar like a rabbit into its
+hole to develop his pictures. That is his main fault, but on the whole
+he’s a good worker. There’s no vice in him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He is still with you, I presume?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, sir. He and a girl of fourteen, who does a bit of simple cooking
+and keeps the place clean—that’s all I have in the house, for I am
+a widower and never had any family. We live very quietly, sir, the three of us;
+and we keep a roof over our heads and pay our debts, if we do nothing more.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The first thing that put us out was that advertisement. Spaulding, he
+came down into the office just this day eight weeks, with this very paper in
+his hand, and he says:
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I wish to the Lord, Mr. Wilson, that I was a red-headed
+man.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Why that?’ I asks.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Why,’ says he, ‘here’s another vacancy on
+the League of the Red-headed Men. It’s worth quite a little fortune to
+any man who gets it, and I understand that there are more vacancies than there
+are men, so that the trustees are at their wits’ end what to do with the
+money. If my hair would only change colour, here’s a nice little crib all
+ready for me to step into.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Why, what is it, then?’ I asked. You see, Mr. Holmes,
+I am a very stay-at-home man, and as my business came to me instead of my
+having to go to it, I was often weeks on end without putting my foot over the
+door-mat. In that way I didn’t know much of what was going on outside,
+and I was always glad of a bit of news.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Have you never heard of the League of the Red-headed
+Men?’ he asked with his eyes open.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Never.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Why, I wonder at that, for you are eligible yourself for
+one of the vacancies.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘And what are they worth?’ I asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Oh, merely a couple of hundred a year, but the work is
+slight, and it need not interfere very much with one’s other
+occupations.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, you can easily think that that made me prick up my ears, for the
+business has not been over good for some years, and an extra couple of hundred
+would have been very handy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Tell me all about it,’ said I.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Well,’ said he, showing me the advertisement,
+‘you can see for yourself that the League has a vacancy, and there is the
+address where you should apply for particulars. As far as I can make out, the
+League was founded by an American millionaire, Ezekiah Hopkins, who was very
+peculiar in his ways. He was himself red-headed, and he had a great sympathy
+for all red-headed men; so, when he died, it was found that he had left his
+enormous fortune in the hands of trustees, with instructions to apply the
+interest to the providing of easy berths to men whose hair is of that colour.
+From all I hear it is splendid pay and very little to do.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘But,’ said I, ‘there would be millions of
+red-headed men who would apply.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Not so many as you might think,’ he answered.
+‘You see it is really confined to Londoners, and to grown men. This
+American had started from London when he was young, and he wanted to do the old
+town a good turn. Then, again, I have heard it is no use your applying if your
+hair is light red, or dark red, or anything but real bright, blazing, fiery
+red. Now, if you cared to apply, Mr. Wilson, you would just walk in; but
+perhaps it would hardly be worth your while to put yourself out of the way for
+the sake of a few hundred pounds.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, it is a fact, gentlemen, as you may see for yourselves, that my
+hair is of a very full and rich tint, so that it seemed to me that if there was
+to be any competition in the matter I stood as good a chance as any man that I
+had ever met. Vincent Spaulding seemed to know so much about it that I thought
+he might prove useful, so I just ordered him to put up the shutters for the day
+and to come right away with me. He was very willing to have a holiday, so we
+shut the business up and started off for the address that was given us in the
+advertisement.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I never hope to see such a sight as that again, Mr. Holmes. From north,
+south, east, and west every man who had a shade of red in his hair had tramped
+into the city to answer the advertisement. Fleet Street was choked with
+red-headed folk, and Pope’s Court looked like a coster’s orange
+barrow. I should not have thought there were so many in the whole country as
+were brought together by that single advertisement. Every shade of colour they
+were—straw, lemon, orange, brick, Irish-setter, liver, clay; but, as
+Spaulding said, there were not many who had the real vivid flame-coloured tint.
+When I saw how many were waiting, I would have given it up in despair; but
+Spaulding would not hear of it. How he did it I could not imagine, but he
+pushed and pulled and butted until he got me through the crowd, and right up to
+the steps which led to the office. There was a double stream upon the stair,
+some going up in hope, and some coming back dejected; but we wedged in as well
+as we could and soon found ourselves in the office.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your experience has been a most entertaining one,” remarked Holmes
+as his client paused and refreshed his memory with a huge pinch of snuff.
+“Pray continue your very interesting statement.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There was nothing in the office but a couple of wooden chairs and a deal
+table, behind which sat a small man with a head that was even redder than mine.
+He said a few words to each candidate as he came up, and then he always managed
+to find some fault in them which would disqualify them. Getting a vacancy did
+not seem to be such a very easy matter, after all. However, when our turn came
+the little man was much more favourable to me than to any of the others, and he
+closed the door as we entered, so that he might have a private word with us.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘This is Mr. Jabez Wilson,’ said my assistant,
+‘and he is willing to fill a vacancy in the League.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘And he is admirably suited for it,’ the other
+answered. ‘He has every requirement. I cannot recall when I have seen
+anything so fine.’ He took a step backward, cocked his head on one side,
+and gazed at my hair until I felt quite bashful. Then suddenly he plunged
+forward, wrung my hand, and congratulated me warmly on my success.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘It would be injustice to hesitate,’ said he.
+‘You will, however, I am sure, excuse me for taking an obvious
+precaution.’ With that he seized my hair in both his hands, and tugged
+until I yelled with the pain. ‘There is water in your eyes,’ said
+he as he released me. ‘I perceive that all is as it should be. But we
+have to be careful, for we have twice been deceived by wigs and once by paint.
+I could tell you tales of cobbler’s wax which would disgust you with
+human nature.’ He stepped over to the window and shouted through it at
+the top of his voice that the vacancy was filled. A groan of disappointment
+came up from below, and the folk all trooped away in different directions until
+there was not a red-head to be seen except my own and that of the manager.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘My name,’ said he, ‘is Mr. Duncan Ross, and I
+am myself one of the pensioners upon the fund left by our noble benefactor. Are
+you a married man, Mr. Wilson? Have you a family?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“I answered that I had not.
+</p>
+<p>
+“His face fell immediately.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Dear me!’ he said gravely, ‘that is very
+serious indeed! I am sorry to hear you say that. The fund was, of course, for
+the propagation and spread of the red-heads as well as for their maintenance.
+It is exceedingly unfortunate that you should be a bachelor.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“My face lengthened at this, Mr. Holmes, for I thought that I was not to
+have the vacancy after all; but after thinking it over for a few minutes he
+said that it would be all right.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘In the case of another,’ said he, ‘the
+objection might be fatal, but we must stretch a point in favour of a man with
+such a head of hair as yours. When shall you be able to enter upon your new
+duties?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Well, it is a little awkward, for I have a business
+already,’ said I.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Oh, never mind about that, Mr. Wilson!’ said Vincent
+Spaulding. ‘I should be able to look after that for you.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘What would be the hours?’ I asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Ten to two.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now a pawnbroker’s business is mostly done of an evening, Mr.
+Holmes, especially Thursday and Friday evening, which is just before pay-day;
+so it would suit me very well to earn a little in the mornings. Besides, I knew
+that my assistant was a good man, and that he would see to anything that turned
+up.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘That would suit me very well,’ said I. ‘And the
+pay?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Is £ 4 a week.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘And the work?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Is purely nominal.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘What do you call purely nominal?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Well, you have to be in the office, or at least in the
+building, the whole time. If you leave, you forfeit your whole position
+forever. The will is very clear upon that point. You don’t comply with
+the conditions if you budge from the office during that time.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘It’s only four hours a day, and I should not think of
+leaving,’ said I.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘No excuse will avail,’ said Mr. Duncan Ross;
+‘neither sickness nor business nor anything else. There you must stay, or
+you lose your billet.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘And the work?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Is to copy out the <i>Encyclopædia Britannica</i>. There is the
+first volume of it in that press. You must find your own ink, pens, and
+blotting-paper, but we provide this table and chair. Will you be ready
+to-morrow?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Certainly,’ I answered.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Then, good-bye, Mr. Jabez Wilson, and let me congratulate
+you once more on the important position which you have been fortunate enough to
+gain.’ He bowed me out of the room and I went home with my assistant,
+hardly knowing what to say or do, I was so pleased at my own good fortune.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, I thought over the matter all day, and by evening I was in low
+spirits again; for I had quite persuaded myself that the whole affair must be
+some great hoax or fraud, though what its object might be I could not imagine.
+It seemed altogether past belief that anyone could make such a will, or that
+they would pay such a sum for doing anything so simple as copying out the
+<i>Encyclopædia Britannica</i>. Vincent Spaulding did what he could to cheer me
+up, but by bedtime I had reasoned myself out of the whole thing. However, in
+the morning I determined to have a look at it anyhow, so I bought a penny
+bottle of ink, and with a quill-pen, and seven sheets of foolscap paper, I
+started off for Pope’s Court.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, to my surprise and delight, everything was as right as possible.
+The table was set out ready for me, and Mr. Duncan Ross was there to see that I
+got fairly to work. He started me off upon the letter A, and then he left me;
+but he would drop in from time to time to see that all was right with me. At
+two o’clock he bade me good-day, complimented me upon the amount that I
+had written, and locked the door of the office after me.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This went on day after day, Mr. Holmes, and on Saturday the manager came
+in and planked down four golden sovereigns for my week’s work. It was the
+same next week, and the same the week after. Every morning I was there at ten,
+and every afternoon I left at two. By degrees Mr. Duncan Ross took to coming in
+only once of a morning, and then, after a time, he did not come in at all.
+Still, of course, I never dared to leave the room for an instant, for I was not
+sure when he might come, and the billet was such a good one, and suited me so
+well, that I would not risk the loss of it.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Eight weeks passed away like this, and I had written about Abbots and
+Archery and Armour and Architecture and Attica, and hoped with diligence that I
+might get on to the B’s before very long. It cost me something in
+foolscap, and I had pretty nearly filled a shelf with my writings. And then
+suddenly the whole business came to an end.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“To an end?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, sir. And no later than this morning. I went to my work as usual at
+ten o’clock, but the door was shut and locked, with a little square of
+cardboard hammered on to the middle of the panel with a tack. Here it is, and
+you can read for yourself.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He held up a piece of white cardboard about the size of a sheet of note-paper.
+It read in this fashion:
+</p>
+<p class="letter">
+“THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE IS DISSOLVED. October 9, 1890.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes and I surveyed this curt announcement and the rueful face
+behind it, until the comical side of the affair so completely overtopped every
+other consideration that we both burst out into a roar of laughter.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I cannot see that there is anything very funny,” cried our client,
+flushing up to the roots of his flaming head. “If you can do nothing
+better than laugh at me, I can go elsewhere.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, no,” cried Holmes, shoving him back into the chair from which
+he had half risen. “I really wouldn’t miss your case for the world.
+It is most refreshingly unusual. But there is, if you will excuse my saying so,
+something just a little funny about it. Pray what steps did you take when you
+found the card upon the door?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was staggered, sir. I did not know what to do. Then I called at the
+offices round, but none of them seemed to know anything about it. Finally, I
+went to the landlord, who is an accountant living on the ground floor, and I
+asked him if he could tell me what had become of the Red-headed League. He said
+that he had never heard of any such body. Then I asked him who Mr. Duncan Ross
+was. He answered that the name was new to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Well,’ said I, ‘the gentleman at No. 4.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘What, the red-headed man?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Yes.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Oh,’ said he, ‘his name was William Morris. He
+was a solicitor and was using my room as a temporary convenience until his new
+premises were ready. He moved out yesterday.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Where could I find him?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Oh, at his new offices. He did tell me the address. Yes, 17
+King Edward Street, near St. Paul’s.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“I started off, Mr. Holmes, but when I got to that address it was a
+manufactory of artificial knee-caps, and no one in it had ever heard of either
+Mr. William Morris or Mr. Duncan Ross.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And what did you do then?” asked Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I went home to Saxe-Coburg Square, and I took the advice of my
+assistant. But he could not help me in any way. He could only say that if I
+waited I should hear by post. But that was not quite good enough, Mr. Holmes. I
+did not wish to lose such a place without a struggle, so, as I had heard that
+you were good enough to give advice to poor folk who were in need of it, I came
+right away to you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And you did very wisely,” said Holmes. “Your case is an
+exceedingly remarkable one, and I shall be happy to look into it. From what you
+have told me I think that it is possible that graver issues hang from it than
+might at first sight appear.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Grave enough!” said Mr. Jabez Wilson. “Why, I have lost four
+pound a week.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“As far as you are personally concerned,” remarked Holmes, “I
+do not see that you have any grievance against this extraordinary league. On
+the contrary, you are, as I understand, richer by some £ 30, to say nothing of
+the minute knowledge which you have gained on every subject which comes under
+the letter A. You have lost nothing by them.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, sir. But I want to find out about them, and who they are, and what
+their object was in playing this prank—if it was a prank—upon me.
+It was a pretty expensive joke for them, for it cost them two and thirty
+pounds.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We shall endeavour to clear up these points for you. And, first, one or
+two questions, Mr. Wilson. This assistant of yours who first called your
+attention to the advertisement—how long had he been with you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“About a month then.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How did he come?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In answer to an advertisement.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Was he the only applicant?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I had a dozen.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why did you pick him?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Because he was handy and would come cheap.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“At half wages, in fact.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What is he like, this Vincent Spaulding?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Small, stout-built, very quick in his ways, no hair on his face, though
+he’s not short of thirty. Has a white splash of acid upon his
+forehead.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes sat up in his chair in considerable excitement. “I thought as
+much,” said he. “Have you ever observed that his ears are pierced
+for earrings?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, sir. He told me that a gipsy had done it for him when he was a
+lad.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hum!” said Holmes, sinking back in deep thought. “He is
+still with you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, yes, sir; I have only just left him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And has your business been attended to in your absence?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nothing to complain of, sir. There’s never very much to do of a
+morning.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That will do, Mr. Wilson. I shall be happy to give you an opinion upon
+the subject in the course of a day or two. To-day is Saturday, and I hope that
+by Monday we may come to a conclusion.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, Watson,” said Holmes when our visitor had left us,
+“what do you make of it all?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I make nothing of it,” I answered frankly. “It is a most
+mysterious business.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“As a rule,” said Holmes, “the more bizarre a thing is the
+less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes
+which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to
+identify. But I must be prompt over this matter.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What are you going to do, then?” I asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“To smoke,” he answered. “It is quite a three pipe problem,
+and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.” He curled
+himself up in his chair, with his thin knees drawn up to his hawk-like nose,
+and there he sat with his eyes closed and his black clay pipe thrusting out
+like the bill of some strange bird. I had come to the conclusion that he had
+dropped asleep, and indeed was nodding myself, when he suddenly sprang out of
+his chair with the gesture of a man who has made up his mind and put his pipe
+down upon the mantelpiece.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Sarasate plays at the St. James’s Hall this afternoon,” he
+remarked. “What do you think, Watson? Could your patients spare you for a
+few hours?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have nothing to do to-day. My practice is never very absorbing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then put on your hat and come. I am going through the City first, and we
+can have some lunch on the way. I observe that there is a good deal of German
+music on the programme, which is rather more to my taste than Italian or
+French. It is introspective, and I want to introspect. Come along!”
+</p>
+<p>
+We travelled by the Underground as far as Aldersgate; and a short walk took us
+to Saxe-Coburg Square, the scene of the singular story which we had listened to
+in the morning. It was a poky, little, shabby-genteel place, where four lines
+of dingy two-storied brick houses looked out into a small railed-in enclosure,
+where a lawn of weedy grass and a few clumps of faded laurel bushes made a hard
+fight against a smoke-laden and uncongenial atmosphere. Three gilt balls and a
+brown board with “JABEZ WILSON” in white letters, upon a corner
+house, announced the place where our red-headed client carried on his business.
+Sherlock Holmes stopped in front of it with his head on one side and looked it
+all over, with his eyes shining brightly between puckered lids. Then he walked
+slowly up the street, and then down again to the corner, still looking keenly
+at the houses. Finally he returned to the pawnbroker’s, and, having
+thumped vigorously upon the pavement with his stick two or three times, he went
+up to the door and knocked. It was instantly opened by a bright-looking,
+clean-shaven young fellow, who asked him to step in.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you,” said Holmes, “I only wished to ask you how you
+would go from here to the Strand.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Third right, fourth left,” answered the assistant promptly,
+closing the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Smart fellow, that,” observed Holmes as we walked away. “He
+is, in my judgment, the fourth smartest man in London, and for daring I am not
+sure that he has not a claim to be third. I have known something of him
+before.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Evidently,” said I, “Mr. Wilson’s assistant counts for
+a good deal in this mystery of the Red-headed League. I am sure that you
+inquired your way merely in order that you might see him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The knees of his trousers.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And what did you see?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What I expected to see.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why did you beat the pavement?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My dear doctor, this is a time for observation, not for talk. We are
+spies in an enemy’s country. We know something of Saxe-Coburg Square. Let
+us now explore the parts which lie behind it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The road in which we found ourselves as we turned round the corner from the
+retired Saxe-Coburg Square presented as great a contrast to it as the front of
+a picture does to the back. It was one of the main arteries which conveyed the
+traffic of the City to the north and west. The roadway was blocked with the
+immense stream of commerce flowing in a double tide inward and outward, while
+the footpaths were black with the hurrying swarm of pedestrians. It was
+difficult to realise as we looked at the line of fine shops and stately
+business premises that they really abutted on the other side upon the faded and
+stagnant square which we had just quitted.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Let me see,” said Holmes, standing at the corner and glancing
+along the line, “I should like just to remember the order of the houses
+here. It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London. There is
+Mortimer’s, the tobacconist, the little newspaper shop, the Coburg branch
+of the City and Suburban Bank, the Vegetarian Restaurant, and McFarlane’s
+carriage-building depot. That carries us right on to the other block. And now,
+Doctor, we’ve done our work, so it’s time we had some play. A
+sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is
+sweetness and delicacy and harmony, and there are no red-headed clients to vex
+us with their conundrums.”
+</p>
+<p>
+My friend was an enthusiastic musician, being himself not only a very capable
+performer but a composer of no ordinary merit. All the afternoon he sat in the
+stalls wrapped in the most perfect happiness, gently waving his long, thin
+fingers in time to the music, while his gently smiling face and his languid,
+dreamy eyes were as unlike those of Holmes the sleuth-hound, Holmes the
+relentless, keen-witted, ready-handed criminal agent, as it was possible to
+conceive. In his singular character the dual nature alternately asserted
+itself, and his extreme exactness and astuteness represented, as I have often
+thought, the reaction against the poetic and contemplative mood which
+occasionally predominated in him. The swing of his nature took him from extreme
+languor to devouring energy; and, as I knew well, he was never so truly
+formidable as when, for days on end, he had been lounging in his armchair amid
+his improvisations and his black-letter editions. Then it was that the lust of
+the chase would suddenly come upon him, and that his brilliant reasoning power
+would rise to the level of intuition, until those who were unacquainted with
+his methods would look askance at him as on a man whose knowledge was not that
+of other mortals. When I saw him that afternoon so enwrapped in the music at
+St. James’s Hall I felt that an evil time might be coming upon those whom
+he had set himself to hunt down.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You want to go home, no doubt, Doctor,” he remarked as we emerged.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, it would be as well.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And I have some business to do which will take some hours. This business
+at Coburg Square is serious.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why serious?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A considerable crime is in contemplation. I have every reason to believe
+that we shall be in time to stop it. But to-day being Saturday rather
+complicates matters. I shall want your help to-night.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“At what time?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ten will be early enough.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I shall be at Baker Street at ten.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very well. And, I say, Doctor, there may be some little danger, so
+kindly put your army revolver in your pocket.” He waved his hand, turned
+on his heel, and disappeared in an instant among the crowd.
+</p>
+<p>
+I trust that I am not more dense than my neighbours, but I was always oppressed
+with a sense of my own stupidity in my dealings with Sherlock Holmes. Here I
+had heard what he had heard, I had seen what he had seen, and yet from his
+words it was evident that he saw clearly not only what had happened but what
+was about to happen, while to me the whole business was still confused and
+grotesque. As I drove home to my house in Kensington I thought over it all,
+from the extraordinary story of the red-headed copier of the
+<i>Encyclopædia</i> down to the visit to Saxe-Coburg Square, and the ominous
+words with which he had parted from me. What was this nocturnal expedition, and
+why should I go armed? Where were we going, and what were we to do? I had the
+hint from Holmes that this smooth-faced pawnbroker’s assistant was a
+formidable man—a man who might play a deep game. I tried to puzzle it
+out, but gave it up in despair and set the matter aside until night should
+bring an explanation.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was a quarter-past nine when I started from home and made my way across the
+Park, and so through Oxford Street to Baker Street. Two hansoms were standing
+at the door, and as I entered the passage I heard the sound of voices from
+above. On entering his room, I found Holmes in animated conversation with two
+men, one of whom I recognised as Peter Jones, the official police agent, while
+the other was a long, thin, sad-faced man, with a very shiny hat and
+oppressively respectable frock-coat.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ha! Our party is complete,” said Holmes, buttoning up his
+pea-jacket and taking his heavy hunting crop from the rack. “Watson, I
+think you know Mr. Jones, of Scotland Yard? Let me introduce you to Mr.
+Merryweather, who is to be our companion in to-night’s adventure.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We’re hunting in couples again, Doctor, you see,” said Jones
+in his consequential way. “Our friend here is a wonderful man for
+starting a chase. All he wants is an old dog to help him to do the running
+down.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I hope a wild goose may not prove to be the end of our chase,”
+observed Mr. Merryweather gloomily.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You may place considerable confidence in Mr. Holmes, sir,” said
+the police agent loftily. “He has his own little methods, which are, if
+he won’t mind my saying so, just a little too theoretical and fantastic,
+but he has the makings of a detective in him. It is not too much to say that
+once or twice, as in that business of the Sholto murder and the Agra treasure,
+he has been more nearly correct than the official force.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, if you say so, Mr. Jones, it is all right,” said the stranger
+with deference. “Still, I confess that I miss my rubber. It is the first
+Saturday night for seven-and-twenty years that I have not had my rubber.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think you will find,” said Sherlock Holmes, “that you will
+play for a higher stake to-night than you have ever done yet, and that the play
+will be more exciting. For you, Mr. Merryweather, the stake will be some £
+30,000; and for you, Jones, it will be the man upon whom you wish to lay your
+hands.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“John Clay, the murderer, thief, smasher, and forger. He’s a young
+man, Mr. Merryweather, but he is at the head of his profession, and I would
+rather have my bracelets on him than on any criminal in London. He’s a
+remarkable man, is young John Clay. His grandfather was a royal duke, and he
+himself has been to Eton and Oxford. His brain is as cunning as his fingers,
+and though we meet signs of him at every turn, we never know where to find the
+man himself. He’ll crack a crib in Scotland one week, and be raising
+money to build an orphanage in Cornwall the next. I’ve been on his track
+for years and have never set eyes on him yet.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I hope that I may have the pleasure of introducing you to-night.
+I’ve had one or two little turns also with Mr. John Clay, and I agree
+with you that he is at the head of his profession. It is past ten, however, and
+quite time that we started. If you two will take the first hansom, Watson and I
+will follow in the second.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes was not very communicative during the long drive and lay back
+in the cab humming the tunes which he had heard in the afternoon. We rattled
+through an endless labyrinth of gas-lit streets until we emerged into
+Farrington Street.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We are close there now,” my friend remarked. “This fellow
+Merryweather is a bank director, and personally interested in the matter. I
+thought it as well to have Jones with us also. He is not a bad fellow, though
+an absolute imbecile in his profession. He has one positive virtue. He is as
+brave as a bulldog and as tenacious as a lobster if he gets his claws upon
+anyone. Here we are, and they are waiting for us.”
+</p>
+<p>
+We had reached the same crowded thoroughfare in which we had found ourselves in
+the morning. Our cabs were dismissed, and, following the guidance of Mr.
+Merryweather, we passed down a narrow passage and through a side door, which he
+opened for us. Within there was a small corridor, which ended in a very massive
+iron gate. This also was opened, and led down a flight of winding stone steps,
+which terminated at another formidable gate. Mr. Merryweather stopped to light
+a lantern, and then conducted us down a dark, earth-smelling passage, and so,
+after opening a third door, into a huge vault or cellar, which was piled all
+round with crates and massive boxes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are not very vulnerable from above,” Holmes remarked as he
+held up the lantern and gazed about him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nor from below,” said Mr. Merryweather, striking his stick upon
+the flags which lined the floor. “Why, dear me, it sounds quite
+hollow!” he remarked, looking up in surprise.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I must really ask you to be a little more quiet!” said Holmes
+severely. “You have already imperilled the whole success of our
+expedition. Might I beg that you would have the goodness to sit down upon one
+of those boxes, and not to interfere?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The solemn Mr. Merryweather perched himself upon a crate, with a very injured
+expression upon his face, while Holmes fell upon his knees upon the floor and,
+with the lantern and a magnifying lens, began to examine minutely the cracks
+between the stones. A few seconds sufficed to satisfy him, for he sprang to his
+feet again and put his glass in his pocket.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We have at least an hour before us,” he remarked, “for they
+can hardly take any steps until the good pawnbroker is safely in bed. Then they
+will not lose a minute, for the sooner they do their work the longer time they
+will have for their escape. We are at present, Doctor—as no doubt you
+have divined—in the cellar of the City branch of one of the principal
+London banks. Mr. Merryweather is the chairman of directors, and he will
+explain to you that there are reasons why the more daring criminals of London
+should take a considerable interest in this cellar at present.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is our French gold,” whispered the director. “We have had
+several warnings that an attempt might be made upon it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your French gold?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes. We had occasion some months ago to strengthen our resources and
+borrowed for that purpose 30,000 napoleons from the Bank of France. It has
+become known that we have never had occasion to unpack the money, and that it
+is still lying in our cellar. The crate upon which I sit contains 2,000
+napoleons packed between layers of lead foil. Our reserve of bullion is much
+larger at present than is usually kept in a single branch office, and the
+directors have had misgivings upon the subject.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Which were very well justified,” observed Holmes. “And now
+it is time that we arranged our little plans. I expect that within an hour
+matters will come to a head. In the meantime Mr. Merryweather, we must put the
+screen over that dark lantern.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And sit in the dark?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am afraid so. I had brought a pack of cards in my pocket, and I
+thought that, as we were a <i>partie carrée</i>, you might have your rubber
+after all. But I see that the enemy’s preparations have gone so far that
+we cannot risk the presence of a light. And, first of all, we must choose our
+positions. These are daring men, and though we shall take them at a
+disadvantage, they may do us some harm unless we are careful. I shall stand
+behind this crate, and do you conceal yourselves behind those. Then, when I
+flash a light upon them, close in swiftly. If they fire, Watson, have no
+compunction about shooting them down.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I placed my revolver, cocked, upon the top of the wooden case behind which I
+crouched. Holmes shot the slide across the front of his lantern and left us in
+pitch darkness—such an absolute darkness as I have never before
+experienced. The smell of hot metal remained to assure us that the light was
+still there, ready to flash out at a moment’s notice. To me, with my
+nerves worked up to a pitch of expectancy, there was something depressing and
+subduing in the sudden gloom, and in the cold dank air of the vault.
+</p>
+<p>
+“They have but one retreat,” whispered Holmes. “That is back
+through the house into Saxe-Coburg Square. I hope that you have done what I
+asked you, Jones?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have an inspector and two officers waiting at the front door.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then we have stopped all the holes. And now we must be silent and
+wait.”
+</p>
+<p>
+What a time it seemed! From comparing notes afterwards it was but an hour and a
+quarter, yet it appeared to me that the night must have almost gone, and the
+dawn be breaking above us. My limbs were weary and stiff, for I feared to
+change my position; yet my nerves were worked up to the highest pitch of
+tension, and my hearing was so acute that I could not only hear the gentle
+breathing of my companions, but I could distinguish the deeper, heavier
+in-breath of the bulky Jones from the thin, sighing note of the bank director.
+From my position I could look over the case in the direction of the floor.
+Suddenly my eyes caught the glint of a light.
+</p>
+<p>
+At first it was but a lurid spark upon the stone pavement. Then it lengthened
+out until it became a yellow line, and then, without any warning or sound, a
+gash seemed to open and a hand appeared, a white, almost womanly hand, which
+felt about in the centre of the little area of light. For a minute or more the
+hand, with its writhing fingers, protruded out of the floor. Then it was
+withdrawn as suddenly as it appeared, and all was dark again save the single
+lurid spark which marked a chink between the stones.
+</p>
+<p>
+Its disappearance, however, was but momentary. With a rending, tearing sound,
+one of the broad, white stones turned over upon its side and left a square,
+gaping hole, through which streamed the light of a lantern. Over the edge there
+peeped a clean-cut, boyish face, which looked keenly about it, and then, with a
+hand on either side of the aperture, drew itself shoulder-high and waist-high,
+until one knee rested upon the edge. In another instant he stood at the side of
+the hole and was hauling after him a companion, lithe and small like himself,
+with a pale face and a shock of very red hair.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s all clear,” he whispered. “Have you the chisel
+and the bags? Great Scott! Jump, Archie, jump, and I’ll swing for
+it!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes had sprung out and seized the intruder by the collar. The other
+dived down the hole, and I heard the sound of rending cloth as Jones clutched
+at his skirts. The light flashed upon the barrel of a revolver, but
+Holmes’ hunting crop came down on the man’s wrist, and the pistol
+clinked upon the stone floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s no use, John Clay,” said Holmes blandly. “You
+have no chance at all.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“So I see,” the other answered with the utmost coolness. “I
+fancy that my pal is all right, though I see you have got his
+coat-tails.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There are three men waiting for him at the door,” said Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, indeed! You seem to have done the thing very completely. I must
+compliment you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And I you,” Holmes answered. “Your red-headed idea was very
+new and effective.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You’ll see your pal again presently,” said Jones.
+“He’s quicker at climbing down holes than I am. Just hold out while
+I fix the derbies.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I beg that you will not touch me with your filthy hands,” remarked
+our prisoner as the handcuffs clattered upon his wrists. “You may not be
+aware that I have royal blood in my veins. Have the goodness, also, when you
+address me always to say ‘sir’ and
+‘please.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“All right,” said Jones with a stare and a snigger. “Well,
+would you please, sir, march upstairs, where we can get a cab to carry your
+Highness to the police-station?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is better,” said John Clay serenely. He made a sweeping bow
+to the three of us and walked quietly off in the custody of the detective.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Really, Mr. Holmes,” said Mr. Merryweather as we followed them
+from the cellar, “I do not know how the bank can thank you or repay you.
+There is no doubt that you have detected and defeated in the most complete
+manner one of the most determined attempts at bank robbery that have ever come
+within my experience.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have had one or two little scores of my own to settle with Mr. John
+Clay,” said Holmes. “I have been at some small expense over this
+matter, which I shall expect the bank to refund, but beyond that I am amply
+repaid by having had an experience which is in many ways unique, and by hearing
+the very remarkable narrative of the Red-headed League.”
+</p>
+<p class="p2">
+“You see, Watson,” he explained in the early hours of the morning
+as we sat over a glass of whisky and soda in Baker Street, “it was
+perfectly obvious from the first that the only possible object of this rather
+fantastic business of the advertisement of the League, and the copying of the
+<i>Encyclopædia</i>, must be to get this not over-bright pawnbroker out of the
+way for a number of hours every day. It was a curious way of managing it, but,
+really, it would be difficult to suggest a better. The method was no doubt
+suggested to Clay’s ingenious mind by the colour of his
+accomplice’s hair. The £ 4 a week was a lure which must draw him, and
+what was it to them, who were playing for thousands? They put in the
+advertisement, one rogue has the temporary office, the other rogue incites the
+man to apply for it, and together they manage to secure his absence every
+morning in the week. From the time that I heard of the assistant having come
+for half wages, it was obvious to me that he had some strong motive for
+securing the situation.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But how could you guess what the motive was?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Had there been women in the house, I should have suspected a mere vulgar
+intrigue. That, however, was out of the question. The man’s business was
+a small one, and there was nothing in his house which could account for such
+elaborate preparations, and such an expenditure as they were at. It must, then,
+be something out of the house. What could it be? I thought of the
+assistant’s fondness for photography, and his trick of vanishing into the
+cellar. The cellar! There was the end of this tangled clue. Then I made
+inquiries as to this mysterious assistant and found that I had to deal with one
+of the coolest and most daring criminals in London. He was doing something in
+the cellar—something which took many hours a day for months on end. What
+could it be, once more? I could think of nothing save that he was running a
+tunnel to some other building.
+</p>
+<p>
+“So far I had got when we went to visit the scene of action. I surprised
+you by beating upon the pavement with my stick. I was ascertaining whether the
+cellar stretched out in front or behind. It was not in front. Then I rang the
+bell, and, as I hoped, the assistant answered it. We have had some skirmishes,
+but we had never set eyes upon each other before. I hardly looked at his face.
+His knees were what I wished to see. You must yourself have remarked how worn,
+wrinkled, and stained they were. They spoke of those hours of burrowing. The
+only remaining point was what they were burrowing for. I walked round the
+corner, saw the City and Suburban Bank abutted on our friend’s premises,
+and felt that I had solved my problem. When you drove home after the concert I
+called upon Scotland Yard and upon the chairman of the bank directors, with the
+result that you have seen.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And how could you tell that they would make their attempt
+to-night?” I asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, when they closed their League offices that was a sign that they
+cared no longer about Mr. Jabez Wilson’s presence—in other words,
+that they had completed their tunnel. But it was essential that they should use
+it soon, as it might be discovered, or the bullion might be removed. Saturday
+would suit them better than any other day, as it would give them two days for
+their escape. For all these reasons I expected them to come to-night.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You reasoned it out beautifully,” I exclaimed in unfeigned
+admiration. “It is so long a chain, and yet every link rings true.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It saved me from ennui,” he answered, yawning. “Alas! I
+already feel it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort to
+escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do
+so.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And you are a benefactor of the race,” said I.
+</p>
+<p>
+He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, perhaps, after all, it is of some
+little use,” he remarked. “‘<i>L’homme
+c’est rien—l’œuvre c’est tout</i>,’ as Gustave
+Flaubert wrote to George Sand.”
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap03"></a>III.<br>A CASE OF IDENTITY</h2>
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 1.50em">“M</span>y dear
+fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his
+lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything
+which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things
+which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that
+window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and
+peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the
+plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through
+generations, and leading to the most <i>outré</i> results, it would make all
+fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and
+unprofitable.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And yet I am not convinced of it,” I answered. “The cases
+which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar
+enough. We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and
+yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor
+artistic.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A certain selection and discretion must be used in producing a realistic
+effect,” remarked Holmes. “This is wanting in the police report,
+where more stress is laid, perhaps, upon the platitudes of the magistrate than
+upon the details, which to an observer contain the vital essence of the whole
+matter. Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the
+commonplace.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I smiled and shook my head. “I can quite understand your thinking
+so,” I said. “Of course, in your position of unofficial adviser and
+helper to everybody who is absolutely puzzled, throughout three continents, you
+are brought in contact with all that is strange and bizarre. But
+here”—I picked up the morning paper from the
+ground—“let us put it to a practical test. Here is the first
+heading upon which I come. ‘A husband’s cruelty to his wife.’
+There is half a column of print, but I know without reading it that it is all
+perfectly familiar to me. There is, of course, the other woman, the drink, the
+push, the blow, the bruise, the sympathetic sister or landlady. The crudest of
+writers could invent nothing more crude.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Indeed, your example is an unfortunate one for your argument,”
+said Holmes, taking the paper and glancing his eye down it. “This is the
+Dundas separation case, and, as it happens, I was engaged in clearing up some
+small points in connection with it. The husband was a teetotaler, there was no
+other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the
+habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them
+at his wife, which, you will allow, is not an action likely to occur to the
+imagination of the average story-teller. Take a pinch of snuff, Doctor, and
+acknowledge that I have scored over you in your example.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He held out his snuffbox of old gold, with a great amethyst in the centre of
+the lid. Its splendour was in such contrast to his homely ways and simple life
+that I could not help commenting upon it.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah,” said he, “I forgot that I had not seen you for some
+weeks. It is a little souvenir from the King of Bohemia in return for my
+assistance in the case of the Irene Adler papers.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And the ring?” I asked, glancing at a remarkable brilliant which
+sparkled upon his finger.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was from the reigning family of Holland, though the matter in which I
+served them was of such delicacy that I cannot confide it even to you, who have
+been good enough to chronicle one or two of my little problems.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And have you any on hand just now?” I asked with interest.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Some ten or twelve, but none which present any feature of interest. They
+are important, you understand, without being interesting. Indeed, I have found
+that it is usually in unimportant matters that there is a field for the
+observation, and for the quick analysis of cause and effect which gives the
+charm to an investigation. The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the
+bigger the crime the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive. In these cases,
+save for one rather intricate matter which has been referred to me from
+Marseilles, there is nothing which presents any features of interest. It is
+possible, however, that I may have something better before very many minutes
+are over, for this is one of my clients, or I am much mistaken.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He had risen from his chair and was standing between the parted blinds gazing
+down into the dull neutral-tinted London street. Looking over his shoulder, I
+saw that on the pavement opposite there stood a large woman with a heavy fur
+boa round her neck, and a large curling red feather in a broad-brimmed hat
+which was tilted in a coquettish Duchess of Devonshire fashion over her ear.
+From under this great panoply she peeped up in a nervous, hesitating fashion at
+our windows, while her body oscillated backward and forward, and her fingers
+fidgeted with her glove buttons. Suddenly, with a plunge, as of the swimmer who
+leaves the bank, she hurried across the road, and we heard the sharp clang of
+the bell.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have seen those symptoms before,” said Holmes, throwing his
+cigarette into the fire. “Oscillation upon the pavement always means an
+<i>affaire de cœur</i>. She would like advice, but is not sure that the matter
+is not too delicate for communication. And yet even here we may discriminate.
+When a woman has been seriously wronged by a man she no longer oscillates, and
+the usual symptom is a broken bell wire. Here we may take it that there is a
+love matter, but that the maiden is not so much angry as perplexed, or grieved.
+But here she comes in person to resolve our doubts.”
+</p>
+<p>
+As he spoke there was a tap at the door, and the boy in buttons entered to
+announce Miss Mary Sutherland, while the lady herself loomed behind his small
+black figure like a full-sailed merchant-man behind a tiny pilot boat. Sherlock
+Holmes welcomed her with the easy courtesy for which he was remarkable, and,
+having closed the door and bowed her into an armchair, he looked her over in
+the minute and yet abstracted fashion which was peculiar to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you not find,” he said, “that with your short sight it is
+a little trying to do so much typewriting?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I did at first,” she answered, “but now I know where the
+letters are without looking.” Then, suddenly realising the full purport
+of his words, she gave a violent start and looked up, with fear and
+astonishment upon her broad, good-humoured face. “You’ve heard
+about me, Mr. Holmes,” she cried, “else how could you know all
+that?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Never mind,” said Holmes, laughing; “it is my business to
+know things. Perhaps I have trained myself to see what others overlook. If not,
+why should you come to consult me?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I came to you, sir, because I heard of you from Mrs. Etherege, whose
+husband you found so easy when the police and everyone had given him up for
+dead. Oh, Mr. Holmes, I wish you would do as much for me. I’m not rich,
+but still I have a hundred a year in my own right, besides the little that I
+make by the machine, and I would give it all to know what has become of Mr.
+Hosmer Angel.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why did you come away to consult me in such a hurry?” asked
+Sherlock Holmes, with his finger-tips together and his eyes to the ceiling.
+</p>
+<p>
+Again a startled look came over the somewhat vacuous face of Miss Mary
+Sutherland. “Yes, I did bang out of the house,” she said,
+“for it made me angry to see the easy way in which Mr.
+Windibank—that is, my father—took it all. He would not go to the
+police, and he would not go to you, and so at last, as he would do nothing and
+kept on saying that there was no harm done, it made me mad, and I just on with
+my things and came right away to you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your father,” said Holmes, “your stepfather, surely, since
+the name is different.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, my stepfather. I call him father, though it sounds funny, too, for
+he is only five years and two months older than myself.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And your mother is alive?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, yes, mother is alive and well. I wasn’t best pleased, Mr.
+Holmes, when she married again so soon after father’s death, and a man
+who was nearly fifteen years younger than herself. Father was a plumber in the
+Tottenham Court Road, and he left a tidy business behind him, which mother
+carried on with Mr. Hardy, the foreman; but when Mr. Windibank came he made her
+sell the business, for he was very superior, being a traveller in wines. They
+got £ 4700 for the goodwill and interest, which wasn’t near as much as
+father could have got if he had been alive.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I had expected to see Sherlock Holmes impatient under this rambling and
+inconsequential narrative, but, on the contrary, he had listened with the
+greatest concentration of attention.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your own little income,” he asked, “does it come out of the
+business?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, no, sir. It is quite separate and was left me by my uncle Ned in
+Auckland. It is in New Zealand stock, paying 4½ per cent. Two thousand five
+hundred pounds was the amount, but I can only touch the interest.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You interest me extremely,” said Holmes. “And since you draw
+so large a sum as a hundred a year, with what you earn into the bargain, you no
+doubt travel a little and indulge yourself in every way. I believe that a
+single lady can get on very nicely upon an income of about £ 60.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I could do with much less than that, Mr. Holmes, but you understand that
+as long as I live at home I don’t wish to be a burden to them, and so
+they have the use of the money just while I am staying with them. Of course,
+that is only just for the time. Mr. Windibank draws my interest every quarter
+and pays it over to mother, and I find that I can do pretty well with what I
+earn at typewriting. It brings me twopence a sheet, and I can often do from
+fifteen to twenty sheets in a day.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have made your position very clear to me,” said Holmes.
+“This is my friend, Dr. Watson, before whom you can speak as freely as
+before myself. Kindly tell us now all about your connection with Mr. Hosmer
+Angel.”
+</p>
+<p>
+A flush stole over Miss Sutherland’s face, and she picked nervously at
+the fringe of her jacket. “I met him first at the gasfitters’
+ball,” she said. “They used to send father tickets when he was
+alive, and then afterwards they remembered us, and sent them to mother. Mr.
+Windibank did not wish us to go. He never did wish us to go anywhere. He would
+get quite mad if I wanted so much as to join a Sunday-school treat. But this
+time I was set on going, and I would go; for what right had he to prevent? He
+said the folk were not fit for us to know, when all father’s friends were
+to be there. And he said that I had nothing fit to wear, when I had my purple
+plush that I had never so much as taken out of the drawer. At last, when
+nothing else would do, he went off to France upon the business of the firm, but
+we went, mother and I, with Mr. Hardy, who used to be our foreman, and it was
+there I met Mr. Hosmer Angel.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I suppose,” said Holmes, “that when Mr. Windibank came back
+from France he was very annoyed at your having gone to the ball.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, well, he was very good about it. He laughed, I remember, and
+shrugged his shoulders, and said there was no use denying anything to a woman,
+for she would have her way.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I see. Then at the gasfitters’ ball you met, as I understand, a
+gentleman called Mr. Hosmer Angel.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, sir. I met him that night, and he called next day to ask if we had
+got home all safe, and after that we met him—that is to say, Mr. Holmes,
+I met him twice for walks, but after that father came back again, and Mr.
+Hosmer Angel could not come to the house any more.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, you know father didn’t like anything of the sort. He
+wouldn’t have any visitors if he could help it, and he used to say that a
+woman should be happy in her own family circle. But then, as I used to say to
+mother, a woman wants her own circle to begin with, and I had not got mine
+yet.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But how about Mr. Hosmer Angel? Did he make no attempt to see
+you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, father was going off to France again in a week, and Hosmer wrote
+and said that it would be safer and better not to see each other until he had
+gone. We could write in the meantime, and he used to write every day. I took
+the letters in in the morning, so there was no need for father to know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Were you engaged to the gentleman at this time?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, yes, Mr. Holmes. We were engaged after the first walk that we took.
+Hosmer—Mr. Angel—was a cashier in an office in Leadenhall
+Street—and—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What office?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s the worst of it, Mr. Holmes, I don’t know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Where did he live, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He slept on the premises.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And you don’t know his address?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No—except that it was Leadenhall Street.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Where did you address your letters, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“To the Leadenhall Street Post Office, to be left till called for. He
+said that if they were sent to the office he would be chaffed by all the other
+clerks about having letters from a lady, so I offered to typewrite them, like
+he did his, but he wouldn’t have that, for he said that when I wrote them
+they seemed to come from me, but when they were typewritten he always felt that
+the machine had come between us. That will just show you how fond he was of me,
+Mr. Holmes, and the little things that he would think of.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was most suggestive,” said Holmes. “It has long been an
+axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important. Can you
+remember any other little things about Mr. Hosmer Angel?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He was a very shy man, Mr. Holmes. He would rather walk with me in the
+evening than in the daylight, for he said that he hated to be conspicuous. Very
+retiring and gentlemanly he was. Even his voice was gentle. He’d had the
+quinsy and swollen glands when he was young, he told me, and it had left him
+with a weak throat, and a hesitating, whispering fashion of speech. He was
+always well dressed, very neat and plain, but his eyes were weak, just as mine
+are, and he wore tinted glasses against the glare.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, and what happened when Mr. Windibank, your stepfather, returned to
+France?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mr. Hosmer Angel came to the house again and proposed that we should
+marry before father came back. He was in dreadful earnest and made me swear,
+with my hands on the Testament, that whatever happened I would always be true
+to him. Mother said he was quite right to make me swear, and that it was a sign
+of his passion. Mother was all in his favour from the first and was even fonder
+of him than I was. Then, when they talked of marrying within the week, I began
+to ask about father; but they both said never to mind about father, but just to
+tell him afterwards, and mother said she would make it all right with him. I
+didn’t quite like that, Mr. Holmes. It seemed funny that I should ask his
+leave, as he was only a few years older than me; but I didn’t want to do
+anything on the sly, so I wrote to father at Bordeaux, where the company has
+its French offices, but the letter came back to me on the very morning of the
+wedding.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It missed him, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, sir; for he had started to England just before it arrived.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ha! that was unfortunate. Your wedding was arranged, then, for the
+Friday. Was it to be in church?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, sir, but very quietly. It was to be at St. Saviour’s, near
+King’s Cross, and we were to have breakfast afterwards at the St. Pancras
+Hotel. Hosmer came for us in a hansom, but as there were two of us he put us
+both into it and stepped himself into a four-wheeler, which happened to be the
+only other cab in the street. We got to the church first, and when the
+four-wheeler drove up we waited for him to step out, but he never did, and when
+the cabman got down from the box and looked there was no one there! The cabman
+said that he could not imagine what had become of him, for he had seen him get
+in with his own eyes. That was last Friday, Mr. Holmes, and I have never seen
+or heard anything since then to throw any light upon what became of him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It seems to me that you have been very shamefully treated,” said
+Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, no, sir! He was too good and kind to leave me so. Why, all the
+morning he was saying to me that, whatever happened, I was to be true; and that
+even if something quite unforeseen occurred to separate us, I was always to
+remember that I was pledged to him, and that he would claim his pledge sooner
+or later. It seemed strange talk for a wedding-morning, but what has happened
+since gives a meaning to it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Most certainly it does. Your own opinion is, then, that some unforeseen
+catastrophe has occurred to him?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, sir. I believe that he foresaw some danger, or else he would not
+have talked so. And then I think that what he foresaw happened.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But you have no notion as to what it could have been?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“None.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“One more question. How did your mother take the matter?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She was angry, and said that I was never to speak of the matter
+again.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And your father? Did you tell him?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes; and he seemed to think, with me, that something had happened, and
+that I should hear of Hosmer again. As he said, what interest could anyone have
+in bringing me to the doors of the church, and then leaving me? Now, if he had
+borrowed my money, or if he had married me and got my money settled on him,
+there might be some reason, but Hosmer was very independent about money and
+never would look at a shilling of mine. And yet, what could have happened? And
+why could he not write? Oh, it drives me half-mad to think of it, and I
+can’t sleep a wink at night.” She pulled a little handkerchief out
+of her muff and began to sob heavily into it.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I shall glance into the case for you,” said Holmes, rising,
+“and I have no doubt that we shall reach some definite result. Let the
+weight of the matter rest upon me now, and do not let your mind dwell upon it
+further. Above all, try to let Mr. Hosmer Angel vanish from your memory, as he
+has done from your life.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then you don’t think I’ll see him again?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I fear not.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then what has happened to him?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You will leave that question in my hands. I should like an accurate
+description of him and any letters of his which you can spare.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I advertised for him in last Saturday’s <i>Chronicle</i>,”
+said she. “Here is the slip and here are four letters from him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you. And your address?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No. 31 Lyon Place, Camberwell.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mr. Angel’s address you never had, I understand. Where is your
+father’s place of business?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He travels for Westhouse &amp; Marbank, the great claret importers of
+Fenchurch Street.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you. You have made your statement very clearly. You will leave the
+papers here, and remember the advice which I have given you. Let the whole
+incident be a sealed book, and do not allow it to affect your life.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are very kind, Mr. Holmes, but I cannot do that. I shall be true to
+Hosmer. He shall find me ready when he comes back.”
+</p>
+<p>
+For all the preposterous hat and the vacuous face, there was something noble in
+the simple faith of our visitor which compelled our respect. She laid her
+little bundle of papers upon the table and went her way, with a promise to come
+again whenever she might be summoned.
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes sat silent for a few minutes with his fingertips still pressed
+together, his legs stretched out in front of him, and his gaze directed upward
+to the ceiling. Then he took down from the rack the old and oily clay pipe,
+which was to him as a counsellor, and, having lit it, he leaned back in his
+chair, with the thick blue cloud-wreaths spinning up from him, and a look of
+infinite languor in his face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Quite an interesting study, that maiden,” he observed. “I
+found her more interesting than her little problem, which, by the way, is
+rather a trite one. You will find parallel cases, if you consult my index, in
+Andover in ’77, and there was something of the sort at The Hague last
+year. Old as is the idea, however, there were one or two details which were new
+to me. But the maiden herself was most instructive.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You appeared to read a good deal upon her which was quite invisible to
+me,” I remarked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not invisible but unnoticed, Watson. You did not know where to look, and
+so you missed all that was important. I can never bring you to realise the
+importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues
+that may hang from a boot-lace. Now, what did you gather from that
+woman’s appearance? Describe it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, she had a slate-coloured, broad-brimmed straw hat, with a feather
+of a brickish red. Her jacket was black, with black beads sewn upon it, and a
+fringe of little black jet ornaments. Her dress was brown, rather darker than
+coffee colour, with a little purple plush at the neck and sleeves. Her gloves
+were greyish and were worn through at the right forefinger. Her boots I
+didn’t observe. She had small round, hanging gold earrings, and a general
+air of being fairly well-to-do in a vulgar, comfortable, easy-going way.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes clapped his hands softly together and chuckled.
+</p>
+<p>
+“’Pon my word, Watson, you are coming along wonderfully. You
+have really done very well indeed. It is true that you have missed everything
+of importance, but you have hit upon the method, and you have a quick eye for
+colour. Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself
+upon details. My first glance is always at a woman’s sleeve. In a man it
+is perhaps better first to take the knee of the trouser. As you observe, this
+woman had plush upon her sleeves, which is a most useful material for showing
+traces. The double line a little above the wrist, where the typewritist presses
+against the table, was beautifully defined. The sewing-machine, of the hand
+type, leaves a similar mark, but only on the left arm, and on the side of it
+farthest from the thumb, instead of being right across the broadest part, as
+this was. I then glanced at her face, and, observing the dint of a pince-nez at
+either side of her nose, I ventured a remark upon short sight and typewriting,
+which seemed to surprise her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It surprised me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But, surely, it was obvious. I was then much surprised and interested on
+glancing down to observe that, though the boots which she was wearing were not
+unlike each other, they were really odd ones; the one having a slightly
+decorated toe-cap, and the other a plain one. One was buttoned only in the two
+lower buttons out of five, and the other at the first, third, and fifth. Now,
+when you see that a young lady, otherwise neatly dressed, has come away from
+home with odd boots, half-buttoned, it is no great deduction to say that she
+came away in a hurry.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And what else?” I asked, keenly interested, as I always was, by my
+friend’s incisive reasoning.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I noted, in passing, that she had written a note before leaving home but
+after being fully dressed. You observed that her right glove was torn at the
+forefinger, but you did not apparently see that both glove and finger were
+stained with violet ink. She had written in a hurry and dipped her pen too
+deep. It must have been this morning, or the mark would not remain clear upon
+the finger. All this is amusing, though rather elementary, but I must go back
+to business, Watson. Would you mind reading me the advertised description of
+Mr. Hosmer Angel?”
+</p>
+<p>
+I held the little printed slip to the light. “Missing,” it said,
+“on the morning of the fourteenth, a gentleman named Hosmer Angel. About
+five ft. seven in. in height; strongly built, sallow complexion, black hair, a
+little bald in the centre, bushy, black side-whiskers and moustache; tinted
+glasses, slight infirmity of speech. Was dressed, when last seen, in black
+frock-coat faced with silk, black waistcoat, gold Albert chain, and grey Harris
+tweed trousers, with brown gaiters over elastic-sided boots. Known to have been
+employed in an office in Leadenhall Street. Anybody bringing,” &amp;c,
+&amp;c.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That will do,” said Holmes. “As to the letters,” he
+continued, glancing over them, “they are very commonplace. Absolutely no
+clue in them to Mr. Angel, save that he quotes Balzac once. There is one
+remarkable point, however, which will no doubt strike you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“They are typewritten,” I remarked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not only that, but the signature is typewritten. Look at the neat little
+‘Hosmer Angel’ at the bottom. There is a date, you see, but no
+superscription except Leadenhall Street, which is rather vague. The point about
+the signature is very suggestive—in fact, we may call it
+conclusive.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of what?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My dear fellow, is it possible you do not see how strongly it bears upon
+the case?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I cannot say that I do unless it were that he wished to be able to deny
+his signature if an action for breach of promise were instituted.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, that was not the point. However, I shall write two letters, which
+should settle the matter. One is to a firm in the City, the other is to the
+young lady’s stepfather, Mr. Windibank, asking him whether he could meet
+us here at six o’clock to-morrow evening. It is just as well that we
+should do business with the male relatives. And now, Doctor, we can do nothing
+until the answers to those letters come, so we may put our little problem upon
+the shelf for the interim.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I had had so many reasons to believe in my friend’s subtle powers of
+reasoning and extraordinary energy in action that I felt that he must have some
+solid grounds for the assured and easy demeanour with which he treated the
+singular mystery which he had been called upon to fathom. Once only had I known
+him to fail, in the case of the King of Bohemia and of the Irene Adler
+photograph; but when I looked back to the weird business of the Sign of Four,
+and the extraordinary circumstances connected with the Study in Scarlet, I felt
+that it would be a strange tangle indeed which he could not unravel.
+</p>
+<p>
+I left him then, still puffing at his black clay pipe, with the conviction that
+when I came again on the next evening I would find that he held in his hands
+all the clues which would lead up to the identity of the disappearing
+bridegroom of Miss Mary Sutherland.
+</p>
+<p>
+A professional case of great gravity was engaging my own attention at the time,
+and the whole of next day I was busy at the bedside of the sufferer. It was not
+until close upon six o’clock that I found myself free and was able to
+spring into a hansom and drive to Baker Street, half afraid that I might be too
+late to assist at the <i>dénouement</i> of the little mystery. I found Sherlock
+Holmes alone, however, half asleep, with his long, thin form curled up in the
+recesses of his armchair. A formidable array of bottles and test-tubes, with
+the pungent cleanly smell of hydrochloric acid, told me that he had spent his
+day in the chemical work which was so dear to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, have you solved it?” I asked as I entered.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes. It was the bisulphate of baryta.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, no, the mystery!” I cried.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, that! I thought of the salt that I have been working upon. There was
+never any mystery in the matter, though, as I said yesterday, some of the
+details are of interest. The only drawback is that there is no law, I fear,
+that can touch the scoundrel.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who was he, then, and what was his object in deserting Miss
+Sutherland?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The question was hardly out of my mouth, and Holmes had not yet opened his lips
+to reply, when we heard a heavy footfall in the passage and a tap at the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This is the girl’s stepfather, Mr. James Windibank,” said
+Holmes. “He has written to me to say that he would be here at six. Come
+in!”
+</p>
+<p>
+The man who entered was a sturdy, middle-sized fellow, some thirty years of
+age, clean-shaven, and sallow-skinned, with a bland, insinuating manner, and a
+pair of wonderfully sharp and penetrating grey eyes. He shot a questioning
+glance at each of us, placed his shiny top-hat upon the sideboard, and with a
+slight bow sidled down into the nearest chair.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good-evening, Mr. James Windibank,” said Holmes. “I think
+that this typewritten letter is from you, in which you made an appointment with
+me for six o’clock?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, sir. I am afraid that I am a little late, but I am not quite my own
+master, you know. I am sorry that Miss Sutherland has troubled you about this
+little matter, for I think it is far better not to wash linen of the sort in
+public. It was quite against my wishes that she came, but she is a very
+excitable, impulsive girl, as you may have noticed, and she is not easily
+controlled when she has made up her mind on a point. Of course, I did not mind
+you so much, as you are not connected with the official police, but it is not
+pleasant to have a family misfortune like this noised abroad. Besides, it is a
+useless expense, for how could you possibly find this Hosmer Angel?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“On the contrary,” said Holmes quietly; “I have every reason
+to believe that I will succeed in discovering Mr. Hosmer Angel.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mr. Windibank gave a violent start and dropped his gloves. “I am
+delighted to hear it,” he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is a curious thing,” remarked Holmes, “that a typewriter
+has really quite as much individuality as a man’s handwriting. Unless
+they are quite new, no two of them write exactly alike. Some letters get more
+worn than others, and some wear only on one side. Now, you remark in this note
+of yours, Mr. Windibank, that in every case there is some little slurring over
+of the ‘e,’ and a slight defect in the tail of the ‘r.’
+There are fourteen other characteristics, but those are the more
+obvious.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We do all our correspondence with this machine at the office, and no
+doubt it is a little worn,” our visitor answered, glancing keenly at
+Holmes with his bright little eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And now I will show you what is really a very interesting study, Mr.
+Windibank,” Holmes continued. “I think of writing another little
+monograph some of these days on the typewriter and its relation to crime. It is
+a subject to which I have devoted some little attention. I have here four
+letters which purport to come from the missing man. They are all typewritten.
+In each case, not only are the ‘e’s’ slurred and the
+‘r’s’ tailless, but you will observe, if you care to use my
+magnifying lens, that the fourteen other characteristics to which I have
+alluded are there as well.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mr. Windibank sprang out of his chair and picked up his hat. “I cannot
+waste time over this sort of fantastic talk, Mr. Holmes,” he said.
+“If you can catch the man, catch him, and let me know when you have done
+it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Certainly,” said Holmes, stepping over and turning the key in the
+door. “I let you know, then, that I have caught him!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What! where?” shouted Mr. Windibank, turning white to his lips and
+glancing about him like a rat in a trap.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, it won’t do—really it won’t,” said Holmes
+suavely. “There is no possible getting out of it, Mr. Windibank. It is
+quite too transparent, and it was a very bad compliment when you said that it
+was impossible for me to solve so simple a question. That’s right! Sit
+down and let us talk it over.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Our visitor collapsed into a chair, with a ghastly face and a glitter of
+moisture on his brow. “It—it’s not actionable,” he
+stammered.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am very much afraid that it is not. But between ourselves, Windibank,
+it was as cruel and selfish and heartless a trick in a petty way as ever came
+before me. Now, let me just run over the course of events, and you will
+contradict me if I go wrong.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The man sat huddled up in his chair, with his head sunk upon his breast, like
+one who is utterly crushed. Holmes stuck his feet up on the corner of the
+mantelpiece and, leaning back with his hands in his pockets, began talking,
+rather to himself, as it seemed, than to us.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The man married a woman very much older than himself for her
+money,” said he, “and he enjoyed the use of the money of the
+daughter as long as she lived with them. It was a considerable sum, for people
+in their position, and the loss of it would have made a serious difference. It
+was worth an effort to preserve it. The daughter was of a good, amiable
+disposition, but affectionate and warm-hearted in her ways, so that it was
+evident that with her fair personal advantages, and her little income, she
+would not be allowed to remain single long. Now her marriage would mean, of
+course, the loss of a hundred a year, so what does her stepfather do to prevent
+it? He takes the obvious course of keeping her at home and forbidding her to
+seek the company of people of her own age. But soon he found that that would
+not answer forever. She became restive, insisted upon her rights, and finally
+announced her positive intention of going to a certain ball. What does her
+clever stepfather do then? He conceives an idea more creditable to his head
+than to his heart. With the connivance and assistance of his wife he disguised
+himself, covered those keen eyes with tinted glasses, masked the face with a
+moustache and a pair of bushy whiskers, sunk that clear voice into an
+insinuating whisper, and doubly secure on account of the girl’s short
+sight, he appears as Mr. Hosmer Angel, and keeps off other lovers by making
+love himself.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was only a joke at first,” groaned our visitor. “We never
+thought that she would have been so carried away.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very likely not. However that may be, the young lady was very decidedly
+carried away, and, having quite made up her mind that her stepfather was in
+France, the suspicion of treachery never for an instant entered her mind. She
+was flattered by the gentleman’s attentions, and the effect was increased
+by the loudly expressed admiration of her mother. Then Mr. Angel began to call,
+for it was obvious that the matter should be pushed as far as it would go if a
+real effect were to be produced. There were meetings, and an engagement, which
+would finally secure the girl’s affections from turning towards anyone
+else. But the deception could not be kept up forever. These pretended journeys
+to France were rather cumbrous. The thing to do was clearly to bring the
+business to an end in such a dramatic manner that it would leave a permanent
+impression upon the young lady’s mind and prevent her from looking upon
+any other suitor for some time to come. Hence those vows of fidelity exacted
+upon a Testament, and hence also the allusions to a possibility of something
+happening on the very morning of the wedding. James Windibank wished Miss
+Sutherland to be so bound to Hosmer Angel, and so uncertain as to his fate,
+that for ten years to come, at any rate, she would not listen to another man.
+As far as the church door he brought her, and then, as he could go no farther,
+he conveniently vanished away by the old trick of stepping in at one door of a
+four-wheeler and out at the other. I think that was the chain of events, Mr.
+Windibank!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Our visitor had recovered something of his assurance while Holmes had been
+talking, and he rose from his chair now with a cold sneer upon his pale face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It may be so, or it may not, Mr. Holmes,” said he, “but if
+you are so very sharp you ought to be sharp enough to know that it is you who
+are breaking the law now, and not me. I have done nothing actionable from the
+first, but as long as you keep that door locked you lay yourself open to an
+action for assault and illegal constraint.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The law cannot, as you say, touch you,” said Holmes, unlocking and
+throwing open the door, “yet there never was a man who deserved
+punishment more. If the young lady has a brother or a friend, he ought to lay a
+whip across your shoulders. By Jove!” he continued, flushing up at the
+sight of the bitter sneer upon the man’s face, “it is not part of
+my duties to my client, but here’s a hunting crop handy, and I think I
+shall just treat myself to—” He took two swift steps to the whip,
+but before he could grasp it there was a wild clatter of steps upon the stairs,
+the heavy hall door banged, and from the window we could see Mr. James
+Windibank running at the top of his speed down the road.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There’s a cold-blooded scoundrel!” said Holmes, laughing, as
+he threw himself down into his chair once more. “That fellow will rise
+from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallows.
+The case has, in some respects, been not entirely devoid of interest.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I cannot now entirely see all the steps of your reasoning,” I
+remarked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, of course it was obvious from the first that this Mr. Hosmer Angel
+must have some strong object for his curious conduct, and it was equally clear
+that the only man who really profited by the incident, as far as we could see,
+was the stepfather. Then the fact that the two men were never together, but
+that the one always appeared when the other was away, was suggestive. So were
+the tinted spectacles and the curious voice, which both hinted at a disguise,
+as did the bushy whiskers. My suspicions were all confirmed by his peculiar
+action in typewriting his signature, which, of course, inferred that his
+handwriting was so familiar to her that she would recognise even the smallest
+sample of it. You see all these isolated facts, together with many minor ones,
+all pointed in the same direction.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And how did you verify them?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Having once spotted my man, it was easy to get corroboration. I knew the
+firm for which this man worked. Having taken the printed description. I
+eliminated everything from it which could be the result of a disguise—the
+whiskers, the glasses, the voice, and I sent it to the firm, with a request
+that they would inform me whether it answered to the description of any of
+their travellers. I had already noticed the peculiarities of the typewriter,
+and I wrote to the man himself at his business address asking him if he would
+come here. As I expected, his reply was typewritten and revealed the same
+trivial but characteristic defects. The same post brought me a letter from
+Westhouse &amp; Marbank, of Fenchurch Street, to say that the description
+tallied in every respect with that of their employé, James Windibank. <i>Voilà
+tout</i>!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And Miss Sutherland?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If I tell her she will not believe me. You may remember the old Persian
+saying, ‘There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger
+also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.’ There is as much sense
+in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.”
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap04"></a> IV.<br>THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY</h2>
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 1.50em">W</span>e were seated at
+breakfast one morning, my wife and I, when the maid brought in a telegram. It
+was from Sherlock Holmes and ran in this way:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Have you a couple of days to spare? Have just been wired for from the
+west of England in connection with Boscombe Valley tragedy. Shall be glad if
+you will come with me. Air and scenery perfect. Leave Paddington by the
+11:15.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What do you say, dear?” said my wife, looking across at me.
+“Will you go?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I really don’t know what to say. I have a fairly long list at
+present.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, Anstruther would do your work for you. You have been looking a
+little pale lately. I think that the change would do you good, and you are
+always so interested in Mr. Sherlock Holmes’ cases.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I should be ungrateful if I were not, seeing what I gained through one
+of them,” I answered. “But if I am to go, I must pack at once, for
+I have only half an hour.”
+</p>
+<p>
+My experience of camp life in Afghanistan had at least had the effect of making
+me a prompt and ready traveller. My wants were few and simple, so that in less
+than the time stated I was in a cab with my valise, rattling away to Paddington
+Station. Sherlock Holmes was pacing up and down the platform, his tall, gaunt
+figure made even gaunter and taller by his long grey travelling-cloak and
+close-fitting cloth cap.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is really very good of you to come, Watson,” said he. “It
+makes a considerable difference to me, having someone with me on whom I can
+thoroughly rely. Local aid is always either worthless or else biassed. If you
+will keep the two corner seats I shall get the tickets.”
+</p>
+<p>
+We had the carriage to ourselves save for an immense litter of papers which
+Holmes had brought with him. Among these he rummaged and read, with intervals
+of note-taking and of meditation, until we were past Reading. Then he suddenly
+rolled them all into a gigantic ball and tossed them up onto the rack.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Have you heard anything of the case?” he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not a word. I have not seen a paper for some days.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The London press has not had very full accounts. I have just been
+looking through all the recent papers in order to master the particulars. It
+seems, from what I gather, to be one of those simple cases which are so
+extremely difficult.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That sounds a little paradoxical.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But it is profoundly true. Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The
+more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring
+it home. In this case, however, they have established a very serious case
+against the son of the murdered man.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is a murder, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, it is conjectured to be so. I shall take nothing for granted until
+I have the opportunity of looking personally into it. I will explain the state
+of things to you, as far as I have been able to understand it, in a very few
+words.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Boscombe Valley is a country district not very far from Ross, in
+Herefordshire. The largest landed proprietor in that part is a Mr. John Turner,
+who made his money in Australia and returned some years ago to the old country.
+One of the farms which he held, that of Hatherley, was let to Mr. Charles
+McCarthy, who was also an ex-Australian. The men had known each other in the
+colonies, so that it was not unnatural that when they came to settle down they
+should do so as near each other as possible. Turner was apparently the richer
+man, so McCarthy became his tenant but still remained, it seems, upon terms of
+perfect equality, as they were frequently together. McCarthy had one son, a lad
+of eighteen, and Turner had an only daughter of the same age, but neither of
+them had wives living. They appear to have avoided the society of the
+neighbouring English families and to have led retired lives, though both the
+McCarthys were fond of sport and were frequently seen at the race-meetings of
+the neighbourhood. McCarthy kept two servants—a man and a girl. Turner
+had a considerable household, some half-dozen at the least. That is as much as
+I have been able to gather about the families. Now for the facts.
+</p>
+<p>
+“On June 3rd, that is, on Monday last, McCarthy left his house at
+Hatherley about three in the afternoon and walked down to the Boscombe Pool,
+which is a small lake formed by the spreading out of the stream which runs down
+the Boscombe Valley. He had been out with his serving-man in the morning at
+Ross, and he had told the man that he must hurry, as he had an appointment of
+importance to keep at three. From that appointment he never came back alive.
+</p>
+<p>
+“From Hatherley Farmhouse to the Boscombe Pool is a quarter of a mile,
+and two people saw him as he passed over this ground. One was an old woman,
+whose name is not mentioned, and the other was William Crowder, a game-keeper
+in the employ of Mr. Turner. Both these witnesses depose that Mr. McCarthy was
+walking alone. The game-keeper adds that within a few minutes of his seeing Mr.
+McCarthy pass he had seen his son, Mr. James McCarthy, going the same way with
+a gun under his arm. To the best of his belief, the father was actually in
+sight at the time, and the son was following him. He thought no more of the
+matter until he heard in the evening of the tragedy that had occurred.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The two McCarthys were seen after the time when William Crowder, the
+game-keeper, lost sight of them. The Boscombe Pool is thickly wooded round,
+with just a fringe of grass and of reeds round the edge. A girl of fourteen,
+Patience Moran, who is the daughter of the lodge-keeper of the Boscombe Valley
+estate, was in one of the woods picking flowers. She states that while she was
+there she saw, at the border of the wood and close by the lake, Mr. McCarthy
+and his son, and that they appeared to be having a violent quarrel. She heard
+Mr. McCarthy the elder using very strong language to his son, and she saw the
+latter raise up his hand as if to strike his father. She was so frightened by
+their violence that she ran away and told her mother when she reached home that
+she had left the two McCarthys quarrelling near Boscombe Pool, and that she was
+afraid that they were going to fight. She had hardly said the words when young
+Mr. McCarthy came running up to the lodge to say that he had found his father
+dead in the wood, and to ask for the help of the lodge-keeper. He was much
+excited, without either his gun or his hat, and his right hand and sleeve were
+observed to be stained with fresh blood. On following him they found the dead
+body stretched out upon the grass beside the pool. The head had been beaten in
+by repeated blows of some heavy and blunt weapon. The injuries were such as
+might very well have been inflicted by the butt-end of his son’s gun,
+which was found lying on the grass within a few paces of the body. Under these
+circumstances the young man was instantly arrested, and a verdict of
+‘wilful murder’ having been returned at the inquest on Tuesday, he
+was on Wednesday brought before the magistrates at Ross, who have referred the
+case to the next Assizes. Those are the main facts of the case as they came out
+before the coroner and the police-court.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I could hardly imagine a more damning case,” I remarked. “If
+ever circumstantial evidence pointed to a criminal it does so here.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing,” answered Holmes
+thoughtfully. “It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if
+you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an
+equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different. It must be
+confessed, however, that the case looks exceedingly grave against the young
+man, and it is very possible that he is indeed the culprit. There are several
+people in the neighbourhood, however, and among them Miss Turner, the daughter
+of the neighbouring landowner, who believe in his innocence, and who have
+retained Lestrade, whom you may recollect in connection with the Study in
+Scarlet, to work out the case in his interest. Lestrade, being rather puzzled,
+has referred the case to me, and hence it is that two middle-aged gentlemen are
+flying westward at fifty miles an hour instead of quietly digesting their
+breakfasts at home.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am afraid,” said I, “that the facts are so obvious that
+you will find little credit to be gained out of this case.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” he
+answered, laughing. “Besides, we may chance to hit upon some other
+obvious facts which may have been by no means obvious to Mr. Lestrade. You know
+me too well to think that I am boasting when I say that I shall either confirm
+or destroy his theory by means which he is quite incapable of employing, or
+even of understanding. To take the first example to hand, I very clearly
+perceive that in your bedroom the window is upon the right-hand side, and yet I
+question whether Mr. Lestrade would have noted even so self-evident a thing as
+that.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How on earth—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My dear fellow, I know you well. I know the military neatness which
+characterises you. You shave every morning, and in this season you shave by the
+sunlight; but since your shaving is less and less complete as we get farther
+back on the left side, until it becomes positively slovenly as we get round the
+angle of the jaw, it is surely very clear that that side is less illuminated
+than the other. I could not imagine a man of your habits looking at himself in
+an equal light and being satisfied with such a result. I only quote this as a
+trivial example of observation and inference. Therein lies my <i>métier</i>,
+and it is just possible that it may be of some service in the investigation
+which lies before us. There are one or two minor points which were brought out
+in the inquest, and which are worth considering.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What are they?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It appears that his arrest did not take place at once, but after the
+return to Hatherley Farm. On the inspector of constabulary informing him that
+he was a prisoner, he remarked that he was not surprised to hear it, and that
+it was no more than his deserts. This observation of his had the natural effect
+of removing any traces of doubt which might have remained in the minds of the
+coroner’s jury.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was a confession,” I ejaculated.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, for it was followed by a protestation of innocence.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Coming on the top of such a damning series of events, it was at least a
+most suspicious remark.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“On the contrary,” said Holmes, “it is the brightest rift
+which I can at present see in the clouds. However innocent he might be, he
+could not be such an absolute imbecile as not to see that the circumstances
+were very black against him. Had he appeared surprised at his own arrest, or
+feigned indignation at it, I should have looked upon it as highly suspicious,
+because such surprise or anger would not be natural under the circumstances,
+and yet might appear to be the best policy to a scheming man. His frank
+acceptance of the situation marks him as either an innocent man, or else as a
+man of considerable self-restraint and firmness. As to his remark about his
+deserts, it was also not unnatural if you consider that he stood beside the
+dead body of his father, and that there is no doubt that he had that very day
+so far forgotten his filial duty as to bandy words with him, and even,
+according to the little girl whose evidence is so important, to raise his hand
+as if to strike him. The self-reproach and contrition which are displayed in
+his remark appear to me to be the signs of a healthy mind rather than of a
+guilty one.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I shook my head. “Many men have been hanged on far slighter
+evidence,” I remarked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“So they have. And many men have been wrongfully hanged.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What is the young man’s own account of the matter?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is, I am afraid, not very encouraging to his supporters, though there
+are one or two points in it which are suggestive. You will find it here, and
+may read it for yourself.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He picked out from his bundle a copy of the local Herefordshire paper, and
+having turned down the sheet he pointed out the paragraph in which the
+unfortunate young man had given his own statement of what had occurred. I
+settled myself down in the corner of the carriage and read it very carefully.
+It ran in this way:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mr. James McCarthy, the only son of the deceased, was then called and
+gave evidence as follows: ‘I had been away from home for three days at
+Bristol, and had only just returned upon the morning of last Monday, the 3rd.
+My father was absent from home at the time of my arrival, and I was informed by
+the maid that he had driven over to Ross with John Cobb, the groom. Shortly
+after my return I heard the wheels of his trap in the yard, and, looking out of
+my window, I saw him get out and walk rapidly out of the yard, though I was not
+aware in which direction he was going. I then took my gun and strolled out in
+the direction of the Boscombe Pool, with the intention of visiting the rabbit
+warren which is upon the other side. On my way I saw William Crowder, the
+game-keeper, as he had stated in his evidence; but he is mistaken in thinking
+that I was following my father. I had no idea that he was in front of me. When
+about a hundred yards from the pool I heard a cry of “Cooee!” which
+was a usual signal between my father and myself. I then hurried forward, and
+found him standing by the pool. He appeared to be much surprised at seeing me
+and asked me rather roughly what I was doing there. A conversation ensued which
+led to high words and almost to blows, for my father was a man of a very
+violent temper. Seeing that his passion was becoming ungovernable, I left him
+and returned towards Hatherley Farm. I had not gone more than 150 yards,
+however, when I heard a hideous outcry behind me, which caused me to run back
+again. I found my father expiring upon the ground, with his head terribly
+injured. I dropped my gun and held him in my arms, but he almost instantly
+expired. I knelt beside him for some minutes, and then made my way to Mr.
+Turner’s lodge-keeper, his house being the nearest, to ask for
+assistance. I saw no one near my father when I returned, and I have no idea how
+he came by his injuries. He was not a popular man, being somewhat cold and
+forbidding in his manners, but he had, as far as I know, no active enemies. I
+know nothing further of the matter.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“The Coroner: Did your father make any statement to you before he died?
+</p>
+<p>
+“Witness: He mumbled a few words, but I could only catch some allusion to
+a rat.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The Coroner: What did you understand by that?
+</p>
+<p>
+“Witness: It conveyed no meaning to me. I thought that he was delirious.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The Coroner: What was the point upon which you and your father had this
+final quarrel?
+</p>
+<p>
+“Witness: I should prefer not to answer.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The Coroner: I am afraid that I must press it.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Witness: It is really impossible for me to tell you. I can assure you
+that it has nothing to do with the sad tragedy which followed.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The Coroner: That is for the court to decide. I need not point out to
+you that your refusal to answer will prejudice your case considerably in any
+future proceedings which may arise.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Witness: I must still refuse.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The Coroner: I understand that the cry of ‘Cooee’ was a
+common signal between you and your father?
+</p>
+<p>
+“Witness: It was.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The Coroner: How was it, then, that he uttered it before he saw you, and
+before he even knew that you had returned from Bristol?
+</p>
+<p>
+“Witness (with considerable confusion): I do not know.
+</p>
+<p>
+“A Juryman: Did you see nothing which aroused your suspicions when you
+returned on hearing the cry and found your father fatally injured?
+</p>
+<p>
+“Witness: Nothing definite.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The Coroner: What do you mean?
+</p>
+<p>
+“Witness: I was so disturbed and excited as I rushed out into the open,
+that I could think of nothing except of my father. Yet I have a vague
+impression that as I ran forward something lay upon the ground to the left of
+me. It seemed to me to be something grey in colour, a coat of some sort, or a
+plaid perhaps. When I rose from my father I looked round for it, but it was
+gone.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Do you mean that it disappeared before you went for
+help?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Yes, it was gone.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“  ‘You cannot say what it was?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘No, I had a feeling something was there.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘How far from the body?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘A dozen yards or so.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘And how far from the edge of the wood?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘About the same.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Then if it was removed it was while you were within a dozen
+yards of it?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Yes, but with my back towards it.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“This concluded the examination of the witness.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I see,” said I as I glanced down the column, “that the
+coroner in his concluding remarks was rather severe upon young McCarthy. He
+calls attention, and with reason, to the discrepancy about his father having
+signalled to him before seeing him, also to his refusal to give details of his
+conversation with his father, and his singular account of his father’s
+dying words. They are all, as he remarks, very much against the son.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes laughed softly to himself and stretched himself out upon the cushioned
+seat. “Both you and the coroner have been at some pains,” said he,
+“to single out the very strongest points in the young man’s favour.
+Don’t you see that you alternately give him credit for having too much
+imagination and too little? Too little, if he could not invent a cause of
+quarrel which would give him the sympathy of the jury; too much, if he evolved
+from his own inner consciousness anything so <i>outré</i> as a dying reference
+to a rat, and the incident of the vanishing cloth. No, sir, I shall approach
+this case from the point of view that what this young man says is true, and we
+shall see whither that hypothesis will lead us. And now here is my pocket
+Petrarch, and not another word shall I say of this case until we are on the
+scene of action. We lunch at Swindon, and I see that we shall be there in
+twenty minutes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was nearly four o’clock when we at last, after passing through the
+beautiful Stroud Valley, and over the broad gleaming Severn, found ourselves at
+the pretty little country-town of Ross. A lean, ferret-like man, furtive and
+sly-looking, was waiting for us upon the platform. In spite of the light brown
+dustcoat and leather-leggings which he wore in deference to his rustic
+surroundings, I had no difficulty in recognising Lestrade, of Scotland Yard.
+With him we drove to the Hereford Arms where a room had already been engaged
+for us.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have ordered a carriage,” said Lestrade as we sat over a cup of
+tea. “I knew your energetic nature, and that you would not be happy until
+you had been on the scene of the crime.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was very nice and complimentary of you,” Holmes answered.
+“It is entirely a question of barometric pressure.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Lestrade looked startled. “I do not quite follow,” he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How is the glass? Twenty-nine, I see. No wind, and not a cloud in the
+sky. I have a caseful of cigarettes here which need smoking, and the sofa is
+very much superior to the usual country hotel abomination. I do not think that
+it is probable that I shall use the carriage to-night.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Lestrade laughed indulgently. “You have, no doubt, already formed your
+conclusions from the newspapers,” he said. “The case is as plain as
+a pikestaff, and the more one goes into it the plainer it becomes. Still, of
+course, one can’t refuse a lady, and such a very positive one, too. She
+has heard of you, and would have your opinion, though I repeatedly told her
+that there was nothing which you could do which I had not already done. Why,
+bless my soul! here is her carriage at the door.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He had hardly spoken before there rushed into the room one of the most lovely
+young women that I have ever seen in my life. Her violet eyes shining, her lips
+parted, a pink flush upon her cheeks, all thought of her natural reserve lost
+in her overpowering excitement and concern.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, Mr. Sherlock Holmes!” she cried, glancing from one to the
+other of us, and finally, with a woman’s quick intuition, fastening upon
+my companion, “I am so glad that you have come. I have driven down to
+tell you so. I know that James didn’t do it. I know it, and I want you to
+start upon your work knowing it, too. Never let yourself doubt upon that point.
+We have known each other since we were little children, and I know his faults
+as no one else does; but he is too tender-hearted to hurt a fly. Such a charge
+is absurd to anyone who really knows him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I hope we may clear him, Miss Turner,” said Sherlock Holmes.
+“You may rely upon my doing all that I can.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But you have read the evidence. You have formed some conclusion? Do you
+not see some loophole, some flaw? Do you not yourself think that he is
+innocent?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think that it is very probable.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There, now!” she cried, throwing back her head and looking
+defiantly at Lestrade. “You hear! He gives me hopes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Lestrade shrugged his shoulders. “I am afraid that my colleague has been
+a little quick in forming his conclusions,” he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+“But he is right. Oh! I know that he is right. James never did it. And
+about his quarrel with his father, I am sure that the reason why he would not
+speak about it to the coroner was because I was concerned in it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In what way?” asked Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is no time for me to hide anything. James and his father had many
+disagreements about me. Mr. McCarthy was very anxious that there should be a
+marriage between us. James and I have always loved each other as brother and
+sister; but of course he is young and has seen very little of life yet,
+and—and—well, he naturally did not wish to do anything like that
+yet. So there were quarrels, and this, I am sure, was one of them.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And your father?” asked Holmes. “Was he in favour of such a
+union?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, he was averse to it also. No one but Mr. McCarthy was in favour of
+it.” A quick blush passed over her fresh young face as Holmes shot one of
+his keen, questioning glances at her.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you for this information,” said he. “May I see your
+father if I call to-morrow?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am afraid the doctor won’t allow it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The doctor?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, have you not heard? Poor father has never been strong for years
+back, but this has broken him down completely. He has taken to his bed, and Dr.
+Willows says that he is a wreck and that his nervous system is shattered. Mr.
+McCarthy was the only man alive who had known dad in the old days in
+Victoria.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ha! In Victoria! That is important.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, at the mines.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Quite so; at the gold-mines, where, as I understand, Mr. Turner made his
+money.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, certainly.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you, Miss Turner. You have been of material assistance to
+me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You will tell me if you have any news to-morrow. No doubt you will go to
+the prison to see James. Oh, if you do, Mr. Holmes, do tell him that I know him
+to be innocent.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I will, Miss Turner.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I must go home now, for dad is very ill, and he misses me so if I leave
+him. Good-bye, and God help you in your undertaking.” She hurried from
+the room as impulsively as she had entered, and we heard the wheels of her
+carriage rattle off down the street.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am ashamed of you, Holmes,” said Lestrade with dignity after a
+few minutes’ silence. “Why should you raise up hopes which you are
+bound to disappoint? I am not over-tender of heart, but I call it cruel.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think that I see my way to clearing James McCarthy,” said
+Holmes. “Have you an order to see him in prison?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, but only for you and me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then I shall reconsider my resolution about going out. We have still
+time to take a train to Hereford and see him to-night?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ample.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then let us do so. Watson, I fear that you will find it very slow, but I
+shall only be away a couple of hours.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I walked down to the station with them, and then wandered through the streets
+of the little town, finally returning to the hotel, where I lay upon the sofa
+and tried to interest myself in a yellow-backed novel. The puny plot of the
+story was so thin, however, when compared to the deep mystery through which we
+were groping, and I found my attention wander so continually from the action to
+the fact, that I at last flung it across the room and gave myself up entirely
+to a consideration of the events of the day. Supposing that this unhappy young
+man’s story were absolutely true, then what hellish thing, what
+absolutely unforeseen and extraordinary calamity could have occurred between
+the time when he parted from his father, and the moment when, drawn back by his
+screams, he rushed into the glade? It was something terrible and deadly. What
+could it be? Might not the nature of the injuries reveal something to my
+medical instincts? I rang the bell and called for the weekly county paper,
+which contained a verbatim account of the inquest. In the surgeon’s
+deposition it was stated that the posterior third of the left parietal bone and
+the left half of the occipital bone had been shattered by a heavy blow from a
+blunt weapon. I marked the spot upon my own head. Clearly such a blow must have
+been struck from behind. That was to some extent in favour of the accused, as
+when seen quarrelling he was face to face with his father. Still, it did not go
+for very much, for the older man might have turned his back before the blow
+fell. Still, it might be worth while to call Holmes’ attention to it.
+Then there was the peculiar dying reference to a rat. What could that mean? It
+could not be delirium. A man dying from a sudden blow does not commonly become
+delirious. No, it was more likely to be an attempt to explain how he met his
+fate. But what could it indicate? I cudgelled my brains to find some possible
+explanation. And then the incident of the grey cloth seen by young McCarthy. If
+that were true the murderer must have dropped some part of his dress,
+presumably his overcoat, in his flight, and must have had the hardihood to
+return and to carry it away at the instant when the son was kneeling with his
+back turned not a dozen paces off. What a tissue of mysteries and
+improbabilities the whole thing was! I did not wonder at Lestrade’s
+opinion, and yet I had so much faith in Sherlock Holmes’ insight that I
+could not lose hope as long as every fresh fact seemed to strengthen his
+conviction of young McCarthy’s innocence.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was late before Sherlock Holmes returned. He came back alone, for Lestrade
+was staying in lodgings in the town.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The glass still keeps very high,” he remarked as he sat down.
+“It is of importance that it should not rain before we are able to go
+over the ground. On the other hand, a man should be at his very best and
+keenest for such nice work as that, and I did not wish to do it when fagged by
+a long journey. I have seen young McCarthy.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And what did you learn from him?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nothing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Could he throw no light?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“None at all. I was inclined to think at one time that he knew who had
+done it and was screening him or her, but I am convinced now that he is as
+puzzled as everyone else. He is not a very quick-witted youth, though comely to
+look at and, I should think, sound at heart.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I cannot admire his taste,” I remarked, “if it is indeed a
+fact that he was averse to a marriage with so charming a young lady as this
+Miss Turner.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah, thereby hangs a rather painful tale. This fellow is madly, insanely,
+in love with her, but some two years ago, when he was only a lad, and before he
+really knew her, for she had been away five years at a boarding-school, what
+does the idiot do but get into the clutches of a barmaid in Bristol and marry
+her at a registry office? No one knows a word of the matter, but you can
+imagine how maddening it must be to him to be upbraided for not doing what he
+would give his very eyes to do, but what he knows to be absolutely impossible.
+It was sheer frenzy of this sort which made him throw his hands up into the air
+when his father, at their last interview, was goading him on to propose to Miss
+Turner. On the other hand, he had no means of supporting himself, and his
+father, who was by all accounts a very hard man, would have thrown him over
+utterly had he known the truth. It was with his barmaid wife that he had spent
+the last three days in Bristol, and his father did not know where he was. Mark
+that point. It is of importance. Good has come out of evil, however, for the
+barmaid, finding from the papers that he is in serious trouble and likely to be
+hanged, has thrown him over utterly and has written to him to say that she has
+a husband already in the Bermuda Dockyard, so that there is really no tie
+between them. I think that that bit of news has consoled young McCarthy for all
+that he has suffered.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But if he is innocent, who has done it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah! who? I would call your attention very particularly to two points.
+One is that the murdered man had an appointment with someone at the pool, and
+that the someone could not have been his son, for his son was away, and he did
+not know when he would return. The second is that the murdered man was heard to
+cry ‘Cooee!’ before he knew that his son had returned. Those are
+the crucial points upon which the case depends. And now let us talk about
+George Meredith, if you please, and we shall leave all minor matters until
+to-morrow.”
+</p>
+<p>
+There was no rain, as Holmes had foretold, and the morning broke bright and
+cloudless. At nine o’clock Lestrade called for us with the carriage, and
+we set off for Hatherley Farm and the Boscombe Pool.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is serious news this morning,” Lestrade observed. “It
+is said that Mr. Turner, of the Hall, is so ill that his life is despaired
+of.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“An elderly man, I presume?” said Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“About sixty; but his constitution has been shattered by his life abroad,
+and he has been in failing health for some time. This business has had a very
+bad effect upon him. He was an old friend of McCarthy’s, and, I may add,
+a great benefactor to him, for I have learned that he gave him Hatherley Farm
+rent free.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Indeed! That is interesting,” said Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, yes! In a hundred other ways he has helped him. Everybody about here
+speaks of his kindness to him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Really! Does it not strike you as a little singular that this McCarthy,
+who appears to have had little of his own, and to have been under such
+obligations to Turner, should still talk of marrying his son to Turner’s
+daughter, who is, presumably, heiress to the estate, and that in such a very
+cocksure manner, as if it were merely a case of a proposal and all else would
+follow? It is the more strange, since we know that Turner himself was averse to
+the idea. The daughter told us as much. Do you not deduce something from
+that?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We have got to the deductions and the inferences,” said Lestrade,
+winking at me. “I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without
+flying away after theories and fancies.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are right,” said Holmes demurely; “you do find it very
+hard to tackle the facts.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Anyhow, I have grasped one fact which you seem to find it difficult to
+get hold of,” replied Lestrade with some warmth.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And that is—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That McCarthy senior met his death from McCarthy junior and that all
+theories to the contrary are the merest moonshine.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, moonshine is a brighter thing than fog,” said Holmes,
+laughing. “But I am very much mistaken if this is not Hatherley Farm upon
+the left.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, that is it.” It was a widespread, comfortable-looking
+building, two-storied, slate-roofed, with great yellow blotches of lichen upon
+the grey walls. The drawn blinds and the smokeless chimneys, however, gave it a
+stricken look, as though the weight of this horror still lay heavy upon it. We
+called at the door, when the maid, at Holmes’ request, showed us the
+boots which her master wore at the time of his death, and also a pair of the
+son’s, though not the pair which he had then had. Having measured these
+very carefully from seven or eight different points, Holmes desired to be led
+to the court-yard, from which we all followed the winding track which led to
+Boscombe Pool.
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes was transformed when he was hot upon such a scent as this. Men
+who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of Baker Street would have
+failed to recognise him. His face flushed and darkened. His brows were drawn
+into two hard black lines, while his eyes shone out from beneath them with a
+steely glitter. His face was bent downward, his shoulders bowed, his lips
+compressed, and the veins stood out like whipcord in his long, sinewy neck. His
+nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase, and his mind
+was so absolutely concentrated upon the matter before him that a question or
+remark fell unheeded upon his ears, or, at the most, only provoked a quick,
+impatient snarl in reply. Swiftly and silently he made his way along the track
+which ran through the meadows, and so by way of the woods to the Boscombe Pool.
+It was damp, marshy ground, as is all that district, and there were marks of
+many feet, both upon the path and amid the short grass which bounded it on
+either side. Sometimes Holmes would hurry on, sometimes stop dead, and once he
+made quite a little detour into the meadow. Lestrade and I walked behind him,
+the detective indifferent and contemptuous, while I watched my friend with the
+interest which sprang from the conviction that every one of his actions was
+directed towards a definite end.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Boscombe Pool, which is a little reed-girt sheet of water some fifty yards
+across, is situated at the boundary between the Hatherley Farm and the private
+park of the wealthy Mr. Turner. Above the woods which lined it upon the farther
+side we could see the red, jutting pinnacles which marked the site of the rich
+landowner’s dwelling. On the Hatherley side of the pool the woods grew
+very thick, and there was a narrow belt of sodden grass twenty paces across
+between the edge of the trees and the reeds which lined the lake. Lestrade
+showed us the exact spot at which the body had been found, and, indeed, so
+moist was the ground, that I could plainly see the traces which had been left
+by the fall of the stricken man. To Holmes, as I could see by his eager face
+and peering eyes, very many other things were to be read upon the trampled
+grass. He ran round, like a dog who is picking up a scent, and then turned upon
+my companion.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What did you go into the pool for?” he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I fished about with a rake. I thought there might be some weapon or
+other trace. But how on earth—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, tut, tut! I have no time! That left foot of yours with its inward
+twist is all over the place. A mole could trace it, and there it vanishes among
+the reeds. Oh, how simple it would all have been had I been here before they
+came like a herd of buffalo and wallowed all over it. Here is where the party
+with the lodge-keeper came, and they have covered all tracks for six or eight
+feet round the body. But here are three separate tracks of the same
+feet.” He drew out a lens and lay down upon his waterproof to have a
+better view, talking all the time rather to himself than to us. “These
+are young McCarthy’s feet. Twice he was walking, and once he ran swiftly,
+so that the soles are deeply marked and the heels hardly visible. That bears
+out his story. He ran when he saw his father on the ground. Then here are the
+father’s feet as he paced up and down. What is this, then? It is the
+butt-end of the gun as the son stood listening. And this? Ha, ha! What have we
+here? Tiptoes! tiptoes! Square, too, quite unusual boots! They come, they go,
+they come again—of course that was for the cloak. Now where did they come
+from?” He ran up and down, sometimes losing, sometimes finding the track
+until we were well within the edge of the wood and under the shadow of a great
+beech, the largest tree in the neighbourhood. Holmes traced his way to the
+farther side of this and lay down once more upon his face with a little cry of
+satisfaction. For a long time he remained there, turning over the leaves and
+dried sticks, gathering up what seemed to me to be dust into an envelope and
+examining with his lens not only the ground but even the bark of the tree as
+far as he could reach. A jagged stone was lying among the moss, and this also
+he carefully examined and retained. Then he followed a pathway through the wood
+until he came to the high road, where all traces were lost.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It has been a case of considerable interest,” he remarked,
+returning to his natural manner. “I fancy that this grey house on the
+right must be the lodge. I think that I will go in and have a word with Moran,
+and perhaps write a little note. Having done that, we may drive back to our
+luncheon. You may walk to the cab, and I shall be with you presently.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was about ten minutes before we regained our cab and drove back into Ross,
+Holmes still carrying with him the stone which he had picked up in the wood.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This may interest you, Lestrade,” he remarked, holding it out.
+“The murder was done with it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I see no marks.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There are none.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How do you know, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The grass was growing under it. It had only lain there a few days. There
+was no sign of a place whence it had been taken. It corresponds with the
+injuries. There is no sign of any other weapon.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And the murderer?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is a tall man, left-handed, limps with the right leg, wears thick-soled
+shooting-boots and a grey cloak, smokes Indian cigars, uses a cigar-holder, and
+carries a blunt pen-knife in his pocket. There are several other indications,
+but these may be enough to aid us in our search.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Lestrade laughed. “I am afraid that I am still a sceptic,” he said.
+“Theories are all very well, but we have to deal with a hard-headed
+British jury.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“<i>Nous verrons</i>,” answered Holmes calmly. “You work your
+own method, and I shall work mine. I shall be busy this afternoon, and shall
+probably return to London by the evening train.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And leave your case unfinished?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, finished.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But the mystery?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is solved.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who was the criminal, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The gentleman I describe.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But who is he?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Surely it would not be difficult to find out. This is not such a
+populous neighbourhood.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Lestrade shrugged his shoulders. “I am a practical man,” he said,
+“and I really cannot undertake to go about the country looking for a
+left-handed gentleman with a game leg. I should become the laughing-stock of
+Scotland Yard.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“All right,” said Holmes quietly. “I have given you the
+chance. Here are your lodgings. Good-bye. I shall drop you a line before I
+leave.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Having left Lestrade at his rooms, we drove to our hotel, where we found lunch
+upon the table. Holmes was silent and buried in thought with a pained
+expression upon his face, as one who finds himself in a perplexing position.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Look here, Watson,” he said when the cloth was cleared “just
+sit down in this chair and let me preach to you for a little. I don’t
+know quite what to do, and I should value your advice. Light a cigar and let me
+expound.”
+</p>
+<p>
+ “Pray do so.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, now, in considering this case there are two points about young
+McCarthy’s narrative which struck us both instantly, although they
+impressed me in his favour and you against him. One was the fact that his
+father should, according to his account, cry ‘Cooee!’ before seeing
+him. The other was his singular dying reference to a rat. He mumbled several
+words, you understand, but that was all that caught the son’s ear. Now
+from this double point our research must commence, and we will begin it by
+presuming that what the lad says is absolutely true.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What of this ‘Cooee!’ then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, obviously it could not have been meant for the son. The son, as
+far as he knew, was in Bristol. It was mere chance that he was within earshot.
+The ‘Cooee!’ was meant to attract the attention of whoever it was
+that he had the appointment with. But ‘Cooee’ is a distinctly
+Australian cry, and one which is used between Australians. There is a strong
+presumption that the person whom McCarthy expected to meet him at Boscombe Pool
+was someone who had been in Australia.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What of the rat, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes took a folded paper from his pocket and flattened it out on the
+table. “This is a map of the Colony of Victoria,” he said. “I
+wired to Bristol for it last night.” He put his hand over part of the
+map. “What do you read?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“ARAT,” I read.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And now?” He raised his hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+“BALLARAT.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Quite so. That was the word the man uttered, and of which his son only
+caught the last two syllables. He was trying to utter the name of his murderer.
+So and so, of Ballarat.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is wonderful!” I exclaimed.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is obvious. And now, you see, I had narrowed the field down
+considerably. The possession of a grey garment was a third point which,
+granting the son’s statement to be correct, was a certainty. We have come
+now out of mere vagueness to the definite conception of an Australian from
+Ballarat with a grey cloak.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Certainly.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And one who was at home in the district, for the pool can only be
+approached by the farm or by the estate, where strangers could hardly
+wander.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Quite so.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then comes our expedition of to-day. By an examination of the ground I
+gained the trifling details which I gave to that imbecile Lestrade, as to the
+personality of the criminal.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But how did you gain them?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of
+trifles.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“His height I know that you might roughly judge from the length of his
+stride. His boots, too, might be told from their traces.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, they were peculiar boots.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But his lameness?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The impression of his right foot was always less distinct than his left.
+He put less weight upon it. Why? Because he limped—he was lame.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But his left-handedness.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You were yourself struck by the nature of the injury as recorded by the
+surgeon at the inquest. The blow was struck from immediately behind, and yet
+was upon the left side. Now, how can that be unless it were by a left-handed
+man? He had stood behind that tree during the interview between the father and
+son. He had even smoked there. I found the ash of a cigar, which my special
+knowledge of tobacco ashes enables me to pronounce as an Indian cigar. I have,
+as you know, devoted some attention to this, and written a little monograph on
+the ashes of 140 different varieties of pipe, cigar, and cigarette tobacco.
+Having found the ash, I then looked round and discovered the stump among the
+moss where he had tossed it. It was an Indian cigar, of the variety which are
+rolled in Rotterdam.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And the cigar-holder?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I could see that the end had not been in his mouth. Therefore he used a
+holder. The tip had been cut off, not bitten off, but the cut was not a clean
+one, so I deduced a blunt pen-knife.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Holmes,” I said, “you have drawn a net round this man from
+which he cannot escape, and you have saved an innocent human life as truly as
+if you had cut the cord which was hanging him. I see the direction in which all
+this points. The culprit is—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mr. John Turner,” cried the hotel waiter, opening the door of our
+sitting-room, and ushering in a visitor.
+</p>
+<p>
+The man who entered was a strange and impressive figure. His slow, limping step
+and bowed shoulders gave the appearance of decrepitude, and yet his hard,
+deep-lined, craggy features, and his enormous limbs showed that he was
+possessed of unusual strength of body and of character. His tangled beard,
+grizzled hair, and outstanding, drooping eyebrows combined to give an air of
+dignity and power to his appearance, but his face was of an ashen white, while
+his lips and the corners of his nostrils were tinged with a shade of blue. It
+was clear to me at a glance that he was in the grip of some deadly and chronic
+disease.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pray sit down on the sofa,” said Holmes gently. “You had my
+note?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, the lodge-keeper brought it up. You said that you wished to see me
+here to avoid scandal.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I thought people would talk if I went to the Hall.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And why did you wish to see me?” He looked across at my companion
+with despair in his weary eyes, as though his question was already answered.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” said Holmes, answering the look rather than the words.
+“It is so. I know all about McCarthy.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The old man sank his face in his hands. “God help me!” he cried.
+“But I would not have let the young man come to harm. I give you my word
+that I would have spoken out if it went against him at the Assizes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am glad to hear you say so,” said Holmes gravely.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I would have spoken now had it not been for my dear girl. It would break
+her heart—it will break her heart when she hears that I am
+arrested.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It may not come to that,” said Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am no official agent. I understand that it was your daughter who
+required my presence here, and I am acting in her interests. Young McCarthy
+must be got off, however.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am a dying man,” said old Turner. “I have had diabetes for
+years. My doctor says it is a question whether I shall live a month. Yet I
+would rather die under my own roof than in a gaol.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes rose and sat down at the table with his pen in his hand and a bundle of
+paper before him. “Just tell us the truth,” he said. “I shall
+jot down the facts. You will sign it, and Watson here can witness it. Then I
+could produce your confession at the last extremity to save young McCarthy. I
+promise you that I shall not use it unless it is absolutely needed.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s as well,” said the old man; “it’s a
+question whether I shall live to the Assizes, so it matters little to me, but I
+should wish to spare Alice the shock. And now I will make the thing clear to
+you; it has been a long time in the acting, but will not take me long to tell.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You didn’t know this dead man, McCarthy. He was a devil incarnate.
+I tell you that. God keep you out of the clutches of such a man as he. His grip
+has been upon me these twenty years, and he has blasted my life. I’ll
+tell you first how I came to be in his power.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was in the early ’60’s at the diggings. I was a young
+chap then, hot-blooded and reckless, ready to turn my hand at anything; I got
+among bad companions, took to drink, had no luck with my claim, took to the
+bush, and in a word became what you would call over here a highway robber.
+There were six of us, and we had a wild, free life of it, sticking up a station
+from time to time, or stopping the wagons on the road to the diggings. Black
+Jack of Ballarat was the name I went under, and our party is still remembered
+in the colony as the Ballarat Gang.
+</p>
+<p>
+“One day a gold convoy came down from Ballarat to Melbourne, and we lay
+in wait for it and attacked it. There were six troopers and six of us, so it
+was a close thing, but we emptied four of their saddles at the first volley.
+Three of our boys were killed, however, before we got the swag. I put my pistol
+to the head of the wagon-driver, who was this very man McCarthy. I wish to the
+Lord that I had shot him then, but I spared him, though I saw his wicked little
+eyes fixed on my face, as though to remember every feature. We got away with
+the gold, became wealthy men, and made our way over to England without being
+suspected. There I parted from my old pals and determined to settle down to a
+quiet and respectable life. I bought this estate, which chanced to be in the
+market, and I set myself to do a little good with my money, to make up for the
+way in which I had earned it. I married, too, and though my wife died young she
+left me my dear little Alice. Even when she was just a baby her wee hand seemed
+to lead me down the right path as nothing else had ever done. In a word, I
+turned over a new leaf and did my best to make up for the past. All was going
+well when McCarthy laid his grip upon me.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I had gone up to town about an investment, and I met him in Regent
+Street with hardly a coat to his back or a boot to his foot.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Here we are, Jack,’ says he, touching me on the arm;
+‘we’ll be as good as a family to you. There’s two of us, me
+and my son, and you can have the keeping of us. If you
+don’t—it’s a fine, law-abiding country is England, and
+there’s always a policeman within hail.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, down they came to the west country, there was no shaking them off,
+and there they have lived rent free on my best land ever since. There was no
+rest for me, no peace, no forgetfulness; turn where I would, there was his
+cunning, grinning face at my elbow. It grew worse as Alice grew up, for he soon
+saw I was more afraid of her knowing my past than of the police. Whatever he
+wanted he must have, and whatever it was I gave him without question, land,
+money, houses, until at last he asked a thing which I could not give. He asked
+for Alice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“His son, you see, had grown up, and so had my girl, and as I was known
+to be in weak health, it seemed a fine stroke to him that his lad should step
+into the whole property. But there I was firm. I would not have his cursed
+stock mixed with mine; not that I had any dislike to the lad, but his blood was
+in him, and that was enough. I stood firm. McCarthy threatened. I braved him to
+do his worst. We were to meet at the pool midway between our houses to talk it
+over.
+</p>
+<p>
+“When I went down there I found him talking with his son, so I smoked a
+cigar and waited behind a tree until he should be alone. But as I listened to
+his talk all that was black and bitter in me seemed to come uppermost. He was
+urging his son to marry my daughter with as little regard for what she might
+think as if she were a slut from off the streets. It drove me mad to think that
+I and all that I held most dear should be in the power of such a man as this.
+Could I not snap the bond? I was already a dying and a desperate man. Though
+clear of mind and fairly strong of limb, I knew that my own fate was sealed.
+But my memory and my girl! Both could be saved if I could but silence that foul
+tongue. I did it, Mr. Holmes. I would do it again. Deeply as I have sinned, I
+have led a life of martyrdom to atone for it. But that my girl should be
+entangled in the same meshes which held me was more than I could suffer. I
+struck him down with no more compunction than if he had been some foul and
+venomous beast. His cry brought back his son; but I had gained the cover of the
+wood, though I was forced to go back to fetch the cloak which I had dropped in
+my flight. That is the true story, gentlemen, of all that occurred.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, it is not for me to judge you,” said Holmes as the old man
+signed the statement which had been drawn out. “I pray that we may never
+be exposed to such a temptation.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I pray not, sir. And what do you intend to do?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In view of your health, nothing. You are yourself aware that you will
+soon have to answer for your deed at a higher court than the Assizes. I will
+keep your confession, and if McCarthy is condemned I shall be forced to use it.
+If not, it shall never be seen by mortal eye; and your secret, whether you be
+alive or dead, shall be safe with us.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Farewell, then,” said the old man solemnly. “Your own
+deathbeds, when they come, will be the easier for the thought of the peace
+which you have given to mine.” Tottering and shaking in all his giant
+frame, he stumbled slowly from the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“God help us!” said Holmes after a long silence. “Why does
+fate play such tricks with poor, helpless worms? I never hear of such a case as
+this that I do not think of Baxter’s words, and say, ‘There, but
+for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+James McCarthy was acquitted at the Assizes on the strength of a number of
+objections which had been drawn out by Holmes and submitted to the defending
+counsel. Old Turner lived for seven months after our interview, but he is now
+dead; and there is every prospect that the son and daughter may come to live
+happily together in ignorance of the black cloud which rests upon their past.
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap05"></a>V.<br>THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS</h2>
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 1.50em">W</span>hen I glance over my
+notes and records of the Sherlock Holmes cases between the years ’82 and
+’90, I am faced by so many which present strange and interesting features
+that it is no easy matter to know which to choose and which to leave. Some,
+however, have already gained publicity through the papers, and others have not
+offered a field for those peculiar qualities which my friend possessed in so
+high a degree, and which it is the object of these papers to illustrate. Some,
+too, have baffled his analytical skill, and would be, as narratives, beginnings
+without an ending, while others have been but partially cleared up, and have
+their explanations founded rather upon conjecture and surmise than on that
+absolute logical proof which was so dear to him. There is, however, one of
+these last which was so remarkable in its details and so startling in its
+results that I am tempted to give some account of it in spite of the fact that
+there are points in connection with it which never have been, and probably
+never will be, entirely cleared up.
+</p>
+<p>
+The year ’87 furnished us with a long series of cases of greater or less
+interest, of which I retain the records. Among my headings under this one
+twelve months I find an account of the adventure of the Paradol Chamber, of the
+Amateur Mendicant Society, who held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a
+furniture warehouse, of the facts connected with the loss of the British barque
+<i>Sophy Anderson</i>, of the singular adventures of the Grice Patersons in the
+island of Uffa, and finally of the Camberwell poisoning case. In the latter, as
+may be remembered, Sherlock Holmes was able, by winding up the dead man’s
+watch, to prove that it had been wound up two hours before, and that therefore
+the deceased had gone to bed within that time—a deduction which was of
+the greatest importance in clearing up the case. All these I may sketch out at
+some future date, but none of them present such singular features as the
+strange train of circumstances which I have now taken up my pen to describe.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was in the latter days of September, and the equinoctial gales had set in
+with exceptional violence. All day the wind had screamed and the rain had
+beaten against the windows, so that even here in the heart of great, hand-made
+London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of
+life and to recognise the presence of those great elemental forces which shriek
+at mankind through the bars of his civilisation, like untamed beasts in a cage.
+As evening drew in, the storm grew higher and louder, and the wind cried and
+sobbed like a child in the chimney. Sherlock Holmes sat moodily at one side of
+the fireplace cross-indexing his records of crime, while I at the other was
+deep in one of Clark Russell’s fine sea-stories until the howl of the
+gale from without seemed to blend with the text, and the splash of the rain to
+lengthen out into the long swash of the sea waves. My wife was on a visit to
+her mother’s, and for a few days I was a dweller once more in my old
+quarters at Baker Street.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why,” said I, glancing up at my companion, “that was surely
+the bell. Who could come to-night? Some friend of yours, perhaps?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Except yourself I have none,” he answered. “I do not
+encourage visitors.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A client, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If so, it is a serious case. Nothing less would bring a man out on such
+a day and at such an hour. But I take it that it is more likely to be some
+crony of the landlady’s.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes was wrong in his conjecture, however, for there came a step in
+the passage and a tapping at the door. He stretched out his long arm to turn
+the lamp away from himself and towards the vacant chair upon which a newcomer
+must sit.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come in!” said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+The man who entered was young, some two-and-twenty at the outside, well-groomed
+and trimly clad, with something of refinement and delicacy in his bearing. The
+streaming umbrella which he held in his hand, and his long shining waterproof
+told of the fierce weather through which he had come. He looked about him
+anxiously in the glare of the lamp, and I could see that his face was pale and
+his eyes heavy, like those of a man who is weighed down with some great
+anxiety.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I owe you an apology,” he said, raising his golden pince-nez to
+his eyes. “I trust that I am not intruding. I fear that I have brought
+some traces of the storm and rain into your snug chamber.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Give me your coat and umbrella,” said Holmes. “They may rest
+here on the hook and will be dry presently. You have come up from the
+south-west, I see.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, from Horsham.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That clay and chalk mixture which I see upon your toe caps is quite
+distinctive.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have come for advice.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is easily got.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And help.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is not always so easy.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have heard of you, Mr. Holmes. I heard from Major Prendergast how you
+saved him in the Tankerville Club scandal.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah, of course. He was wrongfully accused of cheating at cards.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He said that you could solve anything.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He said too much.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That you are never beaten.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have been beaten four times—three times by men, and once by a
+woman.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But what is that compared with the number of your successes?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is true that I have been generally successful.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then you may be so with me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I beg that you will draw your chair up to the fire and favour me with
+some details as to your case.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is no ordinary one.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“None of those which come to me are. I am the last court of
+appeal.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And yet I question, sir, whether, in all your experience, you have ever
+listened to a more mysterious and inexplicable chain of events than those which
+have happened in my own family.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You fill me with interest,” said Holmes. “Pray give us the
+essential facts from the commencement, and I can afterwards question you as to
+those details which seem to me to be most important.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The young man pulled his chair up and pushed his wet feet out towards the
+blaze.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My name,” said he, “is John Openshaw, but my own affairs
+have, as far as I can understand, little to do with this awful business. It is
+a hereditary matter; so in order to give you an idea of the facts, I must go
+back to the commencement of the affair.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You must know that my grandfather had two sons—my uncle Elias and
+my father Joseph. My father had a small factory at Coventry, which he enlarged
+at the time of the invention of bicycling. He was a patentee of the Openshaw
+unbreakable tire, and his business met with such success that he was able to
+sell it and to retire upon a handsome competence.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My uncle Elias emigrated to America when he was a young man and became a
+planter in Florida, where he was reported to have done very well. At the time
+of the war he fought in Jackson’s army, and afterwards under Hood, where
+he rose to be a colonel. When Lee laid down his arms my uncle returned to his
+plantation, where he remained for three or four years. About 1869 or 1870 he
+came back to Europe and took a small estate in Sussex, near Horsham. He had
+made a very considerable fortune in the States, and his reason for leaving them
+was his aversion to the negroes, and his dislike of the Republican policy in
+extending the franchise to them. He was a singular man, fierce and
+quick-tempered, very foul-mouthed when he was angry, and of a most retiring
+disposition. During all the years that he lived at Horsham, I doubt if ever he
+set foot in the town. He had a garden and two or three fields round his house,
+and there he would take his exercise, though very often for weeks on end he
+would never leave his room. He drank a great deal of brandy and smoked very
+heavily, but he would see no society and did not want any friends, not even his
+own brother.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He didn’t mind me; in fact, he took a fancy to me, for at the time
+when he saw me first I was a youngster of twelve or so. This would be in the
+year 1878, after he had been eight or nine years in England. He begged my
+father to let me live with him and he was very kind to me in his way. When he
+was sober he used to be fond of playing backgammon and draughts with me, and he
+would make me his representative both with the servants and with the
+tradespeople, so that by the time that I was sixteen I was quite master of the
+house. I kept all the keys and could go where I liked and do what I liked, so
+long as I did not disturb him in his privacy. There was one singular exception,
+however, for he had a single room, a lumber-room up among the attics, which was
+invariably locked, and which he would never permit either me or anyone else to
+enter. With a boy’s curiosity I have peeped through the keyhole, but I
+was never able to see more than such a collection of old trunks and bundles as
+would be expected in such a room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“One day—it was in March, 1883—a letter with a foreign stamp
+lay upon the table in front of the colonel’s plate. It was not a common
+thing for him to receive letters, for his bills were all paid in ready money,
+and he had no friends of any sort. ‘From India!’ said he as he took
+it up, ‘Pondicherry postmark! What can this be?’ Opening it
+hurriedly, out there jumped five little dried orange pips, which pattered down
+upon his plate. I began to laugh at this, but the laugh was struck from my lips
+at the sight of his face. His lip had fallen, his eyes were protruding, his
+skin the colour of putty, and he glared at the envelope which he still held in
+his trembling hand, ‘K. K. K.!’ he shrieked, and then, ‘My
+God, my God, my sins have overtaken me!’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘What is it, uncle?’ I cried.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Death,’ said he, and rising from the table he retired
+to his room, leaving me palpitating with horror. I took up the envelope and saw
+scrawled in red ink upon the inner flap, just above the gum, the letter K three
+times repeated. There was nothing else save the five dried pips. What could be
+the reason of his overpowering terror? I left the breakfast-table, and as I
+ascended the stair I met him coming down with an old rusty key, which must have
+belonged to the attic, in one hand, and a small brass box, like a cashbox, in
+the other.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘They may do what they like, but I’ll checkmate them
+still,’ said he with an oath. ‘Tell Mary that I shall want a fire
+in my room to-day, and send down to Fordham, the Horsham lawyer.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“I did as he ordered, and when the lawyer arrived I was asked to step up
+to the room. The fire was burning brightly, and in the grate there was a mass
+of black, fluffy ashes, as of burned paper, while the brass box stood open and
+empty beside it. As I glanced at the box I noticed, with a start, that upon the
+lid was printed the treble K which I had read in the morning upon the envelope.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I wish you, John,’ said my uncle, ‘to witness
+my will. I leave my estate, with all its advantages and all its disadvantages,
+to my brother, your father, whence it will, no doubt, descend to you. If you
+can enjoy it in peace, well and good! If you find you cannot, take my advice,
+my boy, and leave it to your deadliest enemy. I am sorry to give you such a
+two-edged thing, but I can’t say what turn things are going to take.
+Kindly sign the paper where Mr. Fordham shows you.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“I signed the paper as directed, and the lawyer took it away with him.
+The singular incident made, as you may think, the deepest impression upon me,
+and I pondered over it and turned it every way in my mind without being able to
+make anything of it. Yet I could not shake off the vague feeling of dread which
+it left behind, though the sensation grew less keen as the weeks passed and
+nothing happened to disturb the usual routine of our lives. I could see a
+change in my uncle, however. He drank more than ever, and he was less inclined
+for any sort of society. Most of his time he would spend in his room, with the
+door locked upon the inside, but sometimes he would emerge in a sort of drunken
+frenzy and would burst out of the house and tear about the garden with a
+revolver in his hand, screaming out that he was afraid of no man, and that he
+was not to be cooped up, like a sheep in a pen, by man or devil. When these hot
+fits were over, however, he would rush tumultuously in at the door and lock and
+bar it behind him, like a man who can brazen it out no longer against the
+terror which lies at the roots of his soul. At such times I have seen his face,
+even on a cold day, glisten with moisture, as though it were new raised from a
+basin.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, to come to an end of the matter, Mr. Holmes, and not to abuse your
+patience, there came a night when he made one of those drunken sallies from
+which he never came back. We found him, when we went to search for him, face
+downward in a little green-scummed pool, which lay at the foot of the garden.
+There was no sign of any violence, and the water was but two feet deep, so that
+the jury, having regard to his known eccentricity, brought in a verdict of
+‘suicide.’ But I, who knew how he winced from the very thought of
+death, had much ado to persuade myself that he had gone out of his way to meet
+it. The matter passed, however, and my father entered into possession of the
+estate, and of some £ 14,000, which lay to his credit at the bank.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“One moment,” Holmes interposed, “your statement is, I
+foresee, one of the most remarkable to which I have ever listened. Let me have
+the date of the reception by your uncle of the letter, and the date of his
+supposed suicide.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The letter arrived on March 10, 1883. His death was seven weeks later,
+upon the night of May 2nd.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you. Pray proceed.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“When my father took over the Horsham property, he, at my request, made a
+careful examination of the attic, which had been always locked up. We found the
+brass box there, although its contents had been destroyed. On the inside of the
+cover was a paper label, with the initials of K. K. K. repeated upon it, and
+‘Letters, memoranda, receipts, and a register’ written beneath.
+These, we presume, indicated the nature of the papers which had been destroyed
+by Colonel Openshaw. For the rest, there was nothing of much importance in the
+attic save a great many scattered papers and note-books bearing upon my
+uncle’s life in America. Some of them were of the war time and showed
+that he had done his duty well and had borne the repute of a brave soldier.
+Others were of a date during the reconstruction of the Southern states, and
+were mostly concerned with politics, for he had evidently taken a strong part
+in opposing the carpet-bag politicians who had been sent down from the North.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, it was the beginning of ’84 when my father came to live at
+Horsham, and all went as well as possible with us until the January of
+’85. On the fourth day after the new year I heard my father give a sharp
+cry of surprise as we sat together at the breakfast-table. There he was,
+sitting with a newly opened envelope in one hand and five dried orange pips in
+the outstretched palm of the other one. He had always laughed at what he called
+my cock-and-bull story about the colonel, but he looked very scared and puzzled
+now that the same thing had come upon himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Why, what on earth does this mean, John?’ he
+stammered.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My heart had turned to lead. ‘It is K. K. K.,’ said I.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He looked inside the envelope. ‘So it is,’ he cried.
+‘Here are the very letters. But what is this written above them?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Put the papers on the sundial,’ I read, peeping over
+his shoulder.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘What papers? What sundial?’ he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘The sundial in the garden. There is no other,’ said
+I; ‘but the papers must be those that are destroyed.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Pooh!’ said he, gripping hard at his courage.
+‘We are in a civilised land here, and we can’t have tomfoolery of
+this kind. Where does the thing come from?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘From Dundee,’ I answered, glancing at the postmark.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Some preposterous practical joke,’ said he.
+‘What have I to do with sundials and papers? I shall take no notice of
+such nonsense.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I should certainly speak to the police,’ I said.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘And be laughed at for my pains. Nothing of the sort.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Then let me do so?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘No, I forbid you. I won’t have a fuss made about such
+nonsense.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was in vain to argue with him, for he was a very obstinate man. I
+went about, however, with a heart which was full of forebodings.
+</p>
+<p>
+“On the third day after the coming of the letter my father went from home
+to visit an old friend of his, Major Freebody, who is in command of one of the
+forts upon Portsdown Hill. I was glad that he should go, for it seemed to me
+that he was farther from danger when he was away from home. In that, however, I
+was in error. Upon the second day of his absence I received a telegram from the
+major, imploring me to come at once. My father had fallen over one of the deep
+chalk-pits which abound in the neighbourhood, and was lying senseless, with a
+shattered skull. I hurried to him, but he passed away without having ever
+recovered his consciousness. He had, as it appears, been returning from Fareham
+in the twilight, and as the country was unknown to him, and the chalk-pit
+unfenced, the jury had no hesitation in bringing in a verdict of ‘death
+from accidental causes.’ Carefully as I examined every fact connected
+with his death, I was unable to find anything which could suggest the idea of
+murder. There were no signs of violence, no footmarks, no robbery, no record of
+strangers having been seen upon the roads. And yet I need not tell you that my
+mind was far from at ease, and that I was well-nigh certain that some foul plot
+had been woven round him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“In this sinister way I came into my inheritance. You will ask me why I
+did not dispose of it? I answer, because I was well convinced that our troubles
+were in some way dependent upon an incident in my uncle’s life, and that
+the danger would be as pressing in one house as in another.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was in January, ’85, that my poor father met his end, and two
+years and eight months have elapsed since then. During that time I have lived
+happily at Horsham, and I had begun to hope that this curse had passed away
+from the family, and that it had ended with the last generation. I had begun to
+take comfort too soon, however; yesterday morning the blow fell in the very
+shape in which it had come upon my father.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The young man took from his waistcoat a crumpled envelope, and turning to the
+table he shook out upon it five little dried orange pips.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This is the envelope,” he continued. “The postmark is
+London—eastern division. Within are the very words which were upon my
+father’s last message: ‘K. K. K.’; and then ‘Put the
+papers on the sundial.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What have you done?” asked Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nothing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nothing?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“To tell the truth”—he sank his face into his thin, white
+hands—“I have felt helpless. I have felt like one of those poor
+rabbits when the snake is writhing towards it. I seem to be in the grasp of
+some resistless, inexorable evil, which no foresight and no precautions can
+guard against.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Tut! tut!” cried Sherlock Holmes. “You must act, man, or you
+are lost. Nothing but energy can save you. This is no time for despair.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have seen the police.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But they listened to my story with a smile. I am convinced that the
+inspector has formed the opinion that the letters are all practical jokes, and
+that the deaths of my relations were really accidents, as the jury stated, and
+were not to be connected with the warnings.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes shook his clenched hands in the air. “Incredible
+imbecility!” he cried.
+</p>
+<p>
+“They have, however, allowed me a policeman, who may remain in the house
+with me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Has he come with you to-night?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No. His orders were to stay in the house.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Again Holmes raved in the air.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why did you come to me?” he said, “and, above all, why did
+you not come at once?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I did not know. It was only to-day that I spoke to Major Prendergast
+about my troubles and was advised by him to come to you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is really two days since you had the letter. We should have acted
+before this. You have no further evidence, I suppose, than that which you have
+placed before us—no suggestive detail which might help us?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is one thing,” said John Openshaw. He rummaged in his coat
+pocket, and, drawing out a piece of discoloured, blue-tinted paper, he laid it
+out upon the table. “I have some remembrance,” said he, “that
+on the day when my uncle burned the papers I observed that the small, unburned
+margins which lay amid the ashes were of this particular colour. I found this
+single sheet upon the floor of his room, and I am inclined to think that it may
+be one of the papers which has, perhaps, fluttered out from among the others,
+and in that way has escaped destruction. Beyond the mention of pips, I do not
+see that it helps us much. I think myself that it is a page from some private
+diary. The writing is undoubtedly my uncle’s.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes moved the lamp, and we both bent over the sheet of paper, which showed
+by its ragged edge that it had indeed been torn from a book. It was headed,
+“March, 1869,” and beneath were the following enigmatical notices:
+</p>
+<p>
+“4th. Hudson came. Same old platform.
+</p>
+<p>
+“7th. Set the pips on McCauley, Paramore, and John Swain of St.
+Augustine.
+</p>
+<p>
+“9th. McCauley cleared.
+</p>
+<p>
+“10th. John Swain cleared.
+</p>
+<p>
+“12th. Visited Paramore. All well.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you!” said Holmes, folding up the paper and returning it to
+our visitor. “And now you must on no account lose another instant. We
+cannot spare time even to discuss what you have told me. You must get home
+instantly and act.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What shall I do?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is but one thing to do. It must be done at once. You must put this
+piece of paper which you have shown us into the brass box which you have
+described. You must also put in a note to say that all the other papers were
+burned by your uncle, and that this is the only one which remains. You must
+assert that in such words as will carry conviction with them. Having done this,
+you must at once put the box out upon the sundial, as directed. Do you
+understand?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Entirely.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do not think of revenge, or anything of the sort, at present. I think
+that we may gain that by means of the law; but we have our web to weave, while
+theirs is already woven. The first consideration is to remove the pressing
+danger which threatens you. The second is to clear up the mystery and to punish
+the guilty parties.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I thank you,” said the young man, rising and pulling on his
+overcoat. “You have given me fresh life and hope. I shall certainly do as
+you advise.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do not lose an instant. And, above all, take care of yourself in the
+meanwhile, for I do not think that there can be a doubt that you are threatened
+by a very real and imminent danger. How do you go back?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“By train from Waterloo.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is not yet nine. The streets will be crowded, so I trust that you may
+be in safety. And yet you cannot guard yourself too closely.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am armed.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is well. To-morrow I shall set to work upon your case.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I shall see you at Horsham, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, your secret lies in London. It is there that I shall seek it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then I shall call upon you in a day, or in two days, with news as to the
+box and the papers. I shall take your advice in every particular.” He
+shook hands with us and took his leave. Outside the wind still screamed and the
+rain splashed and pattered against the windows. This strange, wild story seemed
+to have come to us from amid the mad elements—blown in upon us like a
+sheet of sea-weed in a gale—and now to have been reabsorbed by them once
+more.
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes sat for some time in silence, with his head sunk forward and
+his eyes bent upon the red glow of the fire. Then he lit his pipe, and leaning
+back in his chair he watched the blue smoke-rings as they chased each other up
+to the ceiling.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think, Watson,” he remarked at last, “that of all our
+cases we have had none more fantastic than this.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Save, perhaps, the Sign of Four.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, yes. Save, perhaps, that. And yet this John Openshaw seems to me
+to be walking amid even greater perils than did the Sholtos.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But have you,” I asked, “formed any definite conception as
+to what these perils are?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There can be no question as to their nature,” he answered.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then what are they? Who is this K. K. K., and why does he pursue this
+unhappy family?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes closed his eyes and placed his elbows upon the arms of his
+chair, with his finger-tips together. “The ideal reasoner,” he
+remarked, “would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its
+bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it
+but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly
+describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer
+who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able
+to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. We have not yet
+grasped the results which the reason alone can attain to. Problems may be
+solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by
+the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is
+necessary that the reasoner should be able to utilise all the facts which have
+come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a
+possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and
+encyclopædias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment. It is not so impossible,
+however, that a man should possess all knowledge which is likely to be useful
+to him in his work, and this I have endeavoured in my case to do. If I remember
+rightly, you on one occasion, in the early days of our friendship, defined my
+limits in a very precise fashion.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” I answered, laughing. “It was a singular document.
+Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany
+variable, geology profound as regards the mud-stains from any region within
+fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational
+literature and crime records unique, violin-player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer,
+and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco. Those, I think, were the main points
+of my analysis.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes grinned at the last item. “Well,” he said, “I say now,
+as I said then, that a man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all
+the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the
+lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it. Now, for such a
+case as the one which has been submitted to us to-night, we need certainly to
+muster all our resources. Kindly hand me down the letter K of the <i>American
+Encyclopædia</i> which stands upon the shelf beside you. Thank you. Now let us
+consider the situation and see what may be deduced from it. In the first place,
+we may start with a strong presumption that Colonel Openshaw had some very
+strong reason for leaving America. Men at his time of life do not change all
+their habits and exchange willingly the charming climate of Florida for the
+lonely life of an English provincial town. His extreme love of solitude in
+England suggests the idea that he was in fear of someone or something, so we
+may assume as a working hypothesis that it was fear of someone or something
+which drove him from America. As to what it was he feared, we can only deduce
+that by considering the formidable letters which were received by himself and
+his successors. Did you remark the postmarks of those letters?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The first was from Pondicherry, the second from Dundee, and the third
+from London.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“From East London. What do you deduce from that?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“They are all seaports. That the writer was on board of a ship.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Excellent. We have already a clue. There can be no doubt that the
+probability—the strong probability—is that the writer was on board
+of a ship. And now let us consider another point. In the case of Pondicherry,
+seven weeks elapsed between the threat and its fulfilment, in Dundee it was
+only some three or four days. Does that suggest anything?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A greater distance to travel.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But the letter had also a greater distance to come.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then I do not see the point.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is at least a presumption that the vessel in which the man or men
+are is a sailing-ship. It looks as if they always send their singular warning
+or token before them when starting upon their mission. You see how quickly the
+deed followed the sign when it came from Dundee. If they had come from
+Pondicherry in a steamer they would have arrived almost as soon as their
+letter. But, as a matter of fact, seven weeks elapsed. I think that those seven
+weeks represented the difference between the mail-boat which brought the letter
+and the sailing vessel which brought the writer.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is possible.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“More than that. It is probable. And now you see the deadly urgency of
+this new case, and why I urged young Openshaw to caution. The blow has always
+fallen at the end of the time which it would take the senders to travel the
+distance. But this one comes from London, and therefore we cannot count upon
+delay.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good God!” I cried. “What can it mean, this relentless
+persecution?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The papers which Openshaw carried are obviously of vital importance to
+the person or persons in the sailing-ship. I think that it is quite clear that
+there must be more than one of them. A single man could not have carried out
+two deaths in such a way as to deceive a coroner’s jury. There must have
+been several in it, and they must have been men of resource and determination.
+Their papers they mean to have, be the holder of them who it may. In this way
+you see K. K. K. ceases to be the initials of an individual and becomes the
+badge of a society.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But of what society?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Have you never—” said Sherlock Holmes, bending forward and
+sinking his voice—“have you never heard of the Ku Klux Klan?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I never have.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes turned over the leaves of the book upon his knee. “Here it
+is,” said he presently:
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Ku Klux Klan. A name derived from the fanciful resemblance
+to the sound produced by cocking a rifle. This terrible secret society was
+formed by some ex-Confederate soldiers in the Southern states after the Civil
+War, and it rapidly formed local branches in different parts of the country,
+notably in Tennessee, Louisiana, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. Its power
+was used for political purposes, principally for the terrorising of the negro
+voters and the murdering and driving from the country of those who were opposed
+to its views. Its outrages were usually preceded by a warning sent to the
+marked man in some fantastic but generally recognised shape—a sprig of
+oak-leaves in some parts, melon seeds or orange pips in others. On receiving
+this the victim might either openly abjure his former ways, or might fly from
+the country. If he braved the matter out, death would unfailingly come upon
+him, and usually in some strange and unforeseen manner. So perfect was the
+organisation of the society, and so systematic its methods, that there is
+hardly a case upon record where any man succeeded in braving it with impunity,
+or in which any of its outrages were traced home to the perpetrators. For some
+years the organisation flourished in spite of the efforts of the United States
+government and of the better classes of the community in the South. Eventually,
+in the year 1869, the movement rather suddenly collapsed, although there have
+been sporadic outbreaks of the same sort since that date.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“You will observe,” said Holmes, laying down the volume,
+“that the sudden breaking up of the society was coincident with the
+disappearance of Openshaw from America with their papers. It may well have been
+cause and effect. It is no wonder that he and his family have some of the more
+implacable spirits upon their track. You can understand that this register and
+diary may implicate some of the first men in the South, and that there may be
+many who will not sleep easy at night until it is recovered.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then the page we have seen—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is such as we might expect. It ran, if I remember right, ‘sent the
+pips to A, B, and C’—that is, sent the society’s warning to
+them. Then there are successive entries that A and B cleared, or left the
+country, and finally that C was visited, with, I fear, a sinister result for C.
+Well, I think, Doctor, that we may let some light into this dark place, and I
+believe that the only chance young Openshaw has in the meantime is to do what I
+have told him. There is nothing more to be said or to be done to-night, so hand
+me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable
+weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellow men.”
+</p>
+<p class="p2">
+It had cleared in the morning, and the sun was shining with a subdued
+brightness through the dim veil which hangs over the great city. Sherlock
+Holmes was already at breakfast when I came down.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You will excuse me for not waiting for you,” said he; “I
+have, I foresee, a very busy day before me in looking into this case of young
+Openshaw’s.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What steps will you take?” I asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It will very much depend upon the results of my first inquiries. I may
+have to go down to Horsham, after all.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You will not go there first?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I shall commence with the City. Just ring the bell and the maid will
+bring up your coffee.”
+</p>
+<p>
+As I waited, I lifted the unopened newspaper from the table and glanced my eye
+over it. It rested upon a heading which sent a chill to my heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Holmes,” I cried, “you are too late.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah!” said he, laying down his cup, “I feared as much. How
+was it done?” He spoke calmly, but I could see that he was deeply moved.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My eye caught the name of Openshaw, and the heading ‘Tragedy Near
+Waterloo Bridge.’ Here is the account:
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Between nine and ten last night Police-Constable Cook, of
+the H Division, on duty near Waterloo Bridge, heard a cry for help and a splash
+in the water. The night, however, was extremely dark and stormy, so that, in
+spite of the help of several passers-by, it was quite impossible to effect a
+rescue. The alarm, however, was given, and, by the aid of the water-police, the
+body was eventually recovered. It proved to be that of a young gentleman whose
+name, as it appears from an envelope which was found in his pocket, was John
+Openshaw, and whose residence is near Horsham. It is conjectured that he may
+have been hurrying down to catch the last train from Waterloo Station, and that
+in his haste and the extreme darkness he missed his path and walked over the
+edge of one of the small landing-places for river steamboats. The body
+exhibited no traces of violence, and there can be no doubt that the deceased
+had been the victim of an unfortunate accident, which should have the effect of
+calling the attention of the authorities to the condition of the riverside
+landing-stages.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+We sat in silence for some minutes, Holmes more depressed and shaken than I had
+ever seen him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That hurts my pride, Watson,” he said at last. “It is a
+petty feeling, no doubt, but it hurts my pride. It becomes a personal matter
+with me now, and, if God sends me health, I shall set my hand upon this gang.
+That he should come to me for help, and that I should send him away to his
+death—!” He sprang from his chair and paced about the room in
+uncontrollable agitation, with a flush upon his sallow cheeks and a nervous
+clasping and unclasping of his long thin hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+“They must be cunning devils,” he exclaimed at last. “How
+could they have decoyed him down there? The Embankment is not on the direct
+line to the station. The bridge, no doubt, was too crowded, even on such a
+night, for their purpose. Well, Watson, we shall see who will win in the long
+run. I am going out now!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“To the police?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No; I shall be my own police. When I have spun the web they may take the
+flies, but not before.”
+</p>
+<p>
+All day I was engaged in my professional work, and it was late in the evening
+before I returned to Baker Street. Sherlock Holmes had not come back yet. It
+was nearly ten o’clock before he entered, looking pale and worn. He
+walked up to the sideboard, and tearing a piece from the loaf he devoured it
+voraciously, washing it down with a long draught of water.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are hungry,” I remarked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Starving. It had escaped my memory. I have had nothing since
+breakfast.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nothing?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not a bite. I had no time to think of it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And how have you succeeded?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have a clue?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have them in the hollow of my hand. Young Openshaw shall not long
+remain unavenged. Why, Watson, let us put their own devilish trade-mark upon
+them. It is well thought of!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What do you mean?”
+</p>
+<p>
+He took an orange from the cupboard, and tearing it to pieces he squeezed out
+the pips upon the table. Of these he took five and thrust them into an
+envelope. On the inside of the flap he wrote “S. H. for J. O.” Then
+he sealed it and addressed it to “Captain James Calhoun, Barque <i>Lone
+Star</i>, Savannah, Georgia.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That will await him when he enters port,” said he, chuckling.
+“It may give him a sleepless night. He will find it as sure a precursor
+of his fate as Openshaw did before him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And who is this Captain Calhoun?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The leader of the gang. I shall have the others, but he first.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How did you trace it, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+He took a large sheet of paper from his pocket, all covered with dates and
+names.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have spent the whole day,” said he, “over Lloyd’s
+registers and files of the old papers, following the future career of every
+vessel which touched at Pondicherry in January and February in ’83. There
+were thirty-six ships of fair tonnage which were reported there during those
+months. Of these, one, the <i>Lone Star</i>, instantly attracted my attention,
+since, although it was reported as having cleared from London, the name is that
+which is given to one of the states of the Union.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Texas, I think.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was not and am not sure which; but I knew that the ship must have an
+American origin.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I searched the Dundee records, and when I found that the barque <i>Lone
+Star</i> was there in January, ’85, my suspicion became a certainty. I
+then inquired as to the vessels which lay at present in the port of
+London.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The <i>Lone Star</i> had arrived here last week. I went down to the
+Albert Dock and found that she had been taken down the river by the early tide
+this morning, homeward bound to Savannah. I wired to Gravesend and learned that
+she had passed some time ago, and as the wind is easterly I have no doubt that
+she is now past the Goodwins and not very far from the Isle of Wight.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What will you do, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, I have my hand upon him. He and the two mates, are as I learn, the
+only native-born Americans in the ship. The others are Finns and Germans. I
+know, also, that they were all three away from the ship last night. I had it
+from the stevedore who has been loading their cargo. By the time that their
+sailing-ship reaches Savannah the mail-boat will have carried this letter, and
+the cable will have informed the police of Savannah that these three gentlemen
+are badly wanted here upon a charge of murder.”
+</p>
+<p>
+There is ever a flaw, however, in the best laid of human plans, and the
+murderers of John Openshaw were never to receive the orange pips which would
+show them that another, as cunning and as resolute as themselves, was upon
+their track. Very long and very severe were the equinoctial gales that year. We
+waited long for news of the <i>Lone Star</i> of Savannah, but none ever reached
+us. We did at last hear that somewhere far out in the Atlantic a shattered
+stern-post of a boat was seen swinging in the trough of a wave, with the
+letters “L. S.” carved upon it, and that is all which we shall ever
+know of the fate of the <i>Lone Star</i>.
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap06"></a>VI.<br>THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP</h2>
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 1.50em">I</span>sa Whitney, brother of
+the late Elias Whitney, D.D., Principal of the Theological College of St.
+George’s, was much addicted to opium. The habit grew upon him, as I
+understand, from some foolish freak when he was at college; for having read De
+Quincey’s description of his dreams and sensations, he had drenched his
+tobacco with laudanum in an attempt to produce the same effects. He found, as
+so many more have done, that the practice is easier to attain than to get rid
+of, and for many years he continued to be a slave to the drug, an object of
+mingled horror and pity to his friends and relatives. I can see him now, with
+yellow, pasty face, drooping lids, and pin-point pupils, all huddled in a
+chair, the wreck and ruin of a noble man.
+</p>
+<p>
+One night—it was in June, ’89—there came a ring to my bell,
+about the hour when a man gives his first yawn and glances at the clock. I sat
+up in my chair, and my wife laid her needle-work down in her lap and made a
+little face of disappointment.
+</p>
+<p>
+“A patient!” said she. “You’ll have to go out.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I groaned, for I was newly come back from a weary day.
+</p>
+<p>
+We heard the door open, a few hurried words, and then quick steps upon the
+linoleum. Our own door flew open, and a lady, clad in some dark-coloured stuff,
+with a black veil, entered the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You will excuse my calling so late,” she began, and then, suddenly
+losing her self-control, she ran forward, threw her arms about my wife’s
+neck, and sobbed upon her shoulder. “Oh, I’m in such
+trouble!” she cried; “I do so want a little help.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why,” said my wife, pulling up her veil, “it is Kate
+Whitney. How you startled me, Kate! I had not an idea who you were when you
+came in.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I didn’t know what to do, so I came straight to you.” That
+was always the way. Folk who were in grief came to my wife like birds to a
+lighthouse.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was very sweet of you to come. Now, you must have some wine and
+water, and sit here comfortably and tell us all about it. Or should you rather
+that I sent James off to bed?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, no, no! I want the doctor’s advice and help, too. It’s
+about Isa. He has not been home for two days. I am so frightened about
+him!”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was not the first time that she had spoken to us of her husband’s
+trouble, to me as a doctor, to my wife as an old friend and school companion.
+We soothed and comforted her by such words as we could find. Did she know where
+her husband was? Was it possible that we could bring him back to her?
+</p>
+<p>
+It seems that it was. She had the surest information that of late he had, when
+the fit was on him, made use of an opium den in the farthest east of the City.
+Hitherto his orgies had always been confined to one day, and he had come back,
+twitching and shattered, in the evening. But now the spell had been upon him
+eight-and-forty hours, and he lay there, doubtless among the dregs of the
+docks, breathing in the poison or sleeping off the effects. There he was to be
+found, she was sure of it, at the Bar of Gold, in Upper Swandam Lane. But what
+was she to do? How could she, a young and timid woman, make her way into such a
+place and pluck her husband out from among the ruffians who surrounded him?
+</p>
+<p>
+There was the case, and of course there was but one way out of it. Might I not
+escort her to this place? And then, as a second thought, why should she come at
+all? I was Isa Whitney’s medical adviser, and as such I had influence
+over him. I could manage it better if I were alone. I promised her on my word
+that I would send him home in a cab within two hours if he were indeed at the
+address which she had given me. And so in ten minutes I had left my armchair
+and cheery sitting-room behind me, and was speeding eastward in a hansom on a
+strange errand, as it seemed to me at the time, though the future only could
+show how strange it was to be.
+</p>
+<p>
+But there was no great difficulty in the first stage of my adventure. Upper
+Swandam Lane is a vile alley lurking behind the high wharves which line the
+north side of the river to the east of London Bridge. Between a slop-shop and a
+gin-shop, approached by a steep flight of steps leading down to a black gap
+like the mouth of a cave, I found the den of which I was in search. Ordering my
+cab to wait, I passed down the steps, worn hollow in the centre by the
+ceaseless tread of drunken feet; and by the light of a flickering oil-lamp
+above the door I found the latch and made my way into a long, low room, thick
+and heavy with the brown opium smoke, and terraced with wooden berths, like the
+forecastle of an emigrant ship.
+</p>
+<p>
+Through the gloom one could dimly catch a glimpse of bodies lying in strange
+fantastic poses, bowed shoulders, bent knees, heads thrown back, and chins
+pointing upward, with here and there a dark, lack-lustre eye turned upon the
+newcomer. Out of the black shadows there glimmered little red circles of light,
+now bright, now faint, as the burning poison waxed or waned in the bowls of the
+metal pipes. The most lay silent, but some muttered to themselves, and others
+talked together in a strange, low, monotonous voice, their conversation coming
+in gushes, and then suddenly tailing off into silence, each mumbling out his
+own thoughts and paying little heed to the words of his neighbour. At the
+farther end was a small brazier of burning charcoal, beside which on a
+three-legged wooden stool there sat a tall, thin old man, with his jaw resting
+upon his two fists, and his elbows upon his knees, staring into the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+As I entered, a sallow Malay attendant had hurried up with a pipe for me and a
+supply of the drug, beckoning me to an empty berth.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you. I have not come to stay,” said I. “There is a
+friend of mine here, Mr. Isa Whitney, and I wish to speak with him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a movement and an exclamation from my right, and peering through the
+gloom, I saw Whitney, pale, haggard, and unkempt, staring out at me.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My God! It’s Watson,” said he. He was in a pitiable state of
+reaction, with every nerve in a twitter. “I say, Watson, what
+o’clock is it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nearly eleven.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of what day?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of Friday, June 19th.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good heavens! I thought it was Wednesday. It is Wednesday. What
+d’you want to frighten a chap for?” He sank his face onto his arms
+and began to sob in a high treble key.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I tell you that it is Friday, man. Your wife has been waiting this two
+days for you. You should be ashamed of yourself!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“So I am. But you’ve got mixed, Watson, for I have only been here a
+few hours, three pipes, four pipes—I forget how many. But I’ll go
+home with you. I wouldn’t frighten Kate—poor little Kate. Give me
+your hand! Have you a cab?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, I have one waiting.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then I shall go in it. But I must owe something. Find what I owe,
+Watson. I am all off colour. I can do nothing for myself.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I walked down the narrow passage between the double row of sleepers, holding my
+breath to keep out the vile, stupefying fumes of the drug, and looking about
+for the manager. As I passed the tall man who sat by the brazier I felt a
+sudden pluck at my skirt, and a low voice whispered, “Walk past me, and
+then look back at me.” The words fell quite distinctly upon my ear. I
+glanced down. They could only have come from the old man at my side, and yet he
+sat now as absorbed as ever, very thin, very wrinkled, bent with age, an opium
+pipe dangling down from between his knees, as though it had dropped in sheer
+lassitude from his fingers. I took two steps forward and looked back. It took
+all my self-control to prevent me from breaking out into a cry of astonishment.
+He had turned his back so that none could see him but I. His form had filled
+out, his wrinkles were gone, the dull eyes had regained their fire, and there,
+sitting by the fire and grinning at my surprise, was none other than Sherlock
+Holmes. He made a slight motion to me to approach him, and instantly, as he
+turned his face half round to the company once more, subsided into a doddering,
+loose-lipped senility.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Holmes!” I whispered, “what on earth are you doing in this
+den?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“As low as you can,” he answered; “I have excellent ears. If
+you would have the great kindness to get rid of that sottish friend of yours I
+should be exceedingly glad to have a little talk with you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have a cab outside.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then pray send him home in it. You may safely trust him, for he appears
+to be too limp to get into any mischief. I should recommend you also to send a
+note by the cabman to your wife to say that you have thrown in your lot with
+me. If you will wait outside, I shall be with you in five minutes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was difficult to refuse any of Sherlock Holmes’ requests, for they
+were always so exceedingly definite, and put forward with such a quiet air of
+mastery. I felt, however, that when Whitney was once confined in the cab my
+mission was practically accomplished; and for the rest, I could not wish
+anything better than to be associated with my friend in one of those singular
+adventures which were the normal condition of his existence. In a few minutes I
+had written my note, paid Whitney’s bill, led him out to the cab, and
+seen him driven through the darkness. In a very short time a decrepit figure
+had emerged from the opium den, and I was walking down the street with Sherlock
+Holmes. For two streets he shuffled along with a bent back and an uncertain
+foot. Then, glancing quickly round, he straightened himself out and burst into
+a hearty fit of laughter.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I suppose, Watson,” said he, “that you imagine that I have
+added opium-smoking to cocaine injections, and all the other little weaknesses
+on which you have favoured me with your medical views.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was certainly surprised to find you there.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But not more so than I to find you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I came to find a friend.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And I to find an enemy.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“An enemy?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes; one of my natural enemies, or, shall I say, my natural prey.
+Briefly, Watson, I am in the midst of a very remarkable inquiry, and I have
+hoped to find a clue in the incoherent ramblings of these sots, as I have done
+before now. Had I been recognised in that den my life would not have been worth
+an hour’s purchase; for I have used it before now for my own purposes,
+and the rascally Lascar who runs it has sworn to have vengeance upon me. There
+is a trap-door at the back of that building, near the corner of Paul’s
+Wharf, which could tell some strange tales of what has passed through it upon
+the moonless nights.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What! You do not mean bodies?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ay, bodies, Watson. We should be rich men if we had £ 1000 for every
+poor devil who has been done to death in that den. It is the vilest murder-trap
+on the whole riverside, and I fear that Neville St. Clair has entered it never
+to leave it more. But our trap should be here.” He put his two
+forefingers between his teeth and whistled shrilly—a signal which was
+answered by a similar whistle from the distance, followed shortly by the rattle
+of wheels and the clink of horses’ hoofs.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, Watson,” said Holmes, as a tall dog-cart dashed up through
+the gloom, throwing out two golden tunnels of yellow light from its side
+lanterns. “You’ll come with me, won’t you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If I can be of use.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, a trusty comrade is always of use; and a chronicler still more so.
+My room at The Cedars is a double-bedded one.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The Cedars?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes; that is Mr. St. Clair’s house. I am staying there while I
+conduct the inquiry.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Where is it, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Near Lee, in Kent. We have a seven-mile drive before us.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I am all in the dark.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course you are. You’ll know all about it presently. Jump up
+here. All right, John; we shall not need you. Here’s half a crown. Look
+out for me to-morrow, about eleven. Give her her head. So long, then!”
+</p>
+<p>
+He flicked the horse with his whip, and we dashed away through the endless
+succession of sombre and deserted streets, which widened gradually, until we
+were flying across a broad balustraded bridge, with the murky river flowing
+sluggishly beneath us. Beyond lay another dull wilderness of bricks and mortar,
+its silence broken only by the heavy, regular footfall of the policeman, or the
+songs and shouts of some belated party of revellers. A dull wrack was drifting
+slowly across the sky, and a star or two twinkled dimly here and there through
+the rifts of the clouds. Holmes drove in silence, with his head sunk upon his
+breast, and the air of a man who is lost in thought, while I sat beside him,
+curious to learn what this new quest might be which seemed to tax his powers so
+sorely, and yet afraid to break in upon the current of his thoughts. We had
+driven several miles, and were beginning to get to the fringe of the belt of
+suburban villas, when he shook himself, shrugged his shoulders, and lit up his
+pipe with the air of a man who has satisfied himself that he is acting for the
+best.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have a grand gift of silence, Watson,” said he. “It
+makes you quite invaluable as a companion. ’Pon my word, it is a great
+thing for me to have someone to talk to, for my own thoughts are not
+over-pleasant. I was wondering what I should say to this dear little woman
+to-night when she meets me at the door.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You forget that I know nothing about it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I shall just have time to tell you the facts of the case before we get
+to Lee. It seems absurdly simple, and yet, somehow I can get nothing to go
+upon. There’s plenty of thread, no doubt, but I can’t get the end
+of it into my hand. Now, I’ll state the case clearly and concisely to
+you, Watson, and maybe you can see a spark where all is dark to me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Proceed, then.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Some years ago—to be definite, in May, 1884—there came to
+Lee a gentleman, Neville St. Clair by name, who appeared to have plenty of
+money. He took a large villa, laid out the grounds very nicely, and lived
+generally in good style. By degrees he made friends in the neighbourhood, and
+in 1887 he married the daughter of a local brewer, by whom he now has two
+children. He had no occupation, but was interested in several companies and
+went into town as a rule in the morning, returning by the 5:14 from Cannon
+Street every night. Mr. St. Clair is now thirty-seven years of age, is a man of
+temperate habits, a good husband, a very affectionate father, and a man who is
+popular with all who know him. I may add that his whole debts at the present
+moment, as far as we have been able to ascertain, amount to £ 88 10<i>s</i>.,
+while he has £ 220 standing to his credit in the Capital and Counties Bank.
+There is no reason, therefore, to think that money troubles have been weighing
+upon his mind.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Last Monday Mr. Neville St. Clair went into town rather earlier than
+usual, remarking before he started that he had two important commissions to
+perform, and that he would bring his little boy home a box of bricks. Now, by
+the merest chance, his wife received a telegram upon this same Monday, very
+shortly after his departure, to the effect that a small parcel of considerable
+value which she had been expecting was waiting for her at the offices of the
+Aberdeen Shipping Company. Now, if you are well up in your London, you will
+know that the office of the company is in Fresno Street, which branches out of
+Upper Swandam Lane, where you found me to-night. Mrs. St. Clair had her lunch,
+started for the City, did some shopping, proceeded to the company’s
+office, got her packet, and found herself at exactly 4:35 walking through
+Swandam Lane on her way back to the station. Have you followed me so
+far?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is very clear.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If you remember, Monday was an exceedingly hot day, and Mrs. St. Clair
+walked slowly, glancing about in the hope of seeing a cab, as she did not like
+the neighbourhood in which she found herself. While she was walking in this way
+down Swandam Lane, she suddenly heard an ejaculation or cry, and was struck
+cold to see her husband looking down at her and, as it seemed to her, beckoning
+to her from a second-floor window. The window was open, and she distinctly saw
+his face, which she describes as being terribly agitated. He waved his hands
+frantically to her, and then vanished from the window so suddenly that it
+seemed to her that he had been plucked back by some irresistible force from
+behind. One singular point which struck her quick feminine eye was that
+although he wore some dark coat, such as he had started to town in, he had on
+neither collar nor necktie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Convinced that something was amiss with him, she rushed down the
+steps—for the house was none other than the opium den in which you found
+me to-night—and running through the front room she attempted to ascend
+the stairs which led to the first floor. At the foot of the stairs, however,
+she met this Lascar scoundrel of whom I have spoken, who thrust her back and,
+aided by a Dane, who acts as assistant there, pushed her out into the street.
+Filled with the most maddening doubts and fears, she rushed down the lane and,
+by rare good-fortune, met in Fresno Street a number of constables with an
+inspector, all on their way to their beat. The inspector and two men
+accompanied her back, and in spite of the continued resistance of the
+proprietor, they made their way to the room in which Mr. St. Clair had last
+been seen. There was no sign of him there. In fact, in the whole of that floor
+there was no one to be found save a crippled wretch of hideous aspect, who, it
+seems, made his home there. Both he and the Lascar stoutly swore that no one
+else had been in the front room during the afternoon. So determined was their
+denial that the inspector was staggered, and had almost come to believe that
+Mrs. St. Clair had been deluded when, with a cry, she sprang at a small deal
+box which lay upon the table and tore the lid from it. Out there fell a cascade
+of children’s bricks. It was the toy which he had promised to bring home.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This discovery, and the evident confusion which the cripple showed, made
+the inspector realise that the matter was serious. The rooms were carefully
+examined, and results all pointed to an abominable crime. The front room was
+plainly furnished as a sitting-room and led into a small bedroom, which looked
+out upon the back of one of the wharves. Between the wharf and the bedroom
+window is a narrow strip, which is dry at low tide but is covered at high tide
+with at least four and a half feet of water. The bedroom window was a broad one
+and opened from below. On examination traces of blood were to be seen upon the
+windowsill, and several scattered drops were visible upon the wooden floor of
+the bedroom. Thrust away behind a curtain in the front room were all the
+clothes of Mr. Neville St. Clair, with the exception of his coat. His boots,
+his socks, his hat, and his watch—all were there. There were no signs of
+violence upon any of these garments, and there were no other traces of Mr.
+Neville St. Clair. Out of the window he must apparently have gone for no other
+exit could be discovered, and the ominous bloodstains upon the sill gave little
+promise that he could save himself by swimming, for the tide was at its very
+highest at the moment of the tragedy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And now as to the villains who seemed to be immediately implicated in
+the matter. The Lascar was known to be a man of the vilest antecedents, but as,
+by Mrs. St. Clair’s story, he was known to have been at the foot of the
+stair within a very few seconds of her husband’s appearance at the
+window, he could hardly have been more than an accessory to the crime. His
+defence was one of absolute ignorance, and he protested that he had no
+knowledge as to the doings of Hugh Boone, his lodger, and that he could not
+account in any way for the presence of the missing gentleman’s clothes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“So much for the Lascar manager. Now for the sinister cripple who lives
+upon the second floor of the opium den, and who was certainly the last human
+being whose eyes rested upon Neville St. Clair. His name is Hugh Boone, and his
+hideous face is one which is familiar to every man who goes much to the City.
+He is a professional beggar, though in order to avoid the police regulations he
+pretends to a small trade in wax vestas. Some little distance down Threadneedle
+Street, upon the left-hand side, there is, as you may have remarked, a small
+angle in the wall. Here it is that this creature takes his daily seat,
+cross-legged with his tiny stock of matches on his lap, and as he is a piteous
+spectacle a small rain of charity descends into the greasy leather cap which
+lies upon the pavement beside him. I have watched the fellow more than once
+before ever I thought of making his professional acquaintance, and I have been
+surprised at the harvest which he has reaped in a short time. His appearance,
+you see, is so remarkable that no one can pass him without observing him. A
+shock of orange hair, a pale face disfigured by a horrible scar, which, by its
+contraction, has turned up the outer edge of his upper lip, a bulldog chin, and
+a pair of very penetrating dark eyes, which present a singular contrast to the
+colour of his hair, all mark him out from amid the common crowd of mendicants
+and so, too, does his wit, for he is ever ready with a reply to any piece of
+chaff which may be thrown at him by the passers-by. This is the man whom we now
+learn to have been the lodger at the opium den, and to have been the last man
+to see the gentleman of whom we are in quest.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But a cripple!” said I. “What could he have done
+single-handed against a man in the prime of life?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He is a cripple in the sense that he walks with a limp; but in other
+respects he appears to be a powerful and well-nurtured man. Surely your medical
+experience would tell you, Watson, that weakness in one limb is often
+compensated for by exceptional strength in the others.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pray continue your narrative.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mrs. St. Clair had fainted at the sight of the blood upon the window,
+and she was escorted home in a cab by the police, as her presence could be of
+no help to them in their investigations. Inspector Barton, who had charge of
+the case, made a very careful examination of the premises, but without finding
+anything which threw any light upon the matter. One mistake had been made in
+not arresting Boone instantly, as he was allowed some few minutes during which
+he might have communicated with his friend the Lascar, but this fault was soon
+remedied, and he was seized and searched, without anything being found which
+could incriminate him. There were, it is true, some blood-stains upon his right
+shirt-sleeve, but he pointed to his ring-finger, which had been cut near the
+nail, and explained that the bleeding came from there, adding that he had been
+to the window not long before, and that the stains which had been observed
+there came doubtless from the same source. He denied strenuously having ever
+seen Mr. Neville St. Clair and swore that the presence of the clothes in his
+room was as much a mystery to him as to the police. As to Mrs. St.
+Clair’s assertion that she had actually seen her husband at the window,
+he declared that she must have been either mad or dreaming. He was removed,
+loudly protesting, to the police-station, while the inspector remained upon the
+premises in the hope that the ebbing tide might afford some fresh clue.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And it did, though they hardly found upon the mud-bank what they had
+feared to find. It was Neville St. Clair’s coat, and not Neville St.
+Clair, which lay uncovered as the tide receded. And what do you think they
+found in the pockets?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I cannot imagine.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I don’t think you would guess. Every pocket stuffed with
+pennies and half-pennies—421 pennies and 270 half-pennies. It was no
+wonder that it had not been swept away by the tide. But a human body is a
+different matter. There is a fierce eddy between the wharf and the house. It
+seemed likely enough that the weighted coat had remained when the stripped body
+had been sucked away into the river.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I understand that all the other clothes were found in the room.
+Would the body be dressed in a coat alone?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, sir, but the facts might be met speciously enough. Suppose that this
+man Boone had thrust Neville St. Clair through the window, there is no human
+eye which could have seen the deed. What would he do then? It would of course
+instantly strike him that he must get rid of the tell-tale garments. He would
+seize the coat, then, and be in the act of throwing it out, when it would occur
+to him that it would swim and not sink. He has little time, for he has heard
+the scuffle downstairs when the wife tried to force her way up, and perhaps he
+has already heard from his Lascar confederate that the police are hurrying up
+the street. There is not an instant to be lost. He rushes to some secret hoard,
+where he has accumulated the fruits of his beggary, and he stuffs all the coins
+upon which he can lay his hands into the pockets to make sure of the
+coat’s sinking. He throws it out, and would have done the same with the
+other garments had not he heard the rush of steps below, and only just had time
+to close the window when the police appeared.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It certainly sounds feasible.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, we will take it as a working hypothesis for want of a better.
+Boone, as I have told you, was arrested and taken to the station, but it could
+not be shown that there had ever before been anything against him. He had for
+years been known as a professional beggar, but his life appeared to have been a
+very quiet and innocent one. There the matter stands at present, and the
+questions which have to be solved—what Neville St. Clair was doing in the
+opium den, what happened to him when there, where is he now, and what Hugh
+Boone had to do with his disappearance—are all as far from a solution as
+ever. I confess that I cannot recall any case within my experience which looked
+at the first glance so simple and yet which presented such difficulties.”
+</p>
+<p>
+While Sherlock Holmes had been detailing this singular series of events, we had
+been whirling through the outskirts of the great town until the last straggling
+houses had been left behind, and we rattled along with a country hedge upon
+either side of us. Just as he finished, however, we drove through two scattered
+villages, where a few lights still glimmered in the windows.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We are on the outskirts of Lee,” said my companion. “We have
+touched on three English counties in our short drive, starting in Middlesex,
+passing over an angle of Surrey, and ending in Kent. See that light among the
+trees? That is The Cedars, and beside that lamp sits a woman whose anxious ears
+have already, I have little doubt, caught the clink of our horse’s
+feet.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But why are you not conducting the case from Baker Street?” I
+asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Because there are many inquiries which must be made out here. Mrs. St.
+Clair has most kindly put two rooms at my disposal, and you may rest assured
+that she will have nothing but a welcome for my friend and colleague. I hate to
+meet her, Watson, when I have no news of her husband. Here we are. Whoa, there,
+whoa!”
+</p>
+<p>
+We had pulled up in front of a large villa which stood within its own grounds.
+A stable-boy had run out to the horse’s head, and springing down, I
+followed Holmes up the small, winding gravel-drive which led to the house. As
+we approached, the door flew open, and a little blonde woman stood in the
+opening, clad in some sort of light mousseline de soie, with a touch of fluffy
+pink chiffon at her neck and wrists. She stood with her figure outlined against
+the flood of light, one hand upon the door, one half-raised in her eagerness,
+her body slightly bent, her head and face protruded, with eager eyes and parted
+lips, a standing question.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well?” she cried, “well?” And then, seeing that there
+were two of us, she gave a cry of hope which sank into a groan as she saw that
+my companion shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No good news?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“None.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No bad?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank God for that. But come in. You must be weary, for you have had a
+long day.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“This is my friend, Dr. Watson. He has been of most vital use to me in
+several of my cases, and a lucky chance has made it possible for me to bring
+him out and associate him with this investigation.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am delighted to see you,” said she, pressing my hand warmly.
+“You will, I am sure, forgive anything that may be wanting in our
+arrangements, when you consider the blow which has come so suddenly upon
+us.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My dear madam,” said I, “I am an old campaigner, and if I
+were not I can very well see that no apology is needed. If I can be of any
+assistance, either to you or to my friend here, I shall be indeed happy.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said the lady as we entered a well-lit
+dining-room, upon the table of which a cold supper had been laid out, “I
+should very much like to ask you one or two plain questions, to which I beg
+that you will give a plain answer.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Certainly, madam.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do not trouble about my feelings. I am not hysterical, nor given to
+fainting. I simply wish to hear your real, real opinion.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Upon what point?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In your heart of hearts, do you think that Neville is alive?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes seemed to be embarrassed by the question. “Frankly,
+now!” she repeated, standing upon the rug and looking keenly down at him
+as he leaned back in a basket-chair.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Frankly, then, madam, I do not.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You think that he is dead?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I do.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Murdered?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t say that. Perhaps.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And on what day did he meet his death?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“On Monday.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then perhaps, Mr. Holmes, you will be good enough to explain how it is
+that I have received a letter from him to-day.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes sprang out of his chair as if he had been galvanised.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What!” he roared.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, to-day.” She stood smiling, holding up a little slip of paper
+in the air.
+</p>
+<p>
+“May I see it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Certainly.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He snatched it from her in his eagerness, and smoothing it out upon the table
+he drew over the lamp and examined it intently. I had left my chair and was
+gazing at it over his shoulder. The envelope was a very coarse one and was
+stamped with the Gravesend postmark and with the date of that very day, or
+rather of the day before, for it was considerably after midnight.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Coarse writing,” murmured Holmes. “Surely this is not your
+husband’s writing, madam.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, but the enclosure is.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I perceive also that whoever addressed the envelope had to go and
+inquire as to the address.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How can you tell that?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The name, you see, is in perfectly black ink, which has dried itself.
+The rest is of the greyish colour, which shows that blotting-paper has been
+used. If it had been written straight off, and then blotted, none would be of a
+deep black shade. This man has written the name, and there has then been a
+pause before he wrote the address, which can only mean that he was not familiar
+with it. It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as
+trifles. Let us now see the letter. Ha! there has been an enclosure
+here!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, there was a ring. His signet-ring.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And you are sure that this is your husband’s hand?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“One of his hands.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“One?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“His hand when he wrote hurriedly. It is very unlike his usual writing,
+and yet I know it well.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Dearest do not be frightened. All will come well. There is
+a huge error which it may take some little time to rectify. Wait in
+patience.—NEVILLE.’ Written in pencil upon the fly-leaf of a book,
+octavo size, no water-mark. Hum! Posted to-day in Gravesend by a man with a
+dirty thumb. Ha! And the flap has been gummed, if I am not very much in error,
+by a person who had been chewing tobacco. And you have no doubt that it is your
+husband’s hand, madam?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“None. Neville wrote those words.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And they were posted to-day at Gravesend. Well, Mrs. St. Clair, the
+clouds lighten, though I should not venture to say that the danger is
+over.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But he must be alive, Mr. Holmes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Unless this is a clever forgery to put us on the wrong scent. The ring,
+after all, proves nothing. It may have been taken from him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, no; it is, it is his very own writing!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very well. It may, however, have been written on Monday and only posted
+to-day.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is possible.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If so, much may have happened between.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, you must not discourage me, Mr. Holmes. I know that all is well with
+him. There is so keen a sympathy between us that I should know if evil came
+upon him. On the very day that I saw him last he cut himself in the bedroom,
+and yet I in the dining-room rushed upstairs instantly with the utmost
+certainty that something had happened. Do you think that I would respond to
+such a trifle and yet be ignorant of his death?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be
+more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner. And in this letter
+you certainly have a very strong piece of evidence to corroborate your view.
+But if your husband is alive and able to write letters, why should he remain
+away from you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I cannot imagine. It is unthinkable.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And on Monday he made no remarks before leaving you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And you were surprised to see him in Swandam Lane?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very much so.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Was the window open?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then he might have called to you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He might.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He only, as I understand, gave an inarticulate cry?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A call for help, you thought?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes. He waved his hands.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But it might have been a cry of surprise. Astonishment at the unexpected
+sight of you might cause him to throw up his hands?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is possible.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And you thought he was pulled back?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He disappeared so suddenly.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He might have leaped back. You did not see anyone else in the
+room?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, but this horrible man confessed to having been there, and the Lascar
+was at the foot of the stairs.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Quite so. Your husband, as far as you could see, had his ordinary
+clothes on?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But without his collar or tie. I distinctly saw his bare throat.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Had he ever spoken of Swandam Lane?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Never.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Had he ever showed any signs of having taken opium?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Never.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you, Mrs. St. Clair. Those are the principal points about which I
+wished to be absolutely clear. We shall now have a little supper and then
+retire, for we may have a very busy day to-morrow.”
+</p>
+<p>
+A large and comfortable double-bedded room had been placed at our disposal, and
+I was quickly between the sheets, for I was weary after my night of adventure.
+Sherlock Holmes was a man, however, who, when he had an unsolved problem upon
+his mind, would go for days, and even for a week, without rest, turning it
+over, rearranging his facts, looking at it from every point of view until he
+had either fathomed it or convinced himself that his data were insufficient. It
+was soon evident to me that he was now preparing for an all-night sitting. He
+took off his coat and waistcoat, put on a large blue dressing-gown, and then
+wandered about the room collecting pillows from his bed and cushions from the
+sofa and armchairs. With these he constructed a sort of Eastern divan, upon
+which he perched himself cross-legged, with an ounce of shag tobacco and a box
+of matches laid out in front of him. In the dim light of the lamp I saw him
+sitting there, an old briar pipe between his lips, his eyes fixed vacantly upon
+the corner of the ceiling, the blue smoke curling up from him, silent,
+motionless, with the light shining upon his strong-set aquiline features. So he
+sat as I dropped off to sleep, and so he sat when a sudden ejaculation caused
+me to wake up, and I found the summer sun shining into the apartment. The pipe
+was still between his lips, the smoke still curled upward, and the room was
+full of a dense tobacco haze, but nothing remained of the heap of shag which I
+had seen upon the previous night.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Awake, Watson?” he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Game for a morning drive?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Certainly.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then dress. No one is stirring yet, but I know where the stable-boy
+sleeps, and we shall soon have the trap out.” He chuckled to himself as
+he spoke, his eyes twinkled, and he seemed a different man to the sombre
+thinker of the previous night.
+</p>
+<p>
+As I dressed I glanced at my watch. It was no wonder that no one was stirring.
+It was twenty-five minutes past four. I had hardly finished when Holmes
+returned with the news that the boy was putting in the horse.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I want to test a little theory of mine,” said he, pulling on his
+boots. “I think, Watson, that you are now standing in the presence of one
+of the most absolute fools in Europe. I deserve to be kicked from here to
+Charing Cross. But I think I have the key of the affair now.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And where is it?” I asked, smiling.
+</p>
+<p>
+“In the bathroom,” he answered. “Oh, yes, I am not
+joking,” he continued, seeing my look of incredulity. “I have just
+been there, and I have taken it out, and I have got it in this Gladstone bag.
+Come on, my boy, and we shall see whether it will not fit the lock.”
+</p>
+<p>
+We made our way downstairs as quietly as possible, and out into the bright
+morning sunshine. In the road stood our horse and trap, with the half-clad
+stable-boy waiting at the head. We both sprang in, and away we dashed down the
+London Road. A few country carts were stirring, bearing in vegetables to the
+metropolis, but the lines of villas on either side were as silent and lifeless
+as some city in a dream.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It has been in some points a singular case,” said Holmes, flicking
+the horse on into a gallop. “I confess that I have been as blind as a
+mole, but it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at
+all.”
+</p>
+<p>
+In town the earliest risers were just beginning to look sleepily from their
+windows as we drove through the streets of the Surrey side. Passing down the
+Waterloo Bridge Road we crossed over the river, and dashing up Wellington
+Street wheeled sharply to the right and found ourselves in Bow Street. Sherlock
+Holmes was well known to the force, and the two constables at the door saluted
+him. One of them held the horse’s head while the other led us in.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who is on duty?” asked Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Inspector Bradstreet, sir.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah, Bradstreet, how are you?” A tall, stout official had come down
+the stone-flagged passage, in a peaked cap and frogged jacket. “I wish to
+have a quiet word with you, Bradstreet.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Certainly, Mr. Holmes. Step into my room here.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was a small, office-like room, with a huge ledger upon the table, and a
+telephone projecting from the wall. The inspector sat down at his desk.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What can I do for you, Mr. Holmes?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I called about that beggarman, Boone—the one who was charged with
+being concerned in the disappearance of Mr. Neville St. Clair, of Lee.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes. He was brought up and remanded for further inquiries.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“So I heard. You have him here?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In the cells.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is he quiet?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, he gives no trouble. But he is a dirty scoundrel.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Dirty?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, it is all we can do to make him wash his hands, and his face is as
+black as a tinker’s. Well, when once his case has been settled, he will
+have a regular prison bath; and I think, if you saw him, you would agree with
+me that he needed it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I should like to see him very much.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Would you? That is easily done. Come this way. You can leave your
+bag.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I think that I’ll take it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very good. Come this way, if you please.” He led us down a
+passage, opened a barred door, passed down a winding stair, and brought us to a
+whitewashed corridor with a line of doors on each side.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The third on the right is his,” said the inspector. “Here it
+is!” He quietly shot back a panel in the upper part of the door and
+glanced through.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He is asleep,” said he. “You can see him very well.”
+</p>
+<p>
+We both put our eyes to the grating. The prisoner lay with his face towards us,
+in a very deep sleep, breathing slowly and heavily. He was a middle-sized man,
+coarsely clad as became his calling, with a coloured shirt protruding through
+the rent in his tattered coat. He was, as the inspector had said, extremely
+dirty, but the grime which covered his face could not conceal its repulsive
+ugliness. A broad wheal from an old scar ran right across it from eye to chin,
+and by its contraction had turned up one side of the upper lip, so that three
+teeth were exposed in a perpetual snarl. A shock of very bright red hair grew
+low over his eyes and forehead.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He’s a beauty, isn’t he?” said the inspector.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He certainly needs a wash,” remarked Holmes. “I had an idea
+that he might, and I took the liberty of bringing the tools with me.” He
+opened the Gladstone bag as he spoke, and took out, to my astonishment, a very
+large bath-sponge.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He! he! You are a funny one,” chuckled the inspector.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, if you will have the great goodness to open that door very quietly,
+we will soon make him cut a much more respectable figure.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, I don’t know why not,” said the inspector. “He
+doesn’t look a credit to the Bow Street cells, does he?” He slipped
+his key into the lock, and we all very quietly entered the cell. The sleeper
+half turned, and then settled down once more into a deep slumber. Holmes
+stooped to the water-jug, moistened his sponge, and then rubbed it twice
+vigorously across and down the prisoner’s face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Let me introduce you,” he shouted, “to Mr. Neville St.
+Clair, of Lee, in the county of Kent.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Never in my life have I seen such a sight. The man’s face peeled off
+under the sponge like the bark from a tree. Gone was the coarse brown tint!
+Gone, too, was the horrid scar which had seamed it across, and the twisted lip
+which had given the repulsive sneer to the face! A twitch brought away the
+tangled red hair, and there, sitting up in his bed, was a pale, sad-faced,
+refined-looking man, black-haired and smooth-skinned, rubbing his eyes and
+staring about him with sleepy bewilderment. Then suddenly realising the
+exposure, he broke into a scream and threw himself down with his face to the
+pillow.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Great heavens!” cried the inspector, “it is, indeed, the
+missing man. I know him from the photograph.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The prisoner turned with the reckless air of a man who abandons himself to his
+destiny. “Be it so,” said he. “And pray what am I charged
+with?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“With making away with Mr. Neville St.— Oh, come, you can’t
+be charged with that unless they make a case of attempted suicide of it,”
+said the inspector with a grin. “Well, I have been twenty-seven years in
+the force, but this really takes the cake.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If I am Mr. Neville St. Clair, then it is obvious that no crime has been
+committed, and that, therefore, I am illegally detained.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No crime, but a very great error has been committed,” said Holmes.
+“You would have done better to have trusted your wife.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was not the wife; it was the children,” groaned the prisoner.
+“God help me, I would not have them ashamed of their father. My God! What
+an exposure! What can I do?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes sat down beside him on the couch and patted him kindly on the
+shoulder.
+</p>
+<p>
+“If you leave it to a court of law to clear the matter up,” said
+he, “of course you can hardly avoid publicity. On the other hand, if you
+convince the police authorities that there is no possible case against you, I
+do not know that there is any reason that the details should find their way
+into the papers. Inspector Bradstreet would, I am sure, make notes upon
+anything which you might tell us and submit it to the proper authorities. The
+case would then never go into court at all.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“God bless you!” cried the prisoner passionately. “I would
+have endured imprisonment, ay, even execution, rather than have left my
+miserable secret as a family blot to my children.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are the first who have ever heard my story. My father was a
+schoolmaster in Chesterfield, where I received an excellent education. I
+travelled in my youth, took to the stage, and finally became a reporter on an
+evening paper in London. One day my editor wished to have a series of articles
+upon begging in the metropolis, and I volunteered to supply them. There was the
+point from which all my adventures started. It was only by trying begging as an
+amateur that I could get the facts upon which to base my articles. When an
+actor I had, of course, learned all the secrets of making up, and had been
+famous in the green-room for my skill. I took advantage now of my attainments.
+I painted my face, and to make myself as pitiable as possible I made a good
+scar and fixed one side of my lip in a twist by the aid of a small slip of
+flesh-coloured plaster. Then with a red head of hair, and an appropriate dress,
+I took my station in the business part of the city, ostensibly as a
+match-seller but really as a beggar. For seven hours I plied my trade, and when
+I returned home in the evening I found to my surprise that I had received no
+less than 26<i>s</i>. 4<i>d</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I wrote my articles and thought little more of the matter until, some
+time later, I backed a bill for a friend and had a writ served upon me for £
+25. I was at my wit’s end where to get the money, but a sudden idea came
+to me. I begged a fortnight’s grace from the creditor, asked for a
+holiday from my employers, and spent the time in begging in the City under my
+disguise. In ten days I had the money and had paid the debt.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, you can imagine how hard it was to settle down to arduous work at
+£ 2 a week when I knew that I could earn as much in a day by smearing my face
+with a little paint, laying my cap on the ground, and sitting still. It was a
+long fight between my pride and the money, but the dollars won at last, and I
+threw up reporting and sat day after day in the corner which I had first
+chosen, inspiring pity by my ghastly face and filling my pockets with coppers.
+Only one man knew my secret. He was the keeper of a low den in which I used to
+lodge in Swandam Lane, where I could every morning emerge as a squalid beggar
+and in the evenings transform myself into a well-dressed man about town. This
+fellow, a Lascar, was well paid by me for his rooms, so that I knew that my
+secret was safe in his possession.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, very soon I found that I was saving considerable sums of money. I
+do not mean that any beggar in the streets of London could earn £ 700 a
+year—which is less than my average takings—but I had exceptional
+advantages in my power of making up, and also in a facility of repartee, which
+improved by practice and made me quite a recognised character in the City. All
+day a stream of pennies, varied by silver, poured in upon me, and it was a very
+bad day in which I failed to take £ 2.
+</p>
+<p>
+“As I grew richer I grew more ambitious, took a house in the country, and
+eventually married, without anyone having a suspicion as to my real occupation.
+My dear wife knew that I had business in the City. She little knew what.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Last Monday I had finished for the day and was dressing in my room above
+the opium den when I looked out of my window and saw, to my horror and
+astonishment, that my wife was standing in the street, with her eyes fixed full
+upon me. I gave a cry of surprise, threw up my arms to cover my face, and,
+rushing to my confidant, the Lascar, entreated him to prevent anyone from
+coming up to me. I heard her voice downstairs, but I knew that she could not
+ascend. Swiftly I threw off my clothes, pulled on those of a beggar, and put on
+my pigments and wig. Even a wife’s eyes could not pierce so complete a
+disguise. But then it occurred to me that there might be a search in the room,
+and that the clothes might betray me. I threw open the window, reopening by my
+violence a small cut which I had inflicted upon myself in the bedroom that
+morning. Then I seized my coat, which was weighted by the coppers which I had
+just transferred to it from the leather bag in which I carried my takings. I
+hurled it out of the window, and it disappeared into the Thames. The other
+clothes would have followed, but at that moment there was a rush of constables
+up the stair, and a few minutes after I found, rather, I confess, to my relief,
+that instead of being identified as Mr. Neville St. Clair, I was arrested as
+his murderer.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I do not know that there is anything else for me to explain. I was
+determined to preserve my disguise as long as possible, and hence my preference
+for a dirty face. Knowing that my wife would be terribly anxious, I slipped off
+my ring and confided it to the Lascar at a moment when no constable was
+watching me, together with a hurried scrawl, telling her that she had no cause
+to fear.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That note only reached her yesterday,” said Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good God! What a week she must have spent!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The police have watched this Lascar,” said Inspector Bradstreet,
+“and I can quite understand that he might find it difficult to post a
+letter unobserved. Probably he handed it to some sailor customer of his, who
+forgot all about it for some days.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That was it,” said Holmes, nodding approvingly; “I have no
+doubt of it. But have you never been prosecuted for begging?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Many times; but what was a fine to me?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It must stop here, however,” said Bradstreet. “If the police
+are to hush this thing up, there must be no more of Hugh Boone.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have sworn it by the most solemn oaths which a man can take.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In that case I think that it is probable that no further steps may be
+taken. But if you are found again, then all must come out. I am sure, Mr.
+Holmes, that we are very much indebted to you for having cleared the matter up.
+I wish I knew how you reach your results.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I reached this one,” said my friend, “by sitting upon five
+pillows and consuming an ounce of shag. I think, Watson, that if we drive to
+Baker Street we shall just be in time for breakfast.”
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap07"></a>VII.<br>THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE</h2>
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 1.50em">I</span> had called upon my
+friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the
+intention of wishing him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon
+the sofa in a purple dressing-gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the
+right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at
+hand. Beside the couch was a wooden chair, and on the angle of the back hung a
+very seedy and disreputable hard-felt hat, much the worse for wear, and cracked
+in several places. A lens and a forceps lying upon the seat of the chair
+suggested that the hat had been suspended in this manner for the purpose of
+examination.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are engaged,” said I; “perhaps I interrupt you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not at all. I am glad to have a friend with whom I can discuss my
+results. The matter is a perfectly trivial one”—he jerked his thumb
+in the direction of the old hat—“but there are points in connection
+with it which are not entirely devoid of interest and even of
+instruction.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I seated myself in his armchair and warmed my hands before his crackling fire,
+for a sharp frost had set in, and the windows were thick with the ice crystals.
+“I suppose,” I remarked, “that, homely as it looks, this
+thing has some deadly story linked on to it—that it is the clue which
+will guide you in the solution of some mystery and the punishment of some
+crime.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, no. No crime,” said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. “Only one
+of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four
+million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square
+miles. Amid the action and reaction of so dense a swarm of humanity, every
+possible combination of events may be expected to take place, and many a little
+problem will be presented which may be striking and bizarre without being
+criminal. We have already had experience of such.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“So much so,” I remarked, “that of the last six cases which I
+have added to my notes, three have been entirely free of any legal
+crime.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Precisely. You allude to my attempt to recover the Irene Adler papers,
+to the singular case of Miss Mary Sutherland, and to the adventure of the man
+with the twisted lip. Well, I have no doubt that this small matter will fall
+into the same innocent category. You know Peterson, the commissionaire?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is to him that this trophy belongs.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is his hat.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, no, he found it. Its owner is unknown. I beg that you will look upon
+it not as a battered billycock but as an intellectual problem. And, first, as
+to how it came here. It arrived upon Christmas morning, in company with a good
+fat goose, which is, I have no doubt, roasting at this moment in front of
+Peterson’s fire. The facts are these: about four o’clock on
+Christmas morning, Peterson, who, as you know, is a very honest fellow, was
+returning from some small jollification and was making his way homeward down
+Tottenham Court Road. In front of him he saw, in the gaslight, a tallish man,
+walking with a slight stagger, and carrying a white goose slung over his
+shoulder. As he reached the corner of Goodge Street, a row broke out between
+this stranger and a little knot of roughs. One of the latter knocked off the
+man’s hat, on which he raised his stick to defend himself and, swinging
+it over his head, smashed the shop window behind him. Peterson had rushed
+forward to protect the stranger from his assailants; but the man, shocked at
+having broken the window, and seeing an official-looking person in uniform
+rushing towards him, dropped his goose, took to his heels, and vanished amid
+the labyrinth of small streets which lie at the back of Tottenham Court Road.
+The roughs had also fled at the appearance of Peterson, so that he was left in
+possession of the field of battle, and also of the spoils of victory in the
+shape of this battered hat and a most unimpeachable Christmas goose.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Which surely he restored to their owner?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My dear fellow, there lies the problem. It is true that ‘For Mrs.
+Henry Baker’ was printed upon a small card which was tied to the
+bird’s left leg, and it is also true that the initials ‘H.
+B.’ are legible upon the lining of this hat, but as there are some
+thousands of Bakers, and some hundreds of Henry Bakers in this city of ours, it
+is not easy to restore lost property to any one of them.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What, then, did Peterson do?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He brought round both hat and goose to me on Christmas morning, knowing
+that even the smallest problems are of interest to me. The goose we retained
+until this morning, when there were signs that, in spite of the slight frost,
+it would be well that it should be eaten without unnecessary delay. Its finder
+has carried it off, therefore, to fulfil the ultimate destiny of a goose, while
+I continue to retain the hat of the unknown gentleman who lost his Christmas
+dinner.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did he not advertise?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then, what clue could you have as to his identity?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Only as much as we can deduce.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“From his hat?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Precisely.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But you are joking. What can you gather from this old battered
+felt?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Here is my lens. You know my methods. What can you gather yourself as to
+the individuality of the man who has worn this article?”
+</p>
+<p>
+I took the tattered object in my hands and turned it over rather ruefully. It
+was a very ordinary black hat of the usual round shape, hard and much the worse
+for wear. The lining had been of red silk, but was a good deal discoloured.
+There was no maker’s name; but, as Holmes had remarked, the initials
+“H. B.” were scrawled upon one side. It was pierced in the brim for
+a hat-securer, but the elastic was missing. For the rest, it was cracked,
+exceedingly dusty, and spotted in several places, although there seemed to have
+been some attempt to hide the discoloured patches by smearing them with ink.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I can see nothing,” said I, handing it back to my friend.
+</p>
+<p>
+“On the contrary, Watson, you can see everything. You fail, however, to
+reason from what you see. You are too timid in drawing your inferences.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then, pray tell me what it is that you can infer from this hat?”
+</p>
+<p>
+He picked it up and gazed at it in the peculiar introspective fashion which was
+characteristic of him. “It is perhaps less suggestive than it might have
+been,” he remarked, “and yet there are a few inferences which are
+very distinct, and a few others which represent at least a strong balance of
+probability. That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the
+face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years,
+although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now
+than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the
+decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink,
+at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has
+ceased to love him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My dear Holmes!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He has, however, retained some degree of self-respect,” he
+continued, disregarding my remonstrance. “He is a man who leads a
+sedentary life, goes out little, is out of training entirely, is middle-aged,
+has grizzled hair which he has had cut within the last few days, and which he
+anoints with lime-cream. These are the more patent facts which are to be
+deduced from his hat. Also, by the way, that it is extremely improbable that he
+has gas laid on in his house.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are certainly joking, Holmes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not in the least. Is it possible that even now, when I give you these
+results, you are unable to see how they are attained?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have no doubt that I am very stupid, but I must confess that I am
+unable to follow you. For example, how did you deduce that this man was
+intellectual?”
+</p>
+<p>
+For answer Holmes clapped the hat upon his head. It came right over the
+forehead and settled upon the bridge of his nose. “It is a question of
+cubic capacity,” said he; “a man with so large a brain must have
+something in it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The decline of his fortunes, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“This hat is three years old. These flat brims curled at the edge came in
+then. It is a hat of the very best quality. Look at the band of ribbed silk and
+the excellent lining. If this man could afford to buy so expensive a hat three
+years ago, and has had no hat since, then he has assuredly gone down in the
+world.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, that is clear enough, certainly. But how about the foresight and
+the moral retrogression?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes laughed. “Here is the foresight,” said he putting
+his finger upon the little disc and loop of the hat-securer. “They are
+never sold upon hats. If this man ordered one, it is a sign of a certain amount
+of foresight, since he went out of his way to take this precaution against the
+wind. But since we see that he has broken the elastic and has not troubled to
+replace it, it is obvious that he has less foresight now than formerly, which
+is a distinct proof of a weakening nature. On the other hand, he has
+endeavoured to conceal some of these stains upon the felt by daubing them with
+ink, which is a sign that he has not entirely lost his self-respect.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your reasoning is certainly plausible.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The further points, that he is middle-aged, that his hair is grizzled,
+that it has been recently cut, and that he uses lime-cream, are all to be
+gathered from a close examination of the lower part of the lining. The lens
+discloses a large number of hair-ends, clean cut by the scissors of the barber.
+They all appear to be adhesive, and there is a distinct odour of lime-cream.
+This dust, you will observe, is not the gritty, grey dust of the street but the
+fluffy brown dust of the house, showing that it has been hung up indoors most
+of the time, while the marks of moisture upon the inside are proof positive
+that the wearer perspired very freely, and could therefore, hardly be in the
+best of training.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But his wife—you said that she had ceased to love him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“This hat has not been brushed for weeks. When I see you, my dear Watson,
+with a week’s accumulation of dust upon your hat, and when your wife
+allows you to go out in such a state, I shall fear that you also have been
+unfortunate enough to lose your wife’s affection.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But he might be a bachelor.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nay, he was bringing home the goose as a peace-offering to his wife.
+Remember the card upon the bird’s leg.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have an answer to everything. But how on earth do you deduce that
+the gas is not laid on in his house?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“One tallow stain, or even two, might come by chance; but when I see no
+less than five, I think that there can be little doubt that the individual must
+be brought into frequent contact with burning tallow—walks upstairs at
+night probably with his hat in one hand and a guttering candle in the other.
+Anyhow, he never got tallow-stains from a gas-jet. Are you satisfied?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, it is very ingenious,” said I, laughing; “but since,
+as you said just now, there has been no crime committed, and no harm done save
+the loss of a goose, all this seems to be rather a waste of energy.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes had opened his mouth to reply, when the door flew open, and
+Peterson, the commissionaire, rushed into the apartment with flushed cheeks and
+the face of a man who is dazed with astonishment.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The goose, Mr. Holmes! The goose, sir!” he gasped.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Eh? What of it, then? Has it returned to life and flapped off through
+the kitchen window?” Holmes twisted himself round upon the sofa to get a
+fairer view of the man’s excited face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“See here, sir! See what my wife found in its crop!” He held out
+his hand and displayed upon the centre of the palm a brilliantly scintillating
+blue stone, rather smaller than a bean in size, but of such purity and radiance
+that it twinkled like an electric point in the dark hollow of his hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes sat up with a whistle. “By Jove, Peterson!” said
+he, “this is treasure trove indeed. I suppose you know what you have
+got?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A diamond, sir? A precious stone. It cuts into glass as though it were
+putty.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s more than a precious stone. It is <i>the</i> precious
+stone.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not the Countess of Morcar’s blue carbuncle!” I ejaculated.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Precisely so. I ought to know its size and shape, seeing that I have
+read the advertisement about it in <i>The Times</i> every day lately. It is
+absolutely unique, and its value can only be conjectured, but the reward
+offered of £ 1000 is certainly not within a twentieth part of the market
+price.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A thousand pounds! Great Lord of mercy!” The commissionaire
+plumped down into a chair and stared from one to the other of us.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is the reward, and I have reason to know that there are sentimental
+considerations in the background which would induce the Countess to part with
+half her fortune if she could but recover the gem.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was lost, if I remember aright, at the Hotel Cosmopolitan,” I
+remarked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Precisely so, on December 22nd, just five days ago. John Horner, a
+plumber, was accused of having abstracted it from the lady’s jewel-case.
+The evidence against him was so strong that the case has been referred to the
+Assizes. I have some account of the matter here, I believe.” He rummaged
+amid his newspapers, glancing over the dates, until at last he smoothed one
+out, doubled it over, and read the following paragraph:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hotel Cosmopolitan Jewel Robbery. John Horner, 26, plumber, was brought
+up upon the charge of having upon the 22nd inst., abstracted from the
+jewel-case of the Countess of Morcar the valuable gem known as the blue
+carbuncle. James Ryder, upper-attendant at the hotel, gave his evidence to the
+effect that he had shown Horner up to the dressing-room of the Countess of
+Morcar upon the day of the robbery in order that he might solder the second bar
+of the grate, which was loose. He had remained with Horner some little time,
+but had finally been called away. On returning, he found that Horner had
+disappeared, that the bureau had been forced open, and that the small morocco
+casket in which, as it afterwards transpired, the Countess was accustomed to
+keep her jewel, was lying empty upon the dressing-table. Ryder instantly gave
+the alarm, and Horner was arrested the same evening; but the stone could not be
+found either upon his person or in his rooms. Catherine Cusack, maid to the
+Countess, deposed to having heard Ryder’s cry of dismay on discovering
+the robbery, and to having rushed into the room, where she found matters as
+described by the last witness. Inspector Bradstreet, B division, gave evidence
+as to the arrest of Horner, who struggled frantically, and protested his
+innocence in the strongest terms. Evidence of a previous conviction for robbery
+having been given against the prisoner, the magistrate refused to deal
+summarily with the offence, but referred it to the Assizes. Horner, who had
+shown signs of intense emotion during the proceedings, fainted away at the
+conclusion and was carried out of court.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hum! So much for the police-court,” said Holmes thoughtfully,
+tossing aside the paper. “The question for us now to solve is the
+sequence of events leading from a rifled jewel-case at one end to the crop of a
+goose in Tottenham Court Road at the other. You see, Watson, our little
+deductions have suddenly assumed a much more important and less innocent
+aspect. Here is the stone; the stone came from the goose, and the goose came
+from Mr. Henry Baker, the gentleman with the bad hat and all the other
+characteristics with which I have bored you. So now we must set ourselves very
+seriously to finding this gentleman and ascertaining what part he has played in
+this little mystery. To do this, we must try the simplest means first, and
+these lie undoubtedly in an advertisement in all the evening papers. If this
+fail, I shall have recourse to other methods.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What will you say?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Give me a pencil and that slip of paper. Now, then: ‘Found at the
+corner of Goodge Street, a goose and a black felt hat. Mr. Henry Baker can have
+the same by applying at 6:30 this evening at 221B, Baker Street.’ That is
+clear and concise.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very. But will he see it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, he is sure to keep an eye on the papers, since, to a poor man, the
+loss was a heavy one. He was clearly so scared by his mischance in breaking the
+window and by the approach of Peterson that he thought of nothing but flight,
+but since then he must have bitterly regretted the impulse which caused him to
+drop his bird. Then, again, the introduction of his name will cause him to see
+it, for everyone who knows him will direct his attention to it. Here you are,
+Peterson, run down to the advertising agency and have this put in the evening
+papers.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In which, sir?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, in the <i>Globe</i>, <i>Star</i>, <i>Pall Mall</i>, <i>St.
+James’s Gazette</i>, <i>Evening News</i>, <i>Standard</i>, <i>Echo</i>,
+and any others that occur to you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very well, sir. And this stone?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah, yes, I shall keep the stone. Thank you. And, I say, Peterson, just
+buy a goose on your way back and leave it here with me, for we must have one to
+give to this gentleman in place of the one which your family is now
+devouring.”
+</p>
+<p>
+When the commissionaire had gone, Holmes took up the stone and held it against
+the light. “It’s a bonny thing,” said he. “Just see how
+it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every
+good stone is. They are the devil’s pet baits. In the larger and older
+jewels every facet may stand for a bloody deed. This stone is not yet twenty
+years old. It was found in the banks of the Amoy River in southern China and is
+remarkable in having every characteristic of the carbuncle, save that it is
+blue in shade instead of ruby red. In spite of its youth, it has already a
+sinister history. There have been two murders, a vitriol-throwing, a suicide,
+and several robberies brought about for the sake of this forty-grain weight of
+crystallised charcoal. Who would think that so pretty a toy would be a purveyor
+to the gallows and the prison? I’ll lock it up in my strong box now and
+drop a line to the Countess to say that we have it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you think that this man Horner is innocent?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I cannot tell.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, then, do you imagine that this other one, Henry Baker, had
+anything to do with the matter?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is, I think, much more likely that Henry Baker is an absolutely
+innocent man, who had no idea that the bird which he was carrying was of
+considerably more value than if it were made of solid gold. That, however, I
+shall determine by a very simple test if we have an answer to our
+advertisement.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And you can do nothing until then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nothing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In that case I shall continue my professional round. But I shall come
+back in the evening at the hour you have mentioned, for I should like to see
+the solution of so tangled a business.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very glad to see you. I dine at seven. There is a woodcock, I believe.
+By the way, in view of recent occurrences, perhaps I ought to ask Mrs. Hudson
+to examine its crop.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I had been delayed at a case, and it was a little after half-past six when I
+found myself in Baker Street once more. As I approached the house I saw a tall
+man in a Scotch bonnet with a coat which was buttoned up to his chin waiting
+outside in the bright semicircle which was thrown from the fanlight. Just as I
+arrived the door was opened, and we were shown up together to Holmes’
+room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mr. Henry Baker, I believe,” said he, rising from his armchair and
+greeting his visitor with the easy air of geniality which he could so readily
+assume. “Pray take this chair by the fire, Mr. Baker. It is a cold night,
+and I observe that your circulation is more adapted for summer than for winter.
+Ah, Watson, you have just come at the right time. Is that your hat, Mr.
+Baker?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, sir, that is undoubtedly my hat.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He was a large man with rounded shoulders, a massive head, and a broad,
+intelligent face, sloping down to a pointed beard of grizzled brown. A touch of
+red in nose and cheeks, with a slight tremor of his extended hand, recalled
+Holmes’ surmise as to his habits. His rusty black frock-coat was buttoned
+right up in front, with the collar turned up, and his lank wrists protruded
+from his sleeves without a sign of cuff or shirt. He spoke in a slow staccato
+fashion, choosing his words with care, and gave the impression generally of a
+man of learning and letters who had had ill-usage at the hands of fortune.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We have retained these things for some days,” said Holmes,
+“because we expected to see an advertisement from you giving your
+address. I am at a loss to know now why you did not advertise.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Our visitor gave a rather shamefaced laugh. “Shillings have not been so
+plentiful with me as they once were,” he remarked. “I had no doubt
+that the gang of roughs who assaulted me had carried off both my hat and the
+bird. I did not care to spend more money in a hopeless attempt at recovering
+them.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very naturally. By the way, about the bird, we were compelled to eat
+it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“To eat it!” Our visitor half rose from his chair in his
+excitement.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, it would have been of no use to anyone had we not done so. But I
+presume that this other goose upon the sideboard, which is about the same
+weight and perfectly fresh, will answer your purpose equally well?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, certainly, certainly,” answered Mr. Baker with a sigh of
+relief.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course, we still have the feathers, legs, crop, and so on of your own
+bird, so if you wish—”
+</p>
+<p>
+The man burst into a hearty laugh. “They might be useful to me as relics
+of my adventure,” said he, “but beyond that I can hardly see what
+use the <i>disjecta membra</i> of my late acquaintance are going to be to me.
+No, sir, I think that, with your permission, I will confine my attentions to
+the excellent bird which I perceive upon the sideboard.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes glanced sharply across at me with a slight shrug of his
+shoulders.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is your hat, then, and there your bird,” said he. “By
+the way, would it bore you to tell me where you got the other one from? I am
+somewhat of a fowl fancier, and I have seldom seen a better grown goose.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Certainly, sir,” said Baker, who had risen and tucked his newly
+gained property under his arm. “There are a few of us who frequent the
+Alpha Inn, near the Museum—we are to be found in the Museum itself during
+the day, you understand. This year our good host, Windigate by name, instituted
+a goose club, by which, on consideration of some few pence every week, we were
+each to receive a bird at Christmas. My pence were duly paid, and the rest is
+familiar to you. I am much indebted to you, sir, for a Scotch bonnet is fitted
+neither to my years nor my gravity.” With a comical pomposity of manner
+he bowed solemnly to both of us and strode off upon his way.
+</p>
+<p>
+“So much for Mr. Henry Baker,” said Holmes when he had closed the
+door behind him. “It is quite certain that he knows nothing whatever
+about the matter. Are you hungry, Watson?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not particularly.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then I suggest that we turn our dinner into a supper and follow up this
+clue while it is still hot.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“By all means.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was a bitter night, so we drew on our ulsters and wrapped cravats about our
+throats. Outside, the stars were shining coldly in a cloudless sky, and the
+breath of the passers-by blew out into smoke like so many pistol shots. Our
+footfalls rang out crisply and loudly as we swung through the doctors’
+quarter, Wimpole Street, Harley Street, and so through Wigmore Street into
+Oxford Street. In a quarter of an hour we were in Bloomsbury at the Alpha Inn,
+which is a small public-house at the corner of one of the streets which runs
+down into Holborn. Holmes pushed open the door of the private bar and ordered
+two glasses of beer from the ruddy-faced, white-aproned landlord.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your beer should be excellent if it is as good as your geese,”
+said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My geese!” The man seemed surprised.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes. I was speaking only half an hour ago to Mr. Henry Baker, who was a
+member of your goose club.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah! yes, I see. But you see, sir, them’s not <i>our</i>
+geese.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Indeed! Whose, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, I got the two dozen from a salesman in Covent Garden.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Indeed? I know some of them. Which was it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Breckinridge is his name.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah! I don’t know him. Well, here’s your good health
+landlord, and prosperity to your house. Good-night.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now for Mr. Breckinridge,” he continued, buttoning up his coat as
+we came out into the frosty air. “Remember, Watson that though we have so
+homely a thing as a goose at one end of this chain, we have at the other a man
+who will certainly get seven years’ penal servitude unless we can
+establish his innocence. It is possible that our inquiry may but confirm his
+guilt; but, in any case, we have a line of investigation which has been missed
+by the police, and which a singular chance has placed in our hands. Let us
+follow it out to the bitter end. Faces to the south, then, and quick
+march!”
+</p>
+<p>
+We passed across Holborn, down Endell Street, and so through a zigzag of slums
+to Covent Garden Market. One of the largest stalls bore the name of
+Breckinridge upon it, and the proprietor a horsey-looking man, with a sharp
+face and trim side-whiskers was helping a boy to put up the shutters.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good-evening. It’s a cold night,” said Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+The salesman nodded and shot a questioning glance at my companion.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Sold out of geese, I see,” continued Holmes, pointing at the bare
+slabs of marble.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Let you have five hundred to-morrow morning.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s no good.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, there are some on the stall with the gas-flare.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah, but I was recommended to you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who by?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The landlord of the Alpha.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, yes; I sent him a couple of dozen.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Fine birds they were, too. Now where did you get them from?”
+</p>
+<p>
+To my surprise the question provoked a burst of anger from the salesman.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, then, mister,” said he, with his head cocked and his arms
+akimbo, “what are you driving at? Let’s have it straight,
+now.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is straight enough. I should like to know who sold you the geese
+which you supplied to the Alpha.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well then, I shan’t tell you. So now!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, it is a matter of no importance; but I don’t know why you
+should be so warm over such a trifle.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Warm! You’d be as warm, maybe, if you were as pestered as I am.
+When I pay good money for a good article there should be an end of the
+business; but it’s ‘Where are the geese?’ and ‘Who did
+you sell the geese to?’ and ‘What will you take for the
+geese?’ One would think they were the only geese in the world, to hear
+the fuss that is made over them.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, I have no connection with any other people who have been making
+inquiries,” said Holmes carelessly. “If you won’t tell us the
+bet is off, that is all. But I’m always ready to back my opinion on a
+matter of fowls, and I have a fiver on it that the bird I ate is country
+bred.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, then, you’ve lost your fiver, for it’s town
+bred,” snapped the salesman.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s nothing of the kind.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I say it is.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t believe it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“D’you think you know more about fowls than I, who have handled
+them ever since I was a nipper? I tell you, all those birds that went to the
+Alpha were town bred.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You’ll never persuade me to believe that.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Will you bet, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s merely taking your money, for I know that I am right. But
+I’ll have a sovereign on with you, just to teach you not to be
+obstinate.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The salesman chuckled grimly. “Bring me the books, Bill,” said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+The small boy brought round a small thin volume and a great greasy-backed one,
+laying them out together beneath the hanging lamp.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now then, Mr. Cocksure,” said the salesman, “I thought that
+I was out of geese, but before I finish you’ll find that there is still
+one left in my shop. You see this little book?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s the list of the folk from whom I buy. D’you see?
+Well, then, here on this page are the country folk, and the numbers after their
+names are where their accounts are in the big ledger. Now, then! You see this
+other page in red ink? Well, that is a list of my town suppliers. Now, look at
+that third name. Just read it out to me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mrs. Oakshott, 117, Brixton Road—249,” read Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Quite so. Now turn that up in the ledger.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes turned to the page indicated. “Here you are, ‘Mrs. Oakshott,
+117, Brixton Road, egg and poultry supplier.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, then, what’s the last entry?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘December 22nd. Twenty-four geese at 7<i>s</i>.
+6<i>d</i>.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Quite so. There you are. And underneath?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Sold to Mr. Windigate of the Alpha, at
+12<i>s</i>.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What have you to say now?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes looked deeply chagrined. He drew a sovereign from his pocket
+and threw it down upon the slab, turning away with the air of a man whose
+disgust is too deep for words. A few yards off he stopped under a lamp-post and
+laughed in the hearty, noiseless fashion which was peculiar to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“When you see a man with whiskers of that cut and the ‘Pink
+’un’ protruding out of his pocket, you can always draw him by a
+bet,” said he. “I daresay that if I had put £ 100 down in front of
+him, that man would not have given me such complete information as was drawn
+from him by the idea that he was doing me on a wager. Well, Watson, we are, I
+fancy, nearing the end of our quest, and the only point which remains to be
+determined is whether we should go on to this Mrs. Oakshott to-night, or
+whether we should reserve it for to-morrow. It is clear from what that surly
+fellow said that there are others besides ourselves who are anxious about the
+matter, and I should—”
+</p>
+<p>
+His remarks were suddenly cut short by a loud hubbub which broke out from the
+stall which we had just left. Turning round we saw a little rat-faced fellow
+standing in the centre of the circle of yellow light which was thrown by the
+swinging lamp, while Breckinridge, the salesman, framed in the door of his
+stall, was shaking his fists fiercely at the cringing figure.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ve had enough of you and your geese,” he shouted. “I
+wish you were all at the devil together. If you come pestering me any more with
+your silly talk I’ll set the dog at you. You bring Mrs. Oakshott here and
+I’ll answer her, but what have you to do with it? Did I buy the geese off
+you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No; but one of them was mine all the same,” whined the little man.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, then, ask Mrs. Oakshott for it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She told me to ask you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, you can ask the King of Proosia, for all I care. I’ve had
+enough of it. Get out of this!” He rushed fiercely forward, and the
+inquirer flitted away into the darkness.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ha! this may save us a visit to Brixton Road,” whispered Holmes.
+“Come with me, and we will see what is to be made of this fellow.”
+Striding through the scattered knots of people who lounged round the flaring
+stalls, my companion speedily overtook the little man and touched him upon the
+shoulder. He sprang round, and I could see in the gas-light that every vestige
+of colour had been driven from his face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who are you, then? What do you want?” he asked in a quavering
+voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You will excuse me,” said Holmes blandly, “but I could not
+help overhearing the questions which you put to the salesman just now. I think
+that I could be of assistance to you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You? Who are you? How could you know anything of the matter?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people
+don’t know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But you can know nothing of this?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Excuse me, I know everything of it. You are endeavouring to trace some
+geese which were sold by Mrs. Oakshott, of Brixton Road, to a salesman named
+Breckinridge, by him in turn to Mr. Windigate, of the Alpha, and by him to his
+club, of which Mr. Henry Baker is a member.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, sir, you are the very man whom I have longed to meet,” cried
+the little fellow with outstretched hands and quivering fingers. “I can
+hardly explain to you how interested I am in this matter.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes hailed a four-wheeler which was passing. “In that case we
+had better discuss it in a cosy room rather than in this wind-swept
+market-place,” said he. “But pray tell me, before we go farther,
+who it is that I have the pleasure of assisting.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The man hesitated for an instant. “My name is John Robinson,” he
+answered with a sidelong glance.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, no; the real name,” said Holmes sweetly. “It is always
+awkward doing business with an alias.”
+</p>
+<p>
+A flush sprang to the white cheeks of the stranger. “Well then,”
+said he, “my real name is James Ryder.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Precisely so. Head attendant at the Hotel Cosmopolitan. Pray step into
+the cab, and I shall soon be able to tell you everything which you would wish
+to know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The little man stood glancing from one to the other of us with half-frightened,
+half-hopeful eyes, as one who is not sure whether he is on the verge of a
+windfall or of a catastrophe. Then he stepped into the cab, and in half an hour
+we were back in the sitting-room at Baker Street. Nothing had been said during
+our drive, but the high, thin breathing of our new companion, and the claspings
+and unclaspings of his hands, spoke of the nervous tension within him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Here we are!” said Holmes cheerily as we filed into the room.
+“The fire looks very seasonable in this weather. You look cold, Mr.
+Ryder. Pray take the basket-chair. I will just put on my slippers before we
+settle this little matter of yours. Now, then! You want to know what became of
+those geese?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, sir.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Or rather, I fancy, of that goose. It was one bird, I imagine in which
+you were interested—white, with a black bar across the tail.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Ryder quivered with emotion. “Oh, sir,” he cried, “can you
+tell me where it went to?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It came here.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Here?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, and a most remarkable bird it proved. I don’t wonder that you
+should take an interest in it. It laid an egg after it was dead—the
+bonniest, brightest little blue egg that ever was seen. I have it here in my
+museum.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Our visitor staggered to his feet and clutched the mantelpiece with his right
+hand. Holmes unlocked his strong-box and held up the blue carbuncle, which
+shone out like a star, with a cold, brilliant, many-pointed radiance. Ryder
+stood glaring with a drawn face, uncertain whether to claim or to disown it.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The game’s up, Ryder,” said Holmes quietly. “Hold up,
+man, or you’ll be into the fire! Give him an arm back into his chair,
+Watson. He’s not got blood enough to go in for felony with impunity. Give
+him a dash of brandy. So! Now he looks a little more human. What a shrimp it
+is, to be sure!”
+</p>
+<p>
+For a moment he had staggered and nearly fallen, but the brandy brought a tinge
+of colour into his cheeks, and he sat staring with frightened eyes at his
+accuser.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have almost every link in my hands, and all the proofs which I could
+possibly need, so there is little which you need tell me. Still, that little
+may as well be cleared up to make the case complete. You had heard, Ryder, of
+this blue stone of the Countess of Morcar’s?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was Catherine Cusack who told me of it,” said he in a crackling
+voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I see—her ladyship’s waiting-maid. Well, the temptation of
+sudden wealth so easily acquired was too much for you, as it has been for
+better men before you; but you were not very scrupulous in the means you used.
+It seems to me, Ryder, that there is the making of a very pretty villain in
+you. You knew that this man Horner, the plumber, had been concerned in some
+such matter before, and that suspicion would rest the more readily upon him.
+What did you do, then? You made some small job in my lady’s
+room—you and your confederate Cusack—and you managed that he should
+be the man sent for. Then, when he had left, you rifled the jewel-case, raised
+the alarm, and had this unfortunate man arrested. You then—”
+</p>
+<p>
+Ryder threw himself down suddenly upon the rug and clutched at my
+companion’s knees. “For God’s sake, have mercy!” he
+shrieked. “Think of my father! Of my mother! It would break their hearts.
+I never went wrong before! I never will again. I swear it. I’ll swear it
+on a Bible. Oh, don’t bring it into court! For Christ’s sake,
+don’t!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Get back into your chair!” said Holmes sternly. “It is very
+well to cringe and crawl now, but you thought little enough of this poor Horner
+in the dock for a crime of which he knew nothing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I will fly, Mr. Holmes. I will leave the country, sir. Then the charge
+against him will break down.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hum! We will talk about that. And now let us hear a true account of the
+next act. How came the stone into the goose, and how came the goose into the
+open market? Tell us the truth, for there lies your only hope of safety.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Ryder passed his tongue over his parched lips. “I will tell you it just
+as it happened, sir,” said he. “When Horner had been arrested, it
+seemed to me that it would be best for me to get away with the stone at once,
+for I did not know at what moment the police might not take it into their heads
+to search me and my room. There was no place about the hotel where it would be
+safe. I went out, as if on some commission, and I made for my sister’s
+house. She had married a man named Oakshott, and lived in Brixton Road, where
+she fattened fowls for the market. All the way there every man I met seemed to
+me to be a policeman or a detective; and, for all that it was a cold night, the
+sweat was pouring down my face before I came to the Brixton Road. My sister
+asked me what was the matter, and why I was so pale; but I told her that I had
+been upset by the jewel robbery at the hotel. Then I went into the back yard
+and smoked a pipe and wondered what it would be best to do.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I had a friend once called Maudsley, who went to the bad, and has just
+been serving his time in Pentonville. One day he had met me, and fell into talk
+about the ways of thieves, and how they could get rid of what they stole. I
+knew that he would be true to me, for I knew one or two things about him; so I
+made up my mind to go right on to Kilburn, where he lived, and take him into my
+confidence. He would show me how to turn the stone into money. But how to get
+to him in safety? I thought of the agonies I had gone through in coming from
+the hotel. I might at any moment be seized and searched, and there would be the
+stone in my waistcoat pocket. I was leaning against the wall at the time and
+looking at the geese which were waddling about round my feet, and suddenly an
+idea came into my head which showed me how I could beat the best detective that
+ever lived.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My sister had told me some weeks before that I might have the pick of
+her geese for a Christmas present, and I knew that she was always as good as
+her word. I would take my goose now, and in it I would carry my stone to
+Kilburn. There was a little shed in the yard, and behind this I drove one of
+the birds—a fine big one, white, with a barred tail. I caught it, and
+prying its bill open, I thrust the stone down its throat as far as my finger
+could reach. The bird gave a gulp, and I felt the stone pass along its gullet
+and down into its crop. But the creature flapped and struggled, and out came my
+sister to know what was the matter. As I turned to speak to her the brute broke
+loose and fluttered off among the others.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Whatever were you doing with that bird, Jem?’ says
+she.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Well,’ said I, ‘you said you’d give me
+one for Christmas, and I was feeling which was the fattest.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Oh,’ says she, ‘we’ve set yours aside for
+you—Jem’s bird, we call it. It’s the big white one over
+yonder. There’s twenty-six of them, which makes one for you, and one for
+us, and two dozen for the market.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Thank you, Maggie,’ says I; ‘but if it is all
+the same to you, I’d rather have that one I was handling just now.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘The other is a good three pound heavier,’ said she,
+‘and we fattened it expressly for you.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Never mind. I’ll have the other, and I’ll take
+it now,’ said I.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Oh, just as you like,’ said she, a little huffed.
+‘Which is it you want, then?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘That white one with the barred tail, right in the middle of
+the flock.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Oh, very well. Kill it and take it with you.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, I did what she said, Mr. Holmes, and I carried the bird all the
+way to Kilburn. I told my pal what I had done, for he was a man that it was
+easy to tell a thing like that to. He laughed until he choked, and we got a
+knife and opened the goose. My heart turned to water, for there was no sign of
+the stone, and I knew that some terrible mistake had occurred. I left the bird,
+rushed back to my sister’s, and hurried into the back yard. There was not
+a bird to be seen there.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Where are they all, Maggie?’ I cried.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Gone to the dealer’s, Jem.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Which dealer’s?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Breckinridge, of Covent Garden.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘But was there another with a barred tail?’ I asked,
+‘the same as the one I chose?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Yes, Jem; there were two barred-tailed ones, and I could
+never tell them apart.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, then, of course I saw it all, and I ran off as hard as my feet
+would carry me to this man Breckinridge; but he had sold the lot at once, and
+not one word would he tell me as to where they had gone. You heard him
+yourselves to-night. Well, he has always answered me like that. My sister
+thinks that I am going mad. Sometimes I think that I am myself. And
+now—and now I am myself a branded thief, without ever having touched the
+wealth for which I sold my character. God help me! God help me!” He burst
+into convulsive sobbing, with his face buried in his hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a long silence, broken only by his heavy breathing and by the
+measured tapping of Sherlock Holmes’ finger-tips upon the edge of the
+table. Then my friend rose and threw open the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Get out!” said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What, sir! Oh, Heaven bless you!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No more words. Get out!”
+</p>
+<p>
+And no more words were needed. There was a rush, a clatter upon the stairs, the
+bang of a door, and the crisp rattle of running footfalls from the street.
+</p>
+<p>
+“After all, Watson,” said Holmes, reaching up his hand for his clay
+pipe, “I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies. If
+Horner were in danger it would be another thing; but this fellow will not
+appear against him, and the case must collapse. I suppose that I am commuting a
+felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not
+go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him to gaol now, and you
+make him a gaol-bird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness. Chance
+has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is
+its own reward. If you will have the goodness to touch the bell, Doctor, we
+will begin another investigation, in which, also a bird will be the chief
+feature.”
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap08"></a>VIII.<br>THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND</h2>
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 1.50em">O</span>n glancing over my
+notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years
+studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some
+comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he
+did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he
+refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards
+the unusual, and even the fantastic. Of all these varied cases, however, I
+cannot recall any which presented more singular features than that which was
+associated with the well-known Surrey family of the Roylotts of Stoke Moran.
+The events in question occurred in the early days of my association with
+Holmes, when we were sharing rooms as bachelors in Baker Street. It is possible
+that I might have placed them upon record before, but a promise of secrecy was
+made at the time, from which I have only been freed during the last month by
+the untimely death of the lady to whom the pledge was given. It is perhaps as
+well that the facts should now come to light, for I have reasons to know that
+there are widespread rumours as to the death of Dr. Grimesby Roylott which tend
+to make the matter even more terrible than the truth.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was early in April in the year ’83 that I woke one morning to find
+Sherlock Holmes standing, fully dressed, by the side of my bed. He was a late
+riser, as a rule, and as the clock on the mantelpiece showed me that it was
+only a quarter-past seven, I blinked up at him in some surprise, and perhaps
+just a little resentment, for I was myself regular in my habits.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very sorry to knock you up, Watson,” said he, “but
+it’s the common lot this morning. Mrs. Hudson has been knocked up, she
+retorted upon me, and I on you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What is it, then—a fire?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No; a client. It seems that a young lady has arrived in a considerable
+state of excitement, who insists upon seeing me. She is waiting now in the
+sitting-room. Now, when young ladies wander about the metropolis at this hour
+of the morning, and knock sleepy people up out of their beds, I presume that it
+is something very pressing which they have to communicate. Should it prove to
+be an interesting case, you would, I am sure, wish to follow it from the
+outset. I thought, at any rate, that I should call you and give you the
+chance.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My dear fellow, I would not miss it for anything.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I had no keener pleasure than in following Holmes in his professional
+investigations, and in admiring the rapid deductions, as swift as intuitions,
+and yet always founded on a logical basis with which he unravelled the problems
+which were submitted to him. I rapidly threw on my clothes and was ready in a
+few minutes to accompany my friend down to the sitting-room. A lady dressed in
+black and heavily veiled, who had been sitting in the window, rose as we
+entered.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good-morning, madam,” said Holmes cheerily. “My name is
+Sherlock Holmes. This is my intimate friend and associate, Dr. Watson, before
+whom you can speak as freely as before myself. Ha! I am glad to see that Mrs.
+Hudson has had the good sense to light the fire. Pray draw up to it, and I
+shall order you a cup of hot coffee, for I observe that you are
+shivering.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is not cold which makes me shiver,” said the woman in a low
+voice, changing her seat as requested.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is fear, Mr. Holmes. It is terror.” She raised her veil as she
+spoke, and we could see that she was indeed in a pitiable state of agitation,
+her face all drawn and grey, with restless frightened eyes, like those of some
+hunted animal. Her features and figure were those of a woman of thirty, but her
+hair was shot with premature grey, and her expression was weary and haggard.
+Sherlock Holmes ran her over with one of his quick, all-comprehensive glances.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You must not fear,” said he soothingly, bending forward and
+patting her forearm. “We shall soon set matters right, I have no doubt.
+You have come in by train this morning, I see.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You know me, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, but I observe the second half of a return ticket in the palm of your
+left glove. You must have started early, and yet you had a good drive in a
+dog-cart, along heavy roads, before you reached the station.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The lady gave a violent start and stared in bewilderment at my companion.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is no mystery, my dear madam,” said he, smiling. “The
+left arm of your jacket is spattered with mud in no less than seven places. The
+marks are perfectly fresh. There is no vehicle save a dog-cart which throws up
+mud in that way, and then only when you sit on the left-hand side of the
+driver.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Whatever your reasons may be, you are perfectly correct,” said
+she. “I started from home before six, reached Leatherhead at twenty past,
+and came in by the first train to Waterloo. Sir, I can stand this strain no
+longer; I shall go mad if it continues. I have no one to turn to—none,
+save only one, who cares for me, and he, poor fellow, can be of little aid. I
+have heard of you, Mr. Holmes; I have heard of you from Mrs. Farintosh, whom
+you helped in the hour of her sore need. It was from her that I had your
+address. Oh, sir, do you not think that you could help me, too, and at least
+throw a little light through the dense darkness which surrounds me? At present
+it is out of my power to reward you for your services, but in a month or six
+weeks I shall be married, with the control of my own income, and then at least
+you shall not find me ungrateful.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes turned to his desk and, unlocking it, drew out a small case-book, which
+he consulted.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Farintosh,” said he. “Ah yes, I recall the case; it was
+concerned with an opal tiara. I think it was before your time, Watson. I can
+only say, madam, that I shall be happy to devote the same care to your case as
+I did to that of your friend. As to reward, my profession is its own reward;
+but you are at liberty to defray whatever expenses I may be put to, at the time
+which suits you best. And now I beg that you will lay before us everything that
+may help us in forming an opinion upon the matter.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Alas!” replied our visitor, “the very horror of my situation
+lies in the fact that my fears are so vague, and my suspicions depend so
+entirely upon small points, which might seem trivial to another, that even he
+to whom of all others I have a right to look for help and advice looks upon all
+that I tell him about it as the fancies of a nervous woman. He does not say so,
+but I can read it from his soothing answers and averted eyes. But I have heard,
+Mr. Holmes, that you can see deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human
+heart. You may advise me how to walk amid the dangers which encompass
+me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am all attention, madam.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My name is Helen Stoner, and I am living with my stepfather, who is the
+last survivor of one of the oldest Saxon families in England, the Roylotts of
+Stoke Moran, on the western border of Surrey.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes nodded his head. “The name is familiar to me,” said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The family was at one time among the richest in England, and the estates
+extended over the borders into Berkshire in the north, and Hampshire in the
+west. In the last century, however, four successive heirs were of a dissolute
+and wasteful disposition, and the family ruin was eventually completed by a
+gambler in the days of the Regency. Nothing was left save a few acres of
+ground, and the two-hundred-year-old house, which is itself crushed under a
+heavy mortgage. The last squire dragged out his existence there, living the
+horrible life of an aristocratic pauper; but his only son, my stepfather,
+seeing that he must adapt himself to the new conditions, obtained an advance
+from a relative, which enabled him to take a medical degree and went out to
+Calcutta, where, by his professional skill and his force of character, he
+established a large practice. In a fit of anger, however, caused by some
+robberies which had been perpetrated in the house, he beat his native butler to
+death and narrowly escaped a capital sentence. As it was, he suffered a long
+term of imprisonment and afterwards returned to England a morose and
+disappointed man.
+</p>
+<p>
+“When Dr. Roylott was in India he married my mother, Mrs. Stoner, the
+young widow of Major-General Stoner, of the Bengal Artillery. My sister Julia
+and I were twins, and we were only two years old at the time of my
+mother’s re-marriage. She had a considerable sum of money—not less
+than £ 1000 a year—and this she bequeathed to Dr. Roylott entirely while
+we resided with him, with a provision that a certain annual sum should be
+allowed to each of us in the event of our marriage. Shortly after our return to
+England my mother died—she was killed eight years ago in a railway
+accident near Crewe. Dr. Roylott then abandoned his attempts to establish
+himself in practice in London and took us to live with him in the old ancestral
+house at Stoke Moran. The money which my mother had left was enough for all our
+wants, and there seemed to be no obstacle to our happiness.
+</p>
+<p>
+“But a terrible change came over our stepfather about this time. Instead
+of making friends and exchanging visits with our neighbours, who had at first
+been overjoyed to see a Roylott of Stoke Moran back in the old family seat, he
+shut himself up in his house and seldom came out save to indulge in ferocious
+quarrels with whoever might cross his path. Violence of temper approaching to
+mania has been hereditary in the men of the family, and in my
+stepfather’s case it had, I believe, been intensified by his long
+residence in the tropics. A series of disgraceful brawls took place, two of
+which ended in the police-court, until at last he became the terror of the
+village, and the folks would fly at his approach, for he is a man of immense
+strength, and absolutely uncontrollable in his anger.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Last week he hurled the local blacksmith over a parapet into a stream,
+and it was only by paying over all the money which I could gather together that
+I was able to avert another public exposure. He had no friends at all save the
+wandering gipsies, and he would give these vagabonds leave to encamp upon the
+few acres of bramble-covered land which represent the family estate, and would
+accept in return the hospitality of their tents, wandering away with them
+sometimes for weeks on end. He has a passion also for Indian animals, which are
+sent over to him by a correspondent, and he has at this moment a cheetah and a
+baboon, which wander freely over his grounds and are feared by the villagers
+almost as much as their master.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You can imagine from what I say that my poor sister Julia and I had no
+great pleasure in our lives. No servant would stay with us, and for a long time
+we did all the work of the house. She was but thirty at the time of her death,
+and yet her hair had already begun to whiten, even as mine has.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your sister is dead, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She died just two years ago, and it is of her death that I wish to speak
+to you. You can understand that, living the life which I have described, we
+were little likely to see anyone of our own age and position. We had, however,
+an aunt, my mother’s maiden sister, Miss Honoria Westphail, who lives
+near Harrow, and we were occasionally allowed to pay short visits at this
+lady’s house. Julia went there at Christmas two years ago, and met there
+a half-pay major of marines, to whom she became engaged. My stepfather learned
+of the engagement when my sister returned and offered no objection to the
+marriage; but within a fortnight of the day which had been fixed for the
+wedding, the terrible event occurred which has deprived me of my only
+companion.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes had been leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed and his
+head sunk in a cushion, but he half opened his lids now and glanced across at
+his visitor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pray be precise as to details,” said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is easy for me to be so, for every event of that dreadful time is
+seared into my memory. The manor-house is, as I have already said, very old,
+and only one wing is now inhabited. The bedrooms in this wing are on the ground
+floor, the sitting-rooms being in the central block of the buildings. Of these
+bedrooms the first is Dr. Roylott’s, the second my sister’s, and
+the third my own. There is no communication between them, but they all open out
+into the same corridor. Do I make myself plain?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Perfectly so.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The windows of the three rooms open out upon the lawn. That fatal night
+Dr. Roylott had gone to his room early, though we knew that he had not retired
+to rest, for my sister was troubled by the smell of the strong Indian cigars
+which it was his custom to smoke. She left her room, therefore, and came into
+mine, where she sat for some time, chatting about her approaching wedding. At
+eleven o’clock she rose to leave me, but she paused at the door and
+looked back.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Tell me, Helen,’ said she, ‘have you ever heard
+anyone whistle in the dead of the night?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Never,’ said I.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I suppose that you could not possibly whistle, yourself, in
+your sleep?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Certainly not. But why?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Because during the last few nights I have always, about
+three in the morning, heard a low, clear whistle. I am a light sleeper, and it
+has awakened me. I cannot tell where it came from—perhaps from the next
+room, perhaps from the lawn. I thought that I would just ask you whether you
+had heard it.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘No, I have not. It must be those wretched gipsies in the
+plantation.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Very likely. And yet if it were on the lawn, I wonder that
+you did not hear it also.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Ah, but I sleep more heavily than you.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Well, it is of no great consequence, at any rate.’
+She smiled back at me, closed my door, and a few moments later I heard her key
+turn in the lock.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Indeed,” said Holmes. “Was it your custom always to lock
+yourselves in at night?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Always.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And why?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think that I mentioned to you that the Doctor kept a cheetah and a
+baboon. We had no feeling of security unless our doors were locked.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Quite so. Pray proceed with your statement.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I could not sleep that night. A vague feeling of impending misfortune
+impressed me. My sister and I, you will recollect, were twins, and you know how
+subtle are the links which bind two souls which are so closely allied. It was a
+wild night. The wind was howling outside, and the rain was beating and
+splashing against the windows. Suddenly, amid all the hubbub of the gale, there
+burst forth the wild scream of a terrified woman. I knew that it was my
+sister’s voice. I sprang from my bed, wrapped a shawl round me, and
+rushed into the corridor. As I opened my door I seemed to hear a low whistle,
+such as my sister described, and a few moments later a clanging sound, as if a
+mass of metal had fallen. As I ran down the passage, my sister’s door was
+unlocked, and revolved slowly upon its hinges. I stared at it horror-stricken,
+not knowing what was about to issue from it. By the light of the corridor-lamp
+I saw my sister appear at the opening, her face blanched with terror, her hands
+groping for help, her whole figure swaying to and fro like that of a drunkard.
+I ran to her and threw my arms round her, but at that moment her knees seemed
+to give way and she fell to the ground. She writhed as one who is in terrible
+pain, and her limbs were dreadfully convulsed. At first I thought that she had
+not recognised me, but as I bent over her she suddenly shrieked out in a voice
+which I shall never forget, ‘Oh, my God! Helen! It was the band! The
+speckled band!’ There was something else which she would fain have said,
+and she stabbed with her finger into the air in the direction of the
+Doctor’s room, but a fresh convulsion seized her and choked her words. I
+rushed out, calling loudly for my stepfather, and I met him hastening from his
+room in his dressing-gown. When he reached my sister’s side she was
+unconscious, and though he poured brandy down her throat and sent for medical
+aid from the village, all efforts were in vain, for she slowly sank and died
+without having recovered her consciousness. Such was the dreadful end of my
+beloved sister.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“One moment,” said Holmes, “are you sure about this whistle
+and metallic sound? Could you swear to it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That was what the county coroner asked me at the inquiry. It is my
+strong impression that I heard it, and yet, among the crash of the gale and the
+creaking of an old house, I may possibly have been deceived.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Was your sister dressed?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, she was in her night-dress. In her right hand was found the charred
+stump of a match, and in her left a match-box.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Showing that she had struck a light and looked about her when the alarm
+took place. That is important. And what conclusions did the coroner come
+to?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He investigated the case with great care, for Dr. Roylott’s
+conduct had long been notorious in the county, but he was unable to find any
+satisfactory cause of death. My evidence showed that the door had been fastened
+upon the inner side, and the windows were blocked by old-fashioned shutters
+with broad iron bars, which were secured every night. The walls were carefully
+sounded, and were shown to be quite solid all round, and the flooring was also
+thoroughly examined, with the same result. The chimney is wide, but is barred
+up by four large staples. It is certain, therefore, that my sister was quite
+alone when she met her end. Besides, there were no marks of any violence upon
+her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How about poison?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The doctors examined her for it, but without success.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What do you think that this unfortunate lady died of, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is my belief that she died of pure fear and nervous shock, though
+what it was that frightened her I cannot imagine.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Were there gipsies in the plantation at the time?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, there are nearly always some there.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah, and what did you gather from this allusion to a band—a
+speckled band?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Sometimes I have thought that it was merely the wild talk of delirium,
+sometimes that it may have referred to some band of people, perhaps to these
+very gipsies in the plantation. I do not know whether the spotted handkerchiefs
+which so many of them wear over their heads might have suggested the strange
+adjective which she used.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes shook his head like a man who is far from being satisfied.
+</p>
+<p>
+“These are very deep waters,” said he; “pray go on with your
+narrative.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Two years have passed since then, and my life has been until lately
+lonelier than ever. A month ago, however, a dear friend, whom I have known for
+many years, has done me the honour to ask my hand in marriage. His name is
+Armitage—Percy Armitage—the second son of Mr. Armitage, of Crane
+Water, near Reading. My stepfather has offered no opposition to the match, and
+we are to be married in the course of the spring. Two days ago some repairs
+were started in the west wing of the building, and my bedroom wall has been
+pierced, so that I have had to move into the chamber in which my sister died,
+and to sleep in the very bed in which she slept. Imagine, then, my thrill of
+terror when last night, as I lay awake, thinking over her terrible fate, I
+suddenly heard in the silence of the night the low whistle which had been the
+herald of her own death. I sprang up and lit the lamp, but nothing was to be
+seen in the room. I was too shaken to go to bed again, however, so I dressed,
+and as soon as it was daylight I slipped down, got a dog-cart at the Crown Inn,
+which is opposite, and drove to Leatherhead, from whence I have come on this
+morning with the one object of seeing you and asking your advice.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have done wisely,” said my friend. “But have you told me
+all?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, all.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Miss Roylott, you have not. You are screening your stepfather.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, what do you mean?”
+</p>
+<p>
+For answer Holmes pushed back the frill of black lace which fringed the hand
+that lay upon our visitor’s knee. Five little livid spots, the marks of
+four fingers and a thumb, were printed upon the white wrist.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have been cruelly used,” said Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+The lady coloured deeply and covered over her injured wrist. “He is a
+hard man,” she said, “and perhaps he hardly knows his own
+strength.”
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a long silence, during which Holmes leaned his chin upon his hands
+and stared into the crackling fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This is a very deep business,” he said at last. “There are a
+thousand details which I should desire to know before I decide upon our course
+of action. Yet we have not a moment to lose. If we were to come to Stoke Moran
+to-day, would it be possible for us to see over these rooms without the
+knowledge of your stepfather?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“As it happens, he spoke of coming into town to-day upon some most
+important business. It is probable that he will be away all day, and that there
+would be nothing to disturb you. We have a housekeeper now, but she is old and
+foolish, and I could easily get her out of the way.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Excellent. You are not averse to this trip, Watson?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“By no means.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then we shall both come. What are you going to do yourself?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have one or two things which I would wish to do now that I am in town.
+But I shall return by the twelve o’clock train, so as to be there in time
+for your coming.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And you may expect us early in the afternoon. I have myself some small
+business matters to attend to. Will you not wait and breakfast?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I must go. My heart is lightened already since I have confided my
+trouble to you. I shall look forward to seeing you again this afternoon.”
+She dropped her thick black veil over her face and glided from the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And what do you think of it all, Watson?” asked Sherlock Holmes,
+leaning back in his chair.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It seems to me to be a most dark and sinister business.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Dark enough and sinister enough.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yet if the lady is correct in saying that the flooring and walls are
+sound, and that the door, window, and chimney are impassable, then her sister
+must have been undoubtedly alone when she met her mysterious end.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What becomes, then, of these nocturnal whistles, and what of the very
+peculiar words of the dying woman?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I cannot think.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“When you combine the ideas of whistles at night, the presence of a band
+of gipsies who are on intimate terms with this old doctor, the fact that we
+have every reason to believe that the doctor has an interest in preventing his
+stepdaughter’s marriage, the dying allusion to a band, and, finally, the
+fact that Miss Helen Stoner heard a metallic clang, which might have been
+caused by one of those metal bars that secured the shutters falling back into
+its place, I think that there is good ground to think that the mystery may be
+cleared along those lines.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But what, then, did the gipsies do?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I cannot imagine.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I see many objections to any such theory.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And so do I. It is precisely for that reason that we are going to Stoke
+Moran this day. I want to see whether the objections are fatal, or if they may
+be explained away. But what in the name of the devil!”
+</p>
+<p>
+The ejaculation had been drawn from my companion by the fact that our door had
+been suddenly dashed open, and that a huge man had framed himself in the
+aperture. His costume was a peculiar mixture of the professional and of the
+agricultural, having a black top-hat, a long frock-coat, and a pair of high
+gaiters, with a hunting-crop swinging in his hand. So tall was he that his hat
+actually brushed the cross bar of the doorway, and his breadth seemed to span
+it across from side to side. A large face, seared with a thousand wrinkles,
+burned yellow with the sun, and marked with every evil passion, was turned from
+one to the other of us, while his deep-set, bile-shot eyes, and his high, thin,
+fleshless nose, gave him somewhat the resemblance to a fierce old bird of prey.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Which of you is Holmes?” asked this apparition.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My name, sir; but you have the advantage of me,” said my companion
+quietly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Indeed, Doctor,” said Holmes blandly. “Pray take a
+seat.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I will do nothing of the kind. My stepdaughter has been here. I have
+traced her. What has she been saying to you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is a little cold for the time of the year,” said Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What has she been saying to you?” screamed the old man furiously.
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I have heard that the crocuses promise well,” continued my
+companion imperturbably.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ha! You put me off, do you?” said our new visitor, taking a step
+forward and shaking his hunting-crop. “I know you, you scoundrel! I have
+heard of you before. You are Holmes, the meddler.”
+</p>
+<p>
+My friend smiled.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Holmes, the busybody!”
+</p>
+<p>
+His smile broadened.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Holmes, the Scotland Yard Jack-in-office!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes chuckled heartily. “Your conversation is most entertaining,”
+said he. “When you go out close the door, for there is a decided
+draught.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I will go when I have had my say. Don’t you dare to meddle with my
+affairs. I know that Miss Stoner has been here. I traced her! I am a dangerous
+man to fall foul of! See here.” He stepped swiftly forward, seized the
+poker, and bent it into a curve with his huge brown hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+“See that you keep yourself out of my grip,” he snarled, and
+hurling the twisted poker into the fireplace he strode out of the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He seems a very amiable person,” said Holmes, laughing. “I
+am not quite so bulky, but if he had remained I might have shown him that my
+grip was not much more feeble than his own.” As he spoke he picked up the
+steel poker and, with a sudden effort, straightened it out again.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Fancy his having the insolence to confound me with the official
+detective force! This incident gives zest to our investigation, however, and I
+only trust that our little friend will not suffer from her imprudence in
+allowing this brute to trace her. And now, Watson, we shall order breakfast,
+and afterwards I shall walk down to Doctors’ Commons, where I hope to get
+some data which may help us in this matter.”
+</p>
+<p class="p2">
+It was nearly one o’clock when Sherlock Holmes returned from his
+excursion. He held in his hand a sheet of blue paper, scrawled over with notes
+and figures.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have seen the will of the deceased wife,” said he. “To
+determine its exact meaning I have been obliged to work out the present prices
+of the investments with which it is concerned. The total income, which at the
+time of the wife’s death was little short of £ 1,100, is now, through the
+fall in agricultural prices, not more than £ 750. Each daughter can claim an
+income of £ 250, in case of marriage. It is evident, therefore, that if both
+girls had married, this beauty would have had a mere pittance, while even one
+of them would cripple him to a very serious extent. My morning’s work has
+not been wasted, since it has proved that he has the very strongest motives for
+standing in the way of anything of the sort. And now, Watson, this is too
+serious for dawdling, especially as the old man is aware that we are
+interesting ourselves in his affairs; so if you are ready, we shall call a cab
+and drive to Waterloo. I should be very much obliged if you would slip your
+revolver into your pocket. An Eley’s No. 2 is an excellent argument with
+gentlemen who can twist steel pokers into knots. That and a tooth-brush are, I
+think, all that we need.”
+</p>
+<p>
+At Waterloo we were fortunate in catching a train for Leatherhead, where we
+hired a trap at the station inn and drove for four or five miles through the
+lovely Surrey lanes. It was a perfect day, with a bright sun and a few fleecy
+clouds in the heavens. The trees and wayside hedges were just throwing out
+their first green shoots, and the air was full of the pleasant smell of the
+moist earth. To me at least there was a strange contrast between the sweet
+promise of the spring and this sinister quest upon which we were engaged. My
+companion sat in the front of the trap, his arms folded, his hat pulled down
+over his eyes, and his chin sunk upon his breast, buried in the deepest
+thought. Suddenly, however, he started, tapped me on the shoulder, and pointed
+over the meadows.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Look there!” said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+A heavily timbered park stretched up in a gentle slope, thickening into a grove
+at the highest point. From amid the branches there jutted out the grey gables
+and high roof-tree of a very old mansion.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Stoke Moran?” said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, sir, that be the house of Dr. Grimesby Roylott,” remarked the
+driver.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is some building going on there,” said Holmes; “that
+is where we are going.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There’s the village,” said the driver, pointing to a cluster
+of roofs some distance to the left; “but if you want to get to the house,
+you’ll find it shorter to get over this stile, and so by the footpath
+over the fields. There it is, where the lady is walking.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And the lady, I fancy, is Miss Stoner,” observed Holmes, shading
+his eyes. “Yes, I think we had better do as you suggest.”
+</p>
+<p>
+We got off, paid our fare, and the trap rattled back on its way to Leatherhead.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I thought it as well,” said Holmes as we climbed the stile,
+“that this fellow should think we had come here as architects, or on some
+definite business. It may stop his gossip. Good-afternoon, Miss Stoner. You see
+that we have been as good as our word.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Our client of the morning had hurried forward to meet us with a face which
+spoke her joy. “I have been waiting so eagerly for you,” she cried,
+shaking hands with us warmly. “All has turned out splendidly. Dr. Roylott
+has gone to town, and it is unlikely that he will be back before
+evening.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We have had the pleasure of making the Doctor’s
+acquaintance,” said Holmes, and in a few words he sketched out what had
+occurred. Miss Stoner turned white to the lips as she listened.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good heavens!” she cried, “he has followed me, then.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“So it appears.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He is so cunning that I never know when I am safe from him. What will he
+say when he returns?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He must guard himself, for he may find that there is someone more
+cunning than himself upon his track. You must lock yourself up from him
+to-night. If he is violent, we shall take you away to your aunt’s at
+Harrow. Now, we must make the best use of our time, so kindly take us at once
+to the rooms which we are to examine.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The building was of grey, lichen-blotched stone, with a high central portion
+and two curving wings, like the claws of a crab, thrown out on each side. In
+one of these wings the windows were broken and blocked with wooden boards,
+while the roof was partly caved in, a picture of ruin. The central portion was
+in little better repair, but the right-hand block was comparatively modern, and
+the blinds in the windows, with the blue smoke curling up from the chimneys,
+showed that this was where the family resided. Some scaffolding had been
+erected against the end wall, and the stone-work had been broken into, but
+there were no signs of any workmen at the moment of our visit. Holmes walked
+slowly up and down the ill-trimmed lawn and examined with deep attention the
+outsides of the windows.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This, I take it, belongs to the room in which you used to sleep, the
+centre one to your sister’s, and the one next to the main building to Dr.
+Roylott’s chamber?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Exactly so. But I am now sleeping in the middle one.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pending the alterations, as I understand. By the way, there does not
+seem to be any very pressing need for repairs at that end wall.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There were none. I believe that it was an excuse to move me from my
+room.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah! that is suggestive. Now, on the other side of this narrow wing runs
+the corridor from which these three rooms open. There are windows in it, of
+course?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, but very small ones. Too narrow for anyone to pass through.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“As you both locked your doors at night, your rooms were unapproachable
+from that side. Now, would you have the kindness to go into your room and bar
+your shutters?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Stoner did so, and Holmes, after a careful examination through the open
+window, endeavoured in every way to force the shutter open, but without
+success. There was no slit through which a knife could be passed to raise the
+bar. Then with his lens he tested the hinges, but they were of solid iron,
+built firmly into the massive masonry. “Hum!” said he, scratching
+his chin in some perplexity, “my theory certainly presents some
+difficulties. No one could pass these shutters if they were bolted. Well, we
+shall see if the inside throws any light upon the matter.”
+</p>
+<p>
+A small side door led into the whitewashed corridor from which the three
+bedrooms opened. Holmes refused to examine the third chamber, so we passed at
+once to the second, that in which Miss Stoner was now sleeping, and in which
+her sister had met with her fate. It was a homely little room, with a low
+ceiling and a gaping fireplace, after the fashion of old country-houses. A
+brown chest of drawers stood in one corner, a narrow white-counterpaned bed in
+another, and a dressing-table on the left-hand side of the window. These
+articles, with two small wicker-work chairs, made up all the furniture in the
+room save for a square of Wilton carpet in the centre. The boards round and the
+panelling of the walls were of brown, worm-eaten oak, so old and discoloured
+that it may have dated from the original building of the house. Holmes drew one
+of the chairs into a corner and sat silent, while his eyes travelled round and
+round and up and down, taking in every detail of the apartment.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Where does that bell communicate with?” he asked at last pointing
+to a thick bell-rope which hung down beside the bed, the tassel actually lying
+upon the pillow.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It goes to the housekeeper’s room.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It looks newer than the other things?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, it was only put there a couple of years ago.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your sister asked for it, I suppose?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I never heard of her using it. We used always to get what we wanted
+for ourselves.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Indeed, it seemed unnecessary to put so nice a bell-pull there. You will
+excuse me for a few minutes while I satisfy myself as to this floor.” He
+threw himself down upon his face with his lens in his hand and crawled swiftly
+backward and forward, examining minutely the cracks between the boards. Then he
+did the same with the wood-work with which the chamber was panelled. Finally he
+walked over to the bed and spent some time in staring at it and in running his
+eye up and down the wall. Finally he took the bell-rope in his hand and gave it
+a brisk tug.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, it’s a dummy,” said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Won’t it ring?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, it is not even attached to a wire. This is very interesting. You can
+see now that it is fastened to a hook just above where the little opening for
+the ventilator is.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How very absurd! I never noticed that before.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very strange!” muttered Holmes, pulling at the rope. “There
+are one or two very singular points about this room. For example, what a fool a
+builder must be to open a ventilator into another room, when, with the same
+trouble, he might have communicated with the outside air!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is also quite modern,” said the lady.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Done about the same time as the bell-rope?” remarked Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, there were several little changes carried out about that
+time.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“They seem to have been of a most interesting character—dummy
+bell-ropes, and ventilators which do not ventilate. With your permission, Miss
+Stoner, we shall now carry our researches into the inner apartment.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Dr. Grimesby Roylott’s chamber was larger than that of his step-daughter,
+but was as plainly furnished. A camp-bed, a small wooden shelf full of books,
+mostly of a technical character, an armchair beside the bed, a plain wooden
+chair against the wall, a round table, and a large iron safe were the principal
+things which met the eye. Holmes walked slowly round and examined each and all
+of them with the keenest interest.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What’s in here?” he asked, tapping the safe.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My stepfather’s business papers.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh! you have seen inside, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Only once, some years ago. I remember that it was full of papers.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There isn’t a cat in it, for example?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No. What a strange idea!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, look at this!” He took up a small saucer of milk which stood
+on the top of it.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No; we don’t keep a cat. But there is a cheetah and a
+baboon.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah, yes, of course! Well, a cheetah is just a big cat, and yet a saucer
+of milk does not go very far in satisfying its wants, I daresay. There is one
+point which I should wish to determine.” He squatted down in front of the
+wooden chair and examined the seat of it with the greatest attention.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you. That is quite settled,” said he, rising and putting his
+lens in his pocket. “Hullo! Here is something interesting!”
+</p>
+<p>
+The object which had caught his eye was a small dog lash hung on one corner of
+the bed. The lash, however, was curled upon itself and tied so as to make a
+loop of whipcord.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What do you make of that, Watson?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s a common enough lash. But I don’t know why it should be
+tied.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is not quite so common, is it? Ah, me! it’s a wicked world,
+and when a clever man turns his brains to crime it is the worst of all. I think
+that I have seen enough now, Miss Stoner, and with your permission we shall
+walk out upon the lawn.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I had never seen my friend’s face so grim or his brow so dark as it was
+when we turned from the scene of this investigation. We had walked several
+times up and down the lawn, neither Miss Stoner nor myself liking to break in
+upon his thoughts before he roused himself from his reverie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is very essential, Miss Stoner,” said he, “that you
+should absolutely follow my advice in every respect.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I shall most certainly do so.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The matter is too serious for any hesitation. Your life may depend upon
+your compliance.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I assure you that I am in your hands.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In the first place, both my friend and I must spend the night in your
+room.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Both Miss Stoner and I gazed at him in astonishment.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, it must be so. Let me explain. I believe that that is the village
+inn over there?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, that is the Crown.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very good. Your windows would be visible from there?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Certainly.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You must confine yourself to your room, on pretence of a headache, when
+your stepfather comes back. Then when you hear him retire for the night, you
+must open the shutters of your window, undo the hasp, put your lamp there as a
+signal to us, and then withdraw quietly with everything which you are likely to
+want into the room which you used to occupy. I have no doubt that, in spite of
+the repairs, you could manage there for one night.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, yes, easily.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The rest you will leave in our hands.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But what will you do?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We shall spend the night in your room, and we shall investigate the
+cause of this noise which has disturbed you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I believe, Mr. Holmes, that you have already made up your mind,”
+said Miss Stoner, laying her hand upon my companion’s sleeve.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Perhaps I have.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then, for pity’s sake, tell me what was the cause of my
+sister’s death.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I should prefer to have clearer proofs before I speak.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You can at least tell me whether my own thought is correct, and if she
+died from some sudden fright.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I do not think so. I think that there was probably some more
+tangible cause. And now, Miss Stoner, we must leave you for if Dr. Roylott
+returned and saw us our journey would be in vain. Good-bye, and be brave, for
+if you will do what I have told you, you may rest assured that we shall soon
+drive away the dangers that threaten you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes and I had no difficulty in engaging a bedroom and sitting-room
+at the Crown Inn. They were on the upper floor, and from our window we could
+command a view of the avenue gate, and of the inhabited wing of Stoke Moran
+Manor House. At dusk we saw Dr. Grimesby Roylott drive past, his huge form
+looming up beside the little figure of the lad who drove him. The boy had some
+slight difficulty in undoing the heavy iron gates, and we heard the hoarse roar
+of the Doctor’s voice and saw the fury with which he shook his clinched
+fists at him. The trap drove on, and a few minutes later we saw a sudden light
+spring up among the trees as the lamp was lit in one of the sitting-rooms.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you know, Watson,” said Holmes as we sat together in the
+gathering darkness, “I have really some scruples as to taking you
+to-night. There is a distinct element of danger.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Can I be of assistance?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your presence might be invaluable.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then I shall certainly come.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is very kind of you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You speak of danger. You have evidently seen more in these rooms than
+was visible to me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, but I fancy that I may have deduced a little more. I imagine that
+you saw all that I did.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I saw nothing remarkable save the bell-rope, and what purpose that could
+answer I confess is more than I can imagine.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You saw the ventilator, too?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, but I do not think that it is such a very unusual thing to have a
+small opening between two rooms. It was so small that a rat could hardly pass
+through.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I knew that we should find a ventilator before ever we came to Stoke
+Moran.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My dear Holmes!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, yes, I did. You remember in her statement she said that her sister
+could smell Dr. Roylott’s cigar. Now, of course that suggested at once
+that there must be a communication between the two rooms. It could only be a
+small one, or it would have been remarked upon at the coroner’s inquiry.
+I deduced a ventilator.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But what harm can there be in that?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, there is at least a curious coincidence of dates. A ventilator is
+made, a cord is hung, and a lady who sleeps in the bed dies. Does not that
+strike you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I cannot as yet see any connection.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did you observe anything very peculiar about that bed?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was clamped to the floor. Did you ever see a bed fastened like that
+before?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I cannot say that I have.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The lady could not move her bed. It must always be in the same relative
+position to the ventilator and to the rope—or so we may call it, since it
+was clearly never meant for a bell-pull.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Holmes,” I cried, “I seem to see dimly what you are hinting
+at. We are only just in time to prevent some subtle and horrible crime.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Subtle enough and horrible enough. When a doctor does go wrong he is the
+first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge. Palmer and Pritchard
+were among the heads of their profession. This man strikes even deeper, but I
+think, Watson, that we shall be able to strike deeper still. But we shall have
+horrors enough before the night is over; for goodness’ sake let us have a
+quiet pipe and turn our minds for a few hours to something more
+cheerful.”
+</p>
+<p class="p2">
+About nine o’clock the light among the trees was extinguished, and all
+was dark in the direction of the Manor House. Two hours passed slowly away, and
+then, suddenly, just at the stroke of eleven, a single bright light shone out
+right in front of us.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is our signal,” said Holmes, springing to his feet; “it
+comes from the middle window.”
+</p>
+<p>
+As we passed out he exchanged a few words with the landlord, explaining that we
+were going on a late visit to an acquaintance, and that it was possible that we
+might spend the night there. A moment later we were out on the dark road, a
+chill wind blowing in our faces, and one yellow light twinkling in front of us
+through the gloom to guide us on our sombre errand.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was little difficulty in entering the grounds, for unrepaired breaches
+gaped in the old park wall. Making our way among the trees, we reached the
+lawn, crossed it, and were about to enter through the window when out from a
+clump of laurel bushes there darted what seemed to be a hideous and distorted
+child, who threw itself upon the grass with writhing limbs and then ran swiftly
+across the lawn into the darkness.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My God!” I whispered; “did you see it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes was for the moment as startled as I. His hand closed like a vice upon my
+wrist in his agitation. Then he broke into a low laugh and put his lips to my
+ear.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is a nice household,” he murmured. “That is the
+baboon.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I had forgotten the strange pets which the Doctor affected. There was a
+cheetah, too; perhaps we might find it upon our shoulders at any moment. I
+confess that I felt easier in my mind when, after following Holmes’
+example and slipping off my shoes, I found myself inside the bedroom. My
+companion noiselessly closed the shutters, moved the lamp onto the table, and
+cast his eyes round the room. All was as we had seen it in the daytime. Then
+creeping up to me and making a trumpet of his hand, he whispered into my ear
+again so gently that it was all that I could do to distinguish the words:
+</p>
+<p>
+“The least sound would be fatal to our plans.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I nodded to show that I had heard.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We must sit without light. He would see it through the
+ventilator.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I nodded again.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do not go asleep; your very life may depend upon it. Have your pistol
+ready in case we should need it. I will sit on the side of the bed, and you in
+that chair.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I took out my revolver and laid it on the corner of the table.
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes had brought up a long thin cane, and this he placed upon the bed beside
+him. By it he laid the box of matches and the stump of a candle. Then he turned
+down the lamp, and we were left in darkness.
+</p>
+<p>
+How shall I ever forget that dreadful vigil? I could not hear a sound, not even
+the drawing of a breath, and yet I knew that my companion sat open-eyed, within
+a few feet of me, in the same state of nervous tension in which I was myself.
+The shutters cut off the least ray of light, and we waited in absolute
+darkness.
+</p>
+<p>
+From outside came the occasional cry of a night-bird, and once at our very
+window a long drawn catlike whine, which told us that the cheetah was indeed at
+liberty. Far away we could hear the deep tones of the parish clock, which
+boomed out every quarter of an hour. How long they seemed, those quarters!
+Twelve struck, and one and two and three, and still we sat waiting silently for
+whatever might befall.
+</p>
+<p>
+Suddenly there was the momentary gleam of a light up in the direction of the
+ventilator, which vanished immediately, but was succeeded by a strong smell of
+burning oil and heated metal. Someone in the next room had lit a dark-lantern.
+I heard a gentle sound of movement, and then all was silent once more, though
+the smell grew stronger. For half an hour I sat with straining ears. Then
+suddenly another sound became audible—a very gentle, soothing sound, like
+that of a small jet of steam escaping continually from a kettle. The instant
+that we heard it, Holmes sprang from the bed, struck a match, and lashed
+furiously with his cane at the bell-pull.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You see it, Watson?” he yelled. “You see it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+But I saw nothing. At the moment when Holmes struck the light I heard a low,
+clear whistle, but the sudden glare flashing into my weary eyes made it
+impossible for me to tell what it was at which my friend lashed so savagely. I
+could, however, see that his face was deadly pale and filled with horror and
+loathing. He had ceased to strike and was gazing up at the ventilator when
+suddenly there broke from the silence of the night the most horrible cry to
+which I have ever listened. It swelled up louder and louder, a hoarse yell of
+pain and fear and anger all mingled in the one dreadful shriek. They say that
+away down in the village, and even in the distant parsonage, that cry raised
+the sleepers from their beds. It struck cold to our hearts, and I stood gazing
+at Holmes, and he at me, until the last echoes of it had died away into the
+silence from which it rose.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What can it mean?” I gasped.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It means that it is all over,” Holmes answered. “And
+perhaps, after all, it is for the best. Take your pistol, and we will enter Dr.
+Roylott’s room.”
+</p>
+<p>
+With a grave face he lit the lamp and led the way down the corridor. Twice he
+struck at the chamber door without any reply from within. Then he turned the
+handle and entered, I at his heels, with the cocked pistol in my hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was a singular sight which met our eyes. On the table stood a dark-lantern
+with the shutter half open, throwing a brilliant beam of light upon the iron
+safe, the door of which was ajar. Beside this table, on the wooden chair, sat
+Dr. Grimesby Roylott clad in a long grey dressing-gown, his bare ankles
+protruding beneath, and his feet thrust into red heelless Turkish slippers.
+Across his lap lay the short stock with the long lash which we had noticed
+during the day. His chin was cocked upward and his eyes were fixed in a
+dreadful, rigid stare at the corner of the ceiling. Round his brow he had a
+peculiar yellow band, with brownish speckles, which seemed to be bound tightly
+round his head. As we entered he made neither sound nor motion.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The band! the speckled band!” whispered Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+I took a step forward. In an instant his strange headgear began to move, and
+there reared itself from among his hair the squat diamond-shaped head and
+puffed neck of a loathsome serpent.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is a swamp adder!” cried Holmes; “the deadliest snake in
+India. He has died within ten seconds of being bitten. Violence does, in truth,
+recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for
+another. Let us thrust this creature back into its den, and we can then remove
+Miss Stoner to some place of shelter and let the county police know what has
+happened.”
+</p>
+<p>
+As he spoke he drew the dog-whip swiftly from the dead man’s lap, and
+throwing the noose round the reptile’s neck he drew it from its horrid
+perch and, carrying it at arm’s length, threw it into the iron safe,
+which he closed upon it.
+</p>
+<p class="p2">
+Such are the true facts of the death of Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran.
+It is not necessary that I should prolong a narrative which has already run to
+too great a length by telling how we broke the sad news to the terrified girl,
+how we conveyed her by the morning train to the care of her good aunt at
+Harrow, of how the slow process of official inquiry came to the conclusion that
+the doctor met his fate while indiscreetly playing with a dangerous pet. The
+little which I had yet to learn of the case was told me by Sherlock Holmes as
+we travelled back next day.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I had,” said he, “come to an entirely erroneous conclusion
+which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from
+insufficient data. The presence of the gipsies, and the use of the word
+‘band,’ which was used by the poor girl, no doubt, to explain the
+appearance which she had caught a hurried glimpse of by the light of her match,
+were sufficient to put me upon an entirely wrong scent. I can only claim the
+merit that I instantly reconsidered my position when, however, it became clear
+to me that whatever danger threatened an occupant of the room could not come
+either from the window or the door. My attention was speedily drawn, as I have
+already remarked to you, to this ventilator, and to the bell-rope which hung
+down to the bed. The discovery that this was a dummy, and that the bed was
+clamped to the floor, instantly gave rise to the suspicion that the rope was
+there as a bridge for something passing through the hole and coming to the bed.
+The idea of a snake instantly occurred to me, and when I coupled it with my
+knowledge that the doctor was furnished with a supply of creatures from India,
+I felt that I was probably on the right track. The idea of using a form of
+poison which could not possibly be discovered by any chemical test was just
+such a one as would occur to a clever and ruthless man who had had an Eastern
+training. The rapidity with which such a poison would take effect would also,
+from his point of view, be an advantage. It would be a sharp-eyed coroner,
+indeed, who could distinguish the two little dark punctures which would show
+where the poison fangs had done their work. Then I thought of the whistle. Of
+course he must recall the snake before the morning light revealed it to the
+victim. He had trained it, probably by the use of the milk which we saw, to
+return to him when summoned. He would put it through this ventilator at the
+hour that he thought best, with the certainty that it would crawl down the rope
+and land on the bed. It might or might not bite the occupant, perhaps she might
+escape every night for a week, but sooner or later she must fall a victim.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I had come to these conclusions before ever I had entered his room. An
+inspection of his chair showed me that he had been in the habit of standing on
+it, which of course would be necessary in order that he should reach the
+ventilator. The sight of the safe, the saucer of milk, and the loop of whipcord
+were enough to finally dispel any doubts which may have remained. The metallic
+clang heard by Miss Stoner was obviously caused by her stepfather hastily
+closing the door of his safe upon its terrible occupant. Having once made up my
+mind, you know the steps which I took in order to put the matter to the proof.
+I heard the creature hiss as I have no doubt that you did also, and I instantly
+lit the light and attacked it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“With the result of driving it through the ventilator.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And also with the result of causing it to turn upon its master at the
+other side. Some of the blows of my cane came home and roused its snakish
+temper, so that it flew upon the first person it saw. In this way I am no doubt
+indirectly responsible for Dr. Grimesby Roylott’s death, and I cannot say
+that it is likely to weigh very heavily upon my conscience.”
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap09"></a>IX.<br>THE ADVENTURE OF THE ENGINEER’S THUMB</h2>
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 1.50em">O</span>f all the problems
+which have been submitted to my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for solution
+during the years of our intimacy, there were only two which I was the means of
+introducing to his notice—that of Mr. Hatherley’s thumb, and that
+of Colonel Warburton’s madness. Of these the latter may have afforded a
+finer field for an acute and original observer, but the other was so strange in
+its inception and so dramatic in its details that it may be the more worthy of
+being placed upon record, even if it gave my friend fewer openings for those
+deductive methods of reasoning by which he achieved such remarkable results.
+The story has, I believe, been told more than once in the newspapers, but, like
+all such narratives, its effect is much less striking when set forth <i>en
+bloc</i> in a single half-column of print than when the facts slowly evolve
+before your own eyes, and the mystery clears gradually away as each new
+discovery furnishes a step which leads on to the complete truth. At the time
+the circumstances made a deep impression upon me, and the lapse of two years
+has hardly served to weaken the effect.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was in the summer of ’89, not long after my marriage, that the events
+occurred which I am now about to summarise. I had returned to civil practice
+and had finally abandoned Holmes in his Baker Street rooms, although I
+continually visited him and occasionally even persuaded him to forgo his
+Bohemian habits so far as to come and visit us. My practice had steadily
+increased, and as I happened to live at no very great distance from Paddington
+Station, I got a few patients from among the officials. One of these, whom I
+had cured of a painful and lingering disease, was never weary of advertising my
+virtues and of endeavouring to send me on every sufferer over whom he might
+have any influence.
+</p>
+<p>
+One morning, at a little before seven o’clock, I was awakened by the maid
+tapping at the door to announce that two men had come from Paddington and were
+waiting in the consulting-room. I dressed hurriedly, for I knew by experience
+that railway cases were seldom trivial, and hastened downstairs. As I
+descended, my old ally, the guard, came out of the room and closed the door
+tightly behind him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ve got him here,” he whispered, jerking his thumb over his
+shoulder; “he’s all right.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What is it, then?” I asked, for his manner suggested that it was
+some strange creature which he had caged up in my room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s a new patient,” he whispered. “I thought
+I’d bring him round myself; then he couldn’t slip away. There he
+is, all safe and sound. I must go now, Doctor; I have my dooties, just the same
+as you.” And off he went, this trusty tout, without even giving me time
+to thank him.
+</p>
+<p>
+I entered my consulting-room and found a gentleman seated by the table. He was
+quietly dressed in a suit of heather tweed with a soft cloth cap which he had
+laid down upon my books. Round one of his hands he had a handkerchief wrapped,
+which was mottled all over with bloodstains. He was young, not more than
+five-and-twenty, I should say, with a strong, masculine face; but he was
+exceedingly pale and gave me the impression of a man who was suffering from
+some strong agitation, which it took all his strength of mind to control.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am sorry to knock you up so early, Doctor,” said he, “but
+I have had a very serious accident during the night. I came in by train this
+morning, and on inquiring at Paddington as to where I might find a doctor, a
+worthy fellow very kindly escorted me here. I gave the maid a card, but I see
+that she has left it upon the side-table.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I took it up and glanced at it. “Mr. Victor Hatherley, hydraulic
+engineer, 16A, Victoria Street (3rd floor).” That was the name, style,
+and abode of my morning visitor. “I regret that I have kept you
+waiting,” said I, sitting down in my library-chair. “You are fresh
+from a night journey, I understand, which is in itself a monotonous
+occupation.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, my night could not be called monotonous,” said he, and
+laughed. He laughed very heartily, with a high, ringing note, leaning back in
+his chair and shaking his sides. All my medical instincts rose up against that
+laugh.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Stop it!” I cried; “pull yourself together!” and I
+poured out some water from a caraffe.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was useless, however. He was off in one of those hysterical outbursts which
+come upon a strong nature when some great crisis is over and gone. Presently he
+came to himself once more, very weary and pale-looking.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have been making a fool of myself,” he gasped.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not at all. Drink this.” I dashed some brandy into the water, and
+the colour began to come back to his bloodless cheeks.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s better!” said he. “And now, Doctor, perhaps you
+would kindly attend to my thumb, or rather to the place where my thumb used to
+be.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He unwound the handkerchief and held out his hand. It gave even my hardened
+nerves a shudder to look at it. There were four protruding fingers and a horrid
+red, spongy surface where the thumb should have been. It had been hacked or
+torn right out from the roots.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good heavens!” I cried, “this is a terrible injury. It must
+have bled considerably.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, it did. I fainted when it was done, and I think that I must have
+been senseless for a long time. When I came to I found that it was still
+bleeding, so I tied one end of my handkerchief very tightly round the wrist and
+braced it up with a twig.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Excellent! You should have been a surgeon.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is a question of hydraulics, you see, and came within my own
+province.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“This has been done,” said I, examining the wound, “by a very
+heavy and sharp instrument.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A thing like a cleaver,” said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+“An accident, I presume?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“By no means.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What! a murderous attack?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very murderous indeed.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You horrify me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I sponged the wound, cleaned it, dressed it, and finally covered it over with
+cotton wadding and carbolised bandages. He lay back without wincing, though he
+bit his lip from time to time.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How is that?” I asked when I had finished.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Capital! Between your brandy and your bandage, I feel a new man. I was
+very weak, but I have had a good deal to go through.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Perhaps you had better not speak of the matter. It is evidently trying
+to your nerves.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, no, not now. I shall have to tell my tale to the police; but,
+between ourselves, if it were not for the convincing evidence of this wound of
+mine, I should be surprised if they believed my statement, for it is a very
+extraordinary one, and I have not much in the way of proof with which to back
+it up; and, even if they believe me, the clues which I can give them are so
+vague that it is a question whether justice will be done.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ha!” cried I, “if it is anything in the nature of a problem
+which you desire to see solved, I should strongly recommend you to come to my
+friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, before you go to the official police.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, I have heard of that fellow,” answered my visitor, “and
+I should be very glad if he would take the matter up, though of course I must
+use the official police as well. Would you give me an introduction to
+him?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ll do better. I’ll take you round to him myself.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I should be immensely obliged to you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We’ll call a cab and go together. We shall just be in time to have
+a little breakfast with him. Do you feel equal to it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes; I shall not feel easy until I have told my story.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then my servant will call a cab, and I shall be with you in an
+instant.” I rushed upstairs, explained the matter shortly to my wife, and
+in five minutes was inside a hansom, driving with my new acquaintance to Baker
+Street.
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes was, as I expected, lounging about his sitting-room in his
+dressing-gown, reading the agony column of <i>The Times</i> and smoking his
+before-breakfast pipe, which was composed of all the plugs and dottles left
+from his smokes of the day before, all carefully dried and collected on the
+corner of the mantelpiece. He received us in his quietly genial fashion,
+ordered fresh rashers and eggs, and joined us in a hearty meal. When it was
+concluded he settled our new acquaintance upon the sofa, placed a pillow
+beneath his head, and laid a glass of brandy and water within his reach.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is easy to see that your experience has been no common one, Mr.
+Hatherley,” said he. “Pray, lie down there and make yourself
+absolutely at home. Tell us what you can, but stop when you are tired and keep
+up your strength with a little stimulant.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you,” said my patient, “but I have felt another man
+since the doctor bandaged me, and I think that your breakfast has completed the
+cure. I shall take up as little of your valuable time as possible, so I shall
+start at once upon my peculiar experiences.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes sat in his big armchair with the weary, heavy-lidded expression which
+veiled his keen and eager nature, while I sat opposite to him, and we listened
+in silence to the strange story which our visitor detailed to us.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You must know,” said he, “that I am an orphan and a
+bachelor, residing alone in lodgings in London. By profession I am a hydraulic
+engineer, and I have had considerable experience of my work during the seven
+years that I was apprenticed to Venner &amp; Matheson, the well-known firm, of
+Greenwich. Two years ago, having served my time, and having also come into a
+fair sum of money through my poor father’s death, I determined to start
+in business for myself and took professional chambers in Victoria Street.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I suppose that everyone finds his first independent start in business a
+dreary experience. To me it has been exceptionally so. During two years I have
+had three consultations and one small job, and that is absolutely all that my
+profession has brought me. My gross takings amount to £ 27 10<i>s</i>. Every
+day, from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, I waited in my
+little den, until at last my heart began to sink, and I came to believe that I
+should never have any practice at all.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yesterday, however, just as I was thinking of leaving the office, my
+clerk entered to say there was a gentleman waiting who wished to see me upon
+business. He brought up a card, too, with the name of ‘Colonel Lysander
+Stark’ engraved upon it. Close at his heels came the colonel himself, a
+man rather over the middle size, but of an exceeding thinness. I do not think
+that I have ever seen so thin a man. His whole face sharpened away into nose
+and chin, and the skin of his cheeks was drawn quite tense over his outstanding
+bones. Yet this emaciation seemed to be his natural habit, and due to no
+disease, for his eye was bright, his step brisk, and his bearing assured. He
+was plainly but neatly dressed, and his age, I should judge, would be nearer
+forty than thirty.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Mr. Hatherley?’ said he, with something of a German
+accent. ‘You have been recommended to me, Mr. Hatherley, as being a man
+who is not only proficient in his profession but is also discreet and capable
+of preserving a secret.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“I bowed, feeling as flattered as any young man would at such an address.
+‘May I ask who it was who gave me so good a character?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Well, perhaps it is better that I should not tell you that
+just at this moment. I have it from the same source that you are both an orphan
+and a bachelor and are residing alone in London.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘That is quite correct,’ I answered; ‘but you
+will excuse me if I say that I cannot see how all this bears upon my
+professional qualifications. I understand that it was on a professional matter
+that you wished to speak to me?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Undoubtedly so. But you will find that all I say is really
+to the point. I have a professional commission for you, but absolute secrecy is
+quite essential—absolute secrecy, you understand, and of course we may
+expect that more from a man who is alone than from one who lives in the bosom
+of his family.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘If I promise to keep a secret,’ said I, ‘you
+may absolutely depend upon my doing so.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“He looked very hard at me as I spoke, and it seemed to me that I had
+never seen so suspicious and questioning an eye.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Do you promise, then?’ said he at last.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Yes, I promise.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Absolute and complete silence before, during, and after? No
+reference to the matter at all, either in word or writing?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I have already given you my word.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Very good.’ He suddenly sprang up, and darting like
+lightning across the room he flung open the door. The passage outside was
+empty.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘That’s all right,’ said he, coming back.
+‘I know that clerks are sometimes curious as to their master’s
+affairs. Now we can talk in safety.’ He drew up his chair very close to
+mine and began to stare at me again with the same questioning and thoughtful
+look.
+</p>
+<p>
+“A feeling of repulsion, and of something akin to fear had begun to rise
+within me at the strange antics of this fleshless man. Even my dread of losing
+a client could not restrain me from showing my impatience.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I beg that you will state your business, sir,’ said
+I; ‘my time is of value.’ Heaven forgive me for that last sentence,
+but the words came to my lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘How would fifty guineas for a night’s work suit
+you?’ he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Most admirably.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I say a night’s work, but an hour’s would be
+nearer the mark. I simply want your opinion about a hydraulic stamping machine
+which has got out of gear. If you show us what is wrong we shall soon set it
+right ourselves. What do you think of such a commission as that?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘The work appears to be light and the pay munificent.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Precisely so. We shall want you to come to-night by the
+last train.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Where to?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘To Eyford, in Berkshire. It is a little place near the
+borders of Oxfordshire, and within seven miles of Reading. There is a train
+from Paddington which would bring you there at about 11:15.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Very good.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I shall come down in a carriage to meet you.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘There is a drive, then?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Yes, our little place is quite out in the country. It is a
+good seven miles from Eyford Station.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Then we can hardly get there before midnight. I suppose
+there would be no chance of a train back. I should be compelled to stop the
+night.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Yes, we could easily give you a shake-down.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘That is very awkward. Could I not come at some more
+convenient hour?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘We have judged it best that you should come late. It is to
+recompense you for any inconvenience that we are paying to you, a young and
+unknown man, a fee which would buy an opinion from the very heads of your
+profession. Still, of course, if you would like to draw out of the business,
+there is plenty of time to do so.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“I thought of the fifty guineas, and of how very useful they would be to
+me. ‘Not at all,’ said I, ‘I shall be very happy to
+accommodate myself to your wishes. I should like, however, to understand a
+little more clearly what it is that you wish me to do.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Quite so. It is very natural that the pledge of secrecy
+which we have exacted from you should have aroused your curiosity. I have no
+wish to commit you to anything without your having it all laid before you. I
+suppose that we are absolutely safe from eavesdroppers?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Entirely.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Then the matter stands thus. You are probably aware that
+fuller’s-earth is a valuable product, and that it is only found in one or
+two places in England?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I have heard so.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Some little time ago I bought a small place—a very
+small place—within ten miles of Reading. I was fortunate enough to
+discover that there was a deposit of fuller’s-earth in one of my fields.
+On examining it, however, I found that this deposit was a comparatively small
+one, and that it formed a link between two very much larger ones upon the right
+and left—both of them, however, in the grounds of my neighbours. These
+good people were absolutely ignorant that their land contained that which was
+quite as valuable as a gold-mine. Naturally, it was to my interest to buy their
+land before they discovered its true value, but unfortunately I had no capital
+by which I could do this. I took a few of my friends into the secret, however,
+and they suggested that we should quietly and secretly work our own little
+deposit and that in this way we should earn the money which would enable us to
+buy the neighbouring fields. This we have now been doing for some time, and in
+order to help us in our operations we erected a hydraulic press. This press, as
+I have already explained, has got out of order, and we wish your advice upon
+the subject. We guard our secret very jealously, however, and if it once became
+known that we had hydraulic engineers coming to our little house, it would soon
+rouse inquiry, and then, if the facts came out, it would be good-bye to any
+chance of getting these fields and carrying out our plans. That is why I have
+made you promise me that you will not tell a human being that you are going to
+Eyford to-night. I hope that I make it all plain?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I quite follow you,’ said I. ‘The only point
+which I could not quite understand was what use you could make of a hydraulic
+press in excavating fuller’s-earth, which, as I understand, is dug out
+like gravel from a pit.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Ah!’ said he carelessly, ‘we have our own
+process. We compress the earth into bricks, so as to remove them without
+revealing what they are. But that is a mere detail. I have taken you fully into
+my confidence now, Mr. Hatherley, and I have shown you how I trust you.’
+He rose as he spoke. ‘I shall expect you, then, at Eyford at
+11:15.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I shall certainly be there.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘And not a word to a soul.’ He looked at me with a
+last long, questioning gaze, and then, pressing my hand in a cold, dank grasp,
+he hurried from the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, when I came to think it all over in cool blood I was very much
+astonished, as you may both think, at this sudden commission which had been
+intrusted to me. On the one hand, of course, I was glad, for the fee was at
+least tenfold what I should have asked had I set a price upon my own services,
+and it was possible that this order might lead to other ones. On the other
+hand, the face and manner of my patron had made an unpleasant impression upon
+me, and I could not think that his explanation of the fuller’s-earth was
+sufficient to explain the necessity for my coming at midnight, and his extreme
+anxiety lest I should tell anyone of my errand. However, I threw all fears to
+the winds, ate a hearty supper, drove to Paddington, and started off, having
+obeyed to the letter the injunction as to holding my tongue.
+</p>
+<p>
+“At Reading I had to change not only my carriage but my station. However,
+I was in time for the last train to Eyford, and I reached the little dim-lit
+station after eleven o’clock. I was the only passenger who got out there,
+and there was no one upon the platform save a single sleepy porter with a
+lantern. As I passed out through the wicket gate, however, I found my
+acquaintance of the morning waiting in the shadow upon the other side. Without
+a word he grasped my arm and hurried me into a carriage, the door of which was
+standing open. He drew up the windows on either side, tapped on the wood-work,
+and away we went as fast as the horse could go.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“One horse?” interjected Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, only one.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did you observe the colour?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, I saw it by the side-lights when I was stepping into the carriage.
+It was a chestnut.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Tired-looking or fresh?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, fresh and glossy.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you. I am sorry to have interrupted you. Pray continue your most
+interesting statement.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Away we went then, and we drove for at least an hour. Colonel Lysander
+Stark had said that it was only seven miles, but I should think, from the rate
+that we seemed to go, and from the time that we took, that it must have been
+nearer twelve. He sat at my side in silence all the time, and I was aware, more
+than once when I glanced in his direction, that he was looking at me with great
+intensity. The country roads seem to be not very good in that part of the
+world, for we lurched and jolted terribly. I tried to look out of the windows
+to see something of where we were, but they were made of frosted glass, and I
+could make out nothing save the occasional bright blur of a passing light. Now
+and then I hazarded some remark to break the monotony of the journey, but the
+colonel answered only in monosyllables, and the conversation soon flagged. At
+last, however, the bumping of the road was exchanged for the crisp smoothness
+of a gravel-drive, and the carriage came to a stand. Colonel Lysander Stark
+sprang out, and, as I followed after him, pulled me swiftly into a porch which
+gaped in front of us. We stepped, as it were, right out of the carriage and
+into the hall, so that I failed to catch the most fleeting glance of the front
+of the house. The instant that I had crossed the threshold the door slammed
+heavily behind us, and I heard faintly the rattle of the wheels as the carriage
+drove away.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was pitch dark inside the house, and the colonel fumbled about
+looking for matches and muttering under his breath. Suddenly a door opened at
+the other end of the passage, and a long, golden bar of light shot out in our
+direction. It grew broader, and a woman appeared with a lamp in her hand, which
+she held above her head, pushing her face forward and peering at us. I could
+see that she was pretty, and from the gloss with which the light shone upon her
+dark dress I knew that it was a rich material. She spoke a few words in a
+foreign tongue in a tone as though asking a question, and when my companion
+answered in a gruff monosyllable she gave such a start that the lamp nearly
+fell from her hand. Colonel Stark went up to her, whispered something in her
+ear, and then, pushing her back into the room from whence she had come, he
+walked towards me again with the lamp in his hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Perhaps you will have the kindness to wait in this room for
+a few minutes,’ said he, throwing open another door. It was a quiet,
+little, plainly furnished room, with a round table in the centre, on which
+several German books were scattered. Colonel Stark laid down the lamp on the
+top of a harmonium beside the door. ‘I shall not keep you waiting an
+instant,’ said he, and vanished into the darkness.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I glanced at the books upon the table, and in spite of my ignorance of
+German I could see that two of them were treatises on science, the others being
+volumes of poetry. Then I walked across to the window, hoping that I might
+catch some glimpse of the country-side, but an oak shutter, heavily barred, was
+folded across it. It was a wonderfully silent house. There was an old clock
+ticking loudly somewhere in the passage, but otherwise everything was deadly
+still. A vague feeling of uneasiness began to steal over me. Who were these
+German people, and what were they doing living in this strange, out-of-the-way
+place? And where was the place? I was ten miles or so from Eyford, that was all
+I knew, but whether north, south, east, or west I had no idea. For that matter,
+Reading, and possibly other large towns, were within that radius, so the place
+might not be so secluded, after all. Yet it was quite certain, from the
+absolute stillness, that we were in the country. I paced up and down the room,
+humming a tune under my breath to keep up my spirits and feeling that I was
+thoroughly earning my fifty-guinea fee.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Suddenly, without any preliminary sound in the midst of the utter
+stillness, the door of my room swung slowly open. The woman was standing in the
+aperture, the darkness of the hall behind her, the yellow light from my lamp
+beating upon her eager and beautiful face. I could see at a glance that she was
+sick with fear, and the sight sent a chill to my own heart. She held up one
+shaking finger to warn me to be silent, and she shot a few whispered words of
+broken English at me, her eyes glancing back, like those of a frightened horse,
+into the gloom behind her.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I would go,’ said she, trying hard, as it seemed to
+me, to speak calmly; ‘I would go. I should not stay here. There is no
+good for you to do.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘But, madam,’ said I, ‘I have not yet done what
+I came for. I cannot possibly leave until I have seen the machine.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘It is not worth your while to wait,’ she went on.
+‘You can pass through the door; no one hinders.’ And then, seeing
+that I smiled and shook my head, she suddenly threw aside her constraint and
+made a step forward, with her hands wrung together. ‘For the love of
+Heaven!’ she whispered, ‘get away from here before it is too
+late!’
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I am somewhat headstrong by nature, and the more ready to engage in
+an affair when there is some obstacle in the way. I thought of my fifty-guinea
+fee, of my wearisome journey, and of the unpleasant night which seemed to be
+before me. Was it all to go for nothing? Why should I slink away without having
+carried out my commission, and without the payment which was my due? This woman
+might, for all I knew, be a monomaniac. With a stout bearing, therefore, though
+her manner had shaken me more than I cared to confess, I still shook my head
+and declared my intention of remaining where I was. She was about to renew her
+entreaties when a door slammed overhead, and the sound of several footsteps was
+heard upon the stairs. She listened for an instant, threw up her hands with a
+despairing gesture, and vanished as suddenly and as noiselessly as she had
+come.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The newcomers were Colonel Lysander Stark and a short thick man with a
+chinchilla beard growing out of the creases of his double chin, who was
+introduced to me as Mr. Ferguson.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘This is my secretary and manager,’ said the colonel.
+‘By the way, I was under the impression that I left this door shut just
+now. I fear that you have felt the draught.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘On the contrary,’ said I, ‘I opened the door
+myself because I felt the room to be a little close.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“He shot one of his suspicious looks at me. ‘Perhaps we had better
+proceed to business, then,’ said he. ‘Mr. Ferguson and I will take
+you up to see the machine.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I had better put my hat on, I suppose.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Oh, no, it is in the house.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘What, you dig fuller’s-earth in the house?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘No, no. This is only where we compress it. But never mind
+that. All we wish you to do is to examine the machine and to let us know what
+is wrong with it.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“We went upstairs together, the colonel first with the lamp, the fat
+manager and I behind him. It was a labyrinth of an old house, with corridors,
+passages, narrow winding staircases, and little low doors, the thresholds of
+which were hollowed out by the generations who had crossed them. There were no
+carpets and no signs of any furniture above the ground floor, while the plaster
+was peeling off the walls, and the damp was breaking through in green,
+unhealthy blotches. I tried to put on as unconcerned an air as possible, but I
+had not forgotten the warnings of the lady, even though I disregarded them, and
+I kept a keen eye upon my two companions. Ferguson appeared to be a morose and
+silent man, but I could see from the little that he said that he was at least a
+fellow-countryman.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Colonel Lysander Stark stopped at last before a low door, which he
+unlocked. Within was a small, square room, in which the three of us could
+hardly get at one time. Ferguson remained outside, and the colonel ushered me
+in.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘We are now,’ said he, ‘actually within the
+hydraulic press, and it would be a particularly unpleasant thing for us if
+anyone were to turn it on. The ceiling of this small chamber is really the end
+of the descending piston, and it comes down with the force of many tons upon
+this metal floor. There are small lateral columns of water outside which
+receive the force, and which transmit and multiply it in the manner which is
+familiar to you. The machine goes readily enough, but there is some stiffness
+in the working of it, and it has lost a little of its force. Perhaps you will
+have the goodness to look it over and to show us how we can set it
+right.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“I took the lamp from him, and I examined the machine very thoroughly. It
+was indeed a gigantic one, and capable of exercising enormous pressure. When I
+passed outside, however, and pressed down the levers which controlled it, I
+knew at once by the whishing sound that there was a slight leakage, which
+allowed a regurgitation of water through one of the side cylinders. An
+examination showed that one of the india-rubber bands which was round the head
+of a driving-rod had shrunk so as not quite to fill the socket along which it
+worked. This was clearly the cause of the loss of power, and I pointed it out
+to my companions, who followed my remarks very carefully and asked several
+practical questions as to how they should proceed to set it right. When I had
+made it clear to them, I returned to the main chamber of the machine and took a
+good look at it to satisfy my own curiosity. It was obvious at a glance that
+the story of the fuller’s-earth was the merest fabrication, for it would
+be absurd to suppose that so powerful an engine could be designed for so
+inadequate a purpose. The walls were of wood, but the floor consisted of a
+large iron trough, and when I came to examine it I could see a crust of
+metallic deposit all over it. I had stooped and was scraping at this to see
+exactly what it was when I heard a muttered exclamation in German and saw the
+cadaverous face of the colonel looking down at me.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘What are you doing there?’ he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I felt angry at having been tricked by so elaborate a story as that
+which he had told me. ‘I was admiring your fuller’s-earth,’
+said I; ‘I think that I should be better able to advise you as to your
+machine if I knew what the exact purpose was for which it was used.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“The instant that I uttered the words I regretted the rashness of my
+speech. His face set hard, and a baleful light sprang up in his grey eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Very well,’ said he, ‘you shall know all about
+the machine.’ He took a step backward, slammed the little door, and
+turned the key in the lock. I rushed towards it and pulled at the handle, but
+it was quite secure, and did not give in the least to my kicks and shoves.
+‘Hullo!’ I yelled. ‘Hullo! Colonel! Let me out!’
+</p>
+<p>
+“And then suddenly in the silence I heard a sound which sent my heart
+into my mouth. It was the clank of the levers and the swish of the leaking
+cylinder. He had set the engine at work. The lamp still stood upon the floor
+where I had placed it when examining the trough. By its light I saw that the
+black ceiling was coming down upon me, slowly, jerkily, but, as none knew
+better than myself, with a force which must within a minute grind me to a
+shapeless pulp. I threw myself, screaming, against the door, and dragged with
+my nails at the lock. I implored the colonel to let me out, but the remorseless
+clanking of the levers drowned my cries. The ceiling was only a foot or two
+above my head, and with my hand upraised I could feel its hard, rough surface.
+Then it flashed through my mind that the pain of my death would depend very
+much upon the position in which I met it. If I lay on my face the weight would
+come upon my spine, and I shuddered to think of that dreadful snap. Easier the
+other way, perhaps; and yet, had I the nerve to lie and look up at that deadly
+black shadow wavering down upon me? Already I was unable to stand erect, when
+my eye caught something which brought a gush of hope back to my heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have said that though the floor and ceiling were of iron, the walls
+were of wood. As I gave a last hurried glance around, I saw a thin line of
+yellow light between two of the boards, which broadened and broadened as a
+small panel was pushed backward. For an instant I could hardly believe that
+here was indeed a door which led away from death. The next instant I threw
+myself through, and lay half-fainting upon the other side. The panel had closed
+again behind me, but the crash of the lamp, and a few moments afterwards the
+clang of the two slabs of metal, told me how narrow had been my escape.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was recalled to myself by a frantic plucking at my wrist, and I found
+myself lying upon the stone floor of a narrow corridor, while a woman bent over
+me and tugged at me with her left hand, while she held a candle in her right.
+It was the same good friend whose warning I had so foolishly rejected.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Come! come!’ she cried breathlessly. ‘They will
+be here in a moment. They will see that you are not there. Oh, do not waste the
+so-precious time, but come!’
+</p>
+<p>
+“This time, at least, I did not scorn her advice. I staggered to my feet
+and ran with her along the corridor and down a winding stair. The latter led to
+another broad passage, and just as we reached it we heard the sound of running
+feet and the shouting of two voices, one answering the other from the floor on
+which  we were and from the one beneath. My guide stopped and looked about her
+like one  who is at her wit’s end. Then she threw open a door which led
+into a bedroom, through the window of which the moon was shining brightly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘It is your only chance,’ said she. ‘It is high,
+but it may be that you can jump it.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“As she spoke a light sprang into view at the further end of the passage,
+and I saw the lean figure of Colonel Lysander Stark rushing forward with a
+lantern in one hand and a weapon like a butcher’s cleaver in the other. I
+rushed across the bedroom, flung open the window, and looked out. How quiet and
+sweet and wholesome the garden looked in the moonlight, and it could not be
+more than thirty feet down. I clambered out upon the sill, but I hesitated to
+jump until I should have heard what passed between my saviour and the ruffian
+who pursued me. If she were ill-used, then at any risks I was determined to go
+back to her assistance. The thought had hardly flashed through my mind before
+he was at the door, pushing his way past her; but she threw her arms round him
+and tried to hold him back.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Fritz! Fritz!’ she cried in English, ‘remember
+your promise after the last time. You said it should not be again. He will be
+silent! Oh, he will be silent!’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘You are mad, Elise!’ he shouted, struggling to break
+away from her. ‘You will be the ruin of us. He has seen too much. Let me
+pass, I say!’ He dashed her to one side, and, rushing to the window, cut
+at me with his heavy weapon. I had let myself go, and was hanging by the hands
+to the sill, when his blow fell. I was conscious of a dull pain, my grip
+loosened, and I fell into the garden below.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was shaken but not hurt by the fall; so I picked myself up and rushed
+off among the bushes as hard as I could run, for I understood that I was far
+from being out of danger yet. Suddenly, however, as I ran, a deadly dizziness
+and sickness came over me. I glanced down at my hand, which was throbbing
+painfully, and then, for the first time, saw that my thumb had been cut off and
+that the blood was pouring from my wound. I endeavoured to tie my handkerchief
+round it, but there came a sudden buzzing in my ears, and next moment I fell in
+a dead faint among the rose-bushes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How long I remained unconscious I cannot tell. It must have been a very
+long time, for the moon had sunk, and a bright morning was breaking when I came
+to myself. My clothes were all sodden with dew, and my coat-sleeve was drenched
+with blood from my wounded thumb. The smarting of it recalled in an instant all
+the particulars of my night’s adventure, and I sprang to my feet with the
+feeling that I might hardly yet be safe from my pursuers. But to my
+astonishment, when I came to look round me, neither house nor garden were to be
+seen. I had been lying in an angle of the hedge close by the high road, and just
+a little lower down was a long building, which proved, upon my approaching it,
+to be the very station at which I had arrived upon the previous night. Were it
+not for the ugly wound upon my hand, all that had passed during those dreadful
+hours might have been an evil dream.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Half dazed, I went into the station and asked about the morning train.
+There would be one to Reading in less than an hour. The same porter was on
+duty, I found, as had been there when I arrived. I inquired of him whether he
+had ever heard of Colonel Lysander Stark. The name was strange to him. Had he
+observed a carriage the night before waiting for me? No, he had not. Was there
+a police-station anywhere near? There was one about three miles off.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was too far for me to go, weak and ill as I was. I determined to wait
+until I got back to town before telling my story to the police. It was a little
+past six when I arrived, so I went first to have my wound dressed, and then the
+doctor was kind enough to bring me along here. I put the case into your hands
+and shall do exactly what you advise.”
+</p>
+<p>
+We both sat in silence for some little time after listening to this
+extraordinary narrative. Then Sherlock Holmes pulled down from the shelf one of
+the ponderous commonplace books in which he placed his cuttings.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Here is an advertisement which will interest you,” said he.
+“It appeared in all the papers about a year ago. Listen to this:
+‘Lost, on the 9th inst., Mr. Jeremiah Hayling, aged twenty-six, a
+hydraulic engineer. Left his lodgings at ten o’clock at night, and has
+not been heard of since. Was dressed in,’ etc., etc. Ha! That represents
+the last time that the colonel needed to have his machine overhauled, I
+fancy.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good heavens!” cried my patient. “Then that explains what
+the girl said.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Undoubtedly. It is quite clear that the colonel was a cool and desperate
+man, who was absolutely determined that nothing should stand in the way of his
+little game, like those out-and-out pirates who will leave no survivor from a
+captured ship. Well, every moment now is precious, so if you feel equal to it
+we shall go down to Scotland Yard at once as a preliminary to starting for
+Eyford.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Some three hours or so afterwards we were all in the train together, bound from
+Reading to the little Berkshire village. There were Sherlock Holmes, the
+hydraulic engineer, Inspector Bradstreet, of Scotland Yard, a plain-clothes
+man, and myself. Bradstreet had spread an ordnance map of the county out upon
+the seat and was busy with his compasses drawing a circle with Eyford for its
+centre.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There you are,” said he. “That circle is drawn at a radius
+of ten miles from the village. The place we want must be somewhere near that
+line. You said ten miles, I think, sir.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was an hour’s good drive.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And you think that they brought you back all that way when you were
+unconscious?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“They must have done so. I have a confused memory, too, of having been
+lifted and conveyed somewhere.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What I cannot understand,” said I, “is why they should have
+spared you when they found you lying fainting in the garden. Perhaps the
+villain was softened by the woman’s entreaties.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I hardly think that likely. I never saw a more inexorable face in my
+life.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, we shall soon clear up all that,” said Bradstreet.
+“Well, I have drawn my circle, and I only wish I knew at what point upon
+it the folk that we are in search of are to be found.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think I could lay my finger on it,” said Holmes quietly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Really, now!” cried the inspector, “you have formed your
+opinion! Come, now, we shall see who agrees with you. I say it is south, for
+the country is more deserted there.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And I say east,” said my patient.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am for west,” remarked the plain-clothes man. “There are
+several quiet little villages up there.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And I am for north,” said I, “because there are no hills
+there, and our friend says that he did not notice the carriage go up
+any.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come,” cried the inspector, laughing; “it’s a very
+pretty diversity of opinion. We have boxed the compass among us. Who do you
+give your casting vote to?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are all wrong.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But we can’t all be.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, yes, you can. This is my point.” He placed his finger in the
+centre of the circle. “This is where we shall find them.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But the twelve-mile drive?” gasped Hatherley.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Six out and six back. Nothing simpler. You say yourself that the horse
+was fresh and glossy when you got in. How could it be that if it had gone
+twelve miles over heavy roads?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Indeed, it is a likely ruse enough,” observed Bradstreet
+thoughtfully. “Of course there can be no doubt as to the nature of this
+gang.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“None at all,” said Holmes. “They are coiners on a large
+scale, and have used the machine to form the amalgam which has taken the place
+of silver.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We have known for some time that a clever gang was at work,” said
+the inspector. “They have been turning out half-crowns by the thousand.
+We even traced them as far as Reading, but could get no farther, for they had
+covered their traces in a way that showed that they were very old hands. But
+now, thanks to this lucky chance, I think that we have got them right
+enough.”
+</p>
+<p>
+But the inspector was mistaken, for those criminals were not destined to fall
+into the hands of justice. As we rolled into Eyford Station we saw a gigantic
+column of smoke which streamed up from behind a small clump of trees in the
+neighbourhood and hung like an immense ostrich feather over the landscape.
+</p>
+<p>
+“A house on fire?” asked Bradstreet as the train steamed off again
+on its way.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, sir!” said the station-master.
+</p>
+<p>
+“When did it break out?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I hear that it was during the night, sir, but it has got worse, and the
+whole place is in a blaze.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Whose house is it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Dr. Becher’s.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Tell me,” broke in the engineer, “is Dr. Becher a German,
+very thin, with a long, sharp nose?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The station-master laughed heartily. “No, sir, Dr. Becher is an
+Englishman, and there isn’t a man in the parish who has a better-lined
+waistcoat. But he has a gentleman staying with him, a patient, as I understand,
+who is a foreigner, and he looks as if a little good Berkshire beef would do
+him no harm.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The station-master had not finished his speech before we were all hastening in
+the direction of the fire. The road topped a low hill, and there was a great
+widespread whitewashed building in front of us, spouting fire at every chink
+and window, while in the garden in front three fire-engines were vainly
+striving to keep the flames under.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s it!” cried Hatherley, in intense excitement.
+“There is the gravel-drive, and there are the rose-bushes where I lay.
+That second window is the one that I jumped from.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, at least,” said Holmes, “you have had your revenge
+upon them. There can be no question that it was your oil-lamp which, when it
+was crushed in the press, set fire to the wooden walls, though no doubt they
+were too excited in the chase after you to observe it at the time. Now keep
+your eyes open in this crowd for your friends of last night, though I very much
+fear that they are a good hundred miles off by now.”
+</p>
+<p>
+And Holmes’ fears came to be realised, for from that day to this no word
+has ever been heard either of the beautiful woman, the sinister German, or the
+morose Englishman. Early that morning a peasant had met a cart containing
+several people and some very bulky boxes driving rapidly in the direction of
+Reading, but there all traces of the fugitives disappeared, and even
+Holmes’ ingenuity failed ever to discover the least clue as to their
+whereabouts.
+</p>
+<p>
+The firemen had been much perturbed at the strange arrangements which they had
+found within, and still more so by discovering a newly severed human thumb upon
+a window-sill of the second floor. About sunset, however, their efforts were at
+last successful, and they subdued the flames, but not before the roof had
+fallen in, and the whole place been reduced to such absolute ruin that, save
+some twisted cylinders and iron piping, not a trace remained of the machinery
+which had cost our unfortunate acquaintance so dearly. Large masses of nickel
+and of tin were discovered stored in an out-house, but no coins were to be
+found, which may have explained the presence of those bulky boxes which have
+been already referred to.
+</p>
+<p>
+How our hydraulic engineer had been conveyed from the garden to the spot where
+he recovered his senses might have remained forever a mystery were it not for
+the soft mould, which told us a very plain tale. He had evidently been carried
+down by two persons, one of whom had remarkably small feet and the other
+unusually large ones. On the whole, it was most probable that the silent
+Englishman, being less bold or less murderous than his companion, had assisted
+the woman to bear the unconscious man out of the way of danger.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well,” said our engineer ruefully as we took our seats to return
+once more to London, “it has been a pretty business for me! I have lost
+my thumb and I have lost a fifty-guinea fee, and what have I gained?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Experience,” said Holmes, laughing. “Indirectly it may be of
+value, you know; you have only to put it into words to gain the reputation of
+being excellent company for the remainder of your existence.”
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap10"></a>X.<br>THE ADVENTURE OF THE NOBLE BACHELOR</h2>
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 1.50em">T</span>he Lord St. Simon
+marriage, and its curious termination, have long ceased to be a subject of
+interest in those exalted circles in which the unfortunate bridegroom moves.
+Fresh scandals have eclipsed it, and their more piquant details have drawn the
+gossips away from this four-year-old drama. As I have reason to believe,
+however, that the full facts have never been revealed to the general public,
+and as my friend Sherlock Holmes had a considerable share in clearing the
+matter up, I feel that no memoir of him would be complete without some little
+sketch of this remarkable episode.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was a few weeks before my own marriage, during the days when I was still
+sharing rooms with Holmes in Baker Street, that he came home from an afternoon
+stroll to find a letter on the table waiting for him. I had remained indoors
+all day, for the weather had taken a sudden turn to rain, with high autumnal
+winds, and the jezail bullet which I had brought back in one of my limbs as a
+relic of my Afghan campaign throbbed with dull persistence. With my body in one
+easy-chair and my legs upon another, I had surrounded myself with a cloud of
+newspapers until at last, saturated with the news of the day, I tossed them all
+aside and lay listless, watching the huge crest and monogram upon the envelope
+upon the table and wondering lazily who my friend’s noble correspondent
+could be.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Here is a very fashionable epistle,” I remarked as he entered.
+“Your morning letters, if I remember right, were from a fish-monger and a
+tide-waiter.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, my correspondence has certainly the charm of variety,” he
+answered, smiling, “and the humbler are usually the more interesting.
+This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man
+either to be bored or to lie.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He broke the seal and glanced over the contents.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, come, it may prove to be something of interest, after all.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not social, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, distinctly professional.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And from a noble client?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“One of the highest in England.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My dear fellow, I congratulate you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I assure you, Watson, without affectation, that the status of my client
+is a matter of less moment to me than the interest of his case. It is just
+possible, however, that that also may not be wanting in this new investigation.
+You have been reading the papers diligently of late, have you not?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It looks like it,” said I ruefully, pointing to a huge bundle in
+the corner. “I have had nothing else to do.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is fortunate, for you will perhaps be able to post me up. I read
+nothing except the criminal news and the agony column. The latter is always
+instructive. But if you have followed recent events so closely you must have
+read about Lord St. Simon and his wedding?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, yes, with the deepest interest.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is well. The letter which I hold in my hand is from Lord St. Simon.
+I will read it to you, and in return you must turn over these papers and let me
+have whatever bears upon the matter. This is what he says:
+</p>
+<p class="letter">
+“‘MY DEAR MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES,—Lord Backwater tells me
+that I may place implicit reliance upon your judgment and discretion. I have
+determined, therefore, to call upon you and to consult you in reference to the
+very painful event which has occurred in connection with my wedding. Mr.
+Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, is acting already in the matter, but he assures me
+that he sees no objection to your co-operation, and that he even thinks that it
+might be of some assistance. I will call at four o’clock in the
+afternoon, and, should you have any other engagement at that time, I hope that
+you will postpone it, as this matter is of paramount importance. Yours
+faithfully,
+</p>
+<p class="right">
+“‘ROBERT ST. SIMON.’
+</p>
+<p class="p2">
+“It is dated from Grosvenor Mansions, written with a quill pen, and the
+noble lord has had the misfortune to get a smear of ink upon the outer side of
+his right little finger,” remarked Holmes as he folded up the epistle.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He says four o’clock. It is three now. He will be here in an
+hour.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then I have just time, with your assistance, to get clear upon the
+subject. Turn over those papers and arrange the extracts in their order of
+time, while I take a glance as to who our client is.” He picked a
+red-covered volume from a line of books of reference beside the mantelpiece.
+“Here he is,” said he, sitting down and flattening it out upon his
+knee. “‘Lord Robert Walsingham de Vere St. Simon, second son
+of the Duke of Balmoral.’ Hum! ‘Arms: Azure, three caltrops in
+chief over a fess sable. Born in 1846.’ He’s forty-one years of
+age, which is mature for marriage. Was Under-Secretary for the colonies in a
+late administration. The Duke, his father, was at one time Secretary for
+Foreign Affairs. They inherit Plantagenet blood by direct descent, and Tudor on
+the distaff side. Ha! Well, there is nothing very instructive in all this. I
+think that I must turn to you Watson, for something more solid.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have very little difficulty in finding what I want,” said I,
+“for the facts are quite recent, and the matter struck me as remarkable.
+I feared to refer them to you, however, as I knew that you had an inquiry on
+hand and that you disliked the intrusion of other matters.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, you mean the little problem of the Grosvenor Square furniture van.
+That is quite cleared up now—though, indeed, it was obvious from the
+first. Pray give me the results of your newspaper selections.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Here is the first notice which I can find. It is in the personal column
+of the <i>Morning Post</i>, and dates, as you see, some weeks back: ‘A
+marriage has been arranged,’ it says, ‘and will, if rumour is
+correct, very shortly take place, between Lord Robert St. Simon, second son of
+the Duke of Balmoral, and Miss Hatty Doran, the only daughter of Aloysius
+Doran. Esq., of San Francisco, Cal., U.S.A.’ That is all.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Terse and to the point,” remarked Holmes, stretching his long,
+thin legs towards the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There was a paragraph amplifying this in one of the society papers of
+the same week. Ah, here it is: ‘There will soon be a call for protection
+in the marriage  market, for the present free-trade principle appears to tell
+heavily against our home product. One by one the management of the noble houses
+of Great Britain is passing into the hands of our fair cousins from across the
+Atlantic. An important addition has been made during the last week to the list
+of the prizes which have been borne away by these charming invaders. Lord St.
+Simon, who has shown himself for over twenty years proof against the little
+god’s arrows, has now definitely announced his approaching marriage with
+Miss Hatty Doran, the fascinating daughter of a California millionaire. Miss
+Doran, whose graceful figure and striking face attracted much attention at the
+Westbury House festivities, is an only child, and it is currently reported that
+her dowry will run to considerably over the six figures, with expectancies for
+the future. As it is an open secret that the Duke of Balmoral has been
+compelled to sell his pictures within the last few years, and as Lord St. Simon
+has no property of his own save the small estate of Birchmoor, it is obvious
+that the Californian heiress is not the only gainer by an alliance which will
+enable her to make the easy and common transition from a Republican lady to a
+British peeress.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Anything else?” asked Holmes, yawning.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, yes; plenty. Then there is another note in the <i>Morning Post</i>
+to say that the marriage would be an absolutely quiet one, that it would be at
+St. George’s, Hanover Square, that only half a dozen intimate friends
+would be invited, and that the party would return to the furnished house at
+Lancaster Gate which has been taken by Mr. Aloysius Doran. Two days
+later—that is, on Wednesday last—there is a curt announcement that
+the wedding had taken place, and that the honeymoon would be passed at Lord
+Backwater’s place, near Petersfield. Those are all the notices which
+appeared before the disappearance of the bride.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Before the what?” asked Holmes with a start.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The vanishing of the lady.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“When did she vanish, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“At the wedding breakfast.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Indeed. This is more interesting than it promised to be; quite dramatic,
+in fact.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes; it struck me as being a little out of the common.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“They often vanish before the ceremony, and occasionally during the
+honeymoon; but I cannot call to mind anything quite so prompt as this. Pray let
+me have the details.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I warn you that they are very incomplete.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Perhaps we may make them less so.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Such as they are, they are set forth in a single article of a morning
+paper of yesterday, which I will read to you. It is headed, ‘Singular
+Occurrence at a Fashionable Wedding’:
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘The family of Lord Robert St. Simon has been thrown into
+the greatest consternation by the strange and painful episodes which have taken
+place in connection with his wedding. The ceremony, as shortly announced in the
+papers of yesterday, occurred on the previous morning; but it is only now that
+it has been possible to confirm the strange rumours which have been so
+persistently floating about. In spite of the attempts of the friends to hush
+the matter up, so much public attention has now been drawn to it that no good
+purpose can be served by affecting to disregard what is a common subject for
+conversation.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘The ceremony, which was performed at St. George’s,
+Hanover Square, was a very quiet one, no one being present save the father of
+the bride, Mr. Aloysius Doran, the Duchess of Balmoral, Lord Backwater, Lord
+Eustace and Lady Clara St. Simon (the younger brother and sister of the
+bridegroom), and Lady Alicia Whittington. The whole party proceeded afterwards
+to the house of Mr. Aloysius Doran, at Lancaster Gate, where breakfast had been
+prepared. It appears that some little trouble was caused by a woman, whose name
+has not been ascertained, who endeavoured to force her way into the house after
+the bridal party, alleging that she had some claim upon Lord St. Simon. It was
+only after a painful and prolonged scene that she was ejected by the butler and
+the footman. The bride, who had fortunately entered the house before this
+unpleasant interruption, had sat down to breakfast with the rest, when she
+complained of a sudden indisposition and retired to her room. Her prolonged
+absence having caused some comment, her father followed her, but learned from
+her maid that she had only come up to her chamber for an instant, caught up an
+ulster and bonnet, and hurried down to the passage. One of the footmen declared
+that he had seen a lady leave the house thus apparelled, but had refused to
+credit that it was his mistress, believing her to be with the company. On
+ascertaining that his daughter had disappeared, Mr. Aloysius Doran, in
+conjunction with the bridegroom, instantly put themselves in communication with
+the police, and very energetic inquiries are being made, which will probably
+result in a speedy clearing up of this very singular business. Up to a late
+hour last night, however, nothing had transpired as to the whereabouts of the
+missing lady. There are rumours of foul play in the matter, and it is said that
+the police have caused the arrest of the woman who had caused the original
+disturbance, in the belief that, from jealousy or some other motive, she may
+have been concerned in the strange disappearance of the
+bride.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And is that all?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Only one little item in another of the morning papers, but it is a
+suggestive one.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And it is—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That Miss Flora Millar, the lady who had caused the disturbance, has
+actually been arrested. It appears that she was formerly a <i>danseuse</i> at
+the Allegro, and that she has known the bridegroom for some years. There are no
+further particulars, and the whole case is in your hands now—so far as it
+has been set forth in the public press.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And an exceedingly interesting case it appears to be. I would not have
+missed it for worlds. But there is a ring at the bell, Watson, and as the clock
+makes it a few minutes after four, I have no doubt that this will prove to be
+our noble client. Do not dream of going, Watson, for I very much prefer having
+a witness, if only as a check to my own memory.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Lord Robert St. Simon,” announced our page-boy, throwing open the
+door. A gentleman entered, with a pleasant, cultured face, high-nosed and pale,
+with something perhaps of petulance about the mouth, and with the steady,
+well-opened eye of a man whose pleasant lot it had ever been to command and to
+be obeyed. His manner was brisk, and yet his general appearance gave an undue
+impression of age, for he had a slight forward stoop and a little bend of the
+knees as he walked. His hair, too, as he swept off his very curly-brimmed hat,
+was grizzled round the edges and thin upon the top. As to his dress, it was
+careful to the verge of foppishness, with high collar, black frock-coat, white
+waistcoat, yellow gloves, patent-leather shoes, and light-coloured gaiters. He
+advanced slowly into the room, turning his head from left to right, and
+swinging in his right hand the cord which held his golden eyeglasses.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good-day, Lord St. Simon,” said Holmes, rising and bowing.
+“Pray take the basket-chair. This is my friend and colleague, Dr. Watson.
+Draw up a little to the fire, and we will talk this matter over.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A most painful matter to me, as you can most readily imagine, Mr.
+Holmes. I have been cut to the quick. I understand that you have already
+managed several delicate cases of this sort, sir, though I presume that they
+were hardly from the same class of society.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I am descending.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I beg pardon.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My last client of the sort was a king.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, really! I had no idea. And which king?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The King of Scandinavia.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What! Had he lost his wife?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You can understand,” said Holmes suavely, “that I extend to
+the affairs of my other clients the same secrecy which I promise to you in
+yours.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course! Very right! very right! I’m sure I beg pardon. As to my
+own case, I am ready to give you any information which may assist you in
+forming an opinion.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you. I have already learned all that is in the public prints,
+nothing more. I presume that I may take it as correct—this article, for
+example, as to the disappearance of the bride.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Lord St. Simon glanced over it. “Yes, it is correct, as far as it
+goes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But it needs a great deal of supplementing before anyone could offer an
+opinion. I think that I may arrive at my facts most directly by questioning
+you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pray do so.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“When did you first meet Miss Hatty Doran?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In San Francisco, a year ago.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You were travelling in the States?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did you become engaged then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But you were on a friendly footing?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was amused by her society, and she could see that I was amused.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Her father is very rich?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He is said to be the richest man on the Pacific slope.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And how did he make his money?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In mining. He had nothing a few years ago. Then he struck gold, invested
+it, and came up by leaps and bounds.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, what is your own impression as to the young lady’s—your
+wife’s character?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The nobleman swung his glasses a little faster and stared down into the fire.
+“You see, Mr. Holmes,” said he, “my wife was twenty before
+her father became a rich man. During that time she ran free in a mining camp
+and wandered through woods or mountains, so that her education has come from
+Nature rather than from the schoolmaster. She is what we call in England a
+tomboy, with a strong nature, wild and free, unfettered by any sort of
+traditions. She is impetuous—volcanic, I was about to say. She is swift
+in making up her mind and fearless in carrying out her resolutions. On the
+other hand, I would not have given her the name which I have the honour to
+bear”—he gave a little stately cough—“had I not thought
+her to be at bottom a noble woman. I believe that she is capable of heroic
+self-sacrifice and that anything dishonourable would be repugnant to
+her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Have you her photograph?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I brought this with me.” He opened a locket and showed us the full
+face of a very lovely woman. It was not a photograph but an ivory miniature,
+and the artist had brought out the full effect of the lustrous black hair, the
+large dark eyes, and the exquisite mouth. Holmes gazed long and earnestly at
+it. Then he closed the locket and handed it back to Lord St. Simon.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The young lady came to London, then, and you renewed your
+acquaintance?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, her father brought her over for this last London season. I met her
+several times, became engaged to her, and have now married her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She brought, I understand, a considerable dowry?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A fair dowry. Not more than is usual in my family.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And this, of course, remains to you, since the marriage is a <i>fait
+accompli</i>?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I really have made no inquiries on the subject.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very naturally not. Did you see Miss Doran on the day before the
+wedding?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Was she in good spirits?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Never better. She kept talking of what we should do in our future
+lives.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Indeed! That is very interesting. And on the morning of the
+wedding?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She was as bright as possible—at least until after the
+ceremony.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And did you observe any change in her then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, to tell the truth, I saw then the first signs that I had ever seen
+that her temper was just a little sharp. The incident however, was too trivial
+to relate and can have no possible bearing upon the case.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pray let us have it, for all that.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, it is childish. She dropped her bouquet as we went towards the
+vestry. She was passing the front pew at the time, and it fell over into the
+pew. There was a moment’s delay, but the gentleman in the pew handed it
+up to her again, and it did not appear to be the worse for the fall. Yet when I
+spoke to her of the matter, she answered me abruptly; and in the carriage, on
+our way home, she seemed absurdly agitated over this trifling cause.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Indeed! You say that there was a gentleman in the pew. Some of the
+general public were present, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, yes. It is impossible to exclude them when the church is
+open.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“This gentleman was not one of your wife’s friends?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, no; I call him a gentleman by courtesy, but he was quite a
+common-looking person. I hardly noticed his appearance. But really I think that
+we are wandering rather far from the point.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Lady St. Simon, then, returned from the wedding in a less cheerful frame
+of mind than she had gone to it. What did she do on re-entering her
+father’s house?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I saw her in conversation with her maid.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And who is her maid?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Alice is her name. She is an American and came from California with
+her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A confidential servant?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A little too much so. It seemed to me that her mistress allowed her to
+take great liberties. Still, of course, in America they look upon these things
+in a different way.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How long did she speak to this Alice?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, a few minutes. I had something else to think of.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You did not overhear what they said?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Lady St. Simon said something about ‘jumping a claim.’ She
+was accustomed to use slang of the kind. I have no idea what she meant.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“American slang is very expressive sometimes. And what did your wife do
+when she finished speaking to her maid?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She walked into the breakfast-room.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“On your arm?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, alone. She was very independent in little matters like that. Then,
+after we had sat down for ten minutes or so, she rose hurriedly, muttered some
+words of apology, and left the room. She never came back.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But this maid, Alice, as I understand, deposes that she went to her
+room, covered her bride’s dress with a long ulster, put on a bonnet, and
+went out.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Quite so. And she was afterwards seen walking into Hyde Park in company
+with Flora Millar, a woman who is now in custody, and who had already made a
+disturbance at Mr. Doran’s house that morning.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah, yes. I should like a few particulars as to this young lady, and your
+relations to her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Lord St. Simon shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows. “We have
+been on a friendly footing for some years—I may say on a <i>very</i>
+friendly footing. She used to be at the Allegro. I have not treated her
+ungenerously, and she had no just cause of complaint against me, but you know
+what women are, Mr. Holmes. Flora was a dear little thing, but exceedingly
+hot-headed and devotedly attached to me. She wrote me dreadful letters when she
+heard that I was about to be married, and, to tell the truth, the reason why I
+had the marriage celebrated so quietly was that I feared lest there might be a
+scandal in the church. She came to Mr. Doran’s door just after we
+returned, and she endeavoured to push her way in, uttering very abusive
+expressions towards my wife, and even threatening her, but I had foreseen the
+possibility of something of the sort, and I had two police fellows there in
+private clothes, who soon pushed her out again. She was quiet when she saw that
+there was no good in making a row.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did your wife hear all this?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, thank goodness, she did not.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And she was seen walking with this very woman afterwards?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes. That is what Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, looks upon as so
+serious. It is thought that Flora decoyed my wife out and laid some terrible
+trap for her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, it is a possible supposition.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You think so, too?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I did not say a probable one. But you do not yourself look upon this as
+likely?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I do not think Flora would hurt a fly.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Still, jealousy is a strange transformer of characters. Pray what is
+your own theory as to what took place?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, really, I came to seek a theory, not to propound one. I have given
+you all the facts. Since you ask me, however, I may say that it has occurred to
+me as possible that the excitement of this affair, the consciousness that she
+had made so immense a social stride, had the effect of causing some little
+nervous disturbance in my wife.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In short, that she had become suddenly deranged?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, really, when I consider that she has turned her back—I will
+not say upon me, but upon so much that many have aspired to without
+success—I can hardly explain it in any other fashion.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, certainly that is also a conceivable hypothesis,” said
+Holmes, smiling. “And now, Lord St. Simon, I think that I have nearly all
+my data. May I ask whether you were seated at the breakfast-table so that you
+could see out of the window?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We could see the other side of the road and the Park.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Quite so. Then I do not think that I need to detain you longer. I shall
+communicate with you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Should you be fortunate enough to solve this problem,” said our
+client, rising.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have solved it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Eh? What was that?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I say that I have solved it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Where, then, is my wife?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is a detail which I shall speedily supply.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Lord St. Simon shook his head. “I am afraid that it will take wiser heads
+than yours or mine,” he remarked, and bowing in a stately, old-fashioned
+manner he departed.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is very good of Lord St. Simon to honour my head by putting it on a
+level with his own,” said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. “I think that
+I shall have a whisky and soda and a cigar after all this cross-questioning. I
+had formed my conclusions as to the case before our client came into the
+room.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My dear Holmes!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have notes of several similar cases, though none, as I remarked
+before, which were quite as prompt. My whole examination served to turn my
+conjecture into a certainty. Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very
+convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau’s
+example.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I have heard all that you have heard.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Without, however, the knowledge of pre-existing cases which serves me so
+well. There was a parallel instance in Aberdeen some years back, and something
+on very much the same lines at Munich the year after the Franco-Prussian War.
+It is one of these cases—but, hullo, here is Lestrade! Good-afternoon,
+Lestrade! You will find an extra tumbler upon the sideboard, and there are
+cigars in the box.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The official detective was attired in a pea-jacket and cravat, which gave him a
+decidedly nautical appearance, and he carried a black canvas bag in his hand.
+With a short greeting he seated himself and lit the cigar which had been
+offered to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What’s up, then?” asked Holmes with a twinkle in his eye.
+“You look dissatisfied.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And I feel dissatisfied. It is this infernal St. Simon marriage case. I
+can make neither head nor tail of the business.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Really! You surprise me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who ever heard of such a mixed affair? Every clue seems to slip through
+my fingers. I have been at work upon it all day.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And very wet it seems to have made you,” said Holmes laying his
+hand upon the arm of the pea-jacket.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, I have been dragging the Serpentine.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In Heaven’s name, what for?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In search of the body of Lady St. Simon.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes leaned back in his chair and laughed heartily.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Have you dragged the basin of Trafalgar Square fountain?” he
+asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why? What do you mean?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Because you have just as good a chance of finding this lady in the one
+as in the other.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Lestrade shot an angry glance at my companion. “I suppose you know all
+about it,” he snarled.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, I have only just heard the facts, but my mind is made up.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, indeed! Then you think that the Serpentine plays no part in the
+matter?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think it very unlikely.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then perhaps you will kindly explain how it is that we found this in
+it?” He opened his bag as he spoke, and tumbled onto the floor a
+wedding-dress of watered silk, a pair of white satin shoes and a bride’s
+wreath and veil, all discoloured and soaked in water. “There,” said
+he, putting a new wedding-ring upon the top of the pile. “There is a
+little nut for you to crack, Master Holmes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, indeed!” said my friend, blowing blue rings into the air.
+“You dragged them from the Serpentine?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No. They were found floating near the margin by a park-keeper. They have
+been identified as her clothes, and it seemed to me that if the clothes were
+there the body would not be far off.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“By the same brilliant reasoning, every man’s body is to be found
+in the neighbourhood of his wardrobe. And pray what did you hope to arrive at
+through this?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“At some evidence implicating Flora Millar in the disappearance.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am afraid that you will find it difficult.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Are you, indeed, now?” cried Lestrade with some bitterness.
+“I am afraid, Holmes, that you are not very practical with your
+deductions and your inferences. You have made two blunders in as many minutes.
+This dress does implicate Miss Flora Millar.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And how?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In the dress is a pocket. In the pocket is a card-case. In the card-case
+is a note. And here is the very note.” He slapped it down upon the table
+in front of him. “Listen to this: ‘You will see me when all is
+ready. Come at once. F. H. M.’ Now my theory all along has been that Lady
+St. Simon was decoyed away by Flora Millar, and that she, with confederates, no
+doubt, was responsible for her disappearance. Here, signed with her initials,
+is the very note which was no doubt quietly slipped into her hand at the door
+and which lured her within their reach.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very good, Lestrade,” said Holmes, laughing. “You really are
+very fine indeed. Let me see it.” He took up the paper in a listless way,
+but his attention instantly became riveted, and he gave a little cry of
+satisfaction. “This is indeed important,” said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ha! you find it so?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Extremely so. I congratulate you warmly.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Lestrade rose in his triumph and bent his head to look. “Why,” he
+shrieked, “you’re looking at the wrong side!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“On the contrary, this is the right side.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The right side? You’re mad! Here is the note written in pencil
+over here.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And over here is what appears to be the fragment of a hotel bill, which
+interests me deeply.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There’s nothing in it. I looked at it before,” said
+Lestrade. “‘Oct. 4th, rooms 8<i>s</i>., breakfast 2<i>s</i>.
+6<i>d</i>., cocktail 1<i>s</i>., lunch 2<i>s</i>. 6<i>d</i>., glass sherry,
+8<i>d</i>.’ I see nothing in that.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very likely not. It is most important, all the same. As to the note, it
+is important also, or at least the initials are, so I congratulate you
+again.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ve wasted time enough,” said Lestrade, rising. “I
+believe in hard work and not in sitting by the fire spinning fine theories.
+Good-day, Mr. Holmes, and we shall see which gets to the bottom of the matter
+first.” He gathered up the garments, thrust them into the bag, and made
+for the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Just one hint to you, Lestrade,” drawled Holmes before his rival
+vanished; “I will tell you the true solution of the matter. Lady St.
+Simon is a myth. There is not, and there never has been, any such
+person.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Lestrade looked sadly at my companion. Then he turned to me, tapped his
+forehead three times, shook his head solemnly, and hurried away.
+</p>
+<p>
+He had hardly shut the door behind him when Holmes rose to put on his overcoat.
+“There is something in what the fellow says about outdoor work,” he
+remarked, “so I think, Watson, that I must leave you to your papers for a
+little.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was after five o’clock when Sherlock Holmes left me, but I had no time
+to be lonely, for within an hour there arrived a confectioner’s man with
+a very large flat box. This he unpacked with the help of a youth whom he had
+brought with him, and presently, to my very great astonishment, a quite
+epicurean little cold supper began to be laid out upon our humble lodging-house
+mahogany. There were a couple of brace of cold woodcock, a pheasant, a <i>pâté
+de foie gras</i> pie with a group of ancient and cobwebby bottles. Having laid
+out all these luxuries, my two visitors vanished away, like the genii of the
+Arabian Nights, with no explanation save that the things had been paid for and
+were ordered to this address.
+</p>
+<p>
+Just before nine o’clock Sherlock Holmes stepped briskly into the room.
+His features were gravely set, but there was a light in his eye which made me
+think that he had not been disappointed in his conclusions.
+</p>
+<p>
+“They have laid the supper, then,” he said, rubbing his hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You seem to expect company. They have laid for five.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, I fancy we may have some company dropping in,” said he.
+“I am surprised that Lord St. Simon has not already arrived. Ha! I fancy
+that I hear his step now upon the stairs.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was indeed our visitor of the afternoon who came bustling in, dangling his
+glasses more vigorously than ever, and with a very perturbed expression upon
+his aristocratic features.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My messenger reached you, then?” asked Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, and I confess that the contents startled me beyond measure. Have
+you good authority for what you say?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The best possible.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Lord St. Simon sank into a chair and passed his hand over his forehead.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What will the Duke say,” he murmured, “when he hears that
+one of the family has been subjected to such humiliation?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is the purest accident. I cannot allow that there is any
+humiliation.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah, you look on these things from another standpoint.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I fail to see that anyone is to blame. I can hardly see how the lady
+could have acted otherwise, though her abrupt method of doing it was
+undoubtedly to be regretted. Having no mother, she had no one to advise her at
+such a crisis.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was a slight, sir, a public slight,” said Lord St. Simon,
+tapping his fingers upon the table.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You must make allowance for this poor girl, placed in so unprecedented a
+position.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I will make no allowance. I am very angry indeed, and I have been
+shamefully used.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think that I heard a ring,” said Holmes. “Yes, there are
+steps on the landing. If I cannot persuade you to take a lenient view of the
+matter, Lord St. Simon, I have brought an advocate here who may be more
+successful.” He opened the door and ushered in a lady and gentleman.
+“Lord St. Simon,” said he “allow me to introduce you to Mr.
+and Mrs. Francis Hay Moulton. The lady, I think, you have already met.”
+</p>
+<p>
+At the sight of these newcomers our client had sprung from his seat and stood
+very erect, with his eyes cast down and his hand thrust into the breast of his
+frock-coat, a picture of offended dignity. The lady had taken a quick step
+forward and had held out her hand to him, but he still refused to raise his
+eyes. It was as well for his resolution, perhaps, for her pleading face was one
+which it was hard to resist.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You’re angry, Robert,” said she. “Well, I guess you
+have every cause to be.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pray make no apology to me,” said Lord St. Simon bitterly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, yes, I know that I have treated you real bad and that I should have
+spoken to you before I went; but I was kind of rattled, and from the time when
+I saw Frank here again I just didn’t know what I was doing or saying. I
+only wonder I didn’t fall down and do a faint right there before the
+altar.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Perhaps, Mrs. Moulton, you would like my friend and me to leave the room
+while you explain this matter?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If I may give an opinion,” remarked the strange gentleman,
+“we’ve had just a little too much secrecy over this business
+already. For my part, I should like all Europe and America to hear the rights
+of it.” He was a small, wiry, sunburnt man, clean-shaven, with a sharp
+face and alert manner.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then I’ll tell our story right away,” said the lady.
+“Frank here and I met in ’84, in McQuire’s camp, near the
+Rockies, where Pa was working a claim. We were engaged to each other, Frank and
+I; but then one day father struck a rich pocket and made a pile, while poor
+Frank here had a claim that petered out and came to nothing. The richer Pa grew
+the poorer was Frank; so at last Pa wouldn’t hear of our engagement
+lasting any longer, and he took me away to ’Frisco. Frank wouldn’t
+throw up his hand, though; so he followed me there, and he saw me without Pa
+knowing anything about it. It would only have made him mad to know, so we just
+fixed it all up for ourselves. Frank said that he would go and make his pile,
+too, and never come back to claim me until he had as much as Pa. So then I
+promised to wait for him to the end of time and pledged myself not to marry
+anyone else while he lived. ‘Why shouldn’t we be married right
+away, then,’ said he, ‘and then I will feel sure of you; and I
+won’t claim to be your husband until I come back?’ Well, we talked
+it over, and he had fixed it all up so nicely, with a clergyman all ready in
+waiting, that we just did it right there; and then Frank went off to seek his
+fortune, and I went back to Pa.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The next I heard of Frank was that he was in Montana, and then he went
+prospecting in Arizona, and then I heard of him from New Mexico. After that
+came a long newspaper story about how a miners’ camp had been attacked by
+Apache Indians, and there was my Frank’s name among the killed. I fainted
+dead away, and I was very sick for months after. Pa thought I had a decline and
+took me to half the doctors in ’Frisco. Not a word of news came for a
+year and more, so that I never doubted that Frank was really dead. Then Lord
+St. Simon came to ’Frisco, and we came to London, and a marriage was
+arranged, and Pa was very pleased, but I felt all the time that no man on this
+earth would ever take the place in my heart that had been given to my poor
+Frank.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Still, if I had married Lord St. Simon, of course I’d have done my
+duty by him. We can’t command our love, but we can our actions. I went to
+the altar with him with the intention to make him just as good a wife as it was
+in me to be. But you may imagine what I felt when, just as I came to the altar
+rails, I glanced back and saw Frank standing and looking at me out of the first
+pew. I thought it was his ghost at first; but when I looked again there he was
+still, with a kind of question in his eyes, as if to ask me whether I were glad
+or sorry to see him. I wonder I didn’t drop. I know that everything was
+turning round, and the words of the clergyman were just like the buzz of a bee
+in my ear. I didn’t know what to do. Should I stop the service and make a
+scene in the church? I glanced at him again, and he seemed to know what I was
+thinking, for he raised his finger to his lips to tell me to be still. Then I
+saw him scribble on a piece of paper, and I knew that he was writing me a note.
+As I passed his pew on the way out I dropped my bouquet over to him, and he
+slipped the note into my hand when he returned me the flowers. It was only a
+line asking me to join him when he made the sign to me to do so. Of course I
+never doubted for a moment that my first duty was now to him, and I determined
+to do just whatever he might direct.
+</p>
+<p>
+“When I got back I told my maid, who had known him in California, and had
+always been his friend. I ordered her to say nothing, but to get a few things
+packed and my ulster ready. I know I ought to have spoken to Lord St. Simon,
+but it was dreadful hard before his mother and all those great people. I just
+made up my mind to run away and explain afterwards. I hadn’t been at the
+table ten minutes before I saw Frank out of the window at the other side of the
+road. He beckoned to me and then began walking into the Park. I slipped out,
+put on my things, and followed him. Some woman came talking something or other
+about Lord St. Simon to me—seemed to me from the little I heard as if he
+had a little secret of his own before marriage also—but I managed to get
+away from her and soon overtook Frank. We got into a cab together, and away we
+drove to some lodgings he had taken in Gordon Square, and that was my true
+wedding after all those years of waiting. Frank had been a prisoner among the
+Apaches, had escaped, came on to ’Frisco, found that I had given him up
+for dead and had gone to England, followed me there, and had come upon me at
+last on the very morning of my second wedding.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I saw it in a paper,” explained the American. “It gave the
+name and the church but not where the lady lived.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then we had a talk as to what we should do, and Frank was all for
+openness, but I was so ashamed of it all that I felt as if I should like to
+vanish away and never see any of them again—just sending a line to Pa,
+perhaps, to show him that I was alive. It was awful to me to think of all those
+lords and ladies sitting round that breakfast-table and waiting for me to come
+back. So Frank took my wedding-clothes and things and made a bundle of them, so
+that I should not be traced, and dropped them away somewhere where no one could
+find them. It is likely that we should have gone on to Paris to-morrow, only
+that this good gentleman, Mr. Holmes, came round to us this evening, though how
+he found us is more than I can think, and he showed us very clearly and kindly
+that I was wrong and that Frank was right, and that we should be putting
+ourselves in the wrong if we were so secret. Then he offered to give us a
+chance of talking to Lord St. Simon alone, and so we came right away round to
+his rooms at once. Now, Robert, you have heard it all, and I am very sorry if I
+have given you pain, and I hope that you do not think very meanly of me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Lord St. Simon had by no means relaxed his rigid attitude, but had listened
+with a frowning brow and a compressed lip to this long narrative.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Excuse me,” he said, “but it is not my custom to discuss my
+most intimate personal affairs in this public manner.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then you won’t forgive me? You won’t shake hands before I
+go?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, certainly, if it would give you any pleasure.” He put out his
+hand and coldly grasped that which she extended to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I had hoped,” suggested Holmes, “that you would have joined
+us in a friendly supper.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think that there you ask a little too much,” responded his
+Lordship. “I may be forced to acquiesce in these recent developments, but
+I can hardly be expected to make merry over them. I think that with your
+permission I will now wish you all a very good-night.” He included us all
+in a sweeping bow and stalked out of the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then I trust that you at least will honour me with your company,”
+said Sherlock Holmes. “It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr.
+Moulton, for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the
+blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from
+being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall
+be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.”
+</p>
+<p class="p2">
+“The case has been an interesting one,” remarked Holmes when our
+visitors had left us, “because it serves to show very clearly how simple
+the explanation may be of an affair which at first sight seems to be almost
+inexplicable. Nothing could be more natural than the sequence of events as
+narrated by this lady, and nothing stranger than the result when viewed, for
+instance, by Mr. Lestrade of Scotland Yard.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You were not yourself at fault at all, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“From the first, two facts were very obvious to me, the one that the lady
+had been quite willing to undergo the wedding ceremony, the other that she had
+repented of it within a few minutes of returning home. Obviously something had
+occurred during the morning, then, to cause her to change her mind. What could
+that something be? She could not have spoken to anyone when she was out, for
+she had been in the company of the bridegroom. Had she seen someone, then? If
+she had, it must be someone from America because she had spent so short a time
+in this country that she could hardly have allowed anyone to acquire so deep an
+influence over her that the mere sight of him would induce her to change her
+plans so completely. You see we have already arrived, by a process of
+exclusion, at the idea that she might have seen an American. Then who could
+this American be, and why should he possess so much influence over her? It
+might be a lover; it might be a husband. Her young womanhood had, I knew, been
+spent in rough scenes and under strange conditions. So far I had got before I
+ever heard Lord St. Simon’s narrative. When he told us of a man in a pew,
+of the change in the bride’s manner, of so transparent a device for
+obtaining a note as the dropping of a bouquet, of her resort to her
+confidential maid, and of her very significant allusion to
+claim-jumping—which in miners’ parlance means taking possession of
+that which another person has a prior claim to—the whole situation became
+absolutely clear. She had gone off with a man, and the man was either a lover
+or was a previous husband—the chances being in favour of the
+latter.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And how in the world did you find them?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It might have been difficult, but friend Lestrade held information in
+his hands the value of which he did not himself know. The initials were, of
+course, of the highest importance, but more valuable still was it to know that
+within a week he had settled his bill at one of the most select London
+hotels.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How did you deduce the select?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“By the select prices. Eight shillings for a bed and eightpence for a
+glass of sherry pointed to one of the most expensive hotels. There are not many
+in London which charge at that rate. In the second one which I visited in
+Northumberland Avenue, I learned by an inspection of the book that Francis H.
+Moulton, an American gentleman, had left only the day before, and on looking
+over the entries against him, I came upon the very items which I had seen in
+the duplicate bill. His letters were to be forwarded to 226 Gordon Square; so
+thither I travelled, and being fortunate enough to find the loving couple at
+home, I ventured to give them some paternal advice and to point out to them
+that it would be better in every way that they should make their position a
+little clearer both to the general public and to Lord St. Simon in particular.
+I invited them to meet him here, and, as you see, I made him keep the
+appointment.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But with no very good result,” I remarked. “His conduct was
+certainly not very gracious.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah, Watson,” said Holmes, smiling, “perhaps you would not be
+very gracious either, if, after all the trouble of wooing and wedding, you
+found yourself deprived in an instant of wife and of fortune. I think that we
+may judge Lord St. Simon very mercifully and thank our stars that we are never
+likely to find ourselves in the same position. Draw your chair up and hand me
+my violin, for the only problem we have still to solve is how to while away
+these bleak autumnal evenings.”
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap11"></a>XI.<br>THE ADVENTURE OF THE BERYL CORONET</h2>
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 1.50em">“H</span>olmes,”
+said I as I stood one morning in our bow-window looking down the street,
+“here is a madman coming along. It seems rather sad that his relatives
+should allow him to come out alone.”
+</p>
+<p>
+My friend rose lazily from his armchair and stood with his hands in the pockets
+of his dressing-gown, looking over my shoulder. It was a bright, crisp February
+morning, and the snow of the day before still lay deep upon the ground,
+shimmering brightly in the wintry sun. Down the centre of Baker Street it had
+been ploughed into a brown crumbly band by the traffic, but at either side and
+on the heaped-up edges of the footpaths it still lay as white as when it fell.
+The grey pavement had been cleaned and scraped, but was still dangerously
+slippery, so that there were fewer passengers than usual. Indeed, from the
+direction of the Metropolitan Station no one was coming save the single
+gentleman whose eccentric conduct had drawn my attention.
+</p>
+<p>
+He was a man of about fifty, tall, portly, and imposing, with a massive,
+strongly marked face and a commanding figure. He was dressed in a sombre yet
+rich style, in black frock-coat, shining hat, neat brown gaiters, and well-cut
+pearl-grey trousers. Yet his actions were in absurd contrast to the dignity of
+his dress and features, for he was running hard, with occasional little
+springs, such as a weary man gives who is little accustomed to set any tax upon
+his legs. As he ran he jerked his hands up and down, waggled his head, and
+writhed his face into the most extraordinary contortions.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What on earth can be the matter with him?” I asked. “He is
+looking up at the numbers of the houses.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I believe that he is coming here,” said Holmes, rubbing his hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Here?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes; I rather think he is coming to consult me professionally. I think
+that I recognise the symptoms. Ha! did I not tell you?” As he spoke, the
+man, puffing and blowing, rushed at our door and pulled at our bell until the
+whole house resounded with the clanging.
+</p>
+<p>
+A few moments later he was in our room, still puffing, still gesticulating, but
+with so fixed a look of grief and despair in his eyes that our smiles were
+turned in an instant to horror and pity. For a while he could not get his words
+out, but swayed his body and plucked at his hair like one who has been driven
+to the extreme limits of his reason. Then, suddenly springing to his feet, he
+beat his head against the wall with such force that we both rushed upon him and
+tore him away to the centre of the room. Sherlock Holmes pushed him down into
+the easy-chair and, sitting beside him, patted his hand and chatted with him in
+the easy, soothing tones which he knew so well how to employ.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have come to me to tell your story, have you not?” said he.
+“You are fatigued with your haste. Pray wait until you have recovered
+yourself, and then I shall be most happy to look into any little problem which
+you may submit to me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The man sat for a minute or more with a heaving chest, fighting against his
+emotion. Then he passed his handkerchief over his brow, set his lips tight, and
+turned his face towards us.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No doubt you think me mad?” said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I see that you have had some great trouble,” responded Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“God knows I have!—a trouble which is enough to unseat my reason,
+so sudden and so terrible is it. Public disgrace I might have faced, although I
+am a man whose character has never yet borne a stain. Private affliction also
+is the lot of every man; but the two coming together, and in so frightful a
+form, have been enough to shake my very soul. Besides, it is not I alone. The
+very noblest in the land may suffer unless some way be found out of this
+horrible affair.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pray compose yourself, sir,” said Holmes, “and let me have a
+clear account of who you are and what it is that has befallen you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My name,” answered our visitor, “is probably familiar to
+your ears. I am Alexander Holder, of the banking firm of Holder &amp;
+Stevenson, of Threadneedle Street.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The name was indeed well known to us as belonging to the senior partner in the
+second largest private banking concern in the City of London. What could have
+happened, then, to bring one of the foremost citizens of London to this most
+pitiable pass? We waited, all curiosity, until with another effort he braced
+himself to tell his story.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I feel that time is of value,” said he; “that is why I
+hastened here when the police inspector suggested that I should secure your
+co-operation. I came to Baker Street by the Underground and hurried from there
+on foot, for the cabs go slowly through this snow. That is why I was so out of
+breath, for I am a man who takes very little exercise. I feel better now, and I
+will put the facts before you as shortly and yet as clearly as I can.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is, of course, well known to you that in a successful banking
+business as much depends upon our being able to find remunerative investments
+for our funds as upon our increasing our connection and the number of our
+depositors. One of our most lucrative means of laying out money is in the shape
+of loans, where the security is unimpeachable. We have done a good deal in this
+direction during the last few years, and there are many noble families to whom
+we have advanced large sums upon the security of their pictures, libraries, or
+plate.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yesterday morning I was seated in my office at the bank when a card was
+brought in to me by one of the clerks. I started when I saw the name, for it
+was that of none other than—well, perhaps even to you I had better say no
+more than that it was a name which is a household word all over the
+earth—one of the highest, noblest, most exalted names in England. I was
+overwhelmed by the honour and attempted, when he entered, to say so, but he
+plunged at once into business with the air of a man who wishes to hurry quickly
+through a disagreeable task.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Mr. Holder,’ said he, ‘I have been informed
+that you are in the habit of advancing money.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘The firm does so when the security is good.’ I
+answered.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘It is absolutely essential to me,’ said he, ‘that I
+should have £ 50,000 at once. I could, of course, borrow so trifling a sum ten
+times over from my friends, but I much prefer to make it a matter of business
+and to carry out that business myself. In my position you can readily
+understand that it is unwise to place one’s self under obligations.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘For how long, may I ask, do you want this sum?’ I
+asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Next Monday I have a large sum due to me, and I shall then
+most certainly repay what you advance, with whatever interest you think it
+right to charge. But it is very essential to me that the money should be paid
+at once.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I should be happy to advance it without further parley from
+my own private purse,’ said I, ‘were it not that the strain would
+be rather more than it could bear. If, on the other hand, I am to do it in the
+name of the firm, then in justice to my partner I must insist that, even in
+your case, every businesslike precaution should be taken.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I should much prefer to have it so,’ said he, raising
+up a square, black morocco case which he had laid beside his chair. ‘You
+have doubtless heard of the Beryl Coronet?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘One of the most precious public possessions of the
+empire,’ said I.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Precisely.’ He opened the case, and there, imbedded
+in soft, flesh-coloured velvet, lay the magnificent piece of jewellery which he
+had named. ‘There are thirty-nine enormous beryls,’ said he,
+‘and the price of the gold chasing is incalculable. The lowest estimate
+would put the worth of the coronet at double the sum which I have asked. I am
+prepared to leave it with you as my security.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“I took the precious case into my hands and looked in some perplexity
+from it to my illustrious client.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘You doubt its value?’ he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Not at all. I only doubt—’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘The propriety of my leaving it. You may set your mind at
+rest about that. I should not dream of doing so were it not absolutely certain
+that I should be able in four days to reclaim it. It is a pure matter of form.
+Is the security sufficient?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Ample.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘You understand, Mr. Holder, that I am giving you a strong
+proof of the confidence which I have in you, founded upon all that I have heard
+of you. I rely upon you not only to be discreet and to refrain from all gossip
+upon the matter but, above all, to preserve this coronet with every possible
+precaution because I need not say that a great public scandal would be caused
+if any harm were to befall it. Any injury to it would be almost as serious as
+its complete loss, for there are no beryls in the world to match these, and it
+would be impossible to replace them. I leave it with you, however, with every
+confidence, and I shall call for it in person on Monday morning.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“Seeing that my client was anxious to leave, I said no more but, calling
+for my cashier, I ordered him to pay over fifty £ 1000 notes. When I was alone
+once more, however, with the precious case lying upon the table in front of me,
+I could not but think with some misgivings of the immense responsibility which
+it entailed upon me. There could be no doubt that, as it was a national
+possession, a horrible scandal would ensue if any misfortune should occur to
+it. I already regretted having ever consented to take charge of it. However, it
+was too late to alter the matter now, so I locked it up in my private safe and
+turned once more to my work.
+</p>
+<p>
+“When evening came I felt that it would be an imprudence to leave so
+precious a thing in the office behind me. Bankers’ safes had been forced
+before now, and why should not mine be? If so, how terrible would be the
+position in which I should find myself! I determined, therefore, that for the
+next few days I would always carry the case backward and forward with me, so
+that it might never be really out of my reach. With this intention, I called a
+cab and drove out to my house at Streatham, carrying the jewel with me. I did
+not breathe freely until I had taken it upstairs and locked it in the bureau of
+my dressing-room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And now a word as to my household, Mr. Holmes, for I wish you to
+thoroughly understand the situation. My groom and my page sleep out of the
+house, and may be set aside altogether. I have three maid-servants who have
+been with me a number of years and whose absolute reliability is quite above
+suspicion. Another, Lucy Parr, the second waiting-maid, has only been in my
+service a few months. She came with an excellent character, however, and has
+always given me satisfaction. She is a very pretty girl and has attracted
+admirers who have occasionally hung about the place. That is the only drawback
+which we have found to her, but we believe her to be a thoroughly good girl in
+every way.
+</p>
+<p>
+“So much for the servants. My family itself is so small that it will not
+take me long to describe it. I am a widower and have an only son, Arthur. He
+has been a disappointment to me, Mr. Holmes—a grievous disappointment. I
+have no doubt that I am myself to blame. People tell me that I have spoiled
+him. Very likely I have. When my dear wife died I felt that he was all I had to
+love. I could not bear to see the smile fade even for a moment from his face. I
+have never denied him a wish. Perhaps it would have been better for both of us
+had I been sterner, but I meant it for the best.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was naturally my intention that he should succeed me in my business,
+but he was not of a business turn. He was wild, wayward, and, to speak the
+truth, I could not trust him in the handling of large sums of money. When he
+was young he became a member of an aristocratic club, and there, having
+charming manners, he was soon the intimate of a number of men with long purses
+and expensive habits. He learned to play heavily at cards and to squander money
+on the turf, until he had again and again to come to me and implore me to give
+him an advance upon his allowance, that he might settle his debts of honour. He
+tried more than once to break away from the dangerous company which he was
+keeping, but each time the influence of his friend, Sir George Burnwell, was
+enough to draw him back again.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And, indeed, I could not wonder that such a man as Sir George Burnwell
+should gain an influence over him, for he has frequently brought him to my
+house, and I have found myself that I could hardly resist the fascination of
+his manner. He is older than Arthur, a man of the world to his finger-tips, one
+who had been everywhere, seen everything, a brilliant talker, and a man of
+great personal beauty. Yet when I think of him in cold blood, far away from the
+glamour of his presence, I am convinced from his cynical speech and the look
+which I have caught in his eyes that he is one who should be deeply distrusted.
+So I think, and so, too, thinks my little Mary, who has a woman’s quick
+insight into character.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And now there is only she to be described. She is my niece; but when my
+brother died five years ago and left her alone in the world I adopted her, and
+have looked upon her ever since as my daughter. She is a sunbeam in my
+house—sweet, loving, beautiful, a wonderful manager and housekeeper, yet
+as tender and quiet and gentle as a woman could be. She is my right hand. I do
+not know what I could do without her. In only one matter has she ever gone
+against my wishes. Twice my boy has asked her to marry him, for he loves her
+devotedly, but each time she has refused him. I think that if anyone could have
+drawn him into the right path it would have been she, and that his marriage
+might have changed his whole life; but now, alas! it is too late—forever
+too late!
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, Mr. Holmes, you know the people who live under my roof, and I shall
+continue with my miserable story.
+</p>
+<p>
+“When we were taking coffee in the drawing-room that night after dinner,
+I told Arthur and Mary my experience, and of the precious treasure which we had
+under our roof, suppressing only the name of my client. Lucy Parr, who had
+brought in the coffee, had, I am sure, left the room; but I cannot swear that
+the door was closed. Mary and Arthur were much interested and wished to see the
+famous coronet, but I thought it better not to disturb it.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Where have you put it?’ asked Arthur.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘In my own bureau.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Well, I hope to goodness the house won’t be burgled
+during the night.’ said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘It is locked up,’ I answered.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Oh, any old key will fit that bureau. When I was a
+youngster I have opened it myself with the key of the box-room cupboard.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“He often had a wild way of talking, so that I thought little of what he
+said. He followed me to my room, however, that night with a very grave face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Look here, dad,’ said he with his eyes cast down,
+‘can you let me have £ 200?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘No, I cannot!’ I answered sharply. ‘I have been
+far too generous with you in money matters.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘You have been very kind,’ said he, ‘but I must
+have this money, or else I can never show my face inside the club again.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘And a very good thing, too!’ I cried.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Yes, but you would not have me leave it a dishonoured
+man,’ said he. ‘I could not bear the disgrace. I must raise the
+money in some way, and if you will not let me have it, then I must try other
+means.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was very angry, for this was the third demand during the month.
+‘You shall not have a farthing from me,’ I cried, on which he bowed
+and left the room without another word.
+</p>
+<p>
+“When he was gone I unlocked my bureau, made sure that my treasure was
+safe, and locked it again. Then I started to go round the house to see that all
+was secure—a duty which I usually leave to Mary but which I thought it
+well to perform myself that night. As I came down the stairs I saw Mary herself
+at the side window of the hall, which she closed and fastened as I approached.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Tell me, dad,’ said she, looking, I thought, a little
+disturbed, ‘did you give Lucy, the maid, leave to go out to-night?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Certainly not.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘She came in just now by the back door. I have no doubt that
+she has only been to the side gate to see someone, but I think that it is
+hardly safe and should be stopped.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘You must speak to her in the morning, or I will if you
+prefer it. Are you sure that everything is fastened?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Quite sure, dad.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Then, good-night.’ I kissed her and went up to my
+bedroom again, where I was soon asleep.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am endeavouring to tell you everything, Mr. Holmes, which may have any
+bearing upon the case, but I beg that you will question me upon any point which
+I do not make clear.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“On the contrary, your statement is singularly lucid.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I come to a part of my story now in which I should wish to be
+particularly so. I am not a very heavy sleeper, and the anxiety in my mind
+tended, no doubt, to make me even less so than usual. About two in the morning,
+then, I was awakened by some sound in the house. It had ceased ere I was wide
+awake, but it had left an impression behind it as though a window had gently
+closed somewhere. I lay listening with all my ears. Suddenly, to my horror,
+there was a distinct sound of footsteps moving softly in the next room. I
+slipped out of bed, all palpitating with fear, and peeped round the corner of
+my dressing-room door.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Arthur!’ I screamed, ‘you villain! you thief!
+How dare you touch that coronet?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“The gas was half up, as I had left it, and my unhappy boy, dressed only
+in his shirt and trousers, was standing beside the light, holding the coronet
+in his hands. He appeared to be wrenching at it, or bending it with all his
+strength. At my cry he dropped it from his grasp and turned as pale as death. I
+snatched it up and examined it. One of the gold corners, with three of the
+beryls in it, was missing.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘You blackguard!’ I shouted, beside myself with rage.
+‘You have destroyed it! You have dishonoured me forever! Where are the
+jewels which you have stolen?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Stolen!’ he cried.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Yes, thief!’ I roared, shaking him by the shoulder.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘There are none missing. There cannot be any missing,’
+said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘There are three missing. And you know where they are. Must
+I call you a liar as well as a thief? Did I not see you trying to tear off
+another piece?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘You have called me names enough,’ said he, ‘I
+will not stand it any longer. I shall not say another word about this business,
+since you have chosen to insult me. I will leave your house in the morning and
+make my own way in the world.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘You shall leave it in the hands of the police!’ I
+cried half-mad with grief and rage. ‘I shall have this matter probed to
+the bottom.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘You shall learn nothing from me,’ said he with a
+passion such as I should not have thought was in his nature. ‘If you
+choose to call the police, let the police find what they can.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“By this time the whole house was astir, for I had raised my voice in my
+anger. Mary was the first to rush into my room, and, at the sight of the
+coronet and of Arthur’s face, she read the whole story and, with a
+scream, fell down senseless on the ground. I sent the housemaid for the police
+and put the investigation into their hands at once. When the inspector and a
+constable entered the house, Arthur, who had stood sullenly with his arms
+folded, asked me whether it was my intention to charge him with theft. I
+answered that it had ceased to be a private matter, but had become a public
+one, since the ruined coronet was national property. I was determined that the
+law should have its way in everything.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘At least,’ said he, ‘you will not have me
+arrested at once. It would be to your advantage as well as mine if I might
+leave the house for five minutes.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘That you may get away, or perhaps that you may conceal what
+you have stolen,’ said I. And then, realising the dreadful position in
+which I was placed, I implored him to remember that not only my honour but that
+of one who was far greater than I was at stake; and that he threatened to raise
+a scandal which would convulse the nation. He might avert it all if he would
+but tell me what he had done with the three missing stones.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘You may as well face the matter,’ said I; ‘you
+have been caught in the act, and no confession could make your guilt more
+heinous. If you but make such reparation as is in your power, by telling us
+where the beryls are, all shall be forgiven and forgotten.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Keep your forgiveness for those who ask for it,’ he
+answered, turning away from me with a sneer. I saw that he was too hardened for
+any words of mine to influence him. There was but one way for it. I called in
+the inspector and gave him into custody. A search was made at once not only of
+his person but of his room and of every portion of the house where he could
+possibly have concealed the gems; but no trace of them could be found, nor
+would the wretched boy open his mouth for all our persuasions and our threats.
+This morning he was removed to a cell, and I, after going through all the
+police formalities, have hurried round to you to implore you to use your skill
+in unravelling the matter. The police have openly confessed that they can at
+present make nothing of it. You may go to any expense which you think
+necessary. I have already offered a reward of £ 1000. My God, what shall I do!
+I have lost my honour, my gems, and my son in one night. Oh, what shall I
+do!”
+</p>
+<p>
+He put a hand on either side of his head and rocked himself to and fro, droning
+to himself like a child whose grief has got beyond words.
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes sat silent for some few minutes, with his brows knitted and his
+eyes fixed upon the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you receive much company?” he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“None save my partner with his family and an occasional friend of
+Arthur’s. Sir George Burnwell has been several times lately. No one else,
+I think.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you go out much in society?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Arthur does. Mary and I stay at home. We neither of us care for
+it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is unusual in a young girl.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She is of a quiet nature. Besides, she is not so very young. She is
+four-and-twenty.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“This matter, from what you say, seems to have been a shock to her
+also.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Terrible! She is even more affected than I.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have neither of you any doubt as to your son’s guilt?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How can we have when I saw him with my own eyes with the coronet in his
+hands.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I hardly consider that a conclusive proof. Was the remainder of the
+coronet at all injured?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, it was twisted.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you not think, then, that he might have been trying to straighten
+it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“God bless you! You are doing what you can for him and for me. But it is
+too heavy a task. What was he doing there at all? If his purpose were innocent,
+why did he not say so?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Precisely. And if it were guilty, why did he not invent a lie? His
+silence appears to me to cut both ways. There are several singular points about
+the case. What did the police think of the noise which awoke you from your
+sleep?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“They considered that it might be caused by Arthur’s closing his
+bedroom door.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A likely story! As if a man bent on felony would slam his door so as to
+wake a household. What did they say, then, of the disappearance of these
+gems?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“They are still sounding the planking and probing the furniture in the
+hope of finding them.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Have they thought of looking outside the house?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, they have shown extraordinary energy. The whole garden has already
+been minutely examined.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, my dear sir,” said Holmes, “is it not obvious to you
+now that this matter really strikes very much deeper than either you or the
+police were at first inclined to think? It appeared to you to be a simple case;
+to me it seems exceedingly complex. Consider what is involved by your theory.
+You suppose that your son came down from his bed, went, at great risk, to your
+dressing-room, opened your bureau, took out your coronet, broke off by main
+force a small portion of it, went off to some other place, concealed three gems
+out of the thirty-nine, with such skill that nobody can find them, and then
+returned with the other thirty-six into the room in which he exposed himself to
+the greatest danger of being discovered. I ask you now, is such a theory
+tenable?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But what other is there?” cried the banker with a gesture of
+despair. “If his motives were innocent, why does he not explain
+them?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is our task to find that out,” replied Holmes; “so now,
+if you please, Mr. Holder, we will set off for Streatham together, and devote
+an hour to glancing a little more closely into details.”
+</p>
+<p>
+My friend insisted upon my accompanying them in their expedition, which I was
+eager enough to do, for my curiosity and sympathy were deeply stirred by the
+story to which we had listened. I confess that the guilt of the banker’s
+son appeared to me to be as obvious as it did to his unhappy father, but still
+I had such faith in Holmes’ judgment that I felt that there must be some
+grounds for hope as long as he was dissatisfied with the accepted explanation.
+He hardly spoke a word the whole way out to the southern suburb, but sat with
+his chin upon his breast and his hat drawn over his eyes, sunk in the deepest
+thought. Our client appeared to have taken fresh heart at the little glimpse of
+hope which had been presented to him, and he even broke into a desultory chat
+with me over his business affairs. A short railway journey and a shorter walk
+brought us to Fairbank, the modest residence of the great financier.
+</p>
+<p>
+Fairbank was a good-sized square house of white stone, standing back a little
+from the road. A double carriage-sweep, with a snow-clad lawn, stretched down
+in front to two large iron gates which closed the entrance. On the right side
+was a small wooden thicket, which led into a narrow path between two neat
+hedges stretching from the road to the kitchen door, and forming the
+tradesmen’s entrance. On the left ran a lane which led to the stables,
+and was not itself within the grounds at all, being a public, though little
+used, thoroughfare. Holmes left us standing at the door and walked slowly all
+round the house, across the front, down the tradesmen’s path, and so
+round by the garden behind into the stable lane. So long was he that Mr. Holder
+and I went into the dining-room and waited by the fire until he should return.
+We were sitting there in silence when the door opened and a young lady came in.
+She was rather above the middle height, slim, with dark hair and eyes, which
+seemed the darker against the absolute pallor of her skin. I do not think that
+I have ever seen such deadly paleness in a woman’s face. Her lips, too,
+were bloodless, but her eyes were flushed with crying. As she swept silently
+into the room she impressed me with a greater sense of grief than the banker
+had done in the morning, and it was the more striking in her as she was
+evidently a woman of strong character, with immense capacity for
+self-restraint. Disregarding my presence, she went straight to her uncle and
+passed her hand over his head with a sweet womanly caress.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have given orders that Arthur should be liberated, have you not,
+dad?” she asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, no, my girl, the matter must be probed to the bottom.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I am so sure that he is innocent. You know what woman’s
+instincts are. I know that he has done no harm and that you will be sorry for
+having acted so harshly.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why is he silent, then, if he is innocent?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who knows? Perhaps because he was so angry that you should suspect
+him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How could I help suspecting him, when I actually saw him with the
+coronet in his hand?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, but he had only picked it up to look at it. Oh, do, do take my word
+for it that he is innocent. Let the matter drop and say no more. It is so
+dreadful to think of our dear Arthur in prison!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I shall never let it drop until the gems are found—never, Mary!
+Your affection for Arthur blinds you as to the awful consequences to me. Far
+from hushing the thing up, I have brought a gentleman down from London to
+inquire more deeply into it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“This gentleman?” she asked, facing round to me.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, his friend. He wished us to leave him alone. He is round in the
+stable lane now.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The stable lane?” She raised her dark eyebrows. “What can he
+hope to find there? Ah! this, I suppose, is he. I trust, sir, that you will
+succeed in proving, what I feel sure is the truth, that my cousin Arthur is
+innocent of this crime.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I fully share your opinion, and I trust, with you, that we may prove
+it,” returned Holmes, going back to the mat to knock the snow from his
+shoes. “I believe I have the honour of addressing Miss Mary Holder. Might
+I ask you a question or two?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pray do, sir, if it may help to clear this horrible affair up.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You heard nothing yourself last night?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nothing, until my uncle here began to speak loudly. I heard that, and I
+came down.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You shut up the windows and doors the night before. Did you fasten all
+the windows?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Were they all fastened this morning?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have a maid who has a sweetheart? I think that you remarked to your
+uncle last night that she had been out to see him?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, and she was the girl who waited in the drawing-room, and who may
+have heard uncle’s remarks about the coronet.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I see. You infer that she may have gone out to tell her sweetheart, and
+that the two may have planned the robbery.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But what is the good of all these vague theories,” cried the
+banker impatiently, “when I have told you that I saw Arthur with the
+coronet in his hands?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Wait a little, Mr. Holder. We must come back to that. About this girl,
+Miss Holder. You saw her return by the kitchen door, I presume?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes; when I went to see if the door was fastened for the night I met her
+slipping in. I saw the man, too, in the gloom.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you know him?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, yes! he is the greengrocer who brings our vegetables round. His
+name is Francis Prosper.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He stood,” said Holmes, “to the left of the door—that
+is to say, farther up the path than is necessary to reach the door?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, he did.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And he is a man with a wooden leg?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Something like fear sprang up in the young lady’s expressive black eyes.
+“Why, you are like a magician,” said she. “How do you know
+that?” She smiled, but there was no answering smile in Holmes’
+thin, eager face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I should be very glad now to go upstairs,” said he. “I shall
+probably wish to go over the outside of the house again. Perhaps I had better
+take a look at the lower windows before I go up.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He walked swiftly round from one to the other, pausing only at the large one
+which looked from the hall onto the stable lane. This he opened and made a very
+careful examination of the sill with his powerful magnifying lens. “Now
+we shall go upstairs,” said he at last.
+</p>
+<p>
+The banker’s dressing-room was a plainly furnished little chamber, with a
+grey carpet, a large bureau, and a long mirror. Holmes went to the bureau first
+and looked hard at the lock.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Which key was used to open it?” he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That which my son himself indicated—that of the cupboard of the
+lumber-room.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Have you it here?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is it on the dressing-table.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Sherlock Holmes took it up and opened the bureau.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is a noiseless lock,” said he. “It is no wonder that it
+did not wake you. This case, I presume, contains the coronet. We must have a
+look at it.” He opened the case, and taking out the diadem he laid it
+upon the table. It was a magnificent specimen of the jeweller’s art, and
+the thirty-six stones were the finest that I have ever seen. At one side of the
+coronet was a cracked edge, where a corner holding three gems had been torn
+away.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, Mr. Holder,” said Holmes, “here is the corner which
+corresponds to that which has been so unfortunately lost. Might I beg that you
+will break it off.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The banker recoiled in horror. “I should not dream of trying,” said
+he.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then I will.” Holmes suddenly bent his strength upon it, but
+without result. “I feel it give a little,” said he; “but,
+though I am exceptionally strong in the fingers, it would take me all my time
+to break it. An ordinary man could not do it. Now, what do you think would
+happen if I did break it, Mr. Holder? There would be a noise like a pistol
+shot. Do you tell me that all this happened within a few yards of your bed and
+that you heard nothing of it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I do not know what to think. It is all dark to me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But perhaps it may grow lighter as we go. What do you think, Miss
+Holder?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I confess that I still share my uncle’s perplexity.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your son had no shoes or slippers on when you saw him?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He had nothing on save only his trousers and shirt.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you. We have certainly been favoured with extraordinary luck
+during this inquiry, and it will be entirely our own fault if we do not succeed
+in clearing the matter up. With your permission, Mr. Holder, I shall now
+continue my investigations outside.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He went alone, at his own request, for he explained that any unnecessary
+footmarks might make his task more difficult. For an hour or more he was at
+work, returning at last with his feet heavy with snow and his features as
+inscrutable as ever.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think that I have seen now all that there is to see, Mr.
+Holder,” said he; “I can serve you best by returning to my
+rooms.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But the gems, Mr. Holmes. Where are they?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I cannot tell.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The banker wrung his hands. “I shall never see them again!” he
+cried. “And my son? You give me hopes?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My opinion is in no way altered.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then, for God’s sake, what was this dark business which was acted
+in my house last night?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If you can call upon me at my Baker Street rooms to-morrow morning
+between nine and ten I shall be happy to do what I can to make it clearer. I
+understand that you give me <i>carte blanche</i> to act for you, provided only
+that I get back the gems, and that you place no limit on the sum I may
+draw.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I would give my fortune to have them back.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very good. I shall look into the matter between this and then. Good-bye;
+it is just possible that I may have to come over here again before
+evening.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was obvious to me that my companion’s mind was now made up about the
+case, although what his conclusions were was more than I could even dimly
+imagine. Several times during our homeward journey I endeavoured to sound him
+upon the point, but he always glided away to some other topic, until at last I
+gave it over in despair. It was not yet three when we found ourselves in our
+rooms once more. He hurried to his chamber and was down again in a few minutes
+dressed as a common loafer. With his collar turned up, his shiny, seedy coat,
+his red cravat, and his worn boots, he was a perfect sample of the class.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think that this should do,” said he, glancing into the glass
+above the fireplace. “I only wish that you could come with me, Watson,
+but I fear that it won’t do. I may be on the trail in this matter, or I
+may be following a will-o’-the-wisp, but I shall soon know which it is. I
+hope that I may be back in a few hours.” He cut a slice of beef from the
+joint upon the sideboard, sandwiched it between two rounds of bread, and
+thrusting this rude meal into his pocket he started off upon his expedition.
+</p>
+<p>
+I had just finished my tea when he returned, evidently in excellent spirits,
+swinging an old elastic-sided boot in his hand. He chucked it down into a
+corner and helped himself to a cup of tea.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I only looked in as I passed,” said he. “I am going right
+on.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Where to?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, to the other side of the West End. It may be some time before I get
+back. Don’t wait up for me in case I should be late.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How are you getting on?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, so so. Nothing to complain of. I have been out to Streatham since I
+saw you last, but I did not call at the house. It is a very sweet little
+problem, and I would not have missed it for a good deal. However, I must not
+sit gossiping here, but must get these disreputable clothes off and return to
+my highly respectable self.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I could see by his manner that he had stronger reasons for satisfaction than
+his words alone would imply. His eyes twinkled, and there was even a touch of
+colour upon his sallow cheeks. He hastened upstairs, and a few minutes later I
+heard the slam of the hall door, which told me that he was off once more upon
+his congenial hunt.
+</p>
+<p>
+I waited until midnight, but there was no sign of his return, so I retired to
+my room. It was no uncommon thing for him to be away for days and nights on end
+when he was hot upon a scent, so that his lateness caused me no surprise. I do
+not know at what hour he came in, but when I came down to breakfast in the
+morning there he was with a cup of coffee in one hand and the paper in the
+other, as fresh and trim as possible.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You will excuse my beginning without you, Watson,” said he,
+“but you remember that our client has rather an early appointment this
+morning.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, it is after nine now,” I answered. “I should not be
+surprised if that were he. I thought I heard a ring.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was, indeed, our friend the financier. I was shocked by the change which had
+come over him, for his face which was naturally of a broad and massive mould,
+was now pinched and fallen in, while his hair seemed to me at least a shade
+whiter. He entered with a weariness and lethargy which was even more painful
+than his violence of the morning before, and he dropped heavily into the
+armchair which I pushed forward for him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I do not know what I have done to be so severely tried,” said he.
+“Only two days ago I was a happy and prosperous man, without a care in
+the world. Now I am left to a lonely and dishonoured age. One sorrow comes
+close upon the heels of another. My niece, Mary, has deserted me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Deserted you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes. Her bed this morning had not been slept in, her room was empty, and
+a note for me lay upon the hall table. I had said to her last night, in sorrow
+and not in anger, that if she had married my boy all might have been well with
+him. Perhaps it was thoughtless of me to say so. It is to that remark that she
+refers in this note:
+</p>
+<p class="letter">
+“‘MY DEAREST UNCLE,—I feel that I have brought trouble
+upon you, and that if I had acted differently this terrible misfortune might
+never have occurred. I cannot, with this thought in my mind, ever again be
+happy under your roof, and I feel that I must leave you forever. Do not worry
+about my future, for that is provided for; and, above all, do not search for
+me, for it will be fruitless labour and an ill-service to me. In life or in
+death, I am ever your loving,
+</p>
+<p class="right">
+“‘MARY.’
+</p>
+<p class="p2">
+“What could she mean by that note, Mr. Holmes? Do you think it points to
+suicide?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, no, nothing of the kind. It is perhaps the best possible solution. I
+trust, Mr. Holder, that you are nearing the end of your troubles.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ha! You say so! You have heard something, Mr. Holmes; you have learned
+something! Where are the gems?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You would not think £ 1000 apiece an excessive sum for
+them?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I would pay ten.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That would be unnecessary. Three thousand will cover the matter. And
+there is a little reward, I fancy. Have you your cheque-book? Here is a pen.
+Better make it out for £ 4000.”
+</p>
+<p>
+With a dazed face the banker made out the required check. Holmes walked over to
+his desk, took out a little triangular piece of gold with three gems in it, and
+threw it down upon the table.
+</p>
+<p>
+With a shriek of joy our client clutched it up.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have it!” he gasped. “I am saved! I am saved!”
+</p>
+<p>
+The reaction of joy was as passionate as his grief had been, and he hugged his
+recovered gems to his bosom.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is one other thing you owe, Mr. Holder,” said Sherlock
+Holmes rather sternly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Owe!” He caught up a pen. “Name the sum, and I will pay
+it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, the debt is not to me. You owe a very humble apology to that noble
+lad, your son, who has carried himself in this matter as I should be proud to
+see my own son do, should I ever chance to have one.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then it was not Arthur who took them?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I told you yesterday, and I repeat to-day, that it was not.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are sure of it! Then let us hurry to him at once to let him know
+that the truth is known.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He knows it already. When I had cleared it all up I had an interview
+with him, and finding that he would not tell me the story, I told it to him, on
+which he had to confess that I was right and to add the very few details which
+were not yet quite clear to me. Your news of this morning, however, may open
+his lips.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“For Heaven’s sake, tell me, then, what is this extraordinary
+mystery!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I will do so, and I will show you the steps by which I reached it. And
+let me say to you, first, that which it is hardest for me to say and for you to
+hear: there has been an understanding between Sir George Burnwell and your
+niece Mary. They have now fled together.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“My Mary? Impossible!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is unfortunately more than possible; it is certain. Neither you nor
+your son knew the true character of this man when you admitted him into your
+family circle. He is one of the most dangerous men in England—a ruined
+gambler, an absolutely desperate villain, a man without heart or conscience.
+Your niece knew nothing of such men. When he breathed his vows to her, as he
+had done to a hundred before her, she flattered herself that she alone had
+touched his heart. The devil knows best what he said, but at least she became
+his tool and was in the habit of seeing him nearly every evening.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I cannot, and I will not, believe it!” cried the banker with an
+ashen face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I will tell you, then, what occurred in your house last night. Your
+niece, when you had, as she thought, gone to your room, slipped down and talked
+to her lover through the window which leads into the stable lane. His footmarks
+had pressed right through the snow, so long had he stood there. She told him of
+the coronet. His wicked lust for gold kindled at the news, and he bent her to
+his will. I have no doubt that she loved you, but there are women in whom the
+love of a lover extinguishes all other loves, and I think that she must have
+been one. She had hardly listened to his instructions when she saw you coming
+downstairs, on which she closed the window rapidly and told you about one of
+the servants’ escapade with her wooden-legged lover, which was all
+perfectly true.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Your boy, Arthur, went to bed after his interview with you but he slept
+badly on account of his uneasiness about his club debts. In the middle of the
+night he heard a soft tread pass his door, so he rose and, looking out, was
+surprised to see his cousin walking very stealthily along the passage until she
+disappeared into your dressing-room. Petrified with astonishment, the lad
+slipped on some clothes and waited there in the dark to see what would come of
+this strange affair. Presently she emerged from the room again, and in the
+light of the passage-lamp your son saw that she carried the precious coronet in
+her hands. She passed down the stairs, and he, thrilling with horror, ran along
+and slipped behind the curtain near your door, whence he could see what passed
+in the hall beneath. He saw her stealthily open the window, hand out the
+coronet to someone in the gloom, and then closing it once more hurry back to
+her room, passing quite close to where he stood hid behind the curtain.
+</p>
+<p>
+“As long as she was on the scene he could not take any action without a
+horrible exposure of the woman whom he loved. But the instant that she was gone
+he realised how crushing a misfortune this would be for you, and how
+all-important it was to set it right. He rushed down, just as he was, in his
+bare feet, opened the window, sprang out into the snow, and ran down the lane,
+where he could see a dark figure in the moonlight. Sir George Burnwell tried to
+get away, but Arthur caught him, and there was a struggle between them, your
+lad tugging at one side of the coronet, and his opponent at the other. In the
+scuffle, your son struck Sir George and cut him over the eye. Then something
+suddenly snapped, and your son, finding that he had the coronet in his hands,
+rushed back, closed the window, ascended to your room, and had just observed
+that the coronet had been twisted in the struggle and was endeavouring to
+straighten it when you appeared upon the scene.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is it possible?” gasped the banker.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You then roused his anger by calling him names at a moment when he felt
+that he had deserved your warmest thanks. He could not explain the true state
+of affairs without betraying one who certainly deserved little enough
+consideration at his hands. He took the more chivalrous view, however, and
+preserved her secret.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And that was why she shrieked and fainted when she saw the
+coronet,” cried Mr. Holder. “Oh, my God! what a blind fool I have
+been! And his asking to be allowed to go out for five minutes! The dear fellow
+wanted to see if the missing piece were at the scene of the struggle. How
+cruelly I have misjudged him!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“When I arrived at the house,” continued Holmes, “I at once
+went very carefully round it to observe if there were any traces in the snow
+which might help me. I knew that none had fallen since the evening before, and
+also that there had been a strong frost to preserve impressions. I passed along
+the tradesmen’s path, but found it all trampled down and
+indistinguishable. Just beyond it, however, at the far side of the kitchen
+door, a woman had stood and talked with a man, whose round impressions on one
+side showed that he had a wooden leg. I could even tell that they had been
+disturbed, for the woman had run back swiftly to the door, as was shown by the
+deep toe and light heel marks, while Wooden-leg had waited a little, and then
+had gone away. I thought at the time that this might be the maid and her
+sweetheart, of whom you had already spoken to me, and inquiry showed it was so.
+I passed round the garden without seeing anything more than random tracks,
+which I took to be the police; but when I got into the stable lane a very long
+and complex story was written in the snow in front of me.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There was a double line of tracks of a booted man, and a second double
+line which I saw with delight belonged to a man with naked feet. I was at once
+convinced from what you had told me that the latter was your son. The first had
+walked both ways, but the other had run swiftly, and as his tread was marked in
+places over the depression of the boot, it was obvious that he had passed after
+the other. I followed them up and found they led to the hall window, where
+Boots had worn all the snow away while waiting. Then I walked to the other end,
+which was a hundred yards or more down the lane. I saw where Boots had faced
+round, where the snow was cut up as though there had been a struggle, and,
+finally, where a few drops of blood had fallen, to show me that I was not
+mistaken. Boots had then run down the lane, and another little smudge of blood
+showed that it was he who had been hurt. When he came to the high road at the
+other end, I found that the pavement had been cleared, so there was an end to
+that clue.
+</p>
+<p>
+“On entering the house, however, I examined, as you remember, the sill
+and framework of the hall window with my lens, and I could at once see that
+someone had passed out. I could distinguish the outline of an instep where the
+wet foot had been placed in coming in. I was then beginning to be able to form
+an opinion as to what had occurred. A man had waited outside the window;
+someone had brought the gems; the deed had been overseen by your son; he had
+pursued the thief; had struggled with him; they had each tugged at the coronet,
+their united strength causing injuries which neither alone could have effected.
+He had returned with the prize, but had left a fragment in the grasp of his
+opponent. So far I was clear. The question now was, who was the man, and who was
+it brought him the coronet?
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible,
+whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Now, I knew that it
+was not you who had brought it down, so there only remained your niece and the
+maids. But if it were the maids, why should your son allow himself to be
+accused in their place? There could be no possible reason. As he loved his
+cousin, however, there was an excellent explanation why he should retain her
+secret—the more so as the secret was a disgraceful one. When I remembered
+that you had seen her at that window, and how she had fainted on seeing the
+coronet again, my conjecture became a certainty.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And who could it be who was her confederate? A lover evidently, for who
+else could outweigh the love and gratitude which she must feel to you? I knew
+that you went out little, and that your circle of friends was a very limited
+one. But among them was Sir George Burnwell. I had heard of him before as being
+a man of evil reputation among women. It must have been he who wore those boots
+and retained the missing gems. Even though he knew that Arthur had discovered
+him, he might still flatter himself that he was safe, for the lad could not say
+a word without compromising his own family.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, your own good sense will suggest what measures I took next. I went
+in the shape of a loafer to Sir George’s house, managed to pick up an
+acquaintance with his valet, learned that his master had cut his head the night
+before, and, finally, at the expense of six shillings, made all sure by buying
+a pair of his cast-off shoes. With these I journeyed down to Streatham and saw
+that they exactly fitted the tracks.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I saw an ill-dressed vagabond in the lane yesterday evening,” said
+Mr. Holder.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Precisely. It was I. I found that I had my man, so I came home and
+changed my clothes. It was a delicate part which I had to play then, for I saw
+that a prosecution must be avoided to avert scandal, and I knew that so astute
+a villain would see that our hands were tied in the matter. I went and saw him.
+At first, of course, he denied everything. But when I gave him every particular
+that had occurred, he tried to bluster and took down a life-preserver from the
+wall. I knew my man, however, and I clapped a pistol to his head before he
+could strike. Then he became a little more reasonable. I told him that we would
+give him a price for the stones he held—£ 1000 apiece. That brought out
+the first signs of grief that he had shown. ‘Why, dash it all!’
+said he, ‘I’ve let them go at six hundred for the three!’ I
+soon managed to get the address of the receiver who had them, on promising him
+that there would be no prosecution. Off I set to him, and after much chaffering
+I got our stones at £ 1000 apiece. Then I looked in upon your son, told him
+that all was right, and eventually got to my bed about two o’clock, after
+what I may call a really hard day’s work.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A day which has saved England from a great public scandal,” said
+the banker, rising. “Sir, I cannot find words to thank you, but you shall
+not find me ungrateful for what you have done. Your skill has indeed exceeded
+all that I have heard of it. And now I must fly to my dear boy to apologise to
+him for the wrong which I have done him. As to what you tell me of poor Mary,
+it goes to my very heart. Not even your skill can inform me where she is
+now.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think that we may safely say,” returned Holmes, “that she
+is wherever Sir George Burnwell is. It is equally certain, too, that whatever
+her sins are, they will soon receive a more than sufficient punishment.”
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="chap12"></a>XII.<br>THE ADVENTURE OF THE COPPER BEECHES</h2>
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 1.50em">“T</span>o the man who
+loves art for its own sake,” remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the
+advertisement sheet of <i>The Daily Telegraph</i>, “it is frequently in
+its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to
+be derived. It is pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far
+grasped this truth that in these little records of our cases which you have
+been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say, occasionally to embellish,
+you have given prominence not so much to the many <i>causes célèbres</i> and
+sensational trials in which I have figured but rather to those incidents which
+may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those
+faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special
+province.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And yet,” said I, smiling, “I cannot quite hold myself
+absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my
+records.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have erred, perhaps,” he observed, taking up a glowing cinder
+with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to
+replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative
+mood—“you have erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life
+into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of
+placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really
+the only notable feature about the thing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter,” I
+remarked with some coldness, for I was repelled by the egotism which I had more
+than once observed to be a strong factor in my friend’s singular
+character.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, it is not selfishness or conceit,” said he, answering, as was
+his wont, my thoughts rather than my words. “If I claim full justice for
+my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing—a thing beyond myself.
+Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon
+the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a
+course of lectures into a series of tales.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was a cold morning of the early spring, and we sat after breakfast on either
+side of a cheery fire in the old room at Baker Street. A thick fog rolled down
+between the lines of dun-coloured houses, and the opposing windows loomed like
+dark, shapeless blurs through the heavy yellow wreaths. Our gas was lit and
+shone on the white cloth and glimmer of china and metal, for the table had not
+been cleared yet. Sherlock Holmes had been silent all the morning, dipping
+continuously into the advertisement columns of a succession of papers until at
+last, having apparently given up his search, he had emerged in no very sweet
+temper to lecture me upon my literary shortcomings.
+</p>
+<p>
+“At the same time,” he remarked after a pause, during which he had
+sat puffing at his long pipe and gazing down into the fire, “you can
+hardly be open to a charge of sensationalism, for out of these cases which you
+have been so kind as to interest yourself in, a fair proportion do not treat of
+crime, in its legal sense, at all. The small matter in which I endeavoured to
+help the King of Bohemia, the singular experience of Miss Mary Sutherland, the
+problem connected with the man with the twisted lip, and the incident of the
+noble bachelor, were all matters which are outside the pale of the law. But in
+avoiding the sensational, I fear that you may have bordered on the
+trivial.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The end may have been so,” I answered, “but the methods I
+hold to have been novel and of interest.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public,
+who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb,
+care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction! But, indeed, if you are
+trivial, I cannot blame you, for the days of the great cases are past. Man, or
+at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own
+little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost
+lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools. I think
+that I have touched bottom at last, however. This note I had this morning marks
+my zero-point, I fancy. Read it!” He tossed a crumpled letter across to
+me.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was dated from Montague Place upon the preceding evening, and ran thus:
+</p>
+<p class="letter">
+“DEAR MR. HOLMES,—I am very anxious to consult you as to whether I
+should or should not accept a situation which has been offered to me as
+governess. I shall call at half-past ten to-morrow if I do not inconvenience
+you. Yours faithfully,
+</p>
+<p class="right">
+“VIOLET HUNTER.”
+</p>
+<p class="p2">
+“Do you know the young lady?” I asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not I.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is half-past ten now.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, and I have no doubt that is her ring.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It may turn out to be of more interest than you think. You remember that
+the affair of the blue carbuncle, which appeared to be a mere whim at first,
+developed into a serious investigation. It may be so in this case, also.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, let us hope so. But our doubts will very soon be solved, for here,
+unless I am much mistaken, is the person in question.”
+</p>
+<p>
+As he spoke the door opened and a young lady entered the room. She was plainly
+but neatly dressed, with a bright, quick face, freckled like a plover’s
+egg, and with the brisk manner of a woman who has had her own way to make in
+the world.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You will excuse my troubling you, I am sure,” said she, as my
+companion rose to greet her, “but I have had a very strange experience,
+and as I have no parents or relations of any sort from whom I could ask advice,
+I thought that perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me what I should
+do.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pray take a seat, Miss Hunter. I shall be happy to do anything that I
+can to serve you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+I could see that Holmes was favourably impressed by the manner and speech of
+his new client. He looked her over in his searching fashion, and then composed
+himself, with his lids drooping and his finger-tips together, to listen to her
+story.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have been a governess for five years,” said she, “in the
+family of Colonel Spence Munro, but two months ago the colonel received an
+appointment at Halifax, in Nova Scotia, and took his children over to America
+with him, so that I found myself without a situation. I advertised, and I
+answered advertisements, but without success. At last the little money which I
+had saved began to run short, and I was at my wit’s end as to what I
+should do.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is a well-known agency for governesses in the West End called
+Westaway’s, and there I used to call about once a week in order to see
+whether anything had turned up which might suit me. Westaway was the name of
+the founder of the business, but it is really managed by Miss Stoper. She sits
+in her own little office, and the ladies who are seeking employment wait in an
+anteroom, and are then shown in one by one, when she consults her ledgers and
+sees whether she has anything which would suit them.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, when I called last week I was shown into the little office as
+usual, but I found that Miss Stoper was not alone. A prodigiously stout man
+with a very smiling face and a great heavy chin which rolled down in fold upon
+fold over his throat sat at her elbow with a pair of glasses on his nose,
+looking very earnestly at the ladies who entered. As I came in he gave quite a
+jump in his chair and turned quickly to Miss Stoper.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘That will do,’ said he; ‘I could not ask for
+anything better. Capital! capital!’ He seemed quite enthusiastic and
+rubbed his hands together in the most genial fashion. He was such a
+comfortable-looking man that it was quite a pleasure to look at him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘You are looking for a situation, miss?’ he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Yes, sir.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘As governess?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Yes, sir.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘And what salary do you ask?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I had £ 4 a month in my last place with Colonel Spence
+Munro.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Oh, tut, tut! sweating—rank sweating!’ he
+cried, throwing his fat hands out into the air like a man who is in a boiling
+passion. ‘How could anyone offer so pitiful a sum to a lady with such
+attractions and accomplishments?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘My accomplishments, sir, may be less than you
+imagine,’ said I. ‘A little French, a little German, music, and
+drawing—’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Tut, tut!’ he cried. ‘This is all quite beside
+the question. The point is, have you or have you not the bearing and deportment
+of a lady? There it is in a nutshell. If you have not, you are not fitted for
+the rearing of a child who may some day play a considerable part in the history
+of the country. But if you have, why, then, how could any gentleman ask you to
+condescend to accept anything under the three figures? Your salary with me,
+madam, would commence at £ 100 a year.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“You may imagine, Mr. Holmes, that to me, destitute as I was, such an
+offer seemed almost too good to be true. The gentleman, however, seeing perhaps
+the look of incredulity upon my face, opened a pocket-book and took out a note.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘It is also my custom,’ said he, smiling in the most
+pleasant fashion until his eyes were just two little shining slits amid the
+white creases of his face, ‘to advance to my young ladies half their
+salary beforehand, so that they may meet any little expenses of their journey
+and their wardrobe.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“It seemed to me that I had never met so fascinating and so thoughtful a
+man. As I was already in debt to my tradesmen, the advance was a great
+convenience, and yet there was something unnatural about the whole transaction
+which made me wish to know a little more before I quite committed myself.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘May I ask where you live, sir?’ said I.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Hampshire. Charming rural place. The Copper Beeches, five
+miles on the far side of Winchester. It is the most lovely country, my dear
+young lady, and the dearest old country-house.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘And my duties, sir? I should be glad to know what they
+would be.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘One child—one dear little romper just six years old.
+Oh, if you could see him killing cockroaches with a slipper! Smack! smack!
+smack! Three gone before you could wink!’ He leaned back in his chair and
+laughed his eyes into his head again.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was a little startled at the nature of the child’s amusement,
+but the father’s laughter made me think that perhaps he was joking.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘My sole duties, then,’ I asked, ‘are to take
+charge of a single child?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘No, no, not the sole, not the sole, my dear young
+lady,’ he cried. ‘Your duty would be, as I am sure your good sense
+would suggest, to obey any little commands my wife might give, provided always
+that they were such commands as a lady might with propriety obey. You see no
+difficulty, heh?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I should be happy to make myself useful.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Quite so. In dress now, for example. We are faddy people,
+you know—faddy but kind-hearted. If you were asked to wear any dress
+which we might give you, you would not object to our little whim. Heh?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘No,’ said I, considerably astonished at his words.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Or to sit here, or sit there, that would not be offensive
+to you?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Oh, no.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Or to cut your hair quite short before you come to
+us?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“I could hardly believe my ears. As you may observe, Mr. Holmes, my hair
+is somewhat luxuriant, and of a rather peculiar tint of chestnut. It has been
+considered artistic. I could not dream of sacrificing it in this offhand
+fashion.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I am afraid that that is quite impossible,’ said I.
+He had been watching me eagerly out of his small eyes, and I could see a shadow
+pass over his face as I spoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I am afraid that it is quite essential,’ said he.
+‘It is a little fancy of my wife’s, and ladies’ fancies, you
+know, madam, ladies’ fancies must be consulted. And so you won’t
+cut your hair?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘No, sir, I really could not,’ I answered firmly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Ah, very well; then that quite settles the matter. It is a
+pity, because in other respects you would really have done very nicely. In that
+case, Miss Stoper, I had best inspect a few more of your young ladies.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“The manageress had sat all this while busy with her papers without a
+word to either of us, but she glanced at me now with so much annoyance upon her
+face that I could not help suspecting that she had lost a handsome commission
+through my refusal.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Do you desire your name to be kept upon the books?’
+she asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘If you please, Miss Stoper.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Well, really, it seems rather useless, since you refuse the
+most excellent offers in this fashion,’ said she sharply. ‘You can
+hardly expect us to exert ourselves to find another such opening for you.
+Good-day to you, Miss Hunter.’ She struck a gong upon the table, and I
+was shown out by the page.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, Mr. Holmes, when I got back to my lodgings and found little enough
+in the cupboard, and two or three bills upon the table, I began to ask myself
+whether I had not done a very foolish thing. After all, if these people had
+strange fads and expected obedience on the most extraordinary matters, they
+were at least ready to pay for their eccentricity. Very few governesses in
+England are getting £ 100 a year. Besides, what use was my hair to me? Many
+people are improved by wearing it short and perhaps I should be among the
+number. Next day I was inclined to think that I had made a mistake, and by the
+day after I was sure of it. I had almost overcome my pride so far as to go back
+to the agency and inquire whether the place was still open when I received this
+letter from the gentleman himself. I have it here and I will read it to you:
+</p>
+<p class="letter">
+“‘The Copper Beeches, near Winchester.<br>
+“‘DEAR MISS HUNTER,—Miss Stoper has very kindly given me your
+address, and I write from here to ask you whether you have reconsidered your
+decision. My wife is very anxious that you should come, for she has been much
+attracted by my description of you. We are willing to give £ 30 a quarter, or £
+120 a year, so as to recompense you for any little inconvenience which our fads
+may cause you. They are not very exacting, after all. My wife is fond of a
+particular shade of electric blue and would like you to wear such a dress
+indoors in the morning. You need not, however, go to the expense of purchasing
+one, as we have one belonging to my dear daughter Alice (now in Philadelphia),
+which would, I should think, fit you very well. Then, as to sitting here or
+there, or amusing yourself in any manner indicated, that need cause you no
+inconvenience. As regards your hair, it is no doubt a pity, especially as I
+could not help remarking its beauty during our short interview, but I am afraid
+that I must remain firm upon this point, and I only hope that the increased
+salary may recompense you for the loss. Your duties, as far as the child is
+concerned, are very light. Now do try to come, and I shall meet you with the
+dog-cart at Winchester. Let me know your train. Yours faithfully,
+</p>
+<p class="right">
+“‘JEPHRO RUCASTLE.’
+</p>
+<p class="p2">
+“That is the letter which I have just received, Mr. Holmes, and my mind
+is made up that I will accept it. I thought, however, that before taking the
+final step I should like to submit the whole matter to your
+consideration.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, Miss Hunter, if your mind is made up, that settles the
+question,” said Holmes, smiling.
+</p>
+<p>
+“But you would not advise me to refuse?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I confess that it is not the situation which I should like to see a
+sister of mine apply for.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What is the meaning of it all, Mr. Holmes?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah, I have no data. I cannot tell. Perhaps you have yourself formed some
+opinion?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, there seems to me to be only one possible solution. Mr. Rucastle
+seemed to be a very kind, good-natured man. Is it not possible that his wife is
+a lunatic, that he desires to keep the matter quiet for fear she should be
+taken to an asylum, and that he humours her fancies in every way in order to
+prevent an outbreak?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is a possible solution—in fact, as matters stand, it is the
+most probable one. But in any case it does not seem to be a nice household for
+a young lady.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But the money, Mr. Holmes, the money!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, yes, of course the pay is good—too good. That is what makes
+me uneasy. Why should they give you £ 120 a year, when they could have their
+pick for £ 40? There must be some strong reason behind.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I thought that if I told you the circumstances you would understand
+afterwards if I wanted your help. I should feel so much stronger if I felt that
+you were at the back of me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, you may carry that feeling away with you. I assure you that your
+little problem promises to be the most interesting which has come my way for
+some months. There is something distinctly novel about some of the features. If
+you should find yourself in doubt or in danger—”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Danger! What danger do you foresee?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes shook his head gravely. “It would cease to be a danger if we could
+define it,” said he. “But at any time, day or night, a telegram
+would bring me down to your help.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is enough.” She rose briskly from her chair with the anxiety
+all swept from her face. “I shall go down to Hampshire quite easy in my
+mind now. I shall write to Mr. Rucastle at once, sacrifice my poor hair
+to-night, and start for Winchester to-morrow.” With a few grateful words
+to Holmes she bade us both good-night and bustled off upon her way.
+</p>
+<p>
+“At least,” said I as we heard her quick, firm steps descending the
+stairs, “she seems to be a young lady who is very well able to take care
+of herself.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And she would need to be,” said Holmes gravely. “I am much
+mistaken if we do not hear from her before many days are past.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was not very long before my friend’s prediction was fulfilled. A
+fortnight went by, during which I frequently found my thoughts turning in her
+direction and wondering what strange side-alley of human experience this lonely
+woman had strayed into. The unusual salary, the curious conditions, the light
+duties, all pointed to something abnormal, though whether a fad or a plot, or
+whether the man were a philanthropist or a villain, it was quite beyond my
+powers to determine. As to Holmes, I observed that he sat frequently for half
+an hour on end, with knitted brows and an abstracted air, but he swept the
+matter away with a wave of his hand when I mentioned it. “Data! data!
+data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without
+clay.” And yet he would always wind up by muttering that no sister of his
+should ever have accepted such a situation.
+</p>
+<p>
+The telegram which we eventually received came late one night just as I was
+thinking of turning in and Holmes was settling down to one of those all-night
+chemical researches which he frequently indulged in, when I would leave him
+stooping over a retort and a test-tube at night and find him in the same
+position when I came down to breakfast in the morning. He opened the yellow
+envelope, and then, glancing at the message, threw it across to me.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Just look up the trains in Bradshaw,” said he, and turned back to
+his chemical studies.
+</p>
+<p>
+The summons was a brief and urgent one.
+</p>
+<p class="letter">
+“Please be at the Black Swan Hotel at Winchester at midday
+to-morrow,” it said. “Do come! I am at my wit’s end.
+</p>
+<p class="right">
+“HUNTER.”
+</p>
+<p class="p2">
+“Will you come with me?” asked Holmes, glancing up.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I should wish to.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Just look it up, then.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is a train at half-past nine,” said I, glancing over my
+Bradshaw. “It is due at Winchester at 11:30.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That will do very nicely. Then perhaps I had better postpone my analysis
+of the acetones, as we may need to be at our best in the morning.”
+</p>
+<p class="p2">
+By eleven o’clock the next day we were well upon our way to the old
+English capital. Holmes had been buried in the morning papers all the way down,
+but after we had passed the Hampshire border he threw them down and began to
+admire the scenery. It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with
+little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was
+shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which
+set an edge to a man’s energy. All over the countryside, away to the
+rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the
+farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried with all the enthusiasm
+of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.
+</p>
+<p>
+But Holmes shook his head gravely.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses
+of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference
+to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are
+impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to
+me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be
+committed there.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with
+these dear old homesteads?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson,
+founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not
+present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful
+countryside.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You horrify me!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in
+the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the
+scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not
+beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole
+machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it
+going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at
+these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor
+ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish
+cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such
+places, and none the wiser. Had this lady who appeals to us for help gone to
+live in Winchester, I should never have had a fear for her. It is the five
+miles of country which makes the danger. Still, it is clear that she is not
+personally threatened.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No. If she can come to Winchester to meet us she can get away.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Quite so. She has her freedom.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What <i>can</i> be the matter, then? Can you suggest no
+explanation?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have devised seven separate explanations, each of which would cover
+the facts as far as we know them. But which of these is correct can only be
+determined by the fresh information which we shall no doubt find waiting for
+us. Well, there is the tower of the cathedral, and we shall soon learn all that
+Miss Hunter has to tell.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Black Swan is an inn of repute in the High Street, at no distance from the
+station, and there we found the young lady waiting for us. She had engaged a
+sitting-room, and our lunch awaited us upon the table.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am so delighted that you have come,” she said earnestly.
+“It is so very kind of you both; but indeed I do not know what I should
+do. Your advice will be altogether invaluable to me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pray tell us what has happened to you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I will do so, and I must be quick, for I have promised Mr. Rucastle to
+be back before three. I got his leave to come into town this morning, though he
+little knew for what purpose.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Let us have everything in its due order.” Holmes thrust his long
+thin legs out towards the fire and composed himself to listen.
+</p>
+<p>
+“In the first place, I may say that I have met, on the whole, with no
+actual ill-treatment from Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle. It is only fair to them to say
+that. But I cannot understand them, and I am not easy in my mind about
+them.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What can you not understand?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Their reasons for their conduct. But you shall have it all just as it
+occurred. When I came down, Mr. Rucastle met me here and drove me in his
+dog-cart to the Copper Beeches. It is, as he said, beautifully situated, but it
+is not beautiful in itself, for it is a large square block of a house,
+whitewashed, but all stained and streaked with damp and bad weather. There are
+grounds round it, woods on three sides, and on the fourth a field which slopes
+down to the Southampton high road, which curves past about a hundred yards from
+the front door. This ground in front belongs to the house, but the woods all
+round are part of Lord Southerton’s preserves. A clump of copper beeches
+immediately in front of the hall door has given its name to the place.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was driven over by my employer, who was as amiable as ever, and was
+introduced by him that evening to his wife and the child. There was no truth,
+Mr. Holmes, in the conjecture which seemed to us to be probable in your rooms
+at Baker Street. Mrs. Rucastle is not mad. I found her to be a silent,
+pale-faced woman, much younger than her husband, not more than thirty, I should
+think, while he can hardly be less than forty-five. From their conversation I
+have gathered that they have been married about seven years, that he was a
+widower, and that his only child by the first wife was the daughter who has
+gone to Philadelphia. Mr. Rucastle told me in private that the reason why she
+had left them was that she had an unreasoning aversion to her stepmother. As
+the daughter could not have been less than twenty, I can quite imagine that her
+position must have been uncomfortable with her father’s young wife.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mrs. Rucastle seemed to me to be colourless in mind as well as in
+feature. She impressed me neither favourably nor the reverse. She was a
+nonentity. It was easy to see that she was passionately devoted both to her
+husband and to her little son. Her light grey eyes wandered continually from
+one to the other, noting every little want and forestalling it if possible. He
+was kind to her also in his bluff, boisterous fashion, and on the whole they
+seemed to be a happy couple. And yet she had some secret sorrow, this woman.
+She would often be lost in deep thought, with the saddest look upon her face.
+More than once I have surprised her in tears. I have thought sometimes that it
+was the disposition of her child which weighed upon her mind, for I have never
+met so utterly spoiled and so ill-natured a little creature. He is small for
+his age, with a head which is quite disproportionately large. His whole life
+appears to be spent in an alternation between savage fits of passion and gloomy
+intervals of sulking. Giving pain to any creature weaker than himself seems to
+be his one idea of amusement, and he shows quite remarkable talent in planning
+the capture of mice, little birds, and insects. But I would rather not talk
+about the creature, Mr. Holmes, and, indeed, he has little to do with my
+story.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am glad of all details,” remarked my friend, “whether they
+seem to you to be relevant or not.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I shall try not to miss anything of importance. The one unpleasant thing
+about the house, which struck me at once, was the appearance and conduct of the
+servants. There are only two, a man and his wife. Toller, for that is his name,
+is a rough, uncouth man, with grizzled hair and whiskers, and a perpetual smell
+of drink. Twice since I have been with them he has been quite drunk, and yet
+Mr. Rucastle seemed to take no notice of it. His wife is a very tall and strong
+woman with a sour face, as silent as Mrs. Rucastle and much less amiable. They
+are a most unpleasant couple, but fortunately I spend most of my time in the
+nursery and my own room, which are next to each other in one corner of the
+building.
+</p>
+<p>
+“For two days after my arrival at the Copper Beeches my life was very
+quiet; on the third, Mrs. Rucastle came down just after breakfast and whispered
+something to her husband.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Oh, yes,’ said he, turning to me, ‘we are very
+much obliged to you, Miss Hunter, for falling in with our whims so far as to
+cut your hair. I assure you that it has not detracted in the tiniest iota from
+your appearance. We shall now see how the electric-blue dress will become you.
+You will find it laid out upon the bed in your room, and if you would be so
+good as to put it on we should both be extremely obliged.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“The dress which I found waiting for me was of a peculiar shade of blue.
+It was of excellent material, a sort of beige, but it bore unmistakable signs
+of having been worn before. It could not have been a better fit if I had been
+measured for it. Both Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle expressed a delight at the look of
+it, which seemed quite exaggerated in its vehemence. They were waiting for me
+in the drawing-room, which is a very large room, stretching along the entire
+front of the house, with three long windows reaching down to the floor. A chair
+had been placed close to the central window, with its back turned towards it.
+In this I was asked to sit, and then Mr. Rucastle, walking up and down on the
+other side of the room, began to tell me a series of the funniest stories that
+I have ever listened to. You cannot imagine how comical he was, and I laughed
+until I was quite weary. Mrs. Rucastle, however, who has evidently no sense of
+humour, never so much as smiled, but sat with her hands in her lap, and a sad,
+anxious look upon her face. After an hour or so, Mr. Rucastle suddenly remarked
+that it was time to commence the duties of the day, and that I might change my
+dress and go to little Edward in the nursery.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Two days later this same performance was gone through under exactly
+similar circumstances. Again I changed my dress, again I sat in the window, and
+again I laughed very heartily at the funny stories of which my employer had an
+immense <i>répertoire</i>, and which he told inimitably. Then he handed me a
+yellow-backed novel, and moving my chair a little sideways, that my own shadow
+might not fall upon the page, he begged me to read aloud to him. I read for
+about ten minutes, beginning in the heart of a chapter, and then suddenly, in
+the middle of a sentence, he ordered me to cease and to change my dress.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You can easily imagine, Mr. Holmes, how curious I became as to what the
+meaning of this extraordinary performance could possibly be. They were always
+very careful, I observed, to turn my face away from the window, so that I
+became consumed with the desire to see what was going on behind my back. At
+first it seemed to be impossible, but I soon devised a means. My hand-mirror
+had been broken, so a happy thought seized me, and I concealed a piece of the
+glass in my handkerchief. On the next occasion, in the midst of my laughter, I
+put my handkerchief up to my eyes, and was able with a little management to see
+all that there was behind me. I confess that I was disappointed. There was
+nothing. At least that was my first impression. At the second glance, however,
+I perceived that there was a man standing in the Southampton Road, a small
+bearded man in a grey suit, who seemed to be looking in my direction. The road
+is an important highway, and there are usually people there. This man, however,
+was leaning against the railings which bordered our field and was looking
+earnestly up. I lowered my handkerchief and glanced at Mrs. Rucastle to find
+her eyes fixed upon me with a most searching gaze. She said nothing, but I am
+convinced that she had divined that I had a mirror in my hand and had seen what
+was behind me. She rose at once.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Jephro,’ said she, ‘there is an impertinent
+fellow upon the road there who stares up at Miss Hunter.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘No friend of yours, Miss Hunter?’ he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘No, I know no one in these parts.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Dear me! How very impertinent! Kindly turn round and motion
+to him to go away.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Surely it would be better to take no notice.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘No, no, we should have him loitering here always. Kindly
+turn round and wave him away like that.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“I did as I was told, and at the same instant Mrs. Rucastle drew down the
+blind. That was a week ago, and from that time I have not sat again in the
+window, nor have I worn the blue dress, nor seen the man in the road.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Pray continue,” said Holmes. “Your narrative promises to be
+a most interesting one.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You will find it rather disconnected, I fear, and there may prove to be
+little relation between the different incidents of which I speak. On the very
+first day that I was at the Copper Beeches, Mr. Rucastle took me to a small
+outhouse which stands near the kitchen door. As we approached it I heard the
+sharp rattling of a chain, and the sound as of a large animal moving about.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Look in here!’ said Mr. Rucastle, showing me a slit
+between two planks. ‘Is he not a beauty?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“I looked through and was conscious of two glowing eyes, and of a vague
+figure huddled up in the darkness.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Don’t be frightened,’ said my employer,
+laughing at the start which I had given. ‘It’s only Carlo, my
+mastiff. I call him mine, but really old Toller, my groom, is the only man who
+can do anything with him. We feed him once a day, and not too much then, so
+that he is always as keen as mustard. Toller lets him loose every night, and
+God help the trespasser whom he lays his fangs upon. For goodness’ sake
+don’t you ever on any pretext set your foot over the threshold at night,
+for it’s as much as your life is worth.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“The warning was no idle one, for two nights later I happened to look out
+of my bedroom window about two o’clock in the morning. It was a beautiful
+moonlight night, and the lawn in front of the house was silvered over and
+almost as bright as day. I was standing, rapt in the peaceful beauty of the
+scene, when I was aware that something was moving under the shadow of the
+copper beeches. As it emerged into the moonshine I saw what it was. It was a
+giant dog, as large as a calf, tawny tinted, with hanging jowl, black muzzle,
+and huge projecting bones. It walked slowly across the lawn and vanished into
+the shadow upon the other side. That dreadful sentinel sent a chill to my heart
+which I do not think that any burglar could have done.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And now I have a very strange experience to tell you. I had, as you
+know, cut off my hair in London, and I had placed it in a great coil at the
+bottom of my trunk. One evening, after the child was in bed, I began to amuse
+myself by examining the furniture of my room and by rearranging my own little
+things. There was an old chest of drawers in the room, the two upper ones empty
+and open, the lower one locked. I had filled the first two with my linen, and
+as I had still much to pack away I was naturally annoyed at not having the use
+of the third drawer. It struck me that it might have been fastened by a mere
+oversight, so I took out my bunch of keys and tried to open it. The very first
+key fitted to perfection, and I drew the drawer open. There was only one thing
+in it, but I am sure that you would never guess what it was. It was my coil of
+hair.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I took it up and examined it. It was of the same peculiar tint, and the
+same thickness. But then the impossibility of the thing obtruded itself upon
+me. How could my hair have been locked in the drawer? With trembling hands I
+undid my trunk, turned out the contents, and drew from the bottom my own hair.
+I laid the two tresses together, and I assure you that they were identical. Was
+it not extraordinary? Puzzle as I would, I could make nothing at all of what it
+meant. I returned the strange hair to the drawer, and I said nothing of the
+matter to the Rucastles as I felt that I had put myself in the wrong by opening
+a drawer which they had locked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am naturally observant, as you may have remarked, Mr. Holmes, and I
+soon had a pretty good plan of the whole house in my head. There was one wing,
+however, which appeared not to be inhabited at all. A door which faced that
+which led into the quarters of the Tollers opened into this suite, but it was
+invariably locked. One day, however, as I ascended the stair, I met Mr.
+Rucastle coming out through this door, his keys in his hand, and a look on his
+face which made him a very different person to the round, jovial man to whom I
+was accustomed. His cheeks were red, his brow was all crinkled with anger, and
+the veins stood out at his temples with passion. He locked the door and hurried
+past me without a word or a look.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This aroused my curiosity, so when I went out for a walk in the grounds
+with my charge, I strolled round to the side from which I could see the windows
+of this part of the house. There were four of them in a row, three of which
+were simply dirty, while the fourth was shuttered up. They were evidently all
+deserted. As I strolled up and down, glancing at them occasionally, Mr.
+Rucastle came out to me, looking as merry and jovial as ever.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Ah!’ said he, ‘you must not think me rude if I
+passed you without a word, my dear young lady. I was preoccupied with business
+matters.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“I assured him that I was not offended. ‘By the way,’ said I,
+‘you seem to have quite a suite of spare rooms up there, and one of them
+has the shutters up.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“He looked surprised and, as it seemed to me, a little startled at my
+remark.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Photography is one of my hobbies,’ said he. ‘I
+have made my dark room up there. But, dear me! what an observant young lady we
+have come upon. Who would have believed it? Who would have ever believed
+it?’ He spoke in a jesting tone, but there was no jest in his eyes as he
+looked at me. I read suspicion there and annoyance, but no jest.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, Mr. Holmes, from the moment that I understood that there was
+something about that suite of rooms which I was not to know, I was all on fire
+to go over them. It was not mere curiosity, though I have my share of that. It
+was more a feeling of duty—a feeling that some good might come from my
+penetrating to this place. They talk of woman’s instinct; perhaps it was
+woman’s instinct which gave me that feeling. At any rate, it was there,
+and I was keenly on the lookout for any chance to pass the forbidden door.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was only yesterday that the chance came. I may tell you that, besides
+Mr. Rucastle, both Toller and his wife find something to do in these deserted
+rooms, and I once saw him carrying a large black linen bag with him through the
+door. Recently he has been drinking hard, and yesterday evening he was very
+drunk; and when I came upstairs there was the key in the door. I have no doubt
+at all that he had left it there. Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle were both downstairs,
+and the child was with them, so that I had an admirable opportunity. I turned
+the key gently in the lock, opened the door, and slipped through.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There was a little passage in front of me, unpapered and uncarpeted,
+which turned at a right angle at the farther end. Round this corner were three
+doors in a line, the first and third of which were open. They each led into an
+empty room, dusty and cheerless, with two windows in the one and one in the
+other, so thick with dirt that the evening light glimmered dimly through them.
+The centre door was closed, and across the outside of it had been fastened one
+of the broad bars of an iron bed, padlocked at one end to a ring in the wall,
+and fastened at the other with stout cord. The door itself was locked as well,
+and the key was not there. This barricaded door corresponded clearly with the
+shuttered window outside, and yet I could see by the glimmer from beneath it
+that the room was not in darkness. Evidently there was a skylight which let in
+light from above. As I stood in the passage gazing at the sinister door and
+wondering what secret it might veil, I suddenly heard the sound of steps within
+the room and saw a shadow pass backward and forward against the little slit of
+dim light which shone out from under the door. A mad, unreasoning terror rose
+up in me at the sight, Mr. Holmes. My overstrung nerves failed me suddenly, and
+I turned and ran—ran as though some dreadful hand were behind me
+clutching at the skirt of my dress. I rushed down the passage, through the
+door, and straight into the arms of Mr. Rucastle, who was waiting outside.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘So,’ said he, smiling, ‘it was you, then. I
+thought that it must be when I saw the door open.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Oh, I am so frightened!’ I panted.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘My dear young lady! my dear young lady!’—you
+cannot think how caressing and soothing his manner was—‘and what
+has frightened you, my dear young lady?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“But his voice was just a little too coaxing. He overdid it. I was keenly
+on my guard against him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I was foolish enough to go into the empty wing,’ I
+answered. ‘But it is so lonely and eerie in this dim light that I was
+frightened and ran out again. Oh, it is so dreadfully still in there!’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Only that?’ said he, looking at me keenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Why, what did you think?’ I asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Why do you think that I lock this door?’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I am sure that I do not know.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘It is to keep people out who have no business there. Do you
+see?’ He was still smiling in the most amiable manner.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I am sure if I had known—’
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Well, then, you know now. And if you ever put your foot
+over that threshold again’—here in an instant the smile hardened
+into a grin of rage, and he glared down at me with the face of a
+demon—‘I’ll throw you to the mastiff.’
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was so terrified that I do not know what I did. I suppose that I must
+have rushed past him into my room. I remember nothing until I found myself
+lying on my bed trembling all over. Then I thought of you, Mr. Holmes. I could
+not live there longer without some advice. I was frightened of the house, of
+the man, of the woman, of the servants, even of the child. They were all
+horrible to me. If I could only bring you down all would be well. Of course I
+might have fled from the house, but my curiosity was almost as strong as my
+fears. My mind was soon made up. I would send you a wire. I put on my hat and
+cloak, went down to the office, which is about half a mile from the house, and
+then returned, feeling very much easier. A horrible doubt came into my mind as
+I approached the door lest the dog might be loose, but I remembered that Toller
+had drunk himself into a state of insensibility that evening, and I knew that
+he was the only one in the household who had any influence with the savage
+creature, or who would venture to set him free. I slipped in in safety and lay
+awake half the night in my joy at the thought of seeing you. I had no
+difficulty in getting leave to come into Winchester this morning, but I must be
+back before three o’clock, for Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle are going on a
+visit, and will be away all the evening, so that I must look after the child.
+Now I have told you all my adventures, Mr. Holmes, and I should be very glad if
+you could tell me what it all means, and, above all, what I should do.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes and I had listened spellbound to this extraordinary story. My friend
+rose now and paced up and down the room, his hands in his pockets, and an
+expression of the most profound gravity upon his face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is Toller still drunk?” he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes. I heard his wife tell Mrs. Rucastle that she could do nothing with
+him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is well. And the Rucastles go out to-night?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is there a cellar with a good strong lock?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, the wine-cellar.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You seem to me to have acted all through this matter like a very brave
+and sensible girl, Miss Hunter. Do you think that you could perform one more
+feat? I should not ask it of you if I did not think you a quite exceptional
+woman.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I will try. What is it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We shall be at the Copper Beeches by seven o’clock, my friend and
+I. The Rucastles will be gone by that time, and Toller will, we hope, be
+incapable. There only remains Mrs. Toller, who might give the alarm. If you
+could send her into the cellar on some errand, and then turn the key upon her,
+you would facilitate matters immensely.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I will do it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Excellent! We shall then look thoroughly into the affair. Of course
+there is only one feasible explanation. You have been brought there to
+personate someone, and the real person is imprisoned in this chamber. That is
+obvious. As to who this prisoner is, I have no doubt that it is the daughter,
+Miss Alice Rucastle, if I remember right, who was said to have gone to America.
+You were chosen, doubtless, as resembling her in height, figure, and the colour
+of your hair. Hers had been cut off, very possibly in some illness through
+which she has passed, and so, of course, yours had to be sacrificed also. By a
+curious chance you came upon her tresses. The man in the road was undoubtedly
+some friend of hers—possibly her <i>fiancé</i>—and no doubt, as you
+wore the girl’s dress and were so like her, he was convinced from your
+laughter, whenever he saw you, and afterwards from your gesture, that Miss
+Rucastle was perfectly happy, and that she no longer desired his attentions.
+The dog is let loose at night to prevent him from endeavouring to communicate
+with her. So much is fairly clear. The most serious point in the case is the
+disposition of the child.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What on earth has that to do with it?” I ejaculated.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My dear Watson, you as a medical man are continually gaining light as to
+the tendencies of a child by the study of the parents. Don’t you see that
+the converse is equally valid. I have frequently gained my first real insight
+into the character of parents by studying their children. This child’s
+disposition is abnormally cruel, merely for cruelty’s sake, and whether
+he derives this from his smiling father, as I should suspect, or from his
+mother, it bodes evil for the poor girl who is in their power.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am sure that you are right, Mr. Holmes,” cried our client.
+“A thousand things come back to me which make me certain that you have
+hit it. Oh, let us lose not an instant in bringing help to this poor
+creature.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We must be circumspect, for we are dealing with a very cunning man. We
+can do nothing until seven o’clock. At that hour we shall be with you,
+and it will not be long before we solve the mystery.”
+</p>
+<p>
+We were as good as our word, for it was just seven when we reached the Copper
+Beeches, having put up our trap at a wayside public-house. The group of trees,
+with their dark leaves shining like burnished metal in the light of the setting
+sun, were sufficient to mark the house even had Miss Hunter not been standing
+smiling on the door-step.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Have you managed it?” asked Holmes.
+</p>
+<p>
+A loud thudding noise came from somewhere downstairs. “That is Mrs.
+Toller in the cellar,” said she. “Her husband lies snoring on the
+kitchen rug. Here are his keys, which are the duplicates of Mr.
+Rucastle’s.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have done well indeed!” cried Holmes with enthusiasm.
+“Now lead the way, and we shall soon see the end of this black
+business.”
+</p>
+<p>
+We passed up the stair, unlocked the door, followed on down a passage, and
+found ourselves in front of the barricade which Miss Hunter had described.
+Holmes cut the cord and removed the transverse bar. Then he tried the various
+keys in the lock, but without success. No sound came from within, and at the
+silence Holmes’ face clouded over.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I trust that we are not too late,” said he. “I think, Miss
+Hunter, that we had better go in without you. Now, Watson, put your shoulder to
+it, and we shall see whether we cannot make our way in.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was an old rickety door and gave at once before our united strength.
+Together we rushed into the room. It was empty. There was no furniture save a
+little pallet bed, a small table, and a basketful of linen. The skylight above
+was open, and the prisoner gone.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There has been some villainy here,” said Holmes; “this
+beauty has guessed Miss Hunter’s intentions and has carried his victim
+off.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But how?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Through the skylight. We shall soon see how he managed it.” He
+swung himself up onto the roof. “Ah, yes,” he cried,
+“here’s the end of a long light ladder against the eaves. That is
+how he did it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But it is impossible,” said Miss Hunter; “the ladder was not
+there when the Rucastles went away.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He has come back and done it. I tell you that he is a clever and
+dangerous man. I should not be very much surprised if this were he whose step I
+hear now upon the stair. I think, Watson, that it would be as well for you to
+have your pistol ready.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The words were hardly out of his mouth before a man appeared at the door of the
+room, a very fat and burly man, with a heavy stick in his hand. Miss Hunter
+screamed and shrunk against the wall at the sight of him, but Sherlock Holmes
+sprang forward and confronted him.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You villain!” said he, “where’s your daughter?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The fat man cast his eyes round, and then up at the open skylight.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is for me to ask you that,” he shrieked, “you thieves!
+Spies and thieves! I have caught you, have I? You are in my power. I’ll
+serve you!” He turned and clattered down the stairs as hard as he could
+go.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He’s gone for the dog!” cried Miss Hunter.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have my revolver,” said I.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Better close the front door,” cried Holmes, and we all rushed down
+the stairs together. We had hardly reached the hall when we heard the baying of
+a hound, and then a scream of agony, with a horrible worrying sound which it
+was dreadful to listen to. An elderly man with a red face and shaking limbs
+came staggering out at a side door.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My God!” he cried. “Someone has loosed the dog. It’s
+not been fed for two days. Quick, quick, or it’ll be too late!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Holmes and I rushed out and round the angle of the house, with Toller hurrying
+behind us. There was the huge famished brute, its black muzzle buried in
+Rucastle’s throat, while he writhed and screamed upon the ground. Running
+up, I blew its brains out, and it fell over with its keen white teeth still
+meeting in the great creases of his neck. With much labour we separated them
+and carried him, living but horribly mangled, into the house. We laid him upon
+the drawing-room sofa, and having dispatched the sobered Toller to bear the
+news to his wife, I did what I could to relieve his pain. We were all assembled
+round him when the door opened, and a tall, gaunt woman entered the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mrs. Toller!” cried Miss Hunter.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, miss. Mr. Rucastle let me out when he came back before he went up
+to you. Ah, miss, it is a pity you didn’t let me know what you were
+planning, for I would have told you that your pains were wasted.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ha!” said Holmes, looking keenly at her. “It is clear that
+Mrs. Toller knows more about this matter than anyone else.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, sir, I do, and I am ready enough to tell what I know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then, pray, sit down, and let us hear it for there are several points on
+which I must confess that I am still in the dark.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I will soon make it clear to you,” said she; “and I’d
+have done so before now if I could ha’ got out from the cellar. If
+there’s police-court business over this, you’ll remember that I was
+the one that stood your friend, and that I was Miss Alice’s friend too.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She was never happy at home, Miss Alice wasn’t, from the time that
+her father married again. She was slighted like and had no say in anything, but
+it never really became bad for her until after she met Mr. Fowler at a
+friend’s house. As well as I could learn, Miss Alice had rights of her
+own by will, but she was so quiet and patient, she was, that she never said a
+word about them but just left everything in Mr. Rucastle’s hands. He knew
+he was safe with her; but when there was a chance of a husband coming forward,
+who would ask for all that the law would give him, then her father thought it
+time to put a stop on it. He wanted her to sign a paper, so that whether she
+married or not, he could use her money. When she wouldn’t do it, he kept
+on worrying her until she got brain-fever, and for six weeks was at
+death’s door. Then she got better at last, all worn to a shadow, and with
+her beautiful hair cut off; but that didn’t make no change in her young
+man, and he stuck to her as true as man could be.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah,” said Holmes, “I think that what you have been good
+enough to tell us makes the matter fairly clear, and that I can deduce all that
+remains. Mr. Rucastle then, I presume, took to this system of
+imprisonment?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, sir.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And brought Miss Hunter down from London in order to get rid of the
+disagreeable persistence of Mr. Fowler.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That was it, sir.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But Mr. Fowler being a persevering man, as a good seaman should be,
+blockaded the house, and having met you succeeded by certain arguments,
+metallic or otherwise, in convincing you that your interests were the same as
+his.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mr. Fowler was a very kind-spoken, free-handed gentleman,” said
+Mrs. Toller serenely.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And in this way he managed that your good man should have no want of
+drink, and that a ladder should be ready at the moment when your master had
+gone out.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have it, sir, just as it happened.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am sure we owe you an apology, Mrs. Toller,” said Holmes,
+“for you have certainly cleared up everything which puzzled us. And here
+comes the country surgeon and Mrs. Rucastle, so I think, Watson, that we had
+best escort Miss Hunter back to Winchester, as it seems to me that our <i>locus
+standi</i> now is rather a questionable one.”
+</p>
+<p>
+And thus was solved the mystery of the sinister house with the copper beeches
+in front of the door. Mr. Rucastle survived, but was always a broken man, kept
+alive solely through the care of his devoted wife. They still live with their
+old servants, who probably know so much of Rucastle’s past life that he
+finds it difficult to part from them. Mr. Fowler and Miss Rucastle were
+married, by special license, in Southampton the day after their flight, and he
+is now the holder of a government appointment in the island of Mauritius. As to
+Miss Violet Hunter, my friend Holmes, rather to my disappointment, manifested
+no further interest in her when once she had ceased to be the centre of one of
+his problems, and she is now the head of a private school at Walsall, where I
+believe that she has met with considerable success.
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
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+<meta name="dc.creator" content="Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910">
+<meta name="marcrel.trl" content="Maude, Aylmer, 1858-1938">
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+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Historical fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="War stories">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Napoleonic Wars, 1800-1815 -- Campaigns -- Russia -- Fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Russia -- History -- Alexander I, 1801-1825 -- Fiction">
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+<body><header class="pg-boilerplate pgheader" id="pg-header" lang="en"><h2 id="pg-header-heading" title="">The Project Gutenberg eBook of <span lang="en" id="pg-title-no-subtitle">War and Peace</span></h2>
+    
+<div>This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a class="reference external" href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you are not located in the United States,
+you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
+before using this eBook.</div>
+
+<div class="container" id="pg-machine-header"><p><strong>Title</strong>: War and Peace</p>
+<div id="pg-header-authlist">
+<p><strong>Author</strong>: graf Leo Tolstoy</p>
+
+<p><strong>Translator</strong>: Aylmer Maude</p>
+<p style="margin-top:0">        <span style="padding-left: 7.5ex"></span>Louise Maude</p>
+</div>
+<br>
+        
+<p><strong>Release date</strong>: April 1, 2001 [eBook #2600]<br>
+                Most recently updated: June 14, 2022</p>
+
+<p><strong>Language</strong>: English</p>
+
+<p><strong>Other information and formats</strong>: <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600">www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600</a></p>
+
+<p><strong>Credits</strong>: An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger</p>
+
+</div><div id="pg-start-separator">
+<span>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WAR AND PEACE ***</span>
+</div></header><div style="margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em"></div>
+<div class="fig" style="width:70%;">
+<img alt="cover " src="images/cover.jpg" style="width:100%;" id="img_images_cover.jpg">
+</div>
+<h1>WAR AND PEACE</h1>
+<h2 class="no-break">By Leo Tolstoy/Tolstoi</h2>
+<hr>
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+<table style="">
+<tbody><tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0001" class="pginternal"> <b>BOOK ONE: 1805</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0001" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0002" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0003" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0004" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0005" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0006" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0007" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0008" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0009" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0010" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0011" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0012" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0013" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0014" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0015" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0016" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0017" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0018" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0019" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0020" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0021" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0022" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0023" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0024" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0025" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0026" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0027" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0028" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXVIII</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0030" class="pginternal"> <b>BOOK TWO: 1805</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0029" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0030" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0031" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0032" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0033" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0034" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0035" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0036" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0037" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0038" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0039" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0040" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0041" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0042" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0043" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0044" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0045" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0046" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0047" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0048" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0049" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXI</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0052" class="pginternal"> <b>BOOK THREE: 1805</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0050" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0051" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0052" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0053" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0054" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0055" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0056" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0057" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0058" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0059" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0060" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0061" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0062" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0063" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0064" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0065" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0066" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0067" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0068" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIX</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0072" class="pginternal"> <b>BOOK FOUR: 1806</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0069" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0070" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0071" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0072" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0073" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0074" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0075" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0076" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0077" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0078" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0079" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0080" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0081" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0082" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0083" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0084" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVI</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0089" class="pginternal"> <b>BOOK FIVE: 1806 - 07</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0085" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0086" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0087" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0088" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0089" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0090" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0091" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0092" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0093" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0094" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0095" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0096" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0097" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0098" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0099" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0100" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0101" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0102" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0103" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0104" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0105" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0106" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXII</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0112" class="pginternal"> <b>BOOK SIX: 1808 - 10</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0107" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0108" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0109" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0110" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0111" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0112" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0113" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0114" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0115" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0116" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0117" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0118" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0119" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0120" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0121" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0122" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0123" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0124" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0125" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0126" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0127" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0128" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0129" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0130" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0131" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0132" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXVI</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0139" class="pginternal"> <b>BOOK SEVEN: 1810 - 11</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0133" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0134" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0135" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0136" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0137" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0138" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0139" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0140" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0141" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0142" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0143" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0144" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0145" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0153" class="pginternal"> <b>BOOK EIGHT: 1811 - 12</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0146" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0147" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0148" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0149" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0150" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0151" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0152" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0153" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0154" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0155" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0156" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0157" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0158" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0159" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0160" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0161" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0162" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0163" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0164" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0165" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0166" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0167" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXII</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0176" class="pginternal"> <b>BOOK NINE: 1812</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0168" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0169" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0170" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0171" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0172" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0173" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0174" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0175" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0176" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0177" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0178" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0179" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0180" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0181" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0182" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0183" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0184" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0185" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0186" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0187" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0188" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0189" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0190" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXIII</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0200" class="pginternal"> <b>BOOK TEN: 1812</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0191" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0192" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0193" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0194" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0195" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0196" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0197" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0198" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0199" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0200" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0201" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0202" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0203" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0204" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0205" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0206" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0207" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0208" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0209" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0210" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0211" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0212" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0213" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0214" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0215" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0216" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0217" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0218" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXVIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0219" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXIX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0220" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0221" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXXI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0222" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXXII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0223" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXXIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0224" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXXIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0225" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXXV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0226" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXXVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0227" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXXVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0228" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXXVIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0229" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXXIX</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0240" class="pginternal"> <b>BOOK ELEVEN: 1812</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0230" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0231" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0232" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0233" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0234" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0235" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0236" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0237" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0238" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0239" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0240" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0241" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0242" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0243" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0244" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0245" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0246" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0247" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0248" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0249" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0250" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0251" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0252" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0253" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0254" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0255" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0256" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0257" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXVIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0258" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXIX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0259" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0260" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXXI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0261" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXXII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0262" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXXIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0263" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XXXIV</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0275" class="pginternal"> <b>BOOK TWELVE: 1812</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0264" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0265" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0266" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0267" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0268" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0269" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0270" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0271" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0272" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0273" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0274" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0275" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0276" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0277" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0278" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0279" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVI</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0292" class="pginternal"> <b>BOOK THIRTEEN: 1812</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0280" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0281" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0282" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0283" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0284" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0285" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0286" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0287" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0288" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0289" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0290" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0291" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0292" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0293" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0294" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0295" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0296" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0297" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0298" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIX</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0312" class="pginternal"> <b>BOOK FOURTEEN: 1812</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0299" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0300" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0301" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0302" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0303" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0304" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0305" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0306" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0307" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0308" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0309" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0310" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0311" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0312" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0313" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0314" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0315" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0316" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0317" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIX</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0332" class="pginternal"> <b>BOOK FIFTEEN: 1812 - 13</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0318" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0319" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0320" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0321" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0322" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0323" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0324" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0325" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0326" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0327" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0328" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0329" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0330" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0331" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0332" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0333" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0334" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0335" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0336" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0337" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XX</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0353" class="pginternal"> <b>FIRST EPILOGUE: 1813 - 20</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0338" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0339" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0340" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0341" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0342" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0343" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0344" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0345" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0346" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0347" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0348" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0349" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0350" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0351" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XIV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0352" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0353" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XVI</a><br><br></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0370" class="pginternal"> <b>SECOND EPILOGUE</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0354" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER I</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0355" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER II</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0356" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER III</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0357" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0358" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER V</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0359" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0360" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0361" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0362" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0363" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER X</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0364" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0365" class="pginternal"> CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody></table>
+<hr>
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0001"></a>
+      BOOK ONE: 1805
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0001"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      “Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the
+      Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don’t tell me that this means war, if
+      you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that
+      Antichrist—I really believe he is Antichrist—I will have
+      nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my
+      ‘faithful slave,’ as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have
+      frightened you—sit down and tell me all the news.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      It was in July, 1805, and the speaker was the well-known Anna Pávlovna
+      Schérer, maid of honor and favorite of the Empress Márya Fëdorovna. With
+      these words she greeted Prince Vasíli Kurágin, a man of high rank and
+      importance, who was the first to arrive at her reception. Anna Pávlovna
+      had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from <i>la
+      grippe; grippe</i> being then a new word in St. Petersburg, used only by
+      the elite.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All her invitations without exception, written in French, and delivered by
+      a scarlet-liveried footman that morning, ran as follows:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If you have nothing better to do, Count (or Prince), and if the prospect
+      of spending an evening with a poor invalid is not too terrible, I shall be
+      very charmed to see you tonight between 7 and 10—Annette Schérer.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Heavens! what a virulent attack!” replied the prince, not in the least
+      disconcerted by this reception. He had just entered, wearing an
+      embroidered court uniform, knee breeches, and shoes, and had stars on his
+      breast and a serene expression on his flat face. He spoke in that refined
+      French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but thought, and with the
+      gentle, patronizing intonation natural to a man of importance who had
+      grown old in society and at court. He went up to Anna Pávlovna, kissed her
+      hand, presenting to her his bald, scented, and shining head, and
+      complacently seated himself on the sofa.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “First of all, dear friend, tell me how you are. Set your friend’s mind at
+      rest,” said he without altering his tone, beneath the politeness and
+      affected sympathy of which indifference and even irony could be discerned.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Can one be well while suffering morally? Can one be calm in times like
+      these if one has any feeling?” said Anna Pávlovna. “You are staying the
+      whole evening, I hope?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And the fete at the English ambassador’s? Today is Wednesday. I must put
+      in an appearance there,” said the prince. “My daughter is coming for me to
+      take me there.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I thought today’s fete had been canceled. I confess all these festivities
+      and fireworks are becoming wearisome.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If they had known that you wished it, the entertainment would have been
+      put off,” said the prince, who, like a wound-up clock, by force of habit
+      said things he did not even wish to be believed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t tease! Well, and what has been decided about Novosíltsev’s
+      dispatch? You know everything.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What can one say about it?” replied the prince in a cold, listless tone.
+      “What has been decided? They have decided that Buonaparte has burnt his
+      boats, and I believe that we are ready to burn ours.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli always spoke languidly, like an actor repeating a stale
+      part. Anna Pávlovna Schérer on the contrary, despite her forty years,
+      overflowed with animation and impulsiveness. To be an enthusiast had
+      become her social vocation and, sometimes even when she did not feel like
+      it, she became enthusiastic in order not to disappoint the expectations of
+      those who knew her. The subdued smile which, though it did not suit her
+      faded features, always played round her lips expressed, as in a spoiled
+      child, a continual consciousness of her charming defect, which she neither
+      wished, nor could, nor considered it necessary, to correct.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the midst of a conversation on political matters Anna Pávlovna burst
+      out:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, don’t speak to me of Austria. Perhaps I don’t understand things, but
+      Austria never has wished, and does not wish, for war. She is betraying us!
+      Russia alone must save Europe. Our gracious sovereign recognizes his high
+      vocation and will be true to it. That is the one thing I have faith in!
+      Our good and wonderful sovereign has to perform the noblest role on earth,
+      and he is so virtuous and noble that God will not forsake him. He will
+      fulfill his vocation and crush the hydra of revolution, which has become
+      more terrible than ever in the person of this murderer and villain! We
+      alone must avenge the blood of the just one.... Whom, I ask you, can we
+      rely on?... England with her commercial spirit will not and cannot
+      understand the Emperor Alexander’s loftiness of soul. She has refused to
+      evacuate Malta. She wanted to find, and still seeks, some secret motive in
+      our actions. What answer did Novosíltsev get? None. The English have not
+      understood and cannot understand the self-abnegation of our Emperor who
+      wants nothing for himself, but only desires the good of mankind. And what
+      have they promised? Nothing! And what little they have promised they will
+      not perform! Prussia has always declared that Buonaparte is invincible,
+      and that all Europe is powerless before him.... And I don’t believe a word
+      that Hardenburg says, or Haugwitz either. This famous Prussian neutrality
+      is just a trap. I have faith only in God and the lofty destiny of our
+      adored monarch. He will save Europe!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She suddenly paused, smiling at her own impetuosity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I think,” said the prince with a smile, “that if you had been sent
+      instead of our dear Wintzingerode you would have captured the King of
+      Prussia’s consent by assault. You are so eloquent. Will you give me a cup
+      of tea?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “In a moment. <i>À propos</i>,” she added, becoming calm again, “I am
+      expecting two very interesting men tonight, le Vicomte de Mortemart, who
+      is connected with the Montmorencys through the Rohans, one of the best
+      French families. He is one of the genuine <i>émigrés</i>, the good ones.
+      And also the Abbé Morio. Do you know that profound thinker? He has been
+      received by the Emperor. Had you heard?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I shall be delighted to meet them,” said the prince. “But tell me,” he
+      added with studied carelessness as if it had only just occurred to him,
+      though the question he was about to ask was the chief motive of his visit,
+      “is it true that the Dowager Empress wants Baron Funke to be appointed
+      first secretary at Vienna? The baron by all accounts is a poor creature.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli wished to obtain this post for his son, but others were
+      trying through the Dowager Empress Márya Fëdorovna to secure it for the
+      baron.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Pávlovna almost closed her eyes to indicate that neither she nor
+      anyone else had a right to criticize what the Empress desired or was
+      pleased with.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Baron Funke has been recommended to the Dowager Empress by her sister,”
+       was all she said, in a dry and mournful tone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As she named the Empress, Anna Pávlovna’s face suddenly assumed an
+      expression of profound and sincere devotion and respect mingled with
+      sadness, and this occurred every time she mentioned her illustrious
+      patroness. She added that Her Majesty had deigned to show Baron Funke <i>beaucoup
+      d’estime</i>, and again her face clouded over with sadness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The prince was silent and looked indifferent. But, with the womanly and
+      courtierlike quickness and tact habitual to her, Anna Pávlovna wished both
+      to rebuke him (for daring to speak as he had done of a man recommended to
+      the Empress) and at the same time to console him, so she said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now about your family. Do you know that since your daughter came out
+      everyone has been enraptured by her? They say she is amazingly beautiful.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The prince bowed to signify his respect and gratitude.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I often think,” she continued after a short pause, drawing nearer to the
+      prince and smiling amiably at him as if to show that political and social
+      topics were ended and the time had come for intimate conversation—“I
+      often think how unfairly sometimes the joys of life are distributed. Why
+      has fate given you two such splendid children? I don’t speak of Anatole,
+      your youngest. I don’t like him,” she added in a tone admitting of no
+      rejoinder and raising her eyebrows. “Two such charming children. And
+      really you appreciate them less than anyone, and so you don’t deserve to
+      have them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And she smiled her ecstatic smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I can’t help it,” said the prince. “Lavater would have said I lack the
+      bump of paternity.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t joke; I mean to have a serious talk with you. Do you know I am
+      dissatisfied with your younger son? Between ourselves” (and her face
+      assumed its melancholy expression), “he was mentioned at Her Majesty’s and
+      you were pitied....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The prince answered nothing, but she looked at him significantly, awaiting
+      a reply. He frowned.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What would you have me do?” he said at last. “You know I did all a father
+      could for their education, and they have both turned out fools. Hippolyte
+      is at least a quiet fool, but Anatole is an active one. That is the only
+      difference between them.” He said this smiling in a way more natural and
+      animated than usual, so that the wrinkles round his mouth very clearly
+      revealed something unexpectedly coarse and unpleasant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And why are children born to such men as you? If you were not a father
+      there would be nothing I could reproach you with,” said Anna Pávlovna,
+      looking up pensively.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am your faithful slave and to you alone I can confess that my children
+      are the bane of my life. It is the cross I have to bear. That is how I
+      explain it to myself. It can’t be helped!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He said no more, but expressed his resignation to cruel fate by a gesture.
+      Anna Pávlovna meditated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Have you never thought of marrying your prodigal son Anatole?” she asked.
+      “They say old maids have a mania for matchmaking, and though I don’t feel
+      that weakness in myself as yet, I know a little person who is very unhappy
+      with her father. She is a relation of yours, Princess Mary Bolkónskaya.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli did not reply, though, with the quickness of memory and
+      perception befitting a man of the world, he indicated by a movement of the
+      head that he was considering this information.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know,” he said at last, evidently unable to check the sad current
+      of his thoughts, “that Anatole is costing me forty thousand rubles a year?
+      And,” he went on after a pause, “what will it be in five years, if he goes
+      on like this?” Presently he added: “That’s what we fathers have to put up
+      with.... Is this princess of yours rich?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Her father is very rich and stingy. He lives in the country. He is the
+      well-known Prince Bolkónski who had to retire from the army under the late
+      Emperor, and was nicknamed ‘the King of Prussia.’ He is very clever but
+      eccentric, and a bore. The poor girl is very unhappy. She has a brother; I
+      think you know him, he married Lise Meinen lately. He is an aide-de-camp
+      of Kutúzov’s and will be here tonight.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Listen, dear Annette,” said the prince, suddenly taking Anna Pávlovna’s
+      hand and for some reason drawing it downwards. “Arrange that affair for me
+      and I shall always be your most devoted slave-<i>slafe</i> with an <i>f</i>,
+      as a village elder of mine writes in his reports. She is rich and of good
+      family and that’s all I want.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And with the familiarity and easy grace peculiar to him, he raised the
+      maid of honor’s hand to his lips, kissed it, and swung it to and fro as he
+      lay back in his armchair, looking in another direction.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Attendez,”</i> said Anna Pávlovna, reflecting, “I’ll speak to Lise,
+      young Bolkónski’s wife, this very evening, and perhaps the thing can be
+      arranged. It shall be on your family’s behalf that I’ll start my
+      apprenticeship as old maid.”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0002"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Anna Pávlovna’s drawing room was gradually filling. The highest Petersburg
+      society was assembled there: people differing widely in age and character
+      but alike in the social circle to which they belonged. Prince Vasíli’s
+      daughter, the beautiful Hélène, came to take her father to the
+      ambassador’s entertainment; she wore a ball dress and her badge as maid of
+      honor. The youthful little Princess Bolkónskaya, known as <i>la femme la
+      plus séduisante de Pétersbourg</i>, * was also there. She had been married
+      during the previous winter, and being pregnant did not go to any large
+      gatherings, but only to small receptions. Prince Vasíli’s son, Hippolyte,
+      had come with Mortemart, whom he introduced. The Abbé Morio and many
+      others had also come.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+* The most fascinating woman in Petersburg.
+</p>
+<p>
+      To each new arrival Anna Pávlovna said, “You have not yet seen my aunt,”
+       or “You do not know my aunt?” and very gravely conducted him or her to a
+      little old lady, wearing large bows of ribbon in her cap, who had come
+      sailing in from another room as soon as the guests began to arrive; and
+      slowly turning her eyes from the visitor to her aunt, Anna Pávlovna
+      mentioned each one’s name and then left them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not one
+      of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them cared
+      about; Anna Pávlovna observed these greetings with mournful and solemn
+      interest and silent approval. The aunt spoke to each of them in the same
+      words, about their health and her own, and the health of Her Majesty,
+      “who, thank God, was better today.” And each visitor, though politeness
+      prevented his showing impatience, left the old woman with a sense of
+      relief at having performed a vexatious duty and did not return to her the
+      whole evening.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The young Princess Bolkónskaya had brought some work in a gold-embroidered
+      velvet bag. Her pretty little upper lip, on which a delicate dark down was
+      just perceptible, was too short for her teeth, but it lifted all the more
+      sweetly, and was especially charming when she occasionally drew it down to
+      meet the lower lip. As is always the case with a thoroughly attractive
+      woman, her defect—the shortness of her upper lip and her half-open
+      mouth—seemed to be her own special and peculiar form of beauty.
+      Everyone brightened at the sight of this pretty young woman, so soon to
+      become a mother, so full of life and health, and carrying her burden so
+      lightly. Old men and dull dispirited young ones who looked at her, after
+      being in her company and talking to her a little while, felt as if they
+      too were becoming, like her, full of life and health. All who talked to
+      her, and at each word saw her bright smile and the constant gleam of her
+      white teeth, thought that they were in a specially amiable mood that day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The little princess went round the table with quick, short, swaying steps,
+      her workbag on her arm, and gaily spreading out her dress sat down on a
+      sofa near the silver samovar, as if all she was doing was a pleasure to
+      herself and to all around her. “I have brought my work,” said she in
+      French, displaying her bag and addressing all present. “Mind, Annette, I
+      hope you have not played a wicked trick on me,” she added, turning to her
+      hostess. “You wrote that it was to be quite a small reception, and just
+      see how badly I am dressed.” And she spread out her arms to show her
+      short-waisted, lace-trimmed, dainty gray dress, girdled with a broad
+      ribbon just below the breast.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “<i>Soyez tranquille, Lise</i>, you will always be prettier than anyone
+      else,” replied Anna Pávlovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You know,” said the princess in the same tone of voice and still in
+      French, turning to a general, “my husband is deserting me? He is going to
+      get himself killed. Tell me what this wretched war is for?” she added,
+      addressing Prince Vasíli, and without waiting for an answer she turned to
+      speak to his daughter, the beautiful Hélène.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a delightful woman this little princess is!” said Prince Vasíli to
+      Anna Pávlovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One of the next arrivals was a stout, heavily built young man with
+      close-cropped hair, spectacles, the light-colored breeches fashionable at
+      that time, a very high ruffle, and a brown dress coat. This stout young
+      man was an illegitimate son of Count Bezúkhov, a well-known grandee of
+      Catherine’s time who now lay dying in Moscow. The young man had not yet
+      entered either the military or civil service, as he had only just returned
+      from abroad where he had been educated, and this was his first appearance
+      in society. Anna Pávlovna greeted him with the nod she accorded to the
+      lowest hierarchy in her drawing room. But in spite of this lowest-grade
+      greeting, a look of anxiety and fear, as at the sight of something too
+      large and unsuited to the place, came over her face when she saw Pierre
+      enter. Though he was certainly rather bigger than the other men in the
+      room, her anxiety could only have reference to the clever though shy, but
+      observant and natural, expression which distinguished him from everyone
+      else in that drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is very good of you, Monsieur Pierre, to come and visit a poor
+      invalid,” said Anna Pávlovna, exchanging an alarmed glance with her aunt
+      as she conducted him to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre murmured something unintelligible, and continued to look round as
+      if in search of something. On his way to the aunt he bowed to the little
+      princess with a pleased smile, as to an intimate acquaintance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Pávlovna’s alarm was justified, for Pierre turned away from the aunt
+      without waiting to hear her speech about Her Majesty’s health. Anna
+      Pávlovna in dismay detained him with the words: “Do you know the Abbé
+      Morio? He is a most interesting man.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I have heard of his scheme for perpetual peace, and it is very
+      interesting but hardly feasible.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You think so?” rejoined Anna Pávlovna in order to say something and get
+      away to attend to her duties as hostess. But Pierre now committed a
+      reverse act of impoliteness. First he had left a lady before she had
+      finished speaking to him, and now he continued to speak to another who
+      wished to get away. With his head bent, and his big feet spread apart, he
+      began explaining his reasons for thinking the abbé’s plan chimerical.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We will talk of it later,” said Anna Pávlovna with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And having got rid of this young man who did not know how to behave, she
+      resumed her duties as hostess and continued to listen and watch, ready to
+      help at any point where the conversation might happen to flag. As the
+      foreman of a spinning mill, when he has set the hands to work, goes round
+      and notices here a spindle that has stopped or there one that creaks or
+      makes more noise than it should, and hastens to check the machine or set
+      it in proper motion, so Anna Pávlovna moved about her drawing room,
+      approaching now a silent, now a too-noisy group, and by a word or slight
+      rearrangement kept the conversational machine in steady, proper, and
+      regular motion. But amid these cares her anxiety about Pierre was evident.
+      She kept an anxious watch on him when he approached the group round
+      Mortemart to listen to what was being said there, and again when he passed
+      to another group whose center was the abbé.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre had been educated abroad, and this reception at Anna Pávlovna’s was
+      the first he had attended in Russia. He knew that all the intellectual
+      lights of Petersburg were gathered there and, like a child in a toyshop,
+      did not know which way to look, afraid of missing any clever conversation
+      that was to be heard. Seeing the self-confident and refined expression on
+      the faces of those present he was always expecting to hear something very
+      profound. At last he came up to Morio. Here the conversation seemed
+      interesting and he stood waiting for an opportunity to express his own
+      views, as young people are fond of doing.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0003"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Anna Pávlovna’s reception was in full swing. The spindles hummed steadily
+      and ceaselessly on all sides. With the exception of the aunt, beside whom
+      sat only one elderly lady, who with her thin careworn face was rather out
+      of place in this brilliant society, the whole company had settled into
+      three groups. One, chiefly masculine, had formed round the abbé. Another,
+      of young people, was grouped round the beautiful Princess Hélène, Prince
+      Vasíli’s daughter, and the little Princess Bolkónskaya, very pretty and
+      rosy, though rather too plump for her age. The third group was gathered
+      round Mortemart and Anna Pávlovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The vicomte was a nice-looking young man with soft features and polished
+      manners, who evidently considered himself a celebrity but out of
+      politeness modestly placed himself at the disposal of the circle in which
+      he found himself. Anna Pávlovna was obviously serving him up as a treat to
+      her guests. As a clever maître d’hôtel serves up as a specially choice
+      delicacy a piece of meat that no one who had seen it in the kitchen would
+      have cared to eat, so Anna Pávlovna served up to her guests, first the
+      vicomte and then the abbé, as peculiarly choice morsels. The group about
+      Mortemart immediately began discussing the murder of the Duc d’Enghien.
+      The vicomte said that the Duc d’Enghien had perished by his own
+      magnanimity, and that there were particular reasons for Buonaparte’s
+      hatred of him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, yes! Do tell us all about it, Vicomte,” said Anna Pávlovna, with a
+      pleasant feeling that there was something <i>à la Louis XV</i> in the
+      sound of that sentence: <i>“Contez nous çela, Vicomte.”</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      The vicomte bowed and smiled courteously in token of his willingness to
+      comply. Anna Pávlovna arranged a group round him, inviting everyone to
+      listen to his tale.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The vicomte knew the duc personally,” whispered Anna Pávlovna to one of
+      the guests. “The vicomte is a wonderful raconteur,” said she to another.
+      “How evidently he belongs to the best society,” said she to a third; and
+      the vicomte was served up to the company in the choicest and most
+      advantageous style, like a well-garnished joint of roast beef on a hot
+      dish.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The vicomte wished to begin his story and gave a subtle smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come over here, Hélène, dear,” said Anna Pávlovna to the beautiful young
+      princess who was sitting some way off, the center of another group.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess smiled. She rose with the same unchanging smile with which
+      she had first entered the room—the smile of a perfectly beautiful
+      woman. With a slight rustle of her white dress trimmed with moss and ivy,
+      with a gleam of white shoulders, glossy hair, and sparkling diamonds, she
+      passed between the men who made way for her, not looking at any of them
+      but smiling on all, as if graciously allowing each the privilege of
+      admiring her beautiful figure and shapely shoulders, back, and bosom—which
+      in the fashion of those days were very much exposed—and she seemed
+      to bring the glamour of a ballroom with her as she moved toward Anna
+      Pávlovna. Hélène was so lovely that not only did she not show any trace of
+      coquetry, but on the contrary she even appeared shy of her unquestionable
+      and all too victorious beauty. She seemed to wish, but to be unable, to
+      diminish its effect.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How lovely!” said everyone who saw her; and the vicomte lifted his
+      shoulders and dropped his eyes as if startled by something extraordinary
+      when she took her seat opposite and beamed upon him also with her
+      unchanging smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Madame, I doubt my ability before such an audience,” said he, smilingly
+      inclining his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess rested her bare round arm on a little table and considered a
+      reply unnecessary. She smilingly waited. All the time the story was being
+      told she sat upright, glancing now at her beautiful round arm, altered in
+      shape by its pressure on the table, now at her still more beautiful bosom,
+      on which she readjusted a diamond necklace. From time to time she smoothed
+      the folds of her dress, and whenever the story produced an effect she
+      glanced at Anna Pávlovna, at once adopted just the expression she saw on
+      the maid of honor’s face, and again relapsed into her radiant smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The little princess had also left the tea table and followed Hélène.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Wait a moment, I’ll get my work.... Now then, what are you thinking of?”
+       she went on, turning to Prince Hippolyte. “Fetch me my workbag.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      There was a general movement as the princess, smiling and talking merrily
+      to everyone at once, sat down and gaily arranged herself in her seat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now I am all right,” she said, and asking the vicomte to begin, she took
+      up her work.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Hippolyte, having brought the workbag, joined the circle and moving
+      a chair close to hers seated himself beside her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>Le charmant Hippolyte</i> was surprising by his extraordinary
+      resemblance to his beautiful sister, but yet more by the fact that in
+      spite of this resemblance he was exceedingly ugly. His features were like
+      his sister’s, but while in her case everything was lit up by a joyous,
+      self-satisfied, youthful, and constant smile of animation, and by the
+      wonderful classic beauty of her figure, his face on the contrary was
+      dulled by imbecility and a constant expression of sullen self-confidence,
+      while his body was thin and weak. His eyes, nose, and mouth all seemed
+      puckered into a vacant, wearied grimace, and his arms and legs always fell
+      into unnatural positions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s not going to be a ghost story?” said he, sitting down beside the
+      princess and hastily adjusting his lorgnette, as if without this
+      instrument he could not begin to speak.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why no, my dear fellow,” said the astonished narrator, shrugging his
+      shoulders.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Because I hate ghost stories,” said Prince Hippolyte in a tone which
+      showed that he only understood the meaning of his words after he had
+      uttered them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He spoke with such self-confidence that his hearers could not be sure
+      whether what he said was very witty or very stupid. He was dressed in a
+      dark-green dress coat, knee breeches of the color of <i>cuisse de nymphe
+      effrayée</i>, as he called it, shoes, and silk stockings.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The vicomte told his tale very neatly. It was an anecdote, then current,
+      to the effect that the Duc d’Enghien had gone secretly to Paris to visit
+      Mademoiselle George; that at her house he came upon Bonaparte, who also
+      enjoyed the famous actress’ favors, and that in his presence Napoleon
+      happened to fall into one of the fainting fits to which he was subject,
+      and was thus at the duc’s mercy. The latter spared him, and this
+      magnanimity Bonaparte subsequently repaid by death.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The story was very pretty and interesting, especially at the point where
+      the rivals suddenly recognized one another; and the ladies looked
+      agitated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Charming!” said Anna Pávlovna with an inquiring glance at the little
+      princess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Charming!” whispered the little princess, sticking the needle into her
+      work as if to testify that the interest and fascination of the story
+      prevented her from going on with it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The vicomte appreciated this silent praise and smiling gratefully prepared
+      to continue, but just then Anna Pávlovna, who had kept a watchful eye on
+      the young man who so alarmed her, noticed that he was talking too loudly
+      and vehemently with the abbé, so she hurried to the rescue. Pierre had
+      managed to start a conversation with the abbé about the balance of power,
+      and the latter, evidently interested by the young man’s simple-minded
+      eagerness, was explaining his pet theory. Both were talking and listening
+      too eagerly and too naturally, which was why Anna Pávlovna disapproved.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The means are ... the balance of power in Europe and the rights of the
+      people,” the abbé was saying. “It is only necessary for one powerful
+      nation like Russia—barbaric as she is said to be—to place
+      herself disinterestedly at the head of an alliance having for its object
+      the maintenance of the balance of power of Europe, and it would save the
+      world!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But how are you to get that balance?” Pierre was beginning.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment Anna Pávlovna came up and, looking severely at Pierre,
+      asked the Italian how he stood Russian climate. The Italian’s face
+      instantly changed and assumed an offensively affected, sugary expression,
+      evidently habitual to him when conversing with women.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am so enchanted by the brilliancy of the wit and culture of the
+      society, more especially of the feminine society, in which I have had the
+      honor of being received, that I have not yet had time to think of the
+      climate,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Not letting the abbé and Pierre escape, Anna Pávlovna, the more
+      conveniently to keep them under observation, brought them into the larger
+      circle.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0004"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Just then another visitor entered the drawing room: Prince Andrew
+      Bolkónski, the little princess’ husband. He was a very handsome young man,
+      of medium height, with firm, clearcut features. Everything about him, from
+      his weary, bored expression to his quiet, measured step, offered a most
+      striking contrast to his quiet, little wife. It was evident that he not
+      only knew everyone in the drawing room, but had found them to be so
+      tiresome that it wearied him to look at or listen to them. And among all
+      these faces that he found so tedious, none seemed to bore him so much as
+      that of his pretty wife. He turned away from her with a grimace that
+      distorted his handsome face, kissed Anna Pávlovna’s hand, and screwing up
+      his eyes scanned the whole company.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are off to the war, Prince?” said Anna Pávlovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “General Kutúzov,” said Bolkónski, speaking French and stressing the last
+      syllable of the general’s name like a Frenchman, “has been pleased to take
+      me as an aide-de-camp....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And Lise, your wife?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “She will go to the country.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Are you not ashamed to deprive us of your charming wife?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<i>“André,”</i> said his wife, addressing her husband in the same
+      coquettish manner in which she spoke to other men, “the vicomte has been
+      telling us such a tale about Mademoiselle George and Buonaparte!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew screwed up his eyes and turned away. Pierre, who from the
+      moment Prince Andrew entered the room had watched him with glad,
+      affectionate eyes, now came up and took his arm. Before he looked round
+      Prince Andrew frowned again, expressing his annoyance with whoever was
+      touching his arm, but when he saw Pierre’s beaming face he gave him an
+      unexpectedly kind and pleasant smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There now!... So you, too, are in the great world?” said he to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I knew you would be here,” replied Pierre. “I will come to supper with
+      you. May I?” he added in a low voice so as not to disturb the vicomte who
+      was continuing his story.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, impossible!” said Prince Andrew, laughing and pressing Pierre’s hand
+      to show that there was no need to ask the question. He wished to say
+      something more, but at that moment Prince Vasíli and his daughter got up
+      to go and the two young men rose to let them pass.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You must excuse me, dear Vicomte,” said Prince Vasíli to the Frenchman,
+      holding him down by the sleeve in a friendly way to prevent his rising.
+      “This unfortunate fete at the ambassador’s deprives me of a pleasure, and
+      obliges me to interrupt you. I am very sorry to leave your enchanting
+      party,” said he, turning to Anna Pávlovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His daughter, Princess Hélène, passed between the chairs, lightly holding
+      up the folds of her dress, and the smile shone still more radiantly on her
+      beautiful face. Pierre gazed at her with rapturous, almost frightened,
+      eyes as she passed him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very lovely,” said Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In passing Prince Vasíli seized Pierre’s hand and said to Anna Pávlovna:
+      “Educate this bear for me! He has been staying with me a whole month and
+      this is the first time I have seen him in society. Nothing is so necessary
+      for a young man as the society of clever women.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Anna Pávlovna smiled and promised to take Pierre in hand. She knew his
+      father to be a connection of Prince Vasíli’s. The elderly lady who had
+      been sitting with the old aunt rose hurriedly and overtook Prince Vasíli
+      in the anteroom. All the affectation of interest she had assumed had left
+      her kindly and tear-worn face and it now expressed only anxiety and fear.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How about my son Borís, Prince?” said she, hurrying after him into the
+      anteroom. “I can’t remain any longer in Petersburg. Tell me what news I
+      may take back to my poor boy.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Although Prince Vasíli listened reluctantly and not very politely to the
+      elderly lady, even betraying some impatience, she gave him an ingratiating
+      and appealing smile, and took his hand that he might not go away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What would it cost you to say a word to the Emperor, and then he would be
+      transferred to the Guards at once?” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Believe me, Princess, I am ready to do all I can,” answered Prince
+      Vasíli, “but it is difficult for me to ask the Emperor. I should advise
+      you to appeal to Rumyántsev through Prince Golítsyn. That would be the
+      best way.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The elderly lady was a Princess Drubetskáya, belonging to one of the best
+      families in Russia, but she was poor, and having long been out of society
+      had lost her former influential connections. She had now come to
+      Petersburg to procure an appointment in the Guards for her only son. It
+      was, in fact, solely to meet Prince Vasíli that she had obtained an
+      invitation to Anna Pávlovna’s reception and had sat listening to the
+      vicomte’s story. Prince Vasíli’s words frightened her, an embittered look
+      clouded her once handsome face, but only for a moment; then she smiled
+      again and clutched Prince Vasíli’s arm more tightly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Listen to me, Prince,” said she. “I have never yet asked you for anything
+      and I never will again, nor have I ever reminded you of my father’s
+      friendship for you; but now I entreat you for God’s sake to do this for my
+      son—and I shall always regard you as a benefactor,” she added
+      hurriedly. “No, don’t be angry, but promise! I have asked Golítsyn and he
+      has refused. Be the kindhearted man you always were,” she said, trying to
+      smile though tears were in her eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Papa, we shall be late,” said Princess Hélène, turning her beautiful head
+      and looking over her classically molded shoulder as she stood waiting by
+      the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Influence in society, however, is a capital which has to be economized if
+      it is to last. Prince Vasíli knew this, and having once realized that if
+      he asked on behalf of all who begged of him, he would soon be unable to
+      ask for himself, he became chary of using his influence. But in Princess
+      Drubetskáya’s case he felt, after her second appeal, something like qualms
+      of conscience. She had reminded him of what was quite true; he had been
+      indebted to her father for the first steps in his career. Moreover, he
+      could see by her manners that she was one of those women—mostly
+      mothers—who, having once made up their minds, will not rest until
+      they have gained their end, and are prepared if necessary to go on
+      insisting day after day and hour after hour, and even to make scenes. This
+      last consideration moved him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear Anna Mikháylovna,” said he with his usual familiarity and
+      weariness of tone, “it is almost impossible for me to do what you ask; but
+      to prove my devotion to you and how I respect your father’s memory, I will
+      do the impossible—your son shall be transferred to the Guards. Here
+      is my hand on it. Are you satisfied?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear benefactor! This is what I expected from you—I knew your
+      kindness!” He turned to go.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Wait—just a word! When he has been transferred to the Guards...”
+       she faltered. “You are on good terms with Michael Ilariónovich Kutúzov ...
+      recommend Borís to him as adjutant! Then I shall be at rest, and then...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I won’t promise that. You don’t know how Kutúzov is pestered since
+      his appointment as Commander in Chief. He told me himself that all the
+      Moscow ladies have conspired to give him all their sons as adjutants.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, but do promise! I won’t let you go! My dear benefactor...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Papa,” said his beautiful daughter in the same tone as before, “we shall
+      be late.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, <i>au revoir!</i> Good-by! You hear her?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Then tomorrow you will speak to the Emperor?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Certainly; but about Kutúzov, I don’t promise.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Do promise, do promise, Vasíli!” cried Anna Mikháylovna as he went, with
+      the smile of a coquettish girl, which at one time probably came naturally
+      to her, but was now very ill-suited to her careworn face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Apparently she had forgotten her age and by force of habit employed all
+      the old feminine arts. But as soon as the prince had gone her face resumed
+      its former cold, artificial expression. She returned to the group where
+      the vicomte was still talking, and again pretended to listen, while
+      waiting till it would be time to leave. Her task was accomplished.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0005"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      “And what do you think of this latest comedy, the coronation at Milan?”
+       asked Anna Pávlovna, “and of the comedy of the people of Genoa and Lucca
+      laying their petitions before Monsieur Buonaparte, and Monsieur Buonaparte
+      sitting on a throne and granting the petitions of the nations? Adorable!
+      It is enough to make one’s head whirl! It is as if the whole world had
+      gone crazy.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew looked Anna Pávlovna straight in the face with a sarcastic
+      smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“‘Dieu me la donne, gare à qui la touche!’’</i> * They say he was very
+      fine when he said that,” he remarked, repeating the words in Italian: <i>“‘Dio
+      mi l’ha dato. Guai a chi la tocchi!’’</i>
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * God has given it to me, let him who touches it beware!
+</p>
+<p>
+      “I hope this will prove the last drop that will make the glass run over,”
+       Anna Pávlovna continued. “The sovereigns will not be able to endure this
+      man who is a menace to everything.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The sovereigns? I do not speak of Russia,” said the vicomte, polite but
+      hopeless: “The sovereigns, madame... What have they done for Louis XVII,
+      for the Queen, or for Madame Elizabeth? Nothing!” and he became more
+      animated. “And believe me, they are reaping the reward of their betrayal
+      of the Bourbon cause. The sovereigns! Why, they are sending ambassadors to
+      compliment the usurper.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And sighing disdainfully, he again changed his position.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Hippolyte, who had been gazing at the vicomte for some time through
+      his lorgnette, suddenly turned completely round toward the little
+      princess, and having asked for a needle began tracing the Condé coat of
+      arms on the table. He explained this to her with as much gravity as if she
+      had asked him to do it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Bâton de gueules, engrêlé de gueules d’azur—maison Condé,”</i>
+      said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess listened, smiling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If Buonaparte remains on the throne of France a year longer,” the vicomte
+      continued, with the air of a man who, in a matter with which he is better
+      acquainted than anyone else, does not listen to others but follows the
+      current of his own thoughts, “things will have gone too far. By intrigues,
+      violence, exile, and executions, French society—I mean good French
+      society—will have been forever destroyed, and then....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands. Pierre wished to make
+      a remark, for the conversation interested him, but Anna Pávlovna, who had
+      him under observation, interrupted:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Emperor Alexander,” said she, with the melancholy which always
+      accompanied any reference of hers to the Imperial family, “has declared
+      that he will leave it to the French people themselves to choose their own
+      form of government; and I believe that once free from the usurper, the
+      whole nation will certainly throw itself into the arms of its rightful
+      king,” she concluded, trying to be amiable to the royalist emigrant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That is doubtful,” said Prince Andrew. “Monsieur le Vicomte quite rightly
+      supposes that matters have already gone too far. I think it will be
+      difficult to return to the old regime.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “From what I have heard,” said Pierre, blushing and breaking into the
+      conversation, “almost all the aristocracy has already gone over to
+      Bonaparte’s side.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It is the Buonapartists who say that,” replied the vicomte without
+      looking at Pierre. “At the present time it is difficult to know the real
+      state of French public opinion.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Bonaparte has said so,” remarked Prince Andrew with a sarcastic smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was evident that he did not like the vicomte and was aiming his remarks
+      at him, though without looking at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “‘I showed them the path to glory, but they did not follow it,’” Prince
+      Andrew continued after a short silence, again quoting Napoleon’s words.
+      “‘I opened my antechambers and they crowded in.’ I do not know how far he
+      was justified in saying so.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Not in the least,” replied the vicomte. “After the murder of the duc even
+      the most partial ceased to regard him as a hero. If to some people,” he
+      went on, turning to Anna Pávlovna, “he ever was a hero, after the murder
+      of the duc there was one martyr more in heaven and one hero less on
+      earth.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Before Anna Pávlovna and the others had time to smile their appreciation
+      of the vicomte’s epigram, Pierre again broke into the conversation, and
+      though Anna Pávlovna felt sure he would say something inappropriate, she
+      was unable to stop him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The execution of the Duc d’Enghien,” declared Monsieur Pierre, “was a
+      political necessity, and it seems to me that Napoleon showed greatness of
+      soul by not fearing to take on himself the whole responsibility of that
+      deed.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Dieu! Mon Dieu!”</i> muttered Anna Pávlovna in a terrified whisper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What, Monsieur Pierre... Do you consider that assassination shows
+      greatness of soul?” said the little princess, smiling and drawing her work
+      nearer to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh! Oh!” exclaimed several voices.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Capital!” said Prince Hippolyte in English, and began slapping his knee
+      with the palm of his hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The vicomte merely shrugged his shoulders. Pierre looked solemnly at his
+      audience over his spectacles and continued.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I say so,” he continued desperately, “because the Bourbons fled from the
+      Revolution leaving the people to anarchy, and Napoleon alone understood
+      the Revolution and quelled it, and so for the general good, he could not
+      stop short for the sake of one man’s life.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Won’t you come over to the other table?” suggested Anna Pávlovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Pierre continued his speech without heeding her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No,” cried he, becoming more and more eager, “Napoleon is great because
+      he rose superior to the Revolution, suppressed its abuses, preserved all
+      that was good in it—equality of citizenship and freedom of speech
+      and of the press—and only for that reason did he obtain power.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, if having obtained power, without availing himself of it to commit
+      murder he had restored it to the rightful king, I should have called him a
+      great man,” remarked the vicomte.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He could not do that. The people only gave him power that he might rid
+      them of the Bourbons and because they saw that he was a great man. The
+      Revolution was a grand thing!” continued Monsieur Pierre, betraying by
+      this desperate and provocative proposition his extreme youth and his wish
+      to express all that was in his mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What? Revolution and regicide a grand thing?... Well, after that... But
+      won’t you come to this other table?” repeated Anna Pávlovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Rousseau’s <i>Contrat Social</i>,” said the vicomte with a tolerant
+      smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am not speaking of regicide, I am speaking about ideas.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes: ideas of robbery, murder, and regicide,” again interjected an
+      ironical voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Those were extremes, no doubt, but they are not what is most important.
+      What is important are the rights of man, emancipation from prejudices, and
+      equality of citizenship, and all these ideas Napoleon has retained in full
+      force.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Liberty and equality,” said the vicomte contemptuously, as if at last
+      deciding seriously to prove to this youth how foolish his words were,
+      “high-sounding words which have long been discredited. Who does not love
+      liberty and equality? Even our Saviour preached liberty and equality. Have
+      people since the Revolution become happier? On the contrary. We wanted
+      liberty, but Buonaparte has destroyed it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew kept looking with an amused smile from Pierre to the vicomte
+      and from the vicomte to their hostess. In the first moment of Pierre’s
+      outburst Anna Pávlovna, despite her social experience, was horror-struck.
+      But when she saw that Pierre’s sacrilegious words had not exasperated the
+      vicomte, and had convinced herself that it was impossible to stop him, she
+      rallied her forces and joined the vicomte in a vigorous attack on the
+      orator.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But, my dear Monsieur Pierre,” said she, “how do you explain the fact of
+      a great man executing a duc—or even an ordinary man who—is
+      innocent and untried?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I should like,” said the vicomte, “to ask how monsieur explains the 18th
+      Brumaire; was not that an imposture? It was a swindle, and not at all like
+      the conduct of a great man!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And the prisoners he killed in Africa? That was horrible!” said the
+      little princess, shrugging her shoulders.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He’s a low fellow, say what you will,” remarked Prince Hippolyte.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre, not knowing whom to answer, looked at them all and smiled. His
+      smile was unlike the half-smile of other people. When he smiled, his
+      grave, even rather gloomy, look was instantaneously replaced by another—a
+      childlike, kindly, even rather silly look, which seemed to ask
+      forgiveness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The vicomte who was meeting him for the first time saw clearly that this
+      young Jacobin was not so terrible as his words suggested. All were silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How do you expect him to answer you all at once?” said Prince Andrew.
+      “Besides, in the actions of a statesman one has to distinguish between his
+      acts as a private person, as a general, and as an emperor. So it seems to
+      me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, of course!” Pierre chimed in, pleased at the arrival of this
+      reinforcement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One must admit,” continued Prince Andrew, “that Napoleon as a man was
+      great on the bridge of Arcola, and in the hospital at Jaffa where he gave
+      his hand to the plague-stricken; but ... but there are other acts which it
+      is difficult to justify.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew, who had evidently wished to tone down the awkwardness of
+      Pierre’s remarks, rose and made a sign to his wife that it was time to go.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Suddenly Prince Hippolyte started up making signs to everyone to attend,
+      and asking them all to be seated began:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I was told a charming Moscow story today and must treat you to it. Excuse
+      me, Vicomte—I must tell it in Russian or the point will be lost....”
+       And Prince Hippolyte began to tell his story in such Russian as a
+      Frenchman would speak after spending about a year in Russia. Everyone
+      waited, so emphatically and eagerly did he demand their attention to his
+      story.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There is in Moscow a lady, <i>une dame</i>, and she is very stingy. She
+      must have two footmen behind her carriage, and very big ones. That was her
+      taste. And she had a lady’s maid, also big. She said....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Here Prince Hippolyte paused, evidently collecting his ideas with
+      difficulty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She said.... Oh yes! She said, ‘Girl,’ to the maid, ‘put on a livery, get
+      up behind the carriage, and come with me while I make some calls.’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Here Prince Hippolyte spluttered and burst out laughing long before his
+      audience, which produced an effect unfavorable to the narrator. Several
+      persons, among them the elderly lady and Anna Pávlovna, did however smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She went. Suddenly there was a great wind. The girl lost her hat and her
+      long hair came down....” Here he could contain himself no longer and went
+      on, between gasps of laughter: “And the whole world knew....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And so the anecdote ended. Though it was unintelligible why he had told
+      it, or why it had to be told in Russian, still Anna Pávlovna and the
+      others appreciated Prince Hippolyte’s social tact in so agreeably ending
+      Pierre’s unpleasant and unamiable outburst. After the anecdote the
+      conversation broke up into insignificant small talk about the last and
+      next balls, about theatricals, and who would meet whom, and when and
+      where.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0006"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Having thanked Anna Pávlovna for her charming soiree, the guests began to
+      take their leave.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was ungainly. Stout, about the average height, broad, with huge red
+      hands; he did not know, as the saying is, how to enter a drawing room and
+      still less how to leave one; that is, how to say something particularly
+      agreeable before going away. Besides this he was absent-minded. When he
+      rose to go, he took up instead of his own, the general’s three-cornered
+      hat, and held it, pulling at the plume, till the general asked him to
+      restore it. All his absent-mindedness and inability to enter a room and
+      converse in it was, however, redeemed by his kindly, simple, and modest
+      expression. Anna Pávlovna turned toward him and, with a Christian mildness
+      that expressed forgiveness of his indiscretion, nodded and said: “I hope
+      to see you again, but I also hope you will change your opinions, my dear
+      Monsieur Pierre.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      When she said this, he did not reply and only bowed, but again everybody
+      saw his smile, which said nothing, unless perhaps, “Opinions are opinions,
+      but you see what a capital, good-natured fellow I am.” And everyone,
+      including Anna Pávlovna, felt this.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew had gone out into the hall, and, turning his shoulders to
+      the footman who was helping him on with his cloak, listened indifferently
+      to his wife’s chatter with Prince Hippolyte who had also come into the
+      hall. Prince Hippolyte stood close to the pretty, pregnant princess, and
+      stared fixedly at her through his eyeglass.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go in, Annette, or you will catch cold,” said the little princess, taking
+      leave of Anna Pávlovna. “It is settled,” she added in a low voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Pávlovna had already managed to speak to Lise about the match she
+      contemplated between Anatole and the little princess’ sister-in-law.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I rely on you, my dear,” said Anna Pávlovna, also in a low tone. “Write
+      to her and let me know how her father looks at the matter. <i>Au revoir!
+      </i>”—and she left the hall.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Hippolyte approached the little princess and, bending his face
+      close to her, began to whisper something.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Two footmen, the princess’ and his own, stood holding a shawl and a cloak,
+      waiting for the conversation to finish. They listened to the French
+      sentences which to them were meaningless, with an air of understanding but
+      not wishing to appear to do so. The princess as usual spoke smilingly and
+      listened with a laugh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am very glad I did not go to the ambassador’s,” said Prince Hippolyte “—so
+      dull—. It has been a delightful evening, has it not? Delightful!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “They say the ball will be very good,” replied the princess, drawing up
+      her downy little lip. “All the pretty women in society will be there.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Not all, for you will not be there; not all,” said Prince Hippolyte
+      smiling joyfully; and snatching the shawl from the footman, whom he even
+      pushed aside, he began wrapping it round the princess. Either from
+      awkwardness or intentionally (no one could have said which) after the
+      shawl had been adjusted he kept his arm around her for a long time, as
+      though embracing her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Still smiling, she gracefully moved away, turning and glancing at her
+      husband. Prince Andrew’s eyes were closed, so weary and sleepy did he
+      seem.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Are you ready?” he asked his wife, looking past her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Hippolyte hurriedly put on his cloak, which in the latest fashion
+      reached to his very heels, and, stumbling in it, ran out into the porch
+      following the princess, whom a footman was helping into the carriage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Princesse, au revoir,”</i> cried he, stumbling with his tongue as well
+      as with his feet.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess, picking up her dress, was taking her seat in the dark
+      carriage, her husband was adjusting his saber; Prince Hippolyte, under
+      pretense of helping, was in everyone’s way.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Allow me, sir,” said Prince Andrew in Russian in a cold, disagreeable
+      tone to Prince Hippolyte who was blocking his path.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am expecting you, Pierre,” said the same voice, but gently and
+      affectionately.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The postilion started, the carriage wheels rattled. Prince Hippolyte
+      laughed spasmodically as he stood in the porch waiting for the vicomte
+      whom he had promised to take home.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, <i>mon cher</i>,” said the vicomte, having seated himself beside
+      Hippolyte in the carriage, “your little princess is very nice, very nice
+      indeed, quite French,” and he kissed the tips of his fingers. Hippolyte
+      burst out laughing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know, you are a terrible chap for all your innocent airs,”
+       continued the vicomte. “I pity the poor husband, that little officer who
+      gives himself the airs of a monarch.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Hippolyte spluttered again, and amid his laughter said, “And you were
+      saying that the Russian ladies are not equal to the French? One has to
+      know how to deal with them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre reaching the house first went into Prince Andrew’s study like one
+      quite at home, and from habit immediately lay down on the sofa, took from
+      the shelf the first book that came to his hand (it was Caesar’s <i>Commentaries</i>),
+      and resting on his elbow, began reading it in the middle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What have you done to Mlle Schérer? She will be quite ill now,” said
+      Prince Andrew, as he entered the study, rubbing his small white hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre turned his whole body, making the sofa creak. He lifted his eager
+      face to Prince Andrew, smiled, and waved his hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That abbé is very interesting but he does not see the thing in the right
+      light.... In my opinion perpetual peace is possible but—I do not
+      know how to express it ... not by a balance of political power....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      It was evident that Prince Andrew was not interested in such abstract
+      conversation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One can’t everywhere say all one thinks, <i>mon cher</i>. Well, have you
+      at last decided on anything? Are you going to be a guardsman or a
+      diplomatist?” asked Prince Andrew after a momentary silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre sat up on the sofa, with his legs tucked under him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Really, I don’t yet know. I don’t like either the one or the other.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But you must decide on something! Your father expects it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre at the age of ten had been sent abroad with an abbé as tutor, and
+      had remained away till he was twenty. When he returned to Moscow his
+      father dismissed the abbé and said to the young man, “Now go to
+      Petersburg, look round, and choose your profession. I will agree to
+      anything. Here is a letter to Prince Vasíli, and here is money. Write to
+      me all about it, and I will help you in everything.” Pierre had already
+      been choosing a career for three months, and had not decided on anything.
+      It was about this choice that Prince Andrew was speaking. Pierre rubbed
+      his forehead.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But he must be a Freemason,” said he, referring to the abbé whom he had
+      met that evening.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That is all nonsense.” Prince Andrew again interrupted him, “let us talk
+      business. Have you been to the Horse Guards?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I have not; but this is what I have been thinking and wanted to tell
+      you. There is a war now against Napoleon. If it were a war for freedom I
+      could understand it and should be the first to enter the army; but to help
+      England and Austria against the greatest man in the world is not right.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew only shrugged his shoulders at Pierre’s childish words. He
+      put on the air of one who finds it impossible to reply to such nonsense,
+      but it would in fact have been difficult to give any other answer than the
+      one Prince Andrew gave to this naïve question.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars,”
+       he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And that would be splendid,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew smiled ironically.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very likely it would be splendid, but it will never come about....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, why are you going to the war?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What for? I don’t know. I must. Besides that I am going....” He paused.
+      “I am going because the life I am leading here does not suit me!”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0007"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The rustle of a woman’s dress was heard in the next room. Prince Andrew
+      shook himself as if waking up, and his face assumed the look it had had in
+      Anna Pávlovna’s drawing room. Pierre removed his feet from the sofa. The
+      princess came in. She had changed her gown for a house dress as fresh and
+      elegant as the other. Prince Andrew rose and politely placed a chair for
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How is it,” she began, as usual in French, settling down briskly and
+      fussily in the easy chair, “how is it Annette never got married? How
+      stupid you men all are not to have married her! Excuse me for saying so,
+      but you have no sense about women. What an argumentative fellow you are,
+      Monsieur Pierre!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And I am still arguing with your husband. I can’t understand why he wants
+      to go to the war,” replied Pierre, addressing the princess with none of
+      the embarrassment so commonly shown by young men in their intercourse with
+      young women.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess started. Evidently Pierre’s words touched her to the quick.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, that is just what I tell him!” said she. “I don’t understand it; I
+      don’t in the least understand why men can’t live without wars. How is it
+      that we women don’t want anything of the kind, don’t need it? Now you
+      shall judge between us. I always tell him: Here he is Uncle’s
+      aide-de-camp, a most brilliant position. He is so well known, so much
+      appreciated by everyone. The other day at the Apráksins’ I heard a lady
+      asking, ‘Is that the famous Prince Andrew?’ I did indeed.” She laughed.
+      “He is so well received everywhere. He might easily become aide-de-camp to
+      the Emperor. You know the Emperor spoke to him most graciously. Annette
+      and I were speaking of how to arrange it. What do you think?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked at his friend and, noticing that he did not like the
+      conversation, gave no reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “When are you starting?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, don’t speak of his going, don’t! I won’t hear it spoken of,” said the
+      princess in the same petulantly playful tone in which she had spoken to
+      Hippolyte in the drawing room and which was so plainly ill-suited to the
+      family circle of which Pierre was almost a member. “Today when I
+      remembered that all these delightful associations must be broken off ...
+      and then you know, André...” (she looked significantly at her husband)
+      “I’m afraid, I’m afraid!” she whispered, and a shudder ran down her back.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Her husband looked at her as if surprised to notice that someone besides
+      Pierre and himself was in the room, and addressed her in a tone of frigid
+      politeness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it you are afraid of, Lise? I don’t understand,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There, what egotists men all are: all, all egotists! Just for a whim of
+      his own, goodness only knows why, he leaves me and locks me up alone in
+      the country.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “With my father and sister, remember,” said Prince Andrew gently.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Alone all the same, without <i>my</i> friends.... And he expects me not
+      to be afraid.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Her tone was now querulous and her lip drawn up, giving her not a joyful,
+      but an animal, squirrel-like expression. She paused as if she felt it
+      indecorous to speak of her pregnancy before Pierre, though the gist of the
+      matter lay in that.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I still can’t understand what you are afraid of,” said Prince Andrew
+      slowly, not taking his eyes off his wife.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess blushed, and raised her arms with a gesture of despair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, Andrew, I must say you have changed. Oh, how you have....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Your doctor tells you to go to bed earlier,” said Prince Andrew. “You had
+      better go.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess said nothing, but suddenly her short downy lip quivered.
+      Prince Andrew rose, shrugged his shoulders, and walked about the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked over his spectacles with naïve surprise, now at him and now
+      at her, moved as if about to rise too, but changed his mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why should I mind Monsieur Pierre being here?” exclaimed the little
+      princess suddenly, her pretty face all at once distorted by a tearful
+      grimace. “I have long wanted to ask you, Andrew, why you have changed so
+      to me? What have I done to you? You are going to the war and have no pity
+      for me. Why is it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Lise!” was all Prince Andrew said. But that one word expressed an
+      entreaty, a threat, and above all conviction that she would herself regret
+      her words. But she went on hurriedly:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You treat me like an invalid or a child. I see it all! Did you behave
+      like that six months ago?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Lise, I beg you to desist,” said Prince Andrew still more emphatically.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre, who had been growing more and more agitated as he listened to all
+      this, rose and approached the princess. He seemed unable to bear the sight
+      of tears and was ready to cry himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Calm yourself, Princess! It seems so to you because.... I assure you I
+      myself have experienced ... and so ... because ... No, excuse me! An
+      outsider is out of place here.... No, don’t distress yourself....
+      Good-by!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew caught him by the hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, wait, Pierre! The princess is too kind to wish to deprive me of the
+      pleasure of spending the evening with you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, he thinks only of himself,” muttered the princess without restraining
+      her angry tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lise!” said Prince Andrew dryly, raising his voice to the pitch which
+      indicates that patience is exhausted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Suddenly the angry, squirrel-like expression of the princess’ pretty face
+      changed into a winning and piteous look of fear. Her beautiful eyes
+      glanced askance at her husband’s face, and her own assumed the timid,
+      deprecating expression of a dog when it rapidly but feebly wags its
+      drooping tail.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!”</i> she muttered, and lifting her dress with one
+      hand she went up to her husband and kissed him on the forehead.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good night, Lise,” said he, rising and courteously kissing her hand as he
+      would have done to a stranger.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0008"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The friends were silent. Neither cared to begin talking. Pierre
+      continually glanced at Prince Andrew; Prince Andrew rubbed his forehead
+      with his small hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let us go and have supper,” he said with a sigh, going to the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They entered the elegant, newly decorated, and luxurious dining room.
+      Everything from the table napkins to the silver, china, and glass bore
+      that imprint of newness found in the households of the newly married.
+      Halfway through supper Prince Andrew leaned his elbows on the table and,
+      with a look of nervous agitation such as Pierre had never before seen on
+      his face, began to talk—as one who has long had something on his
+      mind and suddenly determines to speak out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Never, never marry, my dear fellow! That’s my advice: never marry till
+      you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of, and
+      until you have ceased to love the woman of your choice and have seen her
+      plainly as she is, or else you will make a cruel and irrevocable mistake.
+      Marry when you are old and good for nothing—or all that is good and
+      noble in you will be lost. It will all be wasted on trifles. Yes! Yes!
+      Yes! Don’t look at me with such surprise. If you marry expecting anything
+      from yourself in the future, you will feel at every step that for you all
+      is ended, all is closed except the drawing room, where you will be ranged
+      side by side with a court lackey and an idiot!... But what’s the good?...”
+       and he waved his arm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre took off his spectacles, which made his face seem different and the
+      good-natured expression still more apparent, and gazed at his friend in
+      amazement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My wife,” continued Prince Andrew, “is an excellent woman, one of those
+      rare women with whom a man’s honor is safe; but, O God, what would I not
+      give now to be unmarried! You are the first and only one to whom I mention
+      this, because I like you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      As he said this Prince Andrew was less than ever like that Bolkónski who
+      had lolled in Anna Pávlovna’s easy chairs and with half-closed eyes had
+      uttered French phrases between his teeth. Every muscle of his thin face
+      was now quivering with nervous excitement; his eyes, in which the fire of
+      life had seemed extinguished, now flashed with brilliant light. It was
+      evident that the more lifeless he seemed at ordinary times, the more
+      impassioned he became in these moments of almost morbid irritation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You don’t understand why I say this,” he continued, “but it is the whole
+      story of life. You talk of Bonaparte and his career,” said he (though
+      Pierre had not mentioned Bonaparte), “but Bonaparte when he worked went
+      step by step toward his goal. He was free, he had nothing but his aim to
+      consider, and he reached it. But tie yourself up with a woman and, like a
+      chained convict, you lose all freedom! And all you have of hope and
+      strength merely weighs you down and torments you with regret. Drawing
+      rooms, gossip, balls, vanity, and triviality—these are the enchanted
+      circle I cannot escape from. I am now going to the war, the greatest war
+      there ever was, and I know nothing and am fit for nothing. I am very
+      amiable and have a caustic wit,” continued Prince Andrew, “and at Anna
+      Pávlovna’s they listen to me. And that stupid set without whom my wife
+      cannot exist, and those women.... If you only knew what those society
+      women are, and women in general! My father is right. Selfish, vain,
+      stupid, trivial in everything—that’s what women are when you see
+      them in their true colors! When you meet them in society it seems as if
+      there were something in them, but there’s nothing, nothing, nothing! No,
+      don’t marry, my dear fellow; don’t marry!” concluded Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It seems funny to me,” said Pierre, “that <i>you, you</i> should consider
+      yourself incapable and your life a spoiled life. You have everything
+      before you, everything. And you....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He did not finish his sentence, but his tone showed how highly he thought
+      of his friend and how much he expected of him in the future.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How can he talk like that?” thought Pierre. He considered his friend a
+      model of perfection because Prince Andrew possessed in the highest degree
+      just the very qualities Pierre lacked, and which might be best described
+      as strength of will. Pierre was always astonished at Prince Andrew’s calm
+      manner of treating everybody, his extraordinary memory, his extensive
+      reading (he had read everything, knew everything, and had an opinion about
+      everything), but above all at his capacity for work and study. And if
+      Pierre was often struck by Andrew’s lack of capacity for philosophical
+      meditation (to which he himself was particularly addicted), he regarded
+      even this not as a defect but as a sign of strength.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Even in the best, most friendly and simplest relations of life, praise and
+      commendation are essential, just as grease is necessary to wheels that
+      they may run smoothly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My part is played out,” said Prince Andrew. “What’s the use of talking
+      about me? Let us talk about you,” he added after a silence, smiling at his
+      reassuring thoughts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That smile was immediately reflected on Pierre’s face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But what is there to say about me?” said Pierre, his face relaxing into a
+      careless, merry smile. “What am I? An illegitimate son!” He suddenly
+      blushed crimson, and it was plain that he had made a great effort to say
+      this. “Without a name and without means... And it really...” But he did
+      not say what “it really” was. “For the present I am free and am all right.
+      Only I haven’t the least idea what I am to do; I wanted to consult you
+      seriously.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew looked kindly at him, yet his glance—friendly and
+      affectionate as it was—expressed a sense of his own superiority.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am fond of you, especially as you are the one live man among our whole
+      set. Yes, you’re all right! Choose what you will; it’s all the same.
+      You’ll be all right anywhere. But look here: give up visiting those
+      Kurágins and leading that sort of life. It suits you so badly—all
+      this debauchery, dissipation, and the rest of it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What would you have, my dear fellow?” answered Pierre, shrugging his
+      shoulders. “Women, my dear fellow; women!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t understand it,” replied Prince Andrew. “Women who are <i>comme il
+      faut</i>, that’s a different matter; but the Kurágins’ set of women,
+      ‘women and wine’ I don’t understand!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was staying at Prince Vasíli Kurágin’s and sharing the dissipated
+      life of his son Anatole, the son whom they were planning to reform by
+      marrying him to Prince Andrew’s sister.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know?” said Pierre, as if suddenly struck by a happy thought,
+      “seriously, I have long been thinking of it.... Leading such a life I
+      can’t decide or think properly about anything. One’s head aches, and one
+      spends all one’s money. He asked me for tonight, but I won’t go.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You give me your word of honor not to go?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “On my honor!”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0009"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      It was past one o’clock when Pierre left his friend. It was a cloudless,
+      northern, summer night. Pierre took an open cab intending to drive
+      straight home. But the nearer he drew to the house the more he felt the
+      impossibility of going to sleep on such a night. It was light enough to
+      see a long way in the deserted street and it seemed more like morning or
+      evening than night. On the way Pierre remembered that Anatole Kurágin was
+      expecting the usual set for cards that evening, after which there was
+      generally a drinking bout, finishing with visits of a kind Pierre was very
+      fond of.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I should like to go to Kurágin’s,” thought he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But he immediately recalled his promise to Prince Andrew not to go there.
+      Then, as happens to people of weak character, he desired so passionately
+      once more to enjoy that dissipation he was so accustomed to that he
+      decided to go. The thought immediately occurred to him that his promise to
+      Prince Andrew was of no account, because before he gave it he had already
+      promised Prince Anatole to come to his gathering; “besides,” thought he,
+      “all such ‘words of honor’ are conventional things with no definite
+      meaning, especially if one considers that by tomorrow one may be dead, or
+      something so extraordinary may happen to one that honor and dishonor will
+      be all the same!” Pierre often indulged in reflections of this sort,
+      nullifying all his decisions and intentions. He went to Kurágin’s.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Reaching the large house near the Horse Guards’ barracks, in which Anatole
+      lived, Pierre entered the lighted porch, ascended the stairs, and went in
+      at the open door. There was no one in the anteroom; empty bottles, cloaks,
+      and overshoes were lying about; there was a smell of alcohol, and sounds
+      of voices and shouting in the distance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Cards and supper were over, but the visitors had not yet dispersed. Pierre
+      threw off his cloak and entered the first room, in which were the remains
+      of supper. A footman, thinking no one saw him, was drinking on the sly
+      what was left in the glasses. From the third room came sounds of laughter,
+      the shouting of familiar voices, the growling of a bear, and general
+      commotion. Some eight or nine young men were crowding anxiously round an
+      open window. Three others were romping with a young bear, one pulling him
+      by the chain and trying to set him at the others.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I bet a hundred on Stevens!” shouted one.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mind, no holding on!” cried another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I bet on Dólokhov!” cried a third. “Kurágin, you part our hands.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “There, leave Bruin alone; here’s a bet on.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “At one draught, or he loses!” shouted a fourth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Jacob, bring a bottle!” shouted the host, a tall, handsome fellow who
+      stood in the midst of the group, without a coat, and with his fine linen
+      shirt unfastened in front. “Wait a bit, you fellows.... Here is Pétya!
+      Good man!” cried he, addressing Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Another voice, from a man of medium height with clear blue eyes,
+      particularly striking among all these drunken voices by its sober ring,
+      cried from the window: “Come here; part the bets!” This was Dólokhov, an
+      officer of the Semënov regiment, a notorious gambler and duelist, who was
+      living with Anatole. Pierre smiled, looking about him merrily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t understand. What’s it all about?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Wait a bit, he is not drunk yet! A bottle here,” said Anatole,
+      and taking a glass from the table he went up to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “First of all you must drink!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre drank one glass after another, looking from under his brows at the
+      tipsy guests who were again crowding round the window, and listening to
+      their chatter. Anatole kept on refilling Pierre’s glass while explaining
+      that Dólokhov was betting with Stevens, an English naval officer, that he
+      would drink a bottle of rum sitting on the outer ledge of the third floor
+      window with his legs hanging out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go on, you must drink it all,” said Anatole, giving Pierre the last
+      glass, “or I won’t let you go!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I won’t,” said Pierre, pushing Anatole aside, and he went up to the
+      window.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov was holding the Englishman’s hand and clearly and distinctly
+      repeating the terms of the bet, addressing himself particularly to Anatole
+      and Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov was of medium height, with curly hair and light-blue eyes. He was
+      about twenty-five. Like all infantry officers he wore no mustache, so that
+      his mouth, the most striking feature of his face, was clearly seen. The
+      lines of that mouth were remarkably finely curved. The middle of the upper
+      lip formed a sharp wedge and closed firmly on the firm lower one, and
+      something like two distinct smiles played continually round the two
+      corners of the mouth; this, together with the resolute, insolent
+      intelligence of his eyes, produced an effect which made it impossible not
+      to notice his face. Dólokhov was a man of small means and no connections.
+      Yet, though Anatole spent tens of thousands of rubles, Dólokhov lived with
+      him and had placed himself on such a footing that all who knew them,
+      including Anatole himself, respected him more than they did Anatole.
+      Dólokhov could play all games and nearly always won. However much he
+      drank, he never lost his clearheadedness. Both Kurágin and Dólokhov were
+      at that time notorious among the rakes and scapegraces of Petersburg.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The bottle of rum was brought. The window frame which prevented anyone
+      from sitting on the outer sill was being forced out by two footmen, who
+      were evidently flurried and intimidated by the directions and shouts of
+      the gentlemen around.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole with his swaggering air strode up to the window. He wanted to
+      smash something. Pushing away the footmen he tugged at the frame, but
+      could not move it. He smashed a pane.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You have a try, Hercules,” said he, turning to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre seized the crossbeam, tugged, and wrenched the oak frame out with a
+      crash.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Take it right out, or they’ll think I’m holding on,” said Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is the Englishman bragging?... Eh? Is it all right?” said Anatole.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “First-rate,” said Pierre, looking at Dólokhov, who with a bottle of rum
+      in his hand was approaching the window, from which the light of the sky,
+      the dawn merging with the afterglow of sunset, was visible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov, the bottle of rum still in his hand, jumped onto the window
+      sill. “Listen!” cried he, standing there and addressing those in the room.
+      All were silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I bet fifty imperials”—he spoke French that the Englishman might
+      understand him, but he did not speak it very well—“I bet fifty
+      imperials ... or do you wish to make it a hundred?” added he, addressing
+      the Englishman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, fifty,” replied the latter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All right. Fifty imperials ... that I will drink a whole bottle of rum
+      without taking it from my mouth, sitting outside the window on this spot”
+       (he stooped and pointed to the sloping ledge outside the window) “and
+      without holding on to anything. Is that right?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Quite right,” said the Englishman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole turned to the Englishman and taking him by one of the buttons of
+      his coat and looking down at him—the Englishman was short—began
+      repeating the terms of the wager to him in English.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Wait!” cried Dólokhov, hammering with the bottle on the window sill to
+      attract attention. “Wait a bit, Kurágin. Listen! If anyone else does the
+      same, I will pay him a hundred imperials. Do you understand?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The Englishman nodded, but gave no indication whether he intended to
+      accept this challenge or not. Anatole did not release him, and though he
+      kept nodding to show that he understood, Anatole went on translating
+      Dólokhov’s words into English. A thin young lad, an hussar of the Life
+      Guards, who had been losing that evening, climbed on the window sill,
+      leaned over, and looked down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh! Oh! Oh!” he muttered, looking down from the window at the stones of
+      the pavement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Shut up!” cried Dólokhov, pushing him away from the window. The lad
+      jumped awkwardly back into the room, tripping over his spurs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Placing the bottle on the window sill where he could reach it easily,
+      Dólokhov climbed carefully and slowly through the window and lowered his
+      legs. Pressing against both sides of the window, he adjusted himself on
+      his seat, lowered his hands, moved a little to the right and then to the
+      left, and took up the bottle. Anatole brought two candles and placed them
+      on the window sill, though it was already quite light. Dólokhov’s back in
+      his white shirt, and his curly head, were lit up from both sides. Everyone
+      crowded to the window, the Englishman in front. Pierre stood smiling but
+      silent. One man, older than the others present, suddenly pushed forward
+      with a scared and angry look and wanted to seize hold of Dólokhov’s shirt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I say, this is folly! He’ll be killed,” said this more sensible man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole stopped him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t touch him! You’ll startle him and then he’ll be killed. Eh?... What
+      then?... Eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov turned round and, again holding on with both hands, arranged
+      himself on his seat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If anyone comes meddling again,” said he, emitting the words separately
+      through his thin compressed lips, “I will throw him down there. Now then!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Saying this he again turned round, dropped his hands, took the bottle and
+      lifted it to his lips, threw back his head, and raised his free hand to
+      balance himself. One of the footmen who had stooped to pick up some broken
+      glass remained in that position without taking his eyes from the window
+      and from Dólokhov’s back. Anatole stood erect with staring eyes. The
+      Englishman looked on sideways, pursing up his lips. The man who had wished
+      to stop the affair ran to a corner of the room and threw himself on a sofa
+      with his face to the wall. Pierre hid his face, from which a faint smile
+      forgot to fade though his features now expressed horror and fear. All were
+      still. Pierre took his hands from his eyes. Dólokhov still sat in the same
+      position, only his head was thrown further back till his curly hair
+      touched his shirt collar, and the hand holding the bottle was lifted
+      higher and higher and trembled with the effort. The bottle was emptying
+      perceptibly and rising still higher and his head tilting yet further back.
+      “Why is it so long?” thought Pierre. It seemed to him that more than half
+      an hour had elapsed. Suddenly Dólokhov made a backward movement with his
+      spine, and his arm trembled nervously; this was sufficient to cause his
+      whole body to slip as he sat on the sloping ledge. As he began slipping
+      down, his head and arm wavered still more with the strain. One hand moved
+      as if to clutch the window sill, but refrained from touching it. Pierre
+      again covered his eyes and thought he would never open them again.
+      Suddenly he was aware of a stir all around. He looked up: Dólokhov was
+      standing on the window sill, with a pale but radiant face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s empty.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He threw the bottle to the Englishman, who caught it neatly. Dólokhov
+      jumped down. He smelt strongly of rum.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well done!... Fine fellow!... There’s a bet for you!... Devil take you!”
+       came from different sides.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Englishman took out his purse and began counting out the money.
+      Dólokhov stood frowning and did not speak. Pierre jumped upon the window
+      sill.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Gentlemen, who wishes to bet with me? I’ll do the same thing!” he
+      suddenly cried. “Even without a bet, there! Tell them to bring me a
+      bottle. I’ll do it.... Bring a bottle!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Let him do it, let him do it,” said Dólokhov, smiling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What next? Have you gone mad?... No one would let you!... Why, you go
+      giddy even on a staircase,” exclaimed several voices.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll drink it! Let’s have a bottle of rum!” shouted Pierre, banging the
+      table with a determined and drunken gesture and preparing to climb out of
+      the window.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They seized him by his arms; but he was so strong that everyone who
+      touched him was sent flying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, you’ll never manage him that way,” said Anatole. “Wait a bit and I’ll
+      get round him.... Listen! I’ll take your bet tomorrow, but now we are all
+      going to ——’s.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Come on then,” cried Pierre. “Come on!... And we’ll take Bruin with us.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And he caught the bear, took it in his arms, lifted it from the ground,
+      and began dancing round the room with it.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0010"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli kept the promise he had given to Princess Drubetskáya who
+      had spoken to him on behalf of her only son Borís on the evening of Anna
+      Pávlovna’s soiree. The matter was mentioned to the Emperor, an exception
+      made, and Borís transferred into the regiment of Semënov Guards with the
+      rank of cornet. He received, however, no appointment to Kutúzov’s staff
+      despite all Anna Mikháylovna’s endeavors and entreaties. Soon after Anna
+      Pávlovna’s reception Anna Mikháylovna returned to Moscow and went straight
+      to her rich relations, the Rostóvs, with whom she stayed when in the town
+      and where her darling Bóry, who had only just entered a regiment of the
+      line and was being at once transferred to the Guards as a cornet, had been
+      educated from childhood and lived for years at a time. The Guards had
+      already left Petersburg on the tenth of August, and her son, who had
+      remained in Moscow for his equipment, was to join them on the march to
+      Radzivílov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was St. Natalia’s day and the name day of two of the Rostóvs—the
+      mother and the youngest daughter—both named Nataly. Ever since the
+      morning, carriages with six horses had been coming and going continually,
+      bringing visitors to the Countess Rostóva’s big house on the Povarskáya,
+      so well known to all Moscow. The countess herself and her handsome eldest
+      daughter were in the drawing room with the visitors who came to
+      congratulate, and who constantly succeeded one another in relays.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess was a woman of about forty-five, with a thin Oriental type of
+      face, evidently worn out with childbearing—she had had twelve. A
+      languor of motion and speech, resulting from weakness, gave her a
+      distinguished air which inspired respect. Princess Anna Mikháylovna
+      Drubetskáya, who as a member of the household was also seated in the
+      drawing room, helped to receive and entertain the visitors. The young
+      people were in one of the inner rooms, not considering it necessary to
+      take part in receiving the visitors. The count met the guests and saw them
+      off, inviting them all to dinner.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am very, very grateful to you, <i>mon cher</i>,” or <i>“ma chère”</i>—he
+      called everyone without exception and without the slightest variation in
+      his tone, “my dear,” whether they were above or below him in rank—“I
+      thank you for myself and for our two dear ones whose name day we are
+      keeping. But mind you come to dinner or I shall be offended, <i>ma chère!</i>
+      On behalf of the whole family I beg you to come, <i>mon cher!</i>” These
+      words he repeated to everyone without exception or variation, and with the
+      same expression on his full, cheerful, clean-shaven face, the same firm
+      pressure of the hand and the same quick, repeated bows. As soon as he had
+      seen a visitor off he returned to one of those who were still in the
+      drawing room, drew a chair toward him or her, and jauntily spreading out
+      his legs and putting his hands on his knees with the air of a man who
+      enjoys life and knows how to live, he swayed to and fro with dignity,
+      offered surmises about the weather, or touched on questions of health,
+      sometimes in Russian and sometimes in very bad but self-confident French;
+      then again, like a man weary but unflinching in the fulfillment of duty,
+      he rose to see some visitors off and, stroking his scanty gray hairs over
+      his bald patch, also asked them to dinner. Sometimes on his way back from
+      the anteroom he would pass through the conservatory and pantry into the
+      large marble dining hall, where tables were being set out for eighty
+      people; and looking at the footmen, who were bringing in silver and china,
+      moving tables, and unfolding damask table linen, he would call Dmítri
+      Vasílevich, a man of good family and the manager of all his affairs, and
+      while looking with pleasure at the enormous table would say: “Well,
+      Dmítri, you’ll see that things are all as they should be? That’s right!
+      The great thing is the serving, that’s it.” And with a complacent sigh he
+      would return to the drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Márya Lvóvna Karágina and her daughter!” announced the countess’ gigantic
+      footman in his bass voice, entering the drawing room. The countess
+      reflected a moment and took a pinch from a gold snuffbox with her
+      husband’s portrait on it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’m quite worn out by these callers. However, I’ll see her and no more.
+      She is so affected. Ask her in,” she said to the footman in a sad voice,
+      as if saying: “Very well, finish me off.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A tall, stout, and proud-looking woman, with a round-faced smiling
+      daughter, entered the drawing room, their dresses rustling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear Countess, what an age... She has been laid up, poor child ... at the
+      Razumóvski’s ball ... and Countess Apráksina ... I was so delighted...”
+       came the sounds of animated feminine voices, interrupting one another and
+      mingling with the rustling of dresses and the scraping of chairs. Then one
+      of those conversations began which last out until, at the first pause, the
+      guests rise with a rustle of dresses and say, “I am so delighted...
+      Mamma’s health... and Countess Apráksina...” and then, again rustling,
+      pass into the anteroom, put on cloaks or mantles, and drive away. The
+      conversation was on the chief topic of the day: the illness of the wealthy
+      and celebrated beau of Catherine’s day, Count Bezúkhov, and about his
+      illegitimate son Pierre, the one who had behaved so improperly at Anna
+      Pávlovna’s reception.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am so sorry for the poor count,” said the visitor. “He is in such bad
+      health, and now this vexation about his son is enough to kill him!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What is that?” asked the countess as if she did not know what the visitor
+      alluded to, though she had already heard about the cause of Count
+      Bezúkhov’s distress some fifteen times.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s what comes of a modern education,” exclaimed the visitor. “It
+      seems that while he was abroad this young man was allowed to do as he
+      liked, now in Petersburg I hear he has been doing such terrible things
+      that he has been expelled by the police.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You don’t say so!” replied the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He chose his friends badly,” interposed Anna Mikháylovna. “Prince
+      Vasíli’s son, he, and a certain Dólokhov have, it is said, been up to
+      heaven only knows what! And they have had to suffer for it. Dólokhov has
+      been degraded to the ranks and Bezúkhov’s son sent back to Moscow. Anatole
+      Kurágin’s father managed somehow to get his son’s affair hushed up, but
+      even he was ordered out of Petersburg.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But what have they been up to?” asked the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They are regular brigands, especially Dólokhov,” replied the visitor. “He
+      is a son of Márya Ivánovna Dólokhova, such a worthy woman, but there, just
+      fancy! Those three got hold of a bear somewhere, put it in a carriage, and
+      set off with it to visit some actresses! The police tried to interfere,
+      and what did the young men do? They tied a policeman and the bear back to
+      back and put the bear into the Moyka Canal. And there was the bear
+      swimming about with the policeman on his back!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What a nice figure the policeman must have cut, my dear!” shouted the
+      count, dying with laughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, how dreadful! How can you laugh at it, Count?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Yet the ladies themselves could not help laughing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It was all they could do to rescue the poor man,” continued the visitor.
+      “And to think it is Cyril Vladímirovich Bezúkhov’s son who amuses himself
+      in this sensible manner! And he was said to be so well educated and
+      clever. This is all that his foreign education has done for him! I hope
+      that here in Moscow no one will receive him, in spite of his money. They
+      wanted to introduce him to me, but I quite declined: I have my daughters
+      to consider.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why do you say this young man is so rich?” asked the countess, turning
+      away from the girls, who at once assumed an air of inattention. “His
+      children are all illegitimate. I think Pierre also is illegitimate.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The visitor made a gesture with her hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I should think he has a score of them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Anna Mikháylovna intervened in the conversation, evidently
+      wishing to show her connections and knowledge of what went on in society.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The fact of the matter is,” said she significantly, and also in a half
+      whisper, “everyone knows Count Cyril’s reputation.... He has lost count of
+      his children, but this Pierre was his favorite.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How handsome the old man still was only a year ago!” remarked the
+      countess. “I have never seen a handsomer man.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “He is very much altered now,” said Anna Mikháylovna. “Well, as I was
+      saying, Prince Vasíli is the next heir through his wife, but the count is
+      very fond of Pierre, looked after his education, and wrote to the Emperor
+      about him; so that in the case of his death—and he is so ill that he
+      may die at any moment, and Dr. Lorrain has come from Petersburg—no
+      one knows who will inherit his immense fortune, Pierre or Prince Vasíli.
+      Forty thousand serfs and millions of rubles! I know it all very well for
+      Prince Vasíli told me himself. Besides, Cyril Vladímirovich is my mother’s
+      second cousin. He’s also my Bóry’s godfather,” she added, as if she
+      attached no importance at all to the fact.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Prince Vasíli arrived in Moscow yesterday. I hear he has come on some
+      inspection business,” remarked the visitor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, but between ourselves,” said the princess, “that is a pretext. The
+      fact is he has come to see Count Cyril Vladímirovich, hearing how ill he
+      is.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But do you know, my dear, that was a capital joke,” said the count; and
+      seeing that the elder visitor was not listening, he turned to the young
+      ladies. “I can just imagine what a funny figure that policeman cut!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And as he waved his arms to impersonate the policeman, his portly form
+      again shook with a deep ringing laugh, the laugh of one who always eats
+      well and, in particular, drinks well. “So do come and dine with us!” he
+      said.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0011"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Silence ensued. The countess looked at her callers, smiling affably, but
+      not concealing the fact that she would not be distressed if they now rose
+      and took their leave. The visitor’s daughter was already smoothing down
+      her dress with an inquiring look at her mother, when suddenly from the
+      next room were heard the footsteps of boys and girls running to the door
+      and the noise of a chair falling over, and a girl of thirteen, hiding
+      something in the folds of her short muslin frock, darted in and stopped
+      short in the middle of the room. It was evident that she had not intended
+      her flight to bring her so far. Behind her in the doorway appeared a
+      student with a crimson coat collar, an officer of the Guards, a girl of
+      fifteen, and a plump rosy-faced boy in a short jacket.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count jumped up and, swaying from side to side, spread his arms wide
+      and threw them round the little girl who had run in.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, here she is!” he exclaimed laughing. “My pet, whose name day it is.
+      My dear pet!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “<i>Ma chère</i>, there is a time for everything,” said the countess with
+      feigned severity. “You spoil her, Ilyá,” she added, turning to her
+      husband.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How do you do, my dear? I wish you many happy returns of your name day,”
+       said the visitor. “What a charming child,” she added, addressing the
+      mother.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This black-eyed, wide-mouthed girl, not pretty but full of life—with
+      childish bare shoulders which after her run heaved and shook her bodice,
+      with black curls tossed backward, thin bare arms, little legs in
+      lace-frilled drawers, and feet in low slippers—was just at that
+      charming age when a girl is no longer a child, though the child is not yet
+      a young woman. Escaping from her father she ran to hide her flushed face
+      in the lace of her mother’s mantilla—not paying the least attention
+      to her severe remark—and began to laugh. She laughed, and in
+      fragmentary sentences tried to explain about a doll which she produced
+      from the folds of her frock.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you see?... My doll... Mimi... You see...” was all Natásha managed to
+      utter (to her everything seemed funny). She leaned against her mother and
+      burst into such a loud, ringing fit of laughter that even the prim visitor
+      could not help joining in.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then, go away and take your monstrosity with you,” said the mother,
+      pushing away her daughter with pretended sternness, and turning to the
+      visitor she added: “She is my youngest girl.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha, raising her face for a moment from her mother’s mantilla, glanced
+      up at her through tears of laughter, and again hid her face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The visitor, compelled to look on at this family scene, thought it
+      necessary to take some part in it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Tell me, my dear,” said she to Natásha, “is Mimi a relation of yours? A
+      daughter, I suppose?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha did not like the visitor’s tone of condescension to childish
+      things. She did not reply, but looked at her seriously.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Meanwhile the younger generation: Borís, the officer, Anna Mikháylovna’s
+      son; Nicholas, the undergraduate, the count’s eldest son; Sónya, the
+      count’s fifteen-year-old niece, and little Pétya, his youngest boy, had
+      all settled down in the drawing room and were obviously trying to restrain
+      within the bounds of decorum the excitement and mirth that shone in all
+      their faces. Evidently in the back rooms, from which they had dashed out
+      so impetuously, the conversation had been more amusing than the drawing
+      room talk of society scandals, the weather, and Countess Apráksina. Now
+      and then they glanced at one another, hardly able to suppress their
+      laughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The two young men, the student and the officer, friends from childhood,
+      were of the same age and both handsome fellows, though not alike. Borís
+      was tall and fair, and his calm and handsome face had regular, delicate
+      features. Nicholas was short with curly hair and an open expression. Dark
+      hairs were already showing on his upper lip, and his whole face expressed
+      impetuosity and enthusiasm. Nicholas blushed when he entered the drawing
+      room. He evidently tried to find something to say, but failed. Borís on
+      the contrary at once found his footing, and related quietly and humorously
+      how he had known that doll Mimi when she was still quite a young lady,
+      before her nose was broken; how she had aged during the five years he had
+      known her, and how her head had cracked right across the skull. Having
+      said this he glanced at Natásha. She turned away from him and glanced at
+      her younger brother, who was screwing up his eyes and shaking with
+      suppressed laughter, and unable to control herself any longer, she jumped
+      up and rushed from the room as fast as her nimble little feet would carry
+      her. Borís did not laugh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You were meaning to go out, weren’t you, Mamma? Do you want the
+      carriage?” he asked his mother with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, go and tell them to get it ready,” she answered, returning his
+      smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís quietly left the room and went in search of Natásha. The plump boy
+      ran after them angrily, as if vexed that their program had been disturbed.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0012"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The only young people remaining in the drawing room, not counting the
+      young lady visitor and the countess’ eldest daughter (who was four years
+      older than her sister and behaved already like a grown-up person), were
+      Nicholas and Sónya, the niece. Sónya was a slender little brunette with a
+      tender look in her eyes which were veiled by long lashes, thick black
+      plaits coiling twice round her head, and a tawny tint in her complexion
+      and especially in the color of her slender but graceful and muscular arms
+      and neck. By the grace of her movements, by the softness and flexibility
+      of her small limbs, and by a certain coyness and reserve of manner, she
+      reminded one of a pretty, half-grown kitten which promises to become a
+      beautiful little cat. She evidently considered it proper to show an
+      interest in the general conversation by smiling, but in spite of herself
+      her eyes under their thick long lashes watched her cousin who was going to
+      join the army, with such passionate girlish adoration that her smile could
+      not for a single instant impose upon anyone, and it was clear that the
+      kitten had settled down only to spring up with more energy and again play
+      with her cousin as soon as they too could, like Natásha and Borís, escape
+      from the drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah yes, my dear,” said the count, addressing the visitor and pointing to
+      Nicholas, “his friend Borís has become an officer, and so for friendship’s
+      sake he is leaving the university and me, his old father, and entering the
+      military service, my dear. And there was a place and everything waiting
+      for him in the Archives Department! Isn’t that friendship?” remarked the
+      count in an inquiring tone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But they say that war has been declared,” replied the visitor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They’ve been saying so a long while,” said the count, “and they’ll say so
+      again and again, and that will be the end of it. My dear, there’s
+      friendship for you,” he repeated. “He’s joining the hussars.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The visitor, not knowing what to say, shook her head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s not at all from friendship,” declared Nicholas, flaring up and
+      turning away as if from a shameful aspersion. “It is not from friendship
+      at all; I simply feel that the army is my vocation.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He glanced at his cousin and the young lady visitor; and they were both
+      regarding him with a smile of approbation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Schubert, the colonel of the Pávlograd Hussars, is dining with us today.
+      He has been here on leave and is taking Nicholas back with him. It can’t
+      be helped!” said the count, shrugging his shoulders and speaking playfully
+      of a matter that evidently distressed him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have already told you, Papa,” said his son, “that if you don’t wish to
+      let me go, I’ll stay. But I know I am no use anywhere except in the army;
+      I am not a diplomat or a government clerk.—I don’t know how to hide
+      what I feel.” As he spoke he kept glancing with the flirtatiousness of a
+      handsome youth at Sónya and the young lady visitor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The little kitten, feasting her eyes on him, seemed ready at any moment to
+      start her gambols again and display her kittenish nature.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All right, all right!” said the old count. “He always flares up! This
+      Buonaparte has turned all their heads; they all think of how he rose from
+      an ensign and became Emperor. Well, well, God grant it,” he added, not
+      noticing his visitor’s sarcastic smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The elders began talking about Bonaparte. Julie Karágina turned to young
+      Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a pity you weren’t at the Arkhárovs’ on Thursday. It was so dull
+      without you,” said she, giving him a tender smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The young man, flattered, sat down nearer to her with a coquettish smile,
+      and engaged the smiling Julie in a confidential conversation without at
+      all noticing that his involuntary smile had stabbed the heart of Sónya,
+      who blushed and smiled unnaturally. In the midst of his talk he glanced
+      round at her. She gave him a passionately angry glance, and hardly able to
+      restrain her tears and maintain the artificial smile on her lips, she got
+      up and left the room. All Nicholas’ animation vanished. He waited for the
+      first pause in the conversation, and then with a distressed face left the
+      room to find Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How plainly all these young people wear their hearts on their sleeves!”
+       said Anna Mikháylovna, pointing to Nicholas as he went out. <i>“Cousinage—dangereux
+      voisinage,”</i> * she added.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * Cousinhood is a dangerous neighborhood.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” said the countess when the brightness these young people had
+      brought into the room had vanished; and as if answering a question no one
+      had put but which was always in her mind, “and how much suffering, how
+      much anxiety one has had to go through that we might rejoice in them now!
+      And yet really the anxiety is greater now than the joy. One is always,
+      always anxious! Especially just at this age, so dangerous both for girls
+      and boys.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It all depends on the bringing up,” remarked the visitor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, you’re quite right,” continued the countess. “Till now I have
+      always, thank God, been my children’s friend and had their full
+      confidence,” said she, repeating the mistake of so many parents who
+      imagine that their children have no secrets from them. “I know I shall
+      always be my daughters’ first confidante, and that if Nicholas, with his
+      impulsive nature, does get into mischief (a boy can’t help it), he will
+      all the same never be like those Petersburg young men.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, they are splendid, splendid youngsters,” chimed in the count, who
+      always solved questions that seemed to him perplexing by deciding that
+      everything was splendid. “Just fancy: wants to be an hussar. What’s one to
+      do, my dear?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What a charming creature your younger girl is,” said the visitor; “a
+      little volcano!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, a regular volcano,” said the count. “Takes after me! And what a
+      voice she has; though she’s my daughter, I tell the truth when I say
+      she’ll be a singer, a second Salomoni! We have engaged an Italian to give
+      her lessons.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Isn’t she too young? I have heard that it harms the voice to train it at
+      that age.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh no, not at all too young!” replied the count. “Why, our mothers used
+      to be married at twelve or thirteen.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And she’s in love with Borís already. Just fancy!” said the countess with
+      a gentle smile, looking at Borís and went on, evidently concerned with a
+      thought that always occupied her: “Now you see if I were to be severe with
+      her and to forbid it ... goodness knows what they might be up to on the
+      sly” (she meant that they would be kissing), “but as it is, I know every
+      word she utters. She will come running to me of her own accord in the
+      evening and tell me everything. Perhaps I spoil her, but really that seems
+      the best plan. With her elder sister I was stricter.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I was brought up quite differently,” remarked the handsome elder
+      daughter, Countess Véra, with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the smile did not enhance Véra’s beauty as smiles generally do; on the
+      contrary it gave her an unnatural, and therefore unpleasant, expression.
+      Véra was good-looking, not at all stupid, quick at learning, was
+      well brought up, and had a pleasant voice; what she said was true and
+      appropriate, yet, strange to say, everyone—the visitors and countess
+      alike—turned to look at her as if wondering why she had said it, and
+      they all felt awkward.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “People are always too clever with their eldest children and try to make
+      something exceptional of them,” said the visitor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s the good of denying it, my dear? Our dear countess was too clever
+      with Véra,” said the count. “Well, what of that? She’s turned out
+      splendidly all the same,” he added, winking at Véra.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The guests got up and took their leave, promising to return to dinner.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What manners! I thought they would never go,” said the countess, when she
+      had seen her guests out.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0013"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      When Natásha ran out of the drawing room she only went as far as the
+      conservatory. There she paused and stood listening to the conversation in
+      the drawing room, waiting for Borís to come out. She was already growing
+      impatient, and stamped her foot, ready to cry at his not coming at once,
+      when she heard the young man’s discreet steps approaching neither quickly
+      nor slowly. At this Natásha dashed swiftly among the flower tubs and hid
+      there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís paused in the middle of the room, looked round, brushed a little
+      dust from the sleeve of his uniform, and going up to a mirror examined his
+      handsome face. Natásha, very still, peered out from her ambush, waiting to
+      see what he would do. He stood a little while before the glass, smiled,
+      and walked toward the other door. Natásha was about to call him but
+      changed her mind. “Let him look for me,” thought she. Hardly had Borís
+      gone than Sónya, flushed, in tears, and muttering angrily, came in at the
+      other door. Natásha checked her first impulse to run out to her, and
+      remained in her hiding place, watching—as under an invisible cap—to
+      see what went on in the world. She was experiencing a new and peculiar
+      pleasure. Sónya, muttering to herself, kept looking round toward the
+      drawing room door. It opened and Nicholas came in.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya, what is the matter with you? How can you?” said he, running up to
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s nothing, nothing; leave me alone!” sobbed Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, I know what it is.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, if you do, so much the better, and you can go back to her!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Só-o-onya! Look here! How can you torture me and yourself like that, for
+      a mere fancy?” said Nicholas taking her hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya did not pull it away, and left off crying. Natásha, not stirring and
+      scarcely breathing, watched from her ambush with sparkling eyes. “What
+      will happen now?” thought she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya! What is anyone in the world to me? You alone are everything!” said
+      Nicholas. “And I will prove it to you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t like you to talk like that.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, then, I won’t; only forgive me, Sónya!” He drew her to him and
+      kissed her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, how nice,” thought Natásha; and when Sónya and Nicholas had gone out
+      of the conservatory she followed and called Borís to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Borís, come here,” said she with a sly and significant look. “I have
+      something to tell you. Here, here!” and she led him into the conservatory
+      to the place among the tubs where she had been hiding.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís followed her, smiling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is the <i>something?</i>” asked he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She grew confused, glanced round, and, seeing the doll she had thrown down
+      on one of the tubs, picked it up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Kiss the doll,” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís looked attentively and kindly at her eager face, but did not reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t you want to? Well, then, come here,” said she, and went further in
+      among the plants and threw down the doll. “Closer, closer!” she whispered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She caught the young officer by his cuffs, and a look of solemnity and
+      fear appeared on her flushed face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And me? Would you like to kiss me?” she whispered almost inaudibly,
+      glancing up at him from under her brows, smiling, and almost crying from
+      excitement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís blushed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How funny you are!” he said, bending down to her and blushing still more,
+      but he waited and did nothing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Suddenly she jumped up onto a tub to be higher than he, embraced him so
+      that both her slender bare arms clasped him above his neck, and, tossing
+      back her hair, kissed him full on the lips.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Then she slipped down among the flowerpots on the other side of the tubs
+      and stood, hanging her head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha,” he said, “you know that I love you, but....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You are in love with me?” Natásha broke in.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I am, but please don’t let us do like that.... In another four years
+      ... then I will ask for your hand.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha considered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,” she counted on her slender little
+      fingers. “All right! Then it’s settled?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A smile of joy and satisfaction lit up her eager face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Settled!” replied Borís.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Forever?” said the little girl. “Till death itself?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She took his arm and with a happy face went with him into the adjoining
+      sitting room.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0014"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After receiving her visitors, the countess was so tired that she gave
+      orders to admit no more, but the porter was told to be sure to invite to
+      dinner all who came “to congratulate.” The countess wished to have a
+      tête-à-tête talk with the friend of her childhood, Princess Anna
+      Mikháylovna, whom she had not seen properly since she returned from
+      Petersburg. Anna Mikháylovna, with her tear-worn but pleasant face, drew
+      her chair nearer to that of the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “With you I will be quite frank,” said Anna Mikháylovna. “There are not
+      many left of us old friends! That’s why I so value your friendship.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Mikháylovna looked at Véra and paused. The countess pressed her
+      friend’s hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Véra,” she said to her eldest daughter who was evidently not a favorite,
+      “how is it you have so little tact? Don’t you see you are not wanted here?
+      Go to the other girls, or...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The handsome Véra smiled contemptuously but did not seem at all hurt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If you had told me sooner, Mamma, I would have gone,” she replied as she
+      rose to go to her own room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But as she passed the sitting room she noticed two couples sitting, one
+      pair at each window. She stopped and smiled scornfully. Sónya was sitting
+      close to Nicholas who was copying out some verses for her, the first he
+      had ever written. Borís and Natásha were at the other window and ceased
+      talking when Véra entered. Sónya and Natásha looked at Véra with guilty,
+      happy faces.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was pleasant and touching to see these little girls in love; but
+      apparently the sight of them roused no pleasant feeling in Véra.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How often have I asked you not to take my things?” she said. “You have a
+      room of your own,” and she took the inkstand from Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In a minute, in a minute,” he said, dipping his pen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You always manage to do things at the wrong time,” continued Véra. “You
+      came rushing into the drawing room so that everyone felt ashamed of you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Though what she said was quite just, perhaps for that very reason no one
+      replied, and the four simply looked at one another. She lingered in the
+      room with the inkstand in her hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And at your age what secrets can there be between Natásha and Borís, or
+      between you two? It’s all nonsense!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Now, Véra, what does it matter to you?” said Natásha in defense, speaking
+      very gently.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She seemed that day to be more than ever kind and affectionate to
+      everyone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very silly,” said Véra. “I am ashamed of you. Secrets indeed!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “All have secrets of their own,” answered Natásha, getting warmer. “We
+      don’t interfere with you and Berg.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I should think not,” said Véra, “because there can never be anything
+      wrong in my behavior. But I’ll just tell Mamma how you are behaving with
+      Borís.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Natálya Ilyníchna behaves very well to me,” remarked Borís. “I have
+      nothing to complain of.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t, Borís! You are such a diplomat that it is really tiresome,” said
+      Natásha in a mortified voice that trembled slightly. (She used the word
+      “diplomat,” which was just then much in vogue among the children, in the
+      special sense they attached to it.) “Why does she bother me?” And she
+      added, turning to Véra, “You’ll never understand it, because you’ve never
+      loved anyone. You have no heart! You are a Madame de Genlis and nothing
+      more” (this nickname, bestowed on Véra by Nicholas, was considered very
+      stinging), “and your greatest pleasure is to be unpleasant to people! Go
+      and flirt with Berg as much as you please,” she finished quickly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I shall at any rate not run after a young man before visitors...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, now you’ve done what you wanted,” put in Nicholas—“said
+      unpleasant things to everyone and upset them. Let’s go to the nursery.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      All four, like a flock of scared birds, got up and left the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The unpleasant things were said to me,” remarked Véra, “I said none to
+      anyone.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Madame de Genlis! Madame de Genlis!” shouted laughing voices through the
+      door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The handsome Véra, who produced such an irritating and unpleasant effect
+      on everyone, smiled and, evidently unmoved by what had been said to her,
+      went to the looking glass and arranged her hair and scarf. Looking at her
+      own handsome face she seemed to become still colder and calmer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      In the drawing room the conversation was still going on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, my dear,” said the countess, “my life is not all roses either. Don’t
+      I know that at the rate we are living our means won’t last long? It’s all
+      the Club and his easygoing nature. Even in the country do we get any rest?
+      Theatricals, hunting, and heaven knows what besides! But don’t let’s talk
+      about me; tell me how you managed everything. I often wonder at you,
+      Annette—how at your age you can rush off alone in a carriage to
+      Moscow, to Petersburg, to those ministers and great people, and know how
+      to deal with them all! It’s quite astonishing. How did you get things
+      settled? I couldn’t possibly do it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, my love,” answered Anna Mikháylovna, “God grant you never know what
+      it is to be left a widow without means and with a son you love to
+      distraction! One learns many things then,” she added with a certain pride.
+      “That lawsuit taught me much. When I want to see one of those big people I
+      write a note: ‘Princess So-and-So desires an interview with So and-So,’
+      and then I take a cab and go myself two, three, or four times—till I
+      get what I want. I don’t mind what they think of me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, and to whom did you apply about Bóry?” asked the countess. “You see
+      yours is already an officer in the Guards, while my Nicholas is going as a
+      cadet. There’s no one to interest himself for him. To whom did you apply?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “To Prince Vasíli. He was so kind. He at once agreed to everything, and
+      put the matter before the Emperor,” said Princess Anna Mikháylovna
+      enthusiastically, quite forgetting all the humiliation she had endured to
+      gain her end.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Has Prince Vasíli aged much?” asked the countess. “I have not seen him
+      since we acted together at the Rumyántsovs’ theatricals. I expect he has
+      forgotten me. He paid me attentions in those days,” said the countess,
+      with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is just the same as ever,” replied Anna Mikháylovna, “overflowing with
+      amiability. His position has not turned his head at all. He said to me, ‘I
+      am sorry I can do so little for you, dear Princess. I am at your command.’
+      Yes, he is a fine fellow and a very kind relation. But, Nataly, you know
+      my love for my son: I would do anything for his happiness! And my affairs
+      are in such a bad way that my position is now a terrible one,” continued
+      Anna Mikháylovna, sadly, dropping her voice. “My wretched lawsuit takes
+      all I have and makes no progress. Would you believe it, I have literally
+      not a penny and don’t know how to equip Borís.” She took out her
+      handkerchief and began to cry. “I need five hundred rubles, and have only
+      one twenty-five-ruble note. I am in such a state.... My only hope now is
+      in Count Cyril Vladímirovich Bezúkhov. If he will not assist his godson—you
+      know he is Bóry’s godfather—and allow him something for his
+      maintenance, all my trouble will have been thrown away.... I shall not be
+      able to equip him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The countess’ eyes filled with tears and she pondered in silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I often think, though, perhaps it’s a sin,” said the princess, “that here
+      lives Count Cyril Vladímirovich Bezúkhov so rich, all alone... that
+      tremendous fortune... and what is his life worth? It’s a burden to him,
+      and Bóry’s life is only just beginning....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Surely he will leave something to Borís,” said the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Heaven only knows, my dear! These rich grandees are so selfish. Still, I
+      will take Borís and go to see him at once, and I shall speak to him
+      straight out. Let people think what they will of me, it’s really all the
+      same to me when my son’s fate is at stake.” The princess rose. “It’s now
+      two o’clock and you dine at four. There will just be time.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And like a practical Petersburg lady who knows how to make the most of
+      time, Anna Mikháylovna sent someone to call her son, and went into the
+      anteroom with him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good-by, my dear,” said she to the countess who saw her to the door, and
+      added in a whisper so that her son should not hear, “Wish me good luck.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Are you going to Count Cyril Vladímirovich, my dear?” said the count
+      coming out from the dining hall into the anteroom, and he added: “If he is
+      better, ask Pierre to dine with us. He has been to the house, you know,
+      and danced with the children. Be sure to invite him, my dear. We will see
+      how Tarás distinguishes himself today. He says Count Orlóv never gave such
+      a dinner as ours will be!”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0015"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      “My dear Borís,” said Princess Anna Mikháylovna to her son as Countess
+      Rostóva’s carriage in which they were seated drove over the straw covered
+      street and turned into the wide courtyard of Count Cyril Vladímirovich
+      Bezúkhov’s house. “My dear Borís,” said the mother, drawing her hand from
+      beneath her old mantle and laying it timidly and tenderly on her son’s
+      arm, “be affectionate and attentive to him. Count Cyril Vladímirovich is
+      your godfather after all, and your future depends on him. Remember that, my
+      dear, and be nice to him, as you so well know how to be.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If only I knew that anything besides humiliation would come of it...”
+       answered her son coldly. “But I have promised and will do it for your
+      sake.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Although the hall porter saw someone’s carriage standing at the entrance,
+      after scrutinizing the mother and son (who without asking to be announced
+      had passed straight through the glass porch between the rows of statues in
+      niches) and looking significantly at the lady’s old cloak, he asked
+      whether they wanted the count or the princesses, and, hearing that they
+      wished to see the count, said his excellency was worse today, and that his
+      excellency was not receiving anyone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We may as well go back,” said the son in French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear!” exclaimed his mother imploringly, again laying her hand on his
+      arm as if that touch might soothe or rouse him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís said no more, but looked inquiringly at his mother without taking
+      off his cloak.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My friend,” said Anna Mikháylovna in gentle tones, addressing the hall
+      porter, “I know Count Cyril Vladímirovich is very ill... that’s why I have
+      come... I am a relation. I shall not disturb him, my friend... I only need
+      see Prince Vasíli Sergéevich: he is staying here, is he not? Please
+      announce me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The hall porter sullenly pulled a bell that rang upstairs, and turned
+      away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Princess Drubetskáya to see Prince Vasíli Sergéevich,” he called to a
+      footman dressed in knee breeches, shoes, and a swallow-tail coat, who ran
+      downstairs and looked over from the halfway landing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The mother smoothed the folds of her dyed silk dress before a large
+      Venetian mirror in the wall, and in her trodden-down shoes briskly
+      ascended the carpeted stairs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear,” she said to her son, once more stimulating him by a touch, “you
+      promised me!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The son, lowering his eyes, followed her quietly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They entered the large hall, from which one of the doors led to the
+      apartments assigned to Prince Vasíli.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just as the mother and son, having reached the middle of the hall, were
+      about to ask their way of an elderly footman who had sprung up as they
+      entered, the bronze handle of one of the doors turned and Prince Vasíli
+      came out—wearing a velvet coat with a single star on his breast, as
+      was his custom when at home—taking leave of a good-looking,
+      dark-haired man. This was the celebrated Petersburg doctor, Lorrain.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then it is certain?” said the prince.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Prince, <i>humanum est errare</i>, * but...” replied the doctor,
+      swallowing his <i>r</i>’s, and pronouncing the Latin words with a French
+      accent.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * To err is human.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “Very well, very well...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Seeing Anna Mikháylovna and her son, Prince Vasíli dismissed the doctor
+      with a bow and approached them silently and with a look of inquiry. The
+      son noticed that an expression of profound sorrow suddenly clouded his
+      mother’s face, and he smiled slightly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, Prince! In what sad circumstances we meet again! And how is our dear
+      invalid?” said she, as though unaware of the cold offensive look fixed on
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli stared at her and at Borís questioningly and perplexed.
+      Borís bowed politely. Prince Vasíli without acknowledging the bow turned
+      to Anna Mikháylovna, answering her query by a movement of the head and
+      lips indicating very little hope for the patient.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is it possible?” exclaimed Anna Mikháylovna. “Oh, how awful! It is
+      terrible to think.... This is my son,” she added, indicating Borís. “He
+      wanted to thank you himself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Borís bowed again politely.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Believe me, Prince, a mother’s heart will never forget what you have done
+      for us.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I am glad I was able to do you a service, my dear Anna Mikháylovna,” said
+      Prince Vasíli, arranging his lace frill, and in tone and manner, here in
+      Moscow to Anna Mikháylovna whom he had placed under an obligation,
+      assuming an air of much greater importance than he had done in Petersburg
+      at Anna Schérer’s reception.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Try to serve well and show yourself worthy,” added he, addressing Borís
+      with severity. “I am glad.... Are you here on leave?” he went on in his
+      usual tone of indifference.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am awaiting orders to join my new regiment, your excellency,” replied
+      Borís, betraying neither annoyance at the prince’s brusque manner nor a
+      desire to enter into conversation, but speaking so quietly and
+      respectfully that the prince gave him a searching glance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Are you living with your mother?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I am living at Countess Rostóva’s,” replied Borís, again adding, “your
+      excellency.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That is, with Ilyá Rostóv who married Nataly Shinshiná,” said Anna
+      Mikháylovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I know, I know,” answered Prince Vasíli in his monotonous voice. “I never
+      could understand how Nataly made up her mind to marry that unlicked bear!
+      A perfectly absurd and stupid fellow, and a gambler too, I am told.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But a very kind man, Prince,” said Anna Mikháylovna with a pathetic
+      smile, as though she too knew that Count Rostóv deserved this censure, but
+      asked him not to be too hard on the poor old man. “What do the doctors
+      say?” asked the princess after a pause, her worn face again expressing
+      deep sorrow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They give little hope,” replied the prince.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I should so like to thank <i>Uncle</i> once for all his kindness to
+      me and Borís. He is his godson,” she added, her tone suggesting that this
+      fact ought to give Prince Vasíli much satisfaction.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli became thoughtful and frowned. Anna Mikháylovna saw that he
+      was afraid of finding in her a rival for Count Bezúkhov’s fortune, and
+      hastened to reassure him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If it were not for my sincere affection and devotion to <i>Uncle</i>,”
+       said she, uttering the word with peculiar assurance and unconcern, “I know
+      his character: noble, upright ... but you see he has no one with him
+      except the young princesses.... They are still young....” She bent her
+      head and continued in a whisper: “Has he performed his final duty, Prince?
+      How priceless are those last moments! It can make things no worse, and it
+      is absolutely necessary to prepare him if he is so ill. We women, Prince,”
+       and she smiled tenderly, “always know how to say these things. I
+      absolutely must see him, however painful it may be for me. I am used to
+      suffering.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Evidently the prince understood her, and also understood, as he had done
+      at Anna Pávlovna’s, that it would be difficult to get rid of Anna
+      Mikháylovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Would not such a meeting be too trying for him, dear Anna Mikháylovna?”
+       said he. “Let us wait until evening. The doctors are expecting a crisis.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But one cannot delay, Prince, at such a moment! Consider that the welfare
+      of his soul is at stake. Ah, it is awful: the duties of a Christian...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A door of one of the inner rooms opened and one of the princesses, the
+      count’s niece, entered with a cold, stern face. The length of her body was
+      strikingly out of proportion to her short legs. Prince Vasíli turned to
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, how is he?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Still the same; but what can you expect, this noise...” said the
+      princess, looking at Anna Mikháylovna as at a stranger.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, my dear, I hardly knew you,” said Anna Mikháylovna with a happy
+      smile, ambling lightly up to the count’s niece. “I have come, and am at
+      your service to help you nurse <i>my uncle</i>. I imagine what you have
+      gone through,” and she sympathetically turned up her eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess gave no reply and did not even smile, but left the room as
+      Anna Mikháylovna took off her gloves and, occupying the position she had
+      conquered, settled down in an armchair, inviting Prince Vasíli to take a
+      seat beside her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Borís,” she said to her son with a smile, “I shall go in to see the
+      count, my uncle; but you, my dear, had better go to Pierre meanwhile and
+      don’t forget to give him the Rostóvs’ invitation. They ask him to dinner.
+      I suppose he won’t go?” she continued, turning to the prince.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “On the contrary,” replied the prince, who had plainly become depressed,
+      “I shall be only too glad if you relieve me of that young man.... Here he
+      is, and the count has not once asked for him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He shrugged his shoulders. A footman conducted Borís down one flight of
+      stairs and up another, to Pierre’s rooms.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0016"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Pierre, after all, had not managed to choose a career for himself in
+      Petersburg, and had been expelled from there for riotous conduct and sent
+      to Moscow. The story told about him at Count Rostóv’s was true. Pierre had
+      taken part in tying a policeman to a bear. He had now been for some days
+      in Moscow and was staying as usual at his father’s house. Though he
+      expected that the story of his escapade would be already known in Moscow
+      and that the ladies about his father—who were never favorably
+      disposed toward him—would have used it to turn the count against
+      him, he nevertheless on the day of his arrival went to his father’s part
+      of the house. Entering the drawing room, where the princesses spent most
+      of their time, he greeted the ladies, two of whom were sitting at
+      embroidery frames while a third read aloud. It was the eldest who was
+      reading—the one who had met Anna Mikháylovna. The two younger ones
+      were embroidering: both were rosy and pretty and they differed only in
+      that one had a little mole on her lip which made her much prettier. Pierre
+      was received as if he were a corpse or a leper. The eldest princess paused
+      in her reading and silently stared at him with frightened eyes; the second
+      assumed precisely the same expression; while the youngest, the one with
+      the mole, who was of a cheerful and lively disposition, bent over her
+      frame to hide a smile probably evoked by the amusing scene she foresaw.
+      She drew her wool down through the canvas and, scarcely able to refrain
+      from laughing, stooped as if trying to make out the pattern.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How do you do, cousin?” said Pierre. “You don’t recognize me?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I recognize you only too well, too well.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How is the count? Can I see him?” asked Pierre, awkwardly as usual, but
+      unabashed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The count is suffering physically and mentally, and apparently you have
+      done your best to increase his mental sufferings.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Can I see the count?” Pierre again asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hm.... If you wish to kill him, to kill him outright, you can see him...
+      Olga, go and see whether Uncle’s beef tea is ready—it is almost
+      time,” she added, giving Pierre to understand that they were busy, and
+      busy making his father comfortable, while evidently he, Pierre, was only
+      busy causing him annoyance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Olga went out. Pierre stood looking at the sisters; then he bowed and
+      said: “Then I will go to my rooms. You will let me know when I can see
+      him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And he left the room, followed by the low but ringing laughter of the
+      sister with the mole.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day Prince Vasíli had arrived and settled in the count’s house. He
+      sent for Pierre and said to him: “My dear fellow, if you are going to
+      behave here as you did in Petersburg, you will end very badly; that is all
+      I have to say to you. The count is very, very ill, and you must not see
+      him at all.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Since then Pierre had not been disturbed and had spent the whole time in
+      his rooms upstairs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Borís appeared at his door Pierre was pacing up and down his room,
+      stopping occasionally at a corner to make menacing gestures at the wall,
+      as if running a sword through an invisible foe, and glaring savagely over
+      his spectacles, and then again resuming his walk, muttering indistinct
+      words, shrugging his shoulders and gesticulating.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “England is done for,” said he, scowling and pointing his finger at
+      someone unseen. “Mr. Pitt, as a traitor to the nation and to the rights of
+      man, is sentenced to...” But before Pierre—who at that moment
+      imagined himself to be Napoleon in person and to have just effected the
+      dangerous crossing of the Straits of Dover and captured London—could
+      pronounce Pitt’s sentence, he saw a well-built and handsome young officer
+      entering his room. Pierre paused. He had left Moscow when Borís was a boy
+      of fourteen, and had quite forgotten him, but in his usual impulsive and
+      hearty way he took Borís by the hand with a friendly smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you remember me?” asked Borís quietly with a pleasant smile. “I have
+      come with my mother to see the count, but it seems he is not well.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, it seems he is ill. People are always disturbing him,” answered
+      Pierre, trying to remember who this young man was.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís felt that Pierre did not recognize him but did not consider it
+      necessary to introduce himself, and without experiencing the least
+      embarrassment looked Pierre straight in the face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Count Rostóv asks you to come to dinner today,” said he, after a
+      considerable pause which made Pierre feel uncomfortable.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, Count Rostóv!” exclaimed Pierre joyfully. “Then you are his son,
+      Ilyá? Only fancy, I didn’t know you at first. Do you remember how we went
+      to the Sparrow Hills with Madame Jacquot?... It’s such an age...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You are mistaken,” said Borís deliberately, with a bold and slightly
+      sarcastic smile. “I am Borís, son of Princess Anna Mikháylovna
+      Drubetskáya. Rostóv, the father, is Ilyá, and his son is Nicholas. I never
+      knew any Madame Jacquot.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre shook his head and arms as if attacked by mosquitoes or bees.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh dear, what am I thinking about? I’ve mixed everything up. One has so
+      many relatives in Moscow! So you are Borís? Of course. Well, now we know
+      where we are. And what do you think of the Boulogne expedition? The
+      English will come off badly, you know, if Napoleon gets across the
+      Channel. I think the expedition is quite feasible. If only Villeneuve
+      doesn’t make a mess of things!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Borís knew nothing about the Boulogne expedition; he did not read the
+      papers and it was the first time he had heard Villeneuve’s name.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We here in Moscow are more occupied with dinner parties and scandal than
+      with politics,” said he in his quiet ironical tone. “I know nothing about
+      it and have not thought about it. Moscow is chiefly busy with gossip,” he
+      continued. “Just now they are talking about you and your father.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre smiled in his good-natured way as if afraid for his companion’s
+      sake that the latter might say something he would afterwards regret. But
+      Borís spoke distinctly, clearly, and dryly, looking straight into Pierre’s
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Moscow has nothing else to do but gossip,” Borís went on. “Everybody is
+      wondering to whom the count will leave his fortune, though he may perhaps
+      outlive us all, as I sincerely hope he will...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, it is all very horrid,” interrupted Pierre, “very horrid.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was still afraid that this officer might inadvertently say
+      something disconcerting to himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And it must seem to you,” said Borís flushing slightly, but not changing
+      his tone or attitude, “it must seem to you that everyone is trying to get
+      something out of the rich man?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “So it does,” thought Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But I just wish to say, to avoid misunderstandings, that you are quite
+      mistaken if you reckon me or my mother among such people. We are very
+      poor, but for my own part at any rate, for the very reason that your
+      father is rich, I don’t regard myself as a relation of his, and neither I
+      nor my mother would ever ask or take anything from him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      For a long time Pierre could not understand, but when he did, he jumped up
+      from the sofa, seized Borís under the elbow in his quick, clumsy way, and,
+      blushing far more than Borís, began to speak with a feeling of mingled
+      shame and vexation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, this is strange! Do you suppose I... who could think?... I know
+      very well...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But Borís again interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am glad I have spoken out fully. Perhaps you did not like it? You must
+      excuse me,” said he, putting Pierre at ease instead of being put at ease
+      by him, “but I hope I have not offended you. I always make it a rule to
+      speak out... Well, what answer am I to take? Will you come to dinner at
+      the Rostóvs’?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Borís, having apparently relieved himself of an onerous duty and
+      extricated himself from an awkward situation and placed another in it,
+      became quite pleasant again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, but I say,” said Pierre, calming down, “you are a wonderful fellow!
+      What you have just said is good, very good. Of course you don’t know me.
+      We have not met for such a long time... not since we were children. You
+      might think that I... I understand, quite understand. I could not have
+      done it myself, I should not have had the courage, but it’s splendid. I am
+      very glad to have made your acquaintance. It’s queer,” he added after a
+      pause, “that you should have suspected me!” He began to laugh. “Well, what
+      of it! I hope we’ll get better acquainted,” and he pressed Borís’ hand.
+      “Do you know, I have not once been in to see the count. He has not sent
+      for me.... I am sorry for him as a man, but what can one do?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And so you think Napoleon will manage to get an army across?” asked Borís
+      with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre saw that Borís wished to change the subject, and being of the same
+      mind he began explaining the advantages and disadvantages of the Boulogne
+      expedition.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A footman came in to summon Borís—the princess was going. Pierre, in
+      order to make Borís’ better acquaintance, promised to come to dinner, and
+      warmly pressing his hand looked affectionately over his spectacles into
+      Borís’ eyes. After he had gone Pierre continued pacing up and down the
+      room for a long time, no longer piercing an imaginary foe with his
+      imaginary sword, but smiling at the remembrance of that pleasant,
+      intelligent, and resolute young man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As often happens in early youth, especially to one who leads a lonely
+      life, he felt an unaccountable tenderness for this young man and made up
+      his mind that they would be friends.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli saw the princess off. She held a handkerchief to her eyes
+      and her face was tearful.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is dreadful, dreadful!” she was saying, “but cost me what it may I
+      shall do my duty. I will come and spend the night. He must not be left
+      like this. Every moment is precious. I can’t think why his nieces put it
+      off. Perhaps God will help me to find a way to prepare him!... Adieu,
+      Prince! May God support you...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Adieu, ma bonne,”</i> answered Prince Vasíli turning away from her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, he is in a dreadful state,” said the mother to her son when they were
+      in the carriage. “He hardly recognizes anybody.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t understand, Mamma—what is his attitude to Pierre?” asked
+      the son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The will will show that, my dear; our fate also depends on it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But why do you expect that he will leave us anything?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, my dear! He is so rich, and we are so poor!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, that is hardly a sufficient reason, Mamma...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, Heaven! How ill he is!” exclaimed the mother.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0017"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After Anna Mikháylovna had driven off with her son to visit Count Cyril
+      Vladímirovich Bezúkhov, Countess Rostóva sat for a long time all alone
+      applying her handkerchief to her eyes. At last she rang.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is the matter with you, my dear?” she said crossly to the maid who
+      kept her waiting some minutes. “Don’t you wish to serve me? Then I’ll find
+      you another place.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The countess was upset by her friend’s sorrow and humiliating poverty, and
+      was therefore out of sorts, a state of mind which with her always found
+      expression in calling her maid “my dear” and speaking to her with
+      exaggerated politeness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am very sorry, ma’am,” answered the maid.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ask the count to come to me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The count came waddling in to see his wife with a rather guilty look as
+      usual.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, little countess? What a <i>sauté</i> of game <i>au madère</i> we
+      are to have, my dear! I tasted it. The thousand rubles I paid for Tarás
+      were not ill-spent. He is worth it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He sat down by his wife, his elbows on his knees and his hands ruffling
+      his gray hair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What are your commands, little countess?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You see, my dear... What’s that mess?” she said, pointing to his
+      waistcoat. “It’s the <i>sauté</i>, most likely,” she added with a smile.
+      “Well, you see, Count, I want some money.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Her face became sad.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, little countess!” ... and the count began bustling to get out his
+      pocketbook.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I want a great deal, Count! I want five hundred rubles,” and taking out
+      her cambric handkerchief she began wiping her husband’s waistcoat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, immediately, immediately! Hey, who’s there?” he called out in a tone
+      only used by persons who are certain that those they call will rush to
+      obey the summons. “Send Dmítri to me!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dmítri, a man of good family who had been brought up in the count’s house
+      and now managed all his affairs, stepped softly into the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This is what I want, my dear fellow,” said the count to the deferential
+      young man who had entered. “Bring me...” he reflected a moment, “yes,
+      bring me seven hundred rubles, yes! But mind, don’t bring me such tattered
+      and dirty notes as last time, but nice clean ones for the countess.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, Dmítri, clean ones, please,” said the countess, sighing deeply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “When would you like them, your excellency?” asked Dmítri. “Allow me to
+      inform you... But, don’t be uneasy,” he added, noticing that the count was
+      beginning to breathe heavily and quickly which was always a sign of
+      approaching anger. “I was forgetting... Do you wish it brought at once?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes; just so! Bring it. Give it to the countess.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What a treasure that Dmítri is,” added the count with a smile when the
+      young man had departed. “There is never any ‘impossible’ with him. That’s
+      a thing I hate! Everything is possible.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, money, Count, money! How much sorrow it causes in the world,” said
+      the countess. “But I am in great need of this sum.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You, my little countess, are a notorious spendthrift,” said the count,
+      and having kissed his wife’s hand he went back to his study.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Anna Mikháylovna returned from Count Bezúkhov’s the money, all in
+      clean notes, was lying ready under a handkerchief on the countess’ little
+      table, and Anna Mikháylovna noticed that something was agitating her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, my dear?” asked the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, what a terrible state he is in! One would not know him, he is so ill!
+      I was only there a few moments and hardly said a word...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Annette, for heaven’s sake don’t refuse me,” the countess began, with a
+      blush that looked very strange on her thin, dignified, elderly face, and
+      she took the money from under the handkerchief.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Mikháylovna instantly guessed her intention and stooped to be ready
+      to embrace the countess at the appropriate moment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This is for Borís from me, for his outfit.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Mikháylovna was already embracing her and weeping. The countess wept
+      too. They wept because they were friends, and because they were
+      kindhearted, and because they—friends from childhood—had to
+      think about such a base thing as money, and because their youth was
+      over.... But those tears were pleasant to them both.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0018"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Countess Rostóva, with her daughters and a large number of guests, was
+      already seated in the drawing room. The count took the gentlemen into his
+      study and showed them his choice collection of Turkish pipes. From time to
+      time he went out to ask: “Hasn’t she come yet?” They were
+      expecting Márya Dmítrievna Akhrosímova, known in society as <i>le terrible
+      dragon</i>, a lady distinguished not for wealth or rank, but for common sense and
+      frank plainness of speech. Márya Dmítrievna was known to the Imperial family as
+      well as to all Moscow and Petersburg, and both cities wondered at her,
+      laughed privately at her rudenesses, and told good stories about her,
+      while none the less all without exception respected and feared her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the count’s room, which was full of tobacco smoke, they talked of the war
+      that had been announced in a manifesto, and about the recruiting. None of
+      them had yet seen the manifesto, but they all knew it had appeared. The
+      count sat on the sofa between two guests who were smoking and talking. He
+      neither smoked nor talked, but bending his head first to one side and then
+      to the other watched the smokers with evident pleasure and listened to the
+      conversation of his two neighbors, whom he egged on against each other.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One of them was a sallow, clean-shaven civilian with a thin and wrinkled
+      face, already growing old, though he was dressed like a most fashionable
+      young man. He sat with his legs up on the sofa as if quite at home and,
+      having stuck an amber mouthpiece far into his mouth, was inhaling the
+      smoke spasmodically and screwing up his eyes. This was an old bachelor,
+      Shinshín, a cousin of the countess’, a man with “a sharp tongue” as they
+      said in Moscow society. He seemed to be condescending to his companion.
+      The latter, a fresh, rosy officer of the Guards, irreproachably washed,
+      brushed, and buttoned, held his pipe in the middle of his mouth and with
+      red lips gently inhaled the smoke, letting it escape from his handsome
+      mouth in rings. This was Lieutenant Berg, an officer in the Semënov
+      regiment with whom Borís was to travel to join the army, and about whom
+      Natásha had teased her elder sister Véra, speaking of Berg as her
+      “intended.” The count sat between them and listened attentively. His
+      favorite occupation when not playing boston, a card game he was very fond
+      of, was that of listener, especially when he succeeded in setting two
+      loquacious talkers at one another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, then, old chap, <i>mon très honorable</i> Alphonse Kárlovich,” said
+      Shinshín, laughing ironically and mixing the most ordinary Russian
+      expressions with the choicest French phrases—which was a peculiarity
+      of his speech. “<i>Vous comptez vous faire des rentes sur l’état</i>; *
+      you want to make something out of your company?”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * You expect to make an income out of the government.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “No, Peter Nikoláevich; I only want to show that in the cavalry the
+      advantages are far less than in the infantry. Just consider my own
+      position now, Peter Nikoláevich...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Berg always spoke quietly, politely, and with great precision. His
+      conversation always related entirely to himself; he would remain calm and
+      silent when the talk related to any topic that had no direct bearing on
+      himself. He could remain silent for hours without being at all put out of
+      countenance himself or making others uncomfortable, but as soon as the
+      conversation concerned himself he would begin to talk circumstantially and
+      with evident satisfaction.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Consider my position, Peter Nikoláevich. Were I in the cavalry I should
+      get not more than two hundred rubles every four months, even with the rank
+      of lieutenant; but as it is I receive two hundred and thirty,” said he,
+      looking at Shinshín and the count with a joyful, pleasant smile, as if it
+      were obvious to him that his success must always be the chief desire of
+      everyone else.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Besides that, Peter Nikoláevich, by exchanging into the Guards I shall be
+      in a more prominent position,” continued Berg, “and vacancies occur much
+      more frequently in the Foot Guards. Then just think what can be done with
+      two hundred and thirty rubles! I even manage to put a little aside and to
+      send something to my father,” he went on, emitting a smoke ring.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “<i>La balance y est</i>... * A German knows how to skin a flint, as the
+      proverb says,” remarked Shinshín, moving his pipe to the other side of his
+      mouth and winking at the count.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+      * So that squares matters.
+</p>
+<p>
+      The count burst out laughing. The other guests seeing that Shinshín was
+      talking came up to listen. Berg, oblivious of irony or indifference,
+      continued to explain how by exchanging into the Guards he had already
+      gained a step on his old comrades of the Cadet Corps; how in wartime the
+      company commander might get killed and he, as senior in the company, might
+      easily succeed to the post; how popular he was with everyone in the
+      regiment, and how satisfied his father was with him. Berg evidently
+      enjoyed narrating all this, and did not seem to suspect that others, too,
+      might have their own interests. But all he said was so prettily sedate,
+      and the naïveté of his youthful egotism was so obvious, that he disarmed
+      his hearers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, my boy, you’ll get along wherever you go—foot or horse—that
+      I’ll warrant,” said Shinshín, patting him on the shoulder and taking his
+      feet off the sofa.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Berg smiled joyously. The count, followed by his guests, went into
+      the drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was just the moment before a big dinner when the assembled guests,
+      expecting the summons to <i>zakúska</i>, * avoid engaging in any long
+      conversation but think it necessary to move about and talk, in order to
+      show that they are not at all impatient for their food. The host and
+      hostess look toward the door, and now and then glance at one another, and
+      the visitors try to guess from these glances who, or what, they are
+      waiting for—some important relation who has not yet arrived, or a
+      dish that is not yet ready.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * Hors d’oeuvres.
+</p>
+<p>
+      Pierre had come just at dinnertime and was sitting awkwardly in the middle
+      of the drawing room on the first chair he had come across, blocking the
+      way for everyone. The countess tried to make him talk, but he went on
+      naïvely looking around through his spectacles as if in search of somebody
+      and answered all her questions in monosyllables. He was in the way and was
+      the only one who did not notice the fact. Most of the guests, knowing of
+      the affair with the bear, looked with curiosity at this big, stout, quiet
+      man, wondering how such a clumsy, modest fellow could have played such a
+      prank on a policeman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You have only lately arrived?” the countess asked him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Oui, madame,”</i> replied he, looking around him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You have not yet seen my husband?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Non, madame.”</i> He smiled quite inappropriately.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You have been in Paris recently, I believe? I suppose it’s very
+      interesting.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Very interesting.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The countess exchanged glances with Anna Mikháylovna. The latter
+      understood that she was being asked to entertain this young man, and
+      sitting down beside him she began to speak about his father; but he
+      answered her, as he had the countess, only in monosyllables. The other
+      guests were all conversing with one another. “The Razumóvskis... It was
+      charming... You are very kind... Countess Apráksina...” was heard on all
+      sides. The countess rose and went into the ballroom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Márya Dmítrievna?” came her voice from there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Herself,” came the answer in a rough voice, and Márya Dmítrievna entered
+      the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the unmarried ladies and even the married ones except the very oldest
+      rose. Márya Dmítrievna paused at the door. Tall and stout, holding high
+      her fifty-year-old head with its gray curls, she stood surveying the
+      guests, and leisurely arranged her wide sleeves as if rolling them up.
+      Márya Dmítrievna always spoke in Russian.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Health and happiness to her whose name day we are keeping and to her
+      children,” she said, in her loud, full-toned voice which drowned all
+      others. “Well, you old sinner,” she went on, turning to the count who was
+      kissing her hand, “you’re feeling dull in Moscow, I daresay? Nowhere to
+      hunt with your dogs? But what is to be done, old man? Just see how these
+      nestlings are growing up,” and she pointed to the girls. “You must look
+      for husbands for them whether you like it or not....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well,” said she, “how’s my Cossack?” (Márya Dmítrievna always called
+      Natásha a Cossack) and she stroked the child’s arm as she came up fearless
+      and gay to kiss her hand. “I know she’s a scamp of a girl, but I like
+      her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She took a pair of pear-shaped ruby earrings from her huge reticule and,
+      having given them to the rosy Natásha, who beamed with the pleasure of her
+      saint’s-day fete, turned away at once and addressed herself to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh, eh, friend! Come here a bit,” said she, assuming a soft high tone of
+      voice. “Come here, my friend...” and she ominously tucked up her sleeves
+      still higher. Pierre approached, looking at her in a childlike way through
+      his spectacles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come nearer, come nearer, friend! I used to be the only one to tell your
+      father the truth when he was in favor, and in your case it’s my evident
+      duty.” She paused. All were silent, expectant of what was to follow, for
+      this was clearly only a prelude.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A fine lad! My word! A fine lad!... His father lies on his deathbed and
+      he amuses himself setting a policeman astride a bear! For shame, sir, for
+      shame! It would be better if you went to the war.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She turned away and gave her hand to the count, who could hardly keep from
+      laughing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, I suppose it is time we were at table?” said Márya Dmítrievna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count went in first with Márya Dmítrievna, the countess followed on
+      the arm of a colonel of hussars, a man of importance to them because
+      Nicholas was to go with him to the regiment; then came Anna Mikháylovna
+      with Shinshín. Berg gave his arm to Véra. The smiling Julie Karágina went
+      in with Nicholas. After them other couples followed, filling the whole
+      dining hall, and last of all the children, tutors, and governesses
+      followed singly. The footmen began moving about, chairs scraped, the band
+      struck up in the gallery, and the guests settled down in their places.
+      Then the strains of the count’s household band were replaced by the
+      clatter of knives and forks, the voices of visitors, and the soft steps of
+      the footmen. At one end of the table sat the countess with Márya
+      Dmítrievna on her right and Anna Mikháylovna on her left, the other lady
+      visitors were farther down. At the other end sat the count, with the
+      hussar colonel on his left and Shinshín and the other male visitors on his
+      right. Midway down the long table on one side sat the grown-up young
+      people: Véra beside Berg, and Pierre beside Borís; and on the other side,
+      the children, tutors, and governesses. From behind the crystal decanters
+      and fruit vases, the count kept glancing at his wife and her tall cap with
+      its light-blue ribbons, and busily filled his neighbors’ glasses, not
+      neglecting his own. The countess in turn, without omitting her duties as
+      hostess, threw significant glances from behind the pineapples at her
+      husband whose face and bald head seemed by their redness to contrast more
+      than usual with his gray hair. At the ladies’ end an even chatter of
+      voices was heard all the time, at the men’s end the voices sounded louder
+      and louder, especially that of the colonel of hussars who, growing more
+      and more flushed, ate and drank so much that the count held him up as a
+      pattern to the other guests. Berg with tender smiles was saying to Véra
+      that love is not an earthly but a heavenly feeling. Borís was telling his
+      new friend Pierre who the guests were and exchanging glances with Natásha,
+      who was sitting opposite. Pierre spoke little but examined the new faces,
+      and ate a great deal. Of the two soups he chose turtle with savory patties
+      and went on to the game without omitting a single dish or one of the
+      wines. These latter the butler thrust mysteriously forward, wrapped in a
+      napkin, from behind the next man’s shoulders and whispered: “Dry
+      Madeira”... “Hungarian”... or “Rhine wine” as the case might be. Of the
+      four crystal glasses engraved with the count’s monogram that stood before
+      his plate, Pierre held out one at random and drank with enjoyment, gazing
+      with ever-increasing amiability at the other guests. Natásha, who sat
+      opposite, was looking at Borís as girls of thirteen look at the boy they
+      are in love with and have just kissed for the first time. Sometimes that
+      same look fell on Pierre, and that funny lively little girl’s look made
+      him inclined to laugh without knowing why.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas sat at some distance from Sónya, beside Julie Karágina, to whom
+      he was again talking with the same involuntary smile. Sónya wore a company
+      smile but was evidently tormented by jealousy; now she turned pale, now
+      blushed and strained every nerve to overhear what Nicholas and Julie were
+      saying to one another. The governess kept looking round uneasily as if
+      preparing to resent any slight that might be put upon the children. The
+      German tutor was trying to remember all the dishes, wines, and kinds of
+      dessert, in order to send a full description of the dinner to his people
+      in Germany; and he felt greatly offended when the butler with a bottle
+      wrapped in a napkin passed him by. He frowned, trying to appear as if he
+      did not want any of that wine, but was mortified because no one would
+      understand that it was not to quench his thirst or from greediness that he
+      wanted it, but simply from a conscientious desire for knowledge.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0019"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At the men’s end of the table the talk grew more and more animated. The
+      colonel told them that the declaration of war had already appeared in
+      Petersburg and that a copy, which he had himself seen, had that day been
+      forwarded by courier to the commander in chief.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And why the deuce are we going to fight Bonaparte?” remarked Shinshín.
+      “He has stopped Austria’s cackle and I fear it will be our turn next.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The colonel was a stout, tall, plethoric German, evidently devoted to the
+      service and patriotically Russian. He resented Shinshín’s remark.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is for the reasson, my goot sir,” said he, speaking with a German
+      accent, “for the reasson zat ze Emperor knows zat. He declares in ze
+      manifessto zat he cannot fiew wiz indifference ze danger vreatening Russia
+      and zat ze safety and dignity of ze Empire as vell as ze sanctity of its
+      <i>alliances</i>...” he spoke this last word with particular emphasis as
+      if in it lay the gist of the matter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Then with the unerring official memory that characterized him he repeated
+      from the opening words of the manifesto:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      ... <i>and the wish, which constitutes the Emperor’s sole and absolute aim—to
+      establish peace in Europe on firm foundations—has now decided him to
+      despatch part of the army abroad and to create a new condition for the
+      attainment of that purpose</i>.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Zat, my dear sir, is vy...” he concluded, drinking a tumbler of wine with
+      dignity and looking to the count for approval.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “<i>Connaissez-vous le Proverbe:</i>* ‘Jerome, Jerome, do not roam, but
+      turn spindles at home!’?” said Shinshín, puckering his brows and smiling.
+      “<i>Cela nous convient à merveille</i>.*(2) Suvórov now—he knew what
+      he was about; yet they beat him <i>à plate couture</i>,*(3) and where are
+      we to find Suvórovs now? <i>Je vous demande un peu</i>,” *(4) said he,
+      continually changing from French to Russian.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * Do you know the proverb?
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     *(2) That suits us down to the ground.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     *(3) Hollow.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     *(4) I just ask you that.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “Ve must vight to the last tr-r-op of our plood!” said the colonel,
+      thumping the table; “and ve must tie for our Emperor, and zen all vill pe
+      vell. And ve must discuss it as little as po-o-ossible”... he dwelt
+      particularly on the word <i>possible</i>... “as po-o-ossible,” he ended,
+      again turning to the count. “Zat is how ve old hussars look at it, and
+      zere’s an end of it! And how do you, a young man and a young hussar, how
+      do you judge of it?” he added, addressing Nicholas, who when he heard that
+      the war was being discussed had turned from his partner with eyes and ears
+      intent on the colonel.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am quite of your opinion,” replied Nicholas, flaming up, turning his
+      plate round and moving his wineglasses about with as much decision and
+      desperation as though he were at that moment facing some great danger. “I
+      am convinced that we Russians must die or conquer,” he concluded,
+      conscious—as were others—after the words were uttered that his
+      remarks were too enthusiastic and emphatic for the occasion and were
+      therefore awkward.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What you said just now was splendid!” said his partner Julie.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya trembled all over and blushed to her ears and behind them and down
+      to her neck and shoulders while Nicholas was speaking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre listened to the colonel’s speech and nodded approvingly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s fine,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The young man’s a real hussar!” shouted the colonel, again thumping the
+      table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What are you making such a noise about over there?” Márya Dmítrievna’s
+      deep voice suddenly inquired from the other end of the table. “What are
+      you thumping the table for?” she demanded of the hussar, “and why are you
+      exciting yourself? Do you think the French are here?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I am speaking ze truce,” replied the hussar with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s all about the war,” the count shouted down the table. “You know my
+      son’s going, Márya Dmítrievna? My son is going.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I have four sons in the army but still I don’t fret. It is all in God’s
+      hands. You may die in your bed or God may spare you in a battle,” replied
+      Márya Dmítrievna’s deep voice, which easily carried the whole length of
+      the table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s true!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Once more the conversations concentrated, the ladies’ at the one end and
+      the men’s at the other.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You won’t ask,” Natásha’s little brother was saying; “I know you won’t
+      ask!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I will,” replied Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Her face suddenly flushed with reckless and joyous resolution. She half
+      rose, by a glance inviting Pierre, who sat opposite, to listen to what was
+      coming, and turning to her mother:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma!” rang out the clear contralto notes of her childish voice, audible
+      the whole length of the table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it?” asked the countess, startled; but seeing by her daughter’s
+      face that it was only mischief, she shook a finger at her sternly with a
+      threatening and forbidding movement of her head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The conversation was hushed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma! What sweets are we going to have?” and Natásha’s voice sounded
+      still more firm and resolute.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess tried to frown, but could not. Márya Dmítrievna shook her fat
+      finger.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Cossack!” she said threateningly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Most of the guests, uncertain how to regard this sally, looked at the
+      elders.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You had better take care!” said the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma! What sweets are we going to have?” Natásha again cried boldly,
+      with saucy gaiety, confident that her prank would be taken in good part.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya and fat little Pétya doubled up with laughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You see! I <i>have</i> asked,” whispered Natásha to her little brother
+      and to Pierre, glancing at him again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ice pudding, but you won’t get any,” said Márya Dmítrievna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha saw there was nothing to be afraid of and so she braved even Márya
+      Dmítrievna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Márya Dmítrievna! What kind of ice pudding? I don’t like ice cream.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Carrot ices.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No! What kind, Márya Dmítrievna? What kind?” she almost screamed; “I want
+      to know!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Márya Dmítrievna and the countess burst out laughing, and all the guests
+      joined in. Everyone laughed, not at Márya Dmítrievna’s answer but at the
+      incredible boldness and smartness of this little girl who had dared to
+      treat Márya Dmítrievna in this fashion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha only desisted when she had been told that there would be pineapple
+      ice. Before the ices, champagne was served round. The band again struck
+      up, the count and countess kissed, and the guests, leaving their seats,
+      went up to “congratulate” the countess, and reached across the table to
+      clink glasses with the count, with the children, and with one another.
+      Again the footmen rushed about, chairs scraped, and in the same order in
+      which they had entered but with redder faces, the guests returned to the
+      drawing room and to the count’s study.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0020"></a>
+      CHAPTER XX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The card tables were drawn out, sets made up for boston, and the count’s
+      visitors settled themselves, some in the two drawing rooms, some in the
+      sitting room, some in the library.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count, holding his cards fanwise, kept himself with difficulty from
+      dropping into his usual after-dinner nap, and laughed at everything. The
+      young people, at the countess’ instigation, gathered round the clavichord
+      and harp. Julie by general request played first. After she had played a
+      little air with variations on the harp, she joined the other young ladies
+      in begging Natásha and Nicholas, who were noted for their musical talent,
+      to sing something. Natásha, who was treated as though she were grown up,
+      was evidently very proud of this but at the same time felt shy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What shall we sing?” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “‘The Brook,’” suggested Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, then, let’s be quick. Borís, come here,” said Natásha. “But where
+      is Sónya?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She looked round and seeing that her friend was not in the room ran to
+      look for her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Running into Sónya’s room and not finding her there, Natásha ran to the
+      nursery, but Sónya was not there either. Natásha concluded that she must
+      be on the chest in the passage. The chest in the passage was the place of
+      mourning for the younger female generation in the Rostóv household. And
+      there in fact was Sónya lying face downward on Nurse’s dirty feather bed
+      on the top of the chest, crumpling her gauzy pink dress under her, hiding
+      her face with her slender fingers, and sobbing so convulsively that her
+      bare little shoulders shook. Natásha’s face, which had been so radiantly
+      happy all that saint’s day, suddenly changed: her eyes became fixed, and
+      then a shiver passed down her broad neck and the corners of her mouth
+      drooped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya! What is it? What is the matter?... Oo... Oo... Oo...!” And
+      Natásha’s large mouth widened, making her look quite ugly, and she began
+      to wail like a baby without knowing why, except that Sónya was crying.
+      Sónya tried to lift her head to answer but could not, and hid her face
+      still deeper in the bed. Natásha wept, sitting on the blue-striped feather
+      bed and hugging her friend. With an effort Sónya sat up and began wiping
+      her eyes and explaining.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nicholas is going away in a week’s time, his... papers... have come... he
+      told me himself... but still I should not cry,” and she showed a paper she
+      held in her hand—with the verses Nicholas had written, “still, I
+      should not cry, but you can’t... no one can understand... what a soul he
+      has!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And she began to cry again because he had such a noble soul.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s all very well for you... I am not envious... I love you and Borís
+      also,” she went on, gaining a little strength; “he is nice... there are no
+      difficulties in your way.... But Nicholas is my cousin... one would have
+      to... the Metropolitan himself... and even then it can’t be done. And
+      besides, if she tells Mamma” (Sónya looked upon the countess as her mother
+      and called her so) “that I am spoiling Nicholas’ career and am heartless
+      and ungrateful, while truly... God is my witness,” and she made the sign
+      of the cross, “I love her so much, and all of you, only Véra... And what
+      for? What have I done to her? I am so grateful to you that I would
+      willingly sacrifice everything, only I have nothing....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya could not continue, and again hid her face in her hands and in the
+      feather bed. Natásha began consoling her, but her face showed that she
+      understood all the gravity of her friend’s trouble.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya,” she suddenly exclaimed, as if she had guessed the true reason of
+      her friend’s sorrow, “I’m sure Véra has said something to you since
+      dinner? Hasn’t she?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, these verses Nicholas wrote himself and I copied some others, and
+      she found them on my table and said she’d show them to Mamma, and that I
+      was ungrateful, and that Mamma would never allow him to marry me, but that
+      he’ll marry Julie. You see how he’s been with her all day... Natásha, what
+      have I done to deserve it?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And again she began to sob, more bitterly than before. Natásha lifted her
+      up, hugged her, and, smiling through her tears, began comforting her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya, don’t believe her, darling! Don’t believe her! Do you remember how
+      we and Nicholas, all three of us, talked in the sitting room after supper?
+      Why, we settled how everything was to be. I don’t quite remember how, but
+      don’t you remember that it could all be arranged and how nice it all was?
+      There’s Uncle Shinshín’s brother has married his first cousin. And we are
+      only second cousins, you know. And Borís says it is quite possible. You
+      know I have told him all about it. And he is so clever and so good!” said
+      Natásha. “Don’t you cry, Sónya, dear love, darling Sónya!” and she kissed
+      her and laughed. “Véra’s spiteful; never mind her! And all will come right
+      and she won’t say anything to Mamma. Nicholas will tell her himself, and
+      he doesn’t care at all for Julie.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha kissed her on the hair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya sat up. The little kitten brightened, its eyes shone, and it seemed
+      ready to lift its tail, jump down on its soft paws, and begin playing with
+      the ball of worsted as a kitten should.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you think so?... Really? Truly?” she said, quickly smoothing her frock
+      and hair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Really, truly!” answered Natásha, pushing in a crisp lock that had
+      strayed from under her friend’s plaits.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Both laughed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, let’s go and sing ‘The Brook.’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Come along!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know, that fat Pierre who sat opposite me is so funny!” said
+      Natásha, stopping suddenly. “I feel so happy!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And she set off at a run along the passage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya, shaking off some down which clung to her and tucking away the
+      verses in the bosom of her dress close to her bony little chest, ran after
+      Natásha down the passage into the sitting room with flushed face and
+      light, joyous steps. At the visitors’ request the young people sang the
+      quartette, “The Brook,” with which everyone was delighted. Then Nicholas
+      sang a song he had just learned:
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+   At nighttime in the moon’s fair glow<br>
+    How sweet, as fancies wander free,<br>
+   To feel that in this world there’s one<br>
+    Who still is thinking but of thee!<br>
+<br>
+   That while her fingers touch the harp<br>
+    Wafting sweet music o’er the lea,<br>
+   It is for thee thus swells her heart,<br>
+    Sighing its message out to thee...<br>
+<br>
+   A day or two, then bliss unspoilt,<br>
+    But oh! till then I cannot live!...
+</p>
+<p>
+      He had not finished the last verse before the young people began to get
+      ready to dance in the large hall, and the sound of the feet and the
+      coughing of the musicians were heard from the gallery.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was sitting in the drawing room where Shinshín had engaged him, as
+      a man recently returned from abroad, in a political conversation in which
+      several others joined but which bored Pierre. When the music began Natásha
+      came in and walking straight up to Pierre said, laughing and blushing:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma told me to ask you to join the dancers.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I am afraid of mixing the figures,” Pierre replied; “but if you will be
+      my teacher...” And lowering his big arm he offered it to the slender
+      little girl.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While the couples were arranging themselves and the musicians tuning up,
+      Pierre sat down with his little partner. Natásha was perfectly happy; she
+      was dancing with a <i>grown-up</i> man, who had been <i>abroad</i>. She
+      was sitting in a conspicuous place and talking to him like a grown-up
+      lady. She had a fan in her hand that one of the ladies had given her to
+      hold. Assuming quite the pose of a society woman (heaven knows when and
+      where she had learned it) she talked with her partner, fanning herself and
+      smiling over the fan.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear, dear! Just look at her!” exclaimed the countess as she crossed the
+      ballroom, pointing to Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha blushed and laughed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, really, Mamma! Why should you? What is there to be surprised at?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      In the midst of the third <i>écossaise</i> there was a clatter of chairs
+      being pushed back in the sitting room where the count and Márya Dmítrievna
+      had been playing cards with the majority of the more distinguished and
+      older visitors. They now, stretching themselves after sitting so long, and
+      replacing their purses and pocketbooks, entered the ballroom. First came
+      Márya Dmítrievna and the count, both with merry countenances. The count,
+      with playful ceremony somewhat in ballet style, offered his bent arm to
+      Márya Dmítrievna. He drew himself up, a smile of debonair gallantry lit up
+      his face and as soon as the last figure of the <i>écossaise</i> was ended,
+      he clapped his hands to the musicians and shouted up to their gallery,
+      addressing the first violin:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Semën! Do you know the <i>Daniel Cooper?</i>”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      This was the count’s favorite dance, which he had danced in his youth.
+      (Strictly speaking, <i>Daniel Cooper</i> was one figure of the <i>anglaise</i>.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Look at Papa!” shouted Natásha to the whole company, and quite forgetting
+      that she was dancing with a grown-up partner she bent her curly head to
+      her knees and made the whole room ring with her laughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And indeed everybody in the room looked with a smile of pleasure at the
+      jovial old gentleman, who standing beside his tall and stout partner,
+      Márya Dmítrievna, curved his arms, beat time, straightened his shoulders,
+      turned out his toes, tapped gently with his foot, and, by a smile that
+      broadened his round face more and more, prepared the onlookers for what
+      was to follow. As soon as the provocatively gay strains of <i>Daniel
+      Cooper</i> (somewhat resembling those of a merry peasant dance) began to
+      sound, all the doorways of the ballroom were suddenly filled by the
+      domestic serfs—the men on one side and the women on the other—who
+      with beaming faces had come to see their master making merry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Just look at the master! A regular eagle he is!” loudly remarked the
+      nurse, as she stood in one of the doorways.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count danced well and knew it. But his partner could not and did not
+      want to dance well. Her enormous figure stood erect, her powerful arms
+      hanging down (she had handed her reticule to the countess), and only her
+      stern but handsome face really joined in the dance. What was expressed by
+      the whole of the count’s plump figure, in Márya Dmítrievna found
+      expression only in her more and more beaming face and quivering nose. But
+      if the count, getting more and more into the swing of it, charmed the
+      spectators by the unexpectedness of his adroit maneuvers and the agility
+      with which he capered about on his light feet, Márya Dmítrievna produced
+      no less impression by slight exertions—the least effort to move her
+      shoulders or bend her arms when turning, or stamp her foot—which
+      everyone appreciated in view of her size and habitual severity. The dance
+      grew livelier and livelier. The other couples could not attract a moment’s
+      attention to their own evolutions and did not even try to do so. All were
+      watching the count and Márya Dmítrievna. Natásha kept pulling everyone by
+      sleeve or dress, urging them to “look at Papa!” though as it was they
+      never took their eyes off the couple. In the intervals of the dance the
+      count, breathing deeply, waved and shouted to the musicians to play
+      faster. Faster, faster, and faster; lightly, more lightly, and yet more
+      lightly whirled the count, flying round Márya Dmítrievna, now on his toes,
+      now on his heels; until, turning his partner round to her seat, he
+      executed the final <i>pas</i>, raising his soft foot backwards, bowing his
+      perspiring head, smiling and making a wide sweep with his arm, amid a
+      thunder of applause and laughter led by Natásha. Both partners stood
+      still, breathing heavily and wiping their faces with their cambric
+      handkerchiefs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s how we used to dance in our time, <i>ma chère</i>,” said the
+      count.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That <i>was</i> a <i>Daniel Cooper!</i>” exclaimed Márya Dmítrievna,
+      tucking up her sleeves and puffing heavily.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0021"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      While in the Rostóvs’ ballroom the sixth <i>anglaise</i> was being danced,
+      to a tune in which the weary musicians blundered, and while tired footmen
+      and cooks were getting the supper, Count Bezúkhov had a sixth stroke. The
+      doctors pronounced recovery impossible. After a mute confession, communion
+      was administered to the dying man, preparations made for the sacrament of
+      unction, and in his house there was the bustle and thrill of suspense
+      usual at such moments. Outside the house, beyond the gates, a group of
+      undertakers, who hid whenever a carriage drove up, waited in expectation
+      of an important order for an expensive funeral. The Military Governor of
+      Moscow, who had been assiduous in sending aides-de-camp to inquire after
+      the count’s health, came himself that evening to bid a last farewell to
+      the celebrated grandee of Catherine’s court, Count Bezúkhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The magnificent reception room was crowded. Everyone stood up respectfully
+      when the Military Governor, having stayed about half an hour alone with
+      the dying man, passed out, slightly acknowledging their bows and trying to
+      escape as quickly as possible from the glances fixed on him by the
+      doctors, clergy, and relatives of the family. Prince Vasíli, who had grown
+      thinner and paler during the last few days, escorted him to the door,
+      repeating something to him several times in low tones.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the Military Governor had gone, Prince Vasíli sat down all alone on a
+      chair in the ballroom, crossing one leg high over the other, leaning his
+      elbow on his knee and covering his face with his hand. After sitting so
+      for a while he rose, and, looking about him with frightened eyes, went
+      with unusually hurried steps down the long corridor leading to the back of
+      the house, to the room of the eldest princess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Those who were in the dimly lit reception room spoke in nervous whispers,
+      and, whenever anyone went into or came from the dying man’s room, grew
+      silent and gazed with eyes full of curiosity or expectancy at his door,
+      which creaked slightly when opened.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The limits of human life ... are fixed and may not be o’erpassed,” said
+      an old priest to a lady who had taken a seat beside him and was listening
+      naïvely to his words.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I wonder, is it not too late to administer unction?” asked the lady,
+      adding the priest’s clerical title, as if she had no opinion of her own on
+      the subject.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, madam, it is a great sacrament,” replied the priest, passing his hand
+      over the thin grizzled strands of hair combed back across his bald head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who was that? The Military Governor himself?” was being asked at the
+      other side of the room. “How young-looking he is!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, and he is over sixty. I hear the count no longer recognizes anyone.
+      They wished to administer the sacrament of unction.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I knew someone who received that sacrament seven times.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The second princess had just come from the sickroom with her eyes red from
+      weeping and sat down beside Dr. Lorrain, who was sitting in a graceful
+      pose under a portrait of Catherine, leaning his elbow on a table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Beautiful,” said the doctor in answer to a remark about the weather. “The
+      weather is beautiful, Princess; and besides, in Moscow one feels as if one
+      were in the country.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, indeed,” replied the princess with a sigh. “So he may have something
+      to drink?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Lorrain considered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Has he taken his medicine?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The doctor glanced at his watch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Take a glass of boiled water and put a pinch of cream of tartar,” and he
+      indicated with his delicate fingers what he meant by a pinch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dere has neffer been a gase,” a German doctor was saying to an
+      aide-de-camp, “dat one liffs after de sird stroke.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And what a well-preserved man he was!” remarked the aide-de-camp. “And
+      who will inherit his wealth?” he added in a whisper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It von’t go begging,” replied the German with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Everyone again looked toward the door, which creaked as the second
+      princess went in with the drink she had prepared according to Lorrain’s
+      instructions. The German doctor went up to Lorrain.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you think he can last till morning?” asked the German, addressing
+      Lorrain in French which he pronounced badly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Lorrain, pursing up his lips, waved a severely negative finger before his
+      nose.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Tonight, not later,” said he in a low voice, and he moved away with a
+      decorous smile of self-satisfaction at being able clearly to understand
+      and state the patient’s condition.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Meanwhile Prince Vasíli had opened the door into the princess’ room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In this room it was almost dark; only two tiny lamps were burning before
+      the icons and there was a pleasant scent of flowers and burnt pastilles.
+      The room was crowded with small pieces of furniture, whatnots, cupboards,
+      and little tables. The quilt of a high, white feather bed was just visible
+      behind a screen. A small dog began to bark.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, is it you, cousin?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She rose and smoothed her hair, which was as usual so extremely smooth
+      that it seemed to be made of one piece with her head and covered with
+      varnish.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Has anything happened?” she asked. “I am so terrified.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, there is no change. I only came to have a talk about business,
+      Catiche,” * muttered the prince, seating himself wearily on the chair she
+      had just vacated. “You have made the place warm, I must say,” he remarked.
+      “Well, sit down: let’s have a talk.”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * Catherine.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “I thought perhaps something had happened,” she said with her unchanging
+      stonily severe expression; and, sitting down opposite the prince, she
+      prepared to listen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I wished to get a nap, <i>mon cousin</i>, but I can’t.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, my dear?” said Prince Vasíli, taking her hand and bending it
+      downwards as was his habit.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was plain that this “well?” referred to much that they both understood
+      without naming.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess, who had a straight, rigid body, abnormally long for her
+      legs, looked directly at Prince Vasíli with no sign of emotion in her
+      prominent gray eyes. Then she shook her head and glanced up at the icons
+      with a sigh. This might have been taken as an expression of sorrow and
+      devotion, or of weariness and hope of resting before long. Prince Vasíli
+      understood it as an expression of weariness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I?” he said; “do you think it is easier for me? I am as worn out as a
+      post horse, but still I must have a talk with you, Catiche, a very serious
+      talk.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli said no more and his cheeks began to twitch nervously, now
+      on one side, now on the other, giving his face an unpleasant expression
+      which was never to be seen on it in a drawing room. His eyes too seemed
+      strange; at one moment they looked impudently sly and at the next glanced
+      round in alarm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess, holding her little dog on her lap with her thin bony hands,
+      looked attentively into Prince Vasíli’s eyes evidently resolved not to be
+      the first to break silence, if she had to wait till morning.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, you see, my dear princess and cousin, Catherine Semënovna,”
+       continued Prince Vasíli, returning to his theme, apparently not without an
+      inner struggle; “at such a moment as this one must think of everything.
+      One must think of the future, of all of you... I love you all, like
+      children of my own, as you know.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess continued to look at him without moving, and with the same
+      dull expression.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And then of course my family has also to be considered,” Prince Vasíli
+      went on, testily pushing away a little table without looking at her. “You
+      know, Catiche, that we—you three sisters, Mámontov, and my wife—are
+      the count’s only direct heirs. I know, I know how hard it is for you to
+      talk or think of such matters. It is no easier for me; but, my dear, I am
+      getting on for sixty and must be prepared for anything. Do you know I have
+      sent for Pierre? The count,” pointing to his portrait, “definitely
+      demanded that he should be called.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli looked questioningly at the princess, but could not make out
+      whether she was considering what he had just said or whether she was
+      simply looking at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There is one thing I constantly pray God to grant, <i>mon cousin</i>,”
+       she replied, “and it is that He would be merciful to him and would allow
+      his noble soul peacefully to leave this...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, of course,” interrupted Prince Vasíli impatiently, rubbing his
+      bald head and angrily pulling back toward him the little table that he had
+      pushed away. “But... in short, the fact is... you know yourself that last
+      winter the count made a will by which he left all his property, not to us
+      his direct heirs, but to Pierre.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “He has made wills enough!” quietly remarked the princess. “But he cannot
+      leave the estate to Pierre. Pierre is illegitimate.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But, my dear,” said Prince Vasíli suddenly, clutching the little table
+      and becoming more animated and talking more rapidly: “what if a letter has
+      been written to the Emperor in which the count asks for Pierre’s
+      legitimation? Do you understand that in consideration of the count’s
+      services, his request would be granted?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess smiled as people do who think they know more about the
+      subject under discussion than those they are talking with.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I can tell you more,” continued Prince Vasíli, seizing her hand, “that
+      letter was written, though it was not sent, and the Emperor knew of it.
+      The only question is, has it been destroyed or not? If not, then as soon
+      as <i>all is over</i>,” and Prince Vasíli sighed to intimate what he meant
+      by the words <i>all is over</i>, “and the count’s papers are opened, the
+      will and letter will be delivered to the Emperor, and the petition will
+      certainly be granted. Pierre will get everything as the legitimate son.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And our share?” asked the princess smiling ironically, as if anything
+      might happen, only not that.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But, my poor Catiche, it is as clear as daylight! He will then be the
+      legal heir to everything and you won’t get anything. You must know, my
+      dear, whether the will and letter were written, and whether they have been
+      destroyed or not. And if they have somehow been overlooked, you ought to
+      know where they are, and must find them, because...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What next?” the princess interrupted, smiling sardonically and not
+      changing the expression of her eyes. “I am a woman, and you think we are
+      all stupid; but I know this: an illegitimate son cannot inherit... <i>un
+      bâtard!</i>”* she added, as if supposing that this translation of the word
+      would effectively prove to Prince Vasíli the invalidity of his contention.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * A bastard.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “Well, really, Catiche! Can’t you understand! You are so intelligent, how
+      is it you don’t see that if the count has written a letter to the Emperor
+      begging him to recognize Pierre as legitimate, it follows that Pierre will
+      not be Pierre but will become Count Bezúkhov, and will then inherit
+      everything under the will? And if the will and letter are not destroyed,
+      then you will have nothing but the consolation of having been dutiful <i>et
+      tout ce qui s’ensuit!</i>* That’s certain.”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * And all that follows therefrom.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “I know the will was made, but I also know that it is invalid; and you, <i>mon
+      cousin</i>, seem to consider me a perfect fool,” said the princess with
+      the expression women assume when they suppose they are saying something
+      witty and stinging.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear Princess Catherine Semënovna,” began Prince Vasíli impatiently,
+      “I came here not to wrangle with you, but to talk about your interests as
+      with a kinswoman, a good, kind, true relation. And I tell you for the
+      tenth time that if the letter to the Emperor and the will in Pierre’s
+      favor are among the count’s papers, then, my dear girl, you and your
+      sisters are not heiresses! If you don’t believe me, then believe an
+      expert. I have just been talking to Dmítri Onúfrich” (the family
+      solicitor) “and he says the same.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At this a sudden change evidently took place in the princess’ ideas; her
+      thin lips grew white, though her eyes did not change, and her voice when
+      she began to speak passed through such transitions as she herself
+      evidently did not expect.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That would be a fine thing!” said she. “I never wanted anything and I
+      don’t now.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She pushed the little dog off her lap and smoothed her dress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And this is gratitude—this is recognition for those who have
+      sacrificed everything for his sake!” she cried. “It’s splendid! Fine! I
+      don’t want anything, Prince.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, but you are not the only one. There are your sisters...” replied
+      Prince Vasíli.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the princess did not listen to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I knew it long ago but had forgotten. I knew that I could expect
+      nothing but meanness, deceit, envy, intrigue, and ingratitude—the
+      blackest ingratitude—in this house...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you or do you not know where that will is?” insisted Prince Vasíli,
+      his cheeks twitching more than ever.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I was a fool! I still believed in people, loved them, and sacrificed
+      myself. But only the base, the vile succeed! I know who has been
+      intriguing!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess wished to rise, but the prince held her by the hand. She had
+      the air of one who has suddenly lost faith in the whole human race. She
+      gave her companion an angry glance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There is still time, my dear. You must remember, Catiche, that it was all
+      done casually in a moment of anger, of illness, and was afterwards
+      forgotten. Our duty, my dear, is to rectify his mistake, to ease his last
+      moments by not letting him commit this injustice, and not to let him die
+      feeling that he is rendering unhappy those who...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Who sacrificed everything for him,” chimed in the princess, who would
+      again have risen had not the prince still held her fast, “though he never
+      could appreciate it. No, <i>mon cousin</i>,” she added with a sigh, “I
+      shall always remember that in this world one must expect no reward, that
+      in this world there is neither honor nor justice. In this world one has to
+      be cunning and cruel.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Now come, come! Be reasonable. I know your excellent heart.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I have a wicked heart.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I know your heart,” repeated the prince. “I value your friendship and
+      wish you to have as good an opinion of me. Don’t upset yourself, and let
+      us talk sensibly while there is still time, be it a day or be it but an
+      hour.... Tell me all you know about the will, and above all where it is.
+      You must know. We will take it at once and show it to the count. He has,
+      no doubt, forgotten it and will wish to destroy it. You understand that my
+      sole desire is conscientiously to carry out his wishes; that is my only
+      reason for being here. I came simply to help him and you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Now I see it all! I know who has been intriguing—I know!” cried the
+      princess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s not the point, my dear.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s that protégé of yours, that sweet Princess Drubetskáya, that Anna
+      Mikháylovna whom I would not take for a housemaid... the infamous, vile
+      woman!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Do not let us lose any time...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, don’t talk to me! Last winter she wheedled herself in here and told
+      the count such vile, disgraceful things about us, especially about Sophie—I
+      can’t repeat them—that it made the count quite ill and he would not
+      see us for a whole fortnight. I know it was then he wrote this vile,
+      infamous paper, but I thought the thing was invalid.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “We’ve got to it at last—why did you not tell me about it sooner?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s in the inlaid portfolio that he keeps under his pillow,” said the
+      princess, ignoring his question. “Now I know! Yes; if I have a sin, a
+      great sin, it is hatred of that vile woman!” almost shrieked the princess,
+      now quite changed. “And what does she come worming herself in here for?
+      But I will give her a piece of my mind. The time will come!”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0022"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      While these conversations were going on in the reception room and the
+      princess’ room, a carriage containing Pierre (who had been sent for) and
+      Anna Mikháylovna (who found it necessary to accompany him) was driving
+      into the court of Count Bezúkhov’s house. As the wheels rolled softly over
+      the straw beneath the windows, Anna Mikháylovna, having turned with words
+      of comfort to her companion, realized that he was asleep in his corner and
+      woke him up. Rousing himself, Pierre followed Anna Mikháylovna out of the
+      carriage, and only then began to think of the interview with his dying
+      father which awaited him. He noticed that they had not come to the front
+      entrance but to the back door. While he was getting down from the carriage
+      steps two men, who looked like tradespeople, ran hurriedly from the
+      entrance and hid in the shadow of the wall. Pausing for a moment, Pierre
+      noticed several other men of the same kind hiding in the shadow of the
+      house on both sides. But neither Anna Mikháylovna nor the footman nor the
+      coachman, who could not help seeing these people, took any notice of them.
+      “It seems to be all right,” Pierre concluded, and followed Anna
+      Mikháylovna. She hurriedly ascended the narrow dimly lit stone staircase,
+      calling to Pierre, who was lagging behind, to follow. Though he did not
+      see why it was necessary for him to go to the count at all, still less why
+      he had to go by the back stairs, yet judging by Anna Mikháylovna’s air of
+      assurance and haste, Pierre concluded that it was all absolutely
+      necessary. Halfway up the stairs they were almost knocked over by some men
+      who, carrying pails, came running downstairs, their boots clattering.
+      These men pressed close to the wall to let Pierre and Anna Mikháylovna
+      pass and did not evince the least surprise at seeing them there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is this the way to the princesses’ apartments?” asked Anna Mikháylovna of
+      one of them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” replied a footman in a bold loud voice, as if anything were now
+      permissible; “the door to the left, ma’am.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Perhaps the count did not ask for me,” said Pierre when he reached the
+      landing. “I’d better go to my own room.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Mikháylovna paused and waited for him to come up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, my friend!” she said, touching his arm as she had done her son’s when
+      speaking to him that afternoon, “believe me I suffer no less than you do,
+      but be a man!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But really, hadn’t I better go away?” he asked, looking kindly at her
+      over his spectacles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, my dear friend! Forget the wrongs that may have been done you. Think
+      that he is your father ... perhaps in the agony of death.” She sighed. “I
+      have loved you like a son from the first. Trust yourself to me, Pierre. I
+      shall not forget your interests.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre did not understand a word, but the conviction that all this had to
+      be grew stronger, and he meekly followed Anna Mikháylovna who was already
+      opening a door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This door led into a back anteroom. An old man, a servant of the
+      princesses, sat in a corner knitting a stocking. Pierre had never been in
+      this part of the house and did not even know of the existence of these
+      rooms. Anna Mikháylovna, addressing a maid who was hurrying past with a
+      decanter on a tray as “my dear” and “my sweet,” asked about the princess’
+      health and then led Pierre along a stone passage. The first door on the
+      left led into the princesses’ apartments. The maid with the decanter in
+      her haste had not closed the door (everything in the house was done in
+      haste at that time), and Pierre and Anna Mikháylovna in passing
+      instinctively glanced into the room, where Prince Vasíli and the eldest
+      princess were sitting close together talking. Seeing them pass, Prince
+      Vasíli drew back with obvious impatience, while the princess jumped up and
+      with a gesture of desperation slammed the door with all her might.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This action was so unlike her usual composure and the fear depicted on
+      Prince Vasíli’s face so out of keeping with his dignity that Pierre
+      stopped and glanced inquiringly over his spectacles at his guide. Anna
+      Mikháylovna evinced no surprise, she only smiled faintly and sighed, as if
+      to say that this was no more than she had expected.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Be a man, my friend. I will look after your interests,” said she in reply
+      to his look, and went still faster along the passage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre could not make out what it was all about, and still less what
+      “watching over his interests” meant, but he decided that all these things
+      had to be. From the passage they went into a large, dimly lit room
+      adjoining the count’s reception room. It was one of those sumptuous but
+      cold apartments known to Pierre only from the front approach, but even in
+      this room there now stood an empty bath, and water had been spilled on the
+      carpet. They were met by a deacon with a censer and by a servant who
+      passed out on tiptoe without heeding them. They went into the reception
+      room familiar to Pierre, with two Italian windows opening into the
+      conservatory, with its large bust and full length portrait of Catherine
+      the Great. The same people were still sitting here in almost the same
+      positions as before, whispering to one another. All became silent and
+      turned to look at the pale tear-worn Anna Mikháylovna as she entered, and
+      at the big stout figure of Pierre who, hanging his head, meekly followed
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Mikháylovna’s face expressed a consciousness that the decisive moment
+      had arrived. With the air of a practical Petersburg lady she now, keeping
+      Pierre close beside her, entered the room even more boldly than that
+      afternoon. She felt that as she brought with her the person the dying man
+      wished to see, her own admission was assured. Casting a rapid glance at
+      all those in the room and noticing the count’s confessor there, she glided
+      up to him with a sort of amble, not exactly bowing yet seeming to grow
+      suddenly smaller, and respectfully received the blessing first of one and
+      then of another priest.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “God be thanked that you are in time,” said she to one of the priests;
+      “all we relatives have been in such anxiety. This young man is the count’s
+      son,” she added more softly. “What a terrible moment!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Having said this she went up to the doctor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear doctor,” said she, “this young man is the count’s son. Is there any
+      hope?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The doctor cast a rapid glance upwards and silently shrugged his
+      shoulders. Anna Mikháylovna with just the same movement raised her
+      shoulders and eyes, almost closing the latter, sighed, and moved away from
+      the doctor to Pierre. To him, in a particularly respectful and tenderly
+      sad voice, she said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Trust in His mercy!” and pointing out a small sofa for him to sit and
+      wait for her, she went silently toward the door that everyone was watching
+      and it creaked very slightly as she disappeared behind it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre, having made up his mind to obey his monitress implicitly, moved
+      toward the sofa she had indicated. As soon as Anna Mikháylovna had
+      disappeared he noticed that the eyes of all in the room turned to him with
+      something more than curiosity and sympathy. He noticed that they whispered
+      to one another, casting significant looks at him with a kind of awe and
+      even servility. A deference such as he had never before received was shown
+      him. A strange lady, the one who had been talking to the priests, rose and
+      offered him her seat; an aide-de-camp picked up and returned a glove
+      Pierre had dropped; the doctors became respectfully silent as he passed
+      by, and moved to make way for him. At first Pierre wished to take another
+      seat so as not to trouble the lady, and also to pick up the glove himself
+      and to pass round the doctors who were not even in his way; but all at
+      once he felt that this would not do, and that tonight he was a person
+      obliged to perform some sort of awful rite which everyone expected of him,
+      and that he was therefore bound to accept their services. He took the
+      glove in silence from the aide-de-camp, and sat down in the lady’s chair,
+      placing his huge hands symmetrically on his knees in the naïve attitude of
+      an Egyptian statue, and decided in his own mind that all was as it should
+      be, and that in order not to lose his head and do foolish things he must
+      not act on his own ideas tonight, but must yield himself up entirely to
+      the will of those who were guiding him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Not two minutes had passed before Prince Vasíli with head erect
+      majestically entered the room. He was wearing his long coat with three
+      stars on his breast. He seemed to have grown thinner since the morning;
+      his eyes seemed larger than usual when he glanced round and noticed
+      Pierre. He went up to him, took his hand (a thing he never used to do),
+      and drew it downwards as if wishing to ascertain whether it was firmly
+      fixed on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Courage, courage, my friend! He has asked to see you. That is well!” and
+      he turned to go.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Pierre thought it necessary to ask: “How is...” and hesitated, not
+      knowing whether it would be proper to call the dying man “the count,” yet
+      ashamed to call him “father.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “He had another stroke about half an hour ago. Courage, my friend...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre’s mind was in such a confused state that the word “stroke”
+       suggested to him a blow from something. He looked at Prince Vasíli in
+      perplexity, and only later grasped that a stroke was an attack of illness.
+      Prince Vasíli said something to Lorrain in passing and went through the
+      door on tiptoe. He could not walk well on tiptoe and his whole body jerked
+      at each step. The eldest princess followed him, and the priests and
+      deacons and some servants also went in at the door. Through that door was
+      heard a noise of things being moved about, and at last Anna Mikháylovna,
+      still with the same expression, pale but resolute in the discharge of
+      duty, ran out and touching Pierre lightly on the arm said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The divine mercy is inexhaustible! Unction is about to be administered.
+      Come.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre went in at the door, stepping on the soft carpet, and noticed that
+      the strange lady, the aide-de-camp, and some of the servants, all followed
+      him in, as if there were now no further need for permission to enter that
+      room.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0023"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Pierre well knew this large room divided by columns and an arch, its walls
+      hung round with Persian carpets. The part of the room behind the columns,
+      with a high silk-curtained mahogany bedstead on one side and on the other
+      an immense case containing icons, was brightly illuminated with red light
+      like a Russian church during evening service. Under the gleaming icons
+      stood a long invalid chair, and in that chair on snowy-white smooth
+      pillows, evidently freshly changed, Pierre saw—covered to the waist
+      by a bright green quilt—the familiar, majestic figure of his father,
+      Count Bezúkhov, with that gray mane of hair above his broad forehead which
+      reminded one of a lion, and the deep characteristically noble wrinkles of
+      his handsome, ruddy face. He lay just under the icons; his large thick
+      hands outside the quilt. Into the right hand, which was lying palm
+      downwards, a wax taper had been thrust between forefinger and thumb, and
+      an old servant, bending over from behind the chair, held it in position.
+      By the chair stood the priests, their long hair falling over their
+      magnificent glittering vestments, with lighted tapers in their hands,
+      slowly and solemnly conducting the service. A little behind them stood the
+      two younger princesses holding handkerchiefs to their eyes, and just in
+      front of them their eldest sister, Catiche, with a vicious and determined
+      look steadily fixed on the icons, as though declaring to all that she
+      could not answer for herself should she glance round. Anna Mikháylovna,
+      with a meek, sorrowful, and all-forgiving expression on her face, stood by
+      the door near the strange lady. Prince Vasíli in front of the door, near
+      the invalid chair, a wax taper in his left hand, was leaning his left arm
+      on the carved back of a velvet chair he had turned round for the purpose,
+      and was crossing himself with his right hand, turning his eyes upward each
+      time he touched his forehead. His face wore a calm look of piety and
+      resignation to the will of God. “If you do not understand these
+      sentiments,” he seemed to be saying, “so much the worse for you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Behind him stood the aide-de-camp, the doctors, and the menservants; the
+      men and women had separated as in church. All were silently crossing
+      themselves, and the reading of the church service, the subdued chanting of
+      deep bass voices, and in the intervals sighs and the shuffling of feet
+      were the only sounds that could be heard. Anna Mikháylovna, with an air of
+      importance that showed that she felt she quite knew what she was about,
+      went across the room to where Pierre was standing and gave him a taper. He
+      lit it and, distracted by observing those around him, began crossing
+      himself with the hand that held the taper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sophie, the rosy, laughter-loving, youngest princess with the mole,
+      watched him. She smiled, hid her face in her handkerchief, and remained
+      with it hidden for awhile; then looking up and seeing Pierre she again
+      began to laugh. She evidently felt unable to look at him without laughing,
+      but could not resist looking at him: so to be out of temptation she
+      slipped quietly behind one of the columns. In the midst of the service the
+      voices of the priests suddenly ceased, they whispered to one another, and
+      the old servant who was holding the count’s hand got up and said something
+      to the ladies. Anna Mikháylovna stepped forward and, stooping over the
+      dying man, beckoned to Lorrain from behind her back. The French doctor
+      held no taper; he was leaning against one of the columns in a respectful
+      attitude implying that he, a foreigner, in spite of all differences of
+      faith, understood the full importance of the rite now being performed and
+      even approved of it. He now approached the sick man with the noiseless
+      step of one in full vigor of life, with his delicate white fingers raised
+      from the green quilt the hand that was free, and turning sideways felt the
+      pulse and reflected a moment. The sick man was given something to drink,
+      there was a stir around him, then the people resumed their places and the
+      service continued. During this interval Pierre noticed that Prince Vasíli
+      left the chair on which he had been leaning, and—with an air which
+      intimated that he knew what he was about and if others did not understand
+      him it was so much the worse for them—did not go up to the dying
+      man, but passed by him, joined the eldest princess, and moved with her to
+      the side of the room where stood the high bedstead with its silken
+      hangings. On leaving the bed both Prince Vasíli and the princess passed
+      out by a back door, but returned to their places one after the other
+      before the service was concluded. Pierre paid no more attention to this
+      occurrence than to the rest of what went on, having made up his mind once
+      for all that what he saw happening around him that evening was in some way
+      essential.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The chanting of the service ceased, and the voice of the priest was heard
+      respectfully congratulating the dying man on having received the
+      sacrament. The dying man lay as lifeless and immovable as before. Around
+      him everyone began to stir: steps were audible and whispers, among which
+      Anna Mikháylovna’s was the most distinct.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre heard her say:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Certainly he must be moved onto the bed; here it will be impossible...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The sick man was so surrounded by doctors, princesses, and servants that
+      Pierre could no longer see the reddish-yellow face with its gray mane—which,
+      though he saw other faces as well, he had not lost sight of for a single
+      moment during the whole service. He judged by the cautious movements of
+      those who crowded round the invalid chair that they had lifted the dying
+      man and were moving him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Catch hold of my arm or you’ll drop him!” he heard one of the servants
+      say in a frightened whisper. “Catch hold from underneath. Here!” exclaimed
+      different voices; and the heavy breathing of the bearers and the shuffling
+      of their feet grew more hurried, as if the weight they were carrying were
+      too much for them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As the bearers, among whom was Anna Mikháylovna, passed the young man he
+      caught a momentary glimpse between their heads and backs of the dying
+      man’s high, stout, uncovered chest and powerful shoulders, raised by those
+      who were holding him under the armpits, and of his gray, curly, leonine
+      head. This head, with its remarkably broad brow and cheekbones, its
+      handsome, sensual mouth, and its cold, majestic expression, was not
+      disfigured by the approach of death. It was the same as Pierre remembered
+      it three months before, when the count had sent him to Petersburg. But now
+      this head was swaying helplessly with the uneven movements of the bearers,
+      and the cold listless gaze fixed itself upon nothing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After a few minutes’ bustle beside the high bedstead, those who had
+      carried the sick man dispersed. Anna Mikháylovna touched Pierre’s hand and
+      said, “Come.” Pierre went with her to the bed on which the sick man had
+      been laid in a stately pose in keeping with the ceremony just completed.
+      He lay with his head propped high on the pillows. His hands were
+      symmetrically placed on the green silk quilt, the palms downward. When
+      Pierre came up the count was gazing straight at him, but with a look the
+      significance of which could not be understood by mortal man. Either this
+      look meant nothing but that as long as one has eyes they must look
+      somewhere, or it meant too much. Pierre hesitated, not knowing what to do,
+      and glanced inquiringly at his guide. Anna Mikháylovna made a hurried sign
+      with her eyes, glancing at the sick man’s hand and moving her lips as if
+      to send it a kiss. Pierre, carefully stretching his neck so as not to
+      touch the quilt, followed her suggestion and pressed his lips to the large
+      boned, fleshy hand. Neither the hand nor a single muscle of the count’s
+      face stirred. Once more Pierre looked questioningly at Anna Mikháylovna to
+      see what he was to do next. Anna Mikháylovna with her eyes indicated a
+      chair that stood beside the bed. Pierre obediently sat down, his eyes
+      asking if he were doing right. Anna Mikháylovna nodded approvingly. Again
+      Pierre fell into the naïvely symmetrical pose of an Egyptian statue,
+      evidently distressed that his stout and clumsy body took up so much room
+      and doing his utmost to look as small as possible. He looked at the count,
+      who still gazed at the spot where Pierre’s face had been before he sat
+      down. Anna Mikháylovna indicated by her attitude her consciousness of the
+      pathetic importance of these last moments of meeting between the father
+      and son. This lasted about two minutes, which to Pierre seemed an hour.
+      Suddenly the broad muscles and lines of the count’s face began to twitch.
+      The twitching increased, the handsome mouth was drawn to one side (only
+      now did Pierre realize how near death his father was), and from that
+      distorted mouth issued an indistinct, hoarse sound. Anna Mikháylovna
+      looked attentively at the sick man’s eyes, trying to guess what he wanted;
+      she pointed first to Pierre, then to some drink, then named Prince Vasíli
+      in an inquiring whisper, then pointed to the quilt. The eyes and face of
+      the sick man showed impatience. He made an effort to look at the servant
+      who stood constantly at the head of the bed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Wants to turn on the other side,” whispered the servant, and got up to
+      turn the count’s heavy body toward the wall.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre rose to help him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While the count was being turned over, one of his arms fell back
+      helplessly and he made a fruitless effort to pull it forward. Whether he
+      noticed the look of terror with which Pierre regarded that lifeless arm,
+      or whether some other thought flitted across his dying brain, at any rate
+      he glanced at the refractory arm, at Pierre’s terror-stricken face, and
+      again at the arm, and on his face a feeble, piteous smile appeared, quite
+      out of keeping with his features, that seemed to deride his own
+      helplessness. At sight of this smile Pierre felt an unexpected quivering
+      in his breast and a tickling in his nose, and tears dimmed his eyes. The
+      sick man was turned on to his side with his face to the wall. He sighed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is dozing,” said Anna Mikháylovna, observing that one of the
+      princesses was coming to take her turn at watching. “Let us go.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre went out.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0024"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      There was now no one in the reception room except Prince Vasíli and the
+      eldest princess, who were sitting under the portrait of Catherine the
+      Great and talking eagerly. As soon as they saw Pierre and his companion
+      they became silent, and Pierre thought he saw the princess hide something
+      as she whispered:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I can’t bear the sight of that woman.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Catiche has had tea served in the small drawing room,” said Prince Vasíli
+      to Anna Mikháylovna. “Go and take something, my poor Anna Mikháylovna, or
+      you will not hold out.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      To Pierre he said nothing, merely giving his arm a sympathetic squeeze
+      below the shoulder. Pierre went with Anna Mikháylovna into the small
+      drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There is nothing so refreshing after a sleepless night as a cup of this
+      delicious Russian tea,” Lorrain was saying with an air of restrained
+      animation as he stood sipping tea from a delicate Chinese handleless cup
+      before a table on which tea and a cold supper were laid in the small
+      circular room. Around the table all who were at Count Bezúkhov’s house
+      that night had gathered to fortify themselves. Pierre well remembered this
+      small circular drawing room with its mirrors and little tables. During
+      balls given at the house Pierre, who did not know how to dance, had liked
+      sitting in this room to watch the ladies who, as they passed through in
+      their ball dresses with diamonds and pearls on their bare shoulders,
+      looked at themselves in the brilliantly lighted mirrors which repeated
+      their reflections several times. Now this same room was dimly lighted by
+      two candles. On one small table tea things and supper dishes stood in
+      disorder, and in the middle of the night a motley throng of people sat
+      there, not merrymaking, but somberly whispering, and betraying by every
+      word and movement that they none of them forgot what was happening and
+      what was about to happen in the bedroom. Pierre did not eat anything
+      though he would very much have liked to. He looked inquiringly at his
+      monitress and saw that she was again going on tiptoe to the reception room
+      where they had left Prince Vasíli and the eldest princess. Pierre
+      concluded that this also was essential, and after a short interval
+      followed her. Anna Mikháylovna was standing beside the princess, and they
+      were both speaking in excited whispers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Permit me, Princess, to know what is necessary and what is not
+      necessary,” said the younger of the two speakers, evidently in the same
+      state of excitement as when she had slammed the door of her room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But, my dear princess,” answered Anna Mikháylovna blandly but
+      impressively, blocking the way to the bedroom and preventing the other
+      from passing, “won’t this be too much for poor Uncle at a moment when he
+      needs repose? Worldly conversation at a moment when his soul is already
+      prepared...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli was seated in an easy chair in his familiar attitude, with
+      one leg crossed high above the other. His cheeks, which were so flabby
+      that they looked heavier below, were twitching violently; but he wore the
+      air of a man little concerned in what the two ladies were saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come, my dear Anna Mikháylovna, let Catiche do as she pleases. You know
+      how fond the count is of her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t even know what is in this paper,” said the younger of the two
+      ladies, addressing Prince Vasíli and pointing to an inlaid portfolio she
+      held in her hand. “All I know is that his real will is in his writing
+      table, and this is a paper he has forgotten....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She tried to pass Anna Mikháylovna, but the latter sprang so as to bar her
+      path.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I know, my dear, kind princess,” said Anna Mikháylovna, seizing the
+      portfolio so firmly that it was plain she would not let go easily. “Dear
+      princess, I beg and implore you, have some pity on him! <i>Je vous en
+      conjure</i>...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess did not reply. Their efforts in the struggle for the
+      portfolio were the only sounds audible, but it was evident that if the
+      princess did speak, her words would not be flattering to Anna Mikháylovna.
+      Though the latter held on tenaciously, her voice lost none of its honeyed
+      firmness and softness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Pierre, my dear, come here. I think he will not be out of place in a
+      family consultation; is it not so, Prince?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why don’t you speak, cousin?” suddenly shrieked the princess so loud that
+      those in the drawing room heard her and were startled. “Why do you remain
+      silent when heaven knows who permits herself to interfere, making a scene
+      on the very threshold of a dying man’s room? Intriguer!” she hissed
+      viciously, and tugged with all her might at the portfolio.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Anna Mikháylovna went forward a step or two to keep her hold on the
+      portfolio, and changed her grip.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli rose. “Oh!” said he with reproach and surprise, “this is
+      absurd! Come, let go I tell you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess let go.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And you too!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But Anna Mikháylovna did not obey him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let go, I tell you! I will take the responsibility. I myself will go and
+      ask him, I!... does that satisfy you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But, Prince,” said Anna Mikháylovna, “after such a solemn sacrament,
+      allow him a moment’s peace! Here, Pierre, tell them your opinion,” said
+      she, turning to the young man who, having come quite close, was gazing
+      with astonishment at the angry face of the princess which had lost all
+      dignity, and at the twitching cheeks of Prince Vasíli.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Remember that you will answer for the consequences,” said Prince Vasíli
+      severely. “You don’t know what you are doing.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Vile woman!” shouted the princess, darting unexpectedly at Anna
+      Mikháylovna and snatching the portfolio from her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli bent his head and spread out his hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At this moment that terrible door, which Pierre had watched so long and
+      which had always opened so quietly, burst noisily open and banged against
+      the wall, and the second of the three sisters rushed out wringing her
+      hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What are you doing!” she cried vehemently. “He is dying and you leave me
+      alone with him!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Her sister dropped the portfolio. Anna Mikháylovna, stooping, quickly
+      caught up the object of contention and ran into the bedroom. The eldest
+      princess and Prince Vasíli, recovering themselves, followed her. A few
+      minutes later the eldest sister came out with a pale hard face, again
+      biting her underlip. At sight of Pierre her expression showed an
+      irrepressible hatred.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, now you may be glad!” said she; “this is what you have been waiting
+      for.” And bursting into tears she hid her face in her handkerchief and
+      rushed from the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli came next. He staggered to the sofa on which Pierre was
+      sitting and dropped onto it, covering his face with his hand. Pierre
+      noticed that he was pale and that his jaw quivered and shook as if in an
+      ague.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, my friend!” said he, taking Pierre by the elbow; and there was in his
+      voice a sincerity and weakness Pierre had never observed in it before.
+      “How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what? I am near sixty,
+      dear friend... I too... All will end in death, all! Death is awful...” and
+      he burst into tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Mikháylovna came out last. She approached Pierre with slow, quiet
+      steps.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Pierre!” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre gave her an inquiring look. She kissed the young man on his
+      forehead, wetting him with her tears. Then after a pause she said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is no more....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked at her over his spectacles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come, I will go with you. Try to weep, nothing gives such relief as
+      tears.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She led him into the dark drawing room and Pierre was glad no one could
+      see his face. Anna Mikháylovna left him, and when she returned he was fast
+      asleep with his head on his arm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the morning Anna Mikháylovna said to Pierre:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, my dear, this is a great loss for us all, not to speak of you. But
+      God will support you: you are young, and are now, I hope, in command of an
+      immense fortune. The will has not yet been opened. I know you well enough
+      to be sure that this will not turn your head, but it imposes duties on
+      you, and you must be a man.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Perhaps later on I may tell you, my dear boy, that if I had not been
+      there, God only knows what would have happened! You know, Uncle promised
+      me only the day before yesterday not to forget Borís. But he had no time.
+      I hope, my dear friend, you will carry out your father’s wish?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre understood nothing of all this and coloring shyly looked in silence
+      at Princess Anna Mikháylovna. After her talk with Pierre, Anna Mikháylovna
+      returned to the Rostóvs’ and went to bed. On waking in the morning she
+      told the Rostóvs and all her acquaintances the details of Count Bezúkhov’s
+      death. She said the count had died as she would herself wish to die, that
+      his end was not only touching but edifying. As to the last meeting between
+      father and son, it was so touching that she could not think of it without
+      tears, and did not know which had behaved better during those awful
+      moments—the father who so remembered everything and everybody at
+      last and had spoken such pathetic words to the son, or Pierre, whom it had
+      been pitiful to see, so stricken was he with grief, though he tried hard
+      to hide it in order not to sadden his dying father. “It is painful, but it
+      does one good. It uplifts the soul to see such men as the old count and
+      his worthy son,” said she. Of the behavior of the eldest princess and
+      Prince Vasíli she spoke disapprovingly, but in whispers and as a great
+      secret.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0025"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At Bald Hills, Prince Nicholas Andréevich Bolkónski’s estate, the arrival
+      of young Prince Andrew and his wife was daily expected, but this
+      expectation did not upset the regular routine of life in the old prince’s
+      household. General in Chief Prince Nicholas Andréevich (nicknamed in
+      society, “the King of Prussia”) ever since the Emperor Paul had exiled him
+      to his country estate had lived there continuously with his daughter,
+      Princess Mary, and her companion, Mademoiselle Bourienne. Though in the
+      new reign he was free to return to the capitals, he still continued to
+      live in the country, remarking that anyone who wanted to see him could
+      come the hundred miles from Moscow to Bald Hills, while he himself needed
+      no one and nothing. He used to say that there are only two sources of
+      human vice—idleness and superstition, and only two virtues—activity
+      and intelligence. He himself undertook his daughter’s education, and to
+      develop these two cardinal virtues in her gave her lessons in algebra and
+      geometry till she was twenty, and arranged her life so that her whole time
+      was occupied. He was himself always occupied: writing his memoirs, solving
+      problems in higher mathematics, turning snuffboxes on a lathe, working in
+      the garden, or superintending the building that was always going on at his
+      estate. As regularity is a prime condition facilitating activity,
+      regularity in his household was carried to the highest point of
+      exactitude. He always came to table under precisely the same conditions,
+      and not only at the same hour but at the same minute. With those about
+      him, from his daughter to his serfs, the prince was sharp and invariably
+      exacting, so that without being a hardhearted man he inspired such fear
+      and respect as few hardhearted men would have aroused. Although he was in
+      retirement and had now no influence in political affairs, every high
+      official appointed to the province in which the prince’s estate lay
+      considered it his duty to visit him and waited in the lofty antechamber
+      just as the architect, gardener, or Princess Mary did, till the prince
+      appeared punctually to the appointed hour. Everyone sitting in this
+      antechamber experienced the same feeling of respect and even fear when the
+      enormously high study door opened and showed the figure of a rather small
+      old man, with powdered wig, small withered hands, and bushy gray eyebrows
+      which, when he frowned, sometimes hid the gleam of his shrewd, youthfully
+      glittering eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the morning of the day that the young couple were to arrive, Princess
+      Mary entered the antechamber as usual at the time appointed for the
+      morning greeting, crossing herself with trepidation and repeating a silent
+      prayer. Every morning she came in like that, and every morning prayed that
+      the daily interview might pass off well.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      An old powdered manservant who was sitting in the antechamber rose quietly
+      and said in a whisper: “Please walk in.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Through the door came the regular hum of a lathe. The princess timidly
+      opened the door which moved noiselessly and easily. She paused at the
+      entrance. The prince was working at the lathe and after glancing round
+      continued his work.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The enormous study was full of things evidently in constant use. The large
+      table covered with books and plans, the tall glass-fronted bookcases with
+      keys in the locks, the high desk for writing while standing up, on which
+      lay an open exercise book, and the lathe with tools laid ready to hand and
+      shavings scattered around—all indicated continuous, varied, and
+      orderly activity. The motion of the small foot shod in a Tartar boot
+      embroidered with silver, and the firm pressure of the lean sinewy hand,
+      showed that the prince still possessed the tenacious endurance and vigor
+      of hardy old age. After a few more turns of the lathe he removed his foot
+      from the pedal, wiped his chisel, dropped it into a leather pouch attached
+      to the lathe, and, approaching the table, summoned his daughter. He never
+      gave his children a blessing, so he simply held out his bristly cheek (as
+      yet unshaven) and, regarding her tenderly and attentively, said severely:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Quite well? All right then, sit down.” He took the exercise book
+      containing lessons in geometry written by himself and drew up a chair with
+      his foot.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “For tomorrow!” said he, quickly finding the page and making a scratch
+      from one paragraph to another with his hard nail.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess bent over the exercise book on the table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Wait a bit, here’s a letter for you,” said the old man suddenly, taking a
+      letter addressed in a woman’s hand from a bag hanging above the table,
+      onto which he threw it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the sight of the letter red patches showed themselves on the princess’
+      face. She took it quickly and bent her head over it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “From Héloïse?” asked the prince with a cold smile that showed his still
+      sound, yellowish teeth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, it’s from Julie,” replied the princess with a timid glance and a
+      timid smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll let two more letters pass, but the third I’ll read,” said the prince
+      sternly; “I’m afraid you write much nonsense. I’ll read the third!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Read this if you like, Father,” said the princess, blushing still more
+      and holding out the letter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The third, I said the third!” cried the prince abruptly, pushing the
+      letter away, and leaning his elbows on the table he drew toward him the
+      exercise book containing geometrical figures.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, madam,” he began, stooping over the book close to his daughter and
+      placing an arm on the back of the chair on which she sat, so that she felt
+      herself surrounded on all sides by the acrid scent of old age and tobacco,
+      which she had known so long. “Now, madam, these triangles are equal;
+      please note that the angle <i>ABC</i>...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess looked in a scared way at her father’s eyes glittering close
+      to her; the red patches on her face came and went, and it was plain that
+      she understood nothing and was so frightened that her fear would prevent
+      her understanding any of her father’s further explanations, however clear
+      they might be. Whether it was the teacher’s fault or the pupil’s, this
+      same thing happened every day: the princess’ eyes grew dim, she could not
+      see and could not hear anything, but was only conscious of her stern
+      father’s withered face close to her, of his breath and the smell of him,
+      and could think only of how to get away quickly to her own room to make
+      out the problem in peace. The old man was beside himself: moved the chair
+      on which he was sitting noisily backward and forward, made efforts to
+      control himself and not become vehement, but almost always did become
+      vehement, scolded, and sometimes flung the exercise book away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess gave a wrong answer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well now, isn’t she a fool!” shouted the prince, pushing the book aside
+      and turning sharply away; but rising immediately, he paced up and down,
+      lightly touched his daughter’s hair and sat down again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He drew up his chair, and continued to explain.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This won’t do, Princess; it won’t do,” said he, when Princess Mary,
+      having taken and closed the exercise book with the next day’s lesson, was
+      about to leave: “Mathematics are most important, madam! I don’t want to
+      have you like our silly ladies. Get used to it and you’ll like it,” and he
+      patted her cheek. “It will drive all the nonsense out of your head.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She turned to go, but he stopped her with a gesture and took an uncut book
+      from the high desk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Here is some sort of <i>Key to the Mysteries</i> that your Héloïse has
+      sent you. Religious! I don’t interfere with anyone’s belief... I have
+      looked at it. Take it. Well, now go. Go.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He patted her on the shoulder and himself closed the door after her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary went back to her room with the sad, scared expression that
+      rarely left her and which made her plain, sickly face yet plainer. She sat
+      down at her writing table, on which stood miniature portraits and which
+      was littered with books and papers. The princess was as untidy as her
+      father was tidy. She put down the geometry book and eagerly broke the seal
+      of her letter. It was from her most intimate friend from childhood; that
+      same Julie Karágina who had been at the Rostóvs’ name-day party.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Julie wrote in French:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dear and precious Friend, How terrible and frightful a thing is
+      separation! Though I tell myself that half my life and half my happiness
+      are wrapped up in you, and that in spite of the distance separating us our
+      hearts are united by indissoluble bonds, my heart rebels against fate and
+      in spite of the pleasures and distractions around me I cannot overcome a
+      certain secret sorrow that has been in my heart ever since we parted. Why
+      are we not together as we were last summer, in your big study, on the blue
+      sofa, the confidential sofa? Why cannot I now, as three months ago, draw
+      fresh moral strength from your look, so gentle, calm, and penetrating, a
+      look I loved so well and seem to see before me as I write?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having read thus far, Princess Mary sighed and glanced into the mirror
+      which stood on her right. It reflected a weak, ungraceful figure and thin
+      face. Her eyes, always sad, now looked with particular hopelessness at her
+      reflection in the glass. “She flatters me,” thought the princess, turning
+      away and continuing to read. But Julie did not flatter her friend, the
+      princess’ eyes—large, deep and luminous (it seemed as if at times
+      there radiated from them shafts of warm light)—were so beautiful
+      that very often in spite of the plainness of her face they gave her an
+      attraction more powerful than that of beauty. But the princess never saw
+      the beautiful expression of her own eyes—the look they had when she
+      was not thinking of herself. As with everyone, her face assumed a forced
+      unnatural expression as soon as she looked in a glass. She went on
+      reading:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All Moscow talks of nothing but war. One of my two brothers is already
+      abroad, the other is with the Guards, who are starting on their march to
+      the frontier. Our dear Emperor has left Petersburg and it is thought
+      intends to expose his precious person to the chances of war. God grant
+      that the Corsican monster who is destroying the peace of Europe may be
+      overthrown by the angel whom it has pleased the Almighty, in His goodness,
+      to give us as sovereign! To say nothing of my brothers, this war has
+      deprived me of one of the associations nearest my heart. I mean young
+      Nicholas Rostóv, who with his enthusiasm could not bear to remain inactive
+      and has left the university to join the army. I will confess to you, dear
+      Mary, that in spite of his extreme youth his departure for the army was a
+      great grief to me. This young man, of whom I spoke to you last summer, is
+      so noble-minded and full of that real youthfulness which one seldom finds
+      nowadays among our old men of twenty and, particularly, he is so frank and
+      has so much heart. He is so pure and poetic that my relations with him,
+      transient as they were, have been one of the sweetest comforts to my poor
+      heart, which has already suffered so much. Someday I will tell you about
+      our parting and all that was said then. That is still too fresh. Ah, dear
+      friend, you are happy not to know these poignant joys and sorrows. You are
+      fortunate, for the latter are generally the stronger! I know very well
+      that Count Nicholas is too young ever to be more to me than a friend, but
+      this sweet friendship, this poetic and pure intimacy, were what my heart
+      needed. But enough of this! The chief news, about which all Moscow
+      gossips, is the death of old Count Bezúkhov, and his inheritance. Fancy!
+      The three princesses have received very little, Prince Vasíli nothing, and
+      it is Monsieur Pierre who has inherited all the property and has besides
+      been recognized as legitimate; so that he is now Count Bezúkhov and
+      possessor of the finest fortune in Russia. It is rumored that Prince
+      Vasíli played a very despicable part in this affair and that he returned
+      to Petersburg quite crestfallen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      I confess I understand very little about all these matters of wills and
+      inheritance; but I do know that since this young man, whom we all used to
+      know as plain Monsieur Pierre, has become Count Bezúkhov and the owner of
+      one of the largest fortunes in Russia, I am much amused to watch the
+      change in the tone and manners of the mammas burdened by marriageable
+      daughters, and of the young ladies themselves, toward him, though, between
+      you and me, he always seemed to me a poor sort of fellow. As for the past
+      two years people have amused themselves by finding husbands for me (most
+      of whom I don’t even know), the matchmaking chronicles of Moscow now speak
+      of me as the future Countess Bezúkhova. But you will understand that I
+      have no desire for the post. <i>À propos</i> of marriages: do you know
+      that a while ago that <i>universal auntie</i> Anna Mikháylovna told me,
+      under the seal of strict secrecy, of a plan of marriage for you. It is
+      neither more nor less than with Prince Vasíli’s son Anatole, whom they
+      wish to reform by marrying him to someone rich and <i>distinguée</i>, and
+      it is on you that his relations’ choice has fallen. I don’t know what you
+      will think of it, but I consider it my duty to let you know of it. He is
+      said to be very handsome and a terrible scapegrace. That is all I have
+      been able to find out about him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But enough of gossip. I am at the end of my second sheet of paper, and
+      Mamma has sent for me to go and dine at the Apráksins’. Read the mystical
+      book I am sending you; it has an enormous success here. Though there are
+      things in it difficult for the feeble human mind to grasp, it is an
+      admirable book which calms and elevates the soul. Adieu! Give my respects
+      to monsieur your father and my compliments to Mademoiselle Bourienne. I
+      embrace you as I love you.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      JULIE
+    </p>
+<p>
+      P.S. Let me have news of your brother and his charming little wife.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess pondered awhile with a thoughtful smile and her luminous eyes
+      lit up so that her face was entirely transformed. Then she suddenly rose
+      and with her heavy tread went up to the table. She took a sheet of paper
+      and her hand moved rapidly over it. This is the reply she wrote, also in
+      French:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dear and precious Friend, Your letter of the 13th has given me great
+      delight. So you still love me, my romantic Julie? Separation, of which you
+      say so much that is bad, does not seem to have had its usual effect on
+      you. You complain of our separation. What then should I say, if I <i>dared</i>
+      complain, I who am deprived of all who are dear to me? Ah, if we had not
+      religion to console us life would be very sad. Why do you suppose that I
+      should look severely on your affection for that young man? On such matters
+      I am only severe with myself. I understand such feelings in others, and if
+      never having felt them I cannot approve of them, neither do I condemn
+      them. Only it seems to me that Christian love, love of one’s neighbor,
+      love of one’s enemy, is worthier, sweeter, and better than the feelings
+      which the beautiful eyes of a young man can inspire in a romantic and
+      loving young girl like yourself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The news of Count Bezúkhov’s death reached us before your letter and my
+      father was much affected by it. He says the count was the last
+      representative but one of the great century, and that it is his own turn
+      now, but that he will do all he can to let his turn come as late as
+      possible. God preserve us from that terrible misfortune!
+    </p>
+<p>
+      I cannot agree with you about Pierre, whom I knew as a child. He always
+      seemed to me to have an excellent heart, and that is the quality I value
+      most in people. As to his inheritance and the part played by Prince
+      Vasíli, it is very sad for both. Ah, my dear friend, our divine Saviour’s
+      words, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
+      than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, are terribly true. I pity
+      Prince Vasíli but am still more sorry for Pierre. So young, and burdened
+      with such riches—to what temptations he will be exposed! If I were
+      asked what I desire most on earth, it would be to be poorer than the
+      poorest beggar. A thousand thanks, dear friend, for the volume you have
+      sent me and which has such success in Moscow. Yet since you tell me that
+      among some good things it contains others which our weak human
+      understanding cannot grasp, it seems to me rather useless to spend time in
+      reading what is unintelligible and can therefore bear no fruit. I never
+      could understand the fondness some people have for confusing their minds
+      by dwelling on mystical books that merely awaken their doubts and excite
+      their imagination, giving them a bent for exaggeration quite contrary to
+      Christian simplicity. Let us rather read the Epistles and Gospels. Let us
+      not seek to penetrate what mysteries they contain; for how can we,
+      miserable sinners that we are, know the terrible and holy secrets of
+      Providence while we remain in this flesh which forms an impenetrable veil
+      between us and the Eternal? Let us rather confine ourselves to studying
+      those sublime rules which our divine Saviour has left for our guidance
+      here below. Let us try to conform to them and follow them, and let us be
+      persuaded that the less we let our feeble human minds roam, the better we
+      shall please God, who rejects all knowledge that does not come from Him;
+      and the less we seek to fathom what He has been pleased to conceal from
+      us, the sooner will He vouchsafe its revelation to us through His divine
+      Spirit.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      My father has not spoken to me of a suitor, but has only told me that he
+      has received a letter and is expecting a visit from Prince Vasíli. In
+      regard to this project of marriage for me, I will tell you, dear sweet
+      friend, that I look on marriage as a divine institution to which we must
+      conform. However painful it may be to me, should the Almighty lay the
+      duties of wife and mother upon me I shall try to perform them as
+      faithfully as I can, without disquieting myself by examining my feelings
+      toward him whom He may give me for husband.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      I have had a letter from my brother, who announces his speedy arrival at
+      Bald Hills with his wife. This pleasure will be but a brief one, however,
+      for he will leave us again to take part in this unhappy war into which we
+      have been drawn, God knows how or why. Not only where you are—at the
+      heart of affairs and of the world—is the talk all of war, even here
+      amid fieldwork and the calm of nature—which townsfolk consider
+      characteristic of the country—rumors of war are heard and painfully
+      felt. My father talks of nothing but marches and countermarches, things of
+      which I understand nothing; and the day before yesterday during my daily
+      walk through the village I witnessed a heartrending scene.... It was a
+      convoy of conscripts enrolled from our people and starting to join the
+      army. You should have seen the state of the mothers, wives, and children
+      of the men who were going and should have heard the sobs. It seems as
+      though mankind has forgotten the laws of its divine Saviour, Who preached
+      love and forgiveness of injuries—and that men attribute the greatest
+      merit to skill in killing one another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Adieu, dear and kind friend; may our divine Saviour and His most Holy
+      Mother keep you in their holy and all-powerful care!
+    </p>
+<p>
+      MARY
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, you are sending off a letter, Princess? I have already dispatched
+      mine. I have written to my poor mother,” said the smiling Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne rapidly, in her pleasant mellow tones and with guttural <i>r</i>’s.
+      She brought into Princess Mary’s strenuous, mournful, and gloomy world a
+      quite different atmosphere, careless, lighthearted, and self-satisfied.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Princess, I must warn you,” she added, lowering her voice and evidently
+      listening to herself with pleasure, and speaking with exaggerated <i>grasseyement</i>,
+      “the prince has been scolding Michael Ivánovich. He is in a very bad
+      humor, very morose. Be prepared.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, dear friend,” replied Princess Mary, “I have asked you never to warn
+      me of the humor my father is in. I do not allow myself to judge him and
+      would not have others do so.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess glanced at her watch and, seeing that she was five minutes
+      late in starting her practice on the clavichord, went into the sitting
+      room with a look of alarm. Between twelve and two o’clock, as the day was
+      mapped out, the prince rested and the princess played the clavichord.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0026"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The gray-haired valet was sitting drowsily listening to the snoring of the
+      prince, who was in his large study. From the far side of the house through
+      the closed doors came the sound of difficult passages—twenty times
+      repeated—of a sonata by Dussek.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just then a closed carriage and another with a hood drove up to the porch.
+      Prince Andrew got out of the carriage, helped his little wife to alight,
+      and let her pass into the house before him. Old Tíkhon, wearing a wig, put
+      his head out of the door of the antechamber, reported in a whisper that
+      the prince was sleeping, and hastily closed the door. Tíkhon knew that
+      neither the son’s arrival nor any other unusual event must be allowed to
+      disturb the appointed order of the day. Prince Andrew apparently knew this
+      as well as Tíkhon; he looked at his watch as if to ascertain whether his
+      father’s habits had changed since he was at home last, and, having assured
+      himself that they had not, he turned to his wife.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He will get up in twenty minutes. Let us go across to Mary’s room,” he
+      said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The little princess had grown stouter during this time, but her eyes and
+      her short, downy, smiling lip lifted when she began to speak just as
+      merrily and prettily as ever.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, this is a palace!” she said to her husband, looking around with the
+      expression with which people compliment their host at a ball. “Let’s come,
+      quick, quick!” And with a glance round, she smiled at Tíkhon, at her
+      husband, and at the footman who accompanied them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is that Mary practicing? Let’s go quietly and take her by surprise.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew followed her with a courteous but sad expression.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You’ve grown older, Tíkhon,” he said in passing to the old man, who
+      kissed his hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before they reached the room from which the sounds of the clavichord came,
+      the pretty, fair-haired Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle Bourienne, rushed out
+      apparently beside herself with delight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah! what joy for the princess!” exclaimed she: “At last! I must let her
+      know.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, no, please not... You are Mademoiselle Bourienne,” said the little
+      princess, kissing her. “I know you already through my sister-in-law’s
+      friendship for you. She was not expecting us?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They went up to the door of the sitting room from which came the sound of
+      the oft-repeated passage of the sonata. Prince Andrew stopped and made a
+      grimace, as if expecting something unpleasant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The little princess entered the room. The passage broke off in the middle,
+      a cry was heard, then Princess Mary’s heavy tread and the sound of
+      kissing. When Prince Andrew went in the two princesses, who had only met
+      once before for a short time at his wedding, were in each other’s arms
+      warmly pressing their lips to whatever place they happened to touch.
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne stood near them pressing her hand to her heart,
+      with a beatific smile and obviously equally ready to cry or to laugh.
+      Prince Andrew shrugged his shoulders and frowned, as lovers of music do
+      when they hear a false note. The two women let go of one another, and
+      then, as if afraid of being too late, seized each other’s hands, kissing
+      them and pulling them away, and again began kissing each other on the
+      face, and then to Prince Andrew’s surprise both began to cry and kissed
+      again. Mademoiselle Bourienne also began to cry. Prince Andrew evidently
+      felt ill at ease, but to the two women it seemed quite natural that they
+      should cry, and apparently it never entered their heads that it could have
+      been otherwise at this meeting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah! my dear!... Ah! Mary!...” they suddenly exclaimed, and then laughed.
+      “I dreamed last night...”—“You were not expecting us?...” “Ah! Mary,
+      you have got thinner?...” “And you have grown stouter!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I knew the princess at once,” put in Mademoiselle Bourienne.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I had no idea!...” exclaimed Princess Mary. “Ah, Andrew, I did not
+      see you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew and his sister, hand in hand, kissed one another, and he
+      told her she was still the same crybaby as ever. Princess Mary had turned
+      toward her brother, and through her tears the loving, warm, gentle look of
+      her large luminous eyes, very beautiful at that moment, rested on Prince
+      Andrew’s face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The little princess talked incessantly, her short, downy upper lip
+      continually and rapidly touching her rosy nether lip when necessary and
+      drawing up again next moment when her face broke into a smile of
+      glittering teeth and sparkling eyes. She told of an accident they had had
+      on the Spásski Hill which might have been serious for her in her
+      condition, and immediately after that informed them that she had left all
+      her clothes in Petersburg and that heaven knew what she would have to
+      dress in here; and that Andrew had quite changed, and that Kitty Odýntsova
+      had married an old man, and that there was a suitor for Mary, a real one,
+      but that they would talk of that later. Princess Mary was still looking
+      silently at her brother and her beautiful eyes were full of love and
+      sadness. It was plain that she was following a train of thought
+      independent of her sister-in-law’s words. In the midst of a description of
+      the last Petersburg fete she addressed her brother:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So you are really going to the war, Andrew?” she said sighing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Lise sighed too.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, and even tomorrow,” replied her brother.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is leaving me here, God knows why, when he might have had
+      promotion...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary did not listen to the end, but continuing her train of
+      thought turned to her sister-in-law with a tender glance at her figure.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is it certain?” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The face of the little princess changed. She sighed and said: “Yes, quite
+      certain. Ah! it is very dreadful...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Her lip descended. She brought her face close to her sister-in-law’s and
+      unexpectedly again began to cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She needs rest,” said Prince Andrew with a frown. “Don’t you, Lise? Take
+      her to your room and I’ll go to Father. How is he? Just the same?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, just the same. Though I don’t know what your opinion will be,”
+       answered the princess joyfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And are the hours the same? And the walks in the avenues? And the lathe?”
+       asked Prince Andrew with a scarcely perceptible smile which showed that,
+      in spite of all his love and respect for his father, he was aware of his
+      weaknesses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The hours are the same, and the lathe, and also the mathematics and my
+      geometry lessons,” said Princess Mary gleefully, as if her lessons in
+      geometry were among the greatest delights of her life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the twenty minutes had elapsed and the time had come for the old
+      prince to get up, Tíkhon came to call the young prince to his father. The
+      old man made a departure from his usual routine in honor of his son’s
+      arrival: he gave orders to admit him to his apartments while he dressed
+      for dinner. The old prince always dressed in old-fashioned style, wearing
+      an antique coat and powdered hair; and when Prince Andrew entered his
+      father’s dressing room (not with the contemptuous look and manner he wore
+      in drawing rooms, but with the animated face with which he talked to
+      Pierre), the old man was sitting on a large leather-covered chair, wrapped
+      in a powdering mantle, entrusting his head to Tíkhon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah! here’s the warrior! Wants to vanquish Buonaparte?” said the old man,
+      shaking his powdered head as much as the tail, which Tíkhon was holding
+      fast to plait, would allow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You at least must tackle him properly, or else if he goes on like this
+      he’ll soon have us, too, for his subjects! How are you?” And he held out
+      his cheek.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old man was in a good temper after his nap before dinner. (He used to
+      say that a nap “after dinner was silver—before dinner, golden.”) He
+      cast happy, sidelong glances at his son from under his thick, bushy
+      eyebrows. Prince Andrew went up and kissed his father on the spot
+      indicated to him. He made no reply on his father’s favorite topic—making
+      fun of the military men of the day, and more particularly of Bonaparte.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, Father, I have come to you and brought my wife who is pregnant,”
+       said Prince Andrew, following every movement of his father’s face with an
+      eager and respectful look. “How is your health?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Only fools and rakes fall ill, my boy. You know me: I am busy from
+      morning till night and abstemious, so of course I am well.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Thank God,” said his son smiling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “God has nothing to do with it! Well, go on,” he continued, returning to
+      his hobby; “tell me how the Germans have taught you to fight Bonaparte by
+      this new science you call ‘strategy.’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Give me time to collect my wits, Father,” said he, with a smile that
+      showed that his father’s foibles did not prevent his son from loving and
+      honoring him. “Why, I have not yet had time to settle down!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Nonsense, nonsense!” cried the old man, shaking his pigtail to see
+      whether it was firmly plaited, and grasping his by the hand. “The house
+      for your wife is ready. Princess Mary will take her there and show her
+      over, and they’ll talk nineteen to the dozen. That’s their woman’s way! I
+      am glad to have her. Sit down and talk. About Mikhelson’s army I
+      understand—Tolstóy‘s too... a simultaneous expedition.... But
+      what’s the southern army to do? Prussia is neutral... I know that. What
+      about Austria?” said he, rising from his chair and pacing up and down the
+      room followed by Tíkhon, who ran after him, handing him different articles
+      of clothing. “What of Sweden? How will they cross Pomerania?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew, seeing that his father insisted, began—at first
+      reluctantly, but gradually with more and more animation, and from habit
+      changing unconsciously from Russian to French as he went on—to
+      explain the plan of operation for the coming campaign. He explained how an
+      army, ninety thousand strong, was to threaten Prussia so as to bring her
+      out of her neutrality and draw her into the war; how part of that army was
+      to join some Swedish forces at Stralsund; how two hundred and twenty
+      thousand Austrians, with a hundred thousand Russians, were to operate in
+      Italy and on the Rhine; how fifty thousand Russians and as many English
+      were to land at Naples, and how a total force of five hundred thousand men
+      was to attack the French from different sides. The old prince did not
+      evince the least interest during this explanation, but as if he were not
+      listening to it continued to dress while walking about, and three times
+      unexpectedly interrupted. Once he stopped it by shouting: “The white one,
+      the white one!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      This meant that Tíkhon was not handing him the waistcoat he wanted.
+      Another time he interrupted, saying:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And will she soon be confined?” and shaking his head reproachfully said:
+      “That’s bad! Go on, go on.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The third interruption came when Prince Andrew was finishing his
+      description. The old man began to sing, in the cracked voice of old age:
+      <i>“Malbrook s’en va-t-en guerre. Dieu sait quand reviendra.”</i> *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “Marlborough is going to the wars; God knows when he’ll
+     return.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      His son only smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t say it’s a plan I approve of,” said the son; “I am only telling
+      you what it is. Napoleon has also formed his plan by now, not worse than
+      this one.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, you’ve told me nothing new,” and the old man repeated, meditatively
+      and rapidly:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “<i>Dieu sait quand reviendra</i>. Go to the dining room.”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0027"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At the appointed hour the prince, powdered and shaven, entered the dining
+      room where his daughter-in-law, Princess Mary, and Mademoiselle Bourienne
+      were already awaiting him together with his architect, who by a strange
+      caprice of his employer’s was admitted to table though the position of
+      that insignificant individual was such as could certainly not have caused
+      him to expect that honor. The prince, who generally kept very strictly to
+      social distinctions and rarely admitted even important government
+      officials to his table, had unexpectedly selected Michael Ivánovich (who
+      always went into a corner to blow his nose on his checked handkerchief) to
+      illustrate the theory that all men are equals, and had more than once
+      impressed on his daughter that Michael Ivánovich was “not a whit worse
+      than you or I.” At dinner the prince usually spoke to the taciturn Michael
+      Ivánovich more often than to anyone else.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the dining room, which like all the rooms in the house was exceedingly
+      lofty, the members of the household and the footmen—one behind each
+      chair—stood waiting for the prince to enter. The head butler, napkin
+      on arm, was scanning the setting of the table, making signs to the
+      footmen, and anxiously glancing from the clock to the door by which the
+      prince was to enter. Prince Andrew was looking at a large gilt frame, new
+      to him, containing the genealogical tree of the Princes Bolkónski,
+      opposite which hung another such frame with a badly painted portrait
+      (evidently by the hand of the artist belonging to the estate) of a ruling
+      prince, in a crown—an alleged descendant of Rúrik and ancestor of
+      the Bolkónskis. Prince Andrew, looking again at that genealogical tree,
+      shook his head, laughing as a man laughs who looks at a portrait so
+      characteristic of the original as to be amusing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How thoroughly like him that is!” he said to Princess Mary, who had come
+      up to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary looked at her brother in surprise. She did not understand
+      what he was laughing at. Everything her father did inspired her with
+      reverence and was beyond question.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Everyone has his Achilles’ heel,” continued Prince Andrew. “Fancy, with
+      <i>his</i> powerful mind, indulging in such nonsense!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary could not understand the boldness of her brother’s criticism
+      and was about to reply, when the expected footsteps were heard coming from
+      the study. The prince walked in quickly and jauntily as was his wont, as
+      if intentionally contrasting the briskness of his manners with the strict
+      formality of his house. At that moment the great clock struck two and
+      another with a shrill tone joined in from the drawing room. The prince
+      stood still; his lively glittering eyes from under their thick, bushy
+      eyebrows sternly scanned all present and rested on the little princess.
+      She felt, as courtiers do when the Tsar enters, the sensation of fear and
+      respect which the old man inspired in all around him. He stroked her hair
+      and then patted her awkwardly on the back of her neck.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’m glad, glad, to see you,” he said, looking attentively into her eyes,
+      and then quickly went to his place and sat down. “Sit down, sit down! Sit
+      down, Michael Ivánovich!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He indicated a place beside him to his daughter-in-law. A footman moved
+      the chair for her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ho, ho!” said the old man, casting his eyes on her rounded figure.
+      “You’ve been in a hurry. That’s bad!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He laughed in his usual dry, cold, unpleasant way, with his lips only and
+      not with his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You must walk, walk as much as possible, as much as possible,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The little princess did not, or did not wish to, hear his words. She was
+      silent and seemed confused. The prince asked her about her father, and she
+      began to smile and talk. He asked about mutual acquaintances, and she
+      became still more animated and chattered away giving him greetings from
+      various people and retelling the town gossip.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Countess Apráksina, poor thing, has lost her husband and she has cried
+      her eyes out,” she said, growing more and more lively.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As she became animated the prince looked at her more and more sternly, and
+      suddenly, as if he had studied her sufficiently and had formed a definite
+      idea of her, he turned away and addressed Michael Ivánovich.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, Michael Ivánovich, our Bonaparte will be having a bad time of it.
+      Prince Andrew” (he always spoke thus of his son) “has been telling me what
+      forces are being collected against him! While you and I never thought much
+      of him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Michael Ivánovich did not at all know when “you and I” had said such
+      things about Bonaparte, but understanding that he was wanted as a peg on
+      which to hang the prince’s favorite topic, he looked inquiringly at the
+      young prince, wondering what would follow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is a great tactician!” said the prince to his son, pointing to the
+      architect.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And the conversation again turned on the war, on Bonaparte, and the
+      generals and statesmen of the day. The old prince seemed convinced not
+      only that all the men of the day were mere babies who did not know the A B
+      C of war or of politics, and that Bonaparte was an insignificant little
+      Frenchy, successful only because there were no longer any Potëmkins or
+      Suvórovs left to oppose him; but he was also convinced that there were no
+      political difficulties in Europe and no real war, but only a sort of
+      puppet show at which the men of the day were playing, pretending to do
+      something real. Prince Andrew gaily bore with his father’s ridicule of the
+      new men, and drew him on and listened to him with evident pleasure.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The past always seems good,” said he, “but did not Suvórov himself fall
+      into a trap Moreau set him, and from which he did not know how to escape?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Who told you that? Who?” cried the prince. “Suvórov!” And he jerked away
+      his plate, which Tíkhon briskly caught. “Suvórov!... Consider, Prince
+      Andrew. Two... Frederick and Suvórov; Moreau!... Moreau would have been a
+      prisoner if Suvórov had had a free hand; but he had the <i>Hofs-kriegs-wurst-schnapps-Rath</i>
+      on his hands. It would have puzzled the devil himself! When you get there
+      you’ll find out what those <i>Hofs-kriegs-wurst-Raths</i> are! Suvórov
+      couldn’t manage them so what chance has Michael Kutúzov? No, my dear boy,”
+       he continued, “you and your generals won’t get on against Buonaparte;
+      you’ll have to call in the French, so that birds of a feather may fight
+      together. The German, Pahlen, has been sent to New York in America, to
+      fetch the Frenchman, Moreau,” he said, alluding to the invitation made
+      that year to Moreau to enter the Russian service.... “Wonderful!... Were
+      the Potëmkins, Suvórovs, and Orlóvs Germans? No, lad, either you fellows
+      have all lost your wits, or I have outlived mine. May God help you, but
+      we’ll see what will happen. Buonaparte has become a great commander among
+      them! Hm!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t at all say that all the plans are good,” said Prince Andrew, “I
+      am only surprised at your opinion of Bonaparte. You may laugh as much as
+      you like, but all the same Bonaparte is a great general!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Michael Ivánovich!” cried the old prince to the architect who, busy with
+      his roast meat, hoped he had been forgotten: “Didn’t I tell you Buonaparte
+      was a great tactician? Here, he says the same thing.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “To be sure, your excellency,” replied the architect.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The prince again laughed his frigid laugh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Buonaparte was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has got splendid
+      soldiers. Besides he began by attacking Germans. And only idlers have
+      failed to beat the Germans. Since the world began everybody has beaten the
+      Germans. They beat no one—except one another. He made his reputation
+      fighting them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the prince began explaining all the blunders which, according to him,
+      Bonaparte had made in his campaigns and even in politics. His son made no
+      rejoinder, but it was evident that whatever arguments were presented he
+      was as little able as his father to change his opinion. He listened,
+      refraining from a reply, and involuntarily wondered how this old man,
+      living alone in the country for so many years, could know and discuss so
+      minutely and acutely all the recent European military and political
+      events.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You think I’m an old man and don’t understand the present state of
+      affairs?” concluded his father. “But it troubles me. I don’t sleep at
+      night. Come now, where has this great commander of yours shown his skill?”
+       he concluded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That would take too long to tell,” answered the son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, then go off to your Buonaparte! Mademoiselle Bourienne, here’s
+      another admirer of that powder-monkey emperor of yours,” he exclaimed in
+      excellent French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You know, Prince, I am not a Bonapartist!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Dieu sait quand reviendra.”</i> hummed the prince out of tune and,
+      with a laugh still more so, he quitted the table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The little princess during the whole discussion and the rest of the dinner
+      sat silent, glancing with a frightened look now at her father-in-law and
+      now at Princess Mary. When they left the table she took her
+      sister-in-law’s arm and drew her into another room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a clever man your father is,” said she; “perhaps that is why I am
+      afraid of him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, he is so kind!” answered Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0028"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew was to leave next evening. The old prince, not altering his
+      routine, retired as usual after dinner. The little princess was in her
+      sister-in-law’s room. Prince Andrew in a traveling coat without epaulettes
+      had been packing with his valet in the rooms assigned to him. After
+      inspecting the carriage himself and seeing the trunks put in, he ordered
+      the horses to be harnessed. Only those things he always kept with him
+      remained in his room; a small box, a large canteen fitted with silver
+      plate, two Turkish pistols and a saber—a present from his father who
+      had brought it from the siege of Ochákov. All these traveling effects of
+      Prince Andrew’s were in very good order: new, clean, and in cloth covers
+      carefully tied with tapes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When starting on a journey or changing their mode of life, men capable of
+      reflection are generally in a serious frame of mind. At such moments one
+      reviews the past and plans for the future. Prince Andrew’s face looked
+      very thoughtful and tender. With his hands behind him he paced briskly
+      from corner to corner of the room, looking straight before him and
+      thoughtfully shaking his head. Did he fear going to the war, or was he sad
+      at leaving his wife?—perhaps both, but evidently he did not wish to
+      be seen in that mood, for hearing footsteps in the passage he hurriedly
+      unclasped his hands, stopped at a table as if tying the cover of the small
+      box, and assumed his usual tranquil and impenetrable expression. It was
+      the heavy tread of Princess Mary that he heard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I hear you have given orders to harness,” she cried, panting (she had
+      apparently been running), “and I did so wish to have another talk with you
+      alone! God knows how long we may again be parted. You are not angry with
+      me for coming? You have changed so, Andrúsha,” she added, as if to explain
+      such a question.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She smiled as she uttered his pet name, “Andrúsha.” It was obviously
+      strange to her to think that this stern handsome man should be Andrúsha—the
+      slender mischievous boy who had been her playfellow in childhood.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And where is Lise?” he asked, answering her question only by a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She was so tired that she has fallen asleep on the sofa in my room. Oh,
+      Andrew! What a treasure of a wife you have,” said she, sitting down on the
+      sofa, facing her brother. “She is quite a child: such a dear, merry child.
+      I have grown so fond of her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew was silent, but the princess noticed the ironical and
+      contemptuous look that showed itself on his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One must be indulgent to little weaknesses; who is free from them,
+      Andrew? Don’t forget that she has grown up and been educated in society,
+      and so her position now is not a rosy one. We should enter into everyone’s
+      situation. <i>Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner</i>. * Think what it
+      must be for her, poor thing, after what she has been used to, to be parted
+      from her husband and be left alone in the country, in her condition! It’s
+      very hard.”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * To understand all is to forgive all.
+</p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew smiled as he looked at his sister, as we smile at those we
+      think we thoroughly understand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You live in the country and don’t think the life terrible,” he replied.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I... that’s different. Why speak of me? I don’t want any other life, and
+      can’t, for I know no other. But think, Andrew: for a young society woman
+      to be buried in the country during the best years of her life, all alone—for
+      Papa is always busy, and I... well, you know what poor resources I have
+      for entertaining a woman used to the best society. There is only
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t like your Mademoiselle Bourienne at all,” said Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No? She is very nice and kind and, above all, she’s much to be pitied.
+      She has no one, no one. To tell the truth, I don’t need her, and she’s
+      even in my way. You know I always was a savage, and now am even more so. I
+      like being alone.... Father likes her very much. She and Michael Ivánovich
+      are the two people to whom he is always gentle and kind, because he has
+      been a benefactor to them both. As Sterne says: ‘We don’t love people so
+      much for the good they have done us, as for the good we have done them.’
+      Father took her when she was homeless after losing her own father. She is
+      very good-natured, and my father likes her way of reading. She reads to
+      him in the evenings and reads splendidly.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “To be quite frank, Mary, I expect Father’s character sometimes makes
+      things trying for you, doesn’t it?” Prince Andrew asked suddenly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary was first surprised and then aghast at this question.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “For me? For me?... Trying for me!...” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He always was rather harsh; and now I should think he’s getting very
+      trying,” said Prince Andrew, apparently speaking lightly of their father
+      in order to puzzle or test his sister.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are good in every way, Andrew, but you have a kind of intellectual
+      pride,” said the princess, following the train of her own thoughts rather
+      than the trend of the conversation—“and that’s a great sin. How can
+      one judge Father? But even if one might, what feeling except veneration
+      could such a man as my father evoke? And I am so contented and happy with
+      him. I only wish you were all as happy as I am.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Her brother shook his head incredulously.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The only thing that is hard for me... I will tell you the truth,
+      Andrew... is Father’s way of treating religious subjects. I don’t
+      understand how a man of his immense intellect can fail to see what is as
+      clear as day, and can go so far astray. That is the only thing that makes
+      me unhappy. But even in this I can see lately a shade of improvement. His
+      satire has been less bitter of late, and there was a monk he received and
+      had a long talk with.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah! my dear, I am afraid you and your monk are wasting your powder,” said
+      Prince Andrew banteringly yet tenderly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah! <i>mon ami</i>, I only pray, and hope that God will hear me.
+      Andrew...” she said timidly after a moment’s silence, “I have a great
+      favor to ask of you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it, dear?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No—promise that you will not refuse! It will give you no trouble
+      and is nothing unworthy of you, but it will comfort me. Promise,
+      Andrúsha!...” said she, putting her hand in her reticule but not yet
+      taking out what she was holding inside it, as if what she held were the
+      subject of her request and must not be shown before the request was
+      granted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She looked timidly at her brother.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Even if it were a great deal of trouble...” answered Prince Andrew, as if
+      guessing what it was about.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Think what you please! I know you are just like Father. Think as you
+      please, but do this for my sake! Please do! Father’s father, our
+      grandfather, wore it in all his wars.” (She still did not take out what
+      she was holding in her reticule.) “So you promise?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Of course. What is it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Andrew, I bless you with this icon and you must promise me you will never
+      take it off. Do you promise?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If it does not weigh a hundredweight and won’t break my neck... To please
+      you...” said Prince Andrew. But immediately, noticing the pained
+      expression his joke had brought to his sister’s face, he repented and
+      added: “I am glad; really, dear, I am very glad.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Against your will He will save and have mercy on you and bring you to
+      Himself, for in Him alone is truth and peace,” said she in a voice
+      trembling with emotion, solemnly holding up in both hands before her
+      brother a small, oval, antique, dark-faced icon of the Saviour in a gold
+      setting, on a finely wrought silver chain.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She crossed herself, kissed the icon, and handed it to Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Please, Andrew, for my sake!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rays of gentle light shone from her large, timid eyes. Those eyes lit up
+      the whole of her thin, sickly face and made it beautiful. Her brother
+      would have taken the icon, but she stopped him. Andrew understood, crossed
+      himself and kissed the icon. There was a look of tenderness, for he was
+      touched, but also a gleam of irony on his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Thank you, my dear.” She kissed him on the forehead and sat down again on
+      the sofa. They were silent for a while.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “As I was saying to you, Andrew, be kind and generous as you always used
+      to be. Don’t judge Lise harshly,” she began. “She is so sweet, so
+      good-natured, and her position now is a very hard one.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I do not think I have complained of my wife to you, Másha, or blamed her.
+      Why do you say all this to me?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Red patches appeared on Princess Mary’s face and she was silent as if she
+      felt guilty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have said nothing to you, but you have already been talked to. And I am
+      sorry for that,” he went on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The patches grew deeper on her forehead, neck, and cheeks. She tried to
+      say something but could not. Her brother had guessed right: the little
+      princess had been crying after dinner and had spoken of her forebodings
+      about her confinement, and how she dreaded it, and had complained of her
+      fate, her father-in-law, and her husband. After crying she had fallen
+      asleep. Prince Andrew felt sorry for his sister.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Know this, Másha: I can’t reproach, have not reproached, and never shall
+      reproach <i>my wife</i> with anything, and I cannot reproach myself with
+      anything in regard to her; and that always will be so in whatever
+      circumstances I may be placed. But if you want to know the truth... if you
+      want to know whether I am happy? No! Is she happy? No! But why this is so
+      I don’t know...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      As he said this he rose, went to his sister, and, stooping, kissed her
+      forehead. His fine eyes lit up with a thoughtful, kindly, and unaccustomed
+      brightness, but he was looking not at his sister but over her head toward
+      the darkness of the open doorway.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let us go to her, I must say good-by. Or—go and wake and I’ll come
+      in a moment. Petrúshka!” he called to his valet: “Come here, take these
+      away. Put this on the seat and this to the right.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary rose and moved to the door, then stopped and said: “Andrew,
+      if you had faith you would have turned to God and asked Him to give you
+      the love you do not feel, and your prayer would have been answered.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, maybe!” said Prince Andrew. “Go, Másha; I’ll come immediately.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      On the way to his sister’s room, in the passage which connected one wing
+      with the other, Prince Andrew met Mademoiselle Bourienne smiling sweetly.
+      It was the third time that day that, with an ecstatic and artless smile,
+      she had met him in secluded passages.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh! I thought you were in your room,” she said, for some reason blushing
+      and dropping her eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew looked sternly at her and an expression of anger suddenly
+      came over his face. He said nothing to her but looked at her forehead and
+      hair, without looking at her eyes, with such contempt that the Frenchwoman
+      blushed and went away without a word. When he reached his sister’s room
+      his wife was already awake and her merry voice, hurrying one word after
+      another, came through the open door. She was speaking as usual in French,
+      and as if after long self-restraint she wished to make up for lost time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, but imagine the old Countess Zúbova, with false curls and her mouth
+      full of false teeth, as if she were trying to cheat old age.... Ha, ha,
+      ha! Mary!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      This very sentence about Countess Zúbova and this same laugh Prince Andrew
+      had already heard from his wife in the presence of others some five times.
+      He entered the room softly. The little princess, plump and rosy, was
+      sitting in an easy chair with her work in her hands, talking incessantly,
+      repeating Petersburg reminiscences and even phrases. Prince Andrew came
+      up, stroked her hair, and asked if she felt rested after their journey.
+      She answered him and continued her chatter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The coach with six horses was waiting at the porch. It was an autumn
+      night, so dark that the coachman could not see the carriage pole. Servants
+      with lanterns were bustling about in the porch. The immense house was
+      brilliant with lights shining through its lofty windows. The domestic
+      serfs were crowding in the hall, waiting to bid good-by to the young
+      prince. The members of the household were all gathered in the reception
+      hall: Michael Ivánovich, Mademoiselle Bourienne, Princess Mary, and the
+      little princess. Prince Andrew had been called to his father’s study as
+      the latter wished to say good-by to him alone. All were waiting for them
+      to come out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Prince Andrew entered the study the old man in his old-age spectacles
+      and white dressing gown, in which he received no one but his son, sat at
+      the table writing. He glanced round.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Going?” And he went on writing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ve come to say good-by.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Kiss me here,” and he touched his cheek: “Thanks, thanks!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What do you thank me for?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “For not dilly-dallying and not hanging to a woman’s apron strings. The
+      Service before everything. Thanks, thanks!” And he went on writing, so
+      that his quill spluttered and squeaked. “If you have anything to say, say
+      it. These two things can be done together,” he added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “About my wife... I am ashamed as it is to leave her on your hands....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why talk nonsense? Say what you want.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “When her confinement is due, send to Moscow for an <i>accoucheur</i>....
+      Let him be here....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The old prince stopped writing and, as if not understanding, fixed his
+      stern eyes on his son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I know that no one can help if nature does not do her work,” said Prince
+      Andrew, evidently confused. “I know that out of a million cases only one
+      goes wrong, but it is her fancy and mine. They have been telling her
+      things. She has had a dream and is frightened.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Hm... Hm...” muttered the old prince to himself, finishing what he was
+      writing. “I’ll do it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He signed with a flourish and suddenly turning to his son began to laugh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s a bad business, eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What is bad, Father?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The wife!” said the old prince, briefly and significantly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t understand!” said Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, it can’t be helped, lad,” said the prince. “They’re all like that;
+      one can’t unmarry. Don’t be afraid; I won’t tell anyone, but you know it
+      yourself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He seized his son by the hand with small bony fingers, shook it, looked
+      straight into his son’s face with keen eyes which seemed to see through
+      him, and again laughed his frigid laugh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The son sighed, thus admitting that his father had understood him. The old
+      man continued to fold and seal his letter, snatching up and throwing down
+      the wax, the seal, and the paper, with his accustomed rapidity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s to be done? She’s pretty! I will do everything. Make your mind
+      easy,” said he in abrupt sentences while sealing his letter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Andrew did not speak; he was both pleased and displeased that his father
+      understood him. The old man got up and gave the letter to his son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Listen!” said he; “don’t worry about your wife: what can be done shall
+      be. Now listen! Give this letter to Michael Ilariónovich. * I have written
+      that he should make use of you in proper places and not keep you long as
+      an adjutant: a bad position! Tell him I remember and like him. Write and
+      tell me how he receives you. If he is all right—serve him. Nicholas
+      Bolkónski’s son need not serve under anyone if he is in disfavor. Now come
+      here.”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * Kutúzov.
+</p>
+<p>
+      He spoke so rapidly that he did not finish half his words, but his son was
+      accustomed to understand him. He led him to the desk, raised the lid, drew
+      out a drawer, and took out an exercise book filled with his bold, tall,
+      close handwriting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I shall probably die before you. So remember, these are my memoirs; hand
+      them to the Emperor after my death. Now here is a Lombard bond and a
+      letter; it is a premium for the man who writes a history of Suvórov’s
+      wars. Send it to the Academy. Here are some jottings for you to read when
+      I am gone. You will find them useful.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Andrew did not tell his father that he would no doubt live a long time
+      yet. He felt that he must not say it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I will do it all, Father,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, now, good-by!” He gave his son his hand to kiss, and embraced him.
+      “Remember this, Prince Andrew, if they kill you it will hurt me, your old
+      father...” he paused unexpectedly, and then in a querulous voice suddenly
+      shrieked: “but if I hear that you have not behaved like a son of Nicholas
+      Bolkónski, I shall be ashamed!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You need not have said that to me, Father,” said the son with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old man was silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I also wanted to ask you,” continued Prince Andrew, “if I’m killed and if
+      I have a son, do not let him be taken away from you—as I said
+      yesterday... let him grow up with you.... Please.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Not let the wife have him?” said the old man, and laughed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They stood silent, facing one another. The old man’s sharp eyes were fixed
+      straight on his son’s. Something twitched in the lower part of the old
+      prince’s face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We’ve said good-by. Go!” he suddenly shouted in a loud, angry voice,
+      opening his door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it? What?” asked both princesses when they saw for a moment at
+      the door Prince Andrew and the figure of the old man in a white dressing
+      gown, spectacled and wigless, shouting in an angry voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew sighed and made no reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well!” he said, turning to his wife.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And this “Well!” sounded coldly ironic, as if he were saying: “Now go
+      through your performance.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Andrew, already!” said the little princess, turning pale and looking with
+      dismay at her husband.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He embraced her. She screamed and fell unconscious on his shoulder.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He cautiously released the shoulder she leaned on, looked into her face,
+      and carefully placed her in an easy chair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Adieu, Mary,” said he gently to his sister, taking her by the hand and
+      kissing her, and then he left the room with rapid steps.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The little princess lay in the armchair, Mademoiselle Bourienne chafing
+      her temples. Princess Mary, supporting her sister-in-law, still looked
+      with her beautiful eyes full of tears at the door through which Prince
+      Andrew had gone and made the sign of the cross in his direction. From the
+      study, like pistol shots, came the frequent sound of the old man angrily
+      blowing his nose. Hardly had Prince Andrew gone when the study door opened
+      quickly and the stern figure of the old man in the white dressing gown
+      looked out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Gone? That’s all right!” said he; and looking angrily at the unconscious
+      little princess, he shook his head reprovingly and slammed the door.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0030"></a>
+      BOOK TWO: 1805
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0029"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      In October, 1805, a Russian army was occupying the villages and towns of
+      the Archduchy of Austria, and yet other regiments freshly arriving from
+      Russia were settling near the fortress of Braunau and burdening the
+      inhabitants on whom they were quartered. Braunau was the headquarters of
+      the commander in chief, Kutúzov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On October 11, 1805, one of the infantry regiments that had just reached
+      Braunau had halted half a mile from the town, waiting to be inspected by
+      the commander in chief. Despite the un-Russian appearance of the locality
+      and surroundings—fruit gardens, stone fences, tiled roofs, and hills
+      in the distance—and despite the fact that the inhabitants (who gazed
+      with curiosity at the soldiers) were not Russians, the regiment had just
+      the appearance of any Russian regiment preparing for an inspection
+      anywhere in the heart of Russia.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the evening of the last day’s march an order had been received that the
+      commander in chief would inspect the regiment on the march. Though the
+      words of the order were not clear to the regimental commander, and the
+      question arose whether the troops were to be in marching order or not, it
+      was decided at a consultation between the battalion commanders to present
+      the regiment in parade order, on the principle that it is always better to
+      “bow too low than not bow low enough.” So the soldiers, after a
+      twenty-mile march, were kept mending and cleaning all night long without
+      closing their eyes, while the adjutants and company commanders calculated
+      and reckoned, and by morning the regiment—instead of the straggling,
+      disorderly crowd it had been on its last march the day before—presented
+      a well-ordered array of two thousand men each of whom knew his place and
+      his duty, had every button and every strap in place, and shone with
+      cleanliness. And not only externally was all in order, but had it pleased
+      the commander in chief to look under the uniforms he would have found on
+      every man a clean shirt, and in every knapsack the appointed number of
+      articles, “awl, soap, and all,” as the soldiers say. There was only one
+      circumstance concerning which no one could be at ease. It was the state of
+      the soldiers’ boots. More than half the men’s boots were in holes. But
+      this defect was not due to any fault of the regimental commander, for in
+      spite of repeated demands boots had not been issued by the Austrian
+      commissariat, and the regiment had marched some seven hundred miles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The commander of the regiment was an elderly, choleric, stout, and
+      thick-set general with grizzled eyebrows and whiskers, and wider from
+      chest to back than across the shoulders. He had on a brand-new uniform
+      showing the creases where it had been folded and thick gold epaulettes
+      which seemed to stand rather than lie down on his massive shoulders. He
+      had the air of a man happily performing one of the most solemn duties of
+      his life. He walked about in front of the line and at every step pulled
+      himself up, slightly arching his back. It was plain that the commander
+      admired his regiment, rejoiced in it, and that his whole mind was
+      engrossed by it, yet his strut seemed to indicate that, besides military
+      matters, social interests and the fair sex occupied no small part of his
+      thoughts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, Michael Mítrich, sir?” he said, addressing one of the battalion
+      commanders who smilingly pressed forward (it was plain that they both felt
+      happy). “We had our hands full last night. However, I think the regiment
+      is not a bad one, eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The battalion commander perceived the jovial irony and laughed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It would not be turned off the field even on the Tsarítsin Meadow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What?” asked the commander.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment, on the road from the town on which signalers had been
+      posted, two men appeared on horse back. They were an aide-de-camp followed
+      by a Cossack.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The aide-de-camp was sent to confirm the order which had not been clearly
+      worded the day before, namely, that the commander in chief wished to see
+      the regiment just in the state in which it had been on the march: in their
+      greatcoats, and packs, and without any preparation whatever.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A member of the Hofkriegsrath from Vienna had come to Kutúzov the day
+      before with proposals and demands for him to join up with the army of the
+      Archduke Ferdinand and Mack, and Kutúzov, not considering this junction
+      advisable, meant, among other arguments in support of his view, to show
+      the Austrian general the wretched state in which the troops arrived from
+      Russia. With this object he intended to meet the regiment; so the worse
+      the condition it was in, the better pleased the commander in chief would
+      be. Though the aide-de-camp did not know these circumstances, he
+      nevertheless delivered the definite order that the men should be in their
+      greatcoats and in marching order, and that the commander in chief would
+      otherwise be dissatisfied. On hearing this the regimental commander hung
+      his head, silently shrugged his shoulders, and spread out his arms with a
+      choleric gesture.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A fine mess we’ve made of it!” he remarked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There now! Didn’t I tell you, Michael Mítrich, that if it was said ‘on
+      the march’ it meant in greatcoats?” said he reproachfully to the battalion
+      commander. “Oh, my God!” he added, stepping resolutely forward. “Company
+      commanders!” he shouted in a voice accustomed to command. “Sergeants
+      major!... How soon will he be here?” he asked the aide-de-camp with a
+      respectful politeness evidently relating to the personage he was referring
+      to.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In an hour’s time, I should say.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Shall we have time to change clothes?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t know, General....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The regimental commander, going up to the line himself, ordered the
+      soldiers to change into their greatcoats. The company commanders ran off
+      to their companies, the sergeants major began bustling (the greatcoats
+      were not in very good condition), and instantly the squares that had up to
+      then been in regular order and silent began to sway and stretch and hum
+      with voices. On all sides soldiers were running to and fro, throwing up
+      their knapsacks with a jerk of their shoulders and pulling the straps over
+      their heads, unstrapping their overcoats and drawing the sleeves on with
+      upraised arms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In half an hour all was again in order, only the squares had become gray
+      instead of black. The regimental commander walked with his jerky steps to
+      the front of the regiment and examined it from a distance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Whatever is this? This!” he shouted and stood still. “Commander of the
+      third company!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Commander of the third company wanted by the general!... commander to the
+      general... third company to the commander.” The words passed along the
+      lines and an adjutant ran to look for the missing officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the eager but misrepeated words had reached their destination in a
+      cry of: “The general to the third company,” the missing officer appeared
+      from behind his company and, though he was a middle-aged man and not in
+      the habit of running, trotted awkwardly stumbling on his toes toward the
+      general. The captain’s face showed the uneasiness of a schoolboy who is
+      told to repeat a lesson he has not learned. Spots appeared on his nose,
+      the redness of which was evidently due to intemperance, and his mouth
+      twitched nervously. The general looked the captain up and down as he came
+      up panting, slackening his pace as he approached.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You will soon be dressing your men in petticoats! What is this?” shouted
+      the regimental commander, thrusting forward his jaw and pointing at a
+      soldier in the ranks of the third company in a greatcoat of bluish cloth,
+      which contrasted with the others. “What have you been after? The commander
+      in chief is expected and you leave your place? Eh? I’ll teach you to dress
+      the men in fancy coats for a parade.... Eh...?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The commander of the company, with his eyes fixed on his superior, pressed
+      two fingers more and more rigidly to his cap, as if in this pressure lay
+      his only hope of salvation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, why don’t you speak? Whom have you got there dressed up as a
+      Hungarian?” said the commander with an austere gibe.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, your excellency, what? Your excellency! But what about your
+      excellency?... nobody knows.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency, it’s the officer Dólokhov, who has been reduced to the
+      ranks,” said the captain softly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well? Has he been degraded into a field marshal, or into a soldier? If a
+      soldier, he should be dressed in regulation uniform like the others.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency, you gave him leave yourself, on the march.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Gave him leave? Leave? That’s just like you young men,” said the
+      regimental commander cooling down a little. “Leave indeed.... One says a
+      word to you and you... What?” he added with renewed irritation, “I beg you
+      to dress your men decently.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the commander, turning to look at the adjutant, directed his jerky
+      steps down the line. He was evidently pleased at his own display of anger
+      and walking up to the regiment wished to find a further excuse for wrath.
+      Having snapped at an officer for an unpolished badge, at another because
+      his line was not straight, he reached the third company.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “H-o-o-w are you standing? Where’s your leg? Your leg?” shouted the
+      commander with a tone of suffering in his voice, while there were still
+      five men between him and Dólokhov with his bluish-gray uniform.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov slowly straightened his bent knee, looking straight with his
+      clear, insolent eyes in the general’s face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why a blue coat? Off with it... Sergeant major! Change his coat... the
+      ras...” he did not finish.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “General, I must obey orders, but I am not bound to endure...” Dólokhov
+      hurriedly interrupted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No talking in the ranks!... No talking, no talking!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Not bound to endure insults,” Dólokhov concluded in loud, ringing tones.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The eyes of the general and the soldier met. The general became silent,
+      angrily pulling down his tight scarf.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I request you to have the goodness to change your coat,” he said as he
+      turned away.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0030"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      “He’s coming!” shouted the signaler at that moment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The regimental commander, flushing, ran to his horse, seized the stirrup
+      with trembling hands, threw his body across the saddle, righted himself,
+      drew his saber, and with a happy and resolute countenance, opening his
+      mouth awry, prepared to shout. The regiment fluttered like a bird preening
+      its plumage and became motionless.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Att-ention!” shouted the regimental commander in a soul-shaking voice
+      which expressed joy for himself, severity for the regiment, and welcome
+      for the approaching chief.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Along the broad country road, edged on both sides by trees, came a high,
+      light blue Viennese <i>calèche</i>, slightly creaking on its springs and
+      drawn by six horses at a smart trot. Behind the <i>calèche</i> galloped
+      the suite and a convoy of Croats. Beside Kutúzov sat an Austrian general,
+      in a white uniform that looked strange among the Russian black ones. The
+      <i>calèche</i> stopped in front of the regiment. Kutúzov and the Austrian
+      general were talking in low voices and Kutúzov smiled slightly as treading
+      heavily he stepped down from the carriage just as if those two thousand
+      men breathlessly gazing at him and the regimental commander did not exist.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The word of command rang out, and again the regiment quivered, as with a
+      jingling sound it presented arms. Then amidst a dead silence the feeble
+      voice of the commander in chief was heard. The regiment roared, “Health to
+      your ex... len... len... lency!” and again all became silent. At first
+      Kutúzov stood still while the regiment moved; then he and the general in
+      white, accompanied by the suite, walked between the ranks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the way the regimental commander saluted the commander in chief and
+      devoured him with his eyes, drawing himself up obsequiously, and from the
+      way he walked through the ranks behind the generals, bending forward and
+      hardly able to restrain his jerky movements, and from the way he darted
+      forward at every word or gesture of the commander in chief, it was evident
+      that he performed his duty as a subordinate with even greater zeal than
+      his duty as a commander. Thanks to the strictness and assiduity of its
+      commander the regiment, in comparison with others that had reached Braunau
+      at the same time, was in splendid condition. There were only 217 sick and
+      stragglers. Everything was in good order except the boots.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov walked through the ranks, sometimes stopping to say a few friendly
+      words to officers he had known in the Turkish war, sometimes also to the
+      soldiers. Looking at their boots he several times shook his head sadly,
+      pointing them out to the Austrian general with an expression which seemed
+      to say that he was not blaming anyone, but could not help noticing what a
+      bad state of things it was. The regimental commander ran forward on each
+      such occasion, fearing to miss a single word of the commander in chief’s
+      regarding the regiment. Behind Kutúzov, at a distance that allowed every
+      softly spoken word to be heard, followed some twenty men of his suite.
+      These gentlemen talked among themselves and sometimes laughed. Nearest of
+      all to the commander in chief walked a handsome adjutant. This was Prince
+      Bolkónski. Beside him was his comrade Nesvítski, a tall staff officer,
+      extremely stout, with a kindly, smiling, handsome face and moist eyes.
+      Nesvítski could hardly keep from laughter provoked by a swarthy hussar
+      officer who walked beside him. This hussar, with a grave face and without
+      a smile or a change in the expression of his fixed eyes, watched the
+      regimental commander’s back and mimicked his every movement. Each time the
+      commander started and bent forward, the hussar started and bent forward in
+      exactly the same manner. Nesvítski laughed and nudged the others to make
+      them look at the wag.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov walked slowly and languidly past thousands of eyes which were
+      starting from their sockets to watch their chief. On reaching the third
+      company he suddenly stopped. His suite, not having expected this,
+      involuntarily came closer to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, Timókhin!” said he, recognizing the red-nosed captain who had been
+      reprimanded on account of the blue greatcoat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One would have thought it impossible for a man to stretch himself more
+      than Timókhin had done when he was reprimanded by the regimental
+      commander, but now that the commander in chief addressed him he drew
+      himself up to such an extent that it seemed he could not have sustained it
+      had the commander in chief continued to look at him, and so Kutúzov, who
+      evidently understood his case and wished him nothing but good, quickly
+      turned away, a scarcely perceptible smile flitting over his scarred and
+      puffy face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Another Ismail comrade,” said he. “A brave officer! Are you satisfied
+      with him?” he asked the regimental commander.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And the latter—unconscious that he was being reflected in the hussar
+      officer as in a looking glass—started, moved forward, and answered:
+      “Highly satisfied, your excellency!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “We all have our weaknesses,” said Kutúzov smiling and walking away from
+      him. “He used to have a predilection for Bacchus.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The regimental commander was afraid he might be blamed for this and did
+      not answer. The hussar at that moment noticed the face of the red-nosed
+      captain and his drawn-in stomach, and mimicked his expression and pose
+      with such exactitude that Nesvítski could not help laughing. Kutúzov
+      turned round. The officer evidently had complete control of his face, and
+      while Kutúzov was turning managed to make a grimace and then assume a most
+      serious, deferential, and innocent expression.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The third company was the last, and Kutúzov pondered, apparently trying to
+      recollect something. Prince Andrew stepped forward from among the suite
+      and said in French:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You told me to remind you of the officer Dólokhov, reduced to the ranks
+      in this regiment.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Where is Dólokhov?” asked Kutúzov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov, who had already changed into a soldier’s gray greatcoat, did not
+      wait to be called. The shapely figure of the fair-haired soldier, with his
+      clear blue eyes, stepped forward from the ranks, went up to the commander
+      in chief, and presented arms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Have you a complaint to make?” Kutúzov asked with a slight frown.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This is Dólokhov,” said Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah!” said Kutúzov. “I hope this will be a lesson to you. Do your duty.
+      The Emperor is gracious, and I shan’t forget you if you deserve well.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The clear blue eyes looked at the commander in chief just as boldly as
+      they had looked at the regimental commander, seeming by their expression
+      to tear open the veil of convention that separates a commander in chief so
+      widely from a private.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One thing I ask of your excellency,” Dólokhov said in his firm, ringing,
+      deliberate voice. “I ask an opportunity to atone for my fault and prove my
+      devotion to His Majesty the Emperor and to Russia!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov turned away. The same smile of the eyes with which he had turned
+      from Captain Timókhin again flitted over his face. He turned away with a
+      grimace as if to say that everything Dólokhov had said to him and
+      everything he could say had long been known to him, that he was weary of
+      it and it was not at all what he wanted. He turned away and went to the
+      carriage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The regiment broke up into companies, which went to their appointed
+      quarters near Braunau, where they hoped to receive boots and clothes and
+      to rest after their hard marches.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You won’t bear me a grudge, Prokhór Ignátych?” said the regimental
+      commander, overtaking the third company on its way to its quarters and
+      riding up to Captain Timókhin who was walking in front. (The regimental
+      commander’s face now that the inspection was happily over beamed with
+      irrepressible delight.) “It’s in the Emperor’s service... it can’t be
+      helped... one is sometimes a bit hasty on parade... I am the first to
+      apologize, you know me!... He was very pleased!” And he held out his hand
+      to the captain.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t mention it, General, as if I’d be so bold!” replied the captain,
+      his nose growing redder as he gave a smile which showed where two front teeth
+      were missing that had been knocked out by the butt end of a gun at Ismail.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And tell Mr. Dólokhov that I won’t forget him—he may be quite easy.
+      And tell me, please—I’ve been meaning to ask—how is he
+      behaving himself, and in general...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “As far as the service goes he is quite punctilious, your excellency; but
+      his character...” said Timókhin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And what about his character?” asked the regimental commander.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s different on different days,” answered the captain. “One day he is
+      sensible, well educated, and good-natured, and the next he’s a wild
+      beast.... In Poland, if you please, he nearly killed a Jew.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, well, well!” remarked the regimental commander. “Still, one must have
+      pity on a young man in misfortune. You know he has important
+      connections... Well, then, you just...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I will, your excellency,” said Timókhin, showing by his smile that he
+      understood his commander’s wish.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, of course, of course!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The regimental commander sought out Dólokhov in the ranks and, reining in
+      his horse, said to him:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “After the next affair... epaulettes.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov looked round but did not say anything, nor did the mocking smile
+      on his lips change.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, that’s all right,” continued the regimental commander. “A cup of
+      vodka for the men from me,” he added so that the soldiers could hear. “I
+      thank you all! God be praised!” and he rode past that company and overtook
+      the next one.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, he’s really a good fellow, one can serve under him,” said Timókhin
+      to the subaltern beside him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In a word, a hearty one...” said the subaltern, laughing (the regimental
+      commander was nicknamed <i>King of Hearts</i>).
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The cheerful mood of their officers after the inspection infected the
+      soldiers. The company marched on gaily. The soldiers’ voices could be
+      heard on every side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And they said Kutúzov was blind of one eye?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And so he is! Quite blind!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, friend, he is sharper-eyed than you are. Boots and leg bands... he
+      noticed everything...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “When he looked at my feet, friend... well, thinks I...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And that other one with him, the Austrian, looked as if he were smeared
+      with chalk—as white as flour! I suppose they polish him up as they
+      do the guns.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I say, Fédeshon!... Did he say when the battles are to begin? You were
+      near him. Everybody said that Buonaparte himself was at Braunau.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Buonaparte himself!... Just listen to the fool, what he doesn’t know! The
+      Prussians are up in arms now. The Austrians, you see, are putting them
+      down. When they’ve been put down, the war with Buonaparte will begin. And
+      he says Buonaparte is in Braunau! Shows you’re a fool. You’d better listen
+      more carefully!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What devils these quartermasters are! See, the fifth company is turning
+      into the village already... they will have their buckwheat cooked before
+      we reach our quarters.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Give me a biscuit, you devil!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And did you give me tobacco yesterday? That’s just it, friend! Ah, well,
+      never mind, here you are.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “They might call a halt here or we’ll have to do another four miles
+      without eating.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Wasn’t it fine when those Germans gave us lifts! You just sit still and
+      are drawn along.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And here, friend, the people are quite beggarly. There they all seemed to
+      be Poles—all under the Russian crown—but here they’re all
+      regular Germans.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Singers to the front” came the captain’s order.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And from the different ranks some twenty men ran to the front. A drummer,
+      their leader, turned round facing the singers, and flourishing his arm,
+      began a long-drawn-out soldiers’ song, commencing with the words: <i>“Morning
+      dawned, the sun was rising,”</i> and concluding: <i>“On then, brothers, on to
+      glory, led by Father Kámenski.”</i> This song had been composed in the Turkish
+      campaign and now being sung in Austria, the only change being that the
+      words “Father Kámenski” were replaced by “Father Kutúzov.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Having jerked out these last words as soldiers do and waved his arms as if
+      flinging something to the ground, the drummer—a lean, handsome
+      soldier of forty—looked sternly at the singers and screwed up his
+      eyes. Then having satisfied himself that all eyes were fixed on him, he
+      raised both arms as if carefully lifting some invisible but precious
+      object above his head and, holding it there for some seconds, suddenly
+      flung it down and began:
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Oh, my bower, oh, my bower...!”</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>“Oh, my bower new...!”</i> chimed in twenty voices, and the castanet player,
+      in spite of the burden of his equipment, rushed out to the front and,
+      walking backwards before the company, jerked his shoulders and flourished
+      his castanets as if threatening someone. The soldiers, swinging their arms
+      and keeping time spontaneously, marched with long steps. Behind the
+      company the sound of wheels, the creaking of springs, and the tramp of
+      horses’ hoofs were heard. Kutúzov and his suite were returning to the
+      town. The commander in chief made a sign that the men should continue to
+      march at ease, and he and all his suite showed pleasure at the sound of
+      the singing and the sight of the dancing soldier and the gay and smartly
+      marching men. In the second file from the right flank, beside which the
+      carriage passed the company, a blue-eyed soldier involuntarily attracted
+      notice. It was Dólokhov marching with particular grace and boldness in
+      time to the song and looking at those driving past as if he pitied all who
+      were not at that moment marching with the company. The hussar cornet of
+      Kutúzov’s suite who had mimicked the regimental commander, fell back from
+      the carriage and rode up to Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Hussar cornet Zherkóv had at one time, in Petersburg, belonged to the wild
+      set led by Dólokhov. Zherkóv had met Dólokhov abroad as a private and had
+      not seen fit to recognize him. But now that Kutúzov had spoken to the
+      gentleman ranker, he addressed him with the cordiality of an old friend.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear fellow, how are you?” said he through the singing, making his
+      horse keep pace with the company.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How am I?” Dólokhov answered coldly. “I am as you see.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The lively song gave a special flavor to the tone of free and easy gaiety
+      with which Zherkóv spoke, and to the intentional coldness of Dólokhov’s
+      reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And how do you get on with the officers?” inquired Zherkóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All right. They are good fellows. And how have you wriggled onto the
+      staff?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I was attached; I’m on duty.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Both were silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“She let the hawk fly upward from her wide right sleeve,”</i> went the song,
+      arousing an involuntary sensation of courage and cheerfulness. Their
+      conversation would probably have been different but for the effect of that
+      song.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is it true that Austrians have been beaten?” asked Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The devil only knows! They say so.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I’m glad,” answered Dólokhov briefly and clearly, as the song demanded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I say, come round some evening and we’ll have a game of faro!” said
+      Zherkóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, have you too much money?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Do come.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I can’t. I’ve sworn not to. I won’t drink and won’t play till I get
+      reinstated.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, that’s only till the first engagement.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “We shall see.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They were again silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come if you need anything. One can at least be of use on the staff...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov smiled. “Don’t trouble. If I want anything, I won’t beg—I’ll
+      take it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, never mind; I only...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And I only...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Good-by.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Good health...”
+     </p>
+<p class="poem">
+<i>“It’s a long, long way.<br>
+        To my native land...”</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Zherkóv touched his horse with the spurs; it pranced excitedly from foot
+      to foot uncertain with which to start, then settled down, galloped past
+      the company, and overtook the carriage, still keeping time to the song.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0031"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On returning from the review, Kutúzov took the Austrian general into his
+      private room and, calling his adjutant, asked for some papers relating to
+      the condition of the troops on their arrival, and the letters that had
+      come from the Archduke Ferdinand, who was in command of the advanced army.
+      Prince Andrew Bolkónski came into the room with the required papers.
+      Kutúzov and the Austrian member of the Hofkriegsrath were sitting at the
+      table on which a plan was spread out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah!...” said Kutúzov glancing at Bolkónski as if by this exclamation he
+      was asking the adjutant to wait, and he went on with the conversation in
+      French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All I can say, General,” said he with a pleasant elegance of expression
+      and intonation that obliged one to listen to each deliberately spoken
+      word. It was evident that Kutúzov himself listened with pleasure to his
+      own voice. “All I can say, General, is that if the matter depended on my
+      personal wishes, the will of His Majesty the Emperor Francis would have
+      been fulfilled long ago. I should long ago have joined the archduke. And
+      believe me on my honour that to me personally it would be a pleasure to
+      hand over the supreme command of the army into the hands of a better
+      informed and more skillful general—of whom Austria has so many—and
+      to lay down all this heavy responsibility. But circumstances are sometimes
+      too strong for us, General.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Kutúzov smiled in a way that seemed to say, “You are quite at liberty
+      not to believe me and I don’t even care whether you do or not, but you
+      have no grounds for telling me so. And that is the whole point.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The Austrian general looked dissatisfied, but had no option but to reply
+      in the same tone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “On the contrary,” he said, in a querulous and angry tone that contrasted
+      with his flattering words, “on the contrary, your excellency’s
+      participation in the common action is highly valued by His Majesty; but we
+      think the present delay is depriving the splendid Russian troops and their
+      commander of the laurels they have been accustomed to win in their
+      battles,” he concluded his evidently prearranged sentence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov bowed with the same smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But that is my conviction, and judging by the last letter with which His
+      Highness the Archduke Ferdinand has honored me, I imagine that the
+      Austrian troops, under the direction of so skillful a leader as General
+      Mack, have by now already gained a decisive victory and no longer need our
+      aid,” said Kutúzov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The general frowned. Though there was no definite news of an Austrian
+      defeat, there were many circumstances confirming the unfavorable rumors
+      that were afloat, and so Kutúzov’s suggestion of an Austrian victory
+      sounded much like irony. But Kutúzov went on blandly smiling with the same
+      expression, which seemed to say that he had a right to suppose so. And, in
+      fact, the last letter he had received from Mack’s army informed him of a
+      victory and stated strategically the position of the army was very
+      favorable.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Give me that letter,” said Kutúzov turning to Prince Andrew. “Please have
+      a look at it”—and Kutúzov with an ironical smile about the corners
+      of his mouth read to the Austrian general the following passage, in
+      German, from the Archduke Ferdinand’s letter:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      We have fully concentrated forces of nearly seventy thousand men with
+      which to attack and defeat the enemy should he cross the Lech. Also, as we
+      are masters of Ulm, we cannot be deprived of the advantage of commanding
+      both sides of the Danube, so that should the enemy not cross the Lech, we
+      can cross the Danube, throw ourselves on his line of communications,
+      recross the river lower down, and frustrate his intention should he try to
+      direct his whole force against our faithful ally. We shall therefore
+      confidently await the moment when the Imperial Russian army will be fully
+      equipped, and shall then, in conjunction with it, easily find a way to
+      prepare for the enemy the fate he deserves.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov sighed deeply on finishing this paragraph and looked at the member
+      of the Hofkriegsrath mildly and attentively.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But you know the wise maxim your excellency, advising one to expect the
+      worst,” said the Austrian general, evidently wishing to have done with
+      jests and to come to business. He involuntarily looked round at the
+      aide-de-camp.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Excuse me, General,” interrupted Kutúzov, also turning to Prince Andrew.
+      “Look here, my dear fellow, get from Kozlóvski all the reports from our
+      scouts. Here are two letters from Count Nostitz and here is one from His
+      Highness the Archduke Ferdinand and here are these,” he said, handing him
+      several papers, “make a neat memorandum in French out of all this, showing
+      all the news we have had of the movements of the Austrian army, and then
+      give it to his excellency.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew bowed his head in token of having understood from the first
+      not only what had been said but also what Kutúzov would have liked to tell
+      him. He gathered up the papers and with a bow to both, stepped softly over
+      the carpet and went out into the waiting room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though not much time had passed since Prince Andrew had left Russia, he
+      had changed greatly during that period. In the expression of his face, in
+      his movements, in his walk, scarcely a trace was left of his former
+      affected languor and indolence. He now looked like a man who has time to
+      think of the impression he makes on others, but is occupied with agreeable
+      and interesting work. His face expressed more satisfaction with himself
+      and those around him, his smile and glance were brighter and more
+      attractive.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov, whom he had overtaken in Poland, had received him very kindly,
+      promised not to forget him, distinguished him above the other adjutants,
+      and had taken him to Vienna and given him the more serious commissions.
+      From Vienna Kutúzov wrote to his old comrade, Prince Andrew’s father.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Your son bids fair to become an officer distinguished by his industry,
+      firmness, and expedition. I consider myself fortunate to have such a
+      subordinate by me.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On Kutúzov’s staff, among his fellow officers and in the army generally,
+      Prince Andrew had, as he had had in Petersburg society, two quite opposite
+      reputations. Some, a minority, acknowledged him to be different from
+      themselves and from everyone else, expected great things of him, listened
+      to him, admired, and imitated him, and with them Prince Andrew was natural
+      and pleasant. Others, the majority, disliked him and considered him
+      conceited, cold, and disagreeable. But among these people Prince Andrew
+      knew how to take his stand so that they respected and even feared him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Coming out of Kutúzov’s room into the waiting room with the papers in his
+      hand Prince Andrew came up to his comrade, the aide-de-camp on duty,
+      Kozlóvski, who was sitting at the window with a book.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, Prince?” asked Kozlóvski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am ordered to write a memorandum explaining why we are not advancing.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And why is it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew shrugged his shoulders.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Any news from Mack?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If it were true that he has been beaten, news would have come.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Probably,” said Prince Andrew moving toward the outer door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But at that instant a tall Austrian general in a greatcoat, with the order
+      of Maria Theresa on his neck and a black bandage round his head, who had
+      evidently just arrived, entered quickly, slamming the door. Prince Andrew
+      stopped short.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Commander in Chief Kutúzov?” said the newly arrived general speaking
+      quickly with a harsh German accent, looking to both sides and advancing
+      straight toward the inner door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The commander in chief is engaged,” said Kozlóvski, going hurriedly up to
+      the unknown general and blocking his way to the door. “Whom shall I
+      announce?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The unknown general looked disdainfully down at Kozlóvski, who was rather
+      short, as if surprised that anyone should not know him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The commander in chief is engaged,” repeated Kozlóvski calmly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The general’s face clouded, his lips quivered and trembled. He took out a
+      notebook, hurriedly scribbled something in pencil, tore out the leaf, gave
+      it to Kozlóvski, stepped quickly to the window, and threw himself into a
+      chair, gazing at those in the room as if asking, “Why do they look at me?”
+       Then he lifted his head, stretched his neck as if he intended to say
+      something, but immediately, with affected indifference, began to hum to
+      himself, producing a queer sound which immediately broke off. The door of
+      the private room opened and Kutúzov appeared in the doorway. The general
+      with the bandaged head bent forward as though running away from some
+      danger, and, making long, quick strides with his thin legs, went up to
+      Kutúzov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Vous voyez le malheureux Mack,”</i> he uttered in a broken voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov’s face as he stood in the open doorway remained perfectly immobile
+      for a few moments. Then wrinkles ran over his face like a wave and his
+      forehead became smooth again, he bowed his head respectfully, closed his
+      eyes, silently let Mack enter his room before him, and closed the door
+      himself behind him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The report which had been circulated that the Austrians had been beaten
+      and that the whole army had surrendered at Ulm proved to be correct.
+      Within half an hour adjutants had been sent in various directions with
+      orders which showed that the Russian troops, who had hitherto been
+      inactive, would also soon have to meet the enemy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew was one of those rare staff officers whose chief interest
+      lay in the general progress of the war. When he saw Mack and heard the
+      details of his disaster he understood that half the campaign was lost,
+      understood all the difficulties of the Russian army’s position, and
+      vividly imagined what awaited it and the part he would have to play.
+      Involuntarily he felt a joyful agitation at the thought of the humiliation
+      of arrogant Austria and that in a week’s time he might, perhaps, see and
+      take part in the first Russian encounter with the French since Suvórov met
+      them. He feared that Bonaparte’s genius might outweigh all the courage of
+      the Russian troops, and at the same time could not admit the idea of his
+      hero being disgraced.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Excited and irritated by these thoughts Prince Andrew went toward his room
+      to write to his father, to whom he wrote every day. In the corridor he met
+      Nesvítski, with whom he shared a room, and the wag Zherkóv; they were as
+      usual laughing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why are you so glum?” asked Nesvítski noticing Prince Andrew’s pale face
+      and glittering eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There’s nothing to be gay about,” answered Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just as Prince Andrew met Nesvítski and Zherkóv, there came toward them
+      from the other end of the corridor, Strauch, an Austrian general who was on
+      Kutúzov’s staff in charge of the provisioning of the Russian army, and the
+      member of the Hofkriegsrath who had arrived the previous evening. There
+      was room enough in the wide corridor for the generals to pass the three
+      officers quite easily, but Zherkóv, pushing Nesvítski aside with his arm,
+      said in a breathless voice,
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They’re coming!... they’re coming!... Stand aside, make way, please make
+      way!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The generals were passing by, looking as if they wished to avoid
+      embarrassing attentions. On the face of the wag Zherkóv there suddenly
+      appeared a stupid smile of glee which he seemed unable to suppress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency,” said he in German, stepping forward and addressing the
+      Austrian general, “I have the honor to congratulate you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He bowed his head and scraped first with one foot and then with the other,
+      awkwardly, like a child at a dancing lesson.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The member of the Hofkriegsrath looked at him severely but, seeing the
+      seriousness of his stupid smile, could not but give him a moment’s
+      attention. He screwed up his eyes showing that he was listening.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have the honor to congratulate you. General Mack has arrived, quite
+      well, only a little bruised just here,” he added, pointing with a beaming
+      smile to his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The general frowned, turned away, and went on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Gott, wie naiv!”</i> * said he angrily, after he had gone a few steps.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “Good God, what simplicity!”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Nesvítski with a laugh threw his arms round Prince Andrew, but Bolkónski,
+      turning still paler, pushed him away with an angry look and turned to
+      Zherkóv. The nervous irritation aroused by the appearance of Mack, the
+      news of his defeat, and the thought of what lay before the Russian army
+      found vent in anger at Zherkóv’s untimely jest.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If you, sir, choose to make a <i>buffoon</i> of yourself,” he said
+      sharply, with a slight trembling of the lower jaw, “I can’t prevent
+      your doing so; but I warn you that if you <i>dare</i> to play the fool in my
+      presence, I will teach you to behave yourself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Nesvítski and Zherkóv were so surprised by this outburst that they gazed
+      at Bolkónski silently with wide-open eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s the matter? I only congratulated them,” said Zherkóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am not jesting with you; please be silent!” cried Bolkónski, and taking
+      Nesvítski’s arm he left Zherkóv, who did not know what to say.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come, what’s the matter, old fellow?” said Nesvítski trying to soothe
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s the matter?” exclaimed Prince Andrew standing still in
+      his excitement. “Don’t you understand that either we are officers
+      serving our Tsar and our country, rejoicing in the successes and grieving at the
+      misfortunes of our common cause, or we are merely lackeys who care nothing
+      for their master’s business. <i>Quarante mille hommes massacrés et l’armée de
+      nos alliés détruite, et vous trouvez là le mot pour rire,”</i> * he said, as
+      if strengthening his views by this French sentence. <i>“C’est bien pour un
+      garçon de rien comme cet individu dont vous avez fait un ami, mais pas
+      pour vous, pas pour vous</i>. *(2) Only a <i>hobbledehoy</i> could amuse himself in
+      this way,” he added in Russian—but pronouncing the word with a
+      French accent—having noticed that Zherkóv could still hear him.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “Forty thousand men massacred and the army of our allies
+     destroyed, and you find that a cause for jesting!”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * (2) “It is all very well for that good-for-nothing fellow
+     of whom you have made a friend, but not for you, not for
+     you.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      He waited a moment to see whether the cornet would answer, but he turned
+      and went out of the corridor.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0032"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The Pávlograd Hussars were stationed two miles from Braunau. The squadron
+      in which Nicholas Rostóv served as a cadet was quartered in the German
+      village of Salzeneck. The best quarters in the village were assigned to
+      cavalry-captain Denísov, the squadron commander, known throughout the
+      whole cavalry division as Váska Denísov. Cadet Rostóv, ever since he had
+      overtaken the regiment in Poland, had lived with the squadron commander.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On October 11, the day when all was astir at headquarters over the news of
+      Mack’s defeat, the camp life of the officers of this squadron was
+      proceeding as usual. Denísov, who had been losing at cards all night, had
+      not yet come home when Rostóv rode back early in the morning from a
+      foraging expedition. Rostóv in his cadet uniform, with a jerk to his
+      horse, rode up to the porch, swung his leg over the saddle with a supple
+      youthful movement, stood for a moment in the stirrup as if loathe to part
+      from his horse, and at last sprang down and called to his orderly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, Bondarénko, dear friend!” said he to the hussar who rushed up
+      headlong to the horse. “Walk him up and down, my dear fellow,” he
+      continued, with that gay brotherly cordiality which goodhearted young
+      people show to everyone when they are happy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, your excellency,” answered the Ukrainian gaily, tossing his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mind, walk him up and down well!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Another hussar also rushed toward the horse, but Bondarénko had already
+      thrown the reins of the snaffle bridle over the horse’s head. It was
+      evident that the cadet was liberal with his tips and that it paid to serve
+      him. Rostóv patted the horse’s neck and then his flank, and lingered for a
+      moment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Splendid! What a horse he will be!” he thought with a smile, and holding
+      up his saber, his spurs jingling, he ran up the steps of the porch. His
+      landlord, who in a waistcoat and a pointed cap, pitchfork in hand, was
+      clearing manure from the cowhouse, looked out, and his face immediately
+      brightened on seeing Rostóv. <i>“Schön gut Morgen! Schön gut Morgen!”</i> * he
+      said winking with a merry smile, evidently pleased to greet the young man.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “A very good morning! A very good morning!”
+ </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Schon fleissig?”</i> * said Rostóv with the same gay brotherly smile which
+      did not leave his eager face. <i>“Hoch Oestreicher! Hoch Russen! Kaiser
+      Alexander hoch!”</i> *(2) said he, quoting words often repeated by the German
+      landlord.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Busy already?”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * (2) “Hurrah for the Austrians! Hurrah for the Russians!
+     Hurrah for Emperor Alexander!”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      The German laughed, came out of the cowshed, pulled off his cap, and
+      waving it above his head cried:
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Und die ganze Welt hoch!”</i> *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “And hurrah for the whole world!”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv waved his cap above his head like the German and cried laughing,
+      <i>“Und vivat die ganze Welt!”</i> Though neither the German cleaning his cowshed
+      nor Rostóv back with his platoon from foraging for hay had any reason for
+      rejoicing, they looked at each other with joyful delight and brotherly
+      love, wagged their heads in token of their mutual affection, and parted
+      smiling, the German returning to his cowshed and Rostóv going to the
+      cottage he occupied with Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What about your master?” he asked Lavrúshka, Denísov’s orderly, whom all
+      the regiment knew for a rogue.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hasn’t been in since the evening. Must have been losing,” answered
+      Lavrúshka. “I know by now, if he wins he comes back early to brag about
+      it, but if he stays out till morning it means he’s lost and will come back
+      in a rage. Will you have coffee?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, bring some.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Ten minutes later Lavrúshka brought the coffee. “He’s coming!” said he.
+      “Now for trouble!” Rostóv looked out of the window and saw Denísov coming
+      home. Denísov was a small man with a red face, sparkling black eyes, and
+      black tousled mustache and hair. He wore an unfastened cloak, wide
+      breeches hanging down in creases, and a crumpled shako on the back of his
+      head. He came up to the porch gloomily, hanging his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lavwúska!” he shouted loudly and angrily, “take it off, blockhead!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, I am taking it off,” replied Lavrúshka’s voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, you’re up already,” said Denísov, entering the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Long ago,” answered Rostóv, “I have already been for the hay, and have
+      seen Fräulein Mathilde.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Weally! And I’ve been losing, bwother. I lost yesterday like a damned
+      fool!” cried Denísov, not pronouncing his <i>r</i>’s. “Such ill luck! Such ill
+      luck. As soon as you left, it began and went on. Hullo there! Tea!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Puckering up his face though smiling, and showing his short strong teeth,
+      he began with stubby fingers of both hands to ruffle up his thick tangled
+      black hair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And what devil made me go to that wat?” (an officer nicknamed “the rat”)
+      he said, rubbing his forehead and whole face with both hands. “Just fancy,
+      he didn’t let me win a single cahd, not one cahd.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He took the lighted pipe that was offered to him, gripped it in his fist,
+      and tapped it on the floor, making the sparks fly, while he continued to
+      shout.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He lets one win the singles and collahs it as soon as one doubles it;
+      gives the singles and snatches the doubles!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He scattered the burning tobacco, smashed the pipe, and threw it away.
+      Then he remained silent for a while, and all at once looked cheerfully
+      with his glittering, black eyes at Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If at least we had some women here; but there’s nothing foh one to do but
+      dwink. If we could only get to fighting soon. Hullo, who’s there?” he
+      said, turning to the door as he heard a tread of heavy boots and the
+      clinking of spurs that came to a stop, and a respectful cough.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The squadron quartermaster!” said Lavrúshka.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov’s face puckered still more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Wetched!” he muttered, throwing down a purse with some gold in it.
+      “Wostóv, deah fellow, just see how much there is left and shove the purse
+      undah the pillow,” he said, and went out to the quartermaster.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv took the money and, mechanically arranging the old and new coins in
+      separate piles, began counting them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah! Telyánin! How d’ye do? They plucked me last night,” came Denísov’s
+      voice from the next room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where? At Bykov’s, at the rat’s... I knew it,” replied a piping voice,
+      and Lieutenant Telyánin, a small officer of the same squadron, entered the
+      room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv thrust the purse under the pillow and shook the damp little hand
+      which was offered him. Telyánin for some reason had been transferred from
+      the Guards just before this campaign. He behaved very well in the regiment
+      but was not liked; Rostóv especially detested him and was unable to
+      overcome or conceal his groundless antipathy to the man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, young cavalryman, how is my Rook behaving?” he asked. (Rook was a
+      young horse Telyánin had sold to Rostóv.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The lieutenant never looked the man he was speaking to straight in the
+      face; his eyes continually wandered from one object to another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I saw you riding this morning...” he added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, he’s all right, a good horse,” answered Rostóv, though the horse for
+      which he had paid seven hundred rubbles was not worth half that sum. “He’s
+      begun to go a little lame on the left foreleg,” he added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The hoof’s cracked! That’s nothing. I’ll teach you what to do and show
+      you what kind of rivet to use.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, please do,” said Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll show you, I’ll show you! It’s not a secret. And it’s a horse you’ll
+      thank me for.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Then I’ll have it brought round,” said Rostóv wishing to avoid Telyánin,
+      and he went out to give the order.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the passage Denísov, with a pipe, was squatting on the threshold facing
+      the quartermaster who was reporting to him. On seeing Rostóv, Denísov
+      screwed up his face and pointing over his shoulder with his thumb to the
+      room where Telyánin was sitting, he frowned and gave a shudder of disgust.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ugh! I don’t like that fellow,” he said, regardless of the
+      quartermaster’s presence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv shrugged his shoulders as much as to say: “Nor do I, but what’s one
+      to do?” and, having given his order, he returned to Telyánin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Telyánin was sitting in the same indolent pose in which Rostóv had left
+      him, rubbing his small white hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well there certainly are disgusting people,” thought Rostóv as he
+      entered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Have you told them to bring the horse?” asked Telyánin, getting up and
+      looking carelessly about him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Let us go ourselves. I only came round to ask Denísov about yesterday’s
+      order. Have you got it, Denísov?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Not yet. But where are you off to?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I want to teach this young man how to shoe a horse,” said Telyánin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They went through the porch and into the stable. The lieutenant explained
+      how to rivet the hoof and went away to his own quarters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Rostóv went back there was a bottle of vodka and a sausage on the
+      table. Denísov was sitting there scratching with his pen on a sheet of
+      paper. He looked gloomily in Rostóv’s face and said: “I am witing to her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He leaned his elbows on the table with his pen in his hand and, evidently
+      glad of a chance to say quicker in words what he wanted to write, told
+      Rostóv the contents of his letter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You see, my fwiend,” he said, “we sleep when we don’t love. We are
+      childwen of the dust... but one falls in love and one is a God, one is
+      pua’ as on the fihst day of cweation... Who’s that now? Send him to the
+      devil, I’m busy!” he shouted to Lavrúshka, who went up to him not in the
+      least abashed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who should it be? You yourself told him to come. It’s the quartermaster
+      for the money.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov frowned and was about to shout some reply but stopped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Wetched business,” he muttered to himself. “How much is left in the
+      puhse?” he asked, turning to Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Seven new and three old imperials.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, it’s wetched! Well, what are you standing there for, you sca’cwow?
+      Call the quahtehmasteh,” he shouted to Lavrúshka.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Please, Denísov, let me lend you some: I have some, you know,” said
+      Rostóv, blushing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t like bowwowing from my own fellows, I don’t,” growled Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But if you won’t accept money from me like a comrade, you will offend me.
+      Really I have some,” Rostóv repeated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I tell you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Denísov went to the bed to get the purse from under the pillow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where have you put it, Wostóv?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Under the lower pillow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s not there.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov threw both pillows on the floor. The purse was not there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s a miwacle.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Wait, haven’t you dropped it?” said Rostóv, picking up the pillows one at
+      a time and shaking them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He pulled off the quilt and shook it. The purse was not there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear me, can I have forgotten? No, I remember thinking that you kept it
+      under your head like a treasure,” said Rostóv. “I put it just here. Where
+      is it?” he asked, turning to Lavrúshka.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I haven’t been in the room. It must be where you put it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But it isn’t?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You’re always like that; you thwow a thing down anywhere and forget it.
+      Feel in your pockets.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, if I hadn’t thought of it being a treasure,” said Rostóv, “but I
+      remember putting it there.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Lavrúshka turned all the bedding over, looked under the bed and under the
+      table, searched everywhere, and stood still in the middle of the room.
+      Denísov silently watched Lavrúshka’s movements, and when the latter threw
+      up his arms in surprise saying it was nowhere to be found Denísov glanced
+      at Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Wostóv, you’ve not been playing schoolboy twicks...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv felt Denísov’s gaze fixed on him, raised his eyes, and instantly
+      dropped them again. All the blood which had seemed congested somewhere
+      below his throat rushed to his face and eyes. He could not draw breath.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And there hasn’t been anyone in the room except the lieutenant and
+      yourselves. It must be here somewhere,” said Lavrúshka.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then, you devil’s puppet, look alive and hunt for it!” shouted
+      Denísov, suddenly, turning purple and rushing at the man with a
+      threatening gesture. “If the purse isn’t found I’ll flog you, I’ll flog
+      you all.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv, his eyes avoiding Denísov, began buttoning his coat, buckled on
+      his saber, and put on his cap.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I must have that purse, I tell you,” shouted Denísov, shaking his orderly
+      by the shoulders and knocking him against the wall.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Denísov, let him alone, I know who has taken it,” said Rostóv, going
+      toward the door without raising his eyes. Denísov paused, thought a
+      moment, and, evidently understanding what Rostóv hinted at, seized his
+      arm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nonsense!” he cried, and the veins on his forehead and neck stood out
+      like cords. “You are mad, I tell you. I won’t allow it. The purse is here!
+      I’ll flay this scoundwel alive, and it will be found.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I know who has taken it,” repeated Rostóv in an unsteady voice, and went
+      to the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I tell you, don’t you dahe to do it!” shouted Denísov, rushing at the
+      cadet to restrain him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Rostóv pulled away his arm and, with as much anger as though Denísov
+      were his worst enemy, firmly fixed his eyes directly on his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you understand what you’re saying?” he said in a trembling voice.
+      “There was no one else in the room except myself. So that if it is not so,
+      then...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He could not finish, and ran out of the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, may the devil take you and evewybody,” were the last words Rostóv
+      heard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv went to Telyánin’s quarters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The master is not in, he’s gone to headquarters,” said Telyánin’s
+      orderly. “Has something happened?” he added, surprised at the cadet’s
+      troubled face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, nothing.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You’ve only just missed him,” said the orderly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The headquarters were situated two miles away from Salzeneck, and Rostóv,
+      without returning home, took a horse and rode there. There was an inn in
+      the village which the officers frequented. Rostóv rode up to it and saw
+      Telyánin’s horse at the porch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the second room of the inn the lieutenant was sitting over a dish of
+      sausages and a bottle of wine.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, you’ve come here too, young man!” he said, smiling and raising his
+      eyebrows.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” said Rostóv as if it cost him a great deal to utter the word; and
+      he sat down at the nearest table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Both were silent. There were two Germans and a Russian officer in the
+      room. No one spoke and the only sounds heard were the clatter of knives
+      and the munching of the lieutenant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Telyánin had finished his lunch he took out of his pocket a double
+      purse and, drawing its rings aside with his small, white, turned-up
+      fingers, drew out a gold imperial, and lifting his eyebrows gave it to the
+      waiter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Please be quick,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The coin was a new one. Rostóv rose and went up to Telyánin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Allow me to look at your purse,” he said in a low, almost inaudible,
+      voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With shifting eyes but eyebrows still raised, Telyánin handed him the
+      purse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, it’s a nice purse. Yes, yes,” he said, growing suddenly pale, and
+      added, “Look at it, young man.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv took the purse in his hand, examined it and the money in it, and
+      looked at Telyánin. The lieutenant was looking about in his usual way and
+      suddenly seemed to grow very merry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If we get to Vienna I’ll get rid of it there but in these wretched little
+      towns there’s nowhere to spend it,” said he. “Well, let me have it, young
+      man, I’m going.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv did not speak.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And you? Are you going to have lunch too? They feed you quite decently
+      here,” continued Telyánin. “Now then, let me have it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He stretched out his hand to take hold of the purse. Rostóv let go of it.
+      Telyánin took the purse and began carelessly slipping it into the pocket
+      of his riding breeches, with his eyebrows lifted and his mouth slightly
+      open, as if to say, “Yes, yes, I am putting my purse in my pocket and
+      that’s quite simple and is no one else’s business.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, young man?” he said with a sigh, and from under his lifted brows he
+      glanced into Rostóv’s eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Some flash as of an electric spark shot from Telyánin’s eyes to Rostóv’s
+      and back, and back again and again in an instant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come here,” said Rostóv, catching hold of Telyánin’s arm and almost
+      dragging him to the window. “That money is Denísov’s; you took it...” he
+      whispered just above Telyánin’s ear.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What? What? How dare you? What?” said Telyánin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But these words came like a piteous, despairing cry and an entreaty for
+      pardon. As soon as Rostóv heard them, an enormous load of doubt fell from
+      him. He was glad, and at the same instant began to pity the miserable man
+      who stood before him, but the task he had begun had to be completed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Heaven only knows what the people here may imagine,” muttered Telyánin,
+      taking up his cap and moving toward a small empty room. “We must have an
+      explanation...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I know it and shall prove it,” said Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Every muscle of Telyánin’s pale, terrified face began to quiver, his eyes
+      still shifted from side to side but with a downward look not rising to
+      Rostóv’s face, and his sobs were audible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Count!... Don’t ruin a young fellow... here is this wretched money, take
+      it...” He threw it on the table. “I have an old father and mother!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv took the money, avoiding Telyánin’s eyes, and went out of the room
+      without a word. But at the door he stopped and then retraced his steps. “O
+      God,” he said with tears in his eyes, “how could you do it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Count...” said Telyánin drawing nearer to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t touch me,” said Rostóv, drawing back. “If you need it, take the
+      money,” and he threw the purse to him and ran out of the inn.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0033"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      That same evening there was an animated discussion among the squadron’s
+      officers in Denísov’s quarters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I tell you, Rostóv, that you must apologize to the colonel!” said a
+      tall, grizzly-haired staff captain, with enormous mustaches and many
+      wrinkles on his large features, to Rostóv who was crimson with excitement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The staff captain, Kírsten, had twice been reduced to the ranks for
+      affairs of honor and had twice regained his commission.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I will allow no one to call me a liar!” cried Rostóv. “He told me I lied,
+      and I told him he lied. And there it rests. He may keep me on duty every
+      day, or may place me under arrest, but no one can make me apologize,
+      because if he, as commander of this regiment, thinks it beneath his
+      dignity to give me satisfaction, then...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You just wait a moment, my dear fellow, and listen,” interrupted the
+      staff captain in his deep bass, calmly stroking his long mustache. “You
+      tell the colonel in the presence of other officers that an officer has
+      stolen...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I’m not to blame that the conversation began in the presence of other
+      officers. Perhaps I ought not to have spoken before them, but I am not a
+      diplomatist. That’s why I joined the hussars, thinking that here one would
+      not need finesse; and he tells me that I am lying—so let him give me
+      satisfaction...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s all right. No one thinks you a coward, but that’s not the point.
+      Ask Denísov whether it is not out of the question for a cadet to demand
+      satisfaction of his regimental commander?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov sat gloomily biting his mustache and listening to the
+      conversation, evidently with no wish to take part in it. He answered the
+      staff captain’s question by a disapproving shake of his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You speak to the colonel about this nasty business before other
+      officers,” continued the staff captain, “and Bogdánich” (the colonel was
+      called Bogdánich) “shuts you up.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “He did not shut me up, he said I was telling an untruth.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, have it so, and you talked a lot of nonsense to him and must
+      apologize.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Not on any account!” exclaimed Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I did not expect this of you,” said the staff captain seriously and
+      severely. “You don’t wish to apologize, but, man, it’s not only to him but
+      to the whole regiment—all of us—you’re to blame all round. The
+      case is this: you ought to have thought the matter over and taken advice;
+      but no, you go and blurt it all straight out before the officers. Now what
+      was the colonel to do? Have the officer tried and disgrace the whole
+      regiment? Disgrace the whole regiment because of one scoundrel? Is that
+      how you look at it? We don’t see it like that. And Bogdánich was a brick:
+      he told you you were saying what was not true. It’s not pleasant, but
+      what’s to be done, my dear fellow? You landed yourself in it. And now,
+      when one wants to smooth the thing over, some conceit prevents your
+      apologizing, and you wish to make the whole affair public. You are
+      offended at being put on duty a bit, but why not apologize to an old and
+      honorable officer? Whatever Bogdánich may be, anyway he is an honorable
+      and brave old colonel! You’re quick at taking offense, but you don’t mind
+      disgracing the whole regiment!” The staff captain’s voice began to
+      tremble. “You have been in the regiment next to no time, my lad, you’re
+      here today and tomorrow you’ll be appointed adjutant somewhere and can
+      snap your fingers when it is said ‘There are thieves among the Pávlograd
+      officers!’ But it’s not all the same to us! Am I not right, Denísov? It’s
+      not the same!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov remained silent and did not move, but occasionally looked with his
+      glittering black eyes at Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You value your own pride and don’t wish to apologize,” continued the
+      staff captain, “but we old fellows, who have grown up in and, God willing,
+      are going to die in the regiment, we prize the honor of the regiment, and
+      Bogdánich knows it. Oh, we do prize it, old fellow! And all this is not
+      right, it’s not right! You may take offense or not but I always stick to
+      mother truth. It’s not right!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the staff captain rose and turned away from Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s twue, devil take it!” shouted Denísov, jumping up. “Now then,
+      Wostóv, now then!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv, growing red and pale alternately, looked first at one
+      officer and then at the other.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, gentlemen, no... you mustn’t think... I quite understand. You’re
+      wrong to think that of me... I... for me... for the honor of the regiment
+      I’d... Ah well, I’ll show that in action, and for me the honor of the
+      flag... Well, never mind, it’s true I’m to blame, to blame all round.
+      Well, what else do you want?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Come, that’s right, Count!” cried the staff captain, turning round and
+      clapping Rostóv on the shoulder with his big hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I tell you,” shouted Denísov, “he’s a fine fellow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s better, Count,” said the staff captain, beginning to address
+      Rostóv by his title, as if in recognition of his confession. “Go and
+      apologize, your excellency. Yes, go!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Gentlemen, I’ll do anything. No one shall hear a word from me,” said
+      Rostóv in an imploring voice, “but I can’t apologize, by God I can’t, do
+      what you will! How can I go and apologize like a little boy asking
+      forgiveness?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov began to laugh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’ll be worse for you. Bogdánich is vindictive and you’ll pay for your
+      obstinacy,” said Kírsten.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, on my word it’s not obstinacy! I can’t describe the feeling. I
+      can’t...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, it’s as you like,” said the staff captain. “And what has become of
+      that scoundrel?” he asked Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He has weported himself sick, he’s to be stwuck off the list tomowwow,”
+       muttered Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is an illness, there’s no other way of explaining it,” said the staff
+      captain.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Illness or not, he’d better not cwoss my path. I’d kill him!” shouted
+      Denísov in a bloodthirsty tone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just then Zherkóv entered the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What brings you here?” cried the officers turning to the newcomer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We’re to go into action, gentlemen! Mack has surrendered with his whole
+      army.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s not true!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ve seen him myself!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What? Saw the real Mack? With hands and feet?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Into action! Into action! Bring him a bottle for such news! But how did
+      you come here?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ve been sent back to the regiment all on account of that devil, Mack.
+      An Austrian general complained of me. I congratulated him on Mack’s
+      arrival... What’s the matter, Rostóv? You look as if you’d just come out
+      of a hot bath.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, my dear fellow, we’re in such a stew here these last two days.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The regimental adjutant came in and confirmed the news brought by Zherkóv.
+      They were under orders to advance next day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We’re going into action, gentlemen!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, thank God! We’ve been sitting here too long!”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0034"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov fell back toward Vienna, destroying behind him the bridges over
+      the rivers Inn (at Braunau) and Traun (near Linz). On October 23 the
+      Russian troops were crossing the river Enns. At midday the Russian baggage
+      train, the artillery, and columns of troops were defiling through the town
+      of Enns on both sides of the bridge.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was a warm, rainy, autumnal day. The wide expanse that opened out
+      before the heights on which the Russian batteries stood guarding the
+      bridge was at times veiled by a diaphanous curtain of slanting rain, and
+      then, suddenly spread out in the sunlight, far-distant objects could be
+      clearly seen glittering as though freshly varnished. Down below, the
+      little town could be seen with its white, red-roofed houses, its
+      cathedral, and its bridge, on both sides of which streamed jostling masses
+      of Russian troops. At the bend of the Danube, vessels, an island, and a
+      castle with a park surrounded by the waters of the confluence of the Enns
+      and the Danube became visible, and the rocky left bank of the Danube
+      covered with pine forests, with a mystic background of green treetops and
+      bluish gorges. The turrets of a convent stood out beyond a wild virgin
+      pine forest, and far away on the other side of the Enns the enemy’s horse
+      patrols could be discerned.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Among the field guns on the brow of the hill the general in command of the
+      rearguard stood with a staff officer, scanning the country through his
+      fieldglass. A little behind them Nesvítski, who had been sent to the
+      rearguard by the commander in chief, was sitting on the trail of a gun
+      carriage. A Cossack who accompanied him had handed him a knapsack and a
+      flask, and Nesvítski was treating some officers to pies and real
+      <i>doppelkümmel</i>. The officers gladly gathered round him, some on their knees,
+      some squatting Turkish fashion on the wet grass.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, the Austrian prince who built that castle was no fool. It’s a fine
+      place! Why are you not eating anything, gentlemen?” Nesvítski was saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Thank you very much, Prince,” answered one of the officers, pleased to be
+      talking to a staff officer of such importance. “It’s a lovely place! We
+      passed close to the park and saw two deer... and what a splendid house!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Look, Prince,” said another, who would have dearly liked to take another
+      pie but felt shy, and therefore pretended to be examining the countryside—“See,
+      our infantrymen have already got there. Look there in the meadow behind
+      the village, three of them are dragging something. They’ll ransack that
+      castle,” he remarked with evident approval.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So they will,” said Nesvítski. “No, but what I should like,” added he,
+      munching a pie in his moist-lipped handsome mouth, “would be to slip in
+      over there.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He pointed with a smile to a turreted nunnery, and his eyes narrowed and
+      gleamed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That would be fine, gentlemen!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The officers laughed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Just to flutter the nuns a bit. They say there are Italian girls among
+      them. On my word I’d give five years of my life for it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “They must be feeling dull, too,” said one of the bolder officers,
+      laughing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Meanwhile the staff officer standing in front pointed out something to the
+      general, who looked through his field glass.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, so it is, so it is,” said the general angrily, lowering the field
+      glass and shrugging his shoulders, “so it is! They’ll be fired on at the
+      crossing. And why are they dawdling there?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      On the opposite side the enemy could be seen by the naked eye, and from
+      their battery a milk-white cloud arose. Then came the distant report of a
+      shot, and our troops could be seen hurrying to the crossing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nesvítski rose, puffing, and went up to the general, smiling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Would not your excellency like a little refreshment?” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s a bad business,” said the general without answering him, “our men
+      have been wasting time.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Hadn’t I better ride over, your excellency?” asked Nesvítski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, please do,” answered the general, and he repeated the order that had
+      already once been given in detail: “and tell the hussars that they are to
+      cross last and to fire the bridge as I ordered; and the inflammable
+      material on the bridge must be reinspected.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Very good,” answered Nesvítski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He called the Cossack with his horse, told him to put away the knapsack
+      and flask, and swung his heavy person easily into the saddle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll really call in on the nuns,” he said to the officers who watched him
+      smilingly, and he rode off by the winding path down the hill.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then, let’s see how far it will carry, Captain. Just try!” said the
+      general, turning to an artillery officer. “Have a little fun to pass the
+      time.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Crew, to your guns!” commanded the officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In a moment the men came running gaily from their campfires and began
+      loading.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One!” came the command.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Number one jumped briskly aside. The gun rang out with a deafening
+      metallic roar, and a whistling grenade flew above the heads of our troops
+      below the hill and fell far short of the enemy, a little smoke showing the
+      spot where it burst.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The faces of officers and men brightened up at the sound. Everyone got up
+      and began watching the movements of our troops below, as plainly visible
+      as if but a stone’s throw away, and the movements of the approaching enemy
+      farther off. At the same instant the sun came fully out from behind the
+      clouds, and the clear sound of the solitary shot and the brilliance of the
+      bright sunshine merged in a single joyous and spirited impression.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0035"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Two of the enemy’s shots had already flown across the bridge, where there
+      was a crush. Halfway across stood Prince Nesvítski, who had alighted from
+      his horse and whose big body was jammed against the railings. He looked
+      back laughing to the Cossack who stood a few steps behind him holding two
+      horses by their bridles. Each time Prince Nesvítski tried to move on,
+      soldiers and carts pushed him back again and pressed him against the
+      railings, and all he could do was to smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a fine fellow you are, friend!” said the Cossack to a convoy soldier
+      with a wagon, who was pressing onto the infantrymen who were crowded
+      together close to his wheels and his horses. “What a fellow! You can’t
+      wait a moment! Don’t you see the general wants to pass?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But the convoyman took no notice of the word “general” and shouted at the
+      soldiers who were blocking his way. “Hi there, boys! Keep to the left!
+      Wait a bit.” But the soldiers, crowded together shoulder to shoulder,
+      their bayonets interlocking, moved over the bridge in a dense mass.
+      Looking down over the rails Prince Nesvítski saw the rapid, noisy little
+      waves of the Enns, which rippling and eddying round the piles of the
+      bridge chased each other along. Looking on the bridge he saw equally
+      uniform living waves of soldiers, shoulder straps, covered shakos,
+      knapsacks, bayonets, long muskets, and, under the shakos, faces with broad
+      cheekbones, sunken cheeks, and listless tired expressions, and feet that
+      moved through the sticky mud that covered the planks of the bridge.
+      Sometimes through the monotonous waves of men, like a fleck of white foam
+      on the waves of the Enns, an officer, in a cloak and with a type of face
+      different from that of the men, squeezed his way along; sometimes like a
+      chip of wood whirling in the river, an hussar on foot, an orderly, or a
+      townsman was carried through the waves of infantry; and sometimes like a
+      log floating down the river, an officers’ or company’s baggage wagon,
+      piled high, leather covered, and hemmed in on all sides, moved across the
+      bridge.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s as if a dam had burst,” said the Cossack hopelessly. “Are there many
+      more of you to come?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “A million all but one!” replied a waggish soldier in a torn coat, with a
+      wink, and passed on followed by another, an old man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If <i>he</i>” (<i>he</i> meant the enemy) “begins popping at the bridge now,” said the
+      old soldier dismally to a comrade, “you’ll forget to scratch yourself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      That soldier passed on, and after him came another sitting on a cart.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where the devil have the leg bands been shoved to?” said an orderly,
+      running behind the cart and fumbling in the back of it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And he also passed on with the wagon. Then came some merry soldiers who
+      had evidently been drinking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And then, old fellow, he gives him one in the teeth with the butt end of
+      his gun...” a soldier whose greatcoat was well tucked up said gaily, with
+      a wide swing of his arm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, the ham was just delicious...” answered another with a loud laugh.
+      And they, too, passed on, so that Nesvítski did not learn who had been
+      struck on the teeth, or what the ham had to do with it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Bah! How they scurry. He just sends a ball and they think they’ll all be
+      killed,” a sergeant was saying angrily and reproachfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “As it flies past me, Daddy, the ball I mean,” said a young soldier with
+      an enormous mouth, hardly refraining from laughing, “I felt like dying of
+      fright. I did, ‘pon my word, I got that frightened!” said he, as if
+      bragging of having been frightened.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That one also passed. Then followed a cart unlike any that had gone
+      before. It was a German cart with a pair of horses led by a German, and
+      seemed loaded with a whole houseful of effects. A fine brindled cow with a
+      large udder was attached to the cart behind. A woman with an unweaned
+      baby, an old woman, and a healthy German girl with bright red cheeks were
+      sitting on some feather beds. Evidently these fugitives were allowed to
+      pass by special permission. The eyes of all the soldiers turned toward the
+      women, and while the vehicle was passing at foot pace all the soldiers’
+      remarks related to the two young ones. Every face bore almost the same
+      smile, expressing unseemly thoughts about the women.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Just see, the German sausage is making tracks, too!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Sell me the missis,” said another soldier, addressing the German, who,
+      angry and frightened, strode energetically along with downcast eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “See how smart she’s made herself! Oh, the devils!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “There, Fedótov, you should be quartered on them!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I have seen as much before now, mate!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Where are you going?” asked an infantry officer who was eating an apple,
+      also half smiling as he looked at the handsome girl.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The German closed his eyes, signifying that he did not understand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Take it if you like,” said the officer, giving the girl an apple.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The girl smiled and took it. Nesvítski like the rest of the men on the
+      bridge did not take his eyes off the women till they had passed. When they
+      had gone by, the same stream of soldiers followed, with the same kind of
+      talk, and at last all stopped. As often happens, the horses of a convoy
+      wagon became restive at the end of the bridge, and the whole crowd had to
+      wait.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And why are they stopping? There’s no proper order!” said the soldiers.
+      “Where are you shoving to? Devil take you! Can’t you wait? It’ll be worse
+      if he fires the bridge. See, here’s an officer jammed in too”—different
+      voices were saying in the crowd, as the men looked at one another, and all
+      pressed toward the exit from the bridge.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Looking down at the waters of the Enns under the bridge, Nesvítski
+      suddenly heard a sound new to him, of something swiftly approaching...
+      something big, that splashed into the water.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Just see where it carries to!” a soldier near by said sternly, looking
+      round at the sound.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Encouraging us to get along quicker,” said another uneasily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The crowd moved on again. Nesvítski realized that it was a cannon ball.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hey, Cossack, my horse!” he said. “Now, then, you there! get out of the
+      way! Make way!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      With great difficulty he managed to get to his horse, and shouting
+      continually he moved on. The soldiers squeezed themselves to make way for
+      him, but again pressed on him so that they jammed his leg, and those
+      nearest him were not to blame for they were themselves pressed still
+      harder from behind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nesvítski, Nesvítski! you numskull!” came a hoarse voice from behind him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nesvítski looked round and saw, some fifteen paces away but separated by
+      the living mass of moving infantry, Váska Denísov, red and shaggy, with
+      his cap on the back of his black head and a cloak hanging jauntily over
+      his shoulder.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Tell these devils, these fiends, to let me pass!” shouted Denísov
+      evidently in a fit of rage, his coal-black eyes with their bloodshot
+      whites glittering and rolling as he waved his sheathed saber in a small
+      bare hand as red as his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, Váska!” joyfully replied Nesvítski. “What’s up with you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The squadwon can’t pass,” shouted Váska Denísov, showing his white teeth
+      fiercely and spurring his black thoroughbred Arab, which twitched its ears
+      as the bayonets touched it, and snorted, spurting white foam from his bit,
+      tramping the planks of the bridge with his hoofs, and apparently ready to
+      jump over the railings had his rider let him. “What is this? They’re like
+      sheep! Just like sheep! Out of the way!... Let us pass!... Stop there, you
+      devil with the cart! I’ll hack you with my saber!” he shouted, actually
+      drawing his saber from its scabbard and flourishing it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The soldiers crowded against one another with terrified faces, and Denísov
+      joined Nesvítski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How’s it you’re not drunk today?” said Nesvítski when the other had
+      ridden up to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They don’t even give one time to dwink!” answered Váska Denísov. “They
+      keep dwagging the wegiment to and fwo all day. If they mean to fight,
+      let’s fight. But the devil knows what this is.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What a dandy you are today!” said Nesvítski, looking at Denísov’s new
+      cloak and saddlecloth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov smiled, took out of his sabretache a handkerchief that diffused a
+      smell of perfume, and put it to Nesvítski’s nose.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Of course. I’m going into action! I’ve shaved, bwushed my teeth, and
+      scented myself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The imposing figure of Nesvítski followed by his Cossack, and the
+      determination of Denísov who flourished his sword and shouted frantically,
+      had such an effect that they managed to squeeze through to the farther
+      side of the bridge and stopped the infantry. Beside the bridge Nesvítski
+      found the colonel to whom he had to deliver the order, and having done
+      this he rode back.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having cleared the way Denísov stopped at the end of the bridge.
+      Carelessly holding in his stallion that was neighing and pawing the
+      ground, eager to rejoin its fellows, he watched his squadron draw nearer.
+      Then the clang of hoofs, as of several horses galloping, resounded on the
+      planks of the bridge, and the squadron, officers in front and men four
+      abreast, spread across the bridge and began to emerge on his side of it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The infantry who had been stopped crowded near the bridge in the trampled
+      mud and gazed with that particular feeling of ill-will, estrangement, and
+      ridicule with which troops of different arms usually encounter one another
+      at the clean, smart hussars who moved past them in regular order.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Smart lads! Only fit for a fair!” said one.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What good are they? They’re led about just for show!” remarked another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t kick up the dust, you infantry!” jested an hussar whose prancing
+      horse had splashed mud over some foot soldiers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’d like to put you on a two days’ march with a knapsack! Your fine cords
+      would soon get a bit rubbed,” said an infantryman, wiping the mud off his
+      face with his sleeve. “Perched up there, you’re more like a bird than a
+      man.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “There now, Zíkin, they ought to put you on a horse. You’d look fine,”
+       said a corporal, chaffing a thin little soldier who bent under the weight
+      of his knapsack.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Take a stick between your legs, that’ll suit you for a horse!” the hussar
+      shouted back.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0036"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The last of the infantry hurriedly crossed the bridge, squeezing together
+      as they approached it as if passing through a funnel. At last the baggage
+      wagons had all crossed, the crush was less, and the last battalion came
+      onto the bridge. Only Denísov’s squadron of hussars remained on the
+      farther side of the bridge facing the enemy, who could be seen from the
+      hill on the opposite bank but was not yet visible from the bridge, for the
+      horizon as seen from the valley through which the river flowed was formed
+      by the rising ground only half a mile away. At the foot of the hill lay
+      wasteland over which a few groups of our Cossack scouts were moving.
+      Suddenly on the road at the top of the high ground, artillery and troops
+      in blue uniform were seen. These were the French. A group of Cossack
+      scouts retired down the hill at a trot. All the officers and men of
+      Denísov’s squadron, though they tried to talk of other things and to look
+      in other directions, thought only of what was there on the hilltop, and
+      kept constantly looking at the patches appearing on the skyline, which
+      they knew to be the enemy’s troops. The weather had cleared again since
+      noon and the sun was descending brightly upon the Danube and the dark
+      hills around it. It was calm, and at intervals the bugle calls and the
+      shouts of the enemy could be heard from the hill. There was no one now
+      between the squadron and the enemy except a few scattered skirmishers. An
+      empty space of some seven hundred yards was all that separated them. The
+      enemy ceased firing, and that stern, threatening, inaccessible, and
+      intangible line which separates two hostile armies was all the more
+      clearly felt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One step beyond that boundary line which resembles the line dividing the
+      living from the dead lies uncertainty, suffering, and death. And what is
+      there? Who is there?—there beyond that field, that tree, that roof
+      lit up by the sun? No one knows, but one wants to know. You fear and yet
+      long to cross that line, and know that sooner or later it must be crossed
+      and you will have to find out what is there, just as you will inevitably
+      have to learn what lies the other side of death. But you are strong,
+      healthy, cheerful, and excited, and are surrounded by other such excitedly
+      animated and healthy men.” So thinks, or at any rate feels, anyone who
+      comes in sight of the enemy, and that feeling gives a particular glamour
+      and glad keenness of impression to everything that takes place at such
+      moments.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the high ground where the enemy was, the smoke of a cannon rose, and a
+      ball flew whistling over the heads of the hussar squadron. The officers
+      who had been standing together rode off to their places. The hussars began
+      carefully aligning their horses. Silence fell on the whole squadron. All
+      were looking at the enemy in front and at the squadron commander, awaiting
+      the word of command. A second and a third cannon ball flew past. Evidently
+      they were firing at the hussars, but the balls with rapid rhythmic whistle
+      flew over the heads of the horsemen and fell somewhere beyond them. The
+      hussars did not look round, but at the sound of each shot, as at the word
+      of command, the whole squadron with its rows of faces so alike yet so
+      different, holding its breath while the ball flew past, rose in the
+      stirrups and sank back again. The soldiers without turning their heads
+      glanced at one another, curious to see their comrades’ impression. Every
+      face, from Denísov’s to that of the bugler, showed one common expression
+      of conflict, irritation, and excitement, around chin and mouth. The
+      quartermaster frowned, looking at the soldiers as if threatening to punish
+      them. Cadet Mirónov ducked every time a ball flew past. Rostóv on the left
+      flank, mounted on his Rook—a handsome horse despite its game leg—had
+      the happy air of a schoolboy called up before a large audience for an
+      examination in which he feels sure he will distinguish himself. He was
+      glancing at everyone with a clear, bright expression, as if asking them to
+      notice how calmly he sat under fire. But despite himself, on his face too
+      that same indication of something new and stern showed round the mouth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who’s that curtseying there? Cadet Miwónov! That’s not wight! Look at
+      me,” cried Denísov who, unable to keep still on one spot, kept turning his
+      horse in front of the squadron.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The black, hairy, snub-nosed face of Váska Denísov, and his whole short
+      sturdy figure with the sinewy hairy hand and stumpy fingers in which he
+      held the hilt of his naked saber, looked just as it usually did,
+      especially toward evening when he had emptied his second bottle; he was
+      only redder than usual. With his shaggy head thrown back like birds when
+      they drink, pressing his spurs mercilessly into the sides of his good
+      horse, Bedouin, and sitting as though falling backwards in the saddle, he
+      galloped to the other flank of the squadron and shouted in a hoarse voice
+      to the men to look to their pistols. He rode up to Kírsten. The staff
+      captain on his broad-backed, steady mare came at a walk to meet him. His
+      face with its long mustache was serious as always, only his eyes were
+      brighter than usual.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, what about it?” said he to Denísov. “It won’t come to a fight.
+      You’ll see—we shall retire.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The devil only knows what they’re about!” muttered Denísov. “Ah, Wostóv,”
+       he cried noticing the cadet’s bright face, “you’ve got it at last.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And he smiled approvingly, evidently pleased with the cadet. Rostóv felt
+      perfectly happy. Just then the commander appeared on the bridge. Denísov
+      galloped up to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency! Let us attack them! I’ll dwive them off.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Attack indeed!” said the colonel in a bored voice, puckering up his face
+      as if driving off a troublesome fly. “And why are you stopping here? Don’t
+      you see the skirmishers are retreating? Lead the squadron back.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The squadron crossed the bridge and drew out of range of fire without
+      having lost a single man. The second squadron that had been in the front
+      line followed them across and the last Cossacks quitted the farther side
+      of the river.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The two Pávlograd squadrons, having crossed the bridge, retired up the
+      hill one after the other. Their colonel, Karl Bogdánich Schubert, came up
+      to Denísov’s squadron and rode at a footpace not far from Rostóv, without
+      taking any notice of him although they were now meeting for the first time
+      since their encounter concerning Telyánin. Rostóv, feeling that he was at
+      the front and in the power of a man toward whom he now admitted that he
+      had been to blame, did not lift his eyes from the colonel’s athletic back,
+      his nape covered with light hair, and his red neck. It seemed to Rostóv
+      that Bogdánich was only pretending not to notice him, and that his whole
+      aim now was to test the cadet’s courage, so he drew himself up and looked
+      around him merrily; then it seemed to him that Bogdánich rode so near in
+      order to show him his courage. Next he thought that his enemy would send
+      the squadron on a desperate attack just to punish him—Rostóv. Then
+      he imagined how, after the attack, Bogdánich would come up to him as he
+      lay wounded and would magnanimously extend the hand of reconciliation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The high-shouldered figure of Zherkóv, familiar to the Pávlograds as he
+      had but recently left their regiment, rode up to the colonel. After his
+      dismissal from headquarters Zherkóv had not remained in the regiment,
+      saying he was not such a fool as to slave at the front when he could get
+      more rewards by doing nothing on the staff, and had succeeded in attaching
+      himself as an orderly officer to Prince Bagratión. He now came to his
+      former chief with an order from the commander of the rear guard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Colonel,” he said, addressing Rostóv’s enemy with an air of gloomy
+      gravity and glancing round at his comrades, “there is an order to stop and
+      fire the bridge.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “An order to who?” asked the colonel morosely.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t myself know ‘to who,’” replied the cornet in a serious tone, “but
+      the prince told me to ‘go and tell the colonel that the hussars must
+      return quickly and fire the bridge.’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Zherkóv was followed by an officer of the suite who rode up to the colonel
+      of hussars with the same order. After him the stout Nesvítski came
+      galloping up on a Cossack horse that could scarcely carry his weight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How’s this, Colonel?” he shouted as he approached. “I told you to fire
+      the bridge, and now someone has gone and blundered; they are all beside
+      themselves over there and one can’t make anything out.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The colonel deliberately stopped the regiment and turned to Nesvítski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You spoke to me of inflammable material,” said he, “but you said nothing
+      about firing it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But, my dear sir,” said Nesvítski as he drew up, taking off his cap and
+      smoothing his hair wet with perspiration with his plump hand, “wasn’t I
+      telling you to fire the bridge, when inflammable material had been put in
+      position?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I am not your ‘dear sir,’ Mr. Staff Officer, and you did not tell me to
+      burn the bridge! I know the service, and it is my habit orders strictly to
+      obey. You said the bridge would be burned, but who would burn it, I could
+      not know by the holy spirit!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, that’s always the way!” said Nesvítski with a wave of the hand. “How
+      did you get here?” said he, turning to Zherkóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “On the same business. But you <i>are</i> damp! Let me wring you out!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You were saying, Mr. Staff Officer...” continued the colonel in an
+      offended tone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Colonel,” interrupted the officer of the suite, “You must be quick or the
+      enemy will bring up his guns to use grapeshot.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The colonel looked silently at the officer of the suite, at the stout
+      staff officer, and at Zherkóv, and he frowned.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I will the bridge fire,” he said in a solemn tone as if to announce that
+      in spite of all the unpleasantness he had to endure he would still do the
+      right thing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Striking his horse with his long muscular legs as if it were to blame for
+      everything, the colonel moved forward and ordered the second squadron,
+      that in which Rostóv was serving under Denísov, to return to the bridge.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There, it’s just as I thought,” said Rostóv to himself. “He wishes to
+      test me!” His heart contracted and the blood rushed to his face. “Let him
+      see whether I am a coward!” he thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Again on all the bright faces of the squadron the serious expression
+      appeared that they had worn when under fire. Rostóv watched his enemy, the
+      colonel, closely—to find in his face confirmation of his own
+      conjecture, but the colonel did not once glance at Rostóv, and looked as
+      he always did when at the front, solemn and stern. Then came the word of
+      command.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Look sharp! Look sharp!” several voices repeated around him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Their sabers catching in the bridles and their spurs jingling, the hussars
+      hastily dismounted, not knowing what they were to do. The men were
+      crossing themselves. Rostóv no longer looked at the colonel, he had no
+      time. He was afraid of falling behind the hussars, so much afraid that his
+      heart stood still. His hand trembled as he gave his horse into an
+      orderly’s charge, and he felt the blood rush to his heart with a thud.
+      Denísov rode past him, leaning back and shouting something. Rostóv saw
+      nothing but the hussars running all around him, their spurs catching and
+      their sabers clattering.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Stretchers!” shouted someone behind him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv did not think what this call for stretchers meant; he ran on,
+      trying only to be ahead of the others; but just at the bridge, not looking
+      at the ground, he came on some sticky, trodden mud, stumbled, and fell on
+      his hands. The others outstripped him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “At boss zides, Captain,” he heard the voice of the colonel, who, having
+      ridden ahead, had pulled up his horse near the bridge, with a triumphant,
+      cheerful face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv wiping his muddy hands on his breeches looked at his enemy and was
+      about to run on, thinking that the farther he went to the front the
+      better. But Bogdánich, without looking at or recognizing Rostóv, shouted
+      to him:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who’s that running on the middle of the bridge? To the right! Come back,
+      Cadet!” he cried angrily; and turning to Denísov, who, showing off his
+      courage, had ridden on to the planks of the bridge:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why run risks, Captain? You should dismount,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, every bullet has its billet,” answered Váska Denísov, turning in his
+      saddle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Meanwhile Nesvítski, Zherkóv, and the officer of the suite were standing
+      together out of range of the shots, watching, now the small group of men
+      with yellow shakos, dark-green jackets braided with cord, and blue riding
+      breeches, who were swarming near the bridge, and then at what was
+      approaching in the distance from the opposite side—the blue uniforms
+      and groups with horses, easily recognizable as artillery.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Will they burn the bridge or not? Who’ll get there first? Will they get
+      there and fire the bridge or will the French get within grapeshot range
+      and wipe them out?” These were the questions each man of the troops on the
+      high ground above the bridge involuntarily asked himself with a sinking
+      heart—watching the bridge and the hussars in the bright evening
+      light and the blue tunics advancing from the other side with their
+      bayonets and guns.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ugh. The hussars will get it hot!” said Nesvítski; “they are within
+      grapeshot range now.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “He shouldn’t have taken so many men,” said the officer of the suite.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “True enough,” answered Nesvítski; “two smart fellows could have done the
+      job just as well.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, your excellency,” put in Zherkóv, his eyes fixed on the hussars, but
+      still with that naïve air that made it impossible to know whether he was
+      speaking in jest or in earnest. “Ah, your excellency! How you look at
+      things! Send two men? And who then would give us the Vladímir medal and
+      ribbon? But now, even if they do get peppered, the squadron may be
+      recommended for honors and he may get a ribbon. Our Bogdánich knows how
+      things are done.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “There now!” said the officer of the suite, “that’s grapeshot.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He pointed to the French guns, the limbers of which were being detached
+      and hurriedly removed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the French side, amid the groups with cannon, a cloud of smoke
+      appeared, then a second and a third almost simultaneously, and at the
+      moment when the first report was heard a fourth was seen. Then two reports
+      one after another, and a third.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh! Oh!” groaned Nesvítski as if in fierce pain, seizing the officer of
+      the suite by the arm. “Look! A man has fallen! Fallen, fallen!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Two, I think.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If I were Tsar I would never go to war,” said Nesvítski, turning away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French guns were hastily reloaded. The infantry in their blue uniforms
+      advanced toward the bridge at a run. Smoke appeared again but at irregular
+      intervals, and grapeshot cracked and rattled onto the bridge. But this
+      time Nesvítski could not see what was happening there, as a dense cloud of
+      smoke arose from it. The hussars had succeeded in setting it on fire and
+      the French batteries were now firing at them, no longer to hinder them but
+      because the guns were trained and there was someone to fire at.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French had time to fire three rounds of grapeshot before the hussars
+      got back to their horses. Two were misdirected and the shot went too high,
+      but the last round fell in the midst of a group of hussars and knocked
+      three of them over.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv, absorbed by his relations with Bogdánich, had paused on the bridge
+      not knowing what to do. There was no one to hew down (as he had always
+      imagined battles to himself), nor could he help to fire the bridge because
+      he had not brought any burning straw with him like the other soldiers. He
+      stood looking about him, when suddenly he heard a rattle on the bridge as
+      if nuts were being spilt, and the hussar nearest to him fell against the
+      rails with a groan. Rostóv ran up to him with the others. Again someone
+      shouted, “Stretchers!” Four men seized the hussar and began lifting him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oooh! For Christ’s sake let me alone!” cried the wounded man, but still
+      he was lifted and laid on the stretcher.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas Rostóv turned away and, as if searching for something, gazed into
+      the distance, at the waters of the Danube, at the sky, and at the sun. How
+      beautiful the sky looked; how blue, how calm, and how deep! How bright and
+      glorious was the setting sun! With what soft glitter the waters of the
+      distant Danube shone. And fairer still were the faraway blue mountains
+      beyond the river, the nunnery, the mysterious gorges, and the pine forests
+      veiled in the mist of their summits... There was peace and happiness... “I
+      should wish for nothing else, nothing, if only I were there,” thought
+      Rostóv. “In myself alone and in that sunshine there is so much happiness;
+      but here... groans, suffering, fear, and this uncertainty and hurry...
+      There—they are shouting again, and again are all running back
+      somewhere, and I shall run with them, and it, death, is here above me and
+      around... Another instant and I shall never again see the sun, this water,
+      that gorge!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At that instant the sun began to hide behind the clouds, and other
+      stretchers came into view before Rostóv. And the fear of death and of the
+      stretchers, and love of the sun and of life, all merged into one feeling
+      of sickening agitation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “O Lord God! Thou who art in that heaven, save, forgive, and protect me!”
+       Rostóv whispered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The hussars ran back to the men who held their horses; their voices
+      sounded louder and calmer, the stretchers disappeared from sight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, fwiend? So you’ve smelt powdah!” shouted Váska Denísov just above
+      his ear.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s all over; but I am a coward—yes, a coward!” thought Rostóv,
+      and sighing deeply he took Rook, his horse, which stood resting one foot,
+      from the orderly and began to mount.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Was that grapeshot?” he asked Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes and no mistake!” cried Denísov. “You worked like wegular bwicks and
+      it’s nasty work! An attack’s pleasant work! Hacking away at the dogs! But
+      this sort of thing is the very devil, with them shooting at you like a
+      target.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Denísov rode up to a group that had stopped near Rostóv, composed of
+      the colonel, Nesvítski, Zherkóv, and the officer from the suite.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, it seems that no one has noticed,” thought Rostóv. And this was
+      true. No one had taken any notice, for everyone knew the sensation which
+      the cadet under fire for the first time had experienced.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Here’s something for you to report,” said Zherkóv. “See if I don’t get
+      promoted to a sublieutenancy.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Inform the prince that I the bridge fired!” said the colonel triumphantly
+      and gaily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And if he asks about the losses?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “A trifle,” said the colonel in his bass voice: “two hussars wounded, and
+      one knocked out,” he added, unable to restrain a happy smile, and
+      pronouncing the phrase “knocked out” with ringing distinctness.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0037"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Pursued by the French army of a hundred thousand men under the command of
+      Bonaparte, encountering a population that was unfriendly to it, losing
+      confidence in its allies, suffering from shortness of supplies, and
+      compelled to act under conditions of war unlike anything that had been
+      foreseen, the Russian army of thirty-five thousand men commanded by
+      Kutúzov was hurriedly retreating along the Danube, stopping where
+      overtaken by the enemy and fighting rearguard actions only as far as
+      necessary to enable it to retreat without losing its heavy equipment.
+      There had been actions at Lambach, Amstetten, and Melk; but despite the
+      courage and endurance—acknowledged even by the enemy—with
+      which the Russians fought, the only consequence of these actions was a yet
+      more rapid retreat. Austrian troops that had escaped capture at Ulm and
+      had joined Kutúzov at Braunau now separated from the Russian army, and
+      Kutúzov was left with only his own weak and exhausted forces. The defense
+      of Vienna was no longer to be thought of. Instead of an offensive, the
+      plan of which, carefully prepared in accord with the modern science of
+      strategics, had been handed to Kutúzov when he was in Vienna by the
+      Austrian Hofkriegsrath, the sole and almost unattainable aim remaining for
+      him was to effect a junction with the forces that were advancing from
+      Russia, without losing his army as Mack had done at Ulm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the twenty-eighth of October Kutúzov with his army crossed to the left
+      bank of the Danube and took up a position for the first time with the
+      river between himself and the main body of the French. On the thirtieth he
+      attacked Mortier’s division, which was on the left bank, and broke it up.
+      In this action for the first time trophies were taken: banners, cannon,
+      and two enemy generals. For the first time, after a fortnight’s retreat,
+      the Russian troops had halted and after a fight had not only held the
+      field but had repulsed the French. Though the troops were ill-clad,
+      exhausted, and had lost a third of their number in killed, wounded, sick,
+      and stragglers; though a number of sick and wounded had been abandoned on
+      the other side of the Danube with a letter in which Kutúzov entrusted them
+      to the humanity of the enemy; and though the big hospitals and the houses
+      in Krems converted into military hospitals could no longer accommodate all
+      the sick and wounded, yet the stand made at Krems and the victory over
+      Mortier raised the spirits of the army considerably. Throughout the whole
+      army and at headquarters most joyful though erroneous rumors were rife of
+      the imaginary approach of columns from Russia, of some victory gained by
+      the Austrians, and of the retreat of the frightened Bonaparte.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew during the battle had been in attendance on the Austrian
+      General Schmidt, who was killed in the action. His horse had been wounded
+      under him and his own arm slightly grazed by a bullet. As a mark of the
+      commander in chief’s special favor he was sent with the news of this
+      victory to the Austrian court, now no longer at Vienna (which was
+      threatened by the French) but at Brünn. Despite his apparently delicate
+      build Prince Andrew could endure physical fatigue far better than many
+      very muscular men, and on the night of the battle, having arrived at Krems
+      excited but not weary, with dispatches from Dokhtúrov to Kutúzov, he was
+      sent immediately with a special dispatch to Brünn. To be so sent meant not
+      only a reward but an important step toward promotion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The night was dark but starry, the road showed black in the snow that had
+      fallen the previous day—the day of the battle. Reviewing his
+      impressions of the recent battle, picturing pleasantly to himself the
+      impression his news of a victory would create, or recalling the send-off
+      given him by the commander in chief and his fellow officers, Prince Andrew
+      was galloping along in a post chaise enjoying the feelings of a man who
+      has at length begun to attain a long-desired happiness. As soon as he
+      closed his eyes his ears seemed filled with the rattle of the wheels and
+      the sensation of victory. Then he began to imagine that the Russians were
+      running away and that he himself was killed, but he quickly roused himself
+      with a feeling of joy, as if learning afresh that this was not so but that
+      on the contrary the French had run away. He again recalled all the details
+      of the victory and his own calm courage during the battle, and feeling
+      reassured he dozed off.... The dark starry night was followed by a bright
+      cheerful morning. The snow was thawing in the sunshine, the horses
+      galloped quickly, and on both sides of the road were forests of different
+      kinds, fields, and villages.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At one of the post stations he overtook a convoy of Russian wounded. The
+      Russian officer in charge of the transport lolled back in the front cart,
+      shouting and scolding a soldier with coarse abuse. In each of the long
+      German carts six or more pale, dirty, bandaged men were being jolted over
+      the stony road. Some of them were talking (he heard Russian words), others
+      were eating bread; the more severely wounded looked silently, with the
+      languid interest of sick children, at the envoy hurrying past them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew told his driver to stop, and asked a soldier in what action
+      they had been wounded. “Day before yesterday, on the Danube,” answered the
+      soldier. Prince Andrew took out his purse and gave the soldier three gold
+      pieces.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s for them all,” he said to the officer who came up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Get well soon, lads!” he continued, turning to the soldiers. “There’s
+      plenty to do still.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What news, sir?” asked the officer, evidently anxious to start a
+      conversation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good news!... Go on!” he shouted to the driver, and they galloped on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was already quite dark when Prince Andrew rattled over the paved
+      streets of Brünn and found himself surrounded by high buildings, the
+      lights of shops, houses, and street lamps, fine carriages, and all that
+      atmosphere of a large and active town which is always so attractive to a
+      soldier after camp life. Despite his rapid journey and sleepless night,
+      Prince Andrew when he drove up to the palace felt even more vigorous and
+      alert than he had done the day before. Only his eyes gleamed feverishly
+      and his thoughts followed one another with extraordinary clearness and
+      rapidity. He again vividly recalled the details of the battle, no longer
+      dim, but definite and in the concise form in which he imagined himself
+      stating them to the Emperor Francis. He vividly imagined the casual
+      questions that might be put to him and the answers he would give. He
+      expected to be at once presented to the Emperor. At the chief entrance to
+      the palace, however, an official came running out to meet him, and
+      learning that he was a special messenger led him to another entrance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To the right from the corridor, <i>Euer Hochgeboren!</i> There you will find the
+      adjutant on duty,” said the official. “He will conduct you to the Minister
+      of War.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The adjutant on duty, meeting Prince Andrew, asked him to wait, and went
+      in to the Minister of War. Five minutes later he returned and bowing with
+      particular courtesy ushered Prince Andrew before him along a corridor to
+      the cabinet where the Minister of War was at work. The adjutant by his
+      elaborate courtesy appeared to wish to ward off any attempt at familiarity
+      on the part of the Russian messenger.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew’s joyous feeling was considerably weakened as he approached
+      the door of the minister’s room. He felt offended, and without his
+      noticing it the feeling of offense immediately turned into one of disdain
+      which was quite uncalled for. His fertile mind instantly suggested to him
+      a point of view which gave him a right to despise the adjutant and the
+      minister. “Away from the smell of powder, they probably think it easy to
+      gain victories!” he thought. His eyes narrowed disdainfully, he entered
+      the room of the Minister of War with peculiarly deliberate steps. This
+      feeling of disdain was heightened when he saw the minister seated at a
+      large table reading some papers and making pencil notes on them, and for
+      the first two or three minutes taking no notice of his arrival. A wax
+      candle stood at each side of the minister’s bent bald head with its gray
+      temples. He went on reading to the end, without raising his eyes at the
+      opening of the door and the sound of footsteps.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Take this and deliver it,” said he to his adjutant, handing him the
+      papers and still taking no notice of the special messenger.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew felt that either the actions of Kutúzov’s army interested
+      the Minister of War less than any of the other matters he was concerned
+      with, or he wanted to give the Russian special messenger that impression.
+      “But that is a matter of perfect indifference to me,” he thought. The
+      minister drew the remaining papers together, arranged them evenly, and
+      then raised his head. He had an intellectual and distinctive head, but the
+      instant he turned to Prince Andrew the firm, intelligent expression on his
+      face changed in a way evidently deliberate and habitual to him. His face
+      took on the stupid artificial smile (which does not even attempt to hide
+      its artificiality) of a man who is continually receiving many petitioners
+      one after another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “From General Field Marshal Kutúzov?” he asked. “I hope it is good news?
+      There has been an encounter with Mortier? A victory? It was high time!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He took the dispatch which was addressed to him and began to read it with
+      a mournful expression.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, my God! My God! Schmidt!” he exclaimed in German. “What a calamity!
+      What a calamity!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Having glanced through the dispatch he laid it on the table and looked at
+      Prince Andrew, evidently considering something.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah what a calamity! You say the affair was decisive? But Mortier is not
+      captured.” Again he pondered. “I am very glad you have brought good news,
+      though Schmidt’s death is a heavy price to pay for the victory. His
+      Majesty will no doubt wish to see you, but not today. I thank you! You
+      must have a rest. Be at the levee tomorrow after the parade. However, I
+      will let you know.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The stupid smile, which had left his face while he was speaking,
+      reappeared.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “<i>Au revoir!</i> Thank you very much. His Majesty will probably desire to see
+      you,” he added, bowing his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Prince Andrew left the palace he felt that all the interest and
+      happiness the victory had afforded him had been now left in the
+      indifferent hands of the Minister of War and the polite adjutant. The
+      whole tenor of his thoughts instantaneously changed; the battle seemed the
+      memory of a remote event long past.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0038"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew stayed at Brünn with Bilíbin, a Russian acquaintance of his
+      in the diplomatic service.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, my dear prince! I could not have a more welcome visitor,” said
+      Bilíbin as he came out to meet Prince Andrew. “Franz, put the prince’s
+      things in my bedroom,” said he to the servant who was ushering Bolkónski
+      in. “So you’re a messenger of victory, eh? Splendid! And I am sitting here
+      ill, as you see.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      After washing and dressing, Prince Andrew came into the diplomat’s
+      luxurious study and sat down to the dinner prepared for him. Bilíbin
+      settled down comfortably beside the fire.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After his journey and the campaign during which he had been deprived of
+      all the comforts of cleanliness and all the refinements of life, Prince
+      Andrew felt a pleasant sense of repose among luxurious surroundings such
+      as he had been accustomed to from childhood. Besides it was pleasant,
+      after his reception by the Austrians, to speak if not in Russian (for they
+      were speaking French) at least with a Russian who would, he supposed,
+      share the general Russian antipathy to the Austrians which was then
+      particularly strong.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bilíbin was a man of thirty-five, a bachelor, and of the same circle as
+      Prince Andrew. They had known each other previously in Petersburg, but had
+      become more intimate when Prince Andrew was in Vienna with Kutúzov. Just
+      as Prince Andrew was a young man who gave promise of rising high in the
+      military profession, so to an even greater extent Bilíbin gave promise of
+      rising in his diplomatic career. He was still a young man but no longer a
+      young diplomat, as he had entered the service at the age of sixteen, had
+      been in Paris and Copenhagen, and now held a rather important post in
+      Vienna. Both the foreign minister and our ambassador in Vienna knew him
+      and valued him. He was not one of those many diplomats who are esteemed
+      because they have certain negative qualities, avoid doing certain things,
+      and speak French. He was one of those, who, liking work, knew how to do
+      it, and despite his indolence would sometimes spend a whole night at his
+      writing table. He worked well whatever the import of his work. It was not
+      the question “What for?” but the question “How?” that interested him. What
+      the diplomatic matter might be he did not care, but it gave him great
+      pleasure to prepare a circular, memorandum, or report, skillfully,
+      pointedly, and elegantly. Bilíbin’s services were valued not only for what
+      he wrote, but also for his skill in dealing and conversing with those in
+      the highest spheres.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bilíbin liked conversation as he liked work, only when it could be made
+      elegantly witty. In society he always awaited an opportunity to say
+      something striking and took part in a conversation only when that was
+      possible. His conversation was always sprinkled with wittily original,
+      finished phrases of general interest. These sayings were prepared in the
+      inner laboratory of his mind in a portable form as if intentionally, so
+      that insignificant society people might carry them from drawing room to
+      drawing room. And, in fact, Bilíbin’s witticisms were hawked about in the
+      Viennese drawing rooms and often had an influence on matters considered
+      important.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His thin, worn, sallow face was covered with deep wrinkles, which always
+      looked as clean and well washed as the tips of one’s fingers after a
+      Russian bath. The movement of these wrinkles formed the principal play of
+      expression on his face. Now his forehead would pucker into deep folds and
+      his eyebrows were lifted, then his eyebrows would descend and deep
+      wrinkles would crease his cheeks. His small, deep-set eyes always twinkled
+      and looked out straight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, now tell me about your exploits,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bolkónski, very modestly without once mentioning himself, described the
+      engagement and his reception by the Minister of War.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They received me and my news as one receives a dog in a game of
+      skittles,” said he in conclusion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bilíbin smiled and the wrinkles on his face disappeared.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Cependant, mon cher,”</i> he remarked, examining his nails from a
+      distance and puckering the skin above his left eye, <i>“malgré la haute
+      estime que je professe pour</i> the Orthodox Russian army, <i>j’avoue que
+      votre victoire n’est pas des plus victorieuses.”</i> *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “But my dear fellow, with all my respect for the Orthodox
+     Russian army, I must say that your victory was not
+     particularly victorious.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      He went on talking in this way in French, uttering only those words in
+      Russian on which he wished to put a contemptuous emphasis.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come now! You with all your forces fall on the unfortunate Mortier and
+      his one division, and even then Mortier slips through your fingers!
+      Where’s the victory?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But seriously,” said Prince Andrew, “we can at any rate say without
+      boasting that it was a little better than at Ulm...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why didn’t you capture one, just one, marshal for us?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Because not everything happens as one expects or with the smoothness of a
+      parade. We had expected, as I told you, to get at their rear by seven in
+      the morning but had not reached it by five in the afternoon.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And why didn’t you do it at seven in the morning? You ought to have been
+      there at seven in the morning,” returned Bilíbin with a smile. “You ought
+      to have been there at seven in the morning.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why did you not succeed in impressing on Bonaparte by diplomatic methods
+      that he had better leave Genoa alone?” retorted Prince Andrew in the same
+      tone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I know,” interrupted Bilíbin, “you’re thinking it’s very easy to take
+      marshals, sitting on a sofa by the fire! That is true, but still why
+      didn’t you capture him? So don’t be surprised if not only the Minister of
+      War but also his Most August Majesty the Emperor and King Francis is not
+      much delighted by your victory. Even I, a poor secretary of the Russian
+      Embassy, do not feel any need in token of my joy to give my Franz a
+      thaler, or let him go with his <i>Liebchen</i> to the Prater... True, we have no
+      Prater here...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He looked straight at Prince Andrew and suddenly unwrinkled his forehead.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is now my turn to ask you ‘why?’ <i>mon cher</i>,” said Bolkónski. “I confess
+      I do not understand: perhaps there are diplomatic subtleties here beyond
+      my feeble intelligence, but I can’t make it out. Mack loses a whole army,
+      the Archduke Ferdinand and the Archduke Karl give no signs of life and
+      make blunder after blunder. Kutúzov alone at last gains a real victory,
+      destroying the spell of the invincibility of the French, and the Minister
+      of War does not even care to hear the details.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s just it, my dear fellow. You see it’s <i>hurrah</i> for the Tsar, for
+      Russia, for the Orthodox Greek faith! All that is beautiful, but what do
+      we, I mean the Austrian court, care for your victories? Bring us nice news
+      of a victory by the Archduke Karl or Ferdinand (one archduke’s as good as
+      another, as you know) and even if it is only over a fire brigade of
+      Bonaparte’s, that will be another story and we’ll fire off some cannon!
+      But this sort of thing seems done on purpose to vex us. The Archduke Karl
+      does nothing, the Archduke Ferdinand disgraces himself. You abandon
+      Vienna, give up its defense—as much as to say: ‘Heaven is with us,
+      but heaven help you and your capital!’ The one general whom we all loved,
+      Schmidt, you expose to a bullet, and then you congratulate us on the
+      victory! Admit that more irritating news than yours could not have been
+      conceived. It’s as if it had been done on purpose, on purpose. Besides,
+      suppose you did gain a brilliant victory, if even the Archduke Karl gained
+      a victory, what effect would that have on the general course of events?
+      It’s too late now when Vienna is occupied by the French army!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What? Occupied? Vienna occupied?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Not only occupied, but Bonaparte is at Schönbrunn, and the count, our
+      dear Count Vrbna, goes to him for orders.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      After the fatigues and impressions of the journey, his reception, and
+      especially after having dined, Bolkónski felt that he could not take in
+      the full significance of the words he heard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Count Lichtenfels was here this morning,” Bilíbin continued, “and showed
+      me a letter in which the parade of the French in Vienna was fully
+      described: Prince Murat <i>et tout le tremblement</i>... You see that your
+      victory is not a matter for great rejoicing and that you can’t be received
+      as a savior.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Really I don’t care about that, I don’t care at all,” said Prince Andrew,
+      beginning to understand that his news of the battle before Krems was
+      really of small importance in view of such events as the fall of Austria’s
+      capital. “How is it Vienna was taken? What of the bridge and its
+      celebrated bridgehead and Prince Auersperg? We heard reports that Prince
+      Auersperg was defending Vienna?” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Prince Auersperg is on this, on our side of the river, and is defending
+      us—doing it very badly, I think, but still he is defending us. But
+      Vienna is on the other side. No, the bridge has not yet been taken and I
+      hope it will not be, for it is mined and orders have been given to blow it
+      up. Otherwise we should long ago have been in the mountains of Bohemia,
+      and you and your army would have spent a bad quarter of an hour between
+      two fires.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But still this does not mean that the campaign is over,” said Prince
+      Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, I think it is. The bigwigs here think so too, but they daren’t say
+      so. It will be as I said at the beginning of the campaign, it won’t be
+      your skirmishing at Dürrenstein, or gunpowder at all, that will decide the
+      matter, but those who devised it,” said Bilíbin quoting one of his own
+      mots, releasing the wrinkles on his forehead, and pausing. “The only
+      question is what will come of the meeting between the Emperor Alexander
+      and the King of Prussia in Berlin? If Prussia joins the Allies, Austria’s
+      hand will be forced and there will be war. If not it is merely a question
+      of settling where the preliminaries of the new Campo Formio are to be
+      drawn up.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What an extraordinary genius!” Prince Andrew suddenly exclaimed,
+      clenching his small hand and striking the table with it, “and what luck
+      the man has!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Buonaparte?” said Bilíbin inquiringly, puckering up his forehead to
+      indicate that he was about to say something witty. “Buonaparte?” he
+      repeated, accentuating the <i>u</i>: “I think, however, now that he lays down
+      laws for Austria at Schönbrunn, <i>il faut lui faire grâce de l’u!</i> * I shall
+      certainly adopt an innovation and call him simply Bonaparte!”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “We must let him off the u!”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “But joking apart,” said Prince Andrew, “do you really think the campaign
+      is over?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “This is what I think. Austria has been made a fool of, and she is not
+      used to it. She will retaliate. And she has been fooled in the first place
+      because her provinces have been pillaged—they say the Holy Russian
+      army loots terribly—her army is destroyed, her capital taken, and
+      all this for the <i>beaux yeux</i> * of His Sardinian Majesty. And therefore—this
+      is between ourselves—I instinctively feel that we are being
+      deceived, my instinct tells me of negotiations with France and projects
+      for peace, a secret peace concluded separately.”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Fine eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “Impossible!” cried Prince Andrew. “That would be too base.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If we live we shall see,” replied Bilíbin, his face again becoming smooth
+      as a sign that the conversation was at an end.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Prince Andrew reached the room prepared for him and lay down in a
+      clean shirt on the feather bed with its warmed and fragrant pillows, he
+      felt that the battle of which he had brought tidings was far, far away
+      from him. The alliance with Prussia, Austria’s treachery, Bonaparte’s new
+      triumph, tomorrow’s levee and parade, and the audience with the Emperor
+      Francis occupied his thoughts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He closed his eyes, and immediately a sound of cannonading, of musketry
+      and the rattling of carriage wheels seemed to fill his ears, and now again
+      drawn out in a thin line the musketeers were descending the hill, the
+      French were firing, and he felt his heart palpitating as he rode forward
+      beside Schmidt with the bullets merrily whistling all around, and he
+      experienced tenfold the joy of living, as he had not done since childhood.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He woke up...
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, that all happened!” he said, and, smiling happily to himself like a
+      child, he fell into a deep, youthful slumber.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0039"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Next day he woke late. Recalling his recent impressions, the first thought
+      that came into his mind was that today he had to be presented to the
+      Emperor Francis; he remembered the Minister of War, the polite Austrian
+      adjutant, Bilíbin, and last night’s conversation. Having dressed for his
+      attendance at court in full parade uniform, which he had not worn for a
+      long time, he went into Bilíbin’s study fresh, animated, and handsome,
+      with his hand bandaged. In the study were four gentlemen of the diplomatic
+      corps. With Prince Hippolyte Kurágin, who was a secretary to the embassy,
+      Bolkónski was already acquainted. Bilíbin introduced him to the others.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The gentlemen assembled at Bilíbin’s were young, wealthy, gay society men,
+      who here, as in Vienna, formed a special set which Bilíbin, their leader,
+      called <i>les nôtres</i>. * This set, consisting almost exclusively of diplomats,
+      evidently had its own interests which had nothing to do with war or
+      politics but related to high society, to certain women, and to the
+      official side of the service. These gentlemen received Prince Andrew as
+      one of themselves, an honor they did not extend to many. From politeness
+      and to start conversation, they asked him a few questions about the army
+      and the battle, and then the talk went off into merry jests and gossip.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Ours.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “But the best of it was,” said one, telling of the misfortune of a fellow
+      diplomat, “that the Chancellor told him flatly that his appointment to
+      London was a promotion and that he was so to regard it. Can you fancy the
+      figure he cut?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But the worst of it, gentlemen—I am giving Kurágin away to you—is
+      that that man suffers, and this Don Juan, wicked fellow, is taking
+      advantage of it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Hippolyte was lolling in a lounge chair with his legs over its arm.
+      He began to laugh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Tell me about that!” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, you Don Juan! You serpent!” cried several voices.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You, Bolkónski, don’t know,” said Bilíbin turning to Prince Andrew, “that
+      all the atrocities of the French army (I nearly said of the Russian army)
+      are nothing compared to what this man has been doing among the women!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<i>“La femme est la compagne de l’homme,”</i> * announced Prince Hippolyte, and
+      began looking through a lorgnette at his elevated legs.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Woman is man’s companion.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Bilíbin and the rest of “ours” burst out laughing in Hippolyte’s face, and
+      Prince Andrew saw that Hippolyte, of whom—he had to admit—he
+      had almost been jealous on his wife’s account, was the butt of this set.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, I must give you a treat,” Bilíbin whispered to Bolkónski. “Kurágin is
+      exquisite when he discusses politics—you should see his gravity!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He sat down beside Hippolyte and wrinkling his forehead began talking to
+      him about politics. Prince Andrew and the others gathered round these two.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Berlin cabinet cannot express a feeling of alliance,” began Hippolyte
+      gazing round with importance at the others, “without expressing... as in
+      its last note... you understand... Besides, unless His Majesty the Emperor
+      derogates from the principle of our alliance...
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Wait, I have not finished...” he said to Prince Andrew, seizing him by
+      the arm, “I believe that intervention will be stronger than
+      nonintervention. And...” he paused. “Finally one cannot impute the
+      nonreceipt of our dispatch of November 18. That is how it will end.” And
+      he released Bolkónski’s arm to indicate that he had now quite finished.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Demosthenes, I know thee by the pebble thou secretest in thy golden
+      mouth!” said Bilíbin, and the mop of hair on his head moved with
+      satisfaction.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Everybody laughed, and Hippolyte louder than anyone. He was evidently
+      distressed, and breathed painfully, but could not restrain the wild
+      laughter that convulsed his usually impassive features.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well now, gentlemen,” said Bilíbin, “Bolkónski is my guest in this house
+      and in Brünn itself. I want to entertain him as far as I can, with all the
+      pleasures of life here. If we were in Vienna it would be easy, but here,
+      in this wretched Moravian hole, it is more difficult, and I beg you all to
+      help me. Brünn’s attractions must be shown him. You can undertake the
+      theater, I society, and you, Hippolyte, of course the women.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “We must let him see Amelie, she’s exquisite!” said one of
+      “ours,” kissing his finger tips.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In general we must turn this bloodthirsty soldier to more humane
+      interests,” said Bilíbin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I shall scarcely be able to avail myself of your hospitality, gentlemen,
+      it is already time for me to go,” replied Prince Andrew looking at his
+      watch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where to?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “To the Emperor.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, <i>au revoir</i>, Bolkónski! <i>Au revoir</i>, Prince! Come back early
+      to dinner,” cried several voices. “We’ll take you in hand.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “When speaking to the Emperor, try as far as you can to praise the way
+      that provisions are supplied and the routes indicated,” said Bilíbin,
+      accompanying him to the hall.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I should like to speak well of them, but as far as I know the facts, I
+      can’t,” replied Bolkónski, smiling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, talk as much as you can, anyway. He has a passion for giving
+      audiences, but he does not like talking himself and can’t do it, as you
+      will see.”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0040"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At the levee Prince Andrew stood among the Austrian officers as he had
+      been told to, and the Emperor Francis merely looked fixedly into his face
+      and just nodded to him with his long head. But after it was over, the
+      adjutant he had seen the previous day ceremoniously informed Bolkónski
+      that the Emperor desired to give him an audience. The Emperor Francis
+      received him standing in the middle of the room. Before the conversation
+      began Prince Andrew was struck by the fact that the Emperor seemed
+      confused and blushed as if not knowing what to say.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Tell me, when did the battle begin?” he asked hurriedly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew replied. Then followed other questions just as simple: “Was
+      Kutúzov well? When had he left Krems?” and so on. The Emperor spoke as if
+      his sole aim were to put a given number of questions—the answers to
+      these questions, as was only too evident, did not interest him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “At what o’clock did the battle begin?” asked the Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I cannot inform Your Majesty at what o’clock the battle began at the
+      front, but at Dürrenstein, where I was, our attack began after five in the
+      afternoon,” replied Bolkónski growing more animated and expecting that he
+      would have a chance to give a reliable account, which he had ready in his
+      mind, of all he knew and had seen. But the Emperor smiled and interrupted
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How many miles?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “From where to where, Your Majesty?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “From Dürrenstein to Krems.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Three and a half miles, Your Majesty.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The French have abandoned the left bank?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “According to the scouts the last of them crossed on rafts during the
+      night.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Is there sufficient forage in Krems?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Forage has not been supplied to the extent...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “At what o’clock was General Schmidt killed?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “At seven o’clock, I believe.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “At seven o’clock? It’s very sad, very sad!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor thanked Prince Andrew and bowed. Prince Andrew withdrew and
+      was immediately surrounded by courtiers on all sides. Everywhere he saw
+      friendly looks and heard friendly words. Yesterday’s adjutant reproached
+      him for not having stayed at the palace, and offered him his own house.
+      The Minister of War came up and congratulated him on the Maria Theresa
+      Order of the third grade, which the Emperor was conferring on him. The
+      Empress’ chamberlain invited him to see Her Majesty. The archduchess also
+      wished to see him. He did not know whom to answer, and for a few seconds
+      collected his thoughts. Then the Russian ambassador took him by the
+      shoulder, led him to the window, and began to talk to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Contrary to Bilíbin’s forecast the news he had brought was joyfully
+      received. A thanksgiving service was arranged, Kutúzov was awarded the
+      Grand Cross of Maria Theresa, and the whole army received rewards.
+      Bolkónski was invited everywhere, and had to spend the whole morning
+      calling on the principal Austrian dignitaries. Between four and five in
+      the afternoon, having made all his calls, he was returning to Bilíbin’s
+      house thinking out a letter to his father about the battle and his visit
+      to Brünn. At the door he found a vehicle half full of luggage. Franz,
+      Bilíbin’s man, was dragging a portmanteau with some difficulty out of the
+      front door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before returning to Bilíbin’s Prince Andrew had gone to a bookshop to
+      provide himself with some books for the campaign, and had spent some time
+      in the shop.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, your excellency!” said Franz, with difficulty rolling the portmanteau
+      into the vehicle, “we are to move on still farther. The scoundrel is again
+      at our heels!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh? What?” asked Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bilíbin came out to meet him. His usually calm face showed excitement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There now! Confess that this is delightful,” said he. “This affair of the
+      Thabor Bridge, at Vienna.... They have crossed without striking a blow!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew could not understand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But where do you come from not to know what every coachman in the town
+      knows?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I come from the archduchess’. I heard nothing there.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And you didn’t see that everybody is packing up?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I did not... What is it all about?” inquired Prince Andrew impatiently.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s it all about? Why, the French have crossed the bridge that
+      Auersperg was defending, and the bridge was not blown up: so Murat is now
+      rushing along the road to Brünn and will be here in a day or two.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What? Here? But why did they not blow up the bridge, if it was mined?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That is what I ask you. No one, not even Bonaparte, knows why.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Bolkónski shrugged his shoulders.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But if the bridge is crossed it means that the army too is lost? It will
+      be cut off,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s just it,” answered Bilíbin. “Listen! The French entered Vienna as
+      I told you. Very well. Next day, which was yesterday, those gentlemen,
+      <i>messieurs les maréchaux</i>, * Murat, Lannes, and Belliard, mount and ride to
+      the bridge. (Observe that all three are Gascons.) ‘Gentlemen,’ says one of
+      them, ‘you know the Thabor Bridge is mined and doubly mined and that there
+      are menacing fortifications at its head and an army of fifteen thousand
+      men has been ordered to blow up the bridge and not let us cross? But it
+      will please our sovereign the Emperor Napoleon if we take this bridge, so
+      let us three go and take it!’ ‘Yes, let’s!’ say the others. And off they
+      go and take the bridge, cross it, and now with their whole army are on
+      this side of the Danube, marching on us, you, and your lines of
+      communication.”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * The marshalls.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “Stop jesting,” said Prince Andrew sadly and seriously. This news grieved
+      him and yet he was pleased.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as he learned that the Russian army was in such a hopeless
+      situation it occurred to him that it was he who was destined to lead it
+      out of this position; that here was the Toulon that would lift him from
+      the ranks of obscure officers and offer him the first step to fame!
+      Listening to Bilíbin he was already imagining how on reaching the army he
+      would give an opinion at the war council which would be the only one that
+      could save the army, and how he alone would be entrusted with the
+      executing of the plan.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Stop this jesting,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am not jesting,” Bilíbin went on. “Nothing is truer or sadder.
+      These gentlemen ride onto the bridge alone and wave white handkerchiefs; they
+      assure the officer on duty that they, the marshals, are on their way to
+      negotiate with Prince Auersperg. He lets them enter the <i>tête-de-pont</i>. *
+      They spin him a thousand gasconades, saying that the war is over, that the
+      Emperor Francis is arranging a meeting with Bonaparte, that they desire to
+      see Prince Auersperg, and so on. The officer sends for Auersperg; these
+      gentlemen embrace the officers, crack jokes, sit on the cannon, and
+      meanwhile a French battalion gets to the bridge unobserved, flings the
+      bags of incendiary material into the water, and approaches the
+      <i>tête-de-pont</i>. At length appears the lieutenant general, our dear Prince
+      Auersperg von Mautern himself. ‘Dearest foe! Flower of the Austrian army,
+      hero of the Turkish wars! Hostilities are ended, we can shake one another’s
+      hand.... The Emperor Napoleon burns with impatience to make Prince
+      Auersperg’s acquaintance.’ In a word, those gentlemen, Gascons indeed, so
+      bewildered him with fine words, and he is so flattered by his rapidly
+      established intimacy with the French marshals, and so dazzled by the sight
+      of Murat’s mantle and ostrich plumes, <i>qu’il n’y voit que du feu, et oublie
+      celui qu’il devait faire faire sur l’ennemi!”</i> *(2) In spite of the
+      animation of his speech, Bilíbin did not forget to pause after this mot to
+      give time for its due appreciation. “The French battalion rushes to the
+      bridgehead, spikes the guns, and the bridge is taken! But what is best of
+      all,” he went on, his excitement subsiding under the delightful interest
+      of his own story, “is that the sergeant in charge of the cannon which was
+      to give the signal to fire the mines and blow up the bridge, this
+      sergeant, seeing that the French troops were running onto the bridge, was
+      about to fire, but Lannes stayed his hand. The sergeant, who was evidently
+      wiser than his general, goes up to Auersperg and says: ‘Prince, you are
+      being deceived, here are the French!’ Murat, seeing that all is lost if
+      the sergeant is allowed to speak, turns to Auersperg with feigned
+      astonishment (he is a true Gascon) and says: ‘I don’t recognize the
+      world-famous Austrian discipline, if you allow a subordinate to address
+      you like that!’ It was a stroke of genius. Prince Auersperg feels his
+      dignity at stake and orders the sergeant to be arrested. Come, you must
+      own that this affair of the Thabor Bridge is delightful! It is not exactly
+      stupidity, nor rascality....”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * Bridgehead.
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * (2) That their fire gets into his eyes and he forgets that
+     he ought to be firing at the enemy.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “It may be treachery,” said Prince Andrew, vividly imagining the gray
+      overcoats, wounds, the smoke of gunpowder, the sounds of firing, and the
+      glory that awaited him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Not that either. That puts the court in too bad a light,” replied
+      Bilíbin. “It’s not treachery nor rascality nor stupidity: it is just as at
+      Ulm... it is...”—he seemed to be trying to find the right
+      expression. <i>“C’est... c’est du Mack. Nous sommes mackés</i> (It is... it is a
+      bit of Mack. We are <i>Macked</i>),” he concluded, feeling that he had produced a
+      good epigram, a fresh one that would be repeated. His hitherto puckered
+      brow became smooth as a sign of pleasure, and with a slight smile he began
+      to examine his nails.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where are you off to?” he said suddenly to Prince Andrew who had risen
+      and was going toward his room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am going away.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Where to?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “To the army.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But you meant to stay another two days?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But now I am off at once.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Prince Andrew after giving directions about his departure went to his
+      room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know, <i>mon cher</i>,” said Bilíbin following him, “I have been thinking
+      about you. Why are you going?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And in proof of the conclusiveness of his opinion all the wrinkles
+      vanished from his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew looked inquiringly at him and gave no reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why are you going? I know you think it your duty to gallop back to the
+      army now that it is in danger. I understand that. <i>Mon cher</i>, it is
+      heroism!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Not at all,” said Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But as you are a philosopher, be a consistent one, look at the other side
+      of the question and you will see that your duty, on the contrary, is to
+      take care of yourself. Leave it to those who are no longer fit for
+      anything else.... You have not been ordered to return and have not been
+      dismissed from here; therefore, you can stay and go with us wherever our
+      ill luck takes us. They say we are going to Olmütz, and Olmütz is a very
+      decent town. You and I will travel comfortably in my <i>calèche</i>.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Do stop joking, Bilíbin,” cried Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am speaking sincerely as a friend! Consider! Where and why are you
+      going, when you might remain here? You are faced by one of two things,”
+       and the skin over his left temple puckered, “either you will not reach
+      your regiment before peace is concluded, or you will share defeat and
+      disgrace with Kutúzov’s whole army.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Bilíbin unwrinkled his temple, feeling that the dilemma was insoluble.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I cannot argue about it,” replied Prince Andrew coldly, but he thought:
+      “I am going to save the army.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear fellow, you are a hero!” said Bilíbin.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0041"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      That same night, having taken leave of the Minister of War, Bolkónski set
+      off to rejoin the army, not knowing where he would find it and fearing to
+      be captured by the French on the way to Krems.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In Brünn everybody attached to the court was packing up, and the heavy
+      baggage was already being dispatched to Olmütz. Near Hetzelsdorf Prince
+      Andrew struck the high road along which the Russian army was moving with
+      great haste and in the greatest disorder. The road was so obstructed with
+      carts that it was impossible to get by in a carriage. Prince Andrew took a
+      horse and a Cossack from a Cossack commander, and hungry and weary, making
+      his way past the baggage wagons, rode in search of the commander in chief
+      and of his own luggage. Very sinister reports of the position of the army
+      reached him as he went along, and the appearance of the troops in their
+      disorderly flight confirmed these rumors.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Cette armée russe que l’or de l’Angleterre a transportée des extrémités
+      de l’univers, nous allons lui faire éprouver le même sort—(le sort
+      de l’armée d’Ulm).”</i> * He remembered these words in Bonaparte’s address to
+      his army at the beginning of the campaign, and they awoke in him
+      astonishment at the genius of his hero, a feeling of wounded pride, and a
+      hope of glory. “And should there be nothing left but to die?” he thought.
+      “Well, if need be, I shall do it no worse than others.”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “That Russian army which has been brought from the ends of
+     the earth by English gold, we shall cause to share the same
+     fate—(the fate of the army at Ulm).”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      He looked with disdain at the endless confused mass of detachments, carts,
+      guns, artillery, and again baggage wagons and vehicles of all kinds
+      overtaking one another and blocking the muddy road, three and sometimes
+      four abreast. From all sides, behind and before, as far as ear could
+      reach, there were the rattle of wheels, the creaking of carts and gun
+      carriages, the tramp of horses, the crack of whips, shouts, the urging of
+      horses, and the swearing of soldiers, orderlies, and officers. All along
+      the sides of the road fallen horses were to be seen, some flayed, some
+      not, and broken-down carts beside which solitary soldiers sat waiting for
+      something, and again soldiers straggling from their companies, crowds of
+      whom set off to the neighboring villages, or returned from them dragging
+      sheep, fowls, hay, and bulging sacks. At each ascent or descent of the
+      road the crowds were yet denser and the din of shouting more incessant.
+      Soldiers floundering knee-deep in mud pushed the guns and wagons
+      themselves. Whips cracked, hoofs slipped, traces broke, and lungs were
+      strained with shouting. The officers directing the march rode backward and
+      forward between the carts. Their voices were but feebly heard amid the
+      uproar and one saw by their faces that they despaired of the possibility
+      of checking this disorder.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Here is our dear Orthodox Russian army,” thought Bolkónski, recalling
+      Bilíbin’s words.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Wishing to find out where the commander in chief was, he rode up to a
+      convoy. Directly opposite to him came a strange one-horse vehicle,
+      evidently rigged up by soldiers out of any available materials and looking
+      like something between a cart, a cabriolet, and a <i>calèche</i>. A soldier was
+      driving, and a woman enveloped in shawls sat behind the apron under the
+      leather hood of the vehicle. Prince Andrew rode up and was just putting
+      his question to a soldier when his attention was diverted by the desperate
+      shrieks of the woman in the vehicle. An officer in charge of transport was
+      beating the soldier who was driving the woman’s vehicle for trying to get
+      ahead of others, and the strokes of his whip fell on the apron of the
+      equipage. The woman screamed piercingly. Seeing Prince Andrew she leaned
+      out from behind the apron and, waving her thin arms from under the woolen
+      shawl, cried:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mr. Aide-de-camp! Mr. Aide-de-camp!... For heaven’s sake... Protect me!
+      What will become of us? I am the wife of the doctor of the Seventh
+      Chasseurs.... They won’t let us pass, we are left behind and have lost our
+      people...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll flatten you into a pancake!” shouted the angry officer to the
+      soldier. “Turn back with your slut!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Mr. Aide-de-camp! Help me!... What does it all mean?” screamed the
+      doctor’s wife.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Kindly let this cart pass. Don’t you see it’s a woman?” said Prince
+      Andrew riding up to the officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The officer glanced at him, and without replying turned again to the
+      soldier. “I’ll teach you to push on!... Back!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Let them pass, I tell you!” repeated Prince Andrew, compressing his lips.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And who are you?” cried the officer, turning on him with tipsy rage, “who
+      are <i>you?</i> Are you in command here? Eh? I am commander here, not you! Go
+      back or I’ll flatten you into a pancake,” repeated he. This expression
+      evidently pleased him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That was a nice snub for the little aide-de-camp,” came a voice from
+      behind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew saw that the officer was in that state of senseless, tipsy
+      rage when a man does not know what he is saying. He saw that his
+      championship of the doctor’s wife in her queer trap might expose him to
+      what he dreaded more than anything in the world—to ridicule; but his
+      instinct urged him on. Before the officer finished his sentence Prince
+      Andrew, his face distorted with fury, rode up to him and raised his riding
+      whip.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Kind...ly let—them—pass!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The officer flourished his arm and hastily rode away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s all the fault of these fellows on the staff that there’s this
+      disorder,” he muttered. “Do as you like.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew without lifting his eyes rode hastily away from the doctor’s
+      wife, who was calling him her deliverer, and recalling with a sense of
+      disgust the minutest details of this humiliating scene he galloped on to
+      the village where he was told who the commander in chief was.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On reaching the village he dismounted and went to the nearest house,
+      intending to rest if but for a moment, eat something, and try to sort out
+      the stinging and tormenting thoughts that confused his mind. “This is a
+      mob of scoundrels and not an army,” he was thinking as he went up to the
+      window of the first house, when a familiar voice called him by name.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He turned round. Nesvítski’s handsome face looked out of the little
+      window. Nesvítski, moving his moist lips as he chewed something, and
+      flourishing his arm, called him to enter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Bolkónski! Bolkónski!... Don’t you hear? Eh? Come quick...” he shouted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Entering the house, Prince Andrew saw Nesvítski and another adjutant
+      having something to eat. They hastily turned round to him asking if he had
+      any news. On their familiar faces he read agitation and alarm. This was
+      particularly noticeable on Nesvítski’s usually laughing countenance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where is the commander in chief?” asked Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Here, in that house,” answered the adjutant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, is it true that it’s peace and capitulation?” asked Nesvítski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I was going to ask you. I know nothing except that it was all I could do
+      to get here.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And we, my dear boy! It’s terrible! I was wrong to laugh at Mack, we’re
+      getting it still worse,” said Nesvítski. “But sit down and have something
+      to eat.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You won’t be able to find either your baggage or anything else now,
+      Prince. And God only knows where your man Peter is,” said the other
+      adjutant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where are headquarters?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “We are to spend the night in Znaim.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, I have got all I need into packs for two horses,” said Nesvítski.
+      “They’ve made up splendid packs for me—fit to cross the Bohemian
+      mountains with. It’s a bad lookout, old fellow! But what’s the matter with
+      you? You must be ill to shiver like that,” he added, noticing that Prince
+      Andrew winced as at an electric shock.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s nothing,” replied Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He had just remembered his recent encounter with the doctor’s wife and the
+      convoy officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is the commander in chief doing here?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I can’t make out at all,” said Nesvítski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, all I can make out is that everything is abominable, abominable,
+      quite abominable!” said Prince Andrew, and he went off to the house where
+      the commander in chief was.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Passing by Kutúzov’s carriage and the exhausted saddle horses of his
+      suite, with their Cossacks who were talking loudly together, Prince Andrew
+      entered the passage. Kutúzov himself, he was told, was in the house with
+      Prince Bagratión and Weyrother. Weyrother was the Austrian general who had
+      succeeded Schmidt. In the passage little Kozlóvski was squatting on his
+      heels in front of a clerk. The clerk, with cuffs turned up, was hastily
+      writing at a tub turned bottom upwards. Kozlóvski’s face looked worn—he
+      too had evidently not slept all night. He glanced at Prince Andrew and did
+      not even nod to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Second line... have you written it?” he continued dictating to the clerk.
+      “The Kiev Grenadiers, Podolian...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “One can’t write so fast, your honor,” said the clerk, glancing
+      angrily and disrespectfully at Kozlóvski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Through the door came the sounds of Kutúzov’s voice, excited and
+      dissatisfied, interrupted by another, an unfamiliar voice. From the sound
+      of these voices, the inattentive way Kozlóvski looked at him, the
+      disrespectful manner of the exhausted clerk, the fact that the clerk and
+      Kozlóvski were squatting on the floor by a tub so near to the commander in
+      chief, and from the noisy laughter of the Cossacks holding the horses near
+      the window, Prince Andrew felt that something important and disastrous was
+      about to happen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He turned to Kozlóvski with urgent questions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Immediately, Prince,” said Kozlóvski. “Dispositions for Bagratión.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What about capitulation?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Nothing of the sort. Orders are issued for a battle.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew moved toward the door from whence voices were heard. Just as
+      he was going to open it the sounds ceased, the door opened, and Kutúzov
+      with his eagle nose and puffy face appeared in the doorway. Prince Andrew
+      stood right in front of Kutúzov but the expression of the commander in
+      chief’s one sound eye showed him to be so preoccupied with thoughts and
+      anxieties as to be oblivious of his presence. He looked straight at his
+      adjutant’s face without recognizing him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, have you finished?” said he to Kozlóvski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One moment, your excellency.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Bagratión, a gaunt middle-aged man of medium height with a firm, impassive
+      face of Oriental type, came out after the commander in chief.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have the honor to present myself,” repeated Prince Andrew rather
+      loudly, handing Kutúzov an envelope.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, from Vienna? Very good. Later, later!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov went out into the porch with Bagratión.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, good-by, Prince,” said he to Bagratión. “My blessing, and may
+      Christ be with you in your great endeavor!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      His face suddenly softened and tears came into his eyes. With his left
+      hand he drew Bagratión toward him, and with his right, on which he wore a
+      ring, he made the sign of the cross over him with a gesture evidently
+      habitual, offering his puffy cheek, but Bagratión kissed him on the neck
+      instead.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Christ be with you!” Kutúzov repeated and went toward his carriage. “Get
+      in with me,” said he to Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency, I should like to be of use here. Allow me to remain with
+      Prince Bagratión’s detachment.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Get in,” said Kutúzov, and noticing that Bolkónski still delayed, he
+      added: “I need good officers myself, need them myself!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They got into the carriage and drove for a few minutes in silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There is still much, much before us,” he said, as if with an old man’s
+      penetration he understood all that was passing in Bolkónski’s mind. “If a
+      tenth part of his detachment returns I shall thank God,” he added as if
+      speaking to himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew glanced at Kutúzov’s face only a foot distant from him and
+      involuntarily noticed the carefully washed seams of the scar near his
+      temple, where an Ismail bullet had pierced his skull, and the empty eye
+      socket. “Yes, he has a right to speak so calmly of those men’s death,”
+       thought Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That is why I beg to be sent to that detachment,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov did not reply. He seemed to have forgotten what he had been
+      saying, and sat plunged in thought. Five minutes later, gently swaying on
+      the soft springs of the carriage, he turned to Prince Andrew. There was
+      not a trace of agitation on his face. With delicate irony he questioned
+      Prince Andrew about the details of his interview with the Emperor, about
+      the remarks he had heard at court concerning the Krems affair, and about
+      some ladies they both knew.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0042"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On November 1 Kutúzov had received, through a spy, news that the army he
+      commanded was in an almost hopeless position. The spy reported that the
+      French, after crossing the bridge at Vienna, were advancing in immense
+      force upon Kutúzov’s line of communication with the troops that were
+      arriving from Russia. If Kutúzov decided to remain at Krems, Napoleon’s
+      army of one hundred and fifty thousand men would cut him off completely
+      and surround his exhausted army of forty thousand, and he would find
+      himself in the position of Mack at Ulm. If Kutúzov decided to abandon the
+      road connecting him with the troops arriving from Russia, he would have to
+      march with no road into unknown parts of the Bohemian mountains, defending
+      himself against superior forces of the enemy and abandoning all hope of a
+      junction with Buxhöwden. If Kutúzov decided to retreat along the road from
+      Krems to Olmütz, to unite with the troops arriving from Russia, he risked
+      being forestalled on that road by the French who had crossed the Vienna
+      bridge, and encumbered by his baggage and transport, having to accept
+      battle on the march against an enemy three times as strong, who would hem
+      him in from two sides.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov chose this latter course.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French, the spy reported, having crossed the Vienna bridge, were
+      advancing by forced marches toward Znaim, which lay sixty-six miles off on
+      the line of Kutúzov’s retreat. If he reached Znaim before the French,
+      there would be great hope of saving the army; to let the French forestall
+      him at Znaim meant the exposure of his whole army to a disgrace such as
+      that of Ulm, or to utter destruction. But to forestall the French with his
+      whole army was impossible. The road for the French from Vienna to Znaim
+      was shorter and better than the road for the Russians from Krems to Znaim.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The night he received the news, Kutúzov sent Bagratión’s vanguard, four
+      thousand strong, to the right across the hills from the Krems-Znaim to the
+      Vienna-Znaim road. Bagratión was to make this march without resting, and
+      to halt facing Vienna with Znaim to his rear, and if he succeeded in
+      forestalling the French he was to delay them as long as possible. Kutúzov
+      himself with all his transport took the road to Znaim.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Marching thirty miles that stormy night across roadless hills, with his
+      hungry, ill-shod soldiers, and losing a third of his men as stragglers by
+      the way, Bagratión came out on the Vienna-Znaim road at Hollabrünn a few
+      hours ahead of the French who were approaching Hollabrünn from Vienna.
+      Kutúzov with his transport had still to march for some days before he
+      could reach Znaim. Hence Bagratión with his four thousand hungry,
+      exhausted men would have to detain for days the whole enemy army that came
+      upon him at Hollabrünn, which was clearly impossible. But a freak of fate
+      made the impossible possible. The success of the trick that had placed the
+      Vienna bridge in the hands of the French without a fight led Murat to try
+      to deceive Kutúzov in a similar way. Meeting Bagratión’s weak detachment
+      on the Znaim road he supposed it to be Kutúzov’s whole army. To be able to
+      crush it absolutely he awaited the arrival of the rest of the troops who
+      were on their way from Vienna, and with this object offered a three days’
+      truce on condition that both armies should remain in position without
+      moving. Murat declared that negotiations for peace were already
+      proceeding, and that he therefore offered this truce to avoid unnecessary
+      bloodshed. Count Nostitz, the Austrian general occupying the advanced
+      posts, believed Murat’s emissary and retired, leaving Bagratión’s
+      division exposed. Another emissary rode to the Russian line to announce the peace
+      negotiations and to offer the Russian army the three days’ truce.
+      Bagratión replied that he was not authorized either to accept or refuse a
+      truce and sent his adjutant to Kutúzov to report the offer he had
+      received.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A truce was Kutúzov’s sole chance of gaining time, giving Bagratión’s
+      exhausted troops some rest, and letting the transport and heavy convoys
+      (whose movements were concealed from the French) advance if but one stage
+      nearer Znaim. The offer of a truce gave the only, and a quite unexpected,
+      chance of saving the army. On receiving the news he immediately dispatched
+      Adjutant General Wintzingerode, who was in attendance on him, to the enemy
+      camp. Wintzingerode was not merely to agree to the truce but also to offer
+      terms of capitulation, and meanwhile Kutúzov sent his adjutants back to
+      hasten to the utmost the movements of the baggage trains of the entire
+      army along the Krems-Znaim road. Bagratión’s exhausted and hungry
+      detachment, which alone covered this movement of the transport and of the
+      whole army, had to remain stationary in face of an enemy eight times as
+      strong as itself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov’s expectations that the proposals of capitulation (which were in
+      no way binding) might give time for part of the transport to pass, and
+      also that Murat’s mistake would very soon be discovered, proved correct.
+      As soon as Bonaparte (who was at Schönbrunn, sixteen miles from
+      Hollabrünn) received Murat’s dispatch with the proposal of a truce and a
+      capitulation, he detected a ruse and wrote the following letter to Murat:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Schönbrunn, 25th Brumaire, 1805,
+    </p>
+<p>
+      at eight o’clock in the morning
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To PRINCE MURAT,
+    </p>
+<p>
+      I cannot find words to express to you my displeasure. You command only my
+      advance guard, and have no right to arrange an armistice without my order.
+      You are causing me to lose the fruits of a campaign. Break the armistice
+      immediately and march on the enemy. Inform him that the general who signed
+      that capitulation had no right to do so, and that no one but the Emperor
+      of Russia has that right.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If, however, the Emperor of Russia ratifies that convention, I will ratify
+      it; but it is only a trick. March on, destroy the Russian army.... You are
+      in a position to seize its baggage and artillery.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Russian Emperor’s aide-de-camp is an impostor. Officers are nothing
+      when they have no powers; this one had none.... The Austrians let
+      themselves be tricked at the crossing of the Vienna bridge, you are
+      letting yourself be tricked by an aide-de-camp of the Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      NAPOLEON
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bonaparte’s adjutant rode full gallop with this menacing letter to Murat.
+      Bonaparte himself, not trusting to his generals, moved with all the Guards
+      to the field of battle, afraid of letting a ready victim escape, and
+      Bagratión’s four thousand men merrily lighted campfires, dried and warmed
+      themselves, cooked their porridge for the first time for three days, and
+      not one of them knew or imagined what was in store for him.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0043"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Between three and four o’clock in the afternoon Prince Andrew, who had
+      persisted in his request to Kutúzov, arrived at Grunth and reported
+      himself to Bagratión. Bonaparte’s adjutant had not yet reached Murat’s
+      detachment and the battle had not yet begun. In Bagratión’s detachment no
+      one knew anything of the general position of affairs. They talked of peace
+      but did not believe in its possibility; others talked of a battle but also
+      disbelieved in the nearness of an engagement. Bagratión, knowing Bolkónski
+      to be a favorite and trusted adjutant, received him with distinction and
+      special marks of favor, explaining to him that there would probably be an
+      engagement that day or the next, and giving him full liberty to remain
+      with him during the battle or to join the rearguard and have an eye on the
+      order of retreat, “which is also very important.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “However, there will hardly be an engagement today,” said Bagratión
+      as if to reassure Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If he is one of the ordinary little staff dandies sent to earn a medal he
+      can get his reward just as well in the rearguard, but if he wishes to stay
+      with me, let him... he’ll be of use here if he’s a brave
+      officer,” thought Bagratión. Prince Andrew, without replying, asked the
+      prince’s permission to ride round the position to see the disposition of
+      the forces, so as to know his bearings should he be sent to execute an order.
+      The officer on duty, a handsome, elegantly dressed man with a diamond ring on his
+      forefinger, who was fond of speaking French though he spoke it badly,
+      offered to conduct Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On all sides they saw rain-soaked officers with dejected faces who seemed
+      to be seeking something, and soldiers dragging doors, benches, and fencing
+      from the village.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There now, Prince! We can’t stop those fellows,” said the staff officer
+      pointing to the soldiers. “The officers don’t keep them in hand. And
+      there,” he pointed to a sutler’s tent, “they crowd in and sit. This
+      morning I turned them all out and now look, it’s full again. I must go
+      there, Prince, and scare them a bit. It won’t take a moment.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, let’s go in and I will get myself a roll and some cheese,” said
+      Prince Andrew who had not yet had time to eat anything.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why didn’t you mention it, Prince? I would have offered you something.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They dismounted and entered the tent. Several officers, with flushed and
+      weary faces, were sitting at the table eating and drinking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now what does this mean, gentlemen?” said the staff officer, in the
+      reproachful tone of a man who has repeated the same thing more than once.
+      “You know it won’t do to leave your posts like this. The prince gave
+      orders that no one should leave his post. Now you, Captain,” and he turned
+      to a thin, dirty little artillery officer who without his boots (he had
+      given them to the canteen keeper to dry), in only his stockings, rose when
+      they entered, smiling not altogether comfortably.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Captain Túshin?” he continued. “One
+      would think that as an artillery officer you would set a good example, yet
+      here you are without your boots! The alarm will be sounded and you’ll be
+      in a pretty position without your boots!” (The staff officer smiled.)
+      “Kindly return to your posts, gentlemen, all of you, all!” he added in a
+      tone of command.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew smiled involuntarily as he looked at the artillery officer
+      Túshin, who silent and smiling, shifting from one stockinged foot to the
+      other, glanced inquiringly with his large, intelligent, kindly eyes from
+      Prince Andrew to the staff officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The soldiers say it feels easier without boots,” said Captain Túshin
+      smiling shyly in his uncomfortable position, evidently wishing to adopt a
+      jocular tone. But before he had finished he felt that his jest was
+      unacceptable and had not come off. He grew confused.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Kindly return to your posts,” said the staff officer trying to preserve
+      his gravity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew glanced again at the artillery officer’s small figure. There
+      was something peculiar about it, quite unsoldierly, rather comic, but
+      extremely attractive.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The staff officer and Prince Andrew mounted their horses and rode on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having ridden beyond the village, continually meeting and overtaking
+      soldiers and officers of various regiments, they saw on their left some
+      entrenchments being thrown up, the freshly dug clay of which showed up
+      red. Several battalions of soldiers, in their shirt sleeves despite the
+      cold wind, swarmed in these earthworks like a host of white ants;
+      spadefuls of red clay were continually being thrown up from behind the
+      bank by unseen hands. Prince Andrew and the officer rode up, looked at the
+      entrenchment, and went on again. Just behind it they came upon some dozens
+      of soldiers, continually replaced by others, who ran from the
+      entrenchment. They had to hold their noses and put their horses to a trot
+      to escape from the poisoned atmosphere of these latrines.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Voilà l’agrément des camps, monsieur le prince,”</i> * said the staff
+      officer.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “This is a pleasure one gets in camp, Prince.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      They rode up the opposite hill. From there the French could already be
+      seen. Prince Andrew stopped and began examining the position.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s our battery,” said the staff officer indicating the highest point.
+      “It’s in charge of the queer fellow we saw without his boots. You can see
+      everything from there; let’s go there, Prince.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Thank you very much, I will go on alone,” said Prince Andrew, wishing to
+      rid himself of this staff officer’s company, “please don’t trouble
+      yourself further.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The staff officer remained behind and Prince Andrew rode on alone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The farther forward and nearer the enemy he went, the more orderly and
+      cheerful were the troops. The greatest disorder and depression had been in
+      the baggage train he had passed that morning on the Znaim road seven miles
+      away from the French. At Grunth also some apprehension and alarm could be
+      felt, but the nearer Prince Andrew came to the French lines the more
+      confident was the appearance of our troops. The soldiers in their
+      greatcoats were ranged in lines, the sergeants major and company officers
+      were counting the men, poking the last man in each section in the ribs and
+      telling him to hold his hand up. Soldiers scattered over the whole place
+      were dragging logs and brushwood and were building shelters with merry
+      chatter and laughter; around the fires sat others, dressed and undressed,
+      drying their shirts and leg bands or mending boots or overcoats and
+      crowding round the boilers and porridge cookers. In one company dinner was
+      ready, and the soldiers were gazing eagerly at the steaming boiler,
+      waiting till the sample, which a quartermaster sergeant was carrying in a
+      wooden bowl to an officer who sat on a log before his shelter, had been
+      tasted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Another company, a lucky one for not all the companies had vodka, crowded
+      round a pockmarked, broad-shouldered sergeant major who, tilting a keg,
+      filled one after another the canteen lids held out to him. The soldiers
+      lifted the canteen lids to their lips with reverential faces, emptied
+      them, rolling the vodka in their mouths, and walked away from the sergeant
+      major with brightened expressions, licking their lips and wiping them on
+      the sleeves of their greatcoats. All their faces were as serene as if all
+      this were happening at home awaiting peaceful encampment, and not within
+      sight of the enemy before an action in which at least half of them would
+      be left on the field. After passing a chasseur regiment and in the lines
+      of the Kiev grenadiers—fine fellows busy with similar peaceful
+      affairs—near the shelter of the regimental commander, higher than
+      and different from the others, Prince Andrew came out in front of a
+      platoon of grenadiers before whom lay a naked man. Two soldiers held him
+      while two others were flourishing their switches and striking him
+      regularly on his bare back. The man shrieked unnaturally. A stout major
+      was pacing up and down the line, and regardless of the screams kept
+      repeating:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s a shame for a soldier to steal; a soldier must be honest, honorable,
+      and brave, but if he robs his fellows there is no honor in him, he’s a
+      scoundrel. Go on! Go on!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      So the swishing sound of the strokes, and the desperate but unnatural
+      screams, continued.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go on, go on!” said the major.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A young officer with a bewildered and pained expression on his face
+      stepped away from the man and looked round inquiringly at the adjutant as
+      he rode by.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew, having reached the front line, rode along it. Our front
+      line and that of the enemy were far apart on the right and left flanks,
+      but in the center where the men with a flag of truce had passed that
+      morning, the lines were so near together that the men could see one
+      another’s faces and speak to one another. Besides the soldiers who formed
+      the picket line on either side, there were many curious onlookers who,
+      jesting and laughing, stared at their strange foreign enemies.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Since early morning—despite an injunction not to approach the picket
+      line—the officers had been unable to keep sight-seers away. The
+      soldiers forming the picket line, like showmen exhibiting a curiosity, no
+      longer looked at the French but paid attention to the sight-seers and grew
+      weary waiting to be relieved. Prince Andrew halted to have a look at the
+      French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Look! Look there!” one soldier was saying to another, pointing to a
+      Russian musketeer who had gone up to the picket line with an officer and
+      was rapidly and excitedly talking to a French grenadier. “Hark to him
+      jabbering! Fine, isn’t it? It’s all the Frenchy can do to keep up with
+      him. There now, Sídorov!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Wait a bit and listen. It’s fine!” answered Sídorov, who
+      was considered an adept at French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The soldier to whom the laughers referred was Dólokhov. Prince Andrew
+      recognized him and stopped to listen to what he was saying. Dólokhov had
+      come from the left flank where their regiment was stationed, with his
+      captain.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then, go on, go on!” incited the officer, bending forward and trying
+      not to lose a word of the speech which was incomprehensible to him. “More,
+      please: more! What’s he saying?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov did not answer the captain; he had been drawn into a hot dispute
+      with the French grenadier. They were naturally talking about the campaign.
+      The Frenchman, confusing the Austrians with the Russians, was trying to
+      prove that the Russians had surrendered and had fled all the way from Ulm,
+      while Dólokhov maintained that the Russians had not surrendered but had
+      beaten the French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We have orders to drive you off here, and we shall drive you off,” said
+      Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Only take care you and your Cossacks are not all captured!” said the
+      French grenadier.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French onlookers and listeners laughed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We’ll make you dance as we did under Suvórov...,” * said Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * <i>“On vous fera danser.”</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>“Qu’ est-ce qu’il chante?”</i> * asked a Frenchman.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “What’s he singing about?”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s ancient history,” said another, guessing that it referred to a
+      former war. “The Emperor will teach your Suvara as he has taught the
+      others...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Bonaparte...” began Dólokhov, but the Frenchman interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Not Bonaparte. He is the Emperor! <i>Sacré nom...!”</i> cried he angrily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The devil skin your Emperor.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Dólokhov swore at him in coarse soldier’s Russian and shouldering his
+      musket walked away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let us go, Iván Lukích,” he said to the captain.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, that’s the way to talk French,” said the picket soldiers. “Now,
+      Sídorov, you have a try!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sídorov, turning to the French, winked, and began to jabber meaningless
+      sounds very fast: <i>“Kari, mala, tafa, safi, muter, Kaská,”</i> he said, trying
+      to give an expressive intonation to his voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ho! ho! ho! Ha! ha! ha! ha! Ouh! ouh!” came peals of such healthy and
+      good-humored laughter from the soldiers that it infected the French
+      involuntarily, so much so that the only thing left to do seemed to be to
+      unload the muskets, explode the ammunition, and all return home as quickly
+      as possible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the guns remained loaded, the loopholes in blockhouses and
+      entrenchments looked out just as menacingly, and the unlimbered cannon
+      confronted one another as before.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0044"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Having ridden round the whole line from right flank to left, Prince Andrew
+      made his way up to the battery from which the staff officer had told him
+      the whole field could be seen. Here he dismounted, and stopped beside the
+      farthest of the four unlimbered cannon. Before the guns an artillery
+      sentry was pacing up and down; he stood at attention when the officer
+      arrived, but at a sign resumed his measured, monotonous pacing. Behind the
+      guns were their limbers and still farther back picket ropes and
+      artillerymen’s bonfires. To the left, not far from the farthest cannon,
+      was a small, newly constructed wattle shed from which came the sound of
+      officers’ voices in eager conversation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was true that a view over nearly the whole Russian position and the
+      greater part of the enemy’s opened out from this battery. Just facing it,
+      on the crest of the opposite hill, the village of Schön Grabern could be
+      seen, and in three places to left and right the French troops amid the
+      smoke of their campfires, the greater part of whom were evidently in the
+      village itself and behind the hill. To the left from that village, amid
+      the smoke, was something resembling a battery, but it was impossible to
+      see it clearly with the naked eye. Our right flank was posted on a rather
+      steep incline which dominated the French position. Our infantry were
+      stationed there, and at the farthest point the dragoons. In the center,
+      where Túshin’s battery stood and from which Prince Andrew was surveying
+      the position, was the easiest and most direct descent and ascent to the
+      brook separating us from Schön Grabern. On the left our troops were close
+      to a copse, in which smoked the bonfires of our infantry who were felling
+      wood. The French line was wider than ours, and it was plain that they
+      could easily outflank us on both sides. Behind our position was a steep
+      and deep dip, making it difficult for artillery and cavalry to retire.
+      Prince Andrew took out his notebook and, leaning on the cannon, sketched a
+      plan of the position. He made some notes on two points, intending to
+      mention them to Bagratión. His idea was, first, to concentrate all the
+      artillery in the center, and secondly, to withdraw the cavalry to the
+      other side of the dip. Prince Andrew, being always near the commander in
+      chief, closely following the mass movements and general orders, and
+      constantly studying historical accounts of battles, involuntarily pictured
+      to himself the course of events in the forthcoming action in broad
+      outline. He imagined only important possibilities: “If the enemy attacks
+      the right flank,” he said to himself, “the Kiev grenadiers and the Podólsk
+      chasseurs must hold their position till reserves from the center come up.
+      In that case the dragoons could successfully make a flank counterattack.
+      If they attack our center we, having the center battery on this high
+      ground, shall withdraw the left flank under its cover, and retreat to the
+      dip by echelons.” So he reasoned.... All the time he had been beside the
+      gun, he had heard the voices of the officers distinctly, but as often
+      happens had not understood a word of what they were saying. Suddenly,
+      however, he was struck by a voice coming from the shed, and its tone was
+      so sincere that he could not but listen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, friend,” said a pleasant and, as it seemed to Prince Andrew, a
+      familiar voice, “what I say is that if it were possible to know what is
+      beyond death, none of us would be afraid of it. That’s so, friend.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Another, a younger voice, interrupted him: “Afraid or not, you can’t
+      escape it anyhow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “All the same, one is afraid! Oh, you clever people,” said a third manly
+      voice interrupting them both. “Of course you artillery men are very wise,
+      because you can take everything along with you—vodka and snacks.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the owner of the manly voice, evidently an infantry officer, laughed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, one is afraid,” continued the first speaker, he of the familiar
+      voice. “One is afraid of the unknown, that’s what it is. Whatever we may
+      say about the soul going to the sky... we know there is no sky but only an
+      atmosphere.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The manly voice again interrupted the artillery officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, stand us some of your herb vodka, Túshin,” it said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why,” thought Prince Andrew, “that’s the captain who
+      stood up in the sutler’s hut without his boots.” He recognized the
+      agreeable, philosophizing voice with pleasure.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Some herb vodka? Certainly!” said Túshin. “But still, to
+      conceive a future life...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He did not finish. Just then there was a whistle in the air; nearer and
+      nearer, faster and louder, louder and faster, a cannon ball, as if it had
+      not finished saying what was necessary, thudded into the ground near the
+      shed with super human force, throwing up a mass of earth. The ground
+      seemed to groan at the terrible impact.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And immediately Túshin, with a short pipe in the corner of his mouth and
+      his kind, intelligent face rather pale, rushed out of the shed followed by
+      the owner of the manly voice, a dashing infantry officer who hurried off
+      to his company, buttoning up his coat as he ran.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0045"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Mounting his horse again Prince Andrew lingered with the battery, looking
+      at the puff from the gun that had sent the ball. His eyes ran rapidly over
+      the wide space, but he only saw that the hitherto motionless masses of the
+      French now swayed and that there really was a battery to their left. The
+      smoke above it had not yet dispersed. Two mounted Frenchmen, probably
+      adjutants, were galloping up the hill. A small but distinctly visible
+      enemy column was moving down the hill, probably to strengthen the front
+      line. The smoke of the first shot had not yet dispersed before another
+      puff appeared, followed by a report. The battle had begun! Prince Andrew
+      turned his horse and galloped back to Grunth to find Prince Bagratión. He
+      heard the cannonade behind him growing louder and more frequent. Evidently
+      our guns had begun to reply. From the bottom of the slope, where the
+      parleys had taken place, came the report of musketry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Lemarrois had just arrived at a gallop with Bonaparte’s stern letter, and
+      Murat, humiliated and anxious to expiate his fault, had at once moved his
+      forces to attack the center and outflank both the Russian wings, hoping
+      before evening and before the arrival of the Emperor to crush the
+      contemptible detachment that stood before him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It has begun. Here it is!” thought Prince Andrew, feeling the blood rush
+      to his heart. “But where and how will my Toulon present itself?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Passing between the companies that had been eating porridge and drinking
+      vodka a quarter of an hour before, he saw everywhere the same rapid
+      movement of soldiers forming ranks and getting their muskets ready, and on
+      all their faces he recognized the same eagerness that filled his heart.
+      “It has begun! Here it is, dreadful but enjoyable!” was what the face of
+      each soldier and each officer seemed to say.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before he had reached the embankments that were being thrown up, he saw,
+      in the light of the dull autumn evening, mounted men coming toward him.
+      The foremost, wearing a Cossack cloak and lambskin cap and riding a white
+      horse, was Prince Bagratión. Prince Andrew stopped, waiting for him to
+      come up; Prince Bagratión reined in his horse and recognizing Prince
+      Andrew nodded to him. He still looked ahead while Prince Andrew told him
+      what he had seen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The feeling, “It has begun! Here it is!” was seen even on Prince
+      Bagratión’s hard brown face with its half-closed, dull, sleepy eyes.
+      Prince Andrew gazed with anxious curiosity at that impassive face and
+      wished he could tell what, if anything, this man was thinking and feeling
+      at that moment. “Is there anything at all behind that impassive face?”
+       Prince Andrew asked himself as he looked. Prince Bagratión bent his head
+      in sign of agreement with what Prince Andrew told him, and said, “Very
+      good!” in a tone that seemed to imply that everything that took place and
+      was reported to him was exactly what he had foreseen. Prince Andrew, out
+      of breath with his rapid ride, spoke quickly. Prince Bagratión, uttering
+      his words with an Oriental accent, spoke particularly slowly, as if to
+      impress the fact that there was no need to hurry. However, he put his
+      horse to a trot in the direction of Túshin’s battery. Prince Andrew
+      followed with the suite. Behind Prince Bagratión rode an officer of the
+      suite, the prince’s personal adjutant, Zherkóv, an orderly officer, the
+      staff officer on duty, riding a fine bobtailed horse, and a civilian—an
+      accountant who had asked permission to be present at the battle out of
+      curiosity. The accountant, a stout, full-faced man, looked around him with
+      a naïve smile of satisfaction and presented a strange appearance among the
+      hussars, Cossacks, and adjutants, in his camlet coat, as he jolted on his
+      horse with a convoy officer’s saddle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He wants to see a battle,” said Zherkóv to Bolkónski, pointing to the
+      accountant, “but he feels a pain in the pit of his stomach already.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, leave off!” said the accountant with a beaming but rather cunning
+      smile, as if flattered at being made the subject of Zherkóv’s joke, and
+      purposely trying to appear stupider than he really was.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is very strange, <i>mon Monsieur Prince</i>,” said the staff officer. (He
+      remembered that in French there is some peculiar way of addressing a
+      prince, but could not get it quite right.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      By this time they were all approaching Túshin’s battery, and a ball struck
+      the ground in front of them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s that that has fallen?” asked the accountant with a naïve smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A French pancake,” answered Zherkóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So that’s what they hit with?” asked the accountant. “How awful!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He seemed to swell with satisfaction. He had hardly finished speaking when
+      they again heard an unexpectedly violent whistling which suddenly ended
+      with a thud into something soft... <i>f-f-flop!</i> and a Cossack, riding a
+      little to their right and behind the accountant, crashed to earth with his
+      horse. Zherkóv and the staff officer bent over their saddles and turned
+      their horses away. The accountant stopped, facing the Cossack, and
+      examined him with attentive curiosity. The Cossack was dead, but the horse
+      still struggled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Bagratión screwed up his eyes, looked round, and, seeing the cause
+      of the confusion, turned away with indifference, as if to say, “Is it
+      worth while noticing trifles?” He reined in his horse with the care of a
+      skillful rider and, slightly bending over, disengaged his saber which had
+      caught in his cloak. It was an old-fashioned saber of a kind no longer in
+      general use. Prince Andrew remembered the story of Suvórov giving his
+      saber to Bagratión in Italy, and the recollection was particularly
+      pleasant at that moment. They had reached the battery at which Prince
+      Andrew had been when he examined the battlefield.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Whose company?” asked Prince Bagratión of an artilleryman standing by the
+      ammunition wagon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He asked, “Whose company?” but he really meant, “Are you frightened here?”
+       and the artilleryman understood him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Captain Túshin’s, your excellency!” shouted the red-haired, freckled
+      gunner in a merry voice, standing to attention.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes,” muttered Bagratión as if considering something, and he rode
+      past the limbers to the farthest cannon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As he approached, a ringing shot issued from it deafening him and his
+      suite, and in the smoke that suddenly surrounded the gun they could see
+      the gunners who had seized it straining to roll it quickly back to its
+      former position. A huge, broad-shouldered gunner, Number One, holding a
+      mop, his legs far apart, sprang to the wheel; while Number Two with a
+      trembling hand placed a charge in the cannon’s mouth. The short,
+      round-shouldered Captain Túshin, stumbling over the tail of the gun
+      carriage, moved forward and, not noticing the general, looked out shading
+      his eyes with his small hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lift it two lines more and it will be just right,” cried he in a feeble
+      voice to which he tried to impart a dashing note, ill-suited to his weak
+      figure. “Number Two!” he squeaked. “Fire, Medvédev!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Bagratión called to him, and Túshin, raising three fingers to his cap with
+      a bashful and awkward gesture not at all like a military salute but like a
+      priest’s benediction, approached the general. Though Túshin’s guns had
+      been intended to cannonade the valley, he was firing incendiary balls at
+      the village of Schön Grabern visible just opposite, in front of which
+      large masses of French were advancing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      No one had given Túshin orders where and at what to fire, but after
+      consulting his sergeant major, Zakharchénko, for whom he had great
+      respect, he had decided that it would be a good thing to set fire to the
+      village. “Very good!” said Bagratión in reply to the officer’s report, and
+      began deliberately to examine the whole battlefield extended before him.
+      The French had advanced nearest on our right. Below the height on which
+      the Kiev regiment was stationed, in the hollow where the rivulet flowed,
+      the soul-stirring rolling and crackling of musketry was heard, and much
+      farther to the right beyond the dragoons, the officer of the suite pointed
+      out to Bagratión a French column that was outflanking us. To the left the
+      horizon bounded by the adjacent wood. Prince Bagratión ordered two
+      battalions from the center to be sent to reinforce the right flank. The
+      officer of the suite ventured to remark to the prince that if these
+      battalions went away, the guns would remain without support. Prince
+      Bagratión turned to the officer and with his dull eyes looked at him in
+      silence. It seemed to Prince Andrew that the officer’s remark was just and
+      that really no answer could be made to it. But at that moment an adjutant
+      galloped up with a message from the commander of the regiment in the
+      hollow and news that immense masses of the French were coming down upon
+      them and that his regiment was in disorder and was retreating upon the
+      Kiev grenadiers. Prince Bagratión bowed his head in sign of assent and
+      approval. He rode off at a walk to the right and sent an adjutant to the
+      dragoons with orders to attack the French. But this adjutant returned half
+      an hour later with the news that the commander of the dragoons had already
+      retreated beyond the dip in the ground, as a heavy fire had been opened on
+      him and he was losing men uselessly, and so had hastened to throw some
+      sharpshooters into the wood.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very good!” said Bagratión.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As he was leaving the battery, firing was heard on the left also, and as
+      it was too far to the left flank for him to have time to go there himself,
+      Prince Bagratión sent Zherkóv to tell the general in command (the one who
+      had paraded his regiment before Kutúzov at Braunau) that he must retreat
+      as quickly as possible behind the hollow in the rear, as the right flank
+      would probably not be able to withstand the enemy’s attack very long.
+      About Túshin and the battalion that had been in support of his battery all
+      was forgotten. Prince Andrew listened attentively to Bagratión’s
+      colloquies with the commanding officers and the orders he gave them and,
+      to his surprise, found that no orders were really given, but that Prince
+      Bagratión tried to make it appear that everything done by necessity, by
+      accident, or by the will of subordinate commanders was done, if not by his
+      direct command, at least in accord with his intentions. Prince Andrew
+      noticed, however, that though what happened was due to chance and was
+      independent of the commander’s will, owing to the tact Bagratión showed,
+      his presence was very valuable. Officers who approached him with disturbed
+      countenances became calm; soldiers and officers greeted him gaily, grew
+      more cheerful in his presence, and were evidently anxious to display their
+      courage before him.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0046"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Prince Bagratión, having reached the highest point of our right flank,
+      began riding downhill to where the roll of musketry was heard but where on
+      account of the smoke nothing could be seen. The nearer they got to the
+      hollow the less they could see but the more they felt the nearness of the
+      actual battlefield. They began to meet wounded men. One with a bleeding
+      head and no cap was being dragged along by two soldiers who supported him
+      under the arms. There was a gurgle in his throat and he was spitting
+      blood. A bullet had evidently hit him in the throat or mouth. Another was
+      walking sturdily by himself but without his musket, groaning aloud and
+      swinging his arm which had just been hurt, while blood from it was
+      streaming over his greatcoat as from a bottle. He had that moment been
+      wounded and his face showed fear rather than suffering. Crossing a road
+      they descended a steep incline and saw several men lying on the ground;
+      they also met a crowd of soldiers some of whom were unwounded. The
+      soldiers were ascending the hill breathing heavily, and despite the
+      general’s presence were talking loudly and gesticulating. In front of them
+      rows of gray cloaks were already visible through the smoke, and an officer
+      catching sight of Bagratión rushed shouting after the crowd of retreating
+      soldiers, ordering them back. Bagratión rode up to the ranks along which
+      shots crackled now here and now there, drowning the sound of voices and
+      the shouts of command. The whole air reeked with smoke. The excited faces
+      of the soldiers were blackened with it. Some were using their ramrods,
+      others putting powder on the touchpans or taking charges from their
+      pouches, while others were firing, though who they were firing at could
+      not be seen for the smoke which there was no wind to carry away. A
+      pleasant humming and whistling of bullets were often heard. “What is
+      this?” thought Prince Andrew approaching the crowd of soldiers. “It can’t
+      be an attack, for they are not moving; it can’t be a square—for they
+      are not drawn up for that.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The commander of the regiment, a thin, feeble-looking old man with a
+      pleasant smile—his eyelids drooping more than half over his old
+      eyes, giving him a mild expression, rode up to Bagratión and welcomed him
+      as a host welcomes an honored guest. He reported that his regiment had
+      been attacked by French cavalry and that, though the attack had been
+      repulsed, he had lost more than half his men. He said the attack had been
+      repulsed, employing this military term to describe what had occurred to
+      his regiment, but in reality he did not himself know what had happened
+      during that half-hour to the troops entrusted to him, and could not say
+      with certainty whether the attack had been repulsed or his regiment had
+      been broken up. All he knew was that at the commencement of the action
+      balls and shells began flying all over his regiment and hitting men and
+      that afterwards someone had shouted “Cavalry!” and our men had begun
+      firing. They were still firing, not at the cavalry which had disappeared,
+      but at French infantry who had come into the hollow and were firing at our
+      men. Prince Bagratión bowed his head as a sign that this was exactly what
+      he had desired and expected. Turning to his adjutant he ordered him to
+      bring down the two battalions of the Sixth Chasseurs whom they had just
+      passed. Prince Andrew was struck by the changed expression on Prince
+      Bagratión’s face at this moment. It expressed the concentrated and happy
+      resolution you see on the face of a man who on a hot day takes a final run
+      before plunging into the water. The dull, sleepy expression was no longer
+      there, nor the affectation of profound thought. The round, steady, hawk’s
+      eyes looked before him eagerly and rather disdainfully, not resting on
+      anything although his movements were still slow and measured.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The commander of the regiment turned to Prince Bagratión, entreating him
+      to go back as it was too dangerous to remain where they were. “Please,
+      your excellency, for God’s sake!” he kept saying, glancing for support at
+      an officer of the suite who turned away from him. “There, you see!” and he
+      drew attention to the bullets whistling, singing, and hissing continually
+      around them. He spoke in the tone of entreaty and reproach that a
+      carpenter uses to a gentleman who has picked up an ax: “We are used to it,
+      but you, sir, will blister your hands.” He spoke as if those bullets could
+      not kill him, and his half-closed eyes gave still more persuasiveness to
+      his words. The staff officer joined in the colonel’s appeals, but
+      Bagratión did not reply; he only gave an order to cease firing and
+      re-form, so as to give room for the two approaching battalions. While he
+      was speaking, the curtain of smoke that had concealed the hollow, driven
+      by a rising wind, began to move from right to left as if drawn by an
+      invisible hand, and the hill opposite, with the French moving about on it,
+      opened out before them. All eyes fastened involuntarily on this French
+      column advancing against them and winding down over the uneven ground. One
+      could already see the soldiers’ shaggy caps, distinguish the officers from
+      the men, and see the standard flapping against its staff.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They march splendidly,” remarked someone in Bagratión’s suite.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The head of the column had already descended into the hollow. The clash
+      would take place on this side of it...
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The remains of our regiment which had been in action rapidly formed up and
+      moved to the right; from behind it, dispersing the laggards, came two
+      battalions of the Sixth Chasseurs in fine order. Before they had reached
+      Bagratión, the weighty tread of the mass of men marching in step could be
+      heard. On their left flank, nearest to Bagratión, marched a company
+      commander, a fine round-faced man, with a stupid and happy expression—the
+      same man who had rushed out of the wattle shed. At that moment he was
+      clearly thinking of nothing but how dashing a fellow he would appear as he
+      passed the commander.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With the self-satisfaction of a man on parade, he stepped lightly with his
+      muscular legs as if sailing along, stretching himself to his full height
+      without the smallest effort, his ease contrasting with the heavy tread of
+      the soldiers who were keeping step with him. He carried close to his leg a
+      narrow unsheathed sword (small, curved, and not like a real weapon) and
+      looked now at the superior officers and now back at the men without losing
+      step, his whole powerful body turning flexibly. It was as if all the
+      powers of his soul were concentrated on passing the commander in the best
+      possible manner, and feeling that he was doing it well he was happy.
+      “Left... left... left...” he seemed to repeat to himself at each alternate
+      step; and in time to this, with stern but varied faces, the wall of
+      soldiers burdened with knapsacks and muskets marched in step, and each one
+      of these hundreds of soldiers seemed to be repeating to himself at each
+      alternate step, “Left... left... left...” A fat major skirted a bush,
+      puffing and falling out of step; a soldier who had fallen behind, his face
+      showing alarm at his defection, ran at a trot, panting to catch up with
+      his company. A cannon ball, cleaving the air, flew over the heads of
+      Bagratión and his suite, and fell into the column to the measure of
+      <i>“Left... left!”</i> “Close up!” came the company commander’s voice in jaunty
+      tones. The soldiers passed in a semicircle round something where the ball
+      had fallen, and an old trooper on the flank, a noncommissioned officer who
+      had stopped beside the dead men, ran to catch up his line and, falling
+      into step with a hop, looked back angrily, and through the ominous silence
+      and the regular tramp of feet beating the ground in unison, one seemed to
+      hear <i>left... left... left.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      “Well done, lads!” said Prince Bagratión.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Glad to do our best, your ex’len-lency!” came a confused shout from the
+      ranks. A morose soldier marching on the left turned his eyes on Bagratión
+      as he shouted, with an expression that seemed to say: “We know that
+      ourselves!” Another, without looking round, as though fearing to relax,
+      shouted with his mouth wide open and passed on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The order was given to halt and down knapsacks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bagratión rode round the ranks that had marched past him and dismounted.
+      He gave the reins to a Cossack, took off and handed over his felt coat,
+      stretched his legs, and set his cap straight. The head of the French
+      column, with its officers leading, appeared from below the hill.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Forward, with God!” said Bagratión, in a resolute, sonorous voice,
+      turning for a moment to the front line, and slightly swinging his arms, he
+      went forward uneasily over the rough field with the awkward gait of a
+      cavalryman. Prince Andrew felt that an invisible power was leading him
+      forward, and experienced great happiness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French were already near. Prince Andrew, walking beside Bagratión,
+      could clearly distinguish their bandoliers, red epaulets, and even their
+      faces. (He distinctly saw an old French officer who, with gaitered legs
+      and turned-out toes, climbed the hill with difficulty.) Prince Bagratión
+      gave no further orders and silently continued to walk on in front of the
+      ranks. Suddenly one shot after another rang out from the French, smoke
+      appeared all along their uneven ranks, and musket shots sounded. Several
+      of our men fell, among them the round-faced officer who had marched so
+      gaily and complacently. But at the moment the first report was heard,
+      Bagratión looked round and shouted, “Hurrah!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Hurrah—ah!—ah!” rang a long-drawn shout from our ranks, and
+      passing Bagratión and racing one another they rushed in an irregular but
+      joyous and eager crowd down the hill at their disordered foe.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0047"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The attack of the Sixth Chasseurs secured the retreat of our right flank.
+      In the center Túshin’s forgotten battery, which had managed to set fire to
+      the Schön Grabern village, delayed the French advance. The French were
+      putting out the fire which the wind was spreading, and thus gave us time
+      to retreat. The retirement of the center to the other side of the dip in
+      the ground at the rear was hurried and noisy, but the different companies
+      did not get mixed. But our left—which consisted of the Azóv and
+      Podólsk infantry and the Pávlograd hussars—was simultaneously
+      attacked and outflanked by superior French forces under Lannes and was
+      thrown into confusion. Bagratión had sent Zherkóv to the general
+      commanding that left flank with orders to retreat immediately.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Zherkóv, not removing his hand from his cap, turned his horse about and
+      galloped off. But no sooner had he left Bagratión than his courage failed
+      him. He was seized by panic and could not go where it was dangerous.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having reached the left flank, instead of going to the front where the
+      firing was, he began to look for the general and his staff where they
+      could not possibly be, and so did not deliver the order.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The command of the left flank belonged by seniority to the commander of
+      the regiment Kutúzov had reviewed at Braunau and in which Dólokhov was
+      serving as a private. But the command of the extreme left flank had been
+      assigned to the commander of the Pávlograd regiment in which Rostóv was
+      serving, and a misunderstanding arose. The two commanders were much
+      exasperated with one another and, long after the action had begun on the
+      right flank and the French were already advancing, were engaged in
+      discussion with the sole object of offending one another. But the
+      regiments, both cavalry and infantry, were by no means ready for the
+      impending action. From privates to general they were not expecting a
+      battle and were engaged in peaceful occupations, the cavalry feeding the
+      horses and the infantry collecting wood.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He higher iss dan I in rank,” said the German colonel of the hussars,
+      flushing and addressing an adjutant who had ridden up, “so let him do what
+      he vill, but I cannot sacrifice my hussars... Bugler, sount ze retreat!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But haste was becoming imperative. Cannon and musketry, mingling together,
+      thundered on the right and in the center, while the capotes of Lannes’
+      sharpshooters were already seen crossing the milldam and forming up within
+      twice the range of a musket shot. The general in command of the infantry
+      went toward his horse with jerky steps, and having mounted drew himself up
+      very straight and tall and rode to the Pávlograd commander. The commanders
+      met with polite bows but with secret malevolence in their hearts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Once again, Colonel,” said the general, “I can’t leave half my men in the
+      wood. I <i>beg</i> of you, I <i>beg</i> of you,” he repeated, “to occupy the <i>position</i>
+      and prepare for an attack.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I peg of you yourself not to mix in vot is not your business!” suddenly
+      replied the irate colonel. “If you vere in the cavalry...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I am not in the cavalry, Colonel, but I am a Russian general and if you
+      are not aware of the fact...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Quite avare, your excellency,” suddenly shouted the colonel, touching his
+      horse and turning purple in the face. “Vill you be so goot to come to ze
+      front and see dat zis position iss no goot? I don’t vish to destroy my men
+      for your pleasure!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You forget yourself, Colonel. I am not considering my own pleasure and I
+      won’t allow it to be said!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Taking the colonel’s outburst as a challenge to his courage, the general
+      expanded his chest and rode, frowning, beside him to the front line, as if
+      their differences would be settled there amongst the bullets. They reached
+      the front, several bullets sped over them, and they halted in silence.
+      There was nothing fresh to be seen from the line, for from where they had
+      been before it had been evident that it was impossible for cavalry to act
+      among the bushes and broken ground, as well as that the French were
+      outflanking our left. The general and colonel looked sternly and
+      significantly at one another like two fighting cocks preparing for battle,
+      each vainly trying to detect signs of cowardice in the other. Both passed
+      the examination successfully. As there was nothing to be said, and neither
+      wished to give occasion for it to be alleged that he had been the first to
+      leave the range of fire, they would have remained there for a long time
+      testing each other’s courage had it not been that just then they heard the
+      rattle of musketry and a muffled shout almost behind them in the wood. The
+      French had attacked the men collecting wood in the copse. It was no longer
+      possible for the hussars to retreat with the infantry. They were cut off
+      from the line of retreat on the left by the French. However inconvenient
+      the position, it was now necessary to attack in order to cut a way through
+      for themselves.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The squadron in which Rostóv was serving had scarcely time to mount before
+      it was halted facing the enemy. Again, as at the Enns bridge, there was
+      nothing between the squadron and the enemy, and again that terrible
+      dividing line of uncertainty and fear—resembling the line separating
+      the living from the dead—lay between them. All were conscious of
+      this unseen line, and the question whether they would cross it or not, and
+      how they would cross it, agitated them all.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The colonel rode to the front, angrily gave some reply to questions put to
+      him by the officers, and, like a man desperately insisting on having his
+      own way, gave an order. No one said anything definite, but the rumor of an
+      attack spread through the squadron. The command to form up rang out and
+      the sabers whizzed as they were drawn from their scabbards. Still no one
+      moved. The troops of the left flank, infantry and hussars alike, felt that
+      the commander did not himself know what to do, and this irresolution
+      communicated itself to the men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If only they would be quick!” thought Rostóv, feeling that at last the
+      time had come to experience the joy of an attack of which he had so often
+      heard from his fellow hussars.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Fo’ward, with God, lads!” rang out Denísov’s voice. “At a twot fo’ward!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The horses’ croups began to sway in the front line. Rook pulled at the
+      reins and started of his own accord.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before him, on the right, Rostóv saw the front lines of his hussars and
+      still farther ahead a dark line which he could not see distinctly but took
+      to be the enemy. Shots could be heard, but some way off.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Faster!” came the word of command, and Rostóv felt Rook’s flanks drooping
+      as he broke into a gallop.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv anticipated his horse’s movements and became more and more elated.
+      He had noticed a solitary tree ahead of him. This tree had been in the
+      middle of the line that had seemed so terrible—and now he had
+      crossed that line and not only was there nothing terrible, but everything
+      was becoming more and more happy and animated. “Oh, how I will slash at
+      him!” thought Rostóv, gripping the hilt of his saber.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hur-a-a-a-ah!” came a roar of voices. “Let anyone come my way now,”
+       thought Rostóv driving his spurs into Rook and letting him go at a full
+      gallop so that he outstripped the others. Ahead, the enemy was already
+      visible. Suddenly something like a birch broom seemed to sweep over the
+      squadron. Rostóv raised his saber, ready to strike, but at that instant
+      the trooper Nikítenko, who was galloping ahead, shot away from him, and
+      Rostóv felt as in a dream that he continued to be carried forward with
+      unnatural speed but yet stayed on the same spot. From behind him
+      Bondarchúk, an hussar he knew, jolted against him and looked angrily at
+      him. Bondarchúk’s horse swerved and galloped past.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How is it I am not moving? I have fallen, I am killed!” Rostóv asked and
+      answered at the same instant. He was alone in the middle of a field.
+      Instead of the moving horses and hussars’ backs, he saw nothing before him
+      but the motionless earth and the stubble around him. There was warm blood
+      under his arm. “No, I am wounded and the horse is killed.” Rook tried to
+      rise on his forelegs but fell back, pinning his rider’s leg. Blood was
+      flowing from his head; he struggled but could not rise. Rostóv also tried
+      to rise but fell back, his sabretache having become entangled in the
+      saddle. Where our men were, and where the French, he did not know. There
+      was no one near.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having disentangled his leg, he rose. “Where, on which side, was now the
+      line that had so sharply divided the two armies?” he asked himself and
+      could not answer. “Can something bad have happened to me?” he wondered as
+      he got up: and at that moment he felt that something superfluous was
+      hanging on his benumbed left arm. The wrist felt as if it were not his. He
+      examined his hand carefully, vainly trying to find blood on it. “Ah, here
+      are people coming,” he thought joyfully, seeing some men running toward
+      him. “They will help me!” In front came a man wearing a strange shako and
+      a blue cloak, swarthy, sunburned, and with a hooked nose. Then came two
+      more, and many more running behind. One of them said something strange,
+      not in Russian. In among the hindmost of these men wearing similar shakos
+      was a Russian hussar. He was being held by the arms and his horse was
+      being led behind him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It must be one of ours, a prisoner. Yes. Can it be that they will take me
+      too? Who are these men?” thought Rostóv, scarcely believing his eyes. “Can
+      they be French?” He looked at the approaching Frenchmen, and though but a
+      moment before he had been galloping to get at them and hack them to
+      pieces, their proximity now seemed so awful that he could not believe his
+      eyes. “Who are they? Why are they running? Can they be coming at me? And
+      why? To kill me? <i>Me</i> whom everyone is so fond of?” He remembered his
+      mother’s love for him, and his family’s, and his friends’, and the enemy’s
+      intention to kill him seemed impossible. “But perhaps they may do it!” For
+      more than ten seconds he stood not moving from the spot or realizing the
+      situation. The foremost Frenchman, the one with the hooked nose, was
+      already so close that the expression of his face could be seen. And the
+      excited, alien face of that man, his bayonet hanging down, holding his
+      breath, and running so lightly, frightened Rostóv. He seized his pistol
+      and, instead of firing it, flung it at the Frenchman and ran with all his
+      might toward the bushes. He did not now run with the feeling of doubt and
+      conflict with which he had trodden the Enns bridge, but with the feeling
+      of a hare fleeing from the hounds. One single sentiment, that of fear for
+      his young and happy life, possessed his whole being. Rapidly leaping the
+      furrows, he fled across the field with the impetuosity he used to show at
+      catchplay, now and then turning his good-natured, pale, young face to look
+      back. A shudder of terror went through him: “No, better not look,” he
+      thought, but having reached the bushes he glanced round once more. The
+      French had fallen behind, and just as he looked round the first man
+      changed his run to a walk and, turning, shouted something loudly to a
+      comrade farther back. Rostóv paused. “No, there’s some mistake,” thought
+      he. “They can’t have wanted to kill me.” But at the same time, his left
+      arm felt as heavy as if a seventy-pound weight were tied to it. He could
+      run no more. The Frenchman also stopped and took aim. Rostóv closed his
+      eyes and stooped down. One bullet and then another whistled past him. He
+      mustered his last remaining strength, took hold of his left hand with his
+      right, and reached the bushes. Behind these were some Russian
+      sharpshooters.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0048"></a>
+      CHAPTER XX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The infantry regiments that had been caught unawares in the outskirts of
+      the wood ran out of it, the different companies getting mixed, and
+      retreated as a disorderly crowd. One soldier, in his fear, uttered the
+      senseless cry, “Cut off!” that is so terrible in battle, and that word
+      infected the whole crowd with a feeling of panic.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Surrounded! Cut off? We’re lost!” shouted the fugitives.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The moment he heard the firing and the cry from behind, the general
+      realized that something dreadful had happened to his regiment, and the
+      thought that he, an exemplary officer of many years’ service who had never
+      been to blame, might be held responsible at headquarters for negligence or
+      inefficiency so staggered him that, forgetting the recalcitrant cavalry
+      colonel, his own dignity as a general, and above all quite forgetting the
+      danger and all regard for self-preservation, he clutched the crupper of
+      his saddle and, spurring his horse, galloped to the regiment under a hail
+      of bullets which fell around, but fortunately missed him. His one desire
+      was to know what was happening and at any cost correct, or remedy, the
+      mistake if he had made one, so that he, an exemplary officer of twenty-two
+      years’ service, who had never been censured, should not be held to blame.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having galloped safely through the French, he reached a field behind the
+      copse across which our men, regardless of orders, were running and
+      descending the valley. That moment of moral hesitation which decides the
+      fate of battles had arrived. Would this disorderly crowd of soldiers
+      attend to the voice of their commander, or would they, disregarding him,
+      continue their flight? Despite his desperate shouts that used to seem so
+      terrible to the soldiers, despite his furious purple countenance distorted
+      out of all likeness to his former self, and the flourishing of his saber,
+      the soldiers all continued to run, talking, firing into the air, and
+      disobeying orders. The moral hesitation which decided the fate of battles
+      was evidently culminating in a panic.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The general had a fit of coughing as a result of shouting and of the
+      powder smoke and stopped in despair. Everything seemed lost. But at that
+      moment the French who were attacking, suddenly and without any apparent
+      reason, ran back and disappeared from the outskirts, and Russian
+      sharpshooters showed themselves in the copse. It was Timókhin’s company,
+      which alone had maintained its order in the wood and, having lain in
+      ambush in a ditch, now attacked the French unexpectedly. Timókhin, armed
+      only with a sword, had rushed at the enemy with such a desperate cry and
+      such mad, drunken determination that, taken by surprise, the French had
+      thrown down their muskets and run. Dólokhov, running beside Timókhin,
+      killed a Frenchman at close quarters and was the first to seize the
+      surrendering French officer by his collar. Our fugitives returned, the
+      battalions re-formed, and the French who had nearly cut our left flank in
+      half were for the moment repulsed. Our reserve units were able to join up,
+      and the fight was at an end. The regimental commander and Major Ekonómov
+      had stopped beside a bridge, letting the retreating companies pass by
+      them, when a soldier came up and took hold of the commander’s stirrup,
+      almost leaning against him. The man was wearing a bluish coat of
+      broadcloth, he had no knapsack or cap, his head was bandaged, and over his
+      shoulder a French munition pouch was slung. He had an officer’s sword in
+      his hand. The soldier was pale, his blue eyes looked impudently into the
+      commander’s face, and his lips were smiling. Though the commander was
+      occupied in giving instructions to Major Ekonómov, he could not help
+      taking notice of the soldier.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency, here are two trophies,” said Dólokhov, pointing to the
+      French sword and pouch. “I have taken an officer prisoner. I stopped the
+      company.” Dólokhov breathed heavily from weariness and spoke in abrupt
+      sentences. “The whole company can bear witness. I beg you will remember
+      this, your excellency!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “All right, all right,” replied the commander, and turned to Major
+      Ekonómov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Dólokhov did not go away; he untied the handkerchief around his head,
+      pulled it off, and showed the blood congealed on his hair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A bayonet wound. I remained at the front. Remember, your excellency!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Túshin’s battery had been forgotten and only at the very end of the action
+      did Prince Bagratión, still hearing the cannonade in the center, send his
+      orderly staff officer, and later Prince Andrew also, to order the battery
+      to retire as quickly as possible. When the supports attached to Túshin’s
+      battery had been moved away in the middle of the action by someone’s
+      order, the battery had continued firing and was only not captured by the
+      French because the enemy could not surmise that anyone could have the
+      effrontery to continue firing from four quite undefended guns. On the
+      contrary, the energetic action of that battery led the French to suppose
+      that here—in the center—the main Russian forces were
+      concentrated. Twice they had attempted to attack this point, but on each
+      occasion had been driven back by grapeshot from the four isolated guns on
+      the hillock.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Soon after Prince Bagratión had left him, Túshin had succeeded in setting
+      fire to Schön Grabern.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Look at them scurrying! It’s burning! Just see the smoke! Fine! Grand!
+      Look at the smoke, the smoke!” exclaimed the artillerymen, brightening up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the guns, without waiting for orders, were being fired in the
+      direction of the conflagration. As if urging each other on, the soldiers
+      cried at each shot: “Fine! That’s good! Look at it... Grand!” The fire,
+      fanned by the breeze, was rapidly spreading. The French columns that had
+      advanced beyond the village went back; but as though in revenge for this
+      failure, the enemy placed ten guns to the right of the village and began
+      firing them at Túshin’s battery.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In their childlike glee, aroused by the fire and their luck in
+      successfully cannonading the French, our artillerymen only noticed this
+      battery when two balls, and then four more, fell among our guns, one
+      knocking over two horses and another tearing off a munition-wagon driver’s
+      leg. Their spirits once roused were, however, not diminished, but only
+      changed character. The horses were replaced by others from a reserve gun
+      carriage, the wounded were carried away, and the four guns were turned
+      against the ten-gun battery. Túshin’s companion officer had been killed at
+      the beginning of the engagement and within an hour seventeen of the forty
+      men of the guns’ crews had been disabled, but the artillerymen were still
+      as merry and lively as ever. Twice they noticed the French appearing below
+      them, and then they fired grapeshot at them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Little Túshin, moving feebly and awkwardly, kept telling his orderly to
+      “refill my pipe for that one!” and then, scattering sparks from it, ran
+      forward shading his eyes with his small hand to look at the French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Smack at ‘em, lads!” he kept saying, seizing the guns by the wheels and
+      working the screws himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Amid the smoke, deafened by the incessant reports which always made him
+      jump, Túshin not taking his pipe from his mouth ran from gun to gun, now
+      aiming, now counting the charges, now giving orders about replacing dead
+      or wounded horses and harnessing fresh ones, and shouting in his feeble
+      voice, so high pitched and irresolute. His face grew more and more
+      animated. Only when a man was killed or wounded did he frown and turn away
+      from the sight, shouting angrily at the men who, as is always the case,
+      hesitated about lifting the injured or dead. The soldiers, for the most
+      part handsome fellows and, as is always the case in an artillery company,
+      a head and shoulders taller and twice as broad as their officer—all
+      looked at their commander like children in an embarrassing situation, and
+      the expression on his face was invariably reflected on theirs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Owing to the terrible uproar and the necessity for concentration and
+      activity, Túshin did not experience the slightest unpleasant sense of
+      fear, and the thought that he might be killed or badly wounded never
+      occurred to him. On the contrary, he became more and more elated. It
+      seemed to him that it was a very long time ago, almost a day, since he had
+      first seen the enemy and fired the first shot, and that the corner of the
+      field he stood on was well-known and familiar ground. Though he thought of
+      everything, considered everything, and did everything the best of officers
+      could do in his position, he was in a state akin to feverish delirium or
+      drunkenness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the deafening sounds of his own guns around him, the whistle and thud
+      of the enemy’s cannon balls, from the flushed and perspiring faces of the
+      crew bustling round the guns, from the sight of the blood of men and
+      horses, from the little puffs of smoke on the enemy’s side (always
+      followed by a ball flying past and striking the earth, a man, a gun, a
+      horse), from the sight of all these things a fantastic world of his own
+      had taken possession of his brain and at that moment afforded him
+      pleasure. The enemy’s guns were in his fancy not guns but pipes from which
+      occasional puffs were blown by an invisible smoker.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There... he’s puffing again,” muttered Túshin to himself, as a small
+      cloud rose from the hill and was borne in a streak to the left by the
+      wind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now look out for the ball... we’ll throw it back.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What do you want, your honor?” asked an artilleryman, standing close by,
+      who heard him muttering.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nothing... only a shell...” he answered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come along, our Matvévna!” he said to himself. “Matvévna” * was the name
+      his fancy gave to the farthest gun of the battery, which was large and of
+      an old pattern. The French swarming round their guns seemed to him like
+      ants. In that world, the handsome drunkard Number One of the second gun’s
+      crew was “uncle”; Túshin looked at him more often than at anyone else and
+      took delight in his every movement. The sound of musketry at the foot of
+      the hill, now diminishing, now increasing, seemed like someone’s
+      breathing. He listened intently to the ebb and flow of these sounds.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Daughter of Matthew.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “Ah! Breathing again, breathing!” he muttered to himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He imagined himself as an enormously tall, powerful man who was throwing
+      cannon balls at the French with both hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then, Matvévna, dear old lady, don’t let me down!” he was saying as
+      he moved from the gun, when a strange, unfamiliar voice called above his
+      head: “Captain Túshin! Captain!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Túshin turned round in dismay. It was the staff officer who had turned him
+      out of the booth at Grunth. He was shouting in a gasping voice:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Are you mad? You have twice been ordered to retreat, and you...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why are they down on me?” thought Túshin, looking in alarm at his
+      superior.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I... don’t...” he muttered, holding up two fingers to his cap. “I...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But the staff officer did not finish what he wanted to say. A cannon ball,
+      flying close to him, caused him to duck and bend over his horse. He
+      paused, and just as he was about to say something more, another ball
+      stopped him. He turned his horse and galloped off.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Retire! All to retire!” he shouted from a distance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The soldiers laughed. A moment later, an adjutant arrived with the same
+      order.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was Prince Andrew. The first thing he saw on riding up to the space
+      where Túshin’s guns were stationed was an unharnessed horse with a broken
+      leg, that lay screaming piteously beside the harnessed horses. Blood was
+      gushing from its leg as from a spring. Among the limbers lay several dead
+      men. One ball after another passed over as he approached and he felt a
+      nervous shudder run down his spine. But the mere thought of being afraid
+      roused him again. “I cannot be afraid,” thought he, and dismounted slowly
+      among the guns. He delivered the order and did not leave the battery. He
+      decided to have the guns removed from their positions and withdrawn in his
+      presence. Together with Túshin, stepping across the bodies and under a
+      terrible fire from the French, he attended to the removal of the guns.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A staff officer was here a minute ago, but skipped off,” said an
+      artilleryman to Prince Andrew. “Not like your honor!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew said nothing to Túshin. They were both so busy as to seem
+      not to notice one another. When having limbered up the only two cannon
+      that remained uninjured out of the four, they began moving down the hill
+      (one shattered gun and one unicorn were left behind), Prince Andrew rode
+      up to Túshin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, till we meet again...” he said, holding out his hand to Túshin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good-by, my dear fellow,” said Túshin. “Dear soul! Good-by, my dear
+      fellow!” and for some unknown reason tears suddenly filled his eyes.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0049"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The wind had fallen and black clouds, merging with the powder smoke, hung
+      low over the field of battle on the horizon. It was growing dark and the
+      glow of two conflagrations was the more conspicuous. The cannonade was
+      dying down, but the rattle of musketry behind and on the right sounded
+      oftener and nearer. As soon as Túshin with his guns, continually driving
+      round or coming upon wounded men, was out of range of fire and had
+      descended into the dip, he was met by some of the staff, among them the
+      staff officer and Zherkóv, who had been twice sent to Túshin’s battery but
+      had never reached it. Interrupting one another, they all gave, and
+      transmitted, orders as to how to proceed, reprimanding and reproaching
+      him. Túshin gave no orders, and, silently—fearing to speak because
+      at every word he felt ready to weep without knowing why—rode behind
+      on his artillery nag. Though the orders were to abandon the wounded, many
+      of them dragged themselves after troops and begged for seats on the gun
+      carriages. The jaunty infantry officer who just before the battle had
+      rushed out of Túshin’s wattle shed was laid, with a bullet in his stomach,
+      on “Matvévna’s” carriage. At the foot of the hill, a pale hussar cadet,
+      supporting one hand with the other, came up to Túshin and asked for a
+      seat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Captain, for God’s sake! I’ve hurt my arm,” he said timidly. “For God’s
+      sake... I can’t walk. For God’s sake!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      It was plain that this cadet had already repeatedly asked for a lift and
+      been refused. He asked in a hesitating, piteous voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Tell them to give me a seat, for God’s sake!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Give him a seat,” said Túshin. “Lay a cloak for him to sit on, lad,” he
+      said, addressing his favorite soldier. “And where is the wounded officer?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “He has been set down. He died,” replied someone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Help him up. Sit down, dear fellow, sit down! Spread out the cloak,
+      Antónov.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The cadet was Rostóv. With one hand he supported the other; he was pale
+      and his jaw trembled, shivering feverishly. He was placed on “Matvévna,”
+       the gun from which they had removed the dead officer. The cloak they
+      spread under him was wet with blood which stained his breeches and arm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What, are you wounded, my lad?” said Túshin, approaching the gun on which
+      Rostóv sat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, it’s a sprain.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Then what is this blood on the gun carriage?” inquired Túshin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It was the officer, your honor, stained it,” answered the artilleryman,
+      wiping away the blood with his coat sleeve, as if apologizing for the
+      state of his gun.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was all that they could do to get the guns up the rise aided by the
+      infantry, and having reached the village of Gruntersdorf they halted. It
+      had grown so dark that one could not distinguish the uniforms ten paces
+      off, and the firing had begun to subside. Suddenly, near by on the right,
+      shouting and firing were again heard. Flashes of shot gleamed in the
+      darkness. This was the last French attack and was met by soldiers who had
+      sheltered in the village houses. They all rushed out of the village again,
+      but Túshin’s guns could not move, and the artillerymen, Túshin, and the
+      cadet exchanged silent glances as they awaited their fate. The firing died
+      down and soldiers, talking eagerly, streamed out of a side street.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Not hurt, Petróv?” asked one.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We’ve given it ‘em hot, mate! They won’t make another push now,” said
+      another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You couldn’t see a thing. How they shot at their own fellows! Nothing
+      could be seen. Pitch-dark, brother! Isn’t there something to drink?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The French had been repulsed for the last time. And again and again in the
+      complete darkness Túshin’s guns moved forward, surrounded by the humming
+      infantry as by a frame.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the darkness, it seemed as though a gloomy unseen river was flowing
+      always in one direction, humming with whispers and talk and the sound of
+      hoofs and wheels. Amid the general rumble, the groans and voices of the
+      wounded were more distinctly heard than any other sound in the darkness of
+      the night. The gloom that enveloped the army was filled with their groans,
+      which seemed to melt into one with the darkness of the night. After a
+      while the moving mass became agitated, someone rode past on a white horse
+      followed by his suite, and said something in passing: “What did he say?
+      Where to, now? Halt, is it? Did he thank us?” came eager questions from
+      all sides. The whole moving mass began pressing closer together and a
+      report spread that they were ordered to halt: evidently those in front had
+      halted. All remained where they were in the middle of the muddy road.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Fires were lighted and the talk became more audible. Captain Túshin,
+      having given orders to his company, sent a soldier to find a dressing
+      station or a doctor for the cadet, and sat down by a bonfire the soldiers
+      had kindled on the road. Rostóv, too, dragged himself to the fire. From
+      pain, cold, and damp, a feverish shivering shook his whole body.
+      Drowsiness was irresistibly mastering him, but he kept awake by an
+      excruciating pain in his arm, for which he could find no satisfactory
+      position. He kept closing his eyes and then again looking at the fire,
+      which seemed to him dazzlingly red, and at the feeble, round-shouldered
+      figure of Túshin who was sitting cross-legged like a Turk beside him.
+      Túshin’s large, kind, intelligent eyes were fixed with sympathy and
+      commiseration on Rostóv, who saw that Túshin with his whole heart wished
+      to help him but could not.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From all sides were heard the footsteps and talk of the infantry, who were
+      walking, driving past, and settling down all around. The sound of voices,
+      the tramping feet, the horses’ hoofs moving in mud, the crackling of wood
+      fires near and afar, merged into one tremulous rumble.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was no longer, as before, a dark, unseen river flowing through the
+      gloom, but a dark sea swelling and gradually subsiding after a storm.
+      Rostóv looked at and listened listlessly to what passed before and around
+      him. An infantryman came to the fire, squatted on his heels, held his
+      hands to the blaze, and turned away his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You don’t mind your honor?” he asked Túshin. “I’ve lost my company, your
+      honor. I don’t know where... such bad luck!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      With the soldier, an infantry officer with a bandaged cheek came up to the
+      bonfire, and addressing Túshin asked him to have the guns moved a trifle
+      to let a wagon go past. After he had gone, two soldiers rushed to the
+      campfire. They were quarreling and fighting desperately, each trying to
+      snatch from the other a boot they were both holding on to.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You picked it up?... I dare say! You’re very smart!” one of them shouted
+      hoarsely.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Then a thin, pale soldier, his neck bandaged with a bloodstained leg band,
+      came up and in angry tones asked the artillerymen for water.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Must one die like a dog?” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Túshin told them to give the man some water. Then a cheerful soldier ran
+      up, begging a little fire for the infantry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A nice little hot torch for the infantry! Good luck to you, fellow
+      countrymen. Thanks for the fire—we’ll return it with interest,” said
+      he, carrying away into the darkness a glowing stick.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next came four soldiers, carrying something heavy on a cloak, and passed
+      by the fire. One of them stumbled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who the devil has put the logs on the road?” snarled he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He’s dead—why carry him?” said another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Shut up!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And they disappeared into the darkness with their load.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Still aching?” Túshin asked Rostóv in a whisper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Your honor, you’re wanted by the general. He is in the hut here,” said a
+      gunner, coming up to Túshin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Coming, friend.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Túshin rose and, buttoning his greatcoat and pulling it straight, walked
+      away from the fire.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Not far from the artillery campfire, in a hut that had been prepared for
+      him, Prince Bagratión sat at dinner, talking with some commanding officers
+      who had gathered at his quarters. The little old man with the half-closed
+      eyes was there greedily gnawing a mutton bone, and the general who had
+      served blamelessly for twenty-two years, flushed by a glass of vodka and
+      the dinner; and the staff officer with the signet ring, and Zherkóv,
+      uneasily glancing at them all, and Prince Andrew, pale, with compressed
+      lips and feverishly glittering eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In a corner of the hut stood a standard captured from the French, and the
+      accountant with the naïve face was feeling its texture, shaking his head
+      in perplexity—perhaps because the banner really interested him,
+      perhaps because it was hard for him, hungry as he was, to look on at a
+      dinner where there was no place for him. In the next hut there was a
+      French colonel who had been taken prisoner by our dragoons. Our officers
+      were flocking in to look at him. Prince Bagratión was thanking the
+      individual commanders and inquiring into details of the action and our
+      losses. The general whose regiment had been inspected at Braunau was
+      informing the prince that as soon as the action began he had withdrawn
+      from the wood, mustered the men who were woodcutting, and, allowing the
+      French to pass him, had made a bayonet charge with two battalions and had
+      broken up the French troops.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “When I saw, your excellency, that their first battalion was disorganized,
+      I stopped in the road and thought: ‘I’ll let them come on and will meet
+      them with the fire of the whole battalion’—and that’s what I did.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The general had so wished to do this and was so sorry he had not managed
+      to do it that it seemed to him as if it had really happened. Perhaps it
+      might really have been so? Could one possibly make out amid all that
+      confusion what did or did not happen?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “By the way, your excellency, I should inform you,” he continued—remembering
+      Dólokhov’s conversation with Kutúzov and his last interview with the
+      gentleman-ranker—“that Private Dólokhov, who was reduced to the
+      ranks, took a French officer prisoner in my presence and particularly
+      distinguished himself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I saw the Pávlograd hussars attack there, your excellency,” chimed in
+      Zherkóv, looking uneasily around. He had not seen the hussars all that
+      day, but had heard about them from an infantry officer. “They broke up two
+      squares, your excellency.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Several of those present smiled at Zherkóv’s words, expecting one of his
+      usual jokes, but noticing that what he was saying redounded to the glory
+      of our arms and of the day’s work, they assumed a serious expression,
+      though many of them knew that what he was saying was a lie devoid of any
+      foundation. Prince Bagratión turned to the old colonel:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Gentlemen, I thank you all; all arms have behaved heroically: infantry,
+      cavalry, and artillery. How was it that two guns were abandoned in the
+      center?” he inquired, searching with his eyes for someone. (Prince
+      Bagratión did not ask about the guns on the left flank; he knew that all
+      the guns there had been abandoned at the very beginning of the action.) “I
+      think I sent you?” he added, turning to the staff officer on duty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One was damaged,” answered the staff officer, “and the other I can’t
+      understand. I was there all the time giving orders and had only just
+      left.... It is true that it was hot there,” he added, modestly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Someone mentioned that Captain Túshin was bivouacking close to the village
+      and had already been sent for.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, but you were there?” said Prince Bagratión, addressing Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Of course, we only just missed one another,” said the staff officer, with
+      a smile to Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I had not the pleasure of seeing you,” said Prince Andrew, coldly and
+      abruptly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All were silent. Túshin appeared at the threshold and made his way timidly
+      from behind the backs of the generals. As he stepped past the generals in
+      the crowded hut, feeling embarrassed as he always was by the sight of his
+      superiors, he did not notice the staff of the banner and stumbled over it.
+      Several of those present laughed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How was it a gun was abandoned?” asked Bagratión, frowning, not so much
+      at the captain as at those who were laughing, among whom Zherkóv laughed
+      loudest.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only now, when he was confronted by the stern authorities, did his guilt
+      and the disgrace of having lost two guns and yet remaining alive present
+      themselves to Túshin in all their horror. He had been so excited that he
+      had not thought about it until that moment. The officers’ laughter
+      confused him still more. He stood before Bagratión with his lower jaw
+      trembling and was hardly able to mutter: “I don’t know... your
+      excellency... I had no men... your excellency.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You might have taken some from the covering troops.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Túshin did not say that there were no covering troops, though that was
+      perfectly true. He was afraid of getting some other officer into trouble,
+      and silently fixed his eyes on Bagratión as a schoolboy who has blundered
+      looks at an examiner.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The silence lasted some time. Prince Bagratión, apparently not wishing to
+      be severe, found nothing to say; the others did not venture to intervene.
+      Prince Andrew looked at Túshin from under his brows and his fingers
+      twitched nervously.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency!” Prince Andrew broke the silence with his abrupt voice,
+      “you were pleased to send me to Captain Túshin’s battery. I went there and
+      found two thirds of the men and horses knocked out, two guns smashed, and
+      no supports at all.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Bagratión and Túshin looked with equal intentness at Bolkónski, who
+      spoke with suppressed agitation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And, if your excellency will allow me to express my opinion,” he
+      continued, “we owe today’s success chiefly to the action of that battery
+      and the heroic endurance of Captain Túshin and his company,” and without
+      awaiting a reply, Prince Andrew rose and left the table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Bagratión looked at Túshin, evidently reluctant to show distrust in
+      Bolkónski’s emphatic opinion yet not feeling able fully to credit it, bent
+      his head, and told Túshin that he could go. Prince Andrew went out with
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Thank you; you saved me, my dear fellow!” said Túshin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew gave him a look, but said nothing and went away. He felt sad
+      and depressed. It was all so strange, so unlike what he had hoped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      “Who are they? Why are they here? What do they want? And when will all
+      this end?” thought Rostóv, looking at the changing shadows before him. The
+      pain in his arm became more and more intense. Irresistible drowsiness
+      overpowered him, red rings danced before his eyes, and the impression of
+      those voices and faces and a sense of loneliness merged with the physical
+      pain. It was they, these soldiers—wounded and unwounded—it was
+      they who were crushing, weighing down, and twisting the sinews and
+      scorching the flesh of his sprained arm and shoulder. To rid himself of
+      them he closed his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For a moment he dozed, but in that short interval innumerable things
+      appeared to him in a dream: his mother and her large white hand, Sónya’s
+      thin little shoulders, Natásha’s eyes and laughter, Denísov with his voice
+      and mustache, and Telyánin and all that affair with Telyánin and
+      Bogdánich. That affair was the same thing as this soldier with the harsh
+      voice, and it was that affair and this soldier that were so agonizingly,
+      incessantly pulling and pressing his arm and always dragging it in one
+      direction. He tried to get away from them, but they would not for an
+      instant let his shoulder move a hair’s breadth. It would not ache—it
+      would be well—if only they did not pull it, but it was impossible to
+      get rid of them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He opened his eyes and looked up. The black canopy of night hung less than
+      a yard above the glow of the charcoal. Flakes of falling snow were
+      fluttering in that light. Túshin had not returned, the doctor had not
+      come. He was alone now, except for a soldier who was sitting naked at the
+      other side of the fire, warming his thin yellow body.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nobody wants me!” thought Rostóv. “There is no one to help me or pity me.
+      Yet I was once at home, strong, happy, and loved.” He sighed and, doing
+      so, groaned involuntarily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh, is anything hurting you?” asked the soldier, shaking his shirt out
+      over the fire, and not waiting for an answer he gave a grunt and added:
+      “What a lot of men have been crippled today—frightful!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv did not listen to the soldier. He looked at the snowflakes
+      fluttering above the fire and remembered a Russian winter at his warm,
+      bright home, his fluffy fur coat, his quickly gliding sleigh, his healthy
+      body, and all the affection and care of his family. “And why did I come
+      here?” he wondered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day the French army did not renew their attack, and the remnant of
+      Bagratión’s detachment was reunited to Kutúzov’s army.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0052"></a>
+      BOOK THREE: 1805
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0050"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli was not a man who deliberately thought out his plans. Still
+      less did he think of injuring anyone for his own advantage. He was merely
+      a man of the world who had got on and to whom getting on had become a
+      habit. Schemes and devices for which he never rightly accounted to
+      himself, but which formed the whole interest of his life, were constantly
+      shaping themselves in his mind, arising from the circumstances and persons
+      he met. Of these plans he had not merely one or two in his head but
+      dozens, some only beginning to form themselves, some approaching
+      achievement, and some in course of disintegration. He did not, for
+      instance, say to himself: “This man now has influence, I must gain his
+      confidence and friendship and through him obtain a special grant.” Nor did
+      he say to himself: “Pierre is a rich man, I must entice him to marry my
+      daughter and lend me the forty thousand rubles I need.” But when he came
+      across a man of position his instinct immediately told him that this man
+      could be useful, and without any premeditation Prince Vasíli took the
+      first opportunity to gain his confidence, flatter him, become intimate
+      with him, and finally make his request.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He had Pierre at hand in Moscow and procured for him an appointment as
+      Gentleman of the Bedchamber, which at that time conferred the status of
+      Councilor of State, and insisted on the young man accompanying him to
+      Petersburg and staying at his house. With apparent absent-mindedness, yet
+      with unhesitating assurance that he was doing the right thing, Prince
+      Vasíli did everything to get Pierre to marry his daughter. Had he thought
+      out his plans beforehand he could not have been so natural and shown such
+      unaffected familiarity in intercourse with everybody both above and below
+      him in social standing. Something always drew him toward those richer and
+      more powerful than himself and he had rare skill in seizing the most
+      opportune moment for making use of people.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre, on unexpectedly becoming Count Bezúkhov and a rich man, felt
+      himself after his recent loneliness and freedom from cares so beset and
+      preoccupied that only in bed was he able to be by himself. He had to sign
+      papers, to present himself at government offices, the purpose of which was
+      not clear to him, to question his chief steward, to visit his estate near
+      Moscow, and to receive many people who formerly did not even wish to know
+      of his existence but would now have been offended and grieved had he
+      chosen not to see them. These different people—businessmen,
+      relations, and acquaintances alike—were all disposed to treat the
+      young heir in the most friendly and flattering manner: they were all
+      evidently firmly convinced of Pierre’s noble qualities. He was always
+      hearing such words as: “With your remarkable kindness,” or,
+      “With your excellent heart,” “You are yourself so honorable,
+      Count,” or, “Were he as clever as you,” and so on, till he
+      began sincerely to believe in his own exceptional kindness and extraordinary
+      intelligence, the more so as in the depth of his heart it had always seemed to
+      him that he really was very kind and intelligent. Even people who had formerly
+      been spiteful toward him and evidently unfriendly now became gentle and
+      affectionate. The angry eldest princess, with the long waist and hair plastered
+      down like a doll’s, had come into Pierre’s room after the funeral.
+      With drooping eyes and frequent blushes she told him she was very sorry about
+      their past misunderstandings and did not now feel she had a right to ask him
+      for anything, except only for permission, after the blow she had received, to
+      remain for a few weeks longer in the house she so loved and where she had
+      sacrificed so much. She could not refrain from weeping at these words.
+      Touched that this statuesque princess could so change, Pierre took her
+      hand and begged her forgiveness, without knowing what for. From that day
+      the eldest princess quite changed toward Pierre and began knitting a
+      striped scarf for him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do this for my sake, <i>mon cher</i>; after all, she had to put up with a great
+      deal from the deceased,” said Prince Vasíli to him, handing him a deed to
+      sign for the princess’ benefit.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli had come to the conclusion that it was necessary to throw
+      this bone—a bill for thirty thousand rubles—to the poor
+      princess that it might not occur to her to speak of his share in the
+      affair of the inlaid portfolio. Pierre signed the deed and after that the
+      princess grew still kinder. The younger sisters also became affectionate
+      to him, especially the youngest, the pretty one with the mole, who often
+      made him feel confused by her smiles and her own confusion when meeting
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It seemed so natural to Pierre that everyone should like him, and it would
+      have seemed so unnatural had anyone disliked him, that he could not but
+      believe in the sincerity of those around him. Besides, he had no time to
+      ask himself whether these people were sincere or not. He was always busy
+      and always felt in a state of mild and cheerful intoxication. He felt as
+      though he were the center of some important and general movement; that
+      something was constantly expected of him, that if he did not do it he
+      would grieve and disappoint many people, but if he did this and that, all
+      would be well; and he did what was demanded of him, but still that happy
+      result always remained in the future.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      More than anyone else, Prince Vasíli took possession of Pierre’s affairs
+      and of Pierre himself in those early days. From the death of Count
+      Bezúkhov he did not let go his hold of the lad. He had the air of a man
+      oppressed by business, weary and suffering, who yet would not, for pity’s
+      sake, leave this helpless youth who, after all, was the son of his old
+      friend and the possessor of such enormous wealth, to the caprice of fate
+      and the designs of rogues. During the few days he spent in Moscow after
+      the death of Count Bezúkhov, he would call Pierre, or go to him himself,
+      and tell him what ought to be done in a tone of weariness and assurance,
+      as if he were adding every time: “You know I am overwhelmed with business
+      and it is purely out of charity that I trouble myself about you, and you
+      also know quite well that what I propose is the only thing possible.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, my dear fellow, tomorrow we are off at last,” said Prince Vasíli
+      one day, closing his eyes and fingering Pierre’s elbow, speaking as if he
+      were saying something which had long since been agreed upon and could not
+      now be altered. “We start tomorrow and I’m giving you a place in my
+      carriage. I am very glad. All our important business here is now settled,
+      and I ought to have been off long ago. Here is something I have received
+      from the chancellor. I asked him for you, and you have been entered in the
+      diplomatic corps and made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. The diplomatic
+      career now lies open before you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Notwithstanding the tone of wearied assurance with which these words were
+      pronounced, Pierre, who had so long been considering his career, wished to
+      make some suggestion. But Prince Vasíli interrupted him in the special
+      deep cooing tone, precluding the possibility of interrupting his speech,
+      which he used in extreme cases when special persuasion was needed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “<i>Mais, mon cher</i>, I did this for my own sake, to satisfy my conscience, and
+      there is nothing to thank me for. No one has ever complained yet of being
+      too much loved; and besides, you are free, you could throw it up tomorrow.
+      But you will see everything for yourself when you get to Petersburg. It is
+      high time for you to get away from these terrible recollections.” Prince
+      Vasíli sighed. “Yes, yes, my boy. And my valet can go in your carriage.
+      Ah! I was nearly forgetting,” he added. “You know, <i>mon cher</i>, your father
+      and I had some accounts to settle, so I have received what was due from
+      the Ryazán estate and will keep it; you won’t require it. We’ll go into
+      the accounts later.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      By “what was due from the Ryazán estate” Prince Vasíli meant several
+      thousand rubles quitrent received from Pierre’s peasants, which the prince
+      had retained for himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In Petersburg, as in Moscow, Pierre found the same atmosphere of
+      gentleness and affection. He could not refuse the post, or rather the rank
+      (for he did nothing), that Prince Vasíli had procured for him, and
+      acquaintances, invitations, and social occupations were so numerous that,
+      even more than in Moscow, he felt a sense of bewilderment, bustle, and
+      continual expectation of some good, always in front of him but never
+      attained.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Of his former bachelor acquaintances many were no longer in Petersburg.
+      The Guards had gone to the front; Dólokhov had been reduced to the ranks;
+      Anatole was in the army somewhere in the provinces; Prince Andrew was
+      abroad; so Pierre had not the opportunity to spend his nights as he used
+      to like to spend them, or to open his mind by intimate talks with a friend
+      older than himself and whom he respected. His whole time was taken up with
+      dinners and balls and was spent chiefly at Prince Vasíli’s house in the
+      company of the stout princess, his wife, and his beautiful daughter
+      Hélène.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Like the others, Anna Pávlovna Schérer showed Pierre the change of
+      attitude toward him that had taken place in society.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Formerly in Anna Pávlovna’s presence, Pierre had always felt that what he
+      was saying was out of place, tactless and unsuitable, that remarks which
+      seemed to him clever while they formed in his mind became foolish as soon
+      as he uttered them, while on the contrary Hippolyte’s stupidest remarks
+      came out clever and apt. Now everything Pierre said was <i>charmant</i>. Even if
+      Anna Pávlovna did not say so, he could see that she wished to and only
+      refrained out of regard for his modesty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the beginning of the winter of 1805-6 Pierre received one of Anna
+      Pávlovna’s usual pink notes with an invitation to which was added: “You
+      will find the beautiful Hélène here, whom it is always delightful to see.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      When he read that sentence, Pierre felt for the first time that some link
+      which other people recognized had grown up between himself and Hélène, and
+      that thought both alarmed him, as if some obligation were being imposed on
+      him which he could not fulfill, and pleased him as an entertaining
+      supposition.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Pávlovna’s “At Home” was like the former one, only the novelty she
+      offered her guests this time was not Mortemart, but a diplomatist fresh
+      from Berlin with the very latest details of the Emperor Alexander’s visit
+      to Potsdam, and of how the two august friends had pledged themselves in an
+      indissoluble alliance to uphold the cause of justice against the enemy of
+      the human race. Anna Pávlovna received Pierre with a shade of melancholy,
+      evidently relating to the young man’s recent loss by the death of Count
+      Bezúkhov (everyone constantly considered it a duty to assure Pierre that
+      he was greatly afflicted by the death of the father he had hardly known),
+      and her melancholy was just like the august melancholy she showed at the
+      mention of her most august Majesty the Empress Márya Fëdorovna. Pierre
+      felt flattered by this. Anna Pávlovna arranged the different groups in her
+      drawing room with her habitual skill. The large group, in which were
+      Prince Vasíli and the generals, had the benefit of the diplomat. Another
+      group was at the tea table. Pierre wished to join the former, but Anna
+      Pávlovna—who was in the excited condition of a commander on a
+      battlefield to whom thousands of new and brilliant ideas occur which there
+      is hardly time to put in action—seeing Pierre, touched his sleeve
+      with her finger, saying:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Wait a bit, I have something in view for you this evening.” (She glanced
+      at Hélène and smiled at her.) “My dear Hélène, be charitable to my poor
+      aunt who adores you. Go and keep her company for ten minutes. And that it
+      will not be too dull, here is the dear count who will not refuse to
+      accompany you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The beauty went to the aunt, but Anna Pávlovna detained Pierre, looking as
+      if she had to give some final necessary instructions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Isn’t she exquisite?” she said to Pierre, pointing to the stately beauty
+      as she glided away. “And how she carries herself! For so young a girl,
+      such tact, such masterly perfection of manner! It comes from her heart.
+      Happy the man who wins her! With her the least worldly of men would occupy
+      a most brilliant position in society. Don’t you think so? I only wanted to
+      know your opinion,” and Anna Pávlovna let Pierre go.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre, in reply, sincerely agreed with her as to Hélène’s perfection of
+      manner. If he ever thought of Hélène, it was just of her beauty and her
+      remarkable skill in appearing silently dignified in society.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old aunt received the two young people in her corner, but seemed
+      desirous of hiding her adoration for Hélène and inclined rather to show
+      her fear of Anna Pávlovna. She looked at her niece, as if inquiring what
+      she was to do with these people. On leaving them, Anna Pávlovna again
+      touched Pierre’s sleeve, saying: “I hope you won’t say that it is dull in
+      my house again,” and she glanced at Hélène.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Hélène smiled, with a look implying that she did not admit the possibility
+      of anyone seeing her without being enchanted. The aunt coughed, swallowed,
+      and said in French that she was very pleased to see Hélène, then she
+      turned to Pierre with the same words of welcome and the same look. In the
+      middle of a dull and halting conversation, Hélène turned to Pierre with
+      the beautiful bright smile that she gave to everyone. Pierre was so used
+      to that smile, and it had so little meaning for him, that he paid no
+      attention to it. The aunt was just speaking of a collection of snuffboxes
+      that had belonged to Pierre’s father, Count Bezúkhov, and showed them her
+      own box. Princess Hélène asked to see the portrait of the aunt’s husband
+      on the box lid.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That is probably the work of Vinesse,” said Pierre, mentioning a
+      celebrated miniaturist, and he leaned over the table to take the snuffbox
+      while trying to hear what was being said at the other table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He half rose, meaning to go round, but the aunt handed him the snuffbox,
+      passing it across Hélène’s back. Hélène stooped forward to make room, and
+      looked round with a smile. She was, as always at evening parties, wearing
+      a dress such as was then fashionable, cut very low at front and back. Her
+      bust, which had always seemed like marble to Pierre, was so close to him
+      that his shortsighted eyes could not but perceive the living charm of her
+      neck and shoulders, so near to his lips that he need only have bent his
+      head a little to have touched them. He was conscious of the warmth of her
+      body, the scent of perfume, and the creaking of her corset as she moved.
+      He did not see her marble beauty forming a complete whole with her dress,
+      but all the charm of her body only covered by her garments. And having
+      once seen this he could not help being aware of it, just as we cannot
+      renew an illusion we have once seen through.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So you have never noticed before how beautiful I am?” Hélène seemed to
+      say. “You had not noticed that I am a woman? Yes, I am a woman who may
+      belong to anyone—to you too,” said her glance. And at that moment
+      Pierre felt that Hélène not only could, but must, be his wife, and that it
+      could not be otherwise.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He knew this at that moment as surely as if he had been standing at the
+      altar with her. How and when this would be he did not know, he did not
+      even know if it would be a good thing (he even felt, he knew not why, that
+      it would be a bad thing), but he knew it would happen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre dropped his eyes, lifted them again, and wished once more to see
+      her as a distant beauty far removed from him, as he had seen her every day
+      until then, but he could no longer do it. He could not, any more than a
+      man who has been looking at a tuft of steppe grass through the mist and
+      taking it for a tree can again take it for a tree after he has once
+      recognized it to be a tuft of grass. She was terribly close to him. She
+      already had power over him, and between them there was no longer any
+      barrier except the barrier of his own will.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, I will leave you in your little corner,” came Anna Pávlovna’s
+      voice, “I see you are all right there.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Pierre, anxiously trying to remember whether he had done anything
+      reprehensible, looked round with a blush. It seemed to him that everyone
+      knew what had happened to him as he knew it himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A little later when he went up to the large circle, Anna Pávlovna said to
+      him: “I hear you are refitting your Petersburg house?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      This was true. The architect had told him that it was necessary, and
+      Pierre, without knowing why, was having his enormous Petersburg house done
+      up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s a good thing, but don’t move from Prince Vasíli’s. It is good to
+      have a friend like the prince,” she said, smiling at Prince Vasíli. “I
+      know something about that. Don’t I? And you are still so young. You need
+      advice. Don’t be angry with me for exercising an old woman’s privilege.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She paused, as women always do, expecting something after they have
+      mentioned their age. “If you marry it will be a different thing,” she
+      continued, uniting them both in one glance. Pierre did not look at Hélène
+      nor she at him. But she was just as terribly close to him. He muttered
+      something and colored.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he got home he could not sleep for a long time for thinking of what
+      had happened. What had happened? Nothing. He had merely understood that
+      the woman he had known as a child, of whom when her beauty was mentioned
+      he had said absent-mindedly: “Yes, she’s good looking,” he had understood
+      that this woman might belong to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But she’s stupid. I have myself said she is stupid,” he thought. “There
+      is something nasty, something wrong, in the feeling she excites in me. I
+      have been told that her brother Anatole was in love with her and she with
+      him, that there was quite a scandal and that that’s why he was sent away.
+      Hippolyte is her brother... Prince Vasíli is her father... It’s bad....”
+       he reflected, but while he was thinking this (the reflection was still
+      incomplete), he caught himself smiling and was conscious that another line
+      of thought had sprung up, and while thinking of her worthlessness he was
+      also dreaming of how she would be his wife, how she would love him become
+      quite different, and how all he had thought and heard of her might be
+      false. And he again saw her not as the daughter of Prince Vasíli, but
+      visualized her whole body only veiled by its gray dress. “But no! Why did
+      this thought never occur to me before?” and again he told himself that it
+      was impossible, that there would be something unnatural, and as it seemed
+      to him dishonorable, in this marriage. He recalled her former words and
+      looks and the words and looks of those who had seen them together. He
+      recalled Anna Pávlovna’s words and looks when she spoke to him about his
+      house, recalled thousands of such hints from Prince Vasíli and others, and
+      was seized by terror lest he had already, in some way, bound himself to do
+      something that was evidently wrong and that he ought not to do. But at the
+      very time he was expressing this conviction to himself, in another part of
+      his mind her image rose in all its womanly beauty.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0051"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      In November, 1805, Prince Vasíli had to go on a tour of inspection in four
+      different provinces. He had arranged this for himself so as to visit his
+      neglected estates at the same time and pick up his son Anatole where his
+      regiment was stationed, and take him to visit Prince Nicholas Bolkónski in
+      order to arrange a match for him with the daughter of that rich old man.
+      But before leaving home and undertaking these new affairs, Prince Vasíli
+      had to settle matters with Pierre, who, it is true, had latterly spent
+      whole days at home, that is, in Prince Vasíli’s house where he was
+      staying, and had been absurd, excited, and foolish in Hélène’s presence
+      (as a lover should be), but had not yet proposed to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This is all very fine, but things must be settled,” said Prince Vasíli to
+      himself, with a sorrowful sigh, one morning, feeling that Pierre who was
+      under such obligations to him (“But never mind that”) was not behaving
+      very well in this matter. “Youth, frivolity... well, God be with him,”
+       thought he, relishing his own goodness of heart, “but it must be brought
+      to a head. The day after tomorrow will be Lëlya’s name day. I will invite
+      two or three people, and if he does not understand what he ought to do
+      then it will be my affair—yes, my affair. I am her father.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Six weeks after Anna Pávlovna’s “At Home” and after the sleepless night
+      when he had decided that to marry Hélène would be a calamity and that he
+      ought to avoid her and go away, Pierre, despite that decision, had not
+      left Prince Vasíli’s and felt with terror that in people’s eyes he was
+      every day more and more connected with her, that it was impossible for him
+      to return to his former conception of her, that he could not break away
+      from her, and that though it would be a terrible thing he would have to
+      unite his fate with hers. He might perhaps have been able to free himself
+      but that Prince Vasíli (who had rarely before given receptions) now hardly
+      let a day go by without having an evening party at which Pierre had to be
+      present unless he wished to spoil the general pleasure and disappoint
+      everyone’s expectation. Prince Vasíli, in the rare moments when he was at
+      home, would take Pierre’s hand in passing and draw it downwards, or
+      absent-mindedly hold out his wrinkled, clean-shaven cheek for Pierre to
+      kiss and would say: “Till tomorrow,” or, “Be in to dinner or I shall not
+      see you,” or, “I am staying in for your sake,” and so on. And though
+      Prince Vasíli, when he stayed in (as he said) for Pierre’s sake, hardly
+      exchanged a couple of words with him, Pierre felt unable to disappoint
+      him. Every day he said to himself one and the same thing: “It is time I
+      understood her and made up my mind what she really is. Was I mistaken
+      before, or am I mistaken now? No, she is not stupid, she is an excellent
+      girl,” he sometimes said to himself “she never makes a mistake, never says
+      anything stupid. She says little, but what she does say is always clear
+      and simple, so she is not stupid. She never was abashed and is not abashed
+      now, so she cannot be a bad woman!” He had often begun to make reflections
+      or think aloud in her company, and she had always answered him either by a
+      brief but appropriate remark—showing that it did not interest her—or
+      by a silent look and smile which more palpably than anything else showed
+      Pierre her superiority. She was right in regarding all arguments as
+      nonsense in comparison with that smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She always addressed him with a radiantly confiding smile meant for him
+      alone, in which there was something more significant than in the general
+      smile that usually brightened her face. Pierre knew that everyone was
+      waiting for him to say a word and cross a certain line, and he knew that
+      sooner or later he would step across it, but an incomprehensible terror
+      seized him at the thought of that dreadful step. A thousand times during
+      that month and a half while he felt himself drawn nearer and nearer to
+      that dreadful abyss, Pierre said to himself: “What am I doing? I need
+      resolution. Can it be that I have none?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He wished to take a decision, but felt with dismay that in this matter he
+      lacked that strength of will which he had known in himself and really
+      possessed. Pierre was one of those who are only strong when they feel
+      themselves quite innocent, and since that day when he was overpowered by a
+      feeling of desire while stooping over the snuffbox at Anna Pávlovna’s, an
+      unacknowledged sense of the guilt of that desire paralyzed his will.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On Hélène’s name day, a small party of just their own people—as his
+      wife said—met for supper at Prince Vasíli’s. All these friends and
+      relations had been given to understand that the fate of the young girl
+      would be decided that evening. The visitors were seated at supper.
+      Princess Kurágina, a portly imposing woman who had once been handsome, was
+      sitting at the head of the table. On either side of her sat the more
+      important guests—an old general and his wife, and Anna Pávlovna
+      Schérer. At the other end sat the younger and less important guests, and
+      there too sat the members of the family, and Pierre and Hélène, side by
+      side. Prince Vasíli was not having any supper: he went round the table in
+      a merry mood, sitting down now by one, now by another, of the guests. To
+      each of them he made some careless and agreeable remark except to Pierre
+      and Hélène, whose presence he seemed not to notice. He enlivened the whole
+      party. The wax candles burned brightly, the silver and crystal gleamed, so
+      did the ladies’ toilets and the gold and silver of the men’s epaulets;
+      servants in scarlet liveries moved round the table, the clatter of plates,
+      knives, and glasses mingled with the animated hum of several
+      conversations. At one end of the table, the old chamberlain was heard
+      assuring an old baroness that he loved her passionately, at which she
+      laughed; at the other could be heard the story of the misfortunes of some
+      Mary Víktorovna or other. At the center of the table, Prince Vasíli
+      attracted everybody’s attention. With a facetious smile on his face, he
+      was telling the ladies about last Wednesday’s meeting of the Imperial
+      Council, at which Sergéy Kuzmích Vyazmítinov, the new military governor
+      general of Petersburg, had received and read the then famous rescript of
+      the Emperor Alexander from the army to Sergéy Kuzmích, in which the
+      Emperor said that he was receiving from all sides declarations of the
+      people’s loyalty, that the declaration from Petersburg gave him particular
+      pleasure, and that he was proud to be at the head of such a nation and
+      would endeavor to be worthy of it. This rescript began with the words:
+      “Sergéy Kuzmích, From all sides reports reach me,” etc.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, and so he never got farther than: ‘Sergéy Kuzmích’?” asked one of
+      the ladies.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Exactly, not a hair’s breadth farther,” answered Prince Vasíli, laughing,
+      “‘Sergéy Kuzmích... From all sides... From all sides... Sergéy Kuzmích...’
+      Poor Vyazmítinov could not get any farther! He began the rescript again
+      and again, but as soon as he uttered <i>‘Sergéy’</i> he sobbed, <i>‘Kuz-mí-ch,’</i>
+      tears, and <i>‘From all sides’</i> was smothered in sobs and he could get no
+      farther. And again his handkerchief, and again: <i>‘Sergéy Kuzmích, From all
+      sides,’</i>... and tears, till at last somebody else was asked to read it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Kuzmích... From all sides... and then tears,” someone repeated laughing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t be unkind,” cried Anna Pávlovna from her end of the table holding
+      up a threatening finger. “He is such a worthy and excellent man, our dear
+      Vyazmítinov....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Everybody laughed a great deal. At the head of the table, where the
+      honored guests sat, everyone seemed to be in high spirits and under the
+      influence of a variety of exciting sensations. Only Pierre and Hélène sat
+      silently side by side almost at the bottom of the table, a suppressed
+      smile brightening both their faces, a smile that had nothing to do with
+      Sergéy Kuzmích—a smile of bashfulness at their own feelings. But
+      much as all the rest laughed, talked, and joked, much as they enjoyed
+      their Rhine wine, <i>sauté</i>, and ices, and however they avoided looking at the
+      young couple, and heedless and unobservant as they seemed of them, one
+      could feel by the occasional glances they gave that the story about Sergéy
+      Kuzmích, the laughter, and the food were all a pretense, and that the
+      whole attention of that company was directed to—Pierre and Hélène.
+      Prince Vasíli mimicked the sobbing of Sergéy Kuzmích and at the same time
+      his eyes glanced toward his daughter, and while he laughed the expression
+      on his face clearly said: “Yes... it’s getting on, it will all be settled
+      today.” Anna Pávlovna threatened him on behalf of “our dear Vyazmítinov,”
+       and in her eyes, which, for an instant, glanced at Pierre, Prince Vasíli
+      read a congratulation on his future son-in-law and on his daughter’s
+      happiness. The old princess sighed sadly as she offered some wine to the
+      old lady next to her and glanced angrily at her daughter, and her sigh
+      seemed to say: “Yes, there’s nothing left for you and me but to sip sweet
+      wine, my dear, now that the time has come for these young ones to be thus
+      boldly, provocatively happy.” “And what nonsense all this is that I am
+      saying!” thought a diplomatist, glancing at the happy faces of the lovers.
+      “That’s happiness!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Into the insignificant, trifling, and artificial interests uniting that
+      society had entered the simple feeling of the attraction of a healthy and
+      handsome young man and woman for one another. And this human feeling
+      dominated everything else and soared above all their affected chatter.
+      Jests fell flat, news was not interesting, and the animation was evidently
+      forced. Not only the guests but even the footmen waiting at table seemed
+      to feel this, and they forgot their duties as they looked at the beautiful
+      Hélène with her radiant face and at the red, broad, and happy though
+      uneasy face of Pierre. It seemed as if the very light of the candles was
+      focused on those two happy faces alone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre felt that he was the center of it all, and this both pleased and
+      embarrassed him. He was like a man entirely absorbed in some occupation.
+      He did not see, hear, or understand anything clearly. Only now and then
+      detached ideas and impressions from the world of reality shot unexpectedly
+      through his mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So it is all finished!” he thought. “And how has it all happened? How
+      quickly! Now I know that not because of her alone, nor of myself alone,
+      but because of everyone, <i>it</i> must inevitably come about. They are all
+      expecting <i>it</i>, they are so sure that it will happen that I cannot, I
+      cannot, disappoint them. But how will it be? I do not know, but it will
+      certainly happen!” thought Pierre, glancing at those dazzling shoulders
+      close to his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Or he would suddenly feel ashamed of he knew not what. He felt it awkward
+      to attract everyone’s attention and to be considered a lucky man and, with
+      his plain face, to be looked on as a sort of Paris possessed of a Helen.
+      “But no doubt it always is and must be so!” he consoled himself. “And
+      besides, what have I done to bring it about? How did it begin? I traveled
+      from Moscow with Prince Vasíli. Then there was nothing. So why should I
+      not stay at his house? Then I played cards with her and picked up her
+      reticule and drove out with her. How did it begin, when did it all come
+      about?” And here he was sitting by her side as her betrothed, seeing,
+      hearing, feeling her nearness, her breathing, her movements, her beauty.
+      Then it would suddenly seem to him that it was not she but he was so
+      unusually beautiful, and that that was why they all looked so at him, and
+      flattered by this general admiration he would expand his chest, raise his
+      head, and rejoice at his good fortune. Suddenly he heard a familiar voice
+      repeating something to him a second time. But Pierre was so absorbed that
+      he did not understand what was said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am asking you when you last heard from Bolkónski,” repeated Prince
+      Vasíli a third time. “How absent-minded you are, my dear fellow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli smiled, and Pierre noticed that everyone was smiling at him
+      and Hélène. “Well, what of it, if you all know it?” thought Pierre. “What
+      of it? It’s the truth!” and he himself smiled his gentle childlike smile,
+      and Hélène smiled too.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “When did you get the letter? Was it from Olmütz?” repeated Prince Vasíli,
+      who pretended to want to know this in order to settle a dispute.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How can one talk or think of such trifles?” thought Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, from Olmütz,” he answered, with a sigh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After supper Pierre with his partner followed the others into the drawing
+      room. The guests began to disperse, some without taking leave of Hélène.
+      Some, as if unwilling to distract her from an important occupation, came
+      up to her for a moment and made haste to go away, refusing to let her see
+      them off. The diplomatist preserved a mournful silence as he left the
+      drawing room. He pictured the vanity of his diplomatic career in
+      comparison with Pierre’s happiness. The old general grumbled at his wife
+      when she asked how his leg was. “Oh, the old fool,” he thought. “That
+      Princess Hélène will be beautiful still when she’s fifty.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I think I may congratulate you,” whispered Anna Pávlovna to the old
+      princess, kissing her soundly. “If I hadn’t this headache I’d have stayed
+      longer.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The old princess did not reply, she was tormented by jealousy of her
+      daughter’s happiness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While the guests were taking their leave Pierre remained for a long time
+      alone with Hélène in the little drawing room where they were sitting. He
+      had often before, during the last six weeks, remained alone with her, but
+      had never spoken to her of love. Now he felt that it was inevitable, but
+      he could not make up his mind to take the final step. He felt ashamed; he
+      felt that he was occupying someone else’s place here beside Hélène. “This
+      happiness is not for you,” some inner voice whispered to him. “This
+      happiness is for those who have not in them what there is in you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But, as he had to say something, he began by asking her whether she was
+      satisfied with the party. She replied in her usual simple manner that this
+      name day of hers had been one of the pleasantest she had ever had.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Some of the nearest relatives had not yet left. They were sitting in the
+      large drawing room. Prince Vasíli came up to Pierre with languid
+      footsteps. Pierre rose and said it was getting late. Prince Vasíli gave
+      him a look of stern inquiry, as though what Pierre had just said was so
+      strange that one could not take it in. But then the expression of severity
+      changed, and he drew Pierre’s hand downwards, made him sit down, and
+      smiled affectionately.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, Lëlya?” he asked, turning instantly to his daughter and addressing
+      her with the careless tone of habitual tenderness natural to parents who
+      have petted their children from babyhood, but which Prince Vasíli had only
+      acquired by imitating other parents.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And he again turned to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sergéy Kuzmích—From all sides—” he said,
+      unbuttoning the top button of his waistcoat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre smiled, but his smile showed that he knew it was not the story
+      about Sergéy Kuzmích that interested Prince Vasíli just then, and Prince
+      Vasíli saw that Pierre knew this. He suddenly muttered something and went
+      away. It seemed to Pierre that even the prince was disconcerted. The sight
+      of the discomposure of that old man of the world touched Pierre: he looked
+      at Hélène and she too seemed disconcerted, and her look seemed to say:
+      “Well, it is your own fault.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The step must be taken but I cannot, I cannot!” thought Pierre, and he
+      again began speaking about indifferent matters, about Sergéy Kuzmích,
+      asking what the point of the story was as he had not heard it properly.
+      Hélène answered with a smile that she too had missed it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Prince Vasíli returned to the drawing room, the princess, his wife,
+      was talking in low tones to the elderly lady about Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Of course, it is a very brilliant match, but happiness, my dear...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Marriages are made in heaven,” replied the elderly lady.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli passed by, seeming not to hear the ladies, and sat down on a
+      sofa in a far corner of the room. He closed his eyes and seemed to be
+      dozing. His head sank forward and then he roused himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Aline,” he said to his wife, “go and see what they are about.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess went up to the door, passed by it with a dignified and
+      indifferent air, and glanced into the little drawing room. Pierre and
+      Hélène still sat talking just as before.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Still the same,” she said to her husband.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli frowned, twisting his mouth, his cheeks quivered and his
+      face assumed the coarse, unpleasant expression peculiar to him. Shaking
+      himself, he rose, threw back his head, and with resolute steps went past
+      the ladies into the little drawing room. With quick steps he went joyfully
+      up to Pierre. His face was so unusually triumphant that Pierre rose in
+      alarm on seeing it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Thank God!” said Prince Vasíli. “My wife has told me everything!” (He put
+      one arm around Pierre and the other around his daughter.)—“My dear
+      boy... Lëlya... I am very pleased.” (His voice trembled.) “I loved your
+      father... and she will make you a good wife... God bless you!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He embraced his daughter, and then again Pierre, and kissed him with his
+      malodorous mouth. Tears actually moistened his cheeks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Princess, come here!” he shouted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old princess came in and also wept. The elderly lady was using her
+      handkerchief too. Pierre was kissed, and he kissed the beautiful Hélène’s
+      hand several times. After a while they were left alone again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All this had to be and could not be otherwise,” thought Pierre, “so it is
+      useless to ask whether it is good or bad. It is good because it’s definite
+      and one is rid of the old tormenting doubt.” Pierre held the hand of his
+      betrothed in silence, looking at her beautiful bosom as it rose and fell.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hélène!” he said aloud and paused.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Something special is always said in such cases,” he thought, but could
+      not remember what it was that people say. He looked at her face. She drew
+      nearer to him. Her face flushed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, take those off... those...” she said, pointing to his spectacles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre took them off, and his eyes, besides the strange look eyes have
+      from which spectacles have just been removed, had also a frightened and
+      inquiring look. He was about to stoop over her hand and kiss it, but with
+      a rapid, almost brutal movement of her head, she intercepted his lips and
+      met them with her own. Her face struck Pierre, by its altered,
+      unpleasantly excited expression.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is too late now, it’s done; besides I love her,” thought Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Je vous aime!”</i> * he said, remembering what has to be said at such
+      moments: but his words sounded so weak that he felt ashamed of himself.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “I love you.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Six weeks later he was married, and settled in Count Bezúkhov’s large,
+      newly furnished Petersburg house, the happy possessor, as people said, of
+      a wife who was a celebrated beauty and of millions of money.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0052"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Old Prince Nicholas Bolkónski received a letter from Prince Vasíli in
+      November, 1805, announcing that he and his son would be paying him a
+      visit. “I am starting on a journey of inspection, and of course I shall
+      think nothing of an extra seventy miles to come and see you at the same
+      time, my honored benefactor,” wrote Prince Vasíli. “My son Anatole is
+      accompanying me on his way to the army, so I hope you will allow him
+      personally to express the deep respect that, emulating his father, he
+      feels for you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It seems that there will be no need to bring Mary out, suitors are coming
+      to us of their own accord,” incautiously remarked the little princess on
+      hearing the news.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Nicholas frowned, but said nothing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A fortnight after the letter Prince Vasíli’s servants came one evening in
+      advance of him, and he and his son arrived next day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Old Bolkónski had always had a poor opinion of Prince Vasíli’s character,
+      but more so recently, since in the new reigns of Paul and Alexander Prince
+      Vasíli had risen to high position and honors. And now, from the hints
+      contained in his letter and given by the little princess, he saw which way
+      the wind was blowing, and his low opinion changed into a feeling of
+      contemptuous ill will. He snorted whenever he mentioned him. On the day of
+      Prince Vasíli’s arrival, Prince Bolkónski was particularly discontented
+      and out of temper. Whether he was in a bad temper because Prince Vasíli
+      was coming, or whether his being in a bad temper made him specially
+      annoyed at Prince Vasíli’s visit, he was in a bad temper, and in the
+      morning Tíkhon had already advised the architect not to go to the prince
+      with his report.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you hear how he’s walking?” said Tíkhon, drawing the architect’s
+      attention to the sound of the prince’s footsteps. “Stepping flat on his
+      heels—we know what that means....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      However, at nine o’clock the prince, in his velvet coat with a sable
+      collar and cap, went out for his usual walk. It had snowed the day before
+      and the path to the hothouse, along which the prince was in the habit of
+      walking, had been swept: the marks of the broom were still visible in the
+      snow and a shovel had been left sticking in one of the soft snowbanks that
+      bordered both sides of the path. The prince went through the
+      conservatories, the serfs’ quarters, and the outbuildings, frowning and
+      silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Can a sleigh pass?” he asked his overseer, a venerable man, resembling
+      his master in manners and looks, who was accompanying him back to the
+      house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The snow is deep. I am having the avenue swept, your honor.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The prince bowed his head and went up to the porch. “God be thanked,”
+       thought the overseer, “the storm has blown over!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It would have been hard to drive up, your honor,” he added. “I heard,
+      your honor, that a minister is coming to visit your honor.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The prince turned round to the overseer and fixed his eyes on him,
+      frowning.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What? A minister? What minister? Who gave orders?” he said in his shrill,
+      harsh voice. “The road is not swept for the princess my daughter, but for
+      a minister! For me, there are no ministers!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Your honor, I thought...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You thought!” shouted the prince, his words coming more and more rapidly
+      and indistinctly. “You thought!... Rascals! Blackguards!... I’ll teach you
+      to think!” and lifting his stick he swung it and would have hit Alpátych,
+      the overseer, had not the latter instinctively avoided the blow.
+      “Thought... Blackguards...” shouted the prince rapidly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But although Alpátych, frightened at his own temerity in avoiding the
+      stroke, came up to the prince, bowing his bald head resignedly before him,
+      or perhaps for that very reason, the prince, though he continued to shout:
+      “Blackguards!... Throw the snow back on the road!” did not lift his stick
+      again but hurried into the house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before dinner, Princess Mary and Mademoiselle Bourienne, who knew that the
+      prince was in a bad humor, stood awaiting him; Mademoiselle Bourienne with
+      a radiant face that said: “I know nothing, I am the same as usual,” and
+      Princess Mary pale, frightened, and with downcast eyes. What she found
+      hardest to bear was to know that on such occasions she ought to behave
+      like Mademoiselle Bourienne, but could not. She thought: “If I seem not to
+      notice he will think that I do not sympathize with him; if I seem sad and
+      out of spirits myself, he will say (as he has done before) that I’m in the
+      dumps.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The prince looked at his daughter’s frightened face and snorted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Fool... or dummy!” he muttered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And the other one is not here. They’ve been telling tales,” he
+      thought—referring to the little princess who was not in the dining room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where is the princess?” he asked. “Hiding?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “She is not very well,” answered Mademoiselle Bourienne with a bright
+      smile, “so she won’t come down. It is natural in her state.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Hm! Hm!” muttered the prince, sitting down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His plate seemed to him not quite clean, and pointing to a spot he flung
+      it away. Tíkhon caught it and handed it to a footman. The little princess
+      was not unwell, but had such an overpowering fear of the prince that,
+      hearing he was in a bad humor, she had decided not to appear.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am afraid for the baby,” she said to Mademoiselle Bourienne:
+      “Heaven knows what a fright might do.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In general at Bald Hills the little princess lived in constant fear, and
+      with a sense of antipathy to the old prince which she did not realize
+      because the fear was so much the stronger feeling. The prince reciprocated
+      this antipathy, but it was overpowered by his contempt for her. When the
+      little princess had grown accustomed to life at Bald Hills, she took a
+      special fancy to Mademoiselle Bourienne, spent whole days with her, asked
+      her to sleep in her room, and often talked with her about the old prince
+      and criticized him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So we are to have visitors, <i>mon prince?</i>” remarked Mademoiselle Bourienne,
+      unfolding her white napkin with her rosy fingers. “His Excellency Prince
+      Vasíli Kurágin and his son, I understand?” she said inquiringly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hm!—his excellency is a puppy.... I got him his appointment in the
+      service,” said the prince disdainfully. “Why his son is coming I don’t
+      understand. Perhaps Princess Elizabeth and Princess Mary know. I don’t
+      want him.” (He looked at his blushing daughter.) “Are you unwell today?
+      Eh? Afraid of the ‘minister’ as that idiot Alpátych called him this
+      morning?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, <i>mon père</i>.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Though Mademoiselle Bourienne had been so unsuccessful in her choice of a
+      subject, she did not stop talking, but chattered about the conservatories
+      and the beauty of a flower that had just opened, and after the soup the
+      prince became more genial.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After dinner, he went to see his daughter-in-law. The little princess was
+      sitting at a small table, chattering with Másha, her maid. She grew pale
+      on seeing her father-in-law.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She was much altered. She was now plain rather than pretty. Her cheeks had
+      sunk, her lip was drawn up, and her eyes drawn down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I feel a kind of oppression,” she said in reply to the prince’s
+      question as to how she felt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you want anything?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, <i>merci, mon père</i>.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, all right, all right.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He left the room and went to the waiting room where Alpátych stood with
+      bowed head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Has the snow been shoveled back?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, your excellency. Forgive me for heaven’s sake... It was only my
+      stupidity.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “All right, all right,” interrupted the prince, and laughing his unnatural
+      way, he stretched out his hand for Alpátych to kiss, and then proceeded to
+      his study.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli arrived that evening. He was met in the avenue by coachmen
+      and footmen, who, with loud shouts, dragged his sleighs up to one of the
+      lodges over the road purposely laden with snow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli and Anatole had separate rooms assigned to them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole, having taken off his overcoat, sat with arms akimbo before a
+      table on a corner of which he smilingly and absent-mindedly fixed his
+      large and handsome eyes. He regarded his whole life as a continual round
+      of amusement which someone for some reason had to provide for him. And he
+      looked on this visit to a churlish old man and a rich and ugly heiress in
+      the same way. All this might, he thought, turn out very well and
+      amusingly. “And why not marry her if she really has so much money? That
+      never does any harm,” thought Anatole.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He shaved and scented himself with the care and elegance which had become
+      habitual to him and, his handsome head held high, entered his father’s
+      room with the good-humored and victorious air natural to him. Prince
+      Vasíli’s two valets were busy dressing him, and he looked round with much
+      animation and cheerfully nodded to his son as the latter entered, as if to
+      say: “Yes, that’s how I want you to look.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I say, Father, joking apart, is she very hideous?” Anatole asked, as if
+      continuing a conversation the subject of which had often been mentioned
+      during the journey.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Enough! What nonsense! Above all, try to be respectful and cautious with
+      the old prince.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If he starts a row I’ll go away,” said Prince Anatole. “I can’t bear
+      those old men! Eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Remember, for you everything depends on this.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In the meantime, not only was it known in the maidservants’ rooms that the
+      minister and his son had arrived, but the appearance of both had been
+      minutely described. Princess Mary was sitting alone in her room, vainly
+      trying to master her agitation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why did they write, why did Lise tell me about it? It can never happen!”
+       she said, looking at herself in the glass. “How shall I enter the drawing
+      room? Even if I like him I can’t now be myself with him.” The mere thought
+      of her father’s look filled her with terror. The little princess and
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne had already received from Másha, the lady’s maid,
+      the necessary report of how handsome the minister’s son was, with his rosy
+      cheeks and dark eyebrows, and with what difficulty the father had dragged
+      his legs upstairs while the son had followed him like an eagle, three
+      steps at a time. Having received this information, the little princess and
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne, whose chattering voices had reached her from the
+      corridor, went into Princess Mary’s room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You know they’ve come, Marie?” said the little princess,
+      waddling in, and sinking heavily into an armchair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She was no longer in the loose gown she generally wore in the morning, but
+      had on one of her best dresses. Her hair was carefully done and her face
+      was animated, which, however, did not conceal its sunken and faded
+      outlines. Dressed as she used to be in Petersburg society, it was still
+      more noticeable how much plainer she had become. Some unobtrusive touch
+      had been added to Mademoiselle Bourienne’s toilet which rendered her fresh
+      and pretty face yet more attractive.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What! Are you going to remain as you are, dear princess?” she began.
+      “They’ll be announcing that the gentlemen are in the drawing room and we
+      shall have to go down, and you have not smartened yourself up at all!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The little princess got up, rang for the maid, and hurriedly and merrily
+      began to devise and carry out a plan of how Princess Mary should be
+      dressed. Princess Mary’s self-esteem was wounded by the fact that the
+      arrival of a suitor agitated her, and still more so by both her
+      companions’ not having the least conception that it could be otherwise. To
+      tell them that she felt ashamed for herself and for them would be to
+      betray her agitation, while to decline their offers to dress her would
+      prolong their banter and insistence. She flushed, her beautiful eyes grew
+      dim, red blotches came on her face, and it took on the unattractive
+      martyrlike expression it so often wore, as she submitted herself to
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne and Lise. Both these women <i>quite sincerely</i> tried to
+      make her look pretty. She was so plain that neither of them could think of
+      her as a rival, so they began dressing her with perfect sincerity, and
+      with the naïve and firm conviction women have that dress can make a face
+      pretty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No really, my dear, this dress is not pretty,” said Lise, looking
+      sideways at Princess Mary from a little distance. “You have a maroon
+      dress, have it fetched. Really! You know the fate of your whole life may
+      be at stake. But this one is too light, it’s not becoming!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      It was not the dress, but the face and whole figure of Princess Mary that
+      was not pretty, but neither Mademoiselle Bourienne nor the little princess
+      felt this; they still thought that if a blue ribbon were placed in the
+      hair, the hair combed up, and the blue scarf arranged lower on the best
+      maroon dress, and so on, all would be well. They forgot that the
+      frightened face and the figure could not be altered, and that however they
+      might change the setting and adornment of that face, it would still remain
+      piteous and plain. After two or three changes to which Princess Mary
+      meekly submitted, just as her hair had been arranged on the top of her
+      head (a style that quite altered and spoiled her looks) and she had put on
+      a maroon dress with a pale-blue scarf, the little princess walked twice
+      round her, now adjusting a fold of the dress with her little hand, now
+      arranging the scarf and looking at her with her head bent first on one
+      side and then on the other.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, it will not do,” she said decidedly, clasping her hands.
+      “No, Mary, really this dress does not suit you. I prefer you in your little
+      gray everyday dress. Now please, do it for my sake. Katie,” she said to the
+      maid, “bring the princess her gray dress, and you’ll see, Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne, how I shall arrange it,” she added, smiling with a foretaste of
+      artistic pleasure.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But when Katie brought the required dress, Princess Mary remained sitting
+      motionless before the glass, looking at her face, and saw in the mirror
+      her eyes full of tears and her mouth quivering, ready to burst into sobs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come, dear princess,” said Mademoiselle Bourienne, “just one
+      more little effort.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The little princess, taking the dress from the maid, came up to Princess
+      Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, now we’ll arrange something quite simple and becoming,” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The three voices, hers, Mademoiselle Bourienne’s, and Katie’s, who was
+      laughing at something, mingled in a merry sound, like the chirping of
+      birds.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, leave me alone,” said Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Her voice sounded so serious and so sad that the chirping of the birds was
+      silenced at once. They looked at the beautiful, large, thoughtful eyes
+      full of tears and of thoughts, gazing shiningly and imploringly at them,
+      and understood that it was useless and even cruel to insist.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “At least, change your coiffure,” said the little princess. “Didn’t I tell
+      you,” she went on, turning reproachfully to Mademoiselle Bourienne,
+      “Mary’s is a face which such a coiffure does not suit in the least. Not in
+      the least! Please change it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Leave me alone, please leave me alone! It is all quite the same to me,”
+       answered a voice struggling with tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne and the little princess had to own to themselves
+      that Princess Mary in this guise looked very plain, worse than usual, but
+      it was too late. She was looking at them with an expression they both
+      knew, an expression thoughtful and sad. This expression in Princess Mary
+      did not frighten them (she never inspired fear in anyone), but they knew
+      that when it appeared on her face, she became mute and was not to be
+      shaken in her determination.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You will change it, won’t you?” said Lise. And as Princess
+      Mary gave no answer, she left the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary was left alone. She did not comply with Lise’s request, she
+      not only left her hair as it was, but did not even look in her glass.
+      Letting her arms fall helplessly, she sat with downcast eyes and pondered.
+      A husband, a man, a strong dominant and strangely attractive being rose in
+      her imagination, and carried her into a totally different happy world of
+      his own. She fancied a child, <i>her own</i>—such as she had seen the day
+      before in the arms of her nurse’s daughter—at her own breast, the
+      husband standing by and gazing tenderly at her and the child. “But no, it
+      is impossible, I am too ugly,” she thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Please come to tea. The prince will be out in a moment,” came the maid’s
+      voice at the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She roused herself, and felt appalled at what she had been thinking, and
+      before going down she went into the room where the icons hung and, her
+      eyes fixed on the dark face of a large icon of the Saviour lit by a lamp,
+      she stood before it with folded hands for a few moments. A painful doubt
+      filled her soul. Could the joy of love, of earthly love for a man, be for
+      her? In her thoughts of marriage Princess Mary dreamed of happiness and of
+      children, but her strongest, most deeply hidden longing was for earthly
+      love. The more she tried to hide this feeling from others and even from
+      herself, the stronger it grew. “O God,” she said, “how am I to stifle in
+      my heart these temptations of the devil? How am I to renounce forever
+      these vile fancies, so as peacefully to fulfill Thy will?” And scarcely
+      had she put that question than God gave her the answer in her own heart.
+      “Desire nothing for thyself, seek nothing, be not anxious or envious.
+      Man’s future and thy own fate must remain hidden from thee, but live so
+      that thou mayest be ready for anything. If it be God’s will to prove thee
+      in the duties of marriage, be ready to fulfill His will.” With this
+      consoling thought (but yet with a hope for the fulfillment of her
+      forbidden earthly longing) Princess Mary sighed, and having crossed
+      herself went down, thinking neither of her gown and coiffure nor of how
+      she would go in nor of what she would say. What could all that matter in
+      comparison with the will of God, without Whose care not a hair of man’s
+      head can fall?
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0053"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      When Princess Mary came down, Prince Vasíli and his son were already in
+      the drawing room, talking to the little princess and Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne. When she entered with her heavy step, treading on her heels,
+      the gentlemen and Mademoiselle Bourienne rose and the little princess,
+      indicating her to the gentlemen, said: <i>“Voilà Marie!”</i> Princess Mary saw
+      them all and saw them in detail. She saw Prince Vasíli’s face, serious for
+      an instant at the sight of her, but immediately smiling again, and the
+      little princess curiously noting the impression “Marie” produced on the
+      visitors. And she saw Mademoiselle Bourienne, with her ribbon and pretty
+      face, and her unusually animated look which was fixed on <i>him</i>, but <i>him</i> she
+      could not see, she only saw something large, brilliant, and handsome
+      moving toward her as she entered the room. Prince Vasíli approached first,
+      and she kissed the bold forehead that bent over her hand and answered his
+      question by saying that, on the contrary, she remembered him quite well.
+      Then Anatole came up to her. She still could not see him. She only felt a
+      soft hand taking hers firmly, and she touched with her lips a white
+      forehead, over which was beautiful light-brown hair smelling of pomade.
+      When she looked up at him she was struck by his beauty. Anatole stood with
+      his right thumb under a button of his uniform, his chest expanded and his
+      back drawn in, slightly swinging one foot, and, with his head a little
+      bent, looked with beaming face at the princess without speaking and
+      evidently not thinking about her at all. Anatole was not quick-witted, nor
+      ready or eloquent in conversation, but he had the faculty, so invaluable
+      in society, of composure and imperturbable self-possession. If a man
+      lacking in self-confidence remains dumb on a first introduction and
+      betrays a consciousness of the impropriety of such silence and an anxiety
+      to find something to say, the effect is bad. But Anatole was dumb, swung
+      his foot, and smilingly examined the princess’ hair. It was evident that
+      he could be silent in this way for a very long time. “If anyone finds this
+      silence inconvenient, let him talk, but I don’t want to,” he seemed to
+      say. Besides this, in his behavior to women Anatole had a manner which
+      particularly inspires in them curiosity, awe, and even love—a
+      supercilious consciousness of his own superiority. It was as if he said to
+      them: “I know you, I know you, but why should I bother about you? You’d be
+      only too glad, of course.” Perhaps he did not really think this when he
+      met women—even probably he did not, for in general he thought very
+      little—but his looks and manner gave that impression. The princess
+      felt this, and as if wishing to show him that she did not even dare expect
+      to interest him, she turned to his father. The conversation was general
+      and animated, thanks to Princess Lise’s voice and little downy lip that
+      lifted over her white teeth. She met Prince Vasíli with that playful
+      manner often employed by lively chatty people, and consisting in the
+      assumption that between the person they so address and themselves there
+      are some semi-private, long-established jokes and amusing reminiscences,
+      though no such reminiscences really exist—just as none existed in
+      this case. Prince Vasíli readily adopted her tone and the little princess
+      also drew Anatole, whom she hardly knew, into these amusing recollections
+      of things that had never occurred. Mademoiselle Bourienne also shared them
+      and even Princess Mary felt herself pleasantly made to share in these
+      merry reminiscences.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Here at least we shall have the benefit of your company all to ourselves,
+      dear prince,” said the little princess (of course, in French) to Prince
+      Vasíli. “It’s not as at Annette’s * receptions where you
+      always ran away; you remember <i>cette chère Annette!</i>”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Anna Pávlovna.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, but you won’t talk politics to me like Annette!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And our little tea table?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, yes!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why is it you were never at Annette’s?” the little princess asked
+      Anatole. “Ah, I know, I know,” she said with a sly glance, “your brother
+      Hippolyte told me about your goings on. Oh!” and she shook her finger at
+      him, “I have even heard of your doings in Paris!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And didn’t Hippolyte tell you?” asked Prince Vasíli, turning to his son
+      and seizing the little princess’ arm as if she would have run away and he
+      had just managed to catch her, “didn’t he tell you how he himself was
+      pining for the dear princess, and how she showed him the door? Oh, she is
+      a pearl among women, Princess,” he added, turning to Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Paris was mentioned, Mademoiselle Bourienne for her part seized the
+      opportunity of joining in the general current of recollections.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She took the liberty of inquiring whether it was long since Anatole had
+      left Paris and how he had liked that city. Anatole answered the
+      Frenchwoman very readily and, looking at her with a smile, talked to her
+      about her native land. When he saw the pretty little Bourienne, Anatole
+      came to the conclusion that he would not find Bald Hills dull either. “Not
+      at all bad!” he thought, examining her, “not at all bad, that little
+      companion! I hope she will bring her along with her when we’re married, <i>la
+      petite est gentille.</i>” *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * The little one is charming.
+</p>
+<p>
+      The old prince dressed leisurely in his study, frowning and considering
+      what he was to do. The coming of these visitors annoyed him. “What are
+      Prince Vasíli and that son of his to me? Prince Vasíli is a shallow
+      braggart and his son, no doubt, is a fine specimen,” he grumbled to
+      himself. What angered him was that the coming of these visitors revived in
+      his mind an unsettled question he always tried to stifle, one about which
+      he always deceived himself. The question was whether he could ever bring
+      himself to part from his daughter and give her to a husband. The prince
+      never directly asked himself that question, knowing beforehand that he
+      would have to answer it justly, and justice clashed not only with his
+      feelings but with the very possibility of life. Life without Princess
+      Mary, little as he seemed to value her, was unthinkable to him. “And why
+      should she marry?” he thought. “To be unhappy for certain. There’s Lise,
+      married to Andrew—a better husband one would think could hardly be
+      found nowadays—but is she contented with her lot? And who would
+      marry Marie for love? Plain and awkward! They’ll take her for her
+      connections and wealth. Are there no women living unmarried, and even the
+      happier for it?” So thought Prince Bolkónski while dressing, and yet the
+      question he was always putting off demanded an immediate answer. Prince
+      Vasíli had brought his son with the evident intention of proposing, and
+      today or tomorrow he would probably ask for an answer. His birth and
+      position in society were not bad. “Well, I’ve nothing against it,” the
+      prince said to himself, “but he must be worthy of her. And that is what we
+      shall see.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That is what we shall see! That is what we shall see!” he added aloud.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He entered the drawing room with his usual alert step, glancing rapidly
+      round the company. He noticed the change in the little princess’ dress,
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne’s ribbon, Princess Mary’s unbecoming coiffure,
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne’s and Anatole’s smiles, and the loneliness of his
+      daughter amid the general conversation. “Got herself up like a fool!” he
+      thought, looking irritably at her. “She is shameless, and he ignores her!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He went straight up to Prince Vasíli.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well! How d’ye do? How d’ye do? Glad to see you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Friendship laughs at distance,” began Prince Vasíli in his usual rapid,
+      self-confident, familiar tone. “Here is my second son; please love and
+      befriend him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Bolkónski surveyed Anatole.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Fine young fellow! Fine young fellow!” he said. “Well, come
+      and kiss me,” and he offered his cheek.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole kissed the old man, and looked at him with curiosity and perfect
+      composure, waiting for a display of the eccentricities his father had told
+      him to expect.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Bolkónski sat down in his usual place in the corner of the sofa
+      and, drawing up an armchair for Prince Vasíli, pointed to it and began
+      questioning him about political affairs and news. He seemed to listen
+      attentively to what Prince Vasíli said, but kept glancing at Princess
+      Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And so they are writing from Potsdam already?” he said, repeating Prince
+      Vasíli’s last words. Then rising, he suddenly went up to his daughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is it for visitors you’ve got yourself up like that, eh?” said
+      he. “Fine, very fine! You have done up your hair in this new way for the
+      visitors, and before the visitors I tell you that in future you are never to
+      dare to change your way of dress without my consent.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It was my fault, <i>mon père</i>,” interceded the little princess, with a blush.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You must do as you please,” said Prince Bolkónski, bowing to his
+      daughter-in-law, “but she need not make a fool of herself, she’s plain
+      enough as it is.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And he sat down again, paying no more attention to his daughter, who was
+      reduced to tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “On the contrary, that coiffure suits the princess very well,” said Prince
+      Vasíli.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now you, young prince, what’s your name?” said Prince Bolkónski,
+      turning to Anatole, “come here, let us talk and get acquainted.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Now the fun begins,” thought Anatole, sitting down with a smile beside
+      the old prince.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, my dear boy, I hear you’ve been educated abroad, not taught to read
+      and write by the deacon, like your father and me. Now tell me, my dear
+      boy, are you serving in the Horse Guards?” asked the old man, scrutinizing
+      Anatole closely and intently.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I have been transferred to the line,” said Anatole, hardly able to
+      restrain his laughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah! That’s a good thing. So, my dear boy, you wish to serve the Tsar and
+      the country? It is wartime. Such a fine fellow must serve. Well, are you
+      off to the front?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, Prince, our regiment has gone to the front, but I am attached... what
+      is it I am attached to, Papa?” said Anatole, turning to his father with a
+      laugh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A splendid soldier, splendid! ‘What am I attached to!’ Ha, ha,
+      ha!” laughed Prince Bolkónski, and Anatole laughed still louder. Suddenly
+      Prince Bolkónski frowned.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You may go,” he said to Anatole.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole returned smiling to the ladies.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And so you’ve had him educated abroad, Prince Vasíli, haven’t
+      you?” said the old prince to Prince Vasíli.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have done my best for him, and I can assure you the education there is
+      much better than ours.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, everything is different nowadays, everything is changed. The lad’s a
+      fine fellow, a fine fellow! Well, come with me now.” He took Prince
+      Vasíli’s arm and led him to his study. As soon as they were alone
+      together, Prince Vasíli announced his hopes and wishes to the old prince.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, do you think I shall prevent her, that I can’t part from
+      her?” said the old prince angrily. “What an idea! I’m ready
+      for it tomorrow! Only let me tell you, I want to know my son-in-law better. You
+      know my principles—everything aboveboard! I will ask her tomorrow in your
+      presence; if she is willing, then he can stay on. He can stay and I’ll
+      see.” The old prince snorted. “Let her marry, it’s all the same
+      to me!” he screamed in the same piercing tone as when parting from his son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I will tell you frankly,” said Prince Vasíli in the tone of a crafty man
+      convinced of the futility of being cunning with so keen-sighted a
+      companion. “You know, you see right through people. Anatole is no genius,
+      but he is an honest, goodhearted lad; an excellent son or kinsman.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “All right, all right, we’ll see!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      As always happens when women lead lonely lives for any length of time
+      without male society, on Anatole’s appearance all the three women of
+      Prince Bolkónski’s household felt that their life had not been real till
+      then. Their powers of reasoning, feeling, and observing immediately
+      increased tenfold, and their life, which seemed to have been passed in
+      darkness, was suddenly lit up by a new brightness, full of significance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary grew quite unconscious of her face and coiffure. The
+      handsome open face of the man who might perhaps be her husband absorbed
+      all her attention. He seemed to her kind, brave, determined, manly, and
+      magnanimous. She felt convinced of that. Thousands of dreams of a future
+      family life continually rose in her imagination. She drove them away and
+      tried to conceal them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But am I not too cold with him?” thought the princess. “I try
+      to be reserved because in the depth of my soul I feel too near to him already,
+      but then he cannot know what I think of him and may imagine that I do not
+      like him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Princess Mary tried, but could not manage, to be cordial to her new
+      guest. “Poor girl, she’s devilish ugly!” thought Anatole.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne, also roused to great excitement by Anatole’s
+      arrival, thought in another way. Of course, she, a handsome young woman
+      without any definite position, without relations or even a country, did
+      not intend to devote her life to serving Prince Bolkónski, to reading
+      aloud to him and being friends with Princess Mary. Mademoiselle Bourienne
+      had long been waiting for a Russian prince who, able to appreciate at a
+      glance her superiority to the plain, badly dressed, ungainly Russian
+      princesses, would fall in love with her and carry her off; and here at
+      last was a Russian prince. Mademoiselle Bourienne knew a story, heard from
+      her aunt but finished in her own way, which she liked to repeat to
+      herself. It was the story of a girl who had been seduced, and to whom her
+      poor mother (<i>sa pauvre mère</i>) appeared, and reproached her for yielding to
+      a man without being married. Mademoiselle Bourienne was often touched to
+      tears as in imagination she told this story to <i>him</i>, her seducer. And now
+      <i>he</i>, a real Russian prince, had appeared. He would carry her away and then
+      <i>sa pauvre mère</i> would appear and he would marry her. So her future shaped
+      itself in Mademoiselle Bourienne’s head at the very time she was talking
+      to Anatole about Paris. It was not calculation that guided her (she did
+      not even for a moment consider what she should do), but all this had long
+      been familiar to her, and now that Anatole had appeared it just grouped
+      itself around him and she wished and tried to please him as much as
+      possible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The little princess, like an old war horse that hears the trumpet,
+      unconsciously and quite forgetting her condition, prepared for the
+      familiar gallop of coquetry, without any ulterior motive or any struggle,
+      but with naïve and lighthearted gaiety.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Although in female society Anatole usually assumed the role of a man tired
+      of being run after by women, his vanity was flattered by the spectacle of
+      his power over these three women. Besides that, he was beginning to feel
+      for the pretty and provocative Mademoiselle Bourienne that passionate
+      animal feeling which was apt to master him with great suddenness and
+      prompt him to the coarsest and most reckless actions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After tea, the company went into the sitting room and Princess Mary was
+      asked to play on the clavichord. Anatole, laughing and in high spirits,
+      came and leaned on his elbows, facing her and beside Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne. Princess Mary felt his look with a painfully joyous emotion.
+      Her favorite sonata bore her into a most intimately poetic world and the
+      look she felt upon her made that world still more poetic. But Anatole’s
+      expression, though his eyes were fixed on her, referred not to her but to
+      the movements of Mademoiselle Bourienne’s little foot, which he was then
+      touching with his own under the clavichord. Mademoiselle Bourienne was
+      also looking at Princess Mary, and in her lovely eyes there was a look of
+      fearful joy and hope that was also new to the princess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How she loves me!” thought Princess Mary. “How happy I am now,
+      and how happy I may be with such a friend and such a husband! Husband? Can it be
+      possible?” she thought, not daring to look at his face, but still feeling
+      his eyes gazing at her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the evening, after supper, when all were about to retire, Anatole
+      kissed Princess Mary’s hand. She did not know how she found the courage,
+      but she looked straight into his handsome face as it came near to her
+      shortsighted eyes. Turning from Princess Mary he went up and kissed
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne’s hand. (This was not etiquette, but then he did
+      everything so simply and with such assurance!) Mademoiselle Bourienne
+      flushed, and gave the princess a frightened look.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What delicacy!” thought the princess. “Is it possible that
+      Amélie” (Mademoiselle Bourienne) “thinks I could be jealous of her,
+      and not value her pure affection and devotion to me?” She went up to her
+      and kissed her warmly. Anatole went up to kiss the little princess’ hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No! No! No! When your father writes to tell me that you are behaving well
+      I will give you my hand to kiss. Not till then!” she said. And smilingly
+      raising a finger at him, she left the room.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0054"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      They all separated, but, except Anatole who fell asleep as soon as he got
+      into bed, all kept awake a long time that night.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is he really to be my husband, this stranger who is so kind—yes,
+      kind, that is the chief thing,” thought Princess Mary; and fear, which she
+      had seldom experienced, came upon her. She feared to look round, it seemed
+      to her that someone was there standing behind the screen in the dark
+      corner. And this someone was <i>he</i>—the devil—and <i>he</i> was
+      also this man with the white forehead, black eyebrows, and red lips.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She rang for her maid and asked her to sleep in her room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne walked up and down the conservatory for a long time
+      that evening, vainly expecting someone, now smiling at someone, now
+      working herself up to tears with the imaginary words of her <i>pauvre mère</i>
+      rebuking her for her fall.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The little princess grumbled to her maid that her bed was badly made. She
+      could not lie either on her face or on her side. Every position was
+      awkward and uncomfortable, and her burden oppressed her now more than ever
+      because Anatole’s presence had vividly recalled to her the time when she
+      was not like that and when everything was light and gay. She sat in an
+      armchair in her dressing jacket and nightcap and Katie, sleepy and
+      disheveled, beat and turned the heavy feather bed for the third time,
+      muttering to herself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I told you it was all lumps and holes!” the little princess repeated.
+      “I should be glad enough to fall asleep, so it’s not my fault!”
+      and her voice quivered like that of a child about to cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old prince did not sleep either. Tíkhon, half asleep, heard him pacing
+      angrily about and snorting. The old prince felt as though he had been
+      insulted through his daughter. The insult was the more pointed because it
+      concerned not himself but another, his daughter, whom he loved more than
+      himself. He kept telling himself that he would consider the whole matter
+      and decide what was right and how he should act, but instead of that he
+      only excited himself more and more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The first man that turns up—she forgets her father and everything
+      else, runs upstairs and does up her hair and wags her tail and is unlike
+      herself! Glad to throw her father over! And she knew I should notice it.
+      Fr... fr... fr! And don’t I see that that idiot had eyes only for
+      Bourienne—I shall have to get rid of her. And how is it she has not
+      pride enough to see it? If she has no pride for herself she might at least
+      have some for my sake! She must be shown that the blockhead thinks nothing
+      of her and looks only at Bourienne. No, she has no pride... but I’ll let
+      her see....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The old prince knew that if he told his daughter she was making a mistake
+      and that Anatole meant to flirt with Mademoiselle Bourienne, Princess
+      Mary’s self-esteem would be wounded and his point (not to be parted from
+      her) would be gained, so pacifying himself with this thought, he called
+      Tíkhon and began to undress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What devil brought them here?” thought he, while Tíkhon was putting the
+      nightshirt over his dried-up old body and gray-haired chest. “I never
+      invited them. They came to disturb my life—and there is not much of
+      it left.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Devil take ‘em!” he muttered, while his head was still
+      covered by the shirt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Tíkhon knew his master’s habit of sometimes thinking aloud, and therefore
+      met with unaltered looks the angrily inquisitive expression of the face
+      that emerged from the shirt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Gone to bed?” asked the prince.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Tíkhon, like all good valets, instinctively knew the direction of his
+      master’s thoughts. He guessed that the question referred to Prince Vasíli
+      and his son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They have gone to bed and put out their lights, your excellency.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No good... no good...” said the prince rapidly, and thrusting his feet
+      into his slippers and his arms into the sleeves of his dressing gown, he
+      went to the couch on which he slept.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though no words had passed between Anatole and Mademoiselle Bourienne,
+      they quite understood one another as to the first part of their romance,
+      up to the appearance of the <i>pauvre mère</i>; they understood that they had
+      much to say to one another in private and so they had been seeking an
+      opportunity since morning to meet one another alone. When Princess Mary
+      went to her father’s room at the usual hour, Mademoiselle Bourienne and
+      Anatole met in the conservatory.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary went to the door of the study with special trepidation. It
+      seemed to her that not only did everybody know that her fate would be
+      decided that day, but that they also knew what she thought about it. She
+      read this in Tíkhon’s face and in that of Prince Vasíli’s valet,
+      who made her a low bow when she met him in the corridor carrying hot water.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old prince was very affectionate and careful in his treatment of his
+      daughter that morning. Princess Mary well knew this painstaking expression
+      of her father’s. His face wore that expression when his dry hands clenched
+      with vexation at her not understanding a sum in arithmetic, when rising
+      from his chair he would walk away from her, repeating in a low voice the
+      same words several times over.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He came to the point at once, treating her ceremoniously.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have had a proposition made me concerning you,” he said with an
+      unnatural smile. “I expect you have guessed that Prince Vasíli has not
+      come and brought his pupil with him” (for some reason Prince Bolkónski
+      referred to Anatole as a “pupil”) “for the sake of my beautiful
+      eyes. Last night a proposition was made me on your account and, as you know my
+      principles, I refer it to you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How am I to understand you, <i>mon père?</i>” said the princess,
+      growing pale and then blushing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How understand me!” cried her father angrily. “Prince Vasíli
+      finds you to his taste as a daughter-in-law and makes a proposal to you on his
+      pupil’s behalf. That’s how it’s to be understood! ‘How
+      understand it’!... And I ask you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I do not know what you think, Father,” whispered the princess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I? I? What of me? Leave me out of the question. I’m not going to get
+      married. What about <i>you?</i> That’s what I want to know.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess saw that her father regarded the matter with disapproval, but
+      at that moment the thought occurred to her that her fate would be decided
+      now or never. She lowered her eyes so as not to see the gaze under which
+      she felt that she could not think, but would only be able to submit from
+      habit, and she said: “I wish only to do your will, but if I had to express
+      my own desire...” She had no time to finish. The old prince interrupted
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s admirable!” he shouted. “He will take you with your dowry and take
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne into the bargain. She’ll be the wife, while you...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The prince stopped. He saw the effect these words had produced on his
+      daughter. She lowered her head and was ready to burst into tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then, now then, I’m only joking!” he said. “Remember
+      this, Princess, I hold to the principle that a maiden has a full right to choose.
+      I give you freedom. Only remember that your life’s happiness depends on your
+      decision. Never mind me!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But I do not know, Father!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “There’s no need to talk! He receives his orders and will marry you or
+      anybody; but you are free to choose.... Go to your room, think it over,
+      and come back in an hour and tell me in his presence: yes or no. I know
+      you will pray over it. Well, pray if you like, but you had better <i>think</i> it
+      over. Go! Yes or no, yes or no, yes or no!” he still shouted when the
+      princess, as if lost in a fog, had already staggered out of the study.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Her fate was decided and happily decided. But what her father had said
+      about Mademoiselle Bourienne was dreadful. It was untrue to be sure, but
+      still it was terrible, and she could not help thinking of it. She was
+      going straight on through the conservatory, neither seeing nor hearing
+      anything, when suddenly the well-known whispering of Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne aroused her. She raised her eyes, and two steps away saw Anatole
+      embracing the Frenchwoman and whispering something to her. With a
+      horrified expression on his handsome face, Anatole looked at Princess
+      Mary, but did not at once take his arm from the waist of Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne who had not yet seen her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who’s that? Why? Wait a moment!” Anatole’s face seemed to say. Princess
+      Mary looked at them in silence. She could not understand it. At last
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne gave a scream and ran away. Anatole bowed to
+      Princess Mary with a gay smile, as if inviting her to join in a laugh at
+      this strange incident, and then shrugging his shoulders went to the door
+      that led to his own apartments.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      An hour later, Tíkhon came to call Princess Mary to the old prince; he
+      added that Prince Vasíli was also there. When Tíkhon came to her Princess
+      Mary was sitting on the sofa in her room, holding the weeping Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne in her arms and gently stroking her hair. The princess’
+      beautiful eyes with all their former calm radiance were looking with
+      tender affection and pity at Mademoiselle Bourienne’s pretty face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, Princess, I have lost your affection forever!” said Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why? I love you more than ever,” said Princess Mary, “and I will try to
+      do all I can for your happiness.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But you despise me. You who are so pure can never understand being so
+      carried away by passion. Oh, only my poor mother...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I quite understand,” answered Princess Mary, with a sad smile. “Calm
+      yourself, my dear. I will go to my father,” she said, and went out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli, with one leg thrown high over the other and a snuffbox in
+      his hand, was sitting there with a smile of deep emotion on his face, as
+      if stirred to his heart’s core and himself regretting and laughing at his
+      own sensibility, when Princess Mary entered. He hurriedly took a pinch of
+      snuff.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, my dear, my dear!” he began, rising and taking her by both hands.
+      Then, sighing, he added: “My son’s fate is in your hands. Decide, my dear,
+      good, gentle Marie, whom I have always loved as a daughter!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He drew back and a real tear appeared in his eye.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Fr... fr...” snorted Prince Bolkónski. “The prince is making a
+      proposition to you in his pupil’s—I mean, his son’s—name. Do
+      you wish or not to be Prince Anatole Kurágin’s wife? Reply: yes or no,” he
+      shouted, “and then I shall reserve the right to state my opinion also.
+      Yes, my opinion, and only my opinion,” added Prince Bolkónski, turning to
+      Prince Vasíli and answering his imploring look. “Yes, or no?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “My desire is never to leave you, Father, never to separate my life from
+      yours. I don’t wish to marry,” she answered positively, glancing at Prince
+      Vasíli and at her father with her beautiful eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Humbug! Nonsense! Humbug, humbug, humbug!” cried Prince Bolkónski,
+      frowning and taking his daughter’s hand; he did not kiss her, but only
+      bending his forehead to hers just touched it, and pressed her hand so that
+      she winced and uttered a cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli rose.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear, I must tell you that this is a moment I shall never, never
+      forget. But, my dear, will you not give us a little hope of touching this
+      heart, so kind and generous? Say ‘perhaps’... The future is so long. Say
+      ‘perhaps.’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Prince, what I have said is all there is in my heart. I thank you for the
+      honor, but I shall never be your son’s wife.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, so that’s finished, my dear fellow! I am very glad to have seen
+      you. Very glad! Go back to your rooms, Princess. Go!” said the old prince.
+      “Very, very glad to have seen you,” repeated he, embracing Prince Vasíli.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My vocation is a different one,” thought Princess Mary. “My vocation is
+      to be happy with another kind of happiness, the happiness of love and
+      self-sacrifice. And cost what it may, I will arrange poor Amélie’s
+      happiness, she loves him so passionately, and so passionately repents. I
+      will do all I can to arrange the match between them. If he is not rich I
+      will give her the means; I will ask my father and Andrew. I shall be so
+      happy when she is his wife. She is so unfortunate, a stranger, alone,
+      helpless! And, oh God, how passionately she must love him if she could so
+      far forget herself! Perhaps I might have done the same!...” thought
+      Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0055"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      It was long since the Rostóvs had news of Nicholas. Not till midwinter was
+      the count at last handed a letter addressed in his son’s handwriting. On
+      receiving it, he ran on tiptoe to his study in alarm and haste, trying to
+      escape notice, closed the door, and began to read the letter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Mikháylovna, who always knew everything that passed in the house, on
+      hearing of the arrival of the letter went softly into the room and found
+      the count with it in his hand, sobbing and laughing at the same time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Mikháylovna, though her circumstances had improved, was still living
+      with the Rostóvs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear friend?” said she, in a tone of pathetic inquiry, prepared to
+      sympathize in any way.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count sobbed yet more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nikólenka... a letter... wa... a... s... wounded... my darling boy... the
+      countess... promoted to be an officer... thank God... How tell the little
+      countess!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Mikháylovna sat down beside him, with her own handkerchief wiped the
+      tears from his eyes and from the letter, then having dried her own eyes
+      she comforted the count, and decided that at dinner and till teatime she
+      would prepare the countess, and after tea, with God’s help, would inform
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At dinner Anna Mikháylovna talked the whole time about the war news and
+      about Nikólenka, twice asked when the last letter had been received from
+      him, though she knew that already, and remarked that they might very
+      likely be getting a letter from him that day. Each time that these hints
+      began to make the countess anxious and she glanced uneasily at the count
+      and at Anna Mikháylovna, the latter very adroitly turned the conversation
+      to insignificant matters. Natásha, who, of the whole family, was the most
+      gifted with a capacity to feel any shades of intonation, look, and
+      expression, pricked up her ears from the beginning of the meal and was
+      certain that there was some secret between her father and Anna
+      Mikháylovna, that it had something to do with her brother, and that Anna
+      Mikháylovna was preparing them for it. Bold as she was, Natásha, who knew
+      how sensitive her mother was to anything relating to Nikólenka, did not
+      venture to ask any questions at dinner, but she was too excited to eat
+      anything and kept wriggling about on her chair regardless of her
+      governess’ remarks. After dinner, she rushed headlong after Anna
+      Mikháylovna and, dashing at her, flung herself on her neck as soon as she
+      overtook her in the sitting room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Auntie, darling, do tell me what it is!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Nothing, my dear.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, dearest, sweet one, honey, I won’t give up—I know you know
+      something.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Mikháylovna shook her head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are a little slyboots,” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A letter from Nikólenka! I’m sure of it!” exclaimed Natásha, reading
+      confirmation in Anna Mikháylovna’s face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But for God’s sake, be careful, you know how it may affect your mamma.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I will, I will, only tell me! You won’t? Then I will go and tell at
+      once.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Mikháylovna, in a few words, told her the contents of the letter, on
+      condition that she should tell no one.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, on my true word of honor,” said Natásha, crossing herself, “I won’t
+      tell anyone!” and she ran off at once to Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nikólenka... wounded... a letter,” she announced in gleeful triumph.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Nicholas!”</i> was all Sónya said, instantly turning white.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha, seeing the impression the news of her brother’s wound produced on
+      Sónya, felt for the first time the sorrowful side of the news.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She rushed to Sónya, hugged her, and began to cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A little wound, but he has been made an officer; he is well now, he wrote
+      himself,” said she through her tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There now! It’s true that all you women are crybabies,” remarked Pétya,
+      pacing the room with large, resolute strides. “Now I’m very glad, very
+      glad indeed, that my brother has distinguished himself so. You are all
+      blubberers and understand nothing.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha smiled through her tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You haven’t read the letter?” asked Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, but she said that it was all over and that he’s now an officer.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Thank God!” said Sónya, crossing herself. “But perhaps she
+      deceived you. Let us go to Mamma.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya paced the room in silence for a time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If I’d been in Nikólenka’s place I would have killed even more of those
+      Frenchmen,” he said. “What nasty brutes they are! I’d have killed so many
+      that there’d have been a heap of them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Hold your tongue, Pétya, what a goose you are!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I’m not a goose, but they are who cry about trifles,” said Pétya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you remember him?” Natásha suddenly asked, after a moment’s silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do I remember <i>Nicholas?</i>”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, Sónya, but do you remember so that you remember him perfectly,
+      remember everything?” said Natásha, with an expressive gesture, evidently
+      wishing to give her words a very definite meaning. “I remember Nikólenka
+      too, I remember him well,” she said. “But I don’t remember
+      Borís. I don’t remember him a bit.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What! You don’t remember Borís?” asked Sónya in surprise.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s not that I don’t remember—I know what he is like,
+      but not as I remember Nikólenka. Him—I just shut my eyes and remember, but
+      Borís... No!” (She shut her eyes.) “No! there’s nothing at all.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, Natásha!” said Sónya, looking ecstatically and earnestly at her
+      friend as if she did not consider her worthy to hear what she meant to say
+      and as if she were saying it to someone else, with whom joking was out of
+      the question, “I am in love with your brother once for all and, whatever
+      may happen to him or to me, shall never cease to love him as long as I
+      live.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha looked at Sónya with wondering and inquisitive eyes, and said
+      nothing. She felt that Sónya was speaking the truth, that there was such
+      love as Sónya was speaking of. But Natásha had not yet felt anything like
+      it. She believed it could be, but did not understand it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Shall you write to him?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya became thoughtful. The question of how to write to <i>Nicholas</i>, and
+      whether she ought to write, tormented her. Now that he was already an
+      officer and a wounded hero, would it be right to remind him of herself
+      and, as it might seem, of the obligations to her he had taken on himself?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t know. I think if he writes, I will write too,” she said,
+      blushing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And you won’t feel ashamed to write to him?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And I should be ashamed to write to Borís. I’m not going to.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why should you be ashamed?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, I don’t know. It’s awkward and would make me ashamed.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And I know why she’d be ashamed,” said Pétya, offended by Natásha’s
+      previous remark. “It’s because she was in love with that fat one in
+      spectacles” (that was how Pétya described his namesake, the new Count
+      Bezúkhov) “and now she’s in love with that singer” (he meant Natásha’s
+      Italian singing master), “that’s why she’s ashamed!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Pétya, you’re stupid!” said Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Not more stupid than you, madam,” said the nine-year-old Pétya, with the
+      air of an old brigadier.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess had been prepared by Anna Mikháylovna’s hints at dinner. On
+      retiring to her own room, she sat in an armchair, her eyes fixed on a
+      miniature portrait of her son on the lid of a snuffbox, while the tears
+      kept coming into her eyes. Anna Mikháylovna, with the letter, came on
+      tiptoe to the countess’ door and paused.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t come in,” she said to the old count who was following
+      her. “Come later.” And she went in, closing the door behind her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count put his ear to the keyhole and listened.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At first he heard the sound of indifferent voices, then Anna Mikháylovna’s
+      voice alone in a long speech, then a cry, then silence, then both voices
+      together with glad intonations, and then footsteps. Anna Mikháylovna
+      opened the door. Her face wore the proud expression of a surgeon who has
+      just performed a difficult operation and admits the public to appreciate
+      his skill.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is done!” she said to the count, pointing triumphantly to the
+      countess, who sat holding in one hand the snuffbox with its portrait and
+      in the other the letter, and pressing them alternately to her lips.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When she saw the count, she stretched out her arms to him, embraced his
+      bald head, over which she again looked at the letter and the portrait, and
+      in order to press them again to her lips, she slightly pushed away the
+      bald head. Véra, Natásha, Sónya, and Pétya now entered the room, and the
+      reading of the letter began. After a brief description of the campaign and
+      the two battles in which he had taken part, and his promotion, Nicholas
+      said that he kissed his father’s and mother’s hands asking for their
+      blessing, and that he kissed Véra, Natásha, and Pétya. Besides that, he
+      sent greetings to Monsieur Schelling, Madame Schoss, and his old nurse,
+      and asked them to kiss for him “dear Sónya, whom he loved and thought of
+      just the same as ever.” When she heard this Sónya blushed so that tears
+      came into her eyes and, unable to bear the looks turned upon her, ran away
+      into the dancing hall, whirled round it at full speed with her dress
+      puffed out like a balloon, and, flushed and smiling, plumped down on the
+      floor. The countess was crying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why are you crying, Mamma?” asked Véra. “From all he says
+      one should be glad and not cry.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      This was quite true, but the count, the countess, and Natásha looked at
+      her reproachfully. “And who is it she takes after?” thought the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas’ letter was read over hundreds of times, and those who were
+      considered worthy to hear it had to come to the countess, for she did not
+      let it out of her hands. The tutors came, and the nurses, and Dmítri, and
+      several acquaintances, and the countess reread the letter each time with
+      fresh pleasure and each time discovered in it fresh proofs of Nikólenka’s
+      virtues. How strange, how extraordinary, how joyful it seemed, that her
+      son, the scarcely perceptible motion of whose tiny limbs she had felt
+      twenty years ago within her, that son about whom she used to have quarrels
+      with the too indulgent count, that son who had first learned to say “pear”
+       and then “granny,” that this son should now be away in a foreign land amid
+      strange surroundings, a manly warrior doing some kind of man’s work of his
+      own, without help or guidance. The universal experience of ages, showing
+      that children do grow imperceptibly from the cradle to manhood, did not
+      exist for the countess. Her son’s growth toward manhood, at each of its
+      stages, had seemed as extraordinary to her as if there had never existed
+      the millions of human beings who grew up in the same way. As twenty years
+      before, it seemed impossible that the little creature who lived somewhere
+      under her heart would ever cry, suck her breast, and begin to speak, so
+      now she could not believe that that little creature could be this strong,
+      brave man, this model son and officer that, judging by this letter, he now
+      was.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a <i>style!</i> How charmingly he describes!” said she, reading the
+      descriptive part of the letter. “And what a soul! Not a word about
+      himself.... Not a word! About some Denísov or other, though he himself, I
+      dare say, is braver than any of them. He says nothing about his
+      sufferings. What a heart! How like him it is! And how he has remembered
+      everybody! Not forgetting anyone. I always said when he was only so high—I
+      always said....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      For more than a week preparations were being made, rough drafts of letters
+      to Nicholas from all the household were written and copied out, while
+      under the supervision of the countess and the solicitude of the count,
+      money and all things necessary for the uniform and equipment of the newly
+      commissioned officer were collected. Anna Mikháylovna, practical woman
+      that she was, had even managed by favor with army authorities to secure
+      advantageous means of communication for herself and her son. She had
+      opportunities of sending her letters to the Grand Duke Constantine
+      Pávlovich, who commanded the Guards. The Rostóvs supposed that <i>The Russian
+      Guards, Abroad</i>, was quite a definite address, and that if a letter reached
+      the Grand Duke in command of the Guards there was no reason why it should
+      not reach the Pávlograd regiment, which was presumably somewhere in the
+      same neighborhood. And so it was decided to send the letters and money by
+      the Grand Duke’s courier to Borís and Borís was to forward them to
+      Nicholas. The letters were from the old count, the countess, Pétya, Véra,
+      Natásha, and Sónya, and finally there were six thousand rubles for his
+      outfit and various other things the old count sent to his son.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0056"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On the twelfth of November, Kutúzov’s active army, in camp before Olmütz,
+      was preparing to be reviewed next day by the two Emperors—the
+      Russian and the Austrian. The Guards, just arrived from Russia, spent the
+      night ten miles from Olmütz and next morning were to come straight to the
+      review, reaching the field at Olmütz by ten o’clock.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That day Nicholas Rostóv received a letter from Borís, telling him that
+      the Ismáylov regiment was quartered for the night ten miles from Olmütz
+      and that he wanted to see him as he had a letter and money for him. Rostóv
+      was particularly in need of money now that the troops, after their active
+      service, were stationed near Olmütz and the camp swarmed with
+      well-provisioned sutlers and Austrian Jews offering all sorts of tempting
+      wares. The Pávlograds held feast after feast, celebrating awards they had
+      received for the campaign, and made expeditions to Olmütz to visit a
+      certain Caroline the Hungarian, who had recently opened a restaurant there
+      with girls as waitresses. Rostóv, who had just celebrated his promotion to
+      a cornetcy and bought Denísov’s horse, Bedouin, was in debt all round, to
+      his comrades and the sutlers. On receiving Borís’ letter he rode with a
+      fellow officer to Olmütz, dined there, drank a bottle of wine, and then
+      set off alone to the Guards’ camp to find his old playmate. Rostóv had not
+      yet had time to get his uniform. He had on a shabby cadet jacket,
+      decorated with a soldier’s cross, equally shabby cadet’s riding breeches
+      lined with worn leather, and an officer’s saber with a sword knot. The Don
+      horse he was riding was one he had bought from a Cossack during the
+      campaign, and he wore a crumpled hussar cap stuck jauntily back on one
+      side of his head. As he rode up to the camp he thought how he would
+      impress Borís and all his comrades of the Guards by his appearance—that
+      of a fighting hussar who had been under fire.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Guards had made their whole march as if on a pleasure trip, parading
+      their cleanliness and discipline. They had come by easy stages, their
+      knapsacks conveyed on carts, and the Austrian authorities had provided
+      excellent dinners for the officers at every halting place. The regiments
+      had entered and left the town with their bands playing, and by the Grand
+      Duke’s orders the men had marched all the way in step (a practice on which
+      the Guards prided themselves), the officers on foot and at their proper
+      posts. Borís had been quartered, and had marched all the way, with Berg
+      who was already in command of a company. Berg, who had obtained his
+      captaincy during the campaign, had gained the confidence of his superiors
+      by his promptitude and accuracy and had arranged his money matters very
+      satisfactorily. Borís, during the campaign, had made the acquaintance of
+      many persons who might prove useful to him, and by a letter of
+      recommendation he had brought from Pierre had become acquainted with
+      Prince Andrew Bolkónski, through whom he hoped to obtain a post on the
+      commander in chief’s staff. Berg and Borís, having rested after
+      yesterday’s march, were sitting, clean and neatly dressed, at a round
+      table in the clean quarters allotted to them, playing chess. Berg held a
+      smoking pipe between his knees. Borís, in the accurate way characteristic
+      of him, was building a little pyramid of chessmen with his delicate white
+      fingers while awaiting Berg’s move, and watched his opponent’s face,
+      evidently thinking about the game as he always thought only of whatever he
+      was engaged on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, how are you going to get out of that?” he remarked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We’ll try to,” replied Berg, touching a pawn and then removing his hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment the door opened.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Here he is at last!” shouted Rostóv. “And Berg too! Oh, you
+      <i>petisenfans, allay cushay dormir!</i>” he exclaimed, imitating his Russian
+      nurse’s French, at which he and Borís used to laugh long ago.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear me, how you have changed!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Borís rose to meet Rostóv, but in doing so did not omit to steady and
+      replace some chessmen that were falling. He was about to embrace his
+      friend, but Nicholas avoided him. With that peculiar feeling of youth,
+      that dread of beaten tracks, and wish to express itself in a manner
+      different from that of its elders which is often insincere, Nicholas
+      wished to do something special on meeting his friend. He wanted to pinch
+      him, push him, do anything but kiss him—a thing everybody did. But
+      notwithstanding this, Borís embraced him in a quiet, friendly way and
+      kissed him three times.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They had not met for nearly half a year and, being at the age when young
+      men take their first steps on life’s road, each saw immense changes in the
+      other, quite a new reflection of the society in which they had taken those
+      first steps. Both had changed greatly since they last met and both were in
+      a hurry to show the changes that had taken place in them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, you damned dandies! Clean and fresh as if you’d been to a fete, not
+      like us sinners of the line,” cried Rostóv, with martial swagger and with
+      baritone notes in his voice, new to Borís, pointing to his own
+      mud-bespattered breeches. The German landlady, hearing Rostóv’s loud
+      voice, popped her head in at the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh, is she pretty?” he asked with a wink.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why do you shout so? You’ll frighten them!” said Borís.
+      “I did not expect you today,” he added. “I only sent you the
+      note yesterday by Bolkónski—an adjutant of Kutúzov’s, who’s a
+      friend of mine. I did not think he would get it to you so quickly.... Well, how
+      are you? Been under fire already?” asked Borís.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Without answering, Rostóv shook the soldier’s Cross of St. George fastened
+      to the cording of his uniform and, indicating a bandaged arm, glanced at
+      Berg with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “As you see,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Indeed? Yes, yes!” said Borís, with a smile. “And we too have
+      had a splendid march. You know, of course, that His Imperial Highness rode with
+      our regiment all the time, so that we had every comfort and every
+      advantage. What receptions we had in Poland! What dinners and balls! I
+      can’t tell you. And the Tsarévich was very gracious to all our officers.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the two friends told each other of their doings, the one of his hussar
+      revels and life in the fighting line, the other of the pleasures and
+      advantages of service under members of the Imperial family.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, you Guards!” said Rostóv. “I say, send for some wine.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Borís made a grimace.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If you really want it,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He went to his bed, drew a purse from under the clean pillow, and sent for
+      wine.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, and I have some money and a letter to give you,” he added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv took the letter and, throwing the money on the sofa, put both arms
+      on the table and began to read. After reading a few lines, he glanced
+      angrily at Berg, then, meeting his eyes, hid his face behind the letter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, they’ve sent you a tidy sum,” said Berg, eying the heavy purse that
+      sank into the sofa. “As for us, Count, we get along on our pay. I can tell
+      you for myself...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I say, Berg, my dear fellow,” said Rostóv, “when you get a letter from
+      home and meet one of your own people whom you want to talk everything over
+      with, and I happen to be there, I’ll go at once, to be out of your way! Do
+      go somewhere, anywhere... to the devil!” he exclaimed, and immediately
+      seizing him by the shoulder and looking amiably into his face, evidently
+      wishing to soften the rudeness of his words, he added, “Don’t be hurt, my
+      dear fellow; you know I speak from my heart as to an old acquaintance.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, don’t mention it, Count! I quite understand,” said Berg, getting up
+      and speaking in a muffled and guttural voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go across to our hosts: they invited you,” added Borís.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Berg put on the cleanest of coats, without a spot or speck of dust, stood
+      before a looking glass and brushed the hair on his temples upwards, in the
+      way affected by the Emperor Alexander, and, having assured himself from
+      the way Rostóv looked at it that his coat had been noticed, left the room
+      with a pleasant smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh dear, what a beast I am!” muttered Rostóv, as he read the letter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, what a pig I am, not to have written and to have given them such a
+      fright! Oh, what a pig I am!” he repeated, flushing suddenly. “Well, have
+      you sent Gabriel for some wine? All right let’s have some!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In the letter from his parents was enclosed a letter of recommendation to
+      Bagratión which the old countess at Anna Mikháylovna’s advice had obtained
+      through an acquaintance and sent to her son, asking him to take it to its
+      destination and make use of it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What nonsense! Much I need it!” said Rostóv, throwing the letter under
+      the table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why have you thrown that away?” asked Borís.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is some letter of recommendation... what the devil do I want it for!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why ‘What the devil’?” said Borís, picking it up and
+      reading the address. “This letter would be of great use to you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I want nothing, and I won’t be anyone’s adjutant.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why not?” inquired Borís.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s a lackey’s job!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You are still the same dreamer, I see,” remarked Borís, shaking his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And you’re still the same diplomatist! But that’s not the
+      point... Come, how are you?” asked Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, as you see. So far everything’s all right, but I confess I should
+      much like to be an adjutant and not remain at the front.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Because when once a man starts on military service, he should try to make
+      as successful a career of it as possible.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, that’s it!” said Rostóv, evidently thinking of something else.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He looked intently and inquiringly into his friend’s eyes, evidently
+      trying in vain to find the answer to some question.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Old Gabriel brought in the wine.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Shouldn’t we now send for Berg?” asked Borís. “He would
+      drink with you. I can’t.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, send for him... and how do you get on with that German?” asked
+      Rostóv, with a contemptuous smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is a very, very nice, honest, and pleasant fellow,” answered Borís.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Again Rostóv looked intently into Borís’ eyes and sighed. Berg returned,
+      and over the bottle of wine conversation between the three officers became
+      animated. The Guardsmen told Rostóv of their march and how they had been
+      made much of in Russia, Poland, and abroad. They spoke of the sayings and
+      doings of their commander, the Grand Duke, and told stories of his
+      kindness and irascibility. Berg, as usual, kept silent when the subject
+      did not relate to himself, but in connection with the stories of the Grand
+      Duke’s quick temper he related with gusto how in Galicia he had managed to
+      deal with the Grand Duke when the latter made a tour of the regiments and
+      was annoyed at the irregularity of a movement. With a pleasant smile Berg
+      related how the Grand Duke had ridden up to him in a violent passion,
+      shouting: “Arnauts!” (“Arnauts” was the Tsarévich’s
+      favorite expression when he was in a rage) and called for the company commander.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Would you believe it, Count, I was not at all alarmed, because I knew I
+      was right. Without boasting, you know, I may say that I know the Army
+      Orders by heart and know the Regulations as well as I do the Lord’s
+      Prayer. So, Count, there never is any negligence in my company, and so my
+      conscience was at ease. I came forward....” (Berg stood up and showed how
+      he presented himself, with his hand to his cap, and really it would have
+      been difficult for a face to express greater respect and self-complacency
+      than his did.) “Well, he stormed at me, as the saying is, stormed and
+      stormed and stormed! It was not a matter of life but rather of death, as
+      the saying is. ‘Albanians!’ and ‘devils!’ and ‘To Siberia!’” said Berg
+      with a sagacious smile. “I knew I was in the right so I kept silent; was
+      not that best, Count?... ‘Hey, are you dumb?’ he shouted. Still I remained
+      silent. And what do you think, Count? The next day it was not even
+      mentioned in the Orders of the Day. That’s what keeping one’s head means.
+      That’s the way, Count,” said Berg, lighting his pipe and emitting rings of
+      smoke.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, that was fine,” said Rostóv, smiling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Borís noticed that he was preparing to make fun of Berg, and
+      skillfully changed the subject. He asked him to tell them how and where he
+      got his wound. This pleased Rostóv and he began talking about it, and as
+      he went on became more and more animated. He told them of his Schön
+      Grabern affair, just as those who have taken part in a battle generally do
+      describe it, that is, as they would like it to have been, as they have
+      heard it described by others, and as sounds well, but not at all as it
+      really was. Rostóv was a truthful young man and would on no account have
+      told a deliberate lie. He began his story meaning to tell everything just
+      as it happened, but imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably he lapsed
+      into falsehood. If he had told the truth to his hearers—who like
+      himself had often heard stories of attacks and had formed a definite idea
+      of what an attack was and were expecting to hear just such a story—they
+      would either not have believed him or, still worse, would have thought
+      that Rostóv was himself to blame since what generally happens to the
+      narrators of cavalry attacks had not happened to him. He could not tell
+      them simply that everyone went at a trot and that he fell off his horse
+      and sprained his arm and then ran as hard as he could from a Frenchman
+      into the wood. Besides, to tell everything as it really happened, it would
+      have been necessary to make an effort of will to tell only what happened.
+      It is very difficult to tell the truth, and young people are rarely
+      capable of it. His hearers expected a story of how beside himself and all
+      aflame with excitement, he had flown like a storm at the square, cut his
+      way in, slashed right and left, how his saber had tasted flesh and he had
+      fallen exhausted, and so on. And so he told them all that.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the middle of his story, just as he was saying: “You cannot imagine
+      what a strange frenzy one experiences during an attack,” Prince Andrew,
+      whom Borís was expecting, entered the room. Prince Andrew, who liked to
+      help young men, was flattered by being asked for his assistance and being
+      well disposed toward Borís, who had managed to please him the day before,
+      he wished to do what the young man wanted. Having been sent with papers
+      from Kutúzov to the Tsarévich, he looked in on Borís, hoping to find him
+      alone. When he came in and saw an hussar of the line recounting his
+      military exploits (Prince Andrew could not endure that sort of man), he
+      gave Borís a pleasant smile, frowned as with half-closed eyes he looked at
+      Rostóv, bowed slightly and wearily, and sat down languidly on the sofa: he
+      felt it unpleasant to have dropped in on bad company. Rostóv flushed up on
+      noticing this, but he did not care, this was a mere stranger. Glancing,
+      however, at Borís, he saw that he too seemed ashamed of the hussar of the
+      line.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In spite of Prince Andrew’s disagreeable, ironical tone, in spite of the
+      contempt with which Rostóv, from his <i>fighting</i> army point of view, regarded
+      all these little adjutants on the staff of whom the newcomer was evidently
+      one, Rostóv felt confused, blushed, and became silent. Borís inquired what
+      news there might be on the staff, and what, without indiscretion, one
+      might ask about our plans.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We shall probably advance,” replied Bolkónski, evidently reluctant to say
+      more in the presence of a stranger.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Berg took the opportunity to ask, with great politeness, whether, as was
+      rumored, the allowance of forage money to captains of companies would be
+      doubled. To this Prince Andrew answered with a smile that he could give no
+      opinion on such an important government order, and Berg laughed gaily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “As to your business,” Prince Andrew continued, addressing Borís, “we will
+      talk of it later” (and he looked round at Rostóv). “Come to me after the
+      review and we will do what is possible.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And, having glanced round the room, Prince Andrew turned to Rostóv, whose
+      state of unconquerable childish embarrassment now changing to anger he did
+      not condescend to notice, and said: “I think you were talking of the Schön
+      Grabern affair? Were you there?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I was there,” said Rostóv angrily, as if intending to insult the
+      aide-de-camp.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bolkónski noticed the hussar’s state of mind, and it amused him. With a
+      slightly contemptuous smile, he said: “Yes, there are many stories now
+      told about that affair!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, stories!” repeated Rostóv loudly, looking with eyes suddenly grown
+      furious, now at Borís, now at Bolkónski. “Yes, many stories! But our
+      stories are the stories of men who have been under the enemy’s fire! <i>Our</i>
+      stories have some weight, not like the stories of those fellows on the
+      staff who get rewards without doing anything!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Of whom you imagine me to be one?” said Prince Andrew, with a quiet and
+      particularly amiable smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A strange feeling of exasperation and yet of respect for this man’s
+      self-possession mingled at that moment in Rostóv’s soul.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am not talking about you,” he said, “I don’t know you and, frankly, I
+      don’t want to. I am speaking of the staff in general.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And I will tell you this,” Prince Andrew interrupted in a tone of quiet
+      authority, “you wish to insult me, and I am ready to agree with you that
+      it would be very easy to do so if you haven’t sufficient self-respect, but
+      admit that the time and place are very badly chosen. In a day or two we
+      shall all have to take part in a greater and more serious duel, and
+      besides, Drubetskóy, who says he is an old friend of yours, is not at all
+      to blame that my face has the misfortune to displease you. However,” he
+      added rising, “you know my name and where to find me, but don’t forget
+      that I do not regard either myself or you as having been at all insulted,
+      and as a man older than you, my advice is to let the matter drop. Well
+      then, on Friday after the review I shall expect you, Drubetskóy. <i>Au
+      revoir!</i>” exclaimed Prince Andrew, and with a bow to them both he went out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only when Prince Andrew was gone did Rostóv think of what he ought to have
+      said. And he was still more angry at having omitted to say it. He ordered
+      his horse at once and, coldly taking leave of Borís, rode home. Should he
+      go to headquarters next day and challenge that affected adjutant, or
+      really let the matter drop, was the question that worried him all the way.
+      He thought angrily of the pleasure he would have at seeing the fright of
+      that small and frail but proud man when covered by his pistol, and then he
+      felt with surprise that of all the men he knew there was none he would so
+      much like to have for a friend as that very adjutant whom he so hated.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0057"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The day after Rostóv had been to see Borís, a review was held of the
+      Austrian and Russian troops, both those freshly arrived from Russia and
+      those who had been campaigning under Kutúzov. The two Emperors, the
+      Russian with his heir the Tsarévich, and the Austrian with the Archduke,
+      inspected the allied army of eighty thousand men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From early morning the smart clean troops were on the move, forming up on
+      the field before the fortress. Now thousands of feet and bayonets moved
+      and halted at the officers’ command, turned with banners flying, formed up
+      at intervals, and wheeled round other similar masses of infantry in
+      different uniforms; now was heard the rhythmic beat of hoofs and the
+      jingling of showy cavalry in blue, red, and green braided uniforms, with
+      smartly dressed bandsmen in front mounted on black, roan, or gray horses;
+      then again, spreading out with the brazen clatter of the polished shining
+      cannon that quivered on the gun carriages and with the smell of linstocks,
+      came the artillery which crawled between the infantry and cavalry and took
+      up its appointed position. Not only the generals in full parade uniforms,
+      with their thin or thick waists drawn in to the utmost, their red necks
+      squeezed into their stiff collars, and wearing scarves and all their
+      decorations, not only the elegant, pomaded officers, but every soldier
+      with his freshly washed and shaven face and his weapons clean and polished
+      to the utmost, and every horse groomed till its coat shone like satin and
+      every hair of its wetted mane lay smooth—felt that no small matter
+      was happening, but an important and solemn affair. Every general and every
+      soldier was conscious of his own insignificance, aware of being but a drop
+      in that ocean of men, and yet at the same time was conscious of his
+      strength as a part of that enormous whole.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From early morning strenuous activities and efforts had begun and by ten
+      o’clock all had been brought into due order. The ranks were drawn up on
+      the vast field. The whole army was extended in three lines: the cavalry in
+      front, behind it the artillery, and behind that again the infantry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A space like a street was left between each two lines of troops. The three
+      parts of that army were sharply distinguished: Kutúzov’s fighting army
+      (with the Pávlograds on the right flank of the front); those recently
+      arrived from Russia, both Guards and regiments of the line; and the
+      Austrian troops. But they all stood in the same lines, under one command,
+      and in a like order.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Like wind over leaves ran an excited whisper: “They’re coming! They’re
+      coming!” Alarmed voices were heard, and a stir of final preparation swept
+      over all the troops.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the direction of Olmütz in front of them, a group was seen
+      approaching. And at that moment, though the day was still, a light gust of
+      wind blowing over the army slightly stirred the streamers on the lances
+      and the unfolded standards fluttered against their staffs. It looked as if
+      by that slight motion the army itself was expressing its joy at the
+      approach of the Emperors. One voice was heard shouting: “Eyes front!”
+       Then, like the crowing of cocks at sunrise, this was repeated by others
+      from various sides and all became silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the deathlike stillness only the tramp of horses was heard. This was
+      the Emperors’ suites. The Emperors rode up to the flank, and the trumpets
+      of the first cavalry regiment played the general march. It seemed as
+      though not the trumpeters were playing, but as if the army itself,
+      rejoicing at the Emperors’ approach, had naturally burst into music. Amid
+      these sounds, only the youthful kindly voice of the Emperor Alexander was
+      clearly heard. He gave the words of greeting, and the first regiment
+      roared “Hurrah!” so deafeningly, continuously, and joyfully that the men
+      themselves were awed by their multitude and the immensity of the power
+      they constituted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv, standing in the front lines of Kutúzov’s army which the Tsar
+      approached first, experienced the same feeling as every other man in that
+      army: a feeling of self-forgetfulness, a proud consciousness of might, and
+      a passionate attraction to him who was the cause of this triumph.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He felt that at a single word from that man all this vast mass (and he
+      himself an insignificant atom in it) would go through fire and water,
+      commit crime, die, or perform deeds of highest heroism, and so he could
+      not but tremble and his heart stand still at the imminence of that word.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!” thundered from all sides, one regiment after
+      another greeting the Tsar with the strains of the march, and then
+      “Hurrah!”... Then the general march, and again “Hurrah! Hurrah!” growing
+      ever stronger and fuller and merging into a deafening roar.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Till the Tsar reached it, each regiment in its silence and immobility
+      seemed like a lifeless body, but as soon as he came up it became alive,
+      its thunder joining the roar of the whole line along which he had already
+      passed. Through the terrible and deafening roar of those voices, amid the
+      square masses of troops standing motionless as if turned to stone,
+      hundreds of riders composing the suites moved carelessly but symmetrically
+      and above all freely, and in front of them two men—the Emperors.
+      Upon them the undivided, tensely passionate attention of that whole mass
+      of men was concentrated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The handsome young Emperor Alexander, in the uniform of the Horse Guards,
+      wearing a cocked hat with its peaks front and back, with his pleasant face
+      and resonant though not loud voice, attracted everyone’s attention.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv was not far from the trumpeters, and with his keen sight had
+      recognized the Tsar and watched his approach. When he was within twenty
+      paces, and Nicholas could clearly distinguish every detail of his
+      handsome, happy young face, he experienced a feeling of tenderness and
+      ecstasy such as he had never before known. Every trait and every movement
+      of the Tsar’s seemed to him enchanting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Stopping in front of the Pávlograds, the Tsar said something in French to
+      the Austrian Emperor and smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Seeing that smile, Rostóv involuntarily smiled himself and felt a still
+      stronger flow of love for his sovereign. He longed to show that love in
+      some way and knowing that this was impossible was ready to cry. The Tsar
+      called the colonel of the regiment and said a few words to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh God, what would happen to me if the Emperor spoke to me?” thought
+      Rostóv. “I should die of happiness!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The Tsar addressed the officers also: “I thank you all, gentlemen, I thank
+      you with my whole heart.” To Rostóv every word sounded like a voice from
+      heaven. How gladly would he have died at once for his Tsar!
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You have earned the St. George’s standards and will be worthy of them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, to die, to die for him,” thought Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Tsar said something more which Rostóv did not hear, and the soldiers,
+      straining their lungs, shouted “Hurrah!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv too, bending over his saddle, shouted “Hurrah!” with all his might,
+      feeling that he would like to injure himself by that shout, if only to
+      express his rapture fully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Tsar stopped a few minutes in front of the hussars as if undecided.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How can the Emperor be undecided?” thought Rostóv, but then even this
+      indecision appeared to him majestic and enchanting, like everything else
+      the Tsar did.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That hesitation lasted only an instant. The Tsar’s foot, in the narrow
+      pointed boot then fashionable, touched the groin of the bobtailed bay mare
+      he rode, his hand in a white glove gathered up the reins, and he moved off
+      accompanied by an irregularly swaying sea of aides-de-camp. Farther and
+      farther he rode away, stopping at other regiments, till at last only his
+      white plumes were visible to Rostóv from amid the suites that surrounded
+      the Emperors.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Among the gentlemen of the suite, Rostóv noticed Bolkónski, sitting his
+      horse indolently and carelessly. Rostóv recalled their quarrel of
+      yesterday and the question presented itself whether he ought or ought not
+      to challenge Bolkónski. “Of course not!” he now thought. “Is it worth
+      thinking or speaking of it at such a moment? At a time of such love, such
+      rapture, and such self-sacrifice, what do any of our quarrels and affronts
+      matter? I love and forgive everybody now.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      When the Emperor had passed nearly all the regiments, the troops began a
+      ceremonial march past him, and Rostóv on Bedouin, recently purchased from
+      Denísov, rode past too, at the rear of his squadron—that is, alone
+      and in full view of the Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before he reached him, Rostóv, who was a splendid horseman, spurred
+      Bedouin twice and successfully put him to the showy trot in which the
+      animal went when excited. Bending his foaming muzzle to his chest, his
+      tail extended, Bedouin, as if also conscious of the Emperor’s eye upon
+      him, passed splendidly, lifting his feet with a high and graceful action,
+      as if flying through the air without touching the ground.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv himself, his legs well back and his stomach drawn in and feeling
+      himself one with his horse, rode past the Emperor with a frowning but
+      blissful face “like a vewy devil,” as Denísov expressed it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Fine fellows, the Pávlograds!” remarked the Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My God, how happy I should be if he ordered me to leap into the fire this
+      instant!” thought Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the review was over, the newly arrived officers, and also Kutúzov’s,
+      collected in groups and began to talk about the awards, about the
+      Austrians and their uniforms, about their lines, about Bonaparte, and how
+      badly the latter would fare now, especially if the Essen corps arrived and
+      Prussia took our side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the talk in every group was chiefly about the Emperor Alexander. His
+      every word and movement was described with ecstasy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They all had but one wish: to advance as soon as possible against the
+      enemy under the Emperor’s command. Commanded by the Emperor himself they
+      could not fail to vanquish anyone, be it whom it might: so thought Rostóv
+      and most of the officers after the review.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All were then more confident of victory than the winning of two battles
+      would have made them.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0058"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The day after the review, Borís, in his best uniform and with his comrade
+      Berg’s best wishes for success, rode to Olmütz to see Bolkónski, wishing
+      to profit by his friendliness and obtain for himself the best post he
+      could—preferably that of adjutant to some important personage, a
+      position in the army which seemed to him most attractive. “It is all very
+      well for Rostóv, whose father sends him ten thousand rubles at a time, to
+      talk about not wishing to cringe to anybody and not be anyone’s lackey,
+      but I who have nothing but my brains have to make a career and must not
+      miss opportunities, but must avail myself of them!” he reflected.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He did not find Prince Andrew in Olmütz that day, but the appearance of
+      the town where the headquarters and the diplomatic corps were stationed
+      and the two Emperors were living with their suites, households, and courts
+      only strengthened his desire to belong to that higher world.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He knew no one, and despite his smart Guardsman’s uniform, all these
+      exalted personages passing in the streets in their elegant carriages with
+      their plumes, ribbons, and medals, both courtiers and military men, seemed
+      so immeasurably above him, an insignificant officer of the Guards, that
+      they not only did not wish to, but simply could not, be aware of his
+      existence. At the quarters of the commander in chief, Kutúzov, where he
+      inquired for Bolkónski, all the adjutants and even the orderlies looked at
+      him as if they wished to impress on him that a great many officers like
+      him were always coming there and that everybody was heartily sick of them.
+      In spite of this, or rather because of it, next day, November 15, after
+      dinner he again went to Olmütz and, entering the house occupied by
+      Kutúzov, asked for Bolkónski. Prince Andrew was in and Borís was shown
+      into a large hall probably formerly used for dancing, but in which five
+      beds now stood, and furniture of various kinds: a table, chairs, and a
+      clavichord. One adjutant, nearest the door, was sitting at the table in a
+      Persian dressing gown, writing. Another, the red, stout Nesvítski, lay on
+      a bed with his arms under his head, laughing with an officer who had sat
+      down beside him. A third was playing a Viennese waltz on the clavichord,
+      while a fourth, lying on the clavichord, sang the tune. Bolkónski was not
+      there. None of these gentlemen changed his position on seeing Borís. The
+      one who was writing and whom Borís addressed turned round crossly and told
+      him Bolkónski was on duty and that he should go through the door on the
+      left into the reception room if he wished to see him. Borís thanked him
+      and went to the reception room, where he found some ten officers and
+      generals.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he entered, Prince Andrew, his eyes drooping contemptuously (with
+      that peculiar expression of polite weariness which plainly says, “If it
+      were not my duty I would not talk to you for a moment”), was listening to
+      an old Russian general with decorations, who stood very erect, almost on
+      tiptoe, with a soldier’s obsequious expression on his purple face,
+      reporting something.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very well, then, be so good as to wait,” said Prince Andrew to the
+      general, in Russian, speaking with the French intonation he affected when
+      he wished to speak contemptuously, and noticing Borís, Prince Andrew,
+      paying no more heed to the general who ran after him imploring him to hear
+      something more, nodded and turned to him with a cheerful smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment Borís clearly realized what he had before surmised, that in
+      the army, besides the subordination and discipline prescribed in the
+      military code, which he and the others knew in the regiment, there was
+      another, more important, subordination, which made this tight-laced,
+      purple-faced general wait respectfully while Captain Prince Andrew, for
+      his own pleasure, chose to chat with Lieutenant Drubetskóy. More than ever
+      was Borís resolved to serve in future not according to the written code,
+      but under this unwritten law. He felt now that merely by having been
+      recommended to Prince Andrew he had already risen above the general who at
+      the front had the power to annihilate him, a lieutenant of the Guards.
+      Prince Andrew came up to him and took his hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am very sorry you did not find me in yesterday. I was fussing about
+      with Germans all day. We went with Weyrother to survey the dispositions.
+      When Germans start being accurate, there’s no end to it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Borís smiled, as if he understood what Prince Andrew was alluding to as
+      something generally known. But it was the first time he had heard
+      Weyrother’s name, or even the term “dispositions.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, my dear fellow, so you still want to be an adjutant? I have been
+      thinking about you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I was thinking”—for some reason Borís could not help blushing—“of
+      asking the commander in chief. He has had a letter from Prince Kurágin
+      about me. I only wanted to ask because I fear the Guards won’t be in
+      action,” he added as if in apology.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All right, all right. We’ll talk it over,” replied Prince Andrew. “Only
+      let me report this gentleman’s business, and I shall be at your disposal.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      While Prince Andrew went to report about the purple-faced general, that
+      gentleman—evidently not sharing Borís’ conception of the advantages
+      of the unwritten code of subordination—looked so fixedly at the
+      presumptuous lieutenant who had prevented his finishing what he had to say
+      to the adjutant that Borís felt uncomfortable. He turned away and waited
+      impatiently for Prince Andrew’s return from the commander in chief’s room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You see, my dear fellow, I have been thinking about you,” said Prince
+      Andrew when they had gone into the large room where the clavichord was.
+      “It’s no use your going to the commander in chief. He would say a lot of
+      pleasant things, ask you to dinner” (“That would not be bad as regards the
+      unwritten code,” thought Borís), “but nothing more would come of it. There
+      will soon be a battalion of us aides-de-camp and adjutants! But this is
+      what we’ll do: I have a good friend, an adjutant general and an excellent
+      fellow, Prince Dolgorúkov; and though you may not know it, the fact is
+      that now Kutúzov with his staff and all of us count for nothing.
+      Everything is now centered round the Emperor. So we will go to Dolgorúkov;
+      I have to go there anyhow and I have already spoken to him about you. We
+      shall see whether he cannot attach you to himself or find a place for you
+      somewhere nearer the sun.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew always became specially keen when he had to guide a young
+      man and help him to worldly success. Under cover of obtaining help of this
+      kind for another, which from pride he would never accept for himself, he
+      kept in touch with the circle which confers success and which attracted
+      him. He very readily took up Borís’ cause and went with him to Dolgorúkov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was late in the evening when they entered the palace at Olmütz occupied
+      by the Emperors and their retinues.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That same day a council of war had been held in which all the members of
+      the Hofkriegsrath and both Emperors took part. At that council, contrary
+      to the views of the old generals Kutúzov and Prince Schwartzenberg, it had
+      been decided to advance immediately and give battle to Bonaparte. The
+      council of war was just over when Prince Andrew accompanied by Borís
+      arrived at the palace to find Dolgorúkov. Everyone at headquarters was
+      still under the spell of the day’s council, at which the party of the
+      young had triumphed. The voices of those who counseled delay and advised
+      waiting for something else before advancing had been so completely
+      silenced and their arguments confuted by such conclusive evidence of the
+      advantages of attacking that what had been discussed at the council—the
+      coming battle and the victory that would certainly result from it—no
+      longer seemed to be in the future but in the past. All the advantages were
+      on our side. Our enormous forces, undoubtedly superior to Napoleon’s, were
+      concentrated in one place, the troops inspired by the Emperors’ presence
+      were eager for action. The strategic position where the operations would
+      take place was familiar in all its details to the Austrian General
+      Weyrother: a lucky accident had ordained that the Austrian army should
+      maneuver the previous year on the very fields where the French had now to
+      be fought; the adjacent locality was known and shown in every detail on
+      the maps, and Bonaparte, evidently weakened, was undertaking nothing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dolgorúkov, one of the warmest advocates of an attack, had just returned
+      from the council, tired and exhausted but eager and proud of the victory
+      that had been gained. Prince Andrew introduced his protégé, but Prince
+      Dolgorúkov politely and firmly pressing his hand said nothing to Borís
+      and, evidently unable to suppress the thoughts which were uppermost in his
+      mind at that moment, addressed Prince Andrew in French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, my dear fellow, what a battle we have gained! God grant that the one
+      that will result from it will be as victorious! However, dear fellow,” he
+      said abruptly and eagerly, “I must confess to having been unjust to the
+      Austrians and especially to Weyrother. What exactitude, what minuteness,
+      what knowledge of the locality, what foresight for every eventuality,
+      every possibility even to the smallest detail! No, my dear fellow, no
+      conditions better than our present ones could have been devised. This
+      combination of Austrian precision with Russian valor—what more could
+      be wished for?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “So the attack is definitely resolved on?” asked Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And do you know, my dear fellow, it seems to me that Bonaparte has
+      decidedly lost bearings, you know that a letter was received from him
+      today for the Emperor.” Dolgorúkov smiled significantly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is that so? And what did he say?” inquired Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What can he say? Tra-di-ri-di-ra and so on... merely to gain time. I tell
+      you he is in our hands, that’s certain! But what was most amusing,” he
+      continued, with a sudden, good-natured laugh, “was that we could not think
+      how to address the reply! If not as ‘Consul’ and of course not as
+      ‘Emperor,’ it seemed to me it should be to ‘General Bonaparte.’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But between not recognizing him as Emperor and calling him General
+      Bonaparte, there is a difference,” remarked Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s just it,” interrupted Dolgorúkov quickly, laughing. “You know
+      Bilíbin—he’s a very clever fellow. He suggested addressing him as
+      ‘Usurper and Enemy of Mankind.’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dolgorúkov laughed merrily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Only that?” said Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All the same, it was Bilíbin who found a suitable form for the address.
+      He is a wise and clever fellow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What was it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “To the Head of the French Government... <i>Au chef du gouvernement
+      français</i>,” said Dolgorúkov, with grave satisfaction. “Good, wasn’t it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, but he will dislike it extremely,” said Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes, very much! My brother knows him, he’s dined with him—the
+      present Emperor—more than once in Paris, and tells me he never met a
+      more cunning or subtle diplomatist—you know, a combination of French
+      adroitness and Italian play-acting! Do you know the tale about him and
+      Count Markóv? Count Markóv was the only man who knew how to handle him.
+      You know the story of the handkerchief? It is delightful!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the talkative Dolgorúkov, turning now to Borís, now to Prince Andrew,
+      told how Bonaparte wishing to test Markóv, our ambassador, purposely
+      dropped a handkerchief in front of him and stood looking at Markóv,
+      probably expecting Markóv to pick it up for him, and how Markóv
+      immediately dropped his own beside it and picked it up without touching
+      Bonaparte’s.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Delightful!” said Bolkónski. “But I have come to you, Prince, as a
+      petitioner on behalf of this young man. You see...” but before Prince
+      Andrew could finish, an aide-de-camp came in to summon Dolgorúkov to the
+      Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, what a nuisance,” said Dolgorúkov, getting up hurriedly and pressing
+      the hands of Prince Andrew and Borís. “You know I should be very glad to
+      do all in my power both for you and for this dear young man.” Again he
+      pressed the hand of the latter with an expression of good-natured,
+      sincere, and animated levity. “But you see... another time!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Borís was excited by the thought of being so close to the higher powers as
+      he felt himself to be at that moment. He was conscious that here he was in
+      contact with the springs that set in motion the enormous movements of the
+      mass of which in his regiment he felt himself a tiny, obedient, and
+      insignificant atom. They followed Prince Dolgorúkov out into the corridor
+      and met—coming out of the door of the Emperor’s room by which
+      Dolgorúkov had entered—a short man in civilian clothes with a clever
+      face and sharply projecting jaw which, without spoiling his face, gave him
+      a peculiar vivacity and shiftiness of expression. This short man nodded to
+      Dolgorúkov as to an intimate friend and stared at Prince Andrew with cool
+      intensity, walking straight toward him and evidently expecting him to bow
+      or to step out of his way. Prince Andrew did neither: a look of animosity
+      appeared on his face and the other turned away and went down the side of
+      the corridor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who was that?” asked Borís.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is one of the most remarkable, but to me most unpleasant of men—the
+      Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince Adam Czartorýski.... It is such men as
+      he who decide the fate of nations,” added Bolkónski with a sigh he could
+      not suppress, as they passed out of the palace.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day, the army began its campaign, and up to the very battle of
+      Austerlitz, Borís was unable to see either Prince Andrew or Dolgorúkov
+      again and remained for a while with the Ismáylov regiment.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0059"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At dawn on the sixteenth of November, Denísov’s squadron, in which
+      Nicholas Rostóv served and which was in Prince Bagratión’s detachment,
+      moved from the place where it had spent the night, advancing into action
+      as arranged, and after going behind other columns for about two thirds of
+      a mile was stopped on the highroad. Rostóv saw the Cossacks and then the
+      first and second squadrons of hussars and infantry battalions and
+      artillery pass by and go forward and then Generals Bagratión and
+      Dolgorúkov ride past with their adjutants. All the fear before action
+      which he had experienced as previously, all the inner struggle to conquer
+      that fear, all his dreams of distinguishing himself as a true hussar in
+      this battle, had been wasted. Their squadron remained in reserve and
+      Nicholas Rostóv spent that day in a dull and wretched mood. At nine in the
+      morning, he heard firing in front and shouts of <i>hurrah</i>, and saw wounded
+      being brought back (there were not many of them), and at last he saw how a
+      whole detachment of French cavalry was brought in, convoyed by a <i>sótnya</i> of
+      Cossacks. Evidently the affair was over and, though not big, had been a
+      successful engagement. The men and officers returning spoke of a brilliant
+      victory, of the occupation of the town of Wischau and the capture of a
+      whole French squadron. The day was bright and sunny after a sharp night
+      frost, and the cheerful glitter of that autumn day was in keeping with the
+      news of victory which was conveyed, not only by the tales of those who had
+      taken part in it, but also by the joyful expression on the faces of
+      soldiers, officers, generals, and adjutants, as they passed Rostóv going
+      or coming. And Nicholas, who had vainly suffered all the dread that
+      precedes a battle and had spent that happy day in inactivity, was all the
+      more depressed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come here, Wostóv. Let’s dwink to dwown our gwief!” shouted Denísov, who
+      had settled down by the roadside with a flask and some food.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The officers gathered round Denísov’s canteen, eating and talking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There! They are bringing another!” cried one of the officers, indicating
+      a captive French dragoon who was being brought in on foot by two Cossacks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One of them was leading by the bridle a fine large French horse he had
+      taken from the prisoner.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sell us that horse!” Denísov called out to the Cossacks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If you like, your honor!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The officers got up and stood round the Cossacks and their prisoner. The
+      French dragoon was a young Alsatian who spoke French with a German accent.
+      He was breathless with agitation, his face was red, and when he heard some
+      French spoken he at once began speaking to the officers, addressing first
+      one, then another. He said he would not have been taken, it was not his
+      fault but the corporal’s who had sent him to seize some horsecloths,
+      though he had told him the Russians were there. And at every word he
+      added: “But don’t hurt my little horse!” and stroked the animal. It was
+      plain that he did not quite grasp where he was. Now he excused himself for
+      having been taken prisoner and now, imagining himself before his own
+      officers, insisted on his soldierly discipline and zeal in the service. He
+      brought with him into our rearguard all the freshness of atmosphere of the
+      French army, which was so alien to us.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Cossacks sold the horse for two gold pieces, and Rostóv, being the
+      richest of the officers now that he had received his money, bought it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But don’t hurt my little horse!” said the Alsatian good-naturedly to
+      Rostóv when the animal was handed over to the hussar.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv smilingly reassured the dragoon and gave him money.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Alley! Alley!” said the Cossack, touching the prisoner’s arm to make him
+      go on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Emperor! The Emperor!” was suddenly heard among the hussars.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All began to run and bustle, and Rostóv saw coming up the road behind him
+      several riders with white plumes in their hats. In a moment everyone was
+      in his place, waiting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv did not know or remember how he ran to his place and mounted.
+      Instantly his regret at not having been in action and his dejected mood
+      amid people of whom he was weary had gone, instantly every thought of
+      himself had vanished. He was filled with happiness at his nearness to the
+      Emperor. He felt that this nearness by itself made up to him for the day
+      he had lost. He was happy as a lover when the longed-for moment of meeting
+      arrives. Not daring to look round and without looking round, he was
+      ecstatically conscious of <i>his</i> approach. He felt it not only from the sound
+      of the hoofs of the approaching cavalcade, but because as <i>he</i> drew near
+      everything grew brighter, more joyful, more significant, and more festive
+      around him. Nearer and nearer to Rostóv came that sun shedding beams of
+      mild and majestic light around, and already he felt himself enveloped in
+      those beams, he heard <i>his</i> voice, that kindly, calm, and majestic voice
+      that was yet so simple! And as if in accord with Rostóv’s feeling, there
+      was a deathly stillness amid which was heard the Emperor’s voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Pávlograd hussars?” he inquired.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The reserves, sire!” replied a voice, a very human one compared to that
+      which had said: “The Pávlograd hussars?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor drew level with Rostóv and halted. Alexander’s face was even
+      more beautiful than it had been three days before at the review. It shone
+      with such gaiety and youth, such innocent youth, that it suggested the
+      liveliness of a fourteen-year-old boy, and yet it was the face of the
+      majestic Emperor. Casually, while surveying the squadron, the Emperor’s
+      eyes met Rostóv’s and rested on them for not more than two seconds.
+      Whether or no the Emperor understood what was going on in Rostóv’s soul
+      (it seemed to Rostóv that he understood everything), at any rate his
+      light-blue eyes gazed for about two seconds into Rostóv’s face. A gentle,
+      mild light poured from them. Then all at once he raised his eyebrows,
+      abruptly touched his horse with his left foot, and galloped on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The younger Emperor could not restrain his wish to be present at the
+      battle and, in spite of the remonstrances of his courtiers, at twelve
+      o’clock left the third column with which he had been and galloped toward
+      the vanguard. Before he came up with the hussars, several adjutants met
+      him with news of the successful result of the action.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This battle, which consisted in the capture of a French squadron, was
+      represented as a brilliant victory over the French, and so the Emperor and
+      the whole army, especially while the smoke hung over the battlefield,
+      believed that the French had been defeated and were retreating against
+      their will. A few minutes after the Emperor had passed, the Pávlograd
+      division was ordered to advance. In Wischau itself, a petty German town,
+      Rostóv saw the Emperor again. In the market place, where there had been
+      some rather heavy firing before the Emperor’s arrival, lay several killed
+      and wounded soldiers whom there had not been time to move. The Emperor,
+      surrounded by his suite of officers and courtiers, was riding a bobtailed
+      chestnut mare, a different one from that which he had ridden at the
+      review, and bending to one side he gracefully held a gold lorgnette to his
+      eyes and looked at a soldier who lay prone, with blood on his uncovered
+      head. The wounded soldier was so dirty, coarse, and revolting that his
+      proximity to the Emperor shocked Rostóv. Rostóv saw how the Emperor’s
+      rather round shoulders shuddered as if a cold shiver had run down them,
+      how his left foot began convulsively tapping the horse’s side with the
+      spur, and how the well-trained horse looked round unconcerned and did not
+      stir. An adjutant, dismounting, lifted the soldier under the arms to place
+      him on a stretcher that had been brought. The soldier groaned.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Gently, gently! Can’t you do it more gently?” said the Emperor apparently
+      suffering more than the dying soldier, and he rode away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv saw tears filling the Emperor’s eyes and heard him, as he was
+      riding away, say to Czartorýski: “What a terrible thing war is: what a
+      terrible thing! <i>Quelle terrible chose que la guerre!</i>”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The troops of the vanguard were stationed before Wischau, within sight of
+      the enemy’s lines, which all day long had yielded ground to us at the
+      least firing. The Emperor’s gratitude was announced to the vanguard,
+      rewards were promised, and the men received a double ration of vodka. The
+      campfires crackled and the soldiers’ songs resounded even more merrily
+      than on the previous night. Denísov celebrated his promotion to the rank
+      of major, and Rostóv, who had already drunk enough, at the end of the
+      feast proposed the Emperor’s health. “Not ‘our Sovereign, the Emperor,’ as
+      they say at official dinners,” said he, “but the health of our Sovereign,
+      that good, enchanting, and great man! Let us drink to his health and to
+      the certain defeat of the French!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If we fought before,” he said, “not letting the French pass, as at Schön
+      Grabern, what shall we not do now when <i>he</i> is at the front? We will all die
+      for him gladly! Is it not so, gentlemen? Perhaps I am not saying it right,
+      I have drunk a good deal—but that is how I feel, and so do you too!
+      To the health of Alexander the First! Hurrah!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Hurrah!” rang the enthusiastic voices of the officers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And the old cavalry captain, Kírsten, shouted enthusiastically and no less
+      sincerely than the twenty-year-old Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the officers had emptied and smashed their glasses, Kírsten filled
+      others and, in shirt sleeves and breeches, went glass in hand to the
+      soldiers’ bonfires and with his long gray mustache, his white chest
+      showing under his open shirt, he stood in a majestic pose in the light of
+      the campfire, waving his uplifted arm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lads! here’s to our Sovereign, the Emperor, and victory over our enemies!
+      Hurrah!” he exclaimed in his dashing, old, hussar’s baritone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The hussars crowded round and responded heartily with loud shouts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Late that night, when all had separated, Denísov with his short hand
+      patted his favorite, Rostóv, on the shoulder.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “As there’s no one to fall in love with on campaign, he’s fallen in love
+      with the Tsar,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Denísov, don’t make fun of it!” cried Rostóv. “It is such a lofty,
+      beautiful feeling, such a...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I believe it, I believe it, fwiend, and I share and appwove...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, you don’t understand!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Rostóv got up and went wandering among the campfires, dreaming of what
+      happiness it would be to die—not in saving the Emperor’s life (he
+      did not even dare to dream of that), but simply to die before his eyes. He
+      really was in love with the Tsar and the glory of the Russian arms and the
+      hope of future triumph. And he was not the only man to experience that
+      feeling during those memorable days preceding the battle of Austerlitz:
+      nine tenths of the men in the Russian army were then in love, though less
+      ecstatically, with their Tsar and the glory of the Russian arms.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0060"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The next day the Emperor stopped at Wischau, and Villier, his physician,
+      was repeatedly summoned to see him. At headquarters and among the troops
+      near by the news spread that the Emperor was unwell. He ate nothing and
+      had slept badly that night, those around him reported. The cause of this
+      indisposition was the strong impression made on his sensitive mind by the
+      sight of the killed and wounded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At daybreak on the seventeenth, a French officer who had come with a flag
+      of truce, demanding an audience with the Russian Emperor, was brought into
+      Wischau from our outposts. This officer was Savary. The Emperor had only
+      just fallen asleep and so Savary had to wait. At midday he was admitted to
+      the Emperor, and an hour later he rode off with Prince Dolgorúkov to the
+      advanced post of the French army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was rumored that Savary had been sent to propose to Alexander a meeting
+      with Napoleon. To the joy and pride of the whole army, a personal
+      interview was refused, and instead of the Sovereign, Prince Dolgorúkov,
+      the victor at Wischau, was sent with Savary to negotiate with Napoleon if,
+      contrary to expectations, these negotiations were actuated by a real
+      desire for peace.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Toward evening Dolgorúkov came back, went straight to the Tsar, and
+      remained alone with him for a long time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the eighteenth and nineteenth of November, the army advanced two days’
+      march and the enemy’s outposts after a brief interchange of shots
+      retreated. In the highest army circles from midday on the nineteenth, a
+      great, excitedly bustling activity began which lasted till the morning of
+      the twentieth, when the memorable battle of Austerlitz was fought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Till midday on the nineteenth, the activity—the eager talk, running
+      to and fro, and dispatching of adjutants—was confined to the
+      Emperor’s headquarters. But on the afternoon of that day, this activity
+      reached Kutúzov’s headquarters and the staffs of the commanders of
+      columns. By evening, the adjutants had spread it to all ends and parts of
+      the army, and in the night from the nineteenth to the twentieth, the whole
+      eighty thousand allied troops rose from their bivouacs to the hum of
+      voices, and the army swayed and started in one enormous mass six miles
+      long.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The concentrated activity which had begun at the Emperor’s headquarters in
+      the morning and had started the whole movement that followed was like the
+      first movement of the main wheel of a large tower clock. One wheel slowly
+      moved, another was set in motion, and a third, and wheels began to revolve
+      faster and faster, levers and cogwheels to work, chimes to play, figures
+      to pop out, and the hands to advance with regular motion as a result of
+      all that activity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just as in the mechanism of a clock, so in the mechanism of the military
+      machine, an impulse once given leads to the final result; and just as
+      indifferently quiescent till the moment when motion is transmitted to them
+      are the parts of the mechanism which the impulse has not yet reached.
+      Wheels creak on their axles as the cogs engage one another and the
+      revolving pulleys whirr with the rapidity of their movement, but a
+      neighboring wheel is as quiet and motionless as though it were prepared to
+      remain so for a hundred years; but the moment comes when the lever catches
+      it and obeying the impulse that wheel begins to creak and joins in the
+      common motion the result and aim of which are beyond its ken.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just as in a clock, the result of the complicated motion of innumerable
+      wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement of the hands
+      which show the time, so the result of all the complicated human activities
+      of 160,000 Russians and French—all their passions, desires, remorse,
+      humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm—was
+      only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the
+      three Emperors—that is to say, a slow movement of the hand on the
+      dial of human history.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew was on duty that day and in constant attendance on the
+      commander in chief.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At six in the evening, Kutúzov went to the Emperor’s headquarters and
+      after staying but a short time with the Tsar went to see the grand marshal
+      of the court, Count Tolstóy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bolkónski took the opportunity to go in to get some details of the coming
+      action from Dolgorúkov. He felt that Kutúzov was upset and dissatisfied
+      about something and that at headquarters they were dissatisfied with him,
+      and also that at the Emperor’s headquarters everyone adopted toward him
+      the tone of men who know something others do not know: he therefore wished
+      to speak to Dolgorúkov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, how d’you do, my dear fellow?” said Dolgorúkov, who was sitting at
+      tea with Bilíbin. “The fete is for tomorrow. How is your old fellow? Out
+      of sorts?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I won’t say he is out of sorts, but I fancy he would like to be heard.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But they heard him at the council of war and will hear him when he talks
+      sense, but to temporize and wait for something now when Bonaparte fears
+      nothing so much as a general battle is impossible.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, you have seen him?” said Prince Andrew. “Well, what is Bonaparte
+      like? How did he impress you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I saw him, and am convinced that he fears nothing so much as a
+      general engagement,” repeated Dolgorúkov, evidently prizing this general
+      conclusion which he had arrived at from his interview with Napoleon. “If
+      he weren’t afraid of a battle why did he ask for that interview? Why
+      negotiate, and above all why retreat, when to retreat is so contrary to
+      his method of conducting war? Believe me, he is afraid, afraid of a
+      general battle. His hour has come! Mark my words!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But tell me, what is he like, eh?” said Prince Andrew again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is a man in a gray overcoat, very anxious that I should call him ‘Your
+      Majesty,’ but who, to his chagrin, got no title from me! That’s the sort
+      of man he is, and nothing more,” replied Dolgorúkov, looking round at
+      Bilíbin with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Despite my great respect for old Kutúzov,” he continued, “we should be a
+      nice set of fellows if we were to wait about and so give him a chance to
+      escape, or to trick us, now that we certainly have him in our hands! No,
+      we mustn’t forget Suvórov and his rule—not to put yourself in a
+      position to be attacked, but yourself to attack. Believe me in war the
+      energy of young men often shows the way better than all the experience of
+      old Cunctators.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But in what position are we going to attack him? I have been at the
+      outposts today and it is impossible to say where his chief forces are
+      situated,” said Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He wished to explain to Dolgorúkov a plan of attack he had himself formed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, that is all the same,” Dolgorúkov said quickly, and getting up he
+      spread a map on the table. “All eventualities have been foreseen. If he is
+      standing before Brünn...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Prince Dolgorúkov rapidly but indistinctly explained Weyrother’s plan
+      of a flanking movement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew began to reply and to state his own plan, which might have
+      been as good as Weyrother’s, but for the disadvantage that Weyrother’s had
+      already been approved. As soon as Prince Andrew began to demonstrate the
+      defects of the latter and the merits of his own plan, Prince Dolgorúkov
+      ceased to listen to him and gazed absent-mindedly not at the map, but at
+      Prince Andrew’s face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There will be a council of war at Kutúzov’s tonight, though; you can say
+      all this there,” remarked Dolgorúkov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I will do so,” said Prince Andrew, moving away from the map.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Whatever are you bothering about, gentlemen?” said Bilíbin, who, till
+      then, had listened with an amused smile to their conversation and now was
+      evidently ready with a joke. “Whether tomorrow brings victory or defeat,
+      the glory of our Russian arms is secure. Except your Kutúzov, there is not
+      a single Russian in command of a column! The commanders are: Herr General
+      Wimpfen, le Comte de Langeron, le Prince de Lichtenstein, le Prince de
+      Hohenlohe, and finally Prishprish, and so on like all those Polish names.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Be quiet, backbiter!” said Dolgorúkov. “It is not true; there are now two
+      Russians, Milorádovich, and Dokhtúrov, and there would be a third, Count
+      Arakchéev, if his nerves were not too weak.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “However, I think General Kutúzov has come out,” said Prince Andrew. “I
+      wish you good luck and success, gentlemen!” he added and went out after
+      shaking hands with Dolgorúkov and Bilíbin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the way home, Prince Andrew could not refrain from asking Kutúzov, who
+      was sitting silently beside him, what he thought of tomorrow’s battle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov looked sternly at his adjutant and, after a pause, replied: “I
+      think the battle will be lost, and so I told Count Tolstóy and asked him
+      to tell the Emperor. What do you think he replied? ‘But, my dear general,
+      I am engaged with rice and cutlets, look after military matters yourself!’
+      Yes... That was the answer I got!”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0061"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Shortly after nine o’clock that evening, Weyrother drove with his plans to
+      Kutúzov’s quarters where the council of war was to be held. All the
+      commanders of columns were summoned to the commander in chief’s and with
+      the exception of Prince Bagratión, who declined to come, were all there at
+      the appointed time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Weyrother, who was in full control of the proposed battle, by his
+      eagerness and briskness presented a marked contrast to the dissatisfied
+      and drowsy Kutúzov, who reluctantly played the part of chairman and
+      president of the council of war. Weyrother evidently felt himself to be at
+      the head of a movement that had already become unrestrainable. He was like
+      a horse running downhill harnessed to a heavy cart. Whether he was pulling
+      it or being pushed by it he did not know, but rushed along at headlong
+      speed with no time to consider what this movement might lead to. Weyrother
+      had been twice that evening to the enemy’s picket line to reconnoiter
+      personally, and twice to the Emperors, Russian and Austrian, to report and
+      explain, and to his headquarters where he had dictated the dispositions in
+      German, and now, much exhausted, he arrived at Kutúzov’s.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was evidently so busy that he even forgot to be polite to the commander
+      in chief. He interrupted him, talked rapidly and indistinctly, without
+      looking at the man he was addressing, and did not reply to questions put
+      to him. He was bespattered with mud and had a pitiful, weary, and
+      distracted air, though at the same time he was haughty and self-confident.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov was occupying a nobleman’s castle of modest dimensions near
+      Ostralitz. In the large drawing room which had become the commander in
+      chief’s office were gathered Kutúzov himself, Weyrother, and the members
+      of the council of war. They were drinking tea, and only awaited Prince
+      Bagratión to begin the council. At last Bagratión’s orderly came with the
+      news that the prince could not attend. Prince Andrew came in to inform the
+      commander in chief of this and, availing himself of permission previously
+      given him by Kutúzov to be present at the council, he remained in the
+      room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Since Prince Bagratión is not coming, we may begin,” said Weyrother,
+      hurriedly rising from his seat and going up to the table on which an
+      enormous map of the environs of Brünn was spread out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov, with his uniform unbuttoned so that his fat neck bulged over his
+      collar as if escaping, was sitting almost asleep in a low chair, with his
+      podgy old hands resting symmetrically on its arms. At the sound of
+      Weyrother’s voice, he opened his one eye with an effort.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, if you please! It is already late,” said he, and nodding his
+      head he let it droop and again closed his eye.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If at first the members of the council thought that Kutúzov was pretending
+      to sleep, the sounds his nose emitted during the reading that followed
+      proved that the commander in chief at that moment was absorbed by a far
+      more serious matter than a desire to show his contempt for the
+      dispositions or anything else—he was engaged in satisfying the
+      irresistible human need for sleep. He really was asleep. Weyrother, with
+      the gesture of a man too busy to lose a moment, glanced at Kutúzov and,
+      having convinced himself that he was asleep, took up a paper and in a
+      loud, monotonous voice began to read out the dispositions for the
+      impending battle, under a heading which he also read out:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dispositions for an attack on the enemy position behind Kobelnitz and
+      Sokolnitz, November 30, 1805.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The dispositions were very complicated and difficult. They began as
+      follows:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “As the enemy’s left wing rests on wooded hills and his right extends
+      along Kobelnitz and Sokolnitz behind the ponds that are there, while we,
+      on the other hand, with our left wing by far outflank his right, it is
+      advantageous to attack the enemy’s latter wing especially if we occupy the
+      villages of Sokolnitz and Kobelnitz, whereby we can both fall on his flank
+      and pursue him over the plain between Schlappanitz and the Thuerassa
+      forest, avoiding the defiles of Schlappanitz and Bellowitz which cover the
+      enemy’s front. For this object it is necessary that... The first column
+      marches... The second column marches... The third column marches...” and
+      so on, read Weyrother.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The generals seemed to listen reluctantly to the difficult dispositions.
+      The tall, fair-haired General Buxhöwden stood, leaning his back against
+      the wall, his eyes fixed on a burning candle, and seemed not to listen or
+      even to wish to be thought to listen. Exactly opposite Weyrother, with his
+      glistening wide-open eyes fixed upon him and his mustache twisted upwards,
+      sat the ruddy Milorádovich in a military pose, his elbows turned outwards,
+      his hands on his knees, and his shoulders raised. He remained stubbornly
+      silent, gazing at Weyrother’s face, and only turned away his eyes when the
+      Austrian chief of staff finished reading. Then Milorádovich looked round
+      significantly at the other generals. But one could not tell from that
+      significant look whether he agreed or disagreed and was satisfied or not
+      with the arrangements. Next to Weyrother sat Count Langeron who, with a
+      subtle smile that never left his typically southern French face during the
+      whole time of the reading, gazed at his delicate fingers which rapidly
+      twirled by its corners a gold snuffbox on which was a portrait. In the
+      middle of one of the longest sentences, he stopped the rotary motion of
+      the snuffbox, raised his head, and with inimical politeness lurking in the
+      corners of his thin lips interrupted Weyrother, wishing to say something.
+      But the Austrian general, continuing to read, frowned angrily and jerked
+      his elbows, as if to say: “You can tell me your views later, but now be so
+      good as to look at the map and listen.” Langeron lifted his eyes with an
+      expression of perplexity, turned round to Milorádovich as if seeking an
+      explanation, but meeting the latter’s impressive but meaningless gaze
+      drooped his eyes sadly and again took to twirling his snuffbox.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A geography lesson!” he muttered as if to himself, but loud enough to be
+      heard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Przebyszéwski, with respectful but dignified politeness, held his hand to
+      his ear toward Weyrother, with the air of a man absorbed in attention.
+      Dohktúrov, a little man, sat opposite Weyrother, with an assiduous and
+      modest mien, and stooping over the outspread map conscientiously studied
+      the dispositions and the unfamiliar locality. He asked Weyrother several
+      times to repeat words he had not clearly heard and the difficult names of
+      villages. Weyrother complied and Dohktúrov noted them down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the reading which lasted more than an hour was over, Langeron again
+      brought his snuffbox to rest and, without looking at Weyrother or at
+      anyone in particular, began to say how difficult it was to carry out such
+      a plan in which the enemy’s position was assumed to be known, whereas it
+      was perhaps not known, since the enemy was in movement. Langeron’s
+      objections were valid but it was obvious that their chief aim was to show
+      General Weyrother—who had read his dispositions with as much
+      self-confidence as if he were addressing school children—that he had
+      to do, not with fools, but with men who could teach him something in
+      military matters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the monotonous sound of Weyrother’s voice ceased, Kutúzov opened his
+      eye as a miller wakes up when the soporific drone of the mill wheel is
+      interrupted. He listened to what Langeron said, as if remarking, “So you
+      are still at that silly business!” quickly closed his eye again, and let
+      his head sink still lower.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Langeron, trying as virulently as possible to sting Weyrother’s vanity as
+      author of the military plan, argued that Bonaparte might easily attack
+      instead of being attacked, and so render the whole of this plan perfectly
+      worthless. Weyrother met all objections with a firm and contemptuous
+      smile, evidently prepared beforehand to meet all objections be they what
+      they might.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If he could attack us, he would have done so today,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So you think he is powerless?” said Langeron.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He has forty thousand men at most,” replied Weyrother, with the smile of
+      a doctor to whom an old wife wishes to explain the treatment of a case.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In that case he is inviting his doom by awaiting our attack,” said
+      Langeron, with a subtly ironical smile, again glancing round for support
+      to Milorádovich who was near him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Milorádovich was at that moment evidently thinking of anything rather
+      than of what the generals were disputing about.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Ma foi!”</i> said he, “tomorrow we shall see all that on the battlefield.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Weyrother again gave that smile which seemed to say that to him it was
+      strange and ridiculous to meet objections from Russian generals and to
+      have to prove to them what he had not merely convinced himself of, but had
+      also convinced the sovereign Emperors of.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The enemy has quenched his fires and a continual noise is heard from his
+      camp,” said he. “What does that mean? Either he is retreating, which is
+      the only thing we need fear, or he is changing his position.” (He smiled
+      ironically.) “But even if he also took up a position in the Thuerassa, he
+      merely saves us a great deal of trouble and all our arrangements to the
+      minutest detail remain the same.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How is that?...” began Prince Andrew, who had for long been waiting an
+      opportunity to express his doubts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov here woke up, coughed heavily, and looked round at the generals.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Gentlemen, the dispositions for tomorrow—or rather for today, for
+      it is past midnight—cannot now be altered,” said he. “You have heard
+      them, and we shall all do our duty. But before a battle, there is nothing
+      more important...” he paused, “than to have a good sleep.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He moved as if to rise. The generals bowed and retired. It was past
+      midnight. Prince Andrew went out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The council of war, at which Prince Andrew had not been able to express
+      his opinion as he had hoped to, left on him a vague and uneasy impression.
+      Whether Dolgorúkov and Weyrother, or Kutúzov, Langeron, and the others who
+      did not approve of the plan of attack, were right—he did not know.
+      “But was it really not possible for Kutúzov to state his views plainly to
+      the Emperor? Is it possible that on account of court and personal
+      considerations tens of thousands of lives, and my life, <i>my</i> life,” he
+      thought, “must be risked?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, it is very likely that I shall be killed tomorrow,” he thought. And
+      suddenly, at this thought of death, a whole series of most distant, most
+      intimate, memories rose in his imagination: he remembered his last parting
+      from his father and his wife; he remembered the days when he first loved
+      her. He thought of her pregnancy and felt sorry for her and for himself,
+      and in a nervously emotional and softened mood he went out of the hut in
+      which he was billeted with Nesvítski and began to walk up and down before
+      it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The night was foggy and through the fog the moonlight gleamed
+      mysteriously. “Yes, tomorrow, tomorrow!” he thought. “Tomorrow everything
+      may be over for me! All these memories will be no more, none of them will
+      have any meaning for me. Tomorrow perhaps, even certainly, I have a
+      presentiment that for the first time I shall have to show all I can do.”
+       And his fancy pictured the battle, its loss, the concentration of fighting
+      at one point, and the hesitation of all the commanders. And then that
+      happy moment, that Toulon for which he had so long waited, presents itself
+      to him at last. He firmly and clearly expresses his opinion to Kutúzov, to
+      Weyrother, and to the Emperors. All are struck by the justness of his
+      views, but no one undertakes to carry them out, so he takes a regiment, a
+      division—stipulates that no one is to interfere with his arrangements—leads
+      his division to the decisive point, and gains the victory alone. “But
+      death and suffering?” suggested another voice. Prince Andrew, however, did
+      not answer that voice and went on dreaming of his triumphs. The
+      dispositions for the next battle are planned by him alone. Nominally he is
+      only an adjutant on Kutúzov’s staff, but he does everything alone. The
+      next battle is won by him alone. Kutúzov is removed and he is appointed...
+      “Well and then?” asked the other voice. “If before that you are not ten
+      times wounded, killed, or betrayed, well... what then?...” “Well then,”
+       Prince Andrew answered himself, “I don’t know what will happen and don’t
+      want to know, and can’t, but if I want this—want glory, want to be
+      known to men, want to be loved by them, it is not my fault that I want it
+      and want nothing but that and live only for that. Yes, for that alone! I
+      shall never tell anyone, but, oh God! what am I to do if I love nothing
+      but fame and men’s esteem? Death, wounds, the loss of family—I fear
+      nothing. And precious and dear as many persons are to me—father,
+      sister, wife—those dearest to me—yet dreadful and unnatural as
+      it seems, I would give them all at once for a moment of glory, of triumph
+      over men, of love from men I don’t know and never shall know, for the love
+      of these men here,” he thought, as he listened to voices in Kutúzov’s
+      courtyard. The voices were those of the orderlies who were packing up; one
+      voice, probably a coachman’s, was teasing Kutúzov’s old cook whom Prince
+      Andrew knew, and who was called Tit. He was saying, “Tit, I say, Tit!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well?” returned the old man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go, Tit, thresh a bit!” said the wag.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, go to the devil!” called out a voice, drowned by the laughter of the
+      orderlies and servants.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All the same, I love and value nothing but triumph over them all, I value
+      this mystic power and glory that is floating here above me in this mist!”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0062"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      That same night, Rostóv was with a platoon on skirmishing duty in front of
+      Bagratión’s detachment. His hussars were placed along the line in couples
+      and he himself rode along the line trying to master the sleepiness that
+      kept coming over him. An enormous space, with our army’s campfires dimly
+      glowing in the fog, could be seen behind him; in front of him was misty
+      darkness. Rostóv could see nothing, peer as he would into that foggy
+      distance: now something gleamed gray, now there was something black, now
+      little lights seemed to glimmer where the enemy ought to be, now he
+      fancied it was only something in his own eyes. His eyes kept closing, and
+      in his fancy appeared—now the Emperor, now Denísov, and now Moscow
+      memories—and he again hurriedly opened his eyes and saw close before
+      him the head and ears of the horse he was riding, and sometimes, when he
+      came within six paces of them, the black figures of hussars, but in the
+      distance was still the same misty darkness. “Why not?... It might easily
+      happen,” thought Rostóv, “that the Emperor will meet me and give me an
+      order as he would to any other officer; he’ll say: ‘Go and find out what’s
+      there.’ There are many stories of his getting to know an officer in just
+      such a chance way and attaching him to himself! What if he gave me a place
+      near him? Oh, how I would guard him, how I would tell him the truth, how I
+      would unmask his deceivers!” And in order to realize vividly his love
+      devotion to the sovereign, Rostóv pictured to himself an enemy or a
+      deceitful German, whom he would not only kill with pleasure but whom he
+      would slap in the face before the Emperor. Suddenly a distant shout
+      aroused him. He started and opened his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where am I? Oh yes, in the skirmishing line... pass and watchword—<i>shaft,
+      Olmütz.</i> What a nuisance that our squadron will be in reserve tomorrow,” he
+      thought. “I’ll ask leave to go to the front, this may be my only chance of
+      seeing the Emperor. It won’t be long now before I am off duty. I’ll take
+      another turn and when I get back I’ll go to the general and ask him.” He
+      readjusted himself in the saddle and touched up his horse to ride once
+      more round his hussars. It seemed to him that it was getting lighter. To
+      the left he saw a sloping descent lit up, and facing it a black knoll that
+      seemed as steep as a wall. On this knoll there was a white patch that
+      Rostóv could not at all make out: was it a glade in the wood lit up by the
+      moon, or some unmelted snow, or some white houses? He even thought
+      something moved on that white spot. “I expect it’s snow... that spot... a
+      spot—<i>une tache</i>,” he thought. “There now... it’s not a <i>tache</i>...
+      Natásha... sister, black eyes... Na... tasha... (Won’t she be surprised
+      when I tell her how I’ve seen the Emperor?) Natásha... take my
+      sabretache...”—“Keep to the right, your honor, there are bushes
+      here,” came the voice of an hussar, past whom Rostóv was riding in the act
+      of falling asleep. Rostóv lifted his head that had sunk almost to his
+      horse’s mane and pulled up beside the hussar. He was succumbing to
+      irresistible, youthful, childish drowsiness. “But what was I thinking? I
+      mustn’t forget. How shall I speak to the Emperor? No, that’s not it—that’s
+      tomorrow. Oh yes! Natásha... sabretache... saber them... Whom? The
+      hussars... Ah, the hussars with mustaches. Along the Tverskáya Street rode
+      the hussar with mustaches... I thought about him too, just opposite
+      Gúryev’s house... Old Gúryev.... Oh, but Denísov’s a fine fellow. But
+      that’s all nonsense. The chief thing is that the Emperor is here. How he
+      looked at me and wished to say something, but dared not.... No, it was I
+      who dared not. But that’s nonsense, the chief thing is not to forget the
+      important thing I was thinking of. Yes, Na-tásha, sabretache, oh, yes,
+      yes! That’s right!” And his head once more sank to his horse’s neck. All
+      at once it seemed to him that he was being fired at. “What? What? What?...
+      Cut them down! What?...” said Rostóv, waking up. At the moment he opened
+      his eyes he heard in front of him, where the enemy was, the long-drawn
+      shouts of thousands of voices. His horse and the horse of the hussar near
+      him pricked their ears at these shouts. Over there, where the shouting
+      came from, a fire flared up and went out again, then another, and all
+      along the French line on the hill fires flared up and the shouting grew
+      louder and louder. Rostóv could hear the sound of French words but could
+      not distinguish them. The din of many voices was too great; all he could
+      hear was: “ahahah!” and “rrrr!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s that? What do you make of it?” said Rostóv to the hussar beside
+      him. “That must be the enemy’s camp!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The hussar did not reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, don’t you hear it?” Rostóv asked again, after waiting for a reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who can tell, your honor?” replied the hussar reluctantly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “From the direction, it must be the enemy,” repeated Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It may be <i>he</i> or it may be nothing,” muttered the hussar. “It’s dark...
+      Steady!” he cried to his fidgeting horse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv’s horse was also getting restive: it pawed the frozen ground,
+      pricking its ears at the noise and looking at the lights. The shouting
+      grew still louder and merged into a general roar that only an army of
+      several thousand men could produce. The lights spread farther and farther,
+      probably along the line of the French camp. Rostóv no longer wanted to
+      sleep. The gay triumphant shouting of the enemy army had a stimulating
+      effect on him. <i>“Vive l’Empereur! l’Empereur!”</i> he now heard distinctly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They can’t be far off, probably just beyond the stream,” he said to the
+      hussar beside him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The hussar only sighed without replying and coughed angrily. The sound of
+      horse’s hoofs approaching at a trot along the line of hussars was heard,
+      and out of the foggy darkness the figure of a sergeant of hussars suddenly
+      appeared, looming huge as an elephant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your honor, the generals!” said the sergeant, riding up to Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv, still looking round toward the fires and the shouts, rode with the
+      sergeant to meet some mounted men who were riding along the line. One was
+      on a white horse. Prince Bagratión and Prince Dolgorúkov with their
+      adjutants had come to witness the curious phenomenon of the lights and
+      shouts in the enemy’s camp. Rostóv rode up to Bagratión, reported to him,
+      and then joined the adjutants listening to what the generals were saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Believe me,” said Prince Dolgorúkov, addressing Bagratión, “it is nothing
+      but a trick! He has retreated and ordered the rearguard to kindle fires
+      and make a noise to deceive us.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Hardly,” said Bagratión. “I saw them this evening on that knoll; if they
+      had retreated they would have withdrawn from that too.... Officer!” said
+      Bagratión to Rostóv, “are the enemy’s skirmishers still there?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “They were there this evening, but now I don’t know, your excellency.
+      Shall I go with some of my hussars to see?” replied Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bagratión stopped and, before replying, tried to see Rostóv’s face in the
+      mist.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, go and see,” he said, after a pause.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, sir.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv spurred his horse, called to Sergeant Fédchenko and two other
+      hussars, told them to follow him, and trotted downhill in the direction
+      from which the shouting came. He felt both frightened and pleased to be
+      riding alone with three hussars into that mysterious and dangerous misty
+      distance where no one had been before him. Bagratión called to him from
+      the hill not to go beyond the stream, but Rostóv pretended not to hear him
+      and did not stop but rode on and on, continually mistaking bushes for
+      trees and gullies for men and continually discovering his mistakes. Having
+      descended the hill at a trot, he no longer saw either our own or the
+      enemy’s fires, but heard the shouting of the French more loudly and
+      distinctly. In the valley he saw before him something like a river, but
+      when he reached it he found it was a road. Having come out onto the road
+      he reined in his horse, hesitating whether to ride along it or cross it
+      and ride over the black field up the hillside. To keep to the road which
+      gleamed white in the mist would have been safer because it would be easier
+      to see people coming along it. “Follow me!” said he, crossed the road, and
+      began riding up the hill at a gallop toward the point where the French
+      pickets had been standing that evening.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your honor, there he is!” cried one of the hussars behind him. And before
+      Rostóv had time to make out what the black thing was that had suddenly
+      appeared in the fog, there was a flash, followed by a report, and a bullet
+      whizzing high up in the mist with a plaintive sound passed out of hearing.
+      Another musket missed fire but flashed in the pan. Rostóv turned his horse
+      and galloped back. Four more reports followed at intervals, and the
+      bullets passed somewhere in the fog singing in different tones. Rostóv
+      reined in his horse, whose spirits had risen, like his own, at the firing,
+      and went back at a footpace. “Well, some more! Some more!” a merry voice
+      was saying in his soul. But no more shots came.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only when approaching Bagratión did Rostóv let his horse gallop again, and
+      with his hand at the salute rode up to the general.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dolgorúkov was still insisting that the French had retreated and had only
+      lit fires to deceive us.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What does that prove?” he was saying as Rostóv rode up. “They might
+      retreat and leave the pickets.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s plain that they have not all gone yet, Prince,” said Bagratión.
+      “Wait till tomorrow morning, we’ll find out everything tomorrow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The picket is still on the hill, your excellency, just where it was in
+      the evening,” reported Rostóv, stooping forward with his hand at the
+      salute and unable to repress the smile of delight induced by his ride and
+      especially by the sound of the bullets.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very good, very good,” said Bagratión. “Thank you, officer.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency,” said Rostóv, “may I ask a favor?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Tomorrow our squadron is to be in reserve. May I ask to be attached to
+      the first squadron?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s your name?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Count Rostóv.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, very well, you may stay in attendance on me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Count Ilyá Rostóv’s son?” asked Dolgorúkov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Rostóv did not reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then I may reckon on it, your excellency?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I will give the order.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Tomorrow very likely I may be sent with some message to the Emperor,”
+       thought Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Thank God!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The fires and shouting in the enemy’s army were occasioned by the fact
+      that while Napoleon’s proclamation was being read to the troops the
+      Emperor himself rode round his bivouacs. The soldiers, on seeing him, lit
+      wisps of straw and ran after him, shouting, <i>“Vive l’Empereur!”</i> Napoleon’s
+      proclamation was as follows:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Soldiers! The Russian army is advancing against you to avenge the Austrian
+      army of Ulm. They are the same battalions you broke at Hollabrünn and have
+      pursued ever since to this place. The position we occupy is a strong one,
+      and while they are marching to go round me on the right they will expose a
+      flank to me. Soldiers! I will myself direct your battalions. I will keep
+      out of fire if you with your habitual valor carry disorder and confusion
+      into the enemy’s ranks, but should victory be in doubt, even for a moment,
+      you will see your Emperor exposing himself to the first blows of the
+      enemy, for there must be no doubt of victory, especially on this day when
+      what is at stake is the honor of the French infantry, so necessary to the
+      honor of our nation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Do not break your ranks on the plea of removing the wounded! Let every man
+      be fully imbued with the thought that we must defeat these hirelings of
+      England, inspired by such hatred of our nation! This victory will conclude
+      our campaign and we can return to winter quarters, where fresh French
+      troops who are being raised in France will join us, and the peace I shall
+      conclude will be worthy of my people, of you, and of myself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      NAPOLEON
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0063"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At five in the morning it was still quite dark. The troops of the center,
+      the reserves, and Bagratión’s right flank had not yet moved, but on the
+      left flank the columns of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, which were to
+      be the first to descend the heights to attack the French right flank and
+      drive it into the Bohemian mountains according to plan, were already up
+      and astir. The smoke of the campfires, into which they were throwing
+      everything superfluous, made the eyes smart. It was cold and dark. The
+      officers were hurriedly drinking tea and breakfasting, the soldiers,
+      munching biscuit and beating a tattoo with their feet to warm themselves,
+      gathering round the fires throwing into the flames the remains of sheds,
+      chairs, tables, wheels, tubs, and everything that they did not want or
+      could not carry away with them. Austrian column guides were moving in and
+      out among the Russian troops and served as heralds of the advance. As soon
+      as an Austrian officer showed himself near a commanding officer’s
+      quarters, the regiment began to move: the soldiers ran from the fires,
+      thrust their pipes into their boots, their bags into the carts, got their
+      muskets ready, and formed rank. The officers buttoned up their coats,
+      buckled on their swords and pouches, and moved along the ranks shouting.
+      The train drivers and orderlies harnessed and packed the wagons and tied
+      on the loads. The adjutants and battalion and regimental commanders
+      mounted, crossed themselves, gave final instructions, orders, and
+      commissions to the baggage men who remained behind, and the monotonous
+      tramp of thousands of feet resounded. The column moved forward without
+      knowing where and unable, from the masses around them, the smoke and the
+      increasing fog, to see either the place they were leaving or that to which
+      they were going.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A soldier on the march is hemmed in and borne along by his regiment as
+      much as a sailor is by his ship. However far he has walked, whatever
+      strange, unknown, and dangerous places he reaches, just as a sailor is
+      always surrounded by the same decks, masts, and rigging of his ship, so
+      the soldier always has around him the same comrades, the same ranks, the
+      same sergeant major Iván Mítrich, the same company dog Jack, and the same
+      commanders. The sailor rarely cares to know the latitude in which his ship
+      is sailing, but on the day of battle—heaven knows how and whence—a
+      stern note of which all are conscious sounds in the moral atmosphere of an
+      army, announcing the approach of something decisive and solemn, and
+      awakening in the men an unusual curiosity. On the day of battle the
+      soldiers excitedly try to get beyond the interests of their regiment, they
+      listen intently, look about, and eagerly ask concerning what is going on
+      around them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The fog had grown so dense that though it was growing light they could not
+      see ten paces ahead. Bushes looked like gigantic trees and level ground
+      like cliffs and slopes. Anywhere, on any side, one might encounter an
+      enemy invisible ten paces off. But the columns advanced for a long time,
+      always in the same fog, descending and ascending hills, avoiding gardens
+      and enclosures, going over new and unknown ground, and nowhere
+      encountering the enemy. On the contrary, the soldiers became aware that in
+      front, behind, and on all sides, other Russian columns were moving in the
+      same direction. Every soldier felt glad to know that to the unknown place
+      where he was going, many more of our men were going too.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There now, the Kúrskies have also gone past,” was being said in the
+      ranks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s wonderful what a lot of our troops have gathered, lads! Last night I
+      looked at the campfires and there was no end of them. A regular Moscow!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Though none of the column commanders rode up to the ranks or talked to the
+      men (the commanders, as we saw at the council of war, were out of humor
+      and dissatisfied with the affair, and so did not exert themselves to cheer
+      the men but merely carried out the orders), yet the troops marched gaily,
+      as they always do when going into action, especially to an attack. But
+      when they had marched for about an hour in the dense fog, the greater part
+      of the men had to halt and an unpleasant consciousness of some dislocation
+      and blunder spread through the ranks. How such a consciousness is
+      communicated is very difficult to define, but it certainly is communicated
+      very surely, and flows rapidly, imperceptibly, and irrepressibly, as water
+      does in a creek. Had the Russian army been alone without any allies, it
+      might perhaps have been a long time before this consciousness of
+      mismanagement became a general conviction, but as it was, the disorder was
+      readily and naturally attributed to the stupid Germans, and everyone was
+      convinced that a dangerous muddle had been occasioned by the sausage
+      eaters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why have we stopped? Is the way blocked? Or have we already come up
+      against the French?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, one can’t hear them. They’d be firing if we had.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “They were in a hurry enough to start us, and now here we stand in the
+      middle of a field without rhyme or reason. It’s all those damned Germans’
+      muddling! What stupid devils!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I’d send them on in front, but no fear, they’re crowding up behind.
+      And now here we stand hungry.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I say, shall we soon be clear? They say the cavalry are blocking the
+      way,” said an officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, those damned Germans! They don’t know their own country!” said
+      another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What division are you?” shouted an adjutant, riding up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Eighteenth.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Then why are you here? You should have gone on long ago, now you won’t
+      get there till evening.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What stupid orders! They don’t themselves know what they are doing!” said
+      the officer and rode off.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Then a general rode past shouting something angrily, not in Russian.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Tafa-lafa! But what he’s jabbering no one can make out,” said a soldier,
+      mimicking the general who had ridden away. “I’d shoot them, the
+      scoundrels!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “We were ordered to be at the place before nine, but we haven’t got
+      halfway. Fine orders!” was being repeated on different sides.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And the feeling of energy with which the troops had started began to turn
+      into vexation and anger at the stupid arrangements and at the Germans.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The cause of the confusion was that while the Austrian cavalry was moving
+      toward our left flank, the higher command found that our center was too
+      far separated from our right flank and the cavalry were all ordered to
+      turn back to the right. Several thousand cavalry crossed in front of the
+      infantry, who had to wait.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the front an altercation occurred between an Austrian guide and a
+      Russian general. The general shouted a demand that the cavalry should be
+      halted, the Austrian argued that not he, but the higher command, was to
+      blame. The troops meanwhile stood growing listless and dispirited. After
+      an hour’s delay they at last moved on, descending the hill. The fog that
+      was dispersing on the hill lay still more densely below, where they were
+      descending. In front in the fog a shot was heard and then another, at
+      first irregularly at varying intervals—trata...tat—and then
+      more and more regularly and rapidly, and the action at the Goldbach Stream
+      began.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Not expecting to come on the enemy down by the stream, and having stumbled
+      on him in the fog, hearing no encouraging word from their commanders, and
+      with a consciousness of being too late spreading through the ranks, and
+      above all being unable to see anything in front or around them in the
+      thick fog, the Russians exchanged shots with the enemy lazily and advanced
+      and again halted, receiving no timely orders from the officers or
+      adjutants who wandered about in the fog in those unknown surroundings
+      unable to find their own regiments. In this way the action began for the
+      first, second, and third columns, which had gone down into the valley. The
+      fourth column, with which Kutúzov was, stood on the Pratzen Heights.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Below, where the fight was beginning, there was still thick fog; on the
+      higher ground it was clearing, but nothing could be seen of what was going
+      on in front. Whether all the enemy forces were, as we supposed, six miles
+      away, or whether they were near by in that sea of mist, no one knew till
+      after eight o’clock.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was nine o’clock in the morning. The fog lay unbroken like a sea down
+      below, but higher up at the village of Schlappanitz where Napoleon stood
+      with his marshals around him, it was quite light. Above him was a clear
+      blue sky, and the sun’s vast orb quivered like a huge hollow, crimson
+      float on the surface of that milky sea of mist. The whole French army, and
+      even Napoleon himself with his staff, were not on the far side of the
+      streams and hollows of Sokolnitz and Schlappanitz beyond which we intended
+      to take up our position and begin the action, but were on this side, so
+      close to our own forces that Napoleon with the naked eye could distinguish
+      a mounted man from one on foot. Napoleon, in the blue cloak which he had
+      worn on his Italian campaign, sat on his small gray Arab horse a little in
+      front of his marshals. He gazed silently at the hills which seemed to rise
+      out of the sea of mist and on which the Russian troops were moving in the
+      distance, and he listened to the sounds of firing in the valley. Not a
+      single muscle of his face—which in those days was still thin—moved.
+      His gleaming eyes were fixed intently on one spot. His predictions were
+      being justified. Part of the Russian force had already descended into the
+      valley toward the ponds and lakes and part were leaving these Pratzen
+      Heights which he intended to attack and regarded as the key to the
+      position. He saw over the mist that in a hollow between two hills near the
+      village of Pratzen, the Russian columns, their bayonets glittering, were
+      moving continuously in one direction toward the valley and disappearing
+      one after another into the mist. From information he had received the
+      evening before, from the sound of wheels and footsteps heard by the
+      outposts during the night, by the disorderly movement of the Russian
+      columns, and from all indications, he saw clearly that the allies believed
+      him to be far away in front of them, and that the columns moving near
+      Pratzen constituted the center of the Russian army, and that that center
+      was already sufficiently weakened to be successfully attacked. But still
+      he did not begin the engagement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Today was a great day for him—the anniversary of his coronation.
+      Before dawn he had slept for a few hours, and refreshed, vigorous, and in
+      good spirits, he mounted his horse and rode out into the field in that
+      happy mood in which everything seems possible and everything succeeds. He
+      sat motionless, looking at the heights visible above the mist, and his
+      cold face wore that special look of confident, self-complacent happiness
+      that one sees on the face of a boy happily in love. The marshals stood
+      behind him not venturing to distract his attention. He looked now at the
+      Pratzen Heights, now at the sun floating up out of the mist.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the sun had entirely emerged from the fog, and fields and mist were
+      aglow with dazzling light—as if he had only awaited this to begin
+      the action—he drew the glove from his shapely white hand, made a
+      sign with it to the marshals, and ordered the action to begin. The
+      marshals, accompanied by adjutants, galloped off in different directions,
+      and a few minutes later the chief forces of the French army moved rapidly
+      toward those Pratzen Heights which were being more and more denuded by
+      Russian troops moving down the valley to their left.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0064"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At eight o’clock Kutúzov rode to Pratzen at the head of the fourth column,
+      Milorádovich’s, the one that was to take the place of Przebyszéwski’s and
+      Langeron’s columns which had already gone down into the valley. He greeted
+      the men of the foremost regiment and gave them the order to march, thereby
+      indicating that he intended to lead that column himself. When he had
+      reached the village of Pratzen he halted. Prince Andrew was behind, among
+      the immense number forming the commander in chief’s suite. He was in a
+      state of suppressed excitement and irritation, though controlledly calm as
+      a man is at the approach of a long-awaited moment. He was firmly convinced
+      that this was the day of his Toulon, or his bridge of Arcola. How it would
+      come about he did not know, but he felt sure it would do so. The locality
+      and the position of our troops were known to him as far as they could be
+      known to anyone in our army. His own strategic plan, which obviously could
+      not now be carried out, was forgotten. Now, entering into Weyrother’s
+      plan, Prince Andrew considered possible contingencies and formed new
+      projects such as might call for his rapidity of perception and decision.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To the left down below in the mist, the musketry fire of unseen forces
+      could be heard. It was there Prince Andrew thought the fight would
+      concentrate. “There we shall encounter difficulties, and there,” thought
+      he, “I shall be sent with a brigade or division, and there, standard in
+      hand, I shall go forward and break whatever is in front of me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He could not look calmly at the standards of the passing battalions.
+      Seeing them he kept thinking, “That may be the very standard with which I
+      shall lead the army.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In the morning all that was left of the night mist on the heights was a
+      hoar frost now turning to dew, but in the valleys it still lay like a
+      milk-white sea. Nothing was visible in the valley to the left into which
+      our troops had descended and from whence came the sounds of firing. Above
+      the heights was the dark clear sky, and to the right the vast orb of the
+      sun. In front, far off on the farther shore of that sea of mist, some
+      wooded hills were discernible, and it was there the enemy probably was,
+      for something could be descried. On the right the Guards were entering the
+      misty region with a sound of hoofs and wheels and now and then a gleam of
+      bayonets; to the left beyond the village similar masses of cavalry came up
+      and disappeared in the sea of mist. In front and behind moved infantry.
+      The commander in chief was standing at the end of the village letting the
+      troops pass by him. That morning Kutúzov seemed worn and irritable. The
+      infantry passing before him came to a halt without any command being
+      given, apparently obstructed by something in front.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do order them to form into battalion columns and go round the village!”
+       he said angrily to a general who had ridden up. “Don’t you understand,
+      your excellency, my dear sir, that you must not defile through narrow
+      village streets when we are marching against the enemy?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I intended to re-form them beyond the village, your excellency,” answered
+      the general.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov laughed bitterly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You’ll make a fine thing of it, deploying in sight of the enemy! Very
+      fine!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The enemy is still far away, your excellency. According to the
+      dispositions...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The dispositions!” exclaimed Kutúzov bitterly. “Who told you that?...
+      Kindly do as you are ordered.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, sir.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear fellow,” Nesvítski whispered to Prince Andrew, “the old man is as
+      surly as a dog.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      An Austrian officer in a white uniform with green plumes in his hat
+      galloped up to Kutúzov and asked in the Emperor’s name had the fourth
+      column advanced into action.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov turned round without answering and his eye happened to fall upon
+      Prince Andrew, who was beside him. Seeing him, Kutúzov’s malevolent and
+      caustic expression softened, as if admitting that what was being done was
+      not his adjutant’s fault, and still not answering the Austrian adjutant,
+      he addressed Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go, my dear fellow, and see whether the third division has passed the
+      village. Tell it to stop and await my orders.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Hardly had Prince Andrew started than he stopped him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And ask whether sharpshooters have been posted,” he added. “What are they
+      doing? What are they doing?” he murmured to himself, still not replying to
+      the Austrian.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew galloped off to execute the order.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Overtaking the battalions that continued to advance, he stopped the third
+      division and convinced himself that there really were no sharpshooters in
+      front of our columns. The colonel at the head of the regiment was much
+      surprised at the commander in chief’s order to throw out skirmishers. He
+      had felt perfectly sure that there were other troops in front of him and
+      that the enemy must be at least six miles away. There was really nothing
+      to be seen in front except a barren descent hidden by dense mist. Having
+      given orders in the commander in chief’s name to rectify this omission,
+      Prince Andrew galloped back. Kutúzov still in the same place, his stout
+      body resting heavily in the saddle with the lassitude of age, sat yawning
+      wearily with closed eyes. The troops were no longer moving, but stood with
+      the butts of their muskets on the ground.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All right, all right!” he said to Prince Andrew, and turned to a general
+      who, watch in hand, was saying it was time they started as all the
+      left-flank columns had already descended.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Plenty of time, your excellency,” muttered Kutúzov in the midst of a
+      yawn. “Plenty of time,” he repeated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just then at a distance behind Kutúzov was heard the sound of regiments
+      saluting, and this sound rapidly came nearer along the whole extended line
+      of the advancing Russian columns. Evidently the person they were greeting
+      was riding quickly. When the soldiers of the regiment in front of which
+      Kutúzov was standing began to shout, he rode a little to one side and
+      looked round with a frown. Along the road from Pratzen galloped what
+      looked like a squadron of horsemen in various uniforms. Two of them rode
+      side by side in front, at full gallop. One in a black uniform with white
+      plumes in his hat rode a bobtailed chestnut horse, the other who was in a
+      white uniform rode a black one. These were the two Emperors followed by
+      their suites. Kutúzov, affecting the manners of an old soldier at the
+      front, gave the command “Attention!” and rode up to the Emperors with a
+      salute. His whole appearance and manner were suddenly transformed. He put
+      on the air of a subordinate who obeys without reasoning. With an
+      affectation of respect which evidently struck Alexander unpleasantly, he
+      rode up and saluted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This unpleasant impression merely flitted over the young and happy face of
+      the Emperor like a cloud of haze across a clear sky and vanished. After
+      his illness he looked rather thinner that day than on the field of Olmütz
+      where Bolkónski had seen him for the first time abroad, but there was
+      still the same bewitching combination of majesty and mildness in his fine
+      gray eyes, and on his delicate lips the same capacity for varying
+      expression and the same prevalent appearance of goodhearted innocent
+      youth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the Olmütz review he had seemed more majestic; here he seemed brighter
+      and more energetic. He was slightly flushed after galloping two miles, and
+      reining in his horse he sighed restfully and looked round at the faces of
+      his suite, young and animated as his own. Czartorýski, Novosíltsev, Prince
+      Volkónsky, Strógonov, and the others, all richly dressed gay young men on
+      splendid, well-groomed, fresh, only slightly heated horses, exchanging
+      remarks and smiling, had stopped behind the Emperor. The Emperor Francis,
+      a rosy, long faced young man, sat very erect on his handsome black horse,
+      looking about him in a leisurely and preoccupied manner. He beckoned to
+      one of his white adjutants and asked some question—“Most likely he
+      is asking at what o’clock they started,” thought Prince Andrew, watching
+      his old acquaintance with a smile he could not repress as he recalled his
+      reception at Brünn. In the Emperors’ suite were the picked young orderly
+      officers of the Guard and line regiments, Russian and Austrian. Among them
+      were grooms leading the Tsar’s beautiful relay horses covered with
+      embroidered cloths.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As when a window is opened a whiff of fresh air from the fields enters a
+      stuffy room, so a whiff of youthfulness, energy, and confidence of success
+      reached Kutúzov’s cheerless staff with the galloping advent of all these
+      brilliant young men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why aren’t you beginning, Michael Ilariónovich?” said the Emperor
+      Alexander hurriedly to Kutúzov, glancing courteously at the same time at
+      the Emperor Francis.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am waiting, Your Majesty,” answered Kutúzov, bending forward
+      respectfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor, frowning slightly, bent his ear forward as if he had not
+      quite heard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Waiting, Your Majesty,” repeated Kutúzov. (Prince Andrew noted that
+      Kutúzov’s upper lip twitched unnaturally as he said the word “waiting.”)
+      “Not all the columns have formed up yet, Your Majesty.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The Tsar heard but obviously did not like the reply; he shrugged his
+      rather round shoulders and glanced at Novosíltsev who was near him, as if
+      complaining of Kutúzov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You know, Michael Ilariónovich, we are not on the Empress’ Field where
+      a parade does not begin till all the troops are assembled,” said the Tsar
+      with another glance at the Emperor Francis, as if inviting him if not to
+      join in at least to listen to what he was saying. But the Emperor Francis
+      continued to look about him and did not listen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That is just why I do not begin, sire,” said Kutúzov in a resounding
+      voice, apparently to preclude the possibility of not being heard, and
+      again something in his face twitched—“That is just why I do not
+      begin, sire, because we are not on parade and not on the Empress’
+      Field,” said he clearly and distinctly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the Emperor’s suite all exchanged rapid looks that expressed
+      dissatisfaction and reproach. “Old though he may be, he should not, he
+      certainly should not, speak like that,” their glances seemed to say.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Tsar looked intently and observantly into Kutúzov’s eye waiting to
+      hear whether he would say anything more. But Kutúzov, with respectfully
+      bowed head, seemed also to be waiting. The silence lasted for about a
+      minute.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “However, if you command it, Your Majesty,” said Kutúzov, lifting his
+      head and again assuming his former tone of a dull, unreasoning, but submissive
+      general.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He touched his horse and having called Milorádovich, the commander of the
+      column, gave him the order to advance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The troops again began to move, and two battalions of the Nóvgorod and one
+      of the Ápsheron regiment went forward past the Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As this Ápsheron battalion marched by, the red-faced Milorádovich, without
+      his greatcoat, with his Orders on his breast and an enormous tuft of
+      plumes in his cocked hat worn on one side with its corners front and back,
+      galloped strenuously forward, and with a dashing salute reined in his
+      horse before the Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “God be with you, general!” said the Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Ma foi, sire, nous ferons ce qui sera dans notre possibilité, sire,”</i> * he
+      answered gaily, raising nevertheless ironic smiles among the gentlemen of
+      the Tsar’s suite by his poor French.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “Indeed, Sire, we shall do everything it is possible to
+     do, Sire.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Milorádovich wheeled his horse sharply and stationed himself a little
+      behind the Emperor. The Ápsheron men, excited by the Tsar’s presence,
+      passed in step before the Emperors and their suites at a bold, brisk pace.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lads!” shouted Milorádovich in a loud, self-confident, and cheery voice,
+      obviously so elated by the sound of firing, by the prospect of battle, and
+      by the sight of the gallant Ápsherons, his comrades in Suvórov’s time, now
+      passing so gallantly before the Emperors, that he forgot the sovereigns’
+      presence. “Lads, it’s not the first village you’ve had to take,” cried he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Glad to do our best!” shouted the soldiers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor’s horse started at the sudden cry. This horse that had carried
+      the sovereign at reviews in Russia bore him also here on the field of
+      Austerlitz, enduring the heedless blows of his left foot and pricking its
+      ears at the sound of shots just as it had done on the Empress’ Field, not
+      understanding the significance of the firing, nor of the nearness of the
+      Emperor Francis’ black cob, nor of all that was being said, thought, and
+      felt that day by its rider.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor turned with a smile to one of his followers and made a remark
+      to him, pointing to the gallant Ápsherons.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0065"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov accompanied by his adjutants rode at a walking pace behind the
+      carabineers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he had gone less than half a mile in the rear of the column he
+      stopped at a solitary, deserted house that had probably once been an inn,
+      where two roads parted. Both of them led downhill and troops were marching
+      along both.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The fog had begun to clear and enemy troops were already dimly visible
+      about a mile and a half off on the opposite heights. Down below, on the
+      left, the firing became more distinct. Kutúzov had stopped and was
+      speaking to an Austrian general. Prince Andrew, who was a little behind
+      looking at them, turned to an adjutant to ask him for a field glass.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Look, look!” said this adjutant, looking not at the troops in the
+      distance, but down the hill before him. “It’s the French!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The two generals and the adjutant took hold of the field glass, trying to
+      snatch it from one another. The expression on all their faces suddenly
+      changed to one of horror. The French were supposed to be a mile and a half
+      away, but had suddenly and unexpectedly appeared just in front of us.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s the enemy?... No!... Yes, see it is!... for certain.... But how is
+      that?” said different voices.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With the naked eye Prince Andrew saw below them to the right, not more
+      than five hundred paces from where Kutúzov was standing, a dense French
+      column coming up to meet the Ápsherons.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Here it is! The decisive moment has arrived. My turn has come,” thought
+      Prince Andrew, and striking his horse he rode up to Kutúzov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Ápsherons must be stopped, your excellency,” cried he. But at that
+      very instant a cloud of smoke spread all round, firing was heard quite
+      close at hand, and a voice of naïve terror barely two steps from Prince
+      Andrew shouted, “Brothers! All’s lost!” And at this as if at a command,
+      everyone began to run.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Confused and ever-increasing crowds were running back to where five
+      minutes before the troops had passed the Emperors. Not only would it have
+      been difficult to stop that crowd, it was even impossible not to be
+      carried back with it oneself. Bolkónski only tried not to lose touch with
+      it, and looked around bewildered and unable to grasp what was happening in
+      front of him. Nesvítski with an angry face, red and unlike himself, was
+      shouting to Kutúzov that if he did not ride away at once he would
+      certainly be taken prisoner. Kutúzov remained in the same place and
+      without answering drew out a handkerchief. Blood was flowing from his
+      cheek. Prince Andrew forced his way to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are wounded?” he asked, hardly able to master the trembling of his
+      lower jaw.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The wound is not here, it is there!” said Kutúzov, pressing the
+      handkerchief to his wounded cheek and pointing to the fleeing soldiers.
+      “Stop them!” he shouted, and at the same moment, probably realizing that
+      it was impossible to stop them, spurred his horse and rode to the right.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A fresh wave of the flying mob caught him and bore him back with it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The troops were running in such a dense mass that once surrounded by them
+      it was difficult to get out again. One was shouting, “Get on! Why are you
+      hindering us?” Another in the same place turned round and fired in the
+      air; a third was striking the horse Kutúzov himself rode. Having by a
+      great effort got away to the left from that flood of men, Kutúzov, with
+      his suite diminished by more than half, rode toward a sound of artillery
+      fire near by. Having forced his way out of the crowd of fugitives, Prince
+      Andrew, trying to keep near Kutúzov, saw on the slope of the hill amid the
+      smoke a Russian battery that was still firing and Frenchmen running toward
+      it. Higher up stood some Russian infantry, neither moving forward to
+      protect the battery nor backward with the fleeing crowd. A mounted general
+      separated himself from the infantry and approached Kutúzov. Of Kutúzov’s
+      suite only four remained. They were all pale and exchanged looks in
+      silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Stop those wretches!” gasped Kutúzov to the regimental commander,
+      pointing to the flying soldiers; but at that instant, as if to punish him
+      for those words, bullets flew hissing across the regiment and across
+      Kutúzov’s suite like a flock of little birds.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French had attacked the battery and, seeing Kutúzov, were firing at
+      him. After this volley the regimental commander clutched at his leg;
+      several soldiers fell, and a second lieutenant who was holding the flag
+      let it fall from his hands. It swayed and fell, but caught on the muskets
+      of the nearest soldiers. The soldiers started firing without orders.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh! Oh! Oh!” groaned Kutúzov despairingly and looked around....
+      “Bolkónski!” he whispered, his voice trembling from a consciousness of the
+      feebleness of age, “Bolkónski!” he whispered, pointing to the disordered
+      battalion and at the enemy, “what’s that?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But before he had finished speaking, Prince Andrew, feeling tears of shame
+      and anger choking him, had already leapt from his horse and run to the
+      standard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Forward, lads!” he shouted in a voice piercing as a child’s.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Here it is!” thought he, seizing the staff of the standard and hearing
+      with pleasure the whistle of bullets evidently aimed at him. Several
+      soldiers fell.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hurrah!” shouted Prince Andrew, and, scarcely able to hold up the heavy
+      standard, he ran forward with full confidence that the whole battalion
+      would follow him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And really he only ran a few steps alone. One soldier moved and then
+      another and soon the whole battalion ran forward shouting “Hurrah!” and
+      overtook him. A sergeant of the battalion ran up and took the flag that
+      was swaying from its weight in Prince Andrew’s hands, but he was
+      immediately killed. Prince Andrew again seized the standard and, dragging
+      it by the staff, ran on with the battalion. In front he saw our
+      artillerymen, some of whom were fighting, while others, having abandoned
+      their guns, were running toward him. He also saw French infantry soldiers
+      who were seizing the artillery horses and turning the guns round. Prince
+      Andrew and the battalion were already within twenty paces of the cannon.
+      He heard the whistle of bullets above him unceasingly and to right and
+      left of him soldiers continually groaned and dropped. But he did not look
+      at them: he looked only at what was going on in front of him—at the
+      battery. He now saw clearly the figure of a red-haired gunner with his
+      shako knocked awry, pulling one end of a mop while a French soldier tugged
+      at the other. He could distinctly see the distraught yet angry expression
+      on the faces of these two men, who evidently did not realize what they
+      were doing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What are they about?” thought Prince Andrew as he gazed at them. “Why
+      doesn’t the red-haired gunner run away as he is unarmed? Why doesn’t the
+      Frenchman stab him? He will not get away before the Frenchman remembers
+      his bayonet and stabs him....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And really another French soldier, trailing his musket, ran up to the
+      struggling men, and the fate of the red-haired gunner, who had
+      triumphantly secured the mop and still did not realize what awaited him,
+      was about to be decided. But Prince Andrew did not see how it ended. It
+      seemed to him as though one of the soldiers near him hit him on the head
+      with the full swing of a bludgeon. It hurt a little, but the worst of it
+      was that the pain distracted him and prevented his seeing what he had been
+      looking at.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way,” thought he, and fell
+      on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of the
+      Frenchmen with the gunners ended, whether the red-haired gunner had been
+      killed or not and whether the cannon had been captured or saved. But he
+      saw nothing. Above him there was now nothing but the sky—the lofty
+      sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds gliding
+      slowly across it. “How quiet, peaceful, and solemn; not at all as I ran,”
+       thought Prince Andrew—“not as we ran, shouting and fighting, not at
+      all as the gunner and the Frenchman with frightened and angry faces
+      struggled for the mop: how differently do those clouds glide across that
+      lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And
+      how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all
+      falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that.
+      But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank
+      God!...”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0066"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On our right flank commanded by Bagratión, at nine o’clock the battle had
+      not yet begun. Not wishing to agree to Dolgorúkov’s demand to commence the
+      action, and wishing to avert responsibility from himself, Prince Bagratión
+      proposed to Dolgorúkov to send to inquire of the commander in chief.
+      Bagratión knew that as the distance between the two flanks was more than
+      six miles, even if the messenger were not killed (which he very likely
+      would be), and found the commander in chief (which would be very
+      difficult), he would not be able to get back before evening.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bagratión cast his large, expressionless, sleepy eyes round his suite, and
+      the boyish face of Rostóv, breathless with excitement and hope, was the first
+      to catch his eye. He sent him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And if I should meet His Majesty before I meet the commander in chief,
+      your excellency?” said Rostóv, with his hand to his cap.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You can give the message to His Majesty,” said Dolgorúkov, hurriedly
+      interrupting Bagratión.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On being relieved from picket duty Rostóv had managed to get a few hours’
+      sleep before morning and felt cheerful, bold, and resolute, with
+      elasticity of movement, faith in his good fortune, and generally in that
+      state of mind which makes everything seem possible, pleasant, and easy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All his wishes were being fulfilled that morning: there was to be a
+      general engagement in which he was taking part, more than that, he was
+      orderly to the bravest general, and still more, he was going with a
+      message to Kutúzov, perhaps even to the sovereign himself. The morning was
+      bright, he had a good horse under him, and his heart was full of joy and
+      happiness. On receiving the order he gave his horse the rein and galloped
+      along the line. At first he rode along the line of Bagratión’s troops,
+      which had not yet advanced into action but were standing motionless; then
+      he came to the region occupied by Uvárov’s cavalry and here he noticed a
+      stir and signs of preparation for battle; having passed Uvárov’s cavalry
+      he clearly heard the sound of cannon and musketry ahead of him. The firing
+      grew louder and louder.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the fresh morning air were now heard, not two or three musket shots at
+      irregular intervals as before, followed by one or two cannon shots, but a
+      roll of volleys of musketry from the slopes of the hill before Pratzen,
+      interrupted by such frequent reports of cannon that sometimes several of
+      them were not separated from one another but merged into a general roar.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He could see puffs of musketry smoke that seemed to chase one another down
+      the hillsides, and clouds of cannon smoke rolling, spreading, and mingling
+      with one another. He could also, by the gleam of bayonets visible through
+      the smoke, make out moving masses of infantry and narrow lines of
+      artillery with green caissons.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv stopped his horse for a moment on a hillock to see what was going
+      on, but strain his attention as he would he could not understand or make
+      out anything of what was happening: there in the smoke men of some sort
+      were moving about, in front and behind moved lines of troops; but why,
+      whither, and who they were, it was impossible to make out. These sights
+      and sounds had no depressing or intimidating effect on him; on the
+      contrary, they stimulated his energy and determination.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go on! Go on! Give it them!” he mentally exclaimed at these sounds, and
+      again proceeded to gallop along the line, penetrating farther and farther
+      into the region where the army was already in action.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How it will be there I don’t know, but all will be well!” thought Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After passing some Austrian troops he noticed that the next part of the
+      line (the Guards) was already in action.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So much the better! I shall see it close,” he thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was riding almost along the front line. A handful of men came galloping
+      toward him. They were our Uhlans who with disordered ranks were returning
+      from the attack. Rostóv got out of their way, involuntarily noticed that
+      one of them was bleeding, and galloped on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That is no business of mine,” he thought. He had not ridden many hundred
+      yards after that before he saw to his left, across the whole width of the
+      field, an enormous mass of cavalry in brilliant white uniforms, mounted on
+      black horses, trotting straight toward him and across his path. Rostóv put
+      his horse to full gallop to get out of the way of these men, and he would
+      have got clear had they continued at the same speed, but they kept
+      increasing their pace, so that some of the horses were already galloping.
+      Rostóv heard the thud of their hoofs and the jingle of their weapons and
+      saw their horses, their figures, and even their faces, more and more
+      distinctly. They were our Horse Guards, advancing to attack the French
+      cavalry that was coming to meet them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Horse Guards were galloping, but still holding in their horses. Rostóv
+      could already see their faces and heard the command: “Charge!” shouted by
+      an officer who was urging his thoroughbred to full speed. Rostóv, fearing
+      to be crushed or swept into the attack on the French, galloped along the
+      front as hard as his horse could go, but still was not in time to avoid
+      them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The last of the Horse Guards, a huge pockmarked fellow, frowned angrily on
+      seeing Rostóv before him, with whom he would inevitably collide. This
+      Guardsman would certainly have bowled Rostóv and his Bedouin over (Rostóv
+      felt himself quite tiny and weak compared to these gigantic men and
+      horses) had it not occurred to Rostóv to flourish his whip before the eyes
+      of the Guardsman’s horse. The heavy black horse, sixteen hands high,
+      shied, throwing back its ears; but the pockmarked Guardsman drove his huge
+      spurs in violently, and the horse, flourishing its tail and extending its
+      neck, galloped on yet faster. Hardly had the Horse Guards passed Rostóv
+      before he heard them shout, “Hurrah!” and looking back saw that their
+      foremost ranks were mixed up with some foreign cavalry with red epaulets,
+      probably French. He could see nothing more, for immediately afterwards
+      cannon began firing from somewhere and smoke enveloped everything.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment, as the Horse Guards, having passed him, disappeared in the
+      smoke, Rostóv hesitated whether to gallop after them or to go where he was
+      sent. This was the brilliant charge of the Horse Guards that amazed the
+      French themselves. Rostóv was horrified to hear later that of all that
+      mass of huge and handsome men, of all those brilliant, rich youths,
+      officers and cadets, who had galloped past him on their thousand-ruble
+      horses, only eighteen were left after the charge.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why should I envy them? My chance is not lost, and maybe I shall see the
+      Emperor immediately!” thought Rostóv and galloped on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he came level with the Foot Guards he noticed that about them and
+      around them cannon balls were flying, of which he was aware not so much
+      because he heard their sound as because he saw uneasiness on the soldiers’
+      faces and unnatural warlike solemnity on those of the officers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Passing behind one of the lines of a regiment of Foot Guards he heard a
+      voice calling him by name.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Rostóv!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What?” he answered, not recognizing Borís.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I say, we’ve been in the front line! Our regiment attacked!” said Borís
+      with the happy smile seen on the faces of young men who have been under
+      fire for the first time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv stopped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Have you?” he said. “Well, how did it go?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “We drove them back!” said Borís with animation, growing talkative. “Can
+      you imagine it?” and he began describing how the Guards, having taken up
+      their position and seeing troops before them, thought they were Austrians,
+      and all at once discovered from the cannon balls discharged by those
+      troops that they were themselves in the front line and had unexpectedly to
+      go into action. Rostóv without hearing Borís to the end spurred his horse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where are you off to?” asked Borís.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “With a message to His Majesty.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “There he is!” said Borís, thinking Rostóv had said “His Highness,” and
+      pointing to the Grand Duke who with his high shoulders and frowning brows
+      stood a hundred paces away from them in his helmet and Horse Guards’
+      jacket, shouting something to a pale, white uniformed Austrian officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But that’s the Grand Duke, and I want the commander in chief or the
+      Emperor,” said Rostóv, and was about to spur his horse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Count! Count!” shouted Berg who ran up from the other side as eager as
+      Borís. “Count! I am wounded in my right hand” (and he showed his bleeding
+      hand with a handkerchief tied round it) “and I remained at the front. I
+      held my sword in my left hand, Count. All our family—the von Bergs—have
+      been knights!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He said something more, but Rostóv did not wait to hear it and rode away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having passed the Guards and traversed an empty space, Rostóv, to avoid
+      again getting in front of the first line as he had done when the Horse
+      Guards charged, followed the line of reserves, going far round the place
+      where the hottest musket fire and cannonade were heard. Suddenly he heard
+      musket fire quite close in front of him and behind our troops, where he
+      could never have expected the enemy to be.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What can it be?” he thought. “The enemy in the rear of our army?
+      Impossible!” And suddenly he was seized by a panic of fear for himself and
+      for the issue of the whole battle. “But be that what it may,” he
+      reflected, “there is no riding round it now. I must look for the commander
+      in chief here, and if all is lost it is for me to perish with the rest.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The foreboding of evil that had suddenly come over Rostóv was more and
+      more confirmed the farther he rode into the region behind the village of
+      Pratzen, which was full of troops of all kinds.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What does it mean? What is it? Whom are they firing at? Who is firing?”
+       Rostóv kept asking as he came up to Russian and Austrian soldiers running
+      in confused crowds across his path.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The devil knows! They’ve killed everybody! It’s all up now!” he was told
+      in Russian, German, and Czech by the crowd of fugitives who understood
+      what was happening as little as he did.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Kill the Germans!” shouted one.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “May the devil take them—the traitors!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Zum Henker diese Russen!”</i> * muttered a German.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Hang these Russians!”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Several wounded men passed along the road, and words of abuse, screams,
+      and groans mingled in a general hubbub, then the firing died down. Rostóv
+      learned later that Russian and Austrian soldiers had been firing at one
+      another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My God! What does it all mean?” thought he. “And here, where at any
+      moment the Emperor may see them.... But no, these must be only a handful
+      of scoundrels. It will soon be over, it can’t be <i>that</i>, it can’t be! Only
+      to get past them quicker, quicker!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The idea of defeat and flight could not enter Rostóv’s head. Though he saw
+      French cannon and French troops on the Pratzen Heights just where he had
+      been ordered to look for the commander in chief, he could not, did not
+      wish to, believe <i>that</i>.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0067"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Rostóv had been ordered to look for Kutúzov and the Emperor near the
+      village of Pratzen. But neither they nor a single commanding officer were
+      there, only disorganized crowds of troops of various kinds. He urged on
+      his already weary horse to get quickly past these crowds, but the farther
+      he went the more disorganized they were. The highroad on which he had come
+      out was thronged with <i>calèches</i>, carriages of all sorts, and Russian and
+      Austrian soldiers of all arms, some wounded and some not. This whole mass
+      droned and jostled in confusion under the dismal influence of cannon balls
+      flying from the French batteries stationed on the Pratzen Heights.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where is the Emperor? Where is Kutúzov?” Rostóv kept asking everyone he
+      could stop, but got no answer from anyone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At last seizing a soldier by his collar he forced him to answer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh, brother! They’ve all bolted long ago!” said the soldier, laughing for
+      some reason and shaking himself free.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having left that soldier who was evidently drunk, Rostóv stopped the horse
+      of a batman or groom of some important personage and began to question
+      him. The man announced that the Tsar had been driven in a carriage at full
+      speed about an hour before along that very road and that he was
+      dangerously wounded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It can’t be!” said Rostóv. “It must have been someone else.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I saw him myself,” replied the man with a self-confident smile of
+      derision. “I ought to know the Emperor by now, after the times I’ve seen
+      him in Petersburg. I saw him just as I see you.... There he sat in the
+      carriage as pale as anything. How they made the four black horses fly!
+      Gracious me, they did rattle past! It’s time I knew the Imperial horses
+      and Ilyá Iványch. I don’t think Ilyá drives anyone except the Tsar!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv let go of the horse and was about to ride on, when a wounded
+      officer passing by addressed him:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who is it you want?” he asked. “The commander in chief? He was
+      killed by a cannon ball—struck in the breast before our regiment.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Not killed—wounded!” another officer corrected him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who? Kutúzov?” asked Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Not Kutúzov, but what’s his name—well, never mind... there are not
+      many left alive. Go that way, to that village, all the commanders are
+      there,” said the officer, pointing to the village of Hosjeradek, and he
+      walked on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv rode on at a footpace not knowing why or to whom he was now going.
+      The Emperor was wounded, the battle lost. It was impossible to doubt it
+      now. Rostóv rode in the direction pointed out to him, in which he saw
+      turrets and a church. What need to hurry? What was he now to say to the
+      Tsar or to Kutúzov, even if they were alive and unwounded?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Take this road, your honor, that way you will be killed at once!” a
+      soldier shouted to him. “They’d kill you there!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, what are you talking about?” said another. “Where is he to go? That
+      way is nearer.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv considered, and then went in the direction where they said he would
+      be killed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s all the same now. If the Emperor is wounded, am I to try to save
+      myself?” he thought. He rode on to the region where the greatest number of
+      men had perished in fleeing from Pratzen. The French had not yet occupied
+      that region, and the Russians—the uninjured and slightly wounded—had
+      left it long ago. All about the field, like heaps of manure on well-kept
+      plowland, lay from ten to fifteen dead and wounded to each couple of
+      acres. The wounded crept together in twos and threes and one could hear
+      their distressing screams and groans, sometimes feigned—or so it
+      seemed to Rostóv. He put his horse to a trot to avoid seeing all these
+      suffering men, and he felt afraid—afraid not for his life, but for
+      the courage he needed and which he knew would not stand the sight of these
+      unfortunates.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French, who had ceased firing at this field strewn with dead and
+      wounded where there was no one left to fire at, on seeing an adjutant
+      riding over it trained a gun on him and fired several shots. The sensation
+      of those terrible whistling sounds and of the corpses around him merged in
+      Rostóv’s mind into a single feeling of terror and pity for himself. He
+      remembered his mother’s last letter. “What would she feel,” thought he,
+      “if she saw me here now on this field with the cannon aimed at me?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In the village of Hosjeradek there were Russian troops retiring from the
+      field of battle, who though still in some confusion were less disordered.
+      The French cannon did not reach there and the musketry fire sounded far
+      away. Here everyone clearly saw and said that the battle was lost. No one
+      whom Rostóv asked could tell him where the Emperor or Kutúzov was. Some
+      said the report that the Emperor was wounded was correct, others that it
+      was not, and explained the false rumor that had spread by the fact that
+      the Emperor’s carriage had really galloped from the field of battle with
+      the pale and terrified Ober-Hofmarschal Count Tolstóy, who had ridden out
+      to the battlefield with others in the Emperor’s suite. One officer told
+      Rostóv that he had seen someone from headquarters behind the village to
+      the left, and thither Rostóv rode, not hoping to find anyone but merely to
+      ease his conscience. When he had ridden about two miles and had passed the
+      last of the Russian troops, he saw, near a kitchen garden with a ditch
+      round it, two men on horseback facing the ditch. One with a white plume in
+      his hat seemed familiar to Rostóv; the other on a beautiful chestnut horse
+      (which Rostóv fancied he had seen before) rode up to the ditch, struck his
+      horse with his spurs, and giving it the rein leaped lightly over. Only a
+      little earth crumbled from the bank under the horse’s hind hoofs. Turning
+      the horse sharply, he again jumped the ditch, and deferentially addressed
+      the horseman with the white plumes, evidently suggesting that he should do
+      the same. The rider, whose figure seemed familiar to Rostóv and
+      involuntarily riveted his attention, made a gesture of refusal with his
+      head and hand and by that gesture Rostóv instantly recognized his lamented
+      and adored monarch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But it can’t be he, alone in the midst of this empty field!” thought
+      Rostóv. At that moment Alexander turned his head and Rostóv saw the
+      beloved features that were so deeply engraved on his memory. The Emperor
+      was pale, his cheeks sunken and his eyes hollow, but the charm, the
+      mildness of his features, was all the greater. Rostóv was happy in the
+      assurance that the rumors about the Emperor being wounded were false. He
+      was happy to be seeing him. He knew that he might and even ought to go
+      straight to him and give the message Dolgorúkov had ordered him to
+      deliver.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But as a youth in love trembles, is unnerved, and dares not utter the
+      thoughts he has dreamed of for nights, but looks around for help or a
+      chance of delay and flight when the longed-for moment comes and he is
+      alone with <i>her</i>, so Rostóv, now that he had attained what he had longed for
+      more than anything else in the world, did not know how to approach the
+      Emperor, and a thousand reasons occurred to him why it would be
+      inconvenient, unseemly, and impossible to do so.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What! It is as if I were glad of a chance to take advantage of his being
+      alone and despondent! A strange face may seem unpleasant or painful to him
+      at this moment of sorrow; besides, what can I say to him now, when my
+      heart fails me and my mouth feels dry at the mere sight of him?” Not one
+      of the innumerable speeches addressed to the Emperor that he had composed
+      in his imagination could he now recall. Those speeches were intended for
+      quite other conditions, they were for the most part to be spoken at a
+      moment of victory and triumph, generally when he was dying of wounds and
+      the sovereign had thanked him for heroic deeds, and while dying he
+      expressed the love his actions had proved.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Besides how can I ask the Emperor for his instructions for the right
+      flank now that it is nearly four o’clock and the battle is lost? No,
+      certainly I must not approach him, I must not intrude on his reflections.
+      Better die a thousand times than risk receiving an unkind look or bad
+      opinion from him,” Rostóv decided; and sorrowfully and with a heart full
+      despair he rode away, continually looking back at the Tsar, who still
+      remained in the same attitude of indecision.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While Rostóv was thus arguing with himself and riding sadly away, Captain
+      von Toll chanced to ride to the same spot, and seeing the Emperor at once
+      rode up to him, offered his services, and assisted him to cross the ditch
+      on foot. The Emperor, wishing to rest and feeling unwell, sat down under
+      an apple tree and von Toll remained beside him. Rostóv from a distance saw
+      with envy and remorse how von Toll spoke long and warmly to the Emperor
+      and how the Emperor, evidently weeping, covered his eyes with his hand and
+      pressed von Toll’s hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I might have been in his place!” thought Rostóv, and hardly
+      restraining his tears of pity for the Emperor, he rode on in utter
+      despair, not knowing where to or why he was now riding.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His despair was all the greater from feeling that his own weakness was the
+      cause of his grief.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He might... not only might but should, have gone up to the sovereign. It
+      was a unique chance to show his devotion to the Emperor and he had not
+      made use of it.... “What have I done?” thought he. And he turned round and
+      galloped back to the place where he had seen the Emperor, but there was no
+      one beyond the ditch now. Only some carts and carriages were passing by.
+      From one of the drivers he learned that Kutúzov’s staff were not far off,
+      in the village the vehicles were going to. Rostóv followed them. In front
+      of him walked Kutúzov’s groom leading horses in horsecloths. Then came a
+      cart, and behind that walked an old, bandy-legged domestic serf in a
+      peaked cap and sheepskin coat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Tit! I say, Tit!” said the groom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What?” answered the old man absent-mindedly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go, Tit! Thresh a bit!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, you fool!” said the old man, spitting angrily. Some time passed in
+      silence, and then the same joke was repeated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Before five in the evening the battle had been lost at all points. More
+      than a hundred cannon were already in the hands of the French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Przebyszéwski and his corps had laid down their arms. Other columns after
+      losing half their men were retreating in disorderly confused masses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The remains of Langeron’s and Dokhtúrov’s mingled forces were crowding
+      around the dams and banks of the ponds near the village of Augesd.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After five o’clock it was only at the Augesd Dam that a hot cannonade
+      (delivered by the French alone) was still to be heard from numerous
+      batteries ranged on the slopes of the Pratzen Heights, directed at our
+      retreating forces.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the rearguard, Dokhtúrov and others rallying some battalions kept up a
+      musketry fire at the French cavalry that was pursuing our troops. It was
+      growing dusk. On the narrow Augesd Dam where for so many years the old
+      miller had been accustomed to sit in his tasseled cap peacefully angling,
+      while his grandson, with shirt sleeves rolled up, handled the floundering
+      silvery fish in the watering can, on that dam over which for so many years
+      Moravians in shaggy caps and blue jackets had peacefully driven their
+      two-horse carts loaded with wheat and had returned dusty with flour
+      whitening their carts—on that narrow dam amid the wagons and the
+      cannon, under the horses’ hoofs and between the wagon wheels, men
+      disfigured by fear of death now crowded together, crushing one another,
+      dying, stepping over the dying and killing one another, only to move on a
+      few steps and be killed themselves in the same way.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Every ten seconds a cannon ball flew compressing the air around, or a
+      shell burst in the midst of that dense throng, killing some and splashing
+      with blood those near them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov—now an officer—wounded in the arm, and on foot, with
+      the regimental commander on horseback and some ten men of his company,
+      represented all that was left of that whole regiment. Impelled by the
+      crowd, they had got wedged in at the approach to the dam and, jammed in on
+      all sides, had stopped because a horse in front had fallen under a cannon
+      and the crowd were dragging it out. A cannon ball killed someone behind
+      them, another fell in front and splashed Dólokhov with blood. The crowd,
+      pushing forward desperately, squeezed together, moved a few steps, and
+      again stopped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Move on a hundred yards and we are certainly saved, remain here another
+      two minutes and it is certain death,” thought each one.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov who was in the midst of the crowd forced his way to the edge of
+      the dam, throwing two soldiers off their feet, and ran onto the slippery
+      ice that covered the millpool.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Turn this way!” he shouted, jumping over the ice which creaked under him;
+      “turn this way!” he shouted to those with the gun. “It bears!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The ice bore him but it swayed and creaked, and it was plain that it would
+      give way not only under a cannon or a crowd, but very soon even under his
+      weight alone. The men looked at him and pressed to the bank, hesitating to
+      step onto the ice. The general on horseback at the entrance to the dam
+      raised his hand and opened his mouth to address Dólokhov. Suddenly a
+      cannon ball hissed so low above the crowd that everyone ducked. It flopped
+      into something moist, and the general fell from his horse in a pool of
+      blood. Nobody gave him a look or thought of raising him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Get onto the ice, over the ice! Go on! Turn! Don’t you hear? Go on!”
+       innumerable voices suddenly shouted after the ball had struck the general,
+      the men themselves not knowing what, or why, they were shouting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One of the hindmost guns that was going onto the dam turned off onto the
+      ice. Crowds of soldiers from the dam began running onto the frozen pond.
+      The ice gave way under one of the foremost soldiers, and one leg slipped
+      into the water. He tried to right himself but fell in up to his waist. The
+      nearest soldiers shrank back, the gun driver stopped his horse, but from
+      behind still came the shouts: “Onto the ice, why do you stop? Go on! Go
+      on!” And cries of horror were heard in the crowd. The soldiers near the
+      gun waved their arms and beat the horses to make them turn and move on.
+      The horses moved off the bank. The ice, that had held under those on foot,
+      collapsed in a great mass, and some forty men who were on it dashed, some
+      forward and some back, drowning one another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Still the cannon balls continued regularly to whistle and flop onto the
+      ice and into the water and oftenest of all among the crowd that covered
+      the dam, the pond, and the bank.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0068"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On the Pratzen Heights, where he had fallen with the flagstaff in his
+      hand, lay Prince Andrew Bolkónski bleeding profusely and unconsciously
+      uttering a gentle, piteous, and childlike moan.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Toward evening he ceased moaning and became quite still. He did not know
+      how long his unconsciousness lasted. Suddenly he again felt that he was
+      alive and suffering from a burning, lacerating pain in his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where is it, that lofty sky that I did not know till now, but saw today?”
+       was his first thought. “And I did not know this suffering either,” he
+      thought. “Yes, I did not know anything, anything at all till now. But
+      where am I?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He listened and heard the sound of approaching horses, and voices speaking
+      French. He opened his eyes. Above him again was the same lofty sky with
+      clouds that had risen and were floating still higher, and between them
+      gleamed blue infinity. He did not turn his head and did not see those who,
+      judging by the sound of hoofs and voices, had ridden up and stopped near
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was Napoleon accompanied by two aides-de-camp. Bonaparte riding over
+      the battlefield had given final orders to strengthen the batteries firing
+      at the Augesd Dam and was looking at the killed and wounded left on the
+      field.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Fine men!” remarked Napoleon, looking at a dead Russian grenadier, who,
+      with his face buried in the ground and a blackened nape, lay on his
+      stomach with an already stiffened arm flung wide.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The ammunition for the guns in position is exhausted, Your Majesty,” said
+      an adjutant who had come from the batteries that were firing at Augesd.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Have some brought from the reserve,” said Napoleon, and having gone on a
+      few steps he stopped before Prince Andrew, who lay on his back with the
+      flagstaff that had been dropped beside him. (The flag had already been
+      taken by the French as a trophy.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s a fine death!” said Napoleon as he gazed at Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew understood that this was said of him and that it was
+      Napoleon who said it. He heard the speaker addressed as <i>Sire</i>. But he heard
+      the words as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly. Not only did they
+      not interest him, but he took no notice of them and at once forgot them.
+      His head was burning, he felt himself bleeding to death, and he saw above
+      him the remote, lofty, and everlasting sky. He knew it was Napoleon—his
+      hero—but at that moment Napoleon seemed to him such a small,
+      insignificant creature compared with what was passing now between himself
+      and that lofty infinite sky with the clouds flying over it. At that moment
+      it meant nothing to him who might be standing over him, or what was said
+      of him; he was only glad that people were standing near him and only
+      wished that they would help him and bring him back to life, which seemed
+      to him so beautiful now that he had today learned to understand it so
+      differently. He collected all his strength, to stir and utter a sound. He
+      feebly moved his leg and uttered a weak, sickly groan which aroused his
+      own pity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah! He is alive,” said Napoleon. “Lift this young man up and carry him to
+      the dressing station.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Having said this, Napoleon rode on to meet Marshal Lannes, who, hat in
+      hand, rode up smiling to the Emperor to congratulate him on the victory.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew remembered nothing more: he lost consciousness from the
+      terrible pain of being lifted onto the stretcher, the jolting while being
+      moved, and the probing of his wound at the dressing station. He did not
+      regain consciousness till late in the day, when with other wounded and
+      captured Russian officers he was carried to the hospital. During this
+      transfer he felt a little stronger and was able to look about him and even
+      speak.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The first words he heard on coming to his senses were those of a French
+      convoy officer, who said rapidly: “We must halt here: the Emperor will
+      pass here immediately; it will please him to see these gentlemen
+      prisoners.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “There are so many prisoners today, nearly the whole Russian army, that he
+      is probably tired of them,” said another officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All the same! They say this one is the commander of all the Emperor
+      Alexander’s Guards,” said the first one, indicating a Russian officer in
+      the white uniform of the Horse Guards.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bolkónski recognized Prince Repnín whom he had met in Petersburg society.
+      Beside him stood a lad of nineteen, also a wounded officer of the Horse
+      Guards.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bonaparte, having come up at a gallop, stopped his horse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Which is the senior?” he asked, on seeing the prisoners.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They named the colonel, Prince Repnín.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are the commander of the Emperor Alexander’s regiment of Horse
+      Guards?” asked Napoleon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I commanded a squadron,” replied Repnín.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your regiment fulfilled its duty honorably,” said Napoleon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The praise of a great commander is a soldier’s highest reward,” said
+      Repnín.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I bestow it with pleasure,” said Napoleon. “And who is that young man
+      beside you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Repnín named Lieutenant Sukhtélen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After looking at him Napoleon smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He’s very young to come to meddle with us.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Youth is no hindrance to courage,” muttered Sukhtélen in a failing voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A splendid reply!” said Napoleon. “Young man, you will go far!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew, who had also been brought forward before the Emperor’s eyes
+      to complete the show of prisoners, could not fail to attract his
+      attention. Napoleon apparently remembered seeing him on the battlefield
+      and, addressing him, again used the epithet “young man” that was connected
+      in his memory with Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, and you, young man,” said he. “How do you feel, <i>mon brave?</i>”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Though five minutes before, Prince Andrew had been able to say a few words
+      to the soldiers who were carrying him, now with his eyes fixed straight on
+      Napoleon, he was silent.... So insignificant at that moment seemed to him
+      all the interests that engrossed Napoleon, so mean did his hero himself
+      with his paltry vanity and joy in victory appear, compared to the lofty,
+      equitable, and kindly sky which he had seen and understood, that he could
+      not answer him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Everything seemed so futile and insignificant in comparison with the stern
+      and solemn train of thought that weakness from loss of blood, suffering,
+      and the nearness of death aroused in him. Looking into Napoleon’s eyes
+      Prince Andrew thought of the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance
+      of life which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance
+      of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor without waiting for an answer turned away and said to one of
+      the officers as he went: “Have these gentlemen attended to and taken to my
+      bivouac; let my doctor, Larrey, examine their wounds. <i>Au revoir</i>, Prince
+      Repnín!” and he spurred his horse and galloped away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His face shone with self-satisfaction and pleasure.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The soldiers who had carried Prince Andrew had noticed and taken the
+      little gold icon Princess Mary had hung round her brother’s neck, but
+      seeing the favor the Emperor showed the prisoners, they now hastened to
+      return the holy image.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew did not see how and by whom it was replaced, but the little
+      icon with its thin gold chain suddenly appeared upon his chest outside his
+      uniform.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It would be good,” thought Prince Andrew, glancing at the icon his sister
+      had hung round his neck with such emotion and reverence, “it would be good
+      if everything were as clear and simple as it seems to Mary. How good it
+      would be to know where to seek for help in this life, and what to expect
+      after it beyond the grave! How happy and calm I should be if I could now
+      say: ‘Lord, have mercy on me!’... But to whom should I say that? Either to
+      a Power indefinable, incomprehensible, which I not only cannot address but
+      which I cannot even express in words—the Great All or Nothing-” said
+      he to himself, “or to that God who has been sewn into this amulet by Mary!
+      There is nothing certain, nothing at all except the unimportance of
+      everything I understand, and the greatness of something incomprehensible
+      but all-important.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The stretchers moved on. At every jolt he again felt unendurable pain; his
+      feverishness increased and he grew delirious. Visions of his father, wife,
+      sister, and future son, and the tenderness he had felt the night before
+      the battle, the figure of the insignificant little Napoleon, and above all
+      this the lofty sky, formed the chief subjects of his delirious fancies.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The quiet home life and peaceful happiness of Bald Hills presented itself
+      to him. He was already enjoying that happiness when that little Napoleon
+      had suddenly appeared with his unsympathizing look of shortsighted delight
+      at the misery of others, and doubts and torments had followed, and only
+      the heavens promised peace. Toward morning all these dreams melted and
+      merged into the chaos and darkness of unconciousness and oblivion which in
+      the opinion of Napoleon’s doctor, Larrey, was much more likely to end in
+      death than in convalescence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is a nervous, bilious subject,” said Larrey, “and will not recover.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Prince Andrew, with others fatally wounded, was left to the care of
+      the inhabitants of the district.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0072"></a>
+      BOOK FOUR: 1806
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0069"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Early in the year 1806 Nicholas Rostóv returned home on leave. Denísov was
+      going home to Vorónezh and Rostóv persuaded him to travel with him as far
+      as Moscow and to stay with him there. Meeting a comrade at the last post
+      station but one before Moscow, Denísov had drunk three bottles of wine
+      with him and, despite the jolting ruts across the snow-covered road, did
+      not once wake up on the way to Moscow, but lay at the bottom of the sleigh
+      beside Rostóv, who grew more and more impatient the nearer they got to
+      Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How much longer? How much longer? Oh, these insufferable streets, shops,
+      bakers’ signboards, street lamps, and sleighs!” thought Rostóv, when their
+      leave permits had been passed at the town gate and they had entered
+      Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Denísov! We’re here! He’s asleep,” he added, leaning forward with his
+      whole body as if in that position he hoped to hasten the speed of the
+      sleigh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov gave no answer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There’s the corner at the crossroads, where the cabman, Zakhár, has his
+      stand, and there’s Zakhár himself and still the same horse! And here’s the
+      little shop where we used to buy gingerbread! Can’t you hurry up? Now
+      then!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Which house is it?” asked the driver.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, that one, right at the end, the big one. Don’t you see? That’s our
+      house,” said Rostóv. “Of course, it’s our house! Denísov, Denísov! We’re
+      almost there!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov raised his head, coughed, and made no answer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dmítri,” said Rostóv to his valet on the box, “those lights are in our
+      house, aren’t they?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, sir, and there’s a light in your father’s study.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Then they’ve not gone to bed yet? What do you think? Mind now, don’t
+      forget to put out my new coat,” added Rostóv, fingering his new mustache.
+      “Now then, get on,” he shouted to the driver. “Do wake up, Váska!” he went
+      on, turning to Denísov, whose head was again nodding. “Come, get on! You
+      shall have three rubles for vodka—get on!” Rostóv shouted, when the
+      sleigh was only three houses from his door. It seemed to him the horses
+      were not moving at all. At last the sleigh bore to the right, drew up at
+      an entrance, and Rostóv saw overhead the old familiar cornice with a bit
+      of plaster broken off, the porch, and the post by the side of the
+      pavement. He sprang out before the sleigh stopped, and ran into the hall.
+      The house stood cold and silent, as if quite regardless of who had come to
+      it. There was no one in the hall. “Oh God! Is everyone all right?” he
+      thought, stopping for a moment with a sinking heart, and then immediately
+      starting to run along the hall and up the warped steps of the familiar
+      staircase. The well-known old door handle, which always angered the
+      countess when it was not properly cleaned, turned as loosely as ever. A
+      solitary tallow candle burned in the anteroom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Old Michael was asleep on the chest. Prokófy, the footman, who was so
+      strong that he could lift the back of the carriage from behind, sat
+      plaiting slippers out of cloth selvedges. He looked up at the opening door
+      and his expression of sleepy indifference suddenly changed to one of
+      delighted amazement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Gracious heavens! The young count!” he cried, recognizing his young
+      master. “Can it be? My treasure!” and Prokófy, trembling with excitement,
+      rushed toward the drawing room door, probably in order to announce him,
+      but, changing his mind, came back and stooped to kiss the young man’s
+      shoulder.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All well?” asked Rostóv, drawing away his arm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, God be thanked! Yes! They’ve just finished supper. Let me have a
+      look at you, your excellency.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Is everything quite all right?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The Lord be thanked, yes!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv, who had completely forgotten Denísov, not wishing anyone to
+      forestall him, threw off his fur coat and ran on tiptoe through the large
+      dark ballroom. All was the same: there were the same old card tables and
+      the same chandelier with a cover over it; but someone had already seen the
+      young master, and, before he had reached the drawing room, something flew
+      out from a side door like a tornado and began hugging and kissing him.
+      Another and yet another creature of the same kind sprang from a second
+      door and a third; more hugging, more kissing, more outcries, and tears of
+      joy. He could not distinguish which was Papa, which Natásha, and which
+      Pétya. Everyone shouted, talked, and kissed him at the same time. Only his
+      mother was not there, he noticed that.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I did not know... Nicholas... My darling!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Here he is... our own... Kólya, * dear fellow... How he has changed!...
+      Where are the candles?... Tea!...”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Nicholas.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “And me, kiss me!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Dearest... and me!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya, Natásha, Pétya, Anna Mikháylovna, Véra, and the old count were all
+      hugging him, and the serfs, men and maids, flocked into the room,
+      exclaiming and oh-ing and ah-ing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya, clinging to his legs, kept shouting, “And me too!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha, after she had pulled him down toward her and covered his face
+      with kisses, holding him tight by the skirt of his coat, sprang away and
+      pranced up and down in one place like a goat and shrieked piercingly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All around were loving eyes glistening with tears of joy, and all around
+      were lips seeking a kiss.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya too, all rosy red, clung to his arm and, radiant with bliss, looked
+      eagerly toward his eyes, waiting for the look for which she longed. Sónya
+      now was sixteen and she was very pretty, especially at this moment of
+      happy, rapturous excitement. She gazed at him, not taking her eyes off
+      him, and smiling and holding her breath. He gave her a grateful look, but
+      was still expectant and looking for someone. The old countess had not yet
+      come. But now steps were heard at the door, steps so rapid that they could
+      hardly be his mother’s.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Yet it was she, dressed in a new gown which he did not know, made since he
+      had left. All the others let him go, and he ran to her. When they met, she
+      fell on his breast, sobbing. She could not lift her face, but only pressed
+      it to the cold braiding of his hussar’s jacket. Denísov, who had come into
+      the room unnoticed by anyone, stood there and wiped his eyes at the sight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Vasíli Denísov, your son’s friend,” he said, introducing himself to the
+      count, who was looking inquiringly at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are most welcome! I know, I know,” said the count, kissing and
+      embracing Denísov. “Nicholas wrote us... Natásha, Véra, look! Here is
+      Denísov!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The same happy, rapturous faces turned to the shaggy figure of Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Darling Denísov!” screamed Natásha, beside herself with rapture,
+      springing to him, putting her arms round him, and kissing him. This
+      escapade made everybody feel confused. Denísov blushed too, but smiled
+      and, taking Natásha’s hand, kissed it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov was shown to the room prepared for him, and the Rostóvs all
+      gathered round Nicholas in the sitting room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old countess, not letting go of his hand and kissing it every moment,
+      sat beside him: the rest, crowding round him, watched every movement,
+      word, or look of his, never taking their blissfully adoring eyes off him.
+      His brother and sisters struggled for the places nearest to him and
+      disputed with one another who should bring him his tea, handkerchief, and
+      pipe.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv was very happy in the love they showed him; but the first moment of
+      meeting had been so beatific that his present joy seemed insufficient, and
+      he kept expecting something more, more and yet more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next morning, after the fatigues of their journey, the travelers slept
+      till ten o’clock.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the room next to their bedroom there was a confusion of sabers, satchels,
+      sabretaches, open portmanteaus, and dirty boots. Two freshly cleaned pairs
+      with spurs had just been placed by the wall. The servants were bringing in
+      jugs and basins, hot water for shaving, and their well-brushed clothes.
+      There was a masculine odor and a smell of tobacco.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hallo, Gwíska—my pipe!” came Vasíli Denísov’s husky voice. “Wostóv,
+      get up!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv, rubbing his eyes that seemed glued together, raised his disheveled
+      head from the hot pillow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, is it late?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Late! It’s nearly ten o’clock,” answered Natásha’s voice. A rustle of
+      starched petticoats and the whispering and laughter of girls’ voices came
+      from the adjoining room. The door was opened a crack and there was a
+      glimpse of something blue, of ribbons, black hair, and merry faces. It was
+      Natásha, Sónya, and Pétya, who had come to see whether they were getting
+      up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nicholas! Get up!” Natásha’s voice was again heard at the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Directly!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Meanwhile, Pétya, having found and seized the sabers in the outer room,
+      with the delight boys feel at the sight of a military elder brother, and
+      forgetting that it was unbecoming for the girls to see men undressed,
+      opened the bedroom door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is this your saber?” he shouted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The girls sprang aside. Denísov hid his hairy legs under the blanket,
+      looking with a scared face at his comrade for help. The door, having let
+      Pétya in, closed again. A sound of laughter came from behind it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nicholas! Come out in your dressing gown!” said Natásha’s voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is this your saber?” asked Pétya. “Or is it yours?” he said, addressing
+      the black-mustached Denísov with servile deference.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv hurriedly put something on his feet, drew on his dressing gown, and
+      went out. Natásha had put on one spurred boot and was just getting her
+      foot into the other. Sónya, when he came in, was twirling round and was
+      about to expand her dresses into a balloon and sit down. They were dressed
+      alike, in new pale-blue frocks, and were both fresh, rosy, and bright.
+      Sónya ran away, but Natásha, taking her brother’s arm, led him into the
+      sitting room, where they began talking. They hardly gave one another time
+      to ask questions and give replies concerning a thousand little matters
+      which could not interest anyone but themselves. Natásha laughed at every
+      word he said or that she said herself, not because what they were saying
+      was amusing, but because she felt happy and was unable to control her joy
+      which expressed itself by laughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, how nice, how splendid!” she said to everything.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv felt that, under the influence of the warm rays of love, that
+      childlike smile which had not once appeared on his face since he left home
+      now for the first time after eighteen months again brightened his soul and
+      his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, but listen,” she said, “now you are quite a man, aren’t you? I’m
+      awfully glad you’re my brother.” She touched his mustache. “I want to know
+      what you men are like. Are you the same as we? No?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why did Sónya run away?” asked Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, yes! That’s a whole long story! How are you going to speak to
+      her—<i>thou</i> or <i>you?</i>”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “As may happen,” said Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, call her <i>you</i>, please! I’ll tell you all about it some other time. No,
+      I’ll tell you now. You know Sónya’s my dearest friend. Such a friend that
+      I burned my arm for her sake. Look here!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She pulled up her muslin sleeve and showed him a red scar on her long,
+      slender, delicate arm, high above the elbow on that part that is covered
+      even by a ball dress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I burned this to prove my love for her. I just heated a ruler in the fire
+      and pressed it there!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sitting on the sofa with the little cushions on its arms, in what used to
+      be his old schoolroom, and looking into Natásha’s wildly bright eyes,
+      Rostóv re-entered that world of home and childhood which had no meaning
+      for anyone else, but gave him some of the best joys of his life; and the
+      burning of an arm with a ruler as a proof of love did not seem to him
+      senseless, he understood and was not surprised at it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, and is that all?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We are such friends, such friends! All that ruler business was just
+      nonsense, but we are friends forever. She, if she loves anyone, does it
+      for life, but I don’t understand that, I forget quickly.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, what then?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, she loves me and you like that.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha suddenly flushed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, you remember before you went away?... Well, she says you are to
+      forget all that.... She says: ‘I shall love him always, but let him be
+      free.’ Isn’t that lovely and noble! Yes, very noble? Isn’t it?” asked
+      Natásha, so seriously and excitedly that it was evident that what she was
+      now saying she had talked of before, with tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv became thoughtful.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I never go back on my word,” he said. “Besides, Sónya is so charming that
+      only a fool would renounce such happiness.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, no!” cried Natásha, “she and I have already talked it over. We knew
+      you’d say so. But it won’t do, because you see, if you say that—if
+      you consider yourself bound by your promise—it will seem as if she
+      had not meant it seriously. It makes it as if you were marrying her
+      because you must, and that wouldn’t do at all.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv saw that it had been well considered by them. Sónya had already
+      struck him by her beauty on the preceding day. Today, when he had caught a
+      glimpse of her, she seemed still more lovely. She was a charming girl of
+      sixteen, evidently passionately in love with him (he did not doubt that
+      for an instant). Why should he not love her now, and even marry her,
+      Rostóv thought, but just now there were so many other pleasures and
+      interests before him! “Yes, they have taken a wise decision,” he thought,
+      “I must remain free.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well then, that’s excellent,” said he. “We’ll talk it over later on. Oh,
+      how glad I am to have you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, and are you still true to Borís?” he continued.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, what nonsense!” cried Natásha, laughing. “I don’t think about him or
+      anyone else, and I don’t want anything of the kind.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear me! Then what are you up to now?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Now?” repeated Natásha, and a happy smile lit up her face. “Have you seen
+      Duport?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Not seen Duport—the famous dancer? Well then, you won’t understand.
+      That’s what I’m up to.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Curving her arms, Natásha held out her skirts as dancers do, ran back a
+      few steps, turned, cut a caper, brought her little feet sharply together,
+      and made some steps on the very tips of her toes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “See, I’m standing! See!” she said, but could not maintain herself on her
+      toes any longer. “So that’s what I’m up to! I’ll never marry anyone, but
+      will be a dancer. Only don’t tell anyone.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv laughed so loud and merrily that Denísov, in his bedroom, felt
+      envious and Natásha could not help joining in.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, but don’t you think it’s nice?” she kept repeating.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nice! And so you no longer wish to marry Borís?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha flared up. “I don’t want to marry anyone. And I’ll tell him so
+      when I see him!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear me!” said Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But that’s all rubbish,” Natásha chattered on. “And is Denísov nice?” she
+      asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, indeed!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, well then, good-by: go and dress. Is he very terrible, Denísov?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why terrible?” asked Nicholas. “No, Váska is a splendid fellow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You call him Váska? That’s funny! And is he very nice?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Very.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well then, be quick. We’ll all have breakfast together.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Natásha rose and went out of the room on tiptoe, like a ballet dancer,
+      but smiling as only happy girls of fifteen can smile. When Rostóv met
+      Sónya in the drawing room, he reddened. He did not know how to behave with
+      her. The evening before, in the first happy moment of meeting, they had
+      kissed each other, but today they felt it could not be done; he felt that
+      everybody, including his mother and sisters, was looking inquiringly at
+      him and watching to see how he would behave with her. He kissed her hand
+      and addressed her not as <i>thou</i> but as <i>you—Sónya</i>. But their eyes met
+      and said <i>thou</i>, and exchanged tender kisses. Her looks asked him to forgive
+      her for having dared, by Natásha’s intermediacy, to remind him of his
+      promise, and then thanked him for his love. His looks thanked her for
+      offering him his freedom and told her that one way or another he would
+      never cease to love her, for that would be impossible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How strange it is,” said Véra, selecting a moment when all were silent,
+      “that Sónya and Nicholas now say <i>you</i> to one another and meet like
+      strangers.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Véra’s remark was correct, as her remarks always were, but, like most of
+      her observations, it made everyone feel uncomfortable, not only Sónya,
+      Nicholas, and Natásha, but even the old countess, who—dreading this
+      love affair which might hinder Nicholas from making a brilliant match—blushed
+      like a girl.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov, to Rostóv’s surprise, appeared in the drawing room with pomaded
+      hair, perfumed, and in a new uniform, looking just as smart as he made
+      himself when going into battle, and he was more amiable to the ladies and
+      gentlemen than Rostóv had ever expected to see him.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0070"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On his return to Moscow from the army, Nicholas Rostóv was welcomed by his
+      home circle as the best of sons, a hero, and their darling Nikólenka; by
+      his relations as a charming, attractive, and polite young man; by his
+      acquaintances as a handsome lieutenant of hussars, a good dancer, and one
+      of the best matches in the city.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Rostóvs knew everybody in Moscow. The old count had money enough that
+      year, as all his estates had been remortgaged, and so Nicholas, acquiring
+      a trotter of his own, very stylish riding breeches of the latest cut, such
+      as no one else yet had in Moscow, and boots of the latest fashion, with
+      extremely pointed toes and small silver spurs, passed his time very gaily.
+      After a short period of adapting himself to the old conditions of life,
+      Nicholas found it very pleasant to be at home again. He felt that he had
+      grown up and matured very much. His despair at failing in a Scripture
+      examination, his borrowing money from Gavríl to pay a sleigh driver, his
+      kissing Sónya on the sly—he now recalled all this as childishness he
+      had left immeasurably behind. Now he was a lieutenant of hussars, in a
+      jacket laced with silver, and wearing the Cross of St. George, awarded to
+      soldiers for bravery in action, and in the company of well-known, elderly,
+      and respected racing men was training a trotter of his own for a race. He
+      knew a lady on one of the boulevards whom he visited of an evening. He led
+      the mazurka at the Arkhárovs’ ball, talked about the war with Field
+      Marshal Kámenski, visited the English Club, and was on intimate terms with
+      a colonel of forty to whom Denísov had introduced him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His passion for the Emperor had cooled somewhat in Moscow. But still, as
+      he did not see him and had no opportunity of seeing him, he often spoke
+      about him and about his love for him, letting it be understood that he had
+      not told all and that there was something in his feelings for the Emperor
+      not everyone could understand, and with his whole soul he shared the
+      adoration then common in Moscow for the Emperor, who was spoken of as the
+      “angel incarnate.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      During Rostóv’s short stay in Moscow, before rejoining the army, he did
+      not draw closer to Sónya, but rather drifted away from her. She was very
+      pretty and sweet, and evidently deeply in love with him, but he was at the
+      period of youth when there seems so much to do that there is <i>no time</i> for
+      that sort of thing and a young man fears to bind himself and prizes his
+      freedom which he needs for so many other things. When he thought of Sónya,
+      during this stay in Moscow, he said to himself, “Ah, there will be, and
+      there are, many more such girls somewhere whom I do not yet know. There
+      will be time enough to think about love when I want to, but now I have no
+      time.” Besides, it seemed to him that the society of women was rather
+      derogatory to his manhood. He went to balls and into ladies’ society with
+      an affectation of doing so against his will. The races, the English Club,
+      sprees with Denísov, and visits to a certain house—that was another
+      matter and quite the thing for a dashing young hussar!
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the beginning of March, old Count Ilyá Rostóv was very busy arranging a
+      dinner in honor of Prince Bagratión at the English Club.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count walked up and down the hall in his dressing gown, giving orders
+      to the club steward and to the famous Feoktíst, the club’s head cook,
+      about asparagus, fresh cucumbers, strawberries, veal, and fish for this
+      dinner. The count had been a member and on the committee of the club from
+      the day it was founded. To him the club entrusted the arrangement of the
+      festival in honor of Bagratión, for few men knew so well how to arrange a
+      feast on an open-handed, hospitable scale, and still fewer men would be so
+      well able and willing to make up out of their own resources what might be
+      needed for the success of the fete. The club cook and the steward listened
+      to the count’s orders with pleased faces, for they knew that under no
+      other management could they so easily extract a good profit for themselves
+      from a dinner costing several thousand rubles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well then, mind and have cocks’ comb in the turtle soup, you know!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Shall we have three cold dishes then?” asked the cook.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count considered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We can’t have less—yes, three... the mayonnaise, that’s one,” said
+      he, bending down a finger.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then am I to order those large sterlets?” asked the steward.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, it can’t be helped if they won’t take less. Ah, dear me! I was
+      forgetting. We must have another entrée. Ah, goodness gracious!” he
+      clutched at his head. “Who is going to get me the flowers? Dmítri! Eh,
+      Dmítri! Gallop off to our Moscow estate,” he said to the factotum who
+      appeared at his call. “Hurry off and tell Maksím, the gardener, to set the
+      serfs to work. Say that everything out of the hothouses must be brought
+      here well wrapped up in felt. I must have two hundred pots here on
+      Friday.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Having given several more orders, he was about to go to his “little
+      countess” to have a rest, but remembering something else of importance, he
+      returned again, called back the cook and the club steward, and again began
+      giving orders. A light footstep and the clinking of spurs were heard at
+      the door, and the young count, handsome, rosy, with a dark little
+      mustache, evidently rested and made sleeker by his easy life in Moscow,
+      entered the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, my boy, my head’s in a whirl!” said the old man with a smile, as if
+      he felt a little confused before his son. “Now, if you would only help a
+      bit! I must have singers too. I shall have my own orchestra, but shouldn’t
+      we get the gypsy singers as well? You military men like that sort of
+      thing.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Really, Papa, I believe Prince Bagratión worried himself less before the
+      battle of Schön Grabern than you do now,” said his son with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old count pretended to be angry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, you talk, but try it yourself!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the count turned to the cook, who, with a shrewd and respectful
+      expression, looked observantly and sympathetically at the father and son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What have the young people come to nowadays, eh, Feoktíst?” said he.
+      “Laughing at us old fellows!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s so, your excellency, all they have to do is to eat a good dinner,
+      but providing it and serving it all up, that’s not their business!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s it, that’s it!” exclaimed the count, and gaily seizing his son by
+      both hands, he cried, “Now I’ve got you, so take the sleigh and pair at
+      once, and go to Bezúkhov’s, and tell him ‘Count Ilyá has sent you to ask
+      for strawberries and fresh pineapples.’ We can’t get them from anyone
+      else. He’s not there himself, so you’ll have to go in and ask the
+      princesses; and from there go on to the Rasgulyáy—the coachman
+      Ipátka knows—and look up the gypsy Ilyúshka, the one who danced at
+      Count Orlóv’s, you remember, in a white Cossack coat, and bring him along
+      to me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And am I to bring the gypsy girls along with him?” asked Nicholas,
+      laughing. “Dear, dear!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment, with noiseless footsteps and with the businesslike,
+      preoccupied, yet meekly Christian look which never left her face, Anna
+      Mikháylovna entered the hall. Though she came upon the count in his
+      dressing gown every day, he invariably became confused and begged her to
+      excuse his costume.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No matter at all, my dear count,” she said, meekly closing her eyes. “But
+      I’ll go to Bezúkhov’s myself. Pierre has arrived, and now we shall get
+      anything we want from his hothouses. I have to see him in any case. He has
+      forwarded me a letter from Borís. Thank God, Borís is now on the staff.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The count was delighted at Anna Mikháylovna’s taking upon herself one of
+      his commissions and ordered the small closed carriage for her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Tell Bezúkhov to come. I’ll put his name down. Is his wife with him?” he
+      asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Mikháylovna turned up her eyes, and profound sadness was depicted on
+      her face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, my dear friend, he is very unfortunate,” she said. “If what we hear
+      is true, it is dreadful. How little we dreamed of such a thing when we
+      were rejoicing at his happiness! And such a lofty angelic soul as young
+      Bezúkhov! Yes, I pity him from my heart, and shall try to give him what
+      consolation I can.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Wh-what is the matter?” asked both the young and old Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Mikháylovna sighed deeply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dólokhov, Mary Ivánovna’s son,” she said in a mysterious whisper, “has
+      compromised her completely, they say. Pierre took him up, invited him to
+      his house in Petersburg, and now... she has come here and that daredevil
+      after her!” said Anna Mikháylovna, wishing to show her sympathy for
+      Pierre, but by involuntary intonations and a half smile betraying her
+      sympathy for the “daredevil,” as she called Dólokhov. “They say Pierre is
+      quite broken by his misfortune.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear, dear! But still tell him to come to the club—it will all blow
+      over. It will be a tremendous banquet.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Next day, the third of March, soon after one o’clock, two hundred and
+      fifty members of the English Club and fifty guests were awaiting the guest
+      of honor and hero of the Austrian campaign, Prince Bagratión, to dinner.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the first arrival of the news of the battle of Austerlitz, Moscow had
+      been bewildered. At that time, the Russians were so used to victories that
+      on receiving news of the defeat some would simply not believe it, while
+      others sought some extraordinary explanation of so strange an event. In
+      the English Club, where all who were distinguished, important, and well
+      informed foregathered when the news began to arrive in December, nothing
+      was said about the war and the last battle, as though all were in a
+      conspiracy of silence. The men who set the tone in conversation—Count
+      Rostopchín, Prince Yúri Dolgorúkov, Valúev, Count Markóv, and Prince
+      Vyázemski—did not show themselves at the club, but met in private
+      houses in intimate circles, and the Moscovites who took their opinions
+      from others—Ilyá Rostóv among them—remained for a while
+      without any definite opinion on the subject of the war and without
+      leaders. The Moscovites felt that something was wrong and that to discuss
+      the bad news was difficult, and so it was best to be silent. But after a
+      while, just as a jury comes out of its room, the bigwigs who guided the
+      club’s opinion reappeared, and everybody began speaking clearly and
+      definitely. Reasons were found for the incredible, unheard-of, and
+      impossible event of a Russian defeat, everything became clear, and in all
+      corners of Moscow the same things began to be said. These reasons were the
+      treachery of the Austrians, a defective commissariat, the treachery of the
+      Pole Przebyszéwski and of the Frenchman Langeron, Kutúzov’s incapacity,
+      and (it was whispered) the youth and inexperience of the sovereign, who
+      had trusted worthless and insignificant people. But the army, the Russian
+      army, everyone declared, was extraordinary and had achieved miracles of
+      valor. The soldiers, officers, and generals were heroes. But the hero of
+      heroes was Prince Bagratión, distinguished by his Schön Grabern affair and
+      by the retreat from Austerlitz, where he alone had withdrawn his column
+      unbroken and had all day beaten back an enemy force twice as numerous as
+      his own. What also conduced to Bagratión’s being selected as Moscow’s hero
+      was the fact that he had no connections in the city and was a stranger
+      there. In his person, honor was shown to a simple fighting Russian soldier
+      without connections and intrigues, and to one who was associated by
+      memories of the Italian campaign with the name of Suvórov. Moreover,
+      paying such honor to Bagratión was the best way of expressing disapproval
+      and dislike of Kutúzov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Had there been no Bagratión, it would have been necessary to invent him,”
+       said the wit Shinshín, parodying the words of Voltaire. Kutúzov no one
+      spoke of, except some who abused him in whispers, calling him a court
+      weathercock and an old satyr.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All Moscow repeated Prince Dolgorúkov’s saying: “If you go on modeling and
+      modeling you must get smeared with clay,” suggesting consolation for our
+      defeat by the memory of former victories; and the words of Rostopchín,
+      that French soldiers have to be incited to battle by highfalutin words,
+      and Germans by logical arguments to show them that it is more dangerous to
+      run away than to advance, but that Russian soldiers only need to be
+      restrained and held back! On all sides, new and fresh anecdotes were heard
+      of individual examples of heroism shown by our officers and men at
+      Austerlitz. One had saved a standard, another had killed five Frenchmen, a
+      third had loaded five cannon singlehanded. Berg was mentioned, by those
+      who did not know him, as having, when wounded in the right hand, taken his
+      sword in the left, and gone forward. Of Bolkónski, nothing was said, and
+      only those who knew him intimately regretted that he had died so young,
+      leaving a pregnant wife with his eccentric father.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0071"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On that third of March, all the rooms in the English Club were filled with
+      a hum of conversation, like the hum of bees swarming in springtime. The
+      members and guests of the club wandered hither and thither, sat, stood,
+      met, and separated, some in uniform and some in evening dress, and a few
+      here and there with powdered hair and in Russian <i>kaftáns</i>. Powdered
+      footmen, in livery with buckled shoes and smart stockings, stood at every
+      door anxiously noting visitors’ every movement in order to offer their
+      services. Most of those present were elderly, respected men with broad,
+      self-confident faces, fat fingers, and resolute gestures and voices. This
+      class of guests and members sat in certain habitual places and met in
+      certain habitual groups. A minority of those present were casual guests—chiefly
+      young men, among whom were Denísov, Rostóv, and Dólokhov—who was now
+      again an officer in the Semënov regiment. The faces of these young people,
+      especially those who were military men, bore that expression of
+      condescending respect for their elders which seems to say to the older
+      generation, “We are prepared to respect and honor you, but all the same
+      remember that the future belongs to us.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Nesvítski was there as an old member of the club. Pierre, who at his
+      wife’s command had let his hair grow and abandoned his spectacles, went
+      about the rooms fashionably dressed but looking sad and dull. Here, as
+      elsewhere, he was surrounded by an atmosphere of subservience to his
+      wealth, and being in the habit of lording it over these people, he treated
+      them with absent-minded contempt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      By his age he should have belonged to the younger men, but by his wealth
+      and connections he belonged to the groups of old and honored guests, and
+      so he went from one group to another. Some of the most important old men
+      were the center of groups which even strangers approached respectfully to
+      hear the voices of well-known men. The largest circles formed round Count
+      Rostopchín, Valúev, and Narýshkin. Rostopchín was describing how the
+      Russians had been overwhelmed by flying Austrians and had had to force
+      their way through them with bayonets.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Valúev was confidentially telling that Uvárov had been sent from
+      Petersburg to ascertain what Moscow was thinking about Austerlitz.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the third circle, Narýshkin was speaking of the meeting of the Austrian
+      Council of War at which Suvórov crowed like a cock in reply to the
+      nonsense talked by the Austrian generals. Shinshín, standing close by,
+      tried to make a joke, saying that Kutúzov had evidently failed to learn
+      from Suvórov even so simple a thing as the art of crowing like a cock, but
+      the elder members glanced severely at the wit, making him feel that in
+      that place and on that day, it was improper to speak so of Kutúzov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Count Ilyá Rostóv, hurried and preoccupied, went about in his soft boots
+      between the dining and drawing rooms, hastily greeting the important and
+      unimportant, all of whom he knew, as if they were all equals, while his
+      eyes occasionally sought out his fine well-set-up young son, resting on
+      him and winking joyfully at him. Young Rostóv stood at a window with
+      Dólokhov, whose acquaintance he had lately made and highly valued. The old
+      count came up to them and pressed Dólokhov’s hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Please come and visit us... you know my brave boy... been together out
+      there... both playing the hero... Ah, Vasíli Ignátovich... How d’ye do,
+      old fellow?” he said, turning to an old man who was passing, but before he
+      had finished his greeting there was a general stir, and a footman who had
+      run in announced, with a frightened face: “He’s arrived!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Bells rang, the stewards rushed forward, and—like rye shaken
+      together in a shovel—the guests who had been scattered about in
+      different rooms came together and crowded in the large drawing room by the
+      door of the ballroom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bagratión appeared in the doorway of the anteroom without hat or sword,
+      which, in accord with the club custom, he had given up to the hall porter.
+      He had no lambskin cap on his head, nor had he a loaded whip over his
+      shoulder, as when Rostóv had seen him on the eve of the battle of
+      Austerlitz, but wore a tight new uniform with Russian and foreign Orders,
+      and the Star of St. George on his left breast. Evidently just before
+      coming to the dinner he had had his hair and whiskers trimmed, which
+      changed his appearance for the worse. There was something naïvely festive
+      in his air, which, in conjunction with his firm and virile features, gave
+      him a rather comical expression. Bekleshëv and Theodore Uvárov, who had
+      arrived with him, paused at the doorway to allow him, as the guest of
+      honor, to enter first. Bagratión was embarrassed, not wishing to avail
+      himself of their courtesy, and this caused some delay at the doors, but
+      after all he did at last enter first. He walked shyly and awkwardly over
+      the parquet floor of the reception room, not knowing what to do with his
+      hands; he was more accustomed to walk over a plowed field under fire, as
+      he had done at the head of the Kursk regiment at Schön Grabern—and
+      he would have found that easier. The committeemen met him at the first
+      door and, expressing their delight at seeing such a highly honored guest,
+      took possession of him as it were, without waiting for his reply,
+      surrounded him, and led him to the drawing room. It was at first
+      impossible to enter the drawing room door for the crowd of members and
+      guests jostling one another and trying to get a good look at Bagratión
+      over each other’s shoulders, as if he were some rare animal. Count Ilyá
+      Rostóv, laughing and repeating the words, “Make way, dear boy! Make way,
+      make way!” pushed through the crowd more energetically than anyone, led
+      the guests into the drawing room, and seated them on the center sofa. The
+      bigwigs, the most respected members of the club, beset the new arrivals.
+      Count Ilyá, again thrusting his way through the crowd, went out of the
+      drawing room and reappeared a minute later with another committeeman,
+      carrying a large silver salver which he presented to Prince Bagratión. On
+      the salver lay some verses composed and printed in the hero’s honor.
+      Bagratión, on seeing the salver, glanced around in dismay, as though
+      seeking help. But all eyes demanded that he should submit. Feeling himself
+      in their power, he resolutely took the salver with both hands and looked
+      sternly and reproachfully at the count who had presented it to him.
+      Someone obligingly took the dish from Bagratión (or he would, it seemed,
+      have held it till evening and have gone in to dinner with it) and drew his
+      attention to the verses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, I will read them, then!” Bagratión seemed to say, and, fixing his
+      weary eyes on the paper, began to read them with a fixed and serious
+      expression. But the author himself took the verses and began reading them
+      aloud. Bagratión bowed his head and listened:
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+   Bring glory then to Alexander’s reign<br>
+   And on the throne our Titus shield.<br>
+   A dreaded foe be thou, kindhearted as a man,<br>
+   A Rhipheus at home, a Caesar in the field!<br>
+   E’en fortunate Napoleon<br>
+   Knows by experience, now, Bagratión,<br>
+   And dare not Herculean Russians trouble...
+</p>
+<p>
+      But before he had finished reading, a stentorian major-domo announced that
+      dinner was ready! The door opened, and from the dining room came the
+      resounding strains of the polonaise:
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+   Conquest’s joyful thunder waken,<br>
+   Triumph, valiant Russians, now!...
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+      and Count Rostóv, glancing angrily at the author who went on reading his
+      verses, bowed to Bagratión. Everyone rose, feeling that dinner was more
+      important than verses, and Bagratión, again preceding all the rest, went
+      in to dinner. He was seated in the place of honor between two Alexanders—Bekleshëv
+      and Narýshkin—which was a significant allusion to the name of the
+      sovereign. Three hundred persons took their seats in the dining room,
+      according to their rank and importance: the more important nearer to the
+      honored guest, as naturally as water flows deepest where the land lies
+      lowest.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just before dinner, Count Ilyá Rostóv presented his son to Bagratión, who
+      recognized him and said a few words to him, disjointed and awkward, as
+      were all the words he spoke that day, and Count Ilyá looked joyfully and
+      proudly around while Bagratión spoke to his son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas Rostóv, with Denísov and his new acquaintance, Dólokhov, sat
+      almost at the middle of the table. Facing them sat Pierre, beside Prince
+      Nesvítski. Count Ilyá Rostóv with the other members of the committee sat
+      facing Bagratión and, as the very personification of Moscow hospitality,
+      did the honors to the prince.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His efforts had not been in vain. The dinner, both the Lenten and the
+      other fare, was splendid, yet he could not feel quite at ease till the end
+      of the meal. He winked at the butler, whispered directions to the footmen,
+      and awaited each expected dish with some anxiety. Everything was
+      excellent. With the second course, a gigantic sterlet (at sight of which
+      Ilyá Rostóv blushed with self-conscious pleasure), the footmen began
+      popping corks and filling the champagne glasses. After the fish, which
+      made a certain sensation, the count exchanged glances with the other
+      committeemen. “There will be many toasts, it’s time to begin,” he
+      whispered, and taking up his glass, he rose. All were silent, waiting for
+      what he would say.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To the health of our Sovereign, the Emperor!” he cried, and at the same
+      moment his kindly eyes grew moist with tears of joy and enthusiasm. The
+      band immediately struck up “Conquest’s joyful thunder waken...” All rose
+      and cried “Hurrah!” Bagratión also rose and shouted “Hurrah!” in exactly
+      the same voice in which he had shouted it on the field at Schön Grabern.
+      Young Rostóv’s ecstatic voice could be heard above the three hundred
+      others. He nearly wept. “To the health of our Sovereign, the Emperor!” he
+      roared, “Hurrah!” and emptying his glass at one gulp he dashed it to the
+      floor. Many followed his example, and the loud shouting continued for a
+      long time. When the voices subsided, the footmen cleared away the broken
+      glass and everybody sat down again, smiling at the noise they had made and
+      exchanging remarks. The old count rose once more, glanced at a note lying
+      beside his plate, and proposed a toast, “To the health of the hero of our
+      last campaign, Prince Peter Ivánovich Bagratión!” and again his blue eyes
+      grew moist. “Hurrah!” cried the three hundred voices again, but instead of
+      the band a choir began singing a cantata composed by Paul Ivánovich
+      Kutúzov:
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+   Russians! O’er all barriers on!<br>
+   Courage conquest guarantees;<br>
+   Have we not Bagratión?<br>
+   He brings foemen to their knees,... etc.
+</p>
+<p>
+      As soon as the singing was over, another and another toast was proposed
+      and Count Ilyá Rostóv became more and more moved, more glass was smashed,
+      and the shouting grew louder. They drank to Bekleshëv, Narýshkin, Uvárov,
+      Dolgorúkov, Apráksin, Valúev, to the committee, to all the club members
+      and to all the club guests, and finally to Count Ilyá Rostóv separately,
+      as the organizer of the banquet. At that toast, the count took out his
+      handkerchief and, covering his face, wept outright.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0072"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Pierre sat opposite Dólokhov and Nicholas Rostóv. As usual, he ate and
+      drank much, and eagerly. But those who knew him intimately noticed that
+      some great change had come over him that day. He was silent all through
+      dinner and looked about, blinking and scowling, or, with fixed eyes and a
+      look of complete absent-mindedness, kept rubbing the bridge of his nose.
+      His face was depressed and gloomy. He seemed to see and hear nothing of
+      what was going on around him and to be absorbed by some depressing and
+      unsolved problem.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The unsolved problem that tormented him was caused by hints given by the
+      princess, his cousin, at Moscow, concerning Dólokhov’s intimacy with his
+      wife, and by an anonymous letter he had received that morning, which in
+      the mean jocular way common to anonymous letters said that he saw badly
+      through his spectacles, but that his wife’s connection with Dólokhov was a
+      secret to no one but himself. Pierre absolutely disbelieved both the
+      princess’ hints and the letter, but he feared now to look at Dólokhov, who
+      was sitting opposite him. Every time he chanced to meet Dólokhov’s
+      handsome insolent eyes, Pierre felt something terrible and monstrous
+      rising in his soul and turned quickly away. Involuntarily recalling his
+      wife’s past and her relations with Dólokhov, Pierre saw clearly that what
+      was said in the letter might be true, or might at least seem to be true
+      had it not referred to <i>his wife</i>. He involuntarily remembered how Dólokhov,
+      who had fully recovered his former position after the campaign, had
+      returned to Petersburg and come to him. Availing himself of his friendly
+      relations with Pierre as a boon companion, Dólokhov had come straight to
+      his house, and Pierre had put him up and lent him money. Pierre recalled
+      how Hélène had smilingly expressed disapproval of Dólokhov’s living at
+      their house, and how cynically Dólokhov had praised his wife’s beauty to
+      him and from that time till they came to Moscow had not left them for a
+      day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, he is very handsome,” thought Pierre, “and I know him. It would be
+      particularly pleasant to him to dishonor my name and ridicule me, just
+      because I have exerted myself on his behalf, befriended him, and helped
+      him. I know and understand what a spice that would add to the pleasure of
+      deceiving me, if it really were true. Yes, if it were true, but I do not
+      believe it. I have no right to, and can’t, believe it.” He remembered the
+      expression Dólokhov’s face assumed in his moments of cruelty, as when
+      tying the policeman to the bear and dropping them into the water, or when
+      he challenged a man to a duel without any reason, or shot a post-boy’s
+      horse with a pistol. That expression was often on Dólokhov’s face when
+      looking at him. “Yes, he is a bully,” thought Pierre, “to kill a man means
+      nothing to him. It must seem to him that everyone is afraid of him, and
+      that must please him. He must think that I, too, am afraid of him—and
+      in fact I am afraid of him,” he thought, and again he felt something
+      terrible and monstrous rising in his soul. Dólokhov, Denísov, and Rostóv
+      were now sitting opposite Pierre and seemed very gay. Rostóv was talking
+      merrily to his two friends, one of whom was a dashing hussar and the other
+      a notorious duelist and rake, and every now and then he glanced ironically
+      at Pierre, whose preoccupied, absent-minded, and massive figure was a very
+      noticeable one at the dinner. Rostóv looked inimically at Pierre, first
+      because Pierre appeared to his hussar eyes as a rich civilian, the husband
+      of a beauty, and in a word—an old woman; and secondly because Pierre
+      in his preoccupation and absent-mindedness had not recognized Rostóv and
+      had not responded to his greeting. When the Emperor’s health was drunk,
+      Pierre, lost in thought, did not rise or lift his glass.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What are you about?” shouted Rostóv, looking at him in an ecstasy of
+      exasperation. “Don’t you hear it’s His Majesty the Emperor’s health?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre sighed, rose submissively, emptied his glass, and, waiting till all
+      were seated again, turned with his kindly smile to Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, I didn’t recognize you!” he said. But Rostóv was otherwise engaged;
+      he was shouting “Hurrah!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why don’t you renew the acquaintance?” said Dólokhov to Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Confound him, he’s a fool!” said Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One should make up to the husbands of pretty women,” said Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre did not catch what they were saying, but knew they were talking
+      about him. He reddened and turned away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, now to the health of handsome women!” said Dólokhov, and with a
+      serious expression, but with a smile lurking at the corners of his mouth,
+      he turned with his glass to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Here’s to the health of lovely women, Peterkin—and their lovers!”
+       he added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre, with downcast eyes, drank out of his glass without looking at
+      Dólokhov or answering him. The footman, who was distributing leaflets with
+      Kutúzov’s cantata, laid one before Pierre as one of the principal guests.
+      He was just going to take it when Dólokhov, leaning across, snatched it
+      from his hand and began reading it. Pierre looked at Dólokhov and his eyes
+      dropped, the something terrible and monstrous that had tormented him all
+      dinnertime rose and took possession of him. He leaned his whole massive
+      body across the table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How dare you take it?” he shouted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Hearing that cry and seeing to whom it was addressed, Nesvítski and the
+      neighbor on his right quickly turned in alarm to Bezúkhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t! Don’t! What are you about?” whispered their frightened voices.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov looked at Pierre with clear, mirthful, cruel eyes, and that smile
+      of his which seemed to say, “Ah! This is what I like!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You shan’t have it!” he said distinctly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pale, with quivering lips, Pierre snatched the copy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You...! you... scoundrel! I challenge you!” he ejaculated, and, pushing
+      back his chair, he rose from the table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the very instant he did this and uttered those words, Pierre felt that
+      the question of his wife’s guilt which had been tormenting him the whole
+      day was finally and indubitably answered in the affirmative. He hated her
+      and was forever sundered from her. Despite Denísov’s request that he would
+      take no part in the matter, Rostóv agreed to be Dólokhov’s second, and
+      after dinner he discussed the arrangements for the duel with Nesvítski,
+      Bezúkhov’s second. Pierre went home, but Rostóv with Dólokhov and Denísov
+      stayed on at the club till late, listening to the gypsies and other
+      singers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well then, till tomorrow at Sokólniki,” said Dólokhov, as he took leave
+      of Rostóv in the club porch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And do you feel quite calm?” Rostóv asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov paused.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, you see, I’ll tell you the whole secret of dueling in two words. If
+      you are going to fight a duel, and you make a will and write affectionate
+      letters to your parents, and if you think you may be killed, you are a
+      fool and are lost for certain. But go with the firm intention of killing
+      your man as quickly and surely as possible, and then all will be right, as
+      our bear huntsman at Kostromá used to tell me. ‘Everyone fears a bear,’ he
+      says, ‘but when you see one your fear’s all gone, and your only thought is
+      not to let him get away!’ And that’s how it is with me. <i>À demain, mon
+      cher</i>.” *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Till tomorrow, my dear fellow.
+</p>
+<p>
+      Next day, at eight in the morning, Pierre and Nesvítski drove to the
+      Sokólniki forest and found Dólokhov, Denísov, and Rostóv already there.
+      Pierre had the air of a man preoccupied with considerations which had no
+      connection with the matter in hand. His haggard face was yellow. He had
+      evidently not slept that night. He looked about distractedly and screwed
+      up his eyes as if dazzled by the sun. He was entirely absorbed by two
+      considerations: his wife’s guilt, of which after his sleepless night he
+      had not the slightest doubt, and the guiltlessness of Dólokhov, who had no
+      reason to preserve the honor of a man who was nothing to him.... “I should
+      perhaps have done the same thing in his place,” thought Pierre. “It’s even
+      certain that I should have done the same, then why this duel, this murder?
+      Either I shall kill him, or he will hit me in the head, or elbow, or knee.
+      Can’t I go away from here, run away, bury myself somewhere?” passed
+      through his mind. But just at moments when such thoughts occurred to him,
+      he would ask in a particularly calm and absent-minded way, which inspired
+      the respect of the onlookers, “Will it be long? Are things ready?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      When all was ready, the sabers stuck in the snow to mark the barriers, and
+      the pistols loaded, Nesvítski went up to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I should not be doing my duty, Count,” he said in timid tones, “and
+      should not justify your confidence and the honor you have done me in
+      choosing me for your second, if at this grave, this very grave, moment I
+      did not tell you the whole truth. I think there is no sufficient ground
+      for this affair, or for blood to be shed over it.... You were not right,
+      not quite in the right, you were impetuous...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes, it is horribly stupid,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then allow me to express your regrets, and I am sure your opponent will
+      accept them,” said Nesvítski (who like the others concerned in the affair,
+      and like everyone in similar cases, did not yet believe that the affair
+      had come to an actual duel). “You know, Count, it is much more honorable
+      to admit one’s mistake than to let matters become irreparable. There was
+      no insult on either side. Allow me to convey....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No! What is there to talk about?” said Pierre. “It’s all the same.... Is
+      everything ready?” he added. “Only tell me where to go and where to
+      shoot,” he said with an unnaturally gentle smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He took the pistol in his hand and began asking about the working of the
+      trigger, as he had not before held a pistol in his hand—a fact that
+      he did not wish to confess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes, like that, I know, I only forgot,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No apologies, none whatever,” said Dólokhov to Denísov (who on his side
+      had been attempting a reconciliation), and he also went up to the
+      appointed place.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The spot chosen for the duel was some eighty paces from the road, where
+      the sleighs had been left, in a small clearing in the pine forest covered
+      with melting snow, the frost having begun to break up during the last few
+      days. The antagonists stood forty paces apart at the farther edge of the
+      clearing. The seconds, measuring the paces, left tracks in the deep wet
+      snow between the place where they had been standing and Nesvítski’s and
+      Dólokhov’s sabers, which were stuck into the ground ten paces apart to
+      mark the barrier. It was thawing and misty; at forty paces’ distance
+      nothing could be seen. For three minutes all had been ready, but they
+      still delayed and all were silent.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0073"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      “Well, begin!” said Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All right,” said Pierre, still smiling in the same way. A feeling of
+      dread was in the air. It was evident that the affair so lightly begun
+      could no longer be averted but was taking its course independently of
+      men’s will.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov first went to the barrier and announced: “As the adve’sawies have
+      wefused a weconciliation, please pwoceed. Take your pistols, and at the
+      word <i>thwee</i> begin to advance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “O-ne! T-wo! Thwee!” he shouted angrily and stepped aside.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The combatants advanced along the trodden tracks, nearer and nearer to one
+      another, beginning to see one another through the mist. They had the right
+      to fire when they liked as they approached the barrier. Dólokhov walked
+      slowly without raising his pistol, looking intently with his bright,
+      sparkling blue eyes into his antagonist’s face. His mouth wore its usual
+      semblance of a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So I can fire when I like!” said Pierre, and at the word “three,” he went
+      quickly forward, missing the trodden path and stepping into the deep snow.
+      He held the pistol in his right hand at arm’s length, apparently afraid of
+      shooting himself with it. His left hand he held carefully back, because he
+      wished to support his right hand with it and knew he must not do so.
+      Having advanced six paces and strayed off the track into the snow, Pierre
+      looked down at his feet, then quickly glanced at Dólokhov and, bending his
+      finger as he had been shown, fired. Not at all expecting so loud a report,
+      Pierre shuddered at the sound and then, smiling at his own sensations,
+      stood still. The smoke, rendered denser by the mist, prevented him from
+      seeing anything for an instant, but there was no second report as he had
+      expected. He only heard Dólokhov’s hurried steps, and his figure came in
+      view through the smoke. He was pressing one hand to his left side, while
+      the other clutched his drooping pistol. His face was pale. Rostóv ran
+      toward him and said something.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No-o-o!” muttered Dólokhov through his teeth, “no, it’s not over.” And
+      after stumbling a few staggering steps right up to the saber, he sank on
+      the snow beside it. His left hand was bloody; he wiped it on his coat and
+      supported himself with it. His frowning face was pallid and quivered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Plea...” began Dólokhov, but could not at first pronounce the word.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Please,” he uttered with an effort.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre, hardly restraining his sobs, began running toward Dólokhov and was
+      about to cross the space between the barriers, when Dólokhov cried:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To your barrier!” and Pierre, grasping what was meant, stopped by his
+      saber. Only ten paces divided them. Dólokhov lowered his head to the snow,
+      greedily bit at it, again raised his head, adjusted himself, drew in his
+      legs and sat up, seeking a firm center of gravity. He sucked and swallowed
+      the cold snow, his lips quivered but his eyes, still smiling, glittered
+      with effort and exasperation as he mustered his remaining strength. He
+      raised his pistol and aimed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sideways! Cover yourself with your pistol!” ejaculated Nesvítski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Cover yourself!” even Denísov cried to his adversary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre, with a gentle smile of pity and remorse, his arms and legs
+      helplessly spread out, stood with his broad chest directly facing Dólokhov
+      and looked sorrowfully at him. Denísov, Rostóv, and Nesvítski closed their
+      eyes. At the same instant they heard a report and Dólokhov’s angry cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Missed!” shouted Dólokhov, and he lay helplessly, face downwards on the
+      snow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre clutched his temples, and turning round went into the forest,
+      trampling through the deep snow, and muttering incoherent words:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Folly... folly! Death... lies...” he repeated, puckering his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nesvítski stopped him and took him home.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv and Denísov drove away with the wounded Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The latter lay silent in the sleigh with closed eyes and did not answer a
+      word to the questions addressed to him. But on entering Moscow he suddenly
+      came to and, lifting his head with an effort, took Rostóv, who was sitting
+      beside him, by the hand. Rostóv was struck by the totally altered and
+      unexpectedly rapturous and tender expression on Dólokhov’s face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well? How do you feel?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Bad! But it’s not that, my friend—” said Dólokhov with a
+      gasping voice. “Where are we? In Moscow, I know. I don’t matter, but I
+      have killed her, killed... She won’t get over it! She won’t survive....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Who?” asked Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My mother! My mother, my angel, my adored angel mother,” and Dólokhov
+      pressed Rostóv’s hand and burst into tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he had become a little quieter, he explained to Rostóv that he was
+      living with his mother, who, if she saw him dying, would not survive it.
+      He implored Rostóv to go on and prepare her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv went on ahead to do what was asked, and to his great surprise
+      learned that Dólokhov the brawler, Dólokhov the bully, lived in Moscow
+      with an old mother and a hunchback sister, and was the most affectionate
+      of sons and brothers.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0074"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Pierre had of late rarely seen his wife alone. Both in Petersburg and in
+      Moscow their house was always full of visitors. The night after the duel
+      he did not go to his bedroom but, as he often did, remained in his
+      father’s room, that huge room in which Count Bezúkhov had died.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He lay down on the sofa meaning to fall asleep and forget all that had
+      happened to him, but could not do so. Such a storm of feelings, thoughts,
+      and memories suddenly arose within him that he could not fall asleep, nor
+      even remain in one place, but had to jump up and pace the room with rapid
+      steps. Now he seemed to see her in the early days of their marriage, with
+      bare shoulders and a languid, passionate look on her face, and then
+      immediately he saw beside her Dólokhov’s handsome, insolent, hard, and
+      mocking face as he had seen it at the banquet, and then that same face
+      pale, quivering, and suffering, as it had been when he reeled and sank on
+      the snow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What has happened?” he asked himself. “I have killed her <i>lover</i>, yes,
+      killed my wife’s lover. Yes, that was it! And why? How did I come to do
+      it?”—“Because you married her,” answered an inner voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But in what was I to blame?” he asked. “In marrying her without loving
+      her; in deceiving yourself and her.” And he vividly recalled that moment
+      after supper at Prince Vasíli’s, when he spoke those words he had found so
+      difficult to utter: “I love you.” “It all comes from that! Even then I
+      felt it,” he thought. “I felt then that it was not so, that I had no right
+      to do it. And so it turns out.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He remembered his honeymoon and blushed at the recollection. Particularly
+      vivid, humiliating, and shameful was the recollection of how one day soon
+      after his marriage he came out of the bedroom into his study a little
+      before noon in his silk dressing gown and found his head steward there,
+      who, bowing respectfully, looked into his face and at his dressing gown
+      and smiled slightly, as if expressing respectful understanding of his
+      employer’s happiness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But how often I have felt proud of her, proud of her majestic beauty and
+      social tact,” thought he; “been proud of my house, in which she received
+      all Petersburg, proud of her unapproachability and beauty. So this is what
+      I was proud of! I then thought that I did not understand her. How often
+      when considering her character I have told myself that I was to blame for
+      not understanding her, for not understanding that constant composure and
+      complacency and lack of all interests or desires, and the whole secret
+      lies in the terrible truth that she is a depraved woman. Now I have spoken
+      that terrible word to myself all has become clear.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Anatole used to come to borrow money from her and used to kiss her naked
+      shoulders. She did not give him the money, but let herself be kissed. Her
+      father in jest tried to rouse her jealousy, and she replied with a calm
+      smile that she was not so stupid as to be jealous: ‘Let him do what he
+      pleases,’ she used to say of me. One day I asked her if she felt any
+      symptoms of pregnancy. She laughed contemptuously and said she was not a
+      fool to want to have children, and that she was not going to have any
+      children by <i>me</i>.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Then he recalled the coarseness and bluntness of her thoughts and the
+      vulgarity of the expressions that were natural to her, though she had been
+      brought up in the most aristocratic circles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’m not such a fool.... Just you try it on.... <i>Allez-vous promener</i>,” *
+      she used to say. Often seeing the success she had with young and old men
+      and women Pierre could not understand why he did not love her.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “You clear out of this.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I never loved her,” said he to himself; “I knew she was a depraved
+      woman,” he repeated, “but dared not admit it to myself. And now there’s
+      Dólokhov sitting in the snow with a forced smile and perhaps dying, while
+      meeting my remorse with some forced bravado!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was one of those people who, in spite of an appearance of what is
+      called weak character, do not seek a confidant in their troubles. He
+      digested his sufferings alone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is all, all her fault,” he said to himself; “but what of that? Why did
+      I bind myself to her? Why did I say <i>‘Je vous aime’</i> * to her, which was a
+      lie, and worse than a lie? I am guilty and must endure... what? A slur on
+      my name? A misfortune for life? Oh, that’s nonsense,” he thought. “The
+      slur on my name and honor—that’s all apart from myself.”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * I love you.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “Louis XVI was executed because they said he was dishonorable and a
+      criminal,” came into Pierre’s head, “and from their point of view they
+      were right, as were those too who canonized him and died a martyr’s death
+      for his sake. Then Robespierre was beheaded for being a despot. Who is
+      right and who is wrong? No one! But if you are alive—live: tomorrow
+      you’ll die as I might have died an hour ago. And is it worth tormenting
+      oneself, when one has only a moment of life in comparison with eternity?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But at the moment when he imagined himself calmed by such reflections, <i>she</i>
+      suddenly came into his mind as she was at the moments when he had most
+      strongly expressed his insincere love for her, and he felt the blood rush
+      to his heart and had again to get up and move about and break and tear
+      whatever came to his hand. “Why did I tell her that <i>‘Je vous aime’?</i>” he
+      kept repeating to himself. And when he had said it for the tenth time,
+      Molière’s words: <i>“Mais que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?”</i> *
+      occurred to him, and he began to laugh at himself.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+      * “But what the devil was he doing in that galley?”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      In the night he called his valet and told him to pack up to go to
+      Petersburg. He could not imagine how he could speak to her now. He
+      resolved to go away next day and leave a letter informing her of his
+      intention to part from her forever.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next morning when the valet came into the room with his coffee, Pierre was
+      lying asleep on the ottoman with an open book in his hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He woke up and looked round for a while with a startled expression, unable
+      to realize where he was.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The countess told me to inquire whether your excellency was at home,”
+       said the valet.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But before Pierre could decide what answer he would send, the countess
+      herself in a white satin dressing gown embroidered with silver and with
+      simply dressed hair (two immense plaits twice round her lovely head like a
+      coronet) entered the room, calm and majestic, except that there was a
+      wrathful wrinkle on her rather prominent marble brow. With her
+      imperturbable calm she did not begin to speak in front of the valet. She
+      knew of the duel and had come to speak about it. She waited till the valet
+      had set down the coffee things and left the room. Pierre looked at her
+      timidly over his spectacles, and like a hare surrounded by hounds who lays
+      back her ears and continues to crouch motionless before her enemies, he
+      tried to continue reading. But feeling this to be senseless and
+      impossible, he again glanced timidly at her. She did not sit down but
+      looked at him with a contemptuous smile, waiting for the valet to go.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, what’s this now? What have you been up to now, I should like to
+      know?” she asked sternly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I? What have I...?” stammered Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So it seems you’re a hero, eh? Come now, what was this duel about? What
+      is it meant to prove? What? I ask you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre turned over heavily on the ottoman and opened his mouth, but could
+      not reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If you won’t answer, I’ll tell you...” Hélène went on. “You believe
+      everything you’re told. You were told...” Hélène laughed, “that Dólokhov
+      was my lover,” she said in French with her coarse plainness of speech,
+      uttering the word <i>amant</i> as casually as any other word, “and you believed
+      it! Well, what have you proved? What does this duel prove? That you’re a
+      fool, <i>que vous êtes un sot</i>, but everybody knew that. What will be the
+      result? That I shall be the laughingstock of all Moscow, that everyone
+      will say that you, drunk and not knowing what you were about, challenged a
+      man you are jealous of without cause.” Hélène raised her voice and became
+      more and more excited, “A man who’s a better man than you in every way...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Hm... Hm...!” growled Pierre, frowning without looking at her, and not
+      moving a muscle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And how could you believe he was my lover? Why? Because I like his
+      company? If you were cleverer and more agreeable, I should prefer yours.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t speak to me... I beg you,” muttered Pierre hoarsely.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why shouldn’t I speak? I can speak as I like, and I tell you plainly that
+      there are not many wives with husbands such as you who would not have
+      taken lovers (<i>des amants</i>), but I have not done so,” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre wished to say something, looked at her with eyes whose strange
+      expression she did not understand, and lay down again. He was suffering
+      physically at that moment, there was a weight on his chest and he could
+      not breathe. He knew that he must do something to put an end to this
+      suffering, but what he wanted to do was too terrible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We had better separate,” he muttered in a broken voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Separate? Very well, but only if you give me a fortune,” said Hélène.
+      “Separate! That’s a thing to frighten me with!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre leaped up from the sofa and rushed staggering toward her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll kill you!” he shouted, and seizing the marble top of a table with a
+      strength he had never before felt, he made a step toward her brandishing
+      the slab.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Hélène’s face became terrible, she shrieked and sprang aside. His father’s
+      nature showed itself in Pierre. He felt the fascination and delight of
+      frenzy. He flung down the slab, broke it, and swooping down on her with
+      outstretched hands shouted, “Get out!” in such a terrible voice that the
+      whole house heard it with horror. God knows what he would have done at
+      that moment had Hélène not fled from the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      A week later Pierre gave his wife full power to control all his estates in
+      Great Russia, which formed the larger part of his property, and left for
+      Petersburg alone.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0075"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Two months had elapsed since the news of the battle of Austerlitz and the
+      loss of Prince Andrew had reached Bald Hills, and in spite of the letters
+      sent through the embassy and all the searches made, his body had not been
+      found nor was he on the list of prisoners. What was worst of all for his
+      relations was the fact that there was still a possibility of his having
+      been picked up on the battlefield by the people of the place and that he
+      might now be lying, recovering or dying, alone among strangers and unable
+      to send news of himself. The gazettes from which the old prince first
+      heard of the defeat at Austerlitz stated, as usual very briefly and
+      vaguely, that after brilliant engagements the Russians had had to retreat
+      and had made their withdrawal in perfect order. The old prince understood
+      from this official report that our army had been defeated. A week after
+      the gazette report of the battle of Austerlitz came a letter from Kutúzov
+      informing the prince of the fate that had befallen his son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your son,” wrote Kutúzov, “fell before my eyes, a standard in his hand
+      and at the head of a regiment—he fell as a hero, worthy of his
+      father and his fatherland. To the great regret of myself and of the whole
+      army it is still uncertain whether he is alive or not. I comfort myself
+      and you with the hope that your son is alive, for otherwise he would have
+      been mentioned among the officers found on the field of battle, a list of
+      whom has been sent me under flag of truce.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      After receiving this news late in the evening, when he was alone in his
+      study, the old prince went for his walk as usual next morning, but he was
+      silent with his steward, the gardener, and the architect, and though he
+      looked very grim he said nothing to anyone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Princess Mary went to him at the usual hour he was working at his
+      lathe and, as usual, did not look round at her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, Princess Mary!” he said suddenly in an unnatural voice, throwing down
+      his chisel. (The wheel continued to revolve by its own impetus, and
+      Princess Mary long remembered the dying creak of that wheel, which merged
+      in her memory with what followed.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She approached him, saw his face, and something gave way within her. Her
+      eyes grew dim. By the expression of her father’s face, not sad, not
+      crushed, but angry and working unnaturally, she saw that hanging over her
+      and about to crush her was some terrible misfortune, the worst in life,
+      one she had not yet experienced, irreparable and incomprehensible—the
+      death of one she loved.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Father! Andrew!”—said the ungraceful, awkward princess with such an
+      indescribable charm of sorrow and self-forgetfulness that her father could
+      not bear her look but turned away with a sob.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Bad news! He’s not among the prisoners nor among the killed! Kutúzov
+      writes...” and he screamed as piercingly as if he wished to drive the
+      princess away by that scream... “Killed!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess did not fall down or faint. She was already pale, but on
+      hearing these words her face changed and something brightened in her
+      beautiful, radiant eyes. It was as if joy—a supreme joy apart from
+      the joys and sorrows of this world—overflowed the great grief within
+      her. She forgot all fear of her father, went up to him, took his hand, and
+      drawing him down put her arm round his thin, scraggy neck.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Father,” she said, “do not turn away from me, let us weep together.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Scoundrels! Blackguards!” shrieked the old man, turning his face away
+      from her. “Destroying the army, destroying the men! And why? Go, go and
+      tell Lise.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess sank helplessly into an armchair beside her father and wept.
+      She saw her brother now as he had been at the moment when he took leave of
+      her and of Lise, his look tender yet proud. She saw him tender and amused
+      as he was when he put on the little icon. “Did he believe? Had he repented
+      of his unbelief? Was he now there? There in the realms of eternal peace
+      and blessedness?” she thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Father, tell me how it happened,” she asked through her tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go! Go! Killed in battle, where the best of Russian men and Russia’s
+      glory were led to destruction. Go, Princess Mary. Go and tell Lise. I will
+      follow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      When Princess Mary returned from her father, the little princess sat
+      working and looked up with that curious expression of inner, happy calm
+      peculiar to pregnant women. It was evident that her eyes did not see
+      Princess Mary but were looking within... into herself... at something
+      joyful and mysterious taking place within her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mary,” she said, moving away from the embroidery frame and lying back,
+      “give me your hand.” She took her sister-in-law’s hand and held it below
+      her waist.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Her eyes were smiling expectantly, her downy lip rose and remained lifted
+      in childlike happiness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary knelt down before her and hid her face in the folds of her
+      sister-in-law’s dress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There, there! Do you feel it? I feel so strange. And do you know, Mary, I
+      am going to love him very much,” said Lise, looking with bright and happy
+      eyes at her sister-in-law.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary could not lift her head, she was weeping.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is the matter, Mary?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Nothing... only I feel sad... sad about Andrew,” she said, wiping away
+      her tears on her sister-in-law’s knee.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Several times in the course of the morning Princess Mary began trying to
+      prepare her sister-in-law, and every time began to cry. Unobservant as was
+      the little princess, these tears, the cause of which she did not
+      understand, agitated her. She said nothing but looked about uneasily as if
+      in search of something. Before dinner the old prince, of whom she was
+      always afraid, came into her room with a peculiarly restless and malign
+      expression and went out again without saying a word. She looked at
+      Princess Mary, then sat thinking for a while with that expression of
+      attention to something within her that is only seen in pregnant women, and
+      suddenly began to cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Has anything come from Andrew?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, you know it’s too soon for news. But my father is anxious and I feel
+      afraid.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “So there’s nothing?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Nothing,” answered Princess Mary, looking firmly with her radiant eyes at
+      her sister-in-law.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She had determined not to tell her and persuaded her father to hide the
+      terrible news from her till after her confinement, which was expected
+      within a few days. Princess Mary and the old prince each bore and hid
+      their grief in their own way. The old prince would not cherish any hope:
+      he made up his mind that Prince Andrew had been killed, and though he sent
+      an official to Austria to seek for traces of his son, he ordered a
+      monument from Moscow which he intended to erect in his own garden to his
+      memory, and he told everybody that his son had been killed. He tried not
+      to change his former way of life, but his strength failed him. He walked
+      less, ate less, slept less, and became weaker every day. Princess Mary
+      hoped. She prayed for her brother as living and was always awaiting news
+      of his return.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0076"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      “Dearest,” said the little princess after breakfast on the morning of the
+      nineteenth March, and her downy little lip rose from old habit, but as
+      sorrow was manifest in every smile, the sound of every word, and even
+      every footstep in that house since the terrible news had come, so now the
+      smile of the little princess—influenced by the general mood though
+      without knowing its cause—was such as to remind one still more of
+      the general sorrow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dearest, I’m afraid this morning’s <i>fruschtique</i> *—as Fóka the cook
+      calls it—has disagreed with me.”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Frühstück: breakfast.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “What is the matter with you, my darling? You look pale. Oh, you are very
+      pale!” said Princess Mary in alarm, running with her soft, ponderous steps
+      up to her sister-in-law.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency, should not Mary Bogdánovna be sent for?” said one of the
+      maids who was present. (Mary Bogdánovna was a midwife from the neighboring
+      town, who had been at Bald Hills for the last fortnight.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes,” assented Princess Mary, “perhaps that’s it. I’ll go. Courage, my
+      angel.” She kissed Lise and was about to leave the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, no, no!” And besides the pallor and the physical suffering on the
+      little princess’ face, an expression of childish fear of inevitable pain
+      showed itself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, it’s only indigestion?... Say it’s only indigestion, say so, Mary!
+      Say...” And the little princess began to cry capriciously like a suffering
+      child and to wring her little hands even with some affectation. Princess
+      Mary ran out of the room to fetch Mary Bogdánovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “<i>Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!</i> Oh!” she heard as she left the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The midwife was already on her way to meet her, rubbing her small, plump
+      white hands with an air of calm importance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mary Bogdánovna, I think it’s beginning!” said Princess Mary looking at
+      the midwife with wide-open eyes of alarm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, the Lord be thanked, Princess,” said Mary Bogdánovna, not hastening
+      her steps. “You young ladies should not know anything about it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But how is it the doctor from Moscow is not here yet?” said the princess.
+      (In accordance with Lise’s and Prince Andrew’s wishes they had sent in
+      good time to Moscow for a doctor and were expecting him at any moment.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No matter, Princess, don’t be alarmed,” said Mary Bogdánovna. “We’ll
+      manage very well without a doctor.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Five minutes later Princess Mary from her room heard something heavy being
+      carried by. She looked out. The men servants were carrying the large
+      leather sofa from Prince Andrew’s study into the bedroom. On their faces
+      was a quiet and solemn look.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary sat alone in her room listening to the sounds in the house,
+      now and then opening her door when someone passed and watching what was
+      going on in the passage. Some women passing with quiet steps in and out of
+      the bedroom glanced at the princess and turned away. She did not venture
+      to ask any questions, and shut the door again, now sitting down in her
+      easy chair, now taking her prayer book, now kneeling before the icon
+      stand. To her surprise and distress she found that her prayers did not
+      calm her excitement. Suddenly her door opened softly and her old nurse,
+      Praskóvya Sávishna, who hardly ever came to that room as the old prince
+      had forbidden it, appeared on the threshold with a shawl round her head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ve come to sit with you a bit, Másha,” said the nurse, “and here I’ve
+      brought the prince’s wedding candles to light before his saint, my angel,”
+       she said with a sigh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, nurse, I’m so glad!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “God is merciful, birdie.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The nurse lit the gilt candles before the icons and sat down by the door
+      with her knitting. Princess Mary took a book and began reading. Only when
+      footsteps or voices were heard did they look at one another, the princess
+      anxious and inquiring, the nurse encouraging. Everyone in the house was
+      dominated by the same feeling that Princess Mary experienced as she sat in
+      her room. But owing to the superstition that the fewer the people who know
+      of it the less a woman in travail suffers, everyone tried to pretend not
+      to know; no one spoke of it, but apart from the ordinary staid and
+      respectful good manners habitual in the prince’s household, a common
+      anxiety, a softening of the heart, and a consciousness that something
+      great and mysterious was being accomplished at that moment made itself
+      felt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was no laughter in the maids’ large hall. In the men servants’ hall
+      all sat waiting, silently and alert. In the outlying serfs’ quarters
+      torches and candles were burning and no one slept. The old prince,
+      stepping on his heels, paced up and down his study and sent Tíkhon to ask
+      Mary Bogdánovna what news.—“Say only that ‘the prince told me to
+      ask,’ and come and tell me her answer.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Inform the prince that labor has begun,” said Mary Bogdánovna, giving the
+      messenger a significant look.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Tíkhon went and told the prince.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very good!” said the prince closing the door behind him, and Tíkhon did
+      not hear the slightest sound from the study after that.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After a while he re-entered it as if to snuff the candles, and, seeing the
+      prince was lying on the sofa, looked at him, noticed his perturbed face,
+      shook his head, and going up to him silently kissed him on the shoulder
+      and left the room without snuffing the candles or saying why he had
+      entered. The most solemn mystery in the world continued its course.
+      Evening passed, night came, and the feeling of suspense and softening of
+      heart in the presence of the unfathomable did not lessen but increased. No
+      one slept.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was one of those March nights when winter seems to wish to resume its
+      sway and scatters its last snows and storms with desperate fury. A relay
+      of horses had been sent up the highroad to meet the German doctor from
+      Moscow who was expected every moment, and men on horseback with lanterns
+      were sent to the crossroads to guide him over the country road with its
+      hollows and snow-covered pools of water.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary had long since put aside her book: she sat silent, her
+      luminous eyes fixed on her nurse’s wrinkled face (every line of which she
+      knew so well), on the lock of gray hair that escaped from under the
+      kerchief, and the loose skin that hung under her chin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nurse Sávishna, knitting in hand, was telling in low tones, scarcely
+      hearing or understanding her own words, what she had told hundreds of
+      times before: how the late princess had given birth to Princess Mary in
+      Kishenëv with only a Moldavian peasant woman to help instead of a midwife.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “God is merciful, doctors are never needed,” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Suddenly a gust of wind beat violently against the casement of the window,
+      from which the double frame had been removed (by order of the prince, one
+      window frame was removed in each room as soon as the larks returned), and,
+      forcing open a loosely closed latch, set the damask curtain flapping and
+      blew out the candle with its chill, snowy draft. Princess Mary shuddered;
+      her nurse, putting down the stocking she was knitting, went to the window
+      and leaning out tried to catch the open casement. The cold wind flapped
+      the ends of her kerchief and her loose locks of gray hair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Princess, my dear, there’s someone driving up the avenue!” she said,
+      holding the casement and not closing it. “With lanterns. Most likely the
+      doctor.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, my God! thank God!” said Princess Mary. “I must go and meet him, he
+      does not know Russian.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary threw a shawl over her head and ran to meet the newcomer. As
+      she was crossing the anteroom she saw through the window a carriage with
+      lanterns, standing at the entrance. She went out on the stairs. On a
+      banister post stood a tallow candle which guttered in the draft. On the
+      landing below, Philip, the footman, stood looking scared and holding
+      another candle. Still lower, beyond the turn of the staircase, one could
+      hear the footstep of someone in thick felt boots, and a voice that seemed
+      familiar to Princess Mary was saying something.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Thank God!” said the voice. “And Father?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Gone to bed,” replied the voice of Demyán the house steward, who was
+      downstairs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Then the voice said something more, Demyán replied, and the steps in the
+      felt boots approached the unseen bend of the staircase more rapidly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s Andrew!” thought Princess Mary. “No it can’t be, that would be too
+      extraordinary,” and at the very moment she thought this, the face and
+      figure of Prince Andrew, in a fur cloak the deep collar of which covered
+      with snow, appeared on the landing where the footman stood with the
+      candle. Yes, it was he, pale, thin, with a changed and strangely softened
+      but agitated expression on his face. He came up the stairs and embraced
+      his sister.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You did not get my letter?” he asked, and not waiting for a reply—which
+      he would not have received, for the princess was unable to speak—he
+      turned back, rapidly mounted the stairs again with the doctor who had
+      entered the hall after him (they had met at the last post station), and
+      again embraced his sister.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a strange fate, Másha darling!” And having taken off his cloak and
+      felt boots, he went to the little princess’ apartment.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0077"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The little princess lay supported by pillows, with a white cap on her head
+      (the pains had just left her). Strands of her black hair lay round her
+      inflamed and perspiring cheeks, her charming rosy mouth with its downy lip
+      was open and she was smiling joyfully. Prince Andrew entered and paused
+      facing her at the foot of the sofa on which she was lying. Her glittering
+      eyes, filled with childlike fear and excitement, rested on him without
+      changing their expression. “I love you all and have done no harm to
+      anyone; why must I suffer so? Help me!” her look seemed to say. She saw
+      her husband, but did not realize the significance of his appearance before
+      her now. Prince Andrew went round the sofa and kissed her forehead.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My darling!” he said—a word he had never used to her before. “God
+      is merciful....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She looked at him inquiringly and with childlike reproach.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I expected help from you and I get none, none from you either!” said her
+      eyes. She was not surprised at his having come; she did not realize that
+      he had come. His coming had nothing to do with her sufferings or with
+      their relief. The pangs began again and Mary Bogdánovna advised Prince
+      Andrew to leave the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The doctor entered. Prince Andrew went out and, meeting Princess Mary,
+      again joined her. They began talking in whispers, but their talk broke off
+      at every moment. They waited and listened.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go, dear,” said Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew went again to his wife and sat waiting in the room next to
+      hers. A woman came from the bedroom with a frightened face and became
+      confused when she saw Prince Andrew. He covered his face with his hands
+      and remained so for some minutes. Piteous, helpless, animal moans came
+      through the door. Prince Andrew got up, went to the door, and tried to
+      open it. Someone was holding it shut.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You can’t come in! You can’t!” said a terrified voice from within.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He began pacing the room. The screaming ceased, and a few more seconds
+      went by. Then suddenly a terrible shriek—it could not be hers, she
+      could not scream like that—came from the bedroom. Prince Andrew ran
+      to the door; the scream ceased and he heard the wail of an infant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What have they taken a baby in there for?” thought Prince Andrew in the
+      first second. “A baby? What baby...? Why is there a baby there? Or is the
+      baby born?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Then suddenly he realized the joyful significance of that wail; tears
+      choked him, and leaning his elbows on the window sill he began to cry,
+      sobbing like a child. The door opened. The doctor with his shirt sleeves
+      tucked up, without a coat, pale and with a trembling jaw, came out of the
+      room. Prince Andrew turned to him, but the doctor gave him a bewildered
+      look and passed by without a word. A woman rushed out and seeing Prince
+      Andrew stopped, hesitating on the threshold. He went into his wife’s room.
+      She was lying dead, in the same position he had seen her in five minutes
+      before and, despite the fixed eyes and the pallor of the cheeks, the same
+      expression was on her charming childlike face with its upper lip covered
+      with tiny black hair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I love you all, and have done no harm to anyone; and what have you done
+      to me?”—said her charming, pathetic, dead face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In a corner of the room something red and tiny gave a grunt and squealed
+      in Mary Bogdánovna’s trembling white hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Two hours later Prince Andrew, stepping softly, went into his father’s
+      room. The old man already knew everything. He was standing close to the
+      door and as soon as it opened his rough old arms closed like a vise round
+      his son’s neck, and without a word he began to sob like a child.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Three days later the little princess was buried, and Prince Andrew went up
+      the steps to where the coffin stood, to give her the farewell kiss. And
+      there in the coffin was the same face, though with closed eyes. “Ah, what
+      have you done to me?” it still seemed to say, and Prince Andrew felt that
+      something gave way in his soul and that he was guilty of a sin he could
+      neither remedy nor forget. He could not weep. The old man too came up and
+      kissed the waxen little hands that lay quietly crossed one on the other on
+      her breast, and to him, too, her face seemed to say: “Ah, what have you
+      done to me, and why?” And at the sight the old man turned angrily away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Another five days passed, and then the young Prince Nicholas Andréevich
+      was baptized. The wet nurse supported the coverlet with her chin, while
+      the priest with a goose feather anointed the boy’s little red and wrinkled
+      soles and palms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His grandfather, who was his godfather, trembling and afraid of dropping
+      him, carried the infant round the battered tin font and handed him over to
+      the godmother, Princess Mary. Prince Andrew sat in another room, faint
+      with fear lest the baby should be drowned in the font, and awaited the
+      termination of the ceremony. He looked up joyfully at the baby when the
+      nurse brought it to him and nodded approval when she told him that the wax
+      with the baby’s hair had not sunk in the font but had floated.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0078"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Rostóv’s share in Dólokhov’s duel with Bezúkhov was hushed up by the
+      efforts of the old count, and instead of being degraded to the ranks as he
+      expected he was appointed an adjutant to the governor general of Moscow.
+      As a result he could not go to the country with the rest of the family,
+      but was kept all summer in Moscow by his new duties. Dólokhov recovered,
+      and Rostóv became very friendly with him during his convalescence.
+      Dólokhov lay ill at his mother’s who loved him passionately and tenderly,
+      and old Mary Ivánovna, who had grown fond of Rostóv for his friendship to
+      her Fédya, often talked to him about her son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, Count,” she would say, “he is too noble and pure-souled for our
+      present, depraved world. No one now loves virtue; it seems like a reproach
+      to everyone. Now tell me, Count, was it right, was it honorable, of
+      Bezúkhov? And Fédya, with his noble spirit, loved him and even now never
+      says a word against him. Those pranks in Petersburg when they played some
+      tricks on a policeman, didn’t they do it together? And there! Bezúkhov got
+      off scotfree, while Fédya had to bear the whole burden on his shoulders.
+      Fancy what he had to go through! It’s true he has been reinstated, but how
+      could they fail to do that? I think there were not many such gallant sons
+      of the fatherland out there as he. And now—this duel! Have these
+      people no feeling, or honor? Knowing him to be an only son, to challenge
+      him and shoot so straight! It’s well God had mercy on us. And what was it
+      for? Who doesn’t have intrigues nowadays? Why, if he was so jealous, as I
+      see things he should have shown it sooner, but he lets it go on for
+      months. And then to call him out, reckoning on Fédya not fighting because
+      he owed him money! What baseness! What meanness! I know you understand
+      Fédya, my dear count; that, believe me, is why I am so fond of you. Few
+      people do understand him. He is such a lofty, heavenly soul!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov himself during his convalescence spoke to Rostóv in a way no one
+      would have expected of him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I know people consider me a bad man!” he said. “Let them! I don’t care a
+      straw about anyone but those I love; but those I love, I love so that I
+      would give my life for them, and the others I’d throttle if they stood in
+      my way. I have an adored, a priceless mother, and two or three friends—you
+      among them—and as for the rest I only care about them in so far as
+      they are harmful or useful. And most of them are harmful, especially the
+      women. Yes, dear boy,” he continued, “I have met loving, noble,
+      high-minded men, but I have not yet met any women—countesses or
+      cooks—who were not venal. I have not yet met that divine purity and
+      devotion I look for in women. If I found such a one I’d give my life for
+      her! But those!...” and he made a gesture of contempt. “And believe me, if
+      I still value my life it is only because I still hope to meet such a
+      divine creature, who will regenerate, purify, and elevate me. But you
+      don’t understand it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, yes, I quite understand,” answered Rostóv, who was under his new
+      friend’s influence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the autumn the Rostóvs returned to Moscow. Early in the winter Denísov
+      also came back and stayed with them. The first half of the winter of 1806,
+      which Nicholas Rostóv spent in Moscow, was one of the happiest, merriest
+      times for him and the whole family. Nicholas brought many young men to his
+      parents’ house. Véra was a handsome girl of twenty; Sónya a girl of
+      sixteen with all the charm of an opening flower; Natásha, half grown up
+      and half child, was now childishly amusing, now girlishly enchanting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that time in the Rostóvs’ house there prevailed an amorous atmosphere
+      characteristic of homes where there are very young and very charming
+      girls. Every young man who came to the house—seeing those
+      impressionable, smiling young faces (smiling probably at their own
+      happiness), feeling the eager bustle around him, and hearing the fitful
+      bursts of song and music and the inconsequent but friendly prattle of
+      young girls ready for anything and full of hope—experienced the same
+      feeling; sharing with the young folk of the Rostóvs’ household a readiness
+      to fall in love and an expectation of happiness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Among the young men introduced by Rostóv one of the first was Dólokhov,
+      whom everyone in the house liked except Natásha. She almost quarreled with
+      her brother about him. She insisted that he was a bad man, and that in the
+      duel with Bezúkhov, Pierre was right and Dólokhov wrong, and further that
+      he was disagreeable and unnatural.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There’s nothing for me to understand,” she cried out with resolute
+      self-will, “he is wicked and heartless. There now, I like your Denísov
+      though he is a rake and all that, still I like him; so you see I do
+      understand. I don’t know how to put it... with this one everything is
+      calculated, and I don’t like that. But Denísov...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, Denísov is quite different,” replied Nicholas, implying that even
+      Denísov was nothing compared to Dólokhov—“you must understand what a
+      soul there is in Dólokhov, you should see him with his mother. What a
+      heart!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, I don’t know about that, but I am uncomfortable with him. And do
+      you know he has fallen in love with Sónya?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What nonsense...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I’m certain of it; you’ll see.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha’s prediction proved true. Dólokhov, who did not usually care for
+      the society of ladies, began to come often to the house, and the question
+      for whose sake he came (though no one spoke of it) was soon settled. He
+      came because of Sónya. And Sónya, though she would never have dared to say
+      so, knew it and blushed scarlet every time Dólokhov appeared.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov often dined at the Rostóvs’, never missed a performance at which
+      they were present, and went to Iogel’s balls for young people which the
+      Rostóvs always attended. He was pointedly attentive to Sónya and looked at
+      her in such a way that not only could she not bear his glances without
+      coloring, but even the old countess and Natásha blushed when they saw his
+      looks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was evident that this strange, strong man was under the irresistible
+      influence of the dark, graceful girl who loved another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv noticed something new in Dólokhov’s relations with Sónya, but he
+      did not explain to himself what these new relations were. “They’re always
+      in love with someone,” he thought of Sónya and Natásha. But he was not as
+      much at ease with Sónya and Dólokhov as before and was less frequently at
+      home.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the autumn of 1806 everybody had again begun talking of the war with
+      Napoleon with even greater warmth than the year before. Orders were given
+      to raise recruits, ten men in every thousand for the regular army, and
+      besides this, nine men in every thousand for the militia. Everywhere
+      Bonaparte was anathematized and in Moscow nothing but the coming war was
+      talked of. For the Rostóv family the whole interest of these preparations
+      for war lay in the fact that Nicholas would not hear of remaining in
+      Moscow, and only awaited the termination of Denísov’s furlough after
+      Christmas to return with him to their regiment. His approaching departure
+      did not prevent his amusing himself, but rather gave zest to his
+      pleasures. He spent the greater part of his time away from home, at
+      dinners, parties, and balls.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0079"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On the third day after Christmas Nicholas dined at home, a thing he had
+      rarely done of late. It was a grand farewell dinner, as he and Denísov
+      were leaving to join their regiment after Epiphany. About twenty people
+      were present, including Dólokhov and Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Never had love been so much in the air, and never had the amorous
+      atmosphere made itself so strongly felt in the Rostóvs’ house as at this
+      holiday time. “Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is
+      the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we
+      are interested in here,” said the spirit of the place.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas, having as usual exhausted two pairs of horses, without visiting
+      all the places he meant to go to and where he had been invited, returned
+      home just before dinner. As soon as he entered he noticed and felt the
+      tension of the amorous air in the house, and also noticed a curious
+      embarrassment among some of those present. Sónya, Dólokhov, and the old
+      countess were especially disturbed, and to a lesser degree Natásha.
+      Nicholas understood that something must have happened between Sónya and
+      Dólokhov before dinner, and with the kindly sensitiveness natural to him
+      was very gentle and wary with them both at dinner. On that same evening
+      there was to be one of the balls that Iogel (the dancing master) gave for
+      his pupils during the holidays.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nicholas, will you come to Iogel’s? Please do!” said Natásha. “He asked
+      you, and Vasíli Dmítrich * is also going.”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Denísov.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “Where would I not go at the countess’ command!” said Denísov, who at the
+      Rostóvs’ had jocularly assumed the role of Natásha’s knight. “I’m even
+      weady to dance the <i>pas de châle</i>.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If I have time,” answered Nicholas. “But I promised the Arkhárovs; they
+      have a party.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And you?” he asked Dólokhov, but as soon as he had asked the question he
+      noticed that it should not have been put.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Perhaps,” coldly and angrily replied Dólokhov, glancing at Sónya, and,
+      scowling, he gave Nicholas just such a look as he had given Pierre at the
+      club dinner.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There is something up,” thought Nicholas, and he was further confirmed in
+      this conclusion by the fact that Dólokhov left immediately after dinner.
+      He called Natásha and asked her what was the matter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I was looking for you,” said Natásha running out to him. “I told you,
+      but you would not believe it,” she said triumphantly. “He has proposed to
+      Sónya!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Little as Nicholas had occupied himself with Sónya of late, something
+      seemed to give way within him at this news. Dólokhov was a suitable and in
+      some respects a brilliant match for the dowerless, orphan girl. From the
+      point of view of the old countess and of society it was out of the
+      question for her to refuse him. And therefore Nicholas’ first feeling on
+      hearing the news was one of anger with Sónya.... He tried to say, “That’s
+      capital; of course she’ll forget her childish promises and accept the
+      offer,” but before he had time to say it Natásha began again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And fancy! she refused him quite definitely!” adding, after a pause, “she
+      told him she loved another.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, my Sónya could not have done otherwise!” thought Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Much as Mamma pressed her, she refused, and I know she won’t change once
+      she has said...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And Mamma pressed her!” said Nicholas reproachfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” said Natásha. “Do you know, Nicholas—don’t be angry—but
+      I know you will not marry her. I know, heaven knows how, but I know for
+      certain that you won’t marry her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Now you don’t know that at all!” said Nicholas. “But I must talk to her.
+      What a darling Sónya is!” he added with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, she is indeed a darling! I’ll send her to you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Natásha kissed her brother and ran away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A minute later Sónya came in with a frightened, guilty, and scared look.
+      Nicholas went up to her and kissed her hand. This was the first time since
+      his return that they had talked alone and about their love.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sophie,” he began, timidly at first and then more and more boldly, “if
+      you wish to refuse one who is not only a brilliant and advantageous match
+      but a splendid, noble fellow... he is my friend...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have already refused,” she said hurriedly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If you are refusing for my sake, I am afraid that I...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya again interrupted. She gave him an imploring, frightened look.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nicholas, don’t tell me that!” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, but I must. It may be arrogant of me, but still it is best to say it.
+      If you refuse him on my account, I must tell you the whole truth. I love
+      you, and I think I love you more than anyone else....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That is enough for me,” said Sónya, blushing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, but I have been in love a thousand times and shall fall in love
+      again, though for no one have I such a feeling of friendship, confidence,
+      and love as I have for you. Then I am young. Mamma does not wish it. In a
+      word, I make no promise. And I beg you to consider Dólokhov’s offer,” he
+      said, articulating his friend’s name with difficulty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t say that to me! I want nothing. I love you as a brother and always
+      shall, and I want nothing more.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You are an angel: I am not worthy of you, but I am afraid of misleading
+      you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Nicholas again kissed her hand.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0080"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Iogel’s were the most enjoyable balls in Moscow. So said the mothers as
+      they watched their young people executing their newly learned steps, and
+      so said the youths and maidens themselves as they danced till they were
+      ready to drop, and so said the grown-up young men and women who came to
+      these balls with an air of condescension and found them most enjoyable.
+      That year two marriages had come of these balls. The two pretty young
+      Princesses Gorchakóv met suitors there and were married and so further
+      increased the fame of these dances. What distinguished them from others
+      was the absence of host or hostess and the presence of the good-natured
+      Iogel, flying about like a feather and bowing according to the rules of
+      his art, as he collected the tickets from all his visitors. There was the
+      fact that only those came who wished to dance and amuse themselves as
+      girls of thirteen and fourteen do who are wearing long dresses for the
+      first time. With scarcely any exceptions they all were, or seemed to be,
+      pretty—so rapturous were their smiles and so sparkling their eyes.
+      Sometimes the best of the pupils, of whom Natásha, who was exceptionally
+      graceful, was first, even danced the <i>pas de châle</i>, but at this last ball
+      only the <i>écossaise</i>, the <i>anglaise</i>, and the mazurka, which was just coming
+      into fashion, were danced. Iogel had taken a ballroom in Bezúkhov’s house,
+      and the ball, as everyone said, was a great success. There were many
+      pretty girls and the Rostóv girls were among the prettiest. They were both
+      particularly happy and gay. That evening, proud of Dólokhov’s proposal,
+      her refusal, and her explanation with Nicholas, Sónya twirled about before
+      she left home so that the maid could hardly get her hair plaited, and she
+      was transparently radiant with impulsive joy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha no less proud of her first long dress and of being at a real ball
+      was even happier. They were both dressed in white muslin with pink
+      ribbons.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha fell in love the very moment she entered the ballroom. She was not
+      in love with anyone in particular, but with everyone. Whatever person she
+      happened to look at she was in love with for that moment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, how delightful it is!” she kept saying, running up to Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas and Denísov were walking up and down, looking with kindly
+      patronage at the dancers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How sweet she is—she will be a weal beauty!” said Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Countess Natásha,” answered Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And how she dances! What gwace!” he said again after a pause.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who are you talking about?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “About your sister,” ejaculated Denísov testily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear count, you were one of my best pupils—you must dance,”
+      said little Iogel coming up to Nicholas. “Look how many charming young
+      ladies—” He turned with the same request to Denísov who was also a
+      former pupil of his.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, my dear fellow, I’ll be a wallflower,” said Denísov. “Don’t you
+      wecollect what bad use I made of your lessons?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh no!” said Iogel, hastening to reassure him. “You were only
+      inattentive, but you had talent—oh yes, you had talent!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The band struck up the newly introduced mazurka. Nicholas could not
+      refuse Iogel and asked Sónya to dance. Denísov sat down by the old
+      ladies and, leaning on his saber and beating time with his foot, told
+      them something funny and kept them amused, while he watched the young
+      people dancing, Iogel with Natásha, his pride and his best pupil, were
+      the first couple. Noiselessly, skillfully stepping with his little feet
+      in low shoes, Iogel flew first across the hall with Natásha, who, though
+      shy, went on carefully executing her steps. Denísov did not take
+      his eyes off her and beat time with his saber in a way that clearly
+      indicated that if he was not dancing it was because he would not and not
+      because he could not. In the middle of a figure he beckoned to Rostóv
+      who was passing:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This is not at all the thing,” he said. “What sort of Polish mazuwka is
+      this? But she does dance splendidly.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Knowing that Denísov had a reputation even in Poland for the masterly way
+      in which he danced the mazurka, Nicholas ran up to Natásha:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go and choose Denísov. He is a real dancer, a wonder!” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When it came to Natásha’s turn to choose a partner, she rose and, tripping
+      rapidly across in her little shoes trimmed with bows, ran timidly to the
+      corner where Denísov sat. She saw that everybody was looking at her and
+      waiting. Nicholas saw that Denísov was refusing though he smiled
+      delightedly. He ran up to them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Please, Vasíli Dmítrich,” Natásha was saying, “do come!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh no, let me off, Countess,” Denísov replied.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then, Váska,” said Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They coax me as if I were Váska the cat!” said Denísov jokingly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll sing for you a whole evening,” said Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, the faiwy! She can do anything with me!” said Denísov, and he
+      unhooked his saber. He came out from behind the chairs, clasped his
+      partner’s hand firmly, threw back his head, and advanced his foot, waiting
+      for the beat. Only on horse back and in the mazurka was Denísov’s short
+      stature not noticeable and he looked the fine fellow he felt himself to
+      be. At the right beat of the music he looked sideways at his partner with
+      a merry and triumphant air, suddenly stamped with one foot, bounded from
+      the floor like a ball, and flew round the room taking his partner with
+      him. He glided silently on one foot half across the room, and seeming not
+      to notice the chairs was dashing straight at them, when suddenly, clinking
+      his spurs and spreading out his legs, he stopped short on his heels, stood
+      so a second, stamped on the spot clanking his spurs, whirled rapidly
+      round, and, striking his left heel against his right, flew round again in
+      a circle. Natásha guessed what he meant to do, and abandoning herself to
+      him followed his lead hardly knowing how. First he spun her round, holding
+      her now with his left, now with his right hand, then falling on one knee
+      he twirled her round him, and again jumping up, dashed so impetuously
+      forward that it seemed as if he would rush through the whole suite of
+      rooms without drawing breath, and then he suddenly stopped and performed
+      some new and unexpected steps. When at last, smartly whirling his partner
+      round in front of her chair, he drew up with a click of his spurs and
+      bowed to her, Natásha did not even make him a curtsy. She fixed her eyes
+      on him in amazement, smiling as if she did not recognize him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What does this mean?” she brought out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Although Iogel did not acknowledge this to be the real mazurka, everyone
+      was delighted with Denísov’s skill, he was asked again and again as a
+      partner, and the old men began smilingly to talk about Poland and the good
+      old days. Denísov, flushed after the mazurka and mopping himself with his
+      handkerchief, sat down by Natásha and did not leave her for the rest of
+      the evening.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0081"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      For two days after that Rostóv did not see Dólokhov at his own or at
+      Dólokhov’s home: on the third day he received a note from him:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As I do not intend to be at your house again for reasons you know of, and
+      am going to rejoin my regiment, I am giving a farewell supper tonight to
+      my friends—come to the English Hotel.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      About ten o’clock Rostóv went to the English Hotel straight from the
+      theater, where he had been with his family and Denísov. He was at once
+      shown to the best room, which Dólokhov had taken for that evening. Some
+      twenty men were gathered round a table at which Dólokhov sat between two
+      candles. On the table was a pile of gold and paper money, and he was
+      keeping the bank. Rostóv had not seen him since his proposal and Sónya’s
+      refusal and felt uncomfortable at the thought of how they would meet.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov’s clear, cold glance met Rostóv as soon as he entered the door,
+      as though he had long expected him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s a long time since we met,” he said. “Thanks for coming. I’ll just
+      finish dealing, and then Ilyúshka will come with his chorus.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I called once or twice at your house,” said Rostóv, reddening.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov made no reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You may punt,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv recalled at that moment a strange conversation he had once had with
+      Dólokhov. “None but fools trust to luck in play,” Dólokhov had then said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Or are you afraid to play with me?” Dólokhov now asked as if guessing
+      Rostóv’s thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Beneath his smile Rostóv saw in him the mood he had shown at the club
+      dinner and at other times, when as if tired of everyday life he had felt a
+      need to escape from it by some strange, and usually cruel, action.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv felt ill at ease. He tried, but failed, to find some joke with
+      which to reply to Dólokhov’s words. But before he had thought of anything,
+      Dólokhov, looking straight in his face, said slowly and deliberately so
+      that everyone could hear:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you remember we had a talk about cards... ‘He’s a fool who trusts to
+      luck, one should make certain,’ and I want to try.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “To try his luck or the certainty?” Rostóv asked himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, you’d better not play,” Dólokhov added, and springing a new pack of
+      cards said: “Bank, gentlemen!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Moving the money forward he prepared to deal. Rostóv sat down by his side
+      and at first did not play. Dólokhov kept glancing at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why don’t you play?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And strange to say Nicholas felt that he could not help taking up a card,
+      putting a small stake on it, and beginning to play.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have no money with me,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll trust you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv staked five rubles on a card and lost, staked again, and again
+      lost. Dólokhov “killed,” that is, beat, ten cards of Rostóv’s running.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Gentlemen,” said Dólokhov after he had dealt for some time. “Please place
+      your money on the cards or I may get muddled in the reckoning.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      One of the players said he hoped he might be trusted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, you might, but I am afraid of getting the accounts mixed. So I ask
+      you to put the money on your cards,” replied Dólokhov. “Don’t stint
+      yourself, we’ll settle afterwards,” he added, turning to Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The game continued; a waiter kept handing round champagne.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All Rostóv’s cards were beaten and he had eight hundred rubles scored up
+      against him. He wrote “800 rubles” on a card, but while the waiter filled
+      his glass he changed his mind and altered it to his usual stake of twenty
+      rubles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Leave it,” said Dólokhov, though he did not seem to be even looking at
+      Rostóv, “you’ll win it back all the sooner. I lose to the others but win
+      from you. Or are you afraid of me?” he asked again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv submitted. He let the eight hundred remain and laid down a seven of
+      hearts with a torn corner, which he had picked up from the floor. He well
+      remembered that seven afterwards. He laid down the seven of hearts, on
+      which with a broken bit of chalk he had written “800 rubles” in clear
+      upright figures; he emptied the glass of warm champagne that was handed
+      him, smiled at Dólokhov’s words, and with a sinking heart, waiting for a
+      seven to turn up, gazed at Dólokhov’s hands which held the pack. Much
+      depended on Rostóv’s winning or losing on that seven of hearts. On the
+      previous Sunday the old count had given his son two thousand rubles, and
+      though he always disliked speaking of money difficulties had told Nicholas
+      that this was all he could let him have till May, and asked him to be more
+      economical this time. Nicholas had replied that it would be more than
+      enough for him and that he gave his word of honor not to take anything
+      more till the spring. Now only twelve hundred rubles was left of that
+      money, so that this seven of hearts meant for him not only the loss of
+      sixteen hundred rubles, but the necessity of going back on his word. With
+      a sinking heart he watched Dólokhov’s hands and thought, “Now then, make
+      haste and let me have this card and I’ll take my cap and drive home to
+      supper with Denísov, Natásha, and Sónya, and will certainly never touch a
+      card again.” At that moment his home life, jokes with Pétya, talks with
+      Sónya, duets with Natásha, piquet with his father, and even his
+      comfortable bed in the house on the Povarskáya rose before him with such
+      vividness, clearness, and charm that it seemed as if it were all a lost
+      and unappreciated bliss, long past. He could not conceive that a stupid
+      chance, letting the seven be dealt to the right rather than to the left,
+      might deprive him of all this happiness, newly appreciated and newly
+      illumined, and plunge him into the depths of unknown and undefined misery.
+      That could not be, yet he awaited with a sinking heart the movement of
+      Dólokhov’s hands. Those broad, reddish hands, with hairy wrists visible
+      from under the shirt cuffs, laid down the pack and took up a glass and a
+      pipe that were handed him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So you are not afraid to play with me?” repeated Dólokhov, and as if
+      about to tell a good story he put down the cards, leaned back in his
+      chair, and began deliberately with a smile:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, gentlemen, I’ve been told there’s a rumor going about Moscow that
+      I’m a sharper, so I advise you to be careful.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Come now, deal!” exclaimed Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, those Moscow gossips!” said Dólokhov, and he took up the cards with a
+      smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Aah!” Rostóv almost screamed lifting both hands to his head. The seven he
+      needed was lying uppermost, the first card in the pack. He had lost more
+      than he could pay.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Still, don’t ruin yourself!” said Dólokhov with a side glance at Rostóv
+      as he continued to deal.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0082"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      An hour and a half later most of the players were but little interested in
+      their own play.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The whole interest was concentrated on Rostóv. Instead of sixteen hundred
+      rubles he had a long column of figures scored against him, which he had
+      reckoned up to ten thousand, but that now, as he vaguely supposed, must
+      have risen to fifteen thousand. In reality it already exceeded twenty
+      thousand rubles. Dólokhov was no longer listening to stories or telling
+      them, but followed every movement of Rostóv’s hands and occasionally ran
+      his eyes over the score against him. He had decided to play until that
+      score reached forty-three thousand. He had fixed on that number because
+      forty-three was the sum of his and Sónya’s joint ages. Rostóv, leaning his
+      head on both hands, sat at the table which was scrawled over with figures,
+      wet with spilled wine, and littered with cards. One tormenting impression
+      did not leave him: that those broad-boned reddish hands with hairy wrists
+      visible from under the shirt sleeves, those hands which he loved and
+      hated, held him in their power.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Six hundred rubles, ace, a corner, a nine... winning it back’s
+      impossible... Oh, how pleasant it was at home!... The knave, double or
+      quits... it can’t be!... And why is he doing this to me?” Rostóv pondered.
+      Sometimes he staked a large sum, but Dólokhov refused to accept it and
+      fixed the stake himself. Nicholas submitted to him, and at one moment
+      prayed to God as he had done on the battlefield at the bridge over the
+      Enns, and then guessed that the card that came first to hand from the
+      crumpled heap under the table would save him, now counted the cords on his
+      coat and took a card with that number and tried staking the total of his
+      losses on it, then he looked round for aid from the other players, or
+      peered at the now cold face of Dólokhov and tried to read what was passing
+      in his mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He knows of course what this loss means to me. He can’t want my ruin.
+      Wasn’t he my friend? Wasn’t I fond of him? But it’s not his fault. What’s
+      he to do if he has such luck?... And it’s not my fault either,” he thought
+      to himself, “I have done nothing wrong. Have I killed anyone, or insulted
+      or wished harm to anyone? Why such a terrible misfortune? And when did it
+      begin? Such a little while ago I came to this table with the thought of
+      winning a hundred rubles to buy that casket for Mamma’s name day and then
+      going home. I was so happy, so free, so lighthearted! And I did not
+      realize how happy I was! When did that end and when did this new, terrible
+      state of things begin? What marked the change? I sat all the time in this
+      same place at this table, chose and placed cards, and watched those
+      broad-boned agile hands in the same way. When did it happen and what has
+      happened? I am well and strong and still the same and in the same place.
+      No, it can’t be! Surely it will all end in nothing!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He was flushed and bathed in perspiration, though the room was not hot.
+      His face was terrible and piteous to see, especially from its helpless
+      efforts to seem calm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The score against him reached the fateful sum of forty-three thousand.
+      Rostóv had just prepared a card, by bending the corner of which he meant
+      to double the three thousand just put down to his score, when Dólokhov,
+      slamming down the pack of cards, put it aside and began rapidly adding up
+      the total of Rostóv’s debt, breaking the chalk as he marked the figures in
+      his clear, bold hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Supper, it’s time for supper! And here are the gypsies!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Some swarthy men and women were really entering from the cold outside and
+      saying something in their gypsy accents. Nicholas understood that it was
+      all over; but he said in an indifferent tone:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, won’t you go on? I had a splendid card all ready,” as if it were
+      the fun of the game which interested him most.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s all up! I’m lost!” thought he. “Now a bullet through my brain—that’s
+      all that’s left me!” And at the same time he said in a cheerful voice:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come now, just this one more little card!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “All right!” said Dólokhov, having finished the addition. “All right!
+      Twenty-one rubles,” he said, pointing to the figure twenty-one by which
+      the total exceeded the round sum of forty-three thousand; and taking up a
+      pack he prepared to deal. Rostóv submissively unbent the corner of his
+      card and, instead of the six thousand he had intended, carefully wrote
+      twenty-one.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s all the same to me,” he said. “I only want to see whether you will
+      let me win this ten, or beat it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov began to deal seriously. Oh, how Rostóv detested at that moment
+      those hands with their short reddish fingers and hairy wrists, which held
+      him in their power.... The ten fell to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You owe forty-three thousand, Count,” said Dólokhov, and stretching
+      himself he rose from the table. “One does get tired sitting so long,” he
+      added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I’m tired too,” said Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov cut him short, as if to remind him that it was not for him to
+      jest.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “When am I to receive the money, Count?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv, flushing, drew Dólokhov into the next room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I cannot pay it all immediately. Will you take an I.O.U.?” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I say, Rostóv,” said Dólokhov clearly, smiling and looking Nicholas
+      straight in the eyes, “you know the saying, ‘Lucky in love, unlucky at
+      cards.’ Your cousin is in love with you, I know.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, it’s terrible to feel oneself so in this man’s power,” thought
+      Rostóv. He knew what a shock he would inflict on his father and mother by
+      the news of this loss, he knew what a relief it would be to escape it all,
+      and felt that Dólokhov knew that he could save him from all this shame and
+      sorrow, but wanted now to play with him as a cat does with a mouse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your cousin...” Dólokhov started to say, but Nicholas interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My cousin has nothing to do with this and it’s not necessary to mention
+      her!” he exclaimed fiercely.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then when am I to have it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Tomorrow,” replied Rostóv and left the room.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0083"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      To say “tomorrow” and keep up a dignified tone was not difficult, but to
+      go home alone, see his sisters, brother, mother, and father, confess and
+      ask for money he had no right to after giving his word of honor, was
+      terrible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At home, they had not yet gone to bed. The young people, after returning
+      from the theater, had had supper and were grouped round the clavichord. As
+      soon as Nicholas entered, he was enfolded in that poetic atmosphere of
+      love which pervaded the Rostóv household that winter and, now after
+      Dólokhov’s proposal and Iogel’s ball, seemed to have grown thicker round
+      Sónya and Natásha as the air does before a thunderstorm. Sónya and
+      Natásha, in the light-blue dresses they had worn at the theater, looking
+      pretty and conscious of it, were standing by the clavichord, happy and
+      smiling. Véra was playing chess with Shinshín in the drawing room. The old
+      countess, waiting for the return of her husband and son, sat playing
+      patience with the old gentlewoman who lived in their house. Denísov, with
+      sparkling eyes and ruffled hair, sat at the clavichord striking chords
+      with his short fingers, his legs thrown back and his eyes rolling as he
+      sang, with his small, husky, but true voice, some verses called
+      “Enchantress,” which he had composed, and to which he was trying to fit
+      music:
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+   Enchantress, say, to my forsaken lyre<br>
+   What magic power is this recalls me still?<br>
+   What spark has set my inmost soul on fire,<br>
+   What is this bliss that makes my fingers thrill?
+</p>
+<p>
+      He was singing in passionate tones, gazing with his sparkling black-agate
+      eyes at the frightened and happy Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Splendid! Excellent!” exclaimed Natásha. “Another verse,” she said,
+      without noticing Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Everything’s still the same with them,” thought Nicholas, glancing into
+      the drawing room, where he saw Véra and his mother with the old lady.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, and here’s Nicholas!” cried Natásha, running up to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is Papa at home?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am so glad you’ve come!” said Natásha, without answering him. “We are
+      enjoying ourselves! Vasíli Dmítrich is staying a day longer for my sake!
+      Did you know?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, Papa is not back yet,” said Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nicholas, have you come? Come here, dear!” called the old countess from
+      the drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas went to her, kissed her hand, and sitting down silently at her
+      table began to watch her hands arranging the cards. From the dancing room,
+      they still heard the laughter and merry voices trying to persuade Natásha
+      to sing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All wight! All wight!” shouted Denísov. “It’s no good making excuses now!
+      It’s your turn to sing the ba’cawolla—I entweat you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The countess glanced at her silent son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is the matter?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, nothing,” said he, as if weary of being continually asked the same
+      question. “Will Papa be back soon?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I expect so.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Everything’s the same with them. They know nothing about it! Where am I
+      to go?” thought Nicholas, and went again into the dancing room where the
+      clavichord stood.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya was sitting at the clavichord, playing the prelude to Denísov’s
+      favorite barcarolle. Natásha was preparing to sing. Denísov was looking at
+      her with enraptured eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas began pacing up and down the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why do they want to make her sing? How can she sing? There’s nothing to
+      be happy about!” thought he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya struck the first chord of the prelude.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My God, I’m a ruined and dishonored man! A bullet through my brain is the
+      only thing left me—not singing!” his thoughts ran on. “Go away? But
+      where to? It’s one—let them sing!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He continued to pace the room, looking gloomily at Denísov and the girls
+      and avoiding their eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nikólenka, what is the matter?” Sónya’s eyes fixed on him seemed to ask.
+      She noticed at once that something had happened to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas turned away from her. Natásha too, with her quick instinct, had
+      instantly noticed her brother’s condition. But, though she noticed it, she
+      was herself in such high spirits at that moment, so far from sorrow,
+      sadness, or self-reproach, that she purposely deceived herself as young
+      people often do. “No, I am too happy now to spoil my enjoyment by sympathy
+      with anyone’s sorrow,” she felt, and she said to herself: “No, I must be
+      mistaken, he must be feeling happy, just as I am.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Now, Sónya!” she said, going to the very middle of the room, where she
+      considered the resonance was best.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having lifted her head and let her arms droop lifelessly, as ballet
+      dancers do, Natásha, rising energetically from her heels to her toes,
+      stepped to the middle of the room and stood still.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, that’s me!” she seemed to say, answering the rapt gaze with which
+      Denísov followed her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And what is she so pleased about?” thought Nicholas, looking at his
+      sister. “Why isn’t she dull and ashamed?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha took the first note, her throat swelled, her chest rose, her eyes
+      became serious. At that moment she was oblivious of her surroundings, and
+      from her smiling lips flowed sounds which anyone may produce at the same
+      intervals and hold for the same time, but which leave you cold a thousand
+      times and the thousand and first time thrill you and make you weep.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha, that winter, had for the first time begun to sing seriously,
+      mainly because Denísov so delighted in her singing. She no longer sang as
+      a child, there was no longer in her singing that comical, childish,
+      painstaking effect that had been in it before; but she did not yet sing
+      well, as all the connoisseurs who heard her said: “It is not trained, but
+      it is a beautiful voice that must be trained.” Only they generally said
+      this some time after she had finished singing. While that untrained voice,
+      with its incorrect breathing and labored transitions, was sounding, even
+      the connoisseurs said nothing, but only delighted in it and wished to hear
+      it again. In her voice there was a virginal freshness, an unconsciousness
+      of her own powers, and an as yet untrained velvety softness, which so
+      mingled with her lack of art in singing that it seemed as if nothing in
+      that voice could be altered without spoiling it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is this?” thought Nicholas, listening to her with widely opened
+      eyes. “What has happened to her? How she is singing today!” And suddenly
+      the whole world centered for him on anticipation of the next note, the
+      next phrase, and everything in the world was divided into three beats: <i>“Oh
+      mio crudele affetto.”</i>... One, two, three... one, two, three... One... <i>“Oh
+      mio crudele affetto.”</i>... One, two, three... One. “Oh, this senseless life
+      of ours!” thought Nicholas. “All this misery, and money, and Dólokhov, and
+      anger, and honor—it’s all nonsense... but this is real.... Now then,
+      Natásha, now then, dearest! Now then, darling! How will she take that <i>si?</i>
+      She’s taken it! Thank God!” And without noticing that he was singing, to
+      strengthen the <i>si</i> he sung a second, a third below the high note. “Ah,
+      God! How fine! Did I really take it? How fortunate!” he thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Oh, how that chord vibrated, and how moved was something that was finest
+      in Rostóv’s soul! And this something was apart from everything else in the
+      world and above everything in the world. “What were losses, and Dólokhov,
+      and words of honor?... All nonsense! One might kill and rob and yet be
+      happy....”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0084"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      It was long since Rostóv had felt such enjoyment from music as he did that
+      day. But no sooner had Natásha finished her barcarolle than reality again
+      presented itself. He got up without saying a word and went downstairs to
+      his own room. A quarter of an hour later the old count came in from his
+      club, cheerful and contented. Nicholas, hearing him drive up, went to meet
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well—had a good time?” said the old count, smiling gaily and
+      proudly at his son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas tried to say “Yes,” but could not: and he nearly burst into sobs.
+      The count was lighting his pipe and did not notice his son’s condition.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, it can’t be avoided!” thought Nicholas, for the first and last time.
+      And suddenly, in the most casual tone, which made him feel ashamed of
+      himself, he said, as if merely asking his father to let him have the
+      carriage to drive to town:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Papa, I have come on a matter of business. I was nearly forgetting. I
+      need some money.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear me!” said his father, who was in a specially good humor. “I told you
+      it would not be enough. How much?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Very much,” said Nicholas flushing, and with a stupid careless smile, for
+      which he was long unable to forgive himself, “I have lost a little, I mean
+      a good deal, a great deal—forty three thousand.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What! To whom?... Nonsense!” cried the count, suddenly reddening with an
+      apoplectic flush over neck and nape as old people do.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I promised to pay tomorrow,” said Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well!...” said the old count, spreading out his arms and sinking
+      helplessly on the sofa.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It can’t be helped! It happens to everyone!” said the son,
+      with a bold, free, and easy tone, while in his soul he regarded himself as a
+      worthless scoundrel whose whole life could not atone for his crime. He longed
+      to kiss his father’s hands and kneel to beg his forgiveness, but said,
+      in a careless and even rude voice, that it happens to everyone!
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old count cast down his eyes on hearing his son’s words and began
+      bustlingly searching for something.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes,” he muttered, “it will be difficult, I fear, difficult to
+      raise... happens to everybody! Yes, who has not done it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And with a furtive glance at his son’s face, the count went out of the
+      room.... Nicholas had been prepared for resistance, but had not at all
+      expected this.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Papa! Pa-pa!” he called after him, sobbing, “forgive me!” And seizing his
+      father’s hand, he pressed it to his lips and burst into tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While father and son were having their explanation, the mother and
+      daughter were having one not less important. Natásha came running to her
+      mother, quite excited.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma!... Mamma!... He has made me...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Made what?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Made, made me an offer, Mamma! Mamma!” she exclaimed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess did not believe her ears. Denísov had proposed. To whom? To
+      this chit of a girl, Natásha, who not so long ago was playing with dolls
+      and who was still having lessons.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t, Natásha! What nonsense!” she said, hoping it was a joke.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nonsense, indeed! I am telling you the fact,” said Natásha indignantly.
+      “I come to ask you what to do, and you call it ‘nonsense!’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The countess shrugged her shoulders.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If it is true that Monsieur Denísov has made you a proposal, tell him he
+      is a fool, that’s all!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, he’s not a fool!” replied Natásha indignantly and seriously.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well then, what do you want? You’re all in love nowadays. Well, if you
+      are in love, marry him!” said the countess, with a laugh of annoyance.
+      “Good luck to you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, Mamma, I’m not in love with him, I suppose I’m not in love with him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well then, tell him so.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma, are you cross? Don’t be cross, dear! Is it my fault?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, but what is it, my dear? Do you want me to go and tell him?” said the
+      countess smiling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I will do it myself, only tell me what to say. It’s all very well for
+      you,” said Natásha, with a responsive smile. “You should have seen how he
+      said it! I know he did not mean to say it, but it came out accidently.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, all the same, you must refuse him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I mustn’t. I am so sorry for him! He’s so nice.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well then, accept his offer. It’s high time for you to be married,”
+       answered the countess sharply and sarcastically.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, Mamma, but I’m so sorry for him. I don’t know how I’m to say it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And there’s nothing for you to say. I shall speak to him myself,” said
+      the countess, indignant that they should have dared to treat this little
+      Natásha as grown up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, not on any account! I will tell him myself, and you’ll listen at the
+      door,” and Natásha ran across the drawing room to the dancing hall, where
+      Denísov was sitting on the same chair by the clavichord with his face in
+      his hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He jumped up at the sound of her light step.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nataly,” he said, moving with rapid steps toward her, “decide my fate. It
+      is in your hands.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Vasíli Dmítrich, I’m so sorry for you!... No, but you are so nice... but
+      it won’t do...not that... but as a friend, I shall always love you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov bent over her hand and she heard strange sounds she did not
+      understand. She kissed his rough curly black head. At this instant, they
+      heard the quick rustle of the countess’ dress. She came up to them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Vasíli Dmítrich, I thank you for the honor,” she said, with an
+      embarrassed voice, though it sounded severe to Denísov—“but my
+      daughter is so young, and I thought that, as my son’s friend, you would
+      have addressed yourself first to me. In that case you would not have
+      obliged me to give this refusal.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Countess...” said Denísov, with downcast eyes and a guilty face. He tried
+      to say more, but faltered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha could not remain calm, seeing him in such a plight. She began to
+      sob aloud.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Countess, I have done w’ong,” Denísov went on in an unsteady voice, “but
+      believe me, I so adore your daughter and all your family that I would give
+      my life twice over...” He looked at the countess, and seeing her severe
+      face said: “Well, good-by, Countess,” and kissing her hand, he left the
+      room with quick resolute strides, without looking at Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Next day Rostóv saw Denísov off. He did not wish to stay another day in
+      Moscow. All Denísov’s Moscow friends gave him a farewell entertainment at
+      the gypsies’, with the result that he had no recollection of how he was
+      put in the sleigh or of the first three stages of his journey.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After Denísov’s departure, Rostóv spent another fortnight in Moscow,
+      without going out of the house, waiting for the money his father could not
+      at once raise, and he spent most of his time in the girls’ room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya was more tender and devoted to him than ever. It was as if she
+      wanted to show him that his losses were an achievement that made her love
+      him all the more, but Nicholas now considered himself unworthy of her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He filled the girls’ albums with verses and music, and having at last sent
+      Dólokhov the whole forty-three thousand rubles and received his receipt,
+      he left at the end of November, without taking leave of any of his
+      acquaintances, to overtake his regiment which was already in Poland.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0089"></a>
+      BOOK FIVE: 1806 - 07
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0085"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After his interview with his wife Pierre left for Petersburg. At the
+      Torzhók post station, either there were no horses or the postmaster would
+      not supply them. Pierre was obliged to wait. Without undressing, he lay
+      down on the leather sofa in front of a round table, put his big feet in
+      their overboots on the table, and began to reflect.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Will you have the portmanteaus brought in? And a bed got ready, and tea?”
+       asked his valet.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre gave no answer, for he neither heard nor saw anything. He had begun
+      to think of the last station and was still pondering on the same question—one
+      so important that he took no notice of what went on around him. Not only
+      was he indifferent as to whether he got to Petersburg earlier or later, or
+      whether he secured accommodation at this station, but compared to the
+      thoughts that now occupied him it was a matter of indifference whether he
+      remained there for a few hours or for the rest of his life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The postmaster, his wife, the valet, and a peasant woman selling Torzhók
+      embroidery came into the room offering their services. Without changing
+      his careless attitude, Pierre looked at them over his spectacles unable to
+      understand what they wanted or how they could go on living without having
+      solved the problems that so absorbed him. He had been engrossed by the
+      same thoughts ever since the day he returned from Sokólniki after the duel
+      and had spent that first agonizing, sleepless night. But now, in the
+      solitude of the journey, they seized him with special force. No matter
+      what he thought about, he always returned to these same questions which he
+      could not solve and yet could not cease to ask himself. It was as if the
+      thread of the chief screw which held his life together were stripped, so
+      that the screw could not get in or out, but went on turning uselessly in
+      the same place.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The postmaster came in and began obsequiously to beg his excellency to
+      wait only two hours, when, come what might, he would let his excellency
+      have the courier horses. It was plain that he was lying and only wanted to
+      get more money from the traveler.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is this good or bad?” Pierre asked himself. “It is good for me, bad for
+      another traveler, and for himself it’s unavoidable, because he needs money
+      for food; the man said an officer had once given him a thrashing for
+      letting a private traveler have the courier horses. But the officer
+      thrashed him because he had to get on as quickly as possible. And I,”
+       continued Pierre, “shot Dólokhov because I considered myself injured, and
+      Louis XVI was executed because they considered him a criminal, and a year
+      later they executed those who executed him—also for some reason.
+      What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does
+      one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power
+      governs all?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and that not a
+      logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer was: “You’ll die
+      and all will end. You’ll die and know all, or cease asking.” But dying was
+      also dreadful.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Torzhók peddler woman, in a whining voice, went on offering her wares,
+      especially a pair of goatskin slippers. “I have hundreds of rubles I don’t
+      know what to do with, and she stands in her tattered cloak looking timidly
+      at me,” he thought. “And what does she want the money for? As if that
+      money could add a hair’s breadth to happiness or peace of mind. Can
+      anything in the world make her or me less a prey to evil and death?—death
+      which ends all and must come today or tomorrow—at any rate, in an
+      instant as compared with eternity.” And again he twisted the screw with
+      the stripped thread, and again it turned uselessly in the same place.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His servant handed him a half-cut novel, in the form of letters, by Madame
+      de Souza. He began reading about the sufferings and virtuous struggles of
+      a certain Emilie de Mansfeld. “And why did she resist her seducer when she
+      loved him?” he thought. “God could not have put into her heart an impulse
+      that was against His will. My wife—as she once was—did not
+      struggle, and perhaps she was right. Nothing has been found out, nothing
+      discovered,” Pierre again said to himself. “All we can know is that we
+      know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Everything within and around him seemed confused, senseless, and
+      repellent. Yet in this very repugnance to all his circumstances Pierre
+      found a kind of tantalizing satisfaction.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I make bold to ask your excellency to move a little for this gentleman,”
+       said the postmaster, entering the room followed by another traveler, also
+      detained for lack of horses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The newcomer was a short, large-boned, yellow-faced, wrinkled old man,
+      with gray bushy eyebrows overhanging bright eyes of an indefinite grayish
+      color.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre took his feet off the table, stood up, and lay down on a bed that
+      had been got ready for him, glancing now and then at the newcomer, who,
+      with a gloomy and tired face, was wearily taking off his wraps with the
+      aid of his servant, and not looking at Pierre. With a pair of felt boots
+      on his thin bony legs, and keeping on a worn, nankeen-covered, sheepskin
+      coat, the traveler sat down on the sofa, leaned back his big head with its
+      broad temples and close-cropped hair, and looked at Bezúkhov. The stern,
+      shrewd, and penetrating expression of that look struck Pierre. He felt a
+      wish to speak to the stranger, but by the time he had made up his mind to
+      ask him a question about the roads, the traveler had closed his eyes. His
+      shriveled old hands were folded and on the finger of one of them Pierre
+      noticed a large cast iron ring with a seal representing a death’s head.
+      The stranger sat without stirring, either resting or, as it seemed to
+      Pierre, sunk in profound and calm meditation. His servant was also a
+      yellow, wrinkled old man, without beard or mustache, evidently not because
+      he was shaven but because they had never grown. This active old servant
+      was unpacking the traveler’s canteen and preparing tea. He brought in a
+      boiling samovar. When everything was ready, the stranger opened his eyes,
+      moved to the table, filled a tumbler with tea for himself and one for the
+      beardless old man to whom he passed it. Pierre began to feel a sense of
+      uneasiness, and the need, even the inevitability, of entering into
+      conversation with this stranger.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The servant brought back his tumbler turned upside down, * with an
+      unfinished bit of nibbled sugar, and asked if anything more would be
+      wanted.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * To indicate he did not want more tea.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “No. Give me the book,” said the stranger.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The servant handed him a book which Pierre took to be a devotional work,
+      and the traveler became absorbed in it. Pierre looked at him. All at once
+      the stranger closed the book, putting in a marker, and again, leaning with
+      his arms on the back of the sofa, sat in his former position with his eyes
+      shut. Pierre looked at him and had not time to turn away when the old man,
+      opening his eyes, fixed his steady and severe gaze straight on Pierre’s
+      face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre felt confused and wished to avoid that look, but the bright old
+      eyes attracted him irresistibly.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0086"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      “I have the pleasure of addressing Count Bezúkhov, if I am not mistaken,”
+       said the stranger in a deliberate and loud voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked silently and inquiringly at him over his spectacles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have heard of you, my dear sir,” continued the stranger, “and of your
+      misfortune.” He seemed to emphasize the last word, as if to say—“Yes,
+      misfortune! Call it what you please, I know that what happened to you in
+      Moscow was a misfortune.”—“I regret it very much, my dear sir.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre flushed and, hurriedly putting his legs down from the bed, bent
+      forward toward the old man with a forced and timid smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have not referred to this out of curiosity, my dear sir, but for
+      greater reasons.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He paused, his gaze still on Pierre, and moved aside on the sofa by way of
+      inviting the other to take a seat beside him. Pierre felt reluctant to
+      enter into conversation with this old man, but, submitting to him
+      involuntarily, came up and sat down beside him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are unhappy, my dear sir,” the stranger continued. “You are young and
+      I am old. I should like to help you as far as lies in my power.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, yes!” said Pierre, with a forced smile. “I am very grateful to you.
+      Where are you traveling from?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The stranger’s face was not genial, it was even cold and severe, but in
+      spite of this, both the face and words of his new acquaintance were
+      irresistibly attractive to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But if for any reason you don’t feel inclined to talk to me,”
+      said the old man, “say so, my dear sir.” And he suddenly smiled, in
+      an unexpected and tenderly paternal way.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh no, not at all! On the contrary, I am very glad to make your
+      acquaintance,” said Pierre. And again, glancing at the stranger’s hands,
+      he looked more closely at the ring, with its skull—a Masonic sign.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Allow me to ask,” he said, “are you a Mason?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I belong to the Brotherhood of the Freemasons,” said the stranger,
+      looking deeper and deeper into Pierre’s eyes. “And in their name and my
+      own I hold out a brotherly hand to you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I am afraid,” said Pierre, smiling, and wavering between the confidence
+      the personality of the Freemason inspired in him and his own habit of
+      ridiculing the Masonic beliefs—“I am afraid I am very far from
+      understanding—how am I to put it?—I am afraid my way of
+      looking at the world is so opposed to yours that we shall not understand
+      one another.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I know your outlook,” said the Mason, “and the view of life you mention,
+      and which you think is the result of your own mental efforts, is the one
+      held by the majority of people, and is the invariable fruit of pride,
+      indolence, and ignorance. Forgive me, my dear sir, but if I had not known
+      it I should not have addressed you. Your view of life is a regrettable
+      delusion.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Just as I may suppose you to be deluded,” said Pierre, with a faint
+      smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I should never dare to say that I know the truth,” said the Mason, whose
+      words struck Pierre more and more by their precision and firmness. “No one
+      can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone with the
+      cooperation of all, by the millions of generations from our forefather
+      Adam to our own times, is that temple reared which is to be a worthy
+      dwelling place of the Great God,” he added, and closed his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I ought to tell you that I do not believe... do not believe in God,” said
+      Pierre, regretfully and with an effort, feeling it essential to speak the
+      whole truth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Mason looked intently at Pierre and smiled as a rich man with millions
+      in hand might smile at a poor fellow who told him that he, poor man, had
+      not the five rubles that would make him happy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, you do not know Him, my dear sir,” said the Mason. “You cannot know
+      Him. You do not know Him and that is why you are unhappy.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, I am unhappy,” assented Pierre. “But what am I to do?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You know Him not, my dear sir, and so you are very unhappy. You do not
+      know Him, but He is here, He is in me, He is in my words, He is in thee,
+      and even in those blasphemous words thou hast just uttered!” pronounced
+      the Mason in a stern and tremulous voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He paused and sighed, evidently trying to calm himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If He were not,” he said quietly, “you and I would not be speaking of
+      Him, my dear sir. Of what, of whom, are we speaking? Whom hast thou
+      denied?” he suddenly asked with exulting austerity and authority in his
+      voice. “Who invented Him, if He did not exist? Whence came thy conception
+      of the existence of such an incomprehensible Being? didst thou, and why
+      did the whole world, conceive the idea of the existence of such an
+      incomprehensible Being, a Being all-powerful, eternal, and infinite in all
+      His attributes?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He stopped and remained silent for a long time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre could not and did not wish to break this silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He exists, but to understand Him is hard,” the Mason began again, looking
+      not at Pierre but straight before him, and turning the leaves of his book
+      with his old hands which from excitement he could not keep still. “If it
+      were a man whose existence thou didst doubt I could bring him to thee,
+      could take him by the hand and show him to thee. But how can I, an
+      insignificant mortal, show His omnipotence, His infinity, and all His
+      mercy to one who is blind, or who shuts his eyes that he may not see or
+      understand Him and may not see or understand his own vileness and
+      sinfulness?” He paused again. “Who art thou? Thou dreamest that thou art
+      wise because thou couldst utter those blasphemous words,” he went on, with
+      a somber and scornful smile. “And thou art more foolish and unreasonable
+      than a little child, who, playing with the parts of a skillfully made
+      watch, dares to say that, as he does not understand its use, he does not
+      believe in the master who made it. To know Him is hard.... For ages, from
+      our forefather Adam to our own day, we labor to attain that knowledge and
+      are still infinitely far from our aim; but in our lack of understanding we
+      see only our weakness and His greatness....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre listened with swelling heart, gazing into the Mason’s face with
+      shining eyes, not interrupting or questioning him, but believing with his
+      whole soul what the stranger said. Whether he accepted the wise reasoning
+      contained in the Mason’s words, or believed as a child believes, in the
+      speaker’s tone of conviction and earnestness, or the tremor of the
+      speaker’s voice—which sometimes almost broke—or those
+      brilliant aged eyes grown old in this conviction, or the calm firmness and
+      certainty of his vocation, which radiated from his whole being (and which
+      struck Pierre especially by contrast with his own dejection and
+      hopelessness)—at any rate, Pierre longed with his whole soul to
+      believe and he did believe, and felt a joyful sense of comfort,
+      regeneration, and return to life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is not to be apprehended by reason, but by life,” said the Mason.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I do not understand,” said Pierre, feeling with dismay doubts
+      reawakening. He was afraid of any want of clearness, any weakness, in the
+      Mason’s arguments; he dreaded not to be able to believe in him. “I don’t
+      understand,” he said, “how it is that the mind of man cannot attain the
+      knowledge of which you speak.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The Mason smiled with his gentle fatherly smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The highest wisdom and truth are like the purest liquid we may wish to
+      imbibe,” he said. “Can I receive that pure liquid into an impure vessel
+      and judge of its purity? Only by the inner purification of myself can I
+      retain in some degree of purity the liquid I receive.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, that is so,” said Pierre joyfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The highest wisdom is not founded on reason alone, not on those worldly
+      sciences of physics, history, chemistry, and the like, into which
+      intellectual knowledge is divided. The highest wisdom is one. The highest
+      wisdom has but one science—the science of the whole—the
+      science explaining the whole creation and man’s place in it. To receive
+      that science it is necessary to purify and renew one’s inner self, and so
+      before one can know, it is necessary to believe and to perfect one’s self.
+      And to attain this end, we have the light called conscience that God has
+      implanted in our souls.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes,” assented Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Look then at thy inner self with the eyes of the spirit, and ask thyself
+      whether thou art content with thyself. What hast thou attained relying on
+      reason only? What art thou? You are young, you are rich, you are clever,
+      you are well educated. And what have you done with all these good gifts?
+      Are you content with yourself and with your life?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I hate my life,” Pierre muttered, wincing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Thou hatest it. Then change it, purify thyself; and as thou art purified,
+      thou wilt gain wisdom. Look at your life, my dear sir. How have you spent
+      it? In riotous orgies and debauchery, receiving everything from society
+      and giving nothing in return. You have become the possessor of wealth. How
+      have you used it? What have you done for your neighbor? Have you ever
+      thought of your tens of thousands of slaves? Have you helped them
+      physically and morally? No! You have profited by their toil to lead a
+      profligate life. That is what you have done. Have you chosen a post in
+      which you might be of service to your neighbor? No! You have spent your
+      life in idleness. Then you married, my dear sir—took on yourself
+      responsibility for the guidance of a young woman; and what have you done?
+      You have not helped her to find the way of truth, my dear sir, but have
+      thrust her into an abyss of deceit and misery. A man offended you and you
+      shot him, and you say you do not know God and hate your life. There is
+      nothing strange in that, my dear sir!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      After these words, the Mason, as if tired by his long discourse, again
+      leaned his arms on the back of the sofa and closed his eyes. Pierre looked
+      at that aged, stern, motionless, almost lifeless face and moved his lips
+      without uttering a sound. He wished to say, “Yes, a vile, idle, vicious
+      life!” but dared not break the silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Mason cleared his throat huskily, as old men do, and called his
+      servant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How about the horses?” he asked, without looking at Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The exchange horses have just come,” answered the servant. “Will you not
+      rest here?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, tell them to harness.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Can he really be going away leaving me alone without having told me all,
+      and without promising to help me?” thought Pierre, rising with downcast
+      head; and he began to pace the room, glancing occasionally at the Mason.
+      “Yes, I never thought of it, but I have led a contemptible and profligate
+      life, though I did not like it and did not want to,” thought Pierre. “But
+      this man knows the truth and, if he wished to, could disclose it to me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre wished to say this to the Mason, but did not dare to. The traveler,
+      having packed his things with his practiced hands, began fastening his
+      coat. When he had finished, he turned to Bezúkhov, and said in a tone of
+      indifferent politeness:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where are you going to now, my dear sir?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I?... I’m going to Petersburg,” answered Pierre, in a childlike,
+      hesitating voice. “I thank you. I agree with all you have said. But do not
+      suppose me to be so bad. With my whole soul I wish to be what you would
+      have me be, but I have never had help from anyone.... But it is I, above
+      all, who am to blame for everything. Help me, teach me, and perhaps I
+      may...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre could not go on. He gulped and turned away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Mason remained silent for a long time, evidently considering.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Help comes from God alone,” he said, “but such measure of help as our
+      Order can bestow it will render you, my dear sir. You are going to
+      Petersburg. Hand this to Count Willarski” (he took out his notebook and
+      wrote a few words on a large sheet of paper folded in four). “Allow me to
+      give you a piece of advice. When you reach the capital, first of all
+      devote some time to solitude and self-examination and do not resume your
+      former way of life. And now I wish you a good journey, my dear sir,” he
+      added, seeing that his servant had entered... “and success.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The traveler was Joseph Alexéevich Bazdéev, as Pierre saw from the
+      postmaster’s book. Bazdéev had been one of the best-known Freemasons and
+      Martinists, even in Novíkov’s time. For a long while after he had gone,
+      Pierre did not go to bed or order horses but paced up and down the room,
+      pondering over his vicious past, and with a rapturous sense of beginning
+      anew pictured to himself the blissful, irreproachable, virtuous future
+      that seemed to him so easy. It seemed to him that he had been vicious only
+      because he had somehow forgotten how good it is to be virtuous. Not a
+      trace of his former doubts remained in his soul. He firmly believed in the
+      possibility of the brotherhood of men united in the aim of supporting one
+      another in the path of virtue, and that is how Freemasonry presented
+      itself to him.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0087"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On reaching Petersburg Pierre did not let anyone know of his arrival, he
+      went nowhere and spent whole days in reading Thomas à Kempis, whose book
+      had been sent him by someone unknown. One thing he continually realized as
+      he read that book: the joy, hitherto unknown to him, of believing in the
+      possibility of attaining perfection, and in the possibility of active
+      brotherly love among men, which Joseph Alexéevich had revealed to him. A
+      week after his arrival, the young Polish count, Willarski, whom Pierre had
+      known slightly in Petersburg society, came into his room one evening in
+      the official and ceremonious manner in which Dólokhov’s second had called
+      on him, and, having closed the door behind him and satisfied himself that
+      there was nobody else in the room, addressed Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have come to you with a message and an offer, Count,” he said without
+      sitting down. “A person of very high standing in our Brotherhood has made
+      application for you to be received into our Order before the usual term
+      and has proposed to me to be your sponsor. I consider it a sacred duty to
+      fulfill that person’s wishes. Do you wish to enter the Brotherhood of
+      Freemasons under my sponsorship?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The cold, austere tone of this man, whom he had almost always before met
+      at balls, amiably smiling in the society of the most brilliant women,
+      surprised Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I do wish it,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Willarski bowed his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One more question, Count,” he said, “which I beg you to answer in all
+      sincerity—not as a future Mason but as an honest man: have you
+      renounced your former convictions—do you believe in God?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre considered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes... yes, I believe in God,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In that case...” began Willarski, but Pierre interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I do believe in God,” he repeated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In that case we can go,” said Willarski. “My carriage is at your
+      service.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Willarski was silent throughout the drive. To Pierre’s inquiries as to
+      what he must do and how he should answer, Willarski only replied that
+      brothers more worthy than he would test him and that Pierre had only to
+      tell the truth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having entered the courtyard of a large house where the Lodge had its
+      headquarters, and having ascended a dark staircase, they entered a small
+      well-lit anteroom where they took off their cloaks without the aid of a
+      servant. From there they passed into another room. A man in strange attire
+      appeared at the door. Willarski, stepping toward him, said something to
+      him in French in an undertone and then went up to a small wardrobe in
+      which Pierre noticed garments such as he had never seen before. Having
+      taken a kerchief from the cupboard, Willarski bound Pierre’s eyes with it
+      and tied it in a knot behind, catching some hairs painfully in the knot.
+      Then he drew his face down, kissed him, and taking him by the hand led him
+      forward. The hairs tied in the knot hurt Pierre and there were lines of
+      pain on his face and a shamefaced smile. His huge figure, with arms
+      hanging down and with a puckered, though smiling face, moved after
+      Willarski with uncertain, timid steps.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having led him about ten paces, Willarski stopped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Whatever happens to you,” he said, “you must bear it all manfully if you
+      have firmly resolved to join our Brotherhood.” (Pierre nodded
+      affirmatively.) “When you hear a knock at the door, you will uncover your
+      eyes,” added Willarski. “I wish you courage and success,” and, pressing
+      Pierre’s hand, he went out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Left alone, Pierre went on smiling in the same way. Once or twice he
+      shrugged his shoulders and raised his hand to the kerchief, as if wishing
+      to take it off, but let it drop again. The five minutes spent with his
+      eyes bandaged seemed to him an hour. His arms felt numb, his legs almost
+      gave way, it seemed to him that he was tired out. He experienced a variety
+      of most complex sensations. He felt afraid of what would happen to him and
+      still more afraid of showing his fear. He felt curious to know what was
+      going to happen and what would be revealed to him; but most of all, he
+      felt joyful that the moment had come when he would at last start on that
+      path of regeneration and on the actively virtuous life of which he had
+      been dreaming since he met Joseph Alexéevich. Loud knocks were heard at
+      the door. Pierre took the bandage off his eyes and glanced around him. The
+      room was in black darkness, only a small lamp was burning inside something
+      white. Pierre went nearer and saw that the lamp stood on a black table on
+      which lay an open book. The book was the Gospel, and the white thing with
+      the lamp inside was a human skull with its cavities and teeth. After
+      reading the first words of the Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word and
+      the Word was with God,” Pierre went round the table and saw a large open
+      box filled with something. It was a coffin with bones inside. He was not
+      at all surprised by what he saw. Hoping to enter on an entirely new life
+      quite unlike the old one, he expected everything to be unusual, even more
+      unusual than what he was seeing. A skull, a coffin, the Gospel—it
+      seemed to him that he had expected all this and even more. Trying to
+      stimulate his emotions he looked around. “God, death, love, the
+      brotherhood of man,” he kept saying to himself, associating these words
+      with vague yet joyful ideas. The door opened and someone came in.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      By the dim light, to which Pierre had already become accustomed, he saw a
+      rather short man. Having evidently come from the light into the darkness,
+      the man paused, then moved with cautious steps toward the table and placed
+      on it his small leather-gloved hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This short man had on a white leather apron which covered his chest and
+      part of his legs; he had on a kind of necklace above which rose a high
+      white ruffle, outlining his rather long face which was lit up from below.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “For what have you come hither?” asked the newcomer, turning in Pierre’s
+      direction at a slight rustle made by the latter. “Why have you, who do not
+      believe in the truth of the light and who have not seen the light, come
+      here? What do you seek from us? Wisdom, virtue, enlightenment?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At the moment the door opened and the stranger came in, Pierre felt a
+      sense of awe and veneration such as he had experienced in his boyhood at
+      confession; he felt himself in the presence of one socially a complete
+      stranger, yet nearer to him through the brotherhood of man. With bated
+      breath and beating heart he moved toward the Rhetor (by which name the
+      brother who prepared a seeker for entrance into the Brotherhood was
+      known). Drawing nearer, he recognized in the Rhetor a man he knew,
+      Smolyanínov, and it mortified him to think that the newcomer was an
+      acquaintance—he wished him simply a brother and a virtuous
+      instructor. For a long time he could not utter a word, so that the Rhetor
+      had to repeat his question.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes... I... I... desire regeneration,” Pierre uttered with difficulty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very well,” said Smolyanínov, and went on at once: “Have you any idea of
+      the means by which our holy Order will help you to reach your aim?” said
+      he quietly and quickly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I... hope... for guidance... help... in regeneration,” said Pierre, with
+      a trembling voice and some difficulty in utterance due to his excitement
+      and to being unaccustomed to speak of abstract matters in Russian.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is your conception of Freemasonry?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I imagine that Freemasonry is the fraternity and equality of men who have
+      virtuous aims,” said Pierre, feeling ashamed of the inadequacy of his
+      words for the solemnity of the moment, as he spoke. “I imagine...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Good!” said the Rhetor quickly, apparently satisfied with this answer.
+      “Have you sought for means of attaining your aim in religion?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I considered it erroneous and did not follow it,” said Pierre, so
+      softly that the Rhetor did not hear him and asked him what he was saying.
+      “I have been an atheist,” answered Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are seeking for truth in order to follow its laws in your life,
+      therefore you seek wisdom and virtue. Is that not so?” said the Rhetor,
+      after a moment’s pause.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes,” assented Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Rhetor cleared his throat, crossed his gloved hands on his breast, and
+      began to speak.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now I must disclose to you the chief aim of our Order,” he said, “and if
+      this aim coincides with yours, you may enter our Brotherhood with profit.
+      The first and chief object of our Order, the foundation on which it rests
+      and which no human power can destroy, is the preservation and handing on
+      to posterity of a certain important mystery... which has come down to us
+      from the remotest ages, even from the first man—a mystery on which
+      perhaps the fate of mankind depends. But since this mystery is of such a
+      nature that nobody can know or use it unless he be prepared by long and
+      diligent self-purification, not everyone can hope to attain it quickly.
+      Hence we have a secondary aim, that of preparing our members as much as
+      possible to reform their hearts, to purify and enlighten their minds, by
+      means handed on to us by tradition from those who have striven to attain
+      this mystery, and thereby to render them capable of receiving it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “By purifying and regenerating our members we try, thirdly, to improve the
+      whole human race, offering it in our members an example of piety and
+      virtue, and thereby try with all our might to combat the evil which sways
+      the world. Think this over and I will come to you again.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “To combat the evil which sways the world...” Pierre repeated, and a
+      mental image of his future activity in this direction rose in his mind. He
+      imagined men such as he had himself been a fortnight ago, and he addressed
+      an edifying exhortation to them. He imagined to himself vicious and
+      unfortunate people whom he would assist by word and deed, imagined
+      oppressors whose victims he would rescue. Of the three objects mentioned
+      by the Rhetor, this last, that of improving mankind, especially appealed
+      to Pierre. The important mystery mentioned by the Rhetor, though it
+      aroused his curiosity, did not seem to him essential, and the second aim,
+      that of purifying and regenerating himself, did not much interest him
+      because at that moment he felt with delight that he was already perfectly
+      cured of his former faults and was ready for all that was good.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Half an hour later, the Rhetor returned to inform the seeker of the seven
+      virtues, corresponding to the seven steps of Solomon’s temple, which every
+      Freemason should cultivate in himself. These virtues were: 1. <i>Discretion</i>,
+      the keeping of the secrets of the Order. 2. <i>Obedience</i> to those of higher
+      ranks in the Order. 3. <i>Morality</i>. 4. <i>Love of mankind</i>. 5. <i>Courage</i>.
+      6. <i>Generosity</i>. 7. <i>The love of death</i>.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In the seventh place, try, by the frequent thought of death,” the Rhetor
+      said, “to bring yourself to regard it not as a dreaded foe, but as a
+      friend that frees the soul grown weary in the labors of virtue from this
+      distressful life, and leads it to its place of recompense and peace.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, that must be so,” thought Pierre, when after these words the Rhetor
+      went away, leaving him to solitary meditation. “It must be so, but I am
+      still so weak that I love my life, the meaning of which is only now
+      gradually opening before me.” But five of the other virtues which Pierre
+      recalled, counting them on his fingers, he felt already in his soul:
+      <i>courage, generosity, morality, love of mankind</i>, and especially <i>obedience</i>—which
+      did not even seem to him a virtue, but a joy. (He now felt so glad to be
+      free from his own lawlessness and to submit his will to those who knew the
+      indubitable truth.) He forgot what the seventh virtue was and could not
+      recall it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The third time the Rhetor came back more quickly and asked Pierre whether
+      he was still firm in his intention and determined to submit to all that
+      would be required of him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am ready for everything,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I must also inform you,” said the Rhetor, “that our Order delivers its
+      teaching not in words only but also by other means, which may perhaps have
+      a stronger effect on the sincere seeker after wisdom and virtue than mere
+      words. This chamber with what you see therein should already have
+      suggested to your heart, if it is sincere, more than words could do. You
+      will perhaps also see in your further initiation a like method of
+      enlightenment. Our Order imitates the ancient societies that explained
+      their teaching by hieroglyphics. A hieroglyph,” said the Rhetor, “is an
+      emblem of something not cognizable by the senses but which possesses
+      qualities resembling those of the symbol.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre knew very well what a hieroglyph was, but dared not speak. He
+      listened to the Rhetor in silence, feeling from all he said that his
+      ordeal was about to begin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If you are resolved, I must begin your initiation,” said the Rhetor
+      coming closer to Pierre. “In token of generosity I ask you to give me all
+      your valuables.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But I have nothing here,” replied Pierre, supposing that he was asked to
+      give up all he possessed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What you have with you: watch, money, rings....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre quickly took out his purse and watch, but could not manage for some
+      time to get the wedding ring off his fat finger. When that had been done,
+      the Rhetor said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In token of obedience, I ask you to undress.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre took off his coat, waistcoat, and left boot according to the
+      Rhetor’s instructions. The Mason drew the shirt back from Pierre’s left
+      breast, and stooping down pulled up the left leg of his trousers to above
+      the knee. Pierre hurriedly began taking off his right boot also and was
+      going to tuck up the other trouser leg to save this stranger the trouble,
+      but the Mason told him that was not necessary and gave him a slipper for
+      his left foot. With a childlike smile of embarrassment, doubt, and
+      self-derision, which appeared on his face against his will, Pierre stood
+      with his arms hanging down and legs apart, before his brother Rhetor, and
+      awaited his further commands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And now, in token of candor, I ask you to reveal to me your chief
+      passion,” said the latter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My passion! I have had so many,” replied Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That passion which more than all others caused you to waver on the path
+      of virtue,” said the Mason.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre paused, seeking a reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Wine? Gluttony? Idleness? Laziness? Irritability? Anger? Women?” He went
+      over his vices in his mind, not knowing to which of them to give the
+      pre-eminence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Women,” he said in a low, scarcely audible voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Mason did not move and for a long time said nothing after this answer.
+      At last he moved up to Pierre and, taking the kerchief that lay on the
+      table, again bound his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “For the last time I say to you—turn all your attention upon
+      yourself, put a bridle on your senses, and seek blessedness, not in
+      passion but in your own heart. The source of blessedness is not without us
+      but within....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre had already long been feeling in himself that refreshing source of
+      blessedness which now flooded his heart with glad emotion.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0088"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Soon after this there came into the dark chamber to fetch Pierre, not the
+      Rhetor but Pierre’s sponsor, Willarski, whom he recognized by his voice.
+      To fresh questions as to the firmness of his resolution Pierre replied:
+      “Yes, yes, I agree,” and with a beaming, childlike smile, his fat chest
+      uncovered, stepping unevenly and timidly in one slippered and one booted
+      foot, he advanced, while Willarski held a sword to his bare chest. He was
+      conducted from that room along passages that turned backwards and forwards
+      and was at last brought to the doors of the Lodge. Willarski coughed, he
+      was answered by the Masonic knock with mallets, the doors opened before
+      them. A bass voice (Pierre was still blindfolded) questioned him as to who
+      he was, when and where he was born, and so on. Then he was again led
+      somewhere still blindfolded, and as they went along he was told allegories
+      of the toils of his pilgrimage, of holy friendship, of the Eternal
+      Architect of the universe, and of the courage with which he should endure
+      toils and dangers. During these wanderings, Pierre noticed that he was
+      spoken of now as the “Seeker,” now as the “Sufferer,” and now as the
+      “Postulant,” to the accompaniment of various knockings with mallets and
+      swords. As he was being led up to some object he noticed a hesitation and
+      uncertainty among his conductors. He heard those around him disputing in
+      whispers and one of them insisting that he should be led along a certain
+      carpet. After that they took his right hand, placed it on something, and
+      told him to hold a pair of compasses to his left breast with the other
+      hand and to repeat after someone who read aloud an oath of fidelity to the
+      laws of the Order. The candles were then extinguished and some spirit
+      lighted, as Pierre knew by the smell, and he was told that he would now
+      see the lesser light. The bandage was taken off his eyes and, by the faint
+      light of the burning spirit, Pierre, as in a dream, saw several men
+      standing before him, wearing aprons like the Rhetor’s and holding swords
+      in their hands pointed at his breast. Among them stood a man whose white
+      shirt was stained with blood. On seeing this, Pierre moved forward with
+      his breast toward the swords, meaning them to pierce it. But the swords
+      were drawn back from him and he was at once blindfolded again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now thou hast seen the lesser light,” uttered a voice. Then the candles
+      were relit and he was told that he would see the full light; the bandage
+      was again removed and more than ten voices said together: <i>“Sic transit
+      gloria mundi.”</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Pierre gradually began to recover himself and looked about at the room and
+      at the people in it. Round a long table covered with black sat some twelve
+      men in garments like those he had already seen. Some of them Pierre had
+      met in Petersburg society. In the President’s chair sat a young man he did
+      not know, with a peculiar cross hanging from his neck. On his right sat
+      the Italian abbé whom Pierre had met at Anna Pávlovna’s two years before.
+      There were also present a very distinguished dignitary and a Swiss who had
+      formerly been tutor at the Kurágins’. All maintained a solemn silence,
+      listening to the words of the President, who held a mallet in his hand.
+      Let into the wall was a star-shaped light. At one side of the table was a
+      small carpet with various figures worked upon it, at the other was
+      something resembling an altar on which lay a Testament and a skull. Round
+      it stood seven large candlesticks like those used in churches. Two of the
+      brothers led Pierre up to the altar, placed his feet at right angles, and
+      bade him lie down, saying that he must prostrate himself at the Gates of
+      the Temple.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He must first receive the trowel,” whispered one of the brothers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, hush, please!” said another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre, perplexed, looked round with his shortsighted eyes without
+      obeying, and suddenly doubts arose in his mind. “Where am I? What am I
+      doing? Aren’t they laughing at me? Shan’t I be ashamed to remember this?”
+       But these doubts only lasted a moment. Pierre glanced at the serious faces
+      of those around, remembered all he had already gone through, and realized
+      that he could not stop halfway. He was aghast at his hesitation and,
+      trying to arouse his former devotional feeling, prostrated himself before
+      the Gates of the Temple. And really, the feeling of devotion returned to
+      him even more strongly than before. When he had lain there some time, he
+      was told to get up, and a white leather apron, such as the others wore,
+      was put on him: he was given a trowel and three pairs of gloves, and then
+      the Grand Master addressed him. He told him that he should try to do
+      nothing to stain the whiteness of that apron, which symbolized strength
+      and purity; then of the unexplained trowel, he told him to toil with it to
+      cleanse his own heart from vice, and indulgently to smooth with it the
+      heart of his neighbor. As to the first pair of gloves, a man’s, he said
+      that Pierre could not know their meaning but must keep them. The second
+      pair of man’s gloves he was to wear at the meetings, and finally of the
+      third, a pair of women’s gloves, he said: “Dear brother, these woman’s
+      gloves are intended for you too. Give them to the woman whom you shall
+      honor most of all. This gift will be a pledge of your purity of heart to
+      her whom you select to be your worthy helpmeet in Masonry.” And after a
+      pause, he added: “But beware, dear brother, that these gloves do not deck
+      hands that are unclean.” While the Grand Master said these last words it
+      seemed to Pierre that he grew embarrassed. Pierre himself grew still more
+      confused, blushed like a child till tears came to his eyes, began looking
+      about him uneasily, and an awkward pause followed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This silence was broken by one of the brethren, who led Pierre up to the
+      rug and began reading to him from a manuscript book an explanation of all
+      the figures on it: the sun, the moon, a hammer, a plumb line, a trowel, a
+      rough stone and a squared stone, a pillar, three windows, and so on. Then
+      a place was assigned to Pierre, he was shown the signs of the Lodge, told
+      the password, and at last was permitted to sit down. The Grand Master
+      began reading the statutes. They were very long, and Pierre, from joy,
+      agitation, and embarrassment, was not in a state to understand what was
+      being read. He managed to follow only the last words of the statutes and
+      these remained in his mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In our temples we recognize no other distinctions,” read the Grand
+      Master, “but those between virtue and vice. Beware of making any
+      distinctions which may infringe equality. Fly to a brother’s aid whoever
+      he may be, exhort him who goeth astray, raise him that falleth, never bear
+      malice or enmity toward thy brother. Be kindly and courteous. Kindle in
+      all hearts the flame of virtue. Share thy happiness with thy neighbor, and
+      may envy never dim the purity of that bliss. Forgive thy enemy, do not
+      avenge thyself except by doing him good. Thus fulfilling the highest law
+      thou shalt regain traces of the ancient dignity which thou hast lost.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He finished and, getting up, embraced and kissed Pierre, who, with tears
+      of joy in his eyes, looked round him, not knowing how to answer the
+      congratulations and greetings from acquaintances that met him on all
+      sides. He acknowledged no acquaintances but saw in all these men only
+      brothers, and burned with impatience to set to work with them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Grand Master rapped with his mallet. All the Masons sat down in their
+      places, and one of them read an exhortation on the necessity of humility.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Grand Master proposed that the last duty should be performed, and the
+      distinguished dignitary who bore the title of “Collector of Alms” went
+      round to all the brothers. Pierre would have liked to subscribe all he
+      had, but fearing that it might look like pride subscribed the same amount
+      as the others.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The meeting was at an end, and on reaching home Pierre felt as if he had
+      returned from a long journey on which he had spent dozens of years, had
+      become completely changed, and had quite left behind his former habits and
+      way of life.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0089"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The day after he had been received into the Lodge, Pierre was sitting at
+      home reading a book and trying to fathom the significance of the Square,
+      one side of which symbolized God, another moral things, a third physical
+      things, and the fourth a combination of these. Now and then his attention
+      wandered from the book and the Square and he formed in imagination a new
+      plan of life. On the previous evening at the Lodge, he had heard that a
+      rumor of his duel had reached the Emperor and that it would be wiser for
+      him to leave Petersburg. Pierre proposed going to his estates in the south
+      and there attending to the welfare of his serfs. He was joyfully planning
+      this new life, when Prince Vasíli suddenly entered the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear fellow, what have you been up to in Moscow? Why have you
+      quarreled with Hélène, <i>mon cher?</i> You are under a delusion,” said Prince
+      Vasíli, as he entered. “I know all about it, and I can tell you positively
+      that Hélène is as innocent before you as Christ was before the Jews.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was about to reply, but Prince Vasíli interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And why didn’t you simply come straight to me as to a friend? I know all
+      about it and understand it all,” he said. “You behaved as becomes a man
+      who values his honor, perhaps too hastily, but we won’t go into that. But
+      consider the position in which you are placing her and me in the eyes of
+      society, and even of the court,” he added, lowering his voice. “She is
+      living in Moscow and you are here. Remember, dear boy,” and he drew
+      Pierre’s arm downwards, “it is simply a misunderstanding. I expect you
+      feel it so yourself. Let us write her a letter at once, and she’ll come
+      here and all will be explained, or else, my dear boy, let me tell you it’s
+      quite likely you’ll have to suffer for it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli gave Pierre a significant look.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I know from reliable sources that the Dowager Empress is taking a keen
+      interest in the whole affair. You know she is very gracious to Hélène.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre tried several times to speak, but, on one hand, Prince Vasíli did
+      not let him and, on the other, Pierre himself feared to begin to speak in
+      the tone of decided refusal and disagreement in which he had firmly
+      resolved to answer his father-in-law. Moreover, the words of the Masonic
+      statutes, “be kindly and courteous,” recurred to him. He blinked, went
+      red, got up and sat down again, struggling with himself to do what was for
+      him the most difficult thing in life—to say an unpleasant thing to a
+      man’s face, to say what the other, whoever he might be, did not expect. He
+      was so used to submitting to Prince Vasíli’s tone of careless
+      self-assurance that he felt he would be unable to withstand it now, but he
+      also felt that on what he said now his future depended—whether he
+      would follow the same old road, or that new path so attractively shown him
+      by the Masons, on which he firmly believed he would be reborn to a new
+      life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now, dear boy,” said Prince Vasíli playfully, “say ‘yes,’ and I’ll write
+      to her myself, and we will kill the fatted calf.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But before Prince Vasíli had finished his playful speech, Pierre, without
+      looking at him, and with a kind of fury that made him like his father,
+      muttered in a whisper:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Prince, I did not ask you here. Go, please go!” And he jumped up and
+      opened the door for him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go!” he repeated, amazed at himself and glad to see the look of confusion
+      and fear that showed itself on Prince Vasíli’s face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Go!” the quivering voice repeated. And Prince Vasíli had to go without
+      receiving any explanation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A week later, Pierre, having taken leave of his new friends, the Masons,
+      and leaving large sums of money with them for alms, went away to his
+      estates. His new brethren gave him letters to the Kiev and Odessa Masons
+      and promised to write to him and guide him in his new activity.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0090"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The duel between Pierre and Dólokhov was hushed up and, in spite of the
+      Emperor’s severity regarding duels at that time, neither the principals
+      nor their seconds suffered for it. But the story of the duel, confirmed by
+      Pierre’s rupture with his wife, was the talk of society. Pierre who had
+      been regarded with patronizing condescension when he was an illegitimate
+      son, and petted and extolled when he was the best match in Russia, had
+      sunk greatly in the esteem of society after his marriage—when the
+      marriageable daughters and their mothers had nothing to hope from him—especially
+      as he did not know how, and did not wish, to court society’s favor. Now he
+      alone was blamed for what had happened, he was said to be insanely jealous
+      and subject like his father to fits of bloodthirsty rage. And when after
+      Pierre’s departure Hélène returned to Petersburg, she was received by all
+      her acquaintances not only cordially, but even with a shade of deference
+      due to her misfortune. When conversation turned on her husband Hélène
+      assumed a dignified expression, which with characteristic tact she had
+      acquired though she did not understand its significance. This expression
+      suggested that she had resolved to endure her troubles uncomplainingly and
+      that her husband was a cross laid upon her by God. Prince Vasíli expressed
+      his opinion more openly. He shrugged his shoulders when Pierre was
+      mentioned and, pointing to his forehead, remarked:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A bit touched—I always said so.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I said from the first,” declared Anna Pávlovna referring to Pierre, “I
+      said at the time and before anyone else” (she insisted on her priority)
+      “that that senseless young man was spoiled by the depraved ideas of these
+      days. I said so even at the time when everybody was in raptures about him,
+      when he had just returned from abroad, and when, if you remember, he posed
+      as a sort of Marat at one of my soirees. And how has it ended? I was
+      against this marriage even then and foretold all that has happened.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Pávlovna continued to give on free evenings the same kind of soirees
+      as before—such as she alone had the gift of arranging—at which
+      was to be found “the cream of really good society, the bloom of the
+      intellectual essence of Petersburg,” as she herself put it. Besides this
+      refined selection of society Anna Pávlovna’s receptions were also
+      distinguished by the fact that she always presented some new and
+      interesting person to the visitors and that nowhere else was the state of
+      the political thermometer of legitimate Petersburg court society so dearly
+      and distinctly indicated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Toward the end of 1806, when all the sad details of Napoleon’s destruction
+      of the Prussian army at Jena and Auerstädt and the surrender of most of
+      the Prussian fortresses had been received, when our troops had already
+      entered Prussia and our second war with Napoleon was beginning, Anna
+      Pávlovna gave one of her soirees. The “cream of really good society”
+       consisted of the fascinating Hélène, forsaken by her husband, Mortemart,
+      the delightful Prince Hippolyte who had just returned from Vienna, two
+      diplomatists, the old aunt, a young man referred to in that drawing room
+      as “a man of great merit” (<i>un homme de beaucoup de mérite</i>), a newly
+      appointed maid of honor and her mother, and several other less noteworthy
+      persons.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The novelty Anna Pávlovna was setting before her guests that evening was
+      Borís Drubetskóy, who had just arrived as a special messenger from the
+      Prussian army and was aide-de-camp to a very important personage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The temperature shown by the political thermometer to the company that
+      evening was this:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Whatever the European sovereigns and commanders may do to countenance
+      Bonaparte, and to cause <i>me</i>, and <i>us</i> in general, annoyance and
+      mortification, our opinion of Bonaparte cannot alter. We shall not cease
+      to express our sincere views on that subject, and can only say to the King
+      of Prussia and others: ‘So much the worse for you. <i>Tu l’as voulu, George
+      Dandin</i>,’ that’s all we have to say about it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      When Borís, who was to be served up to the guests, entered the drawing
+      room, almost all the company had assembled, and the conversation, guided
+      by Anna Pávlovna, was about our diplomatic relations with Austria and the
+      hope of an alliance with her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís, grown more manly and looking fresh, rosy and self-possessed,
+      entered the drawing room elegantly dressed in the uniform of an
+      aide-de-camp and was duly conducted to pay his respects to the aunt and
+      then brought back to the general circle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Pávlovna gave him her shriveled hand to kiss and introduced him to
+      several persons whom he did not know, giving him a whispered description
+      of each.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Prince Hippolyte Kurágin—charming young fellow; M. Kronq,—chargé
+      d’affaires from Copenhagen—a profound intellect,” and simply,
+      “Mr. Shítov—a man of great merit”—this of the man
+      usually so described.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Thanks to Anna Mikháylovna’s efforts, his own tastes, and the
+      peculiarities of his reserved nature, Borís had managed during his service
+      to place himself very advantageously. He was aide-de-camp to a very
+      important personage, had been sent on a very important mission to Prussia,
+      and had just returned from there as a special messenger. He had become
+      thoroughly conversant with that unwritten code with which he had been so
+      pleased at Olmütz and according to which an ensign might rank incomparably
+      higher than a general, and according to which what was needed for success
+      in the service was not effort or work, or courage, or perseverance, but
+      only the knowledge of how to get on with those who can grant rewards, and
+      he was himself often surprised at the rapidity of his success and at the
+      inability of others to understand these things. In consequence of this
+      discovery his whole manner of life, all his relations with old friends,
+      all his plans for his future, were completely altered. He was not rich,
+      but would spend his last groat to be better dressed than others, and would
+      rather deprive himself of many pleasures than allow himself to be seen in
+      a shabby equipage or appear in the streets of Petersburg in an old
+      uniform. He made friends with and sought the acquaintance of only those
+      above him in position and who could therefore be of use to him. He liked
+      Petersburg and despised Moscow. The remembrance of the Rostóvs’ house and
+      of his childish love for Natásha was unpleasant to him and he had not once
+      been to see the Rostóvs since the day of his departure for the army. To be
+      in Anna Pávlovna’s drawing room he considered an important step up in the
+      service, and he at once understood his role, letting his hostess make use
+      of whatever interest he had to offer. He himself carefully scanned each
+      face, appraising the possibilities of establishing intimacy with each of
+      those present, and the advantages that might accrue. He took the seat
+      indicated to him beside the fair Hélène and listened to the general
+      conversation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Vienna considers the bases of the proposed treaty so unattainable that
+      not even a continuity of most brilliant successes would secure them, and
+      she doubts the means we have of gaining them. That is the actual phrase
+      used by the Vienna cabinet,” said the Danish chargé d’affaires.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The doubt is flattering,” said “the man of profound intellect,” with a
+      subtle smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We must distinguish between the Vienna cabinet and the Emperor of
+      Austria,” said Mortemart. “The Emperor of Austria can never have thought
+      of such a thing, it is only the cabinet that says it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, my dear vicomte,” put in Anna Pávlovna, <i>“L’Urope”</i>
+      (for some reason she called it <i>Urope</i> as if that were a specially refined French
+      pronunciation which she could allow herself when conversing with a
+      Frenchman), <i>“L’Urope ne sera jamais notre alliée sincère.”</i> *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Europe will never be our sincere ally.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      After that Anna Pávlovna led up to the courage and firmness of the King of
+      Prussia, in order to draw Borís into the conversation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís listened attentively to each of the speakers, awaiting his turn, but
+      managed meanwhile to look round repeatedly at his neighbor, the beautiful
+      Hélène, whose eyes several times met those of the handsome young
+      aide-de-camp with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Speaking of the position of Prussia, Anna Pávlovna very naturally asked
+      Borís to tell them about his journey to Glogau and in what state he found
+      the Prussian army. Borís, speaking with deliberation, told them in pure,
+      correct French many interesting details about the armies and the court,
+      carefully abstaining from expressing an opinion of his own about the facts
+      he was recounting. For some time he engrossed the general attention, and
+      Anna Pávlovna felt that the novelty she had served up was received with
+      pleasure by all her visitors. The greatest attention of all to Borís’
+      narrative was shown by Hélène. She asked him several questions about his
+      journey and seemed greatly interested in the state of the Prussian army.
+      As soon as he had finished she turned to him with her usual smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You absolutely must come and see me,” she said in a tone that implied
+      that, for certain considerations he could not know of, this was absolutely
+      necessary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “On Tuesday between eight and nine. It will give me great pleasure.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Borís promised to fulfill her wish and was about to begin a conversation
+      with her, when Anna Pávlovna called him away on the pretext that her aunt
+      wished to hear him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You know her husband, of course?” said Anna Pávlovna, closing her eyes
+      and indicating Hélène with a sorrowful gesture. “Ah, she is such an
+      unfortunate and charming woman! Don’t mention him before her—please
+      don’t! It is too painful for her!”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0091"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      When Borís and Anna Pávlovna returned to the others Prince Hippolyte had
+      the ear of the company.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bending forward in his armchair he said: <i>“Le Roi de Prusse!”</i> and having
+      said this laughed. Everyone turned toward him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Le Roi de Prusse?”</i> Hippolyte said interrogatively, again laughing, and
+      then calmly and seriously sat back in his chair. Anna Pávlovna waited for
+      him to go on, but as he seemed quite decided to say no more she began to
+      tell of how at Potsdam the impious Bonaparte had stolen the sword of
+      Frederick the Great.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is the sword of Frederick the Great which I...” she began, but
+      Hippolyte interrupted her with the words: <i>“Le Roi de Prusse...”</i>
+      and again, as soon as all turned toward him, excused himself and said no more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Pávlovna frowned. Mortemart, Hippolyte’s friend, addressed him
+      firmly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come now, what about your <i>Roi de Prusse?</i>”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Hippolyte laughed as if ashamed of laughing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, it’s nothing. I only wished to say...” (he wanted to repeat a joke he
+      had heard in Vienna and which he had been trying all that evening to get
+      in) “I only wished to say that we are wrong to fight <i>pour le Roi de
+      Prusse!</i>”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Borís smiled circumspectly, so that it might be taken as ironical or
+      appreciative according to the way the joke was received. Everybody
+      laughed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your joke is too bad, it’s witty but unjust,” said Anna Pávlovna, shaking
+      her little shriveled finger at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We are not fighting <i>pour le Roi de Prusse</i>, but for right principles. Oh,
+      that wicked Prince Hippolyte!” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The conversation did not flag all evening and turned chiefly on the
+      political news. It became particularly animated toward the end of the
+      evening when the rewards bestowed by the Emperor were mentioned.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You know N— N— received a snuffbox with the portrait last
+      year?” said “the man of profound intellect.” “Why shouldn’t S— S—
+      get the same distinction?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Pardon me! A snuffbox with the Emperor’s portrait is a reward but not a
+      distinction,” said the diplomatist—“a gift, rather.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “There are precedents, I may mention Schwarzenberg.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s impossible,” replied another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Will you bet? The ribbon of the order is a different matter....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      When everybody rose to go, Hélène who had spoken very little all the
+      evening again turned to Borís, asking him in a tone of caressing
+      significant command to come to her on Tuesday.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is of great importance to me,” she said, turning with a smile toward
+      Anna Pávlovna, and Anna Pávlovna, with the same sad smile with which she
+      spoke of her exalted patroness, supported Hélène’s wish.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It seemed as if from some words Borís had spoken that evening about the
+      Prussian army, Hélène had suddenly found it necessary to see him. She
+      seemed to promise to explain that necessity to him when he came on
+      Tuesday.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But on Tuesday evening, having come to Hélène’s splendid salon, Borís
+      received no clear explanation of why it had been necessary for him to
+      come. There were other guests and the countess talked little to him, and
+      only as he kissed her hand on taking leave said unexpectedly and in a
+      whisper, with a strangely unsmiling face: “Come to dinner tomorrow... in
+      the evening. You must come.... Come!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      During that stay in Petersburg, Borís became an intimate in the countess’
+      house.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0092"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The war was flaming up and nearing the Russian frontier. Everywhere one
+      heard curses on Bonaparte, “the enemy of mankind.” Militiamen and recruits
+      were being enrolled in the villages, and from the seat of war came
+      contradictory news, false as usual and therefore variously interpreted.
+      The life of old Prince Bolkónski, Prince Andrew, and Princess Mary had
+      greatly changed since 1805.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In 1806 the old prince was made one of the eight commanders in chief then
+      appointed to supervise the enrollment decreed throughout Russia. Despite
+      the weakness of age, which had become particularly noticeable since the
+      time when he thought his son had been killed, he did not think it right to
+      refuse a duty to which he had been appointed by the Emperor himself, and
+      this fresh opportunity for action gave him new energy and strength. He was
+      continually traveling through the three provinces entrusted to him, was
+      pedantic in the fulfillment of his duties, severe to cruel with his
+      subordinates, and went into everything down to the minutest details
+      himself. Princess Mary had ceased taking lessons in mathematics from her
+      father, and when the old prince was at home went to his study with the wet
+      nurse and little Prince Nicholas (as his grandfather called him). The baby
+      Prince Nicholas lived with his wet nurse and nurse Sávishna in the late
+      princess’ rooms and Princess Mary spent most of the day in the nursery,
+      taking a mother’s place to her little nephew as best she could.
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne, too, seemed passionately fond of the boy, and
+      Princess Mary often deprived herself to give her friend the pleasure of
+      dandling the little <i>angel</i>—as she called her nephew—and playing
+      with him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Near the altar of the church at Bald Hills there was a chapel over the
+      tomb of the little princess, and in this chapel was a marble monument
+      brought from Italy, representing an angel with outspread wings ready to
+      fly upwards. The angel’s upper lip was slightly raised as though about to
+      smile, and once on coming out of the chapel Prince Andrew and Princess
+      Mary admitted to one another that the angel’s face reminded them strangely
+      of the little princess. But what was still stranger, though of this Prince
+      Andrew said nothing to his sister, was that in the expression the sculptor
+      had happened to give the angel’s face, Prince Andrew read the same mild
+      reproach he had read on the face of his dead wife: “Ah, why have you done
+      this to me?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Soon after Prince Andrew’s return the old prince made over to him a large
+      estate, Boguchárovo, about twenty-five miles from Bald Hills. Partly
+      because of the depressing memories associated with Bald Hills, partly
+      because Prince Andrew did not always feel equal to bearing with his
+      father’s peculiarities, and partly because he needed solitude, Prince
+      Andrew made use of Boguchárovo, began building and spent most of his time
+      there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the Austerlitz campaign Prince Andrew had firmly resolved not to
+      continue his military service, and when the war recommenced and everybody
+      had to serve, he took a post under his father in the recruitment so as to
+      avoid active service. The old prince and his son seemed to have changed
+      roles since the campaign of 1805. The old man, roused by activity,
+      expected the best results from the new campaign, while Prince Andrew on
+      the contrary, taking no part in the war and secretly regretting this, saw
+      only the dark side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On February 26, 1807, the old prince set off on one of his circuits.
+      Prince Andrew remained at Bald Hills as usual during his father’s absence.
+      Little Nicholas had been unwell for four days. The coachman who had driven
+      the old prince to town returned bringing papers and letters for Prince
+      Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Not finding the young prince in his study the valet went with the letters
+      to Princess Mary’s apartments, but did not find him there. He was told
+      that the prince had gone to the nursery.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If you please, your excellency, Pétrusha has brought some papers,” said
+      one of the nursemaids to Prince Andrew who was sitting on a child’s little
+      chair while, frowning and with trembling hands, he poured drops from a
+      medicine bottle into a wineglass half full of water.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it?” he said crossly, and, his hand shaking unintentionally, he
+      poured too many drops into the glass. He threw the mixture onto the floor
+      and asked for some more water. The maid brought it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There were in the room a child’s cot, two boxes, two armchairs, a table, a
+      child’s table, and the little chair on which Prince Andrew was sitting.
+      The curtains were drawn, and a single candle was burning on the table,
+      screened by a bound music book so that the light did not fall on the cot.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear,” said Princess Mary, addressing her brother from beside the cot
+      where she was standing, “better wait a bit... later...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, leave off, you always talk nonsense and keep putting things off—and
+      this is what comes of it!” said Prince Andrew in an exasperated whisper,
+      evidently meaning to wound his sister.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear, really... it’s better not to wake him... he’s asleep,” said the
+      princess in a tone of entreaty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew got up and went on tiptoe up to the little bed, wineglass in
+      hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Perhaps we’d really better not wake him,” he said hesitating.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “As you please... really... I think so... but as you please,” said
+      Princess Mary, evidently intimidated and confused that her opinion had
+      prevailed. She drew her brother’s attention to the maid who was calling
+      him in a whisper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was the second night that neither of them had slept, watching the boy
+      who was in a high fever. These last days, mistrusting their household
+      doctor and expecting another for whom they had sent to town, they had been
+      trying first one remedy and then another. Worn out by sleeplessness and
+      anxiety they threw their burden of sorrow on one another and reproached
+      and disputed with each other.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Pétrusha has come with papers from your father,” whispered the maid.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew went out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Devil take them!” he muttered, and after listening to the verbal
+      instructions his father had sent and taking the correspondence and his
+      father’s letter, he returned to the nursery.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Still the same. Wait, for heaven’s sake. Karl Ivánich always says that
+      sleep is more important than anything,” whispered Princess Mary with a
+      sigh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew went up to the child and felt him. He was burning hot.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Confound you and your Karl Ivánich!” He took the glass with the drops and
+      again went up to the cot.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Andrew, don’t!” said Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But he scowled at her angrily though also with suffering in his eyes, and
+      stooped glass in hand over the infant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But I wish it,” he said. “I beg you—give it him!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary shrugged her shoulders but took the glass submissively and
+      calling the nurse began giving the medicine. The child screamed hoarsely.
+      Prince Andrew winced and, clutching his head, went out and sat down on a
+      sofa in the next room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He still had all the letters in his hand. Opening them mechanically he
+      began reading. The old prince, now and then using abbreviations, wrote in
+      his large elongated hand on blue paper as follows:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Have just this moment received by special messenger very joyful news—if
+      it’s not false. Bennigsen seems to have obtained a complete victory over
+      Buonaparte at Eylau. In Petersburg everyone is rejoicing, and the rewards
+      sent to the army are innumerable. Though he is a German—I
+      congratulate him! I can’t make out what the commander at Kórchevo—a
+      certain Khandrikóv—is up to; till now the additional men and
+      provisions have not arrived. Gallop off to him at once and say I’ll have
+      his head off if everything is not here in a week. Have received another
+      letter about the Preussisch-Eylau battle from Pétenka—he took part
+      in it—and it’s all true. When mischief-makers don’t meddle even a
+      German beats Buonaparte. He is said to be fleeing in great disorder. Mind
+      you gallop off to Kórchevo without delay and carry out instructions!
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew sighed and broke the seal of another envelope. It was a
+      closely written letter of two sheets from Bilíbin. He folded it up without
+      reading it and reread his father’s letter, ending with the words: “Gallop
+      off to Kórchevo and carry out instructions!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, pardon me, I won’t go now till the child is better,” thought he,
+      going to the door and looking into the nursery.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary was still standing by the cot, gently rocking the baby.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah yes, and what else did he say that’s unpleasant?” thought Prince
+      Andrew, recalling his father’s letter. “Yes, we have gained a victory over
+      Bonaparte, just when I’m not serving. Yes, yes, he’s always poking fun at
+      me.... Ah, well! Let him!” And he began reading Bilíbin’s letter which was
+      written in French. He read without understanding half of it, read only to
+      forget, if but for a moment, what he had too long been thinking of so
+      painfully to the exclusion of all else.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0093"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Bilíbin was now at army headquarters in a diplomatic capacity, and though
+      he wrote in French and used French jests and French idioms, he described
+      the whole campaign with a fearless self-censure and self-derision
+      genuinely Russian. Bilíbin wrote that the obligation of diplomatic
+      discretion tormented him, and he was happy to have in Prince Andrew a
+      reliable correspondent to whom he could pour out the bile he had
+      accumulated at the sight of all that was being done in the army. The
+      letter was old, having been written before the battle at Preussisch-Eylau.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Since the day of our brilliant success at Austerlitz,” wrote Bilíbin, “as
+      you know, my dear prince, I never leave headquarters. I have certainly
+      acquired a taste for war, and it is just as well for me; what I have seen
+      during these last three months is incredible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I begin <i>ab ovo</i>. ‘The enemy of the human race,’ as you know, attacks the
+      Prussians. The Prussians are our faithful allies who have only betrayed us
+      three times in three years. We take up their cause, but it turns out that
+      ‘the enemy of the human race’ pays no heed to our fine speeches and in his
+      rude and savage way throws himself on the Prussians without giving them
+      time to finish the parade they had begun, and in two twists of the hand he
+      breaks them to smithereens and installs himself in the palace at Potsdam.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “‘I most ardently desire,’ writes the King of Prussia to Bonaparte, ‘that
+      Your Majesty should be received and treated in my palace in a manner
+      agreeable to yourself, and in so far as circumstances allowed, I have
+      hastened to take all steps to that end. May I have succeeded!’ The
+      Prussian generals pride themselves on being polite to the French and lay
+      down their arms at the first demand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The head of the garrison at Glogau, with ten thousand men, asks the King
+      of Prussia what he is to do if he is summoned to surrender.... All this is
+      absolutely true.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In short, hoping to settle matters by taking up a warlike attitude, it
+      turns out that we have landed ourselves in war, and what is more, in war
+      on our own frontiers, <i>with</i> and <i>for</i> the King of Prussia. We have everything
+      in perfect order, only one little thing is lacking, namely, a commander in
+      chief. As it was considered that the Austerlitz success might have been
+      more decisive had the commander in chief not been so young, all our
+      octogenarians were reviewed, and of Prozoróvski and Kámenski the latter
+      was preferred. The general comes to us, Suvórov-like, in a <i>kibítka</i>, and is
+      received with acclamations of joy and triumph.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “On the 4th, the first courier arrives from Petersburg. The mails are
+      taken to the field marshal’s room, for he likes to do everything himself.
+      I am called in to help sort the letters and take those meant for us. The
+      field marshal looks on and waits for letters addressed to him. We search,
+      but none are to be found. The field marshal grows impatient and sets to
+      work himself and finds letters from the Emperor to Count T., Prince V.,
+      and others. Then he bursts into one of his wild furies and rages at
+      everyone and everything, seizes the letters, opens them, and reads those
+      from the Emperor addressed to others. ‘Ah! So that’s the way they treat
+      me! No confidence in me! Ah, ordered to keep an eye on me! Very well then!
+      Get along with you!’ So he writes the famous order of the day to General
+      Bennigsen:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “‘I am wounded and cannot ride and consequently cannot command the
+      army. You have brought your army corps to Pultúsk, routed: here it is exposed,
+      and without fuel or forage, so something must be done, and, as you
+      yourself reported to Count Buxhöwden yesterday, you must think of
+      retreating to our frontier—which do today.’
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “‘From all my riding,’ he writes to the Emperor, ‘I have got a saddle sore
+      which, coming after all my previous journeys, quite prevents my riding and
+      commanding so vast an army, so I have passed on the command to the general
+      next in seniority, Count Buxhöwden, having sent him my whole staff and all
+      that belongs to it, advising him if there is a lack of bread, to move
+      farther into the interior of Prussia, for only one day’s ration of bread
+      remains, and in some regiments none at all, as reported by the division
+      commanders, Ostermann and Sedmorétzki, and all that the peasants had has
+      been eaten up. I myself will remain in hospital at Ostrolenka till I
+      recover. In regard to which I humbly submit my report, with the
+      information that if the army remains in its present bivouac another
+      fortnight there will not be a healthy man left in it by spring.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “‘Grant leave to retire to his country seat to an old man who is already
+      in any case dishonored by being unable to fulfill the great and glorious
+      task for which he was chosen. I shall await your most gracious permission
+      here in hospital, that I may not have to play the part of a <i>secretary</i>
+      rather than <i>commander</i> in the army. My removal from the army does not
+      produce the slightest stir—a blind man has left it. There are
+      thousands such as I in Russia.’
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The field marshal is angry with the Emperor and he punishes us all, isn’t
+      it logical?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This is the first act. Those that follow are naturally increasingly
+      interesting and entertaining. After the field marshal’s departure it
+      appears that we are within sight of the enemy and must give battle.
+      Buxhöwden is commander in chief by seniority, but General Bennigsen does
+      not quite see it; more particularly as it is he and his corps who are
+      within sight of the enemy and he wishes to profit by the opportunity to
+      fight a battle ‘on his own hand’ as the Germans say. He does so. This is
+      the battle of Pultúsk, which is considered a great victory but in my
+      opinion was nothing of the kind. We civilians, as you know, have a very
+      bad way of deciding whether a battle was won or lost. Those who retreat
+      after a battle have lost it is what we say; and according to that it is we
+      who lost the battle of Pultúsk. In short, we retreat after the battle but
+      send a courier to Petersburg with news of a victory, and General
+      Bennigsen, hoping to receive from Petersburg the post of commander in
+      chief as a reward for his victory, does not give up the command of the
+      army to General Buxhöwden. During this interregnum we begin a very
+      original and interesting series of maneuvers. Our aim is no longer, as it
+      should be, to avoid or attack the enemy, but solely to avoid General
+      Buxhöwden who by right of seniority should be our chief. So energetically
+      do we pursue this aim that after crossing an unfordable river we burn the
+      bridges to separate ourselves from our enemy, who at the moment is not
+      Bonaparte but Buxhöwden. General Buxhöwden was all but attacked and
+      captured by a superior enemy force as a result of one of these maneuvers
+      that enabled us to escape him. Buxhöwden pursues us—we scuttle. He
+      hardly crosses the river to our side before we recross to the other. At
+      last our enemy, Buxhöwden, catches us and attacks. Both generals are
+      angry, and the result is a challenge on Buxhöwden’s part and an epileptic
+      fit on Bennigsen’s. But at the critical moment the courier who carried the
+      news of our victory at Pultúsk to Petersburg returns bringing our
+      appointment as commander in chief, and our first foe, Buxhöwden, is
+      vanquished; we can now turn our thoughts to the second, Bonaparte. But as
+      it turns out, just at that moment a third enemy rises before us—namely
+      the <i>Orthodox Russian soldiers</i>, loudly demanding bread, meat, biscuits,
+      fodder, and whatnot! The stores are empty, the roads impassable. The
+      Orthodox begin looting, and in a way of which our last campaign can give
+      you no idea. Half the regiments form bands and scour the countryside and
+      put everything to fire and sword. The inhabitants are totally ruined, the
+      hospitals overflow with sick, and famine is everywhere. Twice the
+      marauders even attack our headquarters, and the commander in chief has to
+      ask for a battalion to disperse them. During one of these attacks they
+      carried off my empty portmanteau and my dressing gown. The Emperor
+      proposes to give all commanders of divisions the right to shoot marauders,
+      but I much fear this will oblige one half the army to shoot the other.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At first Prince Andrew read with his eyes only, but after a while, in
+      spite of himself (although he knew how far it was safe to trust Bilíbin),
+      what he had read began to interest him more and more. When he had read
+      thus far, he crumpled the letter up and threw it away. It was not what he
+      had read that vexed him, but the fact that the life out there in which he
+      had now no part could perturb him. He shut his eyes, rubbed his forehead
+      as if to rid himself of all interest in what he had read, and listened to
+      what was passing in the nursery. Suddenly he thought he heard a strange
+      noise through the door. He was seized with alarm lest something should
+      have happened to the child while he was reading the letter. He went on
+      tiptoe to the nursery door and opened it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just as he went in he saw that the nurse was hiding something from him
+      with a scared look and that Princess Mary was no longer by the cot.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear,” he heard what seemed to him her despairing whisper behind him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As often happens after long sleeplessness and long anxiety, he was seized
+      by an unreasoning panic—it occurred to him that the child was dead.
+      All that he saw and heard seemed to confirm this terror.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All is over,” he thought, and a cold sweat broke out on his forehead. He
+      went to the cot in confusion, sure that he would find it empty and that
+      the nurse had been hiding the dead baby. He drew the curtain aside and for
+      some time his frightened, restless eyes could not find the baby. At last
+      he saw him: the rosy boy had tossed about till he lay across the bed with
+      his head lower than the pillow, and was smacking his lips in his sleep and
+      breathing evenly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew was as glad to find the boy like that, as if he had already
+      lost him. He bent over him and, as his sister had taught him, tried with
+      his lips whether the child was still feverish. The soft forehead was
+      moist. Prince Andrew touched the head with his hand; even the hair was
+      wet, so profusely had the child perspired. He was not dead, but evidently
+      the crisis was over and he was convalescent. Prince Andrew longed to
+      snatch up, to squeeze, to hold to his heart, this helpless little
+      creature, but dared not do so. He stood over him, gazing at his head and
+      at the little arms and legs which showed under the blanket. He heard a
+      rustle behind him and a shadow appeared under the curtain of the cot. He
+      did not look round, but still gazing at the infant’s face listened to his
+      regular breathing. The dark shadow was Princess Mary, who had come up to
+      the cot with noiseless steps, lifted the curtain, and dropped it again
+      behind her. Prince Andrew recognized her without looking and held out his
+      hand to her. She pressed it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He has perspired,” said Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I was coming to tell you so.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The child moved slightly in his sleep, smiled, and rubbed his forehead
+      against the pillow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew looked at his sister. In the dim shadow of the curtain her
+      luminous eyes shone more brightly than usual from the tears of joy that
+      were in them. She leaned over to her brother and kissed him, slightly
+      catching the curtain of the cot. Each made the other a warning gesture and
+      stood still in the dim light beneath the curtain as if not wishing to
+      leave that seclusion where they three were shut off from all the world.
+      Prince Andrew was the first to move away, ruffling his hair against the
+      muslin of the curtain.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, this is the one thing left me now,” he said with a sigh.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0094"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Soon after his admission to the Masonic Brotherhood, Pierre went to the
+      Kiev province, where he had the greatest number of serfs, taking with him
+      full directions which he had written down for his own guidance as to what
+      he should do on his estates.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he reached Kiev he sent for all his stewards to the head office and
+      explained to them his intentions and wishes. He told them that steps would
+      be taken immediately to free his serfs—and that till then they were
+      not to be overburdened with labor, women while nursing their babies were
+      not to be sent to work, assistance was to be given to the serfs,
+      punishments were to be admonitory and not corporal, and hospitals,
+      asylums, and schools were to be established on all the estates. Some of
+      the stewards (there were semiliterate foremen among them) listened with
+      alarm, supposing these words to mean that the young count was displeased
+      with their management and embezzlement of money, some after their first
+      fright were amused by Pierre’s lisp and the new words they had not heard
+      before, others simply enjoyed hearing how the master talked, while the
+      cleverest among them, including the chief steward, understood from this
+      speech how they could best handle the master for their own ends.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The chief steward expressed great sympathy with Pierre’s intentions, but
+      remarked that besides these changes it would be necessary to go into the
+      general state of affairs which was far from satisfactory.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Despite Count Bezúkhov’s enormous wealth, since he had come into an income
+      which was said to amount to five hundred thousand rubles a year, Pierre
+      felt himself far poorer than when his father had made him an allowance of
+      ten thousand rubles. He had a dim perception of the following budget:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      About 80,000 went in payments on all the estates to the Land Bank, about
+      30,000 went for the upkeep of the estate near Moscow, the town house, and
+      the allowance to the three princesses; about 15,000 was given in pensions
+      and the same amount for asylums; 150,000 alimony was sent to the countess;
+      about 70,000 went for interest on debts. The building of a new church,
+      previously begun, had cost about 10,000 in each of the last two years, and
+      he did not know how the rest, about 100,000 rubles, was spent, and almost
+      every year he was obliged to borrow. Besides this the chief steward wrote
+      every year telling him of fires and bad harvests, or of the necessity of
+      rebuilding factories and workshops. So the first task Pierre had to face
+      was one for which he had very little aptitude or inclination—practical
+      business.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He discussed estate affairs every day with his chief steward. But he felt
+      that this did not forward matters at all. He felt that these consultations
+      were detached from real affairs and did not link up with them or make them
+      move. On the one hand, the chief steward put the state of things to him in
+      the very worst light, pointing out the necessity of paying off the debts
+      and undertaking new activities with serf labor, to which Pierre did not
+      agree. On the other hand, Pierre demanded that steps should be taken to
+      liberate the serfs, which the steward met by showing the necessity of
+      first paying off the loans from the Land Bank, and the consequent
+      impossibility of a speedy emancipation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The steward did not say it was quite impossible, but suggested selling the
+      forests in the province of Kostromá, the land lower down the river, and
+      the Crimean estate, in order to make it possible: all of which operations
+      according to him were connected with such complicated measures—the
+      removal of injunctions, petitions, permits, and so on—that Pierre
+      became quite bewildered and only replied:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, do so.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre had none of the practical persistence that would have enabled him
+      to attend to the business himself and so he disliked it and only tried to
+      pretend to the steward that he was attending to it. The steward for his
+      part tried to pretend to the count that he considered these consultations
+      very valuable for the proprietor and troublesome to himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In Kiev Pierre found some people he knew, and strangers hastened to make
+      his acquaintance and joyfully welcomed the rich newcomer, the largest
+      landowner of the province. Temptations to Pierre’s greatest weakness—the
+      one to which he had confessed when admitted to the Lodge—were so
+      strong that he could not resist them. Again whole days, weeks, and months
+      of his life passed in as great a rush and were as much occupied with
+      evening parties, dinners, lunches, and balls, giving him no time for
+      reflection, as in Petersburg. Instead of the new life he had hoped to lead
+      he still lived the old life, only in new surroundings.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Of the three precepts of Freemasonry Pierre realized that he did not
+      fulfill the one which enjoined every Mason to set an example of moral
+      life, and that of the seven virtues he lacked two—morality and the
+      love of death. He consoled himself with the thought that he fulfilled
+      another of the precepts—that of reforming the human race—and
+      had other virtues—love of his neighbor, and especially generosity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the spring of 1807 he decided to return to Petersburg. On the way he
+      intended to visit all his estates and see for himself how far his orders
+      had been carried out and in what state were the serfs whom God had
+      entrusted to his care and whom he intended to benefit.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The chief steward, who considered the young count’s attempts almost insane—unprofitable
+      to himself, to the count, and to the serfs—made some concessions.
+      Continuing to represent the liberation of the serfs as impracticable, he
+      arranged for the erection of large buildings—schools, hospitals, and
+      asylums—on all the estates before the master arrived. Everywhere
+      preparations were made not for ceremonious welcomes (which he knew Pierre
+      would not like), but for just such gratefully religious ones, with
+      offerings of icons and the bread and salt of hospitality, as, according to
+      his understanding of his master, would touch and delude him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The southern spring, the comfortable rapid traveling in a Vienna carriage,
+      and the solitude of the road, all had a gladdening effect on Pierre. The
+      estates he had not before visited were each more picturesque than the
+      other; the serfs everywhere seemed thriving and touchingly grateful for
+      the benefits conferred on them. Everywhere were receptions, which though
+      they embarrassed Pierre awakened a joyful feeling in the depth of his
+      heart. In one place the peasants presented him with bread and salt and an
+      icon of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, asking permission, as a mark of their
+      gratitude for the benefits he had conferred on them, to build a new
+      chantry to the church at their own expense in honor of Peter and Paul, his
+      patron saints. In another place the women with infants in arms met him to
+      thank him for releasing them from hard work. On a third estate the priest,
+      bearing a cross, came to meet him surrounded by children whom, by the
+      count’s generosity, he was instructing in reading, writing, and religion.
+      On all his estates Pierre saw with his own eyes brick buildings erected or
+      in course of erection, all on one plan, for hospitals, schools, and
+      almshouses, which were soon to be opened. Everywhere he saw the stewards’
+      accounts, according to which the serfs’ manorial labor had been
+      diminished, and heard the touching thanks of deputations of serfs in their
+      full-skirted blue coats.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      What Pierre did not know was that the place where they presented him with
+      bread and salt and wished to build a chantry in honor of Peter and Paul
+      was a market village where a fair was held on St. Peter’s day, and that
+      the richest peasants (who formed the deputation) had begun the chantry
+      long before, but that nine tenths of the peasants in that villages were in
+      a state of the greatest poverty. He did not know that since the nursing
+      mothers were no longer sent to work on his land, they did still harder
+      work on their own land. He did not know that the priest who met him with
+      the cross oppressed the peasants by his exactions, and that the pupils’
+      parents wept at having to let him take their children and secured their
+      release by heavy payments. He did not know that the brick buildings, built
+      to plan, were being built by serfs whose manorial labor was thus
+      increased, though lessened on paper. He did not know that where the
+      steward had shown him in the accounts that the serfs’ payments had been
+      diminished by a third, their obligatory manorial work had been increased
+      by a half. And so Pierre was delighted with his visit to his estates and
+      quite recovered the philanthropic mood in which he had left Petersburg,
+      and wrote enthusiastic letters to his “brother-instructor” as he called
+      the Grand Master.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How easy it is, how little effort it needs, to do so much good,” thought
+      Pierre, “and how little attention we pay to it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He was pleased at the gratitude he received, but felt abashed at receiving
+      it. This gratitude reminded him of how much more he might do for these
+      simple, kindly people.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The chief steward, a very stupid but cunning man who saw perfectly through
+      the naïve and intelligent count and played with him as with a toy, seeing
+      the effect these prearranged receptions had on Pierre, pressed him still
+      harder with proofs of the impossibility and above all the uselessness of
+      freeing the serfs, who were quite happy as it was.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre in his secret soul agreed with the steward that it would be
+      difficult to imagine happier people, and that God only knew what would
+      happen to them when they were free, but he insisted, though reluctantly,
+      on what he thought right. The steward promised to do all in his power to
+      carry out the count’s wishes, seeing clearly that not only would the count
+      never be able to find out whether all measures had been taken for the sale
+      of the land and forests and to release them from the Land Bank, but would
+      probably never even inquire and would never know that the newly erected
+      buildings were standing empty and that the serfs continued to give in
+      money and work all that other people’s serfs gave—that is to say,
+      all that could be got out of them.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0095"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Returning from his journey through South Russia in the happiest state of
+      mind, Pierre carried out an intention he had long had of visiting his
+      friend Bolkónski, whom he had not seen for two years.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Boguchárovo lay in a flat uninteresting part of the country among fields
+      and forests of fir and birch, which were partly cut down. The house lay
+      behind a newly dug pond filled with water to the brink and with banks
+      still bare of grass. It was at the end of a village that stretched along
+      the highroad in the midst of a young copse in which were a few fir trees.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The homestead consisted of a threshing floor, outhouses, stables, a
+      bathhouse, a lodge, and a large brick house with semicircular façade still
+      in course of construction. Round the house was a garden newly laid out.
+      The fences and gates were new and solid; two fire pumps and a water cart,
+      painted green, stood in a shed; the paths were straight, the bridges were
+      strong and had handrails. Everything bore an impress of tidiness and good
+      management. Some domestic serfs Pierre met, in reply to inquiries as to
+      where the prince lived, pointed out a small newly built lodge close to the
+      pond. Antón, a man who had looked after Prince Andrew in his boyhood,
+      helped Pierre out of his carriage, said that the prince was at home, and
+      showed him into a clean little anteroom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was struck by the modesty of the small though clean house after the
+      brilliant surroundings in which he had last met his friend in Petersburg.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He quickly entered the small reception room with its still-unplastered
+      wooden walls redolent of pine, and would have gone farther, but Antón ran
+      ahead on tiptoe and knocked at a door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, what is it?” came a sharp, unpleasant voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A visitor,” answered Antón.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ask him to wait,” and the sound was heard of a chair being pushed back.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre went with rapid steps to the door and suddenly came face to face
+      with Prince Andrew, who came out frowning and looking old. Pierre embraced
+      him and lifting his spectacles kissed his friend on the cheek and looked
+      at him closely.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, I did not expect you, I am very glad,” said Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre said nothing; he looked fixedly at his friend with surprise. He was
+      struck by the change in him. His words were kindly and there was a smile
+      on his lips and face, but his eyes were dull and lifeless and in spite of
+      his evident wish to do so he could not give them a joyous and glad
+      sparkle. Prince Andrew had grown thinner, paler, and more manly-looking,
+      but what amazed and estranged Pierre till he got used to it were his
+      inertia and a wrinkle on his brow indicating prolonged concentration on
+      some one thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As is usually the case with people meeting after a prolonged separation,
+      it was long before their conversation could settle on anything. They put
+      questions and gave brief replies about things they knew ought to be talked
+      over at length. At last the conversation gradually settled on some of the
+      topics at first lightly touched on: their past life, plans for the future,
+      Pierre’s journeys and occupations, the war, and so on. The preoccupation
+      and despondency which Pierre had noticed in his friend’s look was now
+      still more clearly expressed in the smile with which he listened to
+      Pierre, especially when he spoke with joyful animation of the past or the
+      future. It was as if Prince Andrew would have liked to sympathize with
+      what Pierre was saying, but could not. The latter began to feel that it
+      was in bad taste to speak of his enthusiasms, dreams, and hopes of
+      happiness or goodness, in Prince Andrew’s presence. He was ashamed to
+      express his new Masonic views, which had been particularly revived and
+      strengthened by his late tour. He checked himself, fearing to seem naïve,
+      yet he felt an irresistible desire to show his friend as soon as possible
+      that he was now a quite different, and better, Pierre than he had been in
+      Petersburg.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I can’t tell you how much I have lived through since then. I hardly know
+      myself again.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, we have altered much, very much, since then,” said Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, and you? What are your plans?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Plans!” repeated Prince Andrew ironically. “My plans?” he said, as if
+      astonished at the word. “Well, you see, I’m building. I mean to settle
+      here altogether next year....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked silently and searchingly into Prince Andrew’s face, which
+      had grown much older.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I meant to ask...” Pierre began, but Prince Andrew interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But why talk of me?... Talk <i>to</i> me, yes, tell me about your
+      travels and all you have been doing on your estates.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre began describing what he had done on his estates, trying as far as
+      possible to conceal his own part in the improvements that had been made.
+      Prince Andrew several times prompted Pierre’s story of what he had been
+      doing, as though it were all an old-time story, and he listened not only
+      without interest but even as if ashamed of what Pierre was telling him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre felt uncomfortable and even depressed in his friend’s company and
+      at last became silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll tell you what, my dear fellow,” said Prince Andrew, who evidently
+      also felt depressed and constrained with his visitor, “I am only
+      bivouacking here and have just come to look round. I am going back to my
+      sister today. I will introduce you to her. But of course you know her
+      already,” he said, evidently trying to entertain a visitor with whom he
+      now found nothing in common. “We will go after dinner. And would you now
+      like to look round my place?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They went out and walked about till dinnertime, talking of the political
+      news and common acquaintances like people who do not know each other
+      intimately. Prince Andrew spoke with some animation and interest only of
+      the new homestead he was constructing and its buildings, but even here,
+      while on the scaffolding, in the midst of a talk explaining the future
+      arrangements of the house, he interrupted himself:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “However, this is not at all interesting. Let us have dinner, and then
+      we’ll set off.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At dinner, conversation turned on Pierre’s marriage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I was very much surprised when I heard of it,” said Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre blushed, as he always did when it was mentioned, and said
+      hurriedly: “I will tell you some time how it all happened. But you know it
+      is all over, and forever.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Forever?” said Prince Andrew. “Nothing’s forever.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But you know how it all ended, don’t you? You heard of the duel?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And so you had to go through that too!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “One thing I thank God for is that I did not kill that man,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why so?” asked Prince Andrew. “To kill a vicious dog is a very good thing
+      really.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, to kill a man is bad—wrong.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why is it wrong?” urged Prince Andrew. “It is not given to man to know
+      what is right and what is wrong. Men always did and always will err, and
+      in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What does harm to another is wrong,” said Pierre, feeling with pleasure
+      that for the first time since his arrival Prince Andrew was roused, had
+      begun to talk, and wanted to express what had brought him to his present
+      state.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And who has told you what is bad for another man?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Bad! Bad!” exclaimed Pierre. “We all know what is bad for ourselves.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, we know that, but the harm I am conscious of in myself is something
+      I cannot inflict on others,” said Prince Andrew, growing more and more
+      animated and evidently wishing to express his new outlook to Pierre. He
+      spoke in French. “I only know two very real evils in life: remorse and
+      illness. The only good is the absence of those evils. To live for myself
+      avoiding those two evils is my whole philosophy now.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And love of one’s neighbor, and self-sacrifice?” began Pierre. “No, I
+      can’t agree with you! To live only so as not to do evil and not to have to
+      repent is not enough. I lived like that, I lived for myself and ruined my
+      life. And only now when I am living, or at least trying” (Pierre’s modesty
+      made him correct himself) “to live for others, only now have I understood
+      all the happiness of life. No, I shall not agree with you, and you do not
+      really believe what you are saying.” Prince Andrew looked silently at
+      Pierre with an ironic smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “When you see my sister, Princess Mary, you’ll get on with her,” he said.
+      “Perhaps you are right for yourself,” he added after a short pause, “but
+      everyone lives in his own way. You lived for yourself and say you nearly
+      ruined your life and only found happiness when you began living for
+      others. I experienced just the reverse. I lived for glory.—And after
+      all what is glory? The same love of others, a desire to do something for
+      them, a desire for their approval.—So I lived for others, and not
+      almost, but quite, ruined my life. And I have become calmer since I began
+      to live only for myself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But what do you mean by living only for yourself?” asked Pierre, growing
+      excited. “What about your son, your sister, and your father?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But that’s just the same as myself—they are not <i>others</i>,” explained
+      Prince Andrew. “The others, one’s neighbors, <i>le prochain</i>, as you and
+      Princess Mary call it, are the chief source of all error and evil. <i>Le
+      prochain</i>—your Kiev peasants to whom you want to do good.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And he looked at Pierre with a mocking, challenging expression. He
+      evidently wished to draw him on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are joking,” replied Pierre, growing more and more excited. “What
+      error or evil can there be in my wishing to do good, and even doing a
+      little—though I did very little and did it very badly? What evil can
+      there be in it if unfortunate people, our serfs, people like ourselves,
+      were growing up and dying with no idea of God and truth beyond ceremonies
+      and meaningless prayers and are now instructed in a comforting belief in
+      future life, retribution, recompense, and consolation? What evil and error
+      are there in it, if people were dying of disease without help while
+      material assistance could so easily be rendered, and I supplied them with
+      a doctor, a hospital, and an asylum for the aged? And is it not a
+      palpable, unquestionable good if a peasant, or a woman with a baby, has no
+      rest day or night and I give them rest and leisure?” said Pierre, hurrying
+      and lisping. “And I have done that though badly and to a small extent; but
+      I have done something toward it and you cannot persuade me that it was not
+      a good action, and more than that, you can’t make me believe that you do
+      not think so yourself. And the main thing is,” he continued, “that I know,
+      and know for certain, that the enjoyment of doing this good is the only
+      sure happiness in life.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, if you put it like that it’s quite a different matter,” said Prince
+      Andrew. “I build a house and lay out a garden, and you build hospitals.
+      The one and the other may serve as a pastime. But what’s right and what’s
+      good must be judged by one who knows all, but not by us. Well, you want an
+      argument,” he added, “come on then.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They rose from the table and sat down in the entrance porch which served
+      as a veranda.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come, let’s argue then,” said Prince Andrew, “You talk of schools,” he
+      went on, crooking a finger, “education and so forth; that is, you want to
+      raise him” (pointing to a peasant who passed by them taking off his cap)
+      “from his animal condition and awaken in him spiritual needs, while it
+      seems to me that animal happiness is the only happiness possible, and that
+      is just what you want to deprive him of. I envy him, but you want to make
+      him what I am, without giving him my means. Then you say, ‘lighten his
+      toil.’ But as I see it, physical labor is as essential to him, as much a
+      condition of his existence, as mental activity is to you or me. You can’t
+      help thinking. I go to bed after two in the morning, thoughts come and I
+      can’t sleep but toss about till dawn, because I think and can’t help
+      thinking, just as he can’t help plowing and mowing; if he didn’t, he would
+      go to the drink shop or fall ill. Just as I could not stand his terrible
+      physical labor but should die of it in a week, so he could not stand my
+      physical idleness, but would grow fat and die. The third thing—what
+      else was it you talked about?” and Prince Andrew crooked a third finger.
+      “Ah, yes, hospitals, medicine. He has a fit, he is dying, and you come and
+      bleed him and patch him up. He will drag about as a cripple, a burden to
+      everybody, for another ten years. It would be far easier and simpler for
+      him to die. Others are being born and there are plenty of them as it is.
+      It would be different if you grudged losing a laborer—that’s how I
+      regard him—but you want to cure him from love of him. And he does
+      not want that. And besides, what a notion that medicine ever cured anyone!
+      Killed them, yes!” said he, frowning angrily and turning away from Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew expressed his ideas so clearly and distinctly that it was
+      evident he had reflected on this subject more than once, and he spoke
+      readily and rapidly like a man who has not talked for a long time. His
+      glance became more animated as his conclusions became more hopeless.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, that is dreadful, dreadful!” said Pierre. “I don’t understand how one
+      can live with such ideas. I had such moments myself not long ago, in
+      Moscow and when traveling, but at such times I collapsed so that I don’t
+      live at all—everything seems hateful to me... myself most of all.
+      Then I don’t eat, don’t wash... and how is it with you?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why not wash? That is not cleanly,” said Prince Andrew; “on the contrary
+      one must try to make one’s life as pleasant as possible. I’m alive, that
+      is not my fault, so I must live out my life as best I can without hurting
+      others.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But with such ideas what motive have you for living? One would sit
+      without moving, undertaking nothing....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Life as it is leaves one no peace. I should be thankful to do nothing,
+      but here on the one hand the local nobility have done me the honor to
+      choose me to be their marshal; it was all I could do to get out of it.
+      They could not understand that I have not the necessary qualifications for
+      it—the kind of good-natured, fussy shallowness necessary for the
+      position. Then there’s this house, which must be built in order to have a
+      nook of one’s own in which to be quiet. And now there’s this recruiting.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why aren’t you serving in the army?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “After Austerlitz!” said Prince Andrew gloomily. “No, thank you very much!
+      I have promised myself not to serve again in the active Russian army. And
+      I won’t—not even if Bonaparte were here at Smolénsk threatening Bald
+      Hills—even then I wouldn’t serve in the Russian army! Well, as I was
+      saying,” he continued, recovering his composure, “now there’s this
+      recruiting. My father is chief in command of the Third District, and my
+      only way of avoiding active service is to serve under him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Then you are serving?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I am.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He paused a little while.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And why do you serve?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, for this reason! My father is one of the most remarkable men of his
+      time. But he is growing old, and though not exactly cruel he has too
+      energetic a character. He is so accustomed to unlimited power that he is
+      terrible, and now he has this authority of a commander in chief of the
+      recruiting, granted by the Emperor. If I had been two hours late a
+      fortnight ago he would have had a paymaster’s clerk at Yúkhnovna hanged,”
+       said Prince Andrew with a smile. “So I am serving because I alone have any
+      influence with my father, and now and then can save him from actions which
+      would torment him afterwards.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, there you see!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, but it is not as you imagine,” Prince Andrew continued. “I did not,
+      and do not, in the least care about that scoundrel of a clerk who had
+      stolen some boots from the recruits; I should even have been very glad to
+      see him hanged, but I was sorry for my father—that again is for
+      myself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew grew more and more animated. His eyes glittered feverishly
+      while he tried to prove to Pierre that in his actions there was no desire
+      to do good to his neighbor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There now, you wish to liberate your serfs,” he continued; “that is a
+      very good thing, but not for you—I don’t suppose you ever had anyone
+      flogged or sent to Siberia—and still less for your serfs. If they
+      are beaten, flogged, or sent to Siberia, I don’t suppose they are any the
+      worse off. In Siberia they lead the same animal life, and the stripes on
+      their bodies heal, and they are happy as before. But it is a good thing
+      for proprietors who perish morally, bring remorse upon themselves, stifle
+      this remorse and grow callous, as a result of being able to inflict
+      punishments justly and unjustly. It is those people I pity, and for their
+      sake I should like to liberate the serfs. You may not have seen, but I
+      have seen, how good men brought up in those traditions of unlimited power,
+      in time when they grow more irritable, become cruel and harsh, are
+      conscious of it, but cannot restrain themselves and grow more and more
+      miserable.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew spoke so earnestly that Pierre could not help thinking that
+      these thoughts had been suggested to Prince Andrew by his father’s case.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He did not reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So that’s what I’m sorry for—human dignity, peace of mind, purity,
+      and not the serfs’ backs and foreheads, which, beat and shave as you may,
+      always remain the same backs and foreheads.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, no! A thousand times no! I shall never agree with you,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0096"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      In the evening Andrew and Pierre got into the open carriage and drove to
+      Bald Hills. Prince Andrew, glancing at Pierre, broke the silence now and
+      then with remarks which showed that he was in a good temper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pointing to the fields, he spoke of the improvements he was making in his
+      husbandry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre remained gloomily silent, answering in monosyllables and apparently
+      immersed in his own thoughts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was thinking that Prince Andrew was unhappy, had gone astray, did not
+      see the true light, and that he, Pierre, ought to aid, enlighten, and
+      raise him. But as soon as he thought of what he should say, he felt that
+      Prince Andrew with one word, one argument, would upset all his teaching,
+      and he shrank from beginning, afraid of exposing to possible ridicule what
+      to him was precious and sacred.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, but why do you think so?” Pierre suddenly began, lowering his head
+      and looking like a bull about to charge, “why do you think so? You should
+      not think so.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Think? What about?” asked Prince Andrew with surprise.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “About life, about man’s destiny. It can’t be so. I myself thought like
+      that, and do you know what saved me? Freemasonry! No, don’t smile.
+      Freemasonry is not a religious ceremonial sect, as I thought it was:
+      Freemasonry is the best expression of the best, the eternal, aspects of
+      humanity.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And he began to explain Freemasonry as he understood it to Prince Andrew.
+      He said that Freemasonry is the teaching of Christianity freed from the
+      bonds of State and Church, a teaching of equality, brotherhood, and love.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Only our holy brotherhood has the real meaning of life, all the rest is a
+      dream,” said Pierre. “Understand, my dear fellow, that outside this union
+      all is filled with deceit and falsehood and I agree with you that nothing
+      is left for an intelligent and good man but to live out his life, like
+      you, merely trying not to harm others. But make our fundamental
+      convictions your own, join our brotherhood, give yourself up to us, let
+      yourself be guided, and you will at once feel yourself, as I have felt
+      myself, a part of that vast invisible chain the beginning of which is
+      hidden in heaven,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew, looking straight in front of him, listened in silence to
+      Pierre’s words. More than once, when the noise of the wheels prevented his
+      catching what Pierre said, he asked him to repeat it, and by the peculiar
+      glow that came into Prince Andrew’s eyes and by his silence, Pierre saw
+      that his words were not in vain and that Prince Andrew would not interrupt
+      him or laugh at what he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They reached a river that had overflowed its banks and which they had to
+      cross by ferry. While the carriage and horses were being placed on it,
+      they also stepped on the raft.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew, leaning his arms on the raft railing, gazed silently at the
+      flooding waters glittering in the setting sun.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, what do you think about it?” Pierre asked. “Why are you silent?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What do I think about it? I am listening to you. It’s all very well....
+      You say: join our brotherhood and we will show you the aim of life, the
+      destiny of man, and the laws which govern the world. But who are <i>we?</i> Men.
+      How is it you know everything? Why do I alone not see what you see? You
+      see a reign of goodness and truth on earth, but I don’t see it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you believe in a future life?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A future life?” Prince Andrew repeated, but Pierre, giving him no time to
+      reply, took the repetition for a denial, the more readily as he knew
+      Prince Andrew’s former atheistic convictions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You say you can’t see a reign of goodness and truth on earth. Nor could
+      I, and it cannot be seen if one looks on our life here as the end of
+      everything. On <i>earth</i>, here on this earth” (Pierre pointed to the fields),
+      “there is no truth, all is false and evil; but in the universe, in the
+      whole universe there is a kingdom of truth, and we who are now the
+      children of earth are—eternally—children of the whole
+      universe. Don’t I feel in my soul that I am part of this vast harmonious
+      whole? Don’t I feel that I form one link, one step, between the lower and
+      higher beings, in this vast harmonious multitude of beings in whom the
+      Deity—the Supreme Power if you prefer the term—is manifest? If
+      I see, clearly see, that ladder leading from plant to man, why should I
+      suppose it breaks off at me and does not go farther and farther? I feel
+      that I cannot vanish, since nothing vanishes in this world, but that I
+      shall always exist and always have existed. I feel that beyond me and
+      above me there are spirits, and that in this world there is truth.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, that is Herder’s theory,” said Prince Andrew, “but it is not that
+      which can convince me, dear friend—life and death are what convince.
+      What convinces is when one sees a being dear to one, bound up with one’s
+      own life, before whom one was to blame and had hoped to make it right”
+       (Prince Andrew’s voice trembled and he turned away), “and suddenly that
+      being is seized with pain, suffers, and ceases to exist.... Why? It cannot
+      be that there is no answer. And I believe there is.... That’s what
+      convinces, that is what has convinced me,” said Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, of course,” said Pierre, “isn’t that what I’m saying?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No. All I say is that it is not argument that convinces me of the
+      necessity of a future life, but this: when you go hand in hand with
+      someone and all at once that person vanishes <i>there, into nowhere</i>, and you
+      yourself are left facing that abyss, and look in. And I have looked
+      in....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, that’s it then! You know that there is a <i>there</i> and there is a
+      <i>Someone? There</i> is the future life. The <i>Someone</i> is—God.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew did not reply. The carriage and horses had long since been
+      taken off, onto the farther bank, and reharnessed. The sun had sunk half
+      below the horizon and an evening frost was starring the puddles near the
+      ferry, but Pierre and Andrew, to the astonishment of the footmen,
+      coachmen, and ferrymen, still stood on the raft and talked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If there is a God and future life, there is truth and good, and man’s
+      highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we
+      must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on this scrap
+      of earth, but have lived and shall live forever, there, in the Whole,”
+       said Pierre, and he pointed to the sky.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew stood leaning on the railing of the raft listening to
+      Pierre, and he gazed with his eyes fixed on the red reflection of the sun
+      gleaming on the blue waters. There was perfect stillness. Pierre became
+      silent. The raft had long since stopped and only the waves of the current
+      beat softly against it below. Prince Andrew felt as if the sound of the
+      waves kept up a refrain to Pierre’s words, whispering:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is true, believe it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He sighed, and glanced with a radiant, childlike, tender look at Pierre’s
+      face, flushed and rapturous, but yet shy before his superior friend.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, if it only were so!” said Prince Andrew. “However, it is time to get
+      on,” he added, and, stepping off the raft, he looked up at the sky to
+      which Pierre had pointed, and for the first time since Austerlitz saw that
+      high, everlasting sky he had seen while lying on that battlefield; and
+      something that had long been slumbering, something that was best within
+      him, suddenly awoke, joyful and youthful, in his soul. It vanished as soon
+      as he returned to the customary conditions of his life, but he knew that
+      this feeling which he did not know how to develop existed within him. His
+      meeting with Pierre formed an epoch in Prince Andrew’s life. Though
+      outwardly he continued to live in the same old way, inwardly he began a
+      new life.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0097"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      It was getting dusk when Prince Andrew and Pierre drove up to the front
+      entrance of the house at Bald Hills. As they approached the house, Prince
+      Andrew with a smile drew Pierre’s attention to a commotion going on at the
+      back porch. A woman, bent with age, with a wallet on her back, and a
+      short, long-haired, young man in a black garment had rushed back to the
+      gate on seeing the carriage driving up. Two women ran out after them, and
+      all four, looking round at the carriage, ran in dismay up the steps of the
+      back porch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Those are Mary’s ‘God’s folk,’” said Prince Andrew. “They have mistaken
+      us for my father. This is the one matter in which she disobeys him. He
+      orders these pilgrims to be driven away, but she receives them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But what are ‘God’s folk’?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew had no time to answer. The servants came out to meet them,
+      and he asked where the old prince was and whether he was expected back
+      soon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old prince had gone to the town and was expected back any minute.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew led Pierre to his own apartments, which were always kept in
+      perfect order and readiness for him in his father’s house; he himself went
+      to the nursery.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let us go and see my sister,” he said to Pierre when he returned. “I have
+      not found her yet, she is hiding now, sitting with her ‘God’s folk.’ It
+      will serve her right, she will be confused, but you will see her ‘God’s
+      folk.’ It’s really very curious.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What are ‘God’s folk’?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come, and you’ll see for yourself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary really was disconcerted and red patches came on her face
+      when they went in. In her snug room, with lamps burning before the icon
+      stand, a young lad with a long nose and long hair, wearing a monk’s
+      cassock, sat on the sofa beside her, behind a samovar. Near them, in an
+      armchair, sat a thin, shriveled, old woman, with a meek expression on her
+      childlike face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Andrew, why didn’t you warn me?” said the princess, with mild reproach,
+      as she stood before her pilgrims like a hen before her chickens.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Charmée de vous voir. Je suis très contente de vous voir,”</i> * she said to
+      Pierre as he kissed her hand. She had known him as a child, and now his
+      friendship with Andrew, his misfortune with his wife, and above all his
+      kindly, simple face disposed her favorably toward him. She looked at him
+      with her beautiful radiant eyes and seemed to say, “I like you very much,
+      but please don’t laugh at my people.” After exchanging the first
+      greetings, they sat down.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Delighted to see you. I am very glad to see you.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, and Ivánushka is here too!” said Prince Andrew, glancing with a smile
+      at the young pilgrim.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Andrew!” said Princess Mary, imploringly. <i>“Il faut que vous sachiez que
+      c’est une femme,”</i> * said Prince Andrew to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Andrew, <i>au nom de Dieu!</i>” *(2) Princess Mary repeated.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “You must know that this is a woman.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * (2) “For heaven’s sake.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      It was evident that Prince Andrew’s ironical tone toward the pilgrims and
+      Princess Mary’s helpless attempts to protect them were their customary
+      long-established relations on the matter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Mais, ma bonne amie,”</i> said Prince Andrew, <i>“vous devriez au contraire
+      m’être reconnaissante de ce que j’explique à Pierre votre intimité avec ce
+      jeune homme.”</i> *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “But, my dear, you ought on the contrary to be grateful to
+     me for explaining to Pierre your intimacy with this young
+     man.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “Really?” said Pierre, gazing over his spectacles with curiosity and
+      seriousness (for which Princess Mary was specially grateful to him) into
+      Ivánushka’s face, who, seeing that she was being spoken about, looked
+      round at them all with crafty eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary’s embarrassment on <i>her people’s</i> account was quite
+      unnecessary. They were not in the least abashed. The old woman, lowering
+      her eyes but casting side glances at the newcomers, had turned her cup
+      upside down and placed a nibbled bit of sugar beside it, and sat quietly
+      in her armchair, though hoping to be offered another cup of tea.
+      Ivánushka, sipping out of her saucer, looked with sly womanish eyes from
+      under her brows at the young men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where have you been? To Kiev?” Prince Andrew asked the old woman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have, good sir,” she answered garrulously. “Just at
+      Christmastime I was deemed worthy to partake of the holy and heavenly
+      sacrament at the shrine of the saint. And now I’m from Kolyázin, master,
+      where a great and wonderful blessing has been revealed.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And was Ivánushka with you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I go by myself, benefactor,” said Ivánushka, trying to speak in a bass
+      voice. “I only came across Pelagéya in Yúkhnovo....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pelagéya interrupted her companion; she evidently wished to tell what she
+      had seen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In Kolyázin, master, a wonderful blessing has been revealed.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it? Some new relics?” asked Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Andrew, do leave off,” said Princess Mary. “Don’t tell him, Pelagéya.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No... why not, my dear, why shouldn’t I? I like him. He is kind, he is
+      one of God’s chosen, he’s a benefactor, he once gave me ten rubles, I
+      remember. When I was in Kiev, Crazy Cyril says to me (he’s one of God’s
+      own and goes barefoot summer and winter), he says, ‘Why are you not going
+      to the right place? Go to Kolyázin where a wonder-working icon of the Holy
+      Mother of God has been revealed.’ On hearing those words I said good-by to
+      the holy folk and went.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      All were silent, only the pilgrim woman went on in measured tones, drawing
+      in her breath.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So I come, master, and the people say to me: ‘A great blessing has been
+      revealed, holy oil trickles from the cheeks of our blessed Mother, the
+      Holy Virgin Mother of God.’...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “All right, all right, you can tell us afterwards,” said Princess Mary,
+      flushing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let me ask her,” said Pierre. “Did you see it yourselves?” he inquired.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, yes, master, I was found worthy. Such a brightness on the face like
+      the light of heaven, and from the blessed Mother’s cheek it drops and
+      drops....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But, dear me, that must be a fraud!” said Pierre, naïvely, who had
+      listened attentively to the pilgrim.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, master, what are you saying?” exclaimed the horrified Pelagéya,
+      turning to Princess Mary for support.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They impose on the people,” he repeated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lord Jesus Christ!” exclaimed the pilgrim woman, crossing herself. “Oh,
+      don’t speak so, master! There was a general who did not believe, and said,
+      ‘The monks cheat,’ and as soon as he’d said it he went blind. And he
+      dreamed that the Holy Virgin Mother of the Kiev catacombs came to him and
+      said, ‘Believe in me and I will make you whole.’ So he begged: ‘Take me to
+      her, take me to her.’ It’s the real truth I’m telling you, I saw it
+      myself. So he was brought, quite blind, straight to her, and he goes up to
+      her and falls down and says, ‘Make me whole,’ says he, ‘and I’ll give thee
+      what the Tsar bestowed on me.’ I saw it myself, master, the star is fixed
+      into the icon. Well, and what do you think? He received his sight! It’s a
+      sin to speak so. God will punish you,” she said admonishingly, turning to
+      Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How did the star get into the icon?” Pierre asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And was the Holy Mother promoted to the rank of general?” said Prince
+      Andrew, with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pelagéya suddenly grew quite pale and clasped her hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, master, master, what a sin! And you who have a son!” she began, her
+      pallor suddenly turning to a vivid red. “Master, what have you said? God
+      forgive you!” And she crossed herself. “Lord forgive him! My dear, what
+      does it mean?...” she asked, turning to Princess Mary. She got up and,
+      almost crying, began to arrange her wallet. She evidently felt frightened
+      and ashamed to have accepted charity in a house where such things could be
+      said, and was at the same time sorry to have now to forgo the charity of
+      this house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now, why need you do it?” said Princess Mary. “Why did you come to
+      me?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Come, Pelagéya, I was joking,” said Pierre. “<i>Princesse, ma parole, je
+      n’ai pas voulu l’offenser.</i> * I did not mean anything, I was only joking,”
+       he said, smiling shyly and trying to efface his offense. “It was all my
+      fault, and Andrew was only joking.”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Princess, on my word, I did not wish to offend her.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Pelagéya stopped doubtfully, but in Pierre’s face there was such a look of
+      sincere penitence, and Prince Andrew glanced so meekly now at her and now
+      at Pierre, that she was gradually reassured.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0098"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The pilgrim woman was appeased and, being encouraged to talk, gave a long
+      account of Father Amphilochus, who led so holy a life that his hands
+      smelled of incense, and how on her last visit to Kiev some monks she knew
+      let her have the keys of the catacombs, and how she, taking some dried
+      bread with her, had spent two days in the catacombs with the saints. “I’d
+      pray awhile to one, ponder awhile, then go on to another. I’d sleep a bit
+      and then again go and kiss the relics, and there was such peace all
+      around, such blessedness, that one don’t want to come out, even into the
+      light of heaven again.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre listened to her attentively and seriously. Prince Andrew went out
+      of the room, and then, leaving “God’s folk” to finish their tea, Princess
+      Mary took Pierre into the drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are very kind,” she said to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, I really did not mean to hurt her feelings. I understand them so well
+      and have the greatest respect for them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary looked at him silently and smiled affectionately.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have known you a long time, you see, and am as fond of you as of a
+      brother,” she said. “How do you find Andrew?” she added hurriedly, not
+      giving him time to reply to her affectionate words. “I am very anxious
+      about him. His health was better in the winter, but last spring his wound
+      reopened and the doctor said he ought to go away for a cure. And I am also
+      very much afraid for him spiritually. He has not a character like us women
+      who, when we suffer, can weep away our sorrows. He keeps it all within
+      him. Today he is cheerful and in good spirits, but that is the effect of
+      your visit—he is not often like that. If you could persuade him to
+      go abroad. He needs activity, and this quiet regular life is very bad for
+      him. Others don’t notice it, but I see it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Toward ten o’clock the men servants rushed to the front door, hearing the
+      bells of the old prince’s carriage approaching. Prince Andrew and Pierre
+      also went out into the porch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who’s that?” asked the old prince, noticing Pierre as he got out of the
+      carriage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah! Very glad! Kiss me,” he said, having learned who the young stranger
+      was.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old prince was in a good temper and very gracious to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before supper, Prince Andrew, coming back to his father’s study, found him
+      disputing hotly with his visitor. Pierre was maintaining that a time would
+      come when there would be no more wars. The old prince disputed it
+      chaffingly, but without getting angry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Drain the blood from men’s veins and put in water instead, then there
+      will be no more war! Old women’s nonsense—old women’s nonsense!” he
+      repeated, but still he patted Pierre affectionately on the shoulder, and
+      then went up to the table where Prince Andrew, evidently not wishing to
+      join in the conversation, was looking over the papers his father had
+      brought from town. The old prince went up to him and began to talk
+      business.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The marshal, a Count Rostóv, hasn’t sent half his contingent. He came to
+      town and wanted to invite me to dinner—I gave him a pretty
+      dinner!... And there, look at this.... Well, my boy,” the old prince went
+      on, addressing his son and patting Pierre on the shoulder. “A fine fellow—your
+      friend—I like him! He stirs me up. Another says clever things and
+      one doesn’t care to listen, but this one talks rubbish yet stirs an old
+      fellow up. Well, go! Get along! Perhaps I’ll come and sit with you at
+      supper. We’ll have another dispute. Make friends with my little fool,
+      Princess Mary,” he shouted after Pierre, through the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only now, on his visit to Bald Hills, did Pierre fully realize the
+      strength and charm of his friendship with Prince Andrew. That charm was
+      not expressed so much in his relations with him as with all his family and
+      with the household. With the stern old prince and the gentle, timid
+      Princess Mary, though he had scarcely known them, Pierre at once felt like
+      an old friend. They were all fond of him already. Not only Princess Mary,
+      who had been won by his gentleness with the pilgrims, gave him her most
+      radiant looks, but even the one-year-old “Prince Nicholas” (as his
+      grandfather called him) smiled at Pierre and let himself be taken in his
+      arms, and Michael Ivánovich and Mademoiselle Bourienne looked at him with
+      pleasant smiles when he talked to the old prince.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old prince came in to supper; this was evidently on Pierre’s account.
+      And during the two days of the young man’s visit he was extremely kind to
+      him and told him to visit them again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Pierre had gone and the members of the household met together, they
+      began to express their opinions of him as people always do after a new
+      acquaintance has left, but as seldom happens, no one said anything but
+      what was good of him.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0099"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      When returning from his leave, Rostóv felt, for the first time, how close
+      was the bond that united him to Denísov and the whole regiment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On approaching it, Rostóv felt as he had done when approaching his home in
+      Moscow. When he saw the first hussar with the unbuttoned uniform of his
+      regiment, when he recognized red-haired Deméntyev and saw the picket ropes
+      of the roan horses, when Lavrúshka gleefully shouted to his master, “The
+      count has come!” and Denísov, who had been asleep on his bed, ran all
+      disheveled out of the mud hut to embrace him, and the officers collected
+      round to greet the new arrival, Rostóv experienced the same feeling as
+      when his mother, his father, and his sister had embraced him, and tears of
+      joy choked him so that he could not speak. The regiment was also a home,
+      and as unalterably dear and precious as his parents’ house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he had reported himself to the commander of the regiment and had been
+      reassigned to his former squadron, had been on duty and had gone out
+      foraging, when he had again entered into all the little interests of the
+      regiment and felt himself deprived of liberty and bound in one narrow,
+      unchanging frame, he experienced the same sense of peace, of moral
+      support, and the same sense of being at home here in his own place, as he
+      had felt under the parental roof. But here was none of all that turmoil of
+      the world at large, where he did not know his right place and took
+      mistaken decisions; here was no Sónya with whom he ought, or ought not, to
+      have an explanation; here was no possibility of going there or not going
+      there; here there were not twenty-four hours in the day which could be
+      spent in such a variety of ways; there was not that innumerable crowd of
+      people of whom not one was nearer to him or farther from him than another;
+      there were none of those uncertain and undefined money relations with his
+      father, and nothing to recall that terrible loss to Dólokhov. Here, in the
+      regiment, all was clear and simple. The whole world was divided into two
+      unequal parts: one, our Pávlograd regiment; the other, all the rest. And
+      the rest was no concern of his. In the regiment, everything was definite:
+      who was lieutenant, who captain, who was a good fellow, who a bad one, and
+      most of all, who was a comrade. The canteenkeeper gave one credit, one’s
+      pay came every four months, there was nothing to think out or decide, you
+      had only to do nothing that was considered bad in the Pávlograd regiment
+      and, when given an order, to do what was clearly, distinctly, and
+      definitely ordered—and all would be well.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having once more entered into the definite conditions of this regimental
+      life, Rostóv felt the joy and relief a tired man feels on lying down to
+      rest. Life in the regiment, during this campaign, was all the pleasanter
+      for him, because, after his loss to Dólokhov (for which, in spite of all
+      his family’s efforts to console him, he could not forgive himself), he had
+      made up his mind to atone for his fault by serving, not as he had done
+      before, but really well, and by being a perfectly first-rate comrade and
+      officer—in a word, a splendid man altogether, a thing which seemed
+      so difficult out <i>in the world</i>, but so possible in the regiment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After his losses, he had determined to pay back his debt to his parents in
+      five years. He received ten thousand rubles a year, but now resolved to
+      take only two thousand and leave the rest to repay the debt to his
+      parents.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Our army, after repeated retreats and advances and battles at Pultúsk and
+      Preussisch-Eylau, was concentrated near Bartenstein. It was awaiting the
+      Emperor’s arrival and the beginning of a new campaign.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Pávlograd regiment, belonging to that part of the army which had
+      served in the 1805 campaign, had been recruiting up to strength in Russia,
+      and arrived too late to take part in the first actions of the campaign. It
+      had been neither at Pultúsk nor at Preussisch-Eylau and, when it joined
+      the army in the field in the second half of the campaign, was attached to
+      Plátov’s division.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Plátov’s division was acting independently of the main army. Several times
+      parts of the Pávlograd regiment had exchanged shots with the enemy, had
+      taken prisoners, and once had even captured Marshal Oudinot’s carriages.
+      In April the Pávlograds were stationed immovably for some weeks near a
+      totally ruined and deserted German village.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A thaw had set in, it was muddy and cold, the ice on the river broke, and
+      the roads became impassable. For days neither provisions for the men nor
+      fodder for the horses had been issued. As no transports could arrive, the
+      men dispersed about the abandoned and deserted villages, searching for
+      potatoes, but found few even of these.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Everything had been eaten up and the inhabitants had all fled—if any
+      remained, they were worse than beggars and nothing more could be taken
+      from them; even the soldiers, usually pitiless enough, instead of taking
+      anything from them, often gave them the last of their rations.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Pávlograd regiment had had only two men wounded in action, but had
+      lost nearly half its men from hunger and sickness. In the hospitals, death
+      was so certain that soldiers suffering from fever, or the swelling that
+      came from bad food, preferred to remain on duty, and hardly able to drag
+      their legs went to the front rather than to the hospitals. When spring
+      came on, the soldiers found a plant just showing out of the ground that
+      looked like asparagus, which, for some reason, they called “Máshka’s sweet
+      root.” It was very bitter, but they wandered about the fields seeking it
+      and dug it out with their sabers and ate it, though they were ordered not
+      to do so, as it was a noxious plant. That spring a new disease broke out
+      among the soldiers, a swelling of the arms, legs, and face, which the
+      doctors attributed to eating this root. But in spite of all this, the
+      soldiers of Denísov’s squadron fed chiefly on “Máshka’s sweet root,”
+       because it was the second week that the last of the biscuits were being
+      doled out at the rate of half a pound a man and the last potatoes received
+      had sprouted and frozen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The horses also had been fed for a fortnight on straw from the thatched
+      roofs and had become terribly thin, though still covered with tufts of
+      felty winter hair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Despite this destitution, the soldiers and officers went on living just as
+      usual. Despite their pale swollen faces and tattered uniforms, the hussars
+      formed line for roll call, kept things in order, groomed their horses,
+      polished their arms, brought in straw from the thatched roofs in place of
+      fodder, and sat down to dine round the caldrons from which they rose up
+      hungry, joking about their nasty food and their hunger. As usual, in their
+      spare time, they lit bonfires, steamed themselves before them naked;
+      smoked, picked out and baked sprouting rotten potatoes, told and listened
+      to stories of Potëmkin’s and Suvórov’s campaigns, or to legends of Alësha
+      the Sly, or the priest’s laborer Mikólka.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The officers, as usual, lived in twos and threes in the roofless,
+      half-ruined houses. The seniors tried to collect straw and potatoes and,
+      in general, food for the men. The younger ones occupied themselves as
+      before, some playing cards (there was plenty of money, though there was no
+      food), some with more innocent games, such as quoits and skittles. The
+      general trend of the campaign was rarely spoken of, partly because nothing
+      certain was known about it, partly because there was a vague feeling that
+      in the main it was going badly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv lived, as before, with Denísov, and since their furlough they had
+      become more friendly than ever. Denísov never spoke of Rostóv’s family,
+      but by the tender friendship his commander showed him, Rostóv felt that
+      the elder hussar’s luckless love for Natásha played a part in
+      strengthening their friendship. Denísov evidently tried to expose Rostóv
+      to danger as seldom as possible, and after an action greeted his safe
+      return with evident joy. On one of his foraging expeditions, in a deserted
+      and ruined village to which he had come in search of provisions, Rostóv
+      found a family consisting of an old Pole and his daughter with an infant
+      in arms. They were half clad, hungry, too weak to get away on foot and had
+      no means of obtaining a conveyance. Rostóv brought them to his quarters,
+      placed them in his own lodging, and kept them for some weeks while the old
+      man was recovering. One of his comrades, talking of women, began chaffing
+      Rostóv, saying that he was more wily than any of them and that it would
+      not be a bad thing if he introduced to them the pretty Polish girl he had
+      saved. Rostóv took the joke as an insult, flared up, and said such
+      unpleasant things to the officer that it was all Denísov could do to
+      prevent a duel. When the officer had gone away, Denísov, who did not
+      himself know what Rostóv’s relations with the Polish girl might be, began
+      to upbraid him for his quickness of temper, and Rostóv replied:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Say what you like.... She is like a sister to me, and I can’t tell you
+      how it offended me... because... well, for that reason....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov patted him on the shoulder and began rapidly pacing the room
+      without looking at Rostóv, as was his way at moments of deep feeling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, what a mad bweed you Wostóvs are!” he muttered, and Rostóv noticed
+      tears in his eyes.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0100"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      In April the troops were enlivened by news of the Emperor’s arrival, but
+      Rostóv had no chance of being present at the review he held at
+      Bartenstein, as the Pávlograds were at the outposts far beyond that place.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They were bivouacking. Denísov and Rostóv were living in an earth hut, dug
+      out for them by the soldiers and roofed with branches and turf. The hut
+      was made in the following manner, which had then come into vogue. A trench
+      was dug three and a half feet wide, four feet eight inches deep, and eight
+      feet long. At one end of the trench, steps were cut out and these formed
+      the entrance and vestibule. The trench itself was the room, in which the
+      lucky ones, such as the squadron commander, had a board, lying on piles at
+      the end opposite the entrance, to serve as a table. On each side of the
+      trench, the earth was cut out to a breadth of about two and a half feet,
+      and this did duty for bedsteads and couches. The roof was so constructed
+      that one could stand up in the middle of the trench and could even sit up
+      on the beds if one drew close to the table. Denísov, who was living
+      luxuriously because the soldiers of his squadron liked him, had also a
+      board in the roof at the farther end, with a piece of (broken but mended)
+      glass in it for a window. When it was very cold, embers from the soldiers’
+      campfire were placed on a bent sheet of iron on the steps in the
+      “reception room”—as Denísov called that part of the hut—and it
+      was then so warm that the officers, of whom there were always some with
+      Denísov and Rostóv, sat in their shirt sleeves.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In April, Rostóv was on orderly duty. One morning, between seven and
+      eight, returning after a sleepless night, he sent for embers, changed his
+      rain-soaked underclothes, said his prayers, drank tea, got warm, then
+      tidied up the things on the table and in his own corner, and, his face
+      glowing from exposure to the wind and with nothing on but his shirt, lay
+      down on his back, putting his arms under his head. He was pleasantly
+      considering the probability of being promoted in a few days for his last
+      reconnoitering expedition, and was awaiting Denísov, who had gone out
+      somewhere and with whom he wanted a talk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Suddenly he heard Denísov shouting in a vibrating voice behind the hut,
+      evidently much excited. Rostóv moved to the window to see whom he was
+      speaking to, and saw the quartermaster, Topchéenko.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I ordered you not to let them eat that Máshka woot stuff!” Denísov was
+      shouting. “And I saw with my own eyes how Lazarchúk bwought some fwom the
+      fields.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I have given the order again and again, your honor, but they don’t obey,”
+       answered the quartermaster.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv lay down again on his bed and thought complacently: “Let him fuss
+      and bustle now, my job’s done and I’m lying down—capitally!” He
+      could hear that Lavrúshka—that sly, bold orderly of Denísov’s—was
+      talking, as well as the quartermaster. Lavrúshka was saying something
+      about loaded wagons, biscuits, and oxen he had seen when he had gone out
+      for provisions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Then Denísov’s voice was heard shouting farther and farther away. “Saddle!
+      Second platoon!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Where are they off to now?” thought Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Five minutes later, Denísov came into the hut, climbed with muddy boots on
+      the bed, lit his pipe, furiously scattered his things about, took his
+      leaded whip, buckled on his saber, and went out again. In answer to
+      Rostóv’s inquiry where he was going, he answered vaguely and crossly that
+      he had some business.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let God and our gweat monarch judge me afterwards!” said Denísov going
+      out, and Rostóv heard the hoofs of several horses splashing through the
+      mud. He did not even trouble to find out where Denísov had gone. Having
+      got warm in his corner, he fell asleep and did not leave the hut till
+      toward evening. Denísov had not yet returned. The weather had cleared up,
+      and near the next hut two officers and a cadet were playing <i>sváyka</i>,
+      laughing as they threw their missiles which buried themselves in the soft
+      mud. Rostóv joined them. In the middle of the game, the officers saw some
+      wagons approaching with fifteen hussars on their skinny horses behind
+      them. The wagons escorted by the hussars drew up to the picket ropes and a
+      crowd of hussars surrounded them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There now, Denísov has been worrying,” said Rostóv, “and here are the
+      provisions.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “So they are!” said the officers. “Won’t the soldiers be glad!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A little behind the hussars came Denísov, accompanied by two infantry
+      officers with whom he was talking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv went to meet them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I warn you, Captain,” one of the officers, a short thin man, evidently
+      very angry, was saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Haven’t I told you I won’t give them up?” replied Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You will answer for it, Captain. It is mutiny—seizing the transport
+      of one’s own army. Our men have had nothing to eat for two days.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And mine have had nothing for two weeks,” said Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is robbery! You’ll answer for it, sir!” said the infantry officer,
+      raising his voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now, what are you pestewing me for?” cried Denísov, suddenly losing his
+      temper. “I shall answer for it and not you, and you’d better not buzz
+      about here till you get hurt. Be off! Go!” he shouted at the officers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very well, then!” shouted the little officer, undaunted and not riding
+      away. “If you are determined to rob, I’ll...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Go to the devil! quick ma’ch, while you’re safe and sound!” and Denísov
+      turned his horse on the officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very well, very well!” muttered the officer, threateningly, and turning
+      his horse he trotted away, jolting in his saddle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A dog astwide a fence! A weal dog astwide a fence!” shouted Denísov after
+      him (the most insulting expression a cavalryman can address to a mounted
+      infantryman) and riding up to Rostóv, he burst out laughing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ve taken twansports from the infantwy by force!” he said. “After all,
+      can’t let our men starve.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The wagons that had reached the hussars had been consigned to an infantry
+      regiment, but learning from Lavrúshka that the transport was unescorted,
+      Denísov with his hussars had seized it by force. The soldiers had biscuits
+      dealt out to them freely, and they even shared them with the other
+      squadrons.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The next day the regimental commander sent for Denísov, and holding his
+      fingers spread out before his eyes said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This is how I look at this affair: I know nothing about it and won’t
+      begin proceedings, but I advise you to ride over to the staff and settle
+      the business there in the commissariat department and if possible sign a
+      receipt for such and such stores received. If not, as the demand was
+      booked against an infantry regiment, there will be a row and the affair
+      may end badly.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      From the regimental commander’s, Denísov rode straight to the staff with a
+      sincere desire to act on this advice. In the evening he came back to his
+      dugout in a state such as Rostóv had never yet seen him in. Denísov could
+      not speak and gasped for breath. When Rostóv asked what was the matter, he
+      only uttered some incoherent oaths and threats in a hoarse, feeble voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alarmed at Denísov’s condition, Rostóv suggested that he should undress,
+      drink some water, and send for the doctor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Twy me for wobbewy... oh! Some more water... Let them twy me, but I’ll
+      always thwash scoundwels... and I’ll tell the Empewo’... Ice...” he
+      muttered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The regimental doctor, when he came, said it was absolutely necessary to
+      bleed Denísov. A deep saucer of black blood was taken from his hairy arm
+      and only then was he able to relate what had happened to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I get there,” began Denísov. “‘Now then, where’s your chief’s quarters?’
+      They were pointed out. ‘Please to wait.’ ‘I’ve widden twenty miles and
+      have duties to attend to and no time to wait. Announce me.’ Vewy well, so
+      out comes their head chief—also took it into his head to lecture me:
+      ‘It’s wobbewy!’—‘Wobbewy,’ I say, ‘is not done by man who seizes
+      pwovisions to feed his soldiers, but by him who takes them to fill his own
+      pockets!’ ‘Will you please be silent?’ ‘Vewy good!’ Then he says: ‘Go and
+      give a weceipt to the commissioner, but your affair will be passed on to
+      headquarters.’ I go to the commissioner. I enter, and at the table... who
+      do you think? No, but wait a bit!... Who is it that’s starving us?”
+       shouted Denísov, hitting the table with the fist of his newly bled arm so
+      violently that the table nearly broke down and the tumblers on it jumped
+      about. “Telyánin! ‘What? So it’s you who’s starving us to death! Is it?
+      Take this and this!’ and I hit him so pat, stwaight on his snout... ‘Ah,
+      what a... what a...!’ and I sta’ted fwashing him... Well, I’ve had a bit
+      of fun I can tell you!” cried Denísov, gleeful and yet angry, his white
+      teeth showing under his black mustache. “I’d have killed him if they
+      hadn’t taken him away!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But what are you shouting for? Calm yourself,” said Rostóv. “You’ve set
+      your arm bleeding afresh. Wait, we must tie it up again.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov was bandaged up again and put to bed. Next day he woke calm and
+      cheerful.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But at noon the adjutant of the regiment came into Rostóv’s and Denísov’s
+      dugout with a grave and serious face and regretfully showed them a paper
+      addressed to Major Denísov from the regimental commander in which
+      inquiries were made about yesterday’s occurrence. The adjutant told them
+      that the affair was likely to take a very bad turn: that a court-martial
+      had been appointed, and that in view of the severity with which marauding
+      and insubordination were now regarded, degradation to the ranks would be
+      the best that could be hoped for.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The case, as represented by the offended parties, was that, after seizing
+      the transports, Major Denísov, being drunk, went to the chief
+      quartermaster and without any provocation called him a thief, threatened
+      to strike him, and on being led out had rushed into the office and given
+      two officials a thrashing, and dislocated the arm of one of them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In answer to Rostóv’s renewed questions, Denísov said, laughing, that he
+      thought he remembered that some other fellow had got mixed up in it, but
+      that it was all nonsense and rubbish, and he did not in the least fear any
+      kind of trial, and that if those scoundrels dared attack him he would give
+      them an answer that they would not easily forget.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov spoke contemptuously of the whole matter, but Rostóv knew him too
+      well not to detect that (while hiding it from others) at heart he feared a
+      court-martial and was worried over the affair, which was evidently taking
+      a bad turn. Every day, letters of inquiry and notices from the court
+      arrived, and on the first of May, Denísov was ordered to hand the squadron
+      over to the next in seniority and appear before the staff of his division
+      to explain his violence at the commissariat office. On the previous day
+      Plátov reconnoitered with two Cossack regiments and two squadrons of
+      hussars. Denísov, as was his wont, rode out in front of the outposts,
+      parading his courage. A bullet fired by a French sharpshooter hit him in
+      the fleshy part of his leg. Perhaps at another time Denísov would not have
+      left the regiment for so slight a wound, but now he took advantage of it
+      to excuse himself from appearing at the staff and went into hospital.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0101"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      In June the battle of Friedland was fought, in which the Pávlograds did
+      not take part, and after that an armistice was proclaimed. Rostóv, who
+      felt his friend’s absence very much, having no news of him since he left
+      and feeling very anxious about his wound and the progress of his affairs,
+      took advantage of the armistice to get leave to visit Denísov in hospital.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The hospital was in a small Prussian town that had been twice devastated
+      by Russian and French troops. Because it was summer, when it is so
+      beautiful out in the fields, the little town presented a particularly
+      dismal appearance with its broken roofs and fences, its foul streets,
+      tattered inhabitants, and the sick and drunken soldiers wandering about.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The hospital was in a brick building with some of the window frames and
+      panes broken and a courtyard surrounded by the remains of a wooden fence
+      that had been pulled to pieces. Several bandaged soldiers, with pale
+      swollen faces, were sitting or walking about in the sunshine in the yard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Directly Rostóv entered the door he was enveloped by a smell of
+      putrefaction and hospital air. On the stairs he met a Russian army doctor
+      smoking a cigar. The doctor was followed by a Russian assistant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I can’t tear myself to pieces,” the doctor was saying. “Come to Makár
+      Alexéevich in the evening. I shall be there.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The assistant asked some further questions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, do the best you can! Isn’t it all the same?” The doctor noticed
+      Rostóv coming upstairs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What do you want, sir?” said the doctor. “What do you want? The bullets
+      having spared you, do you want to try typhus? This is a pesthouse, sir.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How so?” asked Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Typhus, sir. It’s death to go in. Only we two, Makéev and I” (he pointed
+      to the assistant), “keep on here. Some five of us doctors have died in
+      this place.... When a new one comes he is done for in a week,” said the
+      doctor with evident satisfaction. “Prussian doctors have been invited
+      here, but our allies don’t like it at all.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv explained that he wanted to see Major Denísov of the hussars, who
+      was wounded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t know. I can’t tell you, sir. Only think! I am alone in charge of
+      three hospitals with more than four hundred patients! It’s well that the
+      charitable Prussian ladies send us two pounds of coffee and some lint each
+      month or we should be lost!” he laughed. “Four hundred, sir, and they’re
+      always sending me fresh ones. There <i>are</i> four hundred? Eh?” he asked,
+      turning to the assistant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The assistant looked fagged out. He was evidently vexed and impatient for
+      the talkative doctor to go.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Major Denísov,” Rostóv said again. “He was wounded at Molliten.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Dead, I fancy. Eh, Makéev?” queried the doctor, in a tone of
+      indifference.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The assistant, however, did not confirm the doctor’s words.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is he tall and with reddish hair?” asked the doctor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv described Denísov’s appearance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There was one like that,” said the doctor, as if pleased. “That one is
+      dead, I fancy. However, I’ll look up our list. We had a list. Have you got
+      it, Makéev?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Makár Alexéevich has the list,” answered the assistant. “But if you’ll
+      step into the officers’ wards you’ll see for yourself,” he added, turning
+      to Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, you’d better not go, sir,” said the doctor, “or you may have to stay
+      here yourself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But Rostóv bowed himself away from the doctor and asked the assistant to
+      show him the way.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Only don’t blame me!” the doctor shouted up after him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv and the assistant went into the dark corridor. The smell was so
+      strong there that Rostóv held his nose and had to pause and collect his
+      strength before he could go on. A door opened to the right, and an
+      emaciated sallow man on crutches, barefoot and in underclothing, limped
+      out and, leaning against the doorpost, looked with glittering envious eyes
+      at those who were passing. Glancing in at the door, Rostóv saw that the
+      sick and wounded were lying on the floor on straw and overcoats.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “May I go in and look?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What is there to see?” said the assistant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But, just because the assistant evidently did not want him to go in,
+      Rostóv entered the soldiers’ ward. The foul air, to which he had already
+      begun to get used in the corridor, was still stronger here. It was a
+      little different, more pungent, and one felt that this was where it
+      originated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the long room, brightly lit up by the sun through the large windows,
+      the sick and wounded lay in two rows with their heads to the walls, and
+      leaving a passage in the middle. Most of them were unconscious and paid no
+      attention to the newcomers. Those who were conscious raised themselves or
+      lifted their thin yellow faces, and all looked intently at Rostóv with the
+      same expression of hope, of relief, reproach, and envy of another’s
+      health. Rostóv went to the middle of the room and looking through the open
+      doors into the two adjoining rooms saw the same thing there. He stood
+      still, looking silently around. He had not at all expected such a sight.
+      Just before him, almost across the middle of the passage on the bare
+      floor, lay a sick man, probably a Cossack to judge by the cut of his hair.
+      The man lay on his back, his huge arms and legs outstretched. His face was
+      purple, his eyes were rolled back so that only the whites were seen, and
+      on his bare legs and arms which were still red, the veins stood out like
+      cords. He was knocking the back of his head against the floor, hoarsely
+      uttering some word which he kept repeating. Rostóv listened and made out
+      the word. It was “drink, drink, a drink!” Rostóv glanced round, looking
+      for someone who would put this man back in his place and bring him water.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who looks after the sick here?” he asked the assistant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just then a commissariat soldier, a hospital orderly, came in from the
+      next room, marching stiffly, and drew up in front of Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good day, your honor!” he shouted, rolling his eyes at Rostóv and
+      evidently mistaking him for one of the hospital authorities.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Get him to his place and give him some water,” said Rostóv, pointing to
+      the Cossack.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, your honor,” the soldier replied complacently, and rolling his eyes
+      more than ever he drew himself up still straighter, but did not move.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, it’s impossible to do anything here,” thought Rostóv, lowering his
+      eyes, and he was going out, but became aware of an intense look fixed on
+      him on his right, and he turned. Close to the corner, on an overcoat, sat
+      an old, unshaven, gray-bearded soldier as thin as a skeleton, with a stern
+      sallow face and eyes intently fixed on Rostóv. The man’s neighbor on one
+      side whispered something to him, pointing at Rostóv, who noticed that the
+      old man wanted to speak to him. He drew nearer and saw that the old man
+      had only one leg bent under him, the other had been amputated above the
+      knee. His neighbor on the other side, who lay motionless some distance
+      from him with his head thrown back, was a young soldier with a snub nose.
+      His pale waxen face was still freckled and his eyes were rolled back.
+      Rostóv looked at the young soldier and a cold chill ran down his back.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, this one seems...” he began, turning to the assistant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And how we’ve been begging, your honor,” said the old soldier, his jaw
+      quivering. “He’s been dead since morning. After all we’re men, not dogs.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll send someone at once. He shall be taken away—taken away at
+      once,” said the assistant hurriedly. “Let us go, your honor.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, let us go,” said Rostóv hastily, and lowering his eyes and
+      shrinking, he tried to pass unnoticed between the rows of reproachful
+      envious eyes that were fixed upon him, and went out of the room.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0102"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Going along the corridor, the assistant led Rostóv to the officers’ wards,
+      consisting of three rooms, the doors of which stood open. There were beds
+      in these rooms and the sick and wounded officers were lying or sitting on
+      them. Some were walking about the rooms in hospital dressing gowns. The
+      first person Rostóv met in the officers’ ward was a thin little man with
+      one arm, who was walking about the first room in a nightcap and hospital
+      dressing gown, with a pipe between his teeth. Rostóv looked at him, trying
+      to remember where he had seen him before.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “See where we’ve met again!” said the little man. “Túshin, Túshin, don’t
+      you remember, who gave you a lift at Schön Grabern? And I’ve had a bit cut
+      off, you see...” he went on with a smile, pointing to the empty sleeve of
+      his dressing gown. “Looking for Vasíli Dmítrich Denísov? My neighbor,” he
+      added, when he heard who Rostóv wanted. “Here, here,” and Túshin led him
+      into the next room, from whence came sounds of several laughing voices.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How can they laugh, or even live at all here?” thought Rostóv, still
+      aware of that smell of decomposing flesh that had been so strong in the
+      soldiers’ ward, and still seeming to see fixed on him those envious looks
+      which had followed him out from both sides, and the face of that young
+      soldier with eyes rolled back.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov lay asleep on his bed with his head under the blanket, though it
+      was nearly noon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, Wostóv? How are you, how are you?” he called out, still in the same
+      voice as in the regiment, but Rostóv noticed sadly that under this
+      habitual ease and animation some new, sinister, hidden feeling showed
+      itself in the expression of Denísov’s face and the intonations of his
+      voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His wound, though a slight one, had not yet healed even now, six weeks
+      after he had been hit. His face had the same swollen pallor as the faces
+      of the other hospital patients, but it was not this that struck Rostóv.
+      What struck him was that Denísov did not seem glad to see him, and smiled
+      at him unnaturally. He did not ask about the regiment, nor about the
+      general state of affairs, and when Rostóv spoke of these matters did not
+      listen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv even noticed that Denísov did not like to be reminded of the
+      regiment, or in general of that other free life which was going on outside
+      the hospital. He seemed to try to forget that old life and was only
+      interested in the affair with the commissariat officers. On Rostóv’s
+      inquiry as to how the matter stood, he at once produced from under his
+      pillow a paper he had received from the commission and the rough draft of
+      his answer to it. He became animated when he began reading his paper and
+      specially drew Rostóv’s attention to the stinging rejoinders he made to
+      his enemies. His hospital companions, who had gathered round Rostóv—a
+      fresh arrival from the world outside—gradually began to disperse as
+      soon as Denísov began reading his answer. Rostóv noticed by their faces
+      that all those gentlemen had already heard that story more than once and
+      were tired of it. Only the man who had the next bed, a stout Uhlan,
+      continued to sit on his bed, gloomily frowning and smoking a pipe, and
+      little one-armed Túshin still listened, shaking his head disapprovingly.
+      In the middle of the reading, the Uhlan interrupted Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But what I say is,” he said, turning to Rostóv, “it would be best simply
+      to petition the Emperor for pardon. They say great rewards will now be
+      distributed, and surely a pardon would be granted....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Me petition the Empewo’!” exclaimed Denísov, in a voice to which he tried
+      hard to give the old energy and fire, but which sounded like an expression
+      of irritable impotence. “What for? If I were a wobber I would ask mercy,
+      but I’m being court-martialed for bwinging wobbers to book. Let them twy
+      me, I’m not afwaid of anyone. I’ve served the Tsar and my countwy
+      honowably and have not stolen! And am I to be degwaded?... Listen, I’m
+      w’iting to them stwaight. This is what I say: ‘If I had wobbed the
+      Tweasuwy...’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s certainly well written,” said Túshin, “but that’s not the point,
+      Vasíli Dmítrich,” and he also turned to Rostóv. “One has to submit, and
+      Vasíli Dmítrich doesn’t want to. You know the auditor told you it was a
+      bad business.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, let it be bad,” said Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The auditor wrote out a petition for you,” continued Túshin, “and you
+      ought to sign it and ask this gentleman to take it. No doubt he”
+       (indicating Rostóv) “has connections on the staff. You won’t find a better
+      opportunity.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Haven’t I said I’m not going to gwovel?” Denísov interrupted him, went on
+      reading his paper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv had not the courage to persuade Denísov, though he instinctively
+      felt that the way advised by Túshin and the other officers was the safest,
+      and though he would have been glad to be of service to Denísov. He knew
+      his stubborn will and straightforward hasty temper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the reading of Denísov’s virulent reply, which took more than an
+      hour, was over, Rostóv said nothing, and he spent the rest of the day in a
+      most dejected state of mind amid Denísov’s hospital comrades, who had
+      gathered round him, telling them what he knew and listening to their
+      stories. Denísov was moodily silent all the evening.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Late in the evening, when Rostóv was about to leave, he asked Denísov
+      whether he had no commission for him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, wait a bit,” said Denísov, glancing round at the officers, and
+      taking his papers from under his pillow he went to the window, where he
+      had an inkpot, and sat down to write.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It seems it’s no use knocking one’s head against a wall!” he said, coming
+      from the window and giving Rostóv a large envelope. In it was the petition
+      to the Emperor drawn up by the auditor, in which Denísov, without alluding
+      to the offenses of the commissariat officials, simply asked for pardon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hand it in. It seems...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He did not finish, but gave a painfully unnatural smile.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0103"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Having returned to the regiment and told the commander the state of
+      Denísov’s affairs, Rostóv rode to Tilsit with the letter to the Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the thirteenth of June the French and Russian Emperors arrived in
+      Tilsit. Borís Drubetskóy had asked the important personage on whom he was
+      in attendance, to include him in the suite appointed for the stay at
+      Tilsit.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I should like to see the great man,” he said, alluding to Napoleon, whom
+      hitherto he, like everyone else, had always called Buonaparte.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are speaking of Buonaparte?” asked the general, smiling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís looked at his general inquiringly and immediately saw that he was
+      being tested.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am speaking, Prince, of the Emperor Napoleon,” he replied. The general
+      patted him on the shoulder, with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You will go far,” he said, and took him to Tilsit with him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís was among the few present at the Niemen on the day the two Emperors
+      met. He saw the raft, decorated with monograms, saw Napoleon pass before
+      the French Guards on the farther bank of the river, saw the pensive face
+      of the Emperor Alexander as he sat in silence in a tavern on the bank of
+      the Niemen awaiting Napoleon’s arrival, saw both Emperors get into boats,
+      and saw how Napoleon—reaching the raft first—stepped quickly
+      forward to meet Alexander and held out his hand to him, and how they both
+      retired into the pavilion. Since he had begun to move in the highest
+      circles Borís had made it his habit to watch attentively all that went on
+      around him and to note it down. At the time of the meeting at Tilsit he
+      asked the names of those who had come with Napoleon and about the uniforms
+      they wore, and listened attentively to words spoken by important
+      personages. At the moment the Emperors went into the pavilion he looked at
+      his watch, and did not forget to look at it again when Alexander came out.
+      The interview had lasted an hour and fifty-three minutes. He noted this
+      down that same evening, among other facts he felt to be of historic
+      importance. As the Emperor’s suite was a very small one, it was a matter
+      of great importance, for a man who valued his success in the service, to
+      be at Tilsit on the occasion of this interview between the two Emperors,
+      and having succeeded in this, Borís felt that henceforth his position was
+      fully assured. He had not only become known, but people had grown
+      accustomed to him and accepted him. Twice he had executed commissions to
+      the Emperor himself, so that the latter knew his face, and all those at
+      court, far from cold-shouldering him as at first when they considered him
+      a newcomer, would now have been surprised had he been absent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís lodged with another adjutant, the Polish Count Zhilínski. Zhilínski,
+      a Pole brought up in Paris, was rich, and passionately fond of the French,
+      and almost every day of the stay at Tilsit, French officers of the Guard
+      and from French headquarters were dining and lunching with him and Borís.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the evening of the twenty-fourth of June, Count Zhilínski arranged a
+      supper for his French friends. The guest of honor was an aide-de-camp of
+      Napoleon’s, there were also several French officers of the Guard, and a
+      page of Napoleon’s, a young lad of an old aristocratic French family. That
+      same day, Rostóv, profiting by the darkness to avoid being recognized in
+      civilian dress, came to Tilsit and went to the lodging occupied by Borís
+      and Zhilínski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv, in common with the whole army from which he came, was far from
+      having experienced the change of feeling toward Napoleon and the French—who
+      from being foes had suddenly become friends—that had taken place at
+      headquarters and in Borís. In the army, Bonaparte and the French were
+      still regarded with mingled feelings of anger, contempt, and fear. Only
+      recently, talking with one of Plátov’s Cossack officers, Rostóv had argued
+      that if Napoleon were taken prisoner he would be treated not as a
+      sovereign, but as a criminal. Quite lately, happening to meet a wounded
+      French colonel on the road, Rostóv had maintained with heat that peace was
+      impossible between a legitimate sovereign and the criminal Bonaparte.
+      Rostóv was therefore unpleasantly struck by the presence of French
+      officers in Borís’ lodging, dressed in uniforms he had been accustomed to
+      see from quite a different point of view from the outposts of the flank.
+      As soon as he noticed a French officer, who thrust his head out of the
+      door, that warlike feeling of hostility which he always experienced at the
+      sight of the enemy suddenly seized him. He stopped at the threshold and
+      asked in Russian whether Drubetskóy lived there. Borís, hearing a strange
+      voice in the anteroom, came out to meet him. An expression of annoyance
+      showed itself for a moment on his face on first recognizing Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, it’s you? Very glad, very glad to see you,” he said, however, coming
+      toward him with a smile. But Rostóv had noticed his first impulse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ve come at a bad time I think. I should not have come, but I have
+      business,” he said coldly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I only wonder how you managed to get away from your regiment. <i>Dans un
+      moment je suis à vous</i>,” * he said, answering someone who called him.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “In a minute I shall be at your disposal.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “I see I’m intruding,” Rostóv repeated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The look of annoyance had already disappeared from Borís’ face: having
+      evidently reflected and decided how to act, he very quietly took both
+      Rostóv’s hands and led him into the next room. His eyes, looking serenely
+      and steadily at Rostóv, seemed to be veiled by something, as if screened
+      by blue spectacles of conventionality. So it seemed to Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, come now! As if you could come at a wrong time!” said Borís, and he
+      led him into the room where the supper table was laid and introduced him
+      to his guests, explaining that he was not a civilian, but an hussar
+      officer, and an old friend of his.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Count Zhilínski—<i>le Comte</i> N. N.—<i>le Capitaine</i> S.
+      S.,” said he, naming his guests. Rostóv looked frowningly at the Frenchmen,
+      bowed reluctantly, and remained silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Zhilínski evidently did not receive this new Russian person very willingly
+      into his circle and did not speak to Rostóv. Borís did not appear to
+      notice the constraint the newcomer produced and, with the same pleasant
+      composure and the same veiled look in his eyes with which he had met
+      Rostóv, tried to enliven the conversation. One of the Frenchmen, with the
+      politeness characteristic of his countrymen, addressed the obstinately
+      taciturn Rostóv, saying that the latter had probably come to Tilsit to see
+      the Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I came on business,” replied Rostóv, briefly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv had been out of humor from the moment he noticed the look of
+      dissatisfaction on Borís’ face, and as always happens to those in a bad
+      humor, it seemed to him that everyone regarded him with aversion and that
+      he was in everybody’s way. He really was in their way, for he alone took
+      no part in the conversation which again became general. The looks the
+      visitors cast on him seemed to say: “And what is he sitting here for?” He
+      rose and went up to Borís.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Anyhow, I’m in your way,” he said in a low tone. “Come and talk over my
+      business and I’ll go away.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, no, not at all,” said Borís. “But if you are tired, come and lie down
+      in my room and have a rest.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, really...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They went into the little room where Borís slept. Rostóv, without sitting
+      down, began at once, irritably (as if Borís were to blame in some way)
+      telling him about Denísov’s affair, asking him whether, through his
+      general, he could and would intercede with the Emperor on Denísov’s behalf
+      and get Denísov’s petition handed in. When he and Borís were alone, Rostóv
+      felt for the first time that he could not look Borís in the face without a
+      sense of awkwardness. Borís, with one leg crossed over the other and
+      stroking his left hand with the slender fingers of his right, listened to
+      Rostóv as a general listens to the report of a subordinate, now looking
+      aside and now gazing straight into Rostóv’s eyes with the same veiled
+      look. Each time this happened Rostóv felt uncomfortable and cast down his
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have heard of such cases and know that His Majesty is very severe in
+      such affairs. I think it would be best not to bring it before the Emperor,
+      but to apply to the commander of the corps.... But in general, I think...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “So you don’t want to do anything? Well then, say so!” Rostóv almost
+      shouted, not looking Borís in the face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “On the contrary, I will do what I can. Only I thought...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment Zhilínski’s voice was heard calling Borís.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well then, go, go, go...” said Rostóv, and refusing supper and remaining
+      alone in the little room, he walked up and down for a long time, hearing
+      the lighthearted French conversation from the next room.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0104"></a>
+      CHAPTER XX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Rostóv had come to Tilsit the day least suitable for a petition on
+      Denísov’s behalf. He could not himself go to the general in attendance as
+      he was in mufti and had come to Tilsit without permission to do so, and
+      Borís, even had he wished to, could not have done so on the following day.
+      On that day, June 27, the preliminaries of peace were signed. The Emperors
+      exchanged decorations: Alexander received the Cross of the Legion of Honor
+      and Napoleon the Order of St. Andrew of the First Degree, and a dinner had
+      been arranged for the evening, given by a battalion of the French Guards
+      to the Preobrazhénsk battalion. The Emperors were to be present at that
+      banquet.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv felt so ill at ease and uncomfortable with Borís that, when the
+      latter looked in after supper, he pretended to be asleep, and early next
+      morning went away, avoiding Borís. In his civilian clothes and a round
+      hat, he wandered about the town, staring at the French and their uniforms
+      and at the streets and houses where the Russian and French Emperors were
+      staying. In a square he saw tables being set up and preparations made for
+      the dinner; he saw the Russian and French colors draped from side to side
+      of the streets, with huge monograms <i>A</i> and <i>N</i>. In the windows of the
+      houses also flags and bunting were displayed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Borís doesn’t want to help me and I don’t want to ask him. That’s
+      settled,” thought Nicholas. “All is over between us, but I won’t leave
+      here without having done all I can for Denísov and certainly not without
+      getting his letter to the Emperor. The Emperor!... He is here!” thought
+      Rostóv, who had unconsciously returned to the house where Alexander
+      lodged.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Saddled horses were standing before the house and the suite were
+      assembling, evidently preparing for the Emperor to come out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I may see him at any moment,” thought Rostóv. “If only I were to hand the
+      letter direct to him and tell him all... could they really arrest me for
+      my civilian clothes? Surely not! He would understand on whose side justice
+      lies. He understands everything, knows everything. Who can be more just,
+      more magnanimous than he? And even if they did arrest me for being here,
+      what would it matter?” thought he, looking at an officer who was entering
+      the house the Emperor occupied. “After all, people do go in.... It’s all
+      nonsense! I’ll go in and hand the letter to the Emperor myself so much the
+      worse for Drubetskóy who drives me to it!” And suddenly with a
+      determination he himself did not expect, Rostóv felt for the letter in his
+      pocket and went straight to the house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I won’t miss my opportunity now, as I did after Austerlitz,” he
+      thought, expecting every moment to meet the monarch, and conscious of the
+      blood that rushed to his heart at the thought. “I will fall at his feet
+      and beseech him. He will lift me up, will listen, and will even thank me.
+      ‘I am happy when I can do good, but to remedy injustice is the greatest
+      happiness,’” Rostóv fancied the sovereign saying. And passing people who
+      looked after him with curiosity, he entered the porch of the Emperor’s
+      house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A broad staircase led straight up from the entry, and to the right he saw
+      a closed door. Below, under the staircase, was a door leading to the lower
+      floor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Whom do you want?” someone inquired.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To hand in a letter, a petition, to His Majesty,” said Nicholas, with a
+      tremor in his voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A petition? This way, to the officer on duty” (he was shown the door
+      leading downstairs), “only it won’t be accepted.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      On hearing this indifferent voice, Rostóv grew frightened at what he was
+      doing; the thought of meeting the Emperor at any moment was so fascinating
+      and consequently so alarming that he was ready to run away, but the
+      official who had questioned him opened the door, and Rostóv entered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A short stout man of about thirty, in white breeches and high boots and a
+      batiste shirt that he had evidently only just put on, standing in that
+      room, and his valet was buttoning on to the back of his breeches a new
+      pair of handsome silk-embroidered braces that, for some reason, attracted
+      Rostóv’s attention. This man was speaking to someone in the adjoining
+      room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A good figure and in her first bloom,” he was saying, but on seeing
+      Rostóv, he stopped short and frowned.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it? A petition?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it?” asked the person in the other room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Another petitioner,” answered the man with the braces.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Tell him to come later. He’ll be coming out directly, we must go.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Later... later! Tomorrow. It’s too late...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv turned and was about to go, but the man in the braces stopped him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Whom have you come from? Who are you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I come from Major Denísov,” answered Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Are you an officer?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Lieutenant Count Rostóv.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What audacity! Hand it in through your commander. And go along with
+      you... go,” and he continued to put on the uniform the valet handed him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv went back into the hall and noticed that in the porch there were
+      many officers and generals in full parade uniform, whom he had to pass.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Cursing his temerity, his heart sinking at the thought of finding himself
+      at any moment face to face with the Emperor and being put to shame and
+      arrested in his presence, fully alive now to the impropriety of his
+      conduct and repenting of it, Rostóv, with downcast eyes, was making his
+      way out of the house through the brilliant suite when a familiar voice
+      called him and a hand detained him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What are you doing here, sir, in civilian dress?” asked a deep voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was a cavalry general who had obtained the Emperor’s special favor
+      during this campaign, and who had formerly commanded the division in which
+      Rostóv was serving.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv, in dismay, began justifying himself, but seeing the kindly,
+      jocular face of the general, he took him aside and in an excited voice
+      told him the whole affair, asking him to intercede for Denísov, whom the
+      general knew. Having heard Rostóv to the end, the general shook his head
+      gravely.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’m sorry, sorry for that fine fellow. Give me the letter.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Hardly had Rostóv handed him the letter and finished explaining Denísov’s
+      case, when hasty steps and the jingling of spurs were heard on the stairs,
+      and the general, leaving him, went to the porch. The gentlemen of the
+      Emperor’s suite ran down the stairs and went to their horses. Hayne, the
+      same groom who had been at Austerlitz, led up the Emperor’s horse, and the
+      faint creak of a footstep Rostóv knew at once was heard on the stairs.
+      Forgetting the danger of being recognized, Rostóv went close to the porch,
+      together with some inquisitive civilians, and again, after two years, saw
+      those features he adored: that same face and same look and step, and the
+      same union of majesty and mildness.... And the feeling of enthusiasm and
+      love for his sovereign rose again in Rostóv’s soul in all its old force.
+      In the uniform of the Preobrazhénsk regiment—white chamois-leather
+      breeches and high boots—and wearing a star Rostóv did not know (it
+      was that of the <i>Légion d’honneur</i>), the monarch came out into the porch,
+      putting on his gloves and carrying his hat under his arm. He stopped and
+      looked about him, brightening everything around by his glance. He spoke a
+      few words to some of the generals, and, recognizing the former commander
+      of Rostóv’s division, smiled and beckoned to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the suite drew back and Rostóv saw the general talking for some time
+      to the Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor said a few words to him and took a step toward his horse.
+      Again the crowd of members of the suite and street gazers (among whom was
+      Rostóv) moved nearer to the Emperor. Stopping beside his horse, with his
+      hand on the saddle, the Emperor turned to the cavalry general and said in
+      a loud voice, evidently wishing to be heard by all:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I cannot do it, General. I cannot, because the law is stronger than I,”
+       and he raised his foot to the stirrup.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The general bowed his head respectfully, and the monarch mounted and rode
+      down the street at a gallop. Beside himself with enthusiasm, Rostóv ran
+      after him with the crowd.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0105"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The Emperor rode to the square where, facing one another, a battalion of
+      the Preobrazhénsk regiment stood on the right and a battalion of the
+      French Guards in their bearskin caps on the left.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As the Tsar rode up to one flank of the battalions, which presented arms,
+      another group of horsemen galloped up to the opposite flank, and at the
+      head of them Rostóv recognized Napoleon. It could be no one else. He came
+      at a gallop, wearing a small hat, a blue uniform open over a white vest,
+      and the St. Andrew ribbon over his shoulder. He was riding a very fine
+      thoroughbred gray Arab horse with a crimson gold-embroidered saddlecloth.
+      On approaching Alexander he raised his hat, and as he did so, Rostóv, with
+      his cavalryman’s eye, could not help noticing that Napoleon did not sit
+      well or firmly in the saddle. The battalions shouted “Hurrah!” and <i>“Vive
+      l’Empereur!”</i> Napoleon said something to Alexander, and both Emperors
+      dismounted and took each other’s hands. Napoleon’s face wore an unpleasant
+      and artificial smile. Alexander was saying something affable to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In spite of the trampling of the French gendarmes’ horses, which were
+      pushing back the crowd, Rostóv kept his eyes on every movement of
+      Alexander and Bonaparte. It struck him as a surprise that Alexander
+      treated Bonaparte as an equal and that the latter was quite at ease with
+      the Tsar, as if such relations with an Emperor were an everyday matter to
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alexander and Napoleon, with the long train of their suites, approached
+      the right flank of the Preobrazhénsk battalion and came straight up to the
+      crowd standing there. The crowd unexpectedly found itself so close to the
+      Emperors that Rostóv, standing in the front row, was afraid he might be
+      recognized.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sire, I ask your permission to present the Legion of Honor to the bravest
+      of your soldiers,” said a sharp, precise voice, articulating every letter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This was said by the undersized Napoleon, looking up straight into
+      Alexander’s eyes. Alexander listened attentively to what was said to him
+      and, bending his head, smiled pleasantly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To him who has borne himself most bravely in this last war,” added
+      Napoleon, accentuating each syllable, as with a composure and assurance
+      exasperating to Rostóv, he ran his eyes over the Russian ranks drawn up
+      before him, who all presented arms with their eyes fixed on their Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Will Your Majesty allow me to consult the colonel?” said Alexander and
+      took a few hasty steps toward Prince Kozlóvski, the commander of the
+      battalion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bonaparte meanwhile began taking the glove off his small white hand, tore
+      it in doing so, and threw it away. An aide-de-camp behind him rushed
+      forward and picked it up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To whom shall it be given?” the Emperor Alexander asked Kozlóvski, in
+      Russian in a low voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To whomever Your Majesty commands.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor knit his brows with dissatisfaction and, glancing back,
+      remarked:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But we must give him an answer.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Kozlóvski scanned the ranks resolutely and included Rostóv in his
+      scrutiny.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Can it be me?” thought Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lázarev!” the colonel called, with a frown, and Lázarev, the first
+      soldier in the rank, stepped briskly forward.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where are you off to? Stop here!” voices whispered to Lázarev who did not
+      know where to go. Lázarev stopped, casting a sidelong look at his colonel
+      in alarm. His face twitched, as often happens to soldiers called before
+      the ranks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon slightly turned his head, and put his plump little hand out
+      behind him as if to take something. The members of his suite, guessing at
+      once what he wanted, moved about and whispered as they passed something
+      from one to another, and a page—the same one Rostóv had seen the
+      previous evening at Borís’—ran forward and, bowing respectfully over
+      the outstretched hand and not keeping it waiting a moment, laid in it an
+      Order on a red ribbon. Napoleon, without looking, pressed two fingers
+      together and the badge was between them. Then he approached Lázarev (who
+      rolled his eyes and persistently gazed at his own monarch), looked round
+      at the Emperor Alexander to imply that what he was now doing was done for
+      the sake of his ally, and the small white hand holding the Order touched
+      one of Lázarev’s buttons. It was as if Napoleon knew that it was only
+      necessary for his hand to deign to touch that soldier’s breast for the
+      soldier to be forever happy, rewarded, and distinguished from everyone
+      else in the world. Napoleon merely laid the cross on Lázarev’s breast and,
+      dropping his hand, turned toward Alexander as though sure that the cross
+      would adhere there. And it really did.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Officious hands, Russian and French, immediately seized the cross and
+      fastened it to the uniform. Lázarev glanced morosely at the little man
+      with white hands who was doing something to him and, still standing
+      motionless presenting arms, looked again straight into Alexander’s eyes,
+      as if asking whether he should stand there, or go away, or do something
+      else. But receiving no orders, he remained for some time in that rigid
+      position.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperors remounted and rode away. The Preobrazhénsk battalion,
+      breaking rank, mingled with the French Guards and sat down at the tables
+      prepared for them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Lázarev sat in the place of honor. Russian and French officers embraced
+      him, congratulated him, and pressed his hands. Crowds of officers and
+      civilians drew near merely to see him. A rumble of Russian and French
+      voices and laughter filled the air round the tables in the square. Two
+      officers with flushed faces, looking cheerful and happy, passed by Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What d’you think of the treat? All on silver plate,” one of them was
+      saying. “Have you seen Lázarev?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I have.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Tomorrow, I hear, the Preobrazhénskis will give them a dinner.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, but what luck for Lázarev! Twelve hundred francs’ pension for life.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Here’s a cap, lads!” shouted a Preobrazhénsk soldier, donning a shaggy
+      French cap.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s a fine thing! First-rate!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Have you heard the password?” asked one Guards’ officer of another. “The
+      day before yesterday it was <i>‘Napoléon, France, bravoure’</i>; yesterday,
+      <i>‘Alexandre, Russie, grandeur.’</i> One day our Emperor gives it and next day
+      Napoleon. Tomorrow our Emperor will send a St. George’s Cross to the
+      bravest of the French Guards. It has to be done. He must respond in kind.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Borís, too, with his friend Zhilínski, came to see the Preobrazhénsk
+      banquet. On his way back, he noticed Rostóv standing by the corner of a
+      house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Rostóv! How d’you do? We missed one another,” he said, and could not
+      refrain from asking what was the matter, so strangely dismal and troubled
+      was Rostóv’s face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nothing, nothing,” replied Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You’ll call round?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I will.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv stood at that corner for a long time, watching the feast from a
+      distance. In his mind, a painful process was going on which he could not
+      bring to a conclusion. Terrible doubts rose in his soul. Now he remembered
+      Denísov with his changed expression, his submission, and the whole
+      hospital, with arms and legs torn off and its dirt and disease. So vividly
+      did he recall that hospital stench of dead flesh that he looked round to
+      see where the smell came from. Next he thought of that self-satisfied
+      Bonaparte, with his small white hand, who was now an Emperor, liked and
+      respected by Alexander. Then why those severed arms and legs and those
+      dead men?... Then again he thought of Lázarev rewarded and Denísov
+      punished and unpardoned. He caught himself harboring such strange thoughts
+      that he was frightened.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The smell of the food the Preobrazhénskis were eating and a sense of
+      hunger recalled him from these reflections; he had to get something to eat
+      before going away. He went to a hotel he had noticed that morning. There
+      he found so many people, among them officers who, like himself, had come
+      in civilian clothes, that he had difficulty in getting a dinner. Two
+      officers of his own division joined him. The conversation naturally turned
+      on the peace. The officers, his comrades, like most of the army, were
+      dissatisfied with the peace concluded after the battle of Friedland. They
+      said that had we held out a little longer Napoleon would have been done
+      for, as his troops had neither provisions nor ammunition. Nicholas ate and
+      drank (chiefly the latter) in silence. He finished a couple of bottles of
+      wine by himself. The process in his mind went on tormenting him without
+      reaching a conclusion. He feared to give way to his thoughts, yet could
+      not get rid of them. Suddenly, on one of the officers’ saying that it was
+      humiliating to look at the French, Rostóv began shouting with uncalled-for
+      wrath, and therefore much to the surprise of the officers:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How can you judge what’s best?” he cried, the blood suddenly rushing to
+      his face. “How can you judge the Emperor’s actions? What right have we to
+      argue? We cannot comprehend either the Emperor’s aims or his actions!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But I never said a word about the Emperor!” said the officer, justifying
+      himself, and unable to understand Rostóv’s outburst, except on the
+      supposition that he was drunk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Rostóv did not listen to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We are not diplomatic officials, we are soldiers and nothing more,” he
+      went on. “If we are ordered to die, we must die. If we’re punished, it
+      means that we have deserved it, it’s not for us to judge. If the Emperor
+      pleases to recognize Bonaparte as Emperor and to conclude an alliance with
+      him, it means that that is the right thing to do. If once we begin judging
+      and arguing about everything, nothing sacred will be left! That way we
+      shall be saying there is no God—nothing!” shouted Nicholas, banging
+      the table—very little to the point as it seemed to his listeners,
+      but quite relevantly to the course of his own thoughts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Our business is to do our duty, to fight and not to think! That’s
+      all....” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And to drink,” said one of the officers, not wishing to quarrel.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, and to drink,” assented Nicholas. “Hullo there! Another bottle!” he
+      shouted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In 1808 the Emperor Alexander went to Erfurt for a fresh interview with
+      the Emperor Napoleon, and in the upper circles of Petersburg there was
+      much talk of the grandeur of this important meeting.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0106"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      In 1809 the intimacy between “the world’s two arbiters,” as Napoleon and
+      Alexander were called, was such that when Napoleon declared war on Austria
+      a Russian corps crossed the frontier to co-operate with our old enemy
+      Bonaparte against our old ally the Emperor of Austria, and in court
+      circles the possibility of marriage between Napoleon and one of
+      Alexander’s sisters was spoken of. But besides considerations of foreign
+      policy, the attention of Russian society was at that time keenly directed
+      on the internal changes that were being undertaken in all the departments
+      of government.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Life meanwhile—real life, with its essential interests of health and
+      sickness, toil and rest, and its intellectual interests in thought,
+      science, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, and passions—went
+      on as usual, independently of and apart from political friendship or
+      enmity with Napoleon Bonaparte and from all the schemes of reconstruction.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0112"></a>
+      BOOK SIX: 1808 - 10
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0107"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew had spent two years continuously in the country.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the plans Pierre had attempted on his estates—and constantly
+      changing from one thing to another had never accomplished—were
+      carried out by Prince Andrew without display and without perceptible
+      difficulty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He had in the highest degree a practical tenacity which Pierre lacked, and
+      without fuss or strain on his part this set things going.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On one of his estates the three hundred serfs were liberated and became
+      free agricultural laborers—this being one of the first examples of
+      the kind in Russia. On other estates the serfs’ compulsory labor was
+      commuted for a quitrent. A trained midwife was engaged for Boguchárovo at
+      his expense, and a priest was paid to teach reading and writing to the
+      children of the peasants and household serfs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew spent half his time at Bald Hills with his father and his
+      son, who was still in the care of nurses. The other half he spent in
+      “Boguchárovo Cloister,” as his father called Prince Andrew’s estate.
+      Despite the indifference to the affairs of the world he had expressed to
+      Pierre, he diligently followed all that went on, received many books, and
+      to his surprise noticed that when he or his father had visitors from
+      Petersburg, the very vortex of life, these people lagged behind himself—who
+      never left the country—in knowledge of what was happening in home
+      and foreign affairs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Besides being occupied with his estates and reading a great variety of
+      books, Prince Andrew was at this time busy with a critical survey of our
+      last two unfortunate campaigns, and with drawing up a proposal for a
+      reform of the army rules and regulations.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the spring of 1809 he went to visit the Ryazán estates which had been
+      inherited by his son, whose guardian he was.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Warmed by the spring sunshine he sat in the <i>calèche</i> looking at the new
+      grass, the first leaves on the birches, and the first puffs of white
+      spring clouds floating across the clear blue sky. He was not thinking of
+      anything, but looked absent-mindedly and cheerfully from side to side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They crossed the ferry where he had talked with Pierre the year before.
+      They went through the muddy village, past threshing floors and green
+      fields of winter rye, downhill where snow still lodged near the bridge,
+      uphill where the clay had been liquefied by the rain, past strips of
+      stubble land and bushes touched with green here and there, and into a
+      birch forest growing on both sides of the road. In the forest it was
+      almost hot, no wind could be felt. The birches with their sticky green
+      leaves were motionless, and lilac-colored flowers and the first blades of
+      green grass were pushing up and lifting last year’s leaves. The coarse
+      evergreen color of the small fir trees scattered here and there among the
+      birches was an unpleasant reminder of winter. On entering the forest the
+      horses began to snort and sweated visibly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Peter the footman made some remark to the coachman; the latter assented.
+      But apparently the coachman’s sympathy was not enough for Peter, and he
+      turned on the box toward his master.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How pleasant it is, your excellency!” he said with a respectful smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s pleasant, your excellency!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What is he talking about?” thought Prince Andrew. “Oh, the spring,
+      I suppose,” he thought as he turned round. “Yes, really everything is
+      green already.... How early! The birches and cherry and alders too are
+      coming out.... But the oaks show no sign yet. Ah, here is one oak!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At the edge of the road stood an oak. Probably ten times the age of
+      the birches that formed the forest, it was ten times as thick and twice
+      as tall as they. It was an enormous tree, its girth twice as great as a
+      man could embrace, and evidently long ago some of its branches had been
+      broken off and its bark scarred. With its huge ungainly limbs sprawling
+      unsymmetrically, and its gnarled hands and fingers, it stood an aged,
+      stern, and scornful monster among the smiling birch trees. Only the
+      dead-looking evergreen firs dotted about in the forest, and this oak, refused
+      to yield to the charm of spring or notice either the spring or the sunshine.
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Spring, love, happiness!” this oak seemed to say. “Are you not weary of
+      that stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud? Always the same and
+      always a fraud? There is no spring, no sun, no happiness! Look at those
+      cramped dead firs, ever the same, and at me too, sticking out my broken
+      and barked fingers just where they have grown, whether from my back or my
+      sides: as they have grown so I stand, and I do not believe in your hopes
+      and your lies.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      As he passed through the forest Prince Andrew turned several times to look
+      at that oak, as if expecting something from it. Under the oak, too, were
+      flowers and grass, but it stood among them scowling, rigid, misshapen, and
+      grim as ever.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, the oak is right, a thousand times right,” thought Prince Andrew.
+      “Let others—the young—yield afresh to that fraud, but we know
+      life, our life is finished!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A whole sequence of new thoughts, hopeless but mournfully pleasant, rose
+      in his soul in connection with that tree. During this journey he, as it
+      were, considered his life afresh and arrived at his old conclusion,
+      restful in its hopelessness: that it was not for him to begin anything
+      anew—but that he must live out his life, content to do no harm, and
+      not disturbing himself or desiring anything.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0108"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew had to see the Marshal of the Nobility for the district in
+      connection with the affairs of the Ryazán estate of which he was trustee.
+      This Marshal was Count Ilyá Rostóv, and in the middle of May Prince Andrew
+      went to visit him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was now hot spring weather. The whole forest was already clothed in
+      green. It was dusty and so hot that on passing near water one longed to
+      bathe.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew, depressed and preoccupied with the business about which he
+      had to speak to the Marshal, was driving up the avenue in the grounds of
+      the Rostóvs’ house at Otrádnoe. He heard merry girlish cries behind some
+      trees on the right and saw a group of girls running to cross the path of
+      his <i>calèche</i>. Ahead of the rest and nearer to him ran a dark-haired,
+      remarkably slim, pretty girl in a yellow chintz dress, with a white
+      handkerchief on her head from under which loose locks of hair escaped. The
+      girl was shouting something but, seeing that he was a stranger, ran back
+      laughing without looking at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Suddenly, he did not know why, he felt a pang. The day was so beautiful,
+      the sun so bright, everything around so gay, but that slim pretty girl did
+      not know, or wish to know, of his existence and was contented and cheerful
+      in her own separate—probably foolish—but bright and happy
+      life. “What is she so glad about? What is she thinking of? Not of the
+      military regulations or of the arrangement of the Ryazán serfs’ quitrents.
+      Of what is she thinking? Why is she so happy?” Prince Andrew asked himself
+      with instinctive curiosity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In 1809 Count Ilyá Rostóv was living at Otrádnoe just as he had done in
+      former years, that is, entertaining almost the whole province with hunts,
+      theatricals, dinners, and music. He was glad to see Prince Andrew, as he
+      was to see any new visitor, and insisted on his staying the night.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the dull day, in the course of which he was entertained by his
+      elderly hosts and by the more important of the visitors (the old count’s
+      house was crowded on account of an approaching name day), Prince Andrew
+      repeatedly glanced at Natásha, gay and laughing among the younger members
+      of the company, and asked himself each time, “What is she thinking about?
+      Why is she so glad?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      That night, alone in new surroundings, he was long unable to sleep. He
+      read awhile and then put out his candle, but relit it. It was hot in the
+      room, the inside shutters of which were closed. He was cross with the
+      stupid old man (as he called Rostóv), who had made him stay by assuring
+      him that some necessary documents had not yet arrived from town, and he
+      was vexed with himself for having stayed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He got up and went to the window to open it. As soon as he opened the
+      shutters the moonlight, as if it had long been watching for this, burst
+      into the room. He opened the casement. The night was fresh, bright, and
+      very still. Just before the window was a row of pollard trees, looking
+      black on one side and with a silvery light on the other. Beneath the trees
+      grew some kind of lush, wet, bushy vegetation with silver-lit leaves and
+      stems here and there. Farther back beyond the dark trees a roof glittered
+      with dew, to the right was a leafy tree with brilliantly white trunk and
+      branches, and above it shone the moon, nearly at its full, in a pale,
+      almost starless, spring sky. Prince Andrew leaned his elbows on the window
+      ledge and his eyes rested on that sky.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His room was on the first floor. Those in the rooms above were also awake.
+      He heard female voices overhead.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Just once more,” said a girlish voice above him which Prince Andrew
+      recognized at once.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But when are you coming to bed?” replied another voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I won’t, I can’t sleep, what’s the use? Come now for the last time.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Two girlish voices sang a musical passage—the end of some song.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, how lovely! Now go to sleep, and there’s an end of it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You go to sleep, but I can’t,” said the first voice, coming nearer to the
+      window. She was evidently leaning right out, for the rustle of her dress
+      and even her breathing could be heard. Everything was stone-still, like
+      the moon and its light and the shadows. Prince Andrew, too, dared not
+      stir, for fear of betraying his unintentional presence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya! Sónya!” he again heard the first speaker. “Oh, how can you sleep?
+      Only look how glorious it is! Ah, how glorious! Do wake up, Sónya!” she
+      said almost with tears in her voice. “There never, never was such a lovely
+      night before!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya made some reluctant reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do just come and see what a moon!... Oh, how lovely! Come here....
+      Darling, sweetheart, come here! There, you see? I feel like sitting down
+      on my heels, putting my arms round my knees like this, straining tight, as
+      tight as possible, and flying away! Like this....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Take care, you’ll fall out.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He heard the sound of a scuffle and Sónya’s disapproving voice: “It’s past
+      one o’clock.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, you only spoil things for me. All right, go, go!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Again all was silent, but Prince Andrew knew she was still sitting there.
+      From time to time he heard a soft rustle and at times a sigh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “O God, O God! What does it mean?” she suddenly exclaimed. “To bed then,
+      if it must be!” and she slammed the casement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “For her I might as well not exist!” thought Prince Andrew while he
+      listened to her voice, for some reason expecting yet fearing that she
+      might say something about him. “There she is again! As if it were on
+      purpose,” thought he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In his soul there suddenly arose such an unexpected turmoil of youthful
+      thoughts and hopes, contrary to the whole tenor of his life, that unable
+      to explain his condition to himself he lay down and fell asleep at once.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0109"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Next morning, having taken leave of no one but the count, and not waiting
+      for the ladies to appear, Prince Andrew set off for home.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was already the beginning of June when on his return journey he drove
+      into the birch forest where the gnarled old oak had made so strange and
+      memorable an impression on him. In the forest the harness bells sounded
+      yet more muffled than they had done six weeks before, for now all was
+      thick, shady, and dense, and the young firs dotted about in the forest did
+      not jar on the general beauty but, lending themselves to the mood around,
+      were delicately green with fluffy young shoots.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The whole day had been hot. Somewhere a storm was gathering, but only a
+      small cloud had scattered some raindrops lightly, sprinkling the road and
+      the sappy leaves. The left side of the forest was dark in the shade, the
+      right side glittered in the sunlight, wet and shiny and scarcely swayed by
+      the breeze. Everything was in blossom, the nightingales trilled, and their
+      voices reverberated now near, now far away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, here in this forest was that oak with which I agreed,” thought
+      Prince Andrew. “But where is it?” he again wondered, gazing at the left
+      side of the road, and without recognizing it he looked with admiration at
+      the very oak he sought. The old oak, quite transfigured, spreading out a
+      canopy of sappy dark-green foliage, stood rapt and slightly trembling in
+      the rays of the evening sun. Neither gnarled fingers nor old scars nor old
+      doubts and sorrows were any of them in evidence now. Through the hard
+      century-old bark, even where there were no twigs, leaves had sprouted such
+      as one could hardly believe the old veteran could have produced.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, it is the same oak,” thought Prince Andrew, and all at once he was
+      seized by an unreasoning springtime feeling of joy and renewal. All the
+      best moments of his life suddenly rose to his memory. Austerlitz with the
+      lofty heavens, his wife’s dead reproachful face, Pierre at the ferry, that
+      girl thrilled by the beauty of the night, and that night itself and the
+      moon, and... all this rushed suddenly to his mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, life is not over at thirty-one!” Prince Andrew suddenly decided
+      finally and decisively. “It is not enough for me to know what I have in me—everyone
+      must know it: Pierre, and that young girl who wanted to fly away into the
+      sky, everyone must know me, so that my life may not be lived for myself
+      alone while others live so apart from it, but so that it may be reflected
+      in them all, and they and I may live in harmony!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      On reaching home Prince Andrew decided to go to Petersburg that autumn and
+      found all sorts of reasons for this decision. A whole series of sensible
+      and logical considerations showing it to be essential for him to go to
+      Petersburg, and even to re-enter the service, kept springing up in his
+      mind. He could not now understand how he could ever even have doubted the
+      necessity of taking an active share in life, just as a month before he had
+      not understood how the idea of leaving the quiet country could ever enter
+      his head. It now seemed clear to him that all his experience of life must
+      be senselessly wasted unless he applied it to some kind of work and again
+      played an active part in life. He did not even remember how formerly, on
+      the strength of similar wretched logical arguments, it had seemed obvious
+      that he would be degrading himself if he now, after the lessons he had had
+      in life, allowed himself to believe in the possibility of being useful and
+      in the possibility of happiness or love. Now reason suggested quite the
+      opposite. After that journey to Ryazán he found the country dull; his
+      former pursuits no longer interested him, and often when sitting alone in
+      his study he got up, went to the mirror, and gazed a long time at his own
+      face. Then he would turn away to the portrait of his dead Lise, who with
+      hair curled <i>à la grecque</i> looked tenderly and gaily at him out of the gilt
+      frame. She did not now say those former terrible words to him, but looked
+      simply, merrily, and inquisitively at him. And Prince Andrew, crossing his
+      arms behind him, long paced the room, now frowning, now smiling, as he
+      reflected on those irrational, inexpressible thoughts, secret as a crime,
+      which altered his whole life and were connected with Pierre, with fame,
+      with the girl at the window, the oak, and woman’s beauty and love. And if
+      anyone came into his room at such moments he was particularly cold, stern,
+      and above all unpleasantly logical.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear,” Princess Mary entering at such a moment would say, “little
+      Nicholas can’t go out today, it’s very cold.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If it were hot,” Prince Andrew would reply at such times very dryly to
+      his sister, “he could go out in his smock, but as it is cold he must wear
+      warm clothes, which were designed for that purpose. That is what follows
+      from the fact that it is cold; and not that a child who needs fresh air
+      should remain at home,” he would add with extreme logic, as if punishing
+      someone for those secret illogical emotions that stirred within him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At such moments Princess Mary would think how intellectual work dries men
+      up.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0110"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew arrived in Petersburg in August, 1809. It was the time when
+      the youthful Speránski was at the zenith of his fame and his reforms were
+      being pushed forward with the greatest energy. That same August the
+      Emperor was thrown from his <i>calèche</i>, injured his leg, and remained three
+      weeks at Peterhof, receiving Speránski every day and no one else. At that
+      time the two famous decrees were being prepared that so agitated society—abolishing
+      court ranks and introducing examinations to qualify for the grades of
+      Collegiate Assessor and State Councilor—and not merely these but a
+      whole state constitution, intended to change the existing order of
+      government in Russia: legal, administrative, and financial, from the
+      Council of State down to the district tribunals. Now those vague liberal
+      dreams with which the Emperor Alexander had ascended the throne, and which
+      he had tried to put into effect with the aid of his associates,
+      Czartorýski, Novosíltsev, Kochubéy, and Strógonov—whom he himself in
+      jest had called his <i>Comité de salut public</i>—were taking shape and
+      being realized.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Now all these men were replaced by Speránski on the civil side, and
+      Arakchéev on the military. Soon after his arrival Prince Andrew, as a
+      gentleman of the chamber, presented himself at court and at a levee. The
+      Emperor, though he met him twice, did not favor him with a single word. It
+      had always seemed to Prince Andrew before that he was antipathetic to the
+      Emperor and that the latter disliked his face and personality generally,
+      and in the cold, repellent glance the Emperor gave him, he now found
+      further confirmation of this surmise. The courtiers explained the
+      Emperor’s neglect of him by His Majesty’s displeasure at Bolkónski’s not
+      having served since 1805.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I know myself that one cannot help one’s sympathies and antipathies,”
+       thought Prince Andrew, “so it will not do to present my proposal for the
+      reform of the army regulations to the Emperor personally, but the project
+      will speak for itself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He mentioned what he had written to an old field marshal, a friend of his
+      father’s. The field marshal made an appointment to see him, received him
+      graciously, and promised to inform the Emperor. A few days later Prince
+      Andrew received notice that he was to go to see the Minister of War, Count
+      Arakchéev.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      On the appointed day Prince Andrew entered Count Arakchéev’s waiting room
+      at nine in the morning.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He did not know Arakchéev personally, had never seen him, and all he had
+      heard of him inspired him with but little respect for the man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is Minister of War, a man trusted by the Emperor, and I need not
+      concern myself about his personal qualities: he has been commissioned to
+      consider my project, so he alone can get it adopted,” thought Prince
+      Andrew as he waited among a number of important and unimportant people in
+      Count Arakchéev’s waiting room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During his service, chiefly as an adjutant, Prince Andrew had seen the
+      anterooms of many important men, and the different types of such rooms
+      were well known to him. Count Arakchéev’s anteroom had quite a special
+      character. The faces of the unimportant people awaiting their turn for an
+      audience showed embarrassment and servility; the faces of those of higher
+      rank expressed a common feeling of awkwardness, covered by a mask of
+      unconcern and ridicule of themselves, their situation, and the person for
+      whom they were waiting. Some walked thoughtfully up and down, others
+      whispered and laughed. Prince Andrew heard the nickname “Síla Andréevich”
+       and the words, “<i>Uncle</i> will give it to us hot,” in reference to Count
+      Arakchéev. One general (an important personage), evidently feeling
+      offended at having to wait so long, sat crossing and uncrossing his legs
+      and smiling contemptuously to himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the moment the door opened one feeling alone appeared on all faces—that
+      of fear. Prince Andrew for the second time asked the adjutant on duty to
+      take in his name, but received an ironical look and was told that his turn
+      would come in due course. After some others had been shown in and out of
+      the minister’s room by the adjutant on duty, an officer who struck Prince
+      Andrew by his humiliated and frightened air was admitted at that terrible
+      door. This officer’s audience lasted a long time. Then suddenly the
+      grating sound of a harsh voice was heard from the other side of the door,
+      and the officer—with pale face and trembling lips—came out and
+      passed through the waiting room, clutching his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After this Prince Andrew was conducted to the door and the officer on duty
+      said in a whisper, “To the right, at the window.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew entered a plain tidy room and saw at the table a man of
+      forty with a long waist, a long closely cropped head, deep wrinkles,
+      scowling brows above dull greenish-hazel eyes and an overhanging red nose.
+      Arakchéev turned his head toward him without looking at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is your petition?” asked Arakchéev.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am not petitioning, your excellency,” returned Prince Andrew quietly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Arakchéev’s eyes turned toward him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sit down,” said he. “Prince Bolkónski?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I am not petitioning about anything. His Majesty the Emperor has deigned
+      to send your excellency a project submitted by me...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You see, my dear sir, I have read your project,” interrupted Arakchéev,
+      uttering only the first words amiably and then—again without looking
+      at Prince Andrew—relapsing gradually into a tone of grumbling
+      contempt. “You are proposing new military laws? There are many laws but no
+      one to carry out the old ones. Nowadays everybody designs laws, it is
+      easier writing than doing.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I came at His Majesty the Emperor’s wish to learn from your excellency
+      how you propose to deal with the memorandum I have presented,” said Prince
+      Andrew politely.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have endorsed a resolution on your memorandum and sent it to the
+      committee. I do not approve of it,” said Arakchéev, rising and taking a
+      paper from his writing table. “Here!” and he handed it to Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Across the paper was scrawled in pencil, without capital letters,
+      misspelled, and without punctuation: “Unsoundly constructed because
+      resembles an imitation of the French military code and from the Articles
+      of War needlessly deviating.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “To what committee has the memorandum been referred?” inquired Prince
+      Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To the Committee on Army Regulations, and I have recommended that your
+      honor should be appointed a member, but without a salary.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t want one.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “A member without salary,” repeated Arakchéev. “I have the honor... Eh!
+      Call the next one! Who else is there?” he shouted, bowing to Prince
+      Andrew.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0111"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      While waiting for the announcement of his appointment to the committee
+      Prince Andrew looked up his former acquaintances, particularly those he
+      knew to be in power and whose aid he might need. In Petersburg he now
+      experienced the same feeling he had had on the eve of a battle, when
+      troubled by anxious curiosity and irresistibly attracted to the ruling
+      circles where the future, on which the fate of millions depended, was
+      being shaped. From the irritation of the older men, the curiosity of the
+      uninitiated, the reserve of the initiated, the hurry and preoccupation of
+      everyone, and the innumerable committees and commissions of whose
+      existence he learned every day, he felt that now, in 1809, here in
+      Petersburg a vast civil conflict was in preparation, the commander in
+      chief of which was a mysterious person he did not know, but who was
+      supposed to be a man of genius—Speránski. And this movement of
+      reconstruction of which Prince Andrew had a vague idea, and Speránski its
+      chief promoter, began to interest him so keenly that the question of the
+      army regulations quickly receded to a secondary place in his
+      consciousness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew was most favorably placed to secure good reception in the
+      highest and most diverse Petersburg circles of the day. The reforming
+      party cordially welcomed and courted him, in the first place because he
+      was reputed to be clever and very well read, and secondly because by
+      liberating his serfs he had obtained the reputation of being a liberal.
+      The party of the old and dissatisfied, who censured the innovations,
+      turned to him expecting his sympathy in their disapproval of the reforms,
+      simply because he was the son of his father. The feminine society world
+      welcomed him gladly, because he was rich, distinguished, a good match, and
+      almost a newcomer, with a halo of romance on account of his supposed death
+      and the tragic loss of his wife. Besides this the general opinion of all
+      who had known him previously was that he had greatly improved during these
+      last five years, having softened and grown more manly, lost his former
+      affectation, pride, and contemptuous irony, and acquired the serenity that
+      comes with years. People talked about him, were interested in him, and
+      wanted to meet him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The day after his interview with Count Arakchéev, Prince Andrew spent the
+      evening at Count Kochubéy’s. He told the count of his interview with <i>Síla
+      Andréevich</i> (Kochubéy spoke of Arakchéev by that nickname with the same
+      vague irony Prince Andrew had noticed in the Minister of War’s anteroom).
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “<i>Mon cher</i>, even in this case you can’t do without Michael Mikháylovich
+      Speránski. He manages everything. I’ll speak to him. He has promised to
+      come this evening.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What has Speránski to do with the army regulations?” asked Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kochubéy shook his head smilingly, as if surprised at Bolkónski’s
+      simplicity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We were talking to him about you a few days ago,” Kochubéy continued,
+      “and about your freed plowmen.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, is it you, Prince, who have freed your serfs?” said an old man of
+      Catherine’s day, turning contemptuously toward Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It was a small estate that brought in no profit,” replied Prince Andrew,
+      trying to extenuate his action so as not to irritate the old man
+      uselessly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Afraid of being late...” said the old man, looking at Kochubéy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” he continued. “Who will plow the
+      land if they are set free? It is easy to write laws, but difficult to
+      rule.... Just the same as now—I ask you, Count—who will be
+      heads of the departments when everybody has to pass examinations?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Those who pass the examinations, I suppose,” replied Kochubéy, crossing
+      his legs and glancing round.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, I have Pryánichnikov serving under me, a splendid man, a priceless
+      man, but he’s sixty. Is he to go up for examination?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, that’s a difficulty, as education is not at all general, but...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Count Kochubéy did not finish. He rose, took Prince Andrew by the arm, and
+      went to meet a tall, bald, fair man of about forty with a large open
+      forehead and a long face of unusual and peculiar whiteness, who was just
+      entering. The newcomer wore a blue swallow-tail coat with a cross
+      suspended from his neck and a star on his left breast. It was Speránski.
+      Prince Andrew recognized him at once, and felt a throb within him, as
+      happens at critical moments of life. Whether it was from respect, envy, or
+      anticipation, he did not know. Speránski’s whole figure was of a peculiar
+      type that made him easily recognizable. In the society in which Prince
+      Andrew lived he had never seen anyone who together with awkward and clumsy
+      gestures possessed such calmness and self-assurance; he had never seen so
+      resolute yet gentle an expression as that in those half-closed, rather
+      humid eyes, or so firm a smile that expressed nothing; nor had he heard
+      such a refined, smooth, soft voice; above all he had never seen such
+      delicate whiteness of face or hands—hands which were broad, but very
+      plump, soft, and white. Such whiteness and softness Prince Andrew had only
+      seen on the faces of soldiers who had been long in hospital. This was
+      Speránski, Secretary of State, reporter to the Emperor and his companion
+      at Erfurt, where he had more than once met and talked with Napoleon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Speránski did not shift his eyes from one face to another as people
+      involuntarily do on entering a large company and was in no hurry to speak.
+      He spoke slowly, with assurance that he would be listened to, and he
+      looked only at the person with whom he was conversing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew followed Speránski’s every word and movement with particular
+      attention. As happens to some people, especially to men who judge those
+      near to them severely, he always on meeting anyone new—especially
+      anyone whom, like Speránski, he knew by reputation—expected to
+      discover in him the perfection of human qualities.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Speránski told Kochubéy he was sorry he had been unable to come sooner as
+      he had been detained at the palace. He did not say that the Emperor had
+      kept him, and Prince Andrew noticed this affectation of modesty. When
+      Kochubéy introduced Prince Andrew, Speránski slowly turned his eyes to
+      Bolkónski with his customary smile and looked at him in silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am very glad to make your acquaintance. I had heard of you, as everyone
+      has,” he said after a pause.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kochubéy said a few words about the reception Arakchéev had given
+      Bolkónski. Speránski smiled more markedly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The chairman of the Committee on Army Regulations is my good friend
+      Monsieur Magnítski,” he said, fully articulating every word and syllable,
+      “and if you like I can put you in touch with him.” He paused at the full
+      stop. “I hope you will find him sympathetic and ready to co-operate in
+      promoting all that is reasonable.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A circle soon formed round Speránski, and the old man who had talked about
+      his subordinate Pryánichnikov addressed a question to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew without joining in the conversation watched every movement
+      of Speránski’s: this man, not long since an insignificant divinity
+      student, who now, Bolkónski thought, held in his hands—those plump
+      white hands—the fate of Russia. Prince Andrew was struck by the
+      extraordinarily disdainful composure with which Speránski answered the old
+      man. He appeared to address condescending words to him from an
+      immeasurable height. When the old man began to speak too loud, Speránski
+      smiled and said he could not judge of the advantage or disadvantage of
+      what pleased the sovereign.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having talked for a little while in the general circle, Speránski rose and
+      coming up to Prince Andrew took him along to the other end of the room. It
+      was clear that he thought it necessary to interest himself in Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I had no chance to talk with you, Prince, during the animated
+      conversation in which that venerable gentleman involved me,” he said with
+      a mildly contemptuous smile, as if intimating by that smile that he and
+      Prince Andrew understood the insignificance of the people with whom he had
+      just been talking. This flattered Prince Andrew. “I have known of you for
+      a long time: first from your action with regard to your serfs, a first
+      example, of which it is very desirable that there should be more
+      imitators; and secondly because you are one of those gentlemen of the
+      chamber who have not considered themselves offended by the new decree
+      concerning the ranks allotted to courtiers, which is causing so much
+      gossip and tittle-tattle.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No,” said Prince Andrew, “my father did not wish me to take advantage of
+      the privilege. I began the service from the lower grade.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Your father, a man of the last century, evidently stands above our
+      contemporaries who so condemn this measure which merely re-establishes
+      natural justice.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I think, however, that these condemnations have some ground,” returned
+      Prince Andrew, trying to resist Speránski’s influence, of which he began
+      to be conscious. He did not like to agree with him in everything and felt
+      a wish to contradict. Though he usually spoke easily and well, he felt a
+      difficulty in expressing himself now while talking with Speránski. He was
+      too much absorbed in observing the famous man’s personality.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Grounds of personal ambition maybe,” Speránski put in quietly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And of state interest to some extent,” said Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What do you mean?” asked Speránski quietly, lowering his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am an admirer of Montesquieu,” replied Prince Andrew, “and his idea
+      that <i>le principe des monarchies est l’honneur me paraît incontestable.
+      Certains droits et privilèges de la noblesse me paraissent être des moyens
+      de soutenir ce sentiment.</i>” *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “The principle of monarchies is honor seems to me
+     incontestable. Certain rights and privileges for the
+     aristocracy appear to me a means of maintaining that
+     sentiment.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      The smile vanished from Speránski’s white face, which was much improved by
+      the change. Probably Prince Andrew’s thought interested him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Si vous envisagez la question sous ce point de vue,”</i> * he began,
+      pronouncing French with evident difficulty, and speaking even slower than
+      in Russian but quite calmly.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “If you regard the question from that point of view.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Speránski went on to say that honor, <i>l’honneur</i>, cannot be upheld by
+      privileges harmful to the service; that honor, <i>l’honneur</i>, is either a
+      negative concept of not doing what is blameworthy or it is a source of
+      emulation in pursuit of commendation and rewards, which recognize it. His
+      arguments were concise, simple, and clear.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “An institution upholding honor, the source of emulation, is one similar
+      to the <i>Légion d’honneur</i> of the great Emperor Napoleon, not harmful but
+      helpful to the success of the service, but not a class or court
+      privilege.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I do not dispute that, but it cannot be denied that court privileges have
+      attained the same end,” returned Prince Andrew. “Every courtier considers
+      himself bound to maintain his position worthily.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yet you do not care to avail yourself of the privilege, Prince,” said
+      Speránski, indicating by a smile that he wished to finish amiably an
+      argument which was embarrassing for his companion. “If you will do me the
+      honor of calling on me on Wednesday,” he added, “I will, after talking
+      with Magnítski, let you know what may interest you, and shall also have
+      the pleasure of a more detailed chat with you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Closing his eyes, he bowed <i>à la française</i>, without taking leave, and
+      trying to attract as little attention as possible, he left the room.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0112"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      During the first weeks of his stay in Petersburg Prince Andrew felt the
+      whole trend of thought he had formed during his life of seclusion quite
+      overshadowed by the trifling cares that engrossed him in that city.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On returning home in the evening he would jot down in his notebook four or
+      five necessary calls or appointments for certain hours. The mechanism of
+      life, the arrangement of the day so as to be in time everywhere, absorbed
+      the greater part of his vital energy. He did nothing, did not even think
+      or find time to think, but only talked, and talked successfully, of what
+      he had thought while in the country.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He sometimes noticed with dissatisfaction that he repeated the same remark
+      on the same day in different circles. But he was so busy for whole days
+      together that he had no time to notice that he was thinking of nothing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As he had done on their first meeting at Kochubéy’s, Speránski produced a
+      strong impression on Prince Andrew on the Wednesday, when he received him
+      tête-à-tête at his own house and talked to him long and confidentially.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To Bolkónski so many people appeared contemptible and insignificant
+      creatures, and he so longed to find in someone the living ideal of that
+      perfection toward which he strove, that he readily believed that in
+      Speránski he had found this ideal of a perfectly rational and virtuous
+      man. Had Speránski sprung from the same class as himself and possessed the
+      same breeding and traditions, Bolkónski would soon have discovered his
+      weak, human, unheroic sides; but as it was, Speránski’s strange and
+      logical turn of mind inspired him with respect all the more because he did
+      not quite understand him. Moreover, Speránski, either because he
+      appreciated the other’s capacity or because he considered it necessary to
+      win him to his side, showed off his dispassionate calm reasonableness
+      before Prince Andrew and flattered him with that subtle flattery which
+      goes hand in hand with self-assurance and consists in a tacit assumption
+      that one’s companion is the only man besides oneself capable of
+      understanding the folly of the rest of mankind and the reasonableness and
+      profundity of one’s own ideas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During their long conversation on Wednesday evening, Speránski more than
+      once remarked: “We regard everything that is above the common level of
+      rooted custom...” or, with a smile: “But <i>we</i> want the wolves to
+      be fed and the sheep to be safe...” or: “<i>They</i> cannot understand
+      this...” and all in a way that seemed to say: “<i>We</i>, you and I,
+      understand what <i>they</i> are and who <i>we</i> are.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      This first long conversation with Speránski only strengthened in Prince
+      Andrew the feeling he had experienced toward him at their first meeting.
+      He saw in him a remarkable, clear-thinking man of vast intellect who by
+      his energy and persistence had attained power, which he was using solely
+      for the welfare of Russia. In Prince Andrew’s eyes Speránski was the man
+      he would himself have wished to be—one who explained all the facts
+      of life reasonably, considered important only what was rational, and was
+      capable of applying the standard of reason to everything. Everything
+      seemed so simple and clear in Speránski’s exposition that Prince Andrew
+      involuntarily agreed with him about everything. If he replied and argued,
+      it was only because he wished to maintain his independence and not submit
+      to Speránski’s opinions entirely. Everything was right and everything was
+      as it should be: only one thing disconcerted Prince Andrew. This was
+      Speránski’s cold, mirrorlike look, which did not allow one to penetrate to
+      his soul, and his delicate white hands, which Prince Andrew involuntarily
+      watched as one does watch the hands of those who possess power. This
+      mirrorlike gaze and those delicate hands irritated Prince Andrew, he knew
+      not why. He was unpleasantly struck, too, by the excessive contempt for
+      others that he observed in Speránski, and by the diversity of lines of
+      argument he used to support his opinions. He made use of every kind of
+      mental device, except analogy, and passed too boldly, it seemed to Prince
+      Andrew, from one to another. Now he would take up the position of a
+      practical man and condemn dreamers; now that of a satirist, and laugh
+      ironically at his opponents; now grow severely logical, or suddenly rise
+      to the realm of metaphysics. (This last resource was one he very
+      frequently employed.) He would transfer a question to metaphysical
+      heights, pass on to definitions of space, time, and thought, and, having
+      deduced the refutation he needed, would again descend to the level of the
+      original discussion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In general the trait of Speránski’s mentality which struck Prince Andrew
+      most was his absolute and unshakable belief in the power and authority of
+      reason. It was evident that the thought could never occur to him which to
+      Prince Andrew seemed so natural, namely, that it is after all impossible
+      to express all one thinks; and that he had never felt the doubt, “Is not
+      all I think and believe nonsense?” And it was just this peculiarity of
+      Speránski’s mind that particularly attracted Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the first period of their acquaintance Bolkónski felt a passionate
+      admiration for him similar to that which he had once felt for Bonaparte.
+      The fact that Speránski was the son of a village priest, and that stupid
+      people might meanly despise him on account of his humble origin (as in
+      fact many did), caused Prince Andrew to cherish his sentiment for him the
+      more, and unconsciously to strengthen it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On that first evening Bolkónski spent with him, having mentioned the
+      Commission for the Revision of the Code of Laws, Speránski told him
+      sarcastically that the Commission had existed for a hundred and fifty
+      years, had cost millions, and had done nothing except that Rosenkampf had
+      stuck labels on the corresponding paragraphs of the different codes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And that is all the state has for the millions it has spent,” said he.
+      “We want to give the Senate new juridical powers, but we have no laws.
+      That is why it is a sin for men like you, Prince, not to serve in these
+      times!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew said that for that work an education in jurisprudence was
+      needed which he did not possess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But nobody possesses it, so what would you have? It is a vicious circle
+      from which we must break a way out.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A week later Prince Andrew was a member of the Committee on Army
+      Regulations and—what he had not at all expected—was chairman
+      of a section of the committee for the revision of the laws. At Speránski’s
+      request he took the first part of the Civil Code that was being drawn up
+      and, with the aid of the <i>Code Napoléon</i> and the Institutes of Justinian, he
+      worked at formulating the section on Personal Rights.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0113"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Nearly two years before this, in 1808, Pierre on returning to Petersburg
+      after visiting his estates had involuntarily found himself in a leading
+      position among the Petersburg Freemasons. He arranged dining and funeral
+      lodge meetings, enrolled new members, and busied himself uniting various
+      lodges and acquiring authentic charters. He gave money for the erection of
+      temples and supplemented as far as he could the collection of alms, in
+      regard to which the majority of members were stingy and irregular. He
+      supported almost singlehanded a poorhouse the order had founded in
+      Petersburg.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His life meanwhile continued as before, with the same infatuations and
+      dissipations. He liked to dine and drink well, and though he considered it
+      immoral and humiliating could not resist the temptations of the bachelor
+      circles in which he moved.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Amid the turmoil of his activities and distractions, however, Pierre at
+      the end of a year began to feel that the more firmly he tried to rest upon
+      it, the more Masonic ground on which he stood gave way under him. At the
+      same time he felt that the deeper the ground sank under him the closer
+      bound he involuntarily became to the order. When he had joined the
+      Freemasons he had experienced the feeling of one who confidently steps
+      onto the smooth surface of a bog. When he put his foot down it sank in. To
+      make quite sure of the firmness of the ground, he put his other foot down
+      and sank deeper still, became stuck in it, and involuntarily waded
+      knee-deep in the bog.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Joseph Alexéevich was not in Petersburg—he had of late stood aside
+      from the affairs of the Petersburg lodges, and lived almost entirely in
+      Moscow. All the members of the lodges were men Pierre knew in ordinary
+      life, and it was difficult for him to regard them merely as Brothers in
+      Freemasonry and not as Prince B. or Iván Vasílevich D., whom he knew in
+      society mostly as weak and insignificant men. Under the Masonic aprons and
+      insignia he saw the uniforms and decorations at which they aimed in
+      ordinary life. Often after collecting alms, and reckoning up twenty to
+      thirty rubles received for the most part in promises from a dozen members,
+      of whom half were as well able to pay as himself, Pierre remembered the
+      Masonic vow in which each Brother promised to devote all his belongings to
+      his neighbor, and doubts on which he tried not to dwell arose in his soul.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He divided the Brothers he knew into four categories. In the first he put
+      those who did not take an active part in the affairs of the lodges or in
+      human affairs, but were exclusively occupied with the mystical science of
+      the order: with questions of the threefold designation of God, the three
+      primordial elements—sulphur, mercury, and salt—or the meaning
+      of the square and all the various figures of the temple of Solomon. Pierre
+      respected this class of Brothers to which the elder ones chiefly belonged,
+      including, Pierre thought, Joseph Alexéevich himself, but he did not share
+      their interests. His heart was not in the mystical aspect of Freemasonry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the second category Pierre reckoned himself and others like him,
+      seeking and vacillating, who had not yet found in Freemasonry a straight
+      and comprehensible path, but hoped to do so.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the third category he included those Brothers (the majority) who saw
+      nothing in Freemasonry but the external forms and ceremonies, and prized
+      the strict performance of these forms without troubling about their
+      purport or significance. Such were Willarski and even the Grand Master of
+      the principal lodge.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Finally, to the fourth category also a great many Brothers belonged,
+      particularly those who had lately joined. These according to Pierre’s
+      observations were men who had no belief in anything, nor desire for
+      anything, but joined the Freemasons merely to associate with the wealthy
+      young Brothers who were influential through their connections or rank, and
+      of whom there were very many in the lodge.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre began to feel dissatisfied with what he was doing. Freemasonry, at
+      any rate as he saw it here, sometimes seemed to him based merely on
+      externals. He did not think of doubting Freemasonry itself, but suspected
+      that Russian Masonry had taken a wrong path and deviated from its original
+      principles. And so toward the end of the year he went abroad to be
+      initiated into the higher secrets of the order.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the summer of 1809 Pierre returned to Petersburg. Our Freemasons knew
+      from correspondence with those abroad that Bezúkhov had obtained the
+      confidence of many highly placed persons, had been initiated into many
+      mysteries, had been raised to a higher grade, and was bringing back with
+      him much that might conduce to the advantage of the Masonic cause in
+      Russia. The Petersburg Freemasons all came to see him, tried to ingratiate
+      themselves with him, and it seemed to them all that he was preparing
+      something for them and concealing it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A solemn meeting of the lodge of the second degree was convened, at which
+      Pierre promised to communicate to the Petersburg Brothers what he had to
+      deliver to them from the highest leaders of their order. The meeting was a
+      full one. After the usual ceremonies Pierre rose and began his address.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear Brothers,” he began, blushing and stammering, with a written speech
+      in his hand, “it is not sufficient to observe our mysteries in the
+      seclusion of our lodge—we must act—act! We are drowsing, but
+      we must act.” Pierre raised his notebook and began to read.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “For the dissemination of pure truth and to secure the triumph of virtue,”
+       he read, “we must cleanse men from prejudice, diffuse principles in
+      harmony with the spirit of the times, undertake the education of the
+      young, unite ourselves in indissoluble bonds with the wisest men, boldly
+      yet prudently overcome superstitions, infidelity, and folly, and form of
+      those devoted to us a body linked together by unity of purpose and
+      possessed of authority and power.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To attain this end we must secure a preponderance of virtue over vice and
+      must endeavor to secure that the honest man may, even in this world,
+      receive a lasting reward for his virtue. But in these great endeavors we
+      are gravely hampered by the political institutions of today. What is to be
+      done in these circumstances? To favor revolutions, overthrow everything,
+      repel force by force?... No! We are very far from that. Every violent
+      reform deserves censure, for it quite fails to remedy evil while men
+      remain what they are, and also because wisdom needs no violence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The whole plan of our order should be based on the idea of preparing men
+      of firmness and virtue bound together by unity of conviction—aiming
+      at the punishment of vice and folly, and patronizing talent and virtue:
+      raising worthy men from the dust and attaching them to our Brotherhood.
+      Only then will our order have the power unobtrusively to bind the hands of
+      the protectors of disorder and to control them without their being aware
+      of it. In a word, we must found a form of government holding universal
+      sway, which should be diffused over the whole world without destroying the
+      bonds of citizenship, and beside which all other governments can continue
+      in their customary course and do everything except what impedes the great
+      aim of our order, which is to obtain for virtue the victory over vice.
+      This aim was that of Christianity itself. It taught men to be wise and
+      good and for their own benefit to follow the example and instruction of
+      the best and wisest men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “At that time, when everything was plunged in darkness, preaching alone
+      was of course sufficient. The novelty of Truth endowed her with special
+      strength, but now we need much more powerful methods. It is now necessary
+      that man, governed by his senses, should find in virtue a charm palpable
+      to those senses. It is impossible to eradicate the passions; but we must
+      strive to direct them to a noble aim, and it is therefore necessary that
+      everyone should be able to satisfy his passions within the limits of
+      virtue. Our order should provide means to that end.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “As soon as we have a certain number of worthy men in every state, each of
+      them again training two others and all being closely united, everything
+      will be possible for our order, which has already in secret accomplished
+      much for the welfare of mankind.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      This speech not only made a strong impression, but created excitement in
+      the lodge. The majority of the Brothers, seeing in it dangerous designs of
+      Illuminism, * met it with a coldness that surprised Pierre. The Grand
+      Master began answering him, and Pierre began developing his views with
+      more and more warmth. It was long since there had been so stormy a
+      meeting. Parties were formed, some accusing Pierre of Illuminism, others
+      supporting him. At that meeting he was struck for the first time by the
+      endless variety of men’s minds, which prevents a truth from ever
+      presenting itself identically to two persons. Even those members who
+      seemed to be on his side understood him in their own way with limitations
+      and alterations he could not agree to, as what he always wanted most was
+      to convey his thought to others just as he himself understood it.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * The Illuminati sought to substitute republican for
+     monarchical institutions.
+</p>
+<p>
+      At the end of the meeting the Grand Master with irony and ill-will
+      reproved Bezúkhov for his vehemence and said it was not love of virtue
+      alone, but also a love of strife that had moved him in the dispute. Pierre
+      did not answer him and asked briefly whether his proposal would be
+      accepted. He was told that it would not, and without waiting for the usual
+      formalities he left the lodge and went home.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0114"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Again Pierre was overtaken by the depression he so dreaded. For three days
+      after the delivery of his speech at the lodge he lay on a sofa at home
+      receiving no one and going nowhere.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was just then that he received a letter from his wife, who implored him
+      to see her, telling him how grieved she was about him and how she wished
+      to devote her whole life to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the end of the letter she informed him that in a few days she would
+      return to Petersburg from abroad.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Following this letter one of the Masonic Brothers whom Pierre respected
+      less than the others forced his way in to see him and, turning the
+      conversation upon Pierre’s matrimonial affairs, by way of fraternal advice
+      expressed the opinion that his severity to his wife was wrong and that he
+      was neglecting one of the first rules of Freemasonry by not forgiving the
+      penitent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the same time his mother-in-law, Prince Vasíli’s wife, sent to him
+      imploring him to come if only for a few minutes to discuss a most
+      important matter. Pierre saw that there was a conspiracy against him and
+      that they wanted to reunite him with his wife, and in the mood he then
+      was, this was not even unpleasant to him. Nothing mattered to him. Nothing
+      in life seemed to him of much importance, and under the influence of the
+      depression that possessed him he valued neither his liberty nor his
+      resolution to punish his wife.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No one is right and no one is to blame; so she too is not to blame,” he
+      thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If he did not at once give his consent to a reunion with his wife, it was
+      only because in his state of depression he did not feel able to take any
+      step. Had his wife come to him, he would not have turned her away.
+      Compared to what preoccupied him, was it not a matter of indifference
+      whether he lived with his wife or not?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Without replying either to his wife or his mother-in-law, Pierre late one
+      night prepared for a journey and started for Moscow to see Joseph
+      Alexéevich. This is what he noted in his diary:
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>Moscow, 17th November</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      I have just returned from my benefactor, and hasten to write down what I
+      have experienced. Joseph Alexéevich is living poorly and has for three
+      years been suffering from a painful disease of the bladder. No one has
+      ever heard him utter a groan or a word of complaint. From morning till
+      late at night, except when he eats his very plain food, he is working at
+      science. He received me graciously and made me sit down on the bed on
+      which he lay. I made the sign of the Knights of the East and of Jerusalem,
+      and he responded in the same manner, asking me with a mild smile what I
+      had learned and gained in the Prussian and Scottish lodges. I told him
+      everything as best I could, and told him what I had proposed to our
+      Petersburg lodge, of the bad reception I had encountered, and of my
+      rupture with the Brothers. Joseph Alexéevich, having remained silent and
+      thoughtful for a good while, told me his view of the matter, which at once
+      lit up for me my whole past and the future path I should follow. He
+      surprised me by asking whether I remembered the threefold aim of the
+      order: (1) The preservation and study of the mystery. (2) The purification
+      and reformation of oneself for its reception, and (3) The improvement of
+      the human race by striving for such purification. Which is the principal
+      <i>aim</i> of these three? Certainly self-reformation and self-purification. Only
+      to this aim can we always strive independently of circumstances. But at
+      the same time just this aim demands the greatest efforts of us; and so,
+      led astray by pride, losing sight of this aim, we occupy ourselves either
+      with the mystery which in our impurity we are unworthy to receive, or seek
+      the reformation of the human race while ourselves setting an example of
+      baseness and profligacy. Illuminism is not a pure doctrine, just because
+      it is attracted by social activity and puffed up by pride. On this ground
+      Joseph Alexéevich condemned my speech and my whole activity, and in the
+      depth of my soul I agreed with him. Talking of my family affairs he said
+      to me, “the chief duty of a true Mason, as I have told you, lies in
+      perfecting himself. We often think that by removing all the difficulties
+      of our life we shall more quickly reach our aim, but on the contrary, my
+      dear sir, it is only in the midst of worldly cares that we can attain our
+      three chief aims: (1) Self-knowledge—for man can only know himself
+      by comparison, (2) Self-perfecting, which can only be attained by
+      conflict, and (3) The attainment of the chief virtue—love of death.
+      Only the vicissitudes of life can show us its vanity and develop our
+      innate love of death or of rebirth to a new life.” These words are all the
+      more remarkable because, in spite of his great physical sufferings, Joseph
+      Alexéevich is never weary of life though he loves death, for which—in
+      spite of the purity and loftiness of his inner man—he does not yet
+      feel himself sufficiently prepared. My benefactor then explained to me
+      fully the meaning of the Great Square of creation and pointed out to me
+      that the numbers three and seven are the basis of everything. He advised
+      me not to avoid intercourse with the Petersburg Brothers, but to take up
+      only second-grade posts in the lodge, to try, while diverting the Brothers
+      from pride, to turn them toward the true path self-knowledge and
+      self-perfecting. Besides this he advised me for myself personally above
+      all to keep a watch over myself, and to that end he gave me a notebook,
+      the one I am now writing in and in which I will in future note down all my
+      actions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>Petersburg, 23rd November</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      I am again living with my wife. My mother-in-law came to me in tears and
+      said that Hélène was here and that she implored me to hear her; that she
+      was innocent and unhappy at my desertion, and much more. I knew that if I
+      once let myself see her I should not have strength to go on refusing what
+      she wanted. In my perplexity I did not know whose aid and advice to seek.
+      Had my benefactor been here he would have told me what to do. I went to my
+      room and reread Joseph Alexéevich’s letters and recalled my conversations
+      with him, and deduced from it all that I ought not to refuse a supplicant,
+      and ought to reach a helping hand to everyone—especially to one so
+      closely bound to me—and that I must bear my cross. But if I forgive
+      her for the sake of doing right, then let union with her have only a
+      spiritual aim. That is what I decided, and what I wrote to Joseph
+      Alexéevich. I told my wife that I begged her to forget the past, to
+      forgive me whatever wrong I may have done her, and that I had nothing to
+      forgive. It gave me joy to tell her this. She need not know how hard it
+      was for me to see her again. I have settled on the upper floor of this big
+      house and am experiencing a happy feeling of regeneration.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0115"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At that time, as always happens, the highest society that met at court and
+      at the grand balls was divided into several circles, each with its own
+      particular tone. The largest of these was the French circle of the
+      Napoleonic alliance, the circle of Count Rumyántsev and Caulaincourt. In
+      this group Hélène, as soon as she had settled in Petersburg with her
+      husband, took a very prominent place. She was visited by the members of
+      the French embassy and by many belonging to that circle and noted for
+      their intellect and polished manners.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Hélène had been at Erfurt during the famous meeting of the Emperors and
+      had brought from there these connections with the Napoleonic notabilities.
+      At Erfurt her success had been brilliant. Napoleon himself had noticed her
+      in the theater and said of her: <i>“C’est un superbe animal.”</i> *
+      Her success as a beautiful and elegant woman did not surprise Pierre, for she had
+      become even handsomer than before. What did surprise him was that during
+      these last two years his wife had succeeded in gaining the reputation <i>“d’
+      une femme charmante, aussi spirituelle que belle.”</i> *(2) The distinguished
+      Prince de Ligne wrote her eight-page letters. Bilíbin saved up his
+      epigrams to produce them in Countess Bezúkhova’s presence. To be received
+      in the Countess Bezúkhova’s salon was regarded as a diploma of intellect.
+      Young men read books before attending Hélène’s evenings, to have something
+      to say in her salon, and secretaries of the embassy, and even ambassadors,
+      confided diplomatic secrets to her, so that in a way Hélène was a power.
+      Pierre, who knew she was very stupid, sometimes attended, with a strange
+      feeling of perplexity and fear, her evenings and dinner parties, where
+      politics, poetry, and philosophy were discussed. At these parties his
+      feelings were like those of a conjuror who always expects his trick to be
+      found out at any moment. But whether because stupidity was just what was
+      needed to run such a salon, or because those who were deceived found
+      pleasure in the deception, at any rate it remained unexposed and Hélène
+      Bezúkhova’s reputation as a lovely and clever woman became so firmly
+      established that she could say the emptiest and stupidest things and
+      everybody would go into raptures over every word of hers and look for a
+      profound meaning in it of which she herself had no conception.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “That’s a superb animal.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * (2) “Of a charming woman, as witty as she is lovely.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was just the husband needed for a brilliant society woman. He was
+      that absent-minded crank, a <i>grand seigneur</i> husband who was in no one’s
+      way, and far from spoiling the high tone and general impression of the
+      drawing room, he served, by the contrast he presented to her, as an
+      advantageous background to his elegant and tactful wife. Pierre during the
+      last two years, as a result of his continual absorption in abstract
+      interests and his sincere contempt for all else, had acquired in his
+      wife’s circle, which did not interest him, that air of unconcern,
+      indifference, and benevolence toward all, which cannot be acquired
+      artificially and therefore inspires involuntary respect. He entered his
+      wife’s drawing room as one enters a theater, was acquainted with
+      everybody, equally pleased to see everyone, and equally indifferent to
+      them all. Sometimes he joined in a conversation which interested him and,
+      regardless of whether any “gentlemen of the embassy” were present or not,
+      lispingly expressed his views, which were sometimes not at all in accord
+      with the accepted tone of the moment. But the general opinion concerning
+      the queer husband of “the most distinguished woman in Petersburg” was so
+      well established that no one took his freaks seriously.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Among the many young men who frequented her house every day, Borís
+      Drubetskóy, who had already achieved great success in the service, was the
+      most intimate friend of the Bezúkhov household since Hélène’s return from
+      Erfurt. Hélène spoke of him as <i>“mon page”</i> and treated him like a child.
+      Her smile for him was the same as for everybody, but sometimes that smile
+      made Pierre uncomfortable. Toward him Borís behaved with a particularly
+      dignified and sad deference. This shade of deference also disturbed
+      Pierre. He had suffered so painfully three years before from the
+      mortification to which his wife had subjected him that he now protected
+      himself from the danger of its repetition, first by not being a husband to
+      his wife, and secondly by not allowing himself to suspect.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, now that she has become a bluestocking she has finally renounced her
+      former infatuations,” he told himself. “There has never been an instance
+      of a bluestocking being carried away by affairs of the heart”—a
+      statement which, though gathered from an unknown source, he believed
+      implicitly. Yet strange to say Borís’ presence in his wife’s drawing room
+      (and he was almost always there) had a physical effect upon Pierre; it
+      constricted his limbs and destroyed the unconsciousness and freedom of his
+      movements.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a strange antipathy,” thought Pierre, “yet I used to like him very
+      much.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In the eyes of the world Pierre was a great gentleman, the rather blind
+      and absurd husband of a distinguished wife, a clever crank who did nothing
+      but harmed nobody and was a first-rate, good-natured fellow. But a complex
+      and difficult process of internal development was taking place all this
+      time in Pierre’s soul, revealing much to him and causing him many
+      spiritual doubts and joys.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0116"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Pierre went on with his diary, and this is what he wrote in it during that
+      time:
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>24th November</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Got up at eight, read the Scriptures, then went to my duties. (By Joseph
+      Alexéevich’s advice Pierre had entered the service of the state and served
+      on one of the committees.) Returned home for dinner and dined alone—the
+      countess had many visitors I do not like. I ate and drank moderately and
+      after dinner copied out some passages for the Brothers. In the evening I
+      went down to the countess and told a funny story about B., and only
+      remembered that I ought not to have done so when everybody laughed loudly
+      at it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      I am going to bed with a happy and tranquil mind. Great God, help me to
+      walk in Thy paths, (1) to conquer anger by calmness and deliberation, (2)
+      to vanquish lust by self-restraint and repulsion, (3) to withdraw from
+      worldliness, but not avoid (a) the service of the state, (b) family
+      duties, (c) relations with my friends, and the management of my affairs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>27th November</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      I got up late. On waking I lay long in bed yielding to sloth. O God, help
+      and strengthen me that I may walk in Thy ways! Read the Scriptures, but
+      without proper feeling. Brother Urúsov came and we talked about worldly
+      vanities. He told me of the Emperor’s new projects. I began to criticize
+      them, but remembered my rules and my benefactor’s words—that a true
+      Freemason should be a zealous worker for the state when his aid is
+      required and a quiet onlooker when not called on to assist. My tongue is
+      my enemy. Brothers G. V. and O. visited me and we had a preliminary talk
+      about the reception of a new Brother. They laid on me the duty of Rhetor.
+      I feel myself weak and unworthy. Then our talk turned to the
+      interpretation of the seven pillars and steps of the Temple, the seven
+      sciences, the seven virtues, the seven vices, and the seven gifts of the
+      Holy Spirit. Brother O. was very eloquent. In the evening the admission
+      took place. The new decoration of the Premises contributed much to the
+      magnificence of the spectacle. It was Borís Drubetskóy who was admitted. I
+      nominated him and was the Rhetor. A strange feeling agitated me all the
+      time I was alone with him in the dark chamber. I caught myself harboring a
+      feeling of hatred toward him which I vainly tried to overcome. That is why
+      I should really like to save him from evil and lead him into the path of
+      truth, but evil thoughts of him did not leave me. It seemed to me that his
+      object in entering the Brotherhood was merely to be intimate and in favor
+      with members of our lodge. Apart from the fact that he had asked me
+      several times whether N. and S. were members of our lodge (a question to
+      which I could not reply) and that according to my observation he is
+      incapable of feeling respect for our holy order and is too preoccupied and
+      satisfied with the outer man to desire spiritual improvement, I had no
+      cause to doubt him, but he seemed to me insincere, and all the time I
+      stood alone with him in the dark temple it seemed to me that he was
+      smiling contemptuously at my words, and I wished really to stab his bare
+      breast with the sword I held to it. I could not be eloquent, nor could I
+      frankly mention my doubts to the Brothers and to the Grand Master. Great
+      Architect of Nature, help me to find the true path out of the labyrinth of
+      lies!
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      After this, three pages were left blank in the diary, and then
+      the following was written:
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      I have had a long and instructive talk alone with Brother V., who advised
+      me to hold fast by Brother A. Though I am unworthy, much was revealed to
+      me. Adonai is the name of the creator of the world. Elohim is the name of
+      the ruler of all. The third name is the name unutterable which means the
+      <i>All</i>. Talks with Brother V. strengthen, refresh, and support me in the path
+      of virtue. In his presence doubt has no place. The distinction between the
+      poor teachings of mundane science and our sacred all-embracing teaching is
+      clear to me. Human sciences dissect everything to comprehend it, and kill
+      everything to examine it. In the holy science of our order all is one, all
+      is known in its entirety and life. The Trinity—the three elements of
+      matter—are sulphur, mercury, and salt. Sulphur is of an oily and
+      fiery nature; in combination with salt by its fiery nature it arouses a
+      desire in the latter by means of which it attracts mercury, seizes it,
+      holds it, and in combination produces other bodies. Mercury is a fluid,
+      volatile, spiritual essence. Christ, the Holy Spirit, Him!...
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>3rd December</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Awoke late, read the Scriptures but was apathetic. Afterwards went and
+      paced up and down the large hall. I wished to meditate, but instead my
+      imagination pictured an occurrence of four years ago, when Dólokhov,
+      meeting me in Moscow after our duel, said he hoped I was enjoying perfect
+      peace of mind in spite of my wife’s absence. At the time I gave him no
+      answer. Now I recalled every detail of that meeting and in my mind gave
+      him the most malevolent and bitter replies. I recollected myself and drove
+      away that thought only when I found myself glowing with anger, but I did
+      not sufficiently repent. Afterwards Borís Drubetskóy came and began
+      relating various adventures. His coming vexed me from the first, and I
+      said something disagreeable to him. He replied. I flared up and said much
+      that was unpleasant and even rude to him. He became silent, and I
+      recollected myself only when it was too late. My God, I cannot get on with
+      him at all. The cause of this is my egotism. I set myself above him and so
+      become much worse than he, for he is lenient to my rudeness while I on the
+      contrary nourish contempt for him. O God, grant that in his presence I may
+      rather see my own vileness, and behave so that he too may benefit. After
+      dinner I fell asleep and as I was drowsing off I clearly heard a voice
+      saying in my left ear, “Thy day!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      I dreamed that I was walking in the dark and was suddenly surrounded by
+      dogs, but I went on undismayed. Suddenly a smallish dog seized my left
+      thigh with its teeth and would not let go. I began to throttle it with my
+      hands. Scarcely had I torn it off before another, a bigger one, began
+      biting me. I lifted it up, but the higher I lifted it the bigger and
+      heavier it grew. And suddenly Brother A. came and, taking my arm, led me
+      to a building to enter which we had to pass along a narrow plank. I
+      stepped on it, but it bent and gave way and I began to clamber up a fence
+      which I could scarcely reach with my hands. After much effort I dragged
+      myself up, so that my leg hung down on one side and my body on the other.
+      I looked round and saw Brother A. standing on the fence and pointing me to
+      a broad avenue and garden, and in the garden was a large and beautiful
+      building. I woke up. O Lord, great Architect of Nature, help me to tear
+      from myself these dogs—my passions especially the last, which unites
+      in itself the strength of all the former ones, and aid me to enter that
+      temple of virtue to a vision of which I attained in my dream.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>7th December</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      I dreamed that Joseph Alexéevich was sitting in my house, and that I was
+      very glad and wished to entertain him. It seemed as if I chattered
+      incessantly with other people and suddenly remembered that this could not
+      please him, and I wished to come close to him and embrace him. But as soon
+      as I drew near I saw that his face had changed and grown young, and he was
+      quietly telling me something about the teaching of our order, but so
+      softly that I could not hear it. Then it seemed that we all left the room
+      and something strange happened. We were sitting or lying on the floor. He
+      was telling me something, and I wished to show him my sensibility, and not
+      listening to what he was saying I began picturing to myself the condition
+      of my inner man and the grace of God sanctifying me. And tears came into
+      my eyes, and I was glad he noticed this. But he looked at me with vexation
+      and jumped up, breaking off his remarks. I felt abashed and asked whether
+      what he had been saying did not concern me; but he did not reply, gave me
+      a kind look, and then we suddenly found ourselves in my bedroom where
+      there is a double bed. He lay down on the edge of it and I burned with
+      longing to caress him and lie down too. And he said, “Tell me frankly what
+      is your chief temptation? Do you know it? I think you know it already.”
+       Abashed by this question, I replied that sloth was my chief temptation. He
+      shook his head incredulously; and even more abashed, I said that though I
+      was living with my wife as he advised, I was not living with her as her
+      husband. To this he replied that one should not deprive a wife of one’s
+      embraces and gave me to understand that that was my duty. But I replied
+      that I should be ashamed to do it, and suddenly everything vanished. And I
+      awoke and found in my mind the text from the Gospel: “The life was the
+      light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness
+      comprehended it not.” Joseph Alexéevich’s face had looked young and
+      bright. That day I received a letter from my benefactor in which he wrote
+      about “conjugal duties.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>9th December</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      I had a dream from which I awoke with a throbbing heart. I saw that I was
+      in Moscow in my house, in the big sitting room, and Joseph Alexéevich came
+      in from the drawing room. I seemed to know at once that the process of
+      regeneration had already taken place in him, and I rushed to meet him. I
+      embraced him and kissed his hands, and he said, “Hast thou noticed that my
+      face is different?” I looked at him, still holding him in my arms, and saw
+      that his face was young, but that he had no hair on his head and his
+      features were quite changed. And I said, “I should have known you had I
+      met you by chance,” and I thought to myself, “Am I telling the truth?” And
+      suddenly I saw him lying like a dead body; then he gradually recovered and
+      went with me into my study carrying a large book of sheets of drawing
+      paper; I said, “I drew that,” and he answered by bowing his head. I opened
+      the book, and on all the pages there were excellent drawings. And in my
+      dream I knew that these drawings represented the love adventures of the
+      soul with its beloved. And on its pages I saw a beautiful representation
+      of a maiden in transparent garments and with a transparent body, flying up
+      to the clouds. And I seemed to know that this maiden was nothing else than
+      a representation of the Song of Songs. And looking at those drawings I
+      dreamed I felt that I was doing wrong, but could not tear myself away from
+      them. Lord, help me! My God, if Thy forsaking me is Thy doing, Thy will be
+      done; but if I am myself the cause, teach me what I should do! I shall
+      perish of my debauchery if Thou utterly desertest me!
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0117"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The Rostóvs’ monetary affairs had not improved during the two years they
+      had spent in the country.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though Nicholas Rostóv had kept firmly to his resolution and was still
+      serving modestly in an obscure regiment, spending comparatively little,
+      the way of life at Otrádnoe—Mítenka’s management of affairs, in
+      particular—was such that the debts inevitably increased every year.
+      The only resource obviously presenting itself to the old count was to
+      apply for an official post, so he had come to Petersburg to look for one
+      and also, as he said, to let the lassies enjoy themselves for the last
+      time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Soon after their arrival in Petersburg Berg proposed to Véra and was
+      accepted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though in Moscow the Rostóvs belonged to the best society without
+      themselves giving it a thought, yet in Petersburg their circle of
+      acquaintances was a mixed and indefinite one. In Petersburg they were
+      provincials, and the very people they had entertained in Moscow without
+      inquiring to what set they belonged, here looked down on them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Rostóvs lived in the same hospitable way in Petersburg as in Moscow,
+      and the most diverse people met at their suppers. Country neighbors from
+      Otrádnoe, impoverished old squires and their daughters, Perónskaya a maid
+      of honor, Pierre Bezúkhov, and the son of their district postmaster who
+      had obtained a post in Petersburg. Among the men who very soon became
+      frequent visitors at the Rostóvs’ house in Petersburg were Borís, Pierre
+      whom the count had met in the street and dragged home with him, and Berg
+      who spent whole days at the Rostóvs’ and paid the eldest daughter,
+      Countess Véra, the attentions a young man pays when he intends to propose.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Not in vain had Berg shown everybody his right hand wounded at Austerlitz
+      and held a perfectly unnecessary sword in his left. He narrated that
+      episode so persistently and with so important an air that everyone
+      believed in the merit and usefulness of his deed, and he had obtained two
+      decorations for Austerlitz.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the Finnish war he also managed to distinguish himself. He had picked
+      up the scrap of a grenade that had killed an aide-de-camp standing near
+      the commander in chief and had taken it to his commander. Just as he had
+      done after Austerlitz, he related this occurrence at such length and so
+      insistently that everyone again believed it had been necessary to do this,
+      and he received two decorations for the Finnish war also. In 1809 he was a
+      captain in the Guards, wore medals, and held some special lucrative posts
+      in Petersburg.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though some skeptics smiled when told of Berg’s merits, it could not be
+      denied that he was a painstaking and brave officer, on excellent terms
+      with his superiors, and a moral young man with a brilliant career before
+      him and an assured position in society.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Four years before, meeting a German comrade in the stalls of a Moscow
+      theater, Berg had pointed out Véra Rostóva to him and had said in German,
+      <i>“das soll mein Weib werden,”</i> * and from that moment had made up his mind
+      to marry her. Now in Petersburg, having considered the Rostóvs’ position
+      and his own, he decided that the time had come to propose.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “That girl shall be my wife.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Berg’s proposal was at first received with a perplexity that was not
+      flattering to him. At first it seemed strange that the son of an obscure
+      Livonian gentleman should propose marriage to a Countess Rostóva; but
+      Berg’s chief characteristic was such a naïve and good natured egotism that
+      the Rostóvs involuntarily came to think it would be a good thing, since he
+      himself was so firmly convinced that it was good, indeed excellent.
+      Moreover, the Rostóvs’ affairs were seriously embarrassed, as the suitor
+      could not but know; and above all, Véra was twenty-four, had been taken
+      out everywhere, and though she was certainly good-looking and sensible, no
+      one up to now had proposed to her. So they gave their consent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You see,” said Berg to his comrade, whom he called “friend” only because
+      he knew that everyone has friends, “you see, I have considered it all, and
+      should not marry if I had not thought it all out or if it were in any way
+      unsuitable. But on the contrary, my papa and mamma are now provided for—I
+      have arranged that rent for them in the Baltic Provinces—and I can
+      live in Petersburg on my pay, and with her fortune and my good management
+      we can get along nicely. I am not marrying for money—I consider that
+      dishonorable—but a wife should bring her share and a husband his. I
+      have my position in the service, she has connections and some means. In
+      our times that is worth something, isn’t it? But above all, she is a
+      handsome, estimable girl, and she loves me....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Berg blushed and smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I love her, because her character is sensible and very good. Now the
+      other sister, though they are the same family, is quite different—an
+      unpleasant character and has not the same intelligence. She is so... you
+      know?... Unpleasant... But my fiancée!... Well, you will be coming,” he
+      was going to say, “to dine,” but changed his mind and said “to take tea
+      with us,” and quickly doubling up his tongue he blew a small round ring of
+      tobacco smoke, perfectly embodying his dream of happiness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the first feeling of perplexity aroused in the parents by Berg’s
+      proposal, the holiday tone of joyousness usual at such times took
+      possession of the family, but the rejoicing was external and insincere. In
+      the family’s feeling toward this wedding a certain awkwardness and
+      constraint was evident, as if they were ashamed of not having loved Véra
+      sufficiently and of being so ready to get her off their hands. The old
+      count felt this most. He would probably have been unable to state the
+      cause of his embarrassment, but it resulted from the state of his affairs.
+      He did not know at all how much he had, what his debts amounted to, or
+      what dowry he could give Véra. When his daughters were born he had
+      assigned to each of them, for her dowry, an estate with three hundred
+      serfs; but one of these estates had already been sold, and the other was
+      mortgaged and the interest so much in arrears that it would have to be
+      sold, so that it was impossible to give it to Véra. Nor had he any money.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Berg had already been engaged a month, and only a week remained before the
+      wedding, but the count had not yet decided in his own mind the question of
+      the dowry, nor spoken to his wife about it. At one time the count thought
+      of giving her the Ryazán estate or of selling a forest, at another time of
+      borrowing money on a note of hand. A few days before the wedding Berg
+      entered the count’s study early one morning and, with a pleasant smile,
+      respectfully asked his future father-in-law to let him know what Véra’s
+      dowry would be. The count was so disconcerted by this long-foreseen
+      inquiry that without consideration he gave the first reply that came into
+      his head. “I like your being businesslike about it.... I like it. You
+      shall be satisfied....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And patting Berg on the shoulder he got up, wishing to end the
+      conversation. But Berg, smiling pleasantly, explained that if he did not
+      know for certain how much Véra would have and did not receive at least
+      part of the dowry in advance, he would have to break matters off.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Because, consider, Count—if I allowed myself to marry now without
+      having definite means to maintain my wife, I should be acting badly....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The conversation ended by the count, who wished to be generous and to
+      avoid further importunity, saying that he would give a note of hand for
+      eighty thousand rubles. Berg smiled meekly, kissed the count on the
+      shoulder, and said that he was very grateful, but that it was impossible
+      for him to arrange his new life without receiving thirty thousand in ready
+      money. “Or at least twenty thousand, Count,” he added, “and then a note of
+      hand for only sixty thousand.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, all right!” said the count hurriedly. “Only excuse me, my dear
+      fellow, I’ll give you twenty thousand and a note of hand for eighty
+      thousand as well. Yes, yes! Kiss me.”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0118"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Natásha was sixteen and it was the year 1809, the very year to which she
+      had counted on her fingers with Borís after they had kissed four years
+      ago. Since then she had not seen him. Before Sónya and her mother, if
+      Borís happened to be mentioned, she spoke quite freely of that episode as
+      of some childish, long-forgotten matter that was not worth mentioning. But
+      in the secret depths of her soul the question whether her engagement to
+      Borís was a jest or an important, binding promise tormented her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Since Borís left Moscow in 1805 to join the army he had not seen the
+      Rostóvs. He had been in Moscow several times, and had passed near
+      Otrádnoe, but had never been to see them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sometimes it occurred to Natásha that he did not wish to see her, and this
+      conjecture was confirmed by the sad tone in which her elders spoke of him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nowadays old friends are not remembered,” the countess would say when
+      Borís was mentioned.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Mikháylovna also had of late visited them less frequently, seemed to
+      hold herself with particular dignity, and always spoke rapturously and
+      gratefully of the merits of her son and the brilliant career on which he
+      had entered. When the Rostóvs came to Petersburg Borís called on them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He drove to their house in some agitation. The memory of Natásha was his
+      most poetic recollection. But he went with the firm intention of letting
+      her and her parents feel that the childish relations between himself and
+      Natásha could not be binding either on her or on him. He had a brilliant
+      position in society thanks to his intimacy with Countess Bezúkhova, a
+      brilliant position in the service thanks to the patronage of an important
+      personage whose complete confidence he enjoyed, and he was beginning to
+      make plans for marrying one of the richest heiresses in Petersburg, plans
+      which might very easily be realized. When he entered the Rostóvs’ drawing
+      room Natásha was in her own room. When she heard of his arrival she almost
+      ran into the drawing room, flushed and beaming with a more than cordial
+      smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís remembered Natásha in a short dress, with dark eyes shining from
+      under her curls and boisterous, childish laughter, as he had known her
+      four years before; and so he was taken aback when quite a different
+      Natásha entered, and his face expressed rapturous astonishment. This
+      expression on his face pleased Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, do you recognize your little madcap playmate?” asked the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís kissed Natásha’s hand and said that he was astonished at the change
+      in her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How handsome you have grown!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I should think so!” replied Natásha’s laughing eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And is Papa older?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha sat down and, without joining in Borís’ conversation with the
+      countess, silently and minutely studied her childhood’s suitor. He felt
+      the weight of that resolute and affectionate scrutiny and glanced at her
+      occasionally.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís’ uniform, spurs, tie, and the way his hair was brushed were all
+      <i>comme il faut</i> and in the latest fashion. This Natásha noticed at once. He
+      sat rather sideways in the armchair next to the countess, arranging with
+      his right hand the cleanest of gloves that fitted his left hand like a
+      skin, and he spoke with a particularly refined compression of his lips
+      about the amusements of the highest Petersburg society, recalling with
+      mild irony old times in Moscow and Moscow acquaintances. It was not
+      accidentally, Natásha felt, that he alluded, when speaking of the highest
+      aristocracy, to an ambassador’s ball he had attended, and to invitations
+      he had received from N.N. and S.S.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All this time Natásha sat silent, glancing up at him from under her brows.
+      This gaze disturbed and confused Borís more and more. He looked round more
+      frequently toward her, and broke off in what he was saying. He did not
+      stay more than ten minutes, then rose and took his leave. The same
+      inquisitive, challenging, and rather mocking eyes still looked at him.
+      After his first visit Borís said to himself that Natásha attracted him
+      just as much as ever, but that he must not yield to that feeling, because
+      to marry her, a girl almost without fortune, would mean ruin to his
+      career, while to renew their former relations without intending to marry
+      her would be dishonorable. Borís made up his mind to avoid meeting
+      Natásha, but despite that resolution he called again a few days later and
+      began calling often and spending whole days at the Rostóvs’. It seemed to
+      him that he ought to have an explanation with Natásha and tell her that
+      the old times must be forgotten, that in spite of everything... she could
+      not be his wife, that he had no means, and they would never let her marry
+      him. But he failed to do so and felt awkward about entering on such an
+      explanation. From day to day he became more and more entangled. It seemed
+      to her mother and Sónya that Natásha was in love with Borís as of old. She
+      sang him his favorite songs, showed him her album, making him write in it,
+      did not allow him to allude to the past, letting it be understood how
+      delightful was the present; and every day he went away in a fog, without
+      having said what he meant to, and not knowing what he was doing or why he
+      came, or how it would all end. He left off visiting Hélène and received
+      reproachful notes from her every day, and yet he continued to spend whole
+      days with the Rostóvs.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0119"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      One night when the old countess, in nightcap and dressing jacket, without
+      her false curls, and with her poor little knob of hair showing under her
+      white cotton cap, knelt sighing and groaning on a rug and bowing to the
+      ground in prayer, her door creaked and Natásha, also in a dressing jacket
+      with slippers on her bare feet and her hair in curlpapers, ran in. The
+      countess—her prayerful mood dispelled—looked round and
+      frowned. She was finishing her last prayer: “Can it be that this couch
+      will be my grave?” Natásha, flushed and eager, seeing her mother in
+      prayer, suddenly checked her rush, half sat down, and unconsciously put
+      out her tongue as if chiding herself. Seeing that her mother was still
+      praying she ran on tiptoe to the bed and, rapidly slipping one little foot
+      against the other, pushed off her slippers and jumped onto the bed the
+      countess had feared might become her grave. This couch was high, with a
+      feather bed and five pillows each smaller than the one below. Natásha
+      jumped on it, sank into the feather bed, rolled over to the wall, and
+      began snuggling up the bedclothes as she settled down, raising her knees
+      to her chin, kicking out and laughing almost inaudibly, now covering
+      herself up head and all, and now peeping at her mother. The countess
+      finished her prayers and came to the bed with a stern face, but seeing
+      that Natásha’s head was covered, she smiled in her kind, weak way.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then, now then!” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma, can we have a talk? Yes?” said Natásha. “Now, just one on your
+      throat and another... that’ll do!” And seizing her mother round the neck,
+      she kissed her on the throat. In her behavior to her mother Natásha seemed
+      rough, but she was so sensitive and tactful that however she clasped her
+      mother she always managed to do it without hurting her or making her feel
+      uncomfortable or displeased.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, what is it tonight?” said the mother, having arranged her pillows
+      and waited until Natásha, after turning over a couple of times, had
+      settled down beside her under the quilt, spread out her arms, and assumed
+      a serious expression.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      These visits of Natásha’s at night before the count returned from his club
+      were one of the greatest pleasures of both mother, and daughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it tonight?—But I have to tell you...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha put her hand on her mother’s mouth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “About Borís... I know,” she said seriously; “that’s what I have come
+      about. Don’t say it—I know. No, do tell me!” and she removed her
+      hand. “Tell me, Mamma! He’s nice?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha, you are sixteen. At your age I was married. You say Borís is
+      nice. He is very nice, and I love him like a son. But what then?... What
+      are you thinking about? You have quite turned his head, I can see
+      that....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      As she said this the countess looked round at her daughter. Natásha was
+      lying looking steadily straight before her at one of the mahogany sphinxes
+      carved on the corners of the bedstead, so that the countess only saw her
+      daughter’s face in profile. That face struck her by its peculiarly serious
+      and concentrated expression.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha was listening and considering.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, what then?” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You have quite turned his head, and why? What do you want of him? You
+      know you can’t marry him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why not?” said Natásha, without changing her position.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Because he is young, because he is poor, because he is a relation... and
+      because you yourself don’t love him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How do you know?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I know. It is not right, darling!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But if I want to...” said Natásha.
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Leave off talking nonsense,” said the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But if I want to...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha, I am in earnest...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha did not let her finish. She drew the countess’ large hand to her,
+      kissed it on the back and then on the palm, then again turned it over and
+      began kissing first one knuckle, then the space between the knuckles, then
+      the next knuckle, whispering, “January, February, March, April, May.
+      Speak, Mamma, why don’t you say anything? Speak!” said she, turning to her
+      mother, who was tenderly gazing at her daughter and in that contemplation
+      seemed to have forgotten all she had wished to say.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It won’t do, my love! Not everyone will understand this friendship dating
+      from your childish days, and to see him so intimate with you may injure
+      you in the eyes of other young men who visit us, and above all it torments
+      him for nothing. He may already have found a suitable and wealthy match,
+      and now he’s half crazy.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Crazy?” repeated Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll tell you some things about myself. I had a cousin...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I know! Cyril Matvéich... but he is old.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “He was not always old. But this is what I’ll do, Natásha, I’ll have a
+      talk with Borís. He need not come so often....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why not, if he likes to?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Because I know it will end in nothing....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How can you know? No, Mamma, don’t speak to him! What nonsense!” said
+      Natásha in the tone of one being deprived of her property. “Well, I won’t
+      marry, but let him come if he enjoys it and I enjoy it.” Natásha smiled
+      and looked at her mother. “Not to marry, but just so,” she added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How <i>so</i>, my pet?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Just <i>so</i>. There’s no need for me to marry him. But...
+      just <i>so</i>.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Just so, just so,” repeated the countess, and shaking all over, she went
+      off into a good humored, unexpected, elderly laugh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t laugh, stop!” cried Natásha. “You’re shaking the whole bed! You’re
+      awfully like me, just such another giggler.... Wait...” and she seized the
+      countess’ hands and kissed a knuckle of the little finger, saying, “June,”
+       and continued, kissing, “July, August,” on the other hand. “But, Mamma, is
+      he very much in love? What do you think? Was anybody ever so much in love
+      with you? And he’s very nice, very, very nice. Only not quite my taste—he
+      is so narrow, like the dining-room clock.... Don’t you understand? Narrow,
+      you know—gray, light gray...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What rubbish you’re talking!” said the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha continued: “Don’t you really understand? Nicholas would
+      understand.... Bezúkhov, now, is blue, dark-blue and red, and he is
+      square.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You flirt with him too,” said the countess, laughing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, he is a Freemason, I have found out. He is fine, dark-blue and
+      red.... How can I explain it to you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Little countess!” the count’s voice called from behind the door. “You’re
+      not asleep?” Natásha jumped up, snatched up her slippers, and ran barefoot
+      to her own room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was a long time before she could sleep. She kept thinking that no one
+      could understand all that she understood and all there was in her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya?” she thought, glancing at that curled-up, sleeping little kitten
+      with her enormous plait of hair. “No, how could she? She’s virtuous. She
+      fell in love with Nicholas and does not wish to know anything more. Even
+      Mamma does not understand. It is wonderful how clever I am and how...
+      charming she is,” she went on, speaking of herself in the third person,
+      and imagining it was some very wise man—the wisest and best of men—who
+      was saying it of her. “There is everything, everything in her,” continued
+      this man. “She is unusually intelligent, charming... and then she <i>is</i>
+      pretty, uncommonly pretty, and agile—she swims and rides
+      splendidly... and her voice! One can really say it’s a wonderful voice!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She hummed a scrap from her favorite opera by Cherubini, threw herself on
+      her bed, laughed at the pleasant thought that she would immediately fall
+      asleep, called Dunyásha the maid to put out the candle, and before
+      Dunyásha had left the room had already passed into yet another happier
+      world of dreams, where everything was as light and beautiful as in
+      reality, and even more so because it was different.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day the countess called Borís aside and had a talk with him, after
+      which he ceased coming to the Rostóvs’.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0120"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On the thirty-first of December, New Year’s Eve, 1809 - 10 an old grandee
+      of Catherine’s day was giving a ball and midnight supper. The diplomatic
+      corps and the Emperor himself were to be present.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The grandee’s well-known mansion on the English Quay glittered with
+      innumerable lights. Police were stationed at the brightly lit entrance
+      which was carpeted with red baize, and not only gendarmes but dozens of
+      police officers and even the police master himself stood at the porch.
+      Carriages kept driving away and fresh ones arriving, with red-liveried
+      footmen and footmen in plumed hats. From the carriages emerged men wearing
+      uniforms, stars, and ribbons, while ladies in satin and ermine cautiously
+      descended the carriage steps which were let down for them with a clatter,
+      and then walked hurriedly and noiselessly over the baize at the entrance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Almost every time a new carriage drove up a whisper ran through the crowd
+      and caps were doffed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Emperor?... No, a minister... prince... ambassador. Don’t you see
+      the plumes?...” was whispered among the crowd.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One person, better dressed than the rest, seemed to know everyone and
+      mentioned by name the greatest dignitaries of the day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A third of the visitors had already arrived, but the Rostóvs, who were to
+      be present, were still hurrying to get dressed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There had been many discussions and preparations for this ball in the
+      Rostóv family, many fears that the invitation would not arrive, that the
+      dresses would not be ready, or that something would not be arranged as it
+      should be.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Márya Ignátevna Perónskaya, a thin and shallow maid of honor at the court
+      of the Dowager Empress, who was a friend and relation of the countess and
+      piloted the provincial Rostóvs in Petersburg high society, was to
+      accompany them to the ball.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They were to call for her at her house in the Taurida Gardens at ten
+      o’clock, but it was already five minutes to ten, and the girls were not
+      yet dressed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha was going to her first grand ball. She had got up at eight that
+      morning and had been in a fever of excitement and activity all day. All
+      her powers since morning had been concentrated on ensuring that they all—she
+      herself, Mamma, and Sónya—should be as well dressed as possible.
+      Sónya and her mother put themselves entirely in her hands. The countess
+      was to wear a claret-colored velvet dress, and the two girls white gauze
+      over pink silk slips, with roses on their bodices and their hair dressed <i>à
+      la grecque.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Everything essential had already been done; feet, hands, necks, and ears
+      washed, perfumed, and powdered, as befits a ball; the openwork silk
+      stockings and white satin shoes with ribbons were already on; the
+      hairdressing was almost done. Sónya was finishing dressing and so was the
+      countess, but Natásha, who had bustled about helping them all, was
+      behindhand. She was still sitting before a looking-glass with a dressing
+      jacket thrown over her slender shoulders. Sónya stood ready dressed in the
+      middle of the room and, pressing the head of a pin till it hurt her dainty
+      finger, was fixing on a last ribbon that squeaked as the pin went through
+      it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s not the way, that’s not the way, Sónya!” cried Natásha turning her
+      head and clutching with both hands at her hair which the maid who was
+      dressing it had not time to release. “That bow is not right. Come here!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya sat down and Natásha pinned the ribbon on differently.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Allow me, Miss! I can’t do it like that,” said the maid who was holding
+      Natásha’s hair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, dear! Well then, wait. That’s right, Sónya.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Aren’t you ready? It is nearly ten,” came the countess’ voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Directly! Directly! And you, Mamma?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I have only my cap to pin on.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t do it without me!” called Natásha. “You won’t do it right.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But it’s already ten.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They had decided to be at the ball by half-past ten, and Natásha had still
+      to get dressed and they had to call at the Taurida Gardens.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When her hair was done, Natásha, in her short petticoat from under which
+      her dancing shoes showed, and in her mother’s dressing jacket, ran up to
+      Sónya, scrutinized her, and then ran to her mother. Turning her mother’s
+      head this way and that, she fastened on the cap and, hurriedly kissing her
+      gray hair, ran back to the maids who were turning up the hem of her skirt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The cause of the delay was Natásha’s skirt, which was too long. Two maids
+      were turning up the hem and hurriedly biting off the ends of thread. A
+      third with pins in her mouth was running about between the countess and
+      Sónya, and a fourth held the whole of the gossamer garment up high on one
+      uplifted hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mávra, quicker, darling!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Give me my thimble, Miss, from there...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Whenever will you be ready?” asked the count coming to the door. “Here is
+      some scent. Perónskaya must be tired of waiting.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s ready, Miss,” said the maid, holding up the shortened gauze dress
+      with two fingers, and blowing and shaking something off it, as if by this
+      to express a consciousness of the airiness and purity of what she held.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha began putting on the dress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In a minute! In a minute! Don’t come in, Papa!” she cried to her father
+      as he opened the door—speaking from under the filmy skirt which
+      still covered her whole face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya slammed the door to. A minute later they let the count in. He was
+      wearing a blue swallow-tail coat, shoes and stockings, and was perfumed
+      and his hair pomaded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, Papa! how nice you look! Charming!” cried Natásha, as she stood in
+      the middle of the room smoothing out the folds of the gauze.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If you please, Miss! allow me,” said the maid, who on her knees was
+      pulling the skirt straight and shifting the pins from one side of her
+      mouth to the other with her tongue.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Say what you like,” exclaimed Sónya, in a despairing voice as she looked
+      at Natásha, “say what you like, it’s still too long.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha stepped back to look at herself in the pier glass. The dress <i>was</i>
+      too long.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Really, madam, it is not at all too long,” said Mávra, crawling on her
+      knees after her young lady.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, if it’s too long we’ll tack it up... we’ll tack it up in one
+      minute,” said the resolute Dunyásha taking a needle that was stuck on the
+      front of her little shawl and, still kneeling on the floor, set to work
+      once more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment, with soft steps, the countess came in shyly, in her cap
+      and velvet gown.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oo-oo, my beauty!” exclaimed the count, “she looks better than any of
+      you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He would have embraced her but, blushing, she stepped aside fearing to be
+      rumpled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma, your cap, more to this side,” said Natásha. “I’ll arrange it,” and
+      she rushed forward so that the maids who were tacking up her skirt could
+      not move fast enough and a piece of gauze was torn off.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh goodness! What has happened? Really it was not my fault!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Never mind, I’ll run it up, it won’t show,” said Dunyásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a beauty—a very queen!” said the nurse as she came to the
+      door. “And Sónya! They are lovely!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At a quarter past ten they at last got into their carriages and started.
+      But they had still to call at the Taurida Gardens.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Perónskaya was quite ready. In spite of her age and plainness she had gone
+      through the same process as the Rostóvs, but with less flurry—for to
+      her it was a matter of routine. Her ugly old body was washed, perfumed,
+      and powdered in just the same way. She had washed behind her ears just as
+      carefully, and when she entered her drawing room in her yellow dress,
+      wearing her badge as maid of honor, her old lady’s maid was as full of
+      rapturous admiration as the Rostóvs’ servants had been.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She praised the Rostóvs’ toilets. They praised her taste and toilet, and
+      at eleven o’clock, careful of their coiffures and dresses, they settled
+      themselves in their carriages and drove off.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0121"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Natásha had not had a moment free since early morning and had not once had
+      time to think of what lay before her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the damp chill air and crowded closeness of the swaying carriage, she
+      for the first time vividly imagined what was in store for her there at the
+      ball, in those brightly lighted rooms—with music, flowers, dances,
+      the Emperor, and all the brilliant young people of Petersburg. The
+      prospect was so splendid that she hardly believed it would come true, so
+      out of keeping was it with the chill darkness and closeness of the
+      carriage. She understood all that awaited her only when, after stepping
+      over the red baize at the entrance, she entered the hall, took off her fur
+      cloak, and, beside Sónya and in front of her mother, mounted the brightly
+      illuminated stairs between the flowers. Only then did she remember how she
+      must behave at a ball, and tried to assume the majestic air she considered
+      indispensable for a girl on such an occasion. But, fortunately for her,
+      she felt her eyes growing misty, she saw nothing clearly, her pulse beat a
+      hundred to the minute, and the blood throbbed at her heart. She could not
+      assume that pose, which would have made her ridiculous, and she moved on
+      almost fainting from excitement and trying with all her might to conceal
+      it. And this was the very attitude that became her best. Before and behind
+      them other visitors were entering, also talking in low tones and wearing
+      ball dresses. The mirrors on the landing reflected ladies in white,
+      pale-blue, and pink dresses, with diamonds and pearls on their bare necks
+      and arms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha looked in the mirrors and could not distinguish her reflection
+      from the others. All was blended into one brilliant procession. On
+      entering the ballroom the regular hum of voices, footsteps, and greetings
+      deafened Natásha, and the light and glitter dazzled her still more. The
+      host and hostess, who had already been standing at the door for half an
+      hour repeating the same words to the various arrivals, <i>“Charmé de vous
+      voir,”</i> * greeted the Rostóvs and Perónskaya in the same manner.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Delighted to see you.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      The two girls in their white dresses, each with a rose in her black hair,
+      both curtsied in the same way, but the hostess’ eye involuntarily rested
+      longer on the slim Natásha. She looked at her and gave her alone a special
+      smile in addition to her usual smile as hostess. Looking at her she may
+      have recalled the golden, irrecoverable days of her own girlhood and her
+      own first ball. The host also followed Natásha with his eyes and asked the
+      count which was his daughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Charming!” said he, kissing the tips of his fingers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the ballroom guests stood crowding at the entrance doors awaiting the
+      Emperor. The countess took up a position in one of the front rows of that
+      crowd. Natásha heard and felt that several people were asking about her
+      and looking at her. She realized that those noticing her liked her, and
+      this observation helped to calm her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There are some like ourselves and some worse,” she thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Perónskaya was pointing out to the countess the most important people at
+      the ball.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That is the Dutch ambassador, do you see? That gray-haired man,” she
+      said, indicating an old man with a profusion of silver-gray curly hair,
+      who was surrounded by ladies laughing at something he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, here she is, the Queen of Petersburg, Countess Bezúkhova,” said
+      Perónskaya, indicating Hélène who had just entered. “How lovely! She is
+      quite equal to Márya Antónovna. See how the men, young and old, pay court
+      to her. Beautiful and clever... they say Prince —— is quite mad about
+      her. But see, those two, though not good-looking, are even more run
+      after.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She pointed to a lady who was crossing the room followed by a very plain
+      daughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She is a splendid match, a millionairess,” said Perónskaya. “And look,
+      here come her suitors.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That is Bezúkhova’s brother, Anatole Kurágin,” she said, indicating a
+      handsome officer of the Horse Guards who passed by them with head erect,
+      looking at something over the heads of the ladies. “He’s handsome, isn’t
+      he? I hear they will marry him to that rich girl. But your cousin,
+      Drubetskóy, is also very attentive to her. They say she has millions. Oh
+      yes, that’s the French ambassador himself!” she replied to the countess’
+      inquiry about Caulaincourt. “Looks as if he were a king! All the same, the
+      French are charming, very charming. No one more charming in society. Ah,
+      here she is! Yes, she is still the most beautiful of them all, our Márya
+      Antónovna! And how simply she is dressed! Lovely! And that stout one in
+      spectacles is the universal Freemason,” she went on, indicating Pierre.
+      “Put him beside his wife and he looks a regular buffoon!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre, swaying his stout body, advanced, making way through the crowd and
+      nodding to right and left as casually and good-naturedly as if he were
+      passing through a crowd at a fair. He pushed through, evidently looking
+      for someone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha looked joyfully at the familiar face of Pierre, “the buffoon,” as
+      Perónskaya had called him, and knew he was looking for them, and for her
+      in particular. He had promised to be at the ball and introduce partners to
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But before he reached them Pierre stopped beside a very handsome, dark man
+      of middle height, and in a white uniform, who stood by a window talking to
+      a tall man wearing stars and a ribbon. Natásha at once recognized the
+      shorter and younger man in the white uniform: it was Bolkónski, who seemed
+      to her to have grown much younger, happier, and better-looking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There’s someone else we know—Bolkónski, do you see, Mamma?” said
+      Natásha, pointing out Prince Andrew. “You remember, he stayed a night with
+      us at Otrádnoe.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, you know him?” said Perónskaya. “I can’t bear him.
+      <i>Il fait à présent la pluie et le beau temps.</i> * He’s too proud for
+      anything. Takes after his father. And he’s hand in glove with Speránski,
+      writing some project or other. Just look how he treats the ladies! There’s
+      one talking to him and he has turned away,” she said, pointing at him.
+      “I’d give it to him if he treated me as he does those ladies.”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “He is all the rage just now.”
+ </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0122"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Suddenly everybody stirred, began talking, and pressed forward and then
+      back, and between the two rows, which separated, the Emperor entered to
+      the sounds of music that had immediately struck up. Behind him walked his
+      host and hostess. He walked in rapidly, bowing to right and left as if
+      anxious to get the first moments of the reception over. The band played
+      the polonaise in vogue at that time on account of the words that had been
+      set to it, beginning: “Alexander, Elisaveta, all our hearts you ravish
+      quite...” The Emperor passed on to the drawing room, the crowd made a rush
+      for the doors, and several persons with excited faces hurried there and
+      back again. Then the crowd hastily retired from the drawing room door, at
+      which the Emperor reappeared talking to the hostess. A young man, looking
+      distraught, pounced down on the ladies, asking them to move aside. Some
+      ladies, with faces betraying complete forgetfulness of all the rules of
+      decorum, pushed forward to the detriment of their toilets. The men began
+      to choose partners and take their places for the polonaise.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Everyone moved back, and the Emperor came smiling out of the drawing room
+      leading his hostess by the hand but not keeping time to the music. The
+      host followed with Márya Antónovna Narýshkina; then came ambassadors,
+      ministers, and various generals, whom Perónskaya diligently named. More
+      than half the ladies already had partners and were taking up, or preparing
+      to take up, their positions for the polonaise. Natásha felt that she would
+      be left with her mother and Sónya among a minority of women who crowded
+      near the wall, not having been invited to dance. She stood with her
+      slender arms hanging down, her scarcely defined bosom rising and falling
+      regularly, and with bated breath and glittering, frightened eyes gazed
+      straight before her, evidently prepared for the height of joy or misery.
+      She was not concerned about the Emperor or any of those great people whom
+      Perónskaya was pointing out—she had but one thought: “Is it possible
+      no one will ask me, that I shall not be among the first to dance? Is it
+      possible that not one of all these men will notice me? They do not even
+      seem to see me, or if they do they look as if they were saying, ‘Ah, she’s
+      not the one I’m after, so it’s not worth looking at her!’ No, it’s
+      impossible,” she thought. “They must know how I long to dance, how
+      splendidly I dance, and how they would enjoy dancing with me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The strains of the polonaise, which had continued for a considerable time,
+      had begun to sound like a sad reminiscence to Natásha’s ears. She wanted
+      to cry. Perónskaya had left them. The count was at the other end of the
+      room. She and the countess and Sónya were standing by themselves as in the
+      depths of a forest amid that crowd of strangers, with no one interested in
+      them and not wanted by anyone. Prince Andrew with a lady passed by,
+      evidently not recognizing them. The handsome Anatole was smilingly talking
+      to a partner on his arm and looked at Natásha as one looks at a wall.
+      Borís passed them twice and each time turned away. Berg and his wife, who
+      were not dancing, came up to them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This family gathering seemed humiliating to Natásha—as if there were
+      nowhere else for the family to talk but here at the ball. She did not
+      listen to or look at Véra, who was telling her something about her own
+      green dress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At last the Emperor stopped beside his last partner (he had danced with
+      three) and the music ceased. A worried aide-de-camp ran up to the Rostóvs
+      requesting them to stand farther back, though as it was they were already
+      close to the wall, and from the gallery resounded the distinct, precise,
+      enticingly rhythmical strains of a waltz. The Emperor looked smilingly
+      down the room. A minute passed but no one had yet begun dancing. An
+      aide-de-camp, the Master of Ceremonies, went up to Countess Bezúkhova and
+      asked her to dance. She smilingly raised her hand and laid it on his
+      shoulder without looking at him. The aide-de-camp, an adept in his art,
+      grasping his partner firmly round her waist, with confident deliberation
+      started smoothly, gliding first round the edge of the circle, then at the
+      corner of the room he caught Hélène’s left hand and turned her, the only
+      sound audible, apart from the ever-quickening music, being the rhythmic
+      click of the spurs on his rapid, agile feet, while at every third beat his
+      partner’s velvet dress spread out and seemed to flash as she whirled
+      round. Natásha gazed at them and was ready to cry because it was not she
+      who was dancing that first turn of the waltz.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew, in the white uniform of a cavalry colonel, wearing
+      stockings and dancing shoes, stood looking animated and bright in the
+      front row of the circle not far from the Rostóvs. Baron Firhoff was
+      talking to him about the first sitting of the Council of State to be held
+      next day. Prince Andrew, as one closely connected with Speránski and
+      participating in the work of the legislative commission, could give
+      reliable information about that sitting, concerning which various rumors
+      were current. But not listening to what Firhoff was saying, he was gazing
+      now at the sovereign and now at the men intending to dance who had not yet
+      gathered courage to enter the circle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew was watching these men abashed by the Emperor’s presence,
+      and the women who were breathlessly longing to be asked to dance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre came up to him and caught him by the arm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You always dance. I have a protégée, the young Rostóva, here. Ask her,”
+       he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where is she?” asked Bolkónski. “Excuse me!” he added, turning to the
+      baron, “we will finish this conversation elsewhere—at a ball one
+      must dance.” He stepped forward in the direction Pierre indicated. The
+      despairing, dejected expression of Natásha’s face caught his eye. He
+      recognized her, guessed her feelings, saw that it was her début,
+      remembered her conversation at the window, and with an expression of
+      pleasure on his face approached Countess Rostóva.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Allow me to introduce you to my daughter,” said the countess, with
+      heightened color.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have the pleasure of being already acquainted, if the countess
+      remembers me,” said Prince Andrew with a low and courteous bow quite
+      belying Perónskaya’s remarks about his rudeness, and approaching Natásha
+      he held out his arm to grasp her waist before he had completed his
+      invitation. He asked her to waltz. That tremulous expression on Natásha’s
+      face, prepared either for despair or rapture, suddenly brightened into a
+      happy, grateful, childlike smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have long been waiting for you,” that frightened happy little girl
+      seemed to say by the smile that replaced the threatened tears, as she
+      raised her hand to Prince Andrew’s shoulder. They were the second couple
+      to enter the circle. Prince Andrew was one of the best dancers of his day
+      and Natásha danced exquisitely. Her little feet in their white satin
+      dancing shoes did their work swiftly, lightly, and independently of
+      herself, while her face beamed with ecstatic happiness. Her slender bare
+      arms and neck were not beautiful—compared to Hélène’s her shoulders
+      looked thin and her bosom undeveloped. But Hélène seemed, as it were,
+      hardened by a varnish left by the thousands of looks that had scanned her
+      person, while Natásha was like a girl exposed for the first time, who
+      would have felt very much ashamed had she not been assured that this was
+      absolutely necessary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew liked dancing, and wishing to escape as quickly as possible
+      from the political and clever talk which everyone addressed to him,
+      wishing also to break up the circle of restraint he disliked, caused by
+      the Emperor’s presence, he danced, and had chosen Natásha because Pierre
+      pointed her out to him and because she was the first pretty girl who
+      caught his eye; but scarcely had he embraced that slender supple figure
+      and felt her stirring so close to him and smiling so near him than the
+      wine of her charm rose to his head, and he felt himself revived and
+      rejuvenated when after leaving her he stood breathing deeply and watching
+      the other dancers.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0123"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After Prince Andrew, Borís came up to ask Natásha for a dance, and then
+      the aide-de-camp who had opened the ball, and several other young men, so
+      that, flushed and happy, and passing on her superfluous partners to Sónya,
+      she did not cease dancing all the evening. She noticed and saw nothing of
+      what occupied everyone else. Not only did she fail to notice that the
+      Emperor talked a long time with the French ambassador, and how
+      particularly gracious he was to a certain lady, or that Prince So-and-so
+      and So-and-so did and said this and that, and that Hélène had great
+      success and was honored by the special attention of So-and-so, but she did
+      not even see the Emperor, and only noticed that he had gone because the
+      ball became livelier after his departure. For one of the merry cotillions
+      before supper Prince Andrew was again her partner. He reminded her of
+      their first encounter in the Otrádnoe avenue, and how she had been unable
+      to sleep that moonlight night, and told her how he had involuntarily
+      overheard her. Natásha blushed at that recollection and tried to excuse
+      herself, as if there had been something to be ashamed of in what Prince
+      Andrew had overheard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Like all men who have grown up in society, Prince Andrew liked meeting
+      someone there not of the conventional society stamp. And such was Natásha,
+      with her surprise, her delight, her shyness, and even her mistakes in
+      speaking French. With her he behaved with special care and tenderness,
+      sitting beside her and talking of the simplest and most unimportant
+      matters; he admired her shy grace. In the middle of the cotillion, having
+      completed one of the figures, Natásha, still out of breath, was returning
+      to her seat when another dancer chose her. She was tired and panting and
+      evidently thought of declining, but immediately put her hand gaily on the
+      man’s shoulder, smiling at Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’d be glad to sit beside you and rest: I’m tired; but you see how they
+      keep asking me, and I’m glad of it, I’m happy and I love everybody, and
+      you and I understand it all,” and much, much more was said in her smile.
+      When her partner left her Natásha ran across the room to choose two ladies
+      for the figure.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If she goes to her cousin first and then to another lady, she will be my
+      wife,” said Prince Andrew to himself quite to his own surprise, as he
+      watched her. She did go first to her cousin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What rubbish sometimes enters one’s head!” thought Prince Andrew, “but
+      what is certain is that that girl is so charming, so original, that she
+      won’t be dancing here a month before she will be married.... Such as she
+      are rare here,” he thought, as Natásha, readjusting a rose that was
+      slipping on her bodice, settled herself beside him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the cotillion was over the old count in his blue coat came up to the
+      dancers. He invited Prince Andrew to come and see them, and asked his
+      daughter whether she was enjoying herself. Natásha did not answer at once
+      but only looked up with a smile that said reproachfully: “How can you ask
+      such a question?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I have never enjoyed myself so much before!” she said, and Prince Andrew
+      noticed how her thin arms rose quickly as if to embrace her father and
+      instantly dropped again. Natásha was happier than she had ever been in her
+      life. She was at that height of bliss when one becomes completely kind and
+      good and does not believe in the possibility of evil, unhappiness, or
+      sorrow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that ball Pierre for the first time felt humiliated by the position his
+      wife occupied in court circles. He was gloomy and absent-minded. A deep
+      furrow ran across his forehead, and standing by a window he stared over
+      his spectacles seeing no one.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On her way to supper Natásha passed him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre’s gloomy, unhappy look struck her. She stopped in front of him. She
+      wished to help him, to bestow on him the superabundance of her own
+      happiness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How delightful it is, Count!” said she. “Isn’t it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre smiled absent-mindedly, evidently not grasping what she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I am very glad,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How can people be dissatisfied with anything?” thought Natásha.
+      “Especially such a capital fellow as Bezúkhov!” In Natásha’s eyes all the
+      people at the ball alike were good, kind, and splendid people, loving one
+      another; none of them capable of injuring another—and so they ought
+      all to be happy.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0124"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Next day Prince Andrew thought of the ball, but his mind did not dwell on
+      it long. “Yes, it was a very brilliant ball,” and then... “Yes, that
+      little Rostóva is very charming. There’s something fresh, original,
+      un-Petersburg-like about her that distinguishes her.” That was all he
+      thought about yesterday’s ball, and after his morning tea he set to work.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But either from fatigue or want of sleep he was ill-disposed for work and
+      could get nothing done. He kept criticizing his own work, as he often did,
+      and was glad when he heard someone coming.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The visitor was Bítski, who served on various committees, frequented all
+      the societies in Petersburg, and was a passionate devotee of the new ideas and
+      of Speránski, and a diligent Petersburg newsmonger—one of those men
+      who choose their opinions like their clothes according to the fashion, but
+      who for that very reason appear to be the warmest partisans. Hardly had he
+      got rid of his hat before he ran into Prince Andrew’s room with a
+      preoccupied air and at once began talking. He had just heard particulars
+      of that morning’s sitting of the Council of State opened by the Emperor,
+      and he spoke of it enthusiastically. The Emperor’s speech had been
+      extraordinary. It had been a speech such as only constitutional monarchs
+      deliver. “The Sovereign plainly said that the Council and Senate are
+      <i>estates</i> of the realm, he said that the government must rest not on
+      authority but on secure bases. The Emperor said that the fiscal system
+      must be reorganized and the accounts published,” recounted Bítski,
+      emphasizing certain words and opening his eyes significantly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, yes! Today’s events mark an epoch, the greatest epoch in our
+      history,” he concluded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew listened to the account of the opening of the Council of
+      State, which he had so impatiently awaited and to which he had attached
+      such importance, and was surprised that this event, now that it had taken
+      place, did not affect him, and even seemed quite insignificant. He
+      listened with quiet irony to Bítski’s enthusiastic account of it. A very
+      simple thought occurred to him: “What does it matter to me or to Bítski
+      what the Emperor was pleased to say at the Council? Can all that make me
+      any happier or better?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And this simple reflection suddenly destroyed all the interest Prince
+      Andrew had felt in the impending reforms. He was going to dine that
+      evening at Speránski’s, “with only a few friends,” as the host had said
+      when inviting him. The prospect of that dinner in the intimate home circle
+      of the man he so admired had greatly interested Prince Andrew, especially
+      as he had not yet seen Speránski in his domestic surroundings, but now he
+      felt disinclined to go to it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the appointed hour, however, he entered the modest house Speránski
+      owned in the Taurida Gardens. In the parqueted dining room of this small
+      house, remarkable for its extreme cleanliness (suggesting that of a
+      monastery), Prince Andrew, who was rather late, found the friendly
+      gathering of Speránski’s intimate acquaintances already assembled at five
+      o’clock. There were no ladies present except Speránski’s little daughter
+      (long-faced like her father) and her governess. The other guests were
+      Gervais, Magnítski, and Stolýpin. While still in the anteroom Prince
+      Andrew heard loud voices and a ringing staccato laugh—a laugh such
+      as one hears on the stage. Someone—it sounded like Speránski—was
+      distinctly ejaculating <i>ha-ha-ha</i>. Prince Andrew had never before heard
+      Speránski’s famous laugh, and this ringing, high-pitched laughter from a
+      statesman made a strange impression on him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He entered the dining room. The whole company were standing between two
+      windows at a small table laid with hors-d’oeuvres. Speránski, wearing a
+      gray swallow-tail coat with a star on the breast, and evidently still the
+      same waistcoat and high white stock he had worn at the meeting of the
+      Council of State, stood at the table with a beaming countenance. His
+      guests surrounded him. Magnítski, addressing himself to Speránski, was
+      relating an anecdote, and Speránski was laughing in advance at what
+      Magnítski was going to say. When Prince Andrew entered the room
+      Magnítski’s words were again crowned by laughter. Stolýpin gave a deep
+      bass guffaw as he munched a piece of bread and cheese. Gervais laughed
+      softly with a hissing chuckle, and Speránski in a high-pitched staccato
+      manner.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Still laughing, Speránski held out his soft white hand to Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very pleased to see you, Prince,” he said. “One moment...” he went on,
+      turning to Magnítski and interrupting his story. “We have agreed that this
+      is a dinner for recreation, with not a word about business!” and turning
+      again to the narrator he began to laugh afresh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew looked at the laughing Speránski with astonishment, regret,
+      and disillusionment. It seemed to him that this was not Speránski but
+      someone else. Everything that had formerly appeared mysterious and
+      fascinating in Speránski suddenly became plain and unattractive.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At dinner the conversation did not cease for a moment and seemed to
+      consist of the contents of a book of funny anecdotes. Before Magnítski had
+      finished his story someone else was anxious to relate something still
+      funnier. Most of the anecdotes, if not relating to the state service,
+      related to people in the service. It seemed that in this company the
+      insignificance of those people was so definitely accepted that the only
+      possible attitude toward them was one of good humored ridicule. Speránski
+      related how at the Council that morning a deaf dignitary, when asked his
+      opinion, replied that he thought so too. Gervais gave a long account of an
+      official revision, remarkable for the stupidity of everybody concerned.
+      Stolýpin, stuttering, broke into the conversation and began excitedly
+      talking of the abuses that existed under the former order of things—threatening
+      to give a serious turn to the conversation. Magnítski starting quizzing
+      Stolýpin about his vehemence. Gervais intervened with a joke, and the talk
+      reverted to its former lively tone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Evidently Speránski liked to rest after his labors and find amusement in a
+      circle of friends, and his guests, understanding his wish, tried to
+      enliven him and amuse themselves. But their gaiety seemed to Prince Andrew
+      mirthless and tiresome. Speránski’s high-pitched voice struck him
+      unpleasantly, and the incessant laughter grated on him like a false note.
+      Prince Andrew did not laugh and feared that he would be a damper on the
+      spirits of the company, but no one took any notice of his being out of
+      harmony with the general mood. They all seemed very gay.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He tried several times to join in the conversation, but his remarks were
+      tossed aside each time like a cork thrown out of the water, and he could
+      not jest with them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was nothing wrong or unseemly in what they said, it was witty and
+      might have been funny, but it lacked just that something which is the salt
+      of mirth, and they were not even aware that such a thing existed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After dinner Speránski’s daughter and her governess rose. He patted the
+      little girl with his white hand and kissed her. And that gesture, too,
+      seemed unnatural to Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The men remained at table over their port—English fashion. In the
+      midst of a conversation that was started about Napoleon’s Spanish affairs,
+      which they all agreed in approving, Prince Andrew began to express a
+      contrary opinion. Speránski smiled and, with an evident wish to prevent
+      the conversation from taking an unpleasant course, told a story that had
+      no connection with the previous conversation. For a few moments all were
+      silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having sat some time at table, Speránski corked a bottle of wine and,
+      remarking, “Nowadays good wine rides in a carriage and pair,” passed it to
+      the servant and got up. All rose and continuing to talk loudly went into
+      the drawing room. Two letters brought by a courier were handed to
+      Speránski and he took them to his study. As soon as he had left the room
+      the general merriment stopped and the guests began to converse sensibly
+      and quietly with one another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now for the recitation!” said Speránski on returning from his study. “A
+      wonderful talent!” he said to Prince Andrew, and Magnítski immediately
+      assumed a pose and began reciting some humorous verses in French which he
+      had composed about various well-known Petersburg people. He was
+      interrupted several times by applause. When the verses were finished
+      Prince Andrew went up to Speránski and took his leave.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where are you off to so early?” asked Speránski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I promised to go to a reception.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They said no more. Prince Andrew looked closely into those mirrorlike,
+      impenetrable eyes, and felt that it had been ridiculous of him to have
+      expected anything from Speránski and from any of his own activities
+      connected with him, or ever to have attributed importance to what
+      Speránski was doing. That precise, mirthless laughter rang in Prince
+      Andrew’s ears long after he had left the house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he reached home Prince Andrew began thinking of his life in
+      Petersburg during those last four months as if it were something new. He
+      recalled his exertions and solicitations, and the history of his project
+      of army reform, which had been accepted for consideration and which they
+      were trying to pass over in silence simply because another, a very poor
+      one, had already been prepared and submitted to the Emperor. He thought of
+      the meetings of a committee of which Berg was a member. He remembered how
+      carefully and at what length everything relating to form and procedure was
+      discussed at those meetings, and how sedulously and promptly all that
+      related to the gist of the business was evaded. He recalled his labors on
+      the Legal Code, and how painstakingly he had translated the articles of
+      the Roman and French codes into Russian, and he felt ashamed of himself.
+      Then he vividly pictured to himself Boguchárovo, his occupations in the
+      country, his journey to Ryazán; he remembered the peasants and Dron the
+      village elder, and mentally applying to them the Personal Rights he had
+      divided into paragraphs, he felt astonished that he could have spent so
+      much time on such useless work.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0125"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Next day Prince Andrew called at a few houses he had not visited before,
+      and among them at the Rostóvs’ with whom he had renewed acquaintance at
+      the ball. Apart from considerations of politeness which demanded the call,
+      he wanted to see that original, eager girl who had left such a pleasant
+      impression on his mind, in her own home.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha was one of the first to meet him. She was wearing a dark-blue
+      house dress in which Prince Andrew thought her even prettier than in her
+      ball dress. She and all the Rostóv family welcomed him as an old friend,
+      simply and cordially. The whole family, whom he had formerly judged
+      severely, now seemed to him to consist of excellent, simple, and kindly
+      people. The old count’s hospitality and good nature, which struck one
+      especially in Petersburg as a pleasant surprise, were such that Prince
+      Andrew could not refuse to stay to dinner. “Yes,” he thought, “they are
+      capital people, who of course have not the slightest idea what a treasure
+      they possess in Natásha; but they are kindly folk and form the best
+      possible setting for this strikingly poetic, charming girl, overflowing
+      with life!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In Natásha Prince Andrew was conscious of a strange world completely alien
+      to him and brimful of joys unknown to him, a different world, that in the
+      Otrádnoe avenue and at the window that moonlight night had already begun
+      to disconcert him. Now this world disconcerted him no longer and was no
+      longer alien to him, but he himself having entered it found in it a new
+      enjoyment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After dinner Natásha, at Prince Andrew’s request, went to the clavichord
+      and began singing. Prince Andrew stood by a window talking to the ladies
+      and listened to her. In the midst of a phrase he ceased speaking and
+      suddenly felt tears choking him, a thing he had thought impossible for
+      him. He looked at Natásha as she sang, and something new and joyful
+      stirred in his soul. He felt happy and at the same time sad. He had
+      absolutely nothing to weep about yet he was ready to weep. What about? His
+      former love? The little princess? His disillusionments?... His hopes for
+      the future?... Yes and no. The chief reason was a sudden, vivid sense of
+      the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable
+      within him and that limited and material something that he, and even she,
+      was. This contrast weighed on and yet cheered him while she sang.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as Natásha had finished she went up to him and asked how he liked
+      her voice. She asked this and then became confused, feeling that she ought
+      not to have asked it. He smiled, looking at her, and said he liked her
+      singing as he liked everything she did.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew left the Rostóvs’ late in the evening. He went to bed from
+      habit, but soon realized that he could not sleep. Having lit his candle he
+      sat up in bed, then got up, then lay down again not at all troubled by his
+      sleeplessness: his soul was as fresh and joyful as if he had stepped out
+      of a stuffy room into God’s own fresh air. It did not enter his head that
+      he was in love with Natásha; he was not thinking about her, but only
+      picturing her to himself, and in consequence all life appeared in a new
+      light. “Why do I strive, why do I toil in this narrow, confined frame,
+      when life, all life with all its joys, is open to me?” said he to himself.
+      And for the first time for a very long while he began making happy plans
+      for the future. He decided that he must attend to his son’s education by
+      finding a tutor and putting the boy in his charge, then he ought to retire
+      from the service and go abroad, and see England, Switzerland and Italy. “I
+      must use my freedom while I feel so much strength and youth in me,” he
+      said to himself. “Pierre was right when he said one must believe in the
+      possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and now I do believe in it.
+      Let the dead bury their dead, but while one has life one must live and be
+      happy!” thought he.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0126"></a>
+      CHAPTER XX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      One morning Colonel Berg, whom Pierre knew as he knew everybody in Moscow
+      and Petersburg, came to see him. Berg arrived in an immaculate brand-new
+      uniform, with his hair pomaded and brushed forward over his temples as the
+      Emperor Alexander wore his hair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have just been to see the countess, your wife. Unfortunately she could
+      not grant my request, but I hope, Count, I shall be more fortunate with
+      you,” he said with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it you wish, Colonel? I am at your service.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I have now quite settled in my new rooms, Count” (Berg said this with
+      perfect conviction that this information could not but be agreeable), “and
+      so I wish to arrange just a small party for my own and my wife’s friends.”
+       (He smiled still more pleasantly.) “I wished to ask the countess and you
+      to do me the honor of coming to tea and to supper.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Only Countess Hélène, considering the society of such people as the Bergs
+      beneath her, could be cruel enough to refuse such an invitation. Berg
+      explained so clearly why he wanted to collect at his house a small but
+      select company, and why this would give him pleasure, and why though he
+      grudged spending money on cards or anything harmful, he was prepared to
+      run into some expense for the sake of good society—that Pierre could
+      not refuse, and promised to come.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But don’t be late, Count, if I may venture to ask; about ten minutes to
+      eight, please. We shall make up a rubber. Our general is coming. He is
+      very good to me. We shall have supper, Count. So you will do me the
+      favor.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Contrary to his habit of being late, Pierre on that day arrived at the
+      Bergs’ house, not at ten but at fifteen minutes to eight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having prepared everything necessary for the party, the Bergs were ready
+      for their guests’ arrival.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In their new, clean, and light study with its small busts and pictures and
+      new furniture sat Berg and his wife. Berg, closely buttoned up in his new
+      uniform, sat beside his wife explaining to her that one always could and
+      should be acquainted with people above one, because only then does one get
+      satisfaction from acquaintances.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You can get to know something, you can ask for something. See how I
+      managed from my first promotion.” (Berg measured his life not by years but
+      by promotions.) “My comrades are still nobodies, while I am only waiting
+      for a vacancy to command a regiment, and have the happiness to be your
+      husband.” (He rose and kissed Véra’s hand, and on the way to her
+      straightened out a turned-up corner of the carpet.) “And how have I
+      obtained all this? Chiefly by knowing how to choose my aquaintances. It
+      goes without saying that one must be conscientious and methodical.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Berg smiled with a sense of his superiority over a weak woman, and paused,
+      reflecting that this dear wife of his was after all but a weak woman who
+      could not understand all that constitutes a man’s dignity, what it was <i>ein
+      Mann zu sein.</i> * Véra at the same time smiling with a sense of superiority
+      over her good, conscientious husband, who all the same understood life
+      wrongly, as according to Véra all men did. Berg, judging by his wife,
+      thought all women weak and foolish. Véra, judging only by her husband and
+      generalizing from that observation, supposed that all men, though they
+      understand nothing and are conceited and selfish, ascribe common sense to
+      themselves alone.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * To be a man.
+</p>
+<p>
+      Berg rose and embraced his wife carefully, so as not to crush her lace
+      fichu for which he had paid a good price, kissing her straight on the
+      lips.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The only thing is, we mustn’t have children too soon,” he continued,
+      following an unconscious sequence of ideas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” answered Véra, “I don’t at all want that. We must live for
+      society.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Princess Yusúpova wore one exactly like this,” said Berg, pointing to the
+      fichu with a happy and kindly smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just then Count Bezúkhov was announced. Husband and wife glanced at one
+      another, both smiling with self-satisfaction, and each mentally claiming
+      the honor of this visit.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This is what comes of knowing how to make acquaintances,” thought Berg.
+      “This is what comes of knowing how to conduct oneself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But please don’t interrupt me when I am entertaining the guests,” said
+      Véra, “because I know what interests each of them and what to say to
+      different people.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Berg smiled again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It can’t be helped: men must sometimes have masculine conversation,” said
+      he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They received Pierre in their small, new drawing room, where it was
+      impossible to sit down anywhere without disturbing its symmetry, neatness,
+      and order; so it was quite comprehensible and not strange that Berg,
+      having generously offered to disturb the symmetry of an armchair or of the
+      sofa for his dear guest, but being apparently painfully undecided on the
+      matter himself, eventually left the visitor to settle the question of
+      selection. Pierre disturbed the symmetry by moving a chair for himself,
+      and Berg and Véra immediately began their evening party, interrupting each
+      other in their efforts to entertain their guest.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Véra, having decided in her own mind that Pierre ought to be entertained
+      with conversation about the French embassy, at once began accordingly.
+      Berg, having decided that masculine conversation was required, interrupted
+      his wife’s remarks and touched on the question of the war with Austria,
+      and unconsciously jumped from the general subject to personal
+      considerations as to the proposals made him to take part in the Austrian
+      campaign and the reasons why he had declined them. Though the conversation
+      was very incoherent and Véra was angry at the intrusion of the masculine
+      element, both husband and wife felt with satisfaction that, even if only
+      one guest was present, their evening had begun very well and was as like
+      as two peas to every other evening party with its talk, tea, and lighted
+      candles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before long Borís, Berg’s old comrade, arrived. There was a shade of
+      condescension and patronage in his treatment of Berg and Véra. After Borís
+      came a lady with the colonel, then the general himself, then the Rostóvs,
+      and the party became unquestionably exactly like all other evening
+      parties. Berg and Véra could not repress their smiles of satisfaction at
+      the sight of all this movement in their drawing room, at the sound of the
+      disconnected talk, the rustling of dresses, and the bowing and scraping.
+      Everything was just as everybody always has it, especially so the general,
+      who admired the apartment, patted Berg on the shoulder, and with parental
+      authority superintended the setting out of the table for boston. The
+      general sat down by Count Ilyá Rostóv, who was next to himself the most
+      important guest. The old people sat with the old, the young with the
+      young, and the hostess at the tea table, on which stood exactly the same
+      kind of cakes in a silver cake basket as the Panins had at their party.
+      Everything was just as it was everywhere else.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0127"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Pierre, as one of the principal guests, had to sit down to boston with
+      Count Rostóv, the general, and the colonel. At the card table he happened
+      to be directly facing Natásha, and was struck by a curious change that had
+      come over her since the ball. She was silent, and not only less pretty
+      than at the ball, but only redeemed from plainness by her look of gentle
+      indifference to everything around.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s the matter with her?” thought Pierre, glancing at her. She was
+      sitting by her sister at the tea table, and reluctantly, without looking
+      at him, made some reply to Borís who sat down beside her. After playing
+      out a whole suit and to his partner’s delight taking five tricks, Pierre,
+      hearing greetings and the steps of someone who had entered the room while
+      he was picking up his tricks, glanced again at Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What has happened to her?” he asked himself with still greater surprise.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew was standing before her, saying something to her with a look
+      of tender solicitude. She, having raised her head, was looking up at him,
+      flushed and evidently trying to master her rapid breathing. And the bright
+      glow of some inner fire that had been suppressed was again alight in her.
+      She was completely transformed and from a plain girl had again become what
+      she had been at the ball.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew went up to Pierre, and the latter noticed a new and youthful
+      expression in his friend’s face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre changed places several times during the game, sitting now with his
+      back to Natásha and now facing her, but during the whole of the six
+      rubbers he watched her and his friend.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Something very important is happening between them,” thought Pierre, and
+      a feeling that was both joyful and painful agitated him and made him
+      neglect the game.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After six rubbers the general got up, saying that it was no use playing
+      like that, and Pierre was released. Natásha on one side was talking with
+      Sónya and Borís, and Véra with a subtle smile was saying something to
+      Prince Andrew. Pierre went up to his friend and, asking whether they were
+      talking secrets, sat down beside them. Véra, having noticed Prince
+      Andrew’s attentions to Natásha, decided that at a party, a real evening
+      party, subtle allusions to the tender passion were absolutely necessary
+      and, seizing a moment when Prince Andrew was alone, began a conversation
+      with him about feelings in general and about her sister. With so
+      intellectual a guest as she considered Prince Andrew to be, she felt that
+      she had to employ her diplomatic tact.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Pierre went up to them he noticed that Véra was being carried away by
+      her self-satisfied talk, but that Prince Andrew seemed embarrassed, a
+      thing that rarely happened with him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What do you think?” Véra was saying with an arch smile. “You are so
+      discerning, Prince, and understand people’s characters so well at a
+      glance. What do you think of Natalie? Could she be constant in her
+      attachments? Could she, like other women” (Véra meant herself), “love a
+      man once for all and remain true to him forever? That is what I consider
+      true love. What do you think, Prince?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I know your sister too little,” replied Prince Andrew, with a sarcastic
+      smile under which he wished to hide his embarrassment, “to be able to
+      solve so delicate a question, and then I have noticed that the less
+      attractive a woman is the more constant she is likely to be,” he added,
+      and looked up at Pierre who was just approaching them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, that is true, Prince. In our days,” continued Véra—mentioning
+      “our days” as people of limited intelligence are fond of doing, imagining
+      that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of “our days”
+       and that human characteristics change with the times—“in our days a
+      girl has so much freedom that the pleasure of being courted often stifles
+      real feeling in her. And it must be confessed that Natalie is very
+      susceptible.” This return to the subject of Natalie caused Prince Andrew
+      to knit his brows with discomfort: he was about to rise, but Véra
+      continued with a still more subtle smile:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I think no one has been more courted than she,” she went on, “but till
+      quite lately she never cared seriously for anyone. Now you know, Count,”
+       she said to Pierre, “even our dear cousin Borís, who, between ourselves,
+      was very far gone in the land of tenderness...” (alluding to a map of love
+      much in vogue at that time).
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew frowned and remained silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are friendly with Borís, aren’t you?” asked Véra.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I know him....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I expect he has told you of his childish love for Natásha?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, there was childish love?” suddenly asked Prince Andrew, blushing
+      unexpectedly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, you know between cousins intimacy often leads to love. <i>Le cousinage
+      est un dangereux voisinage.</i> * Don’t you think so?”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Cousinhood is a dangerous neighborhood.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, undoubtedly!” said Prince Andrew, and with sudden and unnatural
+      liveliness he began chaffing Pierre about the need to be very careful with
+      his fifty-year-old Moscow cousins, and in the midst of these jesting
+      remarks he rose, taking Pierre by the arm, and drew him aside.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well?” asked Pierre, seeing his friend’s strange animation with surprise,
+      and noticing the glance he turned on Natásha as he rose.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I must... I must have a talk with you,” said Prince Andrew. “You know
+      that pair of women’s gloves?” (He referred to the Masonic gloves given to
+      a newly initiated Brother to present to the woman he loved.) “I... but no,
+      I will talk to you later on,” and with a strange light in his eyes and
+      restlessness in his movements, Prince Andrew approached Natásha and sat
+      down beside her. Pierre saw how Prince Andrew asked her something and how
+      she flushed as she replied.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But at that moment Berg came to Pierre and began insisting that he should
+      take part in an argument between the general and the colonel on the
+      affairs in Spain.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Berg was satisfied and happy. The smile of pleasure never left his face.
+      The party was very successful and quite like other parties he had seen.
+      Everything was similar: the ladies’ subtle talk, the cards, the general
+      raising his voice at the card table, and the samovar and the tea cakes;
+      only one thing was lacking that he had always seen at the evening parties
+      he wished to imitate. They had not yet had a loud conversation among the
+      men and a dispute about something important and clever. Now the general
+      had begun such a discussion and so Berg drew Pierre to it.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0128"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Next day, having been invited by the count, Prince Andrew dined with the
+      Rostóvs and spent the rest of the day there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Everyone in the house realized for whose sake Prince Andrew came, and
+      without concealing it he tried to be with Natásha all day. Not only in the
+      soul of the frightened yet happy and enraptured Natásha, but in the whole
+      house, there was a feeling of awe at something important that was bound to
+      happen. The countess looked with sad and sternly serious eyes at Prince
+      Andrew when he talked to Natásha and timidly started some artificial
+      conversation about trifles as soon as he looked her way. Sónya was afraid
+      to leave Natásha and afraid of being in the way when she was with them.
+      Natásha grew pale, in a panic of expectation, when she remained alone with
+      him for a moment. Prince Andrew surprised her by his timidity. She felt
+      that he wanted to say something to her but could not bring himself to do
+      so.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the evening, when Prince Andrew had left, the countess went up to
+      Natásha and whispered: “Well, what?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma! For heaven’s sake don’t ask me anything now! One can’t talk about
+      that,” said Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But all the same that night Natásha, now agitated and now frightened, lay
+      a long time in her mother’s bed gazing straight before her. She told her
+      how he had complimented her, how he told her he was going abroad, asked
+      her where they were going to spend the summer, and then how he had asked
+      her about Borís.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But such a... such a... never happened to me before!” she said. “Only I
+      feel afraid in his presence. I am always afraid when I’m with him. What
+      does that mean? Does it mean that it’s the real thing? Yes? Mamma, are you
+      asleep?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, my love; I am frightened myself,” answered her mother. “Now go!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “All the same I shan’t sleep. What silliness, to sleep! Mummy! Mummy! such
+      a thing never happened to me before,” she said, surprised and alarmed at
+      the feeling she was aware of in herself. “And could we ever have
+      thought!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      It seemed to Natásha that even at the time she first saw Prince Andrew at
+      Otrádnoe she had fallen in love with him. It was as if she feared this
+      strange, unexpected happiness of meeting again the very man she had then
+      chosen (she was firmly convinced she had done so) and of finding him, as
+      it seemed, not indifferent to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And it had to happen that he should come specially to Petersburg while we
+      are here. And it had to happen that we should meet at that ball. It is
+      fate. Clearly it is fate that everything led up to this! Already <i>then</i>,
+      directly I saw him I felt something peculiar.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What else did he say to you? What are those verses? Read them...” said
+      her mother, thoughtfully, referring to some verses Prince Andrew had
+      written in Natásha’s album.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma, one need not be ashamed of his being a widower?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t, Natásha! Pray to God. ‘Marriages are made in heaven,’” said her
+      mother.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Darling Mummy, how I love you! How happy I am!” cried Natásha, shedding
+      tears of joy and excitement and embracing her mother.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that very time Prince Andrew was sitting with Pierre and telling him of
+      his love for Natásha and his firm resolve to make her his wife.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That day Countess Hélène had a reception at her house. The French
+      ambassador was there, and a foreign prince of the blood who had of late
+      become a frequent visitor of hers, and many brilliant ladies and
+      gentlemen. Pierre, who had come downstairs, walked through the rooms and
+      struck everyone by his preoccupied, absent-minded, and morose air.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Since the ball he had felt the approach of a fit of nervous depression and
+      had made desperate efforts to combat it. Since the intimacy of his wife
+      with the royal prince, Pierre had unexpectedly been made a gentleman of
+      the bedchamber, and from that time he had begun to feel oppressed and
+      ashamed in court society, and dark thoughts of the vanity of all things
+      human came to him oftener than before. At the same time the feeling he had
+      noticed between his protégée Natásha and Prince Andrew accentuated his
+      gloom by the contrast between his own position and his friend’s. He tried
+      equally to avoid thinking about his wife, and about Natásha and Prince
+      Andrew; and again everything seemed to him insignificant in comparison
+      with eternity; again the question: for what? presented itself; and he
+      forced himself to work day and night at Masonic labors, hoping to drive
+      away the evil spirit that threatened him. Toward midnight, after he had
+      left the countess’ apartments, he was sitting upstairs in a shabby
+      dressing gown, copying out the original transaction of the Scottish lodge
+      of Freemasons at a table in his low room cloudy with tobacco smoke, when
+      someone came in. It was Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, it’s you!” said Pierre with a preoccupied, dissatisfied air. “And I,
+      you see, am hard at it.” He pointed to his manuscript book with that air
+      of escaping from the ills of life with which unhappy people look at their
+      work.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew, with a beaming, ecstatic expression of renewed life on his
+      face, paused in front of Pierre and, not noticing his sad look, smiled at
+      him with the egotism of joy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, dear heart,” said he, “I wanted to tell you about it yesterday and
+      I have come to do so today. I never experienced anything like it before. I
+      am in love, my friend!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Suddenly Pierre heaved a deep sigh and dumped his heavy person down on the
+      sofa beside Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “With Natásha Rostóva, yes?” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes! Who else should it be? I should never have believed it, but the
+      feeling is stronger than I. Yesterday I tormented myself and suffered, but
+      I would not exchange even that torment for anything in the world, I have
+      not lived till now. At last I live, but I can’t live without her! But can
+      she love me?... I am too old for her.... Why don’t you speak?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I? I? What did I tell you?” said Pierre suddenly, rising and beginning to
+      pace up and down the room. “I always thought it.... That girl is such a
+      treasure... she is a rare girl.... My dear friend, I entreat you, don’t
+      philosophize, don’t doubt, marry, marry, marry.... And I am sure there
+      will not be a happier man than you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But what of her?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “She loves you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t talk rubbish...” said Prince Andrew, smiling and looking into
+      Pierre’s eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She does, I know,” Pierre cried fiercely.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But do listen,” returned Prince Andrew, holding him by the arm. “Do you
+      know the condition I am in? I must talk about it to someone.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, go on, go on. I am very glad,” said Pierre, and his face really
+      changed, his brow became smooth, and he listened gladly to Prince Andrew.
+      Prince Andrew seemed, and really was, quite a different, quite a new man.
+      Where was his spleen, his contempt for life, his disillusionment? Pierre
+      was the only person to whom he made up his mind to speak openly; and to
+      him he told all that was in his soul. Now he boldly and lightly made plans
+      for an extended future, said he could not sacrifice his own happiness to
+      his father’s caprice, and spoke of how he would either make his father
+      consent to this marriage and love her, or would do without his consent;
+      then he marveled at the feeling that had mastered him as at something
+      strange, apart from and independent of himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I should not have believed anyone who told me that I was capable of such
+      love,” said Prince Andrew. “It is not at all the same feeling that I knew
+      in the past. The whole world is now for me divided into two halves: one
+      half is she, and there all is joy, hope, light: the other half is
+      everything where she is not, and there is all gloom and darkness....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Darkness and gloom,” reiterated Pierre: “yes, yes, I understand that.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I cannot help loving the light, it is not my fault. And I am very happy!
+      You understand me? I know you are glad for my sake.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes,” Pierre assented, looking at his friend with a touched and sad
+      expression in his eyes. The brighter Prince Andrew’s lot appeared to him,
+      the gloomier seemed his own.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0129"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew needed his father’s consent to his marriage, and to obtain
+      this he started for the country next day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His father received his son’s communication with external composure, but
+      inward wrath. He could not comprehend how anyone could wish to alter his
+      life or introduce anything new into it, when his own life was already
+      ending. “If only they would let me end my days as I want to,” thought the
+      old man, “then they might do as they please.” With his son, however, he
+      employed the diplomacy he reserved for important occasions and, adopting a
+      quiet tone, discussed the whole matter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the first place the marriage was not a brilliant one as regards birth,
+      wealth, or rank. Secondly, Prince Andrew was no longer as young as he had
+      been and his health was poor (the old man laid special stress on this),
+      while she was very young. Thirdly, he had a son whom it would be a pity to
+      entrust to a chit of a girl. “Fourthly and finally,” the father said,
+      looking ironically at his son, “I beg you to put it off for a year: go
+      abroad, take a cure, look out as you wanted to for a German tutor for
+      Prince Nicholas. Then if your love or passion or obstinacy—as you
+      please—is still as great, marry! And that’s my last word on it.
+      Mind, the last...” concluded the prince, in a tone which showed that
+      nothing would make him alter his decision.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew saw clearly that the old man hoped that his feelings, or his
+      fiancée’s, would not stand a year’s test, or that he (the old prince
+      himself) would die before then, and he decided to conform to his father’s
+      wish—to propose, and postpone the wedding for a year.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Three weeks after the last evening he had spent with the Rostóvs, Prince
+      Andrew returned to Petersburg.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Next day after her talk with her mother Natásha expected Bolkónski all
+      day, but he did not come. On the second and third day it was the same.
+      Pierre did not come either and Natásha, not knowing that Prince Andrew had
+      gone to see his father, could not explain his absence to herself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Three weeks passed in this way. Natásha had no desire to go out anywhere
+      and wandered from room to room like a shadow, idle and listless; she wept
+      secretly at night and did not go to her mother in the evenings. She
+      blushed continually and was irritable. It seemed to her that everybody
+      knew about her disappointment and was laughing at her and pitying her.
+      Strong as was her inward grief, this wound to her vanity intensified her
+      misery.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Once she came to her mother, tried to say something, and suddenly began to
+      cry. Her tears were those of an offended child who does not know why it is
+      being punished.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess began to soothe Natásha, who after first listening to her
+      mother’s words, suddenly interrupted her:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Leave off, Mamma! I don’t think, and don’t want to think about it! He
+      just came and then left off, left off....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Her voice trembled, and she again nearly cried, but recovered and went on
+      quietly:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I don’t at all want to get married. And I am afraid of him; I have
+      now become quite calm, quite calm.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The day after this conversation Natásha put on the old dress which she
+      knew had the peculiar property of conducing to cheerfulness in the
+      mornings, and that day she returned to the old way of life which she had
+      abandoned since the ball. Having finished her morning tea she went to the
+      ballroom, which she particularly liked for its loud resonance, and began
+      singing her solfeggio. When she had finished her first exercise she stood
+      still in the middle of the room and sang a musical phrase that
+      particularly pleased her. She listened joyfully (as though she had not
+      expected it) to the charm of the notes reverberating, filling the whole
+      empty ballroom, and slowly dying away; and all at once she felt cheerful.
+      “What’s the good of making so much of it? Things are nice as it is,” she
+      said to herself, and she began walking up and down the room, not stepping
+      simply on the resounding parquet but treading with each step from the heel
+      to the toe (she had on a new and favorite pair of shoes) and listening to
+      the regular tap of the heel and creak of the toe as gladly as she had to
+      the sounds of her own voice. Passing a mirror she glanced into it. “There,
+      that’s me!” the expression of her face seemed to say as she caught sight
+      of herself. “Well, and very nice too! I need nobody.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A footman wanted to come in to clear away something in the room but she
+      would not let him, and having closed the door behind him continued her
+      walk. That morning she had returned to her favorite mood—love of,
+      and delight in, herself. “How charming that Natásha is!” she said again,
+      speaking as some third, collective, male person. “Pretty, a good voice,
+      young, and in nobody’s way if only they leave her in peace.” But however
+      much they left her in peace she could not now be at peace, and immediately
+      felt this.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the hall the porch door opened, and someone asked, “At home?” and then
+      footsteps were heard. Natásha was looking at the mirror, but did not see
+      herself. She listened to the sounds in the hall. When she saw herself, her
+      face was pale. It was <i>he</i>. She knew this for certain, though she hardly
+      heard his voice through the closed doors.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pale and agitated, Natásha ran into the drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma! Bolkónski has come!” she said. “Mamma, it is awful, it is
+      unbearable! I don’t want... to be tormented? What am I to do?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Before the countess could answer, Prince Andrew entered the room with an
+      agitated and serious face. As soon as he saw Natásha his face brightened.
+      He kissed the countess’ hand and Natásha’s, and sat down beside the sofa.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is long since we had the pleasure...” began the countess, but Prince
+      Andrew interrupted her by answering her intended question, obviously in
+      haste to say what he had to.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have not been to see you all this time because I have been at my
+      father’s. I had to talk over a very important matter with him. I only got
+      back last night,” he said glancing at Natásha; “I want to have a talk with
+      you, Countess,” he added after a moment’s pause.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess lowered her eyes, sighing deeply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am at your disposal,” she murmured.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha knew that she ought to go away, but was unable to do so: something
+      gripped her throat, and regardless of manners she stared straight at
+      Prince Andrew with wide-open eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “At once? This instant!... No, it can’t be!” she thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Again he glanced at her, and that glance convinced her that she was not
+      mistaken. Yes, at once, that very instant, her fate would be decided.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go, Natásha! I will call you,” said the countess in a whisper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha glanced with frightened imploring eyes at Prince Andrew and at her
+      mother and went out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have come, Countess, to ask for your daughter’s hand,” said Prince
+      Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess’ face flushed hotly, but she said nothing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your offer...” she began at last sedately. He remained silent, looking
+      into her eyes. “Your offer...” (she grew confused) “is agreeable to us,
+      and I accept your offer. I am glad. And my husband... I hope... but it
+      will depend on her....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I will speak to her when I have your consent.... Do you give it to me?”
+       said Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” replied the countess. She held out her hand to him, and with a
+      mixed feeling of estrangement and tenderness pressed her lips to his
+      forehead as he stooped to kiss her hand. She wished to love him as a son,
+      but felt that to her he was a stranger and a terrifying man. “I am sure my
+      husband will consent,” said the countess, “but your father...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “My father, to whom I have told my plans, has made it an express condition
+      of his consent that the wedding is not to take place for a year. And I
+      wished to tell you of that,” said Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is true that Natásha is still young, but—so long as that?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It is unavoidable,” said Prince Andrew with a sigh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I will send her to you,” said the countess, and left the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lord have mercy upon us!” she repeated while seeking her daughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya said that Natásha was in her bedroom. Natásha was sitting on the
+      bed, pale and dry-eyed, and was gazing at the icons and whispering
+      something as she rapidly crossed herself. Seeing her mother she jumped up
+      and flew to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, Mamma?... Well?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Go, go to him. He is asking for your hand,” said the countess, coldly it
+      seemed to Natásha. “Go... go,” said the mother, sadly and reproachfully,
+      with a deep sigh, as her daughter ran away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha never remembered how she entered the drawing room. When she came
+      in and saw him she paused. “Is it possible that this stranger has now
+      become <i>everything</i> to me?” she asked herself, and immediately answered,
+      “Yes, everything! He alone is now dearer to me than everything in the
+      world.” Prince Andrew came up to her with downcast eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have loved you from the very first moment I saw you. May I hope?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He looked at her and was struck by the serious impassioned expression of
+      her face. Her face said: “Why ask? Why doubt what you cannot but know? Why
+      speak, when words cannot express what one feels?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She drew near to him and stopped. He took her hand and kissed it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you love me?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes!” Natásha murmured as if in vexation. Then she sighed loudly
+      and, catching her breath more and more quickly, began to sob.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it? What’s the matter?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, I am so happy!” she replied, smiled through her tears, bent over
+      closer to him, paused for an instant as if asking herself whether she
+      might, and then kissed him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew held her hands, looked into her eyes, and did not find in
+      his heart his former love for her. Something in him had suddenly changed;
+      there was no longer the former poetic and mystic charm of desire, but
+      there was pity for her feminine and childish weakness, fear at her
+      devotion and trustfulness, and an oppressive yet joyful sense of the duty
+      that now bound him to her forever. The present feeling, though not so
+      bright and poetic as the former, was stronger and more serious.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Did your mother tell you that it cannot be for a year?” asked Prince
+      Andrew, still looking into her eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is it possible that I—the ‘chit of a girl,’ as everybody
+      called me,” thought Natásha—“is it possible that I am now to be
+      the <i>wife</i> and the equal of this strange, dear, clever man whom even my father
+      looks up to? Can it be true? Can it be true that there can be no more playing
+      with life, that now I am grown up, that on me now lies a responsibility
+      for my every word and deed? Yes, but what did he ask me?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No,” she replied, but she had not understood his question.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Forgive me!” he said. “But you are so young, and I have already been
+      through so much in life. I am afraid for you, you do not yet know
+      yourself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha listened with concentrated attention, trying but failing to take
+      in the meaning of his words.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hard as this year which delays my happiness will be,” continued Prince
+      Andrew, “it will give you time to be sure of yourself. I ask you to make
+      me happy in a year, but you are free: our engagement shall remain a
+      secret, and should you find that you do not love me, or should you come to
+      love...” said Prince Andrew with an unnatural smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why do you say that?” Natásha interrupted him. “You know that from the
+      very day you first came to Otrádnoe I have loved you,” she cried, quite
+      convinced that she spoke the truth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In a year you will learn to know yourself....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “A whole year!” Natásha repeated suddenly, only now realizing that the
+      marriage was to be postponed for a year. “But why a year? Why a year?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew began to explain to her the reasons for this delay. Natásha
+      did not hear him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And can’t it be helped?” she asked. Prince Andrew did not reply, but his
+      face expressed the impossibility of altering that decision.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s awful! Oh, it’s awful! awful!” Natásha suddenly cried, and again
+      burst into sobs. “I shall die, waiting a year: it’s impossible, it’s
+      awful!” She looked into her lover’s face and saw in it a look of
+      commiseration and perplexity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, no! I’ll do anything!” she said, suddenly checking her tears. “I am
+      so happy.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The father and mother came into the room and gave the betrothed couple
+      their blessing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From that day Prince Andrew began to frequent the Rostóvs’ as Natásha’s
+      affianced lover.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0130"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      No betrothal ceremony took place and Natásha’s engagement to Bolkónski was
+      not announced; Prince Andrew insisted on that. He said that as he was
+      responsible for the delay he ought to bear the whole burden of it; that he
+      had given his word and bound himself forever, but that he did not wish to
+      bind Natásha and gave her perfect freedom. If after six months she felt
+      that she did not love him she would have full right to reject him.
+      Naturally neither Natásha nor her parents wished to hear of this, but
+      Prince Andrew was firm. He came every day to the Rostóvs’, but did not
+      behave to Natásha as an affianced lover: he did not use the familiar <i>thou</i>,
+      but said <i>you</i> to her, and kissed only her hand. After their engagement,
+      quite different, intimate, and natural relations sprang up between them.
+      It was as if they had not known each other till now. Both liked to recall
+      how they had regarded each other when as yet they were <i>nothing</i> to one
+      another; they felt themselves now quite different beings: then they were
+      artificial, now natural and sincere. At first the family felt some
+      constraint in intercourse with Prince Andrew; he seemed a man from another
+      world, and for a long time Natásha trained the family to get used to him,
+      proudly assuring them all that he only appeared to be different, but was
+      really just like all of them, and that she was not afraid of him and no
+      one else ought to be. After a few days they grew accustomed to him, and
+      without restraint in his presence pursued their usual way of life, in
+      which he took his part. He could talk about rural economy with the count,
+      fashions with the countess and Natásha, and about albums and fancywork
+      with Sónya. Sometimes the household both among themselves and in his
+      presence expressed their wonder at how it had all happened, and at the
+      evident omens there had been of it: Prince Andrew’s coming to Otrádnoe and
+      their coming to Petersburg, and the likeness between Natásha and Prince
+      Andrew which her nurse had noticed on his first visit, and Andrew’s
+      encounter with Nicholas in 1805, and many other incidents betokening that
+      it had to be.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the house that poetic dullness and quiet reigned which always
+      accompanies the presence of a betrothed couple. Often when all sitting
+      together everyone kept silent. Sometimes the others would get up and go
+      away and the couple, left alone, still remained silent. They rarely spoke
+      of their future life. Prince Andrew was afraid and ashamed to speak of it.
+      Natásha shared this as she did all his feelings, which she constantly
+      divined. Once she began questioning him about his son. Prince Andrew
+      blushed, as he often did now—Natásha particularly liked it in him—and
+      said that his son would not live with them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why not?” asked Natásha in a frightened tone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I cannot take him away from his grandfather, and besides...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How I should have loved him!” said Natásha, immediately guessing his
+      thought; “but I know you wish to avoid any pretext for finding fault with
+      us.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sometimes the old count would come up, kiss Prince Andrew, and ask his
+      advice about Pétya’s education or Nicholas’ service. The old countess
+      sighed as she looked at them; Sónya was always getting frightened lest she
+      should be in the way and tried to find excuses for leaving them alone,
+      even when they did not wish it. When Prince Andrew spoke (he could tell a
+      story very well), Natásha listened to him with pride; when she spoke she
+      noticed with fear and joy that he gazed attentively and scrutinizingly at
+      her. She asked herself in perplexity: “What does he look for in me? He is
+      trying to discover something by looking at me! What if what he seeks in me
+      is not there?” Sometimes she fell into one of the mad, merry moods
+      characteristic of her, and then she particularly loved to hear and see how
+      Prince Andrew laughed. He seldom laughed, but when he did he abandoned
+      himself entirely to his laughter, and after such a laugh she always felt
+      nearer to him. Natásha would have been completely happy if the thought of
+      the separation awaiting her and drawing near had not terrified her, just
+      as the mere thought of it made him turn pale and cold.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the eve of his departure from Petersburg Prince Andrew brought with him
+      Pierre, who had not been to the Rostóvs’ once since the ball. Pierre
+      seemed disconcerted and embarrassed. He was talking to the countess, and
+      Natásha sat down beside a little chess table with Sónya, thereby inviting
+      Prince Andrew to come too. He did so.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You have known Bezúkhov a long time?” he asked. “Do you like him?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, he’s a dear, but very absurd.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And as usual when speaking of Pierre, she began to tell anecdotes of his
+      absent-mindedness, some of which had even been invented about him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know I have entrusted him with our secret? I have known him from
+      childhood. He has a heart of gold. I beg you, Natalie,” Prince Andrew said
+      with sudden seriousness—“I am going away and heaven knows what may
+      happen. You may cease to... all right, I know I am not to say that. Only
+      this, then: whatever may happen to you when I am not here...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What can happen?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Whatever trouble may come,” Prince Andrew continued, “I beg you,
+      Mademoiselle Sophie, whatever may happen, to turn to him alone for advice
+      and help! He is a most absent-minded and absurd fellow, but he has a heart
+      of gold.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Neither her father, nor her mother, nor Sónya, nor Prince Andrew himself
+      could have foreseen how the separation from her lover would act on
+      Natásha. Flushed and agitated she went about the house all that day,
+      dry-eyed, occupied with most trivial matters as if not understanding what
+      awaited her. She did not even cry when, on taking leave, he kissed her
+      hand for the last time. “Don’t go!” she said in a tone that made him
+      wonder whether he really ought not to stay and which he remembered long
+      afterwards. Nor did she cry when he was gone; but for several days she sat
+      in her room dry-eyed, taking no interest in anything and only saying now
+      and then, “Oh, why did he go away?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But a fortnight after his departure, to the surprise of those around her,
+      she recovered from her mental sickness just as suddenly and became her old
+      self again, but with a change in her moral physiognomy, as a child gets up
+      after a long illness with a changed expression of face.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0131"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      During that year after his son’s departure, Prince Nicholas Bolkónski’s
+      health and temper became much worse. He grew still more irritable, and it
+      was Princess Mary who generally bore the brunt of his frequent fits of
+      unprovoked anger. He seemed carefully to seek out her tender spots so as
+      to torture her mentally as harshly as possible. Princess Mary had two
+      passions and consequently two joys—her nephew, little Nicholas, and
+      religion—and these were the favorite subjects of the prince’s
+      attacks and ridicule. Whatever was spoken of he would bring round to the
+      superstitiousness of old maids, or the petting and spoiling of children.
+      “You want to make him”—little Nicholas—“into an old maid like
+      yourself! A pity! Prince Andrew wants a son and not an old maid,” he would
+      say. Or, turning to Mademoiselle Bourienne, he would ask her in Princess
+      Mary’s presence how she liked our village priests and icons and would joke
+      about them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He continually hurt Princess Mary’s feelings and tormented her, but it
+      cost her no effort to forgive him. Could he be to blame toward her, or
+      could her father, whom she knew loved her in spite of it all, be unjust?
+      And what is justice? The princess never thought of that proud word
+      “justice.” All the complex laws of man centered for her in one clear and
+      simple law—the law of love and self-sacrifice taught us by Him who
+      lovingly suffered for mankind though He Himself was God. What had she to
+      do with the justice or injustice of other people? She had to endure and
+      love, and that she did.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the winter Prince Andrew had come to Bald Hills and had been gay,
+      gentle, and more affectionate than Princess Mary had known him for a long
+      time past. She felt that something had happened to him, but he said
+      nothing to her about his love. Before he left he had a long talk with his
+      father about something, and Princess Mary noticed that before his
+      departure they were dissatisfied with one another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Soon after Prince Andrew had gone, Princess Mary wrote to her friend Julie
+      Karágina in Petersburg, whom she had dreamed (as all girls dream) of
+      marrying to her brother, and who was at that time in mourning for her own
+      brother, killed in Turkey.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sorrow, it seems, is our common lot, my dear, tender friend Julie.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Your loss is so terrible that I can only explain it to myself as a special
+      providence of God who, loving you, wishes to try you and your excellent
+      mother. Oh, my friend! Religion, and religion alone, can—I will not
+      say comfort us—but save us from despair. Religion alone can explain
+      to us what without its help man cannot comprehend: why, for what cause,
+      kind and noble beings able to find happiness in life—not merely
+      harming no one but necessary to the happiness of others—are called
+      away to God, while cruel, useless, harmful persons, or such as are a
+      burden to themselves and to others, are left living. The first death I
+      saw, and one I shall never forget—that of my dear sister-in-law—left
+      that impression on me. Just as you ask destiny why your splendid brother
+      had to die, so I asked why that angel Lise, who not only never wronged
+      anyone, but in whose soul there were never any unkind thoughts, had to
+      die. And what do you think, dear friend? Five years have passed since
+      then, and already I, with my petty understanding, begin to see clearly why
+      she had to die, and in what way that death was but an expression of the
+      infinite goodness of the Creator, whose every action, though generally
+      incomprehensible to us, is but a manifestation of His infinite love for
+      His creatures. Perhaps, I often think, she was too angelically innocent to
+      have the strength to perform all a mother’s duties. As a young wife she
+      was irreproachable; perhaps she could not have been so as a mother. As it
+      is, not only has she left us, and particularly Prince Andrew, with the
+      purest regrets and memories, but probably she will <i>there</i> receive a place I
+      dare not hope for myself. But not to speak of her alone, that early and
+      terrible death has had the most beneficent influence on me and on my
+      brother in spite of all our grief. Then, at the moment of our loss, these
+      thoughts could not occur to me; I should then have dismissed them with
+      horror, but now they are very clear and certain. I write all this to you,
+      dear friend, only to convince you of the Gospel truth which has become for
+      me a principle of life: not a single hair of our heads will fall without
+      His will. And His will is governed only by infinite love for us, and so
+      whatever befalls us is for our good.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      You ask whether we shall spend next winter in Moscow. In spite of my wish
+      to see you, I do not think so and do not want to do so. You will be
+      surprised to hear that the reason for this is Buonaparte! The case is
+      this: my father’s health is growing noticeably worse, he cannot stand any
+      contradiction and is becoming irritable. This irritability is, as you
+      know, chiefly directed to political questions. He cannot endure the notion
+      that Buonaparte is negotiating on equal terms with all the sovereigns of
+      Europe and particularly with our own, the grandson of the Great Catherine!
+      As you know, I am quite indifferent to politics, but from my father’s
+      remarks and his talks with Michael Ivánovich I know all that goes on in
+      the world and especially about the honors conferred on Buonaparte, who
+      only at Bald Hills in the whole world, it seems, is not accepted as a
+      great man, still less as Emperor of France. And my father cannot stand
+      this. It seems to me that it is chiefly because of his political views
+      that my father is reluctant to speak of going to Moscow; for he foresees
+      the encounters that would result from his way of expressing his views
+      regardless of anybody. All the benefit he might derive from a course of
+      treatment he would lose as a result of the disputes about Buonaparte which
+      would be inevitable. In any case it will be decided very shortly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Our family life goes on in the old way except for my brother Andrew’s
+      absence. He, as I wrote you before, has changed very much of late. After
+      his sorrow he only this year quite recovered his spirits. He has again
+      become as I used to know him when a child: kind, affectionate, with that
+      heart of gold to which I know no equal. He has realized, it seems to me,
+      that life is not over for him. But together with this mental change he has
+      grown physically much weaker. He has become thinner and more nervous. I am
+      anxious about him and glad he is taking this trip abroad which the doctors
+      recommended long ago. I hope it will cure him. You write that in
+      Petersburg he is spoken of as one of the most active, cultivated, and
+      capable of the young men. Forgive my vanity as a relation, but I never
+      doubted it. The good he has done to everybody here, from his peasants up
+      to the gentry, is incalculable. On his arrival in Petersburg he received
+      only his due. I always wonder at the way rumors fly from Petersburg to
+      Moscow, especially such false ones as that you write about—I mean
+      the report of my brother’s betrothal to the little Rostóva. I do not think
+      my brother will ever marry again, and certainly not her; and this is why:
+      first, I know that though he rarely speaks about the wife he has lost, the
+      grief of that loss has gone too deep in his heart for him ever to decide
+      to give her a successor and our little angel a stepmother. Secondly
+      because, as far as I know, that girl is not the kind of girl who could
+      please Prince Andrew. I do not think he would choose her for a wife, and
+      frankly I do not wish it. But I am running on too long and am at the end
+      of my second sheet. Good-by, my dear friend. May God keep you in His holy
+      and mighty care. My dear friend, Mademoiselle Bourienne, sends you kisses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      MARY
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0132"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      In the middle of the summer Princess Mary received an unexpected letter
+      from Prince Andrew in Switzerland in which he gave her strange and
+      surprising news. He informed her of his engagement to Natásha Rostóva. The
+      whole letter breathed loving rapture for his betrothed and tender and
+      confiding affection for his sister. He wrote that he had never loved as he
+      did now and that only now did he understand and know what life was. He
+      asked his sister to forgive him for not having told her of his resolve
+      when he had last visited Bald Hills, though he had spoken of it to his
+      father. He had not done so for fear Princess Mary should ask her father to
+      give his consent, irritating him and having to bear the brunt of his
+      displeasure without attaining her object. “Besides,” he wrote, “the matter
+      was not then so definitely settled as it is now. My father then insisted
+      on a delay of a year and now already <i>six months</i>, half of that period, have
+      passed, and my resolution is firmer than ever. If the doctors did not keep
+      me here at the spas I should be back in Russia, but as it is I have to
+      postpone my return for three months. You know me and my relations with
+      Father. I want nothing from him. I have been and always shall be
+      independent; but to go against his will and arouse his anger, now that he
+      may perhaps remain with us such a short time, would destroy half my
+      happiness. I am now writing to him about the same question, and beg you to
+      choose a good moment to hand him the letter and to let me know how he
+      looks at the whole matter and whether there is hope that he may consent to
+      reduce the term by four months.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      After long hesitations, doubts, and prayers, Princess Mary gave the letter
+      to her father. The next day the old prince said to her quietly:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Write and tell your brother to wait till I am dead.... It won’t be long—I
+      shall soon set him free.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess was about to reply, but her father would not let her speak
+      and, raising his voice more and more, cried:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Marry, marry, my boy!... A good family!... Clever people, eh? Rich, eh?
+      Yes, a nice stepmother little Nicholas will have! Write and tell him that
+      he may marry tomorrow if he likes. She will be little Nicholas’ stepmother
+      and I’ll marry Bourienne!... Ha, ha, ha! He mustn’t be without a
+      stepmother either! Only one thing, no more women are wanted in my house—let
+      him marry and live by himself. Perhaps you will go and live with him too?”
+       he added, turning to Princess Mary. “Go in heaven’s name! Go out into the
+      frost... the frost... the frost!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      After this outburst the prince did not speak any more about the matter.
+      But repressed vexation at his son’s poor-spirited behavior found
+      expression in his treatment of his daughter. To his former pretexts for
+      irony a fresh one was now added—allusions to stepmothers and
+      amiabilities to Mademoiselle Bourienne.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why shouldn’t I marry her?” he asked his daughter. “She’ll make a
+      splendid princess!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And latterly, to her surprise and bewilderment, Princess Mary noticed that
+      her father was really associating more and more with the Frenchwoman. She
+      wrote to Prince Andrew about the reception of his letter, but comforted
+      him with hopes of reconciling their father to the idea.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Little Nicholas and his education, her brother Andrew, and religion were
+      Princess Mary’s joys and consolations; but besides that, since everyone
+      must have personal hopes, Princess Mary in the profoundest depths of her
+      heart had a hidden dream and hope that supplied the chief consolation of
+      her life. This comforting dream and hope were given her by <i>God’s folk</i>—the
+      half-witted and other pilgrims who visited her without the prince’s
+      knowledge. The longer she lived, the more experience and observation she
+      had of life, the greater was her wonder at the short-sightedness of men
+      who seek enjoyment and happiness here on earth: toiling, suffering,
+      struggling, and harming one another, to obtain that impossible, visionary,
+      sinful happiness. Prince Andrew had loved his wife, she died, but that was
+      not enough: he wanted to bind his happiness to another woman. Her father
+      objected to this because he wanted a more distinguished and wealthier
+      match for Andrew. And they all struggled and suffered and tormented one
+      another and injured their souls, their eternal souls, for the attainment
+      of benefits which endure but for an instant. Not only do we know this
+      ourselves, but Christ, the Son of God, came down to earth and told us that
+      this life is but for a moment and is a probation; yet we cling to it and
+      think to find happiness in it. “How is it that no one realizes this?”
+       thought Princess Mary. “No one except these despised <i>God’s folk</i> who,
+      wallet on back, come to me by the back door, afraid of being seen by the
+      prince, not for fear of ill-usage by him but for fear of causing him to
+      sin. To leave family, home, and all the cares of worldly welfare, in order
+      without clinging to anything to wander in hempen rags from place to place
+      under an assumed name, doing no one any harm but praying for all—for
+      those who drive one away as well as for those who protect one: higher than
+      that life and truth there is no life or truth!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      There was one pilgrim, a quiet pockmarked little woman of fifty called
+      Theodosia, who for over thirty years had gone about barefoot and worn
+      heavy chains. Princess Mary was particularly fond of her. Once, when in a
+      room with a lamp dimly lit before the icon Theodosia was talking of her
+      life, the thought that Theodosia alone had found the true path of life
+      suddenly came to Princess Mary with such force that she resolved to become
+      a pilgrim herself. When Theodosia had gone to sleep Princess Mary thought
+      about this for a long time, and at last made up her mind that, strange as
+      it might seem, she must go on a pilgrimage. She disclosed this thought to
+      no one but to her confessor, Father Akínfi, the monk, and he approved of
+      her intention. Under guise of a present for the pilgrims, Princess Mary
+      prepared a pilgrim’s complete costume for herself: a coarse smock, bast
+      shoes, a rough coat, and a black kerchief. Often, approaching the chest of
+      drawers containing this secret treasure, Princess Mary paused, uncertain
+      whether the time had not already come to put her project into execution.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Often, listening to the pilgrims’ tales, she was so stimulated by their
+      simple speech, mechanical to them but to her so full of deep meaning, that
+      several times she was on the point of abandoning everything and running
+      away from home. In imagination she already pictured herself by Theodosia’s
+      side, dressed in coarse rags, walking with a staff, a wallet on her back,
+      along the dusty road, directing her wanderings from one saint’s shrine to
+      another, free from envy, earthly love, or desire, and reaching at last the
+      place where there is no more sorrow or sighing, but eternal joy and bliss.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I shall come to a place and pray there, and before having time to get
+      used to it or getting to love it, I shall go farther. I will go on till my
+      legs fail, and I’ll lie down and die somewhere, and shall at last reach
+      that eternal, quiet haven, where there is neither sorrow nor sighing...”
+       thought Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But afterwards, when she saw her father and especially little Koko
+      (Nicholas), her resolve weakened. She wept quietly, and felt that she was
+      a sinner who loved her father and little nephew more than God.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0139"></a>
+      BOOK SEVEN: 1810 - 11
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0133"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labor—idleness—was
+      a condition of the first man’s blessedness before the Fall. Fallen man has
+      retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only
+      because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our brows, but because
+      our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease. An inner
+      voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle. If man could find a
+      state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his duty, he
+      would have found one of the conditions of man’s primitive blessedness. And
+      such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a
+      whole class—the military. The chief attraction of military service
+      has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable
+      idleness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas Rostóv experienced this blissful condition to the full when,
+      after 1807, he continued to serve in the Pávlograd regiment, in which he
+      already commanded the squadron he had taken over from Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv had become a bluff, good-natured fellow, whom his Moscow
+      acquaintances would have considered rather bad form, but who was liked and
+      respected by his comrades, subordinates, and superiors, and was well
+      contented with his life. Of late, in 1809, he found in letters from home
+      more frequent complaints from his mother that their affairs were falling
+      into greater and greater disorder, and that it was time for him to come
+      back to gladden and comfort his old parents.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Reading these letters, Nicholas felt a dread of their wanting to take him
+      away from surroundings in which, protected from all the entanglements of
+      life, he was living so calmly and quietly. He felt that sooner or later he
+      would have to re-enter that whirlpool of life, with its embarrassments and
+      affairs to be straightened out, its accounts with stewards, quarrels, and
+      intrigues, its ties, society, and with Sónya’s love and his promise to
+      her. It was all dreadfully difficult and complicated; and he replied to
+      his mother in cold, formal letters in French, beginning: “My dear Mamma,”
+       and ending: “Your obedient son,” which said nothing of when he would
+      return. In 1810 he received letters from his parents, in which they told
+      him of Natásha’s engagement to Bolkónski, and that the wedding would be in
+      a year’s time because the old prince made difficulties. This letter
+      grieved and mortified Nicholas. In the first place he was sorry that
+      Natásha, for whom he cared more than for anyone else in the family, should
+      be lost to the home; and secondly, from his hussar point of view, he
+      regretted not to have been there to show that fellow Bolkónski that
+      connection with him was no such great honor after all, and that if he
+      loved Natásha he might dispense with permission from his dotard father.
+      For a moment he hesitated whether he should not apply for leave in order
+      to see Natásha before she was married, but then came the maneuvers, and
+      considerations about Sónya and about the confusion of their affairs, and
+      Nicholas again put it off. But in the spring of that year, he received a
+      letter from his mother, written without his father’s knowledge, and that
+      letter persuaded him to return. She wrote that if he did not come and take
+      matters in hand, their whole property would be sold by auction and they
+      would all have to go begging. The count was so weak, and trusted Mítenka
+      so much, and was so good-natured, that everybody took advantage of him and
+      things were going from bad to worse. “For God’s sake, I implore you, come
+      at once if you do not wish to make me and the whole family wretched,”
+       wrote the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This letter touched Nicholas. He had that common sense of a matter-of-fact
+      man which showed him what he ought to do.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The right thing now was, if not to retire from the service, at any rate to
+      go home on leave. Why he had to go he did not know; but after his
+      after-dinner nap he gave orders to saddle Mars, an extremely vicious gray
+      stallion that had not been ridden for a long time, and when he returned
+      with the horse all in a lather, he informed Lavrúshka (Denísov’s servant
+      who had remained with him) and his comrades who turned up in the evening
+      that he was applying for leave and was going home. Difficult and strange
+      as it was for him to reflect that he would go away without having heard
+      from the staff—and this interested him extremely—whether he
+      was promoted to a captaincy or would receive the Order of St. Anne for the
+      last maneuvers; strange as it was to think that he would go away without
+      having sold his three roans to the Polish Count Golukhovski, who was
+      bargaining for the horses Rostóv had betted he would sell for two thousand
+      rubles; incomprehensible as it seemed that the ball the hussars were
+      giving in honor of the Polish Mademoiselle Przazdziecka (out of rivalry to
+      the Uhlans who had given one in honor of their Polish Mademoiselle
+      Borzozowska) would take place without him—he knew he must go away
+      from this good, bright world to somewhere where everything was stupid and
+      confused. A week later he obtained his leave. His hussar comrades—not
+      only those of his own regiment, but the whole brigade—gave Rostóv a
+      dinner to which the subscription was fifteen rubles a head, and at which
+      there were two bands and two choirs of singers. Rostóv danced the Trepák
+      with Major Básov; the tipsy officers tossed, embraced, and dropped Rostóv;
+      the soldiers of the third squadron tossed him too, and shouted “hurrah!”
+       and then they put him in his sleigh and escorted him as far as the first
+      post station.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the first half of the journey—from Kremenchúg to Kiev—all
+      Rostóv’s thoughts, as is usual in such cases, were behind him, with the
+      squadron; but when he had gone more than halfway he began to forget his
+      three roans and Dozhoyvéyko, his quartermaster, and to wonder anxiously
+      how things would be at Otrádnoe and what he would find there. Thoughts of
+      home grew stronger the nearer he approached it—far stronger, as
+      though this feeling of his was subject to the law by which the force of
+      attraction is in inverse proportion to the square of the distance. At the
+      last post station before Otrádnoe he gave the driver a three-ruble tip,
+      and on arriving he ran breathlessly, like a boy, up the steps of his home.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the rapture of meeting, and after that odd feeling of unsatisfied
+      expectation—the feeling that “everything is just the same, so why
+      did I hurry?”—Nicholas began to settle down in his old home world.
+      His father and mother were much the same, only a little older. What was
+      new in them was a certain uneasiness and occasional discord, which there
+      used not to be, and which, as Nicholas soon found out, was due to the bad
+      state of their affairs. Sónya was nearly twenty; she had stopped growing
+      prettier and promised nothing more than she was already, but that was
+      enough. She exhaled happiness and love from the time Nicholas returned,
+      and the faithful, unalterable love of this girl had a gladdening effect on
+      him. Pétya and Natásha surprised Nicholas most. Pétya was a big handsome
+      boy of thirteen, merry, witty, and mischievous, with a voice that was
+      already breaking. As for Natásha, for a long while Nicholas wondered and
+      laughed whenever he looked at her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You’re not the same at all,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How? Am I uglier?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “On the contrary, but what dignity? A princess!” he whispered to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, yes!” cried Natásha, joyfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She told him about her romance with Prince Andrew and of his visit to
+      Otrádnoe and showed him his last letter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, are you glad?” Natásha asked. “I am so tranquil and happy now.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Very glad,” answered Nicholas. “He is an excellent fellow.... And are you
+      very much in love?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How shall I put it?” replied Natásha. “I was in love with Borís, with my
+      teacher, and with Denísov, but this is quite different. I feel at peace
+      and settled. I know that no better man than he exists, and I am calm and
+      contented now. Not at all as before.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas expressed his disapproval of the postponement of the marriage for
+      a year; but Natásha attacked her brother with exasperation, proving to him
+      that it could not be otherwise, and that it would be a bad thing to enter
+      a family against the father’s will, and that she herself wished it so.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You don’t at all understand,” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas was silent and agreed with her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Her brother often wondered as he looked at her. She did not seem at all
+      like a girl in love and parted from her affianced husband. She was
+      even-tempered and calm and quite as cheerful as of old. This amazed
+      Nicholas and even made him regard Bolkónski’s courtship skeptically. He
+      could not believe that her fate was sealed, especially as he had not seen
+      her with Prince Andrew. It always seemed to him that there was something
+      not quite right about this intended marriage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why this delay? Why no betrothal?” he thought. Once, when he had touched
+      on this topic with his mother, he discovered, to his surprise and somewhat
+      to his satisfaction, that in the depth of her soul she too had doubts
+      about this marriage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You see he writes,” said she, showing her son a letter of Prince
+      Andrew’s, with that latent grudge a mother always has in regard to a
+      daughter’s future married happiness, “he writes that he won’t come before
+      December. What can be keeping him? Illness, probably! His health is very
+      delicate. Don’t tell Natásha. And don’t attach importance to her being so
+      bright: that’s because she’s living through the last days of her girlhood,
+      but I know what she is like every time we receive a letter from him!
+      However, God grant that everything turns out well!” (She always ended with
+      these words.) “He is an excellent man!”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0134"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After reaching home Nicholas was at first serious and even dull. He was
+      worried by the impending necessity of interfering in the stupid business
+      matters for which his mother had called him home. To throw off this burden
+      as quickly as possible, on the third day after his arrival he went, angry
+      and scowling and without answering questions as to where he was going, to
+      Mítenka’s lodge and demanded an <i>account of everything</i>. But what an
+      <i>account of everything</i> might be Nicholas knew even less than the frightened
+      and bewildered Mítenka. The conversation and the examination of the accounts
+      with Mítenka did not last long. The village elder, a peasant delegate, and
+      the village clerk, who were waiting in the passage, heard with fear and
+      delight first the young count’s voice roaring and snapping and rising
+      louder and louder, and then words of abuse, dreadful words, ejaculated one
+      after the other.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Robber!... Ungrateful wretch!... I’ll hack the dog to pieces! I’m not my
+      father!... Robbing us!...” and so on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Then with no less fear and delight they saw how the young count, red in
+      the face and with bloodshot eyes, dragged Mítenka out by the scruff of the
+      neck and applied his foot and knee to his behind with great agility at
+      convenient moments between the words, shouting, “Be off! Never let me see
+      your face here again, you villain!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Mítenka flew headlong down the six steps and ran away into the shrubbery.
+      (This shrubbery was a well-known haven of refuge for culprits at Otrádnoe.
+      Mítenka himself, returning tipsy from the town, used to hide there, and
+      many of the residents at Otrádnoe, hiding from Mítenka, knew of its
+      protective qualities.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Mítenka’s wife and sisters-in-law thrust their heads and frightened faces
+      out of the door of a room where a bright samovar was boiling and where the
+      steward’s high bedstead stood with its patchwork quilt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The young count paid no heed to them, but, breathing hard, passed by with
+      resolute strides and went into the house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess, who heard at once from the maids what had happened at the
+      lodge, was calmed by the thought that now their affairs would certainly
+      improve, but on the other hand felt anxious as to the effect this
+      excitement might have on her son. She went several times to his door on
+      tiptoe and listened, as he lighted one pipe after another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day the old count called his son aside and, with an embarrassed
+      smile, said to him:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But you know, my dear boy, it’s a pity you got excited! Mítenka has told
+      me all about it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I knew,” thought Nicholas, “that I should never understand anything in
+      this crazy world.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You were angry that he had not entered those 700 rubles. But they were
+      carried forward—and you did not look at the other page.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Papa, he is a blackguard and a thief! I know he is! And what I have done,
+      I have done; but, if you like, I won’t speak to him again.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, my dear boy” (the count, too, felt embarrassed. He knew he had
+      mismanaged his wife’s property and was to blame toward his children, but
+      he did not know how to remedy it). “No, I beg you to attend to the
+      business. I am old. I...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, Papa. Forgive me if I have caused you unpleasantness. I understand it
+      all less than you do.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Devil take all these peasants, and money matters, and carryings forward
+      from page to page,” he thought. “I used to understand what a ‘corner’ and
+      the stakes at cards meant, but carrying forward to another page I don’t
+      understand at all,” said he to himself, and after that he did not meddle
+      in business affairs. But once the countess called her son and informed him
+      that she had a promissory note from Anna Mikháylovna for two thousand
+      rubles, and asked him what he thought of doing with it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This,” answered Nicholas. “You say it rests with me. Well, I don’t like
+      Anna Mikháylovna and I don’t like Borís, but they were our friends and
+      poor. Well then, this!” and he tore up the note, and by so doing caused
+      the old countess to weep tears of joy. After that, young Rostóv took no
+      further part in any business affairs, but devoted himself with passionate
+      enthusiasm to what was to him a new pursuit—the chase—for
+      which his father kept a large establishment.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0135"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The weather was already growing wintry and morning frosts congealed an
+      earth saturated by autumn rains. The verdure had thickened and its bright
+      green stood out sharply against the brownish strips of winter rye trodden
+      down by the cattle, and against the pale-yellow stubble of the spring
+      buckwheat. The wooded ravines and the copses, which at the end of August
+      had still been green islands amid black fields and stubble, had become
+      golden and bright-red islands amid the green winter rye. The hares had
+      already half changed their summer coats, the fox cubs were beginning to
+      scatter, and the young wolves were bigger than dogs. It was the best time
+      of the year for the chase. The hounds of that ardent young sportsman
+      Rostóv had not merely reached hard winter condition, but were so jaded
+      that at a meeting of the huntsmen it was decided to give them a three
+      days’ rest and then, on the sixteenth of September, to go on a distant
+      expedition, starting from the oak grove where there was an undisturbed
+      litter of wolf cubs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All that day the hounds remained at home. It was frosty and the air was
+      sharp, but toward evening the sky became overcast and it began to thaw. On
+      the fifteenth, when young Rostóv, in his dressing gown, looked out of the
+      window, he saw it was an unsurpassable morning for hunting: it was as if
+      the sky were melting and sinking to the earth without any wind. The only
+      motion in the air was that of the dripping, microscopic particles of
+      drizzling mist. The bare twigs in the garden were hung with transparent
+      drops which fell on the freshly fallen leaves. The earth in the kitchen
+      garden looked wet and black and glistened like poppy seed and at a short
+      distance merged into the dull, moist veil of mist. Nicholas went out into
+      the wet and muddy porch. There was a smell of decaying leaves and of dog.
+      Mílka, a black-spotted, broad-haunched bitch with prominent black eyes,
+      got up on seeing her master, stretched her hind legs, lay down like a
+      hare, and then suddenly jumped up and licked him right on his nose and
+      mustache. Another borzoi, a dog, catching sight of his master from the
+      garden path, arched his back and, rushing headlong toward the porch with
+      lifted tail, began rubbing himself against his legs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “O-hoy!” came at that moment, that inimitable huntsman’s call which unites
+      the deepest bass with the shrillest tenor, and round the corner came
+      Daniel the head huntsman and head kennelman, a gray, wrinkled old man with
+      hair cut straight over his forehead, Ukrainian fashion, a long bent whip
+      in his hand, and that look of independence and scorn of everything that is
+      only seen in huntsmen. He doffed his Circassian cap to his master and
+      looked at him scornfully. This scorn was not offensive to his master.
+      Nicholas knew that this Daniel, disdainful of everybody and who considered
+      himself above them, was all the same his serf and huntsman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Daniel!” Nicholas said timidly, conscious at the sight of the weather,
+      the hounds, and the huntsman that he was being carried away by that
+      irresistible passion for sport which makes a man forget all his previous
+      resolutions, as a lover forgets in the presence of his mistress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What orders, your excellency?” said the huntsman in his deep bass, deep
+      as a proto-deacon’s and hoarse with hallooing—and two flashing black
+      eyes gazed from under his brows at his master, who was silent. “Can you
+      resist it?” those eyes seemed to be asking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s a good day, eh? For a hunt and a gallop, eh?” asked Nicholas,
+      scratching Mílka behind the ears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Daniel did not answer, but winked instead.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I sent Uvárka at dawn to listen,” his bass boomed out after a minute’s
+      pause. “He says <i>she’s moved them</i> into the Otrádnoe enclosure.
+      They were howling there.” (This meant that the she-wolf, about whom they both
+      knew, had moved with her cubs to the Otrádnoe copse, a small place a mile and a
+      half from the house.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We ought to go, don’t you think so?” said Nicholas. “Come to me with
+      Uvárka.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “As you please.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Then put off feeding them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, sir.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Five minutes later Daniel and Uvárka were standing in Nicholas’ big study.
+      Though Daniel was not a big man, to see him in a room was like seeing a
+      horse or a bear on the floor among the furniture and surroundings of human
+      life. Daniel himself felt this, and as usual stood just inside the door,
+      trying to speak softly and not move, for fear of breaking something in the
+      master’s apartment, and he hastened to say all that was necessary so as to
+      get from under that ceiling, out into the open under the sky once more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having finished his inquiries and extorted from Daniel an opinion that the
+      hounds were fit (Daniel himself wished to go hunting), Nicholas ordered
+      the horses to be saddled. But just as Daniel was about to go Natásha came
+      in with rapid steps, not having done up her hair or finished dressing and
+      with her old nurse’s big shawl wrapped round her. Pétya ran in at the same
+      time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are going?” asked Natásha. “I knew you would! Sónya said you wouldn’t
+      go, but I knew that today is the sort of day when you couldn’t help
+      going.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, we are going,” replied Nicholas reluctantly, for today, as he
+      intended to hunt seriously, he did not want to take Natásha and Pétya. “We
+      are going, but only wolf hunting: it would be dull for you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You know it is my greatest pleasure,” said Natásha. “It’s not fair; you
+      are going by yourself, are having the horses saddled and said nothing to
+      us about it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “‘No barrier bars a Russian’s path’—we’ll go!” shouted Pétya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But you can’t. Mamma said you mustn’t,” said Nicholas to Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I’ll go. I shall certainly go,” said Natásha decisively. “Daniel,
+      tell them to saddle for us, and Michael must come with my dogs,” she added
+      to the huntsman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It seemed to Daniel irksome and improper to be in a room at all, but to
+      have anything to do with a young lady seemed to him impossible. He cast
+      down his eyes and hurried out as if it were none of his business, careful
+      as he went not to inflict any accidental injury on the young lady.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0136"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The old count, who had always kept up an enormous hunting establishment
+      but had now handed it all completely over to his son’s care, being in very
+      good spirits on this fifteenth of September, prepared to go out with the
+      others.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In an hour’s time the whole hunting party was at the porch. Nicholas, with
+      a stern and serious air which showed that now was no time for attending to
+      trifles, went past Natásha and Pétya who were trying to tell him
+      something. He had a look at all the details of the hunt, sent a pack of
+      hounds and huntsmen on ahead to find the quarry, mounted his chestnut
+      Donéts, and whistling to his own leash of borzois, set off across the
+      threshing ground to a field leading to the Otrádnoe wood. The old count’s
+      horse, a sorrel gelding called Viflyánka, was led by the groom in
+      attendance on him, while the count himself was to drive in a small trap
+      straight to a spot reserved for him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They were taking fifty-four hounds, with six hunt attendants and
+      whippers-in. Besides the family, there were eight borzoi kennelmen and
+      more than forty borzois, so that, with the borzois on the leash belonging
+      to members of the family, there were about a hundred and thirty dogs and
+      twenty horsemen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Each dog knew its master and its call. Each man in the hunt knew his
+      business, his place, what he had to do. As soon as they had passed the
+      fence they all spread out evenly and quietly, without noise or talk, along
+      the road and field leading to the Otrádnoe covert.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The horses stepped over the field as over a thick carpet, now and then
+      splashing into puddles as they crossed a road. The misty sky still seemed
+      to descend evenly and imperceptibly toward the earth, the air was still,
+      warm, and silent. Occasionally the whistle of a huntsman, the snort of a
+      horse, the crack of a whip, or the whine of a straggling hound could be
+      heard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When they had gone a little less than a mile, five more riders with dogs
+      appeared out of the mist, approaching the Rostóvs. In front rode a
+      fresh-looking, handsome old man with a large gray mustache.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good morning, Uncle!” said Nicholas, when the old man drew near.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s it. Come on!... I was sure of it,” began “Uncle.” (He was a
+      distant relative of the Rostóvs’, a man of small means, and their
+      neighbor.) “I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist it and it’s a good thing
+      you’re going. That’s it! Come on!” (This was “Uncle’s” favorite
+      expression.) “Take the covert at once, for my Gírchik says the Ilágins are
+      at Kornikí with their hounds. That’s it. Come on!... They’ll take the cubs
+      from under your very nose.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s where I’m going. Shall we join up our packs?” asked Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The hounds were joined into one pack, and “Uncle” and Nicholas rode on
+      side by side. Natásha, muffled up in shawls which did not hide her eager
+      face and shining eyes, galloped up to them. She was followed by Pétya who
+      always kept close to her, by Michael, a huntsman, and by a groom appointed
+      to look after her. Pétya, who was laughing, whipped and pulled at his
+      horse. Natásha sat easily and confidently on her black Arábchik and reined
+      him in without effort with a firm hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Uncle” looked round disapprovingly at Pétya and Natásha. He did not like
+      to combine frivolity with the serious business of hunting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good morning, Uncle! We are going too!” shouted Pétya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good morning, good morning! But don’t go overriding the hounds,” said
+      “Uncle” sternly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nicholas, what a fine dog Truníla is! He knew me,” said Natásha,
+      referring to her favorite hound.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In the first place, Truníla is not a ‘dog,’ but a harrier,” thought
+      Nicholas, and looked sternly at his sister, trying to make her feel the
+      distance that ought to separate them at that moment. Natásha understood
+      it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You mustn’t think we’ll be in anyone’s way, Uncle,” she said. “We’ll go
+      to our places and won’t budge.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “A good thing too, little countess,” said “Uncle,” “only mind you don’t
+      fall off your horse,” he added, “because—that’s it, come on!—you’ve
+      nothing to hold on to.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The oasis of the Otrádnoe covert came in sight a few hundred yards off,
+      the huntsmen were already nearing it. Rostóv, having finally settled with
+      “Uncle” where they should set on the hounds, and having shown Natásha
+      where she was to stand—a spot where nothing could possibly run out—went
+      round above the ravine.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, nephew, you’re going for a big wolf,” said “Uncle.” “Mind and don’t
+      let her slip!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s as may happen,” answered Rostóv. “Karáy, here!” he shouted,
+      answering “Uncle’s” remark by this call to his borzoi. Karáy was a shaggy
+      old dog with a hanging jowl, famous for having tackled a big wolf unaided.
+      They all took up their places.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old count, knowing his son’s ardor in the hunt, hurried so as not to
+      be late, and the huntsmen had not yet reached their places when Count Ilyá
+      Rostóv, cheerful, flushed, and with quivering cheeks, drove up with his
+      black horses over the winter rye to the place reserved for him, where a
+      wolf might come out. Having straightened his coat and fastened on his
+      hunting knives and horn, he mounted his good, sleek, well-fed, and
+      comfortable horse, Viflyánka, which was turning gray, like himself. His
+      horses and trap were sent home. Count Ilyá Rostóv, though not at heart a
+      keen sportsman, knew the rules of the hunt well, and rode to the bushy
+      edge of the road where he was to stand, arranged his reins, settled
+      himself in the saddle, and, feeling that he was ready, looked about with a
+      smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Beside him was Simon Chekmár, his personal attendant, an old horseman now
+      somewhat stiff in the saddle. Chekmár held in leash three formidable
+      wolfhounds, who had, however, grown fat like their master and his horse.
+      Two wise old dogs lay down unleashed. Some hundred paces farther along the
+      edge of the wood stood Mítka, the count’s other groom, a daring horseman
+      and keen rider to hounds. Before the hunt, by old custom, the count had
+      drunk a silver cupful of mulled brandy, taken a snack, and washed it down
+      with half a bottle of his favorite Bordeaux.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was somewhat flushed with the wine and the drive. His eyes were rather
+      moist and glittered more than usual, and as he sat in his saddle, wrapped
+      up in his fur coat, he looked like a child taken out for an outing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The thin, hollow-cheeked Chekmár, having got everything ready, kept
+      glancing at his master with whom he had lived on the best of terms for
+      thirty years, and understanding the mood he was in expected a pleasant
+      chat. A third person rode up circumspectly through the wood (it was plain
+      that he had had a lesson) and stopped behind the count. This person was a
+      gray-bearded old man in a woman’s cloak, with a tall peaked cap on his
+      head. He was the buffoon, who went by a woman’s name, Nastásya Ivánovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, Nastásya Ivánovna!” whispered the count, winking at him. “If you
+      scare away the beast, Daniel’ll give it you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I know a thing or two myself!” said Nastásya Ivánovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hush!” whispered the count and turned to Simon. “Have you seen the young
+      countess?” he asked. “Where is she?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “With young Count Peter, by the Zhárov rank grass,” answered Simon,
+      smiling. “Though she’s a lady, she’s very fond of hunting.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And you’re surprised at the way she rides, Simon, eh?” said the count.
+      “She’s as good as many a man!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Of course! It’s marvelous. So bold, so easy!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And Nicholas? Where is he? By the Lyádov upland, isn’t he?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, sir. He knows where to stand. He understands the matter so well that
+      Daniel and I are often quite astounded,” said Simon, well knowing what
+      would please his master.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Rides well, eh? And how well he looks on his horse, eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “A perfect picture! How he chased a fox out of the rank grass by the
+      Zavárzinsk thicket the other day! Leaped a fearful place; what a sight
+      when they rushed from the covert... the horse worth a thousand rubles and
+      the rider beyond all price! Yes, one would have to search far to find
+      another as smart.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “To search far...” repeated the count, evidently sorry Simon had not said
+      more. “To search far,” he said, turning back the skirt of his coat to get
+      at his snuffbox.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The other day when he came out from Mass in full uniform, Michael
+      Sidórych...” Simon did not finish, for on the still air he had distinctly
+      caught the music of the hunt with only two or three hounds giving tongue.
+      He bent down his head and listened, shaking a warning finger at his
+      master. “They are on the scent of the cubs...” he whispered, “straight to
+      the Lyádov uplands.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The count, forgetting to smooth out the smile on his face, looked into the
+      distance straight before him, down the narrow open space, holding the
+      snuffbox in his hand but not taking any. After the cry of the hounds came
+      the deep tones of the wolf call from Daniel’s hunting horn; the pack
+      joined the first three hounds and they could be heard in full cry, with
+      that peculiar lift in the note that indicates that they are after a wolf.
+      The whippers-in no longer set on the hounds, but changed to the cry of
+      <i>ulyulyu</i>, and above the others rose Daniel’s voice, now a deep bass, now
+      piercingly shrill. His voice seemed to fill the whole wood and carried far
+      beyond out into the open field.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After listening a few moments in silence, the count and his attendant
+      convinced themselves that the hounds had separated into two packs: the
+      sound of the larger pack, eagerly giving tongue, began to die away in the
+      distance, the other pack rushed by the wood past the count, and it was
+      with this that Daniel’s voice was heard calling <i>ulyulyu</i>. The sounds of
+      both packs mingled and broke apart again, but both were becoming more
+      distant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Simon sighed and stooped to straighten the leash a young borzoi had
+      entangled; the count too sighed and, noticing the snuffbox in his hand,
+      opened it and took a pinch. “Back!” cried Simon to a borzoi that was
+      pushing forward out of the wood. The count started and dropped the
+      snuffbox. Nastásya Ivánovna dismounted to pick it up. The count and Simon
+      were looking at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Then, unexpectedly, as often happens, the sound of the hunt suddenly
+      approached, as if the hounds in full cry and Daniel <i>ulyulyuing</i> were just
+      in front of them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count turned and saw on his right Mítka staring at him with eyes
+      starting out of his head, raising his cap and pointing before him to the
+      other side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Look out!” he shouted, in a voice plainly showing that he had long
+      fretted to utter that word, and letting the borzois slip he galloped
+      toward the count.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count and Simon galloped out of the wood and saw on their left a wolf
+      which, softly swaying from side to side, was coming at a quiet lope
+      farther to the left to the very place where they were standing. The angry
+      borzois whined and getting free of the leash rushed past the horses’ feet
+      at the wolf.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The wolf paused, turned its heavy forehead toward the dogs awkwardly, like
+      a man suffering from the quinsy, and, still slightly swaying from side to
+      side, gave a couple of leaps and with a swish of its tail disappeared into
+      the skirt of the wood. At the same instant, with a cry like a wail, first
+      one hound, then another, and then another, sprang helter-skelter from the
+      wood opposite and the whole pack rushed across the field toward the very
+      spot where the wolf had disappeared. The hazel bushes parted behind the
+      hounds and Daniel’s chestnut horse appeared, dark with sweat. On its long
+      back sat Daniel, hunched forward, capless, his disheveled gray hair
+      hanging over his flushed, perspiring face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Ulyulyulyu! ulyulyu!...”</i> he cried. When he caught sight of the count his
+      eyes flashed lightning.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Blast you!” he shouted, holding up his whip threateningly at the count.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You’ve let the wolf go!... What sportsmen!” and as if scorning to say
+      more to the frightened and shamefaced count, he lashed the heaving flanks
+      of his sweating chestnut gelding with all the anger the count had aroused
+      and flew off after the hounds. The count, like a punished schoolboy,
+      looked round, trying by a smile to win Simon’s sympathy for his plight.
+      But Simon was no longer there. He was galloping round by the bushes while
+      the field was coming up on both sides, all trying to head the wolf, but it
+      vanished into the wood before they could do so.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0137"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Nicholas Rostóv meanwhile remained at his post, waiting for the wolf. By
+      the way the hunt approached and receded, by the cries of the dogs whose
+      notes were familiar to him, by the way the voices of the huntsmen
+      approached, receded, and rose, he realized what was happening at the
+      copse. He knew that young and old wolves were there, that the hounds had
+      separated into two packs, that somewhere a wolf was being chased, and that
+      something had gone wrong. He expected the wolf to come his way any moment.
+      He made thousands of different conjectures as to where and from what side
+      the beast would come and how he would set upon it. Hope alternated with
+      despair. Several times he addressed a prayer to God that the wolf should
+      come his way. He prayed with that passionate and shamefaced feeling with
+      which men pray at moments of great excitement arising from trivial causes.
+      “What would it be to Thee to do this for me?” he said to God. “I know Thou
+      art great, and that it is a sin to ask this of Thee, but for God’s sake do
+      let the old wolf come my way and let Karáy spring at it—in sight of
+      ‘Uncle’ who is watching from over there—and seize it by the throat
+      in a death grip!” A thousand times during that half-hour Rostóv cast eager
+      and restless glances over the edge of the wood, with the two scraggy oaks
+      rising above the aspen undergrowth and the gully with its water-worn side
+      and “Uncle’s” cap just visible above the bush on his right.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I shan’t have such luck,” thought Rostóv, “yet what wouldn’t it be
+      worth! It is not to be! Everywhere, at cards and in war, I am always
+      unlucky.” Memories of Austerlitz and of Dólokhov flashed rapidly and
+      clearly through his mind. “Only once in my life to get an old wolf, I want
+      only that!” thought he, straining eyes and ears and looking to the left
+      and then to the right and listening to the slightest variation of note in
+      the cries of the dogs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Again he looked to the right and saw something running toward him across
+      the deserted field. “No, it can’t be!” thought Rostóv, taking a deep
+      breath, as a man does at the coming of something long hoped for. The
+      height of happiness was reached—and so simply, without warning, or
+      noise, or display, that Rostóv could not believe his eyes and remained in
+      doubt for over a second. The wolf ran forward and jumped heavily over a
+      gully that lay in her path. She was an old animal with a gray back and big
+      reddish belly. She ran without hurry, evidently feeling sure that no one
+      saw her. Rostóv, holding his breath, looked round at the borzois. They
+      stood or lay not seeing the wolf or understanding the situation. Old Karáy
+      had turned his head and was angrily searching for fleas, baring his yellow
+      teeth and snapping at his hind legs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Ulyulyulyu!”</i> whispered Rostóv, pouting his lips. The borzois jumped up,
+      jerking the rings of the leashes and pricking their ears. Karáy finished
+      scratching his hindquarters and, cocking his ears, got up with quivering
+      tail from which tufts of matted hair hung down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Shall I loose them or not?” Nicholas asked himself as the wolf approached
+      him coming from the copse. Suddenly the wolf’s whole physiognomy changed:
+      she shuddered, seeing what she had probably never seen before—human
+      eyes fixed upon her—and turning her head a little toward Rostóv, she
+      paused.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Back or forward? Eh, no matter, forward...” the wolf seemed to say to
+      herself, and she moved forward without again looking round and with a
+      quiet, long, easy yet resolute lope.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Ulyulyu!”</i> cried Nicholas, in a voice not his own, and of its own accord
+      his good horse darted headlong downhill, leaping over gullies to head off
+      the wolf, and the borzois passed it, running faster still. Nicholas did
+      not hear his own cry nor feel that he was galloping, nor see the borzois,
+      nor the ground over which he went: he saw only the wolf, who, increasing
+      her speed, bounded on in the same direction along the hollow. The first to
+      come into view was Mílka, with her black markings and powerful quarters,
+      gaining upon the wolf. Nearer and nearer... now she was ahead of it; but
+      the wolf turned its head to face her, and instead of putting on speed as
+      she usually did Mílka suddenly raised her tail and stiffened her forelegs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Ulyulyulyulyu!”</i> shouted Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The reddish Lyubím rushed forward from behind Mílka, sprang impetuously at
+      the wolf, and seized it by its hindquarters, but immediately jumped aside
+      in terror. The wolf crouched, gnashed her teeth, and again rose and
+      bounded forward, followed at the distance of a couple of feet by all the
+      borzois, who did not get any closer to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She’ll get away! No, it’s impossible!” thought Nicholas,
+      still shouting with a hoarse voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Karáy, <i>ulyulyu!</i>...” he shouted, looking round for the old borzoi
+      who was now his only hope. Karáy, with all the strength age had left him,
+      stretched himself to the utmost and, watching the wolf, galloped heavily
+      aside to intercept it. But the quickness of the wolf’s lope and the
+      borzoi’s slower pace made it plain that Karáy had miscalculated. Nicholas
+      could already see not far in front of him the wood where the wolf would
+      certainly escape should she reach it. But, coming toward him, he saw
+      hounds and a huntsman galloping almost straight at the wolf. There was
+      still hope. A long, yellowish young borzoi, one Nicholas did not know,
+      from another leash, rushed impetuously at the wolf from in front and
+      almost knocked her over. But the wolf jumped up more quickly than anyone
+      could have expected and, gnashing her teeth, flew at the yellowish borzoi,
+      which, with a piercing yelp, fell with its head on the ground, bleeding
+      from a gash in its side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Karáy? Old fellow!...” wailed Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Thanks to the delay caused by this crossing of the wolf’s path, the old
+      dog with its felted hair hanging from its thigh was within five paces of
+      it. As if aware of her danger, the wolf turned her eyes on Karáy, tucked
+      her tail yet further between her legs, and increased her speed. But here
+      Nicholas only saw that something happened to Karáy—the borzoi was
+      suddenly on the wolf, and they rolled together down into a gully just in
+      front of them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That instant, when Nicholas saw the wolf struggling in the gully with the
+      dogs, while from under them could be seen her gray hair and outstretched
+      hind leg and her frightened choking head, with her ears laid back (Karáy
+      was pinning her by the throat), was the happiest moment of his life. With
+      his hand on his saddlebow, he was ready to dismount and stab the wolf,
+      when she suddenly thrust her head up from among that mass of dogs, and
+      then her forepaws were on the edge of the gully. She clicked her teeth
+      (Karáy no longer had her by the throat), leaped with a movement of her
+      hind legs out of the gully, and having disengaged herself from the dogs,
+      with tail tucked in again, went forward. Karáy, his hair bristling, and
+      probably bruised or wounded, climbed with difficulty out of the gully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh my God! Why?” Nicholas cried in despair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Uncle’s” huntsman was galloping from the other side across the wolf’s
+      path and his borzois once more stopped the animal’s advance. She was again
+      hemmed in.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas and his attendant, with “Uncle” and his huntsman, were all riding
+      round the wolf, crying <i>“ulyulyu!”</i> shouting and preparing to dismount each
+      moment that the wolf crouched back, and starting forward again every time
+      she shook herself and moved toward the wood where she would be safe.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Already, at the beginning of this chase, Daniel, hearing the ulyulyuing,
+      had rushed out from the wood. He saw Karáy seize the wolf, and checked his
+      horse, supposing the affair to be over. But when he saw that the horsemen
+      did not dismount and that the wolf shook herself and ran for safety,
+      Daniel set his chestnut galloping, not at the wolf but straight toward the
+      wood, just as Karáy had run to cut the animal off. As a result of this, he
+      galloped up to the wolf just when she had been stopped a second time by
+      “Uncle’s” borzois.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Daniel galloped up silently, holding a naked dagger in his left hand and
+      thrashing the laboring sides of his chestnut horse with his whip as if it
+      were a flail.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas neither saw nor heard Daniel until the chestnut, breathing
+      heavily, panted past him, and he heard the fall of a body and saw Daniel
+      lying on the wolf’s back among the dogs, trying to seize her by the ears.
+      It was evident to the dogs, the hunters, and to the wolf herself that all
+      was now over. The terrified wolf pressed back her ears and tried to rise,
+      but the borzois stuck to her. Daniel rose a little, took a step, and with
+      his whole weight, as if lying down to rest, fell on the wolf, seizing her
+      by the ears. Nicholas was about to stab her, but Daniel whispered, “Don’t!
+      We’ll gag her!” and, changing his position, set his foot on the wolf’s
+      neck. A stick was thrust between her jaws and she was fastened with a
+      leash, as if bridled, her legs were bound together, and Daniel rolled her
+      over once or twice from side to side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With happy, exhausted faces, they laid the old wolf, alive, on a shying
+      and snorting horse and, accompanied by the dogs yelping at her, took her
+      to the place where they were all to meet. The hounds had killed two of the
+      cubs and the borzois three. The huntsmen assembled with their booty and
+      their stories, and all came to look at the wolf, which, with her
+      broad-browed head hanging down and the bitten stick between her jaws,
+      gazed with great glassy eyes at this crowd of dogs and men surrounding
+      her. When she was touched, she jerked her bound legs and looked wildly yet
+      simply at everybody. Old Count Rostóv also rode up and touched the wolf.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, what a formidable one!” said he. “A formidable one, eh?” he asked
+      Daniel, who was standing near.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, your excellency,” answered Daniel, quickly doffing his cap.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count remembered the wolf he had let slip and his encounter with
+      Daniel.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, but you are a crusty fellow, friend!” said the count.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For sole reply Daniel gave him a shy, childlike, meek, and amiable smile.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0138"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The old count went home, and Natásha and Pétya promised to return very
+      soon, but as it was still early the hunt went farther. At midday they put
+      the hounds into a ravine thickly overgrown with young trees. Nicholas
+      standing in a fallow field could see all his whips.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Facing him lay a field of winter rye, there his own huntsman stood alone
+      in a hollow behind a hazel bush. The hounds had scarcely been loosed
+      before Nicholas heard one he knew, Voltórn, giving tongue at intervals;
+      other hounds joined in, now pausing and now again giving tongue. A moment
+      later he heard a cry from the wooded ravine that a fox had been found, and
+      the whole pack, joining together, rushed along the ravine toward the
+      ryefield and away from Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He saw the whips in their red caps galloping along the edge of the ravine,
+      he even saw the hounds, and was expecting a fox to show itself at any
+      moment on the ryefield opposite.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The huntsman standing in the hollow moved and loosed his borzois, and
+      Nicholas saw a queer, short-legged red fox with a fine brush going hard
+      across the field. The borzois bore down on it.... Now they drew close to
+      the fox which began to dodge between the field in sharper and sharper
+      curves, trailing its brush, when suddenly a strange white borzoi dashed in
+      followed by a black one, and everything was in confusion; the borzois
+      formed a star-shaped figure, scarcely swaying their bodies and with tails
+      turned away from the center of the group. Two huntsmen galloped up to the
+      dogs; one in a red cap, the other, a stranger, in a green coat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s this?” thought Nicholas. “Where’s that huntsman from? He is not
+      ‘Uncle’s’ man.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The huntsmen got the fox, but stayed there a long time without strapping
+      it to the saddle. Their horses, bridled and with high saddles, stood near
+      them and there too the dogs were lying. The huntsmen waved their arms and
+      did something to the fox. Then from that spot came the sound of a horn,
+      with the signal agreed on in case of a fight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s Ilágin’s huntsman having a row with our Iván,” said Nicholas’
+      groom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas sent the man to call Natásha and Pétya to him, and rode at a
+      footpace to the place where the whips were getting the hounds together.
+      Several of the field galloped to the spot where the fight was going on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas dismounted, and with Natásha and Pétya, who had ridden up,
+      stopped near the hounds, waiting to see how the matter would end. Out of
+      the bushes came the huntsman who had been fighting and rode toward his
+      young master, with the fox tied to his crupper. While still at a distance
+      he took off his cap and tried to speak respectfully, but he was pale and
+      breathless and his face was angry. One of his eyes was black, but he
+      probably was not even aware of it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What has happened?” asked Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A likely thing, killing a fox our dogs had hunted! And it was my gray
+      bitch that caught it! Go to law, indeed!... He snatches at the fox! I gave
+      him one with the fox. Here it is on my saddle! Do you want a taste of
+      this?...” said the huntsman, pointing to his dagger and probably imagining
+      himself still speaking to his foe.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas, not stopping to talk to the man, asked his sister and Pétya to
+      wait for him and rode to the spot where the enemy’s, Ilágin’s, hunting
+      party was.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The victorious huntsman rode off to join the field, and there, surrounded
+      by inquiring sympathizers, recounted his exploits.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The facts were that Ilágin, with whom the Rostóvs had a quarrel and were
+      at law, hunted over places that belonged by custom to the Rostóvs, and had
+      now, as if purposely, sent his men to the very woods the Rostóvs were
+      hunting and let his man snatch a fox their dogs had chased.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas, though he had never seen Ilágin, with his usual absence of
+      moderation in judgment, hated him cordially from reports of his
+      arbitrariness and violence, and regarded him as his bitterest foe. He rode
+      in angry agitation toward him, firmly grasping his whip and fully prepared
+      to take the most resolute and desperate steps to punish his enemy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Hardly had he passed an angle of the wood before a stout gentleman in a
+      beaver cap came riding toward him on a handsome raven-black horse,
+      accompanied by two hunt servants.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Instead of an enemy, Nicholas found in Ilágin a stately and courteous
+      gentleman who was particularly anxious to make the young count’s
+      acquaintance. Having ridden up to Nicholas, Ilágin raised his beaver cap
+      and said he much regretted what had occurred and would have the man
+      punished who had allowed himself to seize a fox hunted by someone else’s
+      borzois. He hoped to become better acquainted with the count and invited
+      him to draw his covert.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha, afraid that her brother would do something dreadful, had followed
+      him in some excitement. Seeing the enemies exchanging friendly greetings,
+      she rode up to them. Ilágin lifted his beaver cap still higher to Natásha
+      and said, with a pleasant smile, that the young countess resembled Diana
+      in her passion for the chase as well as in her beauty, of which he had
+      heard much.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To expiate his huntsman’s offense, Ilágin pressed the Rostóvs to come to
+      an upland of his about a mile away which he usually kept for himself and
+      which, he said, swarmed with hares. Nicholas agreed, and the hunt, now
+      doubled, moved on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The way to Iligin’s upland was across the fields. The hunt servants fell
+      into line. The masters rode together. “Uncle,” Rostóv, and Ilágin kept
+      stealthily glancing at one another’s dogs, trying not to be observed by
+      their companions and searching uneasily for rivals to their own borzois.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv was particularly struck by the beauty of a small, pure-bred,
+      red-spotted bitch on Ilágin’s leash, slender but with muscles like steel,
+      a delicate muzzle, and prominent black eyes. He had heard of the swiftness
+      of Ilágin’s borzois, and in that beautiful bitch saw a rival to his own
+      Mílka.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the middle of a sober conversation begun by Ilágin about the year’s
+      harvest, Nicholas pointed to the red-spotted bitch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A fine little bitch, that!” said he in a careless tone. “Is she swift?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That one? Yes, she’s a good dog, gets what she’s after,” answered Ilágin
+      indifferently, of the red-spotted bitch Erzá, for which, a year before, he
+      had given a neighbor three families of house serfs. “So in your parts,
+      too, the harvest is nothing to boast of, Count?” he went on, continuing
+      the conversation they had begun. And considering it polite to return the
+      young count’s compliment, Ilágin looked at his borzois and picked out
+      Mílka who attracted his attention by her breadth. “That black-spotted one
+      of yours is fine—well shaped!” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, she’s fast enough,” replied Nicholas, and thought: “If only a
+      full-grown hare would cross the field now I’d show you what sort of borzoi
+      she is,” and turning to his groom, he said he would give a ruble to anyone
+      who found a hare.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t understand,” continued Ilágin, “how some sportsmen can be so
+      jealous about game and dogs. For myself, I can tell you, Count, I enjoy
+      riding in company such as this... what could be better?” (he again raised
+      his cap to Natásha) “but as for counting skins and what one takes, I don’t
+      care about that.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Of course not!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Or being upset because someone else’s borzoi and not mine catches
+      something. All I care about is to enjoy seeing the chase, is it not so,
+      Count? For I consider that...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<i>“A-tu!”</i> came the long-drawn cry of one of the borzoi whippers-in, who had
+      halted. He stood on a knoll in the stubble, holding his whip aloft, and
+      again repeated his long-drawn cry, <i>“A-tu!”</i> (This call and the uplifted
+      whip meant that he saw a sitting hare.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, he has found one, I think,” said Ilágin carelessly. “Yes, we must
+      ride up.... Shall we both course it?” answered Nicholas, seeing in Erzá
+      and “Uncle’s” red Rugáy two rivals he had never yet had a chance of
+      pitting against his own borzois. “And suppose they outdo my Mílka at
+      once!” he thought as he rode with “Uncle” and Ilágin toward the hare.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A full-grown one?” asked Ilágin as he approached the whip who had sighted
+      the hare—and not without agitation he looked round and whistled to
+      Erzá.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And you, Michael Nikanórovich?” he said, addressing “Uncle.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The latter was riding with a sullen expression on his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How can I join in? Why, you’ve given a village for each of your borzois!
+      That’s it, come on! Yours are worth thousands. Try yours against one
+      another, you two, and I’ll look on!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Rugáy, hey, hey!” he shouted. “Rugáyushka!” he added, involuntarily by
+      this diminutive expressing his affection and the hopes he placed on this
+      red borzoi. Natásha saw and felt the agitation the two elderly men and her
+      brother were trying to conceal, and was herself excited by it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The huntsman stood halfway up the knoll holding up his whip and the
+      gentlefolk rode up to him at a footpace; the hounds that were far off on
+      the horizon turned away from the hare, and the whips, but not the
+      gentlefolk, also moved away. All were moving slowly and sedately.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How is it pointing?” asked Nicholas, riding a hundred paces toward the
+      whip who had sighted the hare.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But before the whip could reply, the hare, scenting the frost coming next
+      morning, was unable to rest and leaped up. The pack on leash rushed
+      downhill in full cry after the hare, and from all sides the borzois that
+      were not on leash darted after the hounds and the hare. All the hunt, who
+      had been moving slowly, shouted, “Stop!” calling in the hounds, while the
+      borzoi whips, with a cry of <i>“A-tu!”</i> galloped across the field setting the
+      borzois on the hare. The tranquil Ilágin, Nicholas, Natásha, and “Uncle”
+       flew, reckless of where and how they went, seeing only the borzois and the
+      hare and fearing only to lose sight even for an instant of the chase. The
+      hare they had started was a strong and swift one. When he jumped up he did
+      not run at once, but pricked his ears listening to the shouting and
+      trampling that resounded from all sides at once. He took a dozen bounds,
+      not very quickly, letting the borzois gain on him, and, finally having
+      chosen his direction and realized his danger, laid back his ears and
+      rushed off headlong. He had been lying in the stubble, but in front of him
+      was the autumn sowing where the ground was soft. The two borzois of the
+      huntsman who had sighted him, having been the nearest, were the first to
+      see and pursue him, but they had not gone far before Ilágin’s red-spotted
+      Erzá passed them, got within a length, flew at the hare with terrible
+      swiftness aiming at his scut, and, thinking she had seized him, rolled
+      over like a ball. The hare arched his back and bounded off yet more
+      swiftly. From behind Erzá rushed the broad-haunched, black-spotted Mílka
+      and began rapidly gaining on the hare.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Miláshka, dear!” rose Nicholas’ triumphant cry. It looked as if Mílka
+      would immediately pounce on the hare, but she overtook him and flew past.
+      The hare had squatted. Again the beautiful Erzá reached him, but when
+      close to the hare’s scut paused as if measuring the distance, so as not to
+      make a mistake this time but seize his hind leg.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Erzá, darling!” Ilágin wailed in a voice unlike his own. Erzá did not
+      hearken to his appeal. At the very moment when she would have seized her
+      prey, the hare moved and darted along the balk between the winter rye and
+      the stubble. Again Erzá and Mílka were abreast, running like a pair of
+      carriage horses, and began to overtake the hare, but it was easier for the
+      hare to run on the balk and the borzois did not overtake him so quickly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Rugáy, Rugáyushka! That’s it, come on!” came a third voice just then, and
+      “Uncle’s” red borzoi, straining and curving its back, caught up with the
+      two foremost borzois, pushed ahead of them regardless of the terrible
+      strain, put on speed close to the hare, knocked it off the balk onto the
+      ryefield, again put on speed still more viciously, sinking to his knees in
+      the muddy field, and all one could see was how, muddying his back, he
+      rolled over with the hare. A ring of borzois surrounded him. A moment
+      later everyone had drawn up round the crowd of dogs. Only the delighted
+      “Uncle” dismounted, and cut off a pad, shaking the hare for the blood to
+      drip off, and anxiously glancing round with restless eyes while his arms
+      and legs twitched. He spoke without himself knowing whom to or what about.
+      “That’s it, come on! That’s a dog!... There, it has beaten them all, the
+      thousand-ruble as well as the one-ruble borzois. That’s it, come on!” said
+      he, panting and looking wrathfully around as if he were abusing someone,
+      as if they were all his enemies and had insulted him, and only now had he
+      at last succeeded in justifying himself. “There are your thousand-ruble
+      ones.... That’s it, come on!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Rugáy, here’s a pad for you!” he said, throwing down the hare’s muddy
+      pad. “You’ve deserved it, that’s it, come on!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “She’d tired herself out, she’d run it down three times by herself,” said
+      Nicholas, also not listening to anyone and regardless of whether he were
+      heard or not.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But what is there in running across it like that?” said Ilágin’s groom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Once she had missed it and turned it away, any mongrel could take it,”
+       Ilágin was saying at the same time, breathless from his gallop and his
+      excitement. At the same moment Natásha, without drawing breath, screamed
+      joyously, ecstatically, and so piercingly that it set everyone’s ear
+      tingling. By that shriek she expressed what the others expressed by all
+      talking at once, and it was so strange that she must herself have been
+      ashamed of so wild a cry and everyone else would have been amazed at it at
+      any other time. “Uncle” himself twisted up the hare, threw it neatly and
+      smartly across his horse’s back as if by that gesture he meant to rebuke
+      everybody, and, with an air of not wishing to speak to anyone, mounted his
+      bay and rode off. The others all followed, dispirited and shamefaced, and
+      only much later were they able to regain their former affectation of
+      indifference. For a long time they continued to look at red Rugáy who, his
+      arched back spattered with mud and clanking the ring of his leash, walked
+      along just behind “Uncle’s” horse with the serene air of a conqueror.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, I am like any other dog as long as it’s not a question of coursing.
+      But when it is, then look out!” his appearance seemed to Nicholas to be
+      saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When, much later, “Uncle” rode up to Nicholas and began talking to him, he
+      felt flattered that, after what had happened, “Uncle” deigned to speak to
+      him.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0139"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Toward evening Ilágin took leave of Nicholas, who found that they were so
+      far from home that he accepted “Uncle’s” offer that the hunting party
+      should spend the night in his little village of Mikháylovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And if you put up at my house that will be better still. That’s it, come
+      on!” said “Uncle.” “You see it’s damp weather, and you could rest, and the
+      little countess could be driven home in a trap.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Uncle’s” offer was accepted. A huntsman was sent to Otrádnoe for a trap,
+      while Nicholas rode with Natásha and Pétya to “Uncle’s” house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Some five male domestic serfs, big and little, rushed out to the front
+      porch to meet their master. A score of women serfs, old and young, as well
+      as children, popped out from the back entrance to have a look at the
+      hunters who were arriving. The presence of Natásha—a woman, a lady,
+      and on horseback—raised the curiosity of the serfs to such a degree
+      that many of them came up to her, stared her in the face, and unabashed by
+      her presence made remarks about her as though she were some prodigy on
+      show and not a human being able to hear or understand what was said about
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Arínka! Look, she sits sideways! There she sits and her skirt dangles....
+      See, she’s got a little hunting horn!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Goodness gracious! See her knife?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Isn’t she a Tartar!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How is it you didn’t go head over heels?” asked the boldest of all,
+      addressing Natásha directly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Uncle” dismounted at the porch of his little wooden house which stood in
+      the midst of an overgrown garden and, after a glance at his retainers,
+      shouted authoritatively that the superfluous ones should take themselves
+      off and that all necessary preparations should be made to receive the
+      guests and the visitors.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The serfs all dispersed. “Uncle” lifted Natásha off her horse and taking
+      her hand led her up the rickety wooden steps of the porch. The house, with
+      its bare, unplastered log walls, was not overclean—it did not seem
+      that those living in it aimed at keeping it spotless—but neither was
+      it noticeably neglected. In the entry there was a smell of fresh apples,
+      and wolf and fox skins hung about.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Uncle” led the visitors through the anteroom into a small hall with a
+      folding table and red chairs, then into the drawing room with a round
+      birchwood table and a sofa, and finally into his private room where there
+      was a tattered sofa, a worn carpet, and portraits of Suvórov, of the
+      host’s father and mother, and of himself in military uniform. The study
+      smelt strongly of tobacco and dogs. “Uncle” asked his visitors to sit down
+      and make themselves at home, and then went out of the room. Rugáy, his
+      back still muddy, came into the room and lay down on the sofa, cleaning
+      himself with his tongue and teeth. Leading from the study was a passage in
+      which a partition with ragged curtains could be seen. From behind this
+      came women’s laughter and whispers. Natásha, Nicholas, and Pétya took off
+      their wraps and sat down on the sofa. Pétya, leaning on his elbow, fell
+      asleep at once. Natásha and Nicholas were silent. Their faces glowed, they
+      were hungry and very cheerful. They looked at one another (now that the
+      hunt was over and they were in the house, Nicholas no longer considered it
+      necessary to show his manly superiority over his sister), Natásha gave him
+      a wink, and neither refrained long from bursting into a peal of ringing
+      laughter even before they had a pretext ready to account for it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After a while “Uncle” came in, in a Cossack coat, blue trousers, and small
+      top boots. And Natásha felt that this costume, the very one she had
+      regarded with surprise and amusement at Otrádnoe, was just the right thing
+      and not at all worse than a swallow-tail or frock coat. “Uncle” too was in
+      high spirits and far from being offended by the brother’s and sister’s
+      laughter (it could never enter his head that they might be laughing at his
+      way of life) he himself joined in the merriment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s right, young countess, that’s it, come on! I never saw anyone like
+      her!” said he, offering Nicholas a pipe with a long stem and, with a
+      practiced motion of three fingers, taking down another that had been cut
+      short. “She’s ridden all day like a man, and is as fresh as ever!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Soon after “Uncle’s” reappearance the door was opened, evidently from the
+      sound by a barefooted girl, and a stout, rosy, good-looking woman of about
+      forty, with a double chin and full red lips, entered carrying a large
+      loaded tray. With hospitable dignity and cordiality in her glance and in
+      every motion, she looked at the visitors and, with a pleasant smile, bowed
+      respectfully. In spite of her exceptional stoutness, which caused her to
+      protrude her chest and stomach and throw back her head, this woman (who
+      was “Uncle’s” housekeeper) trod very lightly. She went to the table, set
+      down the tray, and with her plump white hands deftly took from it the
+      bottles and various hors d’oeuvres and dishes and arranged them on the
+      table. When she had finished, she stepped aside and stopped at the door
+      with a smile on her face. “Here I am. I am she! Now do you understand
+      ‘Uncle’?” her expression said to Rostóv. How could one help understanding?
+      Not only Nicholas, but even Natásha understood the meaning of his puckered
+      brow and the happy complacent smile that slightly puckered his lips when
+      Anísya Fëdorovna entered. On the tray was a bottle of herb wine, different
+      kinds of vodka, pickled mushrooms, rye cakes made with buttermilk, honey
+      in the comb, still mead and sparkling mead, apples, nuts (raw and
+      roasted), and nut-and-honey sweets. Afterwards she brought a freshly
+      roasted chicken, ham, preserves made with honey, and preserves made with
+      sugar.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All this was the fruit of Anísya Fëdorovna’s housekeeping, gathered and
+      prepared by her. The smell and taste of it all had a smack of Anísya
+      Fëdorovna herself: a savor of juiciness, cleanliness, whiteness, and
+      pleasant smiles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Take this, little Lady-Countess!” she kept saying, as she offered Natásha
+      first one thing and then another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha ate of everything and thought she had never seen or eaten such
+      buttermilk cakes, such aromatic jam, such honey-and-nut sweets, or such a
+      chicken anywhere. Anísya Fëdorovna left the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After supper, over their cherry brandy, Rostóv and “Uncle” talked of past
+      and future hunts, of Rugáy and Ilágin’s dogs, while Natásha sat upright on
+      the sofa and listened with sparkling eyes. She tried several times to wake
+      Pétya that he might eat something, but he only muttered incoherent words
+      without waking up. Natásha felt so lighthearted and happy in these novel
+      surroundings that she only feared the trap would come for her too soon.
+      After a casual pause, such as often occurs when receiving friends for the
+      first time in one’s own house, “Uncle,” answering a thought that was in
+      his visitors’ minds, said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This, you see, is how I am finishing my days... Death will come. That’s
+      it, come on! Nothing will remain. Then why harm anyone?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Uncle’s” face was very significant and even handsome as he said this.
+      Involuntarily Rostóv recalled all the good he had heard about him from his
+      father and the neighbors. Throughout the whole province “Uncle” had the
+      reputation of being the most honorable and disinterested of cranks. They
+      called him in to decide family disputes, chose him as executor, confided
+      secrets to him, elected him to be a justice and to other posts; but he
+      always persistently refused public appointments, passing the autumn and
+      spring in the fields on his bay gelding, sitting at home in winter, and
+      lying in his overgrown garden in summer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why don’t you enter the service, Uncle?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I did once, but gave it up. I am not fit for it. That’s it, come on! I
+      can’t make head or tail of it. That’s for you—I haven’t brains
+      enough. Now, hunting is another matter—that’s it, come on! Open the
+      door, there!” he shouted. “Why have you shut it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The door at the end of the passage led to the huntsmen’s room, as they
+      called the room for the hunt servants.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was a rapid patter of bare feet, and an unseen hand opened the door
+      into the huntsmen’s room, from which came the clear sounds of a balaláyka
+      on which someone, who was evidently a master of the art, was playing.
+      Natásha had been listening to those strains for some time and now went out
+      into the passage to hear better.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s Mítka, my coachman.... I have got him a good balaláyka. I’m fond
+      of it,” said “Uncle.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      It was the custom for Mítka to play the balaláyka in the huntsmen’s room
+      when “Uncle” returned from the chase. “Uncle” was fond of such music.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How good! Really very good!” said Nicholas with some unintentional
+      superciliousness, as if ashamed to confess that the sounds pleased him
+      very much.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very good?” said Natásha reproachfully, noticing her brother’s tone. “Not
+      ‘very good’—it’s simply delicious!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Just as “Uncle’s” pickled mushrooms, honey, and cherry brandy had seemed
+      to her the best in the world, so also that song, at that moment, seemed to
+      her the acme of musical delight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “More, please, more!” cried Natásha at the door as soon as the balaláyka
+      ceased. Mítka tuned up afresh, and recommenced thrumming the balaláyka to
+      the air of <i>My Lady</i>, with trills and variations. “Uncle” sat listening,
+      slightly smiling, with his head on one side. The air was repeated a
+      hundred times. The balaláyka was retuned several times and the same notes
+      were thrummed again, but the listeners did not grow weary of it and wished
+      to hear it again and again. Anísya Fëdorovna came in and leaned her portly
+      person against the doorpost.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You like listening?” she said to Natásha, with a smile extremely like
+      “Uncle’s.” “That’s a good player of ours,” she added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He doesn’t play that part right!” said “Uncle” suddenly, with an
+      energetic gesture. “Here he ought to burst out—that’s it, come on!—ought
+      to burst out.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you play then?” asked Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Uncle” did not answer, but smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Anísya, go and see if the strings of my guitar are all right. I haven’t
+      touched it for a long time. That’s it—come on! I’ve given it up.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Anísya Fëdorovna, with her light step, willingly went to fulfill her
+      errand and brought back the guitar.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Without looking at anyone, “Uncle” blew the dust off it and, tapping the
+      case with his bony fingers, tuned the guitar and settled himself in his
+      armchair. He took the guitar a little above the fingerboard, arching his
+      left elbow with a somewhat theatrical gesture, and, with a wink at Anísya
+      Fëdorovna, struck a single chord, pure and sonorous, and then quietly,
+      smoothly, and confidently began playing in very slow time, not <i>My Lady</i>,
+      but the well-known song: <i>Came a maiden down the street</i>. The tune, played
+      with precision and in exact time, began to thrill in the hearts of
+      Nicholas and Natásha, arousing in them the same kind of sober mirth as
+      radiated from Anísya Fëdorovna’s whole being. Anísya Fëdorovna flushed,
+      and drawing her kerchief over her face went laughing out of the room.
+      “Uncle” continued to play correctly, carefully, with energetic firmness,
+      looking with a changed and inspired expression at the spot where Anísya
+      Fëdorovna had just stood. Something seemed to be laughing a little on one
+      side of his face under his gray mustaches, especially as the song grew
+      brisker and the time quicker and when, here and there, as he ran his
+      fingers over the strings, something seemed to snap.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lovely, lovely! Go on, Uncle, go on!” shouted Natásha as soon as he had
+      finished. She jumped up and hugged and kissed him. “Nicholas, Nicholas!”
+       she said, turning to her brother, as if asking him: “What is it moves me
+      so?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas too was greatly pleased by “Uncle’s” playing, and “Uncle” played
+      the piece over again. Anísya Fëdorovna’s smiling face reappeared in the
+      doorway and behind hers other faces...
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+<i>Fetching water clear and sweet,<br>
+    Stop, dear maiden, I entreat</i>—
+</p>
+<p>
+      played “Uncle” once more, running his fingers skillfully over the strings,
+      and then he stopped short and jerked his shoulders.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go on, Uncle dear,” Natásha wailed in an imploring tone as if her life
+      depended on it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Uncle” rose, and it was as if there were two men in him: one of them
+      smiled seriously at the merry fellow, while the merry fellow struck a
+      naïve and precise attitude preparatory to a folk dance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then, niece!” he exclaimed, waving to Natásha the hand that had just
+      struck a chord.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha threw off the shawl from her shoulders, ran forward to face
+      “Uncle,” and setting her arms akimbo also made a motion with her shoulders
+      and struck an attitude.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Where, how, and when had this young countess, educated by an <i>émigrée</i>
+      French governess, imbibed from the Russian air she breathed that spirit
+      and obtained that manner which the <i>pas de châle</i> * would, one would have
+      supposed, long ago have effaced? But the spirit and the movements were
+      those inimitable and unteachable Russian ones that “Uncle” had expected of
+      her. As soon as she had struck her pose, and smiled triumphantly, proudly,
+      and with sly merriment, the fear that had at first seized Nicholas and the
+      others that she might not do the right thing was at an end, and they were
+      already admiring her.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * The French shawl dance.
+</p>
+<p>
+      She did the right thing with such precision, such complete precision, that
+      Anísya Fëdorovna, who had at once handed her the handkerchief she needed
+      for the dance, had tears in her eyes, though she laughed as she watched
+      this slim, graceful countess, reared in silks and velvets and so different
+      from herself, who yet was able to understand all that was in Anísya and in
+      Anísya’s father and mother and aunt, and in every Russian man and woman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, little countess; that’s it—come on!” cried “Uncle,” with a
+      joyous laugh, having finished the dance. “Well done, niece! Now a fine
+      young fellow must be found as husband for you. That’s it—come on!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “He’s chosen already,” said Nicholas smiling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh?” said “Uncle” in surprise, looking inquiringly at Natásha, who nodded
+      her head with a happy smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And such a one!” she said. But as soon as she had said it a new train of
+      thoughts and feelings arose in her. “What did Nicholas’ smile mean when he
+      said ‘chosen already’? Is he glad of it or not? It is as if he thought my
+      Bolkónski would not approve of or understand our gaiety. But he would
+      understand it all. Where is he now?” she thought, and her face suddenly
+      became serious. But this lasted only a second. “Don’t dare to think about
+      it,” she said to herself, and sat down again smilingly beside “Uncle,”
+       begging him to play something more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Uncle” played another song and a valse; then after a pause he cleared his
+      throat and sang his favorite hunting song:
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+<i>As ‘twas growing dark last night<br>
+    Fell the snow so soft and light...</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      “Uncle” sang as peasants sing, with full and naïve conviction that the
+      whole meaning of a song lies in the words and that the tune comes of
+      itself, and that apart from the words there is no tune, which exists only
+      to give measure to the words. As a result of this the unconsidered tune,
+      like the song of a bird, was extraordinarily good. Natásha was in
+      ecstasies over “Uncle’s” singing. She resolved to give up learning the
+      harp and to play only the guitar. She asked “Uncle” for his guitar and at
+      once found the chords of the song.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After nine o’clock two traps and three mounted men, who had been sent to
+      look for them, arrived to fetch Natásha and Pétya. The count and countess
+      did not know where they were and were very anxious, said one of the men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya was carried out like a log and laid in the larger of the two traps.
+      Natásha and Nicholas got into the other. “Uncle” wrapped Natásha up warmly
+      and took leave of her with quite a new tenderness. He accompanied them on
+      foot as far as the bridge that could not be crossed, so that they had to
+      go round by the ford, and he sent huntsmen to ride in front with lanterns.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good-by, dear niece,” his voice called out of the darkness—not the
+      voice Natásha had known previously, but the one that had sung <i>As ‘twas
+      growing dark last night.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      In the village through which they passed there were red lights and a
+      cheerful smell of smoke.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a darling Uncle is!” said Natásha, when they had come out onto the
+      highroad.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” returned Nicholas. “You’re not cold?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No. I’m quite, quite all right. I feel so comfortable!” answered Natásha,
+      almost perplexed by her feelings. They remained silent a long while. The
+      night was dark and damp. They could not see the horses, but only heard
+      them splashing through the unseen mud.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      What was passing in that receptive childlike soul that so eagerly caught
+      and assimilated all the diverse impressions of life? How did they all find
+      place in her? But she was very happy. As they were nearing home she
+      suddenly struck up the air of <i>As ‘twas growing dark last
+      night</i>—the tune of which she had all the way been trying to get and had
+      at last caught.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Got it?” said Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What were you thinking about just now, Nicholas?” inquired Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They were fond of asking one another that question.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I?” said Nicholas, trying to remember. “Well, you see, first I thought
+      that Rugáy, the red hound, was like Uncle, and that if he were a man he
+      would always keep Uncle near him, if not for his riding, then for his
+      manner. What a good fellow Uncle is! Don’t you think so?... Well, and
+      you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I? Wait a bit, wait.... Yes, first I thought that we are driving along
+      and imagining that we are going home, but that heaven knows where we are
+      really going in the darkness, and that we shall arrive and suddenly find
+      that we are not in Otrádnoe, but in Fairyland. And then I thought... No,
+      nothing else.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I know, I expect you thought of him,” said Nicholas, smiling as Natásha
+      knew by the sound of his voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No,” said Natásha, though she had in reality been thinking about Prince
+      Andrew at the same time as of the rest, and of how he would have liked
+      “Uncle.” “And then I was saying to myself all the way, ‘How well Anísya
+      carried herself, how well!’” And Nicholas heard her spontaneous, happy,
+      ringing laughter. “And do you know,” she suddenly said, “I know that I
+      shall never again be as happy and tranquil as I am now.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Rubbish, nonsense, humbug!” exclaimed Nicholas, and he thought: “How
+      charming this Natásha of mine is! I have no other friend like her and
+      never shall have. Why should she marry? We might always drive about
+      together!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What a darling this Nicholas of mine is!” thought Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, there are still lights in the drawing room!” she said, pointing to
+      the windows of the house that gleamed invitingly in the moist velvety
+      darkness of the night.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0140"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Count Ilyá Rostóv had resigned the position of Marshal of the Nobility
+      because it involved him in too much expense, but still his affairs did not
+      improve. Natásha and Nicholas often noticed their parents conferring
+      together anxiously and privately and heard suggestions of selling the fine
+      ancestral Rostóv house and estate near Moscow. It was not necessary to
+      entertain so freely as when the count had been Marshal, and life at
+      Otrádnoe was quieter than in former years, but still the enormous house
+      and its lodges were full of people and more than twenty sat down to table
+      every day. These were all their own people who had settled down in the
+      house almost as members of the family, or persons who were, it seemed,
+      obliged to live in the count’s house. Such were Dimmler the musician and
+      his wife, Vogel the dancing master and his family, Belóva, an old maiden
+      lady, an inmate of the house, and many others such as Pétya’s tutors, the
+      girls’ former governess, and other people who simply found it preferable
+      and more advantageous to live in the count’s house than at home. They had
+      not as many visitors as before, but the old habits of life without which
+      the count and countess could not conceive of existence remained unchanged.
+      There was still the hunting establishment which Nicholas had even
+      enlarged, the same fifty horses and fifteen grooms in the stables, the
+      same expensive presents and dinner parties to the whole district on name
+      days; there were still the count’s games of whist and boston, at which—spreading
+      out his cards so that everybody could see them—he let himself be
+      plundered of hundreds of rubles every day by his neighbors, who looked
+      upon an opportunity to play a rubber with Count Rostóv as a most
+      profitable source of income.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count moved in his affairs as in a huge net, trying not to believe
+      that he was entangled but becoming more and more so at every step, and
+      feeling too feeble to break the meshes or to set to work carefully and
+      patiently to disentangle them. The countess, with her loving heart, felt
+      that her children were being ruined, that it was not the count’s fault for
+      he could not help being what he was—that (though he tried to hide
+      it) he himself suffered from the consciousness of his own and his
+      children’s ruin, and she tried to find means of remedying the position.
+      From her feminine point of view she could see only one solution, namely,
+      for Nicholas to marry a rich heiress. She felt this to be their last hope
+      and that if Nicholas refused the match she had found for him, she would
+      have to abandon the hope of ever getting matters right. This match was
+      with Julie Karágina, the daughter of excellent and virtuous parents, a
+      girl the Rostóvs had known from childhood, and who had now become a
+      wealthy heiress through the death of the last of her brothers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess had written direct to Julie’s mother in Moscow suggesting a
+      marriage between their children and had received a favorable answer from
+      her. Karágina had replied that for her part she was agreeable, and
+      everything depend on her daughter’s inclination. She invited Nicholas to
+      come to Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Several times the countess, with tears in her eyes, told her son that now
+      both her daughters were settled, her only wish was to see him married. She
+      said she could lie down in her grave peacefully if that were accomplished.
+      Then she told him that she knew of a splendid girl and tried to discover
+      what he thought about marriage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At other times she praised Julie to him and advised him to go to Moscow
+      during the holidays to amuse himself. Nicholas guessed what his mother’s
+      remarks were leading to and during one of these conversations induced her
+      to speak quite frankly. She told him that her only hope of getting their
+      affairs disentangled now lay in his marrying Julie Karágina.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But, Mamma, suppose I loved a girl who has no fortune, would you expect
+      me to sacrifice my feelings and my honor for the sake of money?” he asked
+      his mother, not realizing the cruelty of his question and only wishing to
+      show his noble-mindedness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, you have not understood me,” said his mother, not knowing how to
+      justify herself. “You have not understood me, Nikólenka. It is your
+      happiness I wish for,” she added, feeling that she was telling an untruth
+      and was becoming entangled. She began to cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma, don’t cry! Only tell me that you wish it, and you know I will give
+      my life, anything, to put you at ease,” said Nicholas. “I would sacrifice
+      anything for you—even my feelings.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But the countess did not want the question put like that: she did not want
+      a sacrifice from her son, she herself wished to make a sacrifice for him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, you have not understood me, don’t let us talk about it,” she replied,
+      wiping away her tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Maybe I do love a poor girl,” said Nicholas to himself. “Am I to
+      sacrifice my feelings and my honor for money? I wonder how Mamma could
+      speak so to me. Because Sónya is poor I must not love her,” he thought,
+      “must not respond to her faithful, devoted love? Yet I should certainly be
+      happier with her than with some doll-like Julie. I can always sacrifice my
+      feelings for my family’s welfare,” he said to himself, “but I can’t coerce
+      my feelings. If I love Sónya, that feeling is for me stronger and higher
+      than all else.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas did not go to Moscow, and the countess did not renew the
+      conversation with him about marriage. She saw with sorrow, and sometimes
+      with exasperation, symptoms of a growing attachment between her son and
+      the portionless Sónya. Though she blamed herself for it, she could not
+      refrain from grumbling at and worrying Sónya, often pulling her up without
+      reason, addressing her stiffly as “my dear,” and using the formal “you”
+       instead of the intimate “thou” in speaking to her. The kindhearted
+      countess was the more vexed with Sónya because that poor, dark-eyed niece
+      of hers was so meek, so kind, so devotedly grateful to her benefactors,
+      and so faithfully, unchangingly, and unselfishly in love with Nicholas,
+      that there were no grounds for finding fault with her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas was spending the last of his leave at home. A fourth letter had
+      come from Prince Andrew, from Rome, in which he wrote that he would have
+      been on his way back to Russia long ago had not his wound unexpectedly
+      reopened in the warm climate, which obliged him to defer his return till
+      the beginning of the new year. Natásha was still as much in love with her
+      betrothed, found the same comfort in that love, and was still as ready to
+      throw herself into all the pleasures of life as before; but at the end of
+      the fourth month of their separation she began to have fits of depression
+      which she could not master. She felt sorry for herself: sorry that she was
+      being wasted all this time and of no use to anyone—while she felt
+      herself so capable of loving and being loved.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Things were not cheerful in the Rostóvs’ home.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0141"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Christmas came and except for the ceremonial Mass, the solemn and
+      wearisome Christmas congratulations from neighbors and servants, and the
+      new dresses everyone put on, there were no special festivities, though the
+      calm frost of twenty degrees Réaumur, the dazzling sunshine by day, and
+      the starlight of the winter nights seemed to call for some special
+      celebration of the season.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the third day of Christmas week, after the midday dinner, all the
+      inmates of the house dispersed to various rooms. It was the dullest time
+      of the day. Nicholas, who had been visiting some neighbors that morning,
+      was asleep on the sitting-room sofa. The old count was resting in his
+      study. Sónya sat in the drawing room at the round table, copying a design
+      for embroidery. The countess was playing patience. Nastásya Ivánovna the
+      buffoon sat with a sad face at the window with two old ladies. Natásha
+      came into the room, went up to Sónya, glanced at what she was doing, and
+      then went up to her mother and stood without speaking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why are you wandering about like an outcast?” asked her mother. “What do
+      you want?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “<i>Him</i>... I want him... now, this minute! I want <i>him!</i>”
+      said Natásha, with glittering eyes and no sign of a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess lifted her head and looked attentively at her daughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t look at me, Mamma! Don’t look; I shall cry directly.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Sit down with me a little,” said the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma, I want <i>him</i>. Why should I be wasted like this, Mamma?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Her voice broke, tears gushed from her eyes, and she turned quickly to
+      hide them and left the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She passed into the sitting room, stood there thinking awhile, and then
+      went into the maids’ room. There an old maidservant was grumbling at a
+      young girl who stood panting, having just run in through the cold from the
+      serfs’ quarters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Stop playing—there’s a time for everything,” said the old woman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let her alone, Kondrátevna,” said Natásha. “Go, Mavrúshka, go.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Having released Mavrúshka, Natásha crossed the dancing hall and went to
+      the vestibule. There an old footman and two young ones were playing cards.
+      They broke off and rose as she entered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What can I do with them?” thought Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, Nikíta, please go... where can I send him?... Yes, go to the yard and
+      fetch a fowl, please, a cock, and you, Misha, bring me some oats.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Just a few oats?” said Misha, cheerfully and readily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go, go quickly,” the old man urged him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And you, Theodore, get me a piece of chalk.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      On her way past the butler’s pantry she told them to set a samovar, though
+      it was not at all the time for tea.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Fóka, the butler, was the most ill-tempered person in the house. Natásha
+      liked to test her power over him. He distrusted the order and asked
+      whether the samovar was really wanted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh dear, what a young lady!” said Fóka, pretending to frown at Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      No one in the house sent people about or gave them as much trouble as
+      Natásha did. She could not see people unconcernedly, but had to send them
+      on some errand. She seemed to be trying whether any of them would get
+      angry or sulky with her; but the serfs fulfilled no one’s orders so
+      readily as they did hers. “What can I do, where can I go?” thought she, as
+      she went slowly along the passage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nastásya Ivánovna, what sort of children shall I have?” she asked the
+      buffoon, who was coming toward her in a woman’s jacket.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, fleas, crickets, grasshoppers,” answered the buffoon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “O Lord, O Lord, it’s always the same! Oh, where am I to go? What am I to
+      do with myself?” And tapping with her heels, she ran quickly upstairs to
+      see Vogel and his wife who lived on the upper story.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Two governesses were sitting with the Vogels at a table, on which were
+      plates of raisins, walnuts, and almonds. The governesses were discussing
+      whether it was cheaper to live in Moscow or Odessa. Natásha sat down,
+      listened to their talk with a serious and thoughtful air, and then got up
+      again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The island of Madagascar,” she said, “Ma-da-gas-car,” she repeated,
+      articulating each syllable distinctly, and, not replying to Madame Schoss
+      who asked her what she was saying, she went out of the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Her brother Pétya was upstairs too; with the man in attendance on him he
+      was preparing fireworks to let off that night.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Pétya! Pétya!” she called to him. “Carry me downstairs.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya ran up and offered her his back. She jumped on it, putting her arms
+      round his neck, and he pranced along with her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, don’t... the island of Madagascar!” she said, and jumping off his
+      back she went downstairs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having as it were reviewed her kingdom, tested her power, and made sure
+      that everyone was submissive, but that all the same it was dull, Natásha
+      betook herself to the ballroom, picked up her guitar, sat down in a dark
+      corner behind a bookcase, and began to run her fingers over the strings in
+      the bass, picking out a passage she recalled from an opera she had heard
+      in Petersburg with Prince Andrew. What she drew from the guitar would have
+      had no meaning for other listeners, but in her imagination a whole series
+      of reminiscences arose from those sounds. She sat behind the bookcase with
+      her eyes fixed on a streak of light escaping from the pantry door and
+      listened to herself and pondered. She was in a mood for brooding on the
+      past.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya passed to the pantry with a glass in her hand. Natásha glanced at
+      her and at the crack in the pantry door, and it seemed to her that she
+      remembered the light falling through that crack once before and Sónya
+      passing with a glass in her hand. “Yes it was exactly the same,” thought
+      Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya, what is this?” she cried, twanging a thick string.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, you are there!” said Sónya with a start, and came near and listened.
+      “I don’t know. A storm?” she ventured timidly, afraid of being wrong.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There! That’s just how she started and just how she came up smiling
+      timidly when all this happened before,” thought Natásha, “and in just the
+      same way I thought there was something lacking in her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, it’s the chorus from <i>The Water-Carrier</i>, listen!”
+      and Natásha sang the air of the chorus so that Sónya should catch it. “Where
+      were you going?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To change the water in this glass. I am just finishing the design.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You always find something to do, but I can’t,” said Natásha. “And where’s
+      Nicholas?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Asleep, I think.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya, go and wake him,” said Natásha. “Tell him I want him to come and
+      sing.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She sat awhile, wondering what the meaning of it all having happened
+      before could be, and without solving this problem, or at all regretting
+      not having done so, she again passed in fancy to the time when she was
+      with <i>him</i> and he was looking at her with a lover’s eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, if only he would come quicker! I am so afraid it will never be! And,
+      worst of all, I am growing old—that’s the thing! There won’t then be
+      in me what there is now. But perhaps he’ll come today, will come
+      immediately. Perhaps he has come and is sitting in the drawing room.
+      Perhaps he came yesterday and I have forgotten it.” She rose, put down the
+      guitar, and went to the drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the domestic circle, tutors, governesses, and guests, were already at
+      the tea table. The servants stood round the table—but Prince Andrew
+      was not there and life was going on as before.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, here she is!” said the old count, when he saw Natásha enter. “Well,
+      sit down by me.” But Natásha stayed by her mother and glanced round as if
+      looking for something.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma!” she muttered, “give him to me, give him, Mamma, quickly,
+      quickly!” and she again had difficulty in repressing her sobs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She sat down at the table and listened to the conversation between the
+      elders and Nicholas, who had also come to the table. “My God, my God! The
+      same faces, the same talk, Papa holding his cup and blowing in the same
+      way!” thought Natásha, feeling with horror a sense of repulsion rising up
+      in her for the whole household, because they were always the same.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After tea, Nicholas, Sónya, and Natásha went to the sitting room, to their
+      favorite corner where their most intimate talks always began.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0142"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      “Does it ever happen to you,” said Natásha to her brother, when they
+      settled down in the sitting room, “does it ever happen to you to feel as
+      if there were nothing more to come—nothing; that everything good is
+      past? And to feel not exactly dull, but sad?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I should think so!” he replied. “I have felt like that when everything
+      was all right and everyone was cheerful. The thought has come into my mind
+      that I was already tired of it all, and that we must all die. Once in the
+      regiment I had not gone to some merrymaking where there was music... and
+      suddenly I felt so depressed...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes, I know, I know, I know!” Natásha interrupted him. “When I was
+      quite little that used to be so with me. Do you remember when I was
+      punished once about some plums? You were all dancing, and I sat sobbing in
+      the schoolroom? I shall never forget it: I felt sad and sorry for
+      everyone, for myself, and for everyone. And I was innocent—that was
+      the chief thing,” said Natásha. “Do you remember?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I remember,” answered Nicholas. “I remember that I came to you afterwards
+      and wanted to comfort you, but do you know, I felt ashamed to. We were
+      terribly absurd. I had a funny doll then and wanted to give it to you. Do
+      you remember?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And do you remember,” Natásha asked with a pensive smile, “how once,
+      long, long ago, when we were quite little, Uncle called us into the study—that
+      was in the old house—and it was dark—we went in and suddenly
+      there stood...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “A Negro,” chimed in Nicholas with a smile of delight. “Of course I
+      remember. Even now I don’t know whether there really was a Negro, or if we
+      only dreamed it or were told about him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “He was gray, you remember, and had white teeth, and stood and looked at
+      us....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya, do <i>you</i> remember?” asked Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, I do remember something too,” Sónya answered timidly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You know I have asked Papa and Mamma about that Negro,” said Natásha,
+      “and they say there was no Negro at all. But you see, you remember!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Of course I do, I remember his teeth as if I had just seen them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How strange it is! It’s as if it were a dream! I like that.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And do you remember how we rolled hard-boiled eggs in the ballroom, and
+      suddenly two old women began spinning round on the carpet? Was that real
+      or not? Do you remember what fun it was?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, and you remember how Papa in his blue overcoat fired a gun in the
+      porch?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      So they went through their memories, smiling with pleasure: not the sad
+      memories of old age, but poetic, youthful ones—those impressions of
+      one’s most distant past in which dreams and realities blend—and they
+      laughed with quiet enjoyment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya, as always, did not quite keep pace with them, though they shared
+      the same reminiscences.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Much that they remembered had slipped from her mind, and what she recalled
+      did not arouse the same poetic feeling as they experienced. She simply
+      enjoyed their pleasure and tried to fit in with it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She only really took part when they recalled Sónya’s first arrival. She
+      told them how afraid she had been of Nicholas because he had on a corded
+      jacket and her nurse had told her that she, too, would be sewn up with
+      cords.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I remember their telling me that you had been born under a cabbage,”
+       said Natásha, “and I remember that I dared not disbelieve it then, but
+      knew that it was not true, and I felt so uncomfortable.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      While they were talking a maid thrust her head in at the other door of the
+      sitting room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They have brought the cock, Miss,” she said in a whisper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It isn’t wanted, Pólya. Tell them to take it away,” replied Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the middle of their talk in the sitting room, Dimmler came in and went
+      up to the harp that stood there in a corner. He took off its cloth
+      covering, and the harp gave out a jarring sound.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mr. Dimmler, please play my favorite nocturne by Field,” came the old
+      countess’ voice from the drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dimmler struck a chord and, turning to Natásha, Nicholas, and Sónya,
+      remarked: “How quiet you young people are!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, we’re philosophizing,” said Natásha, glancing round for a moment and
+      then continuing the conversation. They were now discussing dreams.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dimmler began to play; Natásha went on tiptoe noiselessly to the table,
+      took up a candle, carried it out, and returned, seating herself quietly in
+      her former place. It was dark in the room especially where they were
+      sitting on the sofa, but through the big windows the silvery light of the
+      full moon fell on the floor. Dimmler had finished the piece but still sat
+      softly running his fingers over the strings, evidently uncertain whether
+      to stop or to play something else.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know,” said Natásha in a whisper, moving closer to Nicholas and
+      Sónya, “that when one goes on and on recalling memories, one at last
+      begins to remember what happened before one was in the world....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That is metempsychosis,” said Sónya, who had always learned well, and
+      remembered everything. “The Egyptians believed that our souls have lived
+      in animals, and will go back into animals again.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I don’t believe we ever were in animals,” said Natásha, still in a
+      whisper though the music had ceased. “But I am certain that we were angels
+      somewhere <i>there</i>, and have been here, and that is why we remember....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “May I join you?” said Dimmler who had come up quietly, and he sat down by
+      them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If we have been angels, why have we fallen lower?” said Nicholas. “No,
+      that can’t be!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Not lower, who said we were lower?... How do I know what I was before?”
+       Natásha rejoined with conviction. “The soul is immortal—well then,
+      if I shall always live I must have lived before, lived for a whole
+      eternity.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, but it is hard for us to imagine eternity,” remarked Dimmler, who
+      had joined the young folk with a mildly condescending smile but now spoke
+      as quietly and seriously as they.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why is it hard to imagine eternity?” said Natásha. “It is now today, and
+      it will be tomorrow, and always; and there was yesterday, and the day
+      before....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha! Now it’s your turn. Sing me something,” they heard the countess
+      say. “Why are you sitting there like conspirators?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma, I don’t at all want to,” replied Natásha, but all the same she
+      rose.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      None of them, not even the middle-aged Dimmler, wanted to break off their
+      conversation and quit that corner in the sitting room, but Natásha got up
+      and Nicholas sat down at the clavichord. Standing as usual in the middle
+      of the hall and choosing the place where the resonance was best, Natásha
+      began to sing her mother’s favorite song.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She had said she did not want to sing, but it was long since she had sung,
+      and long before she again sang, as she did that evening. The count, from
+      his study where he was talking to Mítenka, heard her and, like a schoolboy
+      in a hurry to run out to play, blundered in his talk while giving orders
+      to the steward, and at last stopped, while Mítenka stood in front of him
+      also listening and smiling. Nicholas did not take his eyes off his sister
+      and drew breath in time with her. Sónya, as she listened, thought of the
+      immense difference there was between herself and her friend, and how
+      impossible it was for her to be anything like as bewitching as her cousin.
+      The old countess sat with a blissful yet sad smile and with tears in her
+      eyes, occasionally shaking her head. She thought of Natásha and of her own
+      youth, and of how there was something unnatural and dreadful in this
+      impending marriage of Natásha and Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dimmler, who had seated himself beside the countess, listened with closed
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, Countess,” he said at last, “that’s a European talent, she has
+      nothing to learn—what softness, tenderness, and strength....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, how afraid I am for her, how afraid I am!” said the countess, not
+      realizing to whom she was speaking. Her maternal instinct told her that
+      Natásha had too much of something, and that because of this she would not
+      be happy. Before Natásha had finished singing, fourteen-year-old Pétya
+      rushed in delightedly, to say that some mummers had arrived.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha stopped abruptly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Idiot!” she screamed at her brother and, running to a chair, threw
+      herself on it, sobbing so violently that she could not stop for a long
+      time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s nothing, Mamma, really it’s nothing; only Pétya startled me,” she
+      said, trying to smile, but her tears still flowed and sobs still choked
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The mummers (some of the house serfs) dressed up as bears, Turks,
+      innkeepers, and ladies—frightening and funny—bringing in with
+      them the cold from outside and a feeling of gaiety, crowded, at first
+      timidly, into the anteroom, then hiding behind one another they pushed
+      into the ballroom where, shyly at first and then more and more merrily and
+      heartily, they started singing, dancing, and playing Christmas games. The
+      countess, when she had identified them and laughed at their costumes, went
+      into the drawing room. The count sat in the ballroom, smiling radiantly
+      and applauding the players. The young people had disappeared.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Half an hour later there appeared among the other mummers in the ballroom
+      an old lady in a hooped skirt—this was Nicholas. A Turkish girl was
+      Pétya. A clown was Dimmler. An hussar was Natásha, and a Circassian was
+      Sónya with burnt-cork mustache and eyebrows.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the condescending surprise, nonrecognition, and praise, from those
+      who were not themselves dressed up, the young people decided that their
+      costumes were so good that they ought to be shown elsewhere.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas, who, as the roads were in splendid condition, wanted to take
+      them all for a drive in his troyka, proposed to take with them about a
+      dozen of the serf mummers and drive to “Uncle’s.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, why disturb the old fellow?” said the countess. “Besides, you
+      wouldn’t have room to turn round there. If you must go, go to the
+      Melyukóvs’.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Melyukóva was a widow, who, with her family and their tutors and
+      governesses, lived three miles from the Rostóvs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s right, my dear,” chimed in the old count, thoroughly aroused.
+      “I’ll dress up at once and go with them. I’ll make Pashette open her
+      eyes.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But the countess would not agree to his going; he had had a bad leg all
+      these last days. It was decided that the count must not go, but that if
+      Louisa Ivánovna (Madame Schoss) would go with them, the young ladies might
+      go to the Melyukóvs’, Sónya, generally so timid and shy, more urgently
+      than anyone begging Louisa Ivánovna not to refuse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya’s costume was the best of all. Her mustache and eyebrows were
+      extraordinarily becoming. Everyone told her she looked very handsome, and
+      she was in a spirited and energetic mood unusual with her. Some inner
+      voice told her that now or never her fate would be decided, and in her
+      male attire she seemed quite a different person. Louisa Ivánovna consented
+      to go, and in half an hour four troyka sleighs with large and small bells,
+      their runners squeaking and whistling over the frozen snow, drove up to
+      the porch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha was foremost in setting a merry holiday tone, which, passing from
+      one to another, grew stronger and reached its climax when they all came
+      out into the frost and got into the sleighs, talking, calling to one
+      another, laughing, and shouting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Two of the troykas were the usual household sleighs, the third was the old
+      count’s with a trotter from the Orlóv stud as shaft horse, the fourth was
+      Nicholas’ own with a short shaggy black shaft horse. Nicholas, in his old
+      lady’s dress over which he had belted his hussar overcoat, stood in the
+      middle of the sleigh, reins in hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was so light that he could see the moonlight reflected from the metal
+      harness disks and from the eyes of the horses, who looked round in alarm
+      at the noisy party under the shadow of the porch roof.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha, Sónya, Madame Schoss, and two maids got into Nicholas’ sleigh;
+      Dimmler, his wife, and Pétya, into the old count’s, and the rest of the
+      mummers seated themselves in the other two sleighs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You go ahead, Zakhár!” shouted Nicholas to his father’s coachman, wishing
+      for a chance to race past him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old count’s troyka, with Dimmler and his party, started forward,
+      squeaking on its runners as though freezing to the snow, its deep-toned
+      bell clanging. The side horses, pressing against the shafts of the middle
+      horse, sank in the snow, which was dry and glittered like sugar, and threw
+      it up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas set off, following the first sleigh; behind him the others moved
+      noisily, their runners squeaking. At first they drove at a steady trot
+      along the narrow road. While they drove past the garden the shadows of the
+      bare trees often fell across the road and hid the brilliant moonlight, but
+      as soon as they were past the fence, the snowy plain bathed in moonlight
+      and motionless spread out before them glittering like diamonds and dappled
+      with bluish shadows. <i>Bang, bang!</i> went the first sleigh over a cradle hole
+      in the snow of the road, and each of the other sleighs jolted in the same
+      way, and rudely breaking the frost-bound stillness, the troykas began to
+      speed along the road, one after the other.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A hare’s track, a lot of tracks!” rang out Natásha’s voice through the
+      frost-bound air.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How light it is, Nicholas!” came Sónya’s voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas glanced round at Sónya, and bent down to see her face closer.
+      Quite a new, sweet face with black eyebrows and mustaches peeped up at him
+      from her sable furs—so close and yet so distant—in the
+      moonlight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That used to be Sónya,” thought he, and looked at her closer and smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it, Nicholas?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Nothing,” said he and turned again to the horses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When they came out onto the beaten highroad—polished by sleigh
+      runners and cut up by rough-shod hoofs, the marks of which were visible in
+      the moonlight—the horses began to tug at the reins of their own
+      accord and increased their pace. The near side horse, arching his head and
+      breaking into a short canter, tugged at his traces. The shaft horse swayed
+      from side to side, moving his ears as if asking: “Isn’t it time to begin
+      now?” In front, already far ahead the deep bell of the sleigh ringing
+      farther and farther off, the black horses driven by Zakhár could be
+      clearly seen against the white snow. From that sleigh one could hear the
+      shouts, laughter, and voices of the mummers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Gee up, my darlings!” shouted Nicholas, pulling the reins to one side and
+      flourishing the whip.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was only by the keener wind that met them and the jerks given by the
+      side horses who pulled harder—ever increasing their gallop—that
+      one noticed how fast the troyka was flying. Nicholas looked back. With
+      screams, squeals, and waving of whips that caused even the shaft horses to
+      gallop—the other sleighs followed. The shaft horse swung steadily
+      beneath the bow over its head, with no thought of slackening pace and
+      ready to put on speed when required.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas overtook the first sleigh. They were driving downhill and coming
+      out upon a broad trodden track across a meadow, near a river.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where are we?” thought he. “It’s the Kosóy meadow, I
+      suppose. But no—this is something new I’ve never seen before. This
+      isn’t the Kosóy meadow nor the Dëmkin hill, and heaven only knows what it is!
+      It is something new and enchanted. Well, whatever it may be...” And shouting
+      to his horses, he began to pass the first sleigh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Zakhár held back his horses and turned his face, which was already covered
+      with hoarfrost to his eyebrows.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas gave the horses the rein, and Zakhár, stretching out his arms,
+      clucked his tongue and let his horses go.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now, look out, master!” he cried.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Faster still the two troykas flew side by side, and faster moved the feet
+      of the galloping side horses. Nicholas began to draw ahead. Zakhár, while
+      still keeping his arms extended, raised one hand with the reins.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No you won’t, master!” he shouted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas put all his horses to a gallop and passed Zakhár. The horses
+      showered the fine dry snow on the faces of those in the sleigh—beside
+      them sounded quick ringing bells and they caught confused glimpses of
+      swiftly moving legs and the shadows of the troyka they were passing. The
+      whistling sound of the runners on the snow and the voices of girls
+      shrieking were heard from different sides.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Again checking his horses, Nicholas looked around him. They were still
+      surrounded by the magic plain bathed in moonlight and spangled with stars.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Zakhár is shouting that I should turn to the left, but why to the left?”
+       thought Nicholas. “Are we getting to the Melyukóvs’? Is this Melyukóvka?
+      Heaven only knows where we are going, and heaven knows what is happening
+      to us—but it is very strange and pleasant whatever it is.” And he
+      looked round in the sleigh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Look, his mustache and eyelashes are all white!” said one of the strange,
+      pretty, unfamiliar people—the one with fine eyebrows and mustache.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I think this used to be Natásha,” thought Nicholas, “and that was Madame
+      Schoss, but perhaps it’s not, and this Circassian with the mustache I
+      don’t know, but I love her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Aren’t you cold?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They did not answer but began to laugh. Dimmler from the sleigh behind
+      shouted something—probably something funny—but they could not
+      make out what he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes!” some voices answered, laughing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But here was a fairy forest with black moving shadows, and a glitter of
+      diamonds and a flight of marble steps and the silver roofs of fairy
+      buildings and the shrill yells of some animals. And if this is really
+      Melyukóvka, it is still stranger that we drove heaven knows where and have
+      come to Melyukóvka,” thought Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It really was Melyukóvka, and maids and footmen with merry faces came
+      running, out to the porch carrying candles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who is it?” asked someone in the porch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The mummers from the count’s. I know by the horses,” replied some voices.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0143"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Pelagéya Danílovna Melyukóva, a broadly built, energetic woman wearing
+      spectacles, sat in the drawing room in a loose dress, surrounded by her
+      daughters whom she was trying to keep from feeling dull. They were quietly
+      dropping melted wax into snow and looking at the shadows the wax figures
+      would throw on the wall, when they heard the steps and voices of new
+      arrivals in the vestibule.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Hussars, ladies, witches, clowns, and bears, after clearing their throats
+      and wiping the hoarfrost from their faces in the vestibule, came into the
+      ballroom where candles were hurriedly lighted. The clown—Dimmler—and
+      the lady—Nicholas—started a dance. Surrounded by the screaming
+      children the mummers, covering their faces and disguising their voices,
+      bowed to their hostess and arranged themselves about the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear me! there’s no recognizing them! And Natásha! See whom she looks
+      like! She really reminds me of somebody. But Herr Dimmler—isn’t he
+      good! I didn’t know him! And how he dances. Dear me, there’s a Circassian.
+      Really, how becoming it is to dear Sónya. And who is that? Well, you have
+      cheered us up! Nikíta and Vanya—clear away the tables! And we were
+      sitting so quietly. Ha, ha, ha!... The hussar, the hussar! Just like a
+      boy! And the legs!... I can’t look at him...” different voices were
+      saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha, the young Melyukóvs’ favorite, disappeared with them into the
+      back rooms where a cork and various dressing gowns and male garments were
+      called for and received from the footman by bare girlish arms from behind
+      the door. Ten minutes later, all the young Melyukóvs joined the mummers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pelagéya Danílovna, having given orders to clear the rooms for the
+      visitors and arranged about refreshments for the gentry and the serfs,
+      went about among the mummers without removing her spectacles, peering into
+      their faces with a suppressed smile and failing to recognize any of them.
+      It was not merely Dimmler and the Rostóvs she failed to recognize, she did
+      not even recognize her own daughters, or her late husband’s, dressing
+      gowns and uniforms, which they had put on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And who is this?” she asked her governess, peering into the face of her
+      own daughter dressed up as a Kazán-Tartar. “I suppose it is one of the
+      Rostóvs! Well, Mr. Hussar, and what regiment do you serve in?” she asked
+      Natásha. “Here, hand some fruit jelly to the Turk!” she ordered the butler
+      who was handing things round. “That’s not forbidden by his law.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sometimes, as she looked at the strange but amusing capers cut by the
+      dancers, who—having decided once for all that being disguised, no
+      one would recognize them—were not at all shy, Pelagéya Danílovna hid
+      her face in her handkerchief, and her whole stout body shook with
+      irrepressible, kindly, elderly laughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My little Sásha! Look at Sásha!” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After Russian country dances and chorus dances, Pelagéya Danílovna made
+      the serfs and gentry join in one large circle: a ring, a string, and a
+      silver ruble were fetched and they all played games together.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In an hour, all the costumes were crumpled and disordered. The corked
+      eyebrows and mustaches were smeared over the perspiring, flushed, and
+      merry faces. Pelagéya Danílovna began to recognize the mummers, admired
+      their cleverly contrived costumes, and particularly how they suited the
+      young ladies, and she thanked them all for having entertained her so well.
+      The visitors were invited to supper in the drawing room, and the serfs had
+      something served to them in the ballroom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now to tell one’s fortune in the empty bathhouse is frightening!” said an
+      old maid who lived with the Melyukóvs, during supper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why?” said the eldest Melyukóv girl.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You wouldn’t go, it takes courage....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll go,” said Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Tell what happened to the young lady!” said the second Melyukóv girl.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well,” began the old maid, “a young lady once went out, took a cock, laid
+      the table for two, all properly, and sat down. After sitting a while, she
+      suddenly hears someone coming... a sleigh drives up with harness bells;
+      she hears him coming! He comes in, just in the shape of a man, like an
+      officer—comes in and sits down to table with her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah! ah!” screamed Natásha, rolling her eyes with horror.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes? And how... did he speak?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, like a man. Everything quite all right, and he began persuading her;
+      and she should have kept him talking till cockcrow, but she got
+      frightened, just got frightened and hid her face in her hands. Then he
+      caught her up. It was lucky the maids ran in just then....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Now, why frighten them?” said Pelagéya Danílovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma, you used to try your fate yourself...” said her daughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And how does one do it in a barn?” inquired Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, say you went to the barn now, and listened. It depends on what you
+      hear; hammering and knocking—that’s bad; but a sound of shifting
+      grain is good and one sometimes hears that, too.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma, tell us what happened to you in the barn.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pelagéya Danílovna smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, I’ve forgotten...” she replied. “But none of you would go?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I will; Pelagéya Danílovna, let me! I’ll go,” said Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, why not, if you’re not afraid?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Louisa Ivánovna, may I?” asked Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Whether they were playing the ring and string game or the ruble game or
+      talking as now, Nicholas did not leave Sónya’s side, and gazed at her with
+      quite new eyes. It seemed to him that it was only today, thanks to that
+      burnt-cork mustache, that he had fully learned to know her. And really,
+      that evening, Sónya was brighter, more animated, and prettier than
+      Nicholas had ever seen her before.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So that’s what she is like; what a fool I have been!” he thought gazing
+      at her sparkling eyes, and under the mustache a happy rapturous smile
+      dimpled her cheeks, a smile he had never seen before.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’m not afraid of anything,” said Sónya. “May I go at once?” She got up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They told her where the barn was and how she should stand and listen, and
+      they handed her a fur cloak. She threw this over her head and shoulders
+      and glanced at Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a darling that girl is!” thought he. “And what have I been thinking
+      of till now?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya went out into the passage to go to the barn. Nicholas went hastily
+      to the front porch, saying he felt too hot. The crowd of people really had
+      made the house stuffy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Outside, there was the same cold stillness and the same moon, but even
+      brighter than before. The light was so strong and the snow sparkled with
+      so many stars that one did not wish to look up at the sky and the real
+      stars were unnoticed. The sky was black and dreary, while the earth was
+      gay.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am a fool, a fool! what have I been waiting for?” thought Nicholas, and
+      running out from the porch he went round the corner of the house and along
+      the path that led to the back porch. He knew Sónya would pass that way.
+      Halfway lay some snow-covered piles of firewood and across and along them
+      a network of shadows from the bare old lime trees fell on the snow and on
+      the path. This path led to the barn. The log walls of the barn and its
+      snow-covered roof, that looked as if hewn out of some precious stone,
+      sparkled in the moonlight. A tree in the garden snapped with the frost,
+      and then all was again perfectly silent. His bosom seemed to inhale not
+      air but the strength of eternal youth and gladness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the back porch came the sound of feet descending the steps, the
+      bottom step upon which snow had fallen gave a ringing creak and he heard
+      the voice of an old maidservant saying, “Straight, straight, along the
+      path, Miss. Only, don’t look back.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I am not afraid,” answered Sónya’s voice, and along the path toward
+      Nicholas came the crunching, whistling sound of Sónya’s feet in her thin
+      shoes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya came along, wrapped in her cloak. She was only a couple of paces
+      away when she saw him, and to her too he was not the Nicholas she had
+      known and always slightly feared. He was in a woman’s dress, with tousled
+      hair and a happy smile new to Sónya. She ran rapidly toward him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Quite different and yet the same,” thought Nicholas, looking at her face
+      all lit up by the moonlight. He slipped his arms under the cloak that
+      covered her head, embraced her, pressed her to him, and kissed her on the
+      lips that wore a mustache and had a smell of burnt cork. Sónya kissed him
+      full on the lips, and disengaging her little hands pressed them to his
+      cheeks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya!... Nicholas!”... was all they said. They ran to the barn and then
+      back again, re-entering, he by the front and she by the back porch.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0144"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      When they all drove back from Pelagéya Danílovna’s, Natásha, who always
+      saw and noticed everything, arranged that she and Madame Schoss should go
+      back in the sleigh with Dimmler, and Sónya with Nicholas and the maids.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the way back Nicholas drove at a steady pace instead of racing and kept
+      peering by that fantastic all-transforming light into Sónya’s face and
+      searching beneath the eyebrows and mustache for his former and his present
+      Sónya from whom he had resolved never to be parted again. He looked and
+      recognizing in her both the old and the new Sónya, and being reminded by
+      the smell of burnt cork of the sensation of her kiss, inhaled the frosty
+      air with a full breast and, looking at the ground flying beneath him and
+      at the sparkling sky, felt himself again in fairyland.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya, is it well with <i>thee?</i>” he asked from time to time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes!” she replied. “And with <i>thee?</i>”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      When halfway home Nicholas handed the reins to the coachman and ran for a
+      moment to Natásha’s sleigh and stood on its wing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha!” he whispered in French, “do you know I have made up my mind
+      about Sónya?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Have you told her?” asked Natásha, suddenly beaming all over with joy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, how strange you are with that mustache and those eyebrows!... Natásha—are
+      you glad?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I am so glad, so glad! I was beginning to be vexed with you. I did not
+      tell you, but you have been treating her badly. What a heart she has,
+      Nicholas! I am horrid sometimes, but I was ashamed to be happy while Sónya
+      was not,” continued Natásha. “Now I am so glad! Well, run back to her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, wait a bit.... Oh, how funny you look!” cried Nicholas, peering into
+      her face and finding in his sister too something new, unusual, and
+      bewitchingly tender that he had not seen in her before. “Natásha, it’s
+      magical, isn’t it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” she replied. “You have done splendidly.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Had I seen her before as she is now,” thought Nicholas, “I should long
+      ago have asked her what to do and have done whatever she told me, and all
+      would have been well.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “So you are glad and I have done right?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, quite right! I had a quarrel with Mamma some time ago about it. Mamma
+      said she was angling for you. How could she say such a thing! I nearly
+      stormed at Mamma. I will never let anyone say anything bad of Sónya, for
+      there is nothing but good in her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Then it’s all right?” said Nicholas, again scrutinizing the expression of
+      his sister’s face to see if she was in earnest. Then he jumped down and,
+      his boots scrunching the snow, ran back to his sleigh. The same happy,
+      smiling Circassian, with mustache and beaming eyes looking up from under a
+      sable hood, was still sitting there, and that Circassian was Sónya, and
+      that Sónya was certainly his future happy and loving wife.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When they reached home and had told their mother how they had spent the
+      evening at the Melyukóvs’, the girls went to their bedroom. When they had
+      undressed, but without washing off the cork mustaches, they sat a long
+      time talking of their happiness. They talked of how they would live when
+      they were married, how their husbands would be friends, and how happy they
+      would be. On Natásha’s table stood two looking glasses which Dunyásha had
+      prepared beforehand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Only when will all that be? I am afraid never.... It would be too good!”
+       said Natásha, rising and going to the looking glasses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sit down, Natásha; perhaps you’ll see him,” said Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha lit the candles, one on each side of one of the looking glasses,
+      and sat down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I see someone with a mustache,” said Natásha, seeing her own face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You mustn’t laugh, Miss,” said Dunyásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With Sónya’s help and the maid’s, Natásha got the glass she held into the
+      right position opposite the other; her face assumed a serious expression
+      and she sat silent. She sat a long time looking at the receding line of
+      candles reflected in the glasses and expecting (from tales she had heard)
+      to see a coffin, or <i>him</i>, Prince Andrew, in that last dim, indistinctly
+      outlined square. But ready as she was to take the smallest speck for the
+      image of a man or of a coffin, she saw nothing. She began blinking rapidly
+      and moved away from the looking glasses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why is it others see things and I don’t?” she said. “You sit down now,
+      Sónya. You absolutely must, tonight! Do it for me.... Today I feel so
+      frightened!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya sat down before the glasses, got the right position, and began
+      looking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now, Miss Sónya is sure to see something,” whispered Dunyásha; “while you
+      do nothing but laugh.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya heard this and Natásha’s whisper:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I know she will. She saw something last year.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      For about three minutes all were silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Of course she will!” whispered Natásha, but did not finish... suddenly
+      Sónya pushed away the glass she was holding and covered her eyes with her
+      hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, Natásha!” she cried.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Did you see? Did you? What was it?” exclaimed Natásha, holding up the
+      looking glass.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya had not seen anything, she was just wanting to blink and to get up
+      when she heard Natásha say, “Of course she will!” She did not wish to
+      disappoint either Dunyásha or Natásha, but it was hard to sit still. She
+      did not herself know how or why the exclamation escaped her when she
+      covered her eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You saw him?” urged Natásha, seizing her hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes. Wait a bit... I... saw him,” Sónya could not help saying, not yet
+      knowing whom Natásha meant by <i>him</i>, Nicholas or Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But why shouldn’t I say I saw something? Others do see! Besides who can
+      tell whether I saw anything or not?” flashed through Sónya’s mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I saw him,” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How? Standing or lying?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I saw... At first there was nothing, then I saw him lying down.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Andrew lying? Is he ill?” asked Natásha, her frightened eyes fixed on her
+      friend.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, on the contrary, on the contrary! His face was cheerful, and he
+      turned to me.” And when saying this she herself fancied she had really
+      seen what she described.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, and then, Sónya?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “After that, I could not make out what there was; something blue and
+      red....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya! When will he come back? When shall I see him! O, God, how afraid I
+      am for him and for myself and about everything!...” Natásha began, and
+      without replying to Sónya’s words of comfort she got into bed, and long
+      after her candle was out lay open-eyed and motionless, gazing at the
+      moonlight through the frosty windowpanes.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0145"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Soon after the Christmas holidays Nicholas told his mother of his love for
+      Sónya and of his firm resolve to marry her. The countess, who had long
+      noticed what was going on between them and was expecting this declaration,
+      listened to him in silence and then told her son that he might marry whom
+      he pleased, but that neither she nor his father would give their blessing
+      to such a marriage. Nicholas, for the first time, felt that his mother was
+      displeased with him and that, despite her love for him, she would not give
+      way. Coldly, without looking at her son, she sent for her husband and,
+      when he came, tried briefly and coldly to inform him of the facts, in her
+      son’s presence, but unable to restrain herself she burst into tears of
+      vexation and left the room. The old count began irresolutely to admonish
+      Nicholas and beg him to abandon his purpose. Nicholas replied that he
+      could not go back on his word, and his father, sighing and evidently
+      disconcerted, very soon became silent and went in to the countess. In all
+      his encounters with his son, the count was always conscious of his own
+      guilt toward him for having wasted the family fortune, and so he could not
+      be angry with him for refusing to marry an heiress and choosing the
+      dowerless Sónya. On this occasion, he was only more vividly conscious of
+      the fact that if his affairs had not been in disorder, no better wife for
+      Nicholas than Sónya could have been wished for, and that no one but
+      himself with his Mítenka and his uncomfortable habits was to blame for the
+      condition of the family finances.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The father and mother did not speak of the matter to their son again, but
+      a few days later the countess sent for Sónya and, with a cruelty neither
+      of them expected, reproached her niece for trying to catch Nicholas and
+      for ingratitude. Sónya listened silently with downcast eyes to the
+      countess’ cruel words, without understanding what was required of her. She
+      was ready to sacrifice everything for her benefactors. Self-sacrifice was
+      her most cherished idea but in this case she could not see what she ought
+      to sacrifice, or for whom. She could not help loving the countess and the
+      whole Rostóv family, but neither could she help loving Nicholas and
+      knowing that his happiness depended on that love. She was silent and sad
+      and did not reply. Nicholas felt the situation to be intolerable and went
+      to have an explanation with his mother. He first implored her to forgive
+      him and Sónya and consent to their marriage, then he threatened that if
+      she molested Sónya he would at once marry her secretly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess, with a coldness her son had never seen in her before,
+      replied that he was of age, that Prince Andrew was marrying without his
+      father’s consent, and he could do the same, but that she would never
+      receive that <i>intriguer</i> as her daughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Exploding at the word <i>intriguer</i>, Nicholas, raising his voice, told his
+      mother he had never expected her to try to force him to sell his feelings,
+      but if that were so, he would say for the last time.... But he had no time
+      to utter the decisive word which the expression of his face caused his
+      mother to await with terror, and which would perhaps have forever remained
+      a cruel memory to them both. He had not time to say it, for Natásha, with
+      a pale and set face, entered the room from the door at which she had been
+      listening.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nicholas, you are talking nonsense! Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet, I tell
+      you!...” she almost screamed, so as to drown his voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma darling, it’s not at all so... my poor, sweet darling,” she said to
+      her mother, who conscious that they had been on the brink of a rupture
+      gazed at her son with terror, but in the obstinacy and excitement of the
+      conflict could not and would not give way.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nicholas, I’ll explain to you. Go away! Listen, Mamma darling,” said
+      Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Her words were incoherent, but they attained the purpose at which she was
+      aiming.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess, sobbing heavily, hid her face on her daughter’s breast,
+      while Nicholas rose, clutching his head, and left the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha set to work to effect a reconciliation, and so far succeeded that
+      Nicholas received a promise from his mother that Sónya should not be
+      troubled, while he on his side promised not to undertake anything without
+      his parents’ knowledge.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Firmly resolved, after putting his affairs in order in the regiment, to
+      retire from the army and return and marry Sónya, Nicholas, serious,
+      sorrowful, and at variance with his parents, but, as it seemed to him,
+      passionately in love, left at the beginning of January to rejoin his
+      regiment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After Nicholas had gone things in the Rostóv household were more
+      depressing than ever, and the countess fell ill from mental agitation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya was unhappy at the separation from Nicholas and still more so on
+      account of the hostile tone the countess could not help adopting toward
+      her. The count was more perturbed than ever by the condition of his
+      affairs, which called for some decisive action. Their town house and
+      estate near Moscow had inevitably to be sold, and for this they had to go
+      to Moscow. But the countess’ health obliged them to delay their departure
+      from day to day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha, who had borne the first period of separation from her betrothed
+      lightly and even cheerfully, now grew more agitated and impatient every
+      day. The thought that her best days, which she would have employed in
+      loving him, were being vainly wasted, with no advantage to anyone,
+      tormented her incessantly. His letters for the most part irritated her. It
+      hurt her to think that while she lived only in the thought of him, he was
+      living a real life, seeing new places and new people that interested him.
+      The more interesting his letters were the more vexed she felt. Her letters
+      to him, far from giving her any comfort, seemed to her a wearisome and
+      artificial obligation. She could not write, because she could not conceive
+      the possibility of expressing sincerely in a letter even a thousandth part
+      of what she expressed by voice, smile, and glance. She wrote to him
+      formal, monotonous, and dry letters, to which she attached no importance
+      herself, and in the rough copies of which the countess corrected her
+      mistakes in spelling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was still no improvement in the countess’ health, but it was
+      impossible to defer the journey to Moscow any longer. Natásha’s trousseau
+      had to be ordered and the house sold. Moreover, Prince Andrew was expected
+      in Moscow, where old Prince Bolkónski was spending the winter, and Natásha
+      felt sure he had already arrived.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      So the countess remained in the country, and the count, taking Sónya and
+      Natásha with him, went to Moscow at the end of January.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0153"></a>
+      BOOK EIGHT: 1811 - 12
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0146"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After Prince Andrew’s engagement to Natásha, Pierre without any apparent
+      cause suddenly felt it impossible to go on living as before. Firmly
+      convinced as he was of the truths revealed to him by his benefactor, and
+      happy as he had been in perfecting his inner man, to which he had devoted
+      himself with such ardor—all the zest of such a life vanished after
+      the engagement of Andrew and Natásha and the death of Joseph Alexéevich,
+      the news of which reached him almost at the same time. Only the skeleton
+      of life remained: his house, a brilliant wife who now enjoyed the favors
+      of a very important personage, acquaintance with all Petersburg, and his
+      court service with its dull formalities. And this life suddenly seemed to
+      Pierre unexpectedly loathsome. He ceased keeping a diary, avoided the
+      company of the Brothers, began going to the club again, drank a great
+      deal, and came once more in touch with the bachelor sets, leading such a
+      life that the Countess Hélène thought it necessary to speak severely to
+      him about it. Pierre felt that she was right, and to avoid compromising
+      her went away to Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In Moscow as soon as he entered his huge house in which the faded and
+      fading princesses still lived, with its enormous retinue; as soon as,
+      driving through the town, he saw the Iberian shrine with innumerable
+      tapers burning before the golden covers of the icons, the Krémlin Square
+      with its snow undisturbed by vehicles, the sleigh drivers and hovels of
+      the Sívtsev Vrazhók, those old Moscovites who desired nothing, hurried
+      nowhere, and were ending their days leisurely; when he saw those old
+      Moscow ladies, the Moscow balls, and the English Club, he felt himself at
+      home in a quiet haven. In Moscow he felt at peace, at home, warm and dirty
+      as in an old dressing gown.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Moscow society, from the old women down to the children, received Pierre
+      like a long-expected guest whose place was always ready awaiting him. For
+      Moscow society Pierre was the nicest, kindest, most intellectual,
+      merriest, and most magnanimous of cranks, a heedless, genial nobleman of
+      the old Russian type. His purse was always empty because it was open to
+      everyone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Benefit performances, poor pictures, statues, benevolent societies, gypsy
+      choirs, schools, subscription dinners, sprees, Freemasons, churches, and
+      books—no one and nothing met with a refusal from him, and had it not
+      been for two friends who had borrowed large sums from him and taken him
+      under their protection, he would have given everything away. There was
+      never a dinner or soiree at the club without him. As soon as he sank into
+      his place on the sofa after two bottles of Margaux he was surrounded, and
+      talking, disputing, and joking began. When there were quarrels, his kindly
+      smile and well-timed jests reconciled the antagonists. The Masonic dinners
+      were dull and dreary when he was not there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When after a bachelor supper he rose with his amiable and kindly smile,
+      yielding to the entreaties of the festive company to drive off somewhere
+      with them, shouts of delight and triumph arose among the young men. At
+      balls he danced if a partner was needed. Young ladies, married and
+      unmarried, liked him because without making love to any of them, he was
+      equally amiable to all, especially after supper. <i>“Il est charmant; il n’a
+      pas de sexe,”</i> * they said of him.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “He is charming; he has no sex.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was one of those retired gentlemen-in-waiting of whom there were
+      hundreds good-humoredly ending their days in Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      How horrified he would have been seven years before, when he first arrived
+      from abroad, had he been told that there was no need for him to seek or
+      plan anything, that his rut had long been shaped, eternally predetermined,
+      and that wriggle as he might, he would be what all in his position were.
+      He could not have believed it! Had he not at one time longed with all his
+      heart to establish a republic in Russia; then himself to be a Napoleon;
+      then to be a philosopher; and then a strategist and the conqueror of
+      Napoleon? Had he not seen the possibility of, and passionately desired,
+      the regeneration of the sinful human race, and his own progress to the
+      highest degree of perfection? Had he not established schools and hospitals
+      and liberated his serfs?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But instead of all that—here he was, the wealthy husband of an
+      unfaithful wife, a retired gentleman-in-waiting, fond of eating and
+      drinking and, as he unbuttoned his waistcoat, of abusing the government a
+      bit, a member of the Moscow English Club, and a universal favorite in
+      Moscow society. For a long time he could not reconcile himself to the idea
+      that he was one of those same retired Moscow gentlemen-in-waiting he had
+      so despised seven years before.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sometimes he consoled himself with the thought that he was only living
+      this life temporarily; but then he was shocked by the thought of how many,
+      like himself, had entered that life and that club temporarily, with all
+      their teeth and hair, and had only left it when not a single tooth or hair
+      remained.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In moments of pride, when he thought of his position it seemed to him that
+      he was quite different and distinct from those other retired
+      gentlemen-in-waiting he had formerly despised: they were empty, stupid,
+      contented fellows, satisfied with their position, “while I am still
+      discontented and want to do something for mankind. But perhaps all these
+      comrades of mine struggled just like me and sought something new, a path
+      in life of their own, and like me were brought by force of circumstances,
+      society, and race—by that elemental force against which man is
+      powerless—to the condition I am in,” said he to himself in moments
+      of humility; and after living some time in Moscow he no longer despised,
+      but began to grow fond of, to respect, and to pity his comrades in
+      destiny, as he pitied himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre no longer suffered moments of despair, hypochondria, and disgust
+      with life, but the malady that had formerly found expression in such acute
+      attacks was driven inwards and never left him for a moment. “What for?
+      Why? What is going on in the world?” he would ask himself in perplexity
+      several times a day, involuntarily beginning to reflect anew on the
+      meaning of the phenomena of life; but knowing by experience that there
+      were no answers to these questions he made haste to turn away from them,
+      and took up a book, or hurried off to the club or to Apollón
+      Nikoláevich’s, to exchange the gossip of the town.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hélène, who has never cared for anything but her own body and is one of
+      the stupidest women in the world,” thought Pierre, “is regarded by people
+      as the acme of intelligence and refinement, and they pay homage to her.
+      Napoleon Bonaparte was despised by all as long as he was great, but now
+      that he has become a wretched comedian the Emperor Francis wants to offer
+      him his daughter in an illegal marriage. The Spaniards, through the
+      Catholic clergy, offer praise to God for their victory over the French on
+      the fourteenth of June, and the French, also through the Catholic clergy,
+      offer praise because on that same fourteenth of June they defeated the
+      Spaniards. My brother Masons swear by the blood that they are ready to
+      sacrifice everything for their neighbor, but they do not give a ruble each
+      to the collections for the poor, and they intrigue, the Astraea Lodge
+      against the Manna Seekers, and fuss about an authentic Scotch carpet and a
+      charter that nobody needs, and the meaning of which the very man who wrote
+      it does not understand. We all profess the Christian law of forgiveness of
+      injuries and love of our neighbors, the law in honor of which we have
+      built in Moscow forty times forty churches—but yesterday a deserter
+      was knouted to death and a minister of that same law of love and
+      forgiveness, a priest, gave the soldier a cross to kiss before his
+      execution.” So thought Pierre, and the whole of this general deception
+      which everyone accepts, accustomed as he was to it, astonished him each
+      time as if it were something new. “I understand the deception and
+      confusion,” he thought, “but how am I to tell them all that I see? I have
+      tried, and have always found that they too in the depths of their souls
+      understand it as I do, and only try not to see it. So it appears that it
+      must be so! But I—what is to become of me?” thought he. He had the
+      unfortunate capacity many men, especially Russians, have of seeing and
+      believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil
+      and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to take a serious part in it.
+      Every sphere of work was connected, in his eyes, with evil and deception.
+      Whatever he tried to be, whatever he engaged in, the evil and falsehood of
+      it repulsed him and blocked every path of activity. Yet he had to live and
+      to find occupation. It was too dreadful to be under the burden of these
+      insoluble problems, so he abandoned himself to any distraction in order to
+      forget them. He frequented every kind of society, drank much, bought
+      pictures, engaged in building, and above all—read.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He read, and read everything that came to hand. On coming home, while his
+      valets were still taking off his things, he picked up a book and began to
+      read. From reading he passed to sleeping, from sleeping to gossip in
+      drawing rooms of the club, from gossip to carousals and women; from
+      carousals back to gossip, reading, and wine. Drinking became more and more
+      a physical and also a moral necessity. Though the doctors warned him that
+      with his corpulence wine was dangerous for him, he drank a great deal. He
+      was only quite at ease when having poured several glasses of wine
+      mechanically into his large mouth he felt a pleasant warmth in his body,
+      an amiability toward all his fellows, and a readiness to respond
+      superficially to every idea without probing it deeply. Only after emptying
+      a bottle or two did he feel dimly that the terribly tangled skein of life
+      which previously had terrified him was not as dreadful as he had thought.
+      He was always conscious of some aspect of that skein, as with a buzzing in
+      his head after dinner or supper he chatted or listened to conversation or
+      read. But under the influence of wine he said to himself: “It doesn’t
+      matter. I’ll get it unraveled. I have a solution ready, but have no time
+      now—I’ll think it all out later on!” But the <i>later on</i> never came.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the morning, on an empty stomach, all the old questions appeared as
+      insoluble and terrible as ever, and Pierre hastily picked up a book, and
+      if anyone came to see him he was glad.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sometimes he remembered how he had heard that soldiers in war when
+      entrenched under the enemy’s fire, if they have nothing to do, try hard to
+      find some occupation the more easily to bear the danger. To Pierre all men
+      seemed like those soldiers, seeking refuge from life: some in ambition,
+      some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in toys, some in
+      horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine, and some in
+      governmental affairs. “Nothing is trivial, and nothing is important, it’s
+      all the same—only to save oneself from it as best one can,” thought
+      Pierre. “Only not to see <i>it</i>, that dreadful <i>it!</i>”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0147"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At the beginning of winter Prince Nicholas Bolkónski and his daughter
+      moved to Moscow. At that time enthusiasm for the Emperor Alexander’s
+      regime had weakened and a patriotic and anti-French tendency prevailed
+      there, and this, together with his past and his intellect and his
+      originality, at once made Prince Nicholas Bolkónski an object of
+      particular respect to the Moscovites and the center of the Moscow
+      opposition to the government.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The prince had aged very much that year. He showed marked signs of
+      senility by a tendency to fall asleep, forgetfulness of quite recent
+      events, remembrance of remote ones, and the childish vanity with which he
+      accepted the role of head of the Moscow opposition. In spite of this the
+      old man inspired in all his visitors alike a feeling of respectful
+      veneration—especially of an evening when he came in to tea in his
+      old-fashioned coat and powdered wig and, aroused by anyone, told his
+      abrupt stories of the past, or uttered yet more abrupt and scathing
+      criticisms of the present. For them all, that old-fashioned house with its
+      gigantic mirrors, pre-Revolution furniture, powdered footmen, and the
+      stern shrewd old man (himself a relic of the past century) with his gentle
+      daughter and the pretty Frenchwoman who were reverently devoted to him
+      presented a majestic and agreeable spectacle. But the visitors did not
+      reflect that besides the couple of hours during which they saw their host,
+      there were also twenty-two hours in the day during which the private and
+      intimate life of the house continued.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Latterly that private life had become very trying for Princess Mary. There
+      in Moscow she was deprived of her greatest pleasures—talks with the
+      pilgrims and the solitude which refreshed her at Bald Hills—and she
+      had none of the advantages and pleasures of city life. She did not go out
+      into society; everyone knew that her father would not let her go anywhere
+      without him, and his failing health prevented his going out himself, so
+      that she was not invited to dinners and evening parties. She had quite
+      abandoned the hope of getting married. She saw the coldness and
+      malevolence with which the old prince received and dismissed the young
+      men, possible suitors, who sometimes appeared at their house. She had no
+      friends: during this visit to Moscow she had been disappointed in the two
+      who had been nearest to her. Mademoiselle Bourienne, with whom she had
+      never been able to be quite frank, had now become unpleasant to her, and
+      for various reasons Princess Mary avoided her. Julie, with whom she had
+      corresponded for the last five years, was in Moscow, but proved to be
+      quite alien to her when they met. Just then Julie, who by the death of her
+      brothers had become one of the richest heiresses in Moscow, was in the
+      full whirl of society pleasures. She was surrounded by young men who, she
+      fancied, had suddenly learned to appreciate her worth. Julie was at that
+      stage in the life of a society woman when she feels that her last chance
+      of marrying has come and that her fate must be decided now or never. On
+      Thursdays Princess Mary remembered with a mournful smile that she now had
+      no one to write to, since Julie—whose presence gave her no pleasure
+      was here and they met every week. Like the old <i>émigré</i> who declined to
+      marry the lady with whom he had spent his evenings for years, she
+      regretted Julie’s presence and having no one to write to. In Moscow
+      Princess Mary had no one to talk to, no one to whom to confide her sorrow,
+      and much sorrow fell to her lot just then. The time for Prince Andrew’s
+      return and marriage was approaching, but his request to her to prepare his
+      father for it had not been carried out; in fact, it seemed as if matters
+      were quite hopeless, for at every mention of the young Countess Rostóva
+      the old prince (who apart from that was usually in a bad temper) lost
+      control of himself. Another lately added sorrow arose from the lessons she
+      gave her six year-old nephew. To her consternation she detected in herself
+      in relation to little Nicholas some symptoms of her father’s irritability.
+      However often she told herself that she must not get irritable when
+      teaching her nephew, almost every time that, pointer in hand, she sat down
+      to show him the French alphabet, she so longed to pour her own knowledge
+      quickly and easily into the child—who was already afraid that Auntie
+      might at any moment get angry—that at his slightest inattention she
+      trembled, became flustered and heated, raised her voice, and sometimes
+      pulled him by the arm and put him in the corner. Having put him in the
+      corner she would herself begin to cry over her cruel, evil nature, and
+      little Nicholas, following her example, would sob, and without permission
+      would leave his corner, come to her, pull her wet hands from her face, and
+      comfort her. But what distressed the princess most of all was her father’s
+      irritability, which was always directed against her and had of late
+      amounted to cruelty. Had he forced her to prostrate herself to the ground
+      all night, had he beaten her or made her fetch wood or water, it would
+      never have entered her mind to think her position hard; but this loving
+      despot—the more cruel because he loved her and for that reason
+      tormented himself and her—knew how not merely to hurt and humiliate
+      her deliberately, but to show her that she was always to blame for
+      everything. Of late he had exhibited a new trait that tormented Princess
+      Mary more than anything else; this was his ever-increasing intimacy with
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne. The idea that at the first moment of receiving the
+      news of his son’s intentions had occurred to him in jest—that if
+      Andrew got married he himself would marry Bourienne—had evidently
+      pleased him, and latterly he had persistently, and as it seemed to
+      Princess Mary merely to offend her, shown special endearments to the
+      companion and expressed his dissatisfaction with his daughter by
+      demonstrations of love of Bourienne.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One day in Moscow in Princess Mary’s presence (she thought her father did
+      it purposely when she was there) the old prince kissed Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne’s hand and, drawing her to him, embraced her affectionately.
+      Princess Mary flushed and ran out of the room. A few minutes later
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne came into Princess Mary’s room smiling and making
+      cheerful remarks in her agreeable voice. Princess Mary hastily wiped away
+      her tears, went resolutely up to Mademoiselle Bourienne, and evidently
+      unconscious of what she was doing began shouting in angry haste at the
+      Frenchwoman, her voice breaking: “It’s horrible, vile, inhuman, to take
+      advantage of the weakness...” She did not finish. “Leave my room,” she
+      exclaimed, and burst into sobs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day the prince did not say a word to his daughter, but she noticed
+      that at dinner he gave orders that Mademoiselle Bourienne should be served
+      first. After dinner, when the footman handed coffee and from habit began
+      with the princess, the prince suddenly grew furious, threw his stick at
+      Philip, and instantly gave instructions to have him conscripted for the
+      army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He doesn’t obey... I said it twice... and he doesn’t obey! She is the
+      first person in this house; she’s my best friend,” cried the prince. “And
+      if you allow yourself,” he screamed in a fury, addressing Princess Mary
+      for the first time, “to forget yourself again before her as you dared to
+      do yesterday, I will show you who is master in this house. Go! Don’t let
+      me set eyes on you; beg her pardon!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary asked Mademoiselle Bourienne’s pardon, and also her father’s
+      pardon for herself and for Philip the footman, who had begged for her
+      intervention.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At such moments something like a pride of sacrifice gathered in her soul.
+      And suddenly that father whom she had judged would look for his spectacles
+      in her presence, fumbling near them and not seeing them, or would forget
+      something that had just occurred, or take a false step with his failing
+      legs and turn to see if anyone had noticed his feebleness, or, worst of
+      all, at dinner when there were no visitors to excite him would suddenly
+      fall asleep, letting his napkin drop and his shaking head sink over his
+      plate. “He is old and feeble, and I dare to condemn him!” she thought at
+      such moments, with a feeling of revulsion against herself.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0148"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      In 1811 there was living in Moscow a French doctor—Métivier—who
+      had rapidly become the fashion. He was enormously tall, handsome, amiable
+      as Frenchmen are, and was, as all Moscow said, an extraordinarily clever
+      doctor. He was received in the best houses not merely as a doctor, but as
+      an equal.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Nicholas had always ridiculed medicine, but latterly on
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne’s advice had allowed this doctor to visit him and
+      had grown accustomed to him. Métivier came to see the prince about twice a
+      week.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On December 6—St. Nicholas’ Day and the prince’s name day—all
+      Moscow came to the prince’s front door but he gave orders to admit no one
+      and to invite to dinner only a small number, a list of whom he gave to
+      Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Métivier, who came in the morning with his felicitations, considered it
+      proper in his quality of doctor <i>de forcer la consigne</i>, * as he told
+      Princess Mary, and went in to see the prince. It happened that on that
+      morning of his name day the prince was in one of his worst moods. He had
+      been going about the house all the morning finding fault with everyone and
+      pretending not to understand what was said to him and not to be understood
+      himself. Princess Mary well knew this mood of quiet absorbed
+      querulousness, which generally culminated in a burst of rage, and she went
+      about all that morning as though facing a cocked and loaded gun and
+      awaited the inevitable explosion. Until the doctor’s arrival the morning
+      had passed off safely. After admitting the doctor, Princess Mary sat down
+      with a book in the drawing room near the door through which she could hear
+      all that passed in the study.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * To force the guard.
+</p>
+<p>
+      At first she heard only Métivier’s voice, then her father’s, then both
+      voices began speaking at the same time, the door was flung open, and on
+      the threshold appeared the handsome figure of the terrified Métivier with
+      his shock of black hair, and the prince in his dressing gown and fez, his
+      face distorted with fury and the pupils of his eyes rolled downwards.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You don’t understand?” shouted the prince, “but I do!
+      French spy, slave of Buonaparte, spy, get out of my house! Be off, I tell
+      you...” and he slammed the door.
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Métivier, shrugging his shoulders, went up to Mademoiselle Bourienne who
+      at the sound of shouting had run in from an adjoining room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The prince is not very well: bile and rush of blood to the head. Keep
+      calm, I will call again tomorrow,” said Métivier; and putting his fingers
+      to his lips he hastened away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Through the study door came the sound of slippered feet and the cry:
+      “Spies, traitors, traitors everywhere! Not a moment’s peace in my own
+      house!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      After Métivier’s departure the old prince called his daughter in, and the
+      whole weight of his wrath fell on her. She was to blame that a spy had
+      been admitted. Had he not told her, yes, told her to make a list, and not
+      to admit anyone who was not on that list? Then why was that scoundrel
+      admitted? She was the cause of it all. With her, he said, he could not
+      have a moment’s peace and could not die quietly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, ma’am! We must part, we must part! Understand that, understand it! I
+      cannot endure any more,” he said, and left the room. Then, as if afraid
+      she might find some means of consolation, he returned and trying to appear
+      calm added: “And don’t imagine I have said this in a moment of anger. I am
+      calm. I have thought it over, and it will be carried out—we must
+      part; so find some place for yourself....” But he could not restrain
+      himself and with the virulence of which only one who loves is capable,
+      evidently suffering himself, he shook his fists at her and screamed:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If only some fool would marry her!” Then he slammed the door, sent for
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne, and subsided into his study.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At two o’clock the six chosen guests assembled for dinner.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      These guests—the famous Count Rostopchín, Prince Lopukhín with his
+      nephew, General Chatróv an old war comrade of the prince’s, and of the
+      younger generation Pierre and Borís Drubetskóy—awaited the prince in
+      the drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís, who had come to Moscow on leave a few days before, had been anxious
+      to be presented to Prince Nicholas Bolkónski, and had contrived to
+      ingratiate himself so well that the old prince in his case made an
+      exception to the rule of not receiving bachelors in his house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The prince’s house did not belong to what is known as <i>fashionable
+      society</i>, but his little circle—though not much talked about in
+      town—was one it was more flattering to be received in than any other.
+      Borís had realized this the week before when the commander in chief in his
+      presence invited Rostopchín to dinner on St. Nicholas’ Day, and Rostopchín
+      had replied that he could not come:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “On that day I always go to pay my devotions to the relics of Prince
+      Nicholas Bolkónski.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, yes, yes!” replied the commander in chief. “How is he?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The small group that assembled before dinner in the lofty old-fashioned
+      drawing room with its old furniture resembled the solemn gathering of a
+      court of justice. All were silent or talked in low tones. Prince Nicholas
+      came in serious and taciturn. Princess Mary seemed even quieter and more
+      diffident than usual. The guests were reluctant to address her, feeling
+      that she was in no mood for their conversation. Count Rostopchín alone
+      kept the conversation going, now relating the latest town news, and now
+      the latest political gossip.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Lopukhín and the old general occasionally took part in the conversation.
+      Prince Bolkónski listened as a presiding judge receives a report, only now
+      and then, silently or by a brief word, showing that he took heed of what
+      was being reported to him. The tone of the conversation was such as
+      indicated that no one approved of what was being done in the political
+      world. Incidents were related evidently confirming the opinion that
+      everything was going from bad to worse, but whether telling a story or
+      giving an opinion the speaker always stopped, or was stopped, at the point
+      beyond which his criticism might touch the sovereign himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At dinner the talk turned on the latest political news: Napoleon’s seizure
+      of the Duke of Oldenburg’s territory, and the Russian Note, hostile to
+      Napoleon, which had been sent to all the European courts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Bonaparte treats Europe as a pirate does a captured vessel,” said Count
+      Rostopchín, repeating a phrase he had uttered several times before. “One
+      only wonders at the long-suffering or blindness of the crowned heads. Now
+      the Pope’s turn has come and Bonaparte doesn’t scruple to depose the head
+      of the Catholic Church—yet all keep silent! Our sovereign alone has
+      protested against the seizure of the Duke of Oldenburg’s territory, and
+      even...” Count Rostopchín paused, feeling that he had reached the limit
+      beyond which censure was impossible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Other territories have been offered in exchange for the Duchy of
+      Oldenburg,” said Prince Bolkónski. “He shifts the Dukes about as I might
+      move my serfs from Bald Hills to Boguchárovo or my Ryazán estates.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The Duke of Oldenburg bears his misfortunes with admirable strength of
+      character and resignation,” remarked Borís, joining in respectfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He said this because on his journey from Petersburg he had had the honor
+      of being presented to the Duke. Prince Bolkónski glanced at the young man
+      as if about to say something in reply, but changed his mind, evidently
+      considering him too young.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have read our protests about the Oldenburg affair and was surprised how
+      badly the Note was worded,” remarked Count Rostopchín in the casual tone
+      of a man dealing with a subject quite familiar to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked at Rostopchín with naïve astonishment, not understanding why
+      he should be disturbed by the bad composition of the Note.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Does it matter, Count, how the Note is worded,” he asked, “so long as its
+      substance is forcible?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear fellow, with our five hundred thousand troops it should be easy
+      to have a good style,” returned Count Rostopchín.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre now understood the count’s dissatisfaction with the wording of the
+      Note.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One would have thought quill drivers enough had sprung up,” remarked the
+      old prince. “There in Petersburg they are always writing—not notes
+      only but even new laws. My Andrew there has written a whole volume of laws
+      for Russia. Nowadays they are always writing!” and he laughed unnaturally.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was a momentary pause in the conversation; the old general cleared
+      his throat to draw attention.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Did you hear of the last event at the review in Petersburg? The figure
+      cut by the new French ambassador.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh? Yes, I heard something: he said something awkward in His Majesty’s
+      presence.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “His Majesty drew attention to the Grenadier division and to the march
+      past,” continued the general, “and it seems the ambassador took no notice
+      and allowed himself to reply that: ‘We in France pay no attention to such
+      trifles!’ The Emperor did not condescend to reply. At the next review,
+      they say, the Emperor did not once deign to address him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      All were silent. On this fact relating to the Emperor personally, it was
+      impossible to pass any judgment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Impudent fellows!” said the prince. “You know Métivier? I turned him out
+      of my house this morning. He was here; they admitted him in spite of my
+      request that they should let no one in,” he went on, glancing angrily at
+      his daughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And he narrated his whole conversation with the French doctor and the
+      reasons that convinced him that Métivier was a spy. Though these reasons
+      were very insufficient and obscure, no one made any rejoinder.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the roast, champagne was served. The guests rose to congratulate the
+      old prince. Princess Mary, too, went round to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He gave her a cold, angry look and offered her his wrinkled, clean-shaven
+      cheek to kiss. The whole expression of his face told her that he had not
+      forgotten the morning’s talk, that his decision remained in force, and
+      only the presence of visitors hindered his speaking of it to her now.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When they went into the drawing room where coffee was served, the old men
+      sat together.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Nicholas grew more animated and expressed his views on the
+      impending war.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He said that our wars with Bonaparte would be disastrous so long as we
+      sought alliances with the Germans and thrust ourselves into European
+      affairs, into which we had been drawn by the Peace of Tilsit. “We ought
+      not to fight either for or against Austria. Our political interests are
+      all in the East, and in regard to Bonaparte the only thing is to have an
+      armed frontier and a firm policy, and he will never dare to cross the
+      Russian frontier, as was the case in 1807!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How can we fight the French, Prince?” said Count Rostopchín. “Can we arm
+      ourselves against our teachers and divinities? Look at our youths, look at
+      our ladies! The French are our Gods: Paris is our Kingdom of Heaven.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He began speaking louder, evidently to be heard by everyone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “French dresses, French ideas, French feelings! There now, you turned
+      Métivier out by the scruff of his neck because he is a Frenchman and a
+      scoundrel, but our ladies crawl after him on their knees. I went to a
+      party last night, and there out of five ladies three were Roman Catholics
+      and had the Pope’s indulgence for doing woolwork on Sundays. And they
+      themselves sit there nearly naked, like the signboards at our Public Baths
+      if I may say so. Ah, when one looks at our young people, Prince, one would
+      like to take Peter the Great’s old cudgel out of the museum and belabor
+      them in the Russian way till all the nonsense jumps out of them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      All were silent. The old prince looked at Rostopchín with a smile and
+      wagged his head approvingly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, good-by, your excellency, keep well!” said Rostopchín, getting up
+      with characteristic briskness and holding out his hand to the prince.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good-by, my dear fellow.... His words are music, I never tire of hearing
+      him!” said the old prince, keeping hold of the hand and offering his cheek
+      to be kissed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Following Rostopchín’s example the others also rose.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0149"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary as she sat listening to the old men’s talk and faultfinding,
+      understood nothing of what she heard; she only wondered whether the guests
+      had all observed her father’s hostile attitude toward her. She did not
+      even notice the special attentions and amiabilities shown her during
+      dinner by Borís Drubetskóy, who was visiting them for the third time
+      already.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary turned with absent-minded questioning look to Pierre, who
+      hat in hand and with a smile on his face was the last of the guests to
+      approach her after the old prince had gone out and they were left alone in
+      the drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “May I stay a little longer?” he said, letting his stout body sink into an
+      armchair beside her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes,” she answered. “You noticed nothing?” her look asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was in an agreeable after-dinner mood. He looked straight before
+      him and smiled quietly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Have you known that young man long, Princess?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Drubetskóy.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, not long....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you like him?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, he is an agreeable young man.... Why do you ask me that?” said
+      Princess Mary, still thinking of that morning’s conversation with her
+      father.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Because I have noticed that when a young man comes on leave from
+      Petersburg to Moscow it is usually with the object of marrying an
+      heiress.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You have observed that?” said Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” returned Pierre with a smile, “and this young man now manages
+      matters so that where there is a wealthy heiress there he is too. I can
+      read him like a book. At present he is hesitating whom to lay siege to—you
+      or Mademoiselle Julie Karágina. He is very attentive to her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “He visits them?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, very often. And do you know the new way of courting?” said Pierre
+      with an amused smile, evidently in that cheerful mood of good humored
+      raillery for which he so often reproached himself in his diary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No,” replied Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To please Moscow girls nowadays one has to be melancholy. He is very
+      melancholy with Mademoiselle Karágina,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Really?” asked Princess Mary, looking into Pierre’s kindly face and still
+      thinking of her own sorrow. “It would be a relief,” thought she, “if I
+      ventured to confide what I am feeling to someone. I should like to tell
+      everything to Pierre. He is kind and generous. It would be a relief. He
+      would give me advice.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Would you marry him?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, my God, Count, there are moments when I would marry anybody!” she
+      cried suddenly to her own surprise and with tears in her voice. “Ah, how
+      bitter it is to love someone near to you and to feel that...” she went on
+      in a trembling voice, “that you can do nothing for him but grieve him, and
+      to know that you cannot alter this. Then there is only one thing left—to
+      go away, but where could I go?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What is wrong? What is it, Princess?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But without finishing what she was saying, Princess Mary burst into tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t know what is the matter with me today. Don’t take any notice—forget
+      what I have said!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre’s gaiety vanished completely. He anxiously questioned the princess,
+      asked her to speak out fully and confide her grief to him; but she only
+      repeated that she begged him to forget what she had said, that she did not
+      remember what she had said, and that she had no trouble except the one he
+      knew of—that Prince Andrew’s marriage threatened to cause a rupture
+      between father and son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Have you any news of the Rostóvs?” she asked, to change the subject. “I
+      was told they are coming soon. I am also expecting Andrew any day. I
+      should like them to meet here.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And how does he now regard the matter?” asked Pierre, referring to the
+      old prince.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary shook her head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is to be done? In a few months the year will be up. The thing is
+      impossible. I only wish I could spare my brother the first moments. I wish
+      they would come sooner. I hope to be friends with her. You have known them
+      a long time,” said Princess Mary. “Tell me honestly the whole truth: what
+      sort of girl is she, and what do you think of her?—The real truth,
+      because you know Andrew is risking so much doing this against his father’s
+      will that I should like to know....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      An undefined instinct told Pierre that these explanations, and repeated
+      requests to be told the <i>whole truth</i>, expressed ill-will on the princess’
+      part toward her future sister-in-law and a wish that he should disapprove
+      of Andrew’s choice; but in reply he said what he felt rather than what he
+      thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t know how to answer your question,” he said, blushing without
+      knowing why. “I really don’t know what sort of girl she is; I can’t
+      analyze her at all. She is enchanting, but what makes her so I don’t know.
+      That is all one can say about her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary sighed, and the expression on her face said: “Yes, that’s
+      what I expected and feared.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Is she clever?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre considered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I think not,” he said, “and yet—yes. She does not deign to be
+      clever.... Oh no, she is simply enchanting, and that is all.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary again shook her head disapprovingly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, I so long to like her! Tell her so if you see her before I do.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I hear they are expected very soon,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary told Pierre of her plan to become intimate with her future
+      sister-in-law as soon as the Rostóvs arrived and to try to accustom the
+      old prince to her.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0150"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Borís had not succeeded in making a wealthy match in Petersburg, so with
+      the same object in view he came to Moscow. There he wavered between the
+      two richest heiresses, Julie and Princess Mary. Though Princess Mary
+      despite her plainness seemed to him more attractive than Julie, he,
+      without knowing why, felt awkward about paying court to her. When they had
+      last met on the old prince’s name day, she had answered at random all his
+      attempts to talk sentimentally, evidently not listening to what he was
+      saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Julie on the contrary accepted his attentions readily, though in a manner
+      peculiar to herself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She was twenty-seven. After the death of her brothers she had become very
+      wealthy. She was by now decidedly plain, but thought herself not merely as
+      good-looking as before but even far more attractive. She was confirmed in
+      this delusion by the fact that she had become a very wealthy heiress and
+      also by the fact that the older she grew the less dangerous she became to
+      men, and the more freely they could associate with her and avail
+      themselves of her suppers, soirees, and the animated company that
+      assembled at her house, without incurring any obligation. A man who would
+      have been afraid ten years before of going every day to the house when
+      there was a girl of seventeen there, for fear of compromising her and
+      committing himself, would now go boldly every day and treat her not as a
+      marriageable girl but as a sexless acquaintance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That winter the Karágins’ house was the most agreeable and hospitable in
+      Moscow. In addition to the formal evening and dinner parties, a large
+      company, chiefly of men, gathered there every day, supping at midnight and
+      staying till three in the morning. Julie never missed a ball, a promenade,
+      or a play. Her dresses were always of the latest fashion. But in spite of
+      that she seemed to be disillusioned about everything and told everyone
+      that she did not believe either in friendship or in love, or any of the
+      joys of life, and expected peace only “yonder.” She adopted the tone of
+      one who has suffered a great disappointment, like a girl who has either
+      lost the man she loved or been cruelly deceived by him. Though nothing of
+      the kind had happened to her she was regarded in that light, and had even
+      herself come to believe that she had suffered much in life. This
+      melancholy, which did not prevent her amusing herself, did not hinder the
+      young people who came to her house from passing the time pleasantly. Every
+      visitor who came to the house paid his tribute to the melancholy mood of
+      the hostess, and then amused himself with society gossip, dancing,
+      intellectual games, and <i>bouts rimés</i>, which were in vogue at the Karágins’.
+      Only a few of these young men, among them Borís, entered more deeply into
+      Julie’s melancholy, and with these she had prolonged conversations in
+      private on the vanity of all worldly things, and to them she showed her
+      albums filled with mournful sketches, maxims, and verses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To Borís, Julie was particularly gracious: she regretted his early
+      disillusionment with life, offered him such consolation of friendship as
+      she who had herself suffered so much could render, and showed him her
+      album. Borís sketched two trees in the album and wrote: “Rustic trees,
+      your dark branches shed gloom and melancholy upon me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      On another page he drew a tomb, and wrote:
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+<i>La mort est secourable et la mort est tranquille.<br>
+    Ah! contre les douleurs il n’y a pas d’autre asile.</i> *
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Death gives relief and death is peaceful.<br>
+      Ah! from suffering there is no other refuge.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Julie said this was charming
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There is something so enchanting in the smile of melancholy,” she said to
+      Borís, repeating word for word a passage she had copied from a book. “It
+      is a ray of light in the darkness, a shade between sadness and despair,
+      showing the possibility of consolation.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In reply Borís wrote these lines:
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+<i>Aliment de poison d’une âme trop sensible,<br>
+    Toi, sans qui le bonheur me serait impossible,<br>
+    Tendre mélancholie, ah, viens me consoler,<br>
+    Viens calmer les tourments de ma sombre retraite,<br>
+    Et mêle une douceur secrète<br>
+    A ces pleurs que je sens couler.</i> *
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+      *Poisonous nourishment of a too sensitive soul,<br>
+     Thou, without whom happiness would for me be impossible,<br>
+     Tender melancholy, ah, come to console me,<br>
+     Come to calm the torments of my gloomy retreat,<br>
+     And mingle a secret sweetness<br>
+     With these tears that I feel to be flowing.
+</p>
+<p>
+      For Borís, Julie played most doleful nocturnes on her harp. Borís read
+      <i>Poor Liza</i> aloud to her, and more than once interrupted the reading
+      because of the emotions that choked him. Meeting at large gatherings Julie
+      and Borís looked on one another as the only souls who understood one
+      another in a world of indifferent people.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Mikháylovna, who often visited the Karágins, while playing cards with
+      the mother made careful inquiries as to Julie’s dowry (she was to have two
+      estates in Pénza and the Nizhegórod forests). Anna Mikháylovna regarded
+      the refined sadness that united her son to the wealthy Julie with emotion,
+      and resignation to the Divine will.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are always charming and melancholy, my dear Julie,” she said to the
+      daughter. “Borís says his soul finds repose at your house. He has suffered
+      so many disappointments and is so sensitive,” said she to the mother. “Ah,
+      my dear, I can’t tell you how fond I have grown of Julie latterly,” she
+      said to her son. “But who could help loving her? She is an angelic being!
+      Ah, Borís, Borís!”—she paused. “And how I pity her mother,” she went
+      on; “today she showed me her accounts and letters from Pénza (they have
+      enormous estates there), and she, poor thing, has no one to help her, and
+      they do cheat her so!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Borís smiled almost imperceptibly while listening to his mother. He
+      laughed blandly at her naïve diplomacy but listened to what she had to
+      say, and sometimes questioned her carefully about the Pénza and Nizhegórod
+      estates.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Julie had long been expecting a proposal from her melancholy adorer and
+      was ready to accept it; but some secret feeling of repulsion for her, for
+      her passionate desire to get married, for her artificiality, and a feeling
+      of horror at renouncing the possibility of real love still restrained
+      Borís. His leave was expiring. He spent every day and whole days at the
+      Karágins’, and every day on thinking the matter over told himself that he
+      would propose tomorrow. But in Julie’s presence, looking at her red face
+      and chin (nearly always powdered), her moist eyes, and her expression of
+      continual readiness to pass at once from melancholy to an unnatural
+      rapture of married bliss, Borís could not utter the decisive words, though
+      in imagination he had long regarded himself as the possessor of those
+      Pénza and Nizhegórod estates and had apportioned the use of the income
+      from them. Julie saw Borís’ indecision, and sometimes the thought occurred
+      to her that she was repulsive to him, but her feminine self-deception
+      immediately supplied her with consolation, and she told herself that he
+      was only shy from love. Her melancholy, however, began to turn to
+      irritability, and not long before Borís’ departure she formed a definite
+      plan of action. Just as Borís’ leave of absence was expiring, Anatole
+      Kurágin made his appearance in Moscow, and of course in the Karágins’
+      drawing room, and Julie, suddenly abandoning her melancholy, became
+      cheerful and very attentive to Kurágin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear,” said Anna Mikháylovna to her son, “I know from a reliable
+      source that Prince Vasíli has sent his son to Moscow to get him married to
+      Julie. I am so fond of Julie that I should be sorry for her. What do you
+      think of it, my dear?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The idea of being made a fool of and of having thrown away that whole
+      month of arduous melancholy service to Julie, and of seeing all the
+      revenue from the Pénza estates which he had already mentally apportioned
+      and put to proper use fall into the hands of another, and especially into
+      the hands of that idiot Anatole, pained Borís. He drove to the Karágins’
+      with the firm intention of proposing. Julie met him in a gay, careless
+      manner, spoke casually of how she had enjoyed yesterday’s ball, and asked
+      when he was leaving. Though Borís had come intentionally to speak of his
+      love and therefore meant to be tender, he began speaking irritably of
+      feminine inconstancy, of how easily women can turn from sadness to joy,
+      and how their moods depend solely on who happens to be paying court to
+      them. Julie was offended and replied that it was true that a woman needs
+      variety, and the same thing over and over again would weary anyone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then I should advise you...” Borís began, wishing to sting her; but at
+      that instant the galling thought occurred to him that he might have to
+      leave Moscow without having accomplished his aim, and have vainly wasted
+      his efforts—which was a thing he never allowed to happen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He checked himself in the middle of the sentence, lowered his eyes to
+      avoid seeing her unpleasantly irritated and irresolute face, and said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I did not come here at all to quarrel with you. On the contrary...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He glanced at her to make sure that he might go on. Her irritability had
+      suddenly quite vanished, and her anxious, imploring eyes were fixed on him
+      with greedy expectation. “I can always arrange so as not to see her
+      often,” thought Borís. “The affair has been begun and must be finished!”
+       He blushed hotly, raised his eyes to hers, and said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You know my feelings for you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      There was no need to say more: Julie’s face shone with triumph and
+      self-satisfaction; but she forced Borís to say all that is said on such
+      occasions—that he loved her and had never loved any other woman more
+      than her. She knew that for the Pénza estates and Nizhegórod forests she
+      could demand this, and she received what she demanded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The affianced couple, no longer alluding to trees that shed gloom and
+      melancholy upon them, planned the arrangements of a splendid house in
+      Petersburg, paid calls, and prepared everything for a brilliant wedding.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0151"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At the end of January old Count Rostóv went to Moscow with Natásha and
+      Sónya. The countess was still unwell and unable to travel but it was
+      impossible to wait for her recovery. Prince Andrew was expected in Moscow
+      any day, the trousseau had to be ordered and the estate near Moscow had to
+      be sold, besides which the opportunity of presenting his future
+      daughter-in-law to old Prince Bolkónski while he was in Moscow could not
+      be missed. The Rostóvs’ Moscow house had not been heated that winter and,
+      as they had come only for a short time and the countess was not with them,
+      the count decided to stay with Márya Dmítrievna Akhrosímova, who had long
+      been pressing her hospitality on them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Late one evening the Rostóvs’ four sleighs drove into Márya Dmítrievna’s
+      courtyard in the old Konyúsheny street. Márya Dmítrievna lived alone. She
+      had already married off her daughter, and her sons were all in the
+      service.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She held herself as erect, told everyone her opinion as candidly, loudly,
+      and bluntly as ever, and her whole bearing seemed a reproach to others for
+      any weakness, passion, or temptation—the possibility of which she
+      did not admit. From early in the morning, wearing a dressing jacket, she
+      attended to her household affairs, and then she drove out: on holy days to
+      church and after the service to jails and prisons on affairs of which she
+      never spoke to anyone. On ordinary days, after dressing, she received
+      petitioners of various classes, of whom there were always some. Then she
+      had dinner, a substantial and appetizing meal at which there were always
+      three or four guests; after dinner she played a game of boston, and at
+      night she had the newspapers or a new book read to her while she knitted.
+      She rarely made an exception and went out to pay visits, and then only to
+      the most important persons in the town.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She had not yet gone to bed when the Rostóvs arrived and the pulley of the
+      hall door squeaked from the cold as it let in the Rostóvs and their
+      servants. Márya Dmítrievna, with her spectacles hanging down on her nose
+      and her head flung back, stood in the hall doorway looking with a stern,
+      grim face at the new arrivals. One might have thought she was angry with
+      the travelers and would immediately turn them out, had she not at the same
+      time been giving careful instructions to the servants for the
+      accommodation of the visitors and their belongings.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The count’s things? Bring them here,” she said, pointing to the
+      portmanteaus and not greeting anyone. “The young ladies’? There to the
+      left. Now what are you dawdling for?” she cried to the maids. “Get the
+      samovar ready!... You’ve grown plumper and prettier,” she remarked,
+      drawing Natásha (whose cheeks were glowing from the cold) to her by the
+      hood. “Foo! You <i>are</i> cold! Now take off your things, quick!” she shouted to
+      the count who was going to kiss her hand. “You’re half frozen, I’m sure!
+      Bring some rum for tea!... <i>Bonjour</i>, Sónya dear!” she added, turning to
+      Sónya and indicating by this French greeting her slightly contemptuous
+      though affectionate attitude toward her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When they came in to tea, having taken off their outdoor things and tidied
+      themselves up after their journey, Márya Dmítrievna kissed them all in due
+      order.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’m heartily glad you have come and are staying with me. It was high
+      time,” she said, giving Natásha a significant look. “The old man is here
+      and his son’s expected any day. You’ll have to make his acquaintance. But
+      we’ll speak of that later on,” she added, glancing at Sónya with a look
+      that showed she did not want to speak of it in her presence. “Now listen,”
+       she said to the count. “What do you want tomorrow? Whom will you send for?
+      Shinshín?” she crooked one of her fingers. “The sniveling Anna
+      Mikháylovna? That’s two. She’s here with her son. The son is getting
+      married! Then Bezúkhov, eh? He is here too, with his wife. He ran away
+      from her and she came galloping after him. He dined with me on Wednesday.
+      As for them”—and she pointed to the girls—“tomorrow I’ll take
+      them first to the Iberian shrine of the Mother of God, and then we’ll
+      drive to the Super-Rogue’s. I suppose you’ll have everything new. Don’t
+      judge by me: sleeves nowadays are this size! The other day young Princess
+      Irína Vasílevna came to see me; she was an awful sight—looked as if
+      she had put two barrels on her arms. You know not a day passes now without
+      some new fashion.... And what have you to do yourself?” she asked the
+      count sternly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One thing has come on top of another: her rags to buy, and now a
+      purchaser has turned up for the Moscow estate and for the house. If you
+      will be so kind, I’ll fix a time and go down to the estate just for a day,
+      and leave my lassies with you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “All right. All right. They’ll be safe with me, as safe as in Chancery!
+      I’ll take them where they must go, scold them a bit, and pet them a bit,”
+       said Márya Dmítrievna, touching her goddaughter and favorite, Natásha, on
+      the cheek with her large hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next morning Márya Dmítrievna took the young ladies to the Iberian shrine
+      of the Mother of God and to Madame Suppert-Roguet, who was so afraid of
+      Márya Dmítrievna that she always let her have costumes at a loss merely to
+      get rid of her. Márya Dmítrievna ordered almost the whole trousseau. When
+      they got home she turned everybody out of the room except Natásha, and
+      then called her pet to her armchair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, now we’ll talk. I congratulate you on your betrothed. You’ve hooked
+      a fine fellow! I am glad for your sake and I’ve known him since he was so
+      high.” She held her hand a couple of feet from the ground. Natásha blushed
+      happily. “I like him and all his family. Now listen! You know that old
+      Prince Nicholas much dislikes his son’s marrying. The old fellow’s
+      crotchety! Of course Prince Andrew is not a child and can shift without
+      him, but it’s not nice to enter a family against a father’s will. One
+      wants to do it peacefully and lovingly. You’re a clever girl and you’ll
+      know how to manage. Be kind, and use your wits. Then all will be well.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha remained silent, from shyness Márya Dmítrievna supposed, but
+      really because she disliked anyone interfering in what touched her love of
+      Prince Andrew, which seemed to her so apart from all human affairs that no
+      one could understand it. She loved and knew Prince Andrew, he loved her
+      only, and was to come one of these days and take her. She wanted nothing
+      more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You see I have known him a long time and am also fond of Mary, your
+      future sister-in-law. ‘Husbands’ sisters bring up blisters,’ but this one
+      wouldn’t hurt a fly. She has asked me to bring you two together. Tomorrow
+      you’ll go with your father to see her. Be very nice and affectionate to
+      her: you’re younger than she. When <i>he</i> comes, he’ll find you already know
+      his sister and father and are liked by them. Am I right or not? Won’t that
+      be best?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, it will,” Natásha answered reluctantly.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0152"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Next day, by Márya Dmítrievna’s advice, Count Rostóv took Natásha to call
+      on Prince Nicholas Bolkónski. The count did not set out cheerfully on this
+      visit, at heart he felt afraid. He well remembered the last interview he
+      had had with the old prince at the time of the enrollment, when in reply
+      to an invitation to dinner he had had to listen to an angry reprimand for
+      not having provided his full quota of men. Natásha, on the other hand,
+      having put on her best gown, was in the highest spirits. “They can’t help
+      liking me,” she thought. “Everybody always has liked me, and I am so
+      willing to do anything they wish, so ready to be fond of him—for
+      being <i>his</i> father—and of her—for being <i>his</i> sister—that
+      there is no reason for them not to like me....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They drove up to the gloomy old house on the Vozdvízhenka and entered the
+      vestibule.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, the Lord have mercy on us!” said the count, half in jest, half in
+      earnest; but Natásha noticed that her father was flurried on entering the
+      anteroom and inquired timidly and softly whether the prince and princess
+      were at home.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When they had been announced a perturbation was noticeable among the
+      servants. The footman who had gone to announce them was stopped by another
+      in the large hall and they whispered to one another. Then a maidservant
+      ran into the hall and hurriedly said something, mentioning the princess.
+      At last an old, cross looking footman came and announced to the Rostóvs
+      that the prince was not receiving, but that the princess begged them to
+      walk up. The first person who came to meet the visitors was Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne. She greeted the father and daughter with special politeness and
+      showed them to the princess’ room. The princess, looking excited and
+      nervous, her face flushed in patches, ran in to meet the visitors,
+      treading heavily, and vainly trying to appear cordial and at ease. From
+      the first glance Princess Mary did not like Natásha. She thought her too
+      fashionably dressed, frivolously gay and vain. She did not at all realize
+      that before having seen her future sister-in-law she was prejudiced
+      against her by involuntary envy of her beauty, youth, and happiness, as
+      well as by jealousy of her brother’s love for her. Apart from this
+      insuperable antipathy to her, Princess Mary was agitated just then because
+      on the Rostóvs’ being announced, the old prince had shouted that he did
+      not wish to see them, that Princess Mary might do so if she chose, but
+      they were not to be admitted to him. She had decided to receive them, but
+      feared lest the prince might at any moment indulge in some freak, as he
+      seemed much upset by the Rostóvs’ visit.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There, my dear princess, I’ve brought you my songstress,” said the count,
+      bowing and looking round uneasily as if afraid the old prince might
+      appear. “I am so glad you should get to know one another... very sorry the
+      prince is still ailing,” and after a few more commonplace remarks he rose.
+      “If you’ll allow me to leave my Natásha in your hands for a quarter of an
+      hour, Princess, I’ll drive round to see Anna Semënovna, it’s quite near in
+      the Dogs’ Square, and then I’ll come back for her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The count had devised this diplomatic ruse (as he afterwards told his
+      daughter) to give the future sisters-in-law an opportunity to talk to one
+      another freely, but another motive was to avoid the danger of encountering
+      the old prince, of whom he was afraid. He did not mention this to his
+      daughter, but Natásha noticed her father’s nervousness and anxiety and
+      felt mortified by it. She blushed for him, grew still angrier at having
+      blushed, and looked at the princess with a bold and defiant expression
+      which said that she was not afraid of anybody. The princess told the count
+      that she would be delighted, and only begged him to stay longer at Anna
+      Semënovna’s, and he departed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Despite the uneasy glances thrown at her by Princess Mary—who wished
+      to have a tête-à-tête with Natásha—Mademoiselle Bourienne remained
+      in the room and persistently talked about Moscow amusements and theaters.
+      Natásha felt offended by the hesitation she had noticed in the anteroom,
+      by her father’s nervousness, and by the unnatural manner of the princess
+      who—she thought—was making a favor of receiving her, and so
+      everything displeased her. She did not like Princess Mary, whom she
+      thought very plain, affected, and dry. Natásha suddenly shrank into
+      herself and involuntarily assumed an offhand air which alienated Princess
+      Mary still more. After five minutes of irksome, constrained conversation,
+      they heard the sound of slippered feet rapidly approaching. Princess Mary
+      looked frightened.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The door opened and the old prince, in a dressing gown and a white
+      nightcap, came in.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, madam!” he began. “Madam, Countess... Countess Rostóva,
+      if I am not mistaken... I beg you to excuse me, to excuse me... I did not know,
+      madam. God is my witness, I did not know you had honored us with a visit, and I
+      came in such a costume only to see my daughter. I beg you to excuse me...
+      God is my witness, I didn’t know—” he repeated, stressing the
+      word “God” so unnaturally and so unpleasantly that Princess Mary
+      stood with downcast eyes not daring to look either at her father or at Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nor did the latter, having risen and curtsied, know what to do.
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne alone smiled agreeably.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I beg you to excuse me, excuse me! God is my witness, I did not know,”
+       muttered the old man, and after looking Natásha over from head to foot he
+      went out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne was the first to recover herself after this
+      apparition and began speaking about the prince’s indisposition. Natásha
+      and Princess Mary looked at one another in silence, and the longer they
+      did so without saying what they wanted to say, the greater grew their
+      antipathy to one another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the count returned, Natásha was impolitely pleased and hastened to
+      get away: at that moment she hated the stiff, elderly princess, who could
+      place her in such an embarrassing position and had spent half an hour with
+      her without once mentioning Prince Andrew. “I couldn’t begin talking about
+      him in the presence of that Frenchwoman,” thought Natásha. The same
+      thought was meanwhile tormenting Princess Mary. She knew what she ought to
+      have said to Natásha, but she had been unable to say it because
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne was in the way, and because, without knowing why,
+      she felt it very difficult to speak of the marriage. When the count was
+      already leaving the room, Princess Mary went up hurriedly to Natásha, took
+      her by the hand, and said with a deep sigh:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Wait, I must...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha glanced at her ironically without knowing why.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear Natalie,” said Princess Mary, “I want you to know that I am glad my
+      brother has found happiness....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She paused, feeling that she was not telling the truth. Natásha noticed
+      this and guessed its reason.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I think, Princess, it is not convenient to speak of that now,” she said
+      with external dignity and coldness, though she felt the tears choking her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What have I said and what have I done?” thought she, as soon as she was
+      out of the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They waited a long time for Natásha to come to dinner that day. She sat in
+      her room crying like a child, blowing her nose and sobbing. Sónya stood
+      beside her, kissing her hair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha, what is it about?” she asked. “What do they matter to you? It
+      will all pass, Natásha.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But if you only knew how offensive it was... as if I...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t talk about it, Natásha. It wasn’t your fault so why should you
+      mind? Kiss me,” said Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha raised her head and, kissing her friend on the lips, pressed her
+      wet face against her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I can’t tell you, I don’t know. No one’s to blame,” said Natásha—“It’s
+      my fault. But it all hurts terribly. Oh, why doesn’t he come?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She came in to dinner with red eyes. Márya Dmítrievna, who knew how the
+      prince had received the Rostóvs, pretended not to notice how upset Natásha
+      was and jested resolutely and loudly at table with the count and the other
+      guests.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0153"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      That evening the Rostóvs went to the Opera, for which Márya Dmítrievna had
+      taken a box.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha did not want to go, but could not refuse Márya Dmítrievna’s kind
+      offer which was intended expressly for her. When she came ready dressed
+      into the ballroom to await her father, and looking in the large mirror
+      there saw that she was pretty, very pretty, she felt even more sad, but it
+      was a sweet, tender sadness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “O God, if he were here now I would not behave as I did then, but
+      differently. I would not be silly and afraid of things, I would simply
+      embrace him, cling to him, and make him look at me with those searching
+      inquiring eyes with which he has so often looked at me, and then I would
+      make him laugh as he used to laugh. And his eyes—how I see those
+      eyes!” thought Natásha. “And what do his father and sister matter to me? I
+      love him alone, him, him, with that face and those eyes, with his smile,
+      manly and yet childlike.... No, I had better not think of him; not think
+      of him but forget him, quite forget him for the present. I can’t bear this
+      waiting and I shall cry in a minute!” and she turned away from the glass,
+      making an effort not to cry. “And how can Sónya love Nicholas so calmly
+      and quietly and wait so long and so patiently?” thought she, looking at
+      Sónya, who also came in quite ready, with a fan in her hand. “No, she’s
+      altogether different. I can’t!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha at that moment felt so softened and tender that it was not enough
+      for her to love and know she was beloved, she wanted now, at once, to
+      embrace the man she loved, to speak and hear from him words of love such
+      as filled her heart. While she sat in the carriage beside her father,
+      pensively watching the lights of the street lamps flickering on the frozen
+      window, she felt still sadder and more in love, and forgot where she was
+      going and with whom. Having fallen into the line of carriages, the
+      Rostóvs’ carriage drove up to the theater, its wheels squeaking over the
+      snow. Natásha and Sónya, holding up their dresses, jumped out quickly. The
+      count got out helped by the footmen, and, passing among men and women who
+      were entering and the program sellers, they all three went along the
+      corridor to the first row of boxes. Through the closed doors the music was
+      already audible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha, your hair!...” whispered Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      An attendant deferentially and quickly slipped before the ladies and
+      opened the door of their box. The music sounded louder and through the
+      door rows of brightly lit boxes in which ladies sat with bare arms and
+      shoulders, and noisy stalls brilliant with uniforms, glittered before
+      their eyes. A lady entering the next box shot a glance of feminine envy at
+      Natásha. The curtain had not yet risen and the overture was being played.
+      Natásha, smoothing her gown, went in with Sónya and sat down, scanning the
+      brilliant tiers of boxes opposite. A sensation she had not experienced for
+      a long time—that of hundreds of eyes looking at her bare arms and
+      neck—suddenly affected her both agreeably and disagreeably and
+      called up a whole crowd of memories, desires and emotions associated with
+      that feeling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The two remarkably pretty girls, Natásha and Sónya, with Count Rostóv who
+      had not been seen in Moscow for a long time, attracted general attention.
+      Moreover, everybody knew vaguely of Natásha’s engagement to Prince Andrew,
+      and knew that the Rostóvs had lived in the country ever since, and all
+      looked with curiosity at a fiancée who was making one of the best matches
+      in Russia.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha’s looks, as everyone told her, had improved in the country, and
+      that evening thanks to her agitation she was particularly pretty. She
+      struck those who saw her by her fullness of life and beauty, combined with
+      her indifference to everything about her. Her black eyes looked at the
+      crowd without seeking anyone, and her delicate arm, bare to above the
+      elbow, lay on the velvet edge of the box, while, evidently unconsciously,
+      she opened and closed her hand in time to the music, crumpling her
+      program. “Look, there’s Alénina,” said Sónya, “with her
+      mother, isn’t it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear me, Michael Kirílovich has grown still stouter!” remarked the count.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Look at our Anna Mikháylovna—what a headdress she has on!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The Karágins, Julie—and Borís with them. One can see at once that
+      they’re engaged....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Drubetskóy has proposed?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes, I heard it today,” said Shinshín, coming into the Rostóvs’ box.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha looked in the direction in which her father’s eyes were turned and
+      saw Julie sitting beside her mother with a happy look on her face and a
+      string of pearls round her thick red neck—which Natásha knew was
+      covered with powder. Behind them, wearing a smile and leaning over with an
+      ear to Julie’s mouth, was Borís’ handsome smoothly brushed head. He looked
+      at the Rostóvs from under his brows and said something, smiling, to his
+      betrothed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They are talking about us, about me and him!” thought Natásha. “And he no
+      doubt is calming her jealousy of me. They needn’t trouble themselves! If
+      only they knew how little I am concerned about any of them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Behind them sat Anna Mikháylovna wearing a green headdress and with a
+      happy look of resignation to the will of God on her face. Their box was
+      pervaded by that atmosphere of an affianced couple which Natásha knew so
+      well and liked so much. She turned away and suddenly remembered all that
+      had been so humiliating in her morning’s visit.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What right has he not to wish to receive me into his family? Oh, better
+      not think of it—not till he comes back!” she told herself, and began
+      looking at the faces, some strange and some familiar, in the stalls. In
+      the front, in the very center, leaning back against the orchestra rail,
+      stood Dólokhov in a Persian dress, his curly hair brushed up into a huge
+      shock. He stood in full view of the audience, well aware that he was
+      attracting everyone’s attention, yet as much at ease as though he were in
+      his own room. Around him thronged Moscow’s most brilliant young men, whom
+      he evidently dominated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count, laughing, nudged the blushing Sónya and pointed to her former
+      adorer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you recognize him?” said he. “And where has he sprung from?” he asked,
+      turning to Shinshín. “Didn’t he vanish somewhere?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “He did,” replied Shinshín. “He was in the Caucasus and ran away from
+      there. They say he has been acting as minister to some ruling prince in
+      Persia, where he killed the Shah’s brother. Now all the Moscow ladies are
+      mad about him! It’s ‘Dólokhov the Persian’ that does it! We never hear a
+      word but Dólokhov is mentioned. They swear by him, they offer him to you
+      as they would a dish of choice sterlet. Dólokhov and Anatole Kurágin have
+      turned all our ladies’ heads.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A tall, beautiful woman with a mass of plaited hair and much exposed plump
+      white shoulders and neck, round which she wore a double string of large
+      pearls, entered the adjoining box rustling her heavy silk dress and took a
+      long time settling into her place.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha involuntarily gazed at that neck, those shoulders, and pearls and
+      coiffure, and admired the beauty of the shoulders and the pearls. While
+      Natásha was fixing her gaze on her for the second time the lady looked
+      round and, meeting the count’s eyes, nodded to him and smiled. She was the
+      Countess Bezúkhova, Pierre’s wife, and the count, who knew everyone in
+      society, leaned over and spoke to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Have you been here long, Countess?” he inquired. “I’ll call, I’ll call to
+      kiss your hand. I’m here on business and have brought my girls with me.
+      They say Semënova acts marvelously. Count Pierre never used to forget us.
+      Is he here?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, he meant to look in,” answered Hélène, and glanced attentively at
+      Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Count Rostóv resumed his seat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Handsome, isn’t she?” he whispered to Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Wonderful!” answered Natásha. “She’s a woman one could easily fall in
+      love with.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Just then the last chords of the overture were heard and the conductor
+      tapped with his stick. Some latecomers took their seats in the stalls, and
+      the curtain rose.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as it rose everyone in the boxes and stalls became silent, and all
+      the men, old and young, in uniform and evening dress, and all the women
+      with gems on their bare flesh, turned their whole attention with eager
+      curiosity to the stage. Natásha too began to look at it.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0154"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The floor of the stage consisted of smooth boards, at the sides was some
+      painted cardboard representing trees, and at the back was a cloth
+      stretched over boards. In the center of the stage sat some girls in red
+      bodices and white skirts. One very fat girl in a white silk dress sat
+      apart on a low bench, to the back of which a piece of green cardboard was
+      glued. They all sang something. When they had finished their song the girl
+      in white went up to the prompter’s box and a man with tight silk trousers
+      over his stout legs, and holding a plume and a dagger, went up to her and
+      began singing, waving his arms about.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      First the man in the tight trousers sang alone, then she sang, then they
+      both paused while the orchestra played and the man fingered the hand of
+      the girl in white, obviously awaiting the beat to start singing with her.
+      They sang together and everyone in the theater began clapping and
+      shouting, while the man and woman on the stage—who represented
+      lovers—began smiling, spreading out their arms, and bowing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After her life in the country, and in her present serious mood, all this
+      seemed grotesque and amazing to Natásha. She could not follow the opera
+      nor even listen to the music; she saw only the painted cardboard and the
+      queerly dressed men and women who moved, spoke, and sang so strangely in
+      that brilliant light. She knew what it was all meant to represent, but it
+      was so pretentiously false and unnatural that she first felt ashamed for
+      the actors and then amused at them. She looked at the faces of the
+      audience, seeking in them the same sense of ridicule and perplexity she
+      herself experienced, but they all seemed attentive to what was happening
+      on the stage, and expressed delight which to Natásha seemed feigned. “I
+      suppose it has to be like this!” she thought. She kept looking round in
+      turn at the rows of pomaded heads in the stalls and then at the seminude
+      women in the boxes, especially at Hélène in the next box, who—apparently
+      quite unclothed—sat with a quiet tranquil smile, not taking her eyes
+      off the stage. And feeling the bright light that flooded the whole place
+      and the warm air heated by the crowd, Natásha little by little began to
+      pass into a state of intoxication she had not experienced for a long
+      while. She did not realize who and where she was, nor what was going on
+      before her. As she looked and thought, the strangest fancies unexpectedly
+      and disconnectedly passed through her mind: the idea occurred to her of
+      jumping onto the edge of the box and singing the aria the actress was
+      singing, then she wished to touch with her fan an old gentleman sitting
+      not far from her, then to lean over to Hélène and tickle her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At a moment when all was quiet before the commencement of a song, a door
+      leading to the stalls on the side nearest the Rostóvs’ box creaked, and
+      the steps of a belated arrival were heard. “There’s Kurágin!” whispered
+      Shinshín. Countess Bezúkhova turned smiling to the newcomer, and Natásha,
+      following the direction of that look, saw an exceptionally handsome
+      adjutant approaching their box with a self-assured yet courteous bearing.
+      This was Anatole Kurágin whom she had seen and noticed long ago at the
+      ball in Petersburg. He was now in an adjutant’s uniform with one epaulet
+      and a shoulder knot. He moved with a restrained swagger which would have
+      been ridiculous had he not been so good-looking and had his handsome face
+      not worn such an expression of good-humored complacency and gaiety. Though
+      the performance was proceeding, he walked deliberately down the carpeted
+      gangway, his sword and spurs slightly jingling and his handsome perfumed
+      head held high. Having looked at Natásha he approached his sister, laid
+      his well gloved hand on the edge of her box, nodded to her, and leaning
+      forward asked a question, with a motion toward Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Mais charmante!”</i> said he, evidently referring to Natásha, who
+      did not exactly hear his words but understood them from the movement of his lips.
+      Then he took his place in the first row of the stalls and sat down beside
+      Dólokhov, nudging with his elbow in a friendly and offhand way that
+      Dólokhov whom others treated so fawningly. He winked at him gaily, smiled,
+      and rested his foot against the orchestra screen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How like the brother is to the sister,” remarked the count. “And how
+      handsome they both are!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Shinshín, lowering his voice, began to tell the count of some intrigue of
+      Kurágin’s in Moscow, and Natásha tried to overhear it just because he had
+      said she was <i>“charmante.”</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      The first act was over. In the stalls everyone began moving about, going
+      out and coming in.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís came to the Rostóvs’ box, received their congratulations very
+      simply, and raising his eyebrows with an absent-minded smile conveyed to
+      Natásha and Sónya his fiancée’s invitation to her wedding, and went away.
+      Natásha with a gay, coquettish smile talked to him, and congratulated on
+      his approaching wedding that same Borís with whom she had formerly been in
+      love. In the state of intoxication she was in, everything seemed simple
+      and natural.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The scantily clad Hélène smiled at everyone in the same way, and Natásha
+      gave Borís a similar smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Hélène’s box was filled and surrounded from the stalls by the most
+      distinguished and intellectual men, who seemed to vie with one another in
+      their wish to let everyone see that they knew her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the whole of that entr’acte Kurágin stood with Dólokhov in front of
+      the orchestra partition, looking at the Rostóvs’ box. Natásha knew he was
+      talking about her and this afforded her pleasure. She even turned so that
+      he should see her profile in what she thought was its most becoming
+      aspect. Before the beginning of the second act Pierre appeared in the
+      stalls. The Rostóvs had not seen him since their arrival. His face looked
+      sad, and he had grown still stouter since Natásha last saw him. He passed
+      up to the front rows, not noticing anyone. Anatole went up to him and
+      began speaking to him, looking at and indicating the Rostóvs’ box. On
+      seeing Natásha Pierre grew animated and, hastily passing between the rows,
+      came toward their box. When he got there he leaned on his elbows and,
+      smiling, talked to her for a long time. While conversing with Pierre,
+      Natásha heard a man’s voice in Countess Bezúkhova’s box and something told
+      her it was Kurágin. She turned and their eyes met. Almost smiling, he
+      gazed straight into her eyes with such an enraptured caressing look that
+      it seemed strange to be so near him, to look at him like that, to be so
+      sure he admired her, and not to be acquainted with him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the second act there was scenery representing tombstones, there was a
+      round hole in the canvas to represent the moon, shades were raised over
+      the footlights, and from horns and contrabass came deep notes while many
+      people appeared from right and left wearing black cloaks and holding
+      things like daggers in their hands. They began waving their arms. Then
+      some other people ran in and began dragging away the maiden who had been
+      in white and was now in light blue. They did not drag her away at once,
+      but sang with her for a long time and then at last dragged her off, and
+      behind the scenes something metallic was struck three times and everyone
+      knelt down and sang a prayer. All these things were repeatedly interrupted
+      by the enthusiastic shouts of the audience.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During this act every time Natásha looked toward the stalls she saw
+      Anatole Kurágin with an arm thrown across the back of his chair, staring
+      at her. She was pleased to see that he was captivated by her and it did
+      not occur to her that there was anything wrong in it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the second act was over Countess Bezúkhova rose, turned to the
+      Rostóvs’ box—her whole bosom completely exposed—beckoned the
+      old count with a gloved finger, and paying no attention to those who had
+      entered her box began talking to him with an amiable smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do make me acquainted with your charming daughters,” said she. “The whole
+      town is singing their praises and I don’t even know them!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha rose and curtsied to the splendid countess. She was so pleased by
+      praise from this brilliant beauty that she blushed with pleasure.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I want to become a Moscovite too, now,” said Hélène. “How is it you’re
+      not ashamed to bury such pearls in the country?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Countess Bezúkhova quite deserved her reputation of being a fascinating
+      woman. She could say what she did not think—especially what was
+      flattering—quite simply and naturally.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear count, you must let me look after your daughters! Though I am not
+      staying here long this time—nor are you—I will try to amuse
+      them. I have already heard much of you in Petersburg and wanted to get to
+      know you,” said she to Natásha with her stereotyped and lovely smile. “I
+      had heard about you from my page, Drubetskóy. Have you heard he is getting
+      married? And also from my husband’s friend Bolkónski, Prince Andrew
+      Bolkónski,” she went on with special emphasis, implying that she knew of
+      his relation to Natásha. To get better acquainted she asked that one of
+      the young ladies should come into her box for the rest of the performance,
+      and Natásha moved over to it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The scene of the third act represented a palace in which many candles were
+      burning and pictures of knights with short beards hung on the walls. In
+      the middle stood what were probably a king and a queen. The king waved his
+      right arm and, evidently nervous, sang something badly and sat down on a
+      crimson throne. The maiden who had been first in white and then in light
+      blue, now wore only a smock, and stood beside the throne with her hair
+      down. She sang something mournfully, addressing the queen, but the king
+      waved his arm severely, and men and women with bare legs came in from both
+      sides and began dancing all together. Then the violins played very shrilly
+      and merrily and one of the women with thick bare legs and thin arms,
+      separating from the others, went behind the wings, adjusted her bodice,
+      returned to the middle of the stage, and began jumping and striking one
+      foot rapidly against the other. In the stalls everyone clapped and shouted
+      “bravo!” Then one of the men went into a corner of the stage. The cymbals
+      and horns in the orchestra struck up more loudly, and this man with bare
+      legs jumped very high and waved his feet about very rapidly. (He was
+      Duport, who received sixty thousand rubles a year for this art.) Everybody
+      in the stalls, boxes, and galleries began clapping and shouting with all
+      their might, and the man stopped and began smiling and bowing to all
+      sides. Then other men and women danced with bare legs. Then the king again
+      shouted to the sound of music, and they all began singing. But suddenly a
+      storm came on, chromatic scales and diminished sevenths were heard in the
+      orchestra, everyone ran off, again dragging one of their number away, and
+      the curtain dropped. Once more there was a terrible noise and clatter
+      among the audience, and with rapturous faces everyone began shouting:
+      “Duport! Duport! Duport!” Natásha no longer thought this strange. She
+      looked about with pleasure, smiling joyfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Isn’t Duport delightful?” Hélène asked her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, yes,” replied Natásha.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0155"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      During the entr’acte a whiff of cold air came into Hélène’s box, the door
+      opened, and Anatole entered, stooping and trying not to brush against
+      anyone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let me introduce my brother to you,” said Hélène, her eyes shifting
+      uneasily from Natásha to Anatole.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha turned her pretty little head toward the elegant young officer and
+      smiled at him over her bare shoulder. Anatole, who was as handsome at
+      close quarters as at a distance, sat down beside her and told her he had
+      long wished to have this happiness—ever since the Narýshkins’ ball
+      in fact, at which he had had the well-remembered pleasure of seeing her.
+      Kurágin was much more sensible and simple with women than among men. He
+      talked boldly and naturally, and Natásha was strangely and agreeably
+      struck by the fact that there was nothing formidable in this man about
+      whom there was so much talk, but that on the contrary his smile was most
+      naïve, cheerful, and good-natured.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kurágin asked her opinion of the performance and told her how at a
+      previous performance Semënova had fallen down on the stage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And do you know, Countess,” he said, suddenly addressing her as an old,
+      familiar acquaintance, “we are getting up a costume tournament; you ought
+      to take part in it! It will be great fun. We shall all meet at the
+      Karágins’! Please come! No! Really, eh?” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While saying this he never removed his smiling eyes from her face, her
+      neck, and her bare arms. Natásha knew for certain that he was enraptured
+      by her. This pleased her, yet his presence made her feel constrained and
+      oppressed. When she was not looking at him she felt that he was looking at
+      her shoulders, and she involuntarily caught his eye so that he should look
+      into hers rather than this. But looking into his eyes she was frightened,
+      realizing that there was not that barrier of modesty she had always felt
+      between herself and other men. She did not know how it was that within
+      five minutes she had come to feel herself terribly near to this man. When
+      she turned away she feared he might seize her from behind by her bare arm
+      and kiss her on the neck. They spoke of most ordinary things, yet she felt
+      that they were closer to one another than she had ever been to any man.
+      Natásha kept turning to Hélène and to her father, as if asking what it all
+      meant, but Hélène was engaged in conversation with a general and did not
+      answer her look, and her father’s eyes said nothing but what they always
+      said: “Having a good time? Well, I’m glad of it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      During one of these moments of awkward silence when Anatole’s prominent
+      eyes were gazing calmly and fixedly at her, Natásha, to break the silence,
+      asked him how he liked Moscow. She asked the question and blushed. She
+      felt all the time that by talking to him she was doing something improper.
+      Anatole smiled as though to encourage her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “At first I did not like it much, because what makes a town pleasant <i>ce
+      sont les jolies femmes</i>, * isn’t that so? But now I like it very much
+      indeed,” he said, looking at her significantly. “You’ll come to the
+      costume tournament, Countess? Do come!” and putting out his hand to her
+      bouquet and dropping his voice, he added, “You will be the prettiest
+      there. Do come, dear countess, and give me this flower as a pledge!”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Are the pretty women.
+</p>
+<p>
+      Natásha did not understand what he was saying any more than he did
+      himself, but she felt that his incomprehensible words had an improper
+      intention. She did not know what to say and turned away as if she had not
+      heard his remark. But as soon as she had turned away she felt that he was
+      there, behind, so close behind her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How is he now? Confused? Angry? Ought I to put it right?” she asked
+      herself, and she could not refrain from turning round. She looked straight
+      into his eyes, and his nearness, self-assurance, and the good-natured
+      tenderness of his smile vanquished her. She smiled just as he was doing,
+      gazing straight into his eyes. And again she felt with horror that no
+      barrier lay between him and her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The curtain rose again. Anatole left the box, serene and gay. Natásha went
+      back to her father in the other box, now quite submissive to the world she
+      found herself in. All that was going on before her now seemed quite
+      natural, but on the other hand all her previous thoughts of her betrothed,
+      of Princess Mary, or of life in the country did not once recur to her mind
+      and were as if belonging to a remote past.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the fourth act there was some sort of devil who sang waving his arm
+      about, till the boards were withdrawn from under him and he disappeared
+      down below. That was the only part of the fourth act that Natásha saw. She
+      felt agitated and tormented, and the cause of this was Kurágin whom she
+      could not help watching. As they were leaving the theater Anatole came up
+      to them, called their carriage, and helped them in. As he was putting
+      Natásha in he pressed her arm above the elbow. Agitated and flushed she
+      turned round. He was looking at her with glittering eyes, smiling
+      tenderly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Only after she had reached home was Natásha able clearly to think over
+      what had happened to her, and suddenly remembering Prince Andrew she was
+      horrified, and at tea to which all had sat down after the opera, she gave
+      a loud exclamation, flushed, and ran out of the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “O God! I am lost!” she said to herself. “How could I let him?” She sat
+      for a long time hiding her flushed face in her hands trying to realize
+      what had happened to her, but was unable either to understand what had
+      happened or what she felt. Everything seemed dark, obscure, and terrible.
+      There in that enormous, illuminated theater where the bare-legged Duport,
+      in a tinsel-decorated jacket, jumped about to the music on wet boards, and
+      young girls and old men, and the nearly naked Hélène with her proud, calm
+      smile, rapturously cried “bravo!”—there in the presence of that
+      Hélène it had all seemed clear and simple; but now, alone by herself, it
+      was incomprehensible. “What is it? What was that terror I felt of him?
+      What is this gnawing of conscience I am feeling now?” she thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only to the old countess at night in bed could Natásha have told all she
+      was feeling. She knew that Sónya with her severe and simple views would
+      either not understand it at all or would be horrified at such a
+      confession. So Natásha tried to solve what was torturing her by herself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Am I spoiled for Andrew’s love or not?” she asked herself, and with
+      soothing irony replied: “What a fool I am to ask that! What did happen to
+      me? Nothing! I have done nothing, I didn’t lead him on at all. Nobody will
+      know and I shall never see him again,” she told herself. “So it is plain
+      that nothing has happened and there is nothing to repent of, and Andrew
+      can love me still. But why ‘still?’ O God, why isn’t he here?” Natásha
+      quieted herself for a moment, but again some instinct told her that though
+      all this was true, and though nothing had happened, yet the former purity
+      of her love for Prince Andrew had perished. And again in imagination she
+      went over her whole conversation with Kurágin, and again saw the face,
+      gestures, and tender smile of that bold handsome man when he pressed her
+      arm.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0156"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Anatole Kurágin was staying in Moscow because his father had sent him away
+      from Petersburg, where he had been spending twenty thousand rubles a year
+      in cash, besides running up debts for as much more, which his creditors
+      demanded from his father.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His father announced to him that he would now pay half his debts for the
+      last time, but only on condition that he went to Moscow as adjutant to the
+      commander in chief—a post his father had procured for him—and
+      would at last try to make a good match there. He indicated to him Princess
+      Mary and Julie Karágina.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole consented and went to Moscow, where he put up at Pierre’s house.
+      Pierre received him unwillingly at first, but got used to him after a
+      while, sometimes even accompanied him on his carousals, and gave him money
+      under the guise of loans.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As Shinshín had remarked, from the time of his arrival Anatole had turned
+      the heads of the Moscow ladies, especially by the fact that he slighted
+      them and plainly preferred the gypsy girls and French actresses—with
+      the chief of whom, Mademoiselle George, he was said to be on intimate
+      relations. He had never missed a carousal at Danílov’s or other Moscow
+      revelers’, drank whole nights through, outvying everyone else, and was at
+      all the balls and parties of the best society. There was talk of his
+      intrigues with some of the ladies, and he flirted with a few of them at
+      the balls. But he did not run after the unmarried girls, especially the
+      rich heiresses who were most of them plain. There was a special reason for
+      this, as he had got married two years before—a fact known only to
+      his most intimate friends. At that time while with his regiment in Poland,
+      a Polish landowner of small means had forced him to marry his daughter.
+      Anatole had very soon abandoned his wife and, for a payment which he
+      agreed to send to his father-in-law, had arranged to be free to pass
+      himself off as a bachelor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole was always content with his position, with himself, and with
+      others. He was instinctively and thoroughly convinced that it was
+      impossible for him to live otherwise than as he did and that he had never
+      in his life done anything base. He was incapable of considering how his
+      actions might affect others or what the consequences of this or that
+      action of his might be. He was convinced that, as a duck is so made that
+      it must live in water, so God had made him such that he must spend thirty
+      thousand rubles a year and always occupy a prominent position in society.
+      He believed this so firmly that others, looking at him, were persuaded of
+      it too and did not refuse him either a leading place in society or money,
+      which he borrowed from anyone and everyone and evidently would not repay.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was not a gambler, at any rate he did not care about winning. He was
+      not vain. He did not mind what people thought of him. Still less could he
+      be accused of ambition. More than once he had vexed his father by spoiling
+      his own career, and he laughed at distinctions of all kinds. He was not
+      mean, and did not refuse anyone who asked of him. All he cared about was
+      gaiety and women, and as according to his ideas there was nothing
+      dishonorable in these tastes, and he was incapable of considering what the
+      gratification of his tastes entailed for others, he honestly considered
+      himself irreproachable, sincerely despised rogues and bad people, and with
+      a tranquil conscience carried his head high.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rakes, those male Magdalenes, have a secret feeling of innocence similar
+      to that which female Magdalenes have, based on the same hope of
+      forgiveness. “All will be forgiven her, for she loved much; and all will
+      be forgiven him, for he enjoyed much.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov, who had reappeared that year in Moscow after his exile and his
+      Persian adventures, and was leading a life of luxury, gambling, and
+      dissipation, associated with his old Petersburg comrade Kurágin and made
+      use of him for his own ends.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole was sincerely fond of Dólokhov for his cleverness and audacity.
+      Dólokhov, who needed Anatole Kurágin’s name, position, and connections as
+      a bait to draw rich young men into his gambling set, made use of him and
+      amused himself at his expense without letting the other feel it. Apart
+      from the advantage he derived from Anatole, the very process of dominating
+      another’s will was in itself a pleasure, a habit, and a necessity to
+      Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha had made a strong impression on Kurágin. At supper after the opera
+      he described to Dólokhov with the air of a connoisseur the attractions of
+      her arms, shoulders, feet, and hair and expressed his intention of making
+      love to her. Anatole had no notion and was incapable of considering what
+      might come of such love-making, as he never had any notion of the outcome
+      of any of his actions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She’s first-rate, my dear fellow, but not for us,” replied Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I will tell my sister to ask her to dinner,” said Anatole. “Eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You’d better wait till she’s married....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You know, I adore little girls, they lose their heads at once,” pursued
+      Anatole.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You have been caught once already by a ‘little girl,’” said Dólokhov who
+      knew of Kurágin’s marriage. “Take care!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, that can’t happen twice! Eh?” said Anatole, with a good-humored
+      laugh.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0157"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The day after the opera the Rostóvs went nowhere and nobody came to see
+      them. Márya Dmítrievna talked to the count about something which they
+      concealed from Natásha. Natásha guessed they were talking about the old
+      prince and planning something, and this disquieted and offended her. She
+      was expecting Prince Andrew any moment and twice that day sent a
+      manservant to the Vozdvízhenka to ascertain whether he had come. He had
+      not arrived. She suffered more now than during her first days in Moscow.
+      To her impatience and pining for him were now added the unpleasant
+      recollection of her interview with Princess Mary and the old prince, and a
+      fear and anxiety of which she did not understand the cause. She
+      continually fancied that either he would never come or that something
+      would happen to her before he came. She could no longer think of him by
+      herself calmly and continuously as she had done before. As soon as she
+      began to think of him, the recollection of the old prince, of Princess
+      Mary, of the theater, and of Kurágin mingled with her thoughts. The
+      question again presented itself whether she was not guilty, whether she
+      had not already broken faith with Prince Andrew, and again she found
+      herself recalling to the minutest detail every word, every gesture, and
+      every shade in the play of expression on the face of the man who had been
+      able to arouse in her such an incomprehensible and terrifying feeling. To
+      the family Natásha seemed livelier than usual, but she was far less
+      tranquil and happy than before.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On Sunday morning Márya Dmítrievna invited her visitors to Mass at her
+      parish church—the Church of the Assumption built over the graves of
+      victims of the plague.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t like those fashionable churches,” she said, evidently priding
+      herself on her independence of thought. “God is the same everywhere. We
+      have an excellent priest, he conducts the service decently and with
+      dignity, and the deacon is the same. What holiness is there in giving
+      concerts in the choir? I don’t like it, it’s just self-indulgence!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Márya Dmítrievna liked Sundays and knew how to keep them. Her whole house
+      was scrubbed and cleaned on Saturdays; neither she nor the servants
+      worked, and they all wore holiday dress and went to church. At her table
+      there were extra dishes at dinner, and the servants had vodka and roast
+      goose or suckling pig. But in nothing in the house was the holiday so
+      noticeable as in Márya Dmítrievna’s broad, stern face, which on that day
+      wore an invariable look of solemn festivity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After Mass, when they had finished their coffee in the dining room where
+      the loose covers had been removed from the furniture, a servant announced
+      that the carriage was ready, and Márya Dmítrievna rose with a stern air.
+      She wore her holiday shawl, in which she paid calls, and announced that
+      she was going to see Prince Nicholas Bolkónski to have an explanation with
+      him about Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After she had gone, a dressmaker from Madame Suppert-Roguet waited on the
+      Rostóvs, and Natásha, very glad of this diversion, having shut herself
+      into a room adjoining the drawing room, occupied herself trying on the new
+      dresses. Just as she had put on a bodice without sleeves and only tacked
+      together, and was turning her head to see in the glass how the back
+      fitted, she heard in the drawing room the animated sounds of her father’s
+      voice and another’s—a woman’s—that made her flush. It was
+      Hélène. Natásha had not time to take off the bodice before the door opened
+      and Countess Bezúkhova, dressed in a purple velvet gown with a high
+      collar, came into the room beaming with good-humored amiable smiles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, my enchantress!” she cried to the blushing Natásha. “Charming! No,
+      this is really beyond anything, my dear count,” said she to Count Rostóv
+      who had followed her in. “How can you live in Moscow and go nowhere? No, I
+      won’t let you off! Mademoiselle George will recite at my house tonight and
+      there’ll be some people, and if you don’t bring your lovely girls—who
+      are prettier than Mademoiselle George—I won’t know you! My husband
+      is away in Tver or I would send him to fetch you. You must come. You
+      positively must! Between eight and nine.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She nodded to the dressmaker, whom she knew and who had curtsied
+      respectfully to her, and seated herself in an armchair beside the looking
+      glass, draping the folds of her velvet dress picturesquely. She did not
+      cease chattering good-naturedly and gaily, continually praising Natásha’s
+      beauty. She looked at Natásha’s dresses and praised them, as well as a new
+      dress of her own made of “metallic gauze,” which she had received from
+      Paris, and advised Natásha to have one like it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But anything suits you, my charmer!” she remarked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A smile of pleasure never left Natásha’s face. She felt happy and as if
+      she were blossoming under the praise of this dear Countess Bezúkhova who
+      had formerly seemed to her so unapproachable and important and was now so
+      kind to her. Natásha brightened up and felt almost in love with this
+      woman, who was so beautiful and so kind. Hélène for her part was sincerely
+      delighted with Natásha and wished to give her a good time. Anatole had
+      asked her to bring him and Natásha together, and she was calling on the
+      Rostóvs for that purpose. The idea of throwing her brother and Natásha
+      together amused her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though at one time, in Petersburg, she had been annoyed with Natásha for
+      drawing Borís away, she did not think of that now, and in her own way
+      heartily wished Natásha well. As she was leaving the Rostóvs she called
+      her protégée aside.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My brother dined with me yesterday—we nearly died of laughter—he
+      ate nothing and kept sighing for you, my charmer! He is madly, quite
+      madly, in love with you, my dear.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha blushed scarlet when she heard this.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How she blushes, how she blushes, my pretty!” said Hélène. “You must
+      certainly come. If you love somebody, my charmer, that is not a reason to
+      shut yourself up. Even if you are engaged, I am sure your fiancé would
+      wish you to go into society rather than be bored to death.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “So she knows I am engaged, and she and her husband Pierre—that good
+      Pierre—have talked and laughed about this. So it’s all right.” And
+      again, under Hélène’s influence, what had seemed terrible now seemed
+      simple and natural. “And she is such a <i>grande dame</i>, so kind, and
+      evidently likes me so much. And why not enjoy myself?” thought Natásha,
+      gazing at Hélène with wide-open, wondering eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Márya Dmítrievna came back to dinner taciturn and serious, having
+      evidently suffered a defeat at the old prince’s. She was still too
+      agitated by the encounter to be able to talk of the affair calmly. In
+      answer to the count’s inquiries she replied that things were all right and
+      that she would tell about it next day. On hearing of Countess Bezúkhova’s
+      visit and the invitation for that evening, Márya Dmítrievna remarked:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t care to have anything to do with Bezúkhova and don’t advise you
+      to; however, if you’ve promised—go. It will divert your thoughts,”
+       she added, addressing Natásha.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0158"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Count Rostóv took the girls to Countess Bezúkhova’s. There were a good
+      many people there, but nearly all strangers to Natásha. Count Rostóv was
+      displeased to see that the company consisted almost entirely of men and
+      women known for the freedom of their conduct. Mademoiselle George was
+      standing in a corner of the drawing room surrounded by young men. There
+      were several Frenchmen present, among them Métivier who from the time
+      Hélène reached Moscow had been an intimate in her house. The count decided
+      not to sit down to cards or let his girls out of his sight and to get away
+      as soon as Mademoiselle George’s performance was over.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole was at the door, evidently on the lookout for the Rostóvs.
+      Immediately after greeting the count he went up to Natásha and followed
+      her. As soon as she saw him she was seized by the same feeling she had had
+      at the opera—gratified vanity at his admiration of her and fear at
+      the absence of a moral barrier between them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Hélène welcomed Natásha delightedly and was loud in admiration of her
+      beauty and her dress. Soon after their arrival Mademoiselle George went
+      out of the room to change her costume. In the drawing room people began
+      arranging the chairs and taking their seats. Anatole moved a chair for
+      Natásha and was about to sit down beside her, but the count, who never
+      lost sight of her, took the seat himself. Anatole sat down behind her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Mademoiselle George, with her bare, fat, dimpled arms, and a red shawl
+      draped over one shoulder, came into the space left vacant for her, and
+      assumed an unnatural pose. Enthusiastic whispering was audible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Mademoiselle George looked sternly and gloomily at the audience and began
+      reciting some French verses describing her guilty love for her son. In
+      some places she raised her voice, in others she whispered, lifting her
+      head triumphantly; sometimes she paused and uttered hoarse sounds, rolling
+      her eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Adorable! divine! delicious!” was heard from every side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha looked at the fat actress, but neither saw nor heard nor
+      understood anything of what went on before her. She only felt herself
+      again completely borne away into this strange senseless world—so
+      remote from her old world—a world in which it was impossible to know
+      what was good or bad, reasonable or senseless. Behind her sat Anatole, and
+      conscious of his proximity she experienced a frightened sense of
+      expectancy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the first monologue the whole company rose and surrounded
+      Mademoiselle George, expressing their enthusiasm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How beautiful she is!” Natásha remarked to her father who had also risen
+      and was moving through the crowd toward the actress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t think so when I look at you!” said Anatole, following Natásha. He
+      said this at a moment when she alone could hear him. “You are
+      enchanting... from the moment I saw you I have never ceased...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Come, come, Natásha!” said the count, as he turned back for his daughter.
+      “How beautiful she is!” Natásha without saying anything stepped up to her
+      father and looked at him with surprised inquiring eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After giving several recitations, Mademoiselle George left, and Countess
+      Bezúkhova asked her visitors into the ballroom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count wished to go home, but Hélène entreated him not to spoil her
+      improvised ball, and the Rostóvs stayed on. Anatole asked Natásha for a
+      valse and as they danced he pressed her waist and hand and told her she
+      was bewitching and that he loved her. During the <i>écossaise</i>, which she also
+      danced with him, Anatole said nothing when they happened to be by
+      themselves, but merely gazed at her. Natásha lifted her frightened eyes to
+      him, but there was such confident tenderness in his affectionate look and
+      smile that she could not, whilst looking at him, say what she had to say.
+      She lowered her eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t say such things to me. I am betrothed and love another,” she said
+      rapidly.... She glanced at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole was not upset or pained by what she had said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t speak to me of that! What can I do?” said he. “I tell you I am
+      madly, madly, in love with you! Is it my fault that you are enchanting?...
+      It’s our turn to begin.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha, animated and excited, looked about her with wide-open frightened
+      eyes and seemed merrier than usual. She understood hardly anything that
+      went on that evening. They danced the <i>écossaise</i> and the <i>Grossvater.</i>
+      Her father asked her to come home, but she begged to remain. Wherever she went
+      and whomever she was speaking to, she felt <i>his</i> eyes upon her. Later on she
+      recalled how she had asked her father to let her go to the dressing room
+      to rearrange her dress, that Hélène had followed her and spoken laughingly
+      of her brother’s love, and that she again met Anatole in the little
+      sitting room. Hélène had disappeared leaving them alone, and Anatole had
+      taken her hand and said in a tender voice:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I cannot come to visit you but is it possible that I shall never see you?
+      I love you madly. Can I never...?” and, blocking her path, he brought his
+      face close to hers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His large, glittering, masculine eyes were so close to hers that she saw
+      nothing but them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natalie?” he whispered inquiringly while she felt her hands being
+      painfully pressed. “Natalie?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t understand. I have nothing to say,” her eyes replied.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Burning lips were pressed to hers, and at the same instant she felt
+      herself released, and Hélène’s footsteps and the rustle of her dress were
+      heard in the room. Natásha looked round at her, and then, red and
+      trembling, threw a frightened look of inquiry at Anatole and moved toward
+      the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One word, just one, for God’s sake!” cried Anatole.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She paused. She so wanted a word from him that would explain to her what
+      had happened and to which she could find no answer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natalie, just a word, only one!” he kept repeating, evidently not knowing
+      what to say and he repeated it till Hélène came up to them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Hélène returned with Natásha to the drawing room. The Rostóvs went away
+      without staying for supper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After reaching home Natásha did not sleep all night. She was tormented by
+      the insoluble question whether she loved Anatole or Prince Andrew. She
+      loved Prince Andrew—she remembered distinctly how deeply she loved
+      him. But she also loved Anatole, of that there was no doubt. “Else how
+      could all this have happened?” thought she. “If, after that, I could
+      return his smile when saying good-by, if I was able to let it come to
+      that, it means that I loved him from the first. It means that he is kind,
+      noble, and splendid, and I could not help loving him. What am I to do if I
+      love him and the other one too?” she asked herself, unable to find an
+      answer to these terrible questions.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0159"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Morning came with its cares and bustle. Everyone got up and began to move
+      about and talk, dressmakers came again. Márya Dmítrievna appeared, and
+      they were called to breakfast. Natásha kept looking uneasily at everybody
+      with wide-open eyes, as if wishing to intercept every glance directed
+      toward her, and tried to appear the same as usual.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After breakfast, which was her best time, Márya Dmítrievna sat down in her
+      armchair and called Natásha and the count to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, friends, I have now thought the whole matter over and this is my
+      advice,” she began. “Yesterday, as you know, I went to see Prince
+      Bolkónski. Well, I had a talk with him.... He took it into his head to
+      begin shouting, but I am not one to be shouted down. I said what I had to
+      say!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, and he?” asked the count.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He? He’s crazy... he did not want to listen. But what’s the use of
+      talking? As it is we have worn the poor girl out,” said Márya Dmítrievna.
+      “My advice to you is finish your business and go back home to Otrádnoe...
+      and wait there.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, no!” exclaimed Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, go back,” said Márya Dmítrievna, “and wait there. If your betrothed
+      comes here now—there will be no avoiding a quarrel; but alone with
+      the old man he will talk things over and then come on to you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Count Rostóv approved of this suggestion, appreciating its reasonableness.
+      If the old man came round it would be all the better to visit him in
+      Moscow or at Bald Hills later on; and if not, the wedding, against his
+      wishes, could only be arranged at Otrádnoe.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That is perfectly true. And I am sorry I went to see him and took her,”
+       said the old count.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, why be sorry? Being here, you had to pay your respects. But if he
+      won’t—that’s his affair,” said Márya Dmítrievna, looking for
+      something in her reticule. “Besides, the trousseau is ready, so there is
+      nothing to wait for; and what is not ready I’ll send after you. Though I
+      don’t like letting you go, it is the best way. So go, with God’s
+      blessing!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Having found what she was looking for in the reticule she handed it to
+      Natásha. It was a letter from Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She has written to you. How she torments herself, poor thing! She’s
+      afraid you might think that she does not like you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But she doesn’t like me,” said Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t talk nonsense!” cried Márya Dmítrievna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I shan’t believe anyone, I know she doesn’t like me,” replied Natásha
+      boldly as she took the letter, and her face expressed a cold and angry
+      resolution that caused Márya Dmítrievna to look at her more intently and
+      to frown.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t answer like that, my good girl!” she said.
+      “What I say is true! Write an answer!”
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha did not reply and went to her own room to read Princess Mary’s letter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary wrote that she was in despair at the misunderstanding that
+      had occurred between them. Whatever her father’s feelings might be, she
+      begged Natásha to believe that she could not help loving her as the one
+      chosen by her brother, for whose happiness she was ready to sacrifice
+      everything.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do not think, however,” she wrote, “that my father is ill-disposed toward
+      you. He is an invalid and an old man who must be forgiven; but he is good
+      and magnanimous and will love her who makes his son happy.” Princess Mary
+      went on to ask Natásha to fix a time when she could see her again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After reading the letter Natásha sat down at the writing table to answer
+      it. “Dear Princess,” she wrote in French quickly and mechanically, and
+      then paused. What more could she write after all that had happened the
+      evening before? “Yes, yes! All that has happened, and now all is changed,”
+       she thought as she sat with the letter she had begun before her. “Must I
+      break off with him? Must I really? That’s awful...” and to escape from
+      these dreadful thoughts she went to Sónya and began sorting patterns with
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After dinner Natásha went to her room and again took up Princess Mary’s
+      letter. “Can it be that it is all over?” she thought. “Can it be that all
+      this has happened so quickly and has destroyed all that went before?” She
+      recalled her love for Prince Andrew in all its former strength, and at the
+      same time felt that she loved Kurágin. She vividly pictured herself as
+      Prince Andrew’s wife, and the scenes of happiness with him she had so
+      often repeated in her imagination, and at the same time, aglow with
+      excitement, recalled every detail of yesterday’s interview with Anatole.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why could that not be as well?” she sometimes asked herself in complete
+      bewilderment. “Only so could I be completely happy; but now I have to
+      choose, and I can’t be happy without either of them. Only,” she thought,
+      “to tell Prince Andrew what has happened or to hide it from him are both
+      equally impossible. But with <i>that one</i> nothing is spoiled. But am I really
+      to abandon forever the joy of Prince Andrew’s love, in which I have lived
+      so long?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Please, Miss!” whispered a maid entering the room with a mysterious air.
+      “A man told me to give you this—” and she handed Natásha a letter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Only, for Christ’s sake...” the girl went on, as Natásha, without
+      thinking, mechanically broke the seal and read a love letter from Anatole,
+      of which, without taking in a word, she understood only that it was a
+      letter from him—from the man she loved. Yes, she loved him, or else
+      how could that have happened which had happened? And how could she have a
+      love letter from him in her hand?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With trembling hands Natásha held that passionate love letter which
+      Dólokhov had composed for Anatole, and as she read it she found in it an
+      echo of all that she herself imagined she was feeling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Since yesterday evening my fate has been sealed; to be loved by you or to
+      die. There is no other way for me,” the letter began. Then he went on to
+      say that he knew her parents would not give her to him—for this
+      there were secret reasons he could reveal only to her—but that if
+      she loved him she need only say the word <i>yes</i>, and no human power could
+      hinder their bliss. Love would conquer all. He would steal her away and
+      carry her off to the ends of the earth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes! I love him!” thought Natásha, reading the letter for the
+      twentieth time and finding some peculiarly deep meaning in each word of
+      it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That evening Márya Dmítrievna was going to the Akhárovs’ and proposed to
+      take the girls with her. Natásha, pleading a headache, remained at home.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0160"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On returning late in the evening Sónya went to Natásha’s room, and to her
+      surprise found her still dressed and asleep on the sofa. Open on the
+      table, beside her lay Anatole’s letter. Sónya picked it up and read it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As she read she glanced at the sleeping Natásha, trying to find in her
+      face an explanation of what she was reading, but did not find it. Her face
+      was calm, gentle, and happy. Clutching her breast to keep herself from
+      choking, Sónya, pale and trembling with fear and agitation, sat down in an
+      armchair and burst into tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How was it I noticed nothing? How could it go so far? Can she have left
+      off loving Prince Andrew? And how could she let Kurágin go to such
+      lengths? He is a deceiver and a villain, that’s plain! What will Nicholas,
+      dear noble Nicholas, do when he hears of it? So this is the meaning of her
+      excited, resolute, unnatural look the day before yesterday, yesterday, and
+      today,” thought Sónya. “But it can’t be that she loves him! She probably
+      opened the letter without knowing who it was from. Probably she is
+      offended by it. She could not do such a thing!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya wiped away her tears and went up to Natásha, again scanning her
+      face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha!” she said, just audibly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha awoke and saw Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, you’re back?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And with the decision and tenderness that often come at the moment of
+      awakening, she embraced her friend, but noticing Sónya’s look of
+      embarrassment, her own face expressed confusion and suspicion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya, you’ve read that letter?” she demanded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” answered Sónya softly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha smiled rapturously.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, Sónya, I can’t any longer!” she said. “I can’t hide it from you any
+      longer. You know, we love one another! Sónya, darling, he writes...
+      Sónya...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya stared open-eyed at Natásha, unable to believe her ears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And Bolkónski?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, Sónya, if you only knew how happy I am!” cried Natásha. “You don’t
+      know what love is....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But, Natásha, can <i>that</i> be all over?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha looked at Sónya with wide-open eyes as if she could not grasp the
+      question.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, then, are you refusing Prince Andrew?” said Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, you don’t understand anything! Don’t talk nonsense, just listen!”
+       said Natásha, with momentary vexation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But I can’t believe it,” insisted Sónya. “I don’t understand. How is it
+      you have loved a man for a whole year and suddenly... Why, you have only
+      seen him three times! Natásha, I don’t believe you, you’re joking! In
+      three days to forget everything and so...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Three days?” said Natásha. “It seems to me I’ve loved him a hundred
+      years. It seems to me that I have never loved anyone before. You can’t
+      understand it.... Sónya, wait a bit, sit here,” and Natásha embraced and
+      kissed her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I had heard that it happens like this, and you must have heard it too,
+      but it’s only now that I feel such love. It’s not the same as before. As
+      soon as I saw him I felt he was my master and I his slave, and that I
+      could not help loving him. Yes, his slave! Whatever he orders I shall do.
+      You don’t understand that. What can I do? What can I do, Sónya?” cried
+      Natásha with a happy yet frightened expression.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But think what you are doing,” cried Sónya. “I can’t leave it like this.
+      This secret correspondence... How could you let him go so far?” she went
+      on, with a horror and disgust she could hardly conceal.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I told you that I have no will,” Natásha replied. “Why can’t you
+      understand? I love him!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Then I won’t let it come to that... I shall tell!” cried Sónya, bursting
+      into tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What do you mean? For God’s sake... If you tell, you are my enemy!”
+       declared Natásha. “You want me to be miserable, you want us to be
+      separated....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      When she saw Natásha’s fright, Sónya shed tears of shame and pity for her
+      friend.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But what has happened between you?” she asked. “What has he said to you?
+      Why doesn’t he come to the house?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha did not answer her questions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “For God’s sake, Sónya, don’t tell anyone, don’t torture me,” Natásha
+      entreated. “Remember no one ought to interfere in such matters! I have
+      confided in you....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But why this secrecy? Why doesn’t he come to the house?” asked Sónya.
+      “Why doesn’t he openly ask for your hand? You know Prince Andrew gave you
+      complete freedom—if it is really so; but I don’t believe it!
+      Natásha, have you considered what these <i>secret reasons</i> can be?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha looked at Sónya with astonishment. Evidently this question
+      presented itself to her mind for the first time and she did not know how
+      to answer it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t know what the reasons are. But there must be reasons!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya sighed and shook her head incredulously.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If there were reasons...” she began.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Natásha, guessing her doubts, interrupted her in alarm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya, one can’t doubt him! One can’t, one can’t! Don’t you understand?”
+       she cried.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Does he love you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Does he love me?” Natásha repeated with a smile of pity at her friend’s
+      lack of comprehension. “Why, you have read his letter and you have seen
+      him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But if he is dishonorable?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “<i>He!</i> dishonorable? If you only knew!” exclaimed Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If he is an honorable man he should either declare his intentions or
+      cease seeing you; and if you won’t do this, I will. I will write to him,
+      and I will tell Papa!” said Sónya resolutely.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But I can’t live without him!” cried Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha, I don’t understand you. And what are you saying! Think of your
+      father and of Nicholas.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t want anyone, I don’t love anyone but him. How dare you say he is
+      dishonorable? Don’t you know that I love him?” screamed Natásha. “Go away,
+      Sónya! I don’t want to quarrel with you, but go, for God’s sake go! You
+      see how I am suffering!” Natásha cried angrily, in a voice of despair and
+      repressed irritation. Sónya burst into sobs and ran from the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha went to the table and without a moment’s reflection wrote that
+      answer to Princess Mary which she had been unable to write all the
+      morning. In this letter she said briefly that all their misunderstandings
+      were at an end; that availing herself of the magnanimity of Prince Andrew
+      who when he went abroad had given her her freedom, she begged Princess
+      Mary to forget everything and forgive her if she had been to blame toward
+      her, but that she could not be his wife. At that moment this all seemed
+      quite easy, simple, and clear to Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      On Friday the Rostóvs were to return to the country, but on Wednesday the
+      count went with the prospective purchaser to his estate near Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the day the count left, Sónya and Natásha were invited to a big dinner
+      party at the Karágins’, and Márya Dmítrievna took them there. At that
+      party Natásha again met Anatole, and Sónya noticed that she spoke to him,
+      trying not to be overheard, and that all through dinner she was more
+      agitated than ever. When they got home Natásha was the first to begin the
+      explanation Sónya expected.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There, Sónya, you were talking all sorts of nonsense about him,” Natásha
+      began in a mild voice such as children use when they wish to be praised.
+      “We have had an explanation today.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, what happened? What did he say? Natásha, how glad I am you’re not
+      angry with me! Tell me everything—the whole truth. What did he say?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha became thoughtful.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, Sónya, if you knew him as I do! He said... He asked me what I had
+      promised Bolkónski. He was glad I was free to refuse him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya sighed sorrowfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But you haven’t refused Bolkónski?” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Perhaps I have. Perhaps all is over between me and Bolkónski. Why do you
+      think so badly of me?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t think anything, only I don’t understand this...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Wait a bit, Sónya, you’ll understand everything. You’ll see what a man he
+      is! Now don’t think badly of me or of him. I don’t think badly of anyone:
+      I love and pity everybody. But what am I to do?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya did not succumb to the tender tone Natásha used toward her. The more
+      emotional and ingratiating the expression of Natásha’s face became, the
+      more serious and stern grew Sónya’s.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha,” said she, “you asked me not to speak to you, and I haven’t
+      spoken, but now you yourself have begun. I don’t trust him, Natásha. Why
+      this secrecy?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Again, again!” interrupted Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha, I am afraid for you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Afraid of what?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I am afraid you’re going to your ruin,” said Sónya resolutely, and was
+      herself horrified at what she had said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anger again showed in Natásha’s face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I’ll go to my ruin, I will, as soon as possible! It’s not your
+      business! It won’t be you, but I, who’ll suffer. Leave me alone, leave me
+      alone! I hate you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha!” moaned Sónya, aghast.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I hate you, I hate you! You’re my enemy forever!” And Natásha ran out of
+      the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha did not speak to Sónya again and avoided her. With the same
+      expression of agitated surprise and guilt she went about the house, taking
+      up now one occupation, now another, and at once abandoning them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Hard as it was for Sónya, she watched her friend and did not let her out
+      of her sight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The day before the count was to return, Sónya noticed that Natásha sat by
+      the drawing room window all the morning as if expecting something and that
+      she made a sign to an officer who drove past, whom Sónya took to be
+      Anatole.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya began watching her friend still more attentively and noticed that at
+      dinner and all that evening Natásha was in a strange and unnatural state.
+      She answered questions at random, began sentences she did not finish, and
+      laughed at everything.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After tea Sónya noticed a housemaid at Natásha’s door timidly waiting to
+      let her pass. She let the girl go in, and then listening at the door
+      learned that another letter had been delivered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Then suddenly it became clear to Sónya that Natásha had some dreadful plan
+      for that evening. Sónya knocked at her door. Natásha did not let her in.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She will run away with him!” thought Sónya. “She is capable of anything.
+      There was something particularly pathetic and resolute in her face today.
+      She cried as she said good-by to Uncle,” Sónya remembered. “Yes, that’s
+      it, she means to elope with him, but what am I to do?” thought she,
+      recalling all the signs that clearly indicated that Natásha had some
+      terrible intention. “The count is away. What am I to do? Write to Kurágin
+      demanding an explanation? But what is there to oblige him to reply? Write
+      to Pierre, as Prince Andrew asked me to in case of some misfortune?... But
+      perhaps she really has already refused Bolkónski—she sent a letter
+      to Princess Mary yesterday. And Uncle is away....” To tell Márya
+      Dmítrievna who had such faith in Natásha seemed to Sónya terrible. “Well,
+      anyway,” thought Sónya as she stood in the dark passage, “now or never I
+      must prove that I remember the family’s goodness to me and that I love
+      Nicholas. Yes! If I don’t sleep for three nights I’ll not leave this
+      passage and will hold her back by force and will and not let the family be
+      disgraced,” thought she.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0161"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Anatole had lately moved to Dólokhov’s. The plan for Natalie Rostóva’s
+      abduction had been arranged and the preparations made by Dólokhov a few
+      days before, and on the day that Sónya, after listening at Natásha’s door,
+      resolved to safeguard her, it was to have been put into execution. Natásha
+      had promised to come out to Kurágin at the back porch at ten that evening.
+      Kurágin was to put her into a troyka he would have ready and to drive her
+      forty miles to the village of Kámenka, where an unfrocked priest was in
+      readiness to perform a marriage ceremony over them. At Kámenka a relay of
+      horses was to wait which would take them to the Warsaw highroad, and from
+      there they would hasten abroad with post horses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole had a passport, an order for post horses, ten thousand rubles he
+      had taken from his sister and another ten thousand borrowed with
+      Dólokhov’s help.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Two witnesses for the mock marriage—Khvóstikov, a retired petty
+      official whom Dólokhov made use of in his gambling transactions, and
+      Makárin, a retired hussar, a kindly, weak fellow who had an unbounded
+      affection for Kurágin—were sitting at tea in Dólokhov’s front room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In his large study, the walls of which were hung to the ceiling with
+      Persian rugs, bearskins, and weapons, sat Dólokhov in a traveling cloak
+      and high boots, at an open desk on which lay an abacus and some bundles of
+      paper money. Anatole, with uniform unbuttoned, walked to and fro from the
+      room where the witnesses were sitting, through the study to the room
+      behind, where his French valet and others were packing the last of his
+      things. Dólokhov was counting the money and noting something down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well,” he said, “Khvóstikov must have two thousand.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Give it to him, then,” said Anatole.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Makárka” (their name for Makárin) “will go through fire and water for you
+      for nothing. So here are our accounts all settled,” said Dólokhov, showing
+      him the memorandum. “Is that right?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, of course,” returned Anatole, evidently not listening to Dólokhov
+      and looking straight before him with a smile that did not leave his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov banged down the lid of his desk and turned to Anatole with an
+      ironic smile:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know? You’d really better drop it all. There’s still time!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Fool,” retorted Anatole. “Don’t talk nonsense! If you only knew... it’s
+      the devil knows what!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, really, give it up!” said Dólokhov. “I am speaking seriously. It’s no
+      joke, this plot you’ve hatched.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What, teasing again? Go to the devil! Eh?” said Anatole, making a
+      grimace. “Really it’s no time for your stupid jokes,” and he left the
+      room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov smiled contemptuously and condescendingly when Anatole had gone
+      out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You wait a bit,” he called after him. “I’m not joking, I’m talking sense.
+      Come here, come here!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole returned and looked at Dólokhov, trying to give him his attention
+      and evidently submitting to him involuntarily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now listen to me. I’m telling you this for the last time. Why should I
+      joke about it? Did I hinder you? Who arranged everything for you? Who
+      found the priest and got the passport? Who raised the money? I did it
+      all.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, thank you for it. Do you think I am not grateful?” And Anatole
+      sighed and embraced Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I helped you, but all the same I must tell you the truth; it is a
+      dangerous business, and if you think about it—a stupid business.
+      Well, you’ll carry her off—all right! Will they let it stop at that?
+      It will come out that you’re already married. Why, they’ll have you in the
+      criminal court....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, nonsense, nonsense!” Anatole ejaculated and again made a grimace.
+      “Didn’t I explain to you? What?” And Anatole, with the partiality
+      dull-witted people have for any conclusion they have reached by their own
+      reasoning, repeated the argument he had already put to Dólokhov a hundred
+      times. “Didn’t I explain to you that I have come to this conclusion: if
+      this marriage is invalid,” he went on, crooking one finger, “then I have
+      nothing to answer for; but if it is valid, no matter! Abroad no one will
+      know anything about it. Isn’t that so? And don’t talk to me, don’t,
+      don’t.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Seriously, you’d better drop it! You’ll only get yourself into a mess!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Go to the devil!” cried Anatole and, clutching his hair, left the room,
+      but returned at once and dropped into an armchair in front of Dólokhov
+      with his feet turned under him. “It’s the very devil! What? Feel how it
+      beats!” He took Dólokhov’s hand and put it on his heart. “What a foot, my
+      dear fellow! What a glance! A goddess!” he added in French. “What?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov with a cold smile and a gleam in his handsome insolent eyes
+      looked at him—evidently wishing to get some more amusement out of
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well and when the money’s gone, what then?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What then? Eh?” repeated Anatole, sincerely perplexed by a thought of the
+      future. “What then?... Then, I don’t know.... But why talk nonsense!” He
+      glanced at his watch. “It’s time!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole went into the back room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then! Nearly ready? You’re dawdling!” he shouted to the servants.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov put away the money, called a footman whom he ordered to bring
+      something for them to eat and drink before the journey, and went into the
+      room where Khvóstikov and Makárin were sitting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole lay on the sofa in the study leaning on his elbow and smiling
+      pensively, while his handsome lips muttered tenderly to himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come and eat something. Have a drink!” Dólokhov shouted to him from the
+      other room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t want to,” answered Anatole continuing to smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come! Balagá is here.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole rose and went into the dining room. Balagá was a famous troyka
+      driver who had known Dólokhov and Anatole some six years and had given
+      them good service with his troykas. More than once when Anatole’s regiment
+      was stationed at Tver he had taken him from Tver in the evening, brought
+      him to Moscow by daybreak, and driven him back again the next night. More
+      than once he had enabled Dólokhov to escape when pursued. More than once
+      he had driven them through the town with gypsies and “ladykins” as he
+      called the cocottes. More than once in their service he had run over
+      pedestrians and upset vehicles in the streets of Moscow and had always
+      been protected from the consequences by “my gentlemen” as he called them.
+      He had ruined more than one horse in their service. More than once they
+      had beaten him, and more than once they had made him drunk on champagne
+      and Madeira, which he loved; and he knew more than one thing about each of
+      them which would long ago have sent an ordinary man to Siberia. They often
+      called Balagá into their orgies and made him drink and dance at the
+      gypsies’, and more than one thousand rubles of their money had passed
+      through his hands. In their service he risked his skin and his life twenty
+      times a year, and in their service had lost more horses than the money he
+      had from them would buy. But he liked them; liked that mad driving at
+      twelve miles an hour, liked upsetting a driver or running down a
+      pedestrian, and flying at full gallop through the Moscow streets. He liked
+      to hear those wild, tipsy shouts behind him: “Get on! Get on!” when it was
+      impossible to go any faster. He liked giving a painful lash on the neck to
+      some peasant who, more dead than alive, was already hurrying out of his
+      way. “Real gentlemen!” he considered them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole and Dólokhov liked Balagá too for his masterly driving and because
+      he liked the things they liked. With others Balagá bargained, charging
+      twenty-five rubles for a two hours’ drive, and rarely drove himself,
+      generally letting his young men do so. But with “his gentlemen” he always
+      drove himself and never demanded anything for his work. Only a couple of
+      times a year—when he knew from their valets that they had money in
+      hand—he would turn up of a morning quite sober and with a deep bow
+      would ask them to help him. The gentlemen always made him sit down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do help me out, Theodore Iványch, sir,” or “your excellency,” he would
+      say. “I am quite out of horses. Let me have what you can to go to the
+      fair.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Anatole and Dólokhov, when they had money, would give him a thousand
+      or a couple of thousand rubles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Balagá was a fair-haired, short, and snub-nosed peasant of about
+      twenty-seven; red-faced, with a particularly red thick neck, glittering
+      little eyes, and a small beard. He wore a fine, dark-blue, silk-lined
+      cloth coat over a sheepskin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On entering the room now he crossed himself, turning toward the front
+      corner of the room, and went up to Dólokhov, holding out a small, black
+      hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Theodore Iványch!” he said, bowing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How d’you do, friend? Well, here he is!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Good day, your excellency!” he said, again holding out his hand to
+      Anatole who had just come in.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I say, Balagá,” said Anatole, putting his hands on the man’s shoulders,
+      “do you care for me or not? Eh? Now, do me a service.... What horses have
+      you come with? Eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “As your messenger ordered, your special beasts,” replied Balagá.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, listen, Balagá! Drive all three to death but get me there in three
+      hours. Eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “When they are dead, what shall I drive?” said Balagá with a wink.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mind, I’ll smash your face in! Don’t make jokes!” cried Anatole, suddenly
+      rolling his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why joke?” said the driver, laughing. “As if I’d grudge my gentlemen
+      anything! As fast as ever the horses can gallop, so fast we’ll go!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah!” said Anatole. “Well, sit down.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, sit down!” said Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll stand, Theodore Iványch.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Sit down; nonsense! Have a drink!” said Anatole, and filled a large glass
+      of Madeira for him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The driver’s eyes sparkled at the sight of the wine. After refusing it for
+      manners’ sake, he drank it and wiped his mouth with a red silk
+      handkerchief he took out of his cap.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And when are we to start, your excellency?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well...” Anatole looked at his watch. “We’ll start at once. Mind, Balagá!
+      You’ll get there in time? Eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That depends on our luck in starting, else why shouldn’t we be there in
+      time?” replied Balagá. “Didn’t we get you to Tver in seven hours? I think
+      you remember that, your excellency?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know, one Christmas I drove from Tver,” said Anatole, smilingly at
+      the recollection and turning to Makárin who gazed rapturously at him with
+      wide-open eyes. “Will you believe it, Makárka, it took one’s breath away,
+      the rate we flew. We came across a train of loaded sleighs and drove right
+      over two of them. Eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Those were horses!” Balagá continued the tale. “That time I’d harnessed
+      two young side horses with the bay in the shafts,” he went on, turning to
+      Dólokhov. “Will you believe it, Theodore Iványch, those animals flew forty
+      miles? I couldn’t hold them in, my hands grew numb in the sharp frost so
+      that I threw down the reins—‘Catch hold yourself, your excellency!’
+      says I, and I just tumbled on the bottom of the sleigh and sprawled there.
+      It wasn’t a case of urging them on, there was no holding them in till we
+      reached the place. The devils took us there in three hours! Only the near
+      one died of it.”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0162"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Anatole went out of the room and returned a few minutes later wearing a
+      fur coat girt with a silver belt, and a sable cap jauntily set on one side
+      and very becoming to his handsome face. Having looked in a mirror, and
+      standing before Dólokhov in the same pose he had assumed before it, he
+      lifted a glass of wine.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, good-by, Theodore. Thank you for everything and farewell!” said
+      Anatole. “Well, comrades and friends...” he considered for a
+      moment “... of my youth, farewell!” he said, turning to Makárin and the others.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though they were all going with him, Anatole evidently wished to make
+      something touching and solemn out of this address to his comrades. He
+      spoke slowly in a loud voice and throwing out his chest slightly swayed
+      one leg.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All take glasses; you too, Balagá. Well, comrades and friends of my
+      youth, we’ve had our fling and lived and reveled. Eh? And now, when shall
+      we meet again? I am going abroad. We have had a good time—now
+      farewell, lads! To our health! Hurrah!...” he cried, and emptying his
+      glass flung it on the floor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To your health!” said Balagá who also emptied his glass, and wiped his
+      mouth with his handkerchief.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Makárin embraced Anatole with tears in his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, Prince, how sorry I am to part from you!
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let’s go. Let’s go!” cried Anatole.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Balagá was about to leave the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, stop!” said Anatole. “Shut the door; we have first to sit down.
+      That’s the way.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They shut the door and all sat down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now, quick march, lads!” said Anatole, rising.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Joseph, his valet, handed him his sabretache and saber, and they all went
+      out into the vestibule.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And where’s the fur cloak?” asked Dólokhov. “Hey, Ignátka! Go to Matrëna
+      Matrévna and ask her for the sable cloak. I have heard what elopements are
+      like,” continued Dólokhov with a wink. “Why, she’ll rush out more dead
+      than alive just in the things she is wearing; if you delay at all there’ll
+      be tears and ‘Papa’ and ‘Mamma,’ and she’s frozen in a minute and must go
+      back—but you wrap the fur cloak round her first thing and carry her
+      to the sleigh.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The valet brought a woman’s fox-lined cloak.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Fool, I told you the sable one! Hey, Matrëna, the sable!” he shouted so
+      that his voice rang far through the rooms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A handsome, slim, and pale-faced gypsy girl with glittering black eyes and
+      curly blue-black hair, wearing a red shawl, ran out with a sable mantle on
+      her arm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Here, I don’t grudge it—take it!” she said, evidently afraid of her
+      master and yet regretful of her cloak.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov, without answering, took the cloak, threw it over Matrëna, and
+      wrapped her up in it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s the way,” said Dólokhov, “and then so!” and he turned the collar
+      up round her head, leaving only a little of the face uncovered. “And then
+      so, do you see?” and he pushed Anatole’s head forward to meet the gap left
+      by the collar, through which Matrëna’s brilliant smile was seen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, good-by, Matrëna,” said Anatole, kissing her. “Ah, my revels here
+      are over. Remember me to Stëshka. There, good-by! Good-by, Matrëna, wish
+      me luck!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, Prince, may God give you great luck!” said Matrëna in her gypsy
+      accent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Two troykas were standing before the porch and two young drivers were
+      holding the horses. Balagá took his seat in the front one and holding his
+      elbows high arranged the reins deliberately. Anatole and Dólokhov got in
+      with him. Makárin, Khvóstikov, and a valet seated themselves in the other
+      sleigh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, are you ready?” asked Balagá.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go!” he cried, twisting the reins round his hands, and the troyka tore
+      down the Nikítski Boulevard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Tproo! Get out of the way! Hi!... Tproo!...” The shouting of Balagá and
+      of the sturdy young fellow seated on the box was all that could be heard.
+      On the Arbát Square the troyka caught against a carriage; something
+      cracked, shouts were heard, and the troyka flew along the Arbát Street.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After taking a turn along the Podnovínski Boulevard, Balagá began to rein
+      in, and turning back drew up at the crossing of the old Konyúsheny Street.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The young fellow on the box jumped down to hold the horses and Anatole and
+      Dólokhov went along the pavement. When they reached the gate Dólokhov
+      whistled. The whistle was answered, and a maidservant ran out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come into the courtyard or you’ll be seen; she’ll come out directly,”
+       said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov stayed by the gate. Anatole followed the maid into the courtyard,
+      turned the corner, and ran up into the porch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was met by Gabriel, Márya Dmítrievna’s gigantic footman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come to the mistress, please,” said the footman in his deep bass,
+      intercepting any retreat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To what Mistress? Who are you?” asked Anatole in a breathless whisper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Kindly step in, my orders are to bring you in.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Kurágin! Come back!” shouted Dólokhov. “Betrayed! Back!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov, after Anatole entered, had remained at the wicket gate and was
+      struggling with the yard porter who was trying to lock it. With a last
+      desperate effort Dólokhov pushed the porter aside, and when Anatole ran
+      back seized him by the arm, pulled him through the wicket, and ran back
+      with him to the troyka.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0163"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Márya Dmítrievna, having found Sónya weeping in the corridor, made her
+      confess everything, and intercepting the note to Natásha she read it and
+      went into Natásha’s room with it in her hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You shameless good-for-nothing!” said she. “I won’t hear a word.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pushing back Natásha who looked at her with astonished but tearless eyes,
+      she locked her in; and having given orders to the yard porter to admit the
+      persons who would be coming that evening, but not to let them out again,
+      and having told the footman to bring them up to her, she seated herself in
+      the drawing room to await the abductors.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Gabriel came to inform her that the men who had come had run away
+      again, she rose frowning, and clasping her hands behind her paced through
+      the rooms a long time considering what she should do. Toward midnight she
+      went to Natásha’s room fingering the key in her pocket. Sónya was sitting
+      sobbing in the corridor. “Márya Dmítrievna, for God’s sake let me in to
+      her!” she pleaded, but Márya Dmítrievna unlocked the door and went in
+      without giving her an answer.... “Disgusting, abominable... In my house...
+      horrid girl, hussy! I’m only sorry for her father!” thought she, trying to
+      restrain her wrath. “Hard as it may be, I’ll tell them all to hold their
+      tongues and will hide it from the count.” She entered the room with
+      resolute steps. Natásha lying on the sofa, her head hidden in her hands,
+      and she did not stir. She was in just the same position in which Márya
+      Dmítrievna had left her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A nice girl! Very nice!” said Márya Dmítrievna. “Arranging meetings with
+      lovers in my house! It’s no use pretending: you listen when I speak to
+      you!” And Márya Dmítrievna touched her arm. “Listen when I speak! You’ve
+      disgraced yourself like the lowest of hussies. I’d treat you differently,
+      but I’m sorry for your father, so I will conceal it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha did not change her position, but her whole body heaved with
+      noiseless, convulsive sobs which choked her. Márya Dmítrievna glanced
+      round at Sónya and seated herself on the sofa beside Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s lucky for him that he escaped me; but I’ll find him!” she said in
+      her rough voice. “Do you hear what I am saying or not?” she added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She put her large hand under Natásha’s face and turned it toward her. Both
+      Márya Dmítrievna and Sónya were amazed when they saw how Natásha looked.
+      Her eyes were dry and glistening, her lips compressed, her cheeks sunken.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let me be!... What is it to me?... I shall die!” she muttered, wrenching
+      herself from Márya Dmítrievna’s hands with a vicious effort and sinking
+      down again into her former position.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natalie!” said Márya Dmítrievna. “I wish for your good. Lie still, stay
+      like that then, I won’t touch you. But listen. I won’t tell you how guilty
+      you are. You know that yourself. But when your father comes back tomorrow
+      what am I to tell him? Eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Again Natásha’s body shook with sobs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Suppose he finds out, and your brother, and your betrothed?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I have no betrothed: I have refused him!” cried Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s all the same,” continued Márya Dmítrievna. “If they hear of this,
+      will they let it pass? He, your father, I know him... if he challenges him
+      to a duel will that be all right? Eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, let me be! Why have you interfered at all? Why? Why? Who asked you
+      to?” shouted Natásha, raising herself on the sofa and looking malignantly
+      at Márya Dmítrievna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But what did you want?” cried Márya Dmítrievna, growing angry again.
+      “Were you kept under lock and key? Who hindered his coming to the house?
+      Why carry you off as if you were some gypsy singing girl?... Well, if he
+      had carried you off... do you think they wouldn’t have found him? Your
+      father, or brother, or your betrothed? And he’s a scoundrel, a wretch—that’s
+      a fact!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “He is better than any of you!” exclaimed Natásha getting up. “If you
+      hadn’t interfered... Oh, my God! What is it all? What is it? Sónya,
+      why?... Go away!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And she burst into sobs with the despairing vehemence with which people
+      bewail disasters they feel they have themselves occasioned. Márya
+      Dmítrievna was to speak again but Natásha cried out:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go away! Go away! You all hate and despise me!” and she threw herself
+      back on the sofa.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Márya Dmítrievna went on admonishing her for some time, enjoining on her
+      that it must all be kept from her father and assuring her that nobody
+      would know anything about it if only Natásha herself would undertake to
+      forget it all and not let anyone see that something had happened. Natásha
+      did not reply, nor did she sob any longer, but she grew cold and had a
+      shivering fit. Márya Dmítrievna put a pillow under her head, covered her
+      with two quilts, and herself brought her some lime-flower water, but
+      Natásha did not respond to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, let her sleep,” said Márya Dmítrievna as she went out of the room
+      supposing Natásha to be asleep.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Natásha was not asleep; with pale face and fixed wide-open eyes she
+      looked straight before her. All that night she did not sleep or weep and
+      did not speak to Sónya who got up and went to her several times.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day Count Rostóv returned from his estate near Moscow in time for
+      lunch as he had promised. He was in very good spirits; the affair with the
+      purchaser was going on satisfactorily, and there was nothing to keep him
+      any longer in Moscow, away from the countess whom he missed. Márya
+      Dmítrievna met him and told him that Natásha had been very unwell the day
+      before and that they had sent for the doctor, but that she was better now.
+      Natásha had not left her room that morning. With compressed and parched
+      lips and dry fixed eyes, she sat at the window, uneasily watching the
+      people who drove past and hurriedly glancing round at anyone who entered
+      the room. She was evidently expecting news of him and that he would come
+      or would write to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the count came to see her she turned anxiously round at the sound of
+      a man’s footstep, and then her face resumed its cold and malevolent
+      expression. She did not even get up to greet him. “What is the matter with
+      you, my angel? Are you ill?” asked the count.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After a moment’s silence Natásha answered: “Yes, ill.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In reply to the count’s anxious inquiries as to why she was so dejected
+      and whether anything had happened to her betrothed, she assured him that
+      nothing had happened and asked him not to worry. Márya Dmítrievna
+      confirmed Natásha’s assurances that nothing had happened. From the
+      pretense of illness, from his daughter’s distress, and by the embarrassed
+      faces of Sónya and Márya Dmítrievna, the count saw clearly that something
+      had gone wrong during his absence, but it was so terrible for him to think
+      that anything disgraceful had happened to his beloved daughter, and he so
+      prized his own cheerful tranquillity, that he avoided inquiries and tried
+      to assure himself that nothing particularly had happened; and he was only
+      dissatisfied that her indisposition delayed their return to the country.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0164"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      From the day his wife arrived in Moscow Pierre had been intending to go
+      away somewhere, so as not to be near her. Soon after the Rostóvs came to
+      Moscow the effect Natásha had on him made him hasten to carry out his
+      intention. He went to Tver to see Joseph Alexéevich’s widow, who had long
+      since promised to hand over to him some papers of her deceased husband’s.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he returned to Moscow Pierre was handed a letter from Márya
+      Dmítrievna asking him to come and see her on a matter of great importance
+      relating to Andrew Bolkónski and his betrothed. Pierre had been avoiding
+      Natásha because it seemed to him that his feeling for her was stronger
+      than a married man’s should be for his friend’s fiancée. Yet some fate
+      constantly threw them together.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What can have happened? And what can they want with me?” thought he as he
+      dressed to go to Márya Dmítrievna’s. “If only Prince Andrew would hurry up
+      and come and marry her!” thought he on his way to the house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the Tverskóy Boulevard a familiar voice called to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Pierre! Been back long?” someone shouted. Pierre raised his head. In a
+      sleigh drawn by two gray trotting-horses that were bespattering the
+      dashboard with snow, Anatole and his constant companion Makárin dashed
+      past. Anatole was sitting upright in the classic pose of military dandies,
+      the lower part of his face hidden by his beaver collar and his head
+      slightly bent. His face was fresh and rosy, his white-plumed hat, tilted
+      to one side, disclosed his curled and pomaded hair besprinkled with
+      powdery snow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, indeed, that’s a true sage,” thought Pierre. “He sees nothing beyond
+      the pleasure of the moment, nothing troubles him and so he is always
+      cheerful, satisfied, and serene. What wouldn’t I give to be like him!” he
+      thought enviously.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In Márya Dmítrievna’s anteroom the footman who helped him off with his fur
+      coat said that the mistress asked him to come to her bedroom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he opened the ballroom door Pierre saw Natásha sitting at the window,
+      with a thin, pale, and spiteful face. She glanced round at him, frowned,
+      and left the room with an expression of cold dignity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What has happened?” asked Pierre, entering Márya Dmítrievna’s room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Fine doings!” answered Dmítrievna. “For fifty-eight years have I lived in
+      this world and never known anything so disgraceful!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And having put him on his honor not to repeat anything she told him, Márya
+      Dmítrievna informed him that Natásha had refused Prince Andrew without her
+      parents’ knowledge and that the cause of this was Anatole Kurágin into
+      whose society Pierre’s wife had thrown her and with whom Natásha had tried
+      to elope during her father’s absence, in order to be married secretly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre raised his shoulders and listened open-mouthed to what was told
+      him, scarcely able to believe his own ears. That Prince Andrew’s deeply
+      loved affianced wife—the same Natásha Rostóva who used to be so
+      charming—should give up Bolkónski for that fool Anatole who was
+      already secretly married (as Pierre knew), and should be so in love with
+      him as to agree to run away with him, was something Pierre could not
+      conceive and could not imagine.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He could not reconcile the charming impression he had of Natásha, whom he
+      had known from a child, with this new conception of her baseness, folly,
+      and cruelty. He thought of his wife. “They are all alike!” he said to
+      himself, reflecting that he was not the only man unfortunate enough to be
+      tied to a bad woman. But still he pitied Prince Andrew to the point of
+      tears and sympathized with his wounded pride, and the more he pitied his
+      friend the more did he think with contempt and even with disgust of that
+      Natásha who had just passed him in the ballroom with such a look of cold
+      dignity. He did not know that Natásha’s soul was overflowing with despair,
+      shame, and humiliation, and that it was not her fault that her face
+      happened to assume an expression of calm dignity and severity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But how get married?” said Pierre, in answer to Márya Dmítrievna. “He
+      could not marry—he is married!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Things get worse from hour to hour!” ejaculated Márya Dmítrievna. “A nice
+      youth! What a scoundrel! And she’s expecting him—expecting him since
+      yesterday. She must be told! Then at least she won’t go on expecting him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      After hearing the details of Anatole’s marriage from Pierre, and giving
+      vent to her anger against Anatole in words of abuse, Márya Dmítrievna told
+      Pierre why she had sent for him. She was afraid that the count or
+      Bolkónski, who might arrive at any moment, if they knew of this affair
+      (which she hoped to hide from them) might challenge Anatole to a duel, and
+      she therefore asked Pierre to tell his brother-in-law in her name to leave
+      Moscow and not dare to let her set eyes on him again. Pierre—only
+      now realizing the danger to the old count, Nicholas, and Prince Andrew—promised
+      to do as she wished. Having briefly and exactly explained her wishes to
+      him, she let him go to the drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mind, the count knows nothing. Behave as if you know nothing either,” she
+      said. “And I will go and tell her it is no use expecting him! And stay to
+      dinner if you care to!” she called after Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre met the old count, who seemed nervous and upset. That morning
+      Natásha had told him that she had rejected Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Troubles, troubles, my dear fellow!” he said to Pierre. “What troubles
+      one has with these girls without their mother! I do so regret having come
+      here.... I will be frank with you. Have you heard she has broken off her
+      engagement without consulting anybody? It’s true this engagement never was
+      much to my liking. Of course he is an excellent man, but still, with his
+      father’s disapproval they wouldn’t have been happy, and Natásha won’t lack
+      suitors. Still, it has been going on so long, and to take such a step
+      without father’s or mother’s consent! And now she’s ill, and God knows
+      what! It’s hard, Count, hard to manage daughters in their mother’s
+      absence....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre saw that the count was much upset and tried to change the subject,
+      but the count returned to his troubles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya entered the room with an agitated face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha is not quite well; she’s in her room and would like to see you.
+      Márya Dmítrievna is with her and she too asks you to come.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, you are a great friend of Bolkónski’s, no doubt she wants to send
+      him a message,” said the count. “Oh dear! Oh dear! How happy it all was!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And clutching the spare gray locks on his temples the count left the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Márya Dmítrievna told Natásha that Anatole was married, Natásha did
+      not wish to believe it and insisted on having it confirmed by Pierre
+      himself. Sónya told Pierre this as she led him along the corridor to
+      Natásha’s room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha, pale and stern, was sitting beside Márya Dmítrievna, and her
+      eyes, glittering feverishly, met Pierre with a questioning look the moment
+      he entered. She did not smile or nod, but only gazed fixedly at him, and
+      her look asked only one thing: was he a friend, or like the others an
+      enemy in regard to Anatole? As for Pierre, he evidently did not exist for
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He knows all about it,” said Márya Dmítrievna pointing to Pierre and
+      addressing Natásha. “Let him tell you whether I have told the truth.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha looked from one to the other as a hunted and wounded animal looks
+      at the approaching dogs and sportsmen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natálya Ilyníchna,” Pierre began, dropping his eyes with a feeling of
+      pity for her and loathing for the thing he had to do, “whether it is true
+      or not should make no difference to you, because...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Then it is not true that he’s married!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, it is true.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Has he been married long?” she asked. “On your honor?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre gave his word of honor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is he still here?” she asked, quickly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I have just seen him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She was evidently unable to speak and made a sign with her hands that they
+      should leave her alone.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0165"></a>
+      CHAPTER XX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Pierre did not stay for dinner, but left the room and went away at once.
+      He drove through the town seeking Anatole Kurágin, at the thought of whom
+      now the blood rushed to his heart and he felt a difficulty in breathing.
+      He was not at the ice hills, nor at the gypsies’, nor at Komoneno’s.
+      Pierre drove to the Club. In the Club all was going on as usual. The
+      members who were assembling for dinner were sitting about in groups; they
+      greeted Pierre and spoke of the town news. The footman having greeted him,
+      knowing his habits and his acquaintances, told him there was a place left
+      for him in the small dining room and that Prince Michael Zakhárych was in
+      the library, but Paul Timoféevich had not yet arrived. One of Pierre’s
+      acquaintances, while they were talking about the weather, asked if he had
+      heard of Kurágin’s abduction of Rostóva which was talked of in the town,
+      and was it true? Pierre laughed and said it was nonsense for he had just
+      come from the Rostóvs’. He asked everyone about Anatole. One man told him
+      he had not come yet, and another that he was coming to dinner. Pierre felt
+      it strange to see this calm, indifferent crowd of people unaware of what
+      was going on in his soul. He paced through the ballroom, waited till
+      everyone had come, and as Anatole had not turned up did not stay for
+      dinner but drove home.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole, for whom Pierre was looking, dined that day with Dólokhov,
+      consulting him as to how to remedy this unfortunate affair. It seemed to
+      him essential to see Natásha. In the evening he drove to his sister’s to
+      discuss with her how to arrange a meeting. When Pierre returned home after
+      vainly hunting all over Moscow, his valet informed him that Prince Anatole
+      was with the countess. The countess’ drawing room was full of guests.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre without greeting his wife whom he had not seen since his return—at
+      that moment she was more repulsive to him than ever—entered the
+      drawing room and seeing Anatole went up to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, Pierre,” said the countess going up to her husband. “You don’t know
+      what a plight our Anatole...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She stopped, seeing in the forward thrust of her husband’s head, in his
+      glowing eyes and his resolute gait, the terrible indications of that rage
+      and strength which she knew and had herself experienced after his duel
+      with Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where you are, there is vice and evil!” said Pierre to his wife.
+      “Anatole, come with me! I must speak to you,” he added in French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole glanced round at his sister and rose submissively, ready to follow
+      Pierre. Pierre, taking him by the arm, pulled him toward himself and was
+      leading him from the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If you allow yourself in my drawing room...” whispered Hélène, but Pierre
+      did not reply and went out of the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole followed him with his usual jaunty step but his face betrayed
+      anxiety.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having entered his study Pierre closed the door and addressed Anatole
+      without looking at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You promised Countess Rostóva to marry her and were about to elope with
+      her, is that so?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Mon cher,”</i> answered Anatole (their whole conversation was in French), “I
+      don’t consider myself bound to answer questions put to me in that tone.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre’s face, already pale, became distorted by fury. He seized Anatole
+      by the collar of his uniform with his big hand and shook him from side to
+      side till Anatole’s face showed a sufficient degree of terror.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “When I tell you that I must talk to you!...” repeated Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come now, this is stupid. What?” said Anatole, fingering a button of his
+      collar that had been wrenched loose with a bit of the cloth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You’re a scoundrel and a blackguard, and I don’t know what deprives me
+      from the pleasure of smashing your head with this!” said Pierre,
+      expressing himself so artificially because he was talking French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He took a heavy paperweight and lifted it threateningly, but at once put
+      it back in its place.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Did you promise to marry her?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I... I didn’t think of it. I never promised, because...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Have you any letters of hers? Any letters?” he said, moving toward
+      Anatole.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole glanced at him and immediately thrust his hand into his pocket and
+      drew out his pocketbook.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre took the letter Anatole handed him and, pushing aside a table that
+      stood in his way, threw himself on the sofa.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I shan’t be violent, don’t be afraid!” said Pierre in answer to a
+      frightened gesture of Anatole’s. “First, the letters,” said he, as if
+      repeating a lesson to himself. “Secondly,” he continued after a short
+      pause, again rising and again pacing the room, “tomorrow you must get out
+      of Moscow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But how can I?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Thirdly,” Pierre continued without listening to him, “you must never
+      breathe a word of what has passed between you and Countess Rostóva. I know
+      I can’t prevent your doing so, but if you have a spark of conscience...”
+       Pierre paced the room several times in silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole sat at a table frowning and biting his lips.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “After all, you must understand that besides your pleasure there is such a
+      thing as other people’s happiness and peace, and that you are ruining a
+      whole life for the sake of amusing yourself! Amuse yourself with women
+      like my wife—with them you are within your rights, for they know
+      what you want of them. They are armed against you by the same experience
+      of debauchery; but to promise a <i>maid</i> to marry her... to deceive, to
+      kidnap.... Don’t you understand that it is as mean as beating an old man
+      or a child?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre paused and looked at Anatole no longer with an angry but with a
+      questioning look.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t know about that, eh?” said Anatole, growing more confident as
+      Pierre mastered his wrath. “I don’t know that and don’t want to,” he said,
+      not looking at Pierre and with a slight tremor of his lower jaw, “but you
+      have used such words to me—‘mean’ and so on—which as a man of
+      honor I can’t allow anyone to use.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre glanced at him with amazement, unable to understand what he wanted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Though it was tête-à-tête,” Anatole continued, “still I can’t...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Is it satisfaction you want?” said Pierre ironically.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You could at least take back your words. What? If you want me to do as
+      you wish, eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I take them back, I take them back!” said Pierre, “and I ask you to
+      forgive me.” Pierre involuntarily glanced at the loose button. “And if you
+      require money for your journey...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Anatole smiled. The expression of that base and cringing smile, which
+      Pierre knew so well in his wife, revolted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, vile and heartless brood!” he exclaimed, and left the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day Anatole left for Petersburg.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0166"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Pierre drove to Márya Dmítrievna’s to tell her of the fulfillment of her
+      wish that Kurágin should be banished from Moscow. The whole house was in a
+      state of alarm and commotion. Natásha was very ill, having, as Márya
+      Dmítrievna told him in secret, poisoned herself the night after she had
+      been told that Anatole was married, with some arsenic she had stealthily
+      procured. After swallowing a little she had been so frightened that she
+      woke Sónya and told her what she had done. The necessary antidotes had
+      been administered in time and she was now out of danger, though still so
+      weak that it was out of the question to move her to the country, and so
+      the countess had been sent for. Pierre saw the distracted count, and
+      Sónya, who had a tear-stained face, but he could not see Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre dined at the club that day and heard on all sides gossip about the
+      attempted abduction of Rostóva. He resolutely denied these rumors,
+      assuring everyone that nothing had happened except that his brother-in-law
+      had proposed to her and been refused. It seemed to Pierre that it was his
+      duty to conceal the whole affair and re-establish Natásha’s reputation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was awaiting Prince Andrew’s return with dread and went every day to
+      the old prince’s for news of him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Old Prince Bolkónski heard all the rumors current in the town from
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne and had read the note to Princess Mary in which
+      Natásha had broken off her engagement. He seemed in better spirits than
+      usual and awaited his son with great impatience.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Some days after Anatole’s departure Pierre received a note from Prince
+      Andrew, informing him of his arrival and asking him to come to see him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as he reached Moscow, Prince Andrew had received from his father
+      Natásha’s note to Princess Mary breaking off her engagement (Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne had purloined it from Princess Mary and given it to the old
+      prince), and he heard from him the story of Natásha’s elopement, with
+      additions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew had arrived in the evening and Pierre came to see him next
+      morning. Pierre expected to find Prince Andrew in almost the same state as
+      Natásha and was therefore surprised on entering the drawing room to hear
+      him in the study talking in a loud animated voice about some intrigue
+      going on in Petersburg. The old prince’s voice and another now and then
+      interrupted him. Princess Mary came out to meet Pierre. She sighed,
+      looking toward the door of the room where Prince Andrew was, evidently
+      intending to express her sympathy with his sorrow, but Pierre saw by her
+      face that she was glad both at what had happened and at the way her
+      brother had taken the news of Natásha’s faithlessness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He says he expected it,” she remarked. “I know his pride will not let him
+      express his feelings, but still he has taken it better, far better, than I
+      expected. Evidently it had to be....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But is it possible that all is really ended?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary looked at him with astonishment. She did not understand how
+      he could ask such a question. Pierre went into the study. Prince Andrew,
+      greatly changed and plainly in better health, but with a fresh horizontal
+      wrinkle between his brows, stood in civilian dress facing his father and
+      Prince Meshchérski, warmly disputing and vigorously gesticulating. The
+      conversation was about Speránski—the news of whose sudden exile and
+      alleged treachery had just reached Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now he is censured and accused by all who were enthusiastic about him a
+      month ago,” Prince Andrew was saying, “and by those who were unable to
+      understand his aims. To judge a man who is in disfavor and to throw on him
+      all the blame of other men’s mistakes is very easy, but I maintain that if
+      anything good has been accomplished in this reign it was done by him, by
+      him alone.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He paused at the sight of Pierre. His face quivered and immediately
+      assumed a vindictive expression.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Posterity will do him justice,” he concluded, and at once turned to
+      Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, how are you? Still getting stouter?” he said with animation, but
+      the new wrinkle on his forehead deepened. “Yes, I am well,” he said in
+      answer to Pierre’s question, and smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To Pierre that smile said plainly: “I am well, but my health is now of no
+      use to anyone.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      After a few words to Pierre about the awful roads from the Polish
+      frontier, about people he had met in Switzerland who knew Pierre, and
+      about M. Dessalles, whom he had brought from abroad to be his son’s tutor,
+      Prince Andrew again joined warmly in the conversation about Speránski
+      which was still going on between the two old men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If there were treason, or proofs of secret relations with Napoleon, they
+      would have been made public,” he said with warmth and haste. “I do not,
+      and never did, like Speránski personally, but I like justice!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre now recognized in his friend a need with which he was only too
+      familiar, to get excited and to have arguments about extraneous matters in
+      order to stifle thoughts that were too oppressive and too intimate. When
+      Prince Meshchérski had left, Prince Andrew took Pierre’s arm and asked him
+      into the room that had been assigned him. A bed had been made up there,
+      and some open portmanteaus and trunks stood about. Prince Andrew went to
+      one and took out a small casket, from which he drew a packet wrapped in
+      paper. He did it all silently and very quickly. He stood up and coughed.
+      His face was gloomy and his lips compressed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Forgive me for troubling you....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre saw that Prince Andrew was going to speak of Natásha, and his broad
+      face expressed pity and sympathy. This expression irritated Prince Andrew,
+      and in a determined, ringing, and unpleasant tone he continued:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have received a refusal from Countess Rostóva and have heard reports of
+      your brother-in-law having sought her hand, or something of that kind. Is
+      that true?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Both true and untrue,” Pierre began; but Prince Andrew interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Here are her letters and her portrait,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He took the packet from the table and handed it to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Give this to the countess... if you see her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “She is very ill,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then she is here still?” said Prince Andrew. “And Prince Kurágin?” he
+      added quickly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He left long ago. She has been at death’s door.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I much regret her illness,” said Prince Andrew; and he smiled like his
+      father, coldly, maliciously, and unpleasantly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So Monsieur Kurágin has not honored Countess Rostóva with his hand?” said
+      Prince Andrew, and he snorted several times.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He could not marry, for he was married already,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew laughed disagreeably, again reminding one of his father.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And where is your brother-in-law now, if I may ask?” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He has gone to Peters... But I don’t know,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, it doesn’t matter,” said Prince Andrew. “Tell Countess Rostóva that
+      she was and is perfectly free and that I wish her all that is good.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre took the packet. Prince Andrew, as if trying to remember whether he
+      had something more to say, or waiting to see if Pierre would say anything,
+      looked fixedly at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I say, do you remember our discussion in Petersburg?” asked Pierre,
+      “about...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” returned Prince Andrew hastily. “I said that a fallen woman should
+      be forgiven, but I didn’t say I could forgive her. I can’t.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But can this be compared...?” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew interrupted him and cried sharply: “Yes, ask her hand again,
+      be magnanimous, and so on?... Yes, that would be very noble, but I am
+      unable to follow in that gentleman’s footsteps. If you wish to be my
+      friend never speak to me of that... of all that! Well, good-by. So you’ll
+      give her the packet?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre left the room and went to the old prince and Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old man seemed livelier than usual. Princess Mary was the same as
+      always, but beneath her sympathy for her brother, Pierre noticed her
+      satisfaction that the engagement had been broken off. Looking at them
+      Pierre realized what contempt and animosity they all felt for the Rostóvs,
+      and that it was impossible in their presence even to mention the name of
+      her who could give up Prince Andrew for anyone else.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At dinner the talk turned on the war, the approach of which was becoming
+      evident. Prince Andrew talked incessantly, arguing now with his father,
+      now with the Swiss tutor Dessalles, and showing an unnatural animation,
+      the cause of which Pierre so well understood.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0167"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      That same evening Pierre went to the Rostóvs’ to fulfill the commission
+      entrusted to him. Natásha was in bed, the count at the club, and Pierre,
+      after giving the letters to Sónya, went to Márya Dmítrievna who was
+      interested to know how Prince Andrew had taken the news. Ten minutes later
+      Sónya came to Márya Dmítrievna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha insists on seeing Count Peter Kirílovich,” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But how? Are we to take him up to her? The room there has not been tidied
+      up.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, she has dressed and gone into the drawing room,” said Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Márya Dmítrievna only shrugged her shoulders.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “When will her mother come? She has worried me to death! Now mind, don’t
+      tell her everything!” said she to Pierre. “One hasn’t the heart to scold
+      her, she is so much to be pitied, so much to be pitied.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha was standing in the middle of the drawing room, emaciated, with a
+      pale set face, but not at all shamefaced as Pierre expected to find her.
+      When he appeared at the door she grew flurried, evidently undecided
+      whether to go to meet him or to wait till he came up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre hastened to her. He thought she would give him her hand as usual;
+      but she, stepping up to him, stopped, breathing heavily, her arms hanging
+      lifelessly just in the pose she used to stand in when she went to the
+      middle of the ballroom to sing, but with quite a different expression of
+      face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Peter Kirílovich,” she began rapidly, “Prince Bolkónski was your friend—is
+      your friend,” she corrected herself. (It seemed to her that everything
+      that had once been must now be different.) “He told me once to apply to
+      you...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre sniffed as he looked at her, but did not speak. Till then he had
+      reproached her in his heart and tried to despise her, but he now felt so
+      sorry for her that there was no room in his soul for reproach.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is here now: tell him... to for... forgive me!” She stopped and
+      breathed still more quickly, but did not shed tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes... I will tell him,” answered Pierre; “but...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He did not know what to say.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha was evidently dismayed at the thought of what he might think she
+      had meant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I know all is over,” she said hurriedly. “No, that can never be. I’m
+      only tormented by the wrong I have done him. Tell him only that I beg him
+      to forgive, forgive, forgive me for everything....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She trembled all over and sat down on a chair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A sense of pity he had never before known overflowed Pierre’s heart.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I will tell him, I will tell him everything once more,” said Pierre.
+      “But... I should like to know one thing....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Know what?” Natásha’s eyes asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I should like to know, did you love...” Pierre did not know how to refer
+      to Anatole and flushed at the thought of him—“did you love that bad
+      man?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t call him bad!” said Natásha. “But I don’t know, don’t know at
+      all....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She began to cry and a still greater sense of pity, tenderness, and love
+      welled up in Pierre. He felt the tears trickle under his spectacles and
+      hoped they would not be noticed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We won’t speak of it any more, my dear,” said Pierre, and his gentle,
+      cordial tone suddenly seemed very strange to Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We won’t speak of it, my dear—I’ll tell him everything; but one
+      thing I beg of you, consider me your friend and if you want help, advice,
+      or simply to open your heart to someone—not now, but when your mind
+      is clearer—think of me!” He took her hand and kissed it. “I shall be happy
+      if it’s in my power...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre grew confused.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t speak to me like that. I am not worth it!” exclaimed Natásha and
+      turned to leave the room, but Pierre held her hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He knew he had something more to say to her. But when he said it he was
+      amazed at his own words.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Stop, stop! You have your whole life before you,” said he to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Before me? No! All is over for me,” she replied with shame and
+      self-abasement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All over?” he repeated. “If I were not myself, but the
+      handsomest, cleverest, and best man in the world, and were free, I would this
+      moment ask on my knees for your hand and your love!”
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For the first time for many days Natásha wept tears of gratitude and
+      tenderness, and glancing at Pierre she went out of the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre too when she had gone almost ran into the anteroom, restraining
+      tears of tenderness and joy that choked him, and without finding the
+      sleeves of his fur cloak threw it on and got into his sleigh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where to now, your excellency?” asked the coachman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where to?” Pierre asked himself. “Where can I go now? Surely
+      not to the Club or to pay calls?” All men seemed so pitiful, so poor,
+      in comparison with this feeling of tenderness and love he experienced: in
+      comparison with that softened, grateful, last look she had given him through
+      her tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Home!” said Pierre, and despite twenty-two degrees of frost Fahrenheit he
+      threw open the bearskin cloak from his broad chest and inhaled the air
+      with joy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was clear and frosty. Above the dirty, ill-lit streets, above the black
+      roofs, stretched the dark starry sky. Only looking up at the sky did
+      Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane things
+      compared with the heights to which his soul had just been raised. At the
+      entrance to the Arbát Square an immense expanse of dark starry sky
+      presented itself to his eyes. Almost in the center of it, above the
+      Prechístenka Boulevard, surrounded and sprinkled on all sides by stars but
+      distinguished from them all by its nearness to the earth, its white light,
+      and its long uplifted tail, shone the enormous and brilliant comet of 1812—the
+      comet which was said to portend all kinds of woes and the end of the
+      world. In Pierre, however, that comet with its long luminous tail aroused
+      no feeling of fear. On the contrary he gazed joyfully, his eyes moist with
+      tears, at this bright comet which, having traveled in its orbit with
+      inconceivable velocity through immeasurable space, seemed suddenly—like
+      an arrow piercing the earth—to remain fixed in a chosen spot,
+      vigorously holding its tail erect, shining and displaying its white light
+      amid countless other scintillating stars. It seemed to Pierre that this
+      comet fully responded to what was passing in his own softened and uplifted
+      soul, now blossoming into a new life.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0176"></a>
+      BOOK NINE: 1812
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0168"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      From the close of the year 1811 an intensified arming and concentrating of
+      the forces of Western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces—millions
+      of men, reckoning those transporting and feeding the army—moved from
+      the west eastwards to the Russian frontier, toward which since 1811
+      Russian forces had been similarly drawn. On the twelfth of June, 1812, the
+      forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that
+      is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature.
+      Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes,
+      frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries,
+      incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the
+      annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed
+      them did not at the time regard as being crimes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? The
+      historians tell us with naïve assurance that its causes were the wrongs
+      inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of the Continental
+      System, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Alexander, the mistakes
+      of the diplomatists, and so on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Consequently, it would only have been necessary for Metternich,
+      Rumyántsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and an evening party, to have
+      taken proper pains and written a more adroit note, or for Napoleon to have
+      written to Alexander: “My respected Brother, I consent to restore the
+      duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg”—and there would have been no war.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      We can understand that the matter seemed like that to contemporaries. It
+      naturally seemed to Napoleon that the war was caused by England’s
+      intrigues (as in fact he said on the island of St. Helena). It naturally
+      seemed to members of the English Parliament that the cause of the war was
+      Napoleon’s ambition; to the Duke of Oldenburg, that the cause of the war
+      was the violence done to him; to businessmen that the cause of the war was
+      the Continental System which was ruining Europe; to the generals and old
+      soldiers that the chief reason for the war was the necessity of giving
+      them employment; to the legitimists of that day that it was the need of
+      re-establishing <i>les bons principes</i>, and to the diplomatists of that time
+      that it all resulted from the fact that the alliance between Russia and
+      Austria in 1809 had not been sufficiently well concealed from Napoleon,
+      and from the awkward wording of Memorandum No. 178. It is natural that
+      these and a countless and infinite quantity of other reasons, the number
+      depending on the endless diversity of points of view, presented themselves
+      to the men of that day; but to us, to posterity who view the thing that
+      happened in all its magnitude and perceive its plain and terrible meaning,
+      these causes seem insufficient. To us it is incomprehensible that millions
+      of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon
+      was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England’s policy was
+      astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what connection
+      such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence:
+      why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of
+      Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolénsk and Moscow and were killed
+      by them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away
+      by the process of research and can therefore regard the event with
+      unclouded common sense, an incalculable number of causes present
+      themselves. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them
+      we find; and each separate cause or whole series of causes appears to us
+      equally valid in itself and equally false by its insignificance compared
+      to the magnitude of the events, and by its impotence—apart from the
+      cooperation of all the other coincident causes—to occasion the
+      event. To us, the wish or objection of this or that French corporal to
+      serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon’s refusal to
+      withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the duchy of
+      Oldenburg; for had he not wished to serve, and had a second, a third, and
+      a thousandth corporal and private also refused, there would have been so
+      many less men in Napoleon’s army and the war could not have occurred.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Had Napoleon not taken offense at the demand that he should withdraw
+      beyond the Vistula, and not ordered his troops to advance, there would
+      have been no war; but had all his sergeants objected to serving a second
+      term then also there could have been no war. Nor could there have been a
+      war had there been no English intrigues and no Duke of Oldenburg, and had
+      Alexander not felt insulted, and had there not been an autocratic
+      government in Russia, or a Revolution in France and a subsequent
+      dictatorship and Empire, or all the things that produced the French
+      Revolution, and so on. Without each of these causes nothing could have
+      happened. So all these causes—myriads of causes—coincided to
+      bring it about. And so there was no one cause for that occurrence, but it
+      had to occur because it had to. Millions of men, renouncing their human
+      feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows,
+      just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to
+      the west, slaying their fellows.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the event seemed to
+      hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn
+      into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This could not be otherwise,
+      for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom the event
+      seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable
+      circumstances was needed without any one of which the event could not have
+      taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the
+      real power—the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and
+      guns—should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals,
+      and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and
+      complex causes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational
+      events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not
+      understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably,
+      the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims,
+      and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing
+      this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed
+      at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in
+      which it has not a free but a predestined significance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which
+      is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive
+      life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the
+      attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity. A deed done is
+      irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of
+      millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man
+      stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the
+      more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination and
+      inevitability of his every action.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A king is history’s slave.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses
+      every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than ever that
+      it depended on him, <i>verser (ou ne pas verser) le sang de ses peuples</i> *—as
+      Alexander expressed it in the last letter he wrote him—he had never
+      been so much in the grip of inevitable laws, which compelled him, while
+      thinking that he was acting on his own volition, to perform for the hive
+      life—that is to say, for history—whatever had to be performed.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “To shed (or not to shed) the blood of his peoples.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      The people of the west moved eastwards to slay their fellow men, and by
+      the law of coincidence thousands of minute causes fitted in and
+      co-ordinated to produce that movement and war: reproaches for the
+      nonobservance of the Continental System, the Duke of Oldenburg’s wrongs,
+      the movement of troops into Prussia—undertaken (as it seemed to
+      Napoleon) only for the purpose of securing an armed peace, the French
+      Emperor’s love and habit of war coinciding with his people’s inclinations,
+      allurement by the grandeur of the preparations, and the expenditure on
+      those preparations and the need of obtaining advantages to compensate for
+      that expenditure, the intoxicating honors he received in Dresden, the
+      diplomatic negotiations which, in the opinion of contemporaries, were
+      carried on with a sincere desire to attain peace, but which only wounded
+      the self-love of both sides, and millions of other causes that adapted
+      themselves to the event that was happening or coincided with it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its
+      attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by
+      the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because
+      the boy standing below wants to eat it?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in
+      which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who
+      finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth
+      is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the
+      apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. Equally right or
+      wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to,
+      and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says
+      that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last
+      navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock. In historic events the
+      so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels
+      they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in
+      an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of
+      history and predestined from eternity.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0169"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On the twenty-ninth of May Napoleon left Dresden, where he had spent three
+      weeks surrounded by a court that included princes, dukes, kings, and even
+      an emperor. Before leaving, Napoleon showed favor to the emperor, kings,
+      and princes who had deserved it, reprimanded the kings and princes with
+      whom he was dissatisfied, presented pearls and diamonds of his own—that
+      is, which he had taken from other kings—to the Empress of Austria,
+      and having, as his historian tells us, tenderly embraced the Empress Marie
+      Louise—who regarded him as her husband, though he had left another
+      wife in Paris—left her grieved by the parting which she seemed
+      hardly able to bear. Though the diplomatists still firmly believed in the
+      possibility of peace and worked zealously to that end, and though the
+      Emperor Napoleon himself wrote a letter to Alexander, calling him <i>Monsieur
+      mon frère</i>, and sincerely assured him that he did not want war and would
+      always love and honor him—yet he set off to join his army, and at
+      every station gave fresh orders to accelerate the movement of his troops
+      from west to east. He went in a traveling coach with six horses,
+      surrounded by pages, aides-de-camp, and an escort, along the road to
+      Posen, Thorn, Danzig, and Königsberg. At each of these towns thousands of
+      people met him with excitement and enthusiasm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The army was moving from west to east, and relays of six horses carried
+      him in the same direction. On the tenth of June, * coming up with the
+      army, he spent the night in apartments prepared for him on the estate of a
+      Polish count in the Vilkavisski forest.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Old style.
+</p>
+<p>
+      Next day, overtaking the army, he went in a carriage to the Niemen, and,
+      changing into a Polish uniform, he drove to the riverbank in order to
+      select a place for the crossing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Seeing, on the other side, some Cossacks <i>(les Cosaques)</i> and the
+      wide-spreading steppes in the midst of which lay the holy city of Moscow
+      <i>(Moscou, la ville sainte)</i>, the capital of a realm such as the Scythia into
+      which Alexander the Great had marched—Napoleon unexpectedly, and
+      contrary alike to strategic and diplomatic considerations, ordered an
+      advance, and the next day his army began to cross the Niemen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Early in the morning of the twelfth of June he came out of his tent, which
+      was pitched that day on the steep left bank of the Niemen, and looked
+      through a spyglass at the streams of his troops pouring out of the
+      Vilkavisski forest and flowing over the three bridges thrown across the
+      river. The troops, knowing of the Emperor’s presence, were on the lookout
+      for him, and when they caught sight of a figure in an overcoat and a
+      cocked hat standing apart from his suite in front of his tent on the hill,
+      they threw up their caps and shouted: <i>“Vive l’Empereur!”</i>
+      and one after another poured in a ceaseless stream out of the vast forest that had
+      concealed them and, separating, flowed on and on by the three bridges to
+      the other side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now we’ll go into action. Oh, when he takes it in hand himself, things
+      get hot... by heaven!... There he is!... <i>Vive l’Empereur!</i> So these are
+      the steppes of Asia! It’s a nasty country all the same. <i>Au revoir</i>, Beauché;
+      I’ll keep the best palace in Moscow for you! <i>Au revoir</i>. Good luck!... Did
+      you see the Emperor? <i>Vive l’Empereur!... preur!</i>—If they make me
+      Governor of India, Gérard, I’ll make you Minister of Kashmir—that’s
+      settled. <i>Vive l’Empereur!</i> Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah! The Cossacks—those
+      rascals—see how they run! <i>Vive l’Empereur!</i> There he is, do you see
+      him? I’ve seen him twice, as I see you now. The little corporal... I saw
+      him give the cross to one of the veterans.... <i>Vive l’Empereur!</i>” came the
+      voices of men, old and young, of most diverse characters and social
+      positions. On the faces of all was one common expression of joy at the
+      commencement of the long-expected campaign and of rapture and devotion to
+      the man in the gray coat who was standing on the hill.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the thirteenth of June a rather small, thoroughbred Arab horse was
+      brought to Napoleon. He mounted it and rode at a gallop to one of the
+      bridges over the Niemen, deafened continually by incessant and rapturous
+      acclamations which he evidently endured only because it was impossible to
+      forbid the soldiers to express their love of him by such shouting, but the
+      shouting which accompanied him everywhere disturbed him and distracted him
+      from the military cares that had occupied him from the time he joined the
+      army. He rode across one of the swaying pontoon bridges to the farther
+      side, turned sharply to the left, and galloped in the direction of Kóvno,
+      preceded by enraptured, mounted chasseurs of the Guard who, breathless
+      with delight, galloped ahead to clear a path for him through the troops.
+      On reaching the broad river Víliya, he stopped near a regiment of Polish
+      Uhlans stationed by the river.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Vivat!”</i> shouted the Poles, ecstatically, breaking their ranks and
+      pressing against one another to see him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon looked up and down the river, dismounted, and sat down on a log
+      that lay on the bank. At a mute sign from him, a telescope was handed him
+      which he rested on the back of a happy page who had run up to him, and he
+      gazed at the opposite bank. Then he became absorbed in a map laid out on
+      the logs. Without lifting his head he said something, and two of his
+      aides-de-camp galloped off to the Polish Uhlans.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What? What did he say?” was heard in the ranks of the Polish Uhlans when
+      one of the aides-de-camp rode up to them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The order was to find a ford and to cross the river. The colonel of the
+      Polish Uhlans, a handsome old man, flushed and, fumbling in his speech
+      from excitement, asked the aide-de-camp whether he would be permitted to
+      swim the river with his Uhlans instead of seeking a ford. In evident fear
+      of refusal, like a boy asking for permission to get on a horse, he begged
+      to be allowed to swim across the river before the Emperor’s eyes. The
+      aide-de-camp replied that probably the Emperor would not be displeased at
+      this excess of zeal.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as the aide-de-camp had said this, the old mustached officer, with
+      happy face and sparkling eyes, raised his saber, shouted <i>“Vivat!”</i>
+      and, commanding the Uhlans to follow him, spurred his horse and galloped into
+      the river. He gave an angry thrust to his horse, which had grown restive
+      under him, and plunged into the water, heading for the deepest part where
+      the current was swift. Hundreds of Uhlans galloped in after him. It was
+      cold and uncanny in the rapid current in the middle of the stream, and the
+      Uhlans caught hold of one another as they fell off their horses. Some of
+      the horses were drowned and some of the men; the others tried to swim on,
+      some in the saddle and some clinging to their horses’ manes. They tried to
+      make their way forward to the opposite bank and, though there was a ford
+      one third of a mile away, were proud that they were swimming and drowning
+      in this river under the eyes of the man who sat on the log and was not
+      even looking at what they were doing. When the aide-de-camp, having
+      returned and choosing an opportune moment, ventured to draw the Emperor’s
+      attention to the devotion of the Poles to his person, the little man in
+      the gray overcoat got up and, having summoned Berthier, began pacing up
+      and down the bank with him, giving him instructions and occasionally
+      glancing disapprovingly at the drowning Uhlans who distracted his
+      attention.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For him it was no new conviction that his presence in any part of the
+      world, from Africa to the steppes of Muscovy alike, was enough to dumfound
+      people and impel them to insane self-oblivion. He called for his horse and
+      rode to his quarters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Some forty Uhlans were drowned in the river, though boats were sent to
+      their assistance. The majority struggled back to the bank from which they
+      had started. The colonel and some of his men got across and with
+      difficulty clambered out on the further bank. And as soon as they had got
+      out, in their soaked and streaming clothes, they shouted <i>“Vivat!”</i>
+      and looked ecstatically at the spot where Napoleon had been but where he no
+      longer was and at that moment considered themselves happy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That evening, between issuing one order that the forged Russian paper
+      money prepared for use in Russia should be delivered as quickly as
+      possible and another that a Saxon should be shot, on whom a letter
+      containing information about the orders to the French army had been found,
+      Napoleon also gave instructions that the Polish colonel who had needlessly
+      plunged into the river should be enrolled in the <i>Légion d’honneur</i> of which
+      Napoleon was himself the head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>Quos vult perdere dementat.</i> *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Those whom (God) wishes to destroy he drives mad.
+</p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0170"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The Emperor of Russia had, meanwhile, been in Vílna for more than a month,
+      reviewing troops and holding maneuvers. Nothing was ready for the war that
+      everyone expected and to prepare for which the Emperor had come from
+      Petersburg. There was no general plan of action. The vacillation between
+      the various plans that were proposed had even increased after the Emperor
+      had been at headquarters for a month. Each of the three armies had its own
+      commander in chief, but there was no supreme commander of all the forces,
+      and the Emperor did not assume that responsibility himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The longer the Emperor remained in Vílna the less did everybody—tired
+      of waiting—prepare for the war. All the efforts of those who
+      surrounded the sovereign seemed directed merely to making him spend his
+      time pleasantly and forget that war was impending.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In June, after many balls and fetes given by the Polish magnates, by the
+      courtiers, and by the Emperor himself, it occurred to one of the Polish
+      aides-de-camp in attendance that a dinner and ball should be given for the
+      Emperor by his aides-de-camp. This idea was eagerly received. The Emperor
+      gave his consent. The aides-de-camp collected money by subscription. The
+      lady who was thought to be most pleasing to the Emperor was invited to act
+      as hostess. Count Bennigsen, being a landowner in the Vílna province,
+      offered his country house for the fete, and the thirteenth of June was
+      fixed for a ball, dinner, regatta, and fireworks at Zakret, Count
+      Bennigsen’s country seat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The very day that Napoleon issued the order to cross the Niemen, and his
+      vanguard, driving off the Cossacks, crossed the Russian frontier,
+      Alexander spent the evening at the entertainment given by his
+      aides-de-camp at Bennigsen’s country house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was a gay and brilliant fete. Connoisseurs of such matters declared
+      that rarely had so many beautiful women been assembled in one place.
+      Countess Bezúkhova was present among other Russian ladies who had followed
+      the sovereign from Petersburg to Vílna and eclipsed the refined Polish
+      ladies by her massive, so-called Russian type of beauty. The Emperor
+      noticed her and honored her with a dance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís Drubetskóy, having left his wife in Moscow and being for the present
+      <i>en garçon</i> (as he phrased it), was also there and, though not an
+      aide-de-camp, had subscribed a large sum toward the expenses. Borís was
+      now a rich man who had risen to high honors and no longer sought patronage
+      but stood on an equal footing with the highest of those of his own age. He
+      was meeting Hélène in Vílna after not having seen her for a long time and
+      did not recall the past, but as Hélène was enjoying the favors of a very
+      important personage and Borís had only recently married, they met as good
+      friends of long standing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At midnight dancing was still going on. Hélène, not having a suitable
+      partner, herself offered to dance the mazurka with Borís. They were the
+      third couple. Borís, coolly looking at Hélène’s dazzling bare shoulders
+      which emerged from a dark, gold-embroidered, gauze gown, talked to her of
+      old acquaintances and at the same time, unaware of it himself and
+      unnoticed by others, never for an instant ceased to observe the Emperor
+      who was in the same room. The Emperor was not dancing, he stood in the
+      doorway, stopping now one pair and now another with gracious words which
+      he alone knew how to utter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As the mazurka began, Borís saw that Adjutant General Balashëv, one of
+      those in closest attendance on the Emperor, went up to him and contrary to
+      court etiquette stood near him while he was talking to a Polish lady.
+      Having finished speaking to her, the Emperor looked inquiringly at
+      Balashëv and, evidently understanding that he only acted thus because
+      there were important reasons for so doing, nodded slightly to the lady and
+      turned to him. Hardly had Balashëv begun to speak before a look of
+      amazement appeared on the Emperor’s face. He took Balashëv by the arm and
+      crossed the room with him, unconsciously clearing a path seven yards wide
+      as the people on both sides made way for him. Borís noticed Arakchéev’s
+      excited face when the sovereign went out with Balashëv. Arakchéev looked
+      at the Emperor from under his brow and, sniffing with his red nose,
+      stepped forward from the crowd as if expecting the Emperor to address him.
+      (Borís understood that Arakchéev envied Balashëv and was displeased that
+      evidently important news had reached the Emperor otherwise than through
+      himself.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the Emperor and Balashëv passed out into the illuminated garden
+      without noticing Arakchéev who, holding his sword and glancing wrathfully
+      around, followed some twenty paces behind them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the time Borís was going through the figures of the mazurka, he was
+      worried by the question of what news Balashëv had brought and how he could
+      find it out before others. In the figure in which he had to choose two
+      ladies, he whispered to Hélène that he meant to choose Countess Potocka
+      who, he thought, had gone out onto the veranda, and glided over the
+      parquet to the door opening into the garden, where, seeing Balashëv and
+      the Emperor returning to the veranda, he stood still. They were moving
+      toward the door. Borís, fluttering as if he had not had time to withdraw,
+      respectfully pressed close to the doorpost with bowed head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor, with the agitation of one who has been personally affronted,
+      was finishing with these words:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To enter Russia without declaring war! I will not make peace as long as a
+      single armed enemy remains in my country!” It seemed to Borís that it gave
+      the Emperor pleasure to utter these words. He was satisfied with the form
+      in which he had expressed his thoughts, but displeased that Borís had
+      overheard it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let no one know of it!” the Emperor added with a frown.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís understood that this was meant for him and, closing his eyes,
+      slightly bowed his head. The Emperor re-entered the ballroom and remained
+      there about another half-hour.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís was thus the first to learn the news that the French army had
+      crossed the Niemen and, thanks to this, was able to show certain important
+      personages that much that was concealed from others was usually known to
+      him, and by this means he rose higher in their estimation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      The unexpected news of the French having crossed the Niemen was
+      particularly startling after a month of unfulfilled expectations, and at a
+      ball. On first receiving the news, under the influence of indignation and
+      resentment the Emperor had found a phrase that pleased him, fully
+      expressed his feelings, and has since become famous. On returning home at
+      two o’clock that night he sent for his secretary, Shishkóv, and told him
+      to write an order to the troops and a rescript to Field Marshal Prince
+      Saltykóv, in which he insisted on the words being inserted that he would
+      not make peace so long as a single armed Frenchman remained on Russian
+      soil.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day the following letter was sent to Napoleon:
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>Monsieur mon frère,</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Yesterday I learned that, despite the loyalty with which I have kept my
+      engagements with Your Majesty, your troops have crossed the Russian
+      frontier, and I have this moment received from Petersburg a note, in which
+      Count Lauriston informs me, as a reason for this aggression, that Your
+      Majesty has considered yourself to be in a state of war with me from the
+      time Prince Kurákin asked for his passports. The reasons on which the Duc
+      de Bassano based his refusal to deliver them to him would never have led
+      me to suppose that that could serve as a pretext for aggression. In fact,
+      the ambassador, as he himself has declared, was never authorized to make
+      that demand, and as soon as I was informed of it I let him know how much I
+      disapproved of it and ordered him to remain at his post. If Your Majesty
+      does not intend to shed the blood of our peoples for such a
+      misunderstanding, and consents to withdraw your troops from Russian
+      territory, I will regard what has passed as not having occurred and an
+      understanding between us will be possible. In the contrary case, Your
+      Majesty, I shall see myself forced to repel an attack that nothing on my
+      part has provoked. It still depends on Your Majesty to preserve humanity
+      from the calamity of another war.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      I am, etc.,
+    </p>
+<p>
+      (signed) Alexander
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0171"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At two in the morning of the fourteenth of June, the Emperor, having sent
+      for Balashëv and read him his letter to Napoleon, ordered him to take it
+      and hand it personally to the French Emperor. When dispatching Balashëv,
+      the Emperor repeated to him the words that he would not make peace so long
+      as a single armed enemy remained on Russian soil and told him to transmit
+      those words to Napoleon. Alexander did not insert them in his letter to
+      Napoleon, because with his characteristic tact he felt it would be
+      injudicious to use them at a moment when a last attempt at reconciliation
+      was being made, but he definitely instructed Balashëv to repeat them
+      personally to Napoleon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having set off in the small hours of the fourteenth, accompanied by a
+      bugler and two Cossacks, Balashëv reached the French outposts at the
+      village of Rykónty, on the Russian side of the Niemen, by dawn. There he
+      was stopped by French cavalry sentinels.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A French noncommissioned officer of hussars, in crimson uniform and a
+      shaggy cap, shouted to the approaching Balashëv to halt. Balashëv did not
+      do so at once, but continued to advance along the road at a walking pace.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The noncommissioned officer frowned and, muttering words of abuse,
+      advanced his horse’s chest against Balashëv, put his hand to his saber,
+      and shouted rudely at the Russian general, asking: was he deaf that he did
+      not do as he was told? Balashëv mentioned who he was. The noncommissioned
+      officer began talking with his comrades about regimental matters without
+      looking at the Russian general.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After living at the seat of the highest authority and power, after
+      conversing with the Emperor less than three hours before, and in general
+      being accustomed to the respect due to his rank in the service, Balashëv
+      found it very strange here on Russian soil to encounter this hostile, and
+      still more this disrespectful, application of brute force to himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The sun was only just appearing from behind the clouds, the air was fresh
+      and dewy. A herd of cattle was being driven along the road from the
+      village, and over the fields the larks rose trilling, one after another,
+      like bubbles rising in water.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv looked around him, awaiting the arrival of an officer from the
+      village. The Russian Cossacks and bugler and the French hussars looked
+      silently at one another from time to time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A French colonel of hussars, who had evidently just left his bed, came
+      riding from the village on a handsome sleek gray horse, accompanied by two
+      hussars. The officer, the soldiers, and their horses all looked smart and
+      well kept.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was that first period of a campaign when troops are still in full trim,
+      almost like that of peacetime maneuvers, but with a shade of martial
+      swagger in their clothes, and a touch of the gaiety and spirit of
+      enterprise which always accompany the opening of a campaign.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French colonel with difficulty repressed a yawn, but was polite and
+      evidently understood Balashëv’s importance. He led him past his soldiers
+      and behind the outposts and told him that his wish to be presented to the
+      Emperor would most likely be satisfied immediately, as the Emperor’s
+      quarters were, he believed, not far off.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They rode through the village of Rykónty, past tethered French hussar
+      horses, past sentinels and men who saluted their colonel and stared with
+      curiosity at a Russian uniform, and came out at the other end of the
+      village. The colonel said that the commander of the division was a mile
+      and a quarter away and would receive Balashëv and conduct him to his
+      destination.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The sun had by now risen and shone gaily on the bright verdure.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They had hardly ridden up a hill, past a tavern, before they saw a group
+      of horsemen coming toward them. In front of the group, on a black horse
+      with trappings that glittered in the sun, rode a tall man with plumes in
+      his hat and black hair curling down to his shoulders. He wore a red
+      mantle, and stretched his long legs forward in French fashion. This man
+      rode toward Balashëv at a gallop, his plumes flowing and his gems and gold
+      lace glittering in the bright June sunshine.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv was only two horses’ length from the equestrian with the
+      bracelets, plumes, necklaces, and gold embroidery, who was galloping
+      toward him with a theatrically solemn countenance, when Julner, the French
+      colonel, whispered respectfully: “The King of Naples!” It was, in fact,
+      Murat, now called “King of Naples.” Though it was quite incomprehensible
+      why he should be King of Naples, he was called so, and was himself
+      convinced that he was so, and therefore assumed a more solemn and
+      important air than formerly. He was so sure that he really was the King of
+      Naples that when, on the eve of his departure from that city, while
+      walking through the streets with his wife, some Italians called out to
+      him: <i>“Viva il re!”</i> * he turned to his wife with a pensive smile and said:
+      “Poor fellows, they don’t know that I am leaving them tomorrow!”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Long live the king.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      But though he firmly believed himself to be King of Naples and pitied the
+      grief felt by the subjects he was abandoning, latterly, after he had been
+      ordered to return to military service—and especially since his last
+      interview with Napoleon in Danzig, when his august brother-in-law had told
+      him: “I made you King that you should reign in my way, but not in yours!”—he
+      had cheerfully taken up his familiar business, and—like a well-fed
+      but not overfat horse that feels himself in harness and grows skittish
+      between the shafts—he dressed up in clothes as variegated and
+      expensive as possible, and gaily and contentedly galloped along the roads
+      of Poland, without himself knowing why or whither.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On seeing the Russian general he threw back his head, with its long hair
+      curling to his shoulders, in a majestically royal manner, and looked
+      inquiringly at the French colonel. The colonel respectfully informed His
+      Majesty of Balashëv’s mission, whose name he could not pronounce.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “De Bal-machève!” said the King (overcoming by his assurance the
+      difficulty that had presented itself to the colonel). “Charmed to make
+      your acquaintance, General!” he added, with a gesture of kingly
+      condescension.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as the King began to speak loud and fast his royal dignity
+      instantly forsook him, and without noticing it he passed into his natural
+      tone of good-natured familiarity. He laid his hand on the withers of
+      Balashëv’s horse and said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, General, it all looks like war,” as if regretting a circumstance of
+      which he was unable to judge.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your Majesty,” replied Balashëv, “my master, the Emperor, does not desire
+      war and as Your Majesty sees...” said Balashëv, using the words <i>Your
+      Majesty</i> at every opportunity, with the affectation unavoidable in
+      frequently addressing one to whom the title was still a novelty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Murat’s face beamed with stupid satisfaction as he listened to “Monsieur
+      de Bal-machève.” But <i>royauté oblige!</i> * and he felt it incumbent on him, as
+      a king and an ally, to confer on state affairs with Alexander’s envoy. He
+      dismounted, took Balashëv’s arm, and moving a few steps away from his
+      suite, which waited respectfully, began to pace up and down with him,
+      trying to speak significantly. He referred to the fact that the Emperor
+      Napoleon had resented the demand that he should withdraw his troops from
+      Prussia, especially when that demand became generally known and the
+      dignity of France was thereby offended.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Royalty has its obligations.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv replied that there was “nothing offensive in the demand,
+      because...” but Murat interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then you don’t consider the Emperor Alexander the aggressor?” he asked
+      unexpectedly, with a kindly and foolish smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv told him why he considered Napoleon to be the originator of the
+      war.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, my dear general!” Murat again interrupted him, “with all my heart I
+      wish the Emperors may arrange the affair between them, and that the war
+      begun by no wish of mine may finish as quickly as possible!” said he, in
+      the tone of a servant who wants to remain good friends with another
+      despite a quarrel between their masters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And he went on to inquiries about the Grand Duke and the state of his
+      health, and to reminiscences of the gay and amusing times he had spent
+      with him in Naples. Then suddenly, as if remembering his royal dignity,
+      Murat solemnly drew himself up, assumed the pose in which he had stood at
+      his coronation, and, waving his right arm, said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I won’t detain you longer, General. I wish success to your mission,” and
+      with his embroidered red mantle, his flowing feathers, and his glittering
+      ornaments, he rejoined his suite who were respectfully awaiting him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv rode on, supposing from Murat’s words that he would very soon be
+      brought before Napoleon himself. But instead of that, at the next village
+      the sentinels of Davout’s infantry corps detained him as the pickets of
+      the vanguard had done, and an adjutant of the corps commander, who was
+      fetched, conducted him into the village to Marshal Davout.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0172"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Davout was to Napoleon what Arakchéev was to Alexander—though not a
+      coward like Arakchéev, he was as precise, as cruel, and as unable to
+      express his devotion to his monarch except by cruelty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the organism of states such men are necessary, as wolves are necessary
+      in the organism of nature, and they always exist, always appear and hold
+      their own, however incongruous their presence and their proximity to the
+      head of the government may be. This inevitability alone can explain how
+      the cruel Arakchéev, who tore out a grenadier’s mustache with his own
+      hands, whose weak nerves rendered him unable to face danger, and who was
+      neither an educated man nor a courtier, was able to maintain his powerful
+      position with Alexander, whose own character was chivalrous, noble, and
+      gentle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv found Davout seated on a barrel in the shed of a peasant’s hut,
+      writing—he was auditing accounts. Better quarters could have been
+      found him, but Marshal Davout was one of those men who purposely put
+      themselves in most depressing conditions to have a justification for being
+      gloomy. For the same reason they are always hard at work and in a hurry.
+      “How can I think of the bright side of life when, as you see, I am sitting
+      on a barrel and working in a dirty shed?” the expression of his face
+      seemed to say. The chief pleasure and necessity of such men, when they
+      encounter anyone who shows animation, is to flaunt their own dreary,
+      persistent activity. Davout allowed himself that pleasure when Balashëv
+      was brought in. He became still more absorbed in his task when the Russian
+      general entered, and after glancing over his spectacles at Balashëv’s
+      face, which was animated by the beauty of the morning and by his talk with
+      Murat, he did not rise or even stir, but scowled still more and sneered
+      malevolently.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he noticed in Balashëv’s face the disagreeable impression this
+      reception produced, Davout raised his head and coldly asked what he
+      wanted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Thinking he could have been received in such a manner only because Davout
+      did not know that he was adjutant general to the Emperor Alexander and
+      even his envoy to Napoleon, Balashëv hastened to inform him of his rank
+      and mission. Contrary to his expectation, Davout, after hearing him,
+      became still surlier and ruder.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where is your dispatch?” he inquired. “Give it to me. I will send it to
+      the Emperor.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv replied that he had been ordered to hand it personally to the
+      Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your Emperor’s orders are obeyed in your army, but here,” said Davout,
+      “you must do as you’re told.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And, as if to make the Russian general still more conscious of his
+      dependence on brute force, Davout sent an adjutant to call the officer on
+      duty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv took out the packet containing the Emperor’s letter and laid it
+      on the table (made of a door with its hinges still hanging on it, laid
+      across two barrels). Davout took the packet and read the inscription.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are perfectly at liberty to treat me with respect or not,” protested
+      Balashëv, “but permit me to observe that I have the honor to be adjutant
+      general to His Majesty....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Davout glanced at him silently and plainly derived pleasure from the signs
+      of agitation and confusion which appeared on Balashëv’s face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You will be treated as is fitting,” said he and, putting the packet in
+      his pocket, left the shed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A minute later the marshal’s adjutant, de Castrès, came in and conducted
+      Balashëv to the quarters assigned him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That day he dined with the marshal, at the same board on the barrels.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day Davout rode out early and, after asking Balashëv to come to him,
+      peremptorily requested him to remain there, to move on with the baggage
+      train should orders come for it to move, and to talk to no one except
+      Monsieur de Castrès.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After four days of solitude, ennui, and consciousness of his impotence and
+      insignificance—particularly acute by contrast with the sphere of
+      power in which he had so lately moved—and after several marches with
+      the marshal’s baggage and the French army, which occupied the whole
+      district, Balashëv was brought to Vílna—now occupied by the French—through
+      the very gate by which he had left it four days previously.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day the imperial gentleman-in-waiting, the Comte de Turenne, came to
+      Balashëv and informed him of the Emperor Napoleon’s wish to honor him with
+      an audience.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Four days before, sentinels of the Preobrazhénsk regiment had stood in
+      front of the house to which Balashëv was conducted, and now two French
+      grenadiers stood there in blue uniforms unfastened in front and with
+      shaggy caps on their heads, and an escort of hussars and Uhlans and a
+      brilliant suite of aides-de-camp, pages, and generals, who were waiting
+      for Napoleon to come out, were standing at the porch, round his saddle
+      horse and his Mameluke, Rustan. Napoleon received Balashëv in the very
+      house in Vílna from which Alexander had dispatched him on his mission.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0173"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Though Balashëv was used to imperial pomp, he was amazed at the luxury and
+      magnificence of Napoleon’s court.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Comte de Turenne showed him into a big reception room where many
+      generals, gentlemen-in-waiting, and Polish magnates—several of whom
+      Balashëv had seen at the court of the Emperor of Russia—were
+      waiting. Duroc said that Napoleon would receive the Russian general before
+      going for his ride.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After some minutes, the gentleman-in-waiting who was on duty came into the
+      great reception room and, bowing politely, asked Balashëv to follow him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv went into a small reception room, one door of which led into a
+      study, the very one from which the Russian Emperor had dispatched him on
+      his mission. He stood a minute or two, waiting. He heard hurried footsteps
+      beyond the door, both halves of it were opened rapidly; all was silent and
+      then from the study the sound was heard of other steps, firm and resolute—they
+      were those of Napoleon. He had just finished dressing for his ride, and
+      wore a blue uniform, opening in front over a white waistcoat so long that
+      it covered his rotund stomach, white leather breeches tightly fitting the
+      fat thighs of his short legs, and Hessian boots. His short hair had
+      evidently just been brushed, but one lock hung down in the middle of his
+      broad forehead. His plump white neck stood out sharply above the black
+      collar of his uniform, and he smelled of Eau de Cologne. His full face,
+      rather young-looking, with its prominent chin, wore a gracious and
+      majestic expression of imperial welcome.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He entered briskly, with a jerk at every step and his head slightly thrown
+      back. His whole short corpulent figure with broad thick shoulders, and
+      chest and stomach involuntarily protruding, had that imposing and stately
+      appearance one sees in men of forty who live in comfort. It was evident,
+      too, that he was in the best of spirits that day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He nodded in answer to Balashëv’s low and respectful bow, and coming up to
+      him at once began speaking like a man who values every moment of his time
+      and does not condescend to prepare what he has to say but is sure he will
+      always say the right thing and say it well.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good day, General!” said he. “I have received the letter you brought from
+      the Emperor Alexander and am very glad to see you.” He glanced with his
+      large eyes into Balashëv’s face and immediately looked past him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was plain that Balashëv’s personality did not interest him at all.
+      Evidently only what took place within <i>his own</i> mind interested him. Nothing
+      outside himself had any significance for him, because everything in the
+      world, it seemed to him, depended entirely on his will.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I do not, and did not, desire war,” he continued, “but it has
+      been forced on me. Even <i>now</i>” (he emphasized the word) “I am
+      ready to receive any explanations you can give me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And he began clearly and concisely to explain his reasons for
+      dissatisfaction with the Russian government. Judging by the calmly
+      moderate and amicable tone in which the French Emperor spoke, Balashëv was
+      firmly persuaded that he wished for peace and intended to enter into
+      negotiations.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Napoleon, having finished speaking, looked inquiringly at the Russian
+      envoy, Balashëv began a speech he had prepared long before: “Sire! The
+      Emperor, my master...” but the sight of the Emperor’s eyes bent on him
+      confused him. “You are flurried—compose yourself!” Napoleon seemed
+      to say, as with a scarcely perceptible smile he looked at Balashëv’s
+      uniform and sword.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv recovered himself and began to speak. He said that the Emperor
+      Alexander did not consider Kurákin’s demand for his passports a sufficient
+      cause for war; that Kurákin had acted on his own initiative and without
+      his sovereign’s assent, that the Emperor Alexander did not desire war, and
+      had no relations with England.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Not <i>yet!</i>” interposed Napoleon, and, as if fearing to give vent to his
+      feelings, he frowned and nodded slightly as a sign that Balashëv might
+      proceed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After saying all he had been instructed to say, Balashëv added that the
+      Emperor Alexander wished for peace, but would not enter into negotiations
+      except on condition that... Here Balashëv hesitated: he remembered the
+      words the Emperor Alexander had not written in his letter, but had
+      specially inserted in the rescript to Saltykóv and had told Balashëv to
+      repeat to Napoleon. Balashëv remembered these words, “So long as a single
+      armed foe remains on Russian soil,” but some complex feeling restrained
+      him. He could not utter them, though he wished to do so. He grew confused
+      and said: “On condition that the French army retires beyond the Niemen.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon noticed Balashëv’s embarrassment when uttering these last words;
+      his face twitched and the calf of his left leg began to quiver
+      rhythmically. Without moving from where he stood he began speaking in a
+      louder tone and more hurriedly than before. During the speech that
+      followed, Balashëv, who more than once lowered his eyes, involuntarily
+      noticed the quivering of Napoleon’s left leg which increased the more
+      Napoleon raised his voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I desire peace, no less than the Emperor Alexander,” he began. “Have I
+      not for eighteen months been doing everything to obtain it? I have waited
+      eighteen months for explanations. But in order to begin negotiations, what
+      is demanded of me?” he said, frowning and making an energetic gesture of
+      inquiry with his small white plump hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The withdrawal of your army beyond the Niemen, sire,” replied Balashëv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Niemen?” repeated Napoleon. “So now you want me to retire beyond the
+      Niemen—only the Niemen?” repeated Napoleon, looking straight at
+      Balashëv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The latter bowed his head respectfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Instead of the demand of four months earlier to withdraw from Pomerania,
+      only a withdrawal beyond the Niemen was now demanded. Napoleon turned
+      quickly and began to pace the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You say the demand now is that I am to withdraw beyond the Niemen before
+      commencing negotiations, but in just the same way two months ago the
+      demand was that I should withdraw beyond the Vistula and the Oder, and yet
+      you are willing to negotiate.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He went in silence from one corner of the room to the other and again
+      stopped in front of Balashëv. Balashëv noticed that his left leg was
+      quivering faster than before and his face seemed petrified in its stern
+      expression. This quivering of his left leg was a thing Napoleon was
+      conscious of. “The vibration of my left calf is a great sign with me,” he
+      remarked at a later date.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Such demands as to retreat beyond the Vistula and Oder may be made to a
+      Prince of Baden, but not to me!” Napoleon almost screamed, quite to his
+      own surprise. “If you gave me Petersburg and Moscow I could not accept
+      such conditions. You say I have begun this war! But who first joined his
+      army? The Emperor Alexander, not I! And you offer me negotiations when I
+      have expended millions, when you are in alliance with England, and when
+      your position is a bad one. You offer me negotiations! But what is the aim
+      of your alliance with England? What has she given you?” he continued
+      hurriedly, evidently no longer trying to show the advantages of peace and
+      discuss its possibility, but only to prove his own rectitude and power and
+      Alexander’s errors and duplicity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The commencement of his speech had obviously been made with the intention
+      of demonstrating the advantages of his position and showing that he was
+      nevertheless willing to negotiate. But he had begun talking, and the more
+      he talked the less could he control his words.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The whole purport of his remarks now was evidently to exalt himself and
+      insult Alexander—just what he had least desired at the commencement
+      of the interview.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I hear you have made peace with Turkey?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv bowed his head affirmatively.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Peace has been concluded...” he began.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Napoleon did not let him speak. He evidently wanted to do all the
+      talking himself, and continued to talk with the sort of eloquence and
+      unrestrained irritability to which spoiled people are so prone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I know you have made peace with the Turks without obtaining Moldavia
+      and Wallachia; I would have given your sovereign those provinces as I gave
+      him Finland. Yes,” he went on, “I promised and would have given the
+      Emperor Alexander Moldavia and Wallachia, and now he won’t have those
+      splendid provinces. Yet he might have united them to his empire and in a
+      single reign would have extended Russia from the Gulf of Bothnia to the
+      mouths of the Danube. Catherine the Great could not have done more,” said
+      Napoleon, growing more and more excited as he paced up and down the room,
+      repeating to Balashëv almost the very words he had used to Alexander
+      himself at Tilsit. “All that, he would have owed to my friendship. Oh,
+      what a splendid reign!” he repeated several times, then paused, drew from
+      his pocket a gold snuffbox, lifted it to his nose, and greedily sniffed at
+      it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a splendid reign the Emperor Alexander’s <i>might have been!</i>”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He looked compassionately at Balashëv, and as soon as the latter tried to
+      make some rejoinder hastily interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What could he wish or look for that he would not have obtained through my
+      friendship?” demanded Napoleon, shrugging his shoulders in perplexity.
+      “But no, he has preferred to surround himself with my enemies, and with
+      whom? With Steins, Armfeldts, Bennigsens, and Wintzingerodes! Stein, a
+      traitor expelled from his own country; Armfeldt, a rake and an intriguer;
+      Wintzingerode, a fugitive French subject; Bennigsen, rather more of a
+      soldier than the others, but all the same an incompetent who was unable to
+      do anything in 1807 and who should awaken terrible memories in the Emperor
+      Alexander’s mind.... Granted that were they competent they might be made
+      use of,” continued Napoleon—hardly able to keep pace in words with
+      the rush of thoughts that incessantly sprang up, proving how right and
+      strong he was (in his perception the two were one and the same)—“but
+      they are not even that! They are neither fit for war nor peace! Barclay is
+      said to be the most capable of them all, but I cannot say so, judging by
+      his first movements. And what are they doing, all these courtiers? Pfuel
+      proposes, Armfeldt disputes, Bennigsen considers, and Barclay, called on
+      to act, does not know what to decide on, and time passes bringing no
+      result. Bagratión alone is a military man. He’s stupid, but he has
+      experience, a quick eye, and resolution.... And what role is your young
+      monarch playing in that monstrous crowd? They compromise him and throw on
+      him the responsibility for all that happens. A sovereign should not be
+      with the army unless he is a general!” said Napoleon, evidently uttering
+      these words as a direct challenge to the Emperor. He knew how Alexander
+      desired to be a military commander.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The campaign began only a week ago, and you haven’t even been able to
+      defend Vílna. You are cut in two and have been driven out of the Polish
+      provinces. Your army is grumbling.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “On the contrary, Your Majesty,” said Balashëv, hardly able to remember
+      what had been said to him and following these verbal fireworks with
+      difficulty, “the troops are burning with eagerness...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I know everything!” Napoleon interrupted him. “I know everything. I know
+      the number of your battalions as exactly as I know my own. You have not
+      two hundred thousand men, and I have three times that number. I give you
+      my word of honor,” said Napoleon, forgetting that his word of honor could
+      carry no weight—“I give you my word of honor that I have five
+      hundred and thirty thousand men this side of the Vistula. The Turks will
+      be of no use to you; they are worth nothing and have shown it by making
+      peace with you. As for the Swedes—it is their fate to be governed by
+      mad kings. Their king was insane and they changed him for another—Bernadotte,
+      who promptly went mad—for no Swede would ally himself with Russia
+      unless he were mad.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon grinned maliciously and again raised his snuffbox to his nose.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv knew how to reply to each of Napoleon’s remarks, and would have
+      done so; he continually made the gesture of a man wishing to say
+      something, but Napoleon always interrupted him. To the alleged insanity of
+      the Swedes, Balashëv wished to reply that when Russia is on her side
+      Sweden is practically an island: but Napoleon gave an angry exclamation to
+      drown his voice. Napoleon was in that state of irritability in which a man
+      has to talk, talk, and talk, merely to convince himself that he is in the
+      right. Balashëv began to feel uncomfortable: as envoy he feared to demean
+      his dignity and felt the necessity of replying; but, as a man, he shrank
+      before the transport of groundless wrath that had evidently seized
+      Napoleon. He knew that none of the words now uttered by Napoleon had any
+      significance, and that Napoleon himself would be ashamed of them when he
+      came to his senses. Balashëv stood with downcast eyes, looking at the
+      movements of Napoleon’s stout legs and trying to avoid meeting his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But what do I care about your allies?” said Napoleon. “I have allies—the
+      Poles. There are eighty thousand of them and they fight like lions. And
+      there will be two hundred thousand of them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And probably still more perturbed by the fact that he had uttered this
+      obvious falsehood, and that Balashëv still stood silently before him in
+      the same attitude of submission to fate, Napoleon abruptly turned round,
+      drew close to Balashëv’s face, and, gesticulating rapidly and
+      energetically with his white hands, almost shouted:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Know that if you stir up Prussia against me, I’ll wipe it off the map of
+      Europe!” he declared, his face pale and distorted by anger, and he struck
+      one of his small hands energetically with the other. “Yes, I will throw
+      you back beyond the Dvína and beyond the Dnieper, and will re-erect
+      against you that barrier which it was criminal and blind of Europe to
+      allow to be destroyed. Yes, that is what will happen to you. That is what
+      you have gained by alienating me!” And he walked silently several times up
+      and down the room, his fat shoulders twitching.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He put his snuffbox into his waistcoat pocket, took it out again, lifted
+      it several times to his nose, and stopped in front of Balashëv. He paused,
+      looked ironically straight into Balashëv’s eyes, and said in a quiet
+      voice:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And yet what a splendid reign your master <i>might have had!</i>”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv, feeling it incumbent on him to reply, said that from the Russian
+      side things did not appear in so gloomy a light. Napoleon was silent,
+      still looking derisively at him and evidently not listening to him.
+      Balashëv said that in Russia the best results were expected from the war.
+      Napoleon nodded condescendingly, as if to say, “I know it’s your duty to
+      say that, but you don’t believe it yourself. I have convinced you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      When Balashëv had ended, Napoleon again took out his snuffbox, sniffed at
+      it, and stamped his foot twice on the floor as a signal. The door opened,
+      a gentleman-in-waiting, bending respectfully, handed the Emperor his hat
+      and gloves; another brought him a pocket handkerchief. Napoleon, without
+      giving them a glance, turned to Balashëv:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Assure the Emperor Alexander from me,” said he, taking his hat, “that I
+      am as devoted to him as before: I know him thoroughly and very highly
+      esteem his lofty qualities. I will detain you no longer, General; you
+      shall receive my letter to the Emperor.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Napoleon went quickly to the door. Everyone in the reception room
+      rushed forward and descended the staircase.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0174"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After all that Napoleon had said to him—those bursts of anger and
+      the last dryly spoken words: “I will detain you no longer, General; you
+      shall receive my letter,” Balashëv felt convinced that Napoleon would not
+      wish to see him, and would even avoid another meeting with him—an
+      insulted envoy—especially as he had witnessed his unseemly anger.
+      But, to his surprise, Balashëv received, through Duroc, an invitation to
+      dine with the Emperor that day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bessières, Caulaincourt, and Berthier were present at that dinner.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon met Balashëv cheerfully and amiably. He not only showed no sign
+      of constraint or self-reproach on account of his outburst that morning,
+      but, on the contrary, tried to reassure Balashëv. It was evident that he
+      had long been convinced that it was impossible for him to make a mistake,
+      and that in his perception whatever he did was right, not because it
+      harmonized with any idea of right and wrong, but because <i>he</i> did it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor was in very good spirits after his ride through Vílna, where
+      crowds of people had rapturously greeted and followed him. From all the
+      windows of the streets through which he rode, rugs, flags, and his
+      monogram were displayed, and the Polish ladies, welcoming him, waved their
+      handkerchiefs to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At dinner, having placed Balashëv beside him, Napoleon not only treated
+      him amiably but behaved as if Balashëv were one of his own courtiers, one
+      of those who sympathized with his plans and ought to rejoice at his
+      success. In the course of conversation he mentioned Moscow and questioned
+      Balashëv about the Russian capital, not merely as an interested traveler
+      asks about a new city he intends to visit, but as if convinced that
+      Balashëv, as a Russian, must be flattered by his curiosity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How many inhabitants are there in Moscow? How many houses? Is it true
+      that Moscow is called ‘Holy Moscow’? How many churches are there in
+      Moscow?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And receiving the reply that there were more than two hundred churches, he
+      remarked:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why such a quantity of churches?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The Russians are very devout,” replied Balashëv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But a large number of monasteries and churches is always a sign of the
+      backwardness of a people,” said Napoleon, turning to Caulaincourt for
+      appreciation of this remark.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv respectfully ventured to disagree with the French Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Every country has its own character,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But nowhere in Europe is there anything like that,” said Napoleon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I beg your Majesty’s pardon,” returned Balashëv, “besides Russia there is
+      Spain, where there are also many churches and monasteries.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      This reply of Balashëv’s, which hinted at the recent defeats of the French
+      in Spain, was much appreciated when he related it at Alexander’s court,
+      but it was not much appreciated at Napoleon’s dinner, where it passed
+      unnoticed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The uninterested and perplexed faces of the marshals showed that they were
+      puzzled as to what Balashëv’s tone suggested. “If there is a point we
+      don’t see it, or it is not at all witty,” their expressions seemed to say.
+      So little was his rejoinder appreciated that Napoleon did not notice it at
+      all and naïvely asked Balashëv through what towns the direct road from
+      there to Moscow passed. Balashëv, who was on the alert all through the
+      dinner, replied that just as “all roads lead to Rome,” so all roads lead
+      to Moscow: there were many roads, and “among them the road through
+      <i>Poltáva</i>, which Charles XII chose.” Balashëv involuntarily flushed with
+      pleasure at the aptitude of this reply, but hardly had he uttered the word
+      <i>Poltáva</i> before Caulaincourt began speaking of the badness of the road from
+      Petersburg to Moscow and of his Petersburg reminiscences.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After dinner they went to drink coffee in Napoleon’s study, which four
+      days previously had been that of the Emperor Alexander. Napoleon sat down,
+      toying with his Sèvres coffee cup, and motioned Balashëv to a chair beside
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon was in that well-known after-dinner mood which, more than any
+      reasoned cause, makes a man contented with himself and disposed to
+      consider everyone his friend. It seemed to him that he was surrounded by
+      men who adored him: and he felt convinced that, after his dinner, Balashëv
+      too was his friend and worshiper. Napoleon turned to him with a pleasant,
+      though slightly ironic, smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They tell me this is the room the Emperor Alexander occupied? Strange,
+      isn’t it, General?” he said, evidently not doubting that this remark would
+      be agreeable to his hearer since it went to prove his, Napoleon’s,
+      superiority to Alexander.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv made no reply and bowed his head in silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes. Four days ago in this room, Wintzingerode and Stein were
+      deliberating,” continued Napoleon with the same derisive and
+      self-confident smile. “What I can’t understand,” he went on, “is that the
+      Emperor Alexander has surrounded himself with my personal enemies. That I
+      do not... understand. Has he not thought that I may do the same?” and he
+      turned inquiringly to Balashëv, and evidently this thought turned him back
+      on to the track of his morning’s anger, which was still fresh in him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And let him know that I will do so!” said Napoleon, rising and pushing
+      his cup away with his hand. “I’ll drive all his Württemberg, Baden, and
+      Weimar relations out of Germany.... Yes. I’ll drive them out. Let him
+      prepare an asylum for them in Russia!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Balashëv bowed his head with an air indicating that he would like to make
+      his bow and leave, and only listened because he could not help hearing
+      what was said to him. Napoleon did not notice this expression; he treated
+      Balashëv not as an envoy from his enemy, but as a man now fully devoted to
+      him and who must rejoice at his former master’s humiliation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And why has the Emperor Alexander taken command of the armies? What is
+      the good of that? War is my profession, but his business is to reign and
+      not to command armies! Why has he taken on himself such a responsibility?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Again Napoleon brought out his snuffbox, paced several times up and down
+      the room in silence, and then, suddenly and unexpectedly, went up to
+      Balashëv and with a slight smile, as confidently, quickly, and simply as
+      if he were doing something not merely important but pleasing to Balashëv,
+      he raised his hand to the forty-year-old Russian general’s face and,
+      taking him by the ear, pulled it gently, smiling with his lips only.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To have one’s ear pulled by the Emperor was considered the greatest honor
+      and mark of favor at the French court.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, adorer and courtier of the Emperor Alexander, why don’t you say
+      anything?” said he, as if it was ridiculous, in his presence, to be the
+      adorer and courtier of anyone but himself, Napoleon. “Are the horses ready
+      for the general?” he added, with a slight inclination of his head in reply
+      to Balashëv’s bow. “Let him have mine, he has a <i>long way to go!</i>”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The letter taken by Balashëv was the last Napoleon sent to Alexander.
+      Every detail of the interview was communicated to the Russian monarch, and
+      the war began....
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0175"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After his interview with Pierre in Moscow, Prince Andrew went to
+      Petersburg, on business as he told his family, but really to meet Anatole
+      Kurágin whom he felt it necessary to encounter. On reaching Petersburg he
+      inquired for Kurágin but the latter had already left the city. Pierre had
+      warned his brother-in-law that Prince Andrew was on his track. Anatole
+      Kurágin promptly obtained an appointment from the Minister of War and went
+      to join the army in Moldavia. While in Petersburg Prince Andrew met
+      Kutúzov, his former commander who was always well disposed toward him, and
+      Kutúzov suggested that he should accompany him to the army in Moldavia, to
+      which the old general had been appointed commander in chief. So Prince
+      Andrew, having received an appointment on the headquarters staff, left for
+      Turkey.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew did not think it proper to write and challenge Kurágin. He
+      thought that if he challenged him without some fresh cause it might
+      compromise the young Countess Rostóva and so he wanted to meet Kurágin
+      personally in order to find a fresh pretext for a duel. But he again
+      failed to meet Kurágin in Turkey, for soon after Prince Andrew arrived,
+      the latter returned to Russia. In a new country, amid new conditions,
+      Prince Andrew found life easier to bear. After his betrothed had broken
+      faith with him—which he felt the more acutely the more he tried to
+      conceal its effects—the surroundings in which he had been happy
+      became trying to him, and the freedom and independence he had once prized
+      so highly were still more so. Not only could he no longer think the
+      thoughts that had first come to him as he lay gazing at the sky on the
+      field of Austerlitz and had later enlarged upon with Pierre, and which had
+      filled his solitude at Boguchárovo and then in Switzerland and Rome, but
+      he even dreaded to recall them and the bright and boundless horizons they
+      had revealed. He was now concerned only with the nearest practical matters
+      unrelated to his past interests, and he seized on these the more eagerly
+      the more those past interests were closed to him. It was as if that lofty,
+      infinite canopy of heaven that had once towered above him had suddenly
+      turned into a low, solid vault that weighed him down, in which all was
+      clear, but nothing eternal or mysterious.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Of the activities that presented themselves to him, army service was the
+      simplest and most familiar. As a general on duty on Kutúzov’s staff, he
+      applied himself to business with zeal and perseverance and surprised
+      Kutúzov by his willingness and accuracy in work. Not having found Kurágin
+      in Turkey, Prince Andrew did not think it necessary to rush back to Russia
+      after him, but all the same he knew that however long it might be before
+      he met Kurágin, despite his contempt for him and despite all the proofs he
+      deduced to convince himself that it was not worth stooping to a conflict
+      with him—he knew that when he did meet him he would not be able to
+      resist calling him out, any more than a ravenous man can help snatching at
+      food. And the consciousness that the insult was not yet avenged, that his
+      rancor was still unspent, weighed on his heart and poisoned the artificial
+      tranquillity which he managed to obtain in Turkey by means of restless,
+      plodding, and rather vainglorious and ambitious activity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the year 1812, when news of the war with Napoleon reached Bucharest—where
+      Kutúzov had been living for two months, passing his days and nights with a
+      Wallachian woman—Prince Andrew asked Kutúzov to transfer him to the
+      Western Army. Kutúzov, who was already weary of Bolkónski’s activity which
+      seemed to reproach his own idleness, very readily let him go and gave him
+      a mission to Barclay de Tolly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before joining the Western Army which was then, in May, encamped at
+      Drissa, Prince Andrew visited Bald Hills which was directly on his way,
+      being only two miles off the Smolénsk highroad. During the last three
+      years there had been so many changes in his life, he had thought, felt,
+      and seen so much (having traveled both in the east and the west), that on
+      reaching Bald Hills it struck him as strange and unexpected to find the
+      way of life there unchanged and still the same in every detail. He entered
+      through the gates with their stone pillars and drove up the avenue leading
+      to the house as if he were entering an enchanted, sleeping castle. The
+      same old stateliness, the same cleanliness, the same stillness reigned
+      there, and inside there was the same furniture, the same walls, sounds,
+      and smell, and the same timid faces, only somewhat older. Princess Mary
+      was still the same timid, plain maiden getting on in years, uselessly and
+      joylessly passing the best years of her life in fear and constant
+      suffering. Mademoiselle Bourienne was the same coquettish, self-satisfied
+      girl, enjoying every moment of her existence and full of joyous hopes for
+      the future. She had merely become more self-confident, Prince Andrew
+      thought. Dessalles, the tutor he had brought from Switzerland, was wearing
+      a coat of Russian cut and talking broken Russian to the servants, but was
+      still the same narrowly intelligent, conscientious, and pedantic
+      preceptor. The old prince had changed in appearance only by the loss of a
+      tooth, which left a noticeable gap on one side of his mouth; in character
+      he was the same as ever, only showing still more irritability and
+      skepticism as to what was happening in the world. Little Nicholas alone
+      had changed. He had grown, become rosier, had curly dark hair, and, when
+      merry and laughing, quite unconsciously lifted the upper lip of his pretty
+      little mouth just as the little princess used to do. He alone did not obey
+      the law of immutability in the enchanted, sleeping castle. But though
+      externally all remained as of old, the inner relations of all these people
+      had changed since Prince Andrew had seen them last. The household was
+      divided into two alien and hostile camps, who changed their habits for his
+      sake and only met because he was there. To the one camp belonged the old
+      prince, Mademoiselle Bourienne, and the architect; to the other Princess
+      Mary, Dessalles, little Nicholas, and all the old nurses and maids.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During his stay at Bald Hills all the family dined together, but they were
+      ill at ease and Prince Andrew felt that he was a visitor for whose sake an
+      exception was being made and that his presence made them all feel awkward.
+      Involuntarily feeling this at dinner on the first day, he was taciturn,
+      and the old prince noticing this also became morosely dumb and retired to
+      his apartments directly after dinner. In the evening, when Prince Andrew
+      went to him and, trying to rouse him, began to tell him of the young Count
+      Kámensky’s campaign, the old prince began unexpectedly to talk about
+      Princess Mary, blaming her for her superstitions and her dislike of
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne, who, he said, was the only person really attached
+      to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old prince said that if he was ill it was only because of Princess
+      Mary: that she purposely worried and irritated him, and that by indulgence
+      and silly talk she was spoiling little Prince Nicholas. The old prince
+      knew very well that he tormented his daughter and that her life was very
+      hard, but he also knew that he could not help tormenting her and that she
+      deserved it. “Why does Prince Andrew, who sees this, say nothing to me
+      about his sister? Does he think me a scoundrel, or an old fool who,
+      without any reason, keeps his own daughter at a distance and attaches this
+      Frenchwoman to himself? He doesn’t understand, so I must explain it, and
+      he must hear me out,” thought the old prince. And he began explaining why
+      he could not put up with his daughter’s unreasonable character.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If you ask me,” said Prince Andrew, without looking up (he was censuring
+      his father for the first time in his life), “I did not wish to speak about
+      it, but as you ask me I will give you my frank opinion. If there is any
+      misunderstanding and discord between you and Mary, I can’t blame her for
+      it at all. I know how she loves and respects you. Since you ask me,”
+       continued Prince Andrew, becoming irritable—as he was always liable
+      to do of late—“I can only say that if there are any
+      misunderstandings they are caused by that worthless woman, who is not fit
+      to be my sister’s companion.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The old man at first stared fixedly at his son, and an unnatural smile
+      disclosed the fresh gap between his teeth to which Prince Andrew could not
+      get accustomed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What companion, my dear boy? Eh? You’ve already been talking it over!
+      Eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Father, I did not want to judge,” said Prince Andrew, in a hard and
+      bitter tone, “but you challenged me, and I have said, and always shall
+      say, that Mary is not to blame, but those to blame—the one to blame—is
+      that Frenchwoman.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, he has passed judgment... passed judgement!” said the old man in a
+      low voice and, as it seemed to Prince Andrew, with some embarrassment, but
+      then he suddenly jumped up and cried: “Be off, be off! Let not a trace of
+      you remain here!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew wished to leave at once, but Princess Mary persuaded him to
+      stay another day. That day he did not see his father, who did not leave
+      his room and admitted no one but Mademoiselle Bourienne and Tíkhon, but
+      asked several times whether his son had gone. Next day, before leaving,
+      Prince Andrew went to his son’s rooms. The boy, curly-headed like his
+      mother and glowing with health, sat on his knee, and Prince Andrew began
+      telling him the story of Bluebeard, but fell into a reverie without
+      finishing the story. He thought not of this pretty child, his son whom he
+      held on his knee, but of himself. He sought in himself either remorse for
+      having angered his father or regret at leaving home for the first time in
+      his life on bad terms with him, and was horrified to find neither. What
+      meant still more to him was that he sought and did not find in himself the
+      former tenderness for his son which he had hoped to reawaken by caressing
+      the boy and taking him on his knee.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, go on!” said his son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew, without replying, put him down from his knee and went out
+      of the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as Prince Andrew had given up his daily occupations, and
+      especially on returning to the old conditions of life amid which he had
+      been happy, weariness of life overcame him with its former intensity, and
+      he hastened to escape from these memories and to find some work as soon as
+      possible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So you’ve decided to go, Andrew?” asked his sister.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Thank God that I can,” replied Prince Andrew. “I am very sorry you
+      can’t.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why do you say that?” replied Princess Mary. “Why do you say that, when
+      you are going to this terrible war, and he is so old? Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne says he has been asking about you....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as she began to speak of that, her lips trembled and her tears
+      began to fall. Prince Andrew turned away and began pacing the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, my God! my God! When one thinks who and what—what trash—can
+      cause people misery!” he said with a malignity that alarmed Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She understood that when speaking of “trash” he referred not only to
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne, the cause of her misery, but also to the man who
+      had ruined his own happiness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Andrew! One thing I beg, I entreat of you!” she said, touching his elbow
+      and looking at him with eyes that shone through her tears. “I understand
+      you” (she looked down). “Don’t imagine that sorrow is the work of <i>men</i>. Men
+      are His tools.” She looked a little above Prince Andrew’s head with the
+      confident, accustomed look with which one looks at the place where a
+      familiar portrait hangs. “Sorrow is sent by <i>Him</i>, not by men. Men are His
+      instruments, they are not to blame. If you think someone has wronged you,
+      forget it and forgive! We have no right to punish. And then you will know
+      the happiness of forgiving.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If I were a woman I would do so, Mary. That is a woman’s virtue. But a
+      man should not and cannot forgive and forget,” he replied, and though till
+      that moment he had not been thinking of Kurágin, all his unexpended anger
+      suddenly swelled up in his heart.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If Mary is already persuading me to forgive, it means that I ought long
+      ago to have punished him,” he thought. And giving her no further reply, he
+      began thinking of the glad vindictive moment when he would meet Kurágin
+      who he knew was now in the army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary begged him to stay one day more, saying that she knew how
+      unhappy her father would be if Andrew left without being reconciled to
+      him, but Prince Andrew replied that he would probably soon be back again
+      from the army and would certainly write to his father, but that the longer
+      he stayed now the more embittered their differences would become.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good-by, Andrew! Remember that misfortunes come from God, and men are
+      never to blame,” were the last words he heard from his sister when he took
+      leave of her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then it must be so!” thought Prince Andrew as he drove out of the avenue
+      from the house at Bald Hills. “She, poor innocent creature, is left to be
+      victimized by an old man who has outlived his wits. The old man feels he
+      is guilty, but cannot change himself. My boy is growing up and rejoices in
+      life, in which like everybody else he will deceive or be deceived. And I
+      am off to the army. Why? I myself don’t know. I want to meet that man whom
+      I despise, so as to give him a chance to kill and laugh at me!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      These conditions of life had been the same before, but then they were all
+      connected, while now they had all tumbled to pieces. Only senseless
+      things, lacking coherence, presented themselves one after another to
+      Prince Andrew’s mind.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0176"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew reached the general headquarters of the army at the end of
+      June. The first army, with which was the Emperor, occupied the fortified
+      camp at Drissa; the second army was retreating, trying to effect a
+      junction with the first one from which it was said to be cut off by large
+      French forces. Everyone was dissatisfied with the general course of
+      affairs in the Russian army, but no one anticipated any danger of invasion
+      of the Russian provinces, and no one thought the war would extend farther
+      than the western, the Polish, provinces.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew found Barclay de Tolly, to whom he had been assigned, on the
+      bank of the Drissa. As there was not a single town or large village in the
+      vicinity of the camp, the immense number of generals and courtiers
+      accompanying the army were living in the best houses of the villages on
+      both sides of the river, over a radius of six miles. Barclay de Tolly was
+      quartered nearly three miles from the Emperor. He received Bolkónski
+      stiffly and coldly and told him in his foreign accent that he would
+      mention him to the Emperor for a decision as to his employment, but asked
+      him meanwhile to remain on his staff. Anatole Kurágin, whom Prince Andrew
+      had hoped to find with the army, was not there. He had gone to Petersburg,
+      but Prince Andrew was glad to hear this. His mind was occupied by the
+      interests of the center that was conducting a gigantic war, and he was
+      glad to be free for a while from the distraction caused by the thought of
+      Kurágin. During the first four days, while no duties were required of him,
+      Prince Andrew rode round the whole fortified camp and, by the aid of his
+      own knowledge and by talks with experts, tried to form a definite opinion
+      about it. But the question whether the camp was advantageous or
+      disadvantageous remained for him undecided. Already from his military
+      experience and what he had seen in the Austrian campaign, he had come to
+      the conclusion that in war the most deeply considered plans have no
+      significance and that all depends on the way unexpected movements of the
+      enemy—that cannot be foreseen—are met, and on how and by whom
+      the whole matter is handled. To clear up this last point for himself,
+      Prince Andrew, utilizing his position and acquaintances, tried to fathom
+      the character of the control of the army and of the men and parties
+      engaged in it, and he deduced for himself the following of the state of
+      affairs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While the Emperor had still been at Vílna, the forces had been divided
+      into three armies. First, the army under Barclay de Tolly, secondly, the
+      army under Bagratión, and thirdly, the one commanded by Tormásov. The
+      Emperor was with the first army, but not as commander in chief. In the
+      orders issued it was stated, not that the Emperor would take command, but
+      only that he would be with the army. The Emperor, moreover, had with him
+      not a commander in chief’s staff but the imperial headquarters staff. In
+      attendance on him was the head of the imperial staff, Quartermaster
+      General Prince Volkónski, as well as generals, imperial aides-de-camp,
+      diplomatic officials, and a large number of foreigners, but not the army
+      staff. Besides these, there were in attendance on the Emperor without any
+      definite appointments: Arakchéev, the ex-Minister of War; Count Bennigsen,
+      the senior general in rank; the Grand Duke Tsarévich Constantine
+      Pávlovich; Count Rumyántsev, the Chancellor; Stein, a former Prussian
+      minister; Armfeldt, a Swedish general; Pfuel, the chief author of the plan
+      of campaign; Paulucci, an adjutant general and Sardinian <i>émigré</i>; Wolzogen—and
+      many others. Though these men had no military appointment in the army,
+      their position gave them influence, and often a corps commander, or even
+      the commander in chief, did not know in what capacity he was questioned by
+      Bennigsen, the Grand Duke, Arakchéev, or Prince Volkónski, or was given
+      this or that advice and did not know whether a certain order received in
+      the form of advice emanated from the man who gave it or from the Emperor
+      and whether it had to be executed or not. But this was only the external
+      condition; the essential significance of the presence of the Emperor and
+      of all these people, from a courtier’s point of view (and in an Emperor’s
+      vicinity all became courtiers), was clear to everyone. It was this: the
+      Emperor did not assume the title of commander in chief, but disposed of
+      all the armies; the men around him were his assistants. Arakchéev was a
+      faithful custodian to enforce order and acted as the sovereign’s
+      bodyguard. Bennigsen was a landlord in the Vílna province who appeared to
+      be doing the honors of the district, but was in reality a good general,
+      useful as an adviser and ready at hand to replace Barclay. The Grand Duke
+      was there because it suited him to be. The ex-Minister Stein was there
+      because his advice was useful and the Emperor Alexander held him in high
+      esteem personally. Armfeldt virulently hated Napoleon and was a general
+      full of self-confidence, a quality that always influenced Alexander.
+      Paulucci was there because he was bold and decided in speech. The
+      adjutants general were there because they always accompanied the Emperor,
+      and lastly and chiefly Pfuel was there because he had drawn up the plan of
+      campaign against Napoleon and, having induced Alexander to believe in the
+      efficacy of that plan, was directing the whole business of the war. With
+      Pfuel was Wolzogen, who expressed Pfuel’s thoughts in a more
+      comprehensible way than Pfuel himself (who was a harsh, bookish theorist,
+      self-confident to the point of despising everyone else) was able to do.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Besides these Russians and foreigners who propounded new and unexpected
+      ideas every day—especially the foreigners, who did so with a
+      boldness characteristic of people employed in a country not their own—there
+      were many secondary personages accompanying the army because their
+      principals were there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Among the opinions and voices in this immense, restless, brilliant, and
+      proud sphere, Prince Andrew noticed the following sharply defined
+      subdivisions of tendencies and parties:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The first party consisted of Pfuel and his adherents—military
+      theorists who believed in a science of war with immutable laws—laws
+      of oblique movements, outflankings, and so forth. Pfuel and his adherents
+      demanded a retirement into the depths of the country in accordance with
+      precise laws defined by a pseudo-theory of war, and they saw only
+      barbarism, ignorance, or evil intention in every deviation from that
+      theory. To this party belonged the foreign nobles, Wolzogen,
+      Wintzingerode, and others, chiefly Germans.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The second party was directly opposed to the first; one extreme, as always
+      happens, was met by representatives of the other. The members of this
+      party were those who had demanded an advance from Vílna into Poland and
+      freedom from all prearranged plans. Besides being advocates of bold
+      action, this section also represented nationalism, which made them still
+      more one-sided in the dispute. They were Russians: Bagratión, Ermólov (who
+      was beginning to come to the front), and others. At that time a famous
+      joke of Ermólov’s was being circulated, that as a great favor he had
+      petitioned the Emperor to make him a German. The men of that party,
+      remembering Suvórov, said that what one had to do was not to reason, or
+      stick pins into maps, but to fight, beat the enemy, keep him out of
+      Russia, and not let the army get discouraged.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To the third party—in which the Emperor had most confidence—belonged
+      the courtiers who tried to arrange compromises between the other two. The
+      members of this party, chiefly civilians and to whom Arakchéev belonged,
+      thought and said what men who have no convictions but wish to seem to have
+      some generally say. They said that undoubtedly war, particularly against
+      such a genius as Bonaparte (they called him Bonaparte now), needs most
+      deeply devised plans and profound scientific knowledge and in that respect
+      Pfuel was a genius, but at the same time it had to be acknowledged that
+      the theorists are often one-sided, and therefore one should not trust them
+      absolutely, but should also listen to what Pfuel’s opponents and practical
+      men of experience in warfare had to say, and then choose a middle course.
+      They insisted on the retention of the camp at Drissa, according to Pfuel’s
+      plan, but on changing the movements of the other armies. Though, by this
+      course, neither one aim nor the other could be attained, yet it seemed
+      best to the adherents of this third party.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Of a fourth opinion the most conspicuous representative was the Tsarévich,
+      who could not forget his disillusionment at Austerlitz, where he had
+      ridden out at the head of the Guards, in his casque and cavalry uniform as
+      to a review, expecting to crush the French gallantly; but unexpectedly
+      finding himself in the front line had narrowly escaped amid the general
+      confusion. The men of this party had both the quality and the defect of
+      frankness in their opinions. They feared Napoleon, recognized his strength
+      and their own weakness, and frankly said so. They said: “Nothing but
+      sorrow, shame, and ruin will come of all this! We have abandoned Vílna and
+      Vítebsk and shall abandon Drissa. The only reasonable thing left to do is
+      to conclude peace as soon as possible, before we are turned out of
+      Petersburg.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      This view was very general in the upper army circles and found support
+      also in Petersburg and from the chancellor, Rumyántsev, who, for other
+      reasons of state, was in favor of peace.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The fifth party consisted of those who were adherents of Barclay de Tolly,
+      not so much as a man but as minister of war and commander in chief. “Be he
+      what he may” (they always began like that), “he is an honest, practical
+      man and we have nobody better. Give him real power, for war cannot be
+      conducted successfully without unity of command, and he will show what he
+      can do, as he did in Finland. If our army is well organized and strong and
+      has withdrawn to Drissa without suffering any defeats, we owe this
+      entirely to Barclay. If Barclay is now to be superseded by Bennigsen all
+      will be lost, for Bennigsen showed his incapacity already in 1807.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The sixth party, the Bennigsenites, said, on the contrary, that at any
+      rate there was no one more active and experienced than Bennigsen: “and
+      twist about as you may, you will have to come to Bennigsen eventually. Let
+      the others make mistakes now!” said they, arguing that our retirement to
+      Drissa was a most shameful reverse and an unbroken series of blunders.
+      “The more mistakes that are made the better. It will at any rate be
+      understood all the sooner that things cannot go on like this. What is
+      wanted is not some Barclay or other, but a man like Bennigsen, who made
+      his mark in 1807, and to whom Napoleon himself did justice—a man
+      whose authority would be willingly recognized, and Bennigsen is the only
+      such man.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The seventh party consisted of the sort of people who are always to be
+      found, especially around young sovereigns, and of whom there were
+      particularly many round Alexander—generals and imperial
+      aides-de-camp passionately devoted to the Emperor, not merely as a monarch
+      but as a man, adoring him sincerely and disinterestedly, as Rostóv had
+      done in 1805, and who saw in him not only all the virtues but all human
+      capabilities as well. These men, though enchanted with the sovereign for
+      refusing the command of the army, yet blamed him for such excessive
+      modesty, and only desired and insisted that their adored sovereign should
+      abandon his diffidence and openly announce that he would place himself at
+      the head of the army, gather round him a commander in chief’s staff, and,
+      consulting experienced theoreticians and practical men where necessary,
+      would himself lead the troops, whose spirits would thereby be raised to
+      the highest pitch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The eighth and largest group, which in its enormous numbers was to the
+      others as ninety-nine to one, consisted of men who desired neither peace
+      nor war, neither an advance nor a defensive camp at the Drissa or anywhere
+      else, neither Barclay nor the Emperor, neither Pfuel nor Bennigsen, but
+      only the one most essential thing—as much advantage and pleasure for
+      themselves as possible. In the troubled waters of conflicting and
+      intersecting intrigues that eddied about the Emperor’s headquarters, it
+      was possible to succeed in many ways unthinkable at other times. A man who
+      simply wished to retain his lucrative post would today agree with Pfuel,
+      tomorrow with his opponent, and the day after, merely to avoid
+      responsibility or to please the Emperor, would declare that he had no
+      opinion at all on the matter. Another who wished to gain some advantage
+      would attract the Emperor’s attention by loudly advocating the very thing
+      the Emperor had hinted at the day before, and would dispute and shout at
+      the council, beating his breast and challenging those who did not agree
+      with him to duels, thereby proving that he was prepared to sacrifice
+      himself for the common good. A third, in the absence of opponents, between
+      two councils would simply solicit a special gratuity for his faithful
+      services, well knowing that at that moment people would be too busy to
+      refuse him. A fourth while seemingly overwhelmed with work would often
+      come accidentally under the Emperor’s eye. A fifth, to achieve his
+      long-cherished aim of dining with the Emperor, would stubbornly insist on
+      the correctness or falsity of some newly emerging opinion and for this
+      object would produce arguments more or less forcible and correct.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the men of this party were fishing for rubles, decorations, and
+      promotions, and in this pursuit watched only the weathercock of imperial
+      favor, and directly they noticed it turning in any direction, this whole
+      drone population of the army began blowing hard that way, so that it was
+      all the harder for the Emperor to turn it elsewhere. Amid the
+      uncertainties of the position, with the menace of serious danger giving a
+      peculiarly threatening character to everything, amid this vortex of
+      intrigue, egotism, conflict of views and feelings, and the diversity of
+      race among these people—this eighth and largest party of those
+      preoccupied with personal interests imparted great confusion and obscurity
+      to the common task. Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones,
+      without having finished their buzzing on a previous theme, flew over to
+      the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the voices of those who
+      were disputing honestly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From among all these parties, just at the time Prince Andrew reached the
+      army, another, a ninth party, was being formed and was beginning to raise
+      its voice. This was the party of the elders, reasonable men experienced
+      and capable in state affairs, who, without sharing any of those
+      conflicting opinions, were able to take a detached view of what was going
+      on at the staff at headquarters and to consider means of escape from this
+      muddle, indecision, intricacy, and weakness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The men of this party said and thought that what was wrong resulted
+      chiefly from the Emperor’s presence in the army with his military court
+      and from the consequent presence there of an indefinite, conditional, and
+      unsteady fluctuation of relations, which is in place at court but harmful
+      in an army; that a sovereign should reign but not command the army, and
+      that the only way out of the position would be for the Emperor and his
+      court to leave the army; that the mere presence of the Emperor paralyzed
+      the action of fifty thousand men required to secure his personal safety,
+      and that the worst commander in chief, if independent, would be better
+      than the very best one trammeled by the presence and authority of the
+      monarch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just at the time Prince Andrew was living unoccupied at Drissa, Shishkóv,
+      the Secretary of State and one of the chief representatives of this party,
+      wrote a letter to the Emperor which Arakchéev and Balashëv agreed to sign.
+      In this letter, availing himself of permission given him by the Emperor to
+      discuss the general course of affairs, he respectfully suggested—on
+      the plea that it was necessary for the sovereign to arouse a warlike
+      spirit in the people of the capital—that the Emperor should leave
+      the army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That arousing of the people by their sovereign and his call to them to
+      defend their country—the very incitement which was the chief cause
+      of Russia’s triumph in so far as it was produced by the Tsar’s personal
+      presence in Moscow—was suggested to the Emperor, and accepted by
+      him, as a pretext for quitting the army.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0177"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      This letter had not yet been presented to the Emperor when Barclay, one
+      day at dinner, informed Bolkónski that the sovereign wished to see him
+      personally, to question him about Turkey, and that Prince Andrew was to
+      present himself at Bennigsen’s quarters at six that evening.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      News was received at the Emperor’s quarters that very day of a fresh
+      movement by Napoleon which might endanger the army—news subsequently
+      found to be false. And that morning Colonel Michaud had ridden round the
+      Drissa fortifications with the Emperor and had pointed out to him that
+      this fortified camp constructed by Pfuel, and till then considered a
+      chef-d’oeuvre of tactical science which would ensure Napoleon’s
+      destruction, was an absurdity, threatening the destruction of the Russian
+      army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew arrived at Bennigsen’s quarters—a country gentleman’s
+      house of moderate size, situated on the very banks of the river. Neither
+      Bennigsen nor the Emperor was there, but Chernýshev, the Emperor’s
+      aide-de-camp, received Bolkónski and informed him that the Emperor,
+      accompanied by General Bennigsen and Marquis Paulucci, had gone a second
+      time that day to inspect the fortifications of the Drissa camp, of the
+      suitability of which serious doubts were beginning to be felt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Chernýshev was sitting at a window in the first room with a French novel
+      in his hand. This room had probably been a music room; there was still an
+      organ in it on which some rugs were piled, and in one corner stood the
+      folding bedstead of Bennigsen’s adjutant. This adjutant was also there and
+      sat dozing on the rolled-up bedding, evidently exhausted by work or by
+      feasting. Two doors led from the room, one straight on into what had been
+      the drawing room, and another, on the right, to the study. Through the
+      first door came the sound of voices conversing in German and occasionally
+      in French. In that drawing room were gathered, by the Emperor’s wish, not
+      a military council (the Emperor preferred indefiniteness), but certain
+      persons whose opinions he wished to know in view of the impending
+      difficulties. It was not a council of war, but, as it were, a council to
+      elucidate certain questions for the Emperor personally. To this
+      semicouncil had been invited the Swedish General Armfeldt, Adjutant
+      General Wolzogen, Wintzingerode (whom Napoleon had referred to as a
+      renegade French subject), Michaud, Toll, Count Stein who was not a
+      military man at all, and Pfuel himself, who, as Prince Andrew had heard,
+      was the mainspring of the whole affair. Prince Andrew had an opportunity
+      of getting a good look at him, for Pfuel arrived soon after himself and,
+      in passing through to the drawing room, stopped a minute to speak to
+      Chernýshev.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At first sight, Pfuel, in his ill-made uniform of a Russian general, which
+      fitted him badly like a fancy costume, seemed familiar to Prince Andrew,
+      though he saw him now for the first time. There was about him something of
+      Weyrother, Mack, and Schmidt, and many other German theorist-generals whom
+      Prince Andrew had seen in 1805, but he was more typical than any of them.
+      Prince Andrew had never yet seen a German theorist in whom all the
+      characteristics of those others were united to such an extent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pfuel was short and very thin but broad-boned, of coarse, robust build,
+      broad in the hips, and with prominent shoulder blades. His face was much
+      wrinkled and his eyes deep set. His hair had evidently been hastily
+      brushed smooth in front of the temples, but stuck up behind in quaint
+      little tufts. He entered the room, looking restlessly and angrily around,
+      as if afraid of everything in that large apartment. Awkwardly holding up
+      his sword, he addressed Chernýshev and asked in German where the Emperor
+      was. One could see that he wished to pass through the rooms as quickly as
+      possible, finish with the bows and greetings, and sit down to business in
+      front of a map, where he would feel at home. He nodded hurriedly in reply
+      to Chernýshev, and smiled ironically on hearing that the sovereign was
+      inspecting the fortifications that he, Pfuel, had planned in accord with
+      his theory. He muttered something to himself abruptly and in a bass voice,
+      as self-assured Germans do—it might have been “stupid fellow”... or
+      “the whole affair will be ruined,” or “something absurd will come of
+      it.”... Prince Andrew did not catch what he said and would have passed on,
+      but Chernýshev introduced him to Pfuel, remarking that Prince Andrew was
+      just back from Turkey where the war had terminated so fortunately. Pfuel
+      barely glanced—not so much at Prince Andrew as past him—and
+      said, with a laugh: “That must have been a fine tactical war”; and,
+      laughing contemptuously, went on into the room from which the sound of
+      voices was heard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pfuel, always inclined to be irritably sarcastic, was particularly
+      disturbed that day, evidently by the fact that they had dared to inspect
+      and criticize his camp in his absence. From this short interview with
+      Pfuel, Prince Andrew, thanks to his Austerlitz experiences, was able to
+      form a clear conception of the man. Pfuel was one of those hopelessly and
+      immutably self-confident men, self-confident to the point of martyrdom as
+      only Germans are, because only Germans are self-confident on the basis of
+      an abstract notion—science, that is, the supposed knowledge of
+      absolute truth. A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself
+      personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and
+      women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the
+      best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always
+      knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is
+      undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable
+      and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured
+      just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he
+      does not believe that anything can be known. The German’s self-assurance
+      is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he
+      imagines that he knows the truth—science—which he himself has
+      invented but which is for him the absolute truth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pfuel was evidently of that sort. He had a science—the theory of
+      oblique movements deduced by him from the history of Frederick the Great’s
+      wars, and all he came across in the history of more recent warfare seemed
+      to him absurd and barbarous—monstrous collisions in which so many
+      blunders were committed by both sides that these wars could not be called
+      wars, they did not accord with the theory, and therefore could not serve
+      as material for science.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In 1806 Pfuel had been one of those responsible, for the plan of campaign
+      that ended in Jena and Auerstädt, but he did not see the least proof of
+      the fallibility of his theory in the disasters of that war. On the
+      contrary, the deviations made from his theory were, in his opinion, the
+      sole cause of the whole disaster, and with characteristically gleeful
+      sarcasm he would remark, “There, I said the whole affair would go to the
+      devil!” Pfuel was one of those theoreticians who so love their theory that
+      they lose sight of the theory’s object—its practical application.
+      His love of theory made him hate everything practical, and he would not
+      listen to it. He was even pleased by failures, for failures resulting from
+      deviations in practice from the theory only proved to him the accuracy of
+      his theory.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He said a few words to Prince Andrew and Chernýshev about the present war,
+      with the air of a man who knows beforehand that all will go wrong, and who
+      is not displeased that it should be so. The unbrushed tufts of hair
+      sticking up behind and the hastily brushed hair on his temples expressed
+      this most eloquently.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He passed into the next room, and the deep, querulous sounds of his voice
+      were at once heard from there.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0178"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew’s eyes were still following Pfuel out of the room when Count
+      Bennigsen entered hurriedly, and nodding to Bolkónski, but not pausing,
+      went into the study, giving instructions to his adjutant as he went. The
+      Emperor was following him, and Bennigsen had hastened on to make some
+      preparations and to be ready to receive the sovereign. Chernýshev and
+      Prince Andrew went out into the porch, where the Emperor, who looked
+      fatigued, was dismounting. Marquis Paulucci was talking to him with
+      particular warmth and the Emperor, with his head bent to the left, was
+      listening with a dissatisfied air. The Emperor moved forward evidently
+      wishing to end the conversation, but the flushed and excited Italian,
+      oblivious of decorum, followed him and continued to speak.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And as for the man who advised forming this camp—the Drissa camp,”
+       said Paulucci, as the Emperor mounted the steps and noticing Prince Andrew
+      scanned his unfamiliar face, “as to that person, sire...” continued
+      Paulucci, desperately, apparently unable to restrain himself, “the man who
+      advised the Drissa camp—I see no alternative but the lunatic asylum
+      or the gallows!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Without heeding the end of the Italian’s remarks, and as though not
+      hearing them, the Emperor, recognizing Bolkónski, addressed him
+      graciously.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am very glad to see you! Go in there where they are meeting, and wait
+      for me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor went into the study. He was followed by Prince Peter
+      Mikháylovich Volkónski and Baron Stein, and the door closed behind them.
+      Prince Andrew, taking advantage of the Emperor’s permission, accompanied
+      Paulucci, whom he had known in Turkey, into the drawing room where the
+      council was assembled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Peter Mikháylovich Volkónski occupied the position, as it were, of
+      chief of the Emperor’s staff. He came out of the study into the drawing
+      room with some maps which he spread on a table, and put questions on which
+      he wished to hear the opinion of the gentlemen present. What had happened
+      was that news (which afterwards proved to be false) had been received
+      during the night of a movement by the French to outflank the Drissa camp.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The first to speak was General Armfeldt who, to meet the difficulty that
+      presented itself, unexpectedly proposed a perfectly new position away from
+      the Petersburg and Moscow roads. The reason for this was inexplicable
+      (unless he wished to show that he, too, could have an opinion), but he
+      urged that at this point the army should unite and there await the enemy.
+      It was plain that Armfeldt had thought out that plan long ago and now
+      expounded it not so much to answer the questions put—which, in fact,
+      his plan did not answer—as to avail himself of the opportunity to
+      air it. It was one of the millions of proposals, one as good as another,
+      that could be made as long as it was quite unknown what character the war
+      would take. Some disputed his arguments, others defended them. Young Count
+      Toll objected to the Swedish general’s views more warmly than anyone else,
+      and in the course of the dispute drew from his side pocket a well-filled
+      notebook, which he asked permission to read to them. In these voluminous
+      notes Toll suggested another scheme, totally different from Armfeldt’s or
+      Pfuel’s plan of campaign. In answer to Toll, Paulucci suggested an advance
+      and an attack, which, he urged, could alone extricate us from the present
+      uncertainty and from the trap (as he called the Drissa camp) in which we
+      were situated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During all these discussions Pfuel and his interpreter, Wolzogen (his
+      “bridge” in court relations), were silent. Pfuel only snorted
+      contemptuously and turned away, to show that he would never demean himself
+      by replying to such nonsense as he was now hearing. So when Prince
+      Volkónski, who was in the chair, called on him to give his opinion, he
+      merely said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why ask me? General Armfeldt has proposed a splendid position with an
+      exposed rear, or why not this Italian gentleman’s attack—very fine,
+      or a retreat, also good! Why ask me?” said he. “Why, you yourselves know
+      everything better than I do.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But when Volkónski said, with a frown, that it was in the Emperor’s name
+      that he asked his opinion, Pfuel rose and, suddenly growing animated,
+      began to speak:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Everything has been spoiled, everything muddled, everybody thought they
+      knew better than I did, and now you come to me! How mend matters? There is
+      nothing to mend! The principles laid down by me must be strictly adhered
+      to,” said he, drumming on the table with his bony fingers. “What is the
+      difficulty? Nonsense, childishness!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He went up to the map and speaking rapidly began proving that no
+      eventuality could alter the efficiency of the Drissa camp, that everything
+      had been foreseen, and that if the enemy were really going to outflank it,
+      the enemy would inevitably be destroyed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Paulucci, who did not know German, began questioning him in French.
+      Wolzogen came to the assistance of his chief, who spoke French badly, and
+      began translating for him, hardly able to keep pace with Pfuel, who was
+      rapidly demonstrating that not only all that had happened, but all that
+      could happen, had been foreseen in his scheme, and that if there were now
+      any difficulties the whole fault lay in the fact that his plan had not
+      been precisely executed. He kept laughing sarcastically, he demonstrated,
+      and at last contemptuously ceased to demonstrate, like a mathematician who
+      ceases to prove in various ways the accuracy of a problem that has already
+      been proved. Wolzogen took his place and continued to explain his views in
+      French, every now and then turning to Pfuel and saying, “Is it not so,
+      your excellency?” But Pfuel, like a man heated in a fight who strikes
+      those on his own side, shouted angrily at his own supporter, Wolzogen:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, of course, what more is there to explain?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Paulucci and Michaud both attacked Wolzogen simultaneously in French.
+      Armfeldt addressed Pfuel in German. Toll explained to Volkónski in
+      Russian. Prince Andrew listened and observed in silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Of all these men Prince Andrew sympathized most with Pfuel, angry,
+      determined, and absurdly self-confident as he was. Of all those present,
+      evidently he alone was not seeking anything for himself, nursed no hatred
+      against anyone, and only desired that the plan, formed on a theory arrived
+      at by years of toil, should be carried out. He was ridiculous, and
+      unpleasantly sarcastic, but yet he inspired involuntary respect by his
+      boundless devotion to an idea. Besides this, the remarks of all except
+      Pfuel had one common trait that had not been noticeable at the council of
+      war in 1805: there was now a panic fear of Napoleon’s genius, which,
+      though concealed, was noticeable in every rejoinder. Everything was
+      assumed to be possible for Napoleon, they expected him from every side,
+      and invoked his terrible name to shatter each other’s proposals. Pfuel
+      alone seemed to consider Napoleon a barbarian like everyone else who
+      opposed his theory. But besides this feeling of respect, Pfuel evoked pity
+      in Prince Andrew. From the tone in which the courtiers addressed him and
+      the way Paulucci had allowed himself to speak of him to the Emperor, but
+      above all from a certain desperation in Pfuel’s own expressions, it was
+      clear that the others knew, and Pfuel himself felt, that his fall was at
+      hand. And despite his self-confidence and grumpy German sarcasm he was
+      pitiable, with his hair smoothly brushed on the temples and sticking up in
+      tufts behind. Though he concealed the fact under a show of irritation and
+      contempt, he was evidently in despair that the sole remaining chance of
+      verifying his theory by a huge experiment and proving its soundness to the
+      whole world was slipping away from him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The discussions continued a long time, and the longer they lasted the more
+      heated became the disputes, culminating in shouts and personalities, and
+      the less was it possible to arrive at any general conclusion from all that
+      had been said. Prince Andrew, listening to this polyglot talk and to these
+      surmises, plans, refutations, and shouts, felt nothing but amazement at
+      what they were saying. A thought that had long since and often occurred to
+      him during his military activities—the idea that there is not and
+      cannot be any science of war, and that therefore there can be no such
+      thing as a military genius—now appeared to him an obvious truth.
+      “What theory and science is possible about a matter the conditions and
+      circumstances of which are unknown and cannot be defined, especially when
+      the strength of the acting forces cannot be ascertained? No one was or is
+      able to foresee in what condition our or the enemy’s armies will be in a
+      day’s time, and no one can gauge the force of this or that detachment.
+      Sometimes—when there is not a coward at the front to shout, ‘We are
+      cut off!’ and start running, but a brave and jolly lad who shouts,
+      ‘Hurrah!’—a detachment of five thousand is worth thirty thousand, as
+      at Schön Grabern, while at times fifty thousand run from eight thousand,
+      as at Austerlitz. What science can there be in a matter in which, as in
+      all practical matters, nothing can be defined and everything depends on
+      innumerable conditions, the significance of which is determined at a
+      particular moment which arrives no one knows when? Armfeldt says our army
+      is cut in half, and Paulucci says we have got the French army between two
+      fires; Michaud says that the worthlessness of the Drissa camp lies in
+      having the river behind it, and Pfuel says that is what constitutes its
+      strength; Toll proposes one plan, Armfeldt another, and they are all good
+      and all bad, and the advantages of any suggestions can be seen only at the
+      moment of trial. And why do they all speak of a ‘military genius’? Is a
+      man a genius who can order bread to be brought up at the right time and
+      say who is to go to the right and who to the left? It is only because
+      military men are invested with pomp and power and crowds of sychophants
+      flatter power, attributing to it qualities of genius it does not possess.
+      The best generals I have known were, on the contrary, stupid or
+      absent-minded men. Bagratión was the best, Napoleon himself admitted that.
+      And of Bonaparte himself! I remember his limited, self-satisfied face on
+      the field of Austerlitz. Not only does a good army commander not need any
+      special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and
+      best human attributes—love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic
+      inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is
+      doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience),
+      and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be
+      humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust. It is
+      understandable that a theory of their ‘genius’ was invented for them long
+      ago because they have power! The success of a military action depends not
+      on them, but on the man in the ranks who shouts, ‘We are lost!’ or who
+      shouts, ‘Hurrah!’ And only in the ranks can one serve with assurance of
+      being useful.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      So thought Prince Andrew as he listened to the talking, and he roused
+      himself only when Paulucci called him and everyone was leaving.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the review next day the Emperor asked Prince Andrew where he would like
+      to serve, and Prince Andrew lost his standing in court circles forever by
+      not asking to remain attached to the sovereign’s person, but for
+      permission to serve in the army.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0179"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Before the beginning of the campaign, Rostóv had received a letter from
+      his parents in which they told him briefly of Natásha’s illness and the
+      breaking off of her engagement to Prince Andrew (which they explained by
+      Natásha’s having rejected him) and again asked Nicholas to retire from the
+      army and return home. On receiving this letter, Nicholas did not even make
+      any attempt to get leave of absence or to retire from the army, but wrote
+      to his parents that he was sorry Natásha was ill and her engagement broken
+      off, and that he would do all he could to meet their wishes. To Sónya he
+      wrote separately.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Adored friend of my soul!” he wrote. “Nothing but honor could keep me
+      from returning to the country. But now, at the commencement of the
+      campaign, I should feel dishonored, not only in my comrades’ eyes but in
+      my own, if I preferred my own happiness to my love and duty to the
+      Fatherland. But this shall be our last separation. Believe me, directly
+      the war is over, if I am still alive and still loved by you, I will throw
+      up everything and fly to you, to press you forever to my ardent breast.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      It was, in fact, only the commencement of the campaign that prevented
+      Rostóv from returning home as he had promised and marrying Sónya. The
+      autumn in Otrádnoe with the hunting, and the winter with the Christmas
+      holidays and Sónya’s love, had opened out to him a vista of tranquil rural
+      joys and peace such as he had never known before, and which now allured
+      him. “A splendid wife, children, a good pack of hounds, a dozen leashes of
+      smart borzois, agriculture, neighbors, service by election...” thought he.
+      But now the campaign was beginning, and he had to remain with his
+      regiment. And since it had to be so, Nicholas Rostóv, as was natural to
+      him, felt contented with the life he led in the regiment and was able to
+      find pleasure in that life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On his return from his furlough Nicholas, having been joyfully welcomed by
+      his comrades, was sent to obtain remounts and brought back from the
+      Ukraine excellent horses which pleased him and earned him commendation
+      from his commanders. During his absence he had been promoted captain, and
+      when the regiment was put on war footing with an increase in numbers, he
+      was again allotted his old squadron.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The campaign began, the regiment was moved into Poland on double pay, new
+      officers arrived, new men and horses, and above all everybody was infected
+      with the merrily excited mood that goes with the commencement of a war,
+      and Rostóv, conscious of his advantageous position in the regiment,
+      devoted himself entirely to the pleasures and interests of military
+      service, though he knew that sooner or later he would have to relinquish
+      them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The troops retired from Vílna for various complicated reasons of state,
+      political and strategic. Each step of the retreat was accompanied by a
+      complicated interplay of interests, arguments, and passions at
+      headquarters. For the Pávlograd hussars, however, the whole of this
+      retreat during the finest period of summer and with sufficient supplies
+      was a very simple and agreeable business.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was only at headquarters that there was depression, uneasiness, and
+      intriguing; in the body of the army they did not ask themselves where they
+      were going or why. If they regretted having to retreat, it was only
+      because they had to leave billets they had grown accustomed to, or some
+      pretty young Polish lady. If the thought that things looked bad chanced to
+      enter anyone’s head, he tried to be as cheerful as befits a good soldier
+      and not to think of the general trend of affairs, but only of the task
+      nearest to hand. First they camped gaily before Vílna, making acquaintance
+      with the Polish landowners, preparing for reviews and being reviewed by
+      the Emperor and other high commanders. Then came an order to retreat to
+      Sventsyáni and destroy any provisions they could not carry away with them.
+      Sventsyáni was remembered by the hussars only as the <i>drunken camp</i>, a name
+      the whole army gave to their encampment there, and because many complaints
+      were made against the troops, who, taking advantage of the order to
+      collect provisions, took also horses, carriages, and carpets from the
+      Polish proprietors. Rostóv remembered Sventsyáni, because on the first day
+      of their arrival at that small town he changed his sergeant major and was
+      unable to manage all the drunken men of his squadron who, unknown to him,
+      had appropriated five barrels of old beer. From Sventsyáni they retired
+      farther and farther to Drissa, and thence again beyond Drissa, drawing
+      near to the frontier of Russia proper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the thirteenth of July the Pávlograds took part in a serious action for
+      the first time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the twelfth of July, on the eve of that action, there was a heavy storm
+      of rain and hail. In general, the summer of 1812 was remarkable for its
+      storms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The two Pávlograd squadrons were bivouacking on a field of rye, which was
+      already in ear but had been completely trodden down by cattle and horses.
+      The rain was descending in torrents, and Rostóv, with a young officer
+      named Ilyín, his protégé, was sitting in a hastily constructed shelter. An
+      officer of their regiment, with long mustaches extending onto his cheeks,
+      who after riding to the staff had been overtaken by the rain, entered
+      Rostóv’s shelter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have come from the staff, Count. Have you heard of Raévski’s exploit?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the officer gave them details of the Saltánov battle, which he had
+      heard at the staff.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv, smoking his pipe and turning his head about as the water trickled
+      down his neck, listened inattentively, with an occasional glance at Ilyín,
+      who was pressing close to him. This officer, a lad of sixteen who had
+      recently joined the regiment, was now in the same relation to Nicholas
+      that Nicholas had been to Denísov seven years before. Ilyín tried to
+      imitate Rostóv in everything and adored him as a girl might have done.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Zdrzhinski, the officer with the long mustache, spoke grandiloquently of
+      the Saltánov dam being “a Russian Thermopylae,” and of how a deed worthy
+      of antiquity had been performed by General Raévski. He recounted how
+      Raévski had led his two sons onto the dam under terrific fire and had
+      charged with them beside him. Rostóv heard the story and not only said
+      nothing to encourage Zdrzhinski’s enthusiasm but, on the contrary, looked
+      like a man ashamed of what he was hearing, though with no intention of
+      contradicting it. Since the campaigns of Austerlitz and of 1807 Rostóv
+      knew by experience that men always lie when describing military exploits,
+      as he himself had done when recounting them; besides that, he had
+      experience enough to know that nothing happens in war at all as we can
+      imagine or relate it. And so he did not like Zdrzhinski’s tale, nor did he
+      like Zdrzhinski himself who, with his mustaches extending over his cheeks,
+      bent low over the face of his hearer, as was his habit, and crowded Rostóv
+      in the narrow shanty. Rostóv looked at him in silence. “In the first
+      place, there must have been such a confusion and crowding on the dam that
+      was being attacked that if Raévski did lead his sons there, it could have
+      had no effect except perhaps on some dozen men nearest to him,” thought
+      he, “the rest could not have seen how or with whom Raévski came onto the
+      dam. And even those who did see it would not have been much stimulated by
+      it, for what had they to do with Raévski’s tender paternal feelings when
+      their own skins were in danger? And besides, the fate of the Fatherland
+      did not depend on whether they took the Saltánov dam or not, as we are
+      told was the case at Thermopylae. So why should he have made such a
+      sacrifice? And why expose his own children in the battle? I would not have
+      taken my brother Pétya there, or even Ilyín, who’s a stranger to me but a
+      nice lad, but would have tried to put them somewhere under cover,”
+       Nicholas continued to think, as he listened to Zdrzhinski. But he did not
+      express his thoughts, for in such matters, too, he had gained experience.
+      He knew that this tale redounded to the glory of our arms and so one had
+      to pretend not to doubt it. And he acted accordingly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I can’t stand this any more,” said Ilyín, noticing that Rostóv did not
+      relish Zdrzhinski’s conversation. “My stockings and shirt... and the water
+      is running on my seat! I’ll go and look for shelter. The rain seems less
+      heavy.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Ilyín went out and Zdrzhinski rode away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Five minutes later Ilyín, splashing through the mud, came running back to
+      the shanty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hurrah! Rostóv, come quick! I’ve found it! About two hundred yards away
+      there’s a tavern where <i>ours</i> have already gathered. We can at least get dry
+      there, and Mary Hendríkhovna’s there.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Mary Hendríkhovna was the wife of the regimental doctor, a pretty young
+      German woman he had married in Poland. The doctor, whether from lack of
+      means or because he did not like to part from his young wife in the early
+      days of their marriage, took her about with him wherever the hussar
+      regiment went and his jealousy had become a standing joke among the hussar
+      officers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv threw his cloak over his shoulders, shouted to Lavrúshka to follow
+      with the things, and—now slipping in the mud, now splashing right
+      through it—set off with Ilyín in the lessening rain and the darkness
+      that was occasionally rent by distant lightning.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Rostóv, where are you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Here. What lightning!” they called to one another.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0180"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      In the tavern, before which stood the doctor’s covered cart, there were
+      already some five officers. Mary Hendríkhovna, a plump little blonde
+      German, in a dressing jacket and nightcap, was sitting on a broad bench in
+      the front corner. Her husband, the doctor, lay asleep behind her. Rostóv
+      and Ilyín, on entering the room, were welcomed with merry shouts and
+      laughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear me, how jolly we are!” said Rostóv laughing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And why do you stand there gaping?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What swells they are! Why, the water streams from them! Don’t make our
+      drawing room so wet.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t mess Mary Hendríkhovna’s dress!” cried other voices.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv and Ilyín hastened to find a corner where they could change into
+      dry clothes without offending Mary Hendríkhovna’s modesty. They were going
+      into a tiny recess behind a partition to change, but found it completely
+      filled by three officers who sat playing cards by the light of a solitary
+      candle on an empty box, and these officers would on no account yield their
+      position. Mary Hendríkhovna obliged them with the loan of a petticoat to
+      be used as a curtain, and behind that screen Rostóv and Ilyín, helped by
+      Lavrúshka who had brought their kits, changed their wet things for dry
+      ones.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A fire was made up in the dilapidated brick stove. A board was found,
+      fixed on two saddles and covered with a horsecloth, a small samovar was
+      produced and a cellaret and half a bottle of rum, and having asked Mary
+      Hendríkhovna to preside, they all crowded round her. One offered her a
+      clean handkerchief to wipe her charming hands, another spread a jacket
+      under her little feet to keep them from the damp, another hung his coat
+      over the window to keep out the draft, and yet another waved the flies off
+      her husband’s face, lest he should wake up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Leave him alone,” said Mary Hendríkhovna, smiling timidly and happily.
+      “He is sleeping well as it is, after a sleepless night.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, no, Mary Hendríkhovna,” replied the officer, “one must look after the
+      doctor. Perhaps he’ll take pity on me someday, when it comes to cutting
+      off a leg or an arm for me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      There were only three tumblers, the water was so muddy that one could not
+      make out whether the tea was strong or weak, and the samovar held only six
+      tumblers of water, but this made it all the pleasanter to take turns in
+      order of seniority to receive one’s tumbler from Mary Hendríkhovna’s plump
+      little hands with their short and not overclean nails. All the officers
+      appeared to be, and really were, in love with her that evening. Even those
+      playing cards behind the partition soon left their game and came over to
+      the samovar, yielding to the general mood of courting Mary Hendríkhovna.
+      She, seeing herself surrounded by such brilliant and polite young men,
+      beamed with satisfaction, try as she might to hide it, and perturbed as
+      she evidently was each time her husband moved in his sleep behind her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was only one spoon, sugar was more plentiful than anything else, but
+      it took too long to dissolve, so it was decided that Mary Hendríkhovna
+      should stir the sugar for everyone in turn. Rostóv received his tumbler,
+      and adding some rum to it asked Mary Hendríkhovna to stir it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But you take it without sugar?” she said, smiling all the time, as if
+      everything she said and everything the others said was very amusing and
+      had a double meaning.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is not the sugar I want, but only that your little hand should stir my
+      tea.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Mary Hendríkhovna assented and began looking for the spoon which someone
+      meanwhile had pounced on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Use your finger, Mary Hendríkhovna, it will be still nicer,” said Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Too hot!” she replied, blushing with pleasure.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Ilyín put a few drops of rum into the bucket of water and brought it to
+      Mary Hendríkhovna, asking her to stir it with her finger.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This is my cup,” said he. “Only dip your finger in it and I’ll drink it
+      all up.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      When they had emptied the samovar, Rostóv took a pack of cards and
+      proposed that they should play “Kings” with Mary Hendríkhovna. They drew
+      lots to settle who should make up her set. At Rostóv’s suggestion it was
+      agreed that whoever became “King” should have the right to kiss Mary
+      Hendríkhovna’s hand, and that the “Booby” should go to refill and reheat
+      the samovar for the doctor when the latter awoke.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, but supposing Mary Hendríkhovna is ‘King’?” asked Ilyín.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “As it is, she is Queen, and her word is law!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They had hardly begun to play before the doctor’s disheveled head suddenly
+      appeared from behind Mary Hendríkhovna. He had been awake for some time,
+      listening to what was being said, and evidently found nothing entertaining
+      or amusing in what was going on. His face was sad and depressed. Without
+      greeting the officers, he scratched himself and asked to be allowed to
+      pass as they were blocking the way. As soon as he had left the room all
+      the officers burst into loud laughter and Mary Hendríkhovna blushed till
+      her eyes filled with tears and thereby became still more attractive to
+      them. Returning from the yard, the doctor told his wife (who had ceased to
+      smile so happily, and looked at him in alarm, awaiting her sentence) that
+      the rain had ceased and they must go to sleep in their covered cart, or
+      everything in it would be stolen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But I’ll send an orderly.... Two of them!” said Rostóv. “What an idea,
+      doctor!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll stand guard on it myself!” said Ilyín.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, gentlemen, you have had your sleep, but I have not slept for two
+      nights,” replied the doctor, and he sat down morosely beside his wife,
+      waiting for the game to end.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Seeing his gloomy face as he frowned at his wife, the officers grew still
+      merrier, and some of them could not refrain from laughter, for which they
+      hurriedly sought plausible pretexts. When he had gone, taking his wife
+      with him, and had settled down with her in their covered cart, the
+      officers lay down in the tavern, covering themselves with their wet
+      cloaks, but they did not sleep for a long time; now they exchanged
+      remarks, recalling the doctor’s uneasiness and his wife’s delight, now
+      they ran out into the porch and reported what was taking place in the
+      covered trap. Several times Rostóv, covering his head, tried to go to
+      sleep, but some remark would arouse him and conversation would be resumed,
+      to the accompaniment of unreasoning, merry, childlike laughter.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0181"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      It was nearly three o’clock but no one was yet asleep, when the
+      quartermaster appeared with an order to move on to the little town of
+      Ostróvna. Still laughing and talking, the officers began hurriedly getting
+      ready and again boiled some muddy water in the samovar. But Rostóv went
+      off to his squadron without waiting for tea. Day was breaking, the rain
+      had ceased, and the clouds were dispersing. It felt damp and cold,
+      especially in clothes that were still moist. As they left the tavern in
+      the twilight of the dawn, Rostóv and Ilyín both glanced under the wet and
+      glistening leather hood of the doctor’s cart, from under the apron of
+      which his feet were sticking out, and in the middle of which his wife’s
+      nightcap was visible and her sleepy breathing audible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She really is a dear little thing,” said Rostóv to Ilyín, who was
+      following him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A charming woman!” said Ilyín, with all the gravity of a boy of sixteen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Half an hour later the squadron was lined up on the road. The command was
+      heard to “mount” and the soldiers crossed themselves and mounted. Rostóv
+      riding in front gave the order “Forward!” and the hussars, with clanking
+      sabers and subdued talk, their horses’ hoofs splashing in the mud, defiled
+      in fours and moved along the broad road planted with birch trees on each
+      side, following the infantry and a battery that had gone on in front.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Tattered, blue-purple clouds, reddening in the east, were scudding before
+      the wind. It was growing lighter and lighter. That curly grass which
+      always grows by country roadsides became clearly visible, still wet with
+      the night’s rain; the drooping branches of the birches, also wet, swayed
+      in the wind and flung down bright drops of water to one side. The
+      soldiers’ faces were more and more clearly visible. Rostóv, always closely
+      followed by Ilyín, rode along the side of the road between two rows of
+      birch trees.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When campaigning, Rostóv allowed himself the indulgence of riding not a
+      regimental but a Cossack horse. A judge of horses and a sportsman, he had
+      lately procured himself a large, fine, mettlesome, Donéts horse,
+      dun-colored, with light mane and tail, and when he rode it no one could
+      outgallop him. To ride this horse was a pleasure to him, and he thought of
+      the horse, of the morning, of the doctor’s wife, but not once of the
+      impending danger.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Formerly, when going into action, Rostóv had felt afraid; now he had not
+      the least feeling of fear. He was fearless, not because he had grown used
+      to being under fire (one cannot grow used to danger), but because he had
+      learned how to manage his thoughts when in danger. He had grown accustomed
+      when going into action to think about anything but what would seem most
+      likely to interest him—the impending danger. During the first period
+      of his service, hard as he tried and much as he reproached himself with
+      cowardice, he had not been able to do this, but with time it had come of
+      itself. Now he rode beside Ilyín under the birch trees, occasionally
+      plucking leaves from a branch that met his hand, sometimes touching his
+      horse’s side with his foot, or, without turning round, handing a pipe he
+      had finished to an hussar riding behind him, with as calm and careless an
+      air as though he were merely out for a ride. He glanced with pity at the
+      excited face of Ilyín, who talked much and in great agitation. He knew
+      from experience the tormenting expectation of terror and death the cornet
+      was suffering and knew that only time could help him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as the sun appeared in a clear strip of sky beneath the clouds,
+      the wind fell, as if it dared not spoil the beauty of the summer morning
+      after the storm; drops still continued to fall, but vertically now, and
+      all was still. The whole sun appeared on the horizon and disappeared
+      behind a long narrow cloud that hung above it. A few minutes later it
+      reappeared brighter still from behind the top of the cloud, tearing its
+      edge. Everything grew bright and glittered. And with that light, and as if
+      in reply to it, came the sound of guns ahead of them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before Rostóv had had time to consider and determine the distance of that
+      firing, Count Ostermann-Tolstóy’s adjutant came galloping from Vítebsk
+      with orders to advance at a trot along the road.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The squadron overtook and passed the infantry and the battery—which
+      had also quickened their pace—rode down a hill, and passing through
+      an empty and deserted village again ascended. The horses began to lather
+      and the men to flush.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Halt! Dress your ranks!” the order of the regimental commander was heard
+      ahead. “Forward by the left. Walk, march!” came the order from in front.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And the hussars, passing along the line of troops on the left flank of our
+      position, halted behind our Uhlans who were in the front line. To the
+      right stood our infantry in a dense column: they were the reserve. Higher
+      up the hill, on the very horizon, our guns were visible through the
+      wonderfully clear air, brightly illuminated by slanting morning sunbeams.
+      In front, beyond a hollow dale, could be seen the enemy’s columns and
+      guns. Our advanced line, already in action, could be heard briskly
+      exchanging shots with the enemy in the dale.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At these sounds, long unheard, Rostóv’s spirits rose, as at the strains of
+      the merriest music. <i>Trap-ta-ta-tap!</i> cracked the shots, now together, now
+      several quickly one after another. Again all was silent and then again it
+      sounded as if someone were walking on detonators and exploding them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The hussars remained in the same place for about an hour. A cannonade
+      began. Count Ostermann with his suite rode up behind the squadron, halted,
+      spoke to the commander of the regiment, and rode up the hill to the guns.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After Ostermann had gone, a command rang out to the Uhlans.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Form column! Prepare to charge!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The infantry in front of them parted into platoons to allow the cavalry to
+      pass. The Uhlans started, the streamers on their spears fluttering, and
+      trotted downhill toward the French cavalry which was seen below to the
+      left.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as the Uhlans descended the hill, the hussars were ordered up the
+      hill to support the battery. As they took the places vacated by the
+      Uhlans, bullets came from the front, whining and whistling, but fell spent
+      without taking effect.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The sounds, which he had not heard for so long, had an even more
+      pleasurable and exhilarating effect on Rostóv than the previous sounds of
+      firing. Drawing himself up, he viewed the field of battle opening out
+      before him from the hill, and with his whole soul followed the movement of
+      the Uhlans. They swooped down close to the French dragoons, something
+      confused happened there amid the smoke, and five minutes later our Uhlans
+      were galloping back, not to the place they had occupied but more to the
+      left, and among the orange-colored Uhlans on chestnut horses and behind
+      them, in a large group, blue French dragoons on gray horses could be seen.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0182"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Rostóv, with his keen sportsman’s eye, was one of the first to catch sight
+      of these blue French dragoons pursuing our Uhlans. Nearer and nearer in
+      disorderly crowds came the Uhlans and the French dragoons pursuing them.
+      He could already see how these men, who looked so small at the foot of the
+      hill, jostled and overtook one another, waving their arms and their sabers
+      in the air.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv gazed at what was happening before him as at a hunt. He felt
+      instinctively that if the hussars struck at the French dragoons now, the
+      latter could not withstand them, but if a charge was to be made it must be
+      done now, at that very moment, or it would be too late. He looked around.
+      A captain, standing beside him, was gazing like himself with eyes fixed on
+      the cavalry below them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Andrew Sevastyánych!” said Rostóv. “You know, we could crush them....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “A fine thing too!” replied the captain, “and really...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv, without waiting to hear him out, touched his horse, galloped to
+      the front of his squadron, and before he had time to finish giving the
+      word of command, the whole squadron, sharing his feeling, was following
+      him. Rostóv himself did not know how or why he did it. He acted as he did
+      when hunting, without reflecting or considering. He saw the dragoons near
+      and that they were galloping in disorder; he knew they could not withstand
+      an attack—knew there was only that moment and that if he let it slip
+      it would not return. The bullets were whining and whistling so
+      stimulatingly around him and his horse was so eager to go that he could
+      not restrain himself. He touched his horse, gave the word of command, and
+      immediately, hearing behind him the tramp of the horses of his deployed
+      squadron, rode at full trot downhill toward the dragoons. Hardly had they
+      reached the bottom of the hill before their pace instinctively changed to
+      a gallop, which grew faster and faster as they drew nearer to our Uhlans
+      and the French dragoons who galloped after them. The dragoons were now
+      close at hand. On seeing the hussars, the foremost began to turn, while
+      those behind began to halt. With the same feeling with which he had
+      galloped across the path of a wolf, Rostóv gave rein to his Donéts horse
+      and galloped to intersect the path of the dragoons’ disordered lines. One
+      Uhlan stopped, another who was on foot flung himself to the ground to
+      avoid being knocked over, and a riderless horse fell in among the hussars.
+      Nearly all the French dragoons were galloping back. Rostóv, picking out
+      one on a gray horse, dashed after him. On the way he came upon a bush, his
+      gallant horse cleared it, and almost before he had righted himself in his
+      saddle he saw that he would immediately overtake the enemy he had
+      selected. That Frenchman, by his uniform an officer, was going at a
+      gallop, crouching on his gray horse and urging it on with his saber. In
+      another moment Rostóv’s horse dashed its breast against the hindquarters
+      of the officer’s horse, almost knocking it over, and at the same instant
+      Rostóv, without knowing why, raised his saber and struck the Frenchman
+      with it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The instant he had done this, all Rostóv’s animation vanished. The officer
+      fell, not so much from the blow—which had but slightly cut his arm
+      above the elbow—as from the shock to his horse and from fright.
+      Rostóv reined in his horse, and his eyes sought his foe to see whom he had
+      vanquished. The French dragoon officer was hopping with one foot on the
+      ground, the other being caught in the stirrup. His eyes, screwed up with
+      fear as if he every moment expected another blow, gazed up at Rostóv with
+      shrinking terror. His pale and mud-stained face—fair and young, with
+      a dimple in the chin and light-blue eyes—was not an enemy’s face at
+      all suited to a battlefield, but a most ordinary, homelike face. Before
+      Rostóv had decided what to do with him, the officer cried, “I surrender!”
+       He hurriedly but vainly tried to get his foot out of the stirrup and did
+      not remove his frightened blue eyes from Rostóv’s face. Some hussars who
+      galloped up disengaged his foot and helped him into the saddle. On all
+      sides, the hussars were busy with the dragoons; one was wounded, but
+      though his face was bleeding, he would not give up his horse; another was
+      perched up behind an hussar with his arms round him; a third was being
+      helped by an hussar to mount his horse. In front, the French infantry were
+      firing as they ran. The hussars galloped hastily back with their
+      prisoners. Rostóv galloped back with the rest, aware of an unpleasant
+      feeling of depression in his heart. Something vague and confused, which he
+      could not at all account for, had come over him with the capture of that
+      officer and the blow he had dealt him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Count Ostermann-Tolstóy met the returning hussars, sent for Rostóv,
+      thanked him, and said he would report his gallant deed to the Emperor and
+      would recommend him for a St. George’s Cross. When sent for by Count
+      Ostermann, Rostóv, remembering that he had charged without orders, felt
+      sure his commander was sending for him to punish him for breach of
+      discipline. Ostermann’s flattering words and promise of a reward should
+      therefore have struck him all the more pleasantly, but he still felt that
+      same vaguely disagreeable feeling of moral nausea. “But what on earth is
+      worrying me?” he asked himself as he rode back from the general. “Ilyín?
+      No, he’s safe. Have I disgraced myself in any way? No, that’s not it.”
+       Something else, resembling remorse, tormented him. “Yes, oh yes, that
+      French officer with the dimple. And I remember how my arm paused when I
+      raised it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv saw the prisoners being led away and galloped after them to have a
+      look at his Frenchman with the dimple on his chin. He was sitting in his
+      foreign uniform on an hussar packhorse and looked anxiously about him. The
+      sword cut on his arm could scarcely be called a wound. He glanced at
+      Rostóv with a feigned smile and waved his hand in greeting. Rostóv still
+      had the same indefinite feeling, as of shame.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All that day and the next his friends and comrades noticed that Rostóv,
+      without being dull or angry, was silent, thoughtful, and preoccupied. He
+      drank reluctantly, tried to remain alone, and kept turning something over
+      in his mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv was always thinking about that brilliant exploit of his, which to
+      his amazement had gained him the St. George’s Cross and even given him a
+      reputation for bravery, and there was something he could not at all
+      understand. “So others are even more afraid than I am!” he thought. “So
+      that’s all there is in what is called heroism! And did I do it for my
+      country’s sake? And how was he to blame, with his dimple and blue eyes?
+      And how frightened he was! He thought that I should kill him. Why should I
+      kill him? My hand trembled. And they have given me a St. George’s
+      Cross.... I can’t make it out at all.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But while Nicholas was considering these questions and still could reach
+      no clear solution of what puzzled him so, the wheel of fortune in the
+      service, as often happens, turned in his favor. After the affair at
+      Ostróvna he was brought into notice, received command of an hussar
+      battalion, and when a brave officer was needed he was chosen.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0183"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On receiving news of Natásha’s illness, the countess, though not quite
+      well yet and still weak, went to Moscow with Pétya and the rest of the
+      household, and the whole family moved from Márya Dmítrievna’s house to
+      their own and settled down in town.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha’s illness was so serious that, fortunately for her and for her
+      parents, the consideration of all that had caused the illness, her conduct
+      and the breaking off of her engagement, receded into the background. She
+      was so ill that it was impossible for them to consider in how far she was
+      to blame for what had happened. She could not eat or sleep, grew visibly
+      thinner, coughed, and, as the doctors made them feel, was in danger. They
+      could not think of anything but how to help her. Doctors came to see her
+      singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German, and Latin,
+      blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all
+      the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of
+      them that they could not know the disease Natásha was suffering from, as
+      no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person
+      has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal,
+      novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine—not a disease of the
+      lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books,
+      but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the
+      maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the
+      doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his
+      charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they received
+      money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that business.
+      But, above all, that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that
+      they saw they were really useful, as in fact they were to the whole Rostóv
+      family. Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow
+      substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible,
+      as they were given in small doses), but they were useful, necessary, and
+      indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and of
+      those who loved her—and that is why there are, and always will be,
+      pseudo-healers, wise women, homeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that
+      eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something
+      should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering. They satisfied
+      the need seen in its most elementary form in a child, when it wants to
+      have a place rubbed that has been hurt. A child knocks itself and runs at
+      once to the arms of its mother or nurse to have the aching spot rubbed or
+      kissed, and it feels better when this is done. The child cannot believe
+      that the strongest and wisest of its people have no remedy for its pain,
+      and the hope of relief and the expression of its mother’s sympathy while
+      she rubs the bump comforts it. The doctors were of use to Natásha because
+      they kissed and rubbed her bump, assuring her that it would soon pass if
+      only the coachman went to the chemist’s in the Arbát and got a powder and
+      some pills in a pretty box for a ruble and seventy kopeks, and if she took
+      those powders in boiled water at intervals of precisely two hours, neither
+      more nor less.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      What would Sónya and the count and countess have done, how would they have
+      looked, if nothing had been done, if there had not been those pills to
+      give by the clock, the warm drinks, the chicken cutlets, and all the other
+      details of life ordered by the doctors, the carrying out of which supplied
+      an occupation and consolation to the family circle? How would the count
+      have borne his dearly loved daughter’s illness had he not known that it
+      was costing him a thousand rubles, and that he would not grudge thousands
+      more to benefit her, or had he not known that if her illness continued he
+      would not grudge yet other thousands and would take her abroad for
+      consultations there, and had he not been able to explain the details of
+      how Métivier and Feller had not understood the symptoms, but Frise had,
+      and Múdrov had diagnosed them even better? What would the countess have
+      done had she not been able sometimes to scold the invalid for not strictly
+      obeying the doctor’s orders?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You’ll never get well like that,” she would say, forgetting her
+      grief in her vexation, “if you won’t obey the doctor and take your
+      medicine at the right time! You mustn’t trifle with it, you know, or it may
+      turn to <i>pneumonia</i>,” she would go on, deriving much comfort from the
+      utterance of that foreign word, incomprehensible to others as well as to herself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      What would Sónya have done without the glad consciousness that she had not
+      undressed during the first three nights, in order to be ready to carry out
+      all the doctor’s injunctions with precision, and that she still kept awake
+      at night so as not to miss the proper time when the slightly harmful pills
+      in the little gilt box had to be administered? Even to Natásha herself it
+      was pleasant to see that so many sacrifices were being made for her sake,
+      and to know that she had to take medicine at certain hours, though she
+      declared that no medicine would cure her and that it was all nonsense. And
+      it was even pleasant to be able to show, by disregarding the orders, that
+      she did not believe in medical treatment and did not value her life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The doctor came every day, felt her pulse, looked at her tongue, and
+      regardless of her grief-stricken face joked with her. But when he had gone
+      into another room, to which the countess hurriedly followed him, he
+      assumed a grave air and thoughtfully shaking his head said that though
+      there was danger, he had hopes of the effect of this last medicine and one
+      must wait and see, that the malady was chiefly mental, but... And the
+      countess, trying to conceal the action from herself and from him, slipped
+      a gold coin into his hand and always returned to the patient with a more
+      tranquil mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The symptoms of Natásha’s illness were that she ate little, slept little,
+      coughed, and was always low-spirited. The doctors said that she could not
+      get on without medical treatment, so they kept her in the stifling
+      atmosphere of the town, and the Rostóvs did not move to the country that
+      summer of 1812.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In spite of the many pills she swallowed and the drops and powders out of
+      the little bottles and boxes of which Madame Schoss who was fond of such
+      things made a large collection, and in spite of being deprived of the
+      country life to which she was accustomed, youth prevailed. Natásha’s grief
+      began to be overlaid by the impressions of daily life, it ceased to press
+      so painfully on her heart, it gradually faded into the past, and she began
+      to recover physically.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0184"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Natásha was calmer but no happier. She not merely avoided all external
+      forms of pleasure—balls, promenades, concerts, and theaters—but
+      she never laughed without a sound of tears in her laughter. She could not
+      sing. As soon as she began to laugh, or tried to sing by herself, tears
+      choked her: tears of remorse, tears at the recollection of those pure
+      times which could never return, tears of vexation that she should so
+      uselessly have ruined her young life which might have been so happy.
+      Laughter and singing in particular seemed to her like a blasphemy, in face
+      of her sorrow. Without any need of self-restraint, no wish to coquet ever
+      entered her head. She said and felt at that time that no man was more to
+      her than Nastásya Ivánovna, the buffoon. Something stood sentinel within
+      her and forbade her every joy. Besides, she had lost all the old interests
+      of her carefree girlish life that had been so full of hope. The previous
+      autumn, the hunting, “Uncle,” and the Christmas holidays spent with
+      Nicholas at Otrádnoe were what she recalled oftenest and most painfully.
+      What would she not have given to bring back even a single day of that
+      time! But it was gone forever. Her presentiment at the time had not
+      deceived her—that that state of freedom and readiness for any
+      enjoyment would not return again. Yet it was necessary to live on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It comforted her to reflect that she was not better as she had formerly
+      imagined, but worse, much worse, than anybody else in the world. But this
+      was not enough. She knew that, and asked herself, “What next?” But there
+      was nothing to come. There was no joy in life, yet life was passing.
+      Natásha apparently tried not to be a burden or a hindrance to anyone, but
+      wanted nothing for herself. She kept away from everyone in the house and
+      felt at ease only with her brother Pétya. She liked to be with him better
+      than with the others, and when alone with him she sometimes laughed. She
+      hardly ever left the house and of those who came to see them was glad to
+      see only one person, Pierre. It would have been impossible to treat her
+      with more delicacy, greater care, and at the same time more seriously than
+      did Count Bezúkhov. Natásha unconsciously felt this delicacy and so found
+      great pleasure in his society. But she was not even grateful to him for
+      it; nothing good on Pierre’s part seemed to her to be an effort, it seemed
+      so natural for him to be kind to everyone that there was no merit in his
+      kindness. Sometimes Natásha noticed embarrassment and awkwardness on his
+      part in her presence, especially when he wanted to do something to please
+      her, or feared that something they spoke of would awaken memories
+      distressing to her. She noticed this and attributed it to his general
+      kindness and shyness, which she imagined must be the same toward everyone
+      as it was to her. After those involuntary words—that if he were free
+      he would have asked on his knees for her hand and her love—uttered
+      at a moment when she was so strongly agitated, Pierre never spoke to
+      Natásha of his feelings; and it seemed plain to her that those words,
+      which had then so comforted her, were spoken as all sorts of meaningless
+      words are spoken to comfort a crying child. It was not because Pierre was
+      a married man, but because Natásha felt very strongly with him that moral
+      barrier the absence of which she had experienced with Kurágin that it
+      never entered her head that the relations between him and herself could
+      lead to love on her part, still less on his, or even to the kind of
+      tender, self-conscious, romantic friendship between a man and a woman of
+      which she had known several instances.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before the end of the fast of St. Peter, Agraféna Ivánovna Belóva, a
+      country neighbor of the Rostóvs, came to Moscow to pay her devotions at
+      the shrines of the Moscow saints. She suggested that Natásha should fast
+      and prepare for Holy Communion, and Natásha gladly welcomed the idea.
+      Despite the doctor’s orders that she should not go out early in the
+      morning, Natásha insisted on fasting and preparing for the sacrament, not
+      as they generally prepared for it in the Rostóv family by attending three
+      services in their own house, but as Agraféna Ivánovna did, by going to
+      church every day for a week and not once missing Vespers, Matins, or Mass.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess was pleased with Natásha’s zeal; after the poor results of
+      the medical treatment, in the depths of her heart she hoped that prayer
+      might help her daughter more than medicines and, though not without fear
+      and concealing it from the doctor, she agreed to Natásha’s wish and
+      entrusted her to Belóva. Agraféna Ivánovna used to come to wake Natásha at
+      three in the morning, but generally found her already awake. She was
+      afraid of being late for Matins. Hastily washing, and meekly putting on
+      her shabbiest dress and an old mantilla, Natásha, shivering in the fresh
+      air, went out into the deserted streets lit by the clear light of dawn. By
+      Agraféna Ivánovna’s advice Natásha prepared herself not in their own
+      parish, but at a church where, according to the devout Agraféna Ivánovna,
+      the priest was a man of very severe and lofty life. There were never many
+      people in the church; Natásha always stood beside Belóva in the customary
+      place before an icon of the Blessed Virgin, let into the screen before the
+      choir on the left side, and a feeling, new to her, of humility before
+      something great and incomprehensible, seized her when at that unusual
+      morning hour, gazing at the dark face of the Virgin illuminated by the
+      candles burning before it and by the morning light falling from the
+      window, she listened to the words of the service which she tried to follow
+      with understanding. When she understood them her personal feeling became
+      interwoven in the prayers with shades of its own. When she did not
+      understand, it was sweeter still to think that the wish to understand
+      everything is pride, that it is impossible to understand all, that it is
+      only necessary to believe and to commit oneself to God, whom she felt
+      guiding her soul at those moments. She crossed herself, bowed low, and
+      when she did not understand, in horror at her own vileness, simply asked
+      God to forgive her everything, everything, to have mercy upon her. The
+      prayers to which she surrendered herself most of all were those of
+      repentance. On her way home at an early hour when she met no one but
+      bricklayers going to work or men sweeping the street, and everybody within
+      the houses was still asleep, Natásha experienced a feeling new to her, a
+      sense of the possibility of correcting her faults, the possibility of a
+      new, clean life, and of happiness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the whole week she spent in this way, that feeling grew every day.
+      And the happiness of taking communion, or “communing” as Agraféna
+      Ivánovna, joyously playing with the word, called it, seemed to Natásha so
+      great that she felt she should never live till that blessed Sunday.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the happy day came, and on that memorable Sunday, when, dressed in
+      white muslin, she returned home after communion, for the first time for
+      many months she felt calm and not oppressed by the thought of the life
+      that lay before her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The doctor who came to see her that day ordered her to continue the
+      powders he had prescribed a fortnight previously.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She must certainly go on taking them morning and evening,” said he,
+      evidently sincerely satisfied with his success. “Only, please be
+      particular about it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Be quite easy,” he continued playfully, as he adroitly took the gold coin
+      in his palm. “She will soon be singing and frolicking about. The last
+      medicine has done her a very great deal of good. She has freshened up very
+      much.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The countess, with a cheerful expression on her face, looked down at her
+      nails and spat a little for luck as she returned to the drawing room.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0185"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At the beginning of July more and more disquieting reports about the war
+      began to spread in Moscow; people spoke of an appeal by the Emperor to the
+      people, and of his coming himself from the army to Moscow. And as up to
+      the eleventh of July no manifesto or appeal had been received, exaggerated
+      reports became current about them and about the position of Russia. It was
+      said that the Emperor was leaving the army because it was in danger, it
+      was said that Smolénsk had surrendered, that Napoleon had an army of a
+      million and only a miracle could save Russia.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the eleventh of July, which was Saturday, the manifesto was received
+      but was not yet in print, and Pierre, who was at the Rostóvs’, promised to
+      come to dinner next day, Sunday, and bring a copy of the manifesto and
+      appeal, which he would obtain from Count Rostopchín.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That Sunday, the Rostóvs went to Mass at the Razumóvskis’ private chapel
+      as usual. It was a hot July day. Even at ten o’clock, when the Rostóvs got
+      out of their carriage at the chapel, the sultry air, the shouts of
+      hawkers, the light and gay summer clothes of the crowd, the dusty leaves
+      of the trees on the boulevard, the sounds of the band and the white
+      trousers of a battalion marching to parade, the rattling of wheels on the
+      cobblestones, and the brilliant, hot sunshine were all full of that summer
+      languor, that content and discontent with the present, which is most
+      strongly felt on a bright, hot day in town. All the Moscow notabilities,
+      all the Rostóvs’ acquaintances, were at the Razumóvskis’ chapel, for, as
+      if expecting something to happen, many wealthy families who usually left
+      town for their country estates had not gone away that summer. As Natásha,
+      at her mother’s side, passed through the crowd behind a liveried footman
+      who cleared the way for them, she heard a young man speaking about her in
+      too loud a whisper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s Rostóva, the one who...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “She’s much thinner, but all the same she’s pretty!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She heard, or thought she heard, the names of Kurágin and Bolkónski. But
+      she was always imagining that. It always seemed to her that everyone who
+      looked at her was thinking only of what had happened to her. With a
+      sinking heart, wretched as she always was now when she found herself in a
+      crowd, Natásha in her lilac silk dress trimmed with black lace walked—as
+      women can walk—with the more repose and stateliness the greater the
+      pain and shame in her soul. She knew for certain that she was pretty, but
+      this no longer gave her satisfaction as it used to. On the contrary it
+      tormented her more than anything else of late, and particularly so on this
+      bright, hot summer day in town. “It’s Sunday again—another week
+      past,” she thought, recalling that she had been here the Sunday before,
+      “and always the same life that is no life, and the same surroundings in
+      which it used to be so easy to live. I’m pretty, I’m young, and I know
+      that now I am good. I used to be bad, but now I know I am good,” she
+      thought, “but yet my best years are slipping by and are no good to
+      anyone.” She stood by her mother’s side and exchanged nods with
+      acquaintances near her. From habit she scrutinized the ladies’ dresses,
+      condemned the bearing of a lady standing close by who was not crossing
+      herself properly but in a cramped manner, and again she thought with
+      vexation that she was herself being judged and was judging others, and
+      suddenly, at the sound of the service, she felt horrified at her own
+      vileness, horrified that the former purity of her soul was again lost to
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A comely, fresh-looking old man was conducting the service with that mild
+      solemnity which has so elevating and soothing an effect on the souls of
+      the worshipers. The gates of the sanctuary screen were closed, the curtain
+      was slowly drawn, and from behind it a soft mysterious voice pronounced
+      some words. Tears, the cause of which she herself did not understand, made
+      Natásha’s breast heave, and a joyous but oppressive feeling agitated her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Teach me what I should do, how to live my life, how I may grow good
+      forever, forever!” she pleaded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The deacon came out onto the raised space before the altar screen and,
+      holding his thumb extended, drew his long hair from under his dalmatic
+      and, making the sign of the cross on his breast, began in a loud and
+      solemn voice to recite the words of the prayer....
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In peace let us pray unto the Lord.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “As one community, without distinction of class, without enmity, united by
+      brotherly love—let us pray!” thought Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “For the peace that is from above, and for the salvation of our souls.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “For the world of angels and all the spirits who dwell above us,” prayed
+      Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When they prayed for the warriors, she thought of her brother and Denísov.
+      When they prayed for all traveling by land and sea, she remembered Prince
+      Andrew, prayed for him, and asked God to forgive her all the wrongs she
+      had done him. When they prayed for those who love us, she prayed for the
+      members of her own family, her father and mother and Sónya, realizing for
+      the first time how wrongly she had acted toward them, and feeling all the
+      strength of her love for them. When they prayed for those who hate us, she
+      tried to think of her enemies and people who hated her, in order to pray
+      for them. She included among her enemies the creditors and all who had
+      business dealings with her father, and always at the thought of enemies
+      and those who hated her she remembered Anatole who had done her so much
+      harm—and though he did not hate her she gladly prayed for him as for
+      an enemy. Only at prayer did she feel able to think clearly and calmly of
+      Prince Andrew and Anatole, as men for whom her feelings were as nothing
+      compared with her awe and devotion to God. When they prayed for the
+      Imperial family and the Synod, she bowed very low and made the sign of the
+      cross, saying to herself that even if she did not understand, still she
+      could not doubt, and at any rate loved the governing Synod and prayed for
+      it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he had finished the Litany the deacon crossed the stole over his
+      breast and said, “Let us commit ourselves and our whole lives to Christ
+      the Lord!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Commit ourselves to God,” Natásha inwardly repeated. “Lord God, I submit
+      myself to Thy will!” she thought. “I want nothing, wish for nothing; teach
+      me what to do and how to use my will! Take me, take me!” prayed Natásha,
+      with impatient emotion in her heart, not crossing herself but letting her
+      slender arms hang down as if expecting some invisible power at any moment
+      to take her and deliver her from herself, from her regrets, desires,
+      remorse, hopes, and sins.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess looked round several times at her daughter’s softened face
+      and shining eyes and prayed God to help her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Unexpectedly, in the middle of the service, and not in the usual order
+      Natásha knew so well, the deacon brought out a small stool, the one he
+      knelt on when praying on Trinity Sunday, and placed it before the doors of
+      the sanctuary screen. The priest came out with his purple velvet biretta
+      on his head, adjusted his hair, and knelt down with an effort. Everybody
+      followed his example and they looked at one another in surprise. Then came
+      the prayer just received from the Synod—a prayer for the deliverance
+      of Russia from hostile invasion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lord God of might, God of our salvation!” began the priest in that voice,
+      clear, not grandiloquent but mild, in which only the Slav clergy read and
+      which acts so irresistibly on a Russian heart.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lord God of might, God of our salvation! Look this day in mercy and
+      blessing on Thy humble people, and graciously hear us, spare us, and have
+      mercy upon us! This foe confounding Thy land, desiring to lay waste the
+      whole world, rises against us; these lawless men are gathered together to
+      overthrow Thy kingdom, to destroy Thy dear Jerusalem, Thy beloved Russia;
+      to defile Thy temples, to overthrow Thine altars, and to desecrate our
+      holy shrines. How long, O Lord, how long shall the wicked triumph? How
+      long shall they wield unlawful power?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lord God! Hear us when we pray to Thee; strengthen with Thy might our
+      most gracious sovereign lord, the Emperor Alexander Pávlovich; be mindful
+      of his uprightness and meekness, reward him according to his
+      righteousness, and let it preserve us, Thy chosen Israel! Bless his
+      counsels, his undertakings, and his work; strengthen his kingdom by Thine
+      almighty hand, and give him victory over his enemy, even as Thou gavest
+      Moses the victory over Amalek, Gideon over Midian, and David over Goliath.
+      Preserve his army, put a bow of brass in the hands of those who have armed
+      themselves in Thy Name, and gird their loins with strength for the fight.
+      Take up the spear and shield and arise to help us; confound and put to
+      shame those who have devised evil against us, may they be before the faces
+      of Thy faithful warriors as dust before the wind, and may Thy mighty Angel
+      confound them and put them to flight; may they be ensnared when they know
+      it not, and may the plots they have laid in secret be turned against them;
+      let them fall before Thy servants’ feet and be laid low by our hosts!
+      Lord, Thou art able to save both great and small; Thou art God, and man
+      cannot prevail against Thee!
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “God of our fathers! Remember Thy bounteous mercy and loving-kindness
+      which are from of old; turn not Thy face from us, but be gracious to our
+      unworthiness, and in Thy great goodness and Thy many mercies regard not
+      our transgressions and iniquities! Create in us a clean heart and renew a
+      right spirit within us, strengthen us all in Thy faith, fortify our hope,
+      inspire us with true love one for another, arm us with unity of spirit in
+      the righteous defense of the heritage Thou gavest to us and to our
+      fathers, and let not the scepter of the wicked be exalted against the
+      destiny of those Thou hast sanctified.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “O Lord our God, in whom we believe and in whom we put our trust, let us
+      not be confounded in our hope of Thy mercy, and give us a token of Thy
+      blessing, that those who hate us and our Orthodox faith may see it and be
+      put to shame and perish, and may all the nations know that Thou art the
+      Lord and we are Thy people. Show Thy mercy upon us this day, O Lord, and
+      grant us Thy salvation; make the hearts of Thy servants to rejoice in Thy
+      mercy; smite down our enemies and destroy them swiftly beneath the feet of
+      Thy faithful servants! For Thou art the defense, the succor, and the
+      victory of them that put their trust in Thee, and to Thee be all glory, to
+      Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, now and forever, world without end. Amen.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In Natásha’s receptive condition of soul this prayer affected her
+      strongly. She listened to every word about the victory of Moses over
+      Amalek, of Gideon over Midian, and of David over Goliath, and about the
+      destruction of “Thy Jerusalem,” and she prayed to God with the tenderness
+      and emotion with which her heart was overflowing, but without fully
+      understanding what she was asking of God in that prayer. She shared with
+      all her heart in the prayer for the spirit of righteousness, for the
+      strengthening of the heart by faith and hope, and its animation by love.
+      But she could not pray that her enemies might be trampled under foot when
+      but a few minutes before she had been wishing she had more of them that
+      she might pray for them. But neither could she doubt the righteousness of
+      the prayer that was being read on bended knees. She felt in her heart a
+      devout and tremulous awe at the thought of the punishment that overtakes
+      men for their sins, and especially of her own sins, and she prayed to God
+      to forgive them all, and her too, and to give them all, and her too, peace
+      and happiness. And it seemed to her that God heard her prayer.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0186"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      From the day when Pierre, after leaving the Rostóvs’ with Natásha’s
+      grateful look fresh in his mind, had gazed at the comet that seemed to be
+      fixed in the sky and felt that something new was appearing on his own
+      horizon—from that day the problem of the vanity and uselessness of
+      all earthly things, that had incessantly tormented him, no longer
+      presented itself. That terrible question “Why?” “Wherefore?” which had
+      come to him amid every occupation, was now replaced, not by another
+      question or by a reply to the former question, but by <i>her</i> image. When he
+      listened to, or himself took part in, trivial conversations, when he read
+      or heard of human baseness or folly, he was not horrified as formerly, and
+      did not ask himself why men struggled so about these things when all is so
+      transient and incomprehensible—but he remembered her as he had last
+      seen her, and all his doubts vanished—not because she had answered
+      the questions that had haunted him, but because his conception of her
+      transferred him instantly to another, a brighter, realm of spiritual
+      activity in which no one could be justified or guilty—a realm of
+      beauty and love which it was worth living for. Whatever worldly baseness
+      presented itself to him, he said to himself:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, supposing N. N. has swindled the country and the Tsar, and the
+      country and the Tsar confer honors upon him, what does that matter? She
+      smiled at me yesterday and asked me to come again, and I love her, and no
+      one will ever know it.” And his soul felt calm and peaceful.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre still went into society, drank as much and led the same idle and
+      dissipated life, because besides the hours he spent at the Rostóvs’ there
+      were other hours he had to spend somehow, and the habits and acquaintances
+      he had made in Moscow formed a current that bore him along irresistibly.
+      But latterly, when more and more disquieting reports came from the seat of
+      war and Natásha’s health began to improve and she no longer aroused in him
+      the former feeling of careful pity, an ever-increasing restlessness, which
+      he could not explain, took possession of him. He felt that the condition
+      he was in could not continue long, that a catastrophe was coming which
+      would change his whole life, and he impatiently sought everywhere for
+      signs of that approaching catastrophe. One of his brother Masons had
+      revealed to Pierre the following prophecy concerning Napoleon, drawn from
+      the Revelation of St. John.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In chapter 13, verse 18, of the Apocalypse, it is said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the
+      beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred
+      threescore and six.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And in the fifth verse of the same chapter:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and
+      blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two
+      months.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      The French alphabet, written out with the same numerical values as the
+      Hebrew, in which the first nine letters denote units and the others tens,
+      will have the following significance:
+    </p>
+<pre>
+      a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   k
+      1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10
+       l    m    n    o    p    q    r    s
+      20   30   40   50   60   70   80   90
+             t    u    v    w    x    y
+            100  110  120  130  140  150
+                        z
+                       160
+</pre>
+<p>
+      Writing the words <i>L’Empereur Napoléon</i> in numbers, it appears that the
+      sum of them is 666, and that Napoleon was therefore the beast foretold in the
+      Apocalypse. Moreover, by applying the same system to the words
+      <i>quarante-deux</i>, * which was the term allowed to the beast that “spoke
+      great things and blasphemies,” the same number 666 was obtained; from which it
+      followed that the limit fixed for Napoleon’s power had come in the year
+      1812 when the French emperor was forty-two. This prophecy pleased Pierre
+      very much and he often asked himself what would put an end to the power of
+      the beast, that is, of Napoleon, and tried by the same system of using
+      letters as numbers and adding them up, to find an answer to the question
+      that engrossed him. He wrote the words <i>L’Empereur Alexandre, La nation
+      russe</i> and added up their numbers, but the sums were either more or less
+      than 666. Once when making such calculations he wrote down his own name in
+      French, Comte Pierre Besouhoff, but the sum of the numbers did not come
+      right. Then he changed the spelling, substituting a <i>z</i> for the <i>s</i> and
+      adding <i>de</i> and the article <i>le</i>, still without obtaining the desired
+      result. Then it occurred to him: if the answer to the question were contained in
+      his name, his nationality would also be given in the answer. So he wrote <i>Le
+      russe Besuhof</i> and adding up the numbers got 671. This was only five too much,
+      and five was represented by <i>e</i>, the very letter elided from the article
+      <i>le</i> before the word <i>Empereur</i>. By omitting the <i>e</i>, though
+      incorrectly, Pierre got the answer he sought. <i>L’russe Besuhof</i> made
+      666. This discovery excited him. How, or by what means, he was connected with the
+      great event foretold in the Apocalypse he did not know, but he did not doubt that
+      connection for a moment. His love for Natásha, Antichrist, Napoleon, the invasion,
+      the comet, 666, <i>L’Empereur Napoléon</i>, and <i>L’russe
+      Besuhof</i>—all this had to mature and culminate, to lift him out of that
+      spellbound, petty sphere of Moscow habits in which he felt himself held captive and
+      lead him to a great achievement and great happiness.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Forty-two.
+</p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      On the eve of the Sunday when the special prayer was read, Pierre had
+      promised the Rostóvs to bring them, from Count Rostopchín whom he knew
+      well, both the appeal to the people and the news from the army. In the
+      morning, when he went to call at Rostopchín’s he met there a courier fresh
+      from the army, an acquaintance of his own, who often danced at Moscow
+      balls.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do, please, for heaven’s sake, relieve me of something!” said the
+      courier. “I have a sackful of letters to parents.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Among these letters was one from Nicholas Rostóv to his father. Pierre
+      took that letter, and Rostopchín also gave him the Emperor’s appeal to
+      Moscow, which had just been printed, the last army orders, and his own
+      most recent bulletin. Glancing through the army orders, Pierre found in
+      one of them, in the lists of killed, wounded, and rewarded, the name of
+      Nicholas Rostóv, awarded a St. George’s Cross of the Fourth Class for
+      courage shown in the Ostróvna affair, and in the same order the name of
+      Prince Andrew Bolkónski, appointed to the command of a regiment of
+      Chasseurs. Though he did not want to remind the Rostóvs of Bolkónski,
+      Pierre could not refrain from making them happy by the news of their son’s
+      having received a decoration, so he sent that printed army order and
+      Nicholas’ letter to the Rostóvs, keeping the appeal, the bulletin, and the
+      other orders to take with him when he went to dinner.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His conversation with Count Rostopchín and the latter’s tone of anxious
+      hurry, the meeting with the courier who talked casually of how badly
+      things were going in the army, the rumors of the discovery of spies in
+      Moscow and of a leaflet in circulation stating that Napoleon promised to
+      be in both the Russian capitals by the autumn, and the talk of the
+      Emperor’s being expected to arrive next day—all aroused with fresh
+      force that feeling of agitation and expectation in Pierre which he had
+      been conscious of ever since the appearance of the comet, and especially
+      since the beginning of the war.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He had long been thinking of entering the army and would have done so had
+      he not been hindered, first, by his membership of the Society of
+      Freemasons to which he was bound by oath and which preached perpetual
+      peace and the abolition of war, and secondly, by the fact that when he saw
+      the great mass of Muscovites who had donned uniform and were talking
+      patriotism, he somehow felt ashamed to take the step. But the chief reason
+      for not carrying out his intention to enter the army lay in the vague idea
+      that he was <i>L’russe Besuhof</i> who had the number of the beast, 666; that
+      his part in the great affair of setting a limit to the power of the beast that
+      spoke great and blasphemous things had been predestined from eternity, and
+      that therefore he ought not to undertake anything, but wait for what was
+      bound to come to pass.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0187"></a>
+      CHAPTER XX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      A few intimate friends were dining with the Rostóvs that day, as usual on
+      Sundays.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre came early so as to find them alone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He had grown so stout this year that he would have been abnormal had he
+      not been so tall, so broad of limb, and so strong that he carried his bulk
+      with evident ease.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He went up the stairs, puffing and muttering something. His coachman did
+      not even ask whether he was to wait. He knew that when his master was at
+      the Rostóvs’ he stayed till midnight. The Rostóvs’ footman rushed eagerly
+      forward to help him off with his cloak and take his hat and stick. Pierre,
+      from club habit, always left both hat and stick in the anteroom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The first person he saw in the house was Natásha. Even before he saw her,
+      while taking off his cloak, he heard her. She was practicing solfa
+      exercises in the music room. He knew that she had not sung since her
+      illness, and so the sound of her voice surprised and delighted him. He
+      opened the door softly and saw her, in the lilac dress she had worn at
+      church, walking about the room singing. She had her back to him when he
+      opened the door, but when, turning quickly, she saw his broad, surprised
+      face, she blushed and came rapidly up to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I want to try to sing again,” she said, adding as if by way of excuse,
+      “it is, at least, something to do.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s capital!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How glad I am you’ve come! I am so happy today,” she said, with the old
+      animation Pierre had not seen in her for a long time. “You know Nicholas
+      has received a St. George’s Cross? I am so proud of him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes, I sent that announcement. But I don’t want to interrupt you,” he
+      added, and was about to go to the drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha stopped him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Count, is it wrong of me to sing?” she said blushing, and fixing her eyes
+      inquiringly on him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No... Why should it be? On the contrary... But why do you ask me?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t know myself,” Natásha answered quickly, “but I should not like to
+      do anything you disapproved of. I believe in you completely. You don’t
+      know how important you are to me, how much you’ve done for me....” She
+      spoke rapidly and did not notice how Pierre flushed at her words. “I saw
+      in that same army order that <i>he</i>, Bolkónski” (she whispered the name
+      hastily), “is in Russia, and in the army again. What do you think?”—she
+      was speaking hurriedly, evidently afraid her strength might fail her—“Will
+      he ever forgive me? Will he not always have a bitter feeling toward me?
+      What do you think? What do you think?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I think...” Pierre replied, “that he has nothing to forgive.... If I were
+      in his place...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      By association of ideas, Pierre was at once carried back to the day when,
+      trying to comfort her, he had said that if he were not himself but the
+      best man in the world and free, he would ask on his knees for her hand;
+      and the same feeling of pity, tenderness, and love took possession of him
+      and the same words rose to his lips. But she did not give him time to say
+      them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, you... you...” she said, uttering the word <i>you</i>
+      rapturously—“that’s a different thing. I know no one kinder, more
+      generous, or better than you; nobody could be! Had you not been there then, and now
+      too, I don’t know what would have become of me, because...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Tears suddenly rose in her eyes, she turned away, lifted her music before
+      her eyes, began singing again, and again began walking up and down the
+      room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just then Pétya came running in from the drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya was now a handsome rosy lad of fifteen with full red lips and
+      resembled Natásha. He was preparing to enter the university, but he and
+      his friend Obolénski had lately, in secret, agreed to join the hussars.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya had come rushing out to talk to his namesake about this affair. He
+      had asked Pierre to find out whether he would be accepted in the hussars.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre walked up and down the drawing room, not listening to what Pétya
+      was saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya pulled him by the arm to attract his attention.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, what about my plan? Peter Kirílych, for heaven’s sake! You are my
+      only hope,” said Pétya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes, your plan. To join the hussars? I’ll mention it, I’ll bring it
+      all up today.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, <i>mon cher</i>, have you got the manifesto?” asked the old count. “The
+      countess has been to Mass at the Razumóvskis’ and heard the new prayer.
+      She says it’s very fine.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I’ve got it,” said Pierre. “The Emperor is to be here tomorrow...
+      there’s to be an Extraordinary Meeting of the nobility, and they are
+      talking of a levy of ten men per thousand. Oh yes, let me congratulate
+      you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, thank God! Well, and what news from the army?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “We are again retreating. They say we’re already near Smolénsk,” replied
+      Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “O Lord, O Lord!” exclaimed the count. “Where is the manifesto?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The Emperor’s appeal? Oh yes!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre began feeling in his pockets for the papers, but could not find
+      them. Still slapping his pockets, he kissed the hand of the countess who
+      entered the room and glanced uneasily around, evidently expecting Natásha,
+      who had left off singing but had not yet come into the drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “On my word, I don’t know what I’ve done with it,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There he is, always losing everything!” remarked the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha entered with a softened and agitated expression of face and sat
+      down looking silently at Pierre. As soon as she entered, Pierre’s
+      features, which had been gloomy, suddenly lighted up, and while still
+      searching for the papers he glanced at her several times.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, really! I’ll drive home, I must have left them there. I’ll
+      certainly...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But you’ll be late for dinner.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh! And my coachman has gone.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But Sónya, who had gone to look for the papers in the anteroom, had found
+      them in Pierre’s hat, where he had carefully tucked them under the lining.
+      Pierre was about to begin reading.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, after dinner,” said the old count, evidently expecting much enjoyment
+      from that reading.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At dinner, at which champagne was drunk to the health of the new chevalier
+      of St. George, Shinshín told them the town news, of the illness of the old
+      Georgian princess, of Métivier’s disappearance from Moscow, and of how
+      some German fellow had been brought to Rostopchín and accused of being a
+      French “spyer” (so Count Rostopchín had told the story), and how
+      Rostopchín let him go and assured the people that he was “not a spire at
+      all, but only an old German ruin.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “People are being arrested...” said the count. “I’ve told the countess she
+      should not speak French so much. It’s not the time for it now.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And have you heard?” Shinshín asked. “Prince Golítsyn has engaged a
+      master to teach him Russian. It is becoming dangerous to speak French in
+      the streets.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And how about you, Count Peter Kirílych? If they call up the militia, you
+      too will have to mount a horse,” remarked the old count, addressing
+      Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre had been silent and preoccupied all through dinner, seeming not to
+      grasp what was said. He looked at the count.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes, the war,” he said. “No! What sort of warrior should I make? And
+      yet everything is so strange, so strange! I can’t make it out. I don’t
+      know, I am very far from having military tastes, but in these times no one
+      can answer for himself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      After dinner the count settled himself comfortably in an easy chair and
+      with a serious face asked Sónya, who was considered an excellent reader,
+      to read the appeal.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To Moscow, our ancient Capital!
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The enemy has entered the borders of Russia with immense forces. He comes
+      to despoil our beloved country.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya read painstakingly in her high-pitched voice. The count listened
+      with closed eyes, heaving abrupt sighs at certain passages.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha sat erect, gazing with a searching look now at her father and now
+      at Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre felt her eyes on him and tried not to look round. The countess
+      shook her head disapprovingly and angrily at every solemn expression in
+      the manifesto. In all these words she saw only that the danger threatening
+      her son would not soon be over. Shinshín, with a sarcastic smile on his
+      lips, was evidently preparing to make fun of anything that gave him the
+      opportunity: Sónya’s reading, any remark of the count’s, or even the
+      manifesto itself should no better pretext present itself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After reading about the dangers that threatened Russia, the hopes the
+      Emperor placed on Moscow and especially on its illustrious nobility,
+      Sónya, with a quiver in her voice due chiefly to the attention that was
+      being paid to her, read the last words:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We ourselves will not delay to appear among our people in that Capital
+      and in other parts of our realm for consultation, and for the direction of
+      all our levies, both those now barring the enemy’s path and those freshly
+      formed to defeat him wherever he may appear. May the ruin he hopes to
+      bring upon us recoil on his own head, and may Europe delivered from
+      bondage glorify the name of Russia!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, that’s it!” cried the count, opening his moist eyes and sniffing
+      repeatedly, as if a strong vinaigrette had been held to his nose; and he
+      added, “Let the Emperor but say the word and we’ll sacrifice everything
+      and begrudge nothing.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Before Shinshín had time to utter the joke he was ready to make on the
+      count’s patriotism, Natásha jumped up from her place and ran to her
+      father.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a darling our Papa is!” she cried, kissing him, and she again looked
+      at Pierre with the unconscious coquetry that had returned to her with her
+      better spirits.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There! Here’s a patriot for you!” said Shinshín.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Not a patriot at all, but simply...” Natásha replied in an injured tone.
+      “Everything seems funny to you, but this isn’t at all a joke....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “A joke indeed!” put in the count. “Let him but say the word and we’ll all
+      go.... We’re not Germans!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But did you notice, it says, ‘for consultation’?” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Never mind what it’s for....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At this moment, Pétya, to whom nobody was paying any attention, came up to
+      his father with a very flushed face and said in his breaking voice that
+      was now deep and now shrill:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, Papa, I tell you definitely, and Mamma too, it’s as you please, but
+      I say definitely that you must let me enter the army, because I can’t...
+      that’s all....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The countess, in dismay, looked up to heaven, clasped her hands, and
+      turned angrily to her husband.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That comes of your talking!” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the count had already recovered from his excitement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come, come!” said he. “Here’s a fine warrior! No! Nonsense! You must
+      study.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s not nonsense, Papa. Fédya Obolénski is younger than I, and he’s
+      going too. Besides, all the same I can’t study now when...” Pétya stopped
+      short, flushed till he perspired, but still got out the words, “when our
+      Fatherland is in danger.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That’ll do, that’ll do—nonsense....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But you said yourself that we would sacrifice everything.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Pétya! Be quiet, I tell you!” cried the count, with a glance at his wife,
+      who had turned pale and was staring fixedly at her son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I tell you—Peter Kirílych here will also tell you...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Nonsense, I tell you. Your mother’s milk has hardly dried on your lips
+      and you want to go into the army! There, there, I tell you,” and the count
+      moved to go out of the room, taking the papers, probably to reread them in
+      his study before having a nap.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, Peter Kirílych, let’s go and have a smoke,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was agitated and undecided. Natásha’s unwontedly brilliant eyes,
+      continually glancing at him with a more than cordial look, had reduced him
+      to this condition.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I think I’ll go home.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Home? Why, you meant to spend the evening with us.... You don’t often
+      come nowadays as it is, and this girl of mine,” said the count
+      good-naturedly, pointing to Natásha, “only brightens up when you’re here.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I had forgotten... I really must go home... business...” said Pierre
+      hurriedly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, then, <i>au revoir!</i>” said the count, and went out of the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why are you going? Why are you upset?” asked Natásha, and she looked
+      challengingly into Pierre’s eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Because I love you!” was what he wanted to say, but he did not say it,
+      and only blushed till the tears came, and lowered his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Because it is better for me to come less often... because... No, simply I
+      have business....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why? No, tell me!” Natásha began resolutely and suddenly stopped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They looked at each other with dismayed and embarrassed faces. He tried to
+      smile but could not: his smile expressed suffering, and he silently kissed
+      her hand and went out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre made up his mind not to go to the Rostóvs’ any more.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0188"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After the definite refusal he had received, Pétya went to his room and
+      there locked himself in and wept bitterly. When he came in to tea, silent,
+      morose, and with tear-stained face, everybody pretended not to notice
+      anything.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day the Emperor arrived in Moscow, and several of the Rostóvs’
+      domestic serfs begged permission to go to have a look at him. That morning
+      Pétya was a long time dressing and arranging his hair and collar to look
+      like a grown-up man. He frowned before his looking glass, gesticulated,
+      shrugged his shoulders, and finally, without saying a word to anyone, took
+      his cap and left the house by the back door, trying to avoid notice. Pétya
+      decided to go straight to where the Emperor was and to explain frankly to
+      some gentleman-in-waiting (he imagined the Emperor to be always surrounded
+      by gentlemen-in-waiting) that he, Count Rostóv, in spite of his youth
+      wished to serve his country; that youth could be no hindrance to loyalty,
+      and that he was ready to... While dressing, Pétya had prepared many fine
+      things he meant to say to the gentleman-in-waiting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was on the very fact of being so young that Pétya counted for success
+      in reaching the Emperor—he even thought how surprised everyone would
+      be at his youthfulness—and yet in the arrangement of his collar and
+      hair and by his sedate deliberate walk he wished to appear a grown-up man.
+      But the farther he went and the more his attention was diverted by the
+      ever-increasing crowds moving toward the Krémlin, the less he remembered
+      to walk with the sedateness and deliberation of a man. As he approached
+      the Krémlin he even began to avoid being crushed and resolutely stuck out
+      his elbows in a menacing way. But within the Trinity Gateway he was so
+      pressed to the wall by people who probably were unaware of the patriotic
+      intentions with which he had come that in spite of all his determination
+      he had to give in, and stop while carriages passed in, rumbling beneath
+      the archway. Beside Pétya stood a peasant woman, a footman, two tradesmen,
+      and a discharged soldier. After standing some time in the gateway, Pétya
+      tried to move forward in front of the others without waiting for all the
+      carriages to pass, and he began resolutely working his way with his
+      elbows, but the woman just in front of him, who was the first against whom
+      he directed his efforts, angrily shouted at him:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What are you shoving for, young lordling? Don’t you see we’re all
+      standing still? Then why push?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Anybody can shove,” said the footman, and also began working his elbows
+      to such effect that he pushed Pétya into a very filthy corner of the
+      gateway.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya wiped his perspiring face with his hands and pulled up the damp
+      collar which he had arranged so well at home to seem like a man’s.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He felt that he no longer looked presentable, and feared that if he were
+      now to approach the gentlemen-in-waiting in that plight he would not be
+      admitted to the Emperor. But it was impossible to smarten oneself up or
+      move to another place, because of the crowd. One of the generals who drove
+      past was an acquaintance of the Rostóvs’, and Pétya thought of asking his
+      help, but came to the conclusion that that would not be a manly thing to
+      do. When the carriages had all passed in, the crowd, carrying Pétya with
+      it, streamed forward into the Krémlin Square which was already full of
+      people. There were people not only in the square, but everywhere—on
+      the slopes and on the roofs. As soon as Pétya found himself in the square
+      he clearly heard the sound of bells and the joyous voices of the crowd
+      that filled the whole Krémlin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For a while the crowd was less dense, but suddenly all heads were bared,
+      and everyone rushed forward in one direction. Pétya was being pressed so
+      that he could scarcely breathe, and everybody shouted, “Hurrah! hurrah!
+      hurrah!” Pétya stood on tiptoe and pushed and pinched, but could see
+      nothing except the people about him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the faces bore the same expression of excitement and enthusiasm. A
+      tradesman’s wife standing beside Pétya sobbed, and the tears ran down her
+      cheeks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Father! Angel! Dear one!” she kept repeating, wiping away her tears with
+      her fingers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hurrah!” was heard on all sides.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For a moment the crowd stood still, but then it made another rush forward.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Quite beside himself, Pétya, clinching his teeth and rolling his eyes
+      ferociously, pushed forward, elbowing his way and shouting “hurrah!” as if
+      he were prepared that instant to kill himself and everyone else, but on
+      both sides of him other people with similarly ferocious faces pushed
+      forward and everybody shouted “hurrah!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “So this is what the Emperor is!” thought Pétya. “No, I can’t petition him
+      myself—that would be too bold.” But in spite of this he continued to
+      struggle desperately forward, and from between the backs of those in front
+      he caught glimpses of an open space with a strip of red cloth spread out
+      on it; but just then the crowd swayed back—the police in front were
+      pushing back those who had pressed too close to the procession: the
+      Emperor was passing from the palace to the Cathedral of the Assumption—and
+      Pétya unexpectedly received such a blow on his side and ribs and was
+      squeezed so hard that suddenly everything grew dim before his eyes and he
+      lost consciousness. When he came to himself, a man of clerical appearance
+      with a tuft of gray hair at the back of his head and wearing a shabby blue
+      cassock—probably a church clerk and chanter—was holding him
+      under the arm with one hand while warding off the pressure of the crowd
+      with the other.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You’ve crushed the young gentleman!” said the clerk. “What are you up to?
+      Gently!... They’ve crushed him, crushed him!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor entered the Cathedral of the Assumption. The crowd spread out
+      again more evenly, and the clerk led Pétya—pale and breathless—to
+      the Tsar-cannon. Several people were sorry for Pétya, and suddenly a crowd
+      turned toward him and pressed round him. Those who stood nearest him
+      attended to him, unbuttoned his coat, seated him on the raised platform of
+      the cannon, and reproached those others (whoever they might be) who had
+      crushed him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One might easily get killed that way! What do they mean by it? Killing
+      people! Poor dear, he’s as white as a sheet!”—various voices were
+      heard saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya soon came to himself, the color returned to his face, the pain had
+      passed, and at the cost of that temporary unpleasantness he had obtained a
+      place by the cannon from where he hoped to see the Emperor who would be
+      returning that way. Pétya no longer thought of presenting his petition. If
+      he could only see the Emperor he would be happy!
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While the service was proceeding in the Cathedral of the Assumption—it
+      was a combined service of prayer on the occasion of the Emperor’s arrival
+      and of thanksgiving for the conclusion of peace with the Turks—the
+      crowd outside spread out and hawkers appeared, selling kvass, gingerbread,
+      and poppyseed sweets (of which Pétya was particularly fond), and ordinary
+      conversation could again be heard. A tradesman’s wife was showing a rent
+      in her shawl and telling how much the shawl had cost; another was saying
+      that all silk goods had now got dear. The clerk who had rescued Pétya was
+      talking to a functionary about the priests who were officiating that day
+      with the bishop. The clerk several times used the word “plenary” (of the
+      service), a word Pétya did not understand. Two young citizens were joking
+      with some serf girls who were cracking nuts. All these conversations,
+      especially the joking with the girls, were such as might have had a
+      particular charm for Pétya at his age, but they did not interest him now.
+      He sat on his elevation—the pedestal of the cannon—still
+      agitated as before by the thought of the Emperor and by his love for him.
+      The feeling of pain and fear he had experienced when he was being crushed,
+      together with that of rapture, still further intensified his sense of the
+      importance of the occasion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Suddenly the sound of a firing of cannon was heard from the embankment, to
+      celebrate the signing of peace with the Turks, and the crowd rushed
+      impetuously toward the embankment to watch the firing. Pétya too would
+      have run there, but the clerk who had taken the young gentleman under his
+      protection stopped him. The firing was still proceeding when officers,
+      generals, and gentlemen-in-waiting came running out of the cathedral, and
+      after them others in a more leisurely manner: caps were again raised, and
+      those who had run to look at the cannon ran back again. At last four men
+      in uniforms and sashes emerged from the cathedral doors. “Hurrah! hurrah!”
+       shouted the crowd again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Which is he? Which?” asked Pétya in a tearful voice, of those around him,
+      but no one answered him, everybody was too excited; and Pétya, fixing on
+      one of those four men, whom he could not clearly see for the tears of joy
+      that filled his eyes, concentrated all his enthusiasm on him—though
+      it happened not to be the Emperor—frantically shouted “Hurrah!” and
+      resolved that tomorrow, come what might, he would join the army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The crowd ran after the Emperor, followed him to the palace, and began to
+      disperse. It was already late, and Pétya had not eaten anything and was
+      drenched with perspiration, yet he did not go home but stood with that
+      diminishing, but still considerable, crowd before the palace while the
+      Emperor dined—looking in at the palace windows, expecting he knew
+      not what, and envying alike the notables he saw arriving at the entrance
+      to dine with the Emperor and the court footmen who served at table,
+      glimpses of whom could be seen through the windows.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While the Emperor was dining, Valúev, looking out of the window, said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The people are still hoping to see Your Majesty again.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The dinner was nearly over, and the Emperor, munching a biscuit, rose and
+      went out onto the balcony. The people, with Pétya among them, rushed
+      toward the balcony.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Angel! Dear one! Hurrah! Father!...” cried the crowd, and Pétya with it,
+      and again the women and men of weaker mold, Pétya among them, wept with
+      joy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A largish piece of the biscuit the Emperor was holding in his hand broke
+      off, fell on the balcony parapet, and then to the ground. A coachman in a
+      jerkin, who stood nearest, sprang forward and snatched it up. Several
+      people in the crowd rushed at the coachman. Seeing this the Emperor had a
+      plateful of biscuits brought him and began throwing them down from the
+      balcony. Pétya’s eyes grew bloodshot, and still more excited by the danger
+      of being crushed, he rushed at the biscuits. He did not know why, but he
+      had to have a biscuit from the Tsar’s hand and he felt that he must not
+      give way. He sprang forward and upset an old woman who was catching at a
+      biscuit; the old woman did not consider herself defeated though she was
+      lying on the ground—she grabbed at some biscuits but her hand did
+      not reach them. Pétya pushed her hand away with his knee, seized a
+      biscuit, and as if fearing to be too late, again shouted “Hurrah!” with a
+      voice already hoarse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor went in, and after that the greater part of the crowd began to
+      disperse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There! I said if only we waited—and so it was!” was being joyfully
+      said by various people.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Happy as Pétya was, he felt sad at having to go home knowing that all the
+      enjoyment of that day was over. He did not go straight home from the
+      Krémlin, but called on his friend Obolénski, who was fifteen and was also
+      entering the regiment. On returning home Pétya announced resolutely and
+      firmly that if he was not allowed to enter the service he would run away.
+      And next day, Count Ilyá Rostóv—though he had not yet quite yielded—went
+      to inquire how he could arrange for Pétya to serve where there would be
+      least danger.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0189">
+<!--  H2 anc -->
+<!--  hor --> </a>
+      CHAPTER XXII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Two days later, on the fifteenth of July, an immense number of carriages
+      were standing outside the Slobóda Palace.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The great halls were full. In the first were the nobility and gentry in
+      their uniforms, in the second bearded merchants in full-skirted coats of
+      blue cloth and wearing medals. In the noblemen’s hall there was an
+      incessant movement and buzz of voices. The chief magnates sat on
+      high-backed chairs at a large table under the portrait of the Emperor, but
+      most of the gentry were strolling about the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All these nobles, whom Pierre met every day at the Club or in their own
+      houses, were in uniform—some in that of Catherine’s day, others in
+      that of Emperor Paul, others again in the new uniforms of Alexander’s time
+      or the ordinary uniform of the nobility, and the general characteristic of
+      being in uniform imparted something strange and fantastic to these diverse
+      and familiar personalities, both old and young. The old men, dim-eyed,
+      toothless, bald, sallow, and bloated, or gaunt and wrinkled, were
+      especially striking. For the most part they sat quietly in their places
+      and were silent, or, if they walked about and talked, attached themselves
+      to someone younger. On all these faces, as on the faces of the crowd Pétya
+      had seen in the Square, there was a striking contradiction: the general
+      expectation of a solemn event, and at the same time the everyday interests
+      in a boston card party, Peter the cook, Zinaída Dmítrievna’s health, and
+      so on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was there too, buttoned up since early morning in a nobleman’s
+      uniform that had become too tight for him. He was agitated; this
+      extraordinary gathering not only of nobles but also of the merchant-class—<i>les
+      états généraux</i> (States-General)—evoked in him a whole series of
+      ideas he had long laid aside but which were deeply graven in his soul:
+      thoughts of the <i>Contrat Social</i> and the French Revolution. The words that
+      had struck him in the Emperor’s appeal—that the sovereign was coming
+      to the capital for consultation with his people—strengthened this
+      idea. And imagining that in this direction something important which he
+      had long awaited was drawing near, he strolled about watching and
+      listening to conversations, but nowhere finding any confirmation of the
+      ideas that occupied him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor’s manifesto was read, evoking enthusiasm, and then all moved
+      about discussing it. Besides the ordinary topics of conversation, Pierre
+      heard questions of where the marshals of the nobility were to stand when
+      the Emperor entered, when a ball should be given in the Emperor’s honor,
+      whether they should group themselves by districts or by whole provinces...
+      and so on; but as soon as the war was touched on, or what the nobility had
+      been convened for, the talk became undecided and indefinite. Then all
+      preferred listening to speaking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A middle-aged man, handsome and virile, in the uniform of a retired naval
+      officer, was speaking in one of the rooms, and a small crowd was pressing
+      round him. Pierre went up to the circle that had formed round the speaker
+      and listened. Count Ilyá Rostóv, in a military uniform of Catherine’s
+      time, was sauntering with a pleasant smile among the crowd, with all of
+      whom he was acquainted. He too approached that group and listened with a
+      kindly smile and nods of approval, as he always did, to what the speaker
+      was saying. The retired naval man was speaking very boldly, as was evident
+      from the expression on the faces of the listeners and from the fact that
+      some people Pierre knew as the meekest and quietest of men walked away
+      disapprovingly or expressed disagreement with him. Pierre pushed his way
+      into the middle of the group, listened, and convinced himself that the man
+      was indeed a liberal, but of views quite different from his own. The naval
+      officer spoke in a particularly sonorous, musical, and aristocratic
+      baritone voice, pleasantly swallowing his <i>r</i>’s and generally slurring his
+      consonants: the voice of a man calling out to his servant, “Heah! Bwing me
+      my pipe!” It was indicative of dissipation and the exercise of authority.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What if the Smolénsk people have offahd to waise militia for the Empewah?
+      Ah we to take Smolénsk as our patte’n? If the noble awistocwacy of the
+      pwovince of Moscow thinks fit, it can show its loyalty to our sov’weign
+      the Empewah in other ways. Have we fo’gotten the waising of the militia in
+      the yeah ‘seven? All that did was to enwich the pwiests’ sons and thieves
+      and wobbahs....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Count Ilyá Rostóv smiled blandly and nodded approval.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And was our militia of any use to the Empia? Not at all! It only wuined
+      our farming! Bettah have another conscwiption... o’ ou’ men will wetu’n
+      neithah soldiers no’ peasants, and we’ll get only depwavity fwom them. The
+      nobility don’t gwudge theah lives—evewy one of us will go and bwing
+      in more wecwuits, and the sov’weign” (that was the way he referred to the
+      Emperor) “need only say the word and we’ll all die fo’ him!” added the
+      orator with animation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Count Rostóv’s mouth watered with pleasure and he nudged Pierre, but
+      Pierre wanted to speak himself. He pushed forward, feeling stirred, but
+      not yet sure what stirred him or what he would say. Scarcely had he opened
+      his mouth when one of the senators, a man without a tooth in his head,
+      with a shrewd though angry expression, standing near the first speaker,
+      interrupted him. Evidently accustomed to managing debates and to
+      maintaining an argument, he began in low but distinct tones:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I imagine, sir,” said he, mumbling with his toothless mouth, “that we
+      have been summoned here not to discuss whether it’s best for the empire at
+      the present moment to adopt conscription or to call out the militia. We
+      have been summoned to reply to the appeal with which our sovereign the
+      Emperor has honored us. But to judge what is best—conscription or
+      the militia—we can leave to the supreme authority....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre suddenly saw an outlet for his excitement. He hardened his heart
+      against the senator who was introducing this set and narrow attitude into
+      the deliberations of the nobility. Pierre stepped forward and interrupted
+      him. He himself did not yet know what he would say, but he began to speak
+      eagerly, occasionally lapsing into French or expressing himself in bookish
+      Russian.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Excuse me, your excellency,” he began. (He was well acquainted with the
+      senator, but thought it necessary on this occasion to address him
+      formally.) “Though I don’t agree with the gentleman...” (he hesitated: he
+      wished to say, <i>“Mon très honorable préopinant”</i>—“My very honorable
+      opponent”) “with the gentleman... whom I have not the honor of knowing, I
+      suppose that the nobility have been summoned not merely to express their
+      sympathy and enthusiasm but also to consider the means by which we can
+      assist our Fatherland! I imagine,” he went on, warming to his subject,
+      “that the Emperor himself would not be satisfied to find in us merely
+      owners of serfs whom we are willing to devote to his service, and <i>chair à
+      canon</i> * we are ready to make of ourselves—and not to obtain from us
+      any co-co-counsel.”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Food for cannon.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Many persons withdrew from the circle, noticing the senator’s sarcastic
+      smile and the freedom of Pierre’s remarks. Only Count Rostóv was pleased
+      with them as he had been pleased with those of the naval officer, the
+      senator, and in general with whatever speech he had last heard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I think that before discussing these questions,” Pierre continued, “we
+      should ask the Emperor—most respectfully ask His Majesty—to
+      let us know the number of our troops and the position in which our army
+      and our forces now are, and then...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But scarcely had Pierre uttered these words before he was attacked from
+      three sides. The most vigorous attack came from an old acquaintance, a
+      boston player who had always been well disposed toward him, Stepán
+      Stepánovich Adráksin. Adráksin was in uniform, and whether as a result of
+      the uniform or from some other cause Pierre saw before him quite a
+      different man. With a sudden expression of malevolence on his aged face,
+      Adráksin shouted at Pierre:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In the first place, I tell you we have no right to question the Emperor
+      about that, and secondly, if the Russian nobility had that right, the
+      Emperor could not answer such a question. The troops are moved according to
+      the enemy’s movements and the number of men increases and decreases....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Another voice, that of a nobleman of medium height and about forty years
+      of age, whom Pierre had formerly met at the gypsies’ and knew as a bad
+      cardplayer, and who, also transformed by his uniform, came up to Pierre,
+      interrupted Adráksin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, and this is not a time for discussing,” he continued, “but for
+      acting: there is war in Russia! The enemy is advancing to destroy Russia,
+      to desecrate the tombs of our fathers, to carry off our wives and
+      children.” The nobleman smote his breast. “We will all arise, everyone of
+      us will go, for our father the Tsar!” he shouted, rolling his bloodshot
+      eyes. Several approving voices were heard in the crowd. “We are Russians
+      and will not grudge our blood in defense of our faith, the throne, and the
+      Fatherland! We must cease raving if we are sons of our Fatherland! We will
+      show Europe how Russia rises to the defense of Russia!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre wished to reply, but could not get in a word. He felt that his
+      words, apart from what meaning they conveyed, were less audible than the
+      sound of his opponent’s voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Count Rostóv at the back of the crowd was expressing approval; several
+      persons, briskly turning a shoulder to the orator at the end of a phrase,
+      said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s right, quite right! Just so!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre wished to say that he was ready to sacrifice his money, his serfs,
+      or himself, only one ought to know the state of affairs in order to be
+      able to improve it, but he was unable to speak. Many voices shouted and
+      talked at the same time, so that Count Rostóv had not time to signify his
+      approval of them all, and the group increased, dispersed, re-formed, and
+      then moved with a hum of talk into the largest hall and to the big table.
+      Not only was Pierre’s attempt to speak unsuccessful, but he was rudely
+      interrupted, pushed aside, and people turned away from him as from a
+      common enemy. This happened not because they were displeased by the
+      substance of his speech, which had even been forgotten after the many
+      subsequent speeches, but to animate it the crowd needed a tangible object
+      to love and a tangible object to hate. Pierre became the latter. Many
+      other orators spoke after the excited nobleman, and all in the same tone.
+      Many spoke eloquently and with originality.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Glínka, the editor of the <i>Russian Messenger</i>, who was recognized (cries of
+      “author! author!” were heard in the crowd), said that “hell must be
+      repulsed by hell,” and that he had seen a child smiling at lightning
+      flashes and thunderclaps, but “we will not be that child.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, at thunderclaps!” was repeated approvingly in the back rows of
+      the crowd.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The crowd drew up to the large table, at which sat gray-haired or bald
+      seventy-year-old magnates, uniformed and besashed, almost all of whom
+      Pierre had seen in their own homes with their buffoons, or playing boston
+      at the clubs. With an incessant hum of voices the crowd advanced to the
+      table. Pressed by the throng against the high backs of the chairs, the
+      orators spoke one after another and sometimes two together. Those standing
+      behind noticed what a speaker omitted to say and hastened to supply it.
+      Others in that heat and crush racked their brains to find some thought and
+      hastened to utter it. The old magnates, whom Pierre knew, sat and turned
+      to look first at one and then at another, and their faces for the most
+      part only expressed the fact that they found it very hot. Pierre, however,
+      felt excited, and the general desire to show that they were ready to go to
+      all lengths—which found expression in the tones and looks more than
+      in the substance of the speeches—infected him too. He did not
+      renounce his opinions, but felt himself in some way to blame and wished to
+      justify himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I only said that it would be more to the purpose to make sacrifices when
+      we know what is needed!” said he, trying to be heard above the other
+      voices.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One of the old men nearest to him looked round, but his attention was
+      immediately diverted by an exclamation at the other side of the table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, Moscow will be surrendered! She will be our expiation!” shouted one
+      man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is the enemy of mankind!” cried another. “Allow me to speak....”
+       “Gentlemen, you are crushing me!...”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0190"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At that moment Count Rostopchín with his protruding chin and alert eyes,
+      wearing the uniform of a general with sash over his shoulder, entered the
+      room, stepping briskly to the front of the crowd of gentry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Our sovereign the Emperor will be here in a moment,” said Rostopchín. “I
+      am straight from the palace. Seeing the position we are in, I think there
+      is little need for discussion. The Emperor has deigned to summon us and
+      the merchants. Millions will pour forth from there”—he pointed to
+      the merchants’ hall—“but our business is to supply men and not spare
+      ourselves.... That is the least we can do!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A conference took place confined to the magnates sitting at the table. The
+      whole consultation passed more than quietly. After all the preceding noise
+      the sound of their old voices saying one after another, “I agree,” or for
+      variety, “I too am of that opinion,” and so on had even a mournful effect.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The secretary was told to write down the resolution of the Moscow nobility
+      and gentry, that they would furnish ten men, fully equipped, out of every
+      thousand serfs, as the Smolénsk gentry had done. Their chairs made a
+      scraping noise as the gentlemen who had conferred rose with apparent
+      relief, and began walking up and down, arm in arm, to stretch their legs
+      and converse in couples.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Emperor! The Emperor!” a sudden cry resounded through the halls and
+      the whole throng hurried to the entrance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor entered the hall through a broad path between two lines of
+      nobles. Every face expressed respectful, awe-struck curiosity. Pierre
+      stood rather far off and could not hear all that the Emperor said. From
+      what he did hear he understood that the Emperor spoke of the danger
+      threatening the empire and of the hopes he placed on the Moscow nobility.
+      He was answered by a voice which informed him of the resolution just
+      arrived at.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Gentlemen!” said the Emperor with a quivering voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was a rustling among the crowd and it again subsided, so that Pierre
+      distinctly heard the pleasantly human voice of the Emperor saying with
+      emotion:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I never doubted the devotion of the Russian nobles, but today it has
+      surpassed my expectations. I thank you in the name of the Fatherland!
+      Gentlemen, let us act! Time is most precious....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor ceased speaking, the crowd began pressing round him, and
+      rapturous exclamations were heard from all sides.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, most precious... a royal word,” said Count Rostóv, with a sob. He
+      stood at the back, and, though he had heard hardly anything, understood
+      everything in his own way.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the hall of the nobility the Emperor went to that of the merchants.
+      There he remained about ten minutes. Pierre was among those who saw him
+      come out from the merchants’ hall with tears of emotion in his eyes. As
+      became known later, he had scarcely begun to address the merchants before
+      tears gushed from his eyes and he concluded in a trembling voice. When
+      Pierre saw the Emperor he was coming out accompanied by two merchants, one
+      of whom Pierre knew, a fat <i>otkupshchík</i>. The other was the mayor, a man
+      with a thin sallow face and narrow beard. Both were weeping. Tears filled
+      the thin man’s eyes, and the fat <i>otkupshchík</i> sobbed outright like a
+      child and kept repeating:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Our lives and property—take them, Your Majesty!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre’s one feeling at the moment was a desire to show that he was ready
+      to go all lengths and was prepared to sacrifice everything. He now felt
+      ashamed of his speech with its constitutional tendency and sought an
+      opportunity of effacing it. Having heard that Count Mamónov was furnishing
+      a regiment, Bezúkhov at once informed Rostopchín that he would give a
+      thousand men and their maintenance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Old Rostóv could not tell his wife of what had passed without tears, and
+      at once consented to Pétya’s request and went himself to enter his name.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day the Emperor left Moscow. The assembled nobles all took off their
+      uniforms and settled down again in their homes and clubs, and not without
+      some groans gave orders to their stewards about the enrollment, feeling
+      amazed themselves at what they had done.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0200"></a>
+      BOOK TEN: 1812
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0191"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Napoleon began the war with Russia because he could not resist going to
+      Dresden, could not help having his head turned by the homage he received,
+      could not help donning a Polish uniform and yielding to the stimulating
+      influence of a June morning, and could not refrain from bursts of anger in
+      the presence of Kurákin and then of Balashëv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alexander refused negotiations because he felt himself to be personally
+      insulted. Barclay de Tolly tried to command the army in the best way,
+      because he wished to fulfill his duty and earn fame as a great commander.
+      Rostóv charged the French because he could not restrain his wish for a
+      gallop across a level field; and in the same way the innumerable people
+      who took part in the war acted in accord with their personal
+      characteristics, habits, circumstances, and aims. They were moved by fear
+      or vanity, rejoiced or were indignant, reasoned, imagining that they knew
+      what they were doing and did it of their own free will, but they all were
+      involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work concealed from them but
+      comprehensible to us. Such is the inevitable fate of men of action, and
+      the higher they stand in the social hierarchy the less are they free.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The actors of 1812 have long since left the stage, their personal
+      interests have vanished leaving no trace, and nothing remains of that time
+      but its historic results.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Providence compelled all these men, striving to attain personal aims, to
+      further the accomplishment of a stupendous result no one of them at all
+      expected—neither Napoleon, nor Alexander, nor still less any of
+      those who did the actual fighting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The cause of the destruction of the French army in 1812 is clear to us
+      now. No one will deny that that cause was, on the one hand, its advance
+      into the heart of Russia late in the season without any preparation for a
+      winter campaign and, on the other, the character given to the war by the
+      burning of Russian towns and the hatred of the foe this aroused among the
+      Russian people. But no one at the time foresaw (what now seems so evident)
+      that this was the only way an army of eight hundred thousand men—the
+      best in the world and led by the best general—could be destroyed in
+      conflict with a raw army of half its numerical strength, and led by
+      inexperienced commanders as the Russian army was. <i>Not only did no one see
+      this</i>, but <i>on the Russian side</i> every effort was made to hinder the only
+      thing that could save Russia, while <i>on the French side</i>, despite Napoleon’s
+      experience and so-called military genius, every effort was directed to
+      pushing on to Moscow at the end of the summer, that is, to doing the very
+      thing that was bound to lead to destruction.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In historical works on the year 1812 French writers are very fond of
+      saying that Napoleon felt the danger of extending his line, that he sought
+      a battle and that his marshals advised him to stop at Smolénsk, and of
+      making similar statements to show that the danger of the campaign was even
+      then understood. Russian authors are still fonder of telling us that from
+      the commencement of the campaign a Scythian war plan was adopted to lure
+      Napoleon into the depths of Russia, and this plan some of them attribute
+      to Pfuel, others to a certain Frenchman, others to Toll, and others again
+      to Alexander himself—pointing to notes, projects, and letters which
+      contain hints of such a line of action. But all these hints at what
+      happened, both from the French side and the Russian, are advanced only
+      because they fit in with the event. Had that event not occurred these
+      hints would have been forgotten, as we have forgotten the thousands and
+      millions of hints and expectations to the contrary which were current then
+      but have now been forgotten because the event falsified them. There are
+      always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that however it
+      may end there will always be people to say: “I said then that it would be
+      so,” quite forgetting that amid their innumerable conjectures many were to
+      quite the contrary effect.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Conjectures as to Napoleon’s awareness of the danger of extending his
+      line, and (on the Russian side) as to luring the enemy into the depths of
+      Russia, are evidently of that kind, and only by much straining can
+      historians attribute such conceptions to Napoleon and his marshals, or
+      such plans to the Russian commanders. All the facts are in flat
+      contradiction to such conjectures. During the whole period of the war not
+      only was there no wish on the Russian side to draw the French into the
+      heart of the country, but from their first entry into Russia everything
+      was done to stop them. And not only was Napoleon not afraid to extend his
+      line, but he welcomed every step forward as a triumph and did not seek
+      battle as eagerly as in former campaigns, but very lazily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the very beginning of the war our armies were divided, and our sole aim
+      was to unite them, though uniting the armies was no advantage if we meant
+      to retire and lure the enemy into the depths of the country. Our Emperor
+      joined the army to encourage it to defend every inch of Russian soil and
+      not to retreat. The enormous Drissa camp was formed on Pfuel’s plan, and
+      there was no intention of retiring farther. The Emperor reproached the
+      commanders in chief for every step they retired. He could not bear the
+      idea of letting the enemy even reach Smolénsk, still less could he
+      contemplate the burning of Moscow, and when our armies did unite he was
+      displeased that Smolénsk was abandoned and burned without a general
+      engagement having been fought under its walls.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      So thought the Emperor, and the Russian commanders and people were still
+      more provoked at the thought that our forces were retreating into the
+      depths of the country.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon having cut our armies apart advanced far into the country and
+      missed several chances of forcing an engagement. In August he was at
+      Smolénsk and thought only of how to advance farther, though as we now see
+      that advance was evidently ruinous to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The facts clearly show that Napoleon did not foresee the danger of the
+      advance on Moscow, nor did Alexander and the Russian commanders then think
+      of luring Napoleon on, but quite the contrary. The luring of Napoleon into
+      the depths of the country was not the result of any plan, for no one
+      believed it to be possible; it resulted from a most complex interplay of
+      intrigues, aims, and wishes among those who took part in the war and had
+      no perception whatever of the inevitable, or of the one way of saving
+      Russia. Everything came about fortuitously. The armies were divided at the
+      commencement of the campaign. We tried to unite them, with the evident
+      intention of giving battle and checking the enemy’s advance, and by this
+      effort to unite them while avoiding battle with a much stronger enemy, and
+      necessarily withdrawing the armies at an acute angle—we led the
+      French on to Smolénsk. But we withdrew at an acute angle not only because
+      the French advanced between our two armies; the angle became still more
+      acute and we withdrew still farther, because Barclay de Tolly was an
+      unpopular foreigner disliked by Bagratión (who would come under his
+      command), and Bagratión—being in command of the second army—tried
+      to postpone joining up and coming under Barclay’s command as long as he
+      could. Bagratión was slow in effecting the junction—though that was
+      the chief aim of all at headquarters—because, as he alleged, he
+      exposed his army to danger on this march, and it was best for him to
+      retire more to the left and more to the south, worrying the enemy from
+      flank and rear and securing from the Ukraine recruits for his army; and it
+      looks as if he planned this in order not to come under the command of the
+      detested foreigner Barclay, whose rank was inferior to his own.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor was with the army to encourage it, but his presence and
+      ignorance of what steps to take, and the enormous number of advisers and
+      plans, destroyed the first army’s energy and it retired.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The intention was to make a stand at the Drissa camp, but Paulucci, aiming
+      at becoming commander in chief, unexpectedly employed his energy to
+      influence Alexander, and Pfuel’s whole plan was abandoned and the command
+      entrusted to Barclay. But as Barclay did not inspire confidence his power
+      was limited. The armies were divided, there was no unity of command, and
+      Barclay was unpopular; but from this confusion, division, and the
+      unpopularity of the foreign commander in chief, there resulted on the one
+      hand indecision and the avoidance of a battle (which we could not have
+      refrained from had the armies been united and had someone else, instead of
+      Barclay, been in command) and on the other an ever-increasing indignation
+      against the foreigners and an increase in patriotic zeal.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At last the Emperor left the army, and as the most convenient and indeed
+      the only pretext for his departure it was decided that it was necessary
+      for him to inspire the people in the capitals and arouse the nation in
+      general to a patriotic war. And by this visit of the Emperor to Moscow the
+      strength of the Russian army was trebled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He left in order not to obstruct the commander in chief’s undivided
+      control of the army, and hoping that more decisive action would then be
+      taken, but the command of the armies became still more confused and
+      enfeebled. Bennigsen, the Tsarévich, and a swarm of adjutants general
+      remained with the army to keep the commander in chief under observation
+      and arouse his energy, and Barclay, feeling less free than ever under the
+      observation of all these “eyes of the Emperor,” became still more cautious
+      of undertaking any decisive action and avoided giving battle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Barclay stood for caution. The Tsarévich hinted at treachery and demanded
+      a general engagement. Lubomírski, Bronnítski, Wlocki, and the others of
+      that group stirred up so much trouble that Barclay, under pretext of
+      sending papers to the Emperor, dispatched these Polish adjutants general
+      to Petersburg and plunged into an open struggle with Bennigsen and the
+      Tsarévich.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At Smolénsk the armies at last reunited, much as Bagratión disliked it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bagratión drove up in a carriage to the house occupied by Barclay. Barclay
+      donned his sash and came out to meet and report to his senior officer
+      Bagratión.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Despite his seniority in rank Bagratión, in this contest of magnanimity,
+      took his orders from Barclay, but, having submitted, agreed with him less
+      than ever. By the Emperor’s orders Bagratión reported direct to him. He
+      wrote to Arakchéev, the Emperor’s confidant: “It must be as my sovereign
+      pleases, but I cannot work with the <i>Minister</i> (meaning Barclay). For God’s
+      sake send me somewhere else if only in command of a regiment. I cannot
+      stand it here. Headquarters are so full of Germans that a Russian cannot
+      exist and there is no sense in anything. I thought I was really serving my
+      sovereign and the Fatherland, but it turns out that I am serving Barclay.
+      I confess I do not want to.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The swarm of Bronnítskis and Wintzingerodes and their like still further
+      embittered the relations between the commanders in chief, and even less
+      unity resulted. Preparations were made to fight the French before
+      Smolénsk. A general was sent to survey the position. This general, hating
+      Barclay, rode to visit a friend of his own, a corps commander, and, having
+      spent the day with him, returned to Barclay and condemned, as unsuitable
+      from every point of view, the battleground he had not seen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While disputes and intrigues were going on about the future field of
+      battle, and while we were looking for the French—having lost touch
+      with them—the French stumbled upon Nevérovski’s division and reached
+      the walls of Smolénsk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was necessary to fight an unexpected battle at Smolénsk to save our
+      lines of communication. The battle was fought and thousands were killed on
+      both sides.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Smolénsk was abandoned contrary to the wishes of the Emperor and of the
+      whole people. But Smolénsk was burned by its own inhabitants who had been
+      misled by their governor. And these ruined inhabitants, setting an example
+      to other Russians, went to Moscow thinking only of their own losses but
+      kindling hatred of the foe. Napoleon advanced farther and we retired, thus
+      arriving at the very result which caused his destruction.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0192"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The day after his son had left, Prince Nicholas sent for Princess Mary to
+      come to his study.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well? Are you satisfied now?” said he. “You’ve made me quarrel with my
+      son! Satisfied, are you? That’s all you wanted! Satisfied?... It hurts me,
+      it hurts. I’m old and weak and this is what you wanted. Well then, gloat
+      over it! Gloat over it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      After that Princess Mary did not see her father for a whole week. He was
+      ill and did not leave his study.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary noticed to her surprise that during this illness the old
+      prince not only excluded her from his room, but did not admit Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne either. Tíkhon alone attended him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the end of the week the prince reappeared and resumed his former way of
+      life, devoting himself with special activity to building operations and
+      the arrangement of the gardens and completely breaking off his relations
+      with Mademoiselle Bourienne. His looks and cold tone to his daughter
+      seemed to say: “There, you see? You plotted against me, you lied to Prince
+      Andrew about my relations with that Frenchwoman and made me quarrel with
+      him, but you see I need neither her nor you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary spent half of every day with little Nicholas, watching his
+      lessons, teaching him Russian and music herself, and talking to Dessalles;
+      the rest of the day she spent over her books, with her old nurse, or with
+      “God’s folk” who sometimes came by the back door to see her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Of the war Princess Mary thought as women do think about wars. She feared
+      for her brother who was in it, was horrified by and amazed at the strange
+      cruelty that impels men to kill one another, but she did not understand
+      the significance of this war, which seemed to her like all previous wars.
+      She did not realize the significance of this war, though Dessalles with
+      whom she constantly conversed was passionately interested in its progress
+      and tried to explain his own conception of it to her, and though the
+      “God’s folk” who came to see her reported, in their own way, the rumors
+      current among the people of an invasion by Antichrist, and though Julie
+      (now Princess Drubetskáya), who had resumed correspondence with her, wrote
+      patriotic letters from Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I write you in Russian, my good friend,” wrote Julie in her Frenchified
+      Russian, “because I have a detestation for all the French, and the same
+      for their language which I cannot support to hear spoken.... We in Moscow
+      are elated by enthusiasm for our adored Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My poor husband is enduring pains and hunger in Jewish taverns, but the
+      news which I have inspires me yet more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You heard probably of the heroic exploit of Raévski, embracing his two
+      sons and saying: ‘I will perish with them but we will not be shaken!’ And
+      truly though the enemy was twice stronger than we, we were unshakable. We
+      pass the time as we can, but in war as in war! The princesses Aline and
+      Sophie sit whole days with me, and we, unhappy widows of live men, make
+      beautiful conversations over our <i>charpie</i>, only you, my friend, are
+      missing...” and so on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The chief reason Princess Mary did not realize the full significance of
+      this war was that the old prince never spoke of it, did not recognize it,
+      and laughed at Dessalles when he mentioned it at dinner. The prince’s tone
+      was so calm and confident that Princess Mary unhesitatingly believed him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All that July the old prince was exceedingly active and even animated. He
+      planned another garden and began a new building for the domestic serfs.
+      The only thing that made Princess Mary anxious about him was that he slept
+      very little and, instead of sleeping in his study as usual, changed his
+      sleeping place every day. One day he would order his camp bed to be set up
+      in the glass gallery, another day he remained on the couch or on the
+      lounge chair in the drawing room and dozed there without undressing, while—instead
+      of Mademoiselle Bourienne—a serf boy read to him. Then again he
+      would spend a night in the dining room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On August 1, a second letter was received from Prince Andrew. In his first
+      letter which came soon after he had left home, Prince Andrew had dutifully
+      asked his father’s forgiveness for what he had allowed himself to say and
+      begged to be restored to his favor. To this letter the old prince had
+      replied affectionately, and from that time had kept the Frenchwoman at a
+      distance. Prince Andrew’s second letter, written near Vítebsk after the
+      French had occupied that town, gave a brief account of the whole campaign,
+      enclosed for them a plan he had drawn and forecasts as to the further
+      progress of the war. In this letter Prince Andrew pointed out to his
+      father the danger of staying at Bald Hills, so near the theater of war and
+      on the army’s direct line of march, and advised him to move to Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At dinner that day, on Dessalles’ mentioning that the French were said to
+      have already entered Vítebsk, the old prince remembered his son’s letter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There was a letter from Prince Andrew today,” he said to Princess Mary—“Haven’t
+      you read it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, Father,” she replied in a frightened voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She could not have read the letter as she did not even know it had
+      arrived.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He writes about this war,” said the prince, with the ironic smile that
+      had become habitual to him in speaking of the present war.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That must be very interesting,” said Dessalles. “Prince Andrew is in a
+      position to know...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, very interesting!” said Mademoiselle Bourienne.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go and get it for me,” said the old prince to Mademoiselle Bourienne.
+      “You know—under the paperweight on the little table.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne jumped up eagerly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, don’t!” he exclaimed with a frown. “You go, Michael Ivánovich.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Michael Ivánovich rose and went to the study. But as soon as he had left
+      the room the old prince, looking uneasily round, threw down his napkin and
+      went himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They can’t do anything... always make some muddle,” he muttered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While he was away Princess Mary, Dessalles, Mademoiselle Bourienne, and
+      even little Nicholas exchanged looks in silence. The old prince returned
+      with quick steps, accompanied by Michael Ivánovich, bringing the letter
+      and a plan. These he put down beside him—not letting anyone read
+      them at dinner.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On moving to the drawing room he handed the letter to Princess Mary and,
+      spreading out before him the plan of the new building and fixing his eyes
+      upon it, told her to read the letter aloud. When she had done so Princess
+      Mary looked inquiringly at her father. He was examining the plan,
+      evidently engrossed in his own ideas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What do you think of it, Prince?” Dessalles ventured to ask.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I? I?...” said the prince as if unpleasantly awakened, and not taking his
+      eyes from the plan of the building.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very possibly the theater of war will move so near to us that...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ha ha ha! The theater of war!” said the prince. “I have said and still
+      say that the theater of war is Poland and the enemy will never get beyond
+      the Niemen.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dessalles looked in amazement at the prince, who was talking of the Niemen
+      when the enemy was already at the Dnieper, but Princess Mary, forgetting
+      the geographical position of the Niemen, thought that what her father was
+      saying was correct.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “When the snow melts they’ll sink in the Polish swamps. Only they could
+      fail to see it,” the prince continued, evidently thinking of the campaign
+      of 1807 which seemed to him so recent. “Bennigsen should have advanced
+      into Prussia sooner, then things would have taken a different turn...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But, Prince,” Dessalles began timidly, “the letter mentions Vítebsk....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, the letter? Yes...” replied the prince peevishly. “Yes... yes...” His
+      face suddenly took on a morose expression. He paused. “Yes, he writes that
+      the French were beaten at... at... what river is it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dessalles dropped his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The prince says nothing about that,” he remarked gently.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Doesn’t he? But I didn’t invent it myself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      No one spoke for a long time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes... yes... Well, Michael Ivánovich,” he suddenly went on, raising his
+      head and pointing to the plan of the building, “tell me how you mean to
+      alter it....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Michael Ivánovich went up to the plan, and the prince after speaking to
+      him about the building looked angrily at Princess Mary and Dessalles and
+      went to his own room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary saw Dessalles’ embarrassed and astonished look fixed on her
+      father, noticed his silence, and was struck by the fact that her father
+      had forgotten his son’s letter on the drawing room table; but she was not
+      only afraid to speak of it and ask Dessalles the reason of his confusion
+      and silence, but was afraid even to think about it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the evening Michael Ivánovich, sent by the prince, came to Princess
+      Mary for Prince Andrew’s letter which had been forgotten in the drawing
+      room. She gave it to him and, unpleasant as it was to her to do so,
+      ventured to ask him what her father was doing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Always busy,” replied Michael Ivánovich with a respectfully ironic smile
+      which caused Princess Mary to turn pale. “He’s worrying very much about
+      the new building. He has been reading a little, but now”—Michael
+      Ivánovich went on, lowering his voice—“now he’s at his desk, busy
+      with his will, I expect.” (One of the prince’s favorite occupations of
+      late had been the preparation of some papers he meant to leave at his
+      death and which he called his “will.”)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And Alpátych is being sent to Smolénsk?” asked Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, yes, he has been waiting to start for some time.”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0193"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      When Michael Ivánovich returned to the study with the letter, the old
+      prince, with spectacles on and a shade over his eyes, was sitting at his
+      open bureau with screened candles, holding a paper in his outstretched
+      hand, and in a somewhat dramatic attitude was reading his manuscript—his
+      “Remarks” as he termed it—which was to be transmitted to the Emperor
+      after his death.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Michael Ivánovich went in there were tears in the prince’s eyes
+      evoked by the memory of the time when the paper he was now reading had
+      been written. He took the letter from Michael Ivánovich’s hand, put it in
+      his pocket, folded up his papers, and called in Alpátych who had long been
+      waiting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The prince had a list of things to be bought in Smolénsk and, walking up
+      and down the room past Alpátych who stood by the door, he gave his
+      instructions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “First, notepaper—do you hear? Eight quires, like this sample,
+      gilt-edged... it must be exactly like the sample. Varnish, sealing wax, as
+      in Michael Ivánovich’s list.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He paced up and down for a while and glanced at his notes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then hand to the governor in person a letter about the deed.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Next, bolts for the doors of the new building were wanted and had to be of
+      a special shape the prince had himself designed, and a leather case had to
+      be ordered to keep the “will” in.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The instructions to Alpátych took over two hours and still the prince did
+      not let him go. He sat down, sank into thought, closed his eyes, and dozed
+      off. Alpátych made a slight movement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, go, go! If anything more is wanted I’ll send after you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych went out. The prince again went to his bureau, glanced into it,
+      fingered his papers, closed the bureau again, and sat down at the table to
+      write to the governor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was already late when he rose after sealing the letter. He wished to
+      sleep, but he knew he would not be able to and that most depressing
+      thoughts came to him in bed. So he called Tíkhon and went through the
+      rooms with him to show him where to set up the bed for that night.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He went about looking at every corner. Every place seemed unsatisfactory,
+      but worst of all was his customary couch in the study. That couch was
+      dreadful to him, probably because of the oppressive thoughts he had had
+      when lying there. It was unsatisfactory everywhere, but the corner behind
+      the piano in the sitting room was better than other places: he had never
+      slept there yet.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With the help of a footman Tíkhon brought in the bedstead and began
+      putting it up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s not right! That’s not right!” cried the prince, and himself pushed
+      it a few inches from the corner and then closer in again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, at last I’ve finished, now I’ll rest,” thought the prince, and let
+      Tíkhon undress him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Frowning with vexation at the effort necessary to divest himself of his
+      coat and trousers, the prince undressed, sat down heavily on the bed, and
+      appeared to be meditating as he looked contemptuously at his withered
+      yellow legs. He was not meditating, but only deferring the moment of
+      making the effort to lift those legs up and turn over on the bed. “Ugh,
+      how hard it is! Oh, that this toil might end and <i>you</i> would release me!”
+       thought he. Pressing his lips together he made that effort for the
+      twenty-thousandth time and lay down. But hardly had he done so before he
+      felt the bed rocking backwards and forwards beneath him as if it were
+      breathing heavily and jolting. This happened to him almost every night. He
+      opened his eyes as they were closing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No peace, damn them!” he muttered, angry he knew not with
+      whom. “Ah yes, there was something else important, very important,
+      that I was keeping till I should be in bed. The bolts? No, I told him
+      about them. No, it was something, something in the drawing room. Princess
+      Mary talked some nonsense. Dessalles, that fool, said something. Something
+      in my pocket—can’t remember....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Tíkhon, what did we talk about at dinner?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “About Prince Michael...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Be quiet, quiet!” The prince slapped his hand on the table. “Yes, I know,
+      Prince Andrew’s letter! Princess Mary read it. Dessalles said something
+      about Vítebsk. Now I’ll read it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He had the letter taken from his pocket and the table—on which stood
+      a glass of lemonade and a spiral wax candle—moved close to the bed,
+      and putting on his spectacles he began reading. Only now in the stillness
+      of the night, reading it by the faint light under the green shade, did he
+      grasp its meaning for a moment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The French at Vítebsk, in four days’ march they may be at Smolénsk;
+      perhaps are already there! Tíkhon!” Tíkhon jumped up. “No, no, I don’t
+      want anything!” he shouted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He put the letter under the candlestick and closed his eyes. And there
+      rose before him the Danube at bright noonday: reeds, the Russian camp, and
+      himself a young general without a wrinkle on his ruddy face, vigorous and
+      alert, entering Potëmkin’s gaily colored tent, and a burning sense of
+      jealousy of “the favorite” agitated him now as strongly as it had done
+      then. He recalled all the words spoken at that first meeting with
+      Potëmkin. And he saw before him a plump, rather sallow-faced, short, stout
+      woman, the Empress Mother, with her smile and her words at her first
+      gracious reception of him, and then that same face on the catafalque, and
+      the encounter he had with Zúbov over her coffin about his right to kiss
+      her hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, quicker, quicker! To get back to that time and have done with all the
+      present! Quicker, quicker—and that they should leave me in peace!”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0194"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Bald Hills, Prince Nicholas Bolkónski’s estate, lay forty miles east from
+      Smolénsk and two miles from the main road to Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The same evening that the prince gave his instructions to Alpátych,
+      Dessalles, having asked to see Princess Mary, told her that, as the prince
+      was not very well and was taking no steps to secure his safety, though
+      from Prince Andrew’s letter it was evident that to remain at Bald Hills
+      might be dangerous, he respectfully advised her to send a letter by
+      Alpátych to the Provincial Governor at Smolénsk, asking him to let her
+      know the state of affairs and the extent of the danger to which Bald Hills
+      was exposed. Dessalles wrote this letter to the Governor for Princess
+      Mary, she signed it, and it was given to Alpátych with instructions to
+      hand it to the Governor and to come back as quickly as possible if there
+      was danger.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having received all his orders Alpátych, wearing a white beaver hat—a
+      present from the prince—and carrying a stick as the prince did, went
+      out accompanied by his family. Three well-fed roans stood ready harnessed
+      to a small conveyance with a leather hood.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The larger bell was muffled and the little bells on the harness stuffed
+      with paper. The prince allowed no one at Bald Hills to drive with ringing
+      bells; but on a long journey Alpátych liked to have them. His satellites—the
+      senior clerk, a countinghouse clerk, a scullery maid, a cook, two old
+      women, a little pageboy, the coachman, and various domestic serfs—were
+      seeing him off.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His daughter placed chintz-covered down cushions for him to sit on and
+      behind his back. His old sister-in-law popped in a small bundle, and one
+      of the coachmen helped him into the vehicle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There! There! Women’s fuss! Women, women!” said Alpátych, puffing and
+      speaking rapidly just as the prince did, and he climbed into the trap.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After giving the clerk orders about the work to be done, Alpátych, not
+      trying to imitate the prince now, lifted the hat from his bald head and
+      crossed himself three times.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If there is anything... come back, Yákov Alpátych! For Christ’s sake
+      think of us!” cried his wife, referring to the rumors of war and the
+      enemy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Women, women! Women’s fuss!” muttered Alpátych to himself and started on
+      his journey, looking round at the fields of yellow rye and the
+      still-green, thickly growing oats, and at other quite black fields just
+      being plowed a second time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As he went along he looked with pleasure at the year’s splendid crop of
+      corn, scrutinized the strips of ryefield which here and there were already
+      being reaped, made his calculations as to the sowing and the harvest, and
+      asked himself whether he had not forgotten any of the prince’s orders.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having baited the horses twice on the way, he arrived at the town toward
+      evening on the fourth of August.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych kept meeting and overtaking baggage trains and troops on the
+      road. As he approached Smolénsk he heard the sounds of distant firing, but
+      these did not impress him. What struck him most was the sight of a
+      splendid field of oats in which a camp had been pitched and which was
+      being mown down by the soldiers, evidently for fodder. This fact impressed
+      Alpátych, but in thinking about his own business he soon forgot it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the interests of his life for more than thirty years had been bounded
+      by the will of the prince, and he never went beyond that limit. Everything
+      not connected with the execution of the prince’s orders did not interest
+      and did not even exist for Alpátych.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On reaching Smolénsk on the evening of the fourth of August he put up in
+      the Gáchina suburb across the Dnieper, at the inn kept by Ferapóntov,
+      where he had been in the habit of putting up for the last thirty years.
+      Some thirty years ago Ferapóntov, by Alpátych’s advice, had bought a wood
+      from the prince, had begun to trade, and now had a house, an inn, and a
+      corn dealer’s shop in that province. He was a stout, dark, red-faced
+      peasant in the forties, with thick lips, a broad knob of a nose, similar
+      knobs over his black frowning brows, and a round belly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Wearing a waistcoat over his cotton shirt, Ferapóntov was standing before
+      his shop which opened onto the street. On seeing Alpátych he went up to
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You’re welcome, Yákov Alpátych. Folks are leaving the town, but you have
+      come to it,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why are they leaving the town?” asked Alpátych.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s what I say. Folks are foolish! Always afraid of the French.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Women’s fuss, women’s fuss!” said Alpátych.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Just what I think, Yákov Alpátych. What I say is: orders have been given
+      not to let them in, so that must be right. And the peasants are asking
+      three rubles for carting—it isn’t Christian!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Yákov Alpátych heard without heeding. He asked for a samovar and for hay
+      for his horses, and when he had had his tea he went to bed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All night long troops were moving past the inn. Next morning Alpátych
+      donned a jacket he wore only in town and went out on business. It was a
+      sunny morning and by eight o’clock it was already hot. “A good day for
+      harvesting,” thought Alpátych.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From beyond the town firing had been heard since early morning. At eight
+      o’clock the booming of cannon was added to the sound of musketry. Many
+      people were hurrying through the streets and there were many soldiers, but
+      cabs were still driving about, tradesmen stood at their shops, and service
+      was being held in the churches as usual. Alpátych went to the shops, to
+      government offices, to the post office, and to the Governor’s. In the
+      offices and shops and at the post office everyone was talking about the
+      army and about the enemy who was already attacking the town, everybody was
+      asking what should be done, and all were trying to calm one another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In front of the Governor’s house Alpátych found a large number of people,
+      Cossacks, and a traveling carriage of the Governor’s. At the porch he met
+      two of the landed gentry, one of whom he knew. This man, an ex-captain of
+      police, was saying angrily:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s no joke, you know! It’s all very well if you’re single. ‘One man
+      though undone is but one,’ as the proverb says, but with thirteen in your
+      family and all the property... They’ve brought us to utter ruin! What sort
+      of governors are they to do that? They ought to be hanged—the
+      brigands!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh come, that’s enough!” said the other.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What do I care? Let him hear! We’re not dogs,” said the ex-captain of
+      police, and looking round he noticed Alpátych.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, Yákov Alpátych! What have you come for?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “To see the Governor by his excellency’s order,” answered Alpátych,
+      lifting his head and proudly thrusting his hand into the bosom of his coat
+      as he always did when he mentioned the prince.... “He has ordered me to
+      inquire into the position of affairs,” he added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, go and find out!” shouted the angry gentleman. “They’ve brought
+      things to such a pass that there are no carts or anything!... There it is
+      again, do you hear?” said he, pointing in the direction whence came the
+      sounds of firing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They’ve brought us all to ruin... the brigands!” he repeated, and
+      descended the porch steps.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych swayed his head and went upstairs. In the waiting room were
+      tradesmen, women, and officials, looking silently at one another. The door
+      of the Governor’s room opened and they all rose and moved forward. An
+      official ran out, said some words to a merchant, called a stout official
+      with a cross hanging on his neck to follow him, and vanished again,
+      evidently wishing to avoid the inquiring looks and questions addressed to
+      him. Alpátych moved forward and next time the official came out addressed
+      him, one hand placed in the breast of his buttoned coat, and handed him
+      two letters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To his Honor Baron Asch, from General-in-Chief Prince Bolkónski,” he
+      announced with such solemnity and significance that the official turned to
+      him and took the letters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A few minutes later the Governor received Alpátych and hurriedly said to
+      him:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Inform the prince and princess that I knew nothing: I acted on the
+      highest instructions—here...” and he handed a paper to Alpátych.
+      “Still, as the prince is unwell my advice is that they should go to
+      Moscow. I am just starting myself. Inform them...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But the Governor did not finish: a dusty perspiring officer ran into the
+      room and began to say something in French. The Governor’s face expressed
+      terror.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go,” he said, nodding his head to Alpátych, and began questioning the
+      officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Eager, frightened, helpless glances were turned on Alpátych when he came
+      out of the Governor’s room. Involuntarily listening now to the firing,
+      which had drawn nearer and was increasing in strength, Alpátych hurried to
+      his inn. The paper handed to him by the Governor said this:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I assure you that the town of Smolénsk is not in the slightest danger as
+      yet and it is unlikely that it will be threatened with any. I from the one
+      side and Prince Bagratión from the other are marching to unite our forces
+      before Smolénsk, which junction will be effected on the 22nd instant, and
+      both armies with their united forces will defend our compatriots of the
+      province entrusted to your care till our efforts shall have beaten back
+      the enemies of our Fatherland, or till the last warrior in our valiant
+      ranks has perished. From this you will see that you have a perfect right
+      to reassure the inhabitants of Smolénsk, for those defended by two such
+      brave armies may feel assured of victory.” (Instructions from Barclay de
+      Tolly to Baron Asch, the civil governor of Smolénsk, 1812.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      People were anxiously roaming about the streets.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Carts piled high with household utensils, chairs, and cupboards kept
+      emerging from the gates of the yards and moving along the streets. Loaded
+      carts stood at the house next to Ferapóntov’s and women were wailing and
+      lamenting as they said good-by. A small watchdog ran round barking in
+      front of the harnessed horses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych entered the innyard at a quicker pace than usual and went
+      straight to the shed where his horses and trap were. The coachman was
+      asleep. He woke him up, told him to harness, and went into the passage.
+      From the host’s room came the sounds of a child crying, the despairing
+      sobs of a woman, and the hoarse angry shouting of Ferapóntov. The cook
+      began running hither and thither in the passage like a frightened hen,
+      just as Alpátych entered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He’s done her to death. Killed the mistress!... Beat her... dragged her
+      about so!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What for?” asked Alpátych.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She kept begging to go away. She’s a woman! ‘Take me away,’ says she,
+      ‘don’t let me perish with my little children! Folks,’ she says, ‘are all
+      gone, so why,’ she says, ‘don’t we go?’ And he began beating and pulling
+      her about so!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At these words Alpátych nodded as if in approval, and not wishing to hear
+      more went to the door of the room opposite the innkeeper’s, where he had
+      left his purchases.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You brute, you murderer!” screamed a thin, pale woman who, with a baby in
+      her arms and her kerchief torn from her head, burst through the door at
+      that moment and down the steps into the yard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Ferapóntov came out after her, but on seeing Alpátych adjusted his
+      waistcoat, smoothed his hair, yawned, and followed Alpátych into the
+      opposite room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Going already?” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych, without answering or looking at his host, sorted his packages
+      and asked how much he owed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We’ll reckon up! Well, have you been to the Governor’s?” asked
+      Ferapóntov. “What has been decided?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych replied that the Governor had not told him anything definite.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “With our business, how can we get away?” said Ferapóntov. “We’d have to
+      pay seven rubles a cartload to Dorogobúzh and I tell them they’re not
+      Christians to ask it! Selivánov, now, did a good stroke last Thursday—sold
+      flour to the army at nine rubles a sack. Will you have some tea?” he
+      added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While the horses were being harnessed Alpátych and Ferapóntov over their
+      tea talked of the price of corn, the crops, and the good weather for
+      harvesting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, it seems to be getting quieter,” remarked Ferapóntov, finishing his
+      third cup of tea and getting up. “Ours must have got the best of it. The
+      orders were not to let them in. So we’re in force, it seems.... They say
+      the other day Matthew Iványch Plátov drove them into the river Márina and
+      drowned some eighteen thousand in one day.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych collected his parcels, handed them to the coachman who had come
+      in, and settled up with the innkeeper. The noise of wheels, hoofs, and
+      bells was heard from the gateway as a little trap passed out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was by now late in the afternoon. Half the street was in shadow, the
+      other half brightly lit by the sun. Alpátych looked out of the window and
+      went to the door. Suddenly the strange sound of a far-off whistling and
+      thud was heard, followed by a boom of cannon blending into a dull roar
+      that set the windows rattling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He went out into the street: two men were running past toward the bridge.
+      From different sides came whistling sounds and the thud of cannon balls
+      and bursting shells falling on the town. But these sounds were hardly
+      heard in comparison with the noise of the firing outside the town and
+      attracted little attention from the inhabitants. The town was being
+      bombarded by a hundred and thirty guns which Napoleon had ordered up after
+      four o’clock. The people did not at once realize the meaning of this
+      bombardment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At first the noise of the falling bombs and shells only aroused curiosity.
+      Ferapóntov’s wife, who till then had not ceased wailing under the shed,
+      became quiet and with the baby in her arms went to the gate, listening to
+      the sounds and looking in silence at the people.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The cook and a shop assistant came to the gate. With lively curiosity
+      everyone tried to get a glimpse of the projectiles as they flew over their
+      heads. Several people came round the corner talking eagerly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What force!” remarked one. “Knocked the roof and ceiling all to
+      splinters!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Routed up the earth like a pig,” said another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s grand, it bucks one up!” laughed the first. “Lucky you jumped
+      aside, or it would have wiped you out!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Others joined those men and stopped and told how cannon balls had fallen
+      on a house close to them. Meanwhile still more projectiles, now with the
+      swift sinister whistle of a cannon ball, now with the agreeable
+      intermittent whistle of a shell, flew over people’s heads incessantly, but
+      not one fell close by, they all flew over. Alpátych was getting into his
+      trap. The innkeeper stood at the gate.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What are you staring at?” he shouted to the cook, who in her red skirt,
+      with sleeves rolled up, swinging her bare elbows, had stepped to the
+      corner to listen to what was being said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What marvels!” she exclaimed, but hearing her master’s voice she turned
+      back, pulling down her tucked-up skirt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Once more something whistled, but this time quite close, swooping
+      downwards like a little bird; a flame flashed in the middle of the street,
+      something exploded, and the street was shrouded in smoke.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Scoundrel, what are you doing?” shouted the innkeeper, rushing to the
+      cook.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment the pitiful wailing of women was heard from different
+      sides, the frightened baby began to cry, and people crowded silently with
+      pale faces round the cook. The loudest sound in that crowd was her
+      wailing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh-h-h! Dear souls, dear kind souls! Don’t let me die! My good souls!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Five minutes later no one remained in the street. The cook, with her thigh
+      broken by a shell splinter, had been carried into the kitchen. Alpátych,
+      his coachman, Ferapóntov’s wife and children and the house porter were all
+      sitting in the cellar, listening. The roar of guns, the whistling of
+      projectiles, and the piteous moaning of the cook, which rose above the
+      other sounds, did not cease for a moment. The mistress rocked and hushed
+      her baby and when anyone came into the cellar asked in a pathetic whisper
+      what had become of her husband who had remained in the street. A shopman
+      who entered told her that her husband had gone with others to the
+      cathedral, whence they were fetching the wonder-working icon of Smolénsk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Toward dusk the cannonade began to subside. Alpátych left the cellar and
+      stopped in the doorway. The evening sky that had been so clear was clouded
+      with smoke, through which, high up, the sickle of the new moon shone
+      strangely. Now that the terrible din of the guns had ceased a hush seemed
+      to reign over the town, broken only by the rustle of footsteps, the
+      moaning, the distant cries, and the crackle of fires which seemed
+      widespread everywhere. The cook’s moans had now subsided. On two sides
+      black curling clouds of smoke rose and spread from the fires. Through the
+      streets soldiers in various uniforms walked or ran confusedly in different
+      directions like ants from a ruined ant-hill. Several of them ran into
+      Ferapóntov’s yard before Alpátych’s eyes. Alpátych went out to the gate. A
+      retreating regiment, thronging and hurrying, blocked the street.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Noticing him, an officer said: “The town is being abandoned. Get away, get
+      away!” and then, turning to the soldiers, shouted:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll teach you to run into the yards!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych went back to the house, called the coachman, and told him to set
+      off. Ferapóntov’s whole household came out too, following Alpátych and the
+      coachman. The women, who had been silent till then, suddenly began to wail
+      as they looked at the fires—the smoke and even the flames of which
+      could be seen in the failing twilight—and as if in reply the same
+      kind of lamentation was heard from other parts of the street. Inside the
+      shed Alpátych and the coachman arranged the tangled reins and traces of
+      their horses with trembling hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As Alpátych was driving out of the gate he saw some ten soldiers in
+      Ferapóntov’s open shop, talking loudly and filling their bags and
+      knapsacks with flour and sunflower seeds. Just then Ferapóntov returned
+      and entered his shop. On seeing the soldiers he was about to shout at
+      them, but suddenly stopped and, clutching at his hair, burst into sobs and
+      laughter:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Loot everything, lads! Don’t let those devils get it!” he cried, taking
+      some bags of flour himself and throwing them into the street.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Some of the soldiers were frightened and ran away, others went on filling
+      their bags. On seeing Alpátych, Ferapóntov turned to him:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Russia is done for!” he cried. “Alpátych, I’ll set the place on fire
+      myself. We’re done for!...” and Ferapóntov ran into the yard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Soldiers were passing in a constant stream along the street blocking it
+      completely, so that Alpátych could not pass out and had to wait.
+      Ferapóntov’s wife and children were also sitting in a cart waiting till it
+      was possible to drive out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Night had come. There were stars in the sky and the new moon shone out
+      amid the smoke that screened it. On the sloping descent to the Dnieper
+      Alpátych’s cart and that of the innkeeper’s wife, which were slowly moving
+      amid the rows of soldiers and of other vehicles, had to stop. In a side
+      street near the crossroads where the vehicles had stopped, a house and
+      some shops were on fire. This fire was already burning itself out. The
+      flames now died down and were lost in the black smoke, now suddenly flared
+      up again brightly, lighting up with strange distinctness the faces of the
+      people crowding at the crossroads. Black figures flitted about before the
+      fire, and through the incessant crackling of the flames talking and
+      shouting could be heard. Seeing that his trap would not be able to move on
+      for some time, Alpátych got down and turned into the side street to look
+      at the fire. Soldiers were continually rushing backwards and forwards near
+      it, and he saw two of them and a man in a frieze coat dragging burning
+      beams into another yard across the street, while others carried bundles of
+      hay.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych went up to a large crowd standing before a high barn which was
+      blazing briskly. The walls were all on fire and the back wall had fallen
+      in, the wooden roof was collapsing, and the rafters were alight. The crowd
+      was evidently watching for the roof to fall in, and Alpátych watched for
+      it too.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Alpátych!” a familiar voice suddenly hailed the old man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mercy on us! Your excellency!” answered Alpátych, immediately recognizing
+      the voice of his young prince.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew in his riding cloak, mounted on a black horse, was looking
+      at Alpátych from the back of the crowd.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why are you here?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your... your excellency,” stammered Alpátych and broke into sobs. “Are we
+      really lost? Master!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why are you here?” Prince Andrew repeated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment the flames flared up and showed his young master’s pale
+      worn face. Alpátych told how he had been sent there and how difficult it
+      was to get away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Are we really quite lost, your excellency?” he asked again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew without replying took out a notebook and raising his knee
+      began writing in pencil on a page he tore out. He wrote to his sister:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Smolénsk is being abandoned. Bald Hills will be occupied by the enemy
+      within a week. Set off immediately for Moscow. Let me know at once when
+      you will start. Send by special messenger to Usvyázh.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Having written this and given the paper to Alpátych, he told him how to
+      arrange for departure of the prince, the princess, his son, and the boy’s
+      tutor, and how and where to let him know immediately. Before he had had
+      time to finish giving these instructions, a chief of staff followed by a
+      suite galloped up to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are a colonel?” shouted the chief of staff with a German accent, in a
+      voice familiar to Prince Andrew. “Houses are set on fire in your presence
+      and you stand by! What does this mean? You will answer for it!” shouted
+      Berg, who was now assistant to the chief of staff of the commander of the
+      left flank of the infantry of the first army, a place, as Berg said, “very
+      agreeable and well <i>en évidence</i>.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew looked at him and without replying went on speaking to
+      Alpátych.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So tell them that I shall await a reply till the tenth, and if by the
+      tenth I don’t receive news that they have all got away I shall have to
+      throw up everything and come myself to Bald Hills.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Prince,” said Berg, recognizing Prince Andrew, “I only spoke because I
+      have to obey orders, because I always do obey exactly.... You must please
+      excuse me,” he went on apologetically.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Something cracked in the flames. The fire died down for a moment and
+      wreaths of black smoke rolled from under the roof. There was another
+      terrible crash and something huge collapsed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ou-rou-rou!” yelled the crowd, echoing the crash of the collapsing roof
+      of the barn, the burning grain in which diffused a cakelike aroma all
+      around. The flames flared up again, lighting the animated, delighted,
+      exhausted faces of the spectators.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The man in the frieze coat raised his arms and shouted:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s fine, lads! Now it’s raging... It’s fine!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s the owner himself,” cried several voices.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well then,” continued Prince Andrew to Alpátych, “report to them as I
+      have told you”; and not replying a word to Berg who was now mute beside
+      him, he touched his horse and rode down the side street.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0195"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      From Smolénsk the troops continued to retreat, followed by the enemy. On
+      the tenth of August the regiment Prince Andrew commanded was marching
+      along the highroad past the avenue leading to Bald Hills. Heat and drought
+      had continued for more than three weeks. Each day fleecy clouds floated
+      across the sky and occasionally veiled the sun, but toward evening the sky
+      cleared again and the sun set in reddish-brown mist. Heavy night dews
+      alone refreshed the earth. The unreaped corn was scorched and shed its
+      grain. The marshes dried up. The cattle lowed from hunger, finding no food
+      on the sun-parched meadows. Only at night and in the forests while the dew
+      lasted was there any freshness. But on the road, the highroad along which
+      the troops marched, there was no such freshness even at night or when the
+      road passed through the forest; the dew was imperceptible on the sandy
+      dust churned up more than six inches deep. As soon as day dawned the march
+      began. The artillery and baggage wagons moved noiselessly through the deep
+      dust that rose to the very hubs of the wheels, and the infantry sank
+      ankle-deep in that soft, choking, hot dust that never cooled even at
+      night. Some of this dust was kneaded by the feet and wheels, while the
+      rest rose and hung like a cloud over the troops, settling in eyes, ears,
+      hair, and nostrils, and worst of all in the lungs of the men and beasts as
+      they moved along that road. The higher the sun rose the higher rose that
+      cloud of dust, and through the screen of its hot fine particles one could
+      look with naked eye at the sun, which showed like a huge crimson ball in
+      the unclouded sky. There was no wind, and the men choked in that
+      motionless atmosphere. They marched with handkerchiefs tied over their
+      noses and mouths. When they passed through a village they all rushed to
+      the wells and fought for the water and drank it down to the mud.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew was in command of a regiment, and the management of that
+      regiment, the welfare of the men and the necessity of receiving and giving
+      orders, engrossed him. The burning of Smolénsk and its abandonment made an
+      epoch in his life. A novel feeling of anger against the foe made him
+      forget his own sorrow. He was entirely devoted to the affairs of his
+      regiment and was considerate and kind to his men and officers. In the
+      regiment they called him “our prince,” were proud of him and loved him.
+      But he was kind and gentle only to those of his regiment, to Timókhin and
+      the like—people quite new to him, belonging to a different world and
+      who could not know and understand his past. As soon as he came across a
+      former acquaintance or anyone from the staff, he bristled up immediately
+      and grew spiteful, ironical, and contemptuous. Everything that reminded
+      him of his past was repugnant to him, and so in his relations with that
+      former circle he confined himself to trying to do his duty and not to be
+      unfair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In truth everything presented itself in a dark and gloomy light to Prince
+      Andrew, especially after the abandonment of Smolénsk on the sixth of
+      August (he considered that it could and should have been defended) and
+      after his sick father had had to flee to Moscow, abandoning to pillage his
+      dearly beloved Bald Hills which he had built and peopled. But despite
+      this, thanks to his regiment, Prince Andrew had something to think about
+      entirely apart from general questions. Two days previously he had received
+      news that his father, son, and sister had left for Moscow; and though
+      there was nothing for him to do at Bald Hills, Prince Andrew with a
+      characteristic desire to foment his own grief decided that he must ride
+      there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He ordered his horse to be saddled and, leaving his regiment on the march,
+      rode to his father’s estate where he had been born and spent his
+      childhood. Riding past the pond where there used always to be dozens of
+      women chattering as they rinsed their linen or beat it with wooden
+      beetles, Prince Andrew noticed that there was not a soul about and that
+      the little washing wharf, torn from its place and half submerged, was
+      floating on its side in the middle of the pond. He rode to the keeper’s
+      lodge. No one was at the stone entrance gates of the drive and the door stood
+      open. Grass had already begun to grow on the garden paths, and horses and
+      calves were straying in the English park. Prince Andrew rode up to the
+      hothouse; some of the glass panes were broken, and of the trees in tubs
+      some were overturned and others dried up. He called for Tarás the
+      gardener, but no one replied. Having gone round the corner of the hothouse
+      to the ornamental garden, he saw that the carved garden fence was broken
+      and branches of the plum trees had been torn off with the fruit. An old
+      peasant whom Prince Andrew in his childhood had often seen at the gate was
+      sitting on a green garden seat, plaiting a bast shoe.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was deaf and did not hear Prince Andrew ride up. He was sitting on the
+      seat the old prince used to like to sit on, and beside him strips of bast
+      were hanging on the broken and withered branch of a magnolia.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew rode up to the house. Several limes in the old garden had
+      been cut down and a piebald mare and her foal were wandering in front of
+      the house among the rosebushes. The shutters were all closed, except at
+      one window which was open. A little serf boy, seeing Prince Andrew, ran
+      into the house. Alpátych, having sent his family away, was alone at Bald
+      Hills and was sitting indoors reading the <i>Lives of the Saints</i>. On hearing
+      that Prince Andrew had come, he went out with his spectacles on his nose,
+      buttoning his coat, and, hastily stepping up, without a word began weeping
+      and kissing Prince Andrew’s knee.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Then, vexed at his own weakness, he turned away and began to report on the
+      position of affairs. Everything precious and valuable had been removed to
+      Boguchárovo. Seventy quarters of grain had also been carted away. The hay
+      and the spring corn, of which Alpátych said there had been a remarkable
+      crop that year, had been commandeered by the troops and mown down while
+      still green. The peasants were ruined; some of them too had gone to
+      Boguchárovo, only a few remained.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Without waiting to hear him out, Prince Andrew asked:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “When did my father and sister leave?” meaning when did they leave for
+      Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych, understanding the question to refer to their departure for
+      Boguchárovo, replied that they had left on the seventh and again went into
+      details concerning the estate management, asking for instructions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Am I to let the troops have the oats, and to take a receipt for them? We
+      have still six hundred quarters left,” he inquired.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What am I to say to him?” thought Prince Andrew, looking down on the old
+      man’s bald head shining in the sun and seeing by the expression on his
+      face that the old man himself understood how untimely such questions were
+      and only asked them to allay his grief.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, let them have it,” replied Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If you noticed some disorder in the garden,” said Alpátych, “it was
+      impossible to prevent it. Three regiments have been here and spent the
+      night, dragoons mostly. I took down the name and rank of their commanding
+      officer, to hand in a complaint about it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, and what are you going to do? Will you stay here if the enemy
+      occupies the place?” asked Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych turned his face to Prince Andrew, looked at him, and suddenly
+      with a solemn gesture raised his arm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is my refuge! His will be done!” he exclaimed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A group of bareheaded peasants was approaching across the meadow toward
+      the prince.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, good-by!” said Prince Andrew, bending over to Alpátych. “You must
+      go away too, take away what you can and tell the serfs to go to the Ryazán
+      estate or to the one near Moscow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych clung to Prince Andrew’s leg and burst into sobs. Gently
+      disengaging himself, the prince spurred his horse and rode down the avenue
+      at a gallop.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old man was still sitting in the ornamental garden, like a fly
+      impassive on the face of a loved one who is dead, tapping the last on
+      which he was making the bast shoe, and two little girls, running out from
+      the hot house carrying in their skirts plums they had plucked from the
+      trees there, came upon Prince Andrew. On seeing the young master, the
+      elder one with frightened look clutched her younger companion by the hand
+      and hid with her behind a birch tree, not stopping to pick up some green
+      plums they had dropped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew turned away with startled haste, unwilling to let them see
+      that they had been observed. He was sorry for the pretty frightened little
+      girl, was afraid of looking at her, and yet felt an irresistible desire to
+      do so. A new sensation of comfort and relief came over him when, seeing
+      these girls, he realized the existence of other human interests entirely
+      aloof from his own and just as legitimate as those that occupied him.
+      Evidently these girls passionately desired one thing—to carry away
+      and eat those green plums without being caught—and Prince Andrew
+      shared their wish for the success of their enterprise. He could not resist
+      looking at them once more. Believing their danger past, they sprang from
+      their ambush and, chirruping something in their shrill little voices and
+      holding up their skirts, their bare little sunburned feet scampered
+      merrily and quickly across the meadow grass.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew was somewhat refreshed by having ridden off the dusty
+      highroad along which the troops were moving. But not far from Bald Hills
+      he again came out on the road and overtook his regiment at its halting
+      place by the dam of a small pond. It was past one o’clock. The sun, a red
+      ball through the dust, burned and scorched his back intolerably through
+      his black coat. The dust always hung motionless above the buzz of talk
+      that came from the resting troops. There was no wind. As he crossed the
+      dam Prince Andrew smelled the ooze and freshness of the pond. He longed to
+      get into that water, however dirty it might be, and he glanced round at
+      the pool from whence came sounds of shrieks and laughter. The small,
+      muddy, green pond had risen visibly more than a foot, flooding the dam,
+      because it was full of the naked white bodies of soldiers with brick-red
+      hands, necks, and faces, who were splashing about in it. All this naked
+      white human flesh, laughing and shrieking, floundered about in that dirty
+      pool like carp stuffed into a watering can, and the suggestion of
+      merriment in that floundering mass rendered it specially pathetic.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One fair-haired young soldier of the third company, whom Prince Andrew
+      knew and who had a strap round the calf of one leg, crossed himself,
+      stepped back to get a good run, and plunged into the water; another, a
+      dark noncommissioned officer who was always shaggy, stood up to his waist
+      in the water joyfully wriggling his muscular figure and snorted with
+      satisfaction as he poured the water over his head with hands blackened to
+      the wrists. There were sounds of men slapping one another, yelling, and
+      puffing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Everywhere on the bank, on the dam, and in the pond, there was healthy,
+      white, muscular flesh. The officer, Timókhin, with his red little nose,
+      standing on the dam wiping himself with a towel, felt confused at seeing
+      the prince, but made up his mind to address him nevertheless.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s very nice, your excellency! Wouldn’t you like to?” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s dirty,” replied Prince Andrew, making a grimace.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We’ll clear it out for you in a minute,” said Timókhin, and, still
+      undressed, ran off to clear the men out of the pond.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The prince wants to bathe.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What prince? Ours?” said many voices, and the men were in such haste to
+      clear out that the prince could hardly stop them. He decided that he would
+      rather wash himself with water in the barn.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Flesh, bodies, cannon fodder!” he thought, and he looked at his own naked
+      body and shuddered, not from cold but from a sense of disgust and horror
+      he did not himself understand, aroused by the sight of that immense number
+      of bodies splashing about in the dirty pond.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      On the seventh of August Prince Bagratión wrote as follows from his
+      quarters at Mikháylovna on the Smolénsk road:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dear Count Aléxis Andréevich—(He was writing to Arakchéev but knew
+      that his letter would be read by the Emperor, and therefore weighed every
+      word in it to the best of his ability.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      I expect the Minister (Barclay de Tolly) has already reported the
+      abandonment of Smolénsk to the enemy. It is pitiable and sad, and the
+      whole army is in despair that this most important place has been wantonly
+      abandoned. I, for my part, begged him personally most urgently and finally
+      wrote him, but nothing would induce him to consent. I swear to you on my
+      honor that Napoleon was in such a fix as never before and might have lost
+      half his army but could not have taken Smolénsk. Our troops fought, and
+      are fighting, as never before. With fifteen thousand men I held the enemy
+      at bay for thirty-five hours and beat him; but <i>he</i> would not hold out even
+      for fourteen hours. It is disgraceful, a stain on our army, and as for
+      him, he ought, it seems to me, not to live. If he reports that our losses
+      were great, it is not true; perhaps about four thousand, not more, and not
+      even that; but even were they ten thousand, that’s war! But the enemy has
+      lost masses....
+    </p>
+<p>
+      What would it have cost him to hold out for another two days? They would
+      have had to retire of their own accord, for they had no water for men or
+      horses. He gave me his word he would not retreat, but suddenly sent
+      instructions that he was retiring that night. We cannot fight in this way,
+      or we may soon bring the enemy to Moscow....
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There is a rumor that you are thinking of peace. God forbid that you
+      should make peace after all our sacrifices and such insane retreats! You
+      would set all Russia against you and everyone of us would feel ashamed to
+      wear the uniform. If it has come to this—we must fight as long as
+      Russia can and as long as there are men able to stand....
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One man ought to be in command, and not two. Your Minister may perhaps be
+      good as a Minister, but as a general he is not merely bad but execrable,
+      yet to him is entrusted the fate of our whole country.... I am really
+      frantic with vexation; forgive my writing boldly. It is clear that the man
+      who advocates the conclusion of a peace, and that the Minister should
+      command the army, does not love our sovereign and desires the ruin of us
+      all. So I write you frankly: call out the militia. For the Minister is
+      leading these visitors after him to Moscow in a most masterly way. The
+      whole army feels great suspicion of the Imperial aide-de-camp Wolzogen. He
+      is said to be more Napoleon’s man than ours, and he is always advising the
+      Minister. I am not merely civil to him but obey him like a corporal,
+      though I am his senior. This is painful, but, loving my benefactor and
+      sovereign, I submit. Only I am sorry for the Emperor that he entrusts our
+      fine army to such as he. Consider that on our retreat we have lost by
+      fatigue and left in the hospital more than fifteen thousand men, and had
+      we attacked this would not have happened. Tell me, for God’s sake, what
+      will Russia, our mother Russia, say to our being so frightened, and why
+      are we abandoning our good and gallant Fatherland to such rabble and
+      implanting feelings of hatred and shame in all our subjects? What are we
+      scared at and of whom are we afraid? I am not to blame that the Minister
+      is vacillating, a coward, dense, dilatory, and has all bad qualities. The
+      whole army bewails it and calls down curses upon him....
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0196"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Among the innumerable categories applicable to the phenomena of human life
+      one may discriminate between those in which substance prevails and those
+      in which form prevails. To the latter—as distinguished from village,
+      country, provincial, or even Moscow life—we may allot Petersburg
+      life, and especially the life of its salons. That life of the salons is
+      unchanging. Since the year 1805 we had made peace and had again quarreled
+      with Bonaparte and had made constitutions and unmade them again, but the
+      salons of Anna Pávlovna and Hélène remained just as they had been—the
+      one seven and the other five years before. At Anna Pávlovna’s they talked
+      with perplexity of Bonaparte’s successes just as before and saw in them
+      and in the subservience shown to him by the European sovereigns a
+      malicious conspiracy, the sole object of which was to cause unpleasantness
+      and anxiety to the court circle of which Anna Pávlovna was the
+      representative. And in Hélène’s salon, which Rumyántsev himself honored
+      with his visits, regarding Hélène as a remarkably intelligent woman, they
+      talked with the same ecstasy in 1812 as in 1808 of the “great nation” and
+      the “great man,” and regretted our rupture with France, a rupture which,
+      according to them, ought to be promptly terminated by peace.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Of late, since the Emperor’s return from the army, there had been some
+      excitement in these conflicting salon circles and some demonstrations of
+      hostility to one another, but each camp retained its own tendency. In Anna
+      Pávlovna’s circle only those Frenchmen were admitted who were deep-rooted
+      legitimists, and patriotic views were expressed to the effect that one
+      ought not to go to the French theater and that to maintain the French
+      troupe was costing the government as much as a whole army corps. The
+      progress of the war was eagerly followed, and only the reports most
+      flattering to our army were circulated. In the French circle of Hélène and
+      Rumyántsev the reports of the cruelty of the enemy and of the war were
+      contradicted and all Napoleon’s attempts at conciliation were discussed.
+      In that circle they discountenanced those who advised hurried preparations
+      for a removal to Kazán of the court and the girls’ educational
+      establishments under the patronage of the Dowager Empress. In Hélène’s
+      circle the war in general was regarded as a series of formal
+      demonstrations which would very soon end in peace, and the view prevailed
+      expressed by Bilíbin—who now in Petersburg was quite at home in
+      Hélène’s house, which every clever man was obliged to visit—that not
+      by gunpowder but by those who invented it would matters be settled. In
+      that circle the Moscow enthusiasm—news of which had reached
+      Petersburg simultaneously with the Emperor’s return—was ridiculed
+      sarcastically and very cleverly, though with much caution.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Pávlovna’s circle on the contrary was enraptured by this enthusiasm
+      and spoke of it as Plutarch speaks of the deeds of the ancients. Prince
+      Vasíli, who still occupied his former important posts, formed a connecting
+      link between these two circles. He visited his “good friend Anna Pávlovna”
+       as well as his daughter’s “diplomatic salon,” and often in his constant
+      comings and goings between the two camps became confused and said at
+      Hélène’s what he should have said at Anna Pávlovna’s and vice versa.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Soon after the Emperor’s return Prince Vasíli in a conversation about the
+      war at Anna Pávlovna’s severely condemned Barclay de Tolly, but was
+      undecided as to who ought to be appointed commander in chief. One of the
+      visitors, usually spoken of as “a man of great merit,” having described
+      how he had that day seen Kutúzov, the newly chosen chief of the Petersburg
+      militia, presiding over the enrollment of recruits at the Treasury,
+      cautiously ventured to suggest that Kutúzov would be the man to satisfy
+      all requirements.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Pávlovna remarked with a melancholy smile that Kutúzov had done
+      nothing but cause the Emperor annoyance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have talked and talked at the Assembly of the Nobility,” Prince Vasíli
+      interrupted, “but they did not listen to me. I told them his election as
+      chief of the militia would not please the Emperor. They did not listen to
+      me.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s all this mania for opposition,” he went on. “And who for? It is all
+      because we want to ape the foolish enthusiasm of those Muscovites,” Prince
+      Vasíli continued, forgetting for a moment that though at Hélène’s one had
+      to ridicule the Moscow enthusiasm, at Anna Pávlovna’s one had to be
+      ecstatic about it. But he retrieved his mistake at once. “Now, is it
+      suitable that Count Kutúzov, the oldest general in Russia, should preside
+      at that tribunal? He will get nothing for his pains! How could they make a
+      man commander in chief who cannot mount a horse, who drops asleep at a
+      council, and has the very worst morals! A good reputation he made for
+      himself at Bucharest! I don’t speak of his capacity as a general, but at a
+      time like this how they appoint a decrepit, blind old man, positively
+      blind? A fine idea to have a blind general! He can’t see anything. To play
+      blindman’s buff? He can’t see at all!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      No one replied to his remarks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This was quite correct on the twenty-fourth of July. But on the
+      twenty-ninth of July Kutúzov received the title of Prince. This might
+      indicate a wish to get rid of him, and therefore Prince Vasíli’s opinion
+      continued to be correct though he was not now in any hurry to express it.
+      But on the eighth of August a committee, consisting of Field Marshal
+      Saltykóv, Arakchéev, Vyazmítinov, Lopukhín, and Kochubéy met to consider
+      the progress of the war. This committee came to the conclusion that our
+      failures were due to a want of unity in the command and though the members
+      of the committee were aware of the Emperor’s dislike of Kutúzov, after a
+      short deliberation they agreed to advise his appointment as commander in
+      chief. That same day Kutúzov was appointed commander in chief with full
+      powers over the armies and over the whole region occupied by them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the ninth of August Prince Vasíli at Anna Pávlovna’s again met the “man
+      of great merit.” The latter was very attentive to Anna Pávlovna because he
+      wanted to be appointed director of one of the educational establishments
+      for young ladies. Prince Vasíli entered the room with the air of a happy
+      conqueror who has attained the object of his desires.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, have you heard the great news? Prince Kutúzov is field marshal! All
+      dissensions are at an end! I am so glad, so delighted! At last we have a
+      man!” said he, glancing sternly and significantly round at everyone in the
+      drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The “man of great merit,” despite his desire to obtain the post of
+      director, could not refrain from reminding Prince Vasíli of his former
+      opinion. Though this was impolite to Prince Vasíli in Anna Pávlovna’s
+      drawing room, and also to Anna Pávlovna herself who had received the news
+      with delight, he could not resist the temptation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But, Prince, they say he is blind!” said he, reminding Prince Vasíli of
+      his own words.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh? Nonsense! He sees well enough,” said Prince Vasíli rapidly, in a deep
+      voice and with a slight cough—the voice and cough with which he was
+      wont to dispose of all difficulties.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He sees well enough,” he added. “And what I am so pleased about,” he went
+      on, “is that our sovereign has given him full powers over all the armies
+      and the whole region—powers no commander in chief ever had before.
+      He is a second autocrat,” he concluded with a victorious smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “God grant it! God grant it!” said Anna Pávlovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The “man of great merit,” who was still a novice in court circles,
+      wishing to flatter Anna Pávlovna by defending her former position on this
+      question, observed:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is said that the Emperor was reluctant to give Kutúzov those powers.
+      They say he blushed like a girl to whom <i>Joconde</i> is read, when he said to
+      Kutúzov: ‘Your Emperor and the Fatherland award you this honor.’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Perhaps the heart took no part in that speech,” said Anna Pávlovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, no, no!” warmly rejoined Prince Vasíli, who would not now yield
+      Kutúzov to anyone; in his opinion Kutúzov was not only admirable himself,
+      but was adored by everybody. “No, that’s impossible,” said he,
+      “for our sovereign appreciated him so highly before.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “God grant only that Prince Kutúzov assumes real power and does not allow
+      <i>anyone</i> to put a spoke in his wheel,” observed Anna Pávlovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Understanding at once to whom she alluded, Prince Vasíli said in a
+      whisper:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I know for a fact that Kutúzov made it an absolute condition that the
+      Tsarévich should not be with the army. Do you know what he said to the
+      Emperor?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Prince Vasíli repeated the words supposed to have been spoken by
+      Kutúzov to the Emperor. “I can neither punish him if he does wrong nor
+      reward him if he does right.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, a very wise man is Prince Kutúzov! I have known him a long time!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “They even say,” remarked the “man of great merit” who did not yet possess
+      courtly tact, “that his excellency made it an express condition that the
+      sovereign himself should not be with the army.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as he said this both Prince Vasíli and Anna Pávlovna turned away
+      from him and glanced sadly at one another with a sigh at his naïveté.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0197"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      While this was taking place in Petersburg the French had already passed
+      Smolénsk and were drawing nearer and nearer to Moscow. Napoleon’s
+      historian Thiers, like other of his historians, trying to justify his hero
+      says that he was drawn to the walls of Moscow against his will. He is as
+      right as other historians who look for the explanation of historic events
+      in the will of one man; he is as right as the Russian historians who
+      maintain that Napoleon was drawn to Moscow by the skill of the Russian
+      commanders. Here besides the law of retrospection, which regards all the
+      past as a preparation for events that subsequently occur, the law of
+      reciprocity comes in, confusing the whole matter. A good chessplayer
+      having lost a game is sincerely convinced that his loss resulted from a
+      mistake he made and looks for that mistake in the opening, but forgets
+      that at each stage of the game there were similar mistakes and that none
+      of his moves were perfect. He only notices the mistake to which he pays
+      attention, because his opponent took advantage of it. How much more
+      complex than this is the game of war, which occurs under certain limits of
+      time, and where it is not one will that manipulates lifeless objects, but
+      everything results from innumerable conflicts of various wills!
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After Smolénsk Napoleon sought a battle beyond Dorogobúzh at Vyázma, and
+      then at Tsárevo-Zaymíshche, but it happened that owing to a conjunction of
+      innumerable circumstances the Russians could not give battle till they
+      reached Borodinó, seventy miles from Moscow. From Vyázma Napoleon ordered
+      a direct advance on Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>Moscou, la capitale asiatique de ce grand empire, la ville sacrée des
+      peuples d’Alexandre, Moscou avec ses innombrables églises en forme de
+      pagodes chinoises</i>, * this Moscow gave Napoleon’s imagination no rest. On
+      the march from Vyázma to Tsárevo-Zaymíshche he rode his light bay
+      bobtailed ambler accompanied by his Guards, his bodyguard, his pages, and
+      aides-de-camp. Berthier, his chief of staff, dropped behind to question a
+      Russian prisoner captured by the cavalry. Followed by Lelorgne d’Ideville,
+      an interpreter, he overtook Napoleon at a gallop and reined in his horse
+      with an amused expression.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “Moscow, the Asiatic capital of this great empire, the
+     sacred city of Alexander’s people, Moscow with its
+     innumerable churches shaped like Chinese pagodas.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “Well?” asked Napoleon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One of Plátov’s Cossacks says that Plátov’s corps is joining up with the
+      main army and that Kutúzov has been appointed commander in chief. He is a
+      very shrewd and garrulous fellow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon smiled and told them to give the Cossack a horse and bring the
+      man to him. He wished to talk to him himself. Several adjutants galloped
+      off, and an hour later, Lavrúshka, the serf Denísov had handed over to
+      Rostóv, rode up to Napoleon in an orderly’s jacket and on a French cavalry
+      saddle, with a merry, and tipsy face. Napoleon told him to ride by his
+      side and began questioning him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are a Cossack?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, a Cossack, your Honor.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The Cossack, not knowing in what company he was, for Napoleon’s plain
+      appearance had nothing about it that would reveal to an Oriental mind the
+      presence of a monarch, talked with extreme familiarity of the incidents of
+      the war,” says Thiers, narrating this episode. In reality Lavrúshka,
+      having got drunk the day before and left his master dinnerless, had been
+      whipped and sent to the village in quest of chickens, where he engaged in
+      looting till the French took him prisoner. Lavrúshka was one of those
+      coarse, bare-faced lackeys who have seen all sorts of things, consider it
+      necessary to do everything in a mean and cunning way, are ready to render
+      any sort of service to their master, and are keen at guessing their
+      master’s baser impulses, especially those prompted by vanity and
+      pettiness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Finding himself in the company of Napoleon, whose identity he had easily
+      and surely recognized, Lavrúshka was not in the least abashed but merely
+      did his utmost to gain his new master’s favor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He knew very well that this was Napoleon, but Napoleon’s presence could no
+      more intimidate him than Rostóv’s, or a sergeant major’s with the rods,
+      would have done, for he had nothing that either the sergeant major or
+      Napoleon could deprive him of.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      So he rattled on, telling all the gossip he had heard among the orderlies.
+      Much of it true. But when Napoleon asked him whether the Russians thought
+      they would beat Bonaparte or not, Lavrúshka screwed up his eyes and
+      considered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In this question he saw subtle cunning, as men of his type see cunning in
+      everything, so he frowned and did not answer immediately.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s like this,” he said thoughtfully, “if there’s a battle soon, yours
+      will win. That’s right. But if three days pass, then after that, well,
+      then that same battle will not soon be over.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Lelorgne d’Ideville smilingly interpreted this speech to Napoleon thus:
+      “If a battle takes place within the next three days the French will win,
+      but if later, God knows what will happen.” Napoleon did not smile, though
+      he was evidently in high good humor, and he ordered these words to be
+      repeated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Lavrúshka noticed this and to entertain him further, pretending not to
+      know who Napoleon was, added:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We know that you have Bonaparte and that he has beaten everybody in the
+      world, but we are a different matter...”—without knowing why or how
+      this bit of boastful patriotism slipped out at the end.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The interpreter translated these words without the last phrase, and
+      Bonaparte smiled. “The young Cossack made his mighty interlocutor smile,”
+       says Thiers. After riding a few paces in silence, Napoleon turned to
+      Berthier and said he wished to see how the news that he was talking to the
+      Emperor himself, to that very Emperor who had written his immortally
+      victorious name on the Pyramids, would affect this <i>enfant du Don</i>. *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Child of the Don.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      The fact was accordingly conveyed to Lavrúshka.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Lavrúshka, understanding that this was done to perplex him and that
+      Napoleon expected him to be frightened, to gratify his new masters
+      promptly pretended to be astonished and awe-struck, opened his eyes wide,
+      and assumed the expression he usually put on when taken to be whipped. “As
+      soon as Napoleon’s interpreter had spoken,” says Thiers, “the Cossack,
+      seized by amazement, did not utter another word, but rode on, his eyes
+      fixed on the conqueror whose fame had reached him across the steppes of
+      the East. All his loquacity was suddenly arrested and replaced by a naïve
+      and silent feeling of admiration. Napoleon, after making the Cossack a
+      present, had him set free like a bird restored to its native fields.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon rode on, dreaming of the Moscow that so appealed to his
+      imagination, and “the bird restored to its native fields” galloped to our
+      outposts, inventing on the way all that had not taken place but that he
+      meant to relate to his comrades. What had really taken place he did not
+      wish to relate because it seemed to him not worth telling. He found the
+      Cossacks, inquired for the regiment operating with Plátov’s detachment and
+      by evening found his master, Nicholas Rostóv, quartered at Yankóvo. Rostóv
+      was just mounting to go for a ride round the neighboring villages with
+      Ilyín; he let Lavrúshka have another horse and took him along with him.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0198"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary was not in Moscow and out of danger as Prince Andrew
+      supposed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the return of Alpátych from Smolénsk the old prince suddenly seemed
+      to awake as from a dream. He ordered the militiamen to be called up from
+      the villages and armed, and wrote a letter to the commander in chief
+      informing him that he had resolved to remain at Bald Hills to the last
+      extremity and to defend it, leaving to the commander in chief’s discretion
+      to take measures or not for the defense of Bald Hills, where one of
+      Russia’s oldest generals would be captured or killed, and he announced to
+      his household that he would remain at Bald Hills.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But while himself remaining, he gave instructions for the departure of the
+      princess and Dessalles with the little prince to Boguchárovo and thence to
+      Moscow. Princess Mary, alarmed by her father’s feverish and sleepless
+      activity after his previous apathy, could not bring herself to leave him
+      alone and for the first time in her life ventured to disobey him. She
+      refused to go away and her father’s fury broke over her in a terrible
+      storm. He repeated every injustice he had ever inflicted on her. Trying to
+      convict her, he told her she had worn him out, had caused his quarrel with
+      his son, had harbored nasty suspicions of him, making it the object of her
+      life to poison his existence, and he drove her from his study telling her
+      that if she did not go away it was all the same to him. He declared that
+      he did not wish to remember her existence and warned her not to dare to
+      let him see her. The fact that he did not, as she had feared, order her to
+      be carried away by force but only told her not to let him see her cheered
+      Princess Mary. She knew it was a proof that in the depth of his soul he
+      was glad she was remaining at home and had not gone away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The morning after little Nicholas had left, the old prince donned his full
+      uniform and prepared to visit the commander in chief. His <i>calèche</i> was
+      already at the door. Princess Mary saw him walk out of the house in his
+      uniform wearing all his orders and go down the garden to review his armed
+      peasants and domestic serfs. She sat by the window listening to his voice
+      which reached her from the garden. Suddenly several men came running up
+      the avenue with frightened faces.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary ran out to the porch, down the flower-bordered path, and
+      into the avenue. A large crowd of militiamen and domestics were moving
+      toward her, and in their midst several men were supporting by the armpits
+      and dragging along a little old man in a uniform and decorations. She ran
+      up to him and, in the play of the sunlight that fell in small round spots
+      through the shade of the lime-tree avenue, could not be sure what change
+      there was in his face. All she could see was that his former stern and
+      determined expression had altered to one of timidity and submission. On
+      seeing his daughter he moved his helpless lips and made a hoarse sound. It
+      was impossible to make out what he wanted. He was lifted up, carried to
+      his study, and laid on the very couch he had so feared of late.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The doctor, who was fetched that same night, bled him and said that the
+      prince had had a seizure paralyzing his right side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was becoming more and more dangerous to remain at Bald Hills, and next
+      day they moved the prince to Boguchárovo, the doctor accompanying him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      By the time they reached Boguchárovo, Dessalles and the little prince had
+      already left for Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For three weeks the old prince lay stricken by paralysis in the new house
+      Prince Andrew had built at Boguchárovo, ever in the same state, getting
+      neither better nor worse. He was unconscious and lay like a distorted
+      corpse. He muttered unceasingly, his eyebrows and lips twitching, and it
+      was impossible to tell whether he understood what was going on around him
+      or not. One thing was certain—that he was suffering and wished to
+      say something. But what it was, no one could tell: it might be some
+      caprice of a sick and half-crazy man, or it might relate to public
+      affairs, or possibly to family concerns.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The doctor said this restlessness did not mean anything and was due to
+      physical causes; but Princess Mary thought he wished to tell her
+      something, and the fact that her presence always increased his
+      restlessness confirmed her opinion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was evidently suffering both physically and mentally. There was no hope
+      of recovery. It was impossible for him to travel, it would not do to let
+      him die on the road. “Would it not be better if the end did come, the very
+      end?” Princess Mary sometimes thought. Night and day, hardly sleeping at
+      all, she watched him and, terrible to say, often watched him not with hope
+      of finding signs of improvement but wishing to find symptoms of the
+      approach of the end.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Strange as it was to her to acknowledge this feeling in herself, yet there
+      it was. And what seemed still more terrible to her was that since her
+      father’s illness began (perhaps even sooner, when she stayed with him
+      expecting something to happen), all the personal desires and hopes that
+      had been forgotten or sleeping within her had awakened. Thoughts that had
+      not entered her mind for years—thoughts of a life free from the fear
+      of her father, and even the possibility of love and of family happiness—floated
+      continually in her imagination like temptations of the devil. Thrust them
+      aside as she would, questions continually recurred to her as to how she
+      would order her life now, after <i>that</i>. These were temptations of the devil
+      and Princess Mary knew it. She knew that the sole weapon against <i>him</i> was
+      prayer, and she tried to pray. She assumed an attitude of prayer, looked
+      at the icons, repeated the words of a prayer, but she could not pray. She
+      felt that a different world had now taken possession of her—the life
+      of a world of strenuous and free activity, quite opposed to the spiritual
+      world in which till now she had been confined and in which her greatest
+      comfort had been prayer. She could not pray, could not weep, and worldly
+      cares took possession of her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was becoming dangerous to remain in Boguchárovo. News of the approach
+      of the French came from all sides, and in one village, ten miles from
+      Boguchárovo, a homestead had been looted by French marauders.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The doctor insisted on the necessity of moving the prince; the provincial
+      Marshal of the Nobility sent an official to Princess Mary to persuade her
+      to get away as quickly as possible, and the head of the rural police
+      having come to Boguchárovo urged the same thing, saying that the French
+      were only some twenty-five miles away, that French proclamations were
+      circulating in the villages, and that if the princess did not take her
+      father away before the fifteenth, he could not answer for the
+      consequences.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess decided to leave on the fifteenth. The cares of preparation
+      and giving orders, for which everyone came to her, occupied her all day.
+      She spent the night of the fourteenth as usual, without undressing, in the
+      room next to the one where the prince lay. Several times, waking up, she
+      heard his groans and muttering, the creak of his bed, and the steps of
+      Tíkhon and the doctor when they turned him over. Several times she
+      listened at the door, and it seemed to her that his mutterings were louder
+      than usual and that they turned him over oftener. She could not sleep and
+      several times went to the door and listened, wishing to enter but not
+      deciding to do so. Though he did not speak, Princess Mary saw and knew how
+      unpleasant every sign of anxiety on his account was to him. She had
+      noticed with what dissatisfaction he turned from the look she sometimes
+      involuntarily fixed on him. She knew that her going in during the night at
+      an unusual hour would irritate him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But never had she felt so grieved for him or so much afraid of losing him.
+      She recalled all her life with him and in every word and act of his found
+      an expression of his love of her. Occasionally amid these memories
+      temptations of the devil would surge into her imagination: thoughts of how
+      things would be after his death, and how her new, liberated life would be
+      ordered. But she drove these thoughts away with disgust. Toward morning he
+      became quiet and she fell asleep.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She woke late. That sincerity which often comes with waking showed her
+      clearly what chiefly concerned her about her father’s illness. On waking
+      she listened to what was going on behind the door and, hearing him groan,
+      said to herself with a sigh that things were still the same.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But what could have happened? What did I want? I want his death!” she
+      cried with a feeling of loathing for herself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She washed, dressed, said her prayers, and went out to the porch. In front
+      of it stood carriages without horses and things were being packed into the
+      vehicles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was a warm, gray morning. Princess Mary stopped at the porch, still
+      horrified by her spiritual baseness and trying to arrange her thoughts
+      before going to her father. The doctor came downstairs and went out to
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is a little better today,” said he. “I was looking for
+      you. One can make out something of what he is saying. His head is clearer.
+      Come in, he is asking for you....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary’s heart beat so violently at this news that she grew pale
+      and leaned against the wall to keep from falling. To see him, talk to him,
+      feel his eyes on her now that her whole soul was overflowing with those
+      dreadful, wicked temptations, was a torment of joy and terror.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come,” said the doctor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary entered her father’s room and went up to his bed. He was
+      lying on his back propped up high, and his small bony hands with their
+      knotted purple veins were lying on the quilt; his left eye gazed straight
+      before him, his right eye was awry, and his brows and lips motionless. He
+      seemed altogether so thin, small, and pathetic. His face seemed to have
+      shriveled or melted; his features had grown smaller. Princess Mary went up
+      and kissed his hand. His left hand pressed hers so that she understood
+      that he had long been waiting for her to come. He twitched her hand, and
+      his brows and lips quivered angrily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She looked at him in dismay trying to guess what he wanted of her. When
+      she changed her position so that his left eye could see her face he calmed
+      down, not taking his eyes off her for some seconds. Then his lips and
+      tongue moved, sounds came, and he began to speak, gazing timidly and
+      imploringly at her, evidently afraid that she might not understand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Straining all her faculties Princess Mary looked at him. The comic efforts
+      with which he moved his tongue made her drop her eyes and with difficulty
+      repress the sobs that rose to her throat. He said something, repeating the
+      same words several times. She could not understand them, but tried to
+      guess what he was saying and inquiringly repeated the words he uttered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mmm...ar...ate...ate...” he repeated several times.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was quite impossible to understand these sounds. The doctor thought he
+      had guessed them, and inquiringly repeated: <i>“Mary, are you
+      afraid?”</i> The prince shook his head, again repeated the same sounds.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“My mind, my mind aches?”</i> questioned Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He made a mumbling sound in confirmation of this, took her hand, and began
+      pressing it to different parts of his breast as if trying to find the
+      right place for it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Always thoughts... about you... thoughts...” he then uttered much more
+      clearly than he had done before, now that he was sure of being understood.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary pressed her head against his hand, trying to hide her sobs
+      and tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He moved his hand over her hair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have been calling you all night...” he brought out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If only I had known...” she said through her tears. “I was afraid to come
+      in.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He pressed her hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Weren’t you asleep?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I did not sleep,” said Princess Mary, shaking her head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Unconsciously imitating her father, she now tried to express herself as he
+      did, as much as possible by signs, and her tongue too seemed to move with
+      difficulty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear one... Dearest...” Princess Mary could not quite make out what he
+      had said, but from his look it was clear that he had uttered a tender
+      caressing word such as he had never used to her before. “Why didn’t you
+      come in?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And I was wishing for his death!” thought Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was silent awhile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Thank you... daughter dear!... for all, for all... forgive!... thank
+      you!... forgive!... thank you!...” and tears began to flow from his eyes.
+      “Call Andrew!” he said suddenly, and a childish, timid expression of doubt
+      showed itself on his face as he spoke.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He himself seemed aware that his demand was meaningless. So at least it
+      seemed to Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have a letter from him,” she replied.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He glanced at her with timid surprise.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where is he?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “He’s with the army, Father, at Smolénsk.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He closed his eyes and remained silent a long time. Then as if in answer
+      to his doubts and to confirm the fact that now he understood and
+      remembered everything, he nodded his head and reopened his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” he said, softly and distinctly. “Russia has perished. They’ve
+      destroyed her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And he began to sob, and again tears flowed from his eyes. Princess Mary
+      could no longer restrain herself and wept while she gazed at his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Again he closed his eyes. His sobs ceased, he pointed to his eyes, and
+      Tíkhon, understanding him, wiped away the tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Then he again opened his eyes and said something none of them could
+      understand for a long time, till at last Tíkhon understood and repeated
+      it. Princess Mary had sought the meaning of his words in the mood in which
+      he had just been speaking. She thought he was speaking of Russia, or
+      Prince Andrew, of herself, of his grandson, or of his own death, and so
+      she could not guess his words.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Put on your white dress. I like it,” was what he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having understood this Princess Mary sobbed still louder, and the doctor
+      taking her arm led her out to the veranda, soothing her and trying to
+      persuade her to prepare for her journey. When she had left the room the
+      prince again began speaking about his son, about the war, and about the
+      Emperor, angrily twitching his brows and raising his hoarse voice, and
+      then he had a second and final stroke.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary stayed on the veranda. The day had cleared, it was hot and
+      sunny. She could understand nothing, think of nothing and feel nothing,
+      except passionate love for her father, love such as she thought she had
+      never felt till that moment. She ran out sobbing into the garden and as
+      far as the pond, along the avenues of young lime trees Prince Andrew had
+      planted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes... I... I... I wished for his death! Yes, I wanted it to end
+      quicker.... I wished to be at peace.... And what will become of me? What
+      use will peace be when he is no longer here?” Princess Mary murmured,
+      pacing the garden with hurried steps and pressing her hands to her bosom
+      which heaved with convulsive sobs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When she had completed the tour of the garden, which brought her again to
+      the house, she saw Mademoiselle Bourienne—who had remained at
+      Boguchárovo and did not wish to leave it—coming toward her with a
+      stranger. This was the Marshal of the Nobility of the district, who had
+      come personally to point out to the princess the necessity for her prompt
+      departure. Princess Mary listened without understanding him; she led him
+      to the house, offered him lunch, and sat down with him. Then, excusing
+      herself, she went to the door of the old prince’s room. The doctor came
+      out with an agitated face and said she could not enter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go away, Princess! Go away... go away!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She returned to the garden and sat down on the grass at the foot of the
+      slope by the pond, where no one could see her. She did not know how long
+      she had been there when she was aroused by the sound of a woman’s
+      footsteps running along the path. She rose and saw Dunyásha her maid, who
+      was evidently looking for her, and who stopped suddenly as if in alarm on
+      seeing her mistress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Please come, Princess... The Prince,” said Dunyásha in a breaking voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Immediately, I’m coming, I’m coming!” replied the princess hurriedly, not
+      giving Dunyásha time to finish what she was saying, and trying to avoid
+      seeing the girl she ran toward the house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Princess, it’s God’s will! You must be prepared for everything,” said the
+      Marshal, meeting her at the house door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let me alone; it’s not true!” she cried angrily to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The doctor tried to stop her. She pushed him aside and ran to her father’s
+      door. “Why are these people with frightened faces stopping me? I don’t
+      want any of them! And what are they doing here?” she thought. She opened
+      the door and the bright daylight in that previously darkened room startled
+      her. In the room were her nurse and other women. They all drew back from
+      the bed, making way for her. He was still lying on the bed as before, but
+      the stern expression of his quiet face made Princess Mary stop short on
+      the threshold.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, he’s not dead—it’s impossible!” she told herself and approached
+      him, and repressing the terror that seized her, she pressed her lips to
+      his cheek. But she stepped back immediately. All the force of the
+      tenderness she had been feeling for him vanished instantly and was
+      replaced by a feeling of horror at what lay there before her. “No, he is
+      no more! He is not, but here where he was is something unfamiliar and
+      hostile, some dreadful, terrifying, and repellent mystery!” And hiding her
+      face in her hands, Princess Mary sank into the arms of the doctor, who
+      held her up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      In the presence of Tíkhon and the doctor the women washed what had been
+      the prince, tied his head up with a handkerchief that the mouth should not
+      stiffen while open, and with another handkerchief tied together the legs
+      that were already spreading apart. Then they dressed him in uniform with
+      his decorations and placed his shriveled little body on a table. Heaven
+      only knows who arranged all this and when, but it all got done as if of
+      its own accord. Toward night candles were burning round his coffin, a pall
+      was spread over it, the floor was strewn with sprays of juniper, a printed
+      band was tucked in under his shriveled head, and in a corner of the room
+      sat a chanter reading the psalms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just as horses shy and snort and gather about a dead horse, so the inmates
+      of the house and strangers crowded into the drawing room round the coffin—the
+      Marshal, the village Elder, peasant women—and all with fixed and
+      frightened eyes, crossing themselves, bowed and kissed the old prince’s
+      cold and stiffened hand.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0199"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Until Prince Andrew settled in Boguchárovo its owners had always been
+      absentees, and its peasants were of quite a different character from those
+      of Bald Hills. They differed from them in speech, dress, and disposition.
+      They were called steppe peasants. The old prince used to approve of them
+      for their endurance at work when they came to Bald Hills to help with the
+      harvest. or to dig ponds and ditches, but he disliked them for their
+      boorishness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew’s last stay at Boguchárovo, when he introduced hospitals and
+      schools and reduced the quitrent the peasants had to pay, had not softened
+      their disposition but had on the contrary strengthened in them the traits
+      of character the old prince called boorishness. Various obscure rumors
+      were always current among them: at one time a rumor that they would all be
+      enrolled as Cossacks; at another of a new religion to which they were all
+      to be converted; then of some proclamation of the Tsar’s and of an oath to
+      the Tsar Paul in 1797 (in connection with which it was rumored that
+      freedom had been granted them but the landowners had stopped it), then of
+      Peter Fëdorovich’s return to the throne in seven years’ time, when
+      everything would be made free and so “simple” that there would be no
+      restrictions. Rumors of the war with Bonaparte and his invasion were
+      connected in their minds with the same sort of vague notions of
+      Antichrist, the end of the world, and “pure freedom.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In the vicinity of Boguchárovo were large villages belonging to the crown
+      or to owners whose serfs paid quitrent and could work where they pleased.
+      There were very few resident landlords in the neighborhood and also very
+      few domestic or literate serfs, and in the lives of the peasantry of those
+      parts the mysterious undercurrents in the life of the Russian people, the
+      causes and meaning of which are so baffling to contemporaries, were more
+      clearly and strongly noticeable than among others. One instance, which had
+      occurred some twenty years before, was a movement among the peasants to
+      emigrate to some unknown “warm rivers.” Hundreds of peasants, among them
+      the Boguchárovo folk, suddenly began selling their cattle and moving in
+      whole families toward the southeast. As birds migrate to somewhere beyond
+      the sea, so these men with their wives and children streamed to the
+      southeast, to parts where none of them had ever been. They set off in
+      caravans, bought their freedom one by one or ran away, and drove or walked
+      toward the “warm rivers.” Many of them were punished, some sent to
+      Siberia, many died of cold and hunger on the road, many returned of their
+      own accord, and the movement died down of itself just as it had sprung up,
+      without apparent reason. But such undercurrents still existed among the
+      people and gathered new forces ready to manifest themselves just as
+      strangely, unexpectedly, and at the same time simply, naturally, and
+      forcibly. Now in 1812, to anyone living in close touch with these people
+      it was apparent that these undercurrents were acting strongly and nearing
+      an eruption.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych, who had reached Boguchárovo shortly before the old prince’s
+      death, noticed an agitation among the peasants, and that contrary to what
+      was happening in the Bald Hills district, where over a radius of forty
+      miles all the peasants were moving away and leaving their villages to be
+      devastated by the Cossacks, the peasants in the steppe region round
+      Boguchárovo were, it was rumored, in touch with the French, received
+      leaflets from them that passed from hand to hand, and did not migrate. He
+      learned from domestic serfs loyal to him that the peasant Karp, who
+      possessed great influence in the village commune and had recently been
+      away driving a government transport, had returned with news that the
+      Cossacks were destroying deserted villages, but that the French did not
+      harm them. Alpátych also knew that on the previous day another peasant had
+      even brought from the village of Visloúkhovo, which was occupied by the
+      French, a proclamation by a French general that no harm would be done to
+      the inhabitants, and if they remained they would be paid for anything
+      taken from them. As proof of this the peasant had brought from Visloúkhovo
+      a hundred rubles in notes (he did not know that they were false) paid to
+      him in advance for hay.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      More important still, Alpátych learned that on the morning of the very day
+      he gave the village Elder orders to collect carts to move the princess’
+      luggage from Boguchárovo, there had been a village meeting at which it had
+      been decided not to move but to wait. Yet there was no time to waste. On
+      the fifteenth, the day of the old prince’s death, the Marshal had insisted
+      on Princess Mary’s leaving at once, as it was becoming dangerous. He had
+      told her that after the sixteenth he could not be responsible for what
+      might happen. On the evening of the day the old prince died the Marshal
+      went away, promising to return next day for the funeral. But this he was
+      unable to do, for he received tidings that the French had unexpectedly
+      advanced, and had barely time to remove his own family and valuables from
+      his estate.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For some thirty years Boguchárovo had been managed by the village Elder,
+      Dron, whom the old prince called by the diminutive “Drónushka.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dron was one of those physically and mentally vigorous peasants who grow
+      big beards as soon as they are of age and go on unchanged till they are
+      sixty or seventy, without a gray hair or the loss of a tooth, as straight
+      and strong at sixty as at thirty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Soon after the migration to the “warm rivers,” in which he had taken part
+      like the rest, Dron was made village Elder and overseer of Boguchárovo,
+      and had since filled that post irreproachably for twenty-three years. The
+      peasants feared him more than they did their master. The masters, both the
+      old prince and the young, and the steward respected him and jestingly
+      called him “the Minister.” During the whole time of his service Dron had
+      never been drunk or ill, never after sleepless nights or the hardest tasks
+      had he shown the least fatigue, and though he could not read he had never
+      forgotten a single money account or the number of quarters of flour in any
+      of the endless cartloads he sold for the prince, nor a single shock of the
+      whole corn crop on any single acre of the Boguchárovo fields.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych, arriving from the devastated Bald Hills estate, sent for his
+      Dron on the day of the prince’s funeral and told him to have twelve horses
+      got ready for the princess’ carriages and eighteen carts for the things to
+      be removed from Boguchárovo. Though the peasants paid quitrent, Alpátych
+      thought no difficulty would be made about complying with this order, for
+      there were two hundred and thirty households at work in Boguchárovo and
+      the peasants were well to do. But on hearing the order Dron lowered his
+      eyes and remained silent. Alpátych named certain peasants he knew, from
+      whom he told him to take the carts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dron replied that the horses of these peasants were away carting. Alpátych
+      named others, but they too, according to Dron, had no horses available:
+      some horses were carting for the government, others were too weak, and
+      others had died for want of fodder. It seemed that no horses could be had
+      even for the carriages, much less for the carting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych looked intently at Dron and frowned. Just as Dron was a model
+      village Elder, so Alpátych had not managed the prince’s estates for twenty
+      years in vain. He was a model steward, possessing in the highest degree
+      the faculty of divining the needs and instincts of those he dealt with.
+      Having glanced at Dron he at once understood that his answers did not
+      express his personal views but the general mood of the Boguchárovo
+      commune, by which the Elder had already been carried away. But he also
+      knew that Dron, who had acquired property and was hated by the commune,
+      must be hesitating between the two camps: the masters’ and the serfs’. He
+      noticed this hesitation in Dron’s look and therefore frowned and moved
+      closer up to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now just listen, Drónushka,” said he. “Don’t talk nonsense to me. His
+      excellency Prince Andrew himself gave me orders to move all the people
+      away and not leave them with the enemy, and there is an order from the
+      Tsar about it too. Anyone who stays is a traitor to the Tsar. Do you
+      hear?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I hear,” Dron answered without lifting his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych was not satisfied with this reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh, Dron, it will turn out badly!” he said, shaking his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The power is in your hands,” Dron rejoined sadly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh, Dron, drop it!” Alpátych repeated, withdrawing his hand from his
+      bosom and solemnly pointing to the floor at Dron’s feet. “I can see
+      through you and three yards into the ground under you,” he continued,
+      gazing at the floor in front of Dron.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dron was disconcerted, glanced furtively at Alpátych and again lowered his
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You drop this nonsense and tell the people to get ready to leave their
+      homes and go to Moscow and to get carts ready for tomorrow morning for the
+      princess’ things. And don’t go to any meeting yourself, do you hear?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dron suddenly fell on his knees.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yákov Alpátych, discharge me! Take the keys from me and discharge me, for
+      Christ’s sake!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Stop that!” cried Alpátych sternly. “I see through you and three yards
+      under you,” he repeated, knowing that his skill in beekeeping, his
+      knowledge of the right time to sow the oats, and the fact that he had been
+      able to retain the old prince’s favor for twenty years had long since
+      gained him the reputation of being a wizard, and that the power of seeing
+      three yards under a man is considered an attribute of wizards.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dron got up and was about to say something, but Alpátych interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it you have got into your heads, eh?... What are you thinking of,
+      eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What am I to do with the people?” said Dron. “They’re quite beside
+      themselves; I have already told them...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “‘Told them,’ I dare say!” said Alpátych. “Are they drinking?” he asked
+      abruptly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Quite beside themselves, Yákov Alpátych; they’ve fetched another barrel.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, then, listen! I’ll go to the police officer, and you tell them so,
+      and that they must stop this and the carts must be got ready.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I understand.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych did not insist further. He had managed people for a long time and
+      knew that the chief way to make them obey is to show no suspicion that
+      they can possibly disobey. Having wrung a submissive “I understand” from
+      Dron, Alpátych contented himself with that, though he not only doubted but
+      felt almost certain that without the help of troops the carts would not be
+      forthcoming.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And so it was, for when evening came no carts had been provided. In the
+      village, outside the drink shop, another meeting was being held, which
+      decided that the horses should be driven out into the woods and the carts
+      should not be provided. Without saying anything of this to the princess,
+      Alpátych had his own belongings taken out of the carts which had arrived
+      from Bald Hills and had those horses got ready for the princess’
+      carriages. Meanwhile he went himself to the police authorities.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0200"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After her father’s funeral Princess Mary shut herself up in her room and
+      did not admit anyone. A maid came to the door to say that Alpátych was
+      asking for orders about their departure. (This was before his talk with
+      Dron.) Princess Mary raised herself on the sofa on which she had been
+      lying and replied through the closed door that she did not mean to go away
+      and begged to be left in peace.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The windows of the room in which she was lying looked westward. She lay on
+      the sofa with her face to the wall, fingering the buttons of the leather
+      cushion and seeing nothing but that cushion, and her confused thoughts
+      were centered on one subject—the irrevocability of death and her own
+      spiritual baseness, which she had not suspected, but which had shown
+      itself during her father’s illness. She wished to pray but did not dare
+      to, dared not in her present state of mind address herself to God. She lay
+      for a long time in that position.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The sun had reached the other side of the house, and its slanting rays
+      shone into the open window, lighting up the room and part of the morocco
+      cushion at which Princess Mary was looking. The flow of her thoughts
+      suddenly stopped. Unconsciously she sat up, smoothed her hair, got up, and
+      went to the window, involuntarily inhaling the freshness of the clear but
+      windy evening.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, you can well enjoy the evening now! He is gone and no one will
+      hinder you,” she said to herself, and sinking into a chair she let her
+      head fall on the window sill.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Someone spoke her name in a soft and tender voice from the garden and
+      kissed her head. She looked up. It was Mademoiselle Bourienne in a black
+      dress and weepers. She softly approached Princess Mary, sighed, kissed
+      her, and immediately began to cry. The princess looked up at her. All
+      their former disharmony and her own jealousy recurred to her mind. But she
+      remembered too how <i>he</i> had changed of late toward Mademoiselle Bourienne
+      and could not bear to see her, thereby showing how unjust were the
+      reproaches Princess Mary had mentally addressed to her. “Besides, is it
+      for me, for me who desired his death, to condemn anyone?” she thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary vividly pictured to herself the position of Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne, whom she had of late kept at a distance, but who yet was
+      dependent on her and living in her house. She felt sorry for her and held
+      out her hand with a glance of gentle inquiry. Mademoiselle Bourienne at
+      once began crying again and kissed that hand, speaking of the princess’
+      sorrow and making herself a partner in it. She said her only consolation
+      was the fact that the princess allowed her to share her sorrow, that all
+      the old misunderstandings should sink into nothing but this great grief;
+      that she felt herself blameless in regard to everyone, and that <i>he</i>, from
+      above, saw her affection and gratitude. The princess heard her, not
+      heeding her words but occasionally looking up at her and listening to the
+      sound of her voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your position is doubly terrible, dear princess,” said Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne after a pause. “I understand that you could not, and cannot,
+      think of yourself, but with my love for you I must do so.... Has Alpátych
+      been to you? Has he spoken to you of going away?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary did not answer. She did not understand who was to go or
+      where to. “Is it possible to plan or think of anything now? Is it not all
+      the same?” she thought, and did not reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You know, <i>chère Marie</i>,” said Mademoiselle Bourienne, “that
+      we are in danger—are surrounded by the French. It would be dangerous to move
+      now. If we go we are almost sure to be taken prisoners, and God knows...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary looked at her companion without understanding what she was
+      talking about.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, if anyone knew how little anything matters to me now,” she said. “Of
+      course I would on no account wish to go away from him.... Alpátych did say
+      something about going.... Speak to him; I can do nothing, nothing, and
+      don’t want to....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ve spoken to him. He hopes we should be in time to get away tomorrow,
+      but I think it would now be better to stay here,” said Mademoiselle
+      Bourienne. “Because, you will agree, <i>chère Marie</i>, to fall into the
+      hands of the soldiers or of riotous peasants would be terrible.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne took from her reticule a proclamation (not printed
+      on ordinary Russian paper) of General Rameau’s, telling people not to
+      leave their homes and that the French authorities would afford them proper
+      protection. She handed this to the princess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I think it would be best to appeal to that general,” she continued, “and
+      I am sure that all due respect would be shown you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary read the paper, and her face began to quiver with stifled
+      sobs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “From whom did you get this?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They probably recognized that I am French, by my name,” replied
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne blushing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary, with the paper in her hand, rose from the window and with a
+      pale face went out of the room and into what had been Prince Andrew’s
+      study.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dunyásha, send Alpátych, or Drónushka, or somebody to me!” she said, “and
+      tell Mademoiselle Bourienne not to come to me,” she added, hearing
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne’s voice. “We must go at once, at once!” she said,
+      appalled at the thought of being left in the hands of the French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If Prince Andrew heard that I was in the power of the French! That I, the
+      daughter of Prince Nicholas Bolkónski, asked General Rameau for protection
+      and accepted his favor!” This idea horrified her, made her shudder, blush,
+      and feel such a rush of anger and pride as she had never experienced
+      before. All that was distressing, and especially all that was humiliating,
+      in her position rose vividly to her mind. “They, the French, would settle
+      in this house: M. le Général Rameau would occupy Prince Andrew’s study and
+      amuse himself by looking through and reading his letters and papers.
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne would do the honors of Boguchárovo for him. I
+      should be given a small room as a favor, the soldiers would violate my
+      father’s newly dug grave to steal his crosses and stars, they would tell
+      me of their victories over the Russians, and would pretend to sympathize
+      with my sorrow...” thought Princess Mary, not thinking her own thoughts
+      but feeling bound to think like her father and her brother. For herself
+      she did not care where she remained or what happened to her, but she felt
+      herself the representative of her dead father and of Prince Andrew.
+      Involuntarily she thought their thoughts and felt their feelings. What
+      they would have said and what they would have done she felt bound to say
+      and do. She went into Prince Andrew’s study, trying to enter completely
+      into his ideas, and considered her position.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The demands of life, which had seemed to her annihilated by her father’s
+      death, all at once rose before her with a new, previously unknown force
+      and took possession of her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Agitated and flushed she paced the room, sending now for Michael Ivánovich
+      and now for Tíkhon or Dron. Dunyásha, the nurse, and the other maids could
+      not say in how far Mademoiselle Bourienne’s statement was correct.
+      Alpátych was not at home, he had gone to the police. Neither could the
+      architect Michael Ivánovich, who on being sent for came in with sleepy
+      eyes, tell Princess Mary anything. With just the same smile of agreement
+      with which for fifteen years he had been accustomed to answer the old
+      prince without expressing views of his own, he now replied to Princess
+      Mary, so that nothing definite could be got from his answers. The old
+      valet Tíkhon, with sunken, emaciated face that bore the stamp of
+      inconsolable grief, replied: “Yes, Princess” to all Princess Mary’s
+      questions and hardly refrained from sobbing as he looked at her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At length Dron, the village Elder, entered the room and with a deep bow to
+      Princess Mary came to a halt by the doorpost.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary walked up and down the room and stopped in front of him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Drónushka,” she said, regarding as a sure friend this Drónushka who
+      always used to bring a special kind of gingerbread from his visit to the
+      fair at Vyázma every year and smilingly offer it to her, “Drónushka, now
+      since our misfortune...” she began, but could not go on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We are all in God’s hands,” said he, with a sigh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They were silent for a while.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Drónushka, Alpátych has gone off somewhere and I have no one to turn to.
+      Is it true, as they tell me, that I can’t even go away?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why shouldn’t you go away, your excellency? You can go,” said Dron.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I was told it would be dangerous because of the enemy. Dear friend, I can
+      do nothing. I understand nothing. I have nobody! I want to go away tonight
+      or early tomorrow morning.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dron paused. He looked askance at Princess Mary and said: “There are no
+      horses; I told Yákov Alpátych so.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why are there none?” asked the princess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s all God’s scourge,” said Dron. “What horses we had have been taken
+      for the army or have died—this is such a year! It’s not a case of
+      feeding horses—we may die of hunger ourselves! As it is, some go
+      three days without eating. We’ve nothing, we’ve been ruined.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary listened attentively to what he told her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The peasants are ruined? They have no bread?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They’re dying of hunger,” said Dron. “It’s not a case of carting.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But why didn’t you tell me, Drónushka? Isn’t it possible to help them?
+      I’ll do all I can....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      To Princess Mary it was strange that now, at a moment when such sorrow was
+      filling her soul, there could be rich people and poor, and the rich could
+      refrain from helping the poor. She had heard vaguely that there was such a
+      thing as “landlord’s corn” which was sometimes given to the peasants. She
+      also knew that neither her father nor her brother would refuse to help the
+      peasants in need, she only feared to make some mistake in speaking about
+      the distribution of the grain she wished to give. She was glad such cares
+      presented themselves, enabling her without scruple to forget her own
+      grief. She began asking Dron about the peasants’ needs and what there was
+      in Boguchárovo that belonged to the landlord.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But we have grain belonging to my brother?” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The landlord’s grain is all safe,” replied Dron proudly. “Our prince did
+      not order it to be sold.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Give it to the peasants, let them have all they need; I give you leave in
+      my brother’s name,” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dron made no answer but sighed deeply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Give them that corn if there is enough of it. Distribute it all. I give
+      this order in my brother’s name; and tell them that what is ours is
+      theirs. We do not grudge them anything. Tell them so.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dron looked intently at the princess while she was speaking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Discharge me, little mother, for God’s sake! Order the keys to be taken
+      from me,” said he. “I have served twenty-three years and have done no
+      wrong. Discharge me, for God’s sake!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary did not understand what he wanted of her or why he was
+      asking to be discharged. She replied that she had never doubted his
+      devotion and that she was ready to do anything for him and for the
+      peasants.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0201"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      An hour later Dunyásha came to tell the princess that Dron had come, and
+      all the peasants had assembled at the barn by the princess’ order and
+      wished to have word with their mistress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But I never told them to come,” said Princess Mary. “I only told Dron to
+      let them have the grain.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Only, for God’s sake, Princess dear, have them sent away and don’t go out
+      to them. It’s all a trick,” said Dunyásha, “and when Yákov Alpátych
+      returns let us get away... and please don’t...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What is a trick?” asked Princess Mary in surprise.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I know it is, only listen to me for God’s sake! Ask nurse too. They say
+      they don’t agree to leave Boguchárovo as you ordered.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You’re making some mistake. I never ordered them to go away,” said
+      Princess Mary. “Call Drónushka.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dron came and confirmed Dunyásha’s words; the peasants had come by the
+      princess’ order.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But I never sent for them,” declared the princess. “You must have given
+      my message wrong. I only said that you were to give them the grain.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dron only sighed in reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If you order it they will go away,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, no. I’ll go out to them,” said Princess Mary, and in spite of the
+      nurse’s and Dunyásha’s protests she went out into the porch; Dron,
+      Dunyásha, the nurse, and Michael Ivánovich following her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They probably think I am offering them the grain to bribe them to remain
+      here, while I myself go away leaving them to the mercy of the French,”
+       thought Princess Mary. “I will offer them monthly rations and housing at
+      our Moscow estate. I am sure Andrew would do even more in my place,” she
+      thought as she went out in the twilight toward the crowd standing on the
+      pasture by the barn.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The men crowded closer together, stirred, and rapidly took off their hats.
+      Princess Mary lowered her eyes and, tripping over her skirt, came close up
+      to them. So many different eyes, old and young, were fixed on her, and
+      there were so many different faces, that she could not distinguish any of
+      them and, feeling that she must speak to them all at once, did not know
+      how to do it. But again the sense that she represented her father and her
+      brother gave her courage, and she boldly began her speech.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am very glad you have come,” she said without raising her eyes, and
+      feeling her heart beating quickly and violently. “Drónushka tells me that
+      the war has ruined you. That is our common misfortune, and I shall grudge
+      nothing to help you. I am myself going away because it is dangerous
+      here... the enemy is near... because... I am giving you everything, my
+      friends, and I beg you to take everything, all our grain, so that you may
+      not suffer want! And if you have been told that I am giving you the grain
+      to keep you here—that is not true. On the contrary, I ask you to go
+      with all your belongings to our estate near Moscow, and I promise you I
+      will see to it that there you shall want for nothing. You shall be given
+      food and lodging.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess stopped. Sighs were the only sound heard in the crowd.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am not doing this on my own account,” she continued, “I do it in the
+      name of my dead father, who was a good master to you, and of my brother
+      and his son.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Again she paused. No one broke the silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ours is a common misfortune and we will share it together. All that is
+      mine is yours,” she concluded, scanning the faces before her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All eyes were gazing at her with one and the same expression. She could
+      not fathom whether it was curiosity, devotion, gratitude, or apprehension
+      and distrust—but the expression on all the faces was identical.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We are all very thankful for your bounty, but it won’t do for us to take
+      the landlord’s grain,” said a voice at the back of the crowd.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But why not?” asked the princess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      No one replied and Princess Mary, looking round at the crowd, found that
+      every eye she met now was immediately dropped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But why don’t you want to take it?” she asked again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      No one answered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The silence began to oppress the princess and she tried to catch someone’s
+      eye.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why don’t you speak?” she inquired of a very old man who stood just in
+      front of her leaning on his stick. “If you think something more is wanted,
+      tell me! I will do anything,” said she, catching his eye.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But as if this angered him, he bent his head quite low and muttered:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why should we agree? We don’t want the grain.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why should we give up everything? We don’t agree. Don’t agree.... We are
+      sorry for you, but we’re not willing. Go away yourself, alone...” came
+      from various sides of the crowd.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And again all the faces in that crowd bore an identical expression, though
+      now it was certainly not an expression of curiosity or gratitude, but of
+      angry resolve.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But you can’t have understood me,” said Princess Mary with a
+      sad smile. “Why don’t you want to go? I promise to house and feed
+      you, while here the enemy would ruin you....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But her voice was drowned by the voices of the crowd.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We’re not willing. Let them ruin us! We won’t take your grain. We don’t
+      agree.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Again Princess Mary tried to catch someone’s eye, but not a single eye in
+      the crowd was turned to her; evidently they were all trying to avoid her
+      look. She felt strange and awkward.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes, an artful tale! Follow her into slavery! Pull down your houses
+      and go into bondage! I dare say! ‘I’ll give you grain, indeed!’ she says,”
+       voices in the crowd were heard saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With drooping head Princess Mary left the crowd and went back to the
+      house. Having repeated her order to Dron to have horses ready for her
+      departure next morning, she went to her room and remained alone with her
+      own thoughts.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0202"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      For a long time that night Princess Mary sat by the open window of her
+      room hearing the sound of the peasants’ voices that reached her from the
+      village, but it was not of them she was thinking. She felt that she could
+      not understand them however much she might think about them. She thought
+      only of one thing, her sorrow, which, after the break caused by cares for
+      the present, seemed already to belong to the past. Now she could remember
+      it and weep or pray.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After sunset the wind had dropped. The night was calm and fresh. Toward
+      midnight the voices began to subside, a cock crowed, the full moon began
+      to show from behind the lime trees, a fresh white dewy mist began to rise,
+      and stillness reigned over the village and the house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pictures of the near past—her father’s illness and last moments—rose
+      one after another to her memory. With mournful pleasure she now lingered
+      over these images, repelling with horror only the last one, the picture of
+      his death, which she felt she could not contemplate even in imagination at
+      this still and mystic hour of night. And these pictures presented
+      themselves to her so clearly and in such detail that they seemed now
+      present, now past, and now future.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She vividly recalled the moment when he had his first stroke and was being
+      dragged along by his armpits through the garden at Bald Hills, muttering
+      something with his helpless tongue, twitching his gray eyebrows and
+      looking uneasily and timidly at her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Even then he wanted to tell me what he told me the day he died,” she
+      thought. “He had always thought what he said then.” And she recalled in
+      all its detail the night at Bald Hills before he had the last stroke, when
+      with a foreboding of disaster she had remained at home against his will.
+      She had not slept and had stolen downstairs on tiptoe, and going to the
+      door of the conservatory where he slept that night had listened at the
+      door. In a suffering and weary voice he was saying something to Tíkhon,
+      speaking of the Crimea and its warm nights and of the Empress. Evidently
+      he had wanted to talk. “And why didn’t he call me? Why didn’t he let me be
+      there instead of Tíkhon?” Princess Mary had thought and thought again now.
+      “Now he will never tell anyone what he had in his soul. Never will that
+      moment return for him or for me when he might have said all he longed to
+      say, and not Tíkhon but I might have heard and understood him. Why didn’t
+      I enter the room?” she thought. “Perhaps he would then have said to me
+      what he said the day he died. While talking to Tíkhon he asked about me
+      twice. He wanted to see me, and I was standing close by, outside the door.
+      It was sad and painful for him to talk to Tíkhon who did not understand
+      him. I remember how he began speaking to him about Lise as if she were
+      alive—he had forgotten she was dead—and Tíkhon reminded him
+      that she was no more, and he shouted, ‘Fool!’ He was greatly depressed.
+      From behind the door I heard how he lay down on his bed groaning and
+      loudly exclaimed, ‘My God!’ Why didn’t I go in then? What could he have
+      done to me? What could I have lost? And perhaps he would then have been
+      comforted and would have said that word to me.” And Princess Mary uttered
+      aloud the caressing word he had said to her on the day of his death.
+      “Dear-est!” she repeated, and began sobbing, with tears that relieved her
+      soul. She now saw his face before her. And not the face she had known ever
+      since she could remember and had always seen at a distance, but the timid,
+      feeble face she had seen for the first time quite closely, with all its
+      wrinkles and details, when she stooped near to his mouth to catch what he
+      said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear-est!” she repeated again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What was he thinking when he uttered that word? What is he thinking now?”
+       This question suddenly presented itself to her, and in answer she saw him
+      before her with the expression that was on his face as he lay in his
+      coffin with his chin bound up with a white handkerchief. And the horror
+      that had seized her when she touched him and convinced herself that <i>that</i>
+      was not <i>he</i>, but something mysterious and horrible, seized her again. She
+      tried to think of something else and to pray, but could do neither. With
+      wide-open eyes she gazed at the moonlight and the shadows, expecting every
+      moment to see his dead face, and she felt that the silence brooding over
+      the house and within it held her fast.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dunyásha,” she whispered. “Dunyásha!” she screamed wildly, and tearing
+      herself out of this silence she ran to the servants’ quarters to meet her
+      old nurse and the maidservants who came running toward her.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0203"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On the seventeenth of August Rostóv and Ilyín, accompanied by Lavrúshka
+      who had just returned from captivity and by an hussar orderly, left their
+      quarters at Yankóvo, ten miles from Boguchárovo, and went for a ride—to
+      try a new horse Ilyín had bought and to find out whether there was any hay
+      to be had in the villages.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For the last three days Boguchárovo had lain between the two hostile
+      armies, so that it was as easy for the Russian rearguard to get to it as
+      for the French vanguard; Rostóv, as a careful squadron commander, wished
+      to take such provisions as remained at Boguchárovo before the French could
+      get them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv and Ilyín were in the merriest of moods. On the way to Boguchárovo,
+      a princely estate with a dwelling house and farm where they hoped to find
+      many domestic serfs and pretty girls, they questioned Lavrúshka about
+      Napoleon and laughed at his stories, and raced one another to try Ilyín’s
+      horse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv had no idea that the village he was entering was the property of
+      that very Bolkónski who had been engaged to his sister.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv and Ilyín gave rein to their horses for a last race along the
+      incline before reaching Boguchárovo, and Rostóv, outstripping Ilyín, was
+      the first to gallop into the village street.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You’re first!” cried Ilyín, flushed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, always first both on the grassland and here,” answered Rostóv,
+      stroking his heated Donéts horse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I’d have won on my Frenchy, your excellency,” said Lavrúshka from
+      behind, alluding to his shabby cart horse, “only I didn’t wish to mortify
+      you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They rode at a footpace to the barn, where a large crowd of peasants was
+      standing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Some of the men bared their heads, others stared at the new arrivals
+      without doffing their caps. Two tall old peasants with wrinkled faces and
+      scanty beards emerged from the tavern, smiling, staggering, and singing
+      some incoherent song, and approached the officers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Fine fellows!” said Rostóv laughing. “Is there any hay here?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And how like one another,” said Ilyín.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A mo-o-st me-r-r-y co-o-m-pa...!” sang one of the peasants with a
+      blissful smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One of the men came out of the crowd and went up to Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who do you belong to?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The French,” replied Ilyín jestingly, “and here is Napoleon himself”—and
+      he pointed to Lavrúshka.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then you are Russians?” the peasant asked again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And is there a large force of you here?” said another, a short man,
+      coming up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very large,” answered Rostóv. “But why have you collected here?” he
+      added. “Is it a holiday?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The old men have met to talk over the business of the commune,” replied
+      the peasant, moving away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment, on the road leading from the big house, two women and a
+      man in a white hat were seen coming toward the officers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The one in pink is mine, so keep off!” said Ilyín on seeing Dunyásha
+      running resolutely toward him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She’ll be ours!” said Lavrúshka to Ilyín, winking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What do you want, my pretty?” said Ilyín with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The princess ordered me to ask your regiment and your name.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “This is Count Rostóv, squadron commander, and I am your humble servant.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Co-o-om-pa-ny!” roared the tipsy peasant with a beatific smile as he
+      looked at Ilyín talking to the girl. Following Dunyásha, Alpátych advanced
+      to Rostóv, having bared his head while still at a distance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “May I make bold to trouble your honor?” said he respectfully, but with a
+      shade of contempt for the youthfulness of this officer and with a hand
+      thrust into his bosom. “My mistress, daughter of General in Chief Prince
+      Nicholas Bolkónski who died on the fifteenth of this month, finding
+      herself in difficulties owing to the boorishness of these people”—he
+      pointed to the peasants—“asks you to come up to the house.... Won’t
+      you, please, ride on a little farther,” said Alpátych with a melancholy
+      smile, “as it is not convenient in the presence of...?” He pointed to the
+      two peasants who kept as close to him as horseflies to a horse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah!... Alpátych... Ah, Yákov Alpátych... Grand! Forgive us for Christ’s
+      sake, eh?” said the peasants, smiling joyfully at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv looked at the tipsy peasants and smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Or perhaps they amuse your honor?” remarked Alpátych with a staid air, as
+      he pointed at the old men with his free hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, there’s not much to be amused at here,” said Rostóv, and rode on a
+      little way. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I make bold to inform your honor that the rude peasants here don’t wish
+      to let the mistress leave the estate, and threaten to unharness her
+      horses, so that though everything has been packed up since morning, her
+      excellency cannot get away.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Impossible!” exclaimed Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have the honor to report to you the actual truth,” said Alpátych.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv dismounted, gave his horse to the orderly, and followed Alpátych to
+      the house, questioning him as to the state of affairs. It appeared that
+      the princess’ offer of corn to the peasants the previous day, and her talk
+      with Dron and at the meeting, had actually had so bad an effect that Dron
+      had finally given up the keys and joined the peasants and had not appeared
+      when Alpátych sent for him; and that in the morning when the princess gave
+      orders to harness for her journey, the peasants had come in a large crowd
+      to the barn and sent word that they would not let her leave the village:
+      that there was an order not to move, and that they would unharness the
+      horses. Alpátych had gone out to admonish them, but was told (it was
+      chiefly Karp who did the talking, Dron not showing himself in the crowd)
+      that they could not let the princess go, that there was an order to the
+      contrary, but that if she stayed they would serve her as before and obey
+      her in everything.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the moment when Rostóv and Ilyín were galloping along the road,
+      Princess Mary, despite the dissuasions of Alpátych, her nurse, and the
+      maids, had given orders to harness and intended to start, but when the
+      cavalrymen were espied they were taken for Frenchmen, the coachman ran
+      away, and the women in the house began to wail.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Father! Benefactor! God has sent you!” exclaimed deeply moved voices as
+      Rostóv passed through the anteroom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary was sitting helpless and bewildered in the large sitting
+      room, when Rostóv was shown in. She could not grasp who he was and why he
+      had come, or what was happening to her. When she saw his Russian face, and
+      by his walk and the first words he uttered recognized him as a man of her
+      own class, she glanced at him with her deep radiant look and began
+      speaking in a voice that faltered and trembled with emotion. This meeting
+      immediately struck Rostóv as a romantic event. “A helpless girl
+      overwhelmed with grief, left to the mercy of coarse, rioting peasants! And
+      what a strange fate sent me here! What gentleness and nobility there are
+      in her features and expression!” thought he as he looked at her and
+      listened to her timid story.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When she began to tell him that all this had happened the day after her
+      father’s funeral, her voice trembled. She turned away, and then, as if
+      fearing he might take her words as meant to move him to pity, looked at
+      him with an apprehensive glance of inquiry. There were tears in Rostóv’s
+      eyes. Princess Mary noticed this and glanced gratefully at him with that
+      radiant look which caused the plainness of her face to be forgotten.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I cannot express, Princess, how glad I am that I happened to ride here
+      and am able to show my readiness to serve you,” said Rostóv, rising. “Go
+      when you please, and I give you my word of honor that no one shall dare to
+      cause you annoyance if only you will allow me to act as your escort.” And
+      bowing respectfully, as if to a lady of royal blood, he moved toward the
+      door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv’s deferential tone seemed to indicate that though he would consider
+      himself happy to be acquainted with her, he did not wish to take advantage
+      of her misfortunes to intrude upon her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary understood this and appreciated his delicacy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am very, very grateful to you,” she said in French, “but I hope it was
+      all a misunderstanding and that no one is to blame for it.” She suddenly
+      began to cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Excuse me!” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv, knitting his brows, left the room with another low bow.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0204"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      “Well, is she pretty? Ah, friend—my pink one is delicious; her name
+      is Dunyásha....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But on glancing at Rostóv’s face Ilyín stopped short. He saw that his hero
+      and commander was following quite a different train of thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv glanced angrily at Ilyín and without replying strode off with rapid
+      steps to the village.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll show them; I’ll give it to them, the brigands!” said he to himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych at a gliding trot, only just managing not to run, kept up with
+      him with difficulty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What decision have you been pleased to come to?” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv stopped and, clenching his fists, suddenly and sternly turned on
+      Alpátych.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Decision? What decision? Old dotard!...” cried he. “What have you been
+      about? Eh? The peasants are rioting, and you can’t manage them? You’re a
+      traitor yourself! I know you. I’ll flay you all alive!...” And as if
+      afraid of wasting his store of anger, he left Alpátych and went rapidly
+      forward. Alpátych, mastering his offended feelings, kept pace with Rostóv
+      at a gliding gait and continued to impart his views. He said the peasants
+      were obdurate and that at the present moment it would be imprudent to
+      “overresist” them without an armed force, and would it not be better first
+      to send for the military?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll give them armed force... I’ll ‘overresist’ them!” uttered Rostóv
+      meaninglessly, breathless with irrational animal fury and the need to vent
+      it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Without considering what he would do he moved unconciously with quick,
+      resolute steps toward the crowd. And the nearer he drew to it the more
+      Alpátych felt that this unreasonable action might produce good results.
+      The peasants in the crowd were similarly impressed when they saw Rostóv’s
+      rapid, firm steps and resolute, frowning face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the hussars had come to the village and Rostóv had gone to see the
+      princess, a certain confusion and dissension had arisen among the crowd.
+      Some of the peasants said that these new arrivals were Russians and might
+      take it amiss that the mistress was being detained. Dron was of this
+      opinion, but as soon as he expressed it Karp and others attacked their
+      ex-Elder.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How many years have you been fattening on the commune?” Karp shouted at
+      him. “It’s all one to you! You’ll dig up your pot of money and take it
+      away with you.... What does it matter to you whether our homes are ruined
+      or not?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “We’ve been told to keep order, and that no one is to leave their homes or
+      take away a single grain, and that’s all about it!” cried another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It was your son’s turn to be conscripted, but no fear! You begrudged your
+      lump of a son,” a little old man suddenly began attacking Dron—“and
+      so they took my Vánka to be shaved for a soldier! But we all have to die.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “To be sure, we all have to die. I’m not against the commune,” said Dron.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s it—not against it! You’ve filled your belly....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The two tall peasants had their say. As soon as Rostóv, followed by Ilyín,
+      Lavrúshka, and Alpátych, came up to the crowd, Karp, thrusting his fingers
+      into his belt and smiling a little, walked to the front. Dron on the
+      contrary retired to the rear and the crowd drew closer together.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who is your Elder here? Hey?” shouted Rostóv, coming up to the crowd with
+      quick steps.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Elder? What do you want with him?...” asked Karp.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But before the words were well out of his mouth, his cap flew off and a
+      fierce blow jerked his head to one side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Caps off, traitors!” shouted Rostóv in a wrathful voice. “Where’s the
+      Elder?” he cried furiously.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Elder.... He wants the Elder!... Dron Zakhárych, you!” meek and
+      flustered voices here and there were heard calling and caps began to come
+      off their heads.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We don’t riot, we’re following the orders,” declared Karp, and at that
+      moment several voices began speaking together.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s as the old men have decided—there’s too many of you giving
+      orders.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Arguing? Mutiny!... Brigands! Traitors!” cried Rostóv unmeaningly in a
+      voice not his own, gripping Karp by the collar. “Bind him, bind him!” he
+      shouted, though there was no one to bind him but Lavrúshka and Alpátych.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Lavrúshka, however, ran up to Karp and seized him by the arms from behind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Shall I call up our men from beyond the hill?” he called out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alpátych turned to the peasants and ordered two of them by name to come
+      and bind Karp. The men obediently came out of the crowd and began taking
+      off their belts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where’s the Elder?” demanded Rostóv in a loud voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With a pale and frowning face Dron stepped out of the crowd.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Are you the Elder? Bind him, Lavrúshka!” shouted Rostóv, as if that
+      order, too, could not possibly meet with any opposition.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And in fact two more peasants began binding Dron, who took off his own
+      belt and handed it to them, as if to aid them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And you all listen to me!” said Rostóv to the peasants. “Be off to your
+      houses at once, and don’t let one of your voices be heard!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, we’ve not done any harm! We did it just out of foolishness.
+      It’s all nonsense.... I said then that it was not in order,” voices
+      were heard bickering with one another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There! What did I say?” said Alpátych, coming into his own
+      again. “It’s wrong, lads!”
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All our stupidity, Yákov Alpátych,” came the answers, and the
+      crowd began at once to disperse through the village.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The two bound men were led off to the master’s house. The two drunken
+      peasants followed them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Aye, when I look at you!...” said one of them to Karp.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How can one talk to the masters like that? What were you thinking of, you
+      fool?” added the other—“A real fool!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Two hours later the carts were standing in the courtyard of the
+      Boguchárovo house. The peasants were briskly carrying out the proprietor’s
+      goods and packing them on the carts, and Dron, liberated at Princess
+      Mary’s wish from the cupboard where he had been confined, was standing in
+      the yard directing the men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t put it in so carelessly,” said one of the peasants, a man with a
+      round smiling face, taking a casket from a housemaid. “You know it has
+      cost money! How can you chuck it in like that or shove it under the cord
+      where it’ll get rubbed? I don’t like that way of doing things. Let it all
+      be done properly, according to rule. Look here, put it under the bast
+      matting and cover it with hay—that’s the way!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh, books, books!” said another peasant, bringing out Prince Andrew’s
+      library cupboards. “Don’t catch up against it! It’s heavy, lads—solid
+      books.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, they worked all day and didn’t play!” remarked the tall,
+      round-faced peasant gravely, pointing with a significant wink at the
+      dictionaries that were on the top.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Unwilling to obtrude himself on the princess, Rostóv did not go back to
+      the house but remained in the village awaiting her departure. When her
+      carriage drove out of the house, he mounted and accompanied her eight
+      miles from Boguchárovo to where the road was occupied by our troops. At
+      the inn at Yankóvo he respectfully took leave of her, for the first time
+      permitting himself to kiss her hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How can you speak so!” he blushingly replied to Princess Mary’s
+      expressions of gratitude for her deliverance, as she termed what had
+      occurred. “Any police officer would have done as much! If we had had only
+      peasants to fight, we should not have let the enemy come so far,” said he
+      with a sense of shame and wishing to change the subject. “I am only happy
+      to have had the opportunity of making your acquaintance. Good-by,
+      Princess. I wish you happiness and consolation and hope to meet you again
+      in happier circumstances. If you don’t want to make me blush, please don’t
+      thank me!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But the princess, if she did not again thank him in words, thanked him
+      with the whole expression of her face, radiant with gratitude and
+      tenderness. She could not believe that there was nothing to thank him for.
+      On the contrary, it seemed to her certain that had he not been there she
+      would have perished at the hands of the mutineers and of the French, and
+      that he had exposed himself to terrible and obvious danger to save her,
+      and even more certain was it that he was a man of lofty and noble soul,
+      able to understand her position and her sorrow. His kind, honest eyes,
+      with the tears rising in them when she herself had begun to cry as she
+      spoke of her loss, did not leave her memory.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When she had taken leave of him and remained alone she suddenly felt her
+      eyes filling with tears, and then not for the first time the strange
+      question presented itself to her: did she love him?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the rest of the way to Moscow, though the princess’ position was not a
+      cheerful one, Dunyásha, who went with her in the carriage, more than once
+      noticed that her mistress leaned out of the window and smiled at something
+      with an expression of mingled joy and sorrow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, supposing I do love him?” thought Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Ashamed as she was of acknowledging to herself that she had fallen in love
+      with a man who would perhaps never love her, she comforted herself with
+      the thought that no one would ever know it and that she would not be to
+      blame if, without ever speaking of it to anyone, she continued to the end
+      of her life to love the man with whom she had fallen in love for the first
+      and last time in her life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sometimes when she recalled his looks, his sympathy, and his words,
+      happiness did not appear impossible to her. It was at those moments that
+      Dunyásha noticed her smiling as she looked out of the carriage window.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Was it not fate that brought him to Boguchárovo, and at that very
+      moment?” thought Princess Mary. “And that caused his sister to refuse my
+      brother?” And in all this Princess Mary saw the hand of Providence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The impression the princess made on Rostóv was a very agreeable one. To
+      remember her gave him pleasure, and when his comrades, hearing of his
+      adventure at Boguchárovo, rallied him on having gone to look for hay and
+      having picked up one of the wealthiest heiresses in Russia, he grew angry.
+      It made him angry just because the idea of marrying the gentle Princess
+      Mary, who was attractive to him and had an enormous fortune, had against
+      his will more than once entered his head. For himself personally Nicholas
+      could not wish for a better wife: by marrying her he would make the
+      countess his mother happy, would be able to put his father’s affairs in
+      order, and would even—he felt it—ensure Princess Mary’s
+      happiness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Sónya? And his plighted word? That was why Rostóv grew angry when he
+      was rallied about Princess Bolkónskaya.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0205"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On receiving command of the armies Kutúzov remembered Prince Andrew and
+      sent an order for him to report at headquarters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew arrived at Tsárevo-Zaymíshche on the very day and at the
+      very hour that Kutúzov was reviewing the troops for the first time. He
+      stopped in the village at the priest’s house in front of which stood the
+      commander in chief’s carriage, and he sat down on the bench at the gate
+      awaiting his Serene Highness, as everyone now called Kutúzov. From the
+      field beyond the village came now sounds of regimental music and now the
+      roar of many voices shouting “Hurrah!” to the new commander in chief. Two
+      orderlies, a courier and a major-domo, stood near by, some ten paces from
+      Prince Andrew, availing themselves of Kutúzov’s absence and of the fine
+      weather. A short, swarthy lieutenant colonel of hussars with thick
+      mustaches and whiskers rode up to the gate and, glancing at Prince Andrew,
+      inquired whether his Serene Highness was putting up there and whether he
+      would soon be back.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew replied that he was not on his Serene Highness’ staff but
+      was himself a new arrival. The lieutenant colonel turned to a smart
+      orderly, who, with the peculiar contempt with which a commander in chief’s
+      orderly speaks to officers, replied:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What? His Serene Highness? I expect he’ll be here soon. What do you
+      want?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The lieutenant colonel of hussars smiled beneath his mustache at the
+      orderly’s tone, dismounted, gave his horse to a dispatch runner, and
+      approached Bolkónski with a slight bow. Bolkónski made room for him on the
+      bench and the lieutenant colonel sat down beside him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You’re also waiting for the commander in chief?” said he. “They say he
+      weceives evewyone, thank God!... It’s awful with those sausage eaters!
+      Ermólov had weason to ask to be pwomoted to be a German! Now p’waps
+      Wussians will get a look in. As it was, devil only knows what was
+      happening. We kept wetweating and wetweating. Did you take part in the
+      campaign?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I had the pleasure,” replied Prince Andrew, “not only of taking part in
+      the retreat but of losing in that retreat all I held dear—not to
+      mention the estate and home of my birth—my father, who died of
+      grief. I belong to the province of Smolénsk.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah? You’re Pwince Bolkónski? Vewy glad to make your acquaintance! I’m
+      Lieutenant Colonel Denísov, better known as ‘Váska,’” said Denísov,
+      pressing Prince Andrew’s hand and looking into his face with a
+      particularly kindly attention. “Yes, I heard,” said he sympathetically,
+      and after a short pause added: “Yes, it’s Scythian warfare. It’s all vewy
+      well—only not for those who get it in the neck. So you are Pwince
+      Andwew Bolkónski?” He swayed his head. “Vewy pleased, Pwince, to make your
+      acquaintance!” he repeated again, smiling sadly, and he again pressed
+      Prince Andrew’s hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew knew Denísov from what Natásha had told him of her first
+      suitor. This memory carried him sadly and sweetly back to those painful
+      feelings of which he had not thought lately, but which still found place
+      in his soul. Of late he had received so many new and very serious
+      impressions—such as the retreat from Smolénsk, his visit to Bald
+      Hills, and the recent news of his father’s death—and had experienced
+      so many emotions, that for a long time past those memories had not entered
+      his mind, and now that they did, they did not act on him with nearly their
+      former strength. For Denísov, too, the memories awakened by the name of
+      Bolkónski belonged to a distant, romantic past, when after supper and
+      after Natásha’s singing he had proposed to a little girl of fifteen
+      without realizing what he was doing. He smiled at the recollection of that
+      time and of his love for Natásha, and passed at once to what now
+      interested him passionately and exclusively. This was a plan of campaign
+      he had devised while serving at the outposts during the retreat. He had
+      proposed that plan to Barclay de Tolly and now wished to propose it to
+      Kutúzov. The plan was based on the fact that the French line of operation
+      was too extended, and it proposed that instead of, or concurrently with,
+      action on the front to bar the advance of the French, we should attack
+      their line of communication. He began explaining his plan to Prince
+      Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They can’t hold all that line. It’s impossible. I will undertake to bweak
+      thwough. Give me five hundwed men and I will bweak the line, that’s
+      certain! There’s only one way—guewilla warfare!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov rose and began gesticulating as he explained his plan to
+      Bolkónski. In the midst of his explanation shouts were heard from the
+      army, growing more incoherent and more diffused, mingling with music and
+      songs and coming from the field where the review was held. Sounds of hoofs
+      and shouts were nearing the village.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He’s coming! He’s coming!” shouted a Cossack standing at the gate.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bolkónski and Denísov moved to the gate, at which a knot of soldiers (a
+      guard of honor) was standing, and they saw Kutúzov coming down the street
+      mounted on a rather small sorrel horse. A huge suite of generals rode
+      behind him. Barclay was riding almost beside him, and a crowd of officers
+      ran after and around them shouting, “Hurrah!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      His adjutants galloped into the yard before him. Kutúzov was impatiently
+      urging on his horse, which ambled smoothly under his weight, and he raised
+      his hand to his white Horse Guard’s cap with a red band and no peak,
+      nodding his head continually. When he came up to the guard of honor, a
+      fine set of Grenadiers mostly wearing decorations, who were giving him the
+      salute, he looked at them silently and attentively for nearly a minute
+      with the steady gaze of a commander and then turned to the crowd of
+      generals and officers surrounding him. Suddenly his face assumed a subtle
+      expression, he shrugged his shoulders with an air of perplexity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And with such fine fellows to retreat and retreat! Well, good-by,
+      General,” he added, and rode into the yard past Prince Andrew and Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!” shouted those behind him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Since Prince Andrew had last seen him Kutúzov had grown still more
+      corpulent, flaccid, and fat. But the bleached eyeball, the scar, and the
+      familiar weariness of his expression were still the same. He was wearing
+      the white Horse Guard’s cap and a military overcoat with a whip hanging
+      over his shoulder by a thin strap. He sat heavily and swayed limply on his
+      brisk little horse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Whew... whew... whew!” he whistled just audibly as he rode into the yard.
+      His face expressed the relief of relaxed strain felt by a man who means to
+      rest after a ceremony. He drew his left foot out of the stirrup and,
+      lurching with his whole body and puckering his face with the effort,
+      raised it with difficulty onto the saddle, leaned on his knee, groaned,
+      and slipped down into the arms of the Cossacks and adjutants who stood
+      ready to assist him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He pulled himself together, looked round, screwing up his eyes, glanced at
+      Prince Andrew, and, evidently not recognizing him, moved with his waddling
+      gait to the porch. “Whew... whew... whew!” he whistled, and again glanced
+      at Prince Andrew. As often occurs with old men, it was only after some
+      seconds that the impression produced by Prince Andrew’s face linked itself
+      up with Kutúzov’s remembrance of his personality.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, how do you do, my dear prince? How do you do, my dear boy? Come
+      along...” said he, glancing wearily round, and he stepped onto the porch
+      which creaked under his weight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He unbuttoned his coat and sat down on a bench in the porch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And how’s your father?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I received news of his death, yesterday,” replied Prince Andrew abruptly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov looked at him with eyes wide open with dismay and then took off
+      his cap and crossed himself:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “May the kingdom of Heaven be his! God’s will be done to us all!” He
+      sighed deeply, his whole chest heaving, and was silent for a while. “I
+      loved him and respected him, and sympathize with you with all my heart.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He embraced Prince Andrew, pressing him to his fat breast, and for some
+      time did not let him go. When he released him Prince Andrew saw that
+      Kutúzov’s flabby lips were trembling and that tears were in his eyes. He
+      sighed and pressed on the bench with both hands to raise himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come! Come with me, we’ll have a talk,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But at that moment Denísov, no more intimidated by his superiors than by
+      the enemy, came with jingling spurs up the steps of the porch, despite the
+      angry whispers of the adjutants who tried to stop him. Kutúzov, his hands
+      still pressed on the seat, glanced at him glumly. Denísov, having given
+      his name, announced that he had to communicate to his Serene Highness a
+      matter of great importance for their country’s welfare. Kutúzov looked
+      wearily at him and, lifting his hands with a gesture of annoyance, folded
+      them across his stomach, repeating the words: “For our country’s welfare?
+      Well, what is it? Speak!” Denísov blushed like a girl (it was strange to
+      see the color rise in that shaggy, bibulous, time-worn face) and boldly
+      began to expound his plan of cutting the enemy’s lines of communication
+      between Smolénsk and Vyázma. Denísov came from those parts and knew the
+      country well. His plan seemed decidedly a good one, especially from the
+      strength of conviction with which he spoke. Kutúzov looked down at his own
+      legs, occasionally glancing at the door of the adjoining hut as if
+      expecting something unpleasant to emerge from it. And from that hut, while
+      Denísov was speaking, a general with a portfolio under his arm really did
+      appear.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What?” said Kutúzov, in the midst of Denísov’s explanations, “are you
+      ready so soon?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ready, your Serene Highness,” replied the general.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov swayed his head, as much as to say: “How is one man to deal with
+      it all?” and again listened to Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I give my word of honor as a Wussian officer,” said Denísov, “that I can
+      bweak Napoleon’s line of communication!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What relation are you to Intendant General Kiríl Andréevich Denísov?”
+       asked Kutúzov, interrupting him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is my uncle, your Sewene Highness.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, we were friends,” said Kutúzov cheerfully. “All right, all right,
+      friend, stay here at the staff and tomorrow we’ll have a talk.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      With a nod to Denísov he turned away and put out his hand for the papers
+      Konovnítsyn had brought him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Would not your Serene Highness like to come inside?” said the general
+      on duty in a discontented voice, “the plans must be examined and several
+      papers have to be signed.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      An adjutant came out and announced that everything was in readiness
+      within. But Kutúzov evidently did not wish to enter that room till he was
+      disengaged. He made a grimace....
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, tell them to bring a small table out here, my dear boy. I’ll look
+      at them here,” said he. “Don’t go away,” he added, turning
+      to Prince Andrew, who remained in the porch and listened to the general’s report.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While this was being given, Prince Andrew heard the whisper of a woman’s
+      voice and the rustle of a silk dress behind the door. Several times on
+      glancing that way he noticed behind that door a plump, rosy, handsome
+      woman in a pink dress with a lilac silk kerchief on her head, holding a
+      dish and evidently awaiting the entrance of the commander in chief.
+      Kutúzov’s adjutant whispered to Prince Andrew that this was the wife of
+      the priest whose home it was, and that she intended to offer his Serene
+      Highness bread and salt. “Her husband has welcomed his Serene Highness
+      with the cross at the church, and she intends to welcome him in the
+      house.... She’s very pretty,” added the adjutant with a smile. At those
+      words Kutúzov looked round. He was listening to the general’s report—which
+      consisted chiefly of a criticism of the position at Tsárevo-Zaymíshche—as
+      he had listened to Denísov, and seven years previously had listened to the
+      discussion at the Austerlitz council of war. He evidently listened only
+      because he had ears which, though there was a piece of tow in one of them,
+      could not help hearing; but it was evident that nothing the general could
+      say would surprise or even interest him, that he knew all that would be
+      said beforehand, and heard it all only because he had to, as one has to
+      listen to the chanting of a service of prayer. All that Denísov had said
+      was clever and to the point. What the general was saying was even more
+      clever and to the point, but it was evident that Kutúzov despised
+      knowledge and cleverness, and knew of something else that would decide the
+      matter—something independent of cleverness and knowledge. Prince
+      Andrew watched the commander in chief’s face attentively, and the only
+      expression he could see there was one of boredom, curiosity as to the
+      meaning of the feminine whispering behind the door, and a desire to
+      observe propriety. It was evident that Kutúzov despised cleverness and
+      learning and even the patriotic feeling shown by Denísov, but despised
+      them not because of his own intellect, feelings, or knowledge—he did
+      not try to display any of these—but because of something else. He
+      despised them because of his old age and experience of life. The only
+      instruction Kutúzov gave of his own accord during that report referred to
+      looting by the Russian troops. At the end of the report the general put
+      before him for signature a paper relating to the recovery of payment from
+      army commanders for green oats mown down by the soldiers, when landowners
+      lodged petitions for compensation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After hearing the matter, Kutúzov smacked his lips together and shook his
+      head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Into the stove... into the fire with it! I tell you once for all, my dear
+      fellow,” said he, “into the fire with all such things! Let them cut the
+      crops and burn wood to their hearts’ content. I don’t order it or allow
+      it, but I don’t exact compensation either. One can’t get on without it.
+      ‘When wood is chopped the chips will fly.’” He looked at the paper again.
+      “Oh, this German precision!” he muttered, shaking his head.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0206"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      “Well, that’s all!” said Kutúzov as he signed the last of the documents,
+      and rising heavily and smoothing out the folds in his fat white neck he
+      moved toward the door with a more cheerful expression.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The priest’s wife, flushing rosy red, caught up the dish she had after all
+      not managed to present at the right moment, though she had so long been
+      preparing for it, and with a low bow offered it to Kutúzov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He screwed up his eyes, smiled, lifted her chin with his hand, and said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, what a beauty! Thank you, sweetheart!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He took some gold pieces from his trouser pocket and put them on the dish
+      for her. “Well, my dear, and how are we getting on?” he asked, moving to
+      the door of the room assigned to him. The priest’s wife smiled, and with
+      dimples in her rosy cheeks followed him into the room. The adjutant came
+      out to the porch and asked Prince Andrew to lunch with him. Half an hour
+      later Prince Andrew was again called to Kutúzov. He found him reclining in
+      an armchair, still in the same unbuttoned overcoat. He had in his hand a
+      French book which he closed as Prince Andrew entered, marking the place
+      with a knife. Prince Andrew saw by the cover that it was <i>Les Chevaliers du
+      Cygne</i> by Madame de Genlis.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, sit down, sit down here. Let’s have a talk,” said Kutúzov. “It’s
+      sad, very sad. But remember, my dear fellow, that I am a father to you, a
+      second father....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew told Kutúzov all he knew of his father’s death, and what he
+      had seen at Bald Hills when he passed through it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What... what they have brought us to!” Kutúzov suddenly cried in an
+      agitated voice, evidently picturing vividly to himself from Prince
+      Andrew’s story the condition Russia was in. “But give me time, give me
+      time!” he said with a grim look, evidently not wishing to continue this
+      agitating conversation, and added: “I sent for you to keep you with me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I thank your Serene Highness, but I fear I am no longer fit for the
+      staff,” replied Prince Andrew with a smile which Kutúzov noticed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov glanced inquiringly at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But above all,” added Prince Andrew, “I have grown used to my regiment,
+      am fond of the officers, and I fancy the men also like me. I should be
+      sorry to leave the regiment. If I decline the honor of being with you,
+      believe me...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A shrewd, kindly, yet subtly derisive expression lit up Kutúzov’s podgy
+      face. He cut Bolkónski short.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am sorry, for I need you. But you’re right, you’re right! It’s not here
+      that men are needed. Advisers are always plentiful, but men are not. The
+      regiments would not be what they are if the would-be advisers served there
+      as you do. I remember you at Austerlitz.... I remember, yes, I remember
+      you with the standard!” said Kutúzov, and a flush of pleasure suffused
+      Prince Andrew’s face at this recollection.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Taking his hand and drawing him downwards, Kutúzov offered his cheek to be
+      kissed, and again Prince Andrew noticed tears in the old man’s eyes.
+      Though Prince Andrew knew that Kutúzov’s tears came easily, and that he
+      was particularly tender to and considerate of him from a wish to show
+      sympathy with his loss, yet this reminder of Austerlitz was both pleasant
+      and flattering to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go your way and God be with you. I know your path is the path of honor!”
+       He paused. “I missed you at Bucharest, but I needed someone to send.” And
+      changing the subject, Kutúzov began to speak of the Turkish war and the
+      peace that had been concluded. “Yes, I have been much blamed,” he said,
+      “both for that war and the peace... but everything came at the right time.
+      <i>Tout vient à point à celui qui sait attendre.</i> * And there were as many
+      advisers there as here...” he went on, returning to the subject of
+      “advisers” which evidently occupied him. “Ah, those advisers!” said he.
+      “If we had listened to them all we should not have made peace with Turkey
+      and should not have been through with that war. Everything in haste, but
+      more haste, less speed. Kámenski would have been lost if he had not died.
+      He stormed fortresses with thirty thousand men. It is not difficult to
+      capture a fortress but it is difficult to win a campaign. For that, not
+      storming and attacking but <i>patience and time</i> are wanted. Kámenski sent
+      soldiers to Rustchuk, but I only employed these two things and took more
+      fortresses than Kámenski and made them Turks eat horseflesh!” He swayed
+      his head. “And the French shall too, believe me,” he went on, growing
+      warmer and beating his chest, “I’ll make them eat horseflesh!”
+      And tears again dimmed his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “But shan’t we have to accept battle?” remarked Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We shall if everybody wants it; it can’t be helped.... But believe me, my
+      dear boy, there is nothing stronger than those two: <i>patience and time</i>,
+      they will do it all. But the advisers <i>n’entendent pas de cette oreille,
+      voilà le mal.</i> * Some want a thing—others don’t. What’s one to do?”
+       he asked, evidently expecting an answer. “Well, what do you want us to
+      do?” he repeated and his eye shone with a deep, shrewd look. “I’ll tell
+      you what to do,” he continued, as Prince Andrew still did not reply: “I
+      will tell you what to do, and what I do. <i>Dans le doute, mon cher</i>,” he
+      paused, <i>“abstiens-toi”</i> *(2)—he articulated the French proverb
+      deliberately.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “Don’t see it that way, that’s the trouble.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * (2) “When in doubt, my dear fellow, do nothing.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, good-by, my dear fellow; remember that with all my heart I share
+      your sorrow, and that for you I am not a Serene Highness, nor a prince,
+      nor a commander in chief, but a father! If you want anything come straight
+      to me. Good-by, my dear boy.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Again he embraced and kissed Prince Andrew, but before the latter had left
+      the room Kutúzov gave a sigh of relief and went on with his unfinished
+      novel, <i>Les Chevaliers du Cygne</i> by Madame de Genlis.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew could not have explained how or why it was, but after that
+      interview with Kutúzov he went back to his regiment reassured as to the
+      general course of affairs and as to the man to whom it had been entrusted.
+      The more he realized the absence of all personal motive in that old man—in
+      whom there seemed to remain only the habit of passions, and in place of an
+      intellect (grouping events and drawing conclusions) only the capacity
+      calmly to contemplate the course of events—the more reassured he was
+      that everything would be as it should. “He will not bring in any plan of
+      his own. He will not devise or undertake anything,” thought Prince Andrew,
+      “but he will hear everything, remember everything, and put everything in
+      its place. He will not hinder anything useful nor allow anything harmful.
+      He understands that there is something stronger and more important than
+      his own will—the inevitable course of events, and he can see them
+      and grasp their significance, and seeing that significance can refrain
+      from meddling and renounce his personal wish directed to something else.
+      And above all,” thought Prince Andrew, “one believes in him because he’s
+      Russian, despite the novel by Genlis and the French proverbs, and because
+      his voice shook when he said: ‘What they have brought us to!’ and had a
+      sob in it when he said he would ‘make them eat horseflesh!’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      On such feelings, more or less dimly shared by all, the unanimity and
+      general approval were founded with which, despite court influences, the
+      popular choice of Kutúzov as commander in chief was received.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0207"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After the Emperor had left Moscow, life flowed on there in its usual
+      course, and its course was so very usual that it was difficult to remember
+      the recent days of patriotic elation and ardor, hard to believe that
+      Russia was really in danger and that the members of the English Club were
+      also sons of the Fatherland ready to sacrifice everything for it. The one
+      thing that recalled the patriotic fervor everyone had displayed during the
+      Emperor’s stay was the call for contributions of men and money, a
+      necessity that as soon as the promises had been made assumed a legal,
+      official form and became unavoidable.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With the enemy’s approach to Moscow, the Moscovites’ view of their
+      situation did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even more
+      frivolous, as always happens with people who see a great danger
+      approaching. At the approach of danger there are always two voices that
+      speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man
+      to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the
+      other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful
+      to think of the danger, since it is not in man’s power to foresee
+      everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore
+      better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what
+      is pleasant. In solitude a man generally listens to the first voice, but
+      in society to the second. So it was now with the inhabitants of Moscow. It
+      was long since people had been as gay in Moscow as that year.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostopchín’s broadsheets, headed by woodcuts of a drink shop, a potman,
+      and a Moscow burgher called Karpúshka Chigírin, <i>“who—having been a
+      militiaman and having had rather too much at the pub—heard that
+      Napoleon wished to come to Moscow, grew angry, abused the French in very
+      bad language, came out of the drink shop, and, under the sign of the
+      eagle, began to address the assembled people,”</i> were read and discussed,
+      together with the latest of Vasíli Lvóvich Púshkin’s <i>bouts rimés</i>.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the corner room at the Club, members gathered to read these
+      broadsheets, and some liked the way Karpúshka jeered at the French,
+      saying: <i>“They will swell up with Russian cabbage, burst with our buckwheat
+      porridge, and choke themselves with cabbage soup. They are all dwarfs and
+      one peasant woman will toss three of them with a hayfork.”</i> Others did not
+      like that tone and said it was stupid and vulgar. It was said that
+      Rostopchín had expelled all Frenchmen and even all foreigners from Moscow,
+      and that there had been some spies and agents of Napoleon among them; but
+      this was told chiefly to introduce Rostopchín’s witty remark on that
+      occasion. The foreigners were deported to Nízhni by boat, and Rostopchín
+      had said to them in French: <i>“Rentrez en vous-mêmes; entrez dans la barque,
+      et n’en faites pas une barque de Charon.”</i> * There was talk of all
+      the government offices having been already removed from Moscow, and to this
+      Shinshín’s witticism was added—that for that alone Moscow ought to
+      be grateful to Napoleon. It was said that Mamónov’s regiment would cost
+      him eight hundred thousand rubles, and that Bezúkhov had spent even more
+      on his, but that the best thing about Bezúkhov’s action was that he
+      himself was going to don a uniform and ride at the head of his regiment
+      without charging anything for the show.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “Think it over; get into the barque, and take care not to
+     make it a barque of Charon.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “You don’t spare anyone,” said Julie Drubetskáya as she collected
+      and pressed together a bunch of raveled lint with her thin, beringed fingers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Julie was preparing to leave Moscow next day and was giving a farewell
+      soiree.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “<i>Bezúkhov est ridicule</i>, but he is so kind and good-natured. What pleasure
+      is there to be so <i>caustique?</i>”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “A forfeit!” cried a young man in militia uniform whom Julie called <i>“mon
+      chevalier,”</i> and who was going with her to Nízhni.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In Julie’s set, as in many other circles in Moscow, it had been agreed
+      that they would speak nothing but Russian and that those who made a slip
+      and spoke French should pay fines to the Committee of Voluntary
+      Contributions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Another forfeit for a Gallicism,” said a Russian writer who was present.
+      “‘What pleasure is there to be’ is not Russian!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You spare no one,” continued Julie to the young man without heeding the
+      author’s remark.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “For <i>caustique</i>—I am guilty and will pay, and I am prepared to pay
+      again for the pleasure of telling you the truth. For Gallicisms I won’t be
+      responsible,” she remarked, turning to the author: “I have neither the
+      money nor the time, like Prince Galítsyn, to engage a master to teach me
+      Russian!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, here he is!” she added. “<i>Quand on</i>... No, no,” she said to the militia
+      officer, “you won’t catch me. Speak of the sun and you see its rays!” and
+      she smiled amiably at Pierre. “We were just talking of you,” she said with
+      the facility in lying natural to a society woman. “We were saying that
+      your regiment would be sure to be better than Mamónov’s.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, don’t talk to me of my regiment,” replied Pierre, kissing his
+      hostess’ hand and taking a seat beside her. “I am so sick of it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You will, of course, command it yourself?” said Julie, directing a sly,
+      sarcastic glance toward the militia officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The latter in Pierre’s presence had ceased to be caustic, and his face
+      expressed perplexity as to what Julie’s smile might mean. In spite of his
+      absent-mindedness and good nature, Pierre’s personality immediately
+      checked any attempt to ridicule him to his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No,” said Pierre, with a laughing glance at his big, stout body. “I
+      should make too good a target for the French, besides I am afraid I should
+      hardly be able to climb onto a horse.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Among those whom Julie’s guests happened to choose to gossip about were
+      the Rostóvs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I hear that their affairs are in a very bad way,” said Julie. “And he is
+      so unreasonable, the count himself I mean. The Razumóvskis wanted to buy
+      his house and his estate near Moscow, but it drags on and on. He asks too
+      much.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I think the sale will come off in a few days,” said someone. “Though
+      it is madness to buy anything in Moscow now.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why?” asked Julie. “You don’t think Moscow is in danger?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Then why are you leaving?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I? What a question! I am going because... well, because everyone is
+      going: and besides—I am not Joan of Arc or an Amazon.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, of course, of course! Let me have some more strips of linen.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If he manages the business properly he will be able to pay off all his
+      debts,” said the militia officer, speaking of Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A kindly old man but not up to much. And why do they stay on so long in
+      Moscow? They meant to leave for the country long ago. Natalie is quite
+      well again now, isn’t she?” Julie asked Pierre with a knowing smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They are waiting for their younger son,” Pierre replied. “He joined
+      Obolénski’s Cossacks and went to Bélaya Tsérkov where the regiment is
+      being formed. But now they have had him transferred to my regiment and are
+      expecting him every day. The count wanted to leave long ago, but the
+      countess won’t on any account leave Moscow till her son returns.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I met them the day before yesterday at the Arkhárovs’. Natalie has
+      recovered her looks and is brighter. She sang a song. How easily some
+      people get over everything!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Get over what?” inquired Pierre, looking displeased.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Julie smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You know, Count, such knights as you are only found in Madame de Souza’s
+      novels.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What knights? What do you mean?” demanded Pierre, blushing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, come, my dear count! <i>C’est la fable de tout Moscou. Je vous admire,
+      ma parole d’honneur!”</i> *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “It is the talk of all Moscow. My word, I admire you!”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “Forfeit, forfeit!” cried the militia officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All right, one can’t talk—how tiresome!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What is ‘the talk of all Moscow’?” Pierre asked angrily, rising to his
+      feet.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come now, Count, you know!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t know anything about it,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I know you were friendly with Natalie, and so... but I was always more
+      friendly with Véra—that dear Véra.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, madame!” Pierre continued in a tone of displeasure, “I have not taken
+      on myself the role of Natalie Rostóva’s knight at all, and have not been
+      to their house for nearly a month. But I cannot understand the cruelty...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Qui s’excuse s’accuse,”</i> * said Julie, smiling and waving the lint
+      triumphantly, and to have the last word she promptly changed the subject.
+      “Do you know what I heard today? Poor Mary Bolkónskaya arrived in Moscow
+      yesterday. Do you know that she has lost her father?”
+     </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Who excuses himself, accuses himself.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “Really? Where is she? I should like very much to see her,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I spent the evening with her yesterday. She is going to their estate near
+      Moscow either today or tomorrow morning, with her nephew.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, and how is she?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She is well, but sad. But do you know who rescued her? It is quite a
+      romance. Nicholas Rostóv! She was surrounded, and they wanted to kill her
+      and had wounded some of her people. He rushed in and saved her....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Another romance,” said the militia officer. “Really, this general flight
+      has been arranged to get all the old maids married off. Catiche is one and
+      Princess Bolkónskaya another.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know, I really believe she is <i>un petit peu amoureuse du jeune
+      homme.</i>” *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “A little bit in love with the young man.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “Forfeit, forfeit, forfeit!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But how could one say that in Russian?”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0208"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      When Pierre returned home he was handed two of Rostopchín’s broadsheets
+      that had been brought that day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The first declared that the report that Count Rostopchín had forbidden
+      people to leave Moscow was false; on the contrary he was glad that ladies
+      and tradesmen’s wives were leaving the city. “There will be less panic and
+      less gossip,” ran the broadsheet “but I will stake my life on it that
+      that scoundrel will not enter Moscow.” These words showed Pierre clearly for
+      the first time that the French would enter Moscow. The second broadsheet
+      stated that our headquarters were at Vyázma, that Count Wittgenstein had
+      defeated the French, but that as many of the inhabitants of Moscow wished
+      to be armed, weapons were ready for them at the arsenal: sabers, pistols,
+      and muskets which could be had at a low price. The tone of the
+      proclamation was not as jocose as in the former Chigírin talks. Pierre
+      pondered over these broadsheets. Evidently the terrible stormcloud he had
+      desired with the whole strength of his soul but which yet aroused
+      involuntary horror in him was drawing near.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Shall I join the army and enter the service, or wait?” he asked himself
+      for the hundredth time. He took a pack of cards that lay on the table and
+      began to lay them out for a game of patience.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If this patience comes out,” he said to himself after shuffling the
+      cards, holding them in his hand, and lifting his head, “if it comes out,
+      it means... what does it mean?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He had not decided what it should mean when he heard the voice of the
+      eldest princess at the door asking whether she might come in.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then it will mean that I must go to the army,” said Pierre to himself.
+      “Come in, come in!” he added to the princess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only the eldest princess, the one with the stony face and long waist, was
+      still living in Pierre’s house. The two younger ones had both married.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Excuse my coming to you, cousin,” she said in a reproachful and agitated
+      voice. “You know some decision must be come to. What is going to happen?
+      Everyone has left Moscow and the people are rioting. How is it that we are
+      staying on?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “On the contrary, things seem satisfactory, <i>ma cousine</i>,” said
+      Pierre in the bantering tone he habitually adopted toward her, always feeling
+      uncomfortable in the role of her benefactor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Satisfactory, indeed! Very satisfactory! Barbara Ivánovna told me today
+      how our troops are distinguishing themselves. It certainly does them
+      credit! And the people too are quite mutinous—they no longer obey,
+      even my maid has taken to being rude. At this rate they will soon begin
+      beating us. One can’t walk in the streets. But, above all, the French will
+      be here any day now, so what are we waiting for? I ask just one thing of
+      you, cousin,” she went on, “arrange for me to be taken to Petersburg.
+      Whatever I may be, I can’t live under Bonaparte’s rule.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, come, <i>ma cousine!</i> Where do you get your information from? On the
+      contrary...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I won’t submit to your Napoleon! Others may if they please.... If you
+      don’t want to do this...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But I will, I’ll give the order at once.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess was apparently vexed at not having anyone to be angry with.
+      Muttering to herself, she sat down on a chair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But you have been misinformed,” said Pierre. “Everything is quiet in the
+      city and there is not the slightest danger. See! I’ve just been
+      reading...” He showed her the broadsheet. “Count Rostopchín writes that he
+      will stake his life on it that the enemy will not enter Moscow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, that count of yours!” said the princess malevolently. “He is a
+      hypocrite, a rascal who has himself roused the people to riot. Didn’t he
+      write in those idiotic broadsheets that anyone, ‘whoever it might be,
+      should be dragged to the lockup by his hair’? (How silly!) ‘And honor and
+      glory to whoever captures him,’ he says. This is what his cajolery has
+      brought us to! Barbara Ivánovna told me the mob near killed her because
+      she said something in French.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, but it’s so... You take everything so to heart,” said Pierre, and
+      began laying out his cards for patience.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Although that patience did come out, Pierre did not join the army, but
+      remained in deserted Moscow ever in the same state of agitation,
+      irresolution, and alarm, yet at the same time joyfully expecting something
+      terrible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day toward evening the princess set off, and Pierre’s head steward
+      came to inform him that the money needed for the equipment of his regiment
+      could not be found without selling one of the estates. In general the head
+      steward made out to Pierre that his project of raising a regiment would
+      ruin him. Pierre listened to him, scarcely able to repress a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well then, sell it,” said he. “What’s to be done? I can’t draw back now!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The worse everything became, especially his own affairs, the better was
+      Pierre pleased and the more evident was it that the catastrophe he
+      expected was approaching. Hardly anyone he knew was left in town. Julie
+      had gone, and so had Princess Mary. Of his intimate friends only the
+      Rostóvs remained, but he did not go to see them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To distract his thoughts he drove that day to the village of Vorontsóvo to
+      see the great balloon Leppich was constructing to destroy the foe, and a
+      trial balloon that was to go up next day. The balloon was not yet ready,
+      but Pierre learned that it was being constructed by the Emperor’s desire.
+      The Emperor had written to Count Rostopchín as follows:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as Leppich is ready, get together a crew of reliable and
+      intelligent men for his car and send a courier to General Kutúzov to let
+      him know. I have informed him of the matter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Please impress upon Leppich to be very careful where he descends for the
+      first time, that he may not make a mistake and fall into the enemy’s
+      hands. It is essential for him to combine his movements with those of the
+      commander in chief.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      On his way home from Vorontsóvo, as he was passing the Bolótnoe Place
+      Pierre, seeing a large crowd round the Lóbnoe Place, stopped and got out
+      of his trap. A French cook accused of being a spy was being flogged. The
+      flogging was only just over, and the executioner was releasing from the
+      flogging bench a stout man with red whiskers, in blue stockings and a
+      green jacket, who was moaning piteously. Another criminal, thin and pale,
+      stood near. Judging by their faces they were both Frenchmen. With a
+      frightened and suffering look resembling that on the thin Frenchman’s
+      face, Pierre pushed his way in through the crowd.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it? Who is it? What is it for?” he kept asking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the attention of the crowd—officials, burghers, shopkeepers,
+      peasants, and women in cloaks and in pelisses—was so eagerly
+      centered on what was passing in Lóbnoe Place that no one answered him. The
+      stout man rose, frowned, shrugged his shoulders, and evidently trying to
+      appear firm began to pull on his jacket without looking about him, but
+      suddenly his lips trembled and he began to cry, in the way full-blooded
+      grown-up men cry, though angry with himself for doing so. In the crowd
+      people began talking loudly, to stifle their feelings of pity as it seemed
+      to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He’s cook to some prince.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh, mounseer, Russian sauce seems to be sour to a Frenchman... sets his
+      teeth on edge!” said a wrinkled clerk who was standing behind Pierre, when
+      the Frenchman began to cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The clerk glanced round, evidently hoping that his joke would be
+      appreciated. Some people began to laugh, others continued to watch in
+      dismay the executioner who was undressing the other man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre choked, his face puckered, and he turned hastily away, went back to
+      his trap muttering something to himself as he went, and took his seat. As
+      they drove along he shuddered and exclaimed several times so audibly that
+      the coachman asked him:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is your pleasure?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Where are you going?” shouted Pierre to the man, who was driving to
+      Lubyánka Street.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To the Governor’s, as you ordered,” answered the coachman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Fool! Idiot!” shouted Pierre, abusing his coachman—a thing he
+      rarely did. “Home, I told you! And drive faster, blockhead!” “I must get
+      away this very day,” he murmured to himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the sight of the tortured Frenchman and the crowd surrounding the
+      Lóbnoe Place, Pierre had so definitely made up his mind that he could no
+      longer remain in Moscow and would leave for the army that very day that it
+      seemed to him that either he had told the coachman this or that the man
+      ought to have known it for himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On reaching home Pierre gave orders to Evstáfey—his head coachman
+      who knew everything, could do anything, and was known to all Moscow—that
+      he would leave that night for the army at Mozháysk, and that his saddle
+      horses should be sent there. This could not all be arranged that day, so
+      on Evstáfey’s representation Pierre had to put off his departure till next
+      day to allow time for the relay horses to be sent on in advance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the twenty-fourth the weather cleared up after a spell of rain, and
+      after dinner Pierre left Moscow. When changing horses that night in
+      Perkhúshkovo, he learned that there had been a great battle that evening.
+      (This was the battle of Shevárdino.) He was told that there in
+      Perkhúshkovo the earth trembled from the firing, but nobody could answer
+      his questions as to who had won. At dawn next day Pierre was approaching
+      Mozháysk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Every house in Mozháysk had soldiers quartered in it, and at the hostel
+      where Pierre was met by his groom and coachman there was no room to be
+      had. It was full of officers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Everywhere in Mozháysk and beyond it, troops were stationed or on the
+      march. Cossacks, foot and horse soldiers, wagons, caissons, and cannon
+      were everywhere. Pierre pushed forward as fast as he could, and the
+      farther he left Moscow behind and the deeper he plunged into that sea of
+      troops the more was he overcome by restless agitation and a new and joyful
+      feeling he had not experienced before. It was a feeling akin to what he
+      had felt at the Slobóda Palace during the Emperor’s visit—a sense of
+      the necessity of undertaking something and sacrificing something. He now
+      experienced a glad consciousness that everything that constitutes men’s
+      happiness—the comforts of life, wealth, even life itself—is
+      rubbish it is pleasant to throw away, compared with something... With
+      what? Pierre could not say, and he did not try to determine for whom and
+      for what he felt such particular delight in sacrificing everything. He was
+      not occupied with the question of what to sacrifice for; the fact of
+      sacrificing in itself afforded him a new and joyous sensation.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0209"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On the twenty-fourth of August the battle of the Shevárdino Redoubt was
+      fought, on the twenty-fifth not a shot was fired by either side, and on
+      the twenty-sixth the battle of Borodinó itself took place.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Why and how were the battles of Shevárdino and Borodinó given and
+      accepted? Why was the battle of Borodinó fought? There was not the least
+      sense in it for either the French or the Russians. Its immediate result
+      for the Russians was, and was bound to be, that we were brought nearer to
+      the destruction of Moscow—which we feared more than anything in the
+      world; and for the French its immediate result was that they were brought
+      nearer to the destruction of their whole army—which they feared more
+      than anything in the world. What the result must be was quite obvious, and
+      yet Napoleon offered and Kutúzov accepted that battle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If the commanders had been guided by reason, it would seem that it must
+      have been obvious to Napoleon that by advancing thirteen hundred miles and
+      giving battle with a probability of losing a quarter of his army, he was
+      advancing to certain destruction, and it must have been equally clear to
+      Kutúzov that by accepting battle and risking the loss of a quarter of his
+      army he would certainly lose Moscow. For Kutúzov this was mathematically
+      clear, as it is that if when playing draughts I have one man less and go
+      on exchanging, I shall certainly lose, and therefore should not exchange.
+      When my opponent has sixteen men and I have fourteen, I am only one eighth
+      weaker than he, but when I have exchanged thirteen more men he will be
+      three times as strong as I am.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before the battle of Borodinó our strength in proportion to the French was
+      about as five to six, but after that battle it was little more than one to
+      two: previously we had a hundred thousand against a hundred and twenty
+      thousand; afterwards little more than fifty thousand against a hundred
+      thousand. Yet the shrewd and experienced Kutúzov accepted the battle,
+      while Napoleon, who was said to be a commander of genius, gave it, losing
+      a quarter of his army and lengthening his lines of communication still
+      more. If it is said that he expected to end the campaign by occupying
+      Moscow as he had ended a previous campaign by occupying Vienna, there is
+      much evidence to the contrary. Napoleon’s historians themselves tell us
+      that from Smolénsk onwards he wished to stop, knew the danger of his
+      extended position, and knew that the occupation of Moscow would not be the
+      end of the campaign, for he had seen at Smolénsk the state in which
+      Russian towns were left to him, and had not received a single reply to his
+      repeated announcements of his wish to negotiate.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In giving and accepting battle at Borodinó, Kutúzov acted involuntarily
+      and irrationally. But later on, to fit what had occurred, the historians
+      provided cunningly devised evidence of the foresight and genius of the
+      generals who, of all the blind tools of history were the most enslaved and
+      involuntary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes furnish
+      the whole interest of the story, and we are still unable to accustom
+      ourselves to the fact that for our epoch histories of that kind are
+      meaningless.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the other question, how the battle of Borodinó and the preceding battle
+      of Shevárdino were fought, there also exists a definite and well-known,
+      but quite false, conception. All the historians describe the affair as
+      follows:
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>The Russian army,</i> they say, <i>in its retreat from Smolénsk sought out for
+      itself the best position for a general engagement and found such a
+      position at Borodinó.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>The Russians,</i> they say, <i>fortified this position in advance on the left of
+      the highroad (from Moscow to Smolénsk) and almost at a right angle to it,
+      from Borodinó to Utítsa, at the very place where the battle was fought.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>In front of this position,</i> they say, <i>a fortified outpost was set up on the
+      Shevárdino mound to observe the enemy. On the twenty-fourth,</i> we are told,
+      <i>Napoleon attacked this advanced post and took it, and, on the
+      twenty-sixth, attacked the whole Russian army, which was in position on
+      the field of Borodinó.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      So the histories say, and it is all quite wrong, as anyone who cares to
+      look into the matter can easily convince himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Russians did not seek out the best position but, on the contrary,
+      during the retreat passed many positions better than Borodinó. They did
+      not stop at any one of these positions because Kutúzov did not wish to
+      occupy a position he had not himself chosen, because the popular demand
+      for a battle had not yet expressed itself strongly enough, and because
+      Milorádovich had not yet arrived with the militia, and for many other
+      reasons. The fact is that other positions they had passed were stronger,
+      and that the position at Borodinó (the one where the battle was fought),
+      far from being strong, was no more a <i>position</i> than any other spot one
+      might find in the Russian Empire by sticking a pin into the map at hazard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Not only did the Russians not fortify the position on the field of
+      Borodinó to the left of, and at a right angle to, the highroad (that is,
+      the position on which the battle took place), but never till the
+      twenty-fifth of August, 1812, did they think that a battle might be fought
+      there. This was shown first by the fact that there were no entrenchments
+      there by the twenty fifth and that those begun on the twenty-fifth and
+      twenty-sixth were not completed, and secondly, by the position of the
+      Shevárdino Redoubt. That redoubt was quite senseless in front of the
+      position where the battle was accepted. Why was it more strongly fortified
+      than any other post? And why were all efforts exhausted and six thousand
+      men sacrificed to defend it till late at night on the twenty-fourth? A
+      Cossack patrol would have sufficed to observe the enemy. Thirdly, as proof
+      that the position on which the battle was fought had not been foreseen and
+      that the Shevárdino Redoubt was not an advanced post of that position, we
+      have the fact that up to the twenty-fifth, Barclay de Tolly and Bagratión
+      were convinced that the Shevárdino Redoubt was the <i>left flank</i> of the
+      position, and that Kutúzov himself in his report, written in hot haste
+      after the battle, speaks of the Shevárdino Redoubt as the <i>left flank</i> of
+      the position. It was much later, when reports on the battle of Borodinó
+      were written at leisure, that the incorrect and extraordinary statement
+      was invented (probably to justify the mistakes of a commander in chief who
+      had to be represented as infallible) that the Shevárdino Redoubt was an
+      <i>advanced</i> post—whereas in reality it was simply a fortified point on
+      the left flank—and that the battle of Borodinó was fought by us on
+      an entrenched position previously selected, whereas it was fought on a
+      quite unexpected spot which was almost unentrenched.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The case was evidently this: a position was selected along the river
+      Kolochá—which crosses the highroad not at a right angle but at an
+      acute angle—so that the left flank was at Shevárdino, the right
+      flank near the village of Nóvoe, and the center at Borodinó at the
+      confluence of the rivers Kolochá and Vóyna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To anyone who looks at the field of Borodinó without thinking of how the
+      battle was actually fought, this position, protected by the river Kolochá,
+      presents itself as obvious for an army whose object was to prevent an
+      enemy from advancing along the Smolénsk road to Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon, riding to Valúevo on the twenty-fourth, did not see (as the
+      history books say he did) the position of the Russians from Utítsa to
+      Borodinó (he could not have seen that position because it did not exist),
+      nor did he see an advanced post of the Russian army, but while pursuing
+      the Russian rearguard he came upon the left flank of the Russian position—at
+      the Shevárdino Redoubt—and unexpectedly for the Russians moved his
+      army across the Kolochá. And the Russians, not having time to begin a
+      general engagement, withdrew their left wing from the position they had
+      intended to occupy and took up a new position which had not been foreseen
+      and was not fortified. By crossing to the other side of the Kolochá to the
+      left of the highroad, Napoleon shifted the whole forthcoming battle from
+      right to left (looking from the Russian side) and transferred it to the
+      plain between Utítsa, Semënovsk, and Borodinó—a plain no more
+      advantageous as a position than any other plain in Russia—and there
+      the whole battle of the twenty-sixth of August took place.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Had Napoleon not ridden out on the evening of the twenty-fourth to the
+      Kolochá, and had he not then ordered an immediate attack on the redoubt
+      but had begun the attack next morning, no one would have doubted that the
+      Shevárdino Redoubt was the left flank of our position, and the battle
+      would have taken place where we expected it. In that case we should
+      probably have defended the Shevárdino Redoubt—our left flank—still
+      more obstinately. We should have attacked Napoleon in the center or on the
+      right, and the engagement would have taken place on the twenty-fifth, in
+      the position we intended and had fortified. But as the attack on our left
+      flank took place in the evening after the retreat of our rear guard (that
+      is, immediately after the fight at Gridnëva), and as the Russian
+      commanders did not wish, or were not in time, to begin a general
+      engagement then on the evening of the twenty-fourth, the first and chief
+      action of the battle of Borodinó was already lost on the twenty-fourth,
+      and obviously led to the loss of the one fought on the twenty-sixth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the loss of the Shevárdino Redoubt, we found ourselves on the
+      morning of the twenty-fifth without a position for our left flank, and
+      were forced to bend it back and hastily entrench it where it chanced to
+      be.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Not only was the Russian army on the twenty-sixth defended by weak,
+      unfinished entrenchments, but the disadvantage of that position was
+      increased by the fact that the Russian commanders—not having fully
+      realized what had happened, namely the loss of our position on the left
+      flank and the shifting of the whole field of the forthcoming battle from
+      right to left—maintained their extended position from the village of
+      Nóvoe to Utítsa, and consequently had to move their forces from right to
+      left during the battle. So it happened that throughout the whole battle
+      the Russians opposed the entire French army launched against our left
+      flank with but half as many men. (Poniatowski’s action against Utítsa, and
+      Uvárov’s on the right flank against the French, were actions distinct from
+      the main course of the battle.) So the battle of Borodinó did not take
+      place at all as (in an effort to conceal our commanders’ mistakes even at
+      the cost of diminishing the glory due to the Russian army and people) it
+      has been described. The battle of Borodinó was not fought on a chosen and
+      entrenched position with forces only slightly weaker than those of the
+      enemy, but, as a result of the loss of the Shevárdino Redoubt, the
+      Russians fought the battle of Borodinó on an open and almost unentrenched
+      position, with forces only half as numerous as the French; that is to say,
+      under conditions in which it was not merely unthinkable to fight for ten
+      hours and secure an indecisive result, but unthinkable to keep an army
+      even from complete disintegration and flight.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0210"></a>
+      CHAPTER XX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On the morning of the twenty-fifth Pierre was leaving Mozháysk. At the
+      descent of the high steep hill, down which a winding road led out of the
+      town past the cathedral on the right, where a service was being held and
+      the bells were ringing, Pierre got out of his vehicle and proceeded on
+      foot. Behind him a cavalry regiment was coming down the hill preceded by
+      its singers. Coming up toward him was a train of carts carrying men who
+      had been wounded in the engagement the day before. The peasant drivers,
+      shouting and lashing their horses, kept crossing from side to side. The
+      carts, in each of which three or four wounded soldiers were lying or
+      sitting, jolted over the stones that had been thrown on the steep incline
+      to make it something like a road. The wounded, bandaged with rags, with
+      pale cheeks, compressed lips, and knitted brows, held on to the sides of
+      the carts as they were jolted against one another. Almost all of them
+      stared with naïve, childlike curiosity at Pierre’s white hat and green
+      swallow-tail coat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre’s coachman shouted angrily at the convoy of wounded to keep to one
+      side of the road. The cavalry regiment, as it descended the hill with its
+      singers, surrounded Pierre’s carriage and blocked the road. Pierre
+      stopped, being pressed against the side of the cutting in which the road
+      ran. The sunshine from behind the hill did not penetrate into the cutting
+      and there it was cold and damp, but above Pierre’s head was the bright
+      August sunshine and the bells sounded merrily. One of the carts with
+      wounded stopped by the side of the road close to Pierre. The driver in his
+      bast shoes ran panting up to it, placed a stone under one of its tireless
+      hind wheels, and began arranging the breech-band on his little horse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One of the wounded, an old soldier with a bandaged arm who was following
+      the cart on foot, caught hold of it with his sound hand and turned to look
+      at Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I say, fellow countryman! Will they set us down here or take us on to
+      Moscow?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was so deep in thought that he did not hear the question. He was
+      looking now at the cavalry regiment that had met the convoy of wounded,
+      now at the cart by which he was standing, in which two wounded men were
+      sitting and one was lying. One of those sitting up in the cart had
+      probably been wounded in the cheek. His whole head was wrapped in rags and
+      one cheek was swollen to the size of a baby’s head. His nose and mouth
+      were twisted to one side. This soldier was looking at the cathedral and
+      crossing himself. Another, a young lad, a fair-haired recruit as white as
+      though there was no blood in his thin face, looked at Pierre kindly, with
+      a fixed smile. The third lay prone so that his face was not visible. The
+      cavalry singers were passing close by:
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+<i>Ah lost, quite lost... is my head so keen,<br>
+   Living in a foreign land...</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      they sang their soldiers’ dance song.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As if responding to them but with a different sort of merriment, the
+      metallic sound of the bells reverberated high above and the hot rays of
+      the sun bathed the top of the opposite slope with yet another sort of
+      merriment. But beneath the slope, by the cart with the wounded near the
+      panting little nag where Pierre stood, it was damp, somber, and sad.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The soldier with the swollen cheek looked angrily at the cavalry singers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, the coxcombs!” he muttered reproachfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s not the soldiers only, but I’ve seen peasants today, too.... The
+      peasants—even they have to go,” said the soldier behind the cart,
+      addressing Pierre with a sad smile. “No distinctions made nowadays....
+      They want the whole nation to fall on them—in a word, it’s Moscow!
+      They want to make an end of it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In spite of the obscurity of the soldier’s words Pierre understood what he
+      wanted to say and nodded approval.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The road was clear again; Pierre descended the hill and drove on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He kept looking to either side of the road for familiar faces, but only
+      saw everywhere the unfamiliar faces of various military men of different
+      branches of the service, who all looked with astonishment at his white hat
+      and green tail coat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having gone nearly three miles he at last met an acquaintance and eagerly
+      addressed him. This was one of the head army doctors. He was driving
+      toward Pierre in a covered gig, sitting beside a young surgeon, and on
+      recognizing Pierre he told the Cossack who occupied the driver’s seat to
+      pull up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Count! Your excellency, how come you to be here?” asked the doctor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, you know, I wanted to see...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, there will be something to see....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre got out and talked to the doctor, explaining his intention of
+      taking part in a battle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The doctor advised him to apply direct to Kutúzov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why should you be God knows where out of sight, during the battle?” he
+      said, exchanging glances with his young companion. “Anyhow his Serene
+      Highness knows you and will receive you graciously. That’s what you must
+      do.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The doctor seemed tired and in a hurry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You think so?... Ah, I also wanted to ask you where our position is
+      exactly?” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The position?” repeated the doctor. “Well, that’s not my line. Drive past
+      Tatárinova, a lot of digging is going on there. Go up the hillock and
+      you’ll see.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Can one see from there?... If you would...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But the doctor interrupted him and moved toward his gig.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I would go with you but on my honor I’m up to here”—and he pointed
+      to his throat. “I’m galloping to the commander of the corps. How do
+      matters stand?... You know, Count, there’ll be a battle tomorrow. Out of
+      an army of a hundred thousand we must expect at least twenty thousand
+      wounded, and we haven’t stretchers, or bunks, or dressers, or doctors
+      enough for six thousand. We have ten thousand carts, but we need other
+      things as well—we must manage as best we can!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The strange thought that of the thousands of men, young and old, who had
+      stared with merry surprise at his hat (perhaps the very men he had
+      noticed), twenty thousand were inevitably doomed to wounds and death
+      amazed Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They may die tomorrow; why are they thinking of anything but death?” And
+      by some latent sequence of thought the descent of the Mozháysk hill, the
+      carts with the wounded, the ringing bells, the slanting rays of the sun,
+      and the songs of the cavalrymen vividly recurred to his mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The cavalry ride to battle and meet the wounded and do not for a moment
+      think of what awaits them, but pass by, winking at the wounded. Yet from
+      among these men twenty thousand are doomed to die, and they wonder at my
+      hat! Strange!” thought Pierre, continuing his way to Tatárinova.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In front of a landowner’s house to the left of the road stood carriages,
+      wagons, and crowds of orderlies and sentinels. The commander in chief was
+      putting up there, but just when Pierre arrived he was not in and hardly
+      any of the staff were there—they had gone to the church service.
+      Pierre drove on toward Górki.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he had ascended the hill and reached the little village street, he
+      saw for the first time peasant militiamen in their white shirts and with
+      crosses on their caps, who, talking and laughing loudly, animated and
+      perspiring, were at work on a huge knoll overgrown with grass to the right
+      of the road.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Some of them were digging, others were wheeling barrowloads of earth along
+      planks, while others stood about doing nothing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Two officers were standing on the knoll, directing the men. On seeing
+      these peasants, who were evidently still amused by the novelty of their
+      position as soldiers, Pierre once more thought of the wounded men at
+      Mozháysk and understood what the soldier had meant when he said: “They
+      want the whole nation to fall on them.” The sight of these bearded
+      peasants at work on the battlefield, with their queer, clumsy boots and
+      perspiring necks, and their shirts opening from the left toward the
+      middle, unfastened, exposing their sunburned collarbones, impressed Pierre
+      more strongly with the solemnity and importance of the moment than
+      anything he had yet seen or heard.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0211"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Pierre stepped out of his carriage and, passing the toiling militiamen,
+      ascended the knoll from which, according to the doctor, the battlefield
+      could be seen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was about eleven o’clock. The sun shone somewhat to the left and behind
+      him and brightly lit up the enormous panorama which, rising like an
+      amphitheater, extended before him in the clear rarefied atmosphere.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From above on the left, bisecting that amphitheater, wound the Smolénsk
+      highroad, passing through a village with a white church some five hundred
+      paces in front of the knoll and below it. This was Borodinó. Below the
+      village the road crossed the river by a bridge and, winding down and up,
+      rose higher and higher to the village of Valúevo visible about four miles
+      away, where Napoleon was then stationed. Beyond Valúevo the road
+      disappeared into a yellowing forest on the horizon. Far in the distance in
+      that birch and fir forest to the right of the road, the cross and belfry
+      of the Kolochá Monastery gleamed in the sun. Here and there over the whole
+      of that blue expanse, to right and left of the forest and the road,
+      smoking campfires could be seen and indefinite masses of troops—ours
+      and the enemy’s. The ground to the right—along the course of the
+      Kolochá and Moskvá rivers—was broken and hilly. Between the hollows
+      the villages of Bezúbova and Zakhárino showed in the distance. On the left
+      the ground was more level; there were fields of grain, and the smoking
+      ruins of Semënovsk, which had been burned down, could be seen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All that Pierre saw was so indefinite that neither the left nor the right
+      side of the field fully satisfied his expectations. Nowhere could he see
+      the battlefield he had expected to find, but only fields, meadows, troops,
+      woods, the smoke of campfires, villages, mounds, and streams; and try as
+      he would he could descry no military “position” in this place which teemed
+      with life, nor could he even distinguish our troops from the enemy’s.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I must ask someone who knows,” he thought, and addressed an officer who
+      was looking with curiosity at his huge unmilitary figure.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “May I ask you,” said Pierre, “what village that is in front?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Búrdino, isn’t it?” said the officer, turning to his companion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Borodinó,” the other corrected him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The officer, evidently glad of an opportunity for a talk, moved up to
+      Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Are those our men there?” Pierre inquired.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, and there, further on, are the French,” said the officer. “There
+      they are, there... you can see them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Where? Where?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One can see them with the naked eye... Why, there!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The officer pointed with his hand to the smoke visible on the left beyond
+      the river, and the same stern and serious expression that Pierre had
+      noticed on many of the faces he had met came into his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, those are the French! And over there?...” Pierre pointed to a knoll
+      on the left, near which some troops could be seen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Those are ours.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, ours! And there?...” Pierre pointed to another knoll in the distance
+      with a big tree on it, near a village that lay in a hollow where also some
+      campfires were smoking and something black was visible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s <i>his</i> again,” said the officer. (It was the Shevárdino Redoubt.) “It
+      was ours yesterday, but now it is <i>his</i>.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Then how about our position?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Our position?” replied the officer with a smile of satisfaction. “I can
+      tell you quite clearly, because I constructed nearly all our
+      entrenchments. There, you see? There’s our center, at Borodinó, just
+      there,” and he pointed to the village in front of them with the white
+      church. “That’s where one crosses the Kolochá. You see down there where
+      the rows of hay are lying in the hollow, there’s the bridge. That’s our
+      center. Our right flank is over there”—he pointed sharply to the
+      right, far away in the broken ground—“That’s where the Moskvá River
+      is, and we have thrown up three redoubts there, very strong ones. The left
+      flank...” here the officer paused. “Well, you see, that’s difficult to
+      explain.... Yesterday our left flank was there at Shevárdino, you see,
+      where the oak is, but now we have withdrawn our left wing—now it is
+      over there, do you see that village and the smoke? That’s Semënovsk, yes,
+      there,” he pointed to Raévski’s knoll. “But the battle will hardly be
+      there. <i>His</i> having moved his troops there is only a ruse; <i>he</i> will probably
+      pass round to the right of the Moskvá. But wherever it may be, many a man
+      will be missing tomorrow!” he remarked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      An elderly sergeant who had approached the officer while he was giving
+      these explanations had waited in silence for him to finish speaking, but
+      at this point, evidently not liking the officer’s remark, interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Gabions must be sent for,” said he sternly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The officer appeared abashed, as though he understood that one might think
+      of how many men would be missing tomorrow but ought not to speak of it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, send number three company again,” the officer replied hurriedly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And you, are you one of the doctors?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I’ve come on my own,” answered Pierre, and he went down the hill
+      again, passing the militiamen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, those damned fellows!” muttered the officer who followed him, holding
+      his nose as he ran past the men at work.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There they are... bringing her, coming... There they are... They’ll be
+      here in a minute...” voices were suddenly heard saying; and officers,
+      soldiers, and militiamen began running forward along the road.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A church procession was coming up the hill from Borodinó. First along the
+      dusty road came the infantry in ranks, bareheaded and with arms reversed.
+      From behind them came the sound of church singing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Soldiers and militiamen ran bareheaded past Pierre toward the procession.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They are bringing her, our Protectress!... The Iberian Mother of God!”
+       someone cried.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Smolénsk Mother of God,” another corrected him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The militiamen, both those who had been in the village and those who had
+      been at work on the battery, threw down their spades and ran to meet the
+      church procession. Following the battalion that marched along the dusty
+      road came priests in their vestments—one little old man in a hood
+      with attendants and singers. Behind them soldiers and officers bore a
+      large, dark-faced icon with an embossed metal cover. This was the icon
+      that had been brought from Smolénsk and had since accompanied the army.
+      Behind, before, and on both sides, crowds of militiamen with bared heads
+      walked, ran, and bowed to the ground.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the summit of the hill they stopped with the icon; the men who had been
+      holding it up by the linen bands attached to it were relieved by others,
+      the chanters relit their censers, and service began. The hot rays of the
+      sun beat down vertically and a fresh soft wind played with the hair of the
+      bared heads and with the ribbons decorating the icon. The singing did not
+      sound loud under the open sky. An immense crowd of bareheaded officers,
+      soldiers, and militiamen surrounded the icon. Behind the priest and a
+      chanter stood the notabilities on a spot reserved for them. A bald general
+      with a St. George’s Cross on his neck stood just behind the priest’s back,
+      and without crossing himself (he was evidently a German) patiently awaited
+      the end of the service, which he considered it necessary to hear to the
+      end, probably to arouse the patriotism of the Russian people. Another
+      general stood in a martial pose, crossing himself by shaking his hand in
+      front of his chest while looking about him. Standing among the crowd of
+      peasants, Pierre recognized several acquaintances among these notables,
+      but did not look at them—his whole attention was absorbed in
+      watching the serious expression on the faces of the crowd of soldiers and
+      militiamen who were all gazing eagerly at the icon. As soon as the tired
+      chanters, who were singing the service for the twentieth time that day,
+      began lazily and mechanically to sing: “Save from calamity Thy servants, O
+      Mother of God,” and the priest and deacon chimed in: “For to Thee under
+      God we all flee as to an inviolable bulwark and protection,” there again
+      kindled in all those faces the same expression of consciousness of the
+      solemnity of the impending moment that Pierre had seen on the faces at the
+      foot of the hill at Mozháysk and momentarily on many and many faces he had
+      met that morning; and heads were bowed more frequently and hair tossed
+      back, and sighs and the sound men made as they crossed themselves were
+      heard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The crowd round the icon suddenly parted and pressed against Pierre.
+      Someone, a very important personage judging by the haste with which way
+      was made for him, was approaching the icon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was Kutúzov, who had been riding round the position and on his way back
+      to Tatárinova had stopped where the service was being held. Pierre
+      recognized him at once by his peculiar figure, which distinguished him
+      from everybody else.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With a long overcoat on his exceedingly stout, round-shouldered body, with
+      uncovered white head and puffy face showing the white ball of the eye he
+      had lost, Kutúzov walked with plunging, swaying gait into the crowd and
+      stopped behind the priest. He crossed himself with an accustomed movement,
+      bent till he touched the ground with his hand, and bowed his white head
+      with a deep sigh. Behind Kutúzov was Bennigsen and the suite. Despite the
+      presence of the commander in chief, who attracted the attention of all the
+      superior officers, the militiamen and soldiers continued their prayers
+      without looking at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the service was over, Kutúzov stepped up to the icon, sank heavily to
+      his knees, bowed to the ground, and for a long time tried vainly to rise,
+      but could not do so on account of his weakness and weight. His white head
+      twitched with the effort. At last he rose, kissed the icon as a child does
+      with naïvely pouting lips, and again bowed till he touched the ground with
+      his hand. The other generals followed his example, then the officers, and
+      after them with excited faces, pressing on one another, crowding, panting,
+      and pushing, scrambled the soldiers and militiamen.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0212"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Staggering amid the crush, Pierre looked about him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Count Peter Kirílovich! How did you get here?” said a voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked round. Borís Drubetskóy, brushing his knees with his hand
+      (he had probably soiled them when he, too, had knelt before the icon),
+      came up to him smiling. Borís was elegantly dressed, with a slightly
+      martial touch appropriate to a campaign. He wore a long coat and like
+      Kutúzov had a whip slung across his shoulder.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Meanwhile Kutúzov had reached the village and seated himself in the shade
+      of the nearest house, on a bench which one Cossack had run to fetch and
+      another had hastily covered with a rug. An immense and brilliant suite
+      surrounded him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The icon was carried further, accompanied by the throng. Pierre stopped
+      some thirty paces from Kutúzov, talking to Borís.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He explained his wish to be present at the battle and to see the position.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This is what you must do,” said Borís. “I will do the honors of the camp
+      to you. You will see everything best from where Count Bennigsen will be. I
+      am in attendance on him, you know; I’ll mention it to him. But if you want
+      to ride round the position, come along with us. We are just going to the
+      left flank. Then when we get back, do spend the night with me and we’ll
+      arrange a game of cards. Of course you know Dmítri Sergéevich? Those are
+      his quarters,” and he pointed to the third house in the village of Górki.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But I should like to see the right flank. They say it’s very strong,”
+       said Pierre. “I should like to start from the Moskvá River and ride round
+      the whole position.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, you can do that later, but the chief thing is the left flank.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes. But where is Prince Bolkónski’s regiment? Can you point it out
+      to me?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Prince Andrew’s? We shall pass it and I’ll take you to him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What about the left flank?” asked Pierre
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To tell you the truth, between ourselves, God only knows what state our
+      left flank is in,” said Borís confidentially lowering his voice. “It is
+      not at all what Count Bennigsen intended. He meant to fortify that knoll
+      quite differently, but...” Borís shrugged his shoulders, “his Serene
+      Highness would not have it, or someone persuaded him. You see...” but
+      Borís did not finish, for at that moment Kaysárov, Kutúzov’s adjutant,
+      came up to Pierre. “Ah, Kaysárov!” said Borís, addressing him with an
+      unembarrassed smile, “I was just trying to explain our position to the
+      count. It is amazing how his Serene Highness could so foresee the
+      intentions of the French!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You mean the left flank?” asked Kaysárov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, exactly; the left flank is now extremely strong.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Though Kutúzov had dismissed all unnecessary men from the staff, Borís had
+      contrived to remain at headquarters after the changes. He had established
+      himself with Count Bennigsen, who, like all on whom Borís had been in
+      attendance, considered young Prince Drubetskóy an invaluable man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the higher command there were two sharply defined parties: Kutúzov’s
+      party and that of Bennigsen, the chief of staff. Borís belonged to the
+      latter and no one else, while showing servile respect to Kutúzov, could so
+      create an impression that the old fellow was not much good and that
+      Bennigsen managed everything. Now the decisive moment of battle had come
+      when Kutúzov would be destroyed and the power pass to Bennigsen, or even
+      if Kutúzov won the battle it would be felt that everything was done by
+      Bennigsen. In any case many great rewards would have to be given for
+      tomorrow’s action, and new men would come to the front. So Borís was full
+      of nervous vivacity all day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After Kaysárov, others whom Pierre knew came up to him, and he had not
+      time to reply to all the questions about Moscow that were showered upon
+      him, or to listen to all that was told him. The faces all expressed
+      animation and apprehension, but it seemed to Pierre that the cause of the
+      excitement shown in some of these faces lay chiefly in questions of
+      personal success; his mind, however, was occupied by the different
+      expression he saw on other faces—an expression that spoke not of
+      personal matters but of the universal questions of life and death. Kutúzov
+      noticed Pierre’s figure and the group gathered round him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Call him to me,” said Kutúzov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      An adjutant told Pierre of his Serene Highness’ wish, and Pierre went
+      toward Kutúzov’s bench. But a militiaman got there before him. It was
+      Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How did that fellow get here?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He’s a creature that wriggles in anywhere!” was the answer. “He has been
+      degraded, you know. Now he wants to bob up again. He’s been proposing some
+      scheme or other and has crawled into the enemy’s picket line at night....
+      He’s a brave fellow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre took off his hat and bowed respectfully to Kutúzov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I concluded that if I reported to your Serene Highness you might send me
+      away or say that you knew what I was reporting, but then I shouldn’t lose
+      anything...” Dólokhov was saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But if I were right, I should be rendering a service to my Fatherland for
+      which I am ready to die.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And should your Serene Highness require a man who will not spare his
+      skin, please think of me.... Perhaps I may prove useful to your Serene
+      Highness.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes... Yes...” Kutúzov repeated, his laughing eye narrowing more and more
+      as he looked at Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just then Borís, with his courtierlike adroitness, stepped up to Pierre’s
+      side near Kutúzov and in a most natural manner, without raising his voice,
+      said to Pierre, as though continuing an interrupted conversation:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The militia have put on clean white shirts to be ready to die. What
+      heroism, Count!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Borís evidently said this to Pierre in order to be overheard by his Serene
+      Highness. He knew Kutúzov’s attention would be caught by those words, and
+      so it was.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What are you saying about the militia?” he asked Borís.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Preparing for tomorrow, your Serene Highness—for death—they
+      have put on clean shirts.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah... a wonderful, a matchless people!” said Kutúzov; and he closed his
+      eyes and swayed his head. “A matchless people!” he repeated with a sigh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So you want to smell gunpowder?” he said to Pierre. “Yes, it’s a pleasant
+      smell. I have the honor to be one of your wife’s adorers. Is she well? My
+      quarters are at your service.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And as often happens with old people, Kutúzov began looking about
+      absent-mindedly as if forgetting all he wanted to say or do.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Then, evidently remembering what he wanted, he beckoned to Andrew
+      Kaysárov, his adjutant’s brother.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Those verses... those verses of Márin’s... how do they go, eh? Those he
+      wrote about Gerákov: ‘Lectures for the corps inditing’... Recite them,
+      recite them!” said he, evidently preparing to laugh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kaysárov recited.... Kutúzov smilingly nodded his head to the rhythm of
+      the verses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Pierre had left Kutúzov, Dólokhov came up to him and took his hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am very glad to meet you here, Count,” he said aloud, regardless of the
+      presence of strangers and in a particularly resolute and solemn tone. “On
+      the eve of a day when God alone knows who of us is fated to survive, I am
+      glad of this opportunity to tell you that I regret the misunderstandings
+      that occurred between us and should wish you not to have any ill feeling
+      for me. I beg you to forgive me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked at Dólokhov with a smile, not knowing what to say to him.
+      With tears in his eyes Dólokhov embraced Pierre and kissed him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Borís said a few words to his general, and Count Bennigsen turned to
+      Pierre and proposed that he should ride with him along the line.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It will interest you,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, very much,” replied Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Half an hour later Kutúzov left for Tatárinova, and Bennigsen and his
+      suite, with Pierre among them, set out on their ride along the line.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0213"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      From Górki, Bennigsen descended the highroad to the bridge which, when
+      they had looked at it from the hill, the officer had pointed out as being
+      the center of our position and where rows of fragrant new-mown hay lay by
+      the riverside. They rode across that bridge into the village of Borodinó
+      and thence turned to the left, passing an enormous number of troops and
+      guns, and came to a high knoll where militiamen were digging. This was the
+      redoubt, as yet unnamed, which afterwards became known as the Raévski
+      Redoubt, or the Knoll Battery, but Pierre paid no special attention to it.
+      He did not know that it would become more memorable to him than any other
+      spot on the plain of Borodinó.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They then crossed the hollow to Semënovsk, where the soldiers were
+      dragging away the last logs from the huts and barns. Then they rode
+      downhill and uphill, across a ryefield trodden and beaten down as if by
+      hail, following a track freshly made by the artillery over the furrows of
+      the plowed land, and reached some <i>flèches</i> * which were still being dug.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * A kind of entrenchment.
+</p>
+<p>
+      At the <i>flèches</i> Bennigsen stopped and began looking at the Shevárdino
+      Redoubt opposite, which had been ours the day before and where several
+      horsemen could be descried. The officers said that either Napoleon or
+      Murat was there, and they all gazed eagerly at this little group of
+      horsemen. Pierre also looked at them, trying to guess which of the
+      scarcely discernible figures was Napoleon. At last those mounted men rode
+      away from the mound and disappeared.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bennigsen spoke to a general who approached him, and began explaining the
+      whole position of our troops. Pierre listened to him, straining each
+      faculty to understand the essential points of the impending battle, but
+      was mortified to feel that his mental capacity was inadequate for the
+      task. He could make nothing of it. Bennigsen stopped speaking and,
+      noticing that Pierre was listening, suddenly said to him:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t think this interests you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “On the contrary it’s very interesting!” replied Pierre not quite
+      truthfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the <i>flèches</i> they rode still farther to the left, along a road winding
+      through a thick, low-growing birch wood. In the middle of the wood a brown
+      hare with white feet sprang out and, scared by the tramp of the many
+      horses, grew so confused that it leaped along the road in front of them
+      for some time, arousing general attention and laughter, and only when
+      several voices shouted at it did it dart to one side and disappear in the
+      thicket. After going through the wood for about a mile and a half they
+      came out on a glade where troops of Túchkov’s corps were stationed to
+      defend the left flank.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Here, at the extreme left flank, Bennigsen talked a great deal and with
+      much heat, and, as it seemed to Pierre, gave orders of great military
+      importance. In front of Túchkov’s troops was some high ground not occupied
+      by troops. Bennigsen loudly criticized this mistake, saying that it was
+      madness to leave a height which commanded the country around unoccupied
+      and to place troops below it. Some of the generals expressed the same
+      opinion. One in particular declared with martial heat that they were put
+      there to be slaughtered. Bennigsen on his own authority ordered the troops
+      to occupy the high ground. This disposition on the left flank increased
+      Pierre’s doubt of his own capacity to understand military matters.
+      Listening to Bennigsen and the generals criticizing the position of the
+      troops behind the hill, he quite understood them and shared their opinion,
+      but for that very reason he could not understand how the man who put them
+      there behind the hill could have made so gross and palpable a blunder.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre did not know that these troops were not, as Bennigsen supposed, put
+      there to defend the position, but were in a concealed position as an
+      ambush, that they should not be seen and might be able to strike an
+      approaching enemy unexpectedly. Bennigsen did not know this and moved the
+      troops forward according to his own ideas without mentioning the matter to
+      the commander in chief.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0214"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On that bright evening of August 25, Prince Andrew lay leaning on his
+      elbow in a broken-down shed in the village of Knyazkóvo at the further end
+      of his regiment’s encampment. Through a gap in the broken wall he could
+      see, beside the wooden fence, a row of thirty-year-old birches with their
+      lower branches lopped off, a field on which shocks of oats were standing,
+      and some bushes near which rose the smoke of campfires—the soldiers’
+      kitchens.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Narrow and burdensome and useless to anyone as his life now seemed to him,
+      Prince Andrew on the eve of battle felt agitated and irritable as he had
+      done seven years before at Austerlitz.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He had received and given the orders for next day’s battle and had nothing
+      more to do. But his thoughts—the simplest, clearest, and therefore
+      most terrible thoughts—would give him no peace. He knew that
+      tomorrow’s battle would be the most terrible of all he had taken part in,
+      and for the first time in his life the possibility of death presented
+      itself to him—not in relation to any worldly matter or with
+      reference to its effect on others, but simply in relation to himself, to
+      his own soul—vividly, plainly, terribly, and almost as a certainty.
+      And from the height of this perception all that had previously tormented
+      and preoccupied him suddenly became illumined by a cold white light
+      without shadows, without perspective, without distinction of outline. All
+      life appeared to him like magic-lantern pictures at which he had long been
+      gazing by artificial light through a glass. Now he suddenly saw those
+      badly daubed pictures in clear daylight and without a glass. “Yes, yes!
+      There they are, those false images that agitated, enraptured, and
+      tormented me,” said he to himself, passing in review the principal
+      pictures of the magic lantern of life and regarding them now in the cold
+      white daylight of his clear perception of death. “There they are, those
+      rudely painted figures that once seemed splendid and mysterious. Glory,
+      the good of society, love of a woman, the Fatherland itself—how
+      important these pictures appeared to me, with what profound meaning they
+      seemed to be filled! And it is all so simple, pale, and crude in the cold
+      white light of this morning which I feel is dawning for me.” The three
+      great sorrows of his life held his attention in particular: his love for a
+      woman, his father’s death, and the French invasion which had overrun half
+      Russia. “Love... that little girl who seemed to me brimming over with
+      mystic forces! Yes, indeed, I loved her. I made romantic plans of love and
+      happiness with her! Oh, what a boy I was!” he said aloud bitterly. “Ah me!
+      I believed in some ideal love which was to keep her faithful to me for the
+      whole year of my absence! Like the gentle dove in the fable she was to
+      pine apart from me.... But it was much simpler really.... It was all very
+      simple and horrible.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “When my father built Bald Hills he thought the place was his: his land,
+      his air, his peasants. But Napoleon came and swept him aside, unconscious
+      of his existence, as he might brush a chip from his path, and his Bald
+      Hills and his whole life fell to pieces. Princess Mary says it is a trial
+      sent from above. What is the trial for, when he is not here and will never
+      return? He is not here! For whom then is the trial intended? The
+      Fatherland, the destruction of Moscow! And tomorrow I shall be killed,
+      perhaps not even by a Frenchman but by one of our own men, by a soldier
+      discharging a musket close to my ear as one of them did yesterday, and the
+      French will come and take me by head and heels and fling me into a hole
+      that I may not stink under their noses, and new conditions of life will
+      arise, which will seem quite ordinary to others and about which I shall
+      know nothing. I shall not exist....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He looked at the row of birches shining in the sunshine, with their
+      motionless green and yellow foliage and white bark. “To die... to be
+      killed tomorrow... That I should not exist... That all this should still
+      be, but no me....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the birches with their light and shade, the curly clouds, the smoke of
+      the campfires, and all that was around him changed and seemed terrible and
+      menacing. A cold shiver ran down his spine. He rose quickly, went out of
+      the shed, and began to walk about.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After he had returned, voices were heard outside the shed. “Who’s that?”
+       he cried.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The red-nosed Captain Timókhin, formerly Dólokhov’s squadron commander,
+      but now from lack of officers a battalion commander, shyly entered the
+      shed followed by an adjutant and the regimental paymaster.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew rose hastily, listened to the business they had come about,
+      gave them some further instructions, and was about to dismiss them when he
+      heard a familiar, lisping, voice behind the shed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Devil take it!” said the voice of a man stumbling over something.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew looked out of the shed and saw Pierre, who had tripped over
+      a pole on the ground and had nearly fallen, coming his way. It was
+      unpleasant to Prince Andrew to meet people of his own set in general, and
+      Pierre especially, for he reminded him of all the painful moments of his
+      last visit to Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You? What a surprise!” said he. “What brings you here? This is
+      unexpected!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      As he said this his eyes and face expressed more than coldness—they
+      expressed hostility, which Pierre noticed at once. He had approached the
+      shed full of animation, but on seeing Prince Andrew’s face he felt
+      constrained and ill at ease.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have come... simply... you know... come... it interests me,” said
+      Pierre, who had so often that day senselessly repeated that word
+      “interesting.” “I wish to see the battle.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes, and what do the Masonic brothers say about war? How would they
+      stop it?” said Prince Andrew sarcastically. “Well, and how’s Moscow? And
+      my people? Have they reached Moscow at last?” he asked seriously.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, they have. Julie Drubetskáya told me so. I went to see them, but
+      missed them. They have gone to your estate near Moscow.”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0215"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The officers were about to take leave, but Prince Andrew, apparently
+      reluctant to be left alone with his friend, asked them to stay and have
+      tea. Seats were brought in and so was the tea. The officers gazed with
+      surprise at Pierre’s huge stout figure and listened to his talk of Moscow
+      and the position of our army, round which he had ridden. Prince Andrew
+      remained silent, and his expression was so forbidding that Pierre
+      addressed his remarks chiefly to the good-natured battalion commander.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So you understand the whole position of our troops?” Prince Andrew
+      interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes—that is, how do you mean?” said Pierre. “Not being a military
+      man I can’t say I have understood it fully, but I understand the general
+      position.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, then, you know more than anyone else, be it who it may,” said
+      Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh!” said Pierre, looking over his spectacles in perplexity at Prince
+      Andrew. “Well, and what do you think of Kutúzov’s appointment?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I was very glad of his appointment, that’s all I know,” replied Prince
+      Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And tell me your opinion of Barclay de Tolly. In Moscow they are saying
+      heaven knows what about him.... What do you think of him?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ask them,” replied Prince Andrew, indicating the officers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked at Timókhin with the condescendingly interrogative smile
+      with which everybody involuntarily addressed that officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We see light again, since his Serenity has been appointed, your
+      excellency,” said Timókhin timidly, and continually turning to glance at
+      his colonel.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why so?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, to mention only firewood and fodder, let me inform you. Why, when
+      we were retreating from Sventsyáni we dare not touch a stick or a wisp of
+      hay or anything. You see, we were going away, so <i>he</i> would get it all;
+      wasn’t it so, your excellency?” and again Timókhin turned to the prince.
+      “But we daren’t. In our regiment two officers were court-martialed for
+      that kind of thing. But when his Serenity took command everything became
+      straightforward. Now we see light....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Then why was it forbidden?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Timókhin looked about in confusion, not knowing what or how to answer such
+      a question. Pierre put the same question to Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, so as not to lay waste the country we were abandoning to the enemy,”
+       said Prince Andrew with venomous irony. “It is very sound: one can’t
+      permit the land to be pillaged and accustom the troops to marauding. At
+      Smolénsk too he judged correctly that the French might outflank us, as
+      they had larger forces. But he could not understand this,” cried Prince
+      Andrew in a shrill voice that seemed to escape him involuntarily: “he
+      could not understand that there, for the first time, we were fighting for
+      Russian soil, and that there was a spirit in the men such as I had never
+      seen before, that we had held the French for two days, and that that
+      success had increased our strength tenfold. He ordered us to retreat, and
+      all our efforts and losses went for nothing. He had no thought of
+      betraying us, he tried to do the best he could, he thought out everything,
+      and that is why he is unsuitable. He is unsuitable now, just because he
+      plans out everything very thoroughly and accurately as every German has
+      to. How can I explain?... Well, say your father has a German valet, and he
+      is a splendid valet and satisfies your father’s requirements better than
+      you could, then it’s all right to let him serve. But if your father is
+      mortally sick you’ll send the valet away and attend to your father with
+      your own unpracticed, awkward hands, and will soothe him better than a
+      skilled man who is a stranger could. So it has been with Barclay. While
+      Russia was well, a foreigner could serve her and be a splendid minister;
+      but as soon as she is in danger she needs one of her own kin. But in your
+      Club they have been making him out a traitor! They slander him as a
+      traitor, and the only result will be that afterwards, ashamed of their
+      false accusations, they will make him out a hero or a genius instead of a
+      traitor, and that will be still more unjust. He is an honest and very
+      punctilious German.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And they say he’s a skillful commander,” rejoined Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t understand what is meant by ‘a skillful commander,’” replied
+      Prince Andrew ironically.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A skillful commander?” replied Pierre. “Why, one who foresees all
+      contingencies... and foresees the adversary’s intentions.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But that’s impossible,” said Prince Andrew as if it were a matter settled
+      long ago.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked at him in surprise.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And yet they say that war is like a game of chess?” he remarked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” replied Prince Andrew, “but with this little difference, that in
+      chess you may think over each move as long as you please and are not
+      limited for time, and with this difference too, that a knight is always
+      stronger than a pawn, and two pawns are always stronger than one, while in
+      war a battalion is sometimes stronger than a division and sometimes weaker
+      than a company. The relative strength of bodies of troops can never be
+      known to anyone. Believe me,” he went on, “if things depended on
+      arrangements made by the staff, I should be there making arrangements, but
+      instead of that I have the honor to serve here in the regiment with these
+      gentlemen, and I consider that on us tomorrow’s battle will depend and not
+      on those others.... Success never depends, and never will depend, on
+      position, or equipment, or even on numbers, and least of all on position.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But on what then?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “On the feeling that is in me and in him,” he pointed to Timókhin, “and in
+      each soldier.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew glanced at Timókhin, who looked at his commander in alarm
+      and bewilderment. In contrast to his former reticent taciturnity Prince
+      Andrew now seemed excited. He could apparently not refrain from expressing
+      the thoughts that had suddenly occurred to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A battle is won by those who firmly resolve to win it! Why did we lose
+      the battle at Austerlitz? The French losses were almost equal to ours, but
+      very early we said to ourselves that we were losing the battle, and we did
+      lose it. And we said so because we had nothing to fight for there, we
+      wanted to get away from the battlefield as soon as we could. ‘We’ve lost,
+      so let us run,’ and we ran. If we had not said that till the evening,
+      heaven knows what might not have happened. But tomorrow we shan’t say it!
+      You talk about our position, the left flank weak and the right flank too
+      extended,” he went on. “That’s all nonsense, there’s nothing of the kind.
+      But what awaits us tomorrow? A hundred million most diverse chances which
+      will be decided on the instant by the fact that our men or theirs run or
+      do not run, and that this man or that man is killed, but all that is being
+      done at present is only play. The fact is that those men with whom you
+      have ridden round the position not only do not help matters, but hinder.
+      They are only concerned with their own petty interests.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “At such a moment?” said Pierre reproachfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“At such a moment!”</i> Prince Andrew repeated. “To them it is only a moment
+      affording opportunities to undermine a rival and obtain an extra cross or
+      ribbon. For me tomorrow means this: a Russian army of a hundred thousand
+      and a French army of a hundred thousand have met to fight, and the thing
+      is that these two hundred thousand men <i>will</i> fight and the side that fights
+      more fiercely and spares itself least will win. And if you like I will
+      tell you that whatever happens and whatever muddles those at the top may
+      make, we shall win tomorrow’s battle. Tomorrow, happen what may, we shall
+      win!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “There now, your excellency! That’s the truth, the real truth,” said
+      Timókhin. “Who would spare himself now? The soldiers in my battalion,
+      believe me, wouldn’t drink their vodka! ‘It’s not the day for that!’ they
+      say.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      All were silent. The officers rose. Prince Andrew went out of the shed
+      with them, giving final orders to the adjutant. After they had gone Pierre
+      approached Prince Andrew and was about to start a conversation when they
+      heard the clatter of three horses’ hoofs on the road not far from the
+      shed, and looking in that direction Prince Andrew recognized Wolzogen and
+      Clausewitz accompanied by a Cossack. They rode close by continuing to
+      converse, and Prince Andrew involuntarily heard these words:
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Der Krieg muss in Raum verlegt werden. Der Ansicht kann ich nicht genug
+      Preis geben,”</i> * said one of them.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “The war must be extended widely. I cannot sufficiently
+     commend that view.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Oh, ja,”</i> said the other, <i>“der Zweck ist nur den Feind
+      zu schwächen, so kann man gewiss nicht den Verlust der Privat-Personen in Achtung
+      nehmen.”</i>*
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “Oh, yes, the only aim is to weaken the enemy, so of
+     course one cannot take into account the loss of private
+     individuals.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, no,” agreed the other.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Extend widely!” said Prince Andrew with an angry snort, when they had
+      ridden past. “In that ‘extend’ were my father, son, and sister, at Bald
+      Hills. That’s all the same to him! That’s what I was saying to you—those
+      German gentlemen won’t win the battle tomorrow but will only make all the
+      mess they can, because they have nothing in their German heads but
+      theories not worth an empty eggshell and haven’t in their hearts the one
+      thing needed tomorrow—that which Timókhin has. They have yielded up
+      all Europe to <i>him</i>, and have now come to teach us. Fine teachers!” and
+      again his voice grew shrill.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So you think we shall win tomorrow’s battle?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes,” answered Prince Andrew absently. “One thing I would do if I
+      had the power,” he began again, “I would not take prisoners. Why take
+      prisoners? It’s chivalry! The French have destroyed my home and are on
+      their way to destroy Moscow, they have outraged and are outraging me every
+      moment. They are my enemies. In my opinion they are all criminals. And so
+      thinks Timókhin and the whole army. They should be executed! Since they
+      are my foes they cannot be my friends, whatever may have been said at
+      Tilsit.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes,” muttered Pierre, looking with shining eyes at Prince Andrew.
+      “I quite agree with you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The question that had perturbed Pierre on the Mozháysk hill and all that
+      day now seemed to him quite clear and completely solved. He now understood
+      the whole meaning and importance of this war and of the impending battle.
+      All he had seen that day, all the significant and stern expressions on the
+      faces he had seen in passing, were lit up for him by a new light. He
+      understood that latent heat (as they say in physics) of patriotism which
+      was present in all these men he had seen, and this explained to him why
+      they all prepared for death calmly, and as it were lightheartedly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Not take prisoners,” Prince Andrew continued: “That by itself would quite
+      change the whole war and make it less cruel. As it is we have played at
+      war—that’s what’s vile! We play at magnanimity and all that stuff.
+      Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and sensibility
+      of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so
+      kindhearted that she can’t look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf
+      served up with sauce. They talk to us of the rules of war, of chivalry, of
+      flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on. It’s all rubbish! I
+      saw chivalry and flags of truce in 1805; they humbugged us and we
+      humbugged them. They plunder other people’s houses, issue false paper
+      money, and worst of all they kill my children and my father, and then talk
+      of rules of war and magnanimity to foes! Take no prisoners, but kill and
+      be killed! He who has come to this as I have through the same
+      sufferings...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew, who had thought it was all the same to him whether or not
+      Moscow was taken as Smolénsk had been, was suddenly checked in his speech
+      by an unexpected cramp in his throat. He paced up and down a few times in
+      silence, but his eyes glittered feverishly and his lips quivered as he
+      began speaking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only
+      when it was worth while going to certain death, as now. Then there would
+      not be war because Paul Ivánovich had offended Michael Ivánovich. And when
+      there was a war, like this one, it would be war! And then the
+      determination of the troops would be quite different. Then all these
+      Westphalians and Hessians whom Napoleon is leading would not follow him
+      into Russia, and we should not go to fight in Austria and Prussia without
+      knowing why. War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and
+      we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this
+      terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of
+      falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the
+      favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous. The military calling is the
+      most highly honored.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the
+      habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are
+      spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country’s
+      inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and
+      falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the
+      absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty,
+      debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest
+      class, respected by everyone. All the kings, except the Chinese, wear
+      military uniforms, and he who kills most people receives the highest
+      rewards.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill
+      and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having
+      killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they announce
+      a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater
+      their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?”
+       exclaimed Prince Andrew in a shrill, piercing voice. “Ah, my friend, it
+      has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to
+      understand too much. And it doesn’t do for man to taste of the tree of
+      knowledge of good and evil.... Ah, well, it’s not for long!” he added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “However, you’re sleepy, and it’s time for me to sleep. Go back to Górki!”
+       said Prince Andrew suddenly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh no!” Pierre replied, looking at Prince Andrew with frightened,
+      compassionate eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go, go! Before a battle one must have one’s sleep out,” repeated Prince
+      Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He came quickly up to Pierre and embraced and kissed him. “Good-by, be
+      off!” he shouted. “Whether we meet again or not...” and turning away
+      hurriedly he entered the shed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was already dark, and Pierre could not make out whether the expression
+      of Prince Andrew’s face was angry or tender.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For some time he stood in silence considering whether he should follow him
+      or go away. “No, he does not want it!” Pierre concluded. “And I know that
+      this is our last meeting!” He sighed deeply and rode back to Górki.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On re-entering the shed Prince Andrew lay down on a rug, but he could not
+      sleep.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He closed his eyes. One picture succeeded another in his imagination. On
+      one of them he dwelt long and joyfully. He vividly recalled an evening in
+      Petersburg. Natásha with animated and excited face was telling him how she
+      had gone to look for mushrooms the previous summer and had lost her way in
+      the big forest. She incoherently described the depths of the forest, her
+      feelings, and a talk with a beekeeper she met, and constantly interrupted
+      her story to say: “No, I can’t! I’m not telling it right; no, you don’t
+      understand,” though he encouraged her by saying that he did understand,
+      and he really had understood all she wanted to say. But Natásha was not
+      satisfied with her own words: she felt that they did not convey the
+      passionately poetic feeling she had experienced that day and wished to
+      convey. “He was such a delightful old man, and it was so dark in the
+      forest... and he had such kind... No, I can’t describe it,” she had said,
+      flushed and excited. Prince Andrew smiled now the same happy smile as then
+      when he had looked into her eyes. “I understood her,” he thought. “I not
+      only understood her, but it was just that inner, spiritual force, that
+      sincerity, that frankness of soul—that very soul of hers which
+      seemed to be fettered by her body—it was that soul I loved in her...
+      loved so strongly and happily...” and suddenly he remembered how his love
+      had ended. “<i>He</i> did not need anything of that kind. <i>He</i> neither
+      saw nor understood anything of the sort. He only saw in her a pretty and <i>fresh</i>
+      young girl, with whom he did not deign to unite his fate. And I?... and he
+      is still alive and gay!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew jumped up as if someone had burned him, and again began
+      pacing up and down in front of the shed.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0216"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On August 25, the eve of the battle of Borodinó, M. de Beausset, prefect
+      of the French Emperor’s palace, arrived at Napoleon’s quarters at Valúevo
+      with Colonel Fabvier, the former from Paris and the latter from Madrid.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Donning his court uniform, M. de Beausset ordered a box he had brought for
+      the Emperor to be carried before him and entered the first compartment of
+      Napoleon’s tent, where he began opening the box while conversing with
+      Napoleon’s aides-de-camp who surrounded him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Fabvier, not entering the tent, remained at the entrance talking to some
+      generals of his acquaintance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor Napoleon had not yet left his bedroom and was finishing his
+      toilet. Slightly snorting and grunting, he presented now his back and now
+      his plump hairy chest to the brush with which his valet was rubbing him
+      down. Another valet, with his finger over the mouth of a bottle, was
+      sprinkling Eau de Cologne on the Emperor’s pampered body with an
+      expression which seemed to say that he alone knew where and how much Eau
+      de Cologne should be sprinkled. Napoleon’s short hair was wet and matted
+      on the forehead, but his face, though puffy and yellow, expressed physical
+      satisfaction. “Go on, harder, go on!” he muttered to the valet who was
+      rubbing him, slightly twitching and grunting. An aide-de-camp, who had
+      entered the bedroom to report to the Emperor the number of prisoners taken
+      in yesterday’s action, was standing by the door after delivering his
+      message, awaiting permission to withdraw. Napoleon, frowning, looked at
+      him from under his brows.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No prisoners!” said he, repeating the aide-de-camp’s words. “They are
+      forcing us to exterminate them. So much the worse for the Russian army....
+      Go on... harder, harder!” he muttered, hunching his back and presenting
+      his fat shoulders.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All right. Let Monsieur de Beausset enter, and Fabvier too,” he said,
+      nodding to the aide-de-camp.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, sire,” and the aide-de-camp disappeared through the door of the
+      tent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Two valets rapidly dressed His Majesty, and wearing the blue uniform of
+      the Guards he went with firm quick steps to the reception room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      De Beausset’s hands meanwhile were busily engaged arranging the present he
+      had brought from the Empress, on two chairs directly in front of the
+      entrance. But Napoleon had dressed and come out with such unexpected
+      rapidity that he had not time to finish arranging the surprise.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon noticed at once what they were about and guessed that they were
+      not ready. He did not wish to deprive them of the pleasure of giving him a
+      surprise, so he pretended not to see de Beausset and called Fabvier to
+      him, listening silently and with a stern frown to what Fabvier told him of
+      the heroism and devotion of his troops fighting at Salamanca, at the other
+      end of Europe, with but one thought—to be worthy of their Emperor—and
+      but one fear—to fail to please him. The result of that battle had
+      been deplorable. Napoleon made ironic remarks during Fabvier’s account, as
+      if he had not expected that matters could go otherwise in his absence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I must make up for that in Moscow,” said Napoleon. “I’ll see you later,”
+       he added, and summoned de Beausset, who by that time had prepared the
+      surprise, having placed something on the chairs and covered it with a
+      cloth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      De Beausset bowed low, with that courtly French bow which only the old
+      retainers of the Bourbons knew how to make, and approached him, presenting
+      an envelope.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon turned to him gaily and pulled his ear.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You have hurried here. I am very glad. Well, what is Paris saying?” he
+      asked, suddenly changing his former stern expression for a most cordial
+      tone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sire, all Paris regrets your absence,” replied de Beausset as was proper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But though Napoleon knew that de Beausset had to say something of this
+      kind, and though in his lucid moments he knew it was untrue, he was
+      pleased to hear it from him. Again he honored him by touching his ear.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am very sorry to have made you travel so far,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sire, I expected nothing less than to find you at the gates of Moscow,”
+       replied de Beausset.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon smiled and, lifting his head absent-mindedly, glanced to the
+      right. An aide-de-camp approached with gliding steps and offered him a
+      gold snuffbox, which he took.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, it has happened luckily for you,” he said, raising the open snuffbox
+      to his nose. “You are fond of travel, and in three days you will see
+      Moscow. You surely did not expect to see that Asiatic capital. You will
+      have a pleasant journey.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      De Beausset bowed gratefully at this regard for his taste for travel (of
+      which he had not till then been aware).
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ha, what’s this?” asked Napoleon, noticing that all the courtiers were
+      looking at something concealed under a cloth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With courtly adroitness de Beausset half turned and without turning his
+      back to the Emperor retired two steps, twitching off the cloth at the same
+      time, and said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A present to Your Majesty from the Empress.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      It was a portrait, painted in bright colors by Gérard, of the son borne to
+      Napoleon by the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, the boy whom for some
+      reason everyone called “The King of Rome.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A very pretty curly-headed boy with a look of the Christ in the Sistine
+      Madonna was depicted playing at stick and ball. The ball represented the
+      terrestrial globe and the stick in his other hand a scepter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though it was not clear what the artist meant to express by depicting the
+      so-called King of Rome spiking the earth with a stick, the allegory
+      apparently seemed to Napoleon, as it had done to all who had seen it in
+      Paris, quite clear and very pleasing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The King of Rome!” he said, pointing to the portrait with a graceful
+      gesture. “Admirable!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      With the natural capacity of an Italian for changing the expression of his
+      face at will, he drew nearer to the portrait and assumed a look of pensive
+      tenderness. He felt that what he now said and did would be historical, and
+      it seemed to him that it would now be best for him—whose grandeur
+      enabled his son to play stick and ball with the terrestrial globe—to
+      show, in contrast to that grandeur, the simplest paternal tenderness. His
+      eyes grew dim, he moved forward, glanced round at a chair (which seemed to
+      place itself under him), and sat down on it before the portrait. At a
+      single gesture from him everyone went out on tiptoe, leaving the great man
+      to himself and his emotion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having sat still for a while he touched—himself not knowing why—the
+      thick spot of paint representing the highest light in the portrait, rose,
+      and recalled de Beausset and the officer on duty. He ordered the portrait
+      to be carried outside his tent, that the Old Guard, stationed round it,
+      might not be deprived of the pleasure of seeing the King of Rome, the son
+      and heir of their adored monarch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And while he was doing M. de Beausset the honor of breakfasting with him,
+      they heard, as Napoleon had anticipated, the rapturous cries of the
+      officers and men of the Old Guard who had run up to see the portrait.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Vive l’Empereur! Vive le roi de Rome! Vive l’Empereur!”</i>
+      came those ecstatic cries.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After breakfast Napoleon in de Beausset’s presence dictated his order of
+      the day to the army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Short and energetic!” he remarked when he had read over the proclamation
+      which he had dictated straight off without corrections. It ran:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Soldiers! This is the battle you have so longed for. Victory depends on
+      you. It is essential for us; it will give us all we need: comfortable
+      quarters and a speedy return to our country. Behave as you did at
+      Austerlitz, Friedland, Vítebsk, and Smolénsk. Let our remotest posterity
+      recall your achievements this day with pride. Let it be said of each of
+      you: “He was in the great battle before Moscow!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Before Moscow!” repeated Napoleon, and inviting M. de Beausset, who was
+      so fond of travel, to accompany him on his ride, he went out of the tent
+      to where the horses stood saddled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your Majesty is too kind!” replied de Beausset to the invitation to
+      accompany the Emperor; he wanted to sleep, did not know how to ride and
+      was afraid of doing so.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Napoleon nodded to the traveler, and de Beausset had to mount. When
+      Napoleon came out of the tent the shouting of the Guards before his son’s
+      portrait grew still louder. Napoleon frowned.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Take him away!” he said, pointing with a gracefully majestic gesture to
+      the portrait. “It is too soon for him to see a field of battle.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      De Beausset closed his eyes, bowed his head, and sighed deeply, to
+      indicate how profoundly he valued and comprehended the Emperor’s words.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0217"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On the twenty-fifth of August, so his historians tell us, Napoleon spent
+      the whole day on horseback inspecting the locality, considering plans
+      submitted to him by his marshals, and personally giving commands to his
+      generals.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The original line of the Russian forces along the river Kolochá had been
+      dislocated by the capture of the Shevárdino Redoubt on the twenty-fourth,
+      and part of the line—the left flank—had been drawn back. That
+      part of the line was not entrenched and in front of it the ground was more
+      open and level than elsewhere. It was evident to anyone, military or not,
+      that it was here the French should attack. It would seem that not much
+      consideration was needed to reach this conclusion, nor any particular care
+      or trouble on the part of the Emperor and his marshals, nor was there any
+      need of that special and supreme quality called genius that people are so
+      apt to ascribe to Napoleon; yet the historians who described the event
+      later and the men who then surrounded Napoleon, and he himself, thought
+      otherwise.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon rode over the plain and surveyed the locality with a profound air
+      and in silence, nodded with approval or shook his head dubiously, and
+      without communicating to the generals around him the profound course of
+      ideas which guided his decisions merely gave them his final conclusions in
+      the form of commands. Having listened to a suggestion from Davout, who was
+      now called Prince d’Eckmühl, to turn the Russian left wing, Napoleon said
+      it should not be done, without explaining why not. To a proposal made by
+      General Campan (who was to attack the <i>flèches</i>) to lead his division
+      through the woods, Napoleon agreed, though the so-called Duke of Elchingen
+      (Ney) ventured to remark that a movement through the woods was dangerous
+      and might disorder the division.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having inspected the country opposite the Shevárdino Redoubt, Napoleon
+      pondered a little in silence and then indicated the spots where two
+      batteries should be set up by the morrow to act against the Russian
+      entrenchments, and the places where, in line with them, the field
+      artillery should be placed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After giving these and other commands he returned to his tent, and the
+      dispositions for the battle were written down from his dictation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      These dispositions, of which the French historians write with enthusiasm
+      and other historians with profound respect, were as follows:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At dawn the two new batteries established during the night on the plain
+      occupied by the Prince d’Eckmühl will open fire on the opposing batteries
+      of the enemy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the same time the commander of the artillery of the 1st Corps, General
+      Pernetti, with thirty cannon of Campan’s division and all the howitzers of
+      Dessaix’s and Friant’s divisions, will move forward, open fire, and
+      overwhelm with shellfire the enemy’s battery, against which will operate:
+    </p>
+<pre>
+        24 guns of the artillery of the Guards
+        30 guns of Campan’s division
+
+ and     8 guns of Friant’s and Dessaix’s divisions
+        —
+
+ in all 62 guns.
+</pre>
+<p>
+      The commander of the artillery of the 3rd Corps, General Fouché, will
+      place the howitzers of the 3rd and 8th Corps, sixteen in all, on the
+      flanks of the battery that is to bombard the entrenchment on the left,
+      which will have forty guns in all directed against it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      General Sorbier must be ready at the first order to advance with all the
+      howitzers of the Guard’s artillery against either one or other of the
+      entrenchments.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the cannonade Prince Poniatowski is to advance through the wood on
+      the village and turn the enemy’s position.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      General Campan will move through the wood to seize the first
+      fortification.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the advance has begun in this manner, orders will be given in
+      accordance with the enemy’s movements.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The cannonade on the left flank will begin as soon as the guns of the
+      right wing are heard. The sharpshooters of Morand’s division and of the
+      vice-King’s division will open a heavy fire on seeing the attack commence
+      on the right wing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The vice-King will occupy the village and cross by its three bridges,
+      advancing to the same heights as Morand’s and Gibrard’s divisions, which
+      under his leadership will be directed against the redoubt and come into
+      line with the rest of the forces.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All this must be done in good order (<i>le tout se fera avec ordre et
+      méthode</i>) as far as possible retaining troops in reserve.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Imperial Camp near Mozháysk,
+    </p>
+<p>
+      September, 6, 1812.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      These dispositions, which are very obscure and confused if one allows
+      oneself to regard the arrangements without religious awe of his genius,
+      related to Napoleon’s orders to deal with four points—four different
+      orders. Not one of these was, or could be, carried out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the disposition it is said first <i>that the batteries placed on the spot
+      chosen by Napoleon, with the guns of Pernetti and Fouché; which were to
+      come in line with them, 102 guns in all, were to open fire and shower
+      shells on the Russian</i> flèches <i>and redoubts.</i> This could not be done, as
+      from the spots selected by Napoleon the projectiles did not carry to the
+      Russian works, and those 102 guns shot into the air until the nearest
+      commander, contrary to Napoleon’s instructions, moved them forward.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The second order was that <i>Poniatowski, moving to the village through the
+      wood, should turn the Russian left flank.</i> This could not be done and was
+      not done, because Poniatowski, advancing on the village through the wood,
+      met Túchkov there barring his way, and could not and did not turn the
+      Russian position.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The third order was: <i>General Campan will move through the wood to seize
+      the first fortification</i>. General Campan’s division did not seize the
+      first fortification but was driven back, for on emerging from the wood it had
+      to reform under grapeshot, of which Napoleon was unaware.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The fourth order was: <i>The vice-King will occupy the village</i> (Borodinó) <i>and
+      cross by its three bridges, advancing to the same heights as Morand’s and
+      Gérard’s divisions</i> (for whose movements no directions are given), <i>which
+      under his leadership will be directed against the redoubt and come into
+      line with the rest of the forces.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      As far as one can make out, not so much from this unintelligible sentence
+      as from the attempts the vice-King made to execute the orders given him,
+      he was to advance from the left through Borodinó to the redoubt while the
+      divisions of Morand and Gérard were to advance simultaneously from the
+      front.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All this, like the other parts of the disposition, was not and could not
+      be executed. After passing through Borodinó the vice-King was driven back
+      to the Kolochá and could get no farther; while the divisions of Morand and
+      Gérard did not take the redoubt but were driven back, and the redoubt was
+      only taken at the end of the battle by the cavalry (a thing probably
+      unforeseen and not heard of by Napoleon). So not one of the orders in the
+      disposition was, or could be, executed. But in the disposition it is said
+      that, <i>after the fight has commenced in this manner, orders will be given
+      in accordance with the enemy’s movements</i>, and so it might be supposed that
+      all necessary arrangements would be made by Napoleon during the battle.
+      But this was not and could not be done, for during the whole battle
+      Napoleon was so far away that, as appeared later, he could not know the
+      course of the battle and not one of his orders during the fight could be
+      executed.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0218"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Many historians say that the French did not win the battle of Borodinó
+      because Napoleon had a cold, and that if he had not had a cold the orders
+      he gave before and during the battle would have been still more full of
+      genius and Russia would have been lost and the face of the world have been
+      changed. To historians who believe that Russia was shaped by the will of
+      one man—Peter the Great—and that France from a republic became
+      an empire and French armies went to Russia at the will of one man—Napoleon—to
+      say that Russia remained a power because Napoleon had a bad cold on the
+      twenty-fourth of August may seem logical and convincing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If it had depended on Napoleon’s will to fight or not to fight the battle
+      of Borodinó, and if this or that other arrangement depended on his will,
+      then evidently a cold affecting the manifestation of his will might have
+      saved Russia, and consequently the valet who omitted to bring Napoleon his
+      waterproof boots on the twenty-fourth would have been the savior of
+      Russia. Along that line of thought such a deduction is indubitable, as
+      indubitable as the deduction Voltaire made in jest (without knowing what
+      he was jesting at) when he saw that the Massacre of St. Bartholomew was
+      due to Charles IX’s stomach being deranged. But to men who do not admit
+      that Russia was formed by the will of one man, Peter I, or that the French
+      Empire was formed and the war with Russia begun by the will of one man,
+      Napoleon, that argument seems not merely untrue and irrational, but
+      contrary to all human reality. To the question of what causes historic
+      events another answer presents itself, namely, that the course of human
+      events is predetermined from on high—depends on the coincidence of
+      the wills of all who take part in the events, and that a Napoleon’s
+      influence on the course of these events is purely external and fictitious.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Strange as at first glance it may seem to suppose that the Massacre of St.
+      Bartholomew was not due to Charles IX’s will, though he gave the order for
+      it and thought it was done as a result of that order; and strange as it
+      may seem to suppose that the slaughter of eighty thousand men at Borodinó
+      was not due to Napoleon’s will, though he ordered the commencement and
+      conduct of the battle and thought it was done because he ordered it;
+      strange as these suppositions appear, yet human dignity—which tells
+      me that each of us is, if not more at least not less a man than the great
+      Napoleon—demands the acceptance of that solution of the question,
+      and historic investigation abundantly confirms it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the battle of Borodinó Napoleon shot at no one and killed no one. That
+      was all done by the soldiers. Therefore it was not he who killed people.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French soldiers went to kill and be killed at the battle of Borodinó
+      not because of Napoleon’s orders but by their own volition. The whole army—French,
+      Italian, German, Polish, and Dutch—hungry, ragged, and weary of the
+      campaign, felt at the sight of an army blocking their road to Moscow that
+      the wine was drawn and must be drunk. Had Napoleon then forbidden them to
+      fight the Russians, they would have killed him and have proceeded to fight
+      the Russians because it was inevitable.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When they heard Napoleon’s proclamation offering them, as compensation for
+      mutilation and death, the words of posterity about their having been in
+      the battle before Moscow, they cried <i>“Vive l’Empereur!”</i>
+      just as they had cried <i>“Vive l’Empereur!”</i> at the sight of
+      the portrait of the boy piercing the terrestrial globe with a toy stick, and just
+      as they would have cried <i>“Vive l’Empereur!”</i> at any
+      nonsense that might be told them. There was nothing left for them to do but cry
+      <i>“Vive l’Empereur!”</i> and go to fight, in order to get food
+      and rest as conquerors in Moscow. So it was not because of Napoleon’s
+      commands that they killed their fellow men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And it was not Napoleon who directed the course of the battle, for none of
+      his orders were executed and during the battle he did not know what was
+      going on before him. So the way in which these people killed one another
+      was not decided by Napoleon’s will but occurred independently of him, in
+      accord with the will of hundreds of thousands of people who took part in
+      the common action. It <i>only seemed</i> to Napoleon that it all took place by
+      his will. And so the question whether he had or had not a cold has no more
+      historic interest than the cold of the least of the transport soldiers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Moreover, the assertion made by various writers that his cold was the
+      cause of his dispositions not being as well-planned as on former
+      occasions, and of his orders during the battle not being as good as
+      previously, is quite baseless, which again shows that Napoleon’s cold on
+      the twenty-sixth of August was unimportant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The dispositions cited above are not at all worse, but are even better,
+      than previous dispositions by which he had won victories. His
+      pseudo-orders during the battle were also no worse than formerly, but much
+      the same as usual. These dispositions and orders only seem worse than
+      previous ones because the battle of Borodinó was the first Napoleon did
+      not win. The profoundest and most excellent dispositions and orders seem
+      very bad, and every learned militarist criticizes them with looks of
+      importance, when they relate to a battle that has been lost, and the very
+      worst dispositions and orders seem very good, and serious people fill
+      whole volumes to demonstrate their merits, when they relate to a battle
+      that has been won.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The dispositions drawn up by Weyrother for the battle of Austerlitz were a
+      model of perfection for that kind of composition, but still they were
+      criticized—criticized for their very perfection, for their excessive
+      minuteness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon at the battle of Borodinó fulfilled his office as representative
+      of authority as well as, and even better than, at other battles. He did
+      nothing harmful to the progress of the battle; he inclined to the most
+      reasonable opinions, he made no confusion, did not contradict himself, did
+      not get frightened or run away from the field of battle, but with his
+      great tact and military experience carried out his role of appearing to
+      command, calmly and with dignity.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0219"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXIX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On returning from a second inspection of the lines, Napoleon remarked:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The chessmen are set up, the game will begin tomorrow!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Having ordered punch and summoned de Beausset, he began to talk to him
+      about Paris and about some changes he meant to make in the Empress’
+      household, surprising the prefect by his memory of minute details relating
+      to the court.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He showed an interest in trifles, joked about de Beausset’s love of
+      travel, and chatted carelessly, as a famous, self-confident surgeon who
+      knows his job does when turning up his sleeves and putting on his apron
+      while a patient is being strapped to the operating table. “The matter is
+      in my hands and is clear and definite in my head. When the time comes to
+      set to work I shall do it as no one else could, but now I can jest, and
+      the more I jest and the calmer I am the more tranquil and confident you
+      ought to be, and the more amazed at my genius.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Having finished his second glass of punch, Napoleon went to rest before
+      the serious business which, he considered, awaited him next day. He was so
+      much interested in that task that he was unable to sleep, and in spite of
+      his cold which had grown worse from the dampness of the evening, he went
+      into the large division of the tent at three o’clock in the morning,
+      loudly blowing his nose. He asked whether the Russians had not withdrawn,
+      and was told that the enemy’s fires were still in the same places. He
+      nodded approval.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The adjutant in attendance came into the tent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, Rapp, do you think we shall do good business today?” Napoleon asked
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Without doubt, sire,” replied Rapp.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon looked at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you remember, sire, what you did me the honor to say at Smolénsk?”
+       continued Rapp. “The wine is drawn and must be drunk.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon frowned and sat silent for a long time leaning his head on his
+      hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This poor army!” he suddenly remarked. “It has diminished greatly since
+      Smolénsk. Fortune is frankly a courtesan, Rapp. I have always said so and
+      I am beginning to experience it. But the Guards, Rapp, the Guards are
+      intact?” he remarked interrogatively.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, sire,” replied Rapp.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon took a lozenge, put it in his mouth, and glanced at his watch. He
+      was not sleepy and it was still not nearly morning. It was impossible to
+      give further orders for the sake of killing time, for the orders had all
+      been given and were now being executed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Have the biscuits and rice been served out to the regiments of the
+      Guards?” asked Napoleon sternly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, sire.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The rice too?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rapp replied that he had given the Emperor’s order about the rice, but
+      Napoleon shook his head in dissatisfaction as if not believing that his
+      order had been executed. An attendant came in with punch. Napoleon ordered
+      another glass to be brought for Rapp, and silently sipped his own.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have neither taste nor smell,” he remarked, sniffing at his glass.
+      “This cold is tiresome. They talk about medicine—what is the good of
+      medicine when it can’t cure a cold! Corvisart gave me these lozenges but
+      they don’t help at all. What can doctors cure? One can’t cure anything.
+      Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its
+      nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will
+      do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies. Our body
+      is like a perfect watch that should go for a certain time; the watchmaker
+      cannot open it, he can only adjust it by fumbling, and that blindfold....
+      Yes, our body is just a machine for living, that is all.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And having entered on the path of definition, of which he was fond,
+      Napoleon suddenly and unexpectedly gave a new one.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know, Rapp, what military art is?” asked he. “It is the art of
+      being stronger than the enemy at a given moment. That’s all.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Rapp made no reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Tomorrow we shall have to deal with Kutúzov!” said Napoleon. “We shall
+      see! Do you remember at Braunau he commanded an army for three weeks and
+      did not once mount a horse to inspect his entrenchments.... We shall see!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He looked at his watch. It was still only four o’clock. He did not feel
+      sleepy. The punch was finished and there was still nothing to do. He rose,
+      walked to and fro, put on a warm overcoat and a hat, and went out of the
+      tent. The night was dark and damp, a scarcely perceptible moisture was
+      descending from above. Near by, the campfires were dimly burning among the
+      French Guards, and in the distance those of the Russian line shone through
+      the smoke. The weather was calm, and the rustle and tramp of the French
+      troops already beginning to move to take up their positions were clearly
+      audible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon walked about in front of his tent, looked at the fires and
+      listened to these sounds, and as he was passing a tall guardsman in a
+      shaggy cap, who was standing sentinel before his tent and had drawn
+      himself up like a black pillar at sight of the Emperor, Napoleon stopped
+      in front of him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What year did you enter the service?” he asked with that affectation of
+      military bluntness and geniality with which he always addressed the
+      soldiers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The man answered the question.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah! One of the old ones! Has your regiment had its rice?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It has, Your Majesty.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon nodded and walked away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      At half-past five Napoleon rode to the village of Shevárdino.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was growing light, the sky was clearing, only a single cloud lay in the
+      east. The abandoned campfires were burning themselves out in the faint
+      morning light.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the right a single deep report of a cannon resounded and died away in
+      the prevailing silence. Some minutes passed. A second and a third report
+      shook the air, then a fourth and a fifth boomed solemnly near by on the
+      right.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The first shots had not yet ceased to reverberate before others rang out
+      and yet more were heard mingling with and overtaking one another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon with his suite rode up to the Shevárdino Redoubt where he
+      dismounted. The game had begun.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0220"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On returning to Górki after having seen Prince Andrew, Pierre ordered his
+      groom to get the horses ready and to call him early in the morning, and
+      then immediately fell asleep behind a partition in a corner Borís had
+      given up to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before he was thoroughly awake next morning everybody had already left the
+      hut. The panes were rattling in the little windows and his groom was
+      shaking him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency! Your excellency! Your excellency!” he kept repeating
+      pertinaciously while he shook Pierre by the shoulder without looking at
+      him, having apparently lost hope of getting him to wake up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What? Has it begun? Is it time?” Pierre asked, waking up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hear the firing,” said the groom, a discharged soldier. “All the
+      gentlemen have gone out, and his Serene Highness himself rode past long
+      ago.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre dressed hastily and ran out to the porch. Outside all was bright,
+      fresh, dewy, and cheerful. The sun, just bursting forth from behind a
+      cloud that had concealed it, was shining, with rays still half broken by
+      the clouds, over the roofs of the street opposite, on the dew-besprinkled
+      dust of the road, on the walls of the houses, on the windows, the fence,
+      and on Pierre’s horses standing before the hut. The roar of guns sounded
+      more distinct outside. An adjutant accompanied by a Cossack passed by at a
+      sharp trot.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s time, Count; it’s time!” cried the adjutant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Telling the groom to follow him with the horses, Pierre went down the
+      street to the knoll from which he had looked at the field of battle the
+      day before. A crowd of military men was assembled there, members of the
+      staff could be heard conversing in French, and Kutúzov’s gray head in a
+      white cap with a red band was visible, his gray nape sunk between his
+      shoulders. He was looking through a field glass down the highroad before
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Mounting the steps to the knoll Pierre looked at the scene before him,
+      spellbound by beauty. It was the same panorama he had admired from that
+      spot the day before, but now the whole place was full of troops and
+      covered by smoke clouds from the guns, and the slanting rays of the bright
+      sun, rising slightly to the left behind Pierre, cast upon it through the
+      clear morning air penetrating streaks of rosy, golden-tinted light and
+      long dark shadows. The forest at the farthest extremity of the panorama
+      seemed carved in some precious stone of a yellowish-green color; its
+      undulating outline was silhouetted against the horizon and was pierced
+      beyond Valúevo by the Smolénsk highroad crowded with troops. Nearer at
+      hand glittered golden cornfields interspersed with copses. There were
+      troops to be seen everywhere, in front and to the right and left. All this
+      was vivid, majestic, and unexpected; but what impressed Pierre most of all
+      was the view of the battlefield itself, of Borodinó and the hollows on
+      both sides of the Kolochá.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Above the Kolochá, in Borodinó and on both sides of it, especially to the
+      left where the Vóyna flowing between its marshy banks falls into the
+      Kolochá, a mist had spread which seemed to melt, to dissolve, and to
+      become translucent when the brilliant sun appeared and magically colored
+      and outlined everything. The smoke of the guns mingled with this mist, and
+      over the whole expanse and through that mist the rays of the morning sun
+      were reflected, flashing back like lightning from the water, from the dew,
+      and from the bayonets of the troops crowded together by the riverbanks and
+      in Borodinó. A white church could be seen through the mist, and here and
+      there the roofs of huts in Borodinó as well as dense masses of soldiers,
+      or green ammunition chests and ordnance. And all this moved, or seemed to
+      move, as the smoke and mist spread out over the whole space. Just as in
+      the mist-enveloped hollow near Borodinó, so along the entire line outside
+      and above it and especially in the woods and fields to the left, in the
+      valleys and on the summits of the high ground, clouds of powder smoke
+      seemed continually to spring up out of nothing, now singly, now several at
+      a time, some translucent, others dense, which, swelling, growing, rolling,
+      and blending, extended over the whole expanse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      These puffs of smoke and (strange to say) the sound of the firing produced
+      the chief beauty of the spectacle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Puff!”</i>—suddenly a round compact cloud of smoke was seen
+      merging from violet into gray and milky white, and <i>“boom!”</i> came
+      the report a second later.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Puff! puff!”</i>—and two clouds arose pushing one another
+      and blending together; and <i>“boom, boom!”</i> came the sounds
+      confirming what the eye had seen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre glanced round at the first cloud, which he had seen as a round
+      compact ball, and in its place already were balloons of smoke floating to
+      one side, and—<i>“puff”</i> (with a pause)—<i>“puff,
+      puff!”</i> three and then four more appeared and then from each, with the
+      same interval—<i>“boom—boom, boom!”</i> came the fine, firm,
+      precise sounds in reply. It seemed as if those smoke clouds sometimes ran and
+      sometimes stood still while woods, fields, and glittering bayonets ran past them.
+      From the left, over fields and bushes, those large balls of smoke were continually
+      appearing followed by their solemn reports, while nearer still, in the hollows and
+      woods, there burst from the muskets small cloudlets that had no time to become balls,
+      but had their little echoes in just the same way. <i>“Trakh-ta-ta-takh!”</i>
+      came the frequent crackle of musketry, but it was irregular and feeble in
+      comparison with the reports of the cannon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre wished to be there with that smoke, those shining bayonets, that
+      movement, and those sounds. He turned to look at Kutúzov and his suite, to
+      compare his impressions with those of others. They were all looking at the
+      field of battle as he was, and, as it seemed to him, with the same
+      feelings. All their faces were now shining with that latent warmth of
+      feeling Pierre had noticed the day before and had fully understood after
+      his talk with Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go, my dear fellow, go... and Christ be with you!” Kutúzov was saying to
+      a general who stood beside him, not taking his eye from the battlefield.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having received this order the general passed by Pierre on his way down
+      the knoll.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To the crossing!” said the general coldly and sternly in reply to one of
+      the staff who asked where he was going.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll go there too, I too!” thought Pierre, and followed the general.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The general mounted a horse a Cossack had brought him. Pierre went to his
+      groom who was holding his horses and, asking which was the quietest,
+      clambered onto it, seized it by the mane, and turning out his toes pressed
+      his heels against its sides and, feeling that his spectacles were slipping
+      off but unable to let go of the mane and reins, he galloped after the
+      general, causing the staff officers to smile as they watched him from the
+      knoll.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0221"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXXI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Having descended the hill the general after whom Pierre was galloping
+      turned sharply to the left, and Pierre, losing sight of him, galloped in
+      among some ranks of infantry marching ahead of him. He tried to pass
+      either in front of them or to the right or left, but there were soldiers
+      everywhere, all with the same preoccupied expression and busy with some
+      unseen but evidently important task. They all gazed with the same
+      dissatisfied and inquiring expression at this stout man in a white hat,
+      who for some unknown reason threatened to trample them under his horse’s
+      hoofs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why ride into the middle of the battalion?” one of them shouted at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Another prodded his horse with the butt end of a musket, and Pierre,
+      bending over his saddlebow and hardly able to control his shying horse,
+      galloped ahead of the soldiers where there was a free space.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was a bridge ahead of him, where other soldiers stood firing. Pierre
+      rode up to them. Without being aware of it he had come to the bridge
+      across the Kolochá between Górki and Borodinó, which the French (having
+      occupied Borodinó) were attacking in the first phase of the battle. Pierre
+      saw that there was a bridge in front of him and that soldiers were doing
+      something on both sides of it and in the meadow, among the rows of
+      new-mown hay which he had taken no notice of amid the smoke of the
+      campfires the day before; but despite the incessant firing going on there
+      he had no idea that this was the field of battle. He did not notice the
+      sound of the bullets whistling from every side, or the projectiles that
+      flew over him, did not see the enemy on the other side of the river, and
+      for a long time did not notice the killed and wounded, though many fell
+      near him. He looked about him with a smile which did not leave his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why’s that fellow in front of the line?” shouted somebody at him again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To the left!... Keep to the right!” the men shouted to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre went to the right, and unexpectedly encountered one of Raévski’s
+      adjutants whom he knew. The adjutant looked angrily at him, evidently also
+      intending to shout at him, but on recognizing him he nodded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How have you got here?” he said, and galloped on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre, feeling out of place there, having nothing to do, and afraid of
+      getting in someone’s way again, galloped after the adjutant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s happening here? May I come with you?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One moment, one moment!” replied the adjutant, and riding up to a stout
+      colonel who was standing in the meadow, he gave him some message and then
+      addressed Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why have you come here, Count?” he asked with a smile. “Still
+      inquisitive?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes,” assented Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the adjutant turned his horse about and rode on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Here it’s tolerable,” said he, “but with Bagratión on the left flank
+      they’re getting it frightfully hot.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Really?” said Pierre. “Where is that?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Come along with me to our knoll. We can get a view from there and in our
+      battery it is still bearable,” said the adjutant. “Will you come?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I’ll come with you,” replied Pierre, looking round for his groom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was only now that he noticed wounded men staggering along or being
+      carried on stretchers. On that very meadow he had ridden over the day
+      before, a soldier was lying athwart the rows of scented hay, with his head
+      thrown awkwardly back and his shako off.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why haven’t they carried him away?” Pierre was about to ask, but seeing
+      the stern expression of the adjutant who was also looking that way, he
+      checked himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre did not find his groom and rode along the hollow with the adjutant
+      to Raévski’s Redoubt. His horse lagged behind the adjutant’s and jolted
+      him at every step.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You don’t seem to be used to riding, Count?” remarked the adjutant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No it’s not that, but her action seems so jerky,” said Pierre in a
+      puzzled tone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why... she’s wounded!” said the adjutant. “In the off foreleg above the
+      knee. A bullet, no doubt. I congratulate you, Count, on your baptism of
+      fire!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Having ridden in the smoke past the Sixth Corps, behind the artillery
+      which had been moved forward and was in action, deafening them with the
+      noise of firing, they came to a small wood. There it was cool and quiet,
+      with a scent of autumn. Pierre and the adjutant dismounted and walked up
+      the hill on foot.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is the general here?” asked the adjutant on reaching the knoll.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He was here a minute ago but has just gone that way,” someone told him,
+      pointing to the right.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The adjutant looked at Pierre as if puzzled what to do with him now.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t trouble about me,” said Pierre. “I’ll go up onto the knoll if I
+      may?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, do. You’ll see everything from there and it’s less dangerous, and
+      I’ll come for you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre went to the battery and the adjutant rode on. They did not meet
+      again, and only much later did Pierre learn that he lost an arm that day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The knoll to which Pierre ascended was that famous one afterwards known to
+      the Russians as the Knoll Battery or Raévski’s Redoubt, and to the French
+      as <i>la grande redoute, la fatale redoute, la redoute du centre</i>, around
+      which tens of thousands fell, and which the French regarded as the key to
+      the whole position.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This redoubt consisted of a knoll, on three sides of which trenches had
+      been dug. Within the entrenchment stood ten guns that were being fired
+      through openings in the earthwork.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In line with the knoll on both sides stood other guns which also fired
+      incessantly. A little behind the guns stood infantry. When ascending that
+      knoll Pierre had no notion that this spot, on which small trenches had
+      been dug and from which a few guns were firing, was the most important
+      point of the battle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the contrary, just because he happened to be there he thought it one of
+      the least significant parts of the field.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having reached the knoll, Pierre sat down at one end of a trench
+      surrounding the battery and gazed at what was going on around him with an
+      unconsciously happy smile. Occasionally he rose and walked about the
+      battery still with that same smile, trying not to obstruct the soldiers
+      who were loading, hauling the guns, and continually running past him with
+      bags and charges. The guns of that battery were being fired continually
+      one after another with a deafening roar, enveloping the whole neighborhood
+      in powder smoke.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In contrast with the dread felt by the infantrymen placed in support, here
+      in the battery where a small number of men busy at their work were
+      separated from the rest by a trench, everyone experienced a common and as
+      it were family feeling of animation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The intrusion of Pierre’s nonmilitary figure in a white hat made an
+      unpleasant impression at first. The soldiers looked askance at him with
+      surprise and even alarm as they went past him. The senior artillery
+      officer, a tall, long-legged, pockmarked man, moved over to Pierre as if
+      to see the action of the farthest gun and looked at him with curiosity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A young round-faced officer, quite a boy still and evidently only just out
+      of the Cadet College, who was zealously commanding the two guns entrusted
+      to him, addressed Pierre sternly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sir,” he said, “permit me to ask you to stand aside. You must not be
+      here.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The soldiers shook their heads disapprovingly as they looked at Pierre.
+      But when they had convinced themselves that this man in the white hat was
+      doing no harm, but either sat quietly on the slope of the trench with a
+      shy smile or, politely making way for the soldiers, paced up and down the
+      battery under fire as calmly as if he were on a boulevard, their feeling
+      of hostile distrust gradually began to change into a kindly and bantering
+      sympathy, such as soldiers feel for their dogs, cocks, goats, and in
+      general for the animals that live with the regiment. The men soon accepted
+      Pierre into their family, adopted him, gave him a nickname (“our
+      gentleman”), and made kindly fun of him among themselves.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A shell tore up the earth two paces from Pierre and he looked around with
+      a smile as he brushed from his clothes some earth it had thrown up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And how’s it you’re not afraid, sir, really now?” a red-faced,
+      broad-shouldered soldier asked Pierre, with a grin that disclosed a set of
+      sound, white teeth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Are you afraid, then?” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What else do you expect?” answered the soldier. “She has no mercy, you
+      know! When she comes spluttering down, out go your innards. One can’t help
+      being afraid,” he said laughing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Several of the men, with bright kindly faces, stopped beside Pierre. They
+      seemed not to have expected him to talk like anybody else, and the
+      discovery that he did so delighted them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s the business of us soldiers. But in a gentleman it’s wonderful!
+      There’s a gentleman for you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “To your places!” cried the young officer to the men gathered round
+      Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The young officer was evidently exercising his duties for the first or
+      second time and therefore treated both his superiors and the men with
+      great precision and formality.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The booming cannonade and the fusillade of musketry were growing more
+      intense over the whole field, especially to the left where Bagratión’s
+      <i>flèches</i> were, but where Pierre was the smoke of the firing made it almost
+      impossible to distinguish anything. Moreover, his whole attention was
+      engrossed by watching the family circle—separated from all else—formed
+      by the men in the battery. His first unconscious feeling of joyful
+      animation produced by the sights and sounds of the battlefield was now
+      replaced by another, especially since he had seen that soldier lying alone
+      in the hayfield. Now, seated on the slope of the trench, he observed the
+      faces of those around him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      By ten o’clock some twenty men had already been carried away from the
+      battery; two guns were smashed and cannon balls fell more and more
+      frequently on the battery and spent bullets buzzed and whistled around.
+      But the men in the battery seemed not to notice this, and merry voices and
+      jokes were heard on all sides.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A live one!” shouted a man as a whistling shell approached.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Not this way! To the infantry!” added another with loud laughter, seeing
+      the shell fly past and fall into the ranks of the supports.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Are you bowing to a friend, eh?” remarked another, chaffing a peasant who
+      ducked low as a cannon ball flew over.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Several soldiers gathered by the wall of the trench, looking out to see
+      what was happening in front.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They’ve withdrawn the front line, it has retired,” said they, pointing
+      over the earthwork.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mind your own business,” an old sergeant shouted at them. “If they’ve
+      retired it’s because there’s work for them to do farther back.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the sergeant, taking one of the men by the shoulders, gave him a shove
+      with his knee. This was followed by a burst of laughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To the fifth gun, wheel it up!” came shouts from one side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then, all together, like bargees!” rose the merry voices of those who
+      were moving the gun.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, she nearly knocked our gentleman’s hat off!” cried the red-faced
+      humorist, showing his teeth chaffing Pierre. “Awkward baggage!” he added
+      reproachfully to a cannon ball that struck a cannon wheel and a man’s leg.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then, you foxes!” said another, laughing at some militiamen who,
+      stooping low, entered the battery to carry away the wounded man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So this gruel isn’t to your taste? Oh, you crows! You’re scared!” they
+      shouted at the militiamen who stood hesitating before the man whose leg
+      had been torn off.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There, lads... oh, oh!” they mimicked the peasants, “they don’t like it
+      at all!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre noticed that after every ball that hit the redoubt, and after every
+      loss, the liveliness increased more and more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As the flames of the fire hidden within come more and more vividly and
+      rapidly from an approaching thundercloud, so, as if in opposition to what
+      was taking place, the lightning of hidden fire growing more and more
+      intense glowed in the faces of these men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre did not look out at the battlefield and was not concerned to know
+      what was happening there; he was entirely absorbed in watching this fire
+      which burned ever more brightly and which he felt was flaming up in the
+      same way in his own soul.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At ten o’clock the infantry that had been among the bushes in front of the
+      battery and along the Kámenka streamlet retreated. From the battery they
+      could be seen running back past it carrying their wounded on their
+      muskets. A general with his suite came to the battery, and after speaking
+      to the colonel gave Pierre an angry look and went away again having
+      ordered the infantry supports behind the battery to lie down, so as to be
+      less exposed to fire. After this from amid the ranks of infantry to the
+      right of the battery came the sound of a drum and shouts of command, and
+      from the battery one saw how those ranks of infantry moved forward.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked over the wall of the trench and was particularly struck by a
+      pale young officer who, letting his sword hang down, was walking backwards
+      and kept glancing uneasily around.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The ranks of the infantry disappeared amid the smoke but their long-drawn
+      shout and rapid musketry firing could still be heard. A few minutes later
+      crowds of wounded men and stretcher-bearers came back from that direction.
+      Projectiles began to fall still more frequently in the battery. Several
+      men were lying about who had not been removed. Around the cannon the men
+      moved still more briskly and busily. No one any longer took notice of
+      Pierre. Once or twice he was shouted at for being in the way. The senior
+      officer moved with big, rapid strides from one gun to another with a
+      frowning face. The young officer, with his face still more flushed,
+      commanded the men more scrupulously than ever. The soldiers handed up the
+      charges, turned, loaded, and did their business with strained smartness.
+      They gave little jumps as they walked, as though they were on springs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The stormcloud had come upon them, and in every face the fire which Pierre
+      had watched kindle burned up brightly. Pierre standing beside the
+      commanding officer. The young officer, his hand to his shako, ran up to
+      his superior.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have the honor to report, sir, that only eight rounds are left. Are we
+      to continue firing?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Grapeshot!” the senior shouted, without answering the question, looking
+      over the wall of the trench.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Suddenly something happened: the young officer gave a gasp and bending
+      double sat down on the ground like a bird shot on the wing. Everything
+      became strange, confused, and misty in Pierre’s eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One cannon ball after another whistled by and struck the earthwork, a
+      soldier, or a gun. Pierre, who had not noticed these sounds before, now
+      heard nothing else. On the right of the battery soldiers shouting
+      “Hurrah!” were running not forwards but backwards, it seemed to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A cannon ball struck the very end of the earth work by which he was
+      standing, crumbling down the earth; a black ball flashed before his eyes
+      and at the same instant plumped into something. Some militiamen who were
+      entering the battery ran back.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All with grapeshot!” shouted the officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The sergeant ran up to the officer and in a frightened whisper informed
+      him (as a butler at dinner informs his master that there is no more of
+      some wine asked for) that there were no more charges.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The scoundrels! What are they doing?” shouted the officer, turning to
+      Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The officer’s face was red and perspiring and his eyes glittered under his
+      frowning brow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Run to the reserves and bring up the ammunition boxes!” he yelled,
+      angrily avoiding Pierre with his eyes and speaking to his men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll go,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The officer, without answering him, strode across to the opposite side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t fire.... Wait!” he shouted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The man who had been ordered to go for ammunition stumbled against Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh, sir, this is no place for you,” said he, and ran down the slope.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre ran after him, avoiding the spot where the young officer was
+      sitting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One cannon ball, another, and a third flew over him, falling in front,
+      beside, and behind him. Pierre ran down the slope. “Where am I going?” he
+      suddenly asked himself when he was already near the green ammunition
+      wagons. He halted irresolutely, not knowing whether to return or go on.
+      Suddenly a terrible concussion threw him backwards to the ground. At the
+      same instant he was dazzled by a great flash of flame, and immediately a
+      deafening roar, crackling, and whistling made his ears tingle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he came to himself he was sitting on the ground leaning on his hands;
+      the ammunition wagons he had been approaching no longer existed, only
+      charred green boards and rags littered the scorched grass, and a horse,
+      dangling fragments of its shaft behind it, galloped past, while another
+      horse lay, like Pierre, on the ground, uttering prolonged and piercing
+      cries.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0222"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXXII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Beside himself with terror Pierre jumped up and ran back to the battery,
+      as to the only refuge from the horrors that surrounded him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On entering the earthwork he noticed that there were men doing something
+      there but that no shots were being fired from the battery. He had no time
+      to realize who these men were. He saw the senior officer lying on the
+      earth wall with his back turned as if he were examining something down
+      below and that one of the soldiers he had noticed before was struggling
+      forward shouting “Brothers!” and trying to free himself from some men who
+      were holding him by the arm. He also saw something else that was strange.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But he had not time to realize that the colonel had been killed, that the
+      soldier shouting “Brothers!” was a prisoner, and that another man had been
+      bayoneted in the back before his eyes, for hardly had he run into the
+      redoubt before a thin, sallow-faced, perspiring man in a blue uniform
+      rushed on him sword in hand, shouting something. Instinctively guarding
+      against the shock—for they had been running together at full speed
+      before they saw one another—Pierre put out his hands and seized the
+      man (a French officer) by the shoulder with one hand and by the throat
+      with the other. The officer, dropping his sword, seized Pierre by his
+      collar.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For some seconds they gazed with frightened eyes at one another’s
+      unfamiliar faces and both were perplexed at what they had done and what
+      they were to do next. “Am I taken prisoner or have I taken him prisoner?”
+       each was thinking. But the French officer was evidently more inclined to
+      think he had been taken prisoner because Pierre’s strong hand, impelled by
+      instinctive fear, squeezed his throat ever tighter and tighter. The
+      Frenchman was about to say something, when just above their heads,
+      terrible and low, a cannon ball whistled, and it seemed to Pierre that the
+      French officer’s head had been torn off, so swiftly had he ducked it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre too bent his head and let his hands fall. Without further thought
+      as to who had taken whom prisoner, the Frenchman ran back to the battery
+      and Pierre ran down the slope stumbling over the dead and wounded who, it
+      seemed to him, caught at his feet. But before he reached the foot of the
+      knoll he was met by a dense crowd of Russian soldiers who, stumbling,
+      tripping up, and shouting, ran merrily and wildly toward the battery.
+      (This was the attack for which Ermólov claimed the credit, declaring that
+      only his courage and good luck made such a feat possible: it was the
+      attack in which he was said to have thrown some St. George’s Crosses he had
+      in his pocket into the battery for the first soldiers to take who got
+      there.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French who had occupied the battery fled, and our troops shouting
+      “Hurrah!” pursued them so far beyond the battery that it was difficult to
+      call them back.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The prisoners were brought down from the battery and among them was a
+      wounded French general, whom the officers surrounded. Crowds of wounded—some
+      known to Pierre and some unknown—Russians and French, with faces
+      distorted by suffering, walked, crawled, and were carried on stretchers
+      from the battery. Pierre again went up onto the knoll where he had spent
+      over an hour, and of that family circle which had received him as a member
+      he did not find a single one. There were many dead whom he did not know,
+      but some he recognized. The young officer still sat in the same way, bent
+      double, in a pool of blood at the edge of the earth wall. The red-faced
+      man was still twitching, but they did not carry him away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre ran down the slope once more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now they will stop it, now they will be horrified at what they have
+      done!” he thought, aimlessly going toward a crowd of stretcher bearers
+      moving from the battlefield.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But behind the veil of smoke the sun was still high, and in front and
+      especially to the left, near Semënovsk, something seemed to be seething in
+      the smoke, and the roar of cannon and musketry did not diminish, but even
+      increased to desperation like a man who, straining himself, shrieks with
+      all his remaining strength.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0223"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXXIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The chief action of the battle of Borodinó was fought within the seven
+      thousand feet between Borodinó and Bagratión’s <i>flèches</i>. Beyond that
+      space there was, on the one side, a demonstration made by the Russians with
+      Uvárov’s cavalry at midday, and on the other side, beyond Utítsa,
+      Poniatowski’s collision with Túchkov; but these two were detached and
+      feeble actions in comparison with what took place in the center of the
+      battlefield. On the field between Borodinó and the <i>flèches</i>, beside the
+      wood, the chief action of the day took place on an open space visible from
+      both sides and was fought in the simplest and most artless way.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The battle began on both sides with a cannonade from several hundred guns.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Then when the whole field was covered with smoke, two divisions, Campan’s
+      and Dessaix’s, advanced from the French right, while Murat’s troops
+      advanced on Borodinó from their left.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the Shevárdino Redoubt where Napoleon was standing the <i>flèches</i> were
+      two thirds of a mile away, and it was more than a mile as the crow flies
+      to Borodinó, so that Napoleon could not see what was happening there,
+      especially as the smoke mingling with the mist hid the whole locality. The
+      soldiers of Dessaix’s division advancing against the <i>flèches</i> could
+      only be seen till they had entered the hollow that lay between them and the
+      <i>flèches</i>. As soon as they had descended into that hollow, the smoke of the
+      guns and musketry on the <i>flèches</i> grew so dense that it covered the whole
+      approach on that side of it. Through the smoke glimpses could be caught of
+      something black—probably men—and at times the glint of
+      bayonets. But whether they were moving or stationary, whether they were
+      French or Russian, could not be discovered from the Shevárdino Redoubt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The sun had risen brightly and its slanting rays struck straight into
+      Napoleon’s face as, shading his eyes with his hand, he looked at the
+      <i>flèches</i>. The smoke spread out before them, and at times it looked as if
+      the smoke were moving, at times as if the troops moved. Sometimes shouts
+      were heard through the firing, but it was impossible to tell what was
+      being done there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon, standing on the knoll, looked through a field glass, and in its
+      small circlet saw smoke and men, sometimes his own and sometimes Russians,
+      but when he looked again with the naked eye, he could not tell where what
+      he had seen was.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He descended the knoll and began walking up and down before it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Occasionally he stopped, listened to the firing, and gazed intently at the
+      battlefield.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But not only was it impossible to make out what was happening from where
+      he was standing down below, or from the knoll above on which some of his
+      generals had taken their stand, but even from the <i>flèches</i> themselves—in
+      which by this time there were now Russian and now French soldiers,
+      alternately or together, dead, wounded, alive, frightened, or maddened—even
+      at those <i>flèches</i> themselves it was impossible to make out what was taking
+      place. There for several hours amid incessant cannon and musketry fire,
+      now Russians were seen alone, now Frenchmen alone, now infantry, and now
+      cavalry: they appeared, fired, fell, collided, not knowing what to do with
+      one another, screamed, and ran back again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the battlefield adjutants he had sent out, and orderlies from his
+      marshals, kept galloping up to Napoleon with reports of the progress of
+      the action, but all these reports were false, both because it was
+      impossible in the heat of battle to say what was happening at any given
+      moment and because many of the adjutants did not go to the actual place of
+      conflict but reported what they had heard from others; and also because
+      while an adjutant was riding more than a mile to Napoleon circumstances
+      changed and the news he brought was already becoming false. Thus an
+      adjutant galloped up from Murat with tidings that Borodinó had been
+      occupied and the bridge over the Kolochá was in the hands of the French.
+      The adjutant asked whether Napoleon wished the troops to cross it?
+      Napoleon gave orders that the troops should form up on the farther side
+      and wait. But before that order was given—almost as soon in fact as
+      the adjutant had left Borodinó—the bridge had been retaken by the
+      Russians and burned, in the very skirmish at which Pierre had been present
+      at the beginning of the battle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      An adjutant galloped up from the <i>flèches</i> with a pale and frightened face
+      and reported to Napoleon that their attack had been repulsed, Campan
+      wounded, and Davout killed; yet at the very time the adjutant had been
+      told that the French had been repulsed, the <i>flèches</i> had in fact been
+      recaptured by other French troops, and Davout was alive and only slightly
+      bruised. On the basis of these necessarily untrustworthy reports Napoleon
+      gave his orders, which had either been executed before he gave them or
+      could not be and were not executed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The marshals and generals, who were nearer to the field of battle but,
+      like Napoleon, did not take part in the actual fighting and only
+      occasionally went within musket range, made their own arrangements without
+      asking Napoleon and issued orders where and in what direction to fire and
+      where cavalry should gallop and infantry should run. But even their
+      orders, like Napoleon’s, were seldom carried out, and then but partially.
+      For the most part things happened contrary to their orders. Soldiers
+      ordered to advance ran back on meeting grapeshot; soldiers ordered to
+      remain where they were, suddenly, seeing Russians unexpectedly before
+      them, sometimes rushed back and sometimes forward, and the cavalry dashed
+      without orders in pursuit of the flying Russians. In this way two cavalry
+      regiments galloped through the Semënovsk hollow and as soon as they
+      reached the top of the incline turned round and galloped full speed back
+      again. The infantry moved in the same way, sometimes running to quite
+      other places than those they were ordered to go to. All orders as to where
+      and when to move the guns, when to send infantry to shoot or horsemen to
+      ride down the Russian infantry—all such orders were given by the
+      officers on the spot nearest to the units concerned, without asking either
+      Ney, Davout, or Murat, much less Napoleon. They did not fear getting into
+      trouble for not fulfilling orders or for acting on their own initiative,
+      for in battle what is at stake is what is dearest to man—his own
+      life—and it sometimes seems that safety lies in running back,
+      sometimes in running forward; and these men who were right in the heat of
+      the battle acted according to the mood of the moment. In reality, however,
+      all these movements forward and backward did not improve or alter the
+      position of the troops. All their rushing and galloping at one another did
+      little harm, the harm of disablement and death was caused by the balls and
+      bullets that flew over the fields on which these men were floundering
+      about. As soon as they left the place where the balls and bullets were
+      flying about, their superiors, located in the background, re-formed them
+      and brought them under discipline and under the influence of that
+      discipline led them back to the zone of fire, where under the influence of
+      fear of death they lost their discipline and rushed about according to the
+      chance promptings of the throng.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0224"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXXIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Napoleon’s generals—Davout, Ney, and Murat, who were near that
+      region of fire and sometimes even entered it—repeatedly led into it
+      huge masses of well-ordered troops. But contrary to what had always
+      happened in their former battles, instead of the news they expected of the
+      enemy’s flight, these orderly masses returned thence as disorganized and
+      terrified mobs. The generals re-formed them, but their numbers constantly
+      decreased. In the middle of the day Murat sent his adjutant to Napoleon to
+      demand reinforcements.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon sat at the foot of the knoll, drinking punch, when Murat’s
+      adjutant galloped up with an assurance that the Russians would be routed
+      if His Majesty would let him have another division.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Reinforcements?” said Napoleon in a tone of stern surprise, looking at
+      the adjutant—a handsome lad with long black curls arranged like
+      Murat’s own—as though he did not understand his words.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Reinforcements!” thought Napoleon to himself. “How can they need
+      reinforcements when they already have half the army directed against a
+      weak, unentrenched Russian wing?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Tell the King of Naples,” said he sternly, “that it is not noon yet, and
+      I don’t yet see my chessboard clearly. Go!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The handsome boy adjutant with the long hair sighed deeply without
+      removing his hand from his hat and galloped back to where men were being
+      slaughtered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon rose and having summoned Caulaincourt and Berthier began talking
+      to them about matters unconnected with the battle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the midst of this conversation, which was beginning to interest
+      Napoleon, Berthier’s eyes turned to look at a general with a suite, who
+      was galloping toward the knoll on a lathering horse. It was Belliard.
+      Having dismounted he went up to the Emperor with rapid strides and in a
+      loud voice began boldly demonstrating the necessity of sending
+      reinforcements. He swore on his honor that the Russians were lost if the
+      Emperor would give another division.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon shrugged his shoulders and continued to pace up and down without
+      replying. Belliard began talking loudly and eagerly to the generals of the
+      suite around him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are very fiery, Belliard,” said Napoleon, when he again came up to
+      the general. “In the heat of a battle it is easy to make a mistake. Go and
+      have another look and then come back to me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Before Belliard was out of sight, a messenger from another part of the
+      battlefield galloped up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then, what do you want?” asked Napoleon in the tone of a man
+      irritated at being continually disturbed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sire, the prince...” began the adjutant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Asks for reinforcements?” said Napoleon with an angry gesture.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The adjutant bent his head affirmatively and began to report, but the
+      Emperor turned from him, took a couple of steps, stopped, came back, and
+      called Berthier.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We must give reserves,” he said, moving his arms slightly apart. “Who do
+      you think should be sent there?” he asked of Berthier (whom he
+      subsequently termed “that gosling I have made an eagle”).
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Send Claparède’s division, sire,” replied Berthier, who knew all the
+      division’s regiments, and battalions by heart.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon nodded assent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The adjutant galloped to Claparède’s division and a few minutes later the
+      Young Guards stationed behind the knoll moved forward. Napoleon gazed
+      silently in that direction.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No!” he suddenly said to Berthier. “I can’t send Claparède. Send Friant’s
+      division.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Though there was no advantage in sending Friant’s division instead of
+      Claparède’s, and even an obvious inconvenience and delay in stopping
+      Claparède and sending Friant now, the order was carried out exactly.
+      Napoleon did not notice that in regard to his army he was playing the part
+      of a doctor who hinders by his medicines—a role he so justly
+      understood and condemned.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Friant’s division disappeared as the others had done into the smoke of the
+      battlefield. From all sides adjutants continued to arrive at a gallop and
+      as if by agreement all said the same thing. They all asked for
+      reinforcements and all said that the Russians were holding their positions
+      and maintaining a hellish fire under which the French army was melting
+      away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon sat on a campstool, wrapped in thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      M. de Beausset, the man so fond of travel, having fasted since morning,
+      came up to the Emperor and ventured respectfully to suggest lunch to His
+      Majesty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I hope I may now congratulate Your Majesty on a victory?” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon silently shook his head in negation. Assuming the negation to
+      refer only to the victory and not to the lunch, M. de Beausset ventured
+      with respectful jocularity to remark that there is no reason for not
+      having lunch when one can get it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go away...” exclaimed Napoleon suddenly and morosely, and turned aside.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A beatific smile of regret, repentance, and ecstasy beamed on M. de
+      Beausset’s face and he glided away to the other generals.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon was experiencing a feeling of depression like that of an
+      ever-lucky gambler who, after recklessly flinging money about and always
+      winning, suddenly just when he has calculated all the chances of the game,
+      finds that the more he considers his play the more surely he loses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His troops were the same, his generals the same, the same preparations had
+      been made, the same dispositions, and the same proclamation <i>courte et
+      énergique</i>, he himself was still the same: he knew that and knew that he
+      was now even more experienced and skillful than before. Even the enemy was
+      the same as at Austerlitz and Friedland—yet the terrible stroke of
+      his arm had supernaturally become impotent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the old methods that had been unfailingly crowned with success: the
+      concentration of batteries on one point, an attack by reserves to break
+      the enemy’s line, and a cavalry attack by “the men of iron,” all these
+      methods had already been employed, yet not only was there no victory, but
+      from all sides came the same news of generals killed and wounded, of
+      reinforcements needed, of the impossibility of driving back the Russians,
+      and of disorganization among his own troops.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Formerly, after he had given two or three orders and uttered a few
+      phrases, marshals and adjutants had come galloping up with congratulations
+      and happy faces, announcing the trophies taken, the corps of prisoners,
+      bundles of enemy eagles and standards, cannon and stores, and Murat had
+      only begged leave to loose the cavalry to gather in the baggage wagons. So
+      it had been at Lodi, Marengo, Arcola, Jena, Austerlitz, Wagram, and so on.
+      But now something strange was happening to his troops.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Despite news of the capture of the <i>flèches</i>, Napoleon saw that this was not
+      the same, not at all the same, as what had happened in his former battles.
+      He saw that what he was feeling was felt by all the men about him
+      experienced in the art of war. All their faces looked dejected, and they
+      all shunned one another’s eyes—only a de Beausset could fail to
+      grasp the meaning of what was happening.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Napoleon with his long experience of war well knew the meaning of a
+      battle not gained by the attacking side in eight hours, after all efforts
+      had been expended. He knew that it was a lost battle and that the least
+      accident might now—with the fight balanced on such a strained center—destroy
+      him and his army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he ran his mind over the whole of this strange Russian campaign in
+      which not one battle had been won, and in which not a flag, or cannon, or
+      army corps had been captured in two months, when he looked at the
+      concealed depression on the faces around him and heard reports of the
+      Russians still holding their ground—a terrible feeling like a
+      nightmare took possession of him, and all the unlucky accidents that might
+      destroy him occurred to his mind. The Russians might fall on his left
+      wing, might break through his center, he himself might be killed by a
+      stray cannon ball. All this was possible. In former battles he had only
+      considered the possibilities of success, but now innumerable unlucky
+      chances presented themselves, and he expected them all. Yes, it was like a
+      dream in which a man fancies that a ruffian is coming to attack him, and
+      raises his arm to strike that ruffian a terrible blow which he knows
+      should annihilate him, but then feels that his arm drops powerless and
+      limp like a rag, and the horror of unavoidable destruction seizes him in
+      his helplessness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The news that the Russians were attacking the left flank of the French
+      army aroused that horror in Napoleon. He sat silently on a campstool below
+      the knoll, with head bowed and elbows on his knees. Berthier approached
+      and suggested that they should ride along the line to ascertain the
+      position of affairs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What? What do you say?” asked Napoleon. “Yes, tell them to bring me my
+      horse.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He mounted and rode toward Semënovsk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Amid the powder smoke, slowly dispersing over the whole space through
+      which Napoleon rode, horses and men were lying in pools of blood, singly
+      or in heaps. Neither Napoleon nor any of his generals had ever before seen
+      such horrors or so many slain in such a small area. The roar of guns, that
+      had not ceased for ten hours, wearied the ear and gave a peculiar
+      significance to the spectacle, as music does to <i>tableaux vivants</i>. Napoleon
+      rode up the high ground at Semënovsk, and through the smoke saw ranks of
+      men in uniforms of a color unfamiliar to him. They were Russians.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Russians stood in serried ranks behind Semënovsk village and its
+      knoll, and their guns boomed incessantly along their line and sent forth
+      clouds of smoke. It was no longer a battle: it was a continuous slaughter
+      which could be of no avail either to the French or the Russians. Napoleon
+      stopped his horse and again fell into the reverie from which Berthier had
+      aroused him. He could not stop what was going on before him and around him
+      and was supposed to be directed by him and to depend on him, and from its
+      lack of success this affair, for the first time, seemed to him unnecessary
+      and horrible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One of the generals rode up to Napoleon and ventured to offer to lead the
+      Old Guard into action. Ney and Berthier, standing near Napoleon, exchanged
+      looks and smiled contemptuously at this general’s senseless offer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon bowed his head and remained silent a long time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “At eight hundred leagues from France, I will not have my Guard
+      destroyed!” he said, and turning his horse rode back to Shevárdino.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0225"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXXV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On the rug-covered bench where Pierre had seen him in the morning sat
+      Kutúzov, his gray head hanging, his heavy body relaxed. He gave no orders,
+      but only assented to or dissented from what others suggested.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, do that,” he replied to various proposals. “Yes, yes: go, dear
+      boy, and have a look,” he would say to one or another of those about him;
+      or, “No, don’t, we’d better wait!” He listened to the reports that were
+      brought him and gave directions when his subordinates demanded that of
+      him; but when listening to the reports it seemed as if he were not
+      interested in the import of the words spoken, but rather in something else—in
+      the expression of face and tone of voice of those who were reporting. By
+      long years of military experience he knew, and with the wisdom of age
+      understood, that it is impossible for one man to direct hundreds of
+      thousands of others struggling with death, and he knew that the result of
+      a battle is decided not by the orders of a commander in chief, nor the
+      place where the troops are stationed, nor by the number of cannon or of
+      slaughtered men, but by that intangible force called the spirit of the
+      army, and he watched this force and guided it in as far as that was in his
+      power.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov’s general expression was one of concentrated quiet attention, and
+      his face wore a strained look as if he found it difficult to master the
+      fatigue of his old and feeble body.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At eleven o’clock they brought him news that the <i>flèches</i> captured by
+      the French had been retaken, but that Prince Bagratión was wounded. Kutúzov
+      groaned and swayed his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ride over to Prince Peter Ivánovich and find out about it exactly,” he
+      said to one of his adjutants, and then turned to the Duke of Württemberg
+      who was standing behind him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Will Your Highness please take command of the first army?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Soon after the duke’s departure—before he could possibly have
+      reached Semënovsk—his adjutant came back from him and told Kutúzov
+      that the duke asked for more troops.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov made a grimace and sent an order to Dokhtúrov to take over the
+      command of the first army, and a request to the duke—whom he said he
+      could not spare at such an important moment—to return to him. When
+      they brought him news that Murat had been taken prisoner, and the staff
+      officers congratulated him, Kutúzov smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Wait a little, gentlemen,” said he. “The battle is won, and there is
+      nothing extraordinary in the capture of Murat. Still, it is better to wait
+      before we rejoice.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But he sent an adjutant to take the news round the army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Scherbínin came galloping from the left flank with news that the
+      French had captured the <i>flèches</i> and the village of Semënovsk, Kutúzov,
+      guessing by the sounds of the battle and by Scherbínin’s looks that the
+      news was bad, rose as if to stretch his legs and, taking Scherbínin’s arm,
+      led him aside.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go, my dear fellow,” he said to Ermólov, “and see whether something can’t
+      be done.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov was in Górki, near the center of the Russian position. The attack
+      directed by Napoleon against our left flank had been several times
+      repulsed. In the center the French had not got beyond Borodinó, and on
+      their left flank Uvárov’s cavalry had put the French to flight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Toward three o’clock the French attacks ceased. On the faces of all who
+      came from the field of battle, and of those who stood around him, Kutúzov
+      noticed an expression of extreme tension. He was satisfied with the day’s
+      success—a success exceeding his expectations, but the old man’s
+      strength was failing him. Several times his head dropped low as if it were
+      falling and he dozed off. Dinner was brought him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Adjutant General Wolzogen, the man who when riding past Prince Andrew had
+      said, “the war should be extended widely,” and whom Bagratión so detested,
+      rode up while Kutúzov was at dinner. Wolzogen had come from Barclay de
+      Tolly to report on the progress of affairs on the left flank. The
+      sagacious Barclay de Tolly, seeing crowds of wounded men running back and
+      the disordered rear of the army, weighed all the circumstances, concluded
+      that the battle was lost, and sent his favorite officer to the commander
+      in chief with that news.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov was chewing a piece of roast chicken with difficulty and glanced
+      at Wolzogen with eyes that brightened under their puckering lids.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Wolzogen, nonchalantly stretching his legs, approached Kutúzov with a
+      half-contemptuous smile on his lips, scarcely touching the peak of his
+      cap.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He treated his Serene Highness with a somewhat affected nonchalance
+      intended to show that, as a highly trained military man, he left it to
+      Russians to make an idol of this useless old man, but that he knew whom he
+      was dealing with. <i>“Der alte Herr”</i> (as in their own set the
+      Germans called Kutúzov) “is making himself very comfortable,” thought
+      Wolzogen, and looking severely at the dishes in front of Kutúzov he began to report
+      to “the old gentleman” the position of affairs on the left flank as
+      Barclay had ordered him to and as he himself had seen and understood it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All the points of our position are in the enemy’s hands and we cannot
+      dislodge them for lack of troops, the men are running away and it is
+      impossible to stop them,” he reported.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov ceased chewing and fixed an astonished gaze on Wolzogen, as if not
+      understanding what was said to him. Wolzogen, noticing “the old
+      gentleman’s” agitation, said with a smile:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have not considered it right to conceal from your Serene Highness what
+      I have seen. The troops are in complete disorder....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You have seen? You have seen?...” Kutúzov shouted. Frowning and rising
+      quickly, he went up to Wolzogen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How... how dare you!...” he shouted, choking and making a threatening
+      gesture with his trembling arms: “How dare you, sir, say that to <i>me?</i>
+      You know nothing about it. Tell General Barclay from me that his information
+      is incorrect and that the real course of the battle is better known to me,
+      the commander in chief, than to him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Wolzogen was about to make a rejoinder, but Kutúzov interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The enemy has been repulsed on the left and defeated on the right flank.
+      If you have seen amiss, sir, do not allow yourself to say what you don’t
+      know! Be so good as to ride to General Barclay and inform him of my firm
+      intention to attack the enemy tomorrow,” said Kutúzov sternly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All were silent, and the only sound audible was the heavy breathing of the
+      panting old general.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They are repulsed everywhere, for which I thank God and our brave army!
+      The enemy is beaten, and tomorrow we shall drive him from the sacred soil
+      of Russia,” said Kutúzov crossing himself, and he suddenly sobbed as his
+      eyes filled with tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Wolzogen, shrugging his shoulders and curling his lips, stepped silently
+      aside, marveling at “the old gentleman’s” conceited stupidity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, here he is, my hero!” said Kutúzov to a portly, handsome, dark-haired
+      general who was just ascending the knoll.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This was Raévski, who had spent the whole day at the most important part
+      of the field of Borodinó.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Raévski reported that the troops were firmly holding their ground and that
+      the French no longer ventured to attack.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After hearing him, Kutúzov said in French:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then you do not think, <i>like some others</i>, that we must retreat?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “On the contrary, your Highness, in indecisive actions it is always the
+      most stubborn who remain victors,” replied Raévski, “and in my opinion...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Kaysárov!” Kutúzov called to his adjutant. “Sit down and write out the
+      order of the day for tomorrow. And you,” he continued, addressing another,
+      “ride along the line and announce that tomorrow we attack.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      While Kutúzov was talking to Raévski and dictating the order of the day,
+      Wolzogen returned from Barclay and said that General Barclay wished to
+      have written confirmation of the order the field marshal had given.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov, without looking at Wolzogen, gave directions for the order to be
+      written out which the former commander in chief, to avoid personal
+      responsibility, very judiciously wished to receive.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And by means of that mysterious indefinable bond which maintains
+      throughout an army one and the same temper, known as “the spirit of the
+      army,” and which constitutes the sinew of war, Kutúzov’s words, his order
+      for a battle next day, immediately became known from one end of the army
+      to the other.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was far from being the same words or the same order that reached the
+      farthest links of that chain. The tales passing from mouth to mouth at
+      different ends of the army did not even resemble what Kutúzov had said,
+      but the sense of his words spread everywhere because what he said was not
+      the outcome of cunning calculations, but of a feeling that lay in the
+      commander in chief’s soul as in that of every Russian.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And on learning that tomorrow they were to attack the enemy, and hearing
+      from the highest quarters a confirmation of what they wanted to believe,
+      the exhausted, wavering men felt comforted and inspirited.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0226"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXXVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew’s regiment was among the reserves which till after one
+      o’clock were stationed inactive behind Semënovsk, under heavy artillery
+      fire. Toward two o’clock the regiment, having already lost more than two
+      hundred men, was moved forward into a trampled oatfield in the gap between
+      Semënovsk and the Knoll Battery, where thousands of men perished that day
+      and on which an intense, concentrated fire from several hundred enemy guns
+      was directed between one and two o’clock.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Without moving from that spot or firing a single shot the regiment here
+      lost another third of its men. From in front and especially from the
+      right, in the unlifting smoke the guns boomed, and out of the mysterious
+      domain of smoke that overlay the whole space in front, quick hissing
+      cannon balls and slow whistling shells flew unceasingly. At times, as if
+      to allow them a respite, a quarter of an hour passed during which the
+      cannon balls and shells all flew overhead, but sometimes several men were
+      torn from the regiment in a minute and the slain were continually being
+      dragged away and the wounded carried off.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With each fresh blow less and less chance of life remained for those not
+      yet killed. The regiment stood in columns of battalion, three hundred
+      paces apart, but nevertheless the men were always in one and the same
+      mood. All alike were taciturn and morose. Talk was rarely heard in the
+      ranks, and it ceased altogether every time the thud of a successful shot
+      and the cry of “stretchers!” was heard. Most of the time, by their
+      officers’ order, the men sat on the ground. One, having taken off his
+      shako, carefully loosened the gathers of its lining and drew them tight
+      again; another, rubbing some dry clay between his palms, polished his
+      bayonet; another fingered the strap and pulled the buckle of his
+      bandolier, while another smoothed and refolded his leg bands and put his
+      boots on again. Some built little houses of the tufts in the plowed
+      ground, or plaited baskets from the straw in the cornfield. All seemed
+      fully absorbed in these pursuits. When men were killed or wounded, when
+      rows of stretchers went past, when some troops retreated, and when great
+      masses of the enemy came into view through the smoke, no one paid any
+      attention to these things. But when our artillery or cavalry advanced or
+      some of our infantry were seen to move forward, words of approval were
+      heard on all sides. But the liveliest attention was attracted by
+      occurrences quite apart from, and unconnected with, the battle. It was as
+      if the minds of these morally exhausted men found relief in everyday,
+      commonplace occurrences. A battery of artillery was passing in front of
+      the regiment. The horse of an ammunition cart put its leg over a trace.
+      “Hey, look at the trace horse!... Get her leg out! She’ll fall.... Ah,
+      they don’t see it!” came identical shouts from the ranks all along the
+      regiment. Another time, general attention was attracted by a small brown
+      dog, coming heaven knows whence, which trotted in a preoccupied manner in
+      front of the ranks with tail stiffly erect till suddenly a shell fell
+      close by, when it yelped, tucked its tail between its legs, and darted
+      aside. Yells and shrieks of laughter rose from the whole regiment. But
+      such distractions lasted only a moment, and for eight hours the men had
+      been inactive, without food, in constant fear of death, and their pale and
+      gloomy faces grew ever paler and gloomier.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew, pale and gloomy like everyone in the regiment, paced up and
+      down from the border of one patch to another, at the edge of the meadow
+      beside an oatfield, with head bowed and arms behind his back. There was
+      nothing for him to do and no orders to be given. Everything went on of
+      itself. The killed were dragged from the front, the wounded carried away,
+      and the ranks closed up. If any soldiers ran to the rear they returned
+      immediately and hastily. At first Prince Andrew, considering it his duty
+      to rouse the courage of the men and to set them an example, walked about
+      among the ranks, but he soon became convinced that this was unnecessary
+      and that there was nothing he could teach them. All the powers of his
+      soul, as of every soldier there, were unconsciously bent on avoiding the
+      contemplation of the horrors of their situation. He walked along the
+      meadow, dragging his feet, rustling the grass, and gazing at the dust that
+      covered his boots; now he took big strides trying to keep to the
+      footprints left on the meadow by the mowers, then he counted his steps,
+      calculating how often he must walk from one strip to another to walk a
+      mile, then he stripped the flowers from the wormwood that grew along a
+      boundary rut, rubbed them in his palms, and smelled their pungent, sweetly
+      bitter scent. Nothing remained of the previous day’s thoughts. He thought
+      of nothing. He listened with weary ears to the ever-recurring sounds,
+      distinguishing the whistle of flying projectiles from the booming of the
+      reports, glanced at the tiresomely familiar faces of the men of the first
+      battalion, and waited. “Here it comes... this one is coming our way
+      again!” he thought, listening to an approaching whistle in the hidden
+      region of smoke. “One, another! Again! It has hit....” He stopped and
+      looked at the ranks. “No, it has gone over. But this one has hit!” And
+      again he started trying to reach the boundary strip in sixteen paces. A
+      whizz and a thud! Five paces from him, a cannon ball tore up the dry earth
+      and disappeared. A chill ran down his back. Again he glanced at the ranks.
+      Probably many had been hit—a large crowd had gathered near the
+      second battalion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Adjutant!” he shouted. “Order them not to crowd together.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The adjutant, having obeyed this instruction, approached Prince Andrew.
+      From the other side a battalion commander rode up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Look out!” came a frightened cry from a soldier and, like a bird whirring
+      in rapid flight and alighting on the ground, a shell dropped with little
+      noise within two steps of Prince Andrew and close to the battalion
+      commander’s horse. The horse first, regardless of whether it was right or
+      wrong to show fear, snorted, reared almost throwing the major, and
+      galloped aside. The horse’s terror infected the men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lie down!” cried the adjutant, throwing himself flat on the ground.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew hesitated. The smoking shell spun like a top between him and
+      the prostrate adjutant, near a wormwood plant between the field and the
+      meadow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Can this be death?” thought Prince Andrew, looking with a quite new,
+      envious glance at the grass, the wormwood, and the streamlet of smoke that
+      curled up from the rotating black ball. “I cannot, I do not wish to die. I
+      love life—I love this grass, this earth, this air....” He thought
+      this, and at the same time remembered that people were looking at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s shameful, sir!” he said to the adjutant. “What...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He did not finish speaking. At one and the same moment came the sound of
+      an explosion, a whistle of splinters as from a breaking window frame, a
+      suffocating smell of powder, and Prince Andrew started to one side,
+      raising his arm, and fell on his chest. Several officers ran up to him.
+      From the right side of his abdomen, blood was welling out making a large
+      stain on the grass.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The militiamen with stretchers who were called up stood behind the
+      officers. Prince Andrew lay on his chest with his face in the grass,
+      breathing heavily and noisily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What are you waiting for? Come along!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The peasants went up and took him by his shoulders and legs, but he moaned
+      piteously and, exchanging looks, they set him down again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Pick him up, lift him, it’s all the same!” cried someone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They again took him by the shoulders and laid him on the stretcher.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, God! My God! What is it? The stomach? That means death! My God!”—voices
+      among the officers were heard saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It flew a hair’s breadth past my ear,” said the adjutant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The peasants, adjusting the stretcher to their shoulders, started
+      hurriedly along the path they had trodden down, to the dressing station.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Keep in step! Ah... those peasants!” shouted an officer, seizing by their
+      shoulders and checking the peasants, who were walking unevenly and jolting
+      the stretcher.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Get into step, Fëdor... I say, Fëdor!” said the foremost peasant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now that’s right!” said the one behind joyfully, when he had got into
+      step.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency! Eh, Prince!” said the trembling voice of Timókhin, who
+      had run up and was looking down on the stretcher.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew opened his eyes and looked up at the speaker from the
+      stretcher into which his head had sunk deep and again his eyelids drooped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      The militiamen carried Prince Andrew to the dressing station by the wood,
+      where wagons were stationed. The dressing station consisted of three tents
+      with flaps turned back, pitched at the edge of a birch wood. In the wood,
+      wagons and horses were standing. The horses were eating oats from their
+      movable troughs and sparrows flew down and pecked the grains that fell.
+      Some crows, scenting blood, flew among the birch trees cawing impatiently.
+      Around the tents, over more than five acres, bloodstained men in various
+      garbs stood, sat, or lay. Around the wounded stood crowds of soldier
+      stretcher-bearers with dismal and attentive faces, whom the officers
+      keeping order tried in vain to drive from the spot. Disregarding the
+      officers’ orders, the soldiers stood leaning against their stretchers and
+      gazing intently, as if trying to comprehend the difficult problem of what
+      was taking place before them. From the tents came now loud angry cries and
+      now plaintive groans. Occasionally dressers ran out to fetch water, or to
+      point out those who were to be brought in next. The wounded men awaiting
+      their turn outside the tents groaned, sighed, wept, screamed, swore, or
+      asked for vodka. Some were delirious. Prince Andrew’s bearers, stepping
+      over the wounded who had not yet been bandaged, took him, as a regimental
+      commander, close up to one of the tents and there stopped, awaiting
+      instructions. Prince Andrew opened his eyes and for a long time could not
+      make out what was going on around him. He remembered the meadow, the
+      wormwood, the field, the whirling black ball, and his sudden rush of
+      passionate love of life. Two steps from him, leaning against a branch and
+      talking loudly and attracting general attention, stood a tall, handsome,
+      black-haired noncommissioned officer with a bandaged head. He had been
+      wounded in the head and leg by bullets. Around him, eagerly listening to
+      his talk, a crowd of wounded and stretcher-bearers was gathered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We kicked <i>him</i> out from there so that he chucked everything, we grabbed
+      the King himself!” cried he, looking around him with eyes that glittered
+      with fever. “If only reserves had come up just then, lads, there wouldn’t
+      have been nothing left of him! I tell you surely....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Like all the others near the speaker, Prince Andrew looked at him with
+      shining eyes and experienced a sense of comfort. “But isn’t it all the
+      same now?” thought he. “And what will be there, and what has there been
+      here? Why was I so reluctant to part with life? There was something in
+      this life I did not and do not understand.”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0227"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXXVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      One of the doctors came out of the tent in a bloodstained apron, holding a
+      cigar between the thumb and little finger of one of his small bloodstained
+      hands, so as not to smear it. He raised his head and looked about him, but
+      above the level of the wounded men. He evidently wanted a little respite.
+      After turning his head from right to left for some time, he sighed and
+      looked down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All right, immediately,” he replied to a dresser who pointed Prince
+      Andrew out to him, and he told them to carry him into the tent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Murmurs arose among the wounded who were waiting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It seems that even in the next world only the gentry are to have a
+      chance!” remarked one.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew was carried in and laid on a table that had only just been
+      cleared and which a dresser was washing down. Prince Andrew could not make
+      out distinctly what was in that tent. The pitiful groans from all sides
+      and the torturing pain in his thigh, stomach, and back distracted him. All
+      he saw about him merged into a general impression of naked, bleeding human
+      bodies that seemed to fill the whole of the low tent, as a few weeks
+      previously, on that hot August day, such bodies had filled the dirty pond
+      beside the Smolénsk road. Yes, it was the same flesh, the same <i>chair à
+      canon</i>, the sight of which had even then filled him with horror, as by a
+      presentiment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There were three operating tables in the tent. Two were occupied, and on
+      the third they placed Prince Andrew. For a little while he was left alone
+      and involuntarily witnessed what was taking place on the other two tables.
+      On the nearest one sat a Tartar, probably a Cossack, judging by the
+      uniform thrown down beside him. Four soldiers were holding him, and a
+      spectacled doctor was cutting into his muscular brown back.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ooh, ooh, ooh!” grunted the Tartar, and suddenly lifting up his swarthy
+      snub-nosed face with its high cheekbones, and baring his white teeth, he
+      began to wriggle and twitch his body and utter piercing, ringing, and
+      prolonged yells. On the other table, round which many people were
+      crowding, a tall well-fed man lay on his back with his head thrown back.
+      His curly hair, its color, and the shape of his head seemed strangely
+      familiar to Prince Andrew. Several dressers were pressing on his chest to
+      hold him down. One large, white, plump leg twitched rapidly all the time
+      with a feverish tremor. The man was sobbing and choking convulsively. Two
+      doctors—one of whom was pale and trembling—were silently doing
+      something to this man’s other, gory leg. When he had finished with the
+      Tartar, whom they covered with an overcoat, the spectacled doctor came up
+      to Prince Andrew, wiping his hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He glanced at Prince Andrew’s face and quickly turned away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Undress him! What are you waiting for?” he cried angrily to the dressers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His very first, remotest recollections of childhood came back to Prince
+      Andrew’s mind when the dresser with sleeves rolled up began hastily to
+      undo the buttons of his clothes and undressed him. The doctor bent down
+      over the wound, felt it, and sighed deeply. Then he made a sign to
+      someone, and the torturing pain in his abdomen caused Prince Andrew to
+      lose consciousness. When he came to himself the splintered portions of his
+      thighbone had been extracted, the torn flesh cut away, and the wound
+      bandaged. Water was being sprinkled on his face. As soon as Prince Andrew
+      opened his eyes, the doctor bent over, kissed him silently on the lips,
+      and hurried away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the sufferings he had been enduring, Prince Andrew enjoyed a
+      blissful feeling such as he had not experienced for a long time. All the
+      best and happiest moments of his life—especially his earliest
+      childhood, when he used to be undressed and put to bed, and when leaning
+      over him his nurse sang him to sleep and he, burying his head in the
+      pillow, felt happy in the mere consciousness of life—returned to his
+      memory, not merely as something past but as something present.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The doctors were busily engaged with the wounded man the shape of whose
+      head seemed familiar to Prince Andrew: they were lifting him up and trying
+      to quiet him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Show it to me.... Oh, ooh... Oh! Oh, ooh!” his frightened moans could be
+      heard, subdued by suffering and broken by sobs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Hearing those moans Prince Andrew wanted to weep. Whether because he was
+      dying without glory, or because he was sorry to part with life, or because
+      of those memories of a childhood that could not return, or because he was
+      suffering and others were suffering and that man near him was groaning so
+      piteously—he felt like weeping childlike, kindly, and almost happy
+      tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The wounded man was shown his amputated leg stained with clotted blood and
+      with the boot still on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh! Oh, ooh!” he sobbed, like a woman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The doctor who had been standing beside him, preventing Prince Andrew from
+      seeing his face, moved away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My God! What is this? Why is he here?” said Prince Andrew to himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the miserable, sobbing, enfeebled man whose leg had just been
+      amputated, he recognized Anatole Kurágin. Men were supporting him in their
+      arms and offering him a glass of water, but his trembling, swollen lips
+      could not grasp its rim. Anatole was sobbing painfully. “Yes, it is he!
+      Yes, that man is somehow closely and painfully connected with me,” thought
+      Prince Andrew, not yet clearly grasping what he saw before him. “What is
+      the connection of that man with my childhood and life?” he asked himself
+      without finding an answer. And suddenly a new unexpected memory from that
+      realm of pure and loving childhood presented itself to him. He remembered
+      Natásha as he had seen her for the first time at the ball in 1810, with
+      her slender neck and arms and with a frightened happy face ready for
+      rapture, and love and tenderness for her, stronger and more vivid than
+      ever, awoke in his soul. He now remembered the connection that existed
+      between himself and this man who was dimly gazing at him through tears
+      that filled his swollen eyes. He remembered everything, and ecstatic pity
+      and love for that man overflowed his happy heart.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew could no longer restrain himself and wept tender loving
+      tears for his fellow men, for himself, and for his own and their errors.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Compassion, love of our brothers, for those who love us and for those who
+      hate us, love of our enemies; yes, that love which God preached on earth
+      and which Princess Mary taught me and I did not understand—that is
+      what made me sorry to part with life, that is what remained for me had I
+      lived. But now it is too late. I know it!”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0228"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXXVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The terrible spectacle of the battlefield covered with dead and wounded,
+      together with the heaviness of his head and the news that some twenty
+      generals he knew personally had been killed or wounded, and the
+      consciousness of the impotence of his once mighty arm, produced an
+      unexpected impression on Napoleon who usually liked to look at the killed
+      and wounded, thereby, he considered, testing his strength of mind. This
+      day the horrible appearance of the battlefield overcame that strength of
+      mind which he thought constituted his merit and his greatness. He rode
+      hurriedly from the battlefield and returned to the Shevárdino knoll, where
+      he sat on his campstool, his sallow face swollen and heavy, his eyes dim,
+      his nose red, and his voice hoarse, involuntarily listening, with downcast
+      eyes, to the sounds of firing. With painful dejection he awaited the end
+      of this action, in which he regarded himself as a participant and which he
+      was unable to arrest. A personal, human feeling for a brief moment got the
+      better of the artificial phantasm of life he had served so long. He felt
+      in his own person the sufferings and death he had witnessed on the
+      battlefield. The heaviness of his head and chest reminded him of the
+      possibility of suffering and death for himself. At that moment he did not
+      desire Moscow, or victory, or glory (what need had he for any more
+      glory?). The one thing he wished for was rest, tranquillity, and freedom.
+      But when he had been on the Semënovsk heights the artillery commander had
+      proposed to him to bring several batteries of artillery up to those
+      heights to strengthen the fire on the Russian troops crowded in front of
+      Knyazkóvo. Napoleon had assented and had given orders that news should be
+      brought to him of the effect those batteries produced.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      An adjutant came now to inform him that the fire of two hundred guns had
+      been concentrated on the Russians, as he had ordered, but that they still
+      held their ground.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Our fire is mowing them down by rows, but still they hold on,” said the
+      adjutant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They want more!...” said Napoleon in a hoarse voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sire?” asked the adjutant who had not heard the remark.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They want more!” croaked Napoleon frowning. “Let them have it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Even before he gave that order the thing he did not desire, and for which
+      he gave the order only because he thought it was expected of him, was
+      being done. And he fell back into that artificial realm of imaginary
+      greatness, and again—as a horse walking a treadmill thinks it is
+      doing something for itself—he submissively fulfilled the cruel, sad,
+      gloomy, and inhuman role predestined for him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And not for that day and hour alone were the mind and conscience darkened
+      of this man on whom the responsibility for what was happening lay more
+      than on all the others who took part in it. Never to the end of his life
+      could he understand goodness, beauty, or truth, or the significance of his
+      actions which were too contrary to goodness and truth, too remote from
+      everything human, for him ever to be able to grasp their meaning. He could
+      not disavow his actions, belauded as they were by half the world, and so
+      he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Not only on that day, as he rode over the battlefield strewn with men
+      killed and maimed (by his will as he believed), did he reckon as he looked
+      at them how many Russians there were for each Frenchman and, deceiving
+      himself, find reason for rejoicing in the calculation that there were five
+      Russians for every Frenchman. Not on that day alone did he write in a
+      letter to Paris that “the battle field was superb,” because fifty thousand
+      corpses lay there, but even on the island of St. Helena in the peaceful
+      solitude where he said he intended to devote his leisure to an account of
+      the great deeds he had done, he wrote:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Russian war should have been the most popular war of modern times: it
+      was a war of good sense, for real interests, for the tranquillity and
+      security of all; it was purely pacific and conservative.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was a war for a great cause, the end of uncertainties and the beginning
+      of security. A new horizon and new labors were opening out, full of
+      well-being and prosperity for all. The European system was already
+      founded; all that remained was to organize it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Satisfied on these great points and with tranquility everywhere, I too
+      should have had my <i>Congress</i> and my <i>Holy Alliance</i>. Those ideas were
+      stolen from me. In that reunion of great sovereigns we should have discussed our
+      interests like one family, and have rendered account to the peoples as
+      clerk to master.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Europe would in this way soon have been, in fact, but one people, and
+      anyone who traveled anywhere would have found himself always in the common
+      fatherland. I should have demanded the freedom of all navigable rivers for
+      everybody, that the seas should be common to all, and that the great
+      standing armies should be reduced henceforth to mere guards for the
+      sovereigns.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On returning to France, to the bosom of the great, strong, magnificent,
+      peaceful, and glorious fatherland, I should have proclaimed her frontiers
+      immutable; all future wars purely <i>defensive</i>, all aggrandizement
+      <i>antinational</i>. I should have associated my son in the Empire; my
+      <i>dictatorship</i> would have been finished, and his constitutional reign would
+      have begun.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Paris would have been the capital of the world, and the French the envy of
+      the nations!
+    </p>
+<p>
+      My leisure then, and my old age, would have been devoted, in company with
+      the Empress and during the royal apprenticeship of my son, to leisurely
+      visiting, with our own horses and like a true country couple, every corner
+      of the Empire, receiving complaints, redressing wrongs, and scattering
+      public buildings and benefactions on all sides and everywhere.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon, predestined by Providence for the gloomy role of executioner of
+      the peoples, assured himself that the aim of his actions had been the
+      peoples’ welfare and that he could control the fate of millions and by the
+      employment of power confer benefactions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Of four hundred thousand who crossed the Vistula,” he wrote further of
+      the Russian war, “half were Austrians, Prussians, Saxons, Poles,
+      Bavarians, Württembergers, Mecklenburgers, Spaniards, Italians, and
+      Neapolitans. The Imperial army, strictly speaking, was one third composed
+      of Dutch, Belgians, men from the borders of the Rhine, Piedmontese, Swiss,
+      Genevese, Tuscans, Romans, inhabitants of the Thirty-second Military
+      Division, of Bremen, of Hamburg, and so on: it included scarcely a hundred
+      and forty thousand who spoke French. The Russian expedition actually cost
+      France less than fifty thousand men; the Russian army in its retreat from
+      Vílna to Moscow lost in the various battles four times more men than the
+      French army; the burning of Moscow cost the lives of a hundred thousand
+      Russians who died of cold and want in the woods; finally, in its march
+      from Moscow to the Oder the Russian army also suffered from the severity
+      of the season; so that by the time it reached Vílna it numbered only fifty
+      thousand, and at Kálisch less than eighteen thousand.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He imagined that the war with Russia came about by his will, and the
+      horrors that occurred did not stagger his soul. He boldly took the whole
+      responsibility for what happened, and his darkened mind found
+      justification in the belief that among the hundreds of thousands who
+      perished there were fewer Frenchmen than Hessians and Bavarians.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0229"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXXIX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Several tens of thousands of the slain lay in diverse postures and various
+      uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the Davýdov family and to
+      the crown serfs—those fields and meadows where for hundreds of years
+      the peasants of Borodinó, Górki, Shevárdino, and Semënovsk had reaped
+      their harvests and pastured their cattle. At the dressing stations the
+      grass and earth were soaked with blood for a space of some three acres
+      around. Crowds of men of various arms, wounded and unwounded, with
+      frightened faces, dragged themselves back to Mozháysk from the one army
+      and back to Valúevo from the other. Other crowds, exhausted and hungry,
+      went forward led by their officers. Others held their ground and continued
+      to fire.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Over the whole field, previously so gaily beautiful with the glitter of
+      bayonets and cloudlets of smoke in the morning sun, there now spread a
+      mist of damp and smoke and a strange acid smell of saltpeter and blood.
+      Clouds gathered and drops of rain began to fall on the dead and wounded,
+      on the frightened, exhausted, and hesitating men, as if to say: “Enough,
+      men! Enough! Cease... bethink yourselves! What are you doing?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      To the men of both sides alike, worn out by want of food and rest, it
+      began equally to appear doubtful whether they should continue to slaughter
+      one another; all the faces expressed hesitation, and the question arose in
+      every soul: “For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?... You may go
+      and kill whom you please, but I don’t want to do so any more!” By
+      evening this thought had ripened in every soul. At any moment these men might
+      have been seized with horror at what they were doing and might have thrown
+      up everything and run away anywhere.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But though toward the end of the battle the men felt all the horror of
+      what they were doing, though they would have been glad to leave off, some
+      incomprehensible, mysterious power continued to control them, and they
+      still brought up the charges, loaded, aimed, and applied the match, though
+      only one artilleryman survived out of every three, and though they
+      stumbled and panted with fatigue, perspiring and stained with blood and
+      powder. The cannon balls flew just as swiftly and cruelly from both sides,
+      crushing human bodies, and that terrible work which was not done by the
+      will of a man but at the will of Him who governs men and worlds continued.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anyone looking at the disorganized rear of the Russian army would have
+      said that, if only the French made one more slight effort, it would
+      disappear; and anyone looking at the rear of the French army would have
+      said that the Russians need only make one more slight effort and the
+      French would be destroyed. But neither the French nor the Russians made
+      that effort, and the flame of battle burned slowly out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Russians did not make that effort because they were not attacking the
+      French. At the beginning of the battle they stood blocking the way to
+      Moscow and they still did so at the end of the battle as at the beginning.
+      But even had the aim of the Russians been to drive the French from their
+      positions, they could not have made this last effort, for all the Russian
+      troops had been broken up, there was no part of the Russian army that had
+      not suffered in the battle, and though still holding their positions they
+      had lost ONE HALF of their army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French, with the memory of all their former victories during fifteen
+      years, with the assurance of Napoleon’s invincibility, with the
+      consciousness that they had captured part of the battlefield and had lost
+      only a quarter of their men and still had their Guards intact, twenty
+      thousand strong, might easily have made that effort. The French who had
+      attacked the Russian army in order to drive it from its position ought to
+      have made that effort, for as long as the Russians continued to block the
+      road to Moscow as before, the aim of the French had not been attained and
+      all their efforts and losses were in vain. But the French did not make
+      that effort. Some historians say that Napoleon need only have used his Old
+      Guards, who were intact, and the battle would have been won. To speak of
+      what would have happened had Napoleon sent his Guards is like talking of
+      what would happen if autumn became spring. It could not be. Napoleon did
+      not give his Guards, not because he did not want to, but because it could
+      not be done. All the generals, officers, and soldiers of the French army
+      knew it could not be done, because the flagging spirit of the troops would
+      not permit it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was not Napoleon alone who had experienced that nightmare feeling of
+      the mighty arm being stricken powerless, but all the generals and soldiers
+      of his army whether they had taken part in the battle or not, after all
+      their experience of previous battles—when after one tenth of such
+      efforts the enemy had fled—experienced a similar feeling of terror
+      before an enemy who, after losing HALF his men, stood as threateningly at
+      the end as at the beginning of the battle. The moral force of the
+      attacking French army was exhausted. Not that sort of victory which is
+      defined by the capture of pieces of material fastened to sticks, called
+      standards, and of the ground on which the troops had stood and were
+      standing, but a moral victory that convinces the enemy of the moral
+      superiority of his opponent and of his own impotence was gained by the
+      Russians at Borodinó. The French invaders, like an infuriated animal that
+      has in its onslaught received a mortal wound, felt that they were
+      perishing, but could not stop, any more than the Russian army, weaker by
+      one half, could help swerving. By impetus gained, the French army was
+      still able to roll forward to Moscow, but there, without further effort on
+      the part of the Russians, it had to perish, bleeding from the mortal wound
+      it had received at Borodinó. The direct consequence of the battle of
+      Borodinó was Napoleon’s senseless flight from Moscow, his retreat along
+      the old Smolénsk road, the destruction of the invading army of five
+      hundred thousand men, and the downfall of Napoleonic France, on which at
+      Borodinó for the first time the hand of an opponent of stronger spirit had
+      been laid.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0240"></a>
+      BOOK ELEVEN: 1812
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0230"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human mind.
+      Laws of motion of any kind become comprehensible to man only when he
+      examines arbitrarily selected elements of that motion; but at the same
+      time, a large proportion of human error comes from the arbitrary division
+      of continuous motion into discontinuous elements. There is a well-known,
+      so-called sophism of the ancients consisting in this, that Achilles could
+      never catch up with a tortoise he was following, in spite of the fact that
+      he traveled ten times as fast as the tortoise. By the time Achilles has
+      covered the distance that separated him from the tortoise, the tortoise
+      has covered one tenth of that distance ahead of him: when Achilles has
+      covered that tenth, the tortoise has covered another one hundredth, and so
+      on forever. This problem seemed to the ancients insoluble. The absurd
+      answer (that Achilles could never overtake the tortoise) resulted from
+      this: that motion was arbitrarily divided into discontinuous elements,
+      whereas the motion both of Achilles and of the tortoise was continuous.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      By adopting smaller and smaller elements of motion we only approach a
+      solution of the problem, but never reach it. Only when we have admitted
+      the conception of the infinitely small, and the resulting geometrical
+      progression with a common ratio of one tenth, and have found the sum of
+      this progression to infinity, do we reach a solution of the problem.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A modern branch of mathematics having achieved the art of dealing with the
+      infinitely small can now yield solutions in other more complex problems of
+      motion which used to appear insoluble.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This modern branch of mathematics, unknown to the ancients, when dealing
+      with problems of motion admits the conception of the infinitely small, and
+      so conforms to the chief condition of motion (absolute continuity) and
+      thereby corrects the inevitable error which the human mind cannot avoid
+      when it deals with separate elements of motion instead of examining
+      continuous motion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In seeking the laws of historical movement just the same thing happens.
+      The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable arbitrary
+      human wills, is continuous.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of history.
+      But to arrive at these laws, resulting from the sum of all those human
+      wills, man’s mind postulates arbitrary and disconnected units. The first
+      method of history is to take an arbitrarily selected series of continuous
+      events and examine it apart from others, though there is and can be no
+      <i>beginning</i> to any event, for one event always flows uninterruptedly from
+      another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The second method is to consider the actions of some one man—a king
+      or a commander—as equivalent to the sum of many individual wills;
+      whereas the sum of individual wills is never expressed by the activity of
+      a single historic personage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Historical science in its endeavor to draw nearer to truth continually
+      takes smaller and smaller units for examination. But however small the
+      units it takes, we feel that to take any unit disconnected from others, or
+      to assume a <i>beginning</i> of any phenomenon, or to say that the will of many
+      men is expressed by the actions of any one historic personage, is in
+      itself false.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It needs no critical exertion to reduce utterly to dust any deductions
+      drawn from history. It is merely necessary to select some larger or
+      smaller unit as the subject of observation—as criticism has every
+      right to do, seeing that whatever unit history observes must always be
+      arbitrarily selected.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the
+      differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and
+      attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of
+      these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The first fifteen years of the nineteenth century in Europe present an
+      extraordinary movement of millions of people. Men leave their customary
+      pursuits, hasten from one side of Europe to the other, plunder and
+      slaughter one another, triumph and are plunged in despair, and for some
+      years the whole course of life is altered and presents an intensive
+      movement which first increases and then slackens. What was the cause of
+      this movement, by what laws was it governed? asks the mind of man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The historians, replying to this question, lay before us the sayings and
+      doings of a few dozen men in a building in the city of Paris, calling
+      these sayings and doings “the Revolution”; then they give a detailed
+      biography of Napoleon and of certain people favorable or hostile to him;
+      tell of the influence some of these people had on others, and say: that is
+      why this movement took place and those are its laws.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the mind of man not only refuses to believe this explanation, but
+      plainly says that this method of explanation is fallacious, because in it
+      a weaker phenomenon is taken as the cause of a stronger. The sum of human
+      wills produced the Revolution and Napoleon, and only the sum of those
+      wills first tolerated and then destroyed them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But every time there have been conquests there have been conquerors;
+      every time there has been a revolution in any state there have been great
+      men,” says history. And, indeed, human reason replies: every time
+      conquerors appear there have been wars, but this does not prove that the
+      conquerors caused the wars and that it is possible to find the laws of a
+      war in the personal activity of a single man. Whenever I look at my watch
+      and its hands point to ten, I hear the bells of the neighboring church;
+      but because the bells begin to ring when the hands of the clock reach ten,
+      I have no right to assume that the movement of the bells is caused by the
+      position of the hands of the watch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Whenever I see the movement of a locomotive I hear the whistle and see the
+      valves opening and wheels turning; but I have no right to conclude that
+      the whistling and the turning of wheels are the cause of the movement of
+      the engine.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The peasants say that a cold wind blows in late spring because the oaks
+      are budding, and really every spring cold winds do blow when the oak is
+      budding. But though I do not know what causes the cold winds to blow when
+      the oak buds unfold, I cannot agree with the peasants that the unfolding
+      of the oak buds is the cause of the cold wind, for the force of the wind
+      is beyond the influence of the buds. I see only a coincidence of
+      occurrences such as happens with all the phenomena of life, and I see that
+      however much and however carefully I observe the hands of the watch, and
+      the valves and wheels of the engine, and the oak, I shall not discover the
+      cause of the bells ringing, the engine moving, or of the winds of spring.
+      To that I must entirely change my point of view and study the laws of the
+      movement of steam, of the bells, and of the wind. History must do the
+      same. And attempts in this direction have already been made.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our
+      observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study
+      the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved.
+      No one can say in how far it is possible for man to advance in this way
+      toward an understanding of the laws of history; but it is evident that
+      only along that path does the possibility of discovering the laws of
+      history lie, and that as yet not a millionth part as much mental effort
+      has been applied in this direction by historians as has been devoted to
+      describing the actions of various kings, commanders, and ministers and
+      propounding the historians’ own reflections concerning these actions.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0231"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The forces of a dozen European nations burst into Russia. The Russian army
+      and people avoided a collision till Smolénsk was reached, and again from
+      Smolénsk to Borodinó. The French army pushed on to Moscow, its goal, its
+      impetus ever increasing as it neared its aim, just as the velocity of a
+      falling body increases as it approaches the earth. Behind it were seven
+      hundred miles of hunger-stricken, hostile country; ahead were a few dozen
+      miles separating it from its goal. Every soldier in Napoleon’s army felt
+      this and the invasion moved on by its own momentum.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The more the Russian army retreated the more fiercely a spirit of hatred
+      of the enemy flared up, and while it retreated the army increased and
+      consolidated. At Borodinó a collision took place. Neither army was broken
+      up, but the Russian army retreated immediately after the collision as
+      inevitably as a ball recoils after colliding with another having a greater
+      momentum, and with equal inevitability the ball of invasion that had
+      advanced with such momentum rolled on for some distance, though the
+      collision had deprived it of all its force.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Russians retreated eighty miles—to beyond Moscow—and the
+      French reached Moscow and there came to a standstill. For five weeks after
+      that there was not a single battle. The French did not move. As a
+      bleeding, mortally wounded animal licks its wounds, they remained inert in
+      Moscow for five weeks, and then suddenly, with no fresh reason, fled back:
+      they made a dash for the Kalúga road, and (after a victory—for at
+      Málo-Yaroslávets the field of conflict again remained theirs) without
+      undertaking a single serious battle, they fled still more rapidly back to
+      Smolénsk, beyond Smolénsk, beyond the Berëzina, beyond Vílna, and farther
+      still.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the evening of the twenty-sixth of August, Kutúzov and the whole
+      Russian army were convinced that the battle of Borodinó was a victory.
+      Kutúzov reported so to the Emperor. He gave orders to prepare for a fresh
+      conflict to finish the enemy and did this not to deceive anyone, but
+      because he knew that the enemy was beaten, as everyone who had taken part
+      in the battle knew it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But all that evening and next day reports came in one after another of
+      unheard-of losses, of the loss of half the army, and a fresh battle proved
+      physically impossible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>It was impossible</i> to give battle before information had been collected,
+      the wounded gathered in, the supplies of ammunition replenished, the slain
+      reckoned up, new officers appointed to replace those who had been killed,
+      and before the men had had food and sleep. And meanwhile, the very next
+      morning after the battle, the French army advanced of itself upon the
+      Russians, carried forward by the force of its own momentum now seemingly
+      increased in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from its
+      aim. Kutúzov’s wish was to attack next day, and the whole army desired to
+      do so. But to make an attack the wish to do so is not sufficient, there
+      must also be a possibility of doing it, and that possibility did not
+      exist. It was impossible not to retreat a day’s march, and then in the
+      same way it was impossible not to retreat another and a third day’s march,
+      and at last, on the first of September when the army drew near Moscow—despite
+      the strength of the feeling that had arisen in all ranks—the force
+      of circumstances compelled it to retire beyond Moscow. And the troops
+      retired one more, last, day’s march, and abandoned Moscow to the enemy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For people accustomed to think that plans of campaign and battles are made
+      by generals—as anyone of us sitting over a map in his study may
+      imagine how he would have arranged things in this or that battle—the
+      questions present themselves: Why did Kutúzov during the retreat not do
+      this or that? Why did he not take up a position before reaching Filí? Why
+      did he not retire at once by the Kalúga road, abandoning Moscow? and so
+      on. People accustomed to think in that way forget, or do not know, the
+      inevitable conditions which always limit the activities of any commander
+      in chief. The activity of a commander in chief does not at all resemble
+      the activity we imagine to ourselves when we sit at ease in our studies
+      examining some campaign on the map, with a certain number of troops on
+      this and that side in a certain known locality, and begin our plans from
+      some given moment. A commander in chief is never dealing with the
+      <i>beginning</i> of any event—the position from which we always contemplate
+      it. The commander in chief is always in the midst of a series of shifting
+      events and so he never can at any moment consider the whole import of an
+      event that is occurring. Moment by moment the event is imperceptibly
+      shaping itself, and at every moment of this continuous, uninterrupted
+      shaping of events the commander in chief is in the midst of a most complex
+      play of intrigues, worries, contingencies, authorities, projects,
+      counsels, threats, and deceptions and is continually obliged to reply to
+      innumerable questions addressed to him, which constantly conflict with one
+      another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Learned military authorities quite seriously tell us that Kutúzov should
+      have moved his army to the Kalúga road long before reaching Filí, and that
+      somebody actually submitted such a proposal to him. But a commander in
+      chief, especially at a difficult moment, has always before him not one
+      proposal but dozens simultaneously. And all these proposals, based on
+      strategics and tactics, contradict each other.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A commander in chief’s business, it would seem, is simply to choose one of
+      these projects. But even that he cannot do. Events and time do not wait.
+      For instance, on the twenty-eighth it is suggested to him to cross to the
+      Kalúga road, but just then an adjutant gallops up from Milorádovich asking
+      whether he is to engage the French or retire. An order must be given him
+      at once, that instant. And the order to retreat carries us past the turn
+      to the Kalúga road. And after the adjutant comes the commissary general
+      asking where the stores are to be taken, and the chief of the hospitals
+      asks where the wounded are to go, and a courier from Petersburg brings a
+      letter from the sovereign which does not admit of the possibility of
+      abandoning Moscow, and the commander in chief’s rival, the man who is
+      undermining him (and there are always not merely one but several such),
+      presents a new project diametrically opposed to that of turning to the
+      Kalúga road, and the commander in chief himself needs sleep and
+      refreshment to maintain his energy and a respectable general who has been
+      overlooked in the distribution of rewards comes to complain, and the
+      inhabitants of the district pray to be defended, and an officer sent to
+      inspect the locality comes in and gives a report quite contrary to what
+      was said by the officer previously sent; and a spy, a prisoner, and a
+      general who has been on reconnaissance, all describe the position of the
+      enemy’s army differently. People accustomed to misunderstand or to forget
+      these inevitable conditions of a commander in chief’s actions describe to
+      us, for instance, the position of the army at Filí and assume that the
+      commander in chief could, on the first of September, quite freely decide
+      whether to abandon Moscow or defend it; whereas, with the Russian army
+      less than four miles from Moscow, no such question existed. When had that
+      question been settled? At Drissa and at Smolénsk and most palpably of all
+      on the twenty-fourth of August at Shevárdino and on the twenty-sixth at
+      Borodinó, and each day and hour and minute of the retreat from Borodinó to
+      Filí.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0232"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      When Ermólov, having been sent by Kutúzov to inspect the position, told
+      the field marshal that it was impossible to fight there before Moscow and
+      that they must retreat, Kutúzov looked at him in silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Give me your hand,” said he and, turning it over so as to feel the pulse,
+      added: “You are not well, my dear fellow. Think what you are saying!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov could not yet admit the possibility of retreating beyond Moscow
+      without a battle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the Poklónny Hill, four miles from the Dorogomílov gate of Moscow,
+      Kutúzov got out of his carriage and sat down on a bench by the roadside. A
+      great crowd of generals gathered round him, and Count Rostopchín, who had
+      come out from Moscow, joined them. This brilliant company separated into
+      several groups who all discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the
+      position, the state of the army, the plans suggested, the situation of
+      Moscow, and military questions generally. Though they had not been
+      summoned for the purpose, and though it was not so called, they all felt
+      that this was really a council of war. The conversations all dealt with
+      public questions. If anyone gave or asked for personal news, it was done
+      in a whisper and they immediately reverted to general matters. No jokes,
+      or laughter, or smiles even, were seen among all these men. They evidently
+      all made an effort to hold themselves at the height the situation
+      demanded. And all these groups, while talking among themselves, tried to
+      keep near the commander in chief (whose bench formed the center of the
+      gathering) and to speak so that he might overhear them. The commander in
+      chief listened to what was being said and sometimes asked them to repeat
+      their remarks, but did not himself take part in the conversations or
+      express any opinion. After hearing what was being said by one or other of
+      these groups he generally turned away with an air of disappointment, as
+      though they were not speaking of anything he wished to hear. Some
+      discussed the position that had been chosen, criticizing not the position
+      itself so much as the mental capacity of those who had chosen it. Others
+      argued that a mistake had been made earlier and that a battle should have
+      been fought two days before. Others again spoke of the battle of
+      Salamanca, which was described by Crosart, a newly arrived Frenchman in a
+      Spanish uniform. (This Frenchman and one of the German princes serving
+      with the Russian army were discussing the siege of Saragossa and
+      considering the possibility of defending Moscow in a similar manner.)
+      Count Rostopchín was telling a fourth group that he was prepared to die
+      with the city train bands under the walls of the capital, but that he
+      still could not help regretting having been left in ignorance of what was
+      happening, and that had he known it sooner things would have been
+      different.... A fifth group, displaying the profundity of their strategic
+      perceptions, discussed the direction the troops would now have to take. A
+      sixth group was talking absolute nonsense. Kutúzov’s expression grew more
+      and more preoccupied and gloomy. From all this talk he saw only one thing:
+      that to defend Moscow was a <i>physical impossibility</i> in the full meaning of
+      those words, that is to say, so utterly impossible that if any senseless
+      commander were to give orders to fight, confusion would result but the
+      battle would still not take place. It would not take place because the
+      commanders not merely all recognized the position to be impossible, but in
+      their conversations were only discussing what would happen after its
+      inevitable abandonment. How could the commanders lead their troops to a
+      field of battle they considered impossible to hold? The lower-grade
+      officers and even the soldiers (who too reason) also considered the
+      position impossible and therefore could not go to fight, fully convinced
+      as they were of defeat. If Bennigsen insisted on the position being
+      defended and others still discussed it, the question was no longer
+      important in itself but only as a pretext for disputes and intrigue. This
+      Kutúzov knew well.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bennigsen, who had chosen the position, warmly displayed his Russian
+      patriotism (Kutúzov could not listen to this without wincing) by insisting
+      that Moscow must be defended. His aim was as clear as daylight to Kutúzov:
+      if the defense failed, to throw the blame on Kutúzov who had brought the
+      army as far as the Sparrow Hills without giving battle; if it succeeded,
+      to claim the success as his own; or if battle were not given, to clear
+      himself of the crime of abandoning Moscow. But this intrigue did not now
+      occupy the old man’s mind. One terrible question absorbed him and to that
+      question he heard no reply from anyone. The question for him now was:
+      “Have I really allowed Napoleon to reach Moscow, and when did I do so?
+      When was it decided? Can it have been yesterday when I ordered Plátov to
+      retreat, or was it the evening before, when I had a nap and told Bennigsen
+      to issue orders? Or was it earlier still?... When, when was this terrible
+      affair decided? Moscow must be abandoned. The army must retreat and the
+      order to do so must be given.” To give that terrible order seemed to him
+      equivalent to resigning the command of the army. And not only did he love
+      power to which he was accustomed (the honours awarded to Prince
+      Prozoróvski, under whom he had served in Turkey, galled him), but he was
+      convinced that he was destined to save Russia and that that was why,
+      against the Emperor’s wish and by the will of the people, he had been
+      chosen commander in chief. He was convinced that he alone could maintain
+      command of the army in these difficult circumstances, and that in all the
+      world he alone could encounter the invincible Napoleon without fear, and
+      he was horrified at the thought of the order he had to issue. But
+      something had to be decided, and these conversations around him which were
+      assuming too free a character must be stopped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He called the most important generals to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My head, be it good or bad, must depend on itself,” said he, rising from
+      the bench, and he rode to Filí where his carriages were waiting.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0233"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The Council of War began to assemble at two in the afternoon in the better
+      and roomier part of Andrew Savostyánov’s hut. The men, women, and children
+      of the large peasant family crowded into the back room across the passage.
+      Only Malásha, Andrew’s six-year-old granddaughter whom his Serene Highness
+      had petted and to whom he had given a lump of sugar while drinking his
+      tea, remained on the top of the brick oven in the larger room. Malásha
+      looked down from the oven with shy delight at the faces, uniforms, and
+      decorations of the generals, who one after another came into the room and
+      sat down on the broad benches in the corner under the icons. “Granddad”
+       himself, as Malásha in her own mind called Kutúzov, sat apart in a dark
+      corner behind the oven. He sat, sunk deep in a folding armchair, and
+      continually cleared his throat and pulled at the collar of his coat which,
+      though it was unbuttoned, still seemed to pinch his neck. Those who
+      entered went up one by one to the field marshal; he pressed the hands of
+      some and nodded to others. His adjutant Kaysárov was about to draw back
+      the curtain of the window facing Kutúzov, but the latter moved his hand
+      angrily and Kaysárov understood that his Serene Highness did not wish his
+      face to be seen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Round the peasant’s deal table, on which lay maps, plans, pencils, and
+      papers, so many people gathered that the orderlies brought in another
+      bench and put it beside the table. Ermólov, Kaysárov, and Toll, who had
+      just arrived, sat down on this bench. In the foremost place, immediately
+      under the icons, sat Barclay de Tolly, his high forehead merging into his
+      bald crown. He had a St. George’s Cross round his neck and looked pale and
+      ill. He had been feverish for two days and was now shivering and in pain.
+      Beside him sat Uvárov, who with rapid gesticulations was giving him some
+      information, speaking in low tones as they all did. Chubby little
+      Dokhtúrov was listening attentively with eyebrows raised and arms folded
+      on his stomach. On the other side sat Count Ostermann-Tolstóy, seemingly
+      absorbed in his own thoughts. His broad head with its bold features and
+      glittering eyes was resting on his hand. Raévski, twitching forward the
+      black hair on his temples as was his habit, glanced now at Kutúzov and now
+      at the door with a look of impatience. Konovnítsyn’s firm, handsome, and
+      kindly face was lit up by a tender, sly smile. His glance met Malásha’s,
+      and the expression of his eyes caused the little girl to smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They were all waiting for Bennigsen, who on the pretext of inspecting the
+      position was finishing his savory dinner. They waited for him from four
+      till six o’clock and did not begin their deliberations all that time but
+      talked in low tones of other matters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only when Bennigsen had entered the hut did Kutúzov leave his corner and
+      draw toward the table, but not near enough for the candles that had been
+      placed there to light up his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bennigsen opened the council with the question: “Are we to abandon
+      Russia’s ancient and sacred capital without a struggle, or are we to
+      defend it?” A prolonged and general silence followed. There was a frown on
+      every face and only Kutúzov’s angry grunts and occasional cough broke the
+      silence. All eyes were gazing at him. Malásha too looked at “Granddad.”
+       She was nearest to him and saw how his face puckered; he seemed about to
+      cry, but this did not last long.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Russia’s ancient and sacred capital!”</i> he suddenly said,
+      repeating Bennigsen’s words in an angry voice and thereby drawing attention
+      to the false note in them. “Allow me to tell you, your excellency, that that
+      question has no meaning for a Russian.” (He lurched his heavy body
+      forward.) “Such a question cannot be put; it is senseless! The question I
+      have asked these gentlemen to meet to discuss is a military one. The
+      question is that of saving Russia. Is it better to give up Moscow without
+      a battle, or by accepting battle to risk losing the army as well as
+      Moscow? That is the question on which I want your opinion,” and he sank
+      back in his chair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The discussion began. Bennigsen did not yet consider his game lost.
+      Admitting the view of Barclay and others that a defensive battle at Filí
+      was impossible, but imbued with Russian patriotism and the love of Moscow,
+      he proposed to move troops from the right to the left flank during the
+      night and attack the French right flank the following day. Opinions were
+      divided, and arguments were advanced for and against that project.
+      Ermólov, Dokhtúrov, and Raévski agreed with Bennigsen. Whether feeling it
+      necessary to make a sacrifice before abandoning the capital or guided by
+      other, personal considerations, these generals seemed not to understand
+      that this council could not alter the inevitable course of events and that
+      Moscow was in effect already abandoned. The other generals, however,
+      understood it and, leaving aside the question of Moscow, spoke of the
+      direction the army should take in its retreat. Malásha, who kept her eyes
+      fixed on what was going on before her, understood the meaning of the
+      council differently. It seemed to her that it was only a personal struggle
+      between “Granddad” and “Long-coat” as she termed Bennigsen. She saw that
+      they grew spiteful when they spoke to one another, and in her heart she
+      sided with “Granddad.” In the midst of the conversation she noticed
+      “Granddad” give Bennigsen a quick, subtle glance, and then to her joys she
+      saw that “Granddad” said something to “Long-coat” which settled him.
+      Bennigsen suddenly reddened and paced angrily up and down the room. What
+      so affected him was Kutúzov’s calm and quiet comment on the advantage or
+      disadvantage of Bennigsen’s proposal to move troops by night from the
+      right to the left flank to attack the French right wing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Gentlemen,” said Kutúzov, “I cannot approve of the count’s plan. Moving
+      troops in close proximity to an enemy is always dangerous, and military
+      history supports that view. For instance...” Kutúzov seemed to reflect,
+      searching for an example, then with a clear, naïve look at Bennigsen he
+      added: “Oh yes; take the battle of Friedland, which I think the count well
+      remembers, and which was... not fully successful, only because our troops
+      were rearranged too near the enemy....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      There followed a momentary pause, which seemed very long to them all.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The discussion recommenced, but pauses frequently occurred and they all
+      felt that there was no more to be said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During one of these pauses Kutúzov heaved a deep sigh as if preparing to
+      speak. They all looked at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, gentlemen, I see that it is I who will have to pay for the broken
+      crockery,” said he, and rising slowly he moved to the table. “Gentlemen, I
+      have heard your views. Some of you will not agree with me. But I,” he
+      paused, “by the authority entrusted to me by my Sovereign and country,
+      order a retreat.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      After that the generals began to disperse with the solemnity and
+      circumspect silence of people who are leaving, after a funeral.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Some of the generals, in low tones and in a strain very different from the
+      way they had spoken during the council, communicated something to their
+      commander in chief.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Malásha, who had long been expected for supper, climbed carefully
+      backwards down from the oven, her bare little feet catching at its
+      projections, and slipping between the legs of the generals she darted out
+      of the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he had dismissed the generals Kutúzov sat a long time with his elbows
+      on the table, thinking always of the same terrible question: “When, when
+      did the abandonment of Moscow become inevitable? When was that done which
+      settled the matter? And who was to blame for it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I did not expect this,” said he to his adjutant Schneider when the latter
+      came in late that night. “I did not expect this! I did not think this
+      would happen.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You should take some rest, your Serene Highness,” replied Schneider.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But no! They shall eat horseflesh yet, like the Turks!” exclaimed Kutúzov
+      without replying, striking the table with his podgy fist. “They shall too,
+      if only...”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0234"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At that very time, in circumstances even more important than retreating
+      without a battle, namely the evacuation and burning of Moscow, Rostopchín,
+      who is usually represented as being the instigator of that event, acted in
+      an altogether different manner from Kutúzov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the battle of Borodinó the abandonment and burning of Moscow was as
+      inevitable as the retreat of the army beyond Moscow without fighting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Every Russian might have predicted it, not by reasoning but by the feeling
+      implanted in each of us and in our fathers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The same thing that took place in Moscow had happened in all the towns and
+      villages on Russian soil beginning with Smolénsk, without the
+      participation of Count Rostopchín and his broadsheets. The people awaited
+      the enemy unconcernedly, did not riot or become excited or tear anyone to
+      pieces, but faced its fate, feeling within it the strength to find what it
+      should do at that most difficult moment. And as soon as the enemy drew
+      near the wealthy classes went away abandoning their property, while the
+      poorer remained and burned and destroyed what was left.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The consciousness that this would be so and would always be so was and is
+      present in the heart of every Russian. And a consciousness of this, and a
+      foreboding that Moscow would be taken, was present in Russian Moscow
+      society in 1812. Those who had quitted Moscow already in July and at the
+      beginning of August showed that they expected this. Those who went away,
+      taking what they could and abandoning their houses and half their
+      belongings, did so from the latent patriotism which expresses itself not
+      by phrases or by giving one’s children to save the fatherland and similar
+      unnatural exploits, but unobtrusively, simply, organically, and therefore
+      in the way that always produces the most powerful results.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is disgraceful to run away from danger; only cowards are running away
+      from Moscow,” they were told. In his broadsheets Rostopchín impressed on
+      them that to leave Moscow was shameful. They were ashamed to be called
+      cowards, ashamed to leave, but still they left, knowing it had to be done.
+      Why did they go? It is impossible to suppose that Rostopchín had scared
+      them by his accounts of horrors Napoleon had committed in conquered
+      countries. The first people to go away were the rich educated people who
+      knew quite well that Vienna and Berlin had remained intact and that during
+      Napoleon’s occupation the inhabitants had spent their time pleasantly in
+      the company of the charming Frenchmen whom the Russians, and especially
+      the Russian ladies, then liked so much.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They went away because for Russians there could be no question as to
+      whether things would go well or ill under French rule in Moscow. It was
+      out of the question to be under French rule, it would be the worst thing
+      that could happen. They went away even before the battle of Borodinó and
+      still more rapidly after it, despite Rostopchín’s calls to defend Moscow
+      or the announcement of his intention to take the wonder-working icon of
+      the Iberian Mother of God and go to fight, or of the balloons that were to
+      destroy the French, and despite all the nonsense Rostopchín wrote in his
+      broadsheets. They knew that it was for the army to fight, and that if it
+      could not succeed it would not do to take young ladies and house serfs to
+      the Three Hills quarter of Moscow to fight Napoleon, and that they must go
+      away, sorry as they were to abandon their property to destruction. They
+      went away without thinking of the tremendous significance of that immense
+      and wealthy city being given over to destruction, for a great city with
+      wooden buildings was certain when abandoned by its inhabitants to be
+      burned. They went away each on his own account, and yet it was only in
+      consequence of their going away that the momentous event was accomplished
+      that will always remain the greatest glory of the Russian people. The lady
+      who, afraid of being stopped by Count Rostopchín’s orders, had already in
+      June moved with her Negroes and her women jesters from Moscow to her
+      Sarátov estate, with a vague consciousness that she was not Bonaparte’s
+      servant, was really, simply, and truly carrying out the great work which
+      saved Russia. But Count Rostopchín, who now taunted those who left Moscow
+      and now had the government offices removed; now distributed quite useless
+      weapons to the drunken rabble; now had processions displaying the icons,
+      and now forbade Father Augustin to remove icons or the relics of saints;
+      now seized all the private carts in Moscow and on one hundred and
+      thirty-six of them removed the balloon that was being constructed by
+      Leppich; now hinted that he would burn Moscow and related how he had set
+      fire to his own house; now wrote a proclamation to the French solemnly
+      upbraiding them for having destroyed his Orphanage; now claimed the glory
+      of having hinted that he would burn Moscow and now repudiated the deed;
+      now ordered the people to catch all spies and bring them to him, and now
+      reproached them for doing so; now expelled all the French residents from
+      Moscow, and now allowed Madame Aubert-Chalmé (the center of the whole
+      French colony in Moscow) to remain, but ordered the venerable old
+      postmaster Klyucharëv to be arrested and exiled for no particular offense;
+      now assembled the people at the Three Hills to fight the French and now,
+      to get rid of them, handed over to them a man to be killed and himself
+      drove away by a back gate; now declared that he would not survive the fall
+      of Moscow, and now wrote French verses in albums concerning his share in
+      the affair—this man did not understand the meaning of what was
+      happening but merely wanted to do something himself that would astonish
+      people, to perform some patriotically heroic feat; and like a child he
+      made sport of the momentous, and unavoidable event—the abandonment
+      and burning of Moscow—and tried with his puny hand now to speed and
+      now to stay the enormous, popular tide that bore him along with it.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0235"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Hélène, having returned with the court from Vílna to Petersburg, found
+      herself in a difficult position.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In Petersburg she had enjoyed the special protection of a grandee who
+      occupied one of the highest posts in the Empire. In Vílna she had formed
+      an intimacy with a young foreign prince. When she returned to Petersburg
+      both the magnate and the prince were there, and both claimed their rights.
+      Hélène was faced by a new problem—how to preserve her intimacy with
+      both without offending either.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      What would have seemed difficult or even impossible to another woman did
+      not cause the least embarrassment to Countess Bezúkhova, who evidently
+      deserved her reputation of being a very clever woman. Had she attempted
+      concealment, or tried to extricate herself from her awkward position by
+      cunning, she would have spoiled her case by acknowledging herself guilty.
+      But Hélène, like a really great man who can do whatever he pleases, at once
+      assumed her own position to be correct, as she sincerely believed it to
+      be, and that everyone else was to blame.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The first time the young foreigner allowed himself to reproach her, she
+      lifted her beautiful head and, half turning to him, said firmly: “That’s
+      just like a man—selfish and cruel! I expected nothing else. A woman
+      sacrifices herself for you, she suffers, and this is her reward! What
+      right have you, monseigneur, to demand an account of my attachments and
+      friendships? He is a man who has been more than a father to me!” The
+      prince was about to say something, but Hélène interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, yes,” said she, “it may be that he has other sentiments for me than
+      those of a father, but that is not a reason for me to shut my door on him.
+      I am not a man, that I should repay kindness with ingratitude! Know,
+      monseigneur, that in all that relates to my intimate feelings I render
+      account only to God and to my conscience,” she concluded, laying her hand
+      on her beautiful, fully expanded bosom and looking up to heaven.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But for heaven’s sake listen to me!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Marry me, and I will be your slave!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But that’s impossible.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You won’t deign to demean yourself by marrying me, you...” said Hélène,
+      beginning to cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The prince tried to comfort her, but Hélène, as if quite distraught, said
+      through her tears that there was nothing to prevent her marrying, that
+      there were precedents (there were up to that time very few, but she
+      mentioned Napoleon and some other exalted personages), that she had never
+      been her husband’s wife, and that she had been sacrificed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But the law, religion...” said the prince, already yielding.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The law, religion... What have they been invented for if they can’t
+      arrange that?” said Hélène.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The prince was surprised that so simple an idea had not occurred to him,
+      and he applied for advice to the holy brethren of the Society of Jesus,
+      with whom he was on intimate terms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A few days later at one of those enchanting fetes which Hélène gave at her
+      country house on the Stone Island, the charming Monsieur de Jobert, a man
+      no longer young, with snow white hair and brilliant black eyes, a Jesuit <i>à
+      robe courte</i> * was presented to her, and in the garden by the light of the
+      illuminations and to the sound of music talked to her for a long time of
+      the love of God, of Christ, of the Sacred Heart, and of the consolations
+      the one true Catholic religion affords in this world and the next. Hélène
+      was touched, and more than once tears rose to her eyes and to those of
+      Monsieur de Jobert and their voices trembled. A dance, for which her
+      partner came to seek her, put an end to her discourse with her future
+      <i>directeur de conscience</i>, but the next evening Monsieur de Jobert came to
+      see Hélène when she was alone, and after that often came again.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Lay member of the Society of Jesus.
+</p>
+<p>
+      One day he took the countess to a Roman Catholic church, where she knelt
+      down before the altar to which she was led. The enchanting, middle-aged
+      Frenchman laid his hands on her head and, as she herself afterward
+      described it, she felt something like a fresh breeze wafted into her soul.
+      It was explained to her that this was <i>la grâce</i>.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After that a long-frocked abbé was brought to her. She confessed to him,
+      and he absolved her from her sins. Next day she received a box containing
+      the Sacred Host, which was left at her house for her to partake of. A few
+      days later Hélène learned with pleasure that she had now been admitted to
+      the true Catholic Church and that in a few days the Pope himself would
+      hear of her and would send her a certain document.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All that was done around her and to her at this time, all the attention
+      devoted to her by so many clever men and expressed in such pleasant,
+      refined ways, and the state of dove-like purity she was now in (she wore
+      only white dresses and white ribbons all that time) gave her pleasure, but
+      her pleasure did not cause her for a moment to forget her aim. And as it
+      always happens in contests of cunning that a stupid person gets the better
+      of cleverer ones, Hélène—having realized that the main object of all
+      these words and all this trouble was, after converting her to Catholicism,
+      to obtain money from her for Jesuit institutions (as to which she received
+      indications)—before parting with her money insisted that the various
+      operations necessary to free her from her husband should be performed. In
+      her view the aim of every religion was merely to preserve certain
+      proprieties while affording satisfaction to human desires. And with this
+      aim, in one of her talks with her Father Confessor, she insisted on an
+      answer to the question, in how far was she bound by her marriage?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They were sitting in the twilight by a window in the drawing room. The
+      scent of flowers came in at the window. Hélène was wearing a white dress,
+      transparent over her shoulders and bosom. The abbé, a well-fed man with a
+      plump, clean-shaven chin, a pleasant firm mouth, and white hands meekly
+      folded on his knees, sat close to Hélène and, with a subtle smile on his
+      lips and a peaceful look of delight at her beauty, occasionally glanced at
+      her face as he explained his opinion on the subject. Hélène with an uneasy
+      smile looked at his curly hair and his plump, clean-shaven, blackish
+      cheeks and every moment expected the conversation to take a fresh turn.
+      But the abbé, though he evidently enjoyed the beauty of his companion, was
+      absorbed in his mastery of the matter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The course of the Father Confessor’s arguments ran as follows: “Ignorant
+      of the import of what you were undertaking, you made a vow of conjugal
+      fidelity to a man who on his part, by entering the married state without
+      faith in the religious significance of marriage, committed an act of
+      sacrilege. That marriage lacked the dual significance it should have had.
+      Yet in spite of this your vow was binding. You swerved from it. What did
+      you commit by so acting? A venial, or a mortal, sin? A venial sin, for you
+      acted without evil intention. If now you married again with the object of
+      bearing children, your sin might be forgiven. But the question is again a
+      twofold one: firstly...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But suddenly Hélène, who was getting bored, said with one of her
+      bewitching smiles: “But I think that having espoused the true religion I
+      cannot be bound by what a false religion laid upon me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The director of her conscience was astounded at having the case presented
+      to him thus with the simplicity of Columbus’ egg. He was delighted at the
+      unexpected rapidity of his pupil’s progress, but could not abandon the
+      edifice of argument he had laboriously constructed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let us understand one another, Countess,” said he with a smile, and began
+      refuting his spiritual daughter’s arguments.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0236"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Hélène understood that the question was very simple and easy from the
+      ecclesiastical point of view, and that her directors were making
+      difficulties only because they were apprehensive as to how the matter
+      would be regarded by the secular authorities.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      So she decided that it was necessary to prepare the opinion of society.
+      She provoked the jealousy of the elderly magnate and told him what she had
+      told her other suitor; that is, she put the matter so that the only way
+      for him to obtain a right over her was to marry her. The elderly magnate
+      was at first as much taken aback by this suggestion of marriage with a
+      woman whose husband was alive, as the younger man had been, but Hélène’s
+      imperturbable conviction that it was as simple and natural as marrying a
+      maiden had its effect on him too. Had Hélène herself shown the least sign
+      of hesitation, shame, or secrecy, her cause would certainly have been
+      lost; but not only did she show no signs of secrecy or shame, on the
+      contrary, with good-natured naïveté she told her intimate friends (and
+      these were all Petersburg) that both the prince and the magnate had
+      proposed to her and that she loved both and was afraid of grieving either.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A rumor immediately spread in Petersburg, not that Hélène wanted to be
+      divorced from her husband (had such a report spread many would have
+      opposed so illegal an intention) but simply that the unfortunate and
+      interesting Hélène was in doubt which of the two men she should marry. The
+      question was no longer whether this was possible, but only which was the
+      better match and how the matter would be regarded at court. There were, it
+      is true, some rigid individuals unable to rise to the height of such a
+      question, who saw in the project a desecration of the sacrament of
+      marriage, but there were not many such and they remained silent, while the
+      majority were interested in Hélène’s good fortune and in the question
+      which match would be the more advantageous. Whether it was right or wrong
+      to remarry while one had a husband living they did not discuss, for that
+      question had evidently been settled by people “wiser than you or me,” as
+      they said, and to doubt the correctness of that decision would be to risk
+      exposing one’s stupidity and incapacity to live in society.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only Márya Dmítrievna Akhrosímova, who had come to Petersburg that summer
+      to see one of her sons, allowed herself plainly to express an opinion
+      contrary to the general one. Meeting Hélène at a ball she stopped her in
+      the middle of the room and, amid general silence, said in her gruff voice:
+      “So wives of living men have started marrying again! Perhaps you think you
+      have invented a novelty? You have been forestalled, my dear! It was
+      thought of long ago. It is done in all the brothels,” and with these words
+      Márya Dmítrievna, turning up her wide sleeves with her usual threatening
+      gesture and glancing sternly round, moved across the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though people were afraid of Márya Dmítrievna she was regarded in
+      Petersburg as a buffoon, and so of what she had said they only noticed,
+      and repeated in a whisper, the one coarse word she had used, supposing the
+      whole sting of her remark to lie in that word.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli, who of late very often forgot what he had said and repeated
+      one and the same thing a hundred times, remarked to his daughter whenever
+      he chanced to see her:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hélène, I have a word to say to you,” and he would lead her aside,
+      drawing her hand downward. “I have heard of certain projects concerning...
+      you know. Well my dear child, you know how your father’s heart rejoices to
+      know that you... You have suffered so much.... But, my dear child, consult
+      only your own heart. That is all I have to say,” and concealing his
+      unvarying emotion he would press his cheek against his daughter’s and move
+      away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bilíbin, who had not lost his reputation of an exceedingly clever man, and
+      who was one of the disinterested friends so brilliant a woman as Hélène
+      always has—men friends who can never change into lovers—once
+      gave her his view of the matter at a small and intimate gathering.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Listen, Bilíbin,” said Hélène (she always called friends of that sort by
+      their surnames), and she touched his coat sleeve with her white, beringed
+      fingers. “Tell me, as you would a sister, what I ought to do. Which of the
+      two?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Bilíbin wrinkled up the skin over his eyebrows and pondered, with a smile
+      on his lips.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are not taking me unawares, you know,” said he. “As a true friend, I
+      have thought and thought again about your affair. You see, if you marry
+      the prince”—he meant the younger man—and he crooked one
+      finger, “you forever lose the chance of marrying the other, and you will
+      displease the court besides. (You know there is some kind of connection.)
+      But if you marry the old count you will make his last days happy, and as
+      widow of the Grand... the prince would no longer be making a <i>mésalliance</i>
+      by marrying you,” and Bilíbin smoothed out his forehead.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s a true friend!” said Hélène beaming, and again touching Bilíbin’s
+      sleeve. “But I love them, you know, and don’t want to distress either of
+      them. I would give my life for the happiness of them both.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Bilíbin shrugged his shoulders, as much as to say that not even he could
+      help in that difficulty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Une maîtresse-femme!</i> * That’s what is called putting things squarely. She
+      would like to be married to all three at the same time,” thought he.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * A masterly woman.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “But tell me, how will your husband look at the matter?” Bilíbin asked,
+      his reputation being so well established that he did not fear to ask so
+      naïve a question. “Will he agree?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, he loves me so!” said Hélène, who for some reason imagined that
+      Pierre too loved her. “He will do anything for me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Bilíbin puckered his skin in preparation for something witty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Even divorce you?” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Hélène laughed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Among those who ventured to doubt the justifiability of the proposed
+      marriage was Hélène’s mother, Princess Kurágina. She was continually
+      tormented by jealousy of her daughter, and now that jealousy concerned a
+      subject near to her own heart, she could not reconcile herself to the
+      idea. She consulted a Russian priest as to the possibility of divorce and
+      remarriage during a husband’s lifetime, and the priest told her that it
+      was impossible, and to her delight showed her a text in the Gospel which
+      (as it seemed to him) plainly forbids remarriage while the husband is
+      alive.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Armed with these arguments, which appeared to her unanswerable, she drove
+      to her daughter’s early one morning so as to find her alone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having listened to her mother’s objections, Hélène smiled blandly and
+      ironically.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But it says plainly: ‘Whosoever shall marry her that is divorced...’”
+       said the old princess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Ah, Maman, ne dites pas de bêtises. Vous ne comprenez rien. Dans ma
+      position j’ai des devoirs,”</i> * said Hélène changing from Russian, in which
+      language she always felt that her case did not sound quite clear, into
+      French which suited it better.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “Oh, Mamma, don’t talk nonsense! You don’t understand
+     anything. In my position I have obligations.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “But, my dear....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, Mamma, how is it you don’t understand that the Holy Father, who has
+      the right to grant dispensations...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Just then the lady companion who lived with Hélène came in to announce
+      that His Highness was in the ballroom and wished to see her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Non, dites-lui que je ne veux pas le voir, que je suis furieuse contre
+      lui, parce qu’il m’a manqué parole.”</i> *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “No, tell him I don’t wish to see him, I am furious with
+     him for not keeping his word to me.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Comtesse, à tout péché miséricorde,”</i> * said a fair-haired young
+      man with a long face and nose, as he entered the room.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Countess, there is mercy for every sin.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      The old princess rose respectfully and curtsied. The young man who had
+      entered took no notice of her. The princess nodded to her daughter and
+      sidled out of the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, she is right,” thought the old princess, all her convictions
+      dissipated by the appearance of His Highness. “She is right, but how is it
+      that we in our irrecoverable youth did not know it? Yet it is so simple,”
+       she thought as she got into her carriage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      By the beginning of August Hélène’s affairs were clearly defined and she
+      wrote a letter to her husband—who, as she imagined, loved her very
+      much—informing him of her intention to marry N.N. and of her having
+      embraced the one true faith, and asking him to carry out all the
+      formalities necessary for a divorce, which would be explained to him by
+      the bearer of the letter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And so I pray God to have you, my friend, in His holy and powerful keeping—Your
+      friend Hélène.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This letter was brought to Pierre’s house when he was on the field of
+      Borodinó.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0237"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Toward the end of the battle of Borodinó, Pierre, having run down from
+      Raévski’s battery a second time, made his way through a gully to Knyazkóvo
+      with a crowd of soldiers, reached the dressing station, and seeing blood
+      and hearing cries and groans hurried on, still entangled in the crowds of
+      soldiers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The one thing he now desired with his whole soul was to get away quickly
+      from the terrible sensations amid which he had lived that day and return
+      to ordinary conditions of life and sleep quietly in a room in his own bed.
+      He felt that only in the ordinary conditions of life would he be able to
+      understand himself and all he had seen and felt. But such ordinary
+      conditions of life were nowhere to be found.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though shells and bullets did not whistle over the road along which he was
+      going, still on all sides there was what there had been on the field of
+      battle. There were still the same suffering, exhausted, and sometimes
+      strangely indifferent faces, the same blood, the same soldiers’ overcoats,
+      the same sounds of firing which, though distant now, still aroused terror,
+      and besides this there were the foul air and the dust.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having gone a couple of miles along the Mozháysk road, Pierre sat down by
+      the roadside.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dusk had fallen, and the roar of guns died away. Pierre lay leaning on his
+      elbow for a long time, gazing at the shadows that moved past him in the
+      darkness. He was continually imagining that a cannon ball was flying
+      toward him with a terrific whizz, and then he shuddered and sat up. He had
+      no idea how long he had been there. In the middle of the night three
+      soldiers, having brought some firewood, settled down near him and began
+      lighting a fire.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The soldiers, who threw sidelong glances at Pierre, got the fire to burn
+      and placed an iron pot on it into which they broke some dried bread and
+      put a little dripping. The pleasant odor of greasy viands mingled with the
+      smell of smoke. Pierre sat up and sighed. The three soldiers were eating
+      and talking among themselves, taking no notice of him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And who may you be?” one of them suddenly asked Pierre, evidently meaning
+      what Pierre himself had in mind, namely: “If you want to eat we’ll give
+      you some food, only let us know whether you are an honest man.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I, I...” said Pierre, feeling it necessary to minimize his social
+      position as much as possible so as to be nearer to the soldiers and better
+      understood by them. “By rights I am a militia officer, but my men are not
+      here. I came to the battle and have lost them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “There now!” said one of the soldiers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Another shook his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Would you like a little mash?” the first soldier asked, and handed Pierre
+      a wooden spoon after licking it clean.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre sat down by the fire and began eating the mash, as they called the
+      food in the cauldron, and he thought it more delicious than any food he
+      had ever tasted. As he sat bending greedily over it, helping himself to
+      large spoonfuls and chewing one after another, his face was lit up by the
+      fire and the soldiers looked at him in silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where have you to go to? Tell us!” said one of them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To Mozháysk.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You’re a gentleman, aren’t you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And what’s your name?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Peter Kirílych.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well then, Peter Kirílych, come along with us, we’ll take you there.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In the total darkness the soldiers walked with Pierre to Mozháysk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      By the time they got near Mozháysk and began ascending the steep hill into
+      the town, the cocks were already crowing. Pierre went on with the
+      soldiers, quite forgetting that his inn was at the bottom of the hill and
+      that he had already passed it. He would not soon have remembered this,
+      such was his state of forgetfulness, had he not halfway up the hill
+      stumbled upon his groom, who had been to look for him in the town and was
+      returning to the inn. The groom recognized Pierre in the darkness by his
+      white hat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency!” he said. “Why, we were beginning to despair! How is it
+      you are on foot? And where are you going, please?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, yes!” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The soldiers stopped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So you’ve found your folk?” said one of them. “Well, good-by, Peter
+      Kirílych—isn’t it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Good-by, Peter Kirílych!” Pierre heard the other voices repeat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good-by!” he said and turned with his groom toward the inn.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I ought to give them something!” he thought, and felt in his pocket. “No,
+      better not!” said another, inner voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was not a room to be had at the inn, they were all occupied. Pierre
+      went out into the yard and, covering himself up head and all, lay down in
+      his carriage.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0238"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Scarcely had Pierre laid his head on the pillow before he felt himself
+      falling asleep, but suddenly, almost with the distinctness of reality, he
+      heard the <i>boom, boom, boom</i> of firing, the thud of projectiles, groans and
+      cries, and smelled blood and powder, and a feeling of horror and dread of
+      death seized him. Filled with fright he opened his eyes and lifted his
+      head from under his cloak. All was tranquil in the yard. Only someone’s
+      orderly passed through the gateway, splashing through the mud, and talked
+      to the innkeeper. Above Pierre’s head some pigeons, disturbed by the
+      movement he had made in sitting up, fluttered under the dark roof of the
+      penthouse. The whole courtyard was permeated by a strong peaceful smell of
+      stable yards, delightful to Pierre at that moment. He could see the clear
+      starry sky between the dark roofs of two penthouses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Thank God, there is no more of that!” he thought, covering up his head
+      again. “Oh, what a terrible thing is fear, and how shamefully I yielded to
+      it! But they... <i>they</i> were steady and calm all the time, to the end...”
+       thought he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>They</i>, in Pierre’s mind, were the soldiers, those who had been at the
+      battery, those who had given him food, and those who had prayed before the
+      icon. <i>They</i>, those strange men he had not previously known, stood out
+      clearly and sharply from everyone else.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To be a soldier, just a soldier!” thought Pierre as he fell asleep, “to
+      enter communal life completely, to be imbued by what makes them what they
+      are. But how to cast off all the superfluous, devilish burden of my outer
+      man? There was a time when I could have done it. I could have run away
+      from my father, as I wanted to. Or I might have been sent to serve as a
+      soldier after the duel with Dólokhov.” And the memory of the dinner at the
+      English Club when he had challenged Dólokhov flashed through Pierre’s
+      mind, and then he remembered his benefactor at Torzhók. And now a picture
+      of a solemn meeting of the lodge presented itself to his mind. It was
+      taking place at the English Club and someone near and dear to him sat at
+      the end of the table. “Yes, that is he! It is my benefactor. But he died!”
+      thought Pierre. “Yes, he died, and I did not know he was alive. How sorry
+      I am that he died, and how glad I am that he is alive again!” On one side
+      of the table sat Anatole, Dólokhov, Nesvítski, Denísov, and others like
+      them (in his dream the category to which these men belonged was as clearly
+      defined in his mind as the category of those he termed <i>they</i>), and he heard
+      those people, Anatole and Dólokhov, shouting and singing loudly; yet
+      through their shouting the voice of his benefactor was heard speaking all
+      the time and the sound of his words was as weighty and uninterrupted as
+      the booming on the battlefield, but pleasant and comforting. Pierre did
+      not understand what his benefactor was saying, but he knew (the categories
+      of thoughts were also quite distinct in his dream) that he was talking of
+      goodness and the possibility of being what <i>they</i> were. And <i>they</i> with their
+      simple, kind, firm faces surrounded his benefactor on all sides. But
+      though they were kindly they did not look at Pierre and did not know him.
+      Wishing to speak and to attract their attention, he got up, but at that
+      moment his legs grew cold and bare.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He felt ashamed, and with one arm covered his legs from which his cloak
+      had in fact slipped. For a moment as he was rearranging his cloak Pierre
+      opened his eyes and saw the same penthouse roofs, posts, and yard, but now
+      they were all bluish, lit up, and glittering with frost or dew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is dawn,” thought Pierre. “But that’s not what I want. I want to hear
+      and understand my benefactor’s words.” Again he covered himself up with
+      his cloak, but now neither the lodge nor his benefactor was there. There
+      were only thoughts clearly expressed in words, thoughts that someone was
+      uttering or that he himself was formulating.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Afterwards when he recalled those thoughts Pierre was convinced that
+      someone outside himself had spoken them, though the impressions of that
+      day had evoked them. He had never, it seemed to him, been able to think
+      and express his thoughts like that when awake.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To endure war is the most difficult subordination of man’s freedom to the
+      law of God,” the voice had said. “Simplicity is submission to the will of
+      God; you cannot escape from Him. And <i>they</i> are simple. <i>They</i> do not talk,
+      but act. The spoken word is silver but the unspoken is golden. Man can be
+      master of nothing while he fears death, but he who does not fear it
+      possesses all. If there were no suffering, man would not know his
+      limitations, would not know himself. The hardest thing (Pierre went on
+      thinking, or hearing, in his dream) is to be able in your soul to unite
+      the meaning of all. To unite all?” he asked himself. “No, not to unite.
+      Thoughts cannot be united, but to <i>harness</i> all these thoughts together is
+      what we need! Yes, one <i>must harness</i> them, <i>must harness</i> them!”
+      he repeated to himself with inward rapture, feeling that these words and they alone
+      expressed what he wanted to say and solved the question that tormented
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, one must harness, it is time to harness.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Time to harness, time to harness, your excellency! Your excellency!” some
+      voice was repeating. “We must harness, it is time to harness....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      It was the voice of the groom, trying to wake him. The sun shone straight
+      into Pierre’s face. He glanced at the dirty innyard in the middle of which
+      soldiers were watering their lean horses at the pump while carts were
+      passing out of the gate. Pierre turned away with repugnance, and closing
+      his eyes quickly fell back on the carriage seat. “No, I don’t want that, I
+      don’t want to see and understand that. I want to understand what was
+      revealing itself to me in my dream. One second more and I should have
+      understood it all! But what am I to do? Harness, but how can I harness
+      everything?” and Pierre felt with horror that the meaning of all he had
+      seen and thought in the dream had been destroyed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The groom, the coachman, and the innkeeper told Pierre that an officer had
+      come with news that the French were already near Mozháysk and that our men
+      were leaving it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre got up and, having told them to harness and overtake him, went on
+      foot through the town.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The troops were moving on, leaving about ten thousand wounded behind them.
+      There were wounded in the yards, at the windows of the houses, and the
+      streets were crowded with them. In the streets, around carts that were to
+      take some of the wounded away, shouts, curses, and blows could be heard.
+      Pierre offered the use of his carriage, which had overtaken him, to a
+      wounded general he knew, and drove with him to Moscow. On the way Pierre
+      was told of the death of his brother-in-law Anatole and of that of Prince
+      Andrew.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0239"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On the thirtieth of August Pierre reached Moscow. Close to the gates of
+      the city he was met by Count Rostopchín’s adjutant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We have been looking for you everywhere,” said the adjutant. “The count
+      wants to see you particularly. He asks you to come to him at once on a
+      very important matter.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Without going home, Pierre took a cab and drove to see the Moscow
+      commander in chief.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Count Rostopchín had only that morning returned to town from his summer
+      villa at Sokólniki. The anteroom and reception room of his house were full
+      of officials who had been summoned or had come for orders. Vasílchikov and
+      Plátov had already seen the count and explained to him that it was
+      impossible to defend Moscow and that it would have to be surrendered.
+      Though this news was being concealed from the inhabitants, the officials—the
+      heads of the various government departments—knew that Moscow would
+      soon be in the enemy’s hands, just as Count Rostopchín himself knew it,
+      and to escape personal responsibility they had all come to the governor to
+      ask how they were to deal with their various departments.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As Pierre was entering the reception room a courier from the army came out
+      of Rostopchín’s private room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In answer to questions with which he was greeted, the courier made a
+      despairing gesture with his hand and passed through the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While waiting in the reception room Pierre with weary eyes watched the
+      various officials, old and young, military and civilian, who were there.
+      They all seemed dissatisfied and uneasy. Pierre went up to a group of men,
+      one of whom he knew. After greeting Pierre they continued their
+      conversation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If they’re sent out and brought back again later on it will do no harm,
+      but as things are now one can’t answer for anything.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But you see what he writes...” said another, pointing to a printed sheet
+      he held in his hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s another matter. That’s necessary for the people,” said the first.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, it’s a fresh broadsheet.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre took it and began reading.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His Serene Highness has passed through Mozháysk in order to join up with
+      the troops moving toward him and has taken up a strong position where the
+      enemy will not soon attack him. Forty-eight guns with ammunition have been
+      sent him from here, and his Serene Highness says he will defend Moscow to
+      the last drop of blood and is even ready to fight in the streets. Do not
+      be upset, brothers, that the law courts are closed; things have to be put
+      in order, and we will deal with villains in our own way! When the time
+      comes I shall want both town and peasant lads and will raise the cry a day
+      or two beforehand, but they are not wanted yet so I hold my peace. An ax
+      will be useful, a hunting spear not bad, but a three-pronged fork will be
+      best of all: a Frenchman is no heavier than a sheaf of rye. Tomorrow after
+      dinner I shall take the Iberian icon of the Mother of God to the wounded
+      in the Catherine Hospital where we will have some water blessed. That will
+      help them to get well quicker. I, too, am well now: one of my eyes was
+      sore but now I am on the lookout with both.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But military men have told me that it is impossible to fight in the
+      town,” said Pierre, “and that the position...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, of course! That’s what we were saying,” replied the first speaker.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And what does he mean by ‘One of my eyes was sore but now I am on the
+      lookout with both’?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The count had a sty,” replied the adjutant smiling, “and was very much
+      upset when I told him people had come to ask what was the matter with him.
+      By the by, Count,” he added suddenly, addressing Pierre with a smile, “we
+      heard that you have family troubles and that the countess, your wife...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I have heard nothing,” Pierre replied unconcernedly. “But what have you
+      heard?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, well, you know people often invent things. I only say what I heard.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But what did you hear?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, they say,” continued the adjutant with the same smile, “that the
+      countess, your wife, is preparing to go abroad. I expect it’s
+      nonsense....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Possibly,” remarked Pierre, looking about him absent-mindedly. “And who
+      is that?” he asked, indicating a short old man in a clean blue peasant
+      overcoat, with a big snow-white beard and eyebrows and a ruddy face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He? That’s a tradesman, that is to say, he’s the restaurant keeper,
+      Vereshchágin. Perhaps you have heard of that affair with the
+      proclamation.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, so that is Vereshchágin!” said Pierre, looking at the firm, calm face
+      of the old man and seeking any indication of his being a traitor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s not he himself, that’s the father of the fellow who wrote the
+      proclamation,” said the adjutant. “The young man is in prison and I expect
+      it will go hard with him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      An old gentleman wearing a star and another official, a German wearing a
+      cross round his neck, approached the speaker.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s a complicated story, you know,” said the adjutant.
+      “That proclamation appeared about two months ago. The count was informed of
+      it. He gave orders to investigate the matter. Gabriel Ivánovich
+      here made the inquiries. The proclamation had passed through exactly
+      sixty-three hands. He asked one, ‘From whom did you get it?’ ‘From
+      so-and-so.’ He went to the next one. ‘From whom did you get it?’
+      and so on till he reached Vereshchágin, a half educated tradesman, you know,
+      ‘a pet of a trader,’” said the adjutant smiling. “They
+      asked him, ‘Who gave it you?’ And the point is that we knew whom he had
+      it from. He could only have had it from the Postmaster. But evidently they had come
+      to some understanding. He replied: ‘From no one; I made it up myself.’
+      They threatened and questioned him, but he stuck to that: ‘I made it
+      up myself.’ And so it was reported to the count, who sent for the man.
+      ‘From whom did you get the proclamation?’ ‘I wrote it myself.’
+      Well, you know the count,” said the adjutant cheerfully, with a smile of
+      pride, “he flared up dreadfully—and just think of the fellow’s
+      audacity, lying, and obstinacy!”
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And the count wanted him to say it was from Klyucharëv? I
+      understand!” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Not at all,” rejoined the adjutant in dismay. “Klyucharëv had
+      his own sins to answer for without that and that is why he has been banished. But
+      the point is that the count was much annoyed. ‘How could you have written
+      it yourself?’ said he, and he took up the Hamburg <i>Gazette</i> that was
+      lying on the table. ‘Here it is! You did not write it yourself but translated
+      it, and translated it abominably, because you don’t even know French, you
+      fool.’ And what do you think? ‘No,’ said he, ‘I have not
+      read any papers, I made it up myself.’ ‘If that’s so, you’re
+      a traitor and I’ll have you tried, and you’ll be hanged! Say from whom
+      you had it.’ ‘I have seen no papers, I made it up myself.’ And
+      that was the end of it. The count had the father fetched, but the fellow stuck to
+      it. He was sent for trial and condemned to hard labor, I believe. Now the father
+      has come to intercede for him. But he’s a good-for-nothing lad! You know that
+      sort of tradesman’s son, a dandy and lady-killer. He attended some lectures
+      somewhere and imagines that the devil is no match for him. That’s the sort
+      of fellow he is. His father keeps a cookshop here by the Stone Bridge, and
+      you know there was a large icon of God Almighty painted with a scepter in
+      one hand and an orb in the other. Well, he took that icon home with him
+      for a few days and what did he do? He found some scoundrel of a
+      painter...”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0240"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      In the middle of this fresh tale Pierre was summoned to the commander in
+      chief.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he entered the private room Count Rostopchín, puckering his face, was
+      rubbing his forehead and eyes with his hand. A short man was saying
+      something, but when Pierre entered he stopped speaking and went out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, how do you do, great warrior?” said Rostopchín as soon as the short
+      man had left the room. “We have heard of your prowess. But that’s not the
+      point. Between ourselves, <i>mon cher</i>, do you belong to the Masons?”
+      he went on severely, as though there were something wrong about it which he
+      nevertheless intended to pardon. Pierre remained silent. “I am well
+      informed, my friend, but I am aware that there are Masons and I hope that
+      you are not one of those who on pretense of saving mankind wish to ruin
+      Russia.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I am a Mason,” Pierre replied.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There, you see, <i>mon cher!</i> I expect you know that Messrs. Speránski and
+      Magnítski have been deported to their proper place. Mr. Klyucharëv has
+      been treated in the same way, and so have others who on the plea of
+      building up the temple of Solomon have tried to destroy the temple of
+      their fatherland. You can understand that there are reasons for this and
+      that I could not have exiled the Postmaster had he not been a harmful
+      person. It has now come to my knowledge that you lent him your carriage
+      for his removal from town, and that you have even accepted papers from him
+      for safe custody. I like you and don’t wish you any harm and—as you
+      are only half my age—I advise you, as a father would, to cease all
+      communication with men of that stamp and to leave here as soon as
+      possible.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But what did Klyucharëv do wrong, Count?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That is for me to know, but not for you to ask,” shouted Rostopchín.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If he is accused of circulating Napoleon’s proclamation it is not proved
+      that he did so,” said Pierre without looking at Rostopchín, “and
+      Vereshchágin...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “There we are!” Rostopchín shouted at Pierre louder than before, frowning
+      suddenly. “Vereshchágin is a renegade and a traitor who will be punished
+      as he deserves,” said he with the vindictive heat with which people speak
+      when recalling an insult. “But I did not summon you to discuss my actions,
+      but to give you advice—or an order if you prefer it. I beg you to
+      leave the town and break off all communication with such men as
+      Klyucharëv. And I will knock the nonsense out of anybody”—but
+      probably realizing that he was shouting at Bezúkhov who so far was not
+      guilty of anything, he added, taking Pierre’s hand in a friendly manner,
+      “We are on the eve of a public disaster and I haven’t time to be polite to
+      everybody who has business with me. My head is sometimes in a whirl. Well,
+      <i>mon cher</i>, what are you doing personally?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, nothing,” answered Pierre without raising his eyes or changing the
+      thoughtful expression of his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count frowned.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A word of friendly advice, <i>mon cher</i>. Be off as soon as you can, that’s
+      all I have to tell you. Happy he who has ears to hear. Good-by, my dear
+      fellow. Oh, by the by!” he shouted through the doorway after Pierre, “is
+      it true that the countess has fallen into the clutches of the holy fathers
+      of the Society of Jesus?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre did not answer and left Rostopchín’s room more sullen and angry
+      than he had ever before shown himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he reached home it was already getting dark. Some eight people had
+      come to see him that evening: the secretary of a committee, the colonel of
+      his battalion, his steward, his major-domo, and various petitioners. They
+      all had business with Pierre and wanted decisions from him. Pierre did not
+      understand and was not interested in any of these questions and only
+      answered them in order to get rid of these people. When left alone at last
+      he opened and read his wife’s letter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “<i>They</i>, the soldiers at the battery, Prince Andrew killed... that old
+      man... Simplicity is submission to God. Suffering is necessary... the
+      meaning of all... one must harness... my wife is getting married... One
+      must forget and understand...” And going to his bed he threw himself on it
+      without undressing and immediately fell asleep.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he awoke next morning the major-domo came to inform him that a
+      special messenger, a police officer, had come from Count Rostopchín to
+      know whether Count Bezúkhov had left or was leaving the town.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A dozen persons who had business with Pierre were awaiting him in the
+      drawing room. Pierre dressed hurriedly and, instead of going to see them,
+      went to the back porch and out through the gate.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From that time till the end of the destruction of Moscow no one of
+      Bezúkhov’s household, despite all the search they made, saw Pierre again
+      or knew where he was.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0241"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The Rostóvs remained in Moscow till the first of September, that is, till
+      the eve of the enemy’s entry into the city.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After Pétya had joined Obolénski’s regiment of Cossacks and left for
+      Bélaya Tsérkov where that regiment was forming, the countess was seized
+      with terror. The thought that both her sons were at the war, had both gone
+      from under her wing, that today or tomorrow either or both of them might
+      be killed like the three sons of one of her acquaintances, struck her that
+      summer for the first time with cruel clearness. She tried to get Nicholas
+      back and wished to go herself to join Pétya, or to get him an appointment
+      somewhere in Petersburg, but neither of these proved possible. Pétya could
+      not return unless his regiment did so or unless he was transferred to
+      another regiment on active service. Nicholas was somewhere with the army
+      and had not sent a word since his last letter, in which he had given a
+      detailed account of his meeting with Princess Mary. The countess did not
+      sleep at night, or when she did fall asleep dreamed that she saw her sons
+      lying dead. After many consultations and conversations, the count at last
+      devised means to tranquillize her. He got Pétya transferred from
+      Obolénski’s regiment to Bezúkhov’s, which was in training near Moscow.
+      Though Pétya would remain in the service, this transfer would give the
+      countess the consolation of seeing at least one of her sons under her
+      wing, and she hoped to arrange matters for her Pétya so as not to let him
+      go again, but always get him appointed to places where he could not
+      possibly take part in a battle. As long as Nicholas alone was in danger
+      the countess imagined that she loved her first-born more than all her
+      other children and even reproached herself for it; but when her youngest:
+      the scapegrace who had been bad at lessons, was always breaking things in
+      the house and making himself a nuisance to everybody, that snub-nosed
+      Pétya with his merry black eyes and fresh rosy cheeks where soft down was
+      just beginning to show—when he was thrown amid those big, dreadful,
+      cruel men who were fighting somewhere about something and apparently
+      finding pleasure in it—then his mother thought she loved him more,
+      much more, than all her other children. The nearer the time came for Pétya
+      to return, the more uneasy grew the countess. She began to think she would
+      never live to see such happiness. The presence of Sónya, of her beloved
+      Natásha, or even of her husband irritated her. “What do I want with them?
+      I want no one but Pétya,” she thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the end of August the Rostóvs received another letter from Nicholas. He
+      wrote from the province of Vorónezh where he had been sent to procure
+      remounts, but that letter did not set the countess at ease. Knowing that
+      one son was out of danger she became the more anxious about Pétya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though by the twentieth of August nearly all the Rostóvs’ acquaintances
+      had left Moscow, and though everybody tried to persuade the countess to
+      get away as quickly as possible, she would not hear of leaving before her
+      treasure, her adored Pétya, returned. On the twenty-eighth of August he
+      arrived. The passionate tenderness with which his mother received him did
+      not please the sixteen-year-old officer. Though she concealed from him her
+      intention of keeping him under her wing, Pétya guessed her designs, and
+      instinctively fearing that he might give way to emotion when with her—might
+      “become womanish” as he termed it to himself—he treated her coldly,
+      avoided her, and during his stay in Moscow attached himself exclusively to
+      Natásha for whom he had always had a particularly brotherly tenderness,
+      almost lover-like.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Owing to the count’s customary carelessness nothing was ready for their
+      departure by the twenty-eighth of August and the carts that were to come
+      from their Ryazán and Moscow estates to remove their household belongings
+      did not arrive till the thirtieth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the twenty-eighth till the thirty-first all Moscow was in a bustle
+      and commotion. Every day thousands of men wounded at Borodinó were brought
+      in by the Dorogomílov gate and taken to various parts of Moscow, and
+      thousands of carts conveyed the inhabitants and their possessions out by
+      the other gates. In spite of Rostopchín’s broadsheets, or because of them
+      or independently of them, the strangest and most contradictory rumors were
+      current in the town. Some said that no one was to be allowed to leave the
+      city, others on the contrary said that all the icons had been taken out of
+      the churches and everybody was to be ordered to leave. Some said there had
+      been another battle after Borodinó at which the French had been routed,
+      while others on the contrary reported that the Russian army had been
+      destroyed. Some talked about the Moscow militia which, preceded by the
+      clergy, would go to the Three Hills; others whispered that Augustin had
+      been forbidden to leave, that traitors had been seized, that the peasants
+      were rioting and robbing people on their way from Moscow, and so on. But
+      all this was only talk; in reality (though the Council of Filí, at which
+      it was decided to abandon Moscow, had not yet been held) both those who
+      went away and those who remained behind felt, though they did not show it,
+      that Moscow would certainly be abandoned, and that they ought to get away
+      as quickly as possible and save their belongings. It was felt that
+      everything would suddenly break up and change, but up to the first of
+      September nothing had done so. As a criminal who is being led to execution
+      knows that he must die immediately, but yet looks about him and
+      straightens the cap that is awry on his head, so Moscow involuntarily
+      continued its wonted life, though it knew that the time of its destruction
+      was near when the conditions of life to which its people were accustomed
+      to submit would be completely upset.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the three days preceding the occupation of Moscow the whole Rostóv
+      family was absorbed in various activities. The head of the family, Count
+      Ilyá Rostóv, continually drove about the city collecting the current
+      rumors from all sides and gave superficial and hasty orders at home about
+      the preparations for their departure.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess watched the things being packed, was dissatisfied with
+      everything, was constantly in pursuit of Pétya who was always running away
+      from her, and was jealous of Natásha with whom he spent all his time.
+      Sónya alone directed the practical side of matters by getting things
+      packed. But of late Sónya had been particularly sad and silent. Nicholas’
+      letter in which he mentioned Princess Mary had elicited, in her presence,
+      joyous comments from the countess, who saw an intervention of Providence
+      in this meeting of the princess and Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I was never pleased at Bolkónski’s engagement to Natásha,” said the
+      countess, “but I always wanted Nicholas to marry the princess, and had a
+      presentiment that it would happen. What a good thing it would be!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya felt that this was true: that the only possibility of retrieving the
+      Rostóvs’ affairs was by Nicholas marrying a rich woman, and that the
+      princess was a good match. It was very bitter for her. But despite her
+      grief, or perhaps just because of it, she took on herself all the
+      difficult work of directing the storing and packing of their things and
+      was busy for whole days. The count and countess turned to her when they
+      had any orders to give. Pétya and Natásha on the contrary, far from
+      helping their parents, were generally a nuisance and a hindrance to
+      everyone. Almost all day long the house resounded with their running feet,
+      their cries, and their spontaneous laughter. They laughed and were gay not
+      because there was any reason to laugh, but because gaiety and mirth were
+      in their hearts and so everything that happened was a cause for gaiety and
+      laughter to them. Pétya was in high spirits because having left home a boy
+      he had returned (as everybody told him) a fine young man, because he was
+      at home, because he had left Bélaya Tsérkov where there was no hope of
+      soon taking part in a battle and had come to Moscow where there was to be
+      fighting in a few days, and chiefly because Natásha, whose lead he always
+      followed, was in high spirits. Natásha was gay because she had been sad
+      too long and now nothing reminded her of the cause of her sadness, and
+      because she was feeling well. She was also happy because she had someone
+      to adore her: the adoration of others was a lubricant the wheels of her
+      machine needed to make them run freely—and Pétya adored her. Above
+      all, they were gay because there was a war near Moscow, there would be
+      fighting at the town gates, arms were being given out, everybody was
+      escaping—going away somewhere, and in general something
+      extraordinary was happening, and that is always exciting, especially to
+      the young.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0242"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On Saturday, the thirty-first of August, everything in the Rostóvs’ house
+      seemed topsy-turvy. All the doors were open, all the furniture was being
+      carried out or moved about, and the mirrors and pictures had been taken
+      down. There were trunks in the rooms, and hay, wrapping paper, and ropes
+      were scattered about. The peasants and house serfs carrying out the things
+      were treading heavily on the parquet floors. The yard was crowded with
+      peasant carts, some loaded high and already corded up, others still empty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The voices and footsteps of the many servants and of the peasants who had
+      come with the carts resounded as they shouted to one another in the yard
+      and in the house. The count had been out since morning. The countess had a
+      headache brought on by all the noise and turmoil and was lying down in the
+      new sitting room with a vinegar compress on her head. Pétya was not at
+      home, he had gone to visit a friend with whom he meant to obtain a
+      transfer from the militia to the active army. Sónya was in the ballroom
+      looking after the packing of the glass and china. Natásha was sitting on
+      the floor of her dismantled room with dresses, ribbons, and scarves strewn
+      all about her, gazing fixedly at the floor and holding in her hands the
+      old ball dress (already out of fashion) which she had worn at her first
+      Petersburg ball.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha was ashamed of doing nothing when everyone else was so busy, and
+      several times that morning had tried to set to work, but her heart was not
+      in it, and she could not and did not know how to do anything except with
+      all her heart and all her might. For a while she had stood beside Sónya
+      while the china was being packed and tried to help, but soon gave it up
+      and went to her room to pack her own things. At first she found it amusing
+      to give away dresses and ribbons to the maids, but when that was done and
+      what was left had still to be packed, she found it dull.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dunyásha, you pack! You will, won’t you, dear?” And when Dunyásha
+      willingly promised to do it all for her, Natásha sat down on the floor,
+      took her old ball dress, and fell into a reverie quite unrelated to what
+      ought to have occupied her thoughts now. She was roused from her reverie
+      by the talk of the maids in the next room (which was theirs) and by the
+      sound of their hurried footsteps going to the back porch. Natásha got up
+      and looked out of the window. An enormously long row of carts full of
+      wounded men had stopped in the street.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The housekeeper, the old nurse, the cooks, coachmen, maids, footmen,
+      postilions, and scullions stood at the gate, staring at the wounded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha, throwing a clean pocket handkerchief over her hair and holding an
+      end of it in each hand, went out into the street.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The former housekeeper, old Mávra Kuzmínichna, had stepped out of the
+      crowd by the gate, gone up to a cart with a hood constructed of bast mats,
+      and was speaking to a pale young officer who lay inside. Natásha moved a
+      few steps forward and stopped shyly, still holding her handkerchief, and
+      listened to what the housekeeper was saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then you have nobody in Moscow?” she was saying. “You would be more
+      comfortable somewhere in a house... in ours, for instance... the family
+      are leaving.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t know if it would be allowed,” replied the officer in a weak
+      voice. “Here is our commanding officer... ask him,” and he pointed to a
+      stout major who was walking back along the street past the row of carts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha glanced with frightened eyes at the face of the wounded officer
+      and at once went to meet the major.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “May the wounded men stay in our house?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The major raised his hand to his cap with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Which one do you want, Ma’am’selle?” said he, screwing up his eyes and
+      smiling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha quietly repeated her question, and her face and whole manner were
+      so serious, though she was still holding the ends of her handkerchief,
+      that the major ceased smiling and after some reflection—as if
+      considering in how far the thing was possible—replied in the
+      affirmative.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes, why not? They may,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With a slight inclination of her head, Natásha stepped back quickly to
+      Mávra Kuzmínichna, who stood talking compassionately to the officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They may. He says they may!” whispered Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The cart in which the officer lay was turned into the Rostóvs’ yard, and
+      dozens of carts with wounded men began at the invitation of the townsfolk
+      to turn into the yards and to draw up at the entrances of the houses in
+      Povarskáya Street. Natásha was evidently pleased to be dealing with new
+      people outside the ordinary routine of her life. She and Mávra Kuzmínichna
+      tried to get as many of the wounded as possible into their yard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your Papa must be told, though,” said Mávra Kuzmínichna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Never mind, never mind, what does it matter? For one day we can move into
+      the drawing room. They can have all our half of the house.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “There now, young lady, you do take things into your head! Even if we put
+      them into the wing, the men’s room, or the nurse’s room, we must ask
+      permission.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, I’ll ask.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha ran into the house and went on tiptoe through the half-open door
+      into the sitting room, where there was a smell of vinegar and Hoffman’s
+      drops.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Are you asleep, Mamma?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, what sleep—?” said the countess, waking up just as
+      she was dropping into a doze.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma darling!” said Natásha, kneeling by her mother and bringing her
+      face close to her mother’s, “I am sorry, forgive me, I’ll never do it
+      again; I woke you up! Mávra Kuzmínichna has sent me: they have brought
+      some wounded here—officers. Will you let them come? They have
+      nowhere to go. I knew you’d let them come!” she said quickly all in one
+      breath.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What officers? Whom have they brought? I don’t understand anything about
+      it,” said the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha laughed, and the countess too smiled slightly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I knew you’d give permission... so I’ll tell them,” and, having kissed
+      her mother, Natásha got up and went to the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the hall she met her father, who had returned with bad news.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We’ve stayed too long!” said the count with involuntary
+      vexation. “The Club is closed and the police are leaving.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Papa, is it all right—I’ve invited some of the wounded into the
+      house?” said Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Of course it is,” he answered absently. “That’s not the point. I beg you
+      not to indulge in trifles now, but to help to pack, and tomorrow we must
+      go, go, go!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the count gave a similar order to the major-domo and the servants.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At dinner Pétya having returned home told them the news he had heard. He
+      said the people had been getting arms in the Krémlin, and that though
+      Rostopchín’s broadsheet had said that he would sound a call two or three
+      days in advance, the order had certainly already been given for everyone
+      to go armed to the Three Hills tomorrow, and that there would be a big
+      battle there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess looked with timid horror at her son’s eager, excited face as
+      he said this. She realized that if she said a word about his not going to
+      the battle (she knew he enjoyed the thought of the impending engagement)
+      he would say something about men, honor, and the fatherland—something
+      senseless, masculine, and obstinate which there would be no contradicting,
+      and her plans would be spoiled; and so, hoping to arrange to leave before
+      then and take Pétya with her as their protector and defender, she did not
+      answer him, but after dinner called the count aside and implored him with
+      tears to take her away quickly, that very night if possible. With a
+      woman’s involuntary loving cunning she, who till then had not shown any
+      alarm, said that she would die of fright if they did not leave that very
+      night. Without any pretense she was now afraid of everything.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0243"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Madame Schoss, who had been out to visit her daughter, increased the
+      countess’ fears still more by telling what she had seen at a spirit
+      dealer’s in Myasnítski Street. When returning by that street she had been
+      unable to pass because of a drunken crowd rioting in front of the shop.
+      She had taken a cab and driven home by a side street and the cabman had
+      told her that the people were breaking open the barrels at the drink
+      store, having received orders to do so.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After dinner the whole Rostóv household set to work with enthusiastic
+      haste packing their belongings and preparing for their departure. The old
+      count, suddenly setting to work, kept passing from the yard to the house
+      and back again, shouting confused instructions to the hurrying people, and
+      flurrying them still more. Pétya directed things in the yard. Sónya, owing
+      to the count’s contradictory orders, lost her head and did not know what
+      to do. The servants ran noisily about the house and yard, shouting and
+      disputing. Natásha, with the ardor characteristic of all she did suddenly
+      set to work too. At first her intervention in the business of packing was
+      received skeptically. Everybody expected some prank from her and did not
+      wish to obey her; but she resolutely and passionately demanded obedience,
+      grew angry and nearly cried because they did not heed her, and at last
+      succeeded in making them believe her. Her first exploit, which cost her
+      immense effort and established her authority, was the packing of the
+      carpets. The count had valuable Gobelin tapestries and Persian carpets in
+      the house. When Natásha set to work two cases were standing open in the
+      ballroom, one almost full up with crockery, the other with carpets. There
+      was also much china standing on the tables, and still more was being
+      brought in from the storeroom. A third case was needed and servants had
+      gone to fetch it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya, wait a bit—we’ll pack everything into these,” said Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You can’t, Miss, we have tried to,” said the butler’s assistant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, wait a minute, please.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Natásha began rapidly taking out of the case dishes and plates wrapped
+      in paper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The dishes must go in here among the carpets,” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, it’s a mercy if we can get the carpets alone into three cases,” said
+      the butler’s assistant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, wait, please!” And Natásha began rapidly and deftly sorting out the
+      things. “These aren’t needed,” said she, putting aside some plates of Kiev
+      ware. “These—yes, these must go among the carpets,” she said,
+      referring to the Saxony china dishes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t, Natásha! Leave it alone! We’ll get it all packed,” urged Sónya
+      reproachfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a young lady she is!” remarked the major-domo.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Natásha would not give in. She turned everything out and began quickly
+      repacking, deciding that the inferior Russian carpets and unnecessary
+      crockery should not be taken at all. When everything had been taken out of
+      the cases, they recommenced packing, and it turned out that when the
+      cheaper things not worth taking had nearly all been rejected, the valuable
+      ones really did all go into the two cases. Only the lid of the case
+      containing the carpets would not shut down. A few more things might have
+      been taken out, but Natásha insisted on having her own way. She packed,
+      repacked, pressed, made the butler’s assistant and Pétya—whom she
+      had drawn into the business of packing—press on the lid, and made
+      desperate efforts herself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s enough, Natásha,” said Sónya. “I see you were right, but just take
+      out the top one.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I won’t!” cried Natásha, with one hand holding back the hair that hung
+      over her perspiring face, while with the other she pressed down the
+      carpets. “Now press, Pétya! Press, Vasílich, press hard!” she cried.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The carpets yielded and the lid closed; Natásha, clapping her hands,
+      screamed with delight and tears fell from her eyes. But this only lasted a
+      moment. She at once set to work afresh and they now trusted her
+      completely. The count was not angry even when they told him that Natásha
+      had countermanded an order of his, and the servants now came to her to ask
+      whether a cart was sufficiently loaded, and whether it might be corded up.
+      Thanks to Natásha’s directions the work now went on expeditiously,
+      unnecessary things were left, and the most valuable packed as compactly as
+      possible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But hard as they all worked till quite late that night, they could not get
+      everything packed. The countess had fallen asleep and the count, having
+      put off their departure till next morning, went to bed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya and Natásha slept in the sitting room without undressing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That night another wounded man was driven down the Povarskáya, and Mávra
+      Kuzmínichna, who was standing at the gate, had him brought into the
+      Rostóvs’ yard. Mávra Kuzmínichna concluded that he was a very important
+      man. He was being conveyed in a <i>calèche</i> with a raised hood, and was quite
+      covered by an apron. On the box beside the driver sat a venerable old
+      attendant. A doctor and two soldiers followed the carriage in a cart.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Please come in here. The masters are going away and the whole house will
+      be empty,” said the old woman to the old attendant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, perhaps,” said he with a sigh. “We don’t expect to get him home
+      alive! We have a house of our own in Moscow, but it’s a long way from
+      here, and there’s nobody living in it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Do us the honor to come in, there’s plenty of everything in the master’s
+      house. Come in,” said Mávra Kuzmínichna. “Is he very ill?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The attendant made a hopeless gesture.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We don’t expect to get him home! We must ask the doctor.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the old servant got down from the box and went up to the cart.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All right!” said the doctor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old servant returned to the <i>calèche</i>, looked into it, shook his head
+      disconsolately, told the driver to turn into the yard, and stopped beside
+      Mávra Kuzmínichna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “O, Lord Jesus Christ!” she murmured.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She invited them to take the wounded man into the house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The masters won’t object...” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But they had to avoid carrying the man upstairs, and so they took him into
+      the wing and put him in the room that had been Madame Schoss’.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This wounded man was Prince Andrew Bolkónski.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0244"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Moscow’s last day had come. It was a clear bright autumn day, a Sunday.
+      The church bells everywhere were ringing for service, just as usual on
+      Sundays. Nobody seemed yet to realize what awaited the city.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only two things indicated the social condition of Moscow—the rabble,
+      that is the poor people, and the price of commodities. An enormous crowd
+      of factory hands, house serfs, and peasants, with whom some officials,
+      seminarists, and gentry were mingled, had gone early that morning to the
+      Three Hills. Having waited there for Rostopchín who did not turn up, they
+      became convinced that Moscow would be surrendered, and then dispersed all
+      about the town to the public houses and cookshops. Prices too that day
+      indicated the state of affairs. The price of weapons, of gold, of carts
+      and horses, kept rising, but the value of paper money and city articles
+      kept falling, so that by midday there were instances of carters removing
+      valuable goods, such as cloth, and receiving in payment a half of what
+      they carted, while peasant horses were fetching five hundred rubles each,
+      and furniture, mirrors, and bronzes were being given away for nothing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the Rostóvs’ staid old-fashioned house the dissolution of former
+      conditions of life was but little noticeable. As to the serfs the only
+      indication was that three out of their huge retinue disappeared during the
+      night, but nothing was stolen; and as to the value of their possessions,
+      the thirty peasant carts that had come in from their estates and which
+      many people envied proved to be extremely valuable and they were offered
+      enormous sums of money for them. Not only were huge sums offered for the
+      horses and carts, but on the previous evening and early in the morning of
+      the first of September, orderlies and servants sent by wounded officers
+      came to the Rostóvs’ and wounded men dragged themselves there from the
+      Rostóvs’ and from neighboring houses where they were accommodated,
+      entreating the servants to try to get them a lift out of Moscow. The
+      major-domo to whom these entreaties were addressed, though he was sorry
+      for the wounded, resolutely refused, saying that he dare not even mention
+      the matter to the count. Pity these wounded men as one might, it was
+      evident that if they were given one cart there would be no reason to
+      refuse another, or all the carts and one’s own carriages as well. Thirty
+      carts could not save all the wounded and in the general catastrophe one
+      could not disregard oneself and one’s own family. So thought the
+      major-domo on his master’s behalf.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On waking up that morning Count Ilyá Rostóv left his bedroom softly, so as
+      not to wake the countess who had fallen asleep only toward morning, and
+      came out to the porch in his lilac silk dressing gown. In the yard stood
+      the carts ready corded. The carriages were at the front porch. The
+      major-domo stood at the porch talking to an elderly orderly and to a pale
+      young officer with a bandaged arm. On seeing the count the major-domo made
+      a significant and stern gesture to them both to go away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, Vasílich, is everything ready?” asked the count, and stroking his
+      bald head he looked good-naturedly at the officer and the orderly and
+      nodded to them. (He liked to see new faces.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We can harness at once, your excellency.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, that’s right. As soon as the countess wakes we’ll be off, God
+      willing! What is it, gentlemen?” he added, turning to the officer. “Are
+      you staying in my house?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The officer came nearer and suddenly his face flushed crimson.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Count, be so good as to allow me... for God’s sake, to get into some
+      corner of one of your carts! I have nothing here with me.... I shall be
+      all right on a loaded cart....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Before the officer had finished speaking the orderly made the same request
+      on behalf of his master.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, yes, yes, yes!” said the count hastily. “I shall be very pleased,
+      very pleased. Vasílich, you’ll see to it. Just unload one or two carts.
+      Well, what of it... do what’s necessary...” said the count, muttering some
+      indefinite order.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But at the same moment an expression of warm gratitude on the officer’s
+      face had already sealed the order. The count looked around him. In the
+      yard, at the gates, at the window of the wings, wounded officers and their
+      orderlies were to be seen. They were all looking at the count and moving
+      toward the porch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Please step into the gallery, your excellency,” said the major-domo.
+      “What are your orders about the pictures?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The count went into the house with him, repeating his order not to refuse
+      the wounded who asked for a lift.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, never mind, some of the things can be unloaded,” he added in a
+      soft, confidential voice, as though afraid of being overheard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At nine o’clock the countess woke up, and Matrëna Timoféevna, who had been
+      her lady’s maid before her marriage and now performed a sort of chief
+      gendarme’s duty for her, came to say that Madame Schoss was much offended
+      and the young ladies’ summer dresses could not be left behind. On inquiry,
+      the countess learned that Madame Schoss was offended because her trunk had
+      been taken down from its cart, and all the loads were being uncorded and
+      the luggage taken out of the carts to make room for wounded men whom the
+      count in the simplicity of his heart had ordered that they should take
+      with them. The countess sent for her husband.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is this, my dear? I hear that the luggage is being unloaded.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You know, love, I wanted to tell you... Countess dear... an officer came
+      to me to ask for a few carts for the wounded. After all, ours are things
+      that can be bought but think what being left behind means to them!...
+      Really now, in our own yard—we asked them in ourselves and there are
+      officers among them.... You know, I think, my dear... let them be taken...
+      where’s the hurry?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The count spoke timidly, as he always did when talking of money matters.
+      The countess was accustomed to this tone as a precursor of news of
+      something detrimental to the children’s interests, such as the building of
+      a new gallery or conservatory, the inauguration of a private theater or an
+      orchestra. She was accustomed always to oppose anything announced in that
+      timid tone and considered it her duty to do so.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She assumed her dolefully submissive manner and said to her husband:
+      “Listen to me, Count, you have managed matters so that we are getting
+      nothing for the house, and now you wish to throw away all our—all
+      <i>the children’s</i> property! You said yourself that we have a hundred thousand
+      rubles’ worth of things in the house. I don’t consent, my dear, I don’t!
+      Do as you please! It’s the government’s business to look after the
+      wounded; they know that. Look at the Lopukhíns opposite, they cleared out
+      everything two days ago. That’s what other people do. It’s only we who are
+      such fools. If you have no pity on me, have some for the children.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Flourishing his arms in despair the count left the room without replying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Papa, what are you doing that for?” asked Natásha, who had followed him
+      into her mother’s room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nothing! What business is it of yours?” muttered the count angrily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But I heard,” said Natásha. “Why does Mamma object?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What business is it of yours?” cried the count.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha stepped up to the window and pondered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Papa! Here’s Berg coming to see us,” said she, looking out of the window.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0245"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Berg, the Rostóvs’ son-in-law, was already a colonel wearing the orders of
+      Vladímir and Anna, and he still filled the quiet and agreeable post of
+      assistant to the head of the staff of the assistant commander of the first
+      division of the Second Army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the first of September he had come to Moscow from the army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He had nothing to do in Moscow, but he had noticed that everyone in the
+      army was asking for leave to visit Moscow and had something to do there.
+      So he considered it necessary to ask for leave of absence for family and
+      domestic reasons.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Berg drove up to his father-in-law’s house in his spruce little trap with
+      a pair of sleek roans, exactly like those of a certain prince. He looked
+      attentively at the carts in the yard and while going up to the porch took
+      out a clean pocket handkerchief and tied a knot in it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the anteroom Berg ran with smooth though impatient steps into the
+      drawing room, where he embraced the count, kissed the hands of Natásha and
+      Sónya, and hastened to inquire after “Mamma’s” health.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Health, at a time like this?” said the count. “Come, tell us the news! Is
+      the army retreating or will there be another battle?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “God Almighty alone can decide the fate of our fatherland, Papa,” said
+      Berg. “The army is burning with a spirit of heroism and the leaders, so to
+      say, have now assembled in council. No one knows what is coming. But in
+      general I can tell you, Papa, that such a heroic spirit, the truly antique
+      valor of the Russian army, which they—which it” (he corrected
+      himself) “has shown or displayed in the battle of the twenty-sixth—there
+      are no words worthy to do it justice! I tell you, Papa” (he smote himself
+      on the breast as a general he had heard speaking had done, but Berg did it
+      a trifle late for he should have struck his breast at the words “Russian
+      army”), “I tell you frankly that we, the commanders, far from having to
+      urge the men on or anything of that kind, could hardly restrain those...
+      those... yes, those exploits of antique valor,” he went on rapidly.
+      “General Barclay de Tolly risked his life everywhere at the head of the
+      troops, I can assure you. Our corps was stationed on a hillside. You can
+      imagine!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Berg related all that he remembered of the various tales he had heard
+      those days. Natásha watched him with an intent gaze that confused him, as
+      if she were trying to find in his face the answer to some question.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Altogether such heroism as was displayed by the Russian warriors cannot
+      be imagined or adequately praised!” said Berg, glancing round at Natásha,
+      and as if anxious to conciliate her, replying to her intent look with a
+      smile. “‘Russia is not in Moscow, she lives in the hearts of her sons!’
+      Isn’t it so, Papa?” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just then the countess came in from the sitting room with a weary and
+      dissatisfied expression. Berg hurriedly jumped up, kissed her hand, asked
+      about her health, and, swaying his head from side to side to express
+      sympathy, remained standing beside her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, Mamma, I tell you sincerely that these are hard and sad times for
+      every Russian. But why are you so anxious? You have still time to get
+      away....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I can’t think what the servants are about,” said the countess, turning to
+      her husband. “I have just been told that nothing is ready yet. Somebody
+      after all must see to things. One misses Mítenka at such times. There
+      won’t be any end to it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The count was about to say something, but evidently restrained himself. He
+      got up from his chair and went to the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment Berg drew out his handkerchief as if to blow his nose and,
+      seeing the knot in it, pondered, shaking his head sadly and significantly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I have a great favor to ask of you, Papa,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hm...” said the count, and stopped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I was driving past Yusúpov’s house just now,” said Berg with a laugh,
+      “when the steward, a man I know, ran out and asked me whether I wouldn’t
+      buy something. I went in out of curiosity, you know, and there is a small
+      chiffonier and a dressing table. You know how dear Véra wanted a
+      chiffonier like that and how we had a dispute about it.” (At the mention
+      of the chiffonier and dressing table Berg involuntarily changed his tone
+      to one of pleasure at his admirable domestic arrangements.) “And it’s such
+      a beauty! It pulls out and has a secret English drawer, you know! And dear
+      Véra has long wanted one. I wish to give her a surprise, you see. I saw so
+      many of those peasant carts in your yard. Please let me have one, I will
+      pay the man well, and...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The count frowned and coughed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ask the countess, I don’t give orders.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If it’s inconvenient, please don’t,” said Berg. “Only I so wanted it, for
+      dear Véra’s sake.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, go to the devil, all of you! To the devil, the devil, the devil...”
+       cried the old count. “My head’s in a whirl!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And he left the room. The countess began to cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, Mamma! Yes, these are very hard times!” said Berg.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha left the room with her father and, as if finding it difficult to
+      reach some decision, first followed him and then ran downstairs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya was in the porch, engaged in giving out weapons to the servants who
+      were to leave Moscow. The loaded carts were still standing in the yard.
+      Two of them had been uncorded and a wounded officer was climbing into one
+      of them helped by an orderly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know what it’s about?” Pétya asked Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She understood that he meant what were their parents quarreling about. She
+      did not answer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s because Papa wanted to give up all the carts to the wounded,” said
+      Pétya. “Vasílich told me. I consider...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I consider,” Natásha suddenly almost shouted, turning her angry face to
+      Pétya, “I consider it so horrid, so abominable, so... I don’t know what.
+      Are we despicable Germans?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Her throat quivered with convulsive sobs and, afraid of weakening and
+      letting the force of her anger run to waste, she turned and rushed
+      headlong up the stairs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Berg was sitting beside the countess consoling her with the respectful
+      attention of a relative. The count, pipe in hand, was pacing up and down
+      the room, when Natásha, her face distorted by anger, burst in like a
+      tempest and approached her mother with rapid steps.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s horrid! It’s abominable!” she screamed. “You can’t possibly have
+      ordered it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Berg and the countess looked at her, perplexed and frightened. The count
+      stood still at the window and listened.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma, it’s impossible: see what is going on in the yard!” she cried.
+      “They will be left!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s the matter with you? Who are ‘they’? What do you want?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, the wounded! It’s impossible, Mamma. It’s monstrous!... No, Mamma
+      darling, it’s not the thing. Please forgive me, darling.... Mamma, what
+      does it matter what we take away? Only look what is going on in the
+      yard... Mamma!... It’s impossible!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The count stood by the window and listened without turning round. Suddenly
+      he sniffed and put his face closer to the window.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess glanced at her daughter, saw her face full of shame for her
+      mother, saw her agitation, and understood why her husband did not turn to
+      look at her now, and she glanced round quite disconcerted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, do as you like! Am I hindering anyone?” she said, not surrendering at
+      once.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma, darling, forgive me!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But the countess pushed her daughter away and went up to her husband.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear, you order what is right.... You know I don’t understand about
+      it,” said she, dropping her eyes shamefacedly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The eggs... the eggs are teaching the hen,” muttered the count through
+      tears of joy, and he embraced his wife who was glad to hide her look of
+      shame on his breast.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Papa! Mamma! May I see to it? May I?...” asked Natásha. “We will still
+      take all the most necessary things.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The count nodded affirmatively, and Natásha, at the rapid pace at which
+      she used to run when playing at tag, ran through the ballroom to the
+      anteroom and downstairs into the yard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The servants gathered round Natásha, but could not believe the strange
+      order she brought them until the count himself, in his wife’s name,
+      confirmed the order to give up all the carts to the wounded and take the
+      trunks to the storerooms. When they understood that order the servants set
+      to work at this new task with pleasure and zeal. It no longer seemed
+      strange to them but on the contrary it seemed the only thing that could be
+      done, just as a quarter of an hour before it had not seemed strange to
+      anyone that the wounded should be left behind and the goods carted away
+      but that had seemed the only thing to do.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The whole household, as if to atone for not having done it sooner, set
+      eagerly to work at the new task of placing the wounded in the carts. The
+      wounded dragged themselves out of their rooms and stood with pale but
+      happy faces round the carts. The news that carts were to be had spread to
+      the neighboring houses, from which wounded men began to come into the
+      Rostóvs’ yard. Many of the wounded asked them not to unload the carts but
+      only to let them sit on the top of the things. But the work of unloading,
+      once started, could not be arrested. It seemed not to matter whether all
+      or only half the things were left behind. Cases full of china, bronzes,
+      pictures, and mirrors that had been so carefully packed the night before
+      now lay about the yard, and still they went on searching for and finding
+      possibilities of unloading this or that and letting the wounded have
+      another and yet another cart.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We can take four more men,” said the steward. “They can have my trap, or
+      else what is to become of them?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Let them have my wardrobe cart,” said the countess. “Dunyásha can go with
+      me in the carriage.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They unloaded the wardrobe cart and sent it to take wounded men from a
+      house two doors off. The whole household, servants included, was bright
+      and animated. Natásha was in a state of rapturous excitement such as she
+      had not known for a long time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What could we fasten this onto?” asked the servants, trying to fix a
+      trunk on the narrow footboard behind a carriage. “We must keep at least
+      one cart.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s in it?” asked Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The count’s books.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Leave it, Vasílich will put it away. It’s not wanted.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The phaeton was full of people and there was a doubt as to where Count
+      Peter could sit.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “On the box. You’ll sit on the box, won’t you, Pétya?” cried Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya too was busy all this time, but the aim of her efforts was quite
+      different from Natásha’s. She was putting away the things that had to be
+      left behind and making a list of them as the countess wished, and she
+      tried to get as much taken away with them as possible.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0246"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Before two o’clock in the afternoon the Rostóvs’ four carriages, packed
+      full and with the horses harnessed, stood at the front door. One by one
+      the carts with the wounded had moved out of the yard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The <i>calèche</i> in which Prince Andrew was being taken attracted Sónya’s
+      attention as it passed the front porch. With the help of a maid she was
+      arranging a seat for the countess in the huge high coach that stood at the
+      entrance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Whose <i>calèche</i> is that?” she inquired, leaning out of the carriage window.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, didn’t you know, Miss?” replied the maid. “The wounded prince: he
+      spent the night in our house and is going with us.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But who is it? What’s his name?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s our intended that was—Prince Bolkónski himself! They say he is
+      dying,” replied the maid with a sigh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya jumped out of the coach and ran to the countess. The countess, tired
+      out and already dressed in shawl and bonnet for her journey, was pacing up
+      and down the drawing room, waiting for the household to assemble for the
+      usual silent prayer with closed doors before starting. Natásha was not in
+      the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma,” said Sónya, “Prince Andrew is here, mortally wounded. He is going
+      with us.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The countess opened her eyes in dismay and, seizing Sónya’s arm, glanced
+      around.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha?” she murmured.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment this news had only one significance for both of them. They
+      knew their Natásha, and alarm as to what would happen if she heard this
+      news stifled all sympathy for the man they both liked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha does not know yet, but he is going with us,” said Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You say he is dying?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya nodded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess put her arms around Sónya and began to cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The ways of God are past finding out!” she thought, feeling that the
+      Almighty Hand, hitherto unseen, was becoming manifest in all that was now
+      taking place.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, Mamma? Everything is ready. What’s the matter?” asked Natásha, as
+      with animated face she ran into the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nothing,” answered the countess. “If everything is ready let us start.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the countess bent over her reticule to hide her agitated face. Sónya
+      embraced Natásha and kissed her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha looked at her inquiringly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it? What has happened?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Nothing... No...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Is it something very bad for me? What is it?” persisted Natásha with her
+      quick intuition.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya sighed and made no reply. The count, Pétya, Madame Schoss, Mávra
+      Kuzmínichna, and Vasílich came into the drawing room and, having closed
+      the doors, they all sat down and remained for some moments silently seated
+      without looking at one another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count was the first to rise, and with a loud sigh crossed himself
+      before the icon. All the others did the same. Then the count embraced
+      Mávra Kuzmínichna and Vasílich, who were to remain in Moscow, and while
+      they caught at his hand and kissed his shoulder he patted their backs
+      lightly with some vaguely affectionate and comforting words. The countess
+      went into the oratory and there Sónya found her on her knees before the
+      icons that had been left here and there hanging on the wall. (The most
+      precious ones, with which some family tradition was connected, were being
+      taken with them.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the porch and in the yard the men whom Pétya had armed with swords and
+      daggers, with trousers tucked inside their high boots and with belts and
+      girdles tightened, were taking leave of those remaining behind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As is always the case at a departure, much had been forgotten or put in
+      the wrong place, and for a long time two menservants stood one on each
+      side of the open door and the carriage steps waiting to help the countess
+      in, while maids rushed with cushions and bundles from the house to the
+      carriages, the <i>calèche</i>, the phaeton, and back again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They always will forget everything!” said the countess. “Don’t you know I
+      can’t sit like that?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Dunyásha, with clenched teeth, without replying but with an aggrieved
+      look on her face, hastily got into the coach to rearrange the seat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, those servants!” said the count, swaying his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Efím, the old coachman, who was the only one the countess trusted to drive
+      her, sat perched up high on the box and did not so much as glance round at
+      what was going on behind him. From thirty years’ experience he knew it
+      would be some time yet before the order, “Be off, in God’s name!” would be
+      given him: and he knew that even when it was said he would be stopped once
+      or twice more while they sent back to fetch something that had been
+      forgotten, and even after that he would again be stopped and the countess
+      herself would lean out of the window and beg him for the love of heaven to
+      drive carefully down the hill. He knew all this and therefore waited
+      calmly for what would happen, with more patience than the horses,
+      especially the near one, the chestnut Falcon, who was pawing the ground
+      and champing his bit. At last all were seated, the carriage steps were
+      folded and pulled up, the door was shut, somebody was sent for a traveling
+      case, and the countess leaned out and said what she had to say. Then Efím
+      deliberately doffed his hat and began crossing himself. The postilion and
+      all the other servants did the same. “Off, in God’s name!” said Efím,
+      putting on his hat. “Start!” The postilion started the horses, the off
+      pole horse tugged at his collar, the high springs creaked, and the body of
+      the coach swayed. The footman sprang onto the box of the moving coach
+      which jolted as it passed out of the yard onto the uneven roadway; the
+      other vehicles jolted in their turn, and the procession of carriages moved
+      up the street. In the carriages, the <i>calèche</i>, and the phaeton, all crossed
+      themselves as they passed the church opposite the house. Those who were to
+      remain in Moscow walked on either side of the vehicles seeing the
+      travelers off.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rarely had Natásha experienced so joyful a feeling as now, sitting in the
+      carriage beside the countess and gazing at the slowly receding walls of
+      forsaken, agitated Moscow. Occasionally she leaned out of the carriage
+      window and looked back and then forward at the long train of wounded in
+      front of them. Almost at the head of the line she could see the raised
+      hood of Prince Andrew’s <i>calèche</i>. She did not know who was in it,
+      but each time she looked at the procession her eyes sought that <i>calèche</i>.
+      She knew it was right in front.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In Kúdrino, from the Nikítski, Présnya, and Podnovínsk Streets came
+      several other trains of vehicles similar to the Rostóvs’, and as they
+      passed along the Sadóvaya Street the carriages and carts formed two rows
+      abreast.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As they were going round the Súkharev water tower Natásha, who was
+      inquisitively and alertly scrutinizing the people driving or walking past,
+      suddenly cried out in joyful surprise:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear me! Mamma, Sónya, look, it’s he!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Who? Who?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Look! Yes, on my word, it’s Bezúkhov!” said Natásha, putting her head out
+      of the carriage and staring at a tall, stout man in a coachman’s long
+      coat, who from his manner of walking and moving was evidently a gentleman
+      in disguise, and who was passing under the arch of the Súkharev tower
+      accompanied by a small, sallow-faced, beardless old man in a frieze coat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, it really is Bezúkhov in a coachman’s coat, with a queer-looking old
+      boy. Really,” said Natásha, “look, look!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, it’s not he. How can you talk such nonsense?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma,” screamed Natásha, “I’ll stake my head it’s he! I assure you!
+      Stop, stop!” she cried to the coachman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the coachman could not stop, for from the Meshchánski Street came more
+      carts and carriages, and the Rostóvs were being shouted at to move on and
+      not block the way.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In fact, however, though now much farther off than before, the Rostóvs all
+      saw Pierre—or someone extraordinarily like him—in a coachman’s
+      coat, going down the street with head bent and a serious face beside a
+      small, beardless old man who looked like a footman. That old man noticed a
+      face thrust out of the carriage window gazing at them, and respectfully
+      touching Pierre’s elbow said something to him and pointed to the carriage.
+      Pierre, evidently engrossed in thought, could not at first understand him.
+      At length when he had understood and looked in the direction the old man
+      indicated, he recognized Natásha, and following his first impulse stepped
+      instantly and rapidly toward the coach. But having taken a dozen steps he
+      seemed to remember something and stopped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha’s face, leaning out of the window, beamed with quizzical
+      kindliness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Peter Kirílovich, come here! We have recognized you! This is wonderful!”
+       she cried, holding out her hand to him. “What are you doing? Why are you
+      like this?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre took her outstretched hand and kissed it awkwardly as he walked
+      along beside her while the coach still moved on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is the matter, Count?” asked the countess in a surprised and
+      commiserating tone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What? What? Why? Don’t ask me,” said Pierre, and looked round at Natásha
+      whose radiant, happy expression—of which he was conscious without
+      looking at her—filled him with enchantment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Are you remaining in Moscow, then?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre hesitated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In Moscow?” he said in a questioning tone. “Yes, in Moscow. Good-by!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, if only I were a man! I’d certainly stay with you. How splendid!”
+       said Natásha. “Mamma, if you’ll let me, I’ll stay!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre glanced absently at Natásha and was about to say something, but the
+      countess interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You were at the battle, we heard.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I was,” Pierre answered. “There will be another battle tomorrow...”
+       he began, but Natásha interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But what is the matter with you, Count? You are not like yourself....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, don’t ask me, don’t ask me! I don’t know myself. Tomorrow... But no!
+      Good-by, good-by!” he muttered. “It’s an awful time!” and dropping behind
+      the carriage he stepped onto the pavement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha continued to lean out of the window for a long time, beaming at
+      him with her kindly, slightly quizzical, happy smile.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0247"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      For the last two days, ever since leaving home, Pierre had been living in
+      the empty house of his deceased benefactor, Bazdéev. This is how it
+      happened.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he woke up on the morning after his return to Moscow and his
+      interview with Count Rostopchín, he could not for some time make out where
+      he was and what was expected of him. When he was informed that among
+      others awaiting him in his reception room there was a Frenchman who had
+      brought a letter from his wife, the Countess Hélène, he felt suddenly
+      overcome by that sense of confusion and hopelessness to which he was apt
+      to succumb. He felt that everything was now at an end, all was in
+      confusion and crumbling to pieces, that nobody was right or wrong, the
+      future held nothing, and there was no escape from this position. Smiling
+      unnaturally and muttering to himself, he first sat down on the sofa in an
+      attitude of despair, then rose, went to the door of the reception room and
+      peeped through the crack, returned flourishing his arms, and took up a
+      book. His major-domo came in a second time to say that the Frenchman who
+      had brought the letter from the countess was very anxious to see him if
+      only for a minute, and that someone from Bazdéev’s widow had called to ask
+      Pierre to take charge of her husband’s books, as she herself was leaving
+      for the country.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, yes, in a minute; wait... or no! No, of course... go and say I will
+      come directly,” Pierre replied to the major-domo.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But as soon as the man had left the room Pierre took up his hat which was
+      lying on the table and went out of his study by the other door. There was
+      no one in the passage. He went along the whole length of this passage to
+      the stairs and, frowning and rubbing his forehead with both hands, went
+      down as far as the first landing. The hall porter was standing at the
+      front door. From the landing where Pierre stood there was a second
+      staircase leading to the back entrance. He went down that staircase and
+      out into the yard. No one had seen him. But there were some carriages
+      waiting, and as soon as Pierre stepped out of the gate the coachmen and
+      the yard porter noticed him and raised their caps to him. When he felt he
+      was being looked at he behaved like an ostrich which hides its head in a
+      bush in order not to be seen: he hung his head and quickening his pace
+      went down the street.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Of all the affairs awaiting Pierre that day the sorting of Joseph
+      Bazdéev’s books and papers appeared to him the most necessary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He hired the first cab he met and told the driver to go to the Patriarch’s
+      Ponds, where the widow Bazdéev’s house was.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Continually turning round to look at the rows of loaded carts that were
+      making their way from all sides out of Moscow, and balancing his bulky
+      body so as not to slip out of the ramshackle old vehicle, Pierre,
+      experiencing the joyful feeling of a boy escaping from school, began to
+      talk to his driver.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The man told him that arms were being distributed today at the Krémlin and
+      that tomorrow everyone would be sent out beyond the Three Hills gates and
+      a great battle would be fought there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having reached the Patriarch’s Ponds Pierre found the Bazdéevs’ house,
+      where he had not been for a long time past. He went up to the gate.
+      Gerásim, that sallow beardless old man Pierre had seen at Torzhók five
+      years before with Joseph Bazdéev, came out in answer to his knock.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “At home?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Owing to the present state of things Sophia Danílovna has gone to the
+      Torzhók estate with the children, your excellency.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I will come in all the same, I have to look through the books,” said
+      Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Be so good as to step in. Makár Alexéevich, the brother of my late master—may
+      the kingdom of heaven be his—has remained here, but he is in a weak
+      state as you know,” said the old servant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre knew that Makár Alexéevich was Joseph Bazdéev’s half-insane brother
+      and a hard drinker.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, I know. Let us go in...” said Pierre and entered the house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A tall, bald-headed old man with a red nose, wearing a dressing gown and
+      with galoshes on his bare feet, stood in the anteroom. On seeing Pierre he
+      muttered something angrily and went away along the passage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He was a very clever man but has now grown quite feeble, as your honor
+      sees,” said Gerásim. “Will you step into the study?” Pierre nodded. “As it
+      was sealed up so it has remained, but Sophia Danílovna gave orders that if
+      anyone should come from you they were to have the books.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre went into that gloomy study which he had entered with such
+      trepidation in his benefactor’s lifetime. The room, dusty and untouched
+      since the death of Joseph Bazdéev was now even gloomier.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Gerásim opened one of the shutters and left the room on tiptoe. Pierre
+      went round the study, approached the cupboard in which the manuscripts
+      were kept, and took out what had once been one of the most important, the
+      holy of holies of the order. This was the authentic Scotch Acts with
+      Bazdéev’s notes and explanations. He sat down at the dusty writing table,
+      and, having laid the manuscripts before him, opened them out, closed them,
+      finally pushed them away, and resting his head on his hand sank into
+      meditation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Gerásim looked cautiously into the study several times and saw Pierre
+      always sitting in the same attitude.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      More than two hours passed and Gerásim took the liberty of making a slight
+      noise at the door to attract his attention, but Pierre did not hear him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is the cabman to be discharged, your honor?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes!” said Pierre, rousing himself and rising hurriedly. “Look here,”
+       he added, taking Gerásim by a button of his coat and looking down at the
+      old man with moist, shining, and ecstatic eyes, “I say, do you know that
+      there is going to be a battle tomorrow?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “We heard so,” replied the man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I beg you not to tell anyone who I am, and to do what I ask you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, your excellency,” replied Gerásim. “Will you have something to eat?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, but I want something else. I want peasant clothes and a pistol,” said
+      Pierre, unexpectedly blushing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, your excellency,” said Gerásim after thinking for a moment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the rest of that day Pierre spent alone in his benefactor’s study, and
+      Gerásim heard him pacing restlessly from one corner to another and talking
+      to himself. And he spent the night on a bed made up for him there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Gerásim, being a servant who in his time had seen many strange things,
+      accepted Pierre’s taking up his residence in the house without surprise,
+      and seemed pleased to have someone to wait on. That same evening—without
+      even asking himself what they were wanted for—he procured a
+      coachman’s coat and cap for Pierre, and promised to get him the pistol
+      next day. Makár Alexéevich came twice that evening shuffling along in his
+      galoshes as far as the door and stopped and looked ingratiatingly at
+      Pierre. But as soon as Pierre turned toward him he wrapped his dressing
+      gown around him with a shamefaced and angry look and hurried away. It was
+      when Pierre (wearing the coachman’s coat which Gerásim had procured for
+      him and had disinfected by steam) was on his way with the old man to buy
+      the pistol at the Súkharev market that he met the Rostóvs.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0248"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov’s order to retreat through Moscow to the Ryazán road was issued at
+      night on the first of September.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The first troops started at once, and during the night they marched slowly
+      and steadily without hurry. At daybreak, however, those nearing the town
+      at the Dorogomílov bridge saw ahead of them masses of soldiers crowding
+      and hurrying across the bridge, ascending on the opposite side and
+      blocking the streets and alleys, while endless masses of troops were
+      bearing down on them from behind, and an unreasoning hurry and alarm
+      overcame them. They all rushed forward to the bridge, onto it, and to the
+      fords and the boats. Kutúzov himself had driven round by side streets to
+      the other side of Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      By ten o’clock in the morning of the second of September, only the rear
+      guard remained in the Dorogomílov suburb, where they had ample room. The
+      main army was on the other side of Moscow or beyond it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that very time, at ten in the morning of the second of September,
+      Napoleon was standing among his troops on the Poklónny Hill looking at the
+      panorama spread out before him. From the twenty-sixth of August to the
+      second of September, that is from the battle of Borodinó to the entry of
+      the French into Moscow, during the whole of that agitating, memorable
+      week, there had been the extraordinary autumn weather that always comes as
+      a surprise, when the sun hangs low and gives more heat than in spring,
+      when everything shines so brightly in the rare clear atmosphere that the
+      eyes smart, when the lungs are strengthened and refreshed by inhaling the
+      aromatic autumn air, when even the nights are warm, and when in those dark
+      warm nights, golden stars startle and delight us continually by falling
+      from the sky.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At ten in the morning of the second of September this weather still held.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The brightness of the morning was magical. Moscow seen from the Poklónny
+      Hill lay spaciously spread out with her river, her gardens, and her
+      churches, and she seemed to be living her usual life, her cupolas
+      glittering like stars in the sunlight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The view of the strange city with its peculiar architecture, such as he
+      had never seen before, filled Napoleon with the rather envious and uneasy
+      curiosity men feel when they see an alien form of life that has no
+      knowledge of them. This city was evidently living with the full force of
+      its own life. By the indefinite signs which, even at a distance,
+      distinguish a living body from a dead one, Napoleon from the Poklónny Hill
+      perceived the throb of life in the town and felt, as it were, the
+      breathing of that great and beautiful body.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Every Russian looking at Moscow feels her to be a mother; every foreigner
+      who sees her, even if ignorant of her significance as the mother city,
+      must feel her feminine character, and Napoleon felt it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Cette ville asiatique aux innombrables églises, Moscou la sainte. La
+      voilà donc enfin, cette fameuse ville! Il était temps,”</i> * said he, and
+      dismounting he ordered a plan of Moscow to be spread out before him, and
+      summoned Lelorgne d’Ideville, the interpreter.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “That Asiatic city of the innumerable churches, holy
+     Moscow! Here it is then at last, that famous city. It was
+     high time.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “A town captured by the enemy is like a maid who has lost her honor,”
+       thought he (he had said so to Túchkov at Smolénsk). From that point of
+      view he gazed at the Oriental beauty he had not seen before. It seemed
+      strange to him that his long-felt wish, which had seemed unattainable, had
+      at last been realized. In the clear morning light he gazed now at the city
+      and now at the plan, considering its details, and the assurance of
+      possessing it agitated and awed him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But could it be otherwise?” he thought. “Here is this capital at my feet.
+      Where is Alexander now, and of what is he thinking? A strange, beautiful,
+      and majestic city; and a strange and majestic moment! In what light must I
+      appear to them!” thought he, thinking of his troops. “Here she is, the
+      reward for all those fainthearted men,” he reflected, glancing at those
+      near him and at the troops who were approaching and forming up. “One word
+      from me, one movement of my hand, and that ancient capital of the Tsars
+      would perish. But my clemency is always ready to descend upon the
+      vanquished. I must be magnanimous and truly great. But no, it can’t be
+      true that I am in Moscow,” he suddenly thought. “Yet here she is lying at
+      my feet, with her golden domes and crosses scintillating and twinkling in
+      the sunshine. But I shall spare her. On the ancient monuments of barbarism
+      and despotism I will inscribe great words of justice and mercy.... It is
+      just this which Alexander will feel most painfully, I know him.” (It
+      seemed to Napoleon that the chief import of what was taking place lay in
+      the personal struggle between himself and Alexander.) “From the height of
+      the Krémlin—yes, there is the Krémlin, yes—I will give them
+      just laws; I will teach them the meaning of true civilization, I will make
+      generations of boyars remember their conqueror with love. I will tell the
+      deputation that I did not, and do not, desire war, that I have waged war
+      only against the false policy of their court; that I love and respect
+      Alexander and that in Moscow I will accept terms of peace worthy of myself
+      and of my people. I do not wish to utilize the fortunes of war to
+      humiliate an honored monarch. ‘Boyars,’ I will say to them, ‘I do not
+      desire war, I desire the peace and welfare of all my subjects.’ However, I
+      know their presence will inspire me, and I shall speak to them as I always
+      do: clearly, impressively, and majestically. But can it be true that I am
+      in Moscow? Yes, there she lies.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Qu’on m’amène les boyars,”</i> * said he to his suite.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Bring the boyars to me.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      A general with a brilliant suite galloped off at once to fetch the boyars.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Two hours passed. Napoleon had lunched and was again standing in the same
+      place on the Poklónny Hill awaiting the deputation. His speech to the
+      boyars had already taken definite shape in his imagination. That speech
+      was full of dignity and greatness as Napoleon understood it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was himself carried away by the tone of magnanimity he intended to
+      adopt toward Moscow. In his imagination he appointed days for assemblies
+      at the palace of the Tsars, at which Russian notables and his own would
+      mingle. He mentally appointed a governor, one who would win the hearts of
+      the people. Having learned that there were many charitable institutions in
+      Moscow he mentally decided that he would shower favors on them all. He
+      thought that, as in Africa he had to put on a burnoose and sit in a
+      mosque, so in Moscow he must be beneficent like the Tsars. And in order
+      finally to touch the hearts of the Russians—and being like all
+      Frenchmen unable to imagine anything sentimental without a reference to <i>ma
+      chère, ma tendre, ma pauvre mère</i> * —he decided that he would place
+      an inscription on all these establishments in large letters: “This
+      establishment is dedicated to my dear mother.” Or no, it should be simply:
+      <i>Maison de ma Mère</i>, *(2) he concluded. “But am I really in Moscow? Yes,
+      here it lies before me, but why is the deputation from the city so long in
+      appearing?” he wondered.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “My dear, my tender, my poor mother.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * (2) “House of my Mother.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Meanwhile an agitated consultation was being carried on in whispers among
+      his generals and marshals at the rear of his suite. Those sent to fetch
+      the deputation had returned with the news that Moscow was empty, that
+      everyone had left it. The faces of those who were not conferring together
+      were pale and perturbed. They were not alarmed by the fact that Moscow had
+      been abandoned by its inhabitants (grave as that fact seemed), but by the
+      question how to tell the Emperor—without putting him in the terrible
+      position of appearing ridiculous—that he had been awaiting the
+      boyars so long in vain: that there were drunken mobs left in Moscow but no
+      one else. Some said that a deputation of some sort must be scraped
+      together, others disputed that opinion and maintained that the Emperor
+      should first be carefully and skillfully prepared, and then told the
+      truth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He will have to be told, all the same,” said some gentlemen of the suite.
+      “But, gentlemen...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The position was the more awkward because the Emperor, meditating upon his
+      magnanimous plans, was pacing patiently up and down before the outspread
+      map, occasionally glancing along the road to Moscow from under his lifted
+      hand with a bright and proud smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But it’s impossible...” declared the gentlemen of the
+      suite, shrugging their shoulders but not venturing to utter the implied
+      word—<i>le ridicule</i>....
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At last the Emperor, tired of futile expectation, his actor’s instinct
+      suggesting to him that the sublime moment having been too long drawn out
+      was beginning to lose its sublimity, gave a sign with his hand. A single
+      report of a signaling gun followed, and the troops, who were already
+      spread out on different sides of Moscow, moved into the city through the Tver,
+      Kalúga, and Dorogomílov gates. Faster and faster, vying with one another,
+      they moved at the double or at a trot, vanishing amid the clouds of dust
+      they raised and making the air ring with a deafening roar of mingling
+      shouts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Drawn on by the movement of his troops Napoleon rode with them as far as
+      the Dorogomílov gate, but there again stopped and, dismounting from his
+      horse, paced for a long time by the Kámmer-Kollézski rampart, awaiting the
+      deputation.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0249"></a>
+      CHAPTER XX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Meanwhile Moscow was empty. There were still people in it, perhaps a
+      fiftieth part of its former inhabitants had remained, but it was empty. It
+      was empty in the sense that a dying queenless hive is empty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In a queenless hive no life is left though to a superficial glance it
+      seems as much alive as other hives.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The bees circle round a queenless hive in the hot beams of the midday sun
+      as gaily as around the living hives; from a distance it smells of honey
+      like the others, and bees fly in and out in the same way. But one has only
+      to observe that hive to realize that there is no longer any life in it.
+      The bees do not fly in the same way, the smell and the sound that meet the
+      beekeeper are not the same. To the beekeeper’s tap on the wall of the sick
+      hive, instead of the former instant unanimous humming of tens of thousands
+      of bees with their abdomens threateningly compressed, and producing by the
+      rapid vibration of their wings an aerial living sound, the only reply is a
+      disconnected buzzing from different parts of the deserted hive. From the
+      alighting board, instead of the former spirituous fragrant smell of honey
+      and venom, and the warm whiffs of crowded life, comes an odor of emptiness
+      and decay mingling with the smell of honey. There are no longer sentinels
+      sounding the alarm with their abdomens raised, and ready to die in defense
+      of the hive. There is no longer the measured quiet sound of throbbing
+      activity, like the sound of boiling water, but diverse discordant sounds
+      of disorder. In and out of the hive long black robber bees smeared with
+      honey fly timidly and shiftily. They do not sting, but crawl away from
+      danger. Formerly only bees laden with honey flew into the hive, and they
+      flew out empty; now they fly out laden. The beekeeper opens the lower part
+      of the hive and peers in. Instead of black, glossy bees—tamed by
+      toil, clinging to one another’s legs and drawing out the wax, with a
+      ceaseless hum of labor—that used to hang in long clusters down to
+      the floor of the hive, drowsy shriveled bees crawl about separately in
+      various directions on the floor and walls of the hive. Instead of a neatly
+      glued floor, swept by the bees with the fanning of their wings, there is a
+      floor littered with bits of wax, excrement, dying bees scarcely moving
+      their legs, and dead ones that have not been cleared away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The beekeeper opens the upper part of the hive and examines the super.
+      Instead of serried rows of bees sealing up every gap in the combs and
+      keeping the brood warm, he sees the skillful complex structures of the
+      combs, but no longer in their former state of purity. All is neglected and
+      foul. Black robber bees are swiftly and stealthily prowling about the
+      combs, and the short home bees, shriveled and listless as if they were
+      old, creep slowly about without trying to hinder the robbers, having lost
+      all motive and all sense of life. Drones, bumblebees, wasps, and
+      butterflies knock awkwardly against the walls of the hive in their flight.
+      Here and there among the cells containing dead brood and honey an angry
+      buzzing can sometimes be heard. Here and there a couple of bees, by force
+      of habit and custom cleaning out the brood cells, with efforts beyond
+      their strength laboriously drag away a dead bee or bumblebee without
+      knowing why they do it. In another corner two old bees are languidly
+      fighting, or cleaning themselves, or feeding one another, without
+      themselves knowing whether they do it with friendly or hostile intent. In
+      a third place a crowd of bees, crushing one another, attack some victim
+      and fight and smother it, and the victim, enfeebled or killed, drops from
+      above slowly and lightly as a feather, among the heap of corpses. The
+      keeper opens the two center partitions to examine the brood cells. In
+      place of the former close dark circles formed by thousands of bees sitting
+      back to back and guarding the high mystery of generation, he sees hundreds
+      of dull, listless, and sleepy shells of bees. They have almost all died
+      unawares, sitting in the sanctuary they had guarded and which is now no
+      more. They reek of decay and death. Only a few of them still move, rise,
+      and feebly fly to settle on the enemy’s hand, lacking the spirit to die
+      stinging him; the rest are dead and fall as lightly as fish scales. The
+      beekeeper closes the hive, chalks a mark on it, and when he has time tears
+      out its contents and burns it clean.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      So in the same way Moscow was empty when Napoleon, weary, uneasy, and
+      morose, paced up and down in front of the Kámmer-Kollézski rampart,
+      awaiting what to his mind was a necessary, if but formal, observance of
+      the proprieties—a deputation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In various corners of Moscow there still remained a few people aimlessly
+      moving about, following their old habits and hardly aware of what they
+      were doing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When with due circumspection Napoleon was informed that Moscow was empty,
+      he looked angrily at his informant, turned away, and silently continued to
+      walk to and fro.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My carriage!” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He took his seat beside the aide-de-camp on duty and drove into the
+      suburb. “Moscow deserted!” he said to himself. “What an incredible event!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He did not drive into the town, but put up at an inn in the Dorogomílov
+      suburb.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The <i>coup de théâtre</i> had not come off.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0250"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The Russian troops were passing through Moscow from two o’clock at night
+      till two in the afternoon and bore away with them the wounded and the last
+      of the inhabitants who were leaving.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The greatest crush during the movement of the troops took place at the
+      Stone, Moskvá, and Yaúza bridges.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While the troops, dividing into two parts when passing around the Krémlin,
+      were thronging the Moskvá and the Stone bridges, a great many soldiers,
+      taking advantage of the stoppage and congestion, turned back from the
+      bridges and slipped stealthily and silently past the church of Vasíli the
+      Beatified and under the Borovítski gate, back up the hill to the Red
+      Square where some instinct told them they could easily take things not
+      belonging to them. Crowds of the kind seen at cheap sales filled all the
+      passages and alleys of the Bazaar. But there were no dealers with voices
+      of ingratiating affability inviting customers to enter; there were no
+      hawkers, nor the usual motley crowd of female purchasers—but only
+      soldiers, in uniforms and overcoats though without muskets, entering the
+      Bazaar empty-handed and silently making their way out through its passages
+      with bundles. Tradesmen and their assistants (of whom there were but few)
+      moved about among the soldiers quite bewildered. They unlocked their shops
+      and locked them up again, and themselves carried goods away with the help
+      of their assistants. On the square in front of the Bazaar were drummers
+      beating the muster call. But the roll of the drums did not make the
+      looting soldiers run in the direction of the drum as formerly, but made
+      them, on the contrary, run farther away. Among the soldiers in the shops
+      and passages some men were to be seen in gray coats, with closely shaven
+      heads. Two officers, one with a scarf over his uniform and mounted on a
+      lean, dark-gray horse, the other in an overcoat and on foot, stood at the
+      corner of Ilyínka Street, talking. A third officer galloped up to them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The general orders them all to be driven out at once, without fail. This
+      is outrageous! Half the men have dispersed.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Where are you off to?... Where?...” he shouted to three infantrymen
+      without muskets who, holding up the skirts of their overcoats, were
+      slipping past him into the Bazaar passage. “Stop, you rascals!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But how are you going to stop them?” replied another officer. “There is
+      no getting them together. The army should push on before the rest bolt,
+      that’s all!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How can one push on? They are stuck there, wedged on the bridge, and
+      don’t move. Shouldn’t we put a cordon round to prevent the rest from
+      running away?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Come, go in there and drive them out!” shouted the senior officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The officer in the scarf dismounted, called up a drummer, and went with
+      him into the arcade. Some soldiers started running away in a group. A
+      shopkeeper with red pimples on his cheeks near the nose, and a calm,
+      persistent, calculating expression on his plump face, hurriedly and
+      ostentatiously approached the officer, swinging his arms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your honor!” said he. “Be so good as to protect us! We won’t grudge
+      trifles, you are welcome to anything—we shall be delighted! Pray!...
+      I’ll fetch a piece of cloth at once for such an honorable gentleman, or
+      even two pieces with pleasure. For we feel how it is; but what’s all this—sheer
+      robbery! If you please, could not guards be placed if only to let us close
+      the shop....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Several shopkeepers crowded round the officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh, what twaddle!” said one of them, a thin, stern-looking man. “When
+      one’s head is gone one doesn’t weep for one’s hair! Take what any of you
+      like!” And flourishing his arm energetically he turned sideways to the
+      officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s all very well for you, Iván Sidórych, to talk,” said the first
+      tradesman angrily. “Please step inside, your honor!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Talk indeed!” cried the thin one. “In my three shops here I have a
+      hundred thousand rubles’ worth of goods. Can they be saved when the army
+      has gone? Eh, what people! ‘Against God’s might our hands can’t fight.’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Come inside, your honor!” repeated the tradesman, bowing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The officer stood perplexed and his face showed indecision.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s not my business!” he exclaimed, and strode on quickly down one of
+      the passages.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From one open shop came the sound of blows and vituperation, and just as
+      the officer came up to it a man in a gray coat with a shaven head was
+      flung out violently.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This man, bent double, rushed past the tradesman and the officer. The
+      officer pounced on the soldiers who were in the shops, but at that moment
+      fearful screams reached them from the huge crowd on the Moskvá bridge and
+      the officer ran out into the square.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it? What is it?” he asked, but his comrade was already galloping
+      off past Vasíli the Beatified in the direction from which the screams
+      came.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The officer mounted his horse and rode after him. When he reached the
+      bridge he saw two unlimbered guns, the infantry crossing the bridge,
+      several overturned carts, and frightened and laughing faces among the
+      troops. Beside the cannon a cart was standing to which two horses were
+      harnessed. Four borzois with collars were pressing close to the wheels.
+      The cart was loaded high, and at the very top, beside a child’s chair with
+      its legs in the air, sat a peasant woman uttering piercing and desperate
+      shrieks. He was told by his fellow officers that the screams of the crowd
+      and the shrieks of the woman were due to the fact that General Ermólov,
+      coming up to the crowd and learning that soldiers were dispersing among
+      the shops while crowds of civilians blocked the bridge, had ordered two
+      guns to be unlimbered and made a show of firing at the bridge. The crowd,
+      crushing one another, upsetting carts, and shouting and squeezing
+      desperately, had cleared off the bridge and the troops were now moving
+      forward.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0251"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Meanwhile, the city itself was deserted. There was hardly anyone in the
+      streets. The gates and shops were all closed, only here and there round
+      the taverns solitary shouts or drunken songs could be heard. Nobody drove
+      through the streets and footsteps were rarely heard. The Povarskáya was
+      quite still and deserted. The huge courtyard of the Rostóvs’ house was
+      littered with wisps of hay and with dung from the horses, and not a soul
+      was to be seen there. In the great drawing room of the house, which had
+      been left with all it contained, were two people. They were the yard
+      porter Ignát, and the page boy Míshka, Vasílich’s grandson who had stayed
+      in Moscow with his grandfather. Míshka had opened the clavichord and was
+      strumming on it with one finger. The yard porter, his arms akimbo, stood
+      smiling with satisfaction before the large mirror.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Isn’t it fine, eh, Uncle Ignát?” said the boy, suddenly beginning to
+      strike the keyboard with both hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Only fancy!” answered Ignát, surprised at the broadening grin on his face
+      in the mirror.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Impudence! Impudence!” they heard behind them the voice of Mávra
+      Kuzmínichna who had entered silently. “How he’s grinning, the fat mug! Is
+      that what you’re here for? Nothing’s cleared away down there and Vasílich
+      is worn out. Just you wait a bit!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Ignát left off smiling, adjusted his belt, and went out of the room with
+      meekly downcast eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Aunt, I did it gently,” said the boy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll give you something gently, you monkey you!” cried Mávra Kuzmínichna,
+      raising her arm threateningly. “Go and get the samovar to boil for your
+      grandfather.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Mávra Kuzmínichna flicked the dust off the clavichord and closed it, and
+      with a deep sigh left the drawing room and locked its main door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Going out into the yard she paused to consider where she should go next—to
+      drink tea in the servants’ wing with Vasílich, or into the storeroom to
+      put away what still lay about.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She heard the sound of quick footsteps in the quiet street. Someone
+      stopped at the gate, and the latch rattled as someone tried to open it.
+      Mávra Kuzmínichna went to the gate.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who do you want?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The count—Count Ilyá Andréevich Rostóv.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And who are you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “An officer, I have to see him,” came the reply in a pleasant, well-bred
+      Russian voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Mávra Kuzmínichna opened the gate and an officer of eighteen, with the
+      round face of a Rostóv, entered the yard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They have gone away, sir. Went away yesterday at vespertime,” said Mávra
+      Kuzmínichna cordially.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The young officer standing in the gateway, as if hesitating whether to
+      enter or not, clicked his tongue.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, how annoying!” he muttered. “I should have come yesterday.... Ah,
+      what a pity.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Meanwhile, Mávra Kuzmínichna was attentively and sympathetically examining
+      the familiar Rostóv features of the young man’s face, his tattered coat
+      and trodden-down boots.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What did you want to see the count for?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh well... it can’t be helped!” said he in a tone of vexation and placed
+      his hand on the gate as if to leave.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He again paused in indecision.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You see,” he suddenly said, “I am a kinsman of the count’s and he has
+      been very kind to me. As you see” (he glanced with an amused air and
+      good-natured smile at his coat and boots) “my things are worn out and I
+      have no money, so I was going to ask the count...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Mávra Kuzmínichna did not let him finish.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Just wait a minute, sir. One little moment,” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And as soon as the officer let go of the gate handle she turned and,
+      hurrying away on her old legs, went through the back yard to the servants’
+      quarters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While Mávra Kuzmínichna was running to her room the officer walked about
+      the yard gazing at his worn-out boots with lowered head and a faint smile
+      on his lips. “What a pity I’ve missed Uncle! What a nice old woman! Where
+      has she run off to? And how am I to find the nearest way to overtake my
+      regiment, which must by now be getting near the Rogózhski gate?” thought
+      he. Just then Mávra Kuzmínichna appeared from behind the corner of the
+      house with a frightened yet resolute look, carrying a rolled-up check
+      kerchief in her hand. While still a few steps from the officer she
+      unfolded the kerchief and took out of it a white twenty-five-ruble
+      assignat and hastily handed it to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If his excellency had been at home, as a kinsman he would of course...
+      but as it is...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Mávra Kuzmínichna grew abashed and confused. The officer did not decline,
+      but took the note quietly and thanked her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If the count had been at home...” Mávra Kuzmínichna went on
+      apologetically. “Christ be with you, sir! May God preserve you!” said she,
+      bowing as she saw him out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Swaying his head and smiling as if amused at himself, the officer ran
+      almost at a trot through the deserted streets toward the Yaúza bridge to
+      overtake his regiment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Mávra Kuzmínichna stood at the closed gate for some time with moist
+      eyes, pensively swaying her head and feeling an unexpected flow of
+      motherly tenderness and pity for the unknown young officer.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0252"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      From an unfinished house on the Varvárka, the ground floor of which was a
+      dramshop, came drunken shouts and songs. On benches round the tables in a
+      dirty little room sat some ten factory hands. Tipsy and perspiring, with
+      dim eyes and wide-open mouths, they were all laboriously singing some song
+      or other. They were singing discordantly, arduously, and with great
+      effort, evidently not because they wished to sing, but because they wanted
+      to show they were drunk and on a spree. One, a tall, fair-haired lad in a
+      clean blue coat, was standing over the others. His face with its fine
+      straight nose would have been handsome had it not been for his thin,
+      compressed, twitching lips and dull, gloomy, fixed eyes. Evidently
+      possessed by some idea, he stood over those who were singing, and solemnly
+      and jerkily flourished above their heads his white arm with the sleeve
+      turned up to the elbow, trying unnaturally to spread out his dirty
+      fingers. The sleeve of his coat kept slipping down and he always carefully
+      rolled it up again with his left hand, as if it were most important that
+      the sinewy white arm he was flourishing should be bare. In the midst of
+      the song cries were heard, and fighting and blows in the passage and
+      porch. The tall lad waved his arm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Stop it!” he exclaimed peremptorily. “There’s a fight, lads!” And, still
+      rolling up his sleeve, he went out to the porch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The factory hands followed him. These men, who under the leadership of the
+      tall lad were drinking in the dramshop that morning, had brought the
+      publican some skins from the factory and for this had had drink served
+      them. The blacksmiths from a neighboring smithy, hearing the sounds of
+      revelry in the tavern and supposing it to have been broken into, wished to
+      force their way in too and a fight in the porch had resulted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The publican was fighting one of the smiths at the door, and when the
+      workmen came out the smith, wrenching himself free from the tavern keeper,
+      fell face downward on the pavement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Another smith tried to enter the doorway, pressing against the publican
+      with his chest.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The lad with the turned-up sleeve gave the smith a blow in the face and
+      cried wildly: “They’re fighting us, lads!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment the first smith got up and, scratching his bruised face to
+      make it bleed, shouted in a tearful voice: “Police! Murder!... They’ve
+      killed a man, lads!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, gracious me, a man beaten to death—killed!...” screamed a woman
+      coming out of a gate close by.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A crowd gathered round the bloodstained smith.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Haven’t you robbed people enough—taking their last shirts?” said a
+      voice addressing the publican. “What have you killed a man for, you
+      thief?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The tall lad, standing in the porch, turned his bleared eyes from the
+      publican to the smith and back again as if considering whom he ought to
+      fight now.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Murderer!” he shouted suddenly to the publican. “Bind him, lads!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I daresay you would like to bind me!” shouted the publican, pushing away
+      the men advancing on him, and snatching his cap from his head he flung it
+      on the ground.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As if this action had some mysterious and menacing significance, the
+      workmen surrounding the publican paused in indecision.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I know the law very well, mates! I’ll take the matter to the captain of
+      police. You think I won’t get to him? Robbery is not permitted to anybody
+      nowadays!” shouted the publican, picking up his cap.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come along then! Come along then!” the publican and the tall young fellow
+      repeated one after the other, and they moved up the street together.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The bloodstained smith went beside them. The factory hands and others
+      followed behind, talking and shouting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the corner of the Moroséyka, opposite a large house with closed
+      shutters and bearing a bootmaker’s signboard, stood a score of thin,
+      worn-out, gloomy-faced bootmakers, wearing overalls and long tattered
+      coats.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He should pay folks off properly,” a thin workingman, with frowning brows
+      and a straggly beard, was saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But he’s sucked our blood and now he thinks he’s quit of us. He’s been
+      misleading us all the week and now that he’s brought us to this pass he’s
+      made off.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      On seeing the crowd and the bloodstained man the workman ceased speaking,
+      and with eager curiosity all the bootmakers joined the moving crowd.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where are all the folks going?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, to the police, of course!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I say, is it true that we have been beaten?” “And what did you think?
+      Look what folks are saying.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Questions and answers were heard. The publican, taking advantage of the
+      increased crowd, dropped behind and returned to his tavern.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The tall youth, not noticing the disappearance of his foe, waved his bare
+      arm and went on talking incessantly, attracting general attention to
+      himself. It was around him that the people chiefly crowded, expecting
+      answers from him to the questions that occupied all their minds.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He must keep order, keep the law, that’s what the government is there
+      for. Am I not right, good Christians?” said the tall youth, with a
+      scarcely perceptible smile. “He thinks there’s no government! How can one
+      do without government? Or else there would be plenty who’d rob us.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why talk nonsense?” rejoined voices in the crowd. “Will they give up
+      Moscow like this? They told you that for fun, and you believed it! Aren’t
+      there plenty of troops on the march? Let <i>him</i> in, indeed! That’s what the
+      government is for. You’d better listen to what people are saying,” said
+      some of the mob pointing to the tall youth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      By the wall of China-Town a smaller group of people were gathered round a
+      man in a frieze coat who held a paper in his hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “An ukáse, they are reading an ukáse! Reading an ukáse!” cried voices in
+      the crowd, and the people rushed toward the reader.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The man in the frieze coat was reading the broadsheet of August 31. When
+      the crowd collected round him he seemed confused, but at the demand of the
+      tall lad who had pushed his way up to him, he began in a rather tremulous
+      voice to read the sheet from the beginning.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Early tomorrow I shall go to his Serene Highness,” he read (<i>“Sirin
+      Highness,”</i> said the tall fellow with a triumphant smile on his lips and a
+      frown on his brow), “to consult with him to act, and to aid the army to
+      exterminate these scoundrels. We too will take part...” the reader went
+      on, and then paused (“Do you see,” shouted the youth victoriously, “he’s
+      going to clear up the whole affair for you....”), “in destroying them, and
+      will send these visitors to the devil. I will come back to dinner, and
+      we’ll set to work. We will do, completely do, and undo these scoundrels.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The last words were read out in the midst of complete silence. The tall
+      lad hung his head gloomily. It was evident that no one had understood the
+      last part. In particular, the words “I will come back to dinner,”
+       evidently displeased both reader and audience. The people’s minds were
+      tuned to a high pitch and this was too simple and needlessly
+      comprehensible—it was what any one of them might have said and
+      therefore was what an ukáse emanating from the highest authority should
+      not say.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They all stood despondent and silent. The tall youth moved his lips and
+      swayed from side to side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We should ask him... that’s he himself?”... “Yes, ask him indeed!... Why
+      not? He’ll explain”... voices in the rear of the crowd were suddenly heard
+      saying, and the general attention turned to the police superintendent’s
+      trap which drove into the square attended by two mounted dragoons.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The superintendent of police, who had gone that morning by Count
+      Rostopchín’s orders to burn the barges and had in connection with that
+      matter acquired a large sum of money which was at that moment in his
+      pocket, on seeing a crowd bearing down upon him told his coachman to stop.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What people are these?” he shouted to the men, who were moving singly and
+      timidly in the direction of his trap.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What people are these?” he shouted again, receiving no answer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your honor...” replied the shopman in the frieze coat, “your honor, in
+      accord with the proclamation of his highest excellency the count, they
+      desire to serve, not sparing their lives, and it is not any kind of riot,
+      but as his highest excellence said...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The count has not left, he is here, and an order will be issued
+      concerning you,” said the superintendent of police. “Go on!” he ordered
+      his coachman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The crowd halted, pressing around those who had heard what the
+      superintendent had said, and looking at the departing trap.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The superintendent of police turned round at that moment with a scared
+      look, said something to his coachman, and his horses increased their
+      speed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s a fraud, lads! Lead the way to him, himself!” shouted the tall
+      youth. “Don’t let him go, lads! Let him answer us! Keep him!” shouted
+      different people and the people dashed in pursuit of the trap.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Following the superintendent of police and talking loudly the crowd went
+      in the direction of the Lubyánka Street.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There now, the gentry and merchants have gone away and left us to perish.
+      Do they think we’re dogs?” voices in the crowd were heard saying more and
+      more frequently.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0253"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On the evening of the first of September, after his interview with
+      Kutúzov, Count Rostopchín had returned to Moscow mortified and offended
+      because he had not been invited to attend the council of war, and because
+      Kutúzov had paid no attention to his offer to take part in the defense of
+      the city; amazed also at the novel outlook revealed to him at the camp,
+      which treated the tranquillity of the capital and its patriotic fervor as
+      not merely secondary but quite irrelevant and unimportant matters.
+      Distressed, offended, and surprised by all this, Rostopchín had returned
+      to Moscow. After supper he lay down on a sofa without undressing, and was
+      awakened soon after midnight by a courier bringing him a letter from
+      Kutúzov. This letter requested the count to send police officers to guide
+      the troops through the town, as the army was retreating to the Ryazán road
+      beyond Moscow. This was not news to Rostopchín. He had known that Moscow
+      would be abandoned not merely since his interview the previous day with
+      Kutúzov on the Poklónny Hill but ever since the battle of Borodinó, for
+      all the generals who came to Moscow after that battle had said unanimously
+      that it was impossible to fight another battle, and since then the
+      government property had been removed every night, and half the inhabitants
+      had left the city with Rostopchín’s own permission. Yet all the same this
+      information astonished and irritated the count, coming as it did in the
+      form of a simple note with an order from Kutúzov, and received at night,
+      breaking in on his beauty sleep.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When later on in his memoirs Count Rostopchín explained his actions at
+      this time, he repeatedly says that he was then actuated by two important
+      considerations: to maintain tranquillity in Moscow and expedite the
+      departure of the inhabitants. If one accepts this twofold aim all
+      Rostopchín’s actions appear irreproachable. “Why were the holy relics, the
+      arms, ammunition, gunpowder, and stores of corn not removed? Why were
+      thousands of inhabitants deceived into believing that Moscow would not be
+      given up—and thereby ruined?” “To preserve the tranquillity of the
+      city,” explains Count Rostopchín. “Why were bundles of useless papers from
+      the government offices, and Leppich’s balloon and other articles removed?”
+       “To leave the town empty,” explains Count Rostopchín. One need only admit
+      that public tranquillity is in danger and any action finds a
+      justification.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the horrors of the reign of terror were based only on solicitude for
+      public tranquillity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On what, then, was Count Rostopchín’s fear for the tranquillity of Moscow
+      based in 1812? What reason was there for assuming any probability of an
+      uprising in the city? The inhabitants were leaving it and the retreating
+      troops were filling it. Why should that cause the masses to riot?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Neither in Moscow nor anywhere in Russia did anything resembling an
+      insurrection ever occur when the enemy entered a town. More than ten
+      thousand people were still in Moscow on the first and second of September,
+      and except for a mob in the governor’s courtyard, assembled there at his
+      bidding, nothing happened. It is obvious that there would have been even
+      less reason to expect a disturbance among the people if after the battle
+      of Borodinó, when the surrender of Moscow became certain or at least
+      probable, Rostopchín instead of exciting the people by distributing arms
+      and broadsheets had taken steps to remove all the holy relics, the
+      gunpowder, munitions, and money, and had told the population plainly that
+      the town would be abandoned.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostopchín, though he had patriotic sentiments, was a sanguine and
+      impulsive man who had always moved in the highest administrative circles
+      and had no understanding at all of the people he supposed himself to be
+      guiding. Ever since the enemy’s entry into Smolénsk he had in imagination
+      been playing the role of director of the popular feeling of “the heart of
+      Russia.” Not only did it seem to him (as to all administrators) that he
+      controlled the external actions of Moscow’s inhabitants, but he also
+      thought he controlled their mental attitude by means of his broadsheets
+      and posters, written in a coarse tone which the people despise in their
+      own class and do not understand from those in authority. Rostopchín was so
+      pleased with the fine role of leader of popular feeling, and had grown so
+      used to it, that the necessity of relinquishing that role and abandoning
+      Moscow without any heroic display took him unawares and he suddenly felt
+      the ground slip away from under his feet, so that he positively did not
+      know what to do. Though he knew it was coming, he did not till the last
+      moment wholeheartedly believe that Moscow would be abandoned, and did not
+      prepare for it. The inhabitants left against his wishes. If the government
+      offices were removed, this was only done on the demand of officials to
+      whom the count yielded reluctantly. He was absorbed in the role he had
+      created for himself. As is often the case with those gifted with an ardent
+      imagination, though he had long known that Moscow would be abandoned he
+      knew it only with his intellect, he did not believe it in his heart and
+      did not adapt himself mentally to this new position of affairs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All his painstaking and energetic activity (in how far it was useful and
+      had any effect on the people is another question) had been simply directed
+      toward arousing in the masses his own feeling of patriotic hatred of the
+      French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But when events assumed their true historical character, when expressing
+      hatred for the French in words proved insufficient, when it was not even
+      possible to express that hatred by fighting a battle, when self-confidence
+      was of no avail in relation to the one question before Moscow, when the
+      whole population streamed out of Moscow as one man, abandoning their
+      belongings and proving by that negative action all the depth of their
+      national feeling, then the role chosen by Rostopchín suddenly appeared
+      senseless. He unexpectedly felt himself ridiculous, weak, and alone, with
+      no ground to stand on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When, awakened from his sleep, he received that cold, peremptory note from
+      Kutúzov, he felt the more irritated the more he felt himself to blame. All
+      that he had been specially put in charge of, the state property which he
+      should have removed, was still in Moscow and it was no longer possible to
+      take the whole of it away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who is to blame for it? Who has let things come to such a pass?” he
+      ruminated. “Not I, of course. I had everything ready. I had Moscow firmly
+      in hand. And this is what they have let it come to! Villains! Traitors!”
+       he thought, without clearly defining who the villains and traitors were,
+      but feeling it necessary to hate those traitors whoever they might be who
+      were to blame for the false and ridiculous position in which he found
+      himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All that night Count Rostopchín issued orders, for which people came to
+      him from all parts of Moscow. Those about him had never seen the count so
+      morose and irritable.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency, the Director of the Registrar’s Department has sent
+      for instructions.... From the Consistory, from the Senate, from the University,
+      from the Foundling Hospital, the Suffragan has sent... asking for
+      information.... What are your orders about the Fire Brigade? From the
+      governor of the prison... from the superintendent of the lunatic
+      asylum...” All night long such announcements were continually being
+      received by the count.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To all these inquiries he gave brief and angry replies indicating that
+      orders from him were not now needed, that the whole affair, carefully
+      prepared by him, had now been ruined by somebody, and that that somebody
+      would have to bear the whole responsibility for all that might happen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, tell that blockhead,” he said in reply to the question from the
+      Registrar’s Department, “that he should remain to guard his documents.
+      Now why are you asking silly questions about the Fire Brigade? They have
+      horses, let them be off to Vladímir, and not leave them to the French.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency, the superintendent of the lunatic asylum has come: what
+      are your commands?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “My commands? Let them go away, that’s all.... And let the lunatics out
+      into the town. When lunatics command our armies God evidently means these
+      other madmen to be free.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In reply to an inquiry about the convicts in the prison, Count Rostopchín
+      shouted angrily at the governor:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you expect me to give you two battalions—which we have not got—for
+      a convoy? Release them, that’s all about it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency, there are some political prisoners, Meshkóv,
+      Vereshchágin...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Vereshchágin! Hasn’t he been hanged yet?” shouted Rostopchín. “Bring him
+      to me!”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0254"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Toward nine o’clock in the morning, when the troops were already moving
+      through Moscow, nobody came to the count any more for instructions. Those
+      who were able to get away were going of their own accord, those who
+      remained behind decided for themselves what they must do.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count ordered his carriage that he might drive to Sokólniki, and sat
+      in his study with folded hands, morose, sallow, and taciturn.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is
+      only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept
+      going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every
+      administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the
+      sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark,
+      holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving,
+      naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But
+      as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to
+      move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently
+      with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving
+      vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a
+      source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostopchín felt this, and it was this which exasperated him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The superintendent of police, whom the crowd had stopped, went in to see
+      him at the same time as an adjutant who informed the count that the horses
+      were harnessed. They were both pale, and the superintendent of police,
+      after reporting that he had executed the instructions he had received,
+      informed the count that an immense crowd had collected in the courtyard
+      and wished to see him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Without saying a word Rostopchín rose and walked hastily to his light,
+      luxurious drawing room, went to the balcony door, took hold of the handle,
+      let it go again, and went to the window from which he had a better view of
+      the whole crowd. The tall lad was standing in front, flourishing his arm
+      and saying something with a stern look. The blood-stained smith stood
+      beside him with a gloomy face. A drone of voices was audible through the
+      closed window.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is my carriage ready?” asked Rostopchín, stepping back from the window.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is, your excellency,” replied the adjutant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostopchín went again to the balcony door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But what do they want?” he asked the superintendent of police.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your excellency, they say they have got ready, according to your orders,
+      to go against the French, and they shouted something about treachery. But
+      it is a turbulent crowd, your excellency—I hardly managed to get
+      away from it. Your excellency, I venture to suggest...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You may go. I don’t need you to tell me what to do!” exclaimed Rostopchín
+      angrily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He stood by the balcony door looking at the crowd.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This is what they have done with Russia! This is what they have done with
+      me!” thought he, full of an irrepressible fury that welled up within him
+      against the someone to whom what was happening might be attributed. As
+      often happens with passionate people, he was mastered by anger but was
+      still seeking an object on which to vent it. “Here is that mob, the dregs
+      of the people,” he thought as he gazed at the crowd: “this rabble they
+      have roused by their folly! They want a victim,” he thought as he looked
+      at the tall lad flourishing his arm. And this thought occurred to him just
+      because he himself desired a victim, something on which to vent his rage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is the carriage ready?” he asked again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, your excellency. What are your orders about Vereshchágin? He is
+      waiting at the porch,” said the adjutant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah!” exclaimed Rostopchín, as if struck by an unexpected recollection.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And rapidly opening the door he went resolutely out onto the balcony. The
+      talking instantly ceased, hats and caps were doffed, and all eyes were
+      raised to the count.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good morning, lads!” said the count briskly and loudly. “Thank you for
+      coming. I’ll come out to you in a moment, but we must first settle with
+      the villain. We must punish the villain who has caused the ruin of Moscow.
+      Wait for me!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the count stepped as briskly back into the room and slammed the door
+      behind him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A murmur of approbation and satisfaction ran through the crowd. “He’ll
+      settle with all the villains, you’ll see! And you said the French... He’ll
+      show you what law is!” the mob were saying as if reproving one another for
+      their lack of confidence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A few minutes later an officer came hurriedly out of the front door, gave
+      an order, and the dragoons formed up in line. The crowd moved eagerly from
+      the balcony toward the porch. Rostopchín, coming out there with quick
+      angry steps, looked hastily around as if seeking someone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where is he?” he inquired. And as he spoke he saw a young man coming
+      round the corner of the house between two dragoons. He had a long thin
+      neck, and his head, that had been half shaved, was again covered by short
+      hair. This young man was dressed in a threadbare blue cloth coat lined
+      with fox fur, that had once been smart, and dirty hempen convict trousers,
+      over which were pulled his thin, dirty, trodden-down boots. On his thin,
+      weak legs were heavy chains which hampered his irresolute movements.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah!” said Rostopchín, hurriedly turning away his eyes from the young man
+      in the fur-lined coat and pointing to the bottom step of the porch. “Put
+      him there.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The young man in his clattering chains stepped clumsily to the spot
+      indicated, holding away with one finger the coat collar which chafed his
+      neck, turned his long neck twice this way and that, sighed, and
+      submissively folded before him his thin hands, unused to work.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For several seconds while the young man was taking his place on the step
+      the silence continued. Only among the back rows of the people, who were
+      all pressing toward the one spot, could sighs, groans, and the shuffling
+      of feet be heard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While waiting for the young man to take his place on the step Rostopchín
+      stood frowning and rubbing his face with his hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lads!” said he, with a metallic ring in his voice. “This man,
+      Vereshchágin, is the scoundrel by whose doing Moscow is perishing.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The young man in the fur-lined coat, stooping a little, stood in a
+      submissive attitude, his fingers clasped before him. His emaciated young
+      face, disfigured by the half-shaven head, hung down hopelessly. At the
+      count’s first words he raised it slowly and looked up at him as if wishing
+      to say something or at least to meet his eye. But Rostopchín did not look
+      at him. A vein in the young man’s long thin neck swelled like a cord and
+      went blue behind the ear, and suddenly his face flushed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All eyes were fixed on him. He looked at the crowd, and rendered more
+      hopeful by the expression he read on the faces there, he smiled sadly and
+      timidly, and lowering his head shifted his feet on the step.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He has betrayed his Tsar and his country, he has gone over to Bonaparte.
+      He alone of all the Russians has disgraced the Russian name, he has caused
+      Moscow to perish,” said Rostopchín in a sharp, even voice, but suddenly he
+      glanced down at Vereshchágin who continued to stand in the same submissive
+      attitude. As if inflamed by the sight, he raised his arm and addressed the
+      people, almost shouting:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Deal with him as you think fit! I hand him over to you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The crowd remained silent and only pressed closer and closer to one
+      another. To keep one another back, to breathe in that stifling atmosphere,
+      to be unable to stir, and to await something unknown, uncomprehended, and
+      terrible, was becoming unbearable. Those standing in front, who had seen
+      and heard what had taken place before them, all stood with wide-open eyes
+      and mouths, straining with all their strength, and held back the crowd
+      that was pushing behind them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Beat him!... Let the traitor perish and not disgrace the Russian name!”
+       shouted Rostopchín. “Cut him down. I command it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Hearing not so much the words as the angry tone of Rostopchín’s voice, the
+      crowd moaned and heaved forward, but again paused.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Count!” exclaimed the timid yet theatrical voice of Vereshchágin in the
+      midst of the momentary silence that ensued, “Count! One God is above us
+      both....” He lifted his head and again the thick vein in his thin neck
+      filled with blood and the color rapidly came and went in his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He did not finish what he wished to say.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Cut him down! I command it...” shouted Rostopchín, suddenly growing pale
+      like Vereshchágin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Draw sabers!” cried the dragoon officer, drawing his own.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Another still stronger wave flowed through the crowd and reaching the
+      front ranks carried it swaying to the very steps of the porch. The tall
+      youth, with a stony look on his face, and rigid and uplifted arm, stood
+      beside Vereshchágin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Saber him!” the dragoon officer almost whispered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And one of the soldiers, his face all at once distorted with fury, struck
+      Vereshchágin on the head with the blunt side of his saber.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah!” cried Vereshchágin in meek surprise, looking round with a frightened
+      glance as if not understanding why this was done to him. A similar moan of
+      surprise and horror ran through the crowd. “O Lord!” exclaimed a sorrowful
+      voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But after the exclamation of surprise that had escaped from Vereshchágin
+      he uttered a plaintive cry of pain, and that cry was fatal. The barrier of
+      human feeling, strained to the utmost, that had held the crowd in check
+      suddenly broke. The crime had begun and must now be completed. The
+      plaintive moan of reproach was drowned by the threatening and angry roar
+      of the crowd. Like the seventh and last wave that shatters a ship, that
+      last irresistible wave burst from the rear and reached the front ranks,
+      carrying them off their feet and engulfing them all. The dragoon was about
+      to repeat his blow. Vereshchágin with a cry of horror, covering his head
+      with his hands, rushed toward the crowd. The tall youth, against whom he
+      stumbled, seized his thin neck with his hands and, yelling wildly, fell
+      with him under the feet of the pressing, struggling crowd.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Some beat and tore at Vereshchágin, others at the tall youth. And the
+      screams of those that were being trampled on and of those who tried to
+      rescue the tall lad only increased the fury of the crowd. It was a long
+      time before the dragoons could extricate the bleeding youth, beaten almost
+      to death. And for a long time, despite the feverish haste with which the
+      mob tried to end the work that had been begun, those who were hitting,
+      throttling, and tearing at Vereshchágin were unable to kill him, for the
+      crowd pressed from all sides, swaying as one mass with them in the center
+      and rendering it impossible for them either to kill him or let him go.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hit him with an ax, eh!... Crushed?... Traitor, he sold Christ.... Still
+      alive... tenacious... serves him right! Torture serves a thief right. Use
+      the hatchet!... What—still alive?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Only when the victim ceased to struggle and his cries changed to a
+      long-drawn, measured death rattle did the crowd around his prostrate,
+      bleeding corpse begin rapidly to change places. Each one came up, glanced
+      at what had been done, and with horror, reproach, and astonishment pushed
+      back again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “O Lord! The people are like wild beasts! How could he be alive?” voices
+      in the crowd could be heard saying. “Quite a young fellow too... must have
+      been a merchant’s son. What men!... and they say he’s not the right
+      one.... How not the right one?... O Lord! And there’s another has been
+      beaten too—they say he’s nearly done for.... Oh, the people...
+      Aren’t they afraid of sinning?...” said the same mob now, looking with
+      pained distress at the dead body with its long, thin, half-severed neck
+      and its livid face stained with blood and dust.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A painstaking police officer, considering the presence of a corpse in his
+      excellency’s courtyard unseemly, told the dragoons to take it away. Two
+      dragoons took it by its distorted legs and dragged it along the ground.
+      The gory, dust-stained, half-shaven head with its long neck trailed
+      twisting along the ground. The crowd shrank back from it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the moment when Vereshchágin fell and the crowd closed in with savage
+      yells and swayed about him, Rostopchín suddenly turned pale and, instead
+      of going to the back entrance where his carriage awaited him, went with
+      hurried steps and bent head, not knowing where and why, along the passage
+      leading to the rooms on the ground floor. The count’s face was white and
+      he could not control the feverish twitching of his lower jaw.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This way, your excellency... Where are you going?... This way, please...”
+       said a trembling, frightened voice behind him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Count Rostopchín was unable to reply and, turning obediently, went in the
+      direction indicated. At the back entrance stood his <i>calèche</i>. The distant
+      roar of the yelling crowd was audible even there. He hastily took his seat
+      and told the coachman to drive him to his country house in Sokólniki.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When they reached the Myasnítski Street and could no longer hear the
+      shouts of the mob, the count began to repent. He remembered with
+      dissatisfaction the agitation and fear he had betrayed before his
+      subordinates. “The mob is terrible—disgusting,” he said to himself
+      in French. “They are like wolves whom nothing but flesh can appease.”
+       “Count! One God is above us both!”—Vereshchágin’s words suddenly
+      recurred to him, and a disagreeable shiver ran down his back. But this was
+      only a momentary feeling and Count Rostopchín smiled disdainfully at
+      himself. “I had other duties,” thought he. “The people had to be appeased.
+      Many other victims have perished and are perishing for the public good”—and
+      he began thinking of his social duties to his family and to the city
+      entrusted to him, and of himself—not himself as Theodore Vasílyevich
+      Rostopchín (he fancied that Theodore Vasílyevich Rostopchín was
+      sacrificing himself for the public good) but himself as governor, the
+      representative of authority and of the Tsar. “Had I been simply Theodore
+      Vasílyevich my course of action would have been quite different, but it
+      was my duty to safeguard my life and dignity as commander in chief.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Lightly swaying on the flexible springs of his carriage and no longer
+      hearing the terrible sounds of the crowd, Rostopchín grew physically calm
+      and, as always happens, as soon as he became physically tranquil his mind
+      devised reasons why he should be mentally tranquil too. The thought which
+      tranquillized Rostopchín was not a new one. Since the world began and men
+      have killed one another no one has ever committed such a crime against his
+      fellow man without comforting himself with this same idea. This idea is <i>le
+      bien public</i>, the hypothetical welfare of other people.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To a man not swayed by passion that welfare is never certain, but he who
+      commits such a crime always knows just where that welfare lies. And
+      Rostopchín now knew it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Not only did his reason not reproach him for what he had done, but he even
+      found cause for self-satisfaction in having so successfully contrived to
+      avail himself of a convenient opportunity to punish a criminal and at the
+      same time pacify the mob.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Vereshchágin was tried and condemned to death,” thought Rostopchín
+      (though the Senate had only condemned Vereshchágin to hard labor), “he was
+      a traitor and a spy. I could not let him go unpunished and so I have
+      killed two birds with one stone: to appease the mob I gave them a victim
+      and at the same time punished a miscreant.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Having reached his country house and begun to give orders about domestic
+      arrangements, the count grew quite tranquil.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Half an hour later he was driving with his fast horses across the
+      Sokólniki field, no longer thinking of what had occurred but considering
+      what was to come. He was driving to the Yaúza bridge where he had heard
+      that Kutúzov was. Count Rostopchín was mentally preparing the angry and
+      stinging reproaches he meant to address to Kutúzov for his deception. He
+      would make that foxy old courtier feel that the responsibility for all the
+      calamities that would follow the abandonment of the city and the ruin of
+      Russia (as Rostopchín regarded it) would fall upon his doting old head.
+      Planning beforehand what he would say to Kutúzov, Rostopchín turned
+      angrily in his <i>calèche</i> and gazed sternly from side to side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Sokólniki field was deserted. Only at the end of it, in front of the
+      almshouse and the lunatic asylum, could be seen some people in white and
+      others like them walking singly across the field shouting and
+      gesticulating.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One of these was running to cross the path of Count Rostopchín’s carriage,
+      and the count himself, his coachman, and his dragoons looked with vague
+      horror and curiosity at these released lunatics and especially at the one
+      running toward them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Swaying from side to side on his long, thin legs in his fluttering
+      dressing gown, this lunatic was running impetuously, his gaze fixed on
+      Rostopchín, shouting something in a hoarse voice and making signs to him
+      to stop. The lunatic’s solemn, gloomy face was thin and yellow, with its
+      beard growing in uneven tufts. His black, agate pupils with saffron-yellow
+      whites moved restlessly near the lower eyelids.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Stop! Pull up, I tell you!” he cried in a piercing voice, and again
+      shouted something breathlessly with emphatic intonations and gestures.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Coming abreast of the <i>calèche</i> he ran beside it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Thrice have they slain me, thrice have I risen from the dead. They stoned
+      me, crucified me... I shall rise... shall rise... shall rise. They have
+      torn my body. The kingdom of God will be overthrown... Thrice will I
+      overthrow it and thrice re-establish it!” he cried, raising his voice
+      higher and higher.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Count Rostopchín suddenly grew pale as he had done when the crowd closed
+      in on Vereshchágin. He turned away. “Go fas... faster!” he cried in a
+      trembling voice to his coachman. The <i>calèche</i> flew over the ground as fast
+      as the horses could draw it, but for a long time Count Rostopchín still
+      heard the insane despairing screams growing fainter in the distance, while
+      his eyes saw nothing but the astonished, frightened, bloodstained face of
+      “the traitor” in the fur-lined coat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Recent as that mental picture was, Rostopchín already felt that it had cut
+      deep into his heart and drawn blood. Even now he felt clearly that the
+      gory trace of that recollection would not pass with time, but that the
+      terrible memory would, on the contrary, dwell in his heart ever more
+      cruelly and painfully to the end of his life. He seemed still to hear the
+      sound of his own words: “Cut him down! I command it....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why did I utter those words? It was by some accident I said them.... I
+      need not have said them,” he thought. “And then nothing would have
+      happened.” He saw the frightened and then infuriated face of the dragoon
+      who dealt the blow, the look of silent, timid reproach that boy in the
+      fur-lined coat had turned upon him. “But I did not do it for my own sake.
+      I was bound to act that way.... The mob, the traitor... the public
+      welfare,” thought he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Troops were still crowding at the Yaúza bridge. It was hot. Kutúzov,
+      dejected and frowning, sat on a bench by the bridge toying with his whip
+      in the sand when a <i>calèche</i> dashed up noisily. A man in a general’s uniform
+      with plumes in his hat went up to Kutúzov and said something in French. It
+      was Count Rostopchín. He told Kutúzov that he had come because Moscow, the
+      capital, was no more and only the army remained.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Things would have been different if your Serene Highness had not told me
+      that you would not abandon Moscow without another battle; all this would
+      not have happened,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov looked at Rostopchín as if, not grasping what was said to him, he
+      was trying to read something peculiar written at that moment on the face
+      of the man addressing him. Rostopchín grew confused and became silent.
+      Kutúzov slightly shook his head and not taking his penetrating gaze from
+      Rostopchín’s face muttered softly:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No! I shall not give up Moscow without a battle!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Whether Kutúzov was thinking of something entirely different when he spoke
+      those words, or uttered them purposely, knowing them to be meaningless, at
+      any rate Rostopchín made no reply and hastily left him. And strange to
+      say, the Governor of Moscow, the proud Count Rostopchín, took up a Cossack
+      whip and went to the bridge where he began with shouts to drive on the
+      carts that blocked the way.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0255"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Toward four o’clock in the afternoon Murat’s troops were entering Moscow.
+      In front rode a detachment of Württemberg hussars and behind them rode the
+      King of Naples himself accompanied by a numerous suite.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      About the middle of the Arbát Street, near the Church of the Miraculous
+      Icon of St. Nicholas, Murat halted to await news from the advanced
+      detachment as to the condition in which they had found the citadel, <i>le
+      Kremlin</i>.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Around Murat gathered a group of those who had remained in Moscow. They
+      all stared in timid bewilderment at the strange, long-haired commander
+      dressed up in feathers and gold.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is that their Tsar himself? He’s not bad!” low voices could be heard
+      saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      An interpreter rode up to the group.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Take off your cap... your caps!” These words went from one to another in
+      the crowd. The interpreter addressed an old porter and asked if it was far
+      to the Krémlin. The porter, listening in perplexity to the unfamiliar
+      Polish accent and not realizing that the interpreter was speaking Russian,
+      did not understand what was being said to him and slipped behind the
+      others.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Murat approached the interpreter and told him to ask where the Russian
+      army was. One of the Russians understood what was asked and several voices
+      at once began answering the interpreter. A French officer, returning from
+      the advanced detachment, rode up to Murat and reported that the gates of
+      the citadel had been barricaded and that there was probably an ambuscade
+      there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good!” said Murat and, turning to one of the gentlemen in his suite,
+      ordered four light guns to be moved forward to fire at the gates.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The guns emerged at a trot from the column following Murat and advanced up
+      the Arbát. When they reached the end of the Vozdvízhenka Street they
+      halted and drew in the Square. Several French officers superintended the
+      placing of the guns and looked at the Krémlin through field glasses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The bells in the Krémlin were ringing for vespers, and this sound troubled
+      the French. They imagined it to be a call to arms. A few infantrymen ran
+      to the Kutáfyev Gate. Beams and wooden screens had been put there, and two
+      musket shots rang out from under the gate as soon as an officer and men
+      began to run toward it. A general who was standing by the guns shouted
+      some words of command to the officer, and the latter ran back again with
+      his men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The sound of three more shots came from the gate.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One shot struck a French soldier’s foot, and from behind the screens came
+      the strange sound of a few voices shouting. Instantly as at a word of
+      command the expression of cheerful serenity on the faces of the French
+      general, officers, and men changed to one of determined concentrated
+      readiness for strife and suffering. To all of them from the marshal to the
+      least soldier, that place was not the Vozdvízhenka, Mokhaváya, or Kutáfyev
+      Street, nor the Tróitsa Gate (places familiar in Moscow), but a new
+      battlefield which would probably prove sanguinary. And all made ready for
+      that battle. The cries from the gates ceased. The guns were advanced, the
+      artillerymen blew the ash off their linstocks, and an officer gave the
+      word “Fire!” This was followed by two whistling sounds of canister shot,
+      one after another. The shot rattled against the stone of the gate and upon
+      the wooden beams and screens, and two wavering clouds of smoke rose over
+      the Square.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A few instants after the echo of the reports resounding over the
+      stone-built Krémlin had died away the French heard a strange sound above
+      their head. Thousands of crows rose above the walls and circled in the
+      air, cawing and noisily flapping their wings. Together with that sound
+      came a solitary human cry from the gateway and amid the smoke appeared the
+      figure of a bareheaded man in a peasant’s coat. He grasped a musket and
+      took aim at the French. “Fire!” repeated the officer once more, and the
+      reports of a musket and of two cannon shots were heard simultaneously. The
+      gate was again hidden by smoke.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nothing more stirred behind the screens and the French infantry soldiers
+      and officers advanced to the gate. In the gateway lay three wounded and
+      four dead. Two men in peasant coats ran away at the foot of the wall,
+      toward the Známenka.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Clear that away!” said the officer, pointing to the beams and the
+      corpses, and the French soldiers, after dispatching the wounded, threw the
+      corpses over the parapet.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Who these men were nobody knew. “Clear that away!” was all that was said
+      of them, and they were thrown over the parapet and removed later on that
+      they might not stink. Thiers alone dedicates a few eloquent lines to their
+      memory: “These wretches had occupied the sacred citadel, having supplied
+      themselves with guns from the arsenal, and fired” (the wretches) “at the
+      French. Some of them were sabered and the Krémlin was purged of their
+      presence.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Murat was informed that the way had been cleared. The French entered the
+      gates and began pitching their camp in the Senate Square. Out of the
+      windows of the Senate House the soldiers threw chairs into the Square for
+      fuel and kindled fires there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Other detachments passed through the Krémlin and encamped along the
+      Moroséyka, the Lubyánka, and Pokróvka Streets. Others quartered themselves
+      along the Vozdvízhenka, the Nikólski, and the Tverskóy Streets. No masters
+      of the houses being found anywhere, the French were not billeted on the
+      inhabitants as is usual in towns but lived in it as in a camp.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though tattered, hungry, worn out, and reduced to a third of their
+      original number, the French entered Moscow in good marching order. It was
+      a weary and famished, but still a fighting and menacing army. But it
+      remained an army only until its soldiers had dispersed into their
+      different lodgings. As soon as the men of the various regiments began to
+      disperse among the wealthy and deserted houses, the army was lost forever
+      and there came into being something nondescript, neither citizens nor
+      soldiers but what are known as marauders. When five weeks later these same
+      men left Moscow, they no longer formed an army. They were a mob of
+      marauders, each carrying a quantity of articles which seemed to him
+      valuable or useful. The aim of each man when he left Moscow was no longer,
+      as it had been, to conquer, but merely to keep what he had acquired. Like
+      a monkey which puts its paw into the narrow neck of a jug, and having
+      seized a handful of nuts will not open its fist for fear of losing what it
+      holds, and therefore perishes, the French when they left Moscow had
+      inevitably to perish because they carried their loot with them, yet to
+      abandon what they had stolen was as impossible for them as it is for the
+      monkey to open its paw and let go of its nuts. Ten minutes after each
+      regiment had entered a Moscow district, not a soldier or officer was left.
+      Men in military uniforms and Hessian boots could be seen through the
+      windows, laughing and walking through the rooms. In cellars and storerooms
+      similar men were busy among the provisions, and in the yards unlocking or
+      breaking open coach house and stable doors, lighting fires in kitchens and
+      kneading and baking bread with rolled-up sleeves, and cooking; or
+      frightening, amusing, or caressing women and children. There were many
+      such men both in the shops and houses—but there was no army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Order after order was issued by the French commanders that day forbidding
+      the men to disperse about the town, sternly forbidding any violence to the
+      inhabitants or any looting, and announcing a roll call for that very
+      evening. But despite all these measures the men, who had till then
+      constituted an army, flowed all over the wealthy, deserted city with its
+      comforts and plentiful supplies. As a hungry herd of cattle keeps well
+      together when crossing a barren field, but gets out of hand and at once
+      disperses uncontrollably as soon as it reaches rich pastures, so did the
+      army disperse all over the wealthy city.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      No residents were left in Moscow, and the soldiers—like water
+      percolating through sand—spread irresistibly through the city in all
+      directions from the Krémlin into which they had first marched. The
+      cavalry, on entering a merchant’s house that had been abandoned and
+      finding there stabling more than sufficient for their horses, went on, all
+      the same, to the next house which seemed to them better. Many of them
+      appropriated several houses, chalked their names on them, and quarreled
+      and even fought with other companies for them. Before they had had time to
+      secure quarters the soldiers ran out into the streets to see the city and,
+      hearing that everything had been abandoned, rushed to places where
+      valuables were to be had for the taking. The officers followed to check
+      the soldiers and were involuntarily drawn into doing the same. In Carriage
+      Row carriages had been left in the shops, and generals flocked there to
+      select <i>calèches</i> and coaches for themselves. The few inhabitants who had
+      remained invited commanding officers to their houses, hoping thereby to
+      secure themselves from being plundered. There were masses of wealth and
+      there seemed no end to it. All around the quarters occupied by the French
+      were other regions still unexplored and unoccupied where, they thought,
+      yet greater riches might be found. And Moscow engulfed the army ever
+      deeper and deeper. When water is spilled on dry ground both the dry ground
+      and the water disappear and mud results; and in the same way the entry of
+      the famished army into the rich and deserted city resulted in fires and
+      looting and the destruction of both the army and the wealthy city.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      The French attributed the Fire of Moscow <i>au patriotisme féroce de
+      Rostopchíne</i>, * the Russians to the barbarity of the French. In reality,
+      however, it was not, and could not be, possible to explain the burning of
+      Moscow by making any individual, or any group of people, responsible for
+      it. Moscow was burned because it found itself in a position in which any
+      town built of wood was bound to burn, quite apart from whether it had, or
+      had not, a hundred and thirty inferior fire engines. Deserted Moscow had
+      to burn as inevitably as a heap of shavings has to burn on which sparks
+      continually fall for several days. A town built of wood, where scarcely a
+      day passes without conflagrations when the house owners are in residence
+      and a police force is present, cannot help burning when its inhabitants
+      have left it and it is occupied by soldiers who smoke pipes, make
+      campfires of the Senate chairs in the Senate Square, and cook themselves
+      meals twice a day. In peacetime it is only necessary to billet troops in
+      the villages of any district and the number of fires in that district
+      immediately increases. How much then must the probability of fire be
+      increased in an abandoned, wooden town where foreign troops are quartered.
+      <i>“Le patriotisme féroce de Rostopchíne”</i> and the barbarity of the
+      French were not to blame in the matter. Moscow was set on fire by the
+      soldiers’ pipes, kitchens, and campfires, and by the carelessness of enemy
+      soldiers occupying houses they did not own. Even if there was any arson (which is
+      very doubtful, for no one had any reason to burn the houses—in any
+      case a troublesome and dangerous thing to do), arson cannot be regarded as
+      the cause, for the same thing would have happened without any
+      incendiarism.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * To Rostopchín’s ferocious patriotism.
+</p>
+<p>
+      However tempting it might be for the French to blame Rostopchín’s ferocity
+      and for Russians to blame the scoundrel Bonaparte, or later on to place an
+      heroic torch in the hands of their own people, it is impossible not to see
+      that there could be no such direct cause of the fire, for Moscow had to
+      burn as every village, factory, or house must burn which is left by its
+      owners and in which strangers are allowed to live and cook their porridge.
+      Moscow was burned by its inhabitants, it is true, but by those who had
+      abandoned it and not by those who remained in it. Moscow when occupied by
+      the enemy did not remain intact like Berlin, Vienna, and other towns,
+      simply because its inhabitants abandoned it and did not welcome the French
+      with bread and salt, nor bring them the keys of the city.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0256"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The absorption of the French by Moscow, radiating starwise as it did, only
+      reached the quarter where Pierre was staying by the evening of the second
+      of September.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the last two days spent in solitude and unusual circumstances,
+      Pierre was in a state bordering on insanity. He was completely obsessed by
+      one persistent thought. He did not know how or when this thought had taken
+      such possession of him, but he remembered nothing of the past, understood
+      nothing of the present, and all he saw and heard appeared to him like a
+      dream.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He had left home only to escape the intricate tangle of life’s demands
+      that enmeshed him, and which in his present condition he was unable to
+      unravel. He had gone to Joseph Alexéevich’s house, on the plea of sorting
+      the deceased’s books and papers, only in search of rest from life’s
+      turmoil, for in his mind the memory of Joseph Alexéevich was connected
+      with a world of eternal, solemn, and calm thoughts, quite contrary to the
+      restless confusion into which he felt himself being drawn. He sought a
+      quiet refuge, and in Joseph Alexéevich’s study he really found it. When he
+      sat with his elbows on the dusty writing table in the deathlike stillness
+      of the study, calm and significant memories of the last few days rose one
+      after another in his imagination, particularly of the battle of Borodinó
+      and of that vague sense of his own insignificance and insincerity compared
+      with the truth, simplicity, and strength of the class of men he mentally
+      classed as <i>they</i>. When Gerásim roused him from his reverie the idea
+      occurred to him of taking part in the popular defense of Moscow which he
+      knew was projected. And with that object he had asked Gerásim to get him a
+      peasant’s coat and a pistol, confiding to him his intentions of remaining
+      in Joseph Alexéevich’s house and keeping his name secret. Then during the
+      first day spent in inaction and solitude (he tried several times to fix
+      his attention on the Masonic manuscripts, but was unable to do so) the
+      idea that had previously occurred to him of the cabalistic significance of
+      his name in connection with Bonaparte’s more than once vaguely presented
+      itself. But the idea that he, <i>L’russe Besuhof</i>, was destined to set a limit
+      to the power of the <i>Beast</i> was as yet only one of the fancies that often
+      passed through his mind and left no trace behind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When, having bought the coat merely with the object of taking part among
+      the people in the defense of Moscow, Pierre had met the Rostóvs and
+      Natásha had said to him: “Are you remaining in Moscow?... How splendid!”
+       the thought flashed into his mind that it really would be a good thing,
+      even if Moscow were taken, for him to remain there and do what he was
+      predestined to do.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day, with the sole idea of not sparing himself and not lagging in any
+      way behind <i>them</i>, Pierre went to the Three Hills gate. But when he returned
+      to the house convinced that Moscow would not be defended, he suddenly felt
+      that what before had seemed to him merely a possibility had now become
+      absolutely necessary and inevitable. He must remain in Moscow, concealing
+      his name, and must meet Napoleon and kill him, and either perish or put an
+      end to the misery of all Europe—which it seemed to him was solely
+      due to Napoleon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre knew all the details of the attempt on Bonaparte’s life in 1809 by
+      a German student in Vienna, and knew that the student had been shot. And
+      the risk to which he would expose his life by carrying out his design
+      excited him still more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Two equally strong feelings drew Pierre irresistibly to this purpose. The
+      first was a feeling of the necessity of sacrifice and suffering in view of
+      the common calamity, the same feeling that had caused him to go to
+      Mozháysk on the twenty-fifth and to make his way to the very thick of the
+      battle and had now caused him to run away from his home and, in place of
+      the luxury and comfort to which he was accustomed, to sleep on a hard sofa
+      without undressing and eat the same food as Gerásim. The other was that
+      vague and quite Russian feeling of contempt for everything conventional,
+      artificial, and human—for everything the majority of men regard as
+      the greatest good in the world. Pierre had first experienced this strange
+      and fascinating feeling at the Slobóda Palace, when he had suddenly felt
+      that wealth, power, and life—all that men so painstakingly acquire
+      and guard—if it has any worth has so only by reason of the joy with
+      which it can all be renounced.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was the feeling that induces a volunteer recruit to spend his last
+      penny on drink, and a drunken man to smash mirrors or glasses for no
+      apparent reason and knowing that it will cost him all the money he
+      possesses: the feeling which causes a man to perform actions which from an
+      ordinary point of view are insane, to test, as it were, his personal power
+      and strength, affirming the existence of a higher, nonhuman criterion of
+      life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the very day Pierre had experienced this feeling for the first time
+      at the Slobóda Palace he had been continuously under its influence, but
+      only now found full satisfaction for it. Moreover, at this moment Pierre
+      was supported in his design and prevented from renouncing it by what he
+      had already done in that direction. If he were now to leave Moscow like
+      everyone else, his flight from home, the peasant coat, the pistol, and his
+      announcement to the Rostóvs that he would remain in Moscow would all
+      become not merely meaningless but contemptible and ridiculous, and to this
+      Pierre was very sensitive.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre’s physical condition, as is always the case, corresponded to his
+      mental state. The unaccustomed coarse food, the vodka he drank during
+      those days, the absence of wine and cigars, his dirty unchanged linen, two
+      almost sleepless nights passed on a short sofa without bedding—all
+      this kept him in a state of excitement bordering on insanity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The French had already entered
+      Moscow. Pierre knew this, but instead of acting he only thought about his
+      undertaking, going over its minutest details in his mind. In his fancy he
+      did not clearly picture to himself either the striking of the blow or the
+      death of Napoleon, but with extraordinary vividness and melancholy
+      enjoyment imagined his own destruction and heroic endurance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, alone, for the sake of all, I must do it or perish!” he thought.
+      “Yes, I will approach... and then suddenly... with pistol or dagger? But
+      that is all the same! ‘It is not I but the hand of Providence that
+      punishes thee,’ I shall say,” thought he, imagining what he would say when
+      killing Napoleon. “Well then, take me and execute me!” he went on,
+      speaking to himself and bowing his head with a sad but firm expression.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While Pierre, standing in the middle of the room, was talking to himself
+      in this way, the study door opened and on the threshold appeared the
+      figure of Makár Alexéevich, always so timid before but now quite
+      transformed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His dressing gown was unfastened, his face red and distorted. He was
+      obviously drunk. On seeing Pierre he grew confused at first, but noticing
+      embarrassment on Pierre’s face immediately grew bold and, staggering on
+      his thin legs, advanced into the middle of the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They’re frightened,” he said confidentially in a hoarse voice. “I say I
+      won’t surrender, I say... Am I not right, sir?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He paused and then suddenly seeing the pistol on the table seized it with
+      unexpected rapidity and ran out into the corridor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Gerásim and the porter, who had followed Makár Alexéevich, stopped him in
+      the vestibule and tried to take the pistol from him. Pierre, coming out
+      into the corridor, looked with pity and repulsion at the half-crazy old
+      man. Makár Alexéevich, frowning with exertion, held on to the pistol and
+      screamed hoarsely, evidently with some heroic fancy in his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To arms! Board them! No, you shan’t get it,” he yelled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That will do, please, that will do. Have the goodness—please, sir,
+      to let go! Please, sir...” pleaded Gerásim, trying carefully to steer
+      Makár Alexéevich by the elbows back to the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who are you? Bonaparte!...” shouted Makár Alexéevich.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s not right, sir. Come to your room, please, and rest. Allow me to
+      have the pistol.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Be off, thou base slave! Touch me not! See this?” shouted Makár
+      Alexéevich, brandishing the pistol. “Board them!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Catch hold!” whispered Gerásim to the porter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They seized Makár Alexéevich by the arms and dragged him to the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The vestibule was filled with the discordant sounds of a struggle and of a
+      tipsy, hoarse voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Suddenly a fresh sound, a piercing feminine scream, reverberated from the
+      porch and the cook came running into the vestibule.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s them! Gracious heavens! O Lord, four of them, horsemen!” she cried.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Gerásim and the porter let Makár Alexéevich go, and in the now silent
+      corridor the sound of several hands knocking at the front door could be
+      heard.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0257"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Pierre, having decided that until he had carried out his design he would
+      disclose neither his identity nor his knowledge of French, stood at the
+      half-open door of the corridor, intending to conceal himself as soon as
+      the French entered. But the French entered and still Pierre did not retire—an
+      irresistible curiosity kept him there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There were two of them. One was an officer—a tall, soldierly,
+      handsome man—the other evidently a private or an orderly, sunburned,
+      short, and thin, with sunken cheeks and a dull expression. The officer
+      walked in front, leaning on a stick and slightly limping. When he had
+      advanced a few steps he stopped, having apparently decided that these were
+      good quarters, turned round to the soldiers standing at the entrance, and
+      in a loud voice of command ordered them to put up the horses. Having done
+      that, the officer, lifting his elbow with a smart gesture, stroked his
+      mustache and lightly touched his hat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Bonjour, la compagnie!”</i> * said he gaily, smiling and looking about him.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Good day, everybody!”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      No one gave any reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Vous êtes le bourgeois?”</i> * the officer asked Gerásim.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Are you the master here?”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Gerásim gazed at the officer with an alarmed and inquiring look.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Quartier, quartier, logement!”</i> said the officer, looking down at the
+      little man with a condescending and good-natured smile. <i>“Les français sont
+      de bons enfants. Que diable! Voyons! Ne nous fâchons pas, mon vieux!”</i> *
+      added he, clapping the scared and silent Gerásim on the shoulder. “Well,
+      does no one speak French in this establishment?” he asked again in French,
+      looking around and meeting Pierre’s eyes. Pierre moved away from the door.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “Quarters, quarters, lodgings! The French are good
+     fellows. What the devil! There, don’t let us be cross, old
+     fellow!”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Again the officer turned to Gerásim and asked him to show him the rooms in
+      the house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Master, not here—don’t understand... me, you...” said Gerásim,
+      trying to render his words more comprehensible by contorting them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Still smiling, the French officer spread out his hands before Gerásim’s
+      nose, intimating that he did not understand him either, and moved,
+      limping, to the door at which Pierre was standing. Pierre wished to go
+      away and conceal himself, but at that moment he saw Makár Alexéevich
+      appearing at the open kitchen door with the pistol in his hand. With a
+      madman’s cunning, Makár Alexéevich eyed the Frenchman, raised his pistol,
+      and took aim.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Board them!” yelled the tipsy man, trying to press the trigger. Hearing
+      the yell the officer turned round, and at the same moment Pierre threw
+      himself on the drunkard. Just when Pierre snatched at and struck up the
+      pistol Makár Alexéevich at last got his fingers on the trigger, there was
+      a deafening report, and all were enveloped in a cloud of smoke. The
+      Frenchman turned pale and rushed to the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Forgetting his intention of concealing his knowledge of French, Pierre,
+      snatching away the pistol and throwing it down, ran up to the officer and
+      addressed him in French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are not wounded?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I think not,” answered the Frenchman, feeling himself over. “But I have
+      had a lucky escape this time,” he added, pointing to the damaged plaster
+      of the wall. “Who is that man?” said he, looking sternly at Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, I am really in despair at what has occurred,” said Pierre rapidly,
+      quite forgetting the part he had intended to play. “He is an unfortunate
+      madman who did not know what he was doing.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The officer went up to Makár Alexéevich and took him by the collar.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Makár Alexéevich was standing with parted lips, swaying, as if about to
+      fall asleep, as he leaned against the wall.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Brigand! You shall pay for this,” said the Frenchman, letting go of him.
+      “We French are merciful after victory, but we do not pardon traitors,” he
+      added, with a look of gloomy dignity and a fine energetic gesture.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre continued, in French, to persuade the officer not to hold that
+      drunken imbecile to account. The Frenchman listened in silence with the
+      same gloomy expression, but suddenly turned to Pierre with a smile. For a
+      few seconds he looked at him in silence. His handsome face assumed a
+      melodramatically gentle expression and he held out his hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You have saved my life. You are French,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For a Frenchman that deduction was indubitable. Only a Frenchman could
+      perform a great deed, and to save his life—the life of M. Ramballe,
+      captain of the 13th Light Regiment—was undoubtedly a very great
+      deed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But however indubitable that conclusion and the officer’s conviction based
+      upon it, Pierre felt it necessary to disillusion him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am Russian,” he said quickly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Tut, tut, tut! Tell that to others,” said the officer, waving his finger
+      before his nose and smiling. “You shall tell me all about that presently.
+      I am delighted to meet a compatriot. Well, and what are we to do with this
+      man?” he added, addressing himself to Pierre as to a brother.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Even if Pierre were not a Frenchman, having once received that loftiest of
+      human appellations he could not renounce it, said the officer’s look and
+      tone. In reply to his last question Pierre again explained who Makár
+      Alexéevich was and how just before their arrival that drunken imbecile had
+      seized the loaded pistol which they had not had time to recover from him,
+      and begged the officer to let the deed go unpunished.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Frenchman expanded his chest and made a majestic gesture with his arm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You have saved my life! You are French. You ask his pardon? I grant it
+      you. Lead that man away!” said he quickly and energetically, and taking
+      the arm of Pierre whom he had promoted to be a Frenchman for saving his
+      life, he went with him into the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The soldiers in the yard, hearing the shot, came into the passage asking
+      what had happened, and expressed their readiness to punish the culprits,
+      but the officer sternly checked them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You will be called in when you are wanted,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The soldiers went out again, and the orderly, who had meanwhile had time
+      to visit the kitchen, came up to his officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Captain, there is soup and a leg of mutton in the kitchen,” said he.
+      “Shall I serve them up?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, and some wine,” answered the captain.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0258"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXIX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      When the French officer went into the room with Pierre the latter again
+      thought it his duty to assure him that he was not French and wished to go
+      away, but the officer would not hear of it. He was so very polite,
+      amiable, good-natured, and genuinely grateful to Pierre for saving his
+      life that Pierre had not the heart to refuse, and sat down with him in the
+      parlor—the first room they entered. To Pierre’s assurances that he
+      was not a Frenchman, the captain, evidently not understanding how anyone
+      could decline so flattering an appellation, shrugged his shoulders and
+      said that if Pierre absolutely insisted on passing for a Russian let it be
+      so, but for all that he would be forever bound to Pierre by gratitude for
+      saving his life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Had this man been endowed with the slightest capacity for perceiving the
+      feelings of others, and had he at all understood what Pierre’s feelings
+      were, the latter would probably have left him, but the man’s animated
+      obtuseness to everything other than himself disarmed Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A Frenchman or a Russian prince incognito,” said the officer, looking at
+      Pierre’s fine though dirty linen and at the ring on his finger. “I owe my
+      life to you and offer you my friendship. A Frenchman never forgets either
+      an insult or a service. I offer you my friendship. That is all I can say.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      There was so much good nature and nobility (in the French sense of the
+      word) in the officer’s voice, in the expression of his face and in his
+      gestures, that Pierre, unconsciously smiling in response to the
+      Frenchman’s smile, pressed the hand held out to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Captain Ramballe, of the 13th Light Regiment, Chevalier of the Legion of
+      Honor for the affair on the seventh of September,” he introduced himself,
+      a self-satisfied irrepressible smile puckering his lips under his
+      mustache. “Will you now be so good as to tell me with whom I have the
+      honor of conversing so pleasantly, instead of being in the ambulance with
+      that maniac’s bullet in my body?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre replied that he could not tell him his name and, blushing, began to
+      try to invent a name and to say something about his reason for concealing
+      it, but the Frenchman hastily interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, please!” said he. “I understand your reasons. You are an officer... a
+      superior officer perhaps. You have borne arms against us. That’s not my
+      business. I owe you my life. That is enough for me. I am quite at your
+      service. You belong to the gentry?” he concluded with a shade of inquiry
+      in his tone. Pierre bent his head. “Your baptismal name, if you please.
+      That is all I ask. Monsieur Pierre, you say.... That’s all I want to
+      know.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      When the mutton and an omelet had been served and a samovar and vodka
+      brought, with some wine which the French had taken from a Russian cellar
+      and brought with them, Ramballe invited Pierre to share his dinner, and
+      himself began to eat greedily and quickly like a healthy and hungry man,
+      munching his food rapidly with his strong teeth, continually smacking his
+      lips, and repeating—“Excellent! Delicious!” His face grew red and
+      was covered with perspiration. Pierre was hungry and shared the dinner
+      with pleasure. Morel, the orderly, brought some hot water in a saucepan
+      and placed a bottle of claret in it. He also brought a bottle of kvass,
+      taken from the kitchen for them to try. That beverage was already known to
+      the French and had been given a special name. They called it <i>limonade de
+      cochon</i> (pig’s lemonade), and Morel spoke well of the <i>limonade de
+      cochon</i> he had found in the kitchen. But as the captain had the wine they had
+      taken while passing through Moscow, he left the kvass to Morel and applied
+      himself to the bottle of Bordeaux. He wrapped the bottle up to its neck in
+      a table napkin and poured out wine for himself and for Pierre. The
+      satisfaction of his hunger and the wine rendered the captain still more
+      lively and he chatted incessantly all through dinner.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, my dear Monsieur Pierre, I owe you a fine votive candle for saving
+      me from that maniac.... You see, I have bullets enough in my body already.
+      Here is one I got at Wagram” (he touched his side) “and a second at
+      Smolénsk”—he showed a scar on his cheek—“and this leg which as
+      you see does not want to march, I got that on the seventh at the great
+      battle of la Moskowa. <i>Sacré Dieu!</i> It was splendid! That deluge of fire was
+      worth seeing. It was a tough job you set us there, my word! You may be
+      proud of it! And on my honor, in spite of the cough I caught there, I
+      should be ready to begin again. I pity those who did not see it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I was there,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Bah, really? So much the better! You are certainly brave foes. The great
+      redoubt held out well, by my pipe!” continued the Frenchman. “And you made
+      us pay dear for it. I was at it three times—sure as I sit here.
+      Three times we reached the guns and three times we were thrown back like
+      cardboard figures. Oh, it was beautiful, Monsieur Pierre! Your grenadiers
+      were splendid, by heaven! I saw them close up their ranks six times in
+      succession and march as if on parade. Fine fellows! Our King of Naples,
+      who knows what’s what, cried ‘Bravo!’ Ha, ha! So you are one of us
+      soldiers!” he added, smiling, after a momentary pause. “So much the
+      better, so much the better, Monsieur Pierre! Terrible in battle...
+      gallant... with the fair” (he winked and smiled), “that’s what the French
+      are, Monsieur Pierre, aren’t they?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The captain was so naïvely and good-humoredly gay, so real, and so pleased
+      with himself that Pierre almost winked back as he looked merrily at him.
+      Probably the word “gallant” turned the captain’s thoughts to the state of
+      Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Apropos, tell me please, is it true that the women have all left Moscow?
+      What a queer idea! What had they to be afraid of?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Would not the French ladies leave Paris if the Russians entered it?”
+       asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ha, ha, ha!” The Frenchman emitted a merry, sanguine chuckle, patting
+      Pierre on the shoulder. “What a thing to say!” he exclaimed. “Paris?...
+      But Paris, Paris...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Paris—the capital of the world,” Pierre finished his remark for
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The captain looked at Pierre. He had a habit of stopping short in the
+      middle of his talk and gazing intently with his laughing, kindly eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, if you hadn’t told me you were Russian, I should have wagered that
+      you were Parisian! You have that... I don’t know what, that...” and having
+      uttered this compliment, he again gazed at him in silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have been in Paris. I spent years there,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes, one sees that plainly. Paris!... A man who doesn’t know Paris is
+      a savage. You can tell a Parisian two leagues off. Paris is Talma, la
+      Duchénois, Potier, the Sorbonne, the boulevards,” and noticing that his
+      conclusion was weaker than what had gone before, he added quickly: “There
+      is only one Paris in the world. You have been to Paris and have remained
+      Russian. Well, I don’t esteem you the less for it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Under the influence of the wine he had drunk, and after the days he had
+      spent alone with his depressing thoughts, Pierre involuntarily enjoyed
+      talking with this cheerful and good-natured man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To return to your ladies—I hear they are lovely. What a wretched
+      idea to go and bury themselves in the steppes when the French army is in
+      Moscow. What a chance those girls have missed! Your peasants, now—that’s
+      another thing; but you civilized people, you ought to know us better than
+      that. We took Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, Naples, Rome, Warsaw, all the
+      world’s capitals.... We are feared, but we are loved. We are nice to know.
+      And then the Emperor...” he began, but Pierre interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Emperor,” Pierre repeated, and his face suddenly became sad and
+      embarrassed, “is the Emperor...?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The Emperor? He is generosity, mercy, justice, order, genius—that’s
+      what the Emperor is! It is I, Ramballe, who tell you so.... I assure you I
+      was his enemy eight years ago. My father was an emigrant count.... But
+      that man has vanquished me. He has taken hold of me. I could not resist
+      the sight of the grandeur and glory with which he has covered France. When
+      I understood what he wanted—when I saw that he was preparing a bed
+      of laurels for us, you know, I said to myself: ‘That is a monarch,’ and I
+      devoted myself to him! So there! Oh yes, <i>mon cher</i>, he is the greatest man
+      of the ages past or future.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Is he in Moscow?” Pierre stammered with a guilty look.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Frenchman looked at his guilty face and smiled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, he will make his entry tomorrow,” he replied, and continued his talk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Their conversation was interrupted by the cries of several voices at the
+      gate and by Morel, who came to say that some Württemberg hussars had come
+      and wanted to put up their horses in the yard where the captain’s horses
+      were. This difficulty had arisen chiefly because the hussars did not
+      understand what was said to them in French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The captain had their senior sergeant called in, and in a stern voice
+      asked him to what regiment he belonged, who was his commanding officer,
+      and by what right he allowed himself to claim quarters that were already
+      occupied. The German who knew little French, answered the two first
+      questions by giving the names of his regiment and of his commanding
+      officer, but in reply to the third question which he did not understand
+      said, introducing broken French into his own German, that he was the
+      quartermaster of the regiment and his commander had ordered him to occupy
+      all the houses one after another. Pierre, who knew German, translated what
+      the German said to the captain and gave the captain’s reply to the
+      Württemberg hussar in German. When he had understood what was said to him,
+      the German submitted and took his men elsewhere. The captain went out into
+      the porch and gave some orders in a loud voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he returned to the room Pierre was sitting in the same place as
+      before, with his head in his hands. His face expressed suffering. He
+      really was suffering at that moment. When the captain went out and he was
+      left alone, suddenly he came to himself and realized the position he was
+      in. It was not that Moscow had been taken or that the happy conquerors
+      were masters in it and were patronizing him. Painful as that was it was
+      not that which tormented Pierre at the moment. He was tormented by the
+      consciousness of his own weakness. The few glasses of wine he had drunk
+      and the conversation with this good-natured man had destroyed the mood of
+      concentrated gloom in which he had spent the last few days and which was
+      essential for the execution of his design. The pistol, dagger, and peasant
+      coat were ready. Napoleon was to enter the town next day. Pierre still
+      considered that it would be a useful and worthy action to slay the
+      evildoer, but now he felt that he would not do it. He did not know why,
+      but he felt a foreboding that he would not carry out his intention. He
+      struggled against the confession of his weakness but dimly felt that he
+      could not overcome it and that his former gloomy frame of mind, concerning
+      vengeance, killing, and self-sacrifice, had been dispersed like dust by
+      contact with the first man he met.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The captain returned to the room, limping slightly and whistling a tune.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Frenchman’s chatter which had previously amused Pierre now repelled
+      him. The tune he was whistling, his gait, and the gesture with which he
+      twirled his mustache, all now seemed offensive. “I will go away
+      immediately. I won’t say another word to him,” thought Pierre. He thought
+      this, but still sat in the same place. A strange feeling of weakness tied
+      him to the spot; he wished to get up and go away, but could not do so.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The captain, on the other hand, seemed very cheerful. He paced up and down
+      the room twice. His eyes shone and his mustache twitched as if he were
+      smiling to himself at some amusing thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The colonel of those Württembergers is delightful,” he suddenly said.
+      “He’s a German, but a nice fellow all the same.... But he’s a German.” He
+      sat down facing Pierre. “By the way, you know German, then?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked at him in silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is the German for ‘shelter’?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Shelter?” Pierre repeated. “The German for shelter is <i>Unterkunft</i>.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How do you say it?” the captain asked quickly and doubtfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Unterkunft,”</i> Pierre repeated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Onterkoff,” said the captain and looked at Pierre for some seconds with
+      laughing eyes. “These Germans are first-rate fools, don’t you think so,
+      Monsieur Pierre?” he concluded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, let’s have another bottle of this Moscow Bordeaux, shall we? Morel
+      will warm us up another little bottle. Morel!” he called out gaily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Morel brought candles and a bottle of wine. The captain looked at Pierre
+      by the candlelight and was evidently struck by the troubled expression on
+      his companion’s face. Ramballe, with genuine distress and sympathy in his
+      face, went up to Pierre and bent over him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There now, we’re sad,” said he, touching Pierre’s hand. “Have I upset
+      you? No, really, have you anything against me?” he asked Pierre. “Perhaps
+      it’s the state of affairs?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre did not answer, but looked cordially into the Frenchman’s eyes
+      whose expression of sympathy was pleasing to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Honestly, without speaking of what I owe you, I feel friendship for you.
+      Can I do anything for you? Dispose of me. It is for life and death. I say
+      it with my hand on my heart!” said he, striking his chest.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Thank you,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The captain gazed intently at him as he had done when he learned that
+      “shelter” was <i>Unterkunft</i> in German, and his face suddenly brightened.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, in that case, I drink to our friendship!” he cried gaily, filling
+      two glasses with wine.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre took one of the glasses and emptied it. Ramballe emptied his too,
+      again pressed Pierre’s hand, and leaned his elbows on the table in a
+      pensive attitude.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, my dear friend,” he began, “such is fortune’s caprice. Who would
+      have said that I should be a soldier and a captain of dragoons in the
+      service of Bonaparte, as we used to call him? Yet here I am in Moscow with
+      him. I must tell you, <i>mon cher</i>,” he continued in the sad and measured
+      tones of a man who intends to tell a long story, “that our name is one of
+      the most ancient in France.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And with a Frenchman’s easy and naïve frankness the captain told Pierre
+      the story of his ancestors, his childhood, youth, and manhood, and all
+      about his relations and his financial and family affairs, <i>“ma pauvre mère”</i>
+       playing of course an important part in the story.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But all that is only life’s setting, the real thing is love—love!
+      Am I not right, Monsieur Pierre?” said he, growing animated. “Another
+      glass?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre again emptied his glass and poured himself out a third.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, women, women!” and the captain, looking with glistening eyes at
+      Pierre, began talking of love and of his love affairs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There were very many of these, as one could easily believe, looking at the
+      officer’s handsome, self-satisfied face, and noting the eager enthusiasm
+      with which he spoke of women. Though all Ramballe’s love stories had the
+      sensual character which Frenchmen regard as the special charm and poetry
+      of love, yet he told his story with such sincere conviction that he alone
+      had experienced and known all the charm of love and he described women so
+      alluringly that Pierre listened to him with curiosity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was plain that <i>l’amour</i> which the Frenchman was so fond of was not
+      that low and simple kind that Pierre had once felt for his wife, nor was it the
+      romantic love stimulated by himself that he experienced for Natásha.
+      (Ramballe despised both these kinds of love equally: the one he considered
+      the “love of clodhoppers” and the other the “love of
+      simpletons.”) <i>L’amour</i> which the Frenchman worshiped consisted
+      principally in the unnaturalness of his relation to the woman and in a combination
+      of incongruities giving the chief charm to the feeling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Thus the captain touchingly recounted the story of his love for a
+      fascinating marquise of thirty-five and at the same time for a charming,
+      innocent child of seventeen, daughter of the bewitching marquise. The
+      conflict of magnanimity between the mother and the daughter, ending in the
+      mother’s sacrificing herself and offering her daughter in marriage to her
+      lover, even now agitated the captain, though it was the memory of a
+      distant past. Then he recounted an episode in which the husband played the
+      part of the lover, and he—the lover—assumed the role of the
+      husband, as well as several droll incidents from his recollections of
+      Germany, where “shelter” is called <i>Unterkunft</i> and where the
+      husbands eat sauerkraut and the young girls are “too blonde.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Finally, the latest episode in Poland still fresh in the captain’s memory,
+      and which he narrated with rapid gestures and glowing face, was of how he
+      had saved the life of a Pole (in general, the saving of life continually
+      occurred in the captain’s stories) and the Pole had entrusted to him his
+      enchanting wife (<i>parisienne de cœur</i>) while himself entering the French
+      service. The captain was happy, the enchanting Polish lady wished to elope
+      with him, but, prompted by magnanimity, the captain restored the wife to
+      the husband, saying as he did so: “I have saved your life, and I save your
+      honor!” Having repeated these words the captain wiped his eyes and gave
+      himself a shake, as if driving away the weakness which assailed him at
+      this touching recollection.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Listening to the captain’s tales, Pierre—as often happens late in
+      the evening and under the influence of wine—followed all that was
+      told him, understood it all, and at the same time followed a train of
+      personal memories which, he knew not why, suddenly arose in his mind.
+      While listening to these love stories his own love for Natásha
+      unexpectedly rose to his mind, and going over the pictures of that love in
+      his imagination he mentally compared them with Ramballe’s tales. Listening
+      to the story of the struggle between love and duty, Pierre saw before his
+      eyes every minutest detail of his last meeting with the object of his love
+      at the Súkharev water tower. At the time of that meeting it had not
+      produced an effect upon him—he had not even once recalled it. But
+      now it seemed to him that that meeting had had in it something very
+      important and poetic.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Peter Kirílovich, come here! We have recognized you,” he now seemed to
+      hear the words she had uttered and to see before him her eyes, her smile,
+      her traveling hood, and a stray lock of her hair... and there seemed to
+      him something pathetic and touching in all this.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having finished his tale about the enchanting Polish lady, the captain
+      asked Pierre if he had ever experienced a similar impulse to sacrifice
+      himself for love and a feeling of envy of the legitimate husband.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Challenged by this question Pierre raised his head and felt a need to
+      express the thoughts that filled his mind. He began to explain that he
+      understood love for a woman somewhat differently. He said that in all his
+      life he had loved and still loved only one woman, and that she could never
+      be his.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Tiens!”</i> said the captain.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre then explained that he had loved this woman from his earliest
+      years, but that he had not dared to think of her because she was too
+      young, and because he had been an illegitimate son without a name.
+      Afterwards when he had received a name and wealth he dared not think of
+      her because he loved her too well, placing her far above everything in the
+      world, and especially therefore above himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he had reached this point, Pierre asked the captain whether he
+      understood that.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The captain made a gesture signifying that even if he did not understand
+      it he begged Pierre to continue.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Platónic love, clouds...” he muttered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Whether it was the wine he had drunk, or an impulse of frankness, or the
+      thought that this man did not, and never would, know any of those who
+      played a part in his story, or whether it was all these things together,
+      something loosened Pierre’s tongue. Speaking thickly and with a faraway
+      look in his shining eyes, he told the whole story of his life: his
+      marriage, Natásha’s love for his best friend, her betrayal of him, and all
+      his own simple relations with her. Urged on by Ramballe’s questions he
+      also told what he had at first concealed—his own position and even
+      his name.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      More than anything else in Pierre’s story the captain was impressed by the
+      fact that Pierre was very rich, had two mansions in Moscow, and that he
+      had abandoned everything and not left the city, but remained there
+      concealing his name and station.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When it was late at night they went out together into the street. The
+      night was warm and light. To the left of the house on the Pokróvka a fire
+      glowed—the first of those that were beginning in Moscow. To the
+      right and high up in the sky was the sickle of the waning moon and
+      opposite to it hung that bright comet which was connected in Pierre’s
+      heart with his love. At the gate stood Gerásim, the cook, and two
+      Frenchmen. Their laughter and their mutually incomprehensible remarks in
+      two languages could be heard. They were looking at the glow seen in the
+      town.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was nothing terrible in the one small, distant fire in the immense
+      city.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Gazing at the high starry sky, at the moon, at the comet, and at the glow
+      from the fire, Pierre experienced a joyful emotion. “There now, how good
+      it is, what more does one need?” thought he. And suddenly remembering his
+      intention he grew dizzy and felt so faint that he leaned against the fence
+      to save himself from falling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Without taking leave of his new friend, Pierre left the gate with unsteady
+      steps and returning to his room lay down on the sofa and immediately fell
+      asleep.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0259"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The glow of the first fire that began on the second of September was
+      watched from the various roads by the fugitive Muscovites and by the
+      retreating troops, with many different feelings.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Rostóv party spent the night at Mytíshchi, fourteen miles from Moscow.
+      They had started so late on the first of September, the road had been so
+      blocked by vehicles and troops, so many things had been forgotten for
+      which servants were sent back, that they had decided to spend that night
+      at a place three miles out of Moscow. The next morning they woke late and
+      were again delayed so often that they only got as far as Great Mytíshchi.
+      At ten o’clock that evening the Rostóv family and the wounded traveling
+      with them were all distributed in the yards and huts of that large
+      village. The Rostóvs’ servants and coachmen and the orderlies of the
+      wounded officers, after attending to their masters, had supper, fed the
+      horses, and came out into the porches.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In a neighboring hut lay Raévski’s adjutant with a fractured wrist. The
+      awful pain he suffered made him moan incessantly and piteously, and his
+      moaning sounded terrible in the darkness of the autumn night. He had spent
+      the first night in the same yard as the Rostóvs. The countess said she had
+      been unable to close her eyes on account of his moaning, and at Mytíshchi
+      she moved into a worse hut simply to be farther away from the wounded man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the darkness of the night one of the servants noticed, above the high
+      body of a coach standing before the porch, the small glow of another fire.
+      One glow had long been visible and everybody knew that it was Little
+      Mytíshchi burning—set on fire by Mamónov’s Cossacks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But look here, brothers, there’s another fire!” remarked an orderly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All turned their attention to the glow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But they told us Little Mytíshchi had been set on fire by Mamónov’s
+      Cossacks.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But that’s not Mytíshchi, it’s farther away.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Look, it must be in Moscow!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Two of the gazers went round to the other side of the coach and sat down
+      on its steps.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s more to the left, why, Little Mytíshchi is over there, and this is
+      right on the other side.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Several men joined the first two.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “See how it’s flaring,” said one. “That’s a fire in
+      Moscow: either in the Sushchévski or the Rogózhski quarter.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      No one replied to this remark and for some time they all gazed silently at
+      the spreading flames of the second fire in the distance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Old Daniel Teréntich, the count’s valet (as he was called), came up to the
+      group and shouted at Míshka.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What are you staring at, you good-for-nothing?... The count will be
+      calling and there’s nobody there; go and gather the clothes together.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I only ran out to get some water,” said Míshka.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But what do you think, Daniel Teréntich? Doesn’t it look as if that glow
+      were in Moscow?” remarked one of the footmen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Daniel Teréntich made no reply, and again for a long time they were all
+      silent. The glow spread, rising and falling, farther and farther still.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “God have mercy.... It’s windy and dry...” said another voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Just look! See what it’s doing now. O Lord! You can even see the crows
+      flying. Lord have mercy on us sinners!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “They’ll put it out, no fear!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Who’s to put it out?” Daniel Teréntich, who had hitherto been silent, was
+      heard to say. His voice was calm and deliberate. “Moscow it is, brothers,”
+       said he. “Mother Moscow, the white...” his voice faltered, and he gave way
+      to an old man’s sob.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And it was as if they had all only waited for this to realize the
+      significance for them of the glow they were watching. Sighs were heard,
+      words of prayer, and the sobbing of the count’s old valet.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0260"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXXI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The valet, returning to the cottage, informed the count that Moscow was
+      burning. The count donned his dressing gown and went out to look. Sónya
+      and Madame Schoss, who had not yet undressed, went out with him. Only
+      Natásha and the countess remained in the room. Pétya was no longer with
+      the family, he had gone on with his regiment which was making for Tróitsa.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess, on hearing that Moscow was on fire, began to cry. Natásha,
+      pale, with a fixed look, was sitting on the bench under the icons just
+      where she had sat down on arriving and paid no attention to her father’s
+      words. She was listening to the ceaseless moaning of the adjutant, three
+      houses off.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, how terrible,” said Sónya returning from the yard chilled and
+      frightened. “I believe the whole of Moscow will burn, there’s an awful
+      glow! Natásha, do look! You can see it from the window,” she said to her
+      cousin, evidently wishing to distract her mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Natásha looked at her as if not understanding what was said to her and
+      again fixed her eyes on the corner of the stove. She had been in this
+      condition of stupor since the morning, when Sónya, to the surprise and
+      annoyance of the countess, had for some unaccountable reason found it
+      necessary to tell Natásha of Prince Andrew’s wound and of his being with
+      their party. The countess had seldom been so angry with anyone as she was
+      with Sónya. Sónya had cried and begged to be forgiven and now, as if
+      trying to atone for her fault, paid unceasing attention to her cousin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Look, Natásha, how dreadfully it is burning!” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s burning?” asked Natásha. “Oh, yes, Moscow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And as if in order not to offend Sónya and to get rid of her, she turned
+      her face to the window, looked out in such a way that it was evident that
+      she could not see anything, and again settled down in her former attitude.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But you didn’t see it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, really I did,” Natásha replied in a voice that pleaded to be left in
+      peace.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Both the countess and Sónya understood that, naturally, neither Moscow nor
+      the burning of Moscow nor anything else could seem of importance to
+      Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The count returned and lay down behind the partition. The countess went up
+      to her daughter and touched her head with the back of her hand as she was
+      wont to do when Natásha was ill, then touched her forehead with her lips
+      as if to feel whether she was feverish, and finally kissed her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are cold. You are trembling all over. You’d better lie down,” said
+      the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lie down? All right, I will. I’ll lie down at once,” said Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Natásha had been told that morning that Prince Andrew was seriously
+      wounded and was traveling with their party, she had at first asked many
+      questions: Where was he going? How was he wounded? Was it serious? And
+      could she see him? But after she had been told that she could not see him,
+      that he was seriously wounded but that his life was not in danger, she
+      ceased to ask questions or to speak at all, evidently disbelieving what
+      they told her, and convinced that say what she might she would still be
+      told the same. All the way she had sat motionless in a corner of the coach
+      with wide open eyes, and the expression in them which the countess knew so
+      well and feared so much, and now she sat in the same way on the bench
+      where she had seated herself on arriving. She was planning something and
+      either deciding or had already decided something in her mind. The countess
+      knew this, but what it might be she did not know, and this alarmed and
+      tormented her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha, undress, darling; lie down on my bed.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A bed had been made on a bedstead for the countess only. Madame Schoss and
+      the two girls were to sleep on some hay on the floor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, Mamma, I will lie down here on the floor,” Natásha replied irritably
+      and she went to the window and opened it. Through the open window the
+      moans of the adjutant could be heard more distinctly. She put her head out
+      into the damp night air, and the countess saw her slim neck shaking with
+      sobs and throbbing against the window frame. Natásha knew it was not
+      Prince Andrew who was moaning. She knew Prince Andrew was in the same yard
+      as themselves and in a part of the hut across the passage; but this
+      dreadful incessant moaning made her sob. The countess exchanged a look
+      with Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lie down, darling; lie down, my pet,” said the countess, softly touching
+      Natásha’s shoulders. “Come, lie down.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, yes... I’ll lie down at once,” said Natásha, and began hurriedly
+      undressing, tugging at the tapes of her petticoat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When she had thrown off her dress and put on a dressing jacket, she sat
+      down with her foot under her on the bed that had been made up on the
+      floor, jerked her thin and rather short plait of hair to the front, and
+      began replaiting it. Her long, thin, practiced fingers rapidly unplaited,
+      replaited, and tied up her plait. Her head moved from side to side from
+      habit, but her eyes, feverishly wide, looked fixedly before her. When her
+      toilet for the night was finished she sank gently onto the sheet spread
+      over the hay on the side nearest the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha, you’d better lie in the middle,” said Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll stay here,” muttered Natásha. “Do lie down,” she added crossly, and
+      buried her face in the pillow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess, Madame Schoss, and Sónya undressed hastily and lay down. The
+      small lamp in front of the icons was the only light left in the room. But
+      in the yard there was a light from the fire at Little Mytíshchi a mile and
+      a half away, and through the night came the noise of people shouting at a
+      tavern Mamónov’s Cossacks had set up across the street, and the adjutant’s
+      unceasing moans could still be heard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For a long time Natásha listened attentively to the sounds that reached
+      her from inside and outside the room and did not move. First she heard her
+      mother praying and sighing and the creaking of her bed under her, then
+      Madame Schoss’ familiar whistling snore and Sónya’s gentle breathing. Then
+      the countess called to Natásha. Natásha did not answer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I think she’s asleep, Mamma,” said Sónya softly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After a short silence the countess spoke again but this time no one
+      replied.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Soon after that Natásha heard her mother’s even breathing. Natásha did not
+      move, though her little bare foot, thrust out from under the quilt, was
+      growing cold on the bare floor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As if to celebrate a victory over everybody, a cricket chirped in a crack
+      in the wall. A cock crowed far off and another replied near by. The
+      shouting in the tavern had died down; only the moaning of the adjutant was
+      heard. Natásha sat up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya, are you asleep? Mamma?” she whispered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      No one replied. Natásha rose slowly and carefully, crossed herself, and
+      stepped cautiously on the cold and dirty floor with her slim, supple, bare
+      feet. The boards of the floor creaked. Stepping cautiously from one foot
+      to the other she ran like a kitten the few steps to the door and grasped
+      the cold door handle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It seemed to her that something heavy was beating rhythmically against all
+      the walls of the room: it was her own heart, sinking with alarm and terror
+      and overflowing with love.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She opened the door and stepped across the threshold and onto the cold,
+      damp earthen floor of the passage. The cold she felt refreshed her. With
+      her bare feet she touched a sleeping man, stepped over him, and opened the
+      door into the part of the hut where Prince Andrew lay. It was dark in
+      there. In the farthest corner, on a bench beside a bed on which something
+      was lying, stood a tallow candle with a long, thick, and smoldering wick.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the moment she had been told that morning of Prince Andrew’s wound
+      and his presence there, Natásha had resolved to see him. She did not know
+      why she had to, she knew the meeting would be painful, but felt the more
+      convinced that it was necessary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All day she had lived only in hope of seeing him that night. But now that
+      the moment had come she was filled with dread of what she might see. How
+      was he maimed? What was left of him? Was he like that incessant moaning of
+      the adjutant’s? Yes, he was altogether like that. In her imagination he
+      was that terrible moaning personified. When she saw an indistinct shape in
+      the corner, and mistook his knees raised under the quilt for his
+      shoulders, she imagined a horrible body there, and stood still in terror.
+      But an irresistible impulse drew her forward. She cautiously took one step
+      and then another, and found herself in the middle of a small room
+      containing baggage. Another man—Timókhin—was lying in a corner
+      on the benches beneath the icons, and two others—the doctor and a
+      valet—lay on the floor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The valet sat up and whispered something. Timókhin, kept awake by the pain
+      in his wounded leg, gazed with wide-open eyes at this strange apparition
+      of a girl in a white chemise, dressing jacket, and nightcap. The valet’s
+      sleepy, frightened exclamation, “What do you want? What’s the matter?”
+       made Natásha approach more swiftly to what was lying in the corner.
+      Horribly unlike a man as that body looked, she must see him. She passed
+      the valet, the snuff fell from the candle wick, and she saw Prince Andrew
+      clearly with his arms outside the quilt, and such as she had always seen
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was the same as ever, but the feverish color of his face, his
+      glittering eyes rapturously turned toward her, and especially his neck,
+      delicate as a child’s, revealed by the turn-down collar of his shirt, gave
+      him a peculiarly innocent, childlike look, such as she had never seen on
+      him before. She went up to him and with a swift, flexible, youthful
+      movement dropped on her knees.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He smiled and held out his hand to her.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0261"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXXII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Seven days had passed since Prince Andrew found himself in the ambulance
+      station on the field of Borodinó. His feverish state and the inflammation
+      of his bowels, which were injured, were in the doctor’s opinion sure to
+      carry him off. But on the seventh day he ate with pleasure a piece of
+      bread with some tea, and the doctor noticed that his temperature was
+      lower. He had regained consciousness that morning. The first night after
+      they left Moscow had been fairly warm and he had remained in the <i>calèche</i>,
+      but at Mytíshchi the wounded man himself asked to be taken out and given
+      some tea. The pain caused by his removal into the hut had made him groan
+      aloud and again lose consciousness. When he had been placed on his camp
+      bed he lay for a long time motionless with closed eyes. Then he opened
+      them and whispered softly: “And the tea?” His remembering such a small
+      detail of everyday life astonished the doctor. He felt Prince Andrew’s
+      pulse, and to his surprise and dissatisfaction found it had improved. He
+      was dissatisfied because he knew by experience that if his patient did not
+      die now, he would do so a little later with greater suffering. Timókhin,
+      the red-nosed major of Prince Andrew’s regiment, had joined him in Moscow
+      and was being taken along with him, having been wounded in the leg at the
+      battle of Borodinó. They were accompanied by a doctor, Prince Andrew’s
+      valet, his coachman, and two orderlies.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They gave Prince Andrew some tea. He drank it eagerly, looking with
+      feverish eyes at the door in front of him as if trying to understand and
+      remember something.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t want any more. Is Timókhin here?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Timókhin crept along the bench to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am here, your excellency.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How’s your wound?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Mine, sir? All right. But how about you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew again pondered as if trying to remember something.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Couldn’t one get a book?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What book?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The Gospels. I haven’t one.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The doctor promised to procure it for him and began to ask how he was
+      feeling. Prince Andrew answered all his questions reluctantly but
+      reasonably, and then said he wanted a bolster placed under him as he was
+      uncomfortable and in great pain. The doctor and valet lifted the cloak
+      with which he was covered and, making wry faces at the noisome smell of
+      mortifying flesh that came from the wound, began examining that dreadful
+      place. The doctor was very much displeased about something and made a
+      change in the dressings, turning the wounded man over so that he groaned
+      again and grew unconscious and delirious from the agony. He kept asking
+      them to get him the book and put it under him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What trouble would it be to you?” he said. “I have not got one. Please
+      get it for me and put it under for a moment,” he pleaded in a piteous
+      voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The doctor went into the passage to wash his hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You fellows have no conscience,” said he to the valet who was pouring
+      water over his hands. “For just one moment I didn’t look after you... It’s
+      such pain, you know, that I wonder how he can bear it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “By the Lord Jesus Christ, I thought we had put something under him!” said
+      the valet.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The first time Prince Andrew understood where he was and what was the
+      matter with him and remembered being wounded and how was when he asked to
+      be carried into the hut after his <i>calèche</i> had stopped at Mytíshchi. After
+      growing confused from pain while being carried into the hut he again
+      regained consciousness, and while drinking tea once more recalled all that
+      had happened to him, and above all vividly remembered the moment at the
+      ambulance station when, at the sight of the sufferings of a man he
+      disliked, those new thoughts had come to him which promised him happiness.
+      And those thoughts, though now vague and indefinite, again possessed his
+      soul. He remembered that he had now a new source of happiness and that
+      this happiness had something to do with the Gospels. That was why he asked
+      for a copy of them. The uncomfortable position in which they had put him
+      and turned him over again confused his thoughts, and when he came to
+      himself a third time it was in the complete stillness of the night.
+      Everybody near him was sleeping. A cricket chirped from across the
+      passage; someone was shouting and singing in the street; cockroaches
+      rustled on the table, on the icons, and on the walls, and a big fly
+      flopped at the head of the bed and around the candle beside him, the wick
+      of which was charred and had shaped itself like a mushroom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His mind was not in a normal state. A healthy man usually thinks of,
+      feels, and remembers innumerable things simultaneously, but has the power
+      and will to select one sequence of thoughts or events on which to fix his
+      whole attention. A healthy man can tear himself away from the deepest
+      reflections to say a civil word to someone who comes in and can then
+      return again to his own thoughts. But Prince Andrew’s mind was not in a
+      normal state in that respect. All the powers of his mind were more active
+      and clearer than ever, but they acted apart from his will. Most diverse
+      thoughts and images occupied him simultaneously. At times his brain
+      suddenly began to work with a vigor, clearness, and depth it had never
+      reached when he was in health, but suddenly in the midst of its work it
+      would turn to some unexpected idea and he had not the strength to turn it
+      back again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, a new happiness was revealed to me of which man cannot be deprived,”
+       he thought as he lay in the semidarkness of the quiet hut, gazing fixedly
+      before him with feverish wide open eyes. “A happiness lying beyond
+      material forces, outside the material influences that act on man—a
+      happiness of the soul alone, the happiness of loving. Every man can
+      understand it, but to conceive it and enjoin it was possible only for God.
+      But how did God enjoin that law? And why was the Son...?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And suddenly the sequence of these thoughts broke off, and Prince Andrew
+      heard (without knowing whether it was a delusion or reality) a soft
+      whispering voice incessantly and rhythmically repeating “piti-piti-piti,”
+       and then “titi,” and then again “piti-piti-piti,” and “ti-ti” once more.
+      At the same time he felt that above his face, above the very middle of it,
+      some strange airy structure was being erected out of slender needles or
+      splinters, to the sound of this whispered music. He felt that he had to
+      balance carefully (though it was difficult) so that this airy structure
+      should not collapse; but nevertheless it kept collapsing and again slowly
+      rising to the sound of whispered rhythmic music—“it stretches,
+      stretches, spreading out and stretching,” said Prince Andrew to himself.
+      While listening to this whispering and feeling the sensation of this
+      drawing out and the construction of this edifice of needles, he also saw
+      by glimpses a red halo round the candle, and heard the rustle of the
+      cockroaches and the buzzing of the fly that flopped against his pillow and
+      his face. Each time the fly touched his face it gave him a burning
+      sensation and yet to his surprise it did not destroy the structure, though
+      it knocked against the very region of his face where it was rising. But
+      besides this there was something else of importance. It was something
+      white by the door—the statue of a sphinx, which also oppressed him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But perhaps that’s my shirt on the table,” he thought, “and that’s my
+      legs, and that is the door, but why is it always stretching and drawing
+      itself out, and ‘piti-piti-piti’ and ‘ti-ti’ and ‘piti-piti-piti’...?
+      That’s enough, please leave off!” Prince Andrew painfully entreated
+      someone. And suddenly thoughts and feelings again swam to the surface of
+      his mind with peculiar clearness and force.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes—love,” he thought again quite clearly. “But not love which
+      loves for something, for some quality, for some purpose, or for some
+      reason, but the love which I—while dying—first experienced
+      when I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I experienced that feeling of love
+      which is the very essence of the soul and does not require an object. Now
+      again I feel that bliss. To love one’s neighbors, to love one’s enemies,
+      to love everything, to love God in all His manifestations. It is possible
+      to love someone dear to you with human love, but an enemy can only be
+      loved by divine love. That is why I experienced such joy when I felt that
+      I loved that man. What has become of him? Is he alive?...
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine
+      love cannot change. No, neither death nor anything else can destroy it. It
+      is the very essence of the soul. Yet how many people have I hated in my
+      life? And of them all, I loved and hated none as I did her.” And he
+      vividly pictured to himself Natásha, not as he had done in the past with
+      nothing but her charms which gave him delight, but for the first time
+      picturing to himself her soul. And he understood her feelings, her
+      sufferings, shame, and remorse. He now understood for the first time all
+      the cruelty of his rejection of her, the cruelty of his rupture with her.
+      “If only it were possible for me to see her once more! Just once, looking
+      into those eyes to say...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Piti-piti-piti and ti-ti and piti-piti-piti boom!” flopped the
+      fly.... And his attention was suddenly carried into another world, a world
+      of reality and delirium in which something particular was happening. In that
+      world some structure was still being erected and did not fall, something was
+      still stretching out, and the candle with its red halo was still burning,
+      and the same shirtlike sphinx lay near the door; but besides all this
+      something creaked, there was a whiff of fresh air, and a new white sphinx
+      appeared, standing at the door. And that sphinx had the pale face and
+      shining eyes of the very Natásha of whom he had just been thinking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, how oppressive this continual delirium is,” thought Prince Andrew,
+      trying to drive that face from his imagination. But the face remained
+      before him with the force of reality and drew nearer. Prince Andrew wished
+      to return to that former world of pure thought, but he could not, and
+      delirium drew him back into its domain. The soft whispering voice
+      continued its rhythmic murmur, something oppressed him and stretched out,
+      and the strange face was before him. Prince Andrew collected all his
+      strength in an effort to recover his senses, he moved a little, and
+      suddenly there was a ringing in his ears, a dimness in his eyes, and like
+      a man plunged into water he lost consciousness. When he came to himself,
+      Natásha, that same living Natásha whom of all people he most longed to
+      love with this new pure divine love that had been revealed to him, was
+      kneeling before him. He realized that it was the real living Natásha, and
+      he was not surprised but quietly happy. Natásha, motionless on her knees
+      (she was unable to stir), with frightened eyes riveted on him, was
+      restraining her sobs. Her face was pale and rigid. Only in the lower part
+      of it something quivered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew sighed with relief, smiled, and held out his hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You?” he said. “How fortunate!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      With a rapid but careful movement Natásha drew nearer to him on her knees
+      and, taking his hand carefully, bent her face over it and began kissing
+      it, just touching it lightly with her lips.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Forgive me!” she whispered, raising her head and glancing at him.
+      “Forgive me!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I love you,” said Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Forgive...!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Forgive what?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Forgive me for what I ha-ve do-ne!” faltered Natásha in a scarcely
+      audible, broken whisper, and began kissing his hand more rapidly, just
+      touching it with her lips.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I love you more, better than before,” said Prince Andrew, lifting her
+      face with his hand so as to look into her eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Those eyes, filled with happy tears, gazed at him timidly,
+      compassionately, and with joyous love. Natásha’s thin pale face, with its
+      swollen lips, was more than plain—it was dreadful. But Prince Andrew
+      did not see that, he saw her shining eyes which were beautiful. They heard
+      the sound of voices behind them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Peter the valet, who was now wide awake, had roused the doctor. Timókhin,
+      who had not slept at all because of the pain in his leg, had long been
+      watching all that was going on, carefully covering his bare body with the
+      sheet as he huddled up on his bench.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s this?” said the doctor, rising from his bed. “Please go away,
+      madam!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment a maid sent by the countess, who had noticed her daughter’s
+      absence, knocked at the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Like a somnambulist aroused from her sleep Natásha went out of the room
+      and, returning to her hut, fell sobbing on her bed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From that time, during all the rest of the Rostóvs’ journey, at every
+      halting place and wherever they spent a night, Natásha never left the
+      wounded Bolkónski, and the doctor had to admit that he had not expected
+      from a young girl either such firmness or such skill in nursing a wounded
+      man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dreadful as the countess imagined it would be should Prince Andrew die in
+      her daughter’s arms during the journey—as, judging by what the
+      doctor said, it seemed might easily happen—she could not oppose
+      Natásha. Though with the intimacy now established between the wounded man
+      and Natásha the thought occurred that should he recover their former
+      engagement would be renewed, no one—least of all Natásha and Prince
+      Andrew—spoke of this: the unsettled question of life and death,
+      which hung not only over Bolkónski but over all Russia, shut out all other
+      considerations.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0262"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXXIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On the third of September Pierre awoke late. His head was aching, the
+      clothes in which he had slept without undressing felt uncomfortable on his
+      body, and his mind had a dim consciousness of something shameful he had
+      done the day before. That something shameful was his yesterday’s
+      conversation with Captain Ramballe.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was eleven by the clock, but it seemed peculiarly dark out of doors.
+      Pierre rose, rubbed his eyes, and seeing the pistol with an engraved stock
+      which Gerásim had replaced on the writing table, he remembered where he
+      was and what lay before him that very day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Am I not too late?” he thought. “No, probably <i>he</i>
+      won’t make his entry into Moscow before noon.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre did not allow himself to reflect on what lay before him, but
+      hastened to act.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After arranging his clothes, he took the pistol and was about to go out.
+      But it then occurred to him for the first time that he certainly could not
+      carry the weapon in his hand through the streets. It was difficult to hide
+      such a big pistol even under his wide coat. He could not carry it
+      unnoticed in his belt or under his arm. Besides, it had been discharged,
+      and he had not had time to reload it. “No matter, the dagger will
+      do,” he said to himself, though when planning his design he had more than
+      once come to the conclusion that the chief mistake made by the student in 1809
+      had been to try to kill Napoleon with a dagger. But as his chief aim consisted
+      not in carrying out his design, but in proving to himself that he would not
+      abandon his intention and was doing all he could to achieve it, Pierre
+      hastily took the blunt jagged dagger in a green sheath which he had bought
+      at the Súkharev market with the pistol, and hid it under his waistcoat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having tied a girdle over his coat and pulled his cap low on his head,
+      Pierre went down the corridor, trying to avoid making a noise or meeting
+      the captain, and passed out into the street.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The conflagration, at which he had looked with so much indifference the
+      evening before, had greatly increased during the night. Moscow was on fire
+      in several places. The buildings in Carriage Row, across the river, in the
+      Bazaar and the Povarskóy, as well as the barges on the Moskvá River and
+      the timber yards by the Dorogomílov Bridge, were all ablaze.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre’s way led through side streets to the Povarskóy and from there to
+      the church of St. Nicholas on the Arbát, where he had long before decided
+      that the deed should be done. The gates of most of the houses were locked
+      and the shutters up. The streets and lanes were deserted. The air was full
+      of smoke and the smell of burning. Now and then he met Russians with
+      anxious and timid faces, and Frenchmen with an air not of the city but of
+      the camp, walking in the middle of the streets. Both the Russians and the
+      French looked at Pierre with surprise. Besides his height and stoutness,
+      and the strange morose look of suffering in his face and whole figure, the
+      Russians stared at Pierre because they could not make out to what class he
+      could belong. The French followed him with astonishment in their eyes
+      chiefly because Pierre, unlike all the other Russians who gazed at the
+      French with fear and curiosity, paid no attention to them. At the gate of
+      one house three Frenchmen, who were explaining something to some Russians
+      who did not understand them, stopped Pierre asking if he did not know
+      French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre shook his head and went on. In another side street a sentinel
+      standing beside a green caisson shouted at him, but only when the shout
+      was threateningly repeated and he heard the click of the man’s musket as
+      he raised it did Pierre understand that he had to pass on the other side
+      of the street. He heard nothing and saw nothing of what went on around
+      him. He carried his resolution within himself in terror and haste, like
+      something dreadful and alien to him, for, after the previous night’s
+      experience, he was afraid of losing it. But he was not destined to bring
+      his mood safely to his destination. And even had he not been hindered by
+      anything on the way, his intention could not now have been carried out,
+      for Napoleon had passed the Arbát more than four hours previously on his
+      way from the Dorogomílov suburb to the Krémlin, and was now sitting in a
+      very gloomy frame of mind in a royal study in the Krémlin, giving detailed
+      and exact orders as to measures to be taken immediately to extinguish the
+      fire, to prevent looting, and to reassure the inhabitants. But Pierre did
+      not know this; he was entirely absorbed in what lay before him, and was
+      tortured—as those are who obstinately undertake a task that is
+      impossible for them not because of its difficulty but because of its
+      incompatibility with their natures—by the fear of weakening at the
+      decisive moment and so losing his self-esteem.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though he heard and saw nothing around him he found his way by instinct
+      and did not go wrong in the side streets that led to the Povarskóy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As Pierre approached that street the smoke became denser and denser—he
+      even felt the heat of the fire. Occasionally curly tongues of flame rose
+      from under the roofs of the houses. He met more people in the streets and
+      they were more excited. But Pierre, though he felt that something unusual
+      was happening around him, did not realize that he was approaching the
+      fire. As he was going along a footpath across a wide-open space adjoining
+      the Povarskóy on one side and the gardens of Prince Gruzínski’s house on
+      the other, Pierre suddenly heard the desperate weeping of a woman close to
+      him. He stopped as if awakening from a dream and lifted his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      By the side of the path, on the dusty dry grass, all sorts of household
+      goods lay in a heap: featherbeds, a samovar, icons, and trunks. On the
+      ground, beside the trunks, sat a thin woman no longer young, with long,
+      prominent upper teeth, and wearing a black cloak and cap. This woman,
+      swaying to and fro and muttering something, was choking with sobs. Two
+      girls of about ten and twelve, dressed in dirty short frocks and cloaks,
+      were staring at their mother with a look of stupefaction on their pale
+      frightened faces. The youngest child, a boy of about seven, who wore an
+      overcoat and an immense cap evidently not his own, was crying in his old
+      nurse’s arms. A dirty, barefooted maid was sitting on a trunk, and, having
+      undone her pale-colored plait, was pulling it straight and sniffing at her
+      singed hair. The woman’s husband, a short, round-shouldered man in the
+      undress uniform of a civilian official, with sausage-shaped whiskers and
+      showing under his square-set cap the hair smoothly brushed forward over
+      his temples, with expressionless face was moving the trunks, which were
+      placed one on another, and was dragging some garments from under them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as she saw Pierre, the woman almost threw herself at his feet.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Dear people, good Christians, save me, help me, dear friends... help us,
+      somebody,” she muttered between her sobs. “My girl... My daughter! My
+      youngest daughter is left behind. She’s burned! Ooh! Was it for this I
+      nursed you.... Ooh!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t, Mary Nikoláevna!” said her husband to her in a low voice,
+      evidently only to justify himself before the stranger. “Sister must have
+      taken her, or else where can she be?” he added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Monster! Villain!” shouted the woman angrily, suddenly ceasing to weep.
+      “You have no heart, you don’t feel for your own child! Another man would
+      have rescued her from the fire. But this is a monster and neither a man
+      nor a father! You, honored sir, are a noble man,” she went on, addressing
+      Pierre rapidly between her sobs. “The fire broke out alongside, and blew
+      our way, the maid called out ‘Fire!’ and we rushed to collect our things.
+      We ran out just as we were.... This is what we have brought away.... The
+      icons, and my dowry bed, all the rest is lost. We seized the children. But
+      not Katie! Ooh! O Lord!...” and again she began to sob. “My child, my dear
+      one! Burned, burned!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But where was she left?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the expression of his animated face the woman saw that this man might
+      help her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, dear sir!” she cried, seizing him by the legs. “My benefactor, set my
+      heart at ease.... Aníska, go, you horrid girl, show him the way!” she
+      cried to the maid, angrily opening her mouth and still farther exposing
+      her long teeth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Show me the way, show me, I... I’ll do it,” gasped Pierre rapidly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The dirty maidservant stepped from behind the trunk, put up her plait,
+      sighed, and went on her short, bare feet along the path. Pierre felt as if
+      he had come back to life after a heavy swoon. He held his head higher, his
+      eyes shone with the light of life, and with swift steps he followed the
+      maid, overtook her, and came out on the Povarskóy. The whole street was
+      full of clouds of black smoke. Tongues of flame here and there broke
+      through that cloud. A great number of people crowded in front of the
+      conflagration. In the middle of the street stood a French general saying
+      something to those around him. Pierre, accompanied by the maid, was
+      advancing to the spot where the general stood, but the French soldiers
+      stopped him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“On ne passe pas!”</i> * cried a voice.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “You can’t pass!”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “This way, uncle,” cried the girl. “We’ll pass through
+      the side street, by the Nikúlins’!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre turned back, giving a spring now and then to keep up with her. She
+      ran across the street, turned down a side street to the left, and, passing
+      three houses, turned into a yard on the right.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s here, close by,” said she and, running across the yard, opened a
+      gate in a wooden fence and, stopping, pointed out to him a small wooden
+      wing of the house, which was burning brightly and fiercely. One of its
+      sides had fallen in, another was on fire, and bright flames issued from
+      the openings of the windows and from under the roof.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As Pierre passed through the fence gate, he was enveloped by hot air and
+      involuntarily stopped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Which is it? Which is your house?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ooh!” wailed the girl, pointing to the wing. “That’s it, that was our
+      lodging. You’ve burned to death, our treasure, Katie, my precious little
+      missy! Ooh!” lamented Aníska, who at the sight of the fire felt that she
+      too must give expression to her feelings.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre rushed to the wing, but the heat was so great that he involuntarily
+      passed round in a curve and came upon the large house that was as yet
+      burning only at one end, just below the roof, and around which swarmed a
+      crowd of Frenchmen. At first Pierre did not realize what these men, who
+      were dragging something out, were about; but seeing before him a Frenchman
+      hitting a peasant with a blunt saber and trying to take from him a fox-fur
+      coat, he vaguely understood that looting was going on there, but he had no
+      time to dwell on that idea.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The sounds of crackling and the din of falling walls and ceilings, the
+      whistle and hiss of the flames, the excited shouts of the people, and the
+      sight of the swaying smoke, now gathering into thick black clouds and now
+      soaring up with glittering sparks, with here and there dense sheaves of
+      flame (now red and now like golden fish scales creeping along the walls),
+      and the heat and smoke and rapidity of motion, produced on Pierre the
+      usual animating effects of a conflagration. It had a peculiarly strong
+      effect on him because at the sight of the fire he felt himself suddenly
+      freed from the ideas that had weighed him down. He felt young, bright,
+      adroit, and resolute. He ran round to the other side of the lodge and was
+      about to dash into that part of it which was still standing, when just
+      above his head he heard several voices shouting and then a cracking sound
+      and the ring of something heavy falling close beside him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked up and saw at a window of the large house some Frenchmen who
+      had just thrown out the drawer of a chest, filled with metal articles.
+      Other French soldiers standing below went up to the drawer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What does this fellow want?” shouted one of them referring to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There’s a child in that house. Haven’t you seen a child?” cried Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s he talking about? Get along!” said several voices, and one of the
+      soldiers, evidently afraid that Pierre might want to take from them some
+      of the plate and bronzes that were in the drawer, moved threateningly
+      toward him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A child?” shouted a Frenchman from above. “I did hear something squealing
+      in the garden. Perhaps it’s his brat that the fellow is looking for. After
+      all, one must be human, you know....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Where is it? Where?” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There! There!” shouted the Frenchman at the window, pointing to the
+      garden at the back of the house. “Wait a bit—I’m coming down.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And a minute or two later the Frenchman, a black-eyed fellow with a spot
+      on his cheek, in shirt sleeves, really did jump out of a window on the
+      ground floor, and clapping Pierre on the shoulder ran with him into the
+      garden.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hurry up, you others!” he called out to his comrades. “It’s getting hot.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      When they reached a gravel path behind the house the Frenchman pulled
+      Pierre by the arm and pointed to a round, graveled space where a
+      three-year-old girl in a pink dress was lying under a seat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There is your child! Oh, a girl, so much the better!” said the Frenchman.
+      “Good-by, Fatty. We must be human, we are all mortal you know!” and the
+      Frenchman with the spot on his cheek ran back to his comrades.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Breathless with joy, Pierre ran to the little girl and was going to take
+      her in his arms. But seeing a stranger the sickly, scrofulous-looking
+      child, unattractively like her mother, began to yell and run away. Pierre,
+      however, seized her and lifted her in his arms. She screamed desperately
+      and angrily and tried with her little hands to pull Pierre’s hands away
+      and to bite them with her slobbering mouth. Pierre was seized by a sense
+      of horror and repulsion such as he had experienced when touching some
+      nasty little animal. But he made an effort not to throw the child down and
+      ran with her to the large house. It was now, however, impossible to get
+      back the way he had come; the maid, Aníska, was no longer there, and
+      Pierre with a feeling of pity and disgust pressed the wet, painfully
+      sobbing child to himself as tenderly as he could and ran with her through
+      the garden seeking another way out.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0263"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXXIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Having run through different yards and side streets, Pierre got back with
+      his little burden to the Gruzínski garden at the corner of the Povarskóy.
+      He did not at first recognize the place from which he had set out to look
+      for the child, so crowded was it now with people and goods that had been
+      dragged out of the houses. Besides Russian families who had taken refuge
+      here from the fire with their belongings, there were several French
+      soldiers in a variety of clothing. Pierre took no notice of them. He
+      hurried to find the family of that civil servant in order to restore the
+      daughter to her mother and go to save someone else. Pierre felt that he
+      had still much to do and to do quickly. Glowing with the heat and from
+      running, he felt at that moment more strongly than ever the sense of
+      youth, animation, and determination that had come on him when he ran to
+      save the child. She had now become quiet and, clinging with her little
+      hands to Pierre’s coat, sat on his arm gazing about her like some little
+      wild animal. He glanced at her occasionally with a slight smile. He
+      fancied he saw something pathetically innocent in that frightened, sickly
+      little face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He did not find the civil servant or his wife where he had left them. He
+      walked among the crowd with rapid steps, scanning the various faces he
+      met. Involuntarily he noticed a Georgian or Armenian family consisting of
+      a very handsome old man of Oriental type, wearing a new, cloth-covered,
+      sheepskin coat and new boots, an old woman of similar type, and a young
+      woman. That very young woman seemed to Pierre the perfection of Oriental
+      beauty, with her sharply outlined, arched, black eyebrows and the
+      extraordinarily soft, bright color of her long, beautiful, expressionless
+      face. Amid the scattered property and the crowd on the open space, she, in
+      her rich satin cloak with a bright lilac shawl on her head, suggested a
+      delicate exotic plant thrown out onto the snow. She was sitting on some
+      bundles a little behind the old woman, and looked from under her long
+      lashes with motionless, large, almond-shaped eyes at the ground before
+      her. Evidently she was aware of her beauty and fearful because of it. Her
+      face struck Pierre and, hurrying along by the fence, he turned several
+      times to look at her. When he had reached the fence, still without finding
+      those he sought, he stopped and looked about him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With the child in his arms his figure was now more conspicuous than
+      before, and a group of Russians, both men and women, gathered about him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Have you lost anyone, my dear fellow? You’re of the gentry yourself,
+      aren’t you? Whose child is it?” they asked him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre replied that the child belonged to a woman in a black coat who had
+      been sitting there with her other children, and he asked whether anyone
+      knew where she had gone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, that must be the Anférovs,” said an old deacon, addressing a
+      pockmarked peasant woman. “Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy!” he added in
+      his customary bass.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Anférovs? No,” said the woman. “They left in the morning. That must
+      be either Mary Nikoláevna’s or the Ivánovs’!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “He says ‘a woman,’ and Mary Nikoláevna is a lady,” remarked a house serf.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know her? She’s thin, with long teeth,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s Mary Nikoláevna! They went inside the garden when these wolves
+      swooped down,” said the woman, pointing to the French soldiers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “O Lord, have mercy!” added the deacon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go over that way, they’re there. It’s she! She kept on lamenting and
+      crying,” continued the woman. “It’s she. Here, this way!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But Pierre was not listening to the woman. He had for some seconds been
+      intently watching what was going on a few steps away. He was looking at
+      the Armenian family and at two French soldiers who had gone up to them.
+      One of these, a nimble little man, was wearing a blue coat tied round the
+      waist with a rope. He had a nightcap on his head and his feet were bare.
+      The other, whose appearance particularly struck Pierre, was a long, lank,
+      round-shouldered, fair-haired man, slow in his movements and with an
+      idiotic expression of face. He wore a woman’s loose gown of frieze, blue
+      trousers, and large torn Hessian boots. The little barefooted Frenchman in
+      the blue coat went up to the Armenians and, saying something, immediately
+      seized the old man by his legs and the old man at once began pulling off
+      his boots. The other in the frieze gown stopped in front of the beautiful
+      Armenian girl and with his hands in his pockets stood staring at her,
+      motionless and silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Here, take the child!” said Pierre peremptorily and hurriedly to the
+      woman, handing the little girl to her. “Give her back to them, give her
+      back!” he almost shouted, putting the child, who began screaming, on the
+      ground, and again looking at the Frenchman and the Armenian family.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old man was already sitting barefoot. The little Frenchman had secured
+      his second boot and was slapping one boot against the other. The old man
+      was saying something in a voice broken by sobs, but Pierre caught but a
+      glimpse of this, his whole attention was directed to the Frenchman in the
+      frieze gown who meanwhile, swaying slowly from side to side, had drawn
+      nearer to the young woman and taking his hands from his pockets had seized
+      her by the neck.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The beautiful Armenian still sat motionless and in the same attitude, with
+      her long lashes drooping as if she did not see or feel what the soldier
+      was doing to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While Pierre was running the few steps that separated him from the
+      Frenchman, the tall marauder in the frieze gown was already tearing from
+      her neck the necklace the young Armenian was wearing, and the young woman,
+      clutching at her neck, screamed piercingly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let that woman alone!” exclaimed Pierre hoarsely in a furious voice,
+      seizing the soldier by his round shoulders and throwing him aside.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The soldier fell, got up, and ran away. But his comrade, throwing down the
+      boots and drawing his sword, moved threateningly toward Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Voyons, pas de bêtises!”</i> * he cried.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Look here, no nonsense!”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was in such a transport of rage that he remembered nothing and his
+      strength increased tenfold. He rushed at the barefooted Frenchman and,
+      before the latter had time to draw his sword, knocked him off his feet and
+      hammered him with his fists. Shouts of approval were heard from the crowd
+      around, and at the same moment a mounted patrol of French Uhlans appeared
+      from round the corner. The Uhlans came up at a trot to Pierre and the
+      Frenchman and surrounded them. Pierre remembered nothing of what happened
+      after that. He only remembered beating someone and being beaten and
+      finally feeling that his hands were bound and that a crowd of French
+      soldiers stood around him and were searching him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lieutenant, he has a dagger,” were the first words Pierre understood.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, a weapon?” said the officer and turned to the barefooted soldier who
+      had been arrested with Pierre. “All right, you can tell all about it at
+      the court-martial.” Then he turned to Pierre. “Do you speak French?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked around him with bloodshot eyes and did not reply. His face
+      probably looked very terrible, for the officer said something in a whisper
+      and four more Uhlans left the ranks and placed themselves on both sides of
+      Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you speak French?” the officer asked again, keeping at a distance from
+      Pierre. “Call the interpreter.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A little man in Russian civilian clothes rode out from the ranks, and by
+      his clothes and manner of speaking Pierre at once knew him to be a French
+      salesman from one of the Moscow shops.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He does not look like a common man,” said the interpreter, after a
+      searching look at Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, he looks very much like an incendiary,” remarked the officer. “And
+      ask him who he is,” he added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who are you?” asked the interpreter in poor Russian. “You must answer the
+      chief.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I will not tell you who I am. I am your prisoner—take me!” Pierre
+      suddenly replied in French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, ah!” muttered the officer with a frown. “Well then, march!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A crowd had collected round the Uhlans. Nearest to Pierre stood the
+      pockmarked peasant woman with the little girl, and when the patrol started
+      she moved forward.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where are they taking you to, you poor dear?” said she. “And the little
+      girl, the little girl, what am I to do with her if she’s not theirs?” said
+      the woman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What does that woman want?” asked the officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was as if intoxicated. His elation increased at the sight of the
+      little girl he had saved.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What does she want?” he murmured. “She is bringing me my daughter whom I
+      have just saved from the flames,” said he. “Good-by!” And without knowing
+      how this aimless lie had escaped him, he went along with resolute and
+      triumphant steps between the French soldiers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French patrol was one of those sent out through the various streets of
+      Moscow by Durosnel’s order to put a stop to the pillage, and especially to
+      catch the incendiaries who, according to the general opinion which had
+      that day originated among the higher French officers, were the cause of
+      the conflagrations. After marching through a number of streets the patrol
+      arrested five more Russian suspects: a small shopkeeper, two seminary
+      students, a peasant, and a house serf, besides several looters. But of all
+      these various suspected characters, Pierre was considered to be the most
+      suspicious of all. When they had all been brought for the night to a large
+      house on the Zúbov Rampart that was being used as a guardhouse, Pierre was
+      placed apart under strict guard.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0275"></a>
+      BOOK TWELVE: 1812
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0264"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      In Petersburg at that time a complicated struggle was being carried on
+      with greater heat than ever in the highest circles, between the parties of
+      Rumyántsev, the French, Márya Fëdorovna, the Tsarévich, and others,
+      drowned as usual by the buzzing of the court drones. But the calm,
+      luxurious life of Petersburg, concerned only about phantoms and
+      reflections of real life, went on in its old way and made it hard, except
+      by a great effort, to realize the danger and the difficult position of the
+      Russian people. There were the same receptions and balls, the same French
+      theater, the same court interests and service interests and intrigues as
+      usual. Only in the very highest circles were attempts made to keep in mind
+      the difficulties of the actual position. Stories were whispered of how
+      differently the two Empresses behaved in these difficult circumstances.
+      The Empress Márya, concerned for the welfare of the charitable and
+      educational institutions under her patronage, had given directions that
+      they should all be removed to Kazán, and the things belonging to these
+      institutions had already been packed up. The Empress Elisabeth, however,
+      when asked what instructions she would be pleased to give—with her
+      characteristic Russian patriotism had replied that she could give no
+      directions about state institutions for that was the affair of the
+      sovereign, but as far as she personally was concerned she would be the
+      last to quit Petersburg.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At Anna Pávlovna’s on the twenty-sixth of August, the very day of the
+      battle of Borodinó, there was a soiree, the chief feature of which was to
+      be the reading of a letter from His Lordship the Bishop when sending the
+      Emperor an icon of the Venerable Sergius. It was regarded as a model of
+      ecclesiastical, patriotic eloquence. Prince Vasíli himself, famed for his
+      elocution, was to read it. (He used to read at the Empress’.) The art of
+      his reading was supposed to lie in rolling out the words, quite
+      independently of their meaning, in a loud and singsong voice alternating
+      between a despairing wail and a tender murmur, so that the wail fell quite
+      at random on one word and the murmur on another. This reading, as was
+      always the case at Anna Pávlovna’s soirees, had a political significance.
+      That evening she expected several important personages who had to be made
+      ashamed of their visits to the French theater and aroused to a patriotic
+      temper. A good many people had already arrived, but Anna Pávlovna, not yet
+      seeing all those whom she wanted in her drawing room, did not let the
+      reading begin but wound up the springs of a general conversation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The news of the day in Petersburg was the illness of Countess Bezúkhova.
+      She had fallen ill unexpectedly a few days previously, had missed several
+      gatherings of which she was usually the ornament, and was said to be receiving
+      no one, and instead of the celebrated Petersburg doctors who usually
+      attended her had entrusted herself to some Italian doctor who was treating
+      her in some new and unusual way.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They all knew very well that the enchanting countess’ illness arose from
+      an inconvenience resulting from marrying two husbands at the same time,
+      and that the Italian’s cure consisted in removing such inconvenience; but
+      in Anna Pávlovna’s presence no one dared to think of this or even appear
+      to know it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They say the poor countess is very ill. The doctor says it is angina
+      pectoris.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Angina? Oh, that’s a terrible illness!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “They say that the rivals are reconciled, thanks to the angina...” and
+      the word <i>angina</i> was repeated with great satisfaction.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The count is pathetic, they say. He cried like a child when the doctor
+      told him the case was dangerous.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, it would be a terrible loss, she is an enchanting woman.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You are speaking of the poor countess?” said Anna Pávlovna, coming up
+      just then. “I sent to ask for news, and hear that she is a little better.
+      Oh, she is certainly the most charming woman in the world,” she went on,
+      with a smile at her own enthusiasm. “We belong to different camps, but
+      that does not prevent my esteeming her as she deserves. She is very
+      unfortunate!” added Anna Pávlovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Supposing that by these words Anna Pávlovna was somewhat lifting the veil
+      from the secret of the countess’ malady, an unwary young man ventured to
+      express surprise that well-known doctors had not been called in and that
+      the countess was being attended by a charlatan who might employ dangerous
+      remedies.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your information may be better than mine,” Anna Pávlovna suddenly and
+      venomously retorted on the inexperienced young man, “but I know on good
+      authority that this doctor is a very learned and able man. He is private
+      physician to the Queen of Spain.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And having thus demolished the young man, Anna Pávlovna turned to another
+      group where Bilíbin was talking about the Austrians: having wrinkled up
+      his face he was evidently preparing to smooth it out again and utter one
+      of his mots.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I think it is delightful,” he said, referring to a diplomatic note that
+      had been sent to Vienna with some Austrian banners captured from the
+      French by Wittgenstein, “the hero of Petropol” as he was then called in
+      Petersburg.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What? What’s that?” asked Anna Pávlovna, securing silence for the mot,
+      which she had heard before.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And Bilíbin repeated the actual words of the diplomatic dispatch, which he
+      had himself composed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Emperor returns these Austrian banners,” said Bilíbin, “friendly
+      banners gone astray and found on a wrong path,” and his brow became smooth
+      again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Charming, charming!” observed Prince Vasíli.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The path to Warsaw, perhaps,” Prince Hippolyte remarked loudly and
+      unexpectedly. Everybody looked at him, understanding what he meant. Prince
+      Hippolyte himself glanced around with amused surprise. He knew no more
+      than the others what his words meant. During his diplomatic career he had
+      more than once noticed that such utterances were received as very witty,
+      and at every opportunity he uttered in that way the first words that
+      entered his head. “It may turn out very well,” he thought, “but if not,
+      they’ll know how to arrange matters.” And really, during the awkward
+      silence that ensued, that insufficiently patriotic person entered whom
+      Anna Pávlovna had been waiting for and wished to convert, and she, smiling
+      and shaking a finger at Hippolyte, invited Prince Vasíli to the table and
+      bringing him two candles and the manuscript begged him to begin. Everyone
+      became silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Most Gracious Sovereign and Emperor!” Prince Vasíli sternly declaimed,
+      looking round at his audience as if to inquire whether anyone had anything
+      to say to the contrary. But no one said anything. “Moscow, our ancient
+      capital, the New Jerusalem, receives <i>her</i> Christ”—he placed a sudden
+      emphasis on the word <i>her</i>—“as a mother receives her zealous sons into
+      her arms, and through the gathering mists, foreseeing the brilliant glory
+      of thy rule, sings in exultation, ‘Hosanna, blessed is he that cometh!’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli pronounced these last words in a tearful voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bilíbin attentively examined his nails, and many of those present appeared
+      intimidated, as if asking in what they were to blame. Anna Pávlovna
+      whispered the next words in advance, like an old woman muttering the
+      prayer at Communion: “Let the bold and insolent Goliath...” she whispered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Vasíli continued.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let the bold and insolent Goliath from the borders of France encompass
+      the realms of Russia with death-bearing terrors; humble Faith, the sling
+      of the Russian David, shall suddenly smite his head in his bloodthirsty
+      pride. This icon of the Venerable Sergius, the servant of God and zealous
+      champion of old of our country’s weal, is offered to Your Imperial
+      Majesty. I grieve that my waning strength prevents rejoicing in the sight
+      of your most gracious presence. I raise fervent prayers to Heaven that the
+      Almighty may exalt the race of the just, and mercifully fulfill the
+      desires of Your Majesty.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What force! What a style!” was uttered in approval both of reader and of
+      author.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Animated by that address Anna Pávlovna’s guests talked for a long time of
+      the state of the fatherland and offered various conjectures as to the
+      result of the battle to be fought in a few days.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You will see,” said Anna Pávlovna, “that tomorrow, on the Emperor’s
+      birthday, we shall receive news. I have a favorable presentiment!”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0265"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Anna Pávlovna’s presentiment was in fact fulfilled. Next day during the
+      service at the palace church in honor of the Emperor’s birthday, Prince
+      Volkónski was called out of the church and received a dispatch from Prince
+      Kutúzov. It was Kutúzov’s report, written from Tatárinova on the day of
+      the battle. Kutúzov wrote that the Russians had not retreated a step, that
+      the French losses were much heavier than ours, and that he was writing in
+      haste from the field of battle before collecting full information. It
+      followed that there must have been a victory. And at once, without leaving
+      the church, thanks were rendered to the Creator for His help and for the
+      victory.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Anna Pávlovna’s presentiment was justified, and all that morning a
+      joyously festive mood reigned in the city. Everyone believed the victory
+      to have been complete, and some even spoke of Napoleon’s having been
+      captured, of his deposition, and of the choice of a new ruler for France.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It is very difficult for events to be reflected in their real strength and
+      completeness amid the conditions of court life and far from the scene of
+      action. General events involuntarily group themselves around some
+      particular incident. So now the courtiers’ pleasure was based as much on
+      the fact that the news had arrived on the Emperor’s birthday as on the
+      fact of the victory itself. It was like a successfully arranged surprise.
+      Mention was made in Kutúzov’s report of the Russian losses, among which
+      figured the names of Túchkov, Bagratión, and Kutáysov. In the Petersburg
+      world this sad side of the affair again involuntarily centered round a
+      single incident: Kutáysov’s death. Everybody knew him, the Emperor liked
+      him, and he was young and interesting. That day everyone met with the
+      words:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a wonderful coincidence! Just during the service. But what a loss
+      Kutáysov is! How sorry I am!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What did I tell about Kutúzov?” Prince Vasíli now said with a prophet’s
+      pride. “I always said he was the only man capable of defeating Napoleon.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But next day no news arrived from the army and the public mood grew
+      anxious. The courtiers suffered because of the suffering the suspense
+      occasioned the Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Fancy the Emperor’s position!” said they, and instead of extolling
+      Kutúzov as they had done the day before, they condemned him as the cause
+      of the Emperor’s anxiety. That day Prince Vasíli no longer boasted of his
+      protégé Kutúzov, but remained silent when the commander in chief was
+      mentioned. Moreover, toward evening, as if everything conspired to make
+      Petersburg society anxious and uneasy, a terrible piece of news was added.
+      Countess Hélène Bezúkhova had suddenly died of that terrible malady it had
+      been so agreeable to mention. Officially, at large gatherings, everyone
+      said that Countess Bezúkhova had died of a terrible attack of angina
+      pectoris, but in intimate circles details were mentioned of how the
+      private physician of the Queen of Spain had prescribed small doses of a
+      certain drug to produce a certain effect; but Hélène, tortured by the fact
+      that the old count suspected her and that her husband to whom she had
+      written (that wretched, profligate Pierre) had not replied, had suddenly
+      taken a very large dose of the drug, and had died in agony before
+      assistance could be rendered her. It was said that Prince Vasíli and the
+      old count had turned upon the Italian, but the latter had produced such
+      letters from the unfortunate deceased that they had immediately let the
+      matter drop.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Talk in general centered round three melancholy facts: the Emperor’s lack
+      of news, the loss of Kutáysov, and the death of Hélène.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the third day after Kutúzov’s report a country gentleman arrived from
+      Moscow, and news of the surrender of Moscow to the French spread through
+      the whole town. This was terrible! What a position for the Emperor to be
+      in! Kutúzov was a traitor, and Prince Vasíli during the visits of
+      condolence paid to him on the occasion of his daughter’s death said of
+      Kutúzov, whom he had formerly praised (it was excusable for him in his
+      grief to forget what he had said), that it was impossible to expect
+      anything else from a blind and depraved old man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I only wonder that the fate of Russia could have been entrusted to such a
+      man.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      As long as this news remained unofficial it was possible to doubt it, but
+      the next day the following communication was received from Count
+      Rostopchín:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Kutúzov’s adjutant has brought me a letter in which he demands
+      police officers to guide the army to the Ryazán road. He writes that he is
+      regretfully abandoning Moscow. Sire! Kutúzov’s action decides the fate of
+      the capital and of your empire! Russia will shudder to learn of the
+      abandonment of the city in which her greatness is centered and in which
+      lie the ashes of your ancestors! I shall follow the army. I have had
+      everything removed, and it only remains for me to weep over the fate of my
+      fatherland.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On receiving this dispatch the Emperor sent Prince Volkónski to Kutúzov
+      with the following rescript:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Michael Ilariónovich! Since the twenty-ninth of August I have
+      received no communication from you, yet on the first of September I
+      received from the commander in chief of Moscow, via Yaroslávl, the sad
+      news that you, with the army, have decided to abandon Moscow. You can
+      yourself imagine the effect this news has had on me, and your silence
+      increases my astonishment. I am sending this by Adjutant-General Prince
+      Volkónski, to hear from you the situation of the army and the reasons that
+      have induced you to take this melancholy decision.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0266"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Nine days after the abandonment of Moscow, a messenger from Kutúzov
+      reached Petersburg with the official announcement of that event. This
+      messenger was Michaud, a Frenchman who did not know Russian, but who was
+      <i>quoique étranger, russe de cœur et d’âme,</i> * as he said of himself.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Though a foreigner, Russian in heart and soul.
+</p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor at once received this messenger in his study at the palace on
+      Stone Island. Michaud, who had never seen Moscow before the campaign and
+      who did not know Russian, yet felt deeply moved (as he wrote) when he
+      appeared before <i>notre très gracieux souverain</i> * with the news of the
+      burning of Moscow, <i>dont les flammes éclairaient sa route</i>. *(2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * Our most gracious sovereign.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * (2) Whose flames illumined his route.
+</p>
+<p>
+      Though the source of M. Michaud’s chagrin must have been different from
+      that which caused Russians to grieve, he had such a sad face when shown
+      into the Emperor’s study that the latter at once asked:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Have you brought me sad news, Colonel?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Very sad, sire,” replied Michaud, lowering his eyes with a sigh. “The
+      abandonment of Moscow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Have they surrendered my ancient capital without a battle?” asked the
+      Emperor quickly, his face suddenly flushing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Michaud respectfully delivered the message Kutúzov had entrusted to him,
+      which was that it had been impossible to fight before Moscow, and that as
+      the only remaining choice was between losing the army as well as Moscow,
+      or losing Moscow alone, the field marshal had to choose the latter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor listened in silence, not looking at Michaud.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Has the enemy entered the city?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, sire, and Moscow is now in ashes. I left it all in flames,” replied
+      Michaud in a decided tone, but glancing at the Emperor he was frightened
+      by what he had done.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor began to breathe heavily and rapidly, his lower lip trembled,
+      and tears instantly appeared in his fine blue eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But this lasted only a moment. He suddenly frowned, as if blaming himself
+      for his weakness, and raising his head addressed Michaud in a firm voice:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I see, Colonel, from all that is happening, that Providence requires
+      great sacrifices of us... I am ready to submit myself in all things to His
+      will; but tell me, Michaud, how did you leave the army when it saw my
+      ancient capital abandoned without a battle? Did you not notice
+      discouragement?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Seeing that his most gracious ruler was calm once more, Michaud also grew
+      calm, but was not immediately ready to reply to the Emperor’s direct and
+      relevant question which required a direct answer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sire, will you allow me to speak frankly as befits a loyal soldier?” he
+      asked to gain time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Colonel, I always require it,” replied the Emperor. “Conceal nothing from
+      me, I wish to know absolutely how things are.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Sire!” said Michaud with a subtle, scarcely perceptible smile on his
+      lips, having now prepared a well-phrased reply, “sire, I left the whole
+      army, from its chiefs to the lowest soldier, without exception in
+      desperate and agonized terror...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How is that?” the Emperor interrupted him, frowning sternly. “Would
+      misfortune make my Russians lose heart?... Never!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Michaud had only waited for this to bring out the phrase he had prepared.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sire,” he said, with respectful playfulness, “they are only afraid lest
+      Your Majesty, in the goodness of your heart, should allow yourself to be
+      persuaded to make peace. They are burning for the combat,” declared this
+      representative of the Russian nation, “and to prove to Your Majesty by the
+      sacrifice of their lives how devoted they are....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah!” said the Emperor reassured, and with a kindly gleam in his eyes, he
+      patted Michaud on the shoulder. “You set me at ease, Colonel.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He bent his head and was silent for some time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, then, go back to the army,” he said, drawing himself up to his full
+      height and addressing Michaud with a gracious and majestic gesture, “and
+      tell our brave men and all my good subjects wherever you go that when I
+      have not a soldier left I shall put myself at the head of my beloved
+      nobility and my good peasants and so use the last resources of my empire.
+      It still offers me more than my enemies suppose,” said the Emperor growing
+      more and more animated; “but should it ever be ordained by Divine
+      Providence,” he continued, raising to heaven his fine eyes shining with
+      emotion, “that my dynasty should cease to reign on the throne of my
+      ancestors, then after exhausting all the means at my command, I shall let
+      my beard grow to here” (he pointed halfway down his chest) “and go and eat
+      potatoes with the meanest of my peasants, rather than sign the disgrace of
+      my country and of my beloved people whose sacrifices I know how to
+      appreciate.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Having uttered these words in an agitated voice the Emperor suddenly
+      turned away as if to hide from Michaud the tears that rose to his eyes,
+      and went to the further end of his study. Having stood there a few
+      moments, he strode back to Michaud and pressed his arm below the elbow
+      with a vigorous movement. The Emperor’s mild and handsome face was flushed
+      and his eyes gleamed with resolution and anger.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Colonel Michaud, do not forget what I say to you here, perhaps we may
+      recall it with pleasure someday... Napoleon or I,” said the Emperor,
+      touching his breast. “We can no longer both reign together. I have learned
+      to know him, and he will not deceive me any more....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the Emperor paused, with a frown.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he heard these words and saw the expression of firm resolution in the
+      Emperor’s eyes, Michaud—<i>quoique étranger, russe de cœur et
+      d’âme,</i>—at that solemn moment felt himself enraptured by all that
+      he had heard (as he used afterwards to say), and gave expression to his own
+      feelings and those of the Russian people whose representative he considered
+      himself to be, in the following words:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sire!” said he, “Your Majesty is at this moment signing the glory of the
+      nation and the salvation of Europe!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      With an inclination of the head the Emperor dismissed him.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0267"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      It is natural for us who were not living in those days to imagine that
+      when half Russia had been conquered and the inhabitants were fleeing to
+      distant provinces, and one levy after another was being raised for the
+      defense of the fatherland, all Russians from the greatest to the least
+      were solely engaged in sacrificing themselves, saving their fatherland, or
+      weeping over its downfall. The tales and descriptions of that time without
+      exception speak only of the self-sacrifice, patriotic devotion, despair,
+      grief, and the heroism of the Russians. But it was not really so. It
+      appears so to us because we see only the general historic interest of that
+      time and do not see all the personal human interests that people had. Yet
+      in reality those personal interests of the moment so much transcend the
+      general interests that they always prevent the public interest from being
+      felt or even noticed. Most of the people at that time paid no attention to
+      the general progress of events but were guided only by their private
+      interests, and they were the very people whose activities at that period
+      were most useful.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Those who tried to understand the general course of events and to take
+      part in it by self-sacrifice and heroism were the most useless members of
+      society, they saw everything upside down, and all they did for the common
+      good turned out to be useless and foolish—like Pierre’s and
+      Mamónov’s regiments which looted Russian villages, and the lint the young
+      ladies prepared and that never reached the wounded, and so on. Even those,
+      fond of intellectual talk and of expressing their feelings, who discussed
+      Russia’s position at the time involuntarily introduced into their
+      conversation either a shade of pretense and falsehood or useless
+      condemnation and anger directed against people accused of actions no one
+      could possibly be guilty of. In historic events the rule forbidding us to
+      eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is specially applicable. Only
+      unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in an historic
+      event never understands its significance. If he tries to realize it his
+      efforts are fruitless.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The more closely a man was engaged in the events then taking place in
+      Russia the less did he realize their significance. In Petersburg and in
+      the provinces at a distance from Moscow, ladies, and gentlemen in militia
+      uniforms, wept for Russia and its ancient capital and talked of
+      self-sacrifice and so on; but in the army which retired beyond Moscow
+      there was little talk or thought of Moscow, and when they caught sight of
+      its burned ruins no one swore to be avenged on the French, but they
+      thought about their next pay, their next quarters, of Matrëshka the
+      vivandière, and like matters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As the war had caught him in the service, Nicholas Rostóv took a close and
+      prolonged part in the defense of his country, but did so casually, without
+      any aim at self-sacrifice, and he therefore looked at what was going on in
+      Russia without despair and without dismally racking his brains over it.
+      Had he been asked what he thought of the state of Russia, he would have
+      said that it was not his business to think about it, that Kutúzov and
+      others were there for that purpose, but that he had heard that the
+      regiments were to be made up to their full strength, that fighting would
+      probably go on for a long time yet, and that things being so it was quite
+      likely he might be in command of a regiment in a couple of years’ time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As he looked at the matter in this way, he learned that he was being sent
+      to Vorónezh to buy remounts for his division, not only without regret at
+      being prevented from taking part in the coming battle, but with the
+      greatest pleasure—which he did not conceal and which his comrades
+      fully understood.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A few days before the battle of Borodinó, Nicholas received the necessary
+      money and warrants, and having sent some hussars on in advance, he set out
+      with post horses for Vorónezh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only a man who has experienced it—that is, has passed some months
+      continuously in an atmosphere of campaigning and war—can understand
+      the delight Nicholas felt when he escaped from the region covered by the
+      army’s foraging operations, provision trains, and hospitals. When—free
+      from soldiers, wagons, and the filthy traces of a camp—he saw
+      villages with peasants and peasant women, gentlemen’s country houses,
+      fields where cattle were grazing, posthouses with stationmasters asleep in
+      them, he rejoiced as though seeing all this for the first time. What for a
+      long while specially surprised and delighted him were the women, young and
+      healthy, without a dozen officers making up to each of them; women, too,
+      who were pleased and flattered that a passing officer should joke with
+      them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the highest spirits Nicholas arrived at night at a hotel in Vorónezh,
+      ordered things he had long been deprived of in camp, and next day, very
+      clean-shaven and in a full-dress uniform he had not worn for a long time,
+      went to present himself to the authorities.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The commander of the militia was a civilian general, an old man who was
+      evidently pleased with his military designation and rank. He received
+      Nicholas brusquely (imagining this to be characteristically military) and
+      questioned him with an important air, as if considering the general
+      progress of affairs and approving and disapproving with full right to do
+      so. Nicholas was in such good spirits that this merely amused him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the commander of the militia he drove to the governor. The governor
+      was a brisk little man, very simple and affable. He indicated the stud
+      farms at which Nicholas might procure horses, recommended to him a horse
+      dealer in the town and a landowner fourteen miles out of town who had the
+      best horses, and promised to assist him in every way.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are Count Ilyá Rostóv’s son? My wife was a great friend of your
+      mother’s. We are at home on Thursdays—today is Thursday, so please
+      come and see us quite informally,” said the governor, taking leave of him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Immediately on leaving the governor’s, Nicholas hired post horses and,
+      taking his squadron quartermaster with him, drove at a gallop to the
+      landowner, fourteen miles away, who had the stud. Everything seemed to him
+      pleasant and easy during that first part of his stay in Vorónezh and, as
+      usually happens when a man is in a pleasant state of mind, everything went
+      well and easily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The landowner to whom Nicholas went was a bachelor, an old cavalryman, a
+      horse fancier, a sportsman, the possessor of some century-old brandy and
+      some old Hungarian wine, who had a snuggery where he smoked, and who owned
+      some splendid horses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In very few words Nicholas bought seventeen picked stallions for six
+      thousand rubles—to serve, as he said, as samples of his remounts.
+      After dining and taking rather too much of the Hungarian wine, Nicholas—having
+      exchanged kisses with the landowner, with whom he was already on the
+      friendliest terms—galloped back over abominable roads, in the
+      brightest frame of mind, continually urging on the driver so as to be in
+      time for the governor’s party.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he had changed, poured water over his head, and scented himself,
+      Nicholas arrived at the governor’s rather late, but with the phrase
+      “better late than never” on his lips.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was not a ball, nor had dancing been announced, but everyone knew that
+      Catherine Petróvna would play valses and the <i>écossaise</i> on the clavichord
+      and that there would be dancing, and so everyone had come as to a ball.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Provincial life in 1812 went on very much as usual, but with this
+      difference, that it was livelier in the towns in consequence of the
+      arrival of many wealthy families from Moscow, and as in everything that
+      went on in Russia at that time a special recklessness was noticeable, an
+      “in for a penny, in for a pound—who cares?” spirit, and the
+      inevitable small talk, instead of turning on the weather and mutual
+      acquaintances, now turned on Moscow, the army, and Napoleon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The society gathered together at the governor’s was the best in Vorónezh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There were a great many ladies and some of Nicholas’ Moscow acquaintances,
+      but there were no men who could at all vie with the cavalier of St.
+      George, the hussar remount officer, the good-natured and well-bred Count
+      Rostóv. Among the men was an Italian prisoner, an officer of the French
+      army; and Nicholas felt that the presence of that prisoner enhanced his
+      own importance as a Russian hero. The Italian was, as it were, a war
+      trophy. Nicholas felt this, it seemed to him that everyone regarded the
+      Italian in the same light, and he treated him cordially though with
+      dignity and restraint.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as Nicholas entered in his hussar uniform, diffusing around him a
+      fragrance of perfume and wine, and had uttered the words “better late than
+      never” and heard them repeated several times by others, people clustered
+      around him; all eyes turned on him, and he felt at once that he had
+      entered into his proper position in the province—that of a universal
+      favorite: a very pleasant position, and intoxicatingly so after his long
+      privations. At posting stations, at inns, and in the landowner’s snuggery,
+      maidservants had been flattered by his notice, and here too at the
+      governor’s party there were (as it seemed to Nicholas) an inexhaustible
+      number of pretty young women, married and unmarried, impatiently awaiting
+      his notice. The women and girls flirted with him and, from the first day,
+      the people concerned themselves to get this fine young daredevil of an
+      hussar married and settled down. Among these was the governor’s wife
+      herself, who welcomed Rostóv as a near relative and called him “Nicholas.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Catherine Petróvna did actually play valses and the <i>écossaise</i>, and dancing
+      began in which Nicholas still further captivated the provincial society by
+      his agility. His particularly free manner of dancing even surprised them
+      all. Nicholas was himself rather surprised at the way he danced that
+      evening. He had never danced like that in Moscow and would even have
+      considered such a very free and easy manner improper and in bad form, but
+      here he felt it incumbent on him to astonish them all by something
+      unusual, something they would have to accept as the regular thing in the
+      capital though new to them in the provinces.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the evening Nicholas paid attention to a blue-eyed, plump and pleasing
+      little blonde, the wife of one of the provincial officials. With the naïve
+      conviction of young men in a merry mood that other men’s wives were
+      created for them, Rostóv did not leave the lady’s side and treated her
+      husband in a friendly and conspiratorial style, as if, without speaking of
+      it, they knew how capitally Nicholas and the lady would get on together.
+      The husband, however, did not seem to share that conviction and tried to
+      behave morosely with Rostóv. But the latter’s good-natured naïveté was so
+      boundless that sometimes even he involuntarily yielded to Nicholas’ good
+      humor. Toward the end of the evening, however, as the wife’s face grew
+      more flushed and animated, the husband’s became more and more melancholy
+      and solemn, as though there were but a given amount of animation between
+      them and as the wife’s share increased the husband’s diminished.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0268"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Nicholas sat leaning slightly forward in an armchair, bending closely over
+      the blonde lady and paying her mythological compliments with a smile that
+      never left his face. Jauntily shifting the position of his legs in their
+      tight riding breeches, diffusing an odor of perfume, and admiring his
+      partner, himself, and the fine outlines of his legs in their well-fitting
+      Hessian boots, Nicholas told the blonde lady that he wished to run away
+      with a certain lady here in Vorónezh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Which lady?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “A charming lady, a divine one. Her eyes” (Nicholas looked at his partner)
+      “are blue, her mouth coral and ivory; her figure” (he glanced at her
+      shoulders) “like Diana’s....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The husband came up and sullenly asked his wife what she was talking
+      about.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, Nikíta Iványch!” cried Nicholas, rising politely, and as if wishing
+      Nikíta Iványch to share his joke, he began to tell him of his intention to
+      elope with a blonde lady.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The husband smiled gloomily, the wife gaily. The governor’s good-natured
+      wife came up with a look of disapproval.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Anna Ignátyevna wants to see you, Nicholas,” said she, pronouncing the
+      name so that Nicholas at once understood that Anna Ignátyevna was a very
+      important person. “Come, Nicholas! You know you let me call you so?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, yes, Aunt. Who is she?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Anna Ignátyevna Malvíntseva. She has heard from her niece how you rescued
+      her.... Can you guess?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I rescued such a lot of them!” said Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Her niece, Princess Bolkónskaya. She is here in Vorónezh with her aunt.
+      Oho! How you blush. Why, are...?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Not a bit! Please don’t, Aunt!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Very well, very well!... Oh, what a fellow you are!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The governor’s wife led him up to a tall and very stout old lady with a
+      blue headdress, who had just finished her game of cards with the most
+      important personages of the town. This was Malvíntseva, Princess Mary’s
+      aunt on her mother’s side, a rich, childless widow who always lived in
+      Vorónezh. When Rostóv approached her she was standing settling up for the
+      game. She looked at him and, screwing up her eyes sternly, continued to
+      upbraid the general who had won from her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Very pleased, <i>mon cher</i>,” she then said, holding out her
+      hand to Nicholas. “Pray come and see me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      After a few words about Princess Mary and her late father, whom
+      Malvíntseva had evidently not liked, and having asked what Nicholas knew
+      of Prince Andrew, who also was evidently no favorite of hers, the
+      important old lady dismissed Nicholas after repeating her invitation to
+      come to see her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas promised to come and blushed again as he bowed. At the mention of
+      Princess Mary he experienced a feeling of shyness and even of fear, which
+      he himself did not understand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he had parted from Malvíntseva Nicholas wished to return to the
+      dancing, but the governor’s little wife placed her plump hand on his
+      sleeve and, saying that she wanted to have a talk with him, led him to her
+      sitting room, from which those who were there immediately withdrew so as
+      not to be in her way.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know, dear boy,” began the governor’s wife with a serious
+      expression on her kind little face, “that really would be the match for
+      you: would you like me to arrange it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Whom do you mean, Aunt?” asked Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I will make a match for you with the princess. Catherine Petróvna speaks
+      of Lily, but I say, no—the princess! Do you want me to do it? I am
+      sure your mother will be grateful to me. What a charming girl she is,
+      really! And she is not at all so plain, either.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Not at all,” replied Nicholas as if offended at the idea. “As befits a
+      soldier, Aunt, I don’t force myself on anyone or refuse anything,” he said
+      before he had time to consider what he was saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well then, remember, this is not a joke!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Of course not!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes,” the governor’s wife said as if talking to herself. “But, my
+      dear boy, among other things you are too attentive to the other, the
+      blonde. One is sorry for the husband, really....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh no, we are good friends with him,” said Nicholas in the simplicity of
+      his heart; it did not enter his head that a pastime so pleasant to himself
+      might not be pleasant to someone else.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But what nonsense I have been saying to the governor’s wife!” thought
+      Nicholas suddenly at supper. “She will really begin to arrange a match...
+      and Sónya...?” And on taking leave of the governor’s wife, when she again
+      smilingly said to him, “Well then, remember!” he drew her aside.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But see here, to tell the truth, Aunt...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it, my dear? Come, let’s sit down here,” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas suddenly felt a desire and need to tell his most intimate
+      thoughts (which he would not have told to his mother, his sister, or his
+      friend) to this woman who was almost a stranger. When he afterwards
+      recalled that impulse to unsolicited and inexplicable frankness which had
+      very important results for him, it seemed to him—as it seems to
+      everyone in such cases—that it was merely some silly whim that
+      seized him: yet that burst of frankness, together with other trifling
+      events, had immense consequences for him and for all his family.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You see, Aunt, Mamma has long wanted me to marry an heiress, but the very
+      idea of marrying for money is repugnant to me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes, I understand,” said the governor’s wife.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But Princess Bolkónskaya—that’s another matter. I will tell you the
+      truth. In the first place I like her very much, I feel drawn to her; and
+      then, after I met her under such circumstances—so strangely, the
+      idea often occurred to me: ‘This is fate.’ Especially if you remember that
+      Mamma had long been thinking of it; but I had never happened to meet her
+      before, somehow it had always happened that we did not meet. And as long
+      as my sister Natásha was engaged to her brother it was of course out of
+      the question for me to think of marrying her. And it must needs happen
+      that I should meet her just when Natásha’s engagement had been broken
+      off... and then everything... So you see... I never told this to anyone
+      and never will, only to you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The governor’s wife pressed his elbow gratefully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You know Sónya, my cousin? I love her, and promised to marry her, and
+      will do so.... So you see there can be no question about—” said
+      Nicholas incoherently and blushing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dear boy, what a way to look at it! You know Sónya has nothing and you
+      yourself say your Papa’s affairs are in a very bad way. And what about
+      your mother? It would kill her, that’s one thing. And what sort of life
+      would it be for Sónya—if she’s a girl with a heart? Your mother in
+      despair, and you all ruined.... No, my dear, you and Sónya ought to
+      understand that.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas remained silent. It comforted him to hear these arguments.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All the same, Aunt, it is impossible,” he rejoined with a sigh, after a
+      short pause. “Besides, would the princess have me? And besides, she is now
+      in mourning. How can one think of it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But you don’t suppose I’m going to get you married at once? There is
+      always a right way of doing things,” replied the governor’s wife.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a matchmaker you are, Aunt...” said Nicholas, kissing her plump
+      little hand.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0269"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On reaching Moscow after her meeting with Rostóv, Princess Mary had found
+      her nephew there with his tutor, and a letter from Prince Andrew giving
+      her instructions how to get to her Aunt Malvíntseva at Vorónezh. That
+      feeling akin to temptation which had tormented her during her father’s
+      illness, since his death, and especially since her meeting with Rostóv was
+      smothered by arrangements for the journey, anxiety about her brother,
+      settling in a new house, meeting new people, and attending to her nephew’s
+      education. She was sad. Now, after a month passed in quiet surroundings,
+      she felt more and more deeply the loss of her father which was associated
+      in her mind with the ruin of Russia. She was agitated and incessantly
+      tortured by the thought of the dangers to which her brother, the only
+      intimate person now remaining to her, was exposed. She was worried too
+      about her nephew’s education for which she had always felt herself
+      incompetent, but in the depths of her soul she felt at peace—a peace
+      arising from consciousness of having stifled those personal dreams and
+      hopes that had been on the point of awakening within her and were related
+      to her meeting with Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The day after her party the governor’s wife came to see Malvíntseva and,
+      after discussing her plan with the aunt, remarked that though under
+      present circumstances a formal betrothal was, of course, not to be thought
+      of, all the same the young people might be brought together and could get
+      to know one another. Malvíntseva expressed approval, and the governor’s
+      wife began to speak of Rostóv in Mary’s presence, praising him and telling
+      how he had blushed when Princess Mary’s name was mentioned. But Princess
+      Mary experienced a painful rather than a joyful feeling—her mental
+      tranquillity was destroyed, and desires, doubts, self-reproach, and hopes
+      reawoke.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the two days that elapsed before Rostóv called, Princess Mary
+      continually thought of how she ought to behave to him. First she decided
+      not to come to the drawing room when he called to see her aunt—that
+      it would not be proper for her, in her deep mourning, to receive visitors;
+      then she thought this would be rude after what he had done for her; then
+      it occurred to her that her aunt and the governor’s wife had intentions
+      concerning herself and Rostóv—their looks and words at times seemed
+      to confirm this supposition—then she told herself that only she,
+      with her sinful nature, could think this of them: they could not forget
+      that situated as she was, while still wearing deep mourning, such
+      matchmaking would be an insult to her and to her father’s memory. Assuming
+      that she did go down to see him, Princess Mary imagined the words he would
+      say to her and what she would say to him, and these words sometimes seemed
+      undeservedly cold and then to mean too much. More than anything she feared
+      lest the confusion she felt might overwhelm her and betray her as soon as
+      she saw him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But when on Sunday after church the footman announced in the drawing room
+      that Count Rostóv had called, the princess showed no confusion, only a
+      slight blush suffused her cheeks and her eyes lit up with a new and
+      radiant light.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You have met him, Aunt?” said she in a calm voice, unable herself to
+      understand that she could be outwardly so calm and natural.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Rostóv entered the room, the princess dropped her eyes for an
+      instant, as if to give the visitor time to greet her aunt, and then just
+      as Nicholas turned to her she raised her head and met his look with
+      shining eyes. With a movement full of dignity and grace she half rose with
+      a smile of pleasure, held out her slender, delicate hand to him, and began
+      to speak in a voice in which for the first time new deep womanly notes
+      vibrated. Mademoiselle Bourienne, who was in the drawing room, looked at
+      Princess Mary in bewildered surprise. Herself a consummate coquette, she
+      could not have maneuvered better on meeting a man she wished to attract.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Either black is particularly becoming to her or she really has greatly
+      improved without my having noticed it. And above all, what tact and
+      grace!” thought Mademoiselle Bourienne.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Had Princess Mary been capable of reflection at that moment, she would
+      have been more surprised than Mademoiselle Bourienne at the change that
+      had taken place in herself. From the moment she recognized that dear,
+      loved face, a new life force took possession of her and compelled her to
+      speak and act apart from her own will. From the time Rostóv entered, her
+      face became suddenly transformed. It was as if a light had been kindled in
+      a carved and painted lantern and the intricate, skillful, artistic work on
+      its sides, that previously seemed dark, coarse, and meaningless, was
+      suddenly shown up in unexpected and striking beauty. For the first time
+      all that pure, spiritual, inward travail through which she had lived
+      appeared on the surface. All her inward labor, her dissatisfaction with
+      herself, her sufferings, her strivings after goodness, her meekness, love,
+      and self-sacrifice—all this now shone in those radiant eyes, in her
+      delicate smile, and in every trait of her gentle face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Rostóv saw all this as clearly as if he had known her whole life. He felt
+      that the being before him was quite different from, and better than,
+      anyone he had met before, and above all better than himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Their conversation was very simple and unimportant. They spoke of the war,
+      and like everyone else unconsciously exaggerated their sorrow about it;
+      they spoke of their last meeting—Nicholas trying to change the
+      subject—they talked of the governor’s kind wife, of Nicholas’
+      relations, and of Princess Mary’s.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She did not talk about her brother, diverting the conversation as soon as
+      her aunt mentioned Andrew. Evidently she could speak of Russia’s
+      misfortunes with a certain artificiality, but her brother was too near her
+      heart and she neither could nor would speak lightly of him. Nicholas
+      noticed this, as he noticed every shade of Princess Mary’s character with
+      an observation unusual to him, and everything confirmed his conviction
+      that she was a quite unusual and extraordinary being. Nicholas blushed and
+      was confused when people spoke to him about the princess (as she did when
+      he was mentioned) and even when he thought of her, but in her presence he
+      felt quite at ease, and said not at all what he had prepared, but what,
+      quite appropriately, occurred to him at the moment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When a pause occurred during his short visit, Nicholas, as is usual when
+      there are children, turned to Prince Andrew’s little son, caressing him
+      and asking whether he would like to be an hussar. He took the boy on his
+      knee, played with him, and looked round at Princess Mary. With a softened,
+      happy, timid look she watched the boy she loved in the arms of the man she
+      loved. Nicholas also noticed that look and, as if understanding it,
+      flushed with pleasure and began to kiss the boy with good natured
+      playfulness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As she was in mourning Princess Mary did not go out into society, and
+      Nicholas did not think it the proper thing to visit her again; but all the
+      same the governor’s wife went on with her matchmaking, passing on to
+      Nicholas the flattering things Princess Mary said of him and vice versa,
+      and insisting on his declaring himself to Princess Mary. For this purpose
+      she arranged a meeting between the young people at the bishop’s house
+      before Mass.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though Rostóv told the governor’s wife that he would not make any
+      declaration to Princess Mary, he promised to go.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As at Tilsit Rostóv had not allowed himself to doubt that what everybody
+      considered right was right, so now, after a short but sincere struggle
+      between his effort to arrange his life by his own sense of justice, and in
+      obedient submission to circumstances, he chose the latter and yielded to
+      the power he felt irresistibly carrying him he knew not where. He knew
+      that after his promise to Sónya it would be what he deemed base to declare
+      his feelings to Princess Mary. And he knew that he would never act basely.
+      But he also knew (or rather felt at the bottom of his heart) that by
+      resigning himself now to the force of circumstances and to those who were
+      guiding him, he was not only doing nothing wrong, but was doing something
+      very important—more important than anything he had ever done in his
+      life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After meeting Princess Mary, though the course of his life went on
+      externally as before, all his former amusements lost their charm for him
+      and he often thought about her. But he never thought about her as he had
+      thought of all the young ladies without exception whom he had met in
+      society, nor as he had for a long time, and at one time rapturously,
+      thought about Sónya. He had pictured each of those young ladies as almost
+      all honest-hearted young men do, that is, as a possible wife, adapting her
+      in his imagination to all the conditions of married life: a white dressing
+      gown, his wife at the tea table, his wife’s carriage, little ones, Mamma
+      and Papa, their relations to her, and so on—and these pictures of
+      the future had given him pleasure. But with Princess Mary, to whom they
+      were trying to get him engaged, he could never picture anything of future
+      married life. If he tried, his pictures seemed incongruous and false. It
+      made him afraid.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0270"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The dreadful news of the battle of Borodinó, of our losses in killed and
+      wounded, and the still more terrible news of the loss of Moscow reached
+      Vorónezh in the middle of September. Princess Mary, having learned of her
+      brother’s wound only from the <i>Gazette</i> and having no definite news of
+      him, prepared (so Nicholas heard, he had not seen her again himself) to set off
+      in search of Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When he received the news of the battle of Borodinó and the abandonment of
+      Moscow, Rostóv was not seized with despair, anger, the desire for
+      vengeance, or any feeling of that kind, but everything in Vorónezh
+      suddenly seemed to him dull and tiresome, and he experienced an indefinite
+      feeling of shame and awkwardness. The conversations he heard seemed to him
+      insincere; he did not know how to judge all these affairs and felt that
+      only in the regiment would everything again become clear to him. He made
+      haste to finish buying the horses, and often became unreasonably angry
+      with his servant and squadron quartermaster.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A few days before his departure a special thanksgiving, at which Nicholas
+      was present, was held in the cathedral for the Russian victory. He stood a
+      little behind the governor and held himself with military decorum through
+      the service, meditating on a great variety of subjects. When the service
+      was over the governor’s wife beckoned him to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Have you seen the princess?” she asked, indicating with a movement of her
+      head a lady standing on the opposite side, beyond the choir.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas immediately recognized Princess Mary not so much by the profile
+      he saw under her bonnet as by the feeling of solicitude, timidity, and
+      pity that immediately overcame him. Princess Mary, evidently engrossed by
+      her thoughts, was crossing herself for the last time before leaving the
+      church.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas looked at her face with surprise. It was the same face he had
+      seen before, there was the same general expression of refined, inner,
+      spiritual labor, but now it was quite differently lit up. There was a
+      pathetic expression of sorrow, prayer, and hope in it. As had occurred
+      before when she was present, Nicholas went up to her without waiting to be
+      prompted by the governor’s wife and not asking himself whether or not it
+      was right and proper to address her here in church, and told her he had
+      heard of her trouble and sympathized with his whole soul. As soon as she
+      heard his voice a vivid glow kindled in her face, lighting up both her
+      sorrow and her joy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There is one thing I wanted to tell you, Princess,” said Rostóv. “It is
+      that if your brother, Prince Andrew Nikoláevich, were not living, it would
+      have been at once announced in the <i>Gazette</i>, as he is a colonel.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess looked at him, not grasping what he was saying, but cheered
+      by the expression of regretful sympathy on his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And I have known so many cases of a splinter wound” (the <i>Gazette</i> said it
+      was a shell) “either proving fatal at once or being very slight,”
+       continued Nicholas. “We must hope for the best, and I am sure...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, that would be so dread...” she began and, prevented by agitation from
+      finishing, she bent her head with a movement as graceful as everything she
+      did in his presence and, looking up at him gratefully, went out, following
+      her aunt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That evening Nicholas did not go out, but stayed at home to settle some
+      accounts with the horse dealers. When he had finished that business it was
+      already too late to go anywhere but still too early to go to bed, and for
+      a long time he paced up and down the room, reflecting on his life, a thing
+      he rarely did.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary had made an agreeable impression on him when he had met her
+      in Smolénsk province. His having encountered her in such exceptional
+      circumstances, and his mother having at one time mentioned her to him as a
+      good match, had drawn his particular attention to her. When he met her
+      again in Vorónezh the impression she made on him was not merely pleasing
+      but powerful. Nicholas had been struck by the peculiar moral beauty he
+      observed in her at this time. He was, however, preparing to go away and it
+      had not entered his head to regret that he was thus depriving himself of
+      chances of meeting her. But that day’s encounter in church had, he felt,
+      sunk deeper than was desirable for his peace of mind. That pale, sad,
+      refined face, that radiant look, those gentle graceful gestures, and
+      especially the deep and tender sorrow expressed in all her features
+      agitated him and evoked his sympathy. In men Rostóv could not bear to see
+      the expression of a higher spiritual life (that was why he did not like
+      Prince Andrew) and he referred to it contemptuously as philosophy and
+      dreaminess, but in Princess Mary that very sorrow which revealed the depth
+      of a whole spiritual world foreign to him was an irresistible attraction.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She must be a wonderful woman. A real angel!” he said to himself. “Why am
+      I not free? Why was I in such a hurry with Sónya?” And he involuntarily
+      compared the two: the lack of spirituality in the one and the abundance of
+      it in the other—a spirituality he himself lacked and therefore
+      valued most highly. He tried to picture what would happen were he free.
+      How he would propose to her and how she would become his wife. But no, he
+      could not imagine that. He felt awed, and no clear picture presented
+      itself to his mind. He had long ago pictured to himself a future with
+      Sónya, and that was all clear and simple just because it had all been
+      thought out and he knew all there was in Sónya, but it was impossible to
+      picture a future with Princess Mary, because he did not understand her but
+      simply loved her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Reveries about Sónya had had something merry and playful in them, but to
+      dream of Princess Mary was always difficult and a little frightening.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How she prayed!” he thought. “It was plain that her whole soul was in her
+      prayer. Yes, that was the prayer that moves mountains, and I am sure her
+      prayer will be answered. Why don’t I pray for what I want?” he suddenly
+      thought. “What do I want? To be free, released from Sónya... She was
+      right,” he thought, remembering what the governor’s wife had said:
+      “Nothing but misfortune can come of marrying Sónya. Muddles, grief for
+      Mamma... business difficulties... muddles, terrible muddles! Besides, I
+      don’t love her—not as I should. O, God! release me from this
+      dreadful, inextricable position!” he suddenly began to pray. “Yes, prayer
+      can move mountains, but one must have faith and not pray as Natásha and I
+      used to as children, that the snow might turn into sugar—and then
+      run out into the yard to see whether it had done so. No, but I am not
+      praying for trifles now,” he thought as he put his pipe down in a corner,
+      and folding his hands placed himself before the icon. Softened by memories
+      of Princess Mary he began to pray as he had not done for a long time.
+      Tears were in his eyes and in his throat when the door opened and
+      Lavrúshka came in with some papers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Blockhead! Why do you come in without being called?” cried Nicholas,
+      quickly changing his attitude.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “From the governor,” said Lavrúshka in a sleepy voice. “A courier has
+      arrived and there’s a letter for you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, all right, thanks. You can go!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas took the two letters, one of which was from his mother and the
+      other from Sónya. He recognized them by the handwriting and opened Sónya’s
+      first. He had read only a few lines when he turned pale and his eyes
+      opened wide with fear and joy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, it’s not possible!” he cried aloud.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Unable to sit still he paced up and down the room holding the letter and
+      reading it. He glanced through it, then read it again, and then again, and
+      standing still in the middle of the room he raised his shoulders,
+      stretching out his hands, with his mouth wide open and his eyes fixed.
+      What he had just been praying for with confidence that God would hear him
+      had come to pass; but Nicholas was as much astonished as if it were
+      something extraordinary and unexpected, and as if the very fact that it
+      had happened so quickly proved that it had not come from God to whom he
+      had prayed, but by some ordinary coincidence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This unexpected and, as it seemed to Nicholas, quite voluntary letter from
+      Sónya freed him from the knot that fettered him and from which there had
+      seemed no escape. She wrote that the last unfortunate events—the
+      loss of almost the whole of the Rostóvs’ Moscow property—and the
+      countess’ repeatedly expressed wish that Nicholas should marry Princess
+      Bolkónskaya, together with his silence and coldness of late, had all
+      combined to make her decide to release him from his promise and set him
+      completely free.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It would be too painful to me to think that I might be a cause of sorrow
+      or discord in the family that has been so good to me (she wrote), and my
+      love has no aim but the happiness of those I love; so, Nicholas, I beg you
+      to consider yourself free, and to be assured that, in spite of everything,
+      no one can love you more than does
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Your Sónya
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Both letters were written from Tróitsa. The other, from the countess,
+      described their last days in Moscow, their departure, the fire, and the
+      destruction of all their property. In this letter the countess also
+      mentioned that Prince Andrew was among the wounded traveling with them;
+      his state was very critical, but the doctor said there was now more hope.
+      Sónya and Natásha were nursing him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day Nicholas took his mother’s letter and went to see Princess Mary.
+      Neither he nor she said a word about what “Natásha nursing him” might
+      mean, but thanks to this letter Nicholas suddenly became almost as
+      intimate with the princess as if they were relations.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The following day he saw Princess Mary off on her journey to Yaroslávl,
+      and a few days later left to rejoin his regiment.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0271"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Sónya’s letter written from Tróitsa, which had come as an answer to
+      Nicholas’ prayer, was prompted by this: the thought of getting Nicholas
+      married to an heiress occupied the old countess’ mind more and more. She
+      knew that Sónya was the chief obstacle to this happening, and Sónya’s life
+      in the countess’ house had grown harder and harder, especially after they
+      had received a letter from Nicholas telling of his meeting with Princess
+      Mary in Boguchárovo. The countess let no occasion slip of making
+      humiliating or cruel allusions to Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But a few days before they left Moscow, moved and excited by all that was
+      going on, she called Sónya to her and, instead of reproaching and making
+      demands on her, tearfully implored her to sacrifice herself and repay all
+      that the family had done for her by breaking off her engagement with
+      Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I shall not be at peace till you promise me this.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya burst into hysterical tears and replied through her sobs that she
+      would do anything and was prepared for anything, but gave no actual
+      promise and could not bring herself to decide to do what was demanded of
+      her. She must sacrifice herself for the family that had reared and brought
+      her up. To sacrifice herself for others was Sónya’s habit. Her position in
+      the house was such that only by sacrifice could she show her worth, and
+      she was accustomed to this and loved doing it. But in all her former acts
+      of self-sacrifice she had been happily conscious that they raised her in
+      her own esteem and in that of others, and so made her more worthy of
+      Nicholas whom she loved more than anything in the world. But now they
+      wanted her to sacrifice the very thing that constituted the whole reward
+      for her self-sacrifice and the whole meaning of her life. And for the
+      first time she felt bitterness against those who had been her benefactors
+      only to torture her the more painfully; she felt jealous of Natásha who
+      had never experienced anything of this sort, had never needed to sacrifice
+      herself, but made others sacrifice themselves for her and yet was beloved
+      by everybody. And for the first time Sónya felt that out of her pure,
+      quiet love for Nicholas a passionate feeling was beginning to grow up
+      which was stronger than principle, virtue, or religion. Under the
+      influence of this feeling Sónya, whose life of dependence had taught her
+      involuntarily to be secretive, having answered the countess in vague
+      general terms, avoided talking with her and resolved to wait till she
+      should see Nicholas, not in order to set him free but on the contrary at
+      that meeting to bind him to her forever.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The bustle and terror of the Rostóvs’ last days in Moscow stifled the
+      gloomy thoughts that oppressed Sónya. She was glad to find escape from
+      them in practical activity. But when she heard of Prince Andrew’s presence
+      in their house, despite her sincere pity for him and for Natásha, she was
+      seized by a joyful and superstitious feeling that God did not intend her
+      to be separated from Nicholas. She knew that Natásha loved no one but
+      Prince Andrew and had never ceased to love him. She knew that being thrown
+      together again under such terrible circumstances they would again fall in
+      love with one another, and that Nicholas would then not be able to marry
+      Princess Mary as they would be within the prohibited degrees of affinity.
+      Despite all the terror of what had happened during those last days and
+      during the first days of their journey, this feeling that Providence was
+      intervening in her personal affairs cheered Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the Tróitsa monastery the Rostóvs first broke their journey for a whole
+      day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Three large rooms were assigned to them in the monastery hostelry, one of
+      which was occupied by Prince Andrew. The wounded man was much better that
+      day and Natásha was sitting with him. In the next room sat the count and
+      countess respectfully conversing with the prior, who was calling on them
+      as old acquaintances and benefactors of the monastery. Sónya was there
+      too, tormented by curiosity as to what Prince Andrew and Natásha were
+      talking about. She heard the sound of their voices through the door. That
+      door opened and Natásha came out, looking excited. Not noticing the monk,
+      who had risen to greet her and was drawing back the wide sleeve on his
+      right arm, she went up to Sónya and took her hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha, what are you about? Come here!” said the countess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha went up to the monk for his blessing, and he advised her to pray
+      for aid to God and His saint.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as the prior withdrew, Natásha took her friend by the hand and
+      went with her into the unoccupied room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya, will he live?” she asked. “Sónya, how happy I am, and how
+      unhappy!... Sónya, dovey, everything is as it used to be. If only he
+      lives! He cannot... because... because... of...” and Natásha burst into
+      tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes! I knew it! Thank God!” murmured Sónya. “He will live.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya was not less agitated than her friend by the latter’s fear and grief
+      and by her own personal feelings which she shared with no one. Sobbing,
+      she kissed and comforted Natásha. “If only he lives!” she thought. Having
+      wept, talked, and wiped away their tears, the two friends went together to
+      Prince Andrew’s door. Natásha opened it cautiously and glanced into the
+      room, Sónya standing beside her at the half-open door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew was lying raised high on three pillows. His pale face was
+      calm, his eyes closed, and they could see his regular breathing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “O, Natásha!” Sónya suddenly almost screamed, catching her companion’s arm
+      and stepping back from the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What? What is it?” asked Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s that, that...” said Sónya, with a white face and trembling lips.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha softly closed the door and went with Sónya to the window, not yet
+      understanding what the latter was telling her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You remember,” said Sónya with a solemn and frightened expression. “You
+      remember when I looked in the mirror for you... at Otrádnoe at Christmas?
+      Do you remember what I saw?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes!” cried Natásha opening her eyes wide, and vaguely recalling
+      that Sónya had told her something about Prince Andrew whom she had seen
+      lying down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You remember?” Sónya went on. “I saw it then and told everybody, you and
+      Dunyásha. I saw him lying on a bed,” said she, making a gesture with her
+      hand and a lifted finger at each detail, “and that he had his eyes closed
+      and was covered just with a pink quilt, and that his hands were folded,”
+       she concluded, convincing herself that the details she had just seen were
+      exactly what she had seen in the mirror.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She had in fact seen nothing then but had mentioned the first thing that
+      came into her head, but what she had invented then seemed to her now as
+      real as any other recollection. She not only remembered what she had then
+      said—that he turned to look at her and smiled and was covered with
+      something red—but was firmly convinced that she had then seen and
+      said that he was covered with a pink quilt and that his eyes were closed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, it really was pink!” cried Natásha, who now thought she too
+      remembered the word pink being used, and saw in this the most
+      extraordinary and mysterious part of the prediction.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But what does it mean?” she added meditatively.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, I don’t know, it is all so strange,” replied Sónya, clutching at her
+      head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A few minutes later Prince Andrew rang and Natásha went to him, but Sónya,
+      feeling unusually excited and touched, remained at the window thinking
+      about the strangeness of what had occurred.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      They had an opportunity that day to send letters to the army, and the
+      countess was writing to her son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sónya!” said the countess, raising her eyes from her letter as her niece
+      passed, “Sónya, won’t you write to Nicholas?” She spoke in a soft,
+      tremulous voice, and in the weary eyes that looked over her spectacles
+      Sónya read all that the countess meant to convey with these words. Those
+      eyes expressed entreaty, shame at having to ask, fear of a refusal, and
+      readiness for relentless hatred in case of such refusal.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya went up to the countess and, kneeling down, kissed her hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, Mamma, I will write,” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya was softened, excited, and touched by all that had occurred that
+      day, especially by the mysterious fulfillment she had just seen of her
+      vision. Now that she knew that the renewal of Natásha’s relations with
+      Prince Andrew would prevent Nicholas from marrying Princess Mary, she was
+      joyfully conscious of a return of that self-sacrificing spirit in which
+      she was accustomed to live and loved to live. So with a joyful
+      consciousness of performing a magnanimous deed—interrupted several
+      times by the tears that dimmed her velvety black eyes—she wrote that
+      touching letter the arrival of which had so amazed Nicholas.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0272"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The officer and soldiers who had arrested Pierre treated him with
+      hostility but yet with respect, in the guardhouse to which he was taken.
+      In their attitude toward him could still be felt both uncertainty as to
+      who he might be—perhaps a very important person—and hostility
+      as a result of their recent personal conflict with him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But when the guard was relieved next morning, Pierre felt that for the new
+      guard—both officers and men—he was not as interesting as he
+      had been to his captors; and in fact the guard of the second day did not
+      recognize in this big, stout man in a peasant coat the vigorous person who
+      had fought so desperately with the marauder and the convoy and had uttered
+      those solemn words about saving a child; they saw in him only No. 17 of
+      the captured Russians, arrested and detained for some reason by order of
+      the Higher Command. If they noticed anything remarkable about Pierre, it
+      was only his unabashed, meditative concentration and thoughtfulness, and
+      the way he spoke French, which struck them as surprisingly good. In spite
+      of this he was placed that day with the other arrested suspects, as the
+      separate room he had occupied was required by an officer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the Russians confined with Pierre were men of the lowest class and,
+      recognizing him as a gentleman, they all avoided him, more especially as
+      he spoke French. Pierre felt sad at hearing them making fun of him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That evening he learned that all these prisoners (he, probably, among
+      them) were to be tried for incendiarism. On the third day he was taken
+      with the others to a house where a French general with a white mustache
+      sat with two colonels and other Frenchmen with scarves on their arms. With
+      the precision and definiteness customary in addressing prisoners, and
+      which is supposed to preclude human frailty, Pierre like the others was
+      questioned as to who he was, where he had been, with what object, and so
+      on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      These questions, like questions put at trials generally, left the essence
+      of the matter aside, shut out the possibility of that essence’s being
+      revealed, and were designed only to form a channel through which the
+      judges wished the answers of the accused to flow so as to lead to the
+      desired result, namely a conviction. As soon as Pierre began to say
+      anything that did not fit in with that aim, the channel was removed and
+      the water could flow to waste. Pierre felt, moreover, what the accused
+      always feel at their trial, perplexity as to why these questions were put
+      to him. He had a feeling that it was only out of condescension or a kind
+      of civility that this device of placing a channel was employed. He knew he
+      was in these men’s power, that only by force had they brought him there,
+      that force alone gave them the right to demand answers to their questions,
+      and that the sole object of that assembly was to inculpate him. And so, as
+      they had the power and wish to inculpate him, this expedient of an inquiry
+      and trial seemed unnecessary. It was evident that any answer would lead to
+      conviction. When asked what he was doing when he was arrested, Pierre
+      replied in a rather tragic manner that he was restoring to its parents a
+      child he had saved from the flames. Why had he fought the marauder? Pierre
+      answered that he “was protecting a woman,” and that “to protect a woman
+      who was being insulted was the duty of every man; that...” They
+      interrupted him, for this was not to the point. Why was he in the yard of
+      a burning house where witnesses had seen him? He replied that he had gone
+      out to see what was happening in Moscow. Again they interrupted him: they
+      had not asked where he was going, but why he was found near the fire? Who
+      was he? they asked, repeating their first question, which he had declined
+      to answer. Again he replied that he could not answer it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Put that down, that’s bad... very bad,” sternly remarked the general with
+      the white mustache and red flushed face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      On the fourth day fires broke out on the Zúbovski rampart.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre and thirteen others were moved to the coach house of a merchant’s
+      house near the Crimean bridge. On his way through the streets Pierre felt
+      stifled by the smoke which seemed to hang over the whole city. Fires were
+      visible on all sides. He did not then realize the significance of the
+      burning of Moscow, and looked at the fires with horror.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He passed four days in the coach house near the Crimean bridge and during
+      that time learned, from the talk of the French soldiers, that all those
+      confined there were awaiting a decision which might come any day from the
+      marshal. What marshal this was, Pierre could not learn from the soldiers.
+      Evidently for them “the marshal” represented a very high and rather
+      mysterious power.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      These first days, before the eighth of September when the prisoners were
+      had up for a second examination, were the hardest of all for Pierre.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0273"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      On the eighth of September an officer—a very important one judging
+      by the respect the guards showed him—entered the coach house where
+      the prisoners were. This officer, probably someone on the staff, was
+      holding a paper in his hand, and called over all the Russians there,
+      naming Pierre as “the man who does not give his name.” Glancing indolently
+      and indifferently at all the prisoners, he ordered the officer in charge
+      to have them decently dressed and tidied up before taking them to the
+      marshal. An hour later a squad of soldiers arrived and Pierre with
+      thirteen others was led to the Virgin’s Field. It was a fine day, sunny
+      after rain, and the air was unusually pure. The smoke did not hang low as
+      on the day when Pierre had been taken from the guardhouse on the Zúbovski
+      rampart, but rose through the pure air in columns. No flames were seen,
+      but columns of smoke rose on all sides, and all Moscow as far as Pierre
+      could see was one vast charred ruin. On all sides there were waste spaces
+      with only stoves and chimney stacks still standing, and here and there the
+      blackened walls of some brick houses. Pierre gazed at the ruins and did
+      not recognize districts he had known well. Here and there he could see
+      churches that had not been burned. The Krémlin, which was not destroyed,
+      gleamed white in the distance with its towers and the belfry of Iván the
+      Great. The domes of the New Convent of the Virgin glittered brightly and
+      its bells were ringing particularly clearly. These bells reminded Pierre
+      that it was Sunday and the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin. But there
+      seemed to be no one to celebrate this holiday: everywhere were blackened
+      ruins, and the few Russians to be seen were tattered and frightened people
+      who tried to hide when they saw the French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was plain that the Russian nest was ruined and destroyed, but in place
+      of the Russian order of life that had been destroyed, Pierre unconsciously
+      felt that a quite different, firm, French order had been established over
+      this ruined nest. He felt this in the looks of the soldiers who, marching
+      in regular ranks briskly and gaily, were escorting him and the other
+      criminals; he felt it in the looks of an important French official in a
+      carriage and pair driven by a soldier, whom they met on the way. He felt
+      it in the merry sounds of regimental music he heard from the left side of
+      the field, and felt and realized it especially from the list of prisoners
+      the French officer had read out when he came that morning. Pierre had been
+      taken by one set of soldiers and led first to one and then to another
+      place with dozens of other men, and it seemed that they might have
+      forgotten him, or confused him with the others. But no: the answers he had
+      given when questioned had come back to him in his designation as “the man
+      who does not give his name,” and under that appellation, which to Pierre
+      seemed terrible, they were now leading him somewhere with unhesitating
+      assurance on their faces that he and all the other prisoners were exactly
+      the ones they wanted and that they were being taken to the proper place.
+      Pierre felt himself to be an insignificant chip fallen among the wheels of
+      a machine whose action he did not understand but which was working well.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He and the other prisoners were taken to the right side of the Virgin’s
+      Field, to a large white house with an immense garden not far from the
+      convent. This was Prince Shcherbátov’s house, where Pierre had often been
+      in other days, and which, as he learned from the talk of the soldiers, was
+      now occupied by the marshal, the Duke of Eckmühl (Davout).
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They were taken to the entrance and led into the house one by one. Pierre
+      was the sixth to enter. He was conducted through a glass gallery, an
+      anteroom, and a hall, which were familiar to him, into a long low study at
+      the door of which stood an adjutant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Davout, spectacles on nose, sat bent over a table at the further end of
+      the room. Pierre went close up to him, but Davout, evidently consulting a
+      paper that lay before him, did not look up. Without raising his eyes, he
+      said in a low voice:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who are you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was silent because he was incapable of uttering a word. To him
+      Davout was not merely a French general, but a man notorious for his
+      cruelty. Looking at his cold face, as he sat like a stern schoolmaster who
+      was prepared to wait awhile for an answer, Pierre felt that every instant
+      of delay might cost him his life; but he did not know what to say. He did
+      not venture to repeat what he had said at his first examination, yet to
+      disclose his rank and position was dangerous and embarrassing. So he was
+      silent. But before he had decided what to do, Davout raised his head,
+      pushed his spectacles back on his forehead, screwed up his eyes, and
+      looked intently at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I know that man,” he said in a cold, measured tone, evidently calculated
+      to frighten Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The chill that had been running down Pierre’s back now seized his head as
+      in a vise.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You cannot know me, General, I have never seen you...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “He is a Russian spy,” Davout interrupted, addressing another general who
+      was present, but whom Pierre had not noticed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Davout turned away. With an unexpected reverberation in his voice Pierre
+      rapidly began:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, monseigneur,” he said, suddenly remembering that Davout was a duke.
+      “No, monseigneur, you cannot have known me. I am a militia officer and
+      have not quitted Moscow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Your name?” asked Davout.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Bezúkhov.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What proof have I that you are not lying?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Monseigneur!” exclaimed Pierre, not in an offended but in a pleading
+      voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Davout looked up and gazed intently at him. For some seconds they looked
+      at one another, and that look saved Pierre. Apart from conditions of war
+      and law, that look established human relations between the two men. At
+      that moment an immense number of things passed dimly through both their
+      minds, and they realized that they were both children of humanity and were
+      brothers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the first glance, when Davout had only raised his head from the papers
+      where human affairs and lives were indicated by numbers, Pierre was merely
+      a circumstance, and Davout could have shot him without burdening his
+      conscience with an evil deed, but now he saw in him a human being. He
+      reflected for a moment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How can you show me that you are telling the truth?” said Davout coldly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre remembered Ramballe, and named him and his regiment and the street
+      where the house was.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are not what you say,” returned Davout.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In a trembling, faltering voice Pierre began adducing proofs of the truth
+      of his statements.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But at that moment an adjutant entered and reported something to Davout.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Davout brightened up at the news the adjutant brought, and began buttoning
+      up his uniform. It seemed that he had quite forgotten Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the adjutant reminded him of the prisoner, he jerked his head in
+      Pierre’s direction with a frown and ordered him to be led away. But where
+      they were to take him Pierre did not know: back to the coach house or to
+      the place of execution his companions had pointed out to him as they
+      crossed the Virgin’s Field.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He turned his head and saw that the adjutant was putting another question
+      to Davout.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, of course!” replied Davout, but what this “yes” meant, Pierre did
+      not know.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre could not afterwards remember how he went, whether it was far, or
+      in which direction. His faculties were quite numbed, he was stupefied, and
+      noticing nothing around him went on moving his legs as the others did till
+      they all stopped and he stopped too. The only thought in his mind at that
+      time was: who was it that had really sentenced him to death? Not the men
+      on the commission that had first examined him—not one of them wished
+      to or, evidently, could have done it. It was not Davout, who had looked at
+      him in so human a way. In another moment Davout would have realized that
+      he was doing wrong, but just then the adjutant had come in and interrupted
+      him. The adjutant, also, had evidently had no evil intent though he might
+      have refrained from coming in. Then who was executing him, killing him,
+      depriving him of life—him, Pierre, with all his memories,
+      aspirations, hopes, and thoughts? Who was doing this? And Pierre felt that
+      it was no one.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was a system—a concurrence of circumstances.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A system of some sort was killing him—Pierre—depriving him of
+      life, of everything, annihilating him.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0274"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      From Prince Shcherbátov’s house the prisoners were led straight down the
+      Virgin’s Field, to the left of the nunnery, as far as a kitchen garden in
+      which a post had been set up. Beyond that post a fresh pit had been dug in
+      the ground, and near the post and the pit a large crowd stood in a
+      semicircle. The crowd consisted of a few Russians and many of Napoleon’s
+      soldiers who were not on duty—Germans, Italians, and Frenchmen, in a
+      variety of uniforms. To the right and left of the post stood rows of
+      French troops in blue uniforms with red epaulets and high boots and
+      shakos.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The prisoners were placed in a certain order, according to the list
+      (Pierre was sixth), and were led to the post. Several drums suddenly began
+      to beat on both sides of them, and at that sound Pierre felt as if part of
+      his soul had been torn away. He lost the power of thinking or
+      understanding. He could only hear and see. And he had only one wish—that
+      the frightful thing that had to happen should happen quickly. Pierre
+      looked round at his fellow prisoners and scrutinized them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The two first were convicts with shaven heads. One was tall and thin, the
+      other dark, shaggy, and sinewy, with a flat nose. The third was a domestic
+      serf, about forty-five years old, with grizzled hair and a plump,
+      well-nourished body. The fourth was a peasant, a very handsome man with a
+      broad, light-brown beard and black eyes. The fifth was a factory hand, a
+      thin, sallow-faced lad of eighteen in a loose coat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre heard the French consulting whether to shoot them separately or two
+      at a time. “In couples,” replied the officer in command in a calm voice.
+      There was a stir in the ranks of the soldiers and it was evident that they
+      were all hurrying—not as men hurry to do something they understand,
+      but as people hurry to finish a necessary but unpleasant and
+      incomprehensible task.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A French official wearing a scarf came up to the right of the row of
+      prisoners and read out the sentence in Russian and in French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Then two pairs of Frenchmen approached the criminals and at the officer’s
+      command took the two convicts who stood first in the row. The convicts
+      stopped when they reached the post and, while sacks were being brought,
+      looked dumbly around as a wounded beast looks at an approaching huntsman.
+      One crossed himself continually, the other scratched his back and made a
+      movement of the lips resembling a smile. With hurried hands the soldiers
+      blindfolded them, drawing the sacks over their heads, and bound them to
+      the post.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Twelve sharpshooters with muskets stepped out of the ranks with a firm
+      regular tread and halted eight paces from the post. Pierre turned away to
+      avoid seeing what was going to happen. Suddenly a crackling, rolling noise
+      was heard which seemed to him louder than the most terrific thunder, and
+      he looked round. There was some smoke, and the Frenchmen were doing
+      something near the pit, with pale faces and trembling hands. Two more
+      prisoners were led up. In the same way and with similar looks, these two
+      glanced vainly at the onlookers with only a silent appeal for protection
+      in their eyes, evidently unable to understand or believe what was going to
+      happen to them. They could not believe it because they alone knew what
+      their life meant to them, and so they neither understood nor believed that
+      it could be taken from them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Again Pierre did not wish to look and again turned away; but again the
+      sound as of a frightful explosion struck his ear, and at the same moment
+      he saw smoke, blood, and the pale, scared faces of the Frenchmen who were
+      again doing something by the post, their trembling hands impeding one
+      another. Pierre, breathing heavily, looked around as if asking what it
+      meant. The same question was expressed in all the looks that met his.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the faces of all the Russians and of the French soldiers and officers
+      without exception, he read the same dismay, horror, and conflict that were
+      in his own heart. “But who, after all, is doing this? They are all
+      suffering as I am. Who then is it? Who?” flashed for an instant through
+      his mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Sharpshooters of the 86th, forward!” shouted someone. The fifth prisoner,
+      the one next to Pierre, was led away—alone. Pierre did not
+      understand that he was saved, that he and the rest had been brought there
+      only to witness the execution. With ever-growing horror, and no sense of
+      joy or relief, he gazed at what was taking place. The fifth man was the
+      factory lad in the loose cloak. The moment they laid hands on him he
+      sprang aside in terror and clutched at Pierre. (Pierre shuddered and shook
+      himself free.) The lad was unable to walk. They dragged him along, holding
+      him up under the arms, and he screamed. When they got him to the post he
+      grew quiet, as if he suddenly understood something. Whether he understood
+      that screaming was useless or whether he thought it incredible that men
+      should kill him, at any rate he took his stand at the post, waiting to be
+      blindfolded like the others, and like a wounded animal looked around him
+      with glittering eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was no longer able to turn away and close his eyes. His curiosity
+      and agitation, like that of the whole crowd, reached the highest pitch at
+      this fifth murder. Like the others this fifth man seemed calm; he wrapped
+      his loose cloak closer and rubbed one bare foot with the other.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When they began to blindfold him he himself adjusted the knot which hurt
+      the back of his head; then when they propped him against the bloodstained
+      post, he leaned back and, not being comfortable in that position,
+      straightened himself, adjusted his feet, and leaned back again more
+      comfortably. Pierre did not take his eyes from him and did not miss his
+      slightest movement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Probably a word of command was given and was followed by the reports of
+      eight muskets; but try as he would Pierre could not afterwards remember
+      having heard the slightest sound of the shots. He only saw how the workman
+      suddenly sank down on the cords that held him, how blood showed itself in
+      two places, how the ropes slackened under the weight of the hanging body,
+      and how the workman sat down, his head hanging unnaturally and one leg
+      bent under him. Pierre ran up to the post. No one hindered him. Pale,
+      frightened people were doing something around the workman. The lower jaw
+      of an old Frenchman with a thick mustache trembled as he untied the ropes.
+      The body collapsed. The soldiers dragged it awkwardly from the post and
+      began pushing it into the pit.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They all plainly and certainly knew that they were criminals who must hide
+      the traces of their guilt as quickly as possible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre glanced into the pit and saw that the factory lad was lying with
+      his knees close up to his head and one shoulder higher than the other.
+      That shoulder rose and fell rhythmically and convulsively, but spadefuls
+      of earth were already being thrown over the whole body. One of the
+      soldiers, evidently suffering, shouted gruffly and angrily at Pierre to go
+      back. But Pierre did not understand him and remained near the post, and no
+      one drove him away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the pit had been filled up a command was given. Pierre was taken back
+      to his place, and the rows of troops on both sides of the post made a half
+      turn and went past it at a measured pace. The twenty-four sharpshooters
+      with discharged muskets, standing in the center of the circle, ran back to
+      their places as the companies passed by.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre gazed now with dazed eyes at these sharpshooters who ran in couples
+      out of the circle. All but one rejoined their companies. This one, a young
+      soldier, his face deadly pale, his shako pushed back, and his musket
+      resting on the ground, still stood near the pit at the spot from which he
+      had fired. He swayed like a drunken man, taking some steps forward and
+      back to save himself from falling. An old, noncommissioned officer ran out
+      of the ranks and taking him by the elbow dragged him to his company. The
+      crowd of Russians and Frenchmen began to disperse. They all went away
+      silently and with drooping heads.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That will teach them to start fires,” said one of the Frenchmen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre glanced round at the speaker and saw that it was a soldier who was
+      trying to find some relief after what had been done, but was not able to
+      do so. Without finishing what he had begun to say he made a hopeless
+      movement with his arm and went away.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0275"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After the execution Pierre was separated from the rest of the prisoners
+      and placed alone in a small, ruined, and befouled church.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Toward evening a noncommissioned officer entered with two soldiers and
+      told him that he had been pardoned and would now go to the barracks for
+      the prisoners of war. Without understanding what was said to him, Pierre
+      got up and went with the soldiers. They took him to the upper end of the
+      field, where there were some sheds built of charred planks, beams, and
+      battens, and led him into one of them. In the darkness some twenty
+      different men surrounded Pierre. He looked at them without understanding
+      who they were, why they were there, or what they wanted of him. He heard
+      what they said, but did not understand the meaning of the words and made
+      no kind of deduction from or application of them. He replied to questions
+      they put to him, but did not consider who was listening to his replies,
+      nor how they would understand them. He looked at their faces and figures,
+      but they all seemed to him equally meaningless.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the moment Pierre had witnessed those terrible murders committed by
+      men who did not wish to commit them, it was as if the mainspring of his
+      life, on which everything depended and which made everything appear alive,
+      had suddenly been wrenched out and everything had collapsed into a heap of
+      meaningless rubbish. Though he did not acknowledge it to himself, his
+      faith in the right ordering of the universe, in humanity, in his own soul,
+      and in God, had been destroyed. He had experienced this before, but never
+      so strongly as now. When similar doubts had assailed him before, they had
+      been the result of his own wrongdoing, and at the bottom of his heart he
+      had felt that relief from his despair and from those doubts was to be
+      found within himself. But now he felt that the universe had crumbled
+      before his eyes and only meaningless ruins remained, and this not by any
+      fault of his own. He felt that it was not in his power to regain faith in
+      the meaning of life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Around him in the darkness men were standing and evidently something about
+      him interested them greatly. They were telling him something and asking
+      him something. Then they led him away somewhere, and at last he found
+      himself in a corner of the shed among men who were laughing and talking on
+      all sides.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, then, mates... that very prince <i>who</i>...” some voice at
+      the other end of the shed was saying, with a strong emphasis on the word <i>who</i>.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sitting silent and motionless on a heap of straw against the wall, Pierre
+      sometimes opened and sometimes closed his eyes. But as soon as he closed
+      them he saw before him the dreadful face of the factory lad—especially
+      dreadful because of its simplicity—and the faces of the murderers,
+      even more dreadful because of their disquiet. And he opened his eyes again
+      and stared vacantly into the darkness around him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Beside him in a stooping position sat a small man of whose presence he was
+      first made aware by a strong smell of perspiration which came from him
+      every time he moved. This man was doing something to his legs in the
+      darkness, and though Pierre could not see his face he felt that the man
+      continually glanced at him. On growing used to the darkness Pierre saw
+      that the man was taking off his leg bands, and the way he did it aroused
+      Pierre’s interest.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having unwound the string that tied the band on one leg, he carefully
+      coiled it up and immediately set to work on the other leg, glancing up at
+      Pierre. While one hand hung up the first string the other was already
+      unwinding the band on the second leg. In this way, having carefully
+      removed the leg bands by deft circular motions of his arm following one
+      another uninterruptedly, the man hung the leg bands up on some pegs fixed
+      above his head. Then he took out a knife, cut something, closed the knife,
+      placed it under the head of his bed, and, seating himself comfortably,
+      clasped his arms round his lifted knees and fixed his eyes on Pierre. The
+      latter was conscious of something pleasant, comforting, and well-rounded
+      in these deft movements, in the man’s well-ordered arrangements in his
+      corner, and even in his very smell, and he looked at the man without
+      taking his eyes from him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You’ve seen a lot of trouble, sir, eh?” the little man suddenly said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And there was so much kindliness and simplicity in his singsong voice that
+      Pierre tried to reply, but his jaw trembled and he felt tears rising to
+      his eyes. The little fellow, giving Pierre no time to betray his
+      confusion, instantly continued in the same pleasant tones:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh, lad, don’t fret!” said he, in the tender singsong caressing voice old
+      Russian peasant women employ. “Don’t fret, friend—‘suffer an hour,
+      live for an age!’ that’s how it is, my dear fellow. And here we live,
+      thank heaven, without offense. Among these folk, too, there are good men
+      as well as bad,” said he, and still speaking, he turned on his knees with
+      a supple movement, got up, coughed, and went off to another part of the
+      shed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh, you rascal!” Pierre heard the same kind voice saying at the other end
+      of the shed. “So you’ve come, you rascal? She remembers... Now, now,
+      that’ll do!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the soldier, pushing away a little dog that was jumping up at him,
+      returned to his place and sat down. In his hands he had something wrapped
+      in a rag.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Here, eat a bit, sir,” said he, resuming his former respectful tone as he
+      unwrapped and offered Pierre some baked potatoes. “We had soup for dinner
+      and the potatoes are grand!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre had not eaten all day and the smell of the potatoes seemed
+      extremely pleasant to him. He thanked the soldier and began to eat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, are they all right?” said the soldier with a smile. “You should do
+      like this.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He took a potato, drew out his clasp knife, cut the potato into two equal
+      halves on the palm of his hand, sprinkled some salt on it from the rag,
+      and handed it to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The potatoes are grand!” he said once more. “Eat some like that!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre thought he had never eaten anything that tasted better.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, I’m all right,” said he, “but why did they shoot those poor fellows?
+      The last one was hardly twenty.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Tss, tt...!” said the little man. “Ah, what a sin... what a sin!” he
+      added quickly, and as if his words were always waiting ready in his mouth
+      and flew out involuntarily he went on: “How was it, sir, that you stayed
+      in Moscow?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I didn’t think they would come so soon. I stayed accidentally,” replied
+      Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And how did they arrest you, dear lad? At your house?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I went to look at the fire, and they arrested me there, and tried me
+      as an incendiary.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Where there’s law there’s injustice,” put in the little man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And have you been here long?” Pierre asked as he munched the last of the
+      potato.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I? It was last Sunday they took me, out of a hospital in Moscow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, are you a soldier then?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, we are soldiers of the Ápsheron regiment. I was dying of fever. We
+      weren’t told anything. There were some twenty of us lying there. We had no
+      idea, never guessed at all.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And do you feel sad here?” Pierre inquired.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How can one help it, lad? My name is Platón, and the surname is
+      Karatáev,” he added, evidently wishing to make it easier for Pierre to
+      address him. “They call me ‘little falcon’ in the regiment. How is one to
+      help feeling sad? Moscow—she’s the mother of cities. How can one see
+      all this and not feel sad? But ‘the maggot gnaws the cabbage, yet dies
+      first’; that’s what the old folks used to tell us,” he added rapidly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What? What did you say?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who? I?” said Karatáev. “I say things happen not as we plan but as God
+      judges,” he replied, thinking that he was repeating what he had said
+      before, and immediately continued:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, and you, have you a family estate, sir? And a house? So you have
+      abundance, then? And a housewife? And your old parents, are they still
+      living?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And though it was too dark for Pierre to see, he felt that a suppressed
+      smile of kindliness puckered the soldier’s lips as he put these questions.
+      He seemed grieved that Pierre had no parents, especially that he had no
+      mother.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A wife for counsel, a mother-in-law for welcome, but there’s none as dear
+      as one’s own mother!” said he. “Well, and have you little ones?” he went
+      on asking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Again Pierre’s negative answer seemed to distress him, and he hastened to
+      add:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Never mind! You’re young folks yet, and please God may still have some.
+      The great thing is to live in harmony....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But it’s all the same now,” Pierre could not help saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, my dear fellow!” rejoined Karatáev, “never decline a prison or a
+      beggar’s sack!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He seated himself more comfortably and coughed, evidently preparing to
+      tell a long story.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, my dear fellow, I was still living at home,” he began. “We had a
+      well-to-do homestead, plenty of land, we peasants lived well and our house
+      was one to thank God for. When Father and we went out mowing there were
+      seven of us. We lived well. We were real peasants. It so happened...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Platón Karatáev told a long story of how he had gone into someone’s
+      copse to take wood, how he had been caught by the keeper, had been tried,
+      flogged, and sent to serve as a soldier.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, lad,” and a smile changed the tone of his voice, “we thought it was
+      a misfortune but it turned out a blessing! If it had not been for my sin,
+      my brother would have had to go as a soldier. But he, my younger brother,
+      had five little ones, while I, you see, only left a wife behind. We had a
+      little girl, but God took her before I went as a soldier. I come home on
+      leave and I’ll tell you how it was, I look and see that they are living
+      better than before. The yard full of cattle, the women at home, two
+      brothers away earning wages, and only Michael the youngest, at home.
+      Father, he says, ‘All my children are the same to me: it hurts the same
+      whichever finger gets bitten. But if Platón hadn’t been shaved for a
+      soldier, Michael would have had to go.’ called us all to him and, will you
+      believe it, placed us in front of the icons. ‘Michael,’ he says, ‘come
+      here and bow down to his feet; and you, young woman, you bow down too; and
+      you, grandchildren, also bow down before him! Do you understand?’ he says.
+      That’s how it is, dear fellow. Fate looks for a head. But we are always
+      judging, ‘that’s not well—that’s not right!’ Our luck is like water
+      in a dragnet: you pull at it and it bulges, but when you’ve drawn it out
+      it’s empty! That’s how it is.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Platón shifted his seat on the straw.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After a short silence he rose.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, I think you must be sleepy,” said he, and began rapidly crossing
+      himself and repeating:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lord Jesus Christ, holy Saint Nicholas, Frola and Lavra! Lord Jesus
+      Christ, holy Saint Nicholas, Frola and Lavra! Lord Jesus Christ, have
+      mercy on us and save us!” he concluded, then bowed to the ground, got up,
+      sighed, and sat down again on his heap of straw. “That’s the way. Lay me
+      down like a stone, O God, and raise me up like a loaf,” he muttered as he
+      lay down, pulling his coat over him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What prayer was that you were saying?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh?” murmured Platón, who had almost fallen asleep. “What was I saying? I
+      was praying. Don’t you pray?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I do,” said Pierre. “But what was that you said: Frola and Lavra?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, of course,” replied Platón quickly, “the horses’ saints. One must
+      pity the animals too. Eh, the rascal! Now you’ve curled up and got warm,
+      you daughter of a bitch!” said Karatáev, touching the dog that lay at his
+      feet, and again turning over he fell asleep immediately.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sounds of crying and screaming came from somewhere in the distance
+      outside, and flames were visible through the cracks of the shed, but
+      inside it was quiet and dark. For a long time Pierre did not sleep, but
+      lay with eyes open in the darkness, listening to the regular snoring of
+      Platón who lay beside him, and he felt that the world that had been
+      shattered was once more stirring in his soul with a new beauty and on new
+      and unshakable foundations.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0276"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Twenty-three soldiers, three officers, and two officials were confined in
+      the shed in which Pierre had been placed and where he remained for four
+      weeks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Pierre remembered them afterwards they all seemed misty figures to
+      him except Platón Karatáev, who always remained in his mind a most vivid
+      and precious memory and the personification of everything Russian, kindly,
+      and round. When Pierre saw his neighbor next morning at dawn the first
+      impression of him, as of something round, was fully confirmed: Platón’s
+      whole figure—in a French overcoat girdled with a cord, a soldier’s
+      cap, and bast shoes—was round. His head was quite round, his back,
+      chest, shoulders, and even his arms, which he held as if ever ready to
+      embrace something, were rounded, his pleasant smile and his large, gentle
+      brown eyes were also round.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Platón Karatáev must have been fifty, judging by his stories of campaigns
+      he had been in, told as by an old soldier. He did not himself know his age
+      and was quite unable to determine it. But his brilliantly white, strong
+      teeth which showed in two unbroken semicircles when he laughed—as he
+      often did—were all sound and good, there was not a gray hair in his
+      beard or on his head, and his whole body gave an impression of suppleness
+      and especially of firmness and endurance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His face, despite its fine, rounded wrinkles, had an expression of
+      innocence and youth, his voice was pleasant and musical. But the chief
+      peculiarity of his speech was its directness and appositeness. It was
+      evident that he never considered what he had said or was going to say, and
+      consequently the rapidity and justice of his intonation had an
+      irresistible persuasiveness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His physical strength and agility during the first days of his
+      imprisonment were such that he seemed not to know what fatigue and
+      sickness meant. Every night before lying down, he said: “Lord, lay me down
+      as a stone and raise me up as a loaf!” and every morning on getting up, he
+      said: “I lay down and curled up, I get up and shake myself.” And indeed he
+      only had to lie down, to fall asleep like a stone, and he only had to
+      shake himself, to be ready without a moment’s delay for some work, just as
+      children are ready to play directly they awake. He could do everything,
+      not very well but not badly. He baked, cooked, sewed, planed, and mended
+      boots. He was always busy, and only at night allowed himself conversation—of
+      which he was fond—and songs. He did not sing like a trained singer
+      who knows he is listened to, but like the birds, evidently giving vent to
+      the sounds in the same way that one stretches oneself or walks about to
+      get rid of stiffness, and the sounds were always high-pitched, mournful,
+      delicate, and almost feminine, and his face at such times was very
+      serious.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having been taken prisoner and allowed his beard to grow, he seemed to
+      have thrown off all that had been forced upon him—everything
+      military and alien to himself—and had returned to his former peasant
+      habits.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A soldier on leave—a shirt outside breeches,” he would say.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He did not like talking about his life as a soldier, though he did not
+      complain, and often mentioned that he had not been flogged once during the
+      whole of his army service. When he related anything it was generally some
+      old and evidently precious memory of his “Christian” life, as he called
+      his peasant existence. The proverbs, of which his talk was full, were for
+      the most part not the coarse and indecent saws soldiers employ, but those
+      folk sayings which taken without a context seem so insignificant, but when
+      used appositely suddenly acquire a significance of profound wisdom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He would often say the exact opposite of what he had said on a previous
+      occasion, yet both would be right. He liked to talk and he talked well,
+      adorning his speech with terms of endearment and with folk sayings which
+      Pierre thought he invented himself, but the chief charm of his talk lay in
+      the fact that the commonest events—sometimes just such as Pierre had
+      witnessed without taking notice of them—assumed in Karatáev’s a
+      character of solemn fitness. He liked to hear the folk tales one of the
+      soldiers used to tell of an evening (they were always the same), but most
+      of all he liked to hear stories of real life. He would smile joyfully when
+      listening to such stories, now and then putting in a word or asking a
+      question to make the moral beauty of what he was told clear to himself.
+      Karatáev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre understood
+      them, but loved and lived affectionately with everything life brought him
+      in contact with, particularly with man—not any particular man, but
+      those with whom he happened to be. He loved his dog, his comrades, the
+      French, and Pierre who was his neighbor, but Pierre felt that in spite of
+      Karatáev’s affectionate tenderness for him (by which he unconsciously gave
+      Pierre’s spiritual life its due) he would not have grieved for a moment at
+      parting from him. And Pierre began to feel in the same way toward
+      Karatáev.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To all the other prisoners Platón Karatáev seemed a most ordinary soldier.
+      They called him “little falcon” or “Platósha,” chaffed
+      him good-naturedly, and sent him on errands. But to Pierre he always remained
+      what he had seemed that first night: an unfathomable, rounded, eternal
+      personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Platón Karatáev knew nothing by heart except his prayers. When he began to
+      speak he seemed not to know how he would conclude.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sometimes Pierre, struck by the meaning of his words, would ask him to
+      repeat them, but Platón could never recall what he had said a moment
+      before, just as he never could repeat to Pierre the words of his favorite
+      song: <i>native</i> and <i>birch tree</i> and <i>my heart is sick</i> occurred in
+      it, but when spoken and not sung, no meaning could be got out of it. He did not,
+      and could not, understand the meaning of words apart from their context. Every
+      word and action of his was the manifestation of an activity unknown to
+      him, which was his life. But his life, as he regarded it, had no meaning
+      as a separate thing. It had meaning only as part of a whole of which he
+      was always conscious. His words and actions flowed from him as evenly,
+      inevitably, and spontaneously as fragrance exhales from a flower. He could
+      not understand the value or significance of any word or deed taken
+      separately.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0277"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      When Princess Mary heard from Nicholas that her brother was with the
+      Rostóvs at Yaroslávl she at once prepared to go there, in spite of her
+      aunt’s efforts to dissuade her—and not merely to go herself but to
+      take her nephew with her. Whether it were difficult or easy, possible or
+      impossible, she did not ask and did not want to know: it was her duty, not
+      only to herself, to be near her brother who was perhaps dying, but to do
+      everything possible to take his son to him, and so she prepared to set
+      off. That she had not heard from Prince Andrew himself, Princess Mary
+      attributed to his being too weak to write or to his considering the long
+      journey too hard and too dangerous for her and his son.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In a few days Princess Mary was ready to start. Her equipages were the
+      huge family coach in which she had traveled to Vorónezh, a semiopen trap,
+      and a baggage cart. With her traveled Mademoiselle Bourienne, little
+      Nicholas and his tutor, her old nurse, three maids, Tíkhon, and a young
+      footman and courier her aunt had sent to accompany her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The usual route through Moscow could not be thought of, and the roundabout
+      way Princess Mary was obliged to take through Lípetsk, Ryazán, Vladímir,
+      and Shúya was very long and, as post horses were not everywhere
+      obtainable, very difficult, and near Ryazán where the French were said to
+      have shown themselves was even dangerous.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During this difficult journey Mademoiselle Bourienne, Dessalles, and
+      Princess Mary’s servants were astonished at her energy and firmness of
+      spirit. She went to bed later and rose earlier than any of them, and no
+      difficulties daunted her. Thanks to her activity and energy, which
+      infected her fellow travelers, they approached Yaroslávl by the end of the
+      second week.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The last days of her stay in Vorónezh had been the happiest of her life.
+      Her love for Rostóv no longer tormented or agitated her. It filled her
+      whole soul, had become an integral part of herself, and she no longer
+      struggled against it. Latterly she had become convinced that she loved and
+      was beloved, though she never said this definitely to herself in words.
+      She had become convinced of it at her last interview with Nicholas, when
+      he had come to tell her that her brother was with the Rostóvs. Not by a
+      single word had Nicholas alluded to the fact that Prince Andrew’s
+      relations with Natásha might, if he recovered, be renewed, but Princess
+      Mary saw by his face that he knew and thought of this.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Yet in spite of that, his relation to her—considerate, delicate, and
+      loving—not only remained unchanged, but it sometimes seemed to
+      Princess Mary that he was even glad that the family connection between
+      them allowed him to express his friendship more freely. She knew that she
+      loved for the first and only time in her life and felt that she was
+      beloved, and was happy in regard to it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But this happiness on one side of her spiritual nature did not prevent her
+      feeling grief for her brother with full force; on the contrary, that
+      spiritual tranquility on the one side made it the more possible for her to
+      give full play to her feeling for her brother. That feeling was so strong
+      at the moment of leaving Vorónezh that those who saw her off, as they
+      looked at her careworn, despairing face, felt sure she would fall ill on
+      the journey. But the very difficulties and preoccupations of the journey,
+      which she took so actively in hand, saved her for a while from her grief
+      and gave her strength.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As always happens when traveling, Princess Mary thought only of the
+      journey itself, forgetting its object. But as she approached Yaroslávl the
+      thought of what might await her there—not after many days, but that
+      very evening—again presented itself to her and her agitation
+      increased to its utmost limit.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The courier who had been sent on in advance to find out where the Rostóvs
+      were staying in Yaroslávl, and in what condition Prince Andrew was, when
+      he met the big coach just entering the town gates was appalled by the
+      terrible pallor of the princess’ face that looked out at him from the
+      window.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have found out everything, your excellency: the Rostóvs are staying at
+      the merchant Brónnikov’s house, in the Square not far from here, right
+      above the Vólga,” said the courier.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary looked at him with frightened inquiry, not understanding why
+      he did not reply to what she chiefly wanted to know: how was her brother?
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne put that question for her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How is the prince?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “His excellency is staying in the same house with them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Then he is alive,” thought Princess Mary, and asked in a low voice: “How
+      is he?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The servants say he is still the same.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      What “still the same” might mean Princess Mary did not ask, but with an
+      unnoticed glance at little seven-year-old Nicholas, who was sitting in
+      front of her looking with pleasure at the town, she bowed her head and did
+      not raise it again till the heavy coach, rumbling, shaking and swaying,
+      came to a stop. The carriage steps clattered as they were let down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The carriage door was opened. On the left there was water—a great
+      river—and on the right a porch. There were people at the entrance:
+      servants, and a rosy girl with a large plait of black hair, smiling as it
+      seemed to Princess Mary in an unpleasantly affected way. (This was Sónya.)
+      Princess Mary ran up the steps. “This way, this way!” said the girl, with
+      the same artificial smile, and the princess found herself in the hall
+      facing an elderly woman of Oriental type, who came rapidly to meet her
+      with a look of emotion. This was the countess. She embraced Princess Mary
+      and kissed her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Mon enfant!”</i> she muttered, <i>“je vous aime et vous
+      connais depuis longtemps.”</i> *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “My child! I love you and have known you a long time.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Despite her excitement, Princess Mary realized that this was the
+      countess and that it was necessary to say something to her. Hardly
+      knowing how she did it, she contrived to utter a few polite phrases in
+      French in the same tone as those that had been addressed to her, and
+      asked: “How is he?”
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The doctor says that he is not in danger,” said the countess, but as she
+      spoke she raised her eyes with a sigh, and her gesture conveyed a
+      contradiction of her words.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where is he? Can I see him—can I?” asked the princess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One moment, Princess, one moment, my dear! Is this his son?” said the
+      countess, turning to little Nicholas who was coming in with Dessalles.
+      “There will be room for everybody, this is a big house. Oh, what a lovely
+      boy!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The countess took Princess Mary into the drawing room, where Sónya was
+      talking to Mademoiselle Bourienne. The countess caressed the boy, and the
+      old count came in and welcomed the princess. He had changed very much
+      since Princess Mary had last seen him. Then he had been a brisk, cheerful,
+      self-assured old man; now he seemed a pitiful, bewildered person. While
+      talking to Princess Mary he continually looked round as if asking everyone
+      whether he was doing the right thing. After the destruction of Moscow and
+      of his property, thrown out of his accustomed groove he seemed to have
+      lost the sense of his own significance and to feel that there was no
+      longer a place for him in life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In spite of her one desire to see her brother as soon as possible, and her
+      vexation that at the moment when all she wanted was to see him they should
+      be trying to entertain her and pretending to admire her nephew, the
+      princess noticed all that was going on around her and felt the necessity
+      of submitting, for a time, to this new order of things which she had
+      entered. She knew it to be necessary, and though it was hard for her she
+      was not vexed with these people.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “This is my niece,” said the count, introducing Sónya—“You don’t
+      know her, Princess?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary turned to Sónya and, trying to stifle the hostile feeling
+      that arose in her toward the girl, she kissed her. But she felt oppressed
+      by the fact that the mood of everyone around her was so far from what was
+      in her own heart.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where is he?” she asked again, addressing them all.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is downstairs. Natásha is with him,” answered Sónya, flushing. “We
+      have sent to ask. I think you must be tired, Princess.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Tears of vexation showed themselves in Princess Mary’s eyes. She turned
+      away and was about to ask the countess again how to go to him, when light,
+      impetuous, and seemingly buoyant steps were heard at the door. The
+      princess looked round and saw Natásha coming in, almost running—that
+      Natásha whom she had liked so little at their meeting in Moscow long
+      since.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But hardly had the princess looked at Natásha’s face before she realized
+      that here was a real comrade in her grief, and consequently a friend. She
+      ran to meet her, embraced her, and began to cry on her shoulder.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As soon as Natásha, sitting at the head of Prince Andrew’s bed, heard of
+      Princess Mary’s arrival, she softly left his room and hastened to her with
+      those swift steps that had sounded buoyant to Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was only one expression on her agitated face when she ran into the
+      drawing room—that of love—boundless love for him, for her, and
+      for all that was near to the man she loved; and of pity, suffering for
+      others, and passionate desire to give herself entirely to helping them. It
+      was plain that at that moment there was in Natásha’s heart no thought of
+      herself or of her own relations with Prince Andrew.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary, with her acute sensibility, understood all this at the
+      first glance at Natásha’s face, and wept on her shoulder with sorrowful
+      pleasure.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come, come to him, Mary,” said Natásha, leading her into the other room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary raised her head, dried her eyes, and turned to Natásha. She
+      felt that from her she would be able to understand and learn everything.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How...” she began her question but stopped short.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She felt that it was impossible to ask, or to answer, in words. Natásha’s
+      face and eyes would have to tell her all more clearly and profoundly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha was gazing at her, but seemed afraid and in doubt whether to say
+      all she knew or not; she seemed to feel that before those luminous eyes
+      which penetrated into the very depths of her heart, it was impossible not
+      to tell the whole truth which she saw. And suddenly, Natásha’s lips
+      twitched, ugly wrinkles gathered round her mouth, and covering her face
+      with her hands she burst into sobs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary understood.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But she still hoped, and asked, in words she herself did not trust:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But how is his wound? What is his general condition?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You, you... will see,” was all Natásha could say.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They sat a little while downstairs near his room till they had left off
+      crying and were able to go to him with calm faces.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How has his whole illness gone? Is it long since he grew worse? When did
+      this happen?” Princess Mary inquired.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha told her that at first there had been danger from his feverish
+      condition and the pain he suffered, but at Tróitsa that had passed and the
+      doctor had only been afraid of gangrene. That danger had also passed. When
+      they reached Yaroslávl the wound had begun to fester (Natásha knew all
+      about such things as festering) and the doctor had said that the festering
+      might take a normal course. Then fever set in, but the doctor had said the
+      fever was not very serious.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But two days ago <i>this</i> suddenly happened,” said Natásha, struggling with
+      her sobs. “I don’t know why, but you will see what he is like.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Is he weaker? Thinner?” asked the princess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, it’s not that, but worse. You will see. O, Mary, he is too good, he
+      cannot, cannot live, because...”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0278"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      When Natásha opened Prince Andrew’s door with a familiar movement and let
+      Princess Mary pass into the room before her, the princess felt the sobs in
+      her throat. Hard as she had tried to prepare herself, and now tried to
+      remain tranquil, she knew that she would be unable to look at him without
+      tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess understood what Natásha had meant by the words: “two days ago
+      <i>this</i> suddenly happened.” She understood those words to mean that he had
+      suddenly softened and that this softening and gentleness were signs of
+      approaching death. As she stepped to the door she already saw in
+      imagination Andrew’s face as she remembered it in childhood, a gentle,
+      mild, sympathetic face which he had rarely shown, and which therefore
+      affected her very strongly. She was sure he would speak soft, tender words
+      to her such as her father had uttered before his death, and that she would
+      not be able to bear it and would burst into sobs in his presence. Yet
+      sooner or later it had to be, and she went in. The sobs rose higher and
+      higher in her throat as she more and more clearly distinguished his form
+      and her shortsighted eyes tried to make out his features, and then she saw
+      his face and met his gaze.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was lying in a squirrel-fur dressing gown on a divan, surrounded by
+      pillows. He was thin and pale. In one thin, translucently white hand he
+      held a handkerchief, while with the other he stroked the delicate mustache
+      he had grown, moving his fingers slowly. His eyes gazed at them as they
+      entered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On seeing his face and meeting his eyes Princess Mary’s pace suddenly
+      slackened, she felt her tears dry up and her sobs ceased. She suddenly
+      felt guilty and grew timid on catching the expression of his face and
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But in what am I to blame?” she asked herself. And his cold, stern look
+      replied: “Because you are alive and thinking of the living, while I...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In the deep gaze that seemed to look not outwards but inwards there was an
+      almost hostile expression as he slowly regarded his sister and Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He kissed his sister, holding her hand in his as was their wont.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How are you, Mary? How did you manage to get here?” said he in a voice as
+      calm and aloof as his look.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Had he screamed in agony, that scream would not have struck such horror
+      into Princess Mary’s heart as the tone of his voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And have you brought little Nicholas?” he asked in the same slow, quiet
+      manner and with an obvious effort to remember.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How are you now?” said Princess Mary, herself surprised at what she was
+      saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That, my dear, you must ask the doctor,” he replied, and again making an
+      evident effort to be affectionate, he said with his lips only (his words
+      clearly did not correspond to his thoughts):
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Merci, chère amie, d’être venue.”</i> *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Thank you for coming, my dear.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary pressed his hand. The pressure made him wince just
+      perceptibly. He was silent, and she did not know what to say. She now
+      understood what had happened to him two days before. In his words, his
+      tone, and especially in that calm, almost antagonistic look could be felt
+      an estrangement from everything belonging to this world, terrible in one
+      who is alive. Evidently only with an effort did he understand anything
+      living; but it was obvious that he failed to understand, not because he
+      lacked the power to do so but because he understood something else—something
+      the living did not and could not understand—and which wholly
+      occupied his mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There, you see how strangely fate has brought us together,” said he,
+      breaking the silence and pointing to Natásha. “She looks after me all the
+      time.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary heard him and did not understand how he could say such a
+      thing. He, the sensitive, tender Prince Andrew, how could he say that,
+      before her whom he loved and who loved him? Had he expected to live he
+      could not have said those words in that offensively cold tone. If he had
+      not known that he was dying, how could he have failed to pity her and how
+      could he speak like that in her presence? The only explanation was that he
+      was indifferent, because something else, much more important, had been
+      revealed to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The conversation was cold and disconnected and continually broke off.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mary came by way of Ryazán,” said Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew did not notice that she called his sister <i>Mary</i>, and only
+      after calling her so in his presence did Natásha notice it herself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Really?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They told her that all Moscow has been burned down, and that...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha stopped. It was impossible to talk. It was plain that he was
+      making an effort to listen, but could not do so.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, they say it’s burned,” he said. “It’s a great pity,” and he gazed
+      straight before him, absently stroking his mustache with his fingers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And so you have met Count Nicholas, Mary?” Prince Andrew suddenly said,
+      evidently wishing to speak pleasantly to them. “He wrote here that he took
+      a great liking to you,” he went on simply and calmly, evidently unable to
+      understand all the complex significance his words had for living people.
+      “If you liked him too, it would be a good thing for you to get married,”
+       he added rather more quickly, as if pleased at having found words he had
+      long been seeking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary heard his words but they had no meaning for her, except as a
+      proof of how far away he now was from everything living.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why talk of me?” she said quietly and glanced at Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha, who felt her glance, did not look at her. All three were again
+      silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Andrew, would you like...” Princess Mary suddenly said in a trembling
+      voice, “would you like to see little Nicholas? He is always talking about
+      you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew smiled just perceptibly and for the first time, but Princess
+      Mary, who knew his face so well, saw with horror that he did not smile
+      with pleasure or affection for his son, but with quiet, gentle irony
+      because he thought she was trying what she believed to be the last means
+      of arousing him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I shall be very glad to see him. Is he quite well?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      When little Nicholas was brought into Prince Andrew’s room he looked at
+      his father with frightened eyes, but did not cry, because no one else was
+      crying. Prince Andrew kissed him and evidently did not know what to say to
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Nicholas had been led away, Princess Mary again went up to her
+      brother, kissed him, and unable to restrain her tears any longer began to
+      cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He looked at her attentively.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is it about Nicholas?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary nodded her head, weeping.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mary, you know the Gosp...” but he broke off.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What did you say?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Nothing. You mustn’t cry here,” he said, looking at her with the same
+      cold expression.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      When Princess Mary began to cry, he understood that she was crying at the
+      thought that little Nicholas would be left without a father. With a great
+      effort he tried to return to life and to see things from their point of
+      view.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, to them it must seem sad!” he thought. “But how simple it is.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The fowls of the air sow not, neither do they reap, yet your Father
+      feedeth them,” he said to himself and wished to say to Princess Mary; “but
+      no, they will take it their own way, they won’t understand! They can’t
+      understand that all those feelings they prize so—all our feelings,
+      all those ideas that seem so important to us, are <i>unnecessary</i>. We cannot
+      understand one another,” and he remained silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew’s little son was seven. He could scarcely read, and knew
+      nothing. After that day he lived through many things, gaining knowledge,
+      observation, and experience, but had he possessed all the faculties he
+      afterwards acquired, he could not have had a better or more profound
+      understanding of the meaning of the scene he had witnessed between his
+      father, Mary, and Natásha, than he had then. He understood it completely,
+      and, leaving the room without crying, went silently up to Natásha who had
+      come out with him and looked shyly at her with his beautiful, thoughtful
+      eyes, then his uplifted, rosy upper lip trembled and leaning his head
+      against her he began to cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After that he avoided Dessalles and the countess who caressed him and
+      either sat alone or came timidly to Princess Mary, or to Natásha of whom
+      he seemed even fonder than of his aunt, and clung to them quietly and
+      shyly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Princess Mary had left Prince Andrew she fully understood what
+      Natásha’s face had told her. She did not speak any more to Natásha of
+      hopes of saving his life. She took turns with her beside his sofa, and did
+      not cry any more, but prayed continually, turning in soul to that Eternal
+      and Unfathomable, whose presence above the dying man was now so evident.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0279"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Not only did Prince Andrew know he would die, but he felt that he was
+      dying and was already half dead. He was conscious of an aloofness from
+      everything earthly and a strange and joyous lightness of existence.
+      Without haste or agitation he awaited what was coming. That inexorable,
+      eternal, distant, and unknown the presence of which he had felt
+      continually all his life—was now near to him and, by the strange
+      lightness he experienced, almost comprehensible and palpable....
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Formerly he had feared the end. He had twice experienced that terribly
+      tormenting fear of death—the end—but now he no longer understood that
+      fear.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He had felt it for the first time when the shell spun like a top
+      before him, and he looked at the fallow field, the bushes, and the sky,
+      and knew that he was face to face with death. When he came to himself
+      after being wounded and the flower of eternal, unfettered love had
+      instantly unfolded itself in his soul as if freed from the bondage of
+      life that had restrained it, he no longer feared death and ceased to
+      think about it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the hours of solitude, suffering, and partial delirium he spent
+      after he was wounded, the more deeply he penetrated into the new principle
+      of eternal love revealed to him, the more he unconsciously detached
+      himself from earthly life. To love everything and everybody and always to
+      sacrifice oneself for love meant not to love anyone, not to live this
+      earthly life. And the more imbued he became with that principle of love,
+      the more he renounced life and the more completely he destroyed that
+      dreadful barrier which—in the absence of such love—stands
+      between life and death. When during those first days he remembered that he
+      would have to die, he said to himself: “Well, what of it? So much the
+      better!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But after the night in Mytíshchi when, half delirious, he had seen her for
+      whom he longed appear before him and, having pressed her hand to his lips,
+      had shed gentle, happy tears, love for a particular woman again crept
+      unobserved into his heart and once more bound him to life. And joyful and
+      agitating thoughts began to occupy his mind. Recalling the moment at the
+      ambulance station when he had seen Kurágin, he could not now regain the
+      feeling he then had, but was tormented by the question whether Kurágin was
+      alive. And he dared not inquire.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His illness pursued its normal physical course, but what Natásha referred
+      to when she said: “<i>This</i> suddenly happened,” had occurred two
+      days before Princess Mary arrived. It was the last spiritual struggle between
+      life and death, in which death gained the victory. It was the unexpected
+      realization of the fact that he still valued life as presented to him in
+      the form of his love for Natásha, and a last, though ultimately
+      vanquished, attack of terror before the unknown.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was evening. As usual after dinner he was slightly feverish, and his
+      thoughts were preternaturally clear. Sónya was sitting by the table. He
+      began to doze. Suddenly a feeling of happiness seized him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, she has come!” thought he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And so it was: in Sónya’s place sat Natásha who had just come in
+      noiselessly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Since she had begun looking after him, he had always experienced this
+      physical consciousness of her nearness. She was sitting in an armchair
+      placed sideways, screening the light of the candle from him, and was
+      knitting a stocking. She had learned to knit stockings since Prince Andrew
+      had casually mentioned that no one nursed the sick so well as old nurses
+      who knit stockings, and that there is something soothing in the knitting
+      of stockings. The needles clicked lightly in her slender, rapidly moving
+      hands, and he could clearly see the thoughtful profile of her drooping
+      face. She moved, and the ball rolled off her knees. She started, glanced
+      round at him, and screening the candle with her hand stooped carefully
+      with a supple and exact movement, picked up the ball, and regained her
+      former position.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He looked at her without moving and saw that she wanted to draw a deep
+      breath after stooping, but refrained from doing so and breathed
+      cautiously.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the Tróitsa monastery they had spoken of the past, and he had told her
+      that if he lived he would always thank God for his wound which had brought
+      them together again, but after that they never spoke of the future.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Can it or can it not be?” he now thought as he looked at her and listened
+      to the light click of the steel needles. “Can fate have brought me to her
+      so strangely only for me to die?... Is it possible that the truth of life
+      has been revealed to me only to show me that I have spent my life in
+      falsity? I love her more than anything in the world! But what am I to do
+      if I love her?” he thought, and he involuntarily groaned, from a habit
+      acquired during his sufferings.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On hearing that sound Natásha put down the stocking, leaned nearer to him,
+      and suddenly, noticing his shining eyes, stepped lightly up to him and
+      bent over him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are not asleep?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I have been looking at you a long time. I felt you come in. No one
+      else gives me that sense of soft tranquillity that you do... that light. I
+      want to weep for joy.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha drew closer to him. Her face shone with rapturous joy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha, I love you too much! More than anything in the world.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And I!”—She turned away for an instant. “Why too much?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why too much?... Well, what do you, what do you feel in your soul, your
+      whole soul—shall I live? What do you think?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I am sure of it, sure!” Natásha almost shouted, taking hold of both his
+      hands with a passionate movement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He remained silent awhile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How good it would be!” and taking her hand he kissed it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha felt happy and agitated, but at once remembered that this would
+      not do and that he had to be quiet.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But you have not slept,” she said, repressing her joy. “Try to sleep...
+      please!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He pressed her hand and released it, and she went back to the candle and
+      sat down again in her former position. Twice she turned and looked at him,
+      and her eyes met his beaming at her. She set herself a task on her
+      stocking and resolved not to turn round till it was finished.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Soon he really shut his eyes and fell asleep. He did not sleep long and
+      suddenly awoke with a start and in a cold perspiration.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As he fell asleep he had still been thinking of the subject that now
+      always occupied his mind—about life and death, and chiefly about
+      death. He felt himself nearer to it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Love? What is love?” he thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I
+      understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only
+      because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die
+      means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal
+      source.” These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only
+      thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were
+      too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former
+      agitation and obscurity. He fell asleep.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He dreamed that he was lying in the room he really was in, but that he was
+      quite well and unwounded. Many various, indifferent, and insignificant
+      people appeared before him. He talked to them and discussed something
+      trivial. They were preparing to go away somewhere. Prince Andrew dimly
+      realized that all this was trivial and that he had more important cares,
+      but he continued to speak, surprising them by empty witticisms. Gradually,
+      unnoticed, all these persons began to disappear and a single question,
+      that of the closed door, superseded all else. He rose and went to the door
+      to bolt and lock it. Everything depended on whether he was, or was not, in
+      time to lock it. He went, and tried to hurry, but his legs refused to move
+      and he knew he would not be in time to lock the door though he painfully
+      strained all his powers. He was seized by an agonizing fear. And that fear
+      was the fear of death. <i>It</i> stood behind the door. But just when he was
+      clumsily creeping toward the door, that dreadful something on the other
+      side was already pressing against it and forcing its way in. Something not
+      human—death—was breaking in through that door, and had to be
+      kept out. He seized the door, making a final effort to hold it back—to
+      lock it was no longer possible—but his efforts were weak and clumsy
+      and the door, pushed from behind by that terror, opened and closed again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Once again <i>it</i> pushed from outside. His last superhuman efforts were vain
+      and both halves of the door noiselessly opened. <i>It</i> entered, and it was
+      <i>death</i>, and Prince Andrew died.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But at the instant he died, Prince Andrew remembered that he was asleep,
+      and at the very instant he died, having made an effort, he awoke.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, it was death! I died—and woke up. Yes, death is an awakening!”
+       And all at once it grew light in his soul and the veil that had till then
+      concealed the unknown was lifted from his spiritual vision. He felt as if
+      powers till then confined within him had been liberated, and that strange
+      lightness did not again leave him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When, waking in a cold perspiration, he moved on the divan, Natásha went
+      up and asked him what was the matter. He did not answer and looked at her
+      strangely, not understanding.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That was what had happened to him two days before Princess Mary’s arrival.
+      From that day, as the doctor expressed it, the wasting fever assumed a
+      malignant character, but what the doctor said did not interest Natásha,
+      she saw the terrible moral symptoms which to her were more convincing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From that day an awakening from life came to Prince Andrew together with
+      his awakening from sleep. And compared to the duration of life it did not
+      seem to him slower than an awakening from sleep compared to the duration
+      of a dream.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was nothing terrible or violent in this comparatively slow
+      awakening.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His last days and hours passed in an ordinary and simple way. Both
+      Princess Mary and Natásha, who did not leave him, felt this. They did not
+      weep or shudder and during these last days they themselves felt that they
+      were not attending on him (he was no longer there, he had left them) but
+      on what reminded them most closely of him—his body. Both felt this
+      so strongly that the outward and terrible side of death did not affect
+      them and they did not feel it necessary to foment their grief. Neither in
+      his presence nor out of it did they weep, nor did they ever talk to one
+      another about him. They felt that they could not express in words what
+      they understood.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They both saw that he was sinking slowly and quietly, deeper and deeper,
+      away from them, and they both knew that this had to be so and that it was
+      right.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He confessed, and received communion: everyone came to take leave of him.
+      When they brought his son to him, he pressed his lips to the boy’s and
+      turned away, not because he felt it hard and sad (Princess Mary and
+      Natásha understood that) but simply because he thought it was all that was
+      required of him, but when they told him to bless the boy, he did what was
+      demanded and looked round as if asking whether there was anything else he
+      should do.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the last convulsions of the body, which the spirit was leaving,
+      occurred, Princess Mary and Natásha were present.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is it over?” said Princess Mary when his body had for a few minutes lain
+      motionless, growing cold before them. Natásha went up, looked at the dead
+      eyes, and hastened to close them. She closed them but did not kiss them,
+      but clung to that which reminded her most nearly of him—his body.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where has he gone? Where is he now?...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      When the body, washed and dressed, lay in the coffin on a table, everyone
+      came to take leave of him and they all wept.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Little Nicholas cried because his heart was rent by painful perplexity.
+      The countess and Sónya cried from pity for Natásha and because he was no
+      more. The old count cried because he felt that before long, he, too, must
+      take the same terrible step.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha and Princess Mary also wept now, but not because of their own
+      personal grief; they wept with a reverent and softening emotion which had
+      taken possession of their souls at the consciousness of the simple and
+      solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished in their presence.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0292"></a>
+      BOOK THIRTEEN: 1812
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0280"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but
+      the desire to find those causes is implanted in man’s soul. And without
+      considering the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions any one of
+      which taken separately may seem to be the cause, he snatches at the first
+      approximation to a cause that seems to him intelligible and says: “This is
+      the cause!” In historical events (where the actions of men are the subject
+      of observation) the first and most primitive approximation to present
+      itself was the will of the gods and, after that, the will of those who
+      stood in the most prominent position—the heroes of history. But we
+      need only penetrate to the essence of any historic event—which lies
+      in the activity of the general mass of men who take part in it—to be
+      convinced that the will of the historic hero does not control the actions
+      of the mass but is itself continually controlled. It may seem to be a
+      matter of indifference whether we understand the meaning of historical
+      events this way or that; yet there is the same difference between a man
+      who says that the people of the West moved on the East because Napoleon
+      wished it and a man who says that this happened because it had to happen,
+      as there is between those who declared that the earth was stationary and
+      that the planets moved round it and those who admitted that they did not
+      know what upheld the earth, but knew there were laws directing its
+      movement and that of the other planets. There is, and can be, no cause of
+      an historical event except the one cause of all causes. But there are laws
+      directing events, and some of these laws are known to us while we are
+      conscious of others we cannot comprehend. The discovery of these laws is
+      only possible when we have quite abandoned the attempt to find the cause
+      in the will of some one man, just as the discovery of the laws of the
+      motion of the planets was possible only when men abandoned the conception
+      of the fixity of the earth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The historians consider that, next to the battle of Borodinó and the
+      occupation of Moscow by the enemy and its destruction by fire, the most
+      important episode of the war of 1812 was the movement of the Russian army
+      from the Ryazána to the Kalúga road and to the Tarútino camp—the
+      so-called flank march across the Krásnaya Pakhrá River. They ascribe the
+      glory of that achievement of genius to different men and dispute as to
+      whom the honor is due. Even foreign historians, including the French,
+      acknowledge the genius of the Russian commanders when they speak of that
+      flank march. But it is hard to understand why military writers, and
+      following them others, consider this flank march to be the profound
+      conception of some one man who saved Russia and destroyed Napoleon. In the
+      first place it is hard to understand where the profundity and genius of
+      this movement lay, for not much mental effort was needed to see that the
+      best position for an army when it is not being attacked is where there are
+      most provisions; and even a dull boy of thirteen could have guessed that
+      the best position for an army after its retreat from Moscow in 1812 was on
+      the Kalúga road. So it is impossible to understand by what reasoning the
+      historians reach the conclusion that this maneuver was a profound one. And
+      it is even more difficult to understand just why they think that this
+      maneuver was calculated to save Russia and destroy the French; for this
+      flank march, had it been preceded, accompanied, or followed by other
+      circumstances, might have proved ruinous to the Russians and salutary for
+      the French. If the position of the Russian army really began to improve
+      from the time of that march, it does not at all follow that the march was
+      the cause of it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That flank march might not only have failed to give any advantage to the
+      Russian army, but might in other circumstances have led to its
+      destruction. What would have happened had Moscow not burned down? If Murat
+      had not lost sight of the Russians? If Napoleon had not remained inactive?
+      If the Russian army at Krásnaya Pakhrá had given battle as Bennigsen and
+      Barclay advised? What would have happened had the French attacked the
+      Russians while they were marching beyond the Pakhrá? What would have
+      happened if on approaching Tarútino, Napoleon had attacked the Russians
+      with but a tenth of the energy he had shown when he attacked them at
+      Smolénsk? What would have happened had the French moved on Petersburg?...
+      In any of these eventualities the flank march that brought salvation might
+      have proved disastrous.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The third and most incomprehensible thing is that people studying history
+      deliberately avoid seeing that this flank march cannot be attributed to
+      any one man, that no one ever foresaw it, and that in reality, like the
+      retreat from Filí, it did not suggest itself to anyone in its entirety,
+      but resulted—moment by moment, step by step, event by event—from
+      an endless number of most diverse circumstances and was only seen in its
+      entirety when it had been accomplished and belonged to the past.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the council at Filí the prevailing thought in the minds of the Russian
+      commanders was the one naturally suggesting itself, namely, a direct
+      retreat by the Nízhni road. In proof of this there is the fact that the
+      majority of the council voted for such a retreat, and above all there is
+      the well-known conversation after the council, between the commander in
+      chief and Lanskóy, who was in charge of the commissariat department.
+      Lanskóy informed the commander in chief that the army supplies were for
+      the most part stored along the Oká in the Túla and Ryazán provinces, and
+      that if they retreated on Nízhni the army would be separated from its
+      supplies by the broad river Oká, which cannot be crossed early in winter.
+      This was the first indication of the necessity of deviating from what had
+      previously seemed the most natural course—a direct retreat on
+      Nízhni-Nóvgorod. The army turned more to the south, along the Ryazán road
+      and nearer to its supplies. Subsequently the inactivity of the French (who
+      even lost sight of the Russian army), concern for the safety of the
+      arsenal at Túla, and especially the advantages of drawing nearer to its
+      supplies caused the army to turn still further south to the Túla road.
+      Having crossed over, by a forced march, to the Túla road beyond the
+      Pakhrá, the Russian commanders intended to remain at Podólsk and had no
+      thought of the Tarútino position; but innumerable circumstances and the
+      reappearance of French troops who had for a time lost touch with the
+      Russians, and projects of giving battle, and above all the abundance of
+      provisions in Kalúga province, obliged our army to turn still more to the
+      south and to cross from the Túla to the Kalúga road and go to Tarútino,
+      which was between the roads along which those supplies lay. Just as it is
+      impossible to say when it was decided to abandon Moscow, so it is
+      impossible to say precisely when, or by whom, it was decided to move to
+      Tarútino. Only when the army had got there, as the result of innumerable
+      and varying forces, did people begin to assure themselves that they had
+      desired this movement and long ago foreseen its result.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0281"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The famous flank movement merely consisted in this: after the advance of
+      the French had ceased, the Russian army, which had been continually
+      retreating straight back from the invaders, deviated from that direct
+      course and, not finding itself pursued, was naturally drawn toward the
+      district where supplies were abundant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If instead of imagining to ourselves commanders of genius leading the
+      Russian army, we picture that army without any leaders, it could not have
+      done anything but make a return movement toward Moscow, describing an arc
+      in the direction where most provisions were to be found and where the
+      country was richest.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That movement from the Nízhni to the Ryazán, Túla, and Kalúga roads was so
+      natural that even the Russian marauders moved in that direction, and
+      demands were sent from Petersburg for Kutúzov to take his army that way.
+      At Tarútino Kutúzov received what was almost a reprimand from the Emperor
+      for having moved his army along the Ryazán road, and the Emperor’s letter
+      indicated to him the very position he had already occupied near Kalúga.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having rolled like a ball in the direction of the impetus given by the
+      whole campaign and by the battle of Borodinó, the Russian army—when
+      the strength of that impetus was exhausted and no fresh push was received—assumed
+      the position natural to it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov’s merit lay, not in any strategic maneuver of genius, as it is
+      called, but in the fact that he alone understood the significance of what
+      had happened. He alone then understood the meaning of the French army’s
+      inactivity, he alone continued to assert that the battle of Borodinó had
+      been a victory, he alone—who as commander in chief might have been
+      expected to be eager to attack—employed his whole strength to
+      restrain the Russian army from useless engagements.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The beast wounded at Borodinó was lying where the fleeing hunter had left
+      him; but whether he was still alive, whether he was strong and merely
+      lying low, the hunter did not know. Suddenly the beast was heard to moan.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The moan of that wounded beast (the French army) which betrayed its
+      calamitous condition was the sending of Lauriston to Kutúzov’s camp with
+      overtures for peace.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon, with his usual assurance that whatever entered his head was
+      right, wrote to Kutúzov the first words that occurred to him, though they
+      were meaningless.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      MONSIEUR LE PRINCE KOUTOUZOV: I am sending one of my adjutants-general to
+      discuss several interesting questions with you. I beg your Highness to
+      credit what he says to you, <i>especially when he expresses the sentiment of
+      esteem and special regard I have long entertained for your person. This
+      letter having no other object, I pray God, monsieur le prince Koutouzov,
+      to keep you in His holy and gracious protection!</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      NAPOLEON
+    </p>
+<p>
+      MOSCOW, OCTOBER 30, 1812
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov replied: “I should be cursed by posterity were I looked on as the
+      initiator of a settlement of any sort. <i>Such is the present spirit of my
+      nation</i>.” But he continued to exert all his powers to restrain his troops
+      from attacking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the month that the French troops were pillaging in Moscow and the
+      Russian troops were quietly encamped at Tarútino, a change had taken place
+      in the relative strength of the two armies—both in spirit and in
+      number—as a result of which the superiority had passed to the
+      Russian side. Though the condition and numbers of the French army were
+      unknown to the Russians, as soon as that change occurred the need of
+      attacking at once showed itself by countless signs. These signs were:
+      Lauriston’s mission; the abundance of provisions at Tarútino; the reports
+      coming in from all sides of the inactivity and disorder of the French; the
+      flow of recruits to our regiments; the fine weather; the long rest the
+      Russian soldiers had enjoyed, and the impatience to do what they had been
+      assembled for, which usually shows itself in an army that has been
+      resting; curiosity as to what the French army, so long lost sight of, was
+      doing; the boldness with which our outposts now scouted close up to the
+      French stationed at Tarútino; the news of easy successes gained by
+      peasants and guerrilla troops over the French, the envy aroused by this;
+      the desire for revenge that lay in the heart of every Russian as long as
+      the French were in Moscow, and (above all) a dim consciousness in every
+      soldier’s mind that the relative strength of the armies had changed and
+      that the advantage was now on our side. There was a substantial change in
+      the relative strength, and an advance had become inevitable. And at once,
+      as a clock begins to strike and chime as soon as the minute hand has
+      completed a full circle, this change was shown by an increased activity,
+      whirring, and chiming in the higher spheres.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0282"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The Russian army was commanded by Kutúzov and his staff, and also by the
+      Emperor from Petersburg. Before the news of the abandonment of Moscow had
+      been received in Petersburg, a detailed plan of the whole campaign had
+      been drawn up and sent to Kutúzov for his guidance. Though this plan had
+      been drawn up on the supposition that Moscow was still in our hands, it
+      was approved by the staff and accepted as a basis for action. Kutúzov only
+      replied that movements arranged from a distance were always difficult to
+      execute. So fresh instructions were sent for the solution of difficulties
+      that might be encountered, as well as fresh people who were to watch
+      Kutúzov’s actions and report upon them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Besides this, the whole staff of the Russian army was now reorganized. The
+      posts left vacant by Bagratión, who had been killed, and by Barclay, who
+      had gone away in dudgeon, had to be filled. Very serious consideration was
+      given to the question whether it would be better to put A in B’s place and
+      B in D’s, or on the contrary to put D in A’s place, and so on—as if
+      anything more than A’s or B’s satisfaction depended on this.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As a result of the hostility between Kutúzov and Bennigsen, his Chief of
+      Staff, the presence of confidential representatives of the Emperor, and
+      these transfers, a more than usually complicated play of parties was going
+      on among the staff of the army. A was undermining B, D was undermining C,
+      and so on in all possible combinations and permutations. In all these
+      plottings the subject of intrigue was generally the conduct of the war,
+      which all these men believed they were directing; but this affair of the
+      war went on independently of them, as it had to go: that is, never in the
+      way people devised, but flowing always from the essential attitude of the
+      masses. Only in the highest spheres did all these schemes, crossings, and
+      interminglings appear to be a true reflection of what had to happen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Prince Michael Ilariónovich! (wrote the Emperor on the second of October
+      in a letter that reached Kutúzov after the battle at Tarútino) Since
+      September 2 Moscow has been in the hands of the enemy. Your last reports
+      were written on the twentieth, and during all this time not only has no
+      action been taken against the enemy or for the relief of the ancient
+      capital, but according to your last report you have even retreated
+      farther. Sérpukhov is already occupied by an enemy detachment and Túla
+      with its famous arsenal, so indispensable to the army, is in danger. From
+      General Wintzingerode’s reports, I see that an enemy corps of ten thousand
+      men is moving on the Petersburg road. Another corps of several thousand
+      men is moving on Dmítrov. A third has advanced along the Vladímir road,
+      and a fourth, rather considerable detachment is stationed between Rúza and
+      Mozháysk. Napoleon himself was in Moscow as late as the twenty-fifth. In
+      view of all this information, when the enemy has scattered his forces in
+      large detachments, and with Napoleon and his Guards in Moscow, is it
+      possible that the enemy’s forces confronting you are so considerable as
+      not to allow of your taking the offensive? On the contrary, he is probably
+      pursuing you with detachments, or at most with an army corps much weaker
+      than the army entrusted to you. It would seem that, availing yourself of
+      these circumstances, you might advantageously attack a weaker one and
+      annihilate him, or at least oblige him to retreat, retaining in our hands
+      an important part of the provinces now occupied by the enemy, and thereby
+      averting danger from Túla and other towns in the interior. You will be
+      responsible if the enemy is able to direct a force of any size against
+      Petersburg to threaten this capital in which it has not been possible to
+      retain many troops; for with the army entrusted to you, and acting with
+      resolution and energy, you have ample means to avert this fresh calamity.
+      Remember that you have still to answer to our offended country for the
+      loss of Moscow. You have experienced my readiness to reward you. That
+      readiness will not weaken in me, but I and Russia have a right to expect
+      from you all the zeal, firmness, and success which your intellect,
+      military talent, and the courage of the troops you command justify us in
+      expecting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      But by the time this letter, which proved that the real relation of the
+      forces had already made itself felt in Petersburg, was dispatched, Kutúzov
+      had found himself unable any longer to restrain the army he commanded from
+      attacking and a battle had taken place.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the second of October a Cossack, Shapoválov, who was out scouting,
+      killed one hare and wounded another. Following the wounded hare he made
+      his way far into the forest and came upon the left flank of Murat’s army,
+      encamped there without any precautions. The Cossack laughingly told his
+      comrades how he had almost fallen into the hands of the French. A cornet,
+      hearing the story, informed his commander.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Cossack was sent for and questioned. The Cossack officers wished to
+      take advantage of this chance to capture some horses, but one of the
+      superior officers, who was acquainted with the higher authorities,
+      reported the incident to a general on the staff. The state of things on
+      the staff had of late been exceedingly strained. Ermólov had been to see
+      Bennigsen a few days previously and had entreated him to use his influence
+      with the commander in chief to induce him to take the offensive.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If I did not know you I should think you did not want what you are asking
+      for. I need only advise anything and his Highness is sure to do the
+      opposite,” replied Bennigsen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Cossack’s report, confirmed by horse patrols who were sent out, was
+      the final proof that events had matured. The tightly coiled spring was
+      released, the clock began to whirr and the chimes to play. Despite all his
+      supposed power, his intellect, his experience, and his knowledge of men,
+      Kutúzov—having taken into consideration the Cossack’s report, a note
+      from Bennigsen who sent personal reports to the Emperor, the wishes he
+      supposed the Emperor to hold, and the fact that all the generals expressed
+      the same wish—could no longer check the inevitable movement, and
+      gave the order to do what he regarded as useless and harmful—gave
+      his approval, that is, to the accomplished fact.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0283"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Bennigsen’s note and the Cossack’s information that the left flank of the
+      French was unguarded were merely final indications that it was necessary
+      to order an attack, and it was fixed for the fifth of October.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the morning of the fourth of October Kutúzov signed the dispositions.
+      Toll read them to Ermólov, asking him to attend to the further
+      arrangements.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All right—all right. I haven’t time just now,” replied Ermólov, and
+      left the hut.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The dispositions drawn up by Toll were very good. As in the Austerlitz
+      dispositions, it was written—though not in German this time:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The First Column will march here and here,” “the Second Column will march
+      there and there,” and so on; and on paper, all these columns arrived at
+      their places at the appointed time and destroyed the enemy. Everything had
+      been admirably thought out as is usual in dispositions, and as is always
+      the case, not a single column reached its place at the appointed time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the necessary number of copies of the dispositions had been prepared,
+      an officer was summoned and sent to deliver them to Ermólov to deal with.
+      A young officer of the Horse Guards, Kutúzov’s orderly, pleased at the
+      importance of the mission entrusted to him, went to Ermólov’s quarters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Gone away,” said Ermólov’s orderly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The officer of the Horse Guards went to a general with whom Ermólov was
+      often to be found.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, and the general’s out too.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The officer, mounting his horse, rode off to someone else.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, he’s gone out.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If only they don’t make me responsible for this delay! What a nuisance it
+      is!” thought the officer, and he rode round the whole camp. One man said
+      he had seen Ermólov ride past with some other generals, others said he
+      must have returned home. The officer searched till six o’clock in the
+      evening without even stopping to eat. Ermólov was nowhere to be found and
+      no one knew where he was. The officer snatched a little food at a
+      comrade’s, and rode again to the vanguard to find Milorádovich.
+      Milorádovich too was away, but here he was told that he had gone to a ball
+      at General Kíkin’s and that Ermólov was probably there too.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But where is it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, there, over at Échkino,” said a Cossack officer, pointing to a
+      country house in the far distance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What, outside our line?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “They’ve put two regiments as outposts, and they’re having such a spree
+      there, it’s awful! Two bands and three sets of singers!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The officer rode out beyond our lines to Échkino. While still at a
+      distance he heard as he rode the merry sounds of a soldier’s dance song
+      proceeding from the house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “In the meadows... in the meadows!” he heard, accompanied by whistling and
+      the sound of a <i>torban</i>, drowned every now and then by shouts. These sounds
+      made his spirits rise, but at the same time he was afraid that he would be
+      blamed for not having executed sooner the important order entrusted to
+      him. It was already past eight o’clock. He dismounted and went up into the
+      porch of a large country house which had remained intact between the
+      Russian and French forces. In the refreshment room and the hall, footmen
+      were bustling about with wine and viands. Groups of singers stood outside
+      the windows. The officer was admitted and immediately saw all the chief
+      generals of the army together, and among them Ermólov’s big imposing
+      figure. They all had their coats unbuttoned and were standing in a
+      semicircle with flushed and animated faces, laughing loudly. In the middle
+      of the room a short handsome general with a red face was dancing the
+      <i>trepák</i> with much spirit and agility.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ha, ha, ha! Bravo, Nicholas Iványch! Ha, ha, ha!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The officer felt that by arriving with important orders at such a moment
+      he was doubly to blame, and he would have preferred to wait; but one of
+      the generals espied him and, hearing what he had come about, informed
+      Ermólov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Ermólov came forward with a frown on his face and, hearing what the
+      officer had to say, took the papers from him without a word.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      “You think he went off just by chance?” said a comrade, who was on the
+      staff that evening, to the officer of the Horse Guards, referring to
+      Ermólov. “It was a trick. It was done on purpose to get Konovnítsyn into
+      trouble. You’ll see what a mess there’ll be tomorrow.”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0284"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Next day the decrepit Kutúzov, having given orders to be called early,
+      said his prayers, dressed, and, with an unpleasant consciousness of having
+      to direct a battle he did not approve of, got into his <i>calèche</i> and drove
+      from Letashóvka (a village three and a half miles from Tarútino) to the
+      place where the attacking columns were to meet. He sat in the <i>calèche</i>,
+      dozing and waking up by turns, and listening for any sound of firing on
+      the right as an indication that the action had begun. But all was still
+      quiet. A damp dull autumn morning was just dawning. On approaching
+      Tarútino Kutúzov noticed cavalrymen leading their horses to water across
+      the road along which he was driving. Kutúzov looked at them searchingly,
+      stopped his carriage, and inquired what regiment they belonged to. They
+      belonged to a column that should have been far in front and in ambush long
+      before then. “It may be a mistake,” thought the old commander in chief.
+      But a little further on he saw infantry regiments with their arms piled
+      and the soldiers, only partly dressed, eating their rye porridge and
+      carrying fuel. He sent for an officer. The officer reported that no order
+      to advance had been received.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How! Not rec...” Kutúzov began, but checked himself immediately and sent
+      for a senior officer. Getting out of his <i>calèche</i>, he waited with drooping
+      head and breathing heavily, pacing silently up and down. When Eýkhen, the
+      officer of the general staff whom he had summoned, appeared, Kutúzov went
+      purple in the face, not because that officer was to blame for the mistake,
+      but because he was an object of sufficient importance for him to vent his
+      wrath on. Trembling and panting the old man fell into that state of fury
+      in which he sometimes used to roll on the ground, and he fell upon Eýkhen,
+      threatening him with his hands, shouting and loading him with gross abuse.
+      Another man, Captain Brózin, who happened to turn up and who was not at
+      all to blame, suffered the same fate.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What sort of another blackguard are you? I’ll have you shot! Scoundrels!”
+       yelled Kutúzov in a hoarse voice, waving his arms and reeling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was suffering physically. He, the commander in chief, a Serene Highness
+      who everybody said possessed powers such as no man had ever had in Russia,
+      to be placed in this position—made the laughingstock of the whole
+      army! “I needn’t have been in such a hurry to pray about today, or have
+      kept awake thinking everything over all night,” thought he to himself.
+      “When I was a chit of an officer no one would have dared to mock me so...
+      and now!” He was in a state of physical suffering as if from corporal
+      punishment, and could not avoid expressing it by cries of anger and
+      distress. But his strength soon began to fail him, and looking about him,
+      conscious of having said much that was amiss, he again got into his
+      <i>calèche</i> and drove back in silence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His wrath, once expended, did not return, and blinking feebly he listened
+      to excuses and self-justifications (Ermólov did not come to see him till
+      the next day) and to the insistence of Bennigsen, Konovnítsyn, and Toll
+      that the movement that had miscarried should be executed next day. And
+      once more Kutúzov had to consent.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0285"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Next day the troops assembled in their appointed places in the evening and
+      advanced during the night. It was an autumn night with dark purple clouds,
+      but no rain. The ground was damp but not muddy, and the troops advanced
+      noiselessly, only occasionally a jingling of the artillery could be
+      faintly heard. The men were forbidden to talk out loud, to smoke their
+      pipes, or to strike a light, and they tried to prevent their horses
+      neighing. The secrecy of the undertaking heightened its charm and they
+      marched gaily. Some columns, supposing they had reached their destination,
+      halted, piled arms, and settled down on the cold ground, but the majority
+      marched all night and arrived at places where they evidently should not
+      have been.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only Count Orlóv-Denísov with his Cossacks (the least important detachment
+      of all) got to his appointed place at the right time. This detachment
+      halted at the outskirts of a forest, on the path leading from the village
+      of Stromílova to Dmítrovsk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Toward dawn, Count Orlóv-Denísov, who had dozed off, was awakened by a
+      deserter from the French army being brought to him. This was a Polish
+      sergeant of Poniatowski’s corps, who explained in Polish that he had come
+      over because he had been slighted in the service: that he ought long ago
+      to have been made an officer, that he was braver than any of them, and so
+      he had left them and wished to pay them out. He said that Murat was
+      spending the night less than a mile from where they were, and that if they
+      would let him have a convoy of a hundred men he would capture him alive.
+      Count Orlóv-Denísov consulted his fellow officers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The offer was too tempting to be refused. Everyone volunteered to go and
+      everybody advised making the attempt. After much disputing and arguing,
+      Major-General Grékov with two Cossack regiments decided to go with the
+      Polish sergeant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now, remember,” said Count Orlóv-Denísov to the sergeant at parting, “if
+      you have been lying I’ll have you hanged like a dog; but if it’s true you
+      shall have a hundred gold pieces!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Without replying, the sergeant, with a resolute air, mounted and rode away
+      with Grékov whose men had quickly assembled. They disappeared into the
+      forest, and Count Orlóv-Denísov, having seen Grékov off, returned,
+      shivering from the freshness of the early dawn and excited by what he had
+      undertaken on his own responsibility, and began looking at the enemy camp,
+      now just visible in the deceptive light of dawn and the dying campfires.
+      Our columns ought to have begun to appear on an open declivity to his
+      right. He looked in that direction, but though the columns would have been
+      visible quite far off, they were not to be seen. It seemed to the count
+      that things were beginning to stir in the French camp, and his
+      keen-sighted adjutant confirmed this.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, it is really too late,” said Count Orlóv, looking at the camp.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As often happens when someone we have trusted is no longer before our
+      eyes, it suddenly seemed quite clear and obvious to him that the sergeant
+      was an impostor, that he had lied, and that the whole Russian attack would
+      be ruined by the absence of those two regiments, which he would lead away
+      heaven only knew where. How could one capture a commander in chief from
+      among such a mass of troops!
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am sure that rascal was lying,” said the count.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They can still be called back,” said one of his suite, who like Count
+      Orlóv felt distrustful of the adventure when he looked at the enemy’s
+      camp.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh? Really... what do you think? Should we let them go on or not?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Will you have them fetched back?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Fetch them back, fetch them back!” said Count Orlóv with sudden
+      determination, looking at his watch. “It will be too late. It is quite
+      light.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the adjutant galloped through the forest after Grékov. When Grékov
+      returned, Count Orlóv-Denísov, excited both by the abandoned attempt and
+      by vainly awaiting the infantry columns that still did not appear, as well
+      as by the proximity of the enemy, resolved to advance. All his men felt
+      the same excitement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mount!” he commanded in a whisper. The men took their places and crossed
+      themselves.... “Forward, with God’s aid!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Hurrah-ah-ah!” reverberated in the forest, and the Cossack companies,
+      trailing their lances and advancing one after another as if poured out of
+      a sack, dashed gaily across the brook toward the camp.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One desperate, frightened yell from the first French soldier who saw the
+      Cossacks, and all who were in the camp, undressed and only just waking up,
+      ran off in all directions, abandoning cannons, muskets, and horses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Had the Cossacks pursued the French, without heeding what was behind and
+      around them, they would have captured Murat and everything there. That was
+      what the officers desired. But it was impossible to make the Cossacks
+      budge when once they had got booty and prisoners. None of them listened to
+      orders. Fifteen hundred prisoners and thirty-eight guns were taken on the
+      spot, besides standards and (what seemed most important to the Cossacks)
+      horses, saddles, horsecloths, and the like. All this had to be dealt with,
+      the prisoners and guns secured, the booty divided—not without some
+      shouting and even a little fighting among themselves—and it was on
+      this that the Cossacks all busied themselves.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French, not being farther pursued, began to recover themselves: they
+      formed into detachments and began firing. Orlóv-Denísov, still waiting for
+      the other columns to arrive, advanced no further.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Meantime, according to the dispositions which said that “the First Column
+      will march” and so on, the infantry of the belated columns, commanded by
+      Bennigsen and directed by Toll, had started in due order and, as always
+      happens, had got somewhere, but not to their appointed places. As always
+      happens the men, starting cheerfully, began to halt; murmurs were heard,
+      there was a sense of confusion, and finally a backward movement. Adjutants
+      and generals galloped about, shouted, grew angry, quarreled, said they had
+      come quite wrong and were late, gave vent to a little abuse, and at last
+      gave it all up and went forward, simply to get somewhere. “We shall get
+      somewhere or other!” And they did indeed get somewhere, though not to
+      their right places; a few eventually even got to their right place, but
+      too late to be of any use and only in time to be fired at. Toll, who in
+      this battle played the part of Weyrother at Austerlitz, galloped
+      assiduously from place to place, finding everything upside down
+      everywhere. Thus he stumbled on Bagovút’s corps in a wood when it was
+      already broad daylight, though the corps should long before have joined
+      Orlóv-Denísov. Excited and vexed by the failure and supposing that someone
+      must be responsible for it, Toll galloped up to the commander of the corps
+      and began upbraiding him severely, saying that he ought to be shot.
+      General Bagovút, a fighting old soldier of placid temperament, being also
+      upset by all the delay, confusion, and cross-purposes, fell into a rage to
+      everybody’s surprise and quite contrary to his usual character and said
+      disagreeable things to Toll.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I prefer not to take lessons from anyone, but I can die with my men as
+      well as anybody,” he said, and advanced with a single division.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Coming out onto a field under the enemy’s fire, this brave general went
+      straight ahead, leading his men under fire, without considering in his
+      agitation whether going into action now, with a single division, would be
+      of any use or no. Danger, cannon balls, and bullets were just what he
+      needed in his angry mood. One of the first bullets killed him, and other
+      bullets killed many of his men. And his division remained under fire for
+      some time quite uselessly.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0286"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Meanwhile another column was to have attacked the French from the front,
+      but Kutúzov accompanied that column. He well knew that nothing but
+      confusion would come of this battle undertaken against his will, and as
+      far as was in his power held the troops back. He did not advance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He rode silently on his small gray horse, indolently answering suggestions
+      that they should attack.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The word <i>attack</i> is always on your tongue, but you don’t see
+      that we are unable to execute complicated maneuvers,” said he to
+      Milorádovich who asked permission to advance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We couldn’t take Murat prisoner this morning or get to the place in time,
+      and nothing can be done now!” he replied to someone else.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Kutúzov was informed that at the French rear—where according to
+      the reports of the Cossacks there had previously been nobody—there
+      were now two battalions of Poles, he gave a sidelong glance at Ermólov who
+      was behind him and to whom he had not spoken since the previous day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You see! They are asking to attack and making plans of all kinds, but as
+      soon as one gets to business nothing is ready, and the enemy, forewarned,
+      takes measures accordingly.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Ermólov screwed up his eyes and smiled faintly on hearing these words. He
+      understood that for him the storm had blown over, and that Kutúzov would
+      content himself with that hint.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He’s having a little fun at my expense,” said Ermólov softly, nudging
+      with his knee Raévski who was at his side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Soon after this, Ermólov moved up to Kutúzov and respectfully remarked:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is not too late yet, your Highness—the enemy has not gone away—if
+      you were to order an attack! If not, the Guards will not so much as see a
+      little smoke.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov did not reply, but when they reported to him that Murat’s troops
+      were in retreat he ordered an advance, though at every hundred paces he
+      halted for three quarters of an hour.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The whole battle consisted in what Orlóv-Denísov’s Cossacks had done: the
+      rest of the army merely lost some hundreds of men uselessly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In consequence of this battle Kutúzov received a diamond decoration, and
+      Bennigsen some diamonds and a hundred thousand rubles, others also
+      received pleasant recognitions corresponding to their various grades, and
+      following the battle fresh changes were made in the staff.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s how everything is done with us, all topsy-turvy!” said the Russian
+      officers and generals after the Tarútino battle, letting it be understood
+      that some fool there is doing things all wrong but that we ourselves
+      should not have done so, just as people speak today. But people who talk
+      like that either do not know what they are talking about or deliberately
+      deceive themselves. No battle—Tarútino, Borodinó, or Austerlitz—takes
+      place as those who planned it anticipated. That is an essential condition.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A countless number of free forces (for nowhere is man freer than during a
+      battle, where it is a question of life and death) influence the course
+      taken by the fight, and that course never can be known in advance and
+      never coincides with the direction of any one force.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If many simultaneously and variously directed forces act on a given body,
+      the direction of its motion cannot coincide with any one of those forces,
+      but will always be a mean—what in mechanics is represented by the
+      diagonal of a parallelogram of forces.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If in the descriptions given by historians, especially French ones, we
+      find their wars and battles carried out in accordance with previously
+      formed plans, the only conclusion to be drawn is that those descriptions
+      are false.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The battle of Tarútino obviously did not attain the aim Toll had in view—to
+      lead the troops into action in the order prescribed by the dispositions;
+      nor that which Count Orlóv-Denísov may have had in view—to take
+      Murat prisoner; nor the result of immediately destroying the whole corps,
+      which Bennigsen and others may have had in view; nor the aim of the
+      officer who wished to go into action to distinguish himself; nor that of
+      the Cossack who wanted more booty than he got, and so on. But if the aim
+      of the battle was what actually resulted and what all the Russians of that
+      day desired—to drive the French out of Russia and destroy their army—it
+      is quite clear that the battle of Tarútino, just because of its
+      incongruities, was exactly what was wanted at that stage of the campaign.
+      It would be difficult and even impossible to imagine any result more
+      opportune than the actual outcome of this battle. With a minimum of effort
+      and insignificant losses, despite the greatest confusion, the most
+      important results of the whole campaign were attained: the transition from
+      retreat to advance, an exposure of the weakness of the French, and the
+      administration of that shock which Napoleon’s army had only awaited to
+      begin its flight.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0287"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Napoleon enters Moscow after the brilliant victory <i>de la Moskowa</i>; there
+      can be no doubt about the victory for the battlefield remains in the hands
+      of the French. The Russians retreat and abandon their ancient capital.
+      Moscow, abounding in provisions, arms, munitions, and incalculable wealth,
+      is in Napoleon’s hands. The Russian army, only half the strength of the
+      French, does not make a single attempt to attack for a whole month.
+      Napoleon’s position is most brilliant. He can either fall on the Russian
+      army with double its strength and destroy it; negotiate an advantageous
+      peace, or in case of a refusal make a menacing move on Petersburg, or
+      even, in the case of a reverse, return to Smolénsk or Vílna; or remain in
+      Moscow; in short, no special genius would seem to be required to retain
+      the brilliant position the French held at that time. For that, only very
+      simple and easy steps were necessary: not to allow the troops to loot, to
+      prepare winter clothing—of which there was sufficient in Moscow for
+      the whole army—and methodically to collect the provisions, of which
+      (according to the French historians) there were enough in Moscow to supply
+      the whole army for six months. Yet Napoleon, that greatest of all
+      geniuses, who the historians declare had control of the army, took none of
+      these steps.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He not merely did nothing of the kind, but on the contrary he used his
+      power to select the most foolish and ruinous of all the courses open to
+      him. Of all that Napoleon might have done: wintering in Moscow, advancing
+      on Petersburg or on Nízhni-Nóvgorod, or retiring by a more northerly or
+      more southerly route (say by the road Kutúzov afterwards took), nothing
+      more stupid or disastrous can be imagined than what he actually did. He
+      remained in Moscow till October, letting the troops plunder the city;
+      then, hesitating whether to leave a garrison behind him, he quitted
+      Moscow, approached Kutúzov without joining battle, turned to the right and
+      reached Málo-Yaroslávets, again without attempting to break through and
+      take the road Kutúzov took, but retiring instead to Mozháysk along the
+      devastated Smolénsk road. Nothing more stupid than that could have been
+      devised, or more disastrous for the army, as the sequel showed. Had
+      Napoleon’s aim been to destroy his army, the most skillful strategist
+      could hardly have devised any series of actions that would so completely
+      have accomplished that purpose, independently of anything the Russian army
+      might do.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon, the man of genius, did this! But to say that he destroyed his
+      army because he wished to, or because he was very stupid, would be as
+      unjust as to say that he had brought his troops to Moscow because he
+      wished to and because he was very clever and a genius.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In both cases his personal activity, having no more force than the
+      personal activity of any soldier, merely coincided with the laws that
+      guided the event.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The historians quite falsely represent Napoleon’s faculties as having
+      weakened in Moscow, and do so only because the results did not justify his
+      actions. He employed all his ability and strength to do the best he could
+      for himself and his army, as he had done previously and as he did
+      subsequently in 1813. His activity at that time was no less astounding
+      than it was in Egypt, in Italy, in Austria, and in Prussia. We do not know
+      for certain in how far his genius was genuine in Egypt—where forty
+      centuries looked down upon his grandeur—for his great exploits there
+      are all told us by Frenchmen. We cannot accurately estimate his genius in
+      Austria or Prussia, for we have to draw our information from French or
+      German sources, and the incomprehensible surrender of whole corps without
+      fighting and of fortresses without a siege must incline Germans to
+      recognize his genius as the only explanation of the war carried on in
+      Germany. But we, thank God, have no need to recognize his genius in order
+      to hide our shame. We have paid for the right to look at the matter
+      plainly and simply, and we will not abandon that right.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His activity in Moscow was as amazing and as full of genius as elsewhere.
+      Order after order and plan after plan were issued by him from the time he
+      entered Moscow till the time he left it. The absence of citizens and of a
+      deputation, and even the burning of Moscow, did not disconcert him. He did
+      not lose sight either of the welfare of his army or of the doings of the
+      enemy, or of the welfare of the people of Russia, or of the direction of
+      affairs in Paris, or of diplomatic considerations concerning the terms of
+      the anticipated peace.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0288"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      With regard to military matters, Napoleon immediately on his entry into
+      Moscow gave General Sabastiani strict orders to observe the movements of
+      the Russian army, sent army corps out along the different roads, and
+      charged Murat to find Kutúzov. Then he gave careful directions about the
+      fortification of the Krémlin, and drew up a brilliant plan for a future
+      campaign over the whole map of Russia.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With regard to diplomatic questions, Napoleon summoned Captain Yákovlev,
+      who had been robbed and was in rags and did not know how to get out of
+      Moscow, minutely explained to him his whole policy and his magnanimity,
+      and having written a letter to the Emperor Alexander in which he
+      considered it his duty to inform his Friend and Brother that Rostopchín
+      had managed affairs badly in Moscow, he dispatched Yákovlev to Petersburg.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having similarly explained his views and his magnanimity to Tutólmin, he
+      dispatched that old man also to Petersburg to negotiate.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With regard to legal matters, immediately after the fires he gave orders
+      to find and execute the incendiaries. And the scoundrel Rostopchín was
+      punished by an order to burn down his houses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With regard to administrative matters, Moscow was granted a constitution.
+      A municipality was established and the following announcement issued:
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      INHABITANTS OF MOSCOW!
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Your misfortunes are cruel, but His Majesty the Emperor and King desires
+      to arrest their course. Terrible examples have taught you how he punishes
+      disobedience and crime. Strict measures have been taken to put an end to
+      disorder and to re-establish public security. A paternal administration,
+      chosen from among yourselves, will form your municipality or city
+      government. It will take care of you, of your needs, and of your welfare.
+      Its members will be distinguished by a red ribbon worn across the
+      shoulder, and the mayor of the city will wear a white belt as well. But
+      when not on duty they will only wear a red ribbon round the left arm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The city police is established on its former footing, and better order
+      already prevails in consequence of its activity. The government has
+      appointed two commissaries general, or chiefs of police, and twenty
+      commissaries or captains of wards have been appointed to the different
+      wards of the city. You will recognize them by the white ribbon they will
+      wear on the left arm. Several churches of different denominations are
+      open, and divine service is performed in them unhindered. Your fellow
+      citizens are returning every day to their homes and orders have been given
+      that they should find in them the help and protection due to their
+      misfortunes. These are the measures the government has adopted to
+      re-establish order and relieve your condition. But to achieve this aim it
+      is necessary that you should add your efforts and should, if possible,
+      forget the misfortunes you have suffered, should entertain the hope of a
+      less cruel fate, should be certain that inevitable and ignominious death
+      awaits those who make any attempt on your persons or on what remains of
+      your property, and finally that you should not doubt that these will be
+      safeguarded, since such is the will of the greatest and most just of
+      monarchs. Soldiers and citizens, of whatever nation you may be,
+      re-establish public confidence, the source of the welfare of a state, live
+      like brothers, render mutual aid and protection one to another, unite to
+      defeat the intentions of the evil-minded, obey the military and civil
+      authorities, and your tears will soon cease to flow!
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      With regard to supplies for the army, Napoleon decreed that all the troops
+      in turn should enter Moscow <i>à la maraude</i> * to obtain provisions for
+      themselves, so that the army might have its future provided for.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * As looters.
+</p>
+<p>
+      With regard to religion, Napoleon ordered the priests to be brought back
+      and services to be again performed in the churches.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With regard to commerce and to provisioning the army, the following was
+      placarded everywhere:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      PROCLAMATION
+    </p>
+<p>
+      You, peaceful inhabitants of Moscow, artisans and workmen whom misfortune
+      has driven from the city, and you scattered tillers of the soil, still
+      kept out in the fields by groundless fear, listen! Tranquillity is
+      returning to this capital and order is being restored in it. Your fellow
+      countrymen are emerging boldly from their hiding places on finding that
+      they are respected. Any violence to them or to their property is promptly
+      punished. His Majesty the Emperor and King protects them, and considers no
+      one among you his enemy except those who disobey his orders. He desires to
+      end your misfortunes and restore you to your homes and families. Respond,
+      therefore, to his benevolent intentions and come to us without fear.
+      Inhabitants, return with confidence to your abodes! You will soon find
+      means of satisfying your needs. Craftsmen and industrious artisans, return
+      to your work, your houses, your shops, where the protection of guards
+      awaits you! You shall receive proper pay for your work. And lastly you
+      too, peasants, come from the forests where you are hiding in terror,
+      return to your huts without fear, in full assurance that you will find
+      protection! Markets are established in the city where peasants can bring
+      their surplus supplies and the products of the soil. The government has
+      taken the following steps to ensure freedom of sale for them: (1) From
+      today, peasants, husbandmen, and those living in the neighborhood of
+      Moscow may without any danger bring their supplies of all kinds to two
+      appointed markets, of which one is on the Mokhováya Street and the other
+      at the Provision Market. (2) Such supplies will be bought from them at
+      such prices as seller and buyer may agree on, and if a seller is unable to
+      obtain a fair price he will be free to take his goods back to his village
+      and no one may hinder him under any pretense. (3) Sunday and Wednesday of
+      each week are appointed as the chief market days and to that end a
+      sufficient number of troops will be stationed along the highroads on
+      Tuesdays and Saturdays at such distances from the town as to protect the
+      carts. (4) Similar measures will be taken that peasants with their carts
+      and horses may meet with no hindrance on their return journey. (5) Steps
+      will immediately be taken to re-establish ordinary trading.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Inhabitants of the city and villages, and you, workingmen and artisans, to
+      whatever nation you belong, you are called on to carry out the paternal
+      intentions of His Majesty the Emperor and King and to co-operate with him
+      for the public welfare! Lay your respect and confidence at his feet and do
+      not delay to unite with us!
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      With the object of raising the spirits of the troops and of the people,
+      reviews were constantly held and rewards distributed. The Emperor rode
+      through the streets to comfort the inhabitants, and, despite his
+      preoccupation with state affairs, himself visited the theaters that were
+      established by his order.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In regard to philanthropy, the greatest virtue of crowned heads, Napoleon
+      also did all in his power. He caused the words <i>Maison de ma Mère</i> to be
+      inscribed on the charitable institutions, thereby combining tender filial
+      affection with the majestic benevolence of a monarch. He visited the
+      Foundling Hospital and, allowing the orphans saved by him to kiss his
+      white hands, graciously conversed with Tutólmin. Then, as Thiers
+      eloquently recounts, he ordered his soldiers to be paid in forged Russian
+      money which he had prepared: “Raising the use of these means by an act
+      worthy of himself and of the French army, he let relief be distributed to
+      those who had been burned out. But as food was too precious to be given to
+      foreigners, who were for the most part enemies, Napoleon preferred to
+      supply them with money with which to purchase food from outside, and had
+      paper rubles distributed to them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      With reference to army discipline, orders were continually being issued to
+      inflict severe punishment for the nonperformance of military duties and to
+      suppress robbery.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0289"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      But strange to say, all these measures, efforts, and plans—which
+      were not at all worse than others issued in similar circumstances—did
+      not affect the essence of the matter but, like the hands of a clock
+      detached from the mechanism, swung about in an arbitrary and aimless way
+      without engaging the cogwheels.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With reference to the military side—the plan of campaign—that
+      work of genius of which Thiers remarks that, “His genius never devised
+      anything more profound, more skillful, or more admirable,” and enters into
+      a polemic with M. Fain to prove that this work of genius must be referred
+      not to the fourth but to the fifteenth of October—that plan never
+      was or could be executed, for it was quite out of touch with the facts of
+      the case. The fortifying of the Krémlin, for which <i>la Mosquée</i> (as Napoleon
+      termed the church of Basil the Beatified) was to have been razed to the
+      ground, proved quite useless. The mining of the Krémlin only helped toward
+      fulfilling Napoleon’s wish that it should be blown up when he left Moscow—as
+      a child wants the floor on which he has hurt himself to be beaten. The
+      pursuit of the Russian army, about which Napoleon was so concerned,
+      produced an unheard-of result. The French generals lost touch with the
+      Russian army of sixty thousand men, and according to Thiers it was only
+      eventually found, like a lost pin, by the skill—and apparently the
+      genius—of Murat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With reference to diplomacy, all Napoleon’s arguments as to his
+      magnanimity and justice, both to Tutólmin and to Yákovlev (whose chief
+      concern was to obtain a greatcoat and a conveyance), proved useless;
+      Alexander did not receive these envoys and did not reply to their
+      embassage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With regard to legal matters, after the execution of the supposed
+      incendiaries the rest of Moscow burned down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With regard to administrative matters, the establishment of a municipality
+      did not stop the robberies and was only of use to certain people who
+      formed part of that municipality and under pretext of preserving order
+      looted Moscow or saved their own property from being looted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With regard to religion, as to which in Egypt matters had so easily been
+      settled by Napoleon’s visit to a mosque, no results were achieved. Two or
+      three priests who were found in Moscow did try to carry out Napoleon’s
+      wish, but one of them was slapped in the face by a French soldier while
+      conducting service, and a French official reported of another that: “The
+      priest whom I found and invited to say Mass cleaned and locked up the
+      church. That night the doors were again broken open, the padlocks smashed,
+      the books mutilated, and other disorders perpetrated.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      With reference to commerce, the proclamation to industrious workmen and to
+      peasants evoked no response. There were no industrious workmen, and the
+      peasants caught the commissaries who ventured too far out of town with the
+      proclamation and killed them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As to the theaters for the entertainment of the people and the troops,
+      these did not meet with success either. The theaters set up in the Krémlin
+      and in Posnyákov’s house were closed again at once because the actors and
+      actresses were robbed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Even philanthropy did not have the desired effect. The genuine as well as
+      the false paper money which flooded Moscow lost its value. The French,
+      collecting booty, cared only for gold. Not only was the paper money
+      valueless which Napoleon so graciously distributed to the unfortunate, but
+      even silver lost its value in relation to gold.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the most amazing example of the ineffectiveness of the orders given by
+      the authorities at that time was Napoleon’s attempt to stop the looting
+      and re-establish discipline.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This is what the army authorities were reporting:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Looting continues in the city despite the decrees against it. Order is
+      not yet restored and not a single merchant is carrying on trade in a
+      lawful manner. The sutlers alone venture to trade, and they sell stolen
+      goods.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The neighborhood of my ward continues to be pillaged by soldiers of the
+      3rd Corps who, not satisfied with taking from the unfortunate inhabitants
+      hiding in the cellars the little they have left, even have the ferocity to
+      wound them with their sabers, as I have repeatedly witnessed.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Nothing new, except that the soldiers are robbing and pillaging—October
+      9.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Robbery and pillaging continue. There is a band of thieves in our
+      district who ought to be arrested by a strong force—October 11.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The Emperor is extremely displeased that despite the strict orders to
+      stop pillage, parties of marauding Guards are continually seen returning
+      to the Krémlin. Among the Old Guard disorder and pillage were renewed more
+      violently than ever yesterday evening, last night, and today. The Emperor
+      sees with regret that the picked soldiers appointed to guard his person,
+      who should set an example of discipline, carry disobedience to such a
+      point that they break into the cellars and stores containing army
+      supplies. Others have disgraced themselves to the extent of disobeying
+      sentinels and officers, and have abused and beaten them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The Grand Marshal of the palace,” wrote the governor, “complains bitterly
+      that in spite of repeated orders, the soldiers continue to commit
+      nuisances in all the courtyards and even under the very windows of the
+      Emperor.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      That army, like a herd of cattle run wild and trampling underfoot the
+      provender which might have saved it from starvation, disintegrated and
+      perished with each additional day it remained in Moscow. But it did not go
+      away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It began to run away only when suddenly seized by a panic caused by the
+      capture of transport trains on the Smolénsk road, and by the battle of
+      Tarútino. The news of that battle of Tarútino, unexpectedly received by
+      Napoleon at a review, evoked in him a desire to punish the Russians
+      (Thiers says), and he issued the order for departure which the whole army
+      was demanding.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Fleeing from Moscow the soldiers took with them everything they had
+      stolen. Napoleon, too, carried away his own personal <i>trésor</i>, but on seeing
+      the baggage trains that impeded the army, he was (Thiers says)
+      horror-struck. And yet with his experience of war he did not order all the
+      superfluous vehicles to be burned, as he had done with those of a certain
+      marshal when approaching Moscow. He gazed at the <i>calèches</i> and carriages in
+      which soldiers were riding and remarked that it was a very good thing, as
+      those vehicles could be used to carry provisions, the sick, and the
+      wounded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The plight of the whole army resembled that of a wounded animal which
+      feels it is perishing and does not know what it is doing. To study the
+      skillful tactics and aims of Napoleon and his army from the time it
+      entered Moscow till it was destroyed is like studying the dying leaps and
+      shudders of a mortally wounded animal. Very often a wounded animal,
+      hearing a rustle, rushes straight at the hunter’s gun, runs forward and
+      back again, and hastens its own end. Napoleon, under pressure from his
+      whole army, did the same thing. The rustle of the battle of Tarútino
+      frightened the beast, and it rushed forward onto the hunter’s gun, reached
+      him, turned back, and finally—like any wild beast—ran back
+      along the most disadvantageous and dangerous path, where the old scent was
+      familiar.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the whole of that period Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the
+      leader of all these movements—as the figurehead of a ship may seem
+      to a savage to guide the vessel—acted like a child who, holding a
+      couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0290"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Early in the morning of the sixth of October Pierre went out of the shed,
+      and on returning stopped by the door to play with a little blue-gray dog,
+      with a long body and short bandy legs, that jumped about him. This little
+      dog lived in their shed, sleeping beside Karatáev at night; it sometimes
+      made excursions into the town but always returned again. Probably it had
+      never had an owner, and it still belonged to nobody and had no name. The
+      French called it Azor; the soldier who told stories called it Femgálka;
+      Karatáev and others called it Gray, or sometimes Flabby. Its lack of a
+      master, a name, or even of a breed or any definite color did not seem to
+      trouble the blue-gray dog in the least. Its furry tail stood up firm and
+      round as a plume, its bandy legs served it so well that it would often
+      gracefully lift a hind leg and run very easily and quickly on three legs,
+      as if disdaining to use all four. Everything pleased it. Now it would roll
+      on its back, yelping with delight, now bask in the sun with a thoughtful
+      air of importance, and now frolic about playing with a chip of wood or a
+      straw.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre’s attire by now consisted of a dirty torn shirt (the only remnant
+      of his former clothing), a pair of soldier’s trousers which by Karatáev’s
+      advice he tied with string round the ankles for warmth, and a peasant coat
+      and cap. Physically he had changed much during this time. He no longer
+      seemed stout, though he still had the appearance of solidity and strength
+      hereditary in his family. A beard and mustache covered the lower part of
+      his face, and a tangle of hair, infested with lice, curled round his head
+      like a cap. The look of his eyes was resolute, calm, and animatedly alert,
+      as never before. The former slackness which had shown itself even in his
+      eyes was now replaced by an energetic readiness for action and resistance.
+      His feet were bare.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre first looked down the field across which vehicles and horsemen were
+      passing that morning, then into the distance across the river, then at the
+      dog who was pretending to be in earnest about biting him, and then at his
+      bare feet which he placed with pleasure in various positions, moving his
+      dirty thick big toes. Every time he looked at his bare feet a smile of
+      animated self-satisfaction flitted across his face. The sight of them
+      reminded him of all he had experienced and learned during these weeks and
+      this recollection was pleasant to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For some days the weather had been calm and clear with slight frosts in
+      the mornings—what is called an “old wives’ summer.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In the sunshine the air was warm, and that warmth was particularly
+      pleasant with the invigorating freshness of the morning frost still in the
+      air.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On everything—far and near—lay the magic crystal glitter seen
+      only at that time of autumn. The Sparrow Hills were visible in the
+      distance, with the village, the church, and the large white house. The
+      bare trees, the sand, the bricks and roofs of the houses, the green church
+      spire, and the corners of the white house in the distance, all stood out
+      in the transparent air in most delicate outline and with unnatural
+      clearness. Near by could be seen the familiar ruins of a half-burned
+      mansion occupied by the French, with lilac bushes still showing dark green
+      beside the fence. And even that ruined and befouled house—which in
+      dull weather was repulsively ugly—seemed quietly beautiful now, in
+      the clear, motionless brilliance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A French corporal, with coat unbuttoned in a homely way, a skullcap on his
+      head, and a short pipe in his mouth, came from behind a corner of the shed
+      and approached Pierre with a friendly wink.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What sunshine, Monsieur Kiril!” (Their name for Pierre.) “Eh?
+      Just like spring!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And the corporal leaned against the door and offered Pierre his pipe,
+      though whenever he offered it Pierre always declined it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To be on the march in such weather...” he began.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre inquired what was being said about leaving, and the corporal told
+      him that nearly all the troops were starting and there ought to be an
+      order about the prisoners that day. Sokolóv, one of the soldiers in the
+      shed with Pierre, was dying, and Pierre told the corporal that something
+      should be done about him. The corporal replied that Pierre need not worry
+      about that as they had an ambulance and a permanent hospital and
+      arrangements would be made for the sick, and that in general everything
+      that could happen had been foreseen by the authorities.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Besides, Monsieur Kiril, you have only to say a word to the captain, you
+      know. He is a man who never forgets anything. Speak to the captain when he
+      makes his round, he will do anything for you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      (The captain of whom the corporal spoke often had long chats with Pierre
+      and showed him all sorts of favors.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “‘You see, St. Thomas,’ he said to me the other day. ‘Monsieur Kiril is a
+      man of education, who speaks French. He is a Russian seigneur who has had
+      misfortunes, but he is a man. He knows what’s what.... If he wants
+      anything and asks me, he won’t get a refusal. When one has studied, you
+      see, one likes education and well-bred people.’ It is for your sake I
+      mention it, Monsieur Kiril. The other day if it had not been for you that
+      affair would have ended ill.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And after chatting a while longer, the corporal went away. (The affair he
+      had alluded to had happened a few days before—a fight between the
+      prisoners and the French soldiers, in which Pierre had succeeded in
+      pacifying his comrades.) Some of the prisoners who had heard Pierre
+      talking to the corporal immediately asked what the Frenchman had said.
+      While Pierre was repeating what he had been told about the army leaving
+      Moscow, a thin, sallow, tattered French soldier came up to the door of the
+      shed. Rapidly and timidly raising his fingers to his forehead by way of
+      greeting, he asked Pierre whether the soldier Platoche to whom he had
+      given a shirt to sew was in that shed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A week before the French had had boot leather and linen issued to them,
+      which they had given out to the prisoners to make up into boots and shirts
+      for them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ready, ready, dear fellow!” said Karatáev, coming out with a neatly
+      folded shirt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Karatáev, on account of the warm weather and for convenience at work, was
+      wearing only trousers and a tattered shirt as black as soot. His hair was
+      bound round, workman fashion, with a wisp of lime-tree bast, and his round
+      face seemed rounder and pleasanter than ever.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A promise is own brother to performance! I said Friday and here it is,
+      ready,” said Platón, smiling and unfolding the shirt he had sewn.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Frenchman glanced around uneasily and then, as if overcoming his
+      hesitation, rapidly threw off his uniform and put on the shirt. He had a
+      long, greasy, flowered silk waistcoat next to his sallow, thin bare body,
+      but no shirt. He was evidently afraid the prisoners looking on would laugh
+      at him, and thrust his head into the shirt hurriedly. None of the
+      prisoners said a word.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “See, it fits well!” Platón kept repeating, pulling the shirt straight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Frenchman, having pushed his head and hands through, without raising
+      his eyes, looked down at the shirt and examined the seams.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You see, dear man, this is not a sewing shop, and I had no proper tools;
+      and, as they say, one needs a tool even to kill a louse,” said Platón with
+      one of his round smiles, obviously pleased with his work.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s good, quite good, thank you,” said the Frenchman, in French, “but
+      there must be some linen left over.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It will fit better still when it sets to your body,” said Karatáev, still
+      admiring his handiwork. “You’ll be nice and comfortable....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Thanks, thanks, old fellow.... But the bits left over?” said the
+      Frenchman again and smiled. He took out an assignation ruble note and gave
+      it to Karatáev. “But give me the pieces that are over.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre saw that Platón did not want to understand what the Frenchman was
+      saying, and he looked on without interfering. Karatáev thanked the
+      Frenchman for the money and went on admiring his own work. The Frenchman
+      insisted on having the pieces returned that were left over and asked
+      Pierre to translate what he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What does he want the bits for?” said Karatáev. “They’d make fine leg
+      bands for us. Well, never mind.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Karatáev, with a suddenly changed and saddened expression, took a
+      small bundle of scraps from inside his shirt and gave it to the Frenchman
+      without looking at him. “Oh dear!” muttered Karatáev and went away. The
+      Frenchman looked at the linen, considered for a moment, then looked
+      inquiringly at Pierre and, as if Pierre’s look had told him something,
+      suddenly blushed and shouted in a squeaky voice:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Platoche! Eh, Platoche! Keep them yourself!” And handing back the odd
+      bits he turned and went out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There, look at that,” said Karatáev, swaying his head. “People said they
+      were not Christians, but they too have souls. It’s what the old folk used
+      to say: ‘A sweating hand’s an open hand, a dry hand’s close.’ He’s naked,
+      but yet he’s given it back.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Karatáev smiled thoughtfully and was silent awhile looking at the pieces.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But they’ll make grand leg bands, dear friend,” he said, and went back
+      into the shed.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0291"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Four weeks had passed since Pierre had been taken prisoner and though the
+      French had offered to move him from the men’s to the officers’ shed, he
+      had stayed in the shed where he was first put.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In burned and devastated Moscow Pierre experienced almost the extreme
+      limits of privation a man can endure; but thanks to his physical strength
+      and health, of which he had till then been unconscious, and thanks
+      especially to the fact that the privations came so gradually that it was
+      impossible to say when they began, he endured his position not only
+      lightly but joyfully. And just at this time he obtained the tranquillity
+      and ease of mind he had formerly striven in vain to reach. He had long
+      sought in different ways that tranquillity of mind, that inner harmony
+      which had so impressed him in the soldiers at the battle of Borodinó. He
+      had sought it in philanthropy, in Freemasonry, in the dissipations of town
+      life, in wine, in heroic feats of self-sacrifice, and in romantic love for
+      Natásha; he had sought it by reasoning—and all these quests and
+      experiments had failed him. And now without thinking about it he had found
+      that peace and inner harmony only through the horror of death, through
+      privation, and through what he recognized in Karatáev.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Those dreadful moments he had lived through at the executions had as it
+      were forever washed away from his imagination and memory the agitating
+      thoughts and feelings that had formerly seemed so important. It did not
+      now occur to him to think of Russia, or the war, or politics, or Napoleon.
+      It was plain to him that all these things were no business of his, and
+      that he was not called on to judge concerning them and therefore could not
+      do so. “Russia and summer weather are not bound together,” he thought,
+      repeating words of Karatáev’s which he found strangely consoling. His
+      intention of killing Napoleon and his calculations of the cabalistic
+      number of the beast of the Apocalypse now seemed to him meaningless and
+      even ridiculous. His anger with his wife and anxiety that his name should
+      not be smirched now seemed not merely trivial but even amusing. What
+      concern was it of his that somewhere or other that woman was leading the
+      life she preferred? What did it matter to anybody, and especially to him,
+      whether or not they found out that their prisoner’s name was Count
+      Bezúkhov?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He now often remembered his conversation with Prince Andrew and quite
+      agreed with him, though he understood Prince Andrew’s thoughts somewhat
+      differently. Prince Andrew had thought and said that happiness could only
+      be negative, but had said it with a shade of bitterness and irony as
+      though he was really saying that all desire for positive happiness is
+      implanted in us merely to torment us and never be satisfied. But Pierre
+      believed it without any mental reservation. The absence of suffering, the
+      satisfaction of one’s needs and consequent freedom in the choice of one’s
+      occupation, that is, of one’s way of life, now seemed to Pierre to be
+      indubitably man’s highest happiness. Here and now for the first time he
+      fully appreciated the enjoyment of eating when he wanted to eat, drinking
+      when he wanted to drink, sleeping when he wanted to sleep, of warmth when
+      he was cold, of talking to a fellow man when he wished to talk and to hear
+      a human voice. The satisfaction of one’s needs—good food,
+      cleanliness, and freedom—now that he was deprived of all this,
+      seemed to Pierre to constitute perfect happiness; and the choice of
+      occupation, that is, of his way of life—now that that was so
+      restricted—seemed to him such an easy matter that he forgot that a
+      superfluity of the comforts of life destroys all joy in satisfying one’s
+      needs, while great freedom in the choice of occupation—such freedom
+      as his wealth, his education, and his social position had given him in his
+      own life—is just what makes the choice of occupation insolubly
+      difficult and destroys the desire and possibility of having an occupation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All Pierre’s daydreams now turned on the time when he would be free. Yet
+      subsequently, and for the rest of his life, he thought and spoke with
+      enthusiasm of that month of captivity, of those irrecoverable, strong,
+      joyful sensations, and chiefly of the complete peace of mind and inner
+      freedom which he experienced only during those weeks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When on the first day he got up early, went out of the shed at dawn, and
+      saw the cupolas and crosses of the New Convent of the Virgin still dark at
+      first, the hoarfrost on the dusty grass, the Sparrow Hills, and the wooded
+      banks above the winding river vanishing in the purple distance, when he
+      felt the contact of the fresh air and heard the noise of the crows flying
+      from Moscow across the field, and when afterwards light gleamed from the
+      east and the sun’s rim appeared solemnly from behind a cloud, and the
+      cupolas and crosses, the hoarfrost, the distance and the river, all began
+      to sparkle in the glad light—Pierre felt a new joy and strength in
+      life such as he had never before known. And this not only stayed with him
+      during the whole of his imprisonment, but even grew in strength as the
+      hardships of his position increased.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That feeling of alertness and of readiness for anything was still further
+      strengthened in him by the high opinion his fellow prisoners formed of him
+      soon after his arrival at the shed. With his knowledge of languages, the
+      respect shown him by the French, his simplicity, his readiness to give
+      anything asked of him (he received the allowance of three rubles a week
+      made to officers); with his strength, which he showed to the soldiers by
+      pressing nails into the walls of the hut; his gentleness to his
+      companions, and his capacity for sitting still and thinking without doing
+      anything (which seemed to them incomprehensible), he appeared to them a
+      rather mysterious and superior being. The very qualities that had been a
+      hindrance, if not actually harmful, to him in the world he had lived in—his
+      strength, his disdain for the comforts of life, his absent-mindedness and
+      simplicity—here among these people gave him almost the status of a
+      hero. And Pierre felt that their opinion placed responsibilities upon him.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0292"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The French evacuation began on the night between the sixth and seventh of
+      October: kitchens and sheds were dismantled, carts loaded, and troops and
+      baggage trains started.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At seven in the morning a French convoy in marching trim, wearing shakos
+      and carrying muskets, knapsacks, and enormous sacks, stood in front of the
+      sheds, and animated French talk mingled with curses sounded all along the
+      lines.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the shed everyone was ready, dressed, belted, shod, and only awaited
+      the order to start. The sick soldier, Sokolóv, pale and thin with dark
+      shadows round his eyes, alone sat in his place barefoot and not dressed.
+      His eyes, prominent from the emaciation of his face, gazed inquiringly at
+      his comrades who were paying no attention to him, and he moaned regularly
+      and quietly. It was evidently not so much his sufferings that caused him
+      to moan (he had dysentery) as his fear and grief at being left alone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre, girt with a rope round his waist and wearing shoes Karatáev had
+      made for him from some leather a French soldier had torn off a tea chest
+      and brought to have his boots mended with, went up to the sick man and
+      squatted down beside him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You know, Sokolóv, they are not all going away! They have a hospital
+      here. You may be better off than we others,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “O Lord! Oh, it will be the death of me! O Lord!” moaned the man in a
+      louder voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll go and ask them again directly,” said Pierre, rising and going to
+      the door of the shed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just as Pierre reached the door, the corporal who had offered him a pipe
+      the day before came up to it with two soldiers. The corporal and soldiers
+      were in marching kit with knapsacks and shakos that had metal straps, and
+      these changed their familiar faces.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The corporal came, according to orders, to shut the door. The prisoners
+      had to be counted before being let out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Corporal, what will they do with the sick man?...” Pierre began.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But even as he spoke he began to doubt whether this was the corporal he
+      knew or a stranger, so unlike himself did the corporal seem at that
+      moment. Moreover, just as Pierre was speaking a sharp rattle of drums was
+      suddenly heard from both sides. The corporal frowned at Pierre’s words
+      and, uttering some meaningless oaths, slammed the door. The shed became
+      semidark, and the sharp rattle of the drums on two sides drowned the sick
+      man’s groans.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There it is!... <i>It</i> again!...” said Pierre to himself, and an involuntary
+      shudder ran down his spine. In the corporal’s changed face, in the sound
+      of his voice, in the stirring and deafening noise of the drums, he
+      recognized that mysterious, callous force which compelled people against
+      their will to kill their fellow men—that force the effect of which
+      he had witnessed during the executions. To fear or to try to escape that
+      force, to address entreaties or exhortations to those who served as its
+      tools, was useless. Pierre knew this now. One had to wait and endure. He
+      did not again go to the sick man, nor turn to look at him, but stood
+      frowning by the door of the hut.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When that door was opened and the prisoners, crowding against one another
+      like a flock of sheep, squeezed into the exit, Pierre pushed his way
+      forward and approached that very captain who as the corporal had assured
+      him was ready to do anything for him. The captain was also in marching
+      kit, and on his cold face appeared that same <i>it</i> which Pierre had
+      recognized in the corporal’s words and in the roll of the drums.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Pass on, pass on!” the captain reiterated, frowning sternly, and looking
+      at the prisoners who thronged past him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre went up to him, though he knew his attempt would be vain.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What now?” the officer asked with a cold look as if not recognizing
+      Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre told him about the sick man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He’ll manage to walk, devil take him!” said the captain. “Pass on, pass
+      on!” he continued without looking at Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But he is dying,” Pierre again began.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Be so good...” shouted the captain, frowning angrily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Dram-da-da-dam, dam-dam...”</i> rattled the drums, and Pierre
+      understood that this mysterious force completely controlled these men and that
+      it was now useless to say any more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The officer prisoners were separated from the soldiers and told to march
+      in front. There were about thirty officers, with Pierre among them, and
+      about three hundred men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The officers, who had come from the other sheds, were all strangers to
+      Pierre and much better dressed than he. They looked at him and at his
+      shoes mistrustfully, as at an alien. Not far from him walked a fat major
+      with a sallow, bloated, angry face, who was wearing a Kazán dressing gown
+      tied round with a towel, and who evidently enjoyed the respect of his
+      fellow prisoners. He kept one hand, in which he clasped his tobacco pouch,
+      inside the bosom of his dressing gown and held the stem of his pipe firmly
+      with the other. Panting and puffing, the major grumbled and growled at
+      everybody because he thought he was being pushed and that they were all
+      hurrying when they had nowhere to hurry to and were all surprised at
+      something when there was nothing to be surprised at. Another, a thin
+      little officer, was speaking to everyone, conjecturing where they were now
+      being taken and how far they would get that day. An official in felt boots
+      and wearing a commissariat uniform ran round from side to side and gazed
+      at the ruins of Moscow, loudly announcing his observations as to what had
+      been burned down and what this or that part of the city was that they
+      could see. A third officer, who by his accent was a Pole, disputed with
+      the commissariat officer, arguing that he was mistaken in his
+      identification of the different wards of Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What are you disputing about?” said the major angrily. “What does it
+      matter whether it is St. Nicholas or St. Blasius? You see it’s burned
+      down, and there’s an end of it.... What are you pushing for? Isn’t the
+      road wide enough?” said he, turning to a man behind him who was not
+      pushing him at all.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, oh, oh! What have they done?” the prisoners on one side and another
+      were heard saying as they gazed on the charred ruins. “All beyond the
+      river, and Zúbova, and in the Krémlin.... Just look! There’s not half of
+      it left. Yes, I told you—the whole quarter beyond the river, and so
+      it is.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, you know it’s burned, so what’s the use of talking?” said the
+      major.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As they passed near a church in the Khamóvniki (one of the few unburned
+      quarters of Moscow) the whole mass of prisoners suddenly started to one
+      side and exclamations of horror and disgust were heard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, the villains! What heathens! Yes; dead, dead, so he is... And smeared
+      with something!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre too drew near the church where the thing was that evoked these
+      exclamations, and dimly made out something leaning against the palings
+      surrounding the church. From the words of his comrades who saw better than
+      he did, he found that this was the body of a man, set upright against the
+      palings with its face smeared with soot.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go on! What the devil... Go on! Thirty thousand devils!...” the convoy
+      guards began cursing and the French soldiers, with fresh virulence, drove
+      away with their swords the crowd of prisoners who were gazing at the dead
+      man.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0293"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Through the cross streets of the Khamóvniki quarter the prisoners marched,
+      followed only by their escort and the vehicles and wagons belonging to
+      that escort, but when they reached the supply stores they came among a
+      huge and closely packed train of artillery mingled with private vehicles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the bridge they all halted, waiting for those in front to get across.
+      From the bridge they had a view of endless lines of moving baggage trains
+      before and behind them. To the right, where the Kalúga road turns near
+      Neskúchny, endless rows of troops and carts stretched away into the
+      distance. These were troops of Beauharnais’ corps which had started before
+      any of the others. Behind, along the riverside and across the Stone
+      Bridge, were Ney’s troops and transport.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Davout’s troops, in whose charge were the prisoners, were crossing the
+      Crimean bridge and some were already debouching into the Kalúga road. But
+      the baggage trains stretched out so that the last of Beauharnais’ train
+      had not yet got out of Moscow and reached the Kalúga road when the
+      vanguard of Ney’s army was already emerging from the Great Ordýnka Street.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When they had crossed the Crimean bridge the prisoners moved a few steps
+      forward, halted, and again moved on, and from all sides vehicles and men
+      crowded closer and closer together. They advanced the few hundred paces
+      that separated the bridge from the Kalúga road, taking more than an hour
+      to do so, and came out upon the square where the streets of the
+      Transmoskvá ward and the Kalúga road converge, and the prisoners jammed
+      close together had to stand for some hours at that crossway. From all
+      sides, like the roar of the sea, were heard the rattle of wheels, the
+      tramp of feet, and incessant shouts of anger and abuse. Pierre stood
+      pressed against the wall of a charred house, listening to that noise which
+      mingled in his imagination with the roll of the drums.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To get a better view, several officer prisoners climbed onto the wall of
+      the half-burned house against which Pierre was leaning.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What crowds! Just look at the crowds!... They’ve loaded goods even on the
+      cannon! Look there, those are furs!” they exclaimed. “Just see what the
+      blackguards have looted.... There! See what that one has behind in the
+      cart.... Why, those are settings taken from some icons, by heaven!... Oh,
+      the rascals!... See how that fellow has loaded himself up, he can hardly
+      walk! Good lord, they’ve even grabbed those chaises!... See that fellow
+      there sitting on the trunks.... Heavens! They’re fighting.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s right, hit him on the snout—on his snout! Like this, we
+      shan’t get away before evening. Look, look there.... Why, that must be
+      Napoleon’s own. See what horses! And the monograms with a crown! It’s
+      like a portable house.... That fellow’s dropped his sack and doesn’t
+      see it. Fighting again... A woman with a baby, and not bad-looking either! Yes, I
+      dare say, that’s the way they’ll let you pass.... Just look,
+      there’s no end to it. Russian wenches, by heaven, so they are! In
+      carriages—see how comfortably they’ve settled themselves!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Again, as at the church in Khamóvniki, a wave of general curiosity bore
+      all the prisoners forward onto the road, and Pierre, thanks to his
+      stature, saw over the heads of the others what so attracted their
+      curiosity. In three carriages involved among the munition carts, closely
+      squeezed together, sat women with rouged faces, dressed in glaring colors,
+      who were shouting something in shrill voices.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the moment Pierre had recognized the appearance of the mysterious
+      force nothing had seemed to him strange or dreadful: neither the corpse
+      smeared with soot for fun nor these women hurrying away nor the burned
+      ruins of Moscow. All that he now witnessed scarcely made an impression on
+      him—as if his soul, making ready for a hard struggle, refused to
+      receive impressions that might weaken it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The women’s vehicles drove by. Behind them came more carts, soldiers,
+      wagons, soldiers, gun carriages, carriages, soldiers, ammunition carts,
+      more soldiers, and now and then women.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre did not see the people as individuals but saw their movement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All these people and horses seemed driven forward by some invisible power.
+      During the hour Pierre watched them they all came flowing from the
+      different streets with one and the same desire to get on quickly; they all
+      jostled one another, began to grow angry and to fight, white teeth
+      gleamed, brows frowned, ever the same words of abuse flew from side to
+      side, and all the faces bore the same swaggeringly resolute and coldly
+      cruel expression that had struck Pierre that morning on the corporal’s
+      face when the drums were beating.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was not till nearly evening that the officer commanding the escort
+      collected his men and with shouts and quarrels forced his way in among the
+      baggage trains, and the prisoners, hemmed in on all sides, emerged onto
+      the Kalúga road.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They marched very quickly, without resting, and halted only when the sun
+      began to set. The baggage carts drew up close together and the men began
+      to prepare for their night’s rest. They all appeared angry and
+      dissatisfied. For a long time, oaths, angry shouts, and fighting could be
+      heard from all sides. A carriage that followed the escort ran into one of
+      the carts and knocked a hole in it with its pole. Several soldiers ran
+      toward the cart from different sides: some beat the carriage horses on
+      their heads, turning them aside, others fought among themselves, and
+      Pierre saw that one German was badly wounded on the head by a sword.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It seemed that all these men, now that they had stopped amid fields in the
+      chill dusk of the autumn evening, experienced one and the same feeling of
+      unpleasant awakening from the hurry and eagerness to push on that had
+      seized them at the start. Once at a standstill they all seemed to
+      understand that they did not yet know where they were going, and that much
+      that was painful and difficult awaited them on this journey.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During this halt the escort treated the prisoners even worse than they had
+      done at the start. It was here that the prisoners for the first time
+      received horseflesh for their meat ration.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the officer down to the lowest soldier they showed what seemed like
+      personal spite against each of the prisoners, in unexpected contrast to
+      their former friendly relations.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This spite increased still more when, on calling over the roll of
+      prisoners, it was found that in the bustle of leaving Moscow one Russian
+      soldier, who had pretended to suffer from colic, had escaped. Pierre saw a
+      Frenchman beat a Russian soldier cruelly for straying too far from the
+      road, and heard his friend the captain reprimand and threaten to
+      court-martial a noncommissioned officer on account of the escape of the
+      Russian. To the noncommissioned officer’s excuse that the prisoner was ill
+      and could not walk, the officer replied that the order was to shoot those
+      who lagged behind. Pierre felt that that fatal force which had crushed him
+      during the executions, but which he had not felt during his imprisonment,
+      now again controlled his existence. It was terrible, but he felt that in
+      proportion to the efforts of that fatal force to crush him, there grew and
+      strengthened in his soul a power of life independent of it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He ate his supper of buckwheat soup with horseflesh and chatted with his
+      comrades.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Neither Pierre nor any of the others spoke of what they had seen in
+      Moscow, or of the roughness of their treatment by the French, or of the
+      order to shoot them which had been announced to them. As if in reaction
+      against the worsening of their position they were all particularly
+      animated and gay. They spoke of personal reminiscences, of amusing scenes
+      they had witnessed during the campaign, and avoided all talk of their
+      present situation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The sun had set long since. Bright stars shone out here and there in the
+      sky. A red glow as of a conflagration spread above the horizon from the
+      rising full moon, and that vast red ball swayed strangely in the gray
+      haze. It grew light. The evening was ending, but the night had not yet
+      come. Pierre got up and left his new companions, crossing between the
+      campfires to the other side of the road where he had been told the common
+      soldier prisoners were stationed. He wanted to talk to them. On the road
+      he was stopped by a French sentinel who ordered him back.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre turned back, not to his companions by the campfire, but to an
+      unharnessed cart where there was nobody. Tucking his legs under him and
+      dropping his head he sat down on the cold ground by the wheel of the cart
+      and remained motionless a long while sunk in thought. Suddenly he burst
+      out into a fit of his broad, good-natured laughter, so loud that men from
+      various sides turned with surprise to see what this strange and evidently
+      solitary laughter could mean.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ha-ha-ha!” laughed Pierre. And he said aloud to himself: “The soldier did
+      not let me pass. They took me and shut me up. They hold me captive. What,
+      me? Me? My immortal soul? Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha!...” and he laughed till
+      tears started to his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A man got up and came to see what this queer big fellow was laughing at
+      all by himself. Pierre stopped laughing, got up, went farther away from
+      the inquisitive man, and looked around him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The huge, endless bivouac that had previously resounded with the crackling
+      of campfires and the voices of many men had grown quiet, the red campfires
+      were growing paler and dying down. High up in the light sky hung the full
+      moon. Forests and fields beyond the camp, unseen before, were now visible
+      in the distance. And farther still, beyond those forests and fields, the
+      bright, oscillating, limitless distance lured one to itself. Pierre
+      glanced up at the sky and the twinkling stars in its faraway depths. “And
+      all that is me, all that is within me, and it is all I!” thought Pierre.
+      “And they caught all that and put it into a shed boarded up with planks!”
+       He smiled, and went and lay down to sleep beside his companions.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0294"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      In the early days of October another envoy came to Kutúzov with a letter
+      from Napoleon proposing peace and falsely dated from Moscow, though
+      Napoleon was already not far from Kutúzov on the old Kalúga road. Kutúzov
+      replied to this letter as he had done to the one formerly brought by
+      Lauriston, saying that there could be no question of peace.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Soon after that a report was received from Dórokhov’s guerrilla detachment
+      operating to the left of Tarútino that troops of Broussier’s division had
+      been seen at Formínsk and that being separated from the rest of the French
+      army they might easily be destroyed. The soldiers and officers again
+      demanded action. Generals on the staff, excited by the memory of the easy
+      victory at Tarútino, urged Kutúzov to carry out Dórokhov’s suggestion.
+      Kutúzov did not consider any offensive necessary. The result was a
+      compromise which was inevitable: a small detachment was sent to Formínsk
+      to attack Broussier.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      By a strange coincidence, this task, which turned out to be a most
+      difficult and important one, was entrusted to Dokhtúrov—that same
+      modest little Dokhtúrov whom no one had described to us as drawing up
+      plans of battles, dashing about in front of regiments, showering crosses
+      on batteries, and so on, and who was thought to be and was spoken of as
+      undecided and undiscerning—but whom we find commanding wherever the
+      position was most difficult all through the Russo-French wars from
+      Austerlitz to the year 1813. At Austerlitz he remained last at the Augezd
+      dam, rallying the regiments, saving what was possible when all were flying
+      and perishing and not a single general was left in the rear guard. Ill
+      with fever he went to Smolénsk with twenty thousand men to defend the town
+      against Napoleon’s whole army. In Smolénsk, at the Malákhov Gate, he had
+      hardly dozed off in a paroxysm of fever before he was awakened by the
+      bombardment of the town—and Smolénsk held out all day long. At the
+      battle of Borodinó, when Bagratión was killed and nine tenths of the men
+      of our left flank had fallen and the full force of the French artillery
+      fire was directed against it, the man sent there was this same irresolute
+      and undiscerning Dokhtúrov—Kutúzov hastening to rectify a mistake he
+      had made by sending someone else there first. And the quiet little
+      Dokhtúrov rode thither, and Borodinó became the greatest glory of the
+      Russian army. Many heroes have been described to us in verse and prose,
+      but of Dokhtúrov scarcely a word has been said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was Dokhtúrov again whom they sent to Formínsk and from there to
+      Málo-Yaroslávets, the place where the last battle with the French was
+      fought and where the obvious disintegration of the French army began; and
+      we are told of many geniuses and heroes of that period of the campaign,
+      but of Dokhtúrov nothing or very little is said and that dubiously. And
+      this silence about Dokhtúrov is the clearest testimony to his merit.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It is natural for a man who does not understand the workings of a machine
+      to imagine that a shaving that has fallen into it by chance and is
+      interfering with its action and tossing about in it is its most important
+      part. The man who does not understand the construction of the machine
+      cannot conceive that the small connecting cogwheel which revolves quietly
+      is one of the most essential parts of the machine, and not the shaving
+      which merely harms and hinders the working.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the tenth of October when Dokhtúrov had gone halfway to Formínsk and
+      stopped at the village of Aristóvo, preparing faithfully to execute the
+      orders he had received, the whole French army having, in its convulsive
+      movement, reached Murat’s position apparently in order to give battle—suddenly
+      without any reason turned off to the left onto the new Kalúga road and
+      began to enter Formínsk, where only Broussier had been till then. At that
+      time Dokhtúrov had under his command, besides Dórokhov’s detachment, the
+      two small guerrilla detachments of Figner and Seslávin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the evening of October 11 Seslávin came to the Aristóvo headquarters
+      with a French guardsman he had captured. The prisoner said that the troops
+      that had entered Formínsk that day were the vanguard of the whole army,
+      that Napoleon was there and the whole army had left Moscow four days
+      previously. That same evening a house serf who had come from Bórovsk said
+      he had seen an immense army entering the town. Some Cossacks of
+      Dokhtúrov’s detachment reported having sighted the French Guards marching
+      along the road to Bórovsk. From all these reports it was evident that
+      where they had expected to meet a single division there was now the whole
+      French army marching from Moscow in an unexpected direction—along
+      the Kalúga road. Dokhtúrov was unwilling to undertake any action, as it
+      was not clear to him now what he ought to do. He had been ordered to
+      attack Formínsk. But only Broussier had been there at that time and now
+      the whole French army was there. Ermólov wished to act on his own
+      judgment, but Dokhtúrov insisted that he must have Kutúzov’s instructions.
+      So it was decided to send a dispatch to the staff.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For this purpose a capable officer, Bolkhovítinov, was chosen, who was to
+      explain the whole affair by word of mouth, besides delivering a written
+      report. Toward midnight Bolkhovítinov, having received the dispatch and
+      verbal instructions, galloped off to the General Staff accompanied by a
+      Cossack with spare horses.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0295"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      It was a warm, dark, autumn night. It had been raining for four days.
+      Having changed horses twice and galloped twenty miles in an hour and a
+      half over a sticky, muddy road, Bolkhovítinov reached Litashëvka after one
+      o’clock at night. Dismounting at a cottage on whose wattle fence hung a
+      signboard, GENERAL STAFF, and throwing down his reins, he entered a dark
+      passage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The general on duty, quick! It’s very important!” said he to someone who
+      had risen and was sniffing in the dark passage.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He has been very unwell since the evening and this is the third night he
+      has not slept,” said the orderly pleadingly in a whisper. “You should wake
+      the captain first.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But this is very important, from General Dokhtúrov,” said Bolkhovítinov,
+      entering the open door which he had found by feeling in the dark.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The orderly had gone in before him and began waking somebody.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your honor, your honor! A courier.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What? What’s that? From whom?” came a sleepy voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “From Dokhtúrov and from Alexéy Petróvich. Napoleon is at Formínsk,” said
+      Bolkhovítinov, unable to see in the dark who was speaking but guessing by
+      the voice that it was not Konovnítsyn.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The man who had wakened yawned and stretched himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t like waking him,” he said, fumbling for something. “He is very
+      ill. Perhaps this is only a rumor.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Here is the dispatch,” said Bolkhovítinov. “My orders are to give it at
+      once to the general on duty.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Wait a moment, I’ll light a candle. You damned rascal, where do you
+      always hide it?” said the voice of the man who was stretching himself, to
+      the orderly. (This was Shcherbínin, Konovnítsyn’s adjutant.) “I’ve found
+      it, I’ve found it!” he added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The orderly was striking a light and Shcherbínin was fumbling for
+      something on the candlestick.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, the nasty beasts!” said he with disgust.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      By the light of the sparks Bolkhovítinov saw Shcherbínin’s youthful face
+      as he held the candle, and the face of another man who was still asleep.
+      This was Konovnítsyn.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the flame of the sulphur splinters kindled by the tinder burned up,
+      first blue and then red, Shcherbínin lit the tallow candle, from the
+      candlestick of which the cockroaches that had been gnawing it were running
+      away, and looked at the messenger. Bolkhovítinov was bespattered all over
+      with mud and had smeared his face by wiping it with his sleeve.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who gave the report?” inquired Shcherbínin, taking the envelope.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The news is reliable,” said Bolkhovítinov. “Prisoners, Cossacks,
+      and the scouts all say the same thing.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “There’s nothing to be done, we’ll have to wake him,” said Shcherbínin,
+      rising and going up to the man in the nightcap who lay covered by a
+      greatcoat. “Peter Petróvich!” said he. (Konovnítsyn did not stir.) “To the
+      General Staff!” he said with a smile, knowing that those words would be
+      sure to arouse him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And in fact the head in the nightcap was lifted at once. On Konovnítsyn’s
+      handsome, resolute face with cheeks flushed by fever, there still remained
+      for an instant a faraway dreamy expression remote from present affairs,
+      but then he suddenly started and his face assumed its habitual calm and
+      firm appearance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, what is it? From whom?” he asked immediately but without hurry,
+      blinking at the light.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While listening to the officer’s report Konovnítsyn broke the seal and
+      read the dispatch. Hardly had he done so before he lowered his legs in
+      their woolen stockings to the earthen floor and began putting on his
+      boots. Then he took off his nightcap, combed his hair over his temples,
+      and donned his cap.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Did you get here quickly? Let us go to his Highness.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Konovnítsyn had understood at once that the news brought was of great
+      importance and that no time must be lost. He did not consider or ask
+      himself whether the news was good or bad. That did not interest him. He
+      regarded the whole business of the war not with his intelligence or his
+      reason but by something else. There was within him a deep unexpressed
+      conviction that all would be well, but that one must not trust to this and
+      still less speak about it, but must only attend to one’s own work. And he
+      did his work, giving his whole strength to the task.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Peter Petróvich Konovnítsyn, like Dokhtúrov, seems to have been included
+      merely for propriety’s sake in the list of the so-called heroes of 1812—the
+      Barclays, Raévskis, Ermólovs, Plátovs, and Milorádoviches. Like Dokhtúrov
+      he had the reputation of being a man of very limited capacity and
+      information, and like Dokhtúrov he never made plans of battle but was
+      always found where the situation was most difficult. Since his appointment
+      as general on duty he had always slept with his door open, giving orders
+      that every messenger should be allowed to wake him up. In battle he was
+      always under fire, so that Kutúzov reproved him for it and feared to send
+      him to the front, and like Dokhtúrov he was one of those unnoticed
+      cogwheels that, without clatter or noise, constitute the most essential
+      part of the machine.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Coming out of the hut into the damp, dark night Konovnítsyn frowned—partly
+      from an increased pain in his head and partly at the unpleasant thought
+      that occurred to him, of how all that nest of influential men on the staff
+      would be stirred up by this news, especially Bennigsen, who ever since
+      Tarútino had been at daggers drawn with Kutúzov; and how they would make
+      suggestions, quarrel, issue orders, and rescind them. And this premonition
+      was disagreeable to him though he knew it could not be helped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And in fact Toll, to whom he went to communicate the news, immediately
+      began to expound his plans to a general sharing his quarters, until
+      Konovnítsyn, who listened in weary silence, reminded him that they must go
+      to see his Highness.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0296"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov like all old people did not sleep much at night. He often fell
+      asleep unexpectedly in the daytime, but at night, lying on his bed without
+      undressing, he generally remained awake thinking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      So he lay now on his bed, supporting his large, heavy, scarred head on his
+      plump hand, with his one eye open, meditating and peering into the
+      darkness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Since Bennigsen, who corresponded with the Emperor and had more influence
+      than anyone else on the staff, had begun to avoid him, Kutúzov was more at
+      ease as to the possibility of himself and his troops being obliged to take
+      part in useless aggressive movements. The lesson of the Tarútino battle
+      and of the day before it, which Kutúzov remembered with pain, must, he
+      thought, have some effect on others too.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive.
+      Patience and time are my warriors, my champions,” thought Kutúzov. He knew
+      that an apple should not be plucked while it is green. It will fall of
+      itself when ripe, but if picked unripe the apple is spoiled, the tree is
+      harmed, and your teeth are set on edge. Like an experienced sportsman he
+      knew that the beast was wounded, and wounded as only the whole strength of
+      Russia could have wounded it, but whether it was mortally wounded or not
+      was still an undecided question. Now by the fact of Lauriston and
+      Barthélemi having been sent, and by the reports of the guerrillas, Kutúzov
+      was almost sure that the wound was mortal. But he needed further proofs
+      and it was necessary to wait.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They want to run to see how they have wounded it. Wait and we shall see!
+      Continual maneuvers, continual advances!” thought he. “What for? Only to
+      distinguish themselves! As if fighting were fun. They are like children
+      from whom one can’t get any sensible account of what has happened because
+      they all want to show how well they can fight. But that’s not what is
+      needed now.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And what ingenious maneuvers they all propose to me! It seems to them
+      that when they have thought of two or three contingencies” (he remembered
+      the general plan sent him from Petersburg) “they have foreseen everything.
+      But the contingencies are endless.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The undecided question as to whether the wound inflicted at Borodinó was
+      mortal or not had hung over Kutúzov’s head for a whole month. On the one
+      hand the French had occupied Moscow. On the other Kutúzov felt assured
+      with all his being that the terrible blow into which he and all the
+      Russians had put their whole strength must have been mortal. But in any
+      case proofs were needed; he had waited a whole month for them and grew
+      more impatient the longer he waited. Lying on his bed during those
+      sleepless nights he did just what he reproached those younger generals for
+      doing. He imagined all sorts of possible contingencies, just like the
+      younger men, but with this difference, that he saw thousands of
+      contingencies instead of two or three and based nothing on them. The
+      longer he thought the more contingencies presented themselves. He imagined
+      all sorts of movements of the Napoleonic army as a whole or in sections—against
+      Petersburg, or against him, or to outflank him. He thought too of the
+      possibility (which he feared most of all) that Napoleon might fight him
+      with his own weapon and remain in Moscow awaiting him. Kutúzov even
+      imagined that Napoleon’s army might turn back through Medýn and Yukhnóv,
+      but the one thing he could not foresee was what happened—the insane,
+      convulsive stampede of Napoleon’s army during its first eleven days after
+      leaving Moscow: a stampede which made possible what Kutúzov had not yet
+      even dared to think of—the complete extermination of the French.
+      Dórokhov’s report about Broussier’s division, the guerrillas’ reports of
+      distress in Napoleon’s army, rumors of preparations for leaving Moscow,
+      all confirmed the supposition that the French army was beaten and
+      preparing for flight. But these were only suppositions, which seemed
+      important to the younger men but not to Kutúzov. With his sixty years’
+      experience he knew what value to attach to rumors, knew how apt people who
+      desire anything are to group all news so that it appears to confirm what
+      they desire, and he knew how readily in such cases they omit all that
+      makes for the contrary. And the more he desired it the less he allowed
+      himself to believe it. This question absorbed all his mental powers. All
+      else was to him only life’s customary routine. To such customary routine
+      belonged his conversations with the staff, the letters he wrote from
+      Tarútino to Madame de Staël, the reading of novels, the distribution of
+      awards, his correspondence with Petersburg, and so on. But the destruction
+      of the French, which he alone foresaw, was his heart’s one desire.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the night of the eleventh of October he lay leaning on his arm and
+      thinking of that.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was a stir in the next room and he heard the steps of Toll,
+      Konovnítsyn, and Bolkhovítinov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh, who’s there? Come in, come in! What news?” the field marshal called
+      out to them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While a footman was lighting a candle, Toll communicated the substance of
+      the news.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who brought it?” asked Kutúzov with a look which, when the candle was
+      lit, struck Toll by its cold severity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There can be no doubt about it, your Highness.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Call him in, call him here.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov sat up with one leg hanging down from the bed and his big paunch
+      resting against the other which was doubled under him. He screwed up his
+      seeing eye to scrutinize the messenger more carefully, as if wishing to
+      read in his face what preoccupied his own mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Tell me, tell me, friend,” said he to Bolkhovítinov in his low, aged
+      voice, as he pulled together the shirt which gaped open on his chest,
+      “come nearer—nearer. What news have you brought me? Eh? That
+      Napoleon has left Moscow? Are you sure? Eh?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Bolkhovítinov gave a detailed account from the beginning of all he had
+      been told to report.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Speak quicker, quicker! Don’t torture me!” Kutúzov interrupted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Bolkhovítinov told him everything and was then silent, awaiting
+      instructions. Toll was beginning to say something but Kutúzov checked him.
+      He tried to say something, but his face suddenly puckered and wrinkled; he
+      waved his arm at Toll and turned to the opposite side of the room, to the
+      corner darkened by the icons that hung there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “O Lord, my Creator, Thou has heard our prayer...” said he in a tremulous
+      voice with folded hands. “Russia is saved. I thank Thee, O Lord!” and he
+      wept.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0297"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      From the time he received this news to the end of the campaign all
+      Kutúzov’s activity was directed toward restraining his troops, by
+      authority, by guile, and by entreaty, from useless attacks, maneuvers, or
+      encounters with the perishing enemy. Dokhtúrov went to Málo-Yaroslávets,
+      but Kutúzov lingered with the main army and gave orders for the evacuation
+      of Kalúga—a retreat beyond which town seemed to him quite possible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Everywhere Kutúzov retreated, but the enemy without waiting for his
+      retreat fled in the opposite direction.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon’s historians describe to us his skilled maneuvers at Tarútino and
+      Málo-Yaroslávets, and make conjectures as to what would have happened had
+      Napoleon been in time to penetrate into the rich southern provinces.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But not to speak of the fact that nothing prevented him from advancing
+      into those southern provinces (for the Russian army did not bar his way),
+      the historians forget that nothing could have saved his army, for then
+      already it bore within itself the germs of inevitable ruin. How could that
+      army—which had found abundant supplies in Moscow and had trampled
+      them underfoot instead of keeping them, and on arriving at Smolénsk had
+      looted provisions instead of storing them—how could that army
+      recuperate in Kalúga province, which was inhabited by Russians such as
+      those who lived in Moscow, and where fire had the same property of
+      consuming what was set ablaze?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That army could not recover anywhere. Since the battle of Borodinó and the
+      pillage of Moscow it had borne within itself, as it were, the chemical
+      elements of dissolution.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The members of what had once been an army—Napoleon himself and all
+      his soldiers—fled without knowing whither, each concerned only to
+      make his escape as quickly as possible from this position, of the
+      hopelessness of which they were all more or less vaguely conscious.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      So it came about that at the council at Málo-Yaroslávets, when the
+      generals pretending to confer together expressed various opinions, all
+      mouths were closed by the opinion uttered by the simple-minded soldier
+      Mouton who, speaking last, said what they all felt: that the one thing
+      needful was to get away as quickly as possible; and no one, not even
+      Napoleon, could say anything against that truth which they all recognized.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But though they all realized that it was necessary to get away, there
+      still remained a feeling of shame at admitting that they must flee. An
+      external shock was needed to overcome that shame, and this shock came in
+      due time. It was what the French called <i>“le hourra de l’Empereur.”</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      The day after the council at Málo-Yaroslávets Napoleon rode out early in
+      the morning amid the lines of his army with his suite of marshals and an
+      escort, on the pretext of inspecting the army and the scene of the
+      previous and of the impending battle. Some Cossacks on the prowl for booty
+      fell in with the Emperor and very nearly captured him. If the Cossacks did
+      not capture Napoleon then, what saved him was the very thing that was
+      destroying the French army, the booty on which the Cossacks fell. Here as
+      at Tarútino they went after plunder, leaving the men. Disregarding
+      Napoleon they rushed after the plunder and Napoleon managed to escape.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When <i>les enfants du Don</i> might so easily have taken the Emperor himself in
+      the midst of his army, it was clear that there was nothing for it but to
+      fly as fast as possible along the nearest, familiar road. Napoleon with
+      his forty-year-old stomach understood that hint, not feeling his former
+      agility and boldness, and under the influence of the fright the Cossacks
+      had given him he at once agreed with Mouton and issued orders—as the
+      historians tell us—to retreat by the Smolénsk road.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That Napoleon agreed with Mouton, and that the army retreated, does not
+      prove that Napoleon caused it to retreat, but that the forces which
+      influenced the whole army and directed it along the Mozháysk (that is, the
+      Smolénsk) road acted simultaneously on him also.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0298"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      A man in motion always devises an aim for that motion. To be able to go a
+      thousand miles he must imagine that something good awaits him at the end
+      of those thousand miles. One must have the prospect of a promised land to
+      have the strength to move.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The promised land for the French during their advance had been Moscow,
+      during their retreat it was their native land. But that native land was
+      too far off, and for a man going a thousand miles it is absolutely
+      necessary to set aside his final goal and to say to himself: “Today I
+      shall get to a place twenty-five miles off where I shall rest and spend
+      the night,” and during the first day’s journey that resting place eclipses
+      his ultimate goal and attracts all his hopes and desires. And the impulses
+      felt by a single person are always magnified in a crowd.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For the French retreating along the old Smolénsk road, the final goal—their
+      native land—was too remote, and their immediate goal was Smolénsk,
+      toward which all their desires and hopes, enormously intensified in the
+      mass, urged them on. It was not that they knew that much food and fresh
+      troops awaited them in Smolénsk, nor that they were told so (on the
+      contrary their superior officers, and Napoleon himself, knew that
+      provisions were scarce there), but because this alone could give them
+      strength to move on and endure their present privations. So both those who
+      knew and those who did not know deceived themselves, and pushed on to
+      Smolénsk as to a promised land.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Coming out onto the highroad the French fled with surprising energy and
+      unheard-of rapidity toward the goal they had fixed on. Besides the common
+      impulse which bound the whole crowd of French into one mass and supplied
+      them with a certain energy, there was another cause binding them together—their
+      great numbers. As with the physical law of gravity, their enormous mass
+      drew the individual human atoms to itself. In their hundreds of thousands
+      they moved like a whole nation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Each of them desired nothing more than to give himself up as a prisoner to
+      escape from all this horror and misery; but on the one hand the force of
+      this common attraction to Smolénsk, their goal, drew each of them in the
+      same direction; on the other hand an army corps could not surrender to a
+      company, and though the French availed themselves of every convenient
+      opportunity to detach themselves and to surrender on the slightest decent
+      pretext, such pretexts did not always occur. Their very numbers and their
+      crowded and swift movement deprived them of that possibility and rendered
+      it not only difficult but impossible for the Russians to stop this
+      movement, to which the French were directing all their energies. Beyond a
+      certain limit no mechanical disruption of the body could hasten the
+      process of decomposition.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A lump of snow cannot be melted instantaneously. There is a certain limit
+      of time in less than which no amount of heat can melt the snow. On the
+      contrary the greater the heat the more solidified the remaining snow
+      becomes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Of the Russian commanders Kutúzov alone understood this. When the flight
+      of the French army along the Smolénsk road became well defined, what
+      Konovnítsyn had foreseen on the night of the eleventh of October began to
+      occur. The superior officers all wanted to distinguish themselves, to cut
+      off, to seize, to capture, and to overthrow the French, and all clamored
+      for action.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov alone used all his power (and such power is very limited in the
+      case of any commander in chief) to prevent an attack.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He could not tell them what we say now: “Why fight, why block the road,
+      losing our own men and inhumanly slaughtering unfortunate wretches? What
+      is the use of that, when a third of their army has melted away on the road
+      from Moscow to Vyázma without any battle?” But drawing from his aged
+      wisdom what they could understand, he told them of the golden bridge, and
+      they laughed at and slandered him, flinging themselves on, rending and
+      exulting over the dying beast.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Ermólov, Milorádovich, Plátov, and others in proximity to the French near
+      Vyázma could not resist their desire to cut off and break up two French
+      corps, and by way of reporting their intention to Kutúzov they sent him a
+      blank sheet of paper in an envelope.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And try as Kutúzov might to restrain the troops, our men attacked, trying
+      to bar the road. Infantry regiments, we are told, advanced to the attack
+      with music and with drums beating, and killed and lost thousands of men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But they did not cut off or overthrow anybody and the French army, closing
+      up more firmly at the danger, continued, while steadily melting away, to
+      pursue its fatal path to Smolénsk.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0312"></a>
+      BOOK FOURTEEN: 1812
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0299"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The Battle of Borodinó, with the occupation of Moscow that followed it and
+      the flight of the French without further conflicts, is one of the most
+      instructive phenomena in history.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All historians agree that the external activity of states and nations in
+      their conflicts with one another is expressed in wars, and that as a
+      direct result of greater or less success in war the political strength of
+      states and nations increases or decreases.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Strange as may be the historical account of how some king or emperor,
+      having quarreled with another, collects an army, fights his enemy’s army,
+      gains a victory by killing three, five, or ten thousand men, and
+      subjugates a kingdom and an entire nation of several millions, all the
+      facts of history (as far as we know it) confirm the truth of the statement
+      that the greater or lesser success of one army against another is the
+      cause, or at least an essential indication, of an increase or decrease in
+      the strength of the nation—even though it is unintelligible why the
+      defeat of an army—a hundredth part of a nation—should oblige
+      that whole nation to submit. An army gains a victory, and at once the
+      rights of the conquering nation have increased to the detriment of the
+      defeated. An army has suffered defeat, and at once a people loses its
+      rights in proportion to the severity of the reverse, and if its army
+      suffers a complete defeat the nation is quite subjugated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      So according to history it has been found from the most ancient times, and
+      so it is to our own day. All Napoleon’s wars serve to confirm this rule.
+      In proportion to the defeat of the Austrian army Austria loses its rights,
+      and the rights and the strength of France increase. The victories of the
+      French at Jena and Auerstädt destroy the independent existence of Prussia.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But then, in 1812, the French gain a victory near Moscow. Moscow is taken
+      and after that, with no further battles, it is not Russia that ceases to
+      exist, but the French army of six hundred thousand, and then Napoleonic
+      France itself. To strain the facts to fit the rules of history: to say
+      that the field of battle at Borodinó remained in the hands of the
+      Russians, or that after Moscow there were other battles that destroyed
+      Napoleon’s army, is impossible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the French victory at Borodinó there was no general engagement nor
+      any that were at all serious, yet the French army ceased to exist. What
+      does this mean? If it were an example taken from the history of China, we
+      might say that it was not an historic phenomenon (which is the historians’
+      usual expedient when anything does not fit their standards); if the matter
+      concerned some brief conflict in which only a small number of troops took
+      part, we might treat it as an exception; but this event occurred before
+      our fathers’ eyes, and for them it was a question of the life or death of
+      their fatherland, and it happened in the greatest of all known wars.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The period of the campaign of 1812 from the battle of Borodinó to the
+      expulsion of the French proved that the winning of a battle does not
+      produce a conquest and is not even an invariable indication of conquest;
+      it proved that the force which decides the fate of peoples lies not in the
+      conquerors, nor even in armies and battles, but in something else.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French historians, describing the condition of the French army before
+      it left Moscow, affirm that all was in order in the Grand Army, except the
+      cavalry, the artillery, and the transport—there was no forage for
+      the horses or the cattle. That was a misfortune no one could remedy, for
+      the peasants of the district burned their hay rather than let the French
+      have it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The victory gained did not bring the usual results because the peasants
+      Karp and Vlas (who after the French had evacuated Moscow drove in their
+      carts to pillage the town, and in general personally failed to manifest
+      any heroic feelings), and the whole innumerable multitude of such
+      peasants, did not bring their hay to Moscow for the high price offered
+      them, but burned it instead.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Let us imagine two men who have come out to fight a duel with rapiers
+      according to all the rules of the art of fencing. The fencing has gone on
+      for some time; suddenly one of the combatants, feeling himself wounded and
+      understanding that the matter is no joke but concerns his life, throws
+      down his rapier, and seizing the first cudgel that comes to hand begins to
+      brandish it. Then let us imagine that the combatant who so sensibly
+      employed the best and simplest means to attain his end was at the same
+      time influenced by traditions of chivalry and, desiring to conceal the
+      facts of the case, insisted that he had gained his victory with the rapier
+      according to all the rules of art. One can imagine what confusion and
+      obscurity would result from such an account of the duel.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The fencer who demanded a contest according to the rules of fencing was
+      the French army; his opponent who threw away the rapier and snatched up
+      the cudgel was the Russian people; those who try to explain the matter
+      according to the rules of fencing are the historians who have described
+      the event.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the burning of Smolénsk a war began which did not follow any
+      previous traditions of war. The burning of towns and villages, the
+      retreats after battles, the blow dealt at Borodinó and the renewed
+      retreat, the burning of Moscow, the capture of marauders, the seizure of
+      transports, and the guerrilla war were all departures from the rules.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon felt this, and from the time he took up the correct fencing
+      attitude in Moscow and instead of his opponent’s rapier saw a cudgel
+      raised above his head, he did not cease to complain to Kutúzov and to the
+      Emperor Alexander that the war was being carried on contrary to all the
+      rules—as if there were any rules for killing people. In spite of the
+      complaints of the French as to the nonobservance of the rules, in spite of
+      the fact that to some highly placed Russians it seemed rather disgraceful
+      to fight with a cudgel and they wanted to assume a pose <i>en quarte</i> or <i>en
+      tierce</i> according to all the rules, and to make an adroit thrust <i>en prime</i>,
+      and so on—the cudgel of the people’s war was lifted with all its
+      menacing and majestic strength, and without consulting anyone’s tastes or
+      rules and regardless of anything else, it rose and fell with stupid
+      simplicity, but consistently, and belabored the French till the whole
+      invasion had perished.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And it is well for a people who do not—as the French did in 1813—salute
+      according to all the rules of art, and, presenting the hilt of their
+      rapier gracefully and politely, hand it to their magnanimous conqueror,
+      but at the moment of trial, without asking what rules others have adopted
+      in similar cases, simply and easily pick up the first cudgel that comes to
+      hand and strike with it till the feeling of resentment and revenge in
+      their soul yields to a feeling of contempt and compassion.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0300"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      One of the most obvious and advantageous departures from the so-called
+      laws of war is the action of scattered groups against men pressed together
+      in a mass. Such action always occurs in wars that take on a national
+      character. In such actions, instead of two crowds opposing each other, the
+      men disperse, attack singly, run away when attacked by stronger forces,
+      but again attack when opportunity offers. This was done by the guerrillas
+      in Spain, by the mountain tribes in the Caucasus, and by the Russians in
+      1812.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      People have called this kind of war “guerrilla warfare” and assume that by
+      so calling it they have explained its meaning. But such a war does not fit
+      in under any rule and is directly opposed to a well-known rule of tactics
+      which is accepted as infallible. That rule says that an attacker should
+      concentrate his forces in order to be stronger than his opponent at the
+      moment of conflict.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Guerrilla war (always successful, as history shows) directly infringes
+      that rule.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This contradiction arises from the fact that military science assumes the
+      strength of an army to be identical with its numbers. Military science
+      says that the more troops the greater the strength. <i>Les gros bataillons
+      ont toujours raison</i>. *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Large battalions are always victorious.
+</p>
+<p>
+      For military science to say this is like defining momentum in mechanics by
+      reference to the mass only: stating that momenta are equal or unequal to
+      each other simply because the masses involved are equal or unequal.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Momentum (quantity of motion) is the product of mass and velocity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In military affairs the strength of an army is the product of its mass and
+      some unknown <i>x</i>.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Military science, seeing in history innumerable instances of the fact that
+      the size of any army does not coincide with its strength and that small
+      detachments defeat larger ones, obscurely admits the existence of this
+      unknown factor and tries to discover it—now in a geometric
+      formation, now in the equipment employed, now, and most usually, in the
+      genius of the commanders. But the assignment of these various meanings to
+      the factor does not yield results which accord with the historic facts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Yet it is only necessary to abandon the false view (adopted to gratify the
+      “heroes”) of the efficacy of the directions issued in wartime by
+      commanders, in order to find this unknown quantity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That unknown quantity is the spirit of the army, that is to say, the
+      greater or lesser readiness to fight and face danger felt by all the men
+      composing an army, quite independently of whether they are, or are not,
+      fighting under the command of a genius, in two—or three-line
+      formation, with cudgels or with rifles that repeat thirty times a minute.
+      Men who want to fight will always put themselves in the most advantageous
+      conditions for fighting.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The spirit of an army is the factor which multiplied by the mass gives the
+      resulting force. To define and express the significance of this unknown
+      factor—the spirit of an army—is a problem for science.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This problem is only solvable if we cease arbitrarily to substitute for
+      the unknown <i>x</i> itself the conditions under which that force becomes
+      apparent—such as the commands of the general, the equipment
+      employed, and so on—mistaking these for the real significance of the
+      factor, and if we recognize this unknown quantity in its entirety as being
+      the greater or lesser desire to fight and to face danger. Only then,
+      expressing known historic facts by equations and comparing the relative
+      significance of this factor, can we hope to define the unknown.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Ten men, battalions, or divisions, fighting fifteen men, battalions, or
+      divisions, conquer—that is, kill or take captive—all the
+      others, while themselves losing four, so that on the one side four and on
+      the other fifteen were lost. Consequently the four were equal to the
+      fifteen, and therefore 4<i>x</i> = 15<i>y</i>. Consequently <i>x/y</i> = 15/4.
+      This equation does not give us the value of the unknown factor but gives us a ratio
+      between two unknowns. And by bringing variously selected historic units
+      (battles, campaigns, periods of war) into such equations, a series of
+      numbers could be obtained in which certain laws should exist and might be
+      discovered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The tactical rule that an army should act in masses when attacking, and in
+      smaller groups in retreat, unconsciously confirms the truth that the
+      strength of an army depends on its spirit. To lead men forward under fire
+      more discipline (obtainable only by movement in masses) is needed than is
+      needed to resist attacks. But this rule which leaves out of account the
+      spirit of the army continually proves incorrect and is in particularly
+      striking contrast to the facts when some strong rise or fall in the spirit
+      of the troops occurs, as in all national wars.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French, retreating in 1812—though according to tactics they
+      should have separated into detachments to defend themselves—congregated
+      into a mass because the spirit of the army had so fallen that only the
+      mass held the army together. The Russians, on the contrary, ought
+      according to tactics to have attacked in mass, but in fact they split up
+      into small units, because their spirit had so risen that separate
+      individuals, without orders, dealt blows at the French without needing any
+      compulsion to induce them to expose themselves to hardships and dangers.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0301"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The so-called partisan war began with the entry of the French into
+      Smolénsk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before partisan warfare had been officially recognized by the government,
+      thousands of enemy stragglers, marauders, and foragers had been destroyed
+      by the Cossacks and the peasants, who killed them off as instinctively as
+      dogs worry a stray mad dog to death. Denís Davýdov, with his Russian
+      instinct, was the first to recognize the value of this terrible cudgel
+      which regardless of the rules of military science destroyed the French,
+      and to him belongs the credit for taking the first step toward
+      regularizing this method of warfare.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On August 24 Davýdov’s first partisan detachment was formed and then
+      others were recognized. The further the campaign progressed the more
+      numerous these detachments became.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The irregulars destroyed the great army piecemeal. They gathered the
+      fallen leaves that dropped of themselves from that withered tree—the
+      French army—and sometimes shook that tree itself. By October, when
+      the French were fleeing toward Smolénsk, there were hundreds of such
+      companies, of various sizes and characters. There were some that adopted
+      all the army methods and had infantry, artillery, staffs, and the comforts
+      of life. Others consisted solely of Cossack cavalry. There were also small
+      scratch groups of foot and horse, and groups of peasants and landowners
+      that remained unknown. A sacristan commanded one party which captured
+      several hundred prisoners in the course of a month; and there was
+      Vasílisa, the wife of a village elder, who slew hundreds of the French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The partisan warfare flamed up most fiercely in the latter days of
+      October. Its first period had passed: when the partisans themselves,
+      amazed at their own boldness, feared every minute to be surrounded and
+      captured by the French, and hid in the forests without unsaddling, hardly
+      daring to dismount and always expecting to be pursued. By the end of
+      October this kind of warfare had taken definite shape: it had become clear
+      to all what could be ventured against the French and what could not. Now
+      only the commanders of detachments with staffs, and moving according to
+      rules at a distance from the French, still regarded many things as
+      impossible. The small bands that had started their activities long before
+      and had already observed the French closely considered things possible
+      which the commanders of the big detachments did not dare to contemplate.
+      The Cossacks and peasants who crept in among the French now considered
+      everything possible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On October 22, Denísov (who was one of the irregulars) was with his group
+      at the height of the guerrilla enthusiasm. Since early morning he and his
+      party had been on the move. All day long he had been watching from the
+      forest that skirted the highroad a large French convoy of cavalry baggage
+      and Russian prisoners separated from the rest of the army, which—as
+      was learned from spies and prisoners—was moving under a strong
+      escort to Smolénsk. Besides Denísov and Dólokhov (who also led a small
+      party and moved in Denísov’s vicinity), the commanders of some large
+      divisions with staffs also knew of this convoy and, as Denísov expressed
+      it, were sharpening their teeth for it. Two of the commanders of large
+      parties—one a Pole and the other a German—sent invitations to
+      Denísov almost simultaneously, requesting him to join up with their
+      divisions to attack the convoy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, bwother, I have gwown mustaches myself,” said Denísov on reading
+      these documents, and he wrote to the German that, despite his heartfelt
+      desire to serve under so valiant and renowned a general, he had to forgo
+      that pleasure because he was already under the command of the Polish
+      general. To the Polish general he replied to the same effect, informing
+      him that he was already under the command of the German.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having arranged matters thus, Denísov and Dólokhov intended, without
+      reporting matters to the higher command, to attack and seize that convoy
+      with their own small forces. On October 22 it was moving from the village
+      of Mikúlino to that of Shámshevo. To the left of the road between Mikúlino
+      and Shámshevo there were large forests, extending in some places up to the
+      road itself though in others a mile or more back from it. Through these
+      forests Denísov and his party rode all day, sometimes keeping well back in
+      them and sometimes coming to the very edge, but never losing sight of the
+      moving French. That morning, Cossacks of Denísov’s party had seized and
+      carried off into the forest two wagons loaded with cavalry saddles, which
+      had stuck in the mud not far from Mikúlino where the forest ran close to
+      the road. Since then, and until evening, the party had watched the
+      movements of the French without attacking. It was necessary to let the
+      French reach Shámshevo quietly without alarming them and then, after
+      joining Dólokhov who was to come that evening to a consultation at a
+      watchman’s hut in the forest less than a mile from Shámshevo, to surprise
+      the French at dawn, falling like an avalanche on their heads from two
+      sides, and rout and capture them all at one blow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In their rear, more than a mile from Mikúlino where the forest came right
+      up to the road, six Cossacks were posted to report if any fresh columns of
+      French should show themselves.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Beyond Shámshevo, Dólokhov was to observe the road in the same way, to
+      find out at what distance there were other French troops. They reckoned
+      that the convoy had fifteen hundred men. Denísov had two hundred, and
+      Dólokhov might have as many more, but the disparity of numbers did not
+      deter Denísov. All that he now wanted to know was what troops these were
+      and to learn that he had to capture a “tongue”—that is, a man from
+      the enemy column. That morning’s attack on the wagons had been made so
+      hastily that the Frenchmen with the wagons had all been killed; only a
+      little drummer boy had been taken alive, and as he was a straggler he
+      could tell them nothing definite about the troops in that column.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov considered it dangerous to make a second attack for fear of
+      putting the whole column on the alert, so he sent Tíkhon Shcherbáty, a
+      peasant of his party, to Shámshevo to try and seize at least one of the
+      French quartermasters who had been sent on in advance.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0302"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      It was a warm rainy autumn day. The sky and the horizon were both the
+      color of muddy water. At times a sort of mist descended, and then suddenly
+      heavy slanting rain came down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov in a felt cloak and a sheepskin cap from which the rain ran down
+      was riding a thin thoroughbred horse with sunken sides. Like his horse,
+      which turned its head and laid its ears back, he shrank from the driving
+      rain and gazed anxiously before him. His thin face with its short, thick
+      black beard looked angry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Beside Denísov rode an <i>esaul</i>, * Denísov’s fellow worker, also
+      in felt cloak and sheepskin cap, and riding a large sleek Don horse.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * A captain of Cossacks.
+</p>
+<p>
+      Esaul Lováyski the Third was a tall man as straight as an arrow,
+      pale-faced, fair-haired, with narrow light eyes and with calm
+      self-satisfaction in his face and bearing. Though it was impossible to say
+      in what the peculiarity of the horse and rider lay, yet at first glance at
+      the <i>esaul</i> and Denísov one saw that the latter was wet and uncomfortable
+      and was a man mounted on a horse, while looking at the <i>esaul</i> one saw that
+      he was as comfortable and as much at ease as always and that he was not a
+      man who had mounted a horse, but a man who was one with his horse, a being
+      consequently possessed of twofold strength.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A little ahead of them walked a peasant guide, wet to the skin and wearing
+      a gray peasant coat and a white knitted cap.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A little behind, on a poor, small, lean Kirghíz mount with an enormous
+      tail and mane and a bleeding mouth, rode a young officer in a blue French
+      overcoat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Beside him rode an hussar, with a boy in a tattered French uniform and
+      blue cap behind him on the crupper of his horse. The boy held on to the
+      hussar with cold, red hands, and raising his eyebrows gazed about him with
+      surprise. This was the French drummer boy captured that morning.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Behind them along the narrow, sodden, cut up forest road came hussars in
+      threes and fours, and then Cossacks: some in felt cloaks, some in French
+      greatcoats, and some with horsecloths over their heads. The horses, being
+      drenched by the rain, all looked black whether chestnut or bay. Their
+      necks, with their wet, close-clinging manes, looked strangely thin. Steam
+      rose from them. Clothes, saddles, reins, were all wet, slippery, and
+      sodden, like the ground and the fallen leaves that strewed the road. The
+      men sat huddled up trying not to stir, so as to warm the water that had
+      trickled to their bodies and not admit the fresh cold water that was
+      leaking in under their seats, their knees, and at the back of their necks.
+      In the midst of the outspread line of Cossacks two wagons, drawn by French
+      horses and by saddled Cossack horses that had been hitched on in front,
+      rumbled over the tree stumps and branches and splashed through the water
+      that lay in the ruts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov’s horse swerved aside to avoid a pool in the track and bumped his
+      rider’s knee against a tree.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, the devil!” exclaimed Denísov angrily, and showing his teeth he
+      struck his horse three times with his whip, splashing himself and his
+      comrades with mud.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov was out of sorts both because of the rain and also from hunger
+      (none of them had eaten anything since morning), and yet more because he
+      still had no news from Dólokhov and the man sent to capture a “tongue” had
+      not returned.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There’ll hardly be another such chance to fall on a transport as today.
+      It’s too risky to attack them by oneself, and if we put it off till
+      another day one of the big guerrilla detachments will snatch the prey from
+      under our noses,” thought Denísov, continually peering forward, hoping to
+      see a messenger from Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On coming to a path in the forest along which he could see far to the
+      right, Denísov stopped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There’s someone coming,” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The <i>esaul</i> looked in the direction Denísov indicated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There are two, an officer and a Cossack. But it is not <i>presupposable</i>
+      that it is the lieutenant colonel himself,” said the <i>esaul</i>, who was
+      fond of using words the Cossacks did not know.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The approaching riders having descended a decline were no longer visible,
+      but they reappeared a few minutes later. In front, at a weary gallop and
+      using his leather whip, rode an officer, disheveled and drenched, whose
+      trousers had worked up to above his knees. Behind him, standing in the
+      stirrups, trotted a Cossack. The officer, a very young lad with a broad
+      rosy face and keen merry eyes, galloped up to Denísov and handed him a
+      sodden envelope.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “From the general,” said the officer. “Please excuse its
+      not being quite dry.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov, frowning, took the envelope and opened it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There, they kept telling us: ‘It’s dangerous, it’s
+      dangerous,’” said the officer, addressing the <i>esaul</i> while
+      Denísov was reading the dispatch. “But Komaróv and I”—he pointed
+      to the Cossack—“were prepared. We have each of us two pistols.... But
+      what’s this?” he asked, noticing the French drummer boy. “A
+      prisoner? You’ve already been in action? May I speak to him?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Wostóv! Pétya!” exclaimed Denísov, having run through the
+      dispatch. “Why didn’t you say who you were?” and turning with a
+      smile he held out his hand to the lad.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The officer was Pétya Rostóv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the way Pétya had been preparing himself to behave with Denísov as
+      befitted a grown-up man and an officer—without hinting at their
+      previous acquaintance. But as soon as Denísov smiled at him Pétya
+      brightened up, blushed with pleasure, forgot the official manner he had
+      been rehearsing, and began telling him how he had already been in a battle
+      near Vyázma and how a certain hussar had distinguished himself there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, I am glad to see you,” Denísov interrupted him, and his face again
+      assumed its anxious expression.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Michael Feoklítych,” said he to the <i>esaul</i>, “this is
+      again fwom that German, you know. He”—he indicated
+      Pétya—“is serving under him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Denísov told the <i>esaul</i> that the dispatch just delivered was a
+      repetition of the German general’s demand that he should join forces with
+      him for an attack on the transport.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If we don’t take it tomowwow, he’ll snatch it fwom under our noses,” he
+      added.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While Denísov was talking to the <i>esaul</i>, Pétya—abashed by Denísov’s
+      cold tone and supposing that it was due to the condition of his trousers—furtively
+      tried to pull them down under his greatcoat so that no one should notice
+      it, while maintaining as martial an air as possible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Will there be any orders, your honor?” he asked Denísov, holding his hand
+      at the salute and resuming the game of adjutant and general for which he
+      had prepared himself, “or shall I remain with your honor?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Orders?” Denísov repeated thoughtfully. “But can you stay till tomowwow?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, please... May I stay with you?” cried Pétya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But, just what did the genewal tell you? To weturn at once?” asked
+      Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya blushed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He gave me no instructions. I think I could?” he returned, inquiringly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, all wight,” said Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And turning to his men he directed a party to go on to the halting place
+      arranged near the watchman’s hut in the forest, and told the officer on
+      the Kirghíz horse (who performed the duties of an adjutant) to go and find
+      out where Dólokhov was and whether he would come that evening. Denísov
+      himself intended going with the <i>esaul</i> and Pétya to the edge of the forest
+      where it reached out to Shámshevo, to have a look at the part of the
+      French bivouac they were to attack next day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, old fellow,” said he to the peasant guide, “lead us to Shámshevo.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov, Pétya, and the <i>esaul</i>, accompanied by some Cossacks and the hussar
+      who had the prisoner, rode to the left across a ravine to the edge of the
+      forest.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0303"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The rain had stopped, and only the mist was falling and drops from the
+      trees. Denísov, the <i>esaul</i>, and Pétya rode silently, following the peasant
+      in the knitted cap who, stepping lightly with outturned toes and moving
+      noiselessly in his bast shoes over the roots and wet leaves, silently led
+      them to the edge of the forest.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He ascended an incline, stopped, looked about him, and advanced to where
+      the screen of trees was less dense. On reaching a large oak tree that had
+      not yet shed its leaves, he stopped and beckoned mysteriously to them with
+      his hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov and Pétya rode up to him. From the spot where the peasant was
+      standing they could see the French. Immediately beyond the forest, on a
+      downward slope, lay a field of spring rye. To the right, beyond a steep
+      ravine, was a small village and a landowner’s house with a broken roof. In
+      the village, in the house, in the garden, by the well, by the pond, over
+      all the rising ground, and all along the road uphill from the bridge
+      leading to the village, not more than five hundred yards away, crowds of
+      men could be seen through the shimmering mist. Their un-Russian shouting
+      at their horses which were straining uphill with the carts, and their
+      calls to one another, could be clearly heard.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Bwing the prisoner here,” said Denísov in a low voice, not taking his
+      eyes off the French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A Cossack dismounted, lifted the boy down, and took him to Denísov.
+      Pointing to the French troops, Denísov asked him what these and those of
+      them were. The boy, thrusting his cold hands into his pockets and lifting
+      his eyebrows, looked at Denísov in affright, but in spite of an evident
+      desire to say all he knew gave confused answers, merely assenting to
+      everything Denísov asked him. Denísov turned away from him frowning and
+      addressed the <i>esaul</i>, conveying his own conjectures to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya, rapidly turning his head, looked now at the drummer boy, now at
+      Denísov, now at the <i>esaul</i>, and now at the French in the village and along
+      the road, trying not to miss anything of importance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Whether Dólokhov comes or not, we must seize it, eh?” said Denísov with a
+      merry sparkle in his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is a very suitable spot,” said the <i>esaul</i>.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We’ll send the infantwy down by the swamps,” Denísov continued. “They’ll
+      cweep up to the garden; you’ll wide up fwom there with the Cossacks”—he
+      pointed to a spot in the forest beyond the village—“and I with my
+      hussars fwom here. And at the signal shot...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The hollow is impassable—there’s a swamp there,” said the <i>esaul</i>.
+      “The horses would sink. We must ride round more to the left....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      While they were talking in undertones the crack of a shot sounded from the
+      low ground by the pond, a puff of white smoke appeared, then another, and
+      the sound of hundreds of seemingly merry French voices shouting together
+      came up from the slope. For a moment Denísov and the <i>esaul</i> drew back. They
+      were so near that they thought they were the cause of the firing and
+      shouting. But the firing and shouting did not relate to them. Down below,
+      a man wearing something red was running through the marsh. The French were
+      evidently firing and shouting at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, that’s our Tíkhon,” said the <i>esaul</i>.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So it is! It is!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The wascal!” said Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He’ll get away!” said the <i>esaul</i>, screwing up his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The man whom they called Tíkhon, having run to the stream, plunged in so
+      that the water splashed in the air, and, having disappeared for an
+      instant, scrambled out on all fours, all black with the wet, and ran on.
+      The French who had been pursuing him stopped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Smart, that!” said the <i>esaul</i>.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a beast!” said Denísov with his former look of vexation. “What has
+      he been doing all this time?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Who is he?” asked Pétya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He’s our <i>plastún</i>. I sent him to capture a ‘tongue.’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, yes,” said Pétya, nodding at the first words Denísov uttered as if he
+      understood it all, though he really did not understand anything of it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Tíkhon Shcherbáty was one of the most indispensable men in their band. He
+      was a peasant from Pokróvsk, near the river Gzhat. When Denísov had come
+      to Pokróvsk at the beginning of his operations and had as usual summoned
+      the village elder and asked him what he knew about the French, the elder,
+      as though shielding himself, had replied, as all village elders did, that
+      he had neither seen nor heard anything of them. But when Denísov explained
+      that his purpose was to kill the French, and asked if no French had
+      strayed that way, the elder replied that some “more-orderers” had really
+      been at their village, but that Tíkhon Shcherbáty was the only man who
+      dealt with such matters. Denísov had Tíkhon called and, having praised him
+      for his activity, said a few words in the elder’s presence about loyalty
+      to the Tsar and the country and the hatred of the French that all sons of
+      the fatherland should cherish.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We don’t do the French any harm,” said Tíkhon, evidently frightened by
+      Denísov’s words. “We only fooled about with the lads for fun, you know! We
+      killed a score or so of ‘more-orderers,’ but we did no harm else....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Next day when Denísov had left Pokróvsk, having quite forgotten about this
+      peasant, it was reported to him that Tíkhon had attached himself to their
+      party and asked to be allowed to remain with it. Denísov gave orders to
+      let him do so.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Tíkhon, who at first did rough work, laying campfires, fetching water,
+      flaying dead horses, and so on, soon showed a great liking and aptitude
+      for partisan warfare. At night he would go out for booty and always
+      brought back French clothing and weapons, and when told to would bring in
+      French captives also. Denísov then relieved him from drudgery and began
+      taking him with him when he went out on expeditions and had him enrolled
+      among the Cossacks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Tíkhon did not like riding, and always went on foot, never lagging behind
+      the cavalry. He was armed with a musketoon (which he carried rather as a
+      joke), a pike and an ax, which latter he used as a wolf uses its teeth,
+      with equal ease picking fleas out of its fur or crunching thick bones.
+      Tíkhon with equal accuracy would split logs with blows at arm’s length, or
+      holding the head of the ax would cut thin little pegs or carve spoons. In
+      Denísov’s party he held a peculiar and exceptional position. When anything
+      particularly difficult or nasty had to be done—to push a cart out of
+      the mud with one’s shoulders, pull a horse out of a swamp by its tail,
+      skin it, slink in among the French, or walk more than thirty miles in a
+      day—everybody pointed laughingly at Tíkhon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It won’t hurt that devil—he’s as strong as a horse!” they said of
+      him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Once a Frenchman Tíkhon was trying to capture fired a pistol at him and
+      shot him in the fleshy part of the back. That wound (which Tíkhon treated
+      only with internal and external applications of vodka) was the subject of
+      the liveliest jokes by the whole detachment—jokes in which Tíkhon
+      readily joined.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hallo, mate! Never again? Gave you a twist?” the Cossacks would banter
+      him. And Tíkhon, purposely writhing and making faces, pretended to be
+      angry and swore at the French with the funniest curses. The only effect of
+      this incident on Tíkhon was that after being wounded he seldom brought in
+      prisoners.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was the bravest and most useful man in the party. No one found more
+      opportunities for attacking, no one captured or killed more Frenchmen, and
+      consequently he was made the buffoon of all the Cossacks and hussars and
+      willingly accepted that role. Now he had been sent by Denísov overnight to
+      Shámshevo to capture a “tongue.” But whether because he had not been
+      content to take only one Frenchman or because he had slept through the
+      night, he had crept by day into some bushes right among the French and, as
+      Denísov had witnessed from above, had been detected by them.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0304"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After talking for some time with the <i>esaul</i> about next day’s attack, which
+      now, seeing how near they were to the French, he seemed to have definitely
+      decided on, Denísov turned his horse and rode back.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now, my lad, we’ll go and get dwy,” he said to Pétya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As they approached the watchhouse Denísov stopped, peering into the
+      forest. Among the trees a man with long legs and long, swinging arms,
+      wearing a short jacket, bast shoes, and a Kazán hat, was approaching with
+      long, light steps. He had a musketoon over his shoulder and an ax stuck in
+      his girdle. When he espied Denísov he hastily threw something into the
+      bushes, removed his sodden hat by its floppy brim, and approached his
+      commander. It was Tíkhon. His wrinkled and pockmarked face and narrow
+      little eyes beamed with self-satisfied merriment. He lifted his head high
+      and gazed at Denísov as if repressing a laugh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, where did you disappear to?” inquired Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where did I disappear to? I went to get Frenchmen,” answered Tíkhon
+      boldly and hurriedly, in a husky but melodious bass voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why did you push yourself in there by daylight? You ass! Well, why
+      haven’t you taken one?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, I took one all right,” said Tíkhon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where is he?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You see, I took him first thing at dawn,” Tíkhon continued, spreading out
+      his flat feet with outturned toes in their bast shoes. “I took him into
+      the forest. Then I see he’s no good and think I’ll go and fetch a likelier
+      one.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You see?... What a wogue—it’s just as I thought,” said Denísov to
+      the <i>esaul</i>. “Why didn’t you bwing that one?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What was the good of bringing him?” Tíkhon interrupted hastily and
+      angrily—“that one wouldn’t have done for you. As if I don’t know
+      what sort you want!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What a bwute you are!... Well?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I went for another one,” Tíkhon continued, “and I crept like this through
+      the wood and lay down.” (He suddenly lay down on his stomach with a supple
+      movement to show how he had done it.) “One turned up and I grabbed him,
+      like this.” (He jumped up quickly and lightly.) “‘Come along to the
+      colonel,’ I said. He starts yelling, and suddenly there were four of them.
+      They rushed at me with their little swords. So I went for them with my ax,
+      this way: ‘What are you up to?’ says I. ‘Christ be with you!’” shouted
+      Tíkhon, waving his arms with an angry scowl and throwing out his chest.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, we saw from the hill how you took to your heels through the
+      puddles!” said the <i>esaul</i>, screwing up his glittering eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya badly wanted to laugh, but noticed that they all refrained from
+      laughing. He turned his eyes rapidly from Tíkhon’s face to the
+      <i>esaul’s</i> and Denísov’s, unable to make out what it all meant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t play the fool!” said Denísov, coughing angrily. “Why didn’t you
+      bwing the first one?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Tíkhon scratched his back with one hand and his head with the other, then
+      suddenly his whole face expanded into a beaming, foolish grin, disclosing
+      a gap where he had lost a tooth (that was why he was called Shcherbáty—the
+      gap-toothed). Denísov smiled, and Pétya burst into a peal of merry
+      laughter in which Tíkhon himself joined.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, but he was a regular good-for-nothing,” said Tíkhon. “The clothes on
+      him—poor stuff! How could I bring him? And so rude, your honor! Why,
+      he says: ‘I’m a general’s son myself, I won’t go!’ he says.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You are a bwute!” said Denísov. “I wanted to question...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But I questioned him,” said Tíkhon. “He said he didn’t know much. ‘There
+      are a lot of us,’ he says, ‘but all poor stuff—only soldiers in
+      name,’ he says. ‘Shout loud at them,’ he says, ‘and you’ll take them
+      all,’” Tíkhon concluded, looking cheerfully and resolutely into Denísov’s
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll give you a hundwed sharp lashes—that’ll teach you to play the
+      fool!” said Denísov severely.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But why are you angry?” remonstrated Tíkhon, “just as if I’d never seen
+      your Frenchmen! Only wait till it gets dark and I’ll fetch you any of them
+      you want—three if you like.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, let’s go,” said Denísov, and rode all the way to the watchhouse in
+      silence and frowning angrily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Tíkhon followed behind and Pétya heard the Cossacks laughing with him and
+      at him, about some pair of boots he had thrown into the bushes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the fit of laughter that had seized him at Tíkhon’s words and smile
+      had passed and Pétya realized for a moment that this Tíkhon had killed a
+      man, he felt uneasy. He looked round at the captive drummer boy and felt a
+      pang in his heart. But this uneasiness lasted only a moment. He felt it
+      necessary to hold his head higher, to brace himself, and to question the
+      <i>esaul</i> with an air of importance about tomorrow’s undertaking, that he
+      might not be unworthy of the company in which he found himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The officer who had been sent to inquire met Denísov on the way with the
+      news that Dólokhov was soon coming and that all was well with him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov at once cheered up and, calling Pétya to him, said: “Well, tell me
+      about yourself.”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0305"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Pétya, having left his people after their departure from Moscow, joined
+      his regiment and was soon taken as orderly by a general commanding a large
+      guerrilla detachment. From the time he received his commission, and
+      especially since he had joined the active army and taken part in the
+      battle of Vyázma, Pétya had been in a constant state of blissful
+      excitement at being grown-up and in a perpetual ecstatic hurry not to miss
+      any chance to do something really heroic. He was highly delighted with
+      what he saw and experienced in the army, but at the same time it always
+      seemed to him that the really heroic exploits were being performed just
+      where he did not happen to be. And he was always in a hurry to get where
+      he was not.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When on the twenty-first of October his general expressed a wish to send
+      somebody to Denísov’s detachment, Pétya begged so piteously to be sent
+      that the general could not refuse. But when dispatching him he recalled
+      Pétya’s mad action at the battle of Vyázma, where instead of riding by the
+      road to the place to which he had been sent, he had galloped to the
+      advanced line under the fire of the French and had there twice fired his
+      pistol. So now the general explicitly forbade his taking part in any
+      action whatever of Denísov’s. That was why Pétya had blushed and grown
+      confused when Denísov asked him whether he could stay. Before they had
+      ridden to the outskirts of the forest Pétya had considered he must carry
+      out his instructions strictly and return at once. But when he saw the
+      French and saw Tíkhon and learned that there would certainly be an attack
+      that night, he decided, with the rapidity with which young people change
+      their views, that the general, whom he had greatly respected till then,
+      was a rubbishy German, that Denísov was a hero, the <i>esaul</i> a hero, and
+      Tíkhon a hero too, and that it would be shameful for him to leave them at
+      a moment of difficulty.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was already growing dusk when Denísov, Pétya, and the <i>esaul</i> rode up to
+      the watchhouse. In the twilight saddled horses could be seen, and Cossacks
+      and hussars who had rigged up rough shelters in the glade and were
+      kindling glowing fires in a hollow of the forest where the French could
+      not see the smoke. In the passage of the small watchhouse a Cossack with
+      sleeves rolled up was chopping some mutton. In the room three officers of
+      Denísov’s band were converting a door into a tabletop. Pétya took off his
+      wet clothes, gave them to be dried, and at once began helping the officers
+      to fix up the dinner table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In ten minutes the table was ready and a napkin spread on it. On the table
+      were vodka, a flask of rum, white bread, roast mutton, and salt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sitting at table with the officers and tearing the fat savory mutton with
+      his hands, down which the grease trickled, Pétya was in an ecstatic
+      childish state of love for all men, and consequently of confidence that
+      others loved him in the same way.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So then what do you think, Vasíli Dmítrich?” said he to Denísov. “It’s
+      all right my staying a day with you?” And not waiting for a reply he
+      answered his own question: “You see I was told to find out—well, I
+      am finding out.... Only do let me into the very... into the chief... I
+      don’t want a reward.... But I want...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya clenched his teeth and looked around, throwing back his head and
+      flourishing his arms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Into the vewy chief...” Denísov repeated with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Only, please let me command something, so that I may really command...”
+       Pétya went on. “What would it be to you?... Oh, you want a knife?” he
+      said, turning to an officer who wished to cut himself a piece of mutton.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And he handed him his clasp knife. The officer admired it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Please keep it. I have several like it,” said Pétya, blushing. “Heavens!
+      I was quite forgetting!” he suddenly cried. “I have some raisins, fine
+      ones; you know, seedless ones. We have a new sutler and he has such
+      capital things. I bought ten pounds. I am used to something sweet. Would
+      you like some?...” and Pétya ran out into the passage to his Cossack and
+      brought back some bags which contained about five pounds of raisins. “Have
+      some, gentlemen, have some!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You want a coffeepot, don’t you?” he asked the <i>esaul</i>. “I bought a capital
+      one from our sutler! He has splendid things. And he’s very honest, that’s
+      the chief thing. I’ll be sure to send it to you. Or perhaps your flints
+      are giving out, or are worn out—that happens sometimes, you know. I
+      have brought some with me, here they are”—and he showed a bag—“a
+      hundred flints. I bought them very cheap. Please take as many as you want,
+      or all if you like....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Then suddenly, dismayed lest he had said too much, Pétya stopped and
+      blushed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He tried to remember whether he had not done anything else that was
+      foolish. And running over the events of the day he remembered the French
+      drummer boy. “It’s capital for us here, but what of him? Where have they
+      put him? Have they fed him? Haven’t they hurt his feelings?” he thought.
+      But having caught himself saying too much about the flints, he was now
+      afraid to speak out.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I might ask,” he thought, “but they’ll say: ‘He’s a boy himself and so he
+      pities the boy.’ I’ll show them tomorrow whether I’m a boy. Will it seem
+      odd if I ask?” Pétya thought. “Well, never mind!” and immediately,
+      blushing and looking anxiously at the officers to see if they appeared
+      ironical, he said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “May I call in that boy who was taken prisoner and give him something to
+      eat?... Perhaps...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, he’s a poor little fellow,” said Denísov, who evidently saw nothing
+      shameful in this reminder. “Call him in. His name is Vincent Bosse. Have
+      him fetched.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ll call him,” said Pétya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, call him. A poor little fellow,” Denísov repeated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya was standing at the door when Denísov said this. He slipped in
+      between the officers, came close to Denísov, and said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Let me kiss you, dear old fellow! Oh, how fine, how splendid!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And having kissed Denísov he ran out of the hut.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Bosse! Vincent!” Pétya cried, stopping outside the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who do you want, sir?” asked a voice in the darkness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya replied that he wanted the French lad who had been captured that
+      day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, Vesénny?” said a Cossack.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Vincent, the boy’s name, had already been changed by the Cossacks into
+      <i>Vesénny</i> (vernal) and into <i>Vesénya</i> by the peasants and soldiers. In both
+      these adaptations the reference to spring (<i>vesná</i>) matched the impression
+      made by the young lad.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is warming himself there by the bonfire. Ho, Vesénya! Vesénya!—Vesénny!”
+       laughing voices were heard calling to one another in the darkness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He’s a smart lad,” said an hussar standing near Pétya. “We gave him
+      something to eat a while ago. He was awfully hungry!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The sound of bare feet splashing through the mud was heard in the
+      darkness, and the drummer boy came to the door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Ah, c’est vous!”</i> said Pétya. <i>“Voulez-vous
+      manger? N’ayez pas peur, on ne vous fera pas de mal,”</i> * he added
+      shyly and affectionately, touching the boy’s hand. <i>“Entrez, entrez.”</i> *(2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “Ah, it’s you! Do you want something to eat? Don’t be
+     afraid, they won’t hurt you.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * (2) “Come in, come in.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Merci, monsieur,”</i> * said the drummer boy in a trembling
+      almost childish voice, and he began scraping his dirty feet on the threshold.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Thank you, sir.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      There were many things Pétya wanted to say to the drummer boy, but did not
+      dare to. He stood irresolutely beside him in the passage. Then in the
+      darkness he took the boy’s hand and pressed it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come in, come in!” he repeated in a gentle whisper. “Oh, what can I do
+      for him?” he thought, and opening the door he let the boy pass in first.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the boy had entered the hut, Pétya sat down at a distance from him,
+      considering it beneath his dignity to pay attention to him. But he
+      fingered the money in his pocket and wondered whether it would seem
+      ridiculous to give some to the drummer boy.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0306"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The arrival of Dólokhov diverted Pétya’s attention from the drummer boy,
+      to whom Denísov had had some mutton and vodka given, and whom he had had
+      dressed in a Russian coat so that he might be kept with their band and not
+      sent away with the other prisoners. Pétya had heard in the army many
+      stories of Dólokhov’s extraordinary bravery and of his cruelty to the
+      French, so from the moment he entered the hut Pétya did not take his eyes
+      from him, but braced himself up more and more and held his head high, that
+      he might not be unworthy even of such company.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov’s appearance amazed Pétya by its simplicity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov wore a Cossack coat, had a beard, had an icon of Nicholas the
+      Wonder-Worker on his breast, and his way of speaking and everything he did
+      indicated his unusual position. But Dólokhov, who in Moscow had worn a
+      Persian costume, had now the appearance of a most correct officer of the
+      Guards. He was clean-shaven and wore a Guardsman’s padded coat with an
+      Order of St. George at his buttonhole and a plain forage cap set straight
+      on his head. He took off his wet felt cloak in a corner of the room, and
+      without greeting anyone went up to Denísov and began questioning him about
+      the matter in hand. Denísov told him of the designs the large detachments
+      had on the transport, of the message Pétya had brought, and his own
+      replies to both generals. Then he told him all he knew of the French
+      detachment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s so. But we must know what troops they are and their numbers,” said
+      Dólokhov. “It will be necessary to go there. We can’t start the affair
+      without knowing for certain how many there are. I like to work accurately.
+      Here now—wouldn’t one of these gentlemen like to ride over to the
+      French camp with me? I have brought a spare uniform.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I, I... I’ll go with you!” cried Pétya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There’s no need for you to go at all,” said Denísov, addressing Dólokhov,
+      “and as for him, I won’t let him go on any account.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I like that!” exclaimed Pétya. “Why shouldn’t I go?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Because it’s useless.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, you must excuse me, because... because... I shall go, and that’s
+      all. You’ll take me, won’t you?” he said, turning to Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why not?” Dólokhov answered absently, scrutinizing the face of the French
+      drummer boy. “Have you had that youngster with you long?” he asked
+      Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He was taken today but he knows nothing. I’m keeping him with me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, and where do you put the others?” inquired Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Where? I send them away and take a weceipt for them,” shouted Denísov,
+      suddenly flushing. “And I say boldly that I have not a single man’s life
+      on my conscience. Would it be difficult for you to send thirty or thwee
+      hundwed men to town under escort, instead of staining—I speak
+      bluntly—staining the honor of a soldier?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That kind of amiable talk would be suitable from this young count of
+      sixteen,” said Dólokhov with cold irony, “but it’s time for you to drop
+      it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, I’ve not said anything! I only say that I’ll certainly go with you,”
+       said Pétya shyly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But for you and me, old fellow, it’s time to drop these amenities,”
+       continued Dólokhov, as if he found particular pleasure in speaking of this
+      subject which irritated Denísov. “Now, why have you kept this lad?” he
+      went on, swaying his head. “Because you are sorry for him! Don’t we know
+      those ‘receipts’ of yours? You send a hundred men away, and thirty get
+      there. The rest either starve or get killed. So isn’t it all the same not
+      to send them?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The <i>esaul</i>, screwing up his light-colored eyes, nodded approvingly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s not the point. I’m not going to discuss the matter. I do not wish
+      to take it on my conscience. You say they’ll die. All wight. Only not by
+      my fault!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov began laughing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Who has told them not to capture me these twenty times over? But if they
+      did catch me they’d string me up to an aspen tree, and with all your
+      chivalry just the same.” He paused. “However, we must get to work. Tell
+      the Cossack to fetch my kit. I have two French uniforms in it. Well, are
+      you coming with me?” he asked Pétya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I? Yes, yes, certainly!” cried Pétya, blushing almost to tears and
+      glancing at Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While Dólokhov had been disputing with Denísov what should be done with
+      prisoners, Pétya had once more felt awkward and restless; but again he had
+      no time to grasp fully what they were talking about. “If grown-up,
+      distinguished men think so, it must be necessary and right,” thought he.
+      “But above all Denísov must not dare to imagine that I’ll obey him and
+      that he can order me about. I will certainly go to the French camp with
+      Dólokhov. If he can, so can I!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And to all Denísov’s persuasions, Pétya replied that he too was accustomed
+      to do everything accurately and not just anyhow, and that he never
+      considered personal danger.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “For you’ll admit that if we don’t know for sure how many of them there
+      are... hundreds of lives may depend on it, while there are only two of us.
+      Besides, I want to go very much and certainly will go, so don’t hinder
+      me,” said he. “It will only make things worse....”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0307"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Having put on French greatcoats and shakos, Pétya and Dólokhov rode to the
+      clearing from which Denísov had reconnoitered the French camp, and
+      emerging from the forest in pitch darkness they descended into the hollow.
+      On reaching the bottom, Dólokhov told the Cossacks accompanying him to
+      await him there and rode on at a quick trot along the road to the bridge.
+      Pétya, his heart in his mouth with excitement, rode by his side.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If we’re caught, I won’t be taken alive! I have a pistol,” whispered he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t talk Russian,” said Dólokhov in a hurried whisper, and at that very
+      moment they heard through the darkness the challenge: <i>“Qui vive?”</i> * and
+      the click of a musket.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Who goes there?”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      The blood rushed to Pétya’s face and he grasped his pistol.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Lanciers du 6-me,”</i> * replied Dólokhov, neither hastening nor slackening
+      his horse’s pace.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Lancers of the 6th Regiment.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      The black figure of a sentinel stood on the bridge.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Mot d’ordre.”</i> *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Password.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov reined in his horse and advanced at a walk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Dites donc, le colonel Gérard est ici?”</i> * he asked.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Tell me, is Colonel Gérard here?”
+ </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Mot d’ordre,”</i> repeated the sentinel, barring the way and not replying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Quand un officier fait sa ronde, les sentinelles ne demandent pas le mot
+      d’ordre...”</i> cried Dólokhov suddenly flaring up and riding straight
+      at the sentinel. <i>“Je vous demande si le colonel est ici.”</i> *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “When an officer is making his round, sentinels don’t ask
+     him for the password.... I am asking you if the colonel is
+     here.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      And without waiting for an answer from the sentinel, who had stepped
+      aside, Dólokhov rode up the incline at a walk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Noticing the black outline of a man crossing the road, Dólokhov stopped
+      him and inquired where the commander and officers were. The man, a soldier
+      with a sack over his shoulder, stopped, came close up to Dólokhov’s horse,
+      touched it with his hand, and explained simply and in a friendly way that
+      the commander and the officers were higher up the hill to the right in the
+      courtyard of the farm, as he called the landowner’s house.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having ridden up the road, on both sides of which French talk could be
+      heard around the campfires, Dólokhov turned into the courtyard of the
+      landowner’s house. Having ridden in, he dismounted and approached a big
+      blazing campfire, around which sat several men talking noisily. Something
+      was boiling in a small cauldron at the edge of the fire and a soldier in a
+      peaked cap and blue overcoat, lit up by the fire, was kneeling beside it
+      stirring its contents with a ramrod.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, he’s a hard nut to crack,” said one of the officers who was sitting
+      in the shadow at the other side of the fire.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He’ll make them get a move on, those fellows!” said another, laughing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Both fell silent, peering out through the darkness at the sound of
+      Dólokhov’s and Pétya’s steps as they advanced to the fire leading their
+      horses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Bonjour, messieurs!”</i> * said Dólokhov loudly and clearly.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Good day, gentlemen.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      There was a stir among the officers in the shadow beyond the fire, and one
+      tall, long-necked officer, walking round the fire, came up to Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is that you, Clément?” he asked. “Where the devil...?”
+      But, noticing his mistake, he broke off short and, with a frown, greeted Dólokhov
+      as a stranger, asking what he could do for him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov said that he and his companion were trying to overtake their
+      regiment, and addressing the company in general asked whether they knew
+      anything of the 6th Regiment. None of them knew anything, and Pétya
+      thought the officers were beginning to look at him and Dólokhov with
+      hostility and suspicion. For some seconds all were silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If you were counting on the evening soup, you have come too late,” said a
+      voice from behind the fire with a repressed laugh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov replied that they were not hungry and must push on farther that
+      night.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He handed the horses over to the soldier who was stirring the pot and
+      squatted down on his heels by the fire beside the officer with the long
+      neck. That officer did not take his eyes from Dólokhov and again asked to
+      what regiment he belonged. Dólokhov, as if he had not heard the question,
+      did not reply, but lighting a short French pipe which he took from his
+      pocket began asking the officer in how far the road before them was safe
+      from Cossacks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Those brigands are everywhere,” replied an officer from behind the fire.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov remarked that the Cossacks were a danger only to stragglers such
+      as his companion and himself, “but probably they would not dare to attack
+      large detachments?” he added inquiringly. No one replied.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, now he’ll come away,” Pétya thought every moment as he stood by the
+      campfire listening to the talk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Dólokhov restarted the conversation which had dropped and began
+      putting direct questions as to how many men there were in the battalion,
+      how many battalions, and how many prisoners. Asking about the Russian
+      prisoners with that detachment, Dólokhov said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A horrid business dragging these corpses about with one! It would be
+      better to shoot such rabble,” and burst into loud laughter, so strange
+      that Pétya thought the French would immediately detect their disguise, and
+      involuntarily took a step back from the campfire.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      No one replied a word to Dólokhov’s laughter, and a French officer whom
+      they could not see (he lay wrapped in a greatcoat) rose and whispered
+      something to a companion. Dólokhov got up and called to the soldier who
+      was holding their horses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Will they bring our horses or not?” thought Pétya, instinctively drawing
+      nearer to Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The horses were brought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good evening, gentlemen,” said Dólokhov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya wished to say “Good night” but could not utter a word. The officers
+      were whispering together. Dólokhov was a long time mounting his horse
+      which would not stand still, then he rode out of the yard at a footpace.
+      Pétya rode beside him, longing to look round to see whether or not the
+      French were running after them, but not daring to.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Coming out onto the road Dólokhov did not ride back across the open
+      country, but through the village. At one spot he stopped and listened. “Do
+      you hear?” he asked. Pétya recognized the sound of Russian voices and saw
+      the dark figures of Russian prisoners round their campfires. When they had
+      descended to the bridge Pétya and Dólokhov rode past the sentinel, who
+      without saying a word paced morosely up and down it, then they descended
+      into the hollow where the Cossacks awaited them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well now, good-by. Tell Denísov, ‘at the first shot at daybreak,’” said
+      Dólokhov and was about to ride away, but Pétya seized hold of him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Really!” he cried, “you are such a hero! Oh, how fine, how splendid! How
+      I love you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “All right, all right!” said Dólokhov. But Pétya did not let go of him and
+      Dólokhov saw through the gloom that Pétya was bending toward him and
+      wanted to kiss him. Dólokhov kissed him, laughed, turned his horse, and
+      vanished into the darkness.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0308"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Having returned to the watchman’s hut, Pétya found Denísov in the passage.
+      He was awaiting Pétya’s return in a state of agitation, anxiety, and
+      self-reproach for having let him go.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Thank God!” he exclaimed. “Yes, thank God!” he repeated,
+      listening to Pétya’s rapturous account. “But, devil take you, I
+      haven’t slept because of you! Well, thank God. Now lie down. We can still
+      get a nap before morning.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But... no,” said Pétya, “I don’t want to sleep yet. Besides I know
+      myself, if I fall asleep it’s finished. And then I am used to not sleeping
+      before a battle.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He sat awhile in the hut joyfully recalling the details of his expedition
+      and vividly picturing to himself what would happen next day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Then, noticing that Denísov was asleep, he rose and went out of doors.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was still quite dark outside. The rain was over, but drops were still
+      falling from the trees. Near the watchman’s hut the black shapes of the
+      Cossacks’ shanties and of horses tethered together could be seen. Behind
+      the hut the dark shapes of the two wagons with their horses beside them
+      were discernible, and in the hollow the dying campfire gleamed red. Not
+      all the Cossacks and hussars were asleep; here and there, amid the sounds
+      of falling drops and the munching of the horses near by, could be heard
+      low voices which seemed to be whispering.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya came out, peered into the darkness, and went up to the wagons.
+      Someone was snoring under them, and around them stood saddled horses
+      munching their oats. In the dark Pétya recognized his own horse, which he
+      called “Karabákh” though it was of Ukranian breed, and went up to it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, Karabákh! We’ll do some service tomorrow,” said he, sniffing its
+      nostrils and kissing it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why aren’t you asleep, sir?” said a Cossack who was sitting under a
+      wagon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, ah... Likhachëv—isn’t that your name? Do you know I have only
+      just come back! We’ve been into the French camp.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Pétya gave the Cossack a detailed account not only of his ride but
+      also of his object, and why he considered it better to risk his life than
+      to act “just anyhow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, you should get some sleep now,” said the Cossack.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I am used to this,” said Pétya. “I say, aren’t the flints in your
+      pistols worn out? I brought some with me. Don’t you want any? You can have
+      some.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The Cossack bent forward from under the wagon to get a closer look at
+      Pétya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Because I am accustomed to doing everything accurately,” said Pétya.
+      “Some fellows do things just anyhow, without preparation, and then they’re
+      sorry for it afterwards. I don’t like that.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Just so,” said the Cossack.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh yes, another thing! Please, my dear fellow, will you sharpen my saber
+      for me? It’s got bl...” (Pétya feared to tell a lie, and the saber never
+      had been sharpened.) “Can you do it?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Of course I can.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Likhachëv got up, rummaged in his pack, and soon Pétya heard the warlike
+      sound of steel on whetstone. He climbed onto the wagon and sat on its
+      edge. The Cossack was sharpening the saber under the wagon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I say! Are the lads asleep?” asked Pétya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Some are, and some aren’t—like us.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, and that boy?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Vesénny? Oh, he’s thrown himself down there in the passage. Fast asleep
+      after his fright. He was that glad!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      After that Pétya remained silent for a long time, listening to the sounds.
+      He heard footsteps in the darkness and a black figure appeared.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What are you sharpening?” asked a man coming up to the wagon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, this gentleman’s saber.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s right,” said the man, whom Pétya took to be an
+      hussar. “Was the cup left here?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “There, by the wheel!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The hussar took the cup.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It must be daylight soon,” said he, yawning, and went away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya ought to have known that he was in a forest with Denísov’s guerrilla
+      band, less than a mile from the road, sitting on a wagon captured from the
+      French beside which horses were tethered, that under it Likhachëv was
+      sitting sharpening a saber for him, that the big dark blotch to the right
+      was the watchman’s hut, and the red blotch below to the left was the dying
+      embers of a campfire, that the man who had come for the cup was an hussar
+      who wanted a drink; but he neither knew nor waited to know anything of all
+      this. He was in a fairy kingdom where nothing resembled reality. The big
+      dark blotch might really be the watchman’s hut or it might be a cavern
+      leading to the very depths of the earth. Perhaps the red spot was a fire,
+      or it might be the eye of an enormous monster. Perhaps he was really
+      sitting on a wagon, but it might very well be that he was not sitting on a
+      wagon but on a terribly high tower from which, if he fell, he would have
+      to fall for a whole day or a whole month, or go on falling and never reach
+      the bottom. Perhaps it was just the Cossack, Likhachëv, who was sitting
+      under the wagon, but it might be the kindest, bravest, most wonderful,
+      most splendid man in the world, whom no one knew of. It might really have
+      been that the hussar came for water and went back into the hollow, but
+      perhaps he had simply vanished—disappeared altogether and dissolved
+      into nothingness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nothing Pétya could have seen now would have surprised him. He was in a
+      fairy kingdom where everything was possible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He looked up at the sky. And the sky was a fairy realm like the earth. It
+      was clearing, and over the tops of the trees clouds were swiftly sailing
+      as if unveiling the stars. Sometimes it looked as if the clouds were
+      passing, and a clear black sky appeared. Sometimes it seemed as if the
+      black spaces were clouds. Sometimes the sky seemed to be rising high, high
+      overhead, and then it seemed to sink so low that one could touch it with
+      one’s hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya’s eyes began to close and he swayed a little.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The trees were dripping. Quiet talking was heard. The horses neighed and
+      jostled one another. Someone snored.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Ozheg-zheg, Ozheg-zheg...”</i> hissed the saber against the whetstone, and
+      suddenly Pétya heard an harmonious orchestra playing some unknown, sweetly
+      solemn hymn. Pétya was as musical as Natásha and more so than Nicholas,
+      but had never learned music or thought about it, and so the melody that
+      unexpectedly came to his mind seemed to him particularly fresh and
+      attractive. The music became more and more audible. The melody grew and
+      passed from one instrument to another. And what was played was a fugue—though
+      Pétya had not the least conception of what a fugue is. Each instrument—now
+      resembling a violin and now a horn, but better and clearer than violin or
+      horn—played its own part, and before it had finished the melody
+      merged with another instrument that began almost the same air, and then
+      with a third and a fourth; and they all blended into one and again became
+      separate and again blended, now into solemn church music, now into
+      something dazzlingly brilliant and triumphant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh—why, that was in a dream!” Pétya said to himself, as he lurched
+      forward. “It’s in my ears. But perhaps it’s music of my own. Well, go on,
+      my music! Now!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He closed his eyes, and, from all sides as if from a distance, sounds
+      fluttered, grew into harmonies, separated, blended, and again all mingled
+      into the same sweet and solemn hymn. “Oh, this is delightful! As much as I
+      like and as I like!” said Pétya to himself. He tried to conduct that
+      enormous orchestra.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now softly, softly die away!” and the sounds obeyed him. “Now fuller,
+      more joyful. Still more and more joyful!” And from an unknown depth rose
+      increasingly triumphant sounds. “Now voices join in!” ordered Pétya. And
+      at first from afar he heard men’s voices and then women’s. The voices grew
+      in harmonious triumphant strength, and Pétya listened to their surpassing
+      beauty in awe and joy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With a solemn triumphal march there mingled a song, the drip from the
+      trees, and the hissing of the saber, <i>“Ozheg-zheg-zheg...”</i>
+      and again the horses jostled one another and neighed, not disturbing the choir
+      but joining in it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya did not know how long this lasted: he enjoyed himself all the time,
+      wondered at his enjoyment and regretted that there was no one to share it.
+      He was awakened by Likhachëv’s kindly voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s ready, your honor; you can split a Frenchman in half with it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pétya woke up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s getting light, it’s really getting light!” he exclaimed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The horses that had previously been invisible could now be seen to their
+      very tails, and a watery light showed itself through the bare branches.
+      Pétya shook himself, jumped up, took a ruble from his pocket and gave it
+      to Likhachëv; then he flourished the saber, tested it, and sheathed it.
+      The Cossacks were untying their horses and tightening their saddle girths.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And here’s the commander,” said Likhachëv.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov came out of the watchman’s hut and, having called Pétya, gave
+      orders to get ready.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0309"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The men rapidly picked out their horses in the semidarkness, tightened
+      their saddle girths, and formed companies. Denísov stood by the watchman’s
+      hut giving final orders. The infantry of the detachment passed along the
+      road and quickly disappeared amid the trees in the mist of early dawn,
+      hundreds of feet splashing through the mud. The <i>esaul</i> gave some orders to
+      his men. Pétya held his horse by the bridle, impatiently awaiting the
+      order to mount. His face, having been bathed in cold water, was all aglow,
+      and his eyes were particularly brilliant. Cold shivers ran down his spine
+      and his whole body pulsed rhythmically.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, is ev’wything weady?” asked Denísov. “Bwing the horses.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The horses were brought. Denísov was angry with the Cossack because the
+      saddle girths were too slack, reproved him, and mounted. Pétya put his
+      foot in the stirrup. His horse by habit made as if to nip his leg, but
+      Pétya leaped quickly into the saddle unconscious of his own weight and,
+      turning to look at the hussars starting in the darkness behind him, rode
+      up to Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Vasíli Dmítrich, entrust me with some commission! Please... for God’s
+      sake...!” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov seemed to have forgotten Pétya’s very existence. He turned to
+      glance at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I ask one thing of you,” he said sternly, “to obey me and not shove
+      yourself forward anywhere.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He did not say another word to Pétya but rode in silence all the way. When
+      they had come to the edge of the forest it was noticeably growing light
+      over the field. Denísov talked in whispers with the <i>esaul</i> and the Cossacks
+      rode past Pétya and Denísov. When they had all ridden by, Denísov touched
+      his horse and rode down the hill. Slipping onto their haunches and
+      sliding, the horses descended with their riders into the ravine. Pétya
+      rode beside Denísov, the pulsation of his body constantly increasing. It
+      was getting lighter and lighter, but the mist still hid distant objects.
+      Having reached the valley, Denísov looked back and nodded to a Cossack
+      beside him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The signal!” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Cossack raised his arm and a shot rang out. In an instant the tramp of
+      horses galloping forward was heard, shouts came from various sides, and
+      then more shots.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the first sound of trampling hoofs and shouting, Pétya lashed his horse
+      and loosening his rein galloped forward, not heeding Denísov who shouted
+      at him. It seemed to Pétya that at the moment the shot was fired it
+      suddenly became as bright as noon. He galloped to the bridge. Cossacks
+      were galloping along the road in front of him. On the bridge he collided
+      with a Cossack who had fallen behind, but he galloped on. In front of him
+      soldiers, probably Frenchmen, were running from right to left across the
+      road. One of them fell in the mud under his horse’s feet.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Cossacks were crowding about a hut, busy with something. From the midst of
+      that crowd terrible screams arose. Pétya galloped up, and the first thing
+      he saw was the pale face and trembling jaw of a Frenchman, clutching the
+      handle of a lance that had been aimed at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hurrah!... Lads!... ours!” shouted Pétya, and giving rein to his excited
+      horse he galloped forward along the village street.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He could hear shooting ahead of him. Cossacks, hussars, and ragged Russian
+      prisoners, who had come running from both sides of the road, were shouting
+      something loudly and incoherently. A gallant-looking Frenchman, in a blue
+      overcoat, capless, and with a frowning red face, had been defending
+      himself against the hussars. When Pétya galloped up the Frenchman had
+      already fallen. “Too late again!” flashed through Pétya’s mind and he
+      galloped on to the place from which the rapid firing could be heard. The
+      shots came from the yard of the landowner’s house he had visited the night
+      before with Dólokhov. The French were making a stand there behind a wattle
+      fence in a garden thickly overgrown with bushes and were firing at the
+      Cossacks who crowded at the gateway. Through the smoke, as he approached
+      the gate, Pétya saw Dólokhov, whose face was of a pale-greenish tint,
+      shouting to his men. “Go round! Wait for the infantry!” he exclaimed as
+      Pétya rode up to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Wait?... Hurrah-ah-ah!” shouted Pétya, and without pausing a moment
+      galloped to the place whence came the sounds of firing and where the smoke
+      was thickest.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A volley was heard, and some bullets whistled past, while others plashed
+      against something. The Cossacks and Dólokhov galloped after Pétya into the
+      gateway of the courtyard. In the dense wavering smoke some of the French
+      threw down their arms and ran out of the bushes to meet the Cossacks,
+      while others ran down the hill toward the pond. Pétya was galloping along
+      the courtyard, but instead of holding the reins he waved both his arms
+      about rapidly and strangely, slipping farther and farther to one side in
+      his saddle. His horse, having galloped up to a campfire that was
+      smoldering in the morning light, stopped suddenly, and Pétya fell heavily
+      on to the wet ground. The Cossacks saw that his arms and legs jerked
+      rapidly though his head was quite motionless. A bullet had pierced his
+      skull.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After speaking to the senior French officer, who came out of the house
+      with a white handkerchief tied to his sword and announced that they
+      surrendered, Dólokhov dismounted and went up to Pétya, who lay motionless
+      with outstretched arms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Done for!” he said with a frown, and went to the gate to meet Denísov who
+      was riding toward him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Killed?” cried Denísov, recognizing from a distance the unmistakably
+      lifeless attitude—very familiar to him—in which Pétya’s body
+      was lying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Done for!” repeated Dólokhov as if the utterance of these words afforded
+      him pleasure, and he went quickly up to the prisoners, who were surrounded
+      by Cossacks who had hurried up. “We won’t take them!” he called out to
+      Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov did not reply; he rode up to Pétya, dismounted, and with trembling
+      hands turned toward himself the bloodstained, mud-bespattered face which
+      had already gone white.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am used to something sweet. Raisins, fine ones... take them all!” he
+      recalled Pétya’s words. And the Cossacks looked round in surprise at the
+      sound, like the yelp of a dog, with which Denísov turned away, walked to
+      the wattle fence, and seized hold of it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Among the Russian prisoners rescued by Denísov and Dólokhov was Pierre
+      Bezúkhov.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0310"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      During the whole of their march from Moscow no fresh orders had been
+      issued by the French authorities concerning the party of prisoners among
+      whom was Pierre. On the twenty-second of October that party was no longer
+      with the same troops and baggage trains with which it had left Moscow.
+      Half the wagons laden with hardtack that had traveled the first stages
+      with them had been captured by Cossacks, the other half had gone on ahead.
+      Not one of those dismounted cavalrymen who had marched in front of the
+      prisoners was left; they had all disappeared. The artillery the prisoners
+      had seen in front of them during the first days was now replaced by
+      Marshal Junot’s enormous baggage train, convoyed by Westphalians. Behind
+      the prisoners came a cavalry baggage train.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From Vyázma onwards the French army, which had till then moved in three
+      columns, went on as a single group. The symptoms of disorder that Pierre
+      had noticed at their first halting place after leaving Moscow had now
+      reached the utmost limit.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The road along which they moved was bordered on both sides by dead horses;
+      ragged men who had fallen behind from various regiments continually
+      changed about, now joining the moving column, now again lagging behind it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Several times during the march false alarms had been given and the
+      soldiers of the escort had raised their muskets, fired, and run headlong,
+      crushing one another, but had afterwards reassembled and abused each other
+      for their causeless panic.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      These three groups traveling together—the cavalry stores, the convoy
+      of prisoners, and Junot’s baggage train—still constituted a separate
+      and united whole, though each of the groups was rapidly melting away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Of the artillery baggage train which had consisted of a hundred and twenty
+      wagons, not more than sixty now remained; the rest had been captured or
+      left behind. Some of Junot’s wagons also had been captured or abandoned.
+      Three wagons had been raided and robbed by stragglers from Davout’s corps.
+      From the talk of the Germans Pierre learned that a larger guard had been
+      allotted to that baggage train than to the prisoners, and that one of
+      their comrades, a German soldier, had been shot by the marshal’s own order
+      because a silver spoon belonging to the marshal had been found in his
+      possession.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The group of prisoners had melted away most of all. Of the three hundred
+      and thirty men who had set out from Moscow fewer than a hundred now
+      remained. The prisoners were more burdensome to the escort than even the
+      cavalry saddles or Junot’s baggage. They understood that the saddles and
+      Junot’s spoon might be of some use, but that cold and hungry soldiers
+      should have to stand and guard equally cold and hungry Russians who froze
+      and lagged behind on the road (in which case the order was to shoot them)
+      was not merely incomprehensible but revolting. And the escort, as if
+      afraid, in the grievous condition they themselves were in, of giving way
+      to the pity they felt for the prisoners and so rendering their own plight
+      still worse, treated them with particular moroseness and severity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At Dorogobúzh while the soldiers of the convoy, after locking the
+      prisoners in a stable, had gone off to pillage their own stores, several
+      of the soldier prisoners tunneled under the wall and ran away, but were
+      recaptured by the French and shot.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The arrangement adopted when they started, that the officer prisoners
+      should be kept separate from the rest, had long since been abandoned. All
+      who could walk went together, and after the third stage Pierre had
+      rejoined Karatáev and the gray-blue bandy-legged dog that had chosen
+      Karatáev for its master.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the third day after leaving Moscow Karatáev again fell ill with the
+      fever he had suffered from in the hospital in Moscow, and as he grew
+      gradually weaker Pierre kept away from him. Pierre did not know why, but
+      since Karatáev had begun to grow weaker it had cost him an effort to go
+      near him. When he did so and heard the subdued moaning with which Karatáev
+      generally lay down at the halting places, and when he smelled the odor
+      emanating from him which was now stronger than before, Pierre moved
+      farther away and did not think about him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but
+      with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness,
+      that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs,
+      and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity.
+      And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still
+      another new, consolatory truth—that nothing in this world is
+      terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be
+      happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be
+      unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their
+      limits and that those limits are very near together; that the person in a
+      bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now,
+      sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while the
+      other was warming; and that when he had put on tight dancing shoes he had
+      suffered just as he did now when he walked with bare feet that were
+      covered with sores—his footgear having long since fallen to pieces.
+      He discovered that when he had married his wife—of his own free will
+      as it had seemed to him—he had been no more free than now when they
+      locked him up at night in a stable. Of all that he himself subsequently
+      termed his sufferings, but which at the time he scarcely felt, the worst
+      was the state of his bare, raw, and scab-covered feet. (The horseflesh was
+      appetizing and nourishing, the saltpeter flavor of the gunpowder they used
+      instead of salt was even pleasant; there was no great cold, it was always
+      warm walking in the daytime, and at night there were the campfires; the
+      lice that devoured him warmed his body.) The one thing that was at first
+      hard to bear was his feet.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the second day’s march Pierre, having examined his feet by the
+      campfire, thought it would be impossible to walk on them; but when
+      everybody got up he went along, limping, and, when he had warmed up,
+      walked without feeling the pain, though at night his feet were more
+      terrible to look at than before. However, he did not look at them now, but
+      thought of other things.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only now did Pierre realize the full strength of life in man and the
+      saving power he has of transferring his attention from one thing to
+      another, which is like the safety valve of a boiler that allows
+      superfluous steam to blow off when the pressure exceeds a certain limit.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He did not see and did not hear how they shot the prisoners who lagged
+      behind, though more than a hundred perished in that way. He did not think
+      of Karatáev who grew weaker every day and evidently would soon have to
+      share that fate. Still less did Pierre think about himself. The harder his
+      position became and the more terrible the future, the more independent of
+      that position in which he found himself were the joyful and comforting
+      thoughts, memories, and imaginings that came to him.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0311"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At midday on the twenty-second of October Pierre was going uphill along
+      the muddy, slippery road, looking at his feet and at the roughness of the
+      way. Occasionally he glanced at the familiar crowd around him and then
+      again at his feet. The former and the latter were alike familiar and his
+      own. The blue-gray bandy legged dog ran merrily along the side of the
+      road, sometimes in proof of its agility and self-satisfaction lifting one
+      hind leg and hopping along on three, and then again going on all four and
+      rushing to bark at the crows that sat on the carrion. The dog was merrier
+      and sleeker than it had been in Moscow. All around lay the flesh of
+      different animals—from men to horses—in various stages of
+      decomposition; and as the wolves were kept off by the passing men the dog
+      could eat all it wanted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It had been raining since morning and had seemed as if at any moment it
+      might cease and the sky clear, but after a short break it began raining
+      harder than before. The saturated road no longer absorbed the water, which
+      ran along the ruts in streams.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre walked along, looking from side to side, counting his steps in
+      threes, and reckoning them off on his fingers. Mentally addressing the
+      rain, he repeated: “Now then, now then, go on! Pelt harder!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      It seemed to him that he was thinking of nothing, but far down and deep
+      within him his soul was occupied with something important and comforting.
+      This something was a most subtle spiritual deduction from a conversation
+      with Karatáev the day before.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At their yesterday’s halting place, feeling chilly by a dying campfire,
+      Pierre had got up and gone to the next one, which was burning better.
+      There Platón Karatáev was sitting covered up—head and all—with
+      his greatcoat as if it were a vestment, telling the soldiers in his
+      effective and pleasant though now feeble voice a story Pierre knew. It was
+      already past midnight, the hour when Karatáev was usually free of his
+      fever and particularly lively. When Pierre reached the fire and heard
+      Platón’s voice enfeebled by illness, and saw his pathetic face brightly
+      lit up by the blaze, he felt a painful prick at his heart. His feeling of
+      pity for this man frightened him and he wished to go away, but there was
+      no other fire, and Pierre sat down, trying not to look at Platón.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, how are you?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How am I? If we grumble at sickness, God won’t grant us death,” replied
+      Platón, and at once resumed the story he had begun.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And so, brother,” he continued, with a smile on his pale emaciated face
+      and a particularly happy light in his eyes, “you see, brother...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre had long been familiar with that story. Karatáev had told it to him
+      alone some half-dozen times and always with a specially joyful emotion.
+      But well as he knew it, Pierre now listened to that tale as to something
+      new, and the quiet rapture Karatáev evidently felt as he told it
+      communicated itself also to Pierre. The story was of an old merchant who
+      lived a good and God-fearing life with his family, and who went once to
+      the Nízhni fair with a companion—a rich merchant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having put up at an inn they both went to sleep, and next morning his
+      companion was found robbed and with his throat cut. A bloodstained knife
+      was found under the old merchant’s pillow. He was tried, knouted, and his
+      nostrils having been torn off, “all in due form” as Karatáev put it, he
+      was sent to hard labor in Siberia.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And so, brother” (it was at this point that Pierre came up), “ten years
+      or more passed by. The old man was living as a convict, submitting as he
+      should and doing no wrong. Only he prayed to God for death. Well, one
+      night the convicts were gathered just as we are, with the old man among
+      them. And they began telling what each was suffering for, and how they had
+      sinned against God. One told how he had taken a life, another had taken
+      two, a third had set a house on fire, while another had simply been a
+      vagrant and had done nothing. So they asked the old man: ‘What are you
+      being punished for, Daddy?’—‘I, my dear brothers,’ said he, ‘am
+      being punished for my own and other men’s sins. But I have not killed
+      anyone or taken anything that was not mine, but have only helped my poorer
+      brothers. I was a merchant, my dear brothers, and had much property. ‘And
+      he went on to tell them all about it in due order. ‘I don’t grieve for
+      myself,’ he says, ‘God, it seems, has chastened me. Only I am sorry for my
+      old wife and the children,’ and the old man began to weep. Now it happened
+      that in the group was the very man who had killed the other merchant.
+      ‘Where did it happen, Daddy?’ he said. ‘When, and in what month?’ He asked
+      all about it and his heart began to ache. So he comes up to the old man
+      like this, and falls down at his feet! ‘You are perishing because of me,
+      Daddy,’ he says. ‘It’s quite true, lads, that this man,’ he says, ‘is
+      being tortured innocently and for nothing! I,’ he says, ‘did that deed,
+      and I put the knife under your head while you were asleep. Forgive me,
+      Daddy,’ he says, ‘for Christ’s sake!’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Karatáev paused, smiling joyously as he gazed into the fire, and he drew
+      the logs together.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And the old man said, ‘God will forgive you, we are all sinners in His
+      sight. I suffer for my own sins,’ and he wept bitter tears. Well, and what
+      do you think, dear friends?” Karatáev continued, his face brightening more
+      and more with a rapturous smile as if what he now had to tell contained
+      the chief charm and the whole meaning of his story: “What do you think,
+      dear fellows? That murderer confessed to the authorities. ‘I have taken
+      six lives,’ he says (he was a great sinner), ‘but what I am most sorry for
+      is this old man. Don’t let him suffer because of me.’ So he confessed and
+      it was all written down and the papers sent off in due form. The place was
+      a long way off, and while they were judging, what with one thing and
+      another, filling in the papers all in due form—the authorities I
+      mean—time passed. The affair reached the Tsar. After a while the
+      Tsar’s decree came: to set the merchant free and give him a compensation
+      that had been awarded. The paper arrived and they began to look for the
+      old man. ‘Where is the old man who has been suffering innocently and in
+      vain? A paper has come from the Tsar!’ so they began looking for him,”
+       here Karatáev’s lower jaw trembled, “but God had already forgiven him—he
+      was dead! That’s how it was, dear fellows!” Karatáev concluded and sat for
+      a long time silent, gazing before him with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And Pierre’s soul was dimly but joyfully filled not by the story itself
+      but by its mysterious significance: by the rapturous joy that lit up
+      Karatáev’s face as he told it, and the mystic significance of that joy.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0312"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<i>“À vos places!”</i> * suddenly cried a voice.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “To your places.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      A pleasant feeling of excitement and an expectation of something joyful
+      and solemn was aroused among the soldiers of the convoy and the prisoners.
+      From all sides came shouts of command, and from the left came smartly
+      dressed cavalrymen on good horses, passing the prisoners at a trot. The
+      expression on all faces showed the tension people feel at the approach of
+      those in authority. The prisoners thronged together and were pushed off
+      the road. The convoy formed up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Emperor! The Emperor! The Marshal! The Duke!” and hardly had the
+      sleek cavalry passed, before a carriage drawn by six gray horses rattled
+      by. Pierre caught a glimpse of a man in a three-cornered hat with a
+      tranquil look on his handsome, plump, white face. It was one of the
+      marshals. His eye fell on Pierre’s large and striking figure, and in the
+      expression with which he frowned and looked away Pierre thought he
+      detected sympathy and a desire to conceal that sympathy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The general in charge of the stores galloped after the carriage with a red
+      and frightened face, whipping up his skinny horse. Several officers formed
+      a group and some soldiers crowded round them. Their faces all looked
+      excited and worried.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What did he say? What did he say?” Pierre heard them ask.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While the marshal was passing, the prisoners had huddled together in a
+      crowd, and Pierre saw Karatáev whom he had not yet seen that morning. He
+      sat in his short overcoat leaning against a birch tree. On his face,
+      besides the look of joyful emotion it had worn yesterday while telling the
+      tale of the merchant who suffered innocently, there was now an expression
+      of quiet solemnity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Karatáev looked at Pierre with his kindly round eyes now filled with
+      tears, evidently wishing him to come near that he might say something to
+      him. But Pierre was not sufficiently sure of himself. He made as if he did
+      not notice that look and moved hastily away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the prisoners again went forward Pierre looked round. Karatáev was
+      still sitting at the side of the road under the birch tree and two
+      Frenchmen were talking over his head. Pierre did not look round again but
+      went limping up the hill.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From behind, where Karatáev had been sitting, came the sound of a shot.
+      Pierre heard it plainly, but at that moment he remembered that he had not
+      yet finished reckoning up how many stages still remained to Smolénsk—a
+      calculation he had begun before the marshal went by. And he again started
+      reckoning. Two French soldiers ran past Pierre, one of whom carried a
+      lowered and smoking gun. They both looked pale, and in the expression on
+      their faces—one of them glanced timidly at Pierre—there was
+      something resembling what he had seen on the face of the young soldier at
+      the execution. Pierre looked at the soldier and remembered that, two days
+      before, that man had burned his shirt while drying it at the fire and how
+      they had laughed at him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Behind him, where Karatáev had been sitting, the dog began to howl. “What
+      a stupid beast! Why is it howling?” thought Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His comrades, the prisoner soldiers walking beside him, avoided looking
+      back at the place where the shot had been fired and the dog was howling,
+      just as Pierre did, but there was a set look on all their faces.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0313"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The stores, the prisoners, and the marshal’s baggage train stopped at the
+      village of Shámshevo. The men crowded together round the campfires. Pierre
+      went up to the fire, ate some roast horseflesh, lay down with his back to
+      the fire, and immediately fell asleep. He again slept as he had done at
+      Mozháysk after the battle of Borodinó.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Again real events mingled with dreams and again someone, he or another,
+      gave expression to his thoughts, and even to the same thoughts that had
+      been expressed in his dream at Mozháysk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that
+      movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of
+      the divine. To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all
+      else is to love this life in one’s sufferings, in innocent sufferings.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Karatáev!” came to Pierre’s mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And suddenly he saw vividly before him a long-forgotten, kindly old man
+      who had given him geography lessons in Switzerland. “Wait a bit,” said the
+      old man, and showed Pierre a globe. This globe was alive—a vibrating
+      ball without fixed dimensions. Its whole surface consisted of drops
+      closely pressed together, and all these drops moved and changed places,
+      sometimes several of them merging into one, sometimes one dividing into
+      many. Each drop tried to spread out and occupy as much space as possible,
+      but others striving to do the same compressed it, sometimes destroyed it,
+      and sometimes merged with it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That is life,” said the old teacher.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How simple and clear it is,” thought Pierre. “How is it I did not know it
+      before?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “God is in the midst, and each drop tries to expand so as to reflect Him
+      to the greatest extent. And it grows, merges, disappears from the surface,
+      sinks to the depths, and again emerges. There now, Karatáev has spread out
+      and disappeared. Do you understand, my child?” said the teacher.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you understand, damn you?” shouted a voice, and Pierre woke up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He lifted himself and sat up. A Frenchman who had just pushed a Russian
+      soldier away was squatting by the fire, engaged in roasting a piece of
+      meat stuck on a ramrod. His sleeves were rolled up and his sinewy, hairy,
+      red hands with their short fingers deftly turned the ramrod. His brown
+      morose face with frowning brows was clearly visible by the glow of the
+      charcoal.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s all the same to him,” he muttered, turning quickly to a soldier who
+      stood behind him. “Brigand! Get away!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And twisting the ramrod he looked gloomily at Pierre, who turned away and
+      gazed into the darkness. A prisoner, the Russian soldier the Frenchman had
+      pushed away, was sitting near the fire patting something with his hand.
+      Looking more closely Pierre recognized the blue-gray dog, sitting beside
+      the soldier, wagging its tail.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, he’s come?” said Pierre. “And Plat—” he began, but did not finish.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Suddenly and simultaneously a crowd of memories awoke in his fancy—of
+      the look Platón had given him as he sat under the tree, of the shot heard
+      from that spot, of the dog’s howl, of the guilty faces of the two
+      Frenchmen as they ran past him, of the lowered and smoking gun, and of
+      Karatáev’s absence at this halt—and he was on the point of realizing
+      that Karatáev had been killed, but just at that instant, he knew not why,
+      the recollection came to his mind of a summer evening he had spent with a
+      beautiful Polish lady on the veranda of his house in Kiev. And without
+      linking up the events of the day or drawing a conclusion from them, Pierre
+      closed his eyes, seeing a vision of the country in summertime mingled with
+      memories of bathing and of the liquid, vibrating globe, and he sank into
+      water so that it closed over his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before sunrise he was awakened by shouts and loud and rapid firing. French
+      soldiers were running past him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The Cossacks!” one of them shouted, and a moment later a crowd of
+      Russians surrounded Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For a long time he could not understand what was happening to him. All
+      around he heard his comrades sobbing with joy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Brothers! Dear fellows! Darlings!” old soldiers exclaimed, weeping, as
+      they embraced Cossacks and hussars.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The hussars and Cossacks crowded round the prisoners; one offered them
+      clothes, another boots, and a third bread. Pierre sobbed as he sat among
+      them and could not utter a word. He hugged the first soldier who
+      approached him, and kissed him, weeping.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dólokhov stood at the gate of the ruined house, letting a crowd of
+      disarmed Frenchmen pass by. The French, excited by all that had happened,
+      were talking loudly among themselves, but as they passed Dólokhov who
+      gently switched his boots with his whip and watched them with cold glassy
+      eyes that boded no good, they became silent. On the opposite side stood
+      Dólokhov’s Cossack, counting the prisoners and marking off each hundred
+      with a chalk line on the gate.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How many?” Dólokhov asked the Cossack.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The second hundred,” replied the Cossack.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Filez, filez!”</i> * Dólokhov kept saying, having adopted
+      this expression from the French, and when his eyes met those of the prisoners
+      they flashed with a cruel light.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “Get along, get along!”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov, bareheaded and with a gloomy face, walked behind some Cossacks
+      who were carrying the body of Pétya Rostóv to a hole that had been dug in
+      the garden.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0314"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After the twenty-eighth of October when the frosts began, the flight of
+      the French assumed a still more tragic character, with men freezing, or
+      roasting themselves to death at the campfires, while carriages with people
+      dressed in furs continued to drive past, carrying away the property that
+      had been stolen by the Emperor, kings, and dukes; but the process of the
+      flight and disintegration of the French army went on essentially as
+      before.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From Moscow to Vyázma the French army of seventy-three thousand men not
+      reckoning the Guards (who did nothing during the whole war but pillage)
+      was reduced to thirty-six thousand, though not more than five thousand had
+      fallen in battle. From this beginning the succeeding terms of the
+      progression could be determined mathematically. The French army melted
+      away and perished at the same rate from Moscow to Vyázma, from Vyázma to
+      Smolénsk, from Smolénsk to the Berëzina, and from the Berëzina to Vílna—independently
+      of the greater or lesser intensity of the cold, the pursuit, the barring
+      of the way, or any other particular conditions. Beyond Vyázma the French
+      army instead of moving in three columns huddled together into one mass,
+      and so went on to the end. Berthier wrote to his Emperor (we know how far
+      commanding officers allow themselves to diverge from the truth in
+      describing the condition of an army) and this is what he said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      I deem it my duty to report to Your Majesty the condition of the various
+      corps I have had occasion to observe during different stages of the last
+      two or three days’ march. They are almost disbanded. Scarcely a quarter of
+      the soldiers remain with the standards of their regiments, the others go
+      off by themselves in different directions hoping to find food and escape
+      discipline. In general they regard Smolénsk as the place where they hope
+      to recover. During the last few days many of the men have been seen to
+      throw away their cartridges and their arms. In such a state of affairs,
+      whatever your ultimate plans may be, the interest of Your Majesty’s
+      service demands that the army should be rallied at Smolénsk and should
+      first of all be freed from ineffectives, such as dismounted cavalry,
+      unnecessary baggage, and artillery material that is no longer in
+      proportion to the present forces. The soldiers, who are worn out with
+      hunger and fatigue, need these supplies as well as a few days’ rest. Many
+      have died these last days on the road or at the bivouacs. This state of
+      things is continually becoming worse and makes one fear that unless a
+      prompt remedy is applied the troops will no longer be under control in
+      case of an engagement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      November 9: twenty miles from Smolénsk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      After staggering into Smolénsk which seemed to them a promised land, the
+      French, searching for food, killed one another, sacked their own stores,
+      and when everything had been plundered fled farther.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They all went without knowing whither or why they were going. Still less
+      did that genius, Napoleon, know it, for no one issued any orders to him.
+      But still he and those about him retained their old habits: wrote
+      commands, letters, reports, and orders of the day; called one another
+      <i>sire, mon cousin, prince d’Eckmühl, roi de Naples</i>, and so on. But
+      these orders and reports were only on paper, nothing in them was acted upon for
+      they could not be carried out, and though they entitled one another
+      Majesties, Highnesses, or Cousins, they all felt that they were miserable
+      wretches who had done much evil for which they had now to pay. And though
+      they pretended to be concerned about the army, each was thinking only of
+      himself and of how to get away quickly and save himself.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0315"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The movements of the Russian and French armies during the campaign from
+      Moscow back to the Niemen were like those in a game of Russian blindman’s
+      buff, in which two players are blindfolded and one of them occasionally
+      rings a little bell to inform the catcher of his whereabouts. First he
+      rings his bell fearlessly, but when he gets into a tight place he runs
+      away as quietly as he can, and often thinking to escape runs straight into
+      his opponent’s arms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At first while they were still moving along the Kalúga road, Napoleon’s
+      armies made their presence known, but later when they reached the Smolénsk
+      road they ran holding the clapper of their bell tight—and often
+      thinking they were escaping ran right into the Russians.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Owing to the rapidity of the French flight and the Russian pursuit and the
+      consequent exhaustion of the horses, the chief means of approximately
+      ascertaining the enemy’s position—by cavalry scouting—was not
+      available. Besides, as a result of the frequent and rapid change of
+      position by each army, even what information was obtained could not be
+      delivered in time. If news was received one day that the enemy had been in
+      a certain position the day before, by the third day when something could
+      have been done, that army was already two days’ march farther on and in
+      quite another position.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One army fled and the other pursued. Beyond Smolénsk there were several
+      different roads available for the French, and one would have thought that
+      during their stay of four days they might have learned where the enemy
+      was, might have arranged some more advantageous plan and undertaken
+      something new. But after a four days’ halt the mob, with no maneuvers or
+      plans, again began running along the beaten track, neither to the right
+      nor to the left but along the old—the worst—road, through
+      Krásnoe and Orshá.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Expecting the enemy from behind and not in front, the French separated in
+      their flight and spread out over a distance of twenty-four hours. In front
+      of them all fled the Emperor, then the kings, then the dukes. The Russian
+      army, expecting Napoleon to take the road to the right beyond the Dnieper—which
+      was the only reasonable thing for him to do—themselves turned to the
+      right and came out onto the highroad at Krásnoe. And here as in a game of
+      blindman’s buff the French ran into our vanguard. Seeing their enemy
+      unexpectedly the French fell into confusion and stopped short from the
+      sudden fright, but then they resumed their flight, abandoning their
+      comrades who were farther behind. Then for three days separate portions of
+      the French army—first Murat’s (the vice-king’s), then Davout’s, and
+      then Ney’s—ran, as it were, the gauntlet of the Russian army. They
+      abandoned one another, abandoned all their heavy baggage, their artillery,
+      and half their men, and fled, getting past the Russians by night by making
+      semicircles to the right.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Ney, who came last, had been busying himself blowing up the walls of
+      Smolénsk which were in nobody’s way, because despite the unfortunate
+      plight of the French or because of it, they wished to punish the floor
+      against which they had hurt themselves. Ney, who had had a corps of ten
+      thousand men, reached Napoleon at Orshá with only one thousand men left,
+      having abandoned all the rest and all his cannon, and having crossed the
+      Dnieper at night by stealth at a wooded spot.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From Orshá they fled farther along the road to Vílna, still playing at
+      blindman’s buff with the pursuing army. At the Berëzina they again became
+      disorganized, many were drowned and many surrendered, but those who got
+      across the river fled farther. Their supreme chief donned a fur coat and,
+      having seated himself in a sleigh, galloped on alone, abandoning his
+      companions. The others who could do so drove away too, leaving those who
+      could not to surrender or die.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0316"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      This campaign consisted in a flight of the French during which they did
+      all they could to destroy themselves. From the time they turned onto the
+      Kalúga road to the day their leader fled from the army, none of the
+      movements of the crowd had any sense. So one might have thought that
+      regarding this period of the campaign the historians, who attributed the
+      actions of the mass to the will of one man, would have found it impossible
+      to make the story of the retreat fit their theory. But no! Mountains of
+      books have been written by the historians about this campaign, and
+      everywhere are described Napoleon’s arrangements, the maneuvers, and his
+      profound plans which guided the army, as well as the military genius shown
+      by his marshals.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The retreat from Málo-Yaroslávets when he had a free road into a
+      well-supplied district and the parallel road was open to him along which
+      Kutúzov afterwards pursued him—this unnecessary retreat along a
+      devastated road—is explained to us as being due to profound
+      considerations. Similarly profound considerations are given for his
+      retreat from Smolénsk to Orshá. Then his heroism at Krásnoe is described,
+      where he is reported to have been prepared to accept battle and take
+      personal command, and to have walked about with a birch stick and said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“J’ai assez fait l’empereur; il est temps de faire le
+      général,”</i> * but nevertheless immediately ran away again, abandoning
+      to its fate the scattered fragments of the army he left behind.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “I have acted the Emperor long enough; it is time to act
+     the general.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Then we are told of the greatness of soul of the marshals, especially of
+      Ney—a greatness of soul consisting in this: that he made his way by
+      night around through the forest and across the Dnieper and escaped to
+      Orshá, abandoning standards, artillery, and nine tenths of his men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And lastly, the final departure of the great Emperor from his heroic army
+      is presented to us by the historians as something great and characteristic
+      of genius. Even that final running away, described in ordinary language as
+      the lowest depth of baseness which every child is taught to be ashamed of—even
+      that act finds justification in the historians’ language.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical
+      ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that
+      humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving
+      conception of “greatness.” “Greatness,” it seems, excludes the standards
+      of right and wrong. For the “great” man nothing is wrong, there is no
+      atrocity for which a “great” man can be blamed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“C’est grand!”</i> * say the historians, and there no longer
+      exists either good or evil but only <i>“grand”</i> and “not
+      <i>grand.” Grand</i> is good, not <i>grand</i> is bad. <i>Grand</i> is the
+      characteristic, in their conception, of some special animals called
+      “heroes.” And Napoleon, escaping home in a warm fur coat and leaving to
+      perish those who were not merely his comrades but were (in his opinion) men he had
+      brought there, feels <i>que c’est grand</i>, *(2) and his soul is tranquil.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “It is great.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * (2) That it is great.
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>“Du sublime</i> (he saw something sublime in himself) <i>au ridicule il n’y a
+      qu’un pas,”</i> * said he. And the whole world for fifty years has been
+      repeating: <i>“Sublime! Grand! Napoléon le Grand!” Du sublime au ridicule il
+      n’y a qu’un pas.</i>
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      And it occurs to no one that to admit a greatness not commensurable with
+      the standard of right and wrong is merely to admit one’s own nothingness
+      and immeasurable meanness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For us with the standard of good and evil given us by Christ, no human
+      actions are incommensurable. And there is no greatness where simplicity,
+      goodness, and truth are absent.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0317"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      What Russian, reading the account of the last part of the campaign of
+      1812, has not experienced an uncomfortable feeling of regret,
+      dissatisfaction, and perplexity? Who has not asked himself how it is that
+      the French were not all captured or destroyed when our three armies
+      surrounded them in superior numbers, when the disordered French, hungry
+      and freezing, surrendered in crowds, and when (as the historians relate)
+      the aim of the Russians was to stop the French, to cut them off, and
+      capture them all?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      How was it that the Russian army, which when numerically weaker than the
+      French had given battle at Borodinó, did not achieve its purpose when it
+      had surrounded the French on three sides and when its aim was to capture
+      them? Can the French be so enormously superior to us that when we had
+      surrounded them with superior forces we could not beat them? How could
+      that happen?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      History (or what is called by that name) replying to these questions says
+      that this occurred because Kutúzov and Tormásov and Chichagóv, and this
+      man and that man, did not execute such and such maneuvers....
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But why did they not execute those maneuvers? And why if they were guilty
+      of not carrying out a prearranged plan were they not tried and punished?
+      But even if we admitted that Kutúzov, Chichagóv, and others were the cause
+      of the Russian failures, it is still incomprehensible why, the position of
+      the Russian army being what it was at Krásnoe and at the Berëzina (in both
+      cases we had superior forces), the French army with its marshals, kings,
+      and Emperor was not captured, if that was what the Russians aimed at.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The explanation of this strange fact given by Russian military historians
+      (to the effect that Kutúzov hindered an attack) is unfounded, for we know
+      that he could not restrain the troops from attacking at Vyázma and
+      Tarútino.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Why was the Russian army—which with inferior forces had withstood
+      the enemy in full strength at Borodinó—defeated at Krásnoe and the
+      Berëzina by the disorganized crowds of the French when it was numerically
+      superior?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If the aim of the Russians consisted in cutting off and capturing Napoleon
+      and his marshals—and that aim was not merely frustrated but all
+      attempts to attain it were most shamefully baffled—then this last
+      period of the campaign is quite rightly considered by the French to be a
+      series of victories, and quite wrongly considered victorious by Russian
+      historians.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Russian military historians in so far as they submit to claims of
+      logic must admit that conclusion, and in spite of their lyrical rhapsodies
+      about valor, devotion, and so forth, must reluctantly admit that the
+      French retreat from Moscow was a series of victories for Napoleon and
+      defeats for Kutúzov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But putting national vanity entirely aside one feels that such a
+      conclusion involves a contradiction, since the series of French victories
+      brought the French complete destruction, while the series of Russian
+      defeats led to the total destruction of their enemy and the liberation of
+      their country.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The source of this contradiction lies in the fact that the historians
+      studying the events from the letters of the sovereigns and the generals,
+      from memoirs, reports, projects, and so forth, have attributed to this
+      last period of the war of 1812 an aim that never existed, namely that of
+      cutting off and capturing Napoleon with his marshals and his army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There never was or could have been such an aim, for it would have been
+      senseless and its attainment quite impossible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It would have been senseless, first because Napoleon’s disorganized army
+      was flying from Russia with all possible speed, that is to say, was doing
+      just what every Russian desired. So what was the use of performing various
+      operations on the French who were running away as fast as they possibly
+      could?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Secondly, it would have been senseless to block the passage of men whose
+      whole energy was directed to flight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Thirdly, it would have been senseless to sacrifice one’s own troops in
+      order to destroy the French army, which without external interference was
+      destroying itself at such a rate that, though its path was not blocked, it
+      could not carry across the frontier more than it actually did in December,
+      namely a hundredth part of the original army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Fourthly, it would have been senseless to wish to take captive the
+      Emperor, kings, and dukes—whose capture would have been in the
+      highest degree embarrassing for the Russians, as the most adroit
+      diplomatists of the time (Joseph de Maistre and others) recognized. Still
+      more senseless would have been the wish to capture army corps of the
+      French, when our own army had melted away to half before reaching Krásnoe
+      and a whole division would have been needed to convoy the corps of
+      prisoners, and when our men were not always getting full rations and the
+      prisoners already taken were perishing of hunger.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All the profound plans about cutting off and capturing Napoleon and his
+      army were like the plan of a market gardener who, when driving out of his
+      garden a cow that had trampled down the beds he had planted, should run to
+      the gate and hit the cow on the head. The only thing to be said in excuse
+      of that gardener would be that he was very angry. But not even that could
+      be said for those who drew up this project, for it was not they who had
+      suffered from the trampled beds.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But besides the fact that cutting off Napoleon with his army would have
+      been senseless, it was impossible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was impossible first because—as experience shows that a
+      three-mile movement of columns on a battlefield never coincides with the
+      plans—the probability of Chichagóv, Kutúzov, and Wittgenstein
+      effecting a junction on time at an appointed place was so remote as to be
+      tantamount to impossibility, as in fact thought Kutúzov, who when he
+      received the plan remarked that diversions planned over great distances do
+      not yield the desired results.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Secondly it was impossible, because to paralyze the momentum with which
+      Napoleon’s army was retiring, incomparably greater forces than the
+      Russians possessed would have been required.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Thirdly it was impossible, because the military term “to cut off” has no
+      meaning. One can cut off a slice of bread, but not an army. To cut off an
+      army—to bar its road—is quite impossible, for there is always
+      plenty of room to avoid capture and there is the night when nothing can be
+      seen, as the military scientists might convince themselves by the example
+      of Krásnoe and of the Berëzina. It is only possible to capture prisoners
+      if they agree to be captured, just as it is only possible to catch a
+      swallow if it settles on one’s hand. Men can only be taken prisoners if
+      they surrender according to the rules of strategy and tactics, as the
+      Germans did. But the French troops quite rightly did not consider that
+      this suited them, since death by hunger and cold awaited them in flight or
+      captivity alike.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Fourthly and chiefly it was impossible, because never since the world
+      began has a war been fought under such conditions as those that obtained
+      in 1812, and the Russian army in its pursuit of the French strained its
+      strength to the utmost and could not have done more without destroying
+      itself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the movement of the Russian army from Tarútino to Krásnoe it lost
+      fifty thousand sick or stragglers, that is a number equal to the
+      population of a large provincial town. Half the men fell out of the army
+      without a battle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And it is of this period of the campaign—when the army lacked boots
+      and sheepskin coats, was short of provisions and without vodka, and was
+      camping out at night for months in the snow with fifteen degrees of frost,
+      when there were only seven or eight hours of daylight and the rest was
+      night in which the influence of discipline cannot be maintained, when men
+      were taken into that region of death where discipline fails, not for a few
+      hours only as in a battle, but for months, where they were every moment
+      fighting death from hunger and cold, when half the army perished in a
+      single month—it is of this period of the campaign that the
+      historians tell us how Milorádovich should have made a flank march to such
+      and such a place, Tormásov to another place, and Chichagóv should have
+      crossed (more than knee-deep in snow) to somewhere else, and how so-and-so
+      “routed” and “cut off” the French and so on and so on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Russians, half of whom died, did all that could and should have been
+      done to attain an end worthy of the nation, and they are not to blame
+      because other Russians, sitting in warm rooms, proposed that they should
+      do what was impossible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All that strange contradiction now difficult to understand between the
+      facts and the historical accounts only arises because the historians
+      dealing with the matter have written the history of the beautiful words
+      and sentiments of various generals, and not the history of the events.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To them the words of Milorádovich seem very interesting, and so do their
+      surmises and the rewards this or that general received; but the question
+      of those fifty thousand men who were left in hospitals and in graves does
+      not even interest them, for it does not come within the range of their
+      investigation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Yet one need only discard the study of the reports and general plans and
+      consider the movement of those hundreds of thousands of men who took a
+      direct part in the events, and all the questions that seemed insoluble
+      easily and simply receive an immediate and certain solution.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The aim of cutting off Napoleon and his army never existed except in the
+      imaginations of a dozen people. It could not exist because it was
+      senseless and unattainable.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The people had a single aim: to free their land from invasion. That aim
+      was attained in the first place of itself, as the French ran away, and so
+      it was only necessary not to stop their flight. Secondly it was attained
+      by the guerrilla warfare which was destroying the French, and thirdly by
+      the fact that a large Russian army was following the French, ready to use
+      its strength in case their movement stopped.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Russian army had to act like a whip to a running animal. And the
+      experienced driver knew it was better to hold the whip raised as a menace
+      than to strike the running animal on the head.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0332"></a>
+      BOOK FIFTEEN: 1812 - 13
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0318"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      When seeing a dying animal a man feels a sense of horror: substance
+      similar to his own is perishing before his eyes. But when it is a beloved
+      and intimate human being that is dying, besides this horror at the
+      extinction of life there is a severance, a spiritual wound, which like a
+      physical wound is sometimes fatal and sometimes heals, but always aches
+      and shrinks at any external irritating touch.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After Prince Andrew’s death Natásha and Princess Mary alike felt this.
+      Drooping in spirit and closing their eyes before the menacing cloud of
+      death that overhung them, they dared not look life in the face. They
+      carefully guarded their open wounds from any rough and painful contact.
+      Everything: a carriage passing rapidly in the street, a summons to dinner,
+      the maid’s inquiry what dress to prepare, or worse still any word of
+      insincere or feeble sympathy, seemed an insult, painfully irritated the
+      wound, interrupting that necessary quiet in which they both tried to
+      listen to the stern and dreadful choir that still resounded in their
+      imagination, and hindered their gazing into those mysterious limitless
+      vistas that for an instant had opened out before them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only when alone together were they free from such outrage and pain. They
+      spoke little even to one another, and when they did it was of very
+      unimportant matters.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Both avoided any allusion to the future. To admit the possibility of a
+      future seemed to them to insult his memory. Still more carefully did they
+      avoid anything relating to him who was dead. It seemed to them that what
+      they had lived through and experienced could not be expressed in words,
+      and that any reference to the details of his life infringed the majesty
+      and sacredness of the mystery that had been accomplished before their
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Continued abstention from speech, and constant avoidance of everything
+      that might lead up to the subject—this halting on all sides at the
+      boundary of what they might not mention—brought before their minds
+      with still greater purity and clearness what they were both feeling.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
+      Princess Mary, in her position as absolute and independent arbiter of her
+      own fate and guardian and instructor of her nephew, was the first to be
+      called back to life from that realm of sorrow in which she had dwelt for
+      the first fortnight. She received letters from her relations to which she
+      had to reply; the room in which little Nicholas had been put was damp and
+      he began to cough; Alpátych came to Yaroslávl with reports on the state of
+      their affairs and with advice and suggestions that they should return to
+      Moscow to the house on the Vozdvízhenka Street, which had remained
+      uninjured and needed only slight repairs. Life did not stand still and it
+      was necessary to live. Hard as it was for Princess Mary to emerge from the
+      realm of secluded contemplation in which she had lived till then, and
+      sorry and almost ashamed as she felt to leave Natásha alone, yet the cares
+      of life demanded her attention and she involuntarily yielded to them. She
+      went through the accounts with Alpátych, conferred with Dessalles about
+      her nephew, and gave orders and made preparations for the journey to
+      Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha remained alone and, from the time Princess Mary began making
+      preparations for departure, held aloof from her too.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary asked the countess to let Natásha go with her to Moscow, and
+      both parents gladly accepted this offer, for they saw their daughter
+      losing strength every day and thought that a change of scene and the
+      advice of Moscow doctors would be good for her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am not going anywhere,” Natásha replied when this was proposed to her.
+      “Do please just leave me alone!” And she ran out of the room, with
+      difficulty refraining from tears of vexation and irritation rather than of
+      sorrow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After she felt herself deserted by Princes Mary and alone in her grief,
+      Natásha spent most of the time in her room by herself, sitting huddled up
+      feet and all in the corner of the sofa, tearing and twisting something
+      with her slender nervous fingers and gazing intently and fixedly at
+      whatever her eyes chanced to fall on. This solitude exhausted and
+      tormented her but she was in absolute need of it. As soon as anyone
+      entered she got up quickly, changed her position and expression, and
+      picked up a book or some sewing, evidently waiting impatiently for the
+      intruder to go.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She felt all the time as if she might at any moment penetrate that on
+      which—with a terrible questioning too great for her strength—her
+      spiritual gaze was fixed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One day toward the end of December Natásha, pale and thin, dressed in a
+      black woolen gown, her plaited hair negligently twisted into a knot, was
+      crouched feet and all in the corner of her sofa, nervously crumpling and
+      smoothing out the end of her sash while she looked at a corner of the
+      door.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She was gazing in the direction in which he had gone—to the other
+      side of life. And that other side of life, of which she had never before
+      thought and which had formerly seemed to her so far away and improbable,
+      was now nearer and more akin and more comprehensible than this side of
+      life, where everything was either emptiness and desolation or suffering
+      and indignity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She was gazing where she knew him to be; but she could not imagine him
+      otherwise than as he had been here. She now saw him again as he had been
+      at Mytíshchi, at Tróitsa, and at Yaroslávl.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She saw his face, heard his voice, repeated his words and her own, and
+      sometimes devised other words they might have spoken.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There he is lying back in an armchair in his velvet cloak, leaning his
+      head on his thin pale hand. His chest is dreadfully hollow and his
+      shoulders raised. His lips are firmly closed, his eyes glitter, and a
+      wrinkle comes and goes on his pale forehead. One of his legs twitches just
+      perceptibly, but rapidly. Natásha knows that he is struggling with
+      terrible pain. “What is that pain like? Why does he have that pain? What
+      does he feel? How does it hurt him?” thought Natásha. He noticed her
+      watching him, raised his eyes, and began to speak seriously:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One thing would be terrible,” said he: “to bind oneself forever to a
+      suffering man. It would be continual torture.” And he looked searchingly
+      at her. Natásha as usual answered before she had time to think what she
+      would say. She said: “This can’t go on—it won’t. You will get well—quite
+      well.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She now saw him from the commencement of that scene and relived what she
+      had then felt. She recalled his long sad and severe look at those words
+      and understood the meaning of the rebuke and despair in that protracted
+      gaze.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I agreed,” Natásha now said to herself, “that it would be dreadful if he
+      always continued to suffer. I said it then only because it would have been
+      dreadful for him, but he understood it differently. He thought it would be
+      dreadful for me. He then still wished to live and feared death. And I said
+      it so awkwardly and stupidly! I did not say what I meant. I thought quite
+      differently. Had I said what I thought, I should have said: even if he had
+      to go on dying, to die continually before my eyes, I should have been
+      happy compared with what I am now. Now there is nothing... nobody. Did he
+      know that? No, he did not and never will know it. And now it will never,
+      never be possible to put it right.” And now he again seemed to be saying
+      the same words to her, only in her imagination Natásha this time gave him
+      a different answer. She stopped him and said: “Terrible for you, but not
+      for me! You know that for me there is nothing in life but you, and to
+      suffer with you is the greatest happiness for me,” and he took her hand
+      and pressed it as he had pressed it that terrible evening four days before
+      his death. And in her imagination she said other tender and loving words
+      which she might have said then but only spoke now: “I love thee!... thee!
+      I love, love...” she said, convulsively pressing her hands and setting her
+      teeth with a desperate effort....
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She was overcome by sweet sorrow and tears were already rising in her
+      eyes; then she suddenly asked herself to whom she was saying this. Again
+      everything was shrouded in hard, dry perplexity, and again with a strained
+      frown she peered toward the world where he was. And now, now it seemed to
+      her she was penetrating the mystery.... But at the instant when it seemed
+      that the incomprehensible was revealing itself to her a loud rattle of the
+      door handle struck painfully on her ears. Dunyásha, her maid, entered the
+      room quickly and abruptly with a frightened look on her face and showing
+      no concern for her mistress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come to your Papa at once, please!” said she with a strange, excited
+      look. “A misfortune... about Peter Ilýnich... a letter,” she finished with
+      a sob.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0319"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Besides a feeling of aloofness from everybody Natásha was feeling a
+      special estrangement from the members of her own family. All of them—her
+      father, mother, and Sónya—were so near to her, so familiar, so
+      commonplace, that all their words and feelings seemed an insult to the
+      world in which she had been living of late, and she felt not merely
+      indifferent to them but regarded them with hostility. She heard Dunyásha’s
+      words about Peter Ilýnich and a misfortune, but did not grasp them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What misfortune? What misfortune can happen to them? They just live their
+      own old, quiet, and commonplace life,” thought Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As she entered the ballroom her father was hurriedly coming out of her
+      mother’s room. His face was puckered up and wet with tears. He had
+      evidently run out of that room to give vent to the sobs that were choking
+      him. When he saw Natásha he waved his arms despairingly and burst into
+      convulsively painful sobs that distorted his soft round face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Pe... Pétya... Go, go, she... is calling...” and weeping like a child and
+      quickly shuffling on his feeble legs to a chair, he almost fell into it,
+      covering his face with his hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Suddenly an electric shock seemed to run through Natásha’s whole being.
+      Terrible anguish struck her heart, she felt a dreadful ache as if
+      something was being torn inside her and she were dying. But the pain was
+      immediately followed by a feeling of release from the oppressive
+      constraint that had prevented her taking part in life. The sight of her
+      father, the terribly wild cries of her mother that she heard through the
+      door, made her immediately forget herself and her own grief.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She ran to her father, but he feebly waved his arm, pointing to her
+      mother’s door. Princess Mary, pale and with quivering chin, came out from
+      that room and taking Natásha by the arm said something to her. Natásha
+      neither saw nor heard her. She went in with rapid steps, pausing at the
+      door for an instant as if struggling with herself, and then ran to her
+      mother.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess was lying in an armchair in a strange and awkward position,
+      stretching out and beating her head against the wall. Sónya and the maids
+      were holding her arms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha! Natásha!...” cried the countess. “It’s not true... it’s not
+      true... He’s lying... Natásha!” she shrieked, pushing those around her
+      away. “Go away, all of you; it’s not true! Killed!... ha, ha, ha!... It’s
+      not true!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha put one knee on the armchair, stooped over her mother, embraced
+      her, and with unexpected strength raised her, turned her face toward
+      herself, and clung to her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mummy!... darling!... I am here, my dearest Mummy,” she kept on
+      whispering, not pausing an instant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She did not let go of her mother but struggled tenderly with her, demanded
+      a pillow and hot water, and unfastened and tore open her mother’s dress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My dearest darling... Mummy, my precious!...” she whispered incessantly,
+      kissing her head, her hands, her face, and feeling her own irrepressible
+      and streaming tears tickling her nose and cheeks.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess pressed her daughter’s hand, closed her eyes, and became
+      quiet for a moment. Suddenly she sat up with unaccustomed swiftness,
+      glanced vacantly around her, and seeing Natásha began to press her
+      daughter’s head with all her strength. Then she turned toward her
+      daughter’s face which was wincing with pain and gazed long at it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha, you love me?” she said in a soft trustful whisper. “Natásha, you
+      would not deceive me? You’ll tell me the whole truth?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha looked at her with eyes full of tears and in her look there was
+      nothing but love and an entreaty for forgiveness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My darling Mummy!” she repeated, straining all the power of her love to
+      find some way of taking on herself the excess of grief that crushed her
+      mother.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And again in a futile struggle with reality her mother, refusing to
+      believe that she could live when her beloved boy was killed in the bloom
+      of life, escaped from reality into a world of delirium.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha did not remember how that day passed nor that night, nor the next
+      day and night. She did not sleep and did not leave her mother. Her
+      persevering and patient love seemed completely to surround the countess
+      every moment, not explaining or consoling, but recalling her to life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the third night the countess kept very quiet for a few minutes, and
+      Natásha rested her head on the arm of her chair and closed her eyes, but
+      opened them again on hearing the bedstead creak. The countess was sitting
+      up in bed and speaking softly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How glad I am you have come. You are tired. Won’t you have some tea?”
+       Natásha went up to her. “You have improved in looks and grown more manly,”
+       continued the countess, taking her daughter’s hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mamma! What are you saying...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha, he is no more, no more!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And embracing her daughter, the countess began to weep for the first time.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0320"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary postponed her departure. Sónya and the count tried to
+      replace Natásha but could not. They saw that she alone was able to
+      restrain her mother from unreasoning despair. For three weeks Natásha
+      remained constantly at her mother’s side, sleeping on a lounge chair in
+      her room, making her eat and drink, and talking to her incessantly because
+      the mere sound of her tender, caressing tones soothed her mother.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The mother’s wounded spirit could not heal. Pétya’s death had torn from
+      her half her life. When the news of Pétya’s death had come she had been a
+      fresh and vigorous woman of fifty, but a month later she left her room a
+      listless old woman taking no interest in life. But the same blow that
+      almost killed the countess, this second blow, restored Natásha to life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A spiritual wound produced by a rending of the spiritual body is like a
+      physical wound and, strange as it may seem, just as a deep wound may heal
+      and its edges join, physical and spiritual wounds alike can yet heal
+      completely only as the result of a vital force from within.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha’s wound healed in that way. She thought her life was ended, but
+      her love for her mother unexpectedly showed her that the essence of life—love—was
+      still active within her. Love awoke and so did life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Prince Andrew’s last days had bound Princess Mary and Natásha together;
+      this new sorrow brought them still closer to one another. Princess Mary
+      put off her departure, and for three weeks looked after Natásha as if she
+      had been a sick child. The last weeks passed in her mother’s bedroom had
+      strained Natásha’s physical strength.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One afternoon noticing Natásha shivering with fever, Princess Mary took
+      her to her own room and made her lie down on the bed. Natásha lay down,
+      but when Princess Mary had drawn the blinds and was going away she called
+      her back.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t want to sleep, Mary, sit by me a little.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You are tired—try to sleep.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, no. Why did you bring me away? She will be asking for me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “She is much better. She spoke so well today,” said Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha lay on the bed and in the semidarkness of the room scanned
+      Princess Mary’s face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is she like him?” thought Natásha. “Yes, like and yet not like. But she
+      is quite original, strange, new, and unknown. And she loves me. What is in
+      her heart? All that is good. But how? What is her mind like? What does she
+      think about me? Yes, she is splendid!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Mary,” she said timidly, drawing Princess Mary’s hand to herself, “Mary,
+      you mustn’t think me wicked. No? Mary darling, how I love you! Let us be
+      quite, quite friends.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Natásha, embracing her, began kissing her face and hands, making
+      Princess Mary feel shy but happy by this demonstration of her feelings.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From that day a tender and passionate friendship such as exists only
+      between women was established between Princess Mary and Natásha. They were
+      continually kissing and saying tender things to one another and spent most
+      of their time together. When one went out the other became restless and
+      hastened to rejoin her. Together they felt more in harmony with one
+      another than either of them felt with herself when alone. A feeling
+      stronger than friendship sprang up between them; an exclusive feeling of
+      life being possible only in each other’s presence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sometimes they were silent for hours; sometimes after they were already in
+      bed they would begin talking and go on till morning. They spoke most of
+      what was long past. Princess Mary spoke of her childhood, of her mother,
+      her father, and her daydreams; and Natásha, who with a passive lack of
+      understanding had formerly turned away from that life of devotion,
+      submission, and the poetry of Christian self-sacrifice, now feeling
+      herself bound to Princess Mary by affection, learned to love her past too
+      and to understand a side of life previously incomprehensible to her. She
+      did not think of applying submission and self-abnegation to her own life,
+      for she was accustomed to seek other joys, but she understood and loved in
+      another those previously incomprehensible virtues. For Princess Mary,
+      listening to Natásha’s tales of childhood and early youth, there also
+      opened out a new and hitherto uncomprehended side of life: belief in life
+      and its enjoyment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just as before, they never mentioned <i>him</i> so as not to lower (as they
+      thought) their exalted feelings by words; but this silence about him had
+      the effect of making them gradually begin to forget him without being
+      conscious of it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha had grown thin and pale and physically so weak that they all
+      talked about her health, and this pleased her. But sometimes she was
+      suddenly overcome by fear not only of death but of sickness, weakness, and
+      loss of good looks, and involuntarily she examined her bare arm carefully,
+      surprised at its thinness, and in the morning noticed her drawn and, as it
+      seemed to her, piteous face in her glass. It seemed to her that things
+      must be so, and yet it was dreadfully sad.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One day she went quickly upstairs and found herself out of breath.
+      Unconsciously she immediately invented a reason for going down, and then,
+      testing her strength, ran upstairs again, observing the result.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Another time when she called Dunyásha her voice trembled, so she called
+      again—though she could hear Dunyásha coming—called her in the
+      deep chest tones in which she had been wont to sing, and listened
+      attentively to herself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She did not know and would not have believed it, but beneath the layer of
+      slime that covered her soul and seemed to her impenetrable, delicate young
+      shoots of grass were already sprouting, which taking root would so cover
+      with their living verdure the grief that weighed her down that it would
+      soon no longer be seen or noticed. The wound had begun to heal from
+      within.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the end of January Princess Mary left for Moscow, and the count
+      insisted on Natásha’s going with her to consult the doctors.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0321"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After the encounter at Vyázma, where Kutúzov had been unable to hold back
+      his troops in their anxiety to overwhelm and cut off the enemy and so on,
+      the farther movement of the fleeing French, and of the Russians who
+      pursued them, continued as far as Krásnoe without a battle. The flight was
+      so rapid that the Russian army pursuing the French could not keep up with
+      them; cavalry and artillery horses broke down, and the information
+      received of the movements of the French was never reliable.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The men in the Russian army were so worn out by this continuous marching
+      at the rate of twenty-seven miles a day that they could not go any faster.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To realize the degree of exhaustion of the Russian army it is only
+      necessary to grasp clearly the meaning of the fact that, while not losing
+      more than five thousand killed and wounded after Tarútino and less than a
+      hundred prisoners, the Russian army which left that place a hundred
+      thousand strong reached Krásnoe with only fifty thousand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The rapidity of the Russian pursuit was just as destructive to our army as
+      the flight of the French was to theirs. The only difference was that the
+      Russian army moved voluntarily, with no such threat of destruction as hung
+      over the French, and that the sick Frenchmen were left behind in enemy
+      hands while the sick Russians left behind were among their own people. The
+      chief cause of the wastage of Napoleon’s army was the rapidity of its
+      movement, and a convincing proof of this is the corresponding decrease of
+      the Russian army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov as far as was in his power, instead of trying to check the
+      movement of the French as was desired in Petersburg and by the Russian
+      army generals, directed his whole activity here, as he had done at
+      Tarútino and Vyázma, to hastening it on while easing the movement of our
+      army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But besides this, since the exhaustion and enormous diminution of the army
+      caused by the rapidity of the advance had become evident, another reason
+      for slackening the pace and delaying presented itself to Kutúzov. The aim
+      of the Russian army was to pursue the French. The road the French would
+      take was unknown, and so the closer our troops trod on their heels the
+      greater distance they had to cover. Only by following at some distance
+      could one cut across the zigzag path of the French. All the artful
+      maneuvers suggested by our generals meant fresh movements of the army and
+      a lengthening of its marches, whereas the only reasonable aim was to
+      shorten those marches. To that end Kutúzov’s activity was directed during
+      the whole campaign from Moscow to Vílna—not casually or
+      intermittently but so consistently that he never once deviated from it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov felt and knew—not by reasoning or science but with the whole
+      of his Russian being—what every Russian soldier felt: that the
+      French were beaten, that the enemy was flying and must be driven out; but
+      at the same time he like the soldiers realized all the hardship of this
+      march, the rapidity of which was unparalleled for such a time of the year.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But to the generals, especially the foreign ones in the Russian army, who
+      wished to distinguish themselves, to astonish somebody, and for some
+      reason to capture a king or a duke—it seemed that now—when any
+      battle must be horrible and senseless—was the very time to fight and
+      conquer somebody. Kutúzov merely shrugged his shoulders when one after
+      another they presented projects of maneuvers to be made with those
+      soldiers—ill-shod, insufficiently clad, and half starved—who
+      within a month and without fighting a battle had dwindled to half their
+      number, and who at the best if the flight continued would have to go a
+      greater distance than they had already traversed, before they reached the
+      frontier.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This longing to distinguish themselves, to maneuver, to overthrow, and to
+      cut off showed itself particularly whenever the Russians stumbled on the
+      French army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      So it was at Krásnoe, where they expected to find one of the three French
+      columns and stumbled instead on Napoleon himself with sixteen thousand
+      men. Despite all Kutúzov’s efforts to avoid that ruinous encounter and to
+      preserve his troops, the massacre of the broken mob of French soldiers by
+      worn-out Russians continued at Krásnoe for three days.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Toll wrote a disposition: “The first column will march to so and so,” etc.
+      And as usual nothing happened in accord with the disposition. Prince
+      Eugène of Württemberg fired from a hill over the French crowds that were
+      running past, and demanded reinforcements which did not arrive. The
+      French, avoiding the Russians, dispersed and hid themselves in the forest
+      by night, making their way round as best they could, and continued their
+      flight.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Milorádovich, who said he did not want to know anything about the
+      commissariat affairs of his detachment, and could never be found when he
+      was wanted—that <i>chevalier sans peur et sans reproche</i> * as he styled
+      himself—who was fond of parleys with the French, sent envoys
+      demanding their surrender, wasted time, and did not do what he was ordered
+      to do.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Knight without fear and without reproach.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “I give you that column, lads,” he said, riding up to the troops and
+      pointing out the French to the cavalry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And the cavalry, with spurs and sabers urging on horses that could
+      scarcely move, trotted with much effort to the column presented to them—that
+      is to say, to a crowd of Frenchmen stark with cold, frost-bitten, and
+      starving—and the column that had been presented to them threw down
+      its arms and surrendered as it had long been anxious to do.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At Krásnoe they took twenty-six thousand prisoners, several hundred
+      cannon, and a stick called a “marshal’s staff,” and disputed as to who had
+      distinguished himself and were pleased with their achievement—though
+      they much regretted not having taken Napoleon, or at least a marshal or a
+      hero of some sort, and reproached one another and especially Kutúzov for
+      having failed to do so.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      These men, carried away by their passions, were but blind tools of the
+      most melancholy law of necessity, but considered themselves heroes and
+      imagined that they were accomplishing a most noble and honorable deed.
+      They blamed Kutúzov and said that from the very beginning of the campaign
+      he had prevented their vanquishing Napoleon, that he thought of nothing
+      but satisfying his passions and would not advance from the Linen Factories
+      because he was comfortable there, that at Krásnoe he checked the advance
+      because on learning that Napoleon was there he had quite lost his head,
+      and that it was probable that he had an understanding with Napoleon and
+      had been bribed by him, and so on, and so on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Not only did his contemporaries, carried away by their passions, talk in
+      this way, but posterity and history have acclaimed Napoleon as <i>grand</i>,
+      while Kutúzov is described by foreigners as a crafty, dissolute, weak old
+      courtier, and by Russians as something indefinite—a sort of puppet
+      useful only because he had a Russian name.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0322"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      In 1812 and 1813 Kutúzov was openly accused of blundering. The Emperor was
+      dissatisfied with him. And in a history recently written by order of the
+      Highest Authorities it is said that Kutúzov was a cunning court liar,
+      frightened of the name of Napoleon, and that by his blunders at Krásnoe
+      and the Berëzina he deprived the Russian army of the glory of complete
+      victory over the French. *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * <i>History of the year 1812. The character of Kutúzov and
+     reflections on the unsatisfactory results of the battles at
+     Krásnoe</i>, by Bogdánovich.
+</p>
+<p>
+      Such is the fate not of great men (<i>grands hommes</i>) whom the Russian mind
+      does not acknowledge, but of those rare and always solitary individuals
+      who, discerning the will of Providence, submit their personal will to it.
+      The hatred and contempt of the crowd punish such men for discerning the
+      higher laws.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For Russian historians, strange and terrible to say, Napoleon—that
+      most insignificant tool of history who never anywhere, even in exile,
+      showed human dignity—Napoleon is the object of adulation and
+      enthusiasm; he is <i>grand</i>. But Kutúzov—the man who from the beginning
+      to the end of his activity in 1812, never once swerving by word or deed
+      from Borodinó to Vílna, presented an example exceptional in history of
+      self-sacrifice and a present consciousness of the future importance of
+      what was happening—Kutúzov seems to them something indefinite and
+      pitiful, and when speaking of him and of the year 1812 they always seem a
+      little ashamed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And yet it is difficult to imagine an historical character whose activity
+      was so unswervingly directed to a single aim; and it would be difficult to
+      imagine any aim more worthy or more consonant with the will of the whole
+      people. Still more difficult would it be to find an instance in history of
+      the aim of an historical personage being so completely accomplished as
+      that to which all Kutúzov’s efforts were directed in 1812.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov never talked of “forty centuries looking down from the Pyramids,”
+       of the sacrifices he offered for the fatherland, or of what he intended to
+      accomplish or had accomplished; in general he said nothing about himself,
+      adopted no pose, always appeared to be the simplest and most ordinary of
+      men, and said the simplest and most ordinary things. He wrote letters to
+      his daughters and to Madame de Staël, read novels, liked the society of
+      pretty women, jested with generals, officers, and soldiers, and never
+      contradicted those who tried to prove anything to him. When Count
+      Rostopchín at the Yaúza bridge galloped up to Kutúzov with personal
+      reproaches for having caused the destruction of Moscow, and said: “How was
+      it you promised not to abandon Moscow without a battle?” Kutúzov replied:
+      “And I shall not abandon Moscow without a battle,” though Moscow was then
+      already abandoned. When Arakchéev, coming to him from the Emperor, said
+      that Ermólov ought to be appointed chief of the artillery, Kutúzov
+      replied: “Yes, I was just saying so myself,” though a moment before he had
+      said quite the contrary. What did it matter to him—who then alone
+      amid a senseless crowd understood the whole tremendous significance of
+      what was happening—what did it matter to him whether Rostopchín
+      attributed the calamities of Moscow to him or to himself? Still less could
+      it matter to him who was appointed chief of the artillery.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Not merely in these cases but continually did that old man—who by
+      experience of life had reached the conviction that thoughts and the words
+      serving as their expression are not what move people—use quite
+      meaningless words that happened to enter his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But that man, so heedless of his words, did not once during the whole time
+      of his activity utter one word inconsistent with the single aim toward
+      which he moved throughout the whole war. Obviously in spite of himself, in
+      very diverse circumstances, he repeatedly expressed his real thoughts with
+      the bitter conviction that he would not be understood. Beginning with the
+      battle of Borodinó, from which time his disagreement with those about him
+      began, he alone said that <i>the battle of Borodinó was a victory</i>, and
+      repeated this both verbally and in his dispatches and reports up to the
+      time of his death. He alone said that <i>the loss of Moscow is not the loss
+      of Russia</i>. In reply to Lauriston’s proposal of peace, he said: <i>There can
+      be no peace, for such is the people’s will</i>. He alone during the retreat of
+      the French said that <i>all our maneuvers are useless, everything is being
+      accomplished of itself better than we could desire; that the enemy must be
+      offered “a golden bridge”</i>; that <i>neither the Tarútino, the Vyázma, nor the
+      Krásnoe battles were necessary</i>; that <i>we must keep some force to reach the
+      frontier with,</i> and that <i>he would not sacrifice a single Russian for ten
+      Frenchmen.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      And this courtier, as he is described to us, who lies to Arakchéev to
+      please the Emperor, he alone—incurring thereby the Emperor’s
+      displeasure—said in Vílna that <i>to carry the war beyond the frontier
+      is useless and harmful.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Nor do words alone prove that only he understood the meaning of the
+      events. His actions—without the smallest deviation—were all
+      directed to one and the same threefold end: (1) to brace all his strength
+      for conflict with the French, (2) to defeat them, and (3) to drive them
+      out of Russia, minimizing as far as possible the sufferings of our people
+      and of our army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This procrastinator Kutúzov, whose motto was “Patience and Time,” this
+      enemy of decisive action, gave battle at Borodinó, investing the
+      preparations for it with unparalleled solemnity. This Kutúzov who before
+      the battle of Austerlitz began said that it would be lost, he alone, in
+      contradiction to everyone else, declared till his death that Borodinó was
+      a victory, despite the assurance of generals that the battle was lost and
+      despite the fact that for an army to have to retire after winning a battle
+      was unprecedented. He alone during the whole retreat insisted that
+      battles, which were useless then, should not be fought, and that a new war
+      should not be begun nor the frontiers of Russia crossed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It is easy now to understand the significance of these events—if
+      only we abstain from attributing to the activity of the mass aims that
+      existed only in the heads of a dozen individuals—for the events and
+      results now lie before us.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But how did that old man, alone, in opposition to the general opinion, so
+      truly discern the importance of the people’s view of the events that in
+      all his activity he was never once untrue to it?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The source of that extraordinary power of penetrating the meaning of the
+      events then occuring lay in the national feeling which he possessed in
+      full purity and strength.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only the recognition of the fact that he possessed this feeling caused the
+      people in so strange a manner, contrary to the Tsar’s wish, to select him—an
+      old man in disfavor—to be their representative in the national war.
+      And only that feeling placed him on that highest human pedestal from which
+      he, the commander in chief, devoted all his powers not to slaying and
+      destroying men but to saving and showing pity on them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That simple, modest, and therefore truly great, figure could not be cast
+      in the false mold of a European hero—the supposed ruler of men—that
+      history has invented.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To a lackey no man can be great, for a lackey has his own conception of
+      greatness.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0323"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The fifth of November was the first day of what is called the battle of
+      Krásnoe. Toward evening—after much disputing and many mistakes made
+      by generals who did not go to their proper places, and after adjutants had
+      been sent about with counterorders—when it had become plain that the
+      enemy was everywhere in flight and that there could and would be no
+      battle, Kutúzov left Krásnoe and went to Dóbroe whither his headquarters
+      had that day been transferred.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The day was clear and frosty. Kutúzov rode to Dóbroe on his plump little
+      white horse, followed by an enormous suite of discontented generals who
+      whispered among themselves behind his back. All along the road groups of
+      French prisoners captured that day (there were seven thousand of them)
+      were crowding to warm themselves at campfires. Near Dóbroe an immense
+      crowd of tattered prisoners, buzzing with talk and wrapped and bandaged in
+      anything they had been able to get hold of, were standing in the road
+      beside a long row of unharnessed French guns. At the approach of the
+      commander in chief the buzz of talk ceased and all eyes were fixed on
+      Kutúzov who, wearing a white cap with a red band and a padded overcoat
+      that bulged on his round shoulders, moved slowly along the road on his
+      white horse. One of the generals was reporting to him where the guns and
+      prisoners had been captured.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov seemed preoccupied and did not listen to what the general was
+      saying. He screwed up his eyes with a dissatisfied look as he gazed
+      attentively and fixedly at these prisoners, who presented a specially
+      wretched appearance. Most of them were disfigured by frost-bitten noses
+      and cheeks, and nearly all had red, swollen and festering eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One group of the French stood close to the road, and two of them, one of
+      whom had his face covered with sores, were tearing a piece of raw flesh
+      with their hands. There was something horrible and bestial in the fleeting
+      glance they threw at the riders and in the malevolent expression with
+      which, after a glance at Kutúzov, the soldier with the sores immediately
+      turned away and went on with what he was doing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov looked long and intently at these two soldiers. He puckered his
+      face, screwed up his eyes, and pensively swayed his head. At another spot
+      he noticed a Russian soldier laughingly patting a Frenchman on the
+      shoulder, saying something to him in a friendly manner, and Kutúzov with
+      the same expression on his face again swayed his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What were you saying?” he asked the general, who continuing his report
+      directed the commander in chief’s attention to some standards captured
+      from the French and standing in front of the Preobrazhénsk regiment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, the standards!” said Kutúzov, evidently detaching himself with
+      difficulty from the thoughts that preoccupied him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He looked about him absently. Thousands of eyes were looking at him from
+      all sides awaiting a word from him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He stopped in front of the Preobrazhénsk regiment, sighed deeply, and
+      closed his eyes. One of his suite beckoned to the soldiers carrying the
+      standards to advance and surround the commander in chief with them.
+      Kutúzov was silent for a few seconds and then, submitting with evident
+      reluctance to the duty imposed by his position, raised his head and began
+      to speak. A throng of officers surrounded him. He looked attentively
+      around at the circle of officers, recognizing several of them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I thank you all!” he said, addressing the soldiers and then again the
+      officers. In the stillness around him his slowly uttered words were
+      distinctly heard. “I thank you all for your hard and faithful service. The
+      victory is complete and Russia will not forget you! Honor to you forever.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He paused and looked around.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Lower its head, lower it!” he said to a soldier who had accidentally
+      lowered the French eagle he was holding before the Preobrazhénsk
+      standards. “Lower, lower, that’s it. Hurrah lads!” he added, addressing
+      the men with a rapid movement of his chin.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hur-r-rah!” roared thousands of voices.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      While the soldiers were shouting Kutúzov leaned forward in his saddle and
+      bowed his head, and his eye lit up with a mild and apparently ironic
+      gleam.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You see, brothers...” said he when the shouts had ceased... and all at
+      once his voice and the expression of his face changed. It was no longer
+      the commander in chief speaking but an ordinary old man who wanted to tell
+      his comrades something very important.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was a stir among the throng of officers and in the ranks of the
+      soldiers, who moved that they might hear better what he was going to say.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You see, brothers, I know it’s hard for you, but it can’t be helped! Bear
+      up; it won’t be for long now! We’ll see our visitors off and then we’ll
+      rest. The Tsar won’t forget your service. It is hard for you, but still
+      you are at home while they—you see what they have come to,” said he,
+      pointing to the prisoners. “Worse off than our poorest beggars. While they
+      were strong we didn’t spare ourselves, but now we may even pity them. They
+      are human beings too. Isn’t it so, lads?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He looked around, and in the direct, respectful, wondering gaze fixed upon
+      him he read sympathy with what he had said. His face grew brighter and
+      brighter with an old man’s mild smile, which drew the corners of his lips
+      and eyes into a cluster of wrinkles. He ceased speaking and bowed his head
+      as if in perplexity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But after all who asked them here? Serves them right, the bloody
+      bastards!” he cried, suddenly lifting his head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And flourishing his whip he rode off at a gallop for the first time during
+      the whole campaign, and left the broken ranks of the soldiers laughing
+      joyfully and shouting “Hurrah!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov’s words were hardly understood by the troops. No one could have
+      repeated the field marshal’s address, begun solemnly and then changing
+      into an old man’s simplehearted talk; but the hearty sincerity of that
+      speech, the feeling of majestic triumph combined with pity for the foe and
+      consciousness of the justice of our cause, exactly expressed by that old
+      man’s good-natured expletives, was not merely understood but lay in the
+      soul of every soldier and found expression in their joyous and
+      long-sustained shouts. Afterwards when one of the generals addressed
+      Kutúzov asking whether he wished his <i>calèche</i> to be sent for, Kutúzov in
+      answering unexpectedly gave a sob, being evidently greatly moved.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0324"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      When the troops reached their night’s halting place on the eighth of
+      November, the last day of the Krásnoe battles, it was already growing
+      dusk. All day it had been calm and frosty with occasional lightly falling
+      snow and toward evening it began to clear. Through the falling snow a
+      purple-black and starry sky showed itself and the frost grew keener.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      An infantry regiment which had left Tarútino three thousand strong but now
+      numbered only nine hundred was one of the first to arrive that night at
+      its halting place—a village on the highroad. The quartermasters who
+      met the regiment announced that all the huts were full of sick and dead
+      Frenchmen, cavalrymen, and members of the staff. There was only one hut
+      available for the regimental commander.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The commander rode up to his hut. The regiment passed through the village
+      and stacked its arms in front of the last huts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Like some huge many-limbed animal, the regiment began to prepare its lair
+      and its food. One part of it dispersed and waded knee-deep through the
+      snow into a birch forest to the right of the village, and immediately the
+      sound of axes and swords, the crashing of branches, and merry voices could
+      be heard from there. Another section amid the regimental wagons and horses
+      which were standing in a group was busy getting out caldrons and rye
+      biscuit, and feeding the horses. A third section scattered through the
+      village arranging quarters for the staff officers, carrying out the French
+      corpses that were in the huts, and dragging away boards, dry wood, and
+      thatch from the roofs, for the campfires, or wattle fences to serve for
+      shelter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Some fifteen men with merry shouts were shaking down the high wattle wall
+      of a shed, the roof of which had already been removed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then, all together—shove!” cried the voices, and the huge
+      surface of the wall, sprinkled with snow and creaking with frost, was seen
+      swaying in the gloom of the night. The lower stakes cracked more and more
+      and at last the wall fell, and with it the men who had been pushing it.
+      Loud, coarse laughter and joyous shouts ensued.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then, catch hold in twos! Hand up the lever! That’s
+      it.... Where are you shoving to?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Now, all together! But wait a moment, boys... With a song!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      All stood silent, and a soft, pleasant velvety voice began to sing. At the
+      end of the third verse as the last note died away, twenty voices roared
+      out at once: “Oo-oo-oo-oo! That’s it. All together! Heave away, boys!...”
+       but despite their united efforts the wattle hardly moved, and in the
+      silence that followed the heavy breathing of the men was audible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Here, you of the Sixth Company! Devils that you are! Lend a hand... will
+      you? You may want us one of these days.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Some twenty men of the Sixth Company who were on their way into the
+      village joined the haulers, and the wattle wall, which was about
+      thirty-five feet long and seven feet high, moved forward along the village
+      street, swaying, pressing upon and cutting the shoulders of the gasping
+      men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Get along... Falling? What are you stopping for? There now....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Merry senseless words of abuse flowed freely.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What are you up to?” suddenly came the authoritative voice of a sergeant
+      major who came upon the men who were hauling their burden. “There are
+      gentry here; the general himself is in that hut, and you foul-mouthed
+      devils, you brutes, I’ll give it to you!” shouted he, hitting the first
+      man who came in his way a swinging blow on the back. “Can’t you make less
+      noise?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The men became silent. The soldier who had been struck groaned and wiped
+      his face, which had been scratched till it bled by his falling against the
+      wattle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “There, how that devil hits out! He’s made my face all bloody,” said he in
+      a frightened whisper when the sergeant major had passed on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t you like it?” said a laughing voice, and moderating their tones the
+      men moved forward.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When they were out of the village they began talking again as loud as
+      before, interlarding their talk with the same aimless expletives.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the hut which the men had passed, the chief officers had gathered and
+      were in animated talk over their tea about the events of the day and the
+      maneuvers suggested for tomorrow. It was proposed to make a flank march to
+      the left, cut off the Vice-King (Murat) and capture him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      By the time the soldiers had dragged the wattle fence to its place the
+      campfires were blazing on all sides ready for cooking, the wood crackled,
+      the snow was melting, and black shadows of soldiers flitted to and fro all
+      over the occupied space where the snow had been trodden down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Axes and choppers were plied all around. Everything was done without any
+      orders being given. Stores of wood were brought for the night, shelters
+      were rigged up for the officers, caldrons were being boiled, and muskets
+      and accouterments put in order.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The wattle wall the men had brought was set up in a semicircle by the
+      Eighth Company as a shelter from the north, propped up by musket rests,
+      and a campfire was built before it. They beat the tattoo, called the roll,
+      had supper, and settled down round the fires for the night—some
+      repairing their footgear, some smoking pipes, and some stripping
+      themselves naked to steam the lice out of their shirts.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0325"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      One would have thought that under the almost incredibly wretched
+      conditions the Russian soldiers were in at that time—lacking warm
+      boots and sheepskin coats, without a roof over their heads, in the snow
+      with eighteen degrees of frost, and without even full rations (the
+      commissariat did not always keep up with the troops)—they would have
+      presented a very sad and depressing spectacle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the contrary, the army had never under the best material conditions
+      presented a more cheerful and animated aspect. This was because all who
+      began to grow depressed or who lost strength were sifted out of the army
+      day by day. All the physically or morally weak had long since been left
+      behind and only the flower of the army—physically and mentally—remained.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      More men collected behind the wattle fence of the Eighth Company than
+      anywhere else. Two sergeants major were sitting with them and their
+      campfire blazed brighter than others. For leave to sit by their wattle
+      they demanded contributions of fuel.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh, Makéev! What has become of you, you son of a bitch? Are you lost or
+      have the wolves eaten you? Fetch some more wood!” shouted a red-haired and
+      red-faced man, screwing up his eyes and blinking because of the smoke but
+      not moving back from the fire. “And you, Jackdaw, go and fetch some wood!”
+       said he to another soldier.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This red-haired man was neither a sergeant nor a corporal, but being
+      robust he ordered about those weaker than himself. The soldier they called
+      “Jackdaw,” a thin little fellow with a sharp nose, rose obediently and was
+      about to go but at that instant there came into the light of the fire the
+      slender, handsome figure of a young soldier carrying a load of wood.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Bring it here—that’s fine!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They split up the wood, pressed it down on the fire, blew at it with their
+      mouths, and fanned it with the skirts of their greatcoats, making the
+      flames hiss and crackle. The men drew nearer and lit their pipes. The
+      handsome young soldier who had brought the wood, setting his arms akimbo,
+      began stamping his cold feet rapidly and deftly on the spot where he
+      stood.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mother! The dew is cold but clear.... It’s well that I’m a musketeer...”
+       he sang, pretending to hiccough after each syllable.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Look out, your soles will fly off!” shouted the red-haired man, noticing
+      that the sole of the dancer’s boot was hanging loose. “What a fellow you
+      are for dancing!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The dancer stopped, pulled off the loose piece of leather, and threw it on
+      the fire.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Right enough, friend,” said he, and, having sat down, took out of his
+      knapsack a scrap of blue French cloth, and wrapped it round his foot.
+      “It’s the steam that spoils them,” he added, stretching out his feet
+      toward the fire.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They’ll soon be issuing us new ones. They say that when we’ve
+      finished hammering <i>them</i>, we’re to receive double kits!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And that son of a bitch Petróv has lagged behind after all, it seems,”
+       said one sergeant major.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I’ve had an eye on him this long while,” said the other.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, he’s a poor sort of soldier....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But in the Third Company they say nine men were missing yesterday.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, it’s all very well, but when a man’s feet are frozen how can he
+      walk?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Eh? Don’t talk nonsense!” said a sergeant major.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you want to be doing the same?” said an old soldier, turning
+      reproachfully to the man who had spoken of frozen feet.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, you know,” said the sharp-nosed man they called Jackdaw in a
+      squeaky and unsteady voice, raising himself at the other side of the fire,
+      “a plump man gets thin, but for a thin one it’s death. Take me, now! I’ve
+      got no strength left,” he added, with sudden resolution turning to the
+      sergeant major. “Tell them to send me to hospital; I’m aching all over;
+      anyway I shan’t be able to keep up.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That’ll do, that’ll do!” replied the sergeant major quietly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The soldier said no more and the talk went on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What a lot of those Frenchies were taken today, and the fact is that not
+      one of them had what you might call real boots on,” said a soldier,
+      starting a new theme. “They were no more than make-believes.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The Cossacks have taken their boots. They were clearing the hut for the
+      colonel and carried them out. It was pitiful to see them, boys,” put in
+      the dancer. “As they turned them over one seemed still alive and, would
+      you believe it, he jabbered something in their lingo.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But they’re a clean folk, lads,” the first man went on; “he was white—as
+      white as birchbark—and some of them are such fine fellows, you might
+      think they were nobles.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, what do you think? They make soldiers of all classes there.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But they don’t understand our talk at all,” said the dancer with a
+      puzzled smile. “I asked him whose subject he was, and he jabbered in his
+      own way. A queer lot!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But it’s strange, friends,” continued the man who had wondered at their
+      whiteness, “the peasants at Mozháysk were saying that when they began
+      burying the dead—where the battle was you know—well, those
+      dead had been lying there for nearly a month, and says the peasant, ‘they
+      lie as white as paper, clean, and not as much smell as a puff of powder
+      smoke.’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Was it from the cold?” asked someone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You’re a clever fellow! From the cold indeed! Why, it was hot. If it had
+      been from the cold, ours would not have rotted either. ‘But,’ he says, ‘go
+      up to ours and they are all rotten and maggoty. So,’ he says, ‘we tie our
+      faces up with kerchiefs and turn our heads away as we drag them off: we
+      can hardly do it. But theirs,’ he says, ‘are white as paper and not so
+      much smell as a whiff of gunpowder.’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      All were silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It must be from their food,” said the sergeant major. “They used to
+      gobble the same food as the gentry.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      No one contradicted him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That peasant near Mozháysk where the battle was said the men were all
+      called up from ten villages around and they carted for twenty days and
+      still didn’t finish carting the dead away. And as for the wolves, he
+      says...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “That was a real battle,” said an old soldier. “It’s the only one worth
+      remembering; but since that... it’s only been tormenting folk.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And do you know, Daddy, the day before yesterday we ran at them and, my
+      word, they didn’t let us get near before they just threw down their
+      muskets and went on their knees. ‘Pardon!’ they say. That’s only one case.
+      They say Plátov took ‘Poleon himself twice. But he didn’t know the right
+      charm. He catches him and catches him—no good! He turns into a bird
+      in his hands and flies away. And there’s no way of killing him either.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You’re a first-class liar, Kiselëv, when I come to look at you!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Liar, indeed! It’s the real truth.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If he fell into my hands, when I’d caught him I’d bury him in the ground
+      with an aspen stake to fix him down. What a lot of men he’s ruined!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, anyhow we’re going to end it. He won’t come here again,” remarked
+      the old soldier, yawning.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The conversation flagged, and the soldiers began settling down to sleep.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Look at the stars. It’s wonderful how they shine! You would think the
+      women had spread out their linen,” said one of the men, gazing with
+      admiration at the Milky Way.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s a sign of a good harvest next year.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “We shall want some more wood.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You warm your back and your belly gets frozen. That’s queer.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “O Lord!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What are you pushing for? Is the fire only for you? Look how he’s
+      sprawling!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In the silence that ensued, the snoring of those who had fallen asleep
+      could be heard. Others turned over and warmed themselves, now and again
+      exchanging a few words. From a campfire a hundred paces off came a sound
+      of general, merry laughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Hark at them roaring there in the Fifth Company!” said one of the
+      soldiers, “and what a lot of them there are!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      One of the men got up and went over to the Fifth Company.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They’re having such fun,” said he, coming back. “Two Frenchies have
+      turned up. One’s quite frozen and the other’s an awful swaggerer. He’s
+      singing songs....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, I’ll go across and have a look....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And several of the men went over to the Fifth Company.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0326"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The Fifth company was bivouacking at the very edge of the forest. A huge
+      campfire was blazing brightly in the midst of the snow, lighting up the
+      branches of trees heavy with hoarfrost.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      About midnight they heard the sound of steps in the snow of the forest,
+      and the crackling of dry branches.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A bear, lads,” said one of the men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They all raised their heads to listen, and out of the forest into the
+      bright firelight stepped two strangely clad human figures clinging to one
+      another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      These were two Frenchmen who had been hiding in the forest. They came up
+      to the fire, hoarsely uttering something in a language our soldiers did
+      not understand. One was taller than the other; he wore an officer’s hat
+      and seemed quite exhausted. On approaching the fire he had been going to
+      sit down, but fell. The other, a short sturdy soldier with a shawl tied
+      round his head, was stronger. He raised his companion and said something,
+      pointing to his mouth. The soldiers surrounded the Frenchmen, spread a
+      greatcoat on the ground for the sick man, and brought some buckwheat
+      porridge and vodka for both of them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The exhausted French officer was Ramballe and the man with his head
+      wrapped in the shawl was Morel, his orderly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Morel had drunk some vodka and finished his bowl of porridge he
+      suddenly became unnaturally merry and chattered incessantly to the
+      soldiers, who could not understand him. Ramballe refused food and resting
+      his head on his elbow lay silent beside the campfire, looking at the
+      Russian soldiers with red and vacant eyes. Occasionally he emitted a
+      long-drawn groan and then again became silent. Morel, pointing to his
+      shoulders, tried to impress on the soldiers the fact that Ramballe was an
+      officer and ought to be warmed. A Russian officer who had come up to the
+      fire sent to ask his colonel whether he would not take a French officer
+      into his hut to warm him, and when the messenger returned and said that
+      the colonel wished the officer to be brought to him, Ramballe was told to
+      go. He rose and tried to walk, but staggered and would have fallen had not
+      a soldier standing by held him up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You won’t do it again, eh?” said one of the soldiers, winking and turning
+      mockingly to Ramballe.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, you fool! Why talk rubbish, lout that you are—a real peasant!”
+       came rebukes from all sides addressed to the jesting soldier.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They surrounded Ramballe, lifted him on the crossed arms of two soldiers,
+      and carried him to the hut. Ramballe put his arms around their necks while
+      they carried him and began wailing plaintively:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, you fine fellows, my kind, kind friends! These are men! Oh, my brave,
+      kind friends,” and he leaned his head against the shoulder of one of the
+      men like a child.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Meanwhile Morel was sitting in the best place by the fire, surrounded by
+      the soldiers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Morel, a short sturdy Frenchman with inflamed and streaming eyes, was
+      wearing a woman’s cloak and had a shawl tied woman fashion round his head
+      over his cap. He was evidently tipsy, and was singing a French song in a
+      hoarse broken voice, with an arm thrown round the nearest soldier. The
+      soldiers simply held their sides as they watched him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Now then, now then, teach us how it goes! I’ll soon pick it up. How is
+      it?” said the man—a singer and a wag—whom Morel was embracing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>“Vive Henri Quatre! Vive ce roi valiant!”</i> sang Morel,
+      winking. <i>“Ce diable à quatre...”</i> *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+     * “Long live Henry the Fourth, that valiant king! That rowdy
+     devil.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      “Vivarika! Vif-seruvaru! Sedyablyaka!” repeated the soldier, flourishing
+      his arm and really catching the tune.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Bravo! Ha, ha, ha!” rose their rough, joyous laughter from all sides.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Morel, wrinkling up his face, laughed too.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, go on, go on!”
+     </p>
+<p class="poem">
+<i>“Qui eut le triple talent,<br>
+    De boire, de battre,<br>
+    Et d’être un vert galant.”</i> *
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+      * Who had a triple talent<br>
+      For drinking, for fighting,<br>
+      And for being a gallant old boy...
+</p>
+<p>
+      “It goes smoothly, too. Well, now, Zaletáev!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ke...” Zaletáev, brought out with effort: “ke-e-e-e,” he drawled,
+      laboriously pursing his lips, “le-trip-ta-la-de-bu-de-ba, e
+      de-tra-va-ga-la” he sang.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Fine! Just like the Frenchie! Oh, ho ho! Do you want some more to eat?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Give him some porridge: it takes a long time to get filled up after
+      starving.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They gave him some more porridge and Morel with a laugh set to work on his
+      third bowl. All the young soldiers smiled gaily as they watched him. The
+      older men, who thought it undignified to amuse themselves with such
+      nonsense, continued to lie at the opposite side of the fire, but one would
+      occasionally raise himself on an elbow and glance at Morel with a smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “They are men too,” said one of them as he wrapped himself up in his coat.
+      “Even wormwood grows on its own root.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “O Lord, O Lord! How starry it is! Tremendous! That means a hard
+      frost....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They all grew silent. The stars, as if knowing that no one was looking at
+      them, began to disport themselves in the dark sky: now flaring up, now
+      vanishing, now trembling, they were busy whispering something gladsome and
+      mysterious to one another.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0327"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The French army melted away at the uniform rate of a mathematical
+      progression; and that crossing of the Berëzina about which so much has
+      been written was only one intermediate stage in its destruction, and not
+      at all the decisive episode of the campaign. If so much has been and still
+      is written about the Berëzina, on the French side this is only because at
+      the broken bridge across that river the calamities their army had been
+      previously enduring were suddenly concentrated at one moment into a tragic
+      spectacle that remained in every memory, and on the Russian side merely
+      because in Petersburg—far from the seat of war—a plan (again
+      one of Pfuel’s) had been devised to catch Napoleon in a strategic trap at
+      the Berëzina River. Everyone assured himself that all would happen
+      according to plan, and therefore insisted that it was just the crossing of
+      the Berëzina that destroyed the French army. In reality the results of the
+      crossing were much less disastrous to the French—in guns and men
+      lost—than Krásnoe had been, as the figures show.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The sole importance of the crossing of the Berëzina lies in the fact that
+      it plainly and indubitably proved the fallacy of all the plans for cutting
+      off the enemy’s retreat and the soundness of the only possible line of
+      action—the one Kutúzov and the general mass of the army demanded—namely,
+      simply to follow the enemy up. The French crowd fled at a continually
+      increasing speed and all its energy was directed to reaching its goal. It
+      fled like a wounded animal and it was impossible to block its path. This
+      was shown not so much by the arrangements it made for crossing as by what
+      took place at the bridges. When the bridges broke down, unarmed soldiers,
+      people from Moscow and women with children who were with the French
+      transport, all—carried on by <i>vis inertiæ</i>—pressed forward into
+      boats and into the ice-covered water and did not surrender.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That impulse was reasonable. The condition of fugitives and of pursuers
+      was equally bad. As long as they remained with their own people each might
+      hope for help from his fellows and the definite place he held among them.
+      But those who surrendered, while remaining in the same pitiful plight,
+      would be on a lower level to claim a share in the necessities of life. The
+      French did not need to be informed of the fact that half the prisoners—with
+      whom the Russians did not know what to do—perished of cold and
+      hunger despite their captors’ desire to save them; they felt that it could
+      not be otherwise. The most compassionate Russian commanders, those
+      favorable to the French—and even the Frenchmen in the Russian
+      service—could do nothing for the prisoners. The French perished from
+      the conditions to which the Russian army was itself exposed. It was
+      impossible to take bread and clothes from our hungry and indispensable
+      soldiers to give to the French who, though not harmful, or hated, or
+      guilty, were simply unnecessary. Some Russians even did that, but they
+      were exceptions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Certain destruction lay behind the French but in front there was hope.
+      Their ships had been burned, there was no salvation save in collective
+      flight, and on that the whole strength of the French was concentrated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The farther they fled the more wretched became the plight of the remnant,
+      especially after the Berëzina, on which (in consequence of the Petersburg
+      plan) special hopes had been placed by the Russians, and the keener grew
+      the passions of the Russian commanders, who blamed one another and Kutúzov
+      most of all. Anticipation that the failure of the Petersburg Berëzina plan
+      would be attributed to Kutúzov led to dissatisfaction, contempt, and
+      ridicule, more and more strongly expressed. The ridicule and contempt were
+      of course expressed in a respectful form, making it impossible for him to
+      ask wherein he was to blame. They did not talk seriously to him; when
+      reporting to him or asking for his sanction they appeared to be fulfilling
+      a regrettable formality, but they winked behind his back and tried to
+      mislead him at every turn.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Because they could not understand him all these people assumed that it was
+      useless to talk to the old man; that he would never grasp the profundity
+      of their plans, that he would answer with his phrases (which they thought
+      were mere phrases) about a “golden bridge,” about the impossibility of
+      crossing the frontier with a crowd of tatterdemalions, and so forth. They
+      had heard all that before. And all he said—that it was necessary to
+      await provisions, or that the men had no boots—was so simple, while
+      what they proposed was so complicated and clever, that it was evident that
+      he was old and stupid and that they, though not in power, were commanders
+      of genius.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the junction with the army of the brilliant admiral and Petersburg
+      hero Wittgenstein, this mood and the gossip of the staff reached their
+      maximum. Kutúzov saw this and merely sighed and shrugged his shoulders.
+      Only once, after the affair of the Berëzina, did he get angry and write to
+      Bennigsen (who reported separately to the Emperor) the following letter:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “On account of your spells of ill health, will your excellency please be
+      so good as to set off for Kalúga on receipt of this, and there await
+      further commands and appointments from His Imperial Majesty.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But after Bennigsen’s departure, the Grand Duke Tsarévich Constantine
+      Pávlovich joined the army. He had taken part in the beginning of the
+      campaign but had subsequently been removed from the army by Kutúzov. Now
+      having come to the army, he informed Kutúzov of the Emperor’s displeasure
+      at the poor success of our forces and the slowness of their advance. The
+      Emperor intended to join the army personally in a few days’ time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old man, experienced in court as well as in military affairs—this
+      same Kutúzov who in August had been chosen commander in chief against the
+      sovereign’s wishes and who had removed the Grand Duke and heir-apparent
+      from the army—who on his own authority and contrary to the Emperor’s
+      will had decided on the abandonment of Moscow, now realized at once that
+      his day was over, that his part was played, and that the power he was
+      supposed to hold was no longer his. And he understood this not merely from
+      the attitude of the court. He saw on the one hand that the military
+      business in which he had played his part was ended and felt that his
+      mission was accomplished; and at the same time he began to be conscious of
+      the physical weariness of his aged body and of the necessity of physical
+      rest.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the twenty-ninth of November Kutúzov entered Vílna—his “dear
+      Vílna” as he called it. Twice during his career Kutúzov had been governor
+      of Vílna. In that wealthy town, which had not been injured, he found old
+      friends and associations, besides the comforts of life of which he had so
+      long been deprived. And he suddenly turned from the cares of army and
+      state and, as far as the passions that seethed around him allowed,
+      immersed himself in the quiet life to which he had formerly been
+      accustomed, as if all that was taking place and all that had still to be
+      done in the realm of history did not concern him at all.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Chichagóv, one of the most zealous “cutters-off” and “breakers-up,” who
+      had first wanted to effect a diversion in Greece and then in Warsaw but
+      never wished to go where he was sent: Chichagóv, noted for the boldness
+      with which he spoke to the Emperor, and who considered Kutúzov to be under
+      an obligation to him because when he was sent to make peace with Turkey in
+      1811 independently of Kutúzov, and found that peace had already been
+      concluded, he admitted to the Emperor that the merit of securing that
+      peace was really Kutúzov’s; this Chichagóv was the first to meet Kutúzov
+      at the castle where the latter was to stay. In undress naval uniform, with
+      a dirk, and holding his cap under his arm, he handed Kutúzov a garrison
+      report and the keys of the town. The contemptuously respectful attitude of
+      the younger men to the old man in his dotage was expressed in the highest
+      degree by the behavior of Chichagóv, who knew of the accusations that were
+      being directed against Kutúzov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When speaking to Chichagóv, Kutúzov incidentally mentioned that the
+      vehicles packed with china that had been captured from him at Borísov had
+      been recovered and would be restored to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You mean to imply that I have nothing to eat out of.... On the contrary,
+      I can supply you with everything even if you want to give dinner parties,”
+       warmly replied Chichagóv, who tried by every word he spoke to prove his
+      own rectitude and therefore imagined Kutúzov to be animated by the same
+      desire.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov, shrugging his shoulders, replied with his subtle penetrating
+      smile: “I meant merely to say what I said.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Contrary to the Emperor’s wish Kutúzov detained the greater part of the
+      army at Vílna. Those about him said that he became extraordinarily slack
+      and physically feeble during his stay in that town. He attended to army
+      affairs reluctantly, left everything to his generals, and while awaiting
+      the Emperor’s arrival led a dissipated life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having left Petersburg on the seventh of December with his suite—Count
+      Tolstóy, Prince Volkónski, Arakchéev, and others—the Emperor reached
+      Vílna on the eleventh, and in his traveling sleigh drove straight to the
+      castle. In spite of the severe frost some hundred generals and staff
+      officers in full parade uniform stood in front of the castle, as well as a
+      guard of honor of the Semënov regiment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A courier who galloped to the castle in advance, in a troyka with three
+      foam-flecked horses, shouted “Coming!” and Konovnítsyn rushed into the
+      vestibule to inform Kutúzov, who was waiting in the hall porter’s little
+      lodge.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A minute later the old man’s large stout figure in full-dress uniform, his
+      chest covered with orders and a scarf drawn round his stomach, waddled out
+      into the porch. He put on his hat with its peaks to the sides and, holding
+      his gloves in his hand and walking with an effort sideways down the steps
+      to the level of the street, took in his hand the report he had prepared
+      for the Emperor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was running to and fro and whispering; another troyka flew furiously
+      up, and then all eyes were turned on an approaching sleigh in which the
+      figures of the Emperor and Volkónski could already be descried.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the habit of fifty years all this had a physically agitating effect
+      on the old general. He carefully and hastily felt himself all over,
+      readjusted his hat, and pulling himself together drew himself up and, at
+      the very moment when the Emperor, having alighted from the sleigh, lifted
+      his eyes to him, handed him the report and began speaking in his smooth,
+      ingratiating voice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor with a rapid glance scanned Kutúzov from head to foot, frowned
+      for an instant, but immediately mastering himself went up to the old man,
+      extended his arms and embraced him. And this embrace too, owing to a
+      long-standing impression related to his innermost feelings, had its usual
+      effect on Kutúzov and he gave a sob.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor greeted the officers and the Semënov guard, and again pressing
+      the old man’s hand went with him into the castle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When alone with the field marshal the Emperor expressed his
+      dissatisfaction at the slowness of the pursuit and at the mistakes made at
+      Krásnoe and the Berëzina, and informed him of his intentions for a future
+      campaign abroad. Kutúzov made no rejoinder or remark. The same submissive,
+      expressionless look with which he had listened to the Emperor’s commands
+      on the field of Austerlitz seven years before settled on his face now.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Kutúzov came out of the study and with lowered head was crossing the
+      ballroom with his heavy waddling gait, he was arrested by someone’s voice
+      saying:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Your Serene Highness!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov raised his head and looked for a long while into the eyes of Count
+      Tolstóy, who stood before him holding a silver salver on which lay a small
+      object. Kutúzov seemed not to understand what was expected of him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Suddenly he seemed to remember; a scarcely perceptible smile flashed
+      across his puffy face, and bowing low and respectfully he took the object
+      that lay on the salver. It was the Order of St. George of the First Class.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0328"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Next day the field marshal gave a dinner and ball which the Emperor
+      honored by his presence. Kutúzov had received the Order of St. George of
+      the First Class and the Emperor showed him the highest honors, but
+      everyone knew of the imperial dissatisfaction with him. The proprieties
+      were observed and the Emperor was the first to set that example, but
+      everybody understood that the old man was blameworthy and
+      good-for-nothing. When Kutúzov, conforming to a custom of Catherine’s day,
+      ordered the standards that had been captured to be lowered at the
+      Emperor’s feet on his entering the ballroom, the Emperor made a wry face
+      and muttered something in which some people caught the words, “the old
+      comedian.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The Emperor’s displeasure with Kutúzov was specially increased at Vílna by
+      the fact that Kutúzov evidently could not or would not understand the
+      importance of the coming campaign.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When on the following morning the Emperor said to the officers assembled
+      about him: “You have not only saved Russia, you have saved Europe!” they
+      all understood that the war was not ended.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov alone would not see this and openly expressed his opinion that no
+      fresh war could improve the position or add to the glory of Russia, but
+      could only spoil and lower the glorious position that Russia had gained.
+      He tried to prove to the Emperor the impossibility of levying fresh
+      troops, spoke of the hardships already endured by the people, of the
+      possibility of failure and so forth.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This being the field marshal’s frame of mind he was naturally regarded as
+      merely a hindrance and obstacle to the impending war.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To avoid unpleasant encounters with the old man, the natural method was to
+      do what had been done with him at Austerlitz and with Barclay at the
+      beginning of the Russian campaign—to transfer the authority to the
+      Emperor himself, thus cutting the ground from under the commander in
+      chief’s feet without upsetting the old man by informing him of the change.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With this object his staff was gradually reconstructed and its real
+      strength removed and transferred to the Emperor. Toll, Konovnítsyn, and
+      Ermólov received fresh appointments. Everyone spoke loudly of the field
+      marshal’s great weakness and failing health.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His health had to be bad for his place to be taken away and given to
+      another. And in fact his health was poor.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      So naturally, simply, and gradually—just as he had come from Turkey
+      to the Treasury in Petersburg to recruit the militia, and then to the army
+      when he was needed there—now when his part was played out, Kutúzov’s
+      place was taken by a new and necessary performer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The war of 1812, besides its national significance dear to every Russian
+      heart, was now to assume another, a European, significance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The movement of peoples from west to east was to be succeeded by a
+      movement of peoples from east to west, and for this fresh war another
+      leader was necessary, having qualities and views differing from Kutúzov’s
+      and animated by different motives.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alexander I was as necessary for the movement of the peoples from east to
+      west and for the refixing of national frontiers as Kutúzov had been for
+      the salvation and glory of Russia.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Kutúzov did not understand what Europe, the balance of power, or Napoleon
+      meant. He could not understand it. For the representative of the Russian
+      people, after the enemy had been destroyed and Russia had been liberated
+      and raised to the summit of her glory, there was nothing left to do as a
+      Russian. Nothing remained for the representative of the national war but
+      to die, and Kutúzov died.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0329"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      As generally happens, Pierre did not feel the full effects of the physical
+      privation and strain he had suffered as prisoner until after they were
+      over. After his liberation he reached Orël, and on the third day there,
+      when preparing to go to Kiev, he fell ill and was laid up for three
+      months. He had what the doctors termed “bilious fever.” But despite the
+      fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to
+      drink, he recovered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Scarcely any impression was left on Pierre’s mind by all that happened to
+      him from the time of his rescue till his illness. He remembered only the
+      dull gray weather now rainy and now snowy, internal physical distress, and
+      pains in his feet and side. He remembered a general impression of the
+      misfortunes and sufferings of people and of being worried by the curiosity
+      of officers and generals who questioned him, he also remembered his
+      difficulty in procuring a conveyance and horses, and above all he
+      remembered his incapacity to think and feel all that time. On the day of
+      his rescue he had seen the body of Pétya Rostóv. That same day he had
+      learned that Prince Andrew, after surviving the battle of Borodinó for
+      more than a month had recently died in the Rostóvs’ house at Yaroslávl,
+      and Denísov who told him this news also mentioned Hélène’s death,
+      supposing that Pierre had heard of it long before. All this at the time
+      seemed merely strange to Pierre: he felt he could not grasp its
+      significance. Just then he was only anxious to get away as quickly as
+      possible from places where people were killing one another, to some
+      peaceful refuge where he could recover himself, rest, and think over all
+      the strange new facts he had learned; but on reaching Orël he immediately
+      fell ill. When he came to himself after his illness he saw in attendance
+      on him two of his servants, Terénty and Váska, who had come from Moscow;
+      and also his cousin the eldest princess, who had been living on his estate
+      at Eléts and hearing of his rescue and illness had come to look after him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was only gradually during his convalescence that Pierre lost the
+      impressions he had become accustomed to during the last few months and got
+      used to the idea that no one would oblige him to go anywhere tomorrow,
+      that no one would deprive him of his warm bed, and that he would be sure
+      to get his dinner, tea, and supper. But for a long time in his dreams he
+      still saw himself in the conditions of captivity. In the same way little
+      by little he came to understand the news he had been told after his
+      rescue, about the death of Prince Andrew, the death of his wife, and the
+      destruction of the French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A joyous feeling of freedom—that complete inalienable freedom
+      natural to man which he had first experienced at the first halt outside
+      Moscow—filled Pierre’s soul during his convalescence. He was
+      surprised to find that this inner freedom, which was independent of
+      external conditions, now had as it were an additional setting of external
+      liberty. He was alone in a strange town, without acquaintances. No one
+      demanded anything of him or sent him anywhere. He had all he wanted: the
+      thought of his wife which had been a continual torment to him was no
+      longer there, since she was no more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, how good! How splendid!” said he to himself when a cleanly laid table
+      was moved up to him with savory beef tea, or when he lay down for the
+      night on a soft clean bed, or when he remembered that the French had gone
+      and that his wife was no more. “Oh, how good, how splendid!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And by old habit he asked himself the question: “Well, and what then? What
+      am I going to do?” And he immediately gave himself the answer: “Well, I
+      shall live. Ah, how splendid!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The very question that had formerly tormented him, the thing he had
+      continually sought to find—the aim of life—no longer existed
+      for him now. That search for the aim of life had not merely disappeared
+      temporarily—he felt that it no longer existed for him and could not
+      present itself again. And this very absence of an aim gave him the
+      complete, joyous sense of freedom which constituted his happiness at this
+      time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He could not see an aim, for he now had faith—not faith in any kind
+      of rule, or words, or ideas, but faith in an ever-living, ever-manifest
+      God. Formerly he had sought Him in aims he set himself. That search for an
+      aim had been simply a search for God, and suddenly in his captivity he had
+      learned not by words or reasoning but by direct feeling what his nurse had
+      told him long ago: that God is here and everywhere. In his captivity he
+      had learned that in Karatáev God was greater, more infinite and
+      unfathomable than in the Architect of the Universe recognized by the
+      Freemasons. He felt like a man who after straining his eyes to see into
+      the far distance finds what he sought at his very feet. All his life he
+      had looked over the heads of the men around him, when he should have
+      merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the past he had never been able to find that great inscrutable infinite
+      <i>something</i>. He had only felt that it must exist somewhere and had looked
+      for it. In everything near and comprehensible he had seen only what was
+      limited, petty, commonplace, and senseless. He had equipped himself with a
+      mental telescope and looked into remote space, where petty worldliness
+      hiding itself in misty distance had seemed to him great and infinite
+      merely because it was not clearly seen. And such had European life,
+      politics, Freemasonry, philosophy, and philanthropy seemed to him. But
+      even then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted them, his mind had
+      penetrated to those distances and he had there seen the same pettiness,
+      worldliness, and senselessness. Now, however, he had learned to see the
+      great, eternal, and infinite in everything, and therefore—to see it
+      and enjoy its contemplation—he naturally threw away the telescope
+      through which he had till now gazed over men’s heads, and gladly regarded
+      the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around
+      him. And the closer he looked the more tranquil and happy he became. That
+      dreadful question, “What for?” which had formerly destroyed all his mental
+      edifices, no longer existed for him. To that question, “What for?” a
+      simple answer was now always ready in his soul: “Because there is a God,
+      that God without whose will not one hair falls from a man’s head.”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0330"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      In external ways Pierre had hardly changed at all. In appearance he was
+      just what he used to be. As before he was absent-minded and seemed
+      occupied not with what was before his eyes but with something special of
+      his own. The difference between his former and present self was that
+      formerly when he did not grasp what lay before him or was said to him, he
+      had puckered his forehead painfully as if vainly seeking to distinguish
+      something at a distance. At present he still forgot what was said to him
+      and still did not see what was before his eyes, but he now looked with a
+      scarcely perceptible and seemingly ironic smile at what was before him and
+      listened to what was said, though evidently seeing and hearing something
+      quite different. Formerly he had appeared to be a kindhearted but unhappy
+      man, and so people had been inclined to avoid him. Now a smile at the joy
+      of life always played round his lips, and sympathy for others shone in
+      his eyes with a questioning look as to whether they were as contented as
+      he was, and people felt pleased by his presence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Previously he had talked a great deal, grew excited when he talked, and
+      seldom listened; now he was seldom carried away in conversation and knew
+      how to listen so that people readily told him their most intimate secrets.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess, who had never liked Pierre and had been particularly hostile
+      to him since she had felt herself under obligations to him after the old
+      count’s death, now after staying a short time in Orël—where she had
+      come intending to show Pierre that in spite of his ingratitude she
+      considered it her duty to nurse him—felt to her surprise and
+      vexation that she had become fond of him. Pierre did not in any way seek
+      her approval, he merely studied her with interest. Formerly she had felt
+      that he regarded her with indifference and irony, and so had shrunk into
+      herself as she did with others and had shown him only the combative side
+      of her nature; but now he seemed to be trying to understand the most
+      intimate places of her heart, and, mistrustfully at first but afterwards
+      gratefully, she let him see the hidden, kindly sides of her character.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The most cunning man could not have crept into her confidence more
+      successfully, evoking memories of the best times of her youth and showing
+      sympathy with them. Yet Pierre’s cunning consisted simply in finding
+      pleasure in drawing out the human qualities of the embittered, hard, and
+      (in her own way) proud princess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, he is a very, very kind man when he is not under the influence of
+      bad people but of people such as myself,” thought she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His servants too—Terénty and Váska—in their own way noticed
+      the change that had taken place in Pierre. They considered that he had
+      become much “simpler.” Terénty, when he had helped him undress and wished
+      him good night, often lingered with his master’s boots in his hands and
+      clothes over his arm, to see whether he would not start a talk. And
+      Pierre, noticing that Terénty wanted a chat, generally kept him there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, tell me... now, how did you get food?” he would ask.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And Terénty would begin talking of the destruction of Moscow, and of the
+      old count, and would stand for a long time holding the clothes and
+      talking, or sometimes listening to Pierre’s stories, and then would go out
+      into the hall with a pleasant sense of intimacy with his master and
+      affection for him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The doctor who attended Pierre and visited him every day, though he
+      considered it his duty as a doctor to pose as a man whose every moment was
+      of value to suffering humanity, would sit for hours with Pierre telling
+      him his favorite anecdotes and his observations on the characters of his
+      patients in general, and especially of the ladies.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s a pleasure to talk to a man like that; he is not like our
+      provincials,” he would say.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There were several prisoners from the French army in Orël, and the doctor
+      brought one of them, a young Italian, to see Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This officer began visiting Pierre, and the princess used to make fun of
+      the tenderness the Italian expressed for him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Italian seemed happy only when he could come to see Pierre, talk with
+      him, tell him about his past, his life at home, and his love, and pour out
+      to him his indignation against the French and especially against Napoleon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If all Russians are in the least like you, it is sacrilege to fight such
+      a nation,” he said to Pierre. “You, who have suffered so from the French,
+      do not even feel animosity toward them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre had evoked the passionate affection of the Italian merely by
+      evoking the best side of his nature and taking a pleasure in so doing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the last days of Pierre’s stay in Orël his old Masonic acquaintance
+      Count Willarski, who had introduced him to the lodge in 1807, came to see
+      him. Willarski was married to a Russian heiress who had a large estate in
+      Orël province, and he occupied a temporary post in the commissariat
+      department in that town.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Hearing that Bezúkhov was in Orël, Willarski, though they had never been
+      intimate, came to him with the professions of friendship and intimacy that
+      people who meet in a desert generally express for one another. Willarski
+      felt dull in Orël and was pleased to meet a man of his own circle and, as
+      he supposed, of similar interests.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But to his surprise Willarski soon noticed that Pierre had lagged much
+      behind the times, and had sunk, as he expressed it to himself, into apathy
+      and egotism.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You are letting yourself go, my dear fellow,” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But for all that Willarski found it pleasanter now than it had been
+      formerly to be with Pierre, and came to see him every day. To Pierre as he
+      looked at and listened to Willarski, it seemed strange to think that he
+      had been like that himself but a short time before.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Willarski was a married man with a family, busy with his family affairs,
+      his wife’s affairs, and his official duties. He regarded all these
+      occupations as hindrances to life, and considered that they were all
+      contemptible because their aim was the welfare of himself and his family.
+      Military, administrative, political, and Masonic interests continually
+      absorbed his attention. And Pierre, without trying to change the other’s
+      views and without condemning him, but with the quiet, joyful, and amused
+      smile now habitual to him, was interested in this strange though very
+      familiar phenomenon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There was a new feature in Pierre’s relations with Willarski, with the
+      princess, with the doctor, and with all the people he now met, which
+      gained for him the general good will. This was his acknowledgment of the
+      impossibility of changing a man’s convictions by words, and his
+      recognition of the possibility of everyone thinking, feeling, and seeing
+      things each from his own point of view. This legitimate peculiarity of
+      each individual which used to excite and irritate Pierre now became a
+      basis of the sympathy he felt for, and the interest he took in, other
+      people. The difference, and sometimes complete contradiction, between
+      men’s opinions and their lives, and between one man and another, pleased
+      him and drew from him an amused and gentle smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In practical matters Pierre unexpectedly felt within himself a center of
+      gravity he had previously lacked. Formerly all pecuniary questions,
+      especially requests for money to which, as an extremely wealthy man, he
+      was very exposed, produced in him a state of hopeless agitation and
+      perplexity. “To give or not to give?” he had asked himself. “I have it and
+      he needs it. But someone else needs it still more. Who needs it most? And
+      perhaps they are both impostors?” In the old days he had been unable to
+      find a way out of all these surmises and had given to all who asked as
+      long as he had anything to give. Formerly he had been in a similar state
+      of perplexity with regard to every question concerning his property, when
+      one person advised one thing and another something else.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Now to his surprise he found that he no longer felt either doubt or
+      perplexity about these questions. There was now within him a judge who by
+      some rule unknown to him decided what should or should not be done.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was as indifferent as heretofore to money matters, but now he felt
+      certain of what ought and what ought not to be done. The first time he had
+      recourse to his new judge was when a French prisoner, a colonel, came to
+      him and, after talking a great deal about his exploits, concluded by
+      making what amounted to a demand that Pierre should give him four thousand
+      francs to send to his wife and children. Pierre refused without the least
+      difficulty or effort, and was afterwards surprised how simple and easy had
+      been what used to appear so insurmountably difficult. At the same time
+      that he refused the colonel’s demand he made up his mind that he must have
+      recourse to artifice when leaving Orël, to induce the Italian officer to
+      accept some money of which he was evidently in need. A further proof to
+      Pierre of his own more settled outlook on practical matters was furnished
+      by his decision with regard to his wife’s debts and to the rebuilding of
+      his houses in and near Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His head steward came to him at Orël and Pierre reckoned up with him his
+      diminished income. The burning of Moscow had cost him, according to the
+      head steward’s calculation, about two million rubles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To console Pierre for these losses the head steward gave him an estimate
+      showing that despite these losses his income would not be diminished but
+      would even be increased if he refused to pay his wife’s debts which he was
+      under no obligation to meet, and did not rebuild his Moscow house and the
+      country house on his Moscow estate, which had cost him eighty thousand
+      rubles a year and brought in nothing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, of course that’s true,” said Pierre with a cheerful smile. “I don’t
+      need all that at all. By being ruined I have become much richer.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But in January Savélich came from Moscow and gave him an account of the
+      state of things there, and spoke of the estimate an architect had made of
+      the cost of rebuilding the town and country houses, speaking of this as of
+      a settled matter. About the same time he received letters from Prince
+      Vasíli and other Petersburg acquaintances speaking of his wife’s debts.
+      And Pierre decided that the steward’s proposals which had so pleased him
+      were wrong and that he must go to Petersburg and settle his wife’s affairs
+      and must rebuild in Moscow. Why this was necessary he did not know, but he
+      knew for certain that it was necessary. His income would be reduced by
+      three fourths, but he felt it must be done.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Willarski was going to Moscow and they agreed to travel together.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the whole time of his convalescence in Orël Pierre had experienced
+      a feeling of joy, freedom, and life; but when during his journey he found
+      himself in the open world and saw hundreds of new faces, that feeling was
+      intensified. Throughout his journey he felt like a schoolboy on holiday.
+      Everyone—the stagecoach driver, the post-house overseers, the
+      peasants on the roads and in the villages—had a new significance for
+      him. The presence and remarks of Willarski who continually deplored the
+      ignorance and poverty of Russia and its backwardness compared with Europe
+      only heightened Pierre’s pleasure. Where Willarski saw deadness Pierre saw
+      an extraordinary strength and vitality—the strength which in that
+      vast space amid the snows maintained the life of this original, peculiar,
+      and unique people. He did not contradict Willarski and even seemed to
+      agree with him—an apparent agreement being the simplest way to avoid
+      discussions that could lead to nothing—and he smiled joyfully as he
+      listened to him.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0331"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      It would be difficult to explain why and whither ants whose heap has been
+      destroyed are hurrying: some from the heap dragging bits of rubbish,
+      larvae, and corpses, others back to the heap, or why they jostle, overtake
+      one another, and fight, and it would be equally difficult to explain what
+      caused the Russians after the departure of the French to throng to the
+      place that had formerly been Moscow. But when we watch the ants round
+      their ruined heap, the tenacity, energy, and immense number of the delving
+      insects prove that despite the destruction of the heap, something
+      indestructible, which though intangible is the real strength of the
+      colony, still exists; and similarly, though in Moscow in the month of
+      October there was no government and no churches, shrines, riches, or
+      houses—it was still the Moscow it had been in August. All was
+      destroyed, except something intangible yet powerful and indestructible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The motives of those who thronged from all sides to Moscow after it had
+      been cleared of the enemy were most diverse and personal, and at first for
+      the most part savage and brutal. One motive only they all had in common: a
+      desire to get to the place that had been called Moscow, to apply their
+      activities there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Within a week Moscow already had fifteen thousand inhabitants, in a
+      fortnight twenty-five thousand, and so on. By the autumn of 1813 the
+      number, ever increasing and increasing, exceeded what it had been in 1812.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The first Russians to enter Moscow were the Cossacks of Wintzingerode’s
+      detachment, peasants from the adjacent villages, and residents who had
+      fled from Moscow and had been hiding in its vicinity. The Russians who
+      entered Moscow, finding it plundered, plundered it in their turn. They
+      continued what the French had begun. Trains of peasant carts came to
+      Moscow to carry off to the villages what had been abandoned in the ruined
+      houses and the streets. The Cossacks carried off what they could to their
+      camps, and the householders seized all they could find in other houses and
+      moved it to their own, pretending that it was their property.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the first plunderers were followed by a second and a third contingent,
+      and with increasing numbers plundering became more and more difficult and
+      assumed more definite forms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The French found Moscow abandoned but with all the organizations of
+      regular life, with diverse branches of commerce and craftsmanship, with
+      luxury, and governmental and religious institutions. These forms were
+      lifeless but still existed. There were bazaars, shops, warehouses, market
+      stalls, granaries—for the most part still stocked with goods—and
+      there were factories and workshops, palaces and wealthy houses filled with
+      luxuries, hospitals, prisons, government offices, churches, and
+      cathedrals. The longer the French remained the more these forms of town
+      life perished, until finally all was merged into one confused, lifeless
+      scene of plunder.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The more the plundering by the French continued, the more both the wealth
+      of Moscow and the strength of its plunderers was destroyed. But plundering
+      by the Russians, with which the reoccupation of the city began, had an
+      opposite effect: the longer it continued and the greater the number of
+      people taking part in it the more rapidly was the wealth of the city and
+      its regular life restored.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Besides the plunderers, very various people, some drawn by curiosity, some
+      by official duties, some by self-interest—house owners, clergy,
+      officials of all kinds, tradesmen, artisans, and peasants—streamed
+      into Moscow as blood flows to the heart.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Within a week the peasants who came with empty carts to carry off plunder
+      were stopped by the authorities and made to cart the corpses out of the
+      town. Other peasants, having heard of their comrades’ discomfiture, came
+      to town bringing rye, oats, and hay, and beat down one another’s prices to
+      below what they had been in former days. Gangs of carpenters hoping for
+      high pay arrived in Moscow every day, and on all sides logs were being
+      hewn, new houses built, and old, charred ones repaired. Tradesmen began
+      trading in booths. Cookshops and taverns were opened in partially burned
+      houses. The clergy resumed the services in many churches that had not been
+      burned. Donors contributed Church property that had been stolen.
+      Government clerks set up their baize-covered tables and their pigeonholes
+      of documents in small rooms. The higher authorities and the police
+      organized the distribution of goods left behind by the French. The owners
+      of houses in which much property had been left, brought there from other
+      houses, complained of the injustice of taking everything to the Faceted
+      Palace in the Krémlin; others insisted that as the French had gathered
+      things from different houses into this or that house, it would be unfair
+      to allow its owner to keep all that was found there. They abused the
+      police and bribed them, made out estimates at ten times their value for
+      government stores that had perished in the fire, and demanded relief. And
+      Count Rostopchín wrote proclamations.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0332"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At the end of January Pierre went to Moscow and stayed in an annex of his
+      house which had not been burned. He called on Count Rostopchín and on some
+      acquaintances who were back in Moscow, and he intended to leave for
+      Petersburg two days later. Everybody was celebrating the victory,
+      everything was bubbling with life in the ruined but reviving city.
+      Everyone was pleased to see Pierre, everyone wished to meet him, and
+      everyone questioned him about what he had seen. Pierre felt particularly
+      well disposed toward them all, but was now instinctively on his guard for
+      fear of binding himself in any way. To all questions put to him—whether
+      important or quite trifling—such as: Where would he live? Was he
+      going to rebuild? When was he going to Petersburg and would he mind taking
+      a parcel for someone?—he replied: “Yes, perhaps,” or, “I think so,”
+       and so on.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He had heard that the Rostóvs were at Kostromá but the thought of Natásha
+      seldom occurred to him. If it did it was only as a pleasant memory of the
+      distant past. He felt himself not only free from social obligations but
+      also from that feeling which, it seemed to him, he had aroused in himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the third day after his arrival he heard from the Drubetskóys that
+      Princess Mary was in Moscow. The death, sufferings, and last days of
+      Prince Andrew had often occupied Pierre’s thoughts and now recurred to him
+      with fresh vividness. Having heard at dinner that Princess Mary was in
+      Moscow and living in her house—which had not been burned—in
+      Vozdvízhenka Street, he drove that same evening to see her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On his way to the house Pierre kept thinking of Prince Andrew, of their
+      friendship, of his various meetings with him, and especially of the last
+      one at Borodinó.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is it possible that he died in the bitter frame of mind he was then in?
+      Is it possible that the meaning of life was not disclosed to him before he
+      died?” thought Pierre. He recalled Karatáev and his death and
+      involuntarily began to compare these two men, so different, and yet so
+      similar in that they had both lived and both died and in the love he felt
+      for both of them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre drove up to the house of the old prince in a most serious mood. The
+      house had escaped the fire; it showed signs of damage but its general
+      aspect was unchanged. The old footman, who met Pierre with a stern face as
+      if wishing to make the visitor feel that the absence of the old prince had
+      not disturbed the order of things in the house, informed him that the
+      princess had gone to her own apartments, and that she received on Sundays.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Announce me. Perhaps she will see me,” said Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, sir,” said the man. “Please step into the portrait gallery.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A few minutes later the footman returned with Dessalles, who brought word
+      from the princess that she would be very glad to see Pierre if he would
+      excuse her want of ceremony and come upstairs to her apartment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In a rather low room lit by one candle sat the princess and with her
+      another person dressed in black. Pierre remembered that the princess
+      always had lady companions, but who they were and what they were like he
+      never knew or remembered. “This must be one of her companions,” he
+      thought, glancing at the lady in the black dress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The princess rose quickly to meet him and held out her hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” she said, looking at his altered face after he had kissed her hand,
+      “so this is how we meet again. He spoke of you even at the very last,” she
+      went on, turning her eyes from Pierre to her companion with a shyness that
+      surprised him for an instant.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I was so glad to hear of your safety. It was the first piece of good news
+      we had received for a long time.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Again the princess glanced round at her companion with even more
+      uneasiness in her manner and was about to add something, but Pierre
+      interrupted her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Just imagine—I knew nothing about him!” said he. “I thought he had
+      been killed. All I know I heard at second hand from others. I only know
+      that he fell in with the Rostóvs.... What a strange coincidence!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre spoke rapidly and with animation. He glanced once at the
+      companion’s face, saw her attentive and kindly gaze fixed on him, and, as
+      often happens when one is talking, felt somehow that this companion in the
+      black dress was a good, kind, excellent creature who would not hinder his
+      conversing freely with Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But when he mentioned the Rostóvs, Princess Mary’s face expressed still
+      greater embarrassment. She again glanced rapidly from Pierre’s face to
+      that of the lady in the black dress and said:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you really not recognize her?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked again at the companion’s pale, delicate face with its black
+      eyes and peculiar mouth, and something near to him, long forgotten and
+      more than sweet, looked at him from those attentive eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But no, it can’t be!” he thought. “This stern, thin, pale face that looks
+      so much older! It cannot be she. It merely reminds me of her.” But at that
+      moment Princess Mary said, “Natásha!” And with difficulty, effort, and
+      stress, like the opening of a door grown rusty on its hinges, a smile
+      appeared on the face with the attentive eyes, and from that opening door
+      came a breath of fragrance which suffused Pierre with a happiness he had
+      long forgotten and of which he had not even been thinking—especially
+      at that moment. It suffused him, seized him, and enveloped him completely.
+      When she smiled doubt was no longer possible, it was Natásha and he loved
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment Pierre involuntarily betrayed to her, to Princess Mary, and
+      above all to himself, a secret of which he himself had been unaware. He
+      flushed joyfully yet with painful distress. He tried to hide his
+      agitation. But the more he tried to hide it the more clearly—clearer
+      than any words could have done—did he betray to himself, to her, and
+      to Princess Mary that he loved her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, it’s only the unexpectedness of it,” thought Pierre. But as soon as
+      he tried to continue the conversation he had begun with Princess Mary he
+      again glanced at Natásha, and a still-deeper flush suffused his face and a
+      still-stronger agitation of mingled joy and fear seized his soul. He
+      became confused in his speech and stopped in the middle of what he was
+      saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre had failed to notice Natásha because he did not at all expect to
+      see her there, but he had failed to recognize her because the change in
+      her since he last saw her was immense. She had grown thin and pale, but
+      that was not what made her unrecognizable; she was unrecognizable at the
+      moment he entered because on that face whose eyes had always shone with a
+      suppressed smile of the joy of life, now when he first entered and glanced
+      at her there was not the least shadow of a smile: only her eyes were
+      kindly attentive and sadly interrogative.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre’s confusion was not reflected by any confusion on Natásha’s part,
+      but only by the pleasure that just perceptibly lit up her whole face.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0333"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      “She has come to stay with me,” said Princess Mary. “The count and
+      countess will be here in a few days. The countess is in a dreadful state;
+      but it was necessary for Natásha herself to see a doctor. They insisted on
+      her coming with me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, is there a family free from sorrow now?” said Pierre, addressing
+      Natásha. “You know it happened the very day we were rescued. I saw him.
+      What a delightful boy he was!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha looked at him, and by way of answer to his words her eyes widened
+      and lit up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What can one say or think of as a consolation?” said Pierre. “Nothing!
+      Why had such a splendid boy, so full of life, to die?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, in these days it would be hard to live without faith...” remarked
+      Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, that is really true,” Pierre hastily interrupted her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why is it true?” Natásha asked, looking attentively into Pierre’s eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How can you ask why?” said Princess Mary. “The thought alone of what
+      awaits...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha without waiting for Princess Mary to finish again looked
+      inquiringly at Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And because,” Pierre continued, “only one who believes that there is a
+      God ruling us can bear a loss such as hers and... yours.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha had already opened her mouth to speak but suddenly stopped. Pierre
+      hurriedly turned away from her and again addressed Princess Mary, asking
+      about his friend’s last days.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre’s confusion had now almost vanished, but at the same time he felt
+      that his freedom had also completely gone. He felt that there was now a
+      judge of his every word and action whose judgment mattered more to him
+      than that of all the rest of the world. As he spoke now he was considering
+      what impression his words would make on Natásha. He did not purposely say
+      things to please her, but whatever he was saying he regarded from her
+      standpoint.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary—reluctantly as is usual in such cases—began
+      telling of the condition in which she had found Prince Andrew. But
+      Pierre’s face quivering with emotion, his questions and his eager restless
+      expression, gradually compelled her to go into details which she feared to
+      recall for her own sake.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, and so...?” Pierre kept saying as he leaned toward her with his
+      whole body and eagerly listened to her story. “Yes, yes... so he grew
+      tranquil and softened? With all his soul he had always sought one thing—to
+      be perfectly good—so he could not be afraid of death. The faults he
+      had—if he had any—were not of his making. So he did soften?...
+      What a happy thing that he saw you again,” he added, suddenly turning to
+      Natásha and looking at her with eyes full of tears.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha’s face twitched. She frowned and lowered her eyes for a moment.
+      She hesitated for an instant whether to speak or not.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, that was happiness,” she then said in her quiet voice with its deep
+      chest notes. “For me it certainly was happiness.” She paused. “And he...
+      he... he said he was wishing for it at the very moment I entered the
+      room....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha’s voice broke. She blushed, pressed her clasped hands on her
+      knees, and then controlling herself with an evident effort lifted her head
+      and began to speak rapidly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We knew nothing of it when we started from Moscow. I did not dare to ask
+      about him. Then suddenly Sónya told me he was traveling with us. I had no
+      idea and could not imagine what state he was in, all I wanted was to see
+      him and be with him,” she said, trembling, and breathing quickly.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And not letting them interrupt her she went on to tell what she had never
+      yet mentioned to anyone—all she had lived through during those three
+      weeks of their journey and life at Yaroslávl.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre listened to her with lips parted and eyes fixed upon her full of
+      tears. As he listened he did not think of Prince Andrew, nor of death, nor
+      of what she was telling. He listened to her and felt only pity for her,
+      for what she was suffering now while she was speaking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary, frowning in her effort to hold back her tears, sat beside
+      Natásha, and heard for the first time the story of those last days of her
+      brother’s and Natásha’s love.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Evidently Natásha needed to tell that painful yet joyful tale.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She spoke, mingling most trifling details with the intimate secrets of her
+      soul, and it seemed as if she could never finish. Several times she
+      repeated the same thing twice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Dessalles’ voice was heard outside the door asking whether little Nicholas
+      might come in to say good night.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, that’s all—everything,” said Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She got up quickly just as Nicholas entered, almost ran to the door which
+      was hidden by curtains, struck her head against it, and rushed from the
+      room with a moan either of pain or sorrow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre gazed at the door through which she had disappeared and did not
+      understand why he suddenly felt all alone in the world.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary roused him from his abstraction by drawing his attention to
+      her nephew who had entered the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment of emotional tenderness young Nicholas’ face, which
+      resembled his father’s, affected Pierre so much that when he had kissed
+      the boy he got up quickly, took out his handkerchief, and went to the
+      window. He wished to take leave of Princess Mary, but she would not let
+      him go.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, Natásha and I sometimes don’t go to sleep till after two, so please
+      don’t go. I will order supper. Go downstairs, we will come immediately.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Before Pierre left the room Princess Mary told him: “This is the first
+      time she has talked of him like that.”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0334"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Pierre was shown into the large, brightly lit dining room; a few minutes
+      later he heard footsteps and Princess Mary entered with Natásha. Natásha
+      was calm, though a severe and grave expression had again settled on her
+      face. They all three of them now experienced that feeling of awkwardness
+      which usually follows after a serious and heartfelt talk. It is impossible
+      to go back to the same conversation, to talk of trifles is awkward, and
+      yet the desire to speak is there and silence seems like affectation. They
+      went silently to table. The footmen drew back the chairs and pushed them
+      up again. Pierre unfolded his cold table napkin and, resolving to break
+      the silence, looked at Natásha and at Princess Mary. They had evidently
+      both formed the same resolution; the eyes of both shone with satisfaction
+      and a confession that besides sorrow life also has joy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you take vodka, Count?” asked Princess Mary, and those words suddenly
+      banished the shadows of the past. “Now tell us about yourself,” said she.
+      “One hears such improbable wonders about you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” replied Pierre with the smile of mild irony now habitual to him.
+      “They even tell me wonders I myself never dreamed of! Mary Abrámovna
+      invited me to her house and kept telling me what had happened, or ought to
+      have happened, to me. Stepán Stepánych also instructed me how I ought to
+      tell of my experiences. In general I have noticed that it is very easy to
+      be an interesting man (I am an interesting man now); people invite me out
+      and tell me all about myself.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha smiled and was on the point of speaking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “We have been told,” Princess Mary interrupted her, “that you lost two
+      millions in Moscow. Is that true?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But I am three times as rich as before,” returned Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though the position was now altered by his decision to pay his wife’s
+      debts and to rebuild his houses, Pierre still maintained that he had
+      become three times as rich as before.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What I have certainly gained is freedom,” he began seriously, but did not
+      continue, noticing that this theme was too egotistic.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And are you building?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes. Savélich says I must!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Tell me, you did not know of the countess’ death when you decided to
+      remain in Moscow?” asked Princess Mary and immediately blushed, noticing
+      that her question, following his mention of freedom, ascribed to his words
+      a meaning he had perhaps not intended.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No,” answered Pierre, evidently not considering awkward the meaning
+      Princess Mary had given to his words. “I heard of it in Orël and you
+      cannot imagine how it shocked me. We were not an exemplary couple,” he
+      added quickly, glancing at Natásha and noticing on her face curiosity as
+      to how he would speak of his wife, “but her death shocked me terribly.
+      When two people quarrel they are always both in fault, and one’s own guilt
+      suddenly becomes terribly serious when the other is no longer alive. And
+      then such a death... without friends and without consolation! I am very,
+      very sorry for her,” he concluded, and was pleased to notice a look of
+      glad approval on Natásha’s face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, and so you are once more an eligible bachelor,” said Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre suddenly flushed crimson and for a long time tried not to look at
+      Natásha. When he ventured to glance her way again her face was cold,
+      stern, and he fancied even contemptuous.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And did you really see and speak to Napoleon, as we have been told?” said
+      Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre laughed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, not once! Everybody seems to imagine that being taken prisoner means
+      being Napoleon’s guest. Not only did I never see him but I heard nothing
+      about him—I was in much lower company!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Supper was over, and Pierre who at first declined to speak about his
+      captivity was gradually led on to do so.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But it’s true that you remained in Moscow to kill Napoleon?” Natásha
+      asked with a slight smile. “I guessed it then when we met at the Súkharev
+      tower, do you remember?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre admitted that it was true, and from that was gradually led by
+      Princess Mary’s questions and especially by Natásha’s into giving a
+      detailed account of his adventures.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At first he spoke with the amused and mild irony now customary with him
+      toward everybody and especially toward himself, but when he came to
+      describe the horrors and sufferings he had witnessed he was unconsciously
+      carried away and began speaking with the suppressed emotion of a man
+      re-experiencing in recollection strong impressions he has lived through.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary with a gentle smile looked now at Pierre and now at Natásha.
+      In the whole narrative she saw only Pierre and his goodness. Natásha,
+      leaning on her elbow, the expression of her face constantly changing with
+      the narrative, watched Pierre with an attention that never wandered—evidently
+      herself experiencing all that he described. Not only her look, but her
+      exclamations and the brief questions she put, showed Pierre that she
+      understood just what he wished to convey. It was clear that she understood
+      not only what he said but also what he wished to, but could not, express
+      in words. The account Pierre gave of the incident with the child and the
+      woman for protecting whom he was arrested was this: “It was an awful sight—children
+      abandoned, some in the flames... One was snatched out before my eyes...
+      and there were women who had their things snatched off and their earrings
+      torn out...” he flushed and grew confused. “Then a patrol arrived and all
+      the men—all those who were not looting, that is—were arrested,
+      and I among them.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I am sure you’re not telling us everything; I am sure you did
+      something...” said Natásha and pausing added, “something fine?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre continued. When he spoke of the execution he wanted to pass over
+      the horrible details, but Natásha insisted that he should not omit
+      anything.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre began to tell about Karatáev, but paused. By this time he had risen
+      from the table and was pacing the room, Natásha following him with her
+      eyes. Then he added:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, you can’t understand what I learned from that illiterate man—that
+      simple fellow.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes, go on!” said Natásha. “Where is he?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “They killed him almost before my eyes.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And Pierre, his voice trembling continually, went on to tell of the last
+      days of their retreat, of Karatáev’s illness and his death.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He told of his adventures as he had never yet recalled them. He now, as it
+      were, saw a new meaning in all he had gone through. Now that he was
+      telling it all to Natásha he experienced that pleasure which a man has
+      when women listen to him—not clever women who when listening either
+      try to remember what they hear to enrich their minds and when opportunity
+      offers to retell it, or who wish to adopt it to some thought of their own
+      and promptly contribute their own clever comments prepared in their little
+      mental workshop—but the pleasure given by real women gifted with a
+      capacity to select and absorb the very best a man shows of himself.
+      Natásha without knowing it was all attention: she did not lose a word, no
+      single quiver in Pierre’s voice, no look, no twitch of a muscle in his
+      face, nor a single gesture. She caught the unfinished word in its flight
+      and took it straight into her open heart, divining the secret meaning of
+      all Pierre’s mental travail.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary understood his story and sympathized with him, but she now
+      saw something else that absorbed all her attention. She saw the
+      possibility of love and happiness between Natásha and Pierre, and the
+      first thought of this filled her heart with gladness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was three o’clock in the morning. The footmen came in with sad and
+      stern faces to change the candles, but no one noticed them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre finished his story. Natásha continued to look at him intently with
+      bright, attentive, and animated eyes, as if trying to understand something
+      more which he had perhaps left untold. Pierre in shamefaced and happy
+      confusion glanced occasionally at her, and tried to think what to say next
+      to introduce a fresh subject. Princess Mary was silent. It occurred to
+      none of them that it was three o’clock and time to go to bed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “People speak of misfortunes and sufferings,” remarked Pierre, “but if at
+      this moment I were asked: ‘Would you rather be what you were before you
+      were taken prisoner, or go through all this again?’ then for heaven’s sake
+      let me again have captivity and horseflesh! We imagine that when we are
+      thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is
+      new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is
+      much, much before us. I say this to you,” he added, turning to Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes,” she said, answering something quite different. “I too should
+      wish nothing but to relive it all from the beginning.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre looked intently at her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, and nothing more,” said Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s not true, not true!” cried Pierre. “I am not to blame for being
+      alive and wishing to live—nor you either.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Suddenly Natásha bent her head, covered her face with her hands, and began
+      to cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is it, Natásha?” said Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nothing, nothing.” She smiled at Pierre through her tears. “Good night!
+      It is time for bed.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre rose and took his leave.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary and Natásha met as usual in the bedroom. They talked of what
+      Pierre had told them. Princess Mary did not express her opinion of Pierre
+      nor did Natásha speak of him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, good night, Mary!” said Natásha. “Do you know, I am often afraid
+      that by not speaking of him” (she meant Prince Andrew) “for fear of not
+      doing justice to our feelings, we forget him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary sighed deeply and thereby acknowledged the justice of
+      Natásha’s remark, but she did not express agreement in words.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is it possible to forget?” said she.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It did me so much good to tell all about it today. It was hard and
+      painful, but good, very good!” said Natásha. “I am sure he really loved
+      him. That is why I told him... Was it all right?” she added, suddenly
+      blushing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To tell Pierre? Oh, yes. What a splendid man he is!” said Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know, Mary...” Natásha suddenly said with a mischievous smile such
+      as Princess Mary had not seen on her face for a long time, “he has somehow
+      grown so clean, smooth, and fresh—as if he had just come out of a
+      Russian bath; do you understand? Out of a moral bath. Isn’t it true?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” replied Princess Mary. “He has greatly improved.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “With a short coat and his hair cropped; just as if, well, just as if he
+      had come straight from the bath... Papa used to...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I understand why <i>he</i>” (Prince Andrew) “liked no one so
+      much as him,” said Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, and yet he is quite different. They say men are friends when they
+      are quite different. That must be true. Really he is quite unlike him—in
+      everything.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, but he’s wonderful.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, good night,” said Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And the same mischievous smile lingered for a long time on her face as if
+      it had been forgotten there.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0335"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      It was a long time before Pierre could fall asleep that night. He paced up
+      and down his room, now turning his thoughts on a difficult problem and
+      frowning, now suddenly shrugging his shoulders and wincing, and now
+      smiling happily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was thinking of Prince Andrew, of Natásha, and of their love, at one
+      moment jealous of her past, then reproaching himself for that feeling. It
+      was already six in the morning and he still paced up and down the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, what’s to be done if it cannot be avoided? What’s to be done?
+      Evidently it has to be so,” said he to himself, and hastily undressing he
+      got into bed, happy and agitated but free from hesitation or indecision.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Strange and impossible as such happiness seems, I must do everything that
+      she and I may be man and wife,” he told himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A few days previously Pierre had decided to go to Petersburg on the
+      Friday. When he awoke on the Thursday, Savélich came to ask him about
+      packing for the journey.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What, to Petersburg? What is Petersburg? Who is there in Petersburg?” he
+      asked involuntarily, though only to himself. “Oh, yes, long ago before
+      this happened I did for some reason mean to go to Petersburg,” he
+      reflected. “Why? But perhaps I shall go. What a good fellow he is and how
+      attentive, and how he remembers everything,” he thought, looking at
+      Savélich’s old face, “and what a pleasant smile he has!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, Savélich, do you still not wish to accept your freedom?” Pierre
+      asked him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What’s the good of freedom to me, your excellency? We lived under the
+      late count—the kingdom of heaven be his!—and we have lived
+      under you too, without ever being wronged.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And your children?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “The children will live just the same. With such masters one can live.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But what about my heirs?” said Pierre. “Supposing I suddenly marry... it
+      might happen,” he added with an involuntary smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If I may take the liberty, your excellency, it would be a good thing.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How easy he thinks it,” thought Pierre. “He doesn’t know how terrible it
+      is and how dangerous. Too soon or too late... it is terrible!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “So what are your orders? Are you starting tomorrow?” asked Savélich.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I’ll put it off for a bit. I’ll tell you later. You must forgive the
+      trouble I have put you to,” said Pierre, and seeing Savélich smile, he
+      thought: “But how strange it is that he should not know that now there is
+      no Petersburg for me, and that <i>that</i> must be settled first of all! But
+      probably he knows it well enough and is only pretending. Shall I have a
+      talk with him and see what he thinks?” Pierre reflected. “No, another
+      time.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At breakfast Pierre told the princess, his cousin, that he had been to see
+      Princess Mary the day before and had there met—“Whom do you think?
+      Natásha Rostóva!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess seemed to see nothing more extraordinary in that than if he
+      had seen Anna Semënovna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know her?” asked Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have seen the princess,” she replied. “I heard that they were arranging
+      a match for her with young Rostóv. It would be a very good thing for the
+      Rostóvs, they are said to be utterly ruined.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No; I mean do you know Natásha Rostóva?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I heard about that affair of hers at the time. It was a great pity.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, she either doesn’t understand or is pretending,” thought Pierre.
+      “Better not say anything to her either.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The princess too had prepared provisions for Pierre’s journey.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How kind they all are,” thought Pierre. “What is surprising is that they
+      should trouble about these things now when it can no longer be of interest
+      to them. And all for me!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      On the same day the Chief of Police came to Pierre, inviting him to send a
+      representative to the Faceted Palace to recover things that were to be
+      returned to their owners that day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And this man too,” thought Pierre, looking into the face of the Chief of
+      Police. “What a fine, good-looking officer and how kind. Fancy bothering
+      about such trifles <i>now!</i> And they actually say he is not honest and takes
+      bribes. What nonsense! Besides, why shouldn’t he take bribes? That’s the
+      way he was brought up, and everybody does it. But what a kind, pleasant
+      face and how he smiles as he looks at me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre went to Princess Mary’s to dinner.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As he drove through the streets past the houses that had been burned down,
+      he was surprised by the beauty of those ruins. The picturesqueness of the
+      chimney stacks and tumble-down walls of the burned-out quarters of the
+      town, stretching out and concealing one another, reminded him of the Rhine
+      and the Colosseum. The cabmen he met and their passengers, the carpenters
+      cutting the timber for new houses with axes, the women hawkers, and the
+      shopkeepers, all looked at him with cheerful beaming eyes that seemed to
+      say: “Ah, there he is! Let’s see what will come of it!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At the entrance to Princess Mary’s house Pierre felt doubtful whether he
+      had really been there the night before and really seen Natásha and talked
+      to her. “Perhaps I imagined it; perhaps I shall go in and find no one
+      there.” But he had hardly entered the room before he felt her presence
+      with his whole being by the loss of his sense of freedom. She was in the
+      same black dress with soft folds and her hair was done the same way as the
+      day before, yet she was quite different. Had she been like this when he
+      entered the day before he could not for a moment have failed to recognize
+      her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She was as he had known her almost as a child and later on as Prince
+      Andrew’s fiancée. A bright questioning light shone in her eyes, and on her
+      face was a friendly and strangely roguish expression.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre dined with them and would have spent the whole evening there, but
+      Princess Mary was going to vespers and Pierre left the house with her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Next day he came early, dined, and stayed the whole evening. Though
+      Princess Mary and Natásha were evidently glad to see their visitor and
+      though all Pierre’s interest was now centered in that house, by the
+      evening they had talked over everything and the conversation passed from
+      one trivial topic to another and repeatedly broke off. He stayed so long
+      that Princess Mary and Natásha exchanged glances, evidently wondering when
+      he would go. Pierre noticed this but could not go. He felt uneasy and
+      embarrassed, but sat on because he simply could not get up and take his
+      leave.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary, foreseeing no end to this, rose first, and complaining of a
+      headache began to say good night.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So you are going to Petersburg tomorrow?” she asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, I am not going,” Pierre replied hastily, in a surprised tone and as
+      though offended. “Yes... no... to Petersburg? Tomorrow—but I won’t
+      say good-by yet. I will call round in case you have any commissions for
+      me,” said he, standing before Princess Mary and turning red, but not
+      taking his departure.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha gave him her hand and went out. Princess Mary on the other hand
+      instead of going away sank into an armchair, and looked sternly and
+      intently at him with her deep, radiant eyes. The weariness she had plainly
+      shown before had now quite passed off. With a deep and long-drawn sigh she
+      seemed to be prepared for a lengthy talk.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Natásha left the room Pierre’s confusion and awkwardness immediately
+      vanished and were replaced by eager excitement. He quickly moved an
+      armchair toward Princess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I wanted to tell you,” said he, answering her look as if she had
+      spoken. “Princess, help me! What am I to do? Can I hope? Princess, my dear
+      friend, listen! I know it all. I know I am not worthy of her, I know it’s
+      impossible to speak of it now. But I want to be a brother to her. No, not
+      that, I don’t, I can’t...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He paused and rubbed his face and eyes with his hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well,” he went on with an evident effort at self-control and coherence.
+      “I don’t know when I began to love her, but I have loved her and her alone
+      all my life, and I love her so that I cannot imagine life without her. I
+      cannot propose to her at present, but the thought that perhaps she might
+      someday be my wife and that I may be missing that possibility... that
+      possibility... is terrible. Tell me, can I hope? Tell me what I am to do,
+      dear princess!” he added after a pause, and touched her hand as she did
+      not reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I am thinking of what you have told me,” answered Princess Mary. “This is
+      what I will say. You are right that to speak to her of love at present...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary stopped. She was going to say that to speak of love was
+      impossible, but she stopped because she had seen by the sudden change in
+      Natásha two days before that she would not only not be hurt if Pierre
+      spoke of his love, but that it was the very thing she wished for.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To speak to her now wouldn’t do,” said the princess all the same.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But what am I to do?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Leave it to me,” said Princess Mary. “I know...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was looking into Princess Mary’s eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well?... Well?...” he said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I know that she loves... will love you,” Princess Mary corrected herself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Before her words were out, Pierre had sprung up and with a frightened
+      expression seized Princess Mary’s hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What makes you think so? You think I may hope? You think...?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I think so,” said Princess Mary with a smile. “Write to her parents,
+      and leave it to me. I will tell her when I can. I wish it to happen and my
+      heart tells me it will.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, it cannot be! How happy I am! But it can’t be.... How happy I am! No,
+      it can’t be!” Pierre kept saying as he kissed Princess Mary’s hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go to Petersburg, that will be best. And I will write to you,” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To Petersburg? Go there? Very well, I’ll go. But I may come again
+      tomorrow?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Next day Pierre came to say good-by. Natásha was less animated than she
+      had been the day before; but that day as he looked at her Pierre sometimes
+      felt as if he was vanishing and that neither he nor she existed any
+      longer, that nothing existed but happiness. “Is it possible? No, it can’t
+      be,” he told himself at every look, gesture, and word that filled his soul
+      with joy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When on saying good-by he took her thin, slender hand, he could not help
+      holding it a little longer in his own.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Is it possible that this hand, that face, those eyes, all this treasure
+      of feminine charm so strange to me now, is it possible that it will one
+      day be mine forever, as familiar to me as I am to myself?... No, that’s
+      impossible!...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Good-by, Count,” she said aloud. “I shall look forward very much to your
+      return,” she added in a whisper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And these simple words, her look, and the expression on her face which
+      accompanied them, formed for two months the subject of inexhaustible
+      memories, interpretations, and happy meditations for Pierre. “‘I shall
+      look forward very much to your return....’ Yes, yes, how did she say it?
+      Yes, ‘I shall look forward very much to your return.’ Oh, how happy I am!
+      What is happening to me? How happy I am!” said Pierre to himself.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0336"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      There was nothing in Pierre’s soul now at all like what had troubled it
+      during his courtship of Hélène.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He did not repeat to himself with a sickening feeling of shame the words
+      he had spoken, or say: “Oh, why did I not say that?” and,
+      “Whatever made me say <i>‘Je vous aime’</i>?” On the
+      contrary, he now repeated in imagination every word that he or Natásha had spoken
+      and pictured every detail of her face and smile, and did not wish to diminish or
+      add anything, but only to repeat it again and again. There was now not a shadow of
+      doubt in his mind as to whether what he had undertaken was right or wrong. Only
+      one terrible doubt sometimes crossed his mind: “Wasn’t it all a dream?
+      Isn’t Princess Mary mistaken? Am I not too conceited and self-confident? I
+      believe all this—and suddenly Princess Mary will tell her, and she will be
+      sure to smile and say: ‘How strange! He must be deluding himself.
+      Doesn’t he know that he is a man, just a man, while I...? I am something
+      altogether different and higher.’”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      That was the only doubt often troubling Pierre. He did not now make any
+      plans. The happiness before him appeared so inconceivable that if only he
+      could attain it, it would be the end of all things. Everything ended with
+      that.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A joyful, unexpected frenzy, of which he had thought himself incapable,
+      possessed him. The whole meaning of life—not for him alone but for
+      the whole world—seemed to him centered in his love and the
+      possibility of being loved by her. At times everybody seemed to him to be
+      occupied with one thing only—his future happiness. Sometimes it
+      seemed to him that other people were all as pleased as he was himself and
+      merely tried to hide that pleasure by pretending to be busy with other
+      interests. In every word and gesture he saw allusions to his happiness. He
+      often surprised those he met by his significantly happy looks and smiles
+      which seemed to express a secret understanding between him and them. And
+      when he realized that people might not be aware of his happiness, he
+      pitied them with his whole heart and felt a desire somehow to explain to
+      them that all that occupied them was a mere frivolous trifle unworthy of
+      attention.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When it was suggested to him that he should enter the civil service, or
+      when the war or any general political affairs were discussed on the
+      assumption that everybody’s welfare depended on this or that issue of
+      events, he would listen with a mild and pitying smile and surprise people
+      by his strange comments. But at this time he saw everybody—both
+      those who, as he imagined, understood the real meaning of life (that is,
+      what he was feeling) and those unfortunates who evidently did not
+      understand it—in the bright light of the emotion that shone within
+      himself, and at once without any effort saw in everyone he met everything
+      that was good and worthy of being loved.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When dealing with the affairs and papers of his dead wife, her memory
+      aroused in him no feeling but pity that she had not known the bliss he now
+      knew. Prince Vasíli, who having obtained a new post and some fresh
+      decorations was particularly proud at this time, seemed to him a pathetic,
+      kindly old man much to be pitied.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Often in afterlife Pierre recalled this period of blissful insanity. All
+      the views he formed of men and circumstances at this time remained true
+      for him always. He not only did not renounce them subsequently, but when
+      he was in doubt or inwardly at variance, he referred to the views he had
+      held at this time of his madness and they always proved correct.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I may have appeared strange and queer then,” he thought, “but I was not
+      so mad as I seemed. On the contrary I was then wiser and had more insight
+      than at any other time, and understood all that is worth understanding in
+      life, because... because I was happy.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre’s insanity consisted in not waiting, as he used to do, to discover
+      personal attributes which he termed “good qualities” in people before
+      loving them; his heart was now overflowing with love, and by loving people
+      without cause he discovered indubitable causes for loving them.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0337"></a>
+      CHAPTER XX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      After Pierre’s departure that first evening, when Natásha had said to
+      Princess Mary with a gaily mocking smile: “He looks just, yes, just as if
+      he had come out of a Russian bath—in a short coat and with his hair
+      cropped,” something hidden and unknown to herself, but irrepressible,
+      awoke in Natásha’s soul.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Everything: her face, walk, look, and voice, was suddenly altered. To her
+      own surprise a power of life and hope of happiness rose to the surface and
+      demanded satisfaction. From that evening she seemed to have forgotten all
+      that had happened to her. She no longer complained of her position, did
+      not say a word about the past, and no longer feared to make happy plans
+      for the future. She spoke little of Pierre, but when Princess Mary
+      mentioned him a long-extinguished light once more kindled in her eyes and
+      her lips curved with a strange smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The change that took place in Natásha at first surprised Princess Mary;
+      but when she understood its meaning it grieved her. “Can she have loved
+      my brother so little as to be able to forget him so soon?” she thought
+      when she reflected on the change. But when she was with Natásha she was
+      not vexed with her and did not reproach her. The reawakened power
+      of life that had seized Natásha was so evidently irrepressible and
+      unexpected by her that in her presence Princess Mary felt that she had
+      no right to reproach her even in her heart.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha gave herself up so fully and frankly to this new feeling
+      that she did not try to hide the fact that she was no longer sad, but
+      bright and cheerful.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Princess Mary returned to her room after her nocturnal talk with
+      Pierre, Natásha met her on the threshold.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He has spoken? Yes? He has spoken?” she repeated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And a joyful yet pathetic expression which seemed to beg forgiveness for
+      her joy settled on Natásha’s face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I wanted to listen at the door, but I knew you would tell me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Understandable and touching as the look with which Natásha gazed at her
+      seemed to Princess Mary, and sorry as she was to see her agitation, these
+      words pained her for a moment. She remembered her brother and his love.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But what’s to be done? She can’t help it,” thought the princess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And with a sad and rather stern look she told Natásha all that Pierre had
+      said. On hearing that he was going to Petersburg Natásha was astounded.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “To Petersburg!” she repeated as if unable to understand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But noticing the grieved expression on Princess Mary’s face she guessed
+      the reason of that sadness and suddenly began to cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mary,” said she, “tell me what I should do! I am afraid of being bad.
+      Whatever you tell me, I will do. Tell me....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You love him?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” whispered Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then why are you crying? I am happy for your sake,” said Princess Mary,
+      who because of those tears quite forgave Natásha’s joy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It won’t be just yet—someday. Think what fun it will be when I am
+      his wife and you marry Nicholas!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha, I have asked you not to speak of that. Let us talk about you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They were silent awhile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But why go to Petersburg?” Natásha suddenly asked, and hastily replied to
+      her own question. “But no, no, he must... Yes, Mary, He must....”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0353"></a>
+      FIRST EPILOGUE: 1813 - 20
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0338"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Seven years had passed. The storm-tossed sea of European history had
+      subsided within its shores and seemed to have become calm. But the
+      mysterious forces that move humanity (mysterious because the laws of their
+      motion are unknown to us) continued to operate.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though the surface of the sea of history seemed motionless, the movement
+      of humanity went on as unceasingly as the flow of time. Various groups of
+      people formed and dissolved, the coming formation and dissolution of
+      kingdoms and displacement of peoples was in course of preparation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The sea of history was not driven spasmodically from shore to shore as
+      previously. It was seething in its depths. Historic figures were not borne
+      by the waves from one shore to another as before. They now seemed to
+      rotate on one spot. The historical figures at the head of armies, who
+      formerly reflected the movement of the masses by ordering wars, campaigns,
+      and battles, now reflected the restless movement by political and
+      diplomatic combinations, laws, and treaties.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The historians call this activity of the historical figures “the
+      reaction.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In dealing with this period they sternly condemn the historical personages
+      who, in their opinion, caused what they describe as <i>the reaction</i>. All the
+      well-known people of that period, from Alexander and Napoleon to Madame de
+      Staël, Photius, Schelling, Fichte, Chateaubriand, and the rest, pass
+      before their stern judgment seat and are acquitted or condemned according
+      to whether they conduced to <i>progress</i> or to <i>reaction</i>.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      According to their accounts a reaction took place at that time in Russia
+      also, and the chief culprit was Alexander I, the same man who according to
+      them was the chief cause of the liberal movement at the commencement of
+      his reign, being the savior of Russia.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There is no one in Russian literature now, from schoolboy essayist to
+      learned historian, who does not throw his little stone at Alexander for
+      things he did wrong at this period of his reign.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He ought to have acted in this way and in that way. In this case he did
+      well and in that case badly. He behaved admirably at the beginning of his
+      reign and during 1812, but acted badly by giving a constitution to Poland,
+      forming the Holy Alliance, entrusting power to Arakchéev, favoring
+      Golítsyn and mysticism, and afterwards Shishkóv and Photius. He also acted
+      badly by concerning himself with the active army and disbanding the
+      Semënov regiment.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      It would take a dozen pages to enumerate all the reproaches the historians
+      address to him, based on their knowledge of what is good for humanity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      What do these reproaches mean?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Do not the very actions for which the historians praise Alexander I (the
+      liberal attempts at the beginning of his reign, his struggle with
+      Napoleon, the firmness he displayed in 1812 and the campaign of 1813) flow
+      from the same sources—the circumstances of his birth, education, and
+      life—that made his personality what it was and from which the
+      actions for which they blame him (the Holy Alliance, the restoration of
+      Poland, and the reaction of 1820 and later) also flowed?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In what does the substance of those reproaches lie?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It lies in the fact that an historic character like Alexander I, standing
+      on the highest possible pinnacle of human power with the blinding light of
+      history focused upon him; a character exposed to those strongest of all
+      influences: the intrigues, flattery, and self-deception inseparable from
+      power; a character who at every moment of his life felt a responsibility
+      for all that was happening in Europe; and not a fictitious but a live
+      character who like every man had his personal habits, passions, and
+      impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth—that this character—though
+      not lacking in virtue (the historians do not accuse him of that)—had
+      not the same conception of the welfare of humanity fifty years ago as a
+      present-day professor who from his youth upwards has been occupied with
+      learning: that is, with books and lectures and with taking notes from
+      them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But even if we assume that fifty years ago Alexander I was mistaken in his
+      view of what was good for the people, we must inevitably assume that the
+      historian who judges Alexander will also after the lapse of some time turn
+      out to be mistaken in his view of what is good for humanity. This
+      assumption is all the more natural and inevitable because, watching the
+      movement of history, we see that every year and with each new writer,
+      opinion as to what is good for mankind changes; so that what once seemed
+      good, ten years later seems bad, and vice versa. And what is more, we find
+      at one and the same time quite contradictory views as to what is bad and
+      what is good in history: some people regard giving a constitution to
+      Poland and forming the Holy Alliance as praiseworthy in Alexander, while
+      others regard it as blameworthy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The activity of Alexander or of Napoleon cannot be called useful or
+      harmful, for it is impossible to say for what it was useful or harmful. If
+      that activity displeases somebody, this is only because it does not agree
+      with his limited understanding of what is good. Whether the preservation
+      of my father’s house in Moscow, or the glory of the Russian arms, or the
+      prosperity of the Petersburg and other universities, or the freedom of
+      Poland or the greatness of Russia, or the balance of power in Europe, or a
+      certain kind of European culture called “progress” appear to me to be good
+      or bad, I must admit that besides these things the action of every
+      historic character has other more general purposes inaccessible to me.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But let us assume that what is called science can harmonize all
+      contradictions and possesses an unchanging standard of good and bad by
+      which to try historic characters and events; let us say that Alexander
+      could have done everything differently; let us say that with guidance from
+      those who blame him and who profess to know the ultimate aim of the
+      movement of humanity, he might have arranged matters according to the
+      program his present accusers would have given him—of nationality,
+      freedom, equality, and progress (these, I think, cover the ground). Let us
+      assume that this program was possible and had then been formulated, and
+      that Alexander had acted on it. What would then have become of the
+      activity of all those who opposed the tendency that then prevailed in the
+      government—an activity that in the opinion of the historians was
+      good and beneficent? Their activity would not have existed: there would
+      have been no life, there would have been nothing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of
+      life is destroyed.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0339"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      If we assume as the historians do that great men lead humanity to the
+      attainment of certain ends—the greatness of Russia or of France, the
+      balance of power in Europe, the diffusion of the ideas of the Revolution,
+      general progress, or anything else—then it is impossible to explain
+      the facts of history without introducing the conceptions of <i>chance</i> and
+      <i>genius</i>.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If the aim of the European wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century
+      had been the aggrandizement of Russia, that aim might have been
+      accomplished without all the preceding wars and without the invasion. If
+      the aim was the aggrandizement of France, that might have been attained
+      without the Revolution and without the Empire. If the aim was the
+      dissemination of ideas, the printing press could have accomplished that
+      much better than warfare. If the aim was the progress of civilization, it
+      is easy to see that there are other ways of diffusing civilization more
+      expedient than by the destruction of wealth and of human lives.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Why did it happen in this and not in some other way?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Because it happened so! “<i>Chance</i> created the situation;
+      <i>genius</i> utilized it,” says history.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But what is <i>chance?</i> What is <i>genius?</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      The words <i>chance</i> and <i>genius</i> do not denote any really existing thing and
+      therefore cannot be defined. Those words only denote a certain stage of
+      understanding of phenomena. I do not know why a certain event occurs; I
+      think that I cannot know it; so I do not try to know it and I talk about
+      <i>chance</i>. I see a force producing effects beyond the scope of ordinary human
+      agencies; I do not understand why this occurs and I talk of <i>genius</i>.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To a herd of rams, the ram the herdsman drives each evening into a special
+      enclosure to feed and that becomes twice as fat as the others must seem to
+      be a genius. And it must appear an astonishing conjunction of genius with
+      a whole series of extraordinary chances that this ram, who instead of
+      getting into the general fold every evening goes into a special enclosure
+      where there are oats—that this very ram, swelling with fat, is
+      killed for meat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the rams need only cease to suppose that all that happens to them
+      happens solely for the attainment of their sheepish aims; they need only
+      admit that what happens to them may also have purposes beyond their ken,
+      and they will at once perceive a unity and coherence in what happened to
+      the ram that was fattened. Even if they do not know for what purpose they
+      are fattened, they will at least know that all that happened to the ram
+      did not happen accidentally, and will no longer need the conceptions of
+      <i>chance</i> or <i>genius</i>.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only by renouncing our claim to discern a purpose immediately intelligible
+      to us, and admitting the ultimate purpose to be beyond our ken, may we
+      discern the sequence of experiences in the lives of historic characters
+      and perceive the cause of the effect they produce (incommensurable with
+      ordinary human capabilities), and then the words <i>chance</i> and <i>genius</i>
+      become superfluous.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      We need only confess that we do not know the purpose of the European
+      convulsions and that we know only the facts—that is, the murders,
+      first in France, then in Italy, in Africa, in Prussia, in Austria, in
+      Spain, and in Russia—and that the movements from the west to the
+      east and from the east to the west form the essence and purpose of these
+      events, and not only shall we have no need to see exceptional ability and
+      genius in Napoleon and Alexander, but we shall be unable to consider them
+      to be anything but like other men, and we shall not be obliged to have
+      recourse to <i>chance</i> for an explanation of those small events which made
+      these people what they were, but it will be clear that all those small
+      events were inevitable.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      By discarding a claim to knowledge of the ultimate purpose, we shall
+      clearly perceive that just as one cannot imagine a blossom or seed for any
+      single plant better suited to it than those it produces, so it is
+      impossible to imagine any two people more completely adapted down to the
+      smallest detail for the purpose they had to fulfill, than Napoleon and
+      Alexander with all their antecedents.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0340"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The fundamental and essential significance of the European events of the
+      beginning of the nineteenth century lies in the movement of the mass of
+      the European peoples from west to east and afterwards from east to west.
+      The commencement of that movement was the movement from west to east. For
+      the peoples of the west to be able to make their warlike movement to
+      Moscow it was necessary: (1) that they should form themselves into a
+      military group of a size able to endure a collision with the warlike
+      military group of the east, (2) that they should abandon all established
+      traditions and customs, and (3) that during their military movement they
+      should have at their head a man who could justify to himself and to them
+      the deceptions, robberies, and murders which would have to be committed
+      during that movement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And beginning with the French Revolution the old inadequately large group
+      was destroyed, as well as the old habits and traditions, and step by step
+      a group was formed of larger dimensions with new customs and traditions,
+      and a man was produced who would stand at the head of the coming movement
+      and bear the responsibility for all that had to be done.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A man without convictions, without habits, without traditions, without a
+      name, and not even a Frenchman, emerges—by what seem the strangest
+      chances—from among all the seething French parties, and without
+      joining any one of them is borne forward to a prominent position.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The ignorance of his colleagues, the weakness and insignificance of his
+      opponents, the frankness of his falsehoods, and the dazzling and
+      self-confident limitations of this man raise him to the head of the army.
+      The brilliant qualities of the soldiers of the army sent to Italy, his
+      opponents’ reluctance to fight, and his own childish audacity and
+      self-confidence secure him military fame. Innumerable so-called <i>chances</i>
+      accompany him everywhere. The disfavor into which he falls with the rulers
+      of France turns to his advantage. His attempts to avoid his predestined
+      path are unsuccessful: he is not received into the Russian service, and
+      the appointment he seeks in Turkey comes to nothing. During the war in
+      Italy he is several times on the verge of destruction and each time is
+      saved in an unexpected manner. Owing to various diplomatic considerations
+      the Russian armies—just those which might have destroyed his
+      prestige—do not appear upon the scene till he is no longer there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On his return from Italy he finds the government in Paris in a process of
+      dissolution in which all those who are in it are inevitably wiped out and
+      destroyed. And by chance an escape from this dangerous position presents
+      itself in the form of an aimless and senseless expedition to Africa. Again
+      so-called <i>chance</i> accompanies him. Impregnable Malta surrenders without a
+      shot; his most reckless schemes are crowned with success. The enemy’s
+      fleet, which subsequently did not let a single boat pass, allows his
+      entire army to elude it. In Africa a whole series of outrages are
+      committed against the almost unarmed inhabitants. And the men who commit
+      these crimes, especially their leader, assure themselves that this is
+      admirable, this is glory—it resembles Caesar and Alexander the Great
+      and is therefore good.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This ideal of <i>glory</i> and <i>grandeur</i>—which consists not merely in
+      considering nothing wrong that one does but in priding oneself on every
+      crime one commits, ascribing to it an incomprehensible supernatural
+      significance—that ideal, destined to guide this man and his
+      associates, had scope for its development in Africa. Whatever he does
+      succeeds. The plague does not touch him. The cruelty of murdering
+      prisoners is not imputed to him as a fault. His childishly rash,
+      uncalled-for, and ignoble departure from Africa, leaving his comrades in
+      distress, is set down to his credit, and again the enemy’s fleet twice
+      lets him slip past. When, intoxicated by the crimes he has committed so
+      successfully, he reaches Paris, the dissolution of the republican
+      government, which a year earlier might have ruined him, has reached its
+      extreme limit, and his presence there now as a newcomer free from party
+      entanglements can only serve to exalt him—and though he himself has
+      no plan, he is quite ready for his new rôle.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He had no plan, he was afraid of everything, but the parties snatched at
+      him and demanded his participation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He alone—with his ideal of glory and grandeur developed in Italy and
+      Egypt, his insane self-adulation, his boldness in crime and frankness in
+      lying—he alone could justify what had to be done.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He is needed for the place that awaits him, and so almost apart from his
+      will and despite his indecision, his lack of a plan, and all his mistakes,
+      he is drawn into a conspiracy that aims at seizing power and the
+      conspiracy is crowned with success.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He is pushed into a meeting of the legislature. In alarm he wishes to
+      flee, considering himself lost. He pretends to fall into a swoon and says
+      senseless things that should have ruined him. But the once proud and
+      shrewd rulers of France, feeling that their part is played out, are even
+      more bewildered than he, and do not say the words they should have said to
+      destroy him and retain their power.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<i>Chance</i>, millions of <i>chances</i>, give him power, and all men as if by
+      agreement co-operate to confirm that power. <i>Chance</i> forms the characters of
+      the rulers of France, who submit to him; <i>chance</i> forms the character of
+      Paul I of Russia who recognizes his government; <i>chance</i> contrives a plot
+      against him which not only fails to harm him but confirms his power.
+      <i>Chance</i> puts the Duc d’Enghien in his hands and unexpectedly causes him to
+      kill him—thereby convincing the mob more forcibly than in any other
+      way that he had the right, since he had the might. <i>Chance</i> contrives that
+      though he directs all his efforts to prepare an expedition against England
+      (which would inevitably have ruined him) he never carries out that
+      intention, but unexpectedly falls upon Mack and the Austrians, who
+      surrender without a battle. <i>Chance</i> and <i>genius</i> give him the victory at
+      Austerlitz; and by <i>chance</i> all men, not only the French but all Europe—except
+      England which does not take part in the events about to happen—despite
+      their former horror and detestation of his crimes, now recognize his
+      authority, the title he has given himself, and his ideal of grandeur and
+      glory, which seems excellent and reasonable to them all.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As if measuring themselves and preparing for the coming movement, the
+      western forces push toward the east several times in 1805, 1806, 1807, and
+      1809, gaining strength and growing. In 1811 the group of people that had
+      formed in France unites into one group with the peoples of Central Europe.
+      The strength of the justification of the man who stands at the head of the
+      movement grows with the increased size of the group. During the ten-year
+      preparatory period this man had formed relations with all the crowned
+      heads of Europe. The discredited rulers of the world can oppose no
+      reasonable ideal to the insensate Napoleonic ideal of <i>glory</i> and <i>grandeur</i>.
+      One after another they hasten to display their insignificance before him.
+      The King of Prussia sends his wife to seek the great man’s mercy; the
+      Emperor of Austria considers it a favor that this man receives a daughter
+      of the Caesars into his bed; the Pope, the guardian of all that the
+      nations hold sacred, utilizes religion for the aggrandizement of the great
+      man. It is not Napoleon who prepares himself for the accomplishment of his
+      role, so much as all those round him who prepare him to take on himself
+      the whole responsibility for what is happening and has to happen. There is
+      no step, no crime or petty fraud he commits, which in the mouths of those
+      around him is not at once represented as a great deed. The most suitable
+      fête the Germans can devise for him is a celebration of Jena and
+      Auerstädt. Not only is he great, but so are his ancestors, his brothers,
+      his stepsons, and his brothers-in-law. Everything is done to deprive him
+      of the remains of his reason and to prepare him for his terrible part. And
+      when he is ready so too are the forces.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The invasion pushes eastward and reaches its final goal—Moscow. That
+      city is taken; the Russian army suffers heavier losses than the opposing
+      armies had suffered in the former war from Austerlitz to Wagram. But
+      suddenly instead of those <i>chances</i> and that <i>genius</i> which hitherto had so
+      consistently led him by an uninterrupted series of successes to the
+      predestined goal, an innumerable sequence of inverse <i>chances</i> occur—from
+      the cold in his head at Borodinó to the sparks which set Moscow on fire,
+      and the frosts—and instead of <i>genius</i>, stupidity and immeasurable
+      baseness become evident.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The invaders flee, turn back, flee again, and all the chances are now not
+      for Napoleon but always against him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A countermovement is then accomplished from east to west with a remarkable
+      resemblance to the preceding movement from west to east. Attempted drives
+      from east to west—similar to the contrary movements of 1805, 1807,
+      and 1809—precede the great westward movement; there is the same
+      coalescence into a group of enormous dimensions; the same adhesion of the
+      people of Central Europe to the movement; the same hesitation midway, and
+      the same increasing rapidity as the goal is approached.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Paris, the ultimate goal, is reached. The Napoleonic government and army
+      are destroyed. Napoleon himself is no longer of any account; all his
+      actions are evidently pitiful and mean, but again an inexplicable <i>chance</i>
+      occurs. The allies detest Napoleon whom they regard as the cause of their
+      sufferings. Deprived of power and authority, his crimes and his craft
+      exposed, he should have appeared to them what he appeared ten years
+      previously and one year later—an outlawed brigand. But by some
+      strange chance no one perceives this. His part is not yet ended. The man
+      who ten years before and a year later was considered an outlawed brigand
+      is sent to an island two days’ sail from France, which for some reason is
+      presented to him as his dominion, and guards are given to him and millions
+      of money are paid him.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0341"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The flood of nations begins to subside into its normal channels. The waves
+      of the great movement abate, and on the calm surface eddies are formed in
+      which float the diplomatists, who imagine that they have caused the floods
+      to abate.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the smooth sea again suddenly becomes disturbed. The diplomatists
+      think that their disagreements are the cause of this fresh pressure of
+      natural forces; they anticipate war between their sovereigns; the position
+      seems to them insoluble. But the wave they feel to be rising does not come
+      from the quarter they expect. It rises again from the same point as before—Paris.
+      The last backwash of the movement from the west occurs: a backwash which
+      serves to solve the apparently insuperable diplomatic difficulties and
+      ends the military movement of that period of history.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The man who had devastated France returns to France alone, without any
+      conspiracy and without soldiers. Any guard might arrest him, but by
+      strange chance no one does so and all rapturously greet the man they
+      cursed the day before and will curse again a month later.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This man is still needed to justify the final collective act.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That act is performed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The last rôle is played. The actor is bidden to disrobe and wash off his
+      powder and paint: he will not be wanted any more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And some years pass during which he plays a pitiful comedy to himself in
+      solitude on his island, justifying his actions by intrigues and lies when
+      the justification is no longer needed, and displaying to the whole world
+      what it was that people had mistaken for strength as long as an unseen
+      hand directed his actions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The manager having brought the drama to a close and stripped the actor
+      shows him to us.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “See what you believed in! This is he! Do you now see that it was not he
+      but I who moved you?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But dazed by the force of the movement, it was long before people
+      understood this.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Still greater coherence and inevitability is seen in the life of Alexander
+      I, the man who stood at the head of the countermovement from east to west.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      What was needed for him who, overshadowing others, stood at the head of
+      that movement from east to west?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      What was needed was a sense of justice and a sympathy with European
+      affairs, but a remote sympathy not dulled by petty interests; a moral
+      superiority over those sovereigns of the day who co-operated with him; a
+      mild and attractive personality; and a personal grievance against
+      Napoleon. And all this was found in Alexander I; all this had been
+      prepared by innumerable so-called <i>chances</i> in his life: his education, his
+      early liberalism, the advisers who surrounded him, and by Austerlitz, and
+      Tilsit, and Erfurt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During the national war he was inactive because he was not needed. But as
+      soon as the necessity for a general European war presented itself he
+      appeared in his place at the given moment and, uniting the nations of
+      Europe, led them to the goal.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The goal is reached. After the final war of 1815 Alexander possesses all
+      possible power. How does he use it?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Alexander I—the pacifier of Europe, the man who from his early years
+      had striven only for his people’s welfare, the originator of the liberal
+      innovations in his fatherland—now that he seemed to possess the
+      utmost power and therefore to have the possibility of bringing about the
+      welfare of his peoples—at the time when Napoleon in exile was
+      drawing up childish and mendacious plans of how he would have made mankind
+      happy had he retained power—Alexander I, having fulfilled his
+      mission and feeling the hand of God upon him, suddenly recognizes the
+      insignificance of that supposed power, turns away from it, and gives it
+      into the hands of contemptible men whom he despises, saying only:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy Name!... I too am a man like the
+      rest of you. Let me live like a man and think of my soul and of God.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      As the sun and each atom of ether is a sphere complete in itself, and yet
+      at the same time only a part of a whole too immense for man to comprehend,
+      so each individual has within himself his own aims and yet has them to
+      serve a general purpose incomprehensible to man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of
+      bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee
+      sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the
+      fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from
+      flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey.
+      Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely says
+      that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen,
+      and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee
+      flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter,
+      and sees in this the purpose of the bee’s existence. Another, observing
+      the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may
+      say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of
+      the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes
+      the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the
+      discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the
+      ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee to
+      other manifestations of life. And so it is with the purpose of historic
+      characters and nations.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0342"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Natásha’s wedding to Bezúkhov, which took place in 1813, was the last
+      happy event in the family of the old Rostóvs. Count Ilyá Rostóv died that
+      same year and, as always happens, after the father’s death the family
+      group broke up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The events of the previous year: the burning of Moscow and the flight from
+      it, the death of Prince Andrew, Natásha’s despair, Pétya’s death, and the
+      old countess’ grief fell blow after blow on the old count’s head. He
+      seemed to be unable to understand the meaning of all these events, and
+      bowed his old head in a spiritual sense as if expecting and inviting
+      further blows which would finish him. He seemed now frightened and
+      distraught and now unnaturally animated and enterprising.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The arrangements for Natásha’s marriage occupied him for a while. He
+      ordered dinners and suppers and obviously tried to appear cheerful, but
+      his cheerfulness was not infectious as it used to be: on the contrary it
+      evoked the compassion of those who knew and liked him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Pierre and his wife had left, he grew very quiet and began to
+      complain of depression. A few days later he fell ill and took to his bed.
+      He realized from the first that he would not get up again, despite the
+      doctor’s encouragement. The countess passed a fortnight in an armchair by
+      his pillow without undressing. Every time she gave him his medicine he
+      sobbed and silently kissed her hand. On his last day, sobbing, he asked
+      her and his absent son to forgive him for having dissipated their property—that
+      being the chief fault of which he was conscious. After receiving communion
+      and unction he quietly died; and next day a throng of acquaintances who
+      came to pay their last respects to the deceased filled the house rented by
+      the Rostóvs. All these acquaintances, who had so often dined and danced at
+      his house and had so often laughed at him, now said, with a common feeling
+      of self-reproach and emotion, as if justifying themselves: “Well, whatever
+      he may have been he was a most worthy man. You don’t meet such men
+      nowadays.... And which of us has not weaknesses of his own?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      It was just when the count’s affairs had become so involved that it was
+      impossible to say what would happen if he lived another year that he
+      unexpectedly died.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas was with the Russian army in Paris when the news of his father’s
+      death reached him. He at once resigned his commission, and without waiting
+      for it to be accepted took leave of absence and went to Moscow. The state
+      of the count’s affairs became quite obvious a month after his death,
+      surprising everyone by the immense total of small debts the existence of
+      which no one had suspected. The debts amounted to double the value of the
+      property.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Friends and relations advised Nicholas to decline the inheritance. But he
+      regarded such a refusal as a slur on his father’s memory, which he held
+      sacred, and therefore would not hear of refusing and accepted the
+      inheritance together with the obligation to pay the debts.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The creditors who had so long been silent, restrained by a vague but
+      powerful influence exerted on them while he lived by the count’s careless
+      good nature, all proceeded to enforce their claims at once. As always
+      happens in such cases rivalry sprang up as to which should get paid first,
+      and those who like Mítenka held promissory notes given them as presents
+      now became the most exacting of the creditors. Nicholas was allowed no
+      respite and no peace, and those who had seemed to pity the old man—the
+      cause of their losses (if they were losses)—now remorselessly
+      pursued the young heir who had voluntarily undertaken the debts and was
+      obviously not guilty of contracting them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Not one of the plans Nicholas tried succeeded; the estate was sold by
+      auction for half its value, and half the debts still remained unpaid.
+      Nicholas accepted thirty thousand rubles offered him by his brother-in-law
+      Bezúkhov to pay off debts he regarded as genuinely due for value received.
+      And to avoid being imprisoned for the remainder, as the creditors
+      threatened, he re-entered the government service.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He could not rejoin the army where he would have been made colonel at the
+      next vacancy, for his mother now clung to him as her one hold on life; and
+      so despite his reluctance to remain in Moscow among people who had known
+      him before, and despite his abhorrence of the civil service, he accepted a
+      post in Moscow in that service, doffed the uniform of which he was so
+      fond, and moved with his mother and Sónya to a small house on the Sívtsev
+      Vrazhók.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha and Pierre were living in Petersburg at the time and had no clear
+      idea of Nicholas’ circumstances. Having borrowed money from his
+      brother-in-law, Nicholas tried to hide his wretched condition from him.
+      His position was the more difficult because with his salary of twelve
+      hundred rubles he had not only to keep himself, his mother, and Sónya, but
+      had to shield his mother from knowledge of their poverty. The countess
+      could not conceive of life without the luxurious conditions she had been
+      used to from childhood and, unable to realize how hard it was for her son,
+      kept demanding now a carriage (which they did not keep) to send for a
+      friend, now some expensive article of food for herself, or wine for her
+      son, or money to buy a present as a surprise for Natásha or Sónya, or for
+      Nicholas himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya kept house, attended on her aunt, read to her, put up with her whims
+      and secret ill-will, and helped Nicholas to conceal their poverty from the
+      old countess. Nicholas felt himself irredeemably indebted to Sónya for all
+      she was doing for his mother and greatly admired her patience and
+      devotion, but tried to keep aloof from her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He seemed in his heart to reproach her for being too perfect, and because
+      there was nothing to reproach her with. She had all that people are valued
+      for, but little that could have made him love her. He felt that the more
+      he valued her the less he loved her. He had taken her at her word when she
+      wrote giving him his freedom and now behaved as if all that had passed
+      between them had been long forgotten and could never in any case be
+      renewed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas’ position became worse and worse. The idea of putting something
+      aside out of his salary proved a dream. Not only did he not save anything,
+      but to comply with his mother’s demands he even incurred some small debts.
+      He could see no way out of this situation. The idea of marrying some rich
+      woman, which was suggested to him by his female relations, was repugnant
+      to him. The other way out—his mother’s death—never entered his
+      head. He wished for nothing and hoped for nothing, and deep in his heart
+      experienced a gloomy and stern satisfaction in an uncomplaining endurance
+      of his position. He tried to avoid his old acquaintances with their
+      commiseration and offensive offers of assistance; he avoided all
+      distraction and recreation, and even at home did nothing but play cards
+      with his mother, pace silently up and down the room, and smoke one pipe
+      after another. He seemed carefully to cherish within himself the gloomy
+      mood which alone enabled him to endure his position.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0343"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      At the beginning of winter Princess Mary came to Moscow. From reports
+      current in town she learned how the Rostóvs were situated, and how “the
+      son has sacrificed himself for his mother,” as people were saying.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I never expected anything else of him,” said Princess Mary to herself,
+      feeling a joyous sense of her love for him. Remembering her friendly
+      relations with all the Rostóvs which had made her almost a member of the
+      family, she thought it her duty to go to see them. But remembering her
+      relations with Nicholas in Vorónezh she was shy about doing so. Making a
+      great effort she did however go to call on them a few weeks after her
+      arrival in Moscow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas was the first to meet her, as the countess’ room could only be
+      reached through his. But instead of being greeted with pleasure as she had
+      expected, at his first glance at her his face assumed a cold, stiff, proud
+      expression she had not seen on it before. He inquired about her health,
+      led the way to his mother, and having sat there for five minutes left the
+      room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the princess came out of the countess’ room Nicholas met her again,
+      and with marked solemnity and stiffness accompanied her to the anteroom.
+      To her remarks about his mother’s health he made no reply. “What’s that to
+      you? Leave me in peace,” his looks seemed to say.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why does she come prowling here? What does she want? I can’t bear these
+      ladies and all these civilities!” said he aloud in Sónya’s presence,
+      evidently unable to repress his vexation, after the princess’ carriage had
+      disappeared.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, Nicholas, how can you talk like that?” cried Sónya, hardly able to
+      conceal her delight. “She is so kind and Mamma is so fond of her!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas did not reply and tried to avoid speaking of the princess any
+      more. But after her visit the old countess spoke of her several times a
+      day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She sang her praises, insisted that her son must call on her, expressed a
+      wish to see her often, but yet always became ill-humored when she began to
+      talk about her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas tried to keep silence when his mother spoke of the princess, but
+      his silence irritated her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “She is a very admirable and excellent young woman,” said she, “and you
+      must go and call on her. You would at least be seeing somebody, and I
+      think it must be dull for you only seeing us.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But I don’t in the least want to, Mamma.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You used to want to, and now you don’t. Really I don’t understand you, my
+      dear. One day you are dull, and the next you refuse to see anyone.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But I never said I was dull.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, you said yourself you don’t want even to see her. She is a very
+      admirable young woman and you always liked her, but now suddenly you have
+      got some notion or other in your head. You hide everything from me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Not at all, Mamma.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “If I were asking you to do something disagreeable now—but I only
+      ask you to return a call. One would think mere politeness required it....
+      Well, I have asked you, and now I won’t interfere any more since you have
+      secrets from your mother.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, then, I’ll go if you wish it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “It doesn’t matter to me. I only wish it for your sake.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas sighed, bit his mustache, and laid out the cards for a patience,
+      trying to divert his mother’s attention to another topic.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The same conversation was repeated next day and the day after, and the day
+      after that.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After her visit to the Rostóvs and her unexpectedly chilly reception by
+      Nicholas, Princess Mary confessed to herself that she had been right in
+      not wishing to be the first to call.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I expected nothing else,” she told herself, calling her pride to her aid.
+      “I have nothing to do with him and I only wanted to see the old lady, who
+      was always kind to me and to whom I am under many obligations.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      But she could not pacify herself with these reflections; a feeling akin to
+      remorse troubled her when she thought of her visit. Though she had firmly
+      resolved not to call on the Rostóvs again and to forget the whole matter,
+      she felt herself all the time in an awkward position. And when she asked
+      herself what distressed her, she had to admit that it was her relation to
+      Rostóv. His cold, polite manner did not express his feeling for her (she
+      knew that) but it concealed something, and until she could discover what
+      that something was, she felt that she could not be at ease.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      One day in midwinter when sitting in the schoolroom attending to her
+      nephew’s lessons, she was informed that Rostóv had called. With a firm
+      resolution not to betray herself and not show her agitation, she sent for
+      Mademoiselle Bourienne and went with her to the drawing room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Her first glance at Nicholas’ face told her that he had only come to
+      fulfill the demands of politeness, and she firmly resolved to maintain the
+      tone in which he addressed her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They spoke of the countess’ health, of their mutual friends, of the latest
+      war news, and when the ten minutes required by propriety had elapsed after
+      which a visitor may rise, Nicholas got up to say good-by.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With Mademoiselle Bourienne’s help the princess had maintained the
+      conversation very well, but at the very last moment, just when he rose,
+      she was so tired of talking of what did not interest her, and her mind was
+      so full of the question why she alone was granted so little happiness in
+      life, that in a fit of absent-mindedness she sat still, her luminous eyes
+      gazing fixedly before her, not noticing that he had risen.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas glanced at her and, wishing to appear not to notice her
+      abstraction, made some remark to Mademoiselle Bourienne and then again
+      looked at the princess. She still sat motionless with a look of suffering
+      on her gentle face. He suddenly felt sorry for her and was vaguely
+      conscious that he might be the cause of the sadness her face expressed. He
+      wished to help her and say something pleasant, but could think of nothing
+      to say.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Good-by, Princess!” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She started, flushed, and sighed deeply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, I beg your pardon,” she said as if waking up. “Are you going already,
+      Count? Well then, good-by! Oh, but the cushion for the countess!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Wait a moment, I’ll fetch it,” said Mademoiselle Bourienne, and she left
+      the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They both sat silent, with an occasional glance at one another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, Princess,” said Nicholas at last with a sad smile, “it doesn’t seem
+      long ago since we first met at Boguchárovo, but how much water has flowed
+      since then! In what distress we all seemed to be then, yet I would give
+      much to bring back that time... but there’s no bringing it back.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Princess Mary gazed intently into his eyes with her own luminous ones as
+      he said this. She seemed to be trying to fathom the hidden meaning of his
+      words which would explain his feeling for her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes,” said she, “but you have no reason to regret the past, Count.
+      As I understand your present life, I think you will always recall it with
+      satisfaction, because the self-sacrifice that fills it now...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I cannot accept your praise,” he interrupted her hurriedly. “On the
+      contrary I continually reproach myself.... But this is not at all an
+      interesting or cheerful subject.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      His face again resumed its former stiff and cold expression. But the
+      princess had caught a glimpse of the man she had known and loved, and it
+      was to him that she now spoke.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I thought you would allow me to tell you this,” she said. “I had come so
+      near to you... and to all your family that I thought you would not
+      consider my sympathy misplaced, but I was mistaken,” and suddenly her
+      voice trembled. “I don’t know why,” she continued, recovering herself,
+      “but you used to be different, and...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “There are a thousand reasons <i>why</i>,” laying special emphasis on the <i>why</i>.
+      “Thank you, Princess,” he added softly. “Sometimes it is hard.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “So that’s why! That’s why!” a voice whispered in Princess Mary’s soul.
+      “No, it was not only that gay, kind, and frank look, not only that
+      handsome exterior, that I loved in him. I divined his noble, resolute,
+      self-sacrificing spirit too,” she said to herself. “Yes, he is poor now
+      and I am rich.... Yes, that’s the only reason.... Yes, were it not for
+      that...” And remembering his former tenderness, and looking now at his
+      kind, sorrowful face, she suddenly understood the cause of his coldness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But why, Count, why?” she almost cried, unconsciously moving closer to
+      him. “Why? Tell me. You must tell me!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      He was silent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t understand your <i>why</i>, Count,” she continued,
+      “but it’s hard for me... I confess it. For some reason you wish to
+      deprive me of our former friendship. And that hurts me.” There were tears
+      in her eyes and in her voice. “I have had so little happiness in life that
+      every loss is hard for me to bear.... Excuse me, good-by!” and suddenly she
+      began to cry and was hurrying from the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Princess, for God’s sake!” he exclaimed, trying to stop her. “Princess!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      She turned round. For a few seconds they gazed silently into one another’s
+      eyes—and what had seemed impossible and remote suddenly became
+      possible, inevitable, and very near.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0344"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      In the winter of 1813 Nicholas married Princess Mary and moved to Bald
+      Hills with his wife, his mother, and Sónya.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Within four years he had paid off all his remaining debts without selling
+      any of his wife’s property, and having received a small inheritance on the
+      death of a cousin he paid his debt to Pierre as well.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In another three years, by 1820, he had so managed his affairs that he was
+      able to buy a small estate adjoining Bald Hills and was negotiating to buy
+      back Otrádnoe—that being his pet dream.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having started farming from necessity, he soon grew so devoted to it that
+      it became his favorite and almost his sole occupation. Nicholas was a
+      plain farmer: he did not like innovations, especially the English ones
+      then coming into vogue. He laughed at theoretical treatises on estate
+      management, disliked factories, the raising of expensive products, and the
+      buying of expensive seed corn, and did not make a hobby of any particular
+      part of the work on his estate. He always had before his mind’s eye <i>the
+      estate</i> as a whole and not any particular part of it. The chief thing in
+      his eyes was not the nitrogen in the soil, nor the oxygen in the air, nor
+      manures, nor special plows, but that most important agent by which
+      nitrogen, oxygen, manure, and plow were made effective—the peasant
+      laborer. When Nicholas first began farming and began to understand its
+      different branches, it was the serf who especially attracted his
+      attention. The peasant seemed to him not merely a tool, but also a judge
+      of farming and an end in himself. At first he watched the serfs, trying to
+      understand their aims and what they considered good and bad, and only
+      pretended to direct them and give orders while in reality learning from
+      them their methods, their manner of speech, and their judgment of what was
+      good and bad. Only when he had understood the peasants’ tastes and
+      aspirations, had learned to talk their language, to grasp the hidden
+      meaning of their words, and felt akin to them did he begin boldly to
+      manage his serfs, that is, to perform toward them the duties demanded of
+      him. And Nicholas’ management produced very brilliant results.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Guided by some gift of insight, on taking up the management of the estates
+      he at once unerringly appointed as bailiff, village elder, and delegate,
+      the very men the serfs would themselves have chosen had they had the right
+      to choose, and these posts never changed hands. Before analyzing the
+      properties of manure, before entering into the <i>debit</i> and <i>credit</i>
+      (as he ironically called it), he found out how many cattle the peasants had and
+      increased the number by all possible means. He kept the peasant families
+      together in the largest groups possible, not allowing the family groups to
+      divide into separate households. He was hard alike on the lazy, the
+      depraved, and the weak, and tried to get them expelled from the commune.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was as careful of the sowing and reaping of the peasants’ hay and corn
+      as of his own, and few landowners had their crops sown and harvested so
+      early and so well, or got so good a return, as did Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He disliked having anything to do with the domestic serfs—the
+      “drones” as he called them—and everyone said he spoiled them by his
+      laxity. When a decision had to be taken regarding a domestic serf,
+      especially if one had to be punished, he always felt undecided and
+      consulted everybody in the house; but when it was possible to have a
+      domestic serf conscripted instead of a land worker he did so without the
+      least hesitation. He never felt any hesitation in dealing with the
+      peasants. He knew that his every decision would be approved by them all
+      with very few exceptions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He did not allow himself either to be hard on or punish a man, or to make
+      things easy for or reward anyone, merely because he felt inclined to do
+      so. He could not have said by what standard he judged what he should or
+      should not do, but the standard was quite firm and definite in his own
+      mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Often, speaking with vexation of some failure or irregularity, he would
+      say: “What can one do with our Russian peasants?” and imagined that he
+      could not bear them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Yet he loved “our Russian peasants” and their way of life with his whole
+      soul, and for that very reason had understood and assimilated the one way
+      and manner of farming which produced good results.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Countess Mary was jealous of this passion of her husband’s and regretted
+      that she could not share it; but she could not understand the joys and
+      vexations he derived from that world, to her so remote and alien. She
+      could not understand why he was so particularly animated and happy when,
+      after getting up at daybreak and spending the whole morning in the fields
+      or on the threshing floor, he returned from the sowing or mowing or
+      reaping to have tea with her. She did not understand why he spoke with
+      such admiration and delight of the farming of the thrifty and well-to-do
+      peasant Matthew Ermíshin, who with his family had carted corn all night;
+      or of the fact that his (Nicholas’) sheaves were already stacked before
+      anyone else had his harvest in. She did not understand why he stepped out
+      from the window to the veranda and smiled under his mustache and winked so
+      joyfully, when warm steady rain began to fall on the dry and thirsty
+      shoots of the young oats, or why when the wind carried away a threatening
+      cloud during the hay harvest he would return from the barn, flushed,
+      sunburned, and perspiring, with a smell of wormwood and gentian in his
+      hair and, gleefully rubbing his hands, would say: “Well, one more day and
+      my grain and the peasants’ will all be under cover.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Still less did she understand why he, kindhearted and always ready to
+      anticipate her wishes, should become almost desperate when she brought him
+      a petition from some peasant men or women who had appealed to her to be
+      excused some work; why he, that kind Nicholas, should obstinately refuse
+      her, angrily asking her not to interfere in what was not her business. She
+      felt he had a world apart, which he loved passionately and which had laws
+      she had not fathomed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sometimes when, trying to understand him, she spoke of the good work he
+      was doing for his serfs, he would be vexed and reply: “Not in the least;
+      it never entered my head and I wouldn’t do <i>that</i> for their good!
+      That’s all poetry and old wives’ talk—all that doing good to
+      one’s neighbor! What I want is that our children should not have to go
+      begging. I must put our affairs in order while I am alive, that’s all.
+      And to do that, order and strictness are essential.... That’s all about
+      it!” said he, clenching his vigorous fist. “And fairness, of
+      course,” he added, “for if the peasant is naked and hungry and has
+      only one miserable horse, he can do no good either for himself or for me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And all Nicholas did was fruitful—probably just because he refused
+      to allow himself to think that he was doing good to others for virtue’s
+      sake. His means increased rapidly; serfs from neighboring estates came to
+      beg him to buy them, and long after his death the memory of his
+      administration was devoutly preserved among the serfs. “He was a master...
+      the peasants’ affairs first and then his own. Of course he was not to be
+      trifled with either—in a word, he was a real master!”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0345"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      One matter connected with his management sometimes worried Nicholas, and
+      that was his quick temper together with his old hussar habit of making
+      free use of his fists. At first he saw nothing reprehensible in this, but
+      in the second year of his marriage his view of that form of punishment
+      suddenly changed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Once in summer he had sent for the village elder from Boguchárovo, a man
+      who had succeeded to the post when Dron died and who was accused of
+      dishonesty and various irregularities. Nicholas went out into the porch to
+      question him, and immediately after the elder had given a few replies the
+      sound of cries and blows were heard. On returning to lunch Nicholas went
+      up to his wife, who sat with her head bent low over her embroidery frame,
+      and as usual began to tell her what he had been doing that morning. Among
+      other things he spoke of the Boguchárovo elder. Countess Mary turned red
+      and then pale, but continued to sit with head bowed and lips compressed
+      and gave her husband no reply.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Such an insolent scoundrel!” he cried, growing hot again at the mere
+      recollection of him. “If he had told me he was drunk and did not see...
+      But what is the matter with you, Mary?” he suddenly asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Countess Mary raised her head and tried to speak, but hastily looked down
+      again and her lips puckered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, whatever is the matter, my dearest?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      The looks of the plain Countess Mary always improved when she was in
+      tears. She never cried from pain or vexation, but always from sorrow or
+      pity, and when she wept her radiant eyes acquired an irresistible charm.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The moment Nicholas took her hand she could no longer restrain herself and
+      began to cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nicholas, I saw it... he was to blame, but why do you... Nicholas!” and
+      she covered her face with her hands.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas said nothing. He flushed crimson, left her side, and paced up and
+      down the room. He understood what she was weeping about, but could not in
+      his heart at once agree with her that what he had regarded from childhood
+      as quite an everyday event was wrong. “Is it just sentimentality, old
+      wives’ tales, or is she right?” he asked himself. Before he had solved
+      that point he glanced again at her face filled with love and pain, and he
+      suddenly realized that she was right and that he had long been sinning
+      against himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mary,” he said softly, going up to her, “it will never happen again; I
+      give you my word. Never,” he repeated in a trembling voice like a boy
+      asking for forgiveness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The tears flowed faster still from the countess’ eyes. She took his hand
+      and kissed it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nicholas, when did you break your cameo?” she asked to change the
+      subject, looking at his finger on which he wore a ring with a cameo of
+      Laocoön’s head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Today—it was the same affair. Oh, Mary, don’t remind me of it!” and
+      again he flushed. “I give you my word of honor it shan’t occur again, and
+      let this always be a reminder to me,” and he pointed to the broken ring.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After that, when in discussions with his village elders or stewards the
+      blood rushed to his face and his fists began to clench, Nicholas would
+      turn the broken ring on his finger and would drop his eyes before the man
+      who was making him angry. But he did forget himself once or twice within a
+      twelvemonth, and then he would go and confess to his wife, and would again
+      promise that this should really be the very last time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mary, you must despise me!” he would say. “I deserve it.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You should go, go away at once, if you don’t feel strong enough to
+      control yourself,” she would reply sadly, trying to comfort her husband.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Among the gentry of the province Nicholas was respected but not liked. He
+      did not concern himself with the interests of his own class, and
+      consequently some thought him proud and others thought him stupid. The
+      whole summer, from spring sowing to harvest, he was busy with the work on
+      his farm. In autumn he gave himself up to hunting with the same
+      business-like seriousness—leaving home for a month, or even two,
+      with his hunt. In winter he visited his other villages or spent his time
+      reading. The books he read were chiefly historical, and on these he spent
+      a certain sum every year. He was collecting, as he said, a serious
+      library, and he made it a rule to read through all the books he bought. He
+      would sit in his study with a grave air, reading—a task he first
+      imposed upon himself as a duty, but which afterwards became a habit
+      affording him a special kind of pleasure and a consciousness of being
+      occupied with serious matters. In winter, except for business excursions,
+      he spent most of his time at home making himself one with his family and
+      entering into all the details of his children’s relations with their
+      mother. The harmony between him and his wife grew closer and closer and he
+      daily discovered fresh spiritual treasures in her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the time of his marriage Sónya had lived in his house. Before that,
+      Nicholas had told his wife all that had passed between himself and Sónya,
+      blaming himself and commending her. He had asked Princess Mary to be
+      gentle and kind to his cousin. She thoroughly realized the wrong he had
+      done Sónya, felt herself to blame toward her, and imagined that her wealth
+      had influenced Nicholas’ choice. She could not find fault with Sónya in
+      any way and tried to be fond of her, but often felt ill-will toward her
+      which she could not overcome.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Once she had a talk with her friend Natásha about Sónya and about her own
+      injustice toward her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You know,” said Natásha, “you have read the Gospels a great deal—there
+      is a passage in them that just fits Sónya.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What?” asked Countess Mary, surprised.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “‘To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be
+      taken away.’ You remember? She is one that hath not; why, I don’t know.
+      Perhaps she lacks egotism, I don’t know, but from her is taken away, and
+      everything has been taken away. Sometimes I am dreadfully sorry for her.
+      Formerly I very much wanted Nicholas to marry her, but I always had a sort
+      of presentiment that it would not come off. She is a <i>sterile flower</i>, you
+      know—like some strawberry blossoms. Sometimes I am sorry for her,
+      and sometimes I think she doesn’t feel it as you or I would.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Though Countess Mary told Natásha that those words in the Gospel must be
+      understood differently, yet looking at Sónya she agreed with Natásha’s
+      explanation. It really seemed that Sónya did not feel her position trying,
+      and had grown quite reconciled to her lot as a <i>sterile flower</i>. She seemed
+      to be fond not so much of individuals as of the family as a whole. Like a
+      cat, she had attached herself not to the people but to the home. She
+      waited on the old countess, petted and spoiled the children, was always
+      ready to render the small services for which she had a gift, and all this
+      was unconsciously accepted from her with insufficient gratitude.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The country seat at Bald Hills had been rebuilt, though not on the same
+      scale as under the old prince.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The buildings, begun under straitened circumstances, were more than
+      simple. The immense house on the old stone foundations was of wood,
+      plastered only inside. It had bare deal floors and was furnished with very
+      simple hard sofas, armchairs, tables, and chairs made by their own serf
+      carpenters out of their own birchwood. The house was spacious and had
+      rooms for the house serfs and apartments for visitors. Whole families of
+      the Rostóvs’ and Bolkónskis’ relations sometimes came to Bald Hills with
+      sixteen horses and dozens of servants and stayed for months. Besides that,
+      four times a year, on the name days and birthdays of the hosts, as many as
+      a hundred visitors would gather there for a day or two. The rest of the
+      year life pursued its unbroken routine with its ordinary occupations, and
+      its breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and suppers, provided out of the produce
+      of the estate.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0346"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      It was the eve of St. Nicholas, the fifth of December, 1820. Natásha had
+      been staying at her brother’s with her husband and children since early
+      autumn. Pierre had gone to Petersburg on business of his own for three
+      weeks as he said, but had remained there nearly seven weeks and was
+      expected back every minute.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Besides the Bezúkhov family, Nicholas’ old friend the retired General
+      Vasíli Dmítrich Denísov was staying with the Rostóvs this fifth of
+      December.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the sixth, which was his name day when the house would be full of
+      visitors, Nicholas knew he would have to exchange his Tartar tunic for a
+      tail coat, and put on narrow boots with pointed toes, and drive to the new
+      church he had built, and then receive visitors who would come to
+      congratulate him, offer them refreshments, and talk about the elections of
+      the nobility; but he considered himself entitled to spend the eve of that
+      day in his usual way. He examined the bailiff’s accounts of the village in
+      Ryazán which belonged to his wife’s nephew, wrote two business letters,
+      and walked over to the granaries, cattle yards and stables before dinner.
+      Having taken precautions against the general drunkenness to be expected on
+      the morrow because it was a great saint’s day, he returned to dinner, and
+      without having time for a private talk with his wife sat down at the long
+      table laid for twenty persons, at which the whole household had assembled.
+      At that table were his mother, his mother’s old lady companion Belóva, his
+      wife, their three children with their governess and tutor, his wife’s
+      nephew with his tutor, Sónya, Denísov, Natásha, her three children, their
+      governess, and old Michael Ivánovich, the late prince’s architect, who was
+      living on in retirement at Bald Hills.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Countess Mary sat at the other end of the table. When her husband took his
+      place she concluded, from the rapid manner in which after taking up his
+      table napkin he pushed back the tumbler and wineglass standing before him,
+      that he was out of humor, as was sometimes the case when he came in to
+      dinner straight from the farm—especially before the soup. Countess
+      Mary well knew that mood of his, and when she herself was in a good frame
+      of mind quietly waited till he had had his soup and then began to talk to
+      him and make him admit that there was no cause for his ill-humor. But
+      today she quite forgot that and was hurt that he should be angry with her
+      without any reason, and she felt unhappy. She asked him where he had been.
+      He replied. She again inquired whether everything was going well on the
+      farm. Her unnatural tone made him wince unpleasantly and he replied
+      hastily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Then I’m not mistaken,” thought Countess Mary. “Why is he cross with me?”
+       She concluded from his tone that he was vexed with her and wished to end
+      the conversation. She knew her remarks sounded unnatural, but could not
+      refrain from asking some more questions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Thanks to Denísov the conversation at table soon became general and
+      lively, and she did not talk to her husband. When they left the table and
+      went as usual to thank the old countess, Countess Mary held out her hand
+      and kissed her husband, and asked him why he was angry with her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You always have such strange fancies! I didn’t even think of being
+      angry,” he replied.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But the word <i>always</i> seemed to her to imply: “Yes, I am angry
+      but I won’t tell you why.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas and his wife lived together so happily that even Sónya and the
+      old countess, who felt jealous and would have liked them to disagree,
+      could find nothing to reproach them with; but even they had their moments
+      of antagonism. Occasionally, and it was always just after they had been
+      happiest together, they suddenly had a feeling of estrangement and
+      hostility, which occurred most frequently during Countess Mary’s
+      pregnancies, and this was such a time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, <i>messieurs et mesdames</i>,” said Nicholas loudly and with apparent
+      cheerfulness (it seemed to Countess Mary that he did it on purpose to vex
+      her), “I have been on my feet since six this morning. Tomorrow I shall
+      have to suffer, so today I’ll go and rest.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And without a word to his wife he went to the little sitting room and lay
+      down on the sofa.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s always the way,” thought Countess Mary. “He talks to everyone
+      except me. I see... I see that I am repulsive to him, especially when I am
+      in this condition.” She looked down at her expanded figure and in the
+      glass at her pale, sallow, emaciated face in which her eyes now looked
+      larger than ever.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And everything annoyed her—Denísov’s shouting and laughter,
+      Natásha’s talk, and especially a quick glance Sónya gave her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sónya was always the first excuse Countess Mary found for feeling
+      irritated.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having sat awhile with her visitors without understanding anything of what
+      they were saying, she softly left the room and went to the nursery.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The children were playing at “going to Moscow” in a carriage made of
+      chairs and invited her to go with them. She sat down and played with them
+      a little, but the thought of her husband and his unreasonable crossness
+      worried her. She got up and, walking on tiptoe with difficulty, went to
+      the small sitting room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Perhaps he is not asleep; I’ll have an explanation with him,” she said to
+      herself. Little Andrew, her eldest boy, imitating his mother, followed her
+      on tiptoe. She did not notice him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mary, dear, I think he is asleep—he was so tired,” said Sónya,
+      meeting her in the large sitting room (it seemed to Countess Mary that she
+      crossed her path everywhere). “Andrew may wake him.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Countess Mary looked round, saw little Andrew following her, felt that
+      Sónya was right, and for that very reason flushed and with evident
+      difficulty refrained from saying something harsh. She made no reply, but
+      to avoid obeying Sónya beckoned to Andrew to follow her quietly and went
+      to the door. Sónya went away by another door. From the room in which
+      Nicholas was sleeping came the sound of his even breathing, every
+      slightest tone of which was familiar to his wife. As she listened to it
+      she saw before her his smooth handsome forehead, his mustache, and his
+      whole face, as she had so often seen it in the stillness of the night when
+      he slept. Nicholas suddenly moved and cleared his throat. And at that
+      moment little Andrew shouted from outside the door: “Papa! Mamma’s
+      standing here!” Countess Mary turned pale with fright and made signs to
+      the boy. He grew silent, and quiet ensued for a moment, terrible to
+      Countess Mary. She knew how Nicholas disliked being waked. Then through
+      the door she heard Nicholas clearing his throat again and stirring, and
+      his voice said crossly:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I can’t get a moment’s peace.... Mary, is that you? Why did you bring him
+      here?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I only came in to look and did not notice... forgive me....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas coughed and said no more. Countess Mary moved away from the door
+      and took the boy back to the nursery. Five minutes later little black-eyed
+      three-year-old Natásha, her father’s pet, having learned from her brother
+      that Papa was asleep and Mamma was in the sitting room, ran to her father
+      unobserved by her mother. The dark-eyed little girl boldly opened the
+      creaking door, went up to the sofa with energetic steps of her sturdy
+      little legs, and having examined the position of her father, who was
+      asleep with his back to her, rose on tiptoe and kissed the hand which lay
+      under his head. Nicholas turned with a tender smile on his face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Natásha, Natásha!” came Countess Mary’s frightened whisper from the door.
+      “Papa wants to sleep.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, Mamma, he doesn’t want to sleep,” said little Natásha with
+      conviction. “He’s laughing.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas lowered his legs, rose, and took his daughter in his arms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come in, Mary,” he said to his wife.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She went in and sat down by her husband.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I did not notice him following me,” she said timidly. “I just looked in.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Holding his little girl with one arm, Nicholas glanced at his wife and,
+      seeing her guilty expression, put his other arm around her and kissed her
+      hair.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “May I kiss Mamma?” he asked Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha smiled bashfully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Again!” she commanded, pointing with a peremptory gesture to the spot
+      where Nicholas had placed the kiss.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t know why you think I am cross,” said Nicholas, replying to the
+      question he knew was in his wife’s mind.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You have no idea how unhappy, how lonely, I feel when you are like that.
+      It always seems to me...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Mary, don’t talk nonsense. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” he said
+      gaily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It seems to be that you can’t love me, that I am so plain... always...
+      and now... in this cond...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, how absurd you are! It is not beauty that endears, it’s love that
+      makes us see beauty. It is only Malvínas and women of that kind who are
+      loved for their beauty. But do I love my wife? I don’t love her, but... I
+      don’t know how to put it. Without you, or when something comes between us
+      like this, I seem lost and can’t do anything. Now do I love my finger? I
+      don’t love it, but just try to cut it off!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I’m not like that myself, but I understand. So you’re not angry with me?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Awfully angry!” he said, smiling and getting up. And smoothing his hair
+      he began to pace the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know, Mary, what I’ve been thinking?” he began, immediately
+      thinking aloud in his wife’s presence now that they had made it up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He did not ask if she was ready to listen to him. He did not care. A
+      thought had occurred to him and so it belonged to her also. And he told
+      her of his intention to persuade Pierre to stay with them till spring.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Countess Mary listened till he had finished, made some remark, and in her
+      turn began thinking aloud. Her thoughts were about the children.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You can see the woman in her already,” she said in French, pointing to
+      little Natásha. “You reproach us women with being illogical. Here is our
+      logic. I say: ‘Papa wants to sleep!’ but she says, ‘No, he’s laughing.’
+      And she was right,” said Countess Mary with a happy smile.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, yes.” And Nicholas, taking his little daughter in his strong hand,
+      lifted her high, placed her on his shoulder, held her by the legs, and
+      paced the room with her. There was an expression of carefree happiness on
+      the faces of both father and daughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But you know you may be unfair. You are too fond of this one,” his wife
+      whispered in French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, but what am I to do?... I try not to show...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment they heard the sound of the door pulley and footsteps in
+      the hall and anteroom, as if someone had arrived.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Somebody has come.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I am sure it is Pierre. I will go and see,” said Countess Mary and left
+      the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In her absence Nicholas allowed himself to give his little daughter a
+      gallop round the room. Out of breath, he took the laughing child quickly
+      from his shoulder and pressed her to his heart. His capers reminded him of
+      dancing, and looking at the child’s round happy little face he thought of
+      what she would be like when he was an old man, taking her into society and
+      dancing the mazurka with her as his old father had danced <i>Daniel Cooper</i>
+      with his daughter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is he, it is he, Nicholas!” said Countess Mary, re-entering the room a
+      few minutes later. “Now our Natásha has come to life. You should have seen
+      her ecstasy, and how he caught it for having stayed away so long. Well,
+      come along now, quick, quick! It’s time you two were parted,” she added,
+      looking smilingly at the little girl who clung to her father.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas went out holding the child by the hand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Countess Mary remained in the sitting room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I should never, never have believed that one could be so happy,” she
+      whispered to herself. A smile lit up her face but at the same time she
+      sighed, and her deep eyes expressed a quiet sadness as though she felt,
+      through her happiness, that there is another sort of happiness
+      unattainable in this life and of which she involuntarily thought at that
+      instant.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0347"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Natásha had married in the early spring of 1813, and in 1820 already had
+      three daughters besides a son for whom she had longed and whom she was now
+      nursing. She had grown stouter and broader, so that it was difficult to
+      recognize in this robust, motherly woman the slim, lively Natásha of
+      former days. Her features were more defined and had a calm, soft, and
+      serene expression. In her face there was none of the ever-glowing
+      animation that had formerly burned there and constituted its charm. Now
+      her face and body were often all that one saw, and her soul was not
+      visible at all. All that struck the eye was a strong, handsome, and
+      fertile woman. The old fire very rarely kindled in her face now. That
+      happened only when, as was the case that day, her husband returned home,
+      or a sick child was convalescent, or when she and Countess Mary spoke of
+      Prince Andrew (she never mentioned him to her husband, who she imagined
+      was jealous of Prince Andrew’s memory), or on the rare occasions when
+      something happened to induce her to sing, a practice she had quite
+      abandoned since her marriage. At the rare moments when the old fire did
+      kindle in her handsome, fully developed body she was even more attractive
+      than in former days.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Since their marriage Natásha and her husband had lived in Moscow, in
+      Petersburg, on their estate near Moscow, or with her mother, that is to
+      say, in Nicholas’ house. The young Countess Bezúkhova was not often seen
+      in society, and those who met her there were not pleased with her and
+      found her neither attractive nor amiable. Not that Natásha liked solitude—she
+      did not know whether she liked it or not, she even thought that she did
+      not—but with her pregnancies, her confinements, the nursing of her
+      children, and sharing every moment of her husband’s life, she had demands
+      on her time which could be satisfied only by renouncing society. All who
+      had known Natásha before her marriage wondered at the change in her as at
+      something extraordinary. Only the old countess with her maternal instinct
+      had realized that all Natásha’s outbursts had been due to her need of
+      children and a husband—as she herself had once exclaimed at Otrádnoe
+      not so much in fun as in earnest—and her mother was now surprised at
+      the surprise expressed by those who had never understood Natásha, and she
+      kept saying that she had always known that Natásha would make an exemplary
+      wife and mother.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Only she lets her love of her husband and children overflow all bounds,”
+       said the countess, “so that it even becomes absurd.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha did not follow the golden rule advocated by clever folk,
+      especially by the French, which says that a girl should not let herself go
+      when she marries, should not neglect her accomplishments, should be even
+      more careful of her appearance than when she was unmarried, and should
+      fascinate her husband as much as she did before he became her husband.
+      Natásha on the contrary had at once abandoned all her witchery, of which
+      her singing had been an unusually powerful part. She gave it up just
+      because it was so powerfully seductive. She took no pains with her manners
+      or with delicacy of speech, or with her toilet, or to show herself to her
+      husband in her most becoming attitudes, or to avoid inconveniencing him by
+      being too exacting. She acted in contradiction to all those rules. She
+      felt that the allurements instinct had formerly taught her to use would
+      now be merely ridiculous in the eyes of her husband, to whom she had from
+      the first moment given herself up entirely—that is, with her whole
+      soul, leaving no corner of it hidden from him. She felt that her unity
+      with her husband was not maintained by the poetic feelings that had
+      attracted him to her, but by something else—indefinite but firm as
+      the bond between her own body and soul.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To fluff out her curls, put on fashionable dresses, and sing romantic
+      songs to fascinate her husband would have seemed as strange as to adorn
+      herself to attract herself. To adorn herself for others might perhaps have
+      been agreeable—she did not know—but she had no time at all for
+      it. The chief reason for devoting no time either to singing, to dress, or
+      to choosing her words was that she really had no time to spare for these
+      things.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      We know that man has the faculty of becoming completely absorbed in a
+      subject however trivial it may be, and that there is no subject so trivial
+      that it will not grow to infinite proportions if one’s entire attention is
+      devoted to it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The subject which wholly engrossed Natásha’s attention was her family:
+      that is, her husband whom she had to keep so that he should belong
+      entirely to her and to the home, and the children whom she had to bear,
+      bring into the world, nurse, and bring up.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And the deeper she penetrated, not with her mind only but with her whole
+      soul, her whole being, into the subject that absorbed her, the larger did
+      that subject grow and the weaker and more inadequate did her powers
+      appear, so that she concentrated them wholly on that one thing and yet was
+      unable to accomplish all that she considered necessary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      There were then as now conversations and discussions about women’s rights,
+      the relations of husband and wife and their freedom and rights, though
+      these themes were not yet termed <i>questions</i> as they are now; but these
+      topics were not merely uninteresting to Natásha, she positively did not
+      understand them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      These questions, then as now, existed only for those who see nothing in
+      marriage but the pleasure married people get from one another, that is,
+      only the beginnings of marriage and not its whole significance, which lies
+      in the family.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Discussions and questions of that kind, which are like the question of how
+      to get the greatest gratification from one’s dinner, did not then and do
+      not now exist for those for whom the purpose of a dinner is the
+      nourishment it affords; and the purpose of marriage is the family.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If the purpose of dinner is to nourish the body, a man who eats two
+      dinners at once may perhaps get more enjoyment but will not attain his
+      purpose, for his stomach will not digest the two dinners.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If the purpose of marriage is the family, the person who wishes to have
+      many wives or husbands may perhaps obtain much pleasure, but in that case
+      will not have a family.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If the purpose of food is nourishment and the purpose of marriage is the
+      family, the whole question resolves itself into not eating more than one
+      can digest, and not having more wives or husbands than are needed for the
+      family—that is, one wife or one husband. Natásha needed a husband. A
+      husband was given her and he gave her a family. And she not only saw no
+      need of any other or better husband, but as all the powers of her soul
+      were intent on serving that husband and family, she could not imagine and
+      saw no interest in imagining how it would be if things were different.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha did not care for society in general, but prized the more the
+      society of her relatives—Countess Mary, and her brother, her mother,
+      and Sónya. She valued the company of those to whom she could come striding
+      disheveled from the nursery in her dressing gown, and with joyful face
+      show a yellow instead of a green stain on baby’s napkin, and from whom she
+      could hear reassuring words to the effect that baby was much better.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To such an extent had Natásha let herself go that the way she dressed and
+      did her hair, her ill-chosen words, and her jealousy—she was jealous
+      of Sónya, of the governess, and of every woman, pretty or plain—were
+      habitual subjects of jest to those about her. The general opinion was that
+      Pierre was under his wife’s thumb, which was really true. From the very
+      first days of their married life Natásha had announced her demands. Pierre
+      was greatly surprised by his wife’s view, to him a perfectly novel one,
+      that every moment of his life belonged to her and to the family. His
+      wife’s demands astonished him, but they also flattered him, and he
+      submitted to them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre’s subjection consisted in the fact that he not only dared not flirt
+      with, but dared not even speak smilingly to, any other woman; did not dare
+      dine at the Club as a pastime, did not dare spend money on a whim, and did
+      not dare absent himself for any length of time, except on business—in
+      which his wife included his intellectual pursuits, which she did not in
+      the least understand but to which she attributed great importance. To make
+      up for this, at home Pierre had the right to regulate his life and that of
+      the whole family exactly as he chose. At home Natásha placed herself in
+      the position of a slave to her husband, and the whole household went on
+      tiptoe when he was occupied—that is, was reading or writing in his
+      study. Pierre had but to show a partiality for anything to get just what
+      he liked done always. He had only to express a wish and Natásha would jump
+      up and run to fulfill it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The entire household was governed according to Pierre’s supposed orders,
+      that is, by his wishes which Natásha tried to guess. Their way of life and
+      place of residence, their acquaintances and ties, Natásha’s occupations,
+      the children’s upbringing, were all selected not merely with regard to
+      Pierre’s expressed wishes, but to what Natásha from the thoughts he
+      expressed in conversation supposed his wishes to be. And she deduced the
+      essentials of his wishes quite correctly, and having once arrived at them
+      clung to them tenaciously. When Pierre himself wanted to change his mind
+      she would fight him with his own weapons.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Thus in a time of trouble ever memorable to him after the birth of their
+      first child who was delicate, when they had to change the wet nurse three
+      times and Natásha fell ill from despair, Pierre one day told her of
+      Rousseau’s view, with which he quite agreed, that to have a wet nurse is
+      unnatural and harmful. When her next baby was born, despite the opposition
+      of her mother, the doctors, and even of her husband himself—who were
+      all vigorously opposed to her nursing her baby herself, a thing then
+      unheard of and considered injurious—she insisted on having her own
+      way, and after that nursed all her babies herself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It very often happened that in a moment of irritation husband and wife
+      would have a dispute, but long afterwards Pierre to his surprise and
+      delight would find in his wife’s ideas and actions the very thought
+      against which she had argued, but divested of everything superfluous that
+      in the excitement of the dispute he had added when expressing his opinion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After seven years of marriage Pierre had the joyous and firm consciousness
+      that he was not a bad man, and he felt this because he saw himself
+      reflected in his wife. He felt the good and bad within himself
+      inextricably mingled and overlapping. But only what was really good in him
+      was reflected in his wife, all that was not quite good was rejected. And
+      this was not the result of logical reasoning but was a direct and
+      mysterious reflection.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0348"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Two months previously when Pierre was already staying with the Rostóvs he
+      had received a letter from Prince Theodore, asking him to come to
+      Petersburg to confer on some important questions that were being discussed
+      there by a society of which Pierre was one of the principal founders.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On reading that letter (she always read her husband’s letters) Natásha
+      herself suggested that he should go to Petersburg, though she would feel
+      his absence very acutely. She attributed immense importance to all her
+      husband’s intellectual and abstract interests though she did not
+      understand them, and she always dreaded being a hindrance to him in such
+      matters. To Pierre’s timid look of inquiry after reading the letter she
+      replied by asking him to go, but to fix a definite date for his return. He
+      was given four weeks’ leave of absence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Ever since that leave of absence had expired, more than a fortnight
+      before, Natásha had been in a constant state of alarm, depression, and
+      irritability.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov, now a general on the retired list and much dissatisfied with the
+      present state of affairs, had arrived during that fortnight. He looked at
+      Natásha with sorrow and surprise as at a bad likeness of a person once
+      dear. A dull, dejected look, random replies, and talk about the nursery
+      was all he saw and heard from his former enchantress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha was sad and irritable all that time, especially when her mother,
+      her brother, Sónya, or Countess Mary in their efforts to console her tried
+      to excuse Pierre and suggested reasons for his delay in returning.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It’s all nonsense, all rubbish—those discussions which lead to
+      nothing and all those idiotic societies!” Natásha declared of the very
+      affairs in the immense importance of which she firmly believed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And she would go to the nursery to nurse Pétya, her only boy. No one else
+      could tell her anything so comforting or so reasonable as this little
+      three-month-old creature when he lay at her breast and she was conscious
+      of the movement of his lips and the snuffling of his little nose. That
+      creature said: “You are angry, you are jealous, you would like to pay him
+      out, you are afraid—but here am I! And I am he...” and that was
+      unanswerable. It was more than true.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During that fortnight of anxiety Natásha resorted to the baby for comfort
+      so often, and fussed over him so much, that she overfed him and he fell
+      ill. She was terrified by his illness, and yet that was just what she
+      needed. While attending to him she bore the anxiety about her husband more
+      easily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She was nursing her boy when the sound of Pierre’s sleigh was heard at the
+      front door, and the old nurse—knowing how to please her mistress—entered
+      the room inaudibly but hurriedly and with a beaming face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Has he come?” Natásha asked quickly in a whisper, afraid to move lest she
+      should rouse the dozing baby.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He’s come, ma’am,” whispered the nurse.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The blood rushed to Natásha’s face and her feet involuntarily moved, but
+      she could not jump up and run out. The baby again opened his eyes and
+      looked at her. “You’re here?” he seemed to be saying, and again lazily
+      smacked his lips.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Cautiously withdrawing her breast, Natásha rocked him a little, handed him
+      to the nurse, and went with rapid steps toward the door. But at the door
+      she stopped as if her conscience reproached her for having in her joy left
+      the child too soon, and she glanced round. The nurse with raised elbows
+      was lifting the infant over the rail of his cot.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Go, ma’am! Don’t worry, go!” she whispered, smiling, with the kind of
+      familiarity that grows up between a nurse and her mistress.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha ran with light footsteps to the anteroom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Denísov, who had come out of the study into the dancing room with his
+      pipe, now for the first time recognized the old Natásha. A flood of
+      brilliant, joyful light poured from her transfigured face.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He’s come!” she exclaimed as she ran past, and Denísov felt that he too
+      was delighted that Pierre, whom he did not much care for, had returned.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On reaching the vestibule Natásha saw a tall figure in a fur coat
+      unwinding his scarf. “It’s he! It’s really he! He has come!” she said to
+      herself, and rushing at him embraced him, pressed his head to her breast,
+      and then pushed him back and gazed at his ruddy, happy face, covered with
+      hoarfrost. “Yes, it is he, happy and contented....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Then all at once she remembered the tortures of suspense she had
+      experienced for the last fortnight, and the joy that had lit up her face
+      vanished; she frowned and overwhelmed Pierre with a torrent of reproaches
+      and angry words.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, it’s all very well for you. You are pleased, you’ve had a good
+      time.... But what about me? You might at least have shown consideration
+      for the children. I am nursing and my milk was spoiled.... Pétya was at
+      death’s door. But you were enjoying yourself. Yes, enjoying...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre knew he was not to blame, for he could not have come sooner; he
+      knew this outburst was unseemly and would blow over in a minute or two;
+      above all he knew that he himself was bright and happy. He wanted to smile
+      but dared not even think of doing so. He made a piteous, frightened face
+      and bent down.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I could not, on my honor. But how is Pétya?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “All right now. Come along! I wonder you’re not ashamed! If only you could
+      see what I was like without you, how I suffered!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You are well?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Come, come!” she said, not letting go of his arm. And they went to their
+      rooms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When Nicholas and his wife came to look for Pierre he was in the nursery
+      holding his baby son, who was again awake, on his huge right palm and
+      dandling him. A blissful bright smile was fixed on the baby’s broad face
+      with its toothless open mouth. The storm was long since over and there was
+      bright, joyous sunshine on Natásha’s face as she gazed tenderly at her
+      husband and child.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “And have you talked everything well over with Prince Theodore?” she
+      asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, capitally.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “You see, he holds it up.” (She meant the baby’s head.) “But how he did
+      frighten me... You’ve seen the princess? Is it true she’s in love with
+      that...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, just fancy...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment Nicholas and Countess Mary came in. Pierre with the baby on
+      his hand stooped, kissed them, and replied to their inquiries. But in
+      spite of much that was interesting and had to be discussed, the baby with
+      the little cap on its unsteady head evidently absorbed all his attention.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “How sweet!” said Countess Mary, looking at and playing with the baby.
+      “Now, Nicholas,” she added, turning to her husband, “I can’t understand
+      how it is you don’t see the charm of these delicious marvels.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I don’t and can’t,” replied Nicholas, looking coldly at the baby. “A lump
+      of flesh. Come along, Pierre!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And yet he’s such an affectionate father,” said Countess Mary,
+      vindicating her husband, “but only after they are a year old or so...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Now, Pierre nurses them splendidly,” said Natásha. “He says his hand is
+      just made for a baby’s seat. Just look!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Only not for this...” Pierre suddenly exclaimed with a laugh, and
+      shifting the baby he gave him to the nurse.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0349"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      As in every large household, there were at Bald Hills several perfectly
+      distinct worlds which merged into one harmonious whole, though each
+      retained its own peculiarities and made concessions to the others. Every
+      event, joyful or sad, that took place in that house was important to all
+      these worlds, but each had its own special reasons to rejoice or grieve
+      over that occurrence independently of the others.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For instance, Pierre’s return was a joyful and important event and they
+      all felt it to be so.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The servants—the most reliable judges of their masters because they
+      judge not by their conversation or expressions of feeling but by their
+      acts and way of life—were glad of Pierre’s return because they knew
+      that when he was there Count Nicholas would cease going every day to
+      attend to the estate, and would be in better spirits and temper, and also
+      because they would all receive handsome presents for the holidays.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The children and their governesses were glad of Pierre’s return because no
+      one else drew them into the social life of the household as he did. He
+      alone could play on the clavichord that <i>écossaise</i> (his only piece) to
+      which, as he said, all possible dances could be danced, and they felt sure
+      he had brought presents for them all.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Young Nicholas, now a slim lad of fifteen, delicate and intelligent, with
+      curly light-brown hair and beautiful eyes, was delighted because Uncle
+      Pierre as he called him was the object of his rapturous and passionate
+      affection. No one had instilled into him this love for Pierre whom he saw
+      only occasionally. Countess Mary who had brought him up had done her
+      utmost to make him love her husband as she loved him, and little Nicholas
+      did love his uncle, but loved him with just a shade of contempt. Pierre,
+      however, he adored. He did not want to be an hussar or a Knight of St.
+      George like his uncle Nicholas; he wanted to be learned, wise, and kind
+      like Pierre. In Pierre’s presence his face always shone with pleasure and
+      he flushed and was breathless when Pierre spoke to him. He did not miss a
+      single word he uttered, and would afterwards, with Dessalles or by
+      himself, recall and reconsider the meaning of everything Pierre had said.
+      Pierre’s past life and his unhappiness prior to 1812 (of which young
+      Nicholas had formed a vague poetic picture from some words he had
+      overheard), his adventures in Moscow, his captivity, Platón Karatáev (of
+      whom he had heard from Pierre), his love for Natásha (of whom the lad was
+      also particularly fond), and especially Pierre’s friendship with the
+      father whom Nicholas could not remember—all this made Pierre in his
+      eyes a hero and a saint.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From broken remarks about Natásha and his father, from the emotion with
+      which Pierre spoke of that dead father, and from the careful, reverent
+      tenderness with which Natásha spoke of him, the boy, who was only just
+      beginning to guess what love is, derived the notion that his father had
+      loved Natásha and when dying had left her to his friend. But the father
+      whom the boy did not remember appeared to him a divinity who could not be
+      pictured, and of whom he never thought without a swelling heart and tears
+      of sadness and rapture. So the boy also was happy that Pierre had arrived.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The guests welcomed Pierre because he always helped to enliven and unite
+      any company he was in.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The grown-up members of the family, not to mention his wife, were pleased
+      to have back a friend whose presence made life run more smoothly and
+      peacefully.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old ladies were pleased with the presents he brought them, and
+      especially that Natásha would now be herself again.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre felt the different outlooks of these various worlds and made haste
+      to satisfy all their expectations.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though the most absent-minded and forgetful of men, Pierre, with the aid
+      of a list his wife drew up, had now bought everything, not forgetting his
+      mother—and brother-in-law’s commissions, nor the dress material for
+      a present to Belóva, nor toys for his wife’s nephews. In the early days of
+      his marriage it had seemed strange to him that his wife should expect him
+      not to forget to procure all the things he undertook to buy, and he had
+      been taken aback by her serious annoyance when on his first trip he forgot
+      everything. But in time he grew used to this demand. Knowing that Natásha
+      asked nothing for herself, and gave him commissions for others only when
+      he himself had offered to undertake them, he now found an unexpected and
+      childlike pleasure in this purchase of presents for everyone in the house,
+      and never forgot anything. If he now incurred Natásha’s censure it was
+      only for buying too many and too expensive things. To her other defects
+      (as most people thought them, but which to Pierre were qualities) of
+      untidiness and neglect of herself, she now added stinginess.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the time that Pierre began life as a family man on a footing
+      entailing heavy expenditure, he had noticed to his surprise that he spent
+      only half as much as before, and that his affairs—which had been in
+      disorder of late, chiefly because of his first wife’s debts—had
+      begun to improve.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Life was cheaper because it was circumscribed: that most expensive luxury,
+      the kind of life that can be changed at any moment, was no longer his nor
+      did he wish for it. He felt that his way of life had now been settled once
+      for all till death and that to change it was not in his power, and so that
+      way of life proved economical.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With a merry, smiling face Pierre was sorting his purchases.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What do you think of this?” said he, unrolling a piece of stuff like a
+      shopman.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha, who was sitting opposite to him with her eldest daughter on her
+      lap, turned her sparkling eyes swiftly from her husband to the things he
+      showed her.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s for Belóva? Excellent!” She felt the quality of the material. “It
+      was a ruble an arshin, I suppose?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre told her the price.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Too dear!” Natásha remarked. “How pleased the children will be and Mamma
+      too! Only you need not have bought me this,” she added, unable to suppress
+      a smile as she gazed admiringly at a gold comb set with pearls, of a kind
+      then just coming into fashion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Adèle tempted me: she kept on telling me to buy it,” returned Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “When am I to wear it?” and Natásha stuck it in her coil of hair. “When I
+      take little Másha into society? Perhaps they will be fashionable again by
+      then. Well, let’s go now.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And collecting the presents they went first to the nursery and then to the
+      old countess’ rooms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess was sitting with her companion Belóva, playing grand-patience
+      as usual, when Pierre and Natásha came into the drawing room with parcels
+      under their arms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The countess was now over sixty, was quite gray, and wore a cap with a
+      frill that surrounded her face. Her face had shriveled, her upper lip had
+      sunk in, and her eyes were dim.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After the deaths of her son and husband in such rapid succession, she felt
+      herself a being accidentally forgotten in this world and left without aim
+      or object for her existence. She ate, drank, slept, or kept awake, but did
+      not <i>live</i>. Life gave her no new impressions. She wanted nothing from life
+      but tranquillity, and that tranquillity only death could give her. But
+      until death came she had to go on living, that is, to use her vital
+      forces. A peculiarity one sees in very young children and very old people
+      was particularly evident in her. Her life had no external aims—only
+      a need to exercise her various functions and inclinations was apparent.
+      She had to eat, sleep, think, speak, weep, work, give vent to her anger,
+      and so on, merely because she had a stomach, a brain, muscles, nerves, and
+      a liver. She did these things not under any external impulse as people in
+      the full vigor of life do, when behind the purpose for which they strive
+      that of exercising their functions remains unnoticed. She talked only
+      because she physically needed to exercise her tongue and lungs. She cried
+      as a child does, because her nose had to be cleared, and so on. What for
+      people in their full vigor is an aim was for her evidently merely a
+      pretext.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Thus in the morning—especially if she had eaten anything rich the
+      day before—she felt a need of being angry and would choose as the
+      handiest pretext Belóva’s deafness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She would begin to say something to her in a low tone from the other end
+      of the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It seems a little warmer today, my dear,” she would murmur.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And when Belóva replied: “Oh yes, they’ve come,” she would mutter angrily:
+      “O Lord! How stupid and deaf she is!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Another pretext would be her snuff, which would seem too dry or too damp
+      or not rubbed fine enough. After these fits of irritability her face would
+      grow yellow, and her maids knew by infallible symptoms when Belóva would
+      again be deaf, the snuff damp, and the countess’ face yellow. Just as she
+      needed to work off her spleen so she had sometimes to exercise her
+      still-existing faculty of thinking—and the pretext for that was a
+      game of patience. When she needed to cry, the deceased count would be the
+      pretext. When she wanted to be agitated, Nicholas and his health would be
+      the pretext, and when she felt a need to speak spitefully, the pretext
+      would be Countess Mary. When her vocal organs needed exercise, which was
+      usually toward seven o’clock when she had had an after-dinner rest in a
+      darkened room, the pretext would be the retelling of the same stories over
+      and over again to the same audience.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The old lady’s condition was understood by the whole household though no
+      one ever spoke of it, and they all made every possible effort to satisfy
+      her needs. Only by a rare glance exchanged with a sad smile between
+      Nicholas, Pierre, Natásha, and Countess Mary was the common understanding
+      of her condition expressed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But those glances expressed something more: they said that she had played
+      her part in life, that what they now saw was not her whole self, that we
+      must all become like her, and that they were glad to yield to her, to
+      restrain themselves for this once precious being formerly as full of life
+      as themselves, but now so much to be pitied. <i>“Memento mori,”</i>
+      said these glances.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only the really heartless, the stupid ones of that household, and the
+      little children failed to understand this and avoided her.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0350"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      When Pierre and his wife entered the drawing room the countess was in one
+      of her customary states in which she needed the mental exertion of playing
+      patience, and so—though by force of habit she greeted him with the
+      words she always used when Pierre or her son returned after an absence:
+      “High time, my dear, high time! We were all weary of waiting for you.
+      Well, thank God!” and received her presents with another customary remark:
+      “It’s not the gift that’s precious, my dear, but that you give it to me,
+      an old woman...”—yet it was evident that she was not pleased by
+      Pierre’s arrival at that moment when it diverted her attention from the
+      unfinished game.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She finished her game of patience and only then examined the presents.
+      They consisted of a box for cards, of splendid workmanship, a bright-blue
+      Sèvres tea cup with shepherdesses depicted on it and with a lid, and a
+      gold snuffbox with the count’s portrait on the lid which Pierre had had
+      done by a miniaturist in Petersburg. The countess had long wished for such
+      a box, but as she did not want to cry just then she glanced indifferently
+      at the portrait and gave her attention chiefly to the box for cards.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Thank you, my dear, you have cheered me up,” said she as she always did.
+      “But best of all you have brought yourself back—for I never saw
+      anything like it, you ought to give your wife a scolding! What are we to
+      do with her? She is like a mad woman when you are away. Doesn’t see
+      anything, doesn’t remember anything,” she went on, repeating her usual
+      phrases. “Look, Anna Timoféevna,” she added to her companion, “see what a
+      box for cards my son has brought us!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Belóva admired the presents and was delighted with her dress material.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Though Pierre, Natásha, Nicholas, Countess Mary, and Denísov had much to
+      talk about that they could not discuss before the old countess—not
+      that anything was hidden from her, but because she had dropped so far
+      behindhand in many things that had they begun to converse in her presence
+      they would have had to answer inopportune questions and to repeat what
+      they had already told her many times: that so-and-so was dead and
+      so-and-so was married, which she would again be unable to remember—yet
+      they sat at tea round the samovar in the drawing room from habit, and
+      Pierre answered the countess’ questions as to whether Prince Vasíli had
+      aged and whether Countess Mary Alexéevna had sent greetings and still
+      thought of them, and other matters that interested no one and to which she
+      herself was indifferent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Conversation of this kind, interesting to no one yet unavoidable,
+      continued all through teatime. All the grown-up members of the family were
+      assembled near the round tea table at which Sónya presided beside the
+      samovar. The children with their tutors and governesses had had tea and
+      their voices were audible from the next room. At tea all sat in their
+      accustomed places: Nicholas beside the stove at a small table where his
+      tea was handed to him; Mílka, the old gray borzoi bitch (daughter of the
+      first Mílka), with a quite gray face and large black eyes that seemed more
+      prominent than ever, lay on the armchair beside him; Denísov, whose curly
+      hair, mustache, and whiskers had turned half gray, sat beside countess
+      Mary with his general’s tunic unbuttoned; Pierre sat between his wife and
+      the old countess. He spoke of what he knew might interest the old lady and
+      that she could understand. He told her of external social events and of
+      the people who had formed the circle of her contemporaries and had once
+      been a real, living, and distinct group, but who were now for the most
+      part scattered about the world and like herself were garnering the last
+      ears of the harvests they had sown in earlier years. But to the old
+      countess those contemporaries of hers seemed to be the only serious and
+      real society. Natásha saw by Pierre’s animation that his visit had been
+      interesting and that he had much to tell them but dare not say it before
+      the old countess. Denísov, not being a member of the family, did not
+      understand Pierre’s caution and being, as a malcontent, much interested in
+      what was occurring in Petersburg, kept urging Pierre to tell them about
+      what had happened in the Semënovsk regiment, then about Arakchéev, and
+      then about the Bible Society. Once or twice Pierre was carried away and
+      began to speak of these things, but Nicholas and Natásha always brought
+      him back to the health of Prince Iván and Countess Mary Alexéevna.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, and all this idiocy—Gossner and Tatáwinova?” Denísov asked.
+      “Is that weally still going on?”
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Going on?” Pierre exclaimed. “Why more than ever!
+      The Bible Society is the whole government now!”
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What is that, <i>mon cher ami?</i>” asked the countess, who had
+      finished her tea and evidently needed a pretext for being angry
+      after her meal. “What are you saying about the government? I don’t
+      understand.”
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, you know, <i>Maman</i>,” Nicholas interposed, knowing how to translate
+      things into his mother’s language, “Prince Alexander Golítsyn has founded
+      a society and in consequence has great influence, they say.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Arakchéev and Golítsyn,” incautiously remarked Pierre, “are now the whole
+      government! And what a government! They see treason everywhere and are
+      afraid of everything.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, and how is Prince Alexander to blame? He is a most estimable man. I
+      used to meet him at Mary Antónovna’s,” said the countess in an offended
+      tone; and still more offended that they all remained silent, she went on:
+      “Nowadays everyone finds fault. A Gospel Society! Well, and what harm is
+      there in that?” and she rose (everybody else got up too) and with a severe
+      expression sailed back to her table in the sitting room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The melancholy silence that followed was broken by the sounds of the
+      children’s voices and laughter from the next room. Evidently some jolly
+      excitement was going on there.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Finished, finished!” little Natásha’s gleeful yell rose above them all.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre exchanged glances with Countess Mary and Nicholas (Natásha he never
+      lost sight of) and smiled happily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “That’s delightful music!” said he.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It means that Anna Makárovna has finished her stocking,” said Countess
+      Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, I’ll go and see,” said Pierre, jumping up. “You know,” he added,
+      stopping at the door, “why I’m especially fond of that music? It is always
+      the first thing that tells me all is well. When I was driving here today,
+      the nearer I got to the house the more anxious I grew. As I entered the
+      anteroom I heard Andrúsha’s peals of laughter and that meant that all was
+      well.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I know! I know that feeling,” said Nicholas. “But I mustn’t go there—those
+      stockings are to be a surprise for me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre went to the children, and the shouting and laughter grew still
+      louder.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Come, Anna Makárovna,” Pierre’s voice was heard saying, “come here into
+      the middle of the room and at the word of command, ‘One, two,’ and when I
+      say ‘three’... You stand here, and you in my arms—well now! One,
+      two!...” said Pierre, and a silence followed: “three!” and a rapturously
+      breathless cry of children’s voices filled the room. “Two, two!” they
+      shouted.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This meant two stockings, which by a secret process known only to herself
+      Anna Makárovna used to knit at the same time on the same needles, and
+      which, when they were ready, she always triumphantly drew, one out of the
+      other, in the children’s presence.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0351"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Soon after this the children came in to say good night. They kissed
+      everyone, the tutors and governesses made their bows, and they went out.
+      Only young Nicholas and his tutor remained. Dessalles whispered to the boy
+      to come downstairs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, Monsieur Dessalles, I will ask my aunt to let me stay,” replied
+      Nicholas Bolkónski also in a whisper.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “<i>Ma tante</i>, please let me stay,” said he, going up to his aunt.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      His face expressed entreaty, agitation, and ecstasy. Countess Mary glanced
+      at him and turned to Pierre.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “When you are here he can’t tear himself away,” she said.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I will bring him to you directly, Monsieur Dessalles. Good night!” said
+      Pierre, giving his hand to the Swiss tutor, and he turned to young
+      Nicholas with a smile. “You and I haven’t seen anything of one another
+      yet.... How like he is growing, Mary!” he added, addressing Countess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Like my father?” asked the boy, flushing crimson and looking up at Pierre
+      with bright, ecstatic eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre nodded, and went on with what he had been saying when the children
+      had interrupted. Countess Mary sat down doing woolwork; Natásha did not
+      take her eyes off her husband. Nicholas and Denísov rose, asked for their
+      pipes, smoked, went to fetch more tea from Sónya—who sat weary but
+      resolute at the samovar—and questioned Pierre. The curly-headed,
+      delicate boy sat with shining eyes unnoticed in a corner, starting every
+      now and then and muttering something to himself, and evidently
+      experiencing a new and powerful emotion as he turned his curly head, with
+      his thin neck exposed by his turn-down collar, toward the place where
+      Pierre sat.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The conversation turned on the contemporary gossip about those in power,
+      in which most people see the chief interest of home politics. Denísov,
+      dissatisfied with the government on account of his own disappointments in
+      the service, heard with pleasure of the things done in Petersburg which
+      seemed to him stupid, and made forcible and sharp comments on what Pierre
+      told them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “One used to have to be a German—now one must dance with Tatáwinova
+      and Madame Kwüdener, and wead Ecka’tshausen and the bwethwen. Oh, they
+      should let that fine fellow Bonaparte loose—he’d knock all this
+      nonsense out of them! Fancy giving the command of the Semënov wegiment to
+      a fellow like that Schwa’tz!” he cried.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas, though free from Denísov’s readiness to find fault with
+      everything, also thought that discussion of the government was a very
+      serious and weighty matter, and the fact that <i>A</i> had been appointed
+      Minister of This and <i>B</i> Governor General of That, and that the Emperor had
+      said so-and-so and this minister so-and-so, seemed to him very important.
+      And so he thought it necessary to take an interest in these things and to
+      question Pierre. The questions put by these two kept the conversation from
+      changing its ordinary character of gossip about the higher government
+      circles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But Natásha, knowing all her husband’s ways and ideas, saw that he had
+      long been wishing but had been unable to divert the conversation to
+      another channel and express his own deeply felt idea for the sake of which
+      he had gone to Petersburg to consult with his new friend Prince Theodore,
+      and she helped him by asking how his affairs with Prince Theodore had
+      gone.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What was it about?” asked Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Always the same thing,” said Pierre, looking round at his listeners.
+      “Everybody sees that things are going so badly that they cannot be allowed
+      to go on so and that it is the duty of all decent men to counteract it as
+      far as they can.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “What can decent men do?” Nicholas inquired, frowning slightly. “What can
+      be done?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, this...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Come into my study,” said Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha, who had long expected to be fetched to nurse her baby, now heard
+      the nurse calling her and went to the nursery. Countess Mary followed her.
+      The men went into the study and little Nicholas Bolkónski followed them
+      unnoticed by his uncle and sat down at the writing table in a shady corner
+      by the window.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, what would you do?” asked Denísov.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Always some fantastic schemes,” said Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why this,” began Pierre, not sitting down but pacing the room, sometimes
+      stopping short, gesticulating, and lisping: “the position in Petersburg is
+      this: the Emperor does not look into anything. He has abandoned himself
+      altogether to this mysticism” (Pierre could not tolerate mysticism in
+      anyone now). “He seeks only for peace, and only these people <i>sans foi ni
+      loi</i> * can give it him—people who recklessly hack at and strangle
+      everything—Magnítski, Arakchéev, and <i>tutti quanti</i>.... You will agree
+      that if you did not look after your estates yourself but only wanted a
+      quiet life, the harsher your steward was the more readily your object
+      might be attained,” he said to Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * Without faith or law.
+</p>
+<p>
+      “Well, what does that lead up to?” said Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, everything is going to ruin! Robbery in the law courts, in the army
+      nothing but flogging, drilling, and Military Settlements; the people are
+      tortured, enlightenment is suppressed. All that is young and honest is
+      crushed! Everyone sees that this cannot go on. Everything is strained to
+      such a degree that it will certainly break,” said Pierre (as those who
+      examine the actions of any government have always said since governments
+      began). “I told them just one thing in Petersburg.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Told whom?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, you know whom,” said Pierre, with a meaning glance from under his
+      brows. “Prince Theodore and all those. To encourage culture and
+      philanthropy is all very well of course. The aim is excellent but in the
+      present circumstances something else is needed.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      At that moment Nicholas noticed the presence of his nephew. His face
+      darkened and he went up to the boy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Why are you here?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why? Let him be,” said Pierre, taking Nicholas by the arm and continuing.
+      “That is not enough, I told them. Something else is needed. When you stand
+      expecting the overstrained string to snap at any moment, when everyone is
+      expecting the inevitable catastrophe, as many as possible must join hands
+      as closely as they can to withstand the general calamity. Everything that
+      is young and strong is being enticed away and depraved. One is lured by
+      women, another by honors, a third by ambition or money, and they go over
+      to that camp. No independent men, such as you or I, are left. What I say
+      is widen the scope of our society, let the <i>mot d’ordre</i> be not
+      virtue alone but independence and action as well!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas, who had left his nephew, irritably pushed up an armchair, sat
+      down in it, and listened to Pierre, coughing discontentedly and frowning
+      more and more.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “But action with what aim?” he cried. “And what position will you adopt
+      toward the government?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why, the position of assistants. The society need not be secret if the
+      government allows it. Not merely is it not hostile to government, but it
+      is a society of true conservatives—a society of gentlemen in the
+      full meaning of that word. It is only to prevent some Pugachëv or other
+      from killing my children and yours, and Arakchéev from sending me off to
+      some Military Settlement. We join hands only for the public welfare and
+      the general safety.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, but it’s a secret society and therefore a hostile and harmful one
+      which can only cause harm.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Why? Did the Tugendbund which saved Europe” (they did not then venture to
+      suggest that Russia had saved Europe) “do any harm? The Tugendbund is an
+      alliance of virtue: it is love, mutual help... it is what Christ preached
+      on the Cross.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha, who had come in during the conversation, looked joyfully at her
+      husband. It was not what he was saying that pleased her—that did not
+      even interest her, for it seemed to her that was all extremely simple and
+      that she had known it a long time (it seemed so to her because she knew
+      that it sprang from Pierre’s whole soul), but it was his animated and
+      enthusiastic appearance that made her glad.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The boy with the thin neck stretching out from the turn-down collar—whom
+      everyone had forgotten—gazed at Pierre with even greater and more
+      rapturous joy. Every word of Pierre’s burned into his heart, and with a
+      nervous movement of his fingers he unconsciously broke the sealing wax and
+      quill pens his hands came upon on his uncle’s table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “It is not at all what you suppose; but that is what the German Tugendbund
+      was, and what I am proposing.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, my fwiend! The Tugendbund is all vewy well for the sausage eaters,
+      but I don’t understand it and can’t even pwonounce it,”
+      interposed Denísov in a loud and resolute voice. “I agwee that evewything
+      here is wotten and howwible, but the <i>Tugendbund</i> I don’t understand.
+      If we’re not satisfied, let us have a <i>bunt</i> of our own.
+      That’s all wight. <i>Je suis vot’e homme!”</i> *
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    * “I’m your man.”
+ </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre smiled, Natásha began to laugh, but Nicholas knitted his brows
+      still more and began proving to Pierre that there was no prospect of any
+      great change and that all the danger he spoke of existed only in his
+      imagination. Pierre maintained the contrary, and as his mental faculties
+      were greater and more resourceful, Nicholas felt himself cornered. This
+      made him still angrier, for he was fully convinced, not by reasoning but
+      by something within him stronger than reason, of the justice of his
+      opinion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I will tell you this,” he said, rising and trying with nervously
+      twitching fingers to prop up his pipe in a corner, but finally abandoning
+      the attempt. “I can’t prove it to you. You say that everything here is
+      rotten and that an overthrow is coming: I don’t see it. But you also say
+      that our oath of allegiance is a conditional matter, and to that I reply:
+      ‘You are my best friend, as you know, but if you formed a secret society
+      and began working against the government—be it what it may—I
+      know it is my duty to obey the government. And if Arakchéev ordered me to
+      lead a squadron against you and cut you down, I should not hesitate an
+      instant, but should do it.’ And you may argue about that as you like!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      An awkward silence followed these words. Natásha was the first to speak,
+      defending her husband and attacking her brother. Her defense was weak and
+      inapt but she attained her object. The conversation was resumed, and no
+      longer in the unpleasantly hostile tone of Nicholas’ last remark.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When they all got up to go in to supper, little Nicholas Bolkónski went up
+      to Pierre, pale and with shining, radiant eyes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Uncle Pierre, you... no... If Papa were alive... would he agree with
+      you?” he asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And Pierre suddenly realized what a special, independent, complex, and
+      powerful process of thought and feeling must have been going on in this
+      boy during that conversation, and remembering all he had said he regretted
+      that the lad should have heard him. He had, however, to give him an
+      answer.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I think so,” he said reluctantly, and left the study.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The lad looked down and seemed now for the first time to notice what he
+      had done to the things on the table. He flushed and went up to Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Uncle, forgive me, I did that... unintentionally,” he said, pointing to
+      the broken sealing wax and pens.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas started angrily.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “All right, all right,” he said, throwing the bits under the table.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And evidently suppressing his vexation with difficulty, he turned away
+      from the boy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You ought not to have been here at all,” he said.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0352"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The conversation at supper was not about politics or societies, but turned
+      on the subject Nicholas liked best—recollections of 1812. Denísov
+      started these and Pierre was particularly agreeable and amusing about
+      them. The family separated on the most friendly terms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      After supper Nicholas, having undressed in his study and given
+      instructions to the steward who had been waiting for him, went to the
+      bedroom in his dressing gown, where he found his wife still at her table,
+      writing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What are you writing, Mary?” Nicholas asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Countess Mary blushed. She was afraid that what she was writing would not
+      be understood or approved by her husband.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      She had wanted to conceal what she was writing from him, but at the same
+      time was glad he had surprised her at it and that she would now have to
+      tell him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A diary, Nicholas,” she replied, handing him a blue exercise book filled
+      with her firm, bold writing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “A diary?” Nicholas repeated with a shade of irony, and he took up the
+      book.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It was in French.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      December 4. Today when Andrúsha (her eldest boy) woke up he did not wish
+      to dress and Mademoiselle Louise sent for me. He was naughty and
+      obstinate. I tried threats, but he only grew angrier. Then I took the
+      matter in hand: I left him alone and began with nurse’s help to get the
+      other children up, telling him that I did not love him. For a long time he
+      was silent, as if astonished, then he jumped out of bed, ran to me in his
+      shirt, and sobbed so that I could not calm him for a long time. It was
+      plain that what troubled him most was that he had grieved me. Afterwards
+      in the evening when I gave him his ticket, he again began crying piteously
+      and kissing me. One can do anything with him by tenderness.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      “What is a ‘ticket’?” Nicholas inquired.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have begun giving the elder ones marks every evening, showing how they
+      have behaved.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas looked into the radiant eyes that were gazing at him, and
+      continued to turn over the pages and read. In the diary was set down
+      everything in the children’s lives that seemed noteworthy to their mother
+      as showing their characters or suggesting general reflections on
+      educational methods. They were for the most part quite insignificant
+      trifles, but did not seem so to the mother or to the father either, now
+      that he read this diary about his children for the first time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Under the date “5” was entered:
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Mítya was naughty at table. Papa said he was to have no pudding. He had
+      none, but looked so unhappily and greedily at the others while they were
+      eating! I think that punishment by depriving children of sweets only
+      develops their greediness. Must tell Nicholas this.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Nicholas put down the book and looked at his wife. The radiant eyes gazed
+      at him questioningly: would he approve or disapprove of her diary? There
+      could be no doubt not only of his approval but also of his admiration for
+      his wife.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Perhaps it need not be done so pedantically, thought Nicholas, or even
+      done at all, but this untiring, continual spiritual effort of which the
+      sole aim was the children’s moral welfare delighted him. Had Nicholas been
+      able to analyze his feelings he would have found that his steady, tender,
+      and proud love of his wife rested on his feeling of wonder at her
+      spirituality and at the lofty moral world, almost beyond his reach, in
+      which she had her being.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He was proud of her intelligence and goodness, recognized his own
+      insignificance beside her in the spiritual world, and rejoiced all the
+      more that she with such a soul not only belonged to him but was part of
+      himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I quite, quite approve, my dearest!” said he with a significant look, and
+      after a short pause he added: “And I behaved badly today. You weren’t in
+      the study. We began disputing—Pierre and I—and I lost my
+      temper. But he is impossible: such a child! I don’t know what would become
+      of him if Natásha didn’t keep him in hand.... Have you any idea why he
+      went to Petersburg? They have formed...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I know,” said Countess Mary. “Natásha told me.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, then, you know,” Nicholas went on, growing hot at the mere
+      recollection of their discussion, “he wanted to convince me that it is
+      every honest man’s duty to go against the government, and that the oath of
+      allegiance and duty... I am sorry you weren’t there. They all fell on me—Denísov
+      and Natásha... Natásha is absurd. How she rules over him! And yet there
+      need only be a discussion and she has no words of her own but only repeats
+      his sayings...” added Nicholas, yielding to that irresistible inclination
+      which tempts us to judge those nearest and dearest to us. He forgot that
+      what he was saying about Natásha could have been applied word for word to
+      himself in relation to his wife.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I have noticed that,” said Countess Mary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “When I told him that duty and the oath were above everything, he started
+      proving goodness knows what! A pity you were not there—what would
+      you have said?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “As I see it you were quite right, and I told Natásha so. Pierre says
+      everybody is suffering, tortured, and being corrupted, and that it is our
+      duty to help our neighbor. Of course he is right there,” said Countess
+      Mary, “but he forgets that we have other duties nearer to us, duties
+      indicated to us by God Himself, and that though we might expose ourselves
+      to risks we must not risk our children.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, that’s it! That’s just what I said to him,” put in Nicholas, who
+      fancied he really had said it. “But they insisted on their own view: love
+      of one’s neighbor and Christianity—and all this in the presence of
+      young Nicholas, who had gone into my study and broke all my things.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, Nicholas, do you know I am often troubled about little Nicholas,”
+       said Countess Mary. “He is such an exceptional boy. I am afraid I neglect
+      him in favor of my own: we all have children and relations while he has no
+      one. He is constantly alone with his thoughts.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well, I don’t think you need reproach yourself on his account. All that
+      the fondest mother could do for her son you have done and are doing for
+      him, and of course I am glad of it. He is a fine lad, a fine lad! This
+      evening he listened to Pierre in a sort of trance, and fancy—as we
+      were going in to supper I looked and he had broken everything on my table
+      to bits, and he told me of it himself at once! I never knew him to tell an
+      untruth. A fine lad, a fine lad!” repeated Nicholas, who at heart was not
+      fond of Nicholas Bolkónski but was always anxious to recognize that he was
+      a fine lad.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Still, I am not the same as his own mother,” said Countess Mary. “I feel
+      I am not the same and it troubles me. A wonderful boy, but I am dreadfully
+      afraid for him. It would be good for him to have companions.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Well it won’t be for long. Next summer I’ll take him to Petersburg,” said
+      Nicholas. “Yes, Pierre always was a dreamer and always will be,” he
+      continued, returning to the talk in the study which had evidently
+      disturbed him. “Well, what business is it of mine what goes on there—whether
+      Arakchéev is bad, and all that? What business was it of mine when I
+      married and was so deep in debt that I was threatened with prison, and had
+      a mother who could not see or understand it? And then there are you and
+      the children and our affairs. Is it for my own pleasure that I am at the
+      farm or in the office from morning to night? No, but I know I must work to
+      comfort my mother, to repay you, and not to leave the children such
+      beggars as I was.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Countess Mary wanted to tell him that man does not live by bread alone and
+      that he attached too much importance to these matters. But she knew she
+      must not say this and that it would be useless to do so. She only took his
+      hand and kissed it. He took this as a sign of approval and a confirmation
+      of his thoughts, and after a few minutes’ reflection continued to think
+      aloud.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “You know, Mary, today Elias Mitrofánych” (this was his overseer)
+      “came back from the Tambóv estate and told me they are already
+      offering eighty thousand rubles for the forest.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      And with an eager face Nicholas began to speak of the possibility of
+      repurchasing Otrádnoe before long, and added: “Another ten years of life
+      and I shall leave the children... in an excellent position.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Countess Mary listened to her husband and understood all that he told her.
+      She knew that when he thought aloud in this way he would sometimes ask her
+      what he had been saying, and be vexed if he noticed that she had been
+      thinking about something else. But she had to force herself to attend, for
+      what he was saying did not interest her at all. She looked at him and did
+      not think, but felt, about something different. She felt a submissive
+      tender love for this man who would never understand all that she
+      understood, and this seemed to make her love for him still stronger and
+      added a touch of passionate tenderness. Besides this feeling which
+      absorbed her altogether and hindered her from following the details of her
+      husband’s plans, thoughts that had no connection with what he was saying
+      flitted through her mind. She thought of her nephew. Her husband’s account
+      of the boy’s agitation while Pierre was speaking struck her forcibly, and
+      various traits of his gentle, sensitive character recurred to her mind;
+      and while thinking of her nephew she thought also of her own children. She
+      did not compare them with him, but compared her feeling for them with her
+      feeling for him, and felt with regret that there was something lacking in
+      her feeling for young Nicholas.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Sometimes it seemed to her that this difference arose from the difference
+      in their ages, but she felt herself to blame toward him and promised in
+      her heart to do better and to accomplish the impossible—in this life
+      to love her husband, her children, little Nicholas, and all her neighbors,
+      as Christ loved mankind. Countess Mary’s soul always strove toward the
+      infinite, the eternal, and the absolute, and could therefore never be at
+      peace. A stern expression of the lofty, secret suffering of a soul
+      burdened by the body appeared on her face. Nicholas gazed at her. “O God!
+      What will become of us if she dies, as I always fear when her face is like
+      that?” thought he, and placing himself before the icon he began to say his
+      evening prayers.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0353"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Natásha and Pierre, left alone, also began to talk as only a husband and
+      wife can talk, that is, with extraordinary clearness and rapidity,
+      understanding and expressing each other’s thoughts in ways contrary to all
+      rules of logic, without premises, deductions, or conclusions, and in a
+      quite peculiar way. Natásha was so used to this kind of talk with her
+      husband that for her it was the surest sign of something being wrong
+      between them if Pierre followed a line of logical reasoning. When he began
+      proving anything, or talking argumentatively and calmly and she, led on by
+      his example, began to do the same, she knew that they were on the verge of
+      a quarrel.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the moment they were alone and Natásha came up to him with wide-open
+      happy eyes, and quickly seizing his head pressed it to her bosom, saying:
+      “Now you are all mine, mine! You won’t escape!”—from that moment
+      this conversation began, contrary to all the laws of logic and contrary to
+      them because quite different subjects were talked about at one and the
+      same time. This simultaneous discussion of many topics did not prevent a
+      clear understanding but on the contrary was the surest sign that they
+      fully understood one another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just as in a dream when all is uncertain, unreasoning, and contradictory,
+      except the feeling that guides the dream, so in this intercourse contrary
+      to all laws of reason, the words themselves were not consecutive and clear
+      but only the feeling that prompted them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha spoke to Pierre about her brother’s life and doings, of how she
+      had suffered and lacked life during his own absence, and of how she was
+      fonder than ever of Mary, and how Mary was in every way better than
+      herself. In saying this Natásha was sincere in acknowledging Mary’s
+      superiority, but at the same time by saying it she made a demand on Pierre
+      that he should, all the same, prefer her to Mary and to all other women,
+      and that now, especially after having seen many women in Petersburg, he
+      should tell her so afresh.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre, answering Natásha’s words, told her how intolerable it had been
+      for him to meet ladies at dinners and balls in Petersburg.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I have quite lost the knack of talking to ladies,” he said. “It was
+      simply dull. Besides, I was very busy.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha looked intently at him and went on:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Mary is so splendid,” she said. “How she understands children! It is as
+      if she saw straight into their souls. Yesterday, for instance, Mítya was
+      naughty...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “How like his father he is,” Pierre interjected.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha knew why he mentioned Mítya’s likeness to Nicholas: the
+      recollection of his dispute with his brother-in-law was unpleasant and he
+      wanted to know what Natásha thought of it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Nicholas has the weakness of never agreeing with anything not generally
+      accepted. But I understand that you value what opens up a fresh line,”
+       said she, repeating words Pierre had once uttered.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, the chief point is that to Nicholas ideas and discussions are an
+      amusement—almost a pastime,” said Pierre. “For instance, he is
+      collecting a library and has made it a rule not to buy a new book till he
+      has read what he had already bought—Sismondi and Rousseau and
+      Montesquieu,” he added with a smile. “You know how much I...” he began to
+      soften down what he had said; but Natásha interrupted him to show that
+      this was unnecessary.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “So you say ideas are an amusement to him....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, and for me nothing else is serious. All the time in Petersburg I saw
+      everyone as in a dream. When I am taken up by a thought, all else is mere
+      amusement.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Ah, I’m so sorry I wasn’t there when you met the children,” said Natásha.
+      “Which was most delighted? Lisa, I’m sure.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes,” Pierre replied, and went on with what was in his mind. “Nicholas
+      says we ought not to think. But I can’t help it. Besides, when I was in
+      Petersburg I felt (I can say this to you) that the whole affair would go
+      to pieces without me—everyone was pulling his own way. But I
+      succeeded in uniting them all; and then my idea is so clear and simple.
+      You see, I don’t say that we ought to oppose this and that. We may be
+      mistaken. What I say is: ‘Join hands, you who love the right, and let
+      there be but one banner—that of active virtue.’ Prince Sergéy is a
+      fine fellow and clever.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Natásha would have had no doubt as to the greatness of Pierre’s idea, but
+      one thing disconcerted her. “Can a man so important and necessary to
+      society be also my husband? How did this happen?” She wished to express
+      this doubt to him. “Now who could decide whether he is really cleverer
+      than all the others?” she asked herself, and passed in review all those
+      whom Pierre most respected. Judging by what he had said there was no one
+      he had respected so highly as Platón Karatáev.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Do you know what I am thinking about?” she asked. “About Platón Karatáev.
+      Would he have approved of you now, do you think?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre was not at all surprised at this question. He understood his wife’s
+      line of thought.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Platón Karatáev?” he repeated, and pondered, evidently sincerely trying
+      to imagine Karatáev’s opinion on the subject. “He would not have
+      understood... yet perhaps he would.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I love you awfully!” Natásha suddenly said. “Awfully, awfully!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, he would not have approved,” said Pierre, after reflection. “What he
+      would have approved of is our family life. He was always so anxious to
+      find seemliness, happiness, and peace in everything, and I should have
+      been proud to let him see us. There now—you talk of my absence, but
+      you wouldn’t believe what a special feeling I have for you after a
+      separation....”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes, I should think...” Natásha began.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, it’s not that. I never leave off loving you. And one
+      couldn’t love more, but this is something special.... Yes, of
+      course—” he did not finish because their eyes meeting said the rest.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “What nonsense it is,” Natásha suddenly exclaimed, “about honeymoons, and
+      that the greatest happiness is at first! On the contrary, now is the best
+      of all. If only you did not go away! Do you remember how we quarreled? And
+      it was always my fault. Always mine. And what we quarreled about—I
+      don’t even remember!”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Always about the same thing,” said Pierre with a smile. “Jealo...”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Don’t say it! I can’t bear it!” Natásha cried, and her eyes glittered
+      coldly and vindictively. “Did you see her?” she added, after a pause.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No, and if I had I shouldn’t have recognized her.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They were silent for a while.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh, do you know? While you were talking in the study I was looking at
+      you,” Natásha began, evidently anxious to disperse the cloud that had come
+      over them. “You are as like him as two peas—like the boy.” (She
+      meant her little son.) “Oh, it’s time to go to him.... The milk’s come....
+      But I’m sorry to leave you.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      They were silent for a few seconds. Then suddenly turning to one another
+      at the same time they both began to speak. Pierre began with
+      self-satisfaction and enthusiasm, Natásha with a quiet, happy smile.
+      Having interrupted one another they both stopped to let the other
+      continue.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No. What did you say? Go on, go on.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “No, you go on, I was talking nonsense,” said Natásha.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Pierre finished what he had begun. It was the sequel to his complacent
+      reflections on his success in Petersburg. At that moment it seemed to him
+      that he was chosen to give a new direction to the whole of Russian society
+      and to the whole world.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “I only wished to say that ideas that have great results are always simple
+      ones. My whole idea is that if vicious people are united and constitute a
+      power, then honest folk must do the same. Now that’s simple enough.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Yes.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “And what were you going to say?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “I? Only nonsense.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “But all the same?”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      “Oh nothing, only a trifle,” said Natásha, smiling still more brightly.
+      “I only wanted to tell you about Pétya: today nurse was coming to take him
+      from me, and he laughed, shut his eyes, and clung to me. I’m sure he
+      thought he was hiding. Awfully sweet! There, now he’s crying. Well,
+      good-by!” and she left the room.
+    </p>
+<p>
+<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+      Meanwhile downstairs in young Nicholas Bolkónski’s bedroom a little lamp
+      was burning as usual. (The boy was afraid of the dark and they could not
+      cure him of it.) Dessalles slept propped up on four pillows and his Roman
+      nose emitted sounds of rhythmic snoring. Little Nicholas, who had just
+      waked up in a cold perspiration, sat up in bed and gazed before him with
+      wide-open eyes. He had awaked from a terrible dream. He had dreamed that
+      he and Uncle Pierre, wearing helmets such as were depicted in his
+      Plutarch, were leading a huge army. The army was made up of white slanting
+      lines that filled the air like the cobwebs that float about in autumn and
+      which Dessalles called <i>les fils de la Vièrge</i>. In front was Glory, which
+      was similar to those threads but rather thicker. He and Pierre were borne
+      along lightly and joyously, nearer and nearer to their goal. Suddenly the
+      threads that moved them began to slacken and become entangled and it grew
+      difficult to move. And Uncle Nicholas stood before them in a stern and
+      threatening attitude.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Have you done this?” he said, pointing to some broken sealing wax and
+      pens. “I loved you, but I have orders from Arakchéev and will kill the
+      first of you who moves forward.” Little Nicholas turned to look at Pierre
+      but Pierre was no longer there. In his place was his father—Prince
+      Andrew—and his father had neither shape nor form, but he existed,
+      and when little Nicholas perceived him he grew faint with love: he felt
+      himself powerless, limp, and formless. His father caressed and pitied him.
+      But Uncle Nicholas came nearer and nearer to them. Terror seized young
+      Nicholas and he awoke.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “My father!” he thought. (Though there were two good portraits of Prince
+      Andrew in the house, Nicholas never imagined him in human form.) “My
+      father has been with me and caressed me. He approved of me and of Uncle
+      Pierre. Whatever he may tell me, I will do it. Mucius Scaevola burned his
+      hand. Why should not the same sort of thing happen to me? I know they want
+      me to learn. And I will learn. But someday I shall have finished learning,
+      and then I will do something. I only pray God that something may happen to
+      me such as happened to Plutarch’s men, and I will act as they did. I will
+      do better. Everyone shall know me, love me, and be delighted with me!” And
+      suddenly his bosom heaved with sobs and he began to cry.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Are you ill?” he heard Dessalles’ voice asking.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “No,” answered Nicholas, and lay back on his pillow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “He is good and kind and I am fond of him!” he thought of Dessalles. “But
+      Uncle Pierre! Oh, what a wonderful man he is! And my father? Oh, Father,
+      Father! Yes, I will do something with which even <i>he</i> would be
+      satisfied....”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2H_4_0370"></a>
+      SECOND EPILOGUE
+    </h2>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0354"></a>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      History is the life of nations and of humanity. To seize and put into
+      words, to describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single
+      nation, appears impossible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The ancient historians all employed one and the same method to describe
+      and seize the apparently elusive—the life of a people. They
+      described the activity of individuals who ruled the people, and regarded
+      the activity of those men as representing the activity of the whole
+      nation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The question: how did individuals make nations act as they wished and by
+      what was the will of these individuals themselves guided? the ancients met
+      by recognizing a divinity which subjected the nations to the will of a
+      chosen man, and guided the will of that chosen man so as to accomplish
+      ends that were predestined.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For the ancients these questions were solved by a belief in the direct
+      participation of the Deity in human affairs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Modern history, in theory, rejects both these principles.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It would seem that having rejected the belief of the ancients in man’s
+      subjection to the Deity and in a predetermined aim toward which nations
+      are led, modern history should study not the manifestations of power but
+      the causes that produce it. But modern history has not done this. Having
+      in theory rejected the view held by the ancients, it still follows them in
+      practice.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Instead of men endowed with divine authority and directly guided by the
+      will of God, modern history has given us either heroes endowed with
+      extraordinary, superhuman capacities, or simply men of very various kinds,
+      from monarchs to journalists, who lead the masses. Instead of the former
+      divinely appointed aims of the Jewish, Greek, or Roman nations, which
+      ancient historians regarded as representing the progress of humanity,
+      modern history has postulated its own aims—the welfare of the
+      French, German, or English people, or, in its highest abstraction, the
+      welfare and civilization of humanity in general, by which is usually meant
+      that of the peoples occupying a small northwesterly portion of a large
+      continent.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Modern history has rejected the beliefs of the ancients without replacing
+      them by a new conception, and the logic of the situation has obliged the
+      historians, after they had apparently rejected the divine authority of the
+      kings and the “fate” of the ancients, to reach the same conclusion by
+      another road, that is, to recognize (1) nations guided by individual men,
+      and (2) the existence of a known aim to which these nations and humanity
+      at large are tending.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      At the basis of the works of all the modern historians from Gibbon to
+      Buckle, despite their seeming disagreements and the apparent novelty of
+      their outlooks, lie those two old, unavoidable assumptions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the first place the historian describes the activity of individuals who
+      in his opinion have directed humanity (one historian considers only
+      monarchs, generals, and ministers as being such men, while another
+      includes also orators, learned men, reformers, philosophers, and poets).
+      Secondly, it is assumed that the goal toward which humanity is being led
+      is known to the historians: to one of them this goal is the greatness of
+      the Roman, Spanish, or French realm; to another it is liberty, equality,
+      and a certain kind of civilization of a small corner of the world called
+      Europe.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In 1789 a ferment arises in Paris; it grows, spreads, and is expressed by
+      a movement of peoples from west to east. Several times it moves eastward
+      and collides with a countermovement from the east westward. In 1812 it
+      reaches its extreme limit, Moscow, and then, with remarkable symmetry, a
+      countermovement occurs from east to west, attracting to it, as the first
+      movement had done, the nations of middle Europe. The counter movement
+      reaches the starting point of the first movement in the west—Paris—and
+      subsides.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      During that twenty-year period an immense number of fields were left
+      untilled, houses were burned, trade changed its direction, millions of men
+      migrated, were impoverished, or were enriched, and millions of Christian
+      men professing the law of love of their fellows slew one another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      What does all this mean? Why did it happen? What made those people burn
+      houses and slay their fellow men? What were the causes of these events?
+      What force made men act so? These are the instinctive, plain, and most
+      legitimate questions humanity asks itself when it encounters the monuments
+      and tradition of that period.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For a reply to these questions the common sense of mankind turns to the
+      science of history, whose aim is to enable nations and humanity to know
+      themselves.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If history had retained the conception of the ancients it would have said
+      that God, to reward or punish his people, gave Napoleon power and directed
+      his will to the fulfillment of the divine ends, and that reply would have
+      been clear and complete. One might believe or disbelieve in the divine
+      significance of Napoleon, but for anyone believing in it there would have
+      been nothing unintelligible in the history of that period, nor would there
+      have been any contradictions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But modern history cannot give that reply. Science does not admit the
+      conception of the ancients as to the direct participation of the Deity in
+      human affairs, and therefore history ought to give other answers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Modern history replying to these questions says: you want to know what
+      this movement means, what caused it, and what force produced these events?
+      Then listen:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “Louis XIV was a very proud and self-confident man; he had such and such
+      mistresses and such and such ministers and he ruled France badly. His
+      descendants were weak men and they too ruled France badly. And they had
+      such and such favorites and such and such mistresses. Moreover, certain
+      men wrote some books at that time. At the end of the eighteenth century
+      there were a couple of dozen men in Paris who began to talk about all men
+      being free and equal. This caused people all over France to begin to slash
+      at and drown one another. They killed the king and many other people. At
+      that time there was in France a man of genius—Napoleon. He conquered
+      everybody everywhere—that is, he killed many people because he was a
+      great genius. And for some reason he went to kill Africans, and killed
+      them so well and was so cunning and wise that when he returned to France
+      he ordered everybody to obey him, and they all obeyed him. Having become
+      an Emperor he again went out to kill people in Italy, Austria, and
+      Prussia. And there too he killed a great many. In Russia there was an
+      Emperor, Alexander, who decided to restore order in Europe and therefore
+      fought against Napoleon. In 1807 he suddenly made friends with him, but in
+      1811 they again quarreled and again began killing many people. Napoleon
+      led six hundred thousand men into Russia and captured Moscow; then he
+      suddenly ran away from Moscow, and the Emperor Alexander, helped by the
+      advice of Stein and others, united Europe to arm against the disturber of
+      its peace. All Napoleon’s allies suddenly became his enemies and their
+      forces advanced against the fresh forces he raised. The Allies defeated
+      Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to abdicate, and sent him to the
+      island of Elba, not depriving him of the title of Emperor and showing him
+      every respect, though five years before and one year later they all
+      regarded him as an outlaw and a brigand. Then Louis XVIII, who till then
+      had been the laughingstock both of the French and the Allies, began to
+      reign. And Napoleon, shedding tears before his Old Guards, renounced the
+      throne and went into exile. Then the skillful statesmen and diplomatists
+      (especially Talleyrand, who managed to sit down in a particular chair
+      before anyone else and thereby extended the frontiers of France) talked in
+      Vienna and by these conversations made the nations happy or unhappy.
+      Suddenly the diplomatists and monarchs nearly quarreled and were on the
+      point of again ordering their armies to kill one another, but just then
+      Napoleon arrived in France with a battalion, and the French, who had been
+      hating him, immediately all submitted to him. But the Allied monarchs were
+      angry at this and went to fight the French once more. And they defeated
+      the genius Napoleon and, suddenly recognizing him as a brigand, sent him
+      to the island of St. Helena. And the exile, separated from the beloved
+      France so dear to his heart, died a lingering death on that rock and
+      bequeathed his great deeds to posterity. But in Europe a reaction occurred
+      and the sovereigns once again all began to oppress their subjects.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      It would be a mistake to think that this is ironic—a caricature of
+      the historical accounts. On the contrary it is a very mild expression of
+      the contradictory replies, not meeting the questions, which <i>all</i> the
+      historians give, from the compilers of memoirs and the histories of
+      separate states to the writers of general histories and the new histories
+      of the <i>culture</i> of that period.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The strangeness and absurdity of these replies arise from the fact that
+      modern history, like a deaf man, answers questions no one has asked.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If the purpose of history be to give a description of the movement of
+      humanity and of the peoples, the first question—in the absence of a
+      reply to which all the rest will be incomprehensible—is: what is the
+      power that moves peoples? To this, modern history laboriously replies
+      either that Napoleon was a great genius, or that Louis XIV was very proud,
+      or that certain writers wrote certain books.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All that may be so and mankind is ready to agree with it, but it is not
+      what was asked. All <i>that</i> would be interesting if we recognized a divine
+      power based on itself and always consistently directing its nations
+      through Napoleons, Louis-es, and writers; but we do not acknowledge such a
+      power, and therefore before speaking about Napoleons, Louis-es, and
+      authors, we ought to be shown the connection existing between these men
+      and the movement of the nations.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If instead of a divine power some other force has appeared, it should be
+      explained in what this new force consists, for the whole interest of
+      history lies precisely in that force.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      History seems to assume that this force is self-evident and known to
+      everyone. But in spite of every desire to regard it as known, anyone
+      reading many historical works cannot help doubting whether this new force,
+      so variously understood by the historians themselves, is really quite well
+      known to everybody.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0355"></a>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      What force moves the nations?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Biographical historians and historians of separate nations understand this
+      force as a power inherent in heroes and rulers. In their narration events
+      occur solely by the will of a Napoleon, and Alexander, or in general of
+      the persons they describe. The answers given by this kind of historian to
+      the question of what force causes events to happen are satisfactory only
+      as long as there is but one historian to each event. As soon as historians
+      of different nationalities and tendencies begin to describe the same
+      event, the replies they give immediately lose all meaning, for this force
+      is understood by them all not only differently but often in quite
+      contradictory ways. One historian says that an event was produced by
+      Napoleon’s power, another that it was produced by Alexander’s, a third
+      that it was due to the power of some other person. Besides this,
+      historians of that kind contradict each other even in their statement as
+      to the force on which the authority of some particular person was based.
+      Thiers, a Bonapartist, says that Napoleon’s power was based on his virtue
+      and genius. Lanfrey, a Republican, says it was based on his trickery and
+      deception of the people. So the historians of this class, by mutually
+      destroying one another’s positions, destroy the understanding of the force
+      which produces events, and furnish no reply to history’s essential
+      question.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Writers of universal history who deal with all the nations seem to
+      recognize how erroneous is the specialist historians’ view of the force
+      which produces events. They do not recognize it as a power inherent in
+      heroes and rulers, but as the resultant of a multiplicity of variously
+      directed forces. In describing a war or the subjugation of a people, a
+      general historian looks for the cause of the event not in the power of one
+      man, but in the interaction of many persons connected with the event.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      According to this view the power of historical personages, represented as
+      the product of many forces, can no longer, it would seem, be regarded as a
+      force that itself produces events. Yet in most cases universal historians
+      still employ the conception of power as a force that itself produces
+      events, and treat it as their cause. In their exposition, an historic
+      character is first the product of his time, and his power only the
+      resultant of various forces, and then his power is itself a force
+      producing events. Gervinus, Schlosser, and others, for instance, at one
+      time prove Napoleon to be a product of the Revolution, of the ideas of
+      1789 and so forth, and at another plainly say that the campaign of 1812
+      and other things they do not like were simply the product of Napoleon’s
+      misdirected will, and that the very ideas of 1789 were arrested in their
+      development by Napoleon’s caprice. The ideas of the Revolution and the
+      general temper of the age produced Napoleon’s power. But Napoleon’s power
+      suppressed the ideas of the Revolution and the general temper of the age.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This curious contradiction is not accidental. Not only does it occur at
+      every step, but the universal historians’ accounts are all made up of a
+      chain of such contradictions. This contradiction occurs because after
+      entering the field of analysis the universal historians stop halfway.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To find component forces equal to the composite or resultant force, the
+      sum of the components must equal the resultant. This condition is never
+      observed by the universal historians, and so to explain the resultant
+      forces they are obliged to admit, in addition to the insufficient
+      components, another unexplained force affecting the resultant action.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Specialist historians describing the campaign of 1813 or the restoration
+      of the Bourbons plainly assert that these events were produced by the will
+      of Alexander. But the universal historian Gervinus, refuting this opinion
+      of the specialist historian, tries to prove that the campaign of 1813 and
+      the restoration of the Bourbons were due to other things beside
+      Alexander’s will—such as the activity of Stein, Metternich, Madame
+      de Staël, Talleyrand, Fichte, Chateaubriand, and others. The historian
+      evidently decomposes Alexander’s power into the components: Talleyrand,
+      Chateaubriand, and the rest—but the sum of the components, that is,
+      the interactions of Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Madame de Staël, and the
+      others, evidently does not equal the resultant, namely the phenomenon of
+      millions of Frenchmen submitting to the Bourbons. That Chateaubriand,
+      Madame de Staël, and others spoke certain words to one another only
+      affected their mutual relations but does not account for the submission of
+      millions. And therefore to explain how from these relations of theirs the
+      submission of millions of people resulted—that is, how component
+      forces equal to one <i>A</i> gave a resultant equal to a thousand times
+      <i>A</i>—the historian is again obliged to fall back on power—the
+      force he had denied—and to recognize it as the resultant of the forces,
+      that is, he has to admit an unexplained force acting on the resultant. And
+      that is just what the universal historians do, and consequently they not only
+      contradict the specialist historians but contradict themselves.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Peasants having no clear idea of the cause of rain, say, according to
+      whether they want rain or fine weather: “The wind has blown the clouds
+      away,” or, “The wind has brought up the clouds.” And in the same way the
+      universal historians sometimes, when it pleases them and fits in with
+      their theory, say that power is the result of events, and sometimes, when
+      they want to prove something else, say that power produces events.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A third class of historians—the so-called historians of culture—following
+      the path laid down by the universal historians who sometimes accept
+      writers and ladies as forces producing events—again take that force
+      to be something quite different. They see it in what is called culture—in
+      mental activity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The historians of culture are quite consistent in regard to their
+      progenitors, the writers of universal histories, for if historical events
+      may be explained by the fact that certain persons treated one another in
+      such and such ways, why not explain them by the fact that such and such
+      people wrote such and such books? Of the immense number of indications
+      accompanying every vital phenomenon, these historians select the
+      indication of intellectual activity and say that this indication is the
+      cause. But despite their endeavors to prove that the cause of events lies
+      in intellectual activity, only by a great stretch can one admit that there
+      is any connection between intellectual activity and the movement of
+      peoples, and in no case can one admit that intellectual activity controls
+      people’s actions, for that view is not confirmed by such facts as the very
+      cruel murders of the French Revolution resulting from the doctrine of the
+      equality of man, or the very cruel wars and executions resulting from the
+      preaching of love.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But even admitting as correct all the cunningly devised arguments with
+      which these histories are filled—admitting that nations are governed
+      by some undefined force called an <i>idea</i>—history’s essential question
+      still remains unanswered, and to the former power of monarchs and to the
+      influence of advisers and other people introduced by the universal
+      historians, another, newer force—the <i>idea</i>—is added, the
+      connection of which with the masses needs explanation. It is possible to
+      understand that Napoleon had power and so events occurred; with some
+      effort one may even conceive that Napoleon together with other influences
+      was the cause of an event; but how a book, <i>Le Contrat Social</i>, had the
+      effect of making Frenchmen begin to drown one another cannot be understood
+      without an explanation of the causal nexus of this new force with the
+      event.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Undoubtedly some relation exists between all who live contemporaneously,
+      and so it is possible to find some connection between the intellectual
+      activity of men and their historical movements, just as such a connection
+      may be found between the movements of humanity and commerce, handicraft,
+      gardening, or anything else you please. But why intellectual activity is
+      considered by the historians of culture to be the cause or expression of
+      the whole historical movement is hard to understand. Only the following
+      considerations can have led the historians to such a conclusion: (1) that
+      history is written by learned men, and so it is natural and agreeable for
+      them to think that the activity of their class supplies the basis of the
+      movement of all humanity, just as a similar belief is natural and
+      agreeable to traders, agriculturists, and soldiers (if they do not express
+      it, that is merely because traders and soldiers do not write history), and
+      (2) that spiritual activity, enlightenment, civilization, culture, ideas,
+      are all indistinct, indefinite conceptions under whose banner it is very
+      easy to use words having a still less definite meaning, and which can
+      therefore be readily introduced into any theory.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But not to speak of the intrinsic quality of histories of this kind (which
+      may possibly even be of use to someone for something) the histories of
+      culture, to which all general histories tend more and more to approximate,
+      are significant from the fact that after seriously and minutely examining
+      various religious, philosophic, and political doctrines as causes of
+      events, as soon as they have to describe an actual historic event such as
+      the campaign of 1812 for instance, they involuntarily describe it as
+      resulting from an exercise of power—and say plainly that that was
+      the result of Napoleon’s will. Speaking so, the historians of culture
+      involuntarily contradict themselves, and show that the new force they have
+      devised does not account for what happens in history, and that history can
+      only be explained by introducing a power which they apparently do not
+      recognize.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0356"></a>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      A locomotive is moving. Someone asks: “What moves it?” A peasant says the
+      devil moves it. Another man says the locomotive moves because its wheels
+      go round. A third asserts that the cause of its movement lies in the smoke
+      which the wind carries away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The peasant is irrefutable. He has devised a complete explanation. To
+      refute him someone would have to prove to him that there is no devil, or
+      another peasant would have to explain to him that it is not the devil but
+      a German, who moves the locomotive. Only then, as a result of the
+      contradiction, will they see that they are both wrong. But the man who
+      says that the movement of the wheels is the cause refutes himself, for
+      having once begun to analyze he ought to go on and explain further why the
+      wheels go round; and till he has reached the ultimate cause of the
+      movement of the locomotive in the pressure of steam in the boiler, he has
+      no right to stop in his search for the cause. The man who explains the
+      movement of the locomotive by the smoke that is carried back has noticed
+      that the wheels do not supply an explanation and has taken the first sign
+      that occurs to him and in his turn has offered that as an explanation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The only conception that can explain the movement of the locomotive is
+      that of a force commensurate with the movement observed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The only conception that can explain the movement of the peoples is that
+      of some force commensurate with the whole movement of the peoples.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Yet to supply this conception various historians take forces of different
+      kinds, all of which are incommensurate with the movement observed. Some
+      see it as a force directly inherent in heroes, as the peasant sees the
+      devil in the locomotive; others as a force resulting from several other
+      forces, like the movement of the wheels; others again as an intellectual
+      influence, like the smoke that is blown away.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      So long as histories are written of separate individuals, whether Caesars,
+      Alexanders, Luthers, or Voltaires, and not the histories of <i>all</i>,
+      absolutely <i>all</i> those who take part in an event, it is quite impossible to
+      describe the movement of humanity without the conception of a force
+      compelling men to direct their activity toward a certain end. And the only
+      such conception known to historians is that of power.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This conception is the one handle by means of which the material of
+      history, as at present expounded, can be dealt with, and anyone who breaks
+      that handle off, as Buckle did, without finding some other method of
+      treating historical material, merely deprives himself of the one possible
+      way of dealing with it. The necessity of the conception of power as an
+      explanation of historical events is best demonstrated by the universal
+      historians and historians of culture themselves, for they professedly
+      reject that conception but inevitably have recourse to it at every step.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In dealing with humanity’s inquiry, the science of history up to now is
+      like money in circulation—paper money and coin. The biographies and
+      special national histories are like paper money. They can be used and can
+      circulate and fulfill their purpose without harm to anyone and even
+      advantageously, as long as no one asks what is the security behind them.
+      You need only forget to ask how the will of heroes produces events, and
+      such histories as Thiers’ will be interesting and instructive and may
+      perhaps even possess a tinge of poetry. But just as doubts of the real
+      value of paper money arise either because, being easy to make, too much of
+      it gets made or because people try to exchange it for gold, so also doubts
+      concerning the real value of such histories arise either because too many
+      of them are written or because in his simplicity of heart someone
+      inquires: by what force did Napoleon do this?—that is, wants to
+      exchange the current paper money for the real gold of actual
+      comprehension.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The writers of universal histories and of the history of culture are like
+      people who, recognizing the defects of paper money, decide to substitute
+      for it money made of metal that has not the specific gravity of gold. It
+      may indeed make jingling coin, but will do no more than that. Paper money
+      may deceive the ignorant, but nobody is deceived by tokens of base metal
+      that have no value but merely jingle. As gold is gold only if it is
+      serviceable not merely for exchange but also for use, so universal
+      historians will be valuable only when they can reply to history’s
+      essential question: what is power? The universal historians give
+      contradictory replies to that question, while the historians of culture
+      evade it and answer something quite different. And as counters of
+      imitation gold can be used only among a group of people who agree to
+      accept them as gold, or among those who do not know the nature of gold, so
+      universal historians and historians of culture, not answering humanity’s
+      essential question, serve as currency for some purposes of their own, only
+      in universities and among the mass of readers who have a taste for what
+      they call “serious reading.”
+     </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0357"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Having abandoned the conception of the ancients as to the divine
+      subjection of the will of a nation to some chosen man and the subjection
+      of that man’s will to the Deity, history cannot without contradictions
+      take a single step till it has chosen one of two things: either a return
+      to the former belief in the direct intervention of the Deity in human
+      affairs or a definite explanation of the meaning of the force producing
+      historical events and termed “power.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      A return to the first is impossible, the belief has been destroyed; and so
+      it is essential to explain what is meant by power.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Napoleon ordered an army to be raised and go to war. We are so accustomed
+      to that idea and have become so used to it that the question: why did six
+      hundred thousand men go to fight when Napoleon uttered certain words,
+      seems to us senseless. He had the power and so what he ordered was done.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This reply is quite satisfactory if we believe that the power was given
+      him by God. But as soon as we do not admit that, it becomes essential to
+      determine what is this power of one man over others.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      It cannot be the direct physical power of a strong man over a weak one—a
+      domination based on the application or threat of physical force, like the
+      power of Hercules; nor can it be based on the effect of moral force, as in
+      their simplicity some historians think who say that the leading figures in
+      history are heroes, that is, men gifted with a special strength of soul
+      and mind called genius. This power cannot be based on the predominance of
+      moral strength, for, not to mention heroes such as Napoleon about whose
+      moral qualities opinions differ widely, history shows us that neither a
+      Louis XI nor a Metternich, who ruled over millions of people, had any
+      particular moral qualities, but on the contrary were generally morally
+      weaker than any of the millions they ruled over.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If the source of power lies neither in the physical nor in the moral
+      qualities of him who possesses it, it must evidently be looked for
+      elsewhere—in the relation to the people of the man who wields the
+      power.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And that is how power is understood by the science of jurisprudence, that
+      exchange bank of history which offers to exchange history’s understanding
+      of power for true gold.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Power is the collective will of the people transferred, by expressed or
+      tacit consent, to their chosen rulers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the domain of jurisprudence, which consists of discussions of how a
+      state and power might be arranged were it possible for all that to be
+      arranged, it is all very clear; but when applied to history that
+      definition of power needs explanation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The science of jurisprudence regards the state and power as the ancients
+      regarded fire—namely, as something existing absolutely. But for
+      history, the state and power are merely phenomena, just as for modern
+      physics fire is not an element but a phenomenon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From this fundamental difference between the view held by history and that
+      held by jurisprudence, it follows that jurisprudence can tell minutely how
+      in its opinion power should be constituted and what power—existing
+      immutably outside time—is, but to history’s questions about the
+      meaning of the mutations of power <i>in</i> time it can answer nothing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If power be the collective will of the people transferred to their ruler,
+      was Pugachëv a representative of the will of the people? If not, then why
+      was Napoleon I? Why was Napoleon III a criminal when he was taken prisoner
+      at Boulogne, and why, later on, were those criminals whom he arrested?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Do palace revolutions—in which sometimes only two or three people
+      take part—transfer the will of the people to a new ruler? In
+      international relations, is the will of the people also transferred to
+      their conqueror? Was the will of the Confederation of the Rhine
+      transferred to Napoleon in 1806? Was the will of the Russian people
+      transferred to Napoleon in 1809, when our army in alliance with the French
+      went to fight the Austrians?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To these questions three answers are possible:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Either to assume (1) that the will of the people is always unconditionally
+      transferred to the ruler or rulers they have chosen, and that therefore
+      every emergence of a new power, every struggle against the power once
+      appointed, should be absolutely regarded as an infringement of the real
+      power; or (2) that the will of the people is transferred to the rulers
+      conditionally, under definite and known conditions, and to show that all
+      limitations, conflicts, and even destructions of power result from a
+      nonobservance by the rulers of the conditions under which their power was
+      entrusted to them; or (3) that the will of the people is delegated to the
+      rulers conditionally, but that the conditions are unknown and indefinite,
+      and that the appearance of several authorities, their struggles and their
+      falls, result solely from the greater or lesser fulfillment by the rulers
+      of these unknown conditions on which the will of the people is transferred
+      from some people to others.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And these are the three ways in which the historians do explain the
+      relation of the people to their rulers.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Some historians—those biographical and specialist historians already
+      referred to—in their simplicity failing to understand the question
+      of the meaning of power, seem to consider that the collective will of the
+      people is unconditionally transferred to historical persons, and therefore
+      when describing some single state they assume that particular power to be
+      the one absolute and real power, and that any other force opposing this is
+      not a power but a violation of power—mere violence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Their theory, suitable for primitive and peaceful periods of history, has
+      the inconvenience—in application to complex and stormy periods in
+      the life of nations during which various powers arise simultaneously and
+      struggle with one another—that a Legitimist historian will prove
+      that the National Convention, the Directory, and Bonaparte were mere
+      infringers of the true power, while a Republican and a Bonapartist will
+      prove: the one that the Convention and the other that the Empire was the
+      real power, and that all the others were violations of power. Evidently
+      the explanations furnished by these historians being mutually
+      contradictory can only satisfy young children.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Recognizing the falsity of this view of history, another set of historians
+      say that power rests on a conditional delegation of the will of the people
+      to their rulers, and that historical leaders have power only conditionally
+      on carrying out the program that the will of the people has by tacit
+      agreement prescribed to them. But what this program consists in these
+      historians do not say, or if they do they continually contradict one
+      another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Each historian, according to his view of what constitutes a nation’s
+      progress, looks for these conditions in the greatness, wealth, freedom, or
+      enlightenment of citizens of France or some other country. But not to
+      mention the historians’ contradictions as to the nature of this program—or
+      even admitting that some one general program of these conditions exists—the
+      facts of history almost always contradict that theory. If the conditions
+      under which power is entrusted consist in the wealth, freedom, and
+      enlightenment of the people, how is it that Louis XIV and Iván the
+      Terrible end their reigns tranquilly, while Louis XVI and Charles I are
+      executed by their people? To this question historians reply that Louis
+      XIV’s activity, contrary to the program, reacted on Louis XVI. But why did
+      it not react on Louis XIV or on Louis XV—why should it react just on
+      Louis XVI? And what is the time limit for such reactions? To these
+      questions there are and can be no answers. Equally little does this view
+      explain why for several centuries the collective will is not withdrawn
+      from certain rulers and their heirs, and then suddenly during a period of
+      fifty years is transferred to the Convention, to the Directory, to
+      Napoleon, to Alexander, to Louis XVIII, to Napoleon again, to Charles X,
+      to Louis Philippe, to a Republican government, and to Napoleon III. When
+      explaining these rapid transfers of the people’s will from one individual
+      to another, especially in view of international relations, conquests, and
+      alliances, the historians are obliged to admit that some of these
+      transfers are not normal delegations of the people’s will but are
+      accidents dependent on cunning, on mistakes, on craft, or on the weakness
+      of a diplomatist, a ruler, or a party leader. So that the greater part of
+      the events of history—civil wars, revolutions, and conquests—are
+      presented by these historians not as the results of free transferences of
+      the people’s will, but as results of the ill-directed will of one or more
+      individuals, that is, once again, as usurpations of power. And so these
+      historians also see and admit historical events which are exceptions to
+      the theory.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      These historians resemble a botanist who, having noticed that some plants
+      grow from seeds producing two cotyledons, should insist that all that
+      grows does so by sprouting into two leaves, and that the palm, the
+      mushroom, and even the oak, which blossom into full growth and no longer
+      resemble two leaves, are deviations from the theory.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Historians of the third class assume that the will of the people is
+      transferred to historic personages conditionally, but that the conditions
+      are unknown to us. They say that historical personages have power only
+      because they fulfill the will of the people which has been delegated to
+      them.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But in that case, if the force that moves nations lies not in the historic
+      leaders but in the nations themselves, what significance have those
+      leaders?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The leaders, these historians tell us, express the will of the people: the
+      activity of the leaders represents the activity of the people.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But in that case the question arises whether all the activity of the
+      leaders serves as an expression of the people’s will or only some part of
+      it. If the whole activity of the leaders serves as the expression of the
+      people’s will, as some historians suppose, then all the details of the
+      court scandals contained in the biographies of a Napoleon or a Catherine
+      serve to express the life of the nation, which is evident nonsense; but if
+      it is only some particular side of the activity of an historical leader
+      which serves to express the people’s life, as other so-called
+      “philosophical” historians believe, then to determine which side of the
+      activity of a leader expresses the nation’s life, we have first of all to
+      know in what the nation’s life consists.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Met by this difficulty historians of that class devise some most obscure,
+      impalpable, and general abstraction which can cover all conceivable
+      occurrences, and declare this abstraction to be the aim of humanity’s
+      movement. The most usual generalizations adopted by almost all the
+      historians are: freedom, equality, enlightenment, progress, civilization,
+      and culture. Postulating some generalization as the goal of the movement
+      of humanity, the historians study the men of whom the greatest number of
+      monuments have remained: kings, ministers, generals, authors, reformers,
+      popes, and journalists, to the extent to which in their opinion these
+      persons have promoted or hindered that abstraction. But as it is in no way
+      proved that the aim of humanity does consist in freedom, equality,
+      enlightenment, or civilization, and as the connection of the people with
+      the rulers and enlighteners of humanity is only based on the arbitrary
+      assumption that the collective will of the people is always transferred to
+      the men whom we have noticed, it happens that the activity of the millions
+      who migrate, burn houses, abandon agriculture, and destroy one another
+      never is expressed in the account of the activity of some dozen people who
+      did not burn houses, practice agriculture, or slay their fellow creatures.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      History proves this at every turn. Is the ferment of the peoples of the
+      west at the end of the eighteenth century and their drive eastward
+      explained by the activity of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI, their mistresses and
+      ministers, and by the lives of Napoleon, Rousseau, Diderot, Beaumarchais,
+      and others?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Is the movement of the Russian people eastward to Kazán and Siberia
+      expressed by details of the morbid character of Iván the Terrible and by
+      his correspondence with Kúrbski?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Is the movement of the peoples at the time of the Crusades explained by
+      the life and activity of the Godfreys and the Louis-es and their ladies?
+      For us that movement of the peoples from west to east, without leaders,
+      with a crowd of vagrants, and with Peter the Hermit, remains
+      incomprehensible. And yet more incomprehensible is the cessation of that
+      movement when a rational and sacred aim for the Crusade—the
+      deliverance of Jerusalem—had been clearly defined by historic
+      leaders. Popes, kings, and knights incited the peoples to free the Holy
+      Land; but the people did not go, for the unknown cause which had
+      previously impelled them to go no longer existed. The history of the
+      Godfreys and the Minnesingers can evidently not cover the life of the
+      peoples. And the history of the Godfreys and the Minnesingers has remained
+      the history of Godfreys and Minnesingers, but the history of the life of
+      the peoples and their impulses has remained unknown.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Still less does the history of authors and reformers explain to us the
+      life of the peoples.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The history of culture explains to us the impulses and conditions of life
+      and thought of a writer or a reformer. We learn that Luther had a hot
+      temper and said such and such things; we learn that Rousseau was
+      suspicious and wrote such and such books; but we do not learn why after
+      the Reformation the peoples massacred one another, nor why during the
+      French Revolution they guillotined one another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If we unite both these kinds of history, as is done by the newest
+      historians, we shall have the history of monarchs and writers, but not the
+      history of the life of the peoples.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0358"></a>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      The life of the nations is not contained in the lives of a few men, for
+      the connection between those men and the nations has not been found. The
+      theory that this connection is based on the transference of the collective
+      will of a people to certain historical personages is an hypothesis
+      unconfirmed by the experience of history.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The theory of the transference of the collective will of the people to
+      historic persons may perhaps explain much in the domain of jurisprudence
+      and be essential for its purposes, but in its application to history, as
+      soon as revolutions, conquests, or civil wars occur—that is, as soon
+      as history begins—that theory explains nothing.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The theory seems irrefutable just because the act of transference of the
+      people’s will cannot be verified, for it never occurred.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Whatever happens and whoever may stand at the head of affairs, the theory
+      can always say that such and such a person took the lead because the
+      collective will was transferred to him.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The replies this theory gives to historical questions are like the replies
+      of a man who, watching the movements of a herd of cattle and paying no
+      attention to the varying quality of the pasturage in different parts of
+      the field, or to the driving of the herdsman, should attribute the
+      direction the herd takes to what animal happens to be at its head.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “The herd goes in that direction because the animal in front leads it and
+      the collective will of all the other animals is vested in that leader.”
+       This is what historians of the first class say—those who assume the
+      unconditional transference of the people’s will.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If the animals leading the herd change, this happens because the
+      collective will of all the animals is transferred from one leader to
+      another, according to whether the animal is or is not leading them in the
+      direction selected by the whole herd.” Such is the reply historians who
+      assume that the collective will of the people is delegated to rulers under
+      conditions which they regard as known. (With this method of observation it
+      often happens that the observer, influenced by the direction he himself
+      prefers, regards those as leaders who, owing to the people’s change of
+      direction, are no longer in front, but on one side, or even in the rear.)
+    </p>
+<p>
+      “If the animals in front are continually changing and the direction of the
+      whole herd is constantly altered, this is because in order to follow a
+      given direction the animals transfer their will to the animals that have
+      attracted our attention, and to study the movements of the herd we must
+      watch the movements of all the prominent animals moving on all sides of
+      the herd.” So say the third class of historians who regard all historical
+      persons, from monarchs to journalists, as the expression of their age.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The theory of the transference of the will of the people to historic
+      persons is merely a paraphrase—a restatement of the question in
+      other words.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      What causes historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the
+      collective will of the people transferred to one person. Under what
+      condition is the will of the people delegated to one person? On condition
+      that that person expresses the will of the whole people. That is, power is
+      power: in other words, power is a word the meaning of which we do not
+      understand.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If the realm of human knowledge were confined to abstract reasoning, then
+      having subjected to criticism the explanation of “power” that juridical
+      science gives us, humanity would conclude that power is merely a word and
+      has no real existence. But to understand phenomena man has, besides
+      abstract reasoning, experience by which he verifies his reflections. And
+      experience tells us that power is not merely a word but an actually
+      existing phenomenon.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Not to speak of the fact that no description of the collective activity of
+      men can do without the conception of power, the existence of power is
+      proved both by history and by observing contemporary events.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Whenever an event occurs a man appears or men appear, by whose will the
+      event seems to have taken place. Napoleon III issues a decree and the
+      French go to Mexico. The King of Prussia and Bismarck issue decrees and an
+      army enters Bohemia. Napoleon I issues a decree and an army enters Russia.
+      Alexander I gives a command and the French submit to the Bourbons.
+      Experience shows us that whatever event occurs it is always related to the
+      will of one or of several men who have decreed it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The historians, in accord with the old habit of acknowledging divine
+      intervention in human affairs, want to see the cause of events in the
+      expression of the will of someone endowed with power, but that supposition
+      is not confirmed either by reason or by experience.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On the one side reflection shows that the expression of a man’s will—his
+      words—are only part of the general activity expressed in an event,
+      as for instance in a war or a revolution, and so without assuming an
+      incomprehensible, supernatural force—a miracle—one cannot
+      admit that words can be the immediate cause of the movements of millions
+      of men. On the other hand, even if we admitted that words could be the
+      cause of events, history shows that the expression of the will of
+      historical personages does not in most cases produce any effect, that is
+      to say, their commands are often not executed, and sometimes the very
+      opposite of what they order occurs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Without admitting divine intervention in the affairs of humanity we cannot
+      regard “power” as the cause of events.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Power, from the standpoint of experience, is merely the relation that
+      exists between the expression of someone’s will and the execution of that
+      will by others.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To explain the conditions of that relationship we must first establish a
+      conception of the expression of will, referring it to man and not to the
+      Deity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If the Deity issues a command, expresses His will, as ancient history
+      tells us, the expression of that will is independent of time and is not
+      caused by anything, for the Divinity is not controlled by an event. But
+      speaking of commands that are the expression of the will of men acting in
+      time and in relation to one another, to explain the connection of commands
+      with events we must restore: (1) the condition of all that takes place:
+      the continuity of movement in time both of the events and of the person
+      who commands, and (2) the inevitability of the connection between the
+      person commanding and those who execute his command.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0359"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Only the expression of the will of the Deity, not dependent on time, can
+      relate to a whole series of events occurring over a period of years or
+      centuries, and only the Deity, independent of everything, can by His sole
+      will determine the direction of humanity’s movement; but man acts in time
+      and himself takes part in what occurs.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Reinstating the first condition omitted, that of time, we see that no
+      command can be executed without some preceding order having been given
+      rendering the execution of the last command possible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      No command ever appears spontaneously, or itself covers a whole series of
+      occurrences; but each command follows from another, and never refers to a
+      whole series of events but always to one moment only of an event.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When, for instance, we say that Napoleon ordered armies to go to war, we
+      combine in one simultaneous expression a whole series of consecutive
+      commands dependent one on another. Napoleon could not have commanded an
+      invasion of Russia and never did so. Today he ordered such and such papers
+      to be written to Vienna, to Berlin, and to Petersburg; tomorrow such and
+      such decrees and orders to the army, the fleet, the commissariat, and so
+      on and so on—millions of commands, which formed a whole series
+      corresponding to a series of events which brought the French armies into
+      Russia.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If throughout his reign Napoleon gave commands concerning an invasion of
+      England and expended on no other undertaking so much time and effort, and
+      yet during his whole reign never once attempted to execute that design but
+      undertook an expedition into Russia, with which country he considered it
+      desirable to be in alliance (a conviction he repeatedly expressed)—this
+      came about because his commands did not correspond to the course of events
+      in the first case, but did so correspond in the latter.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For an order to be certainly executed, it is necessary that a man should
+      order what can be executed. But to know what can and what cannot be
+      executed is impossible, not only in the case of Napoleon’s invasion of
+      Russia in which millions participated, but even in the simplest event, for
+      in either case millions of obstacles may arise to prevent its execution.
+      Every order executed is always one of an immense number unexecuted. All
+      the impossible orders inconsistent with the course of events remain
+      unexecuted. Only the possible ones get linked up with a consecutive series
+      of commands corresponding to a series of events, and are executed.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Our false conception that an event is caused by a command which precedes
+      it is due to the fact that when the event has taken place and out of
+      thousands of others those few commands which were consistent with that
+      event have been executed, we forget about the others that were not
+      executed because they could not be. Apart from that, the chief source of
+      our error in this matter is due to the fact that in the historical
+      accounts a whole series of innumerable, diverse, and petty events, such
+      for instance as all those which led the French armies to Russia, is
+      generalized into one event in accord with the result produced by that
+      series of events, and corresponding with this generalization the whole
+      series of commands is also generalized into a single expression of will.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      We say that Napoleon wished to invade Russia and invaded it. In reality in
+      all Napoleon’s activity we never find anything resembling an expression of
+      that wish, but find a series of orders, or expressions of his will, very
+      variously and indefinitely directed. Amid a long series of unexecuted
+      orders of Napoleon’s one series, for the campaign of 1812, was carried out—not
+      because those orders differed in any way from the other, unexecuted orders
+      but because they coincided with the course of events that led the French
+      army into Russia; just as in stencil work this or that figure comes out
+      not because the color was laid on from this side or in that way, but
+      because it was laid on from all sides over the figure cut in the stencil.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      So that examining the relation in time of the commands to the events, we
+      find that a command can never be the cause of the event, but that a
+      certain definite dependence exists between the two.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To understand in what this dependence consists it is necessary to
+      reinstate another omitted condition of every command proceeding not from
+      the Deity but from a man, which is, that the man who gives the command
+      himself takes part in the event.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This relation of the commander to those he commands is just what is called
+      power. This relation consists in the following:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For common action people always unite in certain combinations, in which
+      regardless of the difference of the aims set for the common action, the
+      relation between those taking part in it is always the same.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Men uniting in these combinations always assume such relations toward one
+      another that the larger number take a more direct share, and the smaller
+      number a less direct share, in the collective action for which they have
+      combined.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Of all the combinations in which men unite for collective action one of
+      the most striking and definite examples is an army.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Every army is composed of lower grades of the service—the rank and
+      file—of whom there are always the greatest number; of the next
+      higher military rank—corporals and noncommissioned officers of whom
+      there are fewer, and of still-higher officers of whom there are still
+      fewer, and so on to the highest military command which is concentrated in
+      one person.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A military organization may be quite correctly compared to a cone, of
+      which the base with the largest diameter consists of the rank and file;
+      the next higher and smaller section of the cone consists of the next
+      higher grades of the army, and so on to the apex, the point of which will
+      represent the commander in chief.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The soldiers, of whom there are the most, form the lower section of the
+      cone and its base. The soldier himself does the stabbing, hacking,
+      burning, and pillaging, and always receives orders for these actions from
+      men above him; he himself never gives an order. The noncommissioned
+      officers (of whom there are fewer) perform the action itself less
+      frequently than the soldiers, but they already give commands. An officer
+      still less often acts directly himself, but commands still more
+      frequently. A general does nothing but command the troops, indicates the
+      objective, and hardly ever uses a weapon himself. The commander in chief
+      never takes direct part in the action itself, but only gives general
+      orders concerning the movement of the mass of the troops. A similar
+      relation of people to one another is seen in every combination of men for
+      common activity—in agriculture, trade, and every administration.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And so without particularly analyzing all the contiguous sections of a
+      cone and of the ranks of an army, or the ranks and positions in any
+      administrative or public business whatever from the lowest to the highest,
+      we see a law by which men, to take associated action, combine in such
+      relations that the more directly they participate in performing the action
+      the less they can command and the more numerous they are, while the less
+      their direct participation in the action itself, the more they command and
+      the fewer of them there are; rising in this way from the lowest ranks to
+      the man at the top, who takes the least direct share in the action and
+      directs his activity chiefly to commanding.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This relation of the men who command to those they command is what
+      constitutes the essence of the conception called power.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Having restored the condition of time under which all events occur, we
+      find that a command is executed only when it is related to a corresponding
+      series of events. Restoring the essential condition of relation between
+      those who command and those who execute, we find that by the very nature
+      of the case those who command take the smallest part in the action itself
+      and that their activity is exclusively directed to commanding.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0360"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      When an event is taking place people express their opinions and wishes
+      about it, and as the event results from the collective activity of many
+      people, some one of the opinions or wishes expressed is sure to be
+      fulfilled if but approximately. When one of the opinions expressed is
+      fulfilled, that opinion gets connected with the event as a command
+      preceding it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Men are hauling a log. Each of them expresses his opinion as to how and
+      where to haul it. They haul the log away, and it happens that this is done
+      as one of them said. He <i>ordered</i> it. There we have command and power in
+      their primary form. The man who worked most with his hands could not think
+      so much about what he was doing, or reflect on or command what would
+      result from the common activity; while the man who commanded more would
+      evidently work less with his hands on account of his greater verbal
+      activity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When some larger concourse of men direct their activity to a common aim
+      there is a yet sharper division of those who, because their activity is
+      given to directing and commanding, take less part in the direct work.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When a man works alone he always has a certain set of reflections which as
+      it seems to him directed his past activity, justify his present activity,
+      and guide him in planning his future actions. Just the same is done by a
+      concourse of people, allowing those who do not take a direct part in the
+      activity to devise considerations, justifications, and surmises concerning
+      their collective activity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For reasons known or unknown to us the French began to drown and kill one
+      another. And corresponding to the event its justification appears in
+      people’s belief that this was necessary for the welfare of France, for
+      liberty, and for equality. People ceased to kill one another, and this
+      event was accompanied by its justification in the necessity for a
+      centralization of power, resistance to Europe, and so on. Men went from
+      the west to the east killing their fellow men, and the event was
+      accompanied by phrases about the glory of France, the baseness of England,
+      and so on. History shows us that these justifications of the events have
+      no common sense and are all contradictory, as in the case of killing a man
+      as the result of recognizing his rights, and the killing of millions in
+      Russia for the humiliation of England. But these justifications have a
+      very necessary significance in their own day.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      These justifications release those who produce the events from moral
+      responsibility. These temporary aims are like the broom fixed in front of
+      a locomotive to clear the snow from the rails in front: they clear men’s
+      moral responsibilities from their path.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Without such justification there would be no reply to the simplest
+      question that presents itself when examining each historical event. How is
+      it that millions of men commit collective crimes—make war, commit
+      murder, and so on?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      With the present complex forms of political and social life in Europe can
+      any event that is not prescribed, decreed, or ordered by monarchs,
+      ministers, parliaments, or newspapers be imagined? Is there any collective
+      action which cannot find its justification in political unity, in
+      patriotism, in the balance of power, or in civilization? So that every
+      event that occurs inevitably coincides with some expressed wish and,
+      receiving a justification, presents itself as the result of the will of
+      one man or of several men.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In whatever direction a ship moves, the flow of the waves it cuts will
+      always be noticeable ahead of it. To those on board the ship the movement
+      of those waves will be the only perceptible motion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only by watching closely moment by moment the movement of that flow and
+      comparing it with the movement of the ship do we convince ourselves that
+      every bit of it is occasioned by the forward movement of the ship, and
+      that we were led into error by the fact that we ourselves were
+      imperceptibly moving.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      We see the same if we watch moment by moment the movement of historical
+      characters (that is, re-establish the inevitable condition of all that
+      occurs—the continuity of movement in time) and do not lose sight of
+      the essential connection of historical persons with the masses.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When the ship moves in one direction there is one and the same wave ahead
+      of it, when it turns frequently the wave ahead of it also turns
+      frequently. But wherever it may turn there always will be the wave
+      anticipating its movement.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Whatever happens it always appears that just that event was foreseen and
+      decreed. Wherever the ship may go, the rush of water which neither directs
+      nor increases its movement foams ahead of it, and at a distance seems to
+      us not merely to move of itself but to govern the ship’s movement also.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Examining only those expressions of the will of historical persons which,
+      as commands, were related to events, historians have assumed that the
+      events depended on those commands. But examining the events themselves and
+      the connection in which the historical persons stood to the people, we
+      have found that they and their orders were dependent on events. The
+      incontestable proof of this deduction is that, however many commands were
+      issued, the event does not take place unless there are other causes for
+      it, but as soon as an event occurs—be it what it may—then out
+      of all the continually expressed wishes of different people some will
+      always be found which by their meaning and their time of utterance are
+      related as commands to the events.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Arriving at this conclusion we can reply directly and positively to these
+      two essential questions of history:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      (1) What is power?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      (2) What force produces the movement of the nations?
+    </p>
+<p>
+      (1) Power is the relation of a given person to other individuals, in which
+      the more this person expresses opinions, predictions, and justifications
+      of the collective action that is performed, the less is his participation
+      in that action.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      (2) The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor by intellectual
+      activity, nor even by a combination of the two as historians have
+      supposed, but by the activity of <i>all</i> the people who participate in the
+      events, and who always combine in such a way that those taking the largest
+      direct share in the event take on themselves the least responsibility and
+      vice versa.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Morally the wielder of power appears to cause the event; physically it is
+      those who submit to the power. But as the moral activity is inconceivable
+      without the physical, the cause of the event is neither in the one nor in
+      the other but in the union of the two.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Or in other words, the conception of a cause is inapplicable to the
+      phenomena we are examining.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the last analysis we reach the circle of infinity—that final
+      limit to which in every domain of thought man’s reason arrives if it is
+      not playing with the subject. Electricity produces heat, heat produces
+      electricity. Atoms attract each other and atoms repel one another.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Speaking of the interaction of heat and electricity and of atoms, we
+      cannot say why this occurs, and we say that it is so because it is
+      inconceivable otherwise, because it must be so and that it is a law. The
+      same applies to historical events. Why war and revolution occur we do not
+      know. We only know that to produce the one or the other action, people
+      combine in a certain formation in which they all take part, and we say
+      that this is so because it is unthinkable otherwise, or in other words
+      that it is a law.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0361"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      If history dealt only with external phenomena, the establishment of this
+      simple and obvious law would suffice and we should have finished our
+      argument. But the law of history relates to man. A particle of matter
+      cannot tell us that it does not feel the law of attraction or repulsion
+      and that that law is untrue, but man, who is the subject of history, says
+      plainly: I am free and am therefore not subject to the law.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The presence of the problem of man’s free will, though unexpressed, is
+      felt at every step of history.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All seriously thinking historians have involuntarily encountered this
+      question. All the contradictions and obscurities of history and the false
+      path historical science has followed are due solely to the lack of a
+      solution of that question.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If the will of every man were free, that is, if each man could act as he
+      pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected incidents.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If in a thousand years even one man in a million could act freely, that
+      is, as he chose, it is evident that one single free act of that man’s in
+      violation of the laws governing human action would destroy the possibility
+      of the existence of any laws for the whole of humanity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If there be a single law governing the actions of men, free will cannot
+      exist, for then man’s will is subject to that law.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In this contradiction lies the problem of free will, which from most
+      ancient times has occupied the best human minds and from most ancient
+      times has been presented in its whole tremendous significance.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The problem is that regarding man as a subject of observation from
+      whatever point of view—theological, historical, ethical, or
+      philosophic—we find a general law of necessity to which he (like all
+      that exists) is subject. But regarding him from within ourselves as what
+      we are conscious of, we feel ourselves to be free.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This consciousness is a source of self-cognition quite apart from and
+      independent of reason. Through his reason man observes himself, but only
+      through consciousness does he know himself.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Apart from consciousness of self no observation or application of reason
+      is conceivable.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To understand, observe, and draw conclusions, man must first of all be
+      conscious of himself as living. A man is only conscious of himself as a
+      living being by the fact that he wills, that is, is conscious of his
+      volition. But his will—which forms the essence of his life—man
+      recognizes (and can but recognize) as free.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If, observing himself, man sees that his will is always directed by one
+      and the same law (whether he observes the necessity of taking food, using
+      his brain, or anything else) he cannot recognize this never-varying
+      direction of his will otherwise than as a limitation of it. Were it not
+      free it could not be limited. A man’s will seems to him to be limited just
+      because he is not conscious of it except as free.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall.
+      Everyone understands that this illogical reply is an irrefutable
+      demonstration of freedom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That reply is the expression of a consciousness that is not subject to
+      reason.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If the consciousness of freedom were not a separate and independent source
+      of self-consciousness it would be subject to reasoning and to experience,
+      but in fact such subjection does not exist and is inconceivable.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A series of experiments and arguments proves to every man that he, as an
+      object of observation, is subject to certain laws, and man submits to them
+      and never resists the laws of gravity or impermeability once he has become
+      acquainted with them. But the same series of experiments and arguments
+      proves to him that the complete freedom of which he is conscious in
+      himself is impossible, and that his every action depends on his
+      organization, his character, and the motives acting upon him; yet man
+      never submits to the deductions of these experiments and arguments. Having
+      learned from experiment and argument that a stone falls downwards, a man
+      indubitably believes this and always expects the law that he has learned
+      to be fulfilled.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But learning just as certainly that his will is subject to laws, he does
+      not and cannot believe this.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      However often experiment and reasoning may show a man that under the same
+      conditions and with the same character he will do the same thing as
+      before, yet when under the same conditions and with the same character he
+      approaches for the thousandth time the action that always ends in the same
+      way, he feels as certainly convinced as before the experiment that he can
+      act as he pleases. Every man, savage or sage, however incontestably reason
+      and experiment may prove to him that it is impossible to imagine two
+      different courses of action in precisely the same conditions, feels that
+      without this irrational conception (which constitutes the essence of
+      freedom) he cannot imagine life. He feels that however impossible it may
+      be, it is so, for without this conception of freedom not only would he be
+      unable to understand life, but he would be unable to live for a single
+      moment.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      He could not live, because all man’s efforts, all his impulses to life,
+      are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and
+      obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and
+      disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger,
+      virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If the conception of freedom appears to reason to be a senseless
+      contradiction like the possibility of performing two actions at one and
+      the same instant of time, or of an effect without a cause, that only
+      proves that consciousness is not subject to reason.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      This unshakable, irrefutable consciousness of freedom, uncontrolled by
+      experiment or argument, recognized by all thinkers and felt by everyone
+      without exception, this consciousness without which no conception of man
+      is possible constitutes the other side of the question.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Man is the creation of an all-powerful, all-good, and all-seeing God. What
+      is sin, the conception of which arises from the consciousness of man’s
+      freedom? That is a question for theology.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The actions of men are subject to general immutable laws expressed in
+      statistics. What is man’s responsibility to society, the conception of
+      which results from the conception of freedom? That is a question for
+      jurisprudence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Man’s actions proceed from his innate character and the motives acting
+      upon him. What is conscience and the perception of right and wrong in
+      actions that follows from the consciousness of freedom? That is a question
+      for ethics.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Man in connection with the general life of humanity appears subject to
+      laws which determine that life. But the same man apart from that
+      connection appears to be free. How should the past life of nations and of
+      humanity be regarded—as the result of the free, or as the result of
+      the constrained, activity of man? That is a question for history.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only in our self-confident day of the popularization of knowledge—thanks
+      to that most powerful engine of ignorance, the diffusion of printed matter—has
+      the question of the freedom of will been put on a level on which the
+      question itself cannot exist. In our time the majority of so-called
+      advanced people—that is, the crowd of ignoramuses—have taken
+      the work of the naturalists who deal with one side of the question for a
+      solution of the whole problem.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      They say and write and print that the soul and freedom do not exist, for
+      the life of man is expressed by muscular movements and muscular movements
+      are conditioned by the activity of the nerves; the soul and free will do
+      not exist because at an unknown period of time we sprang from the apes.
+      They say this, not at all suspecting that thousands of years ago that same
+      law of necessity which with such ardor they are now trying to prove by
+      physiology and comparative zoology was not merely acknowledged by all the
+      religions and all the thinkers, but has never been denied. They do not see
+      that the role of the natural sciences in this matter is merely to serve as
+      an instrument for the illumination of one side of it. For the fact that,
+      from the point of view of observation, reason and the will are merely
+      secretions of the brain, and that man following the general law may have
+      developed from lower animals at some unknown period of time, only explains
+      from a fresh side the truth admitted thousands of years ago by all the
+      religious and philosophic theories—that from the point of view of
+      reason man is subject to the law of necessity; but it does not advance by
+      a hair’s breadth the solution of the question, which has another,
+      opposite, side, based on the consciousness of freedom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If men descended from the apes at an unknown period of time, that is as
+      comprehensible as that they were made from a handful of earth at a certain
+      period of time (in the first case the unknown quantity is the time, in the
+      second case it is the origin); and the question of how man’s consciousness
+      of freedom is to be reconciled with the law of necessity to which he is
+      subject cannot be solved by comparative physiology and zoology, for in a
+      frog, a rabbit, or an ape, we can observe only the muscular nervous
+      activity, but in man we observe consciousness as well as the muscular and
+      nervous activity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The naturalists and their followers, thinking they can solve this
+      question, are like plasterers set to plaster one side of the walls of a
+      church who, availing themselves of the absence of the chief superintendent
+      of the work, should in an access of zeal plaster over the windows, icons,
+      woodwork, and still unbuttressed walls, and should be delighted that from
+      their point of view as plasterers, everything is now so smooth and
+      regular.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0362"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      For the solution of the question of free will or inevitability, history
+      has this advantage over other branches of knowledge in which the question
+      is dealt with, that for history this question does not refer to the
+      essence of man’s free will but its manifestation in the past and under
+      certain conditions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In regard to this question, history stands to the other sciences as
+      experimental science stands to abstract science.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The subject for history is not man’s will itself but our presentation of
+      it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And so for history, the insoluble mystery presented by the incompatibility
+      of free will and inevitability does not exist as it does for theology,
+      ethics, and philosophy. History surveys a presentation of man’s life in
+      which the union of these two contradictions has already taken place.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In actual life each historic event, each human action, is very clearly and
+      definitely understood without any sense of contradiction, although each
+      event presents itself as partly free and partly compulsory.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To solve the question of how freedom and necessity are combined and what
+      constitutes the essence of these two conceptions, the philosophy of
+      history can and should follow a path contrary to that taken by other
+      sciences. Instead of first defining the conceptions of freedom and
+      inevitability in themselves, and then ranging the phenomena of life under
+      those definitions, history should deduce a definition of the conception of
+      freedom and inevitability themselves from the immense quantity of
+      phenomena of which it is cognizant and that always appear dependent on
+      these two elements.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Whatever presentation of the activity of many men or of an individual we
+      may consider, we always regard it as the result partly of man’s free will
+      and partly of the law of inevitability.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Whether we speak of the migration of the peoples and the incursions of the
+      barbarians, or of the decrees of Napoleon III, or of someone’s action an
+      hour ago in choosing one direction out of several for his walk, we are
+      unconscious of any contradiction. The degree of freedom and inevitability
+      governing the actions of these people is clearly defined for us.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Our conception of the degree of freedom often varies according to
+      differences in the point of view from which we regard the event, but every
+      human action appears to us as a certain combination of freedom and
+      inevitability. In every action we examine we see a certain measure of
+      freedom and a certain measure of inevitability. And always the more
+      freedom we see in any action the less inevitability do we perceive, and
+      the more inevitability the less freedom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The proportion of freedom to inevitability decreases and increases
+      according to the point of view from which the action is regarded, but
+      their relation is always one of inverse proportion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      A sinking man who clutches at another and drowns him; or a hungry mother
+      exhausted by feeding her baby, who steals some food; or a man trained to
+      discipline who on duty at the word of command kills a defenseless man—seem
+      less guilty, that is, less free and more subject to the law of necessity,
+      to one who knows the circumstances in which these people were placed, and
+      more free to one who does not know that the man was himself drowning, that
+      the mother was hungry, that the soldier was in the ranks, and so on.
+      Similarly a man who committed a murder twenty years ago and has since
+      lived peaceably and harmlessly in society seems less guilty and his action
+      more due to the law of inevitability, to someone who considers his action
+      after twenty years have elapsed than to one who examined it the day after
+      it was committed. And in the same way every action of an insane,
+      intoxicated, or highly excited man appears less free and more inevitable
+      to one who knows the mental condition of him who committed the action, and
+      seems more free and less inevitable to one who does not know it. In all
+      these cases the conception of freedom is increased or diminished and the
+      conception of compulsion is correspondingly decreased or increased,
+      according to the point of view from which the action is regarded. So that
+      the greater the conception of necessity the smaller the conception of
+      freedom and vice versa.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Religion, the common sense of mankind, the science of jurisprudence, and
+      history itself understand alike this relation between necessity and
+      freedom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All cases without exception in which our conception of freedom and
+      necessity is increased and diminished depend on three considerations:
+    </p>
+<p>
+      (1) The relation to the external world of the man who commits the deeds.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      (2) His relation to time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      (3) His relation to the causes leading to the action.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The first consideration is the clearness of our perception of the man’s
+      relation to the external world and the greater or lesser clearness of our
+      understanding of the definite position occupied by the man in relation to
+      everything coexisting with him. This is what makes it evident that a
+      drowning man is less free and more subject to necessity than one standing
+      on dry ground, and that makes the actions of a man closely connected with
+      others in a thickly populated district, or of one bound by family,
+      official, or business duties, seem certainly less free and more subject to
+      necessity than those of a man living in solitude and seclusion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If we consider a man alone, apart from his relation to everything around
+      him, each action of his seems to us free. But if we see his relation to
+      anything around him, if we see his connection with anything whatever—with
+      a man who speaks to him, a book he reads, the work on which he is engaged,
+      even with the air he breathes or the light that falls on the things about
+      him—we see that each of these circumstances has an influence on him
+      and controls at least some side of his activity. And the more we perceive
+      of these influences the more our conception of his freedom diminishes and
+      the more our conception of the necessity that weighs on him increases.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The second consideration is the more or less evident time relation of the
+      man to the world and the clearness of our perception of the place the
+      man’s action occupies in time. That is the ground which makes the fall of
+      the first man, resulting in the production of the human race, appear
+      evidently less free than a man’s entry into marriage today. It is the
+      reason why the life and activity of people who lived centuries ago and are
+      connected with me in time cannot seem to me as free as the life of a
+      contemporary, the consequences of which are still unknown to me.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The degree of our conception of freedom or inevitability depends in this
+      respect on the greater or lesser lapse of time between the performance of
+      the action and our judgment of it.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      If I examine an act I performed a moment ago in approximately the same
+      circumstances as those I am in now, my action appears to me undoubtedly
+      free. But if I examine an act performed a month ago, then being in
+      different circumstances, I cannot help recognizing that if that act had
+      not been committed much that resulted from it—good, agreeable, and
+      even essential—would not have taken place. If I reflect on an action
+      still more remote, ten years ago or more, then the consequences of my
+      action are still plainer to me and I find it hard to imagine what would
+      have happened had that action not been performed. The farther I go back in
+      memory, or what is the same thing the farther I go forward in my judgment,
+      the more doubtful becomes my belief in the freedom of my action.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In history we find a very similar progress of conviction concerning the
+      part played by free will in the general affairs of humanity. A
+      contemporary event seems to us to be indubitably the doing of all the
+      known participants, but with a more remote event we already see its
+      inevitable results which prevent our considering anything else possible.
+      And the farther we go back in examining events the less arbitrary do they
+      appear.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The Austro-Prussian war appears to us undoubtedly the result of the crafty
+      conduct of Bismarck, and so on. The Napoleonic wars still seem to us,
+      though already questionably, to be the outcome of their heroes’ will. But
+      in the Crusades we already see an event occupying its definite place in
+      history and without which we cannot imagine the modern history of Europe,
+      though to the chroniclers of the Crusades that event appeared as merely
+      due to the will of certain people. In regard to the migration of the
+      peoples it does not enter anyone’s head today to suppose that the
+      renovation of the European world depended on Attila’s caprice. The farther
+      back in history the object of our observation lies, the more doubtful does
+      the free will of those concerned in the event become and the more manifest
+      the law of inevitability.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The third consideration is the degree to which we apprehend that endless
+      chain of causation inevitably demanded by reason, in which each phenomenon
+      comprehended, and therefore man’s every action, must have its definite
+      place as a result of what has gone before and as a cause of what will
+      follow.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The better we are acquainted with the physiological, psychological, and
+      historical laws deduced by observation and by which man is controlled, and
+      the more correctly we perceive the physiological, psychological, and
+      historical causes of the action, and the simpler the action we are
+      observing and the less complex the character and mind of the man in
+      question, the more subject to inevitability and the less free do our
+      actions and those of others appear.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      When we do not at all understand the cause of an action, whether a crime,
+      a good action, or even one that is simply nonmoral, we ascribe a greater
+      amount of freedom to it. In the case of a crime we most urgently demand
+      the punishment for such an act; in the case of a virtuous act we rate its
+      merit most highly. In an indifferent case we recognize in it more
+      individuality, originality, and independence. But if even one of the
+      innumerable causes of the act is known to us we recognize a certain
+      element of necessity and are less insistent on punishment for the crime,
+      or the acknowledgment of the merit of the virtuous act, or the freedom of
+      the apparently original action. That a criminal was reared among
+      malefactors mitigates his fault in our eyes. The self-sacrifice of a father or
+      mother, or self-sacrifice with the possibility of a reward, is more
+      comprehensible than gratuitous self-sacrifice, and therefore seems less
+      deserving of sympathy and less the result of free will. The founder of a
+      sect or party, or an inventor, impresses us less when we know how or by
+      what the way was prepared for his activity. If we have a large range of
+      examples, if our observation is constantly directed to seeking the
+      correlation of cause and effect in people’s actions, their actions appear
+      to us more under compulsion and less free the more correctly we connect
+      the effects with the causes. If we examined simple actions and had a vast
+      number of such actions under observation, our conception of their
+      inevitability would be still greater. The dishonest conduct of the son of
+      a dishonest father, the misconduct of a woman who had fallen into bad
+      company, a drunkard’s relapse into drunkenness, and so on are actions that
+      seem to us less free the better we understand their cause. If the man
+      whose actions we are considering is on a very low stage of mental
+      development, like a child, a madman, or a simpleton—then, knowing
+      the causes of the act and the simplicity of the character and intelligence
+      in question, we see so large an element of necessity and so little free
+      will that as soon as we know the cause prompting the action we can
+      foretell the result.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      On these three considerations alone is based the conception of
+      irresponsibility for crimes and the extenuating circumstances admitted by
+      all legislative codes. The responsibility appears greater or less
+      according to our greater or lesser knowledge of the circumstances in which
+      the man was placed whose action is being judged, and according to the
+      greater or lesser interval of time between the commission of the action
+      and its investigation, and according to the greater or lesser
+      understanding of the causes that led to the action.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0363"></a>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      Thus our conception of free will and inevitability gradually diminishes or
+      increases according to the greater or lesser connection with the external
+      world, the greater or lesser remoteness of time, and the greater or lesser
+      dependence on the causes in relation to which we contemplate a man’s life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      So that if we examine the case of a man whose connection with the external
+      world is well known, where the time between the action and its examination
+      is great, and where the causes of the action are most accessible, we get
+      the conception of a maximum of inevitability and a minimum of free will.
+      If we examine a man little dependent on external conditions, whose action
+      was performed very recently, and the causes of whose action are beyond our
+      ken, we get the conception of a minimum of inevitability and a maximum of
+      freedom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In neither case—however we may change our point of view, however
+      plain we may make to ourselves the connection between the man and the
+      external world, however inaccessible it may be to us, however long or
+      short the period of time, however intelligible or incomprehensible the
+      causes of the action may be—can we ever conceive either complete
+      freedom or complete necessity.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      (1) To whatever degree we may imagine a man to be exempt from the
+      influence of the external world, we never get a conception of freedom in
+      space. Every human action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him
+      and by his own body. I lift my arm and let it fall. My action seems to me
+      free; but asking myself whether I could raise my arm in every direction, I
+      see that I raised it in the direction in which there was least obstruction
+      to that action either from things around me or from the construction of my
+      own body. I chose one out of all the possible directions because in it
+      there were fewest obstacles. For my action to be free it was necessary
+      that it should encounter no obstacles. To conceive of a man being free we
+      must imagine him outside space, which is evidently impossible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      (2) However much we approximate the time of judgment to the time of the
+      deed, we never get a conception of freedom in time. For if I examine an
+      action committed a second ago I must still recognize it as not being free,
+      for it is irrevocably linked to the moment at which it was committed. Can
+      I lift my arm? I lift it, but ask myself: could I have abstained from
+      lifting my arm at the moment that has already passed? To convince myself
+      of this I do not lift it the next moment. But I am not now abstaining from
+      doing so at the first moment when I asked the question. Time has gone by
+      which I could not detain, the arm I then lifted is no longer the same as
+      the arm I now refrain from lifting, nor is the air in which I lifted it
+      the same that now surrounds me. The moment in which the first movement was
+      made is irrevocable, and at that moment I could make only one movement,
+      and whatever movement I made would be the only one. That I did not lift my
+      arm a moment later does not prove that I could have abstained from lifting
+      it then. And since I could make only one movement at that single moment of
+      time, it could not have been any other. To imagine it as free, it is
+      necessary to imagine it in the present, on the boundary between the past
+      and the future—that is, outside time, which is impossible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      (3) However much the difficulty of understanding the causes may be
+      increased, we never reach a conception of complete freedom, that is, an
+      absence of cause. However inaccessible to us may be the cause of the
+      expression of will in any action, our own or another’s, the first demand
+      of reason is the assumption of and search for a cause, for without a cause
+      no phenomenon is conceivable. I raise my arm to perform an action
+      independently of any cause, but my wish to perform an action without a
+      cause is the cause of my action.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But even if—imagining a man quite exempt from all influences,
+      examining only his momentary action in the present, unevoked by any cause—we
+      were to admit so infinitely small a remainder of inevitability as equaled
+      zero, we should even then not have arrived at the conception of complete
+      freedom in man, for a being uninfluenced by the external world, standing
+      outside of time and independent of cause, is no longer a man.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the same way we can never imagine the action of a man quite devoid of
+      freedom and entirely subject to the law of inevitability.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      (1) However we may increase our knowledge of the conditions of space in
+      which man is situated, that knowledge can never be complete, for the
+      number of those conditions is as infinite as the infinity of space. And
+      therefore so long as not <i>all</i> the conditions influencing men are defined,
+      there is no complete inevitability but a certain measure of freedom
+      remains.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      (2) However we may prolong the period of time between the action we are
+      examining and the judgment upon it, that period will be finite, while time
+      is infinite, and so in this respect too there can never be absolute
+      inevitability.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      (3) However accessible may be the chain of causation of any action, we
+      shall never know the whole chain since it is endless, and so again we
+      never reach absolute inevitability.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But besides this, even if, admitting the remaining minimum of freedom to
+      equal zero, we assumed in some given case—as for instance in that of
+      a dying man, an unborn babe, or an idiot—complete absence of
+      freedom, by so doing we should destroy the very conception of man in the
+      case we are examining, for as soon as there is no freedom there is also no
+      man. And so the conception of the action of a man subject solely to the
+      law of inevitability without any element of freedom is just as impossible
+      as the conception of a man’s completely free action.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And so to imagine the action of a man entirely subject to the law of
+      inevitability without any freedom, we must assume the knowledge of an
+      <i>infinite</i> number of space relations, an <i>infinitely</i> long
+      period of time, and an <i>infinite</i> series of causes.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To imagine a man perfectly free and not subject to the law of
+      inevitability, we must imagine him all alone, <i>beyond space, beyond time,</i>
+      and <i>free from dependence on cause.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+      In the first case, if inevitability were possible without freedom we
+      should have reached a definition of inevitability by the laws of
+      inevitability itself, that is, a mere form without content.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the second case, if freedom were possible without inevitability we
+      should have arrived at unconditioned freedom beyond space, time, and
+      cause, which by the fact of its being unconditioned and unlimited would be
+      nothing, or mere content without form.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      We should in fact have reached those two fundamentals of which man’s whole
+      outlook on the universe is constructed—the incomprehensible essence
+      of life, and the laws defining that essence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Reason says: (1) space with all the forms of matter that give it
+      visibility is infinite, and cannot be imagined otherwise. (2) Time is
+      infinite motion without a moment of rest and is unthinkable otherwise. (3)
+      The connection between cause and effect has no beginning and can have no
+      end.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Consciousness says: (1) I alone am, and all that exists is but me,
+      consequently I include space. (2) I measure flowing time by the fixed
+      moment of the present in which alone I am conscious of myself as living,
+      consequently I am outside time. (3) I am beyond cause, for I feel myself
+      to be the cause of every manifestation of my life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Reason gives expression to the laws of inevitability. Consciousness gives
+      expression to the essence of freedom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Freedom not limited by anything is the essence of life, in man’s
+      consciousness. Inevitability without content is man’s reason in its three
+      forms.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Freedom is the thing examined. Inevitability is what examines. Freedom is
+      the content. Inevitability is the form.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only by separating the two sources of cognition, related to one another as
+      form to content, do we get the mutually exclusive and separately
+      incomprehensible conceptions of freedom and inevitability.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only by uniting them do we get a clear conception of man’s life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Apart from these two concepts which in their union mutually define one
+      another as form and content, no conception of life is possible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All that we know of the life of man is merely a certain relation of free
+      will to inevitability, that is, of consciousness to the laws of reason.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All that we know of the external world of nature is only a certain
+      relation of the forces of nature to inevitability, or of the essence of
+      life to the laws of reason.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The great natural forces lie outside us and we are not conscious of them;
+      we call those forces gravitation, inertia, electricity, animal force, and
+      so on, but we are conscious of the force of life in man and we call that
+      freedom.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      But just as the force of gravitation, incomprehensible in itself but felt
+      by every man, is understood by us only to the extent to which we know the
+      laws of inevitability to which it is subject (from the first knowledge
+      that all bodies have weight, up to Newton’s law), so too the force of free
+      will, incomprehensible in itself but of which everyone is conscious, is
+      intelligible to us only in as far as we know the laws of inevitability to
+      which it is subject (from the fact that every man dies, up to the
+      knowledge of the most complex economic and historic laws).
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All knowledge is merely a bringing of this essence of life under the laws
+      of reason.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Man’s free will differs from every other force in that man is directly
+      conscious of it, but in the eyes of reason it in no way differs from any
+      other force. The forces of gravitation, electricity, or chemical affinity
+      are only distinguished from one another in that they are differently
+      defined by reason. Just so the force of man’s free will is distinguished
+      by reason from the other forces of nature only by the definition reason
+      gives it. Freedom, apart from necessity, that is, apart from the laws of
+      reason that define it, differs in no way from gravitation, or heat, or the
+      force that makes things grow; for reason, it is only a momentary
+      undefinable sensation of life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And as the undefinable essence of the force moving the heavenly bodies,
+      the undefinable essence of the forces of heat and electricity, or of
+      chemical affinity, or of the vital force, forms the content of astronomy,
+      physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and so on, just in the same way does
+      the force of free will form the content of history. But just as the
+      subject of every science is the manifestation of this unknown essence of
+      life while that essence itself can only be the subject of metaphysics,
+      even the manifestation of the force of free will in human beings in space,
+      in time, and in dependence on cause forms the subject of history, while
+      free will itself is the subject of metaphysics.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the experimental sciences what we know we call the laws of
+      inevitability, what is unknown to us we call vital force. Vital force is
+      only an expression for the unknown remainder over and above what we know
+      of the essence of life.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      So also in history what is known to us we call laws of inevitability, what
+      is unknown we call free will. Free will is for history only an expression
+      for the unknown remainder of what we know about the laws of human life.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0364"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      History examines the manifestations of man’s free will in connection with
+      the external world in time and in dependence on cause, that is, it defines
+      this freedom by the laws of reason, and so history is a science only in so
+      far as this free will is defined by those laws.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The recognition of man’s free will as something capable of influencing
+      historical events, that is, as not subject to laws, is the same for
+      history as the recognition of a free force moving the heavenly bodies
+      would be for astronomy.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      That assumption would destroy the possibility of the existence of laws,
+      that is, of any science whatever. If there is even a single body moving
+      freely, then the laws of Kepler and Newton are negatived and no conception
+      of the movement of the heavenly bodies any longer exists. If any single
+      action is due to free will, then not a single historical law can exist,
+      nor any conception of historical events.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      For history, lines exist of the movement of human wills, one end of which
+      is hidden in the unknown but at the other end of which a consciousness of
+      man’s will in the present moves in space, time, and dependence on cause.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The more this field of motion spreads out before our eyes, the more
+      evident are the laws of that movement. To discover and define those laws
+      is the problem of history.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the standpoint from which the science of history now regards its
+      subject on the path it now follows, seeking the causes of events in man’s
+      free will, a scientific enunciation of those laws is impossible, for
+      however man’s free will may be restricted, as soon as we recognize it as a
+      force not subject to law, the existence of law becomes impossible.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Only by reducing this element of free will to the infinitesimal, that is,
+      by regarding it as an infinitely small quantity, can we convince ourselves
+      of the absolute inaccessibility of the causes, and then instead of seeking
+      causes, history will take the discovery of laws as its problem.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The search for these laws has long been begun and the new methods of
+      thought which history must adopt are being worked out simultaneously with
+      the self-destruction toward which—ever dissecting and dissecting the
+      causes of phenomena—the old method of history is moving.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      All human sciences have traveled along that path. Arriving at
+      infinitesimals, mathematics, the most exact of sciences, abandons the
+      process of analysis and enters on the new process of the integration of
+      unknown, infinitely small, quantities. Abandoning the conception of cause,
+      mathematics seeks law, that is, the property common to all unknown,
+      infinitely small, elements.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In another form but along the same path of reflection the other sciences
+      have proceeded. When Newton enunciated the law of gravity he did not say
+      that the sun or the earth had a property of attraction; he said that all
+      bodies from the largest to the smallest have the property of attracting
+      one another, that is, leaving aside the question of the cause of the
+      movement of the bodies, he expressed the property common to all bodies
+      from the infinitely large to the infinitely small. The same is done by the
+      natural sciences: leaving aside the question of cause, they seek for laws.
+      History stands on the same path. And if history has for its object the
+      study of the movement of the nations and of humanity and not the narration
+      of episodes in the lives of individuals, it too, setting aside the
+      conception of cause, should seek the laws common to all the inseparably
+      interconnected infinitesimal elements of free will.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2><a id="link2HCH0365"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+      From the time the law of Copernicus was discovered and proved, the mere
+      recognition of the fact that it was not the sun but the earth that moves
+      sufficed to destroy the whole cosmography of the ancients. By disproving
+      that law it might have been possible to retain the old conception of the
+      movements of the bodies, but without disproving it, it would seem
+      impossible to continue studying the Ptolemaic worlds. But even after the
+      discovery of the law of Copernicus the Ptolemaic worlds were still studied
+      for a long time.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      From the time the first person said and proved that the number of births
+      or of crimes is subject to mathematical laws, and that this or that mode
+      of government is determined by certain geographical and economic
+      conditions, and that certain relations of population to soil produce
+      migrations of peoples, the foundations on which history had been built
+      were destroyed in their essence.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      By refuting these new laws the former view of history might have been
+      retained; but without refuting them it would seem impossible to continue
+      studying historic events as the results of man’s free will. For if a
+      certain mode of government was established or certain migrations of
+      peoples took place in consequence of such and such geographic,
+      ethnographic, or economic conditions, then the free will of those
+      individuals who appear to us to have established that mode of government
+      or occasioned the migrations can no longer be regarded as the cause.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      And yet the former history continues to be studied side by side with the
+      laws of statistics, geography, political economy, comparative philology,
+      and geology, which directly contradict its assumptions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      The struggle between the old views and the new was long and stubbornly
+      fought out in physical philosophy. Theology stood on guard for the old
+      views and accused the new of violating revelation. But when truth
+      conquered, theology established itself just as firmly on the new
+      foundation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just as prolonged and stubborn is the struggle now proceeding between the
+      old and the new conception of history, and theology in the same way stands
+      on guard for the old view, and accuses the new view of subverting
+      revelation.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      In the one case as in the other, on both sides the struggle provokes
+      passion and stifles truth. On the one hand there is fear and regret for
+      the loss of the whole edifice constructed through the ages, on the other
+      is the passion for destruction.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      To the men who fought against the rising truths of physical philosophy, it
+      seemed that if they admitted that truth it would destroy faith in God, in
+      the creation of the firmament, and in the miracle of Joshua the son of
+      Nun. To the defenders of the laws of Copernicus and Newton, to Voltaire
+      for example, it seemed that the laws of astronomy destroyed religion, and
+      he utilized the law of gravitation as a weapon against religion.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      Just so it now seems as if we have only to admit the law of inevitability,
+      to destroy the conception of the soul, of good and evil, and all the
+      institutions of state and church that have been built up on those
+      conceptions.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      So too, like Voltaire in his time, uninvited defenders of the law of
+      inevitability today use that law as a weapon against religion, though the
+      law of inevitability in history, like the law of Copernicus in astronomy,
+      far from destroying, even strengthens the foundation on which the
+      institutions of state and church are erected.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As in the question of astronomy then, so in the question of history now,
+      the whole difference of opinion is based on the recognition or
+      nonrecognition of something absolute, serving as the measure of visible
+      phenomena. In astronomy it was the immovability of the earth, in history
+      it is the independence of personality—free will.
+    </p>
+<p>
+      As with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth
+      lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth’s fixity and of the
+      motion of the planets, so in history the difficulty of recognizing the
+      subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause lies in
+      renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one’s own
+      personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: “It is true that we do
+      not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we
+      arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel)
+      we arrive at laws,” so also in history the new view says: “It is true that
+      we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we
+      arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external
+      world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws.”
+     </p>
+<p>
+      In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an
+      unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in
+      the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does
+      not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.
+    </p>
+</div><!--end chapter-->
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diff --git a/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/txt/alice_in_wonderland.txt b/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/txt/alice_in_wonderland.txt
new file mode 100644
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/txt/alice_in_wonderland.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,6083 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 
+ 
+ This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States,
+you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
+before using this eBook. 
+
+ Title : Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
+
+
+ 
+ Author : Lewis Carroll
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Release date : June 27, 2008 [eBook #11]
+
+ Most recently updated: June 26, 2025
+
+
+
+ Language : English
+
+
+
+ Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11 
+
+
+
+ Credits : Arthur DiBianca and David Widger
+
+
+
+ 
+ *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND *** 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 
+ by Lewis Carroll 
+ THE MILLENNIUM FULCRUM EDITION 3.0 
+ 
+ Contents 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I. Down the Rabbit-Hole 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II. The Pool of Tears 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III. A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV. The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V. Advice from a Caterpillar 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI. Pig and Pepper 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII. A Mad Tea-Party 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII. The Queen’s Croquet-Ground 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX. The Mock Turtle’s Story 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X. The Lobster Quadrille 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI. Who Stole the Tarts? 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII. Alice’s Evidence 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I.
+
+Down the Rabbit-Hole 
+ 
+Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and
+of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister
+was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the
+use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations?”
+
+
+
+ 
+So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day
+made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a
+daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies,
+when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
+
+
+
+ 
+There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so
+ very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh
+dear! I shall be late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to
+her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed
+quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its
+waistcoat-pocket , and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to
+her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a
+rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and
+burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was
+just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
+
+
+
+ 
+In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the
+world she was to get out again.
+
+
+
+ 
+The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped
+suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping
+herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
+
+
+
+ 
+Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of
+time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen
+next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it
+was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and
+noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there
+she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the
+shelves as she passed; it was labelled “ORANGE MARMALADE”, but to her great
+disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of
+killing somebody underneath, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as
+she fell past it.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well!” thought Alice to herself, “after such a fall as this, I shall think
+nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, I
+wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!”
+(Which was very likely true.)
+
+
+
+ 
+Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? “I wonder how
+many miles I’ve fallen by this time?” she said aloud. “I must be getting
+somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand
+miles down, I think—” (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this
+sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a very 
+good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen
+to her, still it was good practice to say it over) “—yes, that’s about the
+right distance—but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I’ve got to?”
+(Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they
+were nice grand words to say.)
+
+
+
+ 
+Presently she began again. “I wonder if I shall fall right through the
+earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their
+heads downward! The Antipathies, I think—” (she was rather glad there
+ was no one listening, this time, as it didn’t sound at all the right
+word) “—but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know.
+Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand or Australia?” (and she tried to curtsey as
+she spoke—fancy curtseying as you’re falling through the air! Do you
+think you could manage it?) “And what an ignorant little girl she’ll think me
+for asking! No, it’ll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up
+somewhere.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking
+again. “Dinah’ll miss me very much to-night, I should think!” (Dinah was the
+cat.) “I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah my dear! I
+wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but
+you might catch a bat, and that’s very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat
+bats, I wonder?” And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying
+to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, “Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?” and
+sometimes, “Do bats eat cats?” for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either
+question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was
+dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with
+Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, “Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did
+you ever eat a bat?” when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of
+sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment: she
+looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before her was another long passage,
+and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down it. There was not a
+moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind, and was just in time to hear
+it say, as it turned a corner, “Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s
+getting!” She was close behind it when she turned the corner, but the Rabbit
+was no longer to be seen: she found herself in a long, low hall, which was lit
+up by a row of lamps hanging from the roof.
+
+
+
+ 
+There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice
+had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she
+walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.
+
+
+
+ 
+Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass;
+there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice’s first thought was
+that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the
+locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not
+open any of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low
+curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about
+fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her
+great delight it fitted!
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much
+larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the
+loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and
+wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but
+she could not even get her head through the doorway; “and even if my head would
+go through,” thought poor Alice, “it would be of very little use without my
+shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if
+I only knew how to begin.” For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had
+happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were
+really impossible.
+
+
+
+ 
+There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to
+the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book
+of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little
+bottle on it, (“which certainly was not here before,” said Alice,) and round
+the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words “DRINK ME,”
+beautifully printed on it in large letters.
+
+
+
+ 
+It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was not going
+to do that in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether
+it’s marked ‘ poison ’ or not”; for she had read several nice little
+histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and
+other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple
+rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn
+you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply
+with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink
+much from a bottle marked “poison,” it is almost certain to disagree with you,
+sooner or later.
+
+
+
+ 
+However, this bottle was not marked “poison,” so Alice ventured to taste
+it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of
+cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered
+toast,) she very soon finished it off.
+
+
+
+ 
+*      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+    *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+*      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“What a curious feeling!” said Alice; “I must be shutting up like a telescope.”
+
+
+
+ 
+And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened
+up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little
+door into that lovely garden. First, however, she waited for a few minutes to
+see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about
+this; “for it might end, you know,” said Alice to herself, “in my going out
+altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?” And she tried
+to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for
+she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.
+
+
+
+ 
+After a while, finding that nothing more happened, she decided on going into
+the garden at once; but, alas for poor Alice! when she got to the door, she
+found she had forgotten the little golden key, and when she went back to the
+table for it, she found she could not possibly reach it: she could see it quite
+plainly through the glass, and she tried her best to climb up one of the legs
+of the table, but it was too slippery; and when she had tired herself out with
+trying, the poor little thing sat down and cried.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Come, there’s no use in crying like that!” said Alice to herself, rather
+sharply; “I advise you to leave off this minute!” She generally gave herself
+very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she
+scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she
+remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of
+croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond
+of pretending to be two people. “But it’s no use now,” thought poor Alice, “to
+pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make
+ one respectable person!”
+
+
+
+ 
+Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she
+opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words “EAT ME” were
+beautifully marked in currants. “Well, I’ll eat it,” said Alice, “and if it
+makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I
+can creep under the door; so either way I’ll get into the garden, and I don’t
+care which happens!”
+
+
+
+ 
+She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, “Which way? Which way?”,
+holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and
+she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure,
+this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the
+way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed
+quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
+
+
+
+ 
+So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.
+
+
+
+ 
+*      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+    *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+*      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II.
+
+The Pool of Tears 
+ 
+“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the
+moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); “now I’m opening out like
+the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!” (for when she looked down
+at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far
+off). “Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and
+stockings for you now, dears? I’m sure I shan’t be able! I shall be a
+great deal too far off to trouble myself about you: you must manage the best
+way you can;—but I must be kind to them,” thought Alice, “or perhaps they won’t
+walk the way I want to go! Let me see: I’ll give them a new pair of boots every
+Christmas.”
+
+
+
+ 
+And she went on planning to herself how she would manage it. “They must go by
+the carrier,” she thought; “and how funny it’ll seem, sending presents to one’s
+own feet! And how odd the directions will look!
+
+
+
+ 
+ Alice’s Right Foot, Esq.,
+ Hearthrug,
+ near the Fender, 
+ ( with Alice’s love ).
+ 
+ 
+Oh dear, what nonsense I’m talking!”
+
+
+
+ 
+Just then her head struck against the roof of the hall: in fact she was now
+more than nine feet high, and she at once took up the little golden key and
+hurried off to the garden door.
+
+
+
+ 
+Poor Alice! It was as much as she could do, lying down on one side, to look
+through into the garden with one eye; but to get through was more hopeless than
+ever: she sat down and began to cry again.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Alice, “a great girl like you,”
+(she might well say this), “to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I
+tell you!” But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there
+was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down
+the hall.
+
+
+
+ 
+After a time she heard a little pattering of feet in the distance, and she
+hastily dried her eyes to see what was coming. It was the White Rabbit
+returning, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and
+a large fan in the other: he came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to
+himself as he came, “Oh! the Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! won’t she be savage if
+I’ve kept her waiting!” Alice felt so desperate that she was ready to ask help
+of any one; so, when the Rabbit came near her, she began, in a low, timid
+voice, “If you please, sir—” The Rabbit started violently, dropped the white
+kid gloves and the fan, and skurried away into the darkness as hard as he could
+go.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice took up the fan and gloves, and, as the hall was very hot, she kept
+fanning herself all the time she went on talking: “Dear, dear! How queer
+everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if
+I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this
+morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m
+not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s 
+the great puzzle!” And she began thinking over all the children she knew that
+were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any
+of them.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’m sure I’m not Ada,” she said, “for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and
+mine doesn’t go in ringlets at all; and I’m sure I can’t be Mabel, for I know
+all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a very little! Besides,
+ she’s she, and I’m I, and—oh dear, how puzzling it all is! I’ll
+try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is
+twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I
+shall never get to twenty at that rate! However, the Multiplication Table
+doesn’t signify: let’s try Geography. London is the capital of Paris, and Paris
+is the capital of Rome, and Rome—no, that’s all wrong, I’m certain! I
+must have been changed for Mabel! I’ll try and say ‘ How doth the
+little —’” and she crossed her hands on her lap as if she were saying
+lessons, and began to repeat it, but her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and
+the words did not come the same as they used to do:—
+
+
+
+ 
+“How doth the little crocodile
+
+    Improve his shining tail,
+
+And pour the waters of the Nile
+
+    On every golden scale!
+
+
+
+“How cheerfully he seems to grin,
+
+    How neatly spread his claws,
+
+And welcome little fishes in
+
+    With gently smiling jaws!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’m sure those are not the right words,” said poor Alice, and her eyes filled
+with tears again as she went on, “I must be Mabel after all, and I shall have
+to go and live in that poky little house, and have next to no toys to play
+with, and oh! ever so many lessons to learn! No, I’ve made up my mind about it;
+if I’m Mabel, I’ll stay down here! It’ll be no use their putting their heads
+down and saying ‘Come up again, dear!’ I shall only look up and say ‘Who am I
+then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up:
+if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else’—but, oh dear!” cried Alice,
+with a sudden burst of tears, “I do wish they would put their heads
+down! I am so very tired of being all alone here!”
+
+
+
+ 
+As she said this she looked down at her hands, and was surprised to see that
+she had put on one of the Rabbit’s little white kid gloves while she was
+talking. “How can I have done that?” she thought. “I must be growing
+small again.” She got up and went to the table to measure herself by it, and
+found that, as nearly as she could guess, she was now about two feet high, and
+was going on shrinking rapidly: she soon found out that the cause of this was
+the fan she was holding, and she dropped it hastily, just in time to avoid
+shrinking away altogether.
+
+
+
+ 
+“That was a narrow escape!” said Alice, a good deal frightened at the
+sudden change, but very glad to find herself still in existence; “and now for
+the garden!” and she ran with all speed back to the little door: but, alas! the
+little door was shut again, and the little golden key was lying on the glass
+table as before, “and things are worse than ever,” thought the poor child, “for
+I never was so small as this before, never! And I declare it’s too bad, that it
+is!”
+
+
+
+ 
+As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she
+was up to her chin in salt water. Her first idea was that she had somehow
+fallen into the sea, “and in that case I can go back by railway,” she said to
+herself. (Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the
+general conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find a
+number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with
+wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway
+station.) However, she soon made out that she was in the pool of tears which
+she had wept when she was nine feet high.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find
+her way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my
+own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything
+is queer to-day.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Just then she heard something splashing about in the pool a little way off, and
+she swam nearer to make out what it was: at first she thought it must be a
+walrus or hippopotamus, but then she remembered how small she was now, and she
+soon made out that it was only a mouse that had slipped in like herself.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Would it be of any use, now,” thought Alice, “to speak to this mouse?
+Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should think very likely it
+can talk: at any rate, there’s no harm in trying.” So she began: “O Mouse, do
+you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O
+Mouse!” (Alice thought this must be the right way of speaking to a mouse: she
+had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having seen in her
+brother’s Latin Grammar, “A mouse—of a mouse—to a mouse—a mouse—O mouse!”) The
+Mouse looked at her rather inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with one of
+its little eyes, but it said nothing.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Perhaps it doesn’t understand English,” thought Alice; “I daresay it’s a
+French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.” (For, with all her
+knowledge of history, Alice had no very clear notion how long ago anything had
+happened.) So she began again: “Où est ma chatte?” which was the first sentence
+in her French lesson-book. The Mouse gave a sudden leap out of the water, and
+seemed to quiver all over with fright. “Oh, I beg your pardon!” cried Alice
+hastily, afraid that she had hurt the poor animal’s feelings. “I quite forgot
+you didn’t like cats.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not like cats!” cried the Mouse, in a shrill, passionate voice. “Would
+ you like cats if you were me?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, perhaps not,” said Alice in a soothing tone: “don’t be angry about it.
+And yet I wish I could show you our cat Dinah: I think you’d take a fancy to
+cats if you could only see her. She is such a dear quiet thing,” Alice went on,
+half to herself, as she swam lazily about in the pool, “and she sits purring so
+nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face—and she is such a
+nice soft thing to nurse—and she’s such a capital one for catching mice—oh, I
+beg your pardon!” cried Alice again, for this time the Mouse was bristling all
+over, and she felt certain it must be really offended. “We won’t talk about her
+any more if you’d rather not.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We indeed!” cried the Mouse, who was trembling down to the end of his tail.
+“As if I would talk on such a subject! Our family always hated 
+cats: nasty, low, vulgar things! Don’t let me hear the name again!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I won’t indeed!” said Alice, in a great hurry to change the subject of
+conversation. “Are you—are you fond—of—of dogs?” The Mouse did not answer, so
+Alice went on eagerly: “There is such a nice little dog near our house I should
+like to show you! A little bright-eyed terrier, you know, with oh, such long
+curly brown hair! And it’ll fetch things when you throw them, and it’ll sit up
+and beg for its dinner, and all sorts of things—I can’t remember half of
+them—and it belongs to a farmer, you know, and he says it’s so useful, it’s
+worth a hundred pounds! He says it kills all the rats and—oh dear!” cried Alice
+in a sorrowful tone, “I’m afraid I’ve offended it again!” For the Mouse was
+swimming away from her as hard as it could go, and making quite a commotion in
+the pool as it went.
+
+
+
+ 
+So she called softly after it, “Mouse dear! Do come back again, and we won’t
+talk about cats or dogs either, if you don’t like them!” When the Mouse heard
+this, it turned round and swam slowly back to her: its face was quite pale
+(with passion, Alice thought), and it said in a low trembling voice, “Let us
+get to the shore, and then I’ll tell you my history, and you’ll understand why
+it is I hate cats and dogs.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was high time to go, for the pool was getting quite crowded with the birds
+and animals that had fallen into it: there were a Duck and a Dodo, a Lory and
+an Eaglet, and several other curious creatures. Alice led the way, and the
+whole party swam to the shore.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III.
+
+A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale 
+ 
+They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank—the birds
+with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and
+all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable.
+
+
+
+ 
+The first question of course was, how to get dry again: they had a consultation
+about this, and after a few minutes it seemed quite natural to Alice to find
+herself talking familiarly with them, as if she had known them all her life.
+Indeed, she had quite a long argument with the Lory, who at last turned sulky,
+and would only say, “I am older than you, and must know better;” and this Alice
+would not allow without knowing how old it was, and, as the Lory positively
+refused to tell its age, there was no more to be said.
+
+
+
+ 
+At last the Mouse, who seemed to be a person of authority among them, called
+out, “Sit down, all of you, and listen to me! I’ll soon make you dry
+enough!” They all sat down at once, in a large ring, with the Mouse in the
+middle. Alice kept her eyes anxiously fixed on it, for she felt sure she would
+catch a bad cold if she did not get dry very soon.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ahem!” said the Mouse with an important air, “are you all ready? This is the
+driest thing I know. Silence all round, if you please! ‘William the Conqueror,
+whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who
+wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and
+conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria—’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ugh!” said the Lory, with a shiver.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I beg your pardon!” said the Mouse, frowning, but very politely: “Did you
+speak?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not I!” said the Lory hastily.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I thought you did,” said the Mouse. “—I proceed. ‘Edwin and Morcar, the earls
+of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even Stigand, the patriotic
+archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable—’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Found what ?” said the Duck.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Found it ,” the Mouse replied rather crossly: “of course you know what
+‘it’ means.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I know what ‘it’ means well enough, when I find a thing,” said the
+Duck: “it’s generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the
+archbishop find?”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Mouse did not notice this question, but hurriedly went on, “‘—found it
+advisable to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William and offer him the crown.
+William’s conduct at first was moderate. But the insolence of his Normans—’ How
+are you getting on now, my dear?” it continued, turning to Alice as it spoke.
+
+
+
+ 
+“As wet as ever,” said Alice in a melancholy tone: “it doesn’t seem to dry me
+at all.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In that case,” said the Dodo solemnly, rising to its feet, “I move that the
+meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more energetic remedies—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Speak English!” said the Eaglet. “I don’t know the meaning of half those long
+words, and, what’s more, I don’t believe you do either!” And the Eaglet bent
+down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What I was going to say,” said the Dodo in an offended tone, “was, that the
+best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What is a Caucus-race?” said Alice; not that she wanted much to know,
+but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that somebody ought to speak,
+and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why,” said the Dodo, “the best way to explain it is to do it.” (And, as you
+might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the
+Dodo managed it.)
+
+
+
+ 
+First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (“the exact shape
+doesn’t matter,” it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course,
+here and there. There was no “One, two, three, and away,” but they began
+running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy
+to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an
+hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out “The race is
+over!” and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, “But who has won?”
+
+
+
+ 
+This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it
+sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in
+which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest
+waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, “ Everybody has won, and all
+must have prizes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But who is to give the prizes?” quite a chorus of voices asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why, she , of course,” said the Dodo, pointing to Alice with one finger;
+and the whole party at once crowded round her, calling out in a confused way,
+“Prizes! Prizes!”
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice had no idea what to do, and in despair she put her hand in her pocket,
+and pulled out a box of comfits, (luckily the salt water had not got into it),
+and handed them round as prizes. There was exactly one a-piece, all round.
+
+
+
+ 
+“But she must have a prize herself, you know,” said the Mouse.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of course,” the Dodo replied very gravely. “What else have you got in your
+pocket?” he went on, turning to Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Only a thimble,” said Alice sadly.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Hand it over here,” said the Dodo.
+
+
+
+ 
+Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo solemnly presented
+the thimble, saying “We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble;” and, when
+it had finished this short speech, they all cheered.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that
+she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she
+simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could.
+
+
+
+ 
+The next thing was to eat the comfits: this caused some noise and confusion, as
+the large birds complained that they could not taste theirs, and the small ones
+choked and had to be patted on the back. However, it was over at last, and they
+sat down again in a ring, and begged the Mouse to tell them something more.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You promised to tell me your history, you know,” said Alice, “and why it is
+you hate—C and D,” she added in a whisper, half afraid that it would be
+offended again.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Mine is a long and a sad tale!” said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is a long tail, certainly,” said Alice, looking down with wonder at
+the Mouse’s tail; “but why do you call it sad?” And she kept on puzzling about
+it while the Mouse was speaking, so that her idea of the tale was something
+like this:—
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Fury said to a
+ mouse, That he
+ met in the
+ house,
+ ‘Let us
+ both go to
+ law: I will
+ prosecute
+ you .—Come,
+ I’ll take no
+ denial; We
+ must have a
+ trial: For
+ really this
+ morning I’ve
+ nothing
+ to do.’
+ Said the
+ mouse to the
+ cur, ‘Such
+ a trial,
+ dear sir,
+ With
+ no jury
+ or judge,
+ would be
+ wasting
+ our
+ breath.’
+ ‘I’ll be
+ judge, I’ll
+ be jury,’
+ Said
+ cunning
+ old Fury:
+ ‘I’ll
+ try the
+ whole
+ cause,
+ and
+ condemn
+ you
+ to
+ death.’”
+ 
+ 
+“You are not attending!” said the Mouse to Alice severely. “What are you
+thinking of?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I beg your pardon,” said Alice very humbly: “you had got to the fifth bend, I
+think?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I had not! ” cried the Mouse, sharply and very angrily.
+
+
+
+ 
+“A knot!” said Alice, always ready to make herself useful, and looking
+anxiously about her. “Oh, do let me help to undo it!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I shall do nothing of the sort,” said the Mouse, getting up and walking away.
+“You insult me by talking such nonsense!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I didn’t mean it!” pleaded poor Alice. “But you’re so easily offended, you
+know!”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Mouse only growled in reply.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Please come back and finish your story!” Alice called after it; and the others
+all joined in chorus, “Yes, please do!” but the Mouse only shook its head
+impatiently, and walked a little quicker.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What a pity it wouldn’t stay!” sighed the Lory, as soon as it was quite out of
+sight; and an old Crab took the opportunity of saying to her daughter “Ah, my
+dear! Let this be a lesson to you never to lose your temper!” “Hold your
+tongue, Ma!” said the young Crab, a little snappishly. “You’re enough to try
+the patience of an oyster!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I wish I had our Dinah here, I know I do!” said Alice aloud, addressing nobody
+in particular. “She’d soon fetch it back!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And who is Dinah, if I might venture to ask the question?” said the Lory.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice replied eagerly, for she was always ready to talk about her pet: “Dinah’s
+our cat. And she’s such a capital one for catching mice you can’t think! And
+oh, I wish you could see her after the birds! Why, she’ll eat a little bird as
+soon as look at it!”
+
+
+
+ 
+This speech caused a remarkable sensation among the party. Some of the birds
+hurried off at once: one old Magpie began wrapping itself up very carefully,
+remarking, “I really must be getting home; the night-air doesn’t suit my
+throat!” and a Canary called out in a trembling voice to its children, “Come
+away, my dears! It’s high time you were all in bed!” On various pretexts they
+all moved off, and Alice was soon left alone.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I wish I hadn’t mentioned Dinah!” she said to herself in a melancholy tone.
+“Nobody seems to like her, down here, and I’m sure she’s the best cat in the
+world! Oh, my dear Dinah! I wonder if I shall ever see you any more!” And here
+poor Alice began to cry again, for she felt very lonely and low-spirited. In a
+little while, however, she again heard a little pattering of footsteps in the
+distance, and she looked up eagerly, half hoping that the Mouse had changed his
+mind, and was coming back to finish his story.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV.
+
+The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill 
+ 
+It was the White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again, and looking anxiously
+about as it went, as if it had lost something; and she heard it muttering to
+itself “The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers!
+She’ll get me executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets! Where can I have
+dropped them, I wonder?” Alice guessed in a moment that it was looking for the
+fan and the pair of white kid gloves, and she very good-naturedly began hunting
+about for them, but they were nowhere to be seen—everything seemed to have
+changed since her swim in the pool, and the great hall, with the glass table
+and the little door, had vanished completely.
+
+
+
+ 
+Very soon the Rabbit noticed Alice, as she went hunting about, and called out
+to her in an angry tone, “Why, Mary Ann, what are you doing out here?
+Run home this moment, and fetch me a pair of gloves and a fan! Quick, now!” And
+Alice was so much frightened that she ran off at once in the direction it
+pointed to, without trying to explain the mistake it had made.
+
+
+
+ 
+“He took me for his housemaid,” she said to herself as she ran. “How surprised
+he’ll be when he finds out who I am! But I’d better take him his fan and
+gloves—that is, if I can find them.” As she said this, she came upon a neat
+little house, on the door of which was a bright brass plate with the name “W.
+RABBIT,” engraved upon it. She went in without knocking, and hurried upstairs,
+in great fear lest she should meet the real Mary Ann, and be turned out of the
+house before she had found the fan and gloves.
+
+
+
+ 
+“How queer it seems,” Alice said to herself, “to be going messages for a
+rabbit! I suppose Dinah’ll be sending me on messages next!” And she began
+fancying the sort of thing that would happen: “‘Miss Alice! Come here directly,
+and get ready for your walk!’ ‘Coming in a minute, nurse! But I’ve got to see
+that the mouse doesn’t get out.’ Only I don’t think,” Alice went on, “that
+they’d let Dinah stop in the house if it began ordering people about like
+that!”
+
+
+
+ 
+By this time she had found her way into a tidy little room with a table in the
+window, and on it (as she had hoped) a fan and two or three pairs of tiny white
+kid gloves: she took up the fan and a pair of the gloves, and was just going to
+leave the room, when her eye fell upon a little bottle that stood near the
+looking-glass. There was no label this time with the words “DRINK ME,” but
+nevertheless she uncorked it and put it to her lips. “I know something 
+interesting is sure to happen,” she said to herself, “whenever I eat or drink
+anything; so I’ll just see what this bottle does. I do hope it’ll make me grow
+large again, for really I’m quite tired of being such a tiny little thing!”
+
+
+
+ 
+It did so indeed, and much sooner than she had expected: before she had drunk
+half the bottle, she found her head pressing against the ceiling, and had to
+stoop to save her neck from being broken. She hastily put down the bottle,
+saying to herself “That’s quite enough—I hope I shan’t grow any more—As it is,
+I can’t get out at the door—I do wish I hadn’t drunk quite so much!”
+
+
+
+ 
+Alas! it was too late to wish that! She went on growing, and growing, and very
+soon had to kneel down on the floor: in another minute there was not even room
+for this, and she tried the effect of lying down with one elbow against the
+door, and the other arm curled round her head. Still she went on growing, and,
+as a last resource, she put one arm out of the window, and one foot up the
+chimney, and said to herself “Now I can do no more, whatever happens. What
+ will become of me?”
+
+
+
+ 
+Luckily for Alice, the little magic bottle had now had its full effect, and she
+grew no larger: still it was very uncomfortable, and, as there seemed to be no
+sort of chance of her ever getting out of the room again, no wonder she felt
+unhappy.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was much pleasanter at home,” thought poor Alice, “when one wasn’t always
+growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I
+almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole—and yet—and yet—it’s rather
+curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened
+to me! When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never
+happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book
+written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I’ll write one—but I’m
+grown up now,” she added in a sorrowful tone; “at least there’s no room to grow
+up any more here .”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But then,” thought Alice, “shall I never get any older than I am now?
+That’ll be a comfort, one way—never to be an old woman—but then—always to have
+lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn’t like that! ”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, you foolish Alice!” she answered herself. “How can you learn lessons in
+here? Why, there’s hardly room for you , and no room at all for any
+lesson-books!”
+
+
+
+ 
+And so she went on, taking first one side and then the other, and making quite
+a conversation of it altogether; but after a few minutes she heard a voice
+outside, and stopped to listen.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Mary Ann! Mary Ann!” said the voice. “Fetch me my gloves this moment!” Then
+came a little pattering of feet on the stairs. Alice knew it was the Rabbit
+coming to look for her, and she trembled till she shook the house, quite
+forgetting that she was now about a thousand times as large as the Rabbit, and
+had no reason to be afraid of it.
+
+
+
+ 
+Presently the Rabbit came up to the door, and tried to open it; but, as the
+door opened inwards, and Alice’s elbow was pressed hard against it, that
+attempt proved a failure. Alice heard it say to itself “Then I’ll go round and
+get in at the window.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“ That you won’t!” thought Alice, and, after waiting till she fancied she
+heard the Rabbit just under the window, she suddenly spread out her hand, and
+made a snatch in the air. She did not get hold of anything, but she heard a
+little shriek and a fall, and a crash of broken glass, from which she concluded
+that it was just possible it had fallen into a cucumber-frame, or something of
+the sort.
+
+
+
+ 
+Next came an angry voice—the Rabbit’s—“Pat! Pat! Where are you?” And then a
+voice she had never heard before, “Sure then I’m here! Digging for apples, yer
+honour!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Digging for apples, indeed!” said the Rabbit angrily. “Here! Come and help me
+out of this! ” (Sounds of more broken glass.)
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now tell me, Pat, what’s that in the window?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Sure, it’s an arm, yer honour!” (He pronounced it “arrum.”)
+
+
+
+ 
+“An arm, you goose! Who ever saw one that size? Why, it fills the whole
+window!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Sure, it does, yer honour: but it’s an arm for all that.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, it’s got no business there, at any rate: go and take it away!”
+
+
+
+ 
+There was a long silence after this, and Alice could only hear whispers now and
+then; such as, “Sure, I don’t like it, yer honour, at all, at all!” “Do as I
+tell you, you coward!” and at last she spread out her hand again, and made
+another snatch in the air. This time there were two little shrieks, and
+more sounds of broken glass. “What a number of cucumber-frames there must be!”
+thought Alice. “I wonder what they’ll do next! As for pulling me out of the
+window, I only wish they could! I’m sure I don’t want to stay in
+here any longer!”
+
+
+
+ 
+She waited for some time without hearing anything more: at last came a rumbling
+of little cartwheels, and the sound of a good many voices all talking together:
+she made out the words: “Where’s the other ladder?—Why, I hadn’t to bring but
+one; Bill’s got the other—Bill! fetch it here, lad!—Here, put ’em up at this
+corner—No, tie ’em together first—they don’t reach half high enough yet—Oh!
+they’ll do well enough; don’t be particular—Here, Bill! catch hold of this
+rope—Will the roof bear?—Mind that loose slate—Oh, it’s coming down! Heads
+below!” (a loud crash)—“Now, who did that?—It was Bill, I fancy—Who’s to go
+down the chimney?—Nay, I shan’t! You do it!— That I won’t,
+then!—Bill’s to go down—Here, Bill! the master says you’re to go down the
+chimney!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh! So Bill’s got to come down the chimney, has he?” said Alice to herself.
+“Shy, they seem to put everything upon Bill! I wouldn’t be in Bill’s place for
+a good deal: this fireplace is narrow, to be sure; but I think I can
+kick a little!”
+
+
+
+ 
+She drew her foot as far down the chimney as she could, and waited till she
+heard a little animal (she couldn’t guess of what sort it was) scratching and
+scrambling about in the chimney close above her: then, saying to herself “This
+is Bill,” she gave one sharp kick, and waited to see what would happen next.
+
+
+
+ 
+The first thing she heard was a general chorus of “There goes Bill!” then the
+Rabbit’s voice along—“Catch him, you by the hedge!” then silence, and then
+another confusion of voices—“Hold up his head—Brandy now—Don’t choke him—How
+was it, old fellow? What happened to you? Tell us all about it!”
+
+
+
+ 
+Last came a little feeble, squeaking voice, (“That’s Bill,” thought Alice,)
+“Well, I hardly know—No more, thank ye; I’m better now—but I’m a deal too
+flustered to tell you—all I know is, something comes at me like a
+Jack-in-the-box, and up I goes like a sky-rocket!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“So you did, old fellow!” said the others.
+
+
+
+ 
+“We must burn the house down!” said the Rabbit’s voice; and Alice called out as
+loud as she could, “If you do, I’ll set Dinah at you!”
+
+
+
+ 
+There was a dead silence instantly, and Alice thought to herself, “I wonder
+what they will do next! If they had any sense, they’d take the roof
+off.” After a minute or two, they began moving about again, and Alice heard the
+Rabbit say, “A barrowful will do, to begin with.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A barrowful of what? ” thought Alice; but she had not long to doubt, for
+the next moment a shower of little pebbles came rattling in at the window, and
+some of them hit her in the face. “I’ll put a stop to this,” she said to
+herself, and shouted out, “You’d better not do that again!” which produced
+another dead silence.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice noticed with some surprise that the pebbles were all turning into little
+cakes as they lay on the floor, and a bright idea came into her head. “If I eat
+one of these cakes,” she thought, “it’s sure to make some change in my
+size; and as it can’t possibly make me larger, it must make me smaller, I
+suppose.”
+
+
+
+ 
+So she swallowed one of the cakes, and was delighted to find that she began
+shrinking directly. As soon as she was small enough to get through the door,
+she ran out of the house, and found quite a crowd of little animals and birds
+waiting outside. The poor little Lizard, Bill, was in the middle, being held up
+by two guinea-pigs, who were giving it something out of a bottle. They all made
+a rush at Alice the moment she appeared; but she ran off as hard as she could,
+and soon found herself safe in a thick wood.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The first thing I’ve got to do,” said Alice to herself, as she wandered about
+in the wood, “is to grow to my right size again; and the second thing is to
+find my way into that lovely garden. I think that will be the best plan.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It sounded an excellent plan, no doubt, and very neatly and simply arranged;
+the only difficulty was, that she had not the smallest idea how to set about
+it; and while she was peering about anxiously among the trees, a little sharp
+bark just over her head made her look up in a great hurry.
+
+
+
+ 
+An enormous puppy was looking down at her with large round eyes, and feebly
+stretching out one paw, trying to touch her. “Poor little thing!” said Alice,
+in a coaxing tone, and she tried hard to whistle to it; but she was terribly
+frightened all the time at the thought that it might be hungry, in which case
+it would be very likely to eat her up in spite of all her coaxing.
+
+
+
+ 
+Hardly knowing what she did, she picked up a little bit of stick, and held it
+out to the puppy; whereupon the puppy jumped into the air off all its feet at
+once, with a yelp of delight, and rushed at the stick, and made believe to
+worry it; then Alice dodged behind a great thistle, to keep herself from being
+run over; and the moment she appeared on the other side, the puppy made another
+rush at the stick, and tumbled head over heels in its hurry to get hold of it;
+then Alice, thinking it was very like having a game of play with a cart-horse,
+and expecting every moment to be trampled under its feet, ran round the thistle
+again; then the puppy began a series of short charges at the stick, running a
+very little way forwards each time and a long way back, and barking hoarsely
+all the while, till at last it sat down a good way off, panting, with its
+tongue hanging out of its mouth, and its great eyes half shut.
+
+
+
+ 
+This seemed to Alice a good opportunity for making her escape; so she set off
+at once, and ran till she was quite tired and out of breath, and till the
+puppy’s bark sounded quite faint in the distance.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And yet what a dear little puppy it was!” said Alice, as she leant against a
+buttercup to rest herself, and fanned herself with one of the leaves: “I should
+have liked teaching it tricks very much, if—if I’d only been the right size to
+do it! Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again! Let me
+see—how is it to be managed? I suppose I ought to eat or drink something
+or other; but the great question is, what?”
+
+
+
+ 
+The great question certainly was, what? Alice looked all round her at the
+flowers and the blades of grass, but she did not see anything that looked like
+the right thing to eat or drink under the circumstances. There was a large
+mushroom growing near her, about the same height as herself; and when she had
+looked under it, and on both sides of it, and behind it, it occurred to her
+that she might as well look and see what was on the top of it.
+
+
+
+ 
+She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the mushroom,
+and her eyes immediately met those of a large blue caterpillar, that was
+sitting on the top with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah, and
+taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V.
+
+Advice from a Caterpillar 
+ 
+The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at
+last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a
+languid, sleepy voice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Who are you? ” said the Caterpillar.
+
+
+
+ 
+This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather
+shyly, “I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was 
+when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times
+since then.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I can’t explain myself , I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not
+myself, you see.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied very politely, “for I
+can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in
+a day is very confusing.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It isn’t,” said the Caterpillar.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,” said Alice; “but when you have to
+turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a
+butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, won’t you?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,” said Alice; “all I know is, it
+would feel very queer to me .”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You!” said the Caterpillar contemptuously. “Who are you? ”
+
+
+
+ 
+Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation. Alice felt
+a little irritated at the Caterpillar’s making such very short remarks,
+and she drew herself up and said, very gravely, “I think, you ought to tell me
+who you are, first.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why?” said the Caterpillar.
+
+
+
+ 
+Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any good
+reason, and as the Caterpillar seemed to be in a very unpleasant state
+of mind, she turned away.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Come back!” the Caterpillar called after her. “I’ve something important to
+say!”
+
+
+
+ 
+This sounded promising, certainly: Alice turned and came back again.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Keep your temper,” said the Caterpillar.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Is that all?” said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well as she could.
+
+
+
+ 
+“No,” said the Caterpillar.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and
+perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing. For some minutes
+it puffed away without speaking, but at last it unfolded its arms, took the
+hookah out of its mouth again, and said, “So you think you’re changed, do you?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’m afraid I am, sir,” said Alice; “I can’t remember things as I used—and I
+don’t keep the same size for ten minutes together!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Can’t remember what things?” said the Caterpillar.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, I’ve tried to say “How doth the little busy bee,” but it all came
+different!” Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Repeat, ‘ You are old, Father William ,’” said the Caterpillar.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice folded her hands, and began:—
+
+
+
+ 
+“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
+
+    “And your hair has become very white;
+
+And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
+
+    Do you think, at your age, it is right?”
+
+
+
+“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,
+
+    “I feared it might injure the brain;
+
+But, now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
+
+    Why, I do it again and again.”
+
+
+
+“You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before,
+
+    And have grown most uncommonly fat;
+
+Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—
+
+    Pray, what is the reason of that?”
+
+
+
+“In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
+
+    “I kept all my limbs very supple
+
+By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box—
+
+    Allow me to sell you a couple?”
+
+
+
+“You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak
+
+    For anything tougher than suet;
+
+Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—
+
+    Pray, how did you manage to do it?”
+
+
+
+“In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law,
+
+    And argued each case with my wife;
+
+And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
+
+    Has lasted the rest of my life.”
+
+
+
+“You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly suppose
+
+    That your eye was as steady as ever;
+
+Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—
+
+    What made you so awfully clever?”
+
+
+
+“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”
+
+    Said his father; “don’t give yourself airs!
+
+Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
+
+    Be off, or I’ll kick you down stairs!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is not said right,” said the Caterpillar.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not quite right, I’m afraid,” said Alice, timidly; “some of the words
+have got altered.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is wrong from beginning to end,” said the Caterpillar decidedly, and there
+was silence for some minutes.
+
+
+
+ 
+The Caterpillar was the first to speak.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What size do you want to be?” it asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, I’m not particular as to size,” Alice hastily replied; “only one doesn’t
+like changing so often, you know.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I don’t know,” said the Caterpillar.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in her life before,
+and she felt that she was losing her temper.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Are you content now?” said the Caterpillar.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, I should like to be a little larger, sir, if you wouldn’t mind,”
+said Alice: “three inches is such a wretched height to be.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is a very good height indeed!” said the Caterpillar angrily, rearing itself
+upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high).
+
+
+
+ 
+“But I’m not used to it!” pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And she thought
+of herself, “I wish the creatures wouldn’t be so easily offended!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You’ll get used to it in time,” said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah
+into its mouth and began smoking again.
+
+
+
+ 
+This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In a minute or
+two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice,
+and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the
+grass, merely remarking as it went, “One side will make you grow taller, and
+the other side will make you grow shorter.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“One side of what? The other side of what? ” thought Alice to
+herself.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of the mushroom,” said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud; and
+in another moment it was out of sight.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to
+make out which were the two sides of it; and as it was perfectly round, she
+found this a very difficult question. However, at last she stretched her arms
+round it as far as they would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each
+hand.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And now which is which?” she said to herself, and nibbled a little of the
+right-hand bit to try the effect: the next moment she felt a violent blow
+underneath her chin: it had struck her foot!
+
+
+
+ 
+She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but she felt that
+there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly; so she set to work
+at once to eat some of the other bit. Her chin was pressed so closely against
+her foot, that there was hardly room to open her mouth; but she did it at last,
+and managed to swallow a morsel of the lefthand bit.
+
+
+
+ 
+*      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+    *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+*      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Come, my head’s free at last!” said Alice in a tone of delight, which changed
+into alarm in another moment, when she found that her shoulders were nowhere to
+be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of
+neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a sea of green leaves that lay
+far below her.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What can all that green stuff be?” said Alice. “And where have 
+my shoulders got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can’t see you?” She was
+moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a little
+shaking among the distant green leaves.
+
+
+
+ 
+As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried
+to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would
+bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in
+curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the
+leaves, which she found to be nothing but the tops of the trees under which she
+had been wandering, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large
+pigeon had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with its wings.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Serpent!” screamed the Pigeon.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’m not a serpent!” said Alice indignantly. “Let me alone!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Serpent, I say again!” repeated the Pigeon, but in a more subdued tone, and
+added with a kind of sob, “I’ve tried every way, and nothing seems to suit
+them!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about,” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’ve tried the roots of trees, and I’ve tried banks, and I’ve tried hedges,”
+the Pigeon went on, without attending to her; “but those serpents! There’s no
+pleasing them!”
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice was more and more puzzled, but she thought there was no use in saying
+anything more till the Pigeon had finished.
+
+
+
+ 
+“As if it wasn’t trouble enough hatching the eggs,” said the Pigeon; “but I
+must be on the look-out for serpents night and day! Why, I haven’t had a wink
+of sleep these three weeks!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’m very sorry you’ve been annoyed,” said Alice, who was beginning to see its
+meaning.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And just as I’d taken the highest tree in the wood,” continued the Pigeon,
+raising its voice to a shriek, “and just as I was thinking I should be free of
+them at last, they must needs come wriggling down from the sky! Ugh, Serpent!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But I’m not a serpent, I tell you!” said Alice. “I’m a—I’m a—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well! What are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you’re trying to
+invent something!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I—I’m a little girl,” said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the
+number of changes she had gone through that day.
+
+
+
+ 
+“A likely story indeed!” said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest contempt.
+“I’ve seen a good many little girls in my time, but never one with such
+a neck as that! No, no! You’re a serpent; and there’s no use denying it. I
+suppose you’ll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have tasted eggs, certainly,” said Alice, who was a very truthful
+child; “but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I don’t believe it,” said the Pigeon; “but if they do, why then they’re a kind
+of serpent, that’s all I can say.”
+
+
+
+ 
+This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a minute or
+two, which gave the Pigeon the opportunity of adding, “You’re looking for eggs,
+I know that well enough; and what does it matter to me whether you’re a
+little girl or a serpent?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It matters a good deal to me ,” said Alice hastily; “but I’m not looking
+for eggs, as it happens; and if I was, I shouldn’t want yours : I don’t
+like them raw.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, be off, then!” said the Pigeon in a sulky tone, as it settled down again
+into its nest. Alice crouched down among the trees as well as she could, for
+her neck kept getting entangled among the branches, and every now and then she
+had to stop and untwist it. After a while she remembered that she still held
+the pieces of mushroom in her hands, and she set to work very carefully,
+nibbling first at one and then at the other, and growing sometimes taller and
+sometimes shorter, until she had succeeded in bringing herself down to her
+usual height.
+
+
+
+ 
+It was so long since she had been anything near the right size, that it felt
+quite strange at first; but she got used to it in a few minutes, and began
+talking to herself, as usual. “Come, there’s half my plan done now! How
+puzzling all these changes are! I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one
+minute to another! However, I’ve got back to my right size: the next thing is,
+to get into that beautiful garden—how is that to be done, I wonder?” As
+she said this, she came suddenly upon an open place, with a little house in it
+about four feet high. “Whoever lives there,” thought Alice, “it’ll never do to
+come upon them this size: why, I should frighten them out of their
+wits!” So she began nibbling at the righthand bit again, and did not venture to
+go near the house till she had brought herself down to nine inches high.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI.
+
+Pig and Pepper 
+ 
+For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what to do
+next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood—(she
+considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by
+his face only, she would have called him a fish)—and rapped loudly at the door
+with his knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery, with a round
+face, and large eyes like a frog; and both footmen, Alice noticed, had powdered
+hair that curled all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it
+was all about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen.
+
+
+
+ 
+The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly
+as large as himself, and this he handed over to the other, saying, in a solemn
+tone, “For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.” The
+Frog-Footman repeated, in the same solemn tone, only changing the order of the
+words a little, “From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess to play
+croquet.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Then they both bowed low, and their curls got entangled together.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice laughed so much at this, that she had to run back into the wood for fear
+of their hearing her; and when she next peeped out the Fish-Footman was gone,
+and the other was sitting on the ground near the door, staring stupidly up into
+the sky.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice went timidly up to the door, and knocked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There’s no sort of use in knocking,” said the Footman, “and that for two
+reasons. First, because I’m on the same side of the door as you are; secondly,
+because they’re making such a noise inside, no one could possibly hear you.”
+And certainly there was a most extraordinary noise going on within—a
+constant howling and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a
+dish or kettle had been broken to pieces.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Please, then,” said Alice, “how am I to get in?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There might be some sense in your knocking,” the Footman went on without
+attending to her, “if we had the door between us. For instance, if you were
+ inside , you might knock, and I could let you out, you know.” He was
+looking up into the sky all the time he was speaking, and this Alice thought
+decidedly uncivil. “But perhaps he can’t help it,” she said to herself; “his
+eyes are so very nearly at the top of his head. But at any rate he might
+answer questions.—How am I to get in?” she repeated, aloud.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I shall sit here,” the Footman remarked, “till tomorrow—”
+
+
+
+ 
+At this moment the door of the house opened, and a large plate came skimming
+out, straight at the Footman’s head: it just grazed his nose, and broke to
+pieces against one of the trees behind him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“—or next day, maybe,” the Footman continued in the same tone, exactly as if
+nothing had happened.
+
+
+
+ 
+“How am I to get in?” asked Alice again, in a louder tone.
+
+
+
+ 
+“ Are you to get in at all?” said the Footman. “That’s the first
+question, you know.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so. “It’s really
+dreadful,” she muttered to herself, “the way all the creatures argue. It’s
+enough to drive one crazy!”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Footman seemed to think this a good opportunity for repeating his remark,
+with variations. “I shall sit here,” he said, “on and off, for days and days.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But what am I to do?” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Anything you like,” said the Footman, and began whistling.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, there’s no use in talking to him,” said Alice desperately: “he’s perfectly
+idiotic!” And she opened the door and went in.
+
+
+
+ 
+The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from one end
+to the other: the Duchess was sitting on a three-legged stool in the middle,
+nursing a baby; the cook was leaning over the fire, stirring a large cauldron
+which seemed to be full of soup.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There’s certainly too much pepper in that soup!” Alice said to herself, as
+well as she could for sneezing.
+
+
+
+ 
+There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the Duchess sneezed
+occasionally; and as for the baby, it was sneezing and howling alternately
+without a moment’s pause. The only things in the kitchen that did not sneeze,
+were the cook, and a large cat which was sitting on the hearth and grinning
+from ear to ear.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Please would you tell me,” said Alice, a little timidly, for she was not quite
+sure whether it was good manners for her to speak first, “why your cat grins
+like that?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s a Cheshire cat,” said the Duchess, “and that’s why. Pig!”
+
+
+
+ 
+She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped; but
+she saw in another moment that it was addressed to the baby, and not to her, so
+she took courage, and went on again:—
+
+
+
+ 
+“I didn’t know that Cheshire cats always grinned; in fact, I didn’t know that
+cats could grin.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“They all can,” said the Duchess; “and most of ’em do.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I don’t know of any that do,” Alice said very politely, feeling quite pleased
+to have got into a conversation.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You don’t know much,” said the Duchess; “and that’s a fact.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice did not at all like the tone of this remark, and thought it would be as
+well to introduce some other subject of conversation. While she was trying to
+fix on one, the cook took the cauldron of soup off the fire, and at once set to
+work throwing everything within her reach at the Duchess and the baby—the
+fire-irons came first; then followed a shower of saucepans, plates, and dishes.
+The Duchess took no notice of them even when they hit her; and the baby was
+howling so much already, that it was quite impossible to say whether the blows
+hurt it or not.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, please mind what you’re doing!” cried Alice, jumping up and down in
+an agony of terror. “Oh, there goes his precious nose!” as an unusually
+large saucepan flew close by it, and very nearly carried it off.
+
+
+
+ 
+“If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess said in a hoarse growl,
+“the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Which would not be an advantage,” said Alice, who felt very glad to get
+an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. “Just think of what
+work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four
+hours to turn round on its axis—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Talking of axes,” said the Duchess, “chop off her head!”
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice glanced rather anxiously at the cook, to see if she meant to take the
+hint; but the cook was busily stirring the soup, and seemed not to be
+listening, so she went on again: “Twenty-four hours, I think ; or is it
+twelve? I—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, don’t bother me ,” said the Duchess; “I never could abide figures!”
+And with that she began nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to
+it as she did so, and giving it a violent shake at the end of every line:
+
+
+
+ 
+“Speak roughly to your little boy,
+
+    And beat him when he sneezes:
+
+He only does it to annoy,
+
+    Because he knows it teases.”
+
+
+
+ 
+CHORUS.
+
+(In which the cook and the baby joined):
+
+
+
+ 
+“Wow! wow! wow!”
+
+
+
+ 
+While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing the baby
+violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could
+hardly hear the words:—
+
+
+
+ 
+“I speak severely to my boy,
+
+    I beat him when he sneezes;
+
+For he can thoroughly enjoy
+
+    The pepper when he pleases!”
+
+
+
+ 
+CHORUS.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Wow! wow! wow!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Here! you may nurse it a bit, if you like!” the Duchess said to Alice,
+flinging the baby at her as she spoke. “I must go and get ready to play croquet
+with the Queen,” and she hurried out of the room. The cook threw a frying-pan
+after her as she went out, but it just missed her.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little
+creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, “just like a
+star-fish,” thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a
+steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening
+itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as
+much as she could do to hold it.
+
+
+
+ 
+As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it, (which was to twist
+it up into a sort of knot, and then keep tight hold of its right ear and left
+foot, so as to prevent its undoing itself,) she carried it out into the open
+air. “If I don’t take this child away with me,” thought Alice, “they’re sure to
+kill it in a day or two: wouldn’t it be murder to leave it behind?” She said
+the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off
+sneezing by this time). “Don’t grunt,” said Alice; “that’s not at all a proper
+way of expressing yourself.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see
+what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had a very 
+turn-up nose, much more like a snout than a real nose; also its eyes were
+getting extremely small for a baby: altogether Alice did not like the look of
+the thing at all. “But perhaps it was only sobbing,” she thought, and looked
+into its eyes again, to see if there were any tears.
+
+
+
+ 
+No, there were no tears. “If you’re going to turn into a pig, my dear,” said
+Alice, seriously, “I’ll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!” The poor
+little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which), and
+they went on for some while in silence.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice was just beginning to think to herself, “Now, what am I to do with this
+creature when I get it home?” when it grunted again, so violently, that she
+looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be no 
+mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it
+would be quite absurd for her to carry it further.
+
+
+
+ 
+So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot
+away quietly into the wood. “If it had grown up,” she said to herself, “it
+would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I
+think.” And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very
+well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, “if one only knew the right way
+to change them—” when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat
+sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.
+
+
+
+ 
+The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought:
+still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it
+ought to be treated with respect.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Cheshire Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether
+it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. “Come, it’s
+pleased so far,” thought Alice, and she went on. “Would you tell me, please,
+which way I ought to go from here?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
+
+
+
+ 
+“—so long as I get somewhere ,” Alice added as an explanation.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. “What
+sort of people live about here?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a
+Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March
+Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re
+mad.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice didn’t think that proved it at all; however, she went on “And how do you
+know that you’re mad?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“To begin with,” said the Cat, “a dog’s not mad. You grant that?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I suppose so,” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, then,” the Cat went on, “you see, a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags
+its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my
+tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“ I call it purring, not growling,” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Call it what you like,” said the Cat. “Do you play croquet with the Queen
+to-day?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I should like it very much,” said Alice, “but I haven’t been invited yet.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You’ll see me there,” said the Cat, and vanished.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so used to queer things
+happening. While she was looking at the place where it had been, it suddenly
+appeared again.
+
+
+
+ 
+“By-the-bye, what became of the baby?” said the Cat. “I’d nearly forgotten to
+ask.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It turned into a pig,” Alice quietly said, just as if it had come back in a
+natural way.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I thought it would,” said the Cat, and vanished again.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not appear,
+and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March
+Hare was said to live. “I’ve seen hatters before,” she said to herself; “the
+March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it
+won’t be raving mad—at least not so mad as it was in March.” As she said this,
+she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a branch of a tree.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Did you say pig, or fig?” said the Cat.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I said pig,” replied Alice; “and I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and
+vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning
+with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time
+after the rest of it had gone.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin
+without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”
+
+
+
+ 
+She had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house of the
+March Hare: she thought it must be the right house, because the chimneys were
+shaped like ears and the roof was thatched with fur. It was so large a house,
+that she did not like to go nearer till she had nibbled some more of the
+lefthand bit of mushroom, and raised herself to about two feet high: even then
+she walked up towards it rather timidly, saying to herself “Suppose it should
+be raving mad after all! I almost wish I’d gone to see the Hatter instead!”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII.
+
+A Mad Tea-Party 
+ 
+There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March
+Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them,
+fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows
+on it, and talking over its head. “Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,”
+thought Alice; “only, as it’s asleep, I suppose it doesn’t mind.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one
+corner of it: “No room! No room!” they cried out when they saw Alice coming.
+“There’s plenty of room!” said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a
+large arm-chair at one end of the table.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. “I don’t
+see any wine,” she remarked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,” said Alice angrily.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” said the March
+Hare.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I didn’t know it was your table,” said Alice; “it’s laid for a great
+many more than three.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your hair wants cutting,” said the Hatter. He had been looking at Alice for
+some time with great curiosity, and this was his first speech.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You should learn not to make personal remarks,” Alice said with some severity;
+“it’s very rude.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said 
+was, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they’ve begun
+asking riddles.—I believe I can guess that,” she added aloud.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March
+Hare.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Exactly so,” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the
+same thing, you know.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that
+‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’
+is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in
+his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I
+breathe’!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter, and here the
+conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice
+thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which
+wasn’t much.
+
+
+
+ 
+The Hatter was the first to break the silence. “What day of the month is it?”
+he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was
+looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his
+ear.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice considered a little, and then said “The fourth.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Two days wrong!” sighed the Hatter. “I told you butter wouldn’t suit the
+works!” he added looking angrily at the March Hare.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was the best butter,” the March Hare meekly replied.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,” the Hatter grumbled: “you
+shouldn’t have put it in with the bread-knife.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into
+his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to
+say than his first remark, “It was the best butter, you know.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. “What a funny
+watch!” she remarked. “It tells the day of the month, and doesn’t tell what
+o’clock it is!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why should it?” muttered the Hatter. “Does your watch tell you what
+year it is?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of course not,” Alice replied very readily: “but that’s because it stays the
+same year for such a long time together.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Which is just the case with mine ,” said the Hatter.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice felt dreadfully puzzled, The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no sort of
+meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. “I don’t quite understand
+you,” she said, as politely as she could.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The Dormouse is asleep again,” said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea
+upon its nose.
+
+
+
+ 
+The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes,
+“Of course, of course; just what I was going to remark myself.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “what’s the answer?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nor I,” said the March Hare.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,”
+she said, “than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about
+wasting it . It’s him .”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I don’t know what you mean,” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of course you don’t!” the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. “I
+dare say you never even spoke to Time!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Perhaps not,” Alice cautiously replied: “but I know I have to beat time when I
+learn music.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah! that accounts for it,” said the Hatter. “He won’t stand beating. Now, if
+you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with
+the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o’clock in the morning, just time
+to begin lessons: you’d only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the
+clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!”
+
+
+
+ 
+(“I only wish it was,” the March Hare said to itself in a whisper.)
+
+
+
+ 
+“That would be grand, certainly,” said Alice thoughtfully: “but then—I
+shouldn’t be hungry for it, you know.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not at first, perhaps,” said the Hatter: “but you could keep it to half-past
+one as long as you liked.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Is that the way you manage?” Alice asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+The Hatter shook his head mournfully. “Not I!” he replied. “We quarrelled last
+March—just before he went mad, you know—” (pointing with his tea spoon
+at the March Hare,) “—it was at the great concert given by the Queen of Hearts,
+and I had to sing
+
+
+
+ 
+‘Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
+
+How I wonder what you’re at!’
+
+
+
+ 
+You know the song, perhaps?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’ve heard something like it,” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It goes on, you know,” the Hatter continued, “in this way:—
+
+
+
+ 
+‘Up above the world you fly,
+
+Like a tea-tray in the sky.
+
+                    Twinkle, twinkle—’”
+
+
+
+ 
+Here the Dormouse shook itself, and began singing in its sleep “ Twinkle,
+twinkle, twinkle, twinkle —” and went on so long that they had to pinch it
+to make it stop.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, I’d hardly finished the first verse,” said the Hatter, “when the Queen
+jumped up and bawled out, ‘He’s murdering the time! Off with his head!’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How dreadfully savage!” exclaimed Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And ever since that,” the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, “he won’t do a
+thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.”
+
+
+
+ 
+A bright idea came into Alice’s head. “Is that the reason so many tea-things
+are put out here?” she asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, that’s it,” said the Hatter with a sigh: “it’s always tea-time, and we’ve
+no time to wash the things between whiles.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then you keep moving round, I suppose?” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Exactly so,” said the Hatter: “as the things get used up.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But what happens when you come to the beginning again?” Alice ventured to ask.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Suppose we change the subject,” the March Hare interrupted, yawning. “I’m
+getting tired of this. I vote the young lady tells us a story.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’m afraid I don’t know one,” said Alice, rather alarmed at the proposal.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then the Dormouse shall!” they both cried. “Wake up, Dormouse!” And they
+pinched it on both sides at once.
+
+
+
+ 
+The Dormouse slowly opened his eyes. “I wasn’t asleep,” he said in a hoarse,
+feeble voice: “I heard every word you fellows were saying.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Tell us a story!” said the March Hare.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, please do!” pleaded Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And be quick about it,” added the Hatter, “or you’ll be asleep again before
+it’s done.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Once upon a time there were three little sisters,” the Dormouse began in a
+great hurry; “and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at
+the bottom of a well—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What did they live on?” said Alice, who always took a great interest in
+questions of eating and drinking.
+
+
+
+ 
+“They lived on treacle,” said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two.
+
+
+
+ 
+“They couldn’t have done that, you know,” Alice gently remarked; “they’d have
+been ill.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“So they were,” said the Dormouse; “ very ill.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice tried to fancy to herself what such an extraordinary way of living would
+be like, but it puzzled her too much, so she went on: “But why did they live at
+the bottom of a well?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take
+more.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You mean you can’t take less ,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take
+ more than nothing.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nobody asked your opinion,” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Who’s making personal remarks now?” the Hatter asked triumphantly.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice did not quite know what to say to this: so she helped herself to some tea
+and bread-and-butter, and then turned to the Dormouse, and repeated her
+question. “Why did they live at the bottom of a well?”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Dormouse again took a minute or two to think about it, and then said, “It
+was a treacle-well.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There’s no such thing!” Alice was beginning very angrily, but the Hatter and
+the March Hare went “Sh! sh!” and the Dormouse sulkily remarked, “If you can’t
+be civil, you’d better finish the story for yourself.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, please go on!” Alice said very humbly; “I won’t interrupt again. I dare
+say there may be one .”
+
+
+
+ 
+“One, indeed!” said the Dormouse indignantly. However, he consented to go on.
+“And so these three little sisters—they were learning to draw, you know—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What did they draw?” said Alice, quite forgetting her promise.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Treacle,” said the Dormouse, without considering at all this time.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I want a clean cup,” interrupted the Hatter: “let’s all move one place on.”
+
+
+
+ 
+He moved on as he spoke, and the Dormouse followed him: the March Hare moved
+into the Dormouse’s place, and Alice rather unwillingly took the place of the
+March Hare. The Hatter was the only one who got any advantage from the change:
+and Alice was a good deal worse off than before, as the March Hare had just
+upset the milk-jug into his plate.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice did not wish to offend the Dormouse again, so she began very cautiously:
+“But I don’t understand. Where did they draw the treacle from?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You can draw water out of a water-well,” said the Hatter; “so I should think
+you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well—eh, stupid?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But they were in the well,” Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to
+notice this last remark.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of course they were,” said the Dormouse; “—well in.”
+
+
+
+ 
+This answer so confused poor Alice, that she let the Dormouse go on for some
+time without interrupting it.
+
+
+
+ 
+“They were learning to draw,” the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its
+eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; “and they drew all manner of
+things—everything that begins with an M—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why with an M?” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why not?” said the March Hare.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice was silent.
+
+
+
+ 
+The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze;
+but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and
+went on: “—that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and
+memory, and muchness—you know you say things are “much of a muchness”—did you
+ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Really, now you ask me,” said Alice, very much confused, “I don’t think—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then you shouldn’t talk,” said the Hatter.
+
+
+
+ 
+This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in great
+disgust, and walked off; the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and neither of the
+others took the least notice of her going, though she looked back once or
+twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them,
+they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot.
+
+
+
+ 
+“At any rate I’ll never go there again!” said Alice as she picked her
+way through the wood. “It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my
+life!”
+
+
+
+ 
+Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees had a door leading
+right into it. “That’s very curious!” she thought. “But everything’s curious
+today. I think I may as well go in at once.” And in she went.
+
+
+
+ 
+Once more she found herself in the long hall, and close to the little glass
+table. “Now, I’ll manage better this time,” she said to herself, and began by
+taking the little golden key, and unlocking the door that led into the garden.
+Then she went to work nibbling at the mushroom (she had kept a piece of it in
+her pocket) till she was about a foot high: then she walked down the little
+passage: and then —she found herself at last in the beautiful garden,
+among the bright flower-beds and the cool fountains.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII.
+
+The Queen’s Croquet-Ground 
+ 
+A large rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden: the roses growing on
+it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily painting them red.
+Alice thought this a very curious thing, and she went nearer to watch them, and
+just as she came up to them she heard one of them say, “Look out now, Five!
+Don’t go splashing paint over me like that!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I couldn’t help it,” said Five, in a sulky tone; “Seven jogged my elbow.”
+
+
+
+ 
+On which Seven looked up and said, “That’s right, Five! Always lay the blame on
+others!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“ You’d better not talk!” said Five. “I heard the Queen say only
+yesterday you deserved to be beheaded!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What for?” said the one who had spoken first.
+
+
+
+ 
+“That’s none of your business, Two!” said Seven.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, it is his business!” said Five, “and I’ll tell him—it was for
+bringing the cook tulip-roots instead of onions.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Seven flung down his brush, and had just begun “Well, of all the unjust
+things—” when his eye chanced to fall upon Alice, as she stood watching them,
+and he checked himself suddenly: the others looked round also, and all of them
+bowed low.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Would you tell me,” said Alice, a little timidly, “why you are painting those
+roses?”
+
+
+
+ 
+Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began in a low voice, “Why
+the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a red 
+rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake; and if the Queen was to find
+it out, we should all have our heads cut off, you know. So you see, Miss, we’re
+doing our best, afore she comes, to—” At this moment Five, who had been
+anxiously looking across the garden, called out “The Queen! The Queen!” and the
+three gardeners instantly threw themselves flat upon their faces. There was a
+sound of many footsteps, and Alice looked round, eager to see the Queen.
+
+
+
+ 
+First came ten soldiers carrying clubs; these were all shaped like the three
+gardeners, oblong and flat, with their hands and feet at the corners: next the
+ten courtiers; these were ornamented all over with diamonds, and walked two and
+two, as the soldiers did. After these came the royal children; there were ten
+of them, and the little dears came jumping merrily along hand in hand, in
+couples: they were all ornamented with hearts. Next came the guests, mostly
+Kings and Queens, and among them Alice recognised the White Rabbit: it was
+talking in a hurried nervous manner, smiling at everything that was said, and
+went by without noticing her. Then followed the Knave of Hearts, carrying the
+King’s crown on a crimson velvet cushion; and, last of all this grand
+procession, came THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice was rather doubtful whether she ought not to lie down on her face like
+the three gardeners, but she could not remember ever having heard of such a
+rule at processions; “and besides, what would be the use of a procession,”
+thought she, “if people had all to lie down upon their faces, so that they
+couldn’t see it?” So she stood still where she was, and waited.
+
+
+
+ 
+When the procession came opposite to Alice, they all stopped and looked at her,
+and the Queen said severely “Who is this?” She said it to the Knave of Hearts,
+who only bowed and smiled in reply.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Idiot!” said the Queen, tossing her head impatiently; and, turning to Alice,
+she went on, “What’s your name, child?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My name is Alice, so please your Majesty,” said Alice very politely; but she
+added, to herself, “Why, they’re only a pack of cards, after all. I needn’t be
+afraid of them!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And who are these? ” said the Queen, pointing to the three gardeners who
+were lying round the rose-tree; for, you see, as they were lying on their
+faces, and the pattern on their backs was the same as the rest of the pack, she
+could not tell whether they were gardeners, or soldiers, or courtiers, or three
+of her own children.
+
+
+
+ 
+“How should I know?” said Alice, surprised at her own courage. “It’s no
+business of mine .”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like
+a wild beast, screamed “Off with her head! Off—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nonsense!” said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent.
+
+
+
+ 
+The King laid his hand upon her arm, and timidly said “Consider, my dear: she
+is only a child!”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Queen turned angrily away from him, and said to the Knave “Turn them over!”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Knave did so, very carefully, with one foot.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Get up!” said the Queen, in a shrill, loud voice, and the three gardeners
+instantly jumped up, and began bowing to the King, the Queen, the royal
+children, and everybody else.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Leave off that!” screamed the Queen. “You make me giddy.” And then, turning to
+the rose-tree, she went on, “What have you been doing here?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“May it please your Majesty,” said Two, in a very humble tone, going down on
+one knee as he spoke, “we were trying—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“ I see!” said the Queen, who had meanwhile been examining the roses.
+“Off with their heads!” and the procession moved on, three of the soldiers
+remaining behind to execute the unfortunate gardeners, who ran to Alice for
+protection.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You shan’t be beheaded!” said Alice, and she put them into a large flower-pot
+that stood near. The three soldiers wandered about for a minute or two, looking
+for them, and then quietly marched off after the others.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Are their heads off?” shouted the Queen.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Their heads are gone, if it please your Majesty!” the soldiers shouted in
+reply.
+
+
+
+ 
+“That’s right!” shouted the Queen. “Can you play croquet?”
+
+
+
+ 
+The soldiers were silent, and looked at Alice, as the question was evidently
+meant for her.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes!” shouted Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Come on, then!” roared the Queen, and Alice joined the procession, wondering
+very much what would happen next.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s—it’s a very fine day!” said a timid voice at her side. She was walking by
+the White Rabbit, who was peeping anxiously into her face.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very,” said Alice: “—where’s the Duchess?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Hush! Hush!” said the Rabbit in a low, hurried tone. He looked anxiously over
+his shoulder as he spoke, and then raised himself upon tiptoe, put his mouth
+close to her ear, and whispered “She’s under sentence of execution.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What for?” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Did you say ‘What a pity!’?” the Rabbit asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, I didn’t,” said Alice: “I don’t think it’s at all a pity. I said ‘What
+for?’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“She boxed the Queen’s ears—” the Rabbit began. Alice gave a little scream of
+laughter. “Oh, hush!” the Rabbit whispered in a frightened tone. “The Queen
+will hear you! You see, she came rather late, and the Queen said—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Get to your places!” shouted the Queen in a voice of thunder, and people began
+running about in all directions, tumbling up against each other; however, they
+got settled down in a minute or two, and the game began. Alice thought she had
+never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and
+furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the
+soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to
+make the arches.
+
+
+
+ 
+The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she
+succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm,
+with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely
+straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it
+ would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled
+expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got
+its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that
+the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides
+all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted
+to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up
+and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion
+that it was a very difficult game indeed.
+
+
+
+ 
+The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the
+while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was
+in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting “Off with his
+head!” or “Off with her head!” about once in a minute.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute
+with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, “and then,”
+thought she, “what would become of me? They’re dreadfully fond of beheading
+people here; the great wonder is, that there’s any one left alive!”
+
+
+
+ 
+She was looking about for some way of escape, and wondering whether she could
+get away without being seen, when she noticed a curious appearance in the air:
+it puzzled her very much at first, but, after watching it a minute or two, she
+made it out to be a grin, and she said to herself “It’s the Cheshire Cat: now I
+shall have somebody to talk to.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How are you getting on?” said the Cat, as soon as there was mouth enough for
+it to speak with.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice waited till the eyes appeared, and then nodded. “It’s no use speaking to
+it,” she thought, “till its ears have come, or at least one of them.” In
+another minute the whole head appeared, and then Alice put down her flamingo,
+and began an account of the game, feeling very glad she had someone to listen
+to her. The Cat seemed to think that there was enough of it now in sight, and
+no more of it appeared.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I don’t think they play at all fairly,” Alice began, in rather a complaining
+tone, “and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can’t hear oneself speak—and they
+don’t seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody
+attends to them—and you’ve no idea how confusing it is all the things being
+alive; for instance, there’s the arch I’ve got to go through next walking about
+at the other end of the ground—and I should have croqueted the Queen’s hedgehog
+just now, only it ran away when it saw mine coming!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How do you like the Queen?” said the Cat in a low voice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not at all,” said Alice: “she’s so extremely—” Just then she noticed that the
+Queen was close behind her, listening: so she went on, “—likely to win, that
+it’s hardly worth while finishing the game.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Queen smiled and passed on.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Who are you talking to?” said the King, going up to Alice, and looking
+at the Cat’s head with great curiosity.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s a friend of mine—a Cheshire Cat,” said Alice: “allow me to introduce it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I don’t like the look of it at all,” said the King: “however, it may kiss my
+hand if it likes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’d rather not,” the Cat remarked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Don’t be impertinent,” said the King, “and don’t look at me like that!” He got
+behind Alice as he spoke.
+
+
+
+ 
+“A cat may look at a king,” said Alice. “I’ve read that in some book, but I
+don’t remember where.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, it must be removed,” said the King very decidedly, and he called the
+Queen, who was passing at the moment, “My dear! I wish you would have this cat
+removed!”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. “Off
+with his head!” she said, without even looking round.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’ll fetch the executioner myself,” said the King eagerly, and he hurried off.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice thought she might as well go back, and see how the game was going on, as
+she heard the Queen’s voice in the distance, screaming with passion. She had
+already heard her sentence three of the players to be executed for having
+missed their turns, and she did not like the look of things at all, as the game
+was in such confusion that she never knew whether it was her turn or not. So
+she went in search of her hedgehog.
+
+
+
+ 
+The hedgehog was engaged in a fight with another hedgehog, which seemed to
+Alice an excellent opportunity for croqueting one of them with the other: the
+only difficulty was, that her flamingo was gone across to the other side of the
+garden, where Alice could see it trying in a helpless sort of way to fly up
+into a tree.
+
+
+
+ 
+By the time she had caught the flamingo and brought it back, the fight was
+over, and both the hedgehogs were out of sight: “but it doesn’t matter much,”
+thought Alice, “as all the arches are gone from this side of the ground.” So
+she tucked it away under her arm, that it might not escape again, and went back
+for a little more conversation with her friend.
+
+
+
+ 
+When she got back to the Cheshire Cat, she was surprised to find quite a large
+crowd collected round it: there was a dispute going on between the executioner,
+the King, and the Queen, who were all talking at once, while all the rest were
+quite silent, and looked very uncomfortable.
+
+
+
+ 
+The moment Alice appeared, she was appealed to by all three to settle the
+question, and they repeated their arguments to her, though, as they all spoke
+at once, she found it very hard indeed to make out exactly what they said.
+
+
+
+ 
+The executioner’s argument was, that you couldn’t cut off a head unless there
+was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before,
+and he wasn’t going to begin at his time of life.
+
+
+
+ 
+The King’s argument was, that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and
+that you weren’t to talk nonsense.
+
+
+
+ 
+The Queen’s argument was, that if something wasn’t done about it in less than
+no time she’d have everybody executed, all round. (It was this last remark that
+had made the whole party look so grave and anxious.)
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice could think of nothing else to say but “It belongs to the Duchess: you’d
+better ask her about it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“She’s in prison,” the Queen said to the executioner: “fetch her here.” And the
+executioner went off like an arrow.
+
+
+
+ 
+The Cat’s head began fading away the moment he was gone, and, by the time he
+had come back with the Duchess, it had entirely disappeared; so the King and
+the executioner ran wildly up and down looking for it, while the rest of the
+party went back to the game.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX.
+
+The Mock Turtle’s Story 
+ 
+“You can’t think how glad I am to see you again, you dear old thing!” said the
+Duchess, as she tucked her arm affectionately into Alice’s, and they walked off
+together.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice was very glad to find her in such a pleasant temper, and thought to
+herself that perhaps it was only the pepper that had made her so savage when
+they met in the kitchen.
+
+
+
+ 
+“When I’m a Duchess,” she said to herself, (not in a very hopeful tone
+though), “I won’t have any pepper in my kitchen at all . Soup does very
+well without—Maybe it’s always pepper that makes people hot-tempered,” she went
+on, very much pleased at having found out a new kind of rule, “and vinegar that
+makes them sour—and camomile that makes them bitter—and—and barley-sugar and
+such things that make children sweet-tempered. I only wish people knew
+ that : then they wouldn’t be so stingy about it, you know—”
+
+
+
+ 
+She had quite forgotten the Duchess by this time, and was a little startled
+when she heard her voice close to her ear. “You’re thinking about something, my
+dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can’t tell you just now what the
+moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Perhaps it hasn’t one,” Alice ventured to remark.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can
+find it.” And she squeezed herself up closer to Alice’s side as she spoke.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice did not much like keeping so close to her: first, because the Duchess was
+ very ugly; and secondly, because she was exactly the right height to
+rest her chin upon Alice’s shoulder, and it was an uncomfortably sharp chin.
+However, she did not like to be rude, so she bore it as well as she could.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The game’s going on rather better now,” she said, by way of keeping up the
+conversation a little.
+
+
+
+ 
+“’Tis so,” said the Duchess: “and the moral of that is—‘Oh, ’tis love, ’tis
+love, that makes the world go round!’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Somebody said,” Alice whispered, “that it’s done by everybody minding their
+own business!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah, well! It means much the same thing,” said the Duchess, digging her sharp
+little chin into Alice’s shoulder as she added, “and the moral of that 
+is—‘Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How fond she is of finding morals in things!” Alice thought to herself.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I dare say you’re wondering why I don’t put my arm round your waist,” the
+Duchess said after a pause: “the reason is, that I’m doubtful about the temper
+of your flamingo. Shall I try the experiment?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He might bite,” Alice cautiously replied, not feeling at all anxious to have
+the experiment tried.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very true,” said the Duchess: “flamingoes and mustard both bite. And the moral
+of that is—‘Birds of a feather flock together.’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Only mustard isn’t a bird,” Alice remarked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Right, as usual,” said the Duchess: “what a clear way you have of putting
+things!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s a mineral, I think ,” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of course it is,” said the Duchess, who seemed ready to agree to everything
+that Alice said; “there’s a large mustard-mine near here. And the moral of that
+is—‘The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, I know!” exclaimed Alice, who had not attended to this last remark, “it’s
+a vegetable. It doesn’t look like one, but it is.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess; “and the moral of that is—‘Be what
+you would seem to be’—or if you’d like it put more simply—‘Never imagine
+yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you
+were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have
+appeared to them to be otherwise.’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I think I should understand that better,” Alice said very politely, “if I had
+it written down: but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That’s nothing to what I could say if I chose,” the Duchess replied, in a
+pleased tone.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pray don’t trouble yourself to say it any longer than that,” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, don’t talk about trouble!” said the Duchess. “I make you a present of
+everything I’ve said as yet.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A cheap sort of present!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they don’t give birthday
+presents like that!” But she did not venture to say it out loud.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thinking again?” the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’ve a right to think,” said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a
+little worried.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Just about as much right,” said the Duchess, “as pigs have to fly; and the m—”
+
+
+
+ 
+But here, to Alice’s great surprise, the Duchess’s voice died away, even in the
+middle of her favourite word ‘moral,’ and the arm that was linked into hers
+began to tremble. Alice looked up, and there stood the Queen in front of them,
+with her arms folded, frowning like a thunderstorm.
+
+
+
+ 
+“A fine day, your Majesty!” the Duchess began in a low, weak voice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now, I give you fair warning,” shouted the Queen, stamping on the ground as
+she spoke; “either you or your head must be off, and that in about half no
+time! Take your choice!”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Duchess took her choice, and was gone in a moment.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Let’s go on with the game,” the Queen said to Alice; and Alice was too much
+frightened to say a word, but slowly followed her back to the croquet-ground.
+
+
+
+ 
+The other guests had taken advantage of the Queen’s absence, and were resting
+in the shade: however, the moment they saw her, they hurried back to the game,
+the Queen merely remarking that a moment’s delay would cost them their lives.
+
+
+
+ 
+All the time they were playing the Queen never left off quarrelling with the
+other players, and shouting “Off with his head!” or “Off with her head!” Those
+whom she sentenced were taken into custody by the soldiers, who of course had
+to leave off being arches to do this, so that by the end of half an hour or so
+there were no arches left, and all the players, except the King, the Queen, and
+Alice, were in custody and under sentence of execution.
+
+
+
+ 
+Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, “Have you seen
+the Mock Turtle yet?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No,” said Alice. “I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,” said the Queen.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I never saw one, or heard of one,” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Come on, then,” said the Queen, “and he shall tell you his history.”
+
+
+
+ 
+As they walked off together, Alice heard the King say in a low voice, to the
+company generally, “You are all pardoned.” “Come, that’s a good thing!”
+she said to herself, for she had felt quite unhappy at the number of executions
+the Queen had ordered.
+
+
+
+ 
+They very soon came upon a Gryphon, lying fast asleep in the sun. (If you don’t
+know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.) “Up, lazy thing!” said the Queen,
+“and take this young lady to see the Mock Turtle, and to hear his history. I
+must go back and see after some executions I have ordered;” and she walked off,
+leaving Alice alone with the Gryphon. Alice did not quite like the look of the
+creature, but on the whole she thought it would be quite as safe to stay with
+it as to go after that savage Queen: so she waited.
+
+
+
+ 
+The Gryphon sat up and rubbed its eyes: then it watched the Queen till she was
+out of sight: then it chuckled. “What fun!” said the Gryphon, half to itself,
+half to Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What is the fun?” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why, she ,” said the Gryphon. “It’s all her fancy, that: they never
+executes nobody, you know. Come on!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Everybody says ‘come on!’ here,” thought Alice, as she went slowly after it:
+“I never was so ordered about in all my life, never!”
+
+
+
+ 
+They had not gone far before they saw the Mock Turtle in the distance, sitting
+sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock, and, as they came nearer, Alice could
+hear him sighing as if his heart would break. She pitied him deeply. “What is
+his sorrow?” she asked the Gryphon, and the Gryphon answered, very nearly in
+the same words as before, “It’s all his fancy, that: he hasn’t got no sorrow,
+you know. Come on!”
+
+
+
+ 
+So they went up to the Mock Turtle, who looked at them with large eyes full of
+tears, but said nothing.
+
+
+
+ 
+“This here young lady,” said the Gryphon, “she wants for to know your history,
+she do.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’ll tell it her,” said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone: “sit down,
+both of you, and don’t speak a word till I’ve finished.”
+
+
+
+ 
+So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself,
+“I don’t see how he can ever finish, if he doesn’t begin.” But she
+waited patiently.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Once,” said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, “I was a real Turtle.”
+
+
+
+ 
+These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by an occasional
+exclamation of “Hjckrrh!” from the Gryphon, and the constant heavy sobbing of
+the Mock Turtle. Alice was very nearly getting up and saying, “Thank you, sir,
+for your interesting story,” but she could not help thinking there must 
+be more to come, so she sat still and said nothing.
+
+
+
+ 
+“When we were little,” the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though
+still sobbing a little now and then, “we went to school in the sea. The master
+was an old Turtle—we used to call him Tortoise—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?” Alice asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” said the Mock Turtle angrily:
+“really you are very dull!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question,” added
+the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked at poor Alice, who felt
+ready to sink into the earth. At last the Gryphon said to the Mock Turtle,
+“Drive on, old fellow! Don’t be all day about it!” and he went on in these
+words:
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you mayn’t believe it—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I never said I didn’t!” interrupted Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You did,” said the Mock Turtle.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Hold your tongue!” added the Gryphon, before Alice could speak again. The Mock
+Turtle went on.
+
+
+
+ 
+“We had the best of educations—in fact, we went to school every day—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“ I’ve been to a day-school, too,” said Alice; “you needn’t be so proud
+as all that.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“With extras?” asked the Mock Turtle a little anxiously.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes,” said Alice, “we learned French and music.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And washing?” said the Mock Turtle.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Certainly not!” said Alice indignantly.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah! then yours wasn’t a really good school,” said the Mock Turtle in a tone of
+great relief. “Now at ours they had at the end of the bill, ‘French,
+music, and washing —extra.’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You couldn’t have wanted it much,” said Alice; “living at the bottom of the
+sea.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I couldn’t afford to learn it.” said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. “I only took
+the regular course.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What was that?” inquired Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and
+then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification,
+and Derision.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I never heard of ‘Uglification,’” Alice ventured to say. “What is it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. “What! Never heard of
+uglifying!” it exclaimed. “You know what to beautify is, I suppose?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes,” said Alice doubtfully: “it means—to—make—anything—prettier.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, then,” the Gryphon went on, “if you don’t know what to uglify is, you
+ are a simpleton.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it, so she turned
+to the Mock Turtle, and said “What else had you to learn?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects
+on his flappers, “—Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then
+Drawling—the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a
+week: he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What was that like?” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, I can’t show it you myself,” the Mock Turtle said: “I’m too stiff. And
+the Gryphon never learnt it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Hadn’t time,” said the Gryphon: “I went to the Classics master, though. He was
+an old crab, he was.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I never went to him,” the Mock Turtle said with a sigh: “he taught Laughing
+and Grief, they used to say.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“So he did, so he did,” said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn; and both
+creatures hid their faces in their paws.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And how many hours a day did you do lessons?” said Alice, in a hurry to change
+the subject.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ten hours the first day,” said the Mock Turtle: “nine the next, and so on.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What a curious plan!” exclaimed Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“That’s the reason they’re called lessons,” the Gryphon remarked: “because they
+lessen from day to day.”
+
+
+
+ 
+This was quite a new idea to Alice, and she thought it over a little before she
+made her next remark. “Then the eleventh day must have been a holiday?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of course it was,” said the Mock Turtle.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And how did you manage on the twelfth?” Alice went on eagerly.
+
+
+
+ 
+“That’s enough about lessons,” the Gryphon interrupted in a very decided tone:
+“tell her something about the games now.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X.
+
+The Lobster Quadrille 
+ 
+The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and drew the back of one flapper across his
+eyes. He looked at Alice, and tried to speak, but for a minute or two sobs
+choked his voice. “Same as if he had a bone in his throat,” said the Gryphon:
+and it set to work shaking him and punching him in the back. At last the Mock
+Turtle recovered his voice, and, with tears running down his cheeks, he went on
+again:—
+
+
+
+ 
+“You may not have lived much under the sea—” (“I haven’t,” said Alice)—“and
+perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster—” (Alice began to say “I
+once tasted—” but checked herself hastily, and said “No, never”) “—so you can
+have no idea what a delightful thing a Lobster Quadrille is!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, indeed,” said Alice. “What sort of a dance is it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why,” said the Gryphon, “you first form into a line along the sea-shore—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Two lines!” cried the Mock Turtle. “Seals, turtles, salmon, and so on; then,
+when you’ve cleared all the jelly-fish out of the way—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“ That generally takes some time,” interrupted the Gryphon.
+
+
+
+ 
+“—you advance twice—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Each with a lobster as a partner!” cried the Gryphon.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of course,” the Mock Turtle said: “advance twice, set to partners—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“—change lobsters, and retire in same order,” continued the Gryphon.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then, you know,” the Mock Turtle went on, “you throw the—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The lobsters!” shouted the Gryphon, with a bound into the air.
+
+
+
+ 
+“—as far out to sea as you can—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Swim after them!” screamed the Gryphon.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Turn a somersault in the sea!” cried the Mock Turtle, capering wildly about.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Change lobsters again!” yelled the Gryphon at the top of its voice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Back to land again, and that’s all the first figure,” said the Mock Turtle,
+suddenly dropping his voice; and the two creatures, who had been jumping about
+like mad things all this time, sat down again very sadly and quietly, and
+looked at Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It must be a very pretty dance,” said Alice timidly.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Would you like to see a little of it?” said the Mock Turtle.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very much indeed,” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Come, let’s try the first figure!” said the Mock Turtle to the Gryphon. “We
+can do without lobsters, you know. Which shall sing?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, you sing,” said the Gryphon. “I’ve forgotten the words.”
+
+
+
+ 
+So they began solemnly dancing round and round Alice, every now and then
+treading on her toes when they passed too close, and waving their forepaws to
+mark the time, while the Mock Turtle sang this, very slowly and sadly:—
+
+
+
+ 
+“Will you walk a little faster?” said a whiting to a snail.
+
+“There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.
+
+See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!
+
+They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance?
+
+Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
+
+Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?
+
+
+
+“You can really have no notion how delightful it will be
+
+When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!”
+
+But the snail replied “Too far, too far!” and gave a look askance—
+
+Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance.
+
+Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.
+
+Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join the dance.
+
+
+
+“What matters it how far we go?” his scaly friend replied.
+
+“There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.
+
+The further off from England the nearer is to France—
+
+Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.
+
+Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
+
+Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you, it’s a very interesting dance to watch,” said Alice, feeling very
+glad that it was over at last: “and I do so like that curious song about the
+whiting!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, as to the whiting,” said the Mock Turtle, “they—you’ve seen them, of
+course?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes,” said Alice, “I’ve often seen them at dinn—” she checked herself hastily.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I don’t know where Dinn may be,” said the Mock Turtle, “but if you’ve seen
+them so often, of course you know what they’re like.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I believe so,” Alice replied thoughtfully. “They have their tails in their
+mouths—and they’re all over crumbs.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You’re wrong about the crumbs,” said the Mock Turtle: “crumbs would all wash
+off in the sea. But they have their tails in their mouths; and the
+reason is—” here the Mock Turtle yawned and shut his eyes.—“Tell her about the
+reason and all that,” he said to the Gryphon.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The reason is,” said the Gryphon, “that they would go with the lobsters
+to the dance. So they got thrown out to sea. So they had to fall a long way. So
+they got their tails fast in their mouths. So they couldn’t get them out again.
+That’s all.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you,” said Alice, “it’s very interesting. I never knew so much about a
+whiting before.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I can tell you more than that, if you like,” said the Gryphon. “Do you know
+why it’s called a whiting?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I never thought about it,” said Alice. “Why?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“ It does the boots and shoes ,” the Gryphon replied very solemnly.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice was thoroughly puzzled. “Does the boots and shoes!” she repeated in a
+wondering tone.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why, what are your shoes done with?” said the Gryphon. “I mean, what
+makes them so shiny?”
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice looked down at them, and considered a little before she gave her answer.
+“They’re done with blacking, I believe.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Boots and shoes under the sea,” the Gryphon went on in a deep voice, “are done
+with a whiting. Now you know.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And what are they made of?” Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Soles and eels, of course,” the Gryphon replied rather impatiently: “any
+shrimp could have told you that.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“If I’d been the whiting,” said Alice, whose thoughts were still running on the
+song, “I’d have said to the porpoise, ‘Keep back, please: we don’t want
+ you with us!’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“They were obliged to have him with them,” the Mock Turtle said: “no wise fish
+would go anywhere without a porpoise.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Wouldn’t it really?” said Alice in a tone of great surprise.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of course not,” said the Mock Turtle: “why, if a fish came to me , and
+told me he was going a journey, I should say ‘With what porpoise?’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Don’t you mean ‘purpose’?” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I mean what I say,” the Mock Turtle replied in an offended tone. And the
+Gryphon added “Come, let’s hear some of your adventures.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a
+little timidly: “but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a
+different person then.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Explain all that,” said the Mock Turtle.
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, no! The adventures first,” said the Gryphon in an impatient tone:
+“explanations take such a dreadful time.”
+
+
+
+ 
+So Alice began telling them her adventures from the time when she first saw the
+White Rabbit. She was a little nervous about it just at first, the two
+creatures got so close to her, one on each side, and opened their eyes and
+mouths so very wide, but she gained courage as she went on. Her
+listeners were perfectly quiet till she got to the part about her repeating
+“ You are old, Father William ,” to the Caterpillar, and the words all
+coming different, and then the Mock Turtle drew a long breath, and said “That’s
+very curious.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s all about as curious as it can be,” said the Gryphon.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It all came different!” the Mock Turtle repeated thoughtfully. “I should like
+to hear her try and repeat something now. Tell her to begin.” He looked at the
+Gryphon as if he thought it had some kind of authority over Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Stand up and repeat ‘’ Tis the voice of the sluggard ,’” said the
+Gryphon.
+
+
+
+ 
+“How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat lessons!” thought
+Alice; “I might as well be at school at once.” However, she got up, and began
+to repeat it, but her head was so full of the Lobster Quadrille, that she
+hardly knew what she was saying, and the words came very queer indeed:—
+
+
+
+ 
+“’Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare,
+
+“You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.”
+
+As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
+
+Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.”
+
+
+
+[later editions continued as follows
+
+When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark,
+
+And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark,
+
+But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,
+
+His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.]
+
+
+
+ 
+“That’s different from what I used to say when I was a child,” said the
+Gryphon.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, I never heard it before,” said the Mock Turtle; “but it sounds uncommon
+nonsense.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice said nothing; she had sat down with her face in her hands, wondering if
+anything would ever happen in a natural way again.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I should like to have it explained,” said the Mock Turtle.
+
+
+
+ 
+“She can’t explain it,” said the Gryphon hastily. “Go on with the next verse.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But about his toes?” the Mock Turtle persisted. “How could he turn them
+out with his nose, you know?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s the first position in dancing.” Alice said; but was dreadfully puzzled by
+the whole thing, and longed to change the subject.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Go on with the next verse,” the Gryphon repeated impatiently: “it begins ‘ I
+passed by his garden .’”
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice did not dare to disobey, though she felt sure it would all come wrong,
+and she went on in a trembling voice:—
+
+
+
+ 
+“I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,
+
+How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie—”
+
+
+
+[later editions continued as follows
+
+The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat,
+
+While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat.
+
+When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,
+
+Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon:
+
+While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
+
+And concluded the banquet—]
+
+
+
+ 
+“What is the use of repeating all that stuff,” the Mock Turtle
+interrupted, “if you don’t explain it as you go on? It’s by far the most
+confusing thing I ever heard!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, I think you’d better leave off,” said the Gryphon: and Alice was only too
+glad to do so.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Shall we try another figure of the Lobster Quadrille?” the Gryphon went on.
+“Or would you like the Mock Turtle to sing you a song?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, a song, please, if the Mock Turtle would be so kind,” Alice replied, so
+eagerly that the Gryphon said, in a rather offended tone, “Hm! No accounting
+for tastes! Sing her ‘ Turtle Soup ,’ will you, old fellow?”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and began, in a voice sometimes choked with
+sobs, to sing this:—
+
+
+
+ 
+“Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
+
+Waiting in a hot tureen!
+
+Who for such dainties would not stoop?
+
+Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
+
+Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
+
+    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!
+
+    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!
+
+Soo—oop of the e—e—evening,
+
+    Beautiful, beautiful Soup!
+
+
+
+“Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
+
+Game, or any other dish?
+
+Who would not give all else for two p
+
+ennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
+
+Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
+
+    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!
+
+    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!
+
+Soo—oop of the e—e—evening,
+
+    Beautiful, beauti—FUL SOUP!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Chorus again!” cried the Gryphon, and the Mock Turtle had just begun to repeat
+it, when a cry of “The trial’s beginning!” was heard in the distance.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Come on!” cried the Gryphon, and, taking Alice by the hand, it hurried off,
+without waiting for the end of the song.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What trial is it?” Alice panted as she ran; but the Gryphon only answered
+“Come on!” and ran the faster, while more and more faintly came, carried on the
+breeze that followed them, the melancholy words:—
+
+
+
+ 
+“Soo—oop of the e—e—evening,
+
+    Beautiful, beautiful Soup!”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI.
+
+Who Stole the Tarts? 
+ 
+The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their throne when they arrived,
+with a great crowd assembled about them—all sorts of little birds and beasts,
+as well as the whole pack of cards: the Knave was standing before them, in
+chains, with a soldier on each side to guard him; and near the King was the
+White Rabbit, with a trumpet in one hand, and a scroll of parchment in the
+other. In the very middle of the court was a table, with a large dish of tarts
+upon it: they looked so good, that it made Alice quite hungry to look at
+them—“I wish they’d get the trial done,” she thought, “and hand round the
+refreshments!” But there seemed to be no chance of this, so she began looking
+at everything about her, to pass away the time.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice had never been in a court of justice before, but she had read about them
+in books, and she was quite pleased to find that she knew the name of nearly
+everything there. “That’s the judge,” she said to herself, “because of his
+great wig.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The judge, by the way, was the King; and as he wore his crown over the wig,
+(look at the frontispiece if you want to see how he did it,) he did not look at
+all comfortable, and it was certainly not becoming.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And that’s the jury-box,” thought Alice, “and those twelve creatures,” (she
+was obliged to say “creatures,” you see, because some of them were animals, and
+some were birds,) “I suppose they are the jurors.” She said this last word two
+or three times over to herself, being rather proud of it: for she thought, and
+rightly too, that very few little girls of her age knew the meaning of it at
+all. However, “jury-men” would have done just as well.
+
+
+
+ 
+The twelve jurors were all writing very busily on slates. “What are they
+doing?” Alice whispered to the Gryphon. “They can’t have anything to put down
+yet, before the trial’s begun.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“They’re putting down their names,” the Gryphon whispered in reply, “for fear
+they should forget them before the end of the trial.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Stupid things!” Alice began in a loud, indignant voice, but she stopped
+hastily, for the White Rabbit cried out, “Silence in the court!” and the King
+put on his spectacles and looked anxiously round, to make out who was talking.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice could see, as well as if she were looking over their shoulders, that all
+the jurors were writing down “stupid things!” on their slates, and she could
+even make out that one of them didn’t know how to spell “stupid,” and that he
+had to ask his neighbour to tell him. “A nice muddle their slates’ll be in
+before the trial’s over!” thought Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+One of the jurors had a pencil that squeaked. This of course, Alice could
+ not stand, and she went round the court and got behind him, and very
+soon found an opportunity of taking it away. She did it so quickly that the
+poor little juror (it was Bill, the Lizard) could not make out at all what had
+become of it; so, after hunting all about for it, he was obliged to write with
+one finger for the rest of the day; and this was of very little use, as it left
+no mark on the slate.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Herald, read the accusation!” said the King.
+
+
+
+ 
+On this the White Rabbit blew three blasts on the trumpet, and then unrolled
+the parchment scroll, and read as follows:—
+
+
+
+ 
+“The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
+
+    All on a summer day:
+
+The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,
+
+    And took them quite away!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Consider your verdict,” the King said to the jury.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not yet, not yet!” the Rabbit hastily interrupted. “There’s a great deal to
+come before that!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Call the first witness,” said the King; and the White Rabbit blew three blasts
+on the trumpet, and called out, “First witness!”
+
+
+
+ 
+The first witness was the Hatter. He came in with a teacup in one hand and a
+piece of bread-and-butter in the other. “I beg pardon, your Majesty,” he began,
+“for bringing these in: but I hadn’t quite finished my tea when I was sent
+for.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You ought to have finished,” said the King. “When did you begin?”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Hatter looked at the March Hare, who had followed him into the court,
+arm-in-arm with the Dormouse. “Fourteenth of March, I think it was,” he
+said.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Fifteenth,” said the March Hare.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Sixteenth,” added the Dormouse.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Write that down,” the King said to the jury, and the jury eagerly wrote down
+all three dates on their slates, and then added them up, and reduced the answer
+to shillings and pence.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Take off your hat,” the King said to the Hatter.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It isn’t mine,” said the Hatter.
+
+
+
+ 
+“ Stolen! ” the King exclaimed, turning to the jury, who instantly made a
+memorandum of the fact.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I keep them to sell,” the Hatter added as an explanation; “I’ve none of my
+own. I’m a hatter.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Here the Queen put on her spectacles, and began staring at the Hatter, who
+turned pale and fidgeted.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Give your evidence,” said the King; “and don’t be nervous, or I’ll have you
+executed on the spot.”
+
+
+
+ 
+This did not seem to encourage the witness at all: he kept shifting from one
+foot to the other, looking uneasily at the Queen, and in his confusion he bit a
+large piece out of his teacup instead of the bread-and-butter.
+
+
+
+ 
+Just at this moment Alice felt a very curious sensation, which puzzled her a
+good deal until she made out what it was: she was beginning to grow larger
+again, and she thought at first she would get up and leave the court; but on
+second thoughts she decided to remain where she was as long as there was room
+for her.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I wish you wouldn’t squeeze so,” said the Dormouse, who was sitting next to
+her. “I can hardly breathe.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I can’t help it,” said Alice very meekly: “I’m growing.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You’ve no right to grow here ,” said the Dormouse.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Alice more boldly: “you know you’re growing too.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, but I grow at a reasonable pace,” said the Dormouse: “not in that
+ridiculous fashion.” And he got up very sulkily and crossed over to the other
+side of the court.
+
+
+
+ 
+All this time the Queen had never left off staring at the Hatter, and, just as
+the Dormouse crossed the court, she said to one of the officers of the court,
+“Bring me the list of the singers in the last concert!” on which the wretched
+Hatter trembled so, that he shook both his shoes off.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Give your evidence,” the King repeated angrily, “or I’ll have you executed,
+whether you’re nervous or not.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’m a poor man, your Majesty,” the Hatter began, in a trembling voice, “—and I
+hadn’t begun my tea—not above a week or so—and what with the bread-and-butter
+getting so thin—and the twinkling of the tea—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The twinkling of the what? ” said the King.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It began with the tea,” the Hatter replied.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of course twinkling begins with a T!” said the King sharply. “Do you take me
+for a dunce? Go on!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’m a poor man,” the Hatter went on, “and most things twinkled after that—only
+the March Hare said—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I didn’t!” the March Hare interrupted in a great hurry.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You did!” said the Hatter.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I deny it!” said the March Hare.
+
+
+
+ 
+“He denies it,” said the King: “leave out that part.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, at any rate, the Dormouse said—” the Hatter went on, looking anxiously
+round to see if he would deny it too: but the Dormouse denied nothing, being
+fast asleep.
+
+
+
+ 
+“After that,” continued the Hatter, “I cut some more bread-and-butter—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But what did the Dormouse say?” one of the jury asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“That I can’t remember,” said the Hatter.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You must remember,” remarked the King, “or I’ll have you executed.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The miserable Hatter dropped his teacup and bread-and-butter, and went down on
+one knee. “I’m a poor man, your Majesty,” he began.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You’re a very poor speaker ,” said the King.
+
+
+
+ 
+Here one of the guinea-pigs cheered, and was immediately suppressed by the
+officers of the court. (As that is rather a hard word, I will just explain to
+you how it was done. They had a large canvas bag, which tied up at the mouth
+with strings: into this they slipped the guinea-pig, head first, and then sat
+upon it.)
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’m glad I’ve seen that done,” thought Alice. “I’ve so often read in the
+newspapers, at the end of trials, “There was some attempt at applause, which
+was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court,” and I never
+understood what it meant till now.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“If that’s all you know about it, you may stand down,” continued the King.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I can’t go no lower,” said the Hatter: “I’m on the floor, as it is.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then you may sit down,” the King replied.
+
+
+
+ 
+Here the other guinea-pig cheered, and was suppressed.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Come, that finished the guinea-pigs!” thought Alice. “Now we shall get on
+better.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’d rather finish my tea,” said the Hatter, with an anxious look at the Queen,
+who was reading the list of singers.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You may go,” said the King, and the Hatter hurriedly left the court, without
+even waiting to put his shoes on.
+
+
+
+ 
+“—and just take his head off outside,” the Queen added to one of the officers:
+but the Hatter was out of sight before the officer could get to the door.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Call the next witness!” said the King.
+
+
+
+ 
+The next witness was the Duchess’s cook. She carried the pepper-box in her
+hand, and Alice guessed who it was, even before she got into the court, by the
+way the people near the door began sneezing all at once.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Give your evidence,” said the King.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Shan’t,” said the cook.
+
+
+
+ 
+The King looked anxiously at the White Rabbit, who said in a low voice, “Your
+Majesty must cross-examine this witness.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, if I must, I must,” the King said, with a melancholy air, and, after
+folding his arms and frowning at the cook till his eyes were nearly out of
+sight, he said in a deep voice, “What are tarts made of?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pepper, mostly,” said the cook.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Treacle,” said a sleepy voice behind her.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Collar that Dormouse,” the Queen shrieked out. “Behead that Dormouse! Turn
+that Dormouse out of court! Suppress him! Pinch him! Off with his whiskers!”
+
+
+
+ 
+For some minutes the whole court was in confusion, getting the Dormouse turned
+out, and, by the time they had settled down again, the cook had disappeared.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Never mind!” said the King, with an air of great relief. “Call the next
+witness.” And he added in an undertone to the Queen, “Really, my dear,
+ you must cross-examine the next witness. It quite makes my forehead
+ache!”
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice watched the White Rabbit as he fumbled over the list, feeling very
+curious to see what the next witness would be like, “—for they haven’t got much
+evidence yet ,” she said to herself. Imagine her surprise, when the White
+Rabbit read out, at the top of his shrill little voice, the name “Alice!”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII.
+
+Alice’s Evidence 
+ 
+“Here!” cried Alice, quite forgetting in the flurry of the moment how large she
+had grown in the last few minutes, and she jumped up in such a hurry that she
+tipped over the jury-box with the edge of her skirt, upsetting all the jurymen
+on to the heads of the crowd below, and there they lay sprawling about,
+reminding her very much of a globe of goldfish she had accidentally upset the
+week before.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, I beg your pardon!” she exclaimed in a tone of great dismay, and
+began picking them up again as quickly as she could, for the accident of the
+goldfish kept running in her head, and she had a vague sort of idea that they
+must be collected at once and put back into the jury-box, or they would die.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The trial cannot proceed,” said the King in a very grave voice, “until all the
+jurymen are back in their proper places— all ,” he repeated with great
+emphasis, looking hard at Alice as he said so.
+
+
+
+ 
+Alice looked at the jury-box, and saw that, in her haste, she had put the
+Lizard in head downwards, and the poor little thing was waving its tail about
+in a melancholy way, being quite unable to move. She soon got it out again, and
+put it right; “not that it signifies much,” she said to herself; “I should
+think it would be quite as much use in the trial one way up as the
+other.”
+
+
+
+ 
+As soon as the jury had a little recovered from the shock of being upset, and
+their slates and pencils had been found and handed back to them, they set to
+work very diligently to write out a history of the accident, all except the
+Lizard, who seemed too much overcome to do anything but sit with its mouth
+open, gazing up into the roof of the court.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What do you know about this business?” the King said to Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nothing,” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nothing whatever? ” persisted the King.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nothing whatever,” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“That’s very important,” the King said, turning to the jury. They were just
+beginning to write this down on their slates, when the White Rabbit
+interrupted: “ Un important, your Majesty means, of course,” he said in a
+very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke.
+
+
+
+ 
+“ Un important, of course, I meant,” the King hastily said, and went on to
+himself in an undertone,
+
+
+
+ 
+“important—unimportant—unimportant—important—” as if he were trying which word
+sounded best.
+
+
+
+ 
+Some of the jury wrote it down “important,” and some “unimportant.” Alice could
+see this, as she was near enough to look over their slates; “but it doesn’t
+matter a bit,” she thought to herself.
+
+
+
+ 
+At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his
+note-book, cackled out “Silence!” and read out from his book, “Rule Forty-two.
+ All persons more than a mile high to leave the court .”
+
+
+
+ 
+Everybody looked at Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“ I’m not a mile high,” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You are,” said the King.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nearly two miles high,” added the Queen.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, I shan’t go, at any rate,” said Alice: “besides, that’s not a regular
+rule: you invented it just now.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s the oldest rule in the book,” said the King.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then it ought to be Number One,” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+The King turned pale, and shut his note-book hastily. “Consider your verdict,”
+he said to the jury, in a low, trembling voice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There’s more evidence to come yet, please your Majesty,” said the White
+Rabbit, jumping up in a great hurry; “this paper has just been picked up.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What’s in it?” said the Queen.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I haven’t opened it yet,” said the White Rabbit, “but it seems to be a letter,
+written by the prisoner to—to somebody.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It must have been that,” said the King, “unless it was written to nobody,
+which isn’t usual, you know.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Who is it directed to?” said one of the jurymen.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It isn’t directed at all,” said the White Rabbit; “in fact, there’s nothing
+written on the outside .” He unfolded the paper as he spoke, and added
+“It isn’t a letter, after all: it’s a set of verses.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Are they in the prisoner’s handwriting?” asked another of the jurymen.
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, they’re not,” said the White Rabbit, “and that’s the queerest thing about
+it.” (The jury all looked puzzled.)
+
+
+
+ 
+“He must have imitated somebody else’s hand,” said the King. (The jury all
+brightened up again.)
+
+
+
+ 
+“Please your Majesty,” said the Knave, “I didn’t write it, and they can’t prove
+I did: there’s no name signed at the end.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“If you didn’t sign it,” said the King, “that only makes the matter worse. You
+ must have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed your name like
+an honest man.”
+
+
+
+ 
+There was a general clapping of hands at this: it was the first really clever
+thing the King had said that day.
+
+
+
+ 
+“That proves his guilt,” said the Queen.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It proves nothing of the sort!” said Alice. “Why, you don’t even know what
+they’re about!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Read them,” said the King.
+
+
+
+ 
+The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. “Where shall I begin, please your
+Majesty?” he asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to
+the end: then stop.”
+
+
+
+ 
+These were the verses the White Rabbit read:—
+
+
+
+ 
+“They told me you had been to her,
+
+    And mentioned me to him:
+
+She gave me a good character,
+
+    But said I could not swim.
+
+
+
+He sent them word I had not gone
+
+    (We know it to be true):
+
+If she should push the matter on,
+
+    What would become of you?
+
+
+
+I gave her one, they gave him two,
+
+    You gave us three or more;
+
+They all returned from him to you,
+
+    Though they were mine before.
+
+
+
+If I or she should chance to be
+
+    Involved in this affair,
+
+He trusts to you to set them free,
+
+    Exactly as we were.
+
+
+
+My notion was that you had been
+
+    (Before she had this fit)
+
+An obstacle that came between
+
+    Him, and ourselves, and it.
+
+
+
+Don’t let him know she liked them best,
+
+    For this must ever be
+
+A secret, kept from all the rest,
+
+    Between yourself and me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That’s the most important piece of evidence we’ve heard yet,” said the King,
+rubbing his hands; “so now let the jury—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“If any one of them can explain it,” said Alice, (she had grown so large in the
+last few minutes that she wasn’t a bit afraid of interrupting him), “I’ll give
+him sixpence. I don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The jury all wrote down on their slates, “ She doesn’t believe there’s an
+atom of meaning in it,” but none of them attempted to explain the paper.
+
+
+
+ 
+“If there’s no meaning in it,” said the King, “that saves a world of trouble,
+you know, as we needn’t try to find any. And yet I don’t know,” he went on,
+spreading out the verses on his knee, and looking at them with one eye; “I seem
+to see some meaning in them, after all. “— said I could not swim —” you
+can’t swim, can you?” he added, turning to the Knave.
+
+
+
+ 
+The Knave shook his head sadly. “Do I look like it?” he said. (Which he
+certainly did not , being made entirely of cardboard.)
+
+
+
+ 
+“All right, so far,” said the King, and he went on muttering over the verses to
+himself: “‘ We know it to be true —’ that’s the jury, of course—‘ I gave
+her one, they gave him two —’ why, that must be what he did with the tarts,
+you know—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But, it goes on ‘ they all returned from him to you ,’” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why, there they are!” said the King triumphantly, pointing to the tarts on the
+table. “Nothing can be clearer than that . Then again—‘ before she had
+this fit —’ you never had fits, my dear, I think?” he said to the Queen.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Never!” said the Queen furiously, throwing an inkstand at the Lizard as she
+spoke. (The unfortunate little Bill had left off writing on his slate with one
+finger, as he found it made no mark; but he now hastily began again, using the
+ink, that was trickling down his face, as long as it lasted.)
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then the words don’t fit you,” said the King, looking round the court
+with a smile. There was a dead silence.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s a pun!” the King added in an offended tone, and everybody laughed, “Let
+the jury consider their verdict.” the King said, for about the twentieth time
+that day.
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence
+first!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I won’t!” said Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Who cares for you?” said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time).
+“You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”
+
+
+
+ 
+At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she
+gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them
+off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her
+sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down
+from the trees upon her face.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Wake up, Alice dear!” said her sister; “Why, what a long sleep you’ve had!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice, and she told her sister, as
+well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you
+have just been reading about; and when she had finished, her sister kissed her,
+and said, “It was a curious dream, dear, certainly: but now run in to
+your tea; it’s getting late.” So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she
+ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+But her sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her head on her hand,
+watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and all her wonderful
+Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her
+dream:—
+
+
+
+ 
+First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were
+clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers—she
+could hear the very tones of her voice, and see that queer little toss of her
+head to keep back the wandering hair that would always get into her
+eyes—and still as she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place around her
+became alive with the strange creatures of her little sister’s dream.
+
+
+
+ 
+The long grass rustled at her feet as the White Rabbit hurried by—the
+frightened Mouse splashed his way through the neighbouring pool—she could hear
+the rattle of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends shared their
+never-ending meal, and the shrill voice of the Queen ordering off her
+unfortunate guests to execution—once more the pig-baby was sneezing on the
+Duchess’s knee, while plates and dishes crashed around it—once more the shriek
+of the Gryphon, the squeaking of the Lizard’s slate-pencil, and the choking of
+the suppressed guinea-pigs, filled the air, mixed up with the distant sobs of
+the miserable Mock Turtle.
+
+
+
+ 
+So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland,
+though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull
+reality—the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to
+the waving of the reeds—the rattling teacups would change to tinkling
+sheep-bells, and the Queen’s shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy—and
+the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer
+noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy
+farm-yard—while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place
+of the Mock Turtle’s heavy sobs.
+
+
+
+ 
+Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in
+the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all
+her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she
+would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright
+and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland
+of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a
+pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the
+happy summer days.
+
+
+
+ THE END 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND *** 
+ 
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Frankenstein; or, the modern prometheus 
+ 
+ This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States,
+you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
+before using this eBook. 
+
+ Title : Frankenstein; or, the modern prometheus
+
+
+ 
+ Author : Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Release date : October 1, 1993 [eBook #84]
+
+ Most recently updated: February 10, 2026
+
+
+
+ Language : English
+
+
+
+ Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84 
+
+
+
+ Credits : Judith Boss, Christy Phillips, Lynn Hanninen and David Meltzer. HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+ Further corrections by Menno de Leeuw.
+
+
+
+ 
+ *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS *** 
+ 
+
+ Frankenstein; 
+
+ or, the Modern Prometheus 
+
+ by Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ CONTENTS 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Letter 1 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Letter 2 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Letter 3 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Letter 4 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 1 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 2 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 3 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 4 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 5 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 6 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 7 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 8 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 9 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 10 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 11 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 12 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 13 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 14 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 15 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 16 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 17 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 18 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 19 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 20 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 21 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 22 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 23 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Chapter 24 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Letter 1 
+
+ 
+ To Mrs. Saville, England. 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+St. Petersburgh, Dec. 11th, 17—.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of
+an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived
+here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and
+increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I am already far north of London, and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh,
+I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and
+fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has
+travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste
+of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become
+more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat
+of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the
+region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible, its
+broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour.
+There—for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding
+navigators—there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we
+may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region
+hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be
+without example, as the phenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in
+those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal
+light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and
+may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to
+render their seeming eccentricities consistent for ever. I shall satiate my
+ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited,
+and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my
+enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death and
+to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when
+he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of
+discovery up his native river. But supposing all these conjectures to be false,
+you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind,
+to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole to those
+countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite; or by
+ascertaining the secret of the magnet, which, if at all possible, can only be
+effected by an undertaking such as mine.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+These reflections have dispelled the agitation with which I began my letter,
+and I feel my heart glow with an enthusiasm which elevates me to heaven, for
+nothing contributes so much to tranquillise the mind as a steady purpose—a
+point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye. This expedition has been
+the favourite dream of my early years. I have read with ardour the accounts of
+the various voyages which have been made in the prospect of arriving at the
+North Pacific Ocean through the seas which surround the pole. You may remember
+that a history of all the voyages made for purposes of discovery composed the
+whole of our good Uncle Thomas’ library. My education was neglected, yet I was
+passionately fond of reading. These volumes were my study day and night, and my
+familiarity with them increased that regret which I had felt, as a child, on
+learning that my father’s dying injunction had forbidden my uncle to allow me
+to embark in a seafaring life.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+These visions faded when I perused, for the first time, those poets whose
+effusions entranced my soul and lifted it to heaven. I also became a poet and
+for one year lived in a paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also
+might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are
+consecrated. You are well acquainted with my failure and how heavily I bore the
+disappointment. But just at that time I inherited the fortune of my cousin, and
+my thoughts were turned into the channel of their earlier bent.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Six years have passed since I resolved on my present undertaking. I can, even
+now, remember the hour from which I dedicated myself to this great enterprise.
+I commenced by inuring my body to hardship. I accompanied the whale-fishers on
+several expeditions to the North Sea; I voluntarily endured cold, famine,
+thirst, and want of sleep; I often worked harder than the common sailors during
+the day and devoted my nights to the study of mathematics, the theory of
+medicine, and those branches of physical science from which a naval adventurer
+might derive the greatest practical advantage. Twice I actually hired myself as
+an under-mate in a Greenland whaler, and acquitted myself to admiration. I must
+own I felt a little proud when my captain offered me the second dignity in the
+vessel and entreated me to remain with the greatest earnestness, so valuable
+did he consider my services.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+And now, dear Margaret, do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose? My
+life might have been passed in ease and luxury, but I preferred glory to every
+enticement that wealth placed in my path. Oh, that some encouraging voice would
+answer in the affirmative! My courage and my resolution is firm; but my hopes
+fluctuate, and my spirits are often depressed. I am about to proceed on a long
+and difficult voyage, the emergencies of which will demand all my fortitude: I
+am required not only to raise the spirits of others, but sometimes to sustain
+my own, when theirs are failing.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+This is the most favourable period for travelling in Russia. They fly quickly
+over the snow in their sledges; the motion is pleasant, and, in my opinion, far
+more agreeable than that of an English stagecoach. The cold is not excessive,
+if you are wrapped in furs—a dress which I have already adopted, for there is a
+great difference between walking the deck and remaining seated motionless for
+hours, when no exercise prevents the blood from actually freezing in your
+veins. I have no ambition to lose my life on the post-road between St.
+Petersburgh and Archangel.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I shall depart for the latter town in a fortnight or three weeks; and my
+intention is to hire a ship there, which can easily be done by paying the
+insurance for the owner, and to engage as many sailors as I think necessary
+among those who are accustomed to the whale-fishing. I do not intend to sail
+until the month of June; and when shall I return? Ah, dear sister, how can I
+answer this question? If I succeed, many, many months, perhaps years, will pass
+before you and I may meet. If I fail, you will see me again soon, or never.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Farewell, my dear, excellent Margaret. Heaven shower down blessings on you, and
+save me, that I may again and again testify my gratitude for all your love and
+kindness.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Your affectionate brother,
+
+R. Walton
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Letter 2 
+
+ 
+ To Mrs. Saville, England. 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Archangel, 28th March, 17—.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow! Yet a
+second step is taken towards my enterprise. I have hired a vessel and am
+occupied in collecting my sailors; those whom I have already engaged appear to
+be men on whom I can depend and are certainly possessed of dauntless courage.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy, and the
+absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil, I have no
+friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will
+be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will
+endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it
+is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire
+the company of a man who could sympathise with me, whose eyes would reply to
+mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of
+a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a
+cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to
+approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your
+poor brother! I am too ardent in execution and too impatient of difficulties.
+But it is a still greater evil to me that I am self-educated: for the first
+fourteen years of my life I ran wild on a common and read nothing but our Uncle
+Thomas’ books of voyages. At that age I became acquainted with the celebrated
+poets of our own country; but it was only when it had ceased to be in my power
+to derive its most important benefits from such a conviction that I perceived
+the necessity of becoming acquainted with more languages than that of my native
+country. Now I am twenty-eight and am in reality more illiterate than many
+schoolboys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more and that my
+daydreams are more extended and magnificent, but they want (as the painters
+call it) keeping; and I greatly need a friend who would have sense
+enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavour
+to regulate my mind.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Well, these are useless complaints; I shall certainly find no friend on the
+wide ocean, nor even here in Archangel, among merchants and seamen. Yet some
+feelings, unallied to the dross of human nature, beat even in these rugged
+bosoms. My lieutenant, for instance, is a man of wonderful courage and
+enterprise; he is madly desirous of glory, or rather, to word my phrase more
+characteristically, of advancement in his profession. He is an Englishman, and
+in the midst of national and professional prejudices, unsoftened by
+cultivation, retains some of the noblest endowments of humanity. I first became
+acquainted with him on board a whale vessel; finding that he was unemployed in
+this city, I easily engaged him to assist in my enterprise.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The master is a person of an excellent disposition and is remarkable in the
+ship for his gentleness and the mildness of his discipline. This circumstance,
+added to his well-known integrity and dauntless courage, made me very desirous
+to engage him. A youth passed in solitude, my best years spent under your
+gentle and feminine fosterage, has so refined the groundwork of my character
+that I cannot overcome an intense distaste to the usual brutality exercised on
+board ship: I have never believed it to be necessary, and when I heard of a
+mariner equally noted for his kindliness of heart and the respect and obedience
+paid to him by his crew, I felt myself peculiarly fortunate in being able to
+secure his services. I heard of him first in rather a romantic manner, from a
+lady who owes to him the happiness of her life. This, briefly, is his story.
+Some years ago he loved a young Russian lady of moderate fortune, and having
+amassed a considerable sum in prize-money, the father of the girl consented to
+the match. He saw his mistress once before the destined ceremony; but she was
+bathed in tears, and throwing herself at his feet, entreated him to spare her,
+confessing at the same time that she loved another, but that he was poor, and
+that her father would never consent to the union. My generous friend reassured
+the suppliant, and on being informed of the name of her lover, instantly
+abandoned his pursuit. He had already bought a farm with his money, on which he
+had designed to pass the remainder of his life; but he bestowed the whole on
+his rival, together with the remains of his prize-money to purchase stock, and
+then himself solicited the young woman’s father to consent to her marriage with
+her lover. But the old man decidedly refused, thinking himself bound in honour
+to my friend, who, when he found the father inexorable, quitted his country,
+nor returned until he heard that his former mistress was married according to
+her inclinations. “What a noble fellow!” you will exclaim. He is so; but then
+he is wholly uneducated: he is as silent as a Turk, and a kind of ignorant
+carelessness attends him, which, while it renders his conduct the more
+astonishing, detracts from the interest and sympathy which otherwise he would
+command.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Yet do not suppose, because I complain a little or because I can conceive a
+consolation for my toils which I may never know, that I am wavering in my
+resolutions. Those are as fixed as fate, and my voyage is only now delayed
+until the weather shall permit my embarkation. The winter has been dreadfully
+severe, but the spring promises well, and it is considered as a remarkably
+early season, so that perhaps I may sail sooner than I expected. I shall do
+nothing rashly: you know me sufficiently to confide in my prudence and
+considerateness whenever the safety of others is committed to my care.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I cannot describe to you my sensations on the near prospect of my undertaking.
+It is impossible to communicate to you a conception of the trembling sensation,
+half pleasurable and half fearful, with which I am preparing to depart. I am
+going to unexplored regions, to “the land of mist and snow,” but I shall kill
+no albatross; therefore do not be alarmed for my safety or if I should come
+back to you as worn and woeful as the “Ancient Mariner.” You will smile at my
+allusion, but I will disclose a secret. I have often attributed my attachment
+to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of ocean to that
+production of the most imaginative of modern poets. There is something at work
+in my soul which I do not understand. I am practically industrious—painstaking,
+a workman to execute with perseverance and labour—but besides this there is a
+love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my
+projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild
+sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+But to return to dearer considerations. Shall I meet you again, after having
+traversed immense seas, and returned by the most southern cape of Africa or
+America? I dare not expect such success, yet I cannot bear to look on the
+reverse of the picture. Continue for the present to write to me by every
+opportunity: I may receive your letters on some occasions when I need them most
+to support my spirits. I love you very tenderly. Remember me with affection,
+should you never hear from me again.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Your affectionate brother,
+
+Robert Walton
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Letter 3 
+
+ 
+ To Mrs. Saville, England. 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+July 7th, 17—.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My dear Sister,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I write a few lines in haste to say that I am safe—and well advanced on my
+voyage. This letter will reach England by a merchantman now on its homeward
+voyage from Archangel; more fortunate than I, who may not see my native land,
+perhaps, for many years. I am, however, in good spirits: my men are bold and
+apparently firm of purpose, nor do the floating sheets of ice that continually
+pass us, indicating the dangers of the region towards which we are advancing,
+appear to dismay them. We have already reached a very high latitude; but it is
+the height of summer, and although not so warm as in England, the southern
+gales, which blow us speedily towards those shores which I so ardently desire
+to attain, breathe a degree of renovating warmth which I had not expected.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+No incidents have hitherto befallen us that would make a figure in a letter.
+One or two stiff gales and the springing of a leak are accidents which
+experienced navigators scarcely remember to record, and I shall be well content
+if nothing worse happen to us during our voyage.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Adieu, my dear Margaret. Be assured that for my own sake, as well as yours, I
+will not rashly encounter danger. I will be cool, persevering, and prudent.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+But success shall crown my endeavours. Wherefore not? Thus far I have
+gone, tracing a secure way over the pathless seas, the very stars themselves
+being witnesses and testimonies of my triumph. Why not still proceed over the
+untamed yet obedient element? What can stop the determined heart and resolved
+will of man?
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My swelling heart involuntarily pours itself out thus. But I must finish.
+Heaven bless my beloved sister!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+R.W.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Letter 4 
+
+ 
+ To Mrs. Saville, England. 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+August 5th, 17—.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+So strange an accident has happened to us that I cannot forbear recording it,
+although it is very probable that you will see me before these papers can come
+into your possession.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Last Monday (July 31st) we were nearly surrounded by ice, which closed in the
+ship on all sides, scarcely leaving her the sea-room in which she floated. Our
+situation was somewhat dangerous, especially as we were compassed round by a
+very thick fog. We accordingly lay to, hoping that some change would take place
+in the atmosphere and weather.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+About two o’clock the mist cleared away, and we beheld, stretched out in every
+direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end. Some
+of my comrades groaned, and my own mind began to grow watchful with anxious
+thoughts, when a strange sight suddenly attracted our attention and diverted
+our solicitude from our own situation. We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a
+sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a
+mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature,
+sat in the sledge and guided the dogs. We watched the rapid progress of the
+traveller with our telescopes until he was lost among the distant inequalities
+of the ice.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+This appearance excited our unqualified wonder. We were, as we believed, many
+hundred miles from any land; but this apparition seemed to denote that it was
+not, in reality, so distant as we had supposed. Shut in, however, by ice, it
+was impossible to follow his track, which we had observed with the greatest
+attention.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+About two hours after this occurrence we heard the ground sea, and before night
+the ice broke and freed our ship. We, however, lay to until the morning,
+fearing to encounter in the dark those large loose masses which float about
+after the breaking up of the ice. I profited of this time to rest for a few
+hours.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+In the morning, however, as soon as it was light, I went upon deck and found
+all the sailors busy on one side of the vessel, apparently talking to someone
+in the sea. It was, in fact, a sledge, like that we had seen before, which had
+drifted towards us in the night on a large fragment of ice. Only one dog
+remained alive; but there was a human being within it whom the sailors were
+persuading to enter the vessel. He was not, as the other traveller seemed to
+be, a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island, but a European. When I
+appeared on deck the master said, “Here is our captain, and he will not allow
+you to perish on the open sea.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+On perceiving me, the stranger addressed me in English, although with a foreign
+accent. “Before I come on board your vessel,” said he, “will you have the
+kindness to inform me whither you are bound?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+You may conceive my astonishment on hearing such a question addressed to me
+from a man on the brink of destruction and to whom I should have supposed that
+my vessel would have been a resource which he would not have exchanged for the
+most precious wealth the earth can afford. I replied, however, that we were on
+a voyage of discovery towards the northern pole.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Upon hearing this he appeared satisfied and consented to come on board. Good
+God! Margaret, if you had seen the man who thus capitulated for his safety,
+your surprise would have been boundless. His limbs were nearly frozen, and his
+body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering. I never saw a man in so
+wretched a condition. We attempted to carry him into the cabin, but as soon as
+he had quitted the fresh air he fainted. We accordingly brought him back to the
+deck and restored him to animation by rubbing him with brandy and forcing him
+to swallow a small quantity. As soon as he showed signs of life we wrapped him
+up in blankets and placed him near the chimney of the kitchen stove. By slow
+degrees he recovered and ate a little soup, which restored him wonderfully.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Two days passed in this manner before he was able to speak, and I often feared
+that his sufferings had deprived him of understanding. When he had in some
+measure recovered, I removed him to my own cabin and attended on him as much as
+my duty would permit. I never saw a more interesting creature: his eyes have
+generally an expression of wildness, and even madness, but there are moments
+when, if anyone performs an act of kindness towards him or does him any the
+most trifling service, his whole countenance is lighted up, as it were, with a
+beam of benevolence and sweetness that I never saw equalled. But he is
+generally melancholy and despairing, and sometimes he gnashes his teeth, as if
+impatient of the weight of woes that oppresses him.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+When my guest was a little recovered I had great trouble to keep off the men,
+who wished to ask him a thousand questions; but I would not allow him to be
+tormented by their idle curiosity, in a state of body and mind whose
+restoration evidently depended upon entire repose. Once, however, the
+lieutenant asked why he had come so far upon the ice in so strange a vehicle.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+His countenance instantly assumed an aspect of the deepest gloom, and he
+replied, “To seek one who fled from me.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“And did the man whom you pursued travel in the same fashion?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then I fancy we have seen him, for the day before we picked you up we saw some
+dogs drawing a sledge, with a man in it, across the ice.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+This aroused the stranger’s attention, and he asked a multitude of questions
+concerning the route which the dæmon, as he called him, had pursued. Soon
+after, when he was alone with me, he said, “I have, doubtless, excited your
+curiosity, as well as that of these good people; but you are too considerate to
+make inquiries.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Certainly; it would indeed be very impertinent and inhuman in me to trouble
+you with any inquisitiveness of mine.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“And yet you rescued me from a strange and perilous situation; you have
+benevolently restored me to life.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Soon after this he inquired if I thought that the breaking up of the ice had
+destroyed the other sledge. I replied that I could not answer with any degree
+of certainty, for the ice had not broken until near midnight, and the traveller
+might have arrived at a place of safety before that time; but of this I could
+not judge.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+From this time a new spirit of life animated the decaying frame of the
+stranger. He manifested the greatest eagerness to be upon deck to watch for the
+sledge which had before appeared; but I have persuaded him to remain in the
+cabin, for he is far too weak to sustain the rawness of the atmosphere. I have
+promised that someone should watch for him and give him instant notice if any
+new object should appear in sight.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Such is my journal of what relates to this strange occurrence up to the present
+day. The stranger has gradually improved in health but is very silent and
+appears uneasy when anyone except myself enters his cabin. Yet his manners are
+so conciliating and gentle that the sailors are all interested in him, although
+they have had very little communication with him. For my own part, I begin to
+love him as a brother, and his constant and deep grief fills me with sympathy
+and compassion. He must have been a noble creature in his better days, being
+even now in wreck so attractive and amiable.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I said in one of my letters, my dear Margaret, that I should find no friend on
+the wide ocean; yet I have found a man who, before his spirit had been broken
+by misery, I should have been happy to have possessed as the brother of my
+heart.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I shall continue my journal concerning the stranger at intervals, should I have
+any fresh incidents to record.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+August 13th, 17—.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My affection for my guest increases every day. He excites at once my admiration
+and my pity to an astonishing degree. How can I see so noble a creature
+destroyed by misery without feeling the most poignant grief? He is so gentle,
+yet so wise; his mind is so cultivated, and when he speaks, although his words
+are culled with the choicest art, yet they flow with rapidity and unparalleled
+eloquence.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+He is now much recovered from his illness and is continually on the deck,
+apparently watching for the sledge that preceded his own. Yet, although
+unhappy, he is not so utterly occupied by his own misery but that he interests
+himself deeply in the projects of others. He has frequently conversed with me
+on mine, which I have communicated to him without disguise. He entered
+attentively into all my arguments in favour of my eventual success and into
+every minute detail of the measures I had taken to secure it. I was easily led
+by the sympathy which he evinced to use the language of my heart, to give
+utterance to the burning ardour of my soul and to say, with all the fervour
+that warmed me, how gladly I would sacrifice my fortune, my existence, my every
+hope, to the furtherance of my enterprise. One man’s life or death were but a
+small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought, for the
+dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race. As
+I spoke, a dark gloom spread over my listener’s countenance. At first I
+perceived that he tried to suppress his emotion; he placed his hands before his
+eyes, and my voice quivered and failed me as I beheld tears trickle fast from
+between his fingers; a groan burst from his heaving breast. I paused; at length
+he spoke, in broken accents: “Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you
+drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me; let me reveal my tale, and you
+will dash the cup from your lips!”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Such words, you may imagine, strongly excited my curiosity; but the paroxysm of
+grief that had seized the stranger overcame his weakened powers, and many hours
+of repose and tranquil conversation were necessary to restore his composure.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Having conquered the violence of his feelings, he appeared to despise himself
+for being the slave of passion; and quelling the dark tyranny of despair, he
+led me again to converse concerning myself personally. He asked me the history
+of my earlier years. The tale was quickly told, but it awakened various trains
+of reflection. I spoke of my desire of finding a friend, of my thirst for a
+more intimate sympathy with a fellow mind than had ever fallen to my lot, and
+expressed my conviction that a man could boast of little happiness who did not
+enjoy this blessing.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I agree with you,” replied the stranger; “we are unfashioned creatures, but
+half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves—such a friend ought
+to be—do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures. I once
+had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to
+judge respecting friendship. You have hope, and the world before you, and have
+no cause for despair. But I—I have lost everything and cannot begin life anew.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+As he said this his countenance became expressive of a calm, settled grief that
+touched me to the heart. But he was silent and presently retired to his cabin.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the
+beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these
+wonderful regions seem still to have the power of elevating his soul from
+earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery and be
+overwhelmed by disappointments, yet when he has retired into himself, he will
+be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no
+grief or folly ventures.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Will you smile at the enthusiasm I express concerning this divine wanderer? You
+would not if you saw him. You have been tutored and refined by books and
+retirement from the world, and you are therefore somewhat fastidious; but this
+only renders you the more fit to appreciate the extraordinary merits of this
+wonderful man. Sometimes I have endeavoured to discover what quality it is
+which he possesses that elevates him so immeasurably above any other person I
+ever knew. I believe it to be an intuitive discernment, a quick but
+never-failing power of judgment, a penetration into the causes of things,
+unequalled for clearness and precision; add to this a facility of expression
+and a voice whose varied intonations are soul-subduing music.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+August 19th, 17—.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Yesterday the stranger said to me, “You may easily perceive, Captain Walton,
+that I have suffered great and unparalleled misfortunes. I had determined at
+one time that the memory of these evils should die with me, but you have won me
+to alter my determination. You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did;
+and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent
+to sting you, as mine has been. I do not know that the relation of my disasters
+will be useful to you; yet, when I reflect that you are pursuing the same
+course, exposing yourself to the same dangers which have rendered me what I am,
+I imagine that you may deduce an apt moral from my tale, one that may direct
+you if you succeed in your undertaking and console you in case of failure.
+Prepare to hear of occurrences which are usually deemed marvellous. Were we
+among the tamer scenes of nature I might fear to encounter your unbelief,
+perhaps your ridicule; but many things will appear possible in these wild and
+mysterious regions which would provoke the laughter of those unacquainted with
+the ever-varied powers of nature; nor can I doubt but that my tale conveys in
+its series internal evidence of the truth of the events of which it is
+composed.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+You may easily imagine that I was much gratified by the offered communication,
+yet I could not endure that he should renew his grief by a recital of his
+misfortunes. I felt the greatest eagerness to hear the promised narrative,
+partly from curiosity and partly from a strong desire to ameliorate his fate if
+it were in my power. I expressed these feelings in my answer.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I thank you,” he replied, “for your sympathy, but it is useless; my fate is
+nearly fulfilled. I wait but for one event, and then I shall repose in peace. I
+understand your feeling,” continued he, perceiving that I wished to interrupt
+him; “but you are mistaken, my friend, if thus you will allow me to name you;
+nothing can alter my destiny; listen to my history, and you will perceive how
+irrevocably it is determined.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+He then told me that he would commence his narrative the next day when I should
+be at leisure. This promise drew from me the warmest thanks. I have resolved
+every night, when I am not imperatively occupied by my duties, to record, as
+nearly as possible in his own words, what he has related during the day. If I
+should be engaged, I will at least make notes. This manuscript will doubtless
+afford you the greatest pleasure; but to me, who know him, and who hear it from
+his own lips—with what interest and sympathy shall I read it in some future
+day! Even now, as I commence my task, his full-toned voice swells in my ears;
+his lustrous eyes dwell on me with all their melancholy sweetness; I see his
+thin hand raised in animation, while the lineaments of his face are irradiated
+by the soul within. Strange and harrowing must be his story, frightful the
+storm which embraced the gallant vessel on its course and wrecked it—thus!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 1 
+
+ 
+I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of
+that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics,
+and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation.
+He was respected by all who knew him for his integrity and indefatigable
+attention to public business. He passed his younger days perpetually occupied
+by the affairs of his country; a variety of circumstances had prevented his
+marrying early, nor was it until the decline of life that he became a husband
+and the father of a family.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+As the circumstances of his marriage illustrate his character, I cannot refrain
+from relating them. One of his most intimate friends was a merchant who, from a
+flourishing state, fell, through numerous mischances, into poverty. This man,
+whose name was Beaufort, was of a proud and unbending disposition and could not
+bear to live in poverty and oblivion in the same country where he had formerly
+been distinguished for his rank and magnificence. Having paid his debts,
+therefore, in the most honourable manner, he retreated with his daughter to the
+town of Lucerne, where he lived unknown and in wretchedness. My father loved
+Beaufort with the truest friendship and was deeply grieved by his retreat in
+these unfortunate circumstances. He bitterly deplored the false pride which led
+his friend to a conduct so little worthy of the affection that united them. He
+lost no time in endeavouring to seek him out, with the hope of persuading him
+to begin the world again through his credit and assistance.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Beaufort had taken effectual measures to conceal himself, and it was ten months
+before my father discovered his abode. Overjoyed at this discovery, he hastened
+to the house, which was situated in a mean street near the Reuss. But when he
+entered, misery and despair alone welcomed him. Beaufort had saved but a very
+small sum of money from the wreck of his fortunes, but it was sufficient to
+provide him with sustenance for some months, and in the meantime he hoped to
+procure some respectable employment in a merchant’s house. The interval was,
+consequently, spent in inaction; his grief only became more deep and rankling
+when he had leisure for reflection, and at length it took so fast hold of his
+mind that at the end of three months he lay on a bed of sickness, incapable of
+any exertion.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+His daughter attended him with the greatest tenderness, but she saw with
+despair that their little fund was rapidly decreasing and that there was no
+other prospect of support. But Caroline Beaufort possessed a mind of an
+uncommon mould, and her courage rose to support her in her adversity. She
+procured plain work; she plaited straw and by various means contrived to earn a
+pittance scarcely sufficient to support life.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Several months passed in this manner. Her father grew worse; her time was more
+entirely occupied in attending him; her means of subsistence decreased; and in
+the tenth month her father died in her arms, leaving her an orphan and a
+beggar. This last blow overcame her, and she knelt by Beaufort’s coffin weeping
+bitterly, when my father entered the chamber. He came like a protecting spirit
+to the poor girl, who committed herself to his care; and after the interment of
+his friend he conducted her to Geneva and placed her under the protection of a
+relation. Two years after this event Caroline became his wife.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+There was a considerable difference between the ages of my parents, but this
+circumstance seemed to unite them only closer in bonds of devoted affection.
+There was a sense of justice in my father’s upright mind which rendered it
+necessary that he should approve highly to love strongly. Perhaps during former
+years he had suffered from the late-discovered unworthiness of one beloved and
+so was disposed to set a greater value on tried worth. There was a show of
+gratitude and worship in his attachment to my mother, differing wholly from the
+doting fondness of age, for it was inspired by reverence for her virtues and a
+desire to be the means of, in some degree, recompensing her for the sorrows she
+had endured, but which gave inexpressible grace to his behaviour to her.
+Everything was made to yield to her wishes and her convenience. He strove to
+shelter her, as a fair exotic is sheltered by the gardener, from every rougher
+wind and to surround her with all that could tend to excite pleasurable emotion
+in her soft and benevolent mind. Her health, and even the tranquillity of her
+hitherto constant spirit, had been shaken by what she had gone through. During
+the two years that had elapsed previous to their marriage my father had
+gradually relinquished all his public functions; and immediately after their
+union they sought the pleasant climate of Italy, and the change of scene and
+interest attendant on a tour through that land of wonders, as a restorative for
+her weakened frame.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+From Italy they visited Germany and France. I, their eldest child, was born at
+Naples, and as an infant accompanied them in their rambles. I remained for
+several years their only child. Much as they were attached to each other, they
+seemed to draw inexhaustible stores of affection from a very mine of love to
+bestow them upon me. My mother’s tender caresses and my father’s smile of
+benevolent pleasure while regarding me are my first recollections. I was their
+plaything and their idol, and something better—their child, the innocent and
+helpless creature bestowed on them by Heaven, whom to bring up to good, and
+whose future lot it was in their hands to direct to happiness or misery,
+according as they fulfilled their duties towards me. With this deep
+consciousness of what they owed towards the being to which they had given life,
+added to the active spirit of tenderness that animated both, it may be imagined
+that while during every hour of my infant life I received a lesson of patience,
+of charity, and of self-control, I was so guided by a silken cord that all
+seemed but one train of enjoyment to me.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+For a long time I was their only care. My mother had much desired to have a
+daughter, but I continued their single offspring. When I was about five years
+old, while making an excursion beyond the frontiers of Italy, they passed a
+week on the shores of the Lake of Como. Their benevolent disposition often made
+them enter the cottages of the poor. This, to my mother, was more than a duty;
+it was a necessity, a passion—remembering what she had suffered, and how she
+had been relieved—for her to act in her turn the guardian angel to the
+afflicted. During one of their walks a poor cot in the foldings of a vale
+attracted their notice as being singularly disconsolate, while the number of
+half-clothed children gathered about it spoke of penury in its worst shape. One
+day, when my father had gone by himself to Milan, my mother, accompanied by me,
+visited this abode. She found a peasant and his wife, hard working, bent down
+by care and labour, distributing a scanty meal to five hungry babes. Among
+these there was one which attracted my mother far above all the rest. She
+appeared of a different stock. The four others were dark-eyed, hardy little
+vagrants; this child was thin and very fair. Her hair was the brightest living
+gold, and despite the poverty of her clothing, seemed to set a crown of
+distinction on her head. Her brow was clear and ample, her blue eyes cloudless,
+and her lips and the moulding of her face so expressive of sensibility and
+sweetness that none could behold her without looking on her as of a distinct
+species, a being heaven-sent, and bearing a celestial stamp in all her
+features.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The peasant woman, perceiving that my mother fixed eyes of wonder and
+admiration on this lovely girl, eagerly communicated her history. She was not
+her child, but the daughter of a Milanese nobleman. Her mother was a German and
+had died on giving her birth. The infant had been placed with these good people
+to nurse: they were better off then. They had not been long married, and their
+eldest child was but just born. The father of their charge was one of those
+Italians nursed in the memory of the antique glory of Italy—one among the
+ schiavi ognor frementi, who exerted himself to obtain the liberty of his
+country. He became the victim of its weakness. Whether he had died or still
+lingered in the dungeons of Austria was not known. His property was
+confiscated; his child became an orphan and a beggar. She continued with her
+foster parents and bloomed in their rude abode, fairer than a garden rose among
+dark-leaved brambles.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+When my father returned from Milan, he found playing with me in the hall of our
+villa a child fairer than pictured cherub—a creature who seemed to shed
+radiance from her looks and whose form and motions were lighter than the
+chamois of the hills. The apparition was soon explained. With his permission my
+mother prevailed on her rustic guardians to yield their charge to her. They
+were fond of the sweet orphan. Her presence had seemed a blessing to them, but
+it would be unfair to her to keep her in poverty and want when Providence
+afforded her such powerful protection. They consulted their village priest, and
+the result was that Elizabeth Lavenza became the inmate of my parents’ house—my
+more than sister—the beautiful and adored companion of all my occupations and
+my pleasures.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Everyone loved Elizabeth. The passionate and almost reverential attachment with
+which all regarded her became, while I shared it, my pride and my delight. On
+the evening previous to her being brought to my home, my mother had said
+playfully, “I have a pretty present for my Victor—tomorrow he shall have it.”
+And when, on the morrow, she presented Elizabeth to me as her promised gift, I,
+with childish seriousness, interpreted her words literally and looked upon
+Elizabeth as mine—mine to protect, love, and cherish. All praises bestowed on
+her I received as made to a possession of my own. We called each other
+familiarly by the name of cousin. No word, no expression could body forth the
+kind of relation in which she stood to me—my more than sister, since till death
+she was to be mine only.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 2 
+
+ 
+We were brought up together; there was not quite a year difference in our ages.
+I need not say that we were strangers to any species of disunion or dispute.
+Harmony was the soul of our companionship, and the diversity and contrast that
+subsisted in our characters drew us nearer together. Elizabeth was of a calmer
+and more concentrated disposition; but, with all my ardour, I was capable of a
+more intense application and was more deeply smitten with the thirst for
+knowledge. She busied herself with following the aerial creations of the poets;
+and in the majestic and wondrous scenes which surrounded our Swiss home —the
+sublime shapes of the mountains, the changes of the seasons, tempest and calm,
+the silence of winter, and the life and turbulence of our Alpine summers—she
+found ample scope for admiration and delight. While my companion contemplated
+with a serious and satisfied spirit the magnificent appearances of things, I
+delighted in investigating their causes. The world was to me a secret which I
+desired to divine. Curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of
+nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they were unfolded to me, are among the
+earliest sensations I can remember.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+On the birth of a second son, my junior by seven years, my parents gave up
+entirely their wandering life and fixed themselves in their native country. We
+possessed a house in Geneva, and a campagne on Belrive, the eastern
+shore of the lake, at the distance of rather more than a league from the city.
+We resided principally in the latter, and the lives of my parents were passed
+in considerable seclusion. It was my temper to avoid a crowd and to attach
+myself fervently to a few. I was indifferent, therefore, to my school-fellows
+in general; but I united myself in the bonds of the closest friendship to one
+among them. Henry Clerval was the son of a merchant of Geneva. He was a boy of
+singular talent and fancy. He loved enterprise, hardship, and even danger for
+its own sake. He was deeply read in books of chivalry and romance. He composed
+heroic songs and began to write many a tale of enchantment and knightly
+adventure. He tried to make us act plays and to enter into masquerades, in
+which the characters were drawn from the heroes of Roncesvalles, of the Round
+Table of King Arthur, and the chivalrous train who shed their blood to redeem
+the holy sepulchre from the hands of the infidels.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+No human being could have passed a happier childhood than myself. My parents
+were possessed by the very spirit of kindness and indulgence. We felt that they
+were not the tyrants to rule our lot according to their caprice, but the agents
+and creators of all the many delights which we enjoyed. When I mingled with
+other families I distinctly discerned how peculiarly fortunate my lot was, and
+gratitude assisted the development of filial love.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My temper was sometimes violent, and my passions vehement; but by some law in
+my temperature they were turned not towards childish pursuits but to an eager
+desire to learn, and not to learn all things indiscriminately. I confess that
+neither the structure of languages, nor the code of governments, nor the
+politics of various states possessed attractions for me. It was the secrets of
+heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward
+substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of
+man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or
+in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Meanwhile Clerval occupied himself, so to speak, with the moral relations of
+things. The busy stage of life, the virtues of heroes, and the actions of men
+were his theme; and his hope and his dream was to become one among those whose
+names are recorded in story as the gallant and adventurous benefactors of our
+species. The saintly soul of Elizabeth shone like a shrine-dedicated lamp in
+our peaceful home. Her sympathy was ours; her smile, her soft voice, the sweet
+glance of her celestial eyes, were ever there to bless and animate us. She was
+the living spirit of love to soften and attract; I might have become sullen in
+my study, rough through the ardour of my nature, but that she was there to
+subdue me to a semblance of her own gentleness. And Clerval—could aught ill
+entrench on the noble spirit of Clerval? Yet he might not have been so
+perfectly humane, so thoughtful in his generosity, so full of kindness and
+tenderness amidst his passion for adventurous exploit, had she not unfolded to
+him the real loveliness of beneficence and made the doing good the end and aim
+of his soaring ambition.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I feel exquisite pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before
+misfortune had tainted my mind and changed its bright visions of extensive
+usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self. Besides, in drawing
+the picture of my early days, I also record those events which led, by
+insensible steps, to my after tale of misery, for when I would account to
+myself for the birth of that passion which afterwards ruled my destiny I find
+it arise, like a mountain river, from ignoble and almost forgotten sources;
+but, swelling as it proceeded, it became the torrent which, in its course, has
+swept away all my hopes and joys.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate; I desire,
+therefore, in this narration, to state those facts which led to my predilection
+for that science. When I was thirteen years of age we all went on a party of
+pleasure to the baths near Thonon; the inclemency of the weather obliged us to
+remain a day confined to the inn. In this house I chanced to find a volume of
+the works of Cornelius Agrippa. I opened it with apathy; the theory which he
+attempts to demonstrate and the wonderful facts which he relates soon changed
+this feeling into enthusiasm. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind, and
+bounding with joy, I communicated my discovery to my father. My father looked
+carelessly at the title page of my book and said, “Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My
+dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me that
+the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded and that a modern system
+of science had been introduced which possessed much greater powers than the
+ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the
+former were real and practical, under such circumstances I should certainly
+have thrown Agrippa aside and have contented my imagination, warmed as it was,
+by returning with greater ardour to my former studies. It is even possible that
+the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to
+my ruin. But the cursory glance my father had taken of my volume by no means
+assured me that he was acquainted with its contents, and I continued to read
+with the greatest avidity.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+When I returned home my first care was to procure the whole works of this
+author, and afterwards of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. I read and studied
+the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures
+known to few besides myself. I have described myself as always having been
+imbued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature. In spite of
+the intense labour and wonderful discoveries of modern philosophers, I always
+came from my studies discontented and unsatisfied. Sir Isaac Newton is said to
+have avowed that he felt like a child picking up shells beside the great and
+unexplored ocean of truth. Those of his successors in each branch of natural
+philosophy with whom I was acquainted appeared even to my boy’s apprehensions
+as tyros engaged in the same pursuit.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The untaught peasant beheld the elements around him and was acquainted with
+their practical uses. The most learned philosopher knew little more. He had
+partially unveiled the face of Nature, but her immortal lineaments were still a
+wonder and a mystery. He might dissect, anatomise, and give names; but, not to
+speak of a final cause, causes in their secondary and tertiary grades were
+utterly unknown to him. I had gazed upon the fortifications and impediments
+that seemed to keep human beings from entering the citadel of nature, and
+rashly and ignorantly I had repined.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+But here were books, and here were men who had penetrated deeper and knew more.
+I took their word for all that they averred, and I became their disciple. It
+may appear strange that such should arise in the eighteenth century; but while
+I followed the routine of education in the schools of Geneva, I was, to a great
+degree, self-taught with regard to my favourite studies. My father was not
+scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child’s blindness, added to a
+student’s thirst for knowledge. Under the guidance of my new preceptors I
+entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher’s stone
+and the elixir of life; but the latter soon obtained my undivided attention.
+Wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery if I
+could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any
+but a violent death!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise
+liberally accorded by my favourite authors, the fulfilment of which I most
+eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed
+the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake than to a want of skill
+or fidelity in my instructors. And thus for a time I was occupied by exploded
+systems, mingling, like an unadept, a thousand contradictory theories and
+floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge, guided by
+an ardent imagination and childish reasoning, till an accident again changed
+the current of my ideas.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+When I was about fifteen years old we had retired to our house near Belrive,
+when we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from
+behind the mountains of Jura, and the thunder burst at once with frightful
+loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm
+lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the
+door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak
+which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling
+light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted
+stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a
+singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to
+thin ribbons of wood. I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Before this I was not unacquainted with the more obvious laws of electricity.
+On this occasion a man of great research in natural philosophy was with us, and
+excited by this catastrophe, he entered on the explanation of a theory which he
+had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism, which was at once new
+and astonishing to me. All that he said threw greatly into the shade Cornelius
+Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination; but by
+some fatality the overthrow of these men disinclined me to pursue my accustomed
+studies. It seemed to me as if nothing would or could ever be known. All that
+had so long engaged my attention suddenly grew despicable. By one of those
+caprices of the mind which we are perhaps most subject to in early youth, I at
+once gave up my former occupations, set down natural history and all its
+progeny as a deformed and abortive creation, and entertained the greatest
+disdain for a would-be science which could never even step within the threshold
+of real knowledge. In this mood of mind I betook myself to the mathematics and
+the branches of study appertaining to that science as being built upon secure
+foundations, and so worthy of my consideration.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by such slight ligaments are we
+bound to prosperity or ruin. When I look back, it seems to me as if this almost
+miraculous change of inclination and will was the immediate suggestion of the
+guardian angel of my life—the last effort made by the spirit of preservation to
+avert the storm that was even then hanging in the stars and ready to envelop
+me. Her victory was announced by an unusual tranquillity and gladness of soul
+which followed the relinquishing of my ancient and latterly tormenting studies.
+It was thus that I was to be taught to associate evil with their prosecution,
+happiness with their disregard.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+It was a strong effort of the spirit of good, but it was ineffectual. Destiny
+was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible
+destruction.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 3 
+
+ 
+When I had attained the age of seventeen my parents resolved that I should
+become a student at the university of Ingolstadt. I had hitherto attended the
+schools of Geneva, but my father thought it necessary for the completion of my
+education that I should be made acquainted with other customs than those of my
+native country. My departure was therefore fixed at an early date, but before
+the day resolved upon could arrive, the first misfortune of my life occurred—an
+omen, as it were, of my future misery.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Elizabeth had caught the scarlet fever; her illness was severe, and she was in
+the greatest danger. During her illness many arguments had been urged to
+persuade my mother to refrain from attending upon her. She had at first yielded
+to our entreaties, but when she heard that the life of her favourite was
+menaced, she could no longer control her anxiety. She attended her sickbed; her
+watchful attentions triumphed over the malignity of the distemper—Elizabeth was
+saved, but the consequences of this imprudence were fatal to her preserver. On
+the third day my mother sickened; her fever was accompanied by the most
+alarming symptoms, and the looks of her medical attendants prognosticated the
+worst event. On her deathbed the fortitude and benignity of this best of women
+did not desert her. She joined the hands of Elizabeth and myself. “My
+children,” she said, “my firmest hopes of future happiness were placed on the
+prospect of your union. This expectation will now be the consolation of your
+father. Elizabeth, my love, you must supply my place to my younger children.
+Alas! I regret that I am taken from you; and, happy and beloved as I have been,
+is it not hard to quit you all? But these are not thoughts befitting me; I will
+endeavour to resign myself cheerfully to death and will indulge a hope of
+meeting you in another world.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+She died calmly, and her countenance expressed affection even in death. I need
+not describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most
+irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair
+that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can
+persuade itself that she whom we saw every day and whose very existence
+appeared a part of our own can have departed for ever—that the brightness of a
+beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and
+dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard. These are the
+reflections of the first days; but when the lapse of time proves the reality of
+the evil, then the actual bitterness of grief commences. Yet from whom has not
+that rude hand rent away some dear connection? And why should I describe a
+sorrow which all have felt, and must feel? The time at length arrives when
+grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity; and the smile that plays upon
+the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished. My mother was
+dead, but we had still duties which we ought to perform; we must continue our
+course with the rest and learn to think ourselves fortunate whilst one remains
+whom the spoiler has not seized.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My departure for Ingolstadt, which had been deferred by these events, was now
+again determined upon. I obtained from my father a respite of some weeks. It
+appeared to me sacrilege so soon to leave the repose, akin to death, of the
+house of mourning and to rush into the thick of life. I was new to sorrow, but
+it did not the less alarm me. I was unwilling to quit the sight of those that
+remained to me, and above all, I desired to see my sweet Elizabeth in some
+degree consoled.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+She indeed veiled her grief and strove to act the comforter to us all. She
+looked steadily on life and assumed its duties with courage and zeal. She
+devoted herself to those whom she had been taught to call her uncle and
+cousins. Never was she so enchanting as at this time, when she recalled the
+sunshine of her smiles and spent them upon us. She forgot even her own regret
+in her endeavours to make us forget.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The day of my departure at length arrived. Clerval spent the last evening with
+us. He had endeavoured to persuade his father to permit him to accompany me and
+to become my fellow student, but in vain. His father was a narrow-minded trader
+and saw idleness and ruin in the aspirations and ambition of his son. Henry
+deeply felt the misfortune of being debarred from a liberal education. He said
+little, but when he spoke I read in his kindling eye and in his animated glance
+a restrained but firm resolve not to be chained to the miserable details of
+commerce.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We sat late. We could not tear ourselves away from each other nor persuade
+ourselves to say the word “Farewell!” It was said, and we retired under the
+pretence of seeking repose, each fancying that the other was deceived; but when
+at morning’s dawn I descended to the carriage which was to convey me away, they
+were all there—my father again to bless me, Clerval to press my hand once more,
+my Elizabeth to renew her entreaties that I would write often and to bestow the
+last feminine attentions on her playmate and friend.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I threw myself into the chaise that was to convey me away and indulged in the
+most melancholy reflections. I, who had ever been surrounded by amiable
+companions, continually engaged in endeavouring to bestow mutual pleasure—I was
+now alone. In the university whither I was going I must form my own friends and
+be my own protector. My life had hitherto been remarkably secluded and
+domestic, and this had given me invincible repugnance to new countenances. I
+loved my brothers, Elizabeth, and Clerval; these were “old familiar faces,” but
+I believed myself totally unfitted for the company of strangers. Such were my
+reflections as I commenced my journey; but as I proceeded, my spirits and hopes
+rose. I ardently desired the acquisition of knowledge. I had often, when at
+home, thought it hard to remain during my youth cooped up in one place and had
+longed to enter the world and take my station among other human beings. Now my
+desires were complied with, and it would, indeed, have been folly to repent.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I had sufficient leisure for these and many other reflections during my journey
+to Ingolstadt, which was long and fatiguing. At length the high white steeple
+of the town met my eyes. I alighted and was conducted to my solitary apartment
+to spend the evening as I pleased.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The next morning I delivered my letters of introduction and paid a visit to
+some of the principal professors. Chance—or rather the evil influence, the
+Angel of Destruction, which asserted omnipotent sway over me from the moment I
+turned my reluctant steps from my father’s door—led me first to M. Krempe,
+professor of natural philosophy. He was an uncouth man, but deeply imbued in
+the secrets of his science. He asked me several questions concerning my
+progress in the different branches of science appertaining to natural
+philosophy. I replied carelessly, and partly in contempt, mentioned the names
+of my alchemists as the principal authors I had studied. The professor stared.
+“Have you,” he said, “really spent your time in studying such nonsense?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I replied in the affirmative. “Every minute,” continued M. Krempe with warmth,
+“every instant that you have wasted on those books is utterly and entirely
+lost. You have burdened your memory with exploded systems and useless names.
+Good God! In what desert land have you lived, where no one was kind enough to
+inform you that these fancies which you have so greedily imbibed are a thousand
+years old and as musty as they are ancient? I little expected, in this
+enlightened and scientific age, to find a disciple of Albertus Magnus and
+Paracelsus. My dear sir, you must begin your studies entirely anew.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+So saying, he stepped aside and wrote down a list of several books treating of
+natural philosophy which he desired me to procure, and dismissed me after
+mentioning that in the beginning of the following week he intended to commence
+a course of lectures upon natural philosophy in its general relations, and that
+M. Waldman, a fellow professor, would lecture upon chemistry the alternate days
+that he omitted.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I returned home not disappointed, for I have said that I had long considered
+those authors useless whom the professor reprobated; but I returned not at all
+the more inclined to recur to these studies in any shape. M. Krempe was a
+little squat man with a gruff voice and a repulsive countenance; the teacher,
+therefore, did not prepossess me in favour of his pursuits. In rather a too
+philosophical and connected a strain, perhaps, I have given an account of the
+conclusions I had come to concerning them in my early years. As a child I had
+not been content with the results promised by the modern professors of natural
+science. With a confusion of ideas only to be accounted for by my extreme youth
+and my want of a guide on such matters, I had retrod the steps of knowledge
+along the paths of time and exchanged the discoveries of recent inquirers for
+the dreams of forgotten alchemists. Besides, I had a contempt for the uses of
+modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of the
+science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand;
+but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit
+itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was
+chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for
+realities of little worth.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Such were my reflections during the first two or three days of my residence at
+Ingolstadt, which were chiefly spent in becoming acquainted with the localities
+and the principal residents in my new abode. But as the ensuing week commenced,
+I thought of the information which M. Krempe had given me concerning the
+lectures. And although I could not consent to go and hear that little conceited
+fellow deliver sentences out of a pulpit, I recollected what he had said of M.
+Waldman, whom I had never seen, as he had hitherto been out of town.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Partly from curiosity and partly from idleness, I went into the lecturing room,
+which M. Waldman entered shortly after. This professor was very unlike his
+colleague. He appeared about fifty years of age, but with an aspect expressive
+of the greatest benevolence; a few grey hairs covered his temples, but those at
+the back of his head were nearly black. His person was short but remarkably
+erect and his voice the sweetest I had ever heard. He began his lecture by a
+recapitulation of the history of chemistry and the various improvements made by
+different men of learning, pronouncing with fervour the names of the most
+distinguished discoverers. He then took a cursory view of the present state of
+the science and explained many of its elementary terms. After having made a few
+preparatory experiments, he concluded with a panegyric upon modern chemistry,
+the terms of which I shall never forget:
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The ancient teachers of this science,” said he, “promised impossibilities and
+performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that
+metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera but these
+philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to
+pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They
+penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her
+hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood
+circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and
+almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the
+earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Such were the professor’s words—rather let me say such the words of the
+fate—enounced to destroy me. As he went on I felt as if my soul were grappling
+with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed
+the mechanism of my being; chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was
+filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done,
+exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein—more, far more, will I achieve; treading in
+the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and
+unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I closed not my eyes that night. My internal being was in a state of
+insurrection and turmoil; I felt that order would thence arise, but I had no
+power to produce it. By degrees, after the morning’s dawn, sleep came. I awoke,
+and my yesternight’s thoughts were as a dream. There only remained a resolution
+to return to my ancient studies and to devote myself to a science for which I
+believed myself to possess a natural talent. On the same day I paid M. Waldman
+a visit. His manners in private were even more mild and attractive than in
+public, for there was a certain dignity in his mien during his lecture which in
+his own house was replaced by the greatest affability and kindness. I gave him
+pretty nearly the same account of my former pursuits as I had given to his
+fellow professor. He heard with attention the little narration concerning my
+studies and smiled at the names of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, but
+without the contempt that M. Krempe had exhibited. He said that “These were men
+to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the
+foundations of their knowledge. They had left to us, as an easier task, to give
+new names and arrange in connected classifications the facts which they in a
+great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light. The labours of men
+of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately
+turning to the solid advantage of mankind.” I listened to his statement, which
+was delivered without any presumption or affectation, and then added that his
+lecture had removed my prejudices against modern chemists; I expressed myself
+in measured terms, with the modesty and deference due from a youth to his
+instructor, without letting escape (inexperience in life would have made me
+ashamed) any of the enthusiasm which stimulated my intended labours. I
+requested his advice concerning the books I ought to procure.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am happy,” said M. Waldman, “to have gained a disciple; and if your
+application equals your ability, I have no doubt of your success. Chemistry is
+that branch of natural philosophy in which the greatest improvements have been
+and may be made; it is on that account that I have made it my peculiar study;
+but at the same time, I have not neglected the other branches of science. A man
+would make but a very sorry chemist if he attended to that department of human
+knowledge alone. If your wish is to become really a man of science and not
+merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of
+natural philosophy, including mathematics.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+He then took me into his laboratory and explained to me the uses of his various
+machines, instructing me as to what I ought to procure and promising me the use
+of his own when I should have advanced far enough in the science not to derange
+their mechanism. He also gave me the list of books which I had requested, and I
+took my leave.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Thus ended a day memorable to me; it decided my future destiny.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 4 
+
+ 
+From this day natural philosophy, and particularly chemistry, in the most
+comprehensive sense of the term, became nearly my sole occupation. I read with
+ardour those works, so full of genius and discrimination, which modern
+inquirers have written on these subjects. I attended the lectures and
+cultivated the acquaintance of the men of science of the university, and I
+found even in M. Krempe a great deal of sound sense and real information,
+combined, it is true, with a repulsive physiognomy and manners, but not on that
+account the less valuable. In M. Waldman I found a true friend. His gentleness
+was never tinged by dogmatism, and his instructions were given with an air of
+frankness and good nature that banished every idea of pedantry. In a thousand
+ways he smoothed for me the path of knowledge and made the most abstruse
+inquiries clear and facile to my apprehension. My application was at first
+fluctuating and uncertain; it gained strength as I proceeded and soon became so
+ardent and eager that the stars often disappeared in the light of morning
+whilst I was yet engaged in my laboratory.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+As I applied so closely, it may be easily conceived that my progress was rapid.
+My ardour was indeed the astonishment of the students, and my proficiency that
+of the masters. Professor Krempe often asked me, with a sly smile, how
+Cornelius Agrippa went on, whilst M. Waldman expressed the most heartfelt
+exultation in my progress. Two years passed in this manner, during which I paid
+no visit to Geneva, but was engaged, heart and soul, in the pursuit of some
+discoveries which I hoped to make. None but those who have experienced them can
+conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as
+others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a
+scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder. A mind of
+moderate capacity which closely pursues one study must infallibly arrive at
+great proficiency in that study; and I, who continually sought the attainment
+of one object of pursuit and was solely wrapped up in this, improved so rapidly
+that at the end of two years I made some discoveries in the improvement of some
+chemical instruments, which procured me great esteem and admiration at the
+university. When I had arrived at this point and had become as well acquainted
+with the theory and practice of natural philosophy as depended on the lessons
+of any of the professors at Ingolstadt, my residence there being no longer
+conducive to my improvements, I thought of returning to my friends and my
+native town, when an incident happened that protracted my stay.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+One of the phenomena which had peculiarly attracted my attention was the
+structure of the human frame, and, indeed, any animal endued with life. Whence,
+I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed? It was a bold
+question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery; yet with how
+many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or
+carelessness did not restrain our inquiries. I revolved these circumstances in
+my mind and determined thenceforth to apply myself more particularly to those
+branches of natural philosophy which relate to physiology. Unless I had been
+animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm, my application to this study
+would have been irksome and almost intolerable. To examine the causes of life,
+we must first have recourse to death. I became acquainted with the science of
+anatomy, but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and
+corruption of the human body. In my education my father had taken the greatest
+precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors. I do
+not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to have feared
+the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy, and a
+churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which,
+from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I
+was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend
+days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses. My attention was fixed upon every
+object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how
+the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death
+succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders
+of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of
+causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life,
+until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light
+so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the
+immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so
+many men of genius who had directed their inquiries towards the same science,
+that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Remember, I am not recording the vision of a madman. The sun does not more
+certainly shine in the heavens than that which I now affirm is true. Some
+miracle might have produced it, yet the stages of the discovery were distinct
+and probable. After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I
+succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became
+myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The astonishment which I had at first experienced on this discovery soon gave
+place to delight and rapture. After so much time spent in painful labour, to
+arrive at once at the summit of my desires was the most gratifying consummation
+of my toils. But this discovery was so great and overwhelming that all the
+steps by which I had been progressively led to it were obliterated, and I
+beheld only the result. What had been the study and desire of the wisest men
+since the creation of the world was now within my grasp. Not that, like a magic
+scene, it all opened upon me at once: the information I had obtained was of a
+nature rather to direct my endeavours so soon as I should point them towards
+the object of my search than to exhibit that object already accomplished. I was
+like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead and found a passage to life,
+aided only by one glimmering and seemingly ineffectual light.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I see by your eagerness and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my
+friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am
+acquainted; that cannot be; listen patiently until the end of my story, and you
+will easily perceive why I am reserved upon that subject. I will not lead you
+on, unguarded and ardent as I then was, to your destruction and infallible
+misery. Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how
+dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who
+believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater
+than his nature will allow.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long
+time concerning the manner in which I should employ it. Although I possessed
+the capacity of bestowing animation, yet to prepare a frame for the reception
+of it, with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a
+work of inconceivable difficulty and labour. I doubted at first whether I
+should attempt the creation of a being like myself, or one of simpler
+organization; but my imagination was too much exalted by my first success to
+permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and
+wonderful as man. The materials at present within my command hardly appeared
+adequate to so arduous an undertaking, but I doubted not that I should
+ultimately succeed. I prepared myself for a multitude of reverses; my
+operations might be incessantly baffled, and at last my work be imperfect, yet
+when I considered the improvement which every day takes place in science and
+mechanics, I was encouraged to hope my present attempts would at least lay the
+foundations of future success. Nor could I consider the magnitude and
+complexity of my plan as any argument of its impracticability. It was with
+these feelings that I began the creation of a human being. As the minuteness of
+the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my
+first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about
+eight feet in height, and proportionably large. After having formed this
+determination and having spent some months in successfully collecting and
+arranging my materials, I began.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a
+hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me
+ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light
+into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source;
+many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could
+claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.
+Pursuing these reflections, I thought that if I could bestow animation upon
+lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it
+impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to
+corruption.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+These thoughts supported my spirits, while I pursued my undertaking with
+unremitting ardour. My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had
+become emaciated with confinement. Sometimes, on the very brink of certainty, I
+failed; yet still I clung to the hope which the next day or the next hour might
+realise. One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had
+dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with
+unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places. Who
+shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed
+damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?
+My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a
+resistless and almost frantic impulse urged me forward; I seemed to have lost
+all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing
+trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural
+stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits. I collected bones
+from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets
+of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the
+house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase,
+I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their
+sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and
+the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human
+nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an
+eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The summer months passed while I was thus engaged, heart and soul, in one
+pursuit. It was a most beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more
+plentiful harvest or the vines yield a more luxuriant vintage, but my eyes were
+insensible to the charms of nature. And the same feelings which made me neglect
+the scenes around me caused me also to forget those friends who were so many
+miles absent, and whom I had not seen for so long a time. I knew my silence
+disquieted them, and I well remembered the words of my father: “I know that
+while you are pleased with yourself you will think of us with affection, and we
+shall hear regularly from you. You must pardon me if I regard any interruption
+in your correspondence as a proof that your other duties are equally
+neglected.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I knew well therefore what would be my father’s feelings, but I could not tear
+my thoughts from my employment, loathsome in itself, but which had taken an
+irresistible hold of my imagination. I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all
+that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which
+swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I then thought that my father would be unjust if he ascribed my neglect to vice
+or faultiness on my part, but I am now convinced that he was justified in
+conceiving that I should not be altogether free from blame. A human being in
+perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow
+passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that
+the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which
+you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your
+taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that
+study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If
+this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to
+interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been
+enslaved, Cæsar would have spared his country, America would have been
+discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been
+destroyed.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+But I forget that I am moralizing in the most interesting part of my tale, and
+your looks remind me to proceed.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My father made no reproach in his letters and only took notice of my silence by
+inquiring into my occupations more particularly than before. Winter, spring,
+and summer passed away during my labours; but I did not watch the blossom or
+the expanding leaves—sights which before always yielded me supreme delight—so
+deeply was I engrossed in my occupation. The leaves of that year had withered
+before my work drew near to a close, and now every day showed me more plainly
+how well I had succeeded. But my enthusiasm was checked by my anxiety, and I
+appeared rather like one doomed by slavery to toil in the mines, or any other
+unwholesome trade than an artist occupied by his favourite employment. Every
+night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful
+degree; the fall of a leaf startled me, and I shunned my fellow creatures as if
+I had been guilty of a crime. Sometimes I grew alarmed at the wreck I perceived
+that I had become; the energy of my purpose alone sustained me: my labours
+would soon end, and I believed that exercise and amusement would then drive
+away incipient disease; and I promised myself both of these when my creation
+should be complete.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 5 
+
+ 
+It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my
+toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the
+instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the
+lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain
+pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when,
+by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the
+creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch
+whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs
+were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!
+Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries
+beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly
+whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his
+watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in
+which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human
+nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of
+infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest
+and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but
+now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless
+horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I
+had created, I rushed out of the room and continued a long time traversing my
+bed-chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep. At length lassitude succeeded
+to the tumult I had before endured, and I threw myself on the bed in my
+clothes, endeavouring to seek a few moments of forgetfulness. But it was in
+vain; I slept, indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I
+saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt.
+Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on
+her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to
+change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a
+shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of
+the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my
+forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim
+and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters,
+I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the
+curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me.
+His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin
+wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was
+stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs. I
+took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited, where I
+remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest
+agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were
+to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably
+given life.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again
+endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on
+him while unfinished; he was ugly then, but when those muscles and joints were
+rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have
+conceived.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I passed the night wretchedly. Sometimes my pulse beat so quickly and hardly
+that I felt the palpitation of every artery; at others, I nearly sank to the
+ground through languor and extreme weakness. Mingled with this horror, I felt
+the bitterness of disappointment; dreams that had been my food and pleasant
+rest for so long a space were now become a hell to me; and the change was so
+rapid, the overthrow so complete!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Morning, dismal and wet, at length dawned and discovered to my sleepless and
+aching eyes the church of Ingolstadt, its white steeple and clock, which
+indicated the sixth hour. The porter opened the gates of the court, which had
+that night been my asylum, and I issued into the streets, pacing them with
+quick steps, as if I sought to avoid the wretch whom I feared every turning of
+the street would present to my view. I did not dare return to the apartment
+which I inhabited, but felt impelled to hurry on, although drenched by the rain
+which poured from a black and comfortless sky.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I continued walking in this manner for some time, endeavouring by bodily
+exercise to ease the load that weighed upon my mind. I traversed the streets
+without any clear conception of where I was or what I was doing. My heart
+palpitated in the sickness of fear, and I hurried on with irregular steps, not
+daring to look about me:
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Like one who, on a lonely road,
+
+Doth walk in fear and dread,
+
+And, having once turned round, walks on,
+
+And turns no more his head;
+
+Because he knows a frightful fiend
+
+Doth close behind him tread.
+
+
+
+[Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner.”]
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Continuing thus, I came at length opposite to the inn at which the various
+diligences and carriages usually stopped. Here I paused, I knew not why; but I
+remained some minutes with my eyes fixed on a coach that was coming towards me
+from the other end of the street. As it drew nearer I observed that it was the
+Swiss diligence; it stopped just where I was standing, and on the door being
+opened, I perceived Henry Clerval, who, on seeing me, instantly sprung out. “My
+dear Frankenstein,” exclaimed he, “how glad I am to see you! How fortunate that
+you should be here at the very moment of my alighting!”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Nothing could equal my delight on seeing Clerval; his presence brought back to
+my thoughts my father, Elizabeth, and all those scenes of home so dear to my
+recollection. I grasped his hand, and in a moment forgot my horror and
+misfortune; I felt suddenly, and for the first time during many months, calm
+and serene joy. I welcomed my friend, therefore, in the most cordial manner,
+and we walked towards my college. Clerval continued talking for some time about
+our mutual friends and his own good fortune in being permitted to come to
+Ingolstadt. “You may easily believe,” said he, “how great was the difficulty to
+persuade my father that all necessary knowledge was not comprised in the noble
+art of book-keeping; and, indeed, I believe I left him incredulous to the last,
+for his constant answer to my unwearied entreaties was the same as that of the
+Dutch schoolmaster in The Vicar of Wakefield: ‘I have ten thousand florins a
+year without Greek, I eat heartily without Greek.’ But his affection for me at
+length overcame his dislike of learning, and he has permitted me to undertake a
+voyage of discovery to the land of knowledge.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“It gives me the greatest delight to see you; but tell me how you left my
+father, brothers, and Elizabeth.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very well, and very happy, only a little uneasy that they hear from you so
+seldom. By the by, I mean to lecture you a little upon their account myself.
+But, my dear Frankenstein,” continued he, stopping short and gazing full in my
+face, “I did not before remark how very ill you appear; so thin and pale; you
+look as if you had been watching for several nights.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have guessed right; I have lately been so deeply engaged in one occupation
+that I have not allowed myself sufficient rest, as you see; but I hope, I
+sincerely hope, that all these employments are now at an end and that I am at
+length free.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I trembled excessively; I could not endure to think of, and far less to allude
+to, the occurrences of the preceding night. I walked with a quick pace, and we
+soon arrived at my college. I then reflected, and the thought made me shiver,
+that the creature whom I had left in my apartment might still be there, alive
+and walking about. I dreaded to behold this monster, but I feared still more
+that Henry should see him. Entreating him, therefore, to remain a few minutes
+at the bottom of the stairs, I darted up towards my own room. My hand was
+already on the lock of the door before I recollected myself. I then paused, and
+a cold shivering came over me. I threw the door forcibly open, as children are
+accustomed to do when they expect a spectre to stand in waiting for them on the
+other side; but nothing appeared. I stepped fearfully in: the apartment was
+empty, and my bedroom was also freed from its hideous guest. I could hardly
+believe that so great a good fortune could have befallen me, but when I became
+assured that my enemy had indeed fled, I clapped my hands for joy and ran down
+to Clerval.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We ascended into my room, and the servant presently brought breakfast; but I
+was unable to contain myself. It was not joy only that possessed me; I felt my
+flesh tingle with excess of sensitiveness, and my pulse beat rapidly. I was
+unable to remain for a single instant in the same place; I jumped over the
+chairs, clapped my hands, and laughed aloud. Clerval at first attributed my
+unusual spirits to joy on his arrival, but when he observed me more
+attentively, he saw a wildness in my eyes for which he could not account, and
+my loud, unrestrained, heartless laughter frightened and astonished him.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear Victor,” cried he, “what, for God’s sake, is the matter? Do not laugh
+in that manner. How ill you are! What is the cause of all this?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do not ask me,” cried I, putting my hands before my eyes, for I thought I saw
+the dreaded spectre glide into the room; “ he can tell. Oh, save me! Save
+me!” I imagined that the monster seized me; I struggled furiously and fell down
+in a fit.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Poor Clerval! What must have been his feelings? A meeting, which he anticipated
+with such joy, so strangely turned to bitterness. But I was not the witness of
+his grief, for I was lifeless and did not recover my senses for a long, long
+time.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+This was the commencement of a nervous fever which confined me for several
+months. During all that time Henry was my only nurse. I afterwards learned
+that, knowing my father’s advanced age and unfitness for so long a journey, and
+how wretched my sickness would make Elizabeth, he spared them this grief by
+concealing the extent of my disorder. He knew that I could not have a more kind
+and attentive nurse than himself; and, firm in the hope he felt of my recovery,
+he did not doubt that, instead of doing harm, he performed the kindest action
+that he could towards them.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+But I was in reality very ill, and surely nothing but the unbounded and
+unremitting attentions of my friend could have restored me to life. The form of
+the monster on whom I had bestowed existence was for ever before my eyes, and I
+raved incessantly concerning him. Doubtless my words surprised Henry; he at
+first believed them to be the wanderings of my disturbed imagination, but the
+pertinacity with which I continually recurred to the same subject persuaded him
+that my disorder indeed owed its origin to some uncommon and terrible event.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+By very slow degrees, and with frequent relapses that alarmed and grieved my
+friend, I recovered. I remember the first time I became capable of observing
+outward objects with any kind of pleasure, I perceived that the fallen leaves
+had disappeared and that the young buds were shooting forth from the trees that
+shaded my window. It was a divine spring, and the season contributed greatly to
+my convalescence. I felt also sentiments of joy and affection revive in my
+bosom; my gloom disappeared, and in a short time I became as cheerful as before
+I was attacked by the fatal passion.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Dearest Clerval,” exclaimed I, “how kind, how very good you are to me. This
+whole winter, instead of being spent in study, as you promised yourself, has
+been consumed in my sick room. How shall I ever repay you? I feel the greatest
+remorse for the disappointment of which I have been the occasion, but you will
+forgive me.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“You will repay me entirely if you do not discompose yourself, but get well as
+fast as you can; and since you appear in such good spirits, I may speak to you
+on one subject, may I not?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I trembled. One subject! What could it be? Could he allude to an object on whom
+I dared not even think?
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Compose yourself,” said Clerval, who observed my change of colour, “I will not
+mention it if it agitates you; but your father and cousin would be very happy
+if they received a letter from you in your own handwriting. They hardly know
+how ill you have been and are uneasy at your long silence.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Is that all, my dear Henry? How could you suppose that my first thought would
+not fly towards those dear, dear friends whom I love and who are so deserving
+of my love?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“If this is your present temper, my friend, you will perhaps be glad to see a
+letter that has been lying here some days for you; it is from your cousin, I
+believe.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 6 
+
+ 
+Clerval then put the following letter into my hands. It was from my own
+Elizabeth:
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dearest Cousin,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have been ill, very ill, and even the constant letters of dear kind Henry
+are not sufficient to reassure me on your account. You are forbidden to
+write—to hold a pen; yet one word from you, dear Victor, is necessary to calm
+our apprehensions. For a long time I have thought that each post would bring
+this line, and my persuasions have restrained my uncle from undertaking a
+journey to Ingolstadt. I have prevented his encountering the inconveniences and
+perhaps dangers of so long a journey, yet how often have I regretted not being
+able to perform it myself! I figure to myself that the task of attending on
+your sickbed has devolved on some mercenary old nurse, who could never guess
+your wishes nor minister to them with the care and affection of your poor
+cousin. Yet that is over now: Clerval writes that indeed you are getting
+better. I eagerly hope that you will confirm this intelligence soon in your own
+handwriting.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Get well—and return to us. You will find a happy, cheerful home and friends
+who love you dearly. Your father’s health is vigorous, and he asks but to see
+you, but to be assured that you are well; and not a care will ever cloud his
+benevolent countenance. How pleased you would be to remark the improvement of
+our Ernest! He is now sixteen and full of activity and spirit. He is desirous
+to be a true Swiss and to enter into foreign service, but we cannot part with
+him, at least until his elder brother returns to us. My uncle is not pleased
+with the idea of a military career in a distant country, but Ernest never had
+your powers of application. He looks upon study as an odious fetter; his time
+is spent in the open air, climbing the hills or rowing on the lake. I fear that
+he will become an idler unless we yield the point and permit him to enter on
+the profession which he has selected.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Little alteration, except the growth of our dear children, has taken place
+since you left us. The blue lake and snow-clad mountains—they never change; and
+I think our placid home and our contented hearts are regulated by the same
+immutable laws. My trifling occupations take up my time and amuse me, and I am
+rewarded for any exertions by seeing none but happy, kind faces around me.
+Since you left us, but one change has taken place in our little household. Do
+you remember on what occasion Justine Moritz entered our family? Probably you
+do not; I will relate her history, therefore in a few words. Madame Moritz, her
+mother, was a widow with four children, of whom Justine was the third. This
+girl had always been the favourite of her father, but through a strange
+perversity, her mother could not endure her, and after the death of M. Moritz,
+treated her very ill. My aunt observed this, and when Justine was twelve years
+of age, prevailed on her mother to allow her to live at our house. The
+republican institutions of our country have produced simpler and happier
+manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround it.
+Hence there is less distinction between the several classes of its inhabitants;
+and the lower orders, being neither so poor nor so despised, their manners are
+more refined and moral. A servant in Geneva does not mean the same thing as a
+servant in France and England. Justine, thus received in our family, learned
+the duties of a servant, a condition which, in our fortunate country, does not
+include the idea of ignorance and a sacrifice of the dignity of a human being.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Justine, you may remember, was a great favourite of yours; and I recollect you
+once remarked that if you were in an ill humour, one glance from Justine could
+dissipate it, for the same reason that Ariosto gives concerning the beauty of
+Angelica—she looked so frank-hearted and happy. My aunt conceived a great
+attachment for her, by which she was induced to give her an education superior
+to that which she had at first intended. This benefit was fully repaid; Justine
+was the most grateful little creature in the world: I do not mean that she made
+any professions I never heard one pass her lips, but you could see by her eyes
+that she almost adored her protectress. Although her disposition was gay and in
+many respects inconsiderate, yet she paid the greatest attention to every
+gesture of my aunt. She thought her the model of all excellence and endeavoured
+to imitate her phraseology and manners, so that even now she often reminds me
+of her.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“When my dearest aunt died every one was too much occupied in their own grief
+to notice poor Justine, who had attended her during her illness with the most
+anxious affection. Poor Justine was very ill; but other trials were reserved
+for her.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“One by one, her brothers and sister died; and her mother, with the exception
+of her neglected daughter, was left childless. The conscience of the woman was
+troubled; she began to think that the deaths of her favourites was a judgement
+from heaven to chastise her partiality. She was a Roman Catholic; and I believe
+her confessor confirmed the idea which she had conceived. Accordingly, a few
+months after your departure for Ingolstadt, Justine was called home by her
+repentant mother. Poor girl! She wept when she quitted our house; she was much
+altered since the death of my aunt; grief had given softness and a winning
+mildness to her manners, which had before been remarkable for vivacity. Nor was
+her residence at her mother’s house of a nature to restore her gaiety. The poor
+woman was very vacillating in her repentance. She sometimes begged Justine to
+forgive her unkindness, but much oftener accused her of having caused the
+deaths of her brothers and sister. Perpetual fretting at length threw Madame
+Moritz into a decline, which at first increased her irritability, but she is
+now at peace for ever. She died on the first approach of cold weather, at the
+beginning of this last winter. Justine has just returned to us; and I assure
+you I love her tenderly. She is very clever and gentle, and extremely pretty;
+as I mentioned before, her mien and her expression continually remind me of my
+dear aunt.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I must say also a few words to you, my dear cousin, of little darling William.
+I wish you could see him; he is very tall of his age, with sweet laughing blue
+eyes, dark eyelashes, and curling hair. When he smiles, two little dimples
+appear on each cheek, which are rosy with health. He has already had one or two
+little wives, but Louisa Biron is his favourite, a pretty little girl of
+five years of age.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now, dear Victor, I dare say you wish to be indulged in a little gossip
+concerning the good people of Geneva. The pretty Miss Mansfield has already
+received the congratulatory visits on her approaching marriage with a young
+Englishman, John Melbourne, Esq. Her ugly sister, Manon, married M. Duvillard,
+the rich banker, last autumn. Your favourite schoolfellow, Louis Manoir, has
+suffered several misfortunes since the departure of Clerval from Geneva. But he
+has already recovered his spirits, and is reported to be on the point of
+marrying a lively pretty Frenchwoman, Madame Tavernier. She is a widow, and
+much older than Manoir; but she is very much admired, and a favourite with
+everybody.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have written myself into better spirits, dear cousin; but my anxiety returns
+upon me as I conclude. Write, dearest Victor,—one line—one word will be a
+blessing to us. Ten thousand thanks to Henry for his kindness, his affection,
+and his many letters; we are sincerely grateful. Adieu! my cousin; take care of
+yourself; and, I entreat you, write!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Elizabeth Lavenza.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Geneva, March 18th, 17—.”
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Dear, dear Elizabeth!” I exclaimed, when I had read her letter: “I will write
+instantly and relieve them from the anxiety they must feel.” I wrote, and this
+exertion greatly fatigued me; but my convalescence had commenced, and proceeded
+regularly. In another fortnight I was able to leave my chamber.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+One of my first duties on my recovery was to introduce Clerval to the several
+professors of the university. In doing this, I underwent a kind of rough usage,
+ill befitting the wounds that my mind had sustained. Ever since the fatal
+night, the end of my labours, and the beginning of my misfortunes, I had
+conceived a violent antipathy even to the name of natural philosophy. When I
+was otherwise quite restored to health, the sight of a chemical instrument
+would renew all the agony of my nervous symptoms. Henry saw this, and had
+removed all my apparatus from my view. He had also changed my apartment; for he
+perceived that I had acquired a dislike for the room which had previously been
+my laboratory. But these cares of Clerval were made of no avail when I visited
+the professors. M. Waldman inflicted torture when he praised, with kindness and
+warmth, the astonishing progress I had made in the sciences. He soon perceived
+that I disliked the subject; but not guessing the real cause, he attributed my
+feelings to modesty, and changed the subject from my improvement, to the
+science itself, with a desire, as I evidently saw, of drawing me out. What
+could I do? He meant to please, and he tormented me. I felt as if he had placed
+carefully, one by one, in my view those instruments which were to be afterwards
+used in putting me to a slow and cruel death. I writhed under his words, yet
+dared not exhibit the pain I felt. Clerval, whose eyes and feelings were always
+quick in discerning the sensations of others, declined the subject, alleging,
+in excuse, his total ignorance; and the conversation took a more general turn.
+I thanked my friend from my heart, but I did not speak. I saw plainly that he
+was surprised, but he never attempted to draw my secret from me; and although I
+loved him with a mixture of affection and reverence that knew no bounds, yet I
+could never persuade myself to confide in him that event which was so often
+present to my recollection, but which I feared the detail to another would only
+impress more deeply.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+M. Krempe was not equally docile; and in my condition at that time, of almost
+insupportable sensitiveness, his harsh blunt encomiums gave me even more pain
+than the benevolent approbation of M. Waldman. “D—n the fellow!” cried he;
+“why, M. Clerval, I assure you he has outstript us all. Ay, stare if you
+please; but it is nevertheless true. A youngster who, but a few years ago,
+believed in Cornelius Agrippa as firmly as in the gospel, has now set himself
+at the head of the university; and if he is not soon pulled down, we shall all
+be out of countenance.—Ay, ay,” continued he, observing my face expressive of
+suffering, “M. Frankenstein is modest; an excellent quality in a young man.
+Young men should be diffident of themselves, you know, M. Clerval: I was myself
+when young; but that wears out in a very short time.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+M. Krempe had now commenced an eulogy on himself, which happily turned the
+conversation from a subject that was so annoying to me.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Clerval had never sympathised in my tastes for natural science; and his
+literary pursuits differed wholly from those which had occupied me. He came to
+the university with the design of making himself complete master of the
+oriental languages, and thus he should open a field for the plan of life he had
+marked out for himself. Resolved to pursue no inglorious career, he turned his
+eyes toward the East, as affording scope for his spirit of enterprise. The
+Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit languages engaged his attention, and I was easily
+induced to enter on the same studies. Idleness had ever been irksome to me, and
+now that I wished to fly from reflection, and hated my former studies, I felt
+great relief in being the fellow-pupil with my friend, and found not only
+instruction but consolation in the works of the orientalists. I did not, like
+him, attempt a critical knowledge of their dialects, for I did not contemplate
+making any other use of them than temporary amusement. I read merely to
+understand their meaning, and they well repaid my labours. Their melancholy is
+soothing, and their joy elevating, to a degree I never experienced in studying
+the authors of any other country. When you read their writings, life appears to
+consist in a warm sun and a garden of roses,—in the smiles and frowns of a fair
+enemy, and the fire that consumes your own heart. How different from the manly
+and heroical poetry of Greece and Rome!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Summer passed away in these occupations, and my return to Geneva was fixed for
+the latter end of autumn; but being delayed by several accidents, winter and
+snow arrived, the roads were deemed impassable, and my journey was retarded
+until the ensuing spring. I felt this delay very bitterly; for I longed to see
+my native town and my beloved friends. My return had only been delayed so long,
+from an unwillingness to leave Clerval in a strange place, before he had become
+acquainted with any of its inhabitants. The winter, however, was spent
+cheerfully; and although the spring was uncommonly late, when it came its
+beauty compensated for its dilatoriness.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The month of May had already commenced, and I expected the letter daily which
+was to fix the date of my departure, when Henry proposed a pedestrian tour in
+the environs of Ingolstadt, that I might bid a personal farewell to the country
+I had so long inhabited. I acceded with pleasure to this proposition: I was
+fond of exercise, and Clerval had always been my favourite companion in the
+ramble of this nature that I had taken among the scenes of my native country.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We passed a fortnight in these perambulations: my health and spirits had long
+been restored, and they gained additional strength from the salubrious air I
+breathed, the natural incidents of our progress, and the conversation of my
+friend. Study had before secluded me from the intercourse of my
+fellow-creatures, and rendered me unsocial; but Clerval called forth the better
+feelings of my heart; he again taught me to love the aspect of nature, and the
+cheerful faces of children. Excellent friend! how sincerely you did love me,
+and endeavour to elevate my mind until it was on a level with your own. A
+selfish pursuit had cramped and narrowed me, until your gentleness and
+affection warmed and opened my senses; I became the same happy creature who, a
+few years ago, loved and beloved by all, had no sorrow or care. When happy,
+inanimate nature had the power of bestowing on me the most delightful
+sensations. A serene sky and verdant fields filled me with ecstasy. The present
+season was indeed divine; the flowers of spring bloomed in the hedges, while
+those of summer were already in bud. I was undisturbed by thoughts which during
+the preceding year had pressed upon me, notwithstanding my endeavours to throw
+them off, with an invincible burden.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Henry rejoiced in my gaiety, and sincerely sympathised in my feelings: he
+exerted himself to amuse me, while he expressed the sensations that filled his
+soul. The resources of his mind on this occasion were truly astonishing: his
+conversation was full of imagination; and very often, in imitation of the
+Persian and Arabic writers, he invented tales of wonderful fancy and passion.
+At other times he repeated my favourite poems, or drew me out into arguments,
+which he supported with great ingenuity.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We returned to our college on a Sunday afternoon: the peasants were dancing,
+and every one we met appeared gay and happy. My own spirits were high, and I
+bounded along with feelings of unbridled joy and hilarity.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 7 
+
+ 
+On my return, I found the following letter from my father:—
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear Victor,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have probably waited impatiently for a letter to fix the date of your
+return to us; and I was at first tempted to write only a few lines, merely
+mentioning the day on which I should expect you. But that would be a cruel
+kindness, and I dare not do it. What would be your surprise, my son, when you
+expected a happy and glad welcome, to behold, on the contrary, tears and
+wretchedness? And how, Victor, can I relate our misfortune? Absence cannot have
+rendered you callous to our joys and griefs; and how shall I inflict pain on my
+long absent son? I wish to prepare you for the woeful news, but I know it is
+impossible; even now your eye skims over the page to seek the words which are
+to convey to you the horrible tidings.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“William is dead!—that sweet child, whose smiles delighted and warmed my heart,
+who was so gentle, yet so gay! Victor, he is murdered!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I will not attempt to console you; but will simply relate the circumstances of
+the transaction.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Last Thursday (May 7th), I, my niece, and your two brothers, went to walk in
+Plainpalais. The evening was warm and serene, and we prolonged our walk farther
+than usual. It was already dusk before we thought of returning; and then we
+discovered that William and Ernest, who had gone on before, were not to be
+found. We accordingly rested on a seat until they should return. Presently
+Ernest came, and enquired if we had seen his brother; he said, that he had been
+playing with him, that William had run away to hide himself, and that he vainly
+sought for him, and afterwards waited for a long time, but that he did not
+return.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“This account rather alarmed us, and we continued to search for him until night
+fell, when Elizabeth conjectured that he might have returned to the house. He
+was not there. We returned again, with torches; for I could not rest, when I
+thought that my sweet boy had lost himself, and was exposed to all the damps
+and dews of night; Elizabeth also suffered extreme anguish. About five in the
+morning I discovered my lovely boy, whom the night before I had seen blooming
+and active in health, stretched on the grass livid and motionless; the print of
+the murder’s finger was on his neck.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“He was conveyed home, and the anguish that was visible in my countenance
+betrayed the secret to Elizabeth. She was very earnest to see the corpse. At
+first I attempted to prevent her but she persisted, and entering the room where
+it lay, hastily examined the neck of the victim, and clasping her hands
+exclaimed, ‘O God! I have murdered my darling child!’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“She fainted, and was restored with extreme difficulty. When she again lived,
+it was only to weep and sigh. She told me, that that same evening William had
+teased her to let him wear a very valuable miniature that she possessed of your
+mother. This picture is gone, and was doubtless the temptation which urged the
+murderer to the deed. We have no trace of him at present, although our
+exertions to discover him are unremitted; but they will not restore my beloved
+William!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Come, dearest Victor; you alone can console Elizabeth. She weeps continually,
+and accuses herself unjustly as the cause of his death; her words pierce my
+heart. We are all unhappy; but will not that be an additional motive for you,
+my son, to return and be our comforter? Your dear mother! Alas, Victor! I now
+say, Thank God she did not live to witness the cruel, miserable death of her
+youngest darling!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Come, Victor; not brooding thoughts of vengeance against the assassin, but
+with feelings of peace and gentleness, that will heal, instead of festering,
+the wounds of our minds. Enter the house of mourning, my friend, but with
+kindness and affection for those who love you, and not with hatred for your
+enemies.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your affectionate and afflicted father,
+
+“Alphonse Frankenstein.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Geneva, May 12th, 17—.”
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Clerval, who had watched my countenance as I read this letter, was surprised to
+observe the despair that succeeded the joy I at first expressed on receiving
+news from my friends. I threw the letter on the table, and covered my face with
+my hands.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear Frankenstein,” exclaimed Henry, when he perceived me weep with
+bitterness, “are you always to be unhappy? My dear friend, what has happened?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I motioned him to take up the letter, while I walked up and down the room in
+the extremest agitation. Tears also gushed from the eyes of Clerval, as he read
+the account of my misfortune.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I can offer you no consolation, my friend,” said he; “your disaster is
+irreparable. What do you intend to do?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“To go instantly to Geneva: come with me, Henry, to order the horses.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+During our walk, Clerval endeavoured to say a few words of consolation; he
+could only express his heartfelt sympathy. “Poor William!” said he, “dear
+lovely child, he now sleeps with his angel mother! Who that had seen him bright
+and joyous in his young beauty, but must weep over his untimely loss! To die so
+miserably; to feel the murderer’s grasp! How much more a murdered that could
+destroy radiant innocence! Poor little fellow! one only consolation have we;
+his friends mourn and weep, but he is at rest. The pang is over, his sufferings
+are at an end for ever. A sod covers his gentle form, and he knows no pain. He
+can no longer be a subject for pity; we must reserve that for his miserable
+survivors.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Clerval spoke thus as we hurried through the streets; the words impressed
+themselves on my mind and I remembered them afterwards in solitude. But now, as
+soon as the horses arrived, I hurried into a cabriolet, and bade farewell to my
+friend.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My journey was very melancholy. At first I wished to hurry on, for I longed to
+console and sympathise with my loved and sorrowing friends; but when I drew
+near my native town, I slackened my progress. I could hardly sustain the
+multitude of feelings that crowded into my mind. I passed through scenes
+familiar to my youth, but which I had not seen for nearly six years. How
+altered every thing might be during that time! One sudden and desolating change
+had taken place; but a thousand little circumstances might have by degrees
+worked other alterations, which, although they were done more tranquilly, might
+not be the less decisive. Fear overcame me; I dared no advance, dreading a
+thousand nameless evils that made me tremble, although I was unable to define
+them.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I remained two days at Lausanne, in this painful state of mind. I contemplated
+the lake: the waters were placid; all around was calm; and the snowy mountains,
+“the palaces of nature,” were not changed. By degrees the calm and heavenly
+scene restored me, and I continued my journey towards Geneva.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The road ran by the side of the lake, which became narrower as I approached my
+native town. I discovered more distinctly the black sides of Jura, and the
+bright summit of Mont Blanc. I wept like a child. “Dear mountains! my own
+beautiful lake! how do you welcome your wanderer? Your summits are clear; the
+sky and lake are blue and placid. Is this to prognosticate peace, or to mock at
+my unhappiness?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I fear, my friend, that I shall render myself tedious by dwelling on these
+preliminary circumstances; but they were days of comparative happiness, and I
+think of them with pleasure. My country, my beloved country! who but a native
+can tell the delight I took in again beholding thy streams, thy mountains, and,
+more than all, thy lovely lake!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Yet, as I drew nearer home, grief and fear again overcame me. Night also closed
+around; and when I could hardly see the dark mountains, I felt still more
+gloomily. The picture appeared a vast and dim scene of evil, and I foresaw
+obscurely that I was destined to become the most wretched of human beings.
+Alas! I prophesied truly, and failed only in one single circumstance, that in
+all the misery I imagined and dreaded, I did not conceive the hundredth part of
+the anguish I was destined to endure.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+It was completely dark when I arrived in the environs of Geneva; the gates of
+the town were already shut; and I was obliged to pass the night at Secheron, a
+village at the distance of half a league from the city. The sky was serene;
+and, as I was unable to rest, I resolved to visit the spot where my poor
+William had been murdered. As I could not pass through the town, I was obliged
+to cross the lake in a boat to arrive at Plainpalais. During this short voyage
+I saw the lightning playing on the summit of Mont Blanc in the most beautiful
+figures. The storm appeared to approach rapidly, and, on landing, I ascended a
+low hill, that I might observe its progress. It advanced; the heavens were
+clouded, and I soon felt the rain coming slowly in large drops, but its
+violence quickly increased.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I quitted my seat, and walked on, although the darkness and storm increased
+every minute, and the thunder burst with a terrific crash over my head. It was
+echoed from Salêve, the Juras, and the Alps of Savoy; vivid flashes of
+lightning dazzled my eyes, illuminating the lake, making it appear like a vast
+sheet of fire; then for an instant every thing seemed of a pitchy darkness,
+until the eye recovered itself from the preceding flash. The storm, as is often
+the case in Switzerland, appeared at once in various parts of the heavens. The
+most violent storm hung exactly north of the town, over the part of the lake
+which lies between the promontory of Belrive and the village of Copêt. Another
+storm enlightened Jura with faint flashes; and another darkened and sometimes
+disclosed the Môle, a peaked mountain to the east of the lake.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+While I watched the tempest, so beautiful yet terrific, I wandered on with a
+hasty step. This noble war in the sky elevated my spirits; I clasped my hands,
+and exclaimed aloud, “William, dear angel! this is thy funeral, this thy
+dirge!” As I said these words, I perceived in the gloom a figure which stole
+from behind a clump of trees near me; I stood fixed, gazing intently: I could
+not be mistaken. A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered
+its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect
+more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the
+wretch, the filthy dæmon, to whom I had given life. What did he there? Could he
+be (I shuddered at the conception) the murderer of my brother? No sooner did
+that idea cross my imagination, than I became convinced of its truth; my teeth
+chattered, and I was forced to lean against a tree for support. The figure
+passed me quickly, and I lost it in the gloom. Nothing in human shape could
+have destroyed the fair child. He was the murderer! I could not doubt
+it. The mere presence of the idea was an irresistible proof of the fact. I
+thought of pursuing the devil; but it would have been in vain, for another
+flash discovered him to me hanging among the rocks of the nearly perpendicular
+ascent of Mont Salêve, a hill that bounds Plainpalais on the south. He soon
+reached the summit, and disappeared.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I remained motionless. The thunder ceased; but the rain still continued, and
+the scene was enveloped in an impenetrable darkness. I revolved in my mind the
+events which I had until now sought to forget: the whole train of my progress
+toward the creation; the appearance of the works of my own hands at my bedside;
+its departure. Two years had now nearly elapsed since the night on which he
+first received life; and was this his first crime? Alas! I had turned loose
+into the world a depraved wretch, whose delight was in carnage and misery; had
+he not murdered my brother?
+
+
+
+
+ 
+No one can conceive the anguish I suffered during the remainder of the night,
+which I spent, cold and wet, in the open air. But I did not feel the
+inconvenience of the weather; my imagination was busy in scenes of evil and
+despair. I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with
+the will and power to effect purposes of horror, such as the deed which he had
+now done, nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from
+the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Day dawned; and I directed my steps towards the town. The gates were open, and
+I hastened to my father’s house. My first thought was to discover what I knew
+of the murderer, and cause instant pursuit to be made. But I paused when I
+reflected on the story that I had to tell. A being whom I myself had formed,
+and endued with life, had met me at midnight among the precipices of an
+inaccessible mountain. I remembered also the nervous fever with which I had
+been seized just at the time that I dated my creation, and which would give an
+air of delirium to a tale otherwise so utterly improbable. I well knew that if
+any other had communicated such a relation to me, I should have looked upon it
+as the ravings of insanity. Besides, the strange nature of the animal would
+elude all pursuit, even if I were so far credited as to persuade my relatives
+to commence it. And then of what use would be pursuit? Who could arrest a
+creature capable of scaling the overhanging sides of Mont Salêve? These
+reflections determined me, and I resolved to remain silent.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+It was about five in the morning when I entered my father’s house. I told the
+servants not to disturb the family, and went into the library to attend their
+usual hour of rising.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Six years had elapsed, passed in a dream but for one indelible trace, and I
+stood in the same place where I had last embraced my father before my departure
+for Ingolstadt. Beloved and venerable parent! He still remained to me. I gazed
+on the picture of my mother, which stood over the mantel-piece. It was an
+historical subject, painted at my father’s desire, and represented Caroline
+Beaufort in an agony of despair, kneeling by the coffin of her dead father. Her
+garb was rustic, and her cheek pale; but there was an air of dignity and
+beauty, that hardly permitted the sentiment of pity. Below this picture was a
+miniature of William; and my tears flowed when I looked upon it. While I was
+thus engaged, Ernest entered: he had heard me arrive, and hastened to welcome
+me: “Welcome, my dearest Victor,” said he. “Ah! I wish you had come three
+months ago, and then you would have found us all joyous and delighted. You come
+to us now to share a misery which nothing can alleviate; yet your presence
+will, I hope, revive our father, who seems sinking under his misfortune; and
+your persuasions will induce poor Elizabeth to cease her vain and tormenting
+self-accusations.—Poor William! he was our darling and our pride!”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Tears, unrestrained, fell from my brother’s eyes; a sense of mortal agony crept
+over my frame. Before, I had only imagined the wretchedness of my desolated
+home; the reality came on me as a new, and a not less terrible, disaster. I
+tried to calm Ernest; I enquired more minutely concerning my father, and here I
+named my cousin.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“She most of all,” said Ernest, “requires consolation; she accused herself of
+having caused the death of my brother, and that made her very wretched. But
+since the murderer has been discovered—”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The murderer discovered! Good God! how can that be? who could attempt to
+pursue him? It is impossible; one might as well try to overtake the winds, or
+confine a mountain-stream with a straw. I saw him too; he was free last night!”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I do not know what you mean,” replied my brother, in accents of wonder, “but
+to us the discovery we have made completes our misery. No one would believe it
+at first; and even now Elizabeth will not be convinced, notwithstanding all the
+evidence. Indeed, who would credit that Justine Moritz, who was so amiable, and
+fond of all the family, could suddenly become so capable of so frightful, so
+appalling a crime?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Justine Moritz! Poor, poor girl, is she the accused? But it is wrongfully;
+every one knows that; no one believes it, surely, Ernest?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“No one did at first; but several circumstances came out, that have almost
+forced conviction upon us; and her own behaviour has been so confused, as to
+add to the evidence of facts a weight that, I fear, leaves no hope for doubt.
+But she will be tried today, and you will then hear all.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+He then related that, the morning on which the murder of poor William had been
+discovered, Justine had been taken ill, and confined to her bed for several
+days. During this interval, one of the servants, happening to examine the
+apparel she had worn on the night of the murder, had discovered in her pocket
+the picture of my mother, which had been judged to be the temptation of the
+murderer. The servant instantly showed it to one of the others, who, without
+saying a word to any of the family, went to a magistrate; and, upon their
+deposition, Justine was apprehended. On being charged with the fact, the poor
+girl confirmed the suspicion in a great measure by her extreme confusion of
+manner.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+This was a strange tale, but it did not shake my faith; and I replied
+earnestly, “You are all mistaken; I know the murderer. Justine, poor, good
+Justine, is innocent.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+At that instant my father entered. I saw unhappiness deeply impressed on his
+countenance, but he endeavoured to welcome me cheerfully; and, after we had
+exchanged our mournful greeting, would have introduced some other topic than
+that of our disaster, had not Ernest exclaimed, “Good God, papa! Victor says
+that he knows who was the murderer of poor William.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“We do also, unfortunately,” replied my father, “for indeed I had rather have
+been for ever ignorant than have discovered so much depravity and ungratitude
+in one I valued so highly.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear father, you are mistaken; Justine is innocent.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“If she is, God forbid that she should suffer as guilty. She is to be tried
+today, and I hope, I sincerely hope, that she will be acquitted.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+This speech calmed me. I was firmly convinced in my own mind that Justine, and
+indeed every human being, was guiltless of this murder. I had no fear,
+therefore, that any circumstantial evidence could be brought forward strong
+enough to convict her. My tale was not one to announce publicly; its astounding
+horror would be looked upon as madness by the vulgar. Did any one indeed exist,
+except I, the creator, who would believe, unless his senses convinced him, in
+the existence of the living monument of presumption and rash ignorance which I
+had let loose upon the world?
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We were soon joined by Elizabeth. Time had altered her since I last beheld her;
+it had endowed her with loveliness surpassing the beauty of her childish years.
+There was the same candour, the same vivacity, but it was allied to an
+expression more full of sensibility and intellect. She welcomed me with the
+greatest affection. “Your arrival, my dear cousin,” said she, “fills me with
+hope. You perhaps will find some means to justify my poor guiltless Justine.
+Alas! who is safe, if she be convicted of crime? I rely on her innocence as
+certainly as I do upon my own. Our misfortune is doubly hard to us; we have not
+only lost that lovely darling boy, but this poor girl, whom I sincerely love,
+is to be torn away by even a worse fate. If she is condemned, I never shall
+know joy more. But she will not, I am sure she will not; and then I shall be
+happy again, even after the sad death of my little William.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“She is innocent, my Elizabeth,” said I, “and that shall be proved; fear
+nothing, but let your spirits be cheered by the assurance of her acquittal.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“How kind and generous you are! every one else believes in her guilt, and that
+made me wretched, for I knew that it was impossible: and to see every one else
+prejudiced in so deadly a manner rendered me hopeless and despairing.” She
+wept.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Dearest niece,” said my father, “dry your tears. If she is, as you believe,
+innocent, rely on the justice of our laws, and the activity with which I shall
+prevent the slightest shadow of partiality.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 8 
+
+ 
+We passed a few sad hours until eleven o’clock, when the trial was to commence.
+My father and the rest of the family being obliged to attend as witnesses, I
+accompanied them to the court. During the whole of this wretched mockery of
+justice I suffered living torture. It was to be decided whether the result of
+my curiosity and lawless devices would cause the death of two of my fellow
+beings: one a smiling babe full of innocence and joy, the other far more
+dreadfully murdered, with every aggravation of infamy that could make the
+murder memorable in horror. Justine also was a girl of merit and possessed
+qualities which promised to render her life happy; now all was to be
+obliterated in an ignominious grave, and I the cause! A thousand times rather
+would I have confessed myself guilty of the crime ascribed to Justine, but I
+was absent when it was committed, and such a declaration would have been
+considered as the ravings of a madman and would not have exculpated her who
+suffered through me.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The appearance of Justine was calm. She was dressed in mourning, and her
+countenance, always engaging, was rendered, by the solemnity of her feelings,
+exquisitely beautiful. Yet she appeared confident in innocence and did not
+tremble, although gazed on and execrated by thousands, for all the kindness
+which her beauty might otherwise have excited was obliterated in the minds of
+the spectators by the imagination of the enormity she was supposed to have
+committed. She was tranquil, yet her tranquillity was evidently constrained;
+and as her confusion had before been adduced as a proof of her guilt, she
+worked up her mind to an appearance of courage. When she entered the court she
+threw her eyes round it and quickly discovered where we were seated. A tear
+seemed to dim her eye when she saw us, but she quickly recovered herself, and a
+look of sorrowful affection seemed to attest her utter guiltlessness.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The trial began, and after the advocate against her had stated the charge,
+several witnesses were called. Several strange facts combined against her,
+which might have staggered anyone who had not such proof of her innocence as I
+had. She had been out the whole of the night on which the murder had been
+committed and towards morning had been perceived by a market-woman not far from
+the spot where the body of the murdered child had been afterwards found. The
+woman asked her what she did there, but she looked very strangely and only
+returned a confused and unintelligible answer. She returned to the house about
+eight o’clock, and when one inquired where she had passed the night, she
+replied that she had been looking for the child and demanded earnestly if
+anything had been heard concerning him. When shown the body, she fell into
+violent hysterics and kept her bed for several days. The picture was then
+produced which the servant had found in her pocket; and when Elizabeth, in a
+faltering voice, proved that it was the same which, an hour before the child
+had been missed, she had placed round his neck, a murmur of horror and
+indignation filled the court.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Justine was called on for her defence. As the trial had proceeded, her
+countenance had altered. Surprise, horror, and misery were strongly expressed.
+Sometimes she struggled with her tears, but when she was desired to plead, she
+collected her powers and spoke in an audible although variable voice.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“God knows,” she said, “how entirely I am innocent. But I do not pretend that
+my protestations should acquit me; I rest my innocence on a plain and simple
+explanation of the facts which have been adduced against me, and I hope the
+character I have always borne will incline my judges to a favourable
+interpretation where any circumstance appears doubtful or suspicious.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+She then related that, by the permission of Elizabeth, she had passed the
+evening of the night on which the murder had been committed at the house of an
+aunt at Chêne, a village situated at about a league from Geneva. On her return,
+at about nine o’clock, she met a man who asked her if she had seen anything of
+the child who was lost. She was alarmed by this account and passed several
+hours in looking for him, when the gates of Geneva were shut, and she was
+forced to remain several hours of the night in a barn belonging to a cottage,
+being unwilling to call up the inhabitants, to whom she was well known. Most of
+the night she spent here watching; towards morning she believed that she slept
+for a few minutes; some steps disturbed her, and she awoke. It was dawn, and
+she quitted her asylum, that she might again endeavour to find my brother. If
+she had gone near the spot where his body lay, it was without her knowledge.
+That she had been bewildered when questioned by the market-woman was not
+surprising, since she had passed a sleepless night and the fate of poor William
+was yet uncertain. Concerning the picture she could give no account.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I know,” continued the unhappy victim, “how heavily and fatally this one
+circumstance weighs against me, but I have no power of explaining it; and when
+I have expressed my utter ignorance, I am only left to conjecture concerning
+the probabilities by which it might have been placed in my pocket. But here
+also I am checked. I believe that I have no enemy on earth, and none surely
+would have been so wicked as to destroy me wantonly. Did the murderer place it
+there? I know of no opportunity afforded him for so doing; or, if I had, why
+should he have stolen the jewel, to part with it again so soon?
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I commit my cause to the justice of my judges, yet I see no room for hope. I
+beg permission to have a few witnesses examined concerning my character, and if
+their testimony shall not overweigh my supposed guilt, I must be condemned,
+although I would pledge my salvation on my innocence.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Several witnesses were called who had known her for many years, and they spoke
+well of her; but fear and hatred of the crime of which they supposed her guilty
+rendered them timorous and unwilling to come forward. Elizabeth saw even this
+last resource, her excellent dispositions and irreproachable conduct, about to
+fail the accused, when, although violently agitated, she desired permission to
+address the court.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am,” said she, “the cousin of the unhappy child who was murdered, or rather
+his sister, for I was educated by and have lived with his parents ever since
+and even long before his birth. It may therefore be judged indecent in me to
+come forward on this occasion, but when I see a fellow creature about to perish
+through the cowardice of her pretended friends, I wish to be allowed to speak,
+that I may say what I know of her character. I am well acquainted with the
+accused. I have lived in the same house with her, at one time for five and at
+another for nearly two years. During all that period she appeared to me the
+most amiable and benevolent of human creatures. She nursed Madame Frankenstein,
+my aunt, in her last illness, with the greatest affection and care and
+afterwards attended her own mother during a tedious illness, in a manner that
+excited the admiration of all who knew her, after which she again lived in my
+uncle’s house, where she was beloved by all the family. She was warmly attached
+to the child who is now dead and acted towards him like a most affectionate
+mother. For my own part, I do not hesitate to say that, notwithstanding all the
+evidence produced against her, I believe and rely on her perfect innocence. She
+had no temptation for such an action; as to the bauble on which the chief proof
+rests, if she had earnestly desired it, I should have willingly given it to
+her, so much do I esteem and value her.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+A murmur of approbation followed Elizabeth’s simple and powerful appeal, but it
+was excited by her generous interference, and not in favour of poor Justine, on
+whom the public indignation was turned with renewed violence, charging her with
+the blackest ingratitude. She herself wept as Elizabeth spoke, but she did not
+answer. My own agitation and anguish was extreme during the whole trial. I
+believed in her innocence; I knew it. Could the dæmon who had (I did not for a
+minute doubt) murdered my brother also in his hellish sport have betrayed the
+innocent to death and ignominy? I could not sustain the horror of my situation,
+and when I perceived that the popular voice and the countenances of the judges
+had already condemned my unhappy victim, I rushed out of the court in agony.
+The tortures of the accused did not equal mine; she was sustained by innocence,
+but the fangs of remorse tore my bosom and would not forgo their hold.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I passed a night of unmingled wretchedness. In the morning I went to the court;
+my lips and throat were parched. I dared not ask the fatal question, but I was
+known, and the officer guessed the cause of my visit. The ballots had been
+thrown; they were all black, and Justine was condemned.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I cannot pretend to describe what I then felt. I had before experienced
+sensations of horror, and I have endeavoured to bestow upon them adequate
+expressions, but words cannot convey an idea of the heart-sickening despair
+that I then endured. The person to whom I addressed myself added that Justine
+had already confessed her guilt. “That evidence,” he observed, “was hardly
+required in so glaring a case, but I am glad of it, and, indeed, none of our
+judges like to condemn a criminal upon circumstantial evidence, be it ever so
+decisive.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+This was strange and unexpected intelligence; what could it mean? Had my eyes
+deceived me? And was I really as mad as the whole world would believe me to be
+if I disclosed the object of my suspicions? I hastened to return home, and
+Elizabeth eagerly demanded the result.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“My cousin,” replied I, “it is decided as you may have expected; all judges had
+rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape. But
+she has confessed.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+This was a dire blow to poor Elizabeth, who had relied with firmness upon
+Justine’s innocence. “Alas!” said she. “How shall I ever again believe in human
+goodness? Justine, whom I loved and esteemed as my sister, how could she put on
+those smiles of innocence only to betray? Her mild eyes seemed incapable of any
+severity or guile, and yet she has committed a murder.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Soon after we heard that the poor victim had expressed a desire to see my
+cousin. My father wished her not to go but said that he left it to her own
+judgment and feelings to decide. “Yes,” said Elizabeth, “I will go, although
+she is guilty; and you, Victor, shall accompany me; I cannot go alone.” The
+idea of this visit was torture to me, yet I could not refuse.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We entered the gloomy prison chamber and beheld Justine sitting on some straw
+at the farther end; her hands were manacled, and her head rested on her knees.
+She rose on seeing us enter, and when we were left alone with her, she threw
+herself at the feet of Elizabeth, weeping bitterly. My cousin wept also.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, Justine!” said she. “Why did you rob me of my last consolation? I relied
+on your innocence, and although I was then very wretched, I was not so
+miserable as I am now.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“And do you also believe that I am so very, very wicked? Do you also join with
+my enemies to crush me, to condemn me as a murderer?” Her voice was suffocated
+with sobs.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Rise, my poor girl,” said Elizabeth; “why do you kneel, if you are innocent? I
+am not one of your enemies, I believed you guiltless, notwithstanding every
+evidence, until I heard that you had yourself declared your guilt. That report,
+you say, is false; and be assured, dear Justine, that nothing can shake my
+confidence in you for a moment, but your own confession.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I did confess, but I confessed a lie. I confessed, that I might obtain
+absolution; but now that falsehood lies heavier at my heart than all my other
+sins. The God of heaven forgive me! Ever since I was condemned, my confessor
+has besieged me; he threatened and menaced, until I almost began to think that
+I was the monster that he said I was. He threatened excommunication and hell
+fire in my last moments if I continued obdurate. Dear lady, I had none to
+support me; all looked on me as a wretch doomed to ignominy and perdition. What
+could I do? In an evil hour I subscribed to a lie; and now only am I truly
+miserable.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+She paused, weeping, and then continued, “I thought with horror, my sweet lady,
+that you should believe your Justine, whom your blessed aunt had so highly
+honoured, and whom you loved, was a creature capable of a crime which none but
+the devil himself could have perpetrated. Dear William! dearest blessed child!
+I soon shall see you again in heaven, where we shall all be happy; and that
+consoles me, going as I am to suffer ignominy and death.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, Justine! Forgive me for having for one moment distrusted you. Why did you
+confess? But do not mourn, dear girl. Do not fear. I will proclaim, I will
+prove your innocence. I will melt the stony hearts of your enemies by my tears
+and prayers. You shall not die! You, my playfellow, my companion, my sister,
+perish on the scaffold! No! No! I never could survive so horrible a
+misfortune.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Justine shook her head mournfully. “I do not fear to die,” she said; “that pang
+is past. God raises my weakness and gives me courage to endure the worst. I
+leave a sad and bitter world; and if you remember me and think of me as of one
+unjustly condemned, I am resigned to the fate awaiting me. Learn from me, dear
+lady, to submit in patience to the will of heaven!”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+During this conversation I had retired to a corner of the prison room, where I
+could conceal the horrid anguish that possessed me. Despair! Who dared talk of
+that? The poor victim, who on the morrow was to pass the awful boundary between
+life and death, felt not, as I did, such deep and bitter agony. I gnashed my
+teeth and ground them together, uttering a groan that came from my inmost soul.
+Justine started. When she saw who it was, she approached me and said, “Dear
+sir, you are very kind to visit me; you, I hope, do not believe that I am
+guilty?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I could not answer. “No, Justine,” said Elizabeth; “he is more convinced of
+your innocence than I was, for even when he heard that you had confessed, he
+did not credit it.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I truly thank him. In these last moments I feel the sincerest gratitude
+towards those who think of me with kindness. How sweet is the affection of
+others to such a wretch as I am! It removes more than half my misfortune, and I
+feel as if I could die in peace now that my innocence is acknowledged by you,
+dear lady, and your cousin.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Thus the poor sufferer tried to comfort others and herself. She indeed gained
+the resignation she desired. But I, the true murderer, felt the never-dying
+worm alive in my bosom, which allowed of no hope or consolation. Elizabeth also
+wept and was unhappy, but hers also was the misery of innocence, which, like a
+cloud that passes over the fair moon, for a while hides but cannot tarnish its
+brightness. Anguish and despair had penetrated into the core of my heart; I
+bore a hell within me which nothing could extinguish. We stayed several hours
+with Justine, and it was with great difficulty that Elizabeth could tear
+herself away. “I wish,” cried she, “that I were to die with you; I cannot live
+in this world of misery.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Justine assumed an air of cheerfulness, while she with difficulty repressed her
+bitter tears. She embraced Elizabeth and said in a voice of half-suppressed
+emotion, “Farewell, sweet lady, dearest Elizabeth, my beloved and only friend;
+may heaven, in its bounty, bless and preserve you; may this be the last
+misfortune that you will ever suffer! Live, and be happy, and make others so.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+And on the morrow Justine died. Elizabeth’s heart-rending eloquence failed to
+move the judges from their settled conviction in the criminality of the saintly
+sufferer. My passionate and indignant appeals were lost upon them. And when I
+received their cold answers and heard the harsh, unfeeling reasoning of these
+men, my purposed avowal died away on my lips. Thus I might proclaim myself a
+madman, but not revoke the sentence passed upon my wretched victim. She
+perished on the scaffold as a murderess!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+From the tortures of my own heart, I turned to contemplate the deep and
+voiceless grief of my Elizabeth. This also was my doing! And my father’s woe,
+and the desolation of that late so smiling home all was the work of my
+thrice-accursed hands! Ye weep, unhappy ones, but these are not your last
+tears! Again shall you raise the funeral wail, and the sound of your
+lamentations shall again and again be heard! Frankenstein, your son, your
+kinsman, your early, much-loved friend; he who would spend each vital drop of
+blood for your sakes, who has no thought nor sense of joy except as it is
+mirrored also in your dear countenances, who would fill the air with blessings
+and spend his life in serving you—he bids you weep, to shed countless tears;
+happy beyond his hopes, if thus inexorable fate be satisfied, and if the
+destruction pause before the peace of the grave have succeeded to your sad
+torments!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Thus spoke my prophetic soul, as, torn by remorse, horror, and despair, I
+beheld those I loved spend vain sorrow upon the graves of William and Justine,
+the first hapless victims to my unhallowed arts.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 9 
+
+ 
+Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been
+worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and
+certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear. Justine
+died, she rested, and I was alive. The blood flowed freely in my veins, but a
+weight of despair and remorse pressed on my heart which nothing could remove.
+Sleep fled from my eyes; I wandered like an evil spirit, for I had committed
+deeds of mischief beyond description horrible, and more, much more (I persuaded
+myself) was yet behind. Yet my heart overflowed with kindness and the love of
+virtue. I had begun life with benevolent intentions and thirsted for the moment
+when I should put them in practice and make myself useful to my fellow beings.
+Now all was blasted; instead of that serenity of conscience which allowed me to
+look back upon the past with self-satisfaction, and from thence to gather
+promise of new hopes, I was seized by remorse and the sense of guilt, which
+hurried me away to a hell of intense tortures such as no language can describe.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+This state of mind preyed upon my health, which had perhaps never entirely
+recovered from the first shock it had sustained. I shunned the face of man; all
+sound of joy or complacency was torture to me; solitude was my only
+consolation—deep, dark, deathlike solitude.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My father observed with pain the alteration perceptible in my disposition and
+habits and endeavoured by arguments deduced from the feelings of his serene
+conscience and guiltless life to inspire me with fortitude and awaken in me the
+courage to dispel the dark cloud which brooded over me. “Do you think, Victor,”
+said he, “that I do not suffer also? No one could love a child more than I
+loved your brother”—tears came into his eyes as he spoke—“but is it not a duty
+to the survivors that we should refrain from augmenting their unhappiness by an
+appearance of immoderate grief? It is also a duty owed to yourself, for
+excessive sorrow prevents improvement or enjoyment, or even the discharge of
+daily usefulness, without which no man is fit for society.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+This advice, although good, was totally inapplicable to my case; I should have
+been the first to hide my grief and console my friends if remorse had not
+mingled its bitterness, and terror its alarm, with my other sensations. Now I
+could only answer my father with a look of despair and endeavour to hide myself
+from his view.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+About this time we retired to our house at Belrive. This change was
+particularly agreeable to me. The shutting of the gates regularly at ten
+o’clock and the impossibility of remaining on the lake after that hour had
+rendered our residence within the walls of Geneva very irksome to me. I was now
+free. Often, after the rest of the family had retired for the night, I took the
+boat and passed many hours upon the water. Sometimes, with my sails set, I was
+carried by the wind; and sometimes, after rowing into the middle of the lake, I
+left the boat to pursue its own course and gave way to my own miserable
+reflections. I was often tempted, when all was at peace around me, and I the
+only unquiet thing that wandered restless in a scene so beautiful and
+heavenly—if I except some bat, or the frogs, whose harsh and interrupted
+croaking was heard only when I approached the shore—often, I say, I was tempted
+to plunge into the silent lake, that the waters might close over me and my
+calamities for ever. But I was restrained, when I thought of the heroic and
+suffering Elizabeth, whom I tenderly loved, and whose existence was bound up in
+mine. I thought also of my father and surviving brother; should I by my base
+desertion leave them exposed and unprotected to the malice of the fiend whom I
+had let loose among them?
+
+
+
+
+ 
+At these moments I wept bitterly and wished that peace would revisit my mind
+only that I might afford them consolation and happiness. But that could not be.
+Remorse extinguished every hope. I had been the author of unalterable evils,
+and I lived in daily fear lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate
+some new wickedness. I had an obscure feeling that all was not over and that he
+would still commit some signal crime, which by its enormity should almost
+efface the recollection of the past. There was always scope for fear so long as
+anything I loved remained behind. My abhorrence of this fiend cannot be
+conceived. When I thought of him I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed,
+and I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly
+bestowed. When I reflected on his crimes and malice, my hatred and revenge
+burst all bounds of moderation. I would have made a pilgrimage to the highest
+peak of the Andes, could I, when there, have precipitated him to their base. I
+wished to see him again, that I might wreak the utmost extent of abhorrence on
+his head and avenge the deaths of William and Justine.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Our house was the house of mourning. My father’s health was deeply shaken by
+the horror of the recent events. Elizabeth was sad and desponding; she no
+longer took delight in her ordinary occupations; all pleasure seemed to her
+sacrilege toward the dead; eternal woe and tears she then thought was the just
+tribute she should pay to innocence so blasted and destroyed. She was no longer
+that happy creature who in earlier youth wandered with me on the banks of the
+lake and talked with ecstasy of our future prospects. The first of those
+sorrows which are sent to wean us from the earth had visited her, and its
+dimming influence quenched her dearest smiles.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“When I reflect, my dear cousin,” said she, “on the miserable death of Justine
+Moritz, I no longer see the world and its works as they before appeared to me.
+Before, I looked upon the accounts of vice and injustice that I read in books
+or heard from others as tales of ancient days or imaginary evils; at least they
+were remote and more familiar to reason than to the imagination; but now misery
+has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s
+blood. Yet I am certainly unjust. Everybody believed that poor girl to be
+guilty; and if she could have committed the crime for which she suffered,
+assuredly she would have been the most depraved of human creatures. For the
+sake of a few jewels, to have murdered the son of her benefactor and friend, a
+child whom she had nursed from its birth, and appeared to love as if it had
+been her own! I could not consent to the death of any human being, but
+certainly I should have thought such a creature unfit to remain in the society
+of men. But she was innocent. I know, I feel she was innocent; you are of the
+same opinion, and that confirms me. Alas! Victor, when falsehood can look so
+like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness? I feel as if I
+were walking on the edge of a precipice, towards which thousands are crowding
+and endeavouring to plunge me into the abyss. William and Justine were
+assassinated, and the murderer escapes; he walks about the world free, and
+perhaps respected. But even if I were condemned to suffer on the scaffold for
+the same crimes, I would not change places with such a wretch.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I listened to this discourse with the extremest agony. I, not in deed, but in
+effect, was the true murderer. Elizabeth read my anguish in my countenance, and
+kindly taking my hand, said, “My dearest friend, you must calm yourself. These
+events have affected me, God knows how deeply; but I am not so wretched as you
+are. There is an expression of despair, and sometimes of revenge, in your
+countenance that makes me tremble. Dear Victor, banish these dark passions.
+Remember the friends around you, who centre all their hopes in you. Have we
+lost the power of rendering you happy? Ah! While we love, while we are true to
+each other, here in this land of peace and beauty, your native country, we may
+reap every tranquil blessing—what can disturb our peace?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+And could not such words from her whom I fondly prized before every other gift
+of fortune suffice to chase away the fiend that lurked in my heart? Even as she
+spoke I drew near to her, as if in terror, lest at that very moment the
+destroyer had been near to rob me of her.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Thus not the tenderness of friendship, nor the beauty of earth, nor of heaven,
+could redeem my soul from woe; the very accents of love were ineffectual. I was
+encompassed by a cloud which no beneficial influence could penetrate. The
+wounded deer dragging its fainting limbs to some untrodden brake, there to gaze
+upon the arrow which had pierced it, and to die, was but a type of me.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Sometimes I could cope with the sullen despair that overwhelmed me, but
+sometimes the whirlwind passions of my soul drove me to seek, by bodily
+exercise and by change of place, some relief from my intolerable sensations. It
+was during an access of this kind that I suddenly left my home, and bending my
+steps towards the near Alpine valleys, sought in the magnificence, the eternity
+of such scenes, to forget myself and my ephemeral, because human, sorrows. My
+wanderings were directed towards the valley of Chamounix. I had visited it
+frequently during my boyhood. Six years had passed since then: I was a
+wreck, but nought had changed in those savage and enduring scenes.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I performed the first part of my journey on horseback. I afterwards hired a
+mule, as the more sure-footed and least liable to receive injury on these
+rugged roads. The weather was fine; it was about the middle of the month of
+August, nearly two months after the death of Justine, that miserable epoch from
+which I dated all my woe. The weight upon my spirit was sensibly lightened as I
+plunged yet deeper in the ravine of Arve. The immense mountains and precipices
+that overhung me on every side, the sound of the river raging among the rocks,
+and the dashing of the waterfalls around spoke of a power mighty as
+Omnipotence—and I ceased to fear or to bend before any being less almighty than
+that which had created and ruled the elements, here displayed in their most
+terrific guise. Still, as I ascended higher, the valley assumed a more
+magnificent and astonishing character. Ruined castles hanging on the precipices
+of piny mountains, the impetuous Arve, and cottages every here and there
+peeping forth from among the trees formed a scene of singular beauty. But it
+was augmented and rendered sublime by the mighty Alps, whose white and shining
+pyramids and domes towered above all, as belonging to another earth, the
+habitations of another race of beings.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I passed the bridge of Pélissier, where the ravine, which the river forms,
+opened before me, and I began to ascend the mountain that overhangs it. Soon
+after, I entered the valley of Chamounix. This valley is more wonderful and
+sublime, but not so beautiful and picturesque as that of Servox, through which
+I had just passed. The high and snowy mountains were its immediate boundaries,
+but I saw no more ruined castles and fertile fields. Immense glaciers
+approached the road; I heard the rumbling thunder of the falling avalanche and
+marked the smoke of its passage. Mont Blanc, the supreme and magnificent Mont
+Blanc, raised itself from the surrounding aiguilles , and its tremendous
+ dôme overlooked the valley.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+A tingling long-lost sense of pleasure often came across me during this
+journey. Some turn in the road, some new object suddenly perceived and
+recognised, reminded me of days gone by, and were associated with the
+lighthearted gaiety of boyhood. The very winds whispered in soothing accents,
+and maternal Nature bade me weep no more. Then again the kindly influence
+ceased to act—I found myself fettered again to grief and indulging in all the
+misery of reflection. Then I spurred on my animal, striving so to forget the
+world, my fears, and more than all, myself—or, in a more desperate fashion, I
+alighted and threw myself on the grass, weighed down by horror and despair.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+At length I arrived at the village of Chamounix. Exhaustion succeeded to the
+extreme fatigue both of body and of mind which I had endured. For a short space
+of time I remained at the window watching the pallid lightnings that played
+above Mont Blanc and listening to the rushing of the Arve, which pursued its
+noisy way beneath. The same lulling sounds acted as a lullaby to my too keen
+sensations; when I placed my head upon my pillow, sleep crept over me; I felt
+it as it came and blessed the giver of oblivion.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 10 
+
+ 
+I spent the following day roaming through the valley. I stood beside the
+sources of the Arveiron, which take their rise in a glacier, that with slow
+pace is advancing down from the summit of the hills to barricade the valley.
+The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy wall of the glacier
+overhung me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn
+silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial Nature was broken only by
+the brawling waves or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the
+avalanche or the cracking, reverberated along the mountains, of the accumulated
+ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon
+rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands. These sublime
+and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable
+of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling, and although
+they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillised it. In some
+degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded
+for the last month. I retired to rest at night; my slumbers, as it were, waited
+on and ministered to by the assemblance of grand shapes which I had
+contemplated during the day. They congregated round me; the unstained snowy
+mountain-top, the glittering pinnacle, the pine woods, and ragged bare ravine,
+the eagle, soaring amidst the clouds—they all gathered round me and bade me be
+at peace.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Where had they fled when the next morning I awoke? All of soul-inspiriting fled
+with sleep, and dark melancholy clouded every thought. The rain was pouring in
+torrents, and thick mists hid the summits of the mountains, so that I even saw
+not the faces of those mighty friends. Still I would penetrate their misty veil
+and seek them in their cloudy retreats. What were rain and storm to me? My mule
+was brought to the door, and I resolved to ascend to the summit of Montanvert.
+I remembered the effect that the view of the tremendous and ever-moving glacier
+had produced upon my mind when I first saw it. It had then filled me with a
+sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul and allowed it to soar from the
+obscure world to light and joy. The sight of the awful and majestic in nature
+had indeed always the effect of solemnising my mind and causing me to forget
+the passing cares of life. I determined to go without a guide, for I was well
+acquainted with the path, and the presence of another would destroy the
+solitary grandeur of the scene.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The ascent is precipitous, but the path is cut into continual and short
+windings, which enable you to surmount the perpendicularity of the mountain. It
+is a scene terrifically desolate. In a thousand spots the traces of the winter
+avalanche may be perceived, where trees lie broken and strewed on the ground,
+some entirely destroyed, others bent, leaning upon the jutting rocks of the
+mountain or transversely upon other trees. The path, as you ascend higher, is
+intersected by ravines of snow, down which stones continually roll from above;
+one of them is particularly dangerous, as the slightest sound, such as even
+speaking in a loud voice, produces a concussion of air sufficient to draw
+destruction upon the head of the speaker. The pines are not tall or luxuriant,
+but they are sombre and add an air of severity to the scene. I looked on the
+valley beneath; vast mists were rising from the rivers which ran through it and
+curling in thick wreaths around the opposite mountains, whose summits were hid
+in the uniform clouds, while rain poured from the dark sky and added to the
+melancholy impression I received from the objects around me. Alas! Why does man
+boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders
+them more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst,
+and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that
+blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.
+
+    We rise; one wand’ring thought pollutes the day.
+
+We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,
+
+    Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;
+
+It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,
+
+    The path of its departure still is free.
+
+Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;
+
+    Nought may endure but mutability!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+It was nearly noon when I arrived at the top of the ascent. For some time I sat
+upon the rock that overlooks the sea of ice. A mist covered both that and the
+surrounding mountains. Presently a breeze dissipated the cloud, and I descended
+upon the glacier. The surface is very uneven, rising like the waves of a
+troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep. The
+field of ice is almost a league in width, but I spent nearly two hours in
+crossing it. The opposite mountain is a bare perpendicular rock. From the side
+where I now stood Montanvert was exactly opposite, at the distance of a league;
+and above it rose Mont Blanc, in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of the
+rock, gazing on this wonderful and stupendous scene. The sea, or rather the
+vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits
+hung over its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight
+over the clouds. My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with
+something like joy; I exclaimed, “Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and
+do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as
+your companion, away from the joys of life.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+As I said this I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance,
+advancing towards me with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the
+ice, among which I had walked with caution; his stature, also, as he
+approached, seemed to exceed that of man. I was troubled; a mist came over my
+eyes, and I felt a faintness seize me, but I was quickly restored by the cold
+gale of the mountains. I perceived, as the shape came nearer (sight tremendous
+and abhorred!) that it was the wretch whom I had created. I trembled with rage
+and horror, resolving to wait his approach and then close with him in mortal
+combat. He approached; his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with
+disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too
+horrible for human eyes. But I scarcely observed this; rage and hatred had at
+first deprived me of utterance, and I recovered only to overwhelm him with
+words expressive of furious detestation and contempt.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Devil,” I exclaimed, “do you dare approach me? And do not you fear the fierce
+vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone, vile insect! Or
+rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust! And, oh! That I could, with the
+extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims whom you have so
+diabolically murdered!”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I expected this reception,” said the dæmon. “All men hate the wretched; how,
+then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my
+creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only
+dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare
+you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards
+you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will
+leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death,
+until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Abhorred monster! Fiend that thou art! The tortures of hell are too mild a
+vengeance for thy crimes. Wretched devil! You reproach me with your creation,
+come on, then, that I may extinguish the spark which I so negligently
+bestowed.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My rage was without bounds; I sprang on him, impelled by all the feelings which
+can arm one being against the existence of another.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+He easily eluded me and said,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Be calm! I entreat you to hear me before you give vent to your hatred on my
+devoted head. Have I not suffered enough, that you seek to increase my misery?
+Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I
+will defend it. Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my
+height is superior to thine, my joints more supple. But I will not be tempted
+to set myself in opposition to thee. I am thy creature, and I will be even mild
+and docile to my natural lord and king if thou wilt also perform thy part, the
+which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other and
+trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and
+affection, is most due. Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy
+Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no
+misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I
+was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall
+again be virtuous.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Begone! I will not hear you. There can be no community between you and me; we
+are enemies. Begone, or let us try our strength in a fight, in which one must
+fall.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“How can I move thee? Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye
+upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion? Believe me,
+Frankenstein, I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity; but am I
+not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather
+from your fellow creatures, who owe me nothing? They spurn and hate me. The
+desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. I have wandered here many
+days; the caves of ice, which I only do not fear, are a dwelling to me, and the
+only one which man does not grudge. These bleak skies I hail, for they are
+kinder to me than your fellow beings. If the multitude of mankind knew of my
+existence, they would do as you do, and arm themselves for my destruction.
+Shall I not then hate them who abhor me? I will keep no terms with my enemies.
+I am miserable, and they shall share my wretchedness. Yet it is in your power
+to recompense me, and deliver them from an evil which it only remains for you
+to make so great, that not only you and your family, but thousands of others,
+shall be swallowed up in the whirlwinds of its rage. Let your compassion be
+moved, and do not disdain me. Listen to my tale; when you have heard that,
+abandon or commiserate me, as you shall judge that I deserve. But hear me. The
+guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own
+defence before they are condemned. Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of
+murder, and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own
+creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man! Yet I ask you not to spare me;
+listen to me, and then, if you can, and if you will, destroy the work of your
+hands.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why do you call to my remembrance,” I rejoined, “circumstances of which I
+shudder to reflect, that I have been the miserable origin and author? Cursed be
+the day, abhorred devil, in which you first saw light! Cursed (although I curse
+myself) be the hands that formed you! You have made me wretched beyond
+expression. You have left me no power to consider whether I am just to you or
+not. Begone! Relieve me from the sight of your detested form.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thus I relieve thee, my creator,” he said, and placed his hated hands before
+my eyes, which I flung from me with violence; “thus I take from thee a sight
+which you abhor. Still thou canst listen to me and grant me thy compassion. By
+the virtues that I once possessed, I demand this from you. Hear my tale; it is
+long and strange, and the temperature of this place is not fitting to your fine
+sensations; come to the hut upon the mountain. The sun is yet high in the
+heavens; before it descends to hide itself behind your snowy precipices and
+illuminate another world, you will have heard my story and can decide. On you
+it rests, whether I quit for ever the neighbourhood of man and lead a harmless
+life, or become the scourge of your fellow creatures and the author of your own
+speedy ruin.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+As he said this he led the way across the ice; I followed. My heart was full,
+and I did not answer him, but as I proceeded, I weighed the various arguments
+that he had used and determined at least to listen to his tale. I was partly
+urged by curiosity, and compassion confirmed my resolution. I had hitherto
+supposed him to be the murderer of my brother, and I eagerly sought a
+confirmation or denial of this opinion. For the first time, also, I felt what
+the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I ought to render
+him happy before I complained of his wickedness. These motives urged me to
+comply with his demand. We crossed the ice, therefore, and ascended the
+opposite rock. The air was cold, and the rain again began to descend; we
+entered the hut, the fiend with an air of exultation, I with a heavy heart and
+depressed spirits. But I consented to listen, and seating myself by the fire
+which my odious companion had lighted, he thus began his tale.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 11 
+
+ 
+“It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my
+being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange
+multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt at the
+same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish
+between the operations of my various senses. By degrees, I remember, a stronger
+light pressed upon my nerves, so that I was obliged to shut my eyes. Darkness
+then came over me and troubled me, but hardly had I felt this when, by opening
+my eyes, as I now suppose, the light poured in upon me again. I walked and, I
+believe, descended, but I presently found a great alteration in my sensations.
+Before, dark and opaque bodies had surrounded me, impervious to my touch or
+sight; but I now found that I could wander on at liberty, with no obstacles
+which I could not either surmount or avoid. The light became more and more
+oppressive to me, and the heat wearying me as I walked, I sought a place where
+I could receive shade. This was the forest near Ingolstadt; and here I lay by
+the side of a brook resting from my fatigue, until I felt tormented by hunger
+and thirst. This roused me from my nearly dormant state, and I ate some berries
+which I found hanging on the trees or lying on the ground. I slaked my thirst
+at the brook, and then lying down, was overcome by sleep.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was dark when I awoke; I felt cold also, and half frightened, as it were,
+instinctively, finding myself so desolate. Before I had quitted your apartment,
+on a sensation of cold, I had covered myself with some clothes, but these were
+insufficient to secure me from the dews of night. I was a poor, helpless,
+miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing; but feeling pain
+invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Soon a gentle light stole over the heavens and gave me a sensation of
+pleasure. I started up and beheld a radiant form rise from among the trees.
+[The moon] I gazed with a kind of wonder. It moved slowly, but it enlightened
+my path, and I again went out in search of berries. I was still cold when under
+one of the trees I found a huge cloak, with which I covered myself, and sat
+down upon the ground. No distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused. I
+felt light, and hunger, and thirst, and darkness; innumerable sounds rang in my
+ears, and on all sides various scents saluted me; the only object that I could
+distinguish was the bright moon, and I fixed my eyes on that with pleasure.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Several changes of day and night passed, and the orb of night had greatly
+lessened, when I began to distinguish my sensations from each other. I
+gradually saw plainly the clear stream that supplied me with drink and the
+trees that shaded me with their foliage. I was delighted when I first
+discovered that a pleasant sound, which often saluted my ears, proceeded from
+the throats of the little winged animals who had often intercepted the light
+from my eyes. I began also to observe, with greater accuracy, the forms that
+surrounded me and to perceive the boundaries of the radiant roof of light which
+canopied me. Sometimes I tried to imitate the pleasant songs of the birds but
+was unable. Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the
+uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence
+again.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The moon had disappeared from the night, and again, with a lessened form,
+showed itself, while I still remained in the forest. My sensations had by this
+time become distinct, and my mind received every day additional ideas. My eyes
+became accustomed to the light and to perceive objects in their right forms; I
+distinguished the insect from the herb, and by degrees, one herb from another.
+I found that the sparrow uttered none but harsh notes, whilst those of the
+blackbird and thrush were sweet and enticing.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“One day, when I was oppressed by cold, I found a fire which had been left by
+some wandering beggars, and was overcome with delight at the warmth I
+experienced from it. In my joy I thrust my hand into the live embers, but
+quickly drew it out again with a cry of pain. How strange, I thought, that the
+same cause should produce such opposite effects! I examined the materials of
+the fire, and to my joy found it to be composed of wood. I quickly collected
+some branches, but they were wet and would not burn. I was pained at this and
+sat still watching the operation of the fire. The wet wood which I had placed
+near the heat dried and itself became inflamed. I reflected on this, and by
+touching the various branches, I discovered the cause and busied myself in
+collecting a great quantity of wood, that I might dry it and have a plentiful
+supply of fire. When night came on and brought sleep with it, I was in the
+greatest fear lest my fire should be extinguished. I covered it carefully with
+dry wood and leaves and placed wet branches upon it; and then, spreading my
+cloak, I lay on the ground and sank into sleep.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was morning when I awoke, and my first care was to visit the fire. I
+uncovered it, and a gentle breeze quickly fanned it into a flame. I observed
+this also and contrived a fan of branches, which roused the embers when they
+were nearly extinguished. When night came again I found, with pleasure, that
+the fire gave light as well as heat and that the discovery of this element was
+useful to me in my food, for I found some of the offals that the travellers had
+left had been roasted, and tasted much more savoury than the berries I gathered
+from the trees. I tried, therefore, to dress my food in the same manner,
+placing it on the live embers. I found that the berries were spoiled by this
+operation, and the nuts and roots much improved.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Food, however, became scarce, and I often spent the whole day searching in
+vain for a few acorns to assuage the pangs of hunger. When I found this, I
+resolved to quit the place that I had hitherto inhabited, to seek for one where
+the few wants I experienced would be more easily satisfied. In this emigration
+I exceedingly lamented the loss of the fire which I had obtained through
+accident and knew not how to reproduce it. I gave several hours to the serious
+consideration of this difficulty, but I was obliged to relinquish all attempt
+to supply it, and wrapping myself up in my cloak, I struck across the wood
+towards the setting sun. I passed three days in these rambles and at length
+discovered the open country. A great fall of snow had taken place the night
+before, and the fields were of one uniform white; the appearance was
+disconsolate, and I found my feet chilled by the cold damp substance that
+covered the ground.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was about seven in the morning, and I longed to obtain food and shelter; at
+length I perceived a small hut, on a rising ground, which had doubtless been
+built for the convenience of some shepherd. This was a new sight to me, and I
+examined the structure with great curiosity. Finding the door open, I entered.
+An old man sat in it, near a fire, over which he was preparing his breakfast.
+He turned on hearing a noise, and perceiving me, shrieked loudly, and quitting
+the hut, ran across the fields with a speed of which his debilitated form
+hardly appeared capable. His appearance, different from any I had ever before
+seen, and his flight somewhat surprised me. But I was enchanted by the
+appearance of the hut; here the snow and rain could not penetrate; the ground
+was dry; and it presented to me then as exquisite and divine a retreat as
+Pandæmonium appeared to the dæmons of hell after their sufferings in the lake
+of fire. I greedily devoured the remnants of the shepherd’s breakfast, which
+consisted of bread, cheese, milk, and wine; the latter, however, I did not
+like. Then, overcome by fatigue, I lay down among some straw and fell asleep.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was noon when I awoke, and allured by the warmth of the sun, which shone
+brightly on the white ground, I determined to recommence my travels; and,
+depositing the remains of the peasant’s breakfast in a wallet I found, I
+proceeded across the fields for several hours, until at sunset I arrived at a
+village. How miraculous did this appear! The huts, the neater cottages, and
+stately houses engaged my admiration by turns. The vegetables in the gardens,
+the milk and cheese that I saw placed at the windows of some of the cottages,
+allured my appetite. One of the best of these I entered, but I had hardly
+placed my foot within the door before the children shrieked, and one of the
+women fainted. The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me,
+until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons, I
+escaped to the open country and fearfully took refuge in a low hovel, quite
+bare, and making a wretched appearance after the palaces I had beheld in the
+village. This hovel however, joined a cottage of a neat and pleasant
+appearance, but after my late dearly bought experience, I dared not enter it.
+My place of refuge was constructed of wood, but so low that I could with
+difficulty sit upright in it. No wood, however, was placed on the earth, which
+formed the floor, but it was dry; and although the wind entered it by
+innumerable chinks, I found it an agreeable asylum from the snow and rain.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Here, then, I retreated and lay down happy to have found a shelter, however
+miserable, from the inclemency of the season, and still more from the barbarity
+of man. As soon as morning dawned I crept from my kennel, that I might view the
+adjacent cottage and discover if I could remain in the habitation I had found.
+It was situated against the back of the cottage and surrounded on the sides
+which were exposed by a pig sty and a clear pool of water. One part was open,
+and by that I had crept in; but now I covered every crevice by which I might be
+perceived with stones and wood, yet in such a manner that I might move them on
+occasion to pass out; all the light I enjoyed came through the sty, and that
+was sufficient for me.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Having thus arranged my dwelling and carpeted it with clean straw, I retired,
+for I saw the figure of a man at a distance, and I remembered too well my
+treatment the night before to trust myself in his power. I had first, however,
+provided for my sustenance for that day by a loaf of coarse bread, which I
+purloined, and a cup with which I could drink more conveniently than from my
+hand of the pure water which flowed by my retreat. The floor was a little
+raised, so that it was kept perfectly dry, and by its vicinity to the chimney
+of the cottage it was tolerably warm.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Being thus provided, I resolved to reside in this hovel until something should
+occur which might alter my determination. It was indeed a paradise compared to
+the bleak forest, my former residence, the rain-dropping branches, and dank
+earth. I ate my breakfast with pleasure and was about to remove a plank to
+procure myself a little water when I heard a step, and looking through a small
+chink, I beheld a young creature, with a pail on her head, passing before my
+hovel. The girl was young and of gentle demeanour, unlike what I have since
+found cottagers and farmhouse servants to be. Yet she was meanly dressed, a
+coarse blue petticoat and a linen jacket being her only garb; her fair hair was
+plaited but not adorned: she looked patient yet sad. I lost sight of her, and
+in about a quarter of an hour she returned bearing the pail, which was now
+partly filled with milk. As she walked along, seemingly incommoded by the
+burden, a young man met her, whose countenance expressed a deeper despondence.
+Uttering a few sounds with an air of melancholy, he took the pail from her head
+and bore it to the cottage himself. She followed, and they disappeared.
+Presently I saw the young man again, with some tools in his hand, cross the
+field behind the cottage; and the girl was also busied, sometimes in the house
+and sometimes in the yard.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“On examining my dwelling, I found that one of the windows of the cottage had
+formerly occupied a part of it, but the panes had been filled up with wood. In
+one of these was a small and almost imperceptible chink through which the eye
+could just penetrate. Through this crevice a small room was visible,
+whitewashed and clean but very bare of furniture. In one corner, near a small
+fire, sat an old man, leaning his head on his hands in a disconsolate attitude.
+The young girl was occupied in arranging the cottage; but presently she took
+something out of a drawer, which employed her hands, and she sat down beside
+the old man, who, taking up an instrument, began to play and to produce sounds
+sweeter than the voice of the thrush or the nightingale. It was a lovely sight,
+even to me, poor wretch who had never beheld aught beautiful before. The silver
+hair and benevolent countenance of the aged cottager won my reverence, while
+the gentle manners of the girl enticed my love. He played a sweet mournful air
+which I perceived drew tears from the eyes of his amiable companion, of which
+the old man took no notice, until she sobbed audibly; he then pronounced a few
+sounds, and the fair creature, leaving her work, knelt at his feet. He raised
+her and smiled with such kindness and affection that I felt sensations of a
+peculiar and overpowering nature; they were a mixture of pain and pleasure,
+such as I had never before experienced, either from hunger or cold, warmth or
+food; and I withdrew from the window, unable to bear these emotions.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Soon after this the young man returned, bearing on his shoulders a load of
+wood. The girl met him at the door, helped to relieve him of his burden, and
+taking some of the fuel into the cottage, placed it on the fire; then she and
+the youth went apart into a nook of the cottage, and he showed her a large loaf
+and a piece of cheese. She seemed pleased and went into the garden for some
+roots and plants, which she placed in water, and then upon the fire. She
+afterwards continued her work, whilst the young man went into the garden and
+appeared busily employed in digging and pulling up roots. After he had been
+employed thus about an hour, the young woman joined him and they entered the
+cottage together.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The old man had, in the meantime, been pensive, but on the appearance of his
+companions he assumed a more cheerful air, and they sat down to eat. The meal
+was quickly dispatched. The young woman was again occupied in arranging the
+cottage, the old man walked before the cottage in the sun for a few minutes,
+leaning on the arm of the youth. Nothing could exceed in beauty the contrast
+between these two excellent creatures. One was old, with silver hairs and a
+countenance beaming with benevolence and love; the younger was slight and
+graceful in his figure, and his features were moulded with the finest symmetry,
+yet his eyes and attitude expressed the utmost sadness and despondency. The old
+man returned to the cottage, and the youth, with tools different from those he
+had used in the morning, directed his steps across the fields.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Night quickly shut in, but to my extreme wonder, I found that the cottagers
+had a means of prolonging light by the use of tapers, and was delighted to find
+that the setting of the sun did not put an end to the pleasure I experienced in
+watching my human neighbours. In the evening the young girl and her companion
+were employed in various occupations which I did not understand; and the old
+man again took up the instrument which produced the divine sounds that had
+enchanted me in the morning. So soon as he had finished, the youth began, not
+to play, but to utter sounds that were monotonous, and neither resembling the
+harmony of the old man’s instrument nor the songs of the birds; I since found
+that he read aloud, but at that time I knew nothing of the science of words or
+letters.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The family, after having been thus occupied for a short time, extinguished
+their lights and retired, as I conjectured, to rest.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 12 
+
+ 
+“I lay on my straw, but I could not sleep. I thought of the occurrences of the
+day. What chiefly struck me was the gentle manners of these people, and I
+longed to join them, but dared not. I remembered too well the treatment I had
+suffered the night before from the barbarous villagers, and resolved, whatever
+course of conduct I might hereafter think it right to pursue, that for the
+present I would remain quietly in my hovel, watching and endeavouring to
+discover the motives which influenced their actions.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The cottagers arose the next morning before the sun. The young woman arranged
+the cottage and prepared the food, and the youth departed after the first meal.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“This day was passed in the same routine as that which preceded it. The young
+man was constantly employed out of doors, and the girl in various laborious
+occupations within. The old man, whom I soon perceived to be blind, employed
+his leisure hours on his instrument or in contemplation. Nothing could exceed
+the love and respect which the younger cottagers exhibited towards their
+venerable companion. They performed towards him every little office of
+affection and duty with gentleness, and he rewarded them by his benevolent
+smiles.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“They were not entirely happy. The young man and his companion often went apart
+and appeared to weep. I saw no cause for their unhappiness, but I was deeply
+affected by it. If such lovely creatures were miserable, it was less strange
+that I, an imperfect and solitary being, should be wretched. Yet why were these
+gentle beings unhappy? They possessed a delightful house (for such it was in my
+eyes) and every luxury; they had a fire to warm them when chill and delicious
+viands when hungry; they were dressed in excellent clothes; and, still more,
+they enjoyed one another’s company and speech, interchanging each day looks of
+affection and kindness. What did their tears imply? Did they really express
+pain? I was at first unable to solve these questions, but perpetual attention
+and time explained to me many appearances which were at first enigmatic.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“A considerable period elapsed before I discovered one of the causes of the
+uneasiness of this amiable family: it was poverty, and they suffered that evil
+in a very distressing degree. Their nourishment consisted entirely of the
+vegetables of their garden and the milk of one cow, which gave very little
+during the winter, when its masters could scarcely procure food to support it.
+They often, I believe, suffered the pangs of hunger very poignantly, especially
+the two younger cottagers, for several times they placed food before the old
+man when they reserved none for themselves.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“This trait of kindness moved me sensibly. I had been accustomed, during the
+night, to steal a part of their store for my own consumption, but when I found
+that in doing this I inflicted pain on the cottagers, I abstained and satisfied
+myself with berries, nuts, and roots which I gathered from a neighbouring wood.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I discovered also another means through which I was enabled to assist their
+labours. I found that the youth spent a great part of each day in collecting
+wood for the family fire, and during the night I often took his tools, the use
+of which I quickly discovered, and brought home firing sufficient for the
+consumption of several days.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I remember, the first time that I did this, the young woman, when she opened
+the door in the morning, appeared greatly astonished on seeing a great pile of
+wood on the outside. She uttered some words in a loud voice, and the youth
+joined her, who also expressed surprise. I observed, with pleasure, that he did
+not go to the forest that day, but spent it in repairing the cottage and
+cultivating the garden.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“By degrees I made a discovery of still greater moment. I found that these
+people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one
+another by articulate sounds. I perceived that the words they spoke sometimes
+produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of
+the hearers. This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to
+become acquainted with it. But I was baffled in every attempt I made for this
+purpose. Their pronunciation was quick, and the words they uttered, not having
+any apparent connection with visible objects, I was unable to discover any clue
+by which I could unravel the mystery of their reference. By great application,
+however, and after having remained during the space of several revolutions of
+the moon in my hovel, I discovered the names that were given to some of the
+most familiar objects of discourse; I learned and applied the words, fire,
+milk, bread, and wood. I learned also the names of the cottagers
+themselves. The youth and his companion had each of them several names, but the
+old man had only one, which was father. The girl was called
+ sister or Agatha, and the youth Felix, brother, or
+ son . I cannot describe the delight I felt when I learned the ideas
+appropriated to each of these sounds and was able to pronounce them. I
+distinguished several other words without being able as yet to understand or
+apply them, such as good, dearest, unhappy. 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I spent the winter in this manner. The gentle manners and beauty of the
+cottagers greatly endeared them to me; when they were unhappy, I felt
+depressed; when they rejoiced, I sympathised in their joys. I saw few human
+beings besides them, and if any other happened to enter the cottage, their
+harsh manners and rude gait only enhanced to me the superior accomplishments of
+my friends. The old man, I could perceive, often endeavoured to encourage his
+children, as sometimes I found that he called them, to cast off their
+melancholy. He would talk in a cheerful accent, with an expression of goodness
+that bestowed pleasure even upon me. Agatha listened with respect, her eyes
+sometimes filled with tears, which she endeavoured to wipe away unperceived;
+but I generally found that her countenance and tone were more cheerful after
+having listened to the exhortations of her father. It was not thus with Felix.
+He was always the saddest of the group, and even to my unpractised senses, he
+appeared to have suffered more deeply than his friends. But if his countenance
+was more sorrowful, his voice was more cheerful than that of his sister,
+especially when he addressed the old man.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I could mention innumerable instances which, although slight, marked the
+dispositions of these amiable cottagers. In the midst of poverty and want,
+Felix carried with pleasure to his sister the first little white flower that
+peeped out from beneath the snowy ground. Early in the morning, before she had
+risen, he cleared away the snow that obstructed her path to the milk-house,
+drew water from the well, and brought the wood from the outhouse, where, to his
+perpetual astonishment, he found his store always replenished by an invisible
+hand. In the day, I believe, he worked sometimes for a neighbouring farmer,
+because he often went forth and did not return until dinner, yet brought no
+wood with him. At other times he worked in the garden, but as there was little
+to do in the frosty season, he read to the old man and Agatha.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“This reading had puzzled me extremely at first, but by degrees I discovered
+that he uttered many of the same sounds when he read as when he talked. I
+conjectured, therefore, that he found on the paper signs for speech which he
+understood, and I ardently longed to comprehend these also; but how was that
+possible when I did not even understand the sounds for which they stood as
+signs? I improved, however, sensibly in this science, but not sufficiently to
+follow up any kind of conversation, although I applied my whole mind to the
+endeavour, for I easily perceived that, although I eagerly longed to discover
+myself to the cottagers, I ought not to make the attempt until I had first
+become master of their language, which knowledge might enable me to make them
+overlook the deformity of my figure, for with this also the contrast
+perpetually presented to my eyes had made me acquainted.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers—their grace, beauty, and
+delicate complexions; but how was I terrified when I viewed myself in a
+transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed
+I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was
+in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of
+despondence and mortification. Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal
+effects of this miserable deformity.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“As the sun became warmer and the light of day longer, the snow vanished, and I
+beheld the bare trees and the black earth. From this time Felix was more
+employed, and the heart-moving indications of impending famine disappeared.
+Their food, as I afterwards found, was coarse, but it was wholesome; and they
+procured a sufficiency of it. Several new kinds of plants sprang up in the
+garden, which they dressed; and these signs of comfort increased daily as the
+season advanced.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The old man, leaning on his son, walked each day at noon, when it did not
+rain, as I found it was called when the heavens poured forth its waters. This
+frequently took place, but a high wind quickly dried the earth, and the season
+became far more pleasant than it had been.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“My mode of life in my hovel was uniform. During the morning I attended the
+motions of the cottagers, and when they were dispersed in various occupations,
+I slept; the remainder of the day was spent in observing my friends. When they
+had retired to rest, if there was any moon or the night was star-light, I went
+into the woods and collected my own food and fuel for the cottage. When I
+returned, as often as it was necessary, I cleared their path from the snow and
+performed those offices that I had seen done by Felix. I afterwards found that
+these labours, performed by an invisible hand, greatly astonished them; and
+once or twice I heard them, on these occasions, utter the words good spirit,
+wonderful ; but I did not then understand the signification of these terms.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“My thoughts now became more active, and I longed to discover the motives and
+feelings of these lovely creatures; I was inquisitive to know why Felix
+appeared so miserable and Agatha so sad. I thought (foolish wretch!) that it
+might be in my power to restore happiness to these deserving people. When I
+slept or was absent, the forms of the venerable blind father, the gentle
+Agatha, and the excellent Felix flitted before me. I looked upon them as
+superior beings who would be the arbiters of my future destiny. I formed in my
+imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their
+reception of me. I imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle
+demeanour and conciliating words, I should first win their favour and
+afterwards their love.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“These thoughts exhilarated me and led me to apply with fresh ardour to the
+acquiring the art of language. My organs were indeed harsh, but supple; and
+although my voice was very unlike the soft music of their tones, yet I
+pronounced such words as I understood with tolerable ease. It was as the ass
+and the lap-dog; yet surely the gentle ass whose intentions were affectionate,
+although his manners were rude, deserved better treatment than blows and
+execration.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The pleasant showers and genial warmth of spring greatly altered the aspect of
+the earth. Men who before this change seemed to have been hid in caves
+dispersed themselves and were employed in various arts of cultivation. The
+birds sang in more cheerful notes, and the leaves began to bud forth on the
+trees. Happy, happy earth! Fit habitation for gods, which, so short a time
+before, was bleak, damp, and unwholesome. My spirits were elevated by the
+enchanting appearance of nature; the past was blotted from my memory, the
+present was tranquil, and the future gilded by bright rays of hope and
+anticipations of joy.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 13 
+
+ 
+“I now hasten to the more moving part of my story. I shall relate events that
+impressed me with feelings which, from what I had been, have made me what I am.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Spring advanced rapidly; the weather became fine and the skies cloudless. It
+surprised me that what before was desert and gloomy should now bloom with the
+most beautiful flowers and verdure. My senses were gratified and refreshed by a
+thousand scents of delight and a thousand sights of beauty.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was on one of these days, when my cottagers periodically rested from
+labour—the old man played on his guitar, and the children listened to him—that
+I observed the countenance of Felix was melancholy beyond expression; he sighed
+frequently, and once his father paused in his music, and I conjectured by his
+manner that he inquired the cause of his son’s sorrow. Felix replied in a
+cheerful accent, and the old man was recommencing his music when someone tapped
+at the door.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was a lady on horseback, accompanied by a country-man as a guide. The lady
+was dressed in a dark suit and covered with a thick black veil. Agatha asked a
+question, to which the stranger only replied by pronouncing, in a sweet accent,
+the name of Felix. Her voice was musical but unlike that of either of my
+friends. On hearing this word, Felix came up hastily to the lady, who, when she
+saw him, threw up her veil, and I beheld a countenance of angelic beauty and
+expression. Her hair of a shining raven black, and curiously braided; her eyes
+were dark, but gentle, although animated; her features of a regular proportion,
+and her complexion wondrously fair, each cheek tinged with a lovely pink.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Felix seemed ravished with delight when he saw her, every trait of sorrow
+vanished from his face, and it instantly expressed a degree of ecstatic joy, of
+which I could hardly have believed it capable; his eyes sparkled, as his cheek
+flushed with pleasure; and at that moment I thought him as beautiful as the
+stranger. She appeared affected by different feelings; wiping a few tears from
+her lovely eyes, she held out her hand to Felix, who kissed it rapturously and
+called her, as well as I could distinguish, his sweet Arabian. She did not
+appear to understand him, but smiled. He assisted her to dismount, and
+dismissing her guide, conducted her into the cottage. Some conversation took
+place between him and his father, and the young stranger knelt at the old man’s
+feet and would have kissed his hand, but he raised her and embraced her
+affectionately.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I soon perceived that although the stranger uttered articulate sounds and
+appeared to have a language of her own, she was neither understood by nor
+herself understood the cottagers. They made many signs which I did not
+comprehend, but I saw that her presence diffused gladness through the cottage,
+dispelling their sorrow as the sun dissipates the morning mists. Felix seemed
+peculiarly happy and with smiles of delight welcomed his Arabian. Agatha, the
+ever-gentle Agatha, kissed the hands of the lovely stranger, and pointing to
+her brother, made signs which appeared to me to mean that he had been sorrowful
+until she came. Some hours passed thus, while they, by their countenances,
+expressed joy, the cause of which I did not comprehend. Presently I found, by
+the frequent recurrence of some sound which the stranger repeated after them,
+that she was endeavouring to learn their language; and the idea instantly
+occurred to me that I should make use of the same instructions to the same end.
+The stranger learned about twenty words at the first lesson; most of them,
+indeed, were those which I had before understood, but I profited by the others.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“As night came on, Agatha and the Arabian retired early. When they separated
+Felix kissed the hand of the stranger and said, ‘Good night sweet Safie.’ He
+sat up much longer, conversing with his father, and by the frequent repetition
+of her name I conjectured that their lovely guest was the subject of their
+conversation. I ardently desired to understand them, and bent every faculty
+towards that purpose, but found it utterly impossible.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The next morning Felix went out to his work, and after the usual occupations
+of Agatha were finished, the Arabian sat at the feet of the old man, and taking
+his guitar, played some airs so entrancingly beautiful that they at once drew
+tears of sorrow and delight from my eyes. She sang, and her voice flowed in a
+rich cadence, swelling or dying away like a nightingale of the woods.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“When she had finished, she gave the guitar to Agatha, who at first declined
+it. She played a simple air, and her voice accompanied it in sweet accents, but
+unlike the wondrous strain of the stranger. The old man appeared enraptured and
+said some words which Agatha endeavoured to explain to Safie, and by which he
+appeared to wish to express that she bestowed on him the greatest delight by
+her music.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The days now passed as peaceably as before, with the sole alteration that joy
+had taken place of sadness in the countenances of my friends. Safie was always
+gay and happy; she and I improved rapidly in the knowledge of language, so that
+in two months I began to comprehend most of the words uttered by my protectors.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“In the meanwhile also the black ground was covered with herbage, and the green
+banks interspersed with innumerable flowers, sweet to the scent and the eyes,
+stars of pale radiance among the moonlight woods; the sun became warmer, the
+nights clear and balmy; and my nocturnal rambles were an extreme pleasure to
+me, although they were considerably shortened by the late setting and early
+rising of the sun, for I never ventured abroad during daylight, fearful of
+meeting with the same treatment I had formerly endured in the first village
+which I entered.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“My days were spent in close attention, that I might more speedily master the
+language; and I may boast that I improved more rapidly than the Arabian, who
+understood very little and conversed in broken accents, whilst I comprehended
+and could imitate almost every word that was spoken.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“While I improved in speech, I also learned the science of letters as it was
+taught to the stranger, and this opened before me a wide field for wonder and
+delight.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The book from which Felix instructed Safie was Volney’s Ruins of
+Empires . I should not have understood the purport of this book had not
+Felix, in reading it, given very minute explanations. He had chosen this work,
+he said, because the declamatory style was framed in imitation of the Eastern
+authors. Through this work I obtained a cursory knowledge of history and a view
+of the several empires at present existing in the world; it gave me an insight
+into the manners, governments, and religions of the different nations of the
+earth. I heard of the slothful Asiatics, of the stupendous genius and mental
+activity of the Grecians, of the wars and wonderful virtue of the early
+Romans—of their subsequent degenerating—of the decline of that mighty empire,
+of chivalry, Christianity, and kings. I heard of the discovery of the American
+hemisphere and wept with Safie over the hapless fate of its original
+inhabitants.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed,
+at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He
+appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all
+that can be conceived of noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man
+appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and
+vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a
+condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long
+time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or
+even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and
+bloodshed, my wonder ceased and I turned away with disgust and loathing.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Every conversation of the cottagers now opened new wonders to me. While I
+listened to the instructions which Felix bestowed upon the Arabian, the strange
+system of human society was explained to me. I heard of the division of
+property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty, of rank, descent, and noble
+blood.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The words induced me to turn towards myself. I learned that the possessions
+most esteemed by your fellow creatures were high and unsullied descent united
+with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these advantages, but
+without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond
+and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few! And
+what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew
+that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides,
+endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the
+same nature as man. I was more agile than they and could subsist upon coarser
+diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my
+stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around I saw and heard of none like
+me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and
+whom all men disowned?
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I
+tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had
+for ever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations
+of hunger, thirst, and heat!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once
+seized on it like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all
+thought and feeling, but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the
+sensation of pain, and that was death—a state which I feared yet did not
+understand. I admired virtue and good feelings and loved the gentle manners and
+amiable qualities of my cottagers, but I was shut out from intercourse with
+them, except through means which I obtained by stealth, when I was unseen and
+unknown, and which rather increased than satisfied the desire I had of becoming
+one among my fellows. The gentle words of Agatha and the animated smiles of the
+charming Arabian were not for me. The mild exhortations of the old man and the
+lively conversation of the loved Felix were not for me. Miserable, unhappy
+wretch!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Other lessons were impressed upon me even more deeply. I heard of the
+difference of sexes, and the birth and growth of children, how the father doted
+on the smiles of the infant, and the lively sallies of the older child, how all
+the life and cares of the mother were wrapped up in the precious charge, how
+the mind of youth expanded and gained knowledge, of brother, sister, and all
+the various relationships which bind one human being to another in mutual
+bonds.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days,
+no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past
+life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my
+earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had
+never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me.
+What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I will soon explain to what these feelings tended, but allow me now to return
+to the cottagers, whose story excited in me such various feelings of
+indignation, delight, and wonder, but which all terminated in additional love
+and reverence for my protectors (for so I loved, in an innocent, half-painful
+self-deceit, to call them).”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 14 
+
+ 
+“Some time elapsed before I learned the history of my friends. It was one which
+could not fail to impress itself deeply on my mind, unfolding as it did a
+number of circumstances, each interesting and wonderful to one so utterly
+inexperienced as I was.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The name of the old man was De Lacey. He was descended from a good family in
+France, where he had lived for many years in affluence, respected by his
+superiors and beloved by his equals. His son was bred in the service of his
+country, and Agatha had ranked with ladies of the highest distinction. A few
+months before my arrival they had lived in a large and luxurious city called
+Paris, surrounded by friends and possessed of every enjoyment which virtue,
+refinement of intellect, or taste, accompanied by a moderate fortune, could
+afford.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The father of Safie had been the cause of their ruin. He was a Turkish
+merchant and had inhabited Paris for many years, when, for some reason which I
+could not learn, he became obnoxious to the government. He was seized and cast
+into prison the very day that Safie arrived from Constantinople to join him. He
+was tried and condemned to death. The injustice of his sentence was very
+flagrant; all Paris was indignant; and it was judged that his religion and
+wealth rather than the crime alleged against him had been the cause of his
+condemnation.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Felix had accidentally been present at the trial; his horror and indignation
+were uncontrollable when he heard the decision of the court. He made, at that
+moment, a solemn vow to deliver him and then looked around for the means. After
+many fruitless attempts to gain admittance to the prison, he found a strongly
+grated window in an unguarded part of the building, which lighted the dungeon
+of the unfortunate Muhammadan, who, loaded with chains, waited in despair the
+execution of the barbarous sentence. Felix visited the grate at night and made
+known to the prisoner his intentions in his favour. The Turk, amazed and
+delighted, endeavoured to kindle the zeal of his deliverer by promises of
+reward and wealth. Felix rejected his offers with contempt, yet when he saw the
+lovely Safie, who was allowed to visit her father and who by her gestures
+expressed her lively gratitude, the youth could not help owning to his own mind
+that the captive possessed a treasure which would fully reward his toil and
+hazard.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The Turk quickly perceived the impression that his daughter had made on the
+heart of Felix and endeavoured to secure him more entirely in his interests by
+the promise of her hand in marriage so soon as he should be conveyed to a place
+of safety. Felix was too delicate to accept this offer, yet he looked forward
+to the probability of the event as to the consummation of his happiness.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“During the ensuing days, while the preparations were going forward for the
+escape of the merchant, the zeal of Felix was warmed by several letters that he
+received from this lovely girl, who found means to express her thoughts in the
+language of her lover by the aid of an old man, a servant of her father who
+understood French. She thanked him in the most ardent terms for his intended
+services towards her parent, and at the same time she gently deplored her own
+fate.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have copies of these letters, for I found means, during my residence in the
+hovel, to procure the implements of writing; and the letters were often in the
+hands of Felix or Agatha. Before I depart I will give them to you; they will
+prove the truth of my tale; but at present, as the sun is already far declined,
+I shall only have time to repeat the substance of them to you.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Safie related that her mother was a Christian Arab, seized and made a slave by
+the Turks; recommended by her beauty, she had won the heart of the father of
+Safie, who married her. The young girl spoke in high and enthusiastic terms of
+her mother, who, born in freedom, spurned the bondage to which she was now
+reduced. She instructed her daughter in the tenets of her religion and taught
+her to aspire to higher powers of intellect and an independence of spirit
+forbidden to the female followers of Muhammad. This lady died, but her lessons
+were indelibly impressed on the mind of Safie, who sickened at the prospect of
+again returning to Asia and being immured within the walls of a harem, allowed
+only to occupy herself with infantile amusements, ill-suited to the temper of
+her soul, now accustomed to grand ideas and a noble emulation for virtue. The
+prospect of marrying a Christian and remaining in a country where women were
+allowed to take a rank in society was enchanting to her.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The day for the execution of the Turk was fixed, but on the night previous to
+it he quitted his prison and before morning was distant many leagues from
+Paris. Felix had procured passports in the name of his father, sister, and
+himself. He had previously communicated his plan to the former, who aided the
+deceit by quitting his house, under the pretence of a journey and concealed
+himself, with his daughter, in an obscure part of Paris.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Felix conducted the fugitives through France to Lyons and across Mont Cenis to
+Leghorn, where the merchant had decided to wait a favourable opportunity of
+passing into some part of the Turkish dominions.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Safie resolved to remain with her father until the moment of his departure,
+before which time the Turk renewed his promise that she should be united to his
+deliverer; and Felix remained with them in expectation of that event; and in
+the meantime he enjoyed the society of the Arabian, who exhibited towards him
+the simplest and tenderest affection. They conversed with one another through
+the means of an interpreter, and sometimes with the interpretation of looks;
+and Safie sang to him the divine airs of her native country.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The Turk allowed this intimacy to take place and encouraged the hopes of the
+youthful lovers, while in his heart he had formed far other plans. He loathed
+the idea that his daughter should be united to a Christian, but he feared the
+resentment of Felix if he should appear lukewarm, for he knew that he was still
+in the power of his deliverer if he should choose to betray him to the Italian
+state which they inhabited. He revolved a thousand plans by which he should be
+enabled to prolong the deceit until it might be no longer necessary, and
+secretly to take his daughter with him when he departed. His plans were
+facilitated by the news which arrived from Paris.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The government of France were greatly enraged at the escape of their victim
+and spared no pains to detect and punish his deliverer. The plot of Felix was
+quickly discovered, and De Lacey and Agatha were thrown into prison. The news
+reached Felix and roused him from his dream of pleasure. His blind and aged
+father and his gentle sister lay in a noisome dungeon while he enjoyed the free
+air and the society of her whom he loved. This idea was torture to him. He
+quickly arranged with the Turk that if the latter should find a favourable
+opportunity for escape before Felix could return to Italy, Safie should remain
+as a boarder at a convent at Leghorn; and then, quitting the lovely Arabian, he
+hastened to Paris and delivered himself up to the vengeance of the law, hoping
+to free De Lacey and Agatha by this proceeding.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“He did not succeed. They remained confined for five months before the trial
+took place, the result of which deprived them of their fortune and condemned
+them to a perpetual exile from their native country.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“They found a miserable asylum in the cottage in Germany, where I discovered
+them. Felix soon learned that the treacherous Turk, for whom he and his family
+endured such unheard-of oppression, on discovering that his deliverer was thus
+reduced to poverty and ruin, became a traitor to good feeling and honour and
+had quitted Italy with his daughter, insultingly sending Felix a pittance of
+money to aid him, as he said, in some plan of future maintenance.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Such were the events that preyed on the heart of Felix and rendered him, when
+I first saw him, the most miserable of his family. He could have endured
+poverty, and while this distress had been the meed of his virtue, he gloried in
+it; but the ingratitude of the Turk and the loss of his beloved Safie were
+misfortunes more bitter and irreparable. The arrival of the Arabian now infused
+new life into his soul.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“When the news reached Leghorn that Felix was deprived of his wealth and rank,
+the merchant commanded his daughter to think no more of her lover, but to
+prepare to return to her native country. The generous nature of Safie was
+outraged by this command; she attempted to expostulate with her father, but he
+left her angrily, reiterating his tyrannical mandate.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“A few days after, the Turk entered his daughter’s apartment and told her
+hastily that he had reason to believe that his residence at Leghorn had been
+divulged and that he should speedily be delivered up to the French government;
+he had consequently hired a vessel to convey him to Constantinople, for which
+city he should sail in a few hours. He intended to leave his daughter under the
+care of a confidential servant, to follow at her leisure with the greater part
+of his property, which had not yet arrived at Leghorn.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“When alone, Safie resolved in her own mind the plan of conduct that it would
+become her to pursue in this emergency. A residence in Turkey was abhorrent to
+her; her religion and her feelings were alike averse to it. By some papers of
+her father which fell into her hands she heard of the exile of her lover and
+learnt the name of the spot where he then resided. She hesitated some time, but
+at length she formed her determination. Taking with her some jewels that
+belonged to her and a sum of money, she quitted Italy with an attendant, a
+native of Leghorn, but who understood the common language of Turkey, and
+departed for Germany.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“She arrived in safety at a town about twenty leagues from the cottage of De
+Lacey, when her attendant fell dangerously ill. Safie nursed her with the most
+devoted affection, but the poor girl died, and the Arabian was left alone,
+unacquainted with the language of the country and utterly ignorant of the
+customs of the world. She fell, however, into good hands. The Italian had
+mentioned the name of the spot for which they were bound, and after her death
+the woman of the house in which they had lived took care that Safie should
+arrive in safety at the cottage of her lover.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 15 
+
+ 
+“Such was the history of my beloved cottagers. It impressed me deeply. I
+learned, from the views of social life which it developed, to admire their
+virtues and to deprecate the vices of mankind.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“As yet I looked upon crime as a distant evil, benevolence and generosity were
+ever present before me, inciting within me a desire to become an actor in the
+busy scene where so many admirable qualities were called forth and displayed.
+But in giving an account of the progress of my intellect, I must not omit a
+circumstance which occurred in the beginning of the month of August of the same
+year.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“One night during my accustomed visit to the neighbouring wood where I
+collected my own food and brought home firing for my protectors, I found on the
+ground a leathern portmanteau containing several articles of dress and some
+books. I eagerly seized the prize and returned with it to my hovel. Fortunately
+the books were written in the language, the elements of which I had acquired at
+the cottage; they consisted of Paradise Lost , a volume of Plutarch’s
+Lives , and the Sorrows of Werter . The possession of these treasures
+gave me extreme delight; I now continually studied and exercised my mind upon
+these histories, whilst my friends were employed in their ordinary occupations.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced in me an
+infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but
+more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection. In the Sorrows of
+Werter , besides the interest of its simple and affecting story, so many
+opinions are canvassed and so many lights thrown upon what had hitherto been to
+me obscure subjects that I found in it a never-ending source of speculation and
+astonishment. The gentle and domestic manners it described, combined with lofty
+sentiments and feelings, which had for their object something out of self,
+accorded well with my experience among my protectors and with the wants which
+were for ever alive in my own bosom. But I thought Werter himself a more divine
+being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no
+pretension, but it sank deep. The disquisitions upon death and suicide were
+calculated to fill me with wonder. I did not pretend to enter into the merits
+of the case, yet I inclined towards the opinions of the hero, whose extinction
+I wept, without precisely understanding it.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and
+condition. I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike to the
+beings concerning whom I read and to whose conversation I was a listener. I
+sympathised with and partly understood them, but I was unformed in mind; I was
+dependent on none and related to none. ‘The path of my departure was free,’ and
+there was none to lament my annihilation. My person was hideous and my stature
+gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What
+was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to
+solve them.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The volume of Plutarch’s Lives which I possessed contained the
+histories of the first founders of the ancient republics. This book had a far
+different effect upon me from the Sorrows of Werter . I learned from
+Werter’s imaginations despondency and gloom, but Plutarch taught me high
+thoughts; he elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to
+admire and love the heroes of past ages. Many things I read surpassed my
+understanding and experience. I had a very confused knowledge of kingdoms, wide
+extents of country, mighty rivers, and boundless seas. But I was perfectly
+unacquainted with towns and large assemblages of men. The cottage of my
+protectors had been the only school in which I had studied human nature, but
+this book developed new and mightier scenes of action. I read of men concerned
+in public affairs, governing or massacring their species. I felt the greatest
+ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice, as far as I
+understood the signification of those terms, relative as they were, as I
+applied them, to pleasure and pain alone. Induced by these feelings, I was of
+course led to admire peaceable lawgivers, Numa, Solon, and Lycurgus, in
+preference to Romulus and Theseus. The patriarchal lives of my protectors
+caused these impressions to take a firm hold on my mind; perhaps, if my first
+introduction to humanity had been made by a young soldier, burning for glory
+and slaughter, I should have been imbued with different sensations.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“But Paradise Lost excited different and far deeper emotions. I read it,
+as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true
+history. It moved every feeling of wonder and awe that the picture of an
+omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting. I often
+referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like
+Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but
+his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth
+from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the
+especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire
+knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and
+alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for
+often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of
+envy rose within me.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Another circumstance strengthened and confirmed these feelings. Soon after my
+arrival in the hovel I discovered some papers in the pocket of the dress which
+I had taken from your laboratory. At first I had neglected them, but now that I
+was able to decipher the characters in which they were written, I began to
+study them with diligence. It was your journal of the four months that preceded
+my creation. You minutely described in these papers every step you took in the
+progress of your work; this history was mingled with accounts of domestic
+occurrences. You doubtless recollect these papers. Here they are. Everything is
+related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole detail
+of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is set in view;
+the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is given, in
+language which painted your own horrors and rendered mine indelible. I sickened
+as I read. ‘Hateful day when I received life!’ I exclaimed in agony. ‘Accursed
+creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from
+me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own
+image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very
+resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage
+him, but I am solitary and abhorred.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“These were the reflections of my hours of despondency and solitude; but when I
+contemplated the virtues of the cottagers, their amiable and benevolent
+dispositions, I persuaded myself that when they should become acquainted with
+my admiration of their virtues they would compassionate me and overlook my
+personal deformity. Could they turn from their door one, however monstrous, who
+solicited their compassion and friendship? I resolved, at least, not to
+despair, but in every way to fit myself for an interview with them which would
+decide my fate. I postponed this attempt for some months longer, for the
+importance attached to its success inspired me with a dread lest I should fail.
+Besides, I found that my understanding improved so much with every day’s
+experience that I was unwilling to commence this undertaking until a few more
+months should have added to my sagacity.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Several changes, in the meantime, took place in the cottage. The presence of
+Safie diffused happiness among its inhabitants, and I also found that a greater
+degree of plenty reigned there. Felix and Agatha spent more time in amusement
+and conversation, and were assisted in their labours by servants. They did not
+appear rich, but they were contented and happy; their feelings were serene and
+peaceful, while mine became every day more tumultuous. Increase of knowledge
+only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was. I cherished
+hope, it is true, but it vanished when I beheld my person reflected in water or
+my shadow in the moonshine, even as that frail image and that inconstant shade.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I endeavoured to crush these fears and to fortify myself for the trial which
+in a few months I resolved to undergo; and sometimes I allowed my thoughts,
+unchecked by reason, to ramble in the fields of Paradise, and dared to fancy
+amiable and lovely creatures sympathising with my feelings and cheering my
+gloom; their angelic countenances breathed smiles of consolation. But it was
+all a dream; no Eve soothed my sorrows nor shared my thoughts; I was alone. I
+remembered Adam’s supplication to his Creator. But where was mine? He had
+abandoned me, and in the bitterness of my heart I cursed him.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Autumn passed thus. I saw, with surprise and grief, the leaves decay and fall,
+and nature again assume the barren and bleak appearance it had worn when I
+first beheld the woods and the lovely moon. Yet I did not heed the bleakness of
+the weather; I was better fitted by my conformation for the endurance of cold
+than heat. But my chief delights were the sight of the flowers, the birds, and
+all the gay apparel of summer; when those deserted me, I turned with more
+attention towards the cottagers. Their happiness was not decreased by the
+absence of summer. They loved and sympathised with one another; and their joys,
+depending on each other, were not interrupted by the casualties that took place
+around them. The more I saw of them, the greater became my desire to claim
+their protection and kindness; my heart yearned to be known and loved by these
+amiable creatures; to see their sweet looks directed towards me with affection
+was the utmost limit of my ambition. I dared not think that they would turn
+them from me with disdain and horror. The poor that stopped at their door were
+never driven away. I asked, it is true, for greater treasures than a little
+food or rest: I required kindness and sympathy; but I did not believe myself
+utterly unworthy of it.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The winter advanced, and an entire revolution of the seasons had taken place
+since I awoke into life. My attention at this time was solely directed towards
+my plan of introducing myself into the cottage of my protectors. I revolved
+many projects, but that on which I finally fixed was to enter the dwelling when
+the blind old man should be alone. I had sagacity enough to discover that the
+unnatural hideousness of my person was the chief object of horror with those
+who had formerly beheld me. My voice, although harsh, had nothing terrible in
+it; I thought, therefore, that if in the absence of his children I could gain
+the good will and mediation of the old De Lacey, I might by his means be
+tolerated by my younger protectors.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“One day, when the sun shone on the red leaves that strewed the ground and
+diffused cheerfulness, although it denied warmth, Safie, Agatha, and Felix
+departed on a long country walk, and the old man, at his own desire, was left
+alone in the cottage. When his children had departed, he took up his guitar and
+played several mournful but sweet airs, more sweet and mournful than I had ever
+heard him play before. At first his countenance was illuminated with pleasure,
+but as he continued, thoughtfulness and sadness succeeded; at length, laying
+aside the instrument, he sat absorbed in reflection.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“My heart beat quick; this was the hour and moment of trial, which would decide
+my hopes or realise my fears. The servants were gone to a neighbouring fair.
+All was silent in and around the cottage; it was an excellent opportunity; yet,
+when I proceeded to execute my plan, my limbs failed me and I sank to the
+ground. Again I rose, and exerting all the firmness of which I was master,
+removed the planks which I had placed before my hovel to conceal my retreat.
+The fresh air revived me, and with renewed determination I approached the door
+of their cottage.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I knocked. ‘Who is there?’ said the old man. ‘Come in.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I entered. ‘Pardon this intrusion,’ said I; ‘I am a traveller in want of a
+little rest; you would greatly oblige me if you would allow me to remain a few
+minutes before the fire.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Enter,’ said De Lacey, ‘and I will try in what manner I can to relieve your
+wants; but, unfortunately, my children are from home, and as I am blind, I am
+afraid I shall find it difficult to procure food for you.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Do not trouble yourself, my kind host; I have food; it is warmth and rest
+only that I need.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I sat down, and a silence ensued. I knew that every minute was precious to me,
+yet I remained irresolute in what manner to commence the interview, when the
+old man addressed me.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+‘By your language, stranger, I suppose you are my countryman; are you French?’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘No; but I was educated by a French family and understand that language only.
+I am now going to claim the protection of some friends, whom I sincerely love,
+and of whose favour I have some hopes.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Are they Germans?’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘No, they are French. But let us change the subject. I am an unfortunate and
+deserted creature, I look around and I have no relation or friend upon earth.
+These amiable people to whom I go have never seen me and know little of me. I
+am full of fears, for if I fail there, I am an outcast in the world for ever.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Do not despair. To be friendless is indeed to be unfortunate, but the hearts
+of men, when unprejudiced by any obvious self-interest, are full of brotherly
+love and charity. Rely, therefore, on your hopes; and if these friends are good
+and amiable, do not despair.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘They are kind—they are the most excellent creatures in the world; but,
+unfortunately, they are prejudiced against me. I have good dispositions; my
+life has been hitherto harmless and in some degree beneficial; but a fatal
+prejudice clouds their eyes, and where they ought to see a feeling and kind
+friend, they behold only a detestable monster.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘That is indeed unfortunate; but if you are really blameless, cannot you
+undeceive them?’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I am about to undertake that task; and it is on that account that I feel so
+many overwhelming terrors. I tenderly love these friends; I have, unknown to
+them, been for many months in the habits of daily kindness towards them; but
+they believe that I wish to injure them, and it is that prejudice which I wish
+to overcome.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Where do these friends reside?’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Near this spot.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The old man paused and then continued, ‘If you will unreservedly confide to me
+the particulars of your tale, I perhaps may be of use in undeceiving them. I am
+blind and cannot judge of your countenance, but there is something in your
+words which persuades me that you are sincere. I am poor and an exile, but it
+will afford me true pleasure to be in any way serviceable to a human creature.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Excellent man! I thank you and accept your generous offer. You raise me from
+the dust by this kindness; and I trust that, by your aid, I shall not be driven
+from the society and sympathy of your fellow creatures.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Heaven forbid! Even if you were really criminal, for that can only drive you
+to desperation, and not instigate you to virtue. I also am unfortunate; I and
+my family have been condemned, although innocent; judge, therefore, if I do not
+feel for your misfortunes.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘How can I thank you, my best and only benefactor? From your lips first have I
+heard the voice of kindness directed towards me; I shall be for ever grateful;
+and your present humanity assures me of success with those friends whom I am on
+the point of meeting.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘May I know the names and residence of those friends?’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I paused. This, I thought, was the moment of decision, which was to rob me of
+or bestow happiness on me for ever. I struggled vainly for firmness sufficient
+to answer him, but the effort destroyed all my remaining strength; I sank on
+the chair and sobbed aloud. At that moment I heard the steps of my younger
+protectors. I had not a moment to lose, but seizing the hand of the old man, I
+cried, ‘Now is the time! Save and protect me! You and your family are the
+friends whom I seek. Do not you desert me in the hour of trial!’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Great God!’ exclaimed the old man. ‘Who are you?’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“At that instant the cottage door was opened, and Felix, Safie, and Agatha
+entered. Who can describe their horror and consternation on beholding me?
+Agatha fainted, and Safie, unable to attend to her friend, rushed out of the
+cottage. Felix darted forward, and with supernatural force tore me from his
+father, to whose knees I clung, in a transport of fury, he dashed me to the
+ground and struck me violently with a stick. I could have torn him limb from
+limb, as the lion rends the antelope. But my heart sank within me as with
+bitter sickness, and I refrained. I saw him on the point of repeating his blow,
+when, overcome by pain and anguish, I quitted the cottage, and in the general
+tumult escaped unperceived to my hovel.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 16 
+
+ 
+“Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not
+extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed? I know
+not; despair had not yet taken possession of me; my feelings were those of rage
+and revenge. I could with pleasure have destroyed the cottage and its
+inhabitants and have glutted myself with their shrieks and misery.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“When night came I quitted my retreat and wandered in the wood; and now, no
+longer restrained by the fear of discovery, I gave vent to my anguish in
+fearful howlings. I was like a wild beast that had broken the toils, destroying
+the objects that obstructed me and ranging through the wood with a stag-like
+swiftness. Oh! What a miserable night I passed! The cold stars shone in
+mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me; now and then the
+sweet voice of a bird burst forth amidst the universal stillness. All, save I,
+were at rest or in enjoyment; I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me,
+and finding myself unsympathised with, wished to tear up the trees, spread
+havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the
+ruin.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“But this was a luxury of sensation that could not endure; I became fatigued
+with excess of bodily exertion and sank on the damp grass in the sick impotence
+of despair. There was none among the myriads of men that existed who would pity
+or assist me; and should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No: from that
+moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and more than all,
+against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The sun rose; I heard the voices of men and knew that it was impossible to
+return to my retreat during that day. Accordingly I hid myself in some thick
+underwood, determining to devote the ensuing hours to reflection on my
+situation.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The pleasant sunshine and the pure air of day restored me to some degree of
+tranquillity; and when I considered what had passed at the cottage, I could not
+help believing that I had been too hasty in my conclusions. I had certainly
+acted imprudently. It was apparent that my conversation had interested the
+father in my behalf, and I was a fool in having exposed my person to the horror
+of his children. I ought to have familiarised the old De Lacey to me, and by
+degrees to have discovered myself to the rest of his family, when they should
+have been prepared for my approach. But I did not believe my errors to be
+irretrievable, and after much consideration I resolved to return to the
+cottage, seek the old man, and by my representations win him to my party.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“These thoughts calmed me, and in the afternoon I sank into a profound sleep;
+but the fever of my blood did not allow me to be visited by peaceful dreams.
+The horrible scene of the preceding day was for ever acting before my eyes; the
+females were flying and the enraged Felix tearing me from his father’s feet. I
+awoke exhausted, and finding that it was already night, I crept forth from my
+hiding-place, and went in search of food.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“When my hunger was appeased, I directed my steps towards the well-known path
+that conducted to the cottage. All there was at peace. I crept into my hovel
+and remained in silent expectation of the accustomed hour when the family
+arose. That hour passed, the sun mounted high in the heavens, but the cottagers
+did not appear. I trembled violently, apprehending some dreadful misfortune.
+The inside of the cottage was dark, and I heard no motion; I cannot describe
+the agony of this suspense.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Presently two countrymen passed by, but pausing near the cottage, they entered
+into conversation, using violent gesticulations; but I did not understand what
+they said, as they spoke the language of the country, which differed from that
+of my protectors. Soon after, however, Felix approached with another man; I was
+surprised, as I knew that he had not quitted the cottage that morning, and
+waited anxiously to discover from his discourse the meaning of these unusual
+appearances.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Do you consider,’ said his companion to him, ‘that you will be obliged to pay
+three months’ rent and to lose the produce of your garden? I do not wish to
+take any unfair advantage, and I beg therefore that you will take some days to
+consider of your determination.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘It is utterly useless,’ replied Felix; ‘we can never again inhabit your
+cottage. The life of my father is in the greatest danger, owing to the dreadful
+circumstance that I have related. My wife and my sister will never recover from
+their horror. I entreat you not to reason with me any more. Take possession of
+your tenement and let me fly from this place.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Felix trembled violently as he said this. He and his companion entered the
+cottage, in which they remained for a few minutes, and then departed. I never
+saw any of the family of De Lacey more.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I continued for the remainder of the day in my hovel in a state of utter and
+stupid despair. My protectors had departed and had broken the only link that
+held me to the world. For the first time the feelings of revenge and hatred
+filled my bosom, and I did not strive to control them, but allowing myself to
+be borne away by the stream, I bent my mind towards injury and death. When I
+thought of my friends, of the mild voice of De Lacey, the gentle eyes of
+Agatha, and the exquisite beauty of the Arabian, these thoughts vanished and a
+gush of tears somewhat soothed me. But again when I reflected that they had
+spurned and deserted me, anger returned, a rage of anger, and unable to injure
+anything human, I turned my fury towards inanimate objects. As night advanced,
+I placed a variety of combustibles around the cottage, and after having
+destroyed every vestige of cultivation in the garden, I waited with forced
+impatience until the moon had sunk to commence my operations.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“As the night advanced, a fierce wind arose from the woods and quickly
+dispersed the clouds that had loitered in the heavens; the blast tore along
+like a mighty avalanche and produced a kind of insanity in my spirits that
+burst all bounds of reason and reflection. I lighted the dry branch of a tree
+and danced with fury around the devoted cottage, my eyes still fixed on the
+western horizon, the edge of which the moon nearly touched. A part of its orb
+was at length hid, and I waved my brand; it sank, and with a loud scream I
+fired the straw, and heath, and bushes, which I had collected. The wind fanned
+the fire, and the cottage was quickly enveloped by the flames, which clung to
+it and licked it with their forked and destroying tongues.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“As soon as I was convinced that no assistance could save any part of the
+habitation, I quitted the scene and sought for refuge in the woods.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“And now, with the world before me, whither should I bend my steps? I resolved
+to fly far from the scene of my misfortunes; but to me, hated and despised,
+every country must be equally horrible. At length the thought of you crossed my
+mind. I learned from your papers that you were my father, my creator; and to
+whom could I apply with more fitness than to him who had given me life? Among
+the lessons that Felix had bestowed upon Safie, geography had not been omitted;
+I had learned from these the relative situations of the different countries of
+the earth. You had mentioned Geneva as the name of your native town, and
+towards this place I resolved to proceed.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“But how was I to direct myself? I knew that I must travel in a southwesterly
+direction to reach my destination, but the sun was my only guide. I did not
+know the names of the towns that I was to pass through, nor could I ask
+information from a single human being; but I did not despair. From you only
+could I hope for succour, although towards you I felt no sentiment but that of
+hatred. Unfeeling, heartless creator! You had endowed me with perceptions and
+passions and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind.
+But on you only had I any claim for pity and redress, and from you I determined
+to seek that justice which I vainly attempted to gain from any other being that
+wore the human form.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“My travels were long and the sufferings I endured intense. It was late in
+autumn when I quitted the district where I had so long resided. I travelled
+only at night, fearful of encountering the visage of a human being. Nature
+decayed around me, and the sun became heatless; rain and snow poured around me;
+mighty rivers were frozen; the surface of the earth was hard and chill, and
+bare, and I found no shelter. Oh, earth! How often did I imprecate curses on
+the cause of my being! The mildness of my nature had fled, and all within me
+was turned to gall and bitterness. The nearer I approached to your habitation,
+the more deeply did I feel the spirit of revenge enkindled in my heart. Snow
+fell, and the waters were hardened, but I rested not. A few incidents now and
+then directed me, and I possessed a map of the country; but I often wandered
+wide from my path. The agony of my feelings allowed me no respite; no incident
+occurred from which my rage and misery could not extract its food; but a
+circumstance that happened when I arrived on the confines of Switzerland, when
+the sun had recovered its warmth and the earth again began to look green,
+confirmed in an especial manner the bitterness and horror of my feelings.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I generally rested during the day and travelled only when I was secured by
+night from the view of man. One morning, however, finding that my path lay
+through a deep wood, I ventured to continue my journey after the sun had risen;
+the day, which was one of the first of spring, cheered even me by the
+loveliness of its sunshine and the balminess of the air. I felt emotions of
+gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half
+surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away
+by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy. Soft
+tears again bedewed my cheeks, and I even raised my humid eyes with
+thankfulness towards the blessed sun, which bestowed such joy upon me.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I continued to wind among the paths of the wood, until I came to its boundary,
+which was skirted by a deep and rapid river, into which many of the trees bent
+their branches, now budding with the fresh spring. Here I paused, not exactly
+knowing what path to pursue, when I heard the sound of voices, that induced me
+to conceal myself under the shade of a cypress. I was scarcely hid when a young
+girl came running towards the spot where I was concealed, laughing, as if she
+ran from someone in sport. She continued her course along the precipitous sides
+of the river, when suddenly her foot slipped, and she fell into the rapid
+stream. I rushed from my hiding-place and with extreme labour, from the force
+of the current, saved her and dragged her to shore. She was senseless, and I
+endeavoured by every means in my power to restore animation, when I was
+suddenly interrupted by the approach of a rustic, who was probably the person
+from whom she had playfully fled. On seeing me, he darted towards me, and
+tearing the girl from my arms, hastened towards the deeper parts of the wood. I
+followed speedily, I hardly knew why; but when the man saw me draw near, he
+aimed a gun, which he carried, at my body and fired. I sank to the ground, and
+my injurer, with increased swiftness, escaped into the wood.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“This was then the reward of my benevolence! I had saved a human being from
+destruction, and as a recompense I now writhed under the miserable pain of a
+wound which shattered the flesh and bone. The feelings of kindness and
+gentleness which I had entertained but a few moments before gave place to
+hellish rage and gnashing of teeth. Inflamed by pain, I vowed eternal hatred
+and vengeance to all mankind. But the agony of my wound overcame me; my pulses
+paused, and I fainted.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“For some weeks I led a miserable life in the woods, endeavouring to cure the
+wound which I had received. The ball had entered my shoulder, and I knew not
+whether it had remained there or passed through; at any rate I had no means of
+extracting it. My sufferings were augmented also by the oppressive sense of the
+injustice and ingratitude of their infliction. My daily vows rose for revenge—a
+deep and deadly revenge, such as would alone compensate for the outrages and
+anguish I had endured.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“After some weeks my wound healed, and I continued my journey. The labours I
+endured were no longer to be alleviated by the bright sun or gentle breezes of
+spring; all joy was but a mockery which insulted my desolate state and made me
+feel more painfully that I was not made for the enjoyment of pleasure.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“But my toils now drew near a close, and in two months from this time I reached
+the environs of Geneva.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was evening when I arrived, and I retired to a hiding-place among the
+fields that surround it to meditate in what manner I should apply to you. I was
+oppressed by fatigue and hunger and far too unhappy to enjoy the gentle breezes
+of evening or the prospect of the sun setting behind the stupendous mountains
+of Jura.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“At this time a slight sleep relieved me from the pain of reflection, which was
+disturbed by the approach of a beautiful child, who came running into the
+recess I had chosen, with all the sportiveness of infancy. Suddenly, as I gazed
+on him, an idea seized me that this little creature was unprejudiced and had
+lived too short a time to have imbibed a horror of deformity. If, therefore, I
+could seize him and educate him as my companion and friend, I should not be so
+desolate in this peopled earth.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Urged by this impulse, I seized on the boy as he passed and drew him towards
+me. As soon as he beheld my form, he placed his hands before his eyes and
+uttered a shrill scream; I drew his hand forcibly from his face and said,
+‘Child, what is the meaning of this? I do not intend to hurt you; listen to
+me.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“He struggled violently. ‘Let me go,’ he cried; ‘monster! Ugly wretch! You wish
+to eat me and tear me to pieces. You are an ogre. Let me go, or I will tell my
+papa.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Boy, you will never see your father again; you must come with me.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Hideous monster! Let me go. My papa is a syndic—he is M. Frankenstein—he will
+punish you. You dare not keep me.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Frankenstein! you belong then to my enemy—to him towards whom I have sworn
+eternal revenge; you shall be my first victim.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The child still struggled and loaded me with epithets which carried despair to
+my heart; I grasped his throat to silence him, and in a moment he lay dead at
+my feet.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I gazed on my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish
+triumph; clapping my hands, I exclaimed, ‘I too can create desolation; my enemy
+is not invulnerable; this death will carry despair to him, and a thousand other
+miseries shall torment and destroy him.’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“As I fixed my eyes on the child, I saw something glittering on his breast. I
+took it; it was a portrait of a most lovely woman. In spite of my malignity, it
+softened and attracted me. For a few moments I gazed with delight on her dark
+eyes, fringed by deep lashes, and her lovely lips; but presently my rage
+returned; I remembered that I was for ever deprived of the delights that such
+beautiful creatures could bestow and that she whose resemblance I contemplated
+would, in regarding me, have changed that air of divine benignity to one
+expressive of disgust and affright.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Can you wonder that such thoughts transported me with rage? I only wonder that
+at that moment, instead of venting my sensations in exclamations and agony, I
+did not rush among mankind and perish in the attempt to destroy them.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“While I was overcome by these feelings, I left the spot where I had committed
+the murder, and seeking a more secluded hiding-place, I entered a barn which
+had appeared to me to be empty. A woman was sleeping on some straw; she was
+young, not indeed so beautiful as her whose portrait I held, but of an
+agreeable aspect and blooming in the loveliness of youth and health. Here, I
+thought, is one of those whose joy-imparting smiles are bestowed on all but me.
+And then I bent over her and whispered, ‘Awake, fairest, thy lover is near—he
+who would give his life but to obtain one look of affection from thine eyes; my
+beloved, awake!’
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The sleeper stirred; a thrill of terror ran through me. Should she indeed
+awake, and see me, and curse me, and denounce the murderer? Thus would she
+assuredly act if her darkened eyes opened and she beheld me. The thought was
+madness; it stirred the fiend within me—not I, but she, shall suffer; the
+murder I have committed because I am for ever robbed of all that she could give
+me, she shall atone. The crime had its source in her; be hers the punishment!
+Thanks to the lessons of Felix and the sanguinary laws of man, I had learned
+now to work mischief. I bent over her and placed the portrait securely in one
+of the folds of her dress. She moved again, and I fled.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“For some days I haunted the spot where these scenes had taken place, sometimes
+wishing to see you, sometimes resolved to quit the world and its miseries for
+ever. At length I wandered towards these mountains, and have ranged through
+their immense recesses, consumed by a burning passion which you alone can
+gratify. We may not part until you have promised to comply with my requisition.
+I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed
+and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of
+the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 17 
+
+ 
+The being finished speaking and fixed his looks upon me in the expectation of a
+reply. But I was bewildered, perplexed, and unable to arrange my ideas
+sufficiently to understand the full extent of his proposition. He continued,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of
+those sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do, and I demand it
+of you as a right which you must not refuse to concede.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The latter part of his tale had kindled anew in me the anger that had died away
+while he narrated his peaceful life among the cottagers, and as he said this I
+could no longer suppress the rage that burned within me.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I do refuse it,” I replied; “and no torture shall ever extort a consent from
+me. You may render me the most miserable of men, but you shall never make me
+base in my own eyes. Shall I create another like yourself, whose joint
+wickedness might desolate the world. Begone! I have answered you; you may
+torture me, but I will never consent.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“You are in the wrong,” replied the fiend; “and instead of threatening, I am
+content to reason with you. I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not
+shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and
+triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities
+me? You would not call it murder if you could precipitate me into one of those
+ice-rifts and destroy my frame, the work of your own hands. Shall I respect man
+when he condemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and
+instead of injury I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude
+at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable
+barriers to our union. Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery.
+I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and
+chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear
+inextinguishable hatred. Have a care; I will work at your destruction, nor
+finish until I desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your
+birth.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+A fiendish rage animated him as he said this; his face was wrinkled into
+contortions too horrible for human eyes to behold; but presently he calmed
+himself and proceeded—
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I intended to reason. This passion is detrimental to me, for you do not
+reflect that you are the cause of its excess. If any being felt emotions
+of benevolence towards me, I should return them a hundred and a hundredfold;
+for that one creature’s sake I would make peace with the whole kind! But I now
+indulge in dreams of bliss that cannot be realised. What I ask of you is
+reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as
+myself; the gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it
+shall content me. It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world;
+but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will
+not be happy, but they will be harmless and free from the misery I now feel.
+Oh! My creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one
+benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not
+deny me my request!”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I was moved. I shuddered when I thought of the possible consequences of my
+consent, but I felt that there was some justice in his argument. His tale and
+the feelings he now expressed proved him to be a creature of fine sensations,
+and did I not as his maker owe him all the portion of happiness that it was in
+my power to bestow? He saw my change of feeling and continued,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“If you consent, neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again;
+I will go to the vast wilds of South America. My food is not that of man; I do
+not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford
+me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself
+and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves;
+the sun will shine on us as on man and will ripen our food. The picture I
+present to you is peaceful and human, and you must feel that you could deny it
+only in the wantonness of power and cruelty. Pitiless as you have been towards
+me, I now see compassion in your eyes; let me seize the favourable moment and
+persuade you to promise what I so ardently desire.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“You propose,” replied I, “to fly from the habitations of man, to dwell in
+those wilds where the beasts of the field will be your only companions. How can
+you, who long for the love and sympathy of man, persevere in this exile? You
+will return and again seek their kindness, and you will meet with their
+detestation; your evil passions will be renewed, and you will then have a
+companion to aid you in the task of destruction. This may not be; cease to
+argue the point, for I cannot consent.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“How inconstant are your feelings! But a moment ago you were moved by my
+representations, and why do you again harden yourself to my complaints? I swear
+to you, by the earth which I inhabit, and by you that made me, that with the
+companion you bestow, I will quit the neighbourhood of man and dwell, as it may
+chance, in the most savage of places. My evil passions will have fled, for I
+shall meet with sympathy! My life will flow quietly away, and in my dying
+moments I shall not curse my maker.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him and sometimes felt
+a wish to console him, but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass
+that moved and talked, my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those
+of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought that as I
+could not sympathise with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small
+portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“You swear,” I said, “to be harmless; but have you not already shown a degree
+of malice that should reasonably make me distrust you? May not even this be a
+feint that will increase your triumph by affording a wider scope for your
+revenge?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“How is this? I must not be trifled with, and I demand an answer. If I have no
+ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion; the love of another
+will destroy the cause of my crimes, and I shall become a thing of whose
+existence everyone will be ignorant. My vices are the children of a forced
+solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in
+communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being and
+become linked to the chain of existence and events from which I am now
+excluded.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I paused some time to reflect on all he had related and the various arguments
+which he had employed. I thought of the promise of virtues which he had
+displayed on the opening of his existence and the subsequent blight of all
+kindly feeling by the loathing and scorn which his protectors had manifested
+towards him. His power and threats were not omitted in my calculations; a
+creature who could exist in the ice-caves of the glaciers and hide himself from
+pursuit among the ridges of inaccessible precipices was a being possessing
+faculties it would be vain to cope with. After a long pause of reflection I
+concluded that the justice due both to him and my fellow creatures demanded of
+me that I should comply with his request. Turning to him, therefore, I said,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I consent to your demand, on your solemn oath to quit Europe for ever, and
+every other place in the neighbourhood of man, as soon as I shall deliver into
+your hands a female who will accompany you in your exile.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I swear,” he cried, “by the sun, and by the blue sky of heaven, and by the
+fire of love that burns my heart, that if you grant my prayer, while they exist
+you shall never behold me again. Depart to your home and commence your labours;
+I shall watch their progress with unutterable anxiety; and fear not but that
+when you are ready I shall appear.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Saying this, he suddenly quitted me, fearful, perhaps, of any change in my
+sentiments. I saw him descend the mountain with greater speed than the flight
+of an eagle, and quickly lost among the undulations of the sea of ice.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+His tale had occupied the whole day, and the sun was upon the verge of the
+horizon when he departed. I knew that I ought to hasten my descent towards the
+valley, as I should soon be encompassed in darkness; but my heart was heavy,
+and my steps slow. The labour of winding among the little paths of the mountain
+and fixing my feet firmly as I advanced perplexed me, occupied as I was by the
+emotions which the occurrences of the day had produced. Night was far advanced
+when I came to the halfway resting-place and seated myself beside the fountain.
+The stars shone at intervals as the clouds passed from over them; the dark
+pines rose before me, and every here and there a broken tree lay on the ground;
+it was a scene of wonderful solemnity and stirred strange thoughts within me. I
+wept bitterly, and clasping my hands in agony, I exclaimed, “Oh! stars and
+clouds and winds, ye are all about to mock me; if ye really pity me, crush
+sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart, and
+leave me in darkness.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+These were wild and miserable thoughts, but I cannot describe to you how the
+eternal twinkling of the stars weighed upon me and how I listened to every
+blast of wind as if it were a dull ugly siroc on its way to consume me.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Morning dawned before I arrived at the village of Chamounix; I took no rest,
+but returned immediately to Geneva. Even in my own heart I could give no
+expression to my sensations—they weighed on me with a mountain’s weight and
+their excess destroyed my agony beneath them. Thus I returned home, and
+entering the house, presented myself to the family. My haggard and wild
+appearance awoke intense alarm, but I answered no question, scarcely did I
+speak. I felt as if I were placed under a ban—as if I had no right to claim
+their sympathies—as if never more might I enjoy companionship with them. Yet
+even thus I loved them to adoration; and to save them, I resolved to dedicate
+myself to my most abhorred task. The prospect of such an occupation made every
+other circumstance of existence pass before me like a dream, and that thought
+only had to me the reality of life.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 18 
+
+ 
+Day after day, week after week, passed away on my return to Geneva; and I could
+not collect the courage to recommence my work. I feared the vengeance of the
+disappointed fiend, yet I was unable to overcome my repugnance to the task
+which was enjoined me. I found that I could not compose a female without again
+devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition. I had
+heard of some discoveries having been made by an English philosopher, the
+knowledge of which was material to my success, and I sometimes thought of
+obtaining my father’s consent to visit England for this purpose; but I clung to
+every pretence of delay and shrank from taking the first step in an undertaking
+whose immediate necessity began to appear less absolute to me. A change indeed
+had taken place in me; my health, which had hitherto declined, was now much
+restored; and my spirits, when unchecked by the memory of my unhappy promise,
+rose proportionably. My father saw this change with pleasure, and he turned his
+thoughts towards the best method of eradicating the remains of my melancholy,
+which every now and then would return by fits, and with a devouring blackness
+overcast the approaching sunshine. At these moments I took refuge in the most
+perfect solitude. I passed whole days on the lake alone in a little boat,
+watching the clouds and listening to the rippling of the waves, silent and
+listless. But the fresh air and bright sun seldom failed to restore me to some
+degree of composure, and on my return I met the salutations of my friends with
+a readier smile and a more cheerful heart.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+It was after my return from one of these rambles that my father, calling me
+aside, thus addressed me,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am happy to remark, my dear son, that you have resumed your former pleasures
+and seem to be returning to yourself. And yet you are still unhappy and still
+avoid our society. For some time I was lost in conjecture as to the cause of
+this, but yesterday an idea struck me, and if it is well founded, I conjure you
+to avow it. Reserve on such a point would be not only useless, but draw down
+treble misery on us all.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I trembled violently at his exordium, and my father continued—
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I confess, my son, that I have always looked forward to your marriage with our
+dear Elizabeth as the tie of our domestic comfort and the stay of my declining
+years. You were attached to each other from your earliest infancy; you studied
+together, and appeared, in dispositions and tastes, entirely suited to one
+another. But so blind is the experience of man that what I conceived to be the
+best assistants to my plan may have entirely destroyed it. You, perhaps, regard
+her as your sister, without any wish that she might become your wife. Nay, you
+may have met with another whom you may love; and considering yourself as bound
+in honour to Elizabeth, this struggle may occasion the poignant misery which
+you appear to feel.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear father, reassure yourself. I love my cousin tenderly and sincerely. I
+never saw any woman who excited, as Elizabeth does, my warmest admiration and
+affection. My future hopes and prospects are entirely bound up in the
+expectation of our union.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The expression of your sentiments of this subject, my dear Victor, gives me
+more pleasure than I have for some time experienced. If you feel thus, we shall
+assuredly be happy, however present events may cast a gloom over us. But it is
+this gloom which appears to have taken so strong a hold of your mind that I
+wish to dissipate. Tell me, therefore, whether you object to an immediate
+solemnisation of the marriage. We have been unfortunate, and recent events have
+drawn us from that everyday tranquillity befitting my years and infirmities.
+You are younger; yet I do not suppose, possessed as you are of a competent
+fortune, that an early marriage would at all interfere with any future plans of
+honour and utility that you may have formed. Do not suppose, however, that I
+wish to dictate happiness to you or that a delay on your part would cause me
+any serious uneasiness. Interpret my words with candour and answer me, I
+conjure you, with confidence and sincerity.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I listened to my father in silence and remained for some time incapable of
+offering any reply. I revolved rapidly in my mind a multitude of thoughts and
+endeavoured to arrive at some conclusion. Alas! To me the idea of an immediate
+union with my Elizabeth was one of horror and dismay. I was bound by a solemn
+promise which I had not yet fulfilled and dared not break, or if I did, what
+manifold miseries might not impend over me and my devoted family! Could I enter
+into a festival with this deadly weight yet hanging round my neck and bowing me
+to the ground? I must perform my engagement and let the monster depart with his
+mate before I allowed myself to enjoy the delight of a union from which I
+expected peace.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I remembered also the necessity imposed upon me of either journeying to England
+or entering into a long correspondence with those philosophers of that country
+whose knowledge and discoveries were of indispensable use to me in my present
+undertaking. The latter method of obtaining the desired intelligence was
+dilatory and unsatisfactory; besides, I had an insurmountable aversion to the
+idea of engaging myself in my loathsome task in my father’s house while in
+habits of familiar intercourse with those I loved. I knew that a thousand
+fearful accidents might occur, the slightest of which would disclose a tale to
+thrill all connected with me with horror. I was aware also that I should often
+lose all self-command, all capacity of hiding the harrowing sensations that
+would possess me during the progress of my unearthly occupation. I must absent
+myself from all I loved while thus employed. Once commenced, it would quickly
+be achieved, and I might be restored to my family in peace and happiness. My
+promise fulfilled, the monster would depart for ever. Or (so my fond fancy
+imaged) some accident might meanwhile occur to destroy him and put an end to my
+slavery for ever.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+These feelings dictated my answer to my father. I expressed a wish to visit
+England, but concealing the true reasons of this request, I clothed my desires
+under a guise which excited no suspicion, while I urged my desire with an
+earnestness that easily induced my father to comply. After so long a period of
+an absorbing melancholy that resembled madness in its intensity and effects, he
+was glad to find that I was capable of taking pleasure in the idea of such a
+journey, and he hoped that change of scene and varied amusement would, before
+my return, have restored me entirely to myself.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The duration of my absence was left to my own choice; a few months, or at most
+a year, was the period contemplated. One paternal kind precaution he had taken
+to ensure my having a companion. Without previously communicating with me, he
+had, in concert with Elizabeth, arranged that Clerval should join me at
+Strasburgh. This interfered with the solitude I coveted for the prosecution of
+my task; yet at the commencement of my journey the presence of my friend could
+in no way be an impediment, and truly I rejoiced that thus I should be saved
+many hours of lonely, maddening reflection. Nay, Henry might stand between me
+and the intrusion of my foe. If I were alone, would he not at times force his
+abhorred presence on me to remind me of my task or to contemplate its progress?
+
+
+
+
+ 
+To England, therefore, I was bound, and it was understood that my union with
+Elizabeth should take place immediately on my return. My father’s age rendered
+him extremely averse to delay. For myself, there was one reward I promised
+myself from my detested toils—one consolation for my unparalleled sufferings;
+it was the prospect of that day when, enfranchised from my miserable slavery, I
+might claim Elizabeth and forget the past in my union with her.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I now made arrangements for my journey, but one feeling haunted me which filled
+me with fear and agitation. During my absence I should leave my friends
+unconscious of the existence of their enemy and unprotected from his attacks,
+exasperated as he might be by my departure. But he had promised to follow me
+wherever I might go, and would he not accompany me to England? This imagination
+was dreadful in itself, but soothing inasmuch as it supposed the safety of my
+friends. I was agonised with the idea of the possibility that the reverse of
+this might happen. But through the whole period during which I was the slave of
+my creature I allowed myself to be governed by the impulses of the moment; and
+my present sensations strongly intimated that the fiend would follow me and
+exempt my family from the danger of his machinations.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+It was in the latter end of September that I again quitted my native country.
+My journey had been my own suggestion, and Elizabeth therefore acquiesced, but
+she was filled with disquiet at the idea of my suffering, away from her, the
+inroads of misery and grief. It had been her care which provided me a companion
+in Clerval—and yet a man is blind to a thousand minute circumstances which call
+forth a woman’s sedulous attention. She longed to bid me hasten my return; a
+thousand conflicting emotions rendered her mute as she bade me a tearful,
+silent farewell.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I threw myself into the carriage that was to convey me away, hardly knowing
+whither I was going, and careless of what was passing around. I remembered
+only, and it was with a bitter anguish that I reflected on it, to order that my
+chemical instruments should be packed to go with me. Filled with dreary
+imaginations, I passed through many beautiful and majestic scenes, but my eyes
+were fixed and unobserving. I could only think of the bourne of my travels and
+the work which was to occupy me whilst they endured.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+After some days spent in listless indolence, during which I traversed many
+leagues, I arrived at Strasburgh, where I waited two days for Clerval. He came.
+Alas, how great was the contrast between us! He was alive to every new scene,
+joyful when he saw the beauties of the setting sun, and more happy when he
+beheld it rise and recommence a new day. He pointed out to me the shifting
+colours of the landscape and the appearances of the sky. “This is what it is to
+live,” he cried; “now I enjoy existence! But you, my dear Frankenstein,
+wherefore are you desponding and sorrowful!” In truth, I was occupied by gloomy
+thoughts and neither saw the descent of the evening star nor the golden sunrise
+reflected in the Rhine. And you, my friend, would be far more amused with the
+journal of Clerval, who observed the scenery with an eye of feeling and
+delight, than in listening to my reflections. I, a miserable wretch, haunted by
+a curse that shut up every avenue to enjoyment.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We had agreed to descend the Rhine in a boat from Strasburgh to Rotterdam,
+whence we might take shipping for London. During this voyage we passed many
+willowy islands and saw several beautiful towns. We stayed a day at Mannheim,
+and on the fifth from our departure from Strasburgh, arrived at Mainz. The
+course of the Rhine below Mainz becomes much more picturesque. The river
+descends rapidly and winds between hills, not high, but steep, and of beautiful
+forms. We saw many ruined castles standing on the edges of precipices,
+surrounded by black woods, high and inaccessible. This part of the Rhine,
+indeed, presents a singularly variegated landscape. In one spot you view rugged
+hills, ruined castles overlooking tremendous precipices, with the dark Rhine
+rushing beneath; and on the sudden turn of a promontory, flourishing vineyards
+with green sloping banks and a meandering river and populous towns occupy the
+scene.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We travelled at the time of the vintage and heard the song of the labourers as
+we glided down the stream. Even I, depressed in mind, and my spirits
+continually agitated by gloomy feelings, even I was pleased. I lay at the
+bottom of the boat, and as I gazed on the cloudless blue sky, I seemed to drink
+in a tranquillity to which I had long been a stranger. And if these were my
+sensations, who can describe those of Henry? He felt as if he had been
+transported to Fairy-land and enjoyed a happiness seldom tasted by man. “I have
+seen,” he said, “the most beautiful scenes of my own country; I have visited
+the lakes of Lucerne and Uri, where the snowy mountains descend almost
+perpendicularly to the water, casting black and impenetrable shades, which
+would cause a gloomy and mournful appearance were it not for the most verdant
+islands that relieve the eye by their gay appearance; I have seen this lake
+agitated by a tempest, when the wind tore up whirlwinds of water and gave you
+an idea of what the water-spout must be on the great ocean; and the waves dash
+with fury the base of the mountain, where the priest and his mistress were
+overwhelmed by an avalanche and where their dying voices are still said to be
+heard amid the pauses of the nightly wind; I have seen the mountains of La
+Valais, and the Pays de Vaud; but this country, Victor, pleases me more than
+all those wonders. The mountains of Switzerland are more majestic and strange,
+but there is a charm in the banks of this divine river that I never before saw
+equalled. Look at that castle which overhangs yon precipice; and that also on
+the island, almost concealed amongst the foliage of those lovely trees; and now
+that group of labourers coming from among their vines; and that village half
+hid in the recess of the mountain. Oh, surely the spirit that inhabits and
+guards this place has a soul more in harmony with man than those who pile the
+glacier or retire to the inaccessible peaks of the mountains of our own
+country.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Clerval! Beloved friend! Even now it delights me to record your words and to
+dwell on the praise of which you are so eminently deserving. He was a being
+formed in the “very poetry of nature.” His wild and enthusiastic imagination
+was chastened by the sensibility of his heart. His soul overflowed with ardent
+affections, and his friendship was of that devoted and wondrous nature that the
+worldly-minded teach us to look for only in the imagination. But even human
+sympathies were not sufficient to satisfy his eager mind. The scenery of
+external nature, which others regard only with admiration, he loved with
+ardour:—
+
+
+
+
+ 
+——The sounding cataract
+
+Haunted him like a passion: the tall rock,
+
+The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
+
+Their colours and their forms, were then to him
+
+An appetite; a feeling, and a love,
+
+That had no need of a remoter charm,
+
+By thought supplied, or any interest
+
+Unborrow’d from the eye.
+
+
+
+[Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”.]
+
+
+
+
+ 
+And where does he now exist? Is this gentle and lovely being lost for ever? Has
+this mind, so replete with ideas, imaginations fanciful and magnificent, which
+formed a world, whose existence depended on the life of its creator;—has this
+mind perished? Does it now only exist in my memory? No, it is not thus; your
+form so divinely wrought, and beaming with beauty, has decayed, but your spirit
+still visits and consoles your unhappy friend.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Pardon this gush of sorrow; these ineffectual words are but a slight tribute to
+the unexampled worth of Henry, but they soothe my heart, overflowing with the
+anguish which his remembrance creates. I will proceed with my tale.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Beyond Cologne we descended to the plains of Holland; and we resolved to post
+the remainder of our way, for the wind was contrary and the stream of the river
+was too gentle to aid us.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Our journey here lost the interest arising from beautiful scenery, but we
+arrived in a few days at Rotterdam, whence we proceeded by sea to England. It
+was on a clear morning, in the latter days of December, that I first saw the
+white cliffs of Britain. The banks of the Thames presented a new scene; they
+were flat but fertile, and almost every town was marked by the remembrance of
+some story. We saw Tilbury Fort and remembered the Spanish Armada, Gravesend,
+Woolwich, and Greenwich—places which I had heard of even in my country.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+At length we saw the numerous steeples of London, St. Paul’s towering above
+all, and the Tower famed in English history.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 19 
+
+ 
+London was our present point of rest; we determined to remain several months in
+this wonderful and celebrated city. Clerval desired the intercourse of the men
+of genius and talent who flourished at this time, but this was with me a
+secondary object; I was principally occupied with the means of obtaining the
+information necessary for the completion of my promise and quickly availed
+myself of the letters of introduction that I had brought with me, addressed to
+the most distinguished natural philosophers.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+If this journey had taken place during my days of study and happiness, it would
+have afforded me inexpressible pleasure. But a blight had come over my
+existence, and I only visited these people for the sake of the information they
+might give me on the subject in which my interest was so terribly profound.
+Company was irksome to me; when alone, I could fill my mind with the sights of
+heaven and earth; the voice of Henry soothed me, and I could thus cheat myself
+into a transitory peace. But busy, uninteresting, joyous faces brought back
+despair to my heart. I saw an insurmountable barrier placed between me and my
+fellow men; this barrier was sealed with the blood of William and Justine, and
+to reflect on the events connected with those names filled my soul with
+anguish.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+But in Clerval I saw the image of my former self; he was inquisitive and
+anxious to gain experience and instruction. The difference of manners which he
+observed was to him an inexhaustible source of instruction and amusement. He
+was also pursuing an object he had long had in view. His design was to visit
+India, in the belief that he had in his knowledge of its various languages, and
+in the views he had taken of its society, the means of materially assisting the
+progress of European colonization and trade. In Britain only could he further
+the execution of his plan. He was for ever busy, and the only check to his
+enjoyments was my sorrowful and dejected mind. I tried to conceal this as much
+as possible, that I might not debar him from the pleasures natural to one who
+was entering on a new scene of life, undisturbed by any care or bitter
+recollection. I often refused to accompany him, alleging another engagement,
+that I might remain alone. I now also began to collect the materials necessary
+for my new creation, and this was to me like the torture of single drops of
+water continually falling on the head. Every thought that was devoted to it was
+an extreme anguish, and every word that I spoke in allusion to it caused my
+lips to quiver, and my heart to palpitate.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+After passing some months in London, we received a letter from a person in
+Scotland who had formerly been our visitor at Geneva. He mentioned the beauties
+of his native country and asked us if those were not sufficient allurements to
+induce us to prolong our journey as far north as Perth, where he resided.
+Clerval eagerly desired to accept this invitation, and I, although I abhorred
+society, wished to view again mountains and streams and all the wondrous works
+with which Nature adorns her chosen dwelling-places.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We had arrived in England at the beginning of October, and it was now February.
+We accordingly determined to commence our journey towards the north at the
+expiration of another month. In this expedition we did not intend to follow the
+great road to Edinburgh, but to visit Windsor, Oxford, Matlock, and the
+Cumberland lakes, resolving to arrive at the completion of this tour about the
+end of July. I packed up my chemical instruments and the materials I had
+collected, resolving to finish my labours in some obscure nook in the northern
+highlands of Scotland.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We quitted London on the 27th of March and remained a few days at Windsor,
+rambling in its beautiful forest. This was a new scene to us mountaineers; the
+majestic oaks, the quantity of game, and the herds of stately deer were all
+novelties to us.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+From thence we proceeded to Oxford. As we entered this city, our minds were
+filled with the remembrance of the events that had been transacted there more
+than a century and a half before. It was here that Charles I. had collected his
+forces. This city had remained faithful to him, after the whole nation had
+forsaken his cause to join the standard of Parliament and liberty. The memory
+of that unfortunate king and his companions, the amiable Falkland, the insolent
+Goring, his queen, and son, gave a peculiar interest to every part of the city
+which they might be supposed to have inhabited. The spirit of elder days found
+a dwelling here, and we delighted to trace its footsteps. If these feelings had
+not found an imaginary gratification, the appearance of the city had yet in
+itself sufficient beauty to obtain our admiration. The colleges are ancient and
+picturesque; the streets are almost magnificent; and the lovely Isis, which
+flows beside it through meadows of exquisite verdure, is spread forth into a
+placid expanse of waters, which reflects its majestic assemblage of towers, and
+spires, and domes, embosomed among aged trees.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I enjoyed this scene, and yet my enjoyment was embittered both by the memory of
+the past and the anticipation of the future. I was formed for peaceful
+happiness. During my youthful days discontent never visited my mind, and if I
+was ever overcome by ennui , the sight of what is beautiful in nature or
+the study of what is excellent and sublime in the productions of man could
+always interest my heart and communicate elasticity to my spirits. But I am a
+blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should
+survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be—a miserable spectacle of
+wrecked humanity, pitiable to others and intolerable to myself.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We passed a considerable period at Oxford, rambling among its environs and
+endeavouring to identify every spot which might relate to the most animating
+epoch of English history. Our little voyages of discovery were often prolonged
+by the successive objects that presented themselves. We visited the tomb of the
+illustrious Hampden and the field on which that patriot fell. For a moment my
+soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to contemplate the
+divine ideas of liberty and self-sacrifice of which these sights were the
+monuments and the remembrancers. For an instant I dared to shake off my chains
+and look around me with a free and lofty spirit, but the iron had eaten into my
+flesh, and I sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We left Oxford with regret and proceeded to Matlock, which was our next place
+of rest. The country in the neighbourhood of this village resembled, to a
+greater degree, the scenery of Switzerland; but everything is on a lower scale,
+and the green hills want the crown of distant white Alps which always attend on
+the piny mountains of my native country. We visited the wondrous cave and the
+little cabinets of natural history, where the curiosities are disposed in the
+same manner as in the collections at Servox and Chamounix. The latter name made
+me tremble when pronounced by Henry, and I hastened to quit Matlock, with which
+that terrible scene was thus associated.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+From Derby, still journeying northwards, we passed two months in Cumberland and
+Westmorland. I could now almost fancy myself among the Swiss mountains. The
+little patches of snow which yet lingered on the northern sides of the
+mountains, the lakes, and the dashing of the rocky streams were all familiar
+and dear sights to me. Here also we made some acquaintances, who almost
+contrived to cheat me into happiness. The delight of Clerval was proportionably
+greater than mine; his mind expanded in the company of men of talent, and he
+found in his own nature greater capacities and resources than he could have
+imagined himself to have possessed while he associated with his inferiors. “I
+could pass my life here,” said he to me; “and among these mountains I should
+scarcely regret Switzerland and the Rhine.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+But he found that a traveller’s life is one that includes much pain amidst its
+enjoyments. His feelings are for ever on the stretch; and when he begins to
+sink into repose, he finds himself obliged to quit that on which he rests in
+pleasure for something new, which again engages his attention, and which also
+he forsakes for other novelties.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We had scarcely visited the various lakes of Cumberland and Westmorland and
+conceived an affection for some of the inhabitants when the period of our
+appointment with our Scotch friend approached, and we left them to travel on.
+For my own part I was not sorry. I had now neglected my promise for some time,
+and I feared the effects of the dæmon’s disappointment. He might remain in
+Switzerland and wreak his vengeance on my relatives. This idea pursued me and
+tormented me at every moment from which I might otherwise have snatched repose
+and peace. I waited for my letters with feverish impatience; if they were
+delayed I was miserable and overcome by a thousand fears; and when they arrived
+and I saw the superscription of Elizabeth or my father, I hardly dared to read
+and ascertain my fate. Sometimes I thought that the fiend followed me and might
+expedite my remissness by murdering my companion. When these thoughts possessed
+me, I would not quit Henry for a moment, but followed him as his shadow, to
+protect him from the fancied rage of his destroyer. I felt as if I had
+committed some great crime, the consciousness of which haunted me. I was
+guiltless, but I had indeed drawn down a horrible curse upon my head, as mortal
+as that of crime.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I visited Edinburgh with languid eyes and mind; and yet that city might have
+interested the most unfortunate being. Clerval did not like it so well as
+Oxford, for the antiquity of the latter city was more pleasing to him. But the
+beauty and regularity of the new town of Edinburgh, its romantic castle and its
+environs, the most delightful in the world, Arthur’s Seat, St. Bernard’s Well,
+and the Pentland Hills, compensated him for the change and filled him with
+cheerfulness and admiration. But I was impatient to arrive at the termination
+of my journey. 
+
+
+
+ 
+We left Edinburgh in a week, passing through Coupar, St. Andrew’s, and along
+the banks of the Tay, to Perth, where our friend expected us. But I was in no
+mood to laugh and talk with strangers or enter into their feelings or plans
+with the good humour expected from a guest; and accordingly I told Clerval that
+I wished to make the tour of Scotland alone. “Do you,” said I, “enjoy yourself,
+and let this be our rendezvous. I may be absent a month or two; but do not
+interfere with my motions, I entreat you; leave me to peace and solitude for a
+short time; and when I return, I hope it will be with a lighter heart, more
+congenial to your own temper.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Henry wished to dissuade me, but seeing me bent on this plan, ceased to
+remonstrate. He entreated me to write often. “I had rather be with you,” he
+said, “in your solitary rambles, than with these Scotch people, whom I do not
+know; hasten, then, my dear friend, to return, that I may again feel myself
+somewhat at home, which I cannot do in your absence.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Having parted from my friend, I determined to visit some remote spot of
+Scotland and finish my work in solitude. I did not doubt but that the monster
+followed me and would discover himself to me when I should have finished, that
+he might receive his companion.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+With this resolution I traversed the northern highlands and fixed on one of the
+remotest of the Orkneys as the scene of my labours. It was a place fitted for
+such a work, being hardly more than a rock whose high sides were continually
+beaten upon by the waves. The soil was barren, scarcely affording pasture for a
+few miserable cows, and oatmeal for its inhabitants, which consisted of five
+persons, whose gaunt and scraggy limbs gave tokens of their miserable fare.
+Vegetables and bread, when they indulged in such luxuries, and even fresh
+water, was to be procured from the mainland, which was about five miles
+distant.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+On the whole island there were but three miserable huts, and one of these was
+vacant when I arrived. This I hired. It contained but two rooms, and these
+exhibited all the squalidness of the most miserable penury. The thatch had
+fallen in, the walls were unplastered, and the door was off its hinges. I
+ordered it to be repaired, bought some furniture, and took possession, an
+incident which would doubtless have occasioned some surprise had not all the
+senses of the cottagers been benumbed by want and squalid poverty. As it was, I
+lived ungazed at and unmolested, hardly thanked for the pittance of food and
+clothes which I gave, so much does suffering blunt even the coarsest sensations
+of men.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+In this retreat I devoted the morning to labour; but in the evening, when the
+weather permitted, I walked on the stony beach of the sea to listen to the
+waves as they roared and dashed at my feet. It was a monotonous yet
+ever-changing scene. I thought of Switzerland; it was far different from this
+desolate and appalling landscape. Its hills are covered with vines, and its
+cottages are scattered thickly in the plains. Its fair lakes reflect a blue and
+gentle sky, and when troubled by the winds, their tumult is but as the play of
+a lively infant when compared to the roarings of the giant ocean.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+In this manner I distributed my occupations when I first arrived, but as I
+proceeded in my labour, it became every day more horrible and irksome to me.
+Sometimes I could not prevail on myself to enter my laboratory for several
+days, and at other times I toiled day and night in order to complete my work.
+It was, indeed, a filthy process in which I was engaged. During my first
+experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my
+employment; my mind was intently fixed on the consummation of my labour, and my
+eyes were shut to the horror of my proceedings. But now I went to it in cold
+blood, and my heart often sickened at the work of my hands.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Thus situated, employed in the most detestable occupation, immersed in a
+solitude where nothing could for an instant call my attention from the actual
+scene in which I was engaged, my spirits became unequal; I grew restless and
+nervous. Every moment I feared to meet my persecutor. Sometimes I sat with my
+eyes fixed on the ground, fearing to raise them lest they should encounter the
+object which I so much dreaded to behold. I feared to wander from the sight of
+my fellow creatures lest when alone he should come to claim his companion.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+In the mean time I worked on, and my labour was already considerably advanced.
+I looked towards its completion with a tremulous and eager hope, which I dared
+not trust myself to question but which was intermixed with obscure forebodings
+of evil that made my heart sicken in my bosom.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 20 
+
+ 
+I sat one evening in my laboratory; the sun had set, and the moon was just
+rising from the sea; I had not sufficient light for my employment, and I
+remained idle, in a pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labour
+for the night or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention to it. As I
+sat, a train of reflection occurred to me which led me to consider the effects
+of what I was now doing. Three years before, I was engaged in the same manner
+and had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated my heart and
+filled it for ever with the bitterest remorse. I was now about to form another
+being of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand
+times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and
+wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighbourhood of man and hide himself in
+deserts, but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a
+thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made
+before her creation. They might even hate each other; the creature who already
+lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence
+for it when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might turn
+with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he
+be again alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one
+of his own species.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Even if they were to leave Europe and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet
+one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would
+be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might
+make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full
+of terror. Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon
+everlasting generations? I had before been moved by the sophisms of the being I
+had created; I had been struck senseless by his fiendish threats; but now, for
+the first time, the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to
+think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not
+hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the
+whole human race.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I trembled and my heart failed within me, when, on looking up, I saw by the
+light of the moon the dæmon at the casement. A ghastly grin wrinkled his lips
+as he gazed on me, where I sat fulfilling the task which he had allotted to me.
+Yes, he had followed me in my travels; he had loitered in forests, hid himself
+in caves, or taken refuge in wide and desert heaths; and he now came to mark my
+progress and claim the fulfilment of my promise.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+As I looked on him, his countenance expressed the utmost extent of malice and
+treachery. I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating
+another like to him, and trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on
+which I was engaged. The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future
+existence he depended for happiness, and with a howl of devilish despair and
+revenge, withdrew.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I left the room, and locking the door, made a solemn vow in my own heart never
+to resume my labours; and then, with trembling steps, I sought my own
+apartment. I was alone; none were near me to dissipate the gloom and relieve me
+from the sickening oppression of the most terrible reveries.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Several hours passed, and I remained near my window gazing on the sea; it was
+almost motionless, for the winds were hushed, and all nature reposed under the
+eye of the quiet moon. A few fishing vessels alone specked the water, and now
+and then the gentle breeze wafted the sound of voices as the fishermen called
+to one another. I felt the silence, although I was hardly conscious of its
+extreme profundity, until my ear was suddenly arrested by the paddling of oars
+near the shore, and a person landed close to my house.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+In a few minutes after, I heard the creaking of my door, as if some one
+endeavoured to open it softly. I trembled from head to foot; I felt a
+presentiment of who it was and wished to rouse one of the peasants who dwelt in
+a cottage not far from mine; but I was overcome by the sensation of
+helplessness, so often felt in frightful dreams, when you in vain endeavour to
+fly from an impending danger, and was rooted to the spot.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Presently I heard the sound of footsteps along the passage; the door opened,
+and the wretch whom I dreaded appeared. Shutting the door, he approached me and
+said in a smothered voice,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have destroyed the work which you began; what is it that you intend? Do
+you dare to break your promise? I have endured toil and misery; I left
+Switzerland with you; I crept along the shores of the Rhine, among its willow
+islands and over the summits of its hills. I have dwelt many months in the
+heaths of England and among the deserts of Scotland. I have endured
+incalculable fatigue, and cold, and hunger; do you dare destroy my hopes?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Begone! I do break my promise; never will I create another like yourself,
+equal in deformity and wickedness.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my
+condescension. Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but
+I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You
+are my creator, but I am your master; obey!”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“The hour of my irresolution is past, and the period of your power is arrived.
+Your threats cannot move me to do an act of wickedness; but they confirm me in
+a determination of not creating you a companion in vice. Shall I, in cool
+blood, set loose upon the earth a dæmon whose delight is in death and
+wretchedness? Begone! I am firm, and your words will only exasperate my rage.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The monster saw my determination in my face and gnashed his teeth in the
+impotence of anger. “Shall each man,” cried he, “find a wife for his bosom, and
+each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they
+were requited by detestation and scorn. Man! You may hate, but beware! Your
+hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must
+ravish from you your happiness for ever. Are you to be happy while I grovel in
+the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions, but revenge
+remains—revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die, but first
+you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery.
+Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the
+wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of
+the injuries you inflict.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Devil, cease; and do not poison the air with these sounds of malice. I have
+declared my resolution to you, and I am no coward to bend beneath words. Leave
+me; I am inexorable.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is well. I go; but remember, I shall be with you on your wedding-night.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I started forward and exclaimed, “Villain! Before you sign my death-warrant, be
+sure that you are yourself safe.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I would have seized him, but he eluded me and quitted the house with
+precipitation. In a few moments I saw him in his boat, which shot across the
+waters with an arrowy swiftness and was soon lost amidst the waves.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+All was again silent, but his words rang in my ears. I burned with rage to
+pursue the murderer of my peace and precipitate him into the ocean. I walked up
+and down my room hastily and perturbed, while my imagination conjured up a
+thousand images to torment and sting me. Why had I not followed him and closed
+with him in mortal strife? But I had suffered him to depart, and he had
+directed his course towards the mainland. I shuddered to think who might be the
+next victim sacrificed to his insatiate revenge. And then I thought again of
+his words—“ I will be with you on your wedding-night. ” That, then, was
+the period fixed for the fulfilment of my destiny. In that hour I should die
+and at once satisfy and extinguish his malice. The prospect did not move me to
+fear; yet when I thought of my beloved Elizabeth, of her tears and endless
+sorrow, when she should find her lover so barbarously snatched from her, tears,
+the first I had shed for many months, streamed from my eyes, and I resolved not
+to fall before my enemy without a bitter struggle.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The night passed away, and the sun rose from the ocean; my feelings became
+calmer, if it may be called calmness when the violence of rage sinks into the
+depths of despair. I left the house, the horrid scene of the last night’s
+contention, and walked on the beach of the sea, which I almost regarded as an
+insuperable barrier between me and my fellow creatures; nay, a wish that such
+should prove the fact stole across me. I desired that I might pass my life on
+that barren rock, wearily, it is true, but uninterrupted by any sudden shock of
+misery. If I returned, it was to be sacrificed or to see those whom I most
+loved die under the grasp of a dæmon whom I had myself created.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I walked about the isle like a restless spectre, separated from all it loved
+and miserable in the separation. When it became noon, and the sun rose higher,
+I lay down on the grass and was overpowered by a deep sleep. I had been awake
+the whole of the preceding night, my nerves were agitated, and my eyes inflamed
+by watching and misery. The sleep into which I now sank refreshed me; and when
+I awoke, I again felt as if I belonged to a race of human beings like myself,
+and I began to reflect upon what had passed with greater composure; yet still
+the words of the fiend rang in my ears like a death-knell; they appeared like a
+dream, yet distinct and oppressive as a reality.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The sun had far descended, and I still sat on the shore, satisfying my
+appetite, which had become ravenous, with an oaten cake, when I saw a
+fishing-boat land close to me, and one of the men brought me a packet; it
+contained letters from Geneva, and one from Clerval entreating me to join him.
+He said that he was wearing away his time fruitlessly where he was, that
+letters from the friends he had formed in London desired his return to complete
+the negotiation they had entered into for his Indian enterprise. He could not
+any longer delay his departure; but as his journey to London might be followed,
+even sooner than he now conjectured, by his longer voyage, he entreated me to
+bestow as much of my society on him as I could spare. He besought me,
+therefore, to leave my solitary isle and to meet him at Perth, that we might
+proceed southwards together. This letter in a degree recalled me to life, and I
+determined to quit my island at the expiration of two days.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Yet, before I departed, there was a task to perform, on which I shuddered to
+reflect; I must pack up my chemical instruments, and for that purpose I must
+enter the room which had been the scene of my odious work, and I must handle
+those utensils the sight of which was sickening to me. The next morning, at
+daybreak, I summoned sufficient courage and unlocked the door of my laboratory.
+The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered
+on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human
+being. I paused to collect myself and then entered the chamber. With trembling
+hand I conveyed the instruments out of the room, but I reflected that I ought
+not to leave the relics of my work to excite the horror and suspicion of the
+peasants; and I accordingly put them into a basket, with a great quantity of
+stones, and laying them up, determined to throw them into the sea that very
+night; and in the meantime I sat upon the beach, employed in cleaning and
+arranging my chemical apparatus. 
+
+
+
+ 
+Nothing could be more complete than the alteration that had taken place in my
+feelings since the night of the appearance of the dæmon. I had before regarded
+my promise with a gloomy despair as a thing that, with whatever consequences,
+must be fulfilled; but I now felt as if a film had been taken from before my
+eyes and that I for the first time saw clearly. The idea of renewing my labours
+did not for one instant occur to me; the threat I had heard weighed on my
+thoughts, but I did not reflect that a voluntary act of mine could avert it. I
+had resolved in my own mind that to create another like the fiend I had first
+made would be an act of the basest and most atrocious selfishness, and I
+banished from my mind every thought that could lead to a different conclusion.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Between two and three in the morning the moon rose; and I then, putting my
+basket aboard a little skiff, sailed out about four miles from the shore. The
+scene was perfectly solitary; a few boats were returning towards land, but I
+sailed away from them. I felt as if I was about the commission of a dreadful
+crime and avoided with shuddering anxiety any encounter with my fellow
+creatures. At one time the moon, which had before been clear, was suddenly
+overspread by a thick cloud, and I took advantage of the moment of darkness and
+cast my basket into the sea; I listened to the gurgling sound as it sank and
+then sailed away from the spot. The sky became clouded, but the air was pure,
+although chilled by the northeast breeze that was then rising. But it refreshed
+me and filled me with such agreeable sensations that I resolved to prolong my
+stay on the water, and fixing the rudder in a direct position, stretched myself
+at the bottom of the boat. Clouds hid the moon, everything was obscure, and I
+heard only the sound of the boat as its keel cut through the waves; the murmur
+lulled me, and in a short time I slept soundly.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I do not know how long I remained in this situation, but when I awoke I found
+that the sun had already mounted considerably. The wind was high, and the waves
+continually threatened the safety of my little skiff. I found that the wind was
+northeast and must have driven me far from the coast from which I had embarked.
+I endeavoured to change my course but quickly found that if I again made the
+attempt the boat would be instantly filled with water. Thus situated, my only
+resource was to drive before the wind. I confess that I felt a few sensations
+of terror. I had no compass with me and was so slenderly acquainted with the
+geography of this part of the world that the sun was of little benefit to me. I
+might be driven into the wide Atlantic and feel all the tortures of starvation
+or be swallowed up in the immeasurable waters that roared and buffeted around
+me. I had already been out many hours and felt the torment of a burning thirst,
+a prelude to my other sufferings. I looked on the heavens, which were covered
+by clouds that flew before the wind, only to be replaced by others; I looked
+upon the sea; it was to be my grave. “Fiend,” I exclaimed, “your task is
+already fulfilled!” I thought of Elizabeth, of my father, and of Clerval—all
+left behind, on whom the monster might satisfy his sanguinary and merciless
+passions. This idea plunged me into a reverie so despairing and frightful that
+even now, when the scene is on the point of closing before me for ever, I
+shudder to reflect on it.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Some hours passed thus; but by degrees, as the sun declined towards the
+horizon, the wind died away into a gentle breeze and the sea became free from
+breakers. But these gave place to a heavy swell; I felt sick and hardly able to
+hold the rudder, when suddenly I saw a line of high land towards the south.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Almost spent, as I was, by fatigue and the dreadful suspense I endured for
+several hours, this sudden certainty of life rushed like a flood of warm joy to
+my heart, and tears gushed from my eyes.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of
+life even in the excess of misery! I constructed another sail with a part of my
+dress and eagerly steered my course towards the land. It had a wild and rocky
+appearance, but as I approached nearer I easily perceived the traces of
+cultivation. I saw vessels near the shore and found myself suddenly transported
+back to the neighbourhood of civilised man. I carefully traced the windings of
+the land and hailed a steeple which I at length saw issuing from behind a small
+promontory. As I was in a state of extreme debility, I resolved to sail
+directly towards the town, as a place where I could most easily procure
+nourishment. Fortunately I had money with me. As I turned the promontory I
+perceived a small neat town and a good harbour, which I entered, my heart
+bounding with joy at my unexpected escape.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+As I was occupied in fixing the boat and arranging the sails, several people
+crowded towards the spot. They seemed much surprised at my appearance, but
+instead of offering me any assistance, whispered together with gestures that at
+any other time might have produced in me a slight sensation of alarm. As it
+was, I merely remarked that they spoke English, and I therefore addressed them
+in that language. “My good friends,” said I, “will you be so kind as to tell me
+the name of this town and inform me where I am?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“You will know that soon enough,” replied a man with a hoarse voice. “Maybe you
+are come to a place that will not prove much to your taste, but you will not be
+consulted as to your quarters, I promise you.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I was exceedingly surprised on receiving so rude an answer from a stranger, and
+I was also disconcerted on perceiving the frowning and angry countenances of
+his companions. “Why do you answer me so roughly?” I replied. “Surely it is not
+the custom of Englishmen to receive strangers so inhospitably.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I do not know,” said the man, “what the custom of the English may be, but it
+is the custom of the Irish to hate villains.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+While this strange dialogue continued, I perceived the crowd rapidly increase.
+Their faces expressed a mixture of curiosity and anger, which annoyed and in
+some degree alarmed me. I inquired the way to the inn, but no one replied. I
+then moved forward, and a murmuring sound arose from the crowd as they followed
+and surrounded me, when an ill-looking man approaching tapped me on the
+shoulder and said, “Come, sir, you must follow me to Mr. Kirwin’s to give an
+account of yourself.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Who is Mr. Kirwin? Why am I to give an account of myself? Is not this a free
+country?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ay, sir, free enough for honest folks. Mr. Kirwin is a magistrate, and you are
+to give an account of the death of a gentleman who was found murdered here last
+night.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+This answer startled me, but I presently recovered myself. I was innocent; that
+could easily be proved; accordingly I followed my conductor in silence and was
+led to one of the best houses in the town. I was ready to sink from fatigue and
+hunger, but being surrounded by a crowd, I thought it politic to rouse all my
+strength, that no physical debility might be construed into apprehension or
+conscious guilt. Little did I then expect the calamity that was in a few
+moments to overwhelm me and extinguish in horror and despair all fear of
+ignominy or death.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I must pause here, for it requires all my fortitude to recall the memory of the
+frightful events which I am about to relate, in proper detail, to my
+recollection.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 21 
+
+ 
+I was soon introduced into the presence of the magistrate, an old benevolent
+man with calm and mild manners. He looked upon me, however, with some degree of
+severity, and then, turning towards my conductors, he asked who appeared as
+witnesses on this occasion.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+About half a dozen men came forward; and, one being selected by the magistrate,
+he deposed that he had been out fishing the night before with his son and
+brother-in-law, Daniel Nugent, when, about ten o’clock, they observed a strong
+northerly blast rising, and they accordingly put in for port. It was a very
+dark night, as the moon had not yet risen; they did not land at the harbour,
+but, as they had been accustomed, at a creek about two miles below. He walked
+on first, carrying a part of the fishing tackle, and his companions followed
+him at some distance. As he was proceeding along the sands, he struck his foot
+against something and fell at his length on the ground. His companions came up
+to assist him, and by the light of their lantern they found that he had fallen
+on the body of a man, who was to all appearance dead. Their first supposition
+was that it was the corpse of some person who had been drowned and was thrown
+on shore by the waves, but on examination they found that the clothes were not
+wet and even that the body was not then cold. They instantly carried it to the
+cottage of an old woman near the spot and endeavoured, but in vain, to restore
+it to life. It appeared to be a handsome young man, about five and twenty years
+of age. He had apparently been strangled, for there was no sign of any violence
+except the black mark of fingers on his neck.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The first part of this deposition did not in the least interest me, but when
+the mark of the fingers was mentioned I remembered the murder of my brother and
+felt myself extremely agitated; my limbs trembled, and a mist came over my
+eyes, which obliged me to lean on a chair for support. The magistrate observed
+me with a keen eye and of course drew an unfavourable augury from my manner.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The son confirmed his father’s account, but when Daniel Nugent was called he
+swore positively that just before the fall of his companion, he saw a boat,
+with a single man in it, at a short distance from the shore; and as far as he
+could judge by the light of a few stars, it was the same boat in which I had
+just landed.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+A woman deposed that she lived near the beach and was standing at the door of
+her cottage, waiting for the return of the fishermen, about an hour before she
+heard of the discovery of the body, when she saw a boat with only one man in it
+push off from that part of the shore where the corpse was afterwards found.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Another woman confirmed the account of the fishermen having brought the body
+into her house; it was not cold. They put it into a bed and rubbed it, and
+Daniel went to the town for an apothecary, but life was quite gone.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Several other men were examined concerning my landing, and they agreed that,
+with the strong north wind that had arisen during the night, it was very
+probable that I had beaten about for many hours and had been obliged to return
+nearly to the same spot from which I had departed. Besides, they observed that
+it appeared that I had brought the body from another place, and it was likely
+that as I did not appear to know the shore, I might have put into the harbour
+ignorant of the distance of the town of —— from the place where I had deposited
+the corpse.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Mr. Kirwin, on hearing this evidence, desired that I should be taken into the
+room where the body lay for interment, that it might be observed what effect
+the sight of it would produce upon me. This idea was probably suggested by the
+extreme agitation I had exhibited when the mode of the murder had been
+described. I was accordingly conducted, by the magistrate and several other
+persons, to the inn. I could not help being struck by the strange coincidences
+that had taken place during this eventful night; but, knowing that I had been
+conversing with several persons in the island I had inhabited about the time
+that the body had been found, I was perfectly tranquil as to the consequences
+of the affair.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I entered the room where the corpse lay and was led up to the coffin. How can I
+describe my sensations on beholding it? I feel yet parched with horror, nor can
+I reflect on that terrible moment without shuddering and agony. The
+examination, the presence of the magistrate and witnesses, passed like a dream
+from my memory when I saw the lifeless form of Henry Clerval stretched before
+me. I gasped for breath, and throwing myself on the body, I exclaimed, “Have my
+murderous machinations deprived you also, my dearest Henry, of life? Two I have
+already destroyed; other victims await their destiny; but you, Clerval, my
+friend, my benefactor—”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The human frame could no longer support the agonies that I endured, and I was
+carried out of the room in strong convulsions.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+A fever succeeded to this. I lay for two months on the point of death; my
+ravings, as I afterwards heard, were frightful; I called myself the murderer of
+William, of Justine, and of Clerval. Sometimes I entreated my attendants to
+assist me in the destruction of the fiend by whom I was tormented; and at
+others I felt the fingers of the monster already grasping my neck, and screamed
+aloud with agony and terror. Fortunately, as I spoke my native language, Mr.
+Kirwin alone understood me; but my gestures and bitter cries were sufficient to
+affright the other witnesses.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Why did I not die? More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink
+into forgetfulness and rest? Death snatches away many blooming children, the
+only hopes of their doting parents; how many brides and youthful lovers have
+been one day in the bloom of health and hope, and the next a prey for worms and
+the decay of the tomb! Of what materials was I made that I could thus resist so
+many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the
+torture?
+
+
+
+
+ 
+But I was doomed to live and in two months found myself as awaking from a
+dream, in a prison, stretched on a wretched bed, surrounded by gaolers,
+turnkeys, bolts, and all the miserable apparatus of a dungeon. It was morning,
+I remember, when I thus awoke to understanding; I had forgotten the particulars
+of what had happened and only felt as if some great misfortune had suddenly
+overwhelmed me; but when I looked around and saw the barred windows and the
+squalidness of the room in which I was, all flashed across my memory and I
+groaned bitterly.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+This sound disturbed an old woman who was sleeping in a chair beside me. She
+was a hired nurse, the wife of one of the turnkeys, and her countenance
+expressed all those bad qualities which often characterise that class. The
+lines of her face were hard and rude, like that of persons accustomed to see
+without sympathising in sights of misery. Her tone expressed her entire
+indifference; she addressed me in English, and the voice struck me as one that
+I had heard during my sufferings.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Are you better now, sir?” said she.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I replied in the same language, with a feeble voice, “I believe I am; but if it
+be all true, if indeed I did not dream, I am sorry that I am still alive to
+feel this misery and horror.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“For that matter,” replied the old woman, “if you mean about the gentleman you
+murdered, I believe that it were better for you if you were dead, for I fancy
+it will go hard with you! However, that’s none of my business; I am sent to
+nurse you and get you well; I do my duty with a safe conscience; it were well
+if everybody did the same.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I turned with loathing from the woman who could utter so unfeeling a speech to
+a person just saved, on the very edge of death; but I felt languid and unable
+to reflect on all that had passed. The whole series of my life appeared to me
+as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never
+presented itself to my mind with the force of reality.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+As the images that floated before me became more distinct, I grew feverish; a
+darkness pressed around me; no one was near me who soothed me with the gentle
+voice of love; no dear hand supported me. The physician came and prescribed
+medicines, and the old woman prepared them for me; but utter carelessness was
+visible in the first, and the expression of brutality was strongly marked in
+the visage of the second. Who could be interested in the fate of a murderer but
+the hangman who would gain his fee?
+
+
+
+
+ 
+These were my first reflections, but I soon learned that Mr. Kirwin had shown
+me extreme kindness. He had caused the best room in the prison to be prepared
+for me (wretched indeed was the best); and it was he who had provided a
+physician and a nurse. It is true, he seldom came to see me, for although he
+ardently desired to relieve the sufferings of every human creature, he did not
+wish to be present at the agonies and miserable ravings of a murderer. He came,
+therefore, sometimes to see that I was not neglected, but his visits were short
+and with long intervals.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+One day, while I was gradually recovering, I was seated in a chair, my eyes
+half open and my cheeks livid like those in death. I was overcome by gloom and
+misery and often reflected I had better seek death than desire to remain in a
+world which to me was replete with wretchedness. At one time I considered
+whether I should not declare myself guilty and suffer the penalty of the law,
+less innocent than poor Justine had been. Such were my thoughts when the door
+of my apartment was opened and Mr. Kirwin entered. His countenance expressed
+sympathy and compassion; he drew a chair close to mine and addressed me in
+French,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I fear that this place is very shocking to you; can I do anything to make you
+more comfortable?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I thank you, but all that you mention is nothing to me; on the whole earth
+there is no comfort which I am capable of receiving.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I know that the sympathy of a stranger can be but of little relief to one
+borne down as you are by so strange a misfortune. But you will, I hope, soon
+quit this melancholy abode, for doubtless evidence can easily be brought to
+free you from the criminal charge.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is my least concern; I am, by a course of strange events, become the most
+miserable of mortals. Persecuted and tortured as I am and have been, can death
+be any evil to me?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nothing indeed could be more unfortunate and agonising than the strange
+chances that have lately occurred. You were thrown, by some surprising
+accident, on this shore, renowned for its hospitality, seized immediately, and
+charged with murder. The first sight that was presented to your eyes was the
+body of your friend, murdered in so unaccountable a manner and placed, as it
+were, by some fiend across your path.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+As Mr. Kirwin said this, notwithstanding the agitation I endured on this
+retrospect of my sufferings, I also felt considerable surprise at the knowledge
+he seemed to possess concerning me. I suppose some astonishment was exhibited
+in my countenance, for Mr. Kirwin hastened to say,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Immediately upon your being taken ill, all the papers that were on your person
+were brought me, and I examined them that I might discover some trace by which
+I could send to your relations an account of your misfortune and illness. I
+found several letters, and, among others, one which I discovered from its
+commencement to be from your father. I instantly wrote to Geneva; nearly two
+months have elapsed since the departure of my letter. But you are ill; even now
+you tremble; you are unfit for agitation of any kind.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“This suspense is a thousand times worse than the most horrible event; tell me
+what new scene of death has been acted, and whose murder I am now to lament?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your family is perfectly well,” said Mr. Kirwin with gentleness; “and someone,
+a friend, is come to visit you.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I know not by what chain of thought the idea presented itself, but it instantly
+darted into my mind that the murderer had come to mock at my misery and taunt
+me with the death of Clerval, as a new incitement for me to comply with his
+hellish desires. I put my hand before my eyes, and cried out in agony,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh! Take him away! I cannot see him; for God’s sake, do not let him enter!”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Mr. Kirwin regarded me with a troubled countenance. He could not help regarding
+my exclamation as a presumption of my guilt and said in rather a severe tone,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I should have thought, young man, that the presence of your father would have
+been welcome instead of inspiring such violent repugnance.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“My father!” cried I, while every feature and every muscle was relaxed from
+anguish to pleasure. “Is my father indeed come? How kind, how very kind! But
+where is he, why does he not hasten to me?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My change of manner surprised and pleased the magistrate; perhaps he thought
+that my former exclamation was a momentary return of delirium, and now he
+instantly resumed his former benevolence. He rose and quitted the room with my
+nurse, and in a moment my father entered it.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Nothing, at this moment, could have given me greater pleasure than the arrival
+of my father. I stretched out my hand to him and cried,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Are you then safe—and Elizabeth—and Ernest?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My father calmed me with assurances of their welfare and endeavoured, by
+dwelling on these subjects so interesting to my heart, to raise my desponding
+spirits; but he soon felt that a prison cannot be the abode of cheerfulness.
+“What a place is this that you inhabit, my son!” said he, looking mournfully at
+the barred windows and wretched appearance of the room. “You travelled to seek
+happiness, but a fatality seems to pursue you. And poor Clerval—”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The name of my unfortunate and murdered friend was an agitation too great to be
+endured in my weak state; I shed tears.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Alas! Yes, my father,” replied I; “some destiny of the most horrible kind
+hangs over me, and I must live to fulfil it, or surely I should have died on
+the coffin of Henry.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We were not allowed to converse for any length of time, for the precarious
+state of my health rendered every precaution necessary that could ensure
+tranquillity. Mr. Kirwin came in and insisted that my strength should not be
+exhausted by too much exertion. But the appearance of my father was to me like
+that of my good angel, and I gradually recovered my health.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+As my sickness quitted me, I was absorbed by a gloomy and black melancholy that
+nothing could dissipate. The image of Clerval was for ever before me, ghastly
+and murdered. More than once the agitation into which these reflections threw
+me made my friends dread a dangerous relapse. Alas! Why did they preserve so
+miserable and detested a life? It was surely that I might fulfil my destiny,
+which is now drawing to a close. Soon, oh, very soon, will death extinguish
+these throbbings and relieve me from the mighty weight of anguish that bears me
+to the dust; and, in executing the award of justice, I shall also sink to rest.
+Then the appearance of death was distant, although the wish was ever present to
+my thoughts; and I often sat for hours motionless and speechless, wishing for
+some mighty revolution that might bury me and my destroyer in its ruins.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The season of the assizes approached. I had already been three months in
+prison, and although I was still weak and in continual danger of a relapse, I
+was obliged to travel nearly a hundred miles to the country town where the
+court was held. Mr. Kirwin charged himself with every care of collecting
+witnesses and arranging my defence. I was spared the disgrace of appearing
+publicly as a criminal, as the case was not brought before the court that
+decides on life and death. The grand jury rejected the bill, on its being
+proved that I was on the Orkney Islands at the hour the body of my friend was
+found; and a fortnight after my removal I was liberated from prison.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My father was enraptured on finding me freed from the vexations of a criminal
+charge, that I was again allowed to breathe the fresh atmosphere and permitted
+to return to my native country. I did not participate in these feelings, for to
+me the walls of a dungeon or a palace were alike hateful. The cup of life was
+poisoned for ever, and although the sun shone upon me, as upon the happy and
+gay of heart, I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness,
+penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me.
+Sometimes they were the expressive eyes of Henry, languishing in death, the
+dark orbs nearly covered by the lids and the long black lashes that fringed
+them; sometimes it was the watery, clouded eyes of the monster, as I first saw
+them in my chamber at Ingolstadt.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My father tried to awaken in me the feelings of affection. He talked of Geneva,
+which I should soon visit, of Elizabeth and Ernest; but these words only drew
+deep groans from me. Sometimes, indeed, I felt a wish for happiness and thought
+with melancholy delight of my beloved cousin or longed, with a devouring
+ maladie du pays , to see once more the blue lake and rapid Rhone, that
+had been so dear to me in early childhood; but my general state of feeling was
+a torpor in which a prison was as welcome a residence as the divinest scene in
+nature; and these fits were seldom interrupted but by paroxysms of anguish and
+despair. At these moments I often endeavoured to put an end to the existence I
+loathed, and it required unceasing attendance and vigilance to restrain me from
+committing some dreadful act of violence.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Yet one duty remained to me, the recollection of which finally triumphed over
+my selfish despair. It was necessary that I should return without delay to
+Geneva, there to watch over the lives of those I so fondly loved and to lie in
+wait for the murderer, that if any chance led me to the place of his
+concealment, or if he dared again to blast me by his presence, I might, with
+unfailing aim, put an end to the existence of the monstrous image which I had
+endued with the mockery of a soul still more monstrous. My father still desired
+to delay our departure, fearful that I could not sustain the fatigues of a
+journey, for I was a shattered wreck—the shadow of a human being. My strength
+was gone. I was a mere skeleton, and fever night and day preyed upon my wasted
+frame.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Still, as I urged our leaving Ireland with such inquietude and impatience, my
+father thought it best to yield. We took our passage on board a vessel bound
+for Havre-de-Grace and sailed with a fair wind from the Irish shores. It was
+midnight. I lay on the deck looking at the stars and listening to the dashing
+of the waves. I hailed the darkness that shut Ireland from my sight, and my
+pulse beat with a feverish joy when I reflected that I should soon see Geneva.
+The past appeared to me in the light of a frightful dream; yet the vessel in
+which I was, the wind that blew me from the detested shore of Ireland, and the
+sea which surrounded me, told me too forcibly that I was deceived by no vision
+and that Clerval, my friend and dearest companion, had fallen a victim to me
+and the monster of my creation. I repassed, in my memory, my whole life; my
+quiet happiness while residing with my family in Geneva, the death of my
+mother, and my departure for Ingolstadt. I remembered, shuddering, the mad
+enthusiasm that hurried me on to the creation of my hideous enemy, and I called
+to mind the night in which he first lived. I was unable to pursue the train of
+thought; a thousand feelings pressed upon me, and I wept bitterly.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Ever since my recovery from the fever, I had been in the custom of taking every
+night a small quantity of laudanum, for it was by means of this drug only that
+I was enabled to gain the rest necessary for the preservation of life.
+Oppressed by the recollection of my various misfortunes, I now swallowed double
+my usual quantity and soon slept profoundly. But sleep did not afford me
+respite from thought and misery; my dreams presented a thousand objects that
+scared me. Towards morning I was possessed by a kind of nightmare; I felt the
+fiend’s grasp in my neck and could not free myself from it; groans and cries
+rang in my ears. My father, who was watching over me, perceiving my
+restlessness, awoke me; the dashing waves were around, the cloudy sky above,
+the fiend was not here: a sense of security, a feeling that a truce was
+established between the present hour and the irresistible, disastrous future
+imparted to me a kind of calm forgetfulness, of which the human mind is by its
+structure peculiarly susceptible.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 22 
+
+ 
+The voyage came to an end. We landed, and proceeded to Paris. I soon found that
+I had overtaxed my strength and that I must repose before I could continue my
+journey. My father’s care and attentions were indefatigable, but he did not
+know the origin of my sufferings and sought erroneous methods to remedy the
+incurable ill. He wished me to seek amusement in society. I abhorred the face
+of man. Oh, not abhorred! They were my brethren, my fellow beings, and I felt
+attracted even to the most repulsive among them, as to creatures of an angelic
+nature and celestial mechanism. But I felt that I had no right to share their
+intercourse. I had unchained an enemy among them whose joy it was to shed their
+blood and to revel in their groans. How they would, each and all, abhor me and
+hunt me from the world, did they know my unhallowed acts and the crimes which
+had their source in me!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My father yielded at length to my desire to avoid society and strove by various
+arguments to banish my despair. Sometimes he thought that I felt deeply the
+degradation of being obliged to answer a charge of murder, and he endeavoured
+to prove to me the futility of pride.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Alas! My father,” said I, “how little do you know me. Human beings, their
+feelings and passions, would indeed be degraded if such a wretch as I felt
+pride. Justine, poor unhappy Justine, was as innocent as I, and she suffered
+the same charge; she died for it; and I am the cause of this—I murdered her.
+William, Justine, and Henry—they all died by my hands.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My father had often, during my imprisonment, heard me make the same assertion;
+when I thus accused myself, he sometimes seemed to desire an explanation, and
+at others he appeared to consider it as the offspring of delirium, and that,
+during my illness, some idea of this kind had presented itself to my
+imagination, the remembrance of which I preserved in my convalescence. I
+avoided explanation and maintained a continual silence concerning the wretch I
+had created. I had a persuasion that I should be supposed mad, and this in
+itself would for ever have chained my tongue. But, besides, I could not bring
+myself to disclose a secret which would fill my hearer with consternation and
+make fear and unnatural horror the inmates of his breast. I checked, therefore,
+my impatient thirst for sympathy and was silent when I would have given the
+world to have confided the fatal secret. Yet, still, words like those I have
+recorded would burst uncontrollably from me. I could offer no explanation of
+them, but their truth in part relieved the burden of my mysterious woe.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Upon this occasion my father said, with an expression of unbounded wonder, “My
+dearest Victor, what infatuation is this? My dear son, I entreat you never to
+make such an assertion again.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am not mad,” I cried energetically; “the sun and the heavens, who have
+viewed my operations, can bear witness of my truth. I am the assassin of those
+most innocent victims; they died by my machinations. A thousand times would I
+have shed my own blood, drop by drop, to have saved their lives; but I could
+not, my father, indeed I could not sacrifice the whole human race.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The conclusion of this speech convinced my father that my ideas were deranged,
+and he instantly changed the subject of our conversation and endeavoured to
+alter the course of my thoughts. He wished as much as possible to obliterate
+the memory of the scenes that had taken place in Ireland and never alluded to
+them or suffered me to speak of my misfortunes.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+As time passed away I became more calm; misery had her dwelling in my heart,
+but I no longer talked in the same incoherent manner of my own crimes;
+sufficient for me was the consciousness of them. By the utmost self-violence I
+curbed the imperious voice of wretchedness, which sometimes desired to declare
+itself to the whole world, and my manners were calmer and more composed than
+they had ever been since my journey to the sea of ice.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+A few days before we left Paris on our way to Switzerland, I received the
+following letter from Elizabeth:
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear Friend,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“It gave me the greatest pleasure to receive a letter from my uncle dated at
+Paris; you are no longer at a formidable distance, and I may hope to see you in
+less than a fortnight. My poor cousin, how much you must have suffered! I
+expect to see you looking even more ill than when you quitted Geneva. This
+winter has been passed most miserably, tortured as I have been by anxious
+suspense; yet I hope to see peace in your countenance and to find that your
+heart is not totally void of comfort and tranquillity.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yet I fear that the same feelings now exist that made you so miserable a year
+ago, even perhaps augmented by time. I would not disturb you at this period,
+when so many misfortunes weigh upon you, but a conversation that I had with my
+uncle previous to his departure renders some explanation necessary before we
+meet.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Explanation! You may possibly say, What can Elizabeth have to explain? If you
+really say this, my questions are answered and all my doubts satisfied. But you
+are distant from me, and it is possible that you may dread and yet be pleased
+with this explanation; and in a probability of this being the case, I dare not
+any longer postpone writing what, during your absence, I have often wished to
+express to you but have never had the courage to begin.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“You well know, Victor, that our union had been the favourite plan of your
+parents ever since our infancy. We were told this when young, and taught to
+look forward to it as an event that would certainly take place. We were
+affectionate playfellows during childhood, and, I believe, dear and valued
+friends to one another as we grew older. But as brother and sister often
+entertain a lively affection towards each other without desiring a more
+intimate union, may not such also be our case? Tell me, dearest Victor. Answer
+me, I conjure you by our mutual happiness, with simple truth—Do you not love
+another?
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have travelled; you have spent several years of your life at Ingolstadt;
+and I confess to you, my friend, that when I saw you last autumn so unhappy,
+flying to solitude from the society of every creature, I could not help
+supposing that you might regret our connection and believe yourself bound in
+honour to fulfil the wishes of your parents, although they opposed themselves
+to your inclinations. But this is false reasoning. I confess to you, my friend,
+that I love you and that in my airy dreams of futurity you have been my
+constant friend and companion. But it is your happiness I desire as well as my
+own when I declare to you that our marriage would render me eternally miserable
+unless it were the dictate of your own free choice. Even now I weep to think
+that, borne down as you are by the cruellest misfortunes, you may stifle, by
+the word honour , all hope of that love and happiness which would alone
+restore you to yourself. I, who have so disinterested an affection for you, may
+increase your miseries tenfold by being an obstacle to your wishes. Ah! Victor,
+be assured that your cousin and playmate has too sincere a love for you not to
+be made miserable by this supposition. Be happy, my friend; and if you obey me
+in this one request, remain satisfied that nothing on earth will have the power
+to interrupt my tranquillity.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do not let this letter disturb you; do not answer tomorrow, or the next day,
+or even until you come, if it will give you pain. My uncle will send me news of
+your health, and if I see but one smile on your lips when we meet, occasioned
+by this or any other exertion of mine, I shall need no other happiness.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Elizabeth Lavenza.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Geneva, May 18th, 17—”
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+This letter revived in my memory what I had before forgotten, the threat of the
+fiend—“ I will be with you on your wedding-night! ” Such was my sentence,
+and on that night would the dæmon employ every art to destroy me and tear me
+from the glimpse of happiness which promised partly to console my sufferings.
+On that night he had determined to consummate his crimes by my death. Well, be
+it so; a deadly struggle would then assuredly take place, in which if he were
+victorious I should be at peace and his power over me be at an end. If he were
+vanquished, I should be a free man. Alas! What freedom? Such as the peasant
+enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt,
+his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, penniless, and alone,
+but free. Such would be my liberty except that in my Elizabeth I possessed a
+treasure, alas, balanced by those horrors of remorse and guilt which would
+pursue me until death.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Sweet and beloved Elizabeth! I read and reread her letter, and some softened
+feelings stole into my heart and dared to whisper paradisiacal dreams of love
+and joy; but the apple was already eaten, and the angel’s arm bared to drive me
+from all hope. Yet I would die to make her happy. If the monster executed his
+threat, death was inevitable; yet, again, I considered whether my marriage
+would hasten my fate. My destruction might indeed arrive a few months sooner,
+but if my torturer should suspect that I postponed it, influenced by his
+menaces, he would surely find other and perhaps more dreadful means of revenge.
+He had vowed to be with me on my wedding-night , yet he did not consider
+that threat as binding him to peace in the meantime, for as if to show me that
+he was not yet satiated with blood, he had murdered Clerval immediately after
+the enunciation of his threats. I resolved, therefore, that if my immediate
+union with my cousin would conduce either to hers or my father’s happiness, my
+adversary’s designs against my life should not retard it a single hour.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+In this state of mind I wrote to Elizabeth. My letter was calm and
+affectionate. “I fear, my beloved girl,” I said, “little happiness remains for
+us on earth; yet all that I may one day enjoy is centred in you. Chase away
+your idle fears; to you alone do I consecrate my life and my endeavours for
+contentment. I have one secret, Elizabeth, a dreadful one; when revealed to
+you, it will chill your frame with horror, and then, far from being surprised
+at my misery, you will only wonder that I survive what I have endured. I will
+confide this tale of misery and terror to you the day after our marriage shall
+take place, for, my sweet cousin, there must be perfect confidence between us.
+But until then, I conjure you, do not mention or allude to it. This I most
+earnestly entreat, and I know you will comply.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+In about a week after the arrival of Elizabeth’s letter we returned to Geneva.
+The sweet girl welcomed me with warm affection, yet tears were in her eyes as
+she beheld my emaciated frame and feverish cheeks. I saw a change in her also.
+She was thinner and had lost much of that heavenly vivacity that had before
+charmed me; but her gentleness and soft looks of compassion made her a more fit
+companion for one blasted and miserable as I was.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The tranquillity which I now enjoyed did not endure. Memory brought madness
+with it, and when I thought of what had passed, a real insanity possessed me;
+sometimes I was furious and burnt with rage, sometimes low and despondent. I
+neither spoke nor looked at anyone, but sat motionless, bewildered by the
+multitude of miseries that overcame me.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Elizabeth alone had the power to draw me from these fits; her gentle voice
+would soothe me when transported by passion and inspire me with human feelings
+when sunk in torpor. She wept with me and for me. When reason returned, she
+would remonstrate and endeavour to inspire me with resignation. Ah! It is well
+for the unfortunate to be resigned, but for the guilty there is no peace. The
+agonies of remorse poison the luxury there is otherwise sometimes found in
+indulging the excess of grief.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Soon after my arrival my father spoke of my immediate marriage with Elizabeth.
+I remained silent.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Have you, then, some other attachment?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“None on earth. I love Elizabeth and look forward to our union with delight.
+Let the day therefore be fixed; and on it I will consecrate myself, in life or
+death, to the happiness of my cousin.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear Victor, do not speak thus. Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let
+us only cling closer to what remains and transfer our love for those whom we
+have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small but bound close by
+the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened
+your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of
+whom we have been so cruelly deprived.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Such were the lessons of my father. But to me the remembrance of the threat
+returned; nor can you wonder that, omnipotent as the fiend had yet been in his
+deeds of blood, I should almost regard him as invincible, and that when he had
+pronounced the words “ I shall be with you on your wedding-night ,” I
+should regard the threatened fate as unavoidable. But death was no evil to me
+if the loss of Elizabeth were balanced with it, and I therefore, with a
+contented and even cheerful countenance, agreed with my father that if my
+cousin would consent, the ceremony should take place in ten days, and thus put,
+as I imagined, the seal to my fate.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Great God! If for one instant I had thought what might be the hellish intention
+of my fiendish adversary, I would rather have banished myself for ever from my
+native country and wandered a friendless outcast over the earth than have
+consented to this miserable marriage. But, as if possessed of magic powers, the
+monster had blinded me to his real intentions; and when I thought that I had
+prepared only my own death, I hastened that of a far dearer victim.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+As the period fixed for our marriage drew nearer, whether from cowardice or a
+prophetic feeling, I felt my heart sink within me. But I concealed my feelings
+by an appearance of hilarity that brought smiles and joy to the countenance of
+my father, but hardly deceived the ever-watchful and nicer eye of Elizabeth.
+She looked forward to our union with placid contentment, not unmingled with a
+little fear, which past misfortunes had impressed, that what now appeared
+certain and tangible happiness might soon dissipate into an airy dream and
+leave no trace but deep and everlasting regret.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Preparations were made for the event, congratulatory visits were received, and
+all wore a smiling appearance. I shut up, as well as I could, in my own heart
+the anxiety that preyed there and entered with seeming earnestness into the
+plans of my father, although they might only serve as the decorations of my
+tragedy. Through my father’s exertions a part of the inheritance of Elizabeth
+had been restored to her by the Austrian government. A small possession on the
+shores of Como belonged to her. It was agreed that, immediately after our
+union, we should proceed to Villa Lavenza and spend our first days of happiness
+beside the beautiful lake near which it stood.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+In the meantime I took every precaution to defend my person in case the fiend
+should openly attack me. I carried pistols and a dagger constantly about me and
+was ever on the watch to prevent artifice, and by these means gained a greater
+degree of tranquillity. Indeed, as the period approached, the threat appeared
+more as a delusion, not to be regarded as worthy to disturb my peace, while the
+happiness I hoped for in my marriage wore a greater appearance of certainty as
+the day fixed for its solemnisation drew nearer and I heard it continually
+spoken of as an occurrence which no accident could possibly prevent.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Elizabeth seemed happy; my tranquil demeanour contributed greatly to calm her
+mind. But on the day that was to fulfil my wishes and my destiny, she was
+melancholy, and a presentiment of evil pervaded her; and perhaps also she
+thought of the dreadful secret which I had promised to reveal to her on the
+following day. My father was in the meantime overjoyed, and, in the bustle of
+preparation, only recognised in the melancholy of his niece the diffidence of a
+bride.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+After the ceremony was performed a large party assembled at my father’s, but it
+was agreed that Elizabeth and I should commence our journey by water, sleeping
+that night at Evian and continuing our voyage on the following day. The day was
+fair, the wind favourable; all smiled on our nuptial embarkation.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Those were the last moments of my life during which I enjoyed the feeling of
+happiness. We passed rapidly along; the sun was hot, but we were sheltered from
+its rays by a kind of canopy while we enjoyed the beauty of the scene,
+sometimes on one side of the lake, where we saw Mont Salêve, the pleasant banks
+of Montalègre, and at a distance, surmounting all, the beautiful Mont Blanc,
+and the assemblage of snowy mountains that in vain endeavour to emulate her;
+sometimes coasting the opposite banks, we saw the mighty Jura opposing its dark
+side to the ambition that would quit its native country, and an almost
+insurmountable barrier to the invader who should wish to enslave it.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I took the hand of Elizabeth. “You are sorrowful, my love. Ah! If you knew what
+I have suffered and what I may yet endure, you would endeavour to let me taste
+the quiet and freedom from despair that this one day at least permits me to
+enjoy.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Be happy, my dear Victor,” replied Elizabeth; “there is, I hope, nothing to
+distress you; and be assured that if a lively joy is not painted in my face, my
+heart is contented. Something whispers to me not to depend too much on the
+prospect that is opened before us, but I will not listen to such a sinister
+voice. Observe how fast we move along and how the clouds, which sometimes
+obscure and sometimes rise above the dome of Mont Blanc, render this scene of
+beauty still more interesting. Look also at the innumerable fish that are
+swimming in the clear waters, where we can distinguish every pebble that lies
+at the bottom. What a divine day! How happy and serene all nature appears!”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Thus Elizabeth endeavoured to divert her thoughts and mine from all reflection
+upon melancholy subjects. But her temper was fluctuating; joy for a few
+instants shone in her eyes, but it continually gave place to distraction and
+reverie.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The sun sank lower in the heavens; we passed the river Drance and observed its
+path through the chasms of the higher and the glens of the lower hills. The
+Alps here come closer to the lake, and we approached the amphitheatre of
+mountains which forms its eastern boundary. The spire of Evian shone under the
+woods that surrounded it and the range of mountain above mountain by which it
+was overhung.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The wind, which had hitherto carried us along with amazing rapidity, sank at
+sunset to a light breeze; the soft air just ruffled the water and caused a
+pleasant motion among the trees as we approached the shore, from which it
+wafted the most delightful scent of flowers and hay. The sun sank beneath the
+horizon as we landed, and as I touched the shore I felt those cares and fears
+revive which soon were to clasp me and cling to me for ever.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 23 
+
+ 
+It was eight o’clock when we landed; we walked for a short time on the shore,
+enjoying the transitory light, and then retired to the inn and contemplated the
+lovely scene of waters, woods, and mountains, obscured in darkness, yet still
+displaying their black outlines.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The wind, which had fallen in the south, now rose with great violence in the
+west. The moon had reached her summit in the heavens and was beginning to
+descend; the clouds swept across it swifter than the flight of the vulture and
+dimmed her rays, while the lake reflected the scene of the busy heavens,
+rendered still busier by the restless waves that were beginning to rise.
+Suddenly a heavy storm of rain descended.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I had been calm during the day, but so soon as night obscured the shapes of
+objects, a thousand fears arose in my mind. I was anxious and watchful, while
+my right hand grasped a pistol which was hidden in my bosom; every sound
+terrified me, but I resolved that I would sell my life dearly and not shrink
+from the conflict until my own life or that of my adversary was extinguished.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Elizabeth observed my agitation for some time in timid and fearful silence, but
+there was something in my glance which communicated terror to her, and
+trembling, she asked, “What is it that agitates you, my dear Victor? What is it
+you fear?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh! Peace, peace, my love,” replied I; “this night, and all will be safe; but
+this night is dreadful, very dreadful.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I passed an hour in this state of mind, when suddenly I reflected how fearful
+the combat which I momentarily expected would be to my wife, and I earnestly
+entreated her to retire, resolving not to join her until I had obtained some
+knowledge as to the situation of my enemy.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+She left me, and I continued some time walking up and down the passages of the
+house and inspecting every corner that might afford a retreat to my adversary.
+But I discovered no trace of him and was beginning to conjecture that some
+fortunate chance had intervened to prevent the execution of his menaces when
+suddenly I heard a shrill and dreadful scream. It came from the room into which
+Elizabeth had retired. As I heard it, the whole truth rushed into my mind, my
+arms dropped, the motion of every muscle and fibre was suspended; I could feel
+the blood trickling in my veins and tingling in the extremities of my limbs.
+This state lasted but for an instant; the scream was repeated, and I rushed
+into the room.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Great God! Why did I not then expire! Why am I here to relate the destruction
+of the best hope and the purest creature on earth? She was there, lifeless and
+inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down and her pale and
+distorted features half covered by her hair. Everywhere I turn I see the same
+figure—her bloodless arms and relaxed form flung by the murderer on its bridal
+bier. Could I behold this and live? Alas! Life is obstinate and clings closest
+where it is most hated. For a moment only did I lose recollection; I fell
+senseless on the ground.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+When I recovered I found myself surrounded by the people of the inn; their
+countenances expressed a breathless terror, but the horror of others appeared
+only as a mockery, a shadow of the feelings that oppressed me. I escaped from
+them to the room where lay the body of Elizabeth, my love, my wife, so lately
+living, so dear, so worthy. She had been moved from the posture in which I had
+first beheld her, and now, as she lay, her head upon her arm and a handkerchief
+thrown across her face and neck, I might have supposed her asleep. I rushed
+towards her and embraced her with ardour, but the deadly languor and coldness
+of the limbs told me that what I now held in my arms had ceased to be the
+Elizabeth whom I had loved and cherished. The murderous mark of the fiend’s
+grasp was on her neck, and the breath had ceased to issue from her lips.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+While I still hung over her in the agony of despair, I happened to look up. The
+windows of the room had before been darkened, and I felt a kind of panic on
+seeing the pale yellow light of the moon illuminate the chamber. The shutters
+had been thrown back, and with a sensation of horror not to be described, I saw
+at the open window a figure the most hideous and abhorred. A grin was on the
+face of the monster; he seemed to jeer, as with his fiendish finger he pointed
+towards the corpse of my wife. I rushed towards the window, and drawing a
+pistol from my bosom, fired; but he eluded me, leaped from his station, and
+running with the swiftness of lightning, plunged into the lake.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The report of the pistol brought a crowd into the room. I pointed to the spot
+where he had disappeared, and we followed the track with boats; nets were cast,
+but in vain. After passing several hours, we returned hopeless, most of my
+companions believing it to have been a form conjured up by my fancy. After
+having landed, they proceeded to search the country, parties going in different
+directions among the woods and vines.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I attempted to accompany them and proceeded a short distance from the house,
+but my head whirled round, my steps were like those of a drunken man, I fell at
+last in a state of utter exhaustion; a film covered my eyes, and my skin was
+parched with the heat of fever. In this state I was carried back and placed on
+a bed, hardly conscious of what had happened; my eyes wandered round the room
+as if to seek something that I had lost.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+After an interval I arose, and as if by instinct, crawled into the room where
+the corpse of my beloved lay. There were women weeping around; I hung over it
+and joined my sad tears to theirs; all this time no distinct idea presented
+itself to my mind, but my thoughts rambled to various subjects, reflecting
+confusedly on my misfortunes and their cause. I was bewildered, in a cloud of
+wonder and horror. The death of William, the execution of Justine, the murder
+of Clerval, and lastly of my wife; even at that moment I knew not that my only
+remaining friends were safe from the malignity of the fiend; my father even now
+might be writhing under his grasp, and Ernest might be dead at his feet. This
+idea made me shudder and recalled me to action. I started up and resolved to
+return to Geneva with all possible speed.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+There were no horses to be procured, and I must return by the lake; but the
+wind was unfavourable, and the rain fell in torrents. However, it was hardly
+morning, and I might reasonably hope to arrive by night. I hired men to row and
+took an oar myself, for I had always experienced relief from mental torment in
+bodily exercise. But the overflowing misery I now felt, and the excess of
+agitation that I endured rendered me incapable of any exertion. I threw down
+the oar, and leaning my head upon my hands, gave way to every gloomy idea that
+arose. If I looked up, I saw scenes which were familiar to me in my happier
+time and which I had contemplated but the day before in the company of her who
+was now but a shadow and a recollection. Tears streamed from my eyes. The rain
+had ceased for a moment, and I saw the fish play in the waters as they had done
+a few hours before; they had then been observed by Elizabeth. Nothing is so
+painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. The sun might shine or
+the clouds might lower, but nothing could appear to me as it had done the day
+before. A fiend had snatched from me every hope of future happiness; no
+creature had ever been so miserable as I was; so frightful an event is single
+in the history of man.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+But why should I dwell upon the incidents that followed this last overwhelming
+event? Mine has been a tale of horrors; I have reached their acme , and
+what I must now relate can but be tedious to you. Know that, one by one, my
+friends were snatched away; I was left desolate. My own strength is exhausted,
+and I must tell, in a few words, what remains of my hideous narration.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I arrived at Geneva. My father and Ernest yet lived, but the former sunk under
+the tidings that I bore. I see him now, excellent and venerable old man! His
+eyes wandered in vacancy, for they had lost their charm and their delight—his
+Elizabeth, his more than daughter, whom he doted on with all that affection
+which a man feels, who in the decline of life, having few affections, clings
+more earnestly to those that remain. Cursed, cursed be the fiend that brought
+misery on his grey hairs and doomed him to waste in wretchedness! He could not
+live under the horrors that were accumulated around him; the springs of
+existence suddenly gave way; he was unable to rise from his bed, and in a few
+days he died in my arms.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+What then became of me? I know not; I lost sensation, and chains and darkness
+were the only objects that pressed upon me. Sometimes, indeed, I dreamt that I
+wandered in flowery meadows and pleasant vales with the friends of my youth,
+but I awoke and found myself in a dungeon. Melancholy followed, but by degrees
+I gained a clear conception of my miseries and situation and was then released
+from my prison. For they had called me mad, and during many months, as I
+understood, a solitary cell had been my habitation.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Liberty, however, had been a useless gift to me, had I not, as I awakened to
+reason, at the same time awakened to revenge. As the memory of past misfortunes
+pressed upon me, I began to reflect on their cause—the monster whom I had
+created, the miserable dæmon whom I had sent abroad into the world for my
+destruction. I was possessed by a maddening rage when I thought of him, and
+desired and ardently prayed that I might have him within my grasp to wreak a
+great and signal revenge on his cursed head.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Nor did my hate long confine itself to useless wishes; I began to reflect on
+the best means of securing him; and for this purpose, about a month after my
+release, I repaired to a criminal judge in the town and told him that I had an
+accusation to make, that I knew the destroyer of my family, and that I required
+him to exert his whole authority for the apprehension of the murderer.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The magistrate listened to me with attention and kindness. “Be assured, sir,”
+said he, “no pains or exertions on my part shall be spared to discover the
+villain.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I thank you,” replied I; “listen, therefore, to the deposition that I have to
+make. It is indeed a tale so strange that I should fear you would not credit it
+were there not something in truth which, however wonderful, forces conviction.
+The story is too connected to be mistaken for a dream, and I have no motive for
+falsehood.” My manner as I thus addressed him was impressive but calm; I had
+formed in my own heart a resolution to pursue my destroyer to death, and this
+purpose quieted my agony and for an interval reconciled me to life. I now
+related my history briefly but with firmness and precision, marking the dates
+with accuracy and never deviating into invective or exclamation.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The magistrate appeared at first perfectly incredulous, but as I continued he
+became more attentive and interested; I saw him sometimes shudder with horror;
+at others a lively surprise, unmingled with disbelief, was painted on his
+countenance.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+When I had concluded my narration, I said, “This is the being whom I accuse and
+for whose seizure and punishment I call upon you to exert your whole power. It
+is your duty as a magistrate, and I believe and hope that your feelings as a
+man will not revolt from the execution of those functions on this occasion.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+This address caused a considerable change in the physiognomy of my own auditor.
+He had heard my story with that half kind of belief that is given to a tale of
+spirits and supernatural events; but when he was called upon to act officially
+in consequence, the whole tide of his incredulity returned. He, however,
+answered mildly, “I would willingly afford you every aid in your pursuit, but
+the creature of whom you speak appears to have powers which would put all my
+exertions to defiance. Who can follow an animal which can traverse the sea of
+ice and inhabit caves and dens where no man would venture to intrude? Besides,
+some months have elapsed since the commission of his crimes, and no one can
+conjecture to what place he has wandered or what region he may now inhabit.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I do not doubt that he hovers near the spot which I inhabit, and if he has
+indeed taken refuge in the Alps, he may be hunted like the chamois and
+destroyed as a beast of prey. But I perceive your thoughts; you do not credit
+my narrative and do not intend to pursue my enemy with the punishment which is
+his desert.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+As I spoke, rage sparkled in my eyes; the magistrate was intimidated. “You are
+mistaken,” said he. “I will exert myself, and if it is in my power to seize the
+monster, be assured that he shall suffer punishment proportionate to his
+crimes. But I fear, from what you have yourself described to be his properties,
+that this will prove impracticable; and thus, while every proper measure is
+pursued, you should make up your mind to disappointment.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“That cannot be; but all that I can say will be of little avail. My revenge is
+of no moment to you; yet, while I allow it to be a vice, I confess that it is
+the devouring and only passion of my soul. My rage is unspeakable when I
+reflect that the murderer, whom I have turned loose upon society, still exists.
+You refuse my just demand; I have but one resource, and I devote myself, either
+in my life or death, to his destruction.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I trembled with excess of agitation as I said this; there was a frenzy in my
+manner, and something, I doubt not, of that haughty fierceness which the
+martyrs of old are said to have possessed. But to a Genevan magistrate, whose
+mind was occupied by far other ideas than those of devotion and heroism, this
+elevation of mind had much the appearance of madness. He endeavoured to soothe
+me as a nurse does a child and reverted to my tale as the effects of delirium.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Man,” I cried, “how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom! Cease; you know
+not what it is you say.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I broke from the house angry and disturbed and retired to meditate on some
+other mode of action.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ Chapter 24 
+
+ 
+My present situation was one in which all voluntary thought was swallowed up
+and lost. I was hurried away by fury; revenge alone endowed me with strength
+and composure; it moulded my feelings and allowed me to be calculating and calm
+at periods when otherwise delirium or death would have been my portion.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My first resolution was to quit Geneva for ever; my country, which, when I was
+happy and beloved, was dear to me, now, in my adversity, became hateful. I
+provided myself with a sum of money, together with a few jewels which had
+belonged to my mother, and departed.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+And now my wanderings began which are to cease but with life. I have traversed
+a vast portion of the earth and have endured all the hardships which travellers
+in deserts and barbarous countries are wont to meet. How I have lived I hardly
+know; many times have I stretched my failing limbs upon the sandy plain and
+prayed for death. But revenge kept me alive; I dared not die and leave my
+adversary in being.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+When I quitted Geneva my first labour was to gain some clue by which I might
+trace the steps of my fiendish enemy. But my plan was unsettled, and I wandered
+many hours round the confines of the town, uncertain what path I should pursue.
+As night approached I found myself at the entrance of the cemetery where
+William, Elizabeth, and my father reposed. I entered it and approached the tomb
+which marked their graves. Everything was silent except the leaves of the
+trees, which were gently agitated by the wind; the night was nearly dark, and
+the scene would have been solemn and affecting even to an uninterested
+observer. The spirits of the departed seemed to flit around and to cast a
+shadow, which was felt but not seen, around the head of the mourner.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The deep grief which this scene had at first excited quickly gave way to rage
+and despair. They were dead, and I lived; their murderer also lived, and to
+destroy him I must drag out my weary existence. I knelt on the grass and kissed
+the earth and with quivering lips exclaimed, “By the sacred earth on which I
+kneel, by the shades that wander near me, by the deep and eternal grief that I
+feel, I swear; and by thee, O Night, and the spirits that preside over thee, to
+pursue the dæmon who caused this misery, until he or I shall perish in mortal
+conflict. For this purpose I will preserve my life; to execute this dear
+revenge will I again behold the sun and tread the green herbage of earth, which
+otherwise should vanish from my eyes for ever. And I call on you, spirits of
+the dead, and on you, wandering ministers of vengeance, to aid and conduct me
+in my work. Let the cursed and hellish monster drink deep of agony; let him
+feel the despair that now torments me.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I had begun my adjuration with solemnity and an awe which almost assured me
+that the shades of my murdered friends heard and approved my devotion, but the
+furies possessed me as I concluded, and rage choked my utterance.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I was answered through the stillness of night by a loud and fiendish laugh. It
+rang on my ears long and heavily; the mountains re-echoed it, and I felt as if
+all hell surrounded me with mockery and laughter. Surely in that moment I
+should have been possessed by frenzy and have destroyed my miserable existence
+but that my vow was heard and that I was reserved for vengeance. The laughter
+died away, when a well-known and abhorred voice, apparently close to my ear,
+addressed me in an audible whisper, “I am satisfied, miserable wretch! You have
+determined to live, and I am satisfied.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I darted towards the spot from which the sound proceeded, but the devil eluded
+my grasp. Suddenly the broad disk of the moon arose and shone full upon his
+ghastly and distorted shape as he fled with more than mortal speed.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I pursued him, and for many months this has been my task. Guided by a slight
+clue, I followed the windings of the Rhone, but vainly. The blue Mediterranean
+appeared, and by a strange chance, I saw the fiend enter by night and hide
+himself in a vessel bound for the Black Sea. I took my passage in the same
+ship, but he escaped, I know not how.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Amidst the wilds of Tartary and Russia, although he still evaded me, I have
+ever followed in his track. Sometimes the peasants, scared by this horrid
+apparition, informed me of his path; sometimes he himself, who feared that if I
+lost all trace of him I should despair and die, left some mark to guide me. The
+snows descended on my head, and I saw the print of his huge step on the white
+plain. To you first entering on life, to whom care is new and agony unknown,
+how can you understand what I have felt and still feel? Cold, want, and fatigue
+were the least pains which I was destined to endure; I was cursed by some devil
+and carried about with me my eternal hell; yet still a spirit of good followed
+and directed my steps and when I most murmured would suddenly extricate me from
+seemingly insurmountable difficulties. Sometimes, when nature, overcome by
+hunger, sank under the exhaustion, a repast was prepared for me in the desert
+that restored and inspirited me. The fare was, indeed, coarse, such as the
+peasants of the country ate, but I will not doubt that it was set there by the
+spirits that I had invoked to aid me. Often, when all was dry, the heavens
+cloudless, and I was parched by thirst, a slight cloud would bedim the sky,
+shed the few drops that revived me, and vanish.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I followed, when I could, the courses of the rivers; but the dæmon generally
+avoided these, as it was here that the population of the country chiefly
+collected. In other places human beings were seldom seen, and I generally
+subsisted on the wild animals that crossed my path. I had money with me and
+gained the friendship of the villagers by distributing it; or I brought with me
+some food that I had killed, which, after taking a small part, I always
+presented to those who had provided me with fire and utensils for cooking.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My life, as it passed thus, was indeed hateful to me, and it was during sleep
+alone that I could taste joy. O blessed sleep! Often, when most miserable, I
+sank to repose, and my dreams lulled me even to rapture. The spirits that
+guarded me had provided these moments, or rather hours, of happiness that I
+might retain strength to fulfil my pilgrimage. Deprived of this respite, I
+should have sunk under my hardships. During the day I was sustained and
+inspirited by the hope of night, for in sleep I saw my friends, my wife, and my
+beloved country; again I saw the benevolent countenance of my father, heard the
+silver tones of my Elizabeth’s voice, and beheld Clerval enjoying health and
+youth. Often, when wearied by a toilsome march, I persuaded myself that I was
+dreaming until night should come and that I should then enjoy reality in the
+arms of my dearest friends. What agonising fondness did I feel for them! How
+did I cling to their dear forms, as sometimes they haunted even my waking
+hours, and persuade myself that they still lived! At such moments vengeance,
+that burned within me, died in my heart, and I pursued my path towards the
+destruction of the dæmon more as a task enjoined by heaven, as the mechanical
+impulse of some power of which I was unconscious, than as the ardent desire of
+my soul.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+What his feelings were whom I pursued I cannot know. Sometimes, indeed, he left
+marks in writing on the barks of the trees or cut in stone that guided me and
+instigated my fury. “My reign is not yet over”—these words were legible in one
+of these inscriptions—“you live, and my power is complete. Follow me; I seek
+the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and
+frost, to which I am impassive. You will find near this place, if you follow
+not too tardily, a dead hare; eat and be refreshed. Come on, my enemy; we have
+yet to wrestle for our lives, but many hard and miserable hours must you endure
+until that period shall arrive.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Scoffing devil! Again do I vow vengeance; again do I devote thee, miserable
+fiend, to torture and death. Never will I give up my search until he or I
+perish; and then with what ecstasy shall I join my Elizabeth and my departed
+friends, who even now prepare for me the reward of my tedious toil and horrible
+pilgrimage!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+As I still pursued my journey to the northward, the snows thickened and the
+cold increased in a degree almost too severe to support. The peasants were shut
+up in their hovels, and only a few of the most hardy ventured forth to seize
+the animals whom starvation had forced from their hiding-places to seek for
+prey. The rivers were covered with ice, and no fish could be procured; and thus
+I was cut off from my chief article of maintenance.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The triumph of my enemy increased with the difficulty of my labours. One
+inscription that he left was in these words: “Prepare! Your toils only begin;
+wrap yourself in furs and provide food, for we shall soon enter upon a journey
+where your sufferings will satisfy my everlasting hatred.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My courage and perseverance were invigorated by these scoffing words; I
+resolved not to fail in my purpose, and calling on Heaven to support me, I
+continued with unabated fervour to traverse immense deserts, until the ocean
+appeared at a distance and formed the utmost boundary of the horizon. Oh! How
+unlike it was to the blue seasons of the south! Covered with ice, it was only
+to be distinguished from land by its superior wildness and ruggedness. The
+Greeks wept for joy when they beheld the Mediterranean from the hills of Asia,
+and hailed with rapture the boundary of their toils. I did not weep, but I
+knelt down and with a full heart thanked my guiding spirit for conducting me in
+safety to the place where I hoped, notwithstanding my adversary’s gibe, to meet
+and grapple with him.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Some weeks before this period I had procured a sledge and dogs and thus
+traversed the snows with inconceivable speed. I know not whether the fiend
+possessed the same advantages, but I found that, as before I had daily lost
+ground in the pursuit, I now gained on him, so much so that when I first saw
+the ocean he was but one day’s journey in advance, and I hoped to intercept him
+before he should reach the beach. With new courage, therefore, I pressed on,
+and in two days arrived at a wretched hamlet on the seashore. I inquired of the
+inhabitants concerning the fiend and gained accurate information. A gigantic
+monster, they said, had arrived the night before, armed with a gun and many
+pistols, putting to flight the inhabitants of a solitary cottage through fear
+of his terrific appearance. He had carried off their store of winter food, and
+placing it in a sledge, to draw which he had seized on a numerous drove of
+trained dogs, he had harnessed them, and the same night, to the joy of the
+horror-struck villagers, had pursued his journey across the sea in a direction
+that led to no land; and they conjectured that he must speedily be destroyed by
+the breaking of the ice or frozen by the eternal frosts.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+On hearing this information I suffered a temporary access of despair. He had
+escaped me, and I must commence a destructive and almost endless journey across
+the mountainous ices of the ocean, amidst cold that few of the inhabitants
+could long endure and which I, the native of a genial and sunny climate, could
+not hope to survive. Yet at the idea that the fiend should live and be
+triumphant, my rage and vengeance returned, and like a mighty tide, overwhelmed
+every other feeling. After a slight repose, during which the spirits of the
+dead hovered round and instigated me to toil and revenge, I prepared for my
+journey.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I exchanged my land-sledge for one fashioned for the inequalities of the Frozen
+Ocean, and purchasing a plentiful stock of provisions, I departed from land.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I cannot guess how many days have passed since then, but I have endured misery
+which nothing but the eternal sentiment of a just retribution burning within my
+heart could have enabled me to support. Immense and rugged mountains of ice
+often barred up my passage, and I often heard the thunder of the ground sea,
+which threatened my destruction. But again the frost came and made the paths of
+the sea secure.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+By the quantity of provision which I had consumed, I should guess that I had
+passed three weeks in this journey; and the continual protraction of hope,
+returning back upon the heart, often wrung bitter drops of despondency and
+grief from my eyes. Despair had indeed almost secured her prey, and I should
+soon have sunk beneath this misery. Once, after the poor animals that conveyed
+me had with incredible toil gained the summit of a sloping ice mountain, and
+one, sinking under his fatigue, died, I viewed the expanse before me with
+anguish, when suddenly my eye caught a dark speck upon the dusky plain. I
+strained my sight to discover what it could be and uttered a wild cry of
+ecstasy when I distinguished a sledge and the distorted proportions of a
+well-known form within. Oh! With what a burning gush did hope revisit my heart!
+Warm tears filled my eyes, which I hastily wiped away, that they might not
+intercept the view I had of the dæmon; but still my sight was dimmed by the
+burning drops, until, giving way to the emotions that oppressed me, I wept
+aloud.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+But this was not the time for delay; I disencumbered the dogs of their dead
+companion, gave them a plentiful portion of food, and after an hour’s rest,
+which was absolutely necessary, and yet which was bitterly irksome to me, I
+continued my route. The sledge was still visible, nor did I again lose sight of
+it except at the moments when for a short time some ice-rock concealed it with
+its intervening crags. I indeed perceptibly gained on it, and when, after
+nearly two days’ journey, I beheld my enemy at no more than a mile distant, my
+heart bounded within me.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+But now, when I appeared almost within grasp of my foe, my hopes were suddenly
+extinguished, and I lost all trace of him more utterly than I had ever done
+before. A ground sea was heard; the thunder of its progress, as the waters
+rolled and swelled beneath me, became every moment more ominous and terrific. I
+pressed on, but in vain. The wind arose; the sea roared; and, as with the
+mighty shock of an earthquake, it split and cracked with a tremendous and
+overwhelming sound. The work was soon finished; in a few minutes a tumultuous
+sea rolled between me and my enemy, and I was left drifting on a scattered
+piece of ice that was continually lessening and thus preparing for me a hideous
+death.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+In this manner many appalling hours passed; several of my dogs died, and I
+myself was about to sink under the accumulation of distress when I saw your
+vessel riding at anchor and holding forth to me hopes of succour and life. I
+had no conception that vessels ever came so far north and was astounded at the
+sight. I quickly destroyed part of my sledge to construct oars, and by these
+means was enabled, with infinite fatigue, to move my ice raft in the direction
+of your ship. I had determined, if you were going southwards, still to trust
+myself to the mercy of the seas rather than abandon my purpose. I hoped to
+induce you to grant me a boat with which I could pursue my enemy. But your
+direction was northwards. You took me on board when my vigour was exhausted,
+and I should soon have sunk under my multiplied hardships into a death which I
+still dread, for my task is unfulfilled.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Oh! When will my guiding spirit, in conducting me to the dæmon, allow me the
+rest I so much desire; or must I die, and he yet live? If I do, swear to me,
+Walton, that he shall not escape, that you will seek him and satisfy my
+vengeance in his death. And do I dare to ask of you to undertake my pilgrimage,
+to endure the hardships that I have undergone? No; I am not so selfish. Yet,
+when I am dead, if he should appear, if the ministers of vengeance should
+conduct him to you, swear that he shall not live—swear that he shall not
+triumph over my accumulated woes and survive to add to the list of his dark
+crimes. He is eloquent and persuasive, and once his words had even power over
+my heart; but trust him not. His soul is as hellish as his form, full of
+treachery and fiend-like malice. Hear him not; call on the names of William,
+Justine, Clerval, Elizabeth, my father, and of the wretched Victor, and thrust
+your sword into his heart. I will hover near and direct the steel aright.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Walton, in continuation. 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+August 26th, 17—.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+You have read this strange and terrific story, Margaret; and do you not feel
+your blood congeal with horror, like that which even now curdles mine?
+Sometimes, seized with sudden agony, he could not continue his tale; at others,
+his voice broken, yet piercing, uttered with difficulty the words so replete
+with anguish. His fine and lovely eyes were now lighted up with indignation,
+now subdued to downcast sorrow and quenched in infinite wretchedness. Sometimes
+he commanded his countenance and tones and related the most horrible incidents
+with a tranquil voice, suppressing every mark of agitation; then, like a
+volcano bursting forth, his face would suddenly change to an expression of the
+wildest rage as he shrieked out imprecations on his persecutor.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+His tale is connected and told with an appearance of the simplest truth, yet I
+own to you that the letters of Felix and Safie, which he showed me, and the
+apparition of the monster seen from our ship, brought to me a greater
+conviction of the truth of his narrative than his asseverations, however
+earnest and connected. Such a monster has, then, really existence! I cannot
+doubt it, yet I am lost in surprise and admiration. Sometimes I endeavoured to
+gain from Frankenstein the particulars of his creature’s formation, but on this
+point he was impenetrable.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Are you mad, my friend?” said he. “Or whither does your senseless curiosity
+lead you? Would you also create for yourself and the world a demoniacal enemy?
+Peace, peace! Learn my miseries and do not seek to increase your own.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Frankenstein discovered that I made notes concerning his history; he asked to
+see them and then himself corrected and augmented them in many places, but
+principally in giving the life and spirit to the conversations he held with his
+enemy. “Since you have preserved my narration,” said he, “I would not that a
+mutilated one should go down to posterity.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Thus has a week passed away, while I have listened to the strangest tale that
+ever imagination formed. My thoughts and every feeling of my soul have been
+drunk up by the interest for my guest which this tale and his own elevated and
+gentle manners have created. I wish to soothe him, yet can I counsel one so
+infinitely miserable, so destitute of every hope of consolation, to live? Oh,
+no! The only joy that he can now know will be when he composes his shattered
+spirit to peace and death. Yet he enjoys one comfort, the offspring of solitude
+and delirium; he believes that when in dreams he holds converse with his
+friends and derives from that communion consolation for his miseries or
+excitements to his vengeance, that they are not the creations of his fancy, but
+the beings themselves who visit him from the regions of a remote world. This
+faith gives a solemnity to his reveries that render them to me almost as
+imposing and interesting as truth.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Our conversations are not always confined to his own history and misfortunes.
+On every point of general literature he displays unbounded knowledge and a
+quick and piercing apprehension. His eloquence is forcible and touching; nor
+can I hear him, when he relates a pathetic incident or endeavours to move the
+passions of pity or love, without tears. What a glorious creature must he have
+been in the days of his prosperity, when he is thus noble and godlike in ruin!
+He seems to feel his own worth and the greatness of his fall.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“When younger,” said he, “I believed myself destined for some great enterprise.
+My feelings are profound, but I possessed a coolness of judgment that fitted me
+for illustrious achievements. This sentiment of the worth of my nature
+supported me when others would have been oppressed, for I deemed it criminal to
+throw away in useless grief those talents that might be useful to my fellow
+creatures. When I reflected on the work I had completed, no less a one than the
+creation of a sensitive and rational animal, I could not rank myself with the
+herd of common projectors. But this thought, which supported me in the
+commencement of my career, now serves only to plunge me lower in the dust. All
+my speculations and hopes are as nothing, and like the archangel who aspired to
+omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell. My imagination was vivid, yet my
+powers of analysis and application were intense; by the union of these
+qualities I conceived the idea and executed the creation of a man. Even now I
+cannot recollect without passion my reveries while the work was incomplete. I
+trod heaven in my thoughts, now exulting in my powers, now burning with the
+idea of their effects. From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty
+ambition; but how am I sunk! Oh! My friend, if you had known me as I once was,
+you would not recognise me in this state of degradation. Despondency rarely
+visited my heart; a high destiny seemed to bear me on, until I fell, never,
+never again to rise.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Must I then lose this admirable being? I have longed for a friend; I have
+sought one who would sympathise with and love me. Behold, on these desert seas
+I have found such a one, but I fear I have gained him only to know his value
+and lose him. I would reconcile him to life, but he repulses the idea.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“I thank you, Walton,” he said, “for your kind intentions towards so miserable
+a wretch; but when you speak of new ties and fresh affections, think you that
+any can replace those who are gone? Can any man be to me as Clerval was, or any
+woman another Elizabeth? Even where the affections are not strongly moved by
+any superior excellence, the companions of our childhood always possess a
+certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain. They
+know our infantine dispositions, which, however they may be afterwards
+modified, are never eradicated; and they can judge of our actions with more
+certain conclusions as to the integrity of our motives. A sister or a brother
+can never, unless indeed such symptoms have been shown early, suspect the other
+of fraud or false dealing, when another friend, however strongly he may be
+attached, may, in spite of himself, be contemplated with suspicion. But I
+enjoyed friends, dear not only through habit and association, but from their
+own merits; and wherever I am, the soothing voice of my Elizabeth and the
+conversation of Clerval will be ever whispered in my ear. They are dead, and
+but one feeling in such a solitude can persuade me to preserve my life. If I
+were engaged in any high undertaking or design, fraught with extensive utility
+to my fellow creatures, then could I live to fulfil it. But such is not my
+destiny; I must pursue and destroy the being to whom I gave existence; then my
+lot on earth will be fulfilled and I may die.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My beloved Sister,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+September 2d.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I write to you, encompassed by peril and ignorant whether I am ever doomed to
+see again dear England and the dearer friends that inhabit it. I am surrounded
+by mountains of ice which admit of no escape and threaten every moment to crush
+my vessel. The brave fellows whom I have persuaded to be my companions look
+towards me for aid, but I have none to bestow. There is something terribly
+appalling in our situation, yet my courage and hopes do not desert me. Yet it
+is terrible to reflect that the lives of all these men are endangered through
+me. If we are lost, my mad schemes are the cause.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+And what, Margaret, will be the state of your mind? You will not hear of my
+destruction, and you will anxiously await my return. Years will pass, and you
+will have visitings of despair and yet be tortured by hope. Oh! My beloved
+sister, the sickening failing of your heart-felt expectations is, in prospect,
+more terrible to me than my own death. But you have a husband and lovely
+children; you may be happy. Heaven bless you and make you so!
+
+
+
+
+ 
+My unfortunate guest regards me with the tenderest compassion. He endeavours to
+fill me with hope and talks as if life were a possession which he valued. He
+reminds me how often the same accidents have happened to other navigators who
+have attempted this sea, and in spite of myself, he fills me with cheerful
+auguries. Even the sailors feel the power of his eloquence; when he speaks,
+they no longer despair; he rouses their energies, and while they hear his voice
+they believe these vast mountains of ice are mole-hills which will vanish
+before the resolutions of man. These feelings are transitory; each day of
+expectation delayed fills them with fear, and I almost dread a mutiny caused by
+this despair.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+September 5th.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+A scene has just passed of such uncommon interest that, although it is highly
+probable that these papers may never reach you, yet I cannot forbear recording
+it.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+We are still surrounded by mountains of ice, still in imminent danger of being
+crushed in their conflict. The cold is excessive, and many of my unfortunate
+comrades have already found a grave amidst this scene of desolation.
+Frankenstein has daily declined in health; a feverish fire still glimmers in
+his eyes, but he is exhausted, and when suddenly roused to any exertion, he
+speedily sinks again into apparent lifelessness.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I mentioned in my last letter the fears I entertained of a mutiny. This
+morning, as I sat watching the wan countenance of my friend—his eyes half
+closed and his limbs hanging listlessly—I was roused by half a dozen of the
+sailors, who demanded admission into the cabin. They entered, and their leader
+addressed me. He told me that he and his companions had been chosen by the
+other sailors to come in deputation to me to make me a requisition which, in
+justice, I could not refuse. We were immured in ice and should probably never
+escape, but they feared that if, as was possible, the ice should dissipate and
+a free passage be opened, I should be rash enough to continue my voyage and
+lead them into fresh dangers, after they might happily have surmounted this.
+They insisted, therefore, that I should engage with a solemn promise that if
+the vessel should be freed I would instantly direct my course southwards.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+This speech troubled me. I had not despaired, nor had I yet conceived the idea
+of returning if set free. Yet could I, in justice, or even in possibility,
+refuse this demand? I hesitated before I answered, when Frankenstein, who had
+at first been silent, and indeed appeared hardly to have force enough to
+attend, now roused himself; his eyes sparkled, and his cheeks flushed with
+momentary vigour. Turning towards the men, he said,
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“What do you mean? What do you demand of your captain? Are you, then, so easily
+turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition? “And
+wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a
+southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror, because at every
+new incident your fortitude was to be called forth and your courage exhibited,
+because danger and death surrounded it, and these you were to brave and
+overcome. For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honourable
+undertaking. You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your
+species, your names adored as belonging to brave men who encountered death for
+honour and the benefit of mankind. And now, behold, with the first imagination
+of danger, or, if you will, the first mighty and terrific trial of your
+courage, you shrink away and are content to be handed down as men who had not
+strength enough to endure cold and peril; and so, poor souls, they were chilly
+and returned to their warm firesides. Why, that requires not this preparation;
+ye need not have come thus far and dragged your captain to the shame of a
+defeat merely to prove yourselves cowards. Oh! Be men, or be more than men. Be
+steady to your purposes and firm as a rock. This ice is not made of such stuff
+as your hearts may be; it is mutable and cannot withstand you if you say that
+it shall not. Do not return to your families with the stigma of disgrace marked
+on your brows. Return as heroes who have fought and conquered and who know not
+what it is to turn their backs on the foe.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+He spoke this with a voice so modulated to the different feelings expressed in
+his speech, with an eye so full of lofty design and heroism, that can you
+wonder that these men were moved? They looked at one another and were unable to
+reply. I spoke; I told them to retire and consider of what had been said, that
+I would not lead them farther north if they strenuously desired the contrary,
+but that I hoped that, with reflection, their courage would return.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+They retired and I turned towards my friend, but he was sunk in languor and
+almost deprived of life.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+How all this will terminate, I know not, but I had rather die than return
+shamefully, my purpose unfulfilled. Yet I fear such will be my fate; the men,
+unsupported by ideas of glory and honour, can never willingly continue to
+endure their present hardships.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+September 7th.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+The die is cast; I have consented to return if we are not destroyed. Thus are
+my hopes blasted by cowardice and indecision; I come back ignorant and
+disappointed. It requires more philosophy than I possess to bear this injustice
+with patience.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+September 12th.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+It is past; I am returning to England. I have lost my hopes of utility and
+glory; I have lost my friend. But I will endeavour to detail these bitter
+circumstances to you, my dear sister; and while I am wafted towards England and
+towards you, I will not despond.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+September 9th, the ice began to move, and roarings like thunder were heard at a
+distance as the islands split and cracked in every direction. We were in the
+most imminent peril, but as we could only remain passive, my chief attention
+was occupied by my unfortunate guest whose illness increased in such a degree
+that he was entirely confined to his bed. The ice cracked behind us and was
+driven with force towards the north; a breeze sprang from the west, and on the
+11th the passage towards the south became perfectly free. When the sailors saw
+this and that their return to their native country was apparently assured, a
+shout of tumultuous joy broke from them, loud and long-continued. Frankenstein,
+who was dozing, awoke and asked the cause of the tumult. “They shout,” I said,
+“because they will soon return to England.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do you, then, really return?”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Alas! Yes; I cannot withstand their demands. I cannot lead them unwillingly to
+danger, and I must return.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do so, if you will; but I will not. You may give up your purpose, but mine is
+assigned to me by Heaven, and I dare not. I am weak, but surely the spirits who
+assist my vengeance will endow me with sufficient strength.” Saying this, he
+endeavoured to spring from the bed, but the exertion was too great for him; he
+fell back and fainted.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+It was long before he was restored, and I often thought that life was entirely
+extinct. At length he opened his eyes; he breathed with difficulty and was
+unable to speak. The surgeon gave him a composing draught and ordered us to
+leave him undisturbed. In the meantime he told me that my friend had certainly
+not many hours to live.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+His sentence was pronounced, and I could only grieve and be patient. I sat by
+his bed, watching him; his eyes were closed, and I thought he slept; but
+presently he called to me in a feeble voice, and bidding me come near, said,
+“Alas! The strength I relied on is gone; I feel that I shall soon die, and he,
+my enemy and persecutor, may still be in being. Think not, Walton, that in the
+last moments of my existence I feel that burning hatred and ardent desire of
+revenge I once expressed; but I feel myself justified in desiring the death of
+my adversary. During these last days I have been occupied in examining my past
+conduct; nor do I find it blamable. In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created
+a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my
+power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty, but there was another
+still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had
+greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of
+happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did right in
+refusing, to create a companion for the first creature. He showed unparalleled
+malignity and selfishness in evil; he destroyed my friends; he devoted to
+destruction beings who possessed exquisite sensations, happiness, and wisdom;
+nor do I know where this thirst for vengeance may end. Miserable himself that
+he may render no other wretched, he ought to die. The task of his destruction
+was mine, but I have failed. When actuated by selfish and vicious motives, I
+asked you to undertake my unfinished work, and I renew this request now, when I
+am only induced by reason and virtue.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yet I cannot ask you to renounce your country and friends to fulfil this task;
+and now that you are returning to England, you will have little chance of
+meeting with him. But the consideration of these points, and the well balancing
+of what you may esteem your duties, I leave to you; my judgment and ideas are
+already disturbed by the near approach of death. I dare not ask you to do what
+I think right, for I may still be misled by passion.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“That he should live to be an instrument of mischief disturbs me; in other
+respects, this hour, when I momentarily expect my release, is the only happy
+one which I have enjoyed for several years. The forms of the beloved dead flit
+before me, and I hasten to their arms. Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in
+tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one
+of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I
+have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+His voice became fainter as he spoke, and at length, exhausted by his effort,
+he sank into silence. About half an hour afterwards he attempted again to speak
+but was unable; he pressed my hand feebly, and his eyes closed for ever, while
+the irradiation of a gentle smile passed away from his lips.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Margaret, what comment can I make on the untimely extinction of this glorious
+spirit? What can I say that will enable you to understand the depth of my
+sorrow? All that I should express would be inadequate and feeble. My tears
+flow; my mind is overshadowed by a cloud of disappointment. But I journey
+towards England, and I may there find consolation.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I am interrupted. What do these sounds portend? It is midnight; the breeze
+blows fairly, and the watch on deck scarcely stir. Again there is a sound as of
+a human voice, but hoarser; it comes from the cabin where the remains of
+Frankenstein still lie. I must arise and examine. Good night, my sister.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+Great God! what a scene has just taken place! I am yet dizzy with the
+remembrance of it. I hardly know whether I shall have the power to detail it;
+yet the tale which I have recorded would be incomplete without this final and
+wonderful catastrophe.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I entered the cabin where lay the remains of my ill-fated and admirable friend.
+Over him hung a form which I cannot find words to describe—gigantic in stature,
+yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions. As he hung over the coffin, his
+face was concealed by long locks of ragged hair; but one vast hand was
+extended, in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy. When he heard
+the sound of my approach, he ceased to utter exclamations of grief and horror
+and sprung towards the window. Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his
+face, of such loathsome yet appalling hideousness. I shut my eyes involuntarily
+and endeavoured to recollect what were my duties with regard to this destroyer.
+I called on him to stay.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+He paused, looking on me with wonder, and again turning towards the lifeless
+form of his creator, he seemed to forget my presence, and every feature and
+gesture seemed instigated by the wildest rage of some uncontrollable passion.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is also my victim!” he exclaimed. “In his murder my crimes are
+consummated; the miserable series of my being is wound to its close! Oh,
+Frankenstein! Generous and self-devoted being! What does it avail that I now
+ask thee to pardon me? I, who irretrievably destroyed thee by destroying all
+thou lovedst. Alas! He is cold, he cannot answer me.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+His voice seemed suffocated, and my first impulses, which had suggested to me
+the duty of obeying the dying request of my friend in destroying his enemy,
+were now suspended by a mixture of curiosity and compassion. I approached this
+tremendous being; I dared not again raise my eyes to his face, there was
+something so scaring and unearthly in his ugliness. I attempted to speak, but
+the words died away on my lips. The monster continued to utter wild and
+incoherent self-reproaches. At length I gathered resolution to address him in a
+pause of the tempest of his passion.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your repentance,” I said, “is now superfluous. If you had listened to the
+voice of conscience and heeded the stings of remorse before you had urged your
+diabolical vengeance to this extremity, Frankenstein would yet have lived.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“And do you dream?” said the dæmon. “Do you think that I was then dead to agony
+and remorse? He,” he continued, pointing to the corpse, “he suffered not in the
+consummation of the deed. Oh! Not the ten-thousandth portion of the anguish
+that was mine during the lingering detail of its execution. A frightful
+selfishness hurried me on, while my heart was poisoned with remorse. Think you
+that the groans of Clerval were music to my ears? My heart was fashioned to be
+susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and
+hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as
+you cannot even imagine.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“After the murder of Clerval I returned to Switzerland, heart-broken and
+overcome. I pitied Frankenstein; my pity amounted to horror; I abhorred myself.
+But when I discovered that he, the author at once of my existence and of its
+unspeakable torments, dared to hope for happiness, that while he accumulated
+wretchedness and despair upon me he sought his own enjoyment in feelings and
+passions from the indulgence of which I was for ever barred, then impotent envy
+and bitter indignation filled me with an insatiable thirst for vengeance. I
+recollected my threat and resolved that it should be accomplished. I knew that
+I was preparing for myself a deadly torture, but I was the slave, not the
+master, of an impulse which I detested yet could not disobey. Yet when she
+died! Nay, then I was not miserable. I had cast off all feeling, subdued all
+anguish, to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil thenceforth became my good.
+Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I
+had willingly chosen. The completion of my demoniacal design became an
+insatiable passion. And now it is ended; there is my last victim!”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+I was at first touched by the expressions of his misery; yet, when I called to
+mind what Frankenstein had said of his powers of eloquence and persuasion, and
+when I again cast my eyes on the lifeless form of my friend, indignation was
+rekindled within me. “Wretch!” I said. “It is well that you come here to whine
+over the desolation that you have made. You throw a torch into a pile of
+buildings, and when they are consumed, you sit among the ruins and lament the
+fall. Hypocritical fiend! If he whom you mourn still lived, still would he be
+the object, again would he become the prey, of your accursed vengeance. It is
+not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is
+withdrawn from your power.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, it is not thus—not thus,” interrupted the being. “Yet such must be the
+impression conveyed to you by what appears to be the purport of my actions. Yet
+I seek not a fellow feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I
+first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and
+affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be
+participated. But now that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness
+and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I
+seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone while my sufferings shall
+endure; when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should
+load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and
+of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my
+outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of
+unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now
+crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no
+malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the
+frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature
+whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the
+beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes
+a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and
+associates in his desolation; I am alone.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes
+and his misfortunes. But in the detail which he gave you of them he could not
+sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured wasting in impotent
+passions. For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires.
+They were for ever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and
+I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the
+only criminal, when all humankind sinned against me? Why do you not hate Felix,
+who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate the
+rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous
+and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to
+be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the
+recollection of this injustice.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the
+helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his
+throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my
+creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among
+men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he
+lies, white and cold in death. You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal
+that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I
+think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived and long for
+the moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt
+my thoughts no more.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief. My work is nearly
+complete. Neither yours nor any man’s death is needed to consummate the series
+of my being and accomplish that which must be done, but it requires my own. Do
+not think that I shall be slow to perform this sacrifice. I shall quit your
+vessel on the ice raft which brought me thither and shall seek the most
+northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to
+ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious
+and unhallowed wretch who would create such another as I have been. I shall
+die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me or be the prey of
+feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and
+when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.
+I shall no longer see the sun or stars or feel the winds play on my cheeks.
+Light, feeling, and sense will pass away; and in this condition must I find my
+happiness. Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first
+opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer and heard the
+rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me,
+I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes
+and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“Farewell! I leave you, and in you the last of humankind whom these eyes will
+ever behold. Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive and yet cherished a
+desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my
+destruction. But it was not so; thou didst seek my extinction, that I might not
+cause greater wretchedness; and if yet, in some mode unknown to me, thou hadst
+not ceased to think and feel, thou wouldst not desire against me a vengeance
+greater than that which I feel. Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still
+superior to thine, for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in
+my wounds until death shall close them for ever.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+“But soon,” he cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and what I
+now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I
+shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the
+torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will
+be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it
+thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”
+
+
+
+
+ 
+He sprang from the cabin-window as he said this, upon the ice raft which lay
+close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness
+and distance.
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS *** 
+ 
+
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Moby Dick; Or, The Whale 
+ 
+ This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States,
+you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
+before using this eBook. 
+
+ Title : Moby Dick; Or, The Whale
+
+
+ 
+ Author : Herman Melville
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Release date : July 1, 2001 [eBook #2701]
+
+ Most recently updated: October 11, 2026
+
+
+
+ Language : English
+
+
+
+ Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701 
+
+
+
+ Credits : Daniel Lazarus, Jonesey, and David Widger
+
+
+
+ 
+ *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY DICK; OR, THE WHALE *** 
+ 
+ 
+ MOBY-DICK;
+
+or, THE WHALE.
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By Herman Melville
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CONTENTS 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ETYMOLOGY. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 1. Loomings. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 5. Breakfast. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 6. The Street. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 7. The Chapel. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 9. The Sermon. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 11. Nightgown. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 12. Biographical. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 14. Nantucket. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 15. Chowder. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 16. The Ship. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 18. His Mark. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 19. The Prophet. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 20. All Astir. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 24. The Advocate. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 25. Postscript. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 28. Ahab. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 30. The Pipe. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 32. Cetology. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 37. Sunset. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 38. Dusk. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 39. First Night-Watch. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 43. Hark! 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 44. The Chart. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 46. Surmises. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 49. The Hyena. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 52. The Albatross. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 53. The Gam. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho’s Story. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of
+ Whales. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of
+ Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in
+ Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 58. Brit. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 59. Squid. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 60. The Line. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 62. The Dart. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 63. The Crotch. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 64. Stubb’s Supper. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 67. Cutting In. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 68. The Blanket. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 69. The Funeral. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam’s Story. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale;
+ and Then Have a Talk over Him. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted
+ View. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted
+ View. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 79. The Prairie. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 80. The Nut. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 85. The Fountain. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 86. The Tail. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 92. Ambergris. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 93. The Castaway. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 95. The Cassock. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 97. The Lamp. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 101. The Decanter. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s
+ Skeleton. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude
+ Diminish?—Will He Perish? 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 106. Ahab’s Leg. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 111. The Pacific. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 113. The Forge. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 114. The Gilder. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 119. The Candles. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the
+ First Night Watch. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle
+ Bulwarks. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and
+ Lightning. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 123. The Musket. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 124. The Needle. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 127. The Deck. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 129. The Cabin. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 130. The Hat. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 132. The Symphony. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHAPTER 135. The Chase.—Third Day. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Epilogue 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ Original Transcriber’s Notes: 
+ 
+ 
+ This text is a combination of etexts, one from the now-defunct ERIS
+ project at Virginia Tech and one from Project Gutenberg’s archives. The
+ proofreaders of this version are indebted to The University of Adelaide
+ Library for preserving the Virginia Tech version. The resulting etext
+ was compared with a public domain hard copy version of the text.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ ETYMOLOGY.
+ 
+ 
+ (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)
+ 
+ 
+ The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see
+ him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer
+ handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the
+ known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it
+ somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name
+ a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through
+ ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of
+ the word, you deliver that which is not true.” — Hackluyt. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “WHALE. * * * Sw. and Dan. hval . This animal is named from roundness or
+ rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted.” — Webster’s
+ Dictionary. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “WHALE. * * * It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. Wallen ; A.S.
+ Walw-ian , to roll, to wallow.” — Richardson’s Dictionary. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ חו, 
+ Hebrew . 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ ϰητος, 
+ Greek . 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CETUS, 
+ Latin . 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ WHŒL, 
+ Anglo-Saxon . 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ HVALT, 
+ Danish . 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ WAL, 
+ Dutch . 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ HWAL, 
+ Swedish . 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ HVALUR, 
+ Icelandic . 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ WHALE, 
+ English . 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BALEINE, 
+ French . 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BALLENA, 
+ Spanish . 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, 
+ Fegee . 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE, 
+ Erromangoan . 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ EXTRACTS. (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
+ 
+ 
+ It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a
+ poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans
+ and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to
+ whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane.
+ Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the
+ higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these
+ extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching the
+ ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these
+ extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing
+ bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied,
+ and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our
+ own.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou
+ belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world
+ will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong;
+ but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too;
+ and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes
+ and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness—Give
+ it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the
+ world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I
+ could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down
+ your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your
+ friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens,
+ and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael,
+ against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there,
+ ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ EXTRACTS.
+ 
+ 
+ “And God created great whales.” — Genesis .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to
+ be hoary.” — Job .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.” — Jonah .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play
+ therein.” — Psalms .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword, shall
+ punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked
+ serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.” — Isaiah .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster’s
+ mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that
+ foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his
+ paunch.” — Holland’s Plutarch’s Morals .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are: among
+ which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as much in
+ length as four acres or arpens of land.” — Holland’s Pliny .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a
+ great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the
+ former, one was of a most monstrous size.... This came towards us,
+ open-mouthed, raising the waves on all sides, and beating the sea before
+ him into a foam.” — Tooke’s Lucian . “ The True History .”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales,
+ which had bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he brought
+ some to the king.... The best whales were catched in his own country, of
+ which some were forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He said that he was
+ one of six who had killed sixty in two days.” — Other or Other’s
+ verbal narrative taken down from his mouth by King Alfred, A.D. 890.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that enter
+ into the dreadful gulf of this monster’s (whale’s) mouth, are
+ immediately lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in
+ great security, and there sleeps.” —MONTAIGNE. — Apology for
+ Raimond Sebond .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if it is not Leviathan described
+ by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.” — Rabelais .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This whale’s liver was two cartloads.” — Stowe’s Annals .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan.”
+ — Lord Bacon’s Version of the Psalms .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received
+ nothing certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible
+ quantity of oil will be extracted out of one whale.” — Ibid .
+ “ History of Life and Death .”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise.”
+ — King Henry .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very like a whale.” — Hamlet .
+ 
+
+
+ “Which to secure, no skill of leach’s art
+ Mote him availle, but to returne againe
+ To his wound’s worker, that with lowly dart,
+ Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine,
+ Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro’ the maine.”
+ — The Fairie Queen .
+ 
+ 
+ “Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful
+ calm trouble the ocean till it boil.” — Sir William Davenant.
+ Preface to Gondibert .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned
+ Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit .”
+ — Sir T. Browne. Of Sperma Ceti and the Sperma Ceti Whale. Vide his
+ V. E. 
+ 
+
+
+ “Like Spencer’s Talus with his modern flail
+ He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.
+ ...
+ Their fixed jav’lins in his side he wears,
+ And on his back a grove of pikes appears.”
+ — Waller’s Battle of the Summer Islands .
+ 
+ 
+ “By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State—(in
+ Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.” — Opening sentence
+ of Hobbes’s Leviathan .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat
+ in the mouth of a whale.” — Pilgrim’s Progress .
+ 
+
+
+ “That sea beast
+ Leviathan, which God of all his works
+ Created hugest that swim the ocean stream.” — Paradise Lost .
+
+ —“There Leviathan,
+ Hugest of living creatures, in the deep
+ Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,
+ And seems a moving land; and at his gills
+ Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.” — Ibid .
+ 
+ 
+ “The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil
+ swimming in them.” — Fuller’s Profane and Holy State .
+ 
+
+
+ “So close behind some promontory lie
+ The huge Leviathan to attend their prey,
+ And give no chance, but swallow in the fry,
+ Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way.”
+ — Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis .
+ 
+ 
+ “While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off his
+ head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it
+ will be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water.” — Thomas Edge’s
+ Ten Voyages to Spitzbergen, in Purchas .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in
+ wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which
+ nature has placed on their shoulders.” — Sir T. Herbert’s Voyages
+ into Asia and Africa. Harris Coll .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to
+ proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their ship
+ upon them.” — Schouten’s Sixth Circumnavigation .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The
+ Jonas-in-the-Whale.... Some say the whale can’t open his mouth, but that
+ is a fable.... They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they
+ can see a whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains....
+ I was told of a whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel of
+ herrings in his belly.... One of our harpooneers told me that he caught
+ once a whale in Spitzbergen that was white all over.” — A Voyage to
+ Greenland, A.D. 1671. Harris Coll .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one
+ eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was
+ informed), besides a vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of
+ baleen. The jaws of it stand for a gate in the garden of Pitferren.”
+ — Sibbald’s Fife and Kinross .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this
+ Sperma-ceti whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that was
+ killed by any man, such is his fierceness and swiftness.” — Richard
+ Strafford’s Letter from the Bermudas. Phil. Trans. A.D. 1668.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Whales in the sea God’s voice obey.” — N. E. Primer .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those
+ southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the
+ northward of us.” — Captain Cowley’s Voyage round the Globe, A.D. 
+ 1729.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “... and the breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an
+ insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain.” — Ulloa’s
+ South America .
+ 
+
+
+ “To fifty chosen sylphs of special note,
+ We trust the important charge, the petticoat.
+ Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail,
+ Tho’ stuffed with hoops and armed with ribs of whale.”
+ — Rape of the Lock .
+ 
+ 
+ “If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that
+ take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear
+ contemptible in the comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest
+ animal in creation.” — Goldsmith, Nat. Hist .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them
+ speak like great whales.” — Goldsmith to Johnson .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was
+ found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were then
+ towing ashore. They seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves behind the
+ whale, in order to avoid being seen by us.” — Cook’s Voyages .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so
+ great dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to
+ mention even their names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood, and
+ some other articles of the same nature in their boats, in order to
+ terrify and prevent their too near approach.” — Uno Von Troil’s
+ Letters on Banks’s and Solander’s Voyage to Iceland in 1772.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce
+ animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen.”
+ — Thomas Jefferson’s Whale Memorial to the French minister in 1778.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?” — Edmund Burke’s
+ reference in Parliament to the Nantucket Whale-Fishery .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Spain—a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe.” — Edmund
+ Burke . ( somewhere .)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A tenth branch of the king’s ordinary revenue, said to be grounded on
+ the consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from pirates
+ and robbers, is the right to royal fish, which are whale and sturgeon.
+ And these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the coast, are the
+ property of the king.” — Blackstone .
+ 
+
+
+ “Soon to the sport of death the crews repair:
+ Rodmond unerring o’er his head suspends
+ The barbed steel, and every turn attends.”
+ — Falconer’s Shipwreck .
+
+ “Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires,
+ And rockets blew self driven,
+ To hang their momentary fire
+ Around the vault of heaven.
+
+ “So fire with water to compare,
+ The ocean serves on high,
+ Up-spouted by a whale in air,
+ To express unwieldy joy.”
+ — Cowper, on the Queen’s Visit to London .
+ 
+ 
+ “Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a
+ stroke, with immense velocity.” — John Hunter’s account of the
+ dissection of a whale . ( A small sized one .)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the
+ water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage
+ through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood
+ gushing from the whale’s heart.” — Paley’s Theology .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet.” — Baron
+ Cuvier .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take any
+ till the first of May, the sea being then covered with them.” — Colnett’s
+ Voyage for the Purpose of Extending the Spermaceti Whale Fishery .
+ 
+
+
+ “In the free element beneath me swam,
+ Floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle,
+ Fishes of every colour, form, and kind;
+ Which language cannot paint, and mariner
+ Had never seen; from dread Leviathan
+ To insect millions peopling every wave:
+ Gather’d in shoals immense, like floating islands,
+ Led by mysterious instincts through that waste
+ And trackless region, though on every side
+ Assaulted by voracious enemies,
+ Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm’d in front or jaw,
+ With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs.”
+ — Montgomery’s World before the Flood .
+
+ “Io! Paean! Io! sing.
+ To the finny people’s king.
+ Not a mightier whale than this
+ In the vast Atlantic is;
+ Not a fatter fish than he,
+ Flounders round the Polar Sea.”
+ — Charles Lamb’s Triumph of the Whale .
+ 
+ 
+ “In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales
+ spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed: there—pointing
+ to the sea—is a green pasture where our children’s grand-children
+ will go for bread.” — Obed Macy’s History of Nantucket .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form
+ of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale’s jaw bones.” — Hawthorne’s
+ Twice Told Tales .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been killed
+ by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years ago.” — Ibid .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Sir, ’tis a Right Whale,” answered Tom; “I saw his sprout; he threw
+ up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at.
+ He’s a raal oil-butt, that fellow!” — Cooper’s Pilot .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that
+ whales had been introduced on the stage there.” — Eckermann’s
+ Conversations with Goethe .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?” I answered, “we have been stove
+ by a whale.” —“ Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Whale Ship Essex
+ of Nantucket, which was attacked and finally destroyed by a large Sperm
+ Whale in the Pacific Ocean .” By Owen Chace of Nantucket, first mate of
+ said vessel. New York , 1821.
+ 
+
+
+ “A mariner sat in the shrouds one night,
+ The wind was piping free;
+ Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale,
+ And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale,
+ As it floundered in the sea.”
+ — Elizabeth Oakes Smith .
+ 
+ 
+ “The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture of
+ this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six
+ English miles....
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which,
+ cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four miles.”
+ — Scoresby .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the
+ infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head,
+ and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes at
+ the boats with his head; they are propelled before him with vast
+ swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed.... It is a matter of great
+ astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so interesting,
+ and, in a commercial point of view, so important an animal (as the Sperm
+ Whale) should have been so entirely neglected, or should have excited so
+ little curiosity among the numerous, and many of them competent
+ observers, that of late years, must have possessed the most abundant and
+ the most convenient opportunities of witnessing their habitudes.”
+ — Thomas Beale’s History of the Sperm Whale , 1839.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Cachalot” (Sperm Whale) “is not only better armed than the True
+ Whale” (Greenland or Right Whale) “in possessing a formidable weapon at
+ either extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a
+ disposition to employ these weapons offensively and in manner at once so
+ artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as the
+ most dangerous to attack of all the known species of the whale tribe.”
+ — Frederick Debell Bennett’s Whaling Voyage Round the Globe , 1840.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+ October 13. “There she blows,” was sung out from the mast-head.
+
+
+
+ “Where away?” demanded the captain.
+
+
+
+ “Three points off the lee bow, sir.”
+
+
+
+ “Raise up your wheel. Steady!”
+
+
+
+ “Steady, sir.”
+
+
+
+ “Mast-head ahoy! Do you see that whale now?”
+
+
+
+ “Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows! There she
+ breaches!”
+
+
+
+ “Sing out! sing out every time!”
+
+
+
+ “Ay Ay, sir! There she blows! there—there— thar she
+ blows—bowes—bo-o-os!”
+
+
+
+ “How far off?”
+
+
+
+ “Two miles and a half.”
+
+
+
+ “Thunder and lightning! so near! Call all hands.”
+
+
+
+ — J. Ross Browne’s Etchings of a Whaling Cruize . 1846.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+ “The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the horrid
+ transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island of
+ Nantucket.” —“ Narrative of the Globe Mutiny ,” by Lay and Hussey
+ survivors. A.D. 1828.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the
+ assault for some time with a lance; but the furious monster at length
+ rushed on the boat; himself and comrades only being preserved by leaping
+ into the water when they saw the onset was inevitable.” — Missionary
+ Journal of Tyerman and Bennett .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nantucket itself,” said Mr. Webster, “is a very striking and peculiar
+ portion of the National interest. There is a population of eight or nine
+ thousand persons living here in the sea, adding largely every year to
+ the National wealth by the boldest and most persevering industry.”
+ — Report of Daniel Webster’s Speech in the U. S. Senate, on the
+ application for the Erection of a Breakwater at Nantucket . 1828.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a moment.”
+ —“ The Whale and his Captors, or The Whaleman’s Adventures and the
+ Whale’s Biography, gathered on the Homeward Cruise of the Commodore
+ Preble .” By Rev. Henry T. Cheever .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you make the least damn bit of noise,” replied Samuel, “I will send
+ you to hell.” — Life of Samuel Comstock ( the mutineer ), by his
+ brother, William Comstock. Another Version of the whale-ship Globe
+ narrative .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in order,
+ if possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though they
+ failed of their main object, laid-open the haunts of the whale.” — McCulloch’s
+ Commercial Dictionary .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound forward
+ again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the whalemen seem
+ to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same mystic North-West
+ Passage.” — From “ Something ” unpublished .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being struck
+ by her near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with look-outs at
+ the mast-heads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse around them, has a
+ totally different air from those engaged in regular voyage.” — Currents
+ and Whaling. U.S. Ex. Ex .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect
+ having seen large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to form
+ arches over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may perhaps have
+ been told that these were the ribs of whales.” — Tales of a Whale
+ Voyager to the Arctic Ocean .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales,
+ that the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages
+ enrolled among the crew.” — Newspaper Account of the Taking and
+ Retaking of the Whale-Ship Hobomack .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels
+ (American) few ever return in the ships on board of which they
+ departed.” — Cruise in a Whale Boat .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up
+ perpendicularly into the air. It was the whale.” — Miriam Coffin or
+ the Whale Fisherman .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would
+ manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope tied
+ to the root of his tail.” — A Chapter on Whaling in Ribs and
+ Trucks .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male and
+ female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a stone’s
+ throw of the shore” (Terra Del Fuego), “over which the beech tree
+ extended its branches.” — Darwin’s Voyage of a Naturalist .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Stern all!’ exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw the
+ distended jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the boat,
+ threatening it with instant destruction;—‘Stern all, for your
+ lives!’” — Wharton the Whale Killer .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, While the bold
+ harpooneer is striking the whale!” — Nantucket Song .
+ 
+
+
+ “Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale
+ In his ocean home will be
+ A giant in might, where might is right,
+ And King of the boundless sea.”
+ — Whale Song .
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
+ 
+ 
+ Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having
+ little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on
+ shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of
+ the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the
+ circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever
+ it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself
+ involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear
+ of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an
+ upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me
+ from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking
+ people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon
+ as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical
+ flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.
+ There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men
+ in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings
+ towards the ocean with me.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves
+ as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf.
+ Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is
+ the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by
+ breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the
+ crowds of water-gazers there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears
+ Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do
+ you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand
+ thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some
+ leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking
+ over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as
+ if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all
+ landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters,
+ nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green
+ fields gone? What do they here?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and
+ seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the
+ extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder
+ warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as
+ they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of
+ them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys,
+ streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all
+ unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses
+ of all those ships attract them thither?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take
+ almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale,
+ and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let
+ the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand
+ that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead
+ you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be
+ athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan
+ happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one
+ knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest,
+ quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of
+ the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees,
+ each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and
+ here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder
+ cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way,
+ reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue.
+ But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes
+ down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain,
+ unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go
+ visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade
+ knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—Water—there
+ is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would
+ you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of
+ Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate
+ whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a
+ pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy
+ with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to
+ sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such
+ a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out
+ of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the
+ Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this
+ is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of
+ Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he
+ saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image,
+ we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the
+ ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to
+ grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do
+ not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to
+ go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag
+ unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick—grow
+ quarrelsome—don’t sleep of nights—do not enjoy themselves
+ much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though
+ I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a
+ Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to
+ those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable
+ toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as
+ much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships,
+ barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,—though
+ I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of
+ officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though
+ once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered,
+ there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say
+ reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous
+ dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse,
+ that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the
+ pyramids.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
+ plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True,
+ they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like
+ a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is
+ unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honor, particularly if you
+ come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or
+ Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting
+ your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country
+ schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition
+ is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires
+ a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear
+ it. But even this wears off in time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom
+ and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I
+ mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel
+ Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and
+ respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a
+ slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me
+ about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the
+ satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one
+ way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or
+ metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed
+ round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be
+ content.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying
+ me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I
+ ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there
+ is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act
+ of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two
+ orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid ,—what will compare
+ with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really
+ marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root
+ of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven.
+ Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise
+ and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are
+ far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate
+ the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the
+ quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the
+ forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same
+ way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same
+ time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after
+ having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it
+ into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer
+ of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs
+ me, and influences me in some unaccountable way—he can better answer
+ than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed
+ part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time
+ ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more
+ extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run
+ something like this:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. 
+ “WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the
+ Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others
+ were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy
+ parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot
+ tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I
+ think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being
+ cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about
+ performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it
+ was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating
+ judgment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale
+ himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity.
+ Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the
+ undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending
+ marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to
+ my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been
+ inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for
+ things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous
+ coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and
+ could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is
+ but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one
+ lodges in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great
+ flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that
+ swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul,
+ endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand
+ hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.
+ 
+ 
+ I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm,
+ and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of old
+ Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a Saturday night in
+ December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the little packet for
+ Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place would
+ offer, till the following Monday.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at
+ this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be
+ related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up
+ to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine,
+ boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old
+ island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late
+ been gradually monopolising the business of whaling, and though in this
+ matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her
+ great original—the Tyre of this Carthage;—the place where the
+ first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did
+ those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give
+ chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first
+ adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported
+ cobblestones—so goes the story—to throw at the whales, in
+ order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the
+ bowsprit?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me in
+ New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a matter
+ of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a very
+ dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and
+ cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded
+ my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,—So, wherever
+ you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary
+ street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with
+ the darkness towards the south—wherever in your wisdom you may
+ conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the
+ price, and don’t be too particular.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of “The
+ Crossed Harpoons”—but it looked too expensive and jolly there.
+ Further on, from the bright red windows of the “Sword-Fish Inn,” there
+ came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and
+ ice from before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten
+ inches thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement,—rather weary for me,
+ when I struck my foot against the flinty projections, because from hard,
+ remorseless service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight.
+ Too expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the
+ broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses
+ within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don’t you hear? get away from
+ before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I went. I
+ now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for there,
+ doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and
+ here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this
+ hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town
+ proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light proceeding
+ from a low, wide building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had
+ a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the public; so,
+ entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an ash-box in the
+ porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost choked me, are
+ these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But “The Crossed
+ Harpoons,” and “The Sword-Fish?”—this, then must needs be the sign
+ of “The Trap.” However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice
+ within, pushed on and opened a second, interior door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black
+ faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of
+ Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the
+ preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and
+ wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out,
+ Wretched entertainment at the sign of ‘The Trap!’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks,
+ and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging
+ sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a
+ tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath—“The
+ Spouter Inn:—Peter Coffin.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion,
+ thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose
+ this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and
+ the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little
+ wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the
+ ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a
+ poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very
+ spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a queer sort of place—a gable-ended old house, one side
+ palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak
+ corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling
+ than ever it did about poor Paul’s tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless,
+ is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob
+ quietly toasting for bed. “In judging of that tempestuous wind called
+ Euroclydon,” says an old writer—of whose works I possess the only
+ copy extant—“it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest
+ out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or
+ whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on
+ both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier.” True
+ enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind—old
+ black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this
+ body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t stop up the chinks and
+ the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it’s
+ too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the
+ copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor
+ Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow,
+ and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both
+ ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not
+ keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his
+ red silken wrapper—(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What
+ a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them
+ talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give
+ me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to
+ the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than
+ here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of
+ the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to
+ keep out this frost?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the
+ door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be
+ moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar
+ in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a
+ temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is
+ plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet,
+ and see what sort of a place this “Spouter” may be.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.
+ 
+ 
+ Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low,
+ straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the
+ bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large
+ oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the
+ unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study
+ and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the
+ neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its
+ purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first
+ you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New
+ England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of
+ much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and
+ especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the
+ entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild,
+ might not be altogether unwarranted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous,
+ black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three
+ blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy,
+ soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.
+ Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity
+ about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath
+ with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and
+ anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s
+ the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the
+ four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean
+ winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time.
+ But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in
+ the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But
+ stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the
+ great leviathan himself?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly
+ based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I
+ conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a
+ great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three
+ dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to
+ spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself
+ upon the three mast-heads.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array
+ of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth
+ resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and
+ one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment
+ made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you
+ gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have
+ gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed
+ with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons all broken and
+ deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long lance, now wildly
+ elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a
+ sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon—so like a corkscrew now—was
+ flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards slain
+ off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like
+ a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty
+ feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way—cut
+ through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with
+ fireplaces all round—you enter the public room. A still duskier
+ place is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled
+ planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft’s
+ cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored
+ old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low, shelf-like
+ table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities
+ gathered from this wide world’s remotest nooks. Projecting from the
+ further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den—the bar—a
+ rude attempt at a right whale’s head. Be that how it may, there stands the
+ vast arched bone of the whale’s jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive
+ beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters,
+ bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another
+ cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little
+ withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums
+ and death.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true
+ cylinders without—within, the villanous green goggling glasses
+ deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians
+ rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads’ goblets. Fill to
+ this mark, and your charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on
+ to the full glass—the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for
+ a shilling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about a
+ table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of skrimshander . I sought
+ the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room,
+ received for answer that his house was full—not a bed unoccupied.
+ “But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to
+ sharing a harpooneer’s blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are goin’ a-whalin’,
+ so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever
+ do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he
+ (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was
+ not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander further about a
+ strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with the half of any
+ decent man’s blanket.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper?
+ Supper’ll be ready directly.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the
+ Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with
+ his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space
+ between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but he
+ didn’t make much headway, I thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining
+ room. It was cold as Iceland—no fire at all—the landlord said
+ he couldn’t afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a
+ winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and hold to
+ our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But the fare
+ was of the most substantial kind—not only meat and potatoes, but
+ dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in a green
+ box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a dead
+ sartainty.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the harpooneer is it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, “the harpooneer
+ is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don’t—he
+ eats nothing but steaks, and he likes ’em rare.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The devil he does,” says I. “Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’ll be here afore long,” was the answer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this “dark
+ complexioned” harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so
+ turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into bed
+ before I did.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what
+ else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a
+ looker on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord
+ cried, “That’s the Grampus’s crew. I seed her reported in the offing this
+ morning; a three years’ voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we’ll
+ have the latest news from the Feegees.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open,
+ and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy
+ watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all
+ bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an
+ eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat, and
+ this was the first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they made a
+ straight wake for the whale’s mouth—the bar—when the wrinkled
+ little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all
+ round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah mixed
+ him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a
+ sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how
+ long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the
+ weather side of an ice-island.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with
+ the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering about
+ most obstreperously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he
+ seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own
+ sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much noise as
+ the rest. This man interested me at once; and since the sea-gods had
+ ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a
+ sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned), I will here
+ venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six feet in
+ height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom
+ seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his
+ white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of his
+ eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy.
+ His voice at once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine
+ stature, I thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the
+ Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry of his companions had
+ mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I saw no more
+ of him till he became my comrade on the sea. In a few minutes, however, he
+ was missed by his shipmates, and being, it seems, for some reason a huge
+ favourite with them, they raised a cry of “Bulkington! Bulkington! where’s
+ Bulkington?” and darted out of the house in pursuit of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was now about nine o’clock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally
+ quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon a little
+ plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance of the seamen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal
+ rather not sleep with your own brother. I don’t know how it is, but people
+ like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping
+ with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that
+ stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply. Nor was
+ there any earthly reason why I as a sailor should sleep two in a bed, more
+ than anybody else; for sailors no more sleep two in a bed at sea, than
+ bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they all sleep together in one
+ apartment, but you have your own hammock, and cover yourself with your own
+ blanket, and sleep in your own skin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the
+ thought of sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a
+ harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be of
+ the tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over.
+ Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought to be home
+ and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at midnight—how
+ could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Landlord! I’ve changed my mind about that harpooneer.—I shan’t
+ sleep with him. I’ll try the bench here.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just as you please; I’m sorry I can’t spare ye a tablecloth for a
+ mattress, and it’s a plaguy rough board here”—feeling of the knots
+ and notches. “But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I’ve got a carpenter’s plane
+ there in the bar—wait, I say, and I’ll make ye snug enough.” So
+ saying he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief first
+ dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed, the while
+ grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at last the
+ plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was near
+ spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven’s sake to quit—the
+ bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing in
+ the world could make eider down of a pine plank. So gathering up the
+ shavings with another grin, and throwing them into the great stove in the
+ middle of the room, he went about his business, and left me in a brown
+ study.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too
+ short; but that could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too
+ narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four inches higher than
+ the planed one—so there was no yoking them. I then placed the first
+ bench lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall, leaving a
+ little interval between, for my back to settle down in. But I soon found
+ that there came such a draught of cold air over me from under the sill of
+ the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially as another
+ current from the rickety door met the one from the window, and both
+ together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity of
+ the spot where I had thought to spend the night.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn’t I steal a
+ march on him—bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be
+ wakened by the most violent knockings? It seemed no bad idea; but upon
+ second thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next
+ morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be
+ standing in the entry, all ready to knock me down!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending a
+ sufferable night unless in some other person’s bed, I began to think that
+ after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against this
+ unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I’ll wait awhile; he must be dropping in
+ before long. I’ll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may become
+ jolly good bedfellows after all—there’s no telling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes,
+ and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Landlord!” said I, “what sort of a chap is he—does he always keep
+ such late hours?” It was now hard upon twelve o’clock.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be
+ mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. “No,” he answered,
+ “generally he’s an early bird—airley to bed and airley to rise—yes,
+ he’s the bird what catches the worm. But to-night he went out a peddling,
+ you see, and I don’t see what on airth keeps him so late, unless, may be,
+ he can’t sell his head.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Can’t sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you
+ are telling me?” getting into a towering rage. “Do you pretend to say,
+ landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday
+ night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around this town?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s precisely it,” said the landlord, “and I told him he couldn’t sell
+ it here, the market’s overstocked.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “With what?” shouted I.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “With heads to be sure; ain’t there too many heads in the world?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I tell you what it is, landlord,” said I quite calmly, “you’d better stop
+ spinning that yarn to me—I’m not green.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “May be not,” taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, “but I rayther
+ guess you’ll be done brown if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin’
+ his head.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll break it for him,” said I, now flying into a passion again at this
+ unaccountable farrago of the landlord’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s broke a’ready,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Broke,” said I—“ broke , do you mean?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sartain, and that’s the very reason he can’t sell it, I guess.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Landlord,” said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a snow-storm—“landlord,
+ stop whittling. You and I must understand one another, and that too
+ without delay. I come to your house and want a bed; you tell me you can
+ only give me half a one; that the other half belongs to a certain
+ harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you
+ persist in telling me the most mystifying and exasperating stories tending
+ to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you design
+ for my bedfellow—a sort of connexion, landlord, which is an intimate
+ and confidential one in the highest degree. I now demand of you to speak
+ out and tell me who and what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in
+ all respects safe to spend the night with him. And in the first place, you
+ will be so good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if
+ true I take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and
+ I’ve no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you, sir, you I mean,
+ landlord, you , sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would
+ thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wall,” said the landlord, fetching a long breath, “that’s a purty long
+ sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be easy,
+ this here harpooneer I have been tellin’ you of has just arrived from the
+ south seas, where he bought up a lot of ’balmed New Zealand heads (great
+ curios, you know), and he’s sold all on ’em but one, and that one he’s
+ trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow’s Sunday, and it would not do to
+ be sellin’ human heads about the streets when folks is goin’ to churches.
+ He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was goin’ out of
+ the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a
+ string of inions.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed
+ that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me—but at
+ the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of a
+ Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal
+ business as selling the heads of dead idolators?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He pays reg’lar,” was the rejoinder. “But come, it’s getting dreadful
+ late, you had better be turning flukes—it’s a nice bed; Sal and me
+ slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. There’s plenty of room
+ for two to kick about in that bed; it’s an almighty big bed that. Why,
+ afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little Johnny in the foot
+ of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one night, and somehow,
+ Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his arm. Arter that,
+ Sal said it wouldn’t do. Come along here, I’ll give ye a glim in a jiffy;”
+ and so saying he lighted a candle and held it towards me, offering to lead
+ the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a clock in the corner, he
+ exclaimed “I vum it’s Sunday—you won’t see that harpooneer to-night;
+ he’s come to anchor somewhere—come along then; do come; won’t ye
+ come?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was
+ ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough,
+ with a prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four harpooneers
+ to sleep abreast.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There,” said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest
+ that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; “there, make
+ yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye.” I turned round from
+ eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the
+ most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced
+ round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table, could see no
+ other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four walls,
+ and a papered fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of things not
+ properly belonging to the room, there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown
+ upon the floor in one corner; also a large seaman’s bag, containing the
+ harpooneer’s wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk. Likewise, there
+ was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf over the
+ fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the
+ light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive
+ at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to nothing
+ but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags
+ something like the stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin.
+ There was a hole or slit in the middle of this mat, as you see the same in
+ South American ponchos. But could it be possible that any sober harpooneer
+ would get into a door mat, and parade the streets of any Christian town in
+ that sort of guise? I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a
+ hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as
+ though this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I
+ went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw
+ such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I
+ gave myself a kink in the neck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this
+ head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on
+ the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in
+ the middle of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought a
+ little more in my shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now, half
+ undressed as I was, and remembering what the landlord said about the
+ harpooneer’s not coming home at all that night, it being so very late, I
+ made no more ado, but jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and then
+ blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and commended myself to the care
+ of heaven.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there
+ is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a
+ long time. At last I slid off into a light doze, and had pretty nearly
+ made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I heard a heavy footfall
+ in the passage, and saw a glimmer of light come into the room from under
+ the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal
+ head-peddler. But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a word
+ till spoken to. Holding a light in one hand, and that identical New
+ Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and without
+ looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off from me on the
+ floor in one corner, and then began working away at the knotted cords of
+ the large bag I before spoke of as being in the room. I was all eagerness
+ to see his face, but he kept it averted for some time while employed in
+ unlacing the bag’s mouth. This accomplished, however, he turned round—when,
+ good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish,
+ yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large blackish looking
+ squares. Yes, it’s just as I thought, he’s a terrible bedfellow; he’s been
+ in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon. But
+ at that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I
+ plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black
+ squares on his cheeks. They were stains of some sort or other. At first I
+ knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the truth occurred
+ to me. I remembered a story of a white man—a whaleman too—who,
+ falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I concluded that
+ this harpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must have met with
+ a similar adventure. And what is it, thought I, after all! It’s only his
+ outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. But then, what to make
+ of his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about,
+ and completely independent of the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it
+ might be nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never heard of
+ a hot sun’s tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one. However, I had
+ never been in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced these
+ extraordinary effects upon the skin. Now, while all these ideas were
+ passing through me like lightning, this harpooneer never noticed me at
+ all. But, after some difficulty having opened his bag, he commenced
+ fumbling in it, and presently pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a
+ seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing these on the old chest in the
+ middle of the room, he then took the New Zealand head—a ghastly
+ thing enough—and crammed it down into the bag. He now took off his
+ hat—a new beaver hat—when I came nigh singing out with fresh
+ surprise. There was no hair on his head—none to speak of at least—nothing
+ but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head
+ now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. Had not the stranger
+ stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker than
+ ever I bolted a dinner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but it
+ was the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make of this
+ head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension. Ignorance
+ is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded
+ about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was
+ the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night.
+ In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game enough just then to
+ address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed
+ inexplicable in him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his
+ chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with
+ the same squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same dark
+ squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years’ War, and just escaped
+ from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were
+ marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of
+ young palms. It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage
+ or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in
+ this Christian country. I quaked to think of it. A peddler of heads too—perhaps
+ the heads of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to mine—heavens!
+ look at that tomahawk!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about
+ something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that
+ he must indeed be a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or
+ dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the
+ pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with a
+ hunch on its back, and exactly the colour of a three days’ old Congo baby.
+ Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that this black
+ manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner. But seeing that
+ it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal like polished
+ ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed
+ it proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the empty fire-place, and
+ removing the papered fire-board, sets up this little hunch-backed image,
+ like a tenpin, between the andirons. The chimney jambs and all the bricks
+ inside were very sooty, so that I thought this fire-place made a very
+ appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but ill
+ at ease meantime—to see what was next to follow. First he takes
+ about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places
+ them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on top
+ and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into a
+ sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty snatches into the fire, and
+ still hastier withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he seemed to be
+ scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing out the biscuit;
+ then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of it
+ to the little negro. But the little devil did not seem to fancy such dry
+ sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips. All these strange antics
+ were accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from the devotee, who
+ seemed to be praying in a sing-song or else singing some pagan psalmody or
+ other, during which his face twitched about in the most unnatural manner.
+ At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very unceremoniously,
+ and bagged it again in his grego pocket as carelessly as if he were a
+ sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and seeing him
+ now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business operations, and
+ jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time, now or never, before
+ the light was put out, to break the spell in which I had so long been
+ bound.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one.
+ Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an
+ instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle,
+ he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke. The next moment the light was
+ extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth, sprang
+ into bed with me. I sang out, I could not help it now; and giving a sudden
+ grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him against
+ the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might be, to keep
+ quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again. But his guttural
+ responses satisfied me at once that he but ill comprehended my meaning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who-e debel you?”—he at last said—“you no speak-e, dam-me, I
+ kill-e.” And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in
+ the dark.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Landlord, for God’s sake, Peter Coffin!” shouted I. “Landlord! Watch!
+ Coffin! Angels! save me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!” again growled the
+ cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the hot
+ tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on fire. But
+ thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the room light in
+ hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t be afraid now,” said he, grinning again, “Queequeg here wouldn’t
+ harm a hair of your head.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stop your grinning,” shouted I, “and why didn’t you tell me that that
+ infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I thought ye know’d it;—didn’t I tell ye, he was a peddlin’ heads
+ around town?—but turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look
+ here—you sabbee me, I sabbee—you this man sleepe you—you
+ sabbee?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Me sabbee plenty”—grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and
+ sitting up in bed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You gettee in,” he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing
+ the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil but a
+ really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment. For all
+ his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal.
+ What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself—the
+ man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me,
+ as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a
+ drunken Christian.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Landlord,” said I, “tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or
+ whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I will turn
+ in with him. But I don’t fancy having a man smoking in bed with me. It’s
+ dangerous. Besides, I ain’t insured.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely
+ motioned me to get into bed—rolling over to one side as much as to
+ say—“I won’t touch a leg of ye.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good night, landlord,” said I, “you may go.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I turned in, and never slept better in my life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.
+ 
+ 
+ Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown
+ over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought
+ I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little
+ parti-coloured squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all
+ over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of
+ which were of one precise shade—owing I suppose to his keeping his
+ arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly
+ rolled up at various times—this same arm of his, I say, looked for
+ all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly
+ lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from
+ the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the
+ sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging
+ me.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a
+ child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me;
+ whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle. The
+ circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper or other—I
+ think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little sweep
+ do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other, was all
+ the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,—my mother
+ dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to bed, though
+ it was only two o’clock in the afternoon of the 21st June, the longest day
+ in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully. But there was no help
+ for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the third floor,
+ undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time, and with a
+ bitter sigh got between the sheets.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse
+ before I could hope for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed! the small of
+ my back ached to think of it. And it was so light too; the sun shining in
+ at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the streets, and the
+ sound of gay voices all over the house. I felt worse and worse—at
+ last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in my stockinged feet,
+ sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself at her feet,
+ beseeching her as a particular favour to give me a good slippering for my
+ misbehaviour; anything indeed but condemning me to lie abed such an
+ unendurable length of time. But she was the best and most conscientious of
+ stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For several hours I lay
+ there broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I have ever done since,
+ even from the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At last I must have fallen
+ into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it—half
+ steeped in dreams—I opened my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was
+ now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through
+ all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a
+ supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane,
+ and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand
+ belonged, seemed closely seated by my bed-side. For what seemed ages piled
+ on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag
+ away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single
+ inch, the horrid spell would be broken. I knew not how this consciousness
+ at last glided away from me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly
+ remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost
+ myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very
+ hour, I often puzzle myself with it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the
+ supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to
+ those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg’s pagan arm
+ thrown round me. But at length all the past night’s events soberly
+ recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the
+ comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm—unlock his
+ bridegroom clasp—yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me
+ tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to
+ rouse him—“Queequeg!”—but his only answer was a snore. I then
+ rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly
+ felt a slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the
+ tomahawk sleeping by the savage’s side, as if it were a hatchet-faced
+ baby. A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in
+ the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! “Queequeg!—in the
+ name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!” At length, by dint of much wriggling,
+ and loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his
+ hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in
+ extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all
+ over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff
+ as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not
+ altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim consciousness of
+ knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him. Meanwhile, I
+ lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings now, and bent upon
+ narrowly observing so curious a creature. When, at last, his mind seemed
+ made up touching the character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it
+ were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain
+ signs and sounds gave me to understand that, if it pleased me, he would
+ dress first and then leave me to dress afterwards, leaving the whole
+ apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg, under the circumstances, this is
+ a very civilized overture; but, the truth is, these savages have an innate
+ sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous how essentially
+ polite they are. I pay this particular compliment to Queequeg, because he
+ treated me with so much civility and consideration, while I was guilty of
+ great rudeness; staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette
+ motions; for the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding.
+ Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you don’t see every day, he and his ways
+ were well worth unusual regarding.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall one,
+ by the by, and then—still minus his trowsers—he hunted up his
+ boots. What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his next
+ movement was to crush himself—boots in hand, and hat on—under
+ the bed; when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I inferred he
+ was hard at work booting himself; though by no law of propriety that I
+ ever heard of, is any man required to be private when putting on his
+ boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition stage—neither
+ caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized to show off his
+ outlandishness in the strangest possible manners. His education was not
+ yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not been a small degree
+ civilized, he very probably would not have troubled himself with boots at
+ all; but then, if he had not been still a savage, he never would have
+ dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on. At last, he emerged with
+ his hat very much dented and crushed down over his eyes, and began
+ creaking and limping about the room, as if, not being much accustomed to
+ boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide ones—probably not made to
+ order either—rather pinched and tormented him at the first go off of
+ a bitter cold morning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the
+ street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view into
+ the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that Queequeg
+ made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on; I begged
+ him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat, and
+ particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible. He complied,
+ and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in the morning any
+ Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to my amazement,
+ contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms, and
+ hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on
+ the wash-stand centre table, dipped it into water and commenced lathering
+ his face. I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and
+ behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long
+ wooden stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and
+ striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous
+ scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks I, Queequeg, this is
+ using Rogers’s best cutlery with a vengeance. Afterwards I wondered the
+ less at this operation when I came to know of what fine steel the head of
+ a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp the long straight edges are
+ always kept.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of
+ the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his
+ harpoon like a marshal’s baton.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.
+ 
+ 
+ I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the
+ grinning landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him,
+ though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my
+ bedfellow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good
+ thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person,
+ afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let
+ him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the
+ man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is
+ more in that man than you perhaps think for.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the
+ night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were
+ nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and
+ sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and
+ ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn,
+ shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This
+ young fellow’s healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and would
+ seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days landed from
+ his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might
+ say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still
+ lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached withal; he doubtless has
+ tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show a cheek like Queequeg?
+ which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes’ western slope, to
+ show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Grub, ho!” now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went
+ to breakfast.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in
+ manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard, the
+ great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all men,
+ they possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the mere
+ crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or the
+ taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart of
+ Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo’s performances—this kind of
+ travel, I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining a high social
+ polish. Still, for the most part, that sort of thing is to be had
+ anywhere.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that after
+ we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some good
+ stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every man
+ maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they looked
+ embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the
+ slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire
+ strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking; and yet,
+ here they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same calling,
+ all of kindred tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as
+ though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green
+ Mountains. A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior
+ whalemen!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But as for Queequeg—why, Queequeg sat there among them—at the
+ head of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I
+ cannot say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer could not have
+ cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and
+ using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the
+ imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him.
+ But that was certainly very coolly done by him, and every one knows that
+ in most people’s estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ We will not speak of all Queequeg’s peculiarities here; how he eschewed
+ coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks,
+ done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew like the rest
+ into the public room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting there
+ quietly digesting and smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I sallied
+ out for a stroll.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 6. The Street.
+ 
+ 
+ If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an
+ individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a civilized
+ town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first daylight stroll
+ through the streets of New Bedford.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently
+ offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts. Even
+ in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes
+ jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not unknown to Lascars and
+ Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared
+ the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping. In these
+ last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual
+ cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom
+ yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians,
+ and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft
+ which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still
+ more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town
+ scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and
+ glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows
+ who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the
+ whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they came. In
+ some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look there! that
+ chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and swallow-tailed
+ coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife. Here comes another with
+ a sou’-wester and a bombazine cloak.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one—I mean a
+ downright bumpkin dandy—a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his
+ two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a
+ country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a distinguished
+ reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the comical
+ things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his sea-outfit, he
+ orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his canvas trowsers. Ah,
+ poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps in the first howling
+ gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of
+ the tempest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and
+ bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer
+ place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this day
+ perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador. As it
+ is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they look so
+ bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New
+ England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like Canaan; a land,
+ also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with milk; nor in the
+ spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this,
+ nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and
+ gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted
+ upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty
+ mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses
+ and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.
+ One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of
+ the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their
+ daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You
+ must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they
+ have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn
+ their lengths in spermaceti candles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples—long
+ avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and
+ bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their
+ tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art;
+ which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces
+ of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation’s final
+ day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But
+ roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is
+ perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom
+ of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls
+ breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as
+ though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the
+ Puritanic sands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.
+ 
+ 
+ In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are the
+ moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail
+ to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this
+ special errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving
+ sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called
+ bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I found a
+ small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows. A
+ muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm.
+ Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as
+ if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not
+ yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat
+ steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned
+ into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like
+ the following, but I do not pretend to quote:—
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN TALBOT, Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost
+ overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, November 1 st , 1836.
+ THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS SISTER.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER
+ CANNY, SETH MACY, AND SAMUEL GLEIG, Forming one of the boats’ crews OF THE
+ SHIP ELIZA Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the Off-shore Ground
+ in the PACIFIC, December 31 st , 1839. THIS MARBLE Is here placed by their
+ surviving SHIPMATES.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows of
+ his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August 3 d ,
+ 1833. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself
+ near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me.
+ Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of
+ incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage was the only person
+ present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only one who
+ could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions
+ on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of the seamen whose names
+ appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not; but so many
+ are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several
+ women present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing
+ grief, that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose
+ unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused
+ the old wounds to bleed afresh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among
+ flowers can say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the
+ desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those
+ black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those
+ immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the
+ lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the
+ beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might those
+ tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why
+ it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales,
+ though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is that to
+ his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so
+ significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but
+ embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life
+ Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal,
+ unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam
+ who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be
+ comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in
+ unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead;
+ wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city.
+ All these things are not without their meanings.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead
+ doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a
+ Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light
+ of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone
+ before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew
+ merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion,
+ it seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes,
+ there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick
+ chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have
+ hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they
+ call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in
+ looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the
+ sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.
+ Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body
+ who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for
+ Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave
+ my soul, Jove himself cannot.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.
+ 
+ 
+ I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable
+ robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon
+ admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation,
+ sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it was
+ the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he was a
+ very great favourite. He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his youth,
+ but for many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry. At the
+ time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy
+ old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering
+ youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain
+ mild gleams of a newly developing bloom—the spring verdure peeping
+ forth even beneath February’s snow. No one having previously heard his
+ history, could for the first time behold Father Mapple without the utmost
+ interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical peculiarities
+ about him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life he had led. When he
+ entered I observed that he carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come
+ in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and
+ his great pilot cloth jacket seemed almost to drag him to the floor with
+ the weight of the water it had absorbed. However, hat and coat and
+ overshoes were one by one removed, and hung up in a little space in an
+ adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the
+ pulpit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a
+ regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor,
+ seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect, it
+ seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit
+ without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those
+ used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling captain
+ had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted man-ropes for
+ this ladder, which, being itself nicely headed, and stained with a
+ mahogany colour, the whole contrivance, considering what manner of chapel
+ it was, seemed by no means in bad taste. Halting for an instant at the
+ foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of
+ the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly
+ sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the
+ steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case with
+ swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of wood,
+ so that at every step there was a joint. At my first glimpse of the
+ pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a ship, these
+ joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not prepared
+ to see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn round, and
+ stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder step by step,
+ till the whole was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in his little
+ Quebec.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this.
+ Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity,
+ that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks of
+ the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober reason for this thing;
+ furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen. Can it be, then, that by
+ that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for
+ the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions? Yes, for
+ replenished with the meat and wine of the word, to the faithful man of
+ God, this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold—a lofty
+ Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the walls.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place,
+ borrowed from the chaplain’s former sea-farings. Between the marble
+ cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back was
+ adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship beating against
+ a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy breakers. But
+ high above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there floated a little
+ isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel’s face; and this bright
+ face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the ship’s tossed deck,
+ something like that silver plate now inserted into the Victory’s plank
+ where Nelson fell. “Ah, noble ship,” the angel seemed to say, “beat on,
+ beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is
+ breaking through; the clouds are rolling off—serenest azure is at
+ hand.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that had
+ achieved the ladder and the picture. Its panelled front was in the
+ likeness of a ship’s bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting
+ piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship’s fiddle-headed beak.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this
+ earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads
+ the world. From thence it is the storm of God’s quick wrath is first
+ descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the
+ God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favourable winds. Yes,
+ the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the
+ pulpit is its prow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.
+ 
+ 
+ Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered
+ the scattered people to condense. “Starboard gangway, there! side away to
+ larboard—larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still
+ slighter shuffling of women’s shoes, and all was quiet again, and every
+ eye on the preacher.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his large
+ brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a
+ prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom
+ of the sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a
+ bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog—in such tones he
+ commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards the
+ concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy—
+ 
+
+
+ “The ribs and terrors in the whale,
+ Arched over me a dismal gloom,
+ While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by,
+ And lift me deepening down to doom.
+
+ “I saw the opening maw of hell,
+ With endless pains and sorrows there;
+ Which none but they that feel can tell—
+ Oh, I was plunging to despair.
+
+ “In black distress, I called my God,
+ When I could scarce believe him mine,
+ He bowed his ear to my complaints—
+ No more the whale did me confine.
+
+ “With speed he flew to my relief,
+ As on a radiant dolphin borne;
+ Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
+ The face of my Deliverer God.
+
+ “My song for ever shall record
+ That terrible, that joyful hour;
+ I give the glory to my God,
+ His all the mercy and the power.”
+ 
+ 
+ Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the
+ howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned
+ over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the
+ proper page, said: “Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first
+ chapter of Jonah—‘And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up
+ Jonah.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is
+ one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet
+ what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! what a pregnant
+ lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the
+ fish’s belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods
+ surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters;
+ sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson
+ that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a
+ lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the
+ living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story
+ of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift
+ punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of
+ Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was
+ in his wilful disobedience of the command of God—never mind now what
+ that command was, or how conveyed—which he found a hard command. But
+ all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember
+ that—and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade.
+ And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this
+ disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God,
+ by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men will carry
+ him into countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains of this
+ earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that’s bound
+ for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By
+ all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz.
+ That’s the opinion of learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is
+ in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed
+ in those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea.
+ Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast
+ of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two
+ thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the Straits of
+ Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee
+ world-wide from God? Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of
+ all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God;
+ prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the
+ seas. So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there been
+ policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong,
+ had been arrested ere he touched a deck. How plainly he’s a fugitive! no
+ baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,—no friends accompany
+ him to the wharf with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he
+ finds the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he
+ steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the
+ moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger’s evil eye.
+ Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confidence; in
+ vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure the
+ mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious way,
+ one whispers to the other—“Jack, he’s robbed a widow;” or, “Joe, do
+ you mark him; he’s a bigamist;” or, “Harry lad, I guess he’s the adulterer
+ that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing murderers
+ from Sodom.” Another runs to read the bill that’s stuck against the spile
+ upon the wharf to which the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold
+ coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and containing a description of
+ his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill; while all his
+ sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their hands
+ upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his boldness to his
+ face, only looks so much the more a coward. He will not confess himself
+ suspected; but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of
+ it; and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised,
+ they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Who’s there?’ cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out
+ his papers for the Customs—‘Who’s there?’ Oh! how that harmless
+ question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again. But
+ he rallies. ‘I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon sail ye,
+ sir?’ Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up to Jonah, though the man
+ now stands before him; but no sooner does he hear that hollow voice, than
+ he darts a scrutinizing glance. ‘We sail with the next coming tide,’ at
+ last he slowly answered, still intently eyeing him. ‘No sooner, sir?’—‘Soon
+ enough for any honest man that goes a passenger.’ Ha! Jonah, that’s
+ another stab. But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent. ‘I’ll
+ sail with ye,’—he says,—‘the passage money how much is that?—I’ll
+ pay now.’ For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it were a thing
+ not to be overlooked in this history, ‘that he paid the fare thereof’ ere
+ the craft did sail. And taken with the context, this is full of meaning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime
+ in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this
+ world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a
+ passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. So
+ Jonah’s Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah’s purse, ere he judge
+ him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it’s assented to.
+ Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same time
+ resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. Yet when Jonah
+ fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the Captain.
+ He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any way, he
+ mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage. ‘Point out my state-room,
+ Sir,’ says Jonah now, ‘I’m travel-weary; I need sleep.’ ‘Thou lookest like
+ it,’ says the Captain, ‘there’s thy room.’ Jonah enters, and would lock
+ the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling
+ there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about
+ the doors of convicts’ cells being never allowed to be locked within. All
+ dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds
+ the little state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is
+ close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath
+ the ship’s water-line, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that
+ stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his
+ bowels’ wards.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates
+ in Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the
+ weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in
+ slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the
+ room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious
+ the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens
+ Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes roll round the place, and
+ this thus far successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance.
+ But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor,
+ the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. ‘Oh! so my conscience hangs in
+ me!’ he groans, ‘straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of my
+ soul are all in crookedness!’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still
+ reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the
+ Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as
+ one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy anguish,
+ praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid the
+ whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the man who
+ bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there’s naught to
+ staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth, Jonah’s prodigy of
+ ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and
+ from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening,
+ glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded smugglers!
+ the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked
+ burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to break. But now when
+ the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars
+ are clattering overboard; when the wind is shrieking, and the men are
+ yelling, and every plank thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah’s
+ head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees
+ no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little
+ hears he or heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with
+ open mouth is cleaving the seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone
+ down into the sides of the ship—a berth in the cabin as I have taken
+ it, and was fast asleep. But the frightened master comes to him, and
+ shrieks in his dead ear, ‘What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!’ Startled
+ from his lethargy by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and
+ stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at
+ that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the
+ bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy
+ vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning
+ while yet afloat. And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face
+ from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the
+ rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again
+ towards the tormented deep.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing
+ attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors mark
+ him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him, and at last,
+ fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter to high Heaven,
+ they fall to casting lots, to see for whose cause this great tempest was
+ upon them. The lot is Jonah’s; that discovered, then how furiously they
+ mob him with their questions. ‘What is thine occupation? Whence comest
+ thou? Thy country? What people?’ But mark now, my shipmates, the behavior
+ of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where from;
+ whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions, but likewise
+ another answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited answer
+ is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘I am a Hebrew,’ he cries—and then—‘I fear the Lord the God
+ of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!’ Fear him, O Jonah? Aye,
+ well mightest thou fear the Lord God then! Straightway, he now goes on to
+ make a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more and more
+ appalled, but still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating God
+ for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness of his deserts,—when
+ wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and cast him forth into the
+ sea, for he knew that for his sake this great tempest was upon them; they
+ mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means to save the ship. But
+ all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder; then, with one hand raised
+ invokingly to God, with the other they not unreluctantly lay hold of
+ Jonah.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea; when
+ instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea is still,
+ as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth water behind. He
+ goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that he
+ scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into the yawning jaws
+ awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many
+ white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the
+ fish’s belly. But observe his prayer, and learn a weighty lesson. For
+ sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He
+ feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance
+ to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and
+ pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is
+ true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for
+ punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in
+ the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I
+ do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him
+ before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to
+ repent of it like Jonah.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking, slanting
+ storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who, when
+ describing Jonah’s sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself. His deep
+ chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the warring
+ elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his swarthy
+ brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple hearers look
+ on him with a quick fear that was strange to them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves
+ of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with closed
+ eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly,
+ with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these words:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon
+ me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah
+ teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I
+ am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down from
+ this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as
+ you listen, while some one of you reads me that other and more awful
+ lesson which Jonah teaches to me , as a pilot of the living God. How being
+ an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and bidden by the
+ Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh,
+ Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission,
+ and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God
+ is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon
+ him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with
+ swift slantings tore him along ‘into the midst of the seas,’ where the
+ eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were
+ wrapped about his head,’ and all the watery world of woe bowled over him.
+ Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet—‘out of the belly of
+ hell’—when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even
+ then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God
+ spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the
+ sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and
+ all the delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry
+ land;’ when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised
+ and beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously
+ murmuring of the ocean—Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what
+ was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That
+ was it!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the
+ living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel
+ duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed
+ them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe
+ to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in
+ this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even
+ though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot
+ Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face
+ to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a
+ heavenly enthusiasm,—“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of
+ every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight,
+ than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the
+ kelson is low? Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward
+ delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth,
+ ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong
+ arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has
+ gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the
+ truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from
+ under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,—top-gallant delight
+ is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is
+ only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the
+ billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure
+ Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who
+ coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath—O Father!—chiefly
+ known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die. I have
+ striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this
+ is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live
+ out the lifetime of his God?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with
+ his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and
+ he was left alone in the place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.
+ 
+ 
+ Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there quite
+ alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some time. He was
+ sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on the stove hearth, and
+ in one hand was holding close up to his face that little negro idol of
+ his; peering hard into its face, and with a jack-knife gently whittling
+ away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in his heathenish way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going to
+ the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap began
+ counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth page—as
+ I fancied—stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and giving
+ utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He would then
+ begin again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at number one each
+ time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and it was only by
+ such a large number of fifties being found together, that his astonishment
+ at the multitude of pages was excited.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously
+ marred about the face—at least to my taste—his countenance yet
+ had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide
+ the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces
+ of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and
+ bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils.
+ And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan,
+ which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man
+ who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too,
+ that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and
+ brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I
+ will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was
+ phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded
+ me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It
+ had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows,
+ which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly
+ wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be
+ looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence,
+ never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but appeared
+ wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous book.
+ Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the night previous,
+ and especially considering the affectionate arm I had found thrown over me
+ upon waking in the morning, I thought this indifference of his very
+ strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not know exactly
+ how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm
+ self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed
+ also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the
+ other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no
+ desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as
+ mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost
+ sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the
+ way of Cape Horn, that is—which was the only way he could get there—thrown
+ among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter;
+ and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity;
+ content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this
+ was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there
+ was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we
+ mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I
+ hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I
+ conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have “broken his
+ digester.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that mild
+ stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then only
+ glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering round the
+ casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain; the storm
+ booming without in solemn swells; I began to be sensible of strange
+ feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened
+ hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had
+ redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in
+ which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he
+ was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself
+ mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have
+ repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I’ll
+ try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but
+ hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs
+ and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little
+ noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last
+ night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be
+ bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a
+ little complimented.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to him
+ the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures that were
+ in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we went to
+ jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen in
+ this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and, producing his pouch
+ and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging
+ puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly passing between
+ us.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan’s
+ breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left
+ us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I
+ to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine,
+ clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married;
+ meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would
+ gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame
+ of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much
+ distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room
+ together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his enormous
+ tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out some thirty
+ dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and mechanically
+ dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them towards me, and
+ said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he silenced me by
+ pouring them into my trowsers’ pockets. I let them stay. He then went
+ about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed the paper
+ fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious for
+ me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a
+ moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or otherwise.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible
+ Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in
+ worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you
+ suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth—pagans
+ and all included—can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of
+ black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?—to do the will of God— that 
+ is worship. And what is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what
+ I would have my fellow man to do to me— that is the will of God. Now,
+ Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do
+ to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship.
+ Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn
+ idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little
+ idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before him twice or
+ thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at
+ peace with our own consciences and all the world. But we did not go to
+ sleep without some little chat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential
+ disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very
+ bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and
+ chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’
+ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.
+ 
+ 
+ We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and
+ Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over
+ mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy
+ were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what little
+ nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting
+ up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position began
+ to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves sitting up;
+ the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the head-board with our
+ four knees drawn up close together, and our two noses bending over them,
+ as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug, the more
+ so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too,
+ seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because
+ truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for
+ there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by
+ contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are
+ all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be
+ said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed,
+ the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why
+ then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and
+ unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be
+ furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the
+ rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but
+ the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air.
+ Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic
+ crystal.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at
+ once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether by
+ day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always
+ keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of
+ being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except
+ his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our
+ essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part. Upon opening
+ my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant and self-created darkness
+ into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated
+ twelve-o’clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable revulsion. Nor did I
+ at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to
+ strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt a
+ strong desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it said,
+ that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed
+ the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love
+ once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than to have
+ Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such
+ serene household joy then. I no more felt unduly concerned for the
+ landlord’s policy of insurance. I was only alive to the condensed
+ confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real
+ friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed
+ the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew over us a blue
+ hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far
+ distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and,
+ eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly
+ complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his
+ words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar with
+ his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole story such as
+ it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 12. Biographical.
+ 
+ 
+ Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and
+ South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a
+ grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green
+ sapling; even then, in Queequeg’s ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire
+ to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His
+ father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the
+ maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable
+ warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins—royal stuff; though
+ sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his
+ untutored youth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A Sag Harbor ship visited his father’s bay, and Queequeg sought a passage
+ to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of seamen,
+ spurned his suit; and not all the King his father’s influence could
+ prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a
+ distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when she quitted
+ the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low tongue of
+ land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the water. Hiding
+ his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he
+ sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding
+ by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of
+ his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing
+ himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and
+ swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a cutlass
+ over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and Queequeg budged
+ not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit
+ Christendom, the captain at last relented, and told him he might make
+ himself at home. But this fine young savage—this sea Prince of
+ Wales, never saw the Captain’s cabin. They put him down among the sailors,
+ and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter content to toil in the
+ shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming ignominy, if
+ thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his untutored
+ countrymen. For at bottom—so he told me—he was actuated by a
+ profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make
+ his people still happier than they were; and more than that, still better
+ than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him
+ that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more
+ so, than all his father’s heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and
+ seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and
+ seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave
+ it up for lost. Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all meridians; I’ll die
+ a pagan.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians,
+ wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer
+ ways about him, though now some time from home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having a
+ coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he being
+ very old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not yet; and
+ added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted
+ him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings
+ before him. But by and by, he said, he would return,—as soon as he
+ felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he proposed to sail
+ about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They had made a
+ harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future
+ movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon
+ this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my
+ intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port for
+ an adventurous whaleman to embark from. He at once resolved to accompany
+ me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch,
+ the same boat, the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap; with
+ both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds. To all
+ this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now felt for
+ Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to
+ be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant of the
+ mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as known to
+ merchant seamen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His story being ended with his pipe’s last dying puff, Queequeg embraced
+ me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we
+ rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon were
+ sleeping.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.
+ 
+ 
+ Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber,
+ for a block, I settled my own and comrade’s bill; using, however, my
+ comrade’s money. The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed
+ amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between me
+ and Queequeg—especially as Peter Coffin’s cock and bull stories
+ about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person
+ whom I now companied with.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor
+ carpet-bag, and Queequeg’s canvas sack and hammock, away we went down to
+ “the Moss,” the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the wharf. As
+ we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so much—for
+ they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their streets,—but at
+ seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But we heeded them not,
+ going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg now and then
+ stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs. I asked him why he
+ carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and whether all whaling
+ ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in substance, he replied,
+ that though what I hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular
+ affection for his own harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried
+ in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales. In
+ short, like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers’
+ meadows armed with their own scythes—though in no wise obliged to
+ furnish them—even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons,
+ preferred his own harpoon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about
+ the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners
+ of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his heavy chest
+ to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the thing—though
+ in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage
+ the barrow—Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast; and then
+ shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. “Why,” said I, “Queequeg,
+ you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn’t the people
+ laugh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Rokovoko,
+ it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young
+ cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and this
+ punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided mat where
+ the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at
+ Rokovoko, and its commander—from all accounts, a very stately
+ punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain—this commander was
+ invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg’s sister, a pretty young princess
+ just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at
+ the bride’s bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned
+ the post of honor, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between
+ the High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg’s father. Grace being
+ said,—for those people have their grace as well as we—though
+ Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times look downwards to our
+ platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance upwards to the
+ great Giver of all feasts—Grace, I say, being said, the High Priest
+ opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that is,
+ dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the
+ blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and
+ noting the ceremony, and thinking himself—being Captain of a ship—as
+ having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King’s
+ own house—the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the
+ punchbowl;—taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. “Now,” said
+ Queequeg, “what you tink now?—Didn’t our people laugh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner.
+ Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one side, New Bedford
+ rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all glittering in the
+ clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled
+ upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay
+ silent and safely moored at last; while from others came a sound of
+ carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt
+ the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one
+ most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second
+ ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the
+ endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little
+ Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings.
+ How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike earth!—that
+ common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs;
+ and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no
+ records.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me. His
+ dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth. On,
+ on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the blast;
+ ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways leaning,
+ we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the two tall
+ masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes. So full of this
+ reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging bowsprit, that for some
+ time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a
+ lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so
+ companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a
+ whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who, by
+ their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all
+ verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him behind
+ his back. I thought the bumpkin’s hour of doom was come. Dropping his
+ harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost
+ miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into the air;
+ then slightly tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with
+ bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning his back upon him,
+ lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a puff.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Capting! Capting!” yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer;
+ “Capting, Capting, here’s the devil.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hallo, you sir,” cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea,
+ stalking up to Queequeg, “what in thunder do you mean by that? Don’t you
+ know you might have killed that chap?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What him say?” said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He say,” said I, “that you came near kill-e that man there,” pointing to
+ the still shivering greenhorn.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Kill-e,” cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly
+ expression of disdain, “ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so
+ small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look you,” roared the Captain, “I’ll kill-e you , you cannibal, if you try
+ any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to
+ mind his own eye. The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted the
+ weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying from side to side,
+ completely sweeping the entire after part of the deck. The poor fellow
+ whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept overboard; all hands were
+ in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the boom to stay it, seemed
+ madness. It flew from right to left, and back again, almost in one ticking
+ of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point of snapping into
+ splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of being done;
+ those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing the boom as if it
+ were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale. In the midst of this
+ consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and crawling under
+ the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the
+ bulwarks, and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it round the
+ boom as it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that
+ way trapped, and all was safe. The schooner was run into the wind, and
+ while the hands were clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg, stripped to
+ the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of a leap. For
+ three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog, throwing his long
+ arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing his brawny shoulders
+ through the freezing foam. I looked at the grand and glorious fellow, but
+ saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had gone down. Shooting himself
+ perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now took an instant’s glance
+ around him, and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and
+ disappeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking
+ out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked
+ them up. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble
+ trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg
+ like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at
+ all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only
+ asked for water—fresh water—something to wipe the brine off;
+ that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against
+ the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to
+ himself—“It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We
+ cannibals must help these Christians.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
+ 
+ 
+ Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a
+ fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the
+ world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than
+ the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it—a mere hillock, and elbow of
+ sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you
+ would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some
+ gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they
+ don’t grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to
+ send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of
+ wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome;
+ that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the
+ shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades
+ in a day’s walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like
+ Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way
+ inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to
+ their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering,
+ as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that
+ Nantucket is no Illinois.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled
+ by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down
+ upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant Indian in his
+ talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child borne out of sight
+ over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the same direction.
+ Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they discovered the
+ island, and there they found an empty ivory casket,—the poor little
+ Indian’s skeleton.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take
+ to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in the
+ sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more
+ experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last,
+ launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this watery world;
+ put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in at
+ Behring’s Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting
+ war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most
+ monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon,
+ clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very
+ panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious
+ assaults!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from
+ their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so
+ many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and
+ Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add
+ Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all
+ India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this
+ terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it,
+ as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through
+ it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating
+ forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen
+ the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like
+ themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep
+ itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone,
+ in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as
+ his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business,
+ which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the
+ millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie;
+ he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the
+ Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at
+ last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to
+ an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and
+ is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out
+ of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under
+ his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 15. Chowder.
+ 
+ 
+ It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly to
+ anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no business
+ that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. The landlord of the
+ Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the Try Pots,
+ whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one of the best kept hotels in
+ all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that Cousin Hosea, as he
+ called him, was famous for his chowders. In short, he plainly hinted that
+ we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck at the Try Pots. But the
+ directions he had given us about keeping a yellow warehouse on our
+ starboard hand till we opened a white church to the larboard, and then
+ keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a corner three points to
+ the starboard, and that done, then ask the first man we met where the
+ place was: these crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first,
+ especially as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse—our
+ first point of departure—must be left on the larboard hand, whereas
+ I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard. However, by
+ dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now and then knocking up a
+ peaceable inhabitant to inquire the way, we at last came to something
+ which there was no mistaking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses’ ears,
+ swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an old
+ doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other side, so
+ that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows. Perhaps I was
+ over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I could not help
+ staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of crick was in my
+ neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, two of them, one for
+ Queequeg, and one for me. It’s ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper
+ upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the
+ whalemen’s chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots
+ too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman with
+ yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn, under a
+ dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an injured eye, and
+ carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen shirt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Get along with ye,” said she to the man, “or I’ll be combing ye!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come on, Queequeg,” said I, “all right. There’s Mrs. Hussey.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs.
+ Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon making known
+ our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing further
+ scolding for the present, ushered us into a little room, and seating us at
+ a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded repast, turned
+ round to us and said—“Clam or Cod?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s that about Cods, ma’am?” said I, with much politeness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Clam or Cod?” she repeated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A clam for supper? a cold clam; is that what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?” says
+ I, “but that’s a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter time,
+ ain’t it, Mrs. Hussey?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple Shirt,
+ who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing but the
+ word “clam,” Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to the
+ kitchen, and bawling out “clam for two,” disappeared.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Queequeg,” said I, “do you think that we can make out a supper for us
+ both on one clam?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the
+ apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder
+ came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends!
+ hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than
+ hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into
+ little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned
+ with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage,
+ and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food before him,
+ and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great
+ expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey’s
+ clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment.
+ Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word “cod” with great
+ emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savoury steam came
+ forth again, but with a different flavor, and in good time a fine
+ cod-chowder was placed before us.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I to
+ myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head? What’s that
+ stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? “But look, Queequeg, ain’t
+ that a live eel in your bowl? Where’s your harpoon?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its
+ name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for
+ breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began
+ to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area before the
+ house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of
+ codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior
+ old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the milk, too, which I could
+ not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along
+ the beach among some fishermen’s boats, I saw Hosea’s brindled cow feeding
+ on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod’s
+ decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey
+ concerning the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to precede
+ me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and demanded his
+ harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. “Why not?” said I; “every
+ true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon—but why not?” “Because it’s
+ dangerous,” says she. “Ever since young Stiggs coming from that unfort’nt
+ v’y’ge of his, when he was gone four years and a half, with only three
+ barrels of ile , was found dead in my first floor back, with his
+ harpoon in his side; ever since then I allow no boarders to take sich
+ dangerous weepons in their rooms at night. So, Mr. Queequeg” (for she had
+ learned his name), “I will just take this here iron, and keep it for you
+ till morning. But the chowder; clam or cod to-morrow for breakfast, men?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Both,” says I; “and let’s have a couple of smoked herring by way of
+ variety.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 16. The Ship.
+ 
+ 
+ In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and no
+ small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been
+ diligently consulting Yojo—the name of his black little god—and
+ Yojo had told him two or three times over, and strongly insisted upon it
+ everyway, that instead of our going together among the whaling-fleet in
+ harbor, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo
+ earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should rest wholly with
+ me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us; and, in order to do so, had
+ already pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself, I, Ishmael,
+ should infallibly light upon, for all the world as though it had turned
+ out by chance; and in that vessel I must immediately ship myself, for the
+ present irrespective of Queequeg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed great
+ confidence in the excellence of Yojo’s judgment and surprising forecast of
+ things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a rather good sort
+ of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole, but in all cases did
+ not succeed in his benevolent designs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, this plan of Queequeg’s, or rather Yojo’s, touching the selection of
+ our craft; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a little relied upon
+ Queequeg’s sagacity to point out the whaler best fitted to carry us and
+ our fortunes securely. But as all my remonstrances produced no effect upon
+ Queequeg, I was obliged to acquiesce; and accordingly prepared to set
+ about this business with a determined rushing sort of energy and vigor,
+ that should quickly settle that trifling little affair. Next morning
+ early, leaving Queequeg shut up with Yojo in our little bedroom—for
+ it seemed that it was some sort of Lent or Ramadan, or day of fasting,
+ humiliation, and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo that day; how it was I
+ never could find out, for, though I applied myself to it several times, I
+ never could master his liturgies and XXXIX Articles—leaving
+ Queequeg, then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming himself at
+ his sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among the shipping. After
+ much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt that there
+ were three ships up for three-years’ voyages—The Devil-dam, the
+ Tit-bit, and the Pequod. Devil-Dam , I do not know the origin of; Tit-bit 
+ is obvious; Pequod , you will no doubt remember, was the name of a
+ celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct as the ancient
+ Medes. I peered and pryed about the Devil-dam; from her, hopped over to
+ the Tit-bit; and finally, going on board the Pequod, looked around her for
+ a moment, and then decided that this was the very ship for us.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know;—square-toed
+ luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and what not;
+ but take my word for it, you never saw such a rare old craft as this same
+ rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old school, rather small if
+ anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned
+ and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old
+ hull’s complexion was darkened like a French grenadier’s, who has alike
+ fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts—cut
+ somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost
+ overboard in a gale—her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of
+ the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled,
+ like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where
+ Becket bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and
+ marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than
+ half a century she had followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her
+ chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a
+ retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod,—this
+ old Peleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had built upon her
+ original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of
+ material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake’s
+ carved buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian
+ emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing
+ of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased
+ bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were
+ garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm
+ whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons
+ to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly
+ travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her
+ reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one
+ mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary
+ foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the
+ Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble
+ craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with
+ that.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority,
+ in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I saw
+ nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of tent, or rather
+ wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It seemed only a temporary
+ erection used in port. It was of a conical shape, some ten feet high;
+ consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken from the
+ middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale. Planted with their
+ broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced together, mutually
+ sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where
+ the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like the top-knot on some old
+ Pottowottamie Sachem’s head. A triangular opening faced towards the bows
+ of the ship, so that the insider commanded a complete view forward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by
+ his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and the
+ ship’s work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of
+ command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all over
+ with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of a stout
+ interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was constructed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of the
+ elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen, and
+ heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style; only there
+ was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest wrinkles
+ interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his continual
+ sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to windward;—for
+ this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed together. Such
+ eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is this the Captain of the Pequod?” said I, advancing to the door of the
+ tent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?”
+ he demanded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was thinking of shipping.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer—ever been in a
+ stove boat?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Sir, I never have.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say—eh?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I’ve been several
+ voyages in the merchant service, and I think that—”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that leg?—I’ll
+ take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of the marchant
+ service to me again. Marchant service indeed! I suppose now ye feel
+ considerable proud of having served in those marchant ships. But flukes!
+ man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?—it looks a little
+ suspicious, don’t it, eh?—Hast not been a pirate, hast thou?—Didst
+ not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?—Dost not think of murdering
+ the officers when thou gettest to sea?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask of
+ these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated Quakerish
+ Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather distrustful of
+ all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the Vineyard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of
+ shipping ye.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who is Captain Ahab, sir?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg—that’s who ye are speaking to,
+ young man. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted
+ out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including crew. We
+ are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if thou wantest to
+ know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way of
+ finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. Clap eye
+ on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has only one leg.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured, chewed
+ up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a boat!—ah,
+ ah!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at the
+ hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as I could,
+ “What you say is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could I know there was
+ any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale, though indeed I might have
+ inferred as much from the simple fact of the accident.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d’ye see; thou dost
+ not talk shark a bit. Sure , ye’ve been to sea before now; sure of that?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sir,” said I, “I thought I told you that I had been four voyages in the
+ merchant—”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hard down out of that! Mind what I said about the marchant service—don’t
+ aggravate me—I won’t have it. But let us understand each other. I
+ have given thee a hint about what whaling is; do ye yet feel inclined for
+ it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I do, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale’s
+ throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to be
+ got rid of, that is; which I don’t take to be the fact.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to find out
+ by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to see the
+ world? Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well then, just step
+ forward there, and take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back to me
+ and tell me what ye see there.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not knowing
+ exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. But
+ concentrating all his crow’s feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg started me
+ on the errand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship
+ swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing
+ towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly
+ monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what’s the report?” said Peleg when I came back; “what did ye see?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not much,” I replied—“nothing but water; considerable horizon
+ though, and there’s a squall coming up, I think.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go
+ round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can’t ye see the world where
+ you stand?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and the
+ Pequod was as good a ship as any—I thought the best—and all
+ this I now repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed his
+ willingness to ship me.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off,” he added—“come
+ along with ye.” And so saying, he led the way below deck into the cabin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and surprising
+ figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with Captain Peleg
+ was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the other shares, as is
+ sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd of old
+ annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each owning
+ about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in
+ the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling vessels, the
+ same way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing in good
+ interest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker,
+ the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to this day
+ its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the peculiarities
+ of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by things
+ altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same Quakers are the
+ most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting
+ Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture
+ names—a singularly common fashion on the island—and in
+ childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the
+ Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure
+ of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown
+ peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a
+ Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things
+ unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain
+ and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many
+ long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations
+ never seen here at the north, been led to think untraditionally and
+ independently; receiving all nature’s sweet or savage impressions fresh
+ from her own virgin voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly,
+ but with some help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous
+ lofty language—that man makes one in a whole nation’s census—a
+ mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all
+ detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other
+ circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful overruling morbidness at
+ the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically great are made so through
+ a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal
+ greatness is but disease. But, as yet we have not to do with such an one,
+ but with quite another; and still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only
+ results again from another phase of the Quaker, modified by individual
+ circumstances.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman. But
+ unlike Captain Peleg—who cared not a rush for what are called
+ serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the
+ veriest of all trifles—Captain Bildad had not only been originally
+ educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all
+ his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island
+ creatures, round the Horn—all that had not moved this native born
+ Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his vest.
+ Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common
+ consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from
+ conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself
+ had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe
+ to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns
+ upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his
+ days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do
+ not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he
+ had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man’s
+ religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world
+ pays dividends. Rising from a little cabin-boy in short clothes of the
+ drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from
+ that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, and finally a ship
+ owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous career by
+ wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of sixty, and
+ dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his well-earned
+ income.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an
+ incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard
+ task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a
+ curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew,
+ upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore
+ exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was
+ certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to swear,
+ though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity
+ of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a chief-mate,
+ to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking at you, made you feel
+ completely nervous, till you could clutch something—a hammer or a
+ marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at something or other, never mind
+ what. Indolence and idleness perished before him. His own person was the
+ exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he
+ carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft,
+ economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I
+ followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin. The space between the decks
+ was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old Bildad, who always sat so, and
+ never leaned, and this to save his coat tails. His broad-brim was placed
+ beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his drab vesture was buttoned
+ up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he seemed absorbed in reading from
+ a ponderous volume.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bildad,” cried Captain Peleg, “at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been
+ studying those Scriptures, now, for the last thirty years, to my certain
+ knowledge. How far ye got, Bildad?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate, Bildad,
+ without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up, and seeing
+ me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He says he’s our man, Bildad,” said Peleg, “he wants to ship.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dost thee?” said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I dost ,” said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do ye think of him, Bildad?” said Peleg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’ll do,” said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at his
+ book in a mumbling tone quite audible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as Peleg, his
+ friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I said nothing, only
+ looking round me sharply. Peleg now threw open a chest, and drawing forth
+ the ship’s articles, placed pen and ink before him, and seated himself at
+ a little table. I began to think it was high time to settle with myself at
+ what terms I would be willing to engage for the voyage. I was already
+ aware that in the whaling business they paid no wages; but all hands,
+ including the captain, received certain shares of the profits called lays ,
+ and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance
+ pertaining to the respective duties of the ship’s company. I was also
+ aware that being a green hand at whaling, my own lay would not be very
+ large; but considering that I was used to the sea, could steer a ship,
+ splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that from all I had heard I
+ should be offered at least the 275th lay—that is, the 275th part of
+ the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever that might eventually
+ amount to. And though the 275th lay was what they call a rather long lay ,
+ yet it was better than nothing; and if we had a lucky voyage, might pretty
+ nearly pay for the clothing I would wear out on it, not to speak of my
+ three years’ beef and board, for which I would not have to pay one stiver.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely
+ fortune—and so it was, a very poor way indeed. But I am one of those
+ that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the
+ world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am putting up at this grim
+ sign of the Thunder Cloud. Upon the whole, I thought that the 275th lay
+ would be about the fair thing, but would not have been surprised had I
+ been offered the 200th, considering I was of a broad-shouldered make.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about
+ receiving a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had heard
+ something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony Bildad;
+ how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod, therefore the
+ other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners, left nearly the whole
+ management of the ship’s affairs to these two. And I did not know but what
+ the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty deal to say about shipping
+ hands, especially as I now found him on board the Pequod, quite at home
+ there in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his own fireside. Now
+ while Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his jack-knife, old
+ Bildad, to my no small surprise, considering that he was such an
+ interested party in these proceedings; Bildad never heeded us, but went on
+ mumbling to himself out of his book, “ Lay not up for yourselves treasures
+ upon earth, where moth—”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, Captain Bildad,” interrupted Peleg, “what d’ye say, what lay shall
+ we give this young man?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thou knowest best,” was the sepulchral reply, “the seven hundred and
+ seventy-seventh wouldn’t be too much, would it?—‘where moth and rust
+ do corrupt, but lay —’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lay , indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and
+ seventy-seventh! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for one,
+ shall not lay up many lays here below, where moth and rust do corrupt. It
+ was an exceedingly long lay that, indeed; and though from the magnitude of
+ the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet the slightest
+ consideration will show that though seven hundred and seventy-seven is a
+ pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a teenth of it, you will
+ then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh part of a
+ farthing is a good deal less than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold
+ doubloons; and so I thought at the time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, blast your eyes, Bildad,” cried Peleg, “thou dost not want to
+ swindle this young man! he must have more than that.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Seven hundred and seventy-seventh,” again said Bildad, without lifting
+ his eyes; and then went on mumbling—“for where your treasure is,
+ there will your heart be also.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am going to put him down for the three hundredth,” said Peleg, “do ye
+ hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said, “Captain
+ Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the duty thou
+ owest to the other owners of this ship—widows and orphans, many of
+ them—and that if we too abundantly reward the labors of this young
+ man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those orphans. The
+ seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thou Bildad!” roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the cabin.
+ “Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these matters,
+ I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that would be heavy enough
+ to founder the largest ship that ever sailed round Cape Horn.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Captain Peleg,” said Bildad steadily, “thy conscience may be drawing ten
+ inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can’t tell; but as thou art still an
+ impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy conscience be but a
+ leaky one; and will in the end sink thee foundering down to the fiery pit,
+ Captain Peleg.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, ye
+ insult me. It’s an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that he’s
+ bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again to me, and start
+ my soul-bolts, but I’ll—I’ll—yes, I’ll swallow a live goat
+ with all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting,
+ drab-coloured son of a wooden gun—a straight wake with ye!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a marvellous
+ oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and
+ responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up all
+ idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily
+ commanded, I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad, who, I
+ made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before the awakened wrath
+ of Peleg. But to my astonishment, he sat down again on the transom very
+ quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest intention of withdrawing. He
+ seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg and his ways. As for Peleg, after
+ letting off his rage as he had, there seemed no more left in him, and he,
+ too, sat down like a lamb, though he twitched a little as if still
+ nervously agitated. “Whew!” he whistled at last—“the squall’s gone
+ off to leeward, I think. Bildad, thou used to be good at sharpening a
+ lance, mend that pen, will ye. My jack-knife here needs the grindstone.
+ That’s he; thank ye, Bildad. Now then, my young man, Ishmael’s thy name,
+ didn’t ye say? Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael, for the three
+ hundredth lay.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Captain Peleg,” said I, “I have a friend with me who wants to ship too—shall
+ I bring him down to-morrow?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To be sure,” said Peleg. “Fetch him along, and we’ll look at him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What lay does he want?” groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book in
+ which he had again been burying himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad,” said Peleg. “Has he ever whaled
+ it any?” turning to me.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, bring him along then.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that I had
+ done a good morning’s work, and that the Pequod was the identical ship
+ that Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and me round the Cape.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the Captain
+ with whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though, indeed, in many
+ cases, a whale-ship will be completely fitted out, and receive all her
+ crew on board, ere the captain makes himself visible by arriving to take
+ command; for sometimes these voyages are so prolonged, and the shore
+ intervals at home so exceedingly brief, that if the captain have a family,
+ or any absorbing concernment of that sort, he does not trouble himself
+ much about his ship in port, but leaves her to the owners till all is
+ ready for sea. However, it is always as well to have a look at him before
+ irrevocably committing yourself into his hands. Turning back I accosted
+ Captain Peleg, inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It’s all right enough; thou art
+ shipped.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, but I should like to see him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I don’t think thou wilt be able to at present. I don’t know exactly
+ what’s the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort of
+ sick, and yet he don’t look so. In fact, he ain’t sick; but no, he isn’t
+ well either. Any how, young man, he won’t always see me, so I don’t
+ suppose he will thee. He’s a queer man, Captain Ahab—so some think—but
+ a good one. Oh, thou’lt like him well enough; no fear, no fear. He’s a
+ grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn’t speak much; but, when
+ he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s
+ above the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ’mong the cannibals;
+ been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in
+ mightier, stranger foes than whales. His lance! aye, the keenest and the
+ surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain’t Captain Bildad; no, and he
+ ain’t Captain Peleg; he’s Ahab , boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a
+ crowned king!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they
+ not lick his blood?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come hither to me—hither, hither,” said Peleg, with a significance
+ in his eye that almost startled me. “Look ye, lad; never say that on board
+ the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name himself.
+ ’Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died when
+ he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at Gayhead,
+ said that the name would somehow prove prophetic. And, perhaps, other
+ fools like her may tell thee the same. I wish to warn thee. It’s a lie. I
+ know Captain Ahab well; I’ve sailed with him as mate years ago; I know
+ what he is—a good man—not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but
+ a swearing good man—something like me—only there’s a good deal
+ more of him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know
+ that on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but
+ it was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that
+ about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg
+ last voyage by that accursed whale, he’s been a kind of moody—desperate
+ moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all,
+ let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it’s better to sail with a
+ moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So good-bye to thee—and
+ wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked name. Besides,
+ my boy, he has a wife—not three voyages wedded—a sweet,
+ resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that old man has a child:
+ hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my
+ lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been incidentally
+ revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of
+ painfulness concerning him. And somehow, at the time, I felt a sympathy
+ and a sorrow for him, but for I don’t know what, unless it was the cruel
+ loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a strange awe of him; but that sort
+ of awe, which I cannot at all describe, was not exactly awe; I do not know
+ what it was. But I felt it; and it did not disincline me towards him;
+ though I felt impatience at what seemed like mystery in him, so
+ imperfectly as he was known to me then. However, my thoughts were at
+ length carried in other directions, so that for the present dark Ahab
+ slipped my mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.
+ 
+ 
+ As Queequeg’s Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all
+ day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I
+ cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations,
+ never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue
+ even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other
+ creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism
+ quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a
+ deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions
+ yet owned and rented in his name.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these
+ things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals,
+ pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these
+ subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most absurd
+ notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;—but what of that? Queequeg
+ thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content; and
+ there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let him be,
+ I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans
+ alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and
+ sadly need mending.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and rituals
+ must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door; but no
+ answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside. “Queequeg,” said I
+ softly through the key-hole:—all silent. “I say, Queequeg! why don’t
+ you speak? It’s I—Ishmael.” But all remained still as before. I
+ began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time; I thought he
+ might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked through the key-hole; but the
+ door opening into an odd corner of the room, the key-hole prospect was but
+ a crooked and sinister one. I could only see part of the foot-board of the
+ bed and a line of the wall, but nothing more. I was surprised to behold
+ resting against the wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg’s harpoon, which the
+ landlady the evening previous had taken from him, before our mounting to
+ the chamber. That’s strange, thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon
+ stands yonder, and he seldom or never goes abroad without it, therefore he
+ must be inside here, and no possible mistake.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Queequeg!—Queequeg!”—all still. Something must have happened.
+ Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly resisted.
+ Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first person I
+ met—the chamber-maid. “La! la!” she cried, “I thought something must
+ be the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door was
+ locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it’s been just so silent ever
+ since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your
+ baggage in for safe keeping. La! la, ma’am!—Mistress! murder! Mrs.
+ Hussey! apoplexy!”—and with these cries, she ran towards the
+ kitchen, I following.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a
+ vinegar-cruet in the other, having just broken away from the occupation of
+ attending to the castors, and scolding her little black boy meantime.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wood-house!” cried I, “which way to it? Run for God’s sake, and fetch
+ something to pry open the door—the axe!—the axe! he’s had a
+ stroke; depend upon it!”—and so saying I was unmethodically rushing
+ up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the mustard-pot
+ and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her countenance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s the matter with you, young man?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Get the axe! For God’s sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry it
+ open!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look here,” said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet, so
+ as to have one hand free; “look here; are you talking about prying open
+ any of my doors?”—and with that she seized my arm. “What’s the
+ matter with you? What’s the matter with you, shipmate?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand the
+ whole case. Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to one side of her
+ nose, she ruminated for an instant; then exclaimed—“No! I haven’t
+ seen it since I put it there.” Running to a little closet under the
+ landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that
+ Queequeg’s harpoon was missing. “He’s killed himself,” she cried. “It’s
+ unfort’nate Stiggs done over again—there goes another counterpane—God
+ pity his poor mother!—it will be the ruin of my house. Has the poor
+ lad a sister? Where’s that girl?—there, Betty, go to Snarles the
+ Painter, and tell him to paint me a sign, with—“no suicides
+ permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;”—might as well kill
+ both birds at once. Kill? The Lord be merciful to his ghost! What’s that
+ noise there? You, young man, avast there!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force open
+ the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t allow it; I won’t have my premises spoiled. Go for the locksmith,
+ there’s one about a mile from here. But avast!” putting her hand in her
+ side-pocket, “here’s a key that’ll fit, I guess; let’s see.” And with
+ that, she turned it in the lock; but, alas! Queequeg’s supplemental bolt
+ remained unwithdrawn within.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have to burst it open,” said I, and was running down the entry a little,
+ for a good start, when the landlady caught at me, again vowing I should
+ not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and with a sudden bodily
+ rush dashed myself full against the mark.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming against
+ the wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling; and there, good heavens! there
+ sat Queequeg, altogether cool and self-collected; right in the middle of
+ the room; squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on top of his head. He
+ looked neither one way nor the other way, but sat like a carved image with
+ scarce a sign of active life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Queequeg,” said I, going up to him, “Queequeg, what’s the matter with
+ you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He hain’t been a sittin’ so all day, has he?” said the landlady.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt like
+ pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost
+ intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally constrained;
+ especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for upwards of
+ eight or ten hours, going too without his regular meals.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mrs. Hussey,” said I, “he’s alive at all events; so leave us, if you
+ please, and I will see to this strange affair myself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail upon Queequeg
+ to take a chair; but in vain. There he sat; and all he could do—for
+ all my polite arts and blandishments—he would not move a peg, nor
+ say a single word, nor even look at me, nor notice my presence in the
+ slightest way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do
+ they fast on their hams that way in his native island. It must be so; yes,
+ it’s part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him rest; he’ll get up
+ sooner or later, no doubt. It can’t last for ever, thank God, and his
+ Ramadan only comes once a year; and I don’t believe it’s very punctual
+ then.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the long
+ stories of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding voyage, as
+ they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in a schooner or brig,
+ confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean only); after
+ listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o’clock, I went up
+ stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must
+ certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no; there he was
+ just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began to grow
+ vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be sitting
+ there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room, holding a
+ piece of wood on his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For heaven’s sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and have
+ some supper. You’ll starve; you’ll kill yourself, Queequeg.” But not a
+ word did he reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep; and
+ no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me. But previous to
+ turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over him, as it
+ promised to be a very cold night; and he had nothing but his ordinary
+ round jacket on. For some time, do all I would, I could not get into the
+ faintest doze. I had blown out the candle; and the mere thought of
+ Queequeg—not four feet off—sitting there in that uneasy
+ position, stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really wretched.
+ Think of it; sleeping all night in the same room with a wide awake pagan
+ on his hams in this dreary, unaccountable Ramadan!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break of
+ day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as if he had
+ been screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the first glimpse of sun
+ entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating joints, but with a
+ cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay; pressed his forehead again
+ against mine; and said his Ramadan was over.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person’s religion, be
+ it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other
+ person, because that other person don’t believe it also. But when a man’s
+ religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him;
+ and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in;
+ then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the
+ point with him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And just so I now did with Queequeg. “Queequeg,” said I, “get into bed
+ now, and lie and listen to me.” I then went on, beginning with the rise
+ and progress of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various
+ religions of the present time, during which time I labored to show
+ Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in
+ cold, cheerless rooms were stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless for
+ the soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and common
+ sense. I told him, too, that he being in other things such an extremely
+ sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained me, to see
+ him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan of his.
+ Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves
+ in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved. This
+ is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such melancholy
+ notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather
+ digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling;
+ and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by
+ Ramadans.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with dyspepsia;
+ expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it in. He said no;
+ only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a great feast given by his
+ father the king, on the gaining of a great battle wherein fifty of the
+ enemy had been killed by about two o’clock in the afternoon, and all
+ cooked and eaten that very evening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No more, Queequeg,” said I, shuddering; “that will do;” for I knew the
+ inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen a sailor who had
+ visited that very island, and he told me that it was the custom, when a
+ great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain in the yard
+ or garden of the victor; and then, one by one, they were placed in great
+ wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau, with breadfruit and
+ cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths, were sent round with the
+ victor’s compliments to all his friends, just as though these presents
+ were so many Christmas turkeys.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much
+ impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the first place, he somehow seemed
+ dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered from his own
+ point of view; and, in the second place, he did not more than one third
+ understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and, finally, he no doubt
+ thought he knew a good deal more about the true religion than I did. He
+ looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and compassion, as
+ though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible young man should be
+ so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty
+ breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not make
+ much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the Pequod,
+ sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 18. His Mark.
+ 
+ 
+ As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg
+ carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us
+ from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal, and
+ furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board that craft,
+ unless they previously produced their papers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?” said I, now jumping on the
+ bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I mean,” he replied, “he must show his papers.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from
+ behind Peleg’s, out of the wigwam. “He must show that he’s converted. Son
+ of darkness,” he added, turning to Queequeg, “art thou at present in
+ communion with any Christian church?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why,” said I, “he’s a member of the first Congregational Church.” Here be
+ it said, that many tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket ships at last
+ come to be converted into the churches.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “First Congregational Church,” cried Bildad, “what! that worships in
+ Deacon Deuteronomy Coleman’s meeting-house?” and so saying, taking out his
+ spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana handkerchief, and
+ putting them on very carefully, came out of the wigwam, and leaning
+ stiffly over the bulwarks, took a good long look at Queequeg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How long hath he been a member?” he then said, turning to me; “not very
+ long, I rather guess, young man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No,” said Peleg, “and he hasn’t been baptized right either, or it would
+ have washed some of that devil’s blue off his face.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do tell, now,” cried Bildad, “is this Philistine a regular member of
+ Deacon Deuteronomy’s meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it
+ every Lord’s day.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting,” said I;
+ “all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First
+ Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Young man,” said Bildad sternly, “thou art skylarking with me—explain
+ thyself, thou young Hittite. What church dost thee mean? answer me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied. “I mean, sir, the same ancient
+ Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg
+ here, and all of us, and every mother’s son and soul of us belong; the
+ great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world;
+ we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some queer crotchets no
+ ways touching the grand belief; in that we all join hands.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Splice, thou mean’st splice hands,” cried Peleg, drawing nearer. “Young
+ man, you’d better ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast hand; I
+ never heard a better sermon. Deacon Deuteronomy—why Father Mapple
+ himself couldn’t beat it, and he’s reckoned something. Come aboard, come
+ aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, tell Quohog there—what’s
+ that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By the great anchor, what a
+ harpoon he’s got there! looks like good stuff that; and he handles it
+ about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand
+ in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the
+ bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to
+ the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon, cried
+ out in some such way as this:—
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cap’ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well,
+ spose him one whale eye, well, den!” and taking sharp aim at it, he darted
+ the iron right over old Bildad’s broad brim, clean across the ship’s
+ decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now,” said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, “spos-ee him whale-e
+ eye; why, dad whale dead.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Quick, Bildad,” said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close
+ vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway.
+ “Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship’s papers. We must have
+ Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we’ll
+ give ye the ninetieth lay, and that’s more than ever was given a
+ harpooneer yet out of Nantucket.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon
+ enrolled among the same ship’s company to which I myself belonged.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for
+ signing, he turned to me and said, “I guess, Quohog there don’t know how
+ to write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name or
+ make thy mark?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken part
+ in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the offered pen,
+ copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact counterpart of a
+ queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so that through
+ Captain Peleg’s obstinate mistake touching his appellative, it stood
+ something like this:—
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Quohog. his X mark.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg,
+ and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets of his
+ broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts, and selecting one
+ entitled “The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose,” placed it in
+ Queequeg’s hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his,
+ looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, “Son of darkness, I must do my
+ duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel concerned for the
+ souls of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I
+ sadly fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn
+ the idol Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind
+ thine eye, I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad’s language,
+ heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpooneer,”
+ cried Peleg. “Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers—it takes the shark out of ’em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish.
+ There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out of all
+ Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to good.
+ He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered
+ away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in case he got stove and went
+ to Davy Jones.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Peleg! Peleg!” said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, “thou thyself, as
+ I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what it is
+ to have the fear of death; how, then, can’st thou prate in this ungodly
+ guise. Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this same Pequod
+ here had her three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan, that same
+ voyage when thou went mate with Captain Ahab, did’st thou not think of
+ Death and the Judgment then?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hear him, hear him now,” cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and
+ thrusting his hands far down into his pockets,—“hear him, all of ye.
+ Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship would sink! Death and
+ the Judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an everlasting
+ thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us, fore and aft.
+ Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to think about Death
+ then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of; and how to save
+ all hands—how to rig jury-masts—how to get into the nearest
+ port; that was what I was thinking of.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck, where we
+ followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some sailmakers who
+ were mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then he stooped to pick up a
+ patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which otherwise might have been
+ wasted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.
+ 
+ 
+ “Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from the
+ water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the above
+ words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us, levelled his
+ massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but shabbily
+ apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a black
+ handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all
+ directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed
+ bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have ye shipped in her?” he repeated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose,” said I, trying to gain a little
+ more time for an uninterrupted look at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, the Pequod—that ship there,” he said, drawing back his whole
+ arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed
+ bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” said I, “we have just signed the articles.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Anything down there about your souls?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “About what?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, perhaps you hav’n’t got any,” he said quickly. “No matter though, I
+ know many chaps that hav’n’t got any,—good luck to ’em; and they are
+ all the better off for it. A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are you jabbering about, shipmate?” said I.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ He’s got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in
+ other chaps,” abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis upon
+ the word he .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Queequeg,” said I, “let’s go; this fellow has broken loose from
+ somewhere; he’s talking about something and somebody we don’t know.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stop!” cried the stranger. “Ye said true—ye hav’n’t seen Old
+ Thunder yet, have ye?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who’s Old Thunder?” said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness of
+ his manner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Captain Ahab.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye hav’n’t
+ seen him yet, have ye?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, we hav’n’t. He’s sick they say, but is getting better, and will be
+ all right again before long.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right again before long!” laughed the stranger, with a solemnly
+ derisive sort of laugh. “Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then
+ this left arm of mine will be all right; not before.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do you know about him?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What did they tell you about him? Say that!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They didn’t tell much of anything about him; only I’ve heard that he’s a
+ good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s true, that’s true—yes, both true enough. But you must jump
+ when he gives an order. Step and growl; growl and go—that’s the word
+ with Captain Ahab. But nothing about that thing that happened to him off
+ Cape Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights;
+ nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in
+ Santa?—heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the silver
+ calabash he spat into? And nothing about his losing his leg last voyage,
+ according to the prophecy. Didn’t ye hear a word about them matters and
+ something more, eh? No, I don’t think ye did; how could ye? Who knows it?
+ Not all Nantucket, I guess. But hows’ever, mayhap, ye’ve heard tell about
+ the leg, and how he lost it; aye, ye have heard of that, I dare say. Oh
+ yes, that every one knows a’most—I mean they know he’s only one leg;
+ and that a parmacetti took the other off.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My friend,” said I, “what all this gibberish of yours is about, I don’t
+ know, and I don’t much care; for it seems to me that you must be a little
+ damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of Captain Ahab, of that ship
+ there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all about the loss of
+ his leg.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ All about it, eh—sure you do?—all?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pretty sure.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like
+ stranger stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a
+ little, turned and said:—“Ye’ve shipped, have ye? Names down on the
+ papers? Well, well, what’s signed, is signed; and what’s to be, will be;
+ and then again, perhaps it won’t be, after all. Anyhow, it’s all fixed and
+ arranged a’ready; and some sailors or other must go with him, I suppose;
+ as well these as any other men, God pity ’em! Morning to ye, shipmates,
+ morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I’m sorry I stopped ye.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look here, friend,” said I, “if you have anything important to tell us,
+ out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are mistaken
+ in your game; that’s all I have to say.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And it’s said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way; you
+ are just the man for him—the likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates,
+ morning! Oh! when ye get there, tell ’em I’ve concluded not to make one of
+ ’em.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my dear fellow, you can’t fool us that way—you can’t fool us.
+ It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a
+ great secret in him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Morning to ye, shipmates, morning.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Morning it is,” said I. “Come along, Queequeg, let’s leave this crazy
+ man. But stop, tell me your name, will you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Elijah.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each other’s
+ fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was nothing but a
+ humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone perhaps above a
+ hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and looking back as I did
+ so, who should be seen but Elijah following us, though at a distance.
+ Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I said nothing to Queequeg of
+ his being behind, but passed on with my comrade, anxious to see whether
+ the stranger would turn the same corner that we did. He did; and then it
+ seemed to me that he was dogging us, but with what intent I could not for
+ the life of me imagine. This circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous,
+ half-hinting, half-revealing, shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me all
+ kinds of vague wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all connected with
+ the Pequod; and Captain Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn
+ fit; and the silver calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when
+ I left the ship the day previous; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig;
+ and the voyage we had bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy
+ things.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really
+ dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg, and
+ on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without
+ seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more, and finally as it
+ seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 20. All Astir.
+ 
+ 
+ A day or two passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod. Not
+ only were the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming on board,
+ and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; in short, everything betokened
+ that the ship’s preparations were hurrying to a close. Captain Peleg
+ seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam keeping a sharp
+ look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing and providing at
+ the stores; and the men employed in the hold and on the rigging were
+ working till long after night-fall.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the day following Queequeg’s signing the articles, word was given at
+ all the inns where the ship’s company were stopping, that their chests
+ must be on board before night, for there was no telling how soon the
+ vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our traps, resolving,
+ however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it seems they always give very
+ long notice in these cases, and the ship did not sail for several days.
+ But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and there is no telling
+ how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod was fully equipped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Every one knows what a multitude of things—beds, sauce-pans, knives
+ and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are
+ indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling, which
+ necessitates a three-years’ housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all
+ grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And though this also
+ holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means to the same extent as
+ with whalemen. For besides the great length of the whaling voyage, the
+ numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the fishery, and the
+ impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors usually frequented,
+ it must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the most
+ exposed to accidents of all kinds, and especially to the destruction and
+ loss of the very things upon which the success of the voyage most depends.
+ Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and
+ spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain and duplicate ship.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of the
+ Pequod had been almost completed; comprising her beef, bread, water, fuel,
+ and iron hoops and staves. But, as before hinted, for some time there was
+ a continual fetching and carrying on board of divers odds and ends of
+ things, both large and small.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain Bildad’s
+ sister, a lean old lady of a most determined and indefatigable spirit, but
+ withal very kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if she could help it,
+ nothing should be found wanting in the Pequod, after once fairly getting
+ to sea. At one time she would come on board with a jar of pickles for the
+ steward’s pantry; another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate’s
+ desk, where he kept his log; a third time with a roll of flannel for the
+ small of some one’s rheumatic back. Never did any woman better deserve her
+ name, which was Charity—Aunt Charity, as everybody called her. And
+ like a sister of charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about
+ hither and thither, ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that
+ promised to yield safety, comfort, and consolation to all on board a ship
+ in which her beloved brother Bildad was concerned, and in which she
+ herself owned a score or two of well-saved dollars.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on
+ board, as she did the last day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and a
+ still longer whaling lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor
+ Captain Peleg at all backward. As for Bildad, he carried about with him a
+ long list of the articles needed, and at every fresh arrival, down went
+ his mark opposite that article upon the paper. Every once in a while Peleg
+ came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring at the men down the
+ hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head, and then concluded
+ by roaring back into his wigwam.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the craft,
+ and as often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when he was
+ going to come on board his ship. To these questions they would answer,
+ that he was getting better and better, and was expected aboard every day;
+ meantime, the two captains, Peleg and Bildad, could attend to everything
+ necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If I had been downright honest
+ with myself, I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but
+ half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once
+ laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so
+ soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any
+ wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter,
+ he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And
+ much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At last it was given out that some time next day the ship would certainly
+ sail. So next morning, Queequeg and I took a very early start.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.
+ 
+ 
+ It was nearly six o’clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we
+ drew nigh the wharf.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right,” said I to
+ Queequeg, “it can’t be shadows; she’s off by sunrise, I guess; come on!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Avast!” cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close behind
+ us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating himself
+ between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain twilight,
+ strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Going aboard?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hands off, will you,” said I.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lookee here,” said Queequeg, shaking himself, “go ’way!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ain’t going aboard, then?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, we are,” said I, “but what business is that of yours? Do you know,
+ Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, no, no; I wasn’t aware of that,” said Elijah, slowly and wonderingly
+ looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable glances.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Elijah,” said I, “you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We are
+ going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not to be
+ detained.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ye be, be ye? Coming back afore breakfast?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s cracked, Queequeg,” said I, “come on.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Holloa!” cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few
+ paces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Never mind him,” said I, “Queequeg, come on.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my
+ shoulder, said—“Did ye see anything looking like men going towards
+ that ship a while ago?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, “Yes, I
+ thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be sure.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very dim, very dim,” said Elijah. “Morning to ye.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and
+ touching my shoulder again, said, “See if you can find ’em now, will ye?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Find who?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Morning to ye! morning to ye!” he rejoined, again moving off. “Oh! I was
+ going to warn ye against—but never mind, never mind—it’s all
+ one, all in the family too;—sharp frost this morning, ain’t it?
+ Good-bye to ye. Shan’t see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it’s before
+ the Grand Jury.” And with these cracked words he finally departed, leaving
+ me, for the moment, in no small wonderment at his frantic impudence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in profound
+ quiet, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was locked within; the
+ hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging. Going forward to
+ the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open. Seeing a light, we
+ went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a tattered
+ pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two chests, his face
+ downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profoundest slumber slept
+ upon him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?” said I,
+ looking dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the wharf,
+ Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I would have
+ thought myself to have been optically deceived in that matter, were it not
+ for Elijah’s otherwise inexplicable question. But I beat the thing down;
+ and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted to Queequeg that perhaps
+ we had best sit up with the body; telling him to establish himself
+ accordingly. He put his hand upon the sleeper’s rear, as though feeling if
+ it was soft enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly down there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gracious! Queequeg, don’t sit there,” said I.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! perry dood seat,” said Queequeg, “my country way; won’t hurt him
+ face.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Face!” said I, “call that his face? very benevolent countenance then; but
+ how hard he breathes, he’s heaving himself; get off, Queequeg, you are
+ heavy, it’s grinding the face of the poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look, he’ll
+ twitch you off soon. I wonder he don’t wake.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and
+ lighted his tomahawk pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe passing
+ over the sleeper, from one to the other. Meanwhile, upon questioning him
+ in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his land,
+ owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king, chiefs,
+ and great people generally, were in the custom of fattening some of the
+ lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in that
+ respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them
+ round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very convenient on an
+ excursion; much better than those garden-chairs which are convertible into
+ walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant, and desiring
+ him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps in some
+ damp marshy place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk
+ from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper’s head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s that for, Queequeg?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe,
+ which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed
+ his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The
+ strong vapor now completely filling the contracted hole, it began to tell
+ upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed troubled in
+ the nose; then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and rubbed his
+ eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Holloa!” he breathed at last, “who be ye smokers?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Shipped men,” answered I, “when does she sail?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The Captain came
+ aboard last night.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What Captain?—Ahab?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who but him indeed?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we
+ heard a noise on deck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Holloa! Starbuck’s astir,” said the rigger. “He’s a lively chief mate,
+ that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn to.” And so
+ saying he went on deck, and we followed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was now clear sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and threes;
+ the riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively engaged; and
+ several of the shore people were busy in bringing various last things on
+ board. Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained invisibly enshrined within his
+ cabin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.
+ 
+ 
+ At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship’s riggers,
+ and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and after the
+ ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat, with her last gift—a
+ night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her brother-in-law, and a spare
+ Bible for the steward—after all this, the two Captains, Peleg and
+ Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief mate, Peleg said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain Ahab is all
+ ready—just spoke to him—nothing more to be got from shore, eh?
+ Well, call all hands, then. Muster ’em aft here—blast ’em!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg,” said Bildad,
+ “but away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ How now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage, Captain
+ Peleg and Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on the
+ quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at sea, as well
+ as to all appearances in port. And, as for Captain Ahab, no sign of him
+ was yet to be seen; only, they said he was in the cabin. But then, the
+ idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary in getting the ship
+ under weigh, and steering her well out to sea. Indeed, as that was not at
+ all his proper business, but the pilot’s; and as he was not yet completely
+ recovered—so they said—therefore, Captain Ahab stayed below.
+ And all this seemed natural enough; especially as in the merchant service
+ many captains never show themselves on deck for a considerable time after
+ heaving up the anchor, but remain over the cabin table, having a farewell
+ merry-making with their shore friends, before they quit the ship for good
+ with the pilot.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg
+ was now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and commanding, and
+ not Bildad.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aft here, ye sons of bachelors,” he cried, as the sailors lingered at the
+ main-mast. “Mr. Starbuck, drive ’em aft.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Strike the tent there!”—was the next order. As I hinted before,
+ this whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board the
+ Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent was well known to
+ be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!—jump!”—was the next
+ command, and the crew sprang for the handspikes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the pilot is
+ the forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it
+ known, in addition to his other officers, was one of the licensed pilots
+ of the port—he being suspected to have got himself made a pilot in
+ order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was concerned
+ in, for he never piloted any other craft—Bildad, I say, might now be
+ seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching anchor,
+ and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody, to cheer
+ the hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of a chorus about
+ the girls in Booble Alley, with hearty good will. Nevertheless, not three
+ days previous, Bildad had told them that no profane songs would be allowed
+ on board the Pequod, particularly in getting under weigh; and Charity, his
+ sister, had placed a small choice copy of Watts in each seaman’s berth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped and
+ swore astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he would sink
+ the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I paused on my
+ handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the perils we
+ both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a pilot. I was
+ comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious Bildad might be
+ found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay;
+ when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear, and turning round, was
+ horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the act of withdrawing his
+ leg from my immediate vicinity. That was my first kick.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?” he roared. “Spring,
+ thou sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone! Why don’t ye spring, I
+ say, all of ye—spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with the red
+ whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green pants. Spring, I
+ say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!” And so saying, he moved along
+ the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely, while
+ imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks I, Captain
+ Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a
+ short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we
+ found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray
+ cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the
+ bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of
+ some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the
+ old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all
+ over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes
+ were heard,—
+ 
+
+
+ “Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood,
+ Stand dressed in living green.
+ So to the Jews old Canaan stood,
+ While Jordan rolled between.” 
+ 
+ 
+ Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They were
+ full of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the
+ boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was
+ yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads and
+ glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring,
+ untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed no
+ longer. The stout sail-boat that had accompanied us began ranging
+ alongside.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at
+ this juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet; very
+ loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and perilous a voyage—beyond
+ both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of his hard earned
+ dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate sailed as captain;
+ a man almost as old as he, once more starting to encounter all the terrors
+ of the pitiless jaw; loath to say good-bye to a thing so every way brimful
+ of every interest to him,—poor old Bildad lingered long; paced the
+ deck with anxious strides; ran down into the cabin to speak another
+ farewell word there; again came on deck, and looked to windward; looked
+ towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen
+ Eastern Continents; looked towards the land; looked aloft; looked right
+ and left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling
+ a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and
+ holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as
+ much as to say, “Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all his
+ philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the lantern came
+ too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin to deck—now a
+ word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about
+ him,—“Captain Bildad—come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the
+ main-yard there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close alongside, now!
+ Careful, careful!—come, Bildad, boy—say your last. Luck to ye,
+ Starbuck—luck to ye, Mr. Stubb—luck to ye, Mr. Flask—good-bye
+ and good luck to ye all—and this day three years I’ll have a hot
+ supper smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men,” murmured old Bildad,
+ almost incoherently. “I hope ye’ll have fine weather now, so that Captain
+ Ahab may soon be moving among ye—a pleasant sun is all he needs, and
+ ye’ll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go. Be careful in the
+ hunt, ye mates. Don’t stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooneers; good
+ white cedar plank is raised full three per cent. within the year. Don’t
+ forget your prayers, either. Mr. Starbuck, mind that cooper don’t waste
+ the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in the green locker! Don’t
+ whale it too much a’ Lord’s days, men; but don’t miss a fair chance
+ either, that’s rejecting Heaven’s good gifts. Have an eye to the molasses
+ tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the
+ islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. Good-bye, good-bye! Don’t keep
+ that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr. Starbuck; it’ll spoil. Be
+ careful with the butter—twenty cents the pound it was, and mind ye,
+ if—”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,—away!” and with that,
+ Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the boat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a
+ screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three
+ heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone
+ Atlantic.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
+ 
+ 
+ Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded
+ mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive
+ bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm
+ but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the
+ man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage,
+ could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.
+ The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the
+ unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is
+ the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him
+ as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward
+ land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is
+ safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s
+ kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that
+ ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land,
+ though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through.
+ With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights
+ ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the
+ lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into
+ peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally
+ intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid
+ effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the
+ wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous,
+ slavish shore?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite
+ as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be
+ ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like,
+ then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all
+ this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee
+ grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight
+ up, leaps thy apotheosis!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
+ 
+ 
+ As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling; and
+ as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen
+ as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all
+ anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us
+ hunters of whales.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish the
+ fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not accounted
+ on a level with what are called the liberal professions. If a stranger
+ were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society, it would but
+ slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were he presented to
+ the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation of the naval
+ officers he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his
+ visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed pre-eminently presuming
+ and ridiculous.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring us whalemen,
+ is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering
+ sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are
+ surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true.
+ But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all
+ Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor. And as
+ for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon
+ be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and
+ which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at
+ least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting
+ the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a
+ whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those
+ battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies’
+ plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of
+ the soldier’s profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has
+ freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of
+ the sperm whale’s vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head.
+ For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the
+ interlinked terrors and wonders of God!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly
+ pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost
+ all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as
+ before so many shrines, to our glory!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales;
+ see what we whalemen are, and have been.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Why did the Dutch in De Witt’s time have admirals of their whaling fleets?
+ Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling
+ ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two of
+ families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the
+ years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of £1,000,000?
+ And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the
+ rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven
+ hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming
+ 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing,
+ $20,000,000! and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped
+ harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if there be not something
+ puissant in whaling?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But this is not the half; look again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life,
+ point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty years
+ has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in one
+ aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way and
+ another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so
+ continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that whaling may well
+ be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves
+ pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to catalogue
+ all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many years past the
+ whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least
+ known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes which
+ had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If American and
+ European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them
+ fire salutes to the honor and glory of the whale-ship, which originally
+ showed them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages.
+ They may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your
+ Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have
+ sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cook
+ and your Krusenstern. For in their succourless empty-handedness, they, in
+ the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin
+ islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cook with all his
+ marines and muskets would not willingly have dared. All that is made such
+ a flourish of in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the
+ life-time commonplaces of our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which
+ Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of
+ being set down in the ship’s common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial,
+ scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and
+ the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast. It
+ was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous policy of the Spanish
+ crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it might be
+ distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated the liberation
+ of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain, and the
+ establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given
+ to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born
+ discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores as
+ pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship
+ is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of
+ the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved
+ from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily
+ dropping an anchor in their waters. The uncounted isles of all Polynesia
+ confess the same truth, and do commercial homage to the whale-ship, that
+ cleared the way for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases
+ carried the primitive missionaries to their first destinations. If that
+ double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the
+ whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the
+ threshold.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has no
+ æsthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I ready to
+ shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a split helmet
+ every time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will
+ say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler? Who wrote
+ the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed
+ the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than
+ Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from
+ Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our
+ glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no
+ good blood in their veins.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No good blood in their veins? They have something better than royal blood
+ there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel; afterwards,
+ by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the
+ ancestress to a long line of Folgers and harpooneers—all kith and
+ kin to noble Benjamin—this day darting the barbed iron from one side
+ of the world to the other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory
+ law, the whale is declared “a royal fish.” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Oh, that’s only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand
+ imposing way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In one of the mighty
+ triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the world’s capital,
+ the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were the
+ most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.*
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real
+ dignity in whaling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the very heavens attest.
+ Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your hat in
+ presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I know a man
+ that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty whales. I account
+ that man more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who boasted
+ of taking as many walled towns.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered
+ prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small
+ but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if
+ hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather
+ have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more
+ properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I
+ prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a
+ whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
+ 
+ 
+ In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but
+ substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who
+ should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might tell
+ eloquently upon his cause—such an advocate, would he not be
+ blameworthy?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern
+ ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is
+ gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be
+ a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely—who knows?
+ Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his
+ coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint
+ it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery?
+ Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this
+ regal process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and
+ contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that
+ anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally,
+ that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general
+ rule, he can’t amount to much in his totality.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the only thing to be considered here, is this—what kind of oil
+ is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar
+ oil, nor castor oil, nor bear’s oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil.
+ What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured,
+ unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens
+ with coronation stuff!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.
+ 
+ 
+ The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a
+ Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy
+ coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard
+ as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would
+ not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general
+ drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is
+ famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried
+ up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak,
+ seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed
+ the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the
+ man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight
+ skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with
+ inner health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck
+ seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come, and to endure always, as
+ now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his
+ interior vitality was warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into
+ his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those
+ thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid,
+ steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of
+ action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety
+ and fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times
+ affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the rest.
+ Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural
+ reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly
+ incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in
+ some organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than
+ from ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And if
+ at times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more did his
+ far-away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend
+ him still more from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him
+ still further to those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted
+ men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in
+ the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. “I will have no man in my
+ boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” By this, he seemed
+ to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which
+ arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an
+ utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, aye,” said Stubb, the second mate, “Starbuck, there, is as careful a
+ man as you’ll find anywhere in this fishery.” But we shall ere long see
+ what that word “careful” precisely means when used by a man like Stubb, or
+ almost any other whale hunter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment;
+ but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally
+ practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this business
+ of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of the ship, like
+ her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had
+ no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor for persisting in
+ fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him. For, thought
+ Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living,
+ and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been
+ so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was his own father’s? Where, in
+ the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn limbs of his brother?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain
+ superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which
+ could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But it
+ was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such
+ terrible experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature that
+ these things should fail in latently engendering an element in him, which,
+ under suitable circumstances, would break out from its confinement, and
+ burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it was that sort of
+ bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally
+ abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the
+ ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more
+ terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from
+ the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete
+ abasement of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to
+ write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the
+ fall of valour in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint
+ stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be;
+ men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and
+ so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious
+ blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.
+ That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that
+ it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with
+ keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can
+ piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings
+ against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not
+ the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no
+ robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick
+ or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates
+ without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and
+ circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall
+ hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic
+ graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them
+ all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch
+ that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow
+ over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me
+ out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal
+ mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great
+ democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the
+ pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of
+ finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst
+ pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a
+ war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all
+ Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from
+ the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.
+ 
+ 
+ Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,
+ according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky;
+ neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an indifferent
+ air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the chase, toiling
+ away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged for the year.
+ Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his whale-boat as if
+ the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited
+ guests. He was as particular about the comfortable arrangement of his part
+ of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box. When
+ close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his
+ unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer.
+ He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the
+ most exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the
+ jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there
+ is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question;
+ but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable
+ dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of
+ the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something
+ which he would find out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going, unfearing
+ man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a world full of
+ grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their packs; what helped to
+ bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that thing must have
+ been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black little pipe was one of
+ the regular features of his face. You would almost as soon have expected
+ him to turn out of his bunk without his nose as without his pipe. He kept
+ a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy
+ reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in
+ succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then
+ loading them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed,
+ instead of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into
+ his mouth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his
+ peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether
+ ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the
+ numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the
+ cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their
+ mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb’s tobacco
+ smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha’s Vineyard. A
+ short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales, who
+ somehow seemed to think that the great leviathans had personally and
+ hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of honor
+ with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost was he to
+ all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic bulk and
+ mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of any possible
+ danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the wondrous
+ whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat,
+ requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time
+ and trouble in order to kill and boil. This ignorant, unconscious
+ fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in the matter of whales; he
+ followed these fish for the fun of it; and a three years’ voyage round
+ Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted that length of time. As a
+ carpenter’s nails are divided into wrought nails and cut nails; so mankind
+ may be similarly divided. Little Flask was one of the wrought ones; made
+ to clinch tight and last long. They called him King-Post on board of the
+ Pequod; because, in form, he could be well likened to the short, square
+ timber known by that name in Arctic whalers; and which by the means of
+ many radiating side timbers inserted into it, serves to brace the ship
+ against the icy concussions of those battering seas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now these three mates—Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous
+ men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the
+ Pequod’s boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which Captain
+ Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales, these
+ three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with their
+ long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers; even as
+ the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic
+ Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer,
+ who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when the
+ former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and
+ moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a close intimacy
+ and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set down
+ who the Pequod’s harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of them
+ belonged.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected for
+ his squire. But Queequeg is already known.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly
+ promontory of Martha’s Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant
+ of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of
+ Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers. In the fishery, they
+ usually go by the generic name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego’s long, lean,
+ sable hair, his high cheek bones, and black rounding eyes—for an
+ Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering
+ expression—all this sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the
+ unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the
+ great New England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests
+ of the main. But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the
+ woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea;
+ the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of
+ the sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would
+ almost have credited the superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans,
+ and half-believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers
+ of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second mate’s squire.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black
+ negro-savage, with a lion-like tread—an Ahasuerus to behold.
+ Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors
+ called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards
+ to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler,
+ lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And never having been anywhere
+ in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most
+ frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold life of
+ the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of
+ men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a
+ giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his
+ socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white
+ man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a
+ fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the
+ Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man beside him. As for the
+ residue of the Pequod’s company, be it said, that at the present day not
+ one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the
+ American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the
+ officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as
+ with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the
+ engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and
+ Railroads. The same, I say, because in all these cases the native American
+ liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously
+ supplying the muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to
+ the Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to
+ augment their crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like
+ manner, the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the
+ Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the
+ passage homewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no
+ telling, but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly
+ all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging
+ the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate
+ continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these
+ Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the
+ sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to
+ lay the world’s grievances before that bar from which not very many of
+ them ever come back. Black Little Pip—he never did—oh, no! he
+ went before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod’s forecastle, ye shall
+ ere long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time,
+ when sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in
+ with angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here,
+ hailed a hero there!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
+ 
+ 
+ For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen
+ of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the watches,
+ and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed to be the
+ only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from the cabin
+ with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was plain they but
+ commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was there,
+ though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate into the now
+ sacred retreat of the cabin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly gazed
+ aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague
+ disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the sea,
+ became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened at times by
+ the ragged Elijah’s diabolical incoherences uninvitedly recurring to me,
+ with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived of. But poorly
+ could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was almost ready to smile
+ at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish prophet of the wharves.
+ But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness—to call it so—which
+ I felt, yet whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed
+ against all warrantry to cherish such emotions. For though the
+ harpooneers, with the great body of the crew, were a far more barbaric,
+ heathenish, and motley set than any of the tame merchant-ship companies
+ which my previous experiences had made me acquainted with, still I
+ ascribed this—and rightly ascribed it—to the fierce uniqueness
+ of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation in which I had so
+ abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the aspect of the three chief
+ officers of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly calculated to
+ allay these colourless misgivings, and induce confidence and cheerfulness
+ in every presentment of the voyage. Three better, more likely sea-officers
+ and men, each in his own different way, could not readily be found, and
+ they were every one of them Americans; a Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape
+ man. Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot from out her harbor, for a
+ space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from
+ it to the southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we
+ sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable
+ weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still grey and
+ gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the ship
+ was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and
+ melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the
+ forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail,
+ foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab
+ stood upon his quarter-deck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the
+ recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the
+ fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or
+ taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole
+ high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an
+ unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. Threading its way out from
+ among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny
+ scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a
+ slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular
+ seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the
+ upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single
+ twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off
+ into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether
+ that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some
+ desperate wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent,
+ throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made to it, especially by
+ the mates. But once Tashtego’s senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the
+ crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old
+ did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the
+ fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild
+ hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an
+ old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had
+ never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old
+ sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old
+ Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor
+ seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should
+ be tranquilly laid out—which might hardly come to pass, so he
+ muttered—then, whoever should do that last office for the dead,
+ would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid
+ brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted
+ that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric
+ white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that
+ this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the
+ sperm whale’s jaw. “Aye, he was dismasted off Japan,” said the old
+ Gay-Head Indian once; “but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another
+ mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of ’em.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of
+ the Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there
+ was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His
+ bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud;
+ Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship’s
+ ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a
+ determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless,
+ forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his
+ officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and
+ expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness
+ of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that, but moody
+ stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the
+ nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But
+ after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing
+ in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily
+ walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a
+ little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the
+ ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the
+ sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that
+ he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet, for all that he said,
+ or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary
+ there as another mast. But the Pequod was only making a passage now; not
+ regularly cruising; nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision
+ the mates were fully competent to, so that there was little or nothing,
+ out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for
+ that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his
+ brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves
+ upon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant,
+ holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood.
+ For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to
+ the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most
+ thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to
+ welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little
+ respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did
+ he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would
+ have soon flowered out in a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
+ 
+ 
+ Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went
+ rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually
+ reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly
+ cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as
+ crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with
+ rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in
+ jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their
+ absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, ’twas
+ hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But all
+ the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and
+ potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul,
+ especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her
+ crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these
+ subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab’s texture.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less
+ man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the
+ old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked
+ deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much to
+ live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the
+ cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. “It feels like going down into
+ one’s tomb,”—he would mutter to himself—“for an old captain
+ like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug
+ berth.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were
+ set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below; and
+ when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors flung it
+ not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt it to its
+ place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when this sort of
+ steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the silent steersman
+ would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man would emerge,
+ gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way. Some considering
+ touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these, he usually
+ abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his wearied mates,
+ seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would have been
+ the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their dreams would
+ have been on the crunching teeth of sharks. But once, the mood was on him
+ too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was
+ measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the old second mate,
+ came up from below, with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness,
+ hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one
+ could say nay; but there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting
+ something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the
+ insertion into it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab
+ then.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb,” said Ahab, “that thou wouldst wad me that
+ fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave; where
+ such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at last.—Down,
+ dog, and kennel!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly
+ scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, “I
+ am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like
+ it, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away, as
+ if to avoid some passionate temptation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, sir; not yet,” said Stubb, emboldened, “I will not tamely be called a
+ dog, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or
+ I’ll clear the world of thee!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in
+ his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,” muttered
+ Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. “It’s very queer.
+ Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don’t well know whether to go back and strike
+ him, or—what’s that?—down here on my knees and pray for him?
+ Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the first time
+ I ever did pray. It’s queer; very queer; and he’s queer too; aye, take him
+ fore and aft, he’s about the queerest old man Stubb ever sailed with. How
+ he flashed at me!—his eyes like powder-pans! is he mad? Anyway
+ there’s something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a
+ deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours
+ out of the twenty-four; and he don’t sleep then. Didn’t that Dough-Boy,
+ the steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man’s
+ hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot,
+ and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of
+ frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on it? A hot old man! I
+ guess he’s got what some folks ashore call a conscience; it’s a kind of
+ Tic-Dolly-row they say—worse nor a toothache. Well, well; I don’t
+ know what it is, but the Lord keep me from catching it. He’s full of
+ riddles; I wonder what he goes into the after hold for, every night, as
+ Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what’s that for, I should like to know?
+ Who’s made appointments with him in the hold? Ain’t that queer, now? But
+ there’s no telling, it’s the old game—Here goes for a snooze. Damn
+ me, it’s worth a fellow’s while to be born into the world, if only to fall
+ right asleep. And now that I think of it, that’s about the first thing
+ babies do, and that’s a sort of queer, too. Damn me, but all things are
+ queer, come to think of ’em. But that’s against my principles. Think not,
+ is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth—So
+ here goes again. But how’s that? didn’t he call me a dog? blazes! he
+ called me ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of that! 
+ He might as well have kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he did kick me,
+ and I didn’t observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow, somehow.
+ It flashed like a bleached bone. What the devil’s the matter with me? I
+ don’t stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of
+ turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though—How?
+ how? how?—but the only way’s to stash it; so here goes to hammock
+ again; and in the morning, I’ll see how this plaguey juggling thinks over
+ by daylight.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.
+ 
+ 
+ When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks;
+ and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the
+ watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe. Lighting
+ the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the weather side
+ of the deck, he sat and smoked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were
+ fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one
+ look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him
+ of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the
+ sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth in
+ quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. “How now,”
+ he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, “this smoking no longer
+ soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here
+ have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring—aye, and
+ ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such
+ nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the
+ strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe?
+ This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors
+ among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I’ll
+ smoke no more—”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the
+ waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made.
+ With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.
+ 
+ 
+ Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man’s ivory
+ leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick back,
+ upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right off! And then, presto!
+ Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking at it. But
+ what was still more curious, Flask—you know how curious all dreams
+ are—through all this rage that I was in, I somehow seemed to be
+ thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an insult, that
+ kick from Ahab. ‘Why,’ thinks I, ‘what’s the row? It’s not a real leg,
+ only a false leg.’ And there’s a mighty difference between a living thump
+ and a dead thump. That’s what makes a blow from the hand, Flask, fifty
+ times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane. The living member—that
+ makes the living insult, my little man. And thinks I to myself all the
+ while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly toes against that cursed
+ pyramid—so confoundedly contradictory was it all, all the while, I
+ say, I was thinking to myself, ‘what’s his leg now, but a cane—a
+ whalebone cane. Yes,’ thinks I, ‘it was only a playful cudgelling—in
+ fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me—not a base kick. Besides,’
+ thinks I, ‘look at it once; why, the end of it—the foot part—what
+ a small sort of end it is; whereas, if a broad footed farmer kicked me,
+ there’s a devilish broad insult. But this insult is whittled down to a
+ point only.’ But now comes the greatest joke of the dream, Flask. While I
+ was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of badger-haired old merman,
+ with a hump on his back, takes me by the shoulders, and slews me round.
+ ‘What are you ’bout?’ says he. Slid! man, but I was frightened. Such a
+ phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was over the fright. ‘What am I about?’
+ says I at last. ‘And what business is that of yours, I should like to
+ know, Mr. Humpback? Do you want a kick?’ By the lord, Flask, I had no
+ sooner said that, than he turned round his stern to me, bent over, and
+ dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a clout—what do you think, I
+ saw?—why thunder alive, man, his stern was stuck full of
+ marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on second thoughts, ‘I guess I
+ won’t kick you, old fellow.’ ‘Wise Stubb,’ said he, ‘wise Stubb;’ and kept
+ muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of his own gums like a chimney
+ hag. Seeing he wasn’t going to stop saying over his ‘wise Stubb, wise
+ Stubb,’ I thought I might as well fall to kicking the pyramid again. But I
+ had only just lifted my foot for it, when he roared out, ‘Stop that
+ kicking!’ ‘Halloa,’ says I, ‘what’s the matter now, old fellow?’ ‘Look ye
+ here,’ says he; ‘let’s argue the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn’t
+ he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’ says I—‘right here it was.’ ‘Very good,’ says he—‘he
+ used his ivory leg, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’ says I. ‘Well then,’ says
+ he, ‘wise Stubb, what have you to complain of? Didn’t he kick with right
+ good will? it wasn’t a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No,
+ you were kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb.
+ It’s an honor; I consider it an honor. Listen, wise Stubb. In old
+ England the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen,
+ and made garter-knights of; but, be your boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked
+ by old Ahab, and made a wise man of. Remember what I say; be kicked by
+ him; account his kicks honors; and on no account kick back; for you can’t
+ help yourself, wise Stubb. Don’t you see that pyramid?’ With that, he all
+ of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to swim off into the
+ air. I snored; rolled over; and there I was in my hammock! Now, what do
+ you think of that dream, Flask?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “May be; may be. But it’s made a wise man of me, Flask. D’ye see Ahab
+ standing there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best thing you
+ can do, Flask, is to let the old man alone; never speak to him, whatever
+ he says. Halloa! What’s that he shouts? Hark!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do you think of that now, Flask? ain’t there a small drop of
+ something queer about that, eh? A white whale—did ye mark that, man?
+ Look ye—there’s something special in the wind. Stand by for it,
+ Flask. Ahab has that that’s bloody on his mind. But, mum; he comes this
+ way.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 32. Cetology.
+ 
+ 
+ Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in
+ its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the
+ Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the
+ leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost
+ indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special
+ leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that
+ I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The
+ classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here
+ essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled
+ Cetology,” says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry as
+ to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and families. * * *
+ Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal” (sperm whale),
+ says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters.”
+ “Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea.” “A field strewn
+ with thorns.” “All these incomplete indications but serve to torture us
+ naturalists.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson,
+ those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real
+ knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in some
+ small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are the men,
+ small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or in
+ little, written of the whale. Run over a few:—The Authors of the
+ Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner; Ray;
+ Linnæus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson;
+ Marten; Lacépède; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier;
+ John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the Author of
+ Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what ultimate
+ generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts will
+ show.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen ever
+ saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional harpooneer
+ and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate subject of the
+ Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing authority. But Scoresby
+ knew nothing and says nothing of the great sperm whale, compared with
+ which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy mentioning. And here be it
+ said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper upon the throne of the seas.
+ He is not even by any means the largest of the whales. Yet, owing to the
+ long priority of his claims, and the profound ignorance which, till some
+ seventy years back, invested the then fabulous or utterly unknown
+ sperm-whale, and which ignorance to this present day still reigns in all
+ but some few scientific retreats and whale-ports; this usurpation has been
+ every way complete. Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in
+ the great poets of past days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale,
+ without one rival, was to them the monarch of the seas. But the time has
+ at last come for a new proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good
+ people all,—the Greenland whale is deposed,—the great sperm
+ whale now reigneth!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living
+ sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree
+ succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale’s and Bennett’s; both in
+ their time surgeons to English South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact and
+ reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale to be found in
+ their volumes is necessarily small; but so far as it goes, it is of
+ excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific description. As
+ yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in
+ any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten
+ life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive
+ classification, if only an easy outline one for the present, hereafter to
+ be filled in all its departments by subsequent laborers. As no better man
+ advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor
+ endeavors. I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to
+ be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not
+ pretend to a minute anatomical description of the various species, or—in
+ this place at least—to much of any description. My object here is
+ simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the
+ architect, not the builder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-Office
+ is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to
+ have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis
+ of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to
+ hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well
+ appal me. Will he (the leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the
+ hope of him is vain! But I have swam through libraries and sailed through
+ oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in
+ earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to settle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is
+ in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still
+ remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature,
+ A.D. 1776, Linnæus declares, “I hereby separate the whales from the
+ fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks
+ and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnæus’s express edict, were
+ still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The grounds upon which Linnæus would fain have banished the whales from
+ the waters, he states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular
+ heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem
+ intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,” and finally, “ex lege naturæ jure
+ meritoque.” I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley
+ Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they
+ united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether
+ insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned
+ ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me. This
+ fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal respect
+ does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linnæus has given you those
+ items. But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm blood; whereas, all
+ other fish are lungless and cold blooded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as
+ conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a
+ whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail . There you have him.
+ However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded meditation.
+ A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a fish, because
+ he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is still more
+ cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have noticed that
+ all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a vertical, or
+ up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be
+ similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude from
+ the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified with the
+ whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other hand, link with
+ it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as alien.* Hence, all the
+ smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish must be included in this
+ ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the grand divisions of the entire
+ whale host.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and
+ Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included
+ by many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a noisy,
+ contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on
+ wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as
+ whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom
+ of Cetology.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS
+ (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all, both
+ small and large.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As the type of the FOLIO I present the Sperm Whale ; of the OCTAVO, the
+ Grampus ; of the DUODECIMO, the Porpoise .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:—I. The
+ Sperm Whale ; II. the Right Whale ; III. the Fin-Back Whale ; IV. the
+ Hump-backed Whale ; V. the Razor Back Whale ; VI. the Sulphur Bottom Whale .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ BOOK I. ( Folio ), CHAPTER I. ( Sperm Whale ).—This whale, among the
+ English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter whale,
+ and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the French, and the
+ Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the Long Words. He is,
+ without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe; the most formidable of
+ all whales to encounter; the most majestic in aspect; and lastly, by far
+ the most valuable in commerce; he being the only creature from which that
+ valuable substance, spermaceti, is obtained. All his peculiarities will,
+ in many other places, be enlarged upon. It is chiefly with his name that I
+ now have to do. Philologically considered, it is absurd. Some centuries
+ ago, when the Sperm whale was almost wholly unknown in his own proper
+ individuality, and when his oil was only accidentally obtained from the
+ stranded fish; in those days spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly
+ supposed to be derived from a creature identical with the one then known
+ in England as the Greenland or Right Whale. It was the idea also, that
+ this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale
+ which the first syllable of the word literally expresses. In those times,
+ also, spermaceti was exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but
+ only as an ointment and medicament. It was only to be had from the
+ druggists as you nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in
+ the course of time, the true nature of spermaceti became known, its
+ original name was still retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its
+ value by a notion so strangely significant of its scarcity. And so the
+ appellation must at last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from
+ which this spermaceti was really derived.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ BOOK I. ( Folio ), CHAPTER II. ( Right Whale ).—In one respect this is
+ the most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted
+ by man. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or baleen; and
+ the oil specially known as “whale oil,” an inferior article in commerce.
+ Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by all the
+ following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black Whale; the
+ Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale. There is a deal of obscurity
+ concerning the identity of the species thus multitudinously baptised. What
+ then is the whale, which I include in the second species of my Folios? It
+ is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the Greenland Whale of
+ the English whalemen; the Baleine Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the
+ Growlands Walfish of the Swedes. It is the whale which for more than two
+ centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch and English in the Arctic
+ seas; it is the whale which the American fishermen have long pursued in
+ the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor’ West Coast, and various
+ other parts of the world, designated by them Right Whale Cruising Grounds.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the
+ English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree in
+ all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single
+ determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by
+ endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that
+ some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate. The
+ right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with reference to
+ elucidating the sperm whale.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ BOOK I. ( Folio ), CHAPTER III. ( Fin-Back ).—Under this head I reckon a
+ monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and
+ Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale
+ whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the
+ Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In the length he attains, and in
+ his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right whale, but is of a less
+ portly girth, and a lighter colour, approaching to olive. His great lips
+ present a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds
+ of large wrinkles. His grand distinguishing feature, the fin, from which
+ he derives his name, is often a conspicuous object. This fin is some three
+ or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder part of the back, of
+ an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end. Even if not the
+ slightest other part of the creature be visible, this isolated fin will,
+ at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When the sea is
+ moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples, and this
+ gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it
+ may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it somewhat
+ resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved on it. On that
+ Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back. The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He
+ seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very shy; always going
+ solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the remotest and most
+ sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet rising like a tall
+ misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous power
+ and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from man; this
+ leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable Cain of his race, bearing
+ for his mark that style upon his back. From having the baleen in his
+ mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes included with the right whale, among a
+ theoretic species denominated Whalebone whales , that is, whales with
+ baleen. Of these so called Whalebone whales, there would seem to be
+ several varieties, most of which, however, are little known. Broad-nosed
+ whales and beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched whales; under-jawed
+ whales and rostrated whales, are the fishermen’s names for a few sorts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In connection with this appellative of “Whalebone whales,” it is of great
+ importance to mention, that however such a nomenclature may be convenient
+ in facilitating allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is in vain to
+ attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan, founded upon either his
+ baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth; notwithstanding that those marked parts
+ or features very obviously seem better adapted to afford the basis for a
+ regular system of Cetology than any other detached bodily distinctions,
+ which the whale, in his kinds, presents. How then? The baleen, hump,
+ back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose peculiarities are
+ indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales, without any regard
+ to what may be the nature of their structure in other and more essential
+ particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the humpbacked whale, each has a
+ hump; but there the similitude ceases. Then, this same humpbacked whale
+ and the Greenland whale, each of these has baleen; but there again the
+ similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the other parts above
+ mentioned. In various sorts of whales, they form such irregular
+ combinations; or, in the case of any one of them detached, such an
+ irregular isolation; as utterly to defy all general methodization formed
+ upon such a basis. On this rock every one of the whale-naturalists has
+ split.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the whale,
+ in his anatomy—there, at least, we shall be able to hit the right
+ classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the Greenland
+ whale’s anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have seen that by
+ his baleen it is impossible correctly to classify the Greenland whale. And
+ if you descend into the bowels of the various leviathans, why there you
+ will not find distinctions a fiftieth part as available to the
+ systematizer as those external ones already enumerated. What then remains?
+ nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in their entire liberal
+ volume, and boldly sort them that way. And this is the Bibliographical
+ system here adopted; and it is the only one that can possibly succeed, for
+ it alone is practicable. To proceed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ BOOK I. ( Folio ) CHAPTER IV. ( Hump Back ).—This whale is often seen on
+ the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and
+ towed into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or you might
+ call him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate, the popular name for
+ him does not sufficiently distinguish him, since the sperm whale also has
+ a hump though a smaller one. His oil is not very valuable. He has baleen.
+ He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales, making more
+ gay foam and white water generally than any other of them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ BOOK I. ( Folio ), CHAPTER V. ( Razor Back ).—Of this whale little is
+ known but his name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a
+ retiring nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though no
+ coward, he has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which rises
+ in a long sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does
+ anybody else.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ BOOK I. ( Folio ), CHAPTER VI. ( Sulphur Bottom ).—Another retiring
+ gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the
+ Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen; at
+ least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas, and then
+ always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is never
+ chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are told of
+ him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing more that is true of ye, nor
+ can the oldest Nantucketer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thus ends BOOK I. ( Folio ), and now begins BOOK II. ( Octavo ).
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ OCTAVOES.*—These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among
+ which present may be numbered:—I., the Grampus ; II., the Black Fish ;
+ III., the Narwhale ; IV., the Thrasher ; V., the Killer .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain.
+ Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of the
+ former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them in
+ figure, yet the bookbinder’s Quarto volume in its dimensioned form does
+ not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume does.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ BOOK II. ( Octavo ), CHAPTER I. ( Grampus ).—Though this fish, whose
+ loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb to
+ landsmen, is so well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not popularly
+ classed among whales. But possessing all the grand distinctive features of
+ the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him for one. He is of
+ moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to twenty-five feet in length,
+ and of corresponding dimensions round the waist. He swims in herds; he is
+ never regularly hunted, though his oil is considerable in quantity, and
+ pretty good for light. By some fishermen his approach is regarded as
+ premonitory of the advance of the great sperm whale.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ BOOK II. ( Octavo ), CHAPTER II. ( Black Fish ).—I give the popular
+ fishermen’s names for all these fish, for generally they are the best.
+ Where any name happens to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so, and
+ suggest another. I do so now, touching the Black Fish, so-called, because
+ blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So, call him the Hyena
+ Whale, if you please. His voracity is well known, and from the
+ circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards, he
+ carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This whale
+ averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost
+ all latitudes. He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal hooked fin in
+ swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose. When not more
+ profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena
+ whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment—as
+ some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite alone by
+ themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax. Though their
+ blubber is very thin, some of these whales will yield you upwards of
+ thirty gallons of oil.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ BOOK II. ( Octavo ), CHAPTER III. ( Narwhale ), that is, Nostril whale .—Another
+ instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose from his peculiar
+ horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose. The creature is some
+ sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five feet, though some
+ exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly speaking, this horn
+ is but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw in a line a little
+ depressed from the horizontal. But it is only found on the sinister side,
+ which has an ill effect, giving its owner something analogous to the
+ aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. What precise purpose this ivory horn
+ or lance answers, it would be hard to say. It does not seem to be used
+ like the blade of the sword-fish and bill-fish; though some sailors tell
+ me that the Narwhale employs it for a rake in turning over the bottom of
+ the sea for food. Charley Coffin said it was used for an ice-piercer; for
+ the Narwhale, rising to the surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it
+ sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks through. But you
+ cannot prove either of these surmises to be correct. My own opinion is,
+ that however this one-sided horn may really be used by the Narwhale—however
+ that may be—it would certainly be very convenient to him for a
+ folder in reading pamphlets. The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked
+ whale, the Horned whale, and the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a curious
+ example of the Unicornism to be found in almost every kingdom of animated
+ nature. From certain cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same
+ sea-unicorn’s horn was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote
+ against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It
+ was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way
+ that the horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn.
+ Originally it was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black
+ Letter tells me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage,
+ when Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window
+ of Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames; “when Sir
+ Martin returned from that voyage,” saith Black Letter, “on bended knees he
+ presented to her highness a prodigious long horn of the Narwhale, which
+ for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor.” An Irish author
+ avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did likewise present to
+ her highness another horn, pertaining to a land beast of the unicorn
+ nature.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a
+ milk-white ground colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black. His
+ oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there is little of it, and he is
+ seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ BOOK II. ( Octavo ), CHAPTER IV. ( Killer ).—Of this whale little is
+ precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed
+ naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should say that
+ he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage—a sort of
+ Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and
+ hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death. The
+ Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has. Exception
+ might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground of its
+ indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and
+ Sharks included.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ BOOK II. ( Octavo ), CHAPTER V. ( Thrasher ).—This gentleman is famous
+ for his tail, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He mounts
+ the Folio whale’s back, and as he swims, he works his passage by flogging
+ him; as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a similar process.
+ Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both are outlaws,
+ even in the lawless seas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thus ends BOOK II. ( Octavo ), and begins BOOK III. ( Duodecimo ).
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ DUODECIMOES.—These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza
+ Porpoise. II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may
+ possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five
+ feet should be marshalled among WHALES—a word, which, in the popular
+ sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the creatures set down
+ above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my definition
+ of what a whale is— i.e. a spouting fish, with a horizontal tail.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ BOOK III. ( Duodecimo ), CHAPTER 1. ( Huzza Porpoise ).—This is the
+ common porpoise found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own
+ bestowal; for there are more than one sort of porpoises, and something
+ must be done to distinguish them. I call him thus, because he always swims
+ in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing themselves to
+ heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their appearance is generally
+ hailed with delight by the mariner. Full of fine spirits, they invariably
+ come from the breezy billows to windward. They are the lads that always
+ live before the wind. They are accounted a lucky omen. If you yourself can
+ withstand three cheers at beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help
+ ye; the spirit of godly gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza
+ Porpoise will yield you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and
+ delicate fluid extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in
+ request among jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put it on their hones.
+ Porpoise meat is good eating, you know. It may never have occurred to you
+ that a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very
+ readily discernible. But the next time you have a chance, watch him; and
+ you will then see the great Sperm whale himself in miniature.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ BOOK III. ( Duodecimo ), CHAPTER II. ( Algerine Porpoise ).—A pirate.
+ Very savage. He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is somewhat
+ larger than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general make. Provoke
+ him, and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered for him many times, but
+ never yet saw him captured.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ BOOK III. ( Duodecimo ), CHAPTER III. ( Mealy-mouthed Porpoise ).—The
+ largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it is
+ known. The only English name, by which he has hitherto been designated, is
+ that of the fishers—Right-Whale Porpoise, from the circumstance that
+ he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio. In shape, he differs in
+ some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a less rotund and jolly
+ girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and gentleman-like figure. He has no
+ fins on his back (most other porpoises have), he has a lovely tail, and
+ sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his mealy-mouth spoils all.
+ Though his entire back down to his side fins is of a deep sable, yet a
+ boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship’s hull, called the “bright
+ waist,” that line streaks him from stem to stern, with two separate
+ colours, black above and white below. The white comprises part of his
+ head, and the whole of his mouth, which makes him look as if he had just
+ escaped from a felonious visit to a meal-bag. A most mean and mealy
+ aspect! His oil is much like that of the common porpoise.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * * * * * *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as the
+ Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the Leviathans
+ of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous
+ whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by reputation, but not
+ personally. I shall enumerate them by their fore-castle appellations; for
+ possibly such a list may be valuable to future investigators, who may
+ complete what I have here but begun. If any of the following whales, shall
+ hereafter be caught and marked, then he can readily be incorporated into
+ this System, according to his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:—The
+ Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape
+ Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered
+ Whale; the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue
+ Whale; etc. From Icelandic, Dutch, and old English authorities, there
+ might be quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all manner
+ of uncouth names. But I omit them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly
+ help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying
+ nothing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here,
+ and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my
+ word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even
+ as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing
+ upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished
+ by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone
+ to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book
+ is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time,
+ Strength, Cash, and Patience!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.
+ 
+ 
+ Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place as
+ any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising from
+ the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown of
+ course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The large importance attached to the harpooneer’s vocation is evinced by
+ the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries and more
+ ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in the person now
+ called the captain, but was divided between him and an officer called the
+ Specksnyder. Literally this word means Fat-Cutter; usage, however, in time
+ made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. In those days, the captain’s
+ authority was restricted to the navigation and general management of the
+ vessel; while over the whale-hunting department and all its concerns, the
+ Specksnyder or Chief Harpooneer reigned supreme. In the British Greenland
+ Fishery, under the corrupted title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch
+ official is still retained, but his former dignity is sadly abridged. At
+ present he ranks simply as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of
+ the captain’s more inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good
+ conduct of the harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely
+ depends, and since in the American Fishery he is not only an important
+ officer in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night watches on a
+ whaling ground) the command of the ship’s deck is also his; therefore the
+ grand political maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live
+ apart from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as
+ their professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded
+ as their social equal.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is this—the
+ first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and merchantmen
+ alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain; and so, too, in
+ most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in the after part
+ of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the captain’s cabin,
+ and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest of
+ all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and the
+ community of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom, high or
+ low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their common
+ luck, together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and hard work;
+ though all these things do in some cases tend to beget a less rigorous
+ discipline than in merchantmen generally; yet, never mind how much like an
+ old Mesopotamian family these whalemen may, in some primitive instances,
+ live together; for all that, the punctilious externals, at least, of the
+ quarter-deck are seldom materially relaxed, and in no instance done away.
+ Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in which you will see the skipper
+ parading his quarter-deck with an elated grandeur not surpassed in any
+ military navy; nay, extorting almost as much outward homage as if he wore
+ the imperial purple, and not the shabbiest of pilot-cloth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least given
+ to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage he ever
+ exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he required no man
+ to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon the quarter-deck; and
+ though there were times when, owing to peculiar circumstances connected
+ with events hereafter to be detailed, he addressed them in unusual terms,
+ whether of condescension or in terrorem , or otherwise; yet even Captain
+ Ahab was by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the
+ sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those
+ forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally
+ making use of them for other and more private ends than they were
+ legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain,
+ which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through those
+ forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible
+ dictatorship. For be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can
+ never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without
+ the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in
+ themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps
+ God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings; and leaves the
+ highest honors that this air can give, to those men who become famous
+ more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of
+ the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead
+ level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when
+ extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances
+ even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as in the
+ case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire
+ encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before
+ the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would
+ depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direct swing, ever
+ forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the one now
+ alluded to.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness
+ and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and Kings, I must
+ not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old whale-hunter like him;
+ and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings and housings are denied
+ me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at
+ from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied
+ air!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.
+ 
+ 
+ It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread
+ face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and master; who,
+ sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just been taking an observation of
+ the sun; and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on the smooth,
+ medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that daily purpose on the upper part
+ of his ivory leg. From his complete inattention to the tidings, you would
+ think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. But presently, catching
+ hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to the deck, and in an even,
+ unexhilarated voice, saying, “Dinner, Mr. Starbuck,” disappears into the
+ cabin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the last echo of his sultan’s step has died away, and Starbuck, the
+ first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck
+ rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns along the planks, and, after a
+ grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some touch of pleasantness,
+ “Dinner, Mr. Stubb,” and descends the scuttle. The second Emir lounges
+ about the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking the main brace, to see
+ whether it will be all right with that important rope, he likewise takes
+ up the old burden, and with a rapid “Dinner, Mr. Flask,” follows after his
+ predecessors.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck,
+ seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all sorts
+ of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his shoes, he
+ strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right over the
+ Grand Turk’s head; and then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching his cap up
+ into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down rollicking so far at least as
+ he remains visible from the deck, reversing all other processions, by
+ bringing up the rear with music. But ere stepping into the cabin doorway
+ below, he pauses, ships a new face altogether, and, then, independent,
+ hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab’s presence, in the character of
+ Abjectus, or the Slave.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense
+ artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck some
+ officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and defyingly
+ enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those very officers
+ the next moment go down to their customary dinner in that same commander’s
+ cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say deprecatory and
+ humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of the table; this is
+ marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this difference? A problem?
+ Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been
+ Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously, therein certainly must have
+ been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he who in the rightly regal and
+ intelligent spirit presides over his own private dinner-table of invited
+ guests, that man’s unchallenged power and dominion of individual influence
+ for the time; that man’s royalty of state transcends Belshazzar’s, for
+ Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who has but once dined his friends, has
+ tasted what it is to be Cæsar. It is a witchery of social czarship which
+ there is no withstanding. Now, if to this consideration you superadd the
+ official supremacy of a ship-master, then, by inference, you will derive
+ the cause of that peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on
+ the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still deferential
+ cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to be served. They were
+ as little children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab, there seemed not to lurk
+ the smallest social arrogance. With one mind, their intent eyes all
+ fastened upon the old man’s knife, as he carved the chief dish before him.
+ I do not suppose that for the world they would have profaned that moment
+ with the slightest observation, even upon so neutral a topic as the
+ weather. No! And when reaching out his knife and fork, between which the
+ slice of beef was locked, Ahab thereby motioned Starbuck’s plate towards
+ him, the mate received his meat as though receiving alms; and cut it
+ tenderly; and a little started if, perchance, the knife grazed against the
+ plate; and chewed it noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without
+ circumspection. For, like the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the
+ German Emperor profoundly dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these
+ cabin meals were somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at
+ table old Ahab forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb. What a
+ relief it was to choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden racket in the
+ hold below. And poor little Flask, he was the youngest son, and little boy
+ of this weary family party. His were the shinbones of the saline beef; his
+ would have been the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help
+ himself, this must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the first
+ degree. Had he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never more would
+ he have been able to hold his head up in this honest world; nevertheless,
+ strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped himself, the
+ chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all, did Flask
+ presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners of the
+ ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear, sunny
+ complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such
+ marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him,
+ a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and Flask is
+ the first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask’s dinner was badly jammed in
+ point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him; and yet they
+ also have the privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb even, who is but
+ a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small appetite, and soon
+ shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask must bestir himself,
+ he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day; for it is against holy
+ usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck. Therefore it was that Flask
+ once admitted in private, that ever since he had arisen to the dignity of
+ an officer, from that moment he had never known what it was to be
+ otherwise than hungry, more or less. For what he ate did not so much
+ relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him. Peace and satisfaction,
+ thought Flask, have for ever departed from my stomach. I am an officer;
+ but, how I wish I could fish a bit of old-fashioned beef in the
+ forecastle, as I used to when I was before the mast. There’s the fruits of
+ promotion now; there’s the vanity of glory: there’s the insanity of life!
+ Besides, if it were so that any mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge
+ against Flask in Flask’s official capacity, all that sailor had to do, in
+ order to obtain ample vengeance, was to go aft at dinner-time, and get a
+ peep at Flask through the cabin sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered
+ before awful Ahab.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first table in
+ the Pequod’s cabin. After their departure, taking place in inverted order
+ to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared, or rather was restored to
+ some hurried order by the pallid steward. And then the three harpooneers
+ were bidden to the feast, they being its residuary legatees. They made a
+ sort of temporary servants’ hall of the high and mighty cabin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless
+ invisible domineerings of the captain’s table, was the entire care-free
+ license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those inferior fellows
+ the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the
+ sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed their food
+ with such a relish that there was a report to it. They dined like lords;
+ they filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading with spices.
+ Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out the
+ vacancies made by the previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was fain
+ to bring on a great baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of the
+ solid ox. And if he were not lively about it, if he did not go with a
+ nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of
+ accelerating him by darting a fork at his back, harpoon-wise. And once
+ Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted Dough-Boy’s memory by
+ snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head into a great empty wooden
+ trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out the circle
+ preliminary to scalping him. He was naturally a very nervous, shuddering
+ sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny of a bankrupt
+ baker and a hospital nurse. And what with the standing spectacle of the
+ black terrific Ahab, and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these
+ three savages, Dough-Boy’s whole life was one continual lip-quiver.
+ Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they
+ demanded, he would escape from their clutches into his little pantry
+ adjoining, and fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door,
+ till all was over.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing his
+ filed teeth to the Indian’s: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on the
+ floor, for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed head to the low
+ carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the low cabin
+ framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes passenger in a ship.
+ But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious, not to say
+ dainty. It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively small
+ mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad,
+ baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage fed
+ strong and drank deep of the abounding element of air; and through his
+ dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds. Not by beef or
+ by bread, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a mortal,
+ barbaric smack of the lip in eating—an ugly sound enough—so
+ much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether any
+ marks of teeth lurked in his own lean arms. And when he would hear
+ Tashtego singing out for him to produce himself, that his bones might be
+ picked, the simple-witted steward all but shattered the crockery hanging
+ round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor did the
+ whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for their lances
+ and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner, they would
+ ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did not at all
+ tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in his
+ Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some
+ murderous, convivial indiscretions. Alas! Dough-Boy! hard fares the white
+ waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a napkin should he carry on his arm,
+ but a buckler. In good time, though, to his great delight, the three
+ salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous, fable-mongering
+ ears, all their martial bones jingling in them at every step, like Moorish
+ scimetars in scabbards.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived
+ there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits, they were
+ scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just before sleeping-time,
+ when they passed through it to their own peculiar quarters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale
+ captains, who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights the
+ ship’s cabin belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone that
+ anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real truth, the
+ mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly be said to have
+ lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did enter it, it was
+ something as a street-door enters a house; turning inwards for a moment,
+ only to be turned out the next; and, as a permanent thing, residing in the
+ open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin was no
+ companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included
+ in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the
+ world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as
+ when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying
+ himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his
+ own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab’s soul, shut up in
+ the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
+ 
+ 
+ It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the
+ other seamen my first mast-head came round.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously
+ with the vessel’s leaving her port; even though she may have fifteen
+ thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground.
+ And if, after a three, four, or five years’ voyage she is drawing nigh
+ home with anything empty in her—say, an empty vial even—then,
+ her mast-heads are kept manned to the last; and not till her skysail-poles
+ sail in among the spires of the port, does she altogether relinquish the
+ hope of capturing one whale more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very
+ ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here. I take
+ it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old Egyptians;
+ because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them. For though their
+ progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by their tower, have
+ intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia, or Africa either; yet
+ (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great stone mast of theirs may
+ be said to have gone by the board, in the dread gale of God’s wrath;
+ therefore, we cannot give these Babel builders priority over the
+ Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, is
+ an assertion based upon the general belief among archæologists, that the
+ first pyramids were founded for astronomical purposes: a theory singularly
+ supported by the peculiar stair-like formation of all four sides of those
+ edifices; whereby, with prodigious long upliftings of their legs, those
+ old astronomers were wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new
+ stars; even as the look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a
+ whale just bearing in sight. In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian
+ hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and
+ spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his
+ food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance
+ of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his
+ place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing
+ everything out to the last, literally died at his post. Of modern
+ standers-of-mast-heads we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and
+ bronze men; who, though well capable of facing out a stiff gale, are still
+ entirely incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering any
+ strange sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the column of
+ Vendome, stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the
+ air; careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis Philippe,
+ Louis Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high aloft
+ on his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules’ pillars,
+ his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals
+ will go. Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his
+ mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that London
+ smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is
+ smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor
+ Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however madly invoked to
+ befriend by their counsels the distracted decks upon which they gaze;
+ however it may be surmised, that their spirits penetrate through the thick
+ haze of the future, and descry what shoals and what rocks must be shunned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head standers
+ of the land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is not so, is
+ plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole historian of
+ Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells us, that in the early
+ times of the whale fishery, ere ships were regularly launched in pursuit
+ of the game, the people of that island erected lofty spars along the
+ sea-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by means of nailed cleats,
+ something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house. A few years ago this same
+ plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand, who, upon descrying
+ the game, gave notice to the ready-manned boats nigh the beach. But this
+ custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the one proper mast-head,
+ that of a whale-ship at sea. The three mast-heads are kept manned from
+ sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the
+ helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene weather of
+ the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy
+ meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the
+ silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic
+ stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the
+ hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of
+ the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite
+ series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship
+ indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you
+ into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime
+ uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras
+ with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary
+ excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities;
+ fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have
+ for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more are snugly
+ stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years’ voyage,
+ as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head
+ would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be deplored that
+ the place to which you devote so considerable a portion of the whole term
+ of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute of anything approaching
+ to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a comfortable localness of
+ feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a
+ pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small and snug contrivances in
+ which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your most usual point of perch
+ is the head of the t’ gallant-mast, where you stand upon two thin parallel
+ sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t’ gallant cross-trees.
+ Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he
+ would standing on a bull’s horns. To be sure, in cold weather you may
+ carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat; but
+ properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the
+ unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its fleshy tabernacle, and
+ cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out of it, without running
+ great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps
+ in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere
+ envelope, or additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest
+ of drawers in your body, and no more can you make a convenient closet of
+ your watch-coat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a
+ southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or
+ pulpits, called crow’s-nests , in which the look-outs of a Greenland whaler
+ are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In the
+ fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled “A Voyage among the
+ Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the
+ re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;” in this
+ admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a
+ charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented
+ crow’s-nest of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet’s good
+ craft. He called it the Sleet’s crow’s-nest , in honor of himself; he
+ being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous
+ false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children after our own
+ names (we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), so likewise
+ should we denominate after ourselves any other apparatus we may beget. In
+ shape, the Sleet’s crow’s-nest is something like a large tierce or pipe;
+ it is open above, however, where it is furnished with a movable
+ side-screen to keep to windward of your head in a hard gale. Being fixed
+ on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it through a little trap-hatch
+ in the bottom. On the after side, or side next the stern of the ship, is a
+ comfortable seat, with a locker underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and
+ coats. In front is a leather rack, in which to keep your speaking trumpet,
+ pipe, telescope, and other nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in
+ person stood his mast-head in this crow’s-nest of his, he tells us that he
+ always had a rifle with him (also fixed in the rack), together with a
+ powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales,
+ or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot
+ successfully shoot at them from the deck owing to the resistance of the
+ water, but to shoot down upon them is a very different thing. Now, it was
+ plainly a labor of love for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the
+ little detailed conveniences of his crow’s-nest; but though he so enlarges
+ upon many of these, and though he treats us to a very scientific account
+ of his experiments in this crow’s-nest, with a small compass he kept there
+ for the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is called
+ the “local attraction” of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to the
+ horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship’s planks, and in the Glacier’s
+ case, perhaps, to there having been so many broken-down blacksmiths among
+ her crew; I say, that though the Captain is very discreet and scientific
+ here, yet, for all his learned “binnacle deviations,” “azimuth compass
+ observations,” and “approximate errors,” he knows very well, Captain
+ Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in those profound magnetic
+ meditations, as to fail being attracted occasionally towards that well
+ replenished little case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of his
+ crow’s nest, within easy reach of his hand. Though, upon the whole, I
+ greatly admire and even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain;
+ yet I take it very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that
+ case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must have
+ been, while with mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the
+ mathematics aloft there in that bird’s nest within three or four perches
+ of the pole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain
+ Sleet and his Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is greatly
+ counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those seductive
+ seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I used to lounge up
+ the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a chat with
+ Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there; then ascending
+ a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the top-sail yard, take
+ a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at last mount to my
+ ultimate destination.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but
+ sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I—being
+ left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude—how
+ could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships’
+ standing orders, “Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of
+ Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with
+ lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who
+ offers to ship with the Phædon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of
+ such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed;
+ and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the
+ world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these
+ monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an
+ asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men,
+ disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar
+ and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the
+ mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase
+ ejaculates:—
+ 
+
+
+ “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
+ Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”
+ 
+ 
+ Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young
+ philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient
+ “interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to
+ all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather
+ not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists
+ have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what
+ use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses
+ at home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been
+ cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet.
+ Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.” Perhaps they
+ were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon;
+ but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious
+ reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with
+ thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at
+ his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul,
+ pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding,
+ beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of
+ some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive
+ thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In
+ this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes
+ diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic
+ ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a
+ gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the
+ inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move
+ your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes
+ back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at
+ mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop
+ through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for
+ ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
+ 
+ 
+ ( Enter Ahab: Then, all. )
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning
+ shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the cabin-gangway
+ to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that hour, as country
+ gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the garden.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old
+ rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over
+ dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did
+ you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you
+ would see still stranger foot-prints—the foot-prints of his one
+ unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as his
+ nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his thought
+ was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now at the main-mast
+ and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that thought turn in him as
+ he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely possessing him,
+ indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of every outer movement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “D’ye mark him, Flask?” whispered Stubb; “the chick that’s in him pecks
+ the shell. ’Twill soon be out.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The hours wore on;—Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing
+ the deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the bulwarks,
+ and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and with one hand
+ grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody aft.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sir!” said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on
+ ship-board except in some extraordinary case.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Send everybody aft,” repeated Ahab. “Mast-heads, there! come down!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the entire ship’s company were assembled, and with curious and not
+ wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the
+ weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing
+ over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew, started from
+ his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him resumed his heavy
+ turns upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched hat he continued to
+ pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering among the men; till Stubb
+ cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have summoned them there for
+ the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat. But this did not last long.
+ Vehemently pausing, he cried:—
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed
+ voices.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the
+ hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically
+ thrown them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And what do ye next, men?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lower away, and after him!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A dead whale or a stove boat!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the
+ countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began to
+ gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that they
+ themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his
+ pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost
+ convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:—
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white
+ whale. Look ye! d’ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?”—holding up a
+ broad bright coin to the sun—“it is a sixteen dollar piece, men.
+ D’ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was slowly
+ rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to heighten
+ its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly humming to
+ himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate that it
+ seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast
+ with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other,
+ and with a high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises me a
+ white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye
+ raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his
+ starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white
+ whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed
+ the act of nailing the gold to the mast.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s a white whale, I say,” resumed Ahab, as he threw down the topmaul:
+ “a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water;
+ if ye see but a bubble, sing out.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even more
+ intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention of the
+ wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as if each was separately
+ touched by some specific recollection.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Captain Ahab,” said Tashtego, “that white whale must be the same that
+ some call Moby Dick.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Moby Dick?” shouted Ahab. “Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?” said the
+ Gay-Header deliberately.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And has he a curious spout, too,” said Daggoo, “very bushy, even for a
+ parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And he have one, two, three—oh! good many iron in him hide, too,
+ Captain,” cried Queequeg disjointedly, “all twiske-tee be-twisk, like him—him—”
+ faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as though
+ uncorking a bottle—“like him—him—”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Corkscrew!” cried Ahab, “aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and
+ wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole shock
+ of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the great annual
+ sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib in a
+ squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby
+ Dick—Moby Dick!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Captain Ahab,” said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far
+ been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed
+ struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the wonder. “Captain
+ Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick—but it was not Moby Dick that took
+ off thy leg?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who told thee that?” cried Ahab; then pausing, “Aye, Starbuck; aye, my
+ hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that
+ brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,” he shouted with a
+ terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; “Aye,
+ aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging
+ lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both arms, with measureless
+ imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good
+ Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round
+ perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped
+ for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all
+ sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye,
+ men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the
+ excited old man: “A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for Moby
+ Dick!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “God bless ye,” he seemed to half sob and half shout. “God bless ye, men.
+ Steward! go draw the great measure of grog. But what’s this long face
+ about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not game for
+ Moby Dick?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain
+ Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came
+ here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will
+ thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will
+ not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a
+ little lower layer. If money’s to be the measurer, man, and the
+ accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by
+ girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let
+ me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here! ”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He smites his chest,” whispered Stubb, “what’s that for? methinks it
+ rings most vast, but hollow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from
+ blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab,
+ seems blasphemous.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man,
+ are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act,
+ the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing
+ puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.
+ If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach
+ outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is
+ that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But
+ ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength,
+ with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly
+ what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale
+ principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy,
+ man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then
+ could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein,
+ jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even
+ that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye!
+ more intolerable than fiends’ glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou
+ reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye,
+ Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men
+ from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let
+ it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—living,
+ breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards—the
+ unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no
+ reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they
+ not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he
+ laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the
+ general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it?
+ Reckon it. ’Tis but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck.
+ What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all
+ Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has
+ clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow
+ lifts thee! Speak, but speak!—Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that 
+ voices thee. ( Aside ) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has
+ inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now,
+ without rebellion.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “God keep me!—keep us all!” murmured Starbuck, lowly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab did
+ not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the hold;
+ nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage; nor yet the
+ hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a moment their hearts
+ sank in. For again Starbuck’s downcast eyes lighted up with the
+ stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died away; the winds blew on;
+ the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as before. Ah, ye
+ admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But rather are ye
+ predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much predictions from
+ without, as verifications of the foregoing things within. For with little
+ external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in our being, these
+ still drive us on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The measure! the measure!” cried Ahab.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he ordered
+ them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him near the
+ capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while his three mates stood
+ at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship’s company formed a
+ circle round the group; he stood for an instant searchingly eyeing every
+ man of his crew. But those wild eyes met his, as the bloodshot eyes of the
+ prairie wolves meet the eye of their leader, ere he rushes on at their
+ head in the trail of the bison; but, alas! only to fall into the hidden
+ snare of the Indian.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Drink and pass!” he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the
+ nearest seaman. “The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short
+ draughts—long swallows, men; ’tis hot as Satan’s hoof. So, so; it
+ goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the
+ serpent-snapping eye. Well done; almost drained. That way it went, this
+ way it comes. Hand it me—here’s a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so
+ brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and ye
+ mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there with
+ your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may in some sort
+ revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men, you will
+ yet see that—Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner. Hand
+ it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, wer’t not thou St.
+ Vitus’ imp—away, thou ague!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let me
+ touch the axis.” So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three level,
+ radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing, suddenly and
+ nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from Starbuck to
+ Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some nameless,
+ interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery
+ emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life. The
+ three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect. Stubb
+ and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck fell
+ downright.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In vain!” cried Ahab; “but, maybe, ’tis well. For did ye three but once
+ take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, that had perhaps
+ expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye dead.
+ Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do appoint ye
+ three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen there—yon three most
+ honorable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain the
+ task? What, when the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using his
+ tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own condescension, that shall
+ bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings and draw
+ the poles, ye harpooneers!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the
+ detached iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs
+ up, before him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye not
+ the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers, advance.
+ The irons! take them; hold them while I fill!” Forthwith, slowly going
+ from one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon sockets with the
+ fiery waters from the pewter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow
+ them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha!
+ Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon
+ it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful
+ whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not
+ hunt Moby Dick to his death!” The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted;
+ and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were
+ simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and
+ shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds
+ among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to them, they all
+ dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 37. Sunset.
+ 
+ 
+ ( The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out .)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I
+ sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but
+ first I pass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The
+ gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow dived from noon—goes
+ down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the
+ crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright
+ with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel
+ that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. ’Tis iron—that I know—not
+ gold. ’Tis split, too—that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my
+ brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the
+ sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me,
+ so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all
+ loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high
+ perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most
+ malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night—good night!
+ ( waving his hand, he moves from the window .)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ’Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least;
+ but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they
+ revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand
+ before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match
+ itself must needs be wasting! What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve
+ willed, I’ll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac,
+ I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend
+ itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I
+ lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now,
+ then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That’s more than ye, ye great
+ gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists,
+ ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to
+ bullies—Take some one of your own size; don’t pommel me! No, ye’ve
+ knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth
+ from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab’s
+ compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot
+ swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The
+ path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is
+ grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of
+ mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle,
+ naught’s an angle to the iron way!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 38. Dusk.
+ 
+ 
+ ( By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning against it .)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ My soul is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a madman!
+ Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But he
+ drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his
+ impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the
+ ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife
+ to cut. Horrible old man! Who’s over him, he cries;—aye, he would be
+ a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below! Oh! I
+ plainly see my miserable office,—to obey, rebelling; and worse yet,
+ to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would
+ shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide. The
+ hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the small gold-fish
+ has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside. I
+ would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock’s run down; my
+ heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ [ A burst of revelry from the forecastle .]
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human
+ mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is
+ their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward! mark
+ the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost through
+ the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but only to
+ drag dark Ahab after it, where he broods within his sternward cabin,
+ builded over the dead water of the wake, and further on, hunted by its
+ wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills me through! Peace! ye revellers,
+ and set the watch! Oh, life! ’tis in an hour like this, with soul beat
+ down and held to knowledge,—as wild, untutored things are forced to
+ feed—Oh, life! ’tis now that I do feel the latent horror in thee!
+ but ’tis not me! that horror’s out of me! and with the soft feeling of the
+ human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures! Stand
+ by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 39. First Night-Watch.
+ 
+ 
+ Fore-Top.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ( Stubb solus, and mending a brace .)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!—I’ve been thinking over it
+ ever since, and that ha, ha’s the final consequence. Why so? Because a
+ laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer; and come what
+ will, one comfort’s always left—that unfailing comfort is, it’s all
+ predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but to my poor eye
+ Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt. Be sure the
+ old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the gift,
+ might readily have prophesied it—for when I clapped my eye upon his
+ skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, wise Stubb—that’s my title—well,
+ Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here’s a carcase. I know not all that may be
+ coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing. Such a waggish
+ leering as lurks in all your horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra,
+ skirra! What’s my juicy little pear at home doing now? Crying its eyes
+ out?—Giving a party to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay
+ as a frigate’s pennant, and so am I—fa, la! lirra, skirra! Oh—
+ 
+
+
+ We’ll drink to-night with hearts as light,
+ To love, as gay and fleeting
+ As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim,
+ And break on the lips while meeting.
+ 
+ 
+ A brave stave that—who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir—( Aside )
+ he’s my superior, he has his too, if I’m not mistaken.—Aye, aye,
+ sir, just through with this job—coming.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.
+ 
+ 
+ HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ( Foresail rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning, and
+ lying in various attitudes, all singing in chorus .)
+ 
+
+
+ Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies!
+ Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!
+ Our captain’s commanded.—
+ 
+ 
+ 1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR. Oh, boys, don’t be sentimental; it’s bad
+ for the digestion! Take a tonic, follow me!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ( Sings, and all follow. )
+ 
+
+
+ Our captain stood upon the deck,
+ A spy-glass in his hand,
+ A viewing of those gallant whales
+ That blew at every strand.
+ Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys,
+ And by your braces stand,
+ And we’ll have one of those fine whales,
+ Hand, boys, over hand!
+ So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail!
+ While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!
+ 
+ 
+ MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Eight bells there, forward!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR. Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d’ye hear,
+ bell-boy? Strike the bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me call
+ the watch. I’ve the sort of mouth for that—the hogshead mouth. So,
+ so, ( thrusts his head down the scuttle ,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y! Eight
+ bells there below! Tumble up!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ DUTCH SAILOR. Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I mark
+ this in our old Mogul’s wine; it’s quite as deadening to some as filliping
+ to others. We sing; they sleep—aye, lie down there, like ground-tier
+ butts. At ’em again! There, take this copper-pump, and hail ’em through
+ it. Tell ’em to avast dreaming of their lasses. Tell ’em it’s the
+ resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come to judgment. That’s the
+ way— that’s it; thy throat ain’t spoiled with eating Amsterdam
+ butter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ FRENCH SAILOR. Hist, boys! let’s have a jig or two before we ride to
+ anchor in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand by
+ all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ PIP. ( Sulky and sleepy. ) Don’t know where it is.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ FRENCH SAILOR. Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I say;
+ merry’s the word; hurrah! Damn me, won’t you dance? Form, now,
+ Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle? Throw yourselves! Legs!
+ legs!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ICELAND SAILOR. I don’t like your floor, maty; it’s too springy to my
+ taste. I’m used to ice-floors. I’m sorry to throw cold water on the
+ subject; but excuse me.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ MALTESE SAILOR. Me too; where’s your girls? Who but a fool would take his
+ left hand by his right, and say to himself, how d’ye do? Partners! I must
+ have partners!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ SICILIAN SAILOR. Aye; girls and a green!—then I’ll hop with ye; yea,
+ turn grasshopper!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ LONG-ISLAND SAILOR. Well, well, ye sulkies, there’s plenty more of us. Hoe
+ corn when you may, say I. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here comes the
+ music; now for it!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ AZORE SAILOR. ( Ascending, and pitching the tambourine up the scuttle .)
+ Here you are, Pip; and there’s the windlass-bitts; up you mount! Now,
+ boys! ( The half of them dance to the tambourine; some go below; some sleep
+ or lie among the coils of rigging. Oaths a-plenty .)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ AZORE SAILOR. ( Dancing ) Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it,
+ stig it, quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies; break the jinglers!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ PIP. Jinglers, you say?—there goes another, dropped off; I pound it
+ so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CHINA SAILOR. Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of
+ thyself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ FRENCH SAILOR. Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it!
+ Split jibs! tear yourselves!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ TASHTEGO. ( Quietly smoking. ) That’s a white man; he calls that fun: humph!
+ I save my sweat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ OLD MANX SAILOR. I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what
+ they are dancing over. I’ll dance over your grave, I will—that’s the
+ bitterest threat of your night-women, that beat head-winds round corners.
+ O Christ! to think of the green navies and the green-skulled crews! Well,
+ well; belike the whole world’s a ball, as you scholars have it; and so
+ ’tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you’re young; I was
+ once.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 3D NANTUCKET SAILOR. Spell oh!—whew! this is worse than pulling
+ after whales in a calm—give us a whiff, Tash.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ( They cease dancing, and gather in clusters. Meantime the sky darkens—the
+ wind rises .)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ LASCAR SAILOR. By Brahma! boys, it’ll be douse sail soon. The sky-born,
+ high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ MALTESE SAILOR. ( Reclining and shaking his cap .) It’s the waves—the
+ snow’s caps turn to jig it now. They’ll shake their tassels soon. Now
+ would all the waves were women, then I’d go drown, and chassee with them
+ evermore! There’s naught so sweet on earth—heaven may not match it!—as
+ those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the
+ over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ SICILIAN SAILOR. ( Reclining .) Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad—fleet
+ interlacings of the limbs—lithe swayings—coyings—flutterings!
+ lip! heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye,
+ else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? ( Nudging .)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ TAHITAN SAILOR. ( Reclining on a mat .) Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing
+ girls!—the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I still
+ rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven in the
+ wood, my mat! green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn and wilted
+ quite. Ah me!—not thou nor I can bear the change! How then, if so be
+ transplanted to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from Pirohitee’s peak
+ of spears, when they leap down the crags and drown the villages?—The
+ blast! the blast! Up, spine, and meet it! ( Leaps to his feet .)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ PORTUGUESE SAILOR. How the sea rolls swashing ’gainst the side! Stand by
+ for reefing, hearties! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell
+ they’ll go lunging presently.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ DANISH SAILOR. Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou
+ holdest! Well done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He’s no more
+ afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with
+ storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab
+ tell him he must always kill a squall, something as they burst a
+ waterspout with a pistol—fire your ship right into it!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ENGLISH SAILOR. Blood! but that old man’s a grand old cove! We are the
+ lads to hunt him up his whale!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ALL. Aye! aye!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ OLD MANX SAILOR. How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of
+ tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there’s none but the
+ crew’s cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort of weather
+ when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain
+ has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there’s another in the sky—lurid-like,
+ ye see, all else pitch black.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ DAGGOO. What of that? Who’s afraid of black’s afraid of me! I’m quarried
+ out of it!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ SPANISH SAILOR. ( Aside .) He wants to bully, ah!—the old grudge makes
+ me touchy ( Advancing .) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark
+ side of mankind—devilish dark at that. No offence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ DAGGOO ( grimly ). None.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ST. JAGO’S SAILOR. That Spaniard’s mad or drunk. But that can’t be, or
+ else in his one case our old Mogul’s fire-waters are somewhat long in
+ working.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. What’s that I saw—lightning? Yes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ SPANISH SAILOR. No; Daggoo showing his teeth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ DAGGOO ( springing ). Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ SPANISH SAILOR ( meeting him ). Knife thee heartily! big frame, small
+ spirit!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ALL. A row! a row! a row!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ TASHTEGO ( with a whiff ). A row a’low, and a row aloft—Gods and men—both
+ brawlers! Humph!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ BELFAST SAILOR. A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge
+ in with ye!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ENGLISH SAILOR. Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard’s knife! A ring, a ring!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ OLD MANX SAILOR. Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring
+ Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad’st thou
+ the ring?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Hands by the halyards! in top-gallant
+ sails! Stand by to reef topsails!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ALL. The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! ( They scatter .)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ PIP ( shrinking under the windlass ). Jollies? Lord help such jollies!
+ Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower, Pip,
+ here comes the royal yard! It’s worse than being in the whirled woods, the
+ last day of the year! Who’d go climbing after chestnuts now? But there
+ they go, all cursing, and here I don’t. Fine prospects to ’em; they’re on
+ the road to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a squall! But those chaps
+ there are worse yet—they are your white squalls, they. White
+ squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their chat just
+ now, and the white whale—shirr! shirr!—but spoken of once! and
+ only this evening—it makes me jingle all over like my tambourine—that
+ anaconda of an old man swore ’em in to hunt him! Oh, thou big white God
+ aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy
+ down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.
+ 
+ 
+ I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my
+ oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I
+ hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild,
+ mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed
+ mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster
+ against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and
+ revenge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded
+ White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the
+ Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his existence; only a
+ few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him; while the number who
+ as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to him, was small indeed.
+ For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they
+ were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference, many of them
+ adventurously pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so as seldom
+ or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a
+ single news-telling sail of any sort; the inordinate length of each
+ separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all
+ these, with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed the
+ spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special
+ individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted,
+ that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time,
+ or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and
+ malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had
+ completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I
+ say, that the whale in question must have been no other than Moby Dick.
+ Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not
+ unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster
+ attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave
+ battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were
+ content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the
+ perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause.
+ In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and the whale
+ had hitherto been popularly regarded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance
+ caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of
+ them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other
+ whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these
+ assaults—not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs,
+ or devouring amputations—but fatal to the last degree of fatality;
+ those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their
+ terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude
+ of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually
+ come.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more
+ horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do
+ fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising
+ terrible events,—as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but,
+ in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors
+ abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to. And
+ as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery
+ surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and
+ fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only
+ are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness
+ hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the
+ most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly
+ astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest
+ marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest
+ waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand
+ shores, you would not come to any chiseled hearth-stone, or aught
+ hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes,
+ pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by
+ influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty
+ birth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the
+ widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in the
+ end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and
+ half-formed fœtal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually
+ invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly
+ appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally strike, that
+ few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of
+ those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work.
+ Not even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm Whale,
+ as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the leviathan, died
+ out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are those this day among
+ them, who, though intelligent and courageous enough in offering battle to
+ the Greenland or Right whale, would perhaps—either from professional
+ inexperience, or incompetency, or timidity, decline a contest with the
+ Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are plenty of whalemen, especially among
+ those whaling nations not sailing under the American flag, who have never
+ hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the
+ leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the
+ North; seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish
+ fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling.
+ Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere
+ more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary
+ times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists—Olassen
+ and Povelson—declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be a
+ consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so
+ incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor
+ even down to so late a time as Cuvier’s, were these or almost similar
+ impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron himself affirms
+ that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are “struck
+ with the most lively terrors,” and “often in the precipitancy of their
+ flight dash themselves against the rocks with such violence as to cause
+ instantaneous death.” And however the general experiences in the fishery
+ may amend such reports as these; yet in their full terribleness, even to
+ the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in them is, in
+ some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of
+ the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the
+ Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long practised
+ Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring warfare;
+ such men protesting that although other leviathans might be hopefully
+ pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm
+ Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would be inevitably to
+ be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are some remarkable
+ documents that may be consulted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things were
+ ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing
+ only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the specific details of
+ any certain calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments, were
+ sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if offered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked
+ with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the
+ unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been
+ encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether
+ without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets
+ of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most
+ erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale when beneath the
+ surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his pursuers; and from
+ time to time have originated the most curious and contradictory
+ speculations regarding them, especially concerning the mystic modes
+ whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with such
+ vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as
+ well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that
+ some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies
+ have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is
+ it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has been declared
+ that the interval of time between the two assaults could not have exceeded
+ very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been believed by some
+ whalemen, that the Nor’ West Passage, so long a problem to man, was never
+ a problem to the whale. So that here, in the real living experience of
+ living men, the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello
+ mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which
+ the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more
+ wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were
+ believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these
+ fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the
+ whalemen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing
+ that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive;
+ it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still
+ further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous,
+ but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves
+ of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away
+ unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a
+ sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined billows
+ hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in
+ the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike the
+ imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his uncommon bulk
+ that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as was
+ elsewhere thrown out—a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a
+ high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent features; the
+ tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his
+ identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the
+ same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive
+ appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his
+ vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea,
+ leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden
+ gleamings.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his
+ deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror,
+ as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific
+ accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than
+ all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught
+ else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every apparent
+ symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn round suddenly,
+ and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to splinters, or
+ drive them back in consternation to their ship.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar
+ disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the
+ fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale’s infernal
+ aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that he caused,
+ was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent
+ agent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his
+ more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats,
+ and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds
+ of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that
+ smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the
+ eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had
+ dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking
+ with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That
+ captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his
+ sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg,
+ as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired
+ Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small
+ reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal
+ encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all
+ the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to
+ identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual
+ and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the
+ monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men
+ feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and
+ half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning;
+ to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the
+ worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue
+ devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but
+ deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted
+ himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments;
+ all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all
+ that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of
+ life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and
+ made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white
+ hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from
+ Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot
+ heart’s shell upon it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the
+ precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster,
+ knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal
+ animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but
+ felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this
+ collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and
+ weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in
+ mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his
+ torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made
+ him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the
+ encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from
+ the fact that, at intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic;
+ and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his
+ Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that his
+ mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in
+ his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the
+ gales. And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with
+ mild stun’sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all
+ appearances, the old man’s delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape
+ Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light
+ and air; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front, however pale,
+ and issued his calm orders once again; and his mates thanked God the
+ direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved
+ on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you
+ think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler
+ form. Ahab’s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like
+ the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but
+ unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing
+ monomania, not one jot of Ahab’s broad madness had been left behind; so in
+ that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had
+ perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If
+ such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general
+ sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own
+ mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one
+ end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely
+ brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This is much; yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But
+ vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding far
+ down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we
+ here stand—however grand and wonderful, now quit it;—and take
+ your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes;
+ where far beneath the fantastic towers of man’s upper earth, his root of
+ grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique buried
+ beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken throne, the
+ great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits,
+ upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down
+ there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family
+ likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your
+ grim sire only will the old State-secret come.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means are
+ sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change,
+ or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long dissemble;
+ in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling was only
+ subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate. Nevertheless,
+ so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when with ivory leg he
+ stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him otherwise than but
+ naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the terrible casualty which
+ had overtaken him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly
+ ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which
+ always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the present
+ voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely, that far
+ from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on account of
+ such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent isle were
+ inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the
+ better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and
+ wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without,
+ with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one,
+ could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his
+ lance against the most appalling of all brutes. Or, if for any reason
+ thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that, yet such an one would
+ seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the
+ attack. But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad secret
+ of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed
+ upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of
+ hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but
+ half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast
+ and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They
+ were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars
+ from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and
+ supernatural revenge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a
+ Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up
+ of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled
+ also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in
+ Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in
+ Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered,
+ seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him
+ to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded
+ to the old man’s ire—by what evil magic their souls were possessed,
+ that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their
+ insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be—what the White
+ Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in
+ some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of
+ the seas of life,—all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than
+ Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one
+ tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his
+ pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a
+ seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment
+ of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the
+ whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale.
+ 
+ 
+ What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was
+ to me, as yet remains unsaid.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which
+ could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was
+ another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at
+ times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so
+ mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting
+ it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above
+ all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and
+ yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these
+ chapters might be naught.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as
+ if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and
+ pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain
+ royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu
+ placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants” above all their other
+ magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam
+ unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the
+ Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the
+ great Austrian Empire, Cæsarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the
+ imperial colour the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it
+ applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership
+ over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been
+ even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone
+ marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and
+ symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble
+ things—the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among
+ the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the
+ deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the
+ majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the
+ daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in
+ the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the
+ symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire
+ worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar;
+ and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a
+ snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice
+ of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology,
+ that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could
+ send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity;
+ and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests
+ derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic,
+ worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish
+ faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of
+ our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the
+ redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the
+ great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool;
+ yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and
+ honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the
+ innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than
+ that redness which affrights in blood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when
+ divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object
+ terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.
+ Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics;
+ what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors
+ they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent
+ mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their
+ aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so
+ stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.*
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who
+ would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness,
+ separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that
+ brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only
+ rises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the
+ creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love;
+ and hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds,
+ the Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even
+ assuming all this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you
+ would not have that intensified terror.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that
+ creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the
+ same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly hit
+ by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for
+ the dead begins with “Requiem eternam” (eternal rest), whence Requiem 
+ denominating the mass itself, and any other funeral music. Now, in
+ allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and the
+ mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him Requin .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual
+ wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all
+ imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great,
+ unflattering laureate, Nature.*
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged
+ gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch
+ below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main
+ hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a
+ hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast
+ archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and
+ throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some
+ king’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange
+ eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham
+ before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings
+ so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable
+ warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy
+ of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through
+ me then. But at last I awoke; and turning, asked a sailor what bird was
+ this. A goney, he replied. Goney! never had heard that name before; is it
+ conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore!
+ never! But some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman’s name
+ for albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge’s wild Rhyme have
+ had aught to do with those mystical impressions which were mine, when I
+ saw that bird upon our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor
+ knew the bird to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly
+ burnish a little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly
+ lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a
+ solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I
+ have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the
+ Antarctic fowl.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will tell;
+ with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea. At last
+ the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern tally round
+ its neck, with the ship’s time and place; and then letting it escape. But
+ I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in Heaven,
+ when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and
+ adoring cherubim!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the
+ White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed,
+ small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs
+ in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of vast
+ herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the
+ Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward
+ trooped it like that chosen star which every evening leads on the hosts of
+ light. The flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail,
+ invested him with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters
+ could have furnished him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition of
+ that unfallen, western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and
+ hunters revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked
+ majestic as a god, bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether
+ marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that
+ endlessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his
+ circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White Steed
+ gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through his cool
+ milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the bravest
+ Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor can it be
+ questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble horse, that
+ it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with
+ divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, though
+ commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that
+ accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and
+ Albatross.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks
+ the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is
+ that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears.
+ The Albino is as well made as other men—has no substantive deformity—and
+ yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely
+ hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not the
+ less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crowning
+ attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of
+ the Southern Seas has been denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some
+ historic instances, has the art of human malice omitted so potent an
+ auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of that passage in
+ Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their faction, the
+ desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the market-place!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all mankind
+ fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be
+ doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most
+ appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed that
+ pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the other world, as
+ of mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow
+ the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our
+ superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our
+ phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog—Yea, while these
+ terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when
+ personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing
+ he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized
+ significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to
+ account for it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the
+ citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness—though
+ for the time either wholly or in great part stripped of all direct
+ associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful, but nevertheless,
+ is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however modified;—can we
+ thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause
+ we seek?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and
+ without imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And
+ though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions about to
+ be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were
+ entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able to
+ recall them now.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely
+ acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare mention
+ of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless
+ processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast and hooded with new-fallen
+ snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the Middle American
+ States, why does the passing mention of a White Friar or a White Nun,
+ evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and kings
+ (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower of
+ London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of an untravelled
+ American, than those other storied structures, its neighbors—the
+ Byward Tower, or even the Bloody? And those sublimer towers, the White
+ Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar moods, comes that gigantic
+ ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention of that name, while the
+ thought of Virginia’s Blue Ridge is full of a soft, dewy, distant
+ dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and longitudes, does the
+ name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness over the fancy, while that
+ of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of long lacquered mild
+ afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of
+ sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, purely addressed
+ to the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does
+ “the tall pale man” of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor
+ unrustlingly glides through the green of the groves—why is this
+ phantom more terrible than all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling
+ earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness
+ of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning
+ spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of
+ anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon
+ each other, as a tossed pack of cards;—it is not these things alone
+ which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can’st see. For
+ Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this
+ whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for
+ ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads
+ over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its
+ own distortions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is
+ not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects
+ otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught of terror
+ in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost solely
+ consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under any form
+ at all approaching to muteness or universality. What I mean by these two
+ statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the following
+ examples.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by
+ night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just
+ enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely
+ similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his ship
+ sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness—as if from
+ encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him,
+ then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the
+ whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead
+ assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go down;
+ he never rests till blue water is under him again. Yet where is the
+ mariner who will tell thee, “Sir, it was not so much the fear of striking
+ hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so stirred me?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the
+ snow-howdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the mere
+ fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast
+ altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to
+ lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the
+ backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an
+ unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to
+ break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the
+ scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of
+ legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half
+ shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery,
+ views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean
+ ice monuments and splintered crosses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a
+ white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo,
+ Ishmael.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of
+ Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey—why is it that upon the
+ sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he
+ cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness—why
+ will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies
+ of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild
+ creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he
+ smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of
+ former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black
+ bisons of distant Oregon?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No: but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the
+ knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from
+ Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison
+ herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which
+ this instant they may be trampling into dust.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of
+ the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed
+ snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that
+ buffalo robe to the frightened colt!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic
+ sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere
+ those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible world
+ seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned
+ why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more
+ portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning
+ symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity;
+ and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most
+ appalling to mankind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and
+ immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the
+ thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?
+ Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the
+ visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all
+ colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full
+ of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of
+ atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of
+ the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately
+ or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods;
+ yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of
+ young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in
+ substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature
+ absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the
+ charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the
+ mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great
+ principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if
+ operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips
+ and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied
+ universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland,
+ who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the
+ wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that
+ wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino
+ whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 43. Hark!
+ 
+ 
+ “HIST! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was the middle-watch: a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a
+ cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the
+ scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets to
+ fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed
+ precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle
+ their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence,
+ only broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the
+ unceasingly advancing keel.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, whose
+ post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a Cholo, the
+ words above.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d’ye mean?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There it is again—under the hatches—don’t you hear it—a
+ cough—it sounded like a cough.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There again—there it is!—it sounds like two or three sleepers
+ turning over, now!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It’s the three soaked biscuits ye
+ eat for supper turning over inside of ye—nothing else. Look to the
+ bucket!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Say what ye will, shipmate; I’ve sharp ears.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, you are the chap, ain’t ye, that heard the hum of the old
+ Quakeress’s knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you’re the
+ chap.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Grin away; we’ll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody
+ down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect
+ our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell Flask, one
+ morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the wind.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tish! the bucket!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 44. The Chart.
+ 
+ 
+ Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that
+ took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose
+ with his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in the transom, and
+ bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread them
+ before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before it, you
+ would have seen him intently study the various lines and shadings which
+ there met his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace additional
+ courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he would refer
+ to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons
+ and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm
+ whales had been captured or seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his
+ head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw
+ shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it
+ almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on
+ the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and
+ courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his
+ cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were
+ brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others
+ were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab
+ was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more
+ certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it
+ might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary
+ creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to
+ Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating
+ the driftings of the sperm whale’s food; and, also, calling to mind the
+ regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes;
+ could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties,
+ concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of
+ his prey.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the sperm
+ whale’s resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that, could
+ he be closely observed and studied throughout the world; were the logs for
+ one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated, then the
+ migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in
+ invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows.
+ On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory
+ charts of the sperm whale.*
+ 
+
+
+ *Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne
+ out by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of
+ the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By
+ that circular, it appears that precisely such a chart is in
+ course of completion; and portions of it are presented in
+ the circular. “This chart divides the ocean into districts
+ of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude;
+ perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve
+ columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each
+ of which districts are three lines; one to show the number
+ of days that have been spent in each month in every
+ district, and the two others to show the number of days in
+ which whales, sperm or right, have been seen.”
+ 
+ 
+ Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the
+ sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct—say, rather, secret
+ intelligence from the Deity—mostly swim in veins , as they are
+ called; continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such
+ undeviating exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart,
+ with one tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these cases, the
+ direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor’s parallel, and
+ though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable,
+ straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein in which at these times he is said
+ to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width (more or less, as the
+ vein is presumed to expand or contract); but never exceeds the visual
+ sweep from the whale-ship’s mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding along
+ this magic zone. The sum is, that at particular seasons within that
+ breadth and along that path, migrating whales may with great confidence be
+ looked for.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate
+ feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing
+ the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his art,
+ so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly
+ without prospect of a meeting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his
+ delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality, perhaps.
+ Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons for
+ particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the herds
+ which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year, say, will
+ turn out to be identically the same with those that were found there the
+ preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable instances
+ where the contrary of this has proved true. In general, the same remark,
+ only within a less wide limit, applies to the solitaries and hermits among
+ the matured, aged sperm whales. So that though Moby Dick had in a former
+ year been seen, for example, on what is called the Seychelle ground in the
+ Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast; yet it did not follow,
+ that were the Pequod to visit either of those spots at any subsequent
+ corresponding season, she would infallibly encounter him there. So, too,
+ with some other feeding grounds, where he had at times revealed himself.
+ But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to
+ speak, not his places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab’s chances of
+ accomplishing his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only
+ been made to whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere
+ a particular set time or place were attained, when all possibilities would
+ become probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the
+ next thing to a certainty. That particular set time and place were
+ conjoined in the one technical phrase—the Season-on-the-Line. For
+ there and then, for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been
+ periodically descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun,
+ in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of
+ the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with the
+ white whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds;
+ there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the
+ awful motive to his vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and
+ unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this
+ unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon
+ the one crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to
+ those hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize
+ his unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the
+ Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander
+ to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running
+ down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to
+ cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season. Yet the
+ premature hour of the Pequod’s sailing had, perhaps, been correctly
+ selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion of things. Because,
+ an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights was before
+ him; an interval which, instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would
+ spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the White Whale, spending his
+ vacation in seas far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should
+ turn up his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or
+ China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons,
+ Pampas, Nor’-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and
+ Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the
+ Pequod’s circumnavigating wake.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not
+ but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary
+ whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of individual
+ recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged
+ thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar snow-white brow of
+ Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable. And
+ have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself, as after
+ poring over his charts till long after midnight he would throw himself
+ back in reveries—tallied him, and shall he escape? His broad fins
+ are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep’s ear! And here, his mad
+ mind would run on in a breathless race; till a weariness and faintness of
+ pondering came over him; and in the open air of the deck he would seek to
+ recover his strength. Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man
+ endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps
+ with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid
+ dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the
+ day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round
+ and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his
+ life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the
+ case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and
+ a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings
+ shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when
+ this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through
+ the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as
+ though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead
+ of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at
+ his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at
+ such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the
+ white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent
+ that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the
+ eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time
+ dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it
+ for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the
+ scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was
+ no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with
+ the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up
+ all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by
+ its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils
+ into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could
+ grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined,
+ fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore,
+ the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab
+ rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless
+ somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an
+ object to colour, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old
+ man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense
+ thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for
+ ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.
+ 
+ 
+ So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as
+ indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars in
+ the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earlier part, is
+ as important a one as will be found in this volume; but the leading matter
+ of it requires to be still further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in
+ order to be adequately understood, and moreover to take away any
+ incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire subject may induce in
+ some minds, as to the natural verity of the main points of this affair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall be
+ content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of items,
+ practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these
+ citations, I take it—the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow
+ of itself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after
+ receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an
+ interval (in one instance of three years), has been again struck by the
+ same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same private
+ cypher, have been taken from the body. In the instance where three years
+ intervened between the flinging of the two harpoons; and I think it may
+ have been something more than that; the man who darted them happening, in
+ the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore
+ there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far into the interior,
+ where he travelled for a period of nearly two years, often endangered by
+ serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the other common
+ perils incident to wandering in the heart of unknown regions. Meanwhile,
+ the whale he had struck must also have been on its travels; no doubt it
+ had thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing with its flanks all the
+ coasts of Africa; but to no purpose. This man and this whale again came
+ together, and the one vanquished the other. I say I, myself, have known
+ three instances similar to this; that is in two of them I saw the whales
+ struck; and, upon the second attack, saw the two irons with the respective
+ marks cut in them, afterwards taken from the dead fish. In the three-year
+ instance, it so fell out that I was in the boat both times, first and
+ last, and the last time distinctly recognised a peculiar sort of huge mole
+ under the whale’s eye, which I had observed there three years previous. I
+ say three years, but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here are
+ three instances, then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have
+ heard of many other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter
+ there is no good ground to impeach.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however ignorant
+ the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several memorable
+ historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean has been at
+ distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became
+ thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily
+ peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for however peculiar in
+ that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his
+ peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly
+ valuable oil. No: the reason was this: that from the fatal experiences of
+ the fishery there hung a terrible prestige of perilousness about such a
+ whale as there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most fishermen
+ were content to recognise him by merely touching their tarpaulins when he
+ would be discovered lounging by them on the sea, without seeking to
+ cultivate a more intimate acquaintance. Like some poor devils ashore that
+ happen to know an irascible great man, they make distant unobtrusive
+ salutations to him in the street, lest if they pursued the acquaintance
+ further, they might receive a summary thump for their presumption.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual
+ celebrity—Nay, you may call it an ocean-wide renown; not only was he
+ famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death, but
+ he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of a
+ name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Cæsar. Was it not so, O
+ Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long
+ did’st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft seen
+ from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack! thou
+ terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the
+ Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty jet they
+ say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky?
+ Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked like an old
+ tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain prose, here are
+ four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean History as Marius or
+ Sylla to the classic scholar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at various
+ times creating great havoc among the boats of different vessels, were
+ finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and killed by
+ valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with that express
+ object as much in view, as in setting out through the Narragansett Woods,
+ Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture that notorious
+ murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the Indian King Philip.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make
+ mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in
+ printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the whole
+ story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For this is one
+ of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much
+ bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest
+ and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching
+ the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might
+ scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more
+ detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of the general
+ perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid
+ conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they recur. One
+ reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters and
+ deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home,
+ however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you suppose
+ that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the
+ whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the
+ bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan—do you suppose that that
+ poor fellow’s name will appear in the newspaper obituary you will read
+ to-morrow at your breakfast? No: because the mails are very irregular
+ between here and New Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what might be
+ called regular news direct or indirect from New Guinea? Yet I tell you
+ that upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many
+ others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which had had a death
+ by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each lost a
+ boat’s crew. For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles!
+ not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled
+ for it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is
+ an enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that when
+ narrating to them some specific example of this two-fold enormousness,
+ they have significantly complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I
+ declare upon my soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses,
+ when he wrote the history of the plagues of Egypt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But fortunately the special point I here seek can be established upon
+ testimony entirely independent of my own. That point is this: The Sperm
+ Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously
+ malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy, and
+ sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale has done it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket, was
+ cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts, lowered her boats,
+ and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long, several of the whales
+ were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale escaping from the boats,
+ issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon the ship. Dashing his
+ forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that in less than “ten
+ minutes” she settled down and fell over. Not a surviving plank of her has
+ been seen since. After the severest exposure, part of the crew reached the
+ land in their boats. Being returned home at last, Captain Pollard once
+ more sailed for the Pacific in command of another ship, but the gods
+ shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and breakers; for the second time
+ his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith forswearing the sea, he has never
+ tempted it since. At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of Nantucket.
+ I have seen Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the
+ tragedy; I have read his plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed
+ with his son; and all this within a few miles of the scene of the
+ catastrophe.*
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *The following are extracts from Chace’s narrative: “Every fact seemed to
+ warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which directed
+ his operations; he made two several attacks upon the ship, at a short
+ interval between them, both of which, according to their direction, were
+ calculated to do us the most injury, by being made ahead, and thereby
+ combining the speed of the two objects for the shock; to effect which, the
+ exact manœuvres which he made were necessary. His aspect was most
+ horrible, and such as indicated resentment and fury. He came directly from
+ the shoal which we had just before entered, and in which we had struck
+ three of his companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings.”
+ Again: “At all events, the whole circumstances taken together, all
+ happening before my own eyes, and producing, at the time, impressions in
+ my mind of decided, calculating mischief, on the part of the whale (many
+ of which impressions I cannot now recall), induce me to be satisfied that
+ I am correct in my opinion.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during a black
+ night in an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any hospitable
+ shore. “The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing; the fears of
+ being swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed upon hidden rocks,
+ with all the other ordinary subjects of fearful contemplation, seemed
+ scarcely entitled to a moment’s thought; the dismal looking wreck, and the
+ horrid aspect and revenge of the whale , wholly engrossed my reflections,
+ until day again made its appearance.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In another place—p. 45,—he speaks of “ the mysterious and
+ mortal attack of the animal .”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Secondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year 1807 totally
+ lost off the Azores by a similar onset, but the authentic particulars of
+ this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter, though from the whale
+ hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions to it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J——, then
+ commanding an American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be
+ dining with a party of whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in the
+ harbor of Oahu, Sandwich Islands. Conversation turning upon whales, the
+ Commodore was pleased to be sceptical touching the amazing strength
+ ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen present. He peremptorily
+ denied for example, that any whale could so smite his stout sloop-of-war
+ as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful. Very good; but there is
+ more coming. Some weeks after, the Commodore set sail in this impregnable
+ craft for Valparaiso. But he was stopped on the way by a portly sperm
+ whale, that begged a few moments’ confidential business with him. That
+ business consisted in fetching the Commodore’s craft such a thwack, that
+ with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest port to heave
+ down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider the Commodore’s
+ interview with that whale as providential. Was not Saul of Tarsus
+ converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the sperm whale
+ will stand no nonsense.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I will now refer you to Langsdorff’s Voyages for a little circumstance in
+ point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof. Langsdorff, you must
+ know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral Krusenstern’s famous
+ Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present century. Captain
+ Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day we
+ were out in the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was very
+ clear and fine, but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on
+ our fur clothing. For some days we had very little wind; it was not till
+ the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the northwest sprang up. An uncommon
+ large whale, the body of which was larger than the ship itself, lay almost
+ at the surface of the water, but was not perceived by any one on board
+ till the moment when the ship, which was in full sail, was almost upon
+ him, so that it was impossible to prevent its striking against him. We
+ were thus placed in the most imminent danger, as this gigantic creature,
+ setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at least out of the water.
+ The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether, while we who were below
+ all sprang instantly upon the deck, concluding that we had struck upon
+ some rock; instead of this we saw the monster sailing off with the utmost
+ gravity and solemnity. Captain D’Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to
+ examine whether or not the vessel had received any damage from the shock,
+ but we found that very happily it had escaped entirely uninjured.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, the Captain D’Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship in
+ question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual adventures
+ as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village of Dorchester near
+ Boston. I have the honor of being a nephew of his. I have particularly
+ questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff. He substantiates
+ every word. The ship, however, was by no means a large one: a Russian
+ craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my uncle after
+ bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure, so full, too,
+ of honest wonders—the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient
+ Dampier’s old chums—I found a little matter set down so like that
+ just quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a
+ corroborative example, if such be needed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lionel, it seems, was on his way to “John Ferdinando,” as he calls the
+ modern Juan Fernandes. “In our way thither,” he says, “about four o’clock
+ in the morning, when we were about one hundred and fifty leagues from the
+ Main of America, our ship felt a terrible shock, which put our men in such
+ consternation that they could hardly tell where they were or what to
+ think; but every one began to prepare for death. And, indeed, the shock
+ was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted the ship had struck
+ against a rock; but when the amazement was a little over, we cast the
+ lead, and sounded, but found no ground. * * * * * The suddenness of the shock
+ made the guns leap in their carriages, and several of the men were shaken
+ out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who lay with his head on a gun, was
+ thrown out of his cabin!” Lionel then goes on to impute the shock to an
+ earthquake, and seems to substantiate the imputation by stating that a
+ great earthquake, somewhere about that time, did actually do great
+ mischief along the Spanish land. But I should not much wonder if, in the
+ darkness of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all caused
+ by an unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known to
+ me, of the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more
+ than one instance, he has been known, not only to chase the assailing
+ boats back to their ships, but to pursue the ship itself, and long
+ withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks. The English ship
+ Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head; and, as for his strength, let me
+ say, that there have been examples where the lines attached to a running
+ sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and secured
+ there; the whale towing her great hull through the water, as a horse walks
+ off with a cart. Again, it is very often observed that, if the sperm
+ whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts, not so often
+ with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of destruction to his
+ pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent indication of his
+ character, that upon being attacked he will frequently open his mouth, and
+ retain it in that dread expansion for several consecutive minutes. But I
+ must be content with only one more and a concluding illustration; a
+ remarkable and most significant one, by which you will not fail to see,
+ that not only is the most marvellous event in this book corroborated by
+ plain facts of the present day, but that these marvels (like all marvels)
+ are mere repetitions of the ages; so that for the millionth time we say
+ amen with Solomon—Verily there is nothing new under the sun.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Christian magistrate of
+ Constantinople, in the days when Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius
+ general. As many know, he wrote the history of his own times, a work every
+ way of uncommon value. By the best authorities, he has always been
+ considered a most trustworthy and unexaggerating historian, except in some
+ one or two particulars, not at all affecting the matter presently to be
+ mentioned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term of
+ his prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured in the
+ neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed vessels
+ at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty years. A fact
+ thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is
+ there any reason it should be. Of what precise species this sea-monster
+ was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships, as well as for other
+ reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly inclined to think a
+ sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a long time I fancied that the
+ sperm whale had been always unknown in the Mediterranean and the deep
+ waters connecting with it. Even now I am certain that those seas are not,
+ and perhaps never can be, in the present constitution of things, a place
+ for his habitual gregarious resort. But further investigations have
+ recently proved to me, that in modern times there have been isolated
+ instances of the presence of the sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am
+ told, on good authority, that on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of
+ the British navy found the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of
+ war readily passes through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by
+ the same route, pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar substance
+ called brit is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But I have
+ every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale—squid or
+ cuttle-fish—lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large
+ creatures, but by no means the largest of that sort, have been found at
+ its surface. If, then, you properly put these statements together, and
+ reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that, according to all
+ human reasoning, Procopius’s sea-monster, that for half a century stove
+ the ships of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm
+ whale.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 46. Surmises.
+ 
+ 
+ Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his
+ thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick;
+ though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that one
+ passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and long
+ habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman’s ways, altogether to
+ abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage. Or at least if this were
+ otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more influential with
+ him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even considering his
+ monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the White Whale might
+ have possibly extended itself in some degree to all sperm whales, and that
+ the more monsters he slew by so much the more he multiplied the chances
+ that each subsequently encountered whale would prove to be the hated one
+ he hunted. But if such an hypothesis be indeed exceptionable, there were
+ still additional considerations which, though not so strictly according
+ with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet were by no means incapable of
+ swaying him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the
+ shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew, for
+ example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was over
+ Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual man any
+ more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual mastership; for
+ to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in a sort of corporeal
+ relation. Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced will were Ahab’s, so long
+ as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s brain; still he knew that for all
+ this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain’s quest, and could
+ he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it. It
+ might be that a long interval would elapse ere the White Whale was seen.
+ During that long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to fall into open
+ relapses of rebellion against his captain’s leadership, unless some
+ ordinary, prudential, circumstantial influences were brought to bear upon
+ him. Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick
+ was noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and
+ shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some
+ way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally
+ invested it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn
+ into the obscure background (for few men’s courage is proof against
+ protracted meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their
+ long night watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to
+ think of than Moby Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage
+ crew had hailed the announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all
+ sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable—they live in the
+ varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness—and when
+ retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however
+ promissory of life and passion in the end, it is above all things
+ requisite that temporary interests and employments should intervene and
+ hold them healthily suspended for the final dash.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion
+ mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent.
+ The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought
+ Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the
+ hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even
+ breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the
+ love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for
+ their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and chivalric
+ Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two thousand miles of
+ land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries,
+ picking pockets, and gaining other pious perquisites by the way. Had they
+ been strictly held to their one final and romantic object—that final
+ and romantic object, too many would have turned from in disgust. I will
+ not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all hopes of cash—aye, cash.
+ They may scorn cash now; but let some months go by, and no perspective
+ promise of it to them, and then this same quiescent cash all at once
+ mutinying in them, this same cash would soon cashier Ahab.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more related to
+ Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps somewhat
+ prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the Pequod’s voyage,
+ Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing, he had indirectly laid
+ himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation; and with perfect
+ impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if so disposed, and to that end
+ competent, could refuse all further obedience to him, and even violently
+ wrest from him the command. From even the barely hinted imputation of
+ usurpation, and the possible consequences of such a suppressed impression
+ gaining ground, Ahab must of course have been most anxious to protect
+ himself. That protection could only consist in his own predominating brain
+ and heart and hand, backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention to
+ every minute atmospheric influence which it was possible for his crew to
+ be subjected to.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be verbally
+ developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good degree
+ continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod’s voyage;
+ observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force himself to
+ evince all his well known passionate interest in the general pursuit of
+ his profession.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the three
+ mast-heads and admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit
+ reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.
+ 
+ 
+ It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about
+ the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters. Queequeg
+ and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an
+ additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet somehow
+ preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in
+ the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible
+ self.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept
+ passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long
+ yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg,
+ standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the
+ threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly
+ drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign
+ all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting
+ dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time,
+ and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the
+ Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single,
+ ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to
+ admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This
+ warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own
+ shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime,
+ Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof
+ slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be;
+ and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding
+ contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword,
+ thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this
+ easy, indifferent sword must be chance—aye, chance, free will, and
+ necessity—nowise incompatible—all interweavingly working
+ together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its
+ ultimate course—its every alternating vibration, indeed, only
+ tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given
+ threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines
+ of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though
+ thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last
+ featuring blow at events.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so
+ strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of
+ free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds whence
+ that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad
+ Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand
+ stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his
+ cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard
+ all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen’s look-outs perched as high
+ in the air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have
+ derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly
+ peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or
+ seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing
+ their coming.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where-away?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Instantly all was commotion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and
+ reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other
+ tribes of his genus.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There go flukes!” was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales
+ disappeared.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Quick, steward!” cried Ahab. “Time! time!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact
+ minute to Ahab.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling
+ before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to
+ leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of
+ our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale
+ when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while
+ concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the
+ opposite quarter—this deceitfulness of his could not now be in
+ action; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego
+ had been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of
+ the men selected for shipkeepers—that is, those not appointed to the
+ boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The sailors
+ at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed in their
+ places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed, and the three
+ boats swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over high cliffs.
+ Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand clung to the rail,
+ while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale. So look the long
+ line of man-of-war’s men about to throw themselves on board an enemy’s
+ ship.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took
+ every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was
+ surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.
+ 
+ 
+ The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side of
+ the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the tackles
+ and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had always been deemed
+ one of the spare boats, though technically called the captain’s, on
+ account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The figure that now
+ stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly
+ protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese jacket of black
+ cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers of the same dark
+ stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited
+ turban, the living hair braided and coiled round and round upon his head.
+ Less swart in aspect, the companions of this figure were of that vivid,
+ tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the
+ Manillas;—a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty, and
+ by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret
+ confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose
+ counting-room they suppose to be elsewhere.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While yet the wondering ship’s company were gazing upon these strangers,
+ Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head, “All ready
+ there, Fedallah?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ready,” was the half-hissed reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lower away then; d’ye hear?” shouting across the deck. “Lower away there,
+ I say.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their amazement the men
+ sprang over the rail; the sheaves whirled round in the blocks; with a
+ wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea; while, with a dexterous,
+ off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the sailors, goat-like,
+ leaped down the rolling ship’s side into the tossed boats below.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship’s lee, when a fourth keel,
+ coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern, and showed
+ the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the stern, loudly
+ hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely, so as to
+ cover a large expanse of water. But with all their eyes again riveted upon
+ the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other boats obeyed not
+ the command.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Captain Ahab?—” said Starbuck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Spread yourselves,” cried Ahab; “give way, all four boats. Thou, Flask,
+ pull out more to leeward!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, aye, sir,” cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his great
+ steering oar. “Lay back!” addressing his crew. “There!—there!—there
+ again! There she blows right ahead, boys!—lay back!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, I don’t mind ’em, sir,” said Archy; “I knew it
+ all before now. Didn’t I hear ’em in the hold? And didn’t I
+ tell Cabaco here of it? What say ye, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little
+ ones,” drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom
+ still showed signs of uneasiness. “Why don’t you break your backbones, my
+ boys? What is it you stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They are
+ only five more hands come to help us—never mind from where—the
+ more the merrier. Pull, then, do pull; never mind the brimstone—devils
+ are good fellows enough. So, so; there you are now; that’s the stroke for
+ a thousand pounds; that’s the stroke to sweep the stakes! Hurrah for the
+ gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! Three cheers, men—all hearts
+ alive! Easy, easy; don’t be in a hurry—don’t be in a hurry. Why
+ don’t you snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something, you dogs! So, so,
+ so, then:—softly, softly! That’s it—that’s it! long and
+ strong. Give way there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin
+ rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull.
+ Pull, will ye? pull, can’t ye? pull, won’t ye? Why in the name of gudgeons
+ and ginger-cakes don’t ye pull?—pull and break something! pull, and
+ start your eyes out! Here!” whipping out the sharp knife from his girdle;
+ “every mother’s son of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between
+ his teeth. That’s it—that’s it. Now ye do something; that looks like
+ it, my steel-bits. Start her—start her, my silver-spoons! Start her,
+ marling-spikes!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Stubb’s exordium to his crew is given here at large, because he had rather
+ a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially in
+ inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from this
+ specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions
+ with his congregation. Not at all; and therein consisted his chief
+ peculiarity. He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a tone
+ so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so calculated
+ merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such queer
+ invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for the mere
+ joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so easy and indolent
+ himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly gaped—open-mouthed
+ at times—that the mere sight of such a yawning commander, by sheer
+ force of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew. Then again, Stubb was
+ one of those odd sort of humorists, whose jollity is sometimes so
+ curiously ambiguous, as to put all inferiors on their guard in the matter
+ of obeying them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely
+ across Stubb’s bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were pretty
+ near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if ye
+ please!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Halloa!” returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he spoke;
+ still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face set like a
+ flint from Stubb’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, strong,
+ boys!)” in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again: “A sad
+ business, Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind,
+ Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, come what
+ will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There’s hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr.
+ Stubb, and that’s what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm’s the
+ play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, aye, I thought as much,” soliloquized Stubb, when the boats
+ diverged, “as soon as I clapt eye on ’em, I thought so. Aye, and that’s
+ what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long
+ suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale’s at the bottom of
+ it. Well, well, so be it! Can’t be helped! All right! Give way, men! It
+ ain’t the White Whale to-day! Give way!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical instant as
+ the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not unreasonably
+ awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of the ship’s company;
+ but Archy’s fancied discovery having some time previous got abroad among
+ them, though indeed not credited then, this had in some small measure
+ prepared them for the event. It took off the extreme edge of their wonder;
+ and so what with all this and Stubb’s confident way of accounting for
+ their appearance, they were for the time freed from superstitious
+ surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room for all manner of
+ wild conjectures as to dark Ahab’s precise agency in the matter from the
+ beginning. For me, I silently recalled the mysterious shadows I had seen
+ creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket dawn, as well as the
+ enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the furthest
+ to windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a circumstance
+ bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. Those tiger yellow creatures
+ of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five trip-hammers they rose
+ and fell with regular strokes of strength, which periodically started the
+ boat along the water like a horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi
+ steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen pulling the harpooneer oar, he had
+ thrown aside his black jacket, and displayed his naked chest with the
+ whole part of his body above the gunwale, clearly cut against the
+ alternating depressions of the watery horizon; while at the other end of
+ the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a fencer’s, thrown half backward into
+ the air, as if to counterbalance any tendency to trip; Ahab was seen
+ steadily managing his steering oar as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the
+ White Whale had torn him. All at once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar
+ motion and then remained fixed, while the boat’s five oars were seen
+ simultaneously peaked. Boat and crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly
+ the three spread boats in the rear paused on their way. The whales had
+ irregularly settled bodily down into the blue, thus giving no distantly
+ discernible token of the movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab
+ had observed it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Every man look out along his oars!” cried Starbuck. “Thou, Queequeg,
+ stand up!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage
+ stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the
+ spot where the chase had last been descried. Likewise upon the extreme
+ stern of the boat where it was also triangularly platformed level with the
+ gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and adroitly balancing himself
+ to the jerking tossings of his chip of a craft, and silently eyeing the
+ vast blue eye of the sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not very far distant Flask’s boat was also lying breathlessly still; its
+ commander recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a stout sort
+ of post rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above the level of
+ the stern platform. It is used for catching turns with the whale line. Its
+ top is not more spacious than the palm of a man’s hand, and standing upon
+ such a base as that, Flask seemed perched at the mast-head of some ship
+ which had sunk to all but her trucks. But little King-Post was small and
+ short, and at the same time little King-Post was full of a large and tall
+ ambition, so that this loggerhead stand-point of his did by no means
+ satisfy King-Post.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I can’t see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on to
+ that.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way,
+ swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty
+ shoulders for a pedestal.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you
+ fifty feet taller.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the
+ boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to
+ Flask’s foot, and then putting Flask’s hand on his hearse-plumed head and
+ bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one dexterous fling
+ landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders. And here was Flask
+ now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing him with a breastband
+ to lean against and steady himself by.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what wondrous
+ habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect posture
+ in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously perverse and
+ cross-running seas. Still more strange to see him giddily perched upon the
+ loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But the sight of little Flask
+ mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious; for sustaining himself
+ with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble
+ negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his
+ broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked
+ nobler than the rider. Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious
+ little Flask would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added
+ heave did he thereby give to the negro’s lordly chest. So have I seen
+ Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth
+ did not alter her tides and her seasons for that.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing solicitudes.
+ The whales might have made one of their regular soundings, not a temporary
+ dive from mere fright; and if that were the case, Stubb, as his wont in
+ such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace the languishing interval with
+ his pipe. He withdrew it from his hatband, where he always wore it aslant
+ like a feather. He loaded it, and rammed home the loading with his
+ thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his match across the rough sandpaper
+ of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer, whose eyes had been setting to
+ windward like two fixed stars, suddenly dropped like light from his erect
+ attitude to his seat, crying out in a quick phrensy of hurry, “Down, down
+ all, and give way!—there they are!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been
+ visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white
+ water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it, and
+ suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white
+ rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it were,
+ like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this
+ atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of
+ water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other
+ indications, the puffs of vapor they spouted, seemed their forerunning
+ couriers and detached flying outriders.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled water
+ and air. But it bade fair to outstrip them; it flew on and on, as a mass
+ of interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the hills.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pull, pull, my good boys,” said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but
+ intensest concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed glance
+ from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two
+ visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much to
+ his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him. Only the silence
+ of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by one of his peculiar
+ whispers, now harsh with command, now soft with entreaty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ How different the loud little King-Post. “Sing out and say something, my
+ hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their
+ black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I’ll sign over to you my
+ Martha’s Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys. Lay
+ me on—lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring mad!
+ See! see that white water!” And so shouting, he pulled his hat from his
+ head, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted it far
+ off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the boat’s
+ stern like a crazed colt from the prairie.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look at that chap now,” philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his
+ unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth, at a short
+ distance, followed after—“He’s got fits, that Flask has. Fits? yes,
+ give him fits—that’s the very word—pitch fits into ’em.
+ Merrily, merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know;—merry’s
+ the word. Pull, babes—pull, sucklings—pull, all. But what the
+ devil are you hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only
+ pull, and keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite
+ your knives in two—that’s all. Take it easy—why don’t ye take
+ it easy, I say, and burst all your livers and lungs!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of
+ his—these were words best omitted here; for you live under the
+ blessed light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the
+ audacious seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and
+ eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions of Flask
+ to “that whale,” as he called the fictitious monster which he declared to
+ be incessantly tantalizing his boat’s bow with its tail—these
+ allusions of his were at times so vivid and life-like, that they would
+ cause some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look over the
+ shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen must put out
+ their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usage pronouncing that
+ they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but arms, in these
+ critical moments.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the
+ omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along
+ the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the
+ brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the
+ knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to
+ cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows;
+ the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the
+ headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the
+ cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the
+ oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her
+ boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;—all
+ this was thrilling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever
+ heat of his first battle; not the dead man’s ghost encountering the first
+ unknown phantom in the other world;—neither of these can feel
+ stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time
+ finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm
+ whale.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and more
+ visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows flung
+ upon the sea. The jets of vapor no longer blended, but tilted everywhere
+ to right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes. The boats
+ were pulled more apart; Starbuck giving chase to three whales running dead
+ to leeward. Our sail was now set, and, with the still rising wind, we
+ rushed along; the boat going with such madness through the water, that the
+ lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to escape being torn from
+ the row-locks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither ship
+ nor boat to be seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Give way, men,” whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet
+ of his sail; “there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes.
+ There’s white water again!—close to! Spring!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted that
+ the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when with a
+ lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: “Stand up!” and Queequeg,
+ harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril so
+ close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense countenance of the
+ mate in the stern of the boat, they knew that the imminent instant had
+ come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing sound as of fifty elephants
+ stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was still booming through the
+ mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like the erected crests of
+ enraged serpents.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s his hump. There , there , give it to him!” whispered Starbuck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of
+ Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from
+ astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail
+ collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up near by;
+ something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole crew
+ were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the white
+ curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended
+ together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round it
+ we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale,
+ tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the
+ water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes
+ the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom of
+ the ocean.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together;
+ the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white fire
+ upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal in these
+ jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar to the live
+ coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those boats in that
+ storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker with the
+ shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen. The rising sea
+ forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were useless as
+ propellers, performing now the office of life-preservers. So, cutting the
+ lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck
+ contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif
+ pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope.
+ There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that
+ almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man
+ without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat, we
+ lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread over the
+ sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat. Suddenly
+ Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear. We all heard
+ a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by the storm. The
+ sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were dimly parted by a huge,
+ vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the sea as the ship at last
+ loomed into view, bearing right down upon us within a distance of not much
+ more than its length.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant it
+ tossed and gaped beneath the ship’s bows like a chip at the base of a
+ cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no more
+ till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were dashed
+ against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely landed on
+ board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut loose from
+ their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship had given us
+ up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of our
+ perishing,—an oar or a lance pole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.
+ 
+ 
+ There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair
+ we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical
+ joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects
+ that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing
+ dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all
+ events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible
+ and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion
+ gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and
+ worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all
+ these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and
+ jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old
+ joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man
+ only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of
+ his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing
+ most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing
+ like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial,
+ desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the
+ Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Queequeg,” said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck,
+ and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water;
+ “Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?” Without
+ much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand
+ that such things did often happen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mr. Stubb,” said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his
+ oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; “Mr. Stubb, I
+ think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief
+ mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose
+ then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy
+ squall is the height of a whaleman’s discretion?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Certain. I’ve lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape
+ Horn.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mr. Flask,” said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing close
+ by; “you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you tell me
+ whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an
+ oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death’s
+ jaws?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Can’t you twist that smaller?” said Flask. “Yes, that’s the law. I should
+ like to see a boat’s crew backing water up to a whale face foremost. Ha,
+ ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind that!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement of
+ the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings in
+ the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters of common
+ occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the superlatively
+ critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign my life into the
+ hands of him who steered the boat—oftentimes a fellow who at that
+ very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft
+ with his own frantic stampings; considering that the particular disaster
+ to our own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck’s driving
+ on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall, and considering that
+ Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his great heedfulness in the
+ fishery; considering that I belonged to this uncommonly prudent Starbuck’s
+ boat; and finally considering in what a devil’s chase I was implicated,
+ touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say, I thought I
+ might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will. “Queequeg,” said
+ I, “come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their
+ last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond
+ of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life that I had
+ done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon the present
+ occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart.
+ Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that
+ Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so
+ many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself; my death and
+ burial were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and
+ contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the
+ bars of a snug family vault.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock,
+ here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the
+ devil fetch the hindmost.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
+ 
+ 
+ “Who would have thought it, Flask!” cried Stubb; “if I had but one leg you
+ would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my
+ timber toe. Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account,” said Flask. “If
+ his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing. That
+ would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other left,
+ you know.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering the
+ paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is right
+ for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils of the
+ chase. So Tamerlane’s soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes,
+ whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the thickest
+ of the fight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that
+ with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger;
+ considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and
+ extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then
+ comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed man
+ to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the joint-owners of
+ the Pequod must have plainly thought not.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of his
+ entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of the
+ chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving his
+ orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned
+ to him as a regular headsman in the hunt—above all for Captain Ahab
+ to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat’s crew, he well knew
+ that such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners of the
+ Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s crew from them, nor had he
+ in any way hinted his desires on that head. Nevertheless he had taken
+ private measures of his own touching all that matter. Until Cabaco’s
+ published discovery, the sailors had little foreseen it, though to be sure
+ when, after being a little while out of port, all hands had concluded the
+ customary business of fitting the whaleboats for service; when some time
+ after this Ahab was now and then found bestirring himself in the matter of
+ making thole-pins with his own hands for what was thought to be one of the
+ spare boats, and even solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which
+ when the line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when
+ all this was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an
+ extra coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better
+ withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he
+ evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is
+ sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for bracing the
+ knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed how
+ often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the
+ semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter’s chisel
+ gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these
+ things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. But
+ almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness in
+ Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he
+ had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal monster in person.
+ But such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as
+ to any boat’s crew being assigned to that boat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away;
+ for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such
+ unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown
+ nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers;
+ and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found
+ tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats,
+ canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that Beelzebub himself
+ might climb up the side and step down into the cabin to chat with the
+ captain, and it would not create any unsubduable excitement in the
+ forecastle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate
+ phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were
+ somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a
+ muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like this,
+ by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked
+ with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort of a
+ half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even authority
+ over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain an indifferent air
+ concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people
+ in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but
+ the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic
+ communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent—those
+ insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern
+ days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal
+ generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection,
+ and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as
+ real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and
+ to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed
+ consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical
+ Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.
+ 
+ 
+ Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept
+ across four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the Cape de
+ Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la
+ Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality, southerly from
+ St. Helena.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and
+ moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and,
+ by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence,
+ not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in
+ advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked
+ celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.
+ Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights, it was
+ his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a look-out there, with
+ the same precision as if it had been day. And yet, though herds of whales
+ were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering
+ for them. You may think with what emotions, then, the seamen beheld this
+ old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon,
+ companions in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there
+ for several successive nights without uttering a single sound; when, after
+ all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery,
+ moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some
+ winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew.
+ “There she blows!” Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have
+ quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though
+ it was a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so
+ deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively
+ desired a lowering.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the
+ t’gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The best
+ man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the
+ piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving,
+ lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many
+ sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet;
+ while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were
+ struggling in her—one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive
+ yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab’s face that
+ night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were
+ warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every
+ stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this
+ old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every
+ eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more
+ seen that night. Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days
+ after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it was
+ descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it
+ disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after
+ night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted into
+ the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be; disappearing
+ again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and somehow seeming at
+ every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and further in our
+ van, this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance with
+ the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested the
+ Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that whenever and
+ wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however far apart
+ latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by one self-same
+ whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there reigned, too, a sense
+ of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously
+ beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn round upon
+ us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous
+ potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath
+ all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for
+ days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild,
+ that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating
+ itself of life before our urn-like prow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling
+ around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are
+ there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored
+ the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the
+ foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life
+ went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither
+ before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And
+ every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and
+ spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as
+ though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing
+ appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their
+ homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black
+ sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul
+ were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoso, as called of
+ yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had attended
+ us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty
+ beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to
+ swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air
+ without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying; still directing
+ its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us on from before,
+ the solitary jet would at times be descried.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the
+ time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck,
+ manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed his
+ mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and aloft
+ has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the
+ issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists. So,
+ with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand
+ firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand gazing dead
+ to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but
+ congeal his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew driven from the
+ forward part of the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over
+ its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better
+ to guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a
+ sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened
+ belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by
+ painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift
+ madness and gladness of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of
+ humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence the
+ men swung in the bowlines; still wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even
+ when wearied nature seemed demanding repose he would not seek that repose
+ in his hammock. Never could Starbuck forget the old man’s aspect, when one
+ night going down into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw
+ him with closed eyes sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair; the rain
+ and half-melted sleet of the storm from which he had some time before
+ emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and coat. On the
+ table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and currents
+ which have previously been spoken of. His lantern swung from his tightly
+ clenched hand. Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back so that
+ the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale that
+ swung from a beam in the ceiling.*
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the
+ compass at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the
+ course of the ship.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this gale,
+ still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.
+ 
+ 
+ South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising
+ ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by
+ name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head,
+ I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean
+ fisheries—a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the
+ skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral
+ appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her
+ spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over
+ with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to see
+ her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed clad in
+ the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had survived
+ nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast,
+ they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship
+ slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to
+ each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one
+ ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly
+ eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own look-outs, while
+ the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the
+ act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand
+ into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make
+ himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the
+ distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod
+ were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the first mere
+ mention of the White Whale’s name to another ship, Ahab for a moment
+ paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat to board
+ the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking advantage
+ of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and knowing by her
+ aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and shortly bound home,
+ he loudly hailed—“Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the
+ world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean! and
+ this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them
+ to ——”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in
+ accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish, that
+ for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away
+ with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with
+ the stranger’s flanks. Though in the course of his continual voyagings
+ Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any
+ monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Swim away from me, do ye?” murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water.
+ There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep
+ helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced. But
+ turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship in the
+ wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion voice,—“Up
+ helm! Keep her off round the world!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings;
+ but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through
+ numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we
+ left behind secure, were all the time before us.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for
+ ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than
+ any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the
+ voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented
+ chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all
+ human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead
+ us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 53. The Gam.
+ 
+ 
+ The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the whaler we had
+ spoken was this: the wind and sea betokened storms. But even had this not
+ been the case, he would not after all, perhaps, have boarded her—judging
+ by his subsequent conduct on similar occasions—if so it had been
+ that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained a negative answer to the
+ question he put. For, as it eventually turned out, he cared not to
+ consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger captain, except he could
+ contribute some of that information he so absorbingly sought. But all this
+ might remain inadequately estimated, were not something said here of the
+ peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when meeting each other in foreign
+ seas, and especially on a common cruising-ground.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the
+ equally desolate Salisbury Plain in England; if casually encountering each
+ other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain, for the life of them,
+ cannot well avoid a mutual salutation; and stopping for a moment to
+ interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while and resting
+ in concert: then, how much more natural that upon the illimitable Pine
+ Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling vessels descrying
+ each other at the ends of the earth—off lone Fanning’s Island, or
+ the far away King’s Mills; how much more natural, I say, that under such
+ circumstances these ships should not only interchange hails, but come into
+ still closer, more friendly and sociable contact. And especially would
+ this seem to be a matter of course, in the case of vessels owned in one
+ seaport, and whose captains, officers, and not a few of the men are
+ personally known to each other; and consequently, have all sorts of dear
+ domestic things to talk about.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters on
+ board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a date
+ a year or two later than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn files.
+ And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound ship would receive the
+ latest whaling intelligence from the cruising-ground to which she may be
+ destined, a thing of the utmost importance to her. And in degree, all this
+ will hold true concerning whaling vessels crossing each other’s track on
+ the cruising-ground itself, even though they are equally long absent from
+ home. For one of them may have received a transfer of letters from some
+ third, and now far remote vessel; and some of those letters may be for the
+ people of the ship she now meets. Besides, they would exchange the whaling
+ news, and have an agreeable chat. For not only would they meet with all
+ the sympathies of sailors, but likewise with all the peculiar
+ congenialities arising from a common pursuit and mutually shared
+ privations and perils.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference; that
+ is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is the case with
+ Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from the small number of
+ English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when they do
+ occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them; for your
+ Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that
+ sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English whalers
+ sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the American
+ whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his nondescript
+ provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. But where this superiority in
+ the English whalemen does really consist, it would be hard to say, seeing
+ that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more whales than all the
+ English, collectively, in ten years. But this is a harmless little foible
+ in the English whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer does not take much to
+ heart; probably, because he knows that he has a few foibles himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the whalers
+ have most reason to be sociable—and they are so. Whereas, some
+ merchant ships crossing each other’s wake in the mid-Atlantic, will
+ oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition,
+ mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in
+ Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon
+ each other’s rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea, they
+ first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such a
+ ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down hearty
+ good-will and brotherly love about it at all. As touching Slave-ships
+ meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run away from each
+ other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross
+ each other’s cross-bones, the first hail is—“How many skulls?”—the
+ same way that whalers hail—“How many barrels?” And that question
+ once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are infernal
+ villains on both sides, and don’t like to see overmuch of each other’s
+ villanous likenesses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable,
+ free-and-easy whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets another
+ whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a “ Gam ,” a thing so utterly
+ unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the name even; and if
+ by chance they should hear of it, they only grin at it, and repeat
+ gamesome stuff about “spouters” and “blubber-boilers,” and such like
+ pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also all
+ Pirates and Man-of-War’s men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such a
+ scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard
+ to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know
+ whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It
+ sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows. And
+ besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper
+ foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I conclude, that in boasting
+ himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that assertion the pirate
+ has no solid basis to stand on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But what is a Gam? You might wear out your index-finger running up and
+ down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson
+ never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster’s ark does not hold it.
+ Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in
+ constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly, it
+ needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With that
+ view, let me learnedly define it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ GAM. NOUN— A social meeting of two ( or more ) Whaleships,
+ generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits
+ by boats’ crews: the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one
+ ship, and the two chief mates on the other. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten
+ here. All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so
+ has the whale fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when the
+ captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern sheets
+ on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often steers himself
+ with a pretty little milliner’s tiller decorated with gay cords and
+ ribbons. But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa of that sort
+ whatever, and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if whaling captains
+ were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen in patent
+ chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of any such
+ effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete boat’s crew must leave
+ the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of the number,
+ that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion, and the captain,
+ having no place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all standing like a
+ pine tree. And often you will notice that being conscious of the eyes of
+ the whole visible world resting on him from the sides of the two ships,
+ this standing captain is all alive to the importance of sustaining his
+ dignity by maintaining his legs. Nor is this any very easy matter; for in
+ his rear is the immense projecting steering oar hitting him now and then
+ in the small of his back, the after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees
+ in front. He is thus completely wedged before and behind, and can only
+ expand himself sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a
+ sudden, violent pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him, because
+ length of foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make
+ a spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again, it
+ would never do in plain sight of the world’s riveted eyes, it would never
+ do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying himself the
+ slightest particle by catching hold of anything with his hands; indeed, as
+ token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he generally carries his hands
+ in his trowsers’ pockets; but perhaps being generally very large, heavy
+ hands, he carries them there for ballast. Nevertheless there have occurred
+ instances, well authenticated ones too, where the captain has been known
+ for an uncommonly critical moment or two, in a sudden squall say—to
+ seize hold of the nearest oarsman’s hair, and hold on there like grim
+ death.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho’s Story.
+ 
+ 
+ ( As told at the Golden Inn. )
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is
+ much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet more
+ travellers than in any other part.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homeward-bound
+ whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was manned almost wholly by
+ Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby
+ Dick. To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly
+ heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho’s story, which seemed
+ obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted
+ visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are
+ said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance, with its own
+ particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret part of
+ the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab
+ or his mates. For that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain
+ of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private property of three confederate
+ white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to
+ Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy, but the following night
+ Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way,
+ that when he was wakened he could not well withhold the rest.
+ Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing have on those seamen
+ in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange
+ delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this matter, that they kept
+ the secret among themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod’s
+ main-mast. Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the
+ story as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair I
+ now proceed to put on lasting record.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head,
+ still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For my humor’s sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated
+ it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint’s eve,
+ smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those fine
+ cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer terms
+ with me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally put, and
+ which are duly answered at the time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
+ rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket, was
+ cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days’ sail eastward from the
+ eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the northward of the
+ Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to daily usage, it
+ was observed that she made more water in her hold than common. They
+ supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But the captain, having
+ some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck awaited him in those
+ latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit them, and the leak not
+ being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they could not
+ find it after searching the hold as low down as was possible in rather
+ heavy weather, the ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners
+ working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no good luck came;
+ more days went by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it
+ sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the captain,
+ making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among the islands,
+ there to have his hull hove out and repaired.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance
+ favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the way,
+ because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically relieved at
+ them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship free;
+ never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well nigh the whole
+ of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had
+ all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port without the
+ occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the brutal
+ overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked
+ vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Lakeman!—Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?’
+ said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but—I crave your
+ courtesy—may be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now,
+ gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as large
+ and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far Manilla;
+ this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet been
+ nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly connected
+ with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand
+ fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and
+ Superior, and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with
+ many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of
+ races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles,
+ even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great
+ contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime
+ approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all
+ round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by
+ the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet
+ thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to
+ wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry
+ wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered
+ forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic
+ genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and
+ silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they
+ mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago
+ villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed
+ cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by
+ Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave;
+ they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland,
+ they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.
+ Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and
+ wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any. And for
+ Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone
+ Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had
+ long followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was
+ he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman,
+ fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives. Yet was this
+ Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a
+ mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible
+ firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition which
+ is the meanest slave’s right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been
+ retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved so thus far;
+ but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt—but, gentlemen,
+ you shall hear.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her prow
+ for her island haven, that the Town-Ho’s leak seemed again increasing, but
+ only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps every day. You must
+ know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our Atlantic, for example,
+ some skippers think little of pumping their whole way across it; though of
+ a still, sleepy night, should the officer of the deck happen to forget his
+ duty in that respect, the probability would be that he and his shipmates
+ would never again remember it, on account of all hands gently subsiding to
+ the bottom. Nor in the solitary and savage seas far from you to the
+ westward, gentlemen, is it altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging
+ at their pump-handles in full chorus even for a voyage of considerable
+ length; that is, if it lie along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any
+ other reasonable retreat is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel
+ is in some very out of the way part of those waters, some really landless
+ latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little anxious.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found
+ gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by
+ several of her company; especially by Radney the mate. He commanded the
+ upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way expanded
+ to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a coward, and
+ as little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness touching his
+ own person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or on sea that you
+ can conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when he betrayed this
+ solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the seamen declared that
+ it was only on account of his being a part owner in her. So when they were
+ working that evening at the pumps, there was on this head no small
+ gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they stood with their feet
+ continually overflowed by the rippling clear water; clear as any mountain
+ spring, gentlemen—that bubbling from the pumps ran across the deck,
+ and poured itself out in steady spouts at the lee scupper-holes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional
+ world of ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in
+ command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his
+ superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he
+ conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance
+ he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern’s tower, and make a little
+ heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may, gentlemen, at all
+ events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman, and
+ a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy’s
+ snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him, gentlemen,
+ which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to
+ Charlemagne’s father. But Radney, the mate, was ugly as a mule; yet as
+ hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt
+ knew it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the
+ rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with his
+ gay banterings.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Aye, aye, my merry lads, it’s a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one
+ of ye, and let’s have a taste. By the Lord, it’s worth bottling! I tell ye
+ what, men, old Rad’s investment must go for it! he had best cut away his
+ part of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that sword-fish only
+ began the job; he’s come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters,
+ saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the whole posse of ’em are now
+ hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom; making improvements, I
+ suppose. If old Rad were here now, I’d tell him to jump overboard and
+ scatter ’em. They’re playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him.
+ But he’s a simple old soul,—Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they say
+ the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I wonder if he’d
+ give a poor devil like me the model of his nose.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Damn your eyes! what’s that pump stopping for?’ roared Radney,
+ pretending not to have heard the sailors’ talk. ‘Thunder away at it!’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. ‘Lively, boys,
+ lively, now!’ And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines; the
+ men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping of the
+ lungs was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life’s utmost
+ energies.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went
+ forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face fiery
+ red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his brow. Now
+ what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney to meddle
+ with such a man in that corporeally exasperated state, I know not; but so
+ it happened. Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate commanded him
+ to get a broom and sweep down the planks, and also a shovel, and remove
+ some offensive matters consequent upon allowing a pig to run at large.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship’s deck at sea is a piece of household
+ work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every
+ evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships actually
+ foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of
+ sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom
+ would not willingly drown without first washing their faces. But in all
+ vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys, if
+ boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho that
+ had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most
+ athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain
+ of one of the gangs; consequently he should have been freed from any
+ trivial business not connected with truly nautical duties, such being the
+ case with his comrades. I mention all these particulars so that you may
+ understand exactly how this affair stood between the two men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost as
+ plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat in
+ his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will understand
+ this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully comprehended
+ when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat still for a moment, and
+ as he steadfastly looked into the mate’s malignant eye and perceived the
+ stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him and the slow-match silently
+ burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw all this, that strange
+ forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper passionateness in any
+ already ireful being—a repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by
+ really valiant men even when aggrieved—this nameless phantom
+ feeling, gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily
+ exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him saying that sweeping the
+ deck was not his business, and he would not do it. And then, without at
+ all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads as the customary
+ sweepers; who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done little or nothing
+ all day. To this, Radney replied with an oath, in a most domineering and
+ outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his command; meanwhile
+ advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an uplifted cooper’s club
+ hammer which he had snatched from a cask near by.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for
+ all his first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt could
+ but ill brook this bearing in the mate; but somehow still smothering the
+ conflagration within him, without speaking he remained doggedly rooted to
+ his seat, till at last the incensed Radney shook the hammer within a few
+ inches of his face, furiously commanding him to do his bidding.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily
+ followed by the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately repeated his
+ intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his forbearance had not the
+ slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable intimation with his twisted
+ hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man; but it was to no
+ purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly round the windlass;
+ when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him that he had
+ now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the Lakeman paused on
+ the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to
+ yourself.’ But the predestinated mate coming still closer to him, where
+ the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the heavy hammer within an inch of his
+ teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insufferable maledictions.
+ Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye
+ with the unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching his right
+ hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back, told his persecutor that
+ if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would murder him. But,
+ gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter by the gods.
+ Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant the lower jaw
+ of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting blood
+ like a whale.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays
+ leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing their
+ mastheads. They were both Canallers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Canallers!’ cried Don Pedro. ‘We have seen many whale-ships in our
+ harbours, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what are
+ they?’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You
+ must have heard of it.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary
+ land, we know but little of your vigorous North.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha’s very fine; and ere
+ proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such
+ information may throw side-light upon my story.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire breadth
+ of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and most
+ thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and affluent,
+ cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room and
+ bar-room; through the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman arches
+ over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or broken;
+ through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk counties;
+ and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires stand almost
+ like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and
+ often lawless life. There’s your true Ashantee, gentlemen; there howl your
+ pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you; under the long-flung
+ shadow, and the snug patronising lee of churches. For by some curious
+ fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan freebooters that they
+ ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners, gentlemen, most
+ abound in holiest vicinities.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Is that a friar passing?’ said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the
+ crowded plazza, with humorous concern.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella’s Inquisition wanes in
+ Lima,’ laughed Don Sebastian. ‘Proceed, Senor.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘A moment! Pardon!’ cried another of the company. ‘In the name of all us
+ Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by no
+ means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting present Lima for
+ distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow and look
+ surprised; you know the proverb all along this coast—“Corrupt as
+ Lima.” It but bears out your saying, too; churches more plentiful than
+ billiard-tables, and for ever open—and “Corrupt as Lima.” So, too,
+ Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St.
+ Mark!—St. Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now,
+ you pour out again.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would make a
+ fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like
+ Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile, he
+ indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening
+ his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy is
+ dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly sports; his
+ slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features. A terror to
+ the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats; his swart
+ visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on
+ his own canal, I have received good turns from one of these Canallers; I
+ thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful; but it is often one of
+ the prime redeeming qualities of your man of violence, that at times he
+ has as stiff an arm to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a
+ wealthy one. In sum, gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is,
+ is emphatically evinced by this; that our wild whale-fishery contains so
+ many of its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind,
+ except Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor
+ does it at all diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to many
+ thousands of our rural boys and young men born along its line, the
+ probationary life of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition between
+ quietly reaping in a Christian corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the
+ waters of the most barbaric seas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘I see! I see!’ impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha upon
+ his silvery ruffles. ‘No need to travel! The world’s one Lima. I had
+ thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold and
+ holy as the hills.—But the story.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly had
+ he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior mates and the four
+ harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. But sliding down the ropes
+ like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into the uproar, and sought
+ to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle. Others of the sailors
+ joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted turmoil ensued; while
+ standing out of harm’s way, the valiant captain danced up and down with a
+ whale-pike, calling upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious
+ scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck. At intervals, he ran
+ close up to the revolving border of the confusion, and prying into the
+ heart of it with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his
+ resentment. But Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all;
+ they succeeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing
+ about three or four large casks in a line with the windlass, these
+ sea-Parisians entrenched themselves behind the barricade.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Come out of that, ye pirates!’ roared the captain, now menacing them
+ with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the steward. ‘Come out
+ of that, ye cut-throats!’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there, defied
+ the worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain to understand
+ distinctly, that his (Steelkilt’s) death would be the signal for a
+ murderous mutiny on the part of all hands. Fearing in his heart lest this
+ might prove but too true, the captain a little desisted, but still
+ commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their duty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?’ demanded their ringleader.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Turn to! turn to!—I make no promise;—to your duty! Do you
+ want to sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to!’ and
+ he once more raised a pistol.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Sink the ship?’ cried Steelkilt. ‘Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us
+ turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us. What say
+ ye, men?’ turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their response.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his eye on
+ the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:—‘It’s not our
+ fault; we didn’t want it; I told him to take his hammer away; it was boy’s
+ business; he might have known me before this; I told him not to prick the
+ buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here against his cursed jaw;
+ ain’t those mincing knives down in the forecastle there, men? look to
+ those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God, look to yourself; say the
+ word; don’t be a fool; forget it all; we are ready to turn to; treat us
+ decently, and we’re your men; but we won’t be flogged.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Look ye, now,’ cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him,
+ ‘there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who have shipped for
+ the cruise, d’ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can claim our
+ discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don’t want a row; it’s not
+ our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we won’t
+ be flogged.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Turn to!’ roared the Captain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:—‘I tell you
+ what it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a
+ shabby rascal, we won’t lift a hand against ye unless ye attack us; but
+ till you say the word about not flogging us, we don’t do a hand’s turn.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I’ll keep ye there till
+ ye’re sick of it. Down ye go.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Shall we?’ cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against
+ it; but at length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down into
+ their dark den, growlingly disappearing, like bears into a cave.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As the Lakeman’s bare head was just level with the planks, the Captain
+ and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the slide of
+ the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly called for
+ the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock belonging to the
+ companionway. Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered something
+ down the crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them—ten in
+ number—leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had remained neutral.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward and
+ aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway; at which
+ last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after breaking
+ through the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed in peace; the
+ men who still remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps, whose
+ clinking and clanking at intervals through the dreary night dismally
+ resounded through the ship.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At sunrise the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck, summoned
+ the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water was then
+ lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit were tossed
+ after it; when again turning the key upon them and pocketing it, the
+ Captain returned to the quarter-deck. Twice every day for three days this
+ was repeated; but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling, and then a
+ scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered; and suddenly
+ four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to.
+ The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps to
+ some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to surrender at
+ discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his demand to the
+ rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to stop his babbling
+ and betake himself where he belonged. On the fifth morning three others of
+ the mutineers bolted up into the air from the desperate arms below that
+ sought to restrain them. Only three were left.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Better turn to, now?’ said the Captain with a heartless jeer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Shut us up again, will ye!’ cried Steelkilt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Oh certainly,’ said the Captain, and the key clicked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of seven
+ of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had last
+ hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as black as the
+ bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two
+ Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of their
+ hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with their keen
+ mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a handle at each
+ end) run amuck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any
+ devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship. For himself, he
+ would do this, he said, whether they joined him or not. That was the last
+ night he should spend in that den. But the scheme met with no opposition
+ on the part of the other two; they swore they were ready for that, or for
+ any other mad thing, for anything in short but a surrender. And what was
+ more, they each insisted upon being the first man on deck, when the time
+ to make the rush should come. But to this their leader as fiercely
+ objected, reserving that priority for himself; particularly as his two
+ comrades would not yield, the one to the other, in the matter; and both of
+ them could not be first, for the ladder would but admit one man at a time.
+ And here, gentlemen, the foul play of these miscreants must come out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Upon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own
+ separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the same piece of
+ treachery, namely: to be foremost in breaking out, in order to be the
+ first of the three, though the last of the ten, to surrender; and thereby
+ secure whatever small chance of pardon such conduct might merit. But when
+ Steelkilt made known his determination still to lead them to the last,
+ they in some way, by some subtle chemistry of villany, mixed their before
+ secret treacheries together; and when their leader fell into a doze,
+ verbally opened their souls to each other in three sentences; and bound
+ the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords; and shrieked out for
+ the Captain at midnight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood, he and
+ all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle. In a few
+ minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand and foot, the still
+ struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his perfidious allies,
+ who at once claimed the honor of securing a man who had been fully ripe
+ for murder. But all these were collared, and dragged along the deck like
+ dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized up into the mizzen rigging,
+ like three quarters of meat, and there they hung till morning. ‘Damn ye,’
+ cried the Captain, pacing to and fro before them, ‘the vultures would not
+ touch ye, ye villains!’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled
+ from those who had taken no part in the mutiny, he told the former that he
+ had a good mind to flog them all round—thought, upon the whole, he
+ would do so—he ought to—justice demanded it; but for the
+ present, considering their timely surrender, he would let them go with a
+ reprimand, which he accordingly administered in the vernacular.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘But as for you, ye carrion rogues,’ turning to the three men in the
+ rigging—‘for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots;’ and,
+ seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of the two
+ traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their heads
+ sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘My wrist is sprained with ye!’ he cried, at last; ‘but there is still
+ rope enough left for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn’t give up. Take that
+ gag from his mouth, and let us hear what he can say for himself.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For a moment the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous motion of his
+ cramped jaws, and then painfully twisting round his head, said in a sort
+ of hiss, ‘What I say is this—and mind it well—if you flog me,
+ I murder you!’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Say ye so? then see how ye frighten me’—and the Captain drew off
+ with the rope to strike.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Best not,’ hissed the Lakeman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘But I must,’—and the rope was once more drawn back for the stroke.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the Captain;
+ who, to the amazement of all hands, started back, paced the deck rapidly
+ two or three times, and then suddenly throwing down his rope, said, ‘I
+ won’t do it—let him go—cut him down: d’ye hear?’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But as the junior mates were hurrying to execute the order, a pale man,
+ with a bandaged head, arrested them—Radney the chief mate. Ever
+ since the blow, he had lain in his berth; but that morning, hearing the
+ tumult on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had watched the whole
+ scene. Such was the state of his mouth, that he could hardly speak; but
+ mumbling something about his being willing and able to do what the captain
+ dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and advanced to his pinioned foe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘You are a coward!’ hissed the Lakeman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘So I am, but take that.’ The mate was in the very act of striking, when
+ another hiss stayed his uplifted arm. He paused: and then pausing no more,
+ made good his word, spite of Steelkilt’s threat, whatever that might have
+ been. The three men were then cut down, all hands were turned to, and,
+ sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the iron pumps clanged as before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired below, a clamor was
+ heard in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors running up,
+ besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not consort with the crew.
+ Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, so at their own
+ instance they were put down in the ship’s run for salvation. Still, no
+ sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On the contrary, it seemed, that
+ mainly at Steelkilt’s instigation, they had resolved to maintain the
+ strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the last, and, when the ship
+ reached port, desert her in a body. But in order to insure the speediest
+ end to the voyage, they all agreed to another thing—namely, not to
+ sing out for whales, in case any should be discovered. For, spite of her
+ leak, and spite of all her other perils, the Town-Ho still maintained her
+ mast-heads, and her captain was just as willing to lower for a fish that
+ moment, as on the day his craft first struck the cruising ground; and
+ Radney the mate was quite as ready to change his berth for a boat, and
+ with his bandaged mouth seek to gag in death the vital jaw of the whale.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of
+ passiveness in their conduct, he kept his own counsel (at least till all
+ was over) concerning his own proper and private revenge upon the man who
+ had stung him in the ventricles of his heart. He was in Radney the chief
+ mate’s watch; and as if the infatuated man sought to run more than half
+ way to meet his doom, after the scene at the rigging, he insisted, against
+ the express counsel of the captain, upon resuming the head of his watch at
+ night. Upon this, and one or two other circumstances, Steelkilt
+ systematically built the plan of his revenge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the
+ bulwarks of the quarter-deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of the
+ boat which was hoisted up there, a little above the ship’s side. In this
+ attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a considerable
+ vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down between this was the sea.
+ Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his next trick at the helm
+ would come round at two o’clock, in the morning of the third day from that
+ in which he had been betrayed. At his leisure, he employed the interval in
+ braiding something very carefully in his watches below.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘What are you making there?’ said a shipmate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘What do you think? what does it look like?’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Like a lanyard for your bag; but it’s an odd one, seems to me.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Yes, rather oddish,’ said the Lakeman, holding it at arm’s length before
+ him; ‘but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven’t enough twine,—have
+ you any?’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But there was none in the forecastle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Then I must get some from old Rad;’ and he rose to go aft.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘You don’t mean to go a begging to him! ’ said a sailor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Why not? Do you think he won’t do me a turn, when it’s to help himself
+ in the end, shipmate?’ and going to the mate, he looked at him quietly,
+ and asked him for some twine to mend his hammock. It was given him—neither
+ twine nor lanyard were seen again; but the next night an iron ball,
+ closely netted, partly rolled from the pocket of the Lakeman’s monkey
+ jacket, as he was tucking the coat into his hammock for a pillow.
+ Twenty-four hours after, his trick at the silent helm—nigh to the
+ man who was apt to doze over the grave always ready dug to the seaman’s
+ hand—that fatal hour was then to come; and in the fore-ordaining
+ soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already stark and stretched as a corpse,
+ with his forehead crushed in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody deed
+ he had planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and without being the
+ avenger. For by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in to
+ take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he would have done.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second
+ day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man,
+ drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out, ‘There she
+ rolls! there she rolls!’ Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Moby Dick!’ cried Don Sebastian; ‘St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do whales
+ have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;—but
+ that would be too long a story.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘How? how?’ cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Nay, Dons, Dons—nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get
+ more into the air, Sirs.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘The chicha! the chicha!’ cried Don Pedro; ‘our vigorous friend looks
+ faint;—fill up his empty glass!’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.—Now, gentlemen, so
+ suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the ship—forgetful
+ of the compact among the crew—in the excitement of the moment, the
+ Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily lifted his voice for the
+ monster, though for some little time past it had been plainly beheld from
+ the three sullen mast-heads. All was now a phrensy. ‘The White Whale—the
+ White Whale!’ was the cry from captain, mates, and harpooneers, who,
+ undeterred by fearful rumours, were all anxious to capture so famous and
+ precious a fish; while the dogged crew eyed askance, and with curses, the
+ appalling beauty of the vast milky mass, that lit up by a horizontal
+ spangling sun, shifted and glistened like a living opal in the blue
+ morning sea. Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career of
+ these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted.
+ The mutineer was the bowsman of the mate, and when fast to a fish, it was
+ his duty to sit next him, while Radney stood up with his lance in the
+ prow, and haul in or slacken the line, at the word of command. Moreover,
+ when the four boats were lowered, the mate’s got the start; and none
+ howled more fiercely with delight than did Steelkilt, as he strained at
+ his oar. After a stiff pull, their harpooneer got fast, and, spear in
+ hand, Radney sprang to the bow. He was always a furious man, it seems, in
+ a boat. And now his bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale’s topmost
+ back. Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a blinding
+ foam that blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat struck
+ as against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing
+ mate. That instant, as he fell on the whale’s slippery back, the boat
+ righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over
+ into the sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the
+ spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly
+ seeking to remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed
+ round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws; and
+ rearing high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Meantime, at the first tap of the boat’s bottom, the Lakeman had
+ slackened the line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly
+ looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a sudden, terrific, downward
+ jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line. He cut it; and
+ the whale was free. But, at some distance, Moby Dick rose again, with some
+ tatters of Radney’s red woollen shirt, caught in the teeth that had
+ destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but the whale eluded them,
+ and finally wholly disappeared.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port—a savage, solitary place—where
+ no civilized creature resided. There, headed by the Lakeman, all but five
+ or six of the foremastmen deliberately deserted among the palms;
+ eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large double war-canoe of the
+ savages, and setting sail for some other harbor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The ship’s company being reduced to but a handful, the captain called
+ upon the Islanders to assist him in the laborious business of heaving down
+ the ship to stop the leak. But to such unresting vigilance over their
+ dangerous allies was this small band of whites necessitated, both by night
+ and by day, and so extreme was the hard work they underwent, that upon the
+ vessel being ready again for sea, they were in such a weakened condition
+ that the captain durst not put off with them in so heavy a vessel. After
+ taking counsel with his officers, he anchored the ship as far off shore as
+ possible; loaded and ran out his two cannon from the bows; stacked his
+ muskets on the poop; and warning the Islanders not to approach the ship at
+ their peril, took one man with him, and setting the sail of his best
+ whale-boat, steered straight before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred
+ miles distant, to procure a reinforcement to his crew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed
+ to have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from it; but the
+ savage craft bore down on him; and soon the voice of Steelkilt hailed him
+ to heave to, or he would run him under water. The captain presented a
+ pistol. With one foot on each prow of the yoked war-canoes, the Lakeman
+ laughed him to scorn; assuring him that if the pistol so much as clicked
+ in the lock, he would bury him in bubbles and foam.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘What do you want of me?’ cried the captain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?’ demanded Steelkilt;
+ ‘no lies.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘I am bound to Tahiti for more men.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Very good. Let me board you a moment—I come in peace.’ With that
+ he leaped from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale,
+ stood face to face with the captain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me. As
+ soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder island,
+ and remain there six days. If I do not, may lightnings strike me!’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘A pretty scholar,’ laughed the Lakeman. ‘Adios, Senor!’ and leaping into
+ the sea, he swam back to his comrades.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the roots
+ of the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in due time arrived
+ at Tahiti, his own place of destination. There, luck befriended him; two
+ ships were about to sail for France, and were providentially in want of
+ precisely that number of men which the sailor headed. They embarked; and
+ so for ever got the start of their former captain, had he been at all
+ minded to work them legal retribution.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived, and
+ the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized Tahitians, who
+ had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small native schooner, he
+ returned with them to his vessel; and finding all right there, again
+ resumed his cruisings.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of
+ Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to
+ give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that
+ destroyed him. * * * *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Are you through?’ said Don Sebastian, quietly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘I am, Don.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions, this
+ your story is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful! Did
+ you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me if I seem to
+ press.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don Sebastian’s
+ suit,’ cried the company, with exceeding interest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentlemen?’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Nay,’ said Don Sebastian; ‘but I know a worthy priest near by, who will
+ quickly procure one for me. I go for it; but are you well advised? this
+ may grow too serious.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Will you be so good as to bring the priest also, Don?’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Though there are no Auto-da-Fés in Lima now,’ said one of the company
+ to another; ‘I fear our sailor friend runs risk of the archiepiscopacy.
+ Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight. I see no need of this.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg that
+ you will be particular in procuring the largest sized Evangelists you
+ can.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * * * * * *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,’ said Don Sebastian,
+ gravely, returning with a tall and solemn figure.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the light, and
+ hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘So help me Heaven, and on my honor the story I have told ye, gentlemen,
+ is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be true; it
+ happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I have seen and
+ talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
+ 
+ 
+ I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something
+ like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the
+ whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside the
+ whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there. It may be worth
+ while, therefore, previously to advert to those curious imaginary
+ portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge
+ the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the world right in this
+ matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will be
+ found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For ever
+ since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble panellings
+ of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields, medallions, cups,
+ and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of chain-armor like Saladin’s,
+ and a helmeted head like St. George’s; ever since then has something of
+ the same sort of license prevailed, not only in most popular pictures of
+ the whale, but in many scientific presentations of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to
+ be the whale’s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta,
+ in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of
+ that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable
+ avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came
+ into being. No wonder then, that in some sort our noble profession of
+ whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale referred
+ to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the incarnation
+ of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse Avatar.
+ But though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to give
+ the tail of the latter, yet that small section of him is all wrong. It
+ looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad palms of
+ the true whale’s majestic flukes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter’s
+ portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the antediluvian
+ Hindoo. It is Guido’s picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the
+ sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange
+ creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his own
+ “Perseus Descending,” make out one whit better. The huge corpulence of
+ that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface, scarcely drawing one
+ inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its back, and its distended
+ tusked mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be taken for the
+ Traitors’ Gate leading from the Thames by water into the Tower. Then,
+ there are the Prodromus whales of old Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah’s whale,
+ as depicted in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers. What
+ shall be said of these? As for the book-binder’s whale winding like a
+ vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor—as stamped and
+ gilded on the backs and title-pages of many books both old and new—that
+ is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it,
+ from the like figures on antique vases. Though universally denominated a
+ dolphin, I nevertheless call this book-binder’s fish an attempt at a
+ whale; because it was so intended when the device was first introduced. It
+ was introduced by an old Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th
+ century, during the Revival of Learning; and in those days, and even down
+ to a comparatively late period, dolphins were popularly supposed to be a
+ species of the Leviathan.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will
+ at times meet with very curious touches at the whale, where all manner of
+ spouts, jets d’eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden, come
+ bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the original
+ edition of the “Advancement of Learning” you will find some curious
+ whales.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those
+ pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations, by
+ those who know. In old Harris’s collection of voyages there are some
+ plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671,
+ entitled “A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale,
+ Peter Peterson of Friesland, master.” In one of those plates the whales,
+ like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles, with
+ white bears running over their living backs. In another plate, the
+ prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale with perpendicular
+ flukes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett, a
+ Post Captain in the English navy, entitled “A Voyage round Cape Horn into
+ the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale
+ Fisheries.” In this book is an outline purporting to be a “Picture of a
+ Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the coast
+ of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck.” I doubt not the captain had
+ this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines. To mention
+ but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which applied,
+ according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm whale, would
+ make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet long. Ah, my
+ gallant captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the
+ benefit of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of
+ mistake. Look at that popular work “Goldsmith’s Animated Nature.” In the
+ abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged “whale”
+ and a “narwhale.” I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly
+ whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale, one
+ glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century such
+ a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent public of
+ schoolboys.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacépède, a great
+ naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are
+ several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All these are
+ not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland whale
+ (that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a long experienced man
+ as touching that species, declares not to have its counterpart in nature.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was
+ reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron.
+ In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives what
+ he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that picture to any
+ Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket.
+ In a word, Frederick Cuvier’s Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a
+ squash. Of course, he never had the benefit of a whaling voyage (such men
+ seldom have), but whence he derived that picture, who can tell? Perhaps he
+ got it as his scientific predecessor in the same field, Desmarest, got one
+ of his authentic abortions; that is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort
+ of lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and
+ saucers inform us.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As for the sign-painters’ whales seen in the streets hanging over the
+ shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally
+ Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting
+ on three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners: their
+ deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very
+ surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been
+ taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing
+ of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent the noble
+ animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though
+ elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has
+ never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale, in
+ his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in
+ unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like
+ a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing
+ eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so
+ as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not to speak of
+ the highly presumable difference of contour between a young sucking whale
+ and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of
+ those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship’s deck, such is then the
+ outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise
+ expression the devil himself could not catch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale,
+ accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it
+ is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton
+ gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham’s
+ skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his
+ executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old
+ gentleman, with all Jeremy’s other leading personal characteristics; yet
+ nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan’s articulated
+ bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale
+ bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded animal as the
+ insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it. This
+ peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part of this
+ book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously displayed in
+ the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the
+ human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers,
+ the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But all these are permanently
+ lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human fingers in an artificial
+ covering. “However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us,” said
+ humorous Stubb one day, “he can never be truly said to handle us without
+ mittens.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs
+ conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which
+ must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark
+ much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable
+ degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely
+ what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can
+ derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling
+ yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove
+ and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too
+ fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes.
+ 
+ 
+ In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly tempted
+ here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them which are to
+ be found in certain books, both ancient and modern, especially in Pliny,
+ Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass that matter by.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale;
+ Colnett’s, Huggins’s, Frederick Cuvier’s, and Beale’s. In the previous
+ chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins’s is far better
+ than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale’s is the best. All Beale’s drawings
+ of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in the picture of
+ three whales in various attitudes, capping his second chapter. His
+ frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt calculated to
+ excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is admirably correct and
+ life-like in its general effect. Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J.
+ Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they are wretchedly
+ engraved. That is not his fault though.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they
+ are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression. He has
+ but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency, because
+ it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you can derive
+ anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his living
+ hunters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details not
+ the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be
+ anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed, and taken
+ from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent attacks on the
+ Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble Sperm Whale is
+ depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath the boat from the
+ profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the air upon his back the
+ terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of the boat is partially
+ unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the monster’s spine; and
+ standing in that prow, for that one single incomputable flash of time, you
+ behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the incensed boiling spout of the
+ whale, and in the act of leaping, as if from a precipice. The action of
+ the whole thing is wonderfully good and true. The half-emptied line-tub
+ floats on the whitened sea; the wooden poles of the spilled harpoons
+ obliquely bob in it; the heads of the swimming crew are scattered about
+ the whale in contrasting expressions of affright; while in the black
+ stormy distance the ship is bearing down upon the scene. Serious fault
+ might be found with the anatomical details of this whale, but let that
+ pass; since, for the life of me, I could not draw so good a one.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside the
+ barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black weedy
+ bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian cliffs. His
+ jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so that from so abounding a
+ smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave supper cooking
+ in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs,
+ shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale
+ sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while the
+ thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of
+ tumultuous white curds in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock in
+ the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer.
+ Thus, the foreground is all raging commotion; but behind, in admirable
+ artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping
+ unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead
+ whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from
+ the whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he was
+ either practically conversant with his subject, or else marvellously
+ tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the lads for painting
+ action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe, and where will you
+ find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in
+ that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder fights his way,
+ pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of France; where every
+ sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the successive armed kings
+ and Emperors dash by, like a charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly
+ unworthy of a place in that gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of
+ Garnery.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of
+ things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings
+ they have of their whaling scenes. With not one tenth of England’s
+ experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of the
+ Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only
+ finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of the whale
+ hunt. For the most part, the English and American whale draughtsmen seem
+ entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline of things, such as
+ the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as picturesqueness of
+ effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketching the profile of a
+ pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right whaleman, after giving
+ us a stiff full length of the Greenland whale, and three or four delicate
+ miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats us to a series of classical
+ engravings of boat hooks, chopping knives, and grapnels; and with the
+ microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck submits to the inspection of a
+ shivering world ninety-six fac-similes of magnified Arctic snow crystals.
+ I mean no disparagement to the excellent voyager (I honor him for a
+ veteran), but in so important a matter it was certainly an oversight not
+ to have procured for every crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a
+ Greenland Justice of the Peace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other
+ French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself “H.
+ Durand.” One of them, though not precisely adapted to our present purpose,
+ nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts. It is a quiet noon-scene
+ among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler anchored, inshore, in a
+ calm, and lazily taking water on board; the loosened sails of the ship,
+ and the long leaves of the palms in the background, both drooping together
+ in the breezeless air. The effect is very fine, when considered with
+ reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen under one of their few
+ aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving is quite a different
+ affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the very heart of the
+ Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the vessel (in the act of
+ cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a quay; and a boat,
+ hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, is about giving chase
+ to whales in the distance. The harpoons and lances lie levelled for use;
+ three oarsmen are just setting the mast in its hole; while from a sudden
+ roll of the sea, the little craft stands half-erect out of the water, like
+ a rearing horse. From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling
+ whale is going up like the smoke over a village of smithies; and to
+ windward, a black cloud, rising up with earnest of squalls and rains,
+ seems to quicken the activity of the excited seamen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.
+ 
+ 
+ On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a
+ crippled beggar (or kedger , as the sailors say) holding a painted board
+ before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg. There
+ are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed to
+ contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being crunched
+ by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years, they tell me,
+ has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that stump to an
+ incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now come. His
+ three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping, at any
+ rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in the
+ western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a
+ stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, stands
+ ruefully contemplating his own amputation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag
+ Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and whaling-scenes,
+ graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies’ busks
+ wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and other like skrimshander articles,
+ as the whalemen call the numerous little ingenious contrivances they
+ elaborately carve out of the rough material, in their hours of ocean
+ leisure. Some of them have little boxes of dentistical-looking implements,
+ specially intended for the skrimshandering business. But, in general, they
+ toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool
+ of the sailor, they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a
+ mariner’s fancy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to
+ that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your
+ true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a
+ savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready
+ at any moment to rebel against him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic
+ hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-club
+ or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is
+ as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but
+ a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark’s tooth, that miraculous intricacy of
+ wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has cost steady years of steady
+ application.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the
+ same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark’s tooth, of his
+ one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite
+ as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as the
+ Greek savage, Achilles’s shield; and full of barbaric spirit and
+ suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the
+ noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles of
+ American whalers. Some of them are done with much accuracy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung by
+ the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is sleepy,
+ the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking whales are seldom
+ remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some old-fashioned
+ churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weather-cocks;
+ but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes
+ so labelled with “ Hands off! ” you cannot examine them closely enough to
+ decide upon their merit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken
+ cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain,
+ you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the Leviathan
+ partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in a surf
+ of green surges.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually
+ girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky point
+ of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined
+ along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough whaleman, to see
+ these sights; and not only that, but if you wish to return to such a sight
+ again, you must be sure and take the exact intersecting latitude and
+ longitude of your first stand-point, else so chance-like are such
+ observations of the hills, that your precise, previous stand-point would
+ require a laborious re-discovery; like the Soloma Islands, which still
+ remain incognita, though once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old
+ Figuera chronicled them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out
+ great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when
+ long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked in
+ battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round
+ and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first
+ defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have
+ boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far
+ beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for
+ spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see
+ whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie
+ encamped beyond my mortal sight!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 58. Brit.
+ 
+ 
+ Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of
+ brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely
+ feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to
+ be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the
+ attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly swam
+ through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous
+ Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated from the
+ water that escaped at the lip.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their
+ scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters
+ swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them
+ endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.*
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *That part of the sea known among whalemen as the “Brazil Banks” does not
+ bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there being
+ shallows and soundings there, but because of this remarkable meadow-like
+ appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit continually floating in
+ those latitudes, where the Right Whale is often chased.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all
+ reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they
+ paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked more
+ like lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in the great
+ hunting countries of India, the stranger at a distance will sometimes pass
+ on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing them to be such, taking
+ them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil; even so, often, with him,
+ who for the first time beholds this species of the leviathans of the sea.
+ And even when recognised at last, their immense magnitude renders it very
+ hard really to believe that such bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly
+ be instinct, in all parts, with the same sort of life that lives in a dog
+ or a horse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the deep
+ with the same feelings that you do those of the shore. For though some old
+ naturalists have maintained that all creatures of the land are of their
+ kind in the sea; and though taking a broad general view of the thing, this
+ may very well be; yet coming to specialties, where, for example, does the
+ ocean furnish any fish that in disposition answers to the sagacious
+ kindness of the dog? The accursed shark alone can in any generic respect
+ be said to bear comparative analogy to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas
+ have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling;
+ though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that
+ Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one
+ superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all
+ mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and
+ hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a
+ moment’s consideration will teach, that however baby man may brag of his
+ science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science
+ and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom,
+ the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest
+ frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these
+ very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea
+ which aboriginally belongs to it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese
+ vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow.
+ That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships of
+ last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two
+ thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a
+ miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews,
+ when under the feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened and
+ swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in
+ precisely the same manner the live sea swallows up ships and crews.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is
+ also a fiend to its own off-spring; worse than the Persian host who
+ murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath
+ spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own
+ cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and
+ leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy,
+ no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle
+ steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide
+ under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden
+ beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish
+ brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the
+ dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more,
+ the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each
+ other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile
+ earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a
+ strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean
+ surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular
+ Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the
+ half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst
+ never return!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 59. Squid.
+ 
+ 
+ Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her
+ way north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling her
+ keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall tapering masts
+ mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a plain. And
+ still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely, alluring jet
+ would be seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural
+ spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the
+ long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across
+ them, enjoining some secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered together
+ as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a
+ strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and
+ higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before
+ our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening for a
+ moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose, and
+ silently gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick?
+ thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down, but on re-appearing once
+ more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man from his nod, the
+ negro yelled out—“There! there again! there she breaches! right
+ ahead! The White Whale, the White Whale!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the
+ bees rush to the boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on the
+ bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind in readiness to wave his
+ orders to the helmsman, cast his eager glance in the direction indicated
+ aloft by the outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had
+ gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the
+ ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the particular whale
+ he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed him;
+ whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly perceive the
+ white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave orders for
+ lowering.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab’s in advance, and all swiftly
+ pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with oars
+ suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same spot where
+ it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for the moment all
+ thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which
+ the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass,
+ furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating
+ on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling
+ and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any
+ hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no
+ conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on
+ the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still
+ gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice
+ exclaimed—“Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than
+ to have seen thee, thou white ghost!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What was it, Sir?” said Flask.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and
+ returned to their ports to tell of it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel; the
+ rest as silently following.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with
+ the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being so
+ very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with
+ portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them
+ declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few of
+ them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and
+ form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale his
+ only food. For though other species of whales find their food above water,
+ and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains
+ his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and only by inference
+ is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that food consists. At
+ times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what are supposed to be the
+ detached arms of the squid; some of them thus exhibited exceeding twenty
+ and thirty feet in length. They fancy that the monster to which these arms
+ belonged ordinarily clings by them to the bed of the ocean; and that the
+ sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied with teeth in order to
+ attack and tear it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop
+ Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in which
+ the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with some
+ other particulars he narrates, in all this the two correspond. But much
+ abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he assigns it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious
+ creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of cuttle-fish,
+ to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to belong,
+ but only as the Anak of the tribe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 60. The Line.
+ 
+ 
+ With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as
+ for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented, I
+ have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly
+ vapored with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary
+ ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable to
+ the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to the
+ sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary quantity too
+ much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which it must be
+ subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general by no
+ means adds to the rope’s durability or strength, however much it may give
+ it compactness and gloss.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely
+ superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable
+ as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and I will add
+ (since there is an æsthetics in all things), is much more handsome and
+ becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of
+ Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight,
+ you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment its one
+ and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and twenty
+ pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal to three
+ tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line measures something over two
+ hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally coiled away
+ in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so as to form
+ one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded “sheaves,” or layers of
+ concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the “heart,” or minute
+ vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least tangle or
+ kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody’s arm,
+ leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line
+ in its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this
+ business, carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards
+ through a block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it
+ from all possible wrinkles and twists.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the English boats two tubs are used instead of one; the same line being
+ continuously coiled in both tubs. There is some advantage in this; because
+ these twin-tubs being so small they fit more readily into the boat, and do
+ not strain it so much; whereas, the American tub, nearly three feet in
+ diameter and of proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky freight for a
+ craft whose planks are but one half-inch in thickness; for the bottom of
+ the whale-boat is like critical ice, which will bear up a considerable
+ distributed weight, but not very much of a concentrated one. When the
+ painted canvas cover is clapped on the American line-tub, the boat looks
+ as if it were pulling off with a prodigious great wedding-cake to present
+ to the whales.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an
+ eye-splice or loop coming up from the bottom against the side of the tub,
+ and hanging over its edge completely disengaged from everything. This
+ arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. First: In order
+ to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a neighboring
+ boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so deep as to threaten to
+ carry off the entire line originally attached to the harpoon. In these
+ instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug of ale, as it were,
+ from the one boat to the other; though the first boat always hovers at
+ hand to assist its consort. Second: This arrangement is indispensable for
+ common safety’s sake; for were the lower end of the line in any way
+ attached to the boat, and were the whale then to run the line out to the
+ end almost in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not
+ stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him
+ into the profundity of the sea; and in that case no town-crier would ever
+ find her again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is taken
+ aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again carried
+ forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon the loom or
+ handle of every man’s oar, so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing;
+ and also passing between the men, as they alternately sit at the opposite
+ gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of
+ the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a common quill,
+ prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs in a slight
+ festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some
+ ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the box in the
+ bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a little further aft, and
+ is then attached to the short-warp—the rope which is immediately
+ connected with the harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the short-warp
+ goes through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils,
+ twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen
+ are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid eye of the
+ landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest snakes
+ sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal woman, for
+ the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies, and while
+ straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any unknown instant
+ the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible contortions be put in
+ play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus circumstanced without a
+ shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones to quiver in him like a
+ shaken jelly. Yet habit—strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?—Gayer
+ sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never
+ heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch white
+ cedar of the whale-boat, when thus hung in hangman’s nooses; and, like the
+ six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men composing the crew
+ pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you may
+ say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for those
+ repeated whaling disasters—some few of which are casually chronicled—of
+ this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the line, and lost.
+ For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat, is like
+ being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in
+ full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you.
+ It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils,
+ because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and
+ the other, without the slightest warning; and only by a certain
+ self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action, can
+ you escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all-seeing
+ sun himself could never pierce you out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies
+ of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed,
+ the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in
+ itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the
+ ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it
+ silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual
+ play—this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any
+ other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live
+ enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but
+ it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals
+ realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a
+ philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel
+ one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with
+ a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.
+ 
+ 
+ If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to
+ Queequeg it was quite a different object.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When you see him ’quid,” said the savage, honing his harpoon in the bow
+ of his hoisted boat, “then you quick see him ’parm whale.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to
+ engage them, the Pequod’s crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep
+ induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean through
+ which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground;
+ that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish,
+ and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the
+ Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders
+ leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in
+ what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that
+ dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body;
+ though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the
+ power which first moved it is withdrawn.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen
+ at the main and mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last all
+ three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing that we
+ made there was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman. The waves,
+ too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance of the sea,
+ east nodded to west, and the sun over all.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my
+ hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me;
+ with a shock I came back to life. And lo! close under our lee, not forty
+ fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the
+ capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue,
+ glistening in the sun’s rays like a mirror. But lazily undulating in the
+ trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his vapory jet,
+ the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm
+ afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by some
+ enchanter’s wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once
+ started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts
+ of the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted
+ forth the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted
+ the sparkling brine into the air.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Clear away the boats! Luff!” cried Ahab. And obeying his own order, he
+ dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the spokes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere
+ the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward,
+ but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he swam,
+ that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave orders
+ that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers. So
+ seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats, we swiftly but
+ silently paddled along; the calm not admitting of the noiseless sails
+ being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the monster
+ perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then sank
+ out of sight like a tower swallowed up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There go flukes!” was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by
+ Stubb’s producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite was
+ granted. After the full interval of his sounding had elapsed, the whale
+ rose again, and being now in advance of the smoker’s boat, and much nearer
+ to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the honor of the
+ capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length become aware of
+ his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was therefore no longer of use.
+ Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play. And still puffing at
+ his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the assault.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy, he
+ was going “head out”; that part obliquely projecting from the mad yeast
+ which he brewed.*
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the
+ entire interior of the sperm whale’s enormous head consists. Though
+ apparently the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about him.
+ So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does so when
+ going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the upper part
+ of the front of his head, and such the tapering cut-water formation of the
+ lower part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he thereby may be said
+ to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish galliot into a
+ sharppointed New York pilot-boat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Start her, start her, my men! Don’t hurry yourselves; take plenty of time—but
+ start her; start her like thunder-claps, that’s all,” cried Stubb,
+ spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. “Start her, now; give ’em the long
+ and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my boy—start her, all;
+ but keep cool, keep cool—cucumbers is the word—easy, easy—only
+ start her like grim death and grinning devils, and raise the buried dead
+ perpendicular out of their graves, boys—that’s all. Start her!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!” screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some old
+ war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat
+ involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous leading stroke which
+ the eager Indian gave.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. “Kee-hee!
+ Kee-hee!” yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat,
+ like a pacing tiger in his cage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ka-la! Koo-loo!” howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a mouthful
+ of Grenadier’s steak. And thus with oars and yells the keels cut the sea.
+ Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the van, still encouraged his men
+ to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke from his mouth. Like
+ desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the welcome cry was heard—“Stand
+ up, Tashtego!—give it to him!” The harpoon was hurled. “Stern all!”
+ The oarsmen backed water; the same moment something went hot and hissing
+ along every one of their wrists. It was the magical line. An instant
+ before, Stubb had swiftly caught two additional turns with it round the
+ loggerhead, whence, by reason of its increased rapid circlings, a hempen
+ blue smoke now jetted up and mingled with the steady fumes from his pipe.
+ As the line passed round and round the loggerhead; so also, just before
+ reaching that point, it blisteringly passed through and through both of
+ Stubb’s hands, from which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas
+ sometimes worn at these times, had accidentally dropped. It was like
+ holding an enemy’s sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all
+ the time striving to wrest it out of your clutch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wet the line! wet the line!” cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated
+ by the tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed sea-water into it.* More
+ turns were taken, so that the line began holding its place. The boat now
+ flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins. Stubb and Tashtego
+ here changed places—stem for stern—a staggering business truly
+ in that rocking commotion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be stated,
+ that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the running line
+ with water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or bailer, is set apart
+ for that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most convenient.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper part of
+ the boat, and from its now being more tight than a harpstring, you would
+ have thought the craft had two keels—one cleaving the water, the
+ other the air—as the boat churned on through both opposing elements
+ at once. A continual cascade played at the bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy
+ in her wake; and, at the slightest motion from within, even but of a
+ little finger, the vibrating, cracking craft canted over her spasmodic
+ gunwale into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man with might and main
+ clinging to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the foam; and the tall
+ form of Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost double, in order to
+ bring down his centre of gravity. Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed
+ passed as they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat
+ slackened his flight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Haul in—haul in!” cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round
+ towards the whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while yet
+ the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly
+ planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the
+ flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning out of
+ the way of the whale’s horrible wallow, and then ranging up for another
+ fling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a
+ hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled
+ and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing
+ upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every
+ face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men. And all the
+ while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the spiracle
+ of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of the excited
+ headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked lance (by the line
+ attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and again, by a few rapid
+ blows against the gunwale, then again and again sent it into the whale.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pull up—pull up!” he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale
+ relaxed in his wrath. “Pull up!—close to!” and the boat ranged along
+ the fish’s flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned his
+ long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and
+ churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the
+ whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of breaking ere he
+ could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of
+ the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting from his trance into that
+ unspeakable thing called his “flurry,” the monster horribly wallowed in
+ his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so
+ that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly
+ to struggle out from that phrensied twilight into the clear air of the
+ day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view;
+ surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his
+ spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush
+ after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red
+ wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping
+ down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s dead, Mr. Stubb,” said Daggoo.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes; both pipes smoked out!” and withdrawing his own from his mouth,
+ Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood
+ thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 62. The Dart.
+ 
+ 
+ A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes
+ off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary
+ steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost oar,
+ the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong, nervous arm to
+ strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in what is called a long
+ dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the distance of twenty or
+ thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase, the
+ harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost; indeed,
+ he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not
+ only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations;
+ and what it is to keep shouting at the top of one’s compass, while all the
+ other muscles are strained and half started—what that is none know
+ but those who have tried it. For one, I cannot bawl very heartily and work
+ very recklessly at one and the same time. In this straining, bawling
+ state, then, with his back to the fish, all at once the exhausted
+ harpooneer hears the exciting cry—“Stand up, and give it to him!” He
+ now has to drop and secure his oar, turn round on his centre half way,
+ seize his harpoon from the crotch, and with what little strength may
+ remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the whale. No wonder, taking
+ the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty fair chances for
+ a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so many hapless
+ harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some of them
+ actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm
+ whalemen are absent four years with four barrels; no wonder that to many
+ ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the harpooneer
+ that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can
+ you expect to find it there when most wanted!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant,
+ that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer
+ likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of
+ themselves and every one else. It is then they change places; and the
+ headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes his proper station
+ in the bows of the boat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish
+ and unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from first to last;
+ he should both dart the harpoon and the lance, and no rowing whatever
+ should be expected of him, except under circumstances obvious to any
+ fisherman. I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss of speed
+ in the chase; but long experience in various whalemen of more than one
+ nation has convinced me that in the vast majority of failures in the
+ fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale as
+ the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this
+ world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of
+ toil.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.
+ 
+ 
+ Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in
+ productive subjects, grow the chapters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention. It
+ is a notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which is
+ perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow, for the
+ purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the harpoon,
+ whose other naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the prow. Thereby
+ the weapon is instantly at hand to its hurler, who snatches it up as
+ readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his rifle from the wall. It
+ is customary to have two harpoons reposing in the crotch, respectively
+ called the first and second irons.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with the
+ line; the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one instantly
+ after the other into the same whale; so that if, in the coming drag, one
+ should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It is a doubling of
+ the chances. But it very often happens that owing to the instantaneous,
+ violent, convulsive running of the whale upon receiving the first iron, it
+ becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however lightning-like in his
+ movements, to pitch the second iron into him. Nevertheless, as the second
+ iron is already connected with the line, and the line is running, hence
+ that weapon must, at all events, be anticipatingly tossed out of the boat,
+ somehow and somewhere; else the most terrible jeopardy would involve all
+ hands. Tumbled into the water, it accordingly is in such cases; the spare
+ coils of box line (mentioned in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in
+ most instances, prudently practicable. But this critical act is not always
+ unattended with the saddest and most fatal casualties.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown overboard,
+ it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror, skittishly
+ curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines, or cutting
+ them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions. Nor, in
+ general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is fairly
+ captured and a corpse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging one
+ unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to these qualities
+ in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of such an
+ audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be
+ simultaneously dangling about him. For, of course, each boat is supplied
+ with several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first one be
+ ineffectually darted without recovery. All these particulars are
+ faithfully narrated here, as they will not fail to elucidate several most
+ important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be painted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 64. Stubb’s Supper.
+ 
+ 
+ Stubb’s whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was a calm;
+ so, forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow business of
+ towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen men with our
+ thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers, slowly
+ toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the sea; and it
+ seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long intervals; good evidence was
+ hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass we moved. For, upon the
+ great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they call it, in China, four or five
+ laborers on the foot-path will draw a bulky freighted junk at the rate of
+ a mile an hour; but this grand argosy we towed heavily forged along, as if
+ laden with pig-lead in bulk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod’s
+ main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab
+ dropping one of several more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing
+ the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual orders for securing it
+ for the night, and then handing his lantern to a seaman, went his way into
+ the cabin, and did not come forward again until morning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had evinced
+ his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was dead,
+ some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working in
+ him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet
+ to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship,
+ all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object. Very soon
+ you would have thought from the sound on the Pequod’s decks, that all
+ hands were preparing to cast anchor in the deep; for heavy chains are
+ being dragged along the deck, and thrust rattling out of the port-holes.
+ But by those clanking links, the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is to
+ be moored. Tied by the head to the stern, and by the tail to the bows, the
+ whale now lies with its black hull close to the vessel’s and seen through
+ the darkness of the night, which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the
+ two—ship and whale, seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks,
+ whereof one reclines while the other remains standing.*
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most
+ reliable hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside, is
+ by the flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that part is
+ relatively heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its
+ flexibility even in death, causes it to sink low beneath the surface; so
+ that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in order to put the
+ chain round it. But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a small,
+ strong line is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end, and a weight
+ in its middle, while the other end is secured to the ship. By adroit
+ management the wooden float is made to rise on the other side of the mass,
+ so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily made to follow
+ suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last locked fast round the
+ smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with its broad flukes
+ or lobes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be known on
+ deck, Stubb, his second mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an unusual
+ but still good-natured excitement. Such an unwonted bustle was he in that
+ the staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned to him for the
+ time the sole management of affairs. One small, helping cause of all this
+ liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely manifest. Stubb was a high
+ liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish
+ thing to his palate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut me
+ one from his small!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a general
+ thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the enemy defray
+ the current expenses of the war (at least before realizing the proceeds of
+ the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers who have
+ a genuine relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale designated by
+ Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of the body.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two lanterns
+ of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper at the
+ capstan-head, as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb the only
+ banqueter on whale’s flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings with his
+ own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the
+ dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few sleepers below
+ in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails
+ against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers’ hearts. Peering
+ over the side you could just see them (as before you heard them) wallowing
+ in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their backs as they
+ scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human
+ head. This particular feat of the shark seems all but miraculous. How at
+ such an apparently unassailable surface, they contrive to gouge out such
+ symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the universal problem of all
+ things. The mark they thus leave on the whale, may best be likened to the
+ hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks
+ will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs
+ round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every
+ killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers
+ over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other’s live meat
+ with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their
+ jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the
+ dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it
+ would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking
+ sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the
+ invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic,
+ systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be
+ carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or
+ two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms,
+ places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most
+ hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you
+ will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial
+ spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whaleship at
+ sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about
+ the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the
+ devil.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was going
+ on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his own
+ epicurean lips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cook, cook!—where’s that old Fleece?” he cried at length, widening
+ his legs still further, as if to form a more secure base for his supper;
+ and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing with
+ his lance; “cook, you cook!—sail this way, cook!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously roused
+ from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling along
+ from his galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something the matter
+ with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like his other
+ pans; this old Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and limping
+ along, assisting his step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy fashion,
+ were made of straightened iron hoops; this old Ebony floundered along, and
+ in obedience to the word of command, came to a dead stop on the opposite
+ side of Stubb’s sideboard; when, with both hands folded before him, and
+ resting on his two-legged cane, he bowed his arched back still further
+ over, at the same time sideways inclining his head, so as to bring his
+ best ear into play.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cook,” said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth,
+ “don’t you think this steak is rather overdone? You’ve been beating this
+ steak too much, cook; it’s too tender. Don’t I always say that to be good,
+ a whale-steak must be tough? There are those sharks now over the side,
+ don’t you see they prefer it tough and rare? What a shindy they are
+ kicking up! Cook, go and talk to ’em; tell ’em they are welcome to help
+ themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must keep quiet. Blast me,
+ if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and deliver my message. Here, take
+ this lantern,” snatching one from his sideboard; “now then, go and preach
+ to ’em!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck to
+ the bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light low over the sea,
+ so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the other hand he
+ solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a mumbling
+ voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling behind,
+ overheard all that was said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fellow-critters: I’se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise
+ dare. You hear? Stop dat dam smackin’ ob de lip! Massa Stubb say dat you
+ can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you must stop
+ dat dam racket!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cook,” here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap on
+ the shoulder,—“Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn’t swear that way
+ when you’re preaching. That’s no way to convert sinners, cook!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who dat? Den preach to him yourself,” sullenly turning to go.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, cook; go on, go on.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:”—
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Right!” exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, “coax ’em to it; try that,” and
+ Fleece continued.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you,
+ fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness—’top dat dam slappin’ ob de
+ tail! How you tink to hear, spose you keep up such a dam slappin’ and
+ bitin’ dare?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cook,” cried Stubb, collaring him, “I won’t have that swearing. Talk to
+ ’em gentlemanly.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Once more the sermon proceeded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for;
+ dat is natur, and can’t be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is
+ de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den
+ you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.
+ Now, look here, bred’ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs
+ from dat whale. Don’t be tearin’ de blubber out your neighbour’s
+ mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as toder to dat whale? And, by Gor, none
+ on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else. I
+ know some o’ you has berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig
+ mouts sometimes has de small bellies; so dat de brigness of de mout is not
+ to swaller wid, but to bit off de blubber for de small fry ob sharks, dat
+ can’t get into de scrouge to help demselves.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well done, old Fleece!” cried Stubb, “that’s Christianity; go on.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No use goin’ on; de dam willains will keep a scougin’ and slappin’ each
+ oder, Massa Stubb; dey don’t hear one word; no use a-preachin’ to such dam
+ g’uttons as you call ’em, till dare bellies is full, and dare bellies is
+ bottomless; and when dey do get ’em full, dey wont hear you den; for den
+ dey sink in de sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and can’t hear not’ing
+ at all, no more, for eber and eber.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction,
+ Fleece, and I’ll away to my supper.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his
+ shrill voice, and cried—
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill
+ your dam’ bellies ’till dey bust—and den die.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, cook,” said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; “stand just
+ where you stood before, there, over against me, and pay particular
+ attention.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All dention,” said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the
+ desired position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well,” said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; “I shall now go back
+ to the subject of this steak. In the first place, how old are you, cook?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What dat do wid de ’teak,” said the old black, testily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Silence! How old are you, cook?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “’Bout ninety, dey say,” he gloomily muttered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And you have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook, and
+ don’t know yet how to cook a whale-steak?” rapidly bolting another
+ mouthful at the last word, so that morsel seemed a continuation of the
+ question. “Where were you born, cook?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “’Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin’ ober de Roanoke.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Born in a ferry-boat! That’s queer, too. But I want to know what country
+ you were born in, cook!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Didn’t I say de Roanoke country?” he cried sharply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, you didn’t, cook; but I’ll tell you what I’m coming to, cook. You
+ must go home and be born over again; you don’t know how to cook a
+ whale-steak yet.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bress my soul, if I cook noder one,” he growled, angrily, turning round
+ to depart.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come back, cook;—here, hand me those tongs;—now take
+ that bit of steak there, and tell me if you think that steak cooked as it
+ should be? Take it, I say”—holding the tongs towards him—“take
+ it, and taste it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old negro
+ muttered, “Best cooked ’teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cook,” said Stubb, squaring himself once more; “do you belong to the
+ church?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Passed one once in Cape-Down,” said the old man sullenly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town, where
+ you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his
+ beloved fellow-creatures, have you, cook! And yet you come here, and tell
+ me such a dreadful lie as you did just now, eh?” said Stubb. “Where do you
+ expect to go to, cook?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go to bed berry soon,” he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Avast! heave to! I mean when you die, cook. It’s an awful question. Now
+ what’s your answer?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When dis old brack man dies,” said the negro slowly, changing his whole
+ air and demeanor, “he hisself won’t go nowhere; but some bressed angel
+ will come and fetch him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch
+ him where?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Up dere,” said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, and
+ keeping it there very solemnly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So, then, you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when you
+ are dead? But don’t you know the higher you climb, the colder it gets?
+ Main-top, eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Didn’t say dat t’all,” said Fleece, again in the sulks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You said up there, didn’t you? and now look yourself, and see where your
+ tongs are pointing. But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by crawling
+ through the lubber’s hole, cook; but, no, no, cook, you don’t get there,
+ except you go the regular way, round by the rigging. It’s a ticklish
+ business, but must be done, or else it’s no go. But none of us are in
+ heaven yet. Drop your tongs, cook, and hear my orders. Do ye hear? Hold
+ your hat in one hand, and clap t’other a’top of your heart, when I’m
+ giving my orders, cook. What! that your heart, there?—that’s your
+ gizzard! Aloft! aloft!—that’s it—now you have it. Hold it
+ there now, and pay attention.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All ’dention,” said the old black, with both hands placed as desired,
+ vainly wriggling his grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at one
+ and the same time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad, that
+ I have put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that, don’t you?
+ Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for my private
+ table here, the capstan, I’ll tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by
+ overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the
+ other; that done, dish it; d’ye hear? And now to-morrow, cook, when we are
+ cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by to get the tips of his fins;
+ have them put in pickle. As for the ends of the flukes, have them soused,
+ cook. There, now ye may go.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D’ye
+ hear? away you sail, then.—Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go.—Avast
+ heaving again! Whale-balls for breakfast—don’t forget.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wish, by gor! whale eat him, ’stead of him eat whale. I’m bressed if he
+ ain’t more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself,” muttered the old man,
+ limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.
+ 
+ 
+ That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and,
+ like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so
+ outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and
+ philosophy of it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale
+ was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large prices there.
+ Also, that in Henry VIIIth’s time, a certain cook of the court obtained a
+ handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be eaten with
+ barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of whale.
+ Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine eating. The meat is
+ made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and being well seasoned
+ and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls. The old monks of
+ Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great porpoise grant from
+ the crown.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands
+ be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but when you
+ come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes
+ away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of men like Stubb, nowadays
+ partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious. We all
+ know how they live upon whales, and have rare old vintages of prime old
+ train oil. Zogranda, one of their most famous doctors, recommends strips
+ of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly juicy and nourishing. And
+ this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who long ago were accidentally
+ left in Greenland by a whaling vessel—that these men actually lived
+ for several months on the mouldy scraps of whales which had been left
+ ashore after trying out the blubber. Among the Dutch whalemen these scraps
+ are called “fritters”; which, indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown
+ and crisp, and smelling something like old Amsterdam housewives’
+ dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh. They have such an eatable look that
+ the most self-denying stranger can hardly keep his hands off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his
+ exceeding richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be
+ delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating as the
+ buffalo’s (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid
+ pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is;
+ like the transparent, half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the third
+ month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for butter.
+ Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into some other
+ substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try watches of the night
+ it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their ship-biscuit into the
+ huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many a good supper have I
+ thus made.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish.
+ The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump,
+ whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings),
+ they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess, in
+ flavor somewhat resembling calves’ head, which is quite a dish among some
+ epicures; and every one knows that some young bucks among the epicures, by
+ continually dining upon calves’ brains, by and by get to have a little
+ brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a calf’s head from their own
+ heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon discrimination. And that is the
+ reason why a young buck with an intelligent looking calf’s head before
+ him, is somehow one of the saddest sights you can see. The head looks a
+ sort of reproachfully at him, with an “Et tu Brute!” expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous
+ that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that
+ appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned:
+ i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it
+ too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox
+ was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on
+ his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved
+ it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see
+ the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds.
+ Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who
+ is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that
+ salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it
+ will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of
+ judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest
+ geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy
+ paté-de-foie-gras.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding
+ insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized
+ and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is that handle
+ made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are
+ eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat
+ goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the
+ Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders
+ formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two
+ that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.
+ 
+ 
+ When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary
+ toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at
+ least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting him in. For
+ that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very soon completed;
+ and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the common usage is to
+ take in all sail; lash the helm a’lee; and then send every one below to
+ his hammock till daylight, with the reservation that, until that time,
+ anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two for an hour, each
+ couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see that all goes
+ well.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not
+ answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the
+ moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch,
+ little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. In most other
+ parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound,
+ their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably diminished, by
+ vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a procedure
+ notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle them into
+ still greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the
+ Pequod’s sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights,
+ to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the
+ whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was
+ concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on
+ deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately
+ suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns,
+ so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two
+ mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant
+ murdering of the sharks,* by striking the keen steel deep into their
+ skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy confusion of
+ their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their
+ mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of
+ the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments,
+ but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails
+ seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely
+ voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with
+ the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or
+ Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after
+ what might be called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted
+ on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor
+ Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his
+ murderous jaw.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel; is
+ about the bigness of a man’s spread hand; and in general shape,
+ corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named; only its
+ sides are perfectly flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than the
+ lower. This weapon is always kept as sharp as possible; and when being
+ used is occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a stiff
+ pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Queequeg no care what god made him shark,” said the savage, agonizingly
+ lifting his hand up and down; “wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de
+ god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
+ 
+ 
+ It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio
+ professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was
+ turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would have
+ thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous
+ things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which
+ no single man can possibly lift—this vast bunch of grapes was swayed
+ up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the strongest
+ point anywhere above a ship’s deck. The end of the hawser-like rope
+ winding through these intricacies, was then conducted to the windlass, and
+ the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale; to this
+ block the great blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was
+ attached. And now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb,
+ the mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the body
+ for the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two side-fins.
+ This done, a broad, semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is
+ inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now
+ commence heaving in one dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the
+ entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the
+ nail-heads of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and
+ nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans over to
+ the whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass is answered by a
+ helping heave from the billows; till at last, a swift, startling snap is
+ heard; with a great swash the ship rolls upwards and backwards from the
+ whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it the
+ disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of blubber. Now as the
+ blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it
+ stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by
+ spiralizing it. For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass
+ continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water, and as the
+ blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the
+ “scarf,” simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the
+ mates; and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very
+ act itself, it is all the time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till
+ its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the windlass then cease
+ heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways
+ to and fro as if let down from the sky, and every one present must take
+ good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears and pitch
+ him headlong overboard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon
+ called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices out
+ a considerable hole in the lower part of the swaying mass. Into this hole,
+ the end of the second alternating great tackle is then hooked so as to
+ retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what follows.
+ Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to stand off,
+ once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a few sidelong,
+ desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in twain; so that while
+ the short lower part is still fast, the long upper strip, called a
+ blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering. The heavers
+ forward now resume their song, and while the one tackle is peeling and
+ hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other is slowly slackened
+ away, and down goes the first strip through the main hatchway right
+ beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into this
+ twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long
+ blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents. And
+ thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering
+ simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing, the
+ blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship straining,
+ and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the general
+ friction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.
+ 
+ 
+ I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of
+ the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen
+ afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains
+ unchanged; but it is only an opinion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you know
+ what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence of firm,
+ close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from
+ eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature’s
+ skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of
+ fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you cannot
+ raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale’s body but that same
+ blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably
+ dense, what can that be but the skin? True, from the unmarred dead body of
+ the whale, you may scrape off with your hand an infinitely thin,
+ transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds of
+ isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is,
+ previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but
+ becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits, which I
+ use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before; and
+ being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with
+ fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to
+ read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say. But what I
+ am driving at here is this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass
+ substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so
+ much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin,
+ so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of
+ the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a
+ new-born child. But no more of this.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as
+ in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one
+ hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or
+ rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths,
+ and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of
+ the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere
+ integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels to
+ the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of
+ the stuff of the whale’s skin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the
+ many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely
+ crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array,
+ something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these
+ marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above
+ mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon
+ the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick,
+ observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford
+ the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is,
+ if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids
+ hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present
+ connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm
+ Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old
+ Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the
+ banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the
+ mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian
+ rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which
+ the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back,
+ and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular
+ linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an
+ irregular, random aspect. I should say that those New England rocks on the
+ sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent scraping
+ contact with vast floating icebergs—I should say, that those rocks
+ must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It also
+ seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile
+ contact with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large,
+ full-grown bulls of the species.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the
+ whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long
+ pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy
+ and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a
+ real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over
+ his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this cosy
+ blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself
+ comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would
+ become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the
+ North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found
+ exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it observed,
+ are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are
+ refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an
+ iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas,
+ like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he
+ dies. How wonderful is it then—except after explanation—that
+ this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it is
+ to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed to his
+ lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall overboard,
+ they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen into
+ the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber. But more
+ surprising is it to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood
+ of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo negro in summer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong
+ individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare
+ virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after
+ the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this
+ world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at
+ the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale,
+ retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections,
+ how few are domed like St. Peter’s! of creatures, how few vast as the
+ whale!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
+ 
+ 
+ “Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the
+ beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it
+ has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it
+ floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the
+ insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of
+ screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the
+ whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the
+ ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks
+ and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours
+ from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the
+ unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea,
+ wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on,
+ till lost in infinite perspectives.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There’s a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in
+ pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled. In
+ life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween, if peradventure
+ he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral they most piously do
+ pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest
+ whale is free.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives
+ and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering
+ discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming
+ fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and
+ the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale’s unharming
+ corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log— shoals, rocks,
+ and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships
+ shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because
+ their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There’s your
+ law of precedents; there’s your utility of traditions; there’s the story
+ of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and
+ now not even hovering in the air! There’s orthodoxy!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror to
+ his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the
+ Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.
+ 
+ 
+ It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping the
+ body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the Sperm
+ Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced whale
+ surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck; on
+ the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that very
+ place, is the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that the surgeon must
+ operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening between him and his
+ subject, and that subject almost hidden in a discoloured, rolling, and
+ oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear in mind, too, that under
+ these untoward circumstances he has to cut many feet deep in the flesh;
+ and in that subterraneous manner, without so much as getting one single
+ peep into the ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skilfully steer
+ clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at
+ a critical point hard by its insertion into the skull. Do you not marvel,
+ then, at Stubb’s boast, that he demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm
+ whale?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a cable
+ till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small whale it is
+ hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with a full grown
+ leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm whale’s head embraces nearly
+ one third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a burden as
+ that, even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were as vain a thing
+ as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers’ scales.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Pequod’s whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was
+ hoisted against the ship’s side—about half way out of the sea, so
+ that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native element. And
+ there with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason of the
+ enormous downward drag from the lower mast-head, and every yard-arm on
+ that side projecting like a crane over the waves; there, that
+ blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod’s waist like the giant Holofernes’s
+ from the girdle of Judith.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went
+ below to their dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but now
+ deserted deck. An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was
+ more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone from
+ his cabin. Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to gaze over
+ the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he took Stubb’s long
+ spade—still remaining there after the whale’s decapitation—and
+ striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended mass, placed its
+ other end crutch-wise under one arm, and so stood leaning over with eyes
+ attentively fixed on this head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so
+ intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou vast
+ and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a
+ beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head,
+ and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast
+ dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has
+ moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies
+ rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this
+ frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there,
+ in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been
+ where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where
+ sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the
+ locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they
+ sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed
+ false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from
+ the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the
+ insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—while
+ swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a
+ righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen
+ enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one
+ syllable is thine!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sail ho!” cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,” cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself,
+ while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. “That lively cry
+ upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man.—Where
+ away?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to
+ us!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and
+ to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how
+ far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom
+ stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam’s Story.
+ 
+ 
+ Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than the
+ ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By and by, through the glass the stranger’s boats and manned mast-heads
+ proved her a whale-ship. But as she was so far to windward, and shooting
+ by, apparently making a passage to some other ground, the Pequod could not
+ hope to reach her. So the signal was set to see what response would be
+ made.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships of
+ the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all which signals
+ being collected in a book with the names of the respective vessels
+ attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale commanders
+ are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at considerable
+ distances and with no small facility.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Pequod’s signal was at last responded to by the stranger’s setting her
+ own; which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring her
+ yards, she bore down, ranged abeam under the Pequod’s lee, and lowered a
+ boat; it soon drew nigh; but, as the side-ladder was being rigged by
+ Starbuck’s order to accommodate the visiting captain, the stranger in
+ question waved his hand from his boat’s stern in token of that proceeding
+ being entirely unnecessary. It turned out that the Jeroboam had a
+ malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her captain, was fearful of
+ infecting the Pequod’s company. For, though himself and boat’s crew
+ remained untainted, and though his ship was half a rifle-shot off, and an
+ incorruptible sea and air rolling and flowing between; yet conscientiously
+ adhering to the timid quarantine of the land, he peremptorily refused to
+ come into direct contact with the Pequod.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But this did by no means prevent all communications. Preserving an
+ interval of some few yards between itself and the ship, the Jeroboam’s
+ boat by the occasional use of its oars contrived to keep parallel to the
+ Pequod, as she heavily forged through the sea (for by this time it blew
+ very fresh), with her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by the
+ sudden onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be pushed some way
+ ahead; but would be soon skilfully brought to her proper bearings again.
+ Subject to this, and other the like interruptions now and then, a
+ conversation was sustained between the two parties; but at intervals not
+ without still another interruption of a very different sort.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam’s boat, was a man of a singular appearance,
+ even in that wild whaling life where individual notabilities make up all
+ totalities. He was a small, short, youngish man, sprinkled all over his
+ face with freckles, and wearing redundant yellow hair. A long-skirted,
+ cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge enveloped him; the
+ overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A deep,
+ settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had exclaimed—“That’s
+ he! that’s he!—the long-togged scaramouch the Town-Ho’s company told
+ us of!” Stubb here alluded to a strange story told of the Jeroboam, and a
+ certain man among her crew, some time previous when the Pequod spoke the
+ Town-Ho. According to this account and what was subsequently learned, it
+ seemed that the scaramouch in question had gained a wonderful ascendency
+ over almost everybody in the Jeroboam. His story was this:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna
+ Shakers, where he had been a great prophet; in their cracked, secret
+ meetings having several times descended from heaven by the way of a
+ trap-door, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he
+ carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, instead of containing gunpowder,
+ was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A strange, apostolic whim having
+ seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for Nantucket, where, with that cunning
+ peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common-sense exterior, and
+ offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the Jeroboam’s whaling
+ voyage. They engaged him; but straightway upon the ship’s getting out of
+ sight of land, his insanity broke out in a freshet. He announced himself
+ as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded the captain to jump overboard. He
+ published his manifesto, whereby he set himself forth as the deliverer of
+ the isles of the sea and vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching
+ earnestness with which he declared these things;—the dark, daring
+ play of his sleepless, excited imagination, and all the preternatural
+ terrors of real delirium, united to invest this Gabriel in the minds of
+ the majority of the ignorant crew, with an atmosphere of sacredness.
+ Moreover, they were afraid of him. As such a man, however, was not of much
+ practical use in the ship, especially as he refused to work except when he
+ pleased, the incredulous captain would fain have been rid of him; but
+ apprised that that individual’s intention was to land him in the first
+ convenient port, the archangel forthwith opened all his seals and vials—devoting
+ the ship and all hands to unconditional perdition, in case this intention
+ was carried out. So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the
+ crew, that at last in a body they went to the captain and told him if
+ Gabriel was sent from the ship, not a man of them would remain. He was
+ therefore forced to relinquish his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel to
+ be any way maltreated, say or do what he would; so that it came to pass
+ that Gabriel had the complete freedom of the ship. The consequence of all
+ this was, that the archangel cared little or nothing for the captain and
+ mates; and since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a higher hand
+ than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole
+ command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure. The
+ sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before him;
+ in obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal homage,
+ as to a god. Such things may seem incredible; but, however wondrous, they
+ are true. Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking in respect to
+ the measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as his measureless
+ power of deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But it is time to
+ return to the Pequod.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I fear not thy epidemic, man,” said Ahab from the bulwarks, to Captain
+ Mayhew, who stood in the boat’s stern; “come on board.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But now Gabriel started to his feet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious! Beware of the horrible
+ plague!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gabriel! Gabriel!” cried Captain Mayhew; “thou must either—” But
+ that instant a headlong wave shot the boat far ahead, and its seethings
+ drowned all speech.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hast thou seen the White Whale?” demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted
+ back.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible
+ tail!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I tell thee again, Gabriel, that—” But again the boat tore ahead as
+ if dragged by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while a
+ succession of riotous waves rolled by, which by one of those occasional
+ caprices of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted
+ sperm whale’s head jogged about very violently, and Gabriel was seen
+ eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel nature
+ seemed to warrant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story concerning
+ Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions from Gabriel,
+ whenever his name was mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed leagued
+ with him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking a
+ whale-ship, her people were reliably apprised of the existence of Moby
+ Dick, and the havoc he had made. Greedily sucking in this intelligence,
+ Gabriel solemnly warned the captain against attacking the White Whale, in
+ case the monster should be seen; in his gibbering insanity, pronouncing
+ the White Whale to be no less a being than the Shaker God incarnated; the
+ Shakers receiving the Bible. But when, some year or two afterwards, Moby
+ Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads, Macey, the chief mate, burned
+ with ardour to encounter him; and the captain himself being not unwilling
+ to let him have the opportunity, despite all the archangel’s denunciations
+ and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in persuading five men to man his boat.
+ With them he pushed off; and, after much weary pulling, and many perilous,
+ unsuccessful onsets, he at last succeeded in getting one iron fast.
+ Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the main-royal mast-head, was tossing one
+ arm in frantic gestures, and hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom to
+ the sacrilegious assailants of his divinity. Now, while Macey, the mate,
+ was standing up in his boat’s bow, and with all the reckless energy of his
+ tribe was venting his wild exclamations upon the whale, and essaying to
+ get a fair chance for his poised lance, lo! a broad white shadow rose from
+ the sea; by its quick, fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out
+ of the bodies of the oarsmen. Next instant, the luckless mate, so full of
+ furious life, was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in
+ his descent, fell into the sea at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a
+ chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman’s head; but the
+ mate for ever sank.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the
+ Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any.
+ Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is thus annihilated; oftener
+ the boat’s bow is knocked off, or the thigh-board, in which the headsman
+ stands, is torn from its place and accompanies the body. But strangest of
+ all is the circumstance, that in more instances than one, when the body
+ has been recovered, not a single mark of violence is discernible; the man
+ being stark dead.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried
+ from the ship. Raising a piercing shriek—“The vial! the vial!”
+ Gabriel called off the terror-stricken crew from the further hunting of
+ the whale. This terrible event clothed the archangel with added influence;
+ because his credulous disciples believed that he had specifically
+ fore-announced it, instead of only making a general prophecy, which any
+ one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one of many marks in the
+ wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror to the ship.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to him,
+ that the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring whether he intended
+ to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity should offer. To which Ahab
+ answered—“Aye.” Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started to his
+ feet, glaring upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with downward
+ pointed finger—“Think, think of the blasphemer—dead, and down
+ there!—beware of the blasphemer’s end!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, “Captain, I have just
+ bethought me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for one of thy officers,
+ if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships,
+ whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon
+ the mere chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus, most
+ letters never reach their mark; and many are only received after attaining
+ an age of two or three years or more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely tumbled,
+ damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in consequence of
+ being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter, Death himself
+ might well have been the post-boy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Can’st not read it?” cried Ahab. “Give it me, man. Aye, aye, it’s but a
+ dim scrawl;—what’s this?” As he was studying it out, Starbuck took a
+ long cutting-spade pole, and with his knife slightly split the end, to
+ insert the letter there, and in that way, hand it to the boat, without its
+ coming any closer to the ship.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meantime, Ahab holding the letter, muttered, “Mr. Har—yes, Mr. Harry—(a
+ woman’s pinny hand,—the man’s wife, I’ll wager)—Aye—Mr.
+ Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam;—why it’s Macey, and he’s dead!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife,” sighed Mayhew; “but let me
+ have it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nay, keep it thyself,” cried Gabriel to Ahab; “thou art soon going that
+ way.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Curses throttle thee!” yelled Ahab. “Captain Mayhew, stand by now to
+ receive it”; and taking the fatal missive from Starbuck’s hands, he caught
+ it in the slit of the pole, and reached it over towards the boat. But as
+ he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted from rowing; the boat drifted
+ a little towards the ship’s stern; so that, as if by magic, the letter
+ suddenly ranged along with Gabriel’s eager hand. He clutched it in an
+ instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the letter on it, sent it
+ thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab’s feet. Then Gabriel
+ shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in that
+ manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of
+ the whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to this wild
+ affair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.
+ 
+ 
+ In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there
+ is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are
+ wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying in
+ any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done
+ everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description of
+ the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. It was mentioned that
+ upon first breaking ground in the whale’s back, the blubber-hook was
+ inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the mates. But
+ how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook get fixed in that
+ hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend Queequeg, whose duty
+ it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the monster’s back for the special
+ purpose referred to. But in very many cases, circumstances require that
+ the harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the whole flensing or
+ stripping operation is concluded. The whale, be it observed, lies almost
+ entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So down
+ there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer
+ flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass
+ revolves like a tread-mill beneath him. On the occasion in question,
+ Queequeg figured in the Highland costume—a shirt and socks—in
+ which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one
+ had a better chance to observe him, as will presently be seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in
+ his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend
+ upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale’s
+ back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long
+ cord. Just so, from the ship’s steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there
+ in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery a monkey-rope,
+ attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round his waist.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we
+ proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both
+ ends; fast to Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather
+ one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded;
+ and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor
+ demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his
+ wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my
+ own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous
+ liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that
+ while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that
+ my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that
+ my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or
+ misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death.
+ Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for
+ its even-handed equity never could have so gross an injustice. And yet
+ still further pondering—while I jerked him now and then from between
+ the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam him—still further
+ pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise
+ situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way
+ or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If
+ your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you
+ poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding
+ caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil
+ chances of life. But handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I would,
+ sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor
+ could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management
+ of one end of it.*
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod
+ that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement
+ upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb, in
+ order to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible guarantee
+ for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the whale
+ and the ship—where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant
+ rolling and swaying of both. But this was not the only jamming jeopardy he
+ was exposed to. Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the
+ night, the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent
+ blood which began to flow from the carcass—the rabid creatures
+ swarmed round it like bees in a beehive.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside
+ with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were it not that
+ attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise miscellaneously
+ carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a ravenous
+ finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to them.
+ Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which I now and then jerked the
+ poor fellow from too close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed a
+ peculiarly ferocious shark—he was provided with still another
+ protection. Suspended over the side in one of the stages, Tashtego and
+ Daggoo continually flourished over his head a couple of keen whale-spades,
+ wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could reach. This
+ procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very disinterested and benevolent of
+ them. They meant Queequeg’s best happiness, I admit; but in their hasty
+ zeal to befriend him, and from the circumstance that both he and the
+ sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled water, those
+ indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a leg than a
+ tail. But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping there with that
+ great iron hook—poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his Yojo,
+ and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in and
+ then slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea—what matters it,
+ after all? Are you not the precious image of each and all of us men in
+ this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those
+ sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and
+ spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as
+ with blue lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at last climbs up
+ the chains and stands all dripping and involuntarily trembling over the
+ side; the steward advances, and with a benevolent, consolatory glance
+ hands him—what? Some hot Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands him a
+ cup of tepid ginger and water!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ginger? Do I smell ginger?” suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near. “Yes,
+ this must be ginger,” peering into the as yet untasted cup. Then standing
+ as if incredulous for a while, he calmly walked towards the astonished
+ steward slowly saying, “Ginger? ginger? and will you have the goodness to
+ tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of ginger? Ginger! is ginger
+ the sort of fuel you use, Dough-boy, to kindle a fire in this shivering
+ cannibal? Ginger!—what the devil is ginger? Sea-coal? firewood?—lucifer
+ matches?—tinder?—gunpowder?—what the devil is ginger, I
+ say, that you offer this cup to our poor Queequeg here.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business,”
+ he suddenly added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just come from
+ forward. “Will you look at that kannakin, sir: smell of it, if you
+ please.” Then watching the mate’s countenance, he added, “The steward, Mr.
+ Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there,
+ this instant off the whale. Is the steward an apothecary, sir? and may I
+ ask whether this is the sort of bitters by which he blows back the life
+ into a half-drowned man?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I trust not,” said Starbuck, “it is poor stuff enough.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, aye, steward,” cried Stubb, “we’ll teach you to drug a harpooneer;
+ none of your apothecary’s medicine here; you want to poison us, do ye? You
+ have got out insurances on our lives and want to murder us all, and pocket
+ the proceeds, do ye?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It was not me,” cried Dough-Boy, “it was Aunt Charity that brought the
+ ginger on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits, but
+ only this ginger-jub—so she called it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye to the
+ lockers, and get something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr. Starbuck. It
+ is the captain’s orders—grog for the harpooneer on a whale.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Enough,” replied Starbuck, “only don’t hit him again, but—”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of
+ that sort; and this fellow’s a weazel. What were you about saying, sir?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Only this: go down with him, and get what thou wantest thyself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort
+ of tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, and was
+ handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity’s gift, and that was
+ freely given to the waves.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk over Him.
+ 
+ 
+ It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale’s
+ prodigious head hanging to the Pequod’s side. But we must let it continue
+ hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to it. For the
+ present other matters press, and the best we can do now for the head, is
+ to pray heaven the tackles may hold.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually drifted
+ into a sea, which, by its occasional patches of yellow brit, gave unusual
+ tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the Leviathan that
+ but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking anywhere near. And
+ though all hands commonly disdained the capture of those inferior
+ creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to cruise for them
+ at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near the Crozetts
+ without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale had been brought
+ alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the announcement was made
+ that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if opportunity offered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two
+ boats, Stubb’s and Flask’s, were detached in pursuit. Pulling further and
+ further away, they at last became almost invisible to the men at the
+ mast-head. But suddenly in the distance, they saw a great heap of
+ tumultuous white water, and soon after news came from aloft that one or
+ both the boats must be fast. An interval passed and the boats were in
+ plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the ship by the
+ towing whale. So close did the monster come to the hull, that at first it
+ seemed as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a maelstrom,
+ within three rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from view, as if
+ diving under the keel. “Cut, cut!” was the cry from the ship to the boats,
+ which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being brought with a deadly
+ dash against the vessel’s side. But having plenty of line yet in the tubs,
+ and the whale not sounding very rapidly, they paid out abundance of rope,
+ and at the same time pulled with all their might so as to get ahead of the
+ ship. For a few minutes the struggle was intensely critical; for while
+ they still slacked out the tightened line in one direction, and still
+ plied their oars in another, the contending strain threatened to take them
+ under. But it was only a few feet advance they sought to gain. And they
+ stuck to it till they did gain it; when instantly, a swift tremor was felt
+ running like lightning along the keel, as the strained line, scraping
+ beneath the ship, suddenly rose to view under her bows, snapping and
+ quivering; and so flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like
+ bits of broken glass on the water, while the whale beyond also rose to
+ sight, and once more the boats were free to fly. But the fagged whale
+ abated his speed, and blindly altering his course, went round the stern of
+ the ship towing the two boats after him, so that they performed a complete
+ circuit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close flanking
+ him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for lance; and thus
+ round and round the Pequod the battle went, while the multitudes of sharks
+ that had before swum round the Sperm Whale’s body, rushed to the fresh
+ blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking at every new gash, as the eager
+ Israelites did at the new bursting fountains that poured from the smitten
+ rock.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he
+ turned upon his back a corpse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes,
+ and in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some
+ conversation ensued between them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard,” said Stubb,
+ not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so ignoble a
+ leviathan.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wants with it?” said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat’s bow,
+ “did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale’s head
+ hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right Whale’s on the
+ larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never afterwards
+ capsize?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why not?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know, but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying so, and
+ he seems to know all about ships’ charms. But I sometimes think he’ll
+ charm the ship to no good at last. I don’t half like that chap, Stubb. Did
+ you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of carved into a snake’s
+ head, Stubb?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a
+ dark night, and he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one by; look down
+ there, Flask”—pointing into the sea with a peculiar motion of both
+ hands—“Aye, will I! Flask, I take that Fedallah to be the devil in
+ disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about his having been
+ stowed away on board ship? He’s the devil, I say. The reason why you don’t
+ see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries it coiled
+ away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now that I think of it, he’s
+ always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his boots.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He sleeps in his boots, don’t he? He hasn’t got any hammock; but I’ve
+ seen him lay of nights in a coil of rigging.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No doubt, and it’s because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye
+ see, in the eye of the rigging.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s the old man have so much to do with him for?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Striking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bargain?—about what?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and the
+ devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away his
+ silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then he’ll
+ surrender Moby Dick.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know, Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked one, I
+ tell ye. Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the old flag-ship
+ once, switching his tail about devilish easy and gentlemanlike, and
+ inquiring if the old governor was at home. Well, he was at home, and asked
+ the devil what he wanted. The devil, switching his hoofs, up and says, ‘I
+ want John.’ ‘What for?’ says the old governor. ‘What business is that of
+ yours,’ says the devil, getting mad,—‘I want to use him.’ ‘Take
+ him,’ says the governor—and by the Lord, Flask, if the devil didn’t
+ give John the Asiatic cholera before he got through with him, I’ll eat
+ this whale in one mouthful. But look sharp—ain’t you all ready
+ there? Well, then, pull ahead, and let’s get the whale alongside.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I think I remember some such story as you were telling,” said Flask, when
+ at last the two boats were slowly advancing with their burden towards the
+ ship, “but I can’t remember where.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Three Spaniards? Adventures of those three bloody-minded soldadoes? Did ye
+ read it there, Flask? I guess ye did?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No: never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me, Stubb,
+ do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was the same
+ you say is now on board the Pequod?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn’t the devil live for
+ ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any parson
+ a wearing mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a latch-key to get
+ into the admiral’s cabin, don’t you suppose he can crawl into a porthole?
+ Tell me that, Mr. Flask?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you see that mainmast there?” pointing to the ship; “well, that’s the
+ figure one; now take all the hoops in the Pequod’s hold, and string along
+ in a row with that mast, for oughts, do you see; well, that wouldn’t begin
+ to be Fedallah’s age. Nor all the coopers in creation couldn’t show hoops
+ enough to make oughts enough.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But see here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that you
+ meant to give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a good chance. Now, if he’s
+ so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if he is going to live for
+ ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard—tell me that?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Give him a good ducking, anyhow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But he’d crawl back.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Duck him again; and keep ducking him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though—yes,
+ and drown you—what then?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I should like to see him try it; I’d give him such a pair of black eyes
+ that he wouldn’t dare to show his face in the admiral’s cabin again for a
+ long while, let alone down in the orlop there, where he lives, and
+ hereabouts on the upper decks where he sneaks so much. Damn the devil,
+ Flask; so you suppose I’m afraid of the devil? Who’s afraid of him, except
+ the old governor who daresn’t catch him and put him in double-darbies, as
+ he deserves, but lets him go about kidnapping people; aye, and signed a
+ bond with him, that all the people the devil kidnapped, he’d roast for
+ him? There’s a governor!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do I suppose it? You’ll know it before long, Flask. But I am going now to
+ keep a sharp look-out on him; and if I see anything very suspicious going
+ on, I’ll just take him by the nape of his neck, and say—Look here,
+ Beelzebub, you don’t do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord I’ll
+ make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give
+ him such a wrenching and heaving, that his tail will come short off at the
+ stump—do you see; and then, I rather guess when he finds himself
+ docked in that queer fashion, he’ll sneak off without the poor
+ satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And what will you do with the tail, Stubb?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do with it? Sell it for an ox whip when we get home;—what else?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, do you mean what you say, and have been saying all along, Stubb?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mean or not mean, here we are at the ship.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where
+ fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for securing him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Didn’t I tell you so?” said Flask; “yes, you’ll soon see this right
+ whale’s head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti’s.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In good time, Flask’s saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply
+ leaned over towards the sperm whale’s head, now, by the counterpoise of
+ both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may
+ well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over
+ that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back
+ again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming
+ boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then
+ you will float light and right.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the
+ ship, the same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the case
+ of a sperm whale; only, in the latter instance, the head is cut off whole,
+ but in the former the lips and tongue are separately removed and hoisted
+ on deck, with all the well known black bone attached to what is called the
+ crown-piece. But nothing like this, in the present case, had been done.
+ The carcases of both whales had dropped astern; and the head-laden ship
+ not a little resembled a mule carrying a pair of overburdening panniers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale’s head, and ever and
+ anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own hand.
+ And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his shadow; while,
+ if the Parsee’s shadow was there at all it seemed only to blend with, and
+ lengthen Ahab’s. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish speculations were
+ bandied among them, concerning all these passing things.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
+ 
+ 
+ Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join
+ them, and lay together our own.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right
+ Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly
+ hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all
+ the known varieties of the whale. As the external difference between them
+ is mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this moment
+ hanging from the Pequod’s side; and as we may freely go from one to the
+ other, by merely stepping across the deck:—where, I should like to
+ know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than
+ here?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these
+ heads. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain
+ mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale’s which the Right Whale’s sadly
+ lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale’s head. As you behold
+ it, you involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point of
+ pervading dignity. In the present instance, too, this dignity is
+ heightened by the pepper and salt colour of his head at the summit, giving
+ token of advanced age and large experience. In short, he is what the
+ fishermen technically call a “grey-headed whale.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads—namely, the
+ two most important organs, the eye and the ear. Far back on the side of
+ the head, and low down, near the angle of either whale’s jaw, if you
+ narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, which you would
+ fancy to be a young colt’s eye; so out of all proportion is it to the
+ magnitude of the head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale’s eyes, it is plain
+ that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he
+ can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale’s eyes
+ corresponds to that of a man’s ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how
+ it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears.
+ You would find that you could only command some thirty degrees of vision
+ in advance of the straight side-line of sight; and about thirty more
+ behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking straight towards you, with
+ dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not be able to see him, any more
+ than if he were stealing upon you from behind. In a word, you would have
+ two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side
+ fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man—what, indeed,
+ but his eyes?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes
+ are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to
+ produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the
+ whale’s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid
+ head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes
+ in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which
+ each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one
+ distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side;
+ while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man
+ may, in effect, be said to look out on the world from a sentry-box with
+ two joined sashes for his window. But with the whale, these two sashes are
+ separately inserted, making two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the
+ view. This peculiarity of the whale’s eyes is a thing always to be borne
+ in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in some
+ subsequent scenes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this
+ visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a
+ hint. So long as a man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is
+ involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever
+ objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one’s experience will teach him,
+ that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one
+ glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to
+ examine any two things—however large or however small—at one
+ and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side and
+ touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two objects, and
+ surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to see one
+ of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other
+ will be utterly excluded from your contemporary consciousness. How is it,
+ then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must
+ simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive,
+ combining, and subtle than man’s, that he can at the same moment of time
+ attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and
+ the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as
+ marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go
+ through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor,
+ strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the
+ extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset
+ by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so
+ common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the
+ helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically
+ opposite powers of vision must involve them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an
+ entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two heads for
+ hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf
+ whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so
+ wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With
+ respect to their ears, this important difference is to be observed between
+ the sperm whale and the right. While the ear of the former has an external
+ opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered over with a
+ membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from without.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world
+ through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is
+ smaller than a hare’s? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of
+ Herschel’s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of
+ cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of
+ hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind?
+ Subtilize it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant
+ over the sperm whale’s head, that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending by
+ a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not that
+ the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we might
+ descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But let us
+ hold on here by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What a really
+ beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling, lined, or
+ rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems like
+ the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with the hinge at one end,
+ instead of one side. If you pry it up, so as to get it overhead, and
+ expose its rows of teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and such, alas!
+ it proves to many a poor wight in the fishery, upon whom these spikes fall
+ with impaling force. But far more terrible is it to behold, when fathoms
+ down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there suspended, with
+ his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging straight down at
+ right-angles with his body, for all the world like a ship’s jib-boom. This
+ whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps;
+ hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw have relaxed,
+ leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach to all his
+ tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In most cases this lower jaw—being easily unhinged by a practised
+ artist—is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of
+ extracting the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white
+ whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles,
+ including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an
+ anchor; and when the proper time comes—some few days after the other
+ work—Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished
+ dentists, are set to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg
+ lances the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle
+ being rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag
+ stumps of old oaks out of wild wood lands. There are generally forty-two
+ teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled
+ after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and
+ piled away like joists for building houses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
+ 
+ 
+ Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale’s
+ head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to a
+ Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded);
+ so, at a broad view, the Right Whale’s head bears a rather inelegant
+ resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an old
+ Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker’s last. And in this
+ same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale, with the swarming
+ brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she and all her progeny.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different
+ aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit and
+ look at these two F-shaped spoutholes, you would take the whole head for
+ an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in its
+ sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange,
+ crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass—this green,
+ barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the “crown,” and the Southern
+ fishers the “bonnet” of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes solely on this,
+ you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak, with a bird’s nest
+ in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those live crabs that nestle
+ here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost sure to occur to you;
+ unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the technical term “crown”
+ also bestowed upon it; in which case you will take great interest in
+ thinking how this mighty monster is actually a diademed king of the sea,
+ whose green crown has been put together for him in this marvellous manner.
+ But if this whale be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to grace a
+ diadem. Look at that hanging lower lip! what a huge sulk and pout is
+ there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter’s measurement, about twenty feet long
+ and five feet deep; a sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons
+ of oil and more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The
+ fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important
+ interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the
+ beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide
+ into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be
+ the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah
+ went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp
+ angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed,
+ arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical,
+ scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which
+ depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those
+ Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned. The edges
+ of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through which the Right
+ Whale strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains the small
+ fish, when openmouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding time.
+ In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order, there
+ are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some
+ whalemen calculate the creature’s age, as the age of an oak by its
+ circular rings. Though the certainty of this criterion is far from
+ demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical probability. At any rate,
+ if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater age to the Right Whale than
+ at first glance will seem reasonable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies
+ concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous
+ “whiskers” inside of the whale’s mouth;* another, “hogs’ bristles”; a
+ third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language:
+ “There are about two hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his
+ upper chop , which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or
+ rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper
+ part of the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these tufts impart a
+ rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn countenance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As every one knows, these same “hogs’ bristles,” “fins,” “whiskers,”
+ “blinds,” or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and
+ other stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the demand has long
+ been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne’s time that the bone was in its
+ glory, the farthingale being then all the fashion. And as those ancient
+ dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the whale, as you may say;
+ even so, in a shower, with the like thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly
+ under the same jaws for protection; the umbrella being a tent spread over
+ the same bone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing
+ in the Right Whale’s mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all these
+ colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think you
+ were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand
+ pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest Turkey—the
+ tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the mouth. It is very
+ fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting it on deck. This
+ particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I should say it was a
+ six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that amount of oil.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started with—that
+ the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely different heads.
+ To sum up, then: in the Right Whale’s there is no great well of sperm; no
+ ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a lower jaw, like the
+ Sperm Whale’s. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any of those blinds of
+ bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of a tongue. Again, the
+ Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie
+ together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will
+ not be very long in following.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale’s there? It is the same he
+ died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem now faded
+ away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born
+ of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark the other head’s
+ expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the
+ vessel’s side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head
+ seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death? This
+ Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who
+ might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.
+ 
+ 
+ Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale’s head, I would have you, as
+ a sensible physiologist, simply—particularly remark its front
+ aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I would have you investigate
+ it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some unexaggerated,
+ intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may be lodged there.
+ Here is a vital point; for you must either satisfactorily settle this
+ matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of the most
+ appalling, but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be found in
+ all recorded history.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale, the
+ front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the water;
+ you observe that the lower part of that front slopes considerably
+ backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which
+ receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely
+ under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as though your own mouth
+ were entirely under your chin. Moreover you observe that the whale has no
+ external nose; and that what nose he has—his spout hole—is on
+ the top of his head; you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides
+ of his head, nearly one third of his entire length from the front.
+ Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm Whale’s
+ head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender prominence of
+ any sort whatsoever. Furthermore, you are now to consider that only in the
+ extreme, lower, backward sloping part of the front of the head, is there
+ the slightest vestige of bone; and not till you get near twenty feet from
+ the forehead do you come to the full cranial development. So that this
+ whole enormous boneless mass is as one wad. Finally, though, as will soon
+ be revealed, its contents partly comprise the most delicate oil; yet, you
+ are now to be apprised of the nature of the substance which so impregnably
+ invests all that apparent effeminacy. In some previous place I have
+ described to you how the blubber wraps the body of the whale, as the rind
+ wraps an orange. Just so with the head; but with this difference: about
+ the head this envelope, though not so thick, is of a boneless toughness,
+ inestimable by any man who has not handled it. The severest pointed
+ harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by the strongest human arm, impotently
+ rebounds from it. It is as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were
+ paved with horses’ hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks in it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded Indiamen
+ chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do the
+ sailors do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming
+ contact, any merely hard substance, like iron or wood. No, they hold there
+ a large, round wad of tow and cork, enveloped in the thickest and toughest
+ of ox-hide. That bravely and uninjured takes the jam which would have
+ snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron crow-bars. By itself this
+ sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive at. But supplementary to
+ this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that as ordinary fish possess
+ what is called a swimming bladder in them, capable, at will, of distension
+ or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale, as far as I know, has no such
+ provision in him; considering, too, the otherwise inexplicable manner in
+ which he now depresses his head altogether beneath the surface, and anon
+ swims with it high elevated out of the water; considering the unobstructed
+ elasticity of its envelope; considering the unique interior of his head;
+ it has hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical
+ lung-celled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and
+ unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as to be susceptible to
+ atmospheric distension and contraction. If this be so, fancy the
+ irresistibleness of that might, to which the most impalpable and
+ destructive of all elements contributes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable wall,
+ and this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind it all a mass of
+ tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood is—by
+ the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest insect. So
+ that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the specialities and
+ concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this expansive monster;
+ when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable braining feats; I
+ trust you will have renounced all ignorant incredulity, and be ready to
+ abide by this; that though the Sperm Whale stove a passage through the
+ Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific, you would not
+ elevate one hair of your eye-brow. For unless you own the whale, you are
+ but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing
+ for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the
+ provincials then? What befell the weakling youth lifting the dread
+ goddess’s veil at Lais?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
+ 
+ 
+ Now comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must
+ know something of the curious internal structure of the thing operated
+ upon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Regarding the Sperm Whale’s head as a solid oblong, you may, on an
+ inclined plane, sideways divide it into two quoins,* whereof the lower is
+ the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an
+ unctuous mass wholly free from bones; its broad forward end forming the
+ expanded vertical apparent forehead of the whale. At the middle of the
+ forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin, and then you have two
+ almost equal parts, which before were naturally divided by an internal
+ wall of a thick tendinous substance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical
+ mathematics. I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a
+ solid which differs from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the
+ steep inclination of one side, instead of the mutual tapering of both
+ sides.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of
+ oil, formed by the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand infiltrated
+ cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole extent. The
+ upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh
+ Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as that famous great tierce is mystically
+ carved in front, so the whale’s vast plaited forehead forms innumerable
+ strange devices for the emblematical adornment of his wondrous tun.
+ Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished with the most
+ excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun of the whale
+ contains by far the most precious of all his oily vintages; namely, the
+ highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid, and odoriferous
+ state. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed in any other part of
+ the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly fluid, yet, upon
+ exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to concrete; sending
+ forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the first thin delicate ice is
+ just forming in water. A large whale’s case generally yields about five
+ hundred gallons of sperm, though from unavoidable circumstances,
+ considerable of it is spilled, leaks, and dribbles away, or is otherwise
+ irrevocably lost in the ticklish business of securing what you can.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I know not with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun was
+ coated within, but in superlative richness that coating could not possibly
+ have compared with the silken pearl-coloured membrane, like the lining of
+ a fine pelisse, forming the inner surface of the Sperm Whale’s case.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale
+ embraces the entire length of the entire top of the head; and since—as
+ has been elsewhere set forth—the head embraces one third of the
+ whole length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty feet
+ for a good sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for the depth
+ of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a ship’s
+ side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As in decapitating the whale, the operator’s instrument is brought close
+ to the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti
+ magazine; he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest a careless,
+ untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its
+ invaluable contents. It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which
+ is at last elevated out of the water, and retained in that position by the
+ enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on one side, make
+ quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and—in
+ this particular instance—almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm
+ Whale’s great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.
+ 
+ 
+ Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect
+ posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the part
+ where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He has carried with him a
+ light tackle called a whip, consisting of only two parts, travelling
+ through a single-sheaved block. Securing this block, so that it hangs down
+ from the yard-arm, he swings one end of the rope, till it is caught and
+ firmly held by a hand on deck. Then, hand-over-hand, down the other part,
+ the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he lands on the summit
+ of the head. There—still high elevated above the rest of the
+ company, to whom he vivaciously cries—he seems some Turkish Muezzin
+ calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A
+ short-handled sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches for
+ the proper place to begin breaking into the Tun. In this business he
+ proceeds very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house,
+ sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time this
+ cautious search is over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like a
+ well-bucket, has been attached to one end of the whip; while the other
+ end, being stretched across the deck, is there held by two or three alert
+ hands. These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of the Indian, to whom
+ another person has reached up a very long pole. Inserting this pole into
+ the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket into the Tun, till it
+ entirely disappears; then giving the word to the seamen at the whip, up
+ comes the bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid’s pail of new milk.
+ Carefully lowered from its height, the full-freighted vessel is caught by
+ an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a large tub. Then remounting
+ aloft, it again goes through the same round until the deep cistern will
+ yield no more. Towards the end, Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder
+ and harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of
+ the pole have gone down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way;
+ several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at once a
+ queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild Indian,
+ was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed hold
+ on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the place
+ where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil One
+ himself would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular
+ reasons; how it was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden, as
+ the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up—my God! poor
+ Tashtego—like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well,
+ dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a
+ horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Man overboard!” cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation first
+ came to his senses. “Swing the bucket this way!” and putting one foot into
+ it, so as the better to secure his slippery hand-hold on the whip itself,
+ the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head, almost before
+ Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. Meantime, there was a
+ terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before lifeless head
+ throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea, as if that moment
+ seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only the poor Indian
+ unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous depth to which he
+ had sunk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearing the
+ whip—which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles—a
+ sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror of all, one
+ of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with a vast
+ vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship reeled and
+ shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The one remaining hook, upon which the
+ entire strain now depended, seemed every instant to be on the point of
+ giving way; an event still more likely from the violent motions of the
+ head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come down, come down!” yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one hand
+ holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should drop, he would
+ still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul line, rammed
+ down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the buried
+ harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In heaven’s name, man,” cried Stubb, “are you ramming home a cartridge
+ there?—Avast! How will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket
+ on top of his head? Avast, will ye!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stand clear of the tackle!” cried a voice like the bursting of a rocket.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass dropped
+ into the sea, like Niagara’s Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the suddenly
+ relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering copper; and
+ all caught their breath, as half swinging—now over the sailors’
+ heads, and now over the water—Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray,
+ was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor,
+ buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea!
+ But hardly had the blinding vapor cleared away, when a naked figure with
+ a boarding-sword in his hand, was for one swift moment seen hovering over
+ the bulwarks. The next, a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had
+ dived to the rescue. One packed rush was made to the side, and every eye
+ counted every ripple, as moment followed moment, and no sign of either the
+ sinker or the diver could be seen. Some hands now jumped into a boat
+ alongside, and pushed a little off from the ship.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ha! ha!” cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging perch
+ overhead; and looking further off from the side, we saw an arm thrust
+ upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as an arm thrust
+ forth from the grass over a grave.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Both! both!—it is both!”—cried Daggoo again with a joyful
+ shout; and soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one
+ hand, and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian. Drawn into
+ the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego was
+ long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the
+ slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges
+ near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then dropping his
+ sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out
+ poor Tash by the head. He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a
+ leg was presented; but well knowing that that was not as it ought to be,
+ and might occasion great trouble;—he had thrust back the leg, and by
+ a dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon the Indian; so
+ that with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way—head
+ foremost. As for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could be
+ expected.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg,
+ the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully
+ accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently
+ hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten.
+ Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing,
+ riding and rowing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header’s will be sure to seem
+ incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have either seen
+ or heard of some one’s falling into a cistern ashore; an accident which
+ not seldom happens, and with much less reason too than the Indian’s,
+ considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb of the Sperm Whale’s
+ well.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought
+ the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and
+ most corky part about him; and yet thou makest it sink in an element of a
+ far greater specific gravity than itself. We have thee there. Not at all,
+ but I have ye; for at the time poor Tash fell in, the case had been nearly
+ emptied of its lighter contents, leaving little but the dense tendinous
+ wall of the well—a double welded, hammered substance, as I have
+ before said, much heavier than the sea water, and a lump of which sinks in
+ it like lead almost. But the tendency to rapid sinking in this substance
+ was in the present instance materially counteracted by the other parts of
+ the head remaining undetached from it, so that it sank very slowly and
+ deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair chance for performing his
+ agile obstetrics on the run, as you may say. Yes, it was a running
+ delivery, so it was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious
+ perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant
+ spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and
+ sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be
+ recalled—the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking
+ honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it,
+ that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How
+ many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly
+ perished there?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.
+ 
+ 
+ To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this
+ Leviathan; this is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as
+ yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would seem almost as hopeful as for
+ Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar, or for
+ Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated the Dome of the Pantheon.
+ Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater not only treats of the various
+ faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces of horses, birds,
+ serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the modifications of
+ expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and his disciple Spurzheim
+ failed to throw out some hints touching the phrenological characteristics
+ of other beings than man. Therefore, though I am but ill qualified for a
+ pioneer, in the application of these two semi-sciences to the whale, I
+ will do my endeavor. I try all things; I achieve what I can.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature. He
+ has no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most conspicuous
+ of the features; and since it perhaps most modifies and finally controls
+ their combined expression; hence it would seem that its entire absence, as
+ an external appendage, must very largely affect the countenance of the
+ whale. For as in landscape gardening, a spire, cupola, monument, or tower
+ of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable to the completion of the
+ scene; so no face can be physiognomically in keeping without the elevated
+ open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the nose from Phidias’s marble Jove,
+ and what a sorry remainder! Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty a
+ magnitude, all his proportions are so stately, that the same deficiency
+ which in the sculptured Jove were hideous, in him is no blemish at all.
+ Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have been
+ impertinent. As on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast head
+ in your jolly-boat, your noble conceptions of him are never insulted by
+ the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which
+ so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest
+ royal beadle on his throne.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to be
+ had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This aspect
+ is sublime.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the
+ morning. In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the bull has a
+ touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon up mountain defiles, the
+ elephant’s brow is majestic. Human or animal, the mystical brow is as that
+ great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to their decrees. It
+ signifies—“God: done this day by my hand.” But in most creatures,
+ nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip of alpine land
+ lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which like Shakespeare’s
+ or Melancthon’s rise so high, and descend so low, that the eyes themselves
+ seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and all above them in the
+ forehead’s wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered thoughts descending
+ there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the snow prints of the deer.
+ But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity
+ inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that
+ full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly
+ than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one
+ point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes,
+ ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad
+ firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the
+ doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous
+ brow diminish; though that way viewed its grandeur does not domineer upon
+ you so. In profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic
+ depression in the forehead’s middle, which, in man, is Lavater’s mark of
+ genius.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a
+ book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing
+ nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical
+ silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been known to
+ the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian
+ thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is
+ tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or at least it is so
+ exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any
+ highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the
+ merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now
+ egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to
+ Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no
+ Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face.
+ Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If
+ then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the
+ simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how
+ may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s
+ brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 80. The Nut.
+ 
+ 
+ If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his
+ brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet in
+ length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as the
+ side of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level base.
+ But in life—as we have elsewhere seen—this inclined plane is
+ angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent
+ mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end the skull forms a crater to
+ bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of this crater—in
+ another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many in depth—reposes
+ the mere handful of this monster’s brain. The brain is at least twenty
+ feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden away behind its vast
+ outworks, like the innermost citadel within the amplified fortifications
+ of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it secreted in him, that I have
+ known some whalemen who peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale has any
+ other brain than that palpable semblance of one formed by the cubic-yards
+ of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange folds, courses, and convolutions,
+ to their apprehensions, it seems more in keeping with the idea of his
+ general might to regard that mystic part of him as the seat of his
+ intelligence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in the
+ creature’s living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his true
+ brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The whale,
+ like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view of
+ its rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its resemblance
+ to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from the same point
+ of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down to the human
+ magnitude) among a plate of men’s skulls, and you would involuntarily
+ confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on one part of its
+ summit, in phrenological phrase you would say—This man had no
+ self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations, considered along
+ with the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and power, you can best
+ form to yourself the truest, though not the most exhilarating conception
+ of what the most exalted potency is.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale’s proper brain, you
+ deem it incapable of being adequately charted, then I have another idea
+ for you. If you attentively regard almost any quadruped’s spine, you will
+ be struck with the resemblance of its vertebræ to a strung necklace of
+ dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper. It
+ is a German conceit, that the vertebræ are absolutely undeveloped skulls.
+ But the curious external resemblance, I take it the Germans were not the
+ first men to perceive. A foreign friend once pointed it out to me, in the
+ skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with the vertebræ of which he was
+ inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I
+ consider that the phrenologists have omitted an important thing in not
+ pushing their investigations from the cerebellum through the spinal canal.
+ For I believe that much of a man’s character will be found betokened in
+ his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you
+ are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I
+ rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I
+ fling half out to the world.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial
+ cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra
+ the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches across, being eight
+ in height, and of a triangular figure with the base downwards. As it
+ passes through the remaining vertebræ the canal tapers in size, but for a
+ considerable distance remains of large capacity. Now, of course, this
+ canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous substance—the
+ spinal cord—as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain.
+ And what is still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain’s
+ cavity, the spinal cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost equal to
+ that of the brain. Under all these circumstances, would it be unreasonable
+ to survey and map out the whale’s spine phrenologically? For, viewed in
+ this light, the wonderful comparative smallness of his brain proper is
+ more than compensated by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal
+ cord.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But leaving this hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I would
+ merely assume the spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the Sperm
+ Whale’s hump. This august hump, if I mistake not, rises over one of the
+ larger vertebræ, and is, therefore, in some sort, the outer convex mould
+ of it. From its relative situation then, I should call this high hump the
+ organ of firmness or indomitableness in the Sperm Whale. And that the
+ great monster is indomitable, you will yet have reason to know.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
+ 
+ 
+ The predestinated day arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick
+ De Deer, master, of Bremen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and
+ Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very wide intervals
+ of latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with their flag in
+ the Pacific.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her respects.
+ While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and dropping a
+ boat, her captain was impelled towards us, impatiently standing in the
+ bows instead of the stern.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What has he in his hand there?” cried Starbuck, pointing to something
+ wavingly held by the German. “Impossible!—a lamp-feeder!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not that,” said Stubb, “no, no, it’s a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he’s
+ coming off to make us our coffee, is the Yarman; don’t you see that big
+ tin can there alongside of him?—that’s his boiling water. Oh! he’s
+ all right, is the Yarman.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go along with you,” cried Flask, “it’s a lamp-feeder and an oil-can. He’s
+ out of oil, and has come a-begging.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ However curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the
+ whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old
+ proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing
+ really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer did
+ indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all heeding
+ what he had in his hand; but in his broken lingo, the German soon evinced
+ his complete ignorance of the White Whale; immediately turning the
+ conversation to his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some remarks touching
+ his having to turn into his hammock at night in profound darkness—his
+ last drop of Bremen oil being gone, and not a single flying-fish yet
+ captured to supply the deficiency; concluding by hinting that his ship was
+ indeed what in the Fishery is technically called a clean one (that is, an
+ empty one), well deserving the name of Jungfrau or the Virgin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his
+ ship’s side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the
+ mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick, that
+ without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed round
+ his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, the game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German boats
+ that soon followed him, had considerably the start of the Pequod’s keels.
+ There were eight whales, an average pod. Aware of their danger, they were
+ going all abreast with great speed straight before the wind, rubbing their
+ flanks as closely as so many spans of horses in harness. They left a
+ great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling a great wide parchment
+ upon the sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge, humped
+ old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as by the
+ unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted with the
+ jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this whale belonged to the pod
+ in advance, seemed questionable; for it is not customary for such
+ venerable leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck to their
+ wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him, because the
+ white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell
+ formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout was short, slow, and
+ laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself
+ in torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which
+ seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the waters
+ behind him to upbubble.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who’s got some paregoric?” said Stubb, “he has the stomach-ache, I’m
+ afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache! Adverse winds
+ are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It’s the first foul wind I ever
+ knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so before? it must
+ be, he’s lost his tiller.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck load
+ of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her way; so
+ did this old whale heave his aged bulk, and now and then partly turning
+ over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious wake in the
+ unnatural stump of his starboard fin. Whether he had lost that fin in
+ battle, or had been born without it, it were hard to say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Only wait a bit, old chap, and I’ll give ye a sling for that wounded
+ arm,” cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mind he don’t sling thee with it,” cried Starbuck. “Give way, or the
+ German will have him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this one
+ fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most valuable
+ whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were going with
+ such great velocity, moreover, as almost to defy pursuit for the time. At
+ this juncture the Pequod’s keels had shot by the three German boats last
+ lowered; but from the great start he had had, Derick’s boat still led the
+ chase, though every moment neared by his foreign rivals. The only thing
+ they feared, was, that from being already so nigh to his mark, he would be
+ enabled to dart his iron before they could completely overtake and pass
+ him. As for Derick, he seemed quite confident that this would be the case,
+ and occasionally with a deriding gesture shook his lamp-feeder at the
+ other boats.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The ungracious and ungrateful dog!” cried Starbuck; “he mocks and dares
+ me with the very poor-box I filled for him not five minutes ago!”—then
+ in his old intense whisper—“Give way, greyhounds! Dog to it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I tell ye what it is, men”—cried Stubb to his crew—“it’s
+ against my religion to get mad; but I’d like to eat that villainous Yarman—Pull—won’t
+ ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do ye love brandy? A hogshead
+ of brandy, then, to the best man. Come, why don’t some of ye burst a
+ blood-vessel? Who’s that been dropping an anchor overboard—we don’t
+ budge an inch—we’re becalmed. Halloo, here’s grass growing in the
+ boat’s bottom—and by the Lord, the mast there’s budding. This won’t
+ do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long of it is, men, will ye
+ spit fire or not?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! see the suds he makes!” cried Flask, dancing up and down—“What
+ a hump—Oh, do pile on the beef—lays like a log! Oh! my lads,
+ do spring—slap-jacks and quahogs for supper, you know, my lads—baked
+ clams and muffins—oh, do , do , spring,—he’s a hundred barreller—don’t
+ lose him now—don’t oh, don’t! —see that Yarman—Oh, won’t
+ ye pull for your duff, my lads—such a sog! such a sogger! Don’t ye
+ love sperm? There goes three thousand dollars, men!—a bank!—a
+ whole bank! The bank of England!—Oh, do , do , do! —What’s that
+ Yarman about now?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder at the
+ advancing boats, and also his oil-can; perhaps with the double view of
+ retarding his rivals’ way, and at the same time economically accelerating
+ his own by the momentary impetus of the backward toss.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The unmannerly Dutch dogger!” cried Stubb. “Pull now, men, like fifty
+ thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils. What d’ye say,
+ Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in two-and-twenty pieces for
+ the honor of old Gayhead? What d’ye say?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I say, pull like god-dam,”—cried the Indian.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the Pequod’s
+ three boats now began ranging almost abreast; and, so disposed,
+ momentarily neared him. In that fine, loose, chivalrous attitude of the
+ headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three mates stood up proudly,
+ occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating cry of, “There
+ she slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash breeze! Down with the Yarman!
+ Sail over him!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But so decided an original start had Derick had, that spite of all their
+ gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this race, had not a
+ righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught the blade of
+ his midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving to free his
+ white-ash, and while, in consequence, Derick’s boat was nigh to capsizing,
+ and he thundering away at his men in a mighty rage;—that was a good
+ time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a shout, they took a mortal
+ start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German’s quarter. An
+ instant more, and all four boats were diagonically in the whale’s
+ immediate wake, while stretching from them, on both sides, was the foaming
+ swell that he made.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was now
+ going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual tormented
+ jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of fright. Now to
+ this hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight, and still at
+ every billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the sea, or sideways
+ rolled towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I seen a bird with
+ clipped wing making affrighted broken circles in the air, vainly striving
+ to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird has a voice, and with
+ plaintive cries will make known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb
+ brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted in him; he had no voice,
+ save that choking respiration through his spiracle, and this made the
+ sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still, in his amazing bulk,
+ portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to appal the
+ stoutest man who so pitied.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod’s boats
+ the advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick chose to
+ hazard what to him must have seemed a most unusually long dart, ere the
+ last chance would for ever escape.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all three
+ tigers—Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo—instinctively sprang to
+ their feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their
+ barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their three
+ Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapors of foam and
+ white-fire! The three boats, in the first fury of the whale’s headlong
+ rush, bumped the German’s aside with such force, that both Derick and his
+ baffled harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the three flying
+ keels.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t be afraid, my butter-boxes,” cried Stubb, casting a passing glance
+ upon them as he shot by; “ye’ll be picked up presently—all right—I
+ saw some sharks astern—St. Bernard’s dogs, you know—relieve
+ distressed travellers. Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. Every keel a
+ sunbeam! Hurrah!—Here we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a
+ mad cougar! This puts me in mind of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury
+ on a plain—makes the wheel-spokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him
+ that way; and there’s danger of being pitched out too, when you strike a
+ hill. Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels when he’s going to Davy Jones—all
+ a rush down an endless inclined plane! Hurrah! this whale carries the
+ everlasting mail!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the monster’s run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he
+ tumultuously sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines flew round the
+ loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them; while so
+ fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding would soon exhaust
+ the lines, that using all their dexterous might, they caught repeated
+ smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till at last—owing to the
+ perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of the boats, whence the
+ three ropes went straight down into the blue—the gunwales of the
+ bows were almost even with the water, while the three sterns tilted high
+ in the air. And the whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they
+ remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more line, though the
+ position was a little ticklish. But though boats have been taken down and
+ lost in this way, yet it is this “holding on,” as it is called; this
+ hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh from the back; this it is
+ that often torments the Leviathan into soon rising again to meet the sharp
+ lance of his foes. Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing, it is to be
+ doubted whether this course is always the best; for it is but reasonable
+ to presume, that the longer the stricken whale stays under water, the more
+ he is exhausted. Because, owing to the enormous surface of him—in a
+ full grown sperm whale something less than 2000 square feet—the
+ pressure of the water is immense. We all know what an astonishing
+ atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here, above-ground,
+ in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on his back a
+ column of two hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at least equal the weight
+ of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of
+ twenty line-of-battle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on
+ board.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into
+ its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay,
+ not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman
+ would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the
+ utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight
+ inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible
+ that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the
+ big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of
+ board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said—“Canst
+ thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears? The
+ sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the
+ habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee;
+ darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!” This
+ the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets.
+ For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run
+ his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod’s
+ fish-spears!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent
+ down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad enough to
+ shade half Xerxes’ army. Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale
+ must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stand by, men; he stirs,” cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly
+ vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by
+ magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every
+ oarsman felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in great part
+ from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce
+ upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd of white bears are
+ scared from it into the sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Haul in! Haul in!” cried Starbuck again; “he’s rising.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand’s breadth
+ could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all
+ dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water within two ship’s
+ lengths of the hunters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals
+ there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby
+ when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in
+ certain directions. Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities it
+ is to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so that
+ when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at
+ once begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is heightened by
+ the extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance below the surface,
+ his life may be said to pour from him in incessant streams. Yet so vast is
+ the quantity of blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior
+ fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable
+ period; even as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the
+ well-springs of far-off and undiscernible hills. Even now, when the boats
+ pulled upon this whale, and perilously drew over his swaying flukes, and
+ the lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady jets from
+ the new made wound, which kept continually playing, while the natural
+ spout-hole in his head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending its
+ affrighted moisture into the air. From this last vent no blood yet came,
+ because no vital part of him had thus far been struck. His life, as they
+ significantly call it, was untouched.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his
+ form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed.
+ His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As
+ strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when
+ prostrate, so from the points which the whale’s eyes had once occupied,
+ now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was
+ none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must
+ die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other
+ merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that
+ preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his
+ blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discoloured bunch or
+ protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A nice spot,” cried Flask; “just let me prick him there once.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Avast!” cried Starbuck, “there’s no need of that!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an ulcerous
+ jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable
+ anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly
+ darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over
+ with showers of gore, capsizing Flask’s boat and marring the bows. It was
+ his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by loss of blood,
+ that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made; lay panting on
+ his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over
+ slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his
+ belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring
+ spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some
+ mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the
+ spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground—so the last long dying
+ spout of the whale.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body
+ showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately,
+ by Starbuck’s orders, lines were secured to it at different points, so
+ that ere long every boat was a buoy; the sunken whale being suspended a
+ few inches beneath them by the cords. By very heedful management, when the
+ ship drew nigh, the whale was transferred to her side, and was strongly
+ secured there by the stiffest fluke-chains, for it was plain that unless
+ artificially upheld, the body would at once sink to the bottom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade, the
+ entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on
+ the lower part of the bunch before described. But as the stumps of
+ harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales, with
+ the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any kind to
+ denote their place; therefore, there must needs have been some other
+ unknown reason in the present case fully to account for the ulceration
+ alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a lance-head of stone
+ being found in him, not far from the buried iron, the flesh perfectly firm
+ about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And when? It might have been
+ darted by some Nor’ West Indian long before America was discovered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous cabinet
+ there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further discoveries, by
+ the ship’s being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways to the sea, owing
+ to the body’s immensely increasing tendency to sink. However, Starbuck,
+ who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the last; hung on to it
+ so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the ship would have been
+ capsized, if still persisting in locking arms with the body; then, when
+ the command was given to break clear from it, such was the immovable
+ strain upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and cables were
+ fastened, that it was impossible to cast them off. Meantime everything in
+ the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the other side of the deck was like
+ walking up the steep gabled roof of a house. The ship groaned and gasped.
+ Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started from
+ their places, by the unnatural dislocation. In vain handspikes and crows
+ were brought to bear upon the immovable fluke-chains, to pry them adrift
+ from the timberheads; and so low had the whale now settled that the
+ submerged ends could not be at all approached, while every moment whole
+ tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed
+ on the point of going over.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hold on, hold on, won’t ye?” cried Stubb to the body, “don’t be in such a
+ devil of a hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we must do something or go for
+ it. No use prying there; avast, I say with your handspikes, and run one of
+ ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut the big chains.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Knife? Aye, aye,” cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter’s heavy
+ hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began slashing at
+ the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes, full of sparks, were given,
+ when the exceeding strain effected the rest. With a terrific snap, every
+ fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm Whale
+ is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately accounted
+ for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy, with its
+ side or belly considerably elevated above the surface. If the only whales
+ that thus sank were old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their pads
+ of lard diminished and all their bones heavy and rheumatic; then you might
+ with some reason assert that this sinking is caused by an uncommon
+ specific gravity in the fish so sinking, consequent upon this absence of
+ buoyant matter in him. But it is not so. For young whales, in the highest
+ health, and swelling with noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the
+ warm flush and May of life, with all their panting lard about them; even
+ these brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this
+ accident than any other species. Where one of that sort go down, twenty
+ Right Whales do. This difference in the species is no doubt imputable in
+ no small degree to the greater quantity of bone in the Right Whale; his
+ Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a ton; from this
+ incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there are instances where,
+ after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken whale again
+ rises, more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this is obvious. Gases
+ are generated in him; he swells to a prodigious magnitude; becomes a sort
+ of animal balloon. A line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then.
+ In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the Bays of New Zealand, when a
+ Right Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with plenty
+ of rope; so that when the body has gone down, they know where to look for
+ it when it shall have ascended again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from
+ the Pequod’s mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again lowering
+ her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a Fin-Back,
+ belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its incredible
+ power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back’s spout is so similar to the
+ Sperm Whale’s, that by unskilful fishermen it is often mistaken for it.
+ And consequently Derick and all his host were now in valiant chase of this
+ unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail, made after her four young
+ keels, and thus they all disappeared far to leeward, still in bold,
+ hopeful chase.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.
+ 
+ 
+ There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true
+ method.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to
+ the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great
+ honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great
+ demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have
+ shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I
+ myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the
+ eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by
+ our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the
+ knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the
+ distressed, and not to fill men’s lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine
+ story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of
+ a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as Leviathan was in the
+ very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen, intrepidly
+ advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered and married the maid. It
+ was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely achieved by the best harpooneers
+ of the present day; inasmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first
+ dart. And let no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa,
+ now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples, there stood
+ for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale, which the city’s legends and
+ all the inhabitants asserted to be the identical bones of the monster that
+ Perseus slew. When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to
+ Italy in triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively important in
+ this story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda—indeed, by some
+ supposed to be indirectly derived from it—is that famous story of
+ St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale;
+ for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled
+ together, and often stand for each other. “Thou art as a lion of the
+ waters, and as a dragon of the sea,” saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly
+ meaning a whale; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word
+ itself. Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had
+ St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of
+ doing battle with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake,
+ but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to
+ march boldly up to a whale.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the
+ creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely
+ represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted on
+ land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of
+ those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists; and
+ considering that as in Perseus’ case, St. George’s whale might have
+ crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal
+ ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse;
+ bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible with
+ the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this
+ so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In fact,
+ placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare
+ like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name;
+ who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse’s head and both the
+ palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of
+ him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is
+ the tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of
+ Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And
+ therefore, let not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom, I
+ venture to say, have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron),
+ let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen
+ frocks and tarred trowsers we are much better entitled to St. George’s
+ decoration than they.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long remained
+ dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that antique
+ Crockett and Kit Carson—that brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds,
+ was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that strictly
+ makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he
+ ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside.
+ Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman; at any rate
+ the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I claim him for one of our
+ clan.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of Hercules
+ and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more ancient
+ Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versâ; certainly they are
+ very similar. If I claim the demi-god then, why not the prophet?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole
+ roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal
+ kings of old times, we find the head waters of our fraternity in nothing
+ short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now to
+ be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of
+ the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine
+ Vishnoo himself for our Lord;—Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten
+ earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.
+ When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate
+ the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to
+ Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose
+ perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning
+ the creation, and which therefore must have contained something in the
+ shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at
+ the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and
+ sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes.
+ Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even as a man who rides a horse is
+ called a horseman?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there’s a member-roll
+ for you! What club but the whaleman’s can head off like that?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.
+ 
+ 
+ Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the
+ preceding chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical
+ story of Jonah and the whale. But then there were some sceptical Greeks
+ and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans of their times,
+ equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the
+ dolphin; and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those
+ traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One old Sag-Harbor whaleman’s chief reason for questioning the Hebrew
+ story was this:—He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles,
+ embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented
+ Jonah’s whale with two spouts in his head—a peculiarity only true
+ with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the
+ varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this saying,
+ “A penny roll would choke him”; his swallow is so very small. But, to
+ this, Bishop Jebb’s anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary,
+ hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale’s belly,
+ but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems
+ reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale’s mouth
+ would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the
+ players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow
+ tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his want
+ of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something obscurely in
+ reference to his incarcerated body and the whale’s gastric juices. But
+ this objection likewise falls to the ground, because a German exegetist
+ supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating body of a dead 
+ whale—even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned
+ their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them. Besides, it has been
+ divined by other continental commentators, that when Jonah was thrown
+ overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his escape to
+ another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head; and, I
+ would add, possibly called “The Whale,” as some craft are nowadays
+ christened the “Shark,” the “Gull,” the “Eagle.” Nor have there been
+ wanting learned exegetists who have opined that the whale mentioned in the
+ book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver—an inflated bag of wind—which
+ the endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a watery doom. Poor
+ Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But he had still another
+ reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I remember right: Jonah was
+ swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he
+ was vomited up somewhere within three days’ journey of Nineveh, a city on
+ the Tigris, very much more than three days’ journey across from the
+ nearest point of the Mediterranean coast. How is that?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within that
+ short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him round by the way
+ of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to speak of the passage through the
+ whole length of the Mediterranean, and another passage up the Persian Gulf
+ and Red Sea, such a supposition would involve the complete
+ circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to speak of the Tigris
+ waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for any whale to swim
+ in. Besides, this idea of Jonah’s weathering the Cape of Good Hope at so
+ early a day would wrest the honor of the discovery of that great headland
+ from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so make modern history
+ a liar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his foolish
+ pride of reason—a thing still more reprehensible in him, seeing that
+ he had but little learning except what he had picked up from the sun and
+ the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and abominable,
+ devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a Portuguese
+ Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah’s going to Nineveh via the Cape
+ of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of the general
+ miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly enlightened Turks
+ devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah. And some three
+ centuries ago, an English traveller in old Harris’s Voyages, speaks of a
+ Turkish Mosque built in honor of Jonah, in which Mosque was a miraculous
+ lamp that burnt without any oil.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.
+ 
+ 
+ To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are anointed;
+ and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an analogous operation
+ upon their boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it to be doubted that as
+ such a procedure can do no harm, it may possibly be of no contemptible
+ advantage; considering that oil and water are hostile; that oil is a
+ sliding thing, and that the object in view is to make the boat slide
+ bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing his boat, and one morning
+ not long after the German ship Jungfrau disappeared, took more than
+ customary pains in that occupation; crawling under its bottom, where it
+ hung over the side, and rubbing in the unctuousness as though diligently
+ seeking to insure a crop of hair from the craft’s bald keel. He seemed to
+ be working in obedience to some particular presentiment. Nor did it remain
+ unwarranted by the event.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to
+ them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered flight,
+ as of Cleopatra’s barges from Actium.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb’s was foremost. By great
+ exertion, Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the
+ stricken whale, without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal
+ flight, with added fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the
+ planted iron must sooner or later inevitably extract it. It became
+ imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him. But to
+ haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and furious.
+ What then remained?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and
+ countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced,
+ none exceed that fine manœuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small
+ sword, or broad sword, in all its exercises boasts nothing like it. It is
+ only indispensable with an inveterate running whale; its grand fact and
+ feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is accurately
+ darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under extreme headway.
+ Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten or twelve feet in
+ length; the staff is much slighter than that of the harpoon, and also of a
+ lighter material—pine. It is furnished with a small rope called a
+ warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to the hand
+ after darting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But before going further, it is important to mention here, that though the
+ harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it is seldom
+ done; and when done, is still less frequently successful, on account of
+ the greater weight and inferior length of the harpoon as compared with the
+ lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks. As a general thing,
+ therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before any pitchpoling
+ comes into play.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and
+ equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel in
+ pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands upright in the tossed bow of the
+ flying boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is forty feet ahead.
+ Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice along its length
+ to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers up the coil of
+ the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end in his grasp, leaving
+ the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full before his waistband’s
+ middle, he levels it at the whale; when, covering him with it, he steadily
+ depresses the butt-end in his hand, thereby elevating the point till the
+ weapon stands fairly balanced upon his palm, fifteen feet in the air. He
+ minds you somewhat of a juggler, balancing a long staff on his chin. Next
+ moment with a rapid, nameless impulse, in a superb lofty arch the bright
+ steel spans the foaming distance, and quivers in the life spot of the
+ whale. Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That drove the spigot out of him!” cried Stubb. “’Tis July’s immortal
+ Fourth; all fountains must run wine today! Would now, it were old Orleans
+ whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela! Then, Tashtego, lad,
+ I’d have ye hold a canakin to the jet, and we’d drink round it! Yea,
+ verily, hearts alive, we’d brew choice punch in the spread of his
+ spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff the living stuff.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart is repeated, the
+ spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in skilful leash. The
+ agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is slackened, and the
+ pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and mutely watches the
+ monster die.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.
+ 
+ 
+ That for six thousand years—and no one knows how many millions of
+ ages before—the great whales should have been spouting all over the
+ sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so
+ many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back,
+ thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale,
+ watching these sprinklings and spoutings—that all this should be,
+ and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes
+ past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851), it
+ should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all,
+ really water, or nothing but vapor—this is surely a noteworthy
+ thing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items
+ contingent. Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their gills,
+ the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times is combined
+ with the element in which they swim; hence, a herring or a cod might live
+ a century, and never once raise its head above the surface. But owing to
+ his marked internal structure which gives him regular lungs, like a human
+ being’s, the whale can only live by inhaling the disengaged air in the
+ open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity for his periodical visits to the
+ upper world. But he cannot in any degree breathe through his mouth, for,
+ in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm Whale’s mouth is buried at least eight
+ feet beneath the surface; and what is still more, his windpipe has no
+ connexion with his mouth. No, he breathes through his spiracle alone; and
+ this is on the top of his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If I say, that in any creature breathing is only a function indispensable
+ to vitality, inasmuch as it withdraws from the air a certain element,
+ which being subsequently brought into contact with the blood imparts to
+ the blood its vivifying principle, I do not think I shall err; though I
+ may possibly use some superfluous scientific words. Assume it, and it
+ follows that if all the blood in a man could be aerated with one breath,
+ he might then seal up his nostrils and not fetch another for a
+ considerable time. That is to say, he would then live without breathing.
+ Anomalous as it may seem, this is precisely the case with the whale, who
+ systematically lives, by intervals, his full hour and more (when at the
+ bottom) without drawing a single breath, or so much as in any way inhaling
+ a particle of air; for, remember, he has no gills. How is this? Between
+ his ribs and on each side of his spine he is supplied with a remarkable
+ involved Cretan labyrinth of vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when
+ he quits the surface, are completely distended with oxygenated blood. So
+ that for an hour or more, a thousand fathoms in the sea, he carries a
+ surplus stock of vitality in him, just as the camel crossing the waterless
+ desert carries a surplus supply of drink for future use in its four
+ supplementary stomachs. The anatomical fact of this labyrinth is
+ indisputable; and that the supposition founded upon it is reasonable and
+ true, seems the more cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise
+ inexplicable obstinacy of that leviathan in having his spoutings out , as
+ the fishermen phrase it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising
+ to the surface, the Sperm Whale will continue there for a period of time
+ exactly uniform with all his other unmolested risings. Say he stays eleven
+ minutes, and jets seventy times, that is, respires seventy breaths; then
+ whenever he rises again, he will be sure to have his seventy breaths over
+ again, to a minute. Now, if after he fetches a few breaths you alarm him,
+ so that he sounds, he will be always dodging up again to make good his
+ regular allowance of air. And not till those seventy breaths are told,
+ will he finally go down to stay out his full term below. Remark, however,
+ that in different individuals these rates are different; but in any one
+ they are alike. Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having his
+ spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere
+ descending for good? How obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the
+ whale’s rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase. For not
+ by hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing a
+ thousand fathoms beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O
+ hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In man, breathing is incessantly going on—one breath only serving
+ for two or three pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to
+ attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. But the
+ Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole; if
+ it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water, then I
+ opine we should be furnished with the reason why his sense of smell seems
+ obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at all answers to
+ his nose is that identical spout-hole; and being so clogged with two
+ elements, it could not be expected to have the power of smelling. But
+ owing to the mystery of the spout—whether it be water or whether it
+ be vapor—no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on this
+ head. Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper
+ olfactories. But what does he want of them? No roses, no violets, no
+ Cologne-water in the sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting
+ canal, and as that long canal—like the grand Erie Canal—is
+ furnished with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward
+ retention of air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has
+ no voice; unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely
+ rumbles, he talks through his nose. But then again, what has the whale to
+ say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to
+ this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a
+ living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is for
+ the conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along, horizontally, just
+ beneath the upper surface of his head, and a little to one side; this
+ curious canal is very much like a gas-pipe laid down in a city on one side
+ of a street. But the question returns whether this gas-pipe is also a
+ water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout of the Sperm Whale is the
+ mere vapor of the exhaled breath, or whether that exhaled breath is mixed
+ with water taken in at the mouth, and discharged through the spiracle. It
+ is certain that the mouth indirectly communicates with the spouting canal;
+ but it cannot be proved that this is for the purpose of discharging water
+ through the spiracle. Because the greatest necessity for so doing would
+ seem to be, when in feeding he accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm
+ Whale’s food is far beneath the surface, and there he cannot spout even if
+ he would. Besides, if you regard him very closely, and time him with your
+ watch, you will find that when unmolested, there is an undeviating rhyme
+ between the periods of his jets and the ordinary periods of respiration.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out! You
+ have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not tell
+ water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle
+ these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of
+ all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be
+ undecided as to what it is precisely.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping
+ it; and how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it, when,
+ always, when you are close enough to a whale to get a close view of his
+ spout, he is in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading all around
+ him. And if at such times you should think that you really perceived drops
+ of moisture in the spout, how do you know that they are not merely
+ condensed from its vapor; or how do you know that they are not those
+ identical drops superficially lodged in the spout-hole fissure, which is
+ countersunk into the summit of the whale’s head? For even when tranquilly
+ swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with his elevated hump
+ sun-dried as a dromedary’s in the desert; even then, the whale always
+ carries a small basin of water on his head, as under a blazing sun you
+ will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with rain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the
+ precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be peering
+ into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to
+ this fountain and fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into
+ slight contact with the outer, vapory shreds of the jet, which will often
+ happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of the thing
+ so touching it. And I know one, who coming into still closer contact with
+ the spout, whether with some scientific object in view, or otherwise, I
+ cannot say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among
+ whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to evade it. Another
+ thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much doubt it, that if the jet
+ is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you. The wisest thing the
+ investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout
+ alone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My
+ hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides other
+ reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by considerations touching the
+ great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I account him no
+ common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he is
+ never found on soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes are.
+ He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads
+ of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil,
+ Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible
+ steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a
+ little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before
+ me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and
+ undulation in the atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture of my
+ hair, while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin
+ shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an additional argument for
+ the above supposition.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to
+ behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild
+ head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable
+ contemplations, and that vapor—as you will sometimes see it—glorified
+ by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. For,
+ d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor.
+ And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine
+ intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And
+ for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or
+ denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things
+ earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes
+ neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with
+ equal eye.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 86. The Tail.
+ 
+ 
+ Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope, and
+ the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I
+ celebrate a tail.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale’s tail to begin at that point of
+ the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises upon
+ its upper surface alone, an area of at least fifty square feet. The
+ compact round body of its root expands into two broad, firm, flat palms or
+ flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness. At the
+ crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap, then sideways recede
+ from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy between. In no living
+ thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in the
+ crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost expansion in the full
+ grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty feet across.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut into
+ it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it:—upper,
+ middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower layers, are long and
+ horizontal; those of the middle one, very short, and running crosswise
+ between the outside layers. This triune structure, as much as anything
+ else, imparts power to the tail. To the student of old Roman walls, the
+ middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin course of tiles
+ always alternating with the stone in those wonderful relics of the
+ antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so much to the great strength of
+ the masonry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough, the
+ whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular
+ fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins and running
+ down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and largely contribute
+ to their might; so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the
+ whole whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to
+ matter, this were the thing to do it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor does this—its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the
+ graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates
+ through a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive their
+ most appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty or
+ harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful,
+ strength has much to do with the magic. Take away the tied tendons that
+ all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its
+ charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the linen sheet from the
+ naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the
+ man, that seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God
+ the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever they
+ may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled,
+ hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most
+ successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute as they are of all
+ brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative, feminine one
+ of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, form the
+ peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether
+ wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it be
+ in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein no
+ fairy’s arm can transcend it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for
+ progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping;
+ Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ First: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan’s tail acts in a
+ different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never
+ wriggles. In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the
+ whale, his tail is the sole means of propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled
+ forwards beneath the body, and then rapidly sprung backwards, it is this
+ which gives that singular darting, leaping motion to the monster when
+ furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only fights
+ another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his conflicts
+ with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In striking at a
+ boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the blow is only
+ inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed air, especially
+ if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply irresistible. No ribs
+ of man or boat can withstand it. Your only salvation lies in eluding it;
+ but if it comes sideways through the opposing water, then partly owing to
+ the light buoyancy of the whale-boat, and the elasticity of its materials,
+ a cracked rib or a dashed plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is
+ generally the most serious result. These submerged side blows are so often
+ received in the fishery, that they are accounted mere child’s play. Some
+ one strips off a frock, and the hole is stopped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Third: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the whale the
+ sense of touch is concentrated in the tail; for in this respect there is a
+ delicacy in it only equalled by the daintiness of the elephant’s trunk.
+ This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the action of sweeping, when in
+ maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain soft slowness moves his
+ immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of the sea; and if he
+ feel but a sailor’s whisker, woe to that sailor, whiskers and all. What
+ tenderness there is in that preliminary touch! Had this tail any
+ prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of Darmonodes’ elephant
+ that so frequented the flower-market, and with low salutations presented
+ nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their zones. On more accounts than
+ one, a pity it is that the whale does not possess this prehensile virtue
+ in his tail; for I have heard of yet another elephant, that when wounded
+ in the fight, curved round his trunk and extracted the dart.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the
+ middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence of
+ his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if it were a
+ hearth. But still you see his power in his play. The broad palms of his
+ tail are flirted high into the air; then smiting the surface, the
+ thunderous concussion resounds for miles. You would almost think a great
+ gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light wreath of vapor
+ from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would think that that was
+ the smoke from the touch-hole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Fifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes lie
+ considerably below the level of his back, they are then completely out of
+ sight beneath the surface; but when he is about to plunge into the deeps,
+ his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are tossed erect
+ in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they downwards shoot
+ out of view. Excepting the sublime breach —somewhere else to be
+ described—this peaking of the whale’s flukes is perhaps the grandest
+ sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless
+ profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the
+ highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth
+ his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing
+ at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean,
+ the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels.
+ Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky
+ and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading
+ towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes.
+ As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of
+ the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of the fire
+ worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African elephant, I
+ then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all
+ beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of antiquity
+ often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest
+ silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the elephant,
+ so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk of the other
+ are concerned, should not tend to place those two opposite organs on an
+ equality, much less the creatures to which they respectively belong. For
+ as the mightiest elephant is but a terrier to Leviathan, so, compared with
+ Leviathan’s tail, his trunk is but the stalk of a lily. The most direful
+ blow from the elephant’s trunk were as the playful tap of a fan, compared
+ with the measureless crush and crash of the sperm whale’s ponderous
+ flukes, which in repeated instances have one after the other hurled entire
+ boats with all their oars and crews into the air, very much as an Indian
+ juggler tosses his balls.*
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale and
+ the elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the elephant
+ stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does to the
+ elephant; nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious
+ similitude; among these is the spout. It is well known that the elephant
+ will often draw up water or dust in his trunk, and then elevating it, jet
+ it forth in a stream.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability
+ to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they would
+ well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an extensive
+ herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures, that I have
+ heard hunters who have declared them akin to Free-Mason signs and symbols;
+ that the whale, indeed, by these methods intelligently conversed with the
+ world. Nor are there wanting other motions of the whale in his general
+ body, full of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most experienced
+ assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him
+ not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how
+ understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has
+ none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face
+ shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and
+ hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.
+ 
+ 
+ The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward from
+ the territories of Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia. In
+ a continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long islands of Sumatra,
+ Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, form a vast mole, or
+ rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia, and dividing the long
+ unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly studded oriental archipelagoes.
+ This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports for the convenience of
+ ships and whales; conspicuous among which are the straits of Sunda and
+ Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly, vessels bound to China from the
+ west, emerge into the China seas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing
+ midway in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold green
+ promontory, known to seamen as Java Head; they not a little correspond to
+ the central gateway opening into some vast walled empire: and considering
+ the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels, and gold, and
+ ivory, with which the thousand islands of that oriental sea are enriched,
+ it seems a significant provision of nature, that such treasures, by the
+ very formation of the land, should at least bear the appearance, however
+ ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping western world. The
+ shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those domineering
+ fortresses which guard the entrances to the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and
+ the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these Orientals do not demand the
+ obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from the endless procession of
+ ships before the wind, which for centuries past, by night and by day, have
+ passed between the islands of Sumatra and Java, freighted with the
+ costliest cargoes of the east. But while they freely waive a ceremonial
+ like this, they do by no means renounce their claim to more solid tribute.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among the low
+ shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the vessels
+ sailing through the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the point of
+ their spears. Though by the repeated bloody chastisements they have
+ received at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these corsairs
+ has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the present day, we
+ occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which, in those waters,
+ have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these straits;
+ Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea, and thence,
+ cruising northwards, over waters known to be frequented here and there by
+ the Sperm Whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands, and gain the far
+ coast of Japan, in time for the great whaling season there. By these
+ means, the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the known Sperm
+ Whale cruising grounds of the world, previous to descending upon the Line
+ in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere else foiled in his pursuit,
+ firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby Dick, in the sea he was most
+ known to frequent; and at a season when he might most reasonably be
+ presumed to be haunting it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew
+ drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now, the
+ circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs no
+ sustenance but what’s in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the whaler.
+ While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to
+ foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries no cargo but
+ herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a whole lake’s
+ contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with utilities; not
+ altogether with unusable pig-lead and kentledge. She carries years’ water
+ in her. Clear old prime Nantucket water; which, when three years afloat,
+ the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to drink before the brackish
+ fluid, but yesterday rafted off in casks, from the Peruvian or Indian
+ streams. Hence it is, that, while other ships may have gone to China from
+ New York, and back again, touching at a score of ports, the whale-ship, in
+ all that interval, may not have sighted one grain of soil; her crew having
+ seen no man but floating seamen like themselves. So that did you carry
+ them the news that another flood had come; they would only answer—“Well,
+ boys, here’s the ark!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of Java,
+ in the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of the
+ ground, roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an
+ excellent spot for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more and more
+ upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and admonished to
+ keep wide awake. But though the green palmy cliffs of the land soon loomed
+ on the starboard bow, and with delighted nostrils the fresh cinnamon was
+ snuffed in the air, yet not a single jet was descried. Almost renouncing
+ all thought of falling in with any game hereabouts, the ship had well nigh
+ entered the straits, when the customary cheering cry was heard from aloft,
+ and ere long a spectacle of singular magnificence saluted us.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with which
+ of late they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm Whales,
+ instead of almost invariably sailing in small detached companies, as in
+ former times, are now frequently met with in extensive herds, sometimes
+ embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost seem as if numerous
+ nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance
+ and protection. To this aggregation of the Sperm Whale into such immense
+ caravans, may be imputed the circumstance that even in the best cruising
+ grounds, you may now sometimes sail for weeks and months together, without
+ being greeted by a single spout; and then be suddenly saluted by what
+ sometimes seems thousands on thousands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and
+ forming a great semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon, a
+ continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the
+ noon-day air. Unlike the straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Right
+ Whale, which, dividing at top, fall over in two branches, like the cleft
+ drooping boughs of a willow, the single forward-slanting spout of the
+ Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of white mist, continually rising
+ and falling away to leeward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Seen from the Pequod’s deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of the
+ sea, this host of vapory spouts, individually curling up into the air,
+ and beheld through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed like the
+ thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy
+ autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains,
+ accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in
+ their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the plain;
+ even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward through
+ the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and
+ swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Crowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers handling
+ their weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their yet suspended
+ boats. If the wind only held, little doubt had they, that chased through
+ these Straits of Sunda, the vast host would only deploy into the Oriental
+ seas to witness the capture of not a few of their number. And who could
+ tell whether, in that congregated caravan, Moby Dick himself might not
+ temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped white-elephant in the
+ coronation procession of the Siamese! So with stun-sail piled on
+ stun-sail, we sailed along, driving these leviathans before us; when, of a
+ sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard, loudly directing attention to
+ something in our wake.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Corresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear.
+ It seemed formed of detached white vapors, rising and falling something
+ like the spouts of the whales; only they did not so completely come and
+ go; for they constantly hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling
+ his glass at this sight, Ahab quickly revolved in his pivot-hole, crying,
+ “Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to wet the sails;—Malays,
+ sir, and after us!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should fairly
+ have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot pursuit,
+ to make up for their over-cautious delay. But when the swift Pequod, with
+ a fresh leading wind, was herself in hot chase; how very kind of these
+ tawny philanthropists to assist in speeding her on to her own chosen
+ pursuit,—mere riding-whips and rowels to her, that they were. As
+ with glass under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in his forward turn
+ beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after one the bloodthirsty
+ pirates chasing him ; some such fancy as the above seemed his. And when he
+ glanced upon the green walls of the watery defile in which the ship was
+ then sailing, and bethought him that through that gate lay the route to
+ his vengeance, and beheld, how that through that same gate he was now both
+ chasing and being chased to his deadly end; and not only that, but a herd
+ of remorseless wild pirates and inhuman atheistical devils were infernally
+ cheering him on with their curses;—when all these conceits had
+ passed through his brain, Ahab’s brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the
+ black sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being
+ able to drag the firm thing from its place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and when,
+ after steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the Pequod at
+ last shot by the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra side, emerging
+ at last upon the broad waters beyond; then, the harpooneers seemed more to
+ grieve that the swift whales had been gaining upon the ship, than to
+ rejoice that the ship had so victoriously gained upon the Malays. But
+ still driving on in the wake of the whales, at length they seemed abating
+ their speed; gradually the ship neared them; and the wind now dying away,
+ word was passed to spring to the boats. But no sooner did the herd, by
+ some presumed wonderful instinct of the Sperm Whale, become notified of
+ the three keels that were after them,—though as yet a mile in their
+ rear,—than they rallied again, and forming in close ranks and
+ battalions, so that their spouts all looked like flashing lines of stacked
+ bayonets, moved on with redoubled velocity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and after
+ several hours’ pulling were almost disposed to renounce the chase, when a
+ general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating token that they
+ were now at last under the influence of that strange perplexity of inert
+ irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive it in the whale, they say
+ he is gallied. The compact martial columns in which they had been hitherto
+ rapidly and steadily swimming, were now broken up in one measureless rout;
+ and like King Porus’ elephants in the Indian battle with Alexander, they
+ seemed going mad with consternation. In all directions expanding in vast
+ irregular circles, and aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their
+ short thick spoutings, they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic.
+ This was still more strangely evinced by those of their number, who,
+ completely paralysed as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged
+ dismantled ships on the sea. Had these Leviathans been but a flock of
+ simple sheep, pursued over the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could
+ not possibly have evinced such excessive dismay. But this occasional
+ timidity is characteristic of almost all herding creatures. Though banding
+ together in tens of thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have
+ fled before a solitary horseman. Witness, too, all human beings, how when
+ herded together in the sheepfold of a theatre’s pit, they will, at the
+ slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding,
+ trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best,
+ therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before
+ us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not
+ infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion, yet
+ it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor
+ retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is customary in
+ those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one lone
+ whale on the outskirts of the shoal. In about three minutes’ time,
+ Queequeg’s harpoon was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray in
+ our faces, and then running away with us like light, steered straight for
+ the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the part of the whale
+ struck under such circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented; and indeed
+ is almost always more or less anticipated; yet does it present one of the
+ more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. For as the swift monster drags
+ you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect
+ life and only exist in a delirious throb.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of
+ speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we
+ thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by the
+ crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was like a
+ ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer through their
+ complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what moment it may be
+ locked in and crushed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off from
+ this monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away from
+ that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the time,
+ Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our way
+ whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time to
+ make long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted duty
+ was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the shouting
+ part of the business. “Out of the way, Commodore!” cried one, to a great
+ dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an instant
+ threatened to swamp us. “Hard down with your tail, there!” cried a second
+ to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly cooling himself
+ with his own fan-like extremity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented by
+ the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. Two thick squares of wood of equal
+ size are stoutly clenched together, so that they cross each other’s grain
+ at right angles; a line of considerable length is then attached to the
+ middle of this block, and the other end of the line being looped, it can
+ in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly among gallied whales
+ that this drugg is used. For then, more whales are close round you than
+ you can possibly chase at one time. But sperm whales are not every day
+ encountered; while you may, then, you must kill all you can. And if you
+ cannot kill them all at once, you must wing them, so that they can be
+ afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it is, that at times like these
+ the drugg, comes into requisition. Our boat was furnished with three of
+ them. The first and second were successfully darted, and we saw the whales
+ staggeringly running off, fettered by the enormous sidelong resistance of
+ the towing drugg. They were cramped like malefactors with the chain and
+ ball. But upon flinging the third, in the act of tossing overboard the
+ clumsy wooden block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat, and in
+ an instant tore it out and carried it away, dropping the oarsman in the
+ boat’s bottom as the seat slid from under him. On both sides the sea came
+ in at the wounded planks, but we stuffed two or three drawers and shirts
+ in, and so stopped the leaks for the time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were it not
+ that as we advanced into the herd, our whale’s way greatly diminished;
+ moreover, that as we went still further and further from the circumference
+ of commotion, the direful disorders seemed waning. So that when at last
+ the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways vanished;
+ then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we glided between
+ two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if from some mountain
+ torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here the storms in the
+ roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In
+ this central expanse the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface,
+ called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in
+ his more quiet moods. Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they
+ say lurks at the heart of every commotion. And still in the distracted
+ distance we beheld the tumults of the outer concentric circles, and saw
+ successive pods of whales, eight or ten in each, swiftly going round and
+ round, like multiplied spans of horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder
+ to shoulder, that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have over-arched the
+ middle ones, and so have gone round on their backs. Owing to the density
+ of the crowd of reposing whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed
+ axis of the herd, no possible chance of escape was at present afforded us.
+ We must watch for a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall
+ that had only admitted us in order to shut us up. Keeping at the centre of
+ the lake, we were occasionally visited by small tame cows and calves; the
+ women and children of this routed host.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving
+ outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in any
+ one of those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by the
+ whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three square miles.
+ At any rate—though indeed such a test at such a time might be
+ deceptive—spoutings might be discovered from our low boat that
+ seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention this
+ circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely locked
+ up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of the herd had
+ hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its stopping;
+ or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way innocent and
+ inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller whales—now
+ and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake—evinced
+ a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still becharmed panic
+ which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like household dogs they came
+ snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it
+ almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg
+ patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance; but
+ fearful of the consequences, for the time refrained from darting it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still
+ stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in
+ those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the
+ whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become
+ mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth
+ exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly
+ and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives
+ at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still
+ spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did
+ the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if
+ we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their
+ sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little
+ infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might
+ have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He
+ was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered
+ from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the maternal
+ reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the
+ unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow. The delicate side-fins, and
+ the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled
+ appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from foreign parts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Line! line!” cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; “him fast! him
+ fast!—Who line him! Who struck?—Two whale; one big, one
+ little!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What ails ye, man?” cried Starbuck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look-e here,” said Queequeg, pointing down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of
+ fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows
+ the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the
+ air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame
+ Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not
+ seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line, with the
+ maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen one, so that the cub
+ is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed
+ divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in
+ the deep.*
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike
+ most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation
+ which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a
+ time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and
+ Jacob:—a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats,
+ curiously situated, one on each side of the anus; but the breasts
+ themselves extend upwards from that. When by chance these precious parts
+ in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter’s lance, the mother’s pouring
+ milk and blood rivallingly discolour the sea for rods. The milk is very
+ sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with
+ strawberries. When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute more
+ hominum .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and
+ affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and
+ fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in
+ dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my
+ being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and
+ while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and
+ deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic
+ spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other boats, still
+ engaged in drugging the whales on the frontier of the host; or possibly
+ carrying on the war within the first circle, where abundance of room and
+ some convenient retreats were afforded them. But the sight of the enraged
+ drugged whales now and then blindly darting to and fro across the circles,
+ was nothing to what at last met our eyes. It is sometimes the custom when
+ fast to a whale more than commonly powerful and alert, to seek to
+ hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or maiming his gigantic
+ tail-tendon. It is done by darting a short-handled cutting-spade, to which
+ is attached a rope for hauling it back again. A whale wounded (as we
+ afterwards learned) in this part, but not effectually, as it seemed, had
+ broken away from the boat, carrying along with him half of the harpoon
+ line; and in the extraordinary agony of the wound, he was now dashing
+ among the revolving circles like the lone mounted desperado Arnold, at the
+ battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay wherever he went.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle
+ enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to inspire
+ the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause which at first the intervening
+ distance obscured from us. But at length we perceived that by one of the
+ unimaginable accidents of the fishery, this whale had become entangled in
+ the harpoon-line that he towed; he had also run away with the
+ cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the rope attached to that
+ weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the harpoon-line round his
+ tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose from his flesh. So that
+ tormented to madness, he was now churning through the water, violently
+ flailing with his flexible tail, and tossing the keen spade about him,
+ wounding and murdering his own comrades.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their stationary
+ fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake began to crowd a
+ little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by half spent billows
+ from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to heave and swell; the
+ submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in more and more
+ contracting orbits the whales in the more central circles began to swim in
+ thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was departing. A low advancing hum
+ was soon heard; and then like to the tumultuous masses of block-ice when
+ the great river Hudson breaks up in Spring, the entire host of whales came
+ tumbling upon their inner centre, as if to pile themselves up in one
+ common mountain. Instantly Starbuck and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck
+ taking the stern.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oars! Oars!” he intensely whispered, seizing the helm—“gripe your
+ oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him off,
+ you Queequeg—the whale there!—prick him!—hit him! Stand
+ up—stand up, and stay so! Spring, men—pull, men; never mind
+ their backs—scrape them!—scrape away!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, leaving a
+ narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by desperate endeavor
+ we at last shot into a temporary opening; then giving way rapidly, and at
+ the same time earnestly watching for another outlet. After many similar
+ hair-breadth escapes, we at last swiftly glided into what had just been
+ one of the outer circles, but now crossed by random whales, all violently
+ making for one centre. This lucky salvation was cheaply purchased by the
+ loss of Queequeg’s hat, who, while standing in the bows to prick the
+ fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his head by the air-eddy
+ made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad flukes close by.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon
+ resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having clumped
+ together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their onward flight
+ with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but the boats still
+ lingered in their wake to pick up what drugged whales might be dropped
+ astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask had killed and waifed. The
+ waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which are carried by every boat;
+ and which, when additional game is at hand, are inserted upright into the
+ floating body of a dead whale, both to mark its place on the sea, and also
+ as token of prior possession, should the boats of any other ship draw
+ near.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious
+ saying in the Fishery,—the more whales the less fish. Of all the
+ drugged whales only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for the
+ time, but only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other craft
+ than the Pequod.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
+ 
+ 
+ The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm
+ Whales, and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those
+ vast aggregations.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must have
+ been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are occasionally
+ observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each. Such bands are
+ known as schools. They generally are of two sorts; those composed almost
+ entirely of females, and those mustering none but young vigorous males, or
+ bulls, as they are familiarly designated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a
+ male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces
+ his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight of his
+ ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about
+ over the watery world, surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces and
+ endearments of the harem. The contrast between this Ottoman and his
+ concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the largest
+ leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not more
+ than one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They are
+ comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen
+ yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the
+ whole they are hereditarily entitled to en bon point .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It is very curious to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent
+ ramblings. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely
+ search of variety. You meet them on the Line in time for the full flower
+ of the Equatorial feeding season, having just returned, perhaps, from
+ spending the summer in the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all
+ unpleasant weariness and warmth. By the time they have lounged up and down
+ the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for the Oriental waters in
+ anticipation of the cool season there, and so evade the other excessive
+ temperature of the year.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange
+ suspicious sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his
+ interesting family. Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming
+ that way, presume to draw confidentially close to one of the ladies, with
+ what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases him away! High
+ times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like him are to be permitted to
+ invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though do what the Bashaw will, he
+ cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out of his bed; for, alas! all
+ fish bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often cause the most terrible
+ duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales, who sometimes
+ come to deadly battle, and all for love. They fence with their long lower
+ jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving for the supremacy
+ like elks that warringly interweave their antlers. Not a few are captured
+ having the deep scars of these encounters,—furrowed heads, broken
+ teeth, scolloped fins; and in some instances, wrenched and dislocated
+ mouths.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at the
+ first rush of the harem’s lord, then is it very diverting to watch that
+ lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and revels there
+ awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario, like pious
+ Solomon devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines. Granting other
+ whales to be in sight, the fishermen will seldom give chase to one of
+ these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too lavish of their strength,
+ and hence their unctuousness is small. As for the sons and the daughters
+ they beget, why, those sons and daughters must take care of themselves; at
+ least, with only the maternal help. For like certain other omnivorous
+ roving lovers that might be named, my Lord Whale has no taste for the
+ nursery, however much for the bower; and so, being a great traveller, he
+ leaves his anonymous babies all over the world; every baby an exotic. In
+ good time, nevertheless, as the ardour of youth declines; as years and
+ dumps increase; as reflection lends her solemn pauses; in short, as a
+ general lassitude overtakes the sated Turk; then a love of ease and virtue
+ supplants the love for maidens; our Ottoman enters upon the impotent,
+ repentant, admonitory stage of life, forswears, disbands the harem, and
+ grown to an exemplary, sulky old soul, goes about all alone among the
+ meridians and parallels saying his prayers, and warning each young
+ Leviathan from his amorous errors.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so is the
+ lord and master of that school technically known as the schoolmaster. It
+ is therefore not in strict character, however admirably satirical, that
+ after going to school himself, he should then go abroad inculcating not
+ what he learned there, but the folly of it. His title, schoolmaster, would
+ very naturally seem derived from the name bestowed upon the harem itself,
+ but some have surmised that the man who first thus entitled this sort of
+ Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself
+ what sort of a country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his
+ younger days, and what was the nature of those occult lessons he
+ inculcated into some of his pupils.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale
+ betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm Whales.
+ Almost universally, a lone whale—as a solitary Leviathan is called—proves
+ an ancient one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no
+ one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the
+ wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so
+ many moody secrets.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously
+ mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while those
+ female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or
+ forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious of
+ all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter;
+ excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met, and
+ these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like a
+ mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness,
+ tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no
+ prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous lad
+ at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence though, and when
+ about three-fourths grown, break up, and separately go about in quest of
+ settlements, that is, harems.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Another point of difference between the male and female schools is still
+ more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a Forty-barrel-bull—poor
+ devil! all his comrades quit him. But strike a member of the harem school,
+ and her companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes
+ lingering so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
+ 
+ 
+ The allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the last chapter but one,
+ necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the whale
+ fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol and badge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company, a
+ whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed and
+ captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised many minor
+ contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature. For example,—after
+ a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale, the body may get loose
+ from the ship by reason of a violent storm; and drifting far away to
+ leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who, in a calm, snugly tows it
+ alongside, without risk of life or line. Thus the most vexatious and
+ violent disputes would often arise between the fishermen, were there not
+ some written or unwritten, universal, undisputed law applicable to all
+ cases.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment,
+ was that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in A.D. 1695.
+ But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the
+ American fishermen have been their own legislators and lawyers in this
+ matter. They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness
+ surpasses Justinian’s Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for
+ the Suppression of Meddling with other People’s Business. Yes; these laws
+ might be engraven on a Queen Anne’s farthing, or the barb of a harpoon,
+ and worn round the neck, so small are they.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable
+ brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound
+ it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when
+ it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all
+ controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a
+ nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the
+ same. Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any
+ other recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it
+ plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as
+ their intention so to do.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen
+ themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks—the
+ Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and
+ honorable whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases, where
+ it would be an outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim
+ possession of a whale previously chased or killed by another party. But
+ others are by no means so scrupulous.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated in
+ England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of a
+ whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had
+ succeeded in harpooning the fish; they were at last, through peril of
+ their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat
+ itself. Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up with
+ the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it before the
+ very eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those defendants were remonstrated
+ with, their captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs’ teeth, and
+ assured them that by way of doxology to the deed he had done, he would now
+ retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had remained attached to the
+ whale at the time of the seizure. Wherefore the plaintiffs now sued for
+ the recovery of the value of their whale, line, harpoons, and boat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was the
+ judge. In the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went on to
+ illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent crim. con. case, wherein
+ a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his wife’s viciousness, had at
+ last abandoned her upon the seas of life; but in the course of years,
+ repenting of that step, he instituted an action to recover possession of
+ her. Erskine was on the other side; and he then supported it by saying,
+ that though the gentleman had originally harpooned the lady, and had once
+ had her fast, and only by reason of the great stress of her plunging
+ viciousness, had at last abandoned her; yet abandon her he did, so that
+ she became a loose-fish; and therefore when a subsequent gentleman
+ re-harpooned her, the lady then became that subsequent gentleman’s
+ property, along with whatever harpoon might have been found sticking in
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the whale
+ and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very
+ learned judge in set terms decided, to wit,—That as for the boat, he
+ awarded it to the plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it to save
+ their lives; but that with regard to the controverted whale, harpoons, and
+ line, they belonged to the defendants; the whale, because it was a
+ Loose-Fish at the time of the final capture; and the harpoons and line
+ because when the fish made off with them, it (the fish) acquired a
+ property in those articles; and hence anybody who afterwards took the fish
+ had a right to them. Now the defendants afterwards took the fish; ergo,
+ the aforesaid articles were theirs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A common man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might
+ possibly object to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock of the matter,
+ the two great principles laid down in the twin whaling laws previously
+ quoted, and applied and elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in the above cited
+ case; these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say, will, on
+ reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence; for
+ notwithstanding its complicated tracery of sculpture, the Temple of the
+ Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but two props to stand on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Is it not a saying in every one’s mouth, Possession is half of the law:
+ that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often
+ possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of
+ Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is
+ the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow’s last
+ mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain’s marble mansion
+ with a door-plate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the
+ ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone, the
+ bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone’s family from starvation; what is
+ that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of
+ Savesoul’s income of £100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese of
+ hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven
+ without any of Savesoul’s help) what is that globular £100,000 but a
+ Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder’s hereditary towns and hamlets but
+ Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland,
+ but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas
+ but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of
+ the law?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the
+ kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is
+ internationally and universally applicable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the
+ Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress?
+ What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to
+ England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish?
+ What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of
+ religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious
+ smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is
+ the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a
+ Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.
+ 
+ 
+ “De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam.” Bracton,
+ l. 3, c. 3. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the
+ context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of
+ that land, the King, as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head,
+ and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail. A division which,
+ in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no intermediate
+ remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form, is to this day in force
+ in England; and as it offers in various respects a strange anomaly
+ touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of in
+ a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that prompts the
+ English railways to be at the expense of a separate car, specially
+ reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first place, in curious
+ proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in force, I
+ proceed to lay before you a circumstance that happened within the last two
+ years.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of
+ the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and beaching
+ a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from the shore.
+ Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the jurisdiction of a
+ sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden. Holding the office
+ directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal emoluments incident to
+ the Cinque Port territories become by assignment his. By some writers this
+ office is called a sinecure. But not so. Because the Lord Warden is busily
+ employed at times in fobbing his perquisites; which are his chiefly by
+ virtue of that same fobbing of them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their
+ trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat
+ fish high and dry, promising themselves a good £150 from the precious oil
+ and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good ale
+ with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares; up steps
+ a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with a copy of
+ Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon the whale’s head, he says—“Hands
+ off! this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it as the Lord
+ Warden’s.” Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful consternation—so
+ truly English—knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching
+ their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to the
+ stranger. But that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the
+ hard heart of the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone. At length
+ one of them, after long scratching about for his ideas, made bold to
+ speak,
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Duke.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is his.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is all
+ that to go to the Duke’s benefit; we getting nothing at all for our pains
+ but our blisters?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is his.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of
+ getting a livelihood?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is his.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of this
+ whale.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is his.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Won’t the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is his.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of
+ Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular
+ lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree be
+ deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman of
+ the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to take
+ the case of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration. To which
+ my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were published) that he
+ had already done so, and received the money, and would be obliged to the
+ reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend gentleman) would
+ decline meddling with other people’s business. Is this the still militant
+ old man, standing at the corners of the three kingdoms, on all hands
+ coercing alms of beggars?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the Duke to
+ the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs inquire
+ then on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested with that
+ right. The law itself has already been set forth. But Plowdon gives us the
+ reason for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs to the King and
+ Queen, “because of its superior excellence.” And by the soundest
+ commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in such matters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason
+ for that, ye lawyers!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In his treatise on “Queen-Gold,” or Queen-pinmoney, an old King’s Bench
+ author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: “Ye tail is ye Queen’s, that
+ ye Queen’s wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone.” Now this was
+ written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or Right
+ whale was largely used in ladies’ bodices. But this same bone is not in
+ the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer
+ like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail? An
+ allegorical meaning may lurk here.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers—the
+ whale and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and
+ nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown’s ordinary revenue. I
+ know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by inference
+ it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same way as the
+ whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head peculiar to
+ that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be humorously
+ grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there seems a reason in
+ all things, even in law.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
+ 
+ 
+ “In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan,
+ insufferable fetor denying not inquiry.” Sir T. Browne, V.E. 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we
+ were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapory, mid-day sea, that the many
+ noses on the Pequod’s deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the three
+ pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was smelt in
+ the sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will bet something now,” said Stubb, “that somewhere hereabouts are
+ some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought they
+ would keel up before long.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Presently, the vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance
+ lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be
+ alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colours from
+ his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and
+ hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside
+ must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has
+ died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse. It
+ may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale;
+ worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent
+ to bury the departed. So intolerable indeed is it regarded by some, that
+ no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it. Yet are there
+ those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact that the oil obtained
+ from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and by no means of the
+ nature of attar-of-rose.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman
+ had a second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed even more of a
+ nosegay than the first. In truth, it turned out to be one of those
+ problematical whales that seem to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious
+ dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely
+ bankrupt of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the proper place we shall
+ see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn up his nose at such a whale
+ as this, however much he may shun blasted whales in general.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed he
+ recognised his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were knotted
+ round the tail of one of these whales.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There’s a pretty fellow, now,” he banteringly laughed, standing in the
+ ship’s bows, “there’s a jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes of
+ Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering their
+ boats for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes, and
+ sometimes sailing from their port with their hold full of boxes of tallow
+ candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all the oil they will get
+ won’t be enough to dip the Captain’s wick into; aye, we all know these
+ things; but look ye, here’s a Crappo that is content with our leavings,
+ the drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and is content too with scraping the
+ dry bones of that other precious fish he has there. Poor devil! I say,
+ pass round a hat, some one, and let’s make him a present of a little oil
+ for dear charity’s sake. For what oil he’ll get from that drugged whale
+ there, wouldn’t be fit to burn in a jail; no, not in a condemned cell. And
+ as for the other whale, why, I’ll agree to get more oil by chopping up and
+ trying out these three masts of ours, than he’ll get from that bundle of
+ bones; though, now that I think of it, it may contain something worth a
+ good deal more than oil; yes, ambergris. I wonder now if our old man has
+ thought of that. It’s worth trying. Yes, I’m for it;” and so saying he
+ started for the quarter-deck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether or
+ no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of
+ escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb
+ now called his boat’s crew, and pulled off for the stranger. Drawing
+ across her bow, he perceived that in accordance with the fanciful French
+ taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in the likeness of a
+ huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper spikes
+ projecting from it here and there; the whole terminating in a symmetrical
+ folded bulb of a bright red colour. Upon her head boards, in large gilt
+ letters, he read “Bouton de Rose,”—Rose-button, or Rose-bud; and
+ this was the romantic name of this aromatic ship.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though Stubb did not understand the Bouton part of the inscription, yet
+ the word rose , and the bulbous figure-head put together, sufficiently
+ explained the whole to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A wooden rose-bud, eh?” he cried with his hand to his nose, “that will do
+ very well; but how like all creation it smells!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he had
+ to pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come close to the
+ blasted whale; and so talk over it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he bawled—“Bouton-de-Rose,
+ ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that speak English?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out to be the
+ chief-mate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ What whale?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The White Whale—a Sperm Whale—Moby Dick, have ye seen him?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White Whale—no.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very good, then; good bye now, and I’ll call again in a minute.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning over
+ the quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two hands into a
+ trumpet and shouted—“No, Sir! No!” Upon which Ahab retired, and
+ Stubb returned to the Frenchman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He now perceived that the Guernsey-man, who had just got into the chains,
+ and was using a cutting-spade, had slung his nose in a sort of bag.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s the matter with your nose, there?” said Stubb. “Broke it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I wish it was broken, or that I didn’t have any nose at all!” answered
+ the Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very much.
+ “But what are you holding yours for?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, nothing! It’s a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, ain’t it?
+ Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw us a bunch of posies, will ye,
+ Bouton-de-Rose?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What in the devil’s name do you want here?” roared the Guernseyman,
+ flying into a sudden passion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! keep cool—cool? yes, that’s the word! why don’t you pack those
+ whales in ice while you’re working at ’em? But joking aside, though; do
+ you know, Rose-bud, that it’s all nonsense trying to get any oil out of
+ such whales? As for that dried up one, there, he hasn’t a gill in his
+ whole carcase.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know that well enough; but, d’ye see, the Captain here won’t believe
+ it; this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But
+ come aboard, and mayhap he’ll believe you, if he won’t me; and so I’ll get
+ out of this dirty scrape.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow,” rejoined Stubb, and
+ with that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer scene presented
+ itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, were getting the
+ heavy tackles in readiness for the whales. But they worked rather slow and
+ talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a good humor. All their noses
+ upwardly projected from their faces like so many jib-booms. Now and then
+ pairs of them would drop their work, and run up to the mast-head to get
+ some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch the plague, dipped oakum in
+ coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their nostrils. Others having broken
+ the stems of their pipes almost short off at the bowl, were vigorously
+ puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it constantly filled their olfactories.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from the
+ Captain’s round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a fiery
+ face thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from within. This
+ was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating against the
+ proceedings of the day, had betaken himself to the Captain’s round-house
+ ( cabinet he called it) to avoid the pest; but still, could not help
+ yelling out his entreaties and indignations at times.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the
+ Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate
+ expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus, who had
+ brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle. Sounding him
+ carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man had not the
+ slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore held his peace
+ on that head, but otherwise was quite frank and confidential with him, so
+ that the two quickly concocted a little plan for both circumventing and
+ satirizing the Captain, without his at all dreaming of distrusting their
+ sincerity. According to this little plan of theirs, the Guernsey-man,
+ under cover of an interpreter’s office, was to tell the Captain what he
+ pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and as for Stubb, he was to utter any
+ nonsense that should come uppermost in him during the interview.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a small
+ and dark, but rather delicate looking man for a sea-captain, with large
+ whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a red cotton velvet vest with
+ watch-seals at his side. To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely
+ introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at once ostentatiously put on the
+ aspect of interpreting between them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What shall I say to him first?” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why,” said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, “you
+ may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish to me,
+ though I don’t pretend to be a judge.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He says, Monsieur,” said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his
+ captain, “that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain and
+ chief-mate, with six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a
+ blasted whale they had brought alongside.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What now?” said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him
+ carefully, I’m quite certain that he’s no more fit to command a whale-ship
+ than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him from me he’s a baboon.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one, is
+ far more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures us,
+ as we value our lives, to cut loose from these fish.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his crew
+ to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose the
+ cables and chains confining the whales to the ship.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What now?” said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that—that—in
+ fact, tell him I’ve diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody
+ else.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He says, Monsieur, that he’s very happy to have been of any service to
+ us.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties
+ (meaning himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into his
+ cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He wants you to take a glass of wine with him,” said the interpreter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank him heartily; but tell him it’s against my principles to drink with
+ the man I’ve diddled. In fact, tell him I must go.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He says, Monsieur, that his principles won’t admit of his drinking; but
+ that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur had
+ best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales, for
+ it’s so calm they won’t drift.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed
+ the Guernsey-man to this effect,—that having a long tow-line in his
+ boat, he would do what he could to help them, by pulling out the lighter
+ whale of the two from the ship’s side. While the Frenchman’s boats, then,
+ were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb benevolently towed away at
+ his whale the other way, ostentatiously slacking out a most unusually long
+ tow-line.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale;
+ hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, while the
+ Pequod slid in between him and Stubb’s whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly
+ pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to give notice of his
+ intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of his unrighteous
+ cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he commenced an excavation in the
+ body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost have thought he was
+ digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at length his spade struck
+ against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old Roman tiles and pottery
+ buried in fat English loam. His boat’s crew were all in high excitement,
+ eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as gold-hunters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and screaming,
+ and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning to look
+ disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when suddenly
+ from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint stream of
+ perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without being
+ absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then along with another,
+ without at all blending with it for a time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have it, I have it,” cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in
+ the subterranean regions, “a purse! a purse!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of
+ something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese;
+ very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb;
+ it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. And this, good friends, is
+ ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six handfuls
+ were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost in the sea, and still more,
+ perhaps, might have been secured were it not for impatient Ahab’s loud
+ command to Stubb to desist, and come on board, else the ship would bid
+ them good bye.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.
+ 
+ 
+ Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an
+ article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin
+ was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject.
+ For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the precise
+ origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the learned.
+ Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for grey amber, yet
+ the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though at times found on
+ the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris
+ is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent,
+ brittle, odorless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and
+ ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy,
+ that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles,
+ hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it
+ to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s
+ in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale
+ themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale!
+ Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by
+ others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a
+ dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat
+ loads of Brandreth’s pills, and then running out of harm’s way, as
+ laborers do in blasting rocks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris, certain
+ hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought might be sailors’
+ trowsers buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they were nothing more
+ than pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that manner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found
+ in the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that saying
+ of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption; how that we
+ are sown in dishonor, but raised in glory. And likewise call to mind that
+ saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk. Also
+ forget not the strange fact that of all things of ill-savor,
+ Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the worst.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but cannot,
+ owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against whalemen, and
+ which, in the estimation of some already biased minds, might be considered
+ as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the Frenchman’s two
+ whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has been
+ disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly, untidy
+ business. But there is another thing to rebut. They hint that all whales
+ always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma originate?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the
+ Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because
+ those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as
+ the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in
+ small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large casks, and carry it
+ home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas, and
+ the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding any
+ other course. The consequence is, that upon breaking into the hold, and
+ unloading one of these whale cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a savor is
+ given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an old city
+ grave-yard, for the foundations of a Lying-in Hospital.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be
+ likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former
+ times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which
+ latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great
+ work on Smells, a text-book on that subject. As its name imports (smeer,
+ fat; berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to afford a place
+ for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried out, without being
+ taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of furnaces,
+ fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in full operation
+ certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But all this is quite
+ different with a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four years
+ perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil, does not, perhaps,
+ consume fifty days in the business of boiling out; and in the state that
+ it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that living or
+ dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means
+ creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the people of
+ the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose. Nor
+ indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant, when, as a
+ general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance of exercise;
+ always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the open air. I say,
+ that the motion of a Sperm Whale’s flukes above water dispenses a perfume,
+ as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor. What then
+ shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude?
+ Must it not be to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent
+ with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian town to do honor to Alexander
+ the Great?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.
+ 
+ 
+ It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most
+ significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew; an
+ event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes madly
+ merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying prophecy
+ of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some
+ few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work
+ the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing,
+ these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats’
+ crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous
+ wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It was
+ so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by
+ abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his
+ tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a
+ white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in
+ one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and
+ torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom
+ very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his
+ tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer,
+ freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year’s calendar should
+ show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New
+ Year’s Days. Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was
+ brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous
+ ebony, panelled in king’s cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all life’s
+ peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he had
+ somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his
+ brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily
+ subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by strange
+ wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the natural
+ lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had once
+ enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on the green; and at melodious
+ even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one
+ star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day, suspended
+ against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful
+ glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its
+ most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then
+ lights it up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out
+ those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond,
+ once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel
+ stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to the story.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb’s after-oarsman
+ chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed; and,
+ temporarily, Pip was put into his place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness; but
+ happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and
+ therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing
+ him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his courageousness to
+ the utmost, for he might often find it needful.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as the
+ fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which happened,
+ in this instance, to be right under poor Pip’s seat. The involuntary
+ consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in hand, out of the
+ boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale line coming against
+ his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as to become entangled in
+ it, when at last plumping into the water. That instant the stricken whale
+ started on a fierce run, the line swiftly straightened; and presto! poor
+ Pip came all foaming up to the chocks of the boat, remorselessly dragged
+ there by the line, which had taken several turns around his chest and
+ neck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He hated
+ Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath, he suspended
+ its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb, exclaimed
+ interrogatively, “Cut?” Meantime Pip’s blue, choked face plainly looked,
+ Do, for God’s sake! All passed in a flash. In less than half a minute,
+ this entire thing happened.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Damn him, cut!” roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was
+ saved.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed by
+ yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these irregular
+ cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like, but still
+ half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done, unofficially
+ gave him much wholesome advice. The substance was, Never jump from a boat,
+ Pip, except—but all the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice
+ ever is. Now, in general, Stick to the boat , is your true motto in
+ whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when Leap from the boat , is still
+ better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he should give
+ undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him too wide a
+ margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all advice, and
+ concluded with a peremptory command, “Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the
+ Lord, I won’t pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can’t afford to lose
+ whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you
+ would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don’t jump any more.”
+ Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow,
+ yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes
+ with his benevolence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was
+ under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time
+ he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to run,
+ Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller’s trunk. Alas!
+ Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue
+ day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all
+ round, to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin hammered out to the
+ extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like a
+ head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern.
+ Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In
+ three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb.
+ Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black
+ head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the
+ brightest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the
+ practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful
+ lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the
+ middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how
+ when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely
+ they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he
+ did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and
+ he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very
+ quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards
+ oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested
+ by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not
+ unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so called,
+ is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies
+ and armies.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying
+ whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat
+ was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that
+ Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest
+ chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little
+ negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The
+ sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his
+ soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous
+ depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and
+ fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his
+ hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities,
+ Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the
+ firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the
+ treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him
+ mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal
+ reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is
+ absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent
+ as his God.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that
+ fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what
+ like abandonment befell myself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.
+ 
+ 
+ That whale of Stubb’s, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the
+ Pequod’s side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations previously
+ detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of the
+ Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in
+ dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when
+ the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere
+ going to the try-works, of which anon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several
+ others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it
+ strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid
+ part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet
+ and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a
+ favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener!
+ such a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it for only a few
+ minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine
+ and spiralise.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter
+ exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under
+ indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among
+ those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within
+ the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their
+ opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that
+ uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring
+ violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow;
+ I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I
+ washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old
+ Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat
+ of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all
+ ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm
+ till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange
+ sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my
+ co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.
+ Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this
+ avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and
+ looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my
+ dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or
+ know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all
+ round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze
+ ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by
+ many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases
+ man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable
+ felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in
+ the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the
+ country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case
+ eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of
+ angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things akin
+ to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering
+ part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It is
+ tough with congealed tendons—a wad of muscle—but still
+ contains some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is
+ first cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much
+ like blocks of Berkshire marble.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the
+ whale’s flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and
+ often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a
+ most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name
+ imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked
+ snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and
+ purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it
+ is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole
+ behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive a
+ royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, supposing
+ him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, and that
+ particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine vintage of
+ the vineyards of Champagne.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the
+ course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling
+ adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation original
+ with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an
+ ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of
+ sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold it to
+ be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case, coalescing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but
+ sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the
+ dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland
+ or right whale, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior souls
+ who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale’s vocabulary.
+ But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman’s nipper is a short
+ firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of Leviathan’s
+ tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is about the
+ size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the oily deck, it
+ operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless blandishments, as of
+ magic, allures along with it all impurities.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once
+ to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates.
+ This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the
+ blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When the proper
+ time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is a scene of
+ terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one side, lit by a dull
+ lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. They generally go in
+ pairs,—a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The whaling-pike is
+ similar to a frigate’s boarding-weapon of the same name. The gaff is
+ something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a sheet
+ of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches and
+ lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself,
+ perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This spade is
+ sharp as hone can make it; the spademan’s feet are shoeless; the thing he
+ stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge.
+ If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants’, would you
+ be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.
+ 
+ 
+ Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this
+ post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the
+ windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small
+ curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen
+ there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous
+ cistern in the whale’s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower
+ jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so
+ surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,—longer
+ than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and
+ jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is;
+ or, rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that found in
+ the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which,
+ King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it
+ for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th
+ chapter of the First Book of Kings.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted
+ by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it,
+ and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier
+ carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle
+ deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African
+ hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a
+ pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its
+ diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere
+ long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the
+ pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the other
+ end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer now stands
+ before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to
+ all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while
+ employed in the peculiar functions of his office.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the pots;
+ an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted endwise
+ against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into which the
+ minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator’s desk. Arrayed
+ in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves;
+ what a candidate for an archbishopric, what a lad for a Pope were this
+ mincer!*
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the mates to
+ the mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as thin
+ slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of boiling out
+ the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased,
+ besides perhaps improving it in quality.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.
+ 
+ 
+ Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished
+ by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid
+ masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship. It
+ is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her planks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most
+ roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength,
+ fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and mortar,
+ some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The foundation does not
+ penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly secured to the surface by
+ ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides, and screwing it down to
+ the timbers. On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top completely
+ covered by a large, sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we
+ expose the great try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels’
+ capacity. When not in use, they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they
+ are polished with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver
+ punch-bowls. During the night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl
+ into them and coil themselves away there for a nap. While employed in
+ polishing them—one man in each pot, side by side—many
+ confidential communications are carried on, over the iron lips. It is a
+ place also for profound mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand
+ try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone diligently circling round me,
+ that I was first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in
+ geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example,
+ will descend from any point in precisely the same time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare masonry
+ of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of the
+ furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted with heavy
+ doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented from
+ communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir
+ extending under the entire inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel
+ inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as
+ fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open direct
+ from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a moment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was about nine o’clock at night that the Pequod’s try-works were first
+ started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee the
+ business.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the
+ works.” This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his
+ shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said that in
+ a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time
+ with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition
+ to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp,
+ shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains
+ considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames.
+ Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once
+ ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would
+ that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and
+ inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the
+ time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk
+ in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day
+ of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the
+ carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean
+ darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce
+ flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and
+ illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire.
+ The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some
+ vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold
+ Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets
+ of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and folded them
+ in conflagrations.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth
+ in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan
+ harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge pronged poles they
+ pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up
+ the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors
+ to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every
+ pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all
+ eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on
+ the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served
+ for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed,
+ looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in
+ their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat,
+ their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their
+ teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of
+ the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their
+ tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter
+ forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and
+ fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge
+ pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and
+ the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further
+ and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully
+ champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all
+ sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with
+ fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness,
+ seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently
+ guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval,
+ in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the
+ ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me,
+ capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred
+ visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable
+ drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable)
+ thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly
+ conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote my side,
+ which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just
+ beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half
+ conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching
+ them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass
+ before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had been
+ watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing
+ seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of
+ redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing
+ I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all
+ havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me.
+ Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that
+ the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is
+ the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself
+ about, and was fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the
+ compass. In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel
+ from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How glad
+ and how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the
+ night, and the fatal contingency of being brought by the lee!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy
+ hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint
+ of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness
+ makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies
+ will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the
+ morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious,
+ golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s
+ accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of
+ deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which
+ is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So,
+ therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that
+ mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped. With books the
+ same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all
+ books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.
+ “All is vanity.” ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian
+ Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks
+ fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls
+ Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and
+ throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and
+ therefore jolly;—not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones,
+ and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of
+ understanding shall remain” ( i.e. , even while living) “in the congregation
+ of the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee,
+ deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but
+ there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some
+ souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of
+ them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for
+ ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even
+ in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds
+ upon the plain, even though they soar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.
+ 
+ 
+ Had you descended from the Pequod’s try-works to the Pequod’s forecastle,
+ where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment you would
+ have almost thought you were standing in some illuminated shrine of
+ canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay in their triangular oaken
+ vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon
+ his hooded eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of queens.
+ To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in darkness to his
+ pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he seeks the food of
+ light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an Aladdin’s lamp, and
+ lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night the ship’s black hull
+ still houses an illumination.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps—often
+ but old bottles and vials, though—to the copper cooler at the
+ try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He burns,
+ too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore, unvitiated
+ state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral contrivances ashore. It
+ is sweet as early grass butter in April. He goes and hunts for his oil, so
+ as to be sure of its freshness and genuineness, even as the traveller on
+ the prairie hunts up his own supper of game.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
+ 
+ 
+ Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off descried
+ from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and
+ slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside and
+ beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman of old to
+ the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great padded surtout
+ becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he is condemned
+ to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his spermaceti,
+ oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;—but now it remains to
+ conclude the last chapter of this part of the description by rehearsing—singing,
+ if I may—the romantic proceeding of decanting off his oil into the
+ casks and striking them down into the hold, where once again leviathan
+ returns to his native profundities, sliding along beneath the surface as
+ before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the six-barrel
+ casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling this way and
+ that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed round and headed
+ over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot across the slippery
+ deck, like so many land slides, till at last man-handled and stayed in
+ their course; and all round the hoops, rap, rap, go as many hammers as can
+ play upon them, for now, ex officio , every sailor is a cooper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great
+ hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down
+ go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are
+ replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable incidents
+ in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream with freshets of
+ blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale’s
+ head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery
+ yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the bulwarks; the
+ mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire ship seems great
+ leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is deafening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this
+ self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try-works, you
+ would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a most
+ scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses a
+ singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never look
+ so white as just after what they call an affair of oil. Besides, from the
+ ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent lye is readily made; and
+ whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale remains clinging to
+ the side, that lye quickly exterminates it. Hands go diligently along the
+ bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags restore them to their full
+ tidiness. The soot is brushed from the lower rigging. All the numerous
+ implements which have been in use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put
+ away. The great hatch is scrubbed and placed upon the try-works,
+ completely hiding the pots; every cask is out of sight; all tackles are
+ coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined and simultaneous industry
+ of almost the entire ship’s company, the whole of this conscientious duty
+ is at last concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own
+ ablutions; shift themselves from top to toe; and finally issue to the
+ immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow, as bridegrooms new-leaped from out
+ the daintiest Holland.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and
+ humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics;
+ propose to mat the deck; think of having hanging to the top; object not to
+ taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to such
+ musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short of
+ audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and bring
+ us napkins!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent on
+ spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again soil the
+ old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot somewhere.
+ Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted labors,
+ which know no night; continuing straight through for ninety-six hours;
+ when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists with all day
+ rowing on the Line,—they only step to the deck to carry vast chains,
+ and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very
+ sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the
+ equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all
+ this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make
+ a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just
+ buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of
+ “There she blows!” and away they fly to fight another whale, and go
+ through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this is
+ man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings
+ extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and
+ then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and
+ learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this
+ done, when— There she blows! —the ghost is spouted up, and away
+ we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine
+ again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two
+ thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee
+ along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught
+ thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.
+ 
+ 
+ Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck,
+ taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but in
+ the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been added
+ how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood, he was
+ wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely eyeing the
+ particular object before him. When he halted before the binnacle, with his
+ glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass, that glance shot
+ like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his purpose; and when
+ resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast, then, as the same
+ riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin there, he still wore
+ the same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed with a certain wild
+ longing, if not hopefulness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly
+ attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though
+ now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some
+ monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain
+ significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and
+ the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the
+ cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the
+ Milky Way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the
+ heart of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the
+ head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst all the
+ rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet,
+ untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its Quito
+ glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour passed by
+ ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with thick
+ darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless every
+ sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left it last. For it was set
+ apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however wanton in their
+ sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as the white whale’s
+ talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch by night,
+ wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever live to
+ spend it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun and
+ tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun’s disks and
+ stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving, are in
+ luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to
+ derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing through
+ those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example
+ of these things. On its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL
+ ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the
+ middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it;
+ and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows
+ no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes’
+ summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a crowing
+ cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac, the
+ signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun
+ entering the equinoctial point at Libra.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now
+ pausing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all
+ other grand and lofty things; look here,—three peaks as proud as
+ Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the
+ courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all
+ are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe,
+ which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors
+ back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those who ask
+ the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks now this coined
+ sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the
+ equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a former equinox at
+ Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in throes, ’tis fit that
+ man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then! Here’s stout
+ stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil’s claws must have
+ left their mouldings there since yesterday,” murmured Starbuck to himself,
+ leaning against the bulwarks. “The old man seems to read Belshazzar’s
+ awful writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly. He goes below;
+ let me read. A dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks,
+ that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint earthly symbol. So in this
+ vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all our gloom, the sun of
+ Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope. If we bend down our eyes,
+ the dark vale shows her mouldy soil; but if we lift them, the bright sun
+ meets our glance half way, to cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture;
+ and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we
+ gaze for him in vain! This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still
+ sadly to me. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now’s the old Mogul,” soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, “he’s
+ been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with
+ faces which I should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long. And
+ all from looking at a piece of gold, which did I have it now on Negro Hill
+ or in Corlaer’s Hook, I’d not look at it very long ere spending it. Humph!
+ in my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard this as queer. I have seen
+ doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons of old Spain, your
+ doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili, your doubloons of Bolivia,
+ your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and
+ joes, and half joes, and quarter joes. What then should there be in this
+ doubloon of the Equator that is so killing wonderful? By Golconda! let me
+ read it once. Halloa! here’s signs and wonders truly! That, now, is what
+ old Bowditch in his Epitome calls the zodiac, and what my almanac below
+ calls ditto. I’ll get the almanac and as I have heard devils can be raised
+ with Daboll’s arithmetic, I’ll try my hand at raising a meaning out of
+ these queer curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar. Here’s the
+ book. Let’s see now. Signs and wonders; and the sun, he’s always among
+ ’em. Hem, hem, hem; here they are—here they go—all alive:—Aries,
+ or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull and Jimimi! here’s Gemini himself, or the
+ Twins. Well; the sun he wheels among ’em. Aye, here on the coin he’s just
+ crossing the threshold between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring.
+ Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll
+ do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the
+ thoughts. That’s my small experience, so far as the Massachusetts
+ calendar, and Bowditch’s navigator, and Daboll’s arithmetic go. Signs and
+ wonders, eh? Pity if there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant
+ in wonders! There’s a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist—hark! By
+ Jove, I have it! Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man
+ in one round chapter; and now I’ll read it off, straight out of the book.
+ Come, Almanack! To begin: there’s Aries, or the Ram—lecherous dog,
+ he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull—he bumps us the first thing;
+ then Gemini, or the Twins—that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach
+ Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going
+ from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path—he gives a few
+ fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the
+ Virgin! that’s our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye,
+ when pop comes Libra, or the Scales—happiness weighed and found
+ wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump,
+ as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in the rear; we are curing the
+ wound, when whang come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer,
+ is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here’s the
+ battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and
+ headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours out his
+ whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we
+ sleep. There’s a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through
+ it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty. Jollily he,
+ aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so, alow here, does
+ jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly’s the word for aye! Adieu, Doubloon! But stop; here
+ comes little King-Post; dodge round the try-works, now, and let’s hear
+ what he’ll have to say. There; he’s before it; he’ll out with something
+ presently. So, so; he’s beginning.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises a
+ certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what’s all this
+ staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that’s true; and at two
+ cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won’t smoke dirty
+ pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here’s nine hundred and sixty of
+ them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy ’em out.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a
+ foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort of
+ wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman—the old
+ hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. He
+ luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other side of
+ the mast; why, there’s a horse-shoe nailed on that side; and now he’s back
+ again; what does that mean? Hark! he’s muttering—voice like an old
+ worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the
+ sun stands in some one of these signs. I’ve studied signs, and know their
+ marks; they were taught me two score years ago, by the old witch in
+ Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then be? The horse-shoe sign;
+ for there it is, right opposite the gold. And what’s the horse-shoe sign?
+ The lion is the horse-shoe sign—the roaring and devouring lion.
+ Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There’s another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men in
+ one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg—all
+ tattooing—looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the
+ Cannibal? As I live he’s comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone;
+ thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I
+ suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon’s Astronomy in the back country.
+ And by Jove, he’s found something there in the vicinity of his thigh—I
+ guess it’s Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don’t know what to make of
+ the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off some king’s trowsers. But,
+ aside again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled out of
+ sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual. What does he say,
+ with that look of his? Ah, only makes a sign to the sign and bows himself;
+ there is a sun on the coin—fire worshipper, depend upon it. Ho! more
+ and more. This way comes Pip—poor boy! would he had died, or I; he’s
+ half horrible to me. He too has been watching all of these interpreters—myself
+ included—and look now, he comes to read, with that unearthly idiot
+ face. Stand away again and hear him. Hark!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Upon my soul, he’s been studying Murray’s Grammar! Improving his mind,
+ poor fellow! But what’s that he says now—hist!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, he’s getting it by heart—hist! again.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, that’s funny.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I’m a crow,
+ especially when I stand a’top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw!
+ caw! caw! Ain’t I a crow? And where’s the scare-crow? There he stands; two
+ bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the
+ sleeves of an old jacket.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wonder if he means me?—complimentary!—poor lad!—I could
+ go hang myself. Any way, for the present, I’ll quit Pip’s vicinity. I can
+ stand the rest, for they have plain wits; but he’s too crazy-witty for my
+ sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here’s the ship’s navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire to
+ unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what’s the consequence? Then
+ again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught’s nailed to the
+ mast it’s a sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha! old Ahab! the White
+ Whale; he’ll nail ye! This is a pine tree. My father, in old Tolland
+ county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver ring grown over in
+ it; some old darkey’s wedding ring. How did it get there? And so they’ll
+ say in the resurrection, when they come to fish up this old mast, and find
+ a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the shaggy bark. Oh, the
+ gold! the precious, precious, gold! the green miser’ll hoard ye soon!
+ Hish! hish! God goes ’mong the worlds blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and
+ cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your
+ hoe-cake done!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.
+ 
+ 
+ The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London.
+ 
+ 
+ “Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours, bearing
+ down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his
+ hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger
+ captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat’s bow. He was a
+ darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or
+ thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in
+ festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed
+ behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar’s surcoat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hast seen the White Whale?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “See you this?” and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it, he
+ held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like
+ a mallet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Man my boat!” cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near
+ him—“Stand by to lower!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his crew
+ were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger. But
+ here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the
+ moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never
+ once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was
+ always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to
+ the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other vessel
+ at a moment’s warning. Now, it is no very easy matter for anybody—except
+ those who are almost hourly used to it, like whalemen—to clamber up
+ a ship’s side from a boat on the open sea; for the great swells now lift
+ the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it
+ half way down to the kelson. So, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship
+ of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now
+ found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly
+ eyeing the uncertain changeful height he could hardly hope to attain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward
+ circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his
+ luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And in
+ the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the two
+ officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the perpendicular
+ ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a pair of
+ tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem to bethink
+ them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to use their sea
+ bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute, because the strange
+ captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood, cried out, “I see, I
+ see!—avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing over the
+ cutting-tackle.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two
+ previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved
+ blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end. This was
+ quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his
+ solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in the
+ fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then giving the
+ word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his own
+ weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running parts of the
+ tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and gently
+ landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm frankly thrust forth in
+ welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his ivory leg,
+ and crossing the ivory arm (like two sword-fish blades) cried out in his
+ walrus way, “Aye, aye, hearty! let us shake bones together!—an arm
+ and a leg!—an arm that never can shrink, d’ye see; and a leg that
+ never can run. Where did’st thou see the White Whale?—how long ago?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The White Whale,” said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards the
+ East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a telescope;
+ “there I saw him, on the Line, last season.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And he took that arm off, did he?” asked Ahab, now sliding down from the
+ capstan, and resting on the Englishman’s shoulder, as he did so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Spin me the yarn,” said Ahab; “how was it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,” began
+ the Englishman. “I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time. Well, one
+ day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat fastened to
+ one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went milling and
+ milling round so, that my boat’s crew could only trim dish, by sitting all
+ their sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up breaches from the bottom
+ of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white head and hump, all
+ crows’ feet and wrinkles.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It was he, it was he!” cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended
+ breath.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, aye—they were mine— my irons,” cried Ahab, exultingly—“but
+ on!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Give me a chance, then,” said the Englishman, good-humoredly. “Well, this
+ old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam into
+ the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, I see!—wanted to part it; free the fast-fish—an old
+ trick—I know him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How it was exactly,” continued the one-armed commander, “I do not know;
+ but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow;
+ but we didn’t know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled on the line,
+ bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other whale’s; that
+ went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters stood, and what a
+ noble great whale it was—the noblest and biggest I ever saw, sir, in
+ my life—I resolved to capture him, spite of the boiling rage he
+ seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would get loose, or the
+ tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a boat’s crew
+ for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say, I jumped into my
+ first mate’s boat—Mr. Mounttop’s here (by the way, Captain—Mounttop;
+ Mounttop—the captain);—as I was saying, I jumped into
+ Mounttop’s boat, which, d’ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with mine, then;
+ and snatching the first harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have it.
+ But, Lord, look you, sir—hearts and souls alive, man—the next
+ instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat—both eyes out—all
+ befogged and bedeadened with black foam—the whale’s tail looming
+ straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble steeple. No
+ use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday, with a blinding
+ sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after the second iron, to
+ toss it overboard—down comes the tail like a Lima tower, cutting my
+ boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and, flukes first, the white
+ hump backed through the wreck, as though it was all chips. We all struck
+ out. To escape his terrible flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole
+ sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking fish. But a
+ combing sea dashed me off, and at the same instant, the fish, taking one
+ good dart forwards, went down like a flash; and the barb of that cursed
+ second iron towing along near me caught me here” (clapping his hand just
+ below his shoulder); “yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to
+ Hell’s flames, I was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good
+ God, the barb ript its way along the flesh—clear along the whole
+ length of my arm—came out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;—and
+ that gentleman there will tell you the rest (by the way, captain—Dr.
+ Bunger, ship’s surgeon: Bunger, my lad,—the captain). Now, Bunger
+ boy, spin your part of the yarn.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all the
+ time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote his
+ gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but sober
+ one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched
+ trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between a
+ marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other,
+ occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two
+ crippled captains. But, at his superior’s introduction of him to Ahab, he
+ politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain’s bidding.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It was a shocking bad wound,” began the whale-surgeon; “and, taking my
+ advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy—”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship,” interrupted the one-armed
+ captain, addressing Ahab; “go on, boy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot
+ weather there on the Line. But it was no use—I did all I could; sat
+ up with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet—”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, very severe!” chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly altering
+ his voice, “Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till he couldn’t
+ see to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed, half seas over, about
+ three o’clock in the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat up with me indeed, and
+ was very severe in my diet. Oh! a great watcher, and very dietetically
+ severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh out! why don’t ye? You know
+ you’re a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave ahead, boy, I’d rather be
+ killed by you than kept alive by any other man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir”—said
+ the imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab—“is
+ apt to be facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that sort.
+ But I may as well say—en passant, as the French remark—that I
+ myself—that is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend clergy—am
+ a strict total abstinence man; I never drink—”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Water!” cried the captain; “he never drinks it; it’s a sort of fits to
+ him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on—go on
+ with the arm story.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I may as well,” said the surgeon, coolly. “I was about observing,
+ sir, before Captain Boomer’s facetious interruption, that spite of my best
+ and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse; the truth
+ was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more than two
+ feet and several inches long. I measured it with the lead line. In short,
+ it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and off it came. But I had no
+ hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is against all rule”—pointing
+ at it with the marlingspike—“that is the captain’s work, not mine;
+ he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had that club-hammer there put to
+ the end, to knock some one’s brains out with, I suppose, as he tried mine
+ once. He flies into diabolical passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent,
+ sir”—removing his hat, and brushing aside his hair, and exposing a
+ bowl-like cavity in his skull, but which bore not the slightest scarry
+ trace, or any token of ever having been a wound—“Well, the captain
+ there will tell you how that came here; he knows.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I don’t,” said the captain, “but his mother did; he was born with it.
+ Oh, you solemn rogue, you—you Bunger! was there ever such another
+ Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in
+ pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What became of the White Whale?” now cried Ahab, who thus far had been
+ impatiently listening to this by-play between the two Englishmen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh!” cried the one-armed captain, “oh, yes! Well; after he sounded, we
+ didn’t see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I didn’t
+ then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick, till some
+ time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about Moby Dick—as
+ some call him—and then I knew it was he.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Did’st thou cross his wake again?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Twice.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But could not fasten?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Didn’t want to try to: ain’t one limb enough? What should I do without
+ this other arm? And I’m thinking Moby Dick doesn’t bite so much as he
+ swallows.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, then,” interrupted Bunger, “give him your left arm for bait to get
+ the right. Do you know, gentlemen”—very gravely and mathematically
+ bowing to each Captain in succession—“Do you know, gentlemen, that
+ the digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine
+ Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest even
+ a man’s arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the White
+ Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means to swallow a
+ single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But sometimes he is like
+ the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making
+ believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let one drop into him in
+ good earnest, and there it stayed for a twelvemonth or more; when I gave
+ him an emetic, and he heaved it up in small tacks, d’ye see. No possible
+ way for him to digest that jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his
+ general bodily system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about
+ it, and have a mind to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of
+ giving decent burial to the other, why in that case the arm is yours; only
+ let the whale have another chance at you shortly, that’s all.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, thank ye, Bunger,” said the English Captain, “he’s welcome to the arm
+ he has, since I can’t help it, and didn’t know him then; but not to
+ another one. No more White Whales for me; I’ve lowered for him once, and
+ that has satisfied me. There would be great glory in killing him, I know
+ that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye,
+ he’s best let alone; don’t you think so, Captain?”—glancing at the
+ ivory leg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone,
+ that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet!
+ How long since thou saw’st him last? Which way heading?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend’s,” cried Bunger, stoopingly
+ walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; “this man’s blood—bring
+ the thermometer!—it’s at the boiling point!—his pulse makes
+ these planks beat!—sir!”—taking a lancet from his pocket, and
+ drawing near to Ahab’s arm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Avast!” roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks—“Man the
+ boat! Which way heading?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good God!” cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put.
+ “What’s the matter? He was heading east, I think.—Is your Captain
+ crazy?” whispering Fedallah.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to take
+ the boat’s steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle towards
+ him, commanded the ship’s sailors to stand by to lower.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In a moment he was standing in the boat’s stern, and the Manilla men were
+ springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him. With back
+ to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own, Ahab stood
+ upright till alongside of the Pequod.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.
+ 
+ 
+ Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she
+ hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby, merchant
+ of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of Enderby &
+ Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman’s opinion, comes not far behind
+ the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point of real
+ historical interest. How long, prior to the year of our Lord 1775, this
+ great whaling house was in existence, my numerous fish-documents do not
+ make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted out the first English ships
+ that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale; though for some score of years
+ previous (ever since 1726) our valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and
+ the Vineyard had in large fleets pursued that Leviathan, but only in the
+ North and South Atlantic: not elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here,
+ that the Nantucketers were the first among mankind to harpoon with
+ civilized steel the great Sperm Whale; and that for half a century they
+ were the only people of the whole globe who so harpooned him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose, and
+ at the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape Horn, and
+ was the first among the nations to lower a whale-boat of any sort in the
+ great South Sea. The voyage was a skilful and lucky one; and returning to
+ her berth with her hold full of the precious sperm, the Amelia’s example
+ was soon followed by other ships, English and American, and thus the vast
+ Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were thrown open. But not content with
+ this good deed, the indefatigable house again bestirred itself: Samuel and
+ all his Sons—how many, their mother only knows—and under their
+ immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their expense, the British
+ government was induced to send the sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling
+ voyage of discovery into the South Sea. Commanded by a naval Post-Captain,
+ the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and did some service; how much
+ does not appear. But this is not all. In 1819, the same house fitted out a
+ discovery whale ship of their own, to go on a tasting cruise to the remote
+ waters of Japan. That ship—well called the “Syren”—made a
+ noble experimental cruise; and it was thus that the great Japanese Whaling
+ Ground first became generally known. The Syren in this famous voyage was
+ commanded by a Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All honor to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to
+ the present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have
+ slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other world.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The ship named after him was worthy of the honor, being a very fast
+ sailer and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight
+ somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the
+ forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps—every
+ soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine gam
+ I had—long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his
+ ivory heel—it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of
+ that ship; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I
+ ever lose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it
+ at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came (for it’s
+ squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands—visitors and all—were
+ called to reef topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each
+ other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our
+ jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the howling
+ gale, a warning example to all drunken tars. However, the masts did not go
+ overboard; and by and by we scrambled down, so sober, that we had to pass
+ the flip again, though the savage salt spray bursting down the forecastle
+ scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it to my taste.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The beef was fine—tough, but with body in it. They said it was
+ bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for
+ certain, how that was. They had dumplings too; small, but substantial,
+ symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you
+ could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were swallowed. If
+ you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching out of you
+ like billiard-balls. The bread—but that couldn’t be helped; besides,
+ it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread contained the only fresh
+ fare they had. But the forecastle was not very light, and it was very easy
+ to step over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all in all, taking
+ her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions of the cook’s boilers,
+ including his own live parchment boilers; fore and aft, I say, the Samuel
+ Enderby was a jolly ship; of good fare and plenty; fine flip and strong;
+ crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to hat-band.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other English
+ whalers I know of—not all though—were such famous, hospitable
+ ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread, and the can, and the
+ joke; and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking, and laughing? I
+ will tell you. The abounding good cheer of these English whalers is matter
+ for historical research. Nor have I been at all sparing of historical
+ whale research, when it has seemed needed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders,
+ Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant in
+ the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions, touching plenty
+ to eat and drink. For, as a general thing, the English merchant-ship
+ scrimps her crew; but not so the English whaler. Hence, in the English,
+ this thing of whaling good cheer is not normal and natural, but incidental
+ and particular; and, therefore, must have some special origin, which is
+ here pointed out, and will be still further elucidated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an
+ ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must
+ be about whalers. The title was, “Dan Coopman,” wherefore I concluded that
+ this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the
+ fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I was reinforced in
+ this opinion by seeing that it was the production of one “Fitz
+ Swackhammer.” But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man, professor of
+ Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and St. Pott’s, to
+ whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box of sperm candles
+ for his trouble—this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the
+ book, assured me that “Dan Coopman” did not mean “The Cooper,” but “The
+ Merchant.” In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch book treated of
+ the commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained a very
+ interesting account of its whale fishery. And in this chapter it was,
+ headed, “Smeer,” or “Fat,” that I found a long detailed list of the
+ outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from
+ which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock
+ fish. 550,000 lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins of
+ butter. 20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese
+ (probably an inferior article). 550 ankers of Geneva. 10,800 barrels of
+ beer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in the
+ present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes,
+ barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this
+ beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were
+ incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic
+ application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my own,
+ touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by every Low
+ Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen whale fishery.
+ In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and Leyden cheese
+ consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their naturally unctuous
+ natures, being rendered still more unctuous by the nature of their
+ vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game in those frigid
+ Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country where the
+ convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those
+ polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that
+ climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen,
+ including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much
+ exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet of
+ 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say, we have
+ precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks’ allowance,
+ exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin. Now, whether
+ these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might fancy them to have
+ been, were the right sort of men to stand up in a boat’s head, and take
+ good aim at flying whales; this would seem somewhat improbable. Yet they
+ did aim at them, and hit them too. But this was very far North, be it
+ remembered, where beer agrees well with the constitution; upon the
+ Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would be apt to make the harpooneer
+ sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his boat; and grievous loss might
+ ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers of
+ two or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English whalers
+ have not neglected so excellent an example. For, say they, when cruising
+ in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a
+ good dinner out of it, at least. And this empties the decanter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.
+ 
+ 
+ Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly
+ dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail
+ upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough
+ sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still
+ further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters, and
+ casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost bones,
+ set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his unconditional
+ skeleton.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery,
+ pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the whale? Did
+ erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures on the anatomy
+ of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a specimen rib for
+ exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land a full-grown whale on
+ your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a roast-pig? Surely not. A
+ veritable witness have you hitherto been, Ishmael; but have a care how you
+ seize the privilege of Jonah alone; the privilege of discoursing upon the
+ joists and beams; the rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings,
+ making up the frame-work of leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats,
+ dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far beneath
+ the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed with an
+ opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged to, a small
+ cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag,
+ to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the
+ lances. Think you I let that chance go, without using my boat-hatchet and
+ jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the contents of that
+ young cub?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their
+ gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted to
+ my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides. For
+ being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey of
+ Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the
+ lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side glen not
+ very far distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his capital.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted
+ with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought together
+ in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his people could
+ invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices, chiselled shells,
+ inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes; and all these distributed
+ among whatever natural wonders, the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering
+ waves had cast upon his shores.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an
+ unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his
+ head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings seemed
+ his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of its
+ fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun, then the
+ skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where a grand
+ temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebræ were carved with
+ Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests
+ kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again
+ sent forth its vapory spout; while, suspended from a bough, the terrific
+ lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that so
+ affrighted Damocles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the
+ trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious
+ earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it,
+ whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living
+ flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the
+ shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these
+ unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun
+ seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver!
+ unseen weaver!—pause!—one word!—whither flows the
+ fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings?
+ Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single word with thee!
+ Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the loom;
+ the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he
+ weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice;
+ and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only
+ when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.
+ For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are
+ inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard
+ without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have
+ villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all
+ this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be
+ overheard afar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the
+ great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging—a gigantic idler!
+ Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around
+ him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven over
+ with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but himself
+ a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived
+ with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the
+ skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the real jet
+ had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as an object
+ of vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled that the priests should swear
+ that smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro I paced before this skeleton—brushed
+ the vines aside—broke through the ribs—and with a ball of
+ Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid its many winding, shaded
+ colonnades and arbours. But soon my line was out; and following it back, I
+ emerged from the opening where I entered. I saw no living thing within;
+ naught was there but bones.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton.
+ From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the
+ altitude of the final rib, “How now!” they shouted; “Dar’st thou measure
+ this our god! That’s for us.” “Aye, priests—well, how long do ye
+ make him, then?” But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them, concerning
+ feet and inches; they cracked each other’s sconces with their yard-sticks—the
+ great skull echoed—and seizing that lucky chance, I quickly
+ concluded my own admeasurements.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be it
+ recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied
+ measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can refer
+ to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in
+ Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have
+ some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise, I have heard
+ that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they have what the
+ proprietors call “the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or River Whale
+ in the United States.” Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton
+ Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession
+ the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the
+ full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons belonged,
+ were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar grounds. King
+ Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir Clifford, because he was
+ lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir Clifford’s whale has been
+ articulated throughout; so that, like a great chest of drawers, you can
+ open and shut him, in all his bony cavities—spread out his ribs like
+ a gigantic fan—and swing all day upon his lower jaw. Locks are to be
+ put upon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and a footman will show
+ round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side. Sir Clifford
+ thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery in the
+ spinal column; threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his
+ cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied
+ verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild
+ wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving
+ such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the
+ other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then
+ composing—at least, what untattooed parts might remain—I did
+ not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all
+ enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton.
+ 
+ 
+ In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain
+ statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we
+ are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base
+ upon Captain Scoresby’s estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized
+ Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful
+ calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between
+ eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet
+ in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety
+ tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably
+ outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one
+ hundred inhabitants.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this
+ leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman’s imagination?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole, jaw,
+ teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now simply
+ point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his unobstructed
+ bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very large a proportion of
+ the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by far the most complicated
+ part; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in this chapter, you
+ must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your arm, as we proceed,
+ otherwise you will not gain a complete notion of the general structure we
+ are about to view.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In length, the Sperm Whale’s skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two
+ feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have been
+ ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one fifth in
+ length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two feet, his skull
+ and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain
+ back-bone. Attached to this back-bone, for something less than a third of
+ its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once enclosed his
+ vitals.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine,
+ extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled the
+ hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty of
+ her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the time,
+ but a long, disconnected timber.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was nearly
+ six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each successively
+ longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one of the middle
+ ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From that part, the
+ remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only spanned five feet
+ and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore a seemly
+ correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most arched. In
+ some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay footpath
+ bridges over small streams.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the
+ circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the
+ whale is by no means the mould of his invested form. The largest of the
+ Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish
+ which, in life, is greatest in depth. Now, the greatest depth of the
+ invested body of this particular whale must have been at least sixteen
+ feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight
+ feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion of the living
+ magnitude of that part. Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a naked
+ spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of added bulk in
+ flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels. Still more, for the ample fins, I here
+ saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic,
+ but boneless flukes, an utter blank!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to
+ comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead
+ attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the
+ heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry
+ flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale
+ be truly and livingly found out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a crane,
+ to pile its bones high up on end. No speedy enterprise. But now it’s done,
+ it looks much like Pompey’s Pillar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There are forty and odd vertebræ in all, which in the skeleton are not
+ locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic
+ spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest, a middle one,
+ is in width something less than three feet, and in depth more than four.
+ The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two
+ inches in width, and looks something like a white billiard-ball. I was
+ told that there were still smaller ones, but they had been lost by some
+ little cannibal urchins, the priest’s children, who had stolen them to
+ play marbles with. Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of
+ living things tapers off at last into simple child’s play.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.
+ 
+ 
+ From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to
+ enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not
+ compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial
+ folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the
+ yards he measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic involutions
+ of his intestines, where they lie in him like great cables and hawsers
+ coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me to
+ approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking
+ the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the
+ uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him in most of his
+ present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify
+ him in an archæological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view.
+ Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan—to an ant or a flea—such
+ portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when
+ Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this
+ emprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said,
+ that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these
+ dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson,
+ expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer’s
+ uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by
+ a whale author like me.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though
+ it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this
+ Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals.
+ Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!
+ Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this
+ Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching
+ comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the
+ sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past,
+ present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth,
+ and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so
+ magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its
+ bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great
+ and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be
+ who have tried it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials
+ as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a
+ stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells,
+ wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of
+ preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier
+ geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost
+ completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called
+ the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate intercepted
+ links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote
+ posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales hitherto
+ discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last preceding the
+ superficial formations. And though none of them precisely answer to any
+ known species of the present time, they are yet sufficiently akin to them
+ in general respects, to justify their taking rank as Cetacean fossils.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones
+ and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been
+ found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in
+ Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Among
+ the more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the year
+ 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street opening
+ almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones disinterred in
+ excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon’s time. Cuvier
+ pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some utterly unknown
+ Leviathanic species.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost
+ complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on
+ the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous
+ slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels.
+ The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the
+ name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being taken across the
+ sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out that this alleged
+ reptile was a whale, though of a departed species. A significant
+ illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this book, that the
+ skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape of his fully
+ invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in his
+ paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it, in
+ substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of
+ the globe have blotted out of existence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws,
+ ribs, and vertebræ, all characterized by partial resemblances to the
+ existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other
+ hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their
+ incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous
+ period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with
+ man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering
+ glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed
+ hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this
+ world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was
+ visible. Then the whole world was the whale’s; and, king of creation, he
+ left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who
+ can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood
+ than the Pharaoh’s. Methuselah seems a school-boy. I look round to shake
+ hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced
+ existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been
+ before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the
+ stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his
+ ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim
+ for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable print
+ of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah, some fifty
+ years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured and
+ painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and dolphins,
+ similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns.
+ Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in
+ that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of
+ the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by the
+ venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams of
+ which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are
+ oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine, that
+ by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the Temple, no Whale can pass it
+ without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, that on either
+ side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into the Sea, and
+ wound the Whales when they light upon ’em. They keep a Whale’s Rib of an
+ incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with its
+ convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be reached
+ by a Man upon a Camel’s Back. This Rib (says John Leo) is said to have
+ layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their Historians affirm, that
+ a Prophet who prophesy’d of Mahomet, came from this Temple, and some do
+ not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at
+ the Base of the Temple.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a
+ Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?
+ 
+ 
+ Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from the
+ head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether, in the
+ long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the original
+ bulk of his sires.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the
+ present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are found
+ in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period prior to
+ man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those belonging to
+ its latter formations exceed in size those of its earlier ones.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the
+ Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than seventy
+ feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen, that the
+ tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a large sized
+ modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen’s authority, that Sperm Whales
+ have been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of capture.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an
+ advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may it
+ not be, that since Adam’s time they have degenerated?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such
+ gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally. For Pliny tells
+ us of whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus of others
+ which measured eight hundred feet in length—Rope Walks and Thames
+ Tunnels of Whales! And even in the days of Banks and Solander, Cooke’s
+ naturalists, we find a Danish member of the Academy of Sciences setting
+ down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies) at one
+ hundred and twenty yards; that is, three hundred and sixty feet. And
+ Lacépède, the French naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales, in
+ the very beginning of his work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale at one
+ hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet. And this work was
+ published so late as A.D. 1825.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is as
+ big as his ancestors in Pliny’s time. And if ever I go where Pliny is, I,
+ a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to tell him so. Because I
+ cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies that were
+ buried thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not measure so
+ much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks; and while the
+ cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest Egyptian and Nineveh
+ tablets, by the relative proportions in which they are drawn, just as
+ plainly prove that the high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle of Smithfield,
+ not only equal, but far exceed in magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh’s fat
+ kine; in the face of all this, I will not admit that of all animals the
+ whale alone should have degenerated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more
+ recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs
+ at the mast-heads of the whale-ships, now penetrating even through
+ Behring’s straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the
+ world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental
+ coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a
+ chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be
+ exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke
+ his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,
+ which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies
+ of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with
+ their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals,
+ where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such a
+ comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to show that the
+ hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a period
+ ago—not a good lifetime—the census of the buffalo in Illinois
+ exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day
+ not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the
+ cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far
+ different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an
+ end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales for
+ forty-eight months think they have done extremely well, and thank God, if
+ at last they carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days of the
+ old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when the far
+ west (in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and a virgin, the
+ same number of moccasined men, for the same number of months, mounted on
+ horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain not forty, but forty
+ thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need were, could be
+ statistically stated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the gradual
+ extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former years (the
+ latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in small pods,
+ were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in consequence, the
+ voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more remunerative.
+ Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales, influenced by some
+ views to safety, now swim the seas in immense caravans, so that to a large
+ degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, and schools of other
+ days are now aggregated into vast but widely separated, unfrequent armies.
+ That is all. And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the
+ so-called whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years
+ abounding with them, hence that species also is declining. For they are
+ only being driven from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer
+ enlivened with their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand
+ has been very recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two
+ firm fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever remain
+ impregnable. And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty Swiss
+ have retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas and glades
+ of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort to their
+ Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and walls
+ there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle of
+ everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one
+ cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this
+ positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions. But
+ though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than 13,000,
+ have been annually slain on the nor’ west coast by the Americans alone;
+ yet there are considerations which render even this circumstance of little
+ or no account as an opposing argument in this matter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness of
+ the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we say to Harto,
+ the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at one hunting the King of
+ Siam took 4,000 elephants; that in those regions elephants are numerous as
+ droves of cattle in the temperate climes. And there seems no reason to
+ doubt that if these elephants, which have now been hunted for thousands of
+ years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all the successive
+ monarchs of the East—if they still survive there in great numbers,
+ much more may the great whale outlast all hunting, since he has a pasture
+ to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as all Asia, both
+ Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles of the sea
+ combined.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity of
+ whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more, therefore
+ at any one period of time, several distinct adult generations must be
+ contemporary. And what that is, we may soon gain some idea of, by
+ imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults of creation
+ yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and children who were
+ alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this countless host to the
+ present human population of the globe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his
+ species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas before
+ the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries,
+ and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s
+ Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands,
+ to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and
+ rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed
+ defiance to the skies.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 106. Ahab’s Leg.
+ 
+ 
+ The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel
+ Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to his
+ own person. He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his boat that
+ his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock. And when after
+ gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there, he so vehemently
+ wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman (it was, as ever,
+ something about his not steering inflexibly enough); then, the already
+ shaken ivory received such an additional twist and wrench, that though it
+ still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem
+ it entirely trustworthy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his
+ pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the
+ condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not
+ been very long prior to the Pequod’s sailing from Nantucket, that he had
+ been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible; by some
+ unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb
+ having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and
+ all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme difficulty that the
+ agonizing wound was entirely cured.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the
+ anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a
+ former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous
+ reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest
+ songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable
+ events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought
+ Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the
+ ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is an
+ inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural
+ enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world,
+ but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all
+ hell’s despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely
+ beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the
+ grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the
+ deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest
+ earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in
+ them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some
+ men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie
+ the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal
+ miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the
+ gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft
+ cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the
+ gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in
+ the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more
+ properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many other
+ particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some, why
+ it was, that for a certain period, both before and after the sailing of
+ the Pequod, he had hidden himself away with such Grand-Lama-like
+ exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought speechless refuge, as it
+ were, among the marble senate of the dead. Captain Peleg’s bruited reason
+ for this thing appeared by no means adequate; though, indeed, as touching
+ all Ahab’s deeper part, every revelation partook more of significant
+ darkness than of explanatory light. But, in the end, it all came out; this
+ one matter did, at least. That direful mishap was at the bottom of his
+ temporary recluseness. And not only this, but to that ever-contracting,
+ dropping circle ashore, who, for any reason, possessed the privilege of a
+ less banned approach to him; to that timid circle the above hinted
+ casualty—remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted for by Ahab—invested
+ itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the land of spirits and
+ of wails. So that, through their zeal for him, they had all conspired, so
+ far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others;
+ and hence it was, that not till a considerable interval had elapsed, did
+ it transpire upon the Pequod’s decks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air, or
+ the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not with
+ earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain
+ practical procedures;—he called the carpenter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without delay
+ set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him supplied
+ with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which had thus
+ far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a careful selection of
+ the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be secured. This done, the
+ carpenter received orders to have the leg completed that night; and to
+ provide all the fittings for it, independent of those pertaining to the
+ distrusted one in use. Moreover, the ship’s forge was ordered to be
+ hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the hold; and, to accelerate the
+ affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at once to the forging of
+ whatever iron contrivances might be needed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
+ 
+ 
+ Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high
+ abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But
+ from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they
+ seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
+ But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of the
+ high, humane abstraction; the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate; hence,
+ he now comes in person on this stage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to
+ whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent, alike
+ experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own; the
+ carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those
+ numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an
+ auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic
+ remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in
+ those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a
+ large ship, upon a three or four years’ voyage, in uncivilized and
+ far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary duties:—repairing
+ stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars,
+ inserting bull’s eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks,
+ and other miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special
+ business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of
+ conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,
+ was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several
+ vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times
+ except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed
+ athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: the
+ carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and straightway files
+ it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays on board, and is
+ made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and
+ cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking
+ cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a
+ soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars to be painted upon the
+ blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his big vice of wood, the
+ carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation. A sailor takes a fancy
+ to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills his ears. Another has
+ the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping one hand upon his
+ bench bids him be seated there; but the poor fellow unmanageably winces
+ under the unconcluded operation; whirling round the handle of his wooden
+ vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in that, if he would have
+ him draw the tooth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent and
+ without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he deemed
+ but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But while now
+ upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such liveliness
+ of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some uncommon
+ vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was this man
+ more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were;
+ impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of
+ things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the
+ whole visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes,
+ still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you, though you dig
+ foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him,
+ involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness;—yet
+ was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian,
+ wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a certain grizzled
+ wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time during the midnight
+ watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah’s ark. Was it that this old
+ carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro,
+ not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever
+ small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a
+ stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born
+ babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next. You
+ might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a
+ sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to
+ work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been
+ tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but
+ merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a
+ pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed
+ along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of those
+ unreasoning but still highly useful, multum in parvo , Sheffield
+ contrivances, assuming the exterior—though a little swelled—of
+ a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes,
+ but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers,
+ nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the
+ carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part of
+ him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs,
+ and there they were.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was,
+ after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common
+ soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its
+ duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of
+ hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had abided
+ for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same
+ unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a
+ great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel,
+ which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box
+ and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep
+ himself awake.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.
+ 
+ 
+ The Deck—First Night Watch.
+ 
+ 
+ ( Carpenter standing before his vice-bench, and by the light of two
+ lanterns busily filing the ivory joist for the leg, which joist is firmly
+ fixed in the vice. Slabs of ivory, leather straps, pads, screws, and
+ various tools of all sorts lying about the bench. Forward, the red flame
+ of the forge is seen, where the blacksmith is at work. )
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Drat the file, and drat the bone! That is hard which should be soft, and
+ that is soft which should be hard. So we go, who file old jaws and
+ shinbones. Let’s try another. Aye, now, this works better ( sneezes ).
+ Halloa, this bone dust is ( sneezes )—why it’s ( sneezes )—yes
+ it’s ( sneezes )—bless my soul, it won’t let me speak! This is what an
+ old fellow gets now for working in dead lumber. Saw a live tree, and you
+ don’t get this dust; amputate a live bone, and you don’t get it ( sneezes ).
+ Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let’s have that ferule
+ and buckle-screw; I’ll be ready for them presently. Lucky now ( sneezes )
+ there’s no knee-joint to make; that might puzzle a little; but a mere
+ shinbone—why it’s easy as making hop-poles; only I should like to
+ put a good finish on. Time, time; if I but only had the time, I could turn
+ him out as neat a leg now as ever ( sneezes ) scraped to a lady in a parlor.
+ Those buckskin legs and calves of legs I’ve seen in shop windows wouldn’t
+ compare at all. They soak water, they do; and of course get rheumatic, and
+ have to be doctored ( sneezes ) with washes and lotions, just like live
+ legs. There; before I saw it off, now, I must call his old Mogulship, and
+ see whether the length will be all right; too short, if anything, I guess.
+ Ha! that’s the heel; we are in luck; here he comes, or it’s somebody else,
+ that’s certain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ AHAB ( advancing ). ( During the ensuing scene, the carpenter continues
+ sneezing at times. )
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Well, manmaker!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length. Let
+ me measure, sir.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Measured for a leg! good. Well, it’s not the first time. About it! There;
+ keep thy finger on it. This is a cogent vice thou hast here, carpenter;
+ let me feel its grip once. So, so; it does pinch some.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Oh, sir, it will break bones—beware, beware!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery
+ world that can hold, man. What’s Prometheus about there?—the
+ blacksmith, I mean—what’s he about?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He must be forging the buckle-screw, sir, now.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Right. It’s a partnership; he supplies the muscle part. He makes a fierce
+ red flame there!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Aye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of fine work.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Um-m. So he must. I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that old
+ Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they say, should have been a blacksmith,
+ and animated them with fire; for what’s made in fire must properly belong
+ to fire; and so hell’s probable. How the soot flies! This must be the
+ remainder the Greek made the Africans of. Carpenter, when he’s through
+ with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of steel shoulder-blades;
+ there’s a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sir?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I’ll order a complete man after a
+ desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest
+ modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to ’em, to stay in
+ one place; then, arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at all, brass
+ forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let me see—shall
+ I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a sky-light on top of his head
+ to illuminate inwards. There, take the order, and away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, what’s he speaking about, and who’s he speaking to, I should like to
+ know? Shall I keep standing here? ( aside ).
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ’Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here’s one. No,
+ no, no; I must have a lantern.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ho, ho! That’s it, hey? Here are two, sir; one will serve my turn.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What art thou thrusting that thief-catcher into my face for, man? Thrusted
+ light is worse than presented pistols.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I thought, sir, that you spoke to carpenter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Carpenter? why that’s—but no;—a very tidy, and, I may say, an
+ extremely gentlemanlike sort of business thou art in here, carpenter;—or
+ would’st thou rather work in clay?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sir?—Clay? clay, sir? That’s mud; we leave clay to ditchers, sir.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The fellow’s impious! What art thou sneezing about?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bone is rather dusty, sir.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Take the hint, then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself under
+ living people’s noses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sir?—oh! ah!—I guess so;—yes—oh, dear!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good
+ workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for thy
+ work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless
+ feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that is, carpenter,
+ my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst thou not drive
+ that old Adam away?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard
+ something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never
+ entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still pricking
+ him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once was;
+ so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul.
+ Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair,
+ do I. Is’t a riddle?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I should humbly call it a poser, sir.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing
+ may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where
+ thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most
+ solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don’t speak!
+ And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long
+ dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of
+ hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Good Lord! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over again; I
+ think I didn’t carry a small figure, sir.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises.—How long before
+ the leg is done?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Perhaps an hour, sir.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me ( turns to go ). Oh, Life! Here I
+ am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a
+ bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not
+ do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole
+ world’s books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the
+ wealthiest Prætorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the
+ world’s); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By
+ heavens! I’ll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one
+ small, compendious vertebra. So.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ CARPENTER ( resuming his work ).
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he’s
+ queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he’s queer,
+ says Stubb; he’s queer—queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into Mr.
+ Starbuck all the time—queer—sir—queer, queer, very
+ queer. And here’s his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here’s his
+ bedfellow! has a stick of whale’s jaw-bone for a wife! And this is his
+ leg; he’ll stand on this. What was that now about one leg standing in
+ three places, and all three places standing in one hell—how was
+ that? Oh! I don’t wonder he looked so scornful at me! I’m a sort of
+ strange-thoughted sometimes, they say; but that’s only haphazard-like.
+ Then, a short, little old body like me, should never undertake to wade out
+ into deep waters with tall, heron-built captains; the water chucks you
+ under the chin pretty quick, and there’s a great cry for life-boats. And
+ here’s the heron’s leg! long and slim, sure enough! Now, for most folks
+ one pair of legs lasts a lifetime, and that must be because they use them
+ mercifully, as a tender-hearted old lady uses her roly-poly old
+ coach-horses. But Ahab; oh he’s a hard driver. Look, driven one leg to
+ death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears out bone legs by the
+ cord. Halloa, there, you Smut! bear a hand there with those screws, and
+ let’s finish it before the resurrection fellow comes a-calling with his
+ horn for all legs, true or false, as brewery-men go round collecting old
+ beer barrels, to fill ’em up again. What a leg this is! It looks like a
+ real live leg, filed down to nothing but the core; he’ll be standing on
+ this to-morrow; he’ll be taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot
+ the little oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude.
+ So, so; chisel, file, and sand-paper, now!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
+ 
+ 
+ According to usage they were pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no
+ inconsiderable oil came up with the water; the casks below must have
+ sprung a bad leak. Much concern was shown; and Starbuck went down into the
+ cabin to report this unfavourable affair.*
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it is a
+ regular semi-weekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench the
+ casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals, is removed
+ by the ship’s pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept damply tight;
+ while by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the mariners
+ readily detect any serious leakage in the precious cargo.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and
+ the Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from the
+ China waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with a general
+ chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him; and another
+ separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the Japanese islands—Niphon,
+ Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new ivory leg braced against the
+ screwed leg of his table, and with a long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in
+ his hand, the wondrous old man, with his back to the gangway door, was
+ wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old courses again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who’s there?” hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round to
+ it. “On deck! Begone!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir. We
+ must up Burtons and break out.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to here
+ for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make good
+ in a year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving,
+ sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So it is, so it is; if we get it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it leak!
+ I’m all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks,
+ but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that’s a far worse plight
+ than the Pequod’s, man. Yet I don’t stop to plug my leak; for who can find
+ it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if found, in this
+ life’s howling gale? Starbuck! I’ll not have the Burtons hoisted.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What will the owners say, sir?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What
+ cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about
+ those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But look ye,
+ the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye, my
+ conscience is in this ship’s keel.—On deck!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Captain Ahab,” said the reddening mate, moving further into the cabin,
+ with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it almost seemed
+ not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward manifestation of
+ itself, but within also seemed more than half distrustful of itself; “A
+ better man than I might well pass over in thee what he would quickly
+ enough resent in a younger man; aye, and in a happier, Captain Ahab.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?—On
+ deck!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir—to be
+ forbearing! Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto,
+ Captain Ahab?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most
+ South-Sea-men’s cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck,
+ exclaimed: “There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain
+ that is lord over the Pequod.—On deck!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks, you
+ would have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of the
+ levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose, and as he
+ quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: “Thou hast outraged,
+ not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck;
+ thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself,
+ old man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!”
+ murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. “What’s that he said—Ahab
+ beware of Ahab—there’s something there!” Then unconsciously using
+ the musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the
+ little cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and
+ returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck,” he said lowly to the mate;
+ then raising his voice to the crew: “Furl the t’gallant-sails, and
+ close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft; back the main-yard; up Burton, and
+ break out in the main-hold.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It were perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting
+ Starbuck, Ahab thus acted. It may have been a flash of honesty in him; or
+ mere prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously forbade
+ the slightest symptom of open disaffection, however transient, in the
+ important chief officer of his ship. However it was, his orders were
+ executed; and the Burtons were hoisted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.
+ 
+ 
+ Upon searching, it was found that the casks last struck into the hold were
+ perfectly sound, and that the leak must be further off. So, it being calm
+ weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing the slumbers of the
+ huge ground-tier butts; and from that black midnight sending those
+ gigantic moles into the daylight above. So deep did they go; and so
+ ancient, and corroded, and weedy the aspect of the lowermost puncheons,
+ that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-stone cask containing
+ coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted placards, vainly warning
+ the infatuated old world from the flood. Tierce after tierce, too, of
+ water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of staves, and iron bundles of
+ hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks were hard to get
+ about; and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as if you were treading over
+ empty catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the sea like an air-freighted
+ demijohn. Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all
+ Aristotle in his head. Well was it that the Typhoons did not visit them
+ then.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast
+ bosom-friend, Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh to
+ his endless end.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown;
+ dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to be Captain, the higher
+ you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as harpooneer,
+ must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but—as we have
+ elsewhere seen—mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and finally
+ descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating all day in that
+ subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the clumsiest casks and
+ see to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen, the harpooneers are the
+ holders, so called.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should have
+ stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where, stripped
+ to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was crawling about amid that
+ dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard at the bottom of a well.
+ And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, poor pagan; where,
+ strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, he caught a terrible
+ chill which lapsed into a fever; and at last, after some days’ suffering,
+ laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill of the door of death. How
+ he wasted and wasted away in those few long-lingering days, till there
+ seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else
+ in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless,
+ seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of
+ lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a
+ wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or
+ be weakened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter,
+ expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of
+ Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by
+ the side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as
+ any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly
+ wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. And
+ the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all
+ with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could
+ adequately tell. So that—let us say it again—no dying Chaldee
+ or Greek had higher and holier thoughts than those, whose mysterious
+ shades you saw creeping over the face of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay
+ in his swaying hammock, and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to
+ his final rest, and the ocean’s invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and
+ higher towards his destined heaven.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself, what
+ he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favour he asked. He
+ called one to him in the grey morning watch, when the day was just
+ breaking, and taking his hand, said that while in Nantucket he had chanced
+ to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich war-wood of his
+ native isle; and upon inquiry, he had learned that all whalemen who died
+ in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes, and that the fancy of
+ being so laid had much pleased him; for it was not unlike the custom of
+ his own race, who, after embalming a dead warrior, stretched him out in
+ his canoe, and so left him to be floated away to the starry archipelagoes;
+ for not only do they believe that the stars are isles, but that far beyond
+ all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with
+ the blue heavens; and so form the white breakers of the milky way. He
+ added, that he shuddered at the thought of being buried in his hammock,
+ according to the usual sea-custom, tossed like something vile to the
+ death-devouring sharks. No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket,
+ all the more congenial to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat
+ these coffin-canoes were without a keel; though that involved but
+ uncertain steering, and much lee-way adown the dim ages.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter was
+ at once commanded to do Queequeg’s bidding, whatever it might include.
+ There was some heathenish, coffin-coloured old lumber aboard, which, upon
+ a long previous voyage, had been cut from the aboriginal groves of the
+ Lackaday islands, and from these dark planks the coffin was recommended to
+ be made. No sooner was the carpenter apprised of the order, than taking
+ his rule, he forthwith with all the indifferent promptitude of his
+ character, proceeded into the forecastle and took Queequeg’s measure with
+ great accuracy, regularly chalking Queequeg’s person as he shifted the
+ rule.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah! poor fellow! he’ll have to die now,” ejaculated the Long Island
+ sailor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Going to his vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience sake and general
+ reference, now transferringly measured on it the exact length the coffin
+ was to be, and then made the transfer permanent by cutting two notches at
+ its extremities. This done, he marshalled the planks and his tools, and to
+ work.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the last nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted, he
+ lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, inquiring whether
+ they were ready for it yet in that direction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Overhearing the indignant but half-humorous cries with which the people on
+ deck began to drive the coffin away, Queequeg, to every one’s
+ consternation, commanded that the thing should be instantly brought to
+ him, nor was there any denying him; seeing that, of all mortals, some
+ dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly
+ trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with an
+ attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock drawn
+ from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along with one of
+ the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also, biscuits were then
+ ranged round the sides within: a flask of fresh water was placed at the
+ head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up in the hold at the foot;
+ and a piece of sail-cloth being rolled up for a pillow, Queequeg now
+ entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he might make trial of its
+ comforts, if any it had. He lay without moving a few minutes, then told
+ one to go to his bag and bring out his little god, Yojo. Then crossing his
+ arms on his breast with Yojo between, he called for the coffin lid (hatch
+ he called it) to be placed over him. The head part turned over with a
+ leather hinge, and there lay Queequeg in his coffin with little but his
+ composed countenance in view. “Rarmai” (it will do; it is easy), he
+ murmured at last, and signed to be replaced in his hammock.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily hovering near by all this
+ while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with soft sobbings, took him by
+ the hand; in the other, holding his tambourine.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this weary roving? where go
+ ye now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where the
+ beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little errand for
+ me? Seek out one Pip, who’s now been missing long: I think he’s in those
+ far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he must be very sad;
+ for look! he’s left his tambourine behind;—I found it. Rig-a-dig,
+ dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I’ll beat ye your dying march.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have heard,” murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, “that in
+ violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; and
+ that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their wholly
+ forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken in their
+ hearing by some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip, in this
+ strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our
+ heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but there?—Hark! he speaks
+ again: but more wildly now.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Form two and two! Let’s make a General of him! Ho, where’s his harpoon?
+ Lay it across here.—Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a game cock
+ now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies game!—mind ye that;
+ Queequeg dies game!—take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies game! I
+ say; game, game, game! but base little Pip, he died a coward; died all
+ a’shiver;—out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the
+ Antilles he’s a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped
+ from a whale-boat! I’d never beat my tambourine over base Pip, and hail
+ him General, if he were once more dying here. No, no! shame upon all
+ cowards—shame upon them! Let ’em go drown like Pip, that jumped from
+ a whale-boat. Shame! shame!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip was
+ led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But now that he had apparently made every preparation for death; now that
+ his coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon there
+ seemed no need of the carpenter’s box: and thereupon, when some expressed
+ their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that the cause of his
+ sudden convalescence was this;—at a critical moment, he had just
+ recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone; and therefore
+ had changed his mind about dying: he could not die yet, he averred. They
+ asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of his own sovereign
+ will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a word, it was Queequeg’s
+ conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not
+ kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable,
+ unintelligent destroyer of that sort.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized;
+ that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing, generally
+ speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day. So, in good
+ time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after sitting on the
+ windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a vigorous appetite) he
+ suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms and legs, gave himself a
+ good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then springing into the head of
+ his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon, pronounced himself fit for a
+ fight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and
+ emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many
+ spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque
+ figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his
+ rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this
+ tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island,
+ who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete
+ theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of
+ attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to
+ unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even
+ himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these
+ mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the
+ living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the
+ last. And this thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild
+ exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying poor
+ Queequeg—“Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.
+ 
+ 
+ When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South
+ Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific
+ with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was
+ answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of
+ blue.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently
+ awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those
+ fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St.
+ John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery
+ prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise
+ and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades
+ and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call
+ lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in
+ their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must
+ ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of the
+ world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves
+ wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted
+ by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts
+ of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways
+ of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and
+ impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the
+ world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the
+ tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs
+ must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain, as standing like an iron
+ statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one nostril
+ he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles (in whose
+ sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other consciously
+ inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in which the hated
+ White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at length upon these
+ almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese cruising-ground, the
+ old man’s purpose intensified itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a
+ vice; the Delta of his forehead’s veins swelled like overladen brooks; in
+ his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull, “Stern all!
+ the White Whale spouts thick blood!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.
+ 
+ 
+ Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in
+ these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active pursuits
+ shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old blacksmith,
+ had not removed his portable forge to the hold again, after concluding his
+ contributory work for Ahab’s leg, but still retained it on deck, fast
+ lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being now almost incessantly invoked
+ by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen to do some little job for
+ them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their various weapons and
+ boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an eager circle, all
+ waiting to be served; holding boat-spades, pike-heads, harpoons, and
+ lances, and jealously watching his every sooty movement, as he toiled.
+ Nevertheless, this old man’s was a patient hammer wielded by a patient
+ arm. No murmur, no impatience, no petulance did come from him. Silent,
+ slow, and solemn; bowing over still further his chronically broken back,
+ he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his
+ hammer the heavy beating of his heart. And so it was.—Most
+ miserable!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing
+ yawing in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the
+ curiosity of the mariners. And to the importunity of their persisted
+ questionings he had finally given in; and so it came to pass that every
+ one now knew the shameful story of his wretched fate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter’s midnight, on the road
+ running between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt the
+ deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge in a leaning,
+ dilapidated barn. The issue was, the loss of the extremities of both feet.
+ Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four acts of
+ the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied fifth act of
+ the grief of his life’s drama.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly
+ encountered that thing in sorrow’s technicals called ruin. He had been an
+ artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and
+ garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe,
+ ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in
+ a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness, and further concealed in
+ a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his happy home,
+ and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith
+ himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family’s heart. It
+ was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that fatal cork, forth flew
+ the fiend, and shrivelled up his home. Now, for prudent, most wise, and
+ economic reasons, the blacksmith’s shop was in the basement of his
+ dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so that always had the young
+ and loving healthy wife listened with no unhappy nervousness, but with
+ vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of her young-armed old husband’s
+ hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by passing through the floors and
+ walls, came up to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery; and so, to stout
+ Labor’s iron lullaby, the blacksmith’s infants were rocked to slumber.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst
+ thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon him,
+ then had the young widow had a delicious grief, and her orphans a truly
+ venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and all of
+ them a care-killing competency. But Death plucked down some virtuous elder
+ brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of
+ some other family, and left the worse than useless old man standing, till
+ the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more
+ and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last; the
+ wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing
+ into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge choked
+ up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down into the long
+ church-yard grass; her children twice followed her thither; and the
+ houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every
+ woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is
+ only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the
+ first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the
+ Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men,
+ who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide,
+ does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth
+ his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life
+ adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand
+ mermaids sing to them—“Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another
+ life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders
+ supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself in a life
+ which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more
+ oblivious than death. Come hither! put up thy gravestone, too, within the
+ churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall
+ of eve, the blacksmith’s soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went
+ a-whaling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 113. The Forge.
+ 
+ 
+ With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about
+ mid-day, Perth was standing between his forge and anvil, the latter placed
+ upon an iron-wood log, with one hand holding a pike-head in the coals, and
+ with the other at his forge’s lungs, when Captain Ahab came along,
+ carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag. While yet a
+ little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused; till at last, Perth,
+ withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it upon the anvil—the
+ red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights, some of which
+ flew close to Ahab.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Are these thy Mother Carey’s chickens, Perth? they are always flying in
+ thy wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;—look here, they
+ burn; but thou—thou liv’st among them without a scorch.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab,” answered Perth, resting
+ for a moment on his hammer; “I am past scorching; not easily can’st thou
+ scorch a scar.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful to
+ me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is
+ not mad. Thou should’st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad?
+ How can’st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee,
+ that thou can’st not go mad?—What wert thou making there?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And can’st thou make it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such hard
+ usage as it had?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I think so, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I suppose thou can’st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never mind
+ how hard the metal, blacksmith?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look ye here, then,” cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning with
+ both hands on Perth’s shoulders; “look ye here— here —can ye
+ smoothe out a seam like this, blacksmith,” sweeping one hand across his
+ ribbed brow; “if thou could’st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my
+ head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes. Answer!
+ Can’st thou smoothe this seam?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! that is the one, sir! Said I not all seams and dents but one?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable; for though
+ thou only see’st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into the bone of
+ my skull— that is all wrinkles! But, away with child’s play; no more
+ gaffs and pikes to-day. Look ye here!” jingling the leathern bag, as if it
+ were full of gold coins. “I, too, want a harpoon made; one that a thousand
+ yoke of fiends could not part, Perth; something that will stick in a whale
+ like his own fin-bone. There’s the stuff,” flinging the pouch upon the
+ anvil. “Look ye, blacksmith, these are the gathered nail-stubbs of the
+ steel shoes of racing horses.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Horse-shoe stubbs, sir? Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here, then, the best
+ and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together like glue from the
+ melted bones of murderers. Quick! forge me the harpoon. And forge me
+ first, twelve rods for its shank; then wind, and twist, and hammer these
+ twelve together like the yarns and strands of a tow-line. Quick! I’ll blow
+ the fire.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by
+ spiralling them, with his own hand, round a long, heavy iron bolt. “A
+ flaw!” rejecting the last one. “Work that over again, Perth.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This done, Perth was about to begin welding the twelve into one, when Ahab
+ stayed his hand, and said he would weld his own iron. As, then, with
+ regular, gasping hems, he hammered on the anvil, Perth passing to him the
+ glowing rods, one after the other, and the hard pressed forge shooting up
+ its intense straight flame, the Parsee passed silently, and bowing over
+ his head towards the fire, seemed invoking some curse or some blessing on
+ the toil. But, as Ahab looked up, he slid aside.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for?” muttered Stubb,
+ looking on from the forecastle. “That Parsee smells fire like a fusee; and
+ smells of it himself, like a hot musket’s powder-pan.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At last the shank, in one complete rod, received its final heat; and as
+ Perth, to temper it, plunged it all hissing into the cask of water near
+ by, the scalding steam shot up into Ahab’s bent face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Would’st thou brand me, Perth?” wincing for a moment with the pain; “have
+ I been but forging my own branding-iron, then?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this
+ harpoon for the White Whale?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For the white fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must make them thyself,
+ man. Here are my razors—the best of steel; here, and make the barbs
+ sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For a moment, the old blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would fain
+ not use them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Take them, man, I have no need for them; for I now neither shave, sup,
+ nor pray till—but here—to work!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the shank,
+ the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith was
+ about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he cried
+ to Ahab to place the water-cask near.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, no—no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy,
+ there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me as
+ much blood as will cover this barb?” holding it high up. A cluster of dark
+ nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the
+ White Whale’s barbs were then tempered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!” deliriously
+ howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal
+ blood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one of hickory,
+ with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the socket of the
+ iron. A coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some fathoms of it
+ taken to the windlass, and stretched to a great tension. Pressing his foot
+ upon it, till the rope hummed like a harp-string, then eagerly bending
+ over it, and seeing no strandings, Ahab exclaimed, “Good! and now for the
+ seizings.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At one extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns
+ were all braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole was
+ then driven hard up into the socket; from the lower end the rope was
+ traced half-way along the pole’s length, and firmly secured so, with
+ intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope—like the
+ Three Fates—remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with
+ the weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, and the sound of the hickory pole,
+ both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered his cabin,
+ light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous sound was heard. Oh,
+ Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy strange
+ mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of the melancholy
+ ship, and mocked it!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.
+ 
+ 
+ Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising
+ ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild,
+ pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on the
+ stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or sailing, or
+ paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of sixty or seventy minutes
+ calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but small success for their
+ pains.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow
+ heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so
+ sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone
+ cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy
+ quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s
+ skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not
+ willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a
+ certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he
+ regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing only
+ the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high rolling
+ waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when the
+ western emigrants’ horses only show their erected ears, while their hidden
+ bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there
+ steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lie
+ sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of
+ the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so
+ that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one
+ seamless whole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as
+ temporary an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem to
+ open in him his own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon them
+ prove but tarnishing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,—though
+ long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,—in ye, men yet
+ may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few
+ fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to
+ God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of
+ life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for
+ every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do
+ not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:—through
+ infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’
+ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last
+ in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the
+ round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies
+ the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the
+ world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s
+ father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die
+ in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we
+ must there to learn it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat’s side into that
+ same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:—
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye!—Tell
+ me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let
+ faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same golden
+ light:—
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he
+ has always been jolly!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
+ 
+ 
+ And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down
+ before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab’s harpoon had been welded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her last
+ cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, in glad
+ holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously, sailing
+ round among the widely-separated ships on the ground, previous to pointing
+ her prow for home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red bunting
+ at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended, bottom down;
+ and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long lower jaw of the
+ last whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colours were
+ flying from her rigging, on every side. Sideways lashed in each of her
+ three basketed tops were two barrels of sperm; above which, in her
+ top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender breakers of the same precious fluid;
+ and nailed to her main truck was a brazen lamp.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most surprising
+ success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same seas
+ numerous other vessels had gone entire months without securing a single
+ fish. Not only had barrels of beef and bread been given away to make room
+ for the far more valuable sperm, but additional supplemental casks had
+ been bartered for, from the ships she had met; and these were stowed along
+ the deck, and in the captain’s and officers’ state-rooms. Even the cabin
+ table itself had been knocked into kindling-wood; and the cabin mess dined
+ off the broad head of an oil-butt, lashed down to the floor for a
+ centrepiece. In the forecastle, the sailors had actually caulked and
+ pitched their chests, and filled them; it was humorously added, that the
+ cook had clapped a head on his largest boiler, and filled it; that the
+ steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled it; that the
+ harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and filled them; that
+ indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the captain’s pantaloons
+ pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into, in
+ self-complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the
+ barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing
+ still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge
+ try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like poke or stomach skin of
+ the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the clenched
+ hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the mates and harpooneers were
+ dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the
+ Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly secured
+ aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with
+ glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious
+ jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship’s company were tumultuously busy at the
+ masonry of the try-works, from which the huge pots had been removed. You
+ would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed Bastille, such
+ wild cries they raised, as the now useless brick and mortar were being
+ hurled into the sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the ship’s
+ elevated quarter-deck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was full before
+ him, and seemed merely contrived for his own individual diversion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black, with
+ a stubborn gloom; and as the two ships crossed each other’s wakes—one
+ all jubilations for things passed, the other all forebodings as to things
+ to come—their two captains in themselves impersonated the whole
+ striking contrast of the scene.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come aboard, come aboard!” cried the gay Bachelor’s commander, lifting a
+ glass and a bottle in the air.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hast seen the White Whale?” gritted Ahab in reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No; only heard of him; but don’t believe in him at all,” said the other
+ good-humoredly. “Come aboard!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not enough to speak of—two islanders, that’s all;—but come
+ aboard, old hearty, come along. I’ll soon take that black from your brow.
+ Come along, will ye (merry’s the play); a full ship and homeward-bound.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How wondrous familiar is a fool!” muttered Ahab; then aloud, “Thou art a
+ full ship and homeward bound, thou sayst; well, then, call me an empty
+ ship, and outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I will mine. Forward there!
+ Set all sail, and keep her to the wind!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other
+ stubbornly fought against it; and so the two vessels parted; the crew of
+ the Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances towards the receding
+ Bachelor; but the Bachelor’s men never heeding their gaze for the lively
+ revelry they were in. And as Ahab, leaning over the taffrail, eyed the
+ homeward-bound craft, he took from his pocket a small vial of sand, and
+ then looking from the ship to the vial, seemed thereby bringing two remote
+ associations together, for that vial was filled with Nantucket soundings.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.
+ 
+ 
+ Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune’s favourites
+ sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat of the
+ rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out. So seemed it
+ with the Pequod. For next day after encountering the gay Bachelor, whales
+ were seen and four were slain; and one of them by Ahab.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson
+ fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun and
+ whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and such
+ plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that
+ it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of the
+ Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had gone
+ to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned off
+ from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now
+ tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle observable in all sperm whales
+ dying—the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring—that
+ strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab
+ conveyed a wondrousness unknown before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He turns and turns him to it,—how slowly, but how steadfastly, his
+ homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too
+ worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!—Oh
+ that these too-favouring eyes should see these too-favouring sights. Look!
+ here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe; in these most
+ candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks furnish tablets;
+ where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still rolled on speechless
+ and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the Niger’s unknown source;
+ here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than
+ death whirls round the corpse, and it heads some other way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded
+ thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou
+ art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the
+ wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor
+ has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round
+ again, without a lesson to me.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed
+ jet!—that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh
+ whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only
+ calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock
+ me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable imminglings float
+ beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as
+ air, but water now.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl
+ finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill
+ and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.
+ 
+ 
+ The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to
+ windward; one, less distant, to leeward; one ahead; one astern. These last
+ three were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward one could not
+ be reached till morning; and the boat that had killed it lay by its side
+ all night; and that boat was Ahab’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale’s spout-hole; and the
+ lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare upon the
+ black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, which gently
+ chafed the whale’s broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ahab and all his boat’s crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who crouching
+ in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round the
+ whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails. A sound like
+ the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of
+ Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and hooped
+ round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in a flooded
+ world. “I have dreamed it again,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor coffin
+ can be thine?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And who are hearsed that die on the sea?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two
+ hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by
+ mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in
+ America.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:—a hearse and its plumes
+ floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! Such a
+ sight we shall not soon see.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And what was that saying about thyself?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And when thou art so gone before—if that ever befall—then ere
+ I can follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still?—Was
+ it not so? Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here
+ two pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Take another pledge, old man,” said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up
+ like fire-flies in the gloom—“Hemp only can kill thee.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The gallows, ye mean.—I am immortal then, on land and on sea,”
+ cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision;—“Immortal on land and on sea!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and the
+ slumbering crew arose from the boat’s bottom, and ere noon the dead whale
+ was brought to the ship.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.
+ 
+ 
+ The season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab,
+ coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would
+ ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager mariners quickly run to
+ the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes centrally fixed on
+ the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to point the ship’s prow for
+ the equator. In good time the order came. It was hard upon high noon; and
+ Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat, was about taking his
+ wonted daily observation of the sun to determine his latitude.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of
+ effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus
+ of the glassy ocean’s immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered;
+ clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of
+ unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God’s throne. Well
+ that Ahab’s quadrant was furnished with coloured glasses, through which to
+ take sight of that solar fire. So, swinging his seated form to the roll of
+ the ship, and with his astrological-looking instrument placed to his eye,
+ he remained in that posture for some moments to catch the precise instant
+ when the sun should gain its precise meridian. Meantime while his whole
+ attention was absorbed, the Parsee was kneeling beneath him on the ship’s
+ deck, and with face thrown up like Ahab’s, was eyeing the same sun with
+ him; only the lids of his eyes half hooded their orbs, and his wild face
+ was subdued to an earthly passionlessness. At length the desired
+ observation was taken; and with his pencil upon his ivory leg, Ahab soon
+ calculated what his latitude must be at that precise instant. Then falling
+ into a moment’s revery, he again looked up towards the sun and murmured to
+ himself: “Thou sea-mark! thou high and mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly
+ where I am —but canst thou cast the least hint where I shall be? Or
+ canst thou tell where some other thing besides me is this moment living?
+ Where is Moby Dick? This instant thou must be eyeing him. These eyes of
+ mine look into the very eye that is even now beholding him; aye, and into
+ the eye that is even now equally beholding the objects on the unknown,
+ thither side of thee, thou sun!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its
+ numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered:
+ “Foolish toy! babies’ plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and
+ Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what
+ after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou
+ thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee:
+ no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one
+ grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou
+ insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all
+ the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness
+ but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light,
+ O sun! Level by nature to this earth’s horizon are the glances of man’s
+ eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze
+ on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!” dashing it to the deck, “no
+ longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship’s compass, and
+ the level dead-reckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and
+ show me my place on the sea. Aye,” lighting from the boat to the deck,
+ “thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high;
+ thus I split and destroy thee!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live and dead
+ feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a fatalistic
+ despair that seemed meant for himself—these passed over the mute,
+ motionless Parsee’s face. Unobserved he rose and glided away; while,
+ awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered together
+ on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck, shouted out—“To
+ the braces! Up helm!—square in!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled upon her
+ heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon her long,
+ ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one sufficient
+ steed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod’s
+ tumultuous way, and Ahab’s also, as he went lurching along the deck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of
+ its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down, down,
+ to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what
+ will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye,” cried Stubb, “but sea-coal ashes—mind ye that, Mr. Starbuck—sea-coal,
+ not your common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab mutter, ‘Here some one
+ thrusts these cards into these old hands of mine; swears that I must play
+ them, and no others.’ And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in
+ the game, and die in it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
+ 
+ 
+ Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches
+ in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket
+ the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept
+ tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these resplendent Japanese
+ seas the mariner encounters the direst of all storms, the Typhoon. It will
+ sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a
+ dazed and sleepy town.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and
+ bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly
+ ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the
+ thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled masts
+ fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of the
+ tempest had left for its after sport.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every
+ flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional disaster
+ might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask were
+ directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the boats.
+ But all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted to the very top of the
+ cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab’s) did not escape. A great rolling
+ sea, dashing high up against the reeling ship’s high teetering side, stove
+ in the boat’s bottom at the stern, and left it again, all dripping through
+ like a sieve.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck,” said Stubb, regarding the wreck, “but
+ the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can’t fight it. You see, Mr.
+ Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps, all round
+ the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me, all the start
+ I have to meet it, is just across the deck here. But never mind; it’s all
+ in fun: so the old song says;”—( sings .)
+ 
+
+
+ Oh! jolly is the gale,
+ And a joker is the whale,
+ A’ flourishin’ his tail,—
+ Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
+
+ The scud all a flyin’,
+ That’s his flip only foamin’;
+ When he stirs in the spicin’,—
+ Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
+
+ Thunder splits the ships,
+ But he only smacks his lips,
+ A tastin’ of this flip,—
+ Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
+ 
+ 
+ “Avast Stubb,” cried Starbuck, “let the Typhoon sing, and strike his harp
+ here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy
+ peace.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward;
+ and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr. Starbuck,
+ there’s no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my throat. And
+ when that’s done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a wind-up.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else, never
+ mind how foolish?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here!” cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his
+ hand towards the weather bow, “markest thou not that the gale comes from
+ the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick? the very
+ course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat there; where is that
+ stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to stand—his
+ stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and sing away, if thou
+ must!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t half understand ye: what’s in the wind?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nantucket,”
+ soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb’s question. “The gale
+ that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a fair wind that
+ will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom;
+ but to leeward, homeward—I see it lightens up there; but not with
+ the lightning.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following the
+ flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same instant a
+ volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who’s there?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Old Thunder!” said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his
+ pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed
+ lances of fire.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off the
+ perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some ships
+ carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water. But as this
+ conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may avoid all
+ contact with the hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly towing there,
+ it would be liable to many mishaps, besides interfering not a little with
+ some of the rigging, and more or less impeding the vessel’s way in the
+ water; because of all this, the lower parts of a ship’s lightning-rods are
+ not always overboard; but are generally made in long slender links, so as
+ to be the more readily hauled up into the chains outside, or thrown down
+ into the sea, as occasion may require.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The rods! the rods!” cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished to
+ vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting flambeaux, to
+ light Ahab to his post. “Are they overboard? drop them over, fore and aft.
+ Quick!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Avast!” cried Ahab; “let’s have fair play here, though we be the weaker
+ side. Yet I’ll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and Andes, that
+ all the world may be secured; but out on privileges! Let them be, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look aloft!” cried Starbuck. “The corpusants! the corpusants!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each
+ tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of
+ the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like
+ three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Blast the boat! let it go!” cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing
+ sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale violently
+ jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. “Blast it!”—but
+ slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and
+ immediately shifting his tone he cried—“The corpusants have mercy on
+ us all!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of
+ the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses from
+ the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething sea; but
+ in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when God’s burning
+ finger has been laid on the ship; when His “Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin”
+ has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the
+ enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, all
+ their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away
+ constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the gigantic
+ jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed the
+ black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted mouth of Tashtego
+ revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely gleamed as if they too had
+ been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by the preternatural light,
+ Queequeg’s tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on his body.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once more the
+ Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall. A moment or two
+ passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some one. It was
+ Stubb. “What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not the same
+ in the song.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, no, it wasn’t; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I hope
+ they will, still. But do they only have mercy on long faces?—have
+ they no bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck—but it’s too
+ dark to look. Hear me, then: I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign
+ of good luck; for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be
+ chock a’ block with sperm-oil, d’ye see; and so, all that sperm will work
+ up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will yet be as
+ three spermaceti candles—that’s the good promise we saw.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb’s face slowly beginning to
+ glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: “See! see!” and once more
+ the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed redoubled
+ supernaturalness in their pallor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The corpusants have mercy on us all,” cried Stubb, again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame, the
+ Parsee was kneeling in Ahab’s front, but with his head bowed away from
+ him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging rigging, where they
+ had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen, arrested by
+ the glare, now cohered together, and hung pendulous, like a knot of numbed
+ wasps from a drooping, orchard twig. In various enchanted attitudes, like
+ the standing, or stepping, or running skeletons in Herculaneum, others
+ remained rooted to the deck; but all their eyes upcast.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, aye, men!” cried Ahab. “Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame
+ but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast links there;
+ I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against
+ fire! So.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then turning—the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his
+ foot upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm,
+ he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once
+ did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this
+ hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know
+ that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt
+ thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed.
+ No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power;
+ but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional,
+ unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a
+ personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe’er I came;
+ wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives
+ in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come
+ in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy
+ highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of
+ full-freighted worlds, there’s that in here that still remains
+ indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a
+ true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ [ Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap lengthwise to
+ thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his
+ right hand pressed hard upon them. ]
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung
+ from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then
+ grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of
+ these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning
+ flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten
+ brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet
+ blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out
+ of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee!
+ The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh,
+ thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my
+ fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done
+ with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how
+ came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy
+ beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou
+ knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing
+ thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but
+ time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my
+ scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit
+ immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated
+ grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and
+ lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded
+ with thee; defyingly I worship thee!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The boat! the boat!” cried Starbuck, “look at thy boat, old man!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ahab’s harpoon, the one forged at Perth’s fire, remained firmly lashed in
+ its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat’s bow;
+ but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather sheath
+ to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a levelled flame
+ of pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned there like a serpent’s
+ tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm—“God, God is against thee,
+ old man; forbear! ’tis an ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me
+ square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it
+ homewards, to go on a better voyage than this.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the braces—though
+ not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the aghast mate’s thoughts
+ seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous cry. But dashing the rattling
+ lightning links to the deck, and snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved
+ it like a torch among them; swearing to transfix with it the first sailor
+ that but cast loose a rope’s end. Petrified by his aspect, and still more
+ shrinking from the fiery dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay,
+ and Ahab again spoke:—
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart,
+ soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye may know to
+ what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear!”
+ And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the flame.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of
+ some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so
+ much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts; so
+ at those last words of Ahab’s many of the mariners did run from him in a
+ terror of dismay.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.
+ 
+ 
+ ( Ahab standing by the helm. Starbuck approaching him. )
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We must send down the main-top-sail yard, sir. The band is working loose
+ and the lee lift is half-stranded. Shall I strike it, sir?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Strike nothing; lash it. If I had sky-sail poles, I’d sway them up now.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sir!—in God’s name!—sir?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind rises,
+ but it has not got up to my table-lands yet. Quick, and see to it.—By
+ masts and keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of some coasting
+ smack. Send down my main-top-sail yard! Ho, gluepots! Loftiest trucks were
+ made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of mine now sails amid the
+ cloud-scud. Shall I strike that? Oh, none but cowards send down their
+ brain-trucks in tempest time. What a hooroosh aloft there! I would e’en
+ take it for sublime, did I not know that the colic is a noisy malady. Oh,
+ take medicine, take medicine!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle Bulwarks.
+ 
+ 
+ ( Stubb and Flask mounted on them, and passing additional lashings over the
+ anchors there hanging. )
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but you
+ will never pound into me what you were just now saying. And how long ago
+ is it since you said the very contrary? Didn’t you once say that whatever
+ ship Ahab sails in, that ship should pay something extra on its insurance
+ policy, just as though it were loaded with powder barrels aft and boxes of
+ lucifers forward? Stop, now; didn’t you say so?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, suppose I did? What then? I’ve part changed my flesh since that
+ time, why not my mind? Besides, supposing we are loaded with powder
+ barrels aft and lucifers forward; how the devil could the lucifers get
+ afire in this drenching spray here? Why, my little man, you have pretty
+ red hair, but you couldn’t get afire now. Shake yourself; you’re Aquarius,
+ or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill pitchers at your coat collar. Don’t
+ you see, then, that for these extra risks the Marine Insurance companies
+ have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants, Flask. But hark, again, and I’ll
+ answer ye the other thing. First take your leg off from the crown of the
+ anchor here, though, so I can pass the rope; now listen. What’s the mighty
+ difference between holding a mast’s lightning-rod in the storm, and
+ standing close by a mast that hasn’t got any lightning-rod at all in a
+ storm? Don’t you see, you timber-head, that no harm can come to the holder
+ of the rod, unless the mast is first struck? What are you talking about,
+ then? Not one ship in a hundred carries rods, and Ahab,—aye, man,
+ and all of us,—were in no more danger then, in my poor opinion, than
+ all the crews in ten thousand ships now sailing the seas. Why, you
+ King-Post, you, I suppose you would have every man in the world go about
+ with a small lightning-rod running up the corner of his hat, like a
+ militia officer’s skewered feather, and trailing behind like his sash. Why
+ don’t ye be sensible, Flask? it’s easy to be sensible; why don’t ye, then?
+ any man with half an eye can be sensible.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, when a fellow’s soaked through, it’s hard to be sensible, that’s a
+ fact. And I am about drenched with this spray. Never mind; catch the turn
+ there, and pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down these anchors now as
+ if they were never going to be used again. Tying these two anchors here,
+ Flask, seems like tying a man’s hands behind him. And what big generous
+ hands they are, to be sure. These are your iron fists, hey? What a hold
+ they have, too! I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere;
+ if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though. There, hammer
+ that knot down, and we’ve done. So; next to touching land, lighting on
+ deck is the most satisfactory. I say, just wring out my jacket skirts,
+ will ye? Thank ye. They laugh at long-togs so, Flask; but seems to me, a
+ long tailed coat ought always to be worn in all storms afloat. The tails
+ tapering down that way, serve to carry off the water, d’ye see. Same with
+ cocked hats; the cocks form gable-end eave-troughs, Flask. No more
+ monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I must mount a swallow-tail, and
+ drive down a beaver; so. Halloa! whew! there goes my tarpaulin overboard;
+ Lord, Lord, that the winds that come from heaven should be so unmannerly!
+ This is a nasty night, lad.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning.
+ 
+ 
+ ( The main-top-sail yard .— Tashtego passing new lashings around it .)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What’s
+ the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don’t want thunder; we want rum; give
+ us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 123. The Musket.
+ 
+ 
+ During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod’s
+ jaw-bone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by its
+ spasmodic motions, even though preventer tackles had been attached to it—for
+ they were slack—because some play to the tiller was indispensable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to
+ the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the compasses,
+ at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the Pequod’s; at almost
+ every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice the whirling velocity
+ with which they revolved upon the cards; it is a sight that hardly anyone
+ can behold without some sort of unwonted emotion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the
+ strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb—one engaged forward and
+ the other aft—the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and
+ main-top-sails were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to
+ leeward, like the feathers of an albatross, which sometimes are cast to
+ the winds when that storm-tossed bird is on the wing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The three corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed, and a
+ storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went through the
+ water with some precision again; and the course—for the present,
+ East-south-east—which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more
+ given to the helmsman. For during the violence of the gale, he had only
+ steered according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing the ship
+ as near her course as possible, watching the compass meanwhile, lo! a good
+ sign! the wind seemed coming round astern; aye, the foul breeze became
+ fair!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of “ Ho! the fair
+ wind! oh-ye-ho, cheerly men! ” the crew singing for joy, that so promising
+ an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents preceding it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In compliance with the standing order of his commander—to report
+ immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four hours, any decided change
+ in the affairs of the deck,—Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards
+ to the breeze—however reluctantly and gloomily,—than he
+ mechanically went below to apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it a
+ moment. The cabin lamp—taking long swings this way and that—was
+ burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man’s bolted
+ door,—a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper
+ panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming
+ silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of the
+ elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as they
+ stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest,
+ upright man; but out of Starbuck’s heart, at that instant when he saw the
+ muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its
+ neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for
+ itself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He would have shot me once,” he murmured, “yes, there’s the very musket
+ that he pointed at me;—that one with the studded stock; let me touch
+ it—lift it. Strange, that I, who have handled so many deadly lances,
+ strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, aye; and
+ powder in the pan;—that’s not good. Best spill it?—wait. I’ll
+ cure myself of this. I’ll hold the musket boldly while I think.—I
+ come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death and doom,— that’s 
+ fair for Moby Dick. It’s a fair wind that’s only fair for that accursed
+ fish.—The very tube he pointed at me!—the very one; this one—I
+ hold it here; he would have killed me with the very thing I handle now.—Aye
+ and he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say he will not strike
+ his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in
+ these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of
+ the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not swear that
+ he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed old man be tamely
+ suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?—Yes,
+ it would make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship
+ come to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship
+ will, if Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this instant—put
+ aside, that crime would not be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes,
+ just there,—in there, he’s sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but still alive,
+ and soon awake again. I can’t withstand thee, then, old man. Not
+ reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this
+ thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is all thou
+ breathest. Aye, and say’st the men have vow’d thy vow; say’st all of us
+ are Ahabs. Great God forbid!—But is there no other way? no lawful
+ way?—Make him a prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest this
+ old man’s living power from his own living hands? Only a fool would try
+ it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes and hawsers;
+ chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would be more hideous
+ than a caged tiger, then. I could not endure the sight; could not possibly
+ fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason would
+ leave me on the long intolerable voyage. What, then, remains? The land is
+ hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest. I stand alone here
+ upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between me and
+ law.—Aye, aye, ’tis so.—Is heaven a murderer when its
+ lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and
+ skin together?—And would I be a murderer, then, if”—and
+ slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded
+ musket’s end against the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On this level, Ahab’s hammock swings within; his head this way. A touch,
+ and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.—Oh Mary!
+ Mary!—boy! boy! boy!—But if I wake thee not to death, old man,
+ who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck’s body this day week may
+ sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? shall I?—The
+ wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main topsails are reefed
+ and set; she heads her course.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man’s
+ tormented sleep, as if Starbuck’s voice had caused the long dumb dream to
+ speak.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard’s arm against the panel;
+ Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he
+ placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell
+ him. I must see to the deck here. Thou know’st what to say.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 124. The Needle.
+ 
+ 
+ Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of
+ mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod’s gurgling track, pushed her on
+ like giants’ palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded so,
+ that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed
+ before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was
+ only known by the spread intensity of his place; where his bayonet rays
+ moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and
+ queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold,
+ that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time
+ the tetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye
+ the bright sun’s rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly settled by
+ the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun’s rearward place, and how the
+ same yellow rays were blending with his undeviating wake.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of
+ the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye!
+ Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards the
+ helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “East-sou-east, sir,” said the frightened steersman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thou liest!” smiting him with his clenched fist. “Heading East at this
+ hour in the morning, and the sun astern?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then observed
+ by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very blinding
+ palpableness must have been the cause.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of
+ the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed
+ to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses
+ pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the old
+ man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, “I have it! It has happened before. Mr.
+ Starbuck, last night’s thunder turned our compasses—that’s all. Thou
+ hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir,” said the pale mate,
+ gloomily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than
+ one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as
+ developed in the mariner’s needle, is, as all know, essentially one with
+ the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled at,
+ that such things should be. Instances where the lightning has actually
+ struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars and rigging, the
+ effect upon the needle has at times been still more fatal; all its
+ loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetic steel was
+ of no more use than an old wife’s knitting needle. But in either case, the
+ needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue thus marred or
+ lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same fate reaches all
+ the others that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost one inserted
+ into the kelson.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed
+ compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took the
+ precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were exactly
+ inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship’s course to be changed
+ accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod thrust her
+ undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair one had only
+ been juggling her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing,
+ but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask—who
+ in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings—likewise
+ unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some of them lowly
+ rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate. But as
+ ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed; or
+ if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their
+ congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But chancing
+ to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the
+ quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun’s pilot! yesterday I wrecked thee,
+ and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But Ahab is
+ lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck—a lance without a
+ pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker’s needles. Quick!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about to
+ do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to
+ revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a
+ matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old man
+ well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily
+ practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors,
+ without some shudderings and evil portents.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Men,” said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the
+ things he had demanded, “my men, the thunder turned old Ahab’s needles;
+ but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point
+ as true as any.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this
+ was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might
+ follow. But Starbuck looked away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the
+ lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade him
+ hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul, after
+ repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the blunted
+ needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that, several
+ times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then going through some
+ small strange motions with it—whether indispensable to the
+ magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the
+ crew, is uncertain—he called for linen thread; and moving to the
+ binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there, and horizontally
+ suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass-cards. At
+ first, the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either
+ end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently
+ watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle, and
+ pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,—“Look ye, for
+ yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East,
+ and that compass swears it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could
+ persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal
+ pride.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.
+ 
+ 
+ While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log
+ and line had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance
+ upon other means of determining the vessel’s place, some merchantmen, and
+ many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the log;
+ though at the same time, and frequently more for form’s sake than anything
+ else, regularly putting down upon the customary slate the course steered
+ by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of progression every
+ hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden reel and angular log
+ attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the railing of the after
+ bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; sun and wind had warped it; all
+ the elements had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly. But heedless
+ of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened to glance upon the reel,
+ not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered how his quadrant
+ was no more, and recalled his frantic oath about the level log and line.
+ The ship was sailing plungingly; astern the billows rolled in riots.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Forward, there! Heave the log!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. “Take
+ the reel, one of ye, I’ll heave.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship’s lee side, where the
+ deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the
+ creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting
+ handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so
+ stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty
+ turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old
+ Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to
+ speak.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have
+ spoiled it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “’Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee?
+ Thou seem’st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these grey hairs
+ of mine ’tis not worth while disputing, ’specially with a superior, who’ll
+ ne’er confess.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s that? There now’s a patched professor in Queen Nature’s
+ granite-founded College; but methinks he’s too subservient. Where wert
+ thou born?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Excellent! Thou’st hit the world by that.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know not, sir, but I was born there.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it’s good. Here’s a man
+ from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man;
+ which is sucked in—by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall
+ butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long
+ dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In
+ turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing
+ resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hold hard!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging
+ log was gone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea
+ parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian; reel
+ up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and mend
+ thou the line. See to it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There he goes now; to him nothing’s happened; but to me, the skewer seems
+ loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in, Tahitian!
+ These lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and dragging
+ slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip’s missing.
+ Let’s see now if ye haven’t fished him up here, fisherman. It drags hard;
+ I guess he’s holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul in no
+ cowards here. Ho! there’s his arm just breaking water. A hatchet! a
+ hatchet! cut it off—we haul in no cowards here. Captain Ahab! sir,
+ sir! here’s Pip, trying to get on board again.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Peace, thou crazy loon,” cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm. “Away
+ from the quarter-deck!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser,” muttered Ahab, advancing.
+ “Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Astern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of
+ thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve
+ through! Who art thou, boy?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bell-boy, sir; ship’s-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred
+ pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high—looks cowardly—quickest
+ known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip the coward?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look
+ down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye
+ creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s home
+ henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou
+ art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let’s down.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s this? here’s velvet shark-skin,” intently gazing at Ahab’s hand,
+ and feeling it. “Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this,
+ perhaps he had ne’er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope;
+ something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and
+ rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will
+ not let this go.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse
+ horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods
+ all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods
+ oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what
+ he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel
+ prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an
+ Emperor’s!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There go two daft ones now,” muttered the old Manxman. “One daft with
+ strength, the other daft with weakness. But here’s the end of the rotten
+ line—all dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a new
+ line altogether. I’ll see Mr. Stubb about it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.
+ 
+ 
+ Steering now south-eastward by Ahab’s levelled steel, and her progress
+ solely determined by Ahab’s level log and line; the Pequod held on her
+ path towards the Equator. Making so long a passage through such
+ unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled
+ by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed
+ the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate scene.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the
+ Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the
+ dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch—then
+ headed by Flask—was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and
+ unearthly—like half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all
+ Herod’s murdered Innocents—that one and all, they started from their
+ reveries, and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all
+ transfixedly listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild cry
+ remained within hearing. The Christian or civilized part of the crew said
+ it was mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers remained
+ unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman—the oldest mariner of all—declared
+ that the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly
+ drowned men in the sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when he
+ came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not unaccompanied
+ with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus explained the
+ wonder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great numbers
+ of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams that
+ had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept company with
+ her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this only the
+ more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a very
+ superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their peculiar
+ tones when in distress, but also from the human look of their round heads
+ and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water
+ alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than
+ once been mistaken for men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible
+ confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning. At sun-rise
+ this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore; and whether
+ it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for sailors
+ sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus with the
+ man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he had not been long
+ at his perch, when a cry was heard—a cry and a rushing—and
+ looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a
+ little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The life-buoy—a long slender cask—was dropped from the stern,
+ where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to
+ seize it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so
+ that it slowly filled, and that parched wood also filled at its every
+ pore; and the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom,
+ as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out for
+ the White Whale, on the White Whale’s own peculiar ground; that man was
+ swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of that at the time.
+ Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this event, at least as a
+ portent; for they regarded it, not as a foreshadowing of evil in the
+ future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged. They declared
+ that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks they had heard the
+ night before. But again the old Manxman said nay.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see to
+ it; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as in the
+ feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of the voyage,
+ all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly connected with
+ its final end, whatever that might prove to be; therefore, they were going
+ to leave the ship’s stern unprovided with a buoy, when by certain strange
+ signs and inuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint concerning his coffin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A life-buoy of a coffin!” cried Starbuck, starting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Rather queer, that, I should say,” said Stubb.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It will make a good enough one,” said Flask, “the carpenter here can
+ arrange it easily.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bring it up; there’s nothing else for it,” said Starbuck, after a
+ melancholy pause. “Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so—the
+ coffin, I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And shall I nail down the lid, sir?” moving his hand as with a hammer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And shall I caulk the seams, sir?” moving his hand as with a
+ caulking-iron.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?” moving his hand as
+ with a pitch-pot.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Away! what possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and no
+ more.—Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks.
+ Now I don’t like this. I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and he wears it like
+ a gentleman; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he won’t put his head
+ into it. Are all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin? And now I’m
+ ordered to make a life-buoy of it. It’s like turning an old coat; going to
+ bring the flesh on the other side now. I don’t like this cobbling sort of
+ business—I don’t like it at all; it’s undignified; it’s not my
+ place. Let tinkers’ brats do tinkerings; we are their betters. I like to
+ take in hand none but clean, virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs,
+ something that regularly begins at the beginning, and is at the middle
+ when midway, and comes to an end at the conclusion; not a cobbler’s job,
+ that’s at an end in the middle, and at the beginning at the end. It’s the
+ old woman’s tricks to be giving cobbling jobs. Lord! what an affection all
+ old women have for tinkers. I know an old woman of sixty-five who ran away
+ with a bald-headed young tinker once. And that’s the reason I never would
+ work for lonely widow old women ashore, when I kept my job-shop in the
+ Vineyard; they might have taken it into their lonely old heads to run off
+ with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea but snow-caps. Let me see.
+ Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay over the same with pitch; batten
+ them down tight, and hang it with the snap-spring over the ship’s stern.
+ Were ever such things done before with a coffin? Some superstitious old
+ carpenters, now, would be tied up in the rigging, ere they would do the
+ job. But I’m made of knotty Aroostook hemlock; I don’t budge. Cruppered
+ with a coffin! Sailing about with a grave-yard tray! But never mind. We
+ workers in woods make bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as coffins
+ and hearses. We work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit; not
+ for us to ask the why and wherefore of our work, unless it be too
+ confounded cobbling, and then we stash it if we can. Hem! I’ll do the job,
+ now, tenderly. I’ll have me—let’s see—how many in the ship’s
+ company, all told? But I’ve forgotten. Any way, I’ll have me thirty
+ separate, Turk’s-headed life-lines, each three feet long hanging all round
+ to the coffin. Then, if the hull go down, there’ll be thirty lively
+ fellows all fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath
+ the sun! Come hammer, caulking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let’s
+ to it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 127. The Deck.
+ 
+ 
+ ( The coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between the vice-bench and the open
+ hatchway; the Carpenter caulking its seams; the string of twisted oakum
+ slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the bosom of his frock.—Ahab
+ comes slowly from the cabin-gangway, and hears Pip following him. )
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand
+ complies with my humor more genially than that boy.—Middle aisle of
+ a church! What’s here?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck’s orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the
+ hatchway!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy shop?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but
+ they’ve set me now to turning it into something else.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling,
+ monopolising, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the
+ next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those
+ same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a
+ jack-of-all-trades.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The gods again. Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a coffin?
+ The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for
+ volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in hand. Dost
+ thou never?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I’m indifferent enough, sir, for that; but the
+ reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there was
+ none in his spade, sir. But the caulking mallet is full of it. Hark to
+ it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, and that’s because the lid there’s a sounding-board; and what in all
+ things makes the sounding-board is this—there’s naught beneath. And
+ yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same, Carpenter.
+ Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin knock against the
+ churchyard gate, going in?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Faith, sir, I’ve——”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Faith? What’s that?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, faith, sir, it’s only a sort of exclamation-like—that’s all,
+ sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Um, um; go on.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was about to say, sir, that——”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself? Look
+ at thy bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot
+ latitudes. I’ve heard that the Isle of Albemarle, one of the Gallipagos,
+ is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems to me some sort of
+ Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his middle. He’s always under the
+ Line—fiery hot, I tell ye! He’s looking this way—come, oakum;
+ quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork, and I’m the
+ professor of musical glasses—tap, tap!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ( Ahab to himself .)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There’s a sight! There’s a sound! The greyheaded woodpecker
+ tapping the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that
+ thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag, that
+ fellow. Rat-tat! So man’s seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all
+ materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here
+ now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the
+ expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy
+ of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense
+ the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! I’ll think of
+ that. But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other
+ side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me. Will
+ ye never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed sound? I go below; let
+ me not see that thing here when I return again. Now, then, Pip, we’ll talk
+ this over; I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee! Some unknown
+ conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
+ 
+ 
+ Next day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down
+ upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At the time
+ the Pequod was making good speed through the water; but as the
+ broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all
+ fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled from the
+ smitten hull.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bad news; she brings bad news,” muttered the old Manxman. But ere her
+ commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he could
+ hopefully hail, Ahab’s voice was heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hast seen the White Whale?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question; and
+ would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stranger captain
+ himself, having stopped his vessel’s way, was seen descending her side. A
+ few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the Pequod’s main-chains,
+ and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was recognised by Ahab for a
+ Nantucketer he knew. But no formal salutation was exchanged.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where was he?—not killed!—not killed!” cried Ahab, closely
+ advancing. “How was it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous, while
+ three of the stranger’s boats were engaged with a shoal of whales, which
+ had led them some four or five miles from the ship; and while they were
+ yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head of Moby Dick had
+ suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very far to leeward; whereupon,
+ the fourth rigged boat—a reserved one—had been instantly
+ lowered in chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this fourth boat—the
+ swiftest keeled of all—seemed to have succeeded in fastening—at
+ least, as well as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about it.
+ In the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam
+ of bubbling white water; and after that nothing more; whence it was
+ concluded that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with his
+ pursuers, as often happens. There was some apprehension, but no positive
+ alarm, as yet. The recall signals were placed in the rigging; darkness
+ came on; and forced to pick up her three far to windward boats—ere
+ going in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite direction—the
+ ship had not only been necessitated to leave that boat to its fate till
+ near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance from it. But
+ the rest of her crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded all sail—stunsail
+ on stunsail—after the missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots
+ for a beacon; and every other man aloft on the look-out. But though when
+ she had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the presumed place of
+ the absent ones when last seen; though she then paused to lower her spare
+ boats to pull all around her; and not finding anything, had again dashed
+ on; again paused, and lowered her boats; and though she had thus continued
+ doing till daylight; yet not the least glimpse of the missing keel had
+ been seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his
+ object in boarding the Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his own
+ in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five miles apart, on
+ parallel lines, and so sweeping a double horizon, as it were.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will wager something now,” whispered Stubb to Flask, “that some one in
+ that missing boat wore off that Captain’s best coat; mayhap, his watch—he’s
+ so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever heard of two pious whale-ships
+ cruising after one missing whale-boat in the height of the whaling season?
+ See, Flask, only see how pale he looks—pale in the very buttons of
+ his eyes—look—it wasn’t the coat—it must have been the—”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My boy, my own boy is among them. For God’s sake—I beg, I conjure”—here
+ exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far had but icily
+ received his petition. “For eight-and-forty hours let me charter your ship—I
+ will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it—if there be no other
+ way—for eight-and-forty hours only—only that—you must,
+ oh, you must, and you shall do this thing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “His son!” cried Stubb, “oh, it’s his son he’s lost! I take back the coat
+ and watch—what says Ahab? We must save that boy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s drowned with the rest on ’em, last night,” said the old Manx sailor
+ standing behind them; “I heard; all of ye heard their spirits.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel’s the
+ more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of the
+ Captain’s sons among the number of the missing boat’s crew; but among the
+ number of the other boat’s crews, at the same time, but on the other hand,
+ separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the chase, there
+ had been still another son; as that for a time, the wretched father was
+ plunged to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity; which was only solved
+ for him by his chief mate’s instinctively adopting the ordinary procedure
+ of a whale-ship in such emergencies, that is, when placed between
+ jeopardized but divided boats, always to pick up the majority first. But
+ the captain, for some unknown constitutional reason, had refrained from
+ mentioning all this, and not till forced to it by Ahab’s iciness did he
+ allude to his one yet missing boy; a little lad, but twelve years old,
+ whose father with the earnest but unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer’s
+ paternal love, had thus early sought to initiate him in the perils and
+ wonders of a vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his race. Nor
+ does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of
+ such tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four years’
+ voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their first knowledge of
+ a whaleman’s career shall be unenervated by any chance display of a
+ father’s natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and
+ concern.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab; and
+ Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the
+ least quivering of his own.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will not go,” said the stranger, “till you say aye to me. Do to me as
+ you would have me do to you in the like case. For you too have a boy,
+ Captain Ahab—though but a child, and nestling safely at home now—a
+ child of your old age too—Yes, yes, you relent; I see it—run,
+ run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Avast,” cried Ahab—“touch not a rope-yarn”; then in a voice that
+ prolongingly moulded every word—“Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.
+ Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I
+ forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch,
+ and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers:
+ then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin, leaving
+ the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter rejection
+ of his so earnest suit. But starting from his enchantment, Gardiner
+ silently hurried to the side; more fell than stepped into his boat, and
+ returned to his ship.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel
+ was in view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot,
+ however small, on the sea. This way and that her yards were swung round;
+ starboard and larboard, she continued to tack; now she beat against a head
+ sea; and again it pushed her before it; while all the while, her masts and
+ yards were thickly clustered with men, as three tall cherry trees, when
+ the boys are cherrying among the boughs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw
+ that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort.
+ She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.
+ 
+ 
+ ( Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches him by the hand to follow. )
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming
+ when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him.
+ There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady.
+ Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired
+ health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee, as if thou
+ wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own screwed chair;
+ another screw to it, thou must be.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for your
+ one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part
+ of ye.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless
+ fidelity of man!—and a black! and crazy!—but methinks
+ like-cures-like applies to him too; he grows so sane again.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose
+ drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin.
+ But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with
+ ye.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I
+ tell thee no; it cannot be.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh good master, master, master!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad.
+ Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still
+ know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!—Met! True art
+ thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless
+ thee; and if it come to that,—God for ever save thee, let what will
+ befall.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ( Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward. )
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,—but I’m alone. Now
+ were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing. Pip! Pip!
+ Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip? He must be up here; let’s try the door.
+ What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there’s no opening it. It
+ must be the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me this screwed
+ chair was mine. Here, then, I’ll seat me, against the transom, in the
+ ship’s full middle, all her keel and her three masts before me. Here, our
+ old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great admirals sometimes sit
+ at table, and lord it over rows of captains and lieutenants. Ha! what’s
+ this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all come crowding! Pass round the
+ decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs! What an odd feeling, now,
+ when a black boy’s host to white men with gold lace upon their coats!—Monsieurs,
+ have ye seen one Pip?—a little negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog
+ look, and cowardly! Jumped from a whale-boat once;—seen him? No!
+ Well then, fill up again, captains, and let’s drink shame upon all
+ cowards! I name no names. Shame upon them! Put one foot upon the table.
+ Shame upon all cowards.—Hist! above there, I hear ivory—Oh,
+ master! master! I am indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. But here
+ I’ll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and
+ oysters come to join me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 130. The Hat.
+ 
+ 
+ And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a
+ preliminary cruise, Ahab,—all other whaling waters swept—seemed
+ to have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely
+ there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and longitude
+ where his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a vessel had been
+ spoken which on the very day preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick;—and
+ now that all his successive meetings with various ships contrastingly
+ concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the white whale
+ tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against; now it was that there
+ lurked a something in the old man’s eyes, which it was hardly sufferable
+ for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting polar star, which through the
+ livelong, arctic, six months’ night sustains its piercing, steady, central
+ gaze; so Ahab’s purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant
+ midnight of the gloomy crew. It domineered above them so, that all their
+ bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls,
+ and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural,
+ vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove
+ to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to
+ finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab’s
+ iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious
+ that the old man’s despot eye was on them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when he
+ thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that even
+ as Ahab’s eyes so awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Parsee’s glance awed
+ his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it. Such an
+ added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah now; such
+ ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious at him; half
+ uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance, or
+ else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen being’s body.
+ And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by night, even, had
+ Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below. He would stand
+ still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan but wondrous eyes did
+ plainly say—We two watchmen never rest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the
+ deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or
+ exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits,—the
+ main-mast and the mizen; or else they saw him standing in the
+ cabin-scuttle,—his living foot advanced upon the deck, as if to
+ step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless
+ he stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung
+ in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never
+ tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at
+ times; or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though
+ he stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the
+ unheeded night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat
+ and hat. The clothes that the night had wet, the next day’s sunshine dried
+ upon him; and so, day after day, and night after night; he went no more
+ beneath the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent
+ for.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,—breakfast
+ and dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly
+ grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow
+ idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But though
+ his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee’s
+ mystic watch was without intermission as his own; yet these two never
+ seemed to speak—one man to the other—unless at long intervals
+ some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such a potent
+ spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck
+ crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one
+ word; by night, dumb men were both, so far as concerned the slightest
+ verbal interchange. At times, for longest hours, without a single hail,
+ they stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by
+ the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the
+ Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned
+ substance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And yet, somehow, did Ahab—in his own proper self, as daily, hourly,
+ and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,—Ahab
+ seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both
+ seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean shade
+ siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel was
+ solid Ahab.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard
+ from aft,—“Man the mast-heads!”—and all through the day, till
+ after sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at the
+ striking of the helmsman’s bell, was heard—“What d’ye see?—sharp!
+ sharp!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the
+ children-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac
+ old man seemed distrustful of his crew’s fidelity; at least, of nearly all
+ except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether Stubb and
+ Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if these
+ suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally
+ expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will have the first sight of the whale myself,”—he said. “Aye!
+ Ahab must have the doubloon!” and with his own hands he rigged a nest of
+ basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved block,
+ to secure to the main-mast head, he received the two ends of the
+ downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to his basket prepared a pin for
+ the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail. This done, with that end
+ yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked round upon his
+ crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance long upon Daggoo,
+ Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his firm
+ relying eye upon the chief mate, said,—“Take the rope, sir—I
+ give it into thy hands, Starbuck.” Then arranging his person in the
+ basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him to his perch, Starbuck
+ being the one who secured the rope at last; and afterwards stood near it.
+ And thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad
+ upon the sea for miles and miles,—ahead, astern, this side, and
+ that,—within the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a
+ height.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in the
+ rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is hoisted
+ up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope; under these
+ circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given in strict charge
+ to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in such a
+ wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations aloft
+ cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the deck;
+ and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes cast
+ down from the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if,
+ unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some
+ carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the sea.
+ So Ahab’s proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the only strange
+ thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck, almost the one only man who
+ had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the slightest degree
+ approaching to decision—one of those too, whose faithfulness on the
+ look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat;—it was strange, that this
+ was the very man he should select for his watchman; freely giving his
+ whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person’s hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten
+ minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly
+ incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these
+ latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head
+ in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet
+ straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying
+ again round his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed not
+ to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it
+ much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least heedful
+ eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your hat, your hat, sir!” suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who being
+ posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat
+ lower than his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But already the sable wing was before the old man’s eyes; the long hooked
+ bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with his
+ prize.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin’s head, removing his cap to replace it,
+ and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of
+ Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good.
+ Ahab’s hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far
+ in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while from the point of
+ that disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from
+ that vast height into the sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
+ 
+ 
+ The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the
+ life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably
+ misnamed the Delight, was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed
+ upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross
+ the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the
+ spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Upon the stranger’s shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and some
+ few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you now saw
+ through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled,
+ half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hast seen the White Whale?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look!” replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with his
+ trumpet he pointed to the wreck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hast killed him?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that,” answered the
+ other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered
+ sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not forged!” and snatching Perth’s levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab
+ held it out, exclaiming—“Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I
+ hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these
+ barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin,
+ where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then God keep thee, old man—see’st thou that”—pointing to the
+ hammock—“I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only
+ yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only that one I bury; the rest were
+ buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb.” Then turning to his
+ crew—“Are ye ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and lift
+ the body; so, then—Oh! God”—advancing towards the hammock with
+ uplifted hands—“may the resurrection and the life——”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Brace forward! Up helm!” cried Ahab like lightning to his men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound
+ of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not so
+ quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled
+ her hull with their ghostly baptism.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy
+ hanging at the Pequod’s stern came into conspicuous relief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!” cried a foreboding voice in her wake. “In
+ vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your
+ taffrail to show us your coffin!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
+ 
+ 
+ It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly
+ separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was
+ transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and
+ man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest
+ in his sleep.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,
+ unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but
+ to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty
+ leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled,
+ murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and
+ shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were,
+ that distinguished them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air
+ to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling
+ line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion—most seen here at
+ the equator—denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms,
+ with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and
+ unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of
+ ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting
+ his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged
+ creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how
+ oblivious were ye of old Ahab’s close-coiled woe! But so have I seen
+ little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around
+ their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the
+ marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and
+ watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more
+ and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely
+ aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the
+ cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did
+ at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now
+ threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously
+ sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could
+ yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched
+ hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such
+ wealth as that one wee drop.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;
+ and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that
+ stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch him,
+ or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ahab turned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Starbuck!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a
+ day—very much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first whale—a
+ boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty—forty—forty years ago!—ago!
+ Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and
+ storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab
+ forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of
+ the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent
+ three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of
+ solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s
+ exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the
+ green country without—oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery
+ of solitary command!—when I think of all this; only half-suspected,
+ not so keenly known to me before—and how for forty years I have fed
+ upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!—when
+ the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the
+ world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away,
+ from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn
+ the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife? wife?—rather
+ a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I
+ married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling
+ blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab
+ has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man!—aye,
+ aye! what a forty years’ fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab
+ been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the
+ oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now?
+ Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear,
+ one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old
+ hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never
+ grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old,
+ Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam,
+ staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!—crack
+ my heart!—stave my brain!—mockery! mockery! bitter, biting
+ mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and
+ feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look
+ into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than
+ to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is
+ the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no;
+ stay on board, on board!—lower not when I do; when branded Ahab
+ gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with
+ the far away home I see in that eye!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why
+ should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly
+ these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s—wife
+ and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine,
+ sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age!
+ Away! let us away!—this instant let me alter the course! How
+ cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see
+ old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days,
+ even as this, in Nantucket.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They have, they have. I have seen them—some summer days in the
+ morning. About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy
+ vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of
+ cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to
+ dance him again.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “’Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning,
+ should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father’s
+ sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my
+ Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the boy’s face
+ from the window! the boy’s hand on the hill!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and
+ cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what
+ cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands
+ me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and
+ crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready
+ to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?
+ Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great
+ sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single
+ star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small
+ heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that
+ beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man,
+ we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and
+ Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this
+ unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and
+ fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the
+ judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a
+ mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away
+ meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes,
+ Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping?
+ Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye,
+ and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in
+ the half-cut swaths—Starbuck!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two
+ reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly
+ leaning over the same rail.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day.
+ 
+ 
+ That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man—as his wont at
+ intervals—stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and
+ went to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing
+ up the sea air as a sagacious ship’s dog will, in drawing nigh to some
+ barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that peculiar
+ odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living sperm whale,
+ was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner surprised when, after
+ inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and then ascertaining the
+ precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered
+ the ship’s course to be slightly altered, and the sail to be shortened.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated at
+ daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and lengthwise
+ ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery wrinkles
+ bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift tide-rip, at
+ the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle
+ deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they seemed
+ to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear with their
+ clothes in their hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What d’ye see?” cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing, nothing sir!” was the sound hailing down in reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “T’gallant sails!—stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for swaying
+ him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were hoisting
+ him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and while
+ peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the main-top-sail and
+ top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the air. “There she blows!—there
+ she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three
+ look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous
+ whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final perch,
+ some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just beneath him on
+ the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the Indian’s head was almost on a
+ level with Ahab’s heel. From this height the whale was now seen some mile
+ or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing his high sparkling hump,
+ and regularly jetting his silent spout into the air. To the credulous
+ mariners it seemed the same silent spout they had so long ago beheld in
+ the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And did none of ye see it before?” cried Ahab, hailing the perched men
+ all around him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I
+ cried out,” said Tashtego.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not the same instant; not the same—no, the doubloon is mine, Fate
+ reserved the doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have raised the
+ White Whale first. There she blows!—there she blows!—there she
+ blows! There again!—there again!” he cried, in long-drawn,
+ lingering, methodic tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the
+ whale’s visible jets. “He’s going to sound! In stunsails! Down
+ top-gallant-sails! Stand by three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on
+ board, and keep the ship. Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man,
+ steady! There go flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready the boats
+ there? Stand by, stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower,—quick,
+ quicker!” and he slid through the air to the deck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is heading straight to leeward, sir,” cried Stubb, “right away from
+ us; cannot have seen the ship yet.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!—brace up!
+ Shiver her!—shiver her!—So; well that! Boats, boats!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon all the boats but Starbuck’s were dropped; all the boat-sails set—all
+ the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward; and Ahab
+ heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up Fedallah’s sunken eyes; a
+ hideous motion gnawed his mouth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea;
+ but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew
+ still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a
+ noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came
+ so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was
+ distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and
+ continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. He
+ saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond.
+ Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening
+ white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully
+ accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed
+ over into the moving valley of his steady wake; and on either hand bright
+ bubbles arose and danced by his side. But these were broken again by the
+ light toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly feathering the sea, alternate
+ with their fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff rising from the
+ painted hull of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance
+ projected from the white whale’s back; and at intervals one of the cloud
+ of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over
+ the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers
+ streaming like pennons.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness,
+ invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with
+ ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes
+ sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling
+ straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty
+ Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On each soft side—coincident with the parted swell, that but once
+ leaving him, then flowed so wide away—on each bright side, the whale
+ shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who
+ namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to
+ assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of
+ tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all who
+ for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way thou
+ may’st have bejuggled and destroyed before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among
+ waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick
+ moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged
+ trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the
+ fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole
+ marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia’s Natural Bridge, and
+ warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed
+ himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly halting, and dipping
+ on the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly lingered over the agitated pool
+ that he left.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the
+ three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick’s reappearance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “An hour,” said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat’s stern; and he gazed
+ beyond the whale’s place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing
+ vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant; for again his eyes seemed
+ whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze now
+ freshened; the sea began to swell.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The birds!—the birds!” cried Tashtego.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now
+ all flying towards Ahab’s boat; and when within a few yards began
+ fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous,
+ expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man’s; Ahab could discover
+ no sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down into its
+ depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white
+ weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till
+ it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of
+ white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom. It
+ was Moby Dick’s open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast, shadowed bulk still
+ half blending with the blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned
+ beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb; and giving one sidelong
+ sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled the craft aside from this
+ tremendous apparition. Then, calling upon Fedallah to change places with
+ him, went forward to the bows, and seizing Perth’s harpoon, commanded his
+ crew to grasp their oars and stand by to stern.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis, its
+ bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale’s head while yet under
+ water. But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that malicious
+ intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly transplanted himself, as it were,
+ in an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for an
+ instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of a biting
+ shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his mouth, so that
+ the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into the open air, and
+ one of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish pearl-white of the
+ inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab’s head, and reached higher
+ than that. In this attitude the White Whale now shook the slight cedar as
+ a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and
+ crossed his arms; but the tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each
+ other’s heads to gain the uttermost stern.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the
+ whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his
+ body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from the
+ bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and while the
+ other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis impossible to
+ withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing
+ vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and helpless in the very
+ jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his
+ naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe. As now he thus
+ vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the frail gunwales bent in,
+ collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding
+ further aft, bit the craft completely in twain, and locked themselves fast
+ again in the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks. These floated
+ aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew at the stern-wreck clinging to
+ the gunwales, and striving to hold fast to the oars to lash them across.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first to
+ perceive the whale’s intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a
+ movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his hand had
+ made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only slipping
+ further into the whale’s mouth, and tilting over sideways as it slipped,
+ the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw; spilled him out of it, as he
+ leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little
+ distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in the
+ billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body; so
+ that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose—some twenty or more feet
+ out of the water—the now rising swells, with all their confluent
+ waves, dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered
+ spray still higher into the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled
+ Channel billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly
+ to overleap its summit with their scud.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation
+ (pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down poise
+ of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously
+ described. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively
+ view whatever objects may be encircling him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round
+ and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful
+ wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly assault.
+ The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood of
+ grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus’s elephants in the book of
+ Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale’s
+ insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,—though he could
+ still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless
+ Ahab’s head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock
+ might burst. From the boat’s fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and
+ mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not
+ succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves. For so
+ revolvingly appalling was the White Whale’s aspect, and so planetarily
+ swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed horizontally
+ swooping upon them. And though the other boats, unharmed, still hovered
+ hard by; still they dared not pull into the eddy to strike, lest that
+ should be the signal for the instant destruction of the jeopardized
+ castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves hope to
+ escape. With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge of the
+ direful zone, whose centre had now become the old man’s head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship’s
+ mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene; and
+ was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her!—“Sail on the”—but
+ that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed him
+ for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise on a
+ towering crest, he shouted,—“Sail on the whale!—Drive him
+ off!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Pequod’s prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she
+ effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam
+ off, the boats flew to the rescue.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dragged into Stubb’s boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white brine
+ caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab’s bodily strength did
+ crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body’s doom: for a time, lying all
+ crushed in the bottom of Stubb’s boat, like one trodden under foot of
+ herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as desolate
+ sounds from out ravines.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more
+ abbreviate it. In an instant’s compass, great hearts sometimes condense to
+ one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused
+ through feebler men’s whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary in
+ each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time
+ aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous intensities;
+ for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain the
+ entire circumferences of inferior souls.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The harpoon,” said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one
+ bended arm—“is it safe?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it,” said Stubb, showing it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lay it before me;—any missing men?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One, two, three, four, five;—there were five oars, sir, and here
+ are five men.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s good.—Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him!
+ there! there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!—Hands
+ off from me! The eternal sap runs up in Ahab’s bones again! Set the sail;
+ out oars; the helm!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked up
+ by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus
+ continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now. But the
+ added power of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale, for he
+ seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a velocity which
+ plainly showed, that if now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the
+ chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor
+ could any crew endure for so long a period, such an unintermitted, intense
+ straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable only in some one brief
+ vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as it sometimes happens, offered the
+ most promising intermediate means of overtaking the chase. Accordingly,
+ the boats now made for her, and were soon swayed up to their cranes—the
+ two parts of the wrecked boat having been previously secured by her—and
+ then hoisting everything to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and
+ sideways outstretching it with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings
+ of an albatross; the Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick. At
+ the well known, methodic intervals, the whale’s glittering spout was
+ regularly announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be
+ reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing the
+ deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second of the allotted
+ hour expired, his voice was heard.—“Whose is the doubloon now? D’ye
+ see him?” and if the reply was, No, sir! straightway he commanded them to
+ lift him to his perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab, now aloft and
+ motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft,
+ or to bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a still
+ greater breadth—thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at
+ every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon the
+ quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered stern. At
+ last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded sky fresh
+ troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old man’s face
+ there now stole some such added gloom as this.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to evince
+ his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in his
+ Captain’s mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed—“The
+ thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did I
+ not know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear
+ thou wert a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, sir,” said Starbuck drawing near, “’tis a solemn sight; an omen, and
+ an ill one.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Omen? omen?—the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to
+ man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give
+ an old wives’ darkling hint.—Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles
+ of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye
+ two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the
+ peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold—I shiver!—How
+ now? Aloft there! D’ye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he spout
+ ten times a second!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling.
+ Soon, it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Can’t see the spout now, sir;—too dark”—cried a voice from
+ the air.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How heading when last seen?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As before, sir,—straight to leeward.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good! he will travel slower now ’tis night. Down royals and top-gallant
+ stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before morning; he’s
+ making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm there! keep her full
+ before the wind!—Aloft! come down!—Mr. Stubb, send a fresh
+ hand to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till morning.”—Then
+ advancing towards the doubloon in the main-mast—“Men, this gold is
+ mine, for I earned it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale
+ is dead; and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall
+ be killed, this gold is that man’s; and if on that day I shall again raise
+ him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye! Away now!—the
+ deck is thine, sir!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and
+ slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals rousing
+ himself to see how the night wore on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day.
+ 
+ 
+ At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “D’ye see him?” cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the light to
+ spread.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “See nothing, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought for;—the
+ top-gallant sails!—aye, they should have been kept on her all night.
+ But no matter—’tis but resting for the rush.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale,
+ continued through day into night, and through night into day, is a thing
+ by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is the
+ wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible confidence
+ acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders;
+ that from the simple observation of a whale when last descried, they will,
+ under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both the
+ direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of
+ sight, as well as his probable rate of progression during that period.
+ And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a
+ coast, whose general trending he well knows, and which he desires shortly
+ to return to again, but at some further point; like as this pilot stands
+ by his compass, and takes the precise bearing of the cape at present
+ visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen
+ headland, eventually to be visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass,
+ with the whale; for after being chased, and diligently marked, through
+ several hours of daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the
+ creature’s future wake through the darkness is almost as established to
+ the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the pilot’s coast is to him. So that
+ to this hunter’s wondrous skill, the proverbial evanescence of a thing
+ writ in water, a wake, is to all desired purposes well nigh as reliable as
+ the steadfast land. And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway
+ is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their
+ hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly
+ say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot,
+ at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions when these
+ Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep, according to the
+ observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so many hours hence
+ this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have about reached this
+ or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to render this acuteness at
+ all successful in the end, the wind and the sea must be the whaleman’s
+ allies; for of what present avail to the becalmed or windbound mariner is
+ the skill that assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a
+ quarter from his port? Inferable from these statements, are many
+ collateral subtile matters touching the chase of whales.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball,
+ missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level field.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “By salt and hemp!” cried Stubb, “but this swift motion of the deck creeps
+ up one’s legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two brave
+ fellows!—Ha, ha! Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise, on
+ the sea,—for by live-oaks! my spine’s a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait
+ that leaves no dust behind!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There she blows—she blows!—she blows!—right ahead!” was
+ now the mast-head cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, aye!” cried Stubb, “I knew it—ye can’t escape—blow on
+ and split your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow
+ your trump—blister your lungs!—Ahab will dam off your blood,
+ as a miller shuts his watergate upon the stream!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies of
+ the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked
+ anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt
+ before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe
+ of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid
+ prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had
+ snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of the previous day;
+ the rack of the past night’s suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind,
+ reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying
+ mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled along. The wind that
+ made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms
+ invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency
+ which so enslaved them to the race.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all;
+ though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple,
+ and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each
+ other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and
+ directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the
+ crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltiness, all
+ varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal
+ goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were
+ outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one
+ hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others, shading
+ their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking yards; all
+ the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their fate. Ah!
+ how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing
+ that might destroy them!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?” cried Ahab, when, after the
+ lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard. “Sway
+ me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd jet that
+ way, and then disappears.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some
+ other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for
+ hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its pin
+ on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the air
+ vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant halloo
+ of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as—much nearer to the ship than
+ the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead—Moby Dick
+ bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by
+ the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White
+ Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of
+ breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the
+ Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and
+ piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of
+ seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes
+ off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There she breaches! there she breaches!” was the cry, as in his
+ immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to
+ Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved
+ against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for
+ the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and stood
+ there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling intensity,
+ to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!” cried Ahab, “thy hour and
+ thy harpoon are at hand!—Down! down all of ye, but one man at the
+ fore. The boats!—stand by!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like
+ shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and halyards;
+ while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from his perch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lower away,” he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat—a spare
+ one, rigged the afternoon previous. “Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine—keep
+ away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower, all!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first
+ assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the three
+ crews. Ahab’s boat was central; and cheering his men, he told them he
+ would take the whale head-and-head,—that is, pull straight up to his
+ forehead,—a not uncommon thing; for when within a certain limit,
+ such a course excludes the coming onset from the whale’s sidelong vision.
+ But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all three boats were
+ plain as the ship’s three masts to his eye; the White Whale churning
+ himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were, rushing among
+ the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered appalling battle on
+ every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from every boat,
+ seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which those
+ boats were made. But skilfully manœuvred, incessantly wheeling like
+ trained chargers in the field; the boats for a while eluded him; though,
+ at times, but by a plank’s breadth; while all the time, Ahab’s unearthly
+ slogan tore every other cry but his to shreds.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed and
+ recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack of the three lines
+ now fast to him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves, warped the
+ devoted boats towards the planted irons in him; though now for a moment
+ the whale drew aside a little, as if to rally for a more tremendous
+ charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out more line: and then
+ was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again—hoping that way to
+ disencumber it of some snarls—when lo!—a sight more savage
+ than the embattled teeth of sharks!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Caught and twisted—corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose
+ harpoons and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points, came
+ flashing and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab’s boat. Only
+ one thing could be done. Seizing the boat-knife, he critically reached
+ within—through—and then, without—the rays of steel;
+ dragged in the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and then,
+ twice sundering the rope near the chocks—dropped the intercepted
+ fagot of steel into the sea; and was all fast again. That instant, the
+ White Whale made a sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the other
+ lines; by so doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb
+ and Flask towards his flukes; dashed them together like two rolling husks
+ on a surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in
+ a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the
+ wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred
+ bowl of punch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after
+ the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while aslope
+ little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his legs
+ upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily
+ singing out for some one to ladle him up; and while the old man’s line—now
+ parting—admitted of his pulling into the creamy pool to rescue whom
+ he could;—in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand concreted
+ perils,—Ahab’s yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards Heaven by
+ invisible wires,—as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the
+ sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its bottom, and
+ sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till it fell again—gunwale
+ downwards—and Ahab and his men struggled out from under it, like
+ seals from a sea-side cave.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The first uprising momentum of the whale—modifying its direction as
+ he struck the surface—involuntarily launched him along it, to a
+ little distance from the centre of the destruction he had made; and with
+ his back to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling with his flukes
+ from side to side; and whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least chip
+ or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back, and
+ came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his work for
+ that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the ocean, and
+ trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his leeward way at a
+ traveller’s methodic pace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight, again came
+ bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the floating
+ mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else could be caught at, and safely
+ landed them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and ankles;
+ livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable intricacies
+ of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these were there; but no fatal or
+ even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one. As with Fedallah the day
+ before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to his boat’s broken half,
+ which afforded a comparatively easy float; nor did it so exhaust him as
+ the previous day’s mishap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as
+ instead of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder of
+ Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to assist him. His ivory leg
+ had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, aye, Starbuck, ’tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he
+ will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The ferrule has not stood, sir,” said the carpenter, now coming up; “I
+ put good work into that leg.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But no bones broken, sir, I hope,” said Stubb with true concern.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!—d’ye see it.—But
+ even with a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living
+ bone of mine one jot more me, than this dead one that’s lost. Nor white
+ whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper
+ and inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape
+ yonder roof?—Aloft there! which way?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dead to leeward, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of the
+ spare boats and rig them—Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat’s
+ crews.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the
+ unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sir?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane—there, that
+ shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet. By
+ heaven it cannot be!—missing?—quick! call them all.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old man’s hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the
+ Parsee was not there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Parsee!” cried Stubb—“he must have been caught in——”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The black vomit wrench thee!—run all of ye above, alow, cabin,
+ forecastle—find him—not gone—not gone!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was
+ nowhere to be found.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, sir,” said Stubb—“caught among the tangles of your line—I
+ thought I saw him dragging under.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ My line! my line? Gone?—gone? What means that little word?—What
+ death-knell rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry.
+ The harpoon, too!—toss over the litter there,—d’ye see it?—the
+ forged iron, men, the white whale’s—no, no, no,—blistered
+ fool! this hand did dart it!—’tis in the fish!—Aloft there!
+ Keep him nailed—Quick!—all hands to the rigging of the boats—collect
+ the oars—harpooneers! the irons, the irons!—hoist the royals
+ higher—a pull on all the sheets!—helm there! steady, steady
+ for your life! I’ll ten times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea and dive
+ straight through it, but I’ll slay him yet!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Great God! but for one single instant show thyself,” cried Starbuck;
+ “never, never wilt thou capture him, old man—In Jesus’ name no more
+ of this, that’s worse than devil’s madness. Two days chased; twice stove
+ to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil
+ shadow gone—all good angels mobbing thee with warnings:—what more
+ wouldst thou have?—Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps
+ the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be
+ towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh,—Impiety and blasphemy to hunt
+ him more!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour
+ we both saw—thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes. But in this
+ matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this
+ hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This
+ whole act’s immutably decreed. ’Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion
+ years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act
+ under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.—Stand
+ round me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a
+ shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. ’Tis Ahab—his body’s
+ part; but Ahab’s soul’s a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I
+ feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a
+ gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, ye’ll hear me crack; and till ye
+ hear that , know that Ahab’s hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ye, men,
+ in the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they
+ drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface; then rise again, to
+ sink for evermore. So with Moby Dick—two days he’s floated—tomorrow
+ will be the third. Aye, men, he’ll rise once more,—but only to spout
+ his last! D’ye feel brave men, brave?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As fearless fire,” cried Stubb.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And as mechanical,” muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward, he
+ muttered on: “The things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same to
+ Starbuck there, concerning my broken boat. Oh! how valiantly I seek to
+ drive out of others’ hearts what’s clinched so fast in mine!—The
+ Parsee—the Parsee!—gone, gone? and he was to go before:—but
+ still was to be seen again ere I could perish—How’s that?—There’s
+ a riddle now might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts of the
+ whole line of judges:—like a hawk’s beak it pecks my brain. I’ll ,
+ I’ll solve it, though!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly as on
+ the previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of the
+ grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by lanterns
+ in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and sharpening
+ their fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken keel of Ahab’s
+ wrecked craft the carpenter made him another leg; while still as on the
+ night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his scuttle; his hid,
+ heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial; sat due
+ eastward for the earliest sun.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER 135. The Chase.—Third Day.
+ 
+ 
+ The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the
+ solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds of the
+ daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “D’ye see him?” cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that’s all. Helm
+ there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day
+ again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the
+ angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer
+ day could not dawn upon that world. Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time
+ to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s 
+ tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only has that
+ right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a
+ calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for
+ that. And yet, I’ve sometimes thought my brain was very calm—frozen
+ calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned
+ to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this moment
+ growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it’s like that sort of common
+ grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice
+ or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as
+ the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. A vile
+ wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells,
+ and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither
+ as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!—it’s tainted. Were I the wind,
+ I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl somewhere to
+ a cave, and slink there. And yet, ’tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind!
+ who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow.
+ Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that
+ strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even
+ Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing than that . Would now the wind
+ but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal
+ man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as
+ agents. There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious
+ difference! And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that there’s something
+ all glorious and gracious in the wind. These warm Trade Winds, at least,
+ that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in strong and steadfast,
+ vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark, however the baser
+ currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of the
+ land swift and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the
+ eternal Poles! these same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on;
+ these Trades, or something like them—something so unchangeable, and
+ full as strong, blow my keeled soul along! To it! Aloft there! What d’ye
+ see?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See the sun! Aye,
+ aye, it must be so. I’ve oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye, he’s
+ chasing me now; not I, him —that’s bad; I might have known it, too.
+ Fool! the lines—the harpoons he’s towing. Aye, aye, I have run him
+ by last night. About! about! Come down, all of ye, but the regular look
+ outs! Man the braces!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod’s
+ quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced
+ ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own
+ white wake.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw,” murmured Starbuck to
+ himself, as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. “God keep
+ us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from the inside wet my
+ flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stand by to sway me up!” cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket. “We
+ should meet him soon.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, aye, sir,” and straightway Starbuck did Ahab’s bidding, and once
+ more Ahab swung on high.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held
+ long breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the
+ weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three
+ mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck
+ there!—brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind’s eye. He’s too far
+ off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that helmsman
+ with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But let me have
+ one more good round look aloft here at the sea; there’s time for that. An
+ old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; aye, and not changed a wink
+ since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of Nantucket! The same!—the
+ same!—the same to Noah as to me. There’s a soft shower to leeward.
+ Such lovely leewardings! They must lead somewhere—to something else
+ than common land, more palmy than the palms. Leeward! the white whale goes
+ that way; look to windward, then; the better if the bitterer quarter. But
+ good bye, good bye, old mast-head! What’s this?—green? aye, tiny
+ mosses in these warped cracks. No such green weather stains on Ahab’s
+ head! There’s the difference now between man’s old age and matter’s. But
+ aye, old mast, we both grow old together; sound in our hulls, though, are
+ we not, my ship? Aye, minus a leg, that’s all. By heaven this dead wood
+ has the better of my live flesh every way. I can’t compare with it; and
+ I’ve known some ships made of dead trees outlast the lives of men made of
+ the most vital stuff of vital fathers. What’s that he said? he should
+ still go before me, my pilot; and yet to be seen again? But where? Will I
+ have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those endless
+ stairs? and all night I’ve been sailing from him, wherever he did sink to.
+ Aye, aye, like many more thou told’st direful truth as touching thyself, O
+ Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good-bye, mast-head—keep
+ a good eye upon the whale, the while I’m gone. We’ll talk to-morrow, nay,
+ to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered through
+ the cloven blue air to the deck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop’s
+ stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the
+ mate,—who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck—and bade him
+ pause.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Starbuck!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sir?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For the third time my soul’s ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing,
+ Starbuck!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Truth, sir: saddest truth.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the
+ flood;—and I feel now like a billow that’s all one crested comb,
+ Starbuck. I am old;—shake hands with me, man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck’s tears the glue.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!—see,
+ it’s a brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lower away!”—cried Ahab, tossing the mate’s arm from him. “Stand by
+ the crew!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The sharks! the sharks!” cried a voice from the low cabin-window there;
+ “O master, my master, come back!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the
+ boat leaped on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when
+ numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath the
+ hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they
+ dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their
+ bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in those
+ swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in the same
+ prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching regiments
+ in the east. But these were the first sharks that had been observed by the
+ Pequod since the White Whale had been first descried; and whether it was
+ that Ahab’s crew were all such tiger-yellow barbarians, and therefore
+ their flesh more musky to the senses of the sharks—a matter
+ sometimes well known to affect them,—however it was, they seemed to
+ follow that one boat without molesting the others.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Heart of wrought steel!” murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and
+ following with his eyes the receding boat—“canst thou yet ring
+ boldly to that sight?—lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and
+ followed by them, open-mouthed to the chase; and this the critical third
+ day?—For when three days flow together in one continuous intense
+ pursuit; be sure the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the
+ third the evening and the end of that thing—be that end what it may.
+ Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly
+ calm, yet expectant,—fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things
+ swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is
+ somehow grown dim. Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy!
+ I seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life
+ seem clearing; but clouds sweep between—Is my journey’s end coming?
+ My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,—beats
+ it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!—stave it off—move, move! speak
+ aloud!—Mast-head there! See ye my boy’s hand on the hill?—Crazed;—aloft
+ there!—keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:—mark well the
+ whale!—Ho! again!—drive off that hawk! see! he pecks—he tears
+ the vane”—pointing to the red flag flying at the
+ main-truck—“Ha! he soars away with it!—Where’s the old man
+ now? see’st thou that sight, oh Ahab!—shudder, shudder!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads—a
+ downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but intending
+ to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a little sideways
+ from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the profoundest silence,
+ as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered against the opposing bow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads drive
+ them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and no hearse
+ can be mine:—and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then
+ quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice,
+ swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a
+ subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with
+ trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but
+ obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it
+ hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back
+ into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an
+ instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes,
+ leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk
+ of the whale.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Give way!” cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the
+ attack; but maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby
+ Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven.
+ The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead,
+ beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came
+ churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart;
+ spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates’ boats, and dashing
+ in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab’s almost
+ without a scar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the
+ whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he
+ shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and
+ round to the fish’s back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which,
+ during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines
+ around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment
+ frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The harpoon dropped from his hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Befooled, befooled!”—drawing in a long lean breath—“Aye,
+ Parsee! I see thee again.—Aye, and thou goest before; and this, this 
+ then is the hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last
+ letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship!
+ those boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to
+ me; if not, Ahab is enough to die—Down, men! the first thing that
+ but offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are
+ not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.—Where’s the
+ whale? gone down again?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the
+ corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter had
+ been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily
+ swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,—which thus far had
+ been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present her
+ headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and
+ now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third day,
+ to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly
+ seekest him!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly impelled to
+ leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was sliding by the
+ vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck’s face as he leaned
+ over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and follow him, not
+ too swiftly, at a judicious interval. Glancing upwards, he saw Tashtego,
+ Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads; while the
+ oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats which had but just been
+ hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing them. One after
+ the other, through the port-holes, as he sped, he also caught flying
+ glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves on deck among bundles of
+ new irons and lances. As he saw all this; as he heard the hammers in the
+ broken boats; far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart. But
+ he rallied. And now marking that the vane or flag was gone from the
+ main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego, who had just gained that perch, to
+ descend again for another flag, and a hammer and nails, and so nail it to
+ the mast.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whether fagged by the three days’ running chase, and the resistance to his
+ swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some latent
+ deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the White Whale’s way
+ now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly nearing him
+ once more; though indeed the whale’s last start had not been so long a one
+ as before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves the unpitying sharks
+ accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the boat; and so
+ continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became jagged and
+ crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost every dip.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars. Pull on!
+ ’tis the better rest, the shark’s jaw than the yielding water.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They will last long enough! pull on!—But who can tell”—he
+ muttered—“whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on
+ Ahab?—But pull on! Aye, all alive, now—we near him. The helm!
+ take the helm! let me pass,”—and so saying two of the oarsmen helped
+ him forward to the bows of the still flying boat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with
+ the White Whale’s flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its advance—as
+ the whale sometimes will—and Ahab was fairly within the smoky
+ mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale’s spout, curled round his
+ great, Monadnock hump; he was even thus close to him; when, with body
+ arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted
+ his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale. As both
+ steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into a morass, Moby Dick
+ sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh flank against the bow,
+ and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that
+ had it not been for the elevated part of the gunwale to which he then
+ clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed into the sea. As it was,
+ three of the oarsmen—who foreknew not the precise instant of the
+ dart, and were therefore unprepared for its effects—these were flung
+ out; but so fell, that, in an instant two of them clutched the gunwale
+ again, and rising to its level on a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily
+ inboard again; the third man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat
+ and swimming.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,
+ instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering sea.
+ But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with the line,
+ and hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their seats, and
+ tow the boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line felt that
+ double strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!—’tis whole again; oars! oars!
+ Burst in upon him!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled
+ round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution,
+ catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing in
+ it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it—it may be—a
+ larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing prow,
+ smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. “I grow blind; hands! stretch
+ out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is’t night?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The whale! The ship!” cried the cringing oarsmen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for ever
+ too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark! I see: the
+ ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not save my ship?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the
+ sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks
+ burst through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay
+ nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying hard
+ to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego’s mast-head hammer
+ remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrapping him as
+ with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own
+ forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the
+ bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon as
+ he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air,
+ now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a woman’s
+ fainting fit. Up helm, I say—ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is this the
+ end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities? Oh, Ahab,
+ Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again! He
+ turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on towards one, whose
+ duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help
+ Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale!
+ Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb’s own unwinking eye?
+ And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is all too soft; would
+ it were stuffed with brushwood! I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look
+ ye, sun, moon, and stars! I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever
+ spouted up his ghost. For all that, I would yet ring glasses with ye,
+ would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou grinning whale, but
+ there’ll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye not, O Ahab! For me, off
+ shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his drawers! A most mouldy and
+ over salted death, though;—cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask,
+ for one red cherry ere we die!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope my
+ poor mother’s drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will now
+ come to her, for the voyage is up.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the ship’s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers,
+ bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands,
+ just as they had darted from their various employments; all their
+ enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely
+ vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading
+ semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance,
+ eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man
+ could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s
+ starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their
+ faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on
+ their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as
+ mountain torrents down a flume.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The ship! The hearse!—the second hearse!” cried Ahab from the boat;
+ “its wood could only be American!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel;
+ but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the
+ other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where, for a time, he
+ lay quiescent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer.
+ Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only
+ god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,—death-glorious
+ ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond
+ pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life!
+ Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from
+ all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole
+ foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I
+ roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple
+ with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my
+ last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!
+ and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still
+ chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus , I give up the
+ spear!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting
+ velocity the line ran through the grooves;—ran foul. Ahab stooped to
+ clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck,
+ and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out
+ of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy
+ eye-splice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-empty tub,
+ knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned. “The
+ ship? Great God, where is the ship?” Soon they through dim, bewildering
+ mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana;
+ only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or
+ fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers
+ still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric
+ circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating
+ oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round
+ and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of
+ sight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken
+ head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar
+ yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly
+ undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they
+ almost touched;—at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered
+ backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster
+ and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had
+ followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars,
+ pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced
+ to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood;
+ and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage
+ beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird
+ of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards,
+ and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his
+ ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a
+ living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white
+ surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great
+ shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ Epilogue
+ 
+ 
+ “AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE” Job.
+ 
+ 
+ The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one
+ did survive the wreck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the
+ Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman
+ assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men
+ were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating
+ on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the
+ halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly,
+ drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a
+ creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the
+ button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like
+ another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black
+ bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring,
+ and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin
+ life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side.
+ Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on
+ a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with
+ padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks.
+ On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It
+ was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her
+ missing children, only found another orphan.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY DICK; OR, THE WHALE *** 
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diff --git a/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/txt/pride_and_prejudice.txt b/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/txt/pride_and_prejudice.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Pride and Prejudice 
+ 
+ This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States,
+you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
+before using this eBook. 
+
+ Title : Pride and Prejudice
+
+
+ 
+ Author : Jane Austen
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Release date : June 1, 1998 [eBook #1342]
+
+ Most recently updated: September 29, 2026
+
+
+
+ Language : English
+
+
+
+ Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342 
+
+
+
+ Credits : Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+ 
+ *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRIDE AND PREJUDICE *** 
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ PREFACE. 
+
+ List of Illustrations. 
+
+ Chapter: I., 
+ II., 
+ III., 
+ IV., 
+ V., 
+ VI., 
+ VII., 
+ VIII., 
+ IX., 
+ X., 
+ XI., 
+ XII., 
+ XIII., 
+ XIV., 
+ XV., 
+ XVI., 
+ XVII., 
+ XVIII., 
+ XIX., 
+ XX., 
+ XXI., 
+ XXII., 
+ XXIII., 
+ XXIV., 
+ XXV., 
+ XXVI., 
+ XXVII., 
+ XXVIII., 
+ XXIX., 
+ XXX., 
+ XXXI., 
+ XXXII., 
+ XXXIII., 
+ XXXIV., 
+ XXXV., 
+ XXXVI., 
+ XXXVII., 
+ XXXVIII., 
+ XXXIX., 
+ XL., 
+ XLI., 
+ XLII., 
+ XLIII., 
+ XLIV., 
+ XLV., 
+ XLVI., 
+ XLVII., 
+ XLVIII., 
+ XLIX., 
+ L., 
+ LI., 
+ LII., 
+ LIII., 
+ LIV., 
+ LV., 
+ LVI., 
+ LVII., 
+ LVIII., 
+ LIX., 
+ LX., 
+ LXI. 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ {iv} 
+ 
+ 
+
+ {v} 
+ 
+
+
+
+ PRIDE.
+
+and
+
+PREJUDICE 
+
+ 
+by
+
+Jane Austen,
+
+
+ 
+with a Preface by 
+
+George Saintsbury
+
+ and
+
+Illustrations by 
+
+Hugh Thomson
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Ruskin
+
+House. 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+156. Charing
+
+Cross Road. 
+ 
+London
+
+George Allen. 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+CHISWICK PRESS:—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
+
+TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+ {vii} 
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+ {ix} 
+ 
+
+ Walt Whitman has somewhere a fine and just distinction between “loving
+by allowance” and “loving with personal love.” This distinction applies
+to books as well as to men and women; and in the case of the not very
+numerous authors who are the objects of the personal affection, it
+brings a curious consequence with it. There is much more difference as
+to their best work than in the case of those others who are loved “by
+allowance” by convention, and because it is felt to be the right and
+proper thing to love them. And in the sect—fairly large and yet
+unusually choice—of Austenians or Janites, there would probably be
+found partisans of the claim to primacy of almost every one of the
+novels. To some the delightful freshness and humour of Northanger
+Abbey, its completeness, finish, and entrain, obscure the undoubted
+critical facts that its scale is small, and its scheme, after all, that
+of burlesque or parody, a kind in which the first rank is reached with
+difficulty. Persuasion, relatively faint in tone, and not enthralling
+in interest, has devotees who exalt above all the others its exquisite
+delicacy and keeping. The catastrophe of Mansfield Park is admittedly
+theatrical, the hero and heroine are insipid, and the author has almost {x} 
+wickedly destroyed all romantic interest by expressly admitting that
+Edmund only took Fanny because Mary shocked him, and that Fanny might
+very likely have taken Crawford if he had been a little more assiduous;
+yet the matchless rehearsal-scenes and the characters of Mrs. Norris and
+others have secured, I believe, a considerable party for it. Sense and
+Sensibility has perhaps the fewest out-and-out admirers; but it does
+not want them. 
+
+
+
+ I suppose, however, that the majority of at least competent votes
+would, all things considered, be divided between Emma and the present
+book; and perhaps the vulgar verdict (if indeed a fondness for Miss
+Austen be not of itself a patent of exemption from any possible charge
+of vulgarity) would go for Emma. It is the larger, the more varied, the
+more popular; the author had by the time of its composition seen rather
+more of the world, and had improved her general, though not her most
+peculiar and characteristic dialogue; such figures as Miss Bates, as the
+Eltons, cannot but unite the suffrages of everybody. On the other hand,
+I, for my part, declare for Pride and Prejudice unhesitatingly. It
+seems to me the most perfect, the most characteristic, the most
+eminently quintessential of its author’s works; and for this contention
+in such narrow space as is permitted to me, I propose here to show
+cause. 
+
+
+
+ In the first place, the book (it may be barely necessary to remind the
+reader) was in its first shape written very early, somewhere about 1796,
+when Miss Austen was barely twenty-one; though it was revised and
+finished at Chawton some fifteen years later, and was not published till
+1813, only four years before her death. I do not know whether, in {xi} this
+combination of the fresh and vigorous projection of youth, and the
+critical revision of middle life, there may be traced the distinct
+superiority in point of construction, which, as it seems to me, it
+possesses over all the others. The plot, though not elaborate, is almost
+regular enough for Fielding; hardly a character, hardly an incident
+could be retrenched without loss to the story. The elopement of Lydia
+and Wickham is not, like that of Crawford and Mrs. Rushworth, a coup de
+théâtre; it connects itself in the strictest way with the course of the
+story earlier, and brings about the denouement with complete propriety.
+All the minor passages—the loves of Jane and Bingley, the advent of Mr.
+Collins, the visit to Hunsford, the Derbyshire tour—fit in after the
+same unostentatious, but masterly fashion. There is no attempt at the
+hide-and-seek, in-and-out business, which in the transactions between
+Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax contributes no doubt a good deal to the
+intrigue of Emma, but contributes it in a fashion which I do not think
+the best feature of that otherwise admirable book. Although Miss Austen
+always liked something of the misunderstanding kind, which afforded her
+opportunities for the display of the peculiar and incomparable talent to
+be noticed presently, she has been satisfied here with the perfectly
+natural occasions provided by the false account of Darcy’s conduct given
+by Wickham, and by the awkwardness (arising with equal naturalness) from
+the gradual transformation of Elizabeth’s own feelings from positive
+aversion to actual love. I do not know whether the all-grasping hand of
+the playwright has ever been laid upon Pride and Prejudice; and I dare
+say that, {xii} if it were, the situations would prove not startling or
+garish enough for the footlights, the character-scheme too subtle and
+delicate for pit and gallery. But if the attempt were made, it would
+certainly not be hampered by any of those loosenesses of construction,
+which, sometimes disguised by the conveniences of which the novelist can
+avail himself, appear at once on the stage. 
+
+
+
+ I think, however, though the thought will doubtless seem heretical to
+more than one school of critics, that construction is not the highest
+merit, the choicest gift, of the novelist. It sets off his other gifts
+and graces most advantageously to the critical eye; and the want of it
+will sometimes mar those graces—appreciably, though not quite
+consciously—to eyes by no means ultra-critical. But a very badly-built
+novel which excelled in pathetic or humorous character, or which
+displayed consummate command of dialogue—perhaps the rarest of all
+faculties—would be an infinitely better thing than a faultless plot
+acted and told by puppets with pebbles in their mouths. And despite the
+ability which Miss Austen has shown in working out the story, I for one
+should put Pride and Prejudice far lower if it did not contain what
+seem to me the very masterpieces of Miss Austen’s humour and of her
+faculty of character-creation—masterpieces who may indeed admit John
+Thorpe, the Eltons, Mrs. Norris, and one or two others to their company,
+but who, in one instance certainly, and perhaps in others, are still
+superior to them. 
+
+
+
+ The characteristics of Miss Austen’s humour are so subtle and delicate
+that they are, perhaps, at all times easier to apprehend than to
+express, and at any particular {xiii} time likely to be differently
+apprehended by different persons. To me this humour seems to possess a
+greater affinity, on the whole, to that of Addison than to any other of
+the numerous species of this great British genus. The differences of
+scheme, of time, of subject, of literary convention, are, of course,
+obvious enough; the difference of sex does not, perhaps, count for much,
+for there was a distinctly feminine element in “Mr. Spectator,” and in
+Jane Austen’s genius there was, though nothing mannish, much that was
+masculine. But the likeness of quality consists in a great number of
+common subdivisions of quality—demureness, extreme minuteness of touch,
+avoidance of loud tones and glaring effects. Also there is in both a
+certain not inhuman or unamiable cruelty. It is the custom with those
+who judge grossly to contrast the good nature of Addison with the
+savagery of Swift, the mildness of Miss Austen with the boisterousness
+of Fielding and Smollett, even with the ferocious practical jokes that
+her immediate predecessor, Miss Burney, allowed without very much
+protest. Yet, both in Mr. Addison and in Miss Austen there is, though a
+restrained and well-mannered, an insatiable and ruthless delight in
+roasting and cutting up a fool. A man in the early eighteenth century,
+of course, could push this taste further than a lady in the early
+nineteenth; and no doubt Miss Austen’s principles, as well as her heart,
+would have shrunk from such things as the letter from the unfortunate
+husband in the Spectator, who describes, with all the gusto and all the
+innocence in the world, how his wife and his friend induce him to play
+at blind-man’s-buff. But another Spectator letter—that of the damsel
+of fourteen who {xiv} wishes to marry Mr. Shapely, and assures her selected
+Mentor that “he admires your Spectators mightily”—might have been
+written by a rather more ladylike and intelligent Lydia Bennet in the
+days of Lydia’s great-grandmother; while, on the other hand, some (I
+think unreasonably) have found “cynicism” in touches of Miss Austen’s
+own, such as her satire of Mrs. Musgrove’s self-deceiving regrets over
+her son. But this word “cynical” is one of the most misused in the
+English language, especially when, by a glaring and gratuitous
+falsification of its original sense, it is applied, not to rough and
+snarling invective, but to gentle and oblique satire. If cynicism means
+the perception of “the other side,” the sense of “the accepted hells
+beneath,” the consciousness that motives are nearly always mixed, and
+that to seem is not identical with to be—if this be cynicism, then
+every man and woman who is not a fool, who does not care to live in a
+fool’s paradise, who has knowledge of nature and the world and life, is
+a cynic. And in that sense Miss Austen certainly was one. She may even
+have been one in the further sense that, like her own Mr. Bennet, she
+took an epicurean delight in dissecting, in displaying, in setting at
+work her fools and her mean persons. I think she did take this delight,
+and I do not think at all the worse of her for it as a woman, while she
+was immensely the better for it as an artist. 
+
+
+
+ In respect of her art generally, Mr. Goldwin Smith has truly observed
+that “metaphor has been exhausted in depicting the perfection of it,
+combined with the narrowness of her field;” and he has justly added that
+we need not go beyond her own comparison to the art of a miniature {xv} 
+painter. To make this latter observation quite exact we must not use the
+term miniature in its restricted sense, and must think rather of Memling
+at one end of the history of painting and Meissonier at the other, than
+of Cosway or any of his kind. And I am not so certain that I should
+myself use the word “narrow” in connection with her. If her world is a
+microcosm, the cosmic quality of it is at least as eminent as the
+littleness. She does not touch what she did not feel herself called to
+paint; I am not so sure that she could not have painted what she did not
+feel herself called to touch. It is at least remarkable that in two very
+short periods of writing—one of about three years, and another of not
+much more than five—she executed six capital works, and has not left a
+single failure. It is possible that the romantic paste in her
+composition was defective: we must always remember that hardly anybody
+born in her decade—that of the eighteenth-century
+seventies—independently exhibited the full romantic quality. Even Scott
+required hill and mountain and ballad, even Coleridge metaphysics and
+German to enable them to chip the classical shell. Miss Austen was an
+English girl, brought up in a country retirement, at the time when
+ladies went back into the house if there was a white frost which might
+pierce their kid shoes, when a sudden cold was the subject of the
+gravest fears, when their studies, their ways, their conduct were
+subject to all those fantastic limits and restrictions against which
+Mary Wollstonecraft protested with better general sense than particular
+taste or judgment. Miss Austen, too, drew back when the white frost
+touched her shoes; but I think she would have made a pretty good journey
+even in a black one. {xvi} 
+
+
+
+ For if her knowledge was not very extended, she knew two things which
+only genius knows. The one was humanity, and the other was art. On the
+first head she could not make a mistake; her men, though limited, are
+true, and her women are, in the old sense, “absolute.” As to art, if she
+has never tried idealism, her realism is real to a degree which makes
+the false realism of our own day look merely dead-alive. Take almost any
+Frenchman, except the late M. de Maupassant, and watch him laboriously
+piling up strokes in the hope of giving a complete impression. You get
+none; you are lucky if, discarding two-thirds of what he gives, you can
+shape a real impression out of the rest. But with Miss Austen the
+myriad, trivial, unforced strokes build up the picture like magic.
+Nothing is false; nothing is superfluous. When (to take the present book
+only) Mr. Collins changed his mind from Jane to Elizabeth “while Mrs.
+Bennet was stirring the fire” (and we know how Mrs. Bennet would have
+stirred the fire), when Mr. Darcy “brought his coffee-cup back 
+himself,” the touch in each case is like that of Swift—“taller by the
+breadth of my nail”—which impressed the half-reluctant Thackeray with
+just and outspoken admiration. Indeed, fantastic as it may seem, I
+should put Miss Austen as near to Swift in some ways, as I have put her
+to Addison in others. 
+
+
+
+ This Swiftian quality appears in the present novel as it appears
+nowhere else in the character of the immortal, the ineffable Mr.
+Collins. Mr. Collins is really great; far greater than anything Addison
+ever did, almost great enough for Fielding or for Swift himself. It has
+been said that no one ever was like him. But in the first {xvii} place, he
+ was like him; he is there—alive, imperishable, more real than hundreds
+of prime ministers and archbishops, of “metals, semi-metals, and
+distinguished philosophers.” In the second place, it is rash, I think,
+to conclude that an actual Mr. Collins was impossible or non-existent at
+the end of the eighteenth century. It is very interesting that we
+possess, in this same gallery, what may be called a spoiled first
+draught, or an unsuccessful study of him, in John Dashwood. The
+formality, the under-breeding, the meanness, are there; but the portrait
+is only half alive, and is felt to be even a little unnatural. Mr.
+Collins is perfectly natural, and perfectly alive. In fact, for all the
+“miniature,” there is something gigantic in the way in which a certain
+side, and more than one, of humanity, and especially eighteenth-century
+humanity, its Philistinism, its well-meaning but hide-bound morality,
+its formal pettiness, its grovelling respect for rank, its materialism,
+its selfishness, receives exhibition. I will not admit that one speech
+or one action of this inestimable man is incapable of being reconciled
+with reality, and I should not wonder if many of these words and actions
+are historically true. 
+
+
+
+ But the greatness of Mr. Collins could not have been so satisfactorily
+exhibited if his creatress had not adjusted so artfully to him the
+figures of Mr. Bennet and of Lady Catherine de Bourgh. The latter, like
+Mr. Collins himself, has been charged with exaggeration. There is,
+perhaps, a very faint shade of colour for the charge; but it seems to me
+very faint indeed. Even now I do not think that it would be impossible
+to find persons, especially female persons, not necessarily of noble
+birth, as overbearing, as {xviii} self-centred, as neglectful of good manners,
+as Lady Catherine. A hundred years ago, an earl’s daughter, the Lady
+Powerful (if not exactly Bountiful) of an out-of-the-way country parish,
+rich, long out of marital authority, and so forth, had opportunities of
+developing these agreeable characteristics which seldom present
+themselves now. As for Mr. Bennet, Miss Austen, and Mr. Darcy, and even
+Miss Elizabeth herself, were, I am inclined to think, rather hard on him
+for the “impropriety” of his conduct. His wife was evidently, and must
+always have been, a quite irreclaimable fool; and unless he had shot her
+or himself there was no way out of it for a man of sense and spirit but
+the ironic. From no other point of view is he open to any reproach,
+except for an excusable and not unnatural helplessness at the crisis of
+the elopement, and his utterances are the most acutely delightful in the
+consciously humorous kind—in the kind that we laugh with, not at—that
+even Miss Austen has put into the mouth of any of her characters. It is
+difficult to know whether he is most agreeable when talking to his wife,
+or when putting Mr. Collins through his paces; but the general sense of
+the world has probably been right in preferring to the first rank his
+consolation to the former when she maunders over the entail, “My dear,
+do not give way to such gloomy thoughts. Let us hope for better things.
+Let us flatter ourselves that I may be the survivor;” and his inquiry
+to his colossal cousin as to the compliments which Mr. Collins has just
+related as made by himself to Lady Catherine, “May I ask whether these
+pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, {xix} or are the
+result of previous study?” These are the things which give Miss Austen’s
+readers the pleasant shocks, the delightful thrills, which are felt by
+the readers of Swift, of Fielding, and we may here add, of Thackeray, as
+they are felt by the readers of no other English author of fiction
+outside of these four. 
+
+
+
+ The goodness of the minor characters in Pride and Prejudice has been
+already alluded to, and it makes a detailed dwelling on their beauties
+difficult in any space, and impossible in this. Mrs. Bennet we have
+glanced at, and it is not easy to say whether she is more exquisitely
+amusing or more horribly true. Much the same may be said of Kitty and
+Lydia; but it is not every author, even of genius, who would have
+differentiated with such unerring skill the effects of folly and
+vulgarity of intellect and disposition working upon the common
+weaknesses of woman at such different ages. With Mary, Miss Austen has
+taken rather less pains, though she has been even more unkind to her;
+not merely in the text, but, as we learn from those interesting
+traditional appendices which Mr. Austen Leigh has given us, in dooming
+her privately to marry “one of Mr. Philips’s clerks.” The habits of
+first copying and then retailing moral sentiments, of playing and
+singing too long in public, are, no doubt, grievous and criminal; but
+perhaps poor Mary was rather the scapegoat of the sins of blue stockings
+in that Fordyce-belectured generation. It is at any rate difficult not
+to extend to her a share of the respect and affection (affection and
+respect of a peculiar kind; doubtless), with which one regards Mr.
+Collins, when she draws the moral of Lydia’s fall. I {xx} sometimes wish
+that the exigencies of the story had permitted Miss Austen to unite
+these personages, and thus at once achieve a notable mating and soothe
+poor Mrs. Bennet’s anguish over the entail. 
+
+
+
+ The Bingleys and the Gardiners and the Lucases, Miss Darcy and Miss de
+Bourgh, Jane, Wickham, and the rest, must pass without special comment,
+further than the remark that Charlotte Lucas (her egregious papa, though
+delightful, is just a little on the thither side of the line between
+comedy and farce) is a wonderfully clever study in drab of one kind, and
+that Wickham (though something of Miss Austen’s hesitation of touch in
+dealing with young men appears) is a not much less notable sketch in
+drab of another. Only genius could have made Charlotte what she is, yet
+not disagreeable; Wickham what he is, without investing him either with
+a cheap Don Juanish attractiveness or a disgusting rascality. But the
+hero and the heroine are not tints to be dismissed. 
+
+
+
+ Darcy has always seemed to me by far the best and most interesting of
+Miss Austen’s heroes; the only possible competitor being Henry Tilney,
+whose part is so slight and simple that it hardly enters into
+comparison. It has sometimes, I believe, been urged that his pride is
+unnatural at first in its expression and later in its yielding, while
+his falling in love at all is not extremely probable. Here again I
+cannot go with the objectors. Darcy’s own account of the way in which
+his pride had been pampered, is perfectly rational and sufficient; and
+nothing could be, psychologically speaking, a causa verior for its
+sudden restoration to healthy conditions than the shock of Elizabeth’s
+scornful refusal acting on a nature {xxi} ex hypothesi generous. Nothing in
+even our author is finer and more delicately touched than the change of
+his demeanour at the sudden meeting in the grounds of Pemberley. Had he
+been a bad prig or a bad coxcomb, he might have been still smarting
+under his rejection, or suspicious that the girl had come
+husband-hunting. His being neither is exactly consistent with the
+probable feelings of a man spoilt in the common sense, but not really
+injured in disposition, and thoroughly in love. As for his being in
+love, Elizabeth has given as just an exposition of the causes of that
+phenomenon as Darcy has of the conditions of his unregenerate state,
+only she has of course not counted in what was due to her own personal
+charm. 
+
+
+
+ The secret of that charm many men and not a few women, from Miss Austen
+herself downwards, have felt, and like most charms it is a thing rather
+to be felt than to be explained. Elizabeth of course belongs to the 
+allegro or allegra division of the army of Venus. Miss Austen was
+always provokingly chary of description in regard to her beauties; and
+except the fine eyes, and a hint or two that she had at any rate
+sometimes a bright complexion, and was not very tall, we hear nothing
+about her looks. But her chief difference from other heroines of the
+lively type seems to lie first in her being distinctly clever—almost
+strong-minded, in the better sense of that objectionable word—and
+secondly in her being entirely destitute of ill-nature for all her
+propensity to tease and the sharpness of her tongue. Elizabeth can give
+at least as good as she gets when she is attacked; but she never
+“scratches,” and she never attacks first. Some of the merest
+obsoletenesses of phrase and {xxii} manner give one or two of her early
+speeches a slight pertness, but that is nothing, and when she comes to
+serious business, as in the great proposal scene with Darcy (which is,
+as it should be, the climax of the interest of the book), and in the
+final ladies’ battle with Lady Catherine, she is unexceptionable. Then
+too she is a perfectly natural girl. She does not disguise from herself
+or anybody that she resents Darcy’s first ill-mannered personality with
+as personal a feeling. (By the way, the reproach that the ill-manners of
+this speech are overdone is certainly unjust; for things of the same
+kind, expressed no doubt less stiltedly but more coarsely, might have
+been heard in more than one ball-room during this very year from persons
+who ought to have been no worse bred than Darcy.) And she lets the
+injury done to Jane and the contempt shown to the rest of her family
+aggravate this resentment in the healthiest way in the world. 
+
+
+
+ Still, all this does not explain her charm, which, taking beauty as a
+common form of all heroines, may perhaps consist in the addition to her
+playfulness, her wit, her affectionate and natural disposition, of a
+certain fearlessness very uncommon in heroines of her type and age.
+Nearly all of them would have been in speechless awe of the magnificent
+Darcy; nearly all of them would have palpitated and fluttered at the
+idea of proposals, even naughty ones, from the fascinating Wickham.
+Elizabeth, with nothing offensive, nothing viraginous, nothing of the
+“New Woman” about her, has by nature what the best modern (not “new”)
+women have by education and experience, a perfect freedom from the idea
+that all men may bully her if they choose, and that most will {xxiii} away with
+her if they can. Though not in the least “impudent and mannish grown,”
+she has no mere sensibility, no nasty niceness about her. The form of
+passion common and likely to seem natural in Miss Austen’s day was so
+invariably connected with the display of one or the other, or both of
+these qualities, that she has not made Elizabeth outwardly passionate.
+But I, at least, have not the slightest doubt that she would have
+married Darcy just as willingly without Pemberley as with it, and
+anybody who can read between lines will not find the lovers’
+conversations in the final chapters so frigid as they might have looked
+to the Della Cruscans of their own day, and perhaps do look to the Della
+Cruscans of this. 
+
+
+
+ And, after all, what is the good of seeking for the reason of
+charm?—it is there. There were better sense in the sad mechanic
+exercise of determining the reason of its absence where it is not. In
+the novels of the last hundred years there are vast numbers of young
+ladies with whom it might be a pleasure to fall in love; there are at
+least five with whom, as it seems to me, no man of taste and spirit can
+help doing so. Their names are, in chronological order, Elizabeth
+Bennet, Diana Vernon, Argemone Lavington, Beatrix Esmond, and Barbara
+Grant. I should have been most in love with Beatrix and Argemone; I
+should, I think, for mere occasional companionship, have preferred Diana
+and Barbara. But to live with and to marry, I do not know that any one
+of the four can come into competition with Elizabeth. 
+
+
+
+ 
+ George Saintsbury. 
+
+ {xxiv} 
+
+
+
+ {xxv} 
+ 
+
+ 
+   PAGE 
+
+ Frontispiece iv 
+ Title-page v 
+ Dedication vii 
+ Heading to Preface ix 
+ Heading to List of Illustrations xxv 
+ Heading to Chapter I. 1 
+ “He came down to see the place” 2 
+ Mr. and Mrs. Bennet 5 
+ “I hope Mr. Bingley will like it” 6 
+ “I’m the tallest” 9 
+ “He rode a black horse” 10 
+ “When the party entered” 12 
+ “She is tolerable” 15 
+ Heading to Chapter IV. 18 
+ Heading to Chapter V. 22 
+ “Without once opening his lips” 24 
+ Tailpiece to Chapter V. 26 
+ Heading to Chapter VI. 27 
+ “The entreaties of several” 31 
+ “A note for Miss Bennet” 36 
+ “Cheerful prognostics” 40 
+ “The apothecary came” 43 
+ “Covering a screen” 45 
+ “Mrs. Bennet and her two youngest girls” 53 
+ Heading to Chapter X. 60 
+ “No, no; stay where you are” 67 
+ “Piling up the fire” 69 
+ Heading to Chapter XII. 75 
+ Heading to Chapter XIII. 78 
+ Heading to Chapter XIV. 84 
+ “Protested that he never read novels” 87 
+ Heading to Chapter XV. 89 
+ Heading to Chapter XVI. 95 
+ “The officers of the ——shire” 97 
+ “Delighted to see their dear friend again” 108 
+ Heading to Chapter XVIII. 113 
+ “Such very superior dancing is not often seen” 118 
+ “To assure you in the most animated language” 132 
+ Heading to Chapter XX. 139 
+ “They entered the breakfast-room” 143 
+ Heading to Chapter XXI. 146 
+ “Walked back with them” 148 
+ Heading to Chapter XXII. 154 
+ “So much love and eloquence” 156 
+ “Protested he must be entirely mistaken” 161 
+ “Whenever she spoke in a low voice” 166 
+ Heading to Chapter XXIV. 168 
+ Heading to Chapter XXV. 175 
+ “Offended two or three young ladies” 177 
+ “Will you come and see me?” 181 
+ “On the stairs” 189 
+ “At the door” 194 
+ “In conversation with the ladies” 198 
+ “Lady Catherine,” said she, “you have given me a treasure” 200 
+ Heading to Chapter XXX. 209 
+ “He never failed to inform them” 211 
+ “The gentlemen accompanied him” 213 
+ Heading to Chapter XXXI. 215 
+ Heading to Chapter XXXII. 221 
+ “Accompanied by their aunt” 225 
+ “On looking up” 228 
+ Heading to Chapter XXXIV. 235 
+ “Hearing herself called” 243 
+ Heading to Chapter XXXVI. 253 
+ “Meeting accidentally in town” 256 
+ “His parting obeisance” 261 
+ “Dawson” 263 
+ “The elevation of his feelings” 267 
+ “They had forgotten to leave any message” 270 
+ “How nicely we are crammed in!” 272 
+ Heading to Chapter XL. 278 
+ “I am determined never to speak of it again” 283 
+ “When Colonel Miller’s regiment went away” 285 
+ “Tenderly flirting” 290 
+ The arrival of the Gardiners 294 
+ “Conjecturing as to the date” 301 
+ Heading to Chapter XLIV. 318 
+ “To make herself agreeable to all” 321 
+ “Engaged by the river” 327 
+ Heading to Chapter XLVI. 334 
+ “I have not an instant to lose” 339 
+ “The first pleasing earnest of their welcome” 345 
+ The Post 359 
+ “To whom I have related the affair” 363 
+ Heading to Chapter XLIX. 368 
+ “But perhaps you would like to read it” 370 
+ “The spiteful old ladies” 377 
+ “With an affectionate smile” 385 
+ “I am sure she did not listen” 393 
+ “Mr. Darcy with him” 404 
+ “Jane happened to look round” 415 
+ “Mrs. Long and her nieces” 420 
+ “Lizzy, my dear, I want to speak to you” 422 
+ Heading to Chapter LVI. 431 
+ “After a short survey” 434 
+ “But now it comes out” 442 
+ “The efforts of his aunt” 448 
+ “Unable to utter a syllable” 457 
+ “The obsequious civility” 466 
+ Heading to Chapter LXI. 472 
+ The End 476 
+ 
+
+ {1} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+Chapter I. 
+
+ I T is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession
+of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
+
+
+
+ However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his
+first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds
+of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful
+property of some one or other of their daughters.
+
+
+
+ “My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that
+Netherfield Park is let at last? {2} ”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.
+
+
+
+ “But it is,” returned she; “for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she
+told me all about it.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bennet made no answer.
+
+
+
+ “Do not you want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife, impatiently.
+
+
+
+ “ You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“He came down to see the place”
+
+
+
+
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ This was invitation enough.
+
+
+
+ “Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken
+by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came
+down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much
+delighted with it that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is
+to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be
+in the house by the end of next week. {3} ”
+
+
+
+ “What is his name?”
+
+
+
+ “Bingley.”
+
+
+
+ “Is he married or single?”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or
+five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!”
+
+
+
+ “How so? how can it affect them?”
+
+
+
+ “My dear Mr. Bennet,” replied his wife, “how can you be so tiresome? You
+must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them.”
+
+
+
+ “Is that his design in settling here?”
+
+
+
+ “Design? Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he
+ may fall in love with one of them, and therefore you must visit him as
+soon as he comes.”
+
+
+
+ “I see no occasion for that. You and the girls may go—or you may send
+them by themselves, which perhaps will be still better; for as you are
+as handsome as any of them, Mr. Bingley might like you the best of the
+party.”
+
+
+
+ “My dear, you flatter me. I certainly have had my share of beauty, but
+I do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now. When a woman has five
+grown-up daughters, she ought to give over thinking of her own beauty.”
+
+
+
+ “In such cases, a woman has not often much beauty to think of.”
+
+
+
+ “But, my dear, you must indeed go and see Mr. Bingley when he comes into
+the neighbourhood.”
+
+
+
+ “It is more than I engage for, I assure you.”
+
+
+
+ “But consider your daughters. Only think what an establishment it would
+be for one of them. Sir William and Lady Lucas are determined to go,
+merely on that account; for in general, you know, they visit no new {4} 
+comers. Indeed you must go, for it will be impossible for us to visit
+him, if you do not.”
+
+
+
+ “You are over scrupulous, surely. I dare say Mr. Bingley will be very
+glad to see you; and I will send a few lines by you to assure him of my
+hearty consent to his marrying whichever he chooses of the girls—though
+I must throw in a good word for my little Lizzy.”
+
+
+
+ “I desire you will do no such thing. Lizzy is not a bit better than the
+others: and I am sure she is not half so handsome as Jane, nor half so
+good-humoured as Lydia. But you are always giving her the preference.”
+
+
+
+ “They have none of them much to recommend them,” replied he: “they are
+all silly and ignorant like other girls; but Lizzy has something more of
+quickness than her sisters.”
+
+
+
+ “Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take
+delight in vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves.”
+
+
+
+ “You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They
+are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration
+these twenty years at least.”
+
+
+
+ “Ah, you do not know what I suffer.”
+
+
+
+ “But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of four
+thousand a year come into the neighbourhood.”
+
+
+
+ “It will be no use to us, if twenty such should come, since you will not
+visit them.”
+
+
+
+ “Depend upon it, my dear, that when there are twenty, I will visit them
+all.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour,
+reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had
+been insufficient to {5} make his wife understand his character. Her mind
+was less difficult to develope. She was a woman of mean understanding,
+little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she
+fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her
+daughters married: its solace was visiting and news.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ M r. & M rs. Bennet
+
+
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ {6} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+I hope Mr. Bingley will like it.
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+ 
+
+ 
+ R. BENNET was among the earliest of those who waited on Mr. Bingley. He
+had always intended to visit him, though to the last always assuring his
+wife that he should not go; and till the evening after the visit was
+paid she had no knowledge of it. It was then disclosed in the following
+manner. Observing his second daughter employed in trimming a hat, he
+suddenly addressed her with,—
+
+
+
+ “I hope Mr. Bingley will like it, Lizzy.”
+
+
+
+ “We are not in a way to know what Mr. Bingley likes,” said her mother,
+resentfully, “since we are not to visit. {7} ”
+
+
+
+ “But you forget, mamma,” said Elizabeth, “that we shall meet him at the
+assemblies, and that Mrs. Long has promised to introduce him.”
+
+
+
+ “I do not believe Mrs. Long will do any such thing. She has two nieces
+of her own. She is a selfish, hypocritical woman, and I have no opinion
+of her.”
+
+
+
+ “No more have I,” said Mr. Bennet; “and I am glad to find that you do
+not depend on her serving you.”
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet deigned not to make any reply; but, unable to contain
+herself, began scolding one of her daughters.
+
+
+
+ “Don’t keep coughing so, Kitty, for heaven’s sake! Have a little
+compassion on my nerves. You tear them to pieces.”
+
+
+
+ “Kitty has no discretion in her coughs,” said her father; “she times
+them ill.”
+
+
+
+ “I do not cough for my own amusement,” replied Kitty, fretfully. “When
+is your next ball to be, Lizzy?”
+
+
+
+ “To-morrow fortnight.”
+
+
+
+ “Ay, so it is,” cried her mother, “and Mrs. Long does not come back till
+the day before; so, it will be impossible for her to introduce him, for
+she will not know him herself.”
+
+
+
+ “Then, my dear, you may have the advantage of your friend, and introduce
+Mr. Bingley to her .”
+
+
+
+ “Impossible, Mr. Bennet, impossible, when I am not acquainted with him
+myself; how can you be so teasing?”
+
+
+
+ “I honour your circumspection. A fortnight’s acquaintance is certainly
+very little. One cannot know what a man really is by the end of a
+fortnight. But if we do not venture, somebody else will; and after
+all, Mrs. Long and her nieces must stand their chance; and, therefore, {8} 
+as she will think it an act of kindness, if you decline the office, I
+will take it on myself.”
+
+
+
+ The girls stared at their father. Mrs. Bennet said only, “Nonsense,
+nonsense!”
+
+
+
+ “What can be the meaning of that emphatic exclamation?” cried he. “Do
+you consider the forms of introduction, and the stress that is laid on
+them, as nonsense? I cannot quite agree with you there . What say you,
+Mary? For you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read
+great books, and make extracts.”
+
+
+
+ Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.
+
+
+
+ “While Mary is adjusting her ideas,” he continued, “let us return to Mr.
+Bingley.”
+
+
+
+ “I am sick of Mr. Bingley,” cried his wife.
+
+
+
+ “I am sorry to hear that ; but why did you not tell me so before? If I
+had known as much this morning, I certainly would not have called on
+him. It is very unlucky; but as I have actually paid the visit, we
+cannot escape the acquaintance now.”
+
+
+
+ The astonishment of the ladies was just what he wished—that of Mrs.
+Bennet perhaps surpassing the rest; though when the first tumult of joy
+was over, she began to declare that it was what she had expected all the
+while.
+
+
+
+ “How good it was in you, my dear Mr. Bennet! But I knew I should
+persuade you at last. I was sure you loved your girls too well to
+neglect such an acquaintance. Well, how pleased I am! And it is such a
+good joke, too, that you should have gone this morning, and never said a
+word about it till now.”
+
+
+
+ “Now, Kitty, you may cough as much as you choose,” said Mr. Bennet; and,
+as he spoke, he left the room, fatigued with the raptures of his wife. {9} 
+
+
+
+ “What an excellent father you have, girls,” said she, when the door was
+shut. “I do not know how you will ever make him amends for his kindness;
+or me either, for that matter. At our time of life, it is not so
+pleasant, I can tell you, to be making new acquaintances every day; but
+for your sakes we would do anything. Lydia, my love, though you are 
+the youngest, I dare say Mr. Bingley will dance with you at the next
+ball.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh,” said Lydia, stoutly, “I am not afraid; for though I am the
+youngest, I’m the tallest.”
+
+
+
+ The rest of the evening was spent in conjecturing how soon he would
+return Mr. Bennet’s visit, and determining when they should ask him to
+dinner.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ “I’m the tallest {10} ”
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+He rode a black horse.
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER III. 
+
+ 
+ OT all that Mrs. Bennet, however, with the assistance of her five
+daughters, could ask on the subject, was sufficient to draw from her
+husband any satisfactory description of Mr. Bingley. They attacked him
+in various ways, with barefaced questions, ingenious suppositions, and
+distant surmises; but he eluded the skill of them all; and they were at {11} 
+last obliged to accept the second-hand intelligence of their neighbour,
+Lady Lucas. Her report was highly favourable. Sir William had been
+delighted with him. He was quite young, wonderfully handsome, extremely
+agreeable, and, to crown the whole, he meant to be at the next assembly
+with a large party. Nothing could be more delightful! To be fond of
+dancing was a certain step towards falling in love; and very lively
+hopes of Mr. Bingley’s heart were entertained.
+
+
+
+ “If I can but see one of my daughters happily settled at Netherfield,”
+said Mrs. Bennet to her husband, “and all the others equally well
+married, I shall have nothing to wish for.”
+
+
+
+ In a few days Mr. Bingley returned Mr. Bennet’s visit, and sat about ten
+minutes with him in his library. He had entertained hopes of being
+admitted to a sight of the young ladies, of whose beauty he had heard
+much; but he saw only the father. The ladies were somewhat more
+fortunate, for they had the advantage of ascertaining, from an upper
+window, that he wore a blue coat and rode a black horse.
+
+
+
+ An invitation to dinner was soon afterwards despatched; and already had
+Mrs. Bennet planned the courses that were to do credit to her
+housekeeping, when an answer arrived which deferred it all. Mr. Bingley
+was obliged to be in town the following day, and consequently unable to
+accept the honour of their invitation, etc. Mrs. Bennet was quite
+disconcerted. She could not imagine what business he could have in town
+so soon after his arrival in Hertfordshire; and she began to fear that
+he might always be flying about from one place to another, and never
+settled at Netherfield as he ought to be. Lady Lucas quieted her fears a
+little by starting the idea of his {12} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ “When the Party entered”
+
+ 
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ being gone to London only to get a large party for the ball; and a
+report soon followed that Mr. Bingley was to bring twelve ladies and
+seven gentlemen with him to the assembly. The girls grieved over such a
+number of {13} ladies; but were comforted the day before the ball by hearing
+that, instead of twelve, he had brought only six with him from London,
+his five sisters and a cousin. And when the party entered the
+assembly-room, it consisted of only five altogether: Mr. Bingley, his
+two sisters, the husband of the eldest, and another young man.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bingley was good-looking and gentlemanlike: he had a pleasant
+countenance, and easy, unaffected manners. His sisters were fine women,
+with an air of decided fashion. His brother-in-law, Mr. Hurst, merely
+looked the gentleman; but his friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention
+of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien, and
+the report, which was in general circulation within five minutes after
+his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year. The gentlemen
+pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was
+much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great
+admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust
+which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be
+proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his
+large estate in Derbyshire could save him from having a most forbidding,
+disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his
+friend.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bingley had soon made himself acquainted with all the principal
+people in the room: he was lively and unreserved, danced every dance,
+was angry that the ball closed so early, and talked of giving one
+himself at Netherfield. Such amiable qualities must speak for
+themselves. What a contrast between him and his friend! Mr. Darcy danced
+only once with Mrs. Hurst and once with Miss Bingley, declined being
+introduced to {14} any other lady, and spent the rest of the evening in
+walking about the room, speaking occasionally to one of his own party.
+His character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in
+the world, and everybody hoped that he would never come there again.
+Amongst the most violent against him was Mrs. Bennet, whose dislike of
+his general behaviour was sharpened into particular resentment by his
+having slighted one of her daughters.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth Bennet had been obliged, by the scarcity of gentlemen, to sit
+down for two dances; and during part of that time, Mr. Darcy had been
+standing near enough for her to overhear a conversation between him and
+Mr. Bingley, who came from the dance for a few minutes to press his
+friend to join it.
+
+
+
+ “Come, Darcy,” said he, “I must have you dance. I hate to see you
+standing about by yourself in this stupid manner. You had much better
+dance.”
+
+
+
+ “I certainly shall not. You know how I detest it, unless I am
+particularly acquainted with my partner. At such an assembly as this, it
+would be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not
+another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to
+stand up with.”
+
+
+
+ “I would not be so fastidious as you are,” cried Bingley, “for a
+kingdom! Upon my honour, I never met with so many pleasant girls in my
+life as I have this evening; and there are several of them, you see,
+uncommonly pretty.”
+
+
+
+ “ You are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room,” said Mr.
+Darcy, looking at the eldest Miss Bennet.
+
+
+
+ “Oh, she is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! {15} But there is one
+of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I
+dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“She is tolerable”
+
+
+
+
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ “Which do you mean?” and turning round, he looked for a moment at
+Elizabeth, till, catching her eye, he withdrew his own, and coldly said,
+“She is tolerable: but not handsome enough to tempt me ; and I am in no
+humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted
+by other men. You had better return to your {16} partner and enjoy her
+smiles, for you are wasting your time with me.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bingley followed his advice. Mr. Darcy walked off; and Elizabeth
+remained with no very cordial feelings towards him. She told the story,
+however, with great spirit among her friends; for she had a lively,
+playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous.
+
+
+
+ The evening altogether passed off pleasantly to the whole family. Mrs.
+Bennet had seen her eldest daughter much admired by the Netherfield
+party. Mr. Bingley had danced with her twice, and she had been
+distinguished by his sisters. Jane was as much gratified by this as her
+mother could be, though in a quieter way. Elizabeth felt Jane’s
+pleasure. Mary had heard herself mentioned to Miss Bingley as the most
+accomplished girl in the neighbourhood; and Catherine and Lydia had been
+fortunate enough to be never without partners, which was all that they
+had yet learnt to care for at a ball. They returned, therefore, in good
+spirits to Longbourn, the village where they lived, and of which they
+were the principal inhabitants. They found Mr. Bennet still up. With a
+book, he was regardless of time; and on the present occasion he had a
+good deal of curiosity as to the event of an evening which had raised
+such splendid expectations. He had rather hoped that all his wife’s
+views on the stranger would be disappointed; but he soon found that he
+had a very different story to hear.
+
+
+
+ “Oh, my dear Mr. Bennet,” as she entered the room, “we have had a most
+delightful evening, a most excellent ball. I wish you had been there.
+Jane was so admired, nothing could be like it. Everybody said how well
+she looked; and Mr. Bingley thought her quite beautiful, and danced with
+her twice. Only think of that , my dear: he {17} actually danced with her
+twice; and she was the only creature in the room that he asked a second
+time. First of all, he asked Miss Lucas. I was so vexed to see him stand
+up with her; but, however, he did not admire her at all; indeed, nobody
+can, you know; and he seemed quite struck with Jane as she was going
+down the dance. So he inquired who she was, and got introduced, and
+asked her for the two next. Then, the two third he danced with Miss
+King, and the two fourth with Maria Lucas, and the two fifth with Jane
+again, and the two sixth with Lizzy, and the Boulanger ——”
+
+
+
+ “If he had had any compassion for me ,” cried her husband impatiently,
+“he would not have danced half so much! For God’s sake, say no more of
+his partners. O that he had sprained his ancle in the first dance!”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, my dear,” continued Mrs. Bennet, “I am quite delighted with him. He
+is so excessively handsome! and his sisters are charming women. I never
+in my life saw anything more elegant than their dresses. I dare say the
+lace upon Mrs. Hurst’s gown——”
+
+
+
+ Here she was interrupted again. Mr. Bennet protested against any
+description of finery. She was therefore obliged to seek another branch
+of the subject, and related, with much bitterness of spirit, and some
+exaggeration, the shocking rudeness of Mr. Darcy.
+
+
+
+ “But I can assure you,” she added, “that Lizzy does not lose much by not
+suiting his fancy; for he is a most disagreeable, horrid man, not at
+all worth pleasing. So high and so conceited, that there was no enduring
+him! He walked here, and he walked there, fancying himself so very
+great! Not handsome enough to dance with! I wish you had been there, my
+dear, to have given him one of your set-downs. I quite detest the man. {18} ”
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. 
+
+ 
+ HEN Jane and Elizabeth were alone, the former, who had been cautious in
+her praise of Mr. Bingley before, expressed to her sister how very much
+she admired him.
+
+
+
+ “He is just what a young man ought to be,” said she, “sensible,
+good-humoured, lively; and I never saw such happy manners! so much ease,
+with such perfect good breeding!”
+
+
+
+ “He is also handsome,” replied Elizabeth, “which a young man ought
+likewise to be if he possibly can. His character is thereby complete.”
+
+
+
+ “I was very much flattered by his asking me to dance a second time. I
+did not expect such a compliment.”
+
+
+
+ “Did not you? I did for you. But that is one great difference between
+us. Compliments always take you by surprise, and me never. What
+could be more natural than his asking you again? He could not help
+seeing that you {19} were about five times as pretty as every other woman in
+the room. No thanks to his gallantry for that. Well, he certainly is
+very agreeable, and I give you leave to like him. You have liked many a
+stupider person.”
+
+
+
+ “Dear Lizzy!”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, you are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in general.
+You never see a fault in anybody. All the world are good and agreeable
+in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in my life.”
+
+
+
+ “I would wish not to be hasty in censuring anyone; but I always speak
+what I think.”
+
+
+
+ “I know you do: and it is that which makes the wonder. With your 
+good sense, to be so honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of
+others! Affectation of candour is common enough; one meets with it
+everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design,—to take the
+good of everybody’s character and make it still better, and say nothing
+of the bad,—belongs to you alone. And so, you like this man’s sisters,
+too, do you? Their manners are not equal to his.”
+
+
+
+ “Certainly not, at first; but they are very pleasing women when you
+converse with them. Miss Bingley is to live with her brother, and keep
+his house; and I am much mistaken if we shall not find a very charming
+neighbour in her.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth listened in silence, but was not convinced: their behaviour at
+the assembly had not been calculated to please in general; and with more
+quickness of observation and less pliancy of temper than her sister, and
+with a judgment, too, unassailed by any attention to herself, she was
+very little disposed to approve them. They were, in fact, very fine
+ladies; not deficient in good-humour when they were pleased, nor in the
+power {20} of being agreeable where they chose it; but proud and conceited.
+They were rather handsome; had been educated in one of the first private
+seminaries in town; had a fortune of twenty thousand pounds; were in the
+habit of spending more than they ought, and of associating with people
+of rank; and were, therefore, in every respect entitled to think well of
+themselves and meanly of others. They were of a respectable family in
+the north of England; a circumstance more deeply impressed on their
+memories than that their brother’s fortune and their own had been
+acquired by trade.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bingley inherited property to the amount of nearly a hundred
+thousand pounds from his father, who had intended to purchase an estate,
+but did not live to do it. Mr. Bingley intended it likewise, and
+sometimes made choice of his county; but, as he was now provided with a
+good house and the liberty of a manor, it was doubtful to many of those
+who best knew the easiness of his temper, whether he might not spend the
+remainder of his days at Netherfield, and leave the next generation to
+purchase.
+
+
+
+ His sisters were very anxious for his having an estate of his own; but
+though he was now established only as a tenant, Miss Bingley was by no
+means unwilling to preside at his table; nor was Mrs. Hurst, who had
+married a man of more fashion than fortune, less disposed to consider
+his house as her home when it suited her. Mr. Bingley had not been of
+age two years when he was tempted, by an accidental recommendation, to
+look at Netherfield House. He did look at it, and into it, for half an
+hour; was pleased with the situation and the principal rooms, satisfied
+with what the owner said in its praise, and took it immediately.
+
+
+
+ Between him and Darcy there was a very steady {21} friendship, in spite of a
+great opposition of character. Bingley was endeared to Darcy by the
+easiness, openness, and ductility of his temper, though no disposition
+could offer a greater contrast to his own, and though with his own he
+never appeared dissatisfied. On the strength of Darcy’s regard, Bingley
+had the firmest reliance, and of his judgment the highest opinion. In
+understanding, Darcy was the superior. Bingley was by no means
+deficient; but Darcy was clever. He was at the same time haughty,
+reserved, and fastidious; and his manners, though well bred, were not
+inviting. In that respect his friend had greatly the advantage. Bingley
+was sure of being liked wherever he appeared; Darcy was continually
+giving offence.
+
+
+
+ The manner in which they spoke of the Meryton assembly was sufficiently
+characteristic. Bingley had never met with pleasanter people or prettier
+girls in his life; everybody had been most kind and attentive to him;
+there had been no formality, no stiffness; he had soon felt acquainted
+with all the room; and as to Miss Bennet, he could not conceive an angel
+more beautiful. Darcy, on the contrary, had seen a collection of people
+in whom there was little beauty and no fashion, for none of whom he had
+felt the smallest interest, and from none received either attention or
+pleasure. Miss Bennet he acknowledged to be pretty; but she smiled too
+much.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Hurst and her sister allowed it to be so; but still they admired
+her and liked her, and pronounced her to be a sweet girl, and one whom
+they should not object to know more of. Miss Bennet was therefore
+established as a sweet girl; and their brother felt authorized by such
+commendation to think of her as he chose. {22} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. 
+
+ 
+ ITHIN a short walk of Longbourn lived a family with whom the Bennets
+were particularly intimate. Sir William Lucas had been formerly in trade
+in Meryton, where he had made a tolerable fortune, and risen to the
+honour of knighthood by an address to the king during his mayoralty. The
+distinction had, perhaps, been felt too strongly. It had given him a
+disgust to his business and to his residence in a small market town;
+and, quitting them both, he had removed with his family to a house about
+a mile from Meryton, denominated from that period Lucas Lodge; where he
+could think with pleasure of his own importance, and, unshackled by
+business, occupy himself solely in being civil to all the world. For,
+though elated by his rank, it did not render him supercilious; on the
+contrary, he was all attention to everybody. By nature inoffensive,
+friendly, and obliging, his presentation at St. James’s had made him
+courteous.
+
+
+
+ Lady Lucas was a very good kind of woman, not too {23} clever to be a
+valuable neighbour to Mrs. Bennet. They had several children. The eldest
+of them, a sensible, intelligent young woman, about twenty-seven, was
+Elizabeth’s intimate friend.
+
+
+
+ That the Miss Lucases and the Miss Bennets should meet to talk over a
+ball was absolutely necessary; and the morning after the assembly
+brought the former to Longbourn to hear and to communicate.
+
+
+
+ “ You began the evening well, Charlotte,” said Mrs. Bennet, with civil
+self-command, to Miss Lucas. “ You were Mr. Bingley’s first choice.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes; but he seemed to like his second better.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, you mean Jane, I suppose, because he danced with her twice. To be
+sure that did seem as if he admired her—indeed, I rather believe he
+ did —I heard something about it—but I hardly know what—something
+about Mr. Robinson.”
+
+
+
+ “Perhaps you mean what I overheard between him and Mr. Robinson: did not
+I mention it to you? Mr. Robinson’s asking him how he liked our Meryton
+assemblies, and whether he did not think there were a great many pretty
+women in the room, and which he thought the prettiest? and his
+answering immediately to the last question, ‘Oh, the eldest Miss Bennet,
+beyond a doubt: there cannot be two opinions on that point.’ ” 
+
+
+
+ “Upon my word! Well, that was very decided, indeed—that does seem as
+if—but, however, it may all come to nothing, you know.”
+
+
+
+ “ My overhearings were more to the purpose than yours , Eliza,” said
+Charlotte. “Mr. Darcy is not so well worth listening to as his friend,
+is he? Poor Eliza! to be only just tolerable .”
+
+
+
+ “I beg you will not put it into Lizzy’s head to be {24} vexed by his
+ill-treatment, for he is such a disagreeable man that it would be quite
+a misfortune to be liked by him. Mrs. Long told me last night that he
+sat close to her for half an hour without once opening his lips.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ “Without once opening his lips”
+
+
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ “Are you quite sure, ma’am? Is not there a little mistake?” said Jane.
+“I certainly saw Mr. Darcy speaking to her.”
+
+
+
+ “Ay, because she asked him at last how he liked {25} Netherfield, and he
+could not help answering her; but she said he seemed very angry at being
+spoke to.”
+
+
+
+ “Miss Bingley told me,” said Jane, “that he never speaks much unless
+among his intimate acquaintance. With them he is remarkably
+agreeable.”
+
+
+
+ “I do not believe a word of it, my dear. If he had been so very
+agreeable, he would have talked to Mrs. Long. But I can guess how it
+was; everybody says that he is eat up with pride, and I dare say he had
+heard somehow that Mrs. Long does not keep a carriage, and had to come
+to the ball in a hack chaise.”
+
+
+
+ “I do not mind his not talking to Mrs. Long,” said Miss Lucas, “but I
+wish he had danced with Eliza.”
+
+
+
+ “Another time, Lizzy,” said her mother, “I would not dance with him ,
+if I were you.”
+
+
+
+ “I believe, ma’am, I may safely promise you never to dance with him.”
+
+
+
+ “His pride,” said Miss Lucas, “does not offend me so much as pride
+often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so
+very fine a young man, with family, fortune, everything in his favour,
+should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he has a right 
+to be proud.”
+
+
+
+ “That is very true,” replied Elizabeth, “and I could easily forgive
+ his pride, if he had not mortified mine .”
+
+
+
+ “Pride,” observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her
+reflections, “is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have
+ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human
+nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us
+who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some
+quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different
+things, though the words are often {26} used synonymously. A person may be
+proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of
+ourselves; vanity to what we would have others think of us.”
+
+
+
+ “If I were as rich as Mr. Darcy,” cried a young Lucas, who came with his
+sisters, “I should not care how proud I was. I would keep a pack of
+foxhounds, and drink a bottle of wine every day.”
+
+
+
+ “Then you would drink a great deal more than you ought,” said Mrs.
+Bennet; “and if I were to see you at it, I should take away your bottle
+directly.”
+
+
+
+ The boy protested that she should not; she continued to declare that she
+would; and the argument ended only with the visit.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ {27} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. 
+
+ 
+ HE ladies of Longbourn soon waited on those of Netherfield. The visit
+was returned in due form. Miss Bennet’s pleasing manners grew on the
+good-will of Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley; and though the mother was
+found to be intolerable, and the younger sisters not worth speaking to,
+a wish of being better acquainted with them was expressed towards the
+two eldest. By Jane this attention was received with the greatest
+pleasure; but Elizabeth still saw superciliousness in their treatment of
+everybody, hardly excepting even her sister, and could not like them;
+though their kindness to Jane, such as it was, had a value, as arising,
+in all probability, from the influence of their brother’s admiration. It
+was generally evident, whenever they met, that he did admire her; and
+to her it was equally evident that Jane was yielding to the preference
+which she had begun to entertain for him from the first, and was in a
+way to be very much in love; but she considered with pleasure that it
+was not likely to be discovered by the world in general, since Jane
+united with great strength of feeling, a composure of temper and an
+uniform cheerfulness of manner, which would guard {28} her from the
+suspicions of the impertinent. She mentioned this to her friend, Miss
+Lucas.
+
+
+
+ “It may, perhaps, be pleasant,” replied Charlotte, “to be able to impose
+on the public in such a case; but it is sometimes a disadvantage to be
+so very guarded. If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill
+from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and
+it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the
+dark. There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every
+attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all
+ begin freely—a slight preference is natural enough; but there are
+very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without
+encouragement. In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more 
+affection than she feels. Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he
+may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on.”
+
+
+
+ “But she does help him on, as much as her nature will allow. If I can
+perceive her regard for him, he must be a simpleton indeed not to
+discover it too.”
+
+
+
+ “Remember, Eliza, that he does not know Jane’s disposition as you do.”
+
+
+
+ “But if a woman is partial to a man, and does not endeavor to conceal
+it, he must find it out.”
+
+
+
+ “Perhaps he must, if he sees enough of her. But though Bingley and Jane
+meet tolerably often, it is never for many hours together; and as they
+always see each other in large mixed parties, it is impossible that
+every moment should be employed in conversing together. Jane should
+therefore make the most of every half hour in which she can command his
+attention. When she is secure of him, there will be leisure for falling
+in love as much as she chooses. {29} ”
+
+
+
+ “Your plan is a good one,” replied Elizabeth, “where nothing is in
+question but the desire of being well married; and if I were determined
+to get a rich husband, or any husband, I dare say I should adopt it. But
+these are not Jane’s feelings; she is not acting by design. As yet she
+cannot even be certain of the degree of her own regard, nor of its
+reasonableness. She has known him only a fortnight. She danced four
+dances with him at Meryton; she saw him one morning at his own house,
+and has since dined in company with him four times. This is not quite
+enough to make her understand his character.”
+
+
+
+ “Not as you represent it. Had she merely dined with him, she might
+only have discovered whether he had a good appetite; but you must
+remember that four evenings have been also spent together—and four
+evenings may do a great deal.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes: these four evenings have enabled them to ascertain that they both
+like Vingt-un better than Commerce, but with respect to any other
+leading characteristic, I do not imagine that much has been unfolded.”
+
+
+
+ “Well,” said Charlotte, “I wish Jane success with all my heart; and if
+she were married to him to-morrow, I should think she had as good a
+chance of happiness as if she were to be studying his character for a
+twelvemonth. Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If
+the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other, or
+ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the
+least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to
+have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as
+possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your
+life. {30} ”
+
+
+
+ “You make me laugh, Charlotte; but it is not sound. You know it is not
+sound, and that you would never act in this way yourself.”
+
+
+
+ Occupied in observing Mr. Bingley’s attention to her sister, Elizabeth
+was far from suspecting that she was herself becoming an object of some
+interest in the eyes of his friend. Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely
+allowed her to be pretty: he had looked at her without admiration at the
+ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticise. But no
+sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had
+hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered
+uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To
+this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had
+detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry
+in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and
+pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those
+of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness. Of
+this she was perfectly unaware: to her he was only the man who made
+himself agreeable nowhere, and who had not thought her handsome enough
+to dance with.
+
+
+
+ He began to wish to know more of her; and, as a step towards conversing
+with her himself, attended to her conversation with others. His doing so
+drew her notice. It was at Sir William Lucas’s, where a large party were
+assembled.
+
+
+
+ “What does Mr. Darcy mean,” said she to Charlotte, “by listening to my
+conversation with Colonel Forster?”
+
+
+
+ “That is a question which Mr. Darcy only can answer.”
+
+
+
+ “But if he does it any more, I shall certainly let him know that I see
+what he is about. He has a very {31} satirical eye, and if I do not begin by
+being impertinent myself, I shall soon grow afraid of him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ “The entreaties of several” [ Copyright 1894 by George
+Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ On his approaching them soon afterwards, though without seeming to have
+any intention of speaking, Miss Lucas defied her friend to mention such
+a subject to him, which immediately provoking Elizabeth to do it, she
+turned to him and said,—
+
+
+
+ “Did not you think, Mr. Darcy, that I expressed myself uncommonly well
+just now, when I was teasing Colonel Forster to give us a ball at
+Meryton?”
+
+
+
+ “With great energy; but it is a subject which always makes a lady
+energetic. {32} ”
+
+
+
+ “You are severe on us.”
+
+
+
+ “It will be her turn soon to be teased,” said Miss Lucas. “I am going
+to open the instrument, Eliza, and you know what follows.”
+
+
+
+ “You are a very strange creature by way of a friend!—always wanting me
+to play and sing before anybody and everybody! If my vanity had taken a
+musical turn, you would have been invaluable; but as it is, I would
+really rather not sit down before those who must be in the habit of
+hearing the very best performers.” On Miss Lucas’s persevering, however,
+she added, “Very well; if it must be so, it must.” And gravely glancing
+at Mr. Darcy, “There is a very fine old saying, which everybody here is
+of course familiar with—‘Keep your breath to cool your porridge,’—and
+I shall keep mine to swell my song.”
+
+
+
+ Her performance was pleasing, though by no means capital. After a song
+or two, and before she could reply to the entreaties of several that she
+would sing again, she was eagerly succeeded at the instrument by her
+sister Mary, who having, in consequence of being the only plain one in
+the family, worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments, was always
+impatient for display.
+
+
+
+ Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her
+application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited
+manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she
+had reached. Elizabeth, easy and unaffected, had been listened to with
+much more pleasure, though not playing half so well; and Mary, at the
+end of a long concerto, was glad to purchase praise and gratitude by
+Scotch and Irish airs, at the request of her younger sisters, who with
+some of the Lucases, and two or three officers, joined eagerly in
+dancing at one end of the room. {33} 
+
+
+
+ Mr. Darcy stood near them in silent indignation at such a mode of
+passing the evening, to the exclusion of all conversation, and was too
+much engrossed by his own thoughts to perceive that Sir William Lucas
+was his neighbour, till Sir William thus began:—
+
+
+
+ “What a charming amusement for young people this is, Mr. Darcy! There is
+nothing like dancing, after all. I consider it as one of the first
+refinements of polished societies.”
+
+
+
+ “Certainly, sir; and it has the advantage also of being in vogue amongst
+the less polished societies of the world: every savage can dance.”
+
+
+
+ Sir William only smiled. “Your friend performs delightfully,” he
+continued, after a pause, on seeing Bingley join the group; “and I doubt
+not that you are an adept in the science yourself, Mr. Darcy.”
+
+
+
+ “You saw me dance at Meryton, I believe, sir.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, indeed, and received no inconsiderable pleasure from the sight. Do
+you often dance at St. James’s?”
+
+
+
+ “Never, sir.”
+
+
+
+ “Do you not think it would be a proper compliment to the place?”
+
+
+
+ “It is a compliment which I never pay to any place if I can avoid it.”
+
+
+
+ “You have a house in town, I conclude?”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Darcy bowed.
+
+
+
+ “I had once some thoughts of fixing in town myself, for I am fond of
+superior society; but I did not feel quite certain that the air of
+London would agree with Lady Lucas.”
+
+
+
+ He paused in hopes of an answer: but his companion was not disposed to
+make any; and Elizabeth at that instant moving towards them, he was
+struck with the {34} notion of doing a very gallant thing, and called out to
+her,—
+
+
+
+ “My dear Miss Eliza, why are not you dancing? Mr. Darcy, you must allow
+me to present this young lady to you as a very desirable partner. You
+cannot refuse to dance, I am sure, when so much beauty is before you.”
+And, taking her hand, he would have given it to Mr. Darcy, who, though
+extremely surprised, was not unwilling to receive it, when she instantly
+drew back, and said with some discomposure to Sir William,—
+
+
+
+ “Indeed, sir, I have not the least intention of dancing. I entreat you
+not to suppose that I moved this way in order to beg for a partner.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Darcy, with grave propriety, requested to be allowed the honour of
+her hand, but in vain. Elizabeth was determined; nor did Sir William at
+all shake her purpose by his attempt at persuasion.
+
+
+
+ “You excel so much in the dance, Miss Eliza, that it is cruel to deny me
+the happiness of seeing you; and though this gentleman dislikes the
+amusement in general, he can have no objection, I am sure, to oblige us
+for one half hour.”
+
+
+
+ “Mr. Darcy is all politeness,” said Elizabeth, smiling.
+
+
+
+ “He is, indeed: but considering the inducement, my dear Miss Eliza, we
+cannot wonder at his complaisance; for who would object to such a
+partner?”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth looked archly, and turned away. Her resistance had not injured
+her with the gentleman, and he was thinking of her with some
+complacency, when thus accosted by Miss Bingley,—
+
+
+
+ “I can guess the subject of your reverie.”
+
+
+
+ “I should imagine not.”
+
+
+
+ “You are considering how insupportable it would be {35} to pass many
+evenings in this manner,—in such society; and, indeed, I am quite of
+your opinion. I was never more annoyed! The insipidity, and yet the
+noise—the nothingness, and yet the self-importance, of all these
+people! What would I give to hear your strictures on them!”
+
+
+
+ “Your conjecture is totally wrong, I assure you. My mind was more
+agreeably engaged. I have been meditating on the very great pleasure
+which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.”
+
+
+
+ Miss Bingley immediately fixed her eyes on his face, and desired he
+would tell her what lady had the credit of inspiring such reflections.
+Mr. Darcy replied, with great intrepidity,—
+
+
+
+ “Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”
+
+
+
+ “Miss Elizabeth Bennet!” repeated Miss Bingley. “I am all astonishment.
+How long has she been such a favourite? and pray when am I to wish you
+joy?”
+
+
+
+ “That is exactly the question which I expected you to ask. A lady’s
+imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love
+to matrimony, in a moment. I knew you would be wishing me joy.”
+
+
+
+ “Nay, if you are so serious about it, I shall consider the matter as
+absolutely settled. You will have a charming mother-in-law, indeed, and
+of course she will be always at Pemberley with you.”
+
+
+
+ He listened to her with perfect indifference, while she chose to
+entertain herself in this manner; and as his composure convinced her
+that all was safe, her wit flowed along. {36} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+A note for Miss Bennet.
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. 
+
+ 
+ R. BENNET’S property consisted almost entirely in an estate of two
+thousand a year, which, unfortunately for his daughters, was entailed,
+in default of heirs male, on a distant relation; and their mother’s
+fortune, though ample for her situation in life, could but ill supply
+the deficiency of his. Her father had been an {37} attorney in Meryton, and
+had left her four thousand pounds.
+
+
+
+ She had a sister married to a Mr. Philips, who had been a clerk to their
+father and succeeded him in the business, and a brother settled in
+London in a respectable line of trade.
+
+
+
+ The village of Longbourn was only one mile from Meryton; a most
+convenient distance for the young ladies, who were usually tempted
+thither three or four times a week, to pay their duty to their aunt, and
+to a milliner’s shop just over the way. The two youngest of the family,
+Catherine and Lydia, were particularly frequent in these attentions:
+their minds were more vacant than their sisters’, and when nothing
+better offered, a walk to Meryton was necessary to amuse their morning
+hours and furnish conversation for the evening; and, however bare of
+news the country in general might be, they always contrived to learn
+some from their aunt. At present, indeed, they were well supplied both
+with news and happiness by the recent arrival of a militia regiment in
+the neighbourhood; it was to remain the whole winter, and Meryton was
+the head-quarters.
+
+
+
+ Their visits to Mrs. Philips were now productive of the most interesting
+intelligence. Every day added something to their knowledge of the
+officers’ names and connections. Their lodgings were not long a secret,
+and at length they began to know the officers themselves. Mr. Philips
+visited them all, and this opened to his nieces a source of felicity
+unknown before. They could talk of nothing but officers; and Mr.
+Bingley’s large fortune, the mention of which gave animation to their
+mother, was worthless in their eyes when opposed to the regimentals of
+an ensign. {38} 
+
+
+
+ After listening one morning to their effusions on this subject, Mr.
+Bennet coolly observed,—
+
+
+
+ “From all that I can collect by your manner of talking, you must be two
+of the silliest girls in the country. I have suspected it some time, but
+I am now convinced.”
+
+
+
+ Catherine was disconcerted, and made no answer; but Lydia, with perfect
+indifference, continued to express her admiration of Captain Carter, and
+her hope of seeing him in the course of the day, as he was going the
+next morning to London.
+
+
+
+ “I am astonished, my dear,” said Mrs. Bennet, “that you should be so
+ready to think your own children silly. If I wished to think slightingly
+of anybody’s children, it should not be of my own, however.”
+
+
+
+ “If my children are silly, I must hope to be always sensible of it.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes; but as it happens, they are all of them very clever.”
+
+
+
+ “This is the only point, I flatter myself, on which we do not agree. I
+had hoped that our sentiments coincided in every particular, but I must
+so far differ from you as to think our two youngest daughters uncommonly
+foolish.”
+
+
+
+ “My dear Mr. Bennet, you must not expect such girls to have the sense of
+their father and mother. When they get to our age, I dare say they will
+not think about officers any more than we do. I remember the time when I
+liked a red coat myself very well—and, indeed, so I do still at my
+heart; and if a smart young colonel, with five or six thousand a year,
+should want one of my girls, I shall not say nay to him; and I thought
+Colonel Forster looked very becoming the other night at Sir William’s in
+his regimentals. {39} ”
+
+
+
+ “Mamma,” cried Lydia, “my aunt says that Colonel Forster and Captain
+Carter do not go so often to Miss Watson’s as they did when they first
+came; she sees them now very often standing in Clarke’s library.”
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet was prevented replying by the entrance of the footman with a
+note for Miss Bennet; it came from Netherfield, and the servant waited
+for an answer. Mrs. Bennet’s eyes sparkled with pleasure, and she was
+eagerly calling out, while her daughter read,—
+
+
+
+ “Well, Jane, who is it from? What is it about? What does he say? Well,
+Jane, make haste and tell us; make haste, my love.”
+
+
+
+ “It is from Miss Bingley,” said Jane, and then read it aloud.
+
+
+
+ “My dear friend,
+
+
+
+ “If you are not so compassionate as to dine to-day with Louisa and
+me, we shall be in danger of hating each other for the rest of our
+lives; for a whole day’s tête-à-tête between two women can never
+end without a quarrel. Come as soon as you can on the receipt of
+this. My brother and the gentlemen are to dine with the officers.
+Yours ever,
+
+
+
+ 
+“ Caroline Bingley .”
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ “With the officers!” cried Lydia: “I wonder my aunt did not tell us of
+ that .”
+
+
+
+ “Dining out,” said Mrs. Bennet; “that is very unlucky.”
+
+
+
+ “Can I have the carriage?” said Jane.
+
+
+
+ “No, my dear, you had better go on horseback, because it seems likely to
+rain; and then you must stay all night.”
+
+
+
+ “That would be a good scheme,” said Elizabeth, “if you were sure that
+they would not offer to send her home. {40} ”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, but the gentlemen will have Mr. Bingley’s chaise to go to Meryton;
+and the Hursts have no horses to theirs.”
+
+
+
+ “I had much rather go in the coach.”
+
+
+
+ “But, my dear, your father cannot spare the horses, I am sure. They are
+wanted in the farm, Mr. Bennet, are not they?”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ Cheerful prognostics
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ “They are wanted in the farm much oftener than I can get them.”
+
+
+
+ “But if you have got them to-day,” said Elizabeth, “my mother’s purpose
+will be answered. {41} ”
+
+
+
+ She did at last extort from her father an acknowledgment that the horses
+were engaged; Jane was therefore obliged to go on horseback, and her
+mother attended her to the door with many cheerful prognostics of a bad
+day. Her hopes were answered; Jane had not been gone long before it
+rained hard. Her sisters were uneasy for her, but her mother was
+delighted. The rain continued the whole evening without intermission;
+Jane certainly could not come back.
+
+
+
+ “This was a lucky idea of mine, indeed!” said Mrs. Bennet, more than
+once, as if the credit of making it rain were all her own. Till the next
+morning, however, she was not aware of all the felicity of her
+contrivance. Breakfast was scarcely over when a servant from Netherfield
+brought the following note for Elizabeth:—
+
+
+
+ “My dearest Lizzie,
+
+
+
+ “I find myself very unwell this morning, which, I suppose, is to be
+imputed to my getting wet through yesterday. My kind friends will
+not hear of my returning home till I am better. They insist also on
+my seeing Mr. Jones—therefore do not be alarmed if you should hear
+of his having been to me—and, excepting a sore throat and a
+headache, there is not much the matter with me.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yours, etc.”
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ “Well, my dear,” said Mr. Bennet, when Elizabeth had read the note
+aloud, “if your daughter should have a dangerous fit of illness—if she
+should die—it would be a comfort to know that it was all in pursuit of
+Mr. Bingley, and under your orders.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, I am not at all afraid of her dying. People do {42} not die of little
+trifling colds. She will be taken good care of. As long as she stays
+there, it is all very well. I would go and see her if I could have the
+carriage.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth, feeling really anxious, determined to go to her, though the
+carriage was not to be had: and as she was no horsewoman, walking was
+her only alternative. She declared her resolution.
+
+
+
+ “How can you be so silly,” cried her mother, “as to think of such a
+thing, in all this dirt! You will not be fit to be seen when you get
+there.”
+
+
+
+ “I shall be very fit to see Jane—which is all I want.”
+
+
+
+ “Is this a hint to me, Lizzy,” said her father, “to send for the
+horses?”
+
+
+
+ “No, indeed. I do not wish to avoid the walk. The distance is nothing,
+when one has a motive; only three miles. I shall be back by dinner.”
+
+
+
+ “I admire the activity of your benevolence,” observed Mary, “but every
+impulse of feeling should be guided by reason; and, in my opinion,
+exertion should always be in proportion to what is required.”
+
+
+
+ “We will go as far as Meryton with you,” said Catherine and Lydia.
+Elizabeth accepted their company, and the three young ladies set off
+together.
+
+
+
+ “If we make haste,” said Lydia, as they walked along, “perhaps we may
+see something of Captain Carter, before he goes.”
+
+
+
+ In Meryton they parted: the two youngest repaired to the lodgings of one
+of the officers’ wives, and Elizabeth continued her walk alone, crossing
+field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing
+over puddles, with impatient activity, and finding herself at last
+within view of the house, with weary ancles, dirty stockings, and a face
+glowing with the warmth of exercise. {43} 
+
+
+
+ She was shown into the breakfast parlour, where all but Jane were
+assembled, and where her appearance created a great deal of surprise.
+That she should have walked three miles so early in the day in such
+dirty weather, and by herself, was almost incredible to Mrs. Hurst and
+Miss Bingley; and Elizabeth was convinced that they held her in contempt
+for it. She was received, however, very politely by them; and in their
+brother’s manners there was something better than politeness—there was
+good-humour and kindness. Mr. Darcy said very little, and Mr. Hurst
+nothing at all. The former was divided between admiration of the
+brilliancy which exercise had given to her complexion and doubt as to
+the occasion’s justifying her coming so far alone. The latter was
+thinking only of his breakfast.
+
+
+
+ Her inquiries after her sister were not very favourably answered. Miss
+Bennet had slept ill, and though up, was very feverish, and not well
+enough to leave her room. Elizabeth was glad to be taken to her
+immediately; and Jane, who had only been withheld by the fear of giving
+alarm or inconvenience, from expressing in her note how much she longed
+for such a visit, was delighted at her entrance. She was not equal,
+however, to much conversation; and when Miss Bingley left them together,
+could attempt little beside expressions of gratitude for the
+extraordinary kindness she was treated with. Elizabeth silently attended
+her.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+“The Apothecary came”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ When breakfast was over, they were joined by the sisters; and Elizabeth
+began to like them herself, when she saw how much affection and
+solicitude they showed for Jane. The apothecary came; and having
+examined his patient, said, as might be supposed, that she had caught a
+violent cold, and that they must endeavour to {44} get the better of it;
+advised her to return to bed, and promised her some draughts. The advice
+was followed readily, for the feverish symptoms increased, and her head
+ached acutely. Elizabeth did not quit her room for a moment, nor were
+the other ladies often absent; the gentlemen being out, they had in fact
+nothing to do elsewhere.
+
+
+
+ When the clock struck three, Elizabeth felt that she must go, and very
+unwillingly said so. Miss Bingley offered her the carriage, and she only
+wanted a little pressing to accept it, when Jane testified such concern
+at parting with her that Miss Bingley was obliged to convert the offer
+of the chaise into an invitation to remain at Netherfield for the
+present. Elizabeth most thankfully consented, and a servant was
+despatched to Longbourn, to acquaint the family with her stay, and bring
+back a supply of clothes.
+
+
+
+ {45} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+Covering a screen.
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. 
+
+ 
+ T five o’clock the two ladies retired to dress, and at half-past six
+Elizabeth was summoned to dinner. To the civil inquiries which then
+poured in, and amongst which she had the pleasure of distinguishing the
+much superior solicitude of Mr. Bingley, she could not make a very
+favourable answer. {46} Jane was by no means better. The sisters, on hearing
+this, repeated three or four times how much they were grieved, how
+shocking it was to have a bad cold, and how excessively they disliked
+being ill themselves; and then thought no more of the matter: and their
+indifference towards Jane, when not immediately before them, restored
+Elizabeth to the enjoyment of all her original dislike.
+
+
+
+ Their brother, indeed, was the only one of the party whom she could
+regard with any complacency. His anxiety for Jane was evident, and his
+attentions to herself most pleasing; and they prevented her feeling
+herself so much an intruder as she believed she was considered by the
+others. She had very little notice from any but him. Miss Bingley was
+engrossed by Mr. Darcy, her sister scarcely less so; and as for Mr.
+Hurst, by whom Elizabeth sat, he was an indolent man, who lived only to
+eat, drink, and play at cards, who, when he found her prefer a plain
+dish to a ragout, had nothing to say to her.
+
+
+
+ When dinner was over, she returned directly to Jane, and Miss Bingley
+began abusing her as soon as she was out of the room. Her manners were
+pronounced to be very bad indeed,—a mixture of pride and impertinence:
+she had no conversation, no style, no taste, no beauty. Mrs. Hurst
+thought the same, and added,—
+
+
+
+ “She has nothing, in short, to recommend her, but being an excellent
+walker. I shall never forget her appearance this morning. She really
+looked almost wild.”
+
+
+
+ “She did indeed, Louisa. I could hardly keep my countenance. Very
+nonsensical to come at all! Why must she be scampering about the
+country, because her sister had a cold? Her hair so untidy, so blowzy! {47} ”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, and her petticoat; I hope you saw her petticoat, six inches deep
+in mud, I am absolutely certain, and the gown which had been let down to
+hide it not doing its office.”
+
+
+
+ “Your picture may be very exact, Louisa,” said Bingley; “but this was
+all lost upon me. I thought Miss Elizabeth Bennet looked remarkably well
+when she came into the room this morning. Her dirty petticoat quite
+escaped my notice.”
+
+
+
+ “ You observed it, Mr. Darcy, I am sure,” said Miss Bingley; “and I am
+inclined to think that you would not wish to see your sister make such
+an exhibition.”
+
+
+
+ “Certainly not.”
+
+
+
+ “To walk three miles, or four miles, or five miles, or whatever it is,
+above her ancles in dirt, and alone, quite alone! what could she mean by
+it? It seems to me to show an abominable sort of conceited independence,
+a most country-town indifference to decorum.”
+
+
+
+ “It shows an affection for her sister that is very pleasing,” said
+Bingley.
+
+
+
+ “I am afraid, Mr. Darcy,” observed Miss Bingley, in a half whisper,
+“that this adventure has rather affected your admiration of her fine
+eyes.”
+
+
+
+ “Not at all,” he replied: “they were brightened by the exercise.” A
+short pause followed this speech, and Mrs. Hurst began again,—
+
+
+
+ “I have an excessive regard for Jane Bennet,—she is really a very sweet
+girl,—and I wish with all my heart she were well settled. But with such
+a father and mother, and such low connections, I am afraid there is no
+chance of it.”
+
+
+
+ “I think I have heard you say that their uncle is an attorney in
+Meryton? {48} ”
+
+
+
+ “Yes; and they have another, who lives somewhere near Cheapside.”
+
+
+
+ “That is capital,” added her sister; and they both laughed heartily.
+
+
+
+ “If they had uncles enough to fill all Cheapside,” cried Bingley, “it
+would not make them one jot less agreeable.”
+
+
+
+ “But it must very materially lessen their chance of marrying men of any
+consideration in the world,” replied Darcy.
+
+
+
+ To this speech Bingley made no answer; but his sisters gave it their
+hearty assent, and indulged their mirth for some time at the expense of
+their dear friend’s vulgar relations.
+
+
+
+ With a renewal of tenderness, however, they repaired to her room on
+leaving the dining-parlour, and sat with her till summoned to coffee.
+She was still very poorly, and Elizabeth would not quit her at all, till
+late in the evening, when she had the comfort of seeing her asleep, and
+when it appeared to her rather right than pleasant that she should go
+down stairs herself. On entering the drawing-room, she found the whole
+party at loo, and was immediately invited to join them; but suspecting
+them to be playing high, she declined it, and making her sister the
+excuse, said she would amuse herself, for the short time she could stay
+below, with a book. Mr. Hurst looked at her with astonishment.
+
+
+
+ “Do you prefer reading to cards?” said he; “that is rather singular.”
+
+
+
+ “Miss Eliza Bennet,” said Miss Bingley, “despises cards. She is a great
+reader, and has no pleasure in anything else.”
+
+
+
+ “I deserve neither such praise nor such censure,” cried {49} Elizabeth; “I
+am not a great reader, and I have pleasure in many things.”
+
+
+
+ “In nursing your sister I am sure you have pleasure,” said Bingley; “and
+I hope it will soon be increased by seeing her quite well.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth thanked him from her heart, and then walked towards a table
+where a few books were lying. He immediately offered to fetch her
+others; all that his library afforded.
+
+
+
+ “And I wish my collection were larger for your benefit and my own
+credit; but I am an idle fellow; and though I have not many, I have more
+than I ever looked into.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth assured him that she could suit herself perfectly with those
+in the room.
+
+
+
+ “I am astonished,” said Miss Bingley, “that my father should have left
+so small a collection of books. What a delightful library you have at
+Pemberley, Mr. Darcy!”
+
+
+
+ “It ought to be good,” he replied: “it has been the work of many
+generations.”
+
+
+
+ “And then you have added so much to it yourself—you are always buying
+books.”
+
+
+
+ “I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as
+these.”
+
+
+
+ “Neglect! I am sure you neglect nothing that can add to the beauties of
+that noble place. Charles, when you build your house, I wish it may be
+half as delightful as Pemberley.”
+
+
+
+ “I wish it may.”
+
+
+
+ “But I would really advise you to make your purchase in that
+neighbourhood, and take Pemberley for a kind of model. There is not a
+finer county in England than Derbyshire. {50} ”
+
+
+
+ “With all my heart: I will buy Pemberley itself, if Darcy will sell it.”
+
+
+
+ “I am talking of possibilities, Charles.”
+
+
+
+ “Upon my word, Caroline, I should think it more possible to get
+Pemberley by purchase than by imitation.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was so much caught by what passed, as to leave her very little
+attention for her book; and, soon laying it wholly aside, she drew near
+the card-table, and stationed herself between Mr. Bingley and his eldest
+sister, to observe the game.
+
+
+
+ “Is Miss Darcy much grown since the spring?” said Miss Bingley: “will
+she be as tall as I am?”
+
+
+
+ “I think she will. She is now about Miss Elizabeth Bennet’s height, or
+rather taller.”
+
+
+
+ “How I long to see her again! I never met with anybody who delighted me
+so much. Such a countenance, such manners, and so extremely accomplished
+for her age! Her performance on the pianoforte is exquisite.”
+
+
+
+ “It is amazing to me,” said Bingley, “how young ladies can have patience
+to be so very accomplished as they all are.”
+
+
+
+ “All young ladies accomplished! My dear Charles, what do you mean?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, all of them, I think. They all paint tables, cover screens, and
+net purses. I scarcely know any one who cannot do all this; and I am
+sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time, without
+being informed that she was very accomplished.”
+
+
+
+ “Your list of the common extent of accomplishments,” said Darcy, “has
+too much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no
+otherwise than by netting a purse or covering a screen; but I am very
+far {51} from agreeing with you in your estimation of ladies in general. I
+cannot boast of knowing more than half-a-dozen in the whole range of my
+acquaintance that are really accomplished.”
+
+
+
+ “Nor I, I am sure,” said Miss Bingley.
+
+
+
+ “Then,” observed Elizabeth, “you must comprehend a great deal in your
+idea of an accomplished woman.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes; I do comprehend a great deal in it.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, certainly,” cried his faithful assistant, “no one can be really
+esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met
+with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing,
+dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and, besides all
+this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of
+walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word
+will be but half deserved.”
+
+
+
+ “All this she must possess,” added Darcy; “and to all she must yet add
+something more substantial in the improvement of her mind by extensive
+reading.”
+
+
+
+ “I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women.
+I rather wonder now at your knowing any .”
+
+
+
+ “Are you so severe upon your own sex as to doubt the possibility of all
+this?”
+
+
+
+ “ I never saw such a woman. I never saw such capacity, and taste, and
+application, and elegance, as you describe, united.”
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley both cried out against the injustice of her
+implied doubt, and were both protesting that they knew many women who
+answered this description, when Mr. Hurst called them to order, with {52} 
+bitter complaints of their inattention to what was going forward. As all
+conversation was thereby at an end, Elizabeth soon afterwards left the
+room.
+
+
+
+ “Eliza Bennet,” said Miss Bingley, when the door was closed on her, “is
+one of those young ladies who seek to recommend themselves to the other
+sex by undervaluing their own; and with many men, I daresay, it
+succeeds; but, in my opinion, it is a paltry device, a very mean art.”
+
+
+
+ “Undoubtedly,” replied Darcy, to whom this remark was chiefly addressed,
+“there is meanness in all the arts which ladies sometimes condescend
+to employ for captivation. Whatever bears affinity to cunning is
+despicable.”
+
+
+
+ Miss Bingley was not so entirely satisfied with this reply as to
+continue the subject.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth joined them again only to say that her sister was worse, and
+that she could not leave her. Bingley urged Mr. Jones’s being sent for
+immediately; while his sisters, convinced that no country advice could
+be of any service, recommended an express to town for one of the most
+eminent physicians. This she would not hear of; but she was not so
+unwilling to comply with their brother’s proposal; and it was settled
+that Mr. Jones should be sent for early in the morning, if Miss Bennet
+were not decidedly better. Bingley was quite uncomfortable; his sisters
+declared that they were miserable. They solaced their wretchedness,
+however, by duets after supper; while he could find no better relief to
+his feelings than by giving his housekeeper directions that every
+possible attention might be paid to the sick lady and her sister. {53} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+Mrs Bennet and her two youngest girls.
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. 
+
+ 
+ LIZABETH passed the chief of the night in her sister’s room, and in the
+morning had the pleasure of being able to send a tolerable answer to the
+inquiries which she very early received from Mr. Bingley by a housemaid,
+and some time afterwards from the two elegant ladies who waited on his
+sisters. In spite of this amendment, {54} however, she requested to have a
+note sent to Longbourn, desiring her mother to visit Jane, and form her
+own judgment of her situation. The note was immediately despatched, and
+its contents as quickly complied with. Mrs. Bennet, accompanied by her
+two youngest girls, reached Netherfield soon after the family breakfast.
+
+
+
+ Had she found Jane in any apparent danger, Mrs. Bennet would have been
+very miserable; but being satisfied on seeing her that her illness was
+not alarming, she had no wish of her recovering immediately, as her
+restoration to health would probably remove her from Netherfield. She
+would not listen, therefore, to her daughter’s proposal of being carried
+home; neither did the apothecary, who arrived about the same time, think
+it at all advisable. After sitting a little while with Jane, on Miss
+Bingley’s appearance and invitation, the mother and three daughters all
+attended her into the breakfast parlour. Bingley met them with hopes
+that Mrs. Bennet had not found Miss Bennet worse than she expected.
+
+
+
+ “Indeed I have, sir,” was her answer. “She is a great deal too ill to be
+moved. Mr. Jones says we must not think of moving her. We must trespass
+a little longer on your kindness.”
+
+
+
+ “Removed!” cried Bingley. “It must not be thought of. My sister, I am
+sure, will not hear of her removal.”
+
+
+
+ “You may depend upon it, madam,” said Miss Bingley, with cold civility,
+“that Miss Bennet shall receive every possible attention while she
+remains with us.”
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet was profuse in her acknowledgments.
+
+
+
+ “I am sure,” she added, “if it was not for such good friends, I do not
+know what would become of her, for she is very ill indeed, and suffers a
+vast deal, though with the greatest patience in the world, which is
+always {55} the way with her, for she has, without exception, the sweetest
+temper I ever met with. I often tell my other girls they are nothing to
+ her . You have a sweet room here, Mr. Bingley, and a charming prospect
+over that gravel walk. I do not know a place in the country that is
+equal to Netherfield. You will not think of quitting it in a hurry, I
+hope, though you have but a short lease.”
+
+
+
+ “Whatever I do is done in a hurry,” replied he; “and therefore if I
+should resolve to quit Netherfield, I should probably be off in five
+minutes. At present, however, I consider myself as quite fixed here.”
+
+
+
+ “That is exactly what I should have supposed of you,” said Elizabeth.
+
+
+
+ “You begin to comprehend me, do you?” cried he, turning towards her.
+
+
+
+ “Oh yes—I understand you perfectly.”
+
+
+
+ “I wish I might take this for a compliment; but to be so easily seen
+through, I am afraid, is pitiful.”
+
+
+
+ “That is as it happens. It does not necessarily follow that a deep,
+intricate character is more or less estimable than such a one as yours.”
+
+
+
+ “Lizzy,” cried her mother, “remember where you are, and do not run on in
+the wild manner that you are suffered to do at home.”
+
+
+
+ “I did not know before,” continued Bingley, immediately, “that you were
+a studier of character. It must be an amusing study.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes; but intricate characters are the most amusing. They have at
+least that advantage.”
+
+
+
+ “The country,” said Darcy, “can in general supply but few subjects for
+such a study. In a country neighbourhood you move in a very confined and
+unvarying society. {56} ”
+
+
+
+ “But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be
+observed in them for ever.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, indeed,” cried Mrs. Bennet, offended by his manner of mentioning a
+country neighbourhood. “I assure you there is quite as much of that 
+going on in the country as in town.”
+
+
+
+ Everybody was surprised; and Darcy, after looking at her for a moment,
+turned silently away. Mrs. Bennet, who fancied she had gained a complete
+victory over him, continued her triumph,—
+
+
+
+ “I cannot see that London has any great advantage over the country, for
+my part, except the shops and public places. The country is a vast deal
+pleasanter, is not it, Mr. Bingley?”
+
+
+
+ “When I am in the country,” he replied, “I never wish to leave it; and
+when I am in town, it is pretty much the same. They have each their
+advantages, and I can be equally happy in either.”
+
+
+
+ “Ay, that is because you have the right disposition. But that
+gentleman,” looking at Darcy, “seemed to think the country was nothing
+at all.”
+
+
+
+ “Indeed, mamma, you are mistaken,” said Elizabeth, blushing for her
+mother. “You quite mistook Mr. Darcy. He only meant that there was not
+such a variety of people to be met with in the country as in town, which
+you must acknowledge to be true.”
+
+
+
+ “Certainly, my dear, nobody said there were; but as to not meeting with
+many people in this neighbourhood, I believe there are few
+neighbourhoods larger. I know we dine with four-and-twenty families.”
+
+
+
+ Nothing but concern for Elizabeth could enable Bingley to keep his
+countenance. His sister was less delicate, and directed her eye towards
+Mr. Darcy with a {57} very expressive smile. Elizabeth, for the sake of
+saying something that might turn her mother’s thoughts, now asked her if
+Charlotte Lucas had been at Longbourn since her coming away.
+
+
+
+ “Yes, she called yesterday with her father. What an agreeable man Sir
+William is, Mr. Bingley—is not he? so much the man of fashion! so
+genteel and so easy! He has always something to say to everybody. That 
+is my idea of good breeding; and those persons who fancy themselves very
+important and never open their mouths quite mistake the matter.”
+
+
+
+ “Did Charlotte dine with you?”
+
+
+
+ “No, she would go home. I fancy she was wanted about the mince-pies. For
+my part, Mr. Bingley, I always keep servants that can do their own
+work; my daughters are brought up differently. But everybody is to
+judge for themselves, and the Lucases are a very good sort of girls, I
+assure you. It is a pity they are not handsome! Not that I think
+Charlotte so very plain; but then she is our particular friend.”
+
+
+
+ “She seems a very pleasant young woman,” said Bingley.
+
+
+
+ “Oh dear, yes; but you must own she is very plain. Lady Lucas herself
+has often said so, and envied me Jane’s beauty. I do not like to boast
+of my own child; but to be sure, Jane—one does not often see anybody
+better looking. It is what everybody says. I do not trust my own
+partiality. When she was only fifteen there was a gentleman at my
+brother Gardiner’s in town so much in love with her, that my
+sister-in-law was sure he would make her an offer before we came away.
+But, however, he did not. Perhaps he thought her too young. However, he
+wrote some verses on her, and very pretty they were. {58} ”
+
+
+
+ “And so ended his affection,” said Elizabeth, impatiently. “There has
+been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. I wonder who first
+discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!”
+
+
+
+ “I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love,” said Darcy.
+
+
+
+ “Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is
+strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I
+am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.”
+
+
+
+ Darcy only smiled; and the general pause which ensued made Elizabeth
+tremble lest her mother should be exposing herself again. She longed to
+speak, but could think of nothing to say; and after a short silence Mrs.
+Bennet began repeating her thanks to Mr. Bingley for his kindness to
+Jane, with an apology for troubling him also with Lizzy. Mr. Bingley was
+unaffectedly civil in his answer, and forced his younger sister to be
+civil also, and say what the occasion required. She performed her part,
+indeed, without much graciousness, but Mrs. Bennet was satisfied, and
+soon afterwards ordered her carriage. Upon this signal, the youngest of
+her daughters put herself forward. The two girls had been whispering to
+each other during the whole visit; and the result of it was, that the
+youngest should tax Mr. Bingley with having promised on his first coming
+into the country to give a ball at Netherfield.
+
+
+
+ Lydia was a stout, well-grown girl of fifteen, with a fine complexion
+and good-humoured countenance; a favourite with her mother, whose
+affection had brought her into public at an early age. She had high
+animal spirits, and a sort of natural self-consequence, which the
+attentions of the officers, to whom her uncle’s good {59} dinners and her
+own easy manners recommended her, had increased into assurance. She was
+very equal, therefore, to address Mr. Bingley on the subject of the
+ball, and abruptly reminded him of his promise; adding, that it would be
+the most shameful thing in the world if he did not keep it. His answer
+to this sudden attack was delightful to her mother’s ear.
+
+
+
+ “I am perfectly ready, I assure you, to keep my engagement; and, when
+your sister is recovered, you shall, if you please, name the very day of
+the ball. But you would not wish to be dancing while she is ill?”
+
+
+
+ Lydia declared herself satisfied. “Oh yes—it would be much better to
+wait till Jane was well; and by that time, most likely, Captain Carter
+would be at Meryton again. And when you have given your ball,” she
+added, “I shall insist on their giving one also. I shall tell Colonel
+Forster it will be quite a shame if he does not.”
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet and her daughters then departed, and Elizabeth returned
+instantly to Jane, leaving her own and her relations’ behaviour to the
+remarks of the two ladies and Mr. Darcy; the latter of whom, however,
+could not be prevailed on to join in their censure of her , in spite of
+all Miss Bingley’s witticisms on fine eyes . {60} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER X. 
+
+ 
+ HE day passed much as the day before had done. Mrs. Hurst and Miss
+Bingley had spent some hours of the morning with the invalid, who
+continued, though slowly, to mend; and, in the evening, Elizabeth joined
+their party in the drawing-room. The loo table, however, did not appear.
+Mr. Darcy was writing, and Miss Bingley, seated near him, was watching
+the progress of his letter, and repeatedly calling off his attention by
+messages to his sister. Mr. Hurst and Mr. Bingley were at piquet, and
+Mrs. Hurst was observing their game.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth took up some needlework, and was sufficiently amused in
+attending to what passed between Darcy and his companion. The perpetual
+commendations of the lady either on his hand-writing, or on the evenness
+of his lines, or on the length of his letter, with the perfect unconcern
+with which her praises were received, formed a curious dialogue, and was
+exactly in unison with her opinion of each. {61} 
+
+
+
+ “How delighted Miss Darcy will be to receive such a letter!”
+
+
+
+ He made no answer.
+
+
+
+ “You write uncommonly fast.”
+
+
+
+ “You are mistaken. I write rather slowly.”
+
+
+
+ “How many letters you must have occasion to write in the course of a
+year! Letters of business, too! How odious I should think them!”
+
+
+
+ “It is fortunate, then, that they fall to my lot instead of to yours.”
+
+
+
+ “Pray tell your sister that I long to see her.”
+
+
+
+ “I have already told her so once, by your desire.”
+
+
+
+ “I am afraid you do not like your pen. Let me mend it for you. I mend
+pens remarkably well.”
+
+
+
+ “Thank you—but I always mend my own.”
+
+
+
+ “How can you contrive to write so even?”
+
+
+
+ He was silent.
+
+
+
+ “Tell your sister I am delighted to hear of her improvement on the harp,
+and pray let her know that I am quite in raptures with her beautiful
+little design for a table, and I think it infinitely superior to Miss
+Grantley’s.”
+
+
+
+ “Will you give me leave to defer your raptures till I write again? At
+present I have not room to do them justice.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, it is of no consequence. I shall see her in January. But do you
+always write such charming long letters to her, Mr. Darcy?”
+
+
+
+ “They are generally long; but whether always charming, it is not for me
+to determine.”
+
+
+
+ “It is a rule with me, that a person who can write a long letter with
+ease cannot write ill.”
+
+
+
+ “That will not do for a compliment to Darcy, Caroline,” cried her
+brother, “because he does not write with ease. {62} He studies too much
+for words of four syllables. Do not you, Darcy?”
+
+
+
+ “My style of writing is very different from yours.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh,” cried Miss Bingley, “Charles writes in the most careless way
+imaginable. He leaves out half his words, and blots the rest.”
+
+
+
+ “My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them; by which
+means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents.”
+
+
+
+ “Your humility, Mr. Bingley,” said Elizabeth, “must disarm reproof.”
+
+
+
+ “Nothing is more deceitful,” said Darcy, “than the appearance of
+humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an
+indirect boast.”
+
+
+
+ “And which of the two do you call my little recent piece of modesty?”
+
+
+
+ “The indirect boast; for you are really proud of your defects in
+writing, because you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of
+thought and carelessness of execution, which, if not estimable, you
+think at least highly interesting. The power of doing anything with
+quickness is always much prized by the possessor, and often without any
+attention to the imperfection of the performance. When you told Mrs.
+Bennet this morning, that if you ever resolved on quitting Netherfield
+you should be gone in five minutes, you meant it to be a sort of
+panegyric, of compliment to yourself; and yet what is there so very
+laudable in a precipitance which must leave very necessary business
+undone, and can be of no real advantage to yourself or anyone else?”
+
+
+
+ “Nay,” cried Bingley, “this is too much, to remember at night all the
+foolish things that were said in the morning. And yet, upon my honour, I
+believed what I {63} said of myself to be true, and I believe it at this
+moment. At least, therefore, I did not assume the character of needless
+precipitance merely to show off before the ladies.”
+
+
+
+ “I daresay you believed it; but I am by no means convinced that you
+would be gone with such celerity. Your conduct would be quite as
+dependent on chance as that of any man I know; and if, as you were
+mounting your horse, a friend were to say, ‘Bingley, you had better stay
+till next week,’ you would probably do it—you would probably not
+go—and, at another word, might stay a month.”
+
+
+
+ “You have only proved by this,” cried Elizabeth, “that Mr. Bingley did
+not do justice to his own disposition. You have shown him off now much
+more than he did himself.”
+
+
+
+ “I am exceedingly gratified,” said Bingley, “by your converting what my
+friend says into a compliment on the sweetness of my temper. But I am
+afraid you are giving it a turn which that gentleman did by no means
+intend; for he would certainly think the better of me if, under such a
+circumstance, I were to give a flat denial, and ride off as fast as I
+could.”
+
+
+
+ “Would Mr. Darcy then consider the rashness of your original intention
+as atoned for by your obstinacy in adhering to it?”
+
+
+
+ “Upon my word, I cannot exactly explain the matter—Darcy must speak for
+himself.”
+
+
+
+ “You expect me to account for opinions which you choose to call mine,
+but which I have never acknowledged. Allowing the case, however, to
+stand according to your representation, you must remember, Miss Bennet,
+that the friend who is supposed to desire his return to the house, {64} and
+the delay of his plan, has merely desired it, asked it without offering
+one argument in favour of its propriety.”
+
+
+
+ “To yield readily—easily—to the persuasion of a friend is no merit
+with you.”
+
+
+
+ “To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of
+either.”
+
+
+
+ “You appear to me, Mr. Darcy, to allow nothing for the influence of
+friendship and affection. A regard for the requester would often make
+one readily yield to a request, without waiting for arguments to reason
+one into it. I am not particularly speaking of such a case as you have
+supposed about Mr. Bingley. We may as well wait, perhaps, till the
+circumstance occurs, before we discuss the discretion of his behaviour
+thereupon. But in general and ordinary cases, between friend and friend,
+where one of them is desired by the other to change a resolution of no
+very great moment, should you think ill of that person for complying
+with the desire, without waiting to be argued into it?”
+
+
+
+ “Will it not be advisable, before we proceed on this subject, to arrange
+with rather more precision the degree of importance which is to
+appertain to this request, as well as the degree of intimacy subsisting
+between the parties?”
+
+
+
+ “By all means,” cried Bingley; “let us hear all the particulars, not
+forgetting their comparative height and size, for that will have more
+weight in the argument, Miss Bennet, than you may be aware of. I assure
+you that if Darcy were not such a great tall fellow, in comparison with
+myself, I should not pay him half so much deference. I declare I do not
+know a more awful object than Darcy on particular occasions, and in {65} 
+particular places; at his own house especially, and of a Sunday evening,
+when he has nothing to do.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Darcy smiled; but Elizabeth thought she could perceive that he was
+rather offended, and therefore checked her laugh. Miss Bingley warmly
+resented the indignity he had received, in an expostulation with her
+brother for talking such nonsense.
+
+
+
+ “I see your design, Bingley,” said his friend. “You dislike an argument,
+and want to silence this.”
+
+
+
+ “Perhaps I do. Arguments are too much like disputes. If you and Miss
+Bennet will defer yours till I am out of the room, I shall be very
+thankful; and then you may say whatever you like of me.”
+
+
+
+ “What you ask,” said Elizabeth, “is no sacrifice on my side; and Mr.
+Darcy had much better finish his letter.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Darcy took her advice, and did finish his letter.
+
+
+
+ When that business was over, he applied to Miss Bingley and Elizabeth
+for the indulgence of some music. Miss Bingley moved with alacrity to
+the pianoforte, and after a polite request that Elizabeth would lead the
+way, which the other as politely and more earnestly negatived, she
+seated herself.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Hurst sang with her sister; and while they were thus employed,
+Elizabeth could not help observing, as she turned over some music-books
+that lay on the instrument, how frequently Mr. Darcy’s eyes were fixed
+on her. She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of
+admiration to so great a man, and yet that he should look at her because
+he disliked her was still more strange. She could only imagine, however,
+at last, that she drew his notice because there was something about her
+more wrong and reprehensible, according to his ideas of right, than in
+any other person present. {66} The supposition did not pain her. She liked
+him too little to care for his approbation.
+
+
+
+ After playing some Italian songs, Miss Bingley varied the charm by a
+lively Scotch air; and soon afterwards Mr. Darcy, drawing near
+Elizabeth, said to her,—
+
+
+
+ “Do you not feel a great inclination, Miss Bennet, to seize such an
+opportunity of dancing a reel?”
+
+
+
+ She smiled, but made no answer. He repeated the question, with some
+surprise at her silence.
+
+
+
+ “Oh,” said she, “I heard you before; but I could not immediately
+determine what to say in reply. You wanted me, I know, to say ‘Yes,’
+that you might have the pleasure of despising my taste; but I always
+delight in overthrowing those kind of schemes, and cheating a person of
+their premeditated contempt. I have, therefore, made up my mind to tell
+you that I do not want to dance a reel at all; and now despise me if you
+dare.”
+
+
+
+ “Indeed I do not dare.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his
+gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her
+manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody, and Darcy had
+never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her. He really
+believed that, were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he
+should be in some danger.
+
+
+
+ Miss Bingley saw, or suspected, enough to be jealous; and her great
+anxiety for the recovery of her dear friend Jane received some
+assistance from her desire of getting rid of Elizabeth.
+
+
+
+ She often tried to provoke Darcy into disliking her guest, by talking of
+their supposed marriage, and planning his happiness in such an alliance.
+
+
+
+ “I hope,” said she, as they were walking together in {67} the shrubbery the
+next day, “you will give your mother-in-law a few hints, when this
+desirable event takes place, as to the advantage of holding her tongue;
+and if you can compass it, to cure the younger girls of running after
+the officers. And, if I may mention so delicate a subject, endeavour to
+check that little something, bordering on conceit and impertinence,
+which your lady possesses.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ “No, no; stay where you are”
+
+ 
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ “Have you anything else to propose for my domestic felicity? {68} ”
+
+
+
+ “Oh yes. Do let the portraits of your uncle and aunt Philips be placed
+in the gallery at Pemberley. Put them next to your great-uncle the
+judge. They are in the same profession, you know, only in different
+lines. As for your Elizabeth’s picture, you must not attempt to have it
+taken, for what painter could do justice to those beautiful eyes?”
+
+
+
+ “It would not be easy, indeed, to catch their expression; but their
+colour and shape, and the eyelashes, so remarkably fine, might be
+copied.”
+
+
+
+ At that moment they were met from another walk by Mrs. Hurst and
+Elizabeth herself.
+
+
+
+ “I did not know that you intended to walk,” said Miss Bingley, in some
+confusion, lest they had been overheard.
+
+
+
+ “You used us abominably ill,” answered Mrs. Hurst, “running away without
+telling us that you were coming out.”
+
+
+
+ Then taking the disengaged arm of Mr. Darcy, she left Elizabeth to walk
+by herself. The path just admitted three. Mr. Darcy felt their rudeness,
+and immediately said,—
+
+
+
+ “This walk is not wide enough for our party. We had better go into the
+avenue.”
+
+
+
+ But Elizabeth, who had not the least inclination to remain with them,
+laughingly answered,—
+
+
+
+ “No, no; stay where you are. You are charmingly grouped, and appear to
+uncommon advantage. The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a
+fourth. Good-bye.”
+
+
+
+ She then ran gaily off, rejoicing, as she rambled about, in the hope of
+being at home again in a day or two. Jane was already so much recovered
+as to intend leaving her room for a couple of hours that evening. {69} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+Piling up the fire.
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. 
+
+ 
+ HEN the ladies removed after dinner Elizabeth ran up to her sister, and
+seeing her well guarded from cold, attended her into the drawing-room,
+where she was welcomed by her two friends with many professions of
+pleasure; and Elizabeth had never seen them so agreeable as they were
+during the hour which passed before the gentlemen appeared. Their powers
+of conversation were considerable. They could describe an entertainment
+with accuracy, relate an anecdote with humour, and laugh at their
+acquaintance with spirit.
+
+
+
+ But when the gentlemen entered, Jane was no longer {70} the first object;
+Miss Bingley’s eyes were instantly turned towards Darcy, and she had
+something to say to him before he had advanced many steps. He addressed
+himself directly to Miss Bennet with a polite congratulation; Mr. Hurst
+also made her a slight bow, and said he was “very glad;” but diffuseness
+and warmth remained for Bingley’s salutation. He was full of joy and
+attention. The first half hour was spent in piling up the fire, lest she
+should suffer from the change of room; and she removed, at his desire,
+to the other side of the fireplace, that she might be farther from the
+door. He then sat down by her, and talked scarcely to anyone else.
+Elizabeth, at work in the opposite corner, saw it all with great
+delight.
+
+
+
+ When tea was over Mr. Hurst reminded his sister-in-law of the
+card-table—but in vain. She had obtained private intelligence that Mr.
+Darcy did not wish for cards, and Mr. Hurst soon found even his open
+petition rejected. She assured him that no one intended to play, and the
+silence of the whole party on the subject seemed to justify her. Mr.
+Hurst had, therefore, nothing to do but to stretch himself on one of the
+sofas and go to sleep. Darcy took up a book. Miss Bingley did the same;
+and Mrs. Hurst, principally occupied in playing with her bracelets and
+rings, joined now and then in her brother’s conversation with Miss
+Bennet.
+
+
+
+ Miss Bingley’s attention was quite as much engaged in watching Mr.
+Darcy’s progress through his book, as in reading her own; and she was
+perpetually either making some inquiry, or looking at his page. She
+could not win him, however, to any conversation; he merely answered her
+question and read on. At length, quite exhausted by the attempt to be
+amused with her own book, which she {71} had only chosen because it was the
+second volume of his, she gave a great yawn and said, “How pleasant it
+is to spend an evening in this way! I declare, after all, there is no
+enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a
+book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not
+an excellent library.”
+
+
+
+ No one made any reply. She then yawned again, threw aside her book, and
+cast her eyes round the room in quest of some amusement; when, hearing
+her brother mentioning a ball to Miss Bennet, she turned suddenly
+towards him and said,—
+
+
+
+ “By the bye Charles, are you really serious in meditating a dance at
+Netherfield? I would advise you, before you determine on it, to consult
+the wishes of the present party; I am much mistaken if there are not
+some among us to whom a ball would be rather a punishment than a
+pleasure.”
+
+
+
+ “If you mean Darcy,” cried her brother, “he may go to bed, if he
+chooses, before it begins; but as for the ball, it is quite a settled
+thing, and as soon as Nicholls has made white soup enough I shall send
+round my cards.”
+
+
+
+ “I should like balls infinitely better,” she replied, “if they were
+carried on in a different manner; but there is something insufferably
+tedious in the usual process of such a meeting. It would surely be much
+more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the
+day.”
+
+
+
+ “Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say; but it would not be
+near so much like a ball.”
+
+
+
+ Miss Bingley made no answer, and soon afterwards got up and walked about
+the room. Her figure was elegant, and she walked well; but Darcy, at
+whom it was {72} all aimed, was still inflexibly studious. In the
+desperation of her feelings, she resolved on one effort more; and,
+turning to Elizabeth, said,—
+
+
+
+ “Miss Eliza Bennet, let me persuade you to follow my example, and take a
+turn about the room. I assure you it is very refreshing after sitting so
+long in one attitude.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was surprised, but agreed to it immediately. Miss Bingley
+succeeded no less in the real object of her civility: Mr. Darcy looked
+up. He was as much awake to the novelty of attention in that quarter as
+Elizabeth herself could be, and unconsciously closed his book. He was
+directly invited to join their party, but he declined it, observing that
+he could imagine but two motives for their choosing to walk up and down
+the room together, with either of which motives his joining them would
+interfere. What could he mean? She was dying to know what could be his
+meaning—and asked Elizabeth whether she could at all understand him.
+
+
+
+ “Not at all,” was her answer; “but, depend upon it, he means to be
+severe on us, and our surest way of disappointing him will be to ask
+nothing about it.”
+
+
+
+ Miss Bingley, however, was incapable of disappointing Mr. Darcy in
+anything, and persevered, therefore, in requiring an explanation of his
+two motives.
+
+
+
+ “I have not the smallest objection to explaining them,” said he, as soon
+as she allowed him to speak. “You either choose this method of passing
+the evening because you are in each other’s confidence, and have secret
+affairs to discuss, or because you are conscious that your figures
+appear to the greatest advantage in walking: if the first, I should be
+completely in your way; and if the second, I can admire you much better
+as I sit by the fire.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, shocking!” cried Miss Bingley. “I never heard {73} anything so
+abominable. How shall we punish him for such a speech?”
+
+
+
+ “Nothing so easy, if you have but the inclination,” said Elizabeth. “We
+can all plague and punish one another. Tease him—laugh at him. Intimate
+as you are, you must know how it is to be done.”
+
+
+
+ “But upon my honour I do not . I do assure you that my intimacy has not
+yet taught me that . Tease calmness of temper and presence of mind! No,
+no; I feel he may defy us there. And as to laughter, we will not expose
+ourselves, if you please, by attempting to laugh without a subject. Mr.
+Darcy may hug himself.”
+
+
+
+ “Mr. Darcy is not to be laughed at!” cried Elizabeth. “That is an
+uncommon advantage, and uncommon I hope it will continue, for it would
+be a great loss to me to have many such acquaintance. I dearly love a
+laugh.”
+
+
+
+ “Miss Bingley,” said he, “has given me credit for more than can be. The
+wisest and best of men,—nay, the wisest and best of their actions,—may
+be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a
+joke.”
+
+
+
+ “Certainly,” replied Elizabeth, “there are such people, but I hope I am
+not one of them . I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies
+and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I
+laugh at them whenever I can. But these, I suppose, are precisely what
+you are without.”
+
+
+
+ “Perhaps that is not possible for anyone. But it has been the study of
+my life to avoid those weaknesses which often expose a strong
+understanding to ridicule.”
+
+
+
+ “Such as vanity and pride.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride—where there is a real
+superiority of mind—pride will be always under good regulation. {74} ”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth turned away to hide a smile.
+
+
+
+ “Your examination of Mr. Darcy is over, I presume,” said Miss Bingley;
+“and pray what is the result?”
+
+
+
+ “I am perfectly convinced by it that Mr. Darcy has no defect. He owns it
+himself without disguise.”
+
+
+
+ “No,” said Darcy, “I have made no such pretension. I have faults enough,
+but they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch
+for. It is, I believe, too little yielding; certainly too little for the
+convenience of the world. I cannot forget the follies and vices of
+others so soon as I ought, nor their offences against myself. My
+feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper
+would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost is lost for
+ever.”
+
+
+
+ “ That is a failing, indeed!” cried Elizabeth. “Implacable resentment
+ is a shade in a character. But you have chosen your fault well. I
+really cannot laugh at it. You are safe from me.”
+
+
+
+ “There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular
+evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.”
+
+
+
+ “And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.”
+
+
+
+ “And yours,” he replied, with a smile, “is wilfully to misunderstand
+them.”
+
+
+
+ “Do let us have a little music,” cried Miss Bingley, tired of a
+conversation in which she had no share. “Louisa, you will not mind my
+waking Mr. Hurst.”
+
+
+
+ Her sister made not the smallest objection, and the pianoforte was
+opened; and Darcy, after a few moments’ recollection, was not sorry for
+it. He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention. {75} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. 
+
+ 
+ N consequence of an agreement between the sisters, Elizabeth wrote the
+next morning to her mother, to beg that the carriage might be sent for
+them in the course of the day. But Mrs. Bennet, who had calculated on
+her daughters remaining at Netherfield till the following Tuesday, which
+would exactly finish Jane’s week, could not bring herself to receive
+them with pleasure before. Her answer, therefore, was not propitious, at
+least not to Elizabeth’s wishes, for she was impatient to get home. Mrs.
+Bennet sent them word that they could not possibly have the carriage
+before Tuesday; and in her postscript it was added, that if Mr. Bingley
+and his sister pressed them to stay longer, she could spare them very
+well. Against staying longer, however, Elizabeth was positively {76} 
+resolved—nor did she much expect it would be asked; and fearful, on the
+contrary, of being considered as intruding themselves needlessly long,
+she urged Jane to borrow Mr. Bingley’s carriage immediately, and at
+length it was settled that their original design of leaving Netherfield
+that morning should be mentioned, and the request made.
+
+
+
+ The communication excited many professions of concern; and enough was
+said of wishing them to stay at least till the following day to work on
+Jane; and till the morrow their going was deferred. Miss Bingley was
+then sorry that she had proposed the delay; for her jealousy and dislike
+of one sister much exceeded her affection for the other.
+
+
+
+ The master of the house heard with real sorrow that they were to go so
+soon, and repeatedly tried to persuade Miss Bennet that it would not be
+safe for her—that she was not enough recovered; but Jane was firm where
+she felt herself to be right.
+
+
+
+ To Mr. Darcy it was welcome intelligence: Elizabeth had been at
+Netherfield long enough. She attracted him more than he liked; and Miss
+Bingley was uncivil to her and more teasing than usual to himself. He
+wisely resolved to be particularly careful that no sign of admiration
+should now escape him—nothing that could elevate her with the hope of
+influencing his felicity; sensible that, if such an idea had been
+suggested, his behaviour during the last day must have material weight
+in confirming or crushing it. Steady to his purpose, he scarcely spoke
+ten words to her through the whole of Saturday: and though they were at
+one time left by themselves for half an hour, he adhered most
+conscientiously to his book, and would not even look at her. {77} 
+
+
+
+ On Sunday, after morning service, the separation, so agreeable to almost
+all, took place. Miss Bingley’s civility to Elizabeth increased at last
+very rapidly, as well as her affection for Jane; and when they parted,
+after assuring the latter of the pleasure it would always give her to
+see her either at Longbourn or Netherfield, and embracing her most
+tenderly, she even shook hands with the former. Elizabeth took leave of
+the whole party in the liveliest spirits.
+
+
+
+ They were not welcomed home very cordially by their mother. Mrs. Bennet
+wondered at their coming, and thought them very wrong to give so much
+trouble, and was sure Jane would have caught cold again. But their
+father, though very laconic in his expressions of pleasure, was really
+glad to see them; he had felt their importance in the family circle. The
+evening conversation, when they were all assembled, had lost much of its
+animation, and almost all its sense, by the absence of Jane and
+Elizabeth.
+
+
+
+ They found Mary, as usual, deep in the study of thorough bass and human
+nature; and had some new extracts to admire and some new observations of
+threadbare morality to listen to. Catherine and Lydia had information
+for them of a different sort. Much had been done, and much had been said
+in the regiment since the preceding Wednesday; several of the officers
+had dined lately with their uncle; a private had been flogged; and it
+had actually been hinted that Colonel Forster was going to be married. {78} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+hope, my dear,” said Mr. Bennet to his wife, as they were at
+breakfast the next morning, “that you have ordered a good dinner to-day,
+because I have reason to expect an addition to our family party.”
+
+
+
+ “Who do you mean, my dear? I know of nobody that is coming, I am sure,
+unless Charlotte Lucas should happen to call in; and I hope my dinners
+are good enough for her. I do not believe she often sees such at home.”
+
+
+
+ “The person of whom I speak is a gentleman and a stranger.”
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet’s eyes sparkled. “A gentleman and a stranger! It is Mr.
+Bingley, I am sure. Why, Jane—you never dropped a word of this—you sly
+thing! Well, I am sure I shall be extremely glad to see Mr. Bingley.
+But—good Lord! how unlucky! there is not a bit of fish to be got
+to-day. Lydia, my love, ring the bell. I must speak to Hill this
+moment.”
+
+
+
+ “It is not Mr. Bingley,” said her husband; “it is a person whom I
+never saw in the whole course of my life.”
+
+
+
+ This roused a general astonishment; and he had the {79} pleasure of being
+eagerly questioned by his wife and five daughters at once.
+
+
+
+ After amusing himself some time with their curiosity, he thus
+explained:—“About a month ago I received this letter, and about a
+fortnight ago I answered it; for I thought it a case of some delicacy,
+and requiring early attention. It is from my cousin, Mr. Collins, who,
+when I am dead, may turn you all out of this house as soon as he
+pleases.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, my dear,” cried his wife, “I cannot bear to hear that mentioned.
+Pray do not talk of that odious man. I do think it is the hardest thing
+in the world, that your estate should be entailed away from your own
+children; and I am sure, if I had been you, I should have tried long ago
+to do something or other about it.”
+
+
+
+ Jane and Elizabeth attempted to explain to her the nature of an entail.
+They had often attempted it before: but it was a subject on which Mrs.
+Bennet was beyond the reach of reason; and she continued to rail
+bitterly against the cruelty of settling an estate away from a family of
+five daughters, in favour of a man whom nobody cared anything about.
+
+
+
+ “It certainly is a most iniquitous affair,” said Mr. Bennet; “and
+nothing can clear Mr. Collins from the guilt of inheriting Longbourn.
+But if you will listen to his letter, you may, perhaps, be a little
+softened by his manner of expressing himself.”
+
+
+
+ “No, that I am sure I shall not: and I think it was very impertinent of
+him to write to you at all, and very hypocritical. I hate such false
+friends. Why could not he keep on quarrelling with you, as his father
+did before him?”
+
+
+
+ “Why, indeed, he does seem to have had some filial scruples on that
+head, as you will hear. {80} ”
+
+
+
+ “Hunsford, near Westerham, Kent, 15th October .
+
+
+
+ 
+“Dear Sir,
+
+
+
+
+
+ “The disagreement subsisting between yourself and my late honoured
+father always gave me much uneasiness; and, since I have had the
+misfortune to lose him, I have frequently wished to heal the
+breach: but, for some time, I was kept back by my own doubts,
+fearing lest it might seem disrespectful to his memory for me to be
+on good terms with anyone with whom it had always pleased him to be
+at variance.”—‘There, Mrs. Bennet.’—“My mind, however, is now
+made up on the subject; for, having received ordination at Easter,
+I have been so fortunate as to be distinguished by the patronage of
+the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, widow of Sir Lewis
+de Bourgh, whose bounty and beneficence has preferred me to the
+valuable rectory of this parish, where it shall be my earnest
+endeavour to demean myself with grateful respect towards her
+Ladyship, and be ever ready to perform those rites and ceremonies
+which are instituted by the Church of England. As a clergyman,
+moreover, I feel it my duty to promote and establish the blessing
+of peace in all families within the reach of my influence; and on
+these grounds I flatter myself that my present overtures of
+good-will are highly commendable, and that the circumstance of my
+being next in the entail of Longbourn estate will be kindly
+overlooked on your side, and not lead you to reject the offered
+olive branch. I cannot be otherwise than concerned at being the
+means of injuring your amiable daughters, and beg leave to
+apologize for it, as well as to assure you of my readiness to make
+them every possible amends; but of this hereafter. If you should
+have no objection to receive me into {81} your house, I propose myself
+the satisfaction of waiting on you and your family, Monday,
+November 18th, by four o’clock, and shall probably trespass on your
+hospitality till the Saturday se’nnight following, which I can do
+without any inconvenience, as Lady Catherine is far from objecting
+to my occasional absence on a Sunday, provided that some other
+clergyman is engaged to do the duty of the day. I remain, dear sir,
+with respectful compliments to your lady and daughters, your
+well-wisher and friend,
+
+
+
+ 
+“ William Collins .”
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ “At four o’clock, therefore, we may expect this peace-making gentleman,”
+said Mr. Bennet, as he folded up the letter. “He seems to be a most
+conscientious and polite young man, upon my word; and, I doubt not, will
+prove a valuable acquaintance, especially if Lady Catherine should be so
+indulgent as to let him come to us again.”
+
+
+
+ “There is some sense in what he says about the girls, however; and, if
+he is disposed to make them any amends, I shall not be the person to
+discourage him.”
+
+
+
+ “Though it is difficult,” said Jane, “to guess in what way he can mean
+to make us the atonement he thinks our due, the wish is certainly to his
+credit.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was chiefly struck with his extraordinary deference for Lady
+Catherine, and his kind intention of christening, marrying, and burying
+his parishioners whenever it were required.
+
+
+
+ “He must be an oddity, I think,” said she. “I cannot make him out. There
+is something very pompous in his style. And what can he mean by
+apologizing for being next in the entail? We cannot suppose he would
+help it, if he could. Can he be a sensible man, sir?”
+
+
+
+ “No, my dear; I think not. I have great hopes of {82} finding him quite the
+reverse. There is a mixture of servility and self-importance in his
+letter which promises well. I am impatient to see him.”
+
+
+
+ “In point of composition,” said Mary, “his letter does not seem
+defective. The idea of the olive branch perhaps is not wholly new, yet I
+think it is well expressed.”
+
+
+
+ To Catherine and Lydia neither the letter nor its writer were in any
+degree interesting. It was next to impossible that their cousin should
+come in a scarlet coat, and it was now some weeks since they had
+received pleasure from the society of a man in any other colour. As for
+their mother, Mr. Collins’s letter had done away much of her ill-will,
+and she was preparing to see him with a degree of composure which
+astonished her husband and daughters.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Collins was punctual to his time, and was received with great
+politeness by the whole family. Mr. Bennet indeed said little; but the
+ladies were ready enough to talk, and Mr. Collins seemed neither in need
+of encouragement, nor inclined to be silent himself. He was a tall,
+heavy-looking young man of five-and-twenty. His air was grave and
+stately, and his manners were very formal. He had not been long seated
+before he complimented Mrs. Bennet on having so fine a family of
+daughters, said he had heard much of their beauty, but that, in this
+instance, fame had fallen short of the truth; and added, that he did not
+doubt her seeing them all in due time well disposed of in marriage. This
+gallantry was not much to the taste of some of his hearers; but Mrs.
+Bennet, who quarrelled with no compliments, answered most readily,—
+
+
+
+ “You are very kind, sir, I am sure; and I wish with all {83} my heart it may
+prove so; for else they will be destitute enough. Things are settled so
+oddly.”
+
+
+
+ “You allude, perhaps, to the entail of this estate.”
+
+
+
+ “Ah, sir, I do indeed. It is a grievous affair to my poor girls, you
+must confess. Not that I mean to find fault with you , for such things,
+I know, are all chance in this world. There is no knowing how estates
+will go when once they come to be entailed.”
+
+
+
+ “I am very sensible, madam, of the hardship to my fair cousins, and
+could say much on the subject, but that I am cautious of appearing
+forward and precipitate. But I can assure the young ladies that I come
+prepared to admire them. At present I will not say more, but, perhaps,
+when we are better acquainted——”
+
+
+
+ He was interrupted by a summons to dinner; and the girls smiled on each
+other. They were not the only objects of Mr. Collins’s admiration. The
+hall, the dining-room, and all its furniture, were examined and praised;
+and his commendation of everything would have touched Mrs. Bennet’s
+heart, but for the mortifying supposition of his viewing it all as his
+own future property. The dinner, too, in its turn, was highly admired;
+and he begged to know to which of his fair cousins the excellence of its
+cookery was owing. But here he was set right by Mrs. Bennet, who assured
+him, with some asperity, that they were very well able to keep a good
+cook, and that her daughters had nothing to do in the kitchen. He begged
+pardon for having displeased her. In a softened tone she declared
+herself not at all offended; but he continued to apologize for about a
+quarter of an hour. {84} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV 
+
+ 
+ 
+ URING dinner, Mr. Bennet scarcely spoke at all; but when the servants
+were withdrawn, he thought it time to have some conversation with his
+guest, and therefore started a subject in which he expected him to
+shine, by observing that he seemed very fortunate in his patroness. Lady
+Catherine de Bourgh’s attention to his wishes, and consideration for his
+comfort, appeared very remarkable. Mr. Bennet could not have chosen
+better. Mr. Collins was eloquent in her praise. The subject elevated him
+to more than usual solemnity of manner; and with a most important aspect
+he protested that he had never in his life witnessed such behaviour in a
+person of rank—such affability and condescension, as he had himself
+experienced from Lady Catherine. She had been graciously pleased to
+approve of both the discourses which he had already had the honour of
+preaching before her. She had also asked him twice to dine at Rosings,
+and had sent for him only the Saturday before, to make up her pool of
+quadrille in the evening. Lady Catherine was reckoned proud by many
+people, he knew, but he had never seen anything but affability in her.
+She had always spoken to him as she would to any other gentleman; she
+made not the smallest objection to his joining in the society of the
+neighbourhood, nor to his leaving his parish occasionally {85} for a week or
+two to visit his relations. She had even condescended to advise him to
+marry as soon as he could, provided he chose with discretion; and had
+once paid him a visit in his humble parsonage, where she had perfectly
+approved all the alterations he had been making, and had even vouchsafed
+to suggest some herself,—some shelves in the closets upstairs.
+
+
+
+ “That is all very proper and civil, I am sure,” said Mrs. Bennet, “and I
+dare say she is a very agreeable woman. It is a pity that great ladies
+in general are not more like her. Does she live near you, sir?”
+
+
+
+ “The garden in which stands my humble abode is separated only by a lane
+from Rosings Park, her Ladyship’s residence.”
+
+
+
+ “I think you said she was a widow, sir? has she any family?”
+
+
+
+ “She has one only daughter, the heiress of Rosings, and of very
+extensive property.”
+
+
+
+ “Ah,” cried Mrs. Bennet, shaking her head, “then she is better off than
+many girls. And what sort of young lady is she? Is she handsome?”
+
+
+
+ “She is a most charming young lady, indeed. Lady Catherine herself says
+that, in point of true beauty, Miss de Bourgh is far superior to the
+handsomest of her sex; because there is that in her features which marks
+the young woman of distinguished birth. She is unfortunately of a sickly
+constitution, which has prevented her making that progress in many
+accomplishments which she could not otherwise have failed of, as I am
+informed by the lady who superintended her education, and who still
+resides with them. But she is perfectly amiable, and often condescends
+to drive by my humble abode in her little phaeton and ponies. {86} ”
+
+
+
+ “Has she been presented? I do not remember her name among the ladies at
+court.”
+
+
+
+ “Her indifferent state of health unhappily prevents her being in town;
+and by that means, as I told Lady Catherine myself one day, has deprived
+the British Court of its brightest ornament. Her Ladyship seemed pleased
+with the idea; and you may imagine that I am happy on every occasion to
+offer those little delicate compliments which are always acceptable to
+ladies. I have more than once observed to Lady Catherine, that her
+charming daughter seemed born to be a duchess; and that the most
+elevated rank, instead of giving her consequence, would be adorned by
+her. These are the kind of little things which please her Ladyship, and
+it is a sort of attention which I conceive myself peculiarly bound to
+pay.”
+
+
+
+ “You judge very properly,” said Mr. Bennet; “and it is happy for you
+that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask
+whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the
+moment, or are the result of previous study?”
+
+
+
+ “They arise chiefly from what is passing at the time; and though I
+sometimes amuse myself with suggesting and arranging such little elegant
+compliments as may be adapted to ordinary occasions, I always wish to
+give them as unstudied an air as possible.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bennet’s expectations were fully answered. His cousin was as absurd
+as he had hoped; and he listened to him with the keenest enjoyment,
+maintaining at the same time the most resolute composure of countenance,
+and, except in an occasional glance at Elizabeth, requiring no partner
+in his pleasure.
+
+
+
+ By tea-time, however, the dose had been enough, and {87} Mr. Bennet was glad
+to take his guest into the drawing-room again, and when tea was over,
+glad to invite him
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“Protested
+
+that he never read novels” H.T Feb 94
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ to read aloud to the ladies. Mr. Collins readily assented, and a book
+was produced; but on beholding it (for everything announced it to be
+from a circulating library) {88} he started back, and, begging pardon,
+protested that he never read novels. Kitty stared at him, and Lydia
+exclaimed. Other books were produced, and after some deliberation he
+chose “Fordyce’s Sermons.” Lydia gaped as he opened the volume; and
+before he had, with very monotonous solemnity, read three pages, she
+interrupted him with,—
+
+
+
+ “Do you know, mamma, that my uncle Philips talks of turning away
+Richard? and if he does, Colonel Forster will hire him. My aunt told me
+so herself on Saturday. I shall walk to Meryton to-morrow to hear more
+about it, and to ask when Mr. Denny comes back from town.”
+
+
+
+ Lydia was bid by her two eldest sisters to hold her tongue; but Mr.
+Collins, much offended, laid aside his book, and said,—
+
+
+
+ “I have often observed how little young ladies are interested by books
+of a serious stamp, though written solely for their benefit. It amazes
+me, I confess; for certainly there can be nothing so advantageous to
+them as instruction. But I will no longer importune my young cousin.”
+
+
+
+ Then, turning to Mr. Bennet, he offered himself as his antagonist at
+backgammon. Mr. Bennet accepted the challenge, observing that he acted
+very wisely in leaving the girls to their own trifling amusements. Mrs.
+Bennet and her daughters apologized most civilly for Lydia’s
+interruption, and promised that it should not occur again, if he would
+resume his book; but Mr. Collins, after assuring them that he bore his
+young cousin no ill-will, and should never resent her behaviour as any
+affront, seated himself at another table with Mr. Bennet, and prepared
+for backgammon. {89} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XV. 
+
+ 
+ R. COLLINS was not a sensible man, and the deficiency of nature had
+been but little assisted by education or society; the greatest part of
+his life having been spent under the guidance of an illiterate and
+miserly father; and though he belonged to one of the universities, he
+had merely kept the necessary terms without forming at it any useful
+acquaintance. The subjection in which his father had brought him up had
+given him originally great humility of manner; but it was now a good
+deal counteracted by the self-conceit of a weak head, living in
+retirement, and the consequential feelings of early and unexpected
+prosperity. A fortunate chance had recommended him to Lady Catherine de
+Bourgh when the living of Hunsford was vacant; and the respect which he
+felt for her high rank, and his veneration for her as his patroness,
+mingling with a very good opinion of himself, of his authority as a
+clergyman, and his right as a rector, made him altogether a mixture of
+pride and obsequiousness, self-importance and humility.
+
+
+
+ Having now a good house and a very sufficient income, he intended to
+marry; and in seeking a reconciliation with the Longbourn family he had
+a wife in view, as he {90} meant to choose one of the daughters, if he found
+them as handsome and amiable as they were represented by common report.
+This was his plan of amends—of atonement—for inheriting their father’s
+estate; and he thought it an excellent one, full of eligibility and
+suitableness, and excessively generous and disinterested on his own
+part.
+
+
+
+ His plan did not vary on seeing them. Miss Bennet’s lovely face
+confirmed his views, and established all his strictest notions of what
+was due to seniority; and for the first evening she was his settled
+choice. The next morning, however, made an alteration; for in a quarter
+of an hour’s tête-à-tête with Mrs. Bennet before breakfast, a
+conversation beginning with his parsonage-house, and leading naturally
+to the avowal of his hopes, that a mistress for it might be found at
+Longbourn, produced from her, amid very complaisant smiles and general
+encouragement, a caution against the very Jane he had fixed on. “As to
+her younger daughters, she could not take upon her to say—she could
+not positively answer—but she did not know of any prepossession;—her
+ eldest daughter she must just mention—she felt it incumbent on her to
+hint, was likely to be very soon engaged.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Collins had only to change from Jane to Elizabeth—and it was soon
+done—done while Mrs. Bennet was stirring the fire. Elizabeth, equally
+next to Jane in birth and beauty, succeeded her of course.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet treasured up the hint, and trusted that she might soon have
+two daughters married; and the man whom she could not bear to speak of
+the day before, was now high in her good graces.
+
+
+
+ Lydia’s intention of walking to Meryton was not for {91} gotten: every sister
+except Mary agreed to go with her; and Mr. Collins was to attend them,
+at the request of Mr. Bennet, who was most anxious to get rid of him,
+and have his library to himself; for thither Mr. Collins had followed
+him after breakfast, and there he would continue, nominally engaged with
+one of the largest folios in the collection, but really talking to Mr.
+Bennet, with little cessation, of his house and garden at Hunsford. Such
+doings discomposed Mr. Bennet exceedingly. In his library he had been
+always sure of leisure and tranquillity; and though prepared, as he told
+Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the
+house, he was used to be free from them there: his civility, therefore,
+was most prompt in inviting Mr. Collins to join his daughters in their
+walk; and Mr. Collins, being in fact much better fitted for a walker
+than a reader, was extremely well pleased to close his large book, and
+go.
+
+
+
+ In pompous nothings on his side, and civil assents on that of his
+cousins, their time passed till they entered Meryton. The attention of
+the younger ones was then no longer to be gained by him . Their eyes
+were immediately wandering up the street in quest of the officers, and
+nothing less than a very smart bonnet, indeed, or a really new muslin in
+a shop window, could recall them.
+
+
+
+ But the attention of every lady was soon caught by a young man, whom
+they had never seen before, of most gentlemanlike appearance, walking
+with an officer on the other side of the way. The officer was the very
+Mr. Denny concerning whose return from London Lydia came to inquire, and
+he bowed as they passed. All were struck with the stranger’s air, all
+wondered who he could be; and Kitty and Lydia, determined if possible {92} 
+to find out, led the way across the street, under pretence of wanting
+something in an opposite shop, and fortunately had just gained the
+pavement, when the two gentlemen, turning back, had reached the same
+spot. Mr. Denny addressed them directly, and entreated permission to
+introduce his friend, Mr. Wickham, who had returned with him the day
+before from town, and, he was happy to say, had accepted a commission in
+their corps. This was exactly as it should be; for the young man wanted
+only regimentals to make him completely charming. His appearance was
+greatly in his favour: he had all the best parts of beauty, a fine
+countenance, a good figure, and very pleasing address. The introduction
+was followed up on his side by a happy readiness of conversation—a
+readiness at the same time perfectly correct and unassuming; and the
+whole party were still standing and talking together very agreeably,
+when the sound of horses drew their notice, and Darcy and Bingley were
+seen riding down the street. On distinguishing the ladies of the group
+the two gentlemen came directly towards them, and began the usual
+civilities. Bingley was the principal spokesman, and Miss Bennet the
+principal object. He was then, he said, on his way to Longbourn on
+purpose to inquire after her. Mr. Darcy corroborated it with a bow, and
+was beginning to determine not to fix his eyes on Elizabeth, when they
+were suddenly arrested by the sight of the stranger; and Elizabeth
+happening to see the countenance of both as they looked at each other,
+was all astonishment at the effect of the meeting. Both changed colour,
+one looked white, the other red. Mr. Wickham, after a few moments,
+touched his hat—a salutation which Mr. Darcy just deigned to return.
+What could be the meaning of it? {93} It was impossible to imagine; it was
+impossible not to long to know.
+
+
+
+ In another minute Mr. Bingley, but without seeming to have noticed what
+passed, took leave and rode on with his friend.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Denny and Mr. Wickham walked with the young ladies to the door of
+Mr. Philips’s house, and then made their bows, in spite of Miss Lydia’s
+pressing entreaties that they would come in, and even in spite of Mrs.
+Philips’s throwing up the parlour window, and loudly seconding the
+invitation.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Philips was always glad to see her nieces; and the two eldest, from
+their recent absence, were particularly welcome; and she was eagerly
+expressing her surprise at their sudden return home, which, as their own
+carriage had not fetched them, she should have known nothing about, if
+she had not happened to see Mr. Jones’s shopboy in the street, who had
+told her that they were not to send any more draughts to Netherfield,
+because the Miss Bennets were come away, when her civility was claimed
+towards Mr. Collins by Jane’s introduction of him. She received him with
+her very best politeness, which he returned with as much more,
+apologizing for his intrusion, without any previous acquaintance with
+her, which he could not help flattering himself, however, might be
+justified by his relationship to the young ladies who introduced him to
+her notice. Mrs. Philips was quite awed by such an excess of good
+breeding; but her contemplation of one stranger was soon put an end to
+by exclamations and inquiries about the other, of whom, however, she
+could only tell her nieces what they already knew, that Mr. Denny had
+brought him from London, and that he was to have a lieutenant’s
+ {94} commission in the ——shire. She had been watching him the last hour,
+she said, as he walked up and down the street,—and had Mr. Wickham
+appeared, Kitty and Lydia would certainly have continued the occupation;
+but unluckily no one passed the windows now except a few of the
+officers, who, in comparison with the stranger, were become “stupid,
+disagreeable fellows.” Some of them were to dine with the Philipses the
+next day, and their aunt promised to make her husband call on Mr.
+Wickham, and give him an invitation also, if the family from Longbourn
+would come in the evening. This was agreed to; and Mrs. Philips
+protested that they would have a nice comfortable noisy game of lottery
+tickets, and a little bit of hot supper afterwards. The prospect of such
+delights was very cheering, and they parted in mutual good spirits. Mr.
+Collins repeated his apologies in quitting the room, and was assured,
+with unwearying civility, that they were perfectly needless.
+
+
+
+ As they walked home, Elizabeth related to Jane what she had seen pass
+between the two gentlemen; but though Jane would have defended either or
+both, had they appeared to be wrong, she could no more explain such
+behaviour than her sister.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Collins on his return highly gratified Mrs. Bennet by admiring Mrs.
+Philips’s manners and politeness. He protested that, except Lady
+Catherine and her daughter, he had never seen a more elegant woman; for
+she had not only received him with the utmost civility, but had even
+pointedly included him in her invitation for the next evening, although
+utterly unknown to her before. Something, he supposed, might be
+attributed to his connection with them, but yet he had never met with so
+much attention in the whole course of his life. {95} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI. 
+
+ 
+ S no objection was made to the young people’s engagement with their
+aunt, and all Mr. Collins’s scruples of leaving Mr. and Mrs. Bennet for
+a single evening during his visit were most steadily resisted, the coach
+conveyed him and his five cousins at a suitable hour to Meryton; and the
+girls had the pleasure of hearing, as they entered the drawing-room,
+that Mr. Wickham had {96} accepted their uncle’s invitation, and was then in
+the house.
+
+
+
+ When this information was given, and they had all taken their seats, Mr.
+Collins was at leisure to look around him and admire, and he was so much
+struck with the size and furniture of the apartment, that he declared he
+might almost have supposed himself in the small summer breakfast parlour
+at Rosings; a comparison that did not at first convey much
+gratification; but when Mrs. Philips understood from him what Rosings
+was, and who was its proprietor, when she had listened to the
+description of only one of Lady Catherine’s drawing-rooms, and found
+that the chimney-piece alone had cost eight hundred pounds, she felt all
+the force of the compliment, and would hardly have resented a comparison
+with the housekeeper’s room.
+
+
+
+ In describing to her all the grandeur of Lady Catherine and her mansion,
+with occasional digressions in praise of his own humble abode, and the
+improvements it was receiving, he was happily employed until the
+gentlemen joined them; and he found in Mrs. Philips a very attentive
+listener, whose opinion of his consequence increased with what she
+heard, and who was resolving to retail it all among her neighbours as
+soon as she could. To the girls, who could not listen to their cousin,
+and who had nothing to do but to wish for an instrument, and examine
+their own indifferent imitations of china on the mantel-piece, the
+interval of waiting appeared very long. It was over at last, however.
+The gentlemen did approach: and when Mr. Wickham walked into the room,
+Elizabeth felt that she had neither been seeing him before, nor thinking
+of him since, with the smallest degree of {97} unreasonable admiration. The
+officers of the ——shire were in general a very creditable,
+gentlemanlike set and the best of them were of the present party; but
+Mr. Wickham was as far beyond them all in person, countenance, air, and
+walk, as they were superior to the broad-faced stuffy uncle Philips,
+breathing port wine, who followed them into the room.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“The officers of the ——shire”
+
+
+
+
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ Mr. Wickham was the happy man towards whom almost every female eye was
+turned, and Elizabeth was {98} the happy woman by whom he finally seated
+himself; and the agreeable manner in which he immediately fell into
+conversation, though it was only on its being a wet night, and on the
+probability of a rainy season, made her feel that the commonest,
+dullest, most threadbare topic might be rendered interesting by the
+skill of the speaker.
+
+
+
+ With such rivals for the notice of the fair as Mr. Wickham and the
+officers, Mr. Collins seemed to sink into insignificance; to the young
+ladies he certainly was nothing; but he had still at intervals a kind
+listener in Mrs. Philips, and was, by her watchfulness, most abundantly
+supplied with coffee and muffin.
+
+
+
+ When the card tables were placed, he had an opportunity of obliging her,
+in return, by sitting down to whist.
+
+
+
+ “I know little of the game at present,” said he, “but I shall be glad to
+improve myself; for in my situation of life——” Mrs. Philips was very
+thankful for his compliance, but could not wait for his reason.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Wickham did not play at whist, and with ready delight was he
+received at the other table between Elizabeth and Lydia. At first there
+seemed danger of Lydia’s engrossing him entirely, for she was a most
+determined talker; but being likewise extremely fond of lottery tickets,
+she soon grew too much interested in the game, too eager in making bets
+and exclaiming after prizes, to have attention for anyone in particular.
+Allowing for the common demands of the game, Mr. Wickham was therefore
+at leisure to talk to Elizabeth, and she was very willing to hear him,
+though what she chiefly wished to hear she could not hope to be told,
+the history of his acquaintance with Mr. Darcy. She dared not even
+mention that gentleman. Her curiosity, how {99} ever, was unexpectedly
+relieved. Mr. Wickham began the subject himself. He inquired how far
+Netherfield was from Meryton; and, after receiving her answer, asked in
+a hesitating manner how long Mr. Darcy had been staying there.
+
+
+
+ “About a month,” said Elizabeth; and then, unwilling to let the subject
+drop, added, “he is a man of very large property in Derbyshire, I
+understand.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes,” replied Wickham; “his estate there is a noble one. A clear ten
+thousand per annum. You could not have met with a person more capable of
+giving you certain information on that head than myself—for I have been
+connected with his family, in a particular manner, from my infancy.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth could not but look surprised.
+
+
+
+ “You may well be surprised, Miss Bennet, at such an assertion, after
+seeing, as you probably might, the very cold manner of our meeting
+yesterday. Are you much acquainted with Mr. Darcy?”
+
+
+
+ “As much as I ever wish to be,” cried Elizabeth, warmly. “I have spent
+four days in the same house with him, and I think him very
+disagreeable.”
+
+
+
+ “I have no right to give my opinion,” said Wickham, “as to his being
+agreeable or otherwise. I am not qualified to form one. I have known him
+too long and too well to be a fair judge. It is impossible for me to
+be impartial. But I believe your opinion of him would in general
+astonish—and, perhaps, you would not express it quite so strongly
+anywhere else. Here you are in your own family.”
+
+
+
+ “Upon my word I say no more here than I might say in any house in the
+neighbourhood, except Netherfield. He is not at all liked in
+Hertfordshire. Everybody is {100} disgusted with his pride. You will not find
+him more favourably spoken of by anyone.”
+
+
+
+ “I cannot pretend to be sorry,” said Wickham, after a short
+interruption, “that he or that any man should not be estimated beyond
+their deserts; but with him I believe it does not often happen. The
+world is blinded by his fortune and consequence, or frightened by his
+high and imposing manners, and sees him only as he chooses to be seen.”
+
+
+
+ “I should take him, even on my slight acquaintance, to be an
+ill-tempered man.”
+
+
+
+ Wickham only shook his head.
+
+
+
+ “I wonder,” said he, at the next opportunity of speaking, “whether he is
+likely to be in this country much longer.”
+
+
+
+ “I do not at all know; but I heard nothing of his going away when I
+was at Netherfield. I hope your plans in favour of the ——shire will
+not be affected by his being in the neighbourhood.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh no—it is not for me to be driven away by Mr. Darcy. If he 
+wishes to avoid seeing me he must go. We are not on friendly terms,
+and it always gives me pain to meet him, but I have no reason for
+avoiding him but what I might proclaim to all the world—a sense of
+very great ill-usage, and most painful regrets at his being what he is.
+His father, Miss Bennet, the late Mr. Darcy, was one of the best men
+that ever breathed, and the truest friend I ever had; and I can never be
+in company with this Mr. Darcy without being grieved to the soul by a
+thousand tender recollections. His behaviour to myself has been
+scandalous; but I verily believe I could forgive him anything and
+everything, rather than his disappointing the hopes and disgracing the
+memory of his father. {101} ”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth found the interest of the subject increase, and listened with
+all her heart; but the delicacy of it prevented further inquiry.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Wickham began to speak on more general topics, Meryton, the
+neighbourhood, the society, appearing highly pleased with all that he
+had yet seen, and speaking of the latter, especially, with gentle but
+very intelligible gallantry.
+
+
+
+ “It was the prospect of constant society, and good society,” he added,
+“which was my chief inducement to enter the ——shire. I know it to be a
+most respectable, agreeable corps; and my friend Denny tempted me
+further by his account of their present quarters, and the very great
+attentions and excellent acquaintance Meryton had procured them.
+Society, I own, is necessary to me. I have been a disappointed man, and
+my spirits will not bear solitude. I must have employment and society.
+A military life is not what I was intended for, but circumstances have
+now made it eligible. The church ought to have been my profession—I
+was brought up for the church; and I should at this time have been in
+possession of a most valuable living, had it pleased the gentleman we
+were speaking of just now.”
+
+
+
+ “Indeed!”
+
+
+
+ “Yes—the late Mr. Darcy bequeathed me the next presentation of the best
+living in his gift. He was my godfather, and excessively attached to me.
+I cannot do justice to his kindness. He meant to provide for me amply,
+and thought he had done it; but when the living fell, it was given
+elsewhere.”
+
+
+
+ “Good heavens!” cried Elizabeth; “but how could that be? How could his
+will be disregarded? Why did not you seek legal redress? {102} ”
+
+
+
+ “There was just such an informality in the terms of the bequest as to
+give me no hope from law. A man of honour could not have doubted the
+intention, but Mr. Darcy chose to doubt it—or to treat it as a merely
+conditional recommendation, and to assert that I had forfeited all claim
+to it by extravagance, imprudence, in short, anything or nothing.
+Certain it is that the living became vacant two years ago, exactly as I
+was of an age to hold it, and that it was given to another man; and no
+less certain is it, that I cannot accuse myself of having really done
+anything to deserve to lose it. I have a warm unguarded temper, and I
+may perhaps have sometimes spoken my opinion of him, and to him, too
+freely. I can recall nothing worse. But the fact is, that we are very
+different sort of men, and that he hates me.”
+
+
+
+ “This is quite shocking! He deserves to be publicly disgraced.”
+
+
+
+ “Some time or other he will be—but it shall not be by me . Till I
+can forget his father, I can never defy or expose him .”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth honoured him for such feelings, and thought him handsomer than
+ever as he expressed them.
+
+
+
+ “But what,” said she, after a pause, “can have been his motive? what can
+have induced him to behave so cruelly?”
+
+
+
+ “A thorough, determined dislike of me—a dislike which I cannot but
+attribute in some measure to jealousy. Had the late Mr. Darcy liked me
+less, his son might have borne with me better; but his father’s uncommon
+attachment to me irritated him, I believe, very early in life. He had
+not a temper to bear the sort of competition in which we stood—the sort
+of preference which was often given me. {103} ”
+
+
+
+ “I had not thought Mr. Darcy so bad as this—though I have never liked
+him, I had not thought so very ill of him—I had supposed him to be
+despising his fellow-creatures in general, but did not suspect him of
+descending to such malicious revenge, such injustice, such inhumanity as
+this!”
+
+
+
+ After a few minutes’ reflection, however, she continued, “I do 
+remember his boasting one day, at Netherfield, of the implacability of
+his resentments, of his having an unforgiving temper. His disposition
+must be dreadful.”
+
+
+
+ “I will not trust myself on the subject,” replied Wickham; “ I can
+hardly be just to him.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was again deep in thought, and after a time exclaimed, “To
+treat in such a manner the godson, the friend, the favourite of his
+father!” She could have added, “A young man, too, like you , whose very
+countenance may vouch for your being amiable.” But she contented herself
+with—“And one, too, who had probably been his own companion from
+childhood, connected together, as I think you said, in the closest
+manner.”
+
+
+
+ “We were born in the same parish, within the same park; the greatest
+part of our youth was passed together: inmates of the same house,
+sharing the same amusements, objects of the same parental care. My 
+father began life in the profession which your uncle, Mr. Philips,
+appears to do so much credit to; but he gave up everything to be of use
+to the late Mr. Darcy, and devoted all his time to the care of the
+Pemberley property. He was most highly esteemed by Mr. Darcy, a most
+intimate, confidential friend. Mr. Darcy often acknowledged himself to
+be under the greatest obligations to my father’s active superintendence;
+and when, immediately before my father’s death, Mr. Darcy gave him a
+voluntary promise {104} of providing for me, I am convinced that he felt it
+to be as much a debt of gratitude to him as of affection to myself.”
+
+
+
+ “How strange!” cried Elizabeth. “How abominable! I wonder that the very
+pride of this Mr. Darcy has not made him just to you. If from no better
+motive, that he should not have been too proud to be dishonest,—for
+dishonesty I must call it.”
+
+
+
+ “It is wonderful,” replied Wickham; “for almost all his actions may be
+traced to pride; and pride has often been his best friend. It has
+connected him nearer with virtue than any other feeling. But we are none
+of us consistent; and in his behaviour to me there were stronger
+impulses even than pride.”
+
+
+
+ “Can such abominable pride as his have ever done him good?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes; it has often led him to be liberal and generous; to give his money
+freely, to display hospitality, to assist his tenants, and relieve the
+poor. Family pride, and filial pride, for he is very proud of what his
+father was, have done this. Not to appear to disgrace his family, to
+degenerate from the popular qualities, or lose the influence of the
+Pemberley House, is a powerful motive. He has also brotherly pride,
+which, with some brotherly affection, makes him a very kind and
+careful guardian of his sister; and you will hear him generally cried up
+as the most attentive and best of brothers.”
+
+
+
+ “What sort of a girl is Miss Darcy?”
+
+
+
+ He shook his head. “I wish I could call her amiable. It gives me pain to
+speak ill of a Darcy; but she is too much like her brother,—very, very
+proud. As a child, she was affectionate and pleasing, and extremely fond
+of me; and I have devoted hours and hours to her amuse {105} ment. But she is
+nothing to me now. She is a handsome girl, about fifteen or sixteen,
+and, I understand, highly accomplished. Since her father’s death her
+home has been London, where a lady lives with her, and superintends her
+education.”
+
+
+
+ After many pauses and many trials of other subjects, Elizabeth could not
+help reverting once more to the first, and saying,—
+
+
+
+ “I am astonished at his intimacy with Mr. Bingley. How can Mr. Bingley,
+who seems good-humour itself, and is, I really believe, truly amiable,
+be in friendship with such a man? How can they suit each other? Do you
+know Mr. Bingley?”
+
+
+
+ “Not at all.”
+
+
+
+ “He is a sweet-tempered, amiable, charming man. He cannot know what Mr.
+Darcy is.”
+
+
+
+ “Probably not; but Mr. Darcy can please where he chooses. He does not
+want abilities. He can be a conversible companion if he thinks it worth
+his while. Among those who are at all his equals in consequence, he is a
+very different man from what he is to the less prosperous. His pride
+never deserts him; but with the rich he is liberal-minded, just,
+sincere, rational, honourable, and, perhaps, agreeable,—allowing
+something for fortune and figure.”
+
+
+
+ The whist party soon afterwards breaking up, the players gathered round
+the other table, and Mr. Collins took his station between his cousin
+Elizabeth and Mrs. Philips. The usual inquiries as to his success were
+made by the latter. It had not been very great; he had lost every point;
+but when Mrs. Philips began to express her concern thereupon, he assured
+her, with much earnest gravity, that it was not of the least importance;
+that he {106} considered the money as a mere trifle, and begged she would not
+make herself uneasy.
+
+
+
+ “I know very well, madam,” said he, “that when persons sit down to a
+card table they must take their chance of these things,—and happily I
+am not in such circumstances as to make five shillings any object. There
+are, undoubtedly, many who could not say the same; but, thanks to Lady
+Catherine de Bourgh, I am removed far beyond the necessity of regarding
+little matters.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Wickham’s attention was caught; and after observing Mr. Collins for
+a few moments, he asked Elizabeth in a low voice whether her relations
+were very intimately acquainted with the family of De Bourgh.
+
+
+
+ “Lady Catherine de Bourgh,” she replied, “has very lately given him a
+living. I hardly know how Mr. Collins was first introduced to her
+notice, but he certainly has not known her long.”
+
+
+
+ “You know of course that Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Lady Anne Darcy
+were sisters; consequently that she is aunt to the present Mr. Darcy.”
+
+
+
+ “No, indeed, I did not. I knew nothing at all of Lady Catherine’s
+connections. I never heard of her existence till the day before
+yesterday.”
+
+
+
+ “Her daughter, Miss de Bourgh, will have a very large fortune, and it is
+believed that she and her cousin will unite the two estates.”
+
+
+
+ This information made Elizabeth smile, as she thought of poor Miss
+Bingley. Vain indeed must be all her attentions, vain and useless her
+affection for his sister and her praise of himself, if he were already
+self-destined to another.
+
+
+
+ “Mr. Collins,” said she, “speaks highly both of Lady Catherine and her
+daughter; but, from some particulars {107} that he has related of her
+Ladyship, I suspect his gratitude misleads him; and that, in spite of
+her being his patroness, she is an arrogant, conceited woman.”
+
+
+
+ “I believe her to be both in a great degree,” replied Wickham; “I have
+not seen her for many years; but I very well remember that I never liked
+her, and that her manners were dictatorial and insolent. She has the
+reputation of being remarkably sensible and clever; but I rather believe
+she derives part of her abilities from her rank and fortune, part from
+her authoritative manner, and the rest from the pride of her nephew, who
+chooses that everyone connected with him should have an understanding of
+the first class.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth allowed that he had given a very rational account of it, and
+they continued talking together with mutual satisfaction till supper put
+an end to cards, and gave the rest of the ladies their share of Mr.
+Wickham’s attentions. There could be no conversation in the noise of
+Mrs. Philips’s supper party, but his manners recommended him to
+everybody. Whatever he said, was said well; and whatever he did, done
+gracefully. Elizabeth went away with her head full of him. She could
+think of nothing but of Mr. Wickham, and of what he had told her, all
+the way home; but there was not time for her even to mention his name as
+they went, for neither Lydia nor Mr. Collins were once silent. Lydia
+talked incessantly of lottery tickets, of the fish she had lost and the
+fish she had won; and Mr. Collins, in describing the civility of Mr. and
+Mrs. Philips, protesting that he did not in the least regard his losses
+at whist, enumerating all the dishes at supper, and repeatedly fearing
+that he crowded his cousins, had more to say than he could well manage
+before the carriage stopped at Longbourn House. {108} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+delighted to see their dear friend again.
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII. 
+
+ 
+ LIZABETH related to Jane, the next day, what had passed between Mr.
+Wickham and herself. Jane listened with astonishment and concern: she
+knew not how to believe that Mr. Darcy could be so unworthy of Mr.
+Bingley’s regard; and yet it was not in her nature to question the
+veracity of a young man of such amiable appearance as Wickham. The
+possibility of his having really endured such unkindness was enough to
+interest all her tender feelings; and nothing therefore remained to be
+done but to think well of them both, to defend the conduct of each, and
+throw into the account of accident or mistake whatever could not be
+otherwise explained. {109} 
+
+
+
+ “They have both,” said she, “been deceived, I dare say, in some way or
+other, of which we can form no idea. Interested people have perhaps
+misrepresented each to the other. It is, in short, impossible for us to
+conjecture the causes or circumstances which may have alienated them,
+without actual blame on either side.”
+
+
+
+ “Very true, indeed; and now, my dear Jane, what have you got to say in
+behalf of the interested people who have probably been concerned in the
+business? Do clear them , too, or we shall be obliged to think ill of
+somebody.”
+
+
+
+ “Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my
+opinion. My dearest Lizzy, do but consider in what a disgraceful light
+it places Mr. Darcy, to be treating his father’s favourite in such a
+manner,—one whom his father had promised to provide for. It is
+impossible. No man of common humanity, no man who had any value for his
+character, could be capable of it. Can his most intimate friends be so
+excessively deceived in him? Oh no.”
+
+
+
+ “I can much more easily believe Mr. Bingley’s being imposed on than that
+Mr. Wickham should invent such a history of himself as he gave me last
+night; names, facts, everything mentioned without ceremony. If it be not
+so, let Mr. Darcy contradict it. Besides, there was truth in his looks.”
+
+
+
+ “It is difficult, indeed—it is distressing. One does not know what to
+think.”
+
+
+
+ “I beg your pardon;—one knows exactly what to think.”
+
+
+
+ But Jane could think with certainty on only one point,—that Mr.
+Bingley, if he had been imposed on, {110} would have much to suffer when
+the affair became public.
+
+
+
+ The two young ladies were summoned from the shrubbery, where this
+conversation passed, by the arrival of some of the very persons of whom
+they had been speaking; Mr. Bingley and his sisters came to give their
+personal invitation for the long expected ball at Netherfield, which was
+fixed for the following Tuesday. The two ladies were delighted to see
+their dear friend again, called it an age since they had met, and
+repeatedly asked what she had been doing with herself since their
+separation. To the rest of the family they paid little attention;
+avoiding Mrs. Bennet as much as possible, saying not much to Elizabeth,
+and nothing at all to the others. They were soon gone again, rising from
+their seats with an activity which took their brother by surprise, and
+hurrying off as if eager to escape from Mrs. Bennet’s civilities.
+
+
+
+ The prospect of the Netherfield ball was extremely agreeable to every
+female of the family. Mrs. Bennet chose to consider it as given in
+compliment to her eldest daughter, and was particularly flattered by
+receiving the invitation from Mr. Bingley himself, instead of a
+ceremonious card. Jane pictured to herself a happy evening in the
+society of her two friends, and the attentions of their brother; and
+Elizabeth thought with pleasure of dancing a great deal with Mr.
+Wickham, and of seeing a confirmation of everything in Mr. Darcy’s look
+and behaviour. The happiness anticipated by Catherine and Lydia depended
+less on any single event, or any particular person; for though they
+each, like Elizabeth, meant to dance half the evening with Mr. Wickham,
+he was by no means the only partner who {111} could satisfy them, and a ball
+was, at any rate, a ball. And even Mary could assure her family that she
+had no disinclination for it.
+
+
+
+ “While I can have my mornings to myself,” said she, “it is enough. I
+think it is no sacrifice to join occasionally in evening engagements.
+Society has claims on us all; and I profess myself one of those who
+consider intervals of recreation and amusement as desirable for
+everybody.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth’s spirits were so high on the occasion, that though she did
+not often speak unnecessarily to Mr. Collins, she could not help asking
+him whether he intended to accept Mr. Bingley’s invitation, and if he
+did, whether he would think it proper to join in the evening’s
+amusement; and she was rather surprised to find that he entertained no
+scruple whatever on that head, and was very far from dreading a rebuke,
+either from the Archbishop or Lady Catherine de Bourgh, by venturing to
+dance.
+
+
+
+ “I am by no means of opinion, I assure you,” said he, “that a ball of
+this kind, given by a young man of character, to respectable people, can
+have any evil tendency; and I am so far from objecting to dancing
+myself, that I shall hope to be honoured with the hands of all my fair
+cousins in the course of the evening; and I take this opportunity of
+soliciting yours, Miss Elizabeth, for the two first dances especially; a
+preference which I trust my cousin Jane will attribute to the right
+cause, and not to any disrespect for her.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth felt herself completely taken in. She had fully proposed being
+engaged by Wickham for those very dances; and to have Mr. Collins
+instead!—her liveliness had been never worse timed. There was no {112} help
+for it, however. Mr. Wickham’s happiness and her own was perforce
+delayed a little longer, and Mr. Collins’s proposal accepted with as
+good a grace as she could. She was not the better pleased with his
+gallantry, from the idea it suggested of something more. It now first
+struck her, that she was selected from among her sisters as worthy of
+being the mistress of Hunsford Parsonage, and of assisting to form a
+quadrille table at Rosings, in the absence of more eligible visitors.
+The idea soon reached to conviction, as she observed his increasing
+civilities towards herself, and heard his frequent attempt at a
+compliment on her wit and vivacity; and though more astonished than
+gratified herself by this effect of her charms, it was not long before
+her mother gave her to understand that the probability of their marriage
+was exceedingly agreeable to her . Elizabeth, however, did not choose
+to take the hint, being well aware that a serious dispute must be the
+consequence of any reply. Mr. Collins might never make the offer, and,
+till he did, it was useless to quarrel about him.
+
+
+
+ If there had not been a Netherfield ball to prepare for and talk of, the
+younger Miss Bennets would have been in a pitiable state at this time;
+for, from the day of the invitation to the day of the ball, there was
+such a succession of rain as prevented their walking to Meryton once. No
+aunt, no officers, no news could be sought after; the very shoe-roses
+for Netherfield were got by proxy. Even Elizabeth might have found some
+trial of her patience in weather which totally suspended the improvement
+of her acquaintance with Mr. Wickham; and nothing less than a dance on
+Tuesday could have made such a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday
+endurable to Kitty and Lydia. {113} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII. 
+
+ 
+ ILL Elizabeth entered the drawing-room at Netherfield, and looked in
+vain for Mr. Wickham among the cluster of red coats there assembled, a
+doubt of his being present had never occurred to her. The certainty of
+meeting him had not been checked by any of those recollections that
+might not unreasonably have alarmed her. She had dressed with more than
+usual care, and prepared in the highest spirits for the conquest of all
+that remained unsubdued of his heart, trusting that it was not more than
+might be won in the course of the evening. But in an {114} instant arose the
+dreadful suspicion of his being purposely omitted, for Mr. Darcy’s
+pleasure, in the Bingleys’ invitation to the officers; and though this
+was not exactly the case, the absolute fact of his absence was
+pronounced by his friend Mr. Denny, to whom Lydia eagerly applied, and
+who told them that Wickham had been obliged to go to town on business
+the day before, and was not yet returned; adding, with a significant
+smile,—
+
+
+
+ “I do not imagine his business would have called him away just now, if
+he had not wished to avoid a certain gentleman here.”
+
+
+
+ This part of his intelligence, though unheard by Lydia, was caught by
+Elizabeth; and, as it assured her that Darcy was not less answerable for
+Wickham’s absence than if her first surmise had been just, every feeling
+of displeasure against the former was so sharpened by immediate
+disappointment, that she could hardly reply with tolerable civility to
+the polite inquiries which he directly afterwards approached to make.
+Attention, forbearance, patience with Darcy, was injury to Wickham. She
+was resolved against any sort of conversation with him, and turned away
+with a degree of ill-humour which she could not wholly surmount even in
+speaking to Mr. Bingley, whose blind partiality provoked her.
+
+
+
+ But Elizabeth was not formed for ill-humour; and though every prospect
+of her own was destroyed for the evening, it could not dwell long on her
+spirits; and, having told all her griefs to Charlotte Lucas, whom she
+had not seen for a week, she was soon able to make a voluntary
+transition to the oddities of her cousin, and to point him out to her
+particular notice. The two first dances, however, brought a return of
+distress: they were dances of mortification. Mr. Collins, awkward and
+solemn, {115} apologizing instead of attending, and often moving wrong
+without being aware of it, gave her all the shame and misery which a
+disagreeable partner for a couple of dances can give. The moment of her
+release from him was ecstasy.
+
+
+
+ She danced next with an officer, and had the refreshment of talking of
+Wickham, and of hearing that he was universally liked. When those dances
+were over, she returned to Charlotte Lucas, and was in conversation with
+her, when she found herself suddenly addressed by Mr. Darcy, who took
+her so much by surprise in his application for her hand, that, without
+knowing what she did, she accepted him. He walked away again
+immediately, and she was left to fret over her own want of presence of
+mind: Charlotte tried to console her.
+
+
+
+ “I dare say you will find him very agreeable.”
+
+
+
+ “Heaven forbid! That would be the greatest misfortune of all! To find
+a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate! Do not wish me such an
+evil.”
+
+
+
+ When the dancing recommenced, however, and Darcy approached to claim her
+hand, Charlotte could not help cautioning her, in a whisper, not to be a
+simpleton, and allow her fancy for Wickham to make her appear unpleasant
+in the eyes of a man often times his consequence. Elizabeth made no
+answer, and took her place in the set, amazed at the dignity to which
+she was arrived in being allowed to stand opposite to Mr. Darcy, and
+reading in her neighbours’ looks their equal amazement in beholding it.
+They stood for some time without speaking a word; and she began to
+imagine that their silence was to last through the two dances, and, at
+first, was resolved not to break it; till suddenly fancying that it
+would be the greater punishment to her partner to oblige him to talk, {116} 
+she made some slight observation on the dance. He replied, and was again
+silent. After a pause of some minutes, she addressed him a second time,
+with—
+
+
+
+ “It is your turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy. I talked about the
+dance, and you ought to make some kind of remark on the size of the
+room, or the number of couples.”
+
+
+
+ He smiled, and assured her that whatever she wished him to say should be
+said.
+
+
+
+ “Very well; that reply will do for the present. Perhaps, by-and-by, I
+may observe that private balls are much pleasanter than public ones; but
+ now we may be silent.”
+
+
+
+ “Do you talk by rule, then, while you are dancing?”
+
+
+
+ “Sometimes. One must speak a little, you know. It would look odd to be
+entirely silent for half an hour together; and yet, for the advantage of
+ some , conversation ought to be so arranged as that they may have the
+trouble of saying as little as possible.”
+
+
+
+ “Are you consulting your own feelings in the present case, or do you
+imagine that you are gratifying mine?”
+
+
+
+ “Both,” replied Elizabeth archly; “for I have always seen a great
+similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial,
+taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say
+something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to
+posterity with all the éclat of a proverb.”
+
+
+
+ “This is no very striking resemblance of your own character, I am sure,”
+said he. “How near it may be to mine , I cannot pretend to say. You 
+think it a faithful portrait, undoubtedly.”
+
+
+
+ “I must not decide on my own performance.”
+
+
+
+ He made no answer; and they were again silent till they had gone down
+the dance, when he asked her if she {117} and her sisters did not very often
+walk to Meryton. She answered in the affirmative; and, unable to resist
+the temptation, added, “When you met us there the other day, we had just
+been forming a new acquaintance.”
+
+
+
+ The effect was immediate. A deeper shade of hauteur overspread his
+features, but he said not a word; and Elizabeth, though blaming herself
+for her own weakness, could not go on. At length Darcy spoke, and in a
+constrained manner said,—
+
+
+
+ “Mr. Wickham is blessed with such happy manners as may insure his
+ making friends; whether he may be equally capable of retaining them,
+is less certain.”
+
+
+
+ “He has been so unlucky as to lose your friendship,” replied Elizabeth,
+with emphasis, “and in a manner which he is likely to suffer from all
+his life.”
+
+
+
+ Darcy made no answer, and seemed desirous of changing the subject. At
+that moment Sir William Lucas appeared close to them, meaning to pass
+through the set to the other side of the room; but, on perceiving Mr.
+Darcy, he stopped, with a bow of superior courtesy, to compliment him on
+his dancing and his partner.
+
+
+
+ “I have been most highly gratified, indeed, my dear sir; such very
+superior dancing is not often seen. It is evident that you belong to the
+first circles. Allow me to say, however, that your fair partner does not
+disgrace you: and that I must hope to have this pleasure often repeated,
+especially when a certain desirable event, my dear Miss Eliza (glancing
+at her sister and Bingley), shall take place. What congratulations will
+then flow in! I appeal to Mr. Darcy;—but let me not interrupt you, sir.
+You will not thank me for detaining you from the bewitching converse of
+that young lady, whose bright eyes are also upbraiding me. {118} ”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“Such very superior dancing is not
+
+often seen.”
+
+
+
+
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ The latter part of this address was scarcely heard by Darcy; but Sir
+William’s allusion to his friend seemed to strike him forcibly, and his
+eyes were directed, with a very serious expression, towards Bingley and
+Jane, who were dancing together. Recovering himself, however, shortly,
+he turned to his partner, and said,—
+
+
+
+ “Sir William’s interruption has made me forget what we were talking
+of. {119} ”
+
+
+
+ “I do not think we were speaking at all. Sir William could not have
+interrupted any two people in the room who had less to say for
+themselves. We have tried two or three subjects already without success,
+and what we are to talk of next I cannot imagine.”
+
+
+
+ “What think you of books?” said he, smiling.
+
+
+
+ “Books—oh no!—I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same
+feelings.”
+
+
+
+ “I am sorry you think so; but if that be the case, there can at least be
+no want of subject. We may compare our different opinions.”
+
+
+
+ “No—I cannot talk of books in a ball-room; my head is always full of
+something else.”
+
+
+
+ “The present always occupies you in such scenes—does it?” said he,
+with a look of doubt.
+
+
+
+ “Yes, always,” she replied, without knowing what she said; for her
+thoughts had wandered far from the subject, as soon afterwards appeared
+by her suddenly exclaiming, “I remember hearing you once say, Mr. Darcy,
+that you hardly ever forgave;—that your resentment, once created, was
+unappeasable. You are very cautious, I suppose, as to its being
+created ?”
+
+
+
+ “I am,” said he, with a firm voice.
+
+
+
+ “And never allow yourself to be blinded by prejudice?”
+
+
+
+ “I hope not.”
+
+
+
+ “It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion,
+to be secure of judging properly at first.”
+
+
+
+ “May I ask to what these questions tend?”
+
+
+
+ “Merely to the illustration of your character,” said she, endeavouring
+to shake off her gravity. “I am trying to make it out.”
+
+
+
+ “And what is your success? {120} ”
+
+
+
+ She shook her head. “I do not get on at all. I hear such different
+accounts of you as puzzle me exceedingly.”
+
+
+
+ “I can readily believe,” answered he, gravely, “that reports may vary
+greatly with respect to me; and I could wish, Miss Bennet, that you were
+not to sketch my character at the present moment, as there is reason to
+fear that the performance would reflect no credit on either.”
+
+
+
+ “But if I do not take your likeness now, I may never have another
+opportunity.”
+
+
+
+ “I would by no means suspend any pleasure of yours,” he coldly replied.
+She said no more, and they went down the other dance and parted in
+silence; on each side dissatisfied, though not to an equal degree; for
+in Darcy’s breast there was a tolerably powerful feeling towards her,
+which soon procured her pardon, and directed all his anger against
+another.
+
+
+
+ They had not long separated when Miss Bingley came towards her, and,
+with an expression of civil disdain, thus accosted her,—
+
+
+
+ “So, Miss Eliza, I hear you are quite delighted with George Wickham?
+Your sister has been talking to me about him, and asking me a thousand
+questions; and I find that the young man forgot to tell you, among his
+other communications, that he was the son of old Wickham, the late Mr.
+Darcy’s steward. Let me recommend you, however, as a friend, not to give
+implicit confidence to all his assertions; for, as to Mr. Darcy’s using
+him ill, it is perfectly false: for, on the contrary, he has been always
+remarkably kind to him, though George Wickham has treated Mr. Darcy in a
+most infamous manner. I do not know the particulars, but I know very
+well that Mr. Darcy is not in the least to {121} blame; that he cannot bear
+to hear George Wickham mentioned; and that though my brother thought he
+could not well avoid including him in his invitation to the officers, he
+was excessively glad to find that he had taken himself out of the way.
+His coming into the country at all is a most insolent thing, indeed, and
+I wonder how he could presume to do it. I pity you, Miss Eliza, for this
+discovery of your favourite’s guilt; but really, considering his
+descent, one could not expect much better.”
+
+
+
+ “His guilt and his descent appear, by your account, to be the same,”
+said Elizabeth, angrily; “for I have heard you accuse him of nothing
+worse than of being the son of Mr. Darcy’s steward, and of that , I can
+assure you, he informed me himself.”
+
+
+
+ “I beg your pardon,” replied Miss Bingley, turning away with a sneer.
+“Excuse my interference; it was kindly meant.”
+
+
+
+ “Insolent girl!” said Elizabeth to herself. “You are much mistaken if
+you expect to influence me by such a paltry attack as this. I see
+nothing in it but your own wilful ignorance and the malice of Mr.
+Darcy.” She then sought her eldest sister, who had undertaken to make
+inquiries on the same subject of Bingley. Jane met her with a smile of
+such sweet complacency, a glow of such happy expression, as sufficiently
+marked how well she was satisfied with the occurrences of the evening.
+Elizabeth instantly read her feelings; and, at that moment, solicitude
+for Wickham, resentment against his enemies, and everything else, gave
+way before the hope of Jane’s being in the fairest way for happiness.
+
+
+
+ “I want to know,” said she, with a countenance no less smiling than her
+sister’s, “what you have learnt {122} about Mr. Wickham. But perhaps you have
+been too pleasantly engaged to think of any third person, in which case
+you may be sure of my pardon.”
+
+
+
+ “No,” replied Jane, “I have not forgotten him; but I have nothing
+satisfactory to tell you. Mr. Bingley does not know the whole of his
+history, and is quite ignorant of the circumstances which have
+principally offended Mr. Darcy; but he will vouch for the good conduct,
+the probity and honour, of his friend, and is perfectly convinced that
+Mr. Wickham has deserved much less attention from Mr. Darcy than he has
+received; and I am sorry to say that by his account, as well as his
+sister’s, Mr. Wickham is by no means a respectable young man. I am
+afraid he has been very imprudent, and has deserved to lose Mr. Darcy’s
+regard.”
+
+
+
+ “Mr. Bingley does not know Mr. Wickham himself.”
+
+
+
+ “No; he never saw him till the other morning at Meryton.”
+
+
+
+ “This account then is what he has received from Mr. Darcy. I am
+perfectly satisfied. But what does he say of the living?”
+
+
+
+ “He does not exactly recollect the circumstances, though he has heard
+them from Mr. Darcy more than once, but he believes that it was left to
+him conditionally only.”
+
+
+
+ “I have not a doubt of Mr. Bingley’s sincerity,” said Elizabeth warmly,
+“but you must excuse my not being convinced by assurances only. Mr.
+Bingley’s defence of his friend was a very able one, I dare say; but
+since he is unacquainted with several parts of the story, and has learnt
+the rest from that friend himself, I shall venture still to think of
+both gentlemen as I did before.”
+
+
+
+ She then changed the discourse to one more gratifying {123} to each, and on
+which there could be no difference of sentiment. Elizabeth listened with
+delight to the happy though modest hopes which Jane entertained of
+Bingley’s regard, and said all in her power to heighten her confidence
+in it. On their being joined by Mr. Bingley himself, Elizabeth withdrew
+to Miss Lucas; to whose inquiry after the pleasantness of her last
+partner she had scarcely replied, before Mr. Collins came up to them,
+and told her with great exultation, that he had just been so fortunate
+as to make a most important discovery.
+
+
+
+ “I have found out,” said he, “by a singular accident, that there is now
+in the room a near relation to my patroness. I happened to overhear the
+gentleman himself mentioning to the young lady who does the honours of
+this house the names of his cousin Miss De Bourgh, and of her mother,
+Lady Catherine. How wonderfully these sort of things occur! Who would
+have thought of my meeting with—perhaps—a nephew of Lady Catherine de
+Bourgh in this assembly! I am most thankful that the discovery is made
+in time for me to pay my respects to him, which I am now going to do,
+and trust he will excuse my not having done it before. My total
+ignorance of the connection must plead my apology.”
+
+
+
+ “You are not going to introduce yourself to Mr. Darcy?”
+
+
+
+ “Indeed I am. I shall entreat his pardon for not having done it earlier.
+I believe him to be Lady Catherine’s nephew . It will be in my power to
+assure him that her Ladyship was quite well yesterday se’nnight.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth tried hard to dissuade him from such a scheme; assuring him
+that Mr. Darcy would consider his addressing him without introduction as
+an impertinent {124} freedom, rather than a compliment to his aunt; that it
+was not in the least necessary there should be any notice on either
+side, and that if it were, it must belong to Mr. Darcy, the superior in
+consequence, to begin the acquaintance. Mr. Collins listened to her with
+the determined air of following his own inclination, and when she ceased
+speaking, replied thus,—
+
+
+
+ “My dear Miss Elizabeth, I have the highest opinion in the world of your
+excellent judgment in all matters within the scope of your
+understanding, but permit me to say that there must be a wide difference
+between the established forms of ceremony amongst the laity and those
+which regulate the clergy; for, give me leave to observe that I consider
+the clerical office as equal in point of dignity with the highest rank
+in the kingdom—provided that a proper humility of behaviour is at the
+same time maintained. You must, therefore, allow me to follow the
+dictates of my conscience on this occasion, which lead me to perform
+what I look on as a point of duty. Pardon me for neglecting to profit by
+your advice, which on every other subject shall be my constant guide,
+though in the case before us I consider myself more fitted by education
+and habitual study to decide on what is right than a young lady like
+yourself;” and with a low bow he left her to attack Mr. Darcy, whose
+reception of his advances she eagerly watched, and whose astonishment at
+being so addressed was very evident. Her cousin prefaced his speech with
+a solemn bow, and though she could not hear a word of it, she felt as if
+hearing it all, and saw in the motion of his lips the words “apology,”
+“Hunsford,” and “Lady Catherine de Bourgh.” It vexed her to see him
+expose himself to such a man. Mr. Darcy was eyeing him with
+un {125} restrained wonder; and when at last Mr. Collins allowed him to speak,
+replied with an air of distant civility. Mr. Collins, however, was not
+discouraged from speaking again, and Mr. Darcy’s contempt seemed
+abundantly increasing with the length of his second speech; and at the
+end of it he only made him a slight bow, and moved another way: Mr.
+Collins then returned to Elizabeth.
+
+
+
+ “I have no reason, I assure you,” said he, “to be dissatisfied with my
+reception. Mr. Darcy seemed much pleased with the attention. He answered
+me with the utmost civility, and even paid me the compliment of saying,
+that he was so well convinced of Lady Catherine’s discernment as to be
+certain she could never bestow a favour unworthily. It was really a very
+handsome thought. Upon the whole, I am much pleased with him.”
+
+
+
+ As Elizabeth had no longer any interest of her own to pursue, she turned
+her attention almost entirely on her sister and Mr. Bingley; and the
+train of agreeable reflections which her observations gave birth to made
+her perhaps almost as happy as Jane. She saw her in idea settled in that
+very house, in all the felicity which a marriage of true affection could
+bestow; and she felt capable, under such circumstances, of endeavouring
+even to like Bingley’s two sisters. Her mother’s thoughts she plainly
+saw were bent the same way, and she determined not to venture near her,
+lest she might hear too much. When they sat down to supper, therefore,
+she considered it a most unlucky perverseness which placed them within
+one of each other; and deeply was she vexed to find that her mother was
+talking to that one person (Lady Lucas) freely, openly, and of nothing
+else but of her expectation that Jane would be soon married to Mr.
+Bingley. It was an animating subject, and Mrs. Bennet {126} seemed incapable
+of fatigue while enumerating the advantages of the match. His being such
+a charming young man, and so rich, and living but three miles from them,
+were the first points of self-gratulation; and then it was such a
+comfort to think how fond the two sisters were of Jane, and to be
+certain that they must desire the connection as much as she could do. It
+was, moreover, such a promising thing for her younger daughters, as
+Jane’s marrying so greatly must throw them in the way of other rich men;
+and, lastly, it was so pleasant at her time of life to be able to
+consign her single daughters to the care of their sister, that she might
+not be obliged to go into company more than she liked. It was necessary
+to make this circumstance a matter of pleasure, because on such
+occasions it is the etiquette; but no one was less likely than Mrs.
+Bennet to find comfort in staying at home at any period of her life. She
+concluded with many good wishes that Lady Lucas might soon be equally
+fortunate, though evidently and triumphantly believing there was no
+chance of it.
+
+
+
+ In vain did Elizabeth endeavour to check the rapidity of her mother’s
+words, or persuade her to describe her felicity in a less audible
+whisper; for to her inexpressible vexation she could perceive that the
+chief of it was overheard by Mr. Darcy, who sat opposite to them. Her
+mother only scolded her for being nonsensical.
+
+
+
+ “What is Mr. Darcy to me, pray, that I should be afraid of him? I am
+sure we owe him no such particular civility as to be obliged to say
+nothing he may not like to hear.”
+
+
+
+ “For heaven’s sake, madam, speak lower. What advantage can it be to you
+to offend Mr. Darcy? You will never recommend yourself to his friend by
+so doing. {127} ”
+
+
+
+ Nothing that she could say, however, had any influence. Her mother would
+talk of her views in the same intelligible tone. Elizabeth blushed and
+blushed again with shame and vexation. She could not help frequently
+glancing her eye at Mr. Darcy, though every glance convinced her of what
+she dreaded; for though he was not always looking at her mother, she was
+convinced that his attention was invariably fixed by her. The expression
+of his face changed gradually from indignant contempt to a composed and
+steady gravity.
+
+
+
+ At length, however, Mrs. Bennet had no more to say; and Lady Lucas, who
+had been long yawning at the repetition of delights which she saw no
+likelihood of sharing, was left to the comforts of cold ham and chicken.
+Elizabeth now began to revive. But not long was the interval of
+tranquillity; for when supper was over, singing was talked of, and she
+had the mortification of seeing Mary, after very little entreaty,
+preparing to oblige the company. By many significant looks and silent
+entreaties did she endeavour to prevent such a proof of
+complaisance,—but in vain; Mary would not understand them; such an
+opportunity of exhibiting was delightful to her, and she began her song.
+Elizabeth’s eyes were fixed on her, with most painful sensations; and
+she watched her progress through the several stanzas with an impatience
+which was very ill rewarded at their close; for Mary, on receiving
+amongst the thanks of the table the hint of a hope that she might be
+prevailed on to favour them again, after the pause of half a minute
+began another. Mary’s powers were by no means fitted for such a display;
+her voice was weak, and her manner affected. Elizabeth was in agonies.
+She looked at Jane to see how she bore it; but Jane was very composedly {128} 
+talking to Bingley. She looked at his two sisters, and saw them making
+signs of derision at each other, and at Darcy, who continued, however,
+impenetrably grave. She looked at her father to entreat his
+interference, lest Mary should be singing all night. He took the hint,
+and, when Mary had finished her second song, said aloud,—
+
+
+
+ “That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough.
+Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit.”
+
+
+
+ Mary, though pretending not to hear, was somewhat disconcerted; and
+Elizabeth, sorry for her, and sorry for her father’s speech, was afraid
+her anxiety had done no good. Others of the party were now applied to.
+
+
+
+ “If I,” said Mr. Collins, “were so fortunate as to be able to sing, I
+should have great pleasure, I am sure, in obliging the company with an
+air; for I consider music as a very innocent diversion, and perfectly
+compatible with the profession of a clergyman. I do not mean, however,
+to assert that we can be justified in devoting too much of our time to
+music, for there are certainly other things to be attended to. The
+rector of a parish has much to do. In the first place, he must make such
+an agreement for tithes as may be beneficial to himself and not
+offensive to his patron. He must write his own sermons; and the time
+that remains will not be too much for his parish duties, and the care
+and improvement of his dwelling, which he cannot be excused from making
+as comfortable as possible. And I do not think it of light importance
+that he should have attentive and conciliatory manners towards
+everybody, especially towards those to whom he owes his preferment. I
+cannot acquit him of that duty; nor could I think well {129} of the man who
+should omit an occasion of testifying his respect towards anybody
+connected with the family.” And with a bow to Mr. Darcy, he concluded
+his speech, which had been spoken so loud as to be heard by half the
+room. Many stared—many smiled; but no one looked more amused than Mr.
+Bennet himself, while his wife seriously commended Mr. Collins for
+having spoken so sensibly, and observed, in a half-whisper to Lady
+Lucas, that he was a remarkably clever, good kind of young man.
+
+
+
+ To Elizabeth it appeared, that had her family made an agreement to
+expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would
+have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit, or
+finer success; and happy did she think it for Bingley and her sister
+that some of the exhibition had escaped his notice, and that his
+feelings were not of a sort to be much distressed by the folly which he
+must have witnessed. That his two sisters and Mr. Darcy, however, should
+have such an opportunity of ridiculing her relations was bad enough; and
+she could not determine whether the silent contempt of the gentleman, or
+the insolent smiles of the ladies, were more intolerable.
+
+
+
+ The rest of the evening brought her little amusement. She was teased by
+Mr. Collins, who continued most perseveringly by her side; and though he
+could not prevail with her to dance with him again, put it out of her
+power to dance with others. In vain did she entreat him to stand up with
+somebody else, and offered to introduce him to any young lady in the
+room. He assured her that, as to dancing, he was perfectly indifferent
+to it; that his chief object was, by delicate attentions, to recommend
+himself to her; and that he {130} should therefore make a point of remaining
+close to her the whole evening. There was no arguing upon such a
+project. She owed her greatest relief to her friend Miss Lucas, who
+often joined them, and good-naturedly engaged Mr. Collins’s conversation
+to herself.
+
+
+
+ She was at least free from the offence of Mr. Darcy’s further notice:
+though often standing within a very short distance of her, quite
+disengaged, he never came near enough to speak. She felt it to be the
+probable consequence of her allusions to Mr. Wickham, and rejoiced in
+it.
+
+
+
+ The Longbourn party were the last of all the company to depart; and by a
+manœuvre of Mrs. Bennet had to wait for their carriage a quarter of an
+hour after everybody else was gone, which gave them time to see how
+heartily they were wished away by some of the family. Mrs. Hurst and her
+sister scarcely opened their mouths except to complain of fatigue, and
+were evidently impatient to have the house to themselves. They repulsed
+every attempt of Mrs. Bennet at conversation, and, by so doing, threw a
+languor over the whole party, which was very little relieved by the long
+speeches of Mr. Collins, who was complimenting Mr. Bingley and his
+sisters on the elegance of their entertainment, and the hospitality and
+politeness which had marked their behaviour to their guests. Darcy said
+nothing at all. Mr. Bennet, in equal silence, was enjoying the scene.
+Mr. Bingley and Jane were standing together a little detached from the
+rest, and talked only to each other. Elizabeth preserved as steady a
+silence as either Mrs. Hurst or Miss Bingley; and even Lydia was too
+much fatigued to utter more than the occasional exclamation of “Lord,
+how tired I am!” accompanied by a violent yawn. {131} 
+
+
+
+ When at length they arose to take leave, Mrs. Bennet was most pressingly
+civil in her hope of seeing the whole family soon at Longbourn; and
+addressed herself particularly to Mr. Bingley, to assure him how happy
+he would make them, by eating a family dinner with them at any time,
+without the ceremony of a formal invitation. Bingley was all grateful
+pleasure; and he readily engaged for taking the earliest opportunity of
+waiting on her after his return from London, whither he was obliged to
+go the next day for a short time.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet was perfectly satisfied; and quitted the house under the
+delightful persuasion that, allowing for the necessary preparations of
+settlements, new carriages, and wedding clothes, she should undoubtedly
+see her daughter settled at Netherfield in the course of three or four
+months. Of having another daughter married to Mr. Collins she thought
+with equal certainty, and with considerable, though not equal, pleasure.
+Elizabeth was the least dear to her of all her children; and though the
+man and the match were quite good enough for her , the worth of each
+was eclipsed by Mr. Bingley and Netherfield. {132} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“to assure you in the most animated language.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX. 
+
+ 
+ HE next day opened a new scene at Longbourn. Mr. Collins made his
+declaration in form. Having resolved to do it without loss of time, as
+his leave of absence extended only to the following Saturday, and having
+no feelings of diffidence to make it distressing to himself even at the
+moment, he set about it in a very orderly manner, with all the
+observances which he supposed a regular part of the business. On finding
+Mrs. Bennet, Elizabeth, {133} and one of the younger girls together, soon
+after breakfast, he addressed the mother in these words,—
+
+
+
+ “May I hope, madam, for your interest with your fair daughter Elizabeth,
+when I solicit for the honour of a private audience with her in the
+course of this morning?”
+
+
+
+ Before Elizabeth had time for anything but a blush of surprise, Mrs.
+Bennet instantly answered,—
+
+
+
+ “Oh dear! Yes, certainly. I am sure Lizzy will be very happy—I am sure
+she can have no objection. Come, Kitty, I want you upstairs.” And
+gathering her work together, she was hastening away, when Elizabeth
+called out,—
+
+
+
+ “Dear ma’am, do not go. I beg you will not go. Mr. Collins must excuse
+me. He can have nothing to say to me that anybody need not hear. I am
+going away myself.”
+
+
+
+ “No, no, nonsense, Lizzy. I desire you will stay where you are.” And
+upon Elizabeth’s seeming really, with vexed and embarrassed looks, about
+to escape, she added, “Lizzy, I insist upon your staying and hearing
+Mr. Collins.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth would not oppose such an injunction; and a moment’s
+consideration making her also sensible that it would be wisest to get it
+over as soon and as quietly as possible, she sat down again, and tried
+to conceal, by incessant employment, the feelings which were divided
+between distress and diversion. Mrs. Bennet and Kitty walked off, and as
+soon as they were gone, Mr. Collins began,—
+
+
+
+ “Believe me, my dear Miss Elizabeth, that your modesty, so far from
+doing you any disservice, rather adds to your other perfections. You
+would have been less amiable in my eyes had there not been this little
+unwillingness; but allow me to assure you that I have your respected
+mother’s permission for this address. {134} You can hardly doubt the purport
+of my discourse, however your natural delicacy may lead you to
+dissemble; my attentions have been too marked to be mistaken. Almost as
+soon as I entered the house I singled you out as the companion of my
+future life. But before I am run away with by my feelings on this
+subject, perhaps it will be advisable for me to state my reasons for
+marrying—and, moreover, for coming into Hertfordshire with the design
+of selecting a wife, as I certainly did.”
+
+
+
+ The idea of Mr. Collins, with all his solemn composure, being run away
+with by his feelings, made Elizabeth so near laughing that she could not
+use the short pause he allowed in any attempt to stop him farther, and
+he continued,—
+
+
+
+ “My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for
+every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example
+of matrimony in his parish; secondly, that I am convinced it will add
+very greatly to my happiness; and, thirdly, which perhaps I ought to
+have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and
+recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling
+patroness. Twice has she condescended to give me her opinion (unasked
+too!) on this subject; and it was but the very Saturday night before I
+left Hunsford,—between our pools at quadrille, while Mrs. Jenkinson was
+arranging Miss De Bourgh’s footstool,—that she said, ‘Mr. Collins, you
+must marry. A clergyman like you must marry. Choose properly, choose a
+gentlewoman for my sake, and for your own ; let her be an active,
+useful sort of person, not brought up high, but able to make a small
+income go a good way. This is my advice. Find such a woman as soon as
+you can, bring her to Hunsford, and {135} I will visit her.’ Allow me, by the
+way, to observe, my fair cousin, that I do not reckon the notice and
+kindness of Lady Catherine de Bourgh as among the least of the
+advantages in my power to offer. You will find her manners beyond
+anything I can describe; and your wit and vivacity, I think, must be
+acceptable to her, especially when tempered with the silence and respect
+which her rank will inevitably excite. Thus much for my general
+intention in favour of matrimony; it remains to be told why my views
+were directed to Longbourn instead of my own neighbourhood, where I
+assure you there are many amiable young women. But the fact is, that
+being, as I am, to inherit this estate after the death of your honoured
+father (who, however, may live many years longer), I could not satisfy
+myself without resolving to choose a wife from among his daughters, that
+the loss to them might be as little as possible when the melancholy
+event takes place—which, however, as I have already said, may not be
+for several years. This has been my motive, my fair cousin, and I
+flatter myself it will not sink me in your esteem. And now nothing
+remains for me but to assure you in the most animated language of the
+violence of my affection. To fortune I am perfectly indifferent, and
+shall make no demand of that nature on your father, since I am well
+aware that it could not be complied with; and that one thousand pounds
+in the 4 per cents., which will not be yours till after your mother’s
+decease, is all that you may ever be entitled to. On that head,
+therefore, I shall be uniformly silent: and you may assure yourself that
+no ungenerous reproach shall ever pass my lips when we are married.”
+
+
+
+ It was absolutely necessary to interrupt him now.
+
+
+
+ “You are too hasty, sir,” she cried. “You forget that {136} I have made no
+answer. Let me do it without further loss of time. Accept my thanks for
+the compliment you are paying me. I am very sensible of the honour of
+your proposals, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise than decline
+them.”
+
+
+
+ “I am not now to learn,” replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave of the
+hand, “that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the
+man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their
+favour; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second or even a
+third time. I am, therefore, by no means discouraged by what you have
+just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long.”
+
+
+
+ “Upon my word, sir,” cried Elizabeth, “your hope is rather an
+extraordinary one after my declaration. I do assure you that I am not
+one of those young ladies (if such young ladies there are) who are so
+daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second
+time. I am perfectly serious in my refusal. You could not make me 
+happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman in the world who
+would make you so. Nay, were your friend Lady Catherine to know me, I
+am persuaded she would find me in every respect ill qualified for the
+situation.”
+
+
+
+ “Were it certain that Lady Catherine would think so,” said Mr. Collins,
+very gravely—“but I cannot imagine that her Ladyship would at all
+disapprove of you. And you may be certain that when I have the honour of
+seeing her again I shall speak in the highest terms of your modesty,
+economy, and other amiable qualifications.”
+
+
+
+ “Indeed, Mr. Collins, all praise of me will be unnecessary. You must
+give me leave to judge for myself, and {137} pay me the compliment of
+believing what I say. I wish you very happy and very rich, and by
+refusing your hand, do all in my power to prevent your being otherwise.
+In making me the offer, you must have satisfied the delicacy of your
+feelings with regard to my family, and may take possession of Longbourn
+estate whenever it falls, without any self-reproach. This matter may be
+considered, therefore, as finally settled.” And rising as she thus
+spoke, she would have quitted the room, had not Mr. Collins thus
+addressed her,—
+
+
+
+ “When I do myself the honour of speaking to you next on the subject, I
+shall hope to receive a more favourable answer than you have now given
+me; though I am far from accusing you of cruelty at present, because I
+know it to be the established custom of your sex to reject a man on the
+first application, and, perhaps, you have even now said as much to
+encourage my suit as would be consistent with the true delicacy of the
+female character.”
+
+
+
+ “Really, Mr. Collins,” cried Elizabeth, with some warmth, “you puzzle me
+exceedingly. If what I have hitherto said can appear to you in the form
+of encouragement, I know not how to express my refusal in such a way as
+may convince you of its being one.”
+
+
+
+ “You must give me leave to flatter myself, my dear cousin, that your
+refusal of my addresses are merely words of course. My reasons for
+believing it are briefly these:—It does not appear to me that my hand
+is unworthy of your acceptance, or that the establishment I can offer would
+be any other than highly desirable. My situation in life, my connections
+with the family of De Bourgh, and my relationship to your own, are
+circumstances highly in my favour; and you should take {138} it into further
+consideration that, in spite of your manifold attractions, it is by no
+means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made you. Your
+portion is unhappily so small, that it will in all likelihood undo the
+effects of your loveliness and amiable qualifications. As I must,
+therefore, conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I
+shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by
+suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females.”
+
+
+
+ “I do assure you, sir, that I have no pretensions whatever to that kind
+of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. I would
+rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere. I thank you
+again and again for the honour you have done me in your proposals, but
+to accept them is absolutely impossible. My feelings in every respect
+forbid it. Can I speak plainer? Do not consider me now as an elegant
+female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the
+truth from her heart.”
+
+
+
+ “You are uniformly charming!” cried he, with an air of awkward
+gallantry; “and I am persuaded that, when sanctioned by the express
+authority of both your excellent parents, my proposals will not fail of
+being acceptable.”
+
+
+
+ To such perseverance in wilful self-deception Elizabeth would make no
+reply, and immediately and in silence withdrew; determined, that if he
+persisted in considering her repeated refusals as flattering
+encouragement, to apply to her father, whose negative might be uttered
+in such a manner as must be decisive, and whose behaviour at least could
+not be mistaken for the affectation and coquetry of an elegant female. {139} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XX. 
+
+ 
+ R. COLLINS was not left long to the silent contemplation of his
+successful love; for Mrs. Bennet, having dawdled about in the vestibule
+to watch for the end of the conference, no sooner saw Elizabeth open the
+door and with quick step pass her towards the staircase, than she
+entered the breakfast-room, and congratulated both him and herself in
+warm terms on the happy prospect of their nearer connection. Mr. Collins
+received and returned these felicitations with equal pleasure, and then
+proceeded to relate the particulars of their interview, with the result
+of which he trusted he had every reason to be satisfied, since the
+refusal which his cousin had steadfastly given him would naturally flow
+from her bashful modesty and the genuine delicacy of her character. {140} 
+
+
+
+ This information, however, startled Mrs. Bennet: she would have been
+glad to be equally satisfied that her daughter had meant to encourage
+him by protesting against his proposals, but she dared not believe it,
+and could not help saying so.
+
+
+
+ “But depend upon it, Mr. Collins,” she added, “that Lizzy shall be
+brought to reason. I will speak to her about it myself directly. She is
+a very headstrong, foolish girl, and does not know her own interest; but
+I will make her know it.”
+
+
+
+ “Pardon me for interrupting you, madam,” cried Mr. Collins; “but if she
+is really headstrong and foolish, I know not whether she would
+altogether be a very desirable wife to a man in my situation, who
+naturally looks for happiness in the marriage state. If, therefore, she
+actually persists in rejecting my suit, perhaps it were better not to
+force her into accepting me, because, if liable to such defects of
+temper, she could not contribute much to my felicity.”
+
+
+
+ “Sir, you quite misunderstand me,” said Mrs. Bennet, alarmed. “Lizzy is
+only headstrong in such matters as these. In everything else she is as
+good-natured a girl as ever lived. I will go directly to Mr. Bennet, and
+we shall very soon settle it with her, I am sure.”
+
+
+
+ She would not give him time to reply, but hurrying instantly to her
+husband, called out, as she entered the library,—
+
+
+
+ “Oh, Mr. Bennet, you are wanted immediately; we are all in an uproar.
+You must come and make Lizzy marry Mr. Collins, for she vows she will
+not have him; and if you do not make haste he will change his mind and
+not have her . {141} ”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bennet raised his eyes from his book as she entered, and fixed them
+on her face with a calm unconcern, which was not in the least altered by
+her communication.
+
+
+
+ “I have not the pleasure of understanding you,” said he, when she had
+finished her speech. “Of what are you talking?”
+
+
+
+ “Of Mr. Collins and Lizzy. Lizzy declares she will not have Mr. Collins,
+and Mr. Collins begins to say that he will not have Lizzy.”
+
+
+
+ “And what am I to do on the occasion? It seems a hopeless business.”
+
+
+
+ “Speak to Lizzy about it yourself. Tell her that you insist upon her
+marrying him.”
+
+
+
+ “Let her be called down. She shall hear my opinion.”
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet rang the bell, and Miss Elizabeth was summoned to the
+library.
+
+
+
+ “Come here, child,” cried her father as she appeared. “I have sent for
+you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr. Collins has made
+you an offer of marriage. Is it true?”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth replied that it was.
+
+
+
+ “Very well—and this offer of marriage you have refused?”
+
+
+
+ “I have, sir.”
+
+
+
+ “Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your
+accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, or I will never see her again.”
+
+
+
+ “An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must
+be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you
+again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again
+if you do . {142} ”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth could not but smile at such a conclusion of such a beginning;
+but Mrs. Bennet, who had persuaded herself that her husband regarded the
+affair as she wished, was excessively disappointed.
+
+
+
+ “What do you mean, Mr. Bennet, by talking in this way? You promised me
+to insist upon her marrying him.”
+
+
+
+ “My dear,” replied her husband, “I have two small favours to request.
+First, that you will allow me the free use of my understanding on the
+present occasion; and, secondly, of my room. I shall be glad to have the
+library to myself as soon as may be.”
+
+
+
+ Not yet, however, in spite of her disappointment in her husband, did
+Mrs. Bennet give up the point. She talked to Elizabeth again and again;
+coaxed and threatened her by turns. She endeavoured to secure Jane in
+her interest, but Jane, with all possible mildness, declined
+interfering; and Elizabeth, sometimes with real earnestness, and
+sometimes with playful gaiety, replied to her attacks. Though her manner
+varied, however, her determination never did.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Collins, meanwhile, was meditating in solitude on what had passed.
+He thought too well of himself to comprehend on what motive his cousin
+could refuse him; and though his pride was hurt, he suffered in no other
+way. His regard for her was quite imaginary; and the possibility of her
+deserving her mother’s reproach prevented his feeling any regret.
+
+
+
+ While the family were in this confusion, Charlotte Lucas came to spend
+the day with them. She was met in the vestibule by Lydia, who, flying to
+her, cried in a half whisper, “I am glad you are come, for there is such
+fun here! What do you think has happened this {143} morning? Mr. Collins has
+made an offer to Lizzy, and she will not have him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ “they entered the breakfast room”
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ Charlotte had hardly time to answer before they were joined by Kitty,
+who came to tell the same news; and no sooner had they entered the
+breakfast-room, where Mrs. Bennet was alone, than she likewise began on
+the subject, calling on Miss Lucas for her compassion, and entreating
+her to persuade her friend Lizzy to comply with the wishes of her
+family. “Pray do, my dear Miss {144} Lucas,” she added, in a melancholy tone;
+“for nobody is on my side, nobody takes part with me; I am cruelly used,
+nobody feels for my poor nerves.”
+
+
+
+ Charlotte’s reply was spared by the entrance of Jane and Elizabeth.
+
+
+
+ “Ay, there she comes,” continued Mrs. Bennet, “looking as unconcerned as
+may be, and caring no more for us than if we were at York, provided she
+can have her own way. But I tell you what, Miss Lizzy, if you take it
+into your head to go on refusing every offer of marriage in this way,
+you will never get a husband at all—and I am sure I do not know who is
+to maintain you when your father is dead. I shall not be able to keep
+you—and so I warn you. I have done with you from this very day. I told
+you in the library, you know, that I should never speak to you again,
+and you will find me as good as my word. I have no pleasure in talking
+to undutiful children. Not that I have much pleasure, indeed, in talking
+to anybody. People who suffer as I do from nervous complaints can have
+no great inclination for talking. Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it
+is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.”
+
+
+
+ Her daughters listened in silence to this effusion, sensible that any
+attempt to reason with or soothe her would only increase the irritation.
+She talked on, therefore, without interruption from any of them till
+they were joined by Mr. Collins, who entered with an air more stately
+than usual, and on perceiving whom, she said to the girls,—
+
+
+
+ “Now, I do insist upon it, that you, all of you, hold your tongues, and
+let Mr. Collins and me have a little conversation together. {145} ”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth passed quietly out of the room, Jane and Kitty followed, but
+Lydia stood her ground, determined to hear all she could; and Charlotte,
+detained first by the civility of Mr. Collins, whose inquiries after
+herself and all her family were very minute, and then by a little
+curiosity, satisfied herself with walking to the window and pretending
+not to hear. In a doleful voice Mrs. Bennet thus began the projected
+conversation:—
+
+
+
+ “Oh, Mr. Collins!”
+
+
+
+ “My dear madam,” replied he, “let us be for ever silent on this point.
+Far be it from me,” he presently continued, in a voice that marked his
+displeasure, “to resent the behaviour of your daughter. Resignation to
+inevitable evils is the duty of us all: the peculiar duty of a young man
+who has been so fortunate as I have been, in early preferment; and, I
+trust, I am resigned. Perhaps not the less so from feeling a doubt of my
+positive happiness had my fair cousin honoured me with her hand; for I
+have often observed, that resignation is never so perfect as when the
+blessing denied begins to lose somewhat of its value in our estimation.
+You will not, I hope, consider me as showing any disrespect to your
+family, my dear madam, by thus withdrawing my pretensions to your
+daughter’s favour, without having paid yourself and Mr. Bennet the
+compliment of requesting you to interpose your authority in my behalf.
+My conduct may, I fear, be objectionable in having accepted my
+dismission from your daughter’s lips instead of your own; but we are all
+liable to error. I have certainly meant well through the whole affair.
+My object has been to secure an amiable companion for myself, with due
+consideration for the advantage of all your family; and if my manner 
+has been at all reprehensible, I here beg leave to apologize. {146} ”
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI. 
+
+ 
+ HE discussion of Mr. Collins’s offer was now nearly at an end, and
+Elizabeth had only to suffer from the uncomfortable feelings necessarily
+attending it, and occasionally from some peevish allusion of her mother.
+As for the gentleman himself, his feelings were chiefly expressed, not
+by embarrassment or dejection, or {147} by trying to avoid her, but by
+stiffness of manner and resentful silence. He scarcely ever spoke to
+her; and the assiduous attentions which he had been so sensible of
+himself were transferred for the rest of the day to Miss Lucas, whose
+civility in listening to him was a seasonable relief to them all, and
+especially to her friend.
+
+
+
+ The morrow produced no abatement of Mrs. Bennet’s ill humour or ill
+health. Mr. Collins was also in the same state of angry pride. Elizabeth
+had hoped that his resentment might shorten his visit, but his plan did
+not appear in the least affected by it. He was always to have gone on
+Saturday, and to Saturday he still meant to stay.
+
+
+
+ After breakfast, the girls walked to Meryton, to inquire if Mr. Wickham
+were returned, and to lament over his absence from the Netherfield ball.
+He joined them on their entering the town, and attended them to their
+aunt’s, where his regret and vexation and the concern of everybody were
+well talked over. To Elizabeth, however, he voluntarily acknowledged
+that the necessity of his absence had been self-imposed.
+
+
+
+ “I found,” said he, “as the time drew near, that I had better not meet
+Mr. Darcy;—that to be in the same room, the same party with him for so
+many hours together, might be more than I could bear, and that scenes
+might arise unpleasant to more than myself.”
+
+
+
+ She highly approved his forbearance; and they had leisure for a full
+discussion of it, and for all the commendations which they civilly
+bestowed on each other, as Wickham and another officer walked back with
+them to Longbourn, and during the walk he particularly attended to her.
+His accompanying them was a double advantage: she felt all the
+compliment it offered to herself; {148} and it was most acceptable as an
+occasion of introducing him to her father and mother.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ “Walked back with them”
+
+
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ Soon after their return, a letter was delivered to Miss Bennet; it came
+from Netherfield, and was opened immediately. The envelope contained a
+sheet of elegant, little, hot-pressed paper, well covered with a lady’s
+fair, flowing hand; and Elizabeth saw her sister’s countenance change as
+she read it, and saw her dwelling intently on some particular passages.
+Jane recollected herself soon; and putting the letter away, tried to
+join, with her usual cheerfulness, in the general conversation: but
+Elizabeth felt an anxiety on the subject which drew off her attention
+even from Wickham; and no sooner had he and his companion taken leave,
+than a glance from Jane invited her to follow her upstairs. When they
+had gained their own room, Jane, taking out her letter, said, “This is
+from Caroline Bingley: what it {149} contains has surprised me a good deal.
+The whole party have left Netherfield by this time, and are on their way
+to town; and without any intention of coming back again. You shall hear
+what she says.”
+
+
+
+ She then read the first sentence aloud, which comprised the information
+of their having just resolved to follow their brother to town directly,
+and of their meaning to dine that day in Grosvenor Street, where Mr.
+Hurst had a house. The next was in these words:—“ ‘ I do not pretend to
+regret anything I shall leave in Hertfordshire except your society, my
+dearest friend; but we will hope, at some future period, to enjoy many
+returns of that delightful intercourse we have known, and in the
+meanwhile may lessen the pain of separation by a very frequent and most
+unreserved correspondence. I depend on you for that.’ ” To these
+high-flown expressions Elizabeth listened with all the insensibility of
+distrust; and though the suddenness of their removal surprised her, she
+saw nothing in it really to lament: it was not to be supposed that their
+absence from Netherfield would prevent Mr. Bingley’s being there; and as
+to the loss of their society, she was persuaded that Jane must soon
+cease to regard it in the enjoyment of his.
+
+
+
+ “It is unlucky,” said she, after a short pause, “that you should not be
+able to see your friends before they leave the country. But may we not
+hope that the period of future happiness, to which Miss Bingley looks
+forward, may arrive earlier than she is aware, and that the delightful
+intercourse you have known as friends will be renewed with yet greater
+satisfaction as sisters? Mr. Bingley will not be detained in London by
+them.”
+
+
+
+ “Caroline decidedly says that none of the party will return into
+Hertfordshire this winter. I will read it to you. {150} 
+
+
+
+ “ ‘ When my brother left us yesterday, he imagined that the business which
+took him to London might be concluded in three or four days; but as we
+are certain it cannot be so, and at the same time convinced that when
+Charles gets to town he will be in no hurry to leave it again, we have
+determined on following him thither, that he may not be obliged to spend
+his vacant hours in a comfortless hotel. Many of my acquaintance are
+already there for the winter: I wish I could hear that you, my dearest
+friend, had any intention of making one in the crowd, but of that I
+despair. I sincerely hope your Christmas in Hertfordshire may abound in
+the gaieties which that season generally brings, and that your beaux
+will be so numerous as to prevent your feeling the loss of the three of
+whom we shall deprive you.’
+
+
+
+ “It is evident by this,” added Jane, “that he comes back no more this
+winter.”
+
+
+
+ “It is only evident that Miss Bingley does not mean he should .”
+
+
+
+ “Why will you think so? It must be his own doing; he is his own master.
+But you do not know all . I will read you the passage which
+particularly hurts me. I will have no reserves from you . ‘Mr. Darcy is
+impatient to see his sister; and to confess the truth, we are scarcely
+less eager to meet her again. I really do not think Georgiana Darcy has
+her equal for beauty, elegance, and accomplishments; and the affection
+she inspires in Louisa and myself is heightened into something still
+more interesting from the hope we dare to entertain of her being
+hereafter our sister. I do not know whether I ever before mentioned to
+you my feelings on this subject, but I will not leave the country
+without confiding them, and I trust you will not esteem them {151} 
+unreasonable. My brother admires her greatly already; he will have
+frequent opportunity now of seeing her on the most intimate footing; her
+relations all wish the connection as much as his own; and a sister’s
+partiality is not misleading me, I think, when I call Charles most
+capable of engaging any woman’s heart. With all these circumstances to
+favour an attachment, and nothing to prevent it, am I wrong, my dearest
+Jane, in indulging the hope of an event which will secure the happiness
+of so many?’ What think you of this sentence, my dear Lizzy?” said
+Jane, as she finished it. “Is it not clear enough? Does it not expressly
+declare that Caroline neither expects nor wishes me to be her sister;
+that she is perfectly convinced of her brother’s indifference; and that
+if she suspects the nature of my feelings for him she means (most
+kindly!) to put me on my guard. Can there be any other opinion on the
+subject?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, there can; for mine is totally different. Will you hear it?”
+
+
+
+ “Most willingly.”
+
+
+
+ “You shall have it in a few words. Miss Bingley sees that her brother is
+in love with you and wants him to marry Miss Darcy. She follows him to
+town in the hope of keeping him there, and tries to persuade you that he
+does not care about you.”
+
+
+
+ Jane shook her head.
+
+
+
+ “Indeed, Jane, you ought to believe me. No one who has ever seen you
+together can doubt his affection; Miss Bingley, I am sure, cannot: she
+is not such a simpleton. Could she have seen half as much love in Mr.
+Darcy for herself, she would have ordered her wedding clothes. But the
+case is this:—we are not rich enough or grand enough for them; and she
+is {152} the more anxious to get Miss Darcy for her brother, from the notion
+that when there has been one inter-marriage, she may have less trouble
+in achieving a second; in which there is certainly some ingenuity, and I
+dare say it would succeed if Miss de Bourgh were out of the way. But, my
+dearest Jane, you cannot seriously imagine that, because Miss Bingley
+tells you her brother greatly admires Miss Darcy, he is in the smallest
+degree less sensible of your merit than when he took leave of you on
+Tuesday; or that it will be in her power to persuade him that, instead
+of being in love with you, he is very much in love with her friend.”
+
+
+
+ “If we thought alike of Miss Bingley,” replied Jane, “your
+representation of all this might make me quite easy. But I know the
+foundation is unjust. Caroline is incapable of wilfully deceiving
+anyone; and all that I can hope in this case is, that she is deceived
+herself.”
+
+
+
+ “That is right. You could not have started a more happy idea, since you
+will not take comfort in mine: believe her to be deceived, by all means.
+You have now done your duty by her, and must fret no longer.”
+
+
+
+ “But, my dear sister, can I be happy, even supposing the best, in
+accepting a man whose sisters and friends are all wishing him to marry
+elsewhere?”
+
+
+
+ “You must decide for yourself,” said Elizabeth; “and if, upon mature
+deliberation, you find that the misery of disobliging his two sisters is
+more than equivalent to the happiness of being his wife, I advise you,
+by all means, to refuse him.”
+
+
+
+ “How can you talk so?” said Jane, faintly smiling; “you must know, that,
+though I should be exceedingly grieved at their disapprobation, I could
+not hesitate. {153} ”
+
+
+
+ “I did not think you would; and that being the case, I cannot consider
+your situation with much compassion.”
+
+
+
+ “But if he returns no more this winter, my choice will never be
+required. A thousand things may arise in six months.”
+
+
+
+ The idea of his returning no more Elizabeth treated with the utmost
+contempt. It appeared to her merely the suggestion of Caroline’s
+interested wishes; and she could not for a moment suppose that those
+wishes, however openly or artfully spoken, could influence a young man
+so totally independent of everyone.
+
+
+
+ She represented to her sister, as forcibly as possible, what she felt on
+the subject, and had soon the pleasure of seeing its happy effect.
+Jane’s temper was not desponding; and she was gradually led to hope,
+though the diffidence of affection sometimes overcame the hope, that
+Bingley would return to Netherfield, and answer every wish of her heart.
+
+
+
+ They agreed that Mrs. Bennet should only hear of the departure of the
+family, without being alarmed on the score of the gentleman’s conduct;
+but even this partial communication gave her a great deal of concern,
+and she bewailed it as exceedingly unlucky that the ladies should happen
+to go away just as they were all getting so intimate together. After
+lamenting it, however, at some length, she had the consolation of
+thinking that Mr. Bingley would be soon down again, and soon dining at
+Longbourn; and the conclusion of all was the comfortable declaration,
+that, though he had been invited only to a family dinner, she would take
+care to have two full courses. {154} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII. 
+
+ 
+ HE Bennets were engaged to dine with the Lucases; and again, during the
+chief of the day, was Miss Lucas so kind as to listen to Mr. Collins.
+Elizabeth took an opportunity of thanking her. “It keeps him in good
+humour,” said she, “and I am more obliged to you than I can express.”
+
+
+
+ Charlotte assured her friend of her satisfaction in being useful, and
+that it amply repaid her for the little sacrifice of her time. This was
+very amiable; but Charlotte’s kindness extended farther than Elizabeth
+had any conception of:—its object was nothing less than to secure her
+from any return of Mr. Collins’s addresses, by engaging them towards
+herself. Such was Miss Lucas’s scheme; and appearances were so
+favourable, that when they parted at night, she would have felt almost
+sure of success if he had not been to leave Hertfordshire so very soon.
+But here she did injustice to the fire and independence of his
+character; for it led him to escape out of Longbourn House the next
+morning with {155} admirable slyness, and hasten to Lucas Lodge to throw
+himself at her feet. He was anxious to avoid the notice of his cousins,
+from a conviction that, if they saw him depart, they could not fail to
+conjecture his design, and he was not willing to have the attempt known
+till its success could be known likewise; for, though feeling almost
+secure, and with reason, for Charlotte had been tolerably encouraging,
+he was comparatively diffident since the adventure of Wednesday. His
+reception, however, was of the most flattering kind. Miss Lucas
+perceived him from an upper window as he walked towards the house, and
+instantly set out to meet him accidentally in the lane. But little had
+she dared to hope that so much love and eloquence awaited her there.
+
+
+
+ In as short a time as Mr. Collins’s long speeches would allow,
+everything was settled between them to the satisfaction of both; and as
+they entered the house, he earnestly entreated her to name the day that
+was to make him the happiest of men; and though such a solicitation must
+be waived for the present, the lady felt no inclination to trifle with
+his happiness. The stupidity with which he was favoured by nature must
+guard his courtship from any charm that could make a woman wish for its
+continuance; and Miss Lucas, who accepted him solely from the pure and
+disinterested desire of an establishment, cared not how soon that
+establishment were gained.
+
+
+
+ Sir William and Lady Lucas were speedily applied to for their consent;
+and it was bestowed with a most joyful alacrity. Mr. Collins’s present
+circumstances made it a most eligible match for their daughter, to whom
+they could give little fortune; and his prospects of future wealth were
+exceedingly fair. Lady Lucas began directly to calculate, with more
+interest than the matter had ever {156} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ “So much love and eloquence”
+
+ 
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ excited before, how many years longer Mr. Bennet was likely to live; and
+Sir William gave it as his decided opinion, that whenever Mr. Collins
+should be in possession of the Longbourn estate, it would be highly
+expedient that both he and his wife should make their appearance at St.
+James’s. The whole family in short were properly overjoyed on the
+occasion. The younger girls formed {157} hopes of coming out a year or two
+sooner than they might otherwise have done; and the boys were relieved
+from their apprehension of Charlotte’s dying an old maid. Charlotte
+herself was tolerably composed. She had gained her point, and had time
+to consider of it. Her reflections were in general satisfactory. Mr.
+Collins, to be sure, was neither sensible nor agreeable: his society was
+irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would
+be her husband. Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony,
+marriage had always been her object: it was the only honourable
+provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and, however
+uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative
+from want. This preservative she had now obtained; and at the age of
+twenty-seven, without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good
+luck of it. The least agreeable circumstance in the business was the
+surprise it must occasion to Elizabeth Bennet, whose friendship she
+valued beyond that of any other person. Elizabeth would wonder, and
+probably would blame her; and though her resolution was not to be
+shaken, her feelings must be hurt by such a disapprobation. She resolved
+to give her the information herself; and therefore charged Mr. Collins,
+when he returned to Longbourn to dinner, to drop no hint of what had
+passed before any of the family. A promise of secrecy was of course very
+dutifully given, but it could not be kept without difficulty; for the
+curiosity excited by his long absence burst forth in such very direct
+questions on his return, as required some ingenuity to evade, and he was
+at the same time exercising great self-denial, for he was longing to
+publish his prosperous love.
+
+
+
+ As he was to begin his journey too early on the morrow {158} to see any of
+the family, the ceremony of leave-taking was performed when the ladies
+moved for the night; and Mrs. Bennet, with great politeness and
+cordiality, said how happy they should be to see him at Longbourn again,
+whenever his other engagements might allow him to visit them.
+
+
+
+ “My dear madam,” he replied, “this invitation is particularly
+gratifying, because it is what I have been hoping to receive; and you
+may be very certain that I shall avail myself of it as soon as
+possible.”
+
+
+
+ They were all astonished; and Mr. Bennet, who could by no means wish for
+so speedy a return, immediately said,—
+
+
+
+ “But is there not danger of Lady Catherine’s disapprobation here, my
+good sir? You had better neglect your relations than run the risk of
+offending your patroness.”
+
+
+
+ “My dear sir,” replied Mr. Collins, “I am particularly obliged to you
+for this friendly caution, and you may depend upon my not taking so
+material a step without her Ladyship’s concurrence.”
+
+
+
+ “You cannot be too much on your guard. Risk anything rather than her
+displeasure; and if you find it likely to be raised by your coming to us
+again, which I should think exceedingly probable, stay quietly at home,
+and be satisfied that we shall take no offence.”
+
+
+
+ “Believe me, my dear sir, my gratitude is warmly excited by such
+affectionate attention; and, depend upon it, you will speedily receive
+from me a letter of thanks for this as well as for every other mark of
+your regard during my stay in Hertfordshire. As for my fair cousins,
+though my absence may not be long enough to render it necessary, I shall
+now take the liberty of wishing them health and happiness, not excepting
+my cousin Elizabeth. {159} ”
+
+
+
+ With proper civilities, the ladies then withdrew; all of them equally
+surprised to find that he meditated a quick return. Mrs. Bennet wished
+to understand by it that he thought of paying his addresses to one of
+her younger girls, and Mary might have been prevailed on to accept him.
+She rated his abilities much higher than any of the others: there was a
+solidity in his reflections which often struck her; and though by no
+means so clever as herself, she thought that, if encouraged to read and
+improve himself by such an example as hers, he might become a very
+agreeable companion. But on the following morning every hope of this
+kind was done away. Miss Lucas called soon after breakfast, and in a
+private conference with Elizabeth related the event of the day before.
+
+
+
+ The possibility of Mr. Collins’s fancying himself in love with her
+friend had once occurred to Elizabeth within the last day or two: but
+that Charlotte could encourage him seemed almost as far from possibility
+as that she could encourage him herself; and her astonishment was
+consequently so great as to overcome at first the bounds of decorum, and
+she could not help crying out,—
+
+
+
+ “Engaged to Mr. Collins! my dear Charlotte, impossible!”
+
+
+
+ The steady countenance which Miss Lucas had commanded in telling her
+story gave way to a momentary confusion here on receiving so direct a
+reproach; though, as it was no more than she expected, she soon regained
+her composure, and calmly replied,—
+
+
+
+ “Why should you be surprised, my dear Eliza? Do you think it incredible
+that Mr. Collins should be able to procure any woman’s good opinion,
+because he was not so happy as to succeed with you? {160} ”
+
+
+
+ But Elizabeth had now recollected herself; and, making a strong effort
+for it, was able to assure her, with tolerable firmness, that the
+prospect of their relationship was highly grateful to her, and that she
+wished her all imaginable happiness.
+
+
+
+ “I see what you are feeling,” replied Charlotte; “you must be surprised,
+very much surprised, so lately as Mr. Collins was wishing to marry you.
+But when you have had time to think it all over, I hope you will be
+satisfied with what I have done. I am not romantic, you know. I never
+was. I ask only a comfortable home; and, considering Mr. Collins’s
+character, connections, and situation in life, I am convinced that my
+chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on
+entering the marriage state.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth quietly answered “undoubtedly;” and, after an awkward pause,
+they returned to the rest of the family. Charlotte did not stay much
+longer; and Elizabeth was then left to reflect on what she had heard. It
+was a long time before she became at all reconciled to the idea of so
+unsuitable a match. The strangeness of Mr. Collins’s making two offers
+of marriage within three days was nothing in comparison of his being now
+accepted. She had always felt that Charlotte’s opinion of matrimony was
+not exactly like her own; but she could not have supposed it possible
+that, when called into action, she would have sacrificed every better
+feeling to worldly advantage. Charlotte, the wife of Mr. Collins, was a
+most humiliating picture! And to the pang of a friend disgracing
+herself, and sunk in her esteem, was added the distressing conviction
+that it was impossible for that friend to be tolerably happy in the lot
+she had chosen. {161} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“Protested he must be entirely mistaken.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII. 
+
+ 
+ LIZABETH was sitting with her mother and sisters, reflecting on what
+she had heard, and doubting whether she was authorized to mention it,
+when Sir William Lucas himself appeared, sent by his daughter to
+announce her engagement to the family. With many compliments to them,
+and much self-gratulation on the prospect of a connection between the
+houses, he unfolded the {162} matter,—to an audience not merely wondering,
+but incredulous; for Mrs. Bennet, with more perseverance than
+politeness, protested he must be entirely mistaken; and Lydia, always
+unguarded and often uncivil, boisterously exclaimed,—
+
+
+
+ “Good Lord! Sir William, how can you tell such a story? Do not you know
+that Mr. Collins wants to marry Lizzy?”
+
+
+
+ Nothing less than the complaisance of a courtier could have borne
+without anger such treatment: but Sir William’s good-breeding carried
+him through it all; and though he begged leave to be positive as to the
+truth of his information, he listened to all their impertinence with the
+most forbearing courtesy.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth, feeling it incumbent on her to relieve him from so unpleasant
+a situation, now put herself forward to confirm his account, by
+mentioning her prior knowledge of it from Charlotte herself; and
+endeavoured to put a stop to the exclamations of her mother and sisters,
+by the earnestness of her congratulations to Sir William, in which she
+was readily joined by Jane, and by making a variety of remarks on the
+happiness that might be expected from the match, the excellent character
+of Mr. Collins, and the convenient distance of Hunsford from London.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet was, in fact, too much overpowered to say a great deal while
+Sir William remained; but no sooner had he left them than her feelings
+found a rapid vent. In the first place, she persisted in disbelieving
+the whole of the matter; secondly, she was very sure that Mr. Collins
+had been taken in; thirdly, she trusted that they would never be happy
+together; and, fourthly, that the match might be broken off. Two
+inferences, however, {163} were plainly deduced from the whole: one, that
+Elizabeth was the real cause of all the mischief; and the other, that
+she herself had been barbarously used by them all; and on these two
+points she principally dwelt during the rest of the day. Nothing could
+console and nothing appease her. Nor did that day wear out her
+resentment. A week elapsed before she could see Elizabeth without
+scolding her: a month passed away before she could speak to Sir William
+or Lady Lucas without being rude; and many months were gone before she
+could at all forgive their daughter.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bennet’s emotions were much more tranquil on the occasion, and such
+as he did experience he pronounced to be of a most agreeable sort; for
+it gratified him, he said, to discover that Charlotte Lucas, whom he had
+been used to think tolerably sensible, was as foolish as his wife, and
+more foolish than his daughter!
+
+
+
+ Jane confessed herself a little surprised at the match: but she said
+less of her astonishment than of her earnest desire for their happiness;
+nor could Elizabeth persuade her to consider it as improbable. Kitty and
+Lydia were far from envying Miss Lucas, for Mr. Collins was only a
+clergyman; and it affected them in no other way than as a piece of news
+to spread at Meryton.
+
+
+
+ Lady Lucas could not be insensible of triumph on being able to retort on
+Mrs. Bennet the comfort of having a daughter well married; and she
+called at Longbourn rather oftener than usual to say how happy she was,
+though Mrs. Bennet’s sour looks and ill-natured remarks might have been
+enough to drive happiness away.
+
+
+
+ Between Elizabeth and Charlotte there was a restraint which kept them
+mutually silent on the subject; and Elizabeth felt persuaded that no
+real confidence could {164} ever subsist between them again. Her
+disappointment in Charlotte made her turn with fonder regard to her
+sister, of whose rectitude and delicacy she was sure her opinion could
+never be shaken, and for whose happiness she grew daily more anxious, as
+Bingley had now been gone a week, and nothing was heard of his return.
+
+
+
+ Jane had sent Caroline an early answer to her letter, and was counting
+the days till she might reasonably hope to hear again. The promised
+letter of thanks from Mr. Collins arrived on Tuesday, addressed to their
+father, and written with all the solemnity of gratitude which a
+twelve-month’s abode in the family might have prompted. After
+discharging his conscience on that head, he proceeded to inform them,
+with many rapturous expressions, of his happiness in having obtained the
+affection of their amiable neighbour, Miss Lucas, and then explained
+that it was merely with the view of enjoying her society that he had
+been so ready to close with their kind wish of seeing him again at
+Longbourn, whither he hoped to be able to return on Monday fortnight;
+for Lady Catherine, he added, so heartily approved his marriage, that
+she wished it to take place as soon as possible, which he trusted would
+be an unanswerable argument with his amiable Charlotte to name an early
+day for making him the happiest of men.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Collins’s return into Hertfordshire was no longer a matter of
+pleasure to Mrs. Bennet. On the contrary, she was as much disposed to
+complain of it as her husband. It was very strange that he should come
+to Longbourn instead of to Lucas Lodge; it was also very inconvenient
+and exceedingly troublesome. She hated having visitors in the house
+while her health was so indifferent, and lovers were of all people the
+most disagreeable. Such were the gentle murmurs of Mrs. Bennet, and they
+gave way {165} only to the greater distress of Mr. Bingley’s continued
+absence.
+
+
+
+ Neither Jane nor Elizabeth were comfortable on this subject. Day after
+day passed away without bringing any other tidings of him than the
+report which shortly prevailed in Meryton of his coming no more to
+Netherfield the whole winter; a report which highly incensed Mrs.
+Bennet, and which she never failed to contradict as a most scandalous
+falsehood.
+
+
+
+ Even Elizabeth began to fear—not that Bingley was indifferent—but that
+his sisters would be successful in keeping him away. Unwilling as she
+was to admit an idea so destructive to Jane’s happiness, and so
+dishonourable to the stability of her lover, she could not prevent its
+frequently recurring. The united efforts of his two unfeeling sisters,
+and of his overpowering friend, assisted by the attractions of Miss
+Darcy and the amusements of London, might be too much, she feared, for
+the strength of his attachment.
+
+
+
+ As for Jane, her anxiety under this suspense was, of course, more
+painful than Elizabeth’s: but whatever she felt she was desirous of
+concealing; and between herself and Elizabeth, therefore, the subject
+was never alluded to. But as no such delicacy restrained her mother, an
+hour seldom passed in which she did not talk of Bingley, express her
+impatience for his arrival, or even require Jane to confess that if he
+did not come back she should think herself very ill-used. It needed all
+Jane’s steady mildness to bear these attacks with tolerable
+tranquillity.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Collins returned most punctually on the Monday fortnight, but his
+reception at Longbourn was not quite so gracious as it had been on his
+first introduction. He was too happy, however, to need much attention;
+and, {166} luckily for the others, the business of love-making relieved them
+from a great deal of his company. The chief of every day was spent by
+him at Lucas Lodge, and he sometimes returned to Longbourn only in time
+to make an apology for his absence before the family went to bed.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ “ Whenever she spoke in a low voice ”
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ Mrs. Bennet was really in a most pitiable state. The very mention of
+anything concerning the match threw her into an agony of ill-humour, and
+wherever she went she was sure of hearing it talked of. The sight of
+Miss Lucas was odious to her. As her successor in that house, she {167} 
+regarded her with jealous abhorrence. Whenever Charlotte came to see
+them, she concluded her to be anticipating the hour of possession; and
+whenever she spoke in a low voice to Mr. Collins, was convinced that
+they were talking of the Longbourn estate, and resolving to turn herself
+and her daughters out of the house as soon as Mr. Bennet was dead. She
+complained bitterly of all this to her husband.
+
+
+
+ “Indeed, Mr. Bennet,” said she, “it is very hard to think that Charlotte
+Lucas should ever be mistress of this house, that I should be forced
+to make way for her , and live to see her take my place in it!”
+
+
+
+ “My dear, do not give way to such gloomy thoughts. Let us hope for
+better things. Let us flatter ourselves that I may be the survivor.”
+
+
+
+ This was not very consoling to Mrs. Bennet; and, therefore, instead of
+making any answer, she went on as before.
+
+
+
+ “I cannot bear to think that they should have all this estate. If it was
+not for the entail, I should not mind it.”
+
+
+
+ “What should not you mind?”
+
+
+
+ “I should not mind anything at all.”
+
+
+
+ “Let us be thankful that you are preserved from a state of such
+insensibility.”
+
+
+
+ “I never can be thankful, Mr. Bennet, for anything about the entail. How
+anyone could have the conscience to entail away an estate from one’s own
+daughters I cannot understand; and all for the sake of Mr. Collins, too!
+Why should he have it more than anybody else?”
+
+
+
+ “I leave it to yourself to determine,” said Mr. Bennet. {168} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV. 
+
+ 
+ ISS BINGLEY’S letter arrived, and put an end to doubt. The very first
+sentence conveyed the assurance of their being all settled in London for
+the winter, and concluded with her brother’s regret at not having had
+time to pay his respects to his friends in Hertfordshire before he left
+the country.
+
+
+
+ Hope was over, entirely over; and when Jane could attend to the rest of
+the letter, she found little, except the professed affection of the
+writer, that could give her any comfort. Miss Darcy’s praise occupied
+the chief of it. Her many attractions were again dwelt on; and Caroline
+boasted joyfully of their increasing intimacy, and ventured to predict
+the accomplishment of the wishes which had been unfolded in her former
+letter. She wrote also with great pleasure of her brother’s being an
+inmate of Mr. Darcy’s house, and mentioned with raptures some plans of
+the latter with regard to new furniture. {169} 
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth, to whom Jane very soon communicated the chief of all this,
+heard it in silent indignation. Her heart was divided between concern
+for her sister and resentment against all others. To Caroline’s
+assertion of her brother’s being partial to Miss Darcy, she paid no
+credit. That he was really fond of Jane, she doubted no more than she
+had ever done; and much as she had always been disposed to like him, she
+could not think without anger, hardly without contempt, on that easiness
+of temper, that want of proper resolution, which now made him the slave
+of his designing friends, and led him to sacrifice his own happiness to
+the caprice of their inclinations. Had his own happiness, however, been
+the only sacrifice, he might have been allowed to sport with it in
+whatever manner he thought best; but her sister’s was involved in it, as
+she thought he must be sensible himself. It was a subject, in short, on
+which reflection would be long indulged, and must be unavailing. She
+could think of nothing else; and yet, whether Bingley’s regard had
+really died away, or were suppressed by his friends’ interference;
+whether he had been aware of Jane’s attachment, or whether it had
+escaped his observation; whichever were the case, though her opinion of
+him must be materially affected by the difference, her sister’s
+situation remained the same, her peace equally wounded.
+
+
+
+ A day or two passed before Jane had courage to speak of her feelings to
+Elizabeth; but at last, on Mrs. Bennet’s leaving them together, after a
+longer irritation than usual about Netherfield and its master, she could
+not help saying,—
+
+
+
+ “O that my dear mother had more command over herself! she can have no
+idea of the pain she gives me by her continual reflections on him. But I
+will not {170} repine. It cannot last long. He will be forgot, and we shall
+all be as we were before.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth looked at her sister with incredulous solicitude, but said
+nothing.
+
+
+
+ “You doubt me,” cried Jane, slightly colouring; “indeed, you have no
+reason. He may live in my memory as the most amiable man of my
+acquaintance but that is all. I have nothing either to hope or fear, and
+nothing to reproach him with. Thank God I have not that pain. A little
+time, therefore—I shall certainly try to get the better——”
+
+
+
+ With a stronger voice she soon added, “I have this comfort immediately,
+that it has not been more than an error of fancy on my side, and that it
+has done no harm to anyone but myself.”
+
+
+
+ “My dear Jane,” exclaimed Elizabeth, “you are too good. Your sweetness
+and disinterestedness are really angelic; I do not know what to say to
+you. I feel as if I had never done you justice, or loved you as you
+deserve.”
+
+
+
+ Miss Bennet eagerly disclaimed all extraordinary merit, and threw back
+the praise on her sister’s warm affection.
+
+
+
+ “Nay,” said Elizabeth, “this is not fair. You wish to think all the
+world respectable, and are hurt if I speak ill of anybody. I only want
+to think you perfect, and you set yourself against it. Do not be
+afraid of my running into any excess, of my encroaching on your
+privilege of universal good-will. You need not. There are few people
+whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see
+of the world the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms
+my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the
+little dependence that can be placed on the appearance {171} of either merit
+or sense. I have met with two instances lately: one I will not mention,
+the other is Charlotte’s marriage. It is unaccountable! in every view it
+is unaccountable!”
+
+
+
+ “My dear Lizzy, do not give way to such feelings as these. They will
+ruin your happiness. You do not make allowance enough for difference of
+situation and temper. Consider Mr. Collins’s respectability, and
+Charlotte’s prudent, steady character. Remember that she is one of a
+large family; that as to fortune it is a most eligible match; and be
+ready to believe, for everybody’s sake, that she may feel something like
+regard and esteem for our cousin.”
+
+
+
+ “To oblige you, I would try to believe almost anything, but no one else
+could be benefited by such a belief as this; for were I persuaded that
+Charlotte had any regard for him, I should only think worse of her
+understanding than I now do of her heart. My dear Jane, Mr. Collins is a
+conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man: you know he is, as well as
+I do; and you must feel, as well as I do, that the woman who marries him
+cannot have a proper way of thinking. You shall not defend her, though
+it is Charlotte Lucas. You shall not, for the sake of one individual,
+change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade
+yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of
+danger security for happiness.”
+
+
+
+ “I must think your language too strong in speaking of both,” replied
+Jane; “and I hope you will be convinced of it, by seeing them happy
+together. But enough of this. You alluded to something else. You
+mentioned two instances. I cannot misunderstand you, but I entreat
+you, dear Lizzy, not to pain me by thinking that person {172} to blame, and
+saying your opinion of him is sunk. We must not be so ready to fancy
+ourselves intentionally injured. We must not expect a lively young man
+to be always so guarded and circumspect. It is very often nothing but
+our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than
+it does.”
+
+
+
+ “And men take care that they should.”
+
+
+
+ “If it is designedly done, they cannot be justified; but I have no idea
+of there being so much design in the world as some persons imagine.”
+
+
+
+ “I am far from attributing any part of Mr. Bingley’s conduct to design,”
+said Elizabeth; “but, without scheming to do wrong, or to make others
+unhappy, there may be error and there may be misery. Thoughtlessness,
+want of attention to other people’s feelings, and want of resolution,
+will do the business.”
+
+
+
+ “And do you impute it to either of those?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes; to the last. But if I go on I shall displease you by saying what I
+think of persons you esteem. Stop me, whilst you can.”
+
+
+
+ “You persist, then, in supposing his sisters influence him?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, in conjunction with his friend.”
+
+
+
+ “I cannot believe it. Why should they try to influence him? They can
+only wish his happiness; and if he is attached to me no other woman can
+secure it.”
+
+
+
+ “Your first position is false. They may wish many things besides his
+happiness: they may wish his increase of wealth and consequence; they
+may wish him to marry a girl who has all the importance of money, great
+connections, and pride.”
+
+
+
+ “Beyond a doubt they do wish him to choose Miss Darcy,” replied Jane;
+“but this may be from better {173} feelings than you are supposing. They have
+known her much longer than they have known me; no wonder if they love
+her better. But, whatever may be their own wishes, it is very unlikely
+they should have opposed their brother’s. What sister would think
+herself at liberty to do it, unless there were something very
+objectionable? If they believed him attached to me they would not try to
+part us; if he were so, they could not succeed. By supposing such an
+affection, you make everybody acting unnaturally and wrong, and me most
+unhappy. Do not distress me by the idea. I am not ashamed of having been
+mistaken—or, at least, it is slight, it is nothing in comparison of
+what I should feel in thinking ill of him or his sisters. Let me take it
+in the best light, in the light in which it may be understood.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth could not oppose such a wish; and from this time Mr. Bingley’s
+name was scarcely ever mentioned between them.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet still continued to wonder and repine at his returning no
+more; and though a day seldom passed in which Elizabeth did not account
+for it clearly, there seemed little chance of her ever considering it
+with less perplexity. Her daughter endeavoured to convince her of what
+she did not believe herself, that his attentions to Jane had been merely
+the effect of a common and transient liking, which ceased when he saw
+her no more; but though the probability of the statement was admitted at
+the time, she had the same story to repeat every day. Mrs. Bennet’s best
+comfort was, that Mr. Bingley must be down again in the summer.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bennet treated the matter differently. “So, Lizzy,” said he, one
+day, “your sister is crossed in love, I find. I congratulate her. Next
+to being married, a girl likes to {174} be crossed in love a little now and
+then. It is something to think of, and gives her a sort of distinction
+among her companions. When is your turn to come? You will hardly bear to
+be long outdone by Jane. Now is your time. Here are officers enough at
+Meryton to disappoint all the young ladies in the country. Let Wickham
+be your man. He is a pleasant fellow, and would jilt you creditably.”
+
+
+
+ “Thank you, sir, but a less agreeable man would satisfy me. We must not
+all expect Jane’s good fortune.”
+
+
+
+ “True,” said Mr. Bennet; “but it is a comfort to think that, whatever of
+that kind may befall you, you have an affectionate mother who will
+always make the most of it.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Wickham’s society was of material service in dispelling the gloom
+which the late perverse occurrences had thrown on many of the Longbourn
+family. They saw him often, and to his other recommendations was now
+added that of general unreserve. The whole of what Elizabeth had already
+heard, his claims on Mr. Darcy, and all that he had suffered from him,
+was now openly acknowledged and publicly canvassed; and everybody was
+pleased to think how much they had always disliked Mr. Darcy before they
+had known anything of the matter.
+
+
+
+ Miss Bennet was the only creature who could suppose there might be any
+extenuating circumstances in the case unknown to the society of
+Hertfordshire: her mild and steady candour always pleaded for
+allowances, and urged the possibility of mistakes; but by everybody else
+Mr. Darcy was condemned as the worst of men. {175} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV. 
+
+ 
+ FTER a week spent in professions of love and schemes of felicity, Mr.
+Collins was called from his amiable Charlotte by the arrival of
+Saturday. The pain of separation, however, might be alleviated on his
+side by preparations for the reception of his bride, as he had reason to
+hope, that shortly after his next return into Hertfordshire, the day
+would be fixed that was to make him the happiest of men. He took leave
+of his relations at Longbourn with as much solemnity as before; wished
+his fair cousins health and happiness again, and promised their father
+another letter of thanks.
+
+
+
+ On the following Monday, Mrs. Bennet had the pleasure of receiving her
+brother and his wife, who came, as usual, to spend the Christmas at
+Longbourn. Mr. Gardiner was a sensible, gentlemanlike man, greatly
+superior to his sister, as well by nature as education. The Netherfield
+ladies would have had difficulty in believing that a man who lived by
+trade, and within view of his own warehouses, could have been so
+well-bred and agreeable. Mrs. Gardiner, who was several years younger
+than Mrs. Bennet and Mrs. Philips, was an amiable, intelligent, {176} elegant
+woman, and a great favourite with her Longbourn nieces. Between the two
+eldest and herself especially, there subsisted a very particular regard.
+They had frequently been staying with her in town.
+
+
+
+ The first part of Mrs. Gardiner’s business, on her arrival, was to
+distribute her presents and describe the newest fashions. When this was
+done, she had a less active part to play. It became her turn to listen.
+Mrs. Bennet had many grievances to relate, and much to complain of. They
+had all been very ill-used since she last saw her sister. Two of her
+girls had been on the point of marriage, and after all there was nothing
+in it.
+
+
+
+ “I do not blame Jane,” she continued, “for Jane would have got Mr.
+Bingley if she could. But, Lizzy! Oh, sister! it is very hard to think
+that she might have been Mr. Collins’s wife by this time, had not it
+been for her own perverseness. He made her an offer in this very room,
+and she refused him. The consequence of it is, that Lady Lucas will have
+a daughter married before I have, and that Longbourn estate is just as
+much entailed as ever. The Lucases are very artful people, indeed,
+sister. They are all for what they can get. I am sorry to say it of
+them, but so it is. It makes me very nervous and poorly, to be thwarted
+so in my own family, and to have neighbours who think of themselves
+before anybody else. However, your coming just at this time is the
+greatest of comforts, and I am very glad to hear what you tell us of
+long sleeves.”
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Gardiner, to whom the chief of this news had been given before, in
+the course of Jane and Elizabeth’s correspondence with her, made her
+sister a slight answer, and, in compassion to her nieces, turned the
+conversation.
+
+
+
+ When alone with Elizabeth afterwards, she spoke more {177} on the subject.
+“It seems likely to have been a desirable match for Jane,” said she. “I
+am sorry it went off. But these things happen so often! A young man,
+such as you describe Mr. Bingley, so easily falls in love with a pretty
+girl for a few weeks, and, when accident separates them, so easily
+forgets her, that these sort of inconstancies are very frequent.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ “Offended two or three young ladies”
+
+ 
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ “An excellent consolation in its way,” said Elizabeth; “but it will not
+do for us . We do not suffer by accident. {178} It does not often happen
+that the interference of friends will persuade a young man of
+independent fortune to think no more of a girl whom he was violently in
+love with only a few days before.”
+
+
+
+ “But that expression of ‘violently in love’ is so hackneyed, so
+doubtful, so indefinite, that it gives me very little idea. It is as
+often applied to feelings which arise only from a half hour’s
+acquaintance, as to a real, strong attachment. Pray, how violent was 
+Mr. Bingley’s love?”
+
+
+
+ “I never saw a more promising inclination; he was growing quite
+inattentive to other people, and wholly engrossed by her. Every time
+they met, it was more decided and remarkable. At his own ball he
+offended two or three young ladies by not asking them to dance; and I
+spoke to him twice myself without receiving an answer. Could there be
+finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, yes! of that kind of love which I suppose him to have felt. Poor
+Jane! I am sorry for her, because, with her disposition, she may not get
+over it immediately. It had better have happened to you , Lizzy; you
+would have laughed yourself out of it sooner. But do you think she would
+be prevailed on to go back with us? Change of scene might be of
+service—and perhaps a little relief from home may be as useful as
+anything.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was exceedingly pleased with this proposal, and felt persuaded
+of her sister’s ready acquiescence.
+
+
+
+ “I hope,” added Mrs. Gardiner, “that no consideration with regard to
+this young man will influence her. We live in so different a part of
+town, all our connections are so different, and, as you well know, we go
+out so little, that it is very improbable they should meet at all,
+unless he really comes to see her. {179} ”
+
+
+
+ “And that is quite impossible; for he is now in the custody of his
+friend, and Mr. Darcy would no more suffer him to call on Jane in such a
+part of London! My dear aunt, how could you think of it? Mr. Darcy may,
+perhaps, have heard of such a place as Gracechurch Street, but he
+would hardly think a month’s ablution enough to cleanse him from its
+impurities, were he once to enter it; and, depend upon it, Mr. Bingley
+never stirs without him.”
+
+
+
+ “So much the better. I hope they will not meet at all. But does not Jane
+correspond with his sister? She will not be able to help calling.”
+
+
+
+ “She will drop the acquaintance entirely.”
+
+
+
+ But, in spite of the certainty in which Elizabeth affected to place this
+point, as well as the still more interesting one of Bingley’s being
+withheld from seeing Jane, she felt a solicitude on the subject which
+convinced her, on examination, that she did not consider it entirely
+hopeless. It was possible, and sometimes she thought it probable, that
+his affection might be re-animated, and the influence of his friends
+successfully combated by the more natural influence of Jane’s
+attractions.
+
+
+
+ Miss Bennet accepted her aunt’s invitation with pleasure; and the
+Bingleys were no otherwise in her thoughts at the same time than as she
+hoped, by Caroline’s not living in the same house with her brother, she
+might occasionally spend a morning with her, without any danger of
+seeing him.
+
+
+
+ The Gardiners stayed a week at Longbourn; and what with the Philipses,
+the Lucases, and the officers, there was not a day without its
+engagement. Mrs. Bennet had so carefully provided for the entertainment
+of her brother and sister, that they did not once sit down to a family
+dinner. When the engagement was for home, {180} some of the officers always
+made part of it, of which officers Mr. Wickham was sure to be one; and
+on these occasions Mrs. Gardiner, rendered suspicious by Elizabeth’s
+warm commendation of him, narrowly observed them both. Without supposing
+them, from what she saw, to be very seriously in love, their preference
+of each other was plain enough to make her a little uneasy; and she
+resolved to speak to Elizabeth on the subject before she left
+Hertfordshire, and represent to her the imprudence of encouraging such
+an attachment.
+
+
+
+ To Mrs. Gardiner, Wickham had one means of affording pleasure,
+unconnected with his general powers. About ten or a dozen years ago,
+before her marriage, she had spent a considerable time in that very part
+of Derbyshire to which he belonged. They had, therefore, many
+acquaintance in common; and, though Wickham had been little there since
+the death of Darcy’s father, five years before, it was yet in his power
+to give her fresher intelligence of her former friends than she had been
+in the way of procuring.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Gardiner had seen Pemberley, and known the late Mr. Darcy by
+character perfectly well. Here, consequently, was an inexhaustible
+subject of discourse. In comparing her recollection of Pemberley with
+the minute description which Wickham could give, and in bestowing her
+tribute of praise on the character of its late possessor, she was
+delighting both him and herself. On being made acquainted with the
+present Mr. Darcy’s treatment of him, she tried to remember something of
+that gentleman’s reputed disposition, when quite a lad, which might
+agree with it; and was confident, at last, that she recollected having
+heard Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy formerly spoken of as a very proud,
+ill-natured boy. {181} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“Will you come and see me.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI. 
+
+ 
+ RS. GARDINER’S caution to Elizabeth was punctually and kindly given on
+the first favourable opportunity of speaking to her alone: after
+honestly telling her what she thought, she thus went on:—
+
+
+
+ “You are too sensible a girl, Lizzy, to fall in love merely because you
+are warned against it; and, therefore, I am not afraid of speaking
+openly. Seriously, I would have you be on your guard. Do not involve
+yourself, or endeavour to involve him, in an affection which the want of
+fortune would make so very imprudent. I have nothing to say against
+ him : he is a most interesting young man; and if he had the fortune he
+ought to have, I should think you could not do better. But as it is—you
+must not let your fancy run away with you. You {182} have sense, and we all
+expect you to use it. Your father would depend on your resolution and
+good conduct, I am sure. You must not disappoint your father.”
+
+
+
+ “My dear aunt, this is being serious indeed.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, and I hope to engage you to be serious likewise.”
+
+
+
+ “Well, then, you need not be under any alarm. I will take care of
+myself, and of Mr. Wickham too. He shall not be in love with me, if I
+can prevent it.”
+
+
+
+ “Elizabeth, you are not serious now.”
+
+
+
+ “I beg your pardon. I will try again. At present I am not in love with
+Mr. Wickham; no, I certainly am not. But he is, beyond all comparison,
+the most agreeable man I ever saw—and if he becomes really attached to
+me—I believe it will be better that he should not. I see the imprudence
+of it. Oh, that abominable Mr. Darcy! My father’s opinion of me does
+me the greatest honour; and I should be miserable to forfeit it. My
+father, however, is partial to Mr. Wickham. In short, my dear aunt, I
+should be very sorry to be the means of making any of you unhappy; but
+since we see, every day, that where there is affection young people are
+seldom withheld, by immediate want of fortune, from entering into
+engagements with each other, how can I promise to be wiser than so many
+of my fellow-creatures, if I am tempted, or how am I even to know that
+it would be wiser to resist? All that I can promise you, therefore, is
+not to be in a hurry. I will not be in a hurry to believe myself his
+first object. When I am in company with him, I will not be wishing. In
+short, I will do my best.”
+
+
+
+ “Perhaps it will be as well if you discourage his coming here so very
+often. At least you should not remind your mother of inviting him.”
+
+
+
+ “As I did the other day,” said Elizabeth, with a con {183} scious smile; “very
+true, it will be wise in me to refrain from that . But do not imagine
+that he is always here so often. It is on your account that he has been
+so frequently invited this week. You know my mother’s ideas as to the
+necessity of constant company for her friends. But really, and upon my
+honour, I will try to do what I think to be wisest; and now I hope you
+are satisfied.”
+
+
+
+ Her aunt assured her that she was; and Elizabeth, having thanked her for
+the kindness of her hints, they parted,—a wonderful instance of advice
+being given on such a point without being resented.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Collins returned into Hertfordshire soon after it had been quitted
+by the Gardiners and Jane; but, as he took up his abode with the
+Lucases, his arrival was no great inconvenience to Mrs. Bennet. His
+marriage was now fast approaching; and she was at length so far resigned
+as to think it inevitable, and even repeatedly to say, in an ill-natured
+tone, that she “ wished they might be happy.” Thursday was to be the
+wedding-day, and on Wednesday Miss Lucas paid her farewell visit; and
+when she rose to take leave, Elizabeth, ashamed of her mother’s
+ungracious and reluctant good wishes, and sincerely affected herself,
+accompanied her out of the room. As they went down stairs together,
+Charlotte said,—
+
+
+
+ “I shall depend on hearing from you very often, Eliza.”
+
+
+
+ “ That you certainly shall.”
+
+
+
+ “And I have another favour to ask. Will you come and see me?”
+
+
+
+ “We shall often meet, I hope, in Hertfordshire.”
+
+
+
+ “I am not likely to leave Kent for some time. Promise me, therefore, to
+come to Hunsford.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth could not refuse, though she foresaw little pleasure in the
+visit. {184} 
+
+
+
+ “My father and Maria are to come to me in March,” added Charlotte, “and
+I hope you will consent to be of the party. Indeed, Eliza, you will be
+as welcome to me as either of them.”
+
+
+
+ The wedding took place: the bride and bridegroom set off for Kent from
+the church door, and everybody had as much to say or to hear on the
+subject as usual. Elizabeth soon heard from her friend, and their
+correspondence was as regular and frequent as it ever had been: that it
+should be equally unreserved was impossible. Elizabeth could never
+address her without feeling that all the comfort of intimacy was over;
+and, though determined not to slacken as a correspondent, it was for the
+sake of what had been rather than what was. Charlotte’s first letters
+were received with a good deal of eagerness: there could not but be
+curiosity to know how she would speak of her new home, how she would
+like Lady Catherine, and how happy she would dare pronounce herself to
+be; though, when the letters were read, Elizabeth felt that Charlotte
+expressed herself on every point exactly as she might have foreseen. She
+wrote cheerfully, seemed surrounded with comforts, and mentioned nothing
+which she could not praise. The house, furniture, neighbourhood, and
+roads, were all to her taste, and Lady Catherine’s behaviour was most
+friendly and obliging. It was Mr. Collins’s picture of Hunsford and
+Rosings rationally softened; and Elizabeth perceived that she must wait
+for her own visit there, to know the rest.
+
+
+
+ Jane had already written a few lines to her sister, to announce their
+safe arrival in London; and when she wrote again, Elizabeth hoped it
+would be in her power to say something of the Bingleys. {185} 
+
+
+
+ Her impatience for this second letter was as well rewarded as impatience
+generally is. Jane had been a week in town, without either seeing or
+hearing from Caroline. She accounted for it, however, by supposing that
+her last letter to her friend from Longbourn had by some accident been
+lost.
+
+
+
+ “My aunt,” she continued, “is going to-morrow into that part of the
+town, and I shall take the opportunity of calling in Grosvenor Street.”
+
+
+
+ She wrote again when the visit was paid, and she had seen Miss Bingley.
+“I did not think Caroline in spirits,” were her words, “but she was very
+glad to see me, and reproached me for giving her no notice of my coming
+to London. I was right, therefore; my last letter had never reached her.
+I inquired after their brother, of course. He was well, but so much
+engaged with Mr. Darcy that they scarcely ever saw him. I found that
+Miss Darcy was expected to dinner: I wish I could see her. My visit was
+not long, as Caroline and Mrs. Hurst were going out. I dare say I shall
+soon see them here.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth shook her head over this letter. It convinced her that
+accident only could discover to Mr. Bingley her sister’s being in town.
+
+
+
+ Four weeks passed away, and Jane saw nothing of him. She endeavoured to
+persuade herself that she did not regret it; but she could no longer be
+blind to Miss Bingley’s inattention. After waiting at home every morning
+for a fortnight, and inventing every evening a fresh excuse for her, the
+visitor did at last appear; but the shortness of her stay, and, yet
+more, the alteration of her manner, would allow Jane to deceive herself
+no longer. The letter which she wrote on this occasion to her sister
+will prove what she felt: {186} —
+
+
+
+ “My dearest Lizzy will, I am sure, be incapable of triumphing in
+her better judgment, at my expense, when I confess myself to have
+been entirely deceived in Miss Bingley’s regard for me. But, my
+dear sister, though the event has proved you right, do not think me
+obstinate if I still assert that, considering what her behaviour
+was, my confidence was as natural as your suspicion. I do not at
+all comprehend her reason for wishing to be intimate with me; but,
+if the same circumstances were to happen again, I am sure I should
+be deceived again. Caroline did not return my visit till yesterday;
+and not a note, not a line, did I receive in the meantime. When she
+did come, it was very evident that she had no pleasure in it; she
+made a slight, formal apology for not calling before, said not a
+word of wishing to see me again, and was, in every respect, so
+altered a creature, that when she went away I was perfectly
+resolved to continue the acquaintance no longer. I pity, though I
+cannot help blaming, her. She was very wrong in singling me out as
+she did; I can safely say, that every advance to intimacy began on
+her side. But I pity her, because she must feel that she has been
+acting wrong, and because I am very sure that anxiety for her
+brother is the cause of it. I need not explain myself farther; and
+though we know this anxiety to be quite needless, yet if she
+feels it, it will easily account for her behaviour to me; and so
+deservedly dear as he is to his sister, whatever anxiety she may
+feel on his behalf is natural and amiable. I cannot but wonder,
+however, at her having any such fears now, because if he had at all
+cared about me, we must have met long, long ago. He knows of my
+being in town, I am certain, from something she said herself; and
+yet it would seem, by her manner of talking, {187} as if she wanted to
+persuade herself that he is really partial to Miss Darcy. I cannot
+understand it. If I were not afraid of judging harshly, I should be
+almost tempted to say, that there is a strong appearance of
+duplicity in all this. I will endeavour to banish every painful
+thought, and think only of what will make me happy, your affection,
+and the invariable kindness of my dear uncle and aunt. Let me hear
+from you very soon. Miss Bingley said something of his never
+returning to Netherfield again, of giving up the house, but not
+with any certainty. We had better not mention it. I am extremely
+glad that you have such pleasant accounts from our friends at
+Hunsford. Pray go to see them, with Sir William and Maria. I am
+sure you will be very comfortable there.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yours, etc.”
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ This letter gave Elizabeth some pain; but her spirits returned, as she
+considered that Jane would no longer be duped, by the sister at least.
+All expectation from the brother was now absolutely over. She would not
+even wish for any renewal of his attentions. His character sunk on every
+review of it; and, as a punishment for him, as well as a possible
+advantage to Jane, she seriously hoped he might really soon marry Mr.
+Darcy’s sister, as, by Wickham’s account, she would make him abundantly
+regret what he had thrown away.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Gardiner about this time reminded Elizabeth of her promise
+concerning that gentleman, and required information; and Elizabeth had
+such to send as might rather give contentment to her aunt than to
+herself. His apparent partiality had subsided, his attentions were over,
+he was the admirer of some one else. Elizabeth was {188} watchful enough to
+see it all, but she could see it and write of it without material pain.
+Her heart had been but slightly touched, and her vanity was satisfied
+with believing that she would have been his only choice, had fortune
+permitted it. The sudden acquisition of ten thousand pounds was the most
+remarkable charm of the young lady to whom he was now rendering himself
+agreeable; but Elizabeth, less clear-sighted perhaps in this case than
+in Charlotte’s, did not quarrel with him for his wish of independence.
+Nothing, on the contrary, could be more natural; and, while able to
+suppose that it cost him a few struggles to relinquish her, she was
+ready to allow it a wise and desirable measure for both, and could very
+sincerely wish him happy.
+
+
+
+ All this was acknowledged to Mrs. Gardiner; and, after relating the
+circumstances, she thus went on:—“I am now convinced, my dear aunt,
+that I have never been much in love; for had I really experienced that
+pure and elevating passion, I should at present detest his very name,
+and wish him all manner of evil. But my feelings are not only cordial
+towards him , they are even impartial towards Miss King. I cannot find
+out that I hate her at all, or that I am in the least unwilling to think
+her a very good sort of girl. There can be no love in all this. My
+watchfulness has been effectual; and though I should certainly be a more
+interesting object to all my acquaintance, were I distractedly in love
+with him, I cannot say that I regret my comparative insignificance.
+Importance may sometimes be purchased too dearly. Kitty and Lydia take
+his defection much more to heart than I do. They are young in the ways
+of the world, and not yet open to the mortifying conviction that
+handsome young men must have something to live on as well as the
+plain. {189} ”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“On the Stairs.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTERXXVII. 
+
+ 
+ ITH no greater events than these in the Longbourn family, and otherwise
+diversified by little beyond the walks to Meryton, sometimes dirty and
+sometimes cold, did January and February pass away. March was to take
+Elizabeth to Hunsford. She had not at first thought very seriously of
+going thither; but Charlotte, she soon found, was depending on the
+plan, {190} and she gradually learned to consider it herself with greater
+pleasure as well as greater certainty. Absence had increased her desire
+of seeing Charlotte again, and weakened her disgust of Mr. Collins.
+There was novelty in the scheme; and as, with such a mother and such
+uncompanionable sisters, home could not be faultless, a little change
+was not unwelcome for its own sake. The journey would, moreover, give
+her a peep at Jane; and, in short, as the time drew near, she would have
+been very sorry for any delay. Everything, however, went on smoothly,
+and was finally settled according to Charlotte’s first sketch. She was
+to accompany Sir William and his second daughter. The improvement of
+spending a night in London was added in time, and the plan became as
+perfect as plan could be.
+
+
+
+ The only pain was in leaving her father, who would certainly miss her,
+and who, when it came to the point, so little liked her going, that he
+told her to write to him, and almost promised to answer her letter.
+
+
+
+ The farewell between herself and Mr. Wickham was perfectly friendly; on
+his side even more. His present pursuit could not make him forget that
+Elizabeth had been the first to excite and to deserve his attention, the
+first to listen and to pity, the first to be admired; and in his manner
+of bidding her adieu, wishing her every enjoyment, reminding her of what
+she was to expect in Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and trusting their
+opinion of her—their opinion of everybody—would always coincide, there
+was a solicitude, an interest, which she felt must ever attach her to
+him with a most sincere regard; and she parted from him convinced, that,
+whether married or single, he must always be her model of the amiable
+and pleasing. {191} 
+
+
+
+ Her fellow-travellers the next day were not of a kind to make her think
+him less agreeable. Sir William Lucas, and his daughter Maria, a
+good-humoured girl, but as empty-headed as himself, had nothing to say
+that could be worth hearing, and were listened to with about as much
+delight as the rattle of the chaise. Elizabeth loved absurdities, but
+she had known Sir William’s too long. He could tell her nothing new of
+the wonders of his presentation and knighthood; and his civilities were
+worn out, like his information.
+
+
+
+ It was a journey of only twenty-four miles, and they began it so early
+as to be in Gracechurch Street by noon. As they drove to Mr. Gardiner’s
+door, Jane was at a drawing-room window watching their arrival: when
+they entered the passage, she was there to welcome them, and Elizabeth,
+looking earnestly in her face, was pleased to see it healthful and
+lovely as ever. On the stairs were a troop of little boys and girls,
+whose eagerness for their cousin’s appearance would not allow them to
+wait in the drawing-room, and whose shyness, as they had not seen her
+for a twelvemonth, prevented their coming lower. All was joy and
+kindness. The day passed most pleasantly away; the morning in bustle and
+shopping, and the evening at one of the theatres.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth then contrived to sit by her aunt. Their first subject was her
+sister; and she was more grieved than astonished to hear, in reply to
+her minute inquiries, that though Jane always struggled to support her
+spirits, there were periods of dejection. It was reasonable, however, to
+hope that they would not continue long. Mrs. Gardiner gave her the
+particulars also of Miss Bingley’s visit in Gracechurch Street, and
+repeated conversations occurring at different times between Jane and
+herself, {192} which proved that the former had, from her heart, given up the
+acquaintance.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Gardiner then rallied her niece on Wickham’s desertion, and
+complimented her on bearing it so well.
+
+
+
+ “But, my dear Elizabeth,” she added, “what sort of girl is Miss King? I
+should be sorry to think our friend mercenary.”
+
+
+
+ “Pray, my dear aunt, what is the difference in matrimonial affairs,
+between the mercenary and the prudent motive? Where does discretion end,
+and avarice begin? Last Christmas you were afraid of his marrying me,
+because it would be imprudent; and now, because he is trying to get a
+girl with only ten thousand pounds, you want to find out that he is
+mercenary.”
+
+
+
+ “If you will only tell me what sort of girl Miss King is, I shall know
+what to think.”
+
+
+
+ “She is a very good kind of girl, I believe. I know no harm of her.”
+
+
+
+ “But he paid her not the smallest attention till her grandfather’s death
+made her mistress of this fortune?”
+
+
+
+ “No—why should he? If it were not allowable for him to gain my 
+affections, because I had no money, what occasion could there be for
+making love to a girl whom he did not care about, and who was equally
+poor?”
+
+
+
+ “But there seems indelicacy in directing his attentions towards her so
+soon after this event.”
+
+
+
+ “A man in distressed circumstances has not time for all those elegant
+decorums which other people may observe. If she does not object to it,
+why should we ?”
+
+
+
+ “ Her not objecting does not justify him . It only shows her being
+deficient in something herself—sense or feeling. {193} ”
+
+
+
+ “Well,” cried Elizabeth, “have it as you choose. He shall be
+mercenary, and she shall be foolish.”
+
+
+
+ “No, Lizzy, that is what I do not choose. I should be sorry, you know,
+to think ill of a young man who has lived so long in Derbyshire.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, if that is all, I have a very poor opinion of young men who live in
+Derbyshire; and their intimate friends who live in Hertfordshire are not
+much better. I am sick of them all. Thank heaven! I am going to-morrow
+where I shall find a man who has not one agreeable quality, who has
+neither manners nor sense to recommend him. Stupid men are the only ones
+worth knowing, after all.”
+
+
+
+ “Take care, Lizzy; that speech savours strongly of disappointment.”
+
+
+
+ Before they were separated by the conclusion of the play, she had the
+unexpected happiness of an invitation to accompany her uncle and aunt in
+a tour of pleasure which they proposed taking in the summer.
+
+
+
+ “We have not quite determined how far it shall carry us,” said Mrs.
+Gardiner; “but perhaps, to the Lakes.”
+
+
+
+ No scheme could have been more agreeable to Elizabeth, and her
+acceptance of the invitation was most ready and grateful. “My dear, dear
+aunt,” she rapturously cried, “what delight! what felicity! You give me
+fresh life and vigour. Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men
+to rocks and mountains? Oh, what hours of transport we shall spend! And
+when we do return, it shall not be like other travellers, without
+being able to give one accurate idea of anything. We will know where
+we have gone—we will recollect what we have seen. Lakes, mountains,
+and rivers, shall not be jumbled together in our imaginations; nor, when
+we attempt to describe any particular scene, will we begin quarrelling
+about its relative situation. Let our first effusions be less
+insupportable than those of the generality of travellers. {194} ”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“At the door.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTERXXVIII. 
+
+ 
+ VERY object in the next day’s journey was new and interesting to
+Elizabeth; and her spirits were in a state of enjoyment; for she had
+seen her sister looking so well as to banish all fear for her health,
+and the prospect of her northern tour was a constant source of delight.
+
+
+
+ When they left the high road for the lane to Hunsford, every eye was in
+search of the Parsonage, and every turning expected to bring it in view.
+The paling of Rosings park was their boundary on one side. Elizabeth
+smiled at the recollection of all that she had heard of its inhabitants.
+
+
+
+ At length the Parsonage was discernible. The garden {195} sloping to the
+road, the house standing in it, the green pales and the laurel hedge,
+everything declared they were arriving. Mr. Collins and Charlotte
+appeared at the door, and the carriage stopped at the small gate, which
+led by a short gravel walk to the house, amidst the nods and smiles of
+the whole party. In a moment they were all out of the chaise, rejoicing
+at the sight of each other. Mrs. Collins welcomed her friend with the
+liveliest pleasure, and Elizabeth was more and more satisfied with
+coming, when she found herself so affectionately received. She saw
+instantly that her cousin’s manners were not altered by his marriage:
+his formal civility was just what it had been; and he detained her some
+minutes at the gate to hear and satisfy his inquiries after all her
+family. They were then, with no other delay than his pointing out the
+neatness of the entrance, taken into the house; and as soon as they were
+in the parlour, he welcomed them a second time, with ostentatious
+formality, to his humble abode, and punctually repeated all his wife’s
+offers of refreshment.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was prepared to see him in his glory; and she could not help
+fancying that in displaying the good proportion of the room, its aspect,
+and its furniture, he addressed himself particularly to her, as if
+wishing to make her feel what she had lost in refusing him. But though
+everything seemed neat and comfortable, she was not able to gratify him
+by any sigh of repentance; and rather looked with wonder at her friend,
+that she could have so cheerful an air with such a companion. When Mr.
+Collins said anything of which his wife might reasonably be ashamed,
+which certainly was not seldom, she involuntarily turned her eye on
+Charlotte. Once or twice she could discern a faint blush; but in general
+Charlotte {196} wisely did not hear. After sitting long enough to admire
+every article of furniture in the room, from the sideboard to the
+fender, to give an account of their journey, and of all that had
+happened in London, Mr. Collins invited them to take a stroll in the
+garden, which was large and well laid out, and to the cultivation of
+which he attended himself. To work in his garden was one of his most
+respectable pleasures; and Elizabeth admired the command of countenance
+with which Charlotte talked of the healthfulness of the exercise, and
+owned she encouraged it as much as possible. Here, leading the way
+through every walk and cross walk, and scarcely allowing them an
+interval to utter the praises he asked for, every view was pointed out
+with a minuteness which left beauty entirely behind. He could number the
+fields in every direction, and could tell how many trees there were in
+the most distant clump. But of all the views which his garden, or which
+the country or the kingdom could boast, none were to be compared with
+the prospect of Rosings, afforded by an opening in the trees that
+bordered the park nearly opposite the front of his house. It was a
+handsome modern building, well situated on rising ground.
+
+
+
+ From his garden, Mr. Collins would have led them round his two meadows;
+but the ladies, not having shoes to encounter the remains of a white
+frost, turned back; and while Sir William accompanied him, Charlotte
+took her sister and friend over the house, extremely well pleased,
+probably, to have the opportunity of showing it without her husband’s
+help. It was rather small, but well built and convenient; and everything
+was fitted up and arranged with a neatness and consistency, of which
+Elizabeth gave Charlotte all the credit. When Mr. Collins could be
+forgotten, there was really a great air of comfort {197} throughout, and by
+Charlotte’s evident enjoyment of it, Elizabeth supposed he must be often
+forgotten.
+
+
+
+ She had already learnt that Lady Catherine was still in the country. It
+was spoken of again while they were at dinner, when Mr. Collins joining
+in, observed,—
+
+
+
+ “Yes, Miss Elizabeth, you will have the honour of seeing Lady Catherine
+de Bourgh on the ensuing Sunday at church, and I need not say you will
+be delighted with her. She is all affability and condescension, and I
+doubt not but you will be honoured with some portion of her notice when
+service is over. I have scarcely any hesitation in saying that she will
+include you and my sister Maria in every invitation with which she
+honours us during your stay here. Her behaviour to my dear Charlotte is
+charming. We dine at Rosings twice every week, and are never allowed to
+walk home. Her Ladyship’s carriage is regularly ordered for us. I
+ should say, one of her Ladyship’s carriages, for she has several.”
+
+
+
+ “Lady Catherine is a very respectable, sensible woman, indeed,” added
+Charlotte, “and a most attentive neighbour.”
+
+
+
+ “Very true, my dear, that is exactly what I say. She is the sort of
+woman whom one cannot regard with too much deference.”
+
+
+
+ The evening was spent chiefly in talking over Hertfordshire news, and
+telling again what had been already written; and when it closed,
+Elizabeth, in the solitude of her chamber, had to meditate upon
+Charlotte’s degree of contentment, to understand her address in guiding,
+and composure in bearing with, her husband, and to acknowledge that it
+was all done very well. She had also to anticipate how her visit would
+pass, the quiet tenour of their usual employments, the vexatious
+interruptions of {198} Mr. Collins, and the gaieties of their intercourse
+with Rosings. A lively imagination soon settled it all.
+
+
+
+ About the middle of the next day, as she was in her room getting ready
+for a walk, a sudden noise below seemed to speak the whole house in
+confusion; and, after listening a moment, she heard somebody running
+upstairs in a violent hurry, and calling loudly after her. She opened
+the door, and met Maria in the landing-place, who, breathless with
+agitation, cried out,—
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ “In Conversation with the ladies”
+
+ 
+
+ [Copyright 1894 by George Allen.]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ “Oh, my dear Eliza! pray make haste and come into the dining-room, for
+there is such a sight to be seen! I will not tell you what it is. Make
+haste, and come down this moment. {199} ”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth asked questions in vain; Maria would tell her nothing more;
+and down they ran into the dining-room which fronted the lane, in quest
+of this wonder; it was two ladies, stopping in a low phaeton at the
+garden gate.
+
+
+
+ “And is this all?” cried Elizabeth. “I expected at least that the pigs
+were got into the garden, and here is nothing but Lady Catherine and her
+daughter!”
+
+
+
+ “La! my dear,” said Maria, quite shocked at the mistake, “it is not Lady
+Catherine. The old lady is Mrs. Jenkinson, who lives with them. The
+other is Miss De Bourgh. Only look at her. She is quite a little
+creature. Who would have thought she could be so thin and small!”
+
+
+
+ “She is abominably rude to keep Charlotte out of doors in all this wind.
+Why does she not come in?”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, Charlotte says she hardly ever does. It is the greatest of favours
+when Miss De Bourgh comes in.”
+
+
+
+ “I like her appearance,” said Elizabeth, struck with other ideas. “She
+looks sickly and cross. Yes, she will do for him very well. She will
+make him a very proper wife.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Collins and Charlotte were both standing at the gate in conversation
+with the ladies; and Sir William, to Elizabeth’s high diversion, was
+stationed in the doorway, in earnest contemplation of the greatness
+before him, and constantly bowing whenever Miss De Bourgh looked that
+way.
+
+
+
+ At length there was nothing more to be said; the ladies drove on, and
+the others returned into the house. Mr. Collins no sooner saw the two
+girls than he began to congratulate them on their good fortune, which
+Charlotte explained by letting them know that the whole party was asked
+to dine at Rosings the next day. {200} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“Lady Catherine, said she, you have given me a treasure.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX. 
+
+ 
+ R. COLLINS’S triumph, in consequence of this invitation, was complete.
+The power of displaying the grandeur of his patroness to his wondering
+visitors, and of letting them see her civility towards himself and his
+wife, was exactly what he had wished for; and that an opportunity of
+doing it should be given so soon was such an instance of Lady
+Catherine’s condescension as he knew not how to admire enough.
+
+
+
+ “I confess,” said he, “that I should not have been at all surprised by
+her Ladyship’s asking us on Sunday to {201} drink tea and spend the evening
+at Rosings. I rather expected, from my knowledge of her affability, that
+it would happen. But who could have foreseen such an attention as this?
+Who could have imagined that we should receive an invitation to dine
+there (an invitation, moreover, including the whole party) so
+immediately after your arrival?”
+
+
+
+ “I am the less surprised at what has happened,” replied Sir William,
+“from that knowledge of what the manners of the great really are, which
+my situation in life has allowed me to acquire. About the court, such
+instances of elegant breeding are not uncommon.”
+
+
+
+ Scarcely anything was talked of the whole day or next morning but their
+visit to Rosings. Mr. Collins was carefully instructing them in what
+they were to expect, that the sight of such rooms, so many servants, and
+so splendid a dinner, might not wholly overpower them.
+
+
+
+ When the ladies were separating for the toilette, he said to
+Elizabeth,—
+
+
+
+ “Do not make yourself uneasy, my dear cousin, about your apparel. Lady
+Catherine is far from requiring that elegance of dress in us which
+becomes herself and daughter. I would advise you merely to put on
+whatever of your clothes is superior to the rest—there is no occasion
+for anything more. Lady Catherine will not think the worse of you for
+being simply dressed. She likes to have the distinction of rank
+preserved.”
+
+
+
+ While they were dressing, he came two or three times to their different
+doors, to recommend their being quick, as Lady Catherine very much
+objected to be kept waiting for her dinner. Such formidable accounts of
+her Ladyship, and her manner of living, quite frightened Maria {202} Lucas,
+who had been little used to company; and she looked forward to her
+introduction at Rosings with as much apprehension as her father had done
+to his presentation at St. James’s.
+
+
+
+ As the weather was fine, they had a pleasant walk of about half a mile
+across the park. Every park has its beauty and its prospects; and
+Elizabeth saw much to be pleased with, though she could not be in such
+raptures as Mr. Collins expected the scene to inspire, and was but
+slightly affected by his enumeration of the windows in front of the
+house, and his relation of what the glazing altogether had originally
+cost Sir Lewis de Bourgh.
+
+
+
+ When they ascended the steps to the hall, Maria’s alarm was every moment
+increasing, and even Sir William did not look perfectly calm.
+Elizabeth’s courage did not fail her. She had heard nothing of Lady
+Catherine that spoke her awful from any extraordinary talents or
+miraculous virtue, and the mere stateliness of money and rank she
+thought she could witness without trepidation.
+
+
+
+ From the entrance hall, of which Mr. Collins pointed out, with a
+rapturous air, the fine proportion and finished ornaments, they followed
+the servants through an antechamber to the room where Lady Catherine,
+her daughter, and Mrs. Jenkinson were sitting. Her Ladyship, with great
+condescension, arose to receive them; and as Mrs. Collins had settled it
+with her husband that the office of introduction should be hers, it was
+performed in a proper manner, without any of those apologies and thanks
+which he would have thought necessary.
+
+
+
+ In spite of having been at St. James’s, Sir William was so completely
+awed by the grandeur surrounding him, that he had but just courage
+enough to make a very {203} low bow, and take his seat without saying a word;
+and his daughter, frightened almost out of her senses, sat on the edge
+of her chair, not knowing which way to look. Elizabeth found herself
+quite equal to the scene, and could observe the three ladies before her
+composedly. Lady Catherine was a tall, large woman, with strongly-marked
+features, which might once have been handsome. Her air was not
+conciliating, nor was her manner of receiving them such as to make her
+visitors forget their inferior rank. She was not rendered formidable by
+silence: but whatever she said was spoken in so authoritative a tone as
+marked her self-importance, and brought Mr. Wickham immediately to
+Elizabeth’s mind; and, from the observation of the day altogether, she
+believed Lady Catherine to be exactly what he had represented.
+
+
+
+ When, after examining the mother, in whose countenance and deportment
+she soon found some resemblance of Mr. Darcy, she turned her eyes on the
+daughter, she could almost have joined in Maria’s astonishment at her
+being so thin and so small. There was neither in figure nor face any
+likeness between the ladies. Miss de Bourgh was pale and sickly: her
+features, though not plain, were insignificant; and she spoke very
+little, except in a low voice, to Mrs. Jenkinson, in whose appearance
+there was nothing remarkable, and who was entirely engaged in listening
+to what she said, and placing a screen in the proper direction before
+her eyes.
+
+
+
+ After sitting a few minutes, they were all sent to one of the windows to
+admire the view, Mr. Collins attending them to point out its beauties,
+and Lady Catherine kindly informing them that it was much better worth
+looking at in the summer. {204} 
+
+
+
+ The dinner was exceedingly handsome, and there were all the servants,
+and all the articles of plate which Mr. Collins had promised; and, as he
+had likewise foretold, he took his seat at the bottom of the table, by
+her Ladyship’s desire, and looked as if he felt that life could furnish
+nothing greater. He carved and ate and praised with delighted alacrity;
+and every dish was commended first by him, and then by Sir William, who
+was now enough recovered to echo whatever his son-in-law said, in a
+manner which Elizabeth wondered Lady Catherine could bear. But Lady
+Catherine seemed gratified by their excessive admiration, and gave most
+gracious smiles, especially when any dish on the table proved a novelty
+to them. The party did not supply much conversation. Elizabeth was ready
+to speak whenever there was an opening, but she was seated between
+Charlotte and Miss de Bourgh—the former of whom was engaged in
+listening to Lady Catherine, and the latter said not a word to her all
+the dinnertime. Mrs. Jenkinson was chiefly employed in watching how
+little Miss de Bourgh ate, pressing her to try some other dish and
+fearing she was indisposed. Maria thought speaking out of the question,
+and the gentlemen did nothing but eat and admire.
+
+
+
+ When the ladies returned to the drawing-room, there was little to be
+done but to hear Lady Catherine talk, which she did without any
+intermission till coffee came in, delivering her opinion on every
+subject in so decisive a manner as proved that she was not used to have
+her judgment controverted. She inquired into Charlotte’s domestic
+concerns familiarly and minutely, and gave her a great deal of advice as
+to the management of them all; told her how everything ought to be
+regulated in so {205} small a family as hers, and instructed her as to the
+care of her cows and her poultry. Elizabeth found that nothing was
+beneath this great lady’s attention which could furnish her with an
+occasion for dictating to others. In the intervals of her discourse with
+Mrs. Collins, she addressed a variety of questions to Maria and
+Elizabeth, but especially to the latter, of whose connections she knew
+the least, and who, she observed to Mrs. Collins, was a very genteel,
+pretty kind of girl. She asked her at different times how many sisters
+she had, whether they were older or younger than herself, whether any of
+them were likely to be married, whether they were handsome, where they
+had been educated, what carriage her father kept, and what had been her
+mother’s maiden name? Elizabeth felt all the impertinence of her
+questions, but answered them very composedly. Lady Catherine then
+observed,—
+
+
+
+ “Your father’s estate is entailed on Mr. Collins, I think? For your
+sake,” turning to Charlotte, “I am glad of it; but otherwise I see no
+occasion for entailing estates from the female line. It was not thought
+necessary in Sir Lewis de Bourgh’s family. Do you play and sing, Miss
+Bennet?”
+
+
+
+ “A little.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh then—some time or other we shall be happy to hear you. Our
+instrument is a capital one, probably superior to —— you shall try it
+some day. Do your sisters play and sing?”
+
+
+
+ “One of them does.”
+
+
+
+ “Why did not you all learn? You ought all to have learned. The Miss
+Webbs all play, and their father has not so good an income as yours. Do
+you draw?”
+
+
+
+ “No, not at all. {206} ”
+
+
+
+ “What, none of you?”
+
+
+
+ “Not one.”
+
+
+
+ “That is very strange. But I suppose you had no opportunity. Your mother
+should have taken you to town every spring for the benefit of masters.”
+
+
+
+ “My mother would have no objection, but my father hates London.”
+
+
+
+ “Has your governess left you?”
+
+
+
+ “We never had any governess.”
+
+
+
+ “No governess! How was that possible? Five daughters brought up at home
+without a governess! I never heard of such a thing. Your mother must
+have been quite a slave to your education.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth could hardly help smiling, as she assured her that had not
+been the case.
+
+
+
+ “Then who taught you? who attended to you? Without a governess, you must
+have been neglected.”
+
+
+
+ “Compared with some families, I believe we were; but such of us as
+wished to learn never wanted the means. We were always encouraged to
+read, and had all the masters that were necessary. Those who chose to be
+idle certainly might.”
+
+
+
+ “Ay, no doubt: but that is what a governess will prevent; and if I had
+known your mother, I should have advised her most strenuously to engage
+one. I always say that nothing is to be done in education without steady
+and regular instruction, and nobody but a governess can give it. It is
+wonderful how many families I have been the means of supplying in that
+way. I am always glad to get a young person well placed out. Four nieces
+of Mrs. Jenkinson are most delightfully situated through my means; and
+it was but the other day that I recommended another young person, who
+was {207} merely accidentally mentioned to me, and the family are quite
+delighted with her. Mrs. Collins, did I tell you of Lady Metcalfe’s
+calling yesterday to thank me? She finds Miss Pope a treasure. ‘Lady
+Catherine,’ said she, ‘you have given me a treasure.’ Are any of your
+younger sisters out, Miss Bennet?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, ma’am, all.”
+
+
+
+ “All! What, all five out at once? Very odd! And you only the second. The
+younger ones out before the elder are married! Your younger sisters must
+be very young?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, my youngest is not sixteen. Perhaps she is full young to be much
+in company. But really, ma’am, I think it would be very hard upon
+younger sisters that they should not have their share of society and
+amusement, because the elder may not have the means or inclination to
+marry early. The last born has as good a right to the pleasures of youth
+as the first. And to be kept back on such a motive! I think it would
+not be very likely to promote sisterly affection or delicacy of mind.”
+
+
+
+ “Upon my word,” said her Ladyship, “you give your opinion very decidedly
+for so young a person. Pray, what is your age?”
+
+
+
+ “With three younger sisters grown up,” replied Elizabeth, smiling, “your
+Ladyship can hardly expect me to own it.”
+
+
+
+ Lady Catherine seemed quite astonished at not receiving a direct answer;
+and Elizabeth suspected herself to be the first creature who had ever
+dared to trifle with so much dignified impertinence.
+
+
+
+ “You cannot be more than twenty, I am sure,—therefore you need not
+conceal your age.”
+
+
+
+ “I am not one-and-twenty. {208} ”
+
+
+
+ When the gentlemen had joined them, and tea was over, the card tables
+were placed. Lady Catherine, Sir William, and Mr. and Mrs. Collins sat
+down to quadrille; and as Miss De Bourgh chose to play at cassino, the
+two girls had the honour of assisting Mrs. Jenkinson to make up her
+party. Their table was superlatively stupid. Scarcely a syllable was
+uttered that did not relate to the game, except when Mrs. Jenkinson
+expressed her fears of Miss De Bourgh’s being too hot or too cold, or
+having too much or too little light. A great deal more passed at the
+other table. Lady Catherine was generally speaking—stating the mistakes
+of the three others, or relating some anecdote of herself. Mr. Collins
+was employed in agreeing to everything her Ladyship said, thanking her
+for every fish he won, and apologizing if he thought he won too many.
+Sir William did not say much. He was storing his memory with anecdotes
+and noble names.
+
+
+
+ When Lady Catherine and her daughter had played as long as they chose,
+the tables were broken up, the carriage was offered to Mrs. Collins,
+gratefully accepted, and immediately ordered. The party then gathered
+round the fire to hear Lady Catherine determine what weather they were
+to have on the morrow. From these instructions they were summoned by the
+arrival of the coach; and with many speeches of thankfulness on Mr.
+Collins’s side, and as many bows on Sir William’s, they departed. As
+soon as they had driven from the door, Elizabeth was called on by her
+cousin to give her opinion of all that she had seen at Rosings, which,
+for Charlotte’s sake, she made more favourable than it really was. But
+her commendation, though costing her some trouble, could by no means
+satisfy Mr. Collins, and he was very soon obliged to take her Ladyship’s
+praise into his own hands. {209} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX. 
+
+ 
+ IR WILLIAM stayed only a week at Hunsford; but his visit was long
+enough to convince him of his daughter’s being most comfortably settled,
+and of her possessing such a husband and such a neighbour as were not
+often met with. While Sir William was with them, Mr. Collins devoted his
+mornings to driving him out in his gig, and showing him the country: but
+when he went away, the whole family returned to their usual employments,
+and Elizabeth was thankful to find that they did not see more of her
+cousin by the alteration; for the chief of the time between breakfast
+and dinner was now passed by him either at work in the garden, or in
+reading and writing, and looking out of window in his own book room,
+which fronted the road. {210} The room in which the ladies sat was backwards.
+Elizabeth at first had rather wondered that Charlotte should not prefer
+the dining parlour for common use; it was a better sized room, and had a
+pleasanter aspect: but she soon saw that her friend had an excellent
+reason for what she did, for Mr. Collins would undoubtedly have been
+much less in his own apartment had they sat in one equally lively; and
+she gave Charlotte credit for the arrangement.
+
+
+
+ From the drawing-room they could distinguish nothing in the lane, and
+were indebted to Mr. Collins for the knowledge of what carriages went
+along, and how often especially Miss De Bourgh drove by in her phaeton,
+which he never failed coming to inform them of, though it happened
+almost every day. She not unfrequently stopped at the Parsonage, and had
+a few minutes’ conversation with Charlotte, but was scarcely ever
+prevailed on to get out.
+
+
+
+ Very few days passed in which Mr. Collins did not walk to Rosings, and
+not many in which his wife did not think it necessary to go likewise;
+and till Elizabeth recollected that there might be other family livings
+to be disposed of, she could not understand the sacrifice of so many
+hours. Now and then they were honoured with a call from her Ladyship,
+and nothing escaped her observation that was passing in the room during
+these visits. She examined into their employments, looked at their work,
+and advised them to do it differently; found fault with the arrangement
+of the furniture, or detected the housemaid in negligence; and if she
+accepted any refreshment, seemed to do it only for the sake of finding
+out that Mrs. Collins’s joints of meat were too large for her family. {211} 
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth soon perceived, that though this great lady was not in the
+commission of the peace for the county, she was a most active magistrate
+in her own parish, the minutest concerns of which were carried to her by
+Mr. Collins; and whenever any of the cottagers were disposed to be
+quarrelsome, discontented, or too poor, she sallied forth into the
+village to settle their differences, silence their complaints, and scold
+them into harmony and plenty.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ “he never failed to inform them”
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ The entertainment of dining at Rosings was repeated about twice a week;
+and, allowing for the loss of Sir William, and there being only one
+card-table in the {212} evening, every such entertainment was the counterpart
+of the first. Their other engagements were few, as the style of living
+of the neighbourhood in general was beyond the Collinses’ reach. This,
+however, was no evil to Elizabeth, and upon the whole she spent her time
+comfortably enough: there were half hours of pleasant conversation with
+Charlotte, and the weather was so fine for the time of year, that she
+had often great enjoyment out of doors. Her favourite walk, and where
+she frequently went while the others were calling on Lady Catherine, was
+along the open grove which edged that side of the park, where there was
+a nice sheltered path, which no one seemed to value but herself, and
+where she felt beyond the reach of Lady Catherine’s curiosity.
+
+
+
+ In this quiet way the first fortnight of her visit soon passed away.
+Easter was approaching, and the week preceding it was to bring an
+addition to the family at Rosings, which in so small a circle must be
+important. Elizabeth had heard, soon after her arrival, that Mr. Darcy
+was expected there in the course of a few weeks; and though there were
+not many of her acquaintance whom she did not prefer, his coming would
+furnish one comparatively new to look at in their Rosings parties, and
+she might be amused in seeing how hopeless Miss Bingley’s designs on him
+were, by his behaviour to his cousin, for whom he was evidently destined
+by Lady Catherine, who talked of his coming with the greatest
+satisfaction, spoke of him in terms of the highest admiration, and
+seemed almost angry to find that he had already been frequently seen by
+Miss Lucas and herself.
+
+
+
+ His arrival was soon known at the Parsonage; for Mr. Collins was walking
+the whole morning within view of the lodges opening into Hunsford Lane,
+in order to have {213} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“The gentlemen accompanied him.”
+
+
+
+
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ the earliest assurance of it; and, after making his bow as the carriage
+turned into the park, hurried home with the great intelligence. On the
+following morning he hastened to Rosings to pay his respects. There were
+two nephews of Lady Catherine to require them, for Mr. Darcy had brought
+with him a Colonel Fitzwilliam, the younger son of his uncle, Lord ——;
+and, to the great surprise of all the party, when Mr. Collins returned,
+the gentlemen accompanied him. Charlotte had seen them from her
+husband’s room, crossing the road, and {214} immediately running into the
+other, told the girls what an honour they might expect, adding,—
+
+
+
+ “I may thank you, Eliza, for this piece of civility. Mr. Darcy would
+never have come so soon to wait upon me.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth had scarcely time to disclaim all right to the compliment
+before their approach was announced by the door-bell, and shortly
+afterwards the three gentlemen entered the room. Colonel Fitzwilliam,
+who led the way, was about thirty, not handsome, but in person and
+address most truly the gentleman. Mr. Darcy looked just as he had been
+used to look in Hertfordshire, paid his compliments, with his usual
+reserve, to Mrs. Collins; and whatever might be his feelings towards her
+friend, met her with every appearance of composure. Elizabeth merely
+courtesied to him, without saying a word.
+
+
+
+ Colonel Fitzwilliam entered into conversation directly, with the
+readiness and ease of a well-bred man, and talked very pleasantly; but
+his cousin, after having addressed a slight observation on the house and
+garden to Mrs. Collins, sat for some time without speaking to anybody.
+At length, however, his civility was so far awakened as to inquire of
+Elizabeth after the health of her family. She answered him in the usual
+way; and, after a moment’s pause, added,—
+
+
+
+ “My eldest sister has been in town these three months. Have you never
+happened to see her there?”
+
+
+
+ She was perfectly sensible that he never had: but she wished to see
+whether he would betray any consciousness of what had passed between the
+Bingleys and Jane; and she thought he looked a little confused as he
+answered that he had never been so fortunate as to meet Miss Bennet. The
+subject was pursued no further, and the gentlemen soon afterwards went
+away. {215} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI. 
+
+ 
+ OLONEL FITZWILLIAM’S manners were very much admired at the Parsonage,
+and the ladies all felt that he must add considerably to the pleasure of
+their engagements at Rosings. It was some days, however, before they
+received any invitation thither, for while there were visitors in the
+house they could not be necessary; and it was not till Easter-day,
+almost a week after the gentlemen’s arrival, that they were honoured by
+such an attention, and then they were merely asked on leaving church to
+come there in the evening. For the last week they had seen very little
+of either Lady Catherine or her daughter. Colonel Fitzwilliam had called
+at the {216} Parsonage more than once during the time, but Mr. Darcy they had
+only seen at church.
+
+
+
+ The invitation was accepted, of course, and at a proper hour they joined
+the party in Lady Catherine’s drawing-room. Her Ladyship received them
+civilly, but it was plain that their company was by no means so
+acceptable as when she could get nobody else; and she was, in fact,
+almost engrossed by her nephews, speaking to them, especially to Darcy,
+much more than to any other person in the room.
+
+
+
+ Colonel Fitzwilliam seemed really glad to see them: anything was a
+welcome relief to him at Rosings; and Mrs. Collins’s pretty friend had,
+moreover, caught his fancy very much. He now seated himself by her, and
+talked so agreeably of Kent and Hertfordshire, of travelling and staying
+at home, of new books and music, that Elizabeth had never been half so
+well entertained in that room before; and they conversed with so much
+spirit and flow as to draw the attention of Lady Catherine herself, as
+well as of Mr. Darcy. His eyes had been soon and repeatedly turned
+towards them with a look of curiosity; and that her Ladyship, after a
+while, shared the feeling, was more openly acknowledged, for she did not
+scruple to call out,—
+
+
+
+ “What is that you are saying, Fitzwilliam? What is it you are talking
+of? What are you telling Miss Bennet? Let me hear what it is.”
+
+
+
+ “We were talking of music, madam,” said he, when no longer able to avoid
+a reply.
+
+
+
+ “Of music! Then pray speak aloud. It is of all subjects my delight. I
+must have my share in the conversation, if you are speaking of music.
+There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true {217} 
+enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever
+learnt, I should have been a great proficient. And so would Anne, if her
+health had allowed her to apply. I am confident that she would have
+performed delightfully. How does Georgiana get on, Darcy?”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Darcy spoke with affectionate praise of his sister’s proficiency.
+
+
+
+ “I am very glad to hear such a good account of her,” said Lady
+Catherine; “and pray tell her from me, that she cannot expect to excel,
+if she does not practise a great deal.”
+
+
+
+ “I assure you, madam,” he replied, “that she does not need such advice.
+She practises very constantly.”
+
+
+
+ “So much the better. It cannot be done too much; and when I next write
+to her, I shall charge her not to neglect it on any account. I often
+tell young ladies, that no excellence in music is to be acquired without
+constant practice. I have told Miss Bennet several times, that she will
+never play really well, unless she practises more; and though Mrs.
+Collins has no instrument, she is very welcome, as I have often told
+her, to come to Rosings every day, and play on the pianoforte in Mrs.
+Jenkinson’s room. She would be in nobody’s way, you know, in that part
+of the house.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Darcy looked a little ashamed of his aunt’s ill-breeding, and made
+no answer.
+
+
+
+ When coffee was over, Colonel Fitzwilliam reminded Elizabeth of having
+promised to play to him; and she sat down directly to the instrument. He
+drew a chair near her. Lady Catherine listened to half a song, and then
+talked, as before, to her other nephew; till the latter walked away from
+her, and moving with his usual deliberation towards the pianoforte,
+stationed himself so {218} as to command a full view of the fair performer’s
+countenance. Elizabeth saw what he was doing, and at the first
+convenient pause turned to him with an arch smile, and said,—
+
+
+
+ “You mean to frighten me, Mr. Darcy, by coming in all this state to hear
+me. But I will not be alarmed, though your sister does play so well.
+There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at
+the will of others. My courage always rises with every attempt to
+intimidate me.”
+
+
+
+ “I shall not say that you are mistaken,” he replied, “because you could
+not really believe me to entertain any design of alarming you; and I
+have had the pleasure of your acquaintance long enough to know, that you
+find great enjoyment in occasionally professing opinions which, in fact,
+are not your own.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth laughed heartily at this picture of herself, and said to
+Colonel Fitzwilliam, “Your cousin will give you a very pretty notion of
+me, and teach you not to believe a word I say. I am particularly unlucky
+in meeting with a person so well able to expose my real character, in a
+part of the world where I had hoped to pass myself off with some degree
+of credit. Indeed, Mr. Darcy, it is very ungenerous in you to mention
+all that you knew to my disadvantage in Hertfordshire—and, give me
+leave to say, very impolitic too—for it is provoking me to retaliate,
+and such things may come out as will shock your relations to hear.”
+
+
+
+ “I am not afraid of you,” said he, smilingly.
+
+
+
+ “Pray let me hear what you have to accuse him of,” cried Colonel
+Fitzwilliam. “I should like to know how he behaves among strangers.”
+
+
+
+ “You shall hear, then—but prepare for something very {219} dreadful. The
+first time of my ever seeing him in Hertfordshire, you must know, was at
+a ball—and at this ball, what do you think he did? He danced only four
+dances! I am sorry to pain you, but so it was. He danced only four
+dances, though gentlemen were scarce; and, to my certain knowledge, more
+than one young lady was sitting down in want of a partner. Mr. Darcy,
+you cannot deny the fact.”
+
+
+
+ “I had not at that time the honour of knowing any lady in the assembly
+beyond my own party.”
+
+
+
+ “True; and nobody can ever be introduced in a ball-room. Well, Colonel
+Fitzwilliam, what do I play next? My fingers wait your orders.”
+
+
+
+ “Perhaps,” said Darcy, “I should have judged better had I sought an
+introduction, but I am ill-qualified to recommend myself to strangers.”
+
+
+
+ “Shall we ask your cousin the reason of this?” said Elizabeth, still
+addressing Colonel Fitzwilliam. “Shall we ask him why a man of sense and
+education, and who has lived in the world, is ill-qualified to recommend
+himself to strangers?”
+
+
+
+ “I can answer your question,” said Fitzwilliam, “without applying to
+him. It is because he will not give himself the trouble.”
+
+
+
+ “I certainly have not the talent which some people possess,” said Darcy,
+“of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot
+catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their
+concerns, as I often see done.”
+
+
+
+ “My fingers,” said Elizabeth, “do not move over this instrument in the
+masterly manner which I see so many women’s do. They have not the same
+force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I
+have {220} always supposed it to be my own fault—because I would not take
+the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers
+as capable as any other woman’s of superior execution.”
+
+
+
+ Darcy smiled and said, “You are perfectly right. You have employed your
+time much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you can
+think anything wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers.”
+
+
+
+ Here they were interrupted by Lady Catherine, who called out to know
+what they were talking of. Elizabeth immediately began playing again.
+Lady Catherine approached, and, after listening for a few minutes, said
+to Darcy,—
+
+
+
+ “Miss Bennet would not play at all amiss if she practised more, and
+could have the advantage of a London master. She has a very good notion
+of fingering, though her taste is not equal to Anne’s. Anne would have
+been a delightful performer, had her health allowed her to learn.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth looked at Darcy, to see how cordially he assented to his
+cousin’s praise: but neither at that moment nor at any other could she
+discern any symptom of love; and from the whole of his behaviour to Miss
+De Bourgh she derived this comfort for Miss Bingley, that he might have
+been just as likely to marry her , had she been his relation.
+
+
+
+ Lady Catherine continued her remarks on Elizabeth’s performance, mixing
+with them many instructions on execution and taste. Elizabeth received
+them with all the forbearance of civility; and at the request of the
+gentlemen remained at the instrument till her Ladyship’s carriage was
+ready to take them all home. {221} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII. 
+
+ 
+ LIZABETH was sitting by herself the next morning, and writing to Jane,
+while Mrs. Collins and Maria were gone on business into the village,
+when she was startled by a ring at the door, the certain signal of a
+visitor. As she had heard no carriage, she thought it not unlikely to be
+Lady Catherine; and under that apprehension was putting {222} away her
+half-finished letter, that she might escape all impertinent questions,
+when the door opened, and to her very great surprise Mr. Darcy, and Mr.
+Darcy only, entered the room.
+
+
+
+ He seemed astonished too on finding her alone, and apologized for his
+intrusion, by letting her know that he had understood all the ladies to
+be within.
+
+
+
+ They then sat down, and when her inquiries after Rosings were made,
+seemed in danger of sinking into total silence. It was absolutely
+necessary, therefore, to think of something; and in this emergency
+recollecting when she had seen him last in Hertfordshire, and feeling
+curious to know what he would say on the subject of their hasty
+departure, she observed,—
+
+
+
+ “How very suddenly you all quitted Netherfield last November, Mr. Darcy!
+It must have been a most agreeable surprise to Mr. Bingley to see you
+all after him so soon; for, if I recollect right, he went but the day
+before. He and his sisters were well, I hope, when you left London?”
+
+
+
+ “Perfectly so, I thank you.”
+
+
+
+ She found that she was to receive no other answer; and, after a short
+pause, added,—
+
+
+
+ “I think I have understood that Mr. Bingley has not much idea of ever
+returning to Netherfield again?”
+
+
+
+ “I have never heard him say so; but it is probable that he may spend
+very little of his time there in future. He has many friends, and he is
+at a time of life when friends and engagements are continually
+increasing.”
+
+
+
+ “If he means to be but little at Netherfield, it would be better for the
+neighbourhood that he should give up the place entirely, for then we
+might possibly get a settled family there. But, perhaps, Mr. Bingley did
+not take the {223} house so much for the convenience of the neighbourhood as
+for his own, and we must expect him to keep or quit it on the same
+principle.”
+
+
+
+ “I should not be surprised,” said Darcy, “if he were to give it up as
+soon as any eligible purchase offers.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth made no answer. She was afraid of talking longer of his
+friend; and, having nothing else to say, was now determined to leave the
+trouble of finding a subject to him.
+
+
+
+ He took the hint and soon began with, “This seems a very comfortable
+house. Lady Catherine, I believe, did a great deal to it when Mr.
+Collins first came to Hunsford.”
+
+
+
+ “I believe she did—and I am sure she could not have bestowed her
+kindness on a more grateful object.”
+
+
+
+ “Mr. Collins appears very fortunate in his choice of a wife.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, indeed; his friends may well rejoice in his having met with one of
+the very few sensible women who would have accepted him, or have made
+him happy if they had. My friend has an excellent understanding—though
+I am not certain that I consider her marrying Mr. Collins as the wisest
+thing she ever did. She seems perfectly happy, however; and, in a
+prudential light, it is certainly a very good match for her.”
+
+
+
+ “It must be very agreeable to her to be settled within so easy a
+distance of her own family and friends.”
+
+
+
+ “An easy distance do you call it? It is nearly fifty miles.”
+
+
+
+ “And what is fifty miles of good road? Little more than half a day’s
+journey. Yes, I call it a very easy distance.”
+
+
+
+ “I should never have considered the distance as one of {224} the advantages 
+of the match,” cried Elizabeth. “I should never have said Mrs. Collins
+was settled near her family.”
+
+
+
+ “It is a proof of your own attachment to Hertfordshire. Anything beyond
+the very neighbourhood of Longbourn, I suppose, would appear far.”
+
+
+
+ As he spoke there was a sort of smile, which Elizabeth fancied she
+understood; he must be supposing her to be thinking of Jane and
+Netherfield, and she blushed as she answered,—
+
+
+
+ “I do not mean to say that a woman may not be settled too near her
+family. The far and the near must be relative, and depend on many
+varying circumstances. Where there is fortune to make the expense of
+travelling unimportant, distance becomes no evil. But that is not the
+case here . Mr. and Mrs. Collins have a comfortable income, but not
+such a one as will allow of frequent journeys—and I am persuaded my
+friend would not call herself near her family under less than half 
+the present distance.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Darcy drew his chair a little towards her, and said, “ You cannot
+have a right to such very strong local attachment. You cannot have
+been always at Longbourn.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth looked surprised. The gentleman experienced some change of
+feeling; he drew back his chair, took a newspaper from the table, and,
+glancing over it, said, in a colder voice,—
+
+
+
+ “Are you pleased with Kent?”
+
+
+
+ A short dialogue on the subject of the country ensued, on either side
+calm and concise—and soon put an end to by the entrance of Charlotte
+and her sister, just returned from their walk. The tête-à-tête 
+surprised them. Mr. {225} Darcy related the mistake which had occasioned his
+intruding on Miss Bennet, and, after sitting a few minutes longer,
+without saying much to anybody, went away.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ “Accompanied by their aunt”
+
+
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ {226} 
+
+
+
+ “What can be the meaning of this?” said Charlotte, as soon as he was
+gone. “My dear Eliza, he must be in love with you, or he would never
+have called on us in this familiar way.”
+
+
+
+ But when Elizabeth told of his silence, it did not seem very likely,
+even to Charlotte’s wishes, to be the case; and, after various
+conjectures, they could at last only suppose his visit to proceed from
+the difficulty of finding anything to do, which was the more probable
+from the time of year. All field sports were over. Within doors there
+was Lady Catherine, books, and a billiard table, but gentlemen cannot be
+always within doors; and in the nearness of the Parsonage, or the
+pleasantness of the walk to it, or of the people who lived in it, the
+two cousins found a temptation from this period of walking thither
+almost every day. They called at various times of the morning, sometimes
+separately, sometimes together, and now and then accompanied by their
+aunt. It was plain to them all that Colonel Fitzwilliam came because he
+had pleasure in their society, a persuasion which of course recommended
+him still more; and Elizabeth was reminded by her own satisfaction in
+being with him, as well as by his evident admiration, of her former
+favourite, George Wickham; and though, in comparing them, she saw there
+was less captivating softness in Colonel Fitzwilliam’s manners, she
+believed he might have the best informed mind.
+
+
+
+ But why Mr. Darcy came so often to the Parsonage it was more difficult
+to understand. It could not be for society, as he frequently sat there
+ten minutes together without opening his lips; and when he did speak, it
+seemed the effect of necessity rather than of choice—a sacrifice to
+propriety, not a pleasure to himself. He {227} seldom appeared really
+animated. Mrs. Collins knew not what to make of him. Colonel
+Fitzwilliam’s occasionally laughing at his stupidity proved that he was
+generally different, which her own knowledge of him could not have told
+her; and as she would have liked to believe this change the effect of
+love, and the object of that love her friend Eliza, she set herself
+seriously to work to find it out: she watched him whenever they were at
+Rosings, and whenever he came to Hunsford; but without much success. He
+certainly looked at her friend a great deal, but the expression of that
+look was disputable. It was an earnest, steadfast gaze, but she often
+doubted whether there were much admiration in it, and sometimes it
+seemed nothing but absence of mind.
+
+
+
+ She had once or twice suggested to Elizabeth the possibility of his
+being partial to her, but Elizabeth always laughed at the idea; and Mrs.
+Collins did not think it right to press the subject, from the danger of
+raising expectations which might only end in disappointment; for in her
+opinion it admitted not of a doubt, that all her friend’s dislike would
+vanish, if she could suppose him to be in her power.
+
+
+
+ In her kind schemes for Elizabeth, she sometimes planned her marrying
+Colonel Fitzwilliam. He was, beyond comparison, the pleasantest man: he
+certainly admired her, and his situation in life was most eligible; but,
+to counterbalance these advantages, Mr. Darcy had considerable patronage
+in the church, and his cousin could have none at all. {228} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“On looking up.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII. 
+
+ 
+ ORE than once did Elizabeth, in her ramble within the park,
+unexpectedly meet Mr. Darcy. She felt all the perverseness of the
+mischance that should bring him where no one else was brought; and, to
+prevent its ever happening again, took care to inform him, at first,
+that it was a favourite haunt of hers. How it could occur a second time,
+therefore, was very odd! Yet it did, and even the third. It seemed like
+wilful ill-nature, or a voluntary penance; for on these occasions it was
+not merely a few formal inquiries and an awkward pause and then away,
+but he actually thought it necessary to turn back and walk with her. He
+never said a great deal, nor did she give herself the trouble of talking
+or of listening much; but it struck her in the course of their {229} third
+encounter that he was asking some odd unconnected questions—about her
+pleasure in being at Hunsford, her love of solitary walks, and her
+opinion of Mr. and Mrs. Collins’s happiness; and that in speaking of
+Rosings, and her not perfectly understanding the house, he seemed to
+expect that whenever she came into Kent again she would be staying
+ there too. His words seemed to imply it. Could he have Colonel
+Fitzwilliam in his thoughts? She supposed, if he meant anything, he must
+mean an allusion to what might arise in that quarter. It distressed her
+a little, and she was quite glad to find herself at the gate in the
+pales opposite the Parsonage.
+
+
+
+ She was engaged one day, as she walked, in re-perusing Jane’s last
+letter, and dwelling on some passages which proved that Jane had not
+written in spirits, when, instead of being again surprised by Mr. Darcy,
+she saw, on looking up, that Colonel Fitzwilliam was meeting her.
+Putting away the letter immediately, and forcing a smile, she said,—
+
+
+
+ “I did not know before that you ever walked this way.”
+
+
+
+ “I have been making the tour of the park,” he replied, “as I generally
+do every year, and intended to close it with a call at the Parsonage.
+Are you going much farther?”
+
+
+
+ “No, I should have turned in a moment.”
+
+
+
+ And accordingly she did turn, and they walked towards the Parsonage
+together.
+
+
+
+ “Do you certainly leave Kent on Saturday?” said she.
+
+
+
+ “Yes—if Darcy does not put it off again. But I am at his disposal. He
+arranges the business just as he pleases.”
+
+
+
+ “And if not able to please himself in the arrangement, he has at least
+great pleasure in the power of choice. I {230} do not know anybody who seems
+more to enjoy the power of doing what he likes than Mr. Darcy.”
+
+
+
+ “He likes to have his own way very well,” replied Colonel Fitzwilliam.
+“But so we all do. It is only that he has better means of having it than
+many others, because he is rich, and many others are poor. I speak
+feelingly. A younger son, you know, must be inured to self-denial and
+dependence.”
+
+
+
+ “In my opinion, the younger son of an earl can know very little of
+either. Now, seriously, what have you ever known of self-denial and
+dependence? When have you been prevented by want of money from going
+wherever you chose or procuring anything you had a fancy for?”
+
+
+
+ “These are home questions—and perhaps I cannot say that I have
+experienced many hardships of that nature. But in matters of greater
+weight, I may suffer from the want of money. Younger sons cannot marry
+where they like.”
+
+
+
+ “Unless where they like women of fortune, which I think they very often
+do.”
+
+
+
+ “Our habits of expense make us too dependent, and there are not many in
+my rank of life who can afford to marry without some attention to
+money.”
+
+
+
+ “Is this,” thought Elizabeth, “meant for me?” and she coloured at the
+idea; but, recovering herself, said in a lively tone, “And pray, what is
+the usual price of an earl’s younger son? Unless the elder brother is
+very sickly, I suppose you would not ask above fifty thousand pounds.”
+
+
+
+ He answered her in the same style, and the subject dropped. To interrupt
+a silence which might make him fancy her affected with what had passed,
+she soon afterwards said, {231} —
+
+
+
+ “I imagine your cousin brought you down with him chiefly for the sake of
+having somebody at his disposal. I wonder he does not marry, to secure a
+lasting convenience of that kind. But, perhaps, his sister does as well
+for the present; and, as she is under his sole care, he may do what he
+likes with her.”
+
+
+
+ “No,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, “that is an advantage which he must
+divide with me. I am joined with him in the guardianship of Miss Darcy.”
+
+
+
+ “Are you, indeed? And pray what sort of a guardian do you make? Does
+your charge give you much trouble? Young ladies of her age are sometimes
+a little difficult to manage; and if she has the true Darcy spirit, she
+may like to have her own way.”
+
+
+
+ As she spoke, she observed him looking at her earnestly; and the manner
+in which he immediately asked her why she supposed Miss Darcy likely to
+give them any uneasiness, convinced her that she had somehow or other
+got pretty near the truth. She directly replied,—
+
+
+
+ “You need not be frightened. I never heard any harm of her; and I dare
+say she is one of the most tractable creatures in the world. She is a
+very great favourite with some ladies of my acquaintance, Mrs. Hurst and
+Miss Bingley. I think I have heard you say that you know them.”
+
+
+
+ “I know them a little. Their brother is a pleasant, gentlemanlike
+man—he is a great friend of Darcy’s.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh yes,” said Elizabeth drily—“Mr. Darcy is uncommonly kind to Mr.
+Bingley, and takes a prodigious deal of care of him.”
+
+
+
+ “Care of him! Yes, I really believe Darcy does take care of him in
+those points where he most wants care. {232} From something that he told me
+in our journey hither, I have reason to think Bingley very much indebted
+to him. But I ought to beg his pardon, for I have no right to suppose
+that Bingley was the person meant. It was all conjecture.”
+
+
+
+ “What is it you mean?”
+
+
+
+ “It is a circumstance which Darcy of course could not wish to be
+generally known, because if it were to get round to the lady’s family it
+would be an unpleasant thing.”
+
+
+
+ “You may depend upon my not mentioning it.”
+
+
+
+ “And remember that I have not much reason for supposing it to be
+Bingley. What he told me was merely this: that he congratulated himself
+on having lately saved a friend from the inconveniences of a most
+imprudent marriage, but without mentioning names or any other
+particulars; and I only suspected it to be Bingley from believing him
+the kind of young man to get into a scrape of that sort, and from
+knowing them to have been together the whole of last summer.”
+
+
+
+ “Did Mr. Darcy give you his reasons for this interference?”
+
+
+
+ “I understood that there were some very strong objections against the
+lady.”
+
+
+
+ “And what arts did he use to separate them?”
+
+
+
+ “He did not talk to me of his own arts,” said Fitzwilliam, smiling. “He
+only told me what I have now told you.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth made no answer, and walked on, her heart swelling with
+indignation. After watching her a little, Fitzwilliam asked her why she
+was so thoughtful.
+
+
+
+ “I am thinking of what you have been telling me,” said she. “Your
+cousin’s conduct does not suit my feelings. Why was he to be the
+judge? {233} ”
+
+
+
+ “You are rather disposed to call his interference officious?”
+
+
+
+ “I do not see what right Mr. Darcy had to decide on the propriety of his
+friend’s inclination; or why, upon his own judgment alone, he was to
+determine and direct in what manner that friend was to be happy. But,”
+she continued, recollecting herself, “as we know none of the
+particulars, it is not fair to condemn him. It is not to be supposed
+that there was much affection in the case.”
+
+
+
+ “That is not an unnatural surmise,” said Fitzwilliam; “but it is
+lessening the honour of my cousin’s triumph very sadly.”
+
+
+
+ This was spoken jestingly, but it appeared to her so just a picture of
+Mr. Darcy, that she would not trust herself with an answer; and,
+therefore, abruptly changing the conversation, talked on indifferent
+matters till they reached the Parsonage. There, shut into her own room,
+as soon as their visitor left them, she could think without interruption
+of all that she had heard. It was not to be supposed that any other
+people could be meant than those with whom she was connected. There
+could not exist in the world two men over whom Mr. Darcy could have
+such boundless influence. That he had been concerned in the measures
+taken to separate Mr. Bingley and Jane, she had never doubted; but she
+had always attributed to Miss Bingley the principal design and
+arrangement of them. If his own vanity, however, did not mislead him,
+ he was the cause—his pride and caprice were the cause—of all that
+Jane had suffered, and still continued to suffer. He had ruined for a
+while every hope of happiness for the most affectionate, generous heart
+in the world; and no one could say how lasting an evil he might have
+inflicted. {234} 
+
+
+
+ “There were some very strong objections against the lady,” were Colonel
+Fitzwilliam’s words; and these strong objections probably were, her
+having one uncle who was a country attorney, and another who was in
+business in London.
+
+
+
+ “To Jane herself,” she exclaimed, “there could be no possibility of
+objection,—all loveliness and goodness as she is! Her understanding
+excellent, her mind improved, and her manners captivating. Neither could
+anything be urged against my father, who, though with some
+peculiarities, has abilities which Mr. Darcy himself need not disdain,
+and respectability which he will probably never reach.” When she thought
+of her mother, indeed, her confidence gave way a little; but she would
+not allow that any objections there had material weight with Mr.
+Darcy, whose pride, she was convinced, would receive a deeper wound from
+the want of importance in his friend’s connections than from their want
+of sense; and she was quite decided, at last, that he had been partly
+governed by this worst kind of pride, and partly by the wish of
+retaining Mr. Bingley for his sister.
+
+
+
+ The agitation and tears which the subject occasioned brought on a
+headache; and it grew so much worse towards the evening that, added to
+her unwillingness to see Mr. Darcy, it determined her not to attend her
+cousins to Rosings, where they were engaged to drink tea. Mrs. Collins,
+seeing that she was really unwell, did not press her to go, and as much
+as possible prevented her husband from pressing her; but Mr. Collins
+could not conceal his apprehension of Lady Catherine’s being rather
+displeased by her staying at home. {235} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV. 
+
+ 
+ HEN they were gone, Elizabeth, as if intending to exasperate herself as
+much as possible against Mr. Darcy, chose for her employment the
+examination of all the letters which Jane had written to her since her
+being in Kent. They contained no actual complaint, nor was there any
+revival of past occurrences, {236} or any communication of present suffering.
+But in all, and in almost every line of each, there was a want of that
+cheerfulness which had been used to characterize her style, and which,
+proceeding from the serenity of a mind at ease with itself, and kindly
+disposed towards everyone, had been scarcely ever clouded. Elizabeth
+noticed every sentence conveying the idea of uneasiness, with an
+attention which it had hardly received on the first perusal. Mr. Darcy’s
+shameful boast of what misery he had been able to inflict gave her a
+keener sense of her sister’s sufferings. It was some consolation to
+think that his visit to Rosings was to end on the day after the next,
+and a still greater that in less than a fortnight she should herself be
+with Jane again, and enabled to contribute to the recovery of her
+spirits, by all that affection could do.
+
+
+
+ She could not think of Darcy’s leaving Kent without remembering that his
+cousin was to go with him; but Colonel Fitzwilliam had made it clear
+that he had no intentions at all, and, agreeable as he was, she did not
+mean to be unhappy about him.
+
+
+
+ While settling this point, she was suddenly roused by the sound of the
+door-bell; and her spirits were a little fluttered by the idea of its
+being Colonel Fitzwilliam himself, who had once before called late in
+the evening, and might now come to inquire particularly after her. But
+this idea was soon banished, and her spirits were very differently
+affected, when, to her utter amazement, she saw Mr. Darcy walk into the
+room. In a hurried manner he immediately began an inquiry after her
+health, imputing his visit to a wish of hearing that she were better.
+She answered him with cold civility. He sat down for a few moments, and
+then getting up walked {237} about the room. Elizabeth was surprised, but
+said not a word. After a silence of several minutes, he came towards her
+in an agitated manner, and thus began:—
+
+
+
+ “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be
+repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love
+you.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth’s astonishment was beyond expression. She stared, coloured,
+doubted, and was silent. This he considered sufficient encouragement,
+and the avowal of all that he felt and had long felt for her immediately
+followed. He spoke well; but there were feelings besides those of the
+heart to be detailed, and he was not more eloquent on the subject of
+tenderness than of pride. His sense of her inferiority, of its being a
+degradation, of the family obstacles which judgment had always opposed
+to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the
+consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his
+suit.
+
+
+
+ In spite of her deeply-rooted dislike, she could not be insensible to
+the compliment of such a man’s affection, and though her intentions did
+not vary for an instant, she was at first sorry for the pain he was to
+receive; till roused to resentment by his subsequent language, she lost
+all compassion in anger. She tried, however, to compose herself to
+answer him with patience, when he should have done. He concluded with
+representing to her the strength of that attachment which in spite of
+all his endeavours he had found impossible to conquer; and with
+expressing his hope that it would now be rewarded by her acceptance of
+his hand. As he said this she could easily see that he had no doubt of a
+favourable answer. He spoke of apprehension and anxiety, but his
+countenance expressed real security. Such a circumstance {238} could only
+exasperate farther; and when he ceased the colour rose into her cheeks
+and she said,—
+
+
+
+ “In such cases as this, it is, I believe, the established mode to
+express a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed, however
+unequally they may be returned. It is natural that obligation should be
+felt, and if I could feel gratitude, I would now thank you. But I
+cannot—I have never desired your good opinion, and you have certainly
+bestowed it most unwillingly. I am sorry to have occasioned pain to
+anyone. It has been most unconsciously done, however, and I hope will be
+of short duration. The feelings which you tell me have long prevented
+the acknowledgment of your regard can have little difficulty in
+overcoming it after this explanation.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Darcy, who was leaning against the mantel-piece with his eyes fixed
+on her face, seemed to catch her words with no less resentment than
+surprise. His complexion became pale with anger, and the disturbance of
+his mind was visible in every feature. He was struggling for the
+appearance of composure, and would not open his lips till he believed
+himself to have attained it. The pause was to Elizabeth’s feelings
+dreadful. At length, in a voice of forced calmness, he said,—
+
+
+
+ “And this is all the reply which I am to have the honour of expecting! I
+might, perhaps, wish to be informed why, with so little endeavour at
+civility, I am thus rejected. But it is of small importance.”
+
+
+
+ “I might as well inquire,” replied she, “why, with so evident a design
+of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that you liked me
+against your will, against your reason, and even against your character?
+Was not this some excuse for incivility, if I was uncivil? But I have
+other provocations. You know I have. {239} Had not my own feelings decided
+against you, had they been indifferent, or had they even been
+favourable, do you think that any consideration would tempt me to accept
+the man who has been the means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the
+happiness of a most beloved sister?”
+
+
+
+ As she pronounced these words, Mr. Darcy changed colour; but the emotion
+was short, and he listened without attempting to interrupt her while she
+continued,—
+
+
+
+ “I have every reason in the world to think ill of you. No motive can
+excuse the unjust and ungenerous part you acted there . You dare not,
+you cannot deny that you have been the principal, if not the only means
+of dividing them from each other, of exposing one to the censure of the
+world for caprice and instability, the other to its derision for
+disappointed hopes, and involving them both in misery of the acutest
+kind.”
+
+
+
+ She paused, and saw with no slight indignation that he was listening
+with an air which proved him wholly unmoved by any feeling of remorse.
+He even looked at her with a smile of affected incredulity.
+
+
+
+ “Can you deny that you have done it?” she repeated.
+
+
+
+ With assumed tranquillity he then replied, “I have no wish of denying
+that I did everything in my power to separate my friend from your
+sister, or that I rejoice in my success. Towards him I have been
+kinder than towards myself.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth disdained the appearance of noticing this civil reflection,
+but its meaning did not escape, nor was it likely to conciliate her.
+
+
+
+ “But it is not merely this affair,” she continued, “on which my dislike
+is founded. Long before it had taken {240} place, my opinion of you was
+decided. Your character was unfolded in the recital which I received
+many months ago from Mr. Wickham. On this subject, what can you have to
+say? In what imaginary act of friendship can you here defend yourself?
+or under what misrepresentation can you here impose upon others?”
+
+
+
+ “You take an eager interest in that gentleman’s concerns,” said Darcy,
+in a less tranquil tone, and with a heightened colour.
+
+
+
+ “Who that knows what his misfortunes have been can help feeling an
+interest in him?”
+
+
+
+ “His misfortunes!” repeated Darcy, contemptuously,—“yes, his
+misfortunes have been great indeed.”
+
+
+
+ “And of your infliction,” cried Elizabeth, with energy; “You have
+reduced him to his present state of poverty—comparative poverty. You
+have withheld the advantages which you must know to have been designed
+for him. You have deprived the best years of his life of that
+independence which was no less his due than his desert. You have done
+all this! and yet you can treat the mention of his misfortunes with
+contempt and ridicule.”
+
+
+
+ “And this,” cried Darcy, as he walked with quick steps across the room,
+“is your opinion of me! This is the estimation in which you hold me! I
+thank you for explaining it so fully. My faults, according to this
+calculation, are heavy indeed! But, perhaps,” added he, stopping in his
+walk, and turning towards her, “these offences might have been
+overlooked, had not your pride been hurt by my honest confession of the
+scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design. These
+bitter accusations might have been suppressed, had I, with greater
+policy, concealed my struggles, and {241} flattered you into the belief of my
+being impelled by unqualified, unalloyed inclination; by reason, by
+reflection, by everything. But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence.
+Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just.
+Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your
+connections?—to congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose
+condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth felt herself growing more angry every moment; yet she tried to
+the utmost to speak with composure when she said,—
+
+
+
+ “You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your
+declaration affected me in any other way than as it spared me the
+concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a
+more gentlemanlike manner.”
+
+
+
+ She saw him start at this; but he said nothing, and she continued,—
+
+
+
+ “You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way
+that would have tempted me to accept it.”
+
+
+
+ Again his astonishment was obvious; and he looked at her with an
+expression of mingled incredulity and mortification. She went on,—
+
+
+
+ “From the very beginning, from the first moment, I may almost say, of my
+acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest
+belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the
+feelings of others, were such as to form that groundwork of
+disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immovable a
+dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the
+last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry. {242} ”
+
+
+
+ “You have said quite enough, madam. I perfectly comprehend your
+feelings, and have now only to be ashamed of what my own have been.
+Forgive me for having taken up so much of your time, and accept my best
+wishes for your health and happiness.”
+
+
+
+ And with these words he hastily left the room, and Elizabeth heard him
+the next moment open the front door and quit the house. The tumult of
+her mind was now painfully great. She knew not how to support herself,
+and, from actual weakness, sat down and cried for half an hour. Her
+astonishment, as she reflected on what had passed, was increased by
+every review of it. That she should receive an offer of marriage from
+Mr. Darcy! that he should have been in love with her for so many months!
+so much in love as to wish to marry her in spite of all the objections
+which had made him prevent his friend’s marrying her sister, and which
+must appear at least with equal force in his own case, was almost
+incredible! it was gratifying to have inspired unconsciously so strong
+an affection. But his pride, his abominable pride, his shameless avowal
+of what he had done with respect to Jane, his unpardonable assurance in
+acknowledging, though he could not justify it, and the unfeeling manner
+which he had mentioned Mr. Wickham, his cruelty towards whom he had not
+attempted to deny, soon overcame the pity which the consideration of his
+attachment had for a moment excited.
+
+
+
+ She continued in very agitating reflections till the sound of Lady
+Catherine’s carriage made her feel how unequal she was to encounter
+Charlotte’s observation, and hurried her away to her room. {243} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“Hearing herself called.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV. 
+
+ 
+ LIZABETH awoke the next morning to the same thoughts and meditations
+which had at length closed her eyes. She could not yet recover from the
+surprise of what had happened: it was impossible to think of anything
+else; and, totally indisposed for employment, she resolved soon after
+breakfast to indulge herself in air and exercise. She was proceeding
+directly to her favourite walk, when the recollection of Mr. Darcy’s
+sometimes coming there stopped her, and instead of entering the park,
+she turned up the lane which led her farther from the turnpike road. The
+park paling was still the boundary on one side, and she soon passed one
+of the gates into the ground.
+
+
+
+ After walking two or three times along that part of the lane, she was
+tempted, by the pleasantness of the morning, to stop at the gates and
+look into the park. The five weeks which she had now passed in Kent had
+made a great difference in the country, and every day was adding to the
+verdure of the early trees. She was {244} on the point of continuing her
+walk, when she caught a glimpse of a gentleman within the sort of grove
+which edged the park: he was moving that way; and fearful of its being
+Mr. Darcy, she was directly retreating. But the person who advanced was
+now near enough to see her, and stepping forward with eagerness,
+pronounced her name. She had turned away; but on hearing herself called,
+though in a voice which proved it to be Mr. Darcy, she moved again
+towards the gate. He had by that time reached it also; and, holding out
+a letter, which she instinctively took, said, with a look of haughty
+composure, “I have been walking in the grove some time, in the hope of
+meeting you. Will you do me the honour of reading that letter?” and
+then, with a slight bow, turned again into the plantation, and was soon
+out of sight.
+
+
+
+ With no expectation of pleasure, but with the strongest curiosity,
+Elizabeth opened the letter, and to her still increasing wonder,
+perceived an envelope containing two sheets of letter paper, written
+quite through, in a very close hand. The envelope itself was likewise
+full. Pursuing her way along the lane, she then began it. It was dated
+from Rosings, at eight o’clock in the morning, and was as follows:—
+
+
+
+ “Be not alarmed, madam, on receiving this letter, by the apprehension of
+its containing any repetition of those sentiments, or renewal of those
+offers, which were last night so disgusting to you. I write without any
+intention of paining you, or humbling myself, by dwelling on wishes,
+which, for the happiness of both, cannot be too soon forgotten; and the
+effort which the formation and the perusal of this letter must occasion,
+should have been spared, had not my character required it to be written {245} 
+and read. You must, therefore, pardon the freedom with which I demand
+your attention; your feelings, I know, will bestow it unwillingly, but I
+demand it of your justice.
+
+
+
+ “Two offences of a very different nature, and by no means of equal
+magnitude, you last night laid to my charge. The first mentioned was,
+that, regardless of the sentiments of either, I had detached Mr. Bingley
+from your sister,—and the other, that I had, in defiance of various
+claims, in defiance of honour and humanity, ruined the immediate
+prosperity and blasted the prospects of Mr. Wickham. Wilfully and
+wantonly to have thrown off the companion of my youth, the acknowledged
+favourite of my father, a young man who had scarcely any other
+dependence than on our patronage, and who had been brought up to expect
+its exertion, would be a depravity, to which the separation of two young
+persons whose affection could be the growth of only a few weeks, could
+bear no comparison. But from the severity of that blame which was last
+night so liberally bestowed, respecting each circumstance, I shall hope
+to be in future secured, when the following account of my actions and
+their motives has been read. If, in the explanation of them which is due
+to myself, I am under the necessity of relating feelings which may be
+offensive to yours, I can only say that I am sorry. The necessity must
+be obeyed, and further apology would be absurd. I had not been long in
+Hertfordshire before I saw, in common with others, that Bingley
+preferred your elder sister to any other young woman in the country. But
+it was not till the evening of the dance at Netherfield that I had any
+apprehension of his feeling a serious attachment. I had often seen him
+in love before. At that ball, while I had {246} the honour of dancing with
+you, I was first made acquainted, by Sir William Lucas’s accidental
+information, that Bingley’s attentions to your sister had given rise to
+a general expectation of their marriage. He spoke of it as a certain
+event, of which the time alone could be undecided. From that moment I
+observed my friend’s behaviour attentively; and I could then perceive
+that his partiality for Miss Bennet was beyond what I had ever witnessed
+in him. Your sister I also watched. Her look and manners were open,
+cheerful, and engaging as ever, but without any symptom of peculiar
+regard; and I remained convinced, from the evening’s scrutiny, that
+though she received his attentions with pleasure, she did not invite
+them by any participation of sentiment. If you have not been mistaken
+here, I must have been in an error. Your superior knowledge of your
+sister must make the latter probable. If it be so, if I have been misled
+by such error to inflict pain on her, your resentment has not been
+unreasonable. But I shall not scruple to assert, that the serenity of
+your sister’s countenance and air was such as might have given the most
+acute observer a conviction that, however amiable her temper, her heart
+was not likely to be easily touched. That I was desirous of believing
+her indifferent is certain; but I will venture to say that my
+investigations and decisions are not usually influenced by my hopes or
+fears. I did not believe her to be indifferent because I wished it; I
+believed it on impartial conviction, as truly as I wished it in reason.
+My objections to the marriage were not merely those which I last night
+acknowledged to have required the utmost force of passion to put aside
+in my own case; the want of connection could not be so great an evil to
+my friend as to me. But there were {247} other causes of repugnance; causes
+which, though still existing, and existing to an equal degree in both
+instances, I had myself endeavoured to forget, because they were not
+immediately before me. These causes must be stated, though briefly. The
+situation of your mother’s family, though objectionable, was nothing in
+comparison of that total want of propriety so frequently, so almost
+uniformly betrayed by herself, by your three younger sisters, and
+occasionally even by your father:—pardon me,—it pains me to offend
+you. But amidst your concern for the defects of your nearest relations,
+and your displeasure at this representation of them, let it give you
+consolation to consider that to have conducted yourselves so as to avoid
+any share of the like censure is praise no less generally bestowed on
+you and your eldest sister than it is honourable to the sense and
+disposition of both. I will only say, farther, that from what passed
+that evening my opinion of all parties was confirmed, and every
+inducement heightened, which could have led me before to preserve my
+friend from what I esteemed a most unhappy connection. He left
+Netherfield for London on the day following, as you, I am certain,
+remember, with the design of soon returning. The part which I acted is
+now to be explained. His sisters’ uneasiness had been equally excited
+with my own: our coincidence of feeling was soon discovered; and, alike
+sensible that no time was to be lost in detaching their brother, we
+shortly resolved on joining him directly in London. We accordingly
+went—and there I readily engaged in the office of pointing out to my
+friend the certain evils of such a choice. I described and enforced them
+earnestly. But however this remonstrance might have staggered or delayed
+his determination, I do not {248} suppose that it would ultimately have
+prevented the marriage, had it not been seconded by the assurance, which
+I hesitated not in giving, of your sister’s indifference. He had before
+believed her to return his affection with sincere, if not with equal,
+regard. But Bingley has great natural modesty, with a stronger
+dependence on my judgment than on his own. To convince him, therefore,
+that he had deceived himself was no very difficult point. To persuade
+him against returning into Hertfordshire, when that conviction had been
+given, was scarcely the work of a moment. I cannot blame myself for
+having done thus much. There is but one part of my conduct, in the whole
+affair, on which I do not reflect with satisfaction; it is that I
+condescended to adopt the measures of art so far as to conceal from him
+your sister’s being in town. I knew it myself, as it was known to Miss
+Bingley; but her brother is even yet ignorant of it. That they might
+have met without ill consequence is, perhaps, probable; but his regard
+did not appear to me enough extinguished for him to see her without some
+danger. Perhaps this concealment, this disguise, was beneath me. It is
+done, however, and it was done for the best. On this subject I have
+nothing more to say, no other apology to offer. If I have wounded your
+sister’s feelings, it was unknowingly done; and though the motives which
+governed me may to you very naturally appear insufficient, I have not
+yet learnt to condemn them.—With respect to that other, more weighty
+accusation, of having injured Mr. Wickham, I can only refute it by
+laying before you the whole of his connection with my family. Of what he
+has particularly accused me I am ignorant; but of the truth of what I
+shall relate I can summon more than one witness of undoubted veracity. {249} 
+Mr. Wickham is the son of a very respectable man, who had for many years
+the management of all the Pemberley estates, and whose good conduct in
+the discharge of his trust naturally inclined my father to be of service
+to him; and on George Wickham, who was his godson, his kindness was
+therefore liberally bestowed. My father supported him at school, and
+afterwards at Cambridge; most important assistance, as his own father,
+always poor from the extravagance of his wife, would have been unable to
+give him a gentleman’s education. My father was not only fond of this
+young man’s society, whose manners were always engaging, he had also the
+highest opinion of him, and hoping the church would be his profession,
+intended to provide for him in it. As for myself, it is many, many years
+since I first began to think of him in a very different manner. The
+vicious propensities, the want of principle, which he was careful to
+guard from the knowledge of his best friend, could not escape the
+observation of a young man of nearly the same age with himself, and who
+had opportunities of seeing him in unguarded moments, which Mr. Darcy
+could not have. Here again I shall give you pain—to what degree you
+only can tell. But whatever may be the sentiments which Mr. Wickham has
+created, a suspicion of their nature shall not prevent me from unfolding
+his real character. It adds even another motive. My excellent father
+died about five years ago; and his attachment to Mr. Wickham was to the
+last so steady, that in his will he particularly recommended it to me to
+promote his advancement in the best manner that his profession might
+allow, and if he took orders, desired that a valuable family living
+might be his as soon as it became vacant. There was also a legacy of
+one {250} thousand pounds. His own father did not long survive mine; and
+within half a year from these events Mr. Wickham wrote to inform me
+that, having finally resolved against taking orders, he hoped I should
+not think it unreasonable for him to expect some more immediate
+pecuniary advantage, in lieu of the preferment, by which he could not be
+benefited. He had some intention, he added, of studying the law, and I
+must be aware that the interest of one thousand pounds would be a very
+insufficient support therein. I rather wished than believed him to be
+sincere; but, at any rate, was perfectly ready to accede to his
+proposal. I knew that Mr. Wickham ought not to be a clergyman. The
+business was therefore soon settled. He resigned all claim to assistance
+in the church, were it possible that he could ever be in a situation to
+receive it, and accepted in return three thousand pounds. All connection
+between us seemed now dissolved. I thought too ill of him to invite him
+to Pemberley, or admit his society in town. In town, I believe, he
+chiefly lived, but his studying the law was a mere pretence; and being
+now free from all restraint, his life was a life of idleness and
+dissipation. For about three years I heard little of him; but on the
+decease of the incumbent of the living which had been designed for him,
+he applied to me again by letter for the presentation. His
+circumstances, he assured me, and I had no difficulty in believing it,
+were exceedingly bad. He had found the law a most unprofitable study,
+and was now absolutely resolved on being ordained, if I would present
+him to the living in question—of which he trusted there could be little
+doubt, as he was well assured that I had no other person to provide for,
+and I could not have forgotten my revered father’s intentions. You will
+hardly blame me {251} for refusing to comply with this entreaty, or for
+resisting every repetition of it. His resentment was in proportion to
+the distress of his circumstances—and he was doubtless as violent in
+his abuse of me to others as in his reproaches to myself. After this
+period, every appearance of acquaintance was dropped. How he lived, I
+know not. But last summer he was again most painfully obtruded on my
+notice. I must now mention a circumstance which I would wish to forget
+myself, and which no obligation less than the present should induce me
+to unfold to any human being. Having said thus much, I feel no doubt of
+your secrecy. My sister, who is more than ten years my junior, was left
+to the guardianship of my mother’s nephew, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and
+myself. About a year ago, she was taken from school, and an
+establishment formed for her in London; and last summer she went with
+the lady who presided over it to Ramsgate; and thither also went Mr.
+Wickham, undoubtedly by design; for there proved to have been a prior
+acquaintance between him and Mrs. Younge, in whose character we were
+most unhappily deceived; and by her connivance and aid he so far
+recommended himself to Georgiana, whose affectionate heart retained a
+strong impression of his kindness to her as a child, that she was
+persuaded to believe herself in love and to consent to an elopement. She
+was then but fifteen, which must be her excuse; and after stating her
+imprudence, I am happy to add, that I owed the knowledge of it to
+herself. I joined them unexpectedly a day or two before the intended
+elopement; and then Georgiana, unable to support the idea of grieving
+and offending a brother whom she almost looked up to as a father,
+acknowledged the whole to me. You may imagine what {252} I felt and how I
+acted. Regard for my sister’s credit and feelings prevented any public
+exposure; but I wrote to Mr. Wickham, who left the place immediately,
+and Mrs. Younge was of course removed from her charge. Mr. Wickham’s
+chief object was unquestionably my sister’s fortune, which is thirty
+thousand pounds; but I cannot help supposing that the hope of revenging
+himself on me was a strong inducement. His revenge would have been
+complete indeed. This, madam, is a faithful narrative of every event in
+which we have been concerned together; and if you do not absolutely
+reject it as false, you will, I hope, acquit me henceforth of cruelty
+towards Mr. Wickham. I know not in what manner, under what form of
+falsehood, he has imposed on you; but his success is not perhaps to be
+wondered at, ignorant as you previously were of everything concerning
+either. Detection could not be in your power, and suspicion certainly
+not in your inclination. You may possibly wonder why all this was not
+told you last night. But I was not then master enough of myself to know
+what could or ought to be revealed. For the truth of everything here
+related, I can appeal more particularly to the testimony of Colonel
+Fitzwilliam, who, from our near relationship and constant intimacy, and
+still more as one of the executors of my father’s will, has been
+unavoidably acquainted with every particular of these transactions. If
+your abhorrence of me should make my assertions valueless, you
+cannot be prevented by the same cause from confiding in my cousin; and
+that there may be the possibility of consulting him, I shall endeavour
+to find some opportunity of putting this letter in your hands in the
+course of the morning. I will only add, God bless you.
+
+
+
+ 
+“ Fitzwilliam Darcy. ”
+
+ {253} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI. 
+
+ 
+ 
+ ELIZABETH, when Mr. Darcy gave her the letter, did not expect it to
+contain a renewal of his offers, she had formed no expectation at all of
+its contents. But such as they were, it may be well supposed how eagerly
+she went through them, and what a contrariety of emotion they excited.
+Her feelings as she read were scarcely to be defined. With amazement did
+she first understand that he believed any apology to be in his power;
+and steadfastly was she persuaded, that he could have no explanation to
+give, which a just sense of shame would not conceal. With a strong
+prejudice {254} against everything he might say, she began his account of
+what had happened at Netherfield. She read with an eagerness which
+hardly left her power of comprehension; and from impatience of knowing
+what the next sentence might bring, was incapable of attending to the
+sense of the one before her eyes. His belief of her sister’s
+insensibility she instantly resolved to be false; and his account of the
+real, the worst objections to the match, made her too angry to have any
+wish of doing him justice. He expressed no regret for what he had done
+which satisfied her; his style was not penitent, but haughty. It was all
+pride and insolence.
+
+
+
+ But when this subject was succeeded by his account of Mr. Wickham—when
+she read, with somewhat clearer attention, a relation of events which,
+if true, must overthrow every cherished opinion of his worth, and which
+bore so alarming an affinity to his own history of himself—her feelings
+were yet more acutely painful and more difficult of definition.
+Astonishment, apprehension, and even horror, oppressed her. She wished
+to discredit it entirely, repeatedly exclaiming, “This must be false!
+This cannot be! This must be the grossest falsehood!”—and when she had
+gone through the whole letter, though scarcely knowing anything of the
+last page or two, put it hastily away, protesting that she would not
+regard it, that she would never look in it again.
+
+
+
+ In this perturbed state of mind, with thoughts that could rest on
+nothing, she walked on; but it would not do: in half a minute the letter
+was unfolded again; and collecting herself as well as she could, she
+again began the mortifying perusal of all that related to Wickham, and
+commanded herself so far as to examine the meaning of every sentence.
+The account of his connection with {255} the Pemberley family was exactly
+what he had related himself; and the kindness of the late Mr. Darcy,
+though she had not before known its extent, agreed equally well with his
+own words. So far each recital confirmed the other; but when she came to
+the will, the difference was great. What Wickham had said of the living
+was fresh in her memory; and as she recalled his very words, it was
+impossible not to feel that there was gross duplicity on one side or the
+other, and, for a few moments, she flattered herself that her wishes did
+not err. But when she read and re-read, with the closest attention, the
+particulars immediately following of Wickham’s resigning all pretensions
+to the living, of his receiving in lieu so considerable a sum as three
+thousand pounds, again was she forced to hesitate. She put down the
+letter, weighed every circumstance with what she meant to be
+impartiality—deliberated on the probability of each statement—but with
+little success. On both sides it was only assertion. Again she read on.
+But every line proved more clearly that the affair, which she had
+believed it impossible that any contrivance could so represent as to
+render Mr. Darcy’s conduct in it less than infamous, was capable of a
+turn which must make him entirely blameless throughout the whole.
+
+
+
+ The extravagance and general profligacy which he scrupled not to lay to
+Mr. Wickham’s charge exceedingly shocked her; the more so, as she could
+bring no proof of its injustice. She had never heard of him before his
+entrance into the ——shire militia, in which he had engaged at the
+persuasion of the young man, who, on meeting him accidentally in town,
+had there renewed a slight acquaintance. Of his former way of life,
+nothing had been known in Hertfordshire but what he told {256} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ “Meeting accidentally in Town”
+
+ 
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ himself. As to his real character, had information been in her power,
+she had never felt a wish of inquiring. His countenance, voice, and
+manner, had established him at once in the possession of every virtue.
+She tried to recollect some instance of goodness, some distinguished
+trait of integrity or benevolence, that might rescue him from the
+attacks of Mr. Darcy; or at least, by the predominance of virtue, atone
+for those casual errors, under which she would endeavour to class what
+Mr. Darcy had described as the idleness and vice of many years’
+continuance. But no such recollection befriended her. She could see him
+instantly before her, in every charm of air and address, but she could
+remember no more substantial good than the general approbation of the
+neighbourhood, and the regard which his social powers had {257} gained him in
+the mess. After pausing on this point a considerable while, she once
+more continued to read. But, alas! the story which followed, of his
+designs on Miss Darcy, received some confirmation from what had passed
+between Colonel Fitzwilliam and herself only the morning before; and at
+last she was referred for the truth of every particular to Colonel
+Fitzwilliam himself—from whom she had previously received the
+information of his near concern in all his cousin’s affairs and whose
+character she had no reason to question. At one time she had almost
+resolved on applying to him, but the idea was checked by the awkwardness
+of the application, and at length wholly banished by the conviction that
+Mr. Darcy would never have hazarded such a proposal, if he had not been
+well assured of his cousin’s corroboration.
+
+
+
+ She perfectly remembered everything that had passed in conversation
+between Wickham and herself in their first evening at Mr. Philips’s.
+Many of his expressions were still fresh in her memory. She was now 
+struck with the impropriety of such communications to a stranger, and
+wondered it had escaped her before. She saw the indelicacy of putting
+himself forward as he had done, and the inconsistency of his professions
+with his conduct. She remembered that he had boasted of having no fear
+of seeing Mr. Darcy—that Mr. Darcy might leave the country, but that
+ he should stand his ground; yet he had avoided the Netherfield ball
+the very next week. She remembered, also, that till the Netherfield
+family had quitted the country, he had told his story to no one but
+herself; but that after their removal, it had been everywhere discussed;
+that he had then no reserves, no scruples in sinking Mr. Darc {258} y’s
+character, though he had assured her that respect for the father would
+always prevent his exposing the son.
+
+
+
+ How differently did everything now appear in which he was concerned! His
+attentions to Miss King were now the consequence of views solely and
+hatefully mercenary; and the mediocrity of her fortune proved no longer
+the moderation of his wishes, but his eagerness to grasp at anything.
+His behaviour to herself could now have had no tolerable motive: he had
+either been deceived with regard to her fortune, or had been gratifying
+his vanity by encouraging the preference which she believed she had most
+incautiously shown. Every lingering struggle in his favour grew fainter
+and fainter; and in further justification of Mr. Darcy, she could not
+but allow that Mr. Bingley, when questioned by Jane, had long ago
+asserted his blamelessness in the affair;—that, proud and repulsive as
+were his manners, she had never, in the whole course of their
+acquaintance—an acquaintance which had latterly brought them much
+together, and given her a sort of intimacy with his ways—seen anything
+that betrayed him to be unprincipled or unjust—anything that spoke him
+of irreligious or immoral habits;—that among his own connections he was
+esteemed and valued;—that even Wickham had allowed him merit as a
+brother, and that she had often heard him speak so affectionately of his
+sister as to prove him capable of some amiable feeling;—that had his
+actions been what Wickham represented them, so gross a violation of
+everything right could hardly have been concealed from the world; and
+that friendship between a person capable of it and such an amiable man
+as Mr. Bingley was incomprehensible.
+
+
+
+ She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. Of neither {259} Darcy nor Wickham
+could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial,
+prejudiced, absurd.
+
+
+
+ “How despicably have I acted!” she cried. “I, who have prided myself on
+my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have
+often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my
+vanity in useless or blameless distrust. How humiliating is this
+discovery! Yet, how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could not
+have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my
+folly. Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect
+of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted
+prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away where either were
+concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.”
+
+
+
+ From herself to Jane, from Jane to Bingley, her thoughts were in a line
+which soon brought to her recollection that Mr. Darcy’s explanation
+ there had appeared very insufficient; and she read it again. Widely
+different was the effect of a second perusal. How could she deny that
+credit to his assertions, in one instance, which she had been obliged to
+give in the other? He declared himself to have been totally unsuspicious
+of her sister’s attachment; and she could not help remembering what
+Charlotte’s opinion had always been. Neither could she deny the justice
+of his description of Jane. She felt that Jane’s feelings, though
+fervent, were little displayed, and that there was a constant
+complacency in her air and manner, not often united with great
+sensibility.
+
+
+
+ When she came to that part of the letter in which her family were
+mentioned, in tones of such mortifying, yet merited, reproach, her sense
+of shame was severe. The {260} justice of the charge struck her too forcibly
+for denial; and the circumstances to which he particularly alluded, as
+having passed at the Netherfield ball, and as confirming all his first
+disapprobation, could not have made a stronger impression on his mind
+than on hers.
+
+
+
+ The compliment to herself and her sister was not unfelt. It soothed, but
+it could not console her for the contempt which had been thus
+self-attracted by the rest of her family; and as she considered that
+Jane’s disappointment had, in fact, been the work of her nearest
+relations, and reflected how materially the credit of both must be hurt
+by such impropriety of conduct, she felt depressed beyond anything she
+had ever known before.
+
+
+
+ After wandering along the lane for two hours, giving way to every
+variety of thought, reconsidering events, determining probabilities, and
+reconciling herself, as well as she could, to a change so sudden and so
+important, fatigue, and a recollection of her long absence, made her at
+length return home; and she entered the house with the wish of appearing
+cheerful as usual, and the resolution of repressing such reflections as
+must make her unfit for conversation.
+
+
+
+ She was immediately told, that the two gentlemen from Rosings had each
+called during her absence; Mr. Darcy, only for a few minutes, to take
+leave, but that Colonel Fitzwilliam had been sitting with them at least
+an hour, hoping for her return, and almost resolving to walk after her
+till she could be found. Elizabeth could but just affect concern in
+missing him; she really rejoiced at it. Colonel Fitzwilliam was no
+longer an object. She could think only of her letter. {261} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“His parting obeisance.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII. 
+
+ 
+ HE two gentlemen left Rosings the next morning; and Mr. Collins having
+been in waiting near the lodges, to make them his parting obeisance, was
+able to bring home the pleasing intelligence of their appearing in very
+good health, and in as tolerable spirits as could be expected, after the
+melancholy scene so lately gone through at Rosings. To Rosings he then
+hastened to console Lady Catherine and her daughter; and on his return
+brought back, with great satisfaction, a message from her Ladyship,
+importing that she felt herself so dull as to make her very desirous of
+having them all to dine with her. {262} 
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth could not see Lady Catherine without recollecting that, had
+she chosen it, she might by this time have been presented to her as her
+future niece; nor could she think, without a smile, of what her
+Ladyship’s indignation would have been. “What would she have said? how
+would she have behaved?” were the questions with which she amused
+herself.
+
+
+
+ Their first subject was the diminution of the Rosings’ party. “I assure
+you, I feel it exceedingly,” said Lady Catherine; “I believe nobody
+feels the loss of friends so much as I do. But I am particularly
+attached to these young men; and know them to be so much attached to me!
+They were excessively sorry to go! But so they always are. The dear
+Colonel rallied his spirits tolerably till just at last; but Darcy
+seemed to feel it most acutely—more, I think, than last year. His
+attachment to Rosings certainly increases.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Collins had a compliment and an allusion to throw in here, which
+were kindly smiled on by the mother and daughter.
+
+
+
+ Lady Catherine observed, after dinner, that Miss Bennet seemed out of
+spirits; and immediately accounting for it herself, by supposing that
+she did not like to go home again so soon, she added,—
+
+
+
+ “But if that is the case, you must write to your mother to beg that you
+may stay a little longer. Mrs. Collins will be very glad of your
+company, I am sure.”
+
+
+
+ “I am much obliged to your Ladyship for your kind invitation,” replied
+Elizabeth; “but it is not in my power to accept it. I must be in town
+next Saturday.”
+
+
+
+ “Why, at that rate, you will have been here only six weeks. I expected
+you to stay two months. I told Mrs. Collins so before you came. There
+can be no occasion for {263} your going so soon. Mrs. Bennet could certainly
+spare you for another fortnight.”
+
+
+
+ “But my father cannot. He wrote last week to hurry my return.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“Dawson”
+
+
+
+
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ “Oh, your father, of course, may spare you, if your mother can.
+Daughters are never of so much consequence to a father. And if you will
+stay another month complete, it will be in my power to take one of you
+as far as London, for I am going there early in June, {264} for a week; and
+as Dawson does not object to the barouche-box, there will be very good
+room for one of you—and, indeed, if the weather should happen to be
+cool, I should not object to taking you both, as you are neither of you
+large.”
+
+
+
+ “You are all kindness, madam; but I believe we must abide by our
+original plan.”
+
+
+
+ Lady Catherine seemed resigned. “Mrs. Collins, you must send a servant
+with them. You know I always speak my mind, and I cannot bear the idea
+of two young women travelling post by themselves. It is highly improper.
+You must contrive to send somebody. I have the greatest dislike in the
+world to that sort of thing. Young women should always be properly
+guarded and attended, according to their situation in life. When my
+niece Georgiana went to Ramsgate last summer, I made a point of her
+having two men-servants go with her. Miss Darcy, the daughter of Mr.
+Darcy of Pemberley, and Lady Anne, could not have appeared with
+propriety in a different manner. I am excessively attentive to all those
+things. You must send John with the young ladies, Mrs. Collins. I am
+glad it occurred to me to mention it; for it would really be
+discreditable to you to let them go alone.”
+
+
+
+ “My uncle is to send a servant for us.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh! Your uncle! He keeps a man-servant, does he? I am very glad you
+have somebody who thinks of those things. Where shall you change horses?
+Oh, Bromley, of course. If you mention my name at the Bell, you will be
+attended to.”
+
+
+
+ Lady Catherine had many other questions to ask respecting their journey;
+and as she did not answer them all herself attention was
+necessary—which Elizabeth {265} believed to be lucky for her; or, with a
+mind so occupied, she might have forgotten where she was. Reflection
+must be reserved for solitary hours: whenever she was alone, she gave
+way to it as the greatest relief; and not a day went by without a
+solitary walk, in which she might indulge in all the delight of
+unpleasant recollections.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Darcy’s letter she was in a fair way of soon knowing by heart. She
+studied every sentence; and her feelings towards its writer were at
+times widely different. When she remembered the style of his address,
+she was still full of indignation: but when she considered how unjustly
+she had condemned and upbraided him, her anger was turned against
+herself; and his disappointed feelings became the object of compassion.
+His attachment excited gratitude, his general character respect: but she
+could not approve him; nor could she for a moment repent her refusal, or
+feel the slightest inclination ever to see him again. In her own past
+behaviour, there was a constant source of vexation and regret: and in
+the unhappy defects of her family, a subject of yet heavier chagrin.
+They were hopeless of remedy. Her father, contented with laughing at
+them, would never exert himself to restrain the wild giddiness of his
+youngest daughters; and her mother, with manners so far from right
+herself, was entirely insensible of the evil. Elizabeth had frequently
+united with Jane in an endeavour to check the imprudence of Catherine
+and Lydia; but while they were supported by their mother’s indulgence,
+what chance could there be of improvement? Catherine, weak-spirited,
+irritable, and completely under Lydia’s guidance, had been always
+affronted by their advice; and Lydia, self-willed and careless, would
+scarcely give them a hearing. They were ignorant, idle, and vain. {266} While
+there was an officer in Meryton, they would flirt with him; and while
+Meryton was within a walk of Longbourn, they would be going there for
+ever.
+
+
+
+ Anxiety on Jane’s behalf was another prevailing concern; and Mr. Darcy’s
+explanation, by restoring Bingley to all her former good opinion,
+heightened the sense of what Jane had lost. His affection was proved to
+have been sincere, and his conduct cleared of all blame, unless any
+could attach to the implicitness of his confidence in his friend. How
+grievous then was the thought that, of a situation so desirable in every
+respect, so replete with advantage, so promising for happiness, Jane had
+been deprived, by the folly and indecorum of her own family!
+
+
+
+ When to these recollections was added the development of Wickham’s
+character, it may be easily believed that the happy spirits which had
+seldom been depressed before were now so much affected as to make it
+almost impossible for her to appear tolerably cheerful.
+
+
+
+ Their engagements at Rosings were as frequent during the last week of
+her stay as they had been at first. The very last evening was spent
+there; and her Ladyship again inquired minutely into the particulars of
+their journey, gave them directions as to the best method of packing,
+and was so urgent on the necessity of placing gowns in the only right
+way, that Maria thought herself obliged, on her return, to undo all the
+work of the morning, and pack her trunk afresh.
+
+
+
+ When they parted, Lady Catherine, with great condescension, wished them
+a good journey, and invited them to come to Hunsford again next year;
+and Miss de Bourgh exerted herself so far as to courtesy and hold out
+her hand to both. {267} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“The elevation of his feelings.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII. 
+
+ 
+ N Saturday morning Elizabeth and Mr. Collins met for breakfast a few
+minutes before the others appeared; and he took the opportunity of
+paying the parting civilities which he deemed indispensably necessary.
+
+
+
+ “I know not, Miss Elizabeth,” said he, “whether Mrs. Collins has yet
+expressed her sense of your kindness in coming to us; but I am very
+certain you will not leave the house without receiving her thanks for
+it. The favour of your company has been much felt, I assure you. We know
+how little there is to tempt anyone to our humble abode. Our plain
+manner of {268} living, our small rooms, and few domestics, and the little we
+see of the world, must make Hunsford extremely dull to a young lady like
+yourself; but I hope you will believe us grateful for the condescension,
+and that we have done everything in our power to prevent you spending
+your time unpleasantly.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was eager with her thanks and assurances of happiness. She had
+spent six weeks with great enjoyment; and the pleasure of being with
+Charlotte, and the kind attention she had received, must make her feel
+the obliged. Mr. Collins was gratified; and with a more smiling
+solemnity replied,—
+
+
+
+ “It gives me the greatest pleasure to hear that you have passed your
+time not disagreeably. We have certainly done our best; and most
+fortunately having it in our power to introduce you to very superior
+society, and from our connection with Rosings, the frequent means of
+varying the humble home scene, I think we may flatter ourselves that
+your Hunsford visit cannot have been entirely irksome. Our situation
+with regard to Lady Catherine’s family is, indeed, the sort of
+extraordinary advantage and blessing which few can boast. You see on
+what a footing we are. You see how continually we are engaged there. In
+truth, I must acknowledge, that, with all the disadvantages of this
+humble parsonage, I should not think anyone abiding in it an object of
+compassion, while they are sharers of our intimacy at Rosings.”
+
+
+
+ Words were insufficient for the elevation of his feelings; and he was
+obliged to walk about the room, while Elizabeth tried to unite civility
+and truth in a few short sentences.
+
+
+
+ “You may, in fact, carry a very favourable report of us {269} into
+Hertfordshire, my dear cousin. I flatter myself, at least, that you will
+be able to do so. Lady Catherine’s great attentions to Mrs. Collins you
+have been a daily witness of; and altogether I trust it does not appear
+that your friend has drawn an unfortunate—but on this point it will be
+as well to be silent. Only let me assure you, my dear Miss Elizabeth,
+that I can from my heart most cordially wish you equal felicity in
+marriage. My dear Charlotte and I have but one mind and one way of
+thinking. There is in everything a most remarkable resemblance of
+character and ideas between us. We seem to have been designed for each
+other.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth could safely say that it was a great happiness where that was
+the case, and with equal sincerity could add, that she firmly believed
+and rejoiced in his domestic comforts. She was not sorry, however, to
+have the recital of them interrupted by the entrance of the lady from
+whom they sprang. Poor Charlotte! it was melancholy to leave her to such
+society! But she had chosen it with her eyes open; and though evidently
+regretting that her visitors were to go, she did not seem to ask for
+compassion. Her home and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry,
+and all their dependent concerns, had not yet lost their charms.
+
+
+
+ At length the chaise arrived, the trunks were fastened on, the parcels
+placed within, and it was pronounced to be ready. After an affectionate
+parting between the friends, Elizabeth was attended to the carriage by
+Mr. Collins; and as they walked down the garden, he was commissioning
+her with his best respects to all her family, not forgetting his thanks
+for the kindness he had received at Longbourn in the winter, and his
+compliments to Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, though unknown. He then handed {270} 
+her in, Maria followed, and the door was on the point of being closed,
+when he suddenly reminded them, with some consternation, that they had
+hitherto forgotten to leave any message for the ladies of Rosings.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“They had forgotten to leave any message”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ “But,” he added, “you will of course wish to have your humble respects
+delivered to them, with your grateful thanks for their kindness to you
+while you have been here.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth made no objection: the door was then allowed to be shut, and
+the carriage drove off. {271} 
+
+
+
+ “Good gracious!” cried Maria, after a few minutes’ silence, “it seems
+but a day or two since we first came! and yet how many things have
+happened!”
+
+
+
+ “A great many indeed,” said her companion, with a sigh.
+
+
+
+ “We have dined nine times at Rosings, besides drinking tea there twice!
+How much I shall have to tell!”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth privately added, “And how much I shall have to conceal!”
+
+
+
+ Their journey was performed without much conversation, or any alarm; and
+within four hours of their leaving Hunsford they reached Mr. Gardiner’s
+house, where they were to remain a few days.
+
+
+
+ Jane looked well, and Elizabeth had little opportunity of studying her
+spirits, amidst the various engagements which the kindness of her aunt
+had reserved for them. But Jane was to go home with her, and at
+Longbourn there would be leisure enough for observation.
+
+
+
+ It was not without an effort, meanwhile, that she could wait even for
+Longbourn, before she told her sister of Mr. Darcy’s proposals. To know
+that she had the power of revealing what would so exceedingly astonish
+Jane, and must, at the same time, so highly gratify whatever of her own
+vanity she had not yet been able to reason away, was such a temptation
+to openness as nothing could have conquered, but the state of indecision
+in which she remained as to the extent of what she should communicate,
+and her fear, if she once entered on the subject, of being hurried into
+repeating something of Bingley, which might only grieve her sister
+further. {272} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“How nicely we are crammed in.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX. 
+
+ 
+ T was the second week in May, in which the three young ladies set out
+together from Gracechurch Street for the town of ——, in Hertfordshire;
+and, as they drew near the appointed inn where Mr. Bennet’s carriage was
+to meet them, they quickly perceived, in token of the coachman’s
+punctuality, both Kitty and Lydia looking out of a dining-room upstairs.
+These two girls had been above an hour in the place, happily employed
+in {273} visiting an opposite milliner, watching the sentinel on guard, and
+dressing a salad and cucumber.
+
+
+
+ After welcoming their sisters, they triumphantly displayed a table set
+out with such cold meat as an inn larder usually affords, exclaiming,
+“Is not this nice? is not this an agreeable surprise?”
+
+
+
+ “And we mean to treat you all,” added Lydia; “but you must lend us the
+money, for we have just spent ours at the shop out there.” Then showing
+her purchases,—“Look here, I have bought this bonnet. I do not think it
+is very pretty; but I thought I might as well buy it as not. I shall
+pull it to pieces as soon as I get home, and see if I can make it up any
+better.”
+
+
+
+ And when her sisters abused it as ugly, she added, with perfect
+unconcern, “Oh, but there were two or three much uglier in the shop; and
+when I have bought some prettier-coloured satin to trim it with fresh, I
+think it will be very tolerable. Besides, it will not much signify what
+one wears this summer, after the ——shire have left Meryton, and they
+are going in a fortnight.”
+
+
+
+ “Are they, indeed?” cried Elizabeth, with the greatest satisfaction.
+
+
+
+ “They are going to be encamped near Brighton; and I do so want papa to
+take us all there for the summer! It would be such a delicious scheme,
+and I dare say would hardly cost anything at all. Mamma would like to
+go, too, of all things! Only think what a miserable summer else we shall
+have!”
+
+
+
+ “Yes,” thought Elizabeth; “ that would be a delightful scheme, indeed,
+and completely do for us at once. Good Heaven! Brighton and a whole
+campful of soldiers, to us, who have been overset already by one poor
+regiment of militia, and the monthly balls of Meryton! {274} ”
+
+
+
+ “Now I have got some news for you,” said Lydia, as they sat down to
+table. “What do you think? It is excellent news, capital news, and about
+a certain person that we all like.”
+
+
+
+ Jane and Elizabeth looked at each other, and the waiter was told that he
+need not stay. Lydia laughed, and said,—
+
+
+
+ “Ay, that is just like your formality and discretion. You thought the
+waiter must not hear, as if he cared! I dare say he often hears worse
+things said than I am going to say. But he is an ugly fellow! I am glad
+he is gone. I never saw such a long chin in my life. Well, but now for
+my news: it is about dear Wickham; too good for the waiter, is not it?
+There is no danger of Wickham’s marrying Mary King—there’s for you! She
+is gone down to her uncle at Liverpool; gone to stay. Wickham is safe.”
+
+
+
+ “And Mary King is safe!” added Elizabeth; “safe from a connection
+imprudent as to fortune.”
+
+
+
+ “She is a great fool for going away, if she liked him.”
+
+
+
+ “But I hope there is no strong attachment on either side,” said Jane.
+
+
+
+ “I am sure there is not on his . I will answer for it, he never cared
+three straws about her. Who could about such a nasty little freckled
+thing?”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was shocked to think that, however incapable of such
+coarseness of expression herself, the coarseness of the sentiment 
+was little other than her own breast had formerly harboured and fancied
+liberal!
+
+
+
+ As soon as all had ate, and the elder ones paid, the carriage was
+ordered; and, after some contrivance, the whole party, with all their
+boxes, workbags, and parcels, and the unwelcome addition of Kitty’s and
+Lydia’s purchases, were seated in it. {275} 
+
+
+
+ “How nicely we are crammed in!” cried Lydia. “I am glad I brought my
+bonnet, if it is only for the fun of having another band-box! Well, now
+let us be quite comfortable and snug, and talk and laugh all the way
+home. And in the first place, let us hear what has happened to you all
+since you went away. Have you seen any pleasant men? Have you had any
+flirting? I was in great hopes that one of you would have got a husband
+before you came back. Jane will be quite an old maid soon, I declare.
+She is almost three-and-twenty! Lord! how ashamed I should be of not
+being married before three-and-twenty! My aunt Philips wants you so to
+get husbands you can’t think. She says Lizzy had better have taken Mr.
+Collins; but I do not think there would have been any fun in it. Lord!
+how I should like to be married before any of you! and then I would
+ chaperon you about to all the balls. Dear me! we had such a good piece
+of fun the other day at Colonel Forster’s! Kitty and me were to spend
+the day there, and Mrs. Forster promised to have a little dance in the
+evening; (by-the-bye, Mrs. Forster and me are such friends!) and so
+she asked the two Harringtons to come: but Harriet was ill, and so Pen
+was forced to come by herself; and then, what do you think we did? We
+dressed up Chamberlayne in woman’s clothes, on purpose to pass for a
+lady,—only think what fun! Not a soul knew of it, but Colonel and Mrs.
+Forster, and Kitty and me, except my aunt, for we were forced to borrow
+one of her gowns; and you cannot imagine how well he looked! When Denny,
+and Wickham, and Pratt, and two or three more of the men came in, they
+did not know him in the least. Lord! how I laughed! and so did Mrs.
+Forster. I thought I should have died. And that made the men {276} suspect
+something, and then they soon found out what was the matter.”
+
+
+
+ With such kind of histories of their parties and good jokes did Lydia,
+assisted by Kitty’s hints and additions, endeavour to amuse her
+companions all the way to Longbourn. Elizabeth listened as little as she
+could, but there was no escaping the frequent mention of Wickham’s name.
+
+
+
+ Their reception at home was most kind. Mrs. Bennet rejoiced to see Jane
+in undiminished beauty; and more than once during dinner did Mr. Bennet
+say voluntarily to Elizabeth,——
+
+
+
+ “I am glad you are come back, Lizzy.”
+
+
+
+ Their party in the dining-room was large, for almost all the Lucases
+came to meet Maria and hear the news; and various were the subjects
+which occupied them: Lady Lucas was inquiring of Maria, across the
+table, after the welfare and poultry of her eldest daughter; Mrs. Bennet
+was doubly engaged, on one hand collecting an account of the present
+fashions from Jane, who sat some way below her, and on the other,
+retailing them all to the younger Miss Lucases; and Lydia, in a voice
+rather louder than any other person’s, was enumerating the various
+pleasures of the morning to anybody who would hear her.
+
+
+
+ “Oh, Mary,” said she, “I wish you had gone with us, for we had such fun!
+as we went along Kitty and me drew up all the blinds, and pretended
+there was nobody in the coach; and I should have gone so all the way, if
+Kitty had not been sick; and when we got to the George, I do think we
+behaved very handsomely, for we treated the other three with the nicest
+cold luncheon in the world, and if you would have gone, we would have
+treated you {277} too. And then when we came away it was such fun! I thought
+we never should have got into the coach. I was ready to die of laughter.
+And then we were so merry all the way home! we talked and laughed so
+loud, that anybody might have heard us ten miles off!”
+
+
+
+ To this, Mary very gravely replied, “Far be it from me, my dear sister,
+to depreciate such pleasures. They would doubtless be congenial with the
+generality of female minds. But I confess they would have no charms for
+ me . I should infinitely prefer a book.”
+
+
+
+ But of this answer Lydia heard not a word. She seldom listened to
+anybody for more than half a minute, and never attended to Mary at all.
+
+
+
+ In the afternoon Lydia was urgent with the rest of the girls to walk to
+Meryton, and see how everybody went on; but Elizabeth steadily opposed
+the scheme. It should not be said, that the Miss Bennets could not be at
+home half a day before they were in pursuit of the officers. There was
+another reason, too, for her opposition. She dreaded seeing Wickham
+again, and was resolved to avoid it as long as possible. The comfort to
+ her , of the regiment’s approaching removal, was indeed beyond
+expression. In a fortnight they were to go, and once gone, she hoped
+there could be nothing more to plague her on his account.
+
+
+
+ She had not been many hours at home, before she found that the Brighton
+scheme, of which Lydia had given them a hint at the inn, was under
+frequent discussion between her parents. Elizabeth saw directly that her
+father had not the smallest intention of yielding; but his answers were
+at the same time so vague and equivocal, that her mother, though often
+disheartened, had never yet despaired of succeeding at last. {278} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XL. 
+
+ 
+ LIZABETH’S impatience to acquaint Jane with what had happened could no
+longer be overcome; and at length resolving to suppress every particular
+in which her sister was concerned, and preparing her to be surprised,
+she related to her the next morning the chief of the scene between Mr.
+Darcy and herself.
+
+
+
+ Miss Bennet’s astonishment was soon lessened by the strong sisterly
+partiality which made any admiration of Elizabeth appear perfectly
+natural; and all surprise was shortly lost in other feelings. She was
+sorry that Mr. Darcy should have delivered his sentiments in a manner so
+little suited to recommend them; but still more was she grieved for the
+unhappiness which her sister’s refusal must have given him.
+
+
+
+ “His being so sure of succeeding was wrong,” said she, “and certainly
+ought not to have appeared; but consider how much it must increase his
+disappointment. {279} ”
+
+
+
+ “Indeed,” replied Elizabeth, “I am heartily sorry for him; but he has
+other feelings which will probably soon drive away his regard for me.
+You do not blame me, however, for refusing him?”
+
+
+
+ “Blame you! Oh, no.”
+
+
+
+ “But you blame me for having spoken so warmly of Wickham?”
+
+
+
+ “No—I do not know that you were wrong in saying what you did.”
+
+
+
+ “But you will know it, when I have told you what happened the very
+next day.”
+
+
+
+ She then spoke of the letter, repeating the whole of its contents as far
+as they concerned George Wickham. What a stroke was this for poor Jane,
+who would willingly have gone through the world without believing that
+so much wickedness existed in the whole race of mankind as was here
+collected in one individual! Nor was Darcy’s vindication, though
+grateful to her feelings, capable of consoling her for such discovery.
+Most earnestly did she labour to prove the probability of error, and
+seek to clear one, without involving the other.
+
+
+
+ “This will not do,” said Elizabeth; “you never will be able to make both
+of them good for anything. Take your choice, but you must be satisfied
+with only one. There is but such a quantity of merit between them; just
+enough to make one good sort of man; and of late it has been shifting
+about pretty much. For my part, I am inclined to believe it all Mr.
+Darcy’s, but you shall do as you choose.”
+
+
+
+ It was some time, however, before a smile could be extorted from Jane.
+
+
+
+ “I do not know when I have been more shocked,” said she. “Wickham so
+very bad! It is almost past belief. {280} And poor Mr. Darcy! dear Lizzy,
+only consider what he must have suffered. Such a disappointment! and
+with the knowledge of your ill opinion too! and having to relate such a
+thing of his sister! It is really too distressing, I am sure you must
+feel it so.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh no, my regret and compassion are all done away by seeing you so full
+of both. I know you will do him such ample justice, that I am growing
+every moment more unconcerned and indifferent. Your profusion makes me
+saving; and if you lament over him much longer, my heart will be as
+light as a feather.”
+
+
+
+ “Poor Wickham! there is such an expression of goodness in his
+countenance! such an openness and gentleness in his manner.”
+
+
+
+ “There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those
+two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the
+appearance of it.”
+
+
+
+ “I never thought Mr. Darcy so deficient in the appearance of it as you
+used to do.”
+
+
+
+ “And yet I meant to be uncommonly clever in taking so decided a dislike
+to him, without any reason. It is such a spur to one’s genius, such an
+opening for wit, to have a dislike of that kind. One may be continually
+abusive without saying anything just; but one cannot be always laughing
+at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.”
+
+
+
+ “Lizzy, when you first read that letter, I am sure you could not treat
+the matter as you do now.”
+
+
+
+ “Indeed, I could not. I was uncomfortable enough, I was very
+uncomfortable—I may say unhappy. And with no one to speak to of what I
+felt, no Jane to comfort me, and say that I had not been so very weak,
+and {281} vain, and nonsensical, as I knew I had! Oh, how I wanted you!”
+
+
+
+ “How unfortunate that you should have used such very strong expressions
+in speaking of Wickham to Mr. Darcy, for now they do appear wholly
+undeserved.”
+
+
+
+ “Certainly. But the misfortune of speaking with bitterness is a most
+natural consequence of the prejudices I had been encouraging. There is
+one point on which I want your advice. I want to be told whether I
+ought, or ought not, to make our acquaintance in general understand
+Wickham’s character.”
+
+
+
+ Miss Bennet paused a little, and then replied, “Surely there can be no
+occasion for exposing him so dreadfully. What is your own opinion?”
+
+
+
+ “That it ought not to be attempted. Mr. Darcy has not authorized me to
+make his communication public. On the contrary, every particular
+relative to his sister was meant to be kept as much as possible to
+myself; and if I endeavour to undeceive people as to the rest of his
+conduct, who will believe me? The general prejudice against Mr. Darcy is
+so violent, that it would be the death of half the good people in
+Meryton, to attempt to place him in an amiable light. I am not equal to
+it. Wickham will soon be gone; and, therefore, it will not signify to
+anybody here what he really is. Some time hence it will be all found
+out, and then we may laugh at their stupidity in not knowing it before.
+At present I will say nothing about it.”
+
+
+
+ “You are quite right. To have his errors made public might ruin him for
+ever. He is now, perhaps, sorry for what he has done, and anxious to
+re-establish a character. We must not make him desperate.”
+
+
+
+ The tumult of Elizabeth’s mind was allayed by this {282} conversation. She
+had got rid of two of the secrets which had weighed on her for a
+fortnight, and was certain of a willing listener in Jane, whenever she
+might wish to talk again of either. But there was still something
+lurking behind, of which prudence forbade the disclosure. She dared not
+relate the other half of Mr. Darcy’s letter, nor explain to her sister
+how sincerely she had been valued by his friend. Here was knowledge in
+which no one could partake; and she was sensible that nothing less than
+a perfect understanding between the parties could justify her in
+throwing off this last encumbrance of mystery. “And then,” said she, “if
+that very improbable event should ever take place, I shall merely be
+able to tell what Bingley may tell in a much more agreeable manner
+himself. The liberty of communication cannot be mine till it has lost
+all its value!”
+
+
+
+ She was now, on being settled at home, at leisure to observe the real
+state of her sister’s spirits. Jane was not happy. She still cherished a
+very tender affection for Bingley. Having never even fancied herself in
+love before, her regard had all the warmth of first attachment, and from
+her age and disposition, greater steadiness than first attachments often
+boast; and so fervently did she value his remembrance, and prefer him to
+every other man, that all her good sense, and all her attention to the
+feelings of her friends, were requisite to check the indulgence of those
+regrets which must have been injurious to her own health and their
+tranquillity.
+
+
+
+ “Well, Lizzy,” said Mrs. Bennet, one day, “what is your opinion now of
+this sad business of Jane’s? For my part, I am determined never to speak
+of it again to anybody. I told my sister Philips so the other day. But I
+cannot find out that Jane saw anything of him in {283} London. Well, he is a
+very undeserving young man—and I do not suppose there is the least
+chance in the world of her ever getting him now. There is no talk of his
+coming to Netherfield again in the summer; and I have inquired of
+everybody, too, who is likely to know.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ “I am determined never to speak of it again”
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ {284} 
+
+
+
+ “I do not believe that he will ever live at Netherfield any more.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, well! it is just as he chooses. Nobody wants him to come; though I
+shall always say that he used my daughter extremely ill; and, if I was
+her, I would not have put up with it. Well, my comfort is, I am sure
+Jane will die of a broken heart, and then he will be sorry for what he
+has done.”
+
+
+
+ But as Elizabeth could not receive comfort from any such expectation she
+made no answer.
+
+
+
+ “Well, Lizzy,” continued her mother, soon afterwards, “and so the
+Collinses live very comfortable, do they? Well, well, I only hope it
+will last. And what sort of table do they keep? Charlotte is an
+excellent manager, I dare say. If she is half as sharp as her mother,
+she is saving enough. There is nothing extravagant in their 
+housekeeping, I dare say.”
+
+
+
+ “No, nothing at all.”
+
+
+
+ “A great deal of good management, depend upon it. Yes, yes. They will
+take care not to outrun their income. They will never be distressed
+for money. Well, much good may it do them! And so, I suppose, they often
+talk of having Longbourn when your father is dead. They look upon it
+quite as their own, I dare say, whenever that happens.”
+
+
+
+ “It was a subject which they could not mention before me.”
+
+
+
+ “No; it would have been strange if they had. But I make no doubt they
+often talk of it between themselves. Well, if they can be easy with an
+estate that is not lawfully their own, so much the better. I should be
+ashamed of having one that was only entailed on me. {285} ”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“When Colonel Miller’s regiment went away.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI. 
+
+ 
+ HE first week of their return was soon gone. The second began. It was
+the last of the regiment’s stay in Meryton, and all the young ladies in
+the neighbourhood were drooping apace. The dejection was almost
+universal. The elder Miss Bennets alone were still able to eat, drink,
+and sleep, and pursue the usual course of their employments. Very
+frequently were they reproached for this insensibility by Kitty and
+Lydia, {286} whose own misery was extreme, and who could not comprehend such
+hard-heartedness in any of the family.
+
+
+
+ “Good Heaven! What is to become of us? What are we to do?” would they
+often exclaim in the bitterness of woe. “How can you be smiling so,
+Lizzy?”
+
+
+
+ Their affectionate mother shared all their grief; she remembered what
+she had herself endured on a similar occasion five-and-twenty years ago.
+
+
+
+ “I am sure,” said she, “I cried for two days together when Colonel
+Miller’s regiment went away. I thought I should have broke my heart.”
+
+
+
+ “I am sure I shall break mine ,” said Lydia.
+
+
+
+ “If one could but go to Brighton!” observed Mrs. Bennet.
+
+
+
+ “Oh yes!—if one could but go to Brighton! But papa is so disagreeable.”
+
+
+
+ “A little sea-bathing would set me up for ever.”
+
+
+
+ “And my aunt Philips is sure it would do me a great deal of good,”
+added Kitty.
+
+
+
+ Such were the kind of lamentations resounding perpetually through
+Longbourn House. Elizabeth tried to be diverted by them; but all sense
+of pleasure was lost in shame. She felt anew the justice of Mr. Darcy’s
+objections; and never had she before been so much disposed to pardon his
+interference in the views of his friend.
+
+
+
+ But the gloom of Lydia’s prospect was shortly cleared away; for she
+received an invitation from Mrs. Forster, the wife of the colonel of the
+regiment, to accompany her to Brighton. This invaluable friend was a
+very young woman, and very lately married. A resemblance in good-humour
+and good spirits had recommended her and Lydia to each other, and out of
+their three months’ acquaintance they had been intimate two . {287} 
+
+
+
+ The rapture of Lydia on this occasion, her adoration of Mrs. Forster,
+the delight of Mrs. Bennet, and the mortification of Kitty, are scarcely
+to be described. Wholly inattentive to her sister’s feelings, Lydia flew
+about the house in restless ecstasy, calling for everyone’s
+congratulations, and laughing and talking with more violence than ever;
+whilst the luckless Kitty continued in the parlour repining at her fate
+in terms as unreasonable as her accent was peevish.
+
+
+
+ “I cannot see why Mrs. Forster should not ask me as well as Lydia,”
+said she, “though I am not her particular friend. I have just as much
+right to be asked as she has, and more too, for I am two years older.”
+
+
+
+ In vain did Elizabeth attempt to make her reasonable, and Jane to make
+her resigned. As for Elizabeth herself, this invitation was so far from
+exciting in her the same feelings as in her mother and Lydia, that she
+considered it as the death-warrant of all possibility of common sense
+for the latter; and detestable as such a step must make her, were it
+known, she could not help secretly advising her father not to let her
+go. She represented to him all the improprieties of Lydia’s general
+behaviour, the little advantage she could derive from the friendship of
+such a woman as Mrs. Forster, and the probability of her being yet more
+imprudent with such a companion at Brighton, where the temptations must
+be greater than at home. He heard her attentively, and then said,—
+
+
+
+ “Lydia will never be easy till she has exposed herself in some public
+place or other, and we can never expect her to do it with so little
+expense or inconvenience to her family as under the present
+circumstances.”
+
+
+
+ “If you were aware,” said Elizabeth, “of the very great {288} disadvantage to
+us all, which must arise from the public notice of Lydia’s unguarded and
+imprudent manner, nay, which has already arisen from it, I am sure you
+would judge differently in the affair.”
+
+
+
+ “Already arisen!” repeated Mr. Bennet. “What! has she frightened away
+some of your lovers? Poor little Lizzy! But do not be cast down. Such
+squeamish youths as cannot bear to be connected with a little absurdity
+are not worth a regret. Come, let me see the list of the pitiful fellows
+who have been kept aloof by Lydia’s folly.”
+
+
+
+ “Indeed, you are mistaken. I have no such injuries to resent. It is not
+of peculiar, but of general evils, which I am now complaining. Our
+importance, our respectability in the world, must be affected by the
+wild volatility, the assurance and disdain of all restraint which mark
+Lydia’s character. Excuse me,—for I must speak plainly. If you, my dear
+father, will not take the trouble of checking her exuberant spirits, and
+of teaching her that her present pursuits are not to be the business of
+her life, she will soon be beyond the reach of amendment. Her character
+will be fixed; and she will, at sixteen, be the most determined flirt
+that ever made herself and her family ridiculous;—a flirt, too, in the
+worst and meanest degree of flirtation; without any attraction beyond
+youth and a tolerable person; and, from the ignorance and emptiness of
+her mind, wholly unable to ward off any portion of that universal
+contempt which her rage for admiration will excite. In this danger Kitty
+is also comprehended. She will follow wherever Lydia leads. Vain,
+ignorant, idle, and absolutely uncontrolled! Oh, my dear father, can you
+suppose it possible that they will not be censured and despised wherever
+they are known, and that their sisters will not be often involved in the
+disgrace? {289} ”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bennet saw that her whole heart was in the subject; and,
+affectionately taking her hand, said, in reply,—
+
+
+
+ “Do not make yourself uneasy, my love. Wherever you and Jane are known,
+you must be respected and valued; and you will not appear to less
+advantage for having a couple of—or I may say, three—very silly
+sisters. We shall have no peace at Longbourn if Lydia does not go to
+Brighton. Let her go, then. Colonel Forster is a sensible man, and will
+keep her out of any real mischief; and she is luckily too poor to be an
+object of prey to anybody. At Brighton she will be of less importance
+even as a common flirt than she has been here. The officers will find
+women better worth their notice. Let us hope, therefore, that her being
+there may teach her her own insignificance. At any rate, she cannot grow
+many degrees worse, without authorizing us to lock her up for the rest
+of her life.”
+
+
+
+ With this answer Elizabeth was forced to be content; but her own opinion
+continued the same, and she left him disappointed and sorry. It was not
+in her nature, however, to increase her vexations by dwelling on them.
+She was confident of having performed her duty; and to fret over
+unavoidable evils, or augment them by anxiety, was no part of her
+disposition.
+
+
+
+ Had Lydia and her mother known the substance of her conference with her
+father, their indignation would hardly have found expression in their
+united volubility. In Lydia’s imagination, a visit to Brighton comprised
+every possibility of earthly happiness. She saw, with the creative eye
+of fancy, the streets of that gay bathing-place covered with officers.
+She saw herself the object of attention to tens and to scores of them at
+present unknown. She saw all the glories of the camp: its {290} tents
+stretched forth in beauteous uniformity of lines, crowded with the young
+and the gay, and dazzling with scarlet; and, to complete the view, she
+saw herself seated beneath a tent, tenderly flirting with at least six
+officers at once.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“Tenderly flirting”
+
+
+
+
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ Had she known that her sister sought to tear her from such prospects and
+such realities as these, what would have been her sensations? They could
+have been understood only by her mother, who might have felt nearly the
+same. Lydia’s going to Brighton was all that consoled her for the
+melancholy conviction of her husband’s never intending to go there
+himself.
+
+
+
+ But they were entirely ignorant of what had passed; {291} and their raptures
+continued, with little intermission, to the very day of Lydia’s leaving
+home.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was now to see Mr. Wickham for the last time. Having been
+frequently in company with him since her return, agitation was pretty
+well over; the agitations of former partiality entirely so. She had even
+learnt to detect, in the very gentleness which had first delighted her,
+an affectation and a sameness to disgust and weary. In his present
+behaviour to herself, moreover, she had a fresh source of displeasure;
+for the inclination he soon testified of renewing those attentions which
+had marked the early part of their acquaintance could only serve, after
+what had since passed, to provoke her. She lost all concern for him in
+finding herself thus selected as the object of such idle and frivolous
+gallantry; and while she steadily repressed it, could not but feel the
+reproof contained in his believing, that however long, and for whatever
+cause, his attentions had been withdrawn, her vanity would be gratified,
+and her preference secured, at any time, by their renewal.
+
+
+
+ On the very last day of the regiment’s remaining in Meryton, he dined,
+with others of the officers, at Longbourn; and so little was Elizabeth
+disposed to part from him in good-humour, that, on his making some
+inquiry as to the manner in which her time had passed at Hunsford, she
+mentioned Colonel Fitzwilliam’s and Mr. Darcy’s having both spent three
+weeks at Rosings, and asked him if he were acquainted with the former.
+
+
+
+ He looked surprised, displeased, alarmed; but, with a moment’s
+recollection, and a returning smile, replied, that he had formerly seen
+him often; and, after observing that he was a very gentlemanlike man,
+asked her how she had liked him. Her answer was warmly in {292} his favour.
+With an air of indifference, he soon afterwards added, “How long did you
+say that he was at Rosings?”
+
+
+
+ “Nearly three weeks.”
+
+
+
+ “And you saw him frequently?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, almost every day.”
+
+
+
+ “His manners are very different from his cousin’s.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, very different; but I think Mr. Darcy improves on acquaintance.”
+
+
+
+ “Indeed!” cried Wickham, with a look which did not escape her. “And pray
+may I ask—” but checking himself, he added, in a gayer tone, “Is it in
+address that he improves? Has he deigned to add aught of civility to his
+ordinary style? for I dare not hope,” he continued, in a lower and more
+serious tone, “that he is improved in essentials.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, no!” said Elizabeth. “In essentials, I believe, he is very much
+what he ever was.”
+
+
+
+ While she spoke, Wickham looked as if scarcely knowing whether to
+rejoice over her words or to distrust their meaning. There was a
+something in her countenance which made him listen with an apprehensive
+and anxious attention, while she added,—
+
+
+
+ “When I said that he improved on acquaintance, I did not mean that
+either his mind or manners were in a state of improvement; but that,
+from knowing him better, his disposition was better understood.”
+
+
+
+ Wickham’s alarm now appeared in a heightened complexion and agitated
+look; for a few minutes he was silent; till, shaking off his
+embarrassment, he turned to her again, and said in the gentlest of
+accents,—
+
+
+
+ “You, who so well know my feelings towards Mr. Darcy, will readily
+comprehend how sincerely I must rejoice that he is wise enough to assume
+even the {293} appearance of what is right. His pride, in that direction,
+may be of service, if not to himself, to many others, for it must deter
+him from such foul misconduct as I have suffered by. I only fear that
+the sort of cautiousness to which you, I imagine, have been alluding, is
+merely adopted on his visits to his aunt, of whose good opinion and
+judgment he stands much in awe. His fear of her has always operated, I
+know, when they were together; and a good deal is to be imputed to his
+wish of forwarding the match with Miss de Bourgh, which I am certain he
+has very much at heart.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth could not repress a smile at this, but she answered only by a
+slight inclination of the head. She saw that he wanted to engage her on
+the old subject of his grievances, and she was in no humour to indulge
+him. The rest of the evening passed with the appearance , on his side,
+of usual cheerfulness, but with no further attempt to distinguish
+Elizabeth; and they parted at last with mutual civility, and possibly a
+mutual desire of never meeting again.
+
+
+
+ When the party broke up, Lydia returned with Mrs. Forster to Meryton,
+from whence they were to set out early the next morning. The separation
+between her and her family was rather noisy than pathetic. Kitty was the
+only one who shed tears; but she did weep from vexation and envy. Mrs.
+Bennet was diffuse in her good wishes for the felicity of her daughter,
+and impressive in her injunctions that she would not miss the
+opportunity of enjoying herself as much as possible,—advice which there
+was every reason to believe would be attended to; and, in the clamorous
+happiness of Lydia herself in bidding farewell, the more gentle adieus
+of her sisters were uttered without being heard. {294} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“The arrival of the Gardiners.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII. 
+
+ 
+ AD Elizabeth’s opinion been all drawn from her own family, she could
+not have formed a very pleasing picture of conjugal felicity or domestic
+comfort. Her father, captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance
+of good-humour which youth and beauty generally give, had married a
+woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind had very early in
+their marriage put an end to all real affection for her. {295} Respect,
+esteem, and confidence had vanished for ever; and all his views of
+domestic happiness were overthrown. But Mr. Bennet was not of a
+disposition to seek comfort for the disappointment which his own
+imprudence had brought on in any of those pleasures which too often
+console the unfortunate for their folly or their vice. He was fond of
+the country and of books; and from these tastes had arisen his principal
+enjoyments. To his wife he was very little otherwise indebted than as
+her ignorance and folly had contributed to his amusement. This is not
+the sort of happiness which a man would in general wish to owe to his
+wife; but where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true
+philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth, however, had never been blind to the impropriety of her
+father’s behaviour as a husband. She had always seen it with pain; but
+respecting his abilities, and grateful for his affectionate treatment of
+herself, she endeavoured to forget what she could not overlook, and to
+banish from her thoughts that continual breach of conjugal obligation
+and decorum which, in exposing his wife to the contempt of her own
+children, was so highly reprehensible. But she had never felt so
+strongly as now the disadvantages which must attend the children of so
+unsuitable a marriage, nor ever been so fully aware of the evils arising
+from so ill-judged a direction of talents—talents which, rightly used,
+might at least have preserved the respectability of his daughters, even
+if incapable of enlarging the mind of his wife.
+
+
+
+ When Elizabeth had rejoiced over Wickham’s departure, she found little
+other cause for satisfaction in the loss of the regiment. Their parties
+abroad were less varied than before; and at home she had a mother and {296} 
+sister, whose constant repinings at the dulness of everything around
+them threw a real gloom over their domestic circle; and, though Kitty
+might in time regain her natural degree of sense, since the disturbers
+of her brain were removed, her other sister, from whose disposition
+greater evil might be apprehended, was likely to be hardened in all her
+folly and assurance, by a situation of such double danger as a
+watering-place and a camp. Upon the whole, therefore, she found, what
+has been sometimes found before, that an event to which she had looked
+forward with impatient desire, did not, in taking place, bring all the
+satisfaction she had promised herself. It was consequently necessary to
+name some other period for the commencement of actual felicity; to have
+some other point on which her wishes and hopes might be fixed, and by
+again enjoying the pleasure of anticipation, console herself for the
+present, and prepare for another disappointment. Her tour to the Lakes
+was now the object of her happiest thoughts: it was her best consolation
+for all the uncomfortable hours which the discontentedness of her mother
+and Kitty made inevitable; and could she have included Jane in the
+scheme, every part of it would have been perfect.
+
+
+
+ “But it is fortunate,” thought she, “that I have something to wish for.
+Were the whole arrangement complete, my disappointment would be certain.
+But here, by carrying with me one ceaseless source of regret in my
+sister’s absence, I may reasonably hope to have all my expectations of
+pleasure realized. A scheme of which every part promises delight can
+never be successful; and general disappointment is only warded off by
+the defence of some little peculiar vexation.”
+
+
+
+ When Lydia went away she promised to write very {297} often and very minutely
+to her mother and Kitty; but her letters were always long expected, and
+always very short. Those to her mother contained little else than that
+they were just returned from the library, where such and such officers
+had attended them, and where she had seen such beautiful ornaments as
+made her quite wild; that she had a new gown, or a new parasol, which
+she would have described more fully, but was obliged to leave off in a
+violent hurry, as Mrs. Forster called her, and they were going to the
+camp; and from her correspondence with her sister there was still less
+to be learnt, for her letters to Kitty, though rather longer, were much
+too full of lines under the words to be made public.
+
+
+
+ After the first fortnight or three weeks of her absence, health,
+good-humour, and cheerfulness began to reappear at Longbourn. Everything
+wore a happier aspect. The families who had been in town for the winter
+came back again, and summer finery and summer engagements arose. Mrs.
+Bennet was restored to her usual querulous serenity; and by the middle
+of June Kitty was so much recovered as to be able to enter Meryton
+without tears,—an event of such happy promise as to make Elizabeth
+hope, that by the following Christmas she might be so tolerably
+reasonable as not to mention an officer above once a day, unless, by
+some cruel and malicious arrangement at the War Office, another regiment
+should be quartered in Meryton.
+
+
+
+ The time fixed for the beginning of their northern tour was now fast
+approaching; and a fortnight only was wanting of it, when a letter
+arrived from Mrs. Gardiner, which at once delayed its commencement and
+curtailed its extent. Mr. Gardiner would be prevented by business from
+setting out till a fortnight later in July, {298} and must be in London again
+within a month; and as that left too short a period for them to go so
+far, and see so much as they had proposed, or at least to see it with
+the leisure and comfort they had built on, they were obliged to give up
+the Lakes, and substitute a more contracted tour; and, according to the
+present plan, were to go no farther northward than Derbyshire. In that
+county there was enough to be seen to occupy the chief of their three
+weeks; and to Mrs. Gardiner it had a peculiarly strong attraction. The
+town where she had formerly passed some years of her life, and where
+they were now to spend a few days, was probably as great an object of
+her curiosity as all the celebrated beauties of Matlock, Chatsworth,
+Dovedale, or the Peak.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was excessively disappointed: she had set her heart on seeing
+the Lakes; and still thought there might have been time enough. But it
+was her business to be satisfied—and certainly her temper to be happy;
+and all was soon right again.
+
+
+
+ With the mention of Derbyshire, there were many ideas connected. It was
+impossible for her to see the word without thinking of Pemberley and its
+owner. “But surely,” said she, “I may enter his county with impunity,
+and rob it of a few petrified spars, without his perceiving me.”
+
+
+
+ The period of expectation was now doubled. Four weeks were to pass away
+before her uncle and aunt’s arrival. But they did pass away, and Mr. and
+Mrs. Gardiner, with their four children, did at length appear at
+Longbourn. The children, two girls of six and eight years old, and two
+younger boys, were to be left under the particular care of their cousin
+Jane, who was the general favourite, and whose steady sense and
+sweetness {299} of temper exactly adapted her for attending to them in every
+way—teaching them, playing with them, and loving them.
+
+
+
+ The Gardiners stayed only one night at Longbourn, and set off the next
+morning with Elizabeth in pursuit of novelty and amusement. One
+enjoyment was certain—that of suitableness as companions; a
+suitableness which comprehended health and temper to bear
+inconveniences—cheerfulness to enhance every pleasure—and affection
+and intelligence, which might supply it among themselves if there were
+disappointments abroad.
+
+
+
+ It is not the object of this work to give a description of Derbyshire,
+nor of any of the remarkable places through which their route thither
+lay—Oxford, Blenheim, Warwick, Kenilworth, Birmingham, etc., are
+sufficiently known. A small part of Derbyshire is all the present
+concern. To the little town of Lambton, the scene of Mrs. Gardiner’s
+former residence, and where she had lately learned that some
+acquaintance still remained, they bent their steps, after having seen
+all the principal wonders of the country; and within five miles of
+Lambton, Elizabeth found, from her aunt, that Pemberley was situated. It
+was not in their direct road; nor more than a mile or two out of it. In
+talking over their route the evening before, Mrs. Gardiner expressed an
+inclination to see the place again. Mr. Gardiner declared his
+willingness, and Elizabeth was applied to for her approbation.
+
+
+
+ “My love, should not you like to see a place of which you have heard so
+much?” said her aunt. “A place, too, with which so many of your
+acquaintance are connected. Wickham passed all his youth there, you
+know.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was distressed. She felt that she had no {300} business at
+Pemberley, and was obliged to assume a disinclination for seeing it. She
+must own that she was tired of great houses: after going over so many,
+she really had no pleasure in fine carpets or satin curtains.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Gardiner abused her stupidity. “If it were merely a fine house
+richly furnished,” said she, “I should not care about it myself; but the
+grounds are delightful. They have some of the finest woods in the
+country.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth said no more; but her mind could not acquiesce. The
+possibility of meeting Mr. Darcy, while viewing the place, instantly
+occurred. It would be dreadful! She blushed at the very idea; and
+thought it would be better to speak openly to her aunt, than to run such
+a risk. But against this there were objections; and she finally resolved
+that it could be the last resource, if her private inquiries as to the
+absence of the family were unfavourably answered.
+
+
+
+ Accordingly, when she retired at night, she asked the chambermaid
+whether Pemberley were not a very fine place, what was the name of its
+proprietor, and, with no little alarm, whether the family were down for
+the summer? A most welcome negative followed the last question; and her
+alarms being now removed, she was at leisure to feel a great deal of
+curiosity to see the house herself; and when the subject was revived the
+next morning, and she was again applied to, could readily answer, and
+with a proper air of indifference, that she had not really any dislike
+to the scheme.
+
+
+
+ To Pemberley, therefore, they were to go. {301} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“Conjecturing as to the date.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII. 
+
+ 
+ LIZABETH, as they drove along, watched for the first appearance of
+Pemberley Woods with some perturbation; and when at length they turned
+in at the lodge, her spirits were in a high flutter.
+
+
+
+ The park was very large, and contained great variety of ground. They
+entered it in one of its lowest points, and drove for some time through
+a beautiful wood stretching over a wide extent.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth’s mind was too full for conversation, but she saw and admired
+every remarkable spot and point of view. They gradually ascended for
+half a mile, and then found themselves at the top of a considerable
+eminence, where the wood ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by
+Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of the valley, into which
+the road with {302} some abruptness wound. It was a large, handsome stone
+building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high
+woody hills; and in front a stream of some natural importance was
+swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks
+were neither formal nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She
+had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural
+beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste. They were
+all of them warm in their admiration; and at that moment she felt that
+to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!
+
+
+
+ They descended the hill, crossed the bridge, and drove to the door; and,
+while examining the nearer aspect of the house, all her apprehension of
+meeting its owner returned. She dreaded lest the chambermaid had been
+mistaken. On applying to see the place, they were admitted into the
+hall; and Elizabeth, as they waited for the housekeeper, had leisure to
+wonder at her being where she was.
+
+
+
+ The housekeeper came; a respectable looking elderly woman, much less
+fine, and more civil, than she had any notion of finding her. They
+followed her into the dining-parlour. It was a large, well-proportioned
+room, handsomely fitted up. Elizabeth, after slightly surveying it, went
+to a window to enjoy its prospect. The hill, crowned with wood, from
+which they had descended, receiving increased abruptness from the
+distance, was a beautiful object. Every disposition of the ground was
+good; and she looked on the whole scene, the river, the trees scattered
+on its banks, and the winding of the valley, as far as she could trace
+it, with delight. As they passed into other rooms, these objects were
+taking different positions; but {303} from every window there were beauties
+to be seen. The rooms were lofty and handsome, and their furniture
+suitable to the fortune of their proprietor; but Elizabeth saw, with
+admiration of his taste, that it was neither gaudy nor uselessly
+fine,—with less of splendour, and more real elegance, than the
+furniture of Rosings.
+
+
+
+ “And of this place,” thought she, “I might have been mistress! With
+these rooms I might have now been familiarly acquainted! Instead of
+viewing them as a stranger, I might have rejoiced in them as my own, and
+welcomed to them as visitors my uncle and aunt. But, no,” recollecting
+herself, “that could never be; my uncle and aunt would have been lost to
+me; I should not have been allowed to invite them.”
+
+
+
+ This was a lucky recollection—it saved her from something like regret.
+
+
+
+ She longed to inquire of the housekeeper whether her master were really
+absent, but had not courage for it. At length, however, the question was
+asked by her uncle; and she turned away with alarm, while Mrs. Reynolds
+replied, that he was; adding, “But we expect him to-morrow, with a large
+party of friends.” How rejoiced was Elizabeth that their own journey had
+not by any circumstance been delayed a day!
+
+
+
+ Her aunt now called her to look at a picture. She approached, and saw
+the likeness of Mr. Wickham, suspended, amongst several other
+miniatures, over the mantel-piece. Her aunt asked her, smilingly, how
+she liked it. The housekeeper came forward, and told them it was the
+picture of a young gentleman, the son of her late master’s steward, who
+had been brought up by him at his own expense. “He is now gone into the
+army,” she added; “but I am afraid he has turned out very wild. {304} ”
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Gardiner looked at her niece with a smile, but Elizabeth could not
+return it.
+
+
+
+ “And that,” said Mrs. Reynolds, pointing to another of the miniatures,
+“is my master—and very like him. It was drawn at the same time as the
+other—about eight years ago.”
+
+
+
+ “I have heard much of your master’s fine person,” said Mrs. Gardiner,
+looking at the picture; “it is a handsome face. But, Lizzy, you can tell
+us whether it is like or not.”
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Reynolds’ respect for Elizabeth seemed to increase on this
+intimation of her knowing her master.
+
+
+
+ “Does that young lady know Mr. Darcy?”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth coloured, and said, “A little.”
+
+
+
+ “And do not you think him a very handsome gentleman, ma’am?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, very handsome.”
+
+
+
+ “I am sure I know none so handsome; but in the gallery upstairs you
+will see a finer, larger picture of him than this. This room was my late
+master’s favourite room, and these miniatures are just as they used to
+be then. He was very fond of them.”
+
+
+
+ This accounted to Elizabeth for Mr. Wickham’s being among them.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Reynolds then directed their attention to one of Miss Darcy, drawn
+when she was only eight years old.
+
+
+
+ “And is Miss Darcy as handsome as her brother?” said Mr. Gardiner.
+
+
+
+ “Oh, yes—the handsomest young lady that ever was seen; and so
+accomplished! She plays and sings all day long. In the next room is a
+new instrument just come down for her—a present from my master: she
+comes here to-morrow with him.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Gardiner, whose manners were easy and pleasant, {305} encouraged her
+communicativeness by his questions and remarks: Mrs. Reynolds, either
+from pride or attachment, had evidently great pleasure in talking of her
+master and his sister.
+
+
+
+ “Is your master much at Pemberley in the course of the year?”
+
+
+
+ “Not so much as I could wish, sir: but I dare say he may spend half his
+time here; and Miss Darcy is always down for the summer months.”
+
+
+
+ “Except,” thought Elizabeth, “when she goes to Ramsgate.”
+
+
+
+ “If your master would marry, you might see more of him.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, sir; but I do not know when that will be. I do not know who is
+good enough for him.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner smiled. Elizabeth could not help saying, “It is
+very much to his credit, I am sure, that you should think so.”
+
+
+
+ “I say no more than the truth, and what everybody will say that knows
+him,” replied the other. Elizabeth thought this was going pretty far;
+and she listened with increasing astonishment as the housekeeper added,
+“I have never had a cross word from him in my life, and I have known him
+ever since he was four years old.”
+
+
+
+ This was praise of all others most extraordinary, most opposite to her
+ideas. That he was not a good-tempered man had been her firmest opinion.
+Her keenest attention was awakened: she longed to hear more; and was
+grateful to her uncle for saying,—
+
+
+
+ “There are very few people of whom so much can be said. You are lucky in
+having such a master.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, sir, I know I am. If I were to go through the world, I could not
+meet with a better. But I have always {306} observed, that they who are
+good-natured when children, are good-natured when they grow up; and he
+was always the sweetest tempered, most generous-hearted boy in the
+world.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth almost stared at her. “Can this be Mr. Darcy?” thought she.
+
+
+
+ “His father was an excellent man,” said Mrs. Gardiner.
+
+
+
+ “Yes, ma’am, that he was indeed; and his son will be just like him—just
+as affable to the poor.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth listened, wondered, doubted, and was impatient for more. Mrs.
+Reynolds could interest her on no other point. She related the subjects
+of the pictures, the dimensions of the rooms, and the price of the
+furniture in vain. Mr. Gardiner, highly amused by the kind of family
+prejudice, to which he attributed her excessive commendation of her
+master, soon led again to the subject; and she dwelt with energy on his
+many merits, as they proceeded together up the great staircase.
+
+
+
+ “He is the best landlord, and the best master,” said she, “that ever
+lived. Not like the wild young men now-a-days, who think of nothing but
+themselves. There is not one of his tenants or servants but what will
+give him a good name. Some people call him proud; but I am sure I never
+saw anything of it. To my fancy, it is only because he does not rattle
+away like other young men.”
+
+
+
+ “In what an amiable light does this place him!” thought Elizabeth.
+
+
+
+ “This fine account of him,” whispered her aunt as they walked, “is not
+quite consistent with his behaviour to our poor friend.”
+
+
+
+ “Perhaps we might be deceived.”
+
+
+
+ “That is not very likely; our authority was too good. {307} ”
+
+
+
+ On reaching the spacious lobby above, they were shown into a very pretty
+sitting-room, lately fitted up with greater elegance and lightness than
+the apartments below; and were informed that it was but just done to
+give pleasure to Miss Darcy, who had taken a liking to the room, when
+last at Pemberley.
+
+
+
+ “He is certainly a good brother,” said Elizabeth, as she walked towards
+one of the windows.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Reynolds anticipated Miss Darcy’s delight, when she should enter
+the room. “And this is always the way with him,” she added. “Whatever
+can give his sister any pleasure, is sure to be done in a moment. There
+is nothing he would not do for her.”
+
+
+
+ The picture gallery, and two or three of the principal bed-rooms, were
+all that remained to be shown. In the former were many good paintings:
+but Elizabeth knew nothing of the art; and from such as had been already
+visible below, she had willingly turned to look at some drawings of Miss
+Darcy’s, in crayons, whose subjects were usually more interesting, and
+also more intelligible.
+
+
+
+ In the gallery there were many family portraits, but they could have
+little to fix the attention of a stranger. Elizabeth walked on in quest
+of the only face whose features would be known to her. At last it
+arrested her—and she beheld a striking resemblance of Mr. Darcy, with
+such a smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen,
+when he looked at her. She stood several minutes before the picture, in
+earnest contemplation, and returned to it again before they quitted the
+gallery. Mrs. Reynolds informed them, that it had been taken in his
+father’s lifetime.
+
+
+
+ There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabet {308} h’s mind, a more gentle
+sensation towards the original than she had ever felt in the height of
+their acquaintance. The commendation bestowed on him by Mrs. Reynolds
+was of no trifling nature. What praise is more valuable than the praise
+of an intelligent servant? As a brother, a landlord, a master, she
+considered how many people’s happiness were in his guardianship! How
+much of pleasure or pain it was in his power to bestow! How much of good
+or evil must be done by him! Every idea that had been brought forward by
+the housekeeper was favourable to his character; and as she stood before
+the canvas, on which he was represented, and fixed his eyes upon
+herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude
+than it had ever raised before: she remembered its warmth, and softened
+its impropriety of expression.
+
+
+
+ When all of the house that was open to general inspection had been seen,
+they returned down stairs; and, taking leave of the housekeeper, were
+consigned over to the gardener, who met them at the hall door.
+
+
+
+ As they walked across the lawn towards the river, Elizabeth turned back
+to look again; her uncle and aunt stopped also; and while the former was
+conjecturing as to the date of the building, the owner of it himself
+suddenly came forward from the road which led behind it to the stables.
+
+
+
+ They were within twenty yards of each other; and so abrupt was his
+appearance, that it was impossible to avoid his sight. Their eyes
+instantly met, and the cheeks of each were overspread with the deepest
+blush. He absolutely started, and for a moment seemed immovable from
+surprise; but shortly recovering himself, advanced towards the party,
+and spoke to Elizabeth, {309} if not in terms of perfect composure, at least
+of perfect civility.
+
+
+
+ She had instinctively turned away; but stopping on his approach,
+received his compliments with an embarrassment impossible to be
+overcome. Had his first appearance, or his resemblance to the picture
+they had just been examining, been insufficient to assure the other two
+that they now saw Mr. Darcy, the gardener’s expression of surprise, on
+beholding his master, must immediately have told it. They stood a little
+aloof while he was talking to their niece, who, astonished and confused,
+scarcely dared lift her eyes to his face, and knew not what answer she
+returned to his civil inquiries after her family. Amazed at the
+alteration of his manner since they last parted, every sentence that he
+uttered was increasing her embarrassment; and every idea of the
+impropriety of her being found there recurring to her mind, the few
+minutes in which they continued together were some of the most
+uncomfortable of her life. Nor did he seem much more at ease; when he
+spoke, his accent had none of its usual sedateness; and he repeated his
+inquiries as to the time of her having left Longbourn, and of her stay
+in Derbyshire, so often, and in so hurried a way, as plainly spoke the
+distraction of his thoughts.
+
+
+
+ At length, every idea seemed to fail him; and after standing a few
+moments without saying a word, he suddenly recollected himself, and took
+leave.
+
+
+
+ The others then joined her, and expressed their admiration of his
+figure; but Elizabeth heard not a word, and, wholly engrossed by her own
+feelings, followed them in silence. She was overpowered by shame and
+vexation. Her coming there was the most unfortunate, the most ill-judged
+thing in the world! How strange must it {310} appear to him! In what a
+disgraceful light might it not strike so vain a man! It might seem as if
+she had purposely thrown herself in his way again! Oh! why did she come?
+or, why did he thus come a day before he was expected? Had they been
+only ten minutes sooner, they should have been beyond the reach of his
+discrimination; for it was plain that he was that moment arrived, that
+moment alighted from his horse or his carriage. She blushed again and
+again over the perverseness of the meeting. And his behaviour, so
+strikingly altered,—what could it mean? That he should even speak to
+her was amazing!—but to speak with such civility, to inquire after her
+family! Never in her life had she seen his manners so little dignified,
+never had he spoken with such gentleness as on this unexpected meeting.
+What a contrast did it offer to his last address in Rosings Park, when
+he put his letter into her hand! She knew not what to think, or how to
+account for it.
+
+
+
+ They had now entered a beautiful walk by the side of the water, and
+every step was bringing forward a nobler fall of ground, or a finer
+reach of the woods to which they were approaching: but it was some time
+before Elizabeth was sensible of any of it; and, though she answered
+mechanically to the repeated appeals of her uncle and aunt, and seemed
+to direct her eyes to such objects as they pointed out, she
+distinguished no part of the scene. Her thoughts were all fixed on that
+one spot of Pemberley House, whichever it might be, where Mr. Darcy then
+was. She longed to know what at that moment was passing in his mind; in
+what manner he thought of her, and whether, in defiance of everything,
+she was still dear to him. Perhaps he had been civil only because he
+felt himself at ease; yet there had been {311} that in his voice, which was
+not like ease. Whether he had felt more of pain or of pleasure in seeing
+her, she could not tell, but he certainly had not seen her with
+composure.
+
+
+
+ At length, however, the remarks of her companions on her absence of mind
+roused her, and she felt the necessity of appearing more like herself.
+
+
+
+ They entered the woods, and, bidding adieu to the river for a while,
+ascended some of the higher grounds; whence, in spots where the opening
+of the trees gave the eye power to wander, were many charming views of
+the valley, the opposite hills, with the long range of woods
+overspreading many, and occasionally part of the stream. Mr. Gardiner
+expressed a wish of going round the whole park, but feared it might be
+beyond a walk. With a triumphant smile, they were told, that it was ten
+miles round. It settled the matter; and they pursued the accustomed
+circuit; which brought them again, after some time, in a descent among
+hanging woods, to the edge of the water, and one of its narrowest parts.
+They crossed it by a simple bridge, in character with the general air of
+the scene: it was a spot less adorned than any they had yet visited; and
+the valley, here contracted into a glen, allowed room only for the
+stream, and a narrow walk amidst the rough coppice-wood which bordered
+it. Elizabeth longed to explore its windings; but when they had crossed
+the bridge, and perceived their distance from the house, Mrs. Gardiner,
+who was not a great walker, could go no farther, and thought only of
+returning to the carriage as quickly as possible. Her niece was,
+therefore, obliged to submit, and they took their way towards the house
+on the opposite side of the river, in the nearest direction; but their
+progress was {312} slow, for Mr. Gardiner, though seldom able to indulge the
+taste, was very fond of fishing, and was so much engaged in watching the
+occasional appearance of some trout in the water, and talking to the man
+about them, that he advanced but little. Whilst wandering on in this
+slow manner, they were again surprised, and Elizabeth’s astonishment was
+quite equal to what it had been at first, by the sight of Mr. Darcy
+approaching them, and at no great distance. The walk being here less
+sheltered than on the other side, allowed them to see him before they
+met. Elizabeth, however astonished, was at least more prepared for an
+interview than before, and resolved to appear and to speak with
+calmness, if he really intended to meet them. For a few moments, indeed,
+she felt that he would probably strike into some other path. The idea
+lasted while a turning in the walk concealed him from their view; the
+turning past, he was immediately before them. With a glance she saw that
+he had lost none of his recent civility; and, to imitate his politeness,
+she began as they met to admire the beauty of the place; but she had not
+got beyond the words “delightful,” and “charming,” when some unlucky
+recollections obtruded, and she fancied that praise of Pemberley from
+her might be mischievously construed. Her colour changed, and she said
+no more.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Gardiner was standing a little behind; and on her pausing, he asked
+her if she would do him the honour of introducing him to her friends.
+This was a stroke of civility for which she was quite unprepared; and
+she could hardly suppress a smile at his being now seeking the
+acquaintance of some of those very people, against whom his pride had
+revolted, in his offer to herself. “What will be his surprise,” thought
+she, “when he {313} knows who they are! He takes them now for people of
+fashion.”
+
+
+
+ The introduction, however, was immediately made; and as she named their
+relationship to herself, she stole a sly look at him, to see how he bore
+it; and was not without the expectation of his decamping as fast as he
+could from such disgraceful companions. That he was surprised by the
+connection was evident: he sustained it, however, with fortitude: and,
+so far from going away, turned back with them, and entered into
+conversation with Mr. Gardiner. Elizabeth could not but be pleased,
+could not but triumph. It was consoling that he should know she had some
+relations for whom there was no need to blush. She listened most
+attentively to all that passed between them, and gloried in every
+expression, every sentence of her uncle, which marked his intelligence,
+his taste, or his good manners.
+
+
+
+ The conversation soon turned upon fishing; and she heard Mr. Darcy
+invite him, with the greatest civility, to fish there as often as he
+chose, while he continued in the neighbourhood, offering at the same
+time to supply him with fishing tackle, and pointing out those parts of
+the stream where there was usually most sport. Mrs. Gardiner, who was
+walking arm in arm with Elizabeth, gave her a look expressive of her
+wonder. Elizabeth said nothing, but it gratified her exceedingly; the
+compliment must be all for herself. Her astonishment, however, was
+extreme; and continually was she repeating, “Why is he so altered? From
+what can it proceed? It cannot be for me , it cannot be for my sake
+that his manners are thus softened. My reproofs at Hunsford could not
+work such a change as this. It is impossible that he should still love
+me. {314} ”
+
+
+
+ After walking some time in this way, the two ladies in front, the two
+gentlemen behind, on resuming their places, after descending to the
+brink of the river for the better inspection of some curious
+water-plant, there chanced to be a little alteration. It originated in
+Mrs. Gardiner, who, fatigued by the exercise of the morning, found
+Elizabeth’s arm inadequate to her support, and consequently preferred
+her husband’s. Mr. Darcy took her place by her niece, and they walked on
+together. After a short silence the lady first spoke. She wished him to
+know that she had been assured of his absence before she came to the
+place, and accordingly began by observing, that his arrival had been
+very unexpected—“for your housekeeper,” she added, “informed us that
+you would certainly not be here till to-morrow; and, indeed, before we
+left Bakewell, we understood that you were not immediately expected in
+the country.” He acknowledged the truth of it all; and said that
+business with his steward had occasioned his coming forward a few hours
+before the rest of the party with whom he had been travelling. “They
+will join me early to-morrow,” he continued, “and among them are some
+who will claim an acquaintance with you,—Mr. Bingley and his sisters.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth answered only by a slight bow. Her thoughts were instantly
+driven back to the time when Mr. Bingley’s name had been last mentioned
+between them; and if she might judge from his complexion, his mind was
+not very differently engaged.
+
+
+
+ “There is also one other person in the party,” he continued after a
+pause, “who more particularly wishes to be known to you. Will you allow
+me, or do I ask too much, to introduce my sister to your acquaintance
+during your stay at Lambton? {315} ”
+
+
+
+ The surprise of such an application was great indeed; it was too great
+for her to know in what manner she acceded to it. She immediately felt
+that whatever desire Miss Darcy might have of being acquainted with her,
+must be the work of her brother, and without looking farther, it was
+satisfactory; it was gratifying to know that his resentment had not made
+him think really ill of her.
+
+
+
+ They now walked on in silence; each of them deep in thought. Elizabeth
+was not comfortable; that was impossible; but she was flattered and
+pleased. His wish of introducing his sister to her was a compliment of
+the highest kind. They soon outstripped the others; and when they had
+reached the carriage, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner were half a quarter of a
+mile behind.
+
+
+
+ He then asked her to walk into the house—but she declared herself not
+tired, and they stood together on the lawn. At such a time much might
+have been said, and silence was very awkward. She wanted to talk, but
+there seemed an embargo on every subject. At last she recollected that
+she had been travelling, and they talked of Matlock and Dovedale with
+great perseverance. Yet time and her aunt moved slowly—and her patience
+and her ideas were nearly worn out before the tête-à-tête was over.
+
+
+
+ On Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner’s coming up they were all pressed to go into
+the house and take some refreshment; but this was declined, and they
+parted on each side with the utmost politeness. Mr. Darcy handed the
+ladies into the carriage; and when it drove off, Elizabeth saw him
+walking slowly towards the house.
+
+
+
+ The observations of her uncle and aunt now began; and each of them
+pronounced him to be infinitely superior to anything they had expected. {316} 
+
+
+
+ “He is perfectly well-behaved, polite, and unassuming,” said her uncle.
+
+
+
+ “There is something a little stately in him, to be sure,” replied her
+aunt; “but it is confined to his air, and is not unbecoming. I can now
+say with the housekeeper, that though some people may call him proud,
+ I have seen nothing of it.”
+
+
+
+ “I was never more surprised than by his behaviour to us. It was more
+than civil; it was really attentive; and there was no necessity for such
+attention. His acquaintance with Elizabeth was very trifling.”
+
+
+
+ “To be sure, Lizzy,” said her aunt, “he is not so handsome as Wickham;
+or rather he has not Wickham’s countenance, for his features are
+perfectly good. But how came you to tell us that he was so
+disagreeable?”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth excused herself as well as she could: said that she had liked
+him better when they met in Kent than before, and that she had never
+seen him so pleasant as this morning.
+
+
+
+ “But perhaps he may be a little whimsical in his civilities,” replied
+her uncle. “Your great men often are; and therefore I shall not take him
+at his word about fishing, as he might change his mind another day, and
+warn me off his grounds.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth felt that they had entirely mistaken his character, but said
+nothing.
+
+
+
+ “From what we have seen of him,” continued Mrs. Gardiner, “I really
+should not have thought that he could have behaved in so cruel a way by
+anybody as he has done by poor Wickham. He has not an ill-natured look.
+On the contrary, there is something pleasing about his mouth when he
+speaks. And there is something of dignity in his countenance, that would
+not give one an {317} unfavourable idea of his heart. But, to be sure, the
+good lady who showed us the house did give him a most flaming character!
+I could hardly help laughing aloud sometimes. But he is a liberal
+master, I suppose, and that , in the eye of a servant, comprehends
+every virtue.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth here felt herself called on to say something in vindication of
+his behaviour to Wickham; and, therefore, gave them to understand, in as
+guarded a manner as she could, that by what she had heard from his
+relations in Kent, his actions were capable of a very different
+construction; and that his character was by no means so faulty, nor
+Wickham’s so amiable, as they had been considered in Hertfordshire. In
+confirmation of this, she related the particulars of all the pecuniary
+transactions in which they had been connected, without actually naming
+her authority, but stating it to be such as might be relied on.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Gardiner was surprised and concerned: but as they were now
+approaching the scene of her former pleasures, every idea gave way to
+the charm of recollection; and she was too much engaged in pointing out
+to her husband all the interesting spots in its environs, to think of
+anything else. Fatigued as she had been by the morning’s walk, they had
+no sooner dined than she set off again in quest of her former
+acquaintance, and the evening was spent in the satisfactions of an
+intercourse renewed after many years’ discontinuance.
+
+
+
+ The occurrences of the day were too full of interest to leave Elizabeth
+much attention for any of these new friends; and she could do nothing
+but think, and think with wonder, of Mr. Darcy’s civility, and, above
+all, of his wishing her to be acquainted with his sister. {318} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV. 
+
+ 
+ LIZABETH had settled it that Mr. Darcy would bring his sister to visit
+her the very day after her reaching Pemberley; and was, consequently,
+resolved not to be out of sight of the inn the whole of that morning.
+But her conclusion was false; for on the very morning after their own
+arrival at Lambton these visitors came. They had been walking about the
+place with some of their new friends, and were just returned to the inn
+to dress themselves for dining with the same family, when the sound of a
+carriage drew them to a window, and they saw a gentleman and lady in a
+curricle driving up the street. Elizabeth, immediately recognizing the
+livery, guessed what it meant, and imparted no small degree of surprise
+to her relations, by acquainting them with the honour which she
+expected. Her {319} uncle and aunt were all amazement; and the embarrassment
+of her manner as she spoke, joined to the circumstance itself, and many
+of the circumstances of the preceding day, opened to them a new idea on
+the business. Nothing had ever suggested it before, but they now felt
+that there was no other way of accounting for such attentions from such
+a quarter than by supposing a partiality for their niece. While these
+newly-born notions were passing in their heads, the perturbation of
+Elizabeth’s feelings was every moment increasing. She was quite amazed
+at her own discomposure; but, amongst other causes of disquiet, she
+dreaded lest the partiality of the brother should have said too much in
+her favour; and, more than commonly anxious to please, she naturally
+suspected that every power of pleasing would fail her.
+
+
+
+ She retreated from the window, fearful of being seen; and as she walked
+up and down the room, endeavouring to compose herself, saw such looks of
+inquiring surprise in her uncle and aunt as made everything worse.
+
+
+
+ Miss Darcy and her brother appeared, and this formidable introduction
+took place. With astonishment did Elizabeth see that her new
+acquaintance was at least as much embarrassed as herself. Since her
+being at Lambton, she had heard that Miss Darcy was exceedingly proud;
+but the observation of a very few minutes convinced her that she was
+only exceedingly shy. She found it difficult to obtain even a word from
+her beyond a monosyllable.
+
+
+
+ Miss Darcy was tall, and on a larger scale than Elizabeth; and, though
+little more than sixteen, her figure was formed, and her appearance
+womanly and graceful. She was less handsome than her brother, but {320} there
+was sense and good-humour in her face, and her manners were perfectly
+unassuming and gentle. Elizabeth, who had expected to find in her as
+acute and unembarrassed an observer as ever Mr. Darcy had been, was much
+relieved by discerning such different feelings.
+
+
+
+ They had not been long together before Darcy told her that Bingley was
+also coming to wait on her; and she had barely time to express her
+satisfaction, and prepare for such a visitor, when Bingley’s quick step
+was heard on the stairs, and in a moment he entered the room. All
+Elizabeth’s anger against him had been long done away; but had she still
+felt any, it could hardly have stood its ground against the unaffected
+cordiality with which he expressed himself on seeing her again. He
+inquired in a friendly, though general, way, after her family, and
+looked and spoke with the same good-humoured ease that he had ever done.
+
+
+
+ To Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner he was scarcely a less interesting personage
+than to herself. They had long wished to see him. The whole party before
+them, indeed, excited a lively attention. The suspicions which had just
+arisen of Mr. Darcy and their niece, directed their observation towards
+each with an earnest, though guarded, inquiry; and they soon drew from
+those inquiries the full conviction that one of them at least knew what
+it was to love. Of the lady’s sensations they remained a little in
+doubt; but that the gentleman was overflowing with admiration was
+evident enough.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth, on her side, had much to do. She wanted to ascertain the
+feelings of each of her visitors, she wanted to compose her own, and to
+make herself agreeable to all; and in the latter object, where she
+feared most to fail, she was most sure of success, for those to {321} whom
+she endeavoured to give pleasure were pre-possessed in her favour.
+Bingley was ready, Georgiana was eager, and Darcy determined, to be
+pleased.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ “To make herself agreeable to all”
+
+ 
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ In seeing Bingley, her thoughts naturally flew to her sister; and oh!
+how ardently did she long to know whether any of his were directed in a
+like manner. Sometimes she could fancy that he talked less than on
+former occasions, and once or twice pleased herself with the notion
+that, as he looked at her, he was trying to trace a resemblance. But,
+though this might be imaginary, she could not be deceived as to his
+behaviour {322} to Miss Darcy, who had been set up as a rival to Jane. No
+look appeared on either side that spoke particular regard. Nothing
+occurred between them that could justify the hopes of his sister. On
+this point she was soon satisfied; and two or three little circumstances
+occurred ere they parted, which, in her anxious interpretation, denoted
+a recollection of Jane, not untinctured by tenderness, and a wish of
+saying more that might lead to the mention of her, had he dared. He
+observed to her, at a moment when the others were talking together, and
+in a tone which had something of real regret, that it “was a very long
+time since he had had the pleasure of seeing her;” and, before she could
+reply, he added, “It is above eight months. We have not met since the
+26th of November, when we were all dancing together at Netherfield.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was pleased to find his memory so exact; and he afterwards
+took occasion to ask her, when unattended to by any of the rest, whether
+ all her sisters were at Longbourn. There was not much in the question,
+nor in the preceding remark; but there was a look and a manner which
+gave them meaning.
+
+
+
+ It was not often that she could turn her eyes on Mr. Darcy himself; but
+whenever she did catch a glimpse she saw an expression of general
+complaisance, and in all that he said, she heard an accent so far
+removed from hauteur or disdain of his companions, as convinced her
+that the improvement of manners which she had yesterday witnessed,
+however temporary its existence might prove, had at least outlived one
+day. When she saw him thus seeking the acquaintance, and courting the
+good opinion of people with whom any intercourse a few months ago would
+have been a disgrace; when she saw {323} him thus civil, not only to herself,
+but to the very relations whom he had openly disdained, and recollected
+their last lively scene in Hunsford Parsonage, the difference, the
+change was so great, and struck so forcibly on her mind, that she could
+hardly restrain her astonishment from being visible. Never, even in the
+company of his dear friends at Netherfield, or his dignified relations
+at Rosings, had she seen him so desirous to please, so free from
+self-consequence or unbending reserve, as now, when no importance could
+result from the success of his endeavours, and when even the
+acquaintance of those to whom his attentions were addressed, would draw
+down the ridicule and censure of the ladies both of Netherfield and
+Rosings.
+
+
+
+ Their visitors stayed with them above half an hour; and when they arose
+to depart, Mr. Darcy called on his sister to join him in expressing
+their wish of seeing Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, and Miss Bennet, to dinner
+at Pemberley, before they left the country. Miss Darcy, though with a
+diffidence which marked her little in the habit of giving invitations,
+readily obeyed. Mrs. Gardiner looked at her niece, desirous of knowing
+how she , whom the invitation most concerned, felt disposed as to its
+acceptance, but Elizabeth had turned away her head. Presuming, however,
+that this studied avoidance spoke rather a momentary embarrassment than
+any dislike of the proposal, and seeing in her husband, who was fond of
+society, a perfect willingness to accept it, she ventured to engage for
+her attendance, and the day after the next was fixed on.
+
+
+
+ Bingley expressed great pleasure in the certainty of seeing Elizabeth
+again, having still a great deal to say to her, and many inquiries to
+make after all their Hertfordshire friends. Elizabeth, construing all
+this into a wish {324} of hearing her speak of her sister, was pleased; and
+on this account, as well as some others, found herself, when their
+visitors left them, capable of considering the last half hour with some
+satisfaction, though while it was passing the enjoyment of it had been
+little. Eager to be alone, and fearful of inquiries or hints from her
+uncle and aunt, she stayed with them only long enough to hear their
+favourable opinion of Bingley, and then hurried away to dress.
+
+
+
+ But she had no reason to fear Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner’s curiosity; it was
+not their wish to force her communication. It was evident that she was
+much better acquainted with Mr. Darcy than they had before any idea of;
+it was evident that he was very much in love with her. They saw much to
+interest, but nothing to justify inquiry.
+
+
+
+ Of Mr. Darcy it was now a matter of anxiety to think well; and, as far
+as their acquaintance reached, there was no fault to find. They could
+not be untouched by his politeness; and had they drawn his character
+from their own feelings and his servant’s report, without any reference
+to any other account, the circle in Hertfordshire to which he was known
+would not have recognized it for Mr. Darcy. There was now an interest,
+however, in believing the housekeeper; and they soon became sensible
+that the authority of a servant, who had known him since he was four
+years old, and whose own manners indicated respectability, was not to be
+hastily rejected. Neither had anything occurred in the intelligence of
+their Lambton friends that could materially lessen its weight. They had
+nothing to accuse him of but pride; pride he probably had, and if not,
+it would certainly be imputed by the inhabitants of a small market town {325} 
+where the family did not visit. It was acknowledged, however, that he
+was a liberal man, and did much good among the poor.
+
+
+
+ With respect to Wickham, the travellers soon found that he was not held
+there in much estimation; for though the chief of his concerns with the
+son of his patron were imperfectly understood, it was yet a well-known
+fact that, on his quitting Derbyshire, he had left many debts behind
+him, which Mr. Darcy afterwards discharged.
+
+
+
+ As for Elizabeth, her thoughts were at Pemberley this evening more than
+the last; and the evening, though as it passed it seemed long, was not
+long enough to determine her feelings towards one in that mansion; and
+she lay awake two whole hours, endeavouring to make them out. She
+certainly did not hate him. No; hatred had vanished long ago, and she
+had almost as long been ashamed of ever feeling a dislike against him,
+that could be so called. The respect created by the conviction of his
+valuable qualities, though at first unwillingly admitted, had for some
+time ceased to be repugnant to her feelings; and it was now heightened
+into somewhat of a friendlier nature by the testimony so highly in his
+favour, and bringing forward his disposition in so amiable a light,
+which yesterday had produced. But above all, above respect and esteem,
+there was a motive within her of good-will which could not be
+overlooked. It was gratitude;—gratitude, not merely for having once
+loved her, but for loving her still well enough to forgive all the
+petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the
+unjust accusations accompanying her rejection. He who, she had been
+persuaded, would avoid her as his greatest enemy, seemed, on this
+accidental {326} meeting, most eager to preserve the acquaintance; and
+without any indelicate display of regard, or any peculiarity of manner,
+where their two selves only were concerned, was soliciting the good
+opinion of her friends, and bent on making her known to his sister. Such
+a change in a man of so much pride excited not only astonishment but
+gratitude—for to love, ardent love, it must be attributed; and, as
+such, its impression on her was of a sort to be encouraged, as by no
+means unpleasing, though it could not be exactly defined. She respected,
+she esteemed, she was grateful to him, she felt a real interest in his
+welfare; and she only wanted to know how far she wished that welfare to
+depend upon herself, and how far it would be for the happiness of both
+that she should employ the power, which her fancy told her she still
+possessed, of bringing on the renewal of his addresses.
+
+
+
+ It had been settled in the evening, between the aunt and niece, that
+such a striking civility as Miss Darcy’s, in coming to them on the very
+day of her arrival at Pemberley—for she had reached it only to a late
+breakfast—ought to be imitated, though it could not be equalled, by
+some exertion of politeness on their side; and, consequently, that it
+would be highly expedient to wait on her at Pemberley the following
+morning. They were, therefore, to go. Elizabeth was pleased; though when
+she asked herself the reason, she had very little to say in reply.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Gardiner left them soon after breakfast. The fishing scheme had been
+renewed the day before, and a positive engagement made of his meeting
+some of the gentlemen at Pemberley by noon. {327} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“Engaged by the river.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV. 
+
+ 
+ ONVINCED as Elizabeth now was that Miss Bingley’s dislike of her had
+originated in jealousy, she could not help feeling how very unwelcome
+her appearance at Pemberley must be to her, and was curious to know
+with {328} how much civility on that lady’s side the acquaintance would now
+be renewed.
+
+
+
+ On reaching the house, they were shown through the hall into the saloon,
+whose northern aspect rendered it delightful for summer. Its windows,
+opening to the ground, admitted a most refreshing view of the high woody
+hills behind the house, and of the beautiful oaks and Spanish chestnuts
+which were scattered over the intermediate lawn.
+
+
+
+ In this room they were received by Miss Darcy, who was sitting there
+with Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley, and the lady with whom she lived in
+London. Georgiana’s reception of them was very civil, but attended with
+all that embarrassment which, though proceeding from shyness and the
+fear of doing wrong, would easily give to those who felt themselves
+inferior the belief of her being proud and reserved. Mrs. Gardiner and
+her niece, however, did her justice, and pitied her.
+
+
+
+ By Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley they were noticed only by a courtesy; and
+on their being seated, a pause, awkward as such pauses must always be,
+succeeded for a few moments. It was first broken by Mrs. Annesley, a
+genteel, agreeable-looking woman, whose endeavour to introduce some kind
+of discourse proved her to be more truly well-bred than either of the
+others; and between her and Mrs. Gardiner, with occasional help from
+Elizabeth, the conversation was carried on. Miss Darcy looked as if she
+wished for courage enough to join in it; and sometimes did venture a
+short sentence, when there was least danger of its being heard.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth soon saw that she was herself closely watched by Miss Bingley,
+and that she could not speak a word, especially to Miss Darcy, without
+calling her attention. {329} This observation would not have prevented her
+from trying to talk to the latter, had they not been seated at an
+inconvenient distance; but she was not sorry to be spared the necessity
+of saying much: her own thoughts were employing her. She expected every
+moment that some of the gentlemen would enter the room: she wished, she
+feared, that the master of the house might be amongst them; and whether
+she wished or feared it most, she could scarcely determine. After
+sitting in this manner a quarter of an hour, without hearing Miss
+Bingley’s voice, Elizabeth was roused by receiving from her a cold
+inquiry after the health of her family. She answered with equal
+indifference and brevity, and the other said no more.
+
+
+
+ The next variation which their visit afforded was produced by the
+entrance of servants with cold meat, cake, and a variety of all the
+finest fruits in season; but this did not take place till after many a
+significant look and smile from Mrs. Annesley to Miss Darcy had been
+given, to remind her of her post. There was now employment for the whole
+party; for though they could not all talk, they could all eat; and the
+beautiful pyramids of grapes, nectarines, and peaches, soon collected
+them round the table.
+
+
+
+ While thus engaged, Elizabeth had a fair opportunity of deciding whether
+she most feared or wished for the appearance of Mr. Darcy, by the
+feelings which prevailed on his entering the room; and then, though but
+a moment before she had believed her wishes to predominate, she began to
+regret that he came.
+
+
+
+ He had been some time with Mr. Gardiner, who, with two or three other
+gentlemen from the house, was engaged by the river; and had left him
+only on learning {330} that the ladies of the family intended a visit to
+Georgiana that morning. No sooner did he appear, than Elizabeth wisely
+resolved to be perfectly easy and unembarrassed;—a resolution the more
+necessary to be made, but perhaps not the more easily kept, because she
+saw that the suspicions of the whole party were awakened against them,
+and that there was scarcely an eye which did not watch his behaviour
+when he first came into the room. In no countenance was attentive
+curiosity so strongly marked as in Miss Bingley’s, in spite of the
+smiles which overspread her face whenever she spoke to one of its
+objects; for jealousy had not yet made her desperate, and her attentions
+to Mr. Darcy were by no means over. Miss Darcy, on her brother’s
+entrance, exerted herself much more to talk; and Elizabeth saw that he
+was anxious for his sister and herself to get acquainted, and forwarded,
+as much as possible, every attempt at conversation on either side. Miss
+Bingley saw all this likewise; and, in the imprudence of anger, took the
+first opportunity of saying, with sneering civility,—
+
+
+
+ “Pray, Miss Eliza, are not the ——shire militia removed from Meryton?
+They must be a great loss to your family.”
+
+
+
+ In Darcy’s presence she dared not mention Wickham’s name: but Elizabeth
+instantly comprehended that he was uppermost in her thoughts; and the
+various recollections connected with him gave her a moment’s distress;
+but, exerting herself vigorously to repel the ill-natured attack, she
+presently answered the question in a tolerably disengaged tone. While
+she spoke, an involuntary glance showed her Darcy with a heightened
+complexion, earnestly looking at her, and his sister overcome with
+confusion, and unable to lift up her eyes. {331} Had Miss Bingley known what
+pain she was then giving her beloved friend, she undoubtedly would have
+refrained from the hint; but she had merely intended to discompose
+Elizabeth, by bringing forward the idea of a man to whom she believed
+her partial, to make her betray a sensibility which might injure her in
+Darcy’s opinion, and, perhaps, to remind the latter of all the follies
+and absurdities by which some part of her family were connected with
+that corps. Not a syllable had ever reached her of Miss Darcy’s
+meditated elopement. To no creature had it been revealed, where secrecy
+was possible, except to Elizabeth; and from all Bingley’s connections
+her brother was particularly anxious to conceal it, from that very wish
+which Elizabeth had long ago attributed to him, of their becoming
+hereafter her own. He had certainly formed such a plan; and without
+meaning that it should affect his endeavour to separate him from Miss
+Bennet, it is probable that it might add something to his lively concern
+for the welfare of his friend.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth’s collected behaviour, however, soon quieted his emotion; and
+as Miss Bingley, vexed and disappointed, dared not approach nearer to
+Wickham, Georgiana also recovered in time, though not enough to be able
+to speak any more. Her brother, whose eye she feared to meet, scarcely
+recollected her interest in the affair; and the very circumstance which
+had been designed to turn his thoughts from Elizabeth, seemed to have
+fixed them on her more and more cheerfully.
+
+
+
+ Their visit did not continue long after the question and answer above
+mentioned; and while Mr. Darcy was attending them to their carriage,
+Miss Bingley was venting her feelings in criticisms on Elizabet {332} h’s
+person, behaviour, and dress. But Georgiana would not join her. Her
+brother’s recommendation was enough to insure her favour: his judgment
+could not err; and he had spoken in such terms of Elizabeth, as to leave
+Georgiana without the power of finding her otherwise than lovely and
+amiable. When Darcy returned to the saloon, Miss Bingley could not help
+repeating to him some part of what she had been saying to his sister.
+
+
+
+ “How very ill Eliza Bennet looks this morning, Mr. Darcy,” she cried: “I
+never in my life saw anyone so much altered as she is since the winter.
+She is grown so brown and coarse! Louisa and I were agreeing that we
+should not have known her again.”
+
+
+
+ However little Mr. Darcy might have liked such an address, he contented
+himself with coolly replying, that he perceived no other alteration than
+her being rather tanned,—no miraculous consequence of travelling in the
+summer.
+
+
+
+ “For my own part,” she rejoined, “I must confess that I never could see
+any beauty in her. Her face is too thin; her complexion has no
+brilliancy; and her features are not at all handsome. Her nose wants
+character; there is nothing marked in its lines. Her teeth are
+tolerable, but not out of the common way; and as for her eyes, which
+have sometimes been called so fine, I never could perceive anything
+extraordinary in them. They have a sharp, shrewish look, which I do not
+like at all; and in her air altogether, there is a self-sufficiency
+without fashion, which is intolerable.”
+
+
+
+ Persuaded as Miss Bingley was that Darcy admired Elizabeth, this was not
+the best method of recommending herself; but angry people are not always
+wise; and in seeing him at last look somewhat nettled, she had all {333} the
+success she expected. He was resolutely silent, however; and, from a
+determination of making him speak, she continued,—
+
+
+
+ “I remember, when we first knew her in Hertfordshire, how amazed we all
+were to find that she was a reputed beauty; and I particularly recollect
+your saying one night, after they had been dining at Netherfield, ‘ She 
+a beauty! I should as soon call her mother a wit.’ But afterwards she
+seemed to improve on you, and I believe you thought her rather pretty at
+one time.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes,” replied Darcy, who could contain himself no longer, “but that 
+was only when I first knew her; for it is many months since I have
+considered her as one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance.”
+
+
+
+ He then went away, and Miss Bingley was left to all the satisfaction of
+having forced him to say what gave no one any pain but herself.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Gardiner and Elizabeth talked of all that had occurred during their
+visit, as they returned, except what had particularly interested them
+both. The looks and behaviour of everybody they had seen were discussed,
+except of the person who had mostly engaged their attention. They talked
+of his sister, his friends, his house, his fruit, of everything but
+himself; yet Elizabeth was longing to know what Mrs. Gardiner thought of
+him, and Mrs. Gardiner would have been highly gratified by her niece’s
+beginning the subject. {334} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter XLVI. 
+
+ 
+ LIZABETH had been a good deal disappointed in not finding a letter from
+Jane on their first arrival at Lambton; and this disappointment had been
+renewed on each of the mornings that had now been spent there; but on
+the third her repining was over, and her sister justified, by the
+receipt of two letters from her at once, on one of which was marked that
+it had been mis-sent elsewhere. Elizabeth was not surprised at it, as
+Jane had written the direction remarkably ill.
+
+
+
+ They had just been preparing to walk as the letters came in; and her
+uncle and aunt, leaving her to enjoy them in quiet, set off by
+themselves. The one mis-sent must be first attended to; it had been
+written five days ago. The beginning contained an account of all their
+little parties and engagements, with such news as the country afforded;
+but the latter half, which was dated a day later, and written in evident
+agitation, gave more important intelligence. It was to this effect:—
+
+
+
+ “Since writing the above, dearest Lizzy, something has occurred of a
+most unexpected and serious nature; but I am afraid of alarming you—be
+assured that we are all {335} well. What I have to say relates to poor Lydia.
+An express came at twelve last night, just as we were all gone to bed,
+from Colonel Forster, to inform us that she was gone off to Scotland
+with one of his officers; to own the truth, with Wickham! Imagine our
+surprise. To Kitty, however, it does not seem so wholly unexpected. I am
+very, very sorry. So imprudent a match on both sides! But I am willing
+to hope the best, and that his character has been misunderstood.
+Thoughtless and indiscreet I can easily believe him, but this step (and
+let us rejoice over it) marks nothing bad at heart. His choice is
+disinterested at least, for he must know my father can give her nothing.
+Our poor mother is sadly grieved. My father bears it better. How
+thankful am I, that we never let them know what has been said against
+him; we must forget it ourselves. They were off Saturday night about
+twelve, as is conjectured, but were not missed till yesterday morning at
+eight. The express was sent off directly. My dear Lizzy, they must have
+passed within ten miles of us. Colonel Forster gives us reason to expect
+him here soon. Lydia left a few lines for his wife, informing her of
+their intention. I must conclude, for I cannot be long from my poor
+mother. I am afraid you will not be able to make it out, but I hardly
+know what I have written.”
+
+
+
+ Without allowing herself time for consideration, and scarcely knowing
+what she felt, Elizabeth, on finishing this letter, instantly seized the
+other, and opening it with the utmost impatience, read as follows: it
+had been written a day later than the conclusion of the first.
+
+
+
+ “By this time, my dearest sister, you have received my hurried letter; I
+wish this may be more intelligible, but though not confined for time, my
+head is so bewildered that I cannot answer for being coherent. Dearest
+Lizzy, {336} I hardly know what I would write, but I have bad news for you,
+and it cannot be delayed. Imprudent as a marriage between Mr. Wickham
+and our poor Lydia would be, we are now anxious to be assured it has
+taken place, for there is but too much reason to fear they are not gone
+to Scotland. Colonel Forster came yesterday, having left Brighton the
+day before, not many hours after the express. Though Lydia’s short
+letter to Mrs. F. gave them to understand that they were going to Gretna
+Green, something was dropped by Denny expressing his belief that W.
+never intended to go there, or to marry Lydia at all, which was repeated
+to Colonel F., who, instantly taking the alarm, set off from B.,
+intending to trace their route. He did trace them easily to Clapham, but
+no farther; for on entering that place, they removed into a
+hackney-coach, and dismissed the chaise that brought them from Epsom.
+All that is known after this is, that they were seen to continue the
+London road. I know not what to think. After making every possible
+inquiry on that side of London, Colonel F. came on into Hertfordshire,
+anxiously renewing them at all the turnpikes, and at the inns in Barnet
+and Hatfield, but without any success,—no such people had been seen to
+pass through. With the kindest concern he came on to Longbourn, and
+broke his apprehensions to us in a manner most creditable to his heart.
+I am sincerely grieved for him and Mrs. F.; but no one can throw any
+blame on them. Our distress, my dear Lizzy, is very great. My father and
+mother believe the worst, but I cannot think so ill of him. Many
+circumstances might make it more eligible for them to be married
+privately in town than to pursue their first plan; and even if he 
+could form such a design against a young woman of Lydi {337} a’s connections,
+which is not likely, can I suppose her so lost to everything?
+Impossible! I grieve to find, however, that Colonel F. is not disposed
+to depend upon their marriage: he shook his head when I expressed my
+hopes, and said he feared W. was not a man to be trusted. My poor mother
+is really ill, and keeps her room. Could she exert herself, it would be
+better, but this is not to be expected; and as to my father, I never in
+my life saw him so affected. Poor Kitty has anger for having concealed
+their attachment; but as it was a matter of confidence, one cannot
+wonder. I am truly glad, dearest Lizzy, that you have been spared
+something of these distressing scenes; but now, as the first shock is
+over, shall I own that I long for your return? I am not so selfish,
+however, as to press for it, if inconvenient. Adieu! I take up my pen
+again to do, what I have just told you I would not; but circumstances
+are such, that I cannot help earnestly begging you all to come here as
+soon as possible. I know my dear uncle and aunt so well, that I am not
+afraid of requesting it, though I have still something more to ask of
+the former. My father is going to London with Colonel Forster instantly,
+to try to discover her. What he means to do, I am sure I know not; but
+his excessive distress will not allow him to pursue any measure in the
+best and safest way, and Colonel Forster is obliged to be at Brighton
+again to-morrow evening. In such an exigence my uncle’s advice and
+assistance would be everything in the world; he will immediately
+comprehend what I must feel, and I rely upon his goodness.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh! where, where is my uncle?” cried Elizabeth, darting from her seat
+as she finished the letter, in eagerness to follow him, without losing a
+moment of the time so precious; but as she reached the door, it was
+opened {338} by a servant, and Mr. Darcy appeared. Her pale face and
+impetuous manner made him start, and before he could recover himself
+enough to speak, she, in whose mind every idea was superseded by Lydia’s
+situation, hastily exclaimed, “I beg your pardon, but I must leave you.
+I must find Mr. Gardiner this moment on business that cannot be delayed;
+I have not an instant to lose.”
+
+
+
+ “Good God! what is the matter?” cried he, with more feeling than
+politeness; then recollecting himself, “I will not detain you a minute;
+but let me, or let the servant, go after Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. You are
+not well enough; you cannot go yourself.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth hesitated; but her knees trembled under her, and she felt how
+little would be gained by her attempting to pursue them. Calling back
+the servant, therefore, she commissioned him, though in so breathless an
+accent as made her almost unintelligible, to fetch his master and
+mistress home instantly.
+
+
+
+ On his quitting the room, she sat down, unable to support herself, and
+looking so miserably ill, that it was impossible for Darcy to leave her,
+or to refrain from saying, in a tone of gentleness and commiseration,
+“Let me call your maid. Is there nothing you could take to give you
+present relief? A glass of wine; shall I get you one? You are very ill.”
+
+
+
+ “No, I thank you,” she replied, endeavouring to recover herself. “There
+is nothing the matter with me. I am quite well, I am only distressed by
+some dreadful news which I have just received from Longbourn.”
+
+
+
+ She burst into tears as she alluded to it, and for a few minutes could
+not speak another word. Darcy, in wretched suspense, could only say
+something indistinctly of his {339} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ “I have not an instant to lose”
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ concern, and observe her in compassionate silence. At length she spoke
+again. “I have just had a letter from Jane, with such dreadful news. It
+cannot be concealed from anyone. My youngest sister has left all her
+friends—has eloped; has thrown herself into the power of—of Mr. {340} 
+Wickham. They are gone off together from Brighton. You know him too
+well to doubt the rest. She has no money, no connections, nothing that
+can tempt him to—she is lost for ever.”
+
+
+
+ Darcy was fixed in astonishment.
+
+
+
+ “When I consider,” she added, in a yet more agitated voice, “that I 
+might have prevented it! I who knew what he was. Had I but explained
+some part of it only—some part of what I learnt, to my own family! Had
+his character been known, this could not have happened. But it is all,
+all too late now.”
+
+
+
+ “I am grieved, indeed,” cried Darcy: “grieved—shocked. But is it
+certain, absolutely certain?”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, yes! They left Brighton together on Sunday night, and were traced
+almost to London, but not beyond: they are certainly not gone to
+Scotland.”
+
+
+
+ “And what has been done, what has been attempted, to recover her?”
+
+
+
+ “My father has gone to London, and Jane has written to beg my uncle’s
+immediate assistance, and we shall be off, I hope, in half an hour. But
+nothing can be done; I know very well that nothing can be done. How is
+such a man to be worked on? How are they even to be discovered? I have
+not the smallest hope. It is every way horrible!”
+
+
+
+ Darcy shook his head in silent acquiescence.
+
+
+
+ “When my eyes were opened to his real character, oh! had I known what
+I ought, what I dared to do! But I knew not—I was afraid of doing too
+much. Wretched, wretched mistake!”
+
+
+
+ Darcy made no answer. He seemed scarcely to hear her, and was walking up
+and down the room in earnest meditation; his brow contracted, his air
+gloomy. {341} Elizabeth soon observed, and instantly understood it. Her power
+was sinking; everything must sink under such a proof of family
+weakness, such an assurance of the deepest disgrace. She could neither
+wonder nor condemn; but the belief of his self-conquest brought nothing
+consolatory to her bosom, afforded no palliation of her distress. It
+was, on the contrary, exactly calculated to make her understand her own
+wishes; and never had she so honestly felt that she could have loved
+him, as now, when all love must be vain.
+
+
+
+ But self, though it would intrude, could not engross her. Lydia—the
+humiliation, the misery she was bringing on them all—soon swallowed up
+every private care; and covering her face with her handkerchief,
+Elizabeth was soon lost to everything else; and, after a pause of
+several minutes, was only recalled to a sense of her situation by the
+voice of her companion, who, in a manner which, though it spoke
+compassion, spoke likewise restraint, said,—
+
+
+
+ “I am afraid you have been long desiring my absence, nor have I anything
+to plead in excuse of my stay, but real, though unavailing concern.
+Would to Heaven that anything could be either said or done on my part,
+that might offer consolation to such distress! But I will not torment
+you with vain wishes, which may seem purposely to ask for your thanks.
+This unfortunate affair will, I fear, prevent my sister’s having the
+pleasure of seeing you at Pemberley to-day.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, yes! Be so kind as to apologize for us to Miss Darcy. Say that
+urgent business calls us home immediately. Conceal the unhappy truth as
+long as it is possible. I know it cannot be long.”
+
+
+
+ He readily assured her of his secrecy, again expressed {342} his sorrow for
+her distress, wished it a happier conclusion than there was at present
+reason to hope, and, leaving his compliments for her relations, with
+only one serious parting look, went away.
+
+
+
+ As he quitted the room, Elizabeth felt how improbable it was that they
+should ever see each other again on such terms of cordiality as had
+marked their several meetings in Derbyshire; and as she threw a
+retrospective glance over the whole of their acquaintance, so full of
+contradictions and varieties, sighed at the perverseness of those
+feelings which would now have promoted its continuance, and would
+formerly have rejoiced in its termination.
+
+
+
+ If gratitude and esteem are good foundations of affection, Elizabeth’s
+change of sentiment will be neither improbable nor faulty. But if
+otherwise, if the regard springing from such sources is unreasonable or
+unnatural, in comparison of what is so often described as arising on a
+first interview with its object, and even before two words have been
+exchanged, nothing can be said in her defence, except that she had given
+somewhat of a trial to the latter method, in her partiality for Wickham,
+and that its ill success might, perhaps, authorize her to seek the other
+less interesting mode of attachment. Be that as it may, she saw him go
+with regret; and in this early example of what Lydia’s infamy must
+produce, found additional anguish as she reflected on that wretched
+business. Never since reading Jane’s second letter had she entertained a
+hope of Wickham’s meaning to marry her. No one but Jane, she thought,
+could flatter herself with such an expectation. Surprise was the least
+of all her feelings on this development. While the contents of the first
+letter remained on her mind, she was all surprise, {343} all astonishment,
+that Wickham should marry a girl whom it was impossible he could marry
+for money; and how Lydia could ever have attached him had appeared
+incomprehensible. But now it was all too natural. For such an attachment
+as this, she might have sufficient charms; and though she did not
+suppose Lydia to be deliberately engaging in an elopement, without the
+intention of marriage, she had no difficulty in believing that neither
+her virtue nor her understanding would preserve her from falling an easy
+prey.
+
+
+
+ She had never perceived, while the regiment was in Hertfordshire, that
+Lydia had any partiality for him; but she was convinced that Lydia had
+wanted only encouragement to attach herself to anybody. Sometimes one
+officer, sometimes another, had been her favourite, as their attentions
+raised them in her opinion. Her affections had been continually
+fluctuating, but never without an object. The mischief of neglect and
+mistaken indulgence towards such a girl—oh! how acutely did she now
+feel it!
+
+
+
+ She was wild to be at home—to hear, to see, to be upon the spot to
+share with Jane in the cares that must now fall wholly upon her, in a
+family so deranged; a father absent, a mother incapable of exertion, and
+requiring constant attendance; and though almost persuaded that nothing
+could be done for Lydia, her uncle’s interference seemed of the utmost
+importance, and till he entered the room the misery of her impatience
+was severe. Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner had hurried back in alarm, supposing,
+by the servant’s account, that their niece was taken suddenly ill; but
+satisfying them instantly on that head, she eagerly communicated the
+cause of their summons, reading the two letters aloud, {344} and dwelling on
+the postscript of the last with trembling energy. Though Lydia had never
+been a favourite with them, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner could not but be
+deeply affected. Not Lydia only, but all were concerned in it; and after
+the first exclamations of surprise and horror, Mr. Gardiner readily
+promised every assistance in his power. Elizabeth, though expecting no
+less, thanked him with tears of gratitude; and all three being actuated
+by one spirit, everything relating to their journey was speedily
+settled. They were to be off as soon as possible. “But what is to be
+done about Pemberley?” cried Mrs. Gardiner. “John told us Mr. Darcy was
+here when you sent for us;—was it so?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes; and I told him we should not be able to keep our engagement.
+ That is all settled.”
+
+
+
+ “What is all settled?” repeated the other, as she ran into her room to
+prepare. “And are they upon such terms as for her to disclose the real
+truth? Oh, that I knew how it was!”
+
+
+
+ But wishes were vain; or, at best, could serve only to amuse her in the
+hurry and confusion of the following hour. Had Elizabeth been at leisure
+to be idle, she would have remained certain that all employment was
+impossible to one so wretched as herself; but she had her share of
+business as well as her aunt, and amongst the rest there were notes to
+be written to all their friends at Lambton, with false excuses for their
+sudden departure. An hour, however, saw the whole completed; and Mr.
+Gardiner, meanwhile, having settled his account at the inn, nothing
+remained to be done but to go; and Elizabeth, after all the misery of
+the morning, found herself, in a shorter space of time than she could
+have supposed, seated in the carriage, and on the road to Longbourn. {345} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“The first pleasing earnest of their welcome.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVII. 
+
+ 
+“ HAVE been thinking it over again, Elizabeth,” said her uncle, as they
+drove from the town; “and really, upon serious consideration, I am much
+more inclined than I was to judge as your eldest sister does of the
+matter. It appears to me so very unlikely that any young man should form
+such a design against a girl who is by no means unprotected or
+friendless, and who was actually staying in his Colonel’s family, that I
+am strongly inclined to hope the best. Could he expect that her friends
+would not step forward? Could he expect to be noticed again by the
+regiment, after such an affront to Colonel Forster? His temptation is
+not adequate to the risk. {346} ”
+
+
+
+ “Do you really think so?” cried Elizabeth, brightening up for a moment.
+
+
+
+ “Upon my word,” said Mrs. Gardiner, “I begin to be of your uncle’s
+opinion. It is really too great a violation of decency, honour, and
+interest, for him to be guilty of it. I cannot think so very ill of
+Wickham. Can you, yourself, Lizzie, so wholly give him up, as to believe
+him capable of it?”
+
+
+
+ “Not perhaps of neglecting his own interest. But of every other neglect
+I can believe him capable. If, indeed, it should be so! But I dare not
+hope it. Why should they not go on to Scotland, if that had been the
+case?”
+
+
+
+ “In the first place,” replied Mr. Gardiner, “there is no absolute proof
+that they are not gone to Scotland.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, but their removing from the chaise into a hackney coach is such a
+presumption! And, besides, no traces of them were to be found on the
+Barnet road.”
+
+
+
+ “Well, then,—supposing them to be in London—they may be there, though
+for the purpose of concealment, for no more exceptionable purpose. It is
+not likely that money should be very abundant on either side; and it
+might strike them that they could be more economically, though less
+expeditiously, married in London, than in Scotland.”
+
+
+
+ “But why all this secrecy? Why any fear of detection? Why must their
+marriage be private? Oh, no, no—this is not likely. His most particular
+friend, you see by Jane’s account, was persuaded of his never intending
+to marry her. Wickham will never marry a woman without some money. He
+cannot afford it. And what claims has Lydia, what attractions has she
+beyond youth, health, and good humour, that could make him for her sake {347} 
+forego every chance of benefiting himself by marrying well? As to what
+restraint the apprehensions of disgrace in the corps might throw on a
+dishonourable elopement with her, I am not able to judge; for I know
+nothing of the effects that such a step might produce. But as to your
+other objection, I am afraid it will hardly hold good. Lydia has no
+brothers to step forward; and he might imagine, from my father’s
+behaviour, from his indolence and the little attention he has ever
+seemed to give to what was going forward in his family, that he would
+do as little and think as little about it, as any father could do, in
+such a matter.”
+
+
+
+ “But can you think that Lydia is so lost to everything but love of him,
+as to consent to live with him on any other terms than marriage?”
+
+
+
+ “It does seem, and it is most shocking, indeed,” replied Elizabeth, with
+tears in her eyes, “that a sister’s sense of decency and virtue in such
+a point should admit of doubt. But, really, I know not what to say.
+Perhaps I am not doing her justice. But she is very young: she has never
+been taught to think on serious subjects; and for the last half year,
+nay, for a twelvemonth, she has been given up to nothing but amusement
+and vanity. She has been allowed to dispose of her time in the most idle
+and frivolous manner, and to adopt any opinions that came in her way.
+Since the ——shire were first quartered in Meryton, nothing but love,
+flirtation, and officers, have been in her head. She has been doing
+everything in her power, by thinking and talking on the subject, to give
+greater—what shall I call it?—susceptibility to her feelings; which
+are naturally lively enough. And we all know that Wickham has every
+charm of person and address that can captivate a woman. {348} ”
+
+
+
+ “But you see that Jane,” said her aunt, “does not think so ill of
+Wickham, as to believe him capable of the attempt.”
+
+
+
+ “Of whom does Jane ever think ill? And who is there, whatever might be
+their former conduct, that she would believe capable of such an attempt,
+till it were proved against them? But Jane knows, as well as I do, what
+Wickham really is. We both know that he has been profligate in every
+sense of the word; that he has neither integrity nor honour; that he is
+as false and deceitful as he is insinuating.”
+
+
+
+ “And do you really know all this?” cried Mrs. Gardiner, whose curiosity
+as to the mode of her intelligence was all alive.
+
+
+
+ “I do, indeed,” replied Elizabeth, colouring. “I told you the other day
+of his infamous behaviour to Mr. Darcy; and you, yourself, when last at
+Longbourn, heard in what manner he spoke of the man who had behaved with
+such forbearance and liberality towards him. And there are other
+circumstances which I am not at liberty—which it is not worth while to
+relate; but his lies about the whole Pemberley family are endless. From
+what he said of Miss Darcy, I was thoroughly prepared to see a proud,
+reserved, disagreeable girl. Yet he knew to the contrary himself. He
+must know that she was as amiable and unpretending as we have found
+her.”
+
+
+
+ “But does Lydia know nothing of this? can she be ignorant of what you
+and Jane seem so well to understand?”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, yes!—that, that is the worst of all. Till I was in Kent, and saw
+so much both of Mr. Darcy and his relation Colonel Fitzwilliam, I was
+ {349} ignorant of the truth myself. And when I returned home the ——shire
+was to leave Meryton in a week or fortnight’s time. As that was the
+case, neither Jane, to whom I related the whole, nor I, thought it
+necessary to make our knowledge public; for of what use could it
+apparently be to anyone, that the good opinion, which all the
+neighbourhood had of him, should then be overthrown? And even when it
+was settled that Lydia should go with Mrs. Forster, the necessity of
+opening her eyes to his character never occurred to me. That she could
+be in any danger from the deception never entered my head. That such a
+consequence as this should ensue, you may easily believe was far
+enough from my thoughts.”
+
+
+
+ “When they all removed to Brighton, therefore, you had no reason, I
+suppose, to believe them fond of each other?”
+
+
+
+ “Not the slightest. I can remember no symptom of affection on either
+side; and had anything of the kind been perceptible, you must be aware
+that ours is not a family on which it could be thrown away. When first
+he entered the corps, she was ready enough to admire him; but so we all
+were. Every girl in or near Meryton was out of her senses about him for
+the first two months: but he never distinguished her by any particular
+attention; and, consequently, after a moderate period of extravagant and
+wild admiration, her fancy for him gave way, and others of the regiment,
+who treated her with more distinction, again became her favourites.”
+
+
+
+ It may be easily believed, that however little of novelty could be added
+to their fears, hopes, and conjectures, on this interesting subject by
+its repeated discussion, no other could detain them from it long, during
+the whole of the journey. From Elizabeth’s thoughts it was never absent.
+Fixed there by the keenest of all anguish, {350} self-reproach, she could
+find no interval of ease or forgetfulness.
+
+
+
+ They travelled as expeditiously as possible; and sleeping one night on
+the road, reached Longbourn by dinnertime the next day. It was a comfort
+to Elizabeth to consider that Jane could not have been wearied by long
+expectations.
+
+
+
+ The little Gardiners, attracted by the sight of a chaise, were standing
+on the steps of the house, as they entered the paddock; and when the
+carriage drove up to the door, the joyful surprise that lighted up their
+faces and displayed itself over their whole bodies, in a variety of
+capers and frisks, was the first pleasing earnest of their welcome.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth jumped out; and after giving each of them a hasty kiss,
+hurried into the vestibule, where Jane, who came running downstairs from
+her mother’s apartment, immediately met her.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth, as she affectionately embraced her, whilst tears filled the
+eyes of both, lost not a moment in asking whether anything had been
+heard of the fugitives.
+
+
+
+ “Not yet,” replied Jane. “But now that my dear uncle is come, I hope
+everything will be well.”
+
+
+
+ “Is my father in town?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, he went on Tuesday, as I wrote you word.”
+
+
+
+ “And have you heard from him often?”
+
+
+
+ “We have heard only once. He wrote me a few lines on Wednesday, to say
+that he had arrived in safety, and to give me his directions, which I
+particularly begged him to do. He merely added, that he should not write
+again, till he had something of importance to mention.”
+
+
+
+ “And my mother—how is she? How are you all? {351} ”
+
+
+
+ “My mother is tolerably well, I trust; though her spirits are greatly
+shaken. She is upstairs, and will have great satisfaction in seeing you
+all. She does not yet leave her dressing-room. Mary and Kitty, thank
+Heaven! are quite well.”
+
+
+
+ “But you—how are you?” cried Elizabeth. “You look pale. How much you
+must have gone through!”
+
+
+
+ Her sister, however, assured her of her being perfectly well; and their
+conversation, which had been passing while Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner were
+engaged with their children, was now put an end to by the approach of
+the whole party. Jane ran to her uncle and aunt, and welcomed and
+thanked them both, with alternate smiles and tears.
+
+
+
+ When they were all in the drawing-room, the questions which Elizabeth
+had already asked were of course repeated by the others, and they soon
+found that Jane had no intelligence to give. The sanguine hope of good,
+however, which the benevolence of her heart suggested, had not yet
+deserted her; she still expected that it would all end well, and that
+every morning would bring some letter, either from Lydia or her father,
+to explain their proceedings, and, perhaps, announce the marriage.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet, to whose apartment they all repaired, after a few minutes’
+conversation together, received them exactly as might be expected; with
+tears and lamentations of regret, invectives against the villainous
+conduct of Wickham, and complaints of her own sufferings and ill-usage;
+blaming everybody but the person to whose ill-judging indulgence the
+errors of her daughter must be principally owing.
+
+
+
+ “If I had been able,” said she, “to carry my point in going to Brighton
+with all my family, this would not {352} have happened: but poor dear Lydia
+had nobody to take care of her. Why did the Forsters ever let her go out
+of their sight? I am sure there was some great neglect or other on their
+side, for she is not the kind of girl to do such a thing, if she had
+been well looked after. I always thought they were very unfit to have
+the charge of her; but I was over-ruled, as I always am. Poor, dear
+child! And now here’s Mr. Bennet gone away, and I know he will fight
+Wickham, wherever he meets him, and then he will be killed, and what is
+to become of us all? The Collinses will turn us out, before he is cold
+in his grave; and if you are not kind to us, brother, I do not know what
+we shall do.”
+
+
+
+ They all exclaimed against such terrific ideas; and Mr. Gardiner, after
+general assurances of his affection for her and all her family, told her
+that he meant to be in London the very next day, and would assist Mr.
+Bennet in every endeavour for recovering Lydia.
+
+
+
+ “Do not give way to useless alarm,” added he: “though it is right to be
+prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look on it as certain.
+It is not quite a week since they left Brighton. In a few days more, we
+may gain some news of them; and till we know that they are not married,
+and have no design of marrying, do not let us give the matter over as
+lost. As soon as I get to town, I shall go to my brother, and make him
+come home with me to Gracechurch Street, and then we may consult
+together as to what is to be done.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, my dear brother,” replied Mrs. Bennet, “that is exactly what I
+could most wish for. And now do, when you get to town, find them out,
+wherever they may be; and if they are not married already, make them
+marry. And as for wedding clothes, do not let them wait for that, {353} but
+tell Lydia she shall have as much money as she chooses to buy them,
+after they are married. And, above all things, keep Mr. Bennet from
+fighting. Tell him what a dreadful state I am in—that I am frightened
+out of my wits; and have such tremblings, such flutterings all over me,
+such spasms in my side, and pains in my head, and such beatings at my
+heart, that I can get no rest by night nor by day. And tell my dear
+Lydia not to give any directions about her clothes till she has seen me,
+for she does not know which are the best warehouses. Oh, brother, how
+kind you are! I know you will contrive it all.”
+
+
+
+ But Mr. Gardiner, though he assured her again of his earnest endeavours
+in the cause, could not avoid recommending moderation to her, as well in
+her hopes as her fears; and after talking with her in this manner till
+dinner was on table, they left her to vent all her feelings on the
+housekeeper, who attended in the absence of her daughters.
+
+
+
+ Though her brother and sister were persuaded that there was no real
+occasion for such a seclusion from the family, they did not attempt to
+oppose it; for they knew that she had not prudence enough to hold her
+tongue before the servants, while they waited at table, and judged it
+better that one only of the household, and the one whom they could
+most trust, should comprehend all her fears and solicitude on the
+subject.
+
+
+
+ In the dining-room they were soon joined by Mary and Kitty, who had been
+too busily engaged in their separate apartments to make their appearance
+before. One came from her books, and the other from her toilette. The
+faces of both, however, were tolerably calm; and no change was visible
+in either, except that the loss of her {354} favourite sister, or the anger
+which she had herself incurred in the business, had given something more
+of fretfulness than usual to the accents of Kitty. As for Mary, she was
+mistress enough of herself to whisper to Elizabeth, with a countenance
+of grave reflection, soon after they were seated at table,—
+
+
+
+ “This is a most unfortunate affair, and will probably be much talked of.
+But we must stem the tide of malice, and pour into the wounded bosoms of
+each other the balm of sisterly consolation.”
+
+
+
+ Then perceiving in Elizabeth no inclination of replying, she added,
+“Unhappy as the event must be for Lydia, we may draw from it this useful
+lesson:—that loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable, that one
+false step involves her in endless ruin, that her reputation is no less
+brittle than it is beautiful, and that she cannot be too much guarded in
+her behaviour towards the undeserving of the other sex.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth lifted up her eyes in amazement, but was too much oppressed to
+make any reply. Mary, however, continued to console herself with such
+kind of moral extractions from the evil before them.
+
+
+
+ In the afternoon, the two elder Miss Bennets were able to be for half an
+hour by themselves; and Elizabeth instantly availed herself of the
+opportunity of making any inquiries which Jane was equally eager to
+satisfy. After joining in general lamentations over the dreadful sequel
+of this event, which Elizabeth considered as all but certain, and Miss
+Bennet could not assert to be wholly impossible, the former continued
+the subject by saying, “But tell me all and everything about it which I
+have not already heard. Give me further particulars. What did Colonel
+Forster say? Had they no {355} apprehension of anything before the elopement
+took place? They must have seen them together for ever.”
+
+
+
+ “Colonel Forster did own that he had often suspected some partiality,
+especially on Lydia’s side, but nothing to give him any alarm. I am so
+grieved for him. His behaviour was attentive and kind to the utmost. He
+ was coming to us, in order to assure us of his concern, before he had
+any idea of their not being gone to Scotland: when that apprehension
+first got abroad, it hastened his journey.”
+
+
+
+ “And was Denny convinced that Wickham would not marry? Did he know of
+their intending to go off? Had Colonel Forster seen Denny himself?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes; but when questioned by him , Denny denied knowing anything of
+their plan, and would not give his real opinion about it. He did not
+repeat his persuasion of their not marrying, and from that I am
+inclined to hope he might have been misunderstood before.”
+
+
+
+ “And till Colonel Forster came himself, not one of you entertained a
+doubt, I suppose, of their being really married?”
+
+
+
+ “How was it possible that such an idea should enter our brains? I felt a
+little uneasy—a little fearful of my sister’s happiness with him in
+marriage, because I knew that his conduct had not been always quite
+right. My father and mother knew nothing of that; they only felt how
+imprudent a match it must be. Kitty then owned, with a very natural
+triumph on knowing more than the rest of us, that in Lydia’s last letter
+she had prepared her for such a step. She had known, it seems, of their
+being in love with each other many weeks.”
+
+
+
+ “But not before they went to Brighton?”
+
+
+
+ “No, I believe not. {356} ”
+
+
+
+ “And did Colonel Forster appear to think ill of Wickham himself? Does he
+know his real character?”
+
+
+
+ “I must confess that he did not speak so well of Wickham as he formerly
+did. He believed him to be imprudent and extravagant; and since this sad
+affair has taken place, it is said that he left Meryton greatly in debt:
+but I hope this may be false.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, Jane, had we been less secret, had we told what we knew of him,
+this could not have happened!”
+
+
+
+ “Perhaps it would have been better,” replied her sister.
+
+
+
+ “But to expose the former faults of any person, without knowing what
+their present feelings were, seemed unjustifiable.”
+
+
+
+ “We acted with the best intentions.”
+
+
+
+ “Could Colonel Forster repeat the particulars of Lydia’s note to his
+wife?”
+
+
+
+ “He brought it with him for us to see.”
+
+
+
+ Jane then took it from her pocket-book, and gave it to Elizabeth. These
+were the contents:—
+
+
+
+ “My dear Harriet,
+
+
+
+ “You will laugh when you know where I am gone, and I cannot help
+laughing myself at your surprise to-morrow morning, as soon as I am
+missed. I am going to Gretna Green, and if you cannot guess with
+who, I shall think you a simpleton, for there is but one man in the
+world I love, and he is an angel. I should never be happy without
+him, so think it no harm to be off. You need not send them word at
+Longbourn of my going, if you do not like it, for it will make the
+surprise the greater when I write to them, and sign my name Lydia
+Wickham. What a good joke it will be! I can hardly write for
+laughing. Pray make my excuses to Pratt for not keeping my
+engagement, and dancing with him to-night. {357} Tell him I hope he will
+excuse me when he knows all, and tell him I will dance with him at
+the next ball we meet with great pleasure. I shall send for my
+clothes when I get to Longbourn; but I wish you would tell Sally to
+mend a great slit in my worked muslin gown before they are packed
+up. Good-bye. Give my love to Colonel Forster. I hope you will
+drink to our good journey.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your affectionate friend,
+
+
+
+“ Lydia Bennet .”
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ “Oh, thoughtless, thoughtless Lydia!” cried Elizabeth when she had
+finished it. “What a letter is this, to be written at such a moment! But
+at least it shows that she was serious in the object of her journey.
+Whatever he might afterwards persuade her to, it was not on her side a
+ scheme of infamy. My poor father! how he must have felt it!”
+
+
+
+ “I never saw anyone so shocked. He could not speak a word for full ten
+minutes. My mother was taken ill immediately, and the whole house in
+such confusion!”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, Jane,” cried Elizabeth, “was there a servant belonging to it who
+did not know the whole story before the end of the day?”
+
+
+
+ “I do not know: I hope there was. But to be guarded at such a time is
+very difficult. My mother was in hysterics; and though I endeavoured to
+give her every assistance in my power, I am afraid I did not do so much
+as I might have done. But the horror of what might possibly happen
+almost took from me my faculties.”
+
+
+
+ “Your attendance upon her has been too much for you. You do not look
+well. Oh that I had been with you! you have had every care and anxiety
+upon yourself alone.”
+
+
+
+ “Mary and Kitty have been very kind, and would have shared in every
+fatigue, I am sure, but I did not think it {358} right for either of them.
+Kitty is slight and delicate, and Mary studies so much that her hours of
+repose should not be broken in on. My aunt Philips came to Longbourn on
+Tuesday, after my father went away; and was so good as to stay till
+Thursday with me. She was of great use and comfort to us all, and Lady
+Lucas has been very kind: she walked here on Wednesday morning to
+condole with us, and offered her services, or any of her daughters, if
+they could be of use to us.”
+
+
+
+ “She had better have stayed at home,” cried Elizabeth: “perhaps she
+ meant well, but, under such a misfortune as this, one cannot see too
+little of one’s neighbours. Assistance is impossible; condolence,
+insufferable. Let them triumph over us at a distance, and be satisfied.”
+
+
+
+ She then proceeded to inquire into the measures which her father had
+intended to pursue, while in town, for the recovery of his daughter.
+
+
+
+ “He meant, I believe,” replied Jane, “to go to Epsom, the place where
+they last changed horses, see the postilions, and try if anything could
+be made out from them. His principal object must be to discover the
+number of the hackney coach which took them from Clapham. It had come
+with a fare from London; and as he thought the circumstance of a
+gentleman and lady’s removing from one carriage into another might be
+remarked, he meant to make inquiries at Clapham. If he could anyhow
+discover at what house the coachman had before set down his fare, he
+determined to make inquiries there, and hoped it might not be impossible
+to find out the stand and number of the coach. I do not know of any
+other designs that he had formed; but he was in such a hurry to be gone,
+and his spirits so greatly discomposed, that I had difficulty in finding
+out even so much as this. {359} ”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“The Post.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII. 
+
+ 
+ HE whole party were in hopes of a letter from Mr. Bennet the next
+morning, but the post came in without bringing a single line from him.
+His family knew him to be, on all common occasions, a most negligent and
+dilatory correspondent; but at such a time they had hoped for exertion.
+They were forced to conclude, that he had no pleasing intelligence to
+send; but even of that they would have been glad to be certain. Mr.
+Gardiner had waited only for the letters before he set off.
+
+
+
+ When he was gone, they were certain at least of {360} receiving constant
+information of what was going on; and their uncle promised, at parting,
+to prevail on Mr. Bennet to return to Longbourn as soon as he could, to
+the great consolation of his sister, who considered it as the only
+security for her husband’s not being killed in a duel.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Gardiner and the children were to remain in Hertfordshire a few
+days longer, as the former thought her presence might be serviceable to
+her nieces. She shared in their attendance on Mrs. Bennet, and was a
+great comfort to them in their hours of freedom. Their other aunt also
+visited them frequently, and always, as she said, with the design of
+cheering and heartening them up—though, as she never came without
+reporting some fresh instance of Wickham’s extravagance or irregularity,
+she seldom went away without leaving them more dispirited than she found
+them.
+
+
+
+ All Meryton seemed striving to blacken the man who, but three months
+before, had been almost an angel of light. He was declared to be in debt
+to every tradesman in the place, and his intrigues, all honoured with
+the title of seduction, had been extended into every tradesman’s family.
+Everybody declared that he was the wickedest young man in the world; and
+everybody began to find out that they had always distrusted the
+appearance of his goodness. Elizabeth, though she did not credit above
+half of what was said, believed enough to make her former assurance of
+her sister’s ruin still more certain; and even Jane, who believed still
+less of it, became almost hopeless, more especially as the time was now
+come, when, if they had gone to Scotland, which she had never before
+entirely despaired of, they must in all probability have gained some
+news of them. {361} 
+
+
+
+ Mr. Gardiner left Longbourn on Sunday; on Tuesday, his wife received a
+letter from him: it told them, that on his arrival he had immediately
+found out his brother, and persuaded him to come to Gracechurch Street.
+That Mr. Bennet had been to Epsom and Clapham, before his arrival, but
+without gaining any satisfactory information; and that he was now
+determined to inquire at all the principal hotels in town, as Mr. Bennet
+thought it possible they might have gone to one of them, on their first
+coming to London, before they procured lodgings. Mr. Gardiner himself
+did not expect any success from this measure; but as his brother was
+eager in it, he meant to assist him in pursuing it. He added, that Mr.
+Bennet seemed wholly disinclined at present to leave London, and
+promised to write again very soon. There was also a postscript to this
+effect:—
+
+
+
+ “I have written to Colonel Forster to desire him to find out, if
+possible, from some of the young man’s intimates in the regiment,
+whether Wickham has any relations or connections who would be likely to
+know in what part of the town he has now concealed himself. If there
+were anyone that one could apply to, with a probability of gaining such
+a clue as that, it might be of essential consequence. At present we have
+nothing to guide us. Colonel Forster will, I dare say, do everything in
+his power to satisfy us on this head. But, on second thoughts, perhaps
+Lizzy could tell us what relations he has now living better than any
+other person.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was at no loss to understand from whence this deference for
+her authority proceeded; but it was not in her power to give any
+information of so satisfactory a nature as the compliment deserved.
+
+
+
+ She had never heard of his having had any relations, {362} except a father
+and mother, both of whom had been dead many years. It was possible,
+however, that some of his companions in the ——shire might be able to
+give more information; and though she was not very sanguine in expecting
+it, the application was a something to look forward to.
+
+
+
+ Every day at Longbourn was now a day of anxiety; but the most anxious
+part of each was when the post was expected. The arrival of letters was
+the first grand object of every morning’s impatience. Through letters,
+whatever of good or bad was to be told would be communicated; and every
+succeeding day was expected to bring some news of importance.
+
+
+
+ But before they heard again from Mr. Gardiner, a letter arrived for
+their father, from a different quarter, from Mr. Collins; which, as Jane
+had received directions to open all that came for him in his absence,
+she accordingly read; and Elizabeth, who knew what curiosities his
+letters always were, looked over her, and read it likewise. It was as
+follows:—
+
+
+
+ “My dear Sir,
+
+
+
+ “I feel myself called upon, by our relationship, and my situation
+in life, to condole with you on the grievous affliction you are now
+suffering under, of which we were yesterday informed by a letter
+from Hertfordshire. Be assured, my dear sir, that Mrs. Collins and
+myself sincerely sympathize with you, and all your respectable
+family, in your present distress, which must be of the bitterest
+kind, because proceeding from a cause which no time can remove. No
+arguments shall be wanting on my part, that can alleviate so severe
+a misfortune; or that may comfort you, under a circumstance that
+must be, of all others, most afflicting to a parent’s mind. {363} The
+death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison of
+this. And it is the more to be lamented, because there is reason to
+suppose, as my dear Charlotte informs me, that this licentiousness
+of behaviour in your
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“To whom I have related the affair”
+
+
+
+
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ daughter has proceeded from a faulty degree of indulgence; though,
+at the same time, for the consolation of yourself and Mrs. Bennet,
+I am inclined to think that her own disposition must be naturally
+bad, or she could not be guilty of such an enormity, at so early an
+age. Howsoever that may be, you are grievously to be pitied; {364} in
+which opinion I am not only joined by Mrs. Collins, but likewise by
+Lady Catherine and her daughter, to whom I have related the affair.
+They agree with me in apprehending that this false step in one
+daughter will be injurious to the fortunes of all the others: for
+who, as Lady Catherine herself condescendingly says, will connect
+themselves with such a family? And this consideration leads me,
+moreover, to reflect, with augmented satisfaction, on a certain
+event of last November; for had it been otherwise, I must have been
+involved in all your sorrow and disgrace. Let me advise you, then,
+my dear sir, to console yourself as much as possible, to throw off
+your unworthy child from your affection for ever, and leave her to
+reap the fruits of her own heinous offence.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am, dear sir,” etc., etc.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ Mr. Gardiner did not write again, till he had received an answer from
+Colonel Forster; and then he had nothing of a pleasant nature to send.
+It was not known that Wickham had a single relation with whom he kept up
+any connection, and it was certain that he had no near one living. His
+former acquaintance had been numerous; but since he had been in the
+militia, it did not appear that he was on terms of particular friendship
+with any of them. There was no one, therefore, who could be pointed out
+as likely to give any news of him. And in the wretched state of his own
+finances, there was a very powerful motive for secrecy, in addition to
+his fear of discovery by Lydia’s relations; for it had just transpired
+that he had left gaming debts behind him to a very considerable amount.
+Colonel Forster believed that more than a thousand pounds would be
+necessary to clear his expenses at Brighton. He owed a good deal {365} in the
+town, but his debts of honour were still more formidable. Mr. Gardiner
+did not attempt to conceal these particulars from the Longbourn family;
+Jane heard them with horror. “A gamester!” she cried. “This is wholly
+unexpected; I had not an idea of it.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Gardiner added, in his letter, that they might expect to see their
+father at home on the following day, which was Saturday. Rendered
+spiritless by the ill success of all their endeavours, he had yielded to
+his brother-in-law’s entreaty that he would return to his family and
+leave it to him to do whatever occasion might suggest to be advisable
+for continuing their pursuit. When Mrs. Bennet was told of this, she did
+not express so much satisfaction as her children expected, considering
+what her anxiety for his life had been before.
+
+
+
+ “What! is he coming home, and without poor Lydia?” she cried. “Sure he
+will not leave London before he has found them. Who is to fight Wickham,
+and make him marry her, if he comes away?”
+
+
+
+ As Mrs. Gardiner began to wish to be at home, it was settled that she
+and her children should go to London at the same time that Mr. Bennet
+came from it. The coach, therefore, took them the first stage of their
+journey, and brought its master back to Longbourn.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Gardiner went away in all the perplexity about Elizabeth and her
+Derbyshire friend, that had attended her from that part of the world.
+His name had never been voluntarily mentioned before them by her niece;
+and the kind of half-expectation which Mrs. Gardiner had formed, of
+their being followed by a letter from him, had ended in nothing.
+Elizabeth had received none since her return, that could come from
+Pemberley.
+
+
+
+ The present unhappy state of the family rendered any {366} other excuse for
+the lowness of her spirits unnecessary; nothing, therefore, could be
+fairly conjectured from that ,—though Elizabeth, who was by this time
+tolerably well acquainted with her own feelings, was perfectly aware
+that, had she known nothing of Darcy, she could have borne the dread of
+Lydia’s infamy somewhat better. It would have spared her, she thought,
+one sleepless night out of two.
+
+
+
+ When Mr. Bennet arrived, he had all the appearance of his usual
+philosophic composure. He said as little as he had ever been in the
+habit of saying; made no mention of the business that had taken him
+away; and it was some time before his daughters had courage to speak of
+it.
+
+
+
+ It was not till the afternoon, when he joined them at tea, that
+Elizabeth ventured to introduce the subject; and then, on her briefly
+expressing her sorrow for what he must have endured, he replied, “Say
+nothing of that. Who should suffer but myself? It has been my own doing,
+and I ought to feel it.”
+
+
+
+ “You must not be too severe upon yourself,” replied Elizabeth.
+
+
+
+ “You may well warn me against such an evil. Human nature is so prone to
+fall into it! No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have
+been to blame. I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression.
+It will pass away soon enough.”
+
+
+
+ “Do you suppose them to be in London?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes; where else can they be so well concealed?”
+
+
+
+ “And Lydia used to want to go to London,” added Kitty.
+
+
+
+ “She is happy, then,” said her father, drily; “and her residence there
+will probably be of some duration. {367} ”
+
+
+
+ Then, after a short silence, he continued, “Lizzy, I bear you no
+ill-will for being justified in your advice to me last May, which,
+considering the event, shows some greatness of mind.”
+
+
+
+ They were interrupted by Miss Bennet, who came to fetch her mother’s
+tea.
+
+
+
+ “This is a parade,” cried he, “which does one good; it gives such an
+elegance to misfortune! Another day I will do the same; I will sit in my
+library, in my nightcap and powdering gown, and give as much trouble as
+I can,—or perhaps I may defer it till Kitty runs away.”
+
+
+
+ “I am not going to run away, papa,” said Kitty, fretfully. “If I 
+should ever go to Brighton, I would behave better than Lydia.”
+
+
+
+ “ You go to Brighton! I would not trust you so near it as Eastbourne,
+for fifty pounds! No, Kitty, I have at least learnt to be cautious, and
+you will feel the effects of it. No officer is ever to enter my house
+again, nor even to pass through the village. Balls will be absolutely
+prohibited, unless you stand up with one of your sisters. And you are
+never to stir out of doors, till you can prove that you have spent ten
+minutes of every day in a rational manner.”
+
+
+
+ Kitty, who took all these threats in a serious light, began to cry.
+
+
+
+ “Well, well,” said he, “do not make yourself unhappy. If you are a good
+girl for the next ten years, I will take you to a review at the end of
+them. {368} ”
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIX. 
+
+ 
+ WO days after Mr. Bennet’s return, as Jane and Elizabeth were walking
+together in the shrubbery behind the house, they saw the housekeeper
+coming towards them, and concluding that she came to call them to their
+mother, went forward to meet her; but instead of the expected summons,
+when they approached her, she said to Miss Bennet, “I beg your pardon,
+madam, for interrupting you, but I was in hopes you might have got some
+good news from town, so I took the liberty of coming to ask.”
+
+
+
+ “What do you mean, Hill? We have heard nothing from town.”
+
+
+
+ “Dear madam,” cried Mrs. Hill, in great astonishment, “don’t you know
+there is an express come for master {369} from Mr. Gardiner? He has been here
+this half hour, and master has had a letter.”
+
+
+
+ Away ran the girls, too eager to get in to have time for speech. They
+ran through the vestibule into the breakfast-room; from thence to the
+library;—their father was in neither; and they were on the point of
+seeking him upstairs with their mother, when they were met by the
+butler, who said,—
+
+
+
+ “If you are looking for my master, ma’am, he is walking towards the
+little copse.”
+
+
+
+ Upon this information, they instantly passed through the hall once more,
+and ran across the lawn after their father, who was deliberately
+pursuing his way towards a small wood on one side of the paddock.
+
+
+
+ Jane, who was not so light, nor so much in the habit of running as
+Elizabeth, soon lagged behind, while her sister, panting for breath,
+came up with him, and eagerly cried out,—
+
+
+
+ “Oh, papa, what news? what news? have you heard from my uncle?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, I have had a letter from him by express.”
+
+
+
+ “Well, and what news does it bring—good or bad?”
+
+
+
+ “What is there of good to be expected?” said he, taking the letter from
+his pocket; “but perhaps you would like to read it.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth impatiently caught it from his hand. Jane now came up.
+
+
+
+ “Read it aloud,” said their father, “for I hardly know myself what it is
+about.”
+
+
+
+ “Gracechurch Street, Monday, August 2 .
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear Brother,
+
+
+
+
+
+ “At last I am able to send you some tidings of my niece, and such
+as, upon the whole, I hope will give {370} you satisfaction. Soon after
+you left me on Saturday, I was fortunate enough to find out in what
+part of London they were. The particulars I reserve till we meet.
+It is enough to know they are discovered: I have seen them
+both——”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“But perhaps you would like to read it”
+
+
+
+
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ “Then it is as I always hoped,” cried Jane: “they are married! {371} ”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth read on: “I have seen them both. They are not married,
+nor can I find there was any intention of being so; but if you are
+willing to perform the engagements which I have ventured to make on
+your side, I hope it will not be long before they are. All that is
+required of you is, to assure to your daughter, by settlement, her
+equal share of the five thousand pounds, secured among your
+children after the decease of yourself and my sister; and,
+moreover, to enter into an engagement of allowing her, during your
+life, one hundred pounds per annum. These are conditions which,
+considering everything, I had no hesitation in complying with, as
+far as I thought myself privileged, for you. I shall send this by
+express, that no time may be lost in bringing me your answer. You
+will easily comprehend, from these particulars, that Mr. Wickham’s
+circumstances are not so hopeless as they are generally believed to
+be. The world has been deceived in that respect; and I am happy to
+say, there will be some little money, even when all his debts are
+discharged, to settle on my niece, in addition to her own fortune.
+If, as I conclude will be the case, you send me full powers to act
+in your name throughout the whole of this business, I will
+immediately give directions to Haggerston for preparing a proper
+settlement. There will not be the smallest occasion for your coming
+to town again; therefore stay quietly at Longbourn, and depend on
+my diligence and care. Send back your answer as soon as you can,
+and be careful to write explicitly. We have judged it best that my
+niece should be married from this house, of which I hope you will
+approve. She comes to us to-day. I shall write again as soon as
+anything more is determined on. Yours, etc.
+
+
+
+ 
+“ Edw. Gardiner .”
+
+ {372} 
+
+ 
+
+ “Is it possible?” cried Elizabeth, when she had finished. “Can it be
+possible that he will marry her?”
+
+
+
+ “Wickham is not so undeserving, then, as we have thought him,” said her
+sister. “My dear father, I congratulate you.”
+
+
+
+ “And have you answered the letter?” said Elizabeth.
+
+
+
+ “No; but it must be done soon.”
+
+
+
+ Most earnestly did she then entreat him to lose no more time before he
+wrote.
+
+
+
+ “Oh! my dear father,” she cried, “come back and write immediately.
+Consider how important every moment is in such a case.”
+
+
+
+ “Let me write for you,” said Jane, “if you dislike the trouble
+yourself.”
+
+
+
+ “I dislike it very much,” he replied; “but it must be done.”
+
+
+
+ And so saying, he turned back with them, and walked towards the house.
+
+
+
+ “And—may I ask?” said Elizabeth; “but the terms, I suppose, must be
+complied with.”
+
+
+
+ “Complied with! I am only ashamed of his asking so little.”
+
+
+
+ “And they must marry! Yet he is such a man.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, yes, they must marry. There is nothing else to be done. But there
+are two things that I want very much to know:—one is, how much money
+your uncle has laid down to bring it about; and the other, how I am ever
+to pay him.”
+
+
+
+ “Money! my uncle!” cried Jane, “what do you mean, sir?”
+
+
+
+ “I mean that no man in his proper senses would marry Lydia on so slight
+a temptation as one hundred a year during my life, and fifty after I am
+gone. {373} ”
+
+
+
+ “That is very true,” said Elizabeth; “though it had not occurred to me
+before. His debts to be discharged, and something still to remain! Oh,
+it must be my uncle’s doings! Generous, good man, I am afraid he has
+distressed himself. A small sum could not do all this.”
+
+
+
+ “No,” said her father. “Wickham’s a fool if he takes her with a farthing
+less than ten thousand pounds: I should be sorry to think so ill of him,
+in the very beginning of our relationship.”
+
+
+
+ “Ten thousand pounds! Heaven forbid! How is half such a sum to be
+repaid?”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bennet made no answer; and each of them, deep in thought, continued
+silent till they reached the house. Their father then went to the
+library to write, and the girls walked into the breakfast-room.
+
+
+
+ “And they are really to be married!” cried Elizabeth, as soon as they
+were by themselves. “How strange this is! and for this we are to be
+thankful. That they should marry, small as is their chance of happiness,
+and wretched as is his character, we are forced to rejoice! Oh, Lydia!”
+
+
+
+ “I comfort myself with thinking,” replied Jane, “that he certainly would
+not marry Lydia, if he had not a real regard for her. Though our kind
+uncle has done something towards clearing him, I cannot believe that ten
+thousand pounds, or anything like it, has been advanced. He has children
+of his own, and may have more. How could he spare half ten thousand
+pounds?”
+
+
+
+ “If we are ever able to learn what Wickham’s debts have been,” said
+Elizabeth, “and how much is settled on his side on our sister, we shall
+exactly know what Mr. Gardiner has done for them, because Wickham has
+not sixpence of his own. The kindness of my uncle and aunt can never be
+requited. Their taking her home, and affording {374} her their personal
+protection and countenance, is such a sacrifice to her advantage as
+years of gratitude cannot enough acknowledge. By this time she is
+actually with them! If such goodness does not make her miserable now,
+she will never deserve to be happy! What a meeting for her, when she
+first sees my aunt!”
+
+
+
+ “We must endeavour to forget all that has passed on either side,” said
+Jane: “I hope and trust they will yet be happy. His consenting to marry
+her is a proof, I will believe, that he is come to a right way of
+thinking. Their mutual affection will steady them; and I flatter myself
+they will settle so quietly, and live in so rational a manner, as may in
+time make their past imprudence forgotten.”
+
+
+
+ “Their conduct has been such,” replied Elizabeth, “as neither you, nor
+I, nor anybody, can ever forget. It is useless to talk of it.”
+
+
+
+ It now occurred to the girls that their mother was in all likelihood
+perfectly ignorant of what had happened. They went to the library,
+therefore, and asked their father whether he would not wish them to make
+it known to her. He was writing, and, without raising his head, coolly
+replied,—
+
+
+
+ “Just as you please.”
+
+
+
+ “May we take my uncle’s letter to read to her?”
+
+
+
+ “Take whatever you like, and get away.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth took the letter from his writing-table, and they went upstairs
+together. Mary and Kitty were both with Mrs. Bennet: one communication
+would, therefore, do for all. After a slight preparation for good news,
+the letter was read aloud. Mrs. Bennet could hardly contain herself. As
+soon as Jane had read Mr. Gardiner’s hope of Lydia’s being soon married,
+her joy burst forth, and every following sentence added to its
+exuberance. She {375} was now in an irritation as violent from delight as she
+had ever been fidgety from alarm and vexation. To know that her daughter
+would be married was enough. She was disturbed by no fear for her
+felicity, nor humbled by any remembrance of her misconduct.
+
+
+
+ “My dear, dear Lydia!” she cried: “this is delightful indeed! She will
+be married! I shall see her again! She will be married at sixteen! My
+good, kind brother! I knew how it would be—I knew he would manage
+everything. How I long to see her! and to see dear Wickham too! But the
+clothes, the wedding clothes! I will write to my sister Gardiner about
+them directly. Lizzy, my dear, run down to your father, and ask him how
+much he will give her. Stay, stay, I will go myself. Ring the bell,
+Kitty, for Hill. I will put on my things in a moment. My dear, dear
+Lydia! How merry we shall be together when we meet!”
+
+
+
+ Her eldest daughter endeavoured to give some relief to the violence of
+these transports, by leading her thoughts to the obligations which Mr.
+Gardiner’s behaviour laid them all under.
+
+
+
+ “For we must attribute this happy conclusion,” she added, “in a great
+measure to his kindness. We are persuaded that he has pledged himself to
+assist Mr. Wickham with money.”
+
+
+
+ “Well,” cried her mother, “it is all very right; who should do it but
+her own uncle? If he had not had a family of his own, I and my children
+must have had all his money, you know; and it is the first time we have
+ever had anything from him except a few presents. Well! I am so happy.
+In a short time, I shall have a daughter married. Mrs. Wickham! How well
+it sounds! And she was only sixteen last June. My dear Jane, I {376} am in
+such a flutter, that I am sure I can’t write; so I will dictate, and you
+write for me. We will settle with your father about the money
+afterwards; but the things should be ordered immediately.”
+
+
+
+ She was then proceeding to all the particulars of calico, muslin, and
+cambric, and would shortly have dictated some very plentiful orders, had
+not Jane, though with some difficulty, persuaded her to wait till her
+father was at leisure to be consulted. One day’s delay, she observed,
+would be of small importance; and her mother was too happy to be quite
+so obstinate as usual. Other schemes, too, came into her head.
+
+
+
+ “I will go to Meryton,” said she, “as soon as I am dressed, and tell the
+good, good news to my sister Philips. And as I come back, I can call on
+Lady Lucas and Mrs. Long. Kitty, run down and order the carriage. An
+airing would do me a great deal of good, I am sure. Girls, can I do
+anything for you in Meryton? Oh! here comes Hill. My dear Hill, have you
+heard the good news? Miss Lydia is going to be married; and you shall
+all have a bowl of punch to make merry at her wedding.”
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Hill began instantly to express her joy. Elizabeth received her
+congratulations amongst the rest, and then, sick of this folly, took
+refuge in her own room, that she might think with freedom. Poor Lydia’s
+situation must, at best, be bad enough; but that it was no worse, she
+had need to be thankful. She felt it so; and though, in looking forward,
+neither rational happiness, nor worldly prosperity could be justly
+expected for her sister, in looking back to what they had feared, only
+two hours ago, she felt all the advantages of what they had gained. {377} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“The spiteful old ladies.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER L. 
+
+ 
+ R. BENNET had very often wished, before this period of his life, that,
+instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum, for
+the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived
+him. He now wished it more than ever. Had he done his duty in that
+respect, Lydia need not have been indebted to her uncle for whatever of
+honour or credit could now be purchased for her. The satisfaction of
+prevailing on one of the most worthless young {378} men in Great Britain to
+be her husband might then have rested in its proper place.
+
+
+
+ He was seriously concerned that a cause of so little advantage to anyone
+should be forwarded at the sole expense of his brother-in-law; and he
+was determined, if possible, to find out the extent of his assistance,
+and to discharge the obligation as soon as he could.
+
+
+
+ When first Mr. Bennet had married, economy was held to be perfectly
+useless; for, of course, they were to have a son. This son was to join
+in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow
+and younger children would by that means be provided for. Five daughters
+successively entered the world, but yet the son was to come; and Mrs.
+Bennet, for many years after Lydia’s birth, had been certain that he
+would. This event had at last been despaired of, but it was then too
+late to be saving. Mrs. Bennet had no turn for economy; and her
+husband’s love of independence had alone prevented their exceeding their
+income.
+
+
+
+ Five thousand pounds was settled by marriage articles on Mrs. Bennet and
+the children. But in what proportions it should be divided amongst the
+latter depended on the will of the parents. This was one point, with
+regard to Lydia at least, which was now to be settled, and Mr. Bennet
+could have no hesitation in acceding to the proposal before him. In
+terms of grateful acknowledgment for the kindness of his brother, though
+expressed most concisely, he then delivered on paper his perfect
+approbation of all that was done, and his willingness to fulfil the
+engagements that had been made for him. He had never before supposed
+that, could Wickham be prevailed on to marry his daughter, it would be
+done with so little inconvenience to himself as by the present {379} 
+arrangement. He would scarcely be ten pounds a year the loser, by the
+hundred that was to be paid them; for, what with her board and pocket
+allowance, and the continual presents in money which passed to her
+through her mother’s hands, Lydia’s expenses had been very little within
+that sum.
+
+
+
+ That it would be done with such trifling exertion on his side, too, was
+another very welcome surprise; for his chief wish at present was to have
+as little trouble in the business as possible. When the first transports
+of rage which had produced his activity in seeking her were over, he
+naturally returned to all his former indolence. His letter was soon
+despatched; for though dilatory in undertaking business, he was quick in
+its execution. He begged to know further particulars of what he was
+indebted to his brother; but was too angry with Lydia to send any
+message to her.
+
+
+
+ The good news quickly spread through the house; and with proportionate
+speed through the neighbourhood. It was borne in the latter with decent
+philosophy. To be sure, it would have been more for the advantage of
+conversation, had Miss Lydia Bennet come upon the town; or, as the
+happiest alternative, been secluded from the world in some distant
+farm-house. But there was much to be talked of, in marrying her; and the
+good-natured wishes for her well-doing, which had proceeded before from
+all the spiteful old ladies in Meryton, lost but little of their spirit
+in this change of circumstances, because with such a husband her misery
+was considered certain.
+
+
+
+ It was a fortnight since Mrs. Bennet had been down stairs, but on this
+happy day she again took her seat at the head of her table, and in
+spirits oppressively high. No sentiment of shame gave a damp to her
+triumph. {380} The marriage of a daughter, which had been the first object of
+her wishes since Jane was sixteen, was now on the point of
+accomplishment, and her thoughts and her words ran wholly on those
+attendants of elegant nuptials, fine muslins, new carriages, and
+servants. She was busily searching through the neighbourhood for a
+proper situation for her daughter; and, without knowing or considering
+what their income might be, rejected many as deficient in size and
+importance.
+
+
+
+ “Haye Park might do,” said she, “if the Gouldings would quit it, or the
+great house at Stoke, if the drawing-room were larger; but Ashworth is
+too far off. I could not bear to have her ten miles from me; and as for
+Purvis Lodge, the attics are dreadful.”
+
+
+
+ Her husband allowed her to talk on without interruption while the
+servants remained. But when they had withdrawn, he said to her, “Mrs.
+Bennet, before you take any, or all of these houses, for your son and
+daughter, let us come to a right understanding. Into one house in this
+neighbourhood they shall never have admittance. I will not encourage the
+imprudence of either, by receiving them at Longbourn.”
+
+
+
+ A long dispute followed this declaration; but Mr. Bennet was firm: it
+soon led to another; and Mrs. Bennet found, with amazement and horror,
+that her husband would not advance a guinea to buy clothes for his
+daughter. He protested that she should receive from him no mark of
+affection whatever on the occasion. Mrs. Bennet could hardly comprehend
+it. That his anger could be carried to such a point of inconceivable
+resentment as to refuse his daughter a privilege, without which her
+marriage would scarcely seem valid, exceeded all that she could believe
+possible. She was more alive to the {381} disgrace, which her want of new
+clothes must reflect on her daughter’s nuptials, than to any sense of
+shame at her eloping and living with Wickham a fortnight before they
+took place.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was now most heartily sorry that she had, from the distress of
+the moment, been led to make Mr. Darcy acquainted with their fears for
+her sister; for since her marriage would so shortly give the proper
+termination to the elopement, they might hope to conceal its
+unfavourable beginning from all those who were not immediately on the
+spot.
+
+
+
+ She had no fear of its spreading farther, through his means. There were
+few people on whose secrecy she would have more confidently depended;
+but at the same time there was no one whose knowledge of a sister’s
+frailty would have mortified her so much. Not, however, from any fear of
+disadvantage from it individually to herself; for at any rate there
+seemed a gulf impassable between them. Had Lydia’s marriage been
+concluded on the most honourable terms, it was not to be supposed that
+Mr. Darcy would connect himself with a family, where to every other
+objection would now be added an alliance and relationship of the nearest
+kind with the man whom he so justly scorned.
+
+
+
+ From such a connection she could not wonder that he should shrink. The
+wish of procuring her regard, which she had assured herself of his
+feeling in Derbyshire, could not in rational expectation survive such a
+blow as this. She was humbled, she was grieved; she repented, though she
+hardly knew of what. She became jealous of his esteem, when she could no
+longer hope to be benefited by it. She wanted to hear of him, when there
+seemed the least chance of gaining intelligence. She was convinced {382} that
+she could have been happy with him, when it was no longer likely they
+should meet.
+
+
+
+ What a triumph for him, as she often thought, could he know that the
+proposals which she had proudly spurned only four months ago would now
+have been gladly and gratefully received! He was as generous, she
+doubted not, as the most generous of his sex. But while he was mortal,
+there must be a triumph.
+
+
+
+ She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man who, in
+disposition and talents, would most suit her. His understanding and
+temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It
+was an union that must have been to the advantage of both: by her ease
+and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved;
+and from his judgment, information, and knowledge of the world, she must
+have received benefit of greater importance.
+
+
+
+ But no such happy marriage could now teach the admiring multitude what
+connubial felicity really was. An union of a different tendency, and
+precluding the possibility of the other, was soon to be formed in their
+family.
+
+
+
+ How Wickham and Lydia were to be supported in tolerable independence she
+could not imagine. But how little of permanent happiness could belong to
+a couple who were only brought together because their passions were
+stronger than their virtue, she could easily conjecture.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Gardiner soon wrote again to his brother. To Mr. Bennet’s
+acknowledgments he briefly replied, with assurances of his eagerness to
+promote the welfare of any of his family; and concluded with entreaties
+that the subject might never be mentioned to him again. {383} The principal
+purport of his letter was to inform them, that Mr. Wickham had resolved
+on quitting the militia.
+
+
+
+ “It was greatly my wish that he should do so,” he added, “as soon as his
+marriage was fixed on. And I think you will agree with me, in
+considering a removal from that corps as highly advisable, both on his
+account and my niece’s. It is Mr. Wickham’s intention to go into the
+Regulars; and, among his former friends, there are still some who are
+able and willing to assist him in the army. He has the promise of an
+ensigncy in General——’s regiment, now quartered in the north. It is
+an advantage to have it so far from this part of the kingdom. He
+promises fairly; and I hope among different people, where they may each
+have a character to preserve, they will both be more prudent. I have
+written to Colonel Forster, to inform him of our present arrangements,
+and to request that he will satisfy the various creditors of Mr. Wickham
+in and near Brighton with assurances of speedy payment, for which I have
+pledged myself. And will you give yourself the trouble of carrying
+similar assurances to his creditors in Meryton, of whom I shall subjoin
+a list, according to his information? He has given in all his debts; I
+hope at least he has not deceived us. Haggerston has our directions, and
+all will be completed in a week. They will then join his regiment,
+unless they are first invited to Longbourn; and I understand from Mrs.
+Gardiner that my niece is very desirous of seeing you all before she
+leaves the south. She is well, and begs to be dutifully remembered to
+you and her mother.—Yours, etc.
+
+
+
+ 
+“ E. Gardiner .”
+
+
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bennet and his daughters saw all the advantages {384} of Wickham’s
+removal from the ——shire, as clearly as Mr. Gardiner could do. But
+Mrs. Bennet was not so well pleased with it. Lydia’s being settled in
+the north, just when she had expected most pleasure and pride in her
+company, for she had by no means given up her plan of their residing in
+Hertfordshire, was a severe disappointment; and, besides, it was such a
+pity that Lydia should be taken from a regiment where she was acquainted
+with everybody, and had so many favourites.
+
+
+
+ “She is so fond of Mrs. Forster,” said she, “it will be quite shocking
+to send her away! And there are several of the young men, too, that she
+likes very much. The officers may not be so pleasant in General——’s
+regiment.”
+
+
+
+ His daughter’s request, for such it might be considered, of being
+admitted into her family again, before she set off for the north,
+received at first an absolute negative. But Jane and Elizabeth, who
+agreed in wishing, for the sake of their sister’s feelings and
+consequence, that she should be noticed on her marriage by her parents,
+urged him so earnestly, yet so rationally and so mildly, to receive her
+and her husband at Longbourn, as soon as they were married, that he was
+prevailed on to think as they thought, and act as they wished. And their
+mother had the satisfaction of knowing, that she should be able to show
+her married daughter in the neighbourhood, before she was banished to
+the north. When Mr. Bennet wrote again to his brother, therefore, he
+sent his permission for them to come; and it was settled, that, as soon
+as the ceremony was over, they should proceed to Longbourn. Elizabeth
+was surprised, however, that Wickham should consent to such a scheme;
+and, had she consulted only her own inclination, any meeting with him
+would have been the last object of her wishes. {385} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“With an affectionate smile.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER LI. 
+
+ 
+ HEIR sister’s wedding-day arrived; and Jane and Elizabeth felt for her
+probably more than she felt for herself. The carriage was sent to meet
+them at——, and they were to return in it by dinnertime. Their arrival
+was dreaded by the elder Miss Bennets—and Jane more {386} especially, who
+gave Lydia the feelings which would have attended herself, had she 
+been the culprit, and was wretched in the thought of what her sister
+must endure.
+
+
+
+ They came. The family were assembled in the breakfast-room to receive
+them. Smiles decked the face of Mrs. Bennet, as the carriage drove up to
+the door; her husband looked impenetrably grave; her daughters, alarmed,
+anxious, uneasy.
+
+
+
+ Lydia’s voice was heard in the vestibule; the door was thrown open, and
+she ran into the room. Her mother stepped forwards, embraced her, and
+welcomed her with rapture; gave her hand with an affectionate smile to
+Wickham, who followed his lady; and wished them both joy, with an
+alacrity which showed no doubt of their happiness.
+
+
+
+ Their reception from Mr. Bennet, to whom they then turned, was not quite
+so cordial. His countenance rather gained in austerity; and he scarcely
+opened his lips. The easy assurance of the young couple, indeed, was
+enough to provoke him.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was disgusted, and even Miss Bennet was shocked. Lydia was
+Lydia still; untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless. She turned
+from sister to sister, demanding their congratulations; and when at
+length they all sat down, looked eagerly round the room, took notice of
+some little alteration in it, and observed, with a laugh, that it was a
+great while since she had been there.
+
+
+
+ Wickham was not at all more distressed than herself; but his manners
+were always so pleasing, that, had his character and his marriage been
+exactly what they ought, his smiles and his easy address, while he
+claimed their relationship, would have delighted them all. Elizabeth {387} 
+had not before believed him quite equal to such assurance; but she sat
+down, resolving within herself to draw no limits in future to the
+impudence of an impudent man. She blushed, and Jane blushed; but the
+cheeks of the two who caused their confusion suffered no variation of
+colour.
+
+
+
+ There was no want of discourse. The bride and her mother could neither
+of them talk fast enough; and Wickham, who happened to sit near
+Elizabeth, began inquiring after his acquaintance in that neighbourhood,
+with a good-humoured ease, which she felt very unable to equal in her
+replies. They seemed each of them to have the happiest memories in the
+world. Nothing of the past was recollected with pain; and Lydia led
+voluntarily to subjects which her sisters would not have alluded to for
+the world.
+
+
+
+ “Only think of its being three months,” she cried, “since I went away:
+it seems but a fortnight, I declare; and yet there have been things
+enough happened in the time. Good gracious! when I went away, I am sure
+I had no more idea of being married till I came back again! though I
+thought it would be very good fun if I was.”
+
+
+
+ Her father lifted up his eyes, Jane was distressed, Elizabeth looked
+expressively at Lydia; but she, who never heard nor saw anything of
+which she chose to be insensible, gaily continued,—
+
+
+
+ “Oh, mamma, do the people hereabouts know I am married to-day? I was
+afraid they might not; and we overtook William Goulding in his curricle,
+so I was determined he should know it, and so I let down the side glass
+next to him, and took off my glove and let my hand just rest upon the
+window frame, so that he {388} might see the ring, and then I bowed and
+smiled like anything.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth could bear it no longer. She got up and ran out of the room;
+and returned no more, till she heard them passing through the hall to
+the dining-parlour. She then joined them soon enough to see Lydia, with
+anxious parade, walk up to her mother’s right hand, and hear her say to
+her eldest sister,—
+
+
+
+ “Ah, Jane, I take your place now, and you must go lower, because I am a
+married woman.”
+
+
+
+ It was not to be supposed that time would give Lydia that embarrassment
+from which she had been so wholly free at first. Her ease and good
+spirits increased. She longed to see Mrs. Philips, the Lucases, and all
+their other neighbours, and to hear herself called “Mrs. Wickham” by
+each of them; and in the meantime she went after dinner to show her ring
+and boast of being married to Mrs. Hill and the two housemaids.
+
+
+
+ “Well, mamma,” said she, when they were all returned to the
+breakfast-room, “and what do you think of my husband? Is not he a
+charming man? I am sure my sisters must all envy me. I only hope they
+may have half my good luck. They must all go to Brighton. That is the
+place to get husbands. What a pity it is, mamma, we did not all go!”
+
+
+
+ “Very true; and if I had my will we should. But, my dear Lydia, I don’t
+at all like your going such a way off. Must it be so?”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, Lord! yes; there is nothing in that. I shall like it of all things.
+You and papa, and my sisters, must come down and see us. We shall be at
+Newcastle all the winter, and I dare say there will be some balls, and I
+will take care to get good partners for them all. {389} ”
+
+
+
+ “I should like it beyond anything!” said her mother.
+
+
+
+ “And then when you go away, you may leave one or two of my sisters
+behind you; and I dare say I shall get husbands for them before the
+winter is over.”
+
+
+
+ “I thank you for my share of the favour,” said Elizabeth; “but I do not
+particularly like your way of getting husbands.”
+
+
+
+ Their visitors were not to remain above ten days with them. Mr. Wickham
+had received his commission before he left London, and he was to join
+his regiment at the end of a fortnight.
+
+
+
+ No one but Mrs. Bennet regretted that their stay would be so short; and
+she made the most of the time by visiting about with her daughter, and
+having very frequent parties at home. These parties were acceptable to
+all; to avoid a family circle was even more desirable to such as did
+think than such as did not.
+
+
+
+ Wickham’s affection for Lydia was just what Elizabeth had expected to
+find it; not equal to Lydia’s for him. She had scarcely needed her
+present observation to be satisfied, from the reason of things, that
+their elopement had been brought on by the strength of her love rather
+than by his; and she would have wondered why, without violently caring
+for her, he chose to elope with her at all, had she not felt certain
+that his flight was rendered necessary by distress of circumstances; and
+if that were the case, he was not the young man to resist an opportunity
+of having a companion.
+
+
+
+ Lydia was exceedingly fond of him. He was her dear Wickham on every
+occasion; no one was to be put in competition with him. He did
+everything best in the world; and she was sure he would kill more {390} birds
+on the first of September than anybody else in the country.
+
+
+
+ One morning, soon after their arrival, as she was sitting with her two
+elder sisters, she said to Elizabeth,—
+
+
+
+ “Lizzy, I never gave you an account of my wedding, I believe. You were
+not by, when I told mamma, and the others, all about it. Are not you
+curious to hear how it was managed?”
+
+
+
+ “No, really,” replied Elizabeth; “I think there cannot be too little
+said on the subject.”
+
+
+
+ “La! You are so strange! But I must tell you how it went off. We were
+married, you know, at St. Clement’s, because Wickham’s lodgings were in
+that parish. And it was settled that we should all be there by eleven
+o’clock. My uncle and aunt and I were to go together; and the others
+were to meet us at the church.
+
+
+
+ “Well, Monday morning came, and I was in such a fuss! I was so afraid,
+you know, that something would happen to put it off, and then I should
+have gone quite distracted. And there was my aunt, all the time I was
+dressing, preaching and talking away just as if she was reading a
+sermon. However, I did not hear above one word in ten, for I was
+thinking, you may suppose, of my dear Wickham. I longed to know whether
+he would be married in his blue coat.
+
+
+
+ “Well, and so we breakfasted at ten as usual: I thought it would never
+be over; for, by the bye, you are to understand that my uncle and aunt
+were horrid unpleasant all the time I was with them. If you’ll believe
+me, I did not once put my foot out of doors, though I was there a
+fortnight. Not one party, or scheme, or anything! To be sure, London was
+rather thin, but, however, the Little Theatre was open. {391} 
+
+
+
+ “Well, and so, just as the carriage came to the door, my uncle was
+called away upon business to that horrid man Mr. Stone. And then, you
+know, when once they get together, there is no end of it. Well, I was so
+frightened I did not know what to do, for my uncle was to give me away;
+and if we were beyond the hour we could not be married all day. But,
+luckily, he came back again in ten minutes’ time, and then we all set
+out. However, I recollected afterwards, that if he had been prevented
+going, the wedding need not be put off, for Mr. Darcy might have done as
+well.”
+
+
+
+ “Mr. Darcy!” repeated Elizabeth, in utter amazement.
+
+
+
+ “Oh, yes! he was to come there with Wickham, you know. But, gracious me!
+I quite forgot! I ought not to have said a word about it. I promised
+them so faithfully! What will Wickham say? It was to be such a secret!”
+
+
+
+ “If it was to be a secret,” said Jane, “say not another word on the
+subject. You may depend upon my seeking no further.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, certainly,” said Elizabeth, though burning with curiosity; “we will
+ask you no questions.”
+
+
+
+ “Thank you,” said Lydia; “for if you did, I should certainly tell you
+all, and then Wickham would be so angry.”
+
+
+
+ On such encouragement to ask, Elizabeth was forced to put it out of her
+power, by running away.
+
+
+
+ But to live in ignorance on such a point was impossible; or at least it
+was impossible not to try for information. Mr. Darcy had been at her
+sister’s wedding. It was exactly a scene, and exactly among people,
+where he had apparently least to do, and least temptation to go.
+Conjectures as to the meaning of it, rapid and wild, {392} hurried into her
+brain; but she was satisfied with none. Those that best pleased her, as
+placing his conduct in the noblest light, seemed most improbable. She
+could not bear such suspense; and hastily seizing a sheet of paper,
+wrote a short letter to her aunt, to request an explanation of what
+Lydia had dropped, if it were compatible with the secrecy which had been
+intended.
+
+
+
+ “You may readily comprehend,” she added, “what my curiosity must be to
+know how a person unconnected with any of us, and, comparatively
+speaking, a stranger to our family, should have been amongst you at such
+a time. Pray write instantly, and let me understand it—unless it is,
+for very cogent reasons, to remain in the secrecy which Lydia seems to
+think necessary; and then I must endeavour to be satisfied with
+ignorance.”
+
+
+
+ “Not that I shall , though,” she added to herself, and she finished the
+letter; “and, my dear aunt, if you do not tell me in an honourable
+manner, I shall certainly be reduced to tricks and stratagems to find it
+out.”
+
+
+
+ Jane’s delicate sense of honour would not allow her to speak to
+Elizabeth privately of what Lydia had let fall; Elizabeth was glad of
+it:—till it appeared whether her inquiries would receive any
+satisfaction, she had rather be without a confidante. {393} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“I am sure she did not listen.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER LII. 
+
+ 
+ LIZABETH had the satisfaction of receiving an answer to her letter as
+soon as she possibly could. She was no sooner in possession of it, than
+hurrying into the little copse, where she was least likely to be
+interrupted, she sat down on one of the benches, and prepared {394} to be
+happy; for the length of the letter convinced her that it did not
+contain a denial.
+
+
+
+ “Gracechurch Street, Sept. 6 .
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear Niece,
+
+
+
+
+
+ “I have just received your letter, and shall devote this whole
+morning to answering it, as I foresee that a little writing will
+not comprise what I have to tell you. I must confess myself
+surprised by your application; I did not expect it from you .
+Don’t think me angry, however, for I only mean to let you know,
+that I had not imagined such inquiries to be necessary on your 
+side. If you do not choose to understand me, forgive my
+impertinence. Your uncle is as much surprised as I am; and nothing
+but the belief of your being a party concerned would have allowed
+him to act as he has done. But if you are really innocent and
+ignorant, I must be more explicit. On the very day of my coming
+home from Longbourn, your uncle had a most unexpected visitor. Mr.
+Darcy called, and was shut up with him several hours. It was all
+over before I arrived; so my curiosity was not so dreadfully racked
+as yours seems to have been. He came to tell Mr. Gardiner that he
+had found out where your sister and Mr. Wickham were, and that he
+had seen and talked with them both—Wickham repeatedly, Lydia once.
+From what I can collect, he left Derbyshire only one day after
+ourselves, and came to town with the resolution of hunting for
+them. The motive professed was his conviction of its being owing to
+himself that Wickham’s worthlessness had not been so well known as
+to make it impossible for any young woman of character to love or
+confide in him. He generously imputed the whole to his mistaken
+pride, and confessed that he had before thought it beneath him to
+lay his private actions open to {395} the world. His character was to
+speak for itself. He called it, therefore, his duty to step
+forward, and endeavour to remedy an evil which had been brought on
+by himself. If he had another motive, I am sure it would never
+disgrace him. He had been some days in town before he was able to
+discover them; but he had something to direct his search, which was
+more than we had; and the consciousness of this was another
+reason for his resolving to follow us. There is a lady, it seems, a
+Mrs. Younge, who was some time ago governess to Miss Darcy, and was
+dismissed from her charge on some cause of disapprobation, though
+he did not say what. She then took a large house in Edward Street,
+and has since maintained herself by letting lodgings. This Mrs.
+Younge was, he knew, intimately acquainted with Wickham; and he
+went to her for intelligence of him, as soon as he got to town. But
+it was two or three days before he could get from her what he
+wanted. She would not betray her trust, I suppose, without bribery
+and corruption, for she really did know where her friend was to be
+found. Wickham, indeed, had gone to her on their first arrival in
+London; and had she been able to receive them into her house, they
+would have taken up their abode with her. At length, however, our
+kind friend procured the wished-for direction. They were in ——
+Street. He saw Wickham, and afterwards insisted on seeing Lydia.
+His first object with her, he acknowledged, had been to persuade
+her to quit her present disgraceful situation, and return to her
+friends as soon as they could be prevailed on to receive her,
+offering his assistance as far as it would go. But he found Lydia
+absolutely resolved on remaining where she was. She cared for none
+of her friends; she wanted no help of his; she would not hear of
+leaving Wickham. {396} She was sure they should be married some time or
+other, and it did not much signify when. Since such were her
+feelings, it only remained, he thought, to secure and expedite a
+marriage, which, in his very first conversation with Wickham, he
+easily learnt had never been his design. He confessed himself
+obliged to leave the regiment on account of some debts of honour
+which were very pressing; and scrupled not to lay all the ill
+consequences of Lydia’s flight on her own folly alone. He meant to
+resign his commission immediately; and as to his future situation,
+he could conjecture very little about it. He must go somewhere, but
+he did not know where, and he knew he should have nothing to live
+on. Mr. Darcy asked why he did not marry your sister at once.
+Though Mr. Bennet was not imagined to be very rich, he would have
+been able to do something for him, and his situation must have been
+benefited by marriage. But he found, in reply to this question,
+that Wickham still cherished the hope of more effectually making
+his fortune by marriage, in some other country. Under such
+circumstances, however, he was not likely to be proof against the
+temptation of immediate relief. They met several times, for there
+was much to be discussed. Wickham, of course, wanted more than he
+could get; but at length was reduced to be reasonable. Everything
+being settled between them , Mr. Darcy’s next step was to make
+your uncle acquainted with it, and he first called in Gracechurch
+Street the evening before I came home. But Mr. Gardiner could not
+be seen; and Mr. Darcy found, on further inquiry, that your father
+was still with him, but would quit town the next morning. He did
+not judge your father to be a person whom he could so properly
+consult as your uncle, and therefore readily postponed seeing him
+till after the {397} departure of the former. He did not leave his name,
+and till the next day it was only known that a gentleman had called
+on business. On Saturday he came again. Your father was gone, your
+uncle at home, and, as I said before, they had a great deal of talk
+together. They met again on Sunday, and then I saw him too. It
+was not all settled before Monday: as soon as it was, the express
+was sent off to Longbourn. But our visitor was very obstinate. I
+fancy, Lizzy, that obstinacy is the real defect of his character,
+after all. He has been accused of many faults at different times;
+but this is the true one. Nothing was to be done that he did not
+do himself; though I am sure (and I do not speak it to be thanked,
+therefore say nothing about it) your uncle would most readily have
+settled the whole. They battled it together for a long time, which
+was more than either the gentleman or lady concerned in it
+deserved. But at last your uncle was forced to yield, and instead
+of being allowed to be of use to his niece, was forced to put up
+with only having the probable credit of it, which went sorely
+against the grain; and I really believe your letter this morning
+gave him great pleasure, because it required an explanation that
+would rob him of his borrowed feathers, and give the praise where
+it was due. But, Lizzy, this must go no further than yourself, or
+Jane at most. You know pretty well, I suppose, what has been done
+for the young people. His debts are to be paid, amounting, I
+believe, to considerably more than a thousand pounds, another
+thousand in addition to her own settled upon her , and his
+commission purchased. The reason why all this was to be done by him
+alone, was such as I have given above. It was owing to him, to his
+reserve and want of proper consideration, that Wickham’s character
+had been so {398} misunderstood, and consequently that he had been
+received and noticed as he was. Perhaps there was some truth in
+ this ; though I doubt whether his reserve, or anybody’s 
+reserve can be answerable for the event. But in spite of all this
+fine talking, my dear Lizzy, you may rest perfectly assured that
+your uncle would never have yielded, if we had not given him credit
+for another interest in the affair. When all this was resolved
+on, he returned again to his friends, who were still staying at
+Pemberley; but it was agreed that he should be in London once more
+when the wedding took place, and all money matters were then to
+receive the last finish. I believe I have now told you everything.
+It is a relation which you tell me is to give you great surprise; I
+hope at least it will not afford you any displeasure. Lydia came to
+us, and Wickham had constant admission to the house. He was
+exactly what he had been when I knew him in Hertfordshire; but I
+would not tell you how little I was satisfied with her behaviour
+while she stayed with us, if I had not perceived, by Jane’s letter
+last Wednesday, that her conduct on coming home was exactly of a
+piece with it, and therefore what I now tell you can give you no
+fresh pain. I talked to her repeatedly in the most serious manner,
+representing to her the wickedness of what she had done, and all
+the unhappiness she had brought on her family. If she heard me, it
+was by good luck, for I am sure she did not listen. I was sometimes
+quite provoked; but then I recollected my dear Elizabeth and Jane,
+and for their sakes had patience with her. Mr. Darcy was punctual
+in his return, and, as Lydia informed you, attended the wedding. He
+dined with us the next day, and was to leave town again on
+Wednesday or Thursday. Will you be very angry with me, my dear {399} 
+Lizzy, if I take this opportunity of saying (what I was never bold
+enough to say before) how much I like him? His behaviour to us has,
+in every respect, been as pleasing as when we were in Derbyshire.
+His understanding and opinions all please me; he wants nothing but
+a little more liveliness, and that , if he marry prudently , his
+wife may teach him. I thought him very sly; he hardly ever
+mentioned your name. But slyness seems the fashion. Pray forgive
+me, if I have been very presuming, or at least do not punish me so
+far as to exclude me from P. I shall never be quite happy till I
+have been all round the park. A low phaeton with a nice little pair
+of ponies would be the very thing. But I must write no more. The
+children have been wanting me this half hour.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yours, very sincerely,
+
+“ M. Gardiner .”
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ The contents of this letter threw Elizabeth into a flutter of spirits,
+in which it was difficult to determine whether pleasure or pain bore the
+greatest share. The vague and unsettled suspicions which uncertainty had
+produced, of what Mr. Darcy might have been doing to forward her
+sister’s match—which she had feared to encourage, as an exertion of
+goodness too great to be probable, and at the same time dreaded to be
+just, from the pain of obligation—were proved beyond their greatest
+extent to be true! He had followed them purposely to town, he had taken
+on himself all the trouble and mortification attendant on such a
+research; in which supplication had been necessary to a woman whom he
+must abominate and despise, and where he was reduced to meet, frequently
+meet, reason with, persuade, and {400} finally bribe the man whom he always
+most wished to avoid, and whose very name it was punishment to him to
+pronounce. He had done all this for a girl whom he could neither regard
+nor esteem. Her heart did whisper that he had done it for her. But it
+was a hope shortly checked by other considerations; and she soon felt
+that even her vanity was insufficient, when required to depend on his
+affection for her, for a woman who had already refused him, as able to
+overcome a sentiment so natural as abhorrence against relationship with
+Wickham. Brother-in-law of Wickham! Every kind of pride must revolt from
+the connection. He had, to be sure, done much. She was ashamed to think
+how much. But he had given a reason for his interference, which asked no
+extraordinary stretch of belief. It was reasonable that he should feel
+he had been wrong; he had liberality, and he had the means of exercising
+it; and though she would not place herself as his principal inducement,
+she could perhaps believe, that remaining partiality for her might
+assist his endeavours in a cause where her peace of mind must be
+materially concerned. It was painful, exceedingly painful, to know that
+they were under obligations to a person who could never receive a
+return. They owed the restoration of Lydia, her character, everything to
+him. Oh, how heartily did she grieve over every ungracious sensation she
+had ever encouraged, every saucy speech she had ever directed towards
+him! For herself she was humbled; but she was proud of him,—proud that
+in a cause of compassion and honour he had been able to get the better
+of himself. She read over her aunt’s commendation of him again and
+again. It was hardly enough; but it pleased her. She was even sensible
+of some pleasure, though mixed with regret, on {401} finding how steadfastly
+both she and her uncle had been persuaded that affection and confidence
+subsisted between Mr. Darcy and herself.
+
+
+
+ She was roused from her seat and her reflections, by someone’s approach;
+and, before she could strike into another path, she was overtaken by
+Wickham.
+
+
+
+ “I am afraid I interrupt your solitary ramble, my dear sister?” said he,
+as he joined her.
+
+
+
+ “You certainly do,” she replied with a smile; “but it does not follow
+that the interruption must be unwelcome.”
+
+
+
+ “I should be sorry, indeed, if it were. We were always good friends,
+and now we are better.”
+
+
+
+ “True. Are the others coming out?”
+
+
+
+ “I do not know. Mrs. Bennet and Lydia are going in the carriage to
+Meryton. And so, my dear sister, I find, from our uncle and aunt, that
+you have actually seen Pemberley.”
+
+
+
+ She replied in the affirmative.
+
+
+
+ “I almost envy you the pleasure, and yet I believe it would be too much
+for me, or else I could take it in my way to Newcastle. And you saw the
+old housekeeper, I suppose? Poor Reynolds, she was always very fond of
+me. But of course she did not mention my name to you.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, she did.”
+
+
+
+ “And what did she say?”
+
+
+
+ “That you were gone into the army, and she was afraid had—not turned
+out well. At such a distance as that , you know, things are strangely
+misrepresented.”
+
+
+
+ “Certainly,” he replied, biting his lips. Elizabeth hoped she had
+silenced him; but he soon afterwards said, {402} —
+
+
+
+ “I was surprised to see Darcy in town last month. We passed each other
+several times. I wonder what he can be doing there.”
+
+
+
+ “Perhaps preparing for his marriage with Miss de Bourgh,” said
+Elizabeth. “It must be something particular to take him there at this
+time of year.”
+
+
+
+ “Undoubtedly. Did you see him while you were at Lambton? I thought I
+understood from the Gardiners that you had.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes; he introduced us to his sister.”
+
+
+
+ “And do you like her?”
+
+
+
+ “Very much.”
+
+
+
+ “I have heard, indeed, that she is uncommonly improved within this year
+or two. When I last saw her, she was not very promising. I am very glad
+you liked her. I hope she will turn out well.”
+
+
+
+ “I dare say she will; she has got over the most trying age.”
+
+
+
+ “Did you go by the village of Kympton?”
+
+
+
+ “I do not recollect that we did.”
+
+
+
+ “I mention it because it is the living which I ought to have had. A most
+delightful place! Excellent parsonage-house! It would have suited me in
+every respect.”
+
+
+
+ “How should you have liked making sermons?”
+
+
+
+ “Exceedingly well. I should have considered it as part of my duty, and
+the exertion would soon have been nothing. One ought not to repine; but,
+to be sure, it would have been such a thing for me! The quiet, the
+retirement of such a life, would have answered all my ideas of
+happiness! But it was not to be. Did you ever hear Darcy mention the
+circumstance when you were in Kent?”
+
+
+
+ “I have heard from authority, which I thought as good , {403} that it was
+left you conditionally only, and at the will of the present patron.”
+
+
+
+ “You have! Yes, there was something in that ; I told you so from the
+first, you may remember.”
+
+
+
+ “I did hear, too, that there was a time when sermon-making was not so
+palatable to you as it seems to be at present; that you actually
+declared your resolution of never taking orders, and that the business
+had been compromised accordingly.”
+
+
+
+ “You did! and it was not wholly without foundation. You may remember
+what I told you on that point, when first we talked of it.”
+
+
+
+ They were now almost at the door of the house, for she had walked fast
+to get rid of him; and unwilling, for her sister’s sake, to provoke him,
+she only said in reply, with a good-humoured smile,—
+
+
+
+ “Come, Mr. Wickham, we are brother and sister, you know. Do not let us
+quarrel about the past. In future, I hope we shall be always of one
+mind.”
+
+
+
+ She held out her hand: he kissed it with affectionate gallantry, though
+he hardly knew how to look, and they entered the house. {404} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“Mr. Darcy with him.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER LIII. 
+
+ 
+ R. WICKHAM was so perfectly satisfied with this conversation, that he
+never again distressed himself, or provoked his dear sister Elizabeth,
+by introducing the subject of it; and she was pleased to find that she
+had said enough to keep him quiet. {405} 
+
+
+
+ The day of his and Lydia’s departure soon came; and Mrs. Bennet was
+forced to submit to a separation, which, as her husband by no means
+entered into her scheme of their all going to Newcastle, was likely to
+continue at least a twelvemonth.
+
+
+
+ “Oh, my dear Lydia,” she cried, “when shall we meet again?”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, Lord! I don’t know. Not these two or three years, perhaps.”
+
+
+
+ “Write to me very often, my dear.”
+
+
+
+ “As often as I can. But you know married women have never much time for
+writing. My sisters may write to me . They will have nothing else to
+do.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Wickham’s adieus were much more affectionate than his wife’s. He
+smiled, looked handsome, and said many pretty things.
+
+
+
+ “He is as fine a fellow,” said Mr. Bennet, as soon as they were out of
+the house, “as ever I saw. He simpers, and smirks, and makes love to us
+all. I am prodigiously proud of him. I defy even Sir William Lucas
+himself to produce a more valuable son-in-law.”
+
+
+
+ The loss of her daughter made Mrs. Bennet very dull for several days.
+
+
+
+ “I often think,” said she, “that there is nothing so bad as parting with
+one’s friends. One seems so forlorn without them.”
+
+
+
+ “This is the consequence, you see, madam, of marrying a daughter,” said
+Elizabeth. “It must make you better satisfied that your other four are
+single.”
+
+
+
+ “It is no such thing. Lydia does not leave me because she is married;
+but only because her husband’s regiment happens to be so far off. If
+that had been nearer, she would not have gone so soon. {406} ”
+
+
+
+ But the spiritless condition which this event threw her into was shortly
+relieved, and her mind opened again to the agitation of hope, by an
+article of news which then began to be in circulation. The housekeeper
+at Netherfield had received orders to prepare for the arrival of her
+master, who was coming down in a day or two, to shoot there for several
+weeks. Mrs. Bennet was quite in the fidgets. She looked at Jane, and
+smiled, and shook her head, by turns.
+
+
+
+ “Well, well, and so Mr. Bingley is coming down, sister,” (for Mrs.
+Philips first brought her the news). “Well, so much the better. Not that
+I care about it, though. He is nothing to us, you know, and I am sure I
+never want to see him again. But, however, he is very welcome to come to
+Netherfield, if he likes it. And who knows what may happen? But that
+is nothing to us. You know, sister, we agreed long ago never to mention
+a word about it. And so, it is quite certain he is coming?”
+
+
+
+ “You may depend on it,” replied the other, “for Mrs. Nichols was in
+Meryton last night: I saw her passing by, and went out myself on purpose
+to know the truth of it; and she told me that it was certainly true. He
+comes down on Thursday, at the latest, very likely on Wednesday. She was
+going to the butcher’s, she told me, on purpose to order in some meat on
+Wednesday, and she has got three couple of ducks just fit to be killed.”
+
+
+
+ Miss Bennet had not been able to hear of his coming without changing
+colour. It was many months since she had mentioned his name to
+Elizabeth; but now, as soon as they were alone together, she said,—
+
+
+
+ “I saw you look at me to-day, Lizzy, when my aunt told us of the present
+report; and I know I appeared {407} distressed; but don’t imagine it was from
+any silly cause. I was only confused for the moment, because I felt that
+I should be looked at. I do assure you that the news does not affect
+me either with pleasure or pain. I am glad of one thing, that he comes
+alone; because we shall see the less of him. Not that I am afraid of
+ myself , but I dread other people’s remarks.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth did not know what to make of it. Had she not seen him in
+Derbyshire, she might have supposed him capable of coming there with no
+other view than what was acknowledged; but she still thought him partial
+to Jane, and she wavered as to the greater probability of his coming
+there with his friend’s permission, or being bold enough to come
+without it.
+
+
+
+ “Yet it is hard,” she sometimes thought, “that this poor man cannot come
+to a house, which he has legally hired, without raising all this
+speculation! I will leave him to himself.”
+
+
+
+ In spite of what her sister declared, and really believed to be her
+feelings, in the expectation of his arrival, Elizabeth could easily
+perceive that her spirits were affected by it. They were more disturbed,
+more unequal, than she had often seen them.
+
+
+
+ The subject which had been so warmly canvassed between their parents,
+about a twelvemonth ago, was now brought forward again.
+
+
+
+ “As soon as ever Mr. Bingley comes, my dear,” said Mrs. Bennet, “you
+will wait on him, of course.”
+
+
+
+ “No, no. You forced me into visiting him last year, and promised, if I
+went to see him, he should marry one of my daughters. But it ended in
+nothing, and I will not be sent on a fool’s errand again.”
+
+
+
+ His wife represented to him how absolutely necessary {408} such an attention
+would be from all the neighbouring gentlemen, on his returning to
+Netherfield.
+
+
+
+ “ ’ Tis an etiquette I despise,” said he. “If he wants our society, let
+him seek it. He knows where we live. I will not spend my hours in
+running after my neighbours every time they go away and come back
+again.”
+
+
+
+ “Well, all I know is, that it will be abominably rude if you do not wait
+on him. But, however, that shan’t prevent my asking him to dine here, I
+am determined. We must have Mrs. Long and the Gouldings soon. That will
+make thirteen with ourselves, so there will be just room at table for
+him.”
+
+
+
+ Consoled by this resolution, she was the better able to bear her
+husband’s incivility; though it was very mortifying to know that her
+neighbours might all see Mr. Bingley, in consequence of it, before
+ they did. As the day of his arrival drew near,—
+
+
+
+ “I begin to be sorry that he comes at all,” said Jane to her sister. “It
+would be nothing; I could see him with perfect indifference; but I can
+hardly bear to hear it thus perpetually talked of. My mother means well;
+but she does not know, no one can know, how much I suffer from what she
+says. Happy shall I be when his stay at Netherfield is over!”
+
+
+
+ “I wish I could say anything to comfort you,” replied Elizabeth; “but it
+is wholly out of my power. You must feel it; and the usual satisfaction
+of preaching patience to a sufferer is denied me, because you have
+always so much.”
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bingley arrived. Mrs. Bennet, through the assistance of servants,
+contrived to have the earliest tidings of it, that the period of anxiety
+and fretfulness on her side be as long as it could. She counted the days
+that {409} must intervene before their invitation could be sent—hopeless of
+seeing him before. But on the third morning after his arrival in
+Hertfordshire, she saw him from her dressing-room window enter the
+paddock, and ride towards the house.
+
+
+
+ Her daughters were eagerly called to partake of her joy. Jane resolutely
+kept her place at the table; but Elizabeth, to satisfy her mother, went
+to the window—she looked—she saw Mr. Darcy with him, and sat down
+again by her sister.
+
+
+
+ “There is a gentleman with him, mamma,” said Kitty; “who can it be?”
+
+
+
+ “Some acquaintance or other, my dear, I suppose; I am sure I do not
+know.”
+
+
+
+ “La!” replied Kitty, “it looks just like that man that used to be with
+him before. Mr. what’s his name—that tall, proud man.”
+
+
+
+ “Good gracious! Mr. Darcy!—and so it does, I vow. Well, any friend of
+Mr. Bingley’s will always be welcome here, to be sure; but else I must
+say that I hate the very sight of him.”
+
+
+
+ Jane looked at Elizabeth with surprise and concern. She knew but little
+of their meeting in Derbyshire, and therefore felt for the awkwardness
+which must attend her sister, in seeing him almost for the first time
+after receiving his explanatory letter. Both sisters were uncomfortable
+enough. Each felt for the other, and of course for themselves; and their
+mother talked on of her dislike of Mr. Darcy, and her resolution to be
+civil to him only as Mr. Bingley’s friend, without being heard by either
+of them. But Elizabeth had sources of uneasiness which could not yet be
+suspected by Jane, to whom she had never yet had courage to show Mrs.
+Gardine {410} r’s letter, or to relate her own change of sentiment towards
+him. To Jane, he could be only a man whose proposals she had refused,
+and whose merits she had undervalued; but to her own more extensive
+information, he was the person to whom the whole family were indebted
+for the first of benefits, and whom she regarded herself with an
+interest, if not quite so tender, at least as reasonable and just, as
+what Jane felt for Bingley. Her astonishment at his coming—at his
+coming to Netherfield, to Longbourn, and voluntarily seeking her again,
+was almost equal to what she had known on first witnessing his altered
+behaviour in Derbyshire.
+
+
+
+ The colour which had been driven from her face returned for half a
+minute with an additional glow, and a smile of delight added lustre to
+her eyes, as she thought for that space of time that his affection and
+wishes must still be unshaken; but she would not be secure.
+
+
+
+ “Let me first see how he behaves,” said she; “it will then be early
+enough for expectation.”
+
+
+
+ She sat intently at work, striving to be composed, and without daring to
+lift up her eyes, till anxious curiosity carried them to the face of her
+sister as the servant was approaching the door. Jane looked a little
+paler than usual, but more sedate than Elizabeth had expected. On the
+gentlemen’s appearing, her colour increased; yet she received them with
+tolerable ease, and with a propriety of behaviour equally free from any
+symptom of resentment, or any unnecessary complaisance.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth said as little to either as civility would allow, and sat down
+again to her work, with an eagerness which it did not often command. She
+had ventured only one glance at Darcy. He looked serious as usual; {411} and,
+she thought, more as he had been used to look in Hertfordshire, than as
+she had seen him at Pemberley. But, perhaps, he could not in her
+mother’s presence be what he was before her uncle and aunt. It was a
+painful, but not an improbable, conjecture.
+
+
+
+ Bingley she had likewise seen for an instant, and in that short period
+saw him looking both pleased and embarrassed. He was received by Mrs.
+Bennet with a degree of civility which made her two daughters ashamed,
+especially when contrasted with the cold and ceremonious politeness of
+her courtesy and address of his friend.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth particularly, who knew that her mother owed to the latter the
+preservation of her favourite daughter from irremediable infamy, was
+hurt and distressed to a most painful degree by a distinction so ill
+applied.
+
+
+
+ Darcy, after inquiring of her how Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner did—a question
+which she could not answer without confusion—said scarcely anything. He
+was not seated by her: perhaps that was the reason of his silence; but
+it had not been so in Derbyshire. There he had talked to her friends
+when he could not to herself. But now several minutes elapsed, without
+bringing the sound of his voice; and when occasionally, unable to resist
+the impulse of curiosity, she raised her eyes to his face, she as often
+found him looking at Jane as at herself, and frequently on no object but
+the ground. More thoughtfulness and less anxiety to please, than when
+they last met, were plainly expressed. She was disappointed, and angry
+with herself for being so.
+
+
+
+ “Could I expect it to be otherwise?” said she. “Yet why did he come? {412} ”
+
+
+
+ She was in no humour for conversation with anyone but himself; and to
+him she had hardly courage to speak.
+
+
+
+ She inquired after his sister, but could do no more.
+
+
+
+ “It is a long time, Mr. Bingley, since you went away,” said Mrs. Bennet.
+
+
+
+ He readily agreed to it.
+
+
+
+ “I began to be afraid you would never come back again. People did say,
+you meant to quit the place entirely at Michaelmas; but, however, I hope
+it is not true. A great many changes have happened in the neighbourhood
+since you went away. Miss Lucas is married and settled: and one of my
+own daughters. I suppose you have heard of it; indeed, you must have
+seen it in the papers. It was in the ‘Times’ and the ‘Courier,’ I know;
+though it was not put in as it ought to be. It was only said, ‘Lately,
+George Wickham, Esq., to Miss Lydia Bennet,’ without there being a
+syllable said of her father, or the place where she lived, or anything.
+It was my brother Gardiner’s drawing up, too, and I wonder how he came
+to make such an awkward business of it. Did you see it?”
+
+
+
+ Bingley replied that he did, and made his congratulations. Elizabeth
+dared not lift up her eyes. How Mr. Darcy looked, therefore, she could
+not tell.
+
+
+
+ “It is a delightful thing, to be sure, to have a daughter well married,”
+continued her mother; “but at the same time, Mr. Bingley, it is very
+hard to have her taken away from me. They are gone down to Newcastle, a
+place quite northward it seems, and there they are to stay, I do not
+know how long. His regiment is there; for I suppose you have heard of
+his leaving the ——shire, and of his being gone into the Regulars.
+Thank heaven! {413} he has some friends, though, perhaps, not so many as he
+deserves.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth, who knew this to be levelled at Mr. Darcy, was in such misery
+of shame that she could hardly keep her seat. It drew from her, however,
+the exertion of speaking, which nothing else had so effectually done
+before; and she asked Bingley whether he meant to make any stay in the
+country at present. A few weeks, he believed.
+
+
+
+ “When you have killed all your own birds, Mr. Bingley,” said her mother,
+“I beg you will come here and shoot as many as you please on Mr.
+Bennet’s manor. I am sure he will be vastly happy to oblige you, and
+will save all the best of the coveys for you.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth’s misery increased at such unnecessary, such officious
+attention! Were the same fair prospect to arise at present, as had
+flattered them a year ago, everything, she was persuaded, would be
+hastening to the same vexatious conclusion. At that instant she felt,
+that years of happiness could not make Jane or herself amends for
+moments of such painful confusion.
+
+
+
+ “The first wish of my heart,” said she to herself, “is never more to be
+in company with either of them. Their society can afford no pleasure
+that will atone for such wretchedness as this! Let me never see either
+one or the other again!”
+
+
+
+ Yet the misery, for which years of happiness were to offer no
+compensation, received soon afterwards material relief, from observing
+how much the beauty of her sister rekindled the admiration of her former
+lover. When first he came in, he had spoken to her but little, but every
+five minutes seemed to be giving her more of his attention. He found her
+as handsome as she had {414} been last year; as good-natured, and as
+unaffected, though not quite so chatty. Jane was anxious that no
+difference should be perceived in her at all, and was really persuaded
+that she talked as much as ever; but her mind was so busily engaged,
+that she did not always know when she was silent.
+
+
+
+ When the gentlemen rose to go away, Mrs. Bennet was mindful of her
+intended civility, and they were invited and engaged to dine at
+Longbourn in a few days’ time.
+
+
+
+ “You are quite a visit in my debt, Mr. Bingley,” she added; “for when
+you went to town last winter, you promised to take a family dinner with
+us as soon as you returned. I have not forgot, you see; and I assure you
+I was very much disappointed that you did not come back and keep your
+engagement.”
+
+
+
+ Bingley looked a little silly at this reflection, and said something of
+his concern at having been prevented by business. They then went away.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet had been strongly inclined to ask them to stay and dine
+there that day; but, though she always kept a very good table, she did
+not think anything less than two courses could be good enough for a man
+on whom she had such anxious designs, or satisfy the appetite and pride
+of one who had ten thousand a year. {415} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“Jane happened to look round.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER LIV. 
+
+ 
+ S soon as they were gone, Elizabeth walked out to recover her spirits;
+or, in other words, to dwell without interruption on those subjects
+which must deaden them more. Mr. Darcy’s behaviour astonished and vexed
+her.
+
+
+
+ “Why, if he came only to be silent, grave, and indifferent,” said she,
+“did he come at all?”
+
+
+
+ She could settle it in no way that gave her pleasure.
+
+
+
+ “He could be still amiable, still pleasing to my uncle and aunt, when he
+was in town; and why not to me? {416} If he fears me, why come hither? If he
+no longer cares for me, why silent? Teasing, teasing man! I will think
+no more about him.”
+
+
+
+ Her resolution was for a short time involuntarily kept by the approach
+of her sister, who joined her with a cheerful look which showed her
+better satisfied with their visitors than Elizabeth.
+
+
+
+ “Now,” said she, “that this first meeting is over, I feel perfectly
+easy. I know my own strength, and I shall never be embarrassed again by
+his coming. I am glad he dines here on Tuesday. It will then be publicly
+seen, that on both sides we meet only as common and indifferent
+acquaintance.”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, very indifferent, indeed,” said Elizabeth, laughingly. “Oh, Jane!
+take care.”
+
+
+
+ “My dear Lizzy, you cannot think me so weak as to be in danger now.”
+
+
+
+ “I think you are in very great danger of making him as much in love with
+you as ever.”
+
+
+
+ They did not see the gentlemen again till Tuesday; and Mrs. Bennet, in
+the meanwhile, was giving way to all the happy schemes which the
+good-humour and common politeness of Bingley, in half an hour’s visit,
+had revived.
+
+
+
+ On Tuesday there was a large party assembled at Longbourn; and the two
+who were most anxiously expected, to the credit of their punctuality as
+sportsmen, were in very good time. When they repaired to the
+dining-room, Elizabeth eagerly watched to see whether Bingley would take
+the place which, in all their former parties, had belonged to him, by
+her sister. Her prudent mother, occupied by the same ideas, forbore to
+invite him to sit by herself. On entering the room, he {417} seemed to
+hesitate; but Jane happened to look round, and happened to smile: it was
+decided. He placed himself by her.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth, with a triumphant sensation, looked towards his friend. He
+bore it with noble indifference; and she would have imagined that
+Bingley had received his sanction to be happy, had she not seen his eyes
+likewise turned towards Mr. Darcy, with an expression of half-laughing
+alarm.
+
+
+
+ His behaviour to her sister was such during dinnertime as showed an
+admiration of her, which, though more guarded than formerly, persuaded
+Elizabeth, that, if left wholly to himself, Jane’s happiness, and his
+own, would be speedily secured. Though she dared not depend upon the
+consequence, she yet received pleasure from observing his behaviour. It
+gave her all the animation that her spirits could boast; for she was in
+no cheerful humour. Mr. Darcy was almost as far from her as the table
+could divide them. He was on one side of her mother. She knew how little
+such a situation would give pleasure to either, or make either appear to
+advantage. She was not near enough to hear any of their discourse; but
+she could see how seldom they spoke to each other, and how formal and
+cold was their manner whenever they did. Her mother’s ungraciousness
+made the sense of what they owed him more painful to Elizabeth’s mind;
+and she would, at times, have given anything to be privileged to tell
+him, that his kindness was neither unknown nor unfelt by the whole of
+the family.
+
+
+
+ She was in hopes that the evening would afford some opportunity of
+bringing them together; that the whole of the visit would not pass away
+without enabling them {418} to enter into something more of conversation,
+than the mere ceremonious salutation attending his entrance. Anxious and
+uneasy, the period which passed in the drawing-room before the gentlemen
+came, was wearisome and dull to a degree that almost made her uncivil.
+She looked forward to their entrance as the point on which all her
+chance of pleasure for the evening must depend.
+
+
+
+ “If he does not come to me, then ,” said she, “I shall give him up for
+ever.”
+
+
+
+ The gentlemen came; and she thought he looked as if he would have
+answered her hopes; but, alas! the ladies had crowded round the table,
+where Miss Bennet was making tea, and Elizabeth pouring out the coffee,
+in so close a confederacy, that there was not a single vacancy near her
+which would admit of a chair. And on the gentlemen’s approaching, one of
+the girls moved closer to her than ever, and said, in a whisper,—
+
+
+
+ “The men shan’t come and part us, I am determined. We want none of them;
+do we?”
+
+
+
+ Darcy had walked away to another part of the room. She followed him with
+her eyes, envied everyone to whom he spoke, had scarcely patience enough
+to help anybody to coffee, and then was enraged against herself for
+being so silly!
+
+
+
+ “A man who has once been refused! How could I ever be foolish enough to
+expect a renewal of his love? Is there one among the sex who would not
+protest against such a weakness as a second proposal to the same woman?
+There is no indignity so abhorrent to their feelings.”
+
+
+
+ She was a little revived, however, by his bringing back his coffee-cup
+himself; and she seized the opportunity of saying, {419} —
+
+
+
+ “Is your sister at Pemberley still?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes; she will remain there till Christmas.”
+
+
+
+ “And quite alone? Have all her friends left her?”
+
+
+
+ “Mrs. Annesley is with her. The others have been gone on to Scarborough
+these three weeks.”
+
+
+
+ She could think of nothing more to say; but if he wished to converse
+with her, he might have better success. He stood by her, however, for
+some minutes, in silence; and, at last, on the young lady’s whispering
+to Elizabeth again, he walked away.
+
+
+
+ When the tea things were removed, and the card tables placed, the ladies
+all rose; and Elizabeth was then hoping to be soon joined by him, when
+all her views were overthrown, by seeing him fall a victim to her
+mother’s rapacity for whist players, and in a few moments after seated
+with the rest of the party. She now lost every expectation of pleasure.
+They were confined for the evening at different tables; and she had
+nothing to hope, but that his eyes were so often turned towards her side
+of the room, as to make him play as unsuccessfully as herself.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet had designed to keep the two Netherfield gentlemen to
+supper; but their carriage was, unluckily, ordered before any of the
+others, and she had no opportunity of detaining them.
+
+
+
+ “Well, girls,” said she, as soon as they were left to themselves, “what
+say you to the day? I think everything has passed off uncommonly well, I
+assure you. The dinner was as well dressed as any I ever saw. The
+venison was roasted to a turn—and everybody said, they never saw so fat
+a haunch. The soup was fifty times better than what we had at the
+Lucases’ last week; and even Mr. Darcy acknowledged that the partridges
+were {420} remarkably well done; and I suppose he has two or three French
+cooks at least. And, my dear Jane, I never saw you look in greater
+beauty. Mrs. Long said so too, for I asked her whether you did not. And
+what do you think she said besides? ‘Ah! Mrs. Bennet, we shall have her
+at Netherfield at last!’ She did, indeed. I do think Mrs. Long is as
+good a creature as ever lived—and her nieces are very pretty behaved
+girls, and not at all handsome: I like them prodigiously.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ “M rs . Long and her nieces.”
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ {421} 
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet, in short, was in very great spirits: she had seen enough of
+Bingley’s behaviour to Jane to be convinced that she would get him at
+last; and her expectations of advantage to her family, when in a happy
+humour, were so far beyond reason, that she was quite disappointed at
+not seeing him there again the next day, to make his proposals.
+
+
+
+ “It has been a very agreeable day,” said Miss Bennet to Elizabeth. “The
+party seemed so well selected, so suitable one with the other. I hope we
+may often meet again.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth smiled.
+
+
+
+ “Lizzy, you must not do so. You must not suspect me. It mortifies me. I
+assure you that I have now learnt to enjoy his conversation as an
+agreeable and sensible young man without having a wish beyond it. I am
+perfectly satisfied, from what his manners now are, that he never had
+any design of engaging my affection. It is only that he is blessed with
+greater sweetness of address, and a stronger desire of generally
+pleasing, than any other man.”
+
+
+
+ “You are very cruel,” said her sister, “you will not let me smile, and
+are provoking me to it every moment.”
+
+
+
+ “How hard it is in some cases to be believed! And how impossible in
+others! But why should you wish to persuade me that I feel more than I
+acknowledge?”
+
+
+
+ “That is a question which I hardly know how to answer. We all love to
+instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing. Forgive
+me; and if you persist in indifference, do not make me your
+confidante. {422} ”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“Lizzy, my dear, I want to speak to you.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER LV. 
+
+ 
+ FEW days after this visit, Mr. Bingley called again, and alone. His
+friend had left him that morning for London, but was to return home in
+ten days’ time. He sat with them above an hour, and was {423} in remarkably
+good spirits. Mrs. Bennet invited him to dine with them; but, with many
+expressions of concern, he confessed himself engaged elsewhere.
+
+
+
+ “Next time you call,” said she, “I hope we shall be more lucky.”
+
+
+
+ He should be particularly happy at any time, etc., etc.; and if she
+would give him leave, would take an early opportunity of waiting on
+them.
+
+
+
+ “Can you come to-morrow?”
+
+
+
+ Yes, he had no engagement at all for to-morrow; and her invitation was
+accepted with alacrity.
+
+
+
+ He came, and in such very good time, that the ladies were none of them
+dressed. In ran Mrs. Bennet to her daughters’ room, in her
+dressing-gown, and with her hair half finished, crying out,—
+
+
+
+ “My dear Jane, make haste and hurry down. He is come—Mr. Bingley is
+come. He is, indeed. Make haste, make haste. Here, Sarah, come to Miss
+Bennet this moment, and help her on with her gown. Never mind Miss
+Lizzy’s hair.”
+
+
+
+ “We will be down as soon as we can,” said Jane; “but I dare say Kitty is
+forwarder than either of us, for she went upstairs half an hour ago.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh! hang Kitty! what has she to do with it? Come, be quick, be quick!
+where is your sash, my dear?”
+
+
+
+ But when her mother was gone, Jane would not be prevailed on to go down
+without one of her sisters.
+
+
+
+ The same anxiety to get them by themselves was visible again in the
+evening. After tea, Mr. Bennet retired to the library, as was his
+custom, and Mary went upstairs to her instrument. Two obstacles of the
+five being thus removed, Mrs. Bennet sat looking and winking at
+Elizabeth and Catherine for a considerable time, without {424} making any
+impression on them. Elizabeth would not observe her; and when at last
+Kitty did, she very innocently said, “What is the matter, mamma? What do
+you keep winking at me for? What am I to do?”
+
+
+
+ “Nothing, child, nothing. I did not wink at you.” She then sat still
+five minutes longer; but unable to waste such a precious occasion, she
+suddenly got up, and saying to Kitty,—
+
+
+
+ “Come here, my love, I want to speak to you,” took her out of the room.
+Jane instantly gave a look at Elizabeth which spoke her distress at such
+premeditation, and her entreaty that she would not give in to it. In a
+few minutes, Mrs. Bennet half opened the door and called out,—
+
+
+
+ “Lizzy, my dear, I want to speak with you.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was forced to go.
+
+
+
+ “We may as well leave them by themselves, you know,” said her mother as
+soon as she was in the hall. “Kitty and I are going upstairs to sit in
+my dressing-room.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth made no attempt to reason with her mother, but remained
+quietly in the hall till she and Kitty were out of sight, then returned
+into the drawing-room.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet’s schemes for this day were ineffectual. Bingley was
+everything that was charming, except the professed lover of her
+daughter. His ease and cheerfulness rendered him a most agreeable
+addition to their evening party; and he bore with the ill-judged
+officiousness of the mother, and heard all her silly remarks with a
+forbearance and command of countenance particularly grateful to the
+daughter.
+
+
+
+ He scarcely needed an invitation to stay supper; and before he went away
+an engagement was formed, chiefly through his own and Mrs. Bennet’s
+means, for his coming next morning to shoot with her husband. {425} 
+
+
+
+ After this day, Jane said no more of her indifference. Not a word passed
+between the sisters concerning Bingley; but Elizabeth went to bed in the
+happy belief that all must speedily be concluded, unless Mr. Darcy
+returned within the stated time. Seriously, however, she felt tolerably
+persuaded that all this must have taken place with that gentleman’s
+concurrence.
+
+
+
+ Bingley was punctual to his appointment; and he and Mr. Bennet spent the
+morning together, as had been agreed on. The latter was much more
+agreeable than his companion expected. There was nothing of presumption
+or folly in Bingley that could provoke his ridicule, or disgust him into
+silence; and he was more communicative, and less eccentric, than the
+other had ever seen him. Bingley of course returned with him to dinner;
+and in the evening Mrs. Bennet’s invention was again at work to get
+everybody away from him and her daughter. Elizabeth, who had a letter to
+write, went into the breakfast-room for that purpose soon after tea; for
+as the others were all going to sit down to cards, she could not be
+wanted to counteract her mother’s schemes.
+
+
+
+ But on her returning to the drawing-room, when her letter was finished,
+she saw, to her infinite surprise, there was reason to fear that her
+mother had been too ingenious for her. On opening the door, she
+perceived her sister and Bingley standing together over the hearth, as
+if engaged in earnest conversation; and had this led to no suspicion,
+the faces of both, as they hastily turned round and moved away from each
+other, would have told it all. Their situation was awkward enough; but
+ hers she thought was still worse. Not a syllable was uttered by
+either; and Elizabeth was on the point of going away again, when
+Bingley, who as well as the other had sat {426} down, suddenly rose, and,
+whispering a few words to her sister, ran out of the room.
+
+
+
+ Jane could have no reserves from Elizabeth, where confidence would give
+pleasure; and, instantly embracing her, acknowledged, with the liveliest
+emotion, that she was the happiest creature in the world.
+
+
+
+ “ ’ Tis too much!” she added, “by far too much. I do not deserve it. Oh,
+why is not everybody as happy?”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth’s congratulations were given with a sincerity, a warmth, a
+delight, which words could but poorly express. Every sentence of
+kindness was a fresh source of happiness to Jane. But she would not
+allow herself to stay with her sister, or say half that remained to be
+said, for the present.
+
+
+
+ “I must go instantly to my mother,” she cried. “I would not on any
+account trifle with her affectionate solicitude, or allow her to hear it
+from anyone but myself. He is gone to my father already. Oh, Lizzy, to
+know that what I have to relate will give such pleasure to all my dear
+family! how shall I bear so much happiness?”
+
+
+
+ She then hastened away to her mother, who had purposely broken up the
+card-party, and was sitting upstairs with Kitty.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth, who was left by herself, now smiled at the rapidity and ease
+with which an affair was finally settled, that had given them so many
+previous months of suspense and vexation.
+
+
+
+ “And this,” said she, “is the end of all his friend’s anxious
+circumspection! of all his sister’s falsehood and contrivance! the
+happiest, wisest, and most reasonable end!”
+
+
+
+ In a few minutes she was joined by Bingley, whose {427} conference with her
+father had been short and to the purpose.
+
+
+
+ “Where is your sister?” said he hastily, as he opened the door.
+
+
+
+ “With my mother upstairs. She will be down in a moment, I dare say.”
+
+
+
+ He then shut the door, and, coming up to her, claimed the good wishes
+and affection of a sister. Elizabeth honestly and heartily expressed her
+delight in the prospect of their relationship. They shook hands with
+great cordiality; and then, till her sister came down, she had to listen
+to all he had to say of his own happiness, and of Jane’s perfections;
+and in spite of his being a lover, Elizabeth really believed all his
+expectations of felicity to be rationally founded, because they had for
+basis the excellent understanding and super-excellent disposition of
+Jane, and a general similarity of feeling and taste between her and
+himself.
+
+
+
+ It was an evening of no common delight to them all; the satisfaction of
+Miss Bennet’s mind gave such a glow of sweet animation to her face, as
+made her look handsomer than ever. Kitty simpered and smiled, and hoped
+her turn was coming soon. Mrs. Bennet could not give her consent, or
+speak her approbation in terms warm enough to satisfy her feelings,
+though she talked to Bingley of nothing else, for half an hour; and when
+Mr. Bennet joined them at supper, his voice and manner plainly showed
+how really happy he was.
+
+
+
+ Not a word, however, passed his lips in allusion to it, till their
+visitor took his leave for the night; but as soon as he was gone, he
+turned to his daughter and said,—
+
+
+
+ “Jane, I congratulate you. You will be a very happy woman. {428} ”
+
+
+
+ Jane went to him instantly, kissed him, and thanked him for his
+goodness.
+
+
+
+ “You are a good girl,” he replied, “and I have great pleasure in
+thinking you will be so happily settled. I have not a doubt of your
+doing very well together. Your tempers are by no means unlike. You are
+each of you so complying, that nothing will ever be resolved on; so
+easy, that every servant will cheat you; and so generous, that you will
+always exceed your income.”
+
+
+
+ “I hope not so. Imprudence or thoughtlessness in money matters would be
+unpardonable in me .”
+
+
+
+ “Exceed their income! My dear Mr. Bennet,” cried his wife, “what are you
+talking of? Why, he has four or five thousand a year, and very likely
+more.” Then addressing her daughter, “Oh, my dear, dear Jane, I am so
+happy! I am sure I shan’t get a wink of sleep all night. I knew how it
+would be. I always said it must be so, at last. I was sure you could not
+be so beautiful for nothing! I remember, as soon as ever I saw him, when
+he first came into Hertfordshire last year, I thought how likely it was
+that you should come together. Oh, he is the handsomest young man that
+ever was seen!”
+
+
+
+ Wickham, Lydia, were all forgotten. Jane was beyond competition her
+favourite child. At that moment she cared for no other. Her younger
+sisters soon began to make interest with her for objects of happiness
+which she might in future be able to dispense.
+
+
+
+ Mary petitioned for the use of the library at Netherfield; and Kitty
+begged very hard for a few balls there every winter.
+
+
+
+ Bingley, from this time, was of course a daily visitor at Longbourn;
+coming frequently before breakfast, and always remaining till after
+supper; unless when some {429} barbarous neighbour, who could not be enough
+detested, had given him an invitation to dinner, which he thought
+himself obliged to accept.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth had now but little time for conversation with her sister; for
+while he was present Jane had no attention to bestow on anyone else: but
+she found herself considerably useful to both of them, in those hours of
+separation that must sometimes occur. In the absence of Jane, he always
+attached himself to Elizabeth for the pleasure of talking of her; and
+when Bingley was gone, Jane constantly sought the same means of relief.
+
+
+
+ “He has made me so happy,” said she, one evening, “by telling me that he
+was totally ignorant of my being in town last spring! I had not believed
+it possible.”
+
+
+
+ “I suspected as much,” replied Elizabeth. “But how did he account for
+it?”
+
+
+
+ “It must have been his sisters’ doing. They were certainly no friends to
+his acquaintance with me, which I cannot wonder at, since he might have
+chosen so much more advantageously in many respects. But when they see,
+as I trust they will, that their brother is happy with me, they will
+learn to be contented, and we shall be on good terms again: though we
+can never be what we once were to each other.”
+
+
+
+ “That is the most unforgiving speech,” said Elizabeth, “that I ever
+heard you utter. Good girl! It would vex me, indeed, to see you again
+the dupe of Miss Bingley’s pretended regard.”
+
+
+
+ “Would you believe it, Lizzy, that when he went to town last November he
+really loved me, and nothing but a persuasion of my being indifferent
+would have prevented his coming down again? {430} ”
+
+
+
+ “He made a little mistake, to be sure; but it is to the credit of his
+modesty.”
+
+
+
+ This naturally introduced a panegyric from Jane on his diffidence, and
+the little value he put on his own good qualities.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was pleased to find that he had not betrayed the interference
+of his friend; for, though Jane had the most generous and forgiving
+heart in the world, she knew it was a circumstance which must prejudice
+her against him.
+
+
+
+ “I am certainly the most fortunate creature that ever existed!” cried
+Jane. “Oh, Lizzy, why am I thus singled from my family, and blessed
+above them all? If I could but see you as happy! If there were but such
+another man for you!”
+
+
+
+ “If you were to give me forty such men I never could be so happy as you.
+Till I have your disposition, your goodness, I never can have your
+happiness. No, no, let me shift for myself; and, perhaps, if I have very
+good luck, I may meet with another Mr. Collins in time.”
+
+
+
+ The situation of affairs in the Longbourn family could not be long a
+secret. Mrs. Bennet was privileged to whisper it to Mrs. Philips, and
+she ventured, without any permission, to do the same by all her
+neighbours in Meryton.
+
+
+
+ The Bennets were speedily pronounced to be the luckiest family in the
+world; though only a few weeks before, when Lydia had first run away,
+they had been generally proved to be marked out for misfortune. {431} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER LVI. 
+
+ 
+ NE morning, about a week after Bingley’s engagement with Jane had been
+formed, as he and the females of the family were sitting together in the
+dining-room, their attention was suddenly drawn to the window by the
+sound of a carriage; and they perceived a chaise and four driving up the
+lawn. It was too early in the morning for visitors; and besides, the
+equipage did not answer to that of any of their neighbours. The horses
+were post; and neither the carriage, nor the livery of the servant who
+preceded it, were familiar to them. As {432} it was certain, however, that
+somebody was coming, Bingley instantly prevailed on Miss Bennet to avoid
+the confinement of such an intrusion, and walk away with him into the
+shrubbery. They both set off; and the conjectures of the remaining three
+continued, though with little satisfaction, till the door was thrown
+open, and their visitor entered. It was Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
+
+
+
+ They were of course all intending to be surprised: but their
+astonishment was beyond their expectation; and on the part of Mrs.
+Bennet and Kitty, though she was perfectly unknown to them, even
+inferior to what Elizabeth felt.
+
+
+
+ She entered the room with an air more than usually ungracious, made no
+other reply to Elizabeth’s salutation than a slight inclination of the
+head, and sat down without saying a word. Elizabeth had mentioned her
+name to her mother on her Ladyship’s entrance, though no request of
+introduction had been made.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet, all amazement, though flattered by having a guest of such
+high importance, received her with the utmost politeness. After sitting
+for a moment in silence, she said, very stiffly, to Elizabeth,—
+
+
+
+ “I hope you are well, Miss Bennet. That lady, I suppose, is your
+mother?”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth replied very concisely that she was.
+
+
+
+ “And that , I suppose, is one of your sisters?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, madam,” said Mrs. Bennet, delighted to speak to a Lady Catherine.
+“She is my youngest girl but one. My youngest of all is lately married,
+and my eldest is somewhere about the ground, walking with a young man,
+who, I believe, will soon become a part of the family. {433} ”
+
+
+
+ “You have a very small park here,” returned Lady Catherine, after a
+short silence.
+
+
+
+ “It is nothing in comparison of Rosings, my Lady, I dare say; but, I
+assure you, it is much larger than Sir William Lucas’s.”
+
+
+
+ “This must be a most inconvenient sitting-room for the evening in
+summer: the windows are full west.”
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet assured her that they never sat there after dinner; and then
+added,—
+
+
+
+ “May I take the liberty of asking your Ladyship whether you left Mr. and
+Mrs. Collins well?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, very well. I saw them the night before last.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth now expected that she would produce a letter for her from
+Charlotte, as it seemed the only probable motive for her calling. But no
+letter appeared, and she was completely puzzled.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Bennet, with great civility, begged her Ladyship to take some
+refreshment: but Lady Catherine very resolutely, and not very politely,
+declined eating anything; and then, rising up, said to Elizabeth,—
+
+
+
+ “Miss Bennet, there seemed to be a prettyish kind of a little wilderness
+on one side of your lawn. I should be glad to take a turn in it, if you
+will favour me with your company.”
+
+
+
+ “Go, my dear,” cried her mother, “and show her Ladyship about the
+different walks. I think she will be pleased with the hermitage.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth obeyed; and, running into her own room for her parasol,
+attended her noble guest downstairs. As they passed through the hall,
+Lady Catherine opened the doors into the dining-parlour and
+drawing-room, and pronouncing them, after a short survey, to be
+decent-looking rooms, walked on. {434} 
+
+
+
+ Her carriage remained at the door, and Elizabeth saw that her
+waiting-woman was in it. They proceeded in silence along the gravel walk
+that led to the copse; Elizabeth was determined to make no effort for
+conversation with a woman who was now more than usually insolent and
+disagreeable.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“After a short survey”
+
+
+
+
+
+ [ Copyright 1894 by George Allen. ]
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ {435} 
+
+
+
+ “How could I ever think her like her nephew?” said she, as she looked in
+her face.
+
+
+
+ As soon as they entered the copse, Lady Catherine began in the following
+manner:—
+
+
+
+ “You can be at no loss, Miss Bennet, to understand the reason of my
+journey hither. Your own heart, your own conscience, must tell you why I
+come.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth looked with unaffected astonishment.
+
+
+
+ “Indeed, you are mistaken, madam; I have not been at all able to account
+for the honour of seeing you here.”
+
+
+
+ “Miss Bennet,” replied her Ladyship, in an angry tone, “you ought to
+know that I am not to be trifled with. But however insincere you may
+choose to be, you shall not find me so. My character has ever been
+celebrated for its sincerity and frankness; and in a cause of such
+moment as this, I shall certainly not depart from it. A report of a most
+alarming nature reached me two days ago. I was told, that not only your
+sister was on the point of being most advantageously married, but that
+ you —that Miss Elizabeth Bennet would, in all likelihood, be soon
+afterwards united to my nephew—my own nephew, Mr. Darcy. Though I
+ know it must be a scandalous falsehood, though I would not injure him
+so much as to suppose the truth of it possible, I instantly resolved on
+setting off for this place, that I might make my sentiments known to
+you.”
+
+
+
+ “If you believed it impossible to be true,” said Elizabeth, colouring
+with astonishment and disdain, “I wonder you took the trouble of coming
+so far. What could your Ladyship propose by it?”
+
+
+
+ “At once to insist upon having such a report universally contradicted. {436} ”
+
+
+
+ “Your coming to Longbourn, to see me and my family,” said Elizabeth
+coolly, “will be rather a confirmation of it—if, indeed, such a report
+is in existence.”
+
+
+
+ “If! do you then pretend to be ignorant of it? Has it not been
+industriously circulated by yourselves? Do you not know that such a
+report is spread abroad?”
+
+
+
+ “I never heard that it was.”
+
+
+
+ “And can you likewise declare, that there is no foundation for it?”
+
+
+
+ “I do not pretend to possess equal frankness with your Ladyship. You 
+may ask questions which I shall not choose to answer.”
+
+
+
+ “This is not to be borne. Miss Bennet, I insist on being satisfied. Has
+he, has my nephew, made you an offer of marriage?”
+
+
+
+ “Your Ladyship has declared it to be impossible.”
+
+
+
+ “It ought to be so; it must be so, while he retains the use of his
+reason. But your arts and allurements may, in a moment of infatuation,
+have made him forget what he owes to himself and to all his family. You
+may have drawn him in.”
+
+
+
+ “If I have, I shall be the last person to confess it.”
+
+
+
+ “Miss Bennet, do you know who I am? I have not been accustomed to such
+language as this. I am almost the nearest relation he has in the world,
+and am entitled to know all his dearest concerns.”
+
+
+
+ “But you are not entitled to know mine ; nor will such behaviour as
+this ever induce me to be explicit.”
+
+
+
+ “Let me be rightly understood. This match, to which you have the
+presumption to aspire, can never take place. No, never. Mr. Darcy is
+engaged to my daughter . Now, what have you to say? {437} ”
+
+
+
+ “Only this,—that if he is so, you can have no reason to suppose he will
+make an offer to me.”
+
+
+
+ Lady Catherine hesitated for a moment, and then replied,—
+
+
+
+ “The engagement between them is of a peculiar kind. From their infancy,
+they have been intended for each other. It was the favourite wish of
+ his mother, as well as of hers. While in their cradles we planned the
+union; and now, at the moment when the wishes of both sisters would be
+accomplished, is their marriage to be prevented by a young woman of
+inferior birth, of no importance in the world, and wholly unallied to
+the family? Do you pay no regard to the wishes of his friends—to his
+tacit engagement with Miss de Bourgh? Are you lost to every feeling of
+propriety and delicacy? Have you not heard me say, that from his
+earliest hours he was destined for his cousin?”
+
+
+
+ “Yes; and I had heard it before. But what is that to me? If there is no
+other objection to my marrying your nephew, I shall certainly not be
+kept from it by knowing that his mother and aunt wished him to marry
+Miss de Bourgh. You both did as much as you could in planning the
+marriage. Its completion depended on others. If Mr. Darcy is neither by
+honour nor inclination confined to his cousin, why is not he to make
+another choice? And if I am that choice, why may not I accept him?”
+
+
+
+ “Because honour, decorum, prudence—nay, interest—forbid it. Yes, Miss
+Bennet, interest; for do not expect to be noticed by his family or
+friends, if you wilfully act against the inclinations of all. You will
+be censured, slighted, and despised, by everyone connected with him.
+Your alliance will be a disgrace; your name will never even be mentioned
+by any of us. {438} ”
+
+
+
+ “These are heavy misfortunes,” replied Elizabeth. “But the wife of Mr.
+Darcy must have such extraordinary sources of happiness necessarily
+attached to her situation, that she could, upon the whole, have no cause
+to repine.”
+
+
+
+ “Obstinate, headstrong girl! I am ashamed of you! Is this your gratitude
+for my attentions to you last spring? Is nothing due to me on that
+score? Let us sit down. You are to understand, Miss Bennet, that I came
+here with the determined resolution of carrying my purpose; nor will I
+be dissuaded from it. I have not been used to submit to any person’s
+whims. I have not been in the habit of brooking disappointment.”
+
+
+
+ “ That will make your Ladyship’s situation at present more pitiable;
+but it will have no effect on me .”
+
+
+
+ “I will not be interrupted! Hear me in silence. My daughter and my
+nephew are formed for each other. They are descended, on the maternal
+side, from the same noble line; and, on the father’s, from respectable,
+honourable, and ancient, though untitled, families. Their fortune on
+both sides is splendid. They are destined for each other by the voice of
+every member of their respective houses; and what is to divide
+them?—the upstart pretensions of a young woman without family,
+connections, or fortune! Is this to be endured? But it must not, shall
+not be! If you were sensible of your own good, you would not wish to
+quit the sphere in which you have been brought up.”
+
+
+
+ “In marrying your nephew, I should not consider myself as quitting that
+sphere. He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter; so far we are
+equal.”
+
+
+
+ “True. You are a gentleman’s daughter. But what was your mother? Who
+are your uncles and aunts? Do not imagine me ignorant of their
+condition. {439} ”
+
+
+
+ “Whatever my connections may be,” said Elizabeth, “if your nephew does
+not object to them, they can be nothing to you .”
+
+
+
+ “Tell me, once for all, are you engaged to him?”
+
+
+
+ Though Elizabeth would not, for the mere purpose of obliging Lady
+Catherine, have answered this question, she could not but say, after a
+moment’s deliberation,—
+
+
+
+ “I am not.”
+
+
+
+ Lady Catherine seemed pleased.
+
+
+
+ “And will you promise me never to enter into such an engagement?”
+
+
+
+ “I will make no promise of the kind.”
+
+
+
+ “Miss Bennet, I am shocked and astonished. I expected to find a more
+reasonable young woman. But do not deceive yourself into a belief that I
+will ever recede. I shall not go away till you have given me the
+assurance I require.”
+
+
+
+ “And I certainly never shall give it. I am not to be intimidated into
+anything so wholly unreasonable. Your Ladyship wants Mr. Darcy to marry
+your daughter; but would my giving you the wished-for promise make
+ their marriage at all more probable? Supposing him to be attached to
+me, would my refusing to accept his hand make him wish to bestow it on
+his cousin? Allow me to say, Lady Catherine, that the arguments with
+which you have supported this extraordinary application have been as
+frivolous as the application was ill-judged. You have widely mistaken my
+character, if you think I can be worked on by such persuasions as these.
+How far your nephew might approve of your interference in his affairs,
+I cannot tell; but you have certainly no right to concern yourself in
+mine. I must beg, therefore, to be importuned no further on the
+subject. {440} ”
+
+
+
+ “Not so hasty, if you please. I have by no means done. To all the
+objections I have already urged I have still another to add. I am no
+stranger to the particulars of your youngest sister’s infamous
+elopement. I know it all; that the young man’s marrying her was a
+patched-up business, at the expense of your father and uncle. And is
+ such a girl to be my nephew’s sister? Is her husband, who is the son
+of his late father’s steward, to be his brother? Heaven and earth!—of
+what are you thinking? Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?”
+
+
+
+ “You can now have nothing further to say,” she resentfully answered.
+“You have insulted me, in every possible method. I must beg to return to
+the house.”
+
+
+
+ And she rose as she spoke. Lady Catherine rose also, and they turned
+back. Her Ladyship was highly incensed.
+
+
+
+ “You have no regard, then, for the honour and credit of my nephew!
+Unfeeling, selfish girl! Do you not consider that a connection with you
+must disgrace him in the eyes of everybody?”
+
+
+
+ “Lady Catherine, I have nothing further to say. You know my sentiments.”
+
+
+
+ “You are then resolved to have him?”
+
+
+
+ “I have said no such thing. I am only resolved to act in that manner,
+which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without
+reference to you , or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.”
+
+
+
+ “It is well. You refuse, then, to oblige me. You refuse to obey the
+claims of duty, honour, and gratitude. You are determined to ruin him in
+the opinion of all his friends, and make him the contempt of the world.”
+
+
+
+ “Neither duty, nor honour, nor gratitude,” replied Elizabeth, “has any
+possible claim on me, in the present instance. No principle of either
+would be violated by my {441} marriage with Mr. Darcy. And with regard to the
+resentment of his family, or the indignation of the world, if the former
+ were excited by his marrying me, it would not give me one moment’s
+concern—and the world in general would have too much sense to join in
+the scorn.”
+
+
+
+ “And this is your real opinion! This is your final resolve! Very well. I
+shall now know how to act. Do not imagine, Miss Bennet, that your
+ambition will ever be gratified. I came to try you. I hoped to find you
+reasonable; but depend upon it I will carry my point.”
+
+
+
+ In this manner Lady Catherine talked on till they were at the door of
+the carriage, when, turning hastily round, she added,—
+
+
+
+ “I take no leave of you, Miss Bennet. I send no compliments to your
+mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth made no answer; and without attempting to persuade her
+Ladyship to return into the house, walked quietly into it herself. She
+heard the carriage drive away as she proceeded upstairs. Her mother
+impatiently met her at the door of her dressing-room, to ask why Lady
+Catherine would not come in again and rest herself.
+
+
+
+ “She did not choose it,” said her daughter; “she would go.”
+
+
+
+ “She is a very fine-looking woman! and her calling here was prodigiously
+civil! for she only came, I suppose, to tell us the Collinses were well.
+She is on her road somewhere, I dare say; and so, passing through
+Meryton, thought she might as well call on you. I suppose she had
+nothing particular to say to you, Lizzy?”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was forced to give in to a little falsehood here; for to
+acknowledge the substance of their conversation was impossible. {442} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“But now it comes out.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER LVII. 
+
+ 
+ HE discomposure of spirits which this extraordinary visit threw
+Elizabeth into could not be easily overcome; nor could she for many
+hours learn to think of it less than incessantly. Lady Catherine, it
+appeared, had actually taken the trouble of this journey from Rosings
+for the sole purpose of breaking off her supposed engagement with Mr.
+Darcy. It was a rational scheme, to be sure! but from what the report of
+their engagement could originate, Elizabeth was at a loss to imagine;
+till she recollected that his being the intimate friend of Bingley,
+and her being the sister of Jane, was enough, at a time when the
+expectation of one wedding made everybody eager for another, to supply
+the idea. She had not herself forgotten to feel that the marriage of her
+sister must bring them more frequently together. And her neighbours at
+Lucas Lodge, therefore, (for through their {443} communication with the
+Collinses, the report, she concluded, had reached Lady Catherine,) had
+only set that down as almost certain and immediate which she had
+looked forward to as possible at some future time.
+
+
+
+ In revolving Lady Catherine’s expressions, however, she could not help
+feeling some uneasiness as to the possible consequence of her persisting
+in this interference. From what she had said of her resolution to
+prevent the marriage, it occurred to Elizabeth that she must meditate an
+application to her nephew; and how he might take a similar
+representation of the evils attached to a connection with her she dared
+not pronounce. She knew not the exact degree of his affection for his
+aunt, or his dependence on her judgment, but it was natural to suppose
+that he thought much higher of her Ladyship than she could do; and it
+was certain, that in enumerating the miseries of a marriage with one 
+whose immediate connections were so unequal to his own, his aunt would
+address him on his weakest side. With his notions of dignity, he would
+probably feel that the arguments, which to Elizabeth had appeared weak
+and ridiculous, contained much good sense and solid reasoning.
+
+
+
+ If he had been wavering before, as to what he should do, which had often
+seemed likely, the advice and entreaty of so near a relation might
+settle every doubt, and determine him at once to be as happy as dignity
+unblemished could make him. In that case he would return no more. Lady
+Catherine might see him in her way through town; and his engagement to
+Bingley of coming again to Netherfield must give way.
+
+
+
+ “If, therefore, an excuse for not keeping his promise should come to his
+friend within a few days,” she added, “I shall know how to understand
+it. I shall then give {444} over every expectation, every wish of his
+constancy. If he is satisfied with only regretting me, when he might
+have obtained my affections and hand, I shall soon cease to regret him
+at all.”
+
+
+
+ The surprise of the rest of the family, on hearing who their visitor had
+been, was very great: but they obligingly satisfied it with the same
+kind of supposition which had appeased Mrs. Bennet’s curiosity; and
+Elizabeth was spared from much teasing on the subject.
+
+
+
+ The next morning, as she was going down stairs, she was met by her
+father, who came out of his library with a letter in his hand.
+
+
+
+ “Lizzy,” said he, “I was going to look for you: come into my room.”
+
+
+
+ She followed him thither; and her curiosity to know what he had to tell
+her was heightened by the supposition of its being in some manner
+connected with the letter he held. It suddenly struck her that it might
+be from Lady Catherine, and she anticipated with dismay all the
+consequent explanations.
+
+
+
+ She followed her father to the fireplace, and they both sat down. He
+then said,—
+
+
+
+ “I have received a letter this morning that has astonished me
+exceedingly. As it principally concerns yourself, you ought to know its
+contents. I did not know before that I had two daughters on the brink
+of matrimony. Let me congratulate you on a very important conquest.”
+
+
+
+ The colour now rushed into Elizabeth’s cheeks in the instantaneous
+conviction of its being a letter from the nephew, instead of the aunt;
+and she was undetermined whether most to be pleased that he explained
+himself at all, or offended that his letter was not rather addressed to
+herself, when her father continued, {445} —
+
+
+
+ “You look conscious. Young ladies have great penetration in such matters
+as these; but I think I may defy even your sagacity to discover the
+name of your admirer. This letter is from Mr. Collins.”
+
+
+
+ “From Mr. Collins! and what can he have to say?”
+
+
+
+ “Something very much to the purpose, of course. He begins with
+congratulations on the approaching nuptials of my eldest daughter, of
+which, it seems, he has been told by some of the good-natured, gossiping
+Lucases. I shall not sport with your impatience by reading what he says
+on that point. What relates to yourself is as follows:—‘Having thus
+offered you the sincere congratulations of Mrs. Collins and myself on
+this happy event, let me now add a short hint on the subject of another,
+of which we have been advertised by the same authority. Your daughter
+Elizabeth, it is presumed, will not long bear the name of Bennet, after
+her eldest sister has resigned it; and the chosen partner of her fate
+may be reasonably looked up to as one of the most illustrious personages
+in this land.’ Can you possibly guess, Lizzy, who is meant by this?
+‘This young gentleman is blessed, in a peculiar way, with everything the
+heart of mortal can most desire,—splendid property, noble kindred, and
+extensive patronage. Yet, in spite of all these temptations, let me warn
+my cousin Elizabeth, and yourself, of what evils you may incur by a
+precipitate closure with this gentleman’s proposals, which, of course,
+you will be inclined to take immediate advantage of.’ Have you any idea,
+Lizzy, who this gentleman is? But now it comes out. ‘My motive for
+cautioning you is as follows:—We have reason to imagine that his aunt,
+Lady Catherine de Bourgh, does not look on the match with a friendly
+eye.’ Mr. Darcy , you see, is the man! Now, Lizzy, I think {446} I have 
+surprised you. Could he, or the Lucases, have pitched on any man, within
+the circle of our acquaintance, whose name would have given the lie more
+effectually to what they related? Mr. Darcy, who never looks at any
+woman but to see a blemish, and who probably never looked at you in
+his life! It is admirable!”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth tried to join in her father’s pleasantry, but could only force
+one most reluctant smile. Never had his wit been directed in a manner so
+little agreeable to her.
+
+
+
+ “Are you not diverted?”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, yes. Pray read on.”
+
+
+
+ “ ‘ After mentioning the likelihood of this marriage to her Ladyship last
+night, she immediately, with her usual condescension, expressed what she
+felt on the occasion; when it became apparent, that, on the score of
+some family objections on the part of my cousin, she would never give
+her consent to what she termed so disgraceful a match. I thought it my
+duty to give the speediest intelligence of this to my cousin, that she
+and her noble admirer may be aware of what they are about, and not run
+hastily into a marriage which has not been properly sanctioned.’ Mr.
+Collins, moreover, adds, ‘I am truly rejoiced that my cousin Lydia’s sad
+business has been so well hushed up, and am only concerned that their
+living together before the marriage took place should be so generally
+known. I must not, however, neglect the duties of my station, or refrain
+from declaring my amazement, at hearing that you received the young
+couple into your house as soon as they were married. It was an
+encouragement of vice; and had I been the rector of Longbourn, I should
+very strenuously have opposed it. You ought certainly to forgive them as
+a Christian, but never to admit them {447} in your sight, or allow their
+names to be mentioned in your hearing.’ That is his notion of
+Christian forgiveness! The rest of his letter is only about his dear
+Charlotte’s situation, and his expectation of a young olive-branch. But,
+Lizzy, you look as if you did not enjoy it. You are not going to be
+ missish , I hope, and pretend to be affronted at an idle report. For
+what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them
+in our turn?”
+
+
+
+ “Oh,” cried Elizabeth, “I am exceedingly diverted. But it is so
+strange!”
+
+
+
+ “Yes, that is what makes it amusing. Had they fixed on any other man
+it would have been nothing; but his perfect indifference and your 
+pointed dislike make it so delightfully absurd! Much as I abominate
+writing, I would not give up Mr. Collins’s correspondence for any
+consideration. Nay, when I read a letter of his, I cannot help giving
+him the preference even over Wickham, much as I value the impudence and
+hypocrisy of my son-in-law. And pray, Lizzy, what said Lady Catherine
+about this report? Did she call to refuse her consent?”
+
+
+
+ To this question his daughter replied only with a laugh; and as it had
+been asked without the least suspicion, she was not distressed by his
+repeating it. Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make her
+feelings appear what they were not. It was necessary to laugh when she
+would rather have cried. Her father had most cruelly mortified her by
+what he said of Mr. Darcy’s indifference; and she could do nothing but
+wonder at such a want of penetration, or fear that, perhaps, instead of
+his seeing too little , she might have fancied too much . {448} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“The efforts of his aunt.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER LVIII. 
+
+ 
+ NSTEAD of receiving any such letter of excuse from his friend, as
+Elizabeth half expected Mr. Bingley to do, he was able to bring Darcy
+with him to Longbourn before many days had passed after Lady Catherine’s
+visit. The gentlemen {449} arrived early; and, before Mrs. Bennet had time to
+tell him of their having seen his aunt, of which her daughter sat in
+momentary dread, Bingley, who wanted to be alone with Jane, proposed
+their all walking out. It was agreed to. Mrs. Bennet was not in the
+habit of walking, Mary could never spare time, but the remaining five
+set off together. Bingley and Jane, however, soon allowed the others to
+outstrip them. They lagged behind, while Elizabeth, Kitty, and Darcy
+were to entertain each other. Very little was said by either; Kitty was
+too much afraid of him to talk; Elizabeth was secretly forming a
+desperate resolution; and, perhaps, he might be doing the same.
+
+
+
+ They walked towards the Lucases’, because Kitty wished to call upon
+Maria; and as Elizabeth saw no occasion for making it a general concern,
+when Kitty left them she went boldly on with him alone. Now was the
+moment for her resolution to be executed; and while her courage was
+high, she immediately said,—
+
+
+
+ “Mr. Darcy, I am a very selfish creature, and for the sake of giving
+relief to my own feelings care not how much I may be wounding yours. I
+can no longer help thanking you for your unexampled kindness to my poor
+sister. Ever since I have known it I have been most anxious to
+acknowledge to you how gratefully I feel it. Were it known to the rest
+of my family I should not have merely my own gratitude to express.”
+
+
+
+ “I am sorry, exceedingly sorry,” replied Darcy, in a tone of surprise
+and emotion, “that you have ever been informed of what may, in a
+mistaken light, have given you uneasiness. I did not think Mrs. Gardiner
+was so little to be trusted.”
+
+
+
+ “You must not blame my aunt. Lydia’s thoughtlessness {450} first betrayed to
+me that you had been concerned in the matter; and, of course, I could
+not rest till I knew the particulars. Let me thank you again and again,
+in the name of all my family, for that generous compassion which induced
+you to take so much trouble, and bear so many mortifications, for the
+sake of discovering them.”
+
+
+
+ “If you will thank me,” he replied, “let it be for yourself alone.
+That the wish of giving happiness to you might add force to the other
+inducements which led me on, I shall not attempt to deny. But your
+ family owe me nothing. Much as I respect them, I believe I thought
+only of you .”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth was too much embarrassed to say a word. After a short pause,
+her companion added, “You are too generous to trifle with me. If your
+feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My 
+affections and wishes are unchanged; but one word from you will silence
+me on this subject for ever.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of
+his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not
+very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone
+so material a change since the period to which he alluded, as to make
+her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances. The
+happiness which this reply produced was such as he had probably never
+felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as
+warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. Had Elizabeth
+been able to encounter his eyes, she might have seen how well the
+expression of heartfelt delight diffused over his face became him: but
+though she could not look she could listen; and he told her of {451} feelings
+which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his affection
+every moment more valuable.
+
+
+
+ They walked on without knowing in what direction. There was too much to
+be thought, and felt, and said, for attention to any other objects. She
+soon learnt that they were indebted for their present good understanding
+to the efforts of his aunt, who did call on him in her return through
+London, and there relate her journey to Longbourn, its motive, and the
+substance of her conversation with Elizabeth; dwelling emphatically on
+every expression of the latter, which, in her Ladyship’s apprehension,
+peculiarly denoted her perverseness and assurance, in the belief that
+such a relation must assist her endeavours to obtain that promise from
+her nephew which she had refused to give. But, unluckily for her
+Ladyship, its effect had been exactly contrariwise.
+
+
+
+ “It taught me to hope,” said he, “as I had scarcely ever allowed myself
+to hope before. I knew enough of your disposition to be certain, that
+had you been absolutely, irrevocably decided against me, you would have
+acknowledged it to Lady Catherine frankly and openly.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth coloured and laughed as she replied, “Yes, you know enough of
+my frankness to believe me capable of that . After abusing you so
+abominably to your face, I could have no scruple in abusing you to all
+your relations.”
+
+
+
+ “What did you say of me that I did not deserve? For though your
+accusations were ill-founded, formed on mistaken premises, my behaviour
+to you at the time had merited the severest reproof. It was
+unpardonable. I cannot think of it without abhorrence.”
+
+
+
+ “We will not quarrel for the greater share of blame annexed to that
+evening,” said Elizabeth. “The conduct {452} of neither, if strictly
+examined, will be irreproachable; but since then we have both, I hope,
+improved in civility.”
+
+
+
+ “I cannot be so easily reconciled to myself. The recollection of what I
+then said, of my conduct, my manners, my expressions during the whole of
+it, is now, and has been many months, inexpressibly painful to me. Your
+reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: ‘Had you behaved in a
+more gentlemanlike manner.’ Those were your words. You know not, you can
+scarcely conceive, how they have tortured me; though it was some time, I
+confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice.”
+
+
+
+ “I was certainly very far from expecting them to make so strong an
+impression. I had not the smallest idea of their being ever felt in such
+a way.”
+
+
+
+ “I can easily believe it. You thought me then devoid of every proper
+feeling, I am sure you did. The turn of your countenance I shall never
+forget, as you said that I could not have addressed you in any possible
+way that would induce you to accept me.”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, do not repeat what I then said. These recollections will not do at
+all. I assure you that I have long been most heartily ashamed of it.”
+
+
+
+ Darcy mentioned his letter. “Did it,” said he,—“did it soon make you
+think better of me? Did you, on reading it, give any credit to its
+contents?”
+
+
+
+ She explained what its effects on her had been, and how gradually all
+her former prejudices had been removed.
+
+
+
+ “I knew,” said he, “that what I wrote must give you pain, but it was
+necessary. I hope you have destroyed the letter. There was one part,
+especially the opening of it, which I should dread your having the power
+of {453} reading again. I can remember some expressions which might justly
+make you hate me.”
+
+
+
+ “The letter shall certainly be burnt, if you believe it essential to the
+preservation of my regard; but, though we have both reason to think my
+opinions not entirely unalterable, they are not, I hope, quite so easily
+changed as that implies.”
+
+
+
+ “When I wrote that letter,” replied Darcy, “I believed myself perfectly
+calm and cool; but I am since convinced that it was written in a
+dreadful bitterness of spirit.”
+
+
+
+ “The letter, perhaps, began in bitterness, but it did not end so. The
+adieu is charity itself. But think no more of the letter. The feelings
+of the person who wrote and the person who received it are now so widely
+different from what they were then, that every unpleasant circumstance
+attending it ought to be forgotten. You must learn some of my
+philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you
+pleasure.”
+
+
+
+ “I cannot give you credit for any philosophy of the kind. Your 
+retrospections must be so totally void of reproach, that the contentment
+arising from them is not of philosophy, but, what is much better, of
+ignorance. But with me , it is not so. Painful recollections will
+intrude, which cannot, which ought not to be repelled. I have been a
+selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a
+child I was taught what was right , but I was not taught to correct my
+temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride
+and conceit. Unfortunately an only son (for many years an only child ),
+I was spoiled by my parents, who, though good themselves, (my father
+particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable,) allowed, encouraged,
+almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing, to care for none beyond
+my {454} own family circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to
+ wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with
+my own. Such I was, from eight to eight-and-twenty; and such I might
+still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not
+owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most
+advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a
+doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my
+pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.”
+
+
+
+ “Had you then persuaded yourself that I should?”
+
+
+
+ “Indeed I had. What will you think of my vanity? I believed you to be
+wishing, expecting my addresses.”
+
+
+
+ “My manners must have been in fault, but not intentionally, I assure
+you. I never meant to deceive you, but my spirits might often lead me
+wrong. How you must have hated me after that evening!”
+
+
+
+ “Hate you! I was angry, perhaps, at first, but my anger soon began to
+take a proper direction.”
+
+
+
+ “I am almost afraid of asking what you thought of me when we met at
+Pemberley. You blamed me for coming?”
+
+
+
+ “No, indeed, I felt nothing but surprise.”
+
+
+
+ “Your surprise could not be greater than mine in being noticed by you.
+My conscience told me that I deserved no extraordinary politeness, and I
+confess that I did not expect to receive more than my due.”
+
+
+
+ “My object then ,” replied Darcy, “was to show you, by every civility
+in my power, that I was not so mean as to resent the past; and I hoped
+to obtain your forgiveness, to lessen your ill opinion, by letting you
+see that your reproofs had been attended to. How soon any other wishes
+introduced themselves, I can hardly {455} tell, but I believe in about half
+an hour after I had seen you.”
+
+
+
+ He then told her of Georgiana’s delight in her acquaintance, and of her
+disappointment at its sudden interruption; which naturally leading to
+the cause of that interruption, she soon learnt that his resolution of
+following her from Derbyshire in quest of her sister had been formed
+before he quitted the inn, and that his gravity and thoughtfulness there
+had arisen from no other struggles than what such a purpose must
+comprehend.
+
+
+
+ She expressed her gratitude again, but it was too painful a subject to
+each to be dwelt on farther.
+
+
+
+ After walking several miles in a leisurely manner, and too busy to know
+anything about it, they found at last, on examining their watches, that
+it was time to be at home.
+
+
+
+ “What could have become of Mr. Bingley and Jane?” was a wonder which
+introduced the discussion of their affairs. Darcy was delighted with
+their engagement; his friend had given him the earliest information of
+it.
+
+
+
+ “I must ask whether you were surprised?” said Elizabeth.
+
+
+
+ “Not at all. When I went away, I felt that it would soon happen.”
+
+
+
+ “That is to say, you had given your permission. I guessed as much.” And
+though he exclaimed at the term, she found that it had been pretty much
+the case.
+
+
+
+ “On the evening before my going to London,” said he, “I made a
+confession to him, which I believe I ought to have made long ago. I told
+him of all that had occurred to make my former interference in his
+affairs absurd and impertinent. His surprise was great. He had never had
+the slightest suspicion. I told him, moreover, that I {456} believed myself
+mistaken in supposing, as I had done, that your sister was indifferent
+to him; and as I could easily perceive that his attachment to her was
+unabated, I felt no doubt of their happiness together.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth could not help smiling at his easy manner of directing his
+friend.
+
+
+
+ “Did you speak from your own observation,” said she, “when you told him
+that my sister loved him, or merely from my information last spring?”
+
+
+
+ “From the former. I had narrowly observed her, during the two visits
+which I had lately made her here; and I was convinced of her affection.”
+
+
+
+ “And your assurance of it, I suppose, carried immediate conviction to
+him.”
+
+
+
+ “It did. Bingley is most unaffectedly modest. His diffidence had
+prevented his depending on his own judgment in so anxious a case, but
+his reliance on mine made everything easy. I was obliged to confess one
+thing, which for a time, and not unjustly, offended him. I could not
+allow myself to conceal that your sister had been in town three months
+last winter, that I had known it, and purposely kept it from him. He was
+angry. But his anger, I am persuaded, lasted no longer than he remained
+in any doubt of your sister’s sentiments. He has heartily forgiven me
+now.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth longed to observe that Mr. Bingley had been a most delightful
+friend; so easily guided that his worth was invaluable; but she checked
+herself. She remembered that he had yet to learn to be laughed at, and
+it was rather too early to begin. In anticipating the happiness of
+Bingley, which of course was to be inferior only to his own, he
+continued the conversation till they reached the house. In the hall they
+parted. {457} 
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“Unable to utter a syllable.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER LIX. 
+
+ 
+“ Y dear Lizzy, where can you have been walking to?” was a question
+which Elizabeth received from Jane as soon as she entered the room, and
+from all the others when they sat down to table. She had only to say in
+reply, that {458} they had wandered about till she was beyond her own
+knowledge. She coloured as she spoke; but neither that, nor anything
+else, awakened a suspicion of the truth.
+
+
+
+ The evening passed quietly, unmarked by anything extraordinary. The
+acknowledged lovers talked and laughed; the unacknowledged were silent.
+Darcy was not of a disposition in which happiness overflows in mirth;
+and Elizabeth, agitated and confused, rather knew that she was happy
+than felt herself to be so; for, besides the immediate embarrassment,
+there were other evils before her. She anticipated what would be felt in
+the family when her situation became known: she was aware that no one
+liked him but Jane; and even feared that with the others it was a
+ dislike which not all his fortune and consequence might do away.
+
+
+
+ At night she opened her heart to Jane. Though suspicion was very far
+from Miss Bennet’s general habits, she was absolutely incredulous here.
+
+
+
+ “You are joking, Lizzy. This cannot be! Engaged to Mr. Darcy! No, no,
+you shall not deceive me: I know it to be impossible.”
+
+
+
+ “This is a wretched beginning, indeed! My sole dependence was on you;
+and I am sure nobody else will believe me, if you do not. Yet, indeed, I
+am in earnest. I speak nothing but the truth. He still loves me, and we
+are engaged.”
+
+
+
+ Jane looked at her doubtingly. “Oh, Lizzy! it cannot be. I know how much
+you dislike him.”
+
+
+
+ “You know nothing of the matter. That is all to be forgot. Perhaps I
+did not always love him so well as I do now; but in such cases as these
+a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever
+remember it myself. {459} ”
+
+
+
+ Miss Bennet still looked all amazement. Elizabeth again, and more
+seriously, assured her of its truth.
+
+
+
+ “Good heaven! can it be really so? Yet now I must believe you,” cried
+Jane. “My dear, dear Lizzy, I would, I do congratulate you; but are you
+certain—forgive the question—are you quite certain that you can be
+happy with him?”
+
+
+
+ “There can be no doubt of that. It is settled between us already that we
+are to be the happiest couple in the world. But are you pleased, Jane?
+Shall you like to have such a brother?”
+
+
+
+ “Very, very much. Nothing could give either Bingley or myself more
+delight. But we considered it, we talked of it as impossible. And do you
+really love him quite well enough? Oh, Lizzy! do anything rather than
+marry without affection. Are you quite sure that you feel what you ought
+to do?”
+
+
+
+ “Oh, yes! You will only think I feel more than I ought to do when I
+tell you all.”
+
+
+
+ “What do you mean?”
+
+
+
+ “Why, I must confess that I love him better than I do Bingley. I am
+afraid you will be angry.”
+
+
+
+ “My dearest sister, now be, be serious. I want to talk very seriously.
+Let me know everything that I am to know without delay. Will you tell me
+how long you have loved him?”
+
+
+
+ “It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began;
+but I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds
+at Pemberley.”
+
+
+
+ Another entreaty that she would be serious, however, produced the
+desired effect; and she soon satisfied Jane by her solemn assurances of
+attachment. When convinced on that article, Miss Bennet had nothing
+further to wish. {460} 
+
+
+
+ “Now I am quite happy,” said she, “for you will be as happy as myself. I
+always had a value for him. Were it for nothing but his love of you, I
+must always have esteemed him; but now, as Bingley’s friend and your
+husband, there can be only Bingley and yourself more dear to me. But,
+Lizzy, you have been very sly, very reserved with me. How little did you
+tell me of what passed at Pemberley and Lambton! I owe all that I know
+of it to another, not to you.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth told her the motives of her secrecy. She had been unwilling to
+mention Bingley; and the unsettled state of her own feelings had made
+her equally avoid the name of his friend: but now she would no longer
+conceal from her his share in Lydia’s marriage. All was acknowledged,
+and half the night spent in conversation.
+
+
+
+ “Good gracious!” cried Mrs. Bennet, as she stood at a window the next
+morning, “if that disagreeable Mr. Darcy is not coming here again with
+our dear Bingley! What can he mean by being so tiresome as to be always
+coming here? I had no notion but he would go a-shooting, or something or
+other, and not disturb us with his company. What shall we do with him?
+Lizzy, you must walk out with him again, that he may not be in Bingley’s
+way.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth could hardly help laughing at so convenient a proposal; yet
+was really vexed that her mother should be always giving him such an
+epithet.
+
+
+
+ As soon as they entered, Bingley looked at her so expressively, and
+shook hands with such warmth, as left no doubt of his good information;
+and he soon afterwards said aloud, “Mrs. Bennet, have you no more lanes
+hereabouts in which Lizzy may lose her way again to-day?”
+
+
+
+ “I advise Mr. Darcy, and Lizzy, and Kitty,” said Mrs. {461} Bennet, “to walk
+to Oakham Mount this morning. It is a nice long walk, and Mr. Darcy has
+never seen the view.”
+
+
+
+ “It may do very well for the others,” replied Mr. Bingley; “but I am
+sure it will be too much for Kitty. Won’t it, Kitty?”
+
+
+
+ Kitty owned that she had rather stay at home. Darcy professed a great
+curiosity to see the view from the Mount, and Elizabeth silently
+consented. As she went upstairs to get ready, Mrs. Bennet followed her,
+saying,—
+
+
+
+ “I am quite sorry, Lizzy, that you should be forced to have that
+disagreeable man all to yourself; but I hope you will not mind it. It is
+all for Jane’s sake, you know; and there is no occasion for talking to
+him except just now and then; so do not put yourself to inconvenience.”
+
+
+
+ During their walk, it was resolved that Mr. Bennet’s consent should be
+asked in the course of the evening: Elizabeth reserved to herself the
+application for her mother’s. She could not determine how her mother
+would take it; sometimes doubting whether all his wealth and grandeur
+would be enough to overcome her abhorrence of the man; but whether she
+were violently set against the match, or violently delighted with it, it
+was certain that her manner would be equally ill adapted to do credit to
+her sense; and she could no more bear that Mr. Darcy should hear the
+first raptures of her joy, than the first vehemence of her
+disapprobation.
+
+
+
+ In the evening, soon after Mr. Bennet withdrew to the library, she saw
+Mr. Darcy rise also and follow him, and her agitation on seeing it was
+extreme. She did not fear her father’s opposition, but he was going to
+be made unhappy, and that it should be through her means; that she ,
+his favourite child, should be distressing him by her choice, should be
+filling him with fears and regrets in {462} disposing of her, was a wretched
+reflection, and she sat in misery till Mr. Darcy appeared again, when,
+looking at him, she was a little relieved by his smile. In a few minutes
+he approached the table where she was sitting with Kitty; and, while
+pretending to admire her work, said in a whisper, “Go to your father; he
+wants you in the library.” She was gone directly.
+
+
+
+ Her father was walking about the room, looking grave and anxious.
+“Lizzy,” said he, “what are you doing? Are you out of your senses to be
+accepting this man? Have not you always hated him?”
+
+
+
+ How earnestly did she then wish that her former opinions had been more
+reasonable, her expressions more moderate! It would have spared her from
+explanations and professions which it was exceedingly awkward to give;
+but they were now necessary, and she assured him, with some confusion,
+of her attachment to Mr. Darcy.
+
+
+
+ “Or, in other words, you are determined to have him. He is rich, to be
+sure, and you may have more fine clothes and fine carriages than Jane.
+But will they make you happy?”
+
+
+
+ “Have you any other objection,” said Elizabeth, “than your belief of my
+indifference?”
+
+
+
+ “None at all. We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort of man; but
+this would be nothing if you really liked him.”
+
+
+
+ “I do, I do like him,” she replied, with tears in her eyes; “I love him.
+Indeed he has no improper pride. He is perfectly amiable. You do not
+know what he really is; then pray do not pain me by speaking of him in
+such terms.”
+
+
+
+ “Lizzy,” said her father, “I have given him my consent. He is the kind
+of man, indeed, to whom I {463} should never dare refuse anything, which he
+condescended to ask. I now give it to you , if you are resolved on
+having him. But let me advise you to think better of it. I know your
+disposition, Lizzy. I know that you could be neither happy nor
+respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband, unless you looked
+up to him as a superior. Your lively talents would place you in the
+greatest danger in an unequal marriage. You could scarcely escape
+discredit and misery. My child, let me not have the grief of seeing
+ you unable to respect your partner in life. You know not what you are
+about.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth, still more affected, was earnest and solemn in her reply;
+and, at length, by repeated assurances that Mr. Darcy was really the
+object of her choice, by explaining the gradual change which her
+estimation of him had undergone, relating her absolute certainty that
+his affection was not the work of a day, but had stood the test of many
+months’ suspense, and enumerating with energy all his good qualities,
+she did conquer her father’s incredulity, and reconcile him to the
+match.
+
+
+
+ “Well, my dear,” said he, when she ceased speaking, “I have no more to
+say. If this be the case, he deserves you. I could not have parted with
+you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy.”
+
+
+
+ To complete the favourable impression, she then told him what Mr. Darcy
+had voluntarily done for Lydia. He heard her with astonishment.
+
+
+
+ “This is an evening of wonders, indeed! And so, Darcy did everything;
+made up the match, gave the money, paid the fellow’s debts, and got him
+his commission! So much the better. It will save me a world of trouble
+and economy. Had it been your uncle’s doing, I must and would have
+paid him; but these violent {464} young lovers carry everything their own
+way. I shall offer to pay him to-morrow, he will rant and storm about
+his love for you, and there will be an end of the matter.”
+
+
+
+ He then recollected her embarrassment a few days before on his reading
+Mr. Collins’s letter; and after laughing at her some time, allowed her
+at last to go, saying, as she quitted the room, “If any young men come
+for Mary or Kitty, send them in, for I am quite at leisure.”
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth’s mind was now relieved from a very heavy weight; and, after
+half an hour’s quiet reflection in her own room, she was able to join
+the others with tolerable composure. Everything was too recent for
+gaiety, but the evening passed tranquilly away; there was no longer
+anything material to be dreaded, and the comfort of ease and familiarity
+would come in time.
+
+
+
+ When her mother went up to her dressing-room at night, she followed her,
+and made the important communication. Its effect was most extraordinary;
+for, on first hearing it, Mrs. Bennet sat quite still, and unable to
+utter a syllable. Nor was it under many, many minutes, that she could
+comprehend what she heard, though not in general backward to credit what
+was for the advantage of her family, or that came in the shape of a
+lover to any of them. She began at length to recover, to fidget about in
+her chair, get up, sit down again, wonder, and bless herself.
+
+
+
+ “Good gracious! Lord bless me! only think! dear me! Mr. Darcy! Who would
+have thought it? And is it really true? Oh, my sweetest Lizzy! how rich
+and how great you will be! What pin-money, what jewels, what carriages
+you will have! Jane’s is nothing to it—nothing at all. I am so
+pleased—so happy. Such a charming man! so handsome! so tall! Oh, my
+dear {465} Lizzy! pray apologize for my having disliked him so much before. I
+hope he will overlook it. Dear, dear Lizzy. A house in town! Everything
+that is charming! Three daughters married! Ten thousand a year! Oh,
+Lord! what will become of me? I shall go distracted.”
+
+
+
+ This was enough to prove that her approbation need not be doubted; and
+Elizabeth, rejoicing that such an effusion was heard only by herself,
+soon went away. But before she had been three minutes in her own room,
+her mother followed her.
+
+
+
+ “My dearest child,” she cried, “I can think of nothing else. Ten
+thousand a year, and very likely more! ’Tis as good as a lord! And a
+special licence—you must and shall be married by a special licence.
+But, my dearest love, tell me what dish Mr. Darcy is particularly fond
+of, that I may have it to-morrow.”
+
+
+
+ This was a sad omen of what her mother’s behaviour to the gentleman
+himself might be; and Elizabeth found that, though in the certain
+possession of his warmest affection, and secure of her relations’
+consent, there was still something to be wished for. But the morrow
+passed off much better than she expected; for Mrs. Bennet luckily stood
+in such awe of her intended son-in-law, that she ventured not to speak
+to him, unless it was in her power to offer him any attention, or mark
+her deference for his opinion.
+
+
+
+ Elizabeth had the satisfaction of seeing her father taking pains to get
+acquainted with him; and Mr. Bennet soon assured her that he was rising
+every hour in his esteem.
+
+
+
+ “I admire all my three sons-in-law highly,” said he. “Wickham, perhaps,
+is my favourite; but I think I shall like your husband quite as well
+as Jane’s. {466} ”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+“The obsequious civility.”
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER LX. 
+
+ 
+ LIZABETH’S spirits soon rising to playfulness again, she wanted Mr.
+Darcy to account for his having ever fallen in love with her. “How could
+you begin?” said she. “I can comprehend your going on charmingly, when
+you had once made a beginning; but what could set you off in the first
+place? {467} ”
+
+
+
+ “I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which
+laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I
+knew that I had begun.”
+
+
+
+ “My beauty you had early withstood, and as for my manners—my behaviour
+to you was at least always bordering on the uncivil, and I never spoke
+to you without rather wishing to give you pain than not. Now, be
+sincere; did you admire me for my impertinence?”
+
+
+
+ “For the liveliness of your mind I did.”
+
+
+
+ “You may as well call it impertinence at once. It was very little less.
+The fact is, that you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious
+attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking,
+and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone. I roused and
+interested you, because I was so unlike them . Had you not been really
+amiable you would have hated me for it: but in spite of the pains you
+took to disguise yourself, your feelings were always noble and just; and
+in your heart you thoroughly despised the persons who so assiduously
+courted you. There—I have saved you the trouble of accounting for it;
+and really, all things considered, I begin to think it perfectly
+reasonable. To be sure you know no actual good of me—but nobody thinks
+of that when they fall in love.”
+
+
+
+ “Was there no good in your affectionate behaviour to Jane, while she was
+ill at Netherfield?”
+
+
+
+ “Dearest Jane! who could have done less for her? But make a virtue of it
+by all means. My good qualities are under your protection, and you are
+to exaggerate them as much as possible; and, in return, it belongs to me
+to find occasions for teasing and quarrelling with you as often as may
+be; and I shall begin directly, by asking you what made you so unwilling
+to come to the point at last? {468} What made you so shy of me, when you
+first called, and afterwards dined here? Why, especially, when you
+called, did you look as if you did not care about me?”
+
+
+
+ “Because you were grave and silent, and gave me no encouragement.”
+
+
+
+ “But I was embarrassed.”
+
+
+
+ “And so was I.”
+
+
+
+ “You might have talked to me more when you came to dinner.”
+
+
+
+ “A man who had felt less might.”
+
+
+
+ “How unlucky that you should have a reasonable answer to give, and that
+I should be so reasonable as to admit it! But I wonder how long you
+ would have gone on, if you had been left to yourself. I wonder when
+you would have spoken if I had not asked you! My resolution of
+thanking you for your kindness to Lydia had certainly great effect. Too
+much , I am afraid; for what becomes of the moral, if our comfort
+springs from a breach of promise, for I ought not to have mentioned the
+subject? This will never do.”
+
+
+
+ “You need not distress yourself. The moral will be perfectly fair. Lady
+Catherine’s unjustifiable endeavours to separate us were the means of
+removing all my doubts. I am not indebted for my present happiness to
+your eager desire of expressing your gratitude. I was not in a humour to
+wait for an opening of yours. My aunt’s intelligence had given me hope,
+and I was determined at once to know everything.”
+
+
+
+ “Lady Catherine has been of infinite use, which ought to make her happy,
+for she loves to be of use. But tell me, what did you come down to
+Netherfield for? Was it merely to ride to Longbourn and be embarrassed?
+or had you intended any more serious consequences? {469} ”
+
+
+
+ “My real purpose was to see you , and to judge, if I could, whether I
+might ever hope to make you love me. My avowed one, or what I avowed to
+myself, was to see whether your sister was still partial to Bingley, and
+if she were, to make the confession to him which I have since made.”
+
+
+
+ “Shall you ever have courage to announce to Lady Catherine what is to
+befall her?”
+
+
+
+ “I am more likely to want time than courage, Elizabeth. But it ought to
+be done; and if you will give me a sheet of paper it shall be done
+directly.”
+
+
+
+ “And if I had not a letter to write myself, I might sit by you, and
+admire the evenness of your writing, as another young lady once did. But
+I have an aunt, too, who must not be longer neglected.”
+
+
+
+ From an unwillingness to confess how much her intimacy with Mr. Darcy
+had been overrated, Elizabeth had never yet answered Mrs. Gardiner’s
+long letter; but now, having that to communicate which she knew would
+be most welcome, she was almost ashamed to find that her uncle and aunt
+had already lost three days of happiness, and immediately wrote as
+follows:—
+
+
+
+ “I would have thanked you before, my dear aunt, as I ought to have done,
+for your long, kind, satisfactory detail of particulars; but, to say the
+truth, I was too cross to write. You supposed more than really existed.
+But now suppose as much as you choose; give a loose to your fancy,
+indulge your imagination in every possible flight which the subject will
+afford, and unless you believe me actually married, you cannot greatly
+err. You must write again very soon, and praise him a great deal more
+than you did in your last. I thank you again and again, for not going to
+the Lakes. How could I be so {470} silly as to wish it! Your idea of the
+ponies is delightful. We will go round the park every day. I am the
+happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so
+before, but no one with such justice. I am happier even than Jane; she
+only smiles, I laugh. Mr. Darcy sends you all the love in the world that
+can be spared from me. You are all to come to Pemberley at Christmas.
+Yours,” etc.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Darcy’s letter to Lady Catherine was in a different style, and still
+different from either was what Mr. Bennet sent to Mr. Collins, in return
+for his last.
+
+
+
+ “Dear Sir, 
+
+
+
+ “I must trouble you once more for congratulations. Elizabeth will
+soon be the wife of Mr. Darcy. Console Lady Catherine as well as
+you can. But, if I were you, I would stand by the nephew. He has
+more to give.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yours sincerely,” etc.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ Miss Bingley’s congratulations to her brother on his approaching
+marriage were all that was affectionate and insincere. She wrote even to
+Jane on the occasion, to express her delight, and repeat all her former
+professions of regard. Jane was not deceived, but she was affected; and
+though feeling no reliance on her, could not help writing her a much
+kinder answer than she knew was deserved.
+
+
+
+ The joy which Miss Darcy expressed on receiving similar information was
+as sincere as her brother’s in sending it. Four sides of paper were
+insufficient to contain all her delight, and all her earnest desire of
+being loved by her sister.
+
+
+
+ Before any answer could arrive from Mr. Collins, or any congratulations
+to Elizabeth from his wife, the Longbourn family heard that the
+Collinses were come themselves to Lucas Lodge. The reason of this
+sudden {471} removal was soon evident. Lady Catherine had been rendered so
+exceedingly angry by the contents of her nephew’s letter, that
+Charlotte, really rejoicing in the match, was anxious to get away till
+the storm was blown over. At such a moment, the arrival of her friend
+was a sincere pleasure to Elizabeth, though in the course of their
+meetings she must sometimes think the pleasure dearly bought, when she
+saw Mr. Darcy exposed to all the parading and obsequious civility of her
+husband. He bore it, however, with admirable calmness. He could even
+listen to Sir William Lucas, when he complimented him on carrying away
+the brightest jewel of the country, and expressed his hopes of their all
+meeting frequently at St. James’s, with very decent composure. If he did
+shrug his shoulders, it was not till Sir William was out of sight.
+
+
+
+ Mrs. Philips’s vulgarity was another, and, perhaps, a greater tax on his
+forbearance; and though Mrs. Philips, as well as her sister, stood in
+too much awe of him to speak with the familiarity which Bingley’s
+good-humour encouraged; yet, whenever she did speak, she must be
+vulgar. Nor was her respect for him, though it made her more quiet, at
+all likely to make her more elegant. Elizabeth did all she could to
+shield him from the frequent notice of either, and was ever anxious to
+keep him to herself, and to those of her family with whom he might
+converse without mortification; and though the uncomfortable feelings
+arising from all this took from the season of courtship much of its
+pleasure, it added to the hope of the future; and she looked forward
+with delight to the time when they should be removed from society so
+little pleasing to either, to all the comfort and elegance of their
+family party at Pemberley. {472} 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+CHAPTER LXI. 
+
+ 
+ APPY for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got
+rid of her two most deserving daughters. With what delighted pride she
+afterwards visited Mrs. Bingley, and talked of Mrs. Darcy, may be
+guessed. I wish I could say, for the sake of her family, that the
+accomplishment of her earnest desire in the establishment of so many of
+her children produced so happy an effect as to make her a sensible,
+amiable, well-informed woman for the rest of her life; though, perhaps,
+it was lucky for her husband, who might not have relished domestic
+felicity in so unusual a form, that she still was occasionally nervous
+and invariably silly.
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bennet missed his second daughter exceedingly; his affection for her
+drew him oftener from home than anything else could do. He delighted in
+going to Pemberley, especially when he was least expected. {473} 
+
+
+
+ Mr. Bingley and Jane remained at Netherfield only a twelvemonth. So near
+a vicinity to her mother and Meryton relations was not desirable even to
+ his easy temper, or her affectionate heart. The darling wish of his
+sisters was then gratified: he bought an estate in a neighbouring county
+to Derbyshire; and Jane and Elizabeth, in addition to every other source
+of happiness, were within thirty miles of each other.
+
+
+
+ Kitty, to her very material advantage, spent the chief of her time with
+her two elder sisters. In society so superior to what she had generally
+known, her improvement was great. She was not of so ungovernable a
+temper as Lydia; and, removed from the influence of Lydia’s example, she
+became, by proper attention and management, less irritable, less
+ignorant, and less insipid. From the further disadvantage of Lydia’s
+society she was of course carefully kept; and though Mrs. Wickham
+frequently invited her to come and stay with her, with the promise of
+balls and young men, her father would never consent to her going.
+
+
+
+ Mary was the only daughter who remained at home; and she was necessarily
+drawn from the pursuit of accomplishments by Mrs. Bennet’s being quite
+unable to sit alone. Mary was obliged to mix more with the world, but
+she could still moralize over every morning visit; and as she was no
+longer mortified by comparisons between her sisters’ beauty and her own,
+it was suspected by her father that she submitted to the change without
+much reluctance.
+
+
+
+ As for Wickham and Lydia, their characters suffered no revolution from
+the marriage of her sisters. He bore with philosophy the conviction that
+Elizabeth must now become acquainted with whatever of his ingratitude
+and {474} falsehood had before been unknown to her; and, in spite of
+everything, was not wholly without hope that Darcy might yet be
+prevailed on to make his fortune. The congratulatory letter which
+Elizabeth received from Lydia on her marriage explained to her that, by
+his wife at least, if not by himself, such a hope was cherished. The
+letter was to this effect:—
+
+
+
+ “My dear Lizzy, 
+
+
+
+ “I wish you joy. If you love Mr. Darcy half so well as I do my dear
+Wickham, you must be very happy. It is a great comfort to have you
+so rich; and when you have nothing else to do, I hope you will
+think of us. I am sure Wickham would like a place at court very
+much; and I do not think we shall have quite money enough to live
+upon without some help. Any place would do of about three or four
+hundred a year; but, however, do not speak to Mr. Darcy about it,
+if you had rather not.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yours,” etc.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ As it happened that Elizabeth had much rather not, she endeavoured in
+her answer to put an end to every entreaty and expectation of the kind.
+Such relief, however, as it was in her power to afford, by the practice
+of what might be called economy in her own private expenses, she
+frequently sent them. It had always been evident to her that such an
+income as theirs, under the direction of two persons so extravagant in
+their wants, and heedless of the future, must be very insufficient to
+their support; and whenever they changed their quarters, either Jane or
+herself were sure of being applied to for some little assistance towards
+discharging their bills. Their manner of living, even when the
+restoration of peace dismissed them to a home, was unsettled in the
+extreme. They were always moving from place to place {475} in quest of a
+cheap situation, and always spending more than they ought. His affection
+for her soon sunk into indifference: hers lasted a little longer; and,
+in spite of her youth and her manners, she retained all the claims to
+reputation which her marriage had given her. Though Darcy could never
+receive him at Pemberley, yet, for Elizabeth’s sake, he assisted him
+further in his profession. Lydia was occasionally a visitor there, when
+her husband was gone to enjoy himself in London or Bath; and with the
+Bingleys they both of them frequently stayed so long, that even
+Bingley’s good-humour was overcome, and he proceeded so far as to talk 
+of giving them a hint to be gone.
+
+
+
+ Miss Bingley was very deeply mortified by Darcy’s marriage; but as she
+thought it advisable to retain the right of visiting at Pemberley, she
+dropped all her resentment; was fonder than ever of Georgiana, almost as
+attentive to Darcy as heretofore, and paid off every arrear of civility
+to Elizabeth.
+
+
+
+ Pemberley was now Georgiana’s home; and the attachment of the sisters
+was exactly what Darcy had hoped to see. They were able to love each
+other, even as well as they intended. Georgiana had the highest opinion
+in the world of Elizabeth; though at first she often listened with an
+astonishment bordering on alarm at her lively, sportive manner of
+talking to her brother. He, who had always inspired in herself a respect
+which almost overcame her affection, she now saw the object of open
+pleasantry. Her mind received knowledge which had never before fallen in
+her way. By Elizabeth’s instructions she began to comprehend that a
+woman may take liberties with her husband, which a brother will not
+always allow in a sister more than ten years younger than himself. {476} 
+
+
+
+ Lady Catherine was extremely indignant on the marriage of her nephew;
+and as she gave way to all the genuine frankness of her character, in
+her reply to the letter which announced its arrangement, she sent him
+language so very abusive, especially of Elizabeth, that for some time
+all intercourse was at an end. But at length, by Elizabeth’s persuasion,
+he was prevailed on to overlook the offence, and seek a reconciliation;
+and, after a little further resistance on the part of his aunt, her
+resentment gave way, either to her affection for him, or her curiosity
+to see how his wife conducted herself; and she condescended to wait on
+them at Pemberley, in spite of that pollution which its woods had
+received, not merely from the presence of such a mistress, but the
+visits of her uncle and aunt from the city.
+
+
+
+ With the Gardiners they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy,
+as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever
+sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing
+her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+CHISWICK PRESS:—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
+
+TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 
+ 
+ This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States,
+you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
+before using this eBook. 
+
+ Title : The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
+
+
+ 
+ Author : Arthur Conan Doyle
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Release date : March 1, 1999 [eBook #1661]
+
+ Most recently updated: October 10, 2023
+
+
+
+ Language : English
+
+
+
+ Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661 
+
+
+
+ Credits : an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer and Jose Menendez
+
+
+
+ 
+ *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES *** 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+THERE IS AN ILLUSTRATED EDITION OF THIS TITLE WHICH MAY VIEWED AT EBOOK 
+[ #48320 ] 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 
+ by Arthur Conan Doyle 
+ 
+ Contents 
+ 
+ 
+ I. A Scandal in Bohemia 
+ 
+ 
+ II. The Red-Headed League 
+ 
+ 
+ III. A Case of Identity 
+ 
+ 
+ IV. The Boscombe Valley Mystery 
+ 
+ 
+ V. The Five Orange Pips 
+ 
+ 
+ VI. The Man with the Twisted Lip 
+ 
+ 
+ VII. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle 
+ 
+ 
+ VIII. The Adventure of the Speckled Band 
+ 
+ 
+ IX. The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb 
+ 
+ 
+ X. The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor 
+ 
+ 
+ XI. The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet 
+ 
+ 
+ XII. The Adventure of the Copper Beeches 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ I.
+A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA 
+ I. 
+ 
+ T o Sherlock Holmes she
+is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other
+name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was
+not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and
+that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably
+balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing
+machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in
+a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a
+sneer. They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawing
+the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to
+admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was
+to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental
+results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own
+high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a
+nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was
+the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.
+
+
+
+ 
+I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each
+other. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up
+around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were
+sufficient to absorb all my attention, while Holmes, who loathed every form of
+society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street,
+buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine
+and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen
+nature. He was still, as ever, deeply attracted by the study of crime, and
+occupied his immense faculties and extraordinary powers of observation in
+following out those clues, and clearing up those mysteries which had been
+abandoned as hopeless by the official police. From time to time I heard some
+vague account of his doings: of his summons to Odessa in the case of the
+Trepoff murder, of his clearing up of the singular tragedy of the Atkinson
+brothers at Trincomalee, and finally of the mission which he had accomplished
+so delicately and successfully for the reigning family of Holland. Beyond these
+signs of his activity, however, which I merely shared with all the readers of
+the daily press, I knew little of my former friend and companion.
+
+
+
+ 
+One night—it was on the twentieth of March, 1888—I was returning
+from a journey to a patient (for I had now returned to civil practice), when my
+way led me through Baker Street. As I passed the well-remembered door, which
+must always be associated in my mind with my wooing, and with the dark
+incidents of the Study in Scarlet, I was seized with a keen desire to see
+Holmes again, and to know how he was employing his extraordinary powers. His
+rooms were brilliantly lit, and, even as I looked up, I saw his tall, spare
+figure pass twice in a dark silhouette against the blind. He was pacing the
+room swiftly, eagerly, with his head sunk upon his chest and his hands clasped
+behind him. To me, who knew his every mood and habit, his attitude and manner
+told their own story. He was at work again. He had risen out of his
+drug-created dreams and was hot upon the scent of some new problem. I rang the
+bell and was shown up to the chamber which had formerly been in part my own.
+
+
+
+ 
+His manner was not effusive. It seldom was; but he was glad, I think, to see
+me. With hardly a word spoken, but with a kindly eye, he waved me to an
+armchair, threw across his case of cigars, and indicated a spirit case and a
+gasogene in the corner. Then he stood before the fire and looked me over in his
+singular introspective fashion.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Wedlock suits you,” he remarked. “I think, Watson, that you
+have put on seven and a half pounds since I saw you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Seven!” I answered.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Indeed, I should have thought a little more. Just a trifle more, I
+fancy, Watson. And in practice again, I observe. You did not tell me that you
+intended to go into harness.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then, how do you know?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I see it, I deduce it. How do I know that you have been getting yourself
+very wet lately, and that you have a most clumsy and careless servant
+girl?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear Holmes,” said I, “this is too much. You would
+certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago. It is true that
+I had a country walk on Thursday and came home in a dreadful mess, but as I
+have changed my clothes I can’t imagine how you deduce it. As to Mary
+Jane, she is incorrigible, and my wife has given her notice, but there, again,
+I fail to see how you work it out.”
+
+
+
+ 
+He chuckled to himself and rubbed his long, nervous hands together.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is simplicity itself,” said he; “my eyes tell me that on
+the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather
+is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by
+someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to
+remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had
+been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant
+boot-slitting specimen of the London slavey. As to your practice, if a
+gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of
+nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of
+his top-hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull,
+indeed, if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical
+profession.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of
+deduction. “When I hear you give your reasons,” I remarked,
+“the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could
+easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am
+baffled until you explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as
+good as yours.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Quite so,” he answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself
+down into an armchair. “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction
+is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from
+the hall to this room.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Frequently.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How often?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, some hundreds of times.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then how many are there?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How many? I don’t know.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my
+point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and
+observed. By the way, since you are interested in these little problems, and
+since you are good enough to chronicle one or two of my trifling experiences,
+you may be interested in this.” He threw over a sheet of thick,
+pink-tinted notepaper which had been lying open upon the table. “It came
+by the last post,” said he. “Read it aloud.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The note was undated, and without either signature or address.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There will call upon you to-night, at a quarter to eight
+o’clock,” it said, “a gentleman who desires to consult you
+upon a matter of the very deepest moment. Your recent services to one of the
+royal houses of Europe have shown that you are one who may safely be trusted
+with matters which are of an importance which can hardly be exaggerated. This
+account of you we have from all quarters received. Be in your chamber then at
+that hour, and do not take it amiss if your visitor wear a mask.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“This is indeed a mystery,” I remarked. “What do you imagine
+that it means?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has
+data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of
+theories to suit facts. But the note itself. What do you deduce from it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+I carefully examined the writing, and the paper upon which it was written.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The man who wrote it was presumably well to do,” I remarked,
+endeavouring to imitate my companion’s processes. “Such paper could
+not be bought under half a crown a packet. It is peculiarly strong and
+stiff.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Peculiar—that is the very word,” said Holmes. “It is
+not an English paper at all. Hold it up to the light.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I did so, and saw a large “E” with a small “g,” a
+“P,” and a large “G” with a small “t” woven
+into the texture of the paper.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What do you make of that?” asked Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The name of the maker, no doubt; or his monogram, rather.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not at all. The ‘G’ with the small ‘t’ stands
+for ‘Gesellschaft,’ which is the German for ‘Company.’
+It is a customary contraction like our ‘Co.’ ‘P,’ of
+course, stands for ‘Papier.’ Now for the ‘Eg.’ Let us
+glance at our Continental Gazetteer.” He took down a heavy brown volume
+from his shelves. “Eglow, Eglonitz—here we are, Egria. It is in a
+German-speaking country—in Bohemia, not far from Carlsbad.
+‘Remarkable as being the scene of the death of Wallenstein, and for its
+numerous glass-factories and paper-mills.’ Ha, ha, my boy, what do you
+make of that?” His eyes sparkled, and he sent up a great blue triumphant
+cloud from his cigarette.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The paper was made in Bohemia,” I said.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Precisely. And the man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the
+peculiar construction of the sentence—‘This account of you we have
+from all quarters received.’ A Frenchman or Russian could not have
+written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs. It only
+remains, therefore, to discover what is wanted by this German who writes upon
+Bohemian paper and prefers wearing a mask to showing his face. And here he
+comes, if I am not mistaken, to resolve all our doubts.”
+
+
+
+ 
+As he spoke there was the sharp sound of horses’ hoofs and grating wheels
+against the curb, followed by a sharp pull at the bell. Holmes whistled.
+
+
+
+ 
+“A pair, by the sound,” said he. “Yes,” he continued,
+glancing out of the window. “A nice little brougham and a pair of
+beauties. A hundred and fifty guineas apiece. There’s money in this case,
+Watson, if there is nothing else.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I think that I had better go, Holmes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not a bit, Doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell. And
+this promises to be interesting. It would be a pity to miss it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But your client—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Never mind him. I may want your help, and so may he. Here he comes. Sit
+down in that armchair, Doctor, and give us your best attention.”
+
+
+
+ 
+A slow and heavy step, which had been heard upon the stairs and in the passage,
+paused immediately outside the door. Then there was a loud and authoritative
+tap.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Come in!” said Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+A man entered who could hardly have been less than six feet six inches in
+height, with the chest and limbs of a Hercules. His dress was rich with a
+richness which would, in England, be looked upon as akin to bad taste. Heavy
+bands of astrakhan were slashed across the sleeves and fronts of his
+double-breasted coat, while the deep blue cloak which was thrown over his
+shoulders was lined with flame-coloured silk and secured at the neck with a
+brooch which consisted of a single flaming beryl. Boots which extended halfway
+up his calves, and which were trimmed at the tops with rich brown fur,
+completed the impression of barbaric opulence which was suggested by his whole
+appearance. He carried a broad-brimmed hat in his hand, while he wore across
+the upper part of his face, extending down past the cheekbones, a black vizard
+mask, which he had apparently adjusted that very moment, for his hand was still
+raised to it as he entered. From the lower part of the face he appeared to be a
+man of strong character, with a thick, hanging lip, and a long, straight chin
+suggestive of resolution pushed to the length of obstinacy.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You had my note?” he asked with a deep harsh voice and a strongly
+marked German accent. “I told you that I would call.” He looked
+from one to the other of us, as if uncertain which to address.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pray take a seat,” said Holmes. “This is my friend and
+colleague, Dr. Watson, who is occasionally good enough to help me in my cases.
+Whom have I the honour to address?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You may address me as the Count Von Kramm, a Bohemian nobleman. I
+understand that this gentleman, your friend, is a man of honour and discretion,
+whom I may trust with a matter of the most extreme importance. If not, I should
+much prefer to communicate with you alone.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I rose to go, but Holmes caught me by the wrist and pushed me back into my
+chair. “It is both, or none,” said he. “You may say before
+this gentleman anything which you may say to me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Count shrugged his broad shoulders. “Then I must begin,” said
+he, “by binding you both to absolute secrecy for two years; at the end of
+that time the matter will be of no importance. At present it is not too much to
+say that it is of such weight it may have an influence upon European
+history.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I promise,” said Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And I.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You will excuse this mask,” continued our strange visitor.
+“The august person who employs me wishes his agent to be unknown to you,
+and I may confess at once that the title by which I have just called myself is
+not exactly my own.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was aware of it,” said Holmes dryly.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The circumstances are of great delicacy, and every precaution has to be
+taken to quench what might grow to be an immense scandal and seriously
+compromise one of the reigning families of Europe. To speak plainly, the matter
+implicates the great House of Ormstein, hereditary kings of Bohemia.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was also aware of that,” murmured Holmes, settling himself down
+in his armchair and closing his eyes.
+
+
+
+ 
+Our visitor glanced with some apparent surprise at the languid, lounging figure
+of the man who had been no doubt depicted to him as the most incisive reasoner
+and most energetic agent in Europe. Holmes slowly reopened his eyes and looked
+impatiently at his gigantic client.
+
+
+
+ 
+“If your Majesty would condescend to state your case,” he remarked,
+“I should be better able to advise you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The man sprang from his chair and paced up and down the room in uncontrollable
+agitation. Then, with a gesture of desperation, he tore the mask from his face
+and hurled it upon the ground. “You are right,” he cried; “I
+am the King. Why should I attempt to conceal it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why, indeed?” murmured Holmes. “Your Majesty had not spoken
+before I was aware that I was addressing Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von
+Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein, and hereditary King of Bohemia.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But you can understand,” said our strange visitor, sitting down
+once more and passing his hand over his high white forehead, “you can
+understand that I am not accustomed to doing such business in my own person.
+Yet the matter was so delicate that I could not confide it to an agent without
+putting myself in his power. I have come incognito from Prague for the
+purpose of consulting you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then, pray consult,” said Holmes, shutting his eyes once more.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The facts are briefly these: Some five years ago, during a lengthy visit
+to Warsaw, I made the acquaintance of the well-known adventuress, Irene Adler.
+The name is no doubt familiar to you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Kindly look her up in my index, Doctor,” murmured Holmes without
+opening his eyes. For many years he had adopted a system of docketing all
+paragraphs concerning men and things, so that it was difficult to name a
+subject or a person on which he could not at once furnish information. In this
+case I found her biography sandwiched in between that of a Hebrew rabbi and
+that of a staff-commander who had written a monograph upon the deep-sea fishes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Let me see!” said Holmes. “Hum! Born in New Jersey in the
+year 1858. Contralto—hum! La Scala, hum! Prima donna Imperial Opera of
+Warsaw—yes! Retired from operatic stage—ha! Living in
+London—quite so! Your Majesty, as I understand, became entangled with
+this young person, wrote her some compromising letters, and is now desirous of
+getting those letters back.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Precisely so. But how—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Was there a secret marriage?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“None.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No legal papers or certificates?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“None.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then I fail to follow your Majesty. If this young person should produce
+her letters for blackmailing or other purposes, how is she to prove their
+authenticity?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There is the writing.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pooh, pooh! Forgery.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My private note-paper.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Stolen.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My own seal.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Imitated.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My photograph.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Bought.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We were both in the photograph.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, dear! That is very bad! Your Majesty has indeed committed an
+indiscretion.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was mad—insane.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have compromised yourself seriously.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was only Crown Prince then. I was young. I am but thirty now.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It must be recovered.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We have tried and failed.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your Majesty must pay. It must be bought.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“She will not sell.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Stolen, then.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Five attempts have been made. Twice burglars in my pay ransacked her
+house. Once we diverted her luggage when she travelled. Twice she has been
+waylaid. There has been no result.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No sign of it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Absolutely none.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes laughed. “It is quite a pretty little problem,” said he.
+
+
+
+ 
+“But a very serious one to me,” returned the King reproachfully.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very, indeed. And what does she propose to do with the
+photograph?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“To ruin me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But how?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am about to be married.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“So I have heard.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“To Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen, second daughter of the King of
+Scandinavia. You may know the strict principles of her family. She is herself
+the very soul of delicacy. A shadow of a doubt as to my conduct would bring the
+matter to an end.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And Irene Adler?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Threatens to send them the photograph. And she will do it. I know that
+she will do it. You do not know her, but she has a soul of steel. She has the
+face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men.
+Rather than I should marry another woman, there are no lengths to which she
+would not go—none.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You are sure that she has not sent it yet?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am sure.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And why?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Because she has said that she would send it on the day when the
+betrothal was publicly proclaimed. That will be next Monday.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, then we have three days yet,” said Holmes with a yawn.
+“That is very fortunate, as I have one or two matters of importance to
+look into just at present. Your Majesty will, of course, stay in London for the
+present?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Certainly. You will find me at the Langham under the name of the Count
+Von Kramm.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then I shall drop you a line to let you know how we progress.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pray do so. I shall be all anxiety.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then, as to money?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have carte blanche .”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Absolutely?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I tell you that I would give one of the provinces of my kingdom to have
+that photograph.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And for present expenses?”
+
+
+
+ 
+The King took a heavy chamois leather bag from under his cloak and laid it on
+the table.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There are three hundred pounds in gold and seven hundred in
+notes,” he said.
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes scribbled a receipt upon a sheet of his note-book and handed it to him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And Mademoiselle’s address?” he asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Is Briony Lodge, Serpentine Avenue, St. John’s Wood.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes took a note of it. “One other question,” said he. “Was
+the photograph a cabinet?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then, good-night, your Majesty, and I trust that we shall soon have some
+good news for you. And good-night, Watson,” he added, as the wheels of
+the royal brougham rolled down the street. “If you will be good enough to
+call to-morrow afternoon at three o’clock I should like to chat this
+little matter over with you.”
+
+
+
+ II. 
+ 
+At three o’clock precisely I was at Baker Street, but Holmes had not yet
+returned. The landlady informed me that he had left the house shortly after
+eight o’clock in the morning. I sat down beside the fire, however, with
+the intention of awaiting him, however long he might be. I was already deeply
+interested in his inquiry, for, though it was surrounded by none of the grim
+and strange features which were associated with the two crimes which I have
+already recorded, still, the nature of the case and the exalted station of his
+client gave it a character of its own. Indeed, apart from the nature of the
+investigation which my friend had on hand, there was something in his masterly
+grasp of a situation, and his keen, incisive reasoning, which made it a
+pleasure to me to study his system of work, and to follow the quick, subtle
+methods by which he disentangled the most inextricable mysteries. So accustomed
+was I to his invariable success that the very possibility of his failing had
+ceased to enter into my head.
+
+
+
+ 
+It was close upon four before the door opened, and a drunken-looking groom,
+ill-kempt and side-whiskered, with an inflamed face and disreputable clothes,
+walked into the room. Accustomed as I was to my friend’s amazing powers
+in the use of disguises, I had to look three times before I was certain that it
+was indeed he. With a nod he vanished into the bedroom, whence he emerged in
+five minutes tweed-suited and respectable, as of old. Putting his hands into
+his pockets, he stretched out his legs in front of the fire and laughed
+heartily for some minutes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, really!” he cried, and then he choked and laughed again
+until he was obliged to lie back, limp and helpless, in the chair.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What is it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s quite too funny. I am sure you could never guess how I
+employed my morning, or what I ended by doing.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I can’t imagine. I suppose that you have been watching the habits,
+and perhaps the house, of Miss Irene Adler.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Quite so; but the sequel was rather unusual. I will tell you, however. I
+left the house a little after eight o’clock this morning in the character
+of a groom out of work. There is a wonderful sympathy and freemasonry among
+horsey men. Be one of them, and you will know all that there is to know. I soon
+found Briony Lodge. It is a bijou villa, with a garden at the back, but
+built out in front right up to the road, two stories. Chubb lock to the door.
+Large sitting-room on the right side, well furnished, with long windows almost
+to the floor, and those preposterous English window fasteners which a child
+could open. Behind there was nothing remarkable, save that the passage window
+could be reached from the top of the coach-house. I walked round it and
+examined it closely from every point of view, but without noting anything else
+of interest.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I then lounged down the street and found, as I expected, that there was
+a mews in a lane which runs down by one wall of the garden. I lent the ostlers
+a hand in rubbing down their horses, and received in exchange twopence, a glass
+of half-and-half, two fills of shag tobacco, and as much information as I could
+desire about Miss Adler, to say nothing of half a dozen other people in the
+neighbourhood in whom I was not in the least interested, but whose biographies
+I was compelled to listen to.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And what of Irene Adler?” I asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, she has turned all the men’s heads down in that part. She is
+the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet. So say the Serpentine-mews,
+to a man. She lives quietly, sings at concerts, drives out at five every day,
+and returns at seven sharp for dinner. Seldom goes out at other times, except
+when she sings. Has only one male visitor, but a good deal of him. He is dark,
+handsome, and dashing, never calls less than once a day, and often twice. He is
+a Mr. Godfrey Norton, of the Inner Temple. See the advantages of a cabman as a
+confidant. They had driven him home a dozen times from Serpentine-mews, and
+knew all about him. When I had listened to all they had to tell, I began to
+walk up and down near Briony Lodge once more, and to think over my plan of
+campaign.
+
+
+
+ 
+“This Godfrey Norton was evidently an important factor in the matter. He
+was a lawyer. That sounded ominous. What was the relation between them, and
+what the object of his repeated visits? Was she his client, his friend, or his
+mistress? If the former, she had probably transferred the photograph to his
+keeping. If the latter, it was less likely. On the issue of this question
+depended whether I should continue my work at Briony Lodge, or turn my
+attention to the gentleman’s chambers in the Temple. It was a delicate
+point, and it widened the field of my inquiry. I fear that I bore you with
+these details, but I have to let you see my little difficulties, if you are to
+understand the situation.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am following you closely,” I answered.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was still balancing the matter in my mind when a hansom cab drove up
+to Briony Lodge, and a gentleman sprang out. He was a remarkably handsome man,
+dark, aquiline, and moustached—evidently the man of whom I had heard. He
+appeared to be in a great hurry, shouted to the cabman to wait, and brushed
+past the maid who opened the door with the air of a man who was thoroughly at
+home.
+
+
+
+ 
+“He was in the house about half an hour, and I could catch glimpses of
+him in the windows of the sitting-room, pacing up and down, talking excitedly,
+and waving his arms. Of her I could see nothing. Presently he emerged, looking
+even more flurried than before. As he stepped up to the cab, he pulled a gold
+watch from his pocket and looked at it earnestly, ‘Drive like the
+devil,’ he shouted, ‘first to Gross & Hankey’s in Regent
+Street, and then to the Church of St. Monica in the Edgeware Road. Half a
+guinea if you do it in twenty minutes!’
+
+
+
+ 
+“Away they went, and I was just wondering whether I should not do well to
+follow them when up the lane came a neat little landau, the coachman with his
+coat only half-buttoned, and his tie under his ear, while all the tags of his
+harness were sticking out of the buckles. It hadn’t pulled up before she
+shot out of the hall door and into it. I only caught a glimpse of her at the
+moment, but she was a lovely woman, with a face that a man might die for.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘The Church of St. Monica, John,’ she cried,
+‘and half a sovereign if you reach it in twenty minutes.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“This was quite too good to lose, Watson. I was just balancing whether I
+should run for it, or whether I should perch behind her landau when a cab came
+through the street. The driver looked twice at such a shabby fare, but I jumped
+in before he could object. ‘The Church of St. Monica,’ said I,
+‘and half a sovereign if you reach it in twenty minutes.’ It was
+twenty-five minutes to twelve, and of course it was clear enough what was in
+the wind.
+
+
+
+ 
+“My cabby drove fast. I don’t think I ever drove faster, but the
+others were there before us. The cab and the landau with their steaming horses
+were in front of the door when I arrived. I paid the man and hurried into the
+church. There was not a soul there save the two whom I had followed and a
+surpliced clergyman, who seemed to be expostulating with them. They were all
+three standing in a knot in front of the altar. I lounged up the side aisle
+like any other idler who has dropped into a church. Suddenly, to my surprise,
+the three at the altar faced round to me, and Godfrey Norton came running as
+hard as he could towards me.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Thank God,’ he cried. ‘You’ll do. Come!
+Come!’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘What then?’ I asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Come, man, come, only three minutes, or it won’t be
+legal.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was half-dragged up to the altar, and before I knew where I was I
+found myself mumbling responses which were whispered in my ear, and vouching
+for things of which I knew nothing, and generally assisting in the secure tying
+up of Irene Adler, spinster, to Godfrey Norton, bachelor. It was all done in an
+instant, and there was the gentleman thanking me on the one side and the lady
+on the other, while the clergyman beamed on me in front. It was the most
+preposterous position in which I ever found myself in my life, and it was the
+thought of it that started me laughing just now. It seems that there had been
+some informality about their license, that the clergyman absolutely refused to
+marry them without a witness of some sort, and that my lucky appearance saved
+the bridegroom from having to sally out into the streets in search of a best
+man. The bride gave me a sovereign, and I mean to wear it on my watch chain in
+memory of the occasion.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“This is a very unexpected turn of affairs,” said I; “and
+what then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, I found my plans very seriously menaced. It looked as if the pair
+might take an immediate departure, and so necessitate very prompt and energetic
+measures on my part. At the church door, however, they separated, he driving
+back to the Temple, and she to her own house. ‘I shall drive out in the
+park at five as usual,’ she said as she left him. I heard no more. They
+drove away in different directions, and I went off to make my own
+arrangements.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Which are?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Some cold beef and a glass of beer,” he answered, ringing the
+bell. “I have been too busy to think of food, and I am likely to be
+busier still this evening. By the way, Doctor, I shall want your
+co-operation.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I shall be delighted.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You don’t mind breaking the law?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not in the least.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nor running a chance of arrest?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not in a good cause.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, the cause is excellent!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then I am your man.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was sure that I might rely on you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But what is it you wish?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“When Mrs. Turner has brought in the tray I will make it clear to you.
+Now,” he said as he turned hungrily on the simple fare that our landlady
+had provided, “I must discuss it while I eat, for I have not much time.
+It is nearly five now. In two hours we must be on the scene of action. Miss
+Irene, or Madame, rather, returns from her drive at seven. We must be at Briony
+Lodge to meet her.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And what then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You must leave that to me. I have already arranged what is to occur.
+There is only one point on which I must insist. You must not interfere, come
+what may. You understand?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am to be neutral?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“To do nothing whatever. There will probably be some small
+unpleasantness. Do not join in it. It will end in my being conveyed into the
+house. Four or five minutes afterwards the sitting-room window will open. You
+are to station yourself close to that open window.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You are to watch me, for I will be visible to you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And when I raise my hand—so—you will throw into the room
+what I give you to throw, and will, at the same time, raise the cry of fire.
+You quite follow me?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Entirely.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is nothing very formidable,” he said, taking a long
+cigar-shaped roll from his pocket. “It is an ordinary plumber’s
+smoke-rocket, fitted with a cap at either end to make it self-lighting. Your
+task is confined to that. When you raise your cry of fire, it will be taken up
+by quite a number of people. You may then walk to the end of the street, and I
+will rejoin you in ten minutes. I hope that I have made myself clear?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am to remain neutral, to get near the window, to watch you, and at the
+signal to throw in this object, then to raise the cry of fire, and to wait you
+at the corner of the street.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Precisely.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then you may entirely rely on me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is excellent. I think, perhaps, it is almost time that I prepare
+for the new role I have to play.”
+
+
+
+ 
+He disappeared into his bedroom and returned in a few minutes in the character
+of an amiable and simple-minded Nonconformist clergyman. His broad black hat,
+his baggy trousers, his white tie, his sympathetic smile, and general look of
+peering and benevolent curiosity were such as Mr. John Hare alone could have
+equalled. It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression,
+his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed.
+The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he
+became a specialist in crime.
+
+
+
+ 
+It was a quarter past six when we left Baker Street, and it still wanted ten
+minutes to the hour when we found ourselves in Serpentine Avenue. It was
+already dusk, and the lamps were just being lighted as we paced up and down in
+front of Briony Lodge, waiting for the coming of its occupant. The house was
+just such as I had pictured it from Sherlock Holmes’ succinct
+description, but the locality appeared to be less private than I expected. On
+the contrary, for a small street in a quiet neighbourhood, it was remarkably
+animated. There was a group of shabbily dressed men smoking and laughing in a
+corner, a scissors-grinder with his wheel, two guardsmen who were flirting with
+a nurse-girl, and several well-dressed young men who were lounging up and down
+with cigars in their mouths.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You see,” remarked Holmes, as we paced to and fro in front of the
+house, “this marriage rather simplifies matters. The photograph becomes a
+double-edged weapon now. The chances are that she would be as averse to its
+being seen by Mr. Godfrey Norton, as our client is to its coming to the eyes of
+his princess. Now the question is, Where are we to find the photograph?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Where, indeed?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is most unlikely that she carries it about with her. It is cabinet
+size. Too large for easy concealment about a woman’s dress. She knows
+that the King is capable of having her waylaid and searched. Two attempts of
+the sort have already been made. We may take it, then, that she does not carry
+it about with her.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Where, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Her banker or her lawyer. There is that double possibility. But I am
+inclined to think neither. Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do
+their own secreting. Why should she hand it over to anyone else? She could
+trust her own guardianship, but she could not tell what indirect or political
+influence might be brought to bear upon a business man. Besides, remember that
+she had resolved to use it within a few days. It must be where she can lay her
+hands upon it. It must be in her own house.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But it has twice been burgled.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pshaw! They did not know how to look.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But how will you look?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I will not look.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I will get her to show me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But she will refuse.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“She will not be able to. But I hear the rumble of wheels. It is her
+carriage. Now carry out my orders to the letter.”
+
+
+
+ 
+As he spoke the gleam of the sidelights of a carriage came round the curve of
+the avenue. It was a smart little landau which rattled up to the door of Briony
+Lodge. As it pulled up, one of the loafing men at the corner dashed forward to
+open the door in the hope of earning a copper, but was elbowed away by another
+loafer, who had rushed up with the same intention. A fierce quarrel broke out,
+which was increased by the two guardsmen, who took sides with one of the
+loungers, and by the scissors-grinder, who was equally hot upon the other side.
+A blow was struck, and in an instant the lady, who had stepped from her
+carriage, was the centre of a little knot of flushed and struggling men, who
+struck savagely at each other with their fists and sticks. Holmes dashed into
+the crowd to protect the lady; but, just as he reached her, he gave a cry and
+dropped to the ground, with the blood running freely down his face. At his fall
+the guardsmen took to their heels in one direction and the loungers in the
+other, while a number of better dressed people, who had watched the scuffle
+without taking part in it, crowded in to help the lady and to attend to the
+injured man. Irene Adler, as I will still call her, had hurried up the steps;
+but she stood at the top with her superb figure outlined against the lights of
+the hall, looking back into the street.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Is the poor gentleman much hurt?” she asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“He is dead,” cried several voices.
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, no, there’s life in him!” shouted another. “But
+he’ll be gone before you can get him to hospital.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He’s a brave fellow,” said a woman. “They would have
+had the lady’s purse and watch if it hadn’t been for him. They were
+a gang, and a rough one, too. Ah, he’s breathing now.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He can’t lie in the street. May we bring him in, marm?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Surely. Bring him into the sitting-room. There is a comfortable sofa.
+This way, please!”
+
+
+
+ 
+Slowly and solemnly he was borne into Briony Lodge and laid out in the
+principal room, while I still observed the proceedings from my post by the
+window. The lamps had been lit, but the blinds had not been drawn, so that I
+could see Holmes as he lay upon the couch. I do not know whether he was seized
+with compunction at that moment for the part he was playing, but I know that I
+never felt more heartily ashamed of myself in my life than when I saw the
+beautiful creature against whom I was conspiring, or the grace and kindliness
+with which she waited upon the injured man. And yet it would be the blackest
+treachery to Holmes to draw back now from the part which he had intrusted to
+me. I hardened my heart, and took the smoke-rocket from under my ulster. After
+all, I thought, we are not injuring her. We are but preventing her from
+injuring another.
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes had sat up upon the couch, and I saw him motion like a man who is in
+need of air. A maid rushed across and threw open the window. At the same
+instant I saw him raise his hand and at the signal I tossed my rocket into the
+room with a cry of “Fire!” The word was no sooner out of my mouth
+than the whole crowd of spectators, well dressed and ill—gentlemen,
+ostlers, and servant maids—joined in a general shriek of
+“Fire!” Thick clouds of smoke curled through the room and out at
+the open window. I caught a glimpse of rushing figures, and a moment later the
+voice of Holmes from within assuring them that it was a false alarm. Slipping
+through the shouting crowd I made my way to the corner of the street, and in
+ten minutes was rejoiced to find my friend’s arm in mine, and to get away
+from the scene of uproar. He walked swiftly and in silence for some few minutes
+until we had turned down one of the quiet streets which lead towards the
+Edgeware Road.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You did it very nicely, Doctor,” he remarked. “Nothing could
+have been better. It is all right.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have the photograph?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I know where it is.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And how did you find out?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“She showed me, as I told you she would.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am still in the dark.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I do not wish to make a mystery,” said he, laughing. “The
+matter was perfectly simple. You, of course, saw that everyone in the street
+was an accomplice. They were all engaged for the evening.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I guessed as much.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then, when the row broke out, I had a little moist red paint in the palm
+of my hand. I rushed forward, fell down, clapped my hand to my face, and became
+a piteous spectacle. It is an old trick.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That also I could fathom.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then they carried me in. She was bound to have me in. What else could
+she do? And into her sitting-room, which was the very room which I suspected.
+It lay between that and her bedroom, and I was determined to see which. They
+laid me on a couch, I motioned for air, they were compelled to open the window,
+and you had your chance.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How did that help you?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was all-important. When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her
+instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most. It is a
+perfectly overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of
+it. In the case of the Darlington Substitution Scandal it was of use to me, and
+also in the Arnsworth Castle business. A married woman grabs at her baby; an
+unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box. Now it was clear to me that our lady
+of to-day had nothing in the house more precious to her than what we are in
+quest of. She would rush to secure it. The alarm of fire was admirably done.
+The smoke and shouting were enough to shake nerves of steel. She responded
+beautifully. The photograph is in a recess behind a sliding panel just above
+the right bell-pull. She was there in an instant, and I caught a glimpse of it
+as she half drew it out. When I cried out that it was a false alarm, she
+replaced it, glanced at the rocket, rushed from the room, and I have not seen
+her since. I rose, and, making my excuses, escaped from the house. I hesitated
+whether to attempt to secure the photograph at once; but the coachman had come
+in, and as he was watching me narrowly, it seemed safer to wait. A little
+over-precipitance may ruin all.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And now?” I asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Our quest is practically finished. I shall call with the King to-morrow,
+and with you, if you care to come with us. We will be shown into the
+sitting-room to wait for the lady, but it is probable that when she comes she
+may find neither us nor the photograph. It might be a satisfaction to his
+Majesty to regain it with his own hands.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And when will you call?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“At eight in the morning. She will not be up, so that we shall have a
+clear field. Besides, we must be prompt, for this marriage may mean a complete
+change in her life and habits. I must wire to the King without delay.”
+
+
+
+ 
+We had reached Baker Street and had stopped at the door. He was searching his
+pockets for the key when someone passing said:
+
+
+
+ 
+“Good-night, Mister Sherlock Holmes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+There were several people on the pavement at the time, but the greeting
+appeared to come from a slim youth in an ulster who had hurried by.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’ve heard that voice before,” said Holmes, staring down the
+dimly lit street. “Now, I wonder who the deuce that could have
+been.”
+
+
+
+ III. 
+ 
+I slept at Baker Street that night, and we were engaged upon our toast and
+coffee in the morning when the King of Bohemia rushed into the room.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have really got it!” he cried, grasping Sherlock Holmes by
+either shoulder and looking eagerly into his face.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not yet.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But you have hopes?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have hopes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then, come. I am all impatience to be gone.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We must have a cab.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, my brougham is waiting.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then that will simplify matters.” We descended and started off
+once more for Briony Lodge.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Irene Adler is married,” remarked Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Married! When?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yesterday.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But to whom?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“To an English lawyer named Norton.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But she could not love him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am in hopes that she does.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And why in hopes?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Because it would spare your Majesty all fear of future annoyance. If the
+lady loves her husband, she does not love your Majesty. If she does not love
+your Majesty, there is no reason why she should interfere with your
+Majesty’s plan.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is true. And yet—! Well! I wish she had been of my own station!
+What a queen she would have made!” He relapsed into a moody silence,
+which was not broken until we drew up in Serpentine Avenue.
+
+
+
+ 
+The door of Briony Lodge was open, and an elderly woman stood upon the steps.
+She watched us with a sardonic eye as we stepped from the brougham.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I believe?” said she.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am Mr. Holmes,” answered my companion, looking at her with a
+questioning and rather startled gaze.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Indeed! My mistress told me that you were likely to call. She left this
+morning with her husband by the 5:15 train from Charing Cross for the
+Continent.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What!” Sherlock Holmes staggered back, white with chagrin and
+surprise. “Do you mean that she has left England?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Never to return.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And the papers?” asked the King hoarsely. “All is
+lost.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We shall see.” He pushed past the servant and rushed into the
+drawing-room, followed by the King and myself. The furniture was scattered
+about in every direction, with dismantled shelves and open drawers, as if the
+lady had hurriedly ransacked them before her flight. Holmes rushed at the
+bell-pull, tore back a small sliding shutter, and, plunging in his hand, pulled
+out a photograph and a letter. The photograph was of Irene Adler herself in
+evening dress, the letter was superscribed to “Sherlock Holmes, Esq. To
+be left till called for.” My friend tore it open, and we all three read
+it together. It was dated at midnight of the preceding night and ran in this
+way:
+
+
+
+ 
+“MY DEAR MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES,—You really did it very well. You took
+me in completely. Until after the alarm of fire, I had not a suspicion. But
+then, when I found how I had betrayed myself, I began to think. I had been
+warned against you months ago. I had been told that, if the King employed an
+agent, it would certainly be you. And your address had been given me. Yet, with
+all this, you made me reveal what you wanted to know. Even after I became
+suspicious, I found it hard to think evil of such a dear, kind old clergyman.
+But, you know, I have been trained as an actress myself. Male costume is
+nothing new to me. I often take advantage of the freedom which it gives. I sent
+John, the coachman, to watch you, ran upstairs, got into my walking clothes, as
+I call them, and came down just as you departed.
+
+    “Well, I followed you to your door, and so made sure that I was really an
+object of interest to the celebrated Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Then I, rather
+imprudently, wished you good-night, and started for the Temple to see my
+husband.
+
+    “We both thought the best resource was flight, when pursued by
+so formidable an antagonist; so you will find the nest empty when you call
+to-morrow. As to the photograph, your client may rest in peace. I love and am
+loved by a better man than he. The King may do what he will without hindrance
+from one whom he has cruelly wronged. I keep it only to safeguard myself, and
+to preserve a weapon which will always secure me from any steps which he might
+take in the future. I leave a photograph which he might care to possess; and I
+remain, dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes,
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very truly yours,
+
+“IRENE NORTON, née ADLER.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What a woman—oh, what a woman!” cried the King of Bohemia,
+when we had all three read this epistle. “Did I not tell you how quick
+and resolute she was? Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a
+pity that she was not on my level?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“From what I have seen of the lady, she seems, indeed, to be on a very
+different level to your Majesty,” said Holmes coldly. “I am sorry
+that I have not been able to bring your Majesty’s business to a more
+successful conclusion.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“On the contrary, my dear sir,” cried the King; “nothing
+could be more successful. I know that her word is inviolate. The photograph is
+now as safe as if it were in the fire.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am glad to hear your Majesty say so.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am immensely indebted to you. Pray tell me in what way I can reward
+you. This ring—” He slipped an emerald snake ring from his finger
+and held it out upon the palm of his hand.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your Majesty has something which I should value even more highly,”
+said Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have but to name it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“This photograph!”
+
+
+
+ 
+The King stared at him in amazement.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Irene’s photograph!” he cried. “Certainly, if you wish
+it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I thank your Majesty. Then there is no more to be done in the matter. I
+have the honour to wish you a very good morning.” He bowed, and, turning
+away without observing the hand which the King had stretched out to him, he set
+off in my company for his chambers.
+
+
+
+ 
+And that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom of Bohemia,
+and how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s
+wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard
+him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her
+photograph, it is always under the honourable title of the woman.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ II.
+THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE 
+ I had
+called upon my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, one day in the autumn of last year
+and found him in deep conversation with a very stout, florid-faced, elderly
+gentleman with fiery red hair. With an apology for my intrusion, I was about to
+withdraw when Holmes pulled me abruptly into the room and closed the door
+behind me.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You could not possibly have come at a better time, my dear
+Watson,” he said cordially.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was afraid that you were engaged.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“So I am. Very much so.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then I can wait in the next room.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not at all. This gentleman, Mr. Wilson, has been my partner and helper
+in many of my most successful cases, and I have no doubt that he will be of the
+utmost use to me in yours also.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The stout gentleman half rose from his chair and gave a bob of greeting, with a
+quick little questioning glance from his small fat-encircled eyes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Try the settee,” said Holmes, relapsing into his armchair and
+putting his fingertips together, as was his custom when in judicial moods.
+“I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre
+and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life. You have
+shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle,
+and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many of my own
+little adventures.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your cases have indeed been of the greatest interest to me,” I
+observed.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You will remember that I remarked the other day, just before we went
+into the very simple problem presented by Miss Mary Sutherland, that for
+strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which
+is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A proposition which I took the liberty of doubting.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You did, Doctor, but none the less you must come round to my view, for
+otherwise I shall keep on piling fact upon fact on you until your reason breaks
+down under them and acknowledges me to be right. Now, Mr. Jabez Wilson here has
+been good enough to call upon me this morning, and to begin a narrative which
+promises to be one of the most singular which I have listened to for some time.
+You have heard me remark that the strangest and most unique things are very
+often connected not with the larger but with the smaller crimes, and
+occasionally, indeed, where there is room for doubt whether any positive crime
+has been committed. As far as I have heard, it is impossible for me to say
+whether the present case is an instance of crime or not, but the course of
+events is certainly among the most singular that I have ever listened to.
+Perhaps, Mr. Wilson, you would have the great kindness to recommence your
+narrative. I ask you not merely because my friend Dr. Watson has not heard the
+opening part but also because the peculiar nature of the story makes me anxious
+to have every possible detail from your lips. As a rule, when I have heard some
+slight indication of the course of events, I am able to guide myself by the
+thousands of other similar cases which occur to my memory. In the present
+instance I am forced to admit that the facts are, to the best of my belief,
+unique.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The portly client puffed out his chest with an appearance of some little pride
+and pulled a dirty and wrinkled newspaper from the inside pocket of his
+greatcoat. As he glanced down the advertisement column, with his head thrust
+forward and the paper flattened out upon his knee, I took a good look at the
+man and endeavoured, after the fashion of my companion, to read the indications
+which might be presented by his dress or appearance.
+
+
+
+ 
+I did not gain very much, however, by my inspection. Our visitor bore every
+mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and
+slow. He wore rather baggy grey shepherd’s check trousers, a not
+over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with
+a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as
+an ornament. A frayed top-hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet
+collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as I would, there was
+nothing remarkable about the man save his blazing red head, and the expression
+of extreme chagrin and discontent upon his features.
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes’ quick eye took in my occupation, and he shook his head
+with a smile as he noticed my questioning glances. “Beyond the obvious
+facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he
+is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable
+amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Mr. Jabez Wilson started up in his chair, with his forefinger upon the paper,
+but his eyes upon my companion.
+
+
+
+ 
+“How, in the name of good-fortune, did you know all that, Mr.
+Holmes?” he asked. “How did you know, for example, that I did
+manual labour. It’s as true as gospel, for I began as a ship’s
+carpenter.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your hands, my dear sir. Your right hand is quite a size larger than
+your left. You have worked with it, and the muscles are more developed.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, the snuff, then, and the Freemasonry?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you how I read that,
+especially as, rather against the strict rules of your order, you use an
+arc-and-compass breastpin.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah, of course, I forgot that. But the writing?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What else can be indicated by that right cuff so very shiny for five
+inches, and the left one with the smooth patch near the elbow where you rest it
+upon the desk?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, but China?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The fish that you have tattooed immediately above your right wrist could
+only have been done in China. I have made a small study of tattoo marks and
+have even contributed to the literature of the subject. That trick of staining
+the fishes’ scales of a delicate pink is quite peculiar to China. When,
+in addition, I see a Chinese coin hanging from your watch-chain, the matter
+becomes even more simple.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Mr. Jabez Wilson laughed heavily. “Well, I never!” said he.
+“I thought at first that you had done something clever, but I see that
+there was nothing in it after all.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I begin to think, Watson,” said Holmes, “that I make a
+mistake in explaining. ‘ Omne ignotum pro magnifico ,’ you
+know, and my poor little reputation, such as it is, will suffer shipwreck if I
+am so candid. Can you not find the advertisement, Mr. Wilson?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, I have got it now,” he answered with his thick red finger
+planted halfway down the column. “Here it is. This is what began it all.
+You just read it for yourself, sir.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I took the paper from him and read as follows:
+
+
+
+ 
+“TO THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE: On account of the bequest of the late Ezekiah
+Hopkins, of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., there is now another vacancy open
+which entitles a member of the League to a salary of £ 4 a week for purely
+nominal services. All red-headed men who are sound in body and mind and above
+the age of twenty-one years, are eligible. Apply in person on Monday, at eleven
+o’clock, to Duncan Ross, at the offices of the League, 7 Pope’s
+Court, Fleet Street.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What on earth does this mean?” I ejaculated after I had twice read
+over the extraordinary announcement.
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes chuckled and wriggled in his chair, as was his habit when in high
+spirits. “It is a little off the beaten track, isn’t it?”
+said he. “And now, Mr. Wilson, off you go at scratch and tell us all
+about yourself, your household, and the effect which this advertisement had
+upon your fortunes. You will first make a note, Doctor, of the paper and the
+date.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is The Morning Chronicle of April 27, 1890. Just two months
+ago.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very good. Now, Mr. Wilson?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, it is just as I have been telling you, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,”
+said Jabez Wilson, mopping his forehead; “I have a small
+pawnbroker’s business at Coburg Square, near the City. It’s not a
+very large affair, and of late years it has not done more than just give me a
+living. I used to be able to keep two assistants, but now I only keep one; and
+I would have a job to pay him but that he is willing to come for half wages so
+as to learn the business.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What is the name of this obliging youth?” asked Sherlock Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“His name is Vincent Spaulding, and he’s not such a youth, either.
+It’s hard to say his age. I should not wish a smarter assistant, Mr.
+Holmes; and I know very well that he could better himself and earn twice what I
+am able to give him. But, after all, if he is satisfied, why should I put ideas
+in his head?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why, indeed? You seem most fortunate in having an employé who
+comes under the full market price. It is not a common experience among
+employers in this age. I don’t know that your assistant is not as
+remarkable as your advertisement.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, he has his faults, too,” said Mr. Wilson. “Never was
+such a fellow for photography. Snapping away with a camera when he ought to be
+improving his mind, and then diving down into the cellar like a rabbit into its
+hole to develop his pictures. That is his main fault, but on the whole
+he’s a good worker. There’s no vice in him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He is still with you, I presume?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, sir. He and a girl of fourteen, who does a bit of simple cooking
+and keeps the place clean—that’s all I have in the house, for I am
+a widower and never had any family. We live very quietly, sir, the three of us;
+and we keep a roof over our heads and pay our debts, if we do nothing more.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The first thing that put us out was that advertisement. Spaulding, he
+came down into the office just this day eight weeks, with this very paper in
+his hand, and he says:
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I wish to the Lord, Mr. Wilson, that I was a red-headed
+man.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Why that?’ I asks.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Why,’ says he, ‘here’s another vacancy on
+the League of the Red-headed Men. It’s worth quite a little fortune to
+any man who gets it, and I understand that there are more vacancies than there
+are men, so that the trustees are at their wits’ end what to do with the
+money. If my hair would only change colour, here’s a nice little crib all
+ready for me to step into.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Why, what is it, then?’ I asked. You see, Mr. Holmes,
+I am a very stay-at-home man, and as my business came to me instead of my
+having to go to it, I was often weeks on end without putting my foot over the
+door-mat. In that way I didn’t know much of what was going on outside,
+and I was always glad of a bit of news.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Have you never heard of the League of the Red-headed
+Men?’ he asked with his eyes open.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Never.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Why, I wonder at that, for you are eligible yourself for
+one of the vacancies.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘And what are they worth?’ I asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Oh, merely a couple of hundred a year, but the work is
+slight, and it need not interfere very much with one’s other
+occupations.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, you can easily think that that made me prick up my ears, for the
+business has not been over good for some years, and an extra couple of hundred
+would have been very handy.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Tell me all about it,’ said I.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Well,’ said he, showing me the advertisement,
+‘you can see for yourself that the League has a vacancy, and there is the
+address where you should apply for particulars. As far as I can make out, the
+League was founded by an American millionaire, Ezekiah Hopkins, who was very
+peculiar in his ways. He was himself red-headed, and he had a great sympathy
+for all red-headed men; so, when he died, it was found that he had left his
+enormous fortune in the hands of trustees, with instructions to apply the
+interest to the providing of easy berths to men whose hair is of that colour.
+From all I hear it is splendid pay and very little to do.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘But,’ said I, ‘there would be millions of
+red-headed men who would apply.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Not so many as you might think,’ he answered.
+‘You see it is really confined to Londoners, and to grown men. This
+American had started from London when he was young, and he wanted to do the old
+town a good turn. Then, again, I have heard it is no use your applying if your
+hair is light red, or dark red, or anything but real bright, blazing, fiery
+red. Now, if you cared to apply, Mr. Wilson, you would just walk in; but
+perhaps it would hardly be worth your while to put yourself out of the way for
+the sake of a few hundred pounds.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now, it is a fact, gentlemen, as you may see for yourselves, that my
+hair is of a very full and rich tint, so that it seemed to me that if there was
+to be any competition in the matter I stood as good a chance as any man that I
+had ever met. Vincent Spaulding seemed to know so much about it that I thought
+he might prove useful, so I just ordered him to put up the shutters for the day
+and to come right away with me. He was very willing to have a holiday, so we
+shut the business up and started off for the address that was given us in the
+advertisement.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I never hope to see such a sight as that again, Mr. Holmes. From north,
+south, east, and west every man who had a shade of red in his hair had tramped
+into the city to answer the advertisement. Fleet Street was choked with
+red-headed folk, and Pope’s Court looked like a coster’s orange
+barrow. I should not have thought there were so many in the whole country as
+were brought together by that single advertisement. Every shade of colour they
+were—straw, lemon, orange, brick, Irish-setter, liver, clay; but, as
+Spaulding said, there were not many who had the real vivid flame-coloured tint.
+When I saw how many were waiting, I would have given it up in despair; but
+Spaulding would not hear of it. How he did it I could not imagine, but he
+pushed and pulled and butted until he got me through the crowd, and right up to
+the steps which led to the office. There was a double stream upon the stair,
+some going up in hope, and some coming back dejected; but we wedged in as well
+as we could and soon found ourselves in the office.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your experience has been a most entertaining one,” remarked Holmes
+as his client paused and refreshed his memory with a huge pinch of snuff.
+“Pray continue your very interesting statement.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There was nothing in the office but a couple of wooden chairs and a deal
+table, behind which sat a small man with a head that was even redder than mine.
+He said a few words to each candidate as he came up, and then he always managed
+to find some fault in them which would disqualify them. Getting a vacancy did
+not seem to be such a very easy matter, after all. However, when our turn came
+the little man was much more favourable to me than to any of the others, and he
+closed the door as we entered, so that he might have a private word with us.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘This is Mr. Jabez Wilson,’ said my assistant,
+‘and he is willing to fill a vacancy in the League.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘And he is admirably suited for it,’ the other
+answered. ‘He has every requirement. I cannot recall when I have seen
+anything so fine.’ He took a step backward, cocked his head on one side,
+and gazed at my hair until I felt quite bashful. Then suddenly he plunged
+forward, wrung my hand, and congratulated me warmly on my success.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘It would be injustice to hesitate,’ said he.
+‘You will, however, I am sure, excuse me for taking an obvious
+precaution.’ With that he seized my hair in both his hands, and tugged
+until I yelled with the pain. ‘There is water in your eyes,’ said
+he as he released me. ‘I perceive that all is as it should be. But we
+have to be careful, for we have twice been deceived by wigs and once by paint.
+I could tell you tales of cobbler’s wax which would disgust you with
+human nature.’ He stepped over to the window and shouted through it at
+the top of his voice that the vacancy was filled. A groan of disappointment
+came up from below, and the folk all trooped away in different directions until
+there was not a red-head to be seen except my own and that of the manager.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘My name,’ said he, ‘is Mr. Duncan Ross, and I
+am myself one of the pensioners upon the fund left by our noble benefactor. Are
+you a married man, Mr. Wilson? Have you a family?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“I answered that I had not.
+
+
+
+ 
+“His face fell immediately.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Dear me!’ he said gravely, ‘that is very
+serious indeed! I am sorry to hear you say that. The fund was, of course, for
+the propagation and spread of the red-heads as well as for their maintenance.
+It is exceedingly unfortunate that you should be a bachelor.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“My face lengthened at this, Mr. Holmes, for I thought that I was not to
+have the vacancy after all; but after thinking it over for a few minutes he
+said that it would be all right.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘In the case of another,’ said he, ‘the
+objection might be fatal, but we must stretch a point in favour of a man with
+such a head of hair as yours. When shall you be able to enter upon your new
+duties?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Well, it is a little awkward, for I have a business
+already,’ said I.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Oh, never mind about that, Mr. Wilson!’ said Vincent
+Spaulding. ‘I should be able to look after that for you.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘What would be the hours?’ I asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Ten to two.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now a pawnbroker’s business is mostly done of an evening, Mr.
+Holmes, especially Thursday and Friday evening, which is just before pay-day;
+so it would suit me very well to earn a little in the mornings. Besides, I knew
+that my assistant was a good man, and that he would see to anything that turned
+up.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘That would suit me very well,’ said I. ‘And the
+pay?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Is £ 4 a week.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘And the work?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Is purely nominal.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘What do you call purely nominal?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Well, you have to be in the office, or at least in the
+building, the whole time. If you leave, you forfeit your whole position
+forever. The will is very clear upon that point. You don’t comply with
+the conditions if you budge from the office during that time.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘It’s only four hours a day, and I should not think of
+leaving,’ said I.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘No excuse will avail,’ said Mr. Duncan Ross;
+‘neither sickness nor business nor anything else. There you must stay, or
+you lose your billet.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘And the work?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Is to copy out the Encyclopædia Britannica . There is the
+first volume of it in that press. You must find your own ink, pens, and
+blotting-paper, but we provide this table and chair. Will you be ready
+to-morrow?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Certainly,’ I answered.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Then, good-bye, Mr. Jabez Wilson, and let me congratulate
+you once more on the important position which you have been fortunate enough to
+gain.’ He bowed me out of the room and I went home with my assistant,
+hardly knowing what to say or do, I was so pleased at my own good fortune.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, I thought over the matter all day, and by evening I was in low
+spirits again; for I had quite persuaded myself that the whole affair must be
+some great hoax or fraud, though what its object might be I could not imagine.
+It seemed altogether past belief that anyone could make such a will, or that
+they would pay such a sum for doing anything so simple as copying out the
+ Encyclopædia Britannica . Vincent Spaulding did what he could to cheer me
+up, but by bedtime I had reasoned myself out of the whole thing. However, in
+the morning I determined to have a look at it anyhow, so I bought a penny
+bottle of ink, and with a quill-pen, and seven sheets of foolscap paper, I
+started off for Pope’s Court.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, to my surprise and delight, everything was as right as possible.
+The table was set out ready for me, and Mr. Duncan Ross was there to see that I
+got fairly to work. He started me off upon the letter A, and then he left me;
+but he would drop in from time to time to see that all was right with me. At
+two o’clock he bade me good-day, complimented me upon the amount that I
+had written, and locked the door of the office after me.
+
+
+
+ 
+“This went on day after day, Mr. Holmes, and on Saturday the manager came
+in and planked down four golden sovereigns for my week’s work. It was the
+same next week, and the same the week after. Every morning I was there at ten,
+and every afternoon I left at two. By degrees Mr. Duncan Ross took to coming in
+only once of a morning, and then, after a time, he did not come in at all.
+Still, of course, I never dared to leave the room for an instant, for I was not
+sure when he might come, and the billet was such a good one, and suited me so
+well, that I would not risk the loss of it.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Eight weeks passed away like this, and I had written about Abbots and
+Archery and Armour and Architecture and Attica, and hoped with diligence that I
+might get on to the B’s before very long. It cost me something in
+foolscap, and I had pretty nearly filled a shelf with my writings. And then
+suddenly the whole business came to an end.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“To an end?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, sir. And no later than this morning. I went to my work as usual at
+ten o’clock, but the door was shut and locked, with a little square of
+cardboard hammered on to the middle of the panel with a tack. Here it is, and
+you can read for yourself.”
+
+
+
+ 
+He held up a piece of white cardboard about the size of a sheet of note-paper.
+It read in this fashion:
+
+
+
+ 
+“THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE IS DISSOLVED. October 9, 1890.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes and I surveyed this curt announcement and the rueful face
+behind it, until the comical side of the affair so completely overtopped every
+other consideration that we both burst out into a roar of laughter.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I cannot see that there is anything very funny,” cried our client,
+flushing up to the roots of his flaming head. “If you can do nothing
+better than laugh at me, I can go elsewhere.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, no,” cried Holmes, shoving him back into the chair from which
+he had half risen. “I really wouldn’t miss your case for the world.
+It is most refreshingly unusual. But there is, if you will excuse my saying so,
+something just a little funny about it. Pray what steps did you take when you
+found the card upon the door?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was staggered, sir. I did not know what to do. Then I called at the
+offices round, but none of them seemed to know anything about it. Finally, I
+went to the landlord, who is an accountant living on the ground floor, and I
+asked him if he could tell me what had become of the Red-headed League. He said
+that he had never heard of any such body. Then I asked him who Mr. Duncan Ross
+was. He answered that the name was new to him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Well,’ said I, ‘the gentleman at No. 4.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘What, the red-headed man?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Yes.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Oh,’ said he, ‘his name was William Morris. He
+was a solicitor and was using my room as a temporary convenience until his new
+premises were ready. He moved out yesterday.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Where could I find him?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Oh, at his new offices. He did tell me the address. Yes, 17
+King Edward Street, near St. Paul’s.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“I started off, Mr. Holmes, but when I got to that address it was a
+manufactory of artificial knee-caps, and no one in it had ever heard of either
+Mr. William Morris or Mr. Duncan Ross.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And what did you do then?” asked Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I went home to Saxe-Coburg Square, and I took the advice of my
+assistant. But he could not help me in any way. He could only say that if I
+waited I should hear by post. But that was not quite good enough, Mr. Holmes. I
+did not wish to lose such a place without a struggle, so, as I had heard that
+you were good enough to give advice to poor folk who were in need of it, I came
+right away to you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And you did very wisely,” said Holmes. “Your case is an
+exceedingly remarkable one, and I shall be happy to look into it. From what you
+have told me I think that it is possible that graver issues hang from it than
+might at first sight appear.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Grave enough!” said Mr. Jabez Wilson. “Why, I have lost four
+pound a week.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“As far as you are personally concerned,” remarked Holmes, “I
+do not see that you have any grievance against this extraordinary league. On
+the contrary, you are, as I understand, richer by some £ 30, to say nothing of
+the minute knowledge which you have gained on every subject which comes under
+the letter A. You have lost nothing by them.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, sir. But I want to find out about them, and who they are, and what
+their object was in playing this prank—if it was a prank—upon me.
+It was a pretty expensive joke for them, for it cost them two and thirty
+pounds.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We shall endeavour to clear up these points for you. And, first, one or
+two questions, Mr. Wilson. This assistant of yours who first called your
+attention to the advertisement—how long had he been with you?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“About a month then.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How did he come?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In answer to an advertisement.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Was he the only applicant?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, I had a dozen.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why did you pick him?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Because he was handy and would come cheap.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“At half wages, in fact.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What is he like, this Vincent Spaulding?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Small, stout-built, very quick in his ways, no hair on his face, though
+he’s not short of thirty. Has a white splash of acid upon his
+forehead.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes sat up in his chair in considerable excitement. “I thought as
+much,” said he. “Have you ever observed that his ears are pierced
+for earrings?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, sir. He told me that a gipsy had done it for him when he was a
+lad.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Hum!” said Holmes, sinking back in deep thought. “He is
+still with you?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, yes, sir; I have only just left him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And has your business been attended to in your absence?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nothing to complain of, sir. There’s never very much to do of a
+morning.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That will do, Mr. Wilson. I shall be happy to give you an opinion upon
+the subject in the course of a day or two. To-day is Saturday, and I hope that
+by Monday we may come to a conclusion.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, Watson,” said Holmes when our visitor had left us,
+“what do you make of it all?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I make nothing of it,” I answered frankly. “It is a most
+mysterious business.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“As a rule,” said Holmes, “the more bizarre a thing is the
+less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes
+which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to
+identify. But I must be prompt over this matter.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What are you going to do, then?” I asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“To smoke,” he answered. “It is quite a three pipe problem,
+and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.” He curled
+himself up in his chair, with his thin knees drawn up to his hawk-like nose,
+and there he sat with his eyes closed and his black clay pipe thrusting out
+like the bill of some strange bird. I had come to the conclusion that he had
+dropped asleep, and indeed was nodding myself, when he suddenly sprang out of
+his chair with the gesture of a man who has made up his mind and put his pipe
+down upon the mantelpiece.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Sarasate plays at the St. James’s Hall this afternoon,” he
+remarked. “What do you think, Watson? Could your patients spare you for a
+few hours?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have nothing to do to-day. My practice is never very absorbing.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then put on your hat and come. I am going through the City first, and we
+can have some lunch on the way. I observe that there is a good deal of German
+music on the programme, which is rather more to my taste than Italian or
+French. It is introspective, and I want to introspect. Come along!”
+
+
+
+ 
+We travelled by the Underground as far as Aldersgate; and a short walk took us
+to Saxe-Coburg Square, the scene of the singular story which we had listened to
+in the morning. It was a poky, little, shabby-genteel place, where four lines
+of dingy two-storied brick houses looked out into a small railed-in enclosure,
+where a lawn of weedy grass and a few clumps of faded laurel bushes made a hard
+fight against a smoke-laden and uncongenial atmosphere. Three gilt balls and a
+brown board with “JABEZ WILSON” in white letters, upon a corner
+house, announced the place where our red-headed client carried on his business.
+Sherlock Holmes stopped in front of it with his head on one side and looked it
+all over, with his eyes shining brightly between puckered lids. Then he walked
+slowly up the street, and then down again to the corner, still looking keenly
+at the houses. Finally he returned to the pawnbroker’s, and, having
+thumped vigorously upon the pavement with his stick two or three times, he went
+up to the door and knocked. It was instantly opened by a bright-looking,
+clean-shaven young fellow, who asked him to step in.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you,” said Holmes, “I only wished to ask you how you
+would go from here to the Strand.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Third right, fourth left,” answered the assistant promptly,
+closing the door.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Smart fellow, that,” observed Holmes as we walked away. “He
+is, in my judgment, the fourth smartest man in London, and for daring I am not
+sure that he has not a claim to be third. I have known something of him
+before.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Evidently,” said I, “Mr. Wilson’s assistant counts for
+a good deal in this mystery of the Red-headed League. I am sure that you
+inquired your way merely in order that you might see him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The knees of his trousers.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And what did you see?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What I expected to see.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why did you beat the pavement?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear doctor, this is a time for observation, not for talk. We are
+spies in an enemy’s country. We know something of Saxe-Coburg Square. Let
+us now explore the parts which lie behind it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The road in which we found ourselves as we turned round the corner from the
+retired Saxe-Coburg Square presented as great a contrast to it as the front of
+a picture does to the back. It was one of the main arteries which conveyed the
+traffic of the City to the north and west. The roadway was blocked with the
+immense stream of commerce flowing in a double tide inward and outward, while
+the footpaths were black with the hurrying swarm of pedestrians. It was
+difficult to realise as we looked at the line of fine shops and stately
+business premises that they really abutted on the other side upon the faded and
+stagnant square which we had just quitted.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Let me see,” said Holmes, standing at the corner and glancing
+along the line, “I should like just to remember the order of the houses
+here. It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London. There is
+Mortimer’s, the tobacconist, the little newspaper shop, the Coburg branch
+of the City and Suburban Bank, the Vegetarian Restaurant, and McFarlane’s
+carriage-building depot. That carries us right on to the other block. And now,
+Doctor, we’ve done our work, so it’s time we had some play. A
+sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is
+sweetness and delicacy and harmony, and there are no red-headed clients to vex
+us with their conundrums.”
+
+
+
+ 
+My friend was an enthusiastic musician, being himself not only a very capable
+performer but a composer of no ordinary merit. All the afternoon he sat in the
+stalls wrapped in the most perfect happiness, gently waving his long, thin
+fingers in time to the music, while his gently smiling face and his languid,
+dreamy eyes were as unlike those of Holmes the sleuth-hound, Holmes the
+relentless, keen-witted, ready-handed criminal agent, as it was possible to
+conceive. In his singular character the dual nature alternately asserted
+itself, and his extreme exactness and astuteness represented, as I have often
+thought, the reaction against the poetic and contemplative mood which
+occasionally predominated in him. The swing of his nature took him from extreme
+languor to devouring energy; and, as I knew well, he was never so truly
+formidable as when, for days on end, he had been lounging in his armchair amid
+his improvisations and his black-letter editions. Then it was that the lust of
+the chase would suddenly come upon him, and that his brilliant reasoning power
+would rise to the level of intuition, until those who were unacquainted with
+his methods would look askance at him as on a man whose knowledge was not that
+of other mortals. When I saw him that afternoon so enwrapped in the music at
+St. James’s Hall I felt that an evil time might be coming upon those whom
+he had set himself to hunt down.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You want to go home, no doubt, Doctor,” he remarked as we emerged.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, it would be as well.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And I have some business to do which will take some hours. This business
+at Coburg Square is serious.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why serious?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A considerable crime is in contemplation. I have every reason to believe
+that we shall be in time to stop it. But to-day being Saturday rather
+complicates matters. I shall want your help to-night.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“At what time?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ten will be early enough.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I shall be at Baker Street at ten.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very well. And, I say, Doctor, there may be some little danger, so
+kindly put your army revolver in your pocket.” He waved his hand, turned
+on his heel, and disappeared in an instant among the crowd.
+
+
+
+ 
+I trust that I am not more dense than my neighbours, but I was always oppressed
+with a sense of my own stupidity in my dealings with Sherlock Holmes. Here I
+had heard what he had heard, I had seen what he had seen, and yet from his
+words it was evident that he saw clearly not only what had happened but what
+was about to happen, while to me the whole business was still confused and
+grotesque. As I drove home to my house in Kensington I thought over it all,
+from the extraordinary story of the red-headed copier of the
+ Encyclopædia down to the visit to Saxe-Coburg Square, and the ominous
+words with which he had parted from me. What was this nocturnal expedition, and
+why should I go armed? Where were we going, and what were we to do? I had the
+hint from Holmes that this smooth-faced pawnbroker’s assistant was a
+formidable man—a man who might play a deep game. I tried to puzzle it
+out, but gave it up in despair and set the matter aside until night should
+bring an explanation.
+
+
+
+ 
+It was a quarter-past nine when I started from home and made my way across the
+Park, and so through Oxford Street to Baker Street. Two hansoms were standing
+at the door, and as I entered the passage I heard the sound of voices from
+above. On entering his room, I found Holmes in animated conversation with two
+men, one of whom I recognised as Peter Jones, the official police agent, while
+the other was a long, thin, sad-faced man, with a very shiny hat and
+oppressively respectable frock-coat.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ha! Our party is complete,” said Holmes, buttoning up his
+pea-jacket and taking his heavy hunting crop from the rack. “Watson, I
+think you know Mr. Jones, of Scotland Yard? Let me introduce you to Mr.
+Merryweather, who is to be our companion in to-night’s adventure.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We’re hunting in couples again, Doctor, you see,” said Jones
+in his consequential way. “Our friend here is a wonderful man for
+starting a chase. All he wants is an old dog to help him to do the running
+down.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I hope a wild goose may not prove to be the end of our chase,”
+observed Mr. Merryweather gloomily.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You may place considerable confidence in Mr. Holmes, sir,” said
+the police agent loftily. “He has his own little methods, which are, if
+he won’t mind my saying so, just a little too theoretical and fantastic,
+but he has the makings of a detective in him. It is not too much to say that
+once or twice, as in that business of the Sholto murder and the Agra treasure,
+he has been more nearly correct than the official force.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, if you say so, Mr. Jones, it is all right,” said the stranger
+with deference. “Still, I confess that I miss my rubber. It is the first
+Saturday night for seven-and-twenty years that I have not had my rubber.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I think you will find,” said Sherlock Holmes, “that you will
+play for a higher stake to-night than you have ever done yet, and that the play
+will be more exciting. For you, Mr. Merryweather, the stake will be some £
+30,000; and for you, Jones, it will be the man upon whom you wish to lay your
+hands.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“John Clay, the murderer, thief, smasher, and forger. He’s a young
+man, Mr. Merryweather, but he is at the head of his profession, and I would
+rather have my bracelets on him than on any criminal in London. He’s a
+remarkable man, is young John Clay. His grandfather was a royal duke, and he
+himself has been to Eton and Oxford. His brain is as cunning as his fingers,
+and though we meet signs of him at every turn, we never know where to find the
+man himself. He’ll crack a crib in Scotland one week, and be raising
+money to build an orphanage in Cornwall the next. I’ve been on his track
+for years and have never set eyes on him yet.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I hope that I may have the pleasure of introducing you to-night.
+I’ve had one or two little turns also with Mr. John Clay, and I agree
+with you that he is at the head of his profession. It is past ten, however, and
+quite time that we started. If you two will take the first hansom, Watson and I
+will follow in the second.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes was not very communicative during the long drive and lay back
+in the cab humming the tunes which he had heard in the afternoon. We rattled
+through an endless labyrinth of gas-lit streets until we emerged into
+Farrington Street.
+
+
+
+ 
+“We are close there now,” my friend remarked. “This fellow
+Merryweather is a bank director, and personally interested in the matter. I
+thought it as well to have Jones with us also. He is not a bad fellow, though
+an absolute imbecile in his profession. He has one positive virtue. He is as
+brave as a bulldog and as tenacious as a lobster if he gets his claws upon
+anyone. Here we are, and they are waiting for us.”
+
+
+
+ 
+We had reached the same crowded thoroughfare in which we had found ourselves in
+the morning. Our cabs were dismissed, and, following the guidance of Mr.
+Merryweather, we passed down a narrow passage and through a side door, which he
+opened for us. Within there was a small corridor, which ended in a very massive
+iron gate. This also was opened, and led down a flight of winding stone steps,
+which terminated at another formidable gate. Mr. Merryweather stopped to light
+a lantern, and then conducted us down a dark, earth-smelling passage, and so,
+after opening a third door, into a huge vault or cellar, which was piled all
+round with crates and massive boxes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You are not very vulnerable from above,” Holmes remarked as he
+held up the lantern and gazed about him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nor from below,” said Mr. Merryweather, striking his stick upon
+the flags which lined the floor. “Why, dear me, it sounds quite
+hollow!” he remarked, looking up in surprise.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I must really ask you to be a little more quiet!” said Holmes
+severely. “You have already imperilled the whole success of our
+expedition. Might I beg that you would have the goodness to sit down upon one
+of those boxes, and not to interfere?”
+
+
+
+ 
+The solemn Mr. Merryweather perched himself upon a crate, with a very injured
+expression upon his face, while Holmes fell upon his knees upon the floor and,
+with the lantern and a magnifying lens, began to examine minutely the cracks
+between the stones. A few seconds sufficed to satisfy him, for he sprang to his
+feet again and put his glass in his pocket.
+
+
+
+ 
+“We have at least an hour before us,” he remarked, “for they
+can hardly take any steps until the good pawnbroker is safely in bed. Then they
+will not lose a minute, for the sooner they do their work the longer time they
+will have for their escape. We are at present, Doctor—as no doubt you
+have divined—in the cellar of the City branch of one of the principal
+London banks. Mr. Merryweather is the chairman of directors, and he will
+explain to you that there are reasons why the more daring criminals of London
+should take a considerable interest in this cellar at present.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is our French gold,” whispered the director. “We have had
+several warnings that an attempt might be made upon it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your French gold?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes. We had occasion some months ago to strengthen our resources and
+borrowed for that purpose 30,000 napoleons from the Bank of France. It has
+become known that we have never had occasion to unpack the money, and that it
+is still lying in our cellar. The crate upon which I sit contains 2,000
+napoleons packed between layers of lead foil. Our reserve of bullion is much
+larger at present than is usually kept in a single branch office, and the
+directors have had misgivings upon the subject.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Which were very well justified,” observed Holmes. “And now
+it is time that we arranged our little plans. I expect that within an hour
+matters will come to a head. In the meantime Mr. Merryweather, we must put the
+screen over that dark lantern.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And sit in the dark?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am afraid so. I had brought a pack of cards in my pocket, and I
+thought that, as we were a partie carrée , you might have your rubber
+after all. But I see that the enemy’s preparations have gone so far that
+we cannot risk the presence of a light. And, first of all, we must choose our
+positions. These are daring men, and though we shall take them at a
+disadvantage, they may do us some harm unless we are careful. I shall stand
+behind this crate, and do you conceal yourselves behind those. Then, when I
+flash a light upon them, close in swiftly. If they fire, Watson, have no
+compunction about shooting them down.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I placed my revolver, cocked, upon the top of the wooden case behind which I
+crouched. Holmes shot the slide across the front of his lantern and left us in
+pitch darkness—such an absolute darkness as I have never before
+experienced. The smell of hot metal remained to assure us that the light was
+still there, ready to flash out at a moment’s notice. To me, with my
+nerves worked up to a pitch of expectancy, there was something depressing and
+subduing in the sudden gloom, and in the cold dank air of the vault.
+
+
+
+ 
+“They have but one retreat,” whispered Holmes. “That is back
+through the house into Saxe-Coburg Square. I hope that you have done what I
+asked you, Jones?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have an inspector and two officers waiting at the front door.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then we have stopped all the holes. And now we must be silent and
+wait.”
+
+
+
+ 
+What a time it seemed! From comparing notes afterwards it was but an hour and a
+quarter, yet it appeared to me that the night must have almost gone, and the
+dawn be breaking above us. My limbs were weary and stiff, for I feared to
+change my position; yet my nerves were worked up to the highest pitch of
+tension, and my hearing was so acute that I could not only hear the gentle
+breathing of my companions, but I could distinguish the deeper, heavier
+in-breath of the bulky Jones from the thin, sighing note of the bank director.
+From my position I could look over the case in the direction of the floor.
+Suddenly my eyes caught the glint of a light.
+
+
+
+ 
+At first it was but a lurid spark upon the stone pavement. Then it lengthened
+out until it became a yellow line, and then, without any warning or sound, a
+gash seemed to open and a hand appeared, a white, almost womanly hand, which
+felt about in the centre of the little area of light. For a minute or more the
+hand, with its writhing fingers, protruded out of the floor. Then it was
+withdrawn as suddenly as it appeared, and all was dark again save the single
+lurid spark which marked a chink between the stones.
+
+
+
+ 
+Its disappearance, however, was but momentary. With a rending, tearing sound,
+one of the broad, white stones turned over upon its side and left a square,
+gaping hole, through which streamed the light of a lantern. Over the edge there
+peeped a clean-cut, boyish face, which looked keenly about it, and then, with a
+hand on either side of the aperture, drew itself shoulder-high and waist-high,
+until one knee rested upon the edge. In another instant he stood at the side of
+the hole and was hauling after him a companion, lithe and small like himself,
+with a pale face and a shock of very red hair.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s all clear,” he whispered. “Have you the chisel
+and the bags? Great Scott! Jump, Archie, jump, and I’ll swing for
+it!”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes had sprung out and seized the intruder by the collar. The other
+dived down the hole, and I heard the sound of rending cloth as Jones clutched
+at his skirts. The light flashed upon the barrel of a revolver, but
+Holmes’ hunting crop came down on the man’s wrist, and the pistol
+clinked upon the stone floor.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s no use, John Clay,” said Holmes blandly. “You
+have no chance at all.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“So I see,” the other answered with the utmost coolness. “I
+fancy that my pal is all right, though I see you have got his
+coat-tails.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There are three men waiting for him at the door,” said Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, indeed! You seem to have done the thing very completely. I must
+compliment you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And I you,” Holmes answered. “Your red-headed idea was very
+new and effective.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You’ll see your pal again presently,” said Jones.
+“He’s quicker at climbing down holes than I am. Just hold out while
+I fix the derbies.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I beg that you will not touch me with your filthy hands,” remarked
+our prisoner as the handcuffs clattered upon his wrists. “You may not be
+aware that I have royal blood in my veins. Have the goodness, also, when you
+address me always to say ‘sir’ and
+‘please.’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“All right,” said Jones with a stare and a snigger. “Well,
+would you please, sir, march upstairs, where we can get a cab to carry your
+Highness to the police-station?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is better,” said John Clay serenely. He made a sweeping bow
+to the three of us and walked quietly off in the custody of the detective.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Really, Mr. Holmes,” said Mr. Merryweather as we followed them
+from the cellar, “I do not know how the bank can thank you or repay you.
+There is no doubt that you have detected and defeated in the most complete
+manner one of the most determined attempts at bank robbery that have ever come
+within my experience.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have had one or two little scores of my own to settle with Mr. John
+Clay,” said Holmes. “I have been at some small expense over this
+matter, which I shall expect the bank to refund, but beyond that I am amply
+repaid by having had an experience which is in many ways unique, and by hearing
+the very remarkable narrative of the Red-headed League.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You see, Watson,” he explained in the early hours of the morning
+as we sat over a glass of whisky and soda in Baker Street, “it was
+perfectly obvious from the first that the only possible object of this rather
+fantastic business of the advertisement of the League, and the copying of the
+ Encyclopædia , must be to get this not over-bright pawnbroker out of the
+way for a number of hours every day. It was a curious way of managing it, but,
+really, it would be difficult to suggest a better. The method was no doubt
+suggested to Clay’s ingenious mind by the colour of his
+accomplice’s hair. The £ 4 a week was a lure which must draw him, and
+what was it to them, who were playing for thousands? They put in the
+advertisement, one rogue has the temporary office, the other rogue incites the
+man to apply for it, and together they manage to secure his absence every
+morning in the week. From the time that I heard of the assistant having come
+for half wages, it was obvious to me that he had some strong motive for
+securing the situation.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But how could you guess what the motive was?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Had there been women in the house, I should have suspected a mere vulgar
+intrigue. That, however, was out of the question. The man’s business was
+a small one, and there was nothing in his house which could account for such
+elaborate preparations, and such an expenditure as they were at. It must, then,
+be something out of the house. What could it be? I thought of the
+assistant’s fondness for photography, and his trick of vanishing into the
+cellar. The cellar! There was the end of this tangled clue. Then I made
+inquiries as to this mysterious assistant and found that I had to deal with one
+of the coolest and most daring criminals in London. He was doing something in
+the cellar—something which took many hours a day for months on end. What
+could it be, once more? I could think of nothing save that he was running a
+tunnel to some other building.
+
+
+
+ 
+“So far I had got when we went to visit the scene of action. I surprised
+you by beating upon the pavement with my stick. I was ascertaining whether the
+cellar stretched out in front or behind. It was not in front. Then I rang the
+bell, and, as I hoped, the assistant answered it. We have had some skirmishes,
+but we had never set eyes upon each other before. I hardly looked at his face.
+His knees were what I wished to see. You must yourself have remarked how worn,
+wrinkled, and stained they were. They spoke of those hours of burrowing. The
+only remaining point was what they were burrowing for. I walked round the
+corner, saw the City and Suburban Bank abutted on our friend’s premises,
+and felt that I had solved my problem. When you drove home after the concert I
+called upon Scotland Yard and upon the chairman of the bank directors, with the
+result that you have seen.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And how could you tell that they would make their attempt
+to-night?” I asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, when they closed their League offices that was a sign that they
+cared no longer about Mr. Jabez Wilson’s presence—in other words,
+that they had completed their tunnel. But it was essential that they should use
+it soon, as it might be discovered, or the bullion might be removed. Saturday
+would suit them better than any other day, as it would give them two days for
+their escape. For all these reasons I expected them to come to-night.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You reasoned it out beautifully,” I exclaimed in unfeigned
+admiration. “It is so long a chain, and yet every link rings true.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It saved me from ennui,” he answered, yawning. “Alas! I
+already feel it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort to
+escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do
+so.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And you are a benefactor of the race,” said I.
+
+
+
+ 
+He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, perhaps, after all, it is of some
+little use,” he remarked. “‘ L’homme
+c’est rien—l’œuvre c’est tout ,’ as Gustave
+Flaubert wrote to George Sand.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ III.
+A CASE OF IDENTITY 
+ 
+ “M y dear
+fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his
+lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything
+which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things
+which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that
+window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and
+peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the
+plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through
+generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all
+fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and
+unprofitable.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And yet I am not convinced of it,” I answered. “The cases
+which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar
+enough. We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and
+yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor
+artistic.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A certain selection and discretion must be used in producing a realistic
+effect,” remarked Holmes. “This is wanting in the police report,
+where more stress is laid, perhaps, upon the platitudes of the magistrate than
+upon the details, which to an observer contain the vital essence of the whole
+matter. Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the
+commonplace.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I smiled and shook my head. “I can quite understand your thinking
+so,” I said. “Of course, in your position of unofficial adviser and
+helper to everybody who is absolutely puzzled, throughout three continents, you
+are brought in contact with all that is strange and bizarre. But
+here”—I picked up the morning paper from the
+ground—“let us put it to a practical test. Here is the first
+heading upon which I come. ‘A husband’s cruelty to his wife.’
+There is half a column of print, but I know without reading it that it is all
+perfectly familiar to me. There is, of course, the other woman, the drink, the
+push, the blow, the bruise, the sympathetic sister or landlady. The crudest of
+writers could invent nothing more crude.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Indeed, your example is an unfortunate one for your argument,”
+said Holmes, taking the paper and glancing his eye down it. “This is the
+Dundas separation case, and, as it happens, I was engaged in clearing up some
+small points in connection with it. The husband was a teetotaler, there was no
+other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the
+habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them
+at his wife, which, you will allow, is not an action likely to occur to the
+imagination of the average story-teller. Take a pinch of snuff, Doctor, and
+acknowledge that I have scored over you in your example.”
+
+
+
+ 
+He held out his snuffbox of old gold, with a great amethyst in the centre of
+the lid. Its splendour was in such contrast to his homely ways and simple life
+that I could not help commenting upon it.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah,” said he, “I forgot that I had not seen you for some
+weeks. It is a little souvenir from the King of Bohemia in return for my
+assistance in the case of the Irene Adler papers.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And the ring?” I asked, glancing at a remarkable brilliant which
+sparkled upon his finger.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was from the reigning family of Holland, though the matter in which I
+served them was of such delicacy that I cannot confide it even to you, who have
+been good enough to chronicle one or two of my little problems.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And have you any on hand just now?” I asked with interest.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Some ten or twelve, but none which present any feature of interest. They
+are important, you understand, without being interesting. Indeed, I have found
+that it is usually in unimportant matters that there is a field for the
+observation, and for the quick analysis of cause and effect which gives the
+charm to an investigation. The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the
+bigger the crime the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive. In these cases,
+save for one rather intricate matter which has been referred to me from
+Marseilles, there is nothing which presents any features of interest. It is
+possible, however, that I may have something better before very many minutes
+are over, for this is one of my clients, or I am much mistaken.”
+
+
+
+ 
+He had risen from his chair and was standing between the parted blinds gazing
+down into the dull neutral-tinted London street. Looking over his shoulder, I
+saw that on the pavement opposite there stood a large woman with a heavy fur
+boa round her neck, and a large curling red feather in a broad-brimmed hat
+which was tilted in a coquettish Duchess of Devonshire fashion over her ear.
+From under this great panoply she peeped up in a nervous, hesitating fashion at
+our windows, while her body oscillated backward and forward, and her fingers
+fidgeted with her glove buttons. Suddenly, with a plunge, as of the swimmer who
+leaves the bank, she hurried across the road, and we heard the sharp clang of
+the bell.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have seen those symptoms before,” said Holmes, throwing his
+cigarette into the fire. “Oscillation upon the pavement always means an
+ affaire de cœur . She would like advice, but is not sure that the matter
+is not too delicate for communication. And yet even here we may discriminate.
+When a woman has been seriously wronged by a man she no longer oscillates, and
+the usual symptom is a broken bell wire. Here we may take it that there is a
+love matter, but that the maiden is not so much angry as perplexed, or grieved.
+But here she comes in person to resolve our doubts.”
+
+
+
+ 
+As he spoke there was a tap at the door, and the boy in buttons entered to
+announce Miss Mary Sutherland, while the lady herself loomed behind his small
+black figure like a full-sailed merchant-man behind a tiny pilot boat. Sherlock
+Holmes welcomed her with the easy courtesy for which he was remarkable, and,
+having closed the door and bowed her into an armchair, he looked her over in
+the minute and yet abstracted fashion which was peculiar to him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do you not find,” he said, “that with your short sight it is
+a little trying to do so much typewriting?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I did at first,” she answered, “but now I know where the
+letters are without looking.” Then, suddenly realising the full purport
+of his words, she gave a violent start and looked up, with fear and
+astonishment upon her broad, good-humoured face. “You’ve heard
+about me, Mr. Holmes,” she cried, “else how could you know all
+that?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Never mind,” said Holmes, laughing; “it is my business to
+know things. Perhaps I have trained myself to see what others overlook. If not,
+why should you come to consult me?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I came to you, sir, because I heard of you from Mrs. Etherege, whose
+husband you found so easy when the police and everyone had given him up for
+dead. Oh, Mr. Holmes, I wish you would do as much for me. I’m not rich,
+but still I have a hundred a year in my own right, besides the little that I
+make by the machine, and I would give it all to know what has become of Mr.
+Hosmer Angel.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why did you come away to consult me in such a hurry?” asked
+Sherlock Holmes, with his finger-tips together and his eyes to the ceiling.
+
+
+
+ 
+Again a startled look came over the somewhat vacuous face of Miss Mary
+Sutherland. “Yes, I did bang out of the house,” she said,
+“for it made me angry to see the easy way in which Mr.
+Windibank—that is, my father—took it all. He would not go to the
+police, and he would not go to you, and so at last, as he would do nothing and
+kept on saying that there was no harm done, it made me mad, and I just on with
+my things and came right away to you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your father,” said Holmes, “your stepfather, surely, since
+the name is different.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, my stepfather. I call him father, though it sounds funny, too, for
+he is only five years and two months older than myself.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And your mother is alive?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, yes, mother is alive and well. I wasn’t best pleased, Mr.
+Holmes, when she married again so soon after father’s death, and a man
+who was nearly fifteen years younger than herself. Father was a plumber in the
+Tottenham Court Road, and he left a tidy business behind him, which mother
+carried on with Mr. Hardy, the foreman; but when Mr. Windibank came he made her
+sell the business, for he was very superior, being a traveller in wines. They
+got £ 4700 for the goodwill and interest, which wasn’t near as much as
+father could have got if he had been alive.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I had expected to see Sherlock Holmes impatient under this rambling and
+inconsequential narrative, but, on the contrary, he had listened with the
+greatest concentration of attention.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your own little income,” he asked, “does it come out of the
+business?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, no, sir. It is quite separate and was left me by my uncle Ned in
+Auckland. It is in New Zealand stock, paying 4½ per cent. Two thousand five
+hundred pounds was the amount, but I can only touch the interest.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You interest me extremely,” said Holmes. “And since you draw
+so large a sum as a hundred a year, with what you earn into the bargain, you no
+doubt travel a little and indulge yourself in every way. I believe that a
+single lady can get on very nicely upon an income of about £ 60.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I could do with much less than that, Mr. Holmes, but you understand that
+as long as I live at home I don’t wish to be a burden to them, and so
+they have the use of the money just while I am staying with them. Of course,
+that is only just for the time. Mr. Windibank draws my interest every quarter
+and pays it over to mother, and I find that I can do pretty well with what I
+earn at typewriting. It brings me twopence a sheet, and I can often do from
+fifteen to twenty sheets in a day.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have made your position very clear to me,” said Holmes.
+“This is my friend, Dr. Watson, before whom you can speak as freely as
+before myself. Kindly tell us now all about your connection with Mr. Hosmer
+Angel.”
+
+
+
+ 
+A flush stole over Miss Sutherland’s face, and she picked nervously at
+the fringe of her jacket. “I met him first at the gasfitters’
+ball,” she said. “They used to send father tickets when he was
+alive, and then afterwards they remembered us, and sent them to mother. Mr.
+Windibank did not wish us to go. He never did wish us to go anywhere. He would
+get quite mad if I wanted so much as to join a Sunday-school treat. But this
+time I was set on going, and I would go; for what right had he to prevent? He
+said the folk were not fit for us to know, when all father’s friends were
+to be there. And he said that I had nothing fit to wear, when I had my purple
+plush that I had never so much as taken out of the drawer. At last, when
+nothing else would do, he went off to France upon the business of the firm, but
+we went, mother and I, with Mr. Hardy, who used to be our foreman, and it was
+there I met Mr. Hosmer Angel.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I suppose,” said Holmes, “that when Mr. Windibank came back
+from France he was very annoyed at your having gone to the ball.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, well, he was very good about it. He laughed, I remember, and
+shrugged his shoulders, and said there was no use denying anything to a woman,
+for she would have her way.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I see. Then at the gasfitters’ ball you met, as I understand, a
+gentleman called Mr. Hosmer Angel.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, sir. I met him that night, and he called next day to ask if we had
+got home all safe, and after that we met him—that is to say, Mr. Holmes,
+I met him twice for walks, but after that father came back again, and Mr.
+Hosmer Angel could not come to the house any more.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, you know father didn’t like anything of the sort. He
+wouldn’t have any visitors if he could help it, and he used to say that a
+woman should be happy in her own family circle. But then, as I used to say to
+mother, a woman wants her own circle to begin with, and I had not got mine
+yet.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But how about Mr. Hosmer Angel? Did he make no attempt to see
+you?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, father was going off to France again in a week, and Hosmer wrote
+and said that it would be safer and better not to see each other until he had
+gone. We could write in the meantime, and he used to write every day. I took
+the letters in in the morning, so there was no need for father to know.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Were you engaged to the gentleman at this time?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, yes, Mr. Holmes. We were engaged after the first walk that we took.
+Hosmer—Mr. Angel—was a cashier in an office in Leadenhall
+Street—and—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What office?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That’s the worst of it, Mr. Holmes, I don’t know.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Where did he live, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He slept on the premises.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And you don’t know his address?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No—except that it was Leadenhall Street.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Where did you address your letters, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“To the Leadenhall Street Post Office, to be left till called for. He
+said that if they were sent to the office he would be chaffed by all the other
+clerks about having letters from a lady, so I offered to typewrite them, like
+he did his, but he wouldn’t have that, for he said that when I wrote them
+they seemed to come from me, but when they were typewritten he always felt that
+the machine had come between us. That will just show you how fond he was of me,
+Mr. Holmes, and the little things that he would think of.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was most suggestive,” said Holmes. “It has long been an
+axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important. Can you
+remember any other little things about Mr. Hosmer Angel?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He was a very shy man, Mr. Holmes. He would rather walk with me in the
+evening than in the daylight, for he said that he hated to be conspicuous. Very
+retiring and gentlemanly he was. Even his voice was gentle. He’d had the
+quinsy and swollen glands when he was young, he told me, and it had left him
+with a weak throat, and a hesitating, whispering fashion of speech. He was
+always well dressed, very neat and plain, but his eyes were weak, just as mine
+are, and he wore tinted glasses against the glare.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, and what happened when Mr. Windibank, your stepfather, returned to
+France?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Mr. Hosmer Angel came to the house again and proposed that we should
+marry before father came back. He was in dreadful earnest and made me swear,
+with my hands on the Testament, that whatever happened I would always be true
+to him. Mother said he was quite right to make me swear, and that it was a sign
+of his passion. Mother was all in his favour from the first and was even fonder
+of him than I was. Then, when they talked of marrying within the week, I began
+to ask about father; but they both said never to mind about father, but just to
+tell him afterwards, and mother said she would make it all right with him. I
+didn’t quite like that, Mr. Holmes. It seemed funny that I should ask his
+leave, as he was only a few years older than me; but I didn’t want to do
+anything on the sly, so I wrote to father at Bordeaux, where the company has
+its French offices, but the letter came back to me on the very morning of the
+wedding.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It missed him, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, sir; for he had started to England just before it arrived.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ha! that was unfortunate. Your wedding was arranged, then, for the
+Friday. Was it to be in church?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, sir, but very quietly. It was to be at St. Saviour’s, near
+King’s Cross, and we were to have breakfast afterwards at the St. Pancras
+Hotel. Hosmer came for us in a hansom, but as there were two of us he put us
+both into it and stepped himself into a four-wheeler, which happened to be the
+only other cab in the street. We got to the church first, and when the
+four-wheeler drove up we waited for him to step out, but he never did, and when
+the cabman got down from the box and looked there was no one there! The cabman
+said that he could not imagine what had become of him, for he had seen him get
+in with his own eyes. That was last Friday, Mr. Holmes, and I have never seen
+or heard anything since then to throw any light upon what became of him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It seems to me that you have been very shamefully treated,” said
+Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, no, sir! He was too good and kind to leave me so. Why, all the
+morning he was saying to me that, whatever happened, I was to be true; and that
+even if something quite unforeseen occurred to separate us, I was always to
+remember that I was pledged to him, and that he would claim his pledge sooner
+or later. It seemed strange talk for a wedding-morning, but what has happened
+since gives a meaning to it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Most certainly it does. Your own opinion is, then, that some unforeseen
+catastrophe has occurred to him?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, sir. I believe that he foresaw some danger, or else he would not
+have talked so. And then I think that what he foresaw happened.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But you have no notion as to what it could have been?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“None.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“One more question. How did your mother take the matter?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“She was angry, and said that I was never to speak of the matter
+again.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And your father? Did you tell him?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes; and he seemed to think, with me, that something had happened, and
+that I should hear of Hosmer again. As he said, what interest could anyone have
+in bringing me to the doors of the church, and then leaving me? Now, if he had
+borrowed my money, or if he had married me and got my money settled on him,
+there might be some reason, but Hosmer was very independent about money and
+never would look at a shilling of mine. And yet, what could have happened? And
+why could he not write? Oh, it drives me half-mad to think of it, and I
+can’t sleep a wink at night.” She pulled a little handkerchief out
+of her muff and began to sob heavily into it.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I shall glance into the case for you,” said Holmes, rising,
+“and I have no doubt that we shall reach some definite result. Let the
+weight of the matter rest upon me now, and do not let your mind dwell upon it
+further. Above all, try to let Mr. Hosmer Angel vanish from your memory, as he
+has done from your life.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then you don’t think I’ll see him again?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I fear not.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then what has happened to him?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You will leave that question in my hands. I should like an accurate
+description of him and any letters of his which you can spare.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I advertised for him in last Saturday’s Chronicle ,”
+said she. “Here is the slip and here are four letters from him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you. And your address?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No. 31 Lyon Place, Camberwell.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Mr. Angel’s address you never had, I understand. Where is your
+father’s place of business?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He travels for Westhouse & Marbank, the great claret importers of
+Fenchurch Street.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you. You have made your statement very clearly. You will leave the
+papers here, and remember the advice which I have given you. Let the whole
+incident be a sealed book, and do not allow it to affect your life.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You are very kind, Mr. Holmes, but I cannot do that. I shall be true to
+Hosmer. He shall find me ready when he comes back.”
+
+
+
+ 
+For all the preposterous hat and the vacuous face, there was something noble in
+the simple faith of our visitor which compelled our respect. She laid her
+little bundle of papers upon the table and went her way, with a promise to come
+again whenever she might be summoned.
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes sat silent for a few minutes with his fingertips still pressed
+together, his legs stretched out in front of him, and his gaze directed upward
+to the ceiling. Then he took down from the rack the old and oily clay pipe,
+which was to him as a counsellor, and, having lit it, he leaned back in his
+chair, with the thick blue cloud-wreaths spinning up from him, and a look of
+infinite languor in his face.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Quite an interesting study, that maiden,” he observed. “I
+found her more interesting than her little problem, which, by the way, is
+rather a trite one. You will find parallel cases, if you consult my index, in
+Andover in ’77, and there was something of the sort at The Hague last
+year. Old as is the idea, however, there were one or two details which were new
+to me. But the maiden herself was most instructive.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You appeared to read a good deal upon her which was quite invisible to
+me,” I remarked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not invisible but unnoticed, Watson. You did not know where to look, and
+so you missed all that was important. I can never bring you to realise the
+importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues
+that may hang from a boot-lace. Now, what did you gather from that
+woman’s appearance? Describe it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, she had a slate-coloured, broad-brimmed straw hat, with a feather
+of a brickish red. Her jacket was black, with black beads sewn upon it, and a
+fringe of little black jet ornaments. Her dress was brown, rather darker than
+coffee colour, with a little purple plush at the neck and sleeves. Her gloves
+were greyish and were worn through at the right forefinger. Her boots I
+didn’t observe. She had small round, hanging gold earrings, and a general
+air of being fairly well-to-do in a vulgar, comfortable, easy-going way.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes clapped his hands softly together and chuckled.
+
+
+
+ 
+“’Pon my word, Watson, you are coming along wonderfully. You
+have really done very well indeed. It is true that you have missed everything
+of importance, but you have hit upon the method, and you have a quick eye for
+colour. Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself
+upon details. My first glance is always at a woman’s sleeve. In a man it
+is perhaps better first to take the knee of the trouser. As you observe, this
+woman had plush upon her sleeves, which is a most useful material for showing
+traces. The double line a little above the wrist, where the typewritist presses
+against the table, was beautifully defined. The sewing-machine, of the hand
+type, leaves a similar mark, but only on the left arm, and on the side of it
+farthest from the thumb, instead of being right across the broadest part, as
+this was. I then glanced at her face, and, observing the dint of a pince-nez at
+either side of her nose, I ventured a remark upon short sight and typewriting,
+which seemed to surprise her.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It surprised me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But, surely, it was obvious. I was then much surprised and interested on
+glancing down to observe that, though the boots which she was wearing were not
+unlike each other, they were really odd ones; the one having a slightly
+decorated toe-cap, and the other a plain one. One was buttoned only in the two
+lower buttons out of five, and the other at the first, third, and fifth. Now,
+when you see that a young lady, otherwise neatly dressed, has come away from
+home with odd boots, half-buttoned, it is no great deduction to say that she
+came away in a hurry.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And what else?” I asked, keenly interested, as I always was, by my
+friend’s incisive reasoning.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I noted, in passing, that she had written a note before leaving home but
+after being fully dressed. You observed that her right glove was torn at the
+forefinger, but you did not apparently see that both glove and finger were
+stained with violet ink. She had written in a hurry and dipped her pen too
+deep. It must have been this morning, or the mark would not remain clear upon
+the finger. All this is amusing, though rather elementary, but I must go back
+to business, Watson. Would you mind reading me the advertised description of
+Mr. Hosmer Angel?”
+
+
+
+ 
+I held the little printed slip to the light. “Missing,” it said,
+“on the morning of the fourteenth, a gentleman named Hosmer Angel. About
+five ft. seven in. in height; strongly built, sallow complexion, black hair, a
+little bald in the centre, bushy, black side-whiskers and moustache; tinted
+glasses, slight infirmity of speech. Was dressed, when last seen, in black
+frock-coat faced with silk, black waistcoat, gold Albert chain, and grey Harris
+tweed trousers, with brown gaiters over elastic-sided boots. Known to have been
+employed in an office in Leadenhall Street. Anybody bringing,” &c,
+&c.
+
+
+
+ 
+“That will do,” said Holmes. “As to the letters,” he
+continued, glancing over them, “they are very commonplace. Absolutely no
+clue in them to Mr. Angel, save that he quotes Balzac once. There is one
+remarkable point, however, which will no doubt strike you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“They are typewritten,” I remarked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not only that, but the signature is typewritten. Look at the neat little
+‘Hosmer Angel’ at the bottom. There is a date, you see, but no
+superscription except Leadenhall Street, which is rather vague. The point about
+the signature is very suggestive—in fact, we may call it
+conclusive.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of what?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear fellow, is it possible you do not see how strongly it bears upon
+the case?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I cannot say that I do unless it were that he wished to be able to deny
+his signature if an action for breach of promise were instituted.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, that was not the point. However, I shall write two letters, which
+should settle the matter. One is to a firm in the City, the other is to the
+young lady’s stepfather, Mr. Windibank, asking him whether he could meet
+us here at six o’clock to-morrow evening. It is just as well that we
+should do business with the male relatives. And now, Doctor, we can do nothing
+until the answers to those letters come, so we may put our little problem upon
+the shelf for the interim.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I had had so many reasons to believe in my friend’s subtle powers of
+reasoning and extraordinary energy in action that I felt that he must have some
+solid grounds for the assured and easy demeanour with which he treated the
+singular mystery which he had been called upon to fathom. Once only had I known
+him to fail, in the case of the King of Bohemia and of the Irene Adler
+photograph; but when I looked back to the weird business of the Sign of Four,
+and the extraordinary circumstances connected with the Study in Scarlet, I felt
+that it would be a strange tangle indeed which he could not unravel.
+
+
+
+ 
+I left him then, still puffing at his black clay pipe, with the conviction that
+when I came again on the next evening I would find that he held in his hands
+all the clues which would lead up to the identity of the disappearing
+bridegroom of Miss Mary Sutherland.
+
+
+
+ 
+A professional case of great gravity was engaging my own attention at the time,
+and the whole of next day I was busy at the bedside of the sufferer. It was not
+until close upon six o’clock that I found myself free and was able to
+spring into a hansom and drive to Baker Street, half afraid that I might be too
+late to assist at the dénouement of the little mystery. I found Sherlock
+Holmes alone, however, half asleep, with his long, thin form curled up in the
+recesses of his armchair. A formidable array of bottles and test-tubes, with
+the pungent cleanly smell of hydrochloric acid, told me that he had spent his
+day in the chemical work which was so dear to him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, have you solved it?” I asked as I entered.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes. It was the bisulphate of baryta.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, no, the mystery!” I cried.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, that! I thought of the salt that I have been working upon. There was
+never any mystery in the matter, though, as I said yesterday, some of the
+details are of interest. The only drawback is that there is no law, I fear,
+that can touch the scoundrel.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Who was he, then, and what was his object in deserting Miss
+Sutherland?”
+
+
+
+ 
+The question was hardly out of my mouth, and Holmes had not yet opened his lips
+to reply, when we heard a heavy footfall in the passage and a tap at the door.
+
+
+
+ 
+“This is the girl’s stepfather, Mr. James Windibank,” said
+Holmes. “He has written to me to say that he would be here at six. Come
+in!”
+
+
+
+ 
+The man who entered was a sturdy, middle-sized fellow, some thirty years of
+age, clean-shaven, and sallow-skinned, with a bland, insinuating manner, and a
+pair of wonderfully sharp and penetrating grey eyes. He shot a questioning
+glance at each of us, placed his shiny top-hat upon the sideboard, and with a
+slight bow sidled down into the nearest chair.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Good-evening, Mr. James Windibank,” said Holmes. “I think
+that this typewritten letter is from you, in which you made an appointment with
+me for six o’clock?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, sir. I am afraid that I am a little late, but I am not quite my own
+master, you know. I am sorry that Miss Sutherland has troubled you about this
+little matter, for I think it is far better not to wash linen of the sort in
+public. It was quite against my wishes that she came, but she is a very
+excitable, impulsive girl, as you may have noticed, and she is not easily
+controlled when she has made up her mind on a point. Of course, I did not mind
+you so much, as you are not connected with the official police, but it is not
+pleasant to have a family misfortune like this noised abroad. Besides, it is a
+useless expense, for how could you possibly find this Hosmer Angel?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“On the contrary,” said Holmes quietly; “I have every reason
+to believe that I will succeed in discovering Mr. Hosmer Angel.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Mr. Windibank gave a violent start and dropped his gloves. “I am
+delighted to hear it,” he said.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is a curious thing,” remarked Holmes, “that a typewriter
+has really quite as much individuality as a man’s handwriting. Unless
+they are quite new, no two of them write exactly alike. Some letters get more
+worn than others, and some wear only on one side. Now, you remark in this note
+of yours, Mr. Windibank, that in every case there is some little slurring over
+of the ‘e,’ and a slight defect in the tail of the ‘r.’
+There are fourteen other characteristics, but those are the more
+obvious.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We do all our correspondence with this machine at the office, and no
+doubt it is a little worn,” our visitor answered, glancing keenly at
+Holmes with his bright little eyes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And now I will show you what is really a very interesting study, Mr.
+Windibank,” Holmes continued. “I think of writing another little
+monograph some of these days on the typewriter and its relation to crime. It is
+a subject to which I have devoted some little attention. I have here four
+letters which purport to come from the missing man. They are all typewritten.
+In each case, not only are the ‘e’s’ slurred and the
+‘r’s’ tailless, but you will observe, if you care to use my
+magnifying lens, that the fourteen other characteristics to which I have
+alluded are there as well.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Mr. Windibank sprang out of his chair and picked up his hat. “I cannot
+waste time over this sort of fantastic talk, Mr. Holmes,” he said.
+“If you can catch the man, catch him, and let me know when you have done
+it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Certainly,” said Holmes, stepping over and turning the key in the
+door. “I let you know, then, that I have caught him!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What! where?” shouted Mr. Windibank, turning white to his lips and
+glancing about him like a rat in a trap.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, it won’t do—really it won’t,” said Holmes
+suavely. “There is no possible getting out of it, Mr. Windibank. It is
+quite too transparent, and it was a very bad compliment when you said that it
+was impossible for me to solve so simple a question. That’s right! Sit
+down and let us talk it over.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Our visitor collapsed into a chair, with a ghastly face and a glitter of
+moisture on his brow. “It—it’s not actionable,” he
+stammered.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am very much afraid that it is not. But between ourselves, Windibank,
+it was as cruel and selfish and heartless a trick in a petty way as ever came
+before me. Now, let me just run over the course of events, and you will
+contradict me if I go wrong.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The man sat huddled up in his chair, with his head sunk upon his breast, like
+one who is utterly crushed. Holmes stuck his feet up on the corner of the
+mantelpiece and, leaning back with his hands in his pockets, began talking,
+rather to himself, as it seemed, than to us.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The man married a woman very much older than himself for her
+money,” said he, “and he enjoyed the use of the money of the
+daughter as long as she lived with them. It was a considerable sum, for people
+in their position, and the loss of it would have made a serious difference. It
+was worth an effort to preserve it. The daughter was of a good, amiable
+disposition, but affectionate and warm-hearted in her ways, so that it was
+evident that with her fair personal advantages, and her little income, she
+would not be allowed to remain single long. Now her marriage would mean, of
+course, the loss of a hundred a year, so what does her stepfather do to prevent
+it? He takes the obvious course of keeping her at home and forbidding her to
+seek the company of people of her own age. But soon he found that that would
+not answer forever. She became restive, insisted upon her rights, and finally
+announced her positive intention of going to a certain ball. What does her
+clever stepfather do then? He conceives an idea more creditable to his head
+than to his heart. With the connivance and assistance of his wife he disguised
+himself, covered those keen eyes with tinted glasses, masked the face with a
+moustache and a pair of bushy whiskers, sunk that clear voice into an
+insinuating whisper, and doubly secure on account of the girl’s short
+sight, he appears as Mr. Hosmer Angel, and keeps off other lovers by making
+love himself.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was only a joke at first,” groaned our visitor. “We never
+thought that she would have been so carried away.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very likely not. However that may be, the young lady was very decidedly
+carried away, and, having quite made up her mind that her stepfather was in
+France, the suspicion of treachery never for an instant entered her mind. She
+was flattered by the gentleman’s attentions, and the effect was increased
+by the loudly expressed admiration of her mother. Then Mr. Angel began to call,
+for it was obvious that the matter should be pushed as far as it would go if a
+real effect were to be produced. There were meetings, and an engagement, which
+would finally secure the girl’s affections from turning towards anyone
+else. But the deception could not be kept up forever. These pretended journeys
+to France were rather cumbrous. The thing to do was clearly to bring the
+business to an end in such a dramatic manner that it would leave a permanent
+impression upon the young lady’s mind and prevent her from looking upon
+any other suitor for some time to come. Hence those vows of fidelity exacted
+upon a Testament, and hence also the allusions to a possibility of something
+happening on the very morning of the wedding. James Windibank wished Miss
+Sutherland to be so bound to Hosmer Angel, and so uncertain as to his fate,
+that for ten years to come, at any rate, she would not listen to another man.
+As far as the church door he brought her, and then, as he could go no farther,
+he conveniently vanished away by the old trick of stepping in at one door of a
+four-wheeler and out at the other. I think that was the chain of events, Mr.
+Windibank!”
+
+
+
+ 
+Our visitor had recovered something of his assurance while Holmes had been
+talking, and he rose from his chair now with a cold sneer upon his pale face.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It may be so, or it may not, Mr. Holmes,” said he, “but if
+you are so very sharp you ought to be sharp enough to know that it is you who
+are breaking the law now, and not me. I have done nothing actionable from the
+first, but as long as you keep that door locked you lay yourself open to an
+action for assault and illegal constraint.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The law cannot, as you say, touch you,” said Holmes, unlocking and
+throwing open the door, “yet there never was a man who deserved
+punishment more. If the young lady has a brother or a friend, he ought to lay a
+whip across your shoulders. By Jove!” he continued, flushing up at the
+sight of the bitter sneer upon the man’s face, “it is not part of
+my duties to my client, but here’s a hunting crop handy, and I think I
+shall just treat myself to—” He took two swift steps to the whip,
+but before he could grasp it there was a wild clatter of steps upon the stairs,
+the heavy hall door banged, and from the window we could see Mr. James
+Windibank running at the top of his speed down the road.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There’s a cold-blooded scoundrel!” said Holmes, laughing, as
+he threw himself down into his chair once more. “That fellow will rise
+from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallows.
+The case has, in some respects, been not entirely devoid of interest.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I cannot now entirely see all the steps of your reasoning,” I
+remarked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, of course it was obvious from the first that this Mr. Hosmer Angel
+must have some strong object for his curious conduct, and it was equally clear
+that the only man who really profited by the incident, as far as we could see,
+was the stepfather. Then the fact that the two men were never together, but
+that the one always appeared when the other was away, was suggestive. So were
+the tinted spectacles and the curious voice, which both hinted at a disguise,
+as did the bushy whiskers. My suspicions were all confirmed by his peculiar
+action in typewriting his signature, which, of course, inferred that his
+handwriting was so familiar to her that she would recognise even the smallest
+sample of it. You see all these isolated facts, together with many minor ones,
+all pointed in the same direction.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And how did you verify them?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Having once spotted my man, it was easy to get corroboration. I knew the
+firm for which this man worked. Having taken the printed description. I
+eliminated everything from it which could be the result of a disguise—the
+whiskers, the glasses, the voice, and I sent it to the firm, with a request
+that they would inform me whether it answered to the description of any of
+their travellers. I had already noticed the peculiarities of the typewriter,
+and I wrote to the man himself at his business address asking him if he would
+come here. As I expected, his reply was typewritten and revealed the same
+trivial but characteristic defects. The same post brought me a letter from
+Westhouse & Marbank, of Fenchurch Street, to say that the description
+tallied in every respect with that of their employé, James Windibank. Voilà
+tout !”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And Miss Sutherland?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“If I tell her she will not believe me. You may remember the old Persian
+saying, ‘There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger
+also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.’ There is as much sense
+in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ IV.
+THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY 
+ 
+ W e were seated at
+breakfast one morning, my wife and I, when the maid brought in a telegram. It
+was from Sherlock Holmes and ran in this way:
+
+
+
+ 
+“Have you a couple of days to spare? Have just been wired for from the
+west of England in connection with Boscombe Valley tragedy. Shall be glad if
+you will come with me. Air and scenery perfect. Leave Paddington by the
+11:15.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What do you say, dear?” said my wife, looking across at me.
+“Will you go?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I really don’t know what to say. I have a fairly long list at
+present.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, Anstruther would do your work for you. You have been looking a
+little pale lately. I think that the change would do you good, and you are
+always so interested in Mr. Sherlock Holmes’ cases.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I should be ungrateful if I were not, seeing what I gained through one
+of them,” I answered. “But if I am to go, I must pack at once, for
+I have only half an hour.”
+
+
+
+ 
+My experience of camp life in Afghanistan had at least had the effect of making
+me a prompt and ready traveller. My wants were few and simple, so that in less
+than the time stated I was in a cab with my valise, rattling away to Paddington
+Station. Sherlock Holmes was pacing up and down the platform, his tall, gaunt
+figure made even gaunter and taller by his long grey travelling-cloak and
+close-fitting cloth cap.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is really very good of you to come, Watson,” said he. “It
+makes a considerable difference to me, having someone with me on whom I can
+thoroughly rely. Local aid is always either worthless or else biassed. If you
+will keep the two corner seats I shall get the tickets.”
+
+
+
+ 
+We had the carriage to ourselves save for an immense litter of papers which
+Holmes had brought with him. Among these he rummaged and read, with intervals
+of note-taking and of meditation, until we were past Reading. Then he suddenly
+rolled them all into a gigantic ball and tossed them up onto the rack.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Have you heard anything of the case?” he asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not a word. I have not seen a paper for some days.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The London press has not had very full accounts. I have just been
+looking through all the recent papers in order to master the particulars. It
+seems, from what I gather, to be one of those simple cases which are so
+extremely difficult.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That sounds a little paradoxical.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But it is profoundly true. Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The
+more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring
+it home. In this case, however, they have established a very serious case
+against the son of the murdered man.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is a murder, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, it is conjectured to be so. I shall take nothing for granted until
+I have the opportunity of looking personally into it. I will explain the state
+of things to you, as far as I have been able to understand it, in a very few
+words.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Boscombe Valley is a country district not very far from Ross, in
+Herefordshire. The largest landed proprietor in that part is a Mr. John Turner,
+who made his money in Australia and returned some years ago to the old country.
+One of the farms which he held, that of Hatherley, was let to Mr. Charles
+McCarthy, who was also an ex-Australian. The men had known each other in the
+colonies, so that it was not unnatural that when they came to settle down they
+should do so as near each other as possible. Turner was apparently the richer
+man, so McCarthy became his tenant but still remained, it seems, upon terms of
+perfect equality, as they were frequently together. McCarthy had one son, a lad
+of eighteen, and Turner had an only daughter of the same age, but neither of
+them had wives living. They appear to have avoided the society of the
+neighbouring English families and to have led retired lives, though both the
+McCarthys were fond of sport and were frequently seen at the race-meetings of
+the neighbourhood. McCarthy kept two servants—a man and a girl. Turner
+had a considerable household, some half-dozen at the least. That is as much as
+I have been able to gather about the families. Now for the facts.
+
+
+
+ 
+“On June 3rd, that is, on Monday last, McCarthy left his house at
+Hatherley about three in the afternoon and walked down to the Boscombe Pool,
+which is a small lake formed by the spreading out of the stream which runs down
+the Boscombe Valley. He had been out with his serving-man in the morning at
+Ross, and he had told the man that he must hurry, as he had an appointment of
+importance to keep at three. From that appointment he never came back alive.
+
+
+
+ 
+“From Hatherley Farmhouse to the Boscombe Pool is a quarter of a mile,
+and two people saw him as he passed over this ground. One was an old woman,
+whose name is not mentioned, and the other was William Crowder, a game-keeper
+in the employ of Mr. Turner. Both these witnesses depose that Mr. McCarthy was
+walking alone. The game-keeper adds that within a few minutes of his seeing Mr.
+McCarthy pass he had seen his son, Mr. James McCarthy, going the same way with
+a gun under his arm. To the best of his belief, the father was actually in
+sight at the time, and the son was following him. He thought no more of the
+matter until he heard in the evening of the tragedy that had occurred.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The two McCarthys were seen after the time when William Crowder, the
+game-keeper, lost sight of them. The Boscombe Pool is thickly wooded round,
+with just a fringe of grass and of reeds round the edge. A girl of fourteen,
+Patience Moran, who is the daughter of the lodge-keeper of the Boscombe Valley
+estate, was in one of the woods picking flowers. She states that while she was
+there she saw, at the border of the wood and close by the lake, Mr. McCarthy
+and his son, and that they appeared to be having a violent quarrel. She heard
+Mr. McCarthy the elder using very strong language to his son, and she saw the
+latter raise up his hand as if to strike his father. She was so frightened by
+their violence that she ran away and told her mother when she reached home that
+she had left the two McCarthys quarrelling near Boscombe Pool, and that she was
+afraid that they were going to fight. She had hardly said the words when young
+Mr. McCarthy came running up to the lodge to say that he had found his father
+dead in the wood, and to ask for the help of the lodge-keeper. He was much
+excited, without either his gun or his hat, and his right hand and sleeve were
+observed to be stained with fresh blood. On following him they found the dead
+body stretched out upon the grass beside the pool. The head had been beaten in
+by repeated blows of some heavy and blunt weapon. The injuries were such as
+might very well have been inflicted by the butt-end of his son’s gun,
+which was found lying on the grass within a few paces of the body. Under these
+circumstances the young man was instantly arrested, and a verdict of
+‘wilful murder’ having been returned at the inquest on Tuesday, he
+was on Wednesday brought before the magistrates at Ross, who have referred the
+case to the next Assizes. Those are the main facts of the case as they came out
+before the coroner and the police-court.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I could hardly imagine a more damning case,” I remarked. “If
+ever circumstantial evidence pointed to a criminal it does so here.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing,” answered Holmes
+thoughtfully. “It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if
+you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an
+equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different. It must be
+confessed, however, that the case looks exceedingly grave against the young
+man, and it is very possible that he is indeed the culprit. There are several
+people in the neighbourhood, however, and among them Miss Turner, the daughter
+of the neighbouring landowner, who believe in his innocence, and who have
+retained Lestrade, whom you may recollect in connection with the Study in
+Scarlet, to work out the case in his interest. Lestrade, being rather puzzled,
+has referred the case to me, and hence it is that two middle-aged gentlemen are
+flying westward at fifty miles an hour instead of quietly digesting their
+breakfasts at home.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am afraid,” said I, “that the facts are so obvious that
+you will find little credit to be gained out of this case.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” he
+answered, laughing. “Besides, we may chance to hit upon some other
+obvious facts which may have been by no means obvious to Mr. Lestrade. You know
+me too well to think that I am boasting when I say that I shall either confirm
+or destroy his theory by means which he is quite incapable of employing, or
+even of understanding. To take the first example to hand, I very clearly
+perceive that in your bedroom the window is upon the right-hand side, and yet I
+question whether Mr. Lestrade would have noted even so self-evident a thing as
+that.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How on earth—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear fellow, I know you well. I know the military neatness which
+characterises you. You shave every morning, and in this season you shave by the
+sunlight; but since your shaving is less and less complete as we get farther
+back on the left side, until it becomes positively slovenly as we get round the
+angle of the jaw, it is surely very clear that that side is less illuminated
+than the other. I could not imagine a man of your habits looking at himself in
+an equal light and being satisfied with such a result. I only quote this as a
+trivial example of observation and inference. Therein lies my métier ,
+and it is just possible that it may be of some service in the investigation
+which lies before us. There are one or two minor points which were brought out
+in the inquest, and which are worth considering.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What are they?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It appears that his arrest did not take place at once, but after the
+return to Hatherley Farm. On the inspector of constabulary informing him that
+he was a prisoner, he remarked that he was not surprised to hear it, and that
+it was no more than his deserts. This observation of his had the natural effect
+of removing any traces of doubt which might have remained in the minds of the
+coroner’s jury.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was a confession,” I ejaculated.
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, for it was followed by a protestation of innocence.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Coming on the top of such a damning series of events, it was at least a
+most suspicious remark.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“On the contrary,” said Holmes, “it is the brightest rift
+which I can at present see in the clouds. However innocent he might be, he
+could not be such an absolute imbecile as not to see that the circumstances
+were very black against him. Had he appeared surprised at his own arrest, or
+feigned indignation at it, I should have looked upon it as highly suspicious,
+because such surprise or anger would not be natural under the circumstances,
+and yet might appear to be the best policy to a scheming man. His frank
+acceptance of the situation marks him as either an innocent man, or else as a
+man of considerable self-restraint and firmness. As to his remark about his
+deserts, it was also not unnatural if you consider that he stood beside the
+dead body of his father, and that there is no doubt that he had that very day
+so far forgotten his filial duty as to bandy words with him, and even,
+according to the little girl whose evidence is so important, to raise his hand
+as if to strike him. The self-reproach and contrition which are displayed in
+his remark appear to me to be the signs of a healthy mind rather than of a
+guilty one.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I shook my head. “Many men have been hanged on far slighter
+evidence,” I remarked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“So they have. And many men have been wrongfully hanged.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What is the young man’s own account of the matter?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is, I am afraid, not very encouraging to his supporters, though there
+are one or two points in it which are suggestive. You will find it here, and
+may read it for yourself.”
+
+
+
+ 
+He picked out from his bundle a copy of the local Herefordshire paper, and
+having turned down the sheet he pointed out the paragraph in which the
+unfortunate young man had given his own statement of what had occurred. I
+settled myself down in the corner of the carriage and read it very carefully.
+It ran in this way:
+
+
+
+ 
+“Mr. James McCarthy, the only son of the deceased, was then called and
+gave evidence as follows: ‘I had been away from home for three days at
+Bristol, and had only just returned upon the morning of last Monday, the 3rd.
+My father was absent from home at the time of my arrival, and I was informed by
+the maid that he had driven over to Ross with John Cobb, the groom. Shortly
+after my return I heard the wheels of his trap in the yard, and, looking out of
+my window, I saw him get out and walk rapidly out of the yard, though I was not
+aware in which direction he was going. I then took my gun and strolled out in
+the direction of the Boscombe Pool, with the intention of visiting the rabbit
+warren which is upon the other side. On my way I saw William Crowder, the
+game-keeper, as he had stated in his evidence; but he is mistaken in thinking
+that I was following my father. I had no idea that he was in front of me. When
+about a hundred yards from the pool I heard a cry of “Cooee!” which
+was a usual signal between my father and myself. I then hurried forward, and
+found him standing by the pool. He appeared to be much surprised at seeing me
+and asked me rather roughly what I was doing there. A conversation ensued which
+led to high words and almost to blows, for my father was a man of a very
+violent temper. Seeing that his passion was becoming ungovernable, I left him
+and returned towards Hatherley Farm. I had not gone more than 150 yards,
+however, when I heard a hideous outcry behind me, which caused me to run back
+again. I found my father expiring upon the ground, with his head terribly
+injured. I dropped my gun and held him in my arms, but he almost instantly
+expired. I knelt beside him for some minutes, and then made my way to Mr.
+Turner’s lodge-keeper, his house being the nearest, to ask for
+assistance. I saw no one near my father when I returned, and I have no idea how
+he came by his injuries. He was not a popular man, being somewhat cold and
+forbidding in his manners, but he had, as far as I know, no active enemies. I
+know nothing further of the matter.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“The Coroner: Did your father make any statement to you before he died?
+
+
+
+ 
+“Witness: He mumbled a few words, but I could only catch some allusion to
+a rat.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The Coroner: What did you understand by that?
+
+
+
+ 
+“Witness: It conveyed no meaning to me. I thought that he was delirious.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The Coroner: What was the point upon which you and your father had this
+final quarrel?
+
+
+
+ 
+“Witness: I should prefer not to answer.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The Coroner: I am afraid that I must press it.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Witness: It is really impossible for me to tell you. I can assure you
+that it has nothing to do with the sad tragedy which followed.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The Coroner: That is for the court to decide. I need not point out to
+you that your refusal to answer will prejudice your case considerably in any
+future proceedings which may arise.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Witness: I must still refuse.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The Coroner: I understand that the cry of ‘Cooee’ was a
+common signal between you and your father?
+
+
+
+ 
+“Witness: It was.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The Coroner: How was it, then, that he uttered it before he saw you, and
+before he even knew that you had returned from Bristol?
+
+
+
+ 
+“Witness (with considerable confusion): I do not know.
+
+
+
+ 
+“A Juryman: Did you see nothing which aroused your suspicions when you
+returned on hearing the cry and found your father fatally injured?
+
+
+
+ 
+“Witness: Nothing definite.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The Coroner: What do you mean?
+
+
+
+ 
+“Witness: I was so disturbed and excited as I rushed out into the open,
+that I could think of nothing except of my father. Yet I have a vague
+impression that as I ran forward something lay upon the ground to the left of
+me. It seemed to me to be something grey in colour, a coat of some sort, or a
+plaid perhaps. When I rose from my father I looked round for it, but it was
+gone.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Do you mean that it disappeared before you went for
+help?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Yes, it was gone.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“ ‘You cannot say what it was?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘No, I had a feeling something was there.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘How far from the body?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘A dozen yards or so.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘And how far from the edge of the wood?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘About the same.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Then if it was removed it was while you were within a dozen
+yards of it?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Yes, but with my back towards it.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“This concluded the examination of the witness.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I see,” said I as I glanced down the column, “that the
+coroner in his concluding remarks was rather severe upon young McCarthy. He
+calls attention, and with reason, to the discrepancy about his father having
+signalled to him before seeing him, also to his refusal to give details of his
+conversation with his father, and his singular account of his father’s
+dying words. They are all, as he remarks, very much against the son.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes laughed softly to himself and stretched himself out upon the cushioned
+seat. “Both you and the coroner have been at some pains,” said he,
+“to single out the very strongest points in the young man’s favour.
+Don’t you see that you alternately give him credit for having too much
+imagination and too little? Too little, if he could not invent a cause of
+quarrel which would give him the sympathy of the jury; too much, if he evolved
+from his own inner consciousness anything so outré as a dying reference
+to a rat, and the incident of the vanishing cloth. No, sir, I shall approach
+this case from the point of view that what this young man says is true, and we
+shall see whither that hypothesis will lead us. And now here is my pocket
+Petrarch, and not another word shall I say of this case until we are on the
+scene of action. We lunch at Swindon, and I see that we shall be there in
+twenty minutes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was nearly four o’clock when we at last, after passing through the
+beautiful Stroud Valley, and over the broad gleaming Severn, found ourselves at
+the pretty little country-town of Ross. A lean, ferret-like man, furtive and
+sly-looking, was waiting for us upon the platform. In spite of the light brown
+dustcoat and leather-leggings which he wore in deference to his rustic
+surroundings, I had no difficulty in recognising Lestrade, of Scotland Yard.
+With him we drove to the Hereford Arms where a room had already been engaged
+for us.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have ordered a carriage,” said Lestrade as we sat over a cup of
+tea. “I knew your energetic nature, and that you would not be happy until
+you had been on the scene of the crime.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was very nice and complimentary of you,” Holmes answered.
+“It is entirely a question of barometric pressure.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Lestrade looked startled. “I do not quite follow,” he said.
+
+
+
+ 
+“How is the glass? Twenty-nine, I see. No wind, and not a cloud in the
+sky. I have a caseful of cigarettes here which need smoking, and the sofa is
+very much superior to the usual country hotel abomination. I do not think that
+it is probable that I shall use the carriage to-night.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Lestrade laughed indulgently. “You have, no doubt, already formed your
+conclusions from the newspapers,” he said. “The case is as plain as
+a pikestaff, and the more one goes into it the plainer it becomes. Still, of
+course, one can’t refuse a lady, and such a very positive one, too. She
+has heard of you, and would have your opinion, though I repeatedly told her
+that there was nothing which you could do which I had not already done. Why,
+bless my soul! here is her carriage at the door.”
+
+
+
+ 
+He had hardly spoken before there rushed into the room one of the most lovely
+young women that I have ever seen in my life. Her violet eyes shining, her lips
+parted, a pink flush upon her cheeks, all thought of her natural reserve lost
+in her overpowering excitement and concern.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, Mr. Sherlock Holmes!” she cried, glancing from one to the
+other of us, and finally, with a woman’s quick intuition, fastening upon
+my companion, “I am so glad that you have come. I have driven down to
+tell you so. I know that James didn’t do it. I know it, and I want you to
+start upon your work knowing it, too. Never let yourself doubt upon that point.
+We have known each other since we were little children, and I know his faults
+as no one else does; but he is too tender-hearted to hurt a fly. Such a charge
+is absurd to anyone who really knows him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I hope we may clear him, Miss Turner,” said Sherlock Holmes.
+“You may rely upon my doing all that I can.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But you have read the evidence. You have formed some conclusion? Do you
+not see some loophole, some flaw? Do you not yourself think that he is
+innocent?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I think that it is very probable.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There, now!” she cried, throwing back her head and looking
+defiantly at Lestrade. “You hear! He gives me hopes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Lestrade shrugged his shoulders. “I am afraid that my colleague has been
+a little quick in forming his conclusions,” he said.
+
+
+
+ 
+“But he is right. Oh! I know that he is right. James never did it. And
+about his quarrel with his father, I am sure that the reason why he would not
+speak about it to the coroner was because I was concerned in it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In what way?” asked Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is no time for me to hide anything. James and his father had many
+disagreements about me. Mr. McCarthy was very anxious that there should be a
+marriage between us. James and I have always loved each other as brother and
+sister; but of course he is young and has seen very little of life yet,
+and—and—well, he naturally did not wish to do anything like that
+yet. So there were quarrels, and this, I am sure, was one of them.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And your father?” asked Holmes. “Was he in favour of such a
+union?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, he was averse to it also. No one but Mr. McCarthy was in favour of
+it.” A quick blush passed over her fresh young face as Holmes shot one of
+his keen, questioning glances at her.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you for this information,” said he. “May I see your
+father if I call to-morrow?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am afraid the doctor won’t allow it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The doctor?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, have you not heard? Poor father has never been strong for years
+back, but this has broken him down completely. He has taken to his bed, and Dr.
+Willows says that he is a wreck and that his nervous system is shattered. Mr.
+McCarthy was the only man alive who had known dad in the old days in
+Victoria.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ha! In Victoria! That is important.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, at the mines.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Quite so; at the gold-mines, where, as I understand, Mr. Turner made his
+money.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, certainly.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you, Miss Turner. You have been of material assistance to
+me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You will tell me if you have any news to-morrow. No doubt you will go to
+the prison to see James. Oh, if you do, Mr. Holmes, do tell him that I know him
+to be innocent.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I will, Miss Turner.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I must go home now, for dad is very ill, and he misses me so if I leave
+him. Good-bye, and God help you in your undertaking.” She hurried from
+the room as impulsively as she had entered, and we heard the wheels of her
+carriage rattle off down the street.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am ashamed of you, Holmes,” said Lestrade with dignity after a
+few minutes’ silence. “Why should you raise up hopes which you are
+bound to disappoint? I am not over-tender of heart, but I call it cruel.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I think that I see my way to clearing James McCarthy,” said
+Holmes. “Have you an order to see him in prison?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, but only for you and me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then I shall reconsider my resolution about going out. We have still
+time to take a train to Hereford and see him to-night?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ample.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then let us do so. Watson, I fear that you will find it very slow, but I
+shall only be away a couple of hours.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I walked down to the station with them, and then wandered through the streets
+of the little town, finally returning to the hotel, where I lay upon the sofa
+and tried to interest myself in a yellow-backed novel. The puny plot of the
+story was so thin, however, when compared to the deep mystery through which we
+were groping, and I found my attention wander so continually from the action to
+the fact, that I at last flung it across the room and gave myself up entirely
+to a consideration of the events of the day. Supposing that this unhappy young
+man’s story were absolutely true, then what hellish thing, what
+absolutely unforeseen and extraordinary calamity could have occurred between
+the time when he parted from his father, and the moment when, drawn back by his
+screams, he rushed into the glade? It was something terrible and deadly. What
+could it be? Might not the nature of the injuries reveal something to my
+medical instincts? I rang the bell and called for the weekly county paper,
+which contained a verbatim account of the inquest. In the surgeon’s
+deposition it was stated that the posterior third of the left parietal bone and
+the left half of the occipital bone had been shattered by a heavy blow from a
+blunt weapon. I marked the spot upon my own head. Clearly such a blow must have
+been struck from behind. That was to some extent in favour of the accused, as
+when seen quarrelling he was face to face with his father. Still, it did not go
+for very much, for the older man might have turned his back before the blow
+fell. Still, it might be worth while to call Holmes’ attention to it.
+Then there was the peculiar dying reference to a rat. What could that mean? It
+could not be delirium. A man dying from a sudden blow does not commonly become
+delirious. No, it was more likely to be an attempt to explain how he met his
+fate. But what could it indicate? I cudgelled my brains to find some possible
+explanation. And then the incident of the grey cloth seen by young McCarthy. If
+that were true the murderer must have dropped some part of his dress,
+presumably his overcoat, in his flight, and must have had the hardihood to
+return and to carry it away at the instant when the son was kneeling with his
+back turned not a dozen paces off. What a tissue of mysteries and
+improbabilities the whole thing was! I did not wonder at Lestrade’s
+opinion, and yet I had so much faith in Sherlock Holmes’ insight that I
+could not lose hope as long as every fresh fact seemed to strengthen his
+conviction of young McCarthy’s innocence.
+
+
+
+ 
+It was late before Sherlock Holmes returned. He came back alone, for Lestrade
+was staying in lodgings in the town.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The glass still keeps very high,” he remarked as he sat down.
+“It is of importance that it should not rain before we are able to go
+over the ground. On the other hand, a man should be at his very best and
+keenest for such nice work as that, and I did not wish to do it when fagged by
+a long journey. I have seen young McCarthy.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And what did you learn from him?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nothing.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Could he throw no light?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“None at all. I was inclined to think at one time that he knew who had
+done it and was screening him or her, but I am convinced now that he is as
+puzzled as everyone else. He is not a very quick-witted youth, though comely to
+look at and, I should think, sound at heart.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I cannot admire his taste,” I remarked, “if it is indeed a
+fact that he was averse to a marriage with so charming a young lady as this
+Miss Turner.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah, thereby hangs a rather painful tale. This fellow is madly, insanely,
+in love with her, but some two years ago, when he was only a lad, and before he
+really knew her, for she had been away five years at a boarding-school, what
+does the idiot do but get into the clutches of a barmaid in Bristol and marry
+her at a registry office? No one knows a word of the matter, but you can
+imagine how maddening it must be to him to be upbraided for not doing what he
+would give his very eyes to do, but what he knows to be absolutely impossible.
+It was sheer frenzy of this sort which made him throw his hands up into the air
+when his father, at their last interview, was goading him on to propose to Miss
+Turner. On the other hand, he had no means of supporting himself, and his
+father, who was by all accounts a very hard man, would have thrown him over
+utterly had he known the truth. It was with his barmaid wife that he had spent
+the last three days in Bristol, and his father did not know where he was. Mark
+that point. It is of importance. Good has come out of evil, however, for the
+barmaid, finding from the papers that he is in serious trouble and likely to be
+hanged, has thrown him over utterly and has written to him to say that she has
+a husband already in the Bermuda Dockyard, so that there is really no tie
+between them. I think that that bit of news has consoled young McCarthy for all
+that he has suffered.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But if he is innocent, who has done it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah! who? I would call your attention very particularly to two points.
+One is that the murdered man had an appointment with someone at the pool, and
+that the someone could not have been his son, for his son was away, and he did
+not know when he would return. The second is that the murdered man was heard to
+cry ‘Cooee!’ before he knew that his son had returned. Those are
+the crucial points upon which the case depends. And now let us talk about
+George Meredith, if you please, and we shall leave all minor matters until
+to-morrow.”
+
+
+
+ 
+There was no rain, as Holmes had foretold, and the morning broke bright and
+cloudless. At nine o’clock Lestrade called for us with the carriage, and
+we set off for Hatherley Farm and the Boscombe Pool.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There is serious news this morning,” Lestrade observed. “It
+is said that Mr. Turner, of the Hall, is so ill that his life is despaired
+of.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“An elderly man, I presume?” said Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“About sixty; but his constitution has been shattered by his life abroad,
+and he has been in failing health for some time. This business has had a very
+bad effect upon him. He was an old friend of McCarthy’s, and, I may add,
+a great benefactor to him, for I have learned that he gave him Hatherley Farm
+rent free.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Indeed! That is interesting,” said Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, yes! In a hundred other ways he has helped him. Everybody about here
+speaks of his kindness to him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Really! Does it not strike you as a little singular that this McCarthy,
+who appears to have had little of his own, and to have been under such
+obligations to Turner, should still talk of marrying his son to Turner’s
+daughter, who is, presumably, heiress to the estate, and that in such a very
+cocksure manner, as if it were merely a case of a proposal and all else would
+follow? It is the more strange, since we know that Turner himself was averse to
+the idea. The daughter told us as much. Do you not deduce something from
+that?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We have got to the deductions and the inferences,” said Lestrade,
+winking at me. “I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without
+flying away after theories and fancies.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You are right,” said Holmes demurely; “you do find it very
+hard to tackle the facts.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Anyhow, I have grasped one fact which you seem to find it difficult to
+get hold of,” replied Lestrade with some warmth.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And that is—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That McCarthy senior met his death from McCarthy junior and that all
+theories to the contrary are the merest moonshine.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, moonshine is a brighter thing than fog,” said Holmes,
+laughing. “But I am very much mistaken if this is not Hatherley Farm upon
+the left.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, that is it.” It was a widespread, comfortable-looking
+building, two-storied, slate-roofed, with great yellow blotches of lichen upon
+the grey walls. The drawn blinds and the smokeless chimneys, however, gave it a
+stricken look, as though the weight of this horror still lay heavy upon it. We
+called at the door, when the maid, at Holmes’ request, showed us the
+boots which her master wore at the time of his death, and also a pair of the
+son’s, though not the pair which he had then had. Having measured these
+very carefully from seven or eight different points, Holmes desired to be led
+to the court-yard, from which we all followed the winding track which led to
+Boscombe Pool.
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes was transformed when he was hot upon such a scent as this. Men
+who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of Baker Street would have
+failed to recognise him. His face flushed and darkened. His brows were drawn
+into two hard black lines, while his eyes shone out from beneath them with a
+steely glitter. His face was bent downward, his shoulders bowed, his lips
+compressed, and the veins stood out like whipcord in his long, sinewy neck. His
+nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase, and his mind
+was so absolutely concentrated upon the matter before him that a question or
+remark fell unheeded upon his ears, or, at the most, only provoked a quick,
+impatient snarl in reply. Swiftly and silently he made his way along the track
+which ran through the meadows, and so by way of the woods to the Boscombe Pool.
+It was damp, marshy ground, as is all that district, and there were marks of
+many feet, both upon the path and amid the short grass which bounded it on
+either side. Sometimes Holmes would hurry on, sometimes stop dead, and once he
+made quite a little detour into the meadow. Lestrade and I walked behind him,
+the detective indifferent and contemptuous, while I watched my friend with the
+interest which sprang from the conviction that every one of his actions was
+directed towards a definite end.
+
+
+
+ 
+The Boscombe Pool, which is a little reed-girt sheet of water some fifty yards
+across, is situated at the boundary between the Hatherley Farm and the private
+park of the wealthy Mr. Turner. Above the woods which lined it upon the farther
+side we could see the red, jutting pinnacles which marked the site of the rich
+landowner’s dwelling. On the Hatherley side of the pool the woods grew
+very thick, and there was a narrow belt of sodden grass twenty paces across
+between the edge of the trees and the reeds which lined the lake. Lestrade
+showed us the exact spot at which the body had been found, and, indeed, so
+moist was the ground, that I could plainly see the traces which had been left
+by the fall of the stricken man. To Holmes, as I could see by his eager face
+and peering eyes, very many other things were to be read upon the trampled
+grass. He ran round, like a dog who is picking up a scent, and then turned upon
+my companion.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What did you go into the pool for?” he asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I fished about with a rake. I thought there might be some weapon or
+other trace. But how on earth—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, tut, tut! I have no time! That left foot of yours with its inward
+twist is all over the place. A mole could trace it, and there it vanishes among
+the reeds. Oh, how simple it would all have been had I been here before they
+came like a herd of buffalo and wallowed all over it. Here is where the party
+with the lodge-keeper came, and they have covered all tracks for six or eight
+feet round the body. But here are three separate tracks of the same
+feet.” He drew out a lens and lay down upon his waterproof to have a
+better view, talking all the time rather to himself than to us. “These
+are young McCarthy’s feet. Twice he was walking, and once he ran swiftly,
+so that the soles are deeply marked and the heels hardly visible. That bears
+out his story. He ran when he saw his father on the ground. Then here are the
+father’s feet as he paced up and down. What is this, then? It is the
+butt-end of the gun as the son stood listening. And this? Ha, ha! What have we
+here? Tiptoes! tiptoes! Square, too, quite unusual boots! They come, they go,
+they come again—of course that was for the cloak. Now where did they come
+from?” He ran up and down, sometimes losing, sometimes finding the track
+until we were well within the edge of the wood and under the shadow of a great
+beech, the largest tree in the neighbourhood. Holmes traced his way to the
+farther side of this and lay down once more upon his face with a little cry of
+satisfaction. For a long time he remained there, turning over the leaves and
+dried sticks, gathering up what seemed to me to be dust into an envelope and
+examining with his lens not only the ground but even the bark of the tree as
+far as he could reach. A jagged stone was lying among the moss, and this also
+he carefully examined and retained. Then he followed a pathway through the wood
+until he came to the high road, where all traces were lost.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It has been a case of considerable interest,” he remarked,
+returning to his natural manner. “I fancy that this grey house on the
+right must be the lodge. I think that I will go in and have a word with Moran,
+and perhaps write a little note. Having done that, we may drive back to our
+luncheon. You may walk to the cab, and I shall be with you presently.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was about ten minutes before we regained our cab and drove back into Ross,
+Holmes still carrying with him the stone which he had picked up in the wood.
+
+
+
+ 
+“This may interest you, Lestrade,” he remarked, holding it out.
+“The murder was done with it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I see no marks.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There are none.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How do you know, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The grass was growing under it. It had only lain there a few days. There
+was no sign of a place whence it had been taken. It corresponds with the
+injuries. There is no sign of any other weapon.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And the murderer?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Is a tall man, left-handed, limps with the right leg, wears thick-soled
+shooting-boots and a grey cloak, smokes Indian cigars, uses a cigar-holder, and
+carries a blunt pen-knife in his pocket. There are several other indications,
+but these may be enough to aid us in our search.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Lestrade laughed. “I am afraid that I am still a sceptic,” he said.
+“Theories are all very well, but we have to deal with a hard-headed
+British jury.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“ Nous verrons ,” answered Holmes calmly. “You work your
+own method, and I shall work mine. I shall be busy this afternoon, and shall
+probably return to London by the evening train.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And leave your case unfinished?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, finished.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But the mystery?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is solved.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Who was the criminal, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The gentleman I describe.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But who is he?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Surely it would not be difficult to find out. This is not such a
+populous neighbourhood.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Lestrade shrugged his shoulders. “I am a practical man,” he said,
+“and I really cannot undertake to go about the country looking for a
+left-handed gentleman with a game leg. I should become the laughing-stock of
+Scotland Yard.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“All right,” said Holmes quietly. “I have given you the
+chance. Here are your lodgings. Good-bye. I shall drop you a line before I
+leave.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Having left Lestrade at his rooms, we drove to our hotel, where we found lunch
+upon the table. Holmes was silent and buried in thought with a pained
+expression upon his face, as one who finds himself in a perplexing position.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Look here, Watson,” he said when the cloth was cleared “just
+sit down in this chair and let me preach to you for a little. I don’t
+know quite what to do, and I should value your advice. Light a cigar and let me
+expound.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Pray do so.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, now, in considering this case there are two points about young
+McCarthy’s narrative which struck us both instantly, although they
+impressed me in his favour and you against him. One was the fact that his
+father should, according to his account, cry ‘Cooee!’ before seeing
+him. The other was his singular dying reference to a rat. He mumbled several
+words, you understand, but that was all that caught the son’s ear. Now
+from this double point our research must commence, and we will begin it by
+presuming that what the lad says is absolutely true.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What of this ‘Cooee!’ then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, obviously it could not have been meant for the son. The son, as
+far as he knew, was in Bristol. It was mere chance that he was within earshot.
+The ‘Cooee!’ was meant to attract the attention of whoever it was
+that he had the appointment with. But ‘Cooee’ is a distinctly
+Australian cry, and one which is used between Australians. There is a strong
+presumption that the person whom McCarthy expected to meet him at Boscombe Pool
+was someone who had been in Australia.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What of the rat, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes took a folded paper from his pocket and flattened it out on the
+table. “This is a map of the Colony of Victoria,” he said. “I
+wired to Bristol for it last night.” He put his hand over part of the
+map. “What do you read?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“ARAT,” I read.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And now?” He raised his hand.
+
+
+
+ 
+“BALLARAT.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Quite so. That was the word the man uttered, and of which his son only
+caught the last two syllables. He was trying to utter the name of his murderer.
+So and so, of Ballarat.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is wonderful!” I exclaimed.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is obvious. And now, you see, I had narrowed the field down
+considerably. The possession of a grey garment was a third point which,
+granting the son’s statement to be correct, was a certainty. We have come
+now out of mere vagueness to the definite conception of an Australian from
+Ballarat with a grey cloak.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Certainly.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And one who was at home in the district, for the pool can only be
+approached by the farm or by the estate, where strangers could hardly
+wander.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Quite so.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then comes our expedition of to-day. By an examination of the ground I
+gained the trifling details which I gave to that imbecile Lestrade, as to the
+personality of the criminal.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But how did you gain them?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of
+trifles.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“His height I know that you might roughly judge from the length of his
+stride. His boots, too, might be told from their traces.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, they were peculiar boots.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But his lameness?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The impression of his right foot was always less distinct than his left.
+He put less weight upon it. Why? Because he limped—he was lame.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But his left-handedness.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You were yourself struck by the nature of the injury as recorded by the
+surgeon at the inquest. The blow was struck from immediately behind, and yet
+was upon the left side. Now, how can that be unless it were by a left-handed
+man? He had stood behind that tree during the interview between the father and
+son. He had even smoked there. I found the ash of a cigar, which my special
+knowledge of tobacco ashes enables me to pronounce as an Indian cigar. I have,
+as you know, devoted some attention to this, and written a little monograph on
+the ashes of 140 different varieties of pipe, cigar, and cigarette tobacco.
+Having found the ash, I then looked round and discovered the stump among the
+moss where he had tossed it. It was an Indian cigar, of the variety which are
+rolled in Rotterdam.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And the cigar-holder?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I could see that the end had not been in his mouth. Therefore he used a
+holder. The tip had been cut off, not bitten off, but the cut was not a clean
+one, so I deduced a blunt pen-knife.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Holmes,” I said, “you have drawn a net round this man from
+which he cannot escape, and you have saved an innocent human life as truly as
+if you had cut the cord which was hanging him. I see the direction in which all
+this points. The culprit is—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Mr. John Turner,” cried the hotel waiter, opening the door of our
+sitting-room, and ushering in a visitor.
+
+
+
+ 
+The man who entered was a strange and impressive figure. His slow, limping step
+and bowed shoulders gave the appearance of decrepitude, and yet his hard,
+deep-lined, craggy features, and his enormous limbs showed that he was
+possessed of unusual strength of body and of character. His tangled beard,
+grizzled hair, and outstanding, drooping eyebrows combined to give an air of
+dignity and power to his appearance, but his face was of an ashen white, while
+his lips and the corners of his nostrils were tinged with a shade of blue. It
+was clear to me at a glance that he was in the grip of some deadly and chronic
+disease.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pray sit down on the sofa,” said Holmes gently. “You had my
+note?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, the lodge-keeper brought it up. You said that you wished to see me
+here to avoid scandal.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I thought people would talk if I went to the Hall.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And why did you wish to see me?” He looked across at my companion
+with despair in his weary eyes, as though his question was already answered.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes,” said Holmes, answering the look rather than the words.
+“It is so. I know all about McCarthy.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The old man sank his face in his hands. “God help me!” he cried.
+“But I would not have let the young man come to harm. I give you my word
+that I would have spoken out if it went against him at the Assizes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am glad to hear you say so,” said Holmes gravely.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I would have spoken now had it not been for my dear girl. It would break
+her heart—it will break her heart when she hears that I am
+arrested.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It may not come to that,” said Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am no official agent. I understand that it was your daughter who
+required my presence here, and I am acting in her interests. Young McCarthy
+must be got off, however.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am a dying man,” said old Turner. “I have had diabetes for
+years. My doctor says it is a question whether I shall live a month. Yet I
+would rather die under my own roof than in a gaol.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes rose and sat down at the table with his pen in his hand and a bundle of
+paper before him. “Just tell us the truth,” he said. “I shall
+jot down the facts. You will sign it, and Watson here can witness it. Then I
+could produce your confession at the last extremity to save young McCarthy. I
+promise you that I shall not use it unless it is absolutely needed.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s as well,” said the old man; “it’s a
+question whether I shall live to the Assizes, so it matters little to me, but I
+should wish to spare Alice the shock. And now I will make the thing clear to
+you; it has been a long time in the acting, but will not take me long to tell.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You didn’t know this dead man, McCarthy. He was a devil incarnate.
+I tell you that. God keep you out of the clutches of such a man as he. His grip
+has been upon me these twenty years, and he has blasted my life. I’ll
+tell you first how I came to be in his power.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was in the early ’60’s at the diggings. I was a young
+chap then, hot-blooded and reckless, ready to turn my hand at anything; I got
+among bad companions, took to drink, had no luck with my claim, took to the
+bush, and in a word became what you would call over here a highway robber.
+There were six of us, and we had a wild, free life of it, sticking up a station
+from time to time, or stopping the wagons on the road to the diggings. Black
+Jack of Ballarat was the name I went under, and our party is still remembered
+in the colony as the Ballarat Gang.
+
+
+
+ 
+“One day a gold convoy came down from Ballarat to Melbourne, and we lay
+in wait for it and attacked it. There were six troopers and six of us, so it
+was a close thing, but we emptied four of their saddles at the first volley.
+Three of our boys were killed, however, before we got the swag. I put my pistol
+to the head of the wagon-driver, who was this very man McCarthy. I wish to the
+Lord that I had shot him then, but I spared him, though I saw his wicked little
+eyes fixed on my face, as though to remember every feature. We got away with
+the gold, became wealthy men, and made our way over to England without being
+suspected. There I parted from my old pals and determined to settle down to a
+quiet and respectable life. I bought this estate, which chanced to be in the
+market, and I set myself to do a little good with my money, to make up for the
+way in which I had earned it. I married, too, and though my wife died young she
+left me my dear little Alice. Even when she was just a baby her wee hand seemed
+to lead me down the right path as nothing else had ever done. In a word, I
+turned over a new leaf and did my best to make up for the past. All was going
+well when McCarthy laid his grip upon me.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I had gone up to town about an investment, and I met him in Regent
+Street with hardly a coat to his back or a boot to his foot.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Here we are, Jack,’ says he, touching me on the arm;
+‘we’ll be as good as a family to you. There’s two of us, me
+and my son, and you can have the keeping of us. If you
+don’t—it’s a fine, law-abiding country is England, and
+there’s always a policeman within hail.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, down they came to the west country, there was no shaking them off,
+and there they have lived rent free on my best land ever since. There was no
+rest for me, no peace, no forgetfulness; turn where I would, there was his
+cunning, grinning face at my elbow. It grew worse as Alice grew up, for he soon
+saw I was more afraid of her knowing my past than of the police. Whatever he
+wanted he must have, and whatever it was I gave him without question, land,
+money, houses, until at last he asked a thing which I could not give. He asked
+for Alice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“His son, you see, had grown up, and so had my girl, and as I was known
+to be in weak health, it seemed a fine stroke to him that his lad should step
+into the whole property. But there I was firm. I would not have his cursed
+stock mixed with mine; not that I had any dislike to the lad, but his blood was
+in him, and that was enough. I stood firm. McCarthy threatened. I braved him to
+do his worst. We were to meet at the pool midway between our houses to talk it
+over.
+
+
+
+ 
+“When I went down there I found him talking with his son, so I smoked a
+cigar and waited behind a tree until he should be alone. But as I listened to
+his talk all that was black and bitter in me seemed to come uppermost. He was
+urging his son to marry my daughter with as little regard for what she might
+think as if she were a slut from off the streets. It drove me mad to think that
+I and all that I held most dear should be in the power of such a man as this.
+Could I not snap the bond? I was already a dying and a desperate man. Though
+clear of mind and fairly strong of limb, I knew that my own fate was sealed.
+But my memory and my girl! Both could be saved if I could but silence that foul
+tongue. I did it, Mr. Holmes. I would do it again. Deeply as I have sinned, I
+have led a life of martyrdom to atone for it. But that my girl should be
+entangled in the same meshes which held me was more than I could suffer. I
+struck him down with no more compunction than if he had been some foul and
+venomous beast. His cry brought back his son; but I had gained the cover of the
+wood, though I was forced to go back to fetch the cloak which I had dropped in
+my flight. That is the true story, gentlemen, of all that occurred.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, it is not for me to judge you,” said Holmes as the old man
+signed the statement which had been drawn out. “I pray that we may never
+be exposed to such a temptation.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I pray not, sir. And what do you intend to do?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In view of your health, nothing. You are yourself aware that you will
+soon have to answer for your deed at a higher court than the Assizes. I will
+keep your confession, and if McCarthy is condemned I shall be forced to use it.
+If not, it shall never be seen by mortal eye; and your secret, whether you be
+alive or dead, shall be safe with us.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Farewell, then,” said the old man solemnly. “Your own
+deathbeds, when they come, will be the easier for the thought of the peace
+which you have given to mine.” Tottering and shaking in all his giant
+frame, he stumbled slowly from the room.
+
+
+
+ 
+“God help us!” said Holmes after a long silence. “Why does
+fate play such tricks with poor, helpless worms? I never hear of such a case as
+this that I do not think of Baxter’s words, and say, ‘There, but
+for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes.’”
+
+
+
+ 
+James McCarthy was acquitted at the Assizes on the strength of a number of
+objections which had been drawn out by Holmes and submitted to the defending
+counsel. Old Turner lived for seven months after our interview, but he is now
+dead; and there is every prospect that the son and daughter may come to live
+happily together in ignorance of the black cloud which rests upon their past.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ V.
+THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS 
+ 
+ W hen I glance over my
+notes and records of the Sherlock Holmes cases between the years ’82 and
+’90, I am faced by so many which present strange and interesting features
+that it is no easy matter to know which to choose and which to leave. Some,
+however, have already gained publicity through the papers, and others have not
+offered a field for those peculiar qualities which my friend possessed in so
+high a degree, and which it is the object of these papers to illustrate. Some,
+too, have baffled his analytical skill, and would be, as narratives, beginnings
+without an ending, while others have been but partially cleared up, and have
+their explanations founded rather upon conjecture and surmise than on that
+absolute logical proof which was so dear to him. There is, however, one of
+these last which was so remarkable in its details and so startling in its
+results that I am tempted to give some account of it in spite of the fact that
+there are points in connection with it which never have been, and probably
+never will be, entirely cleared up.
+
+
+
+ 
+The year ’87 furnished us with a long series of cases of greater or less
+interest, of which I retain the records. Among my headings under this one
+twelve months I find an account of the adventure of the Paradol Chamber, of the
+Amateur Mendicant Society, who held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a
+furniture warehouse, of the facts connected with the loss of the British barque
+ Sophy Anderson , of the singular adventures of the Grice Patersons in the
+island of Uffa, and finally of the Camberwell poisoning case. In the latter, as
+may be remembered, Sherlock Holmes was able, by winding up the dead man’s
+watch, to prove that it had been wound up two hours before, and that therefore
+the deceased had gone to bed within that time—a deduction which was of
+the greatest importance in clearing up the case. All these I may sketch out at
+some future date, but none of them present such singular features as the
+strange train of circumstances which I have now taken up my pen to describe.
+
+
+
+ 
+It was in the latter days of September, and the equinoctial gales had set in
+with exceptional violence. All day the wind had screamed and the rain had
+beaten against the windows, so that even here in the heart of great, hand-made
+London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of
+life and to recognise the presence of those great elemental forces which shriek
+at mankind through the bars of his civilisation, like untamed beasts in a cage.
+As evening drew in, the storm grew higher and louder, and the wind cried and
+sobbed like a child in the chimney. Sherlock Holmes sat moodily at one side of
+the fireplace cross-indexing his records of crime, while I at the other was
+deep in one of Clark Russell’s fine sea-stories until the howl of the
+gale from without seemed to blend with the text, and the splash of the rain to
+lengthen out into the long swash of the sea waves. My wife was on a visit to
+her mother’s, and for a few days I was a dweller once more in my old
+quarters at Baker Street.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why,” said I, glancing up at my companion, “that was surely
+the bell. Who could come to-night? Some friend of yours, perhaps?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Except yourself I have none,” he answered. “I do not
+encourage visitors.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A client, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“If so, it is a serious case. Nothing less would bring a man out on such
+a day and at such an hour. But I take it that it is more likely to be some
+crony of the landlady’s.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes was wrong in his conjecture, however, for there came a step in
+the passage and a tapping at the door. He stretched out his long arm to turn
+the lamp away from himself and towards the vacant chair upon which a newcomer
+must sit.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Come in!” said he.
+
+
+
+ 
+The man who entered was young, some two-and-twenty at the outside, well-groomed
+and trimly clad, with something of refinement and delicacy in his bearing. The
+streaming umbrella which he held in his hand, and his long shining waterproof
+told of the fierce weather through which he had come. He looked about him
+anxiously in the glare of the lamp, and I could see that his face was pale and
+his eyes heavy, like those of a man who is weighed down with some great
+anxiety.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I owe you an apology,” he said, raising his golden pince-nez to
+his eyes. “I trust that I am not intruding. I fear that I have brought
+some traces of the storm and rain into your snug chamber.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Give me your coat and umbrella,” said Holmes. “They may rest
+here on the hook and will be dry presently. You have come up from the
+south-west, I see.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, from Horsham.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That clay and chalk mixture which I see upon your toe caps is quite
+distinctive.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have come for advice.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is easily got.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And help.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is not always so easy.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have heard of you, Mr. Holmes. I heard from Major Prendergast how you
+saved him in the Tankerville Club scandal.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah, of course. He was wrongfully accused of cheating at cards.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He said that you could solve anything.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He said too much.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That you are never beaten.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have been beaten four times—three times by men, and once by a
+woman.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But what is that compared with the number of your successes?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is true that I have been generally successful.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then you may be so with me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I beg that you will draw your chair up to the fire and favour me with
+some details as to your case.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is no ordinary one.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“None of those which come to me are. I am the last court of
+appeal.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And yet I question, sir, whether, in all your experience, you have ever
+listened to a more mysterious and inexplicable chain of events than those which
+have happened in my own family.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You fill me with interest,” said Holmes. “Pray give us the
+essential facts from the commencement, and I can afterwards question you as to
+those details which seem to me to be most important.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The young man pulled his chair up and pushed his wet feet out towards the
+blaze.
+
+
+
+ 
+“My name,” said he, “is John Openshaw, but my own affairs
+have, as far as I can understand, little to do with this awful business. It is
+a hereditary matter; so in order to give you an idea of the facts, I must go
+back to the commencement of the affair.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You must know that my grandfather had two sons—my uncle Elias and
+my father Joseph. My father had a small factory at Coventry, which he enlarged
+at the time of the invention of bicycling. He was a patentee of the Openshaw
+unbreakable tire, and his business met with such success that he was able to
+sell it and to retire upon a handsome competence.
+
+
+
+ 
+“My uncle Elias emigrated to America when he was a young man and became a
+planter in Florida, where he was reported to have done very well. At the time
+of the war he fought in Jackson’s army, and afterwards under Hood, where
+he rose to be a colonel. When Lee laid down his arms my uncle returned to his
+plantation, where he remained for three or four years. About 1869 or 1870 he
+came back to Europe and took a small estate in Sussex, near Horsham. He had
+made a very considerable fortune in the States, and his reason for leaving them
+was his aversion to the negroes, and his dislike of the Republican policy in
+extending the franchise to them. He was a singular man, fierce and
+quick-tempered, very foul-mouthed when he was angry, and of a most retiring
+disposition. During all the years that he lived at Horsham, I doubt if ever he
+set foot in the town. He had a garden and two or three fields round his house,
+and there he would take his exercise, though very often for weeks on end he
+would never leave his room. He drank a great deal of brandy and smoked very
+heavily, but he would see no society and did not want any friends, not even his
+own brother.
+
+
+
+ 
+“He didn’t mind me; in fact, he took a fancy to me, for at the time
+when he saw me first I was a youngster of twelve or so. This would be in the
+year 1878, after he had been eight or nine years in England. He begged my
+father to let me live with him and he was very kind to me in his way. When he
+was sober he used to be fond of playing backgammon and draughts with me, and he
+would make me his representative both with the servants and with the
+tradespeople, so that by the time that I was sixteen I was quite master of the
+house. I kept all the keys and could go where I liked and do what I liked, so
+long as I did not disturb him in his privacy. There was one singular exception,
+however, for he had a single room, a lumber-room up among the attics, which was
+invariably locked, and which he would never permit either me or anyone else to
+enter. With a boy’s curiosity I have peeped through the keyhole, but I
+was never able to see more than such a collection of old trunks and bundles as
+would be expected in such a room.
+
+
+
+ 
+“One day—it was in March, 1883—a letter with a foreign stamp
+lay upon the table in front of the colonel’s plate. It was not a common
+thing for him to receive letters, for his bills were all paid in ready money,
+and he had no friends of any sort. ‘From India!’ said he as he took
+it up, ‘Pondicherry postmark! What can this be?’ Opening it
+hurriedly, out there jumped five little dried orange pips, which pattered down
+upon his plate. I began to laugh at this, but the laugh was struck from my lips
+at the sight of his face. His lip had fallen, his eyes were protruding, his
+skin the colour of putty, and he glared at the envelope which he still held in
+his trembling hand, ‘K. K. K.!’ he shrieked, and then, ‘My
+God, my God, my sins have overtaken me!’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘What is it, uncle?’ I cried.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Death,’ said he, and rising from the table he retired
+to his room, leaving me palpitating with horror. I took up the envelope and saw
+scrawled in red ink upon the inner flap, just above the gum, the letter K three
+times repeated. There was nothing else save the five dried pips. What could be
+the reason of his overpowering terror? I left the breakfast-table, and as I
+ascended the stair I met him coming down with an old rusty key, which must have
+belonged to the attic, in one hand, and a small brass box, like a cashbox, in
+the other.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘They may do what they like, but I’ll checkmate them
+still,’ said he with an oath. ‘Tell Mary that I shall want a fire
+in my room to-day, and send down to Fordham, the Horsham lawyer.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“I did as he ordered, and when the lawyer arrived I was asked to step up
+to the room. The fire was burning brightly, and in the grate there was a mass
+of black, fluffy ashes, as of burned paper, while the brass box stood open and
+empty beside it. As I glanced at the box I noticed, with a start, that upon the
+lid was printed the treble K which I had read in the morning upon the envelope.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I wish you, John,’ said my uncle, ‘to witness
+my will. I leave my estate, with all its advantages and all its disadvantages,
+to my brother, your father, whence it will, no doubt, descend to you. If you
+can enjoy it in peace, well and good! If you find you cannot, take my advice,
+my boy, and leave it to your deadliest enemy. I am sorry to give you such a
+two-edged thing, but I can’t say what turn things are going to take.
+Kindly sign the paper where Mr. Fordham shows you.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“I signed the paper as directed, and the lawyer took it away with him.
+The singular incident made, as you may think, the deepest impression upon me,
+and I pondered over it and turned it every way in my mind without being able to
+make anything of it. Yet I could not shake off the vague feeling of dread which
+it left behind, though the sensation grew less keen as the weeks passed and
+nothing happened to disturb the usual routine of our lives. I could see a
+change in my uncle, however. He drank more than ever, and he was less inclined
+for any sort of society. Most of his time he would spend in his room, with the
+door locked upon the inside, but sometimes he would emerge in a sort of drunken
+frenzy and would burst out of the house and tear about the garden with a
+revolver in his hand, screaming out that he was afraid of no man, and that he
+was not to be cooped up, like a sheep in a pen, by man or devil. When these hot
+fits were over, however, he would rush tumultuously in at the door and lock and
+bar it behind him, like a man who can brazen it out no longer against the
+terror which lies at the roots of his soul. At such times I have seen his face,
+even on a cold day, glisten with moisture, as though it were new raised from a
+basin.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, to come to an end of the matter, Mr. Holmes, and not to abuse your
+patience, there came a night when he made one of those drunken sallies from
+which he never came back. We found him, when we went to search for him, face
+downward in a little green-scummed pool, which lay at the foot of the garden.
+There was no sign of any violence, and the water was but two feet deep, so that
+the jury, having regard to his known eccentricity, brought in a verdict of
+‘suicide.’ But I, who knew how he winced from the very thought of
+death, had much ado to persuade myself that he had gone out of his way to meet
+it. The matter passed, however, and my father entered into possession of the
+estate, and of some £ 14,000, which lay to his credit at the bank.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“One moment,” Holmes interposed, “your statement is, I
+foresee, one of the most remarkable to which I have ever listened. Let me have
+the date of the reception by your uncle of the letter, and the date of his
+supposed suicide.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The letter arrived on March 10, 1883. His death was seven weeks later,
+upon the night of May 2nd.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you. Pray proceed.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“When my father took over the Horsham property, he, at my request, made a
+careful examination of the attic, which had been always locked up. We found the
+brass box there, although its contents had been destroyed. On the inside of the
+cover was a paper label, with the initials of K. K. K. repeated upon it, and
+‘Letters, memoranda, receipts, and a register’ written beneath.
+These, we presume, indicated the nature of the papers which had been destroyed
+by Colonel Openshaw. For the rest, there was nothing of much importance in the
+attic save a great many scattered papers and note-books bearing upon my
+uncle’s life in America. Some of them were of the war time and showed
+that he had done his duty well and had borne the repute of a brave soldier.
+Others were of a date during the reconstruction of the Southern states, and
+were mostly concerned with politics, for he had evidently taken a strong part
+in opposing the carpet-bag politicians who had been sent down from the North.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, it was the beginning of ’84 when my father came to live at
+Horsham, and all went as well as possible with us until the January of
+’85. On the fourth day after the new year I heard my father give a sharp
+cry of surprise as we sat together at the breakfast-table. There he was,
+sitting with a newly opened envelope in one hand and five dried orange pips in
+the outstretched palm of the other one. He had always laughed at what he called
+my cock-and-bull story about the colonel, but he looked very scared and puzzled
+now that the same thing had come upon himself.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Why, what on earth does this mean, John?’ he
+stammered.
+
+
+
+ 
+“My heart had turned to lead. ‘It is K. K. K.,’ said I.
+
+
+
+ 
+“He looked inside the envelope. ‘So it is,’ he cried.
+‘Here are the very letters. But what is this written above them?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Put the papers on the sundial,’ I read, peeping over
+his shoulder.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘What papers? What sundial?’ he asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘The sundial in the garden. There is no other,’ said
+I; ‘but the papers must be those that are destroyed.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Pooh!’ said he, gripping hard at his courage.
+‘We are in a civilised land here, and we can’t have tomfoolery of
+this kind. Where does the thing come from?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘From Dundee,’ I answered, glancing at the postmark.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Some preposterous practical joke,’ said he.
+‘What have I to do with sundials and papers? I shall take no notice of
+such nonsense.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I should certainly speak to the police,’ I said.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘And be laughed at for my pains. Nothing of the sort.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Then let me do so?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘No, I forbid you. I won’t have a fuss made about such
+nonsense.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was in vain to argue with him, for he was a very obstinate man. I
+went about, however, with a heart which was full of forebodings.
+
+
+
+ 
+“On the third day after the coming of the letter my father went from home
+to visit an old friend of his, Major Freebody, who is in command of one of the
+forts upon Portsdown Hill. I was glad that he should go, for it seemed to me
+that he was farther from danger when he was away from home. In that, however, I
+was in error. Upon the second day of his absence I received a telegram from the
+major, imploring me to come at once. My father had fallen over one of the deep
+chalk-pits which abound in the neighbourhood, and was lying senseless, with a
+shattered skull. I hurried to him, but he passed away without having ever
+recovered his consciousness. He had, as it appears, been returning from Fareham
+in the twilight, and as the country was unknown to him, and the chalk-pit
+unfenced, the jury had no hesitation in bringing in a verdict of ‘death
+from accidental causes.’ Carefully as I examined every fact connected
+with his death, I was unable to find anything which could suggest the idea of
+murder. There were no signs of violence, no footmarks, no robbery, no record of
+strangers having been seen upon the roads. And yet I need not tell you that my
+mind was far from at ease, and that I was well-nigh certain that some foul plot
+had been woven round him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“In this sinister way I came into my inheritance. You will ask me why I
+did not dispose of it? I answer, because I was well convinced that our troubles
+were in some way dependent upon an incident in my uncle’s life, and that
+the danger would be as pressing in one house as in another.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was in January, ’85, that my poor father met his end, and two
+years and eight months have elapsed since then. During that time I have lived
+happily at Horsham, and I had begun to hope that this curse had passed away
+from the family, and that it had ended with the last generation. I had begun to
+take comfort too soon, however; yesterday morning the blow fell in the very
+shape in which it had come upon my father.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The young man took from his waistcoat a crumpled envelope, and turning to the
+table he shook out upon it five little dried orange pips.
+
+
+
+ 
+“This is the envelope,” he continued. “The postmark is
+London—eastern division. Within are the very words which were upon my
+father’s last message: ‘K. K. K.’; and then ‘Put the
+papers on the sundial.’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What have you done?” asked Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nothing.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nothing?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“To tell the truth”—he sank his face into his thin, white
+hands—“I have felt helpless. I have felt like one of those poor
+rabbits when the snake is writhing towards it. I seem to be in the grasp of
+some resistless, inexorable evil, which no foresight and no precautions can
+guard against.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Tut! tut!” cried Sherlock Holmes. “You must act, man, or you
+are lost. Nothing but energy can save you. This is no time for despair.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have seen the police.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But they listened to my story with a smile. I am convinced that the
+inspector has formed the opinion that the letters are all practical jokes, and
+that the deaths of my relations were really accidents, as the jury stated, and
+were not to be connected with the warnings.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes shook his clenched hands in the air. “Incredible
+imbecility!” he cried.
+
+
+
+ 
+“They have, however, allowed me a policeman, who may remain in the house
+with me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Has he come with you to-night?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No. His orders were to stay in the house.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Again Holmes raved in the air.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why did you come to me?” he said, “and, above all, why did
+you not come at once?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I did not know. It was only to-day that I spoke to Major Prendergast
+about my troubles and was advised by him to come to you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is really two days since you had the letter. We should have acted
+before this. You have no further evidence, I suppose, than that which you have
+placed before us—no suggestive detail which might help us?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There is one thing,” said John Openshaw. He rummaged in his coat
+pocket, and, drawing out a piece of discoloured, blue-tinted paper, he laid it
+out upon the table. “I have some remembrance,” said he, “that
+on the day when my uncle burned the papers I observed that the small, unburned
+margins which lay amid the ashes were of this particular colour. I found this
+single sheet upon the floor of his room, and I am inclined to think that it may
+be one of the papers which has, perhaps, fluttered out from among the others,
+and in that way has escaped destruction. Beyond the mention of pips, I do not
+see that it helps us much. I think myself that it is a page from some private
+diary. The writing is undoubtedly my uncle’s.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes moved the lamp, and we both bent over the sheet of paper, which showed
+by its ragged edge that it had indeed been torn from a book. It was headed,
+“March, 1869,” and beneath were the following enigmatical notices:
+
+
+
+ 
+“4th. Hudson came. Same old platform.
+
+
+
+ 
+“7th. Set the pips on McCauley, Paramore, and John Swain of St.
+Augustine.
+
+
+
+ 
+“9th. McCauley cleared.
+
+
+
+ 
+“10th. John Swain cleared.
+
+
+
+ 
+“12th. Visited Paramore. All well.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you!” said Holmes, folding up the paper and returning it to
+our visitor. “And now you must on no account lose another instant. We
+cannot spare time even to discuss what you have told me. You must get home
+instantly and act.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What shall I do?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There is but one thing to do. It must be done at once. You must put this
+piece of paper which you have shown us into the brass box which you have
+described. You must also put in a note to say that all the other papers were
+burned by your uncle, and that this is the only one which remains. You must
+assert that in such words as will carry conviction with them. Having done this,
+you must at once put the box out upon the sundial, as directed. Do you
+understand?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Entirely.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do not think of revenge, or anything of the sort, at present. I think
+that we may gain that by means of the law; but we have our web to weave, while
+theirs is already woven. The first consideration is to remove the pressing
+danger which threatens you. The second is to clear up the mystery and to punish
+the guilty parties.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I thank you,” said the young man, rising and pulling on his
+overcoat. “You have given me fresh life and hope. I shall certainly do as
+you advise.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do not lose an instant. And, above all, take care of yourself in the
+meanwhile, for I do not think that there can be a doubt that you are threatened
+by a very real and imminent danger. How do you go back?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“By train from Waterloo.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is not yet nine. The streets will be crowded, so I trust that you may
+be in safety. And yet you cannot guard yourself too closely.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am armed.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is well. To-morrow I shall set to work upon your case.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I shall see you at Horsham, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, your secret lies in London. It is there that I shall seek it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then I shall call upon you in a day, or in two days, with news as to the
+box and the papers. I shall take your advice in every particular.” He
+shook hands with us and took his leave. Outside the wind still screamed and the
+rain splashed and pattered against the windows. This strange, wild story seemed
+to have come to us from amid the mad elements—blown in upon us like a
+sheet of sea-weed in a gale—and now to have been reabsorbed by them once
+more.
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes sat for some time in silence, with his head sunk forward and
+his eyes bent upon the red glow of the fire. Then he lit his pipe, and leaning
+back in his chair he watched the blue smoke-rings as they chased each other up
+to the ceiling.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I think, Watson,” he remarked at last, “that of all our
+cases we have had none more fantastic than this.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Save, perhaps, the Sign of Four.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, yes. Save, perhaps, that. And yet this John Openshaw seems to me
+to be walking amid even greater perils than did the Sholtos.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But have you,” I asked, “formed any definite conception as
+to what these perils are?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There can be no question as to their nature,” he answered.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then what are they? Who is this K. K. K., and why does he pursue this
+unhappy family?”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes closed his eyes and placed his elbows upon the arms of his
+chair, with his finger-tips together. “The ideal reasoner,” he
+remarked, “would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its
+bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it
+but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly
+describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer
+who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able
+to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. We have not yet
+grasped the results which the reason alone can attain to. Problems may be
+solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by
+the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is
+necessary that the reasoner should be able to utilise all the facts which have
+come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a
+possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and
+encyclopædias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment. It is not so impossible,
+however, that a man should possess all knowledge which is likely to be useful
+to him in his work, and this I have endeavoured in my case to do. If I remember
+rightly, you on one occasion, in the early days of our friendship, defined my
+limits in a very precise fashion.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes,” I answered, laughing. “It was a singular document.
+Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany
+variable, geology profound as regards the mud-stains from any region within
+fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational
+literature and crime records unique, violin-player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer,
+and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco. Those, I think, were the main points
+of my analysis.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes grinned at the last item. “Well,” he said, “I say now,
+as I said then, that a man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all
+the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the
+lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it. Now, for such a
+case as the one which has been submitted to us to-night, we need certainly to
+muster all our resources. Kindly hand me down the letter K of the American
+Encyclopædia which stands upon the shelf beside you. Thank you. Now let us
+consider the situation and see what may be deduced from it. In the first place,
+we may start with a strong presumption that Colonel Openshaw had some very
+strong reason for leaving America. Men at his time of life do not change all
+their habits and exchange willingly the charming climate of Florida for the
+lonely life of an English provincial town. His extreme love of solitude in
+England suggests the idea that he was in fear of someone or something, so we
+may assume as a working hypothesis that it was fear of someone or something
+which drove him from America. As to what it was he feared, we can only deduce
+that by considering the formidable letters which were received by himself and
+his successors. Did you remark the postmarks of those letters?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The first was from Pondicherry, the second from Dundee, and the third
+from London.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“From East London. What do you deduce from that?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“They are all seaports. That the writer was on board of a ship.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Excellent. We have already a clue. There can be no doubt that the
+probability—the strong probability—is that the writer was on board
+of a ship. And now let us consider another point. In the case of Pondicherry,
+seven weeks elapsed between the threat and its fulfilment, in Dundee it was
+only some three or four days. Does that suggest anything?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A greater distance to travel.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But the letter had also a greater distance to come.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then I do not see the point.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There is at least a presumption that the vessel in which the man or men
+are is a sailing-ship. It looks as if they always send their singular warning
+or token before them when starting upon their mission. You see how quickly the
+deed followed the sign when it came from Dundee. If they had come from
+Pondicherry in a steamer they would have arrived almost as soon as their
+letter. But, as a matter of fact, seven weeks elapsed. I think that those seven
+weeks represented the difference between the mail-boat which brought the letter
+and the sailing vessel which brought the writer.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is possible.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“More than that. It is probable. And now you see the deadly urgency of
+this new case, and why I urged young Openshaw to caution. The blow has always
+fallen at the end of the time which it would take the senders to travel the
+distance. But this one comes from London, and therefore we cannot count upon
+delay.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Good God!” I cried. “What can it mean, this relentless
+persecution?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The papers which Openshaw carried are obviously of vital importance to
+the person or persons in the sailing-ship. I think that it is quite clear that
+there must be more than one of them. A single man could not have carried out
+two deaths in such a way as to deceive a coroner’s jury. There must have
+been several in it, and they must have been men of resource and determination.
+Their papers they mean to have, be the holder of them who it may. In this way
+you see K. K. K. ceases to be the initials of an individual and becomes the
+badge of a society.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But of what society?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Have you never—” said Sherlock Holmes, bending forward and
+sinking his voice—“have you never heard of the Ku Klux Klan?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I never have.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes turned over the leaves of the book upon his knee. “Here it
+is,” said he presently:
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Ku Klux Klan. A name derived from the fanciful resemblance
+to the sound produced by cocking a rifle. This terrible secret society was
+formed by some ex-Confederate soldiers in the Southern states after the Civil
+War, and it rapidly formed local branches in different parts of the country,
+notably in Tennessee, Louisiana, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. Its power
+was used for political purposes, principally for the terrorising of the negro
+voters and the murdering and driving from the country of those who were opposed
+to its views. Its outrages were usually preceded by a warning sent to the
+marked man in some fantastic but generally recognised shape—a sprig of
+oak-leaves in some parts, melon seeds or orange pips in others. On receiving
+this the victim might either openly abjure his former ways, or might fly from
+the country. If he braved the matter out, death would unfailingly come upon
+him, and usually in some strange and unforeseen manner. So perfect was the
+organisation of the society, and so systematic its methods, that there is
+hardly a case upon record where any man succeeded in braving it with impunity,
+or in which any of its outrages were traced home to the perpetrators. For some
+years the organisation flourished in spite of the efforts of the United States
+government and of the better classes of the community in the South. Eventually,
+in the year 1869, the movement rather suddenly collapsed, although there have
+been sporadic outbreaks of the same sort since that date.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“You will observe,” said Holmes, laying down the volume,
+“that the sudden breaking up of the society was coincident with the
+disappearance of Openshaw from America with their papers. It may well have been
+cause and effect. It is no wonder that he and his family have some of the more
+implacable spirits upon their track. You can understand that this register and
+diary may implicate some of the first men in the South, and that there may be
+many who will not sleep easy at night until it is recovered.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then the page we have seen—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Is such as we might expect. It ran, if I remember right, ‘sent the
+pips to A, B, and C’—that is, sent the society’s warning to
+them. Then there are successive entries that A and B cleared, or left the
+country, and finally that C was visited, with, I fear, a sinister result for C.
+Well, I think, Doctor, that we may let some light into this dark place, and I
+believe that the only chance young Openshaw has in the meantime is to do what I
+have told him. There is nothing more to be said or to be done to-night, so hand
+me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable
+weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellow men.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It had cleared in the morning, and the sun was shining with a subdued
+brightness through the dim veil which hangs over the great city. Sherlock
+Holmes was already at breakfast when I came down.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You will excuse me for not waiting for you,” said he; “I
+have, I foresee, a very busy day before me in looking into this case of young
+Openshaw’s.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What steps will you take?” I asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It will very much depend upon the results of my first inquiries. I may
+have to go down to Horsham, after all.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You will not go there first?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, I shall commence with the City. Just ring the bell and the maid will
+bring up your coffee.”
+
+
+
+ 
+As I waited, I lifted the unopened newspaper from the table and glanced my eye
+over it. It rested upon a heading which sent a chill to my heart.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Holmes,” I cried, “you are too late.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah!” said he, laying down his cup, “I feared as much. How
+was it done?” He spoke calmly, but I could see that he was deeply moved.
+
+
+
+ 
+“My eye caught the name of Openshaw, and the heading ‘Tragedy Near
+Waterloo Bridge.’ Here is the account:
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Between nine and ten last night Police-Constable Cook, of
+the H Division, on duty near Waterloo Bridge, heard a cry for help and a splash
+in the water. The night, however, was extremely dark and stormy, so that, in
+spite of the help of several passers-by, it was quite impossible to effect a
+rescue. The alarm, however, was given, and, by the aid of the water-police, the
+body was eventually recovered. It proved to be that of a young gentleman whose
+name, as it appears from an envelope which was found in his pocket, was John
+Openshaw, and whose residence is near Horsham. It is conjectured that he may
+have been hurrying down to catch the last train from Waterloo Station, and that
+in his haste and the extreme darkness he missed his path and walked over the
+edge of one of the small landing-places for river steamboats. The body
+exhibited no traces of violence, and there can be no doubt that the deceased
+had been the victim of an unfortunate accident, which should have the effect of
+calling the attention of the authorities to the condition of the riverside
+landing-stages.’”
+
+
+
+ 
+We sat in silence for some minutes, Holmes more depressed and shaken than I had
+ever seen him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“That hurts my pride, Watson,” he said at last. “It is a
+petty feeling, no doubt, but it hurts my pride. It becomes a personal matter
+with me now, and, if God sends me health, I shall set my hand upon this gang.
+That he should come to me for help, and that I should send him away to his
+death—!” He sprang from his chair and paced about the room in
+uncontrollable agitation, with a flush upon his sallow cheeks and a nervous
+clasping and unclasping of his long thin hands.
+
+
+
+ 
+“They must be cunning devils,” he exclaimed at last. “How
+could they have decoyed him down there? The Embankment is not on the direct
+line to the station. The bridge, no doubt, was too crowded, even on such a
+night, for their purpose. Well, Watson, we shall see who will win in the long
+run. I am going out now!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“To the police?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No; I shall be my own police. When I have spun the web they may take the
+flies, but not before.”
+
+
+
+ 
+All day I was engaged in my professional work, and it was late in the evening
+before I returned to Baker Street. Sherlock Holmes had not come back yet. It
+was nearly ten o’clock before he entered, looking pale and worn. He
+walked up to the sideboard, and tearing a piece from the loaf he devoured it
+voraciously, washing it down with a long draught of water.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You are hungry,” I remarked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Starving. It had escaped my memory. I have had nothing since
+breakfast.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nothing?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not a bite. I had no time to think of it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And how have you succeeded?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have a clue?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have them in the hollow of my hand. Young Openshaw shall not long
+remain unavenged. Why, Watson, let us put their own devilish trade-mark upon
+them. It is well thought of!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What do you mean?”
+
+
+
+ 
+He took an orange from the cupboard, and tearing it to pieces he squeezed out
+the pips upon the table. Of these he took five and thrust them into an
+envelope. On the inside of the flap he wrote “S. H. for J. O.” Then
+he sealed it and addressed it to “Captain James Calhoun, Barque Lone
+Star , Savannah, Georgia.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That will await him when he enters port,” said he, chuckling.
+“It may give him a sleepless night. He will find it as sure a precursor
+of his fate as Openshaw did before him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And who is this Captain Calhoun?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The leader of the gang. I shall have the others, but he first.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How did you trace it, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+He took a large sheet of paper from his pocket, all covered with dates and
+names.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have spent the whole day,” said he, “over Lloyd’s
+registers and files of the old papers, following the future career of every
+vessel which touched at Pondicherry in January and February in ’83. There
+were thirty-six ships of fair tonnage which were reported there during those
+months. Of these, one, the Lone Star , instantly attracted my attention,
+since, although it was reported as having cleared from London, the name is that
+which is given to one of the states of the Union.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Texas, I think.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was not and am not sure which; but I knew that the ship must have an
+American origin.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I searched the Dundee records, and when I found that the barque Lone
+Star was there in January, ’85, my suspicion became a certainty. I
+then inquired as to the vessels which lay at present in the port of
+London.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The Lone Star had arrived here last week. I went down to the
+Albert Dock and found that she had been taken down the river by the early tide
+this morning, homeward bound to Savannah. I wired to Gravesend and learned that
+she had passed some time ago, and as the wind is easterly I have no doubt that
+she is now past the Goodwins and not very far from the Isle of Wight.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What will you do, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, I have my hand upon him. He and the two mates, are as I learn, the
+only native-born Americans in the ship. The others are Finns and Germans. I
+know, also, that they were all three away from the ship last night. I had it
+from the stevedore who has been loading their cargo. By the time that their
+sailing-ship reaches Savannah the mail-boat will have carried this letter, and
+the cable will have informed the police of Savannah that these three gentlemen
+are badly wanted here upon a charge of murder.”
+
+
+
+ 
+There is ever a flaw, however, in the best laid of human plans, and the
+murderers of John Openshaw were never to receive the orange pips which would
+show them that another, as cunning and as resolute as themselves, was upon
+their track. Very long and very severe were the equinoctial gales that year. We
+waited long for news of the Lone Star of Savannah, but none ever reached
+us. We did at last hear that somewhere far out in the Atlantic a shattered
+stern-post of a boat was seen swinging in the trough of a wave, with the
+letters “L. S.” carved upon it, and that is all which we shall ever
+know of the fate of the Lone Star .
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ VI.
+THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP 
+ 
+ I sa Whitney, brother of
+the late Elias Whitney, D.D., Principal of the Theological College of St.
+George’s, was much addicted to opium. The habit grew upon him, as I
+understand, from some foolish freak when he was at college; for having read De
+Quincey’s description of his dreams and sensations, he had drenched his
+tobacco with laudanum in an attempt to produce the same effects. He found, as
+so many more have done, that the practice is easier to attain than to get rid
+of, and for many years he continued to be a slave to the drug, an object of
+mingled horror and pity to his friends and relatives. I can see him now, with
+yellow, pasty face, drooping lids, and pin-point pupils, all huddled in a
+chair, the wreck and ruin of a noble man.
+
+
+
+ 
+One night—it was in June, ’89—there came a ring to my bell,
+about the hour when a man gives his first yawn and glances at the clock. I sat
+up in my chair, and my wife laid her needle-work down in her lap and made a
+little face of disappointment.
+
+
+
+ 
+“A patient!” said she. “You’ll have to go out.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I groaned, for I was newly come back from a weary day.
+
+
+
+ 
+We heard the door open, a few hurried words, and then quick steps upon the
+linoleum. Our own door flew open, and a lady, clad in some dark-coloured stuff,
+with a black veil, entered the room.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You will excuse my calling so late,” she began, and then, suddenly
+losing her self-control, she ran forward, threw her arms about my wife’s
+neck, and sobbed upon her shoulder. “Oh, I’m in such
+trouble!” she cried; “I do so want a little help.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why,” said my wife, pulling up her veil, “it is Kate
+Whitney. How you startled me, Kate! I had not an idea who you were when you
+came in.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I didn’t know what to do, so I came straight to you.” That
+was always the way. Folk who were in grief came to my wife like birds to a
+lighthouse.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was very sweet of you to come. Now, you must have some wine and
+water, and sit here comfortably and tell us all about it. Or should you rather
+that I sent James off to bed?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, no, no! I want the doctor’s advice and help, too. It’s
+about Isa. He has not been home for two days. I am so frightened about
+him!”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was not the first time that she had spoken to us of her husband’s
+trouble, to me as a doctor, to my wife as an old friend and school companion.
+We soothed and comforted her by such words as we could find. Did she know where
+her husband was? Was it possible that we could bring him back to her?
+
+
+
+ 
+It seems that it was. She had the surest information that of late he had, when
+the fit was on him, made use of an opium den in the farthest east of the City.
+Hitherto his orgies had always been confined to one day, and he had come back,
+twitching and shattered, in the evening. But now the spell had been upon him
+eight-and-forty hours, and he lay there, doubtless among the dregs of the
+docks, breathing in the poison or sleeping off the effects. There he was to be
+found, she was sure of it, at the Bar of Gold, in Upper Swandam Lane. But what
+was she to do? How could she, a young and timid woman, make her way into such a
+place and pluck her husband out from among the ruffians who surrounded him?
+
+
+
+ 
+There was the case, and of course there was but one way out of it. Might I not
+escort her to this place? And then, as a second thought, why should she come at
+all? I was Isa Whitney’s medical adviser, and as such I had influence
+over him. I could manage it better if I were alone. I promised her on my word
+that I would send him home in a cab within two hours if he were indeed at the
+address which she had given me. And so in ten minutes I had left my armchair
+and cheery sitting-room behind me, and was speeding eastward in a hansom on a
+strange errand, as it seemed to me at the time, though the future only could
+show how strange it was to be.
+
+
+
+ 
+But there was no great difficulty in the first stage of my adventure. Upper
+Swandam Lane is a vile alley lurking behind the high wharves which line the
+north side of the river to the east of London Bridge. Between a slop-shop and a
+gin-shop, approached by a steep flight of steps leading down to a black gap
+like the mouth of a cave, I found the den of which I was in search. Ordering my
+cab to wait, I passed down the steps, worn hollow in the centre by the
+ceaseless tread of drunken feet; and by the light of a flickering oil-lamp
+above the door I found the latch and made my way into a long, low room, thick
+and heavy with the brown opium smoke, and terraced with wooden berths, like the
+forecastle of an emigrant ship.
+
+
+
+ 
+Through the gloom one could dimly catch a glimpse of bodies lying in strange
+fantastic poses, bowed shoulders, bent knees, heads thrown back, and chins
+pointing upward, with here and there a dark, lack-lustre eye turned upon the
+newcomer. Out of the black shadows there glimmered little red circles of light,
+now bright, now faint, as the burning poison waxed or waned in the bowls of the
+metal pipes. The most lay silent, but some muttered to themselves, and others
+talked together in a strange, low, monotonous voice, their conversation coming
+in gushes, and then suddenly tailing off into silence, each mumbling out his
+own thoughts and paying little heed to the words of his neighbour. At the
+farther end was a small brazier of burning charcoal, beside which on a
+three-legged wooden stool there sat a tall, thin old man, with his jaw resting
+upon his two fists, and his elbows upon his knees, staring into the fire.
+
+
+
+ 
+As I entered, a sallow Malay attendant had hurried up with a pipe for me and a
+supply of the drug, beckoning me to an empty berth.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you. I have not come to stay,” said I. “There is a
+friend of mine here, Mr. Isa Whitney, and I wish to speak with him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+There was a movement and an exclamation from my right, and peering through the
+gloom, I saw Whitney, pale, haggard, and unkempt, staring out at me.
+
+
+
+ 
+“My God! It’s Watson,” said he. He was in a pitiable state of
+reaction, with every nerve in a twitter. “I say, Watson, what
+o’clock is it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nearly eleven.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of what day?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of Friday, June 19th.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Good heavens! I thought it was Wednesday. It is Wednesday. What
+d’you want to frighten a chap for?” He sank his face onto his arms
+and began to sob in a high treble key.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I tell you that it is Friday, man. Your wife has been waiting this two
+days for you. You should be ashamed of yourself!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“So I am. But you’ve got mixed, Watson, for I have only been here a
+few hours, three pipes, four pipes—I forget how many. But I’ll go
+home with you. I wouldn’t frighten Kate—poor little Kate. Give me
+your hand! Have you a cab?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, I have one waiting.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then I shall go in it. But I must owe something. Find what I owe,
+Watson. I am all off colour. I can do nothing for myself.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I walked down the narrow passage between the double row of sleepers, holding my
+breath to keep out the vile, stupefying fumes of the drug, and looking about
+for the manager. As I passed the tall man who sat by the brazier I felt a
+sudden pluck at my skirt, and a low voice whispered, “Walk past me, and
+then look back at me.” The words fell quite distinctly upon my ear. I
+glanced down. They could only have come from the old man at my side, and yet he
+sat now as absorbed as ever, very thin, very wrinkled, bent with age, an opium
+pipe dangling down from between his knees, as though it had dropped in sheer
+lassitude from his fingers. I took two steps forward and looked back. It took
+all my self-control to prevent me from breaking out into a cry of astonishment.
+He had turned his back so that none could see him but I. His form had filled
+out, his wrinkles were gone, the dull eyes had regained their fire, and there,
+sitting by the fire and grinning at my surprise, was none other than Sherlock
+Holmes. He made a slight motion to me to approach him, and instantly, as he
+turned his face half round to the company once more, subsided into a doddering,
+loose-lipped senility.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Holmes!” I whispered, “what on earth are you doing in this
+den?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“As low as you can,” he answered; “I have excellent ears. If
+you would have the great kindness to get rid of that sottish friend of yours I
+should be exceedingly glad to have a little talk with you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have a cab outside.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then pray send him home in it. You may safely trust him, for he appears
+to be too limp to get into any mischief. I should recommend you also to send a
+note by the cabman to your wife to say that you have thrown in your lot with
+me. If you will wait outside, I shall be with you in five minutes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was difficult to refuse any of Sherlock Holmes’ requests, for they
+were always so exceedingly definite, and put forward with such a quiet air of
+mastery. I felt, however, that when Whitney was once confined in the cab my
+mission was practically accomplished; and for the rest, I could not wish
+anything better than to be associated with my friend in one of those singular
+adventures which were the normal condition of his existence. In a few minutes I
+had written my note, paid Whitney’s bill, led him out to the cab, and
+seen him driven through the darkness. In a very short time a decrepit figure
+had emerged from the opium den, and I was walking down the street with Sherlock
+Holmes. For two streets he shuffled along with a bent back and an uncertain
+foot. Then, glancing quickly round, he straightened himself out and burst into
+a hearty fit of laughter.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I suppose, Watson,” said he, “that you imagine that I have
+added opium-smoking to cocaine injections, and all the other little weaknesses
+on which you have favoured me with your medical views.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was certainly surprised to find you there.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But not more so than I to find you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I came to find a friend.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And I to find an enemy.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“An enemy?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes; one of my natural enemies, or, shall I say, my natural prey.
+Briefly, Watson, I am in the midst of a very remarkable inquiry, and I have
+hoped to find a clue in the incoherent ramblings of these sots, as I have done
+before now. Had I been recognised in that den my life would not have been worth
+an hour’s purchase; for I have used it before now for my own purposes,
+and the rascally Lascar who runs it has sworn to have vengeance upon me. There
+is a trap-door at the back of that building, near the corner of Paul’s
+Wharf, which could tell some strange tales of what has passed through it upon
+the moonless nights.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What! You do not mean bodies?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ay, bodies, Watson. We should be rich men if we had £ 1000 for every
+poor devil who has been done to death in that den. It is the vilest murder-trap
+on the whole riverside, and I fear that Neville St. Clair has entered it never
+to leave it more. But our trap should be here.” He put his two
+forefingers between his teeth and whistled shrilly—a signal which was
+answered by a similar whistle from the distance, followed shortly by the rattle
+of wheels and the clink of horses’ hoofs.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now, Watson,” said Holmes, as a tall dog-cart dashed up through
+the gloom, throwing out two golden tunnels of yellow light from its side
+lanterns. “You’ll come with me, won’t you?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“If I can be of use.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, a trusty comrade is always of use; and a chronicler still more so.
+My room at The Cedars is a double-bedded one.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The Cedars?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes; that is Mr. St. Clair’s house. I am staying there while I
+conduct the inquiry.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Where is it, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Near Lee, in Kent. We have a seven-mile drive before us.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But I am all in the dark.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of course you are. You’ll know all about it presently. Jump up
+here. All right, John; we shall not need you. Here’s half a crown. Look
+out for me to-morrow, about eleven. Give her her head. So long, then!”
+
+
+
+ 
+He flicked the horse with his whip, and we dashed away through the endless
+succession of sombre and deserted streets, which widened gradually, until we
+were flying across a broad balustraded bridge, with the murky river flowing
+sluggishly beneath us. Beyond lay another dull wilderness of bricks and mortar,
+its silence broken only by the heavy, regular footfall of the policeman, or the
+songs and shouts of some belated party of revellers. A dull wrack was drifting
+slowly across the sky, and a star or two twinkled dimly here and there through
+the rifts of the clouds. Holmes drove in silence, with his head sunk upon his
+breast, and the air of a man who is lost in thought, while I sat beside him,
+curious to learn what this new quest might be which seemed to tax his powers so
+sorely, and yet afraid to break in upon the current of his thoughts. We had
+driven several miles, and were beginning to get to the fringe of the belt of
+suburban villas, when he shook himself, shrugged his shoulders, and lit up his
+pipe with the air of a man who has satisfied himself that he is acting for the
+best.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have a grand gift of silence, Watson,” said he. “It
+makes you quite invaluable as a companion. ’Pon my word, it is a great
+thing for me to have someone to talk to, for my own thoughts are not
+over-pleasant. I was wondering what I should say to this dear little woman
+to-night when she meets me at the door.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You forget that I know nothing about it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I shall just have time to tell you the facts of the case before we get
+to Lee. It seems absurdly simple, and yet, somehow I can get nothing to go
+upon. There’s plenty of thread, no doubt, but I can’t get the end
+of it into my hand. Now, I’ll state the case clearly and concisely to
+you, Watson, and maybe you can see a spark where all is dark to me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Proceed, then.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Some years ago—to be definite, in May, 1884—there came to
+Lee a gentleman, Neville St. Clair by name, who appeared to have plenty of
+money. He took a large villa, laid out the grounds very nicely, and lived
+generally in good style. By degrees he made friends in the neighbourhood, and
+in 1887 he married the daughter of a local brewer, by whom he now has two
+children. He had no occupation, but was interested in several companies and
+went into town as a rule in the morning, returning by the 5:14 from Cannon
+Street every night. Mr. St. Clair is now thirty-seven years of age, is a man of
+temperate habits, a good husband, a very affectionate father, and a man who is
+popular with all who know him. I may add that his whole debts at the present
+moment, as far as we have been able to ascertain, amount to £ 88 10 s .,
+while he has £ 220 standing to his credit in the Capital and Counties Bank.
+There is no reason, therefore, to think that money troubles have been weighing
+upon his mind.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Last Monday Mr. Neville St. Clair went into town rather earlier than
+usual, remarking before he started that he had two important commissions to
+perform, and that he would bring his little boy home a box of bricks. Now, by
+the merest chance, his wife received a telegram upon this same Monday, very
+shortly after his departure, to the effect that a small parcel of considerable
+value which she had been expecting was waiting for her at the offices of the
+Aberdeen Shipping Company. Now, if you are well up in your London, you will
+know that the office of the company is in Fresno Street, which branches out of
+Upper Swandam Lane, where you found me to-night. Mrs. St. Clair had her lunch,
+started for the City, did some shopping, proceeded to the company’s
+office, got her packet, and found herself at exactly 4:35 walking through
+Swandam Lane on her way back to the station. Have you followed me so
+far?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is very clear.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“If you remember, Monday was an exceedingly hot day, and Mrs. St. Clair
+walked slowly, glancing about in the hope of seeing a cab, as she did not like
+the neighbourhood in which she found herself. While she was walking in this way
+down Swandam Lane, she suddenly heard an ejaculation or cry, and was struck
+cold to see her husband looking down at her and, as it seemed to her, beckoning
+to her from a second-floor window. The window was open, and she distinctly saw
+his face, which she describes as being terribly agitated. He waved his hands
+frantically to her, and then vanished from the window so suddenly that it
+seemed to her that he had been plucked back by some irresistible force from
+behind. One singular point which struck her quick feminine eye was that
+although he wore some dark coat, such as he had started to town in, he had on
+neither collar nor necktie.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Convinced that something was amiss with him, she rushed down the
+steps—for the house was none other than the opium den in which you found
+me to-night—and running through the front room she attempted to ascend
+the stairs which led to the first floor. At the foot of the stairs, however,
+she met this Lascar scoundrel of whom I have spoken, who thrust her back and,
+aided by a Dane, who acts as assistant there, pushed her out into the street.
+Filled with the most maddening doubts and fears, she rushed down the lane and,
+by rare good-fortune, met in Fresno Street a number of constables with an
+inspector, all on their way to their beat. The inspector and two men
+accompanied her back, and in spite of the continued resistance of the
+proprietor, they made their way to the room in which Mr. St. Clair had last
+been seen. There was no sign of him there. In fact, in the whole of that floor
+there was no one to be found save a crippled wretch of hideous aspect, who, it
+seems, made his home there. Both he and the Lascar stoutly swore that no one
+else had been in the front room during the afternoon. So determined was their
+denial that the inspector was staggered, and had almost come to believe that
+Mrs. St. Clair had been deluded when, with a cry, she sprang at a small deal
+box which lay upon the table and tore the lid from it. Out there fell a cascade
+of children’s bricks. It was the toy which he had promised to bring home.
+
+
+
+ 
+“This discovery, and the evident confusion which the cripple showed, made
+the inspector realise that the matter was serious. The rooms were carefully
+examined, and results all pointed to an abominable crime. The front room was
+plainly furnished as a sitting-room and led into a small bedroom, which looked
+out upon the back of one of the wharves. Between the wharf and the bedroom
+window is a narrow strip, which is dry at low tide but is covered at high tide
+with at least four and a half feet of water. The bedroom window was a broad one
+and opened from below. On examination traces of blood were to be seen upon the
+windowsill, and several scattered drops were visible upon the wooden floor of
+the bedroom. Thrust away behind a curtain in the front room were all the
+clothes of Mr. Neville St. Clair, with the exception of his coat. His boots,
+his socks, his hat, and his watch—all were there. There were no signs of
+violence upon any of these garments, and there were no other traces of Mr.
+Neville St. Clair. Out of the window he must apparently have gone for no other
+exit could be discovered, and the ominous bloodstains upon the sill gave little
+promise that he could save himself by swimming, for the tide was at its very
+highest at the moment of the tragedy.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And now as to the villains who seemed to be immediately implicated in
+the matter. The Lascar was known to be a man of the vilest antecedents, but as,
+by Mrs. St. Clair’s story, he was known to have been at the foot of the
+stair within a very few seconds of her husband’s appearance at the
+window, he could hardly have been more than an accessory to the crime. His
+defence was one of absolute ignorance, and he protested that he had no
+knowledge as to the doings of Hugh Boone, his lodger, and that he could not
+account in any way for the presence of the missing gentleman’s clothes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“So much for the Lascar manager. Now for the sinister cripple who lives
+upon the second floor of the opium den, and who was certainly the last human
+being whose eyes rested upon Neville St. Clair. His name is Hugh Boone, and his
+hideous face is one which is familiar to every man who goes much to the City.
+He is a professional beggar, though in order to avoid the police regulations he
+pretends to a small trade in wax vestas. Some little distance down Threadneedle
+Street, upon the left-hand side, there is, as you may have remarked, a small
+angle in the wall. Here it is that this creature takes his daily seat,
+cross-legged with his tiny stock of matches on his lap, and as he is a piteous
+spectacle a small rain of charity descends into the greasy leather cap which
+lies upon the pavement beside him. I have watched the fellow more than once
+before ever I thought of making his professional acquaintance, and I have been
+surprised at the harvest which he has reaped in a short time. His appearance,
+you see, is so remarkable that no one can pass him without observing him. A
+shock of orange hair, a pale face disfigured by a horrible scar, which, by its
+contraction, has turned up the outer edge of his upper lip, a bulldog chin, and
+a pair of very penetrating dark eyes, which present a singular contrast to the
+colour of his hair, all mark him out from amid the common crowd of mendicants
+and so, too, does his wit, for he is ever ready with a reply to any piece of
+chaff which may be thrown at him by the passers-by. This is the man whom we now
+learn to have been the lodger at the opium den, and to have been the last man
+to see the gentleman of whom we are in quest.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But a cripple!” said I. “What could he have done
+single-handed against a man in the prime of life?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He is a cripple in the sense that he walks with a limp; but in other
+respects he appears to be a powerful and well-nurtured man. Surely your medical
+experience would tell you, Watson, that weakness in one limb is often
+compensated for by exceptional strength in the others.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pray continue your narrative.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Mrs. St. Clair had fainted at the sight of the blood upon the window,
+and she was escorted home in a cab by the police, as her presence could be of
+no help to them in their investigations. Inspector Barton, who had charge of
+the case, made a very careful examination of the premises, but without finding
+anything which threw any light upon the matter. One mistake had been made in
+not arresting Boone instantly, as he was allowed some few minutes during which
+he might have communicated with his friend the Lascar, but this fault was soon
+remedied, and he was seized and searched, without anything being found which
+could incriminate him. There were, it is true, some blood-stains upon his right
+shirt-sleeve, but he pointed to his ring-finger, which had been cut near the
+nail, and explained that the bleeding came from there, adding that he had been
+to the window not long before, and that the stains which had been observed
+there came doubtless from the same source. He denied strenuously having ever
+seen Mr. Neville St. Clair and swore that the presence of the clothes in his
+room was as much a mystery to him as to the police. As to Mrs. St.
+Clair’s assertion that she had actually seen her husband at the window,
+he declared that she must have been either mad or dreaming. He was removed,
+loudly protesting, to the police-station, while the inspector remained upon the
+premises in the hope that the ebbing tide might afford some fresh clue.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And it did, though they hardly found upon the mud-bank what they had
+feared to find. It was Neville St. Clair’s coat, and not Neville St.
+Clair, which lay uncovered as the tide receded. And what do you think they
+found in the pockets?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I cannot imagine.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, I don’t think you would guess. Every pocket stuffed with
+pennies and half-pennies—421 pennies and 270 half-pennies. It was no
+wonder that it had not been swept away by the tide. But a human body is a
+different matter. There is a fierce eddy between the wharf and the house. It
+seemed likely enough that the weighted coat had remained when the stripped body
+had been sucked away into the river.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But I understand that all the other clothes were found in the room.
+Would the body be dressed in a coat alone?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, sir, but the facts might be met speciously enough. Suppose that this
+man Boone had thrust Neville St. Clair through the window, there is no human
+eye which could have seen the deed. What would he do then? It would of course
+instantly strike him that he must get rid of the tell-tale garments. He would
+seize the coat, then, and be in the act of throwing it out, when it would occur
+to him that it would swim and not sink. He has little time, for he has heard
+the scuffle downstairs when the wife tried to force her way up, and perhaps he
+has already heard from his Lascar confederate that the police are hurrying up
+the street. There is not an instant to be lost. He rushes to some secret hoard,
+where he has accumulated the fruits of his beggary, and he stuffs all the coins
+upon which he can lay his hands into the pockets to make sure of the
+coat’s sinking. He throws it out, and would have done the same with the
+other garments had not he heard the rush of steps below, and only just had time
+to close the window when the police appeared.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It certainly sounds feasible.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, we will take it as a working hypothesis for want of a better.
+Boone, as I have told you, was arrested and taken to the station, but it could
+not be shown that there had ever before been anything against him. He had for
+years been known as a professional beggar, but his life appeared to have been a
+very quiet and innocent one. There the matter stands at present, and the
+questions which have to be solved—what Neville St. Clair was doing in the
+opium den, what happened to him when there, where is he now, and what Hugh
+Boone had to do with his disappearance—are all as far from a solution as
+ever. I confess that I cannot recall any case within my experience which looked
+at the first glance so simple and yet which presented such difficulties.”
+
+
+
+ 
+While Sherlock Holmes had been detailing this singular series of events, we had
+been whirling through the outskirts of the great town until the last straggling
+houses had been left behind, and we rattled along with a country hedge upon
+either side of us. Just as he finished, however, we drove through two scattered
+villages, where a few lights still glimmered in the windows.
+
+
+
+ 
+“We are on the outskirts of Lee,” said my companion. “We have
+touched on three English counties in our short drive, starting in Middlesex,
+passing over an angle of Surrey, and ending in Kent. See that light among the
+trees? That is The Cedars, and beside that lamp sits a woman whose anxious ears
+have already, I have little doubt, caught the clink of our horse’s
+feet.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But why are you not conducting the case from Baker Street?” I
+asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Because there are many inquiries which must be made out here. Mrs. St.
+Clair has most kindly put two rooms at my disposal, and you may rest assured
+that she will have nothing but a welcome for my friend and colleague. I hate to
+meet her, Watson, when I have no news of her husband. Here we are. Whoa, there,
+whoa!”
+
+
+
+ 
+We had pulled up in front of a large villa which stood within its own grounds.
+A stable-boy had run out to the horse’s head, and springing down, I
+followed Holmes up the small, winding gravel-drive which led to the house. As
+we approached, the door flew open, and a little blonde woman stood in the
+opening, clad in some sort of light mousseline de soie, with a touch of fluffy
+pink chiffon at her neck and wrists. She stood with her figure outlined against
+the flood of light, one hand upon the door, one half-raised in her eagerness,
+her body slightly bent, her head and face protruded, with eager eyes and parted
+lips, a standing question.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well?” she cried, “well?” And then, seeing that there
+were two of us, she gave a cry of hope which sank into a groan as she saw that
+my companion shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.
+
+
+
+ 
+“No good news?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“None.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No bad?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank God for that. But come in. You must be weary, for you have had a
+long day.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“This is my friend, Dr. Watson. He has been of most vital use to me in
+several of my cases, and a lucky chance has made it possible for me to bring
+him out and associate him with this investigation.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am delighted to see you,” said she, pressing my hand warmly.
+“You will, I am sure, forgive anything that may be wanting in our
+arrangements, when you consider the blow which has come so suddenly upon
+us.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear madam,” said I, “I am an old campaigner, and if I
+were not I can very well see that no apology is needed. If I can be of any
+assistance, either to you or to my friend here, I shall be indeed happy.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said the lady as we entered a well-lit
+dining-room, upon the table of which a cold supper had been laid out, “I
+should very much like to ask you one or two plain questions, to which I beg
+that you will give a plain answer.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Certainly, madam.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do not trouble about my feelings. I am not hysterical, nor given to
+fainting. I simply wish to hear your real, real opinion.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Upon what point?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In your heart of hearts, do you think that Neville is alive?”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes seemed to be embarrassed by the question. “Frankly,
+now!” she repeated, standing upon the rug and looking keenly down at him
+as he leaned back in a basket-chair.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Frankly, then, madam, I do not.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You think that he is dead?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I do.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Murdered?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I don’t say that. Perhaps.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And on what day did he meet his death?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“On Monday.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then perhaps, Mr. Holmes, you will be good enough to explain how it is
+that I have received a letter from him to-day.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes sprang out of his chair as if he had been galvanised.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What!” he roared.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, to-day.” She stood smiling, holding up a little slip of paper
+in the air.
+
+
+
+ 
+“May I see it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Certainly.”
+
+
+
+ 
+He snatched it from her in his eagerness, and smoothing it out upon the table
+he drew over the lamp and examined it intently. I had left my chair and was
+gazing at it over his shoulder. The envelope was a very coarse one and was
+stamped with the Gravesend postmark and with the date of that very day, or
+rather of the day before, for it was considerably after midnight.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Coarse writing,” murmured Holmes. “Surely this is not your
+husband’s writing, madam.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, but the enclosure is.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I perceive also that whoever addressed the envelope had to go and
+inquire as to the address.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How can you tell that?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The name, you see, is in perfectly black ink, which has dried itself.
+The rest is of the greyish colour, which shows that blotting-paper has been
+used. If it had been written straight off, and then blotted, none would be of a
+deep black shade. This man has written the name, and there has then been a
+pause before he wrote the address, which can only mean that he was not familiar
+with it. It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as
+trifles. Let us now see the letter. Ha! there has been an enclosure
+here!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, there was a ring. His signet-ring.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And you are sure that this is your husband’s hand?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“One of his hands.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“One?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“His hand when he wrote hurriedly. It is very unlike his usual writing,
+and yet I know it well.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Dearest do not be frightened. All will come well. There is
+a huge error which it may take some little time to rectify. Wait in
+patience.—NEVILLE.’ Written in pencil upon the fly-leaf of a book,
+octavo size, no water-mark. Hum! Posted to-day in Gravesend by a man with a
+dirty thumb. Ha! And the flap has been gummed, if I am not very much in error,
+by a person who had been chewing tobacco. And you have no doubt that it is your
+husband’s hand, madam?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“None. Neville wrote those words.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And they were posted to-day at Gravesend. Well, Mrs. St. Clair, the
+clouds lighten, though I should not venture to say that the danger is
+over.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But he must be alive, Mr. Holmes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Unless this is a clever forgery to put us on the wrong scent. The ring,
+after all, proves nothing. It may have been taken from him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, no; it is, it is his very own writing!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very well. It may, however, have been written on Monday and only posted
+to-day.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is possible.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“If so, much may have happened between.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, you must not discourage me, Mr. Holmes. I know that all is well with
+him. There is so keen a sympathy between us that I should know if evil came
+upon him. On the very day that I saw him last he cut himself in the bedroom,
+and yet I in the dining-room rushed upstairs instantly with the utmost
+certainty that something had happened. Do you think that I would respond to
+such a trifle and yet be ignorant of his death?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be
+more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner. And in this letter
+you certainly have a very strong piece of evidence to corroborate your view.
+But if your husband is alive and able to write letters, why should he remain
+away from you?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I cannot imagine. It is unthinkable.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And on Monday he made no remarks before leaving you?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And you were surprised to see him in Swandam Lane?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very much so.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Was the window open?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then he might have called to you?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He might.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He only, as I understand, gave an inarticulate cry?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A call for help, you thought?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes. He waved his hands.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But it might have been a cry of surprise. Astonishment at the unexpected
+sight of you might cause him to throw up his hands?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is possible.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And you thought he was pulled back?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He disappeared so suddenly.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He might have leaped back. You did not see anyone else in the
+room?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, but this horrible man confessed to having been there, and the Lascar
+was at the foot of the stairs.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Quite so. Your husband, as far as you could see, had his ordinary
+clothes on?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But without his collar or tie. I distinctly saw his bare throat.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Had he ever spoken of Swandam Lane?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Never.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Had he ever showed any signs of having taken opium?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Never.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you, Mrs. St. Clair. Those are the principal points about which I
+wished to be absolutely clear. We shall now have a little supper and then
+retire, for we may have a very busy day to-morrow.”
+
+
+
+ 
+A large and comfortable double-bedded room had been placed at our disposal, and
+I was quickly between the sheets, for I was weary after my night of adventure.
+Sherlock Holmes was a man, however, who, when he had an unsolved problem upon
+his mind, would go for days, and even for a week, without rest, turning it
+over, rearranging his facts, looking at it from every point of view until he
+had either fathomed it or convinced himself that his data were insufficient. It
+was soon evident to me that he was now preparing for an all-night sitting. He
+took off his coat and waistcoat, put on a large blue dressing-gown, and then
+wandered about the room collecting pillows from his bed and cushions from the
+sofa and armchairs. With these he constructed a sort of Eastern divan, upon
+which he perched himself cross-legged, with an ounce of shag tobacco and a box
+of matches laid out in front of him. In the dim light of the lamp I saw him
+sitting there, an old briar pipe between his lips, his eyes fixed vacantly upon
+the corner of the ceiling, the blue smoke curling up from him, silent,
+motionless, with the light shining upon his strong-set aquiline features. So he
+sat as I dropped off to sleep, and so he sat when a sudden ejaculation caused
+me to wake up, and I found the summer sun shining into the apartment. The pipe
+was still between his lips, the smoke still curled upward, and the room was
+full of a dense tobacco haze, but nothing remained of the heap of shag which I
+had seen upon the previous night.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Awake, Watson?” he asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Game for a morning drive?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Certainly.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then dress. No one is stirring yet, but I know where the stable-boy
+sleeps, and we shall soon have the trap out.” He chuckled to himself as
+he spoke, his eyes twinkled, and he seemed a different man to the sombre
+thinker of the previous night.
+
+
+
+ 
+As I dressed I glanced at my watch. It was no wonder that no one was stirring.
+It was twenty-five minutes past four. I had hardly finished when Holmes
+returned with the news that the boy was putting in the horse.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I want to test a little theory of mine,” said he, pulling on his
+boots. “I think, Watson, that you are now standing in the presence of one
+of the most absolute fools in Europe. I deserve to be kicked from here to
+Charing Cross. But I think I have the key of the affair now.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And where is it?” I asked, smiling.
+
+
+
+ 
+“In the bathroom,” he answered. “Oh, yes, I am not
+joking,” he continued, seeing my look of incredulity. “I have just
+been there, and I have taken it out, and I have got it in this Gladstone bag.
+Come on, my boy, and we shall see whether it will not fit the lock.”
+
+
+
+ 
+We made our way downstairs as quietly as possible, and out into the bright
+morning sunshine. In the road stood our horse and trap, with the half-clad
+stable-boy waiting at the head. We both sprang in, and away we dashed down the
+London Road. A few country carts were stirring, bearing in vegetables to the
+metropolis, but the lines of villas on either side were as silent and lifeless
+as some city in a dream.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It has been in some points a singular case,” said Holmes, flicking
+the horse on into a gallop. “I confess that I have been as blind as a
+mole, but it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at
+all.”
+
+
+
+ 
+In town the earliest risers were just beginning to look sleepily from their
+windows as we drove through the streets of the Surrey side. Passing down the
+Waterloo Bridge Road we crossed over the river, and dashing up Wellington
+Street wheeled sharply to the right and found ourselves in Bow Street. Sherlock
+Holmes was well known to the force, and the two constables at the door saluted
+him. One of them held the horse’s head while the other led us in.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Who is on duty?” asked Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Inspector Bradstreet, sir.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah, Bradstreet, how are you?” A tall, stout official had come down
+the stone-flagged passage, in a peaked cap and frogged jacket. “I wish to
+have a quiet word with you, Bradstreet.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Certainly, Mr. Holmes. Step into my room here.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was a small, office-like room, with a huge ledger upon the table, and a
+telephone projecting from the wall. The inspector sat down at his desk.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What can I do for you, Mr. Holmes?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I called about that beggarman, Boone—the one who was charged with
+being concerned in the disappearance of Mr. Neville St. Clair, of Lee.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes. He was brought up and remanded for further inquiries.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“So I heard. You have him here?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In the cells.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Is he quiet?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, he gives no trouble. But he is a dirty scoundrel.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Dirty?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, it is all we can do to make him wash his hands, and his face is as
+black as a tinker’s. Well, when once his case has been settled, he will
+have a regular prison bath; and I think, if you saw him, you would agree with
+me that he needed it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I should like to see him very much.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Would you? That is easily done. Come this way. You can leave your
+bag.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, I think that I’ll take it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very good. Come this way, if you please.” He led us down a
+passage, opened a barred door, passed down a winding stair, and brought us to a
+whitewashed corridor with a line of doors on each side.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The third on the right is his,” said the inspector. “Here it
+is!” He quietly shot back a panel in the upper part of the door and
+glanced through.
+
+
+
+ 
+“He is asleep,” said he. “You can see him very well.”
+
+
+
+ 
+We both put our eyes to the grating. The prisoner lay with his face towards us,
+in a very deep sleep, breathing slowly and heavily. He was a middle-sized man,
+coarsely clad as became his calling, with a coloured shirt protruding through
+the rent in his tattered coat. He was, as the inspector had said, extremely
+dirty, but the grime which covered his face could not conceal its repulsive
+ugliness. A broad wheal from an old scar ran right across it from eye to chin,
+and by its contraction had turned up one side of the upper lip, so that three
+teeth were exposed in a perpetual snarl. A shock of very bright red hair grew
+low over his eyes and forehead.
+
+
+
+ 
+“He’s a beauty, isn’t he?” said the inspector.
+
+
+
+ 
+“He certainly needs a wash,” remarked Holmes. “I had an idea
+that he might, and I took the liberty of bringing the tools with me.” He
+opened the Gladstone bag as he spoke, and took out, to my astonishment, a very
+large bath-sponge.
+
+
+
+ 
+“He! he! You are a funny one,” chuckled the inspector.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now, if you will have the great goodness to open that door very quietly,
+we will soon make him cut a much more respectable figure.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, I don’t know why not,” said the inspector. “He
+doesn’t look a credit to the Bow Street cells, does he?” He slipped
+his key into the lock, and we all very quietly entered the cell. The sleeper
+half turned, and then settled down once more into a deep slumber. Holmes
+stooped to the water-jug, moistened his sponge, and then rubbed it twice
+vigorously across and down the prisoner’s face.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Let me introduce you,” he shouted, “to Mr. Neville St.
+Clair, of Lee, in the county of Kent.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Never in my life have I seen such a sight. The man’s face peeled off
+under the sponge like the bark from a tree. Gone was the coarse brown tint!
+Gone, too, was the horrid scar which had seamed it across, and the twisted lip
+which had given the repulsive sneer to the face! A twitch brought away the
+tangled red hair, and there, sitting up in his bed, was a pale, sad-faced,
+refined-looking man, black-haired and smooth-skinned, rubbing his eyes and
+staring about him with sleepy bewilderment. Then suddenly realising the
+exposure, he broke into a scream and threw himself down with his face to the
+pillow.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Great heavens!” cried the inspector, “it is, indeed, the
+missing man. I know him from the photograph.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The prisoner turned with the reckless air of a man who abandons himself to his
+destiny. “Be it so,” said he. “And pray what am I charged
+with?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“With making away with Mr. Neville St.— Oh, come, you can’t
+be charged with that unless they make a case of attempted suicide of it,”
+said the inspector with a grin. “Well, I have been twenty-seven years in
+the force, but this really takes the cake.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“If I am Mr. Neville St. Clair, then it is obvious that no crime has been
+committed, and that, therefore, I am illegally detained.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No crime, but a very great error has been committed,” said Holmes.
+“You would have done better to have trusted your wife.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was not the wife; it was the children,” groaned the prisoner.
+“God help me, I would not have them ashamed of their father. My God! What
+an exposure! What can I do?”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes sat down beside him on the couch and patted him kindly on the
+shoulder.
+
+
+
+ 
+“If you leave it to a court of law to clear the matter up,” said
+he, “of course you can hardly avoid publicity. On the other hand, if you
+convince the police authorities that there is no possible case against you, I
+do not know that there is any reason that the details should find their way
+into the papers. Inspector Bradstreet would, I am sure, make notes upon
+anything which you might tell us and submit it to the proper authorities. The
+case would then never go into court at all.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“God bless you!” cried the prisoner passionately. “I would
+have endured imprisonment, ay, even execution, rather than have left my
+miserable secret as a family blot to my children.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You are the first who have ever heard my story. My father was a
+schoolmaster in Chesterfield, where I received an excellent education. I
+travelled in my youth, took to the stage, and finally became a reporter on an
+evening paper in London. One day my editor wished to have a series of articles
+upon begging in the metropolis, and I volunteered to supply them. There was the
+point from which all my adventures started. It was only by trying begging as an
+amateur that I could get the facts upon which to base my articles. When an
+actor I had, of course, learned all the secrets of making up, and had been
+famous in the green-room for my skill. I took advantage now of my attainments.
+I painted my face, and to make myself as pitiable as possible I made a good
+scar and fixed one side of my lip in a twist by the aid of a small slip of
+flesh-coloured plaster. Then with a red head of hair, and an appropriate dress,
+I took my station in the business part of the city, ostensibly as a
+match-seller but really as a beggar. For seven hours I plied my trade, and when
+I returned home in the evening I found to my surprise that I had received no
+less than 26 s . 4 d .
+
+
+
+ 
+“I wrote my articles and thought little more of the matter until, some
+time later, I backed a bill for a friend and had a writ served upon me for £
+25. I was at my wit’s end where to get the money, but a sudden idea came
+to me. I begged a fortnight’s grace from the creditor, asked for a
+holiday from my employers, and spent the time in begging in the City under my
+disguise. In ten days I had the money and had paid the debt.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, you can imagine how hard it was to settle down to arduous work at
+£ 2 a week when I knew that I could earn as much in a day by smearing my face
+with a little paint, laying my cap on the ground, and sitting still. It was a
+long fight between my pride and the money, but the dollars won at last, and I
+threw up reporting and sat day after day in the corner which I had first
+chosen, inspiring pity by my ghastly face and filling my pockets with coppers.
+Only one man knew my secret. He was the keeper of a low den in which I used to
+lodge in Swandam Lane, where I could every morning emerge as a squalid beggar
+and in the evenings transform myself into a well-dressed man about town. This
+fellow, a Lascar, was well paid by me for his rooms, so that I knew that my
+secret was safe in his possession.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, very soon I found that I was saving considerable sums of money. I
+do not mean that any beggar in the streets of London could earn £ 700 a
+year—which is less than my average takings—but I had exceptional
+advantages in my power of making up, and also in a facility of repartee, which
+improved by practice and made me quite a recognised character in the City. All
+day a stream of pennies, varied by silver, poured in upon me, and it was a very
+bad day in which I failed to take £ 2.
+
+
+
+ 
+“As I grew richer I grew more ambitious, took a house in the country, and
+eventually married, without anyone having a suspicion as to my real occupation.
+My dear wife knew that I had business in the City. She little knew what.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Last Monday I had finished for the day and was dressing in my room above
+the opium den when I looked out of my window and saw, to my horror and
+astonishment, that my wife was standing in the street, with her eyes fixed full
+upon me. I gave a cry of surprise, threw up my arms to cover my face, and,
+rushing to my confidant, the Lascar, entreated him to prevent anyone from
+coming up to me. I heard her voice downstairs, but I knew that she could not
+ascend. Swiftly I threw off my clothes, pulled on those of a beggar, and put on
+my pigments and wig. Even a wife’s eyes could not pierce so complete a
+disguise. But then it occurred to me that there might be a search in the room,
+and that the clothes might betray me. I threw open the window, reopening by my
+violence a small cut which I had inflicted upon myself in the bedroom that
+morning. Then I seized my coat, which was weighted by the coppers which I had
+just transferred to it from the leather bag in which I carried my takings. I
+hurled it out of the window, and it disappeared into the Thames. The other
+clothes would have followed, but at that moment there was a rush of constables
+up the stair, and a few minutes after I found, rather, I confess, to my relief,
+that instead of being identified as Mr. Neville St. Clair, I was arrested as
+his murderer.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I do not know that there is anything else for me to explain. I was
+determined to preserve my disguise as long as possible, and hence my preference
+for a dirty face. Knowing that my wife would be terribly anxious, I slipped off
+my ring and confided it to the Lascar at a moment when no constable was
+watching me, together with a hurried scrawl, telling her that she had no cause
+to fear.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That note only reached her yesterday,” said Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Good God! What a week she must have spent!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The police have watched this Lascar,” said Inspector Bradstreet,
+“and I can quite understand that he might find it difficult to post a
+letter unobserved. Probably he handed it to some sailor customer of his, who
+forgot all about it for some days.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That was it,” said Holmes, nodding approvingly; “I have no
+doubt of it. But have you never been prosecuted for begging?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Many times; but what was a fine to me?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It must stop here, however,” said Bradstreet. “If the police
+are to hush this thing up, there must be no more of Hugh Boone.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have sworn it by the most solemn oaths which a man can take.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In that case I think that it is probable that no further steps may be
+taken. But if you are found again, then all must come out. I am sure, Mr.
+Holmes, that we are very much indebted to you for having cleared the matter up.
+I wish I knew how you reach your results.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I reached this one,” said my friend, “by sitting upon five
+pillows and consuming an ounce of shag. I think, Watson, that if we drive to
+Baker Street we shall just be in time for breakfast.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ VII.
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE 
+ 
+ I had called upon my
+friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the
+intention of wishing him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon
+the sofa in a purple dressing-gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the
+right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at
+hand. Beside the couch was a wooden chair, and on the angle of the back hung a
+very seedy and disreputable hard-felt hat, much the worse for wear, and cracked
+in several places. A lens and a forceps lying upon the seat of the chair
+suggested that the hat had been suspended in this manner for the purpose of
+examination.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You are engaged,” said I; “perhaps I interrupt you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not at all. I am glad to have a friend with whom I can discuss my
+results. The matter is a perfectly trivial one”—he jerked his thumb
+in the direction of the old hat—“but there are points in connection
+with it which are not entirely devoid of interest and even of
+instruction.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I seated myself in his armchair and warmed my hands before his crackling fire,
+for a sharp frost had set in, and the windows were thick with the ice crystals.
+“I suppose,” I remarked, “that, homely as it looks, this
+thing has some deadly story linked on to it—that it is the clue which
+will guide you in the solution of some mystery and the punishment of some
+crime.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, no. No crime,” said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. “Only one
+of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four
+million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square
+miles. Amid the action and reaction of so dense a swarm of humanity, every
+possible combination of events may be expected to take place, and many a little
+problem will be presented which may be striking and bizarre without being
+criminal. We have already had experience of such.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“So much so,” I remarked, “that of the last six cases which I
+have added to my notes, three have been entirely free of any legal
+crime.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Precisely. You allude to my attempt to recover the Irene Adler papers,
+to the singular case of Miss Mary Sutherland, and to the adventure of the man
+with the twisted lip. Well, I have no doubt that this small matter will fall
+into the same innocent category. You know Peterson, the commissionaire?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is to him that this trophy belongs.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is his hat.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, no, he found it. Its owner is unknown. I beg that you will look upon
+it not as a battered billycock but as an intellectual problem. And, first, as
+to how it came here. It arrived upon Christmas morning, in company with a good
+fat goose, which is, I have no doubt, roasting at this moment in front of
+Peterson’s fire. The facts are these: about four o’clock on
+Christmas morning, Peterson, who, as you know, is a very honest fellow, was
+returning from some small jollification and was making his way homeward down
+Tottenham Court Road. In front of him he saw, in the gaslight, a tallish man,
+walking with a slight stagger, and carrying a white goose slung over his
+shoulder. As he reached the corner of Goodge Street, a row broke out between
+this stranger and a little knot of roughs. One of the latter knocked off the
+man’s hat, on which he raised his stick to defend himself and, swinging
+it over his head, smashed the shop window behind him. Peterson had rushed
+forward to protect the stranger from his assailants; but the man, shocked at
+having broken the window, and seeing an official-looking person in uniform
+rushing towards him, dropped his goose, took to his heels, and vanished amid
+the labyrinth of small streets which lie at the back of Tottenham Court Road.
+The roughs had also fled at the appearance of Peterson, so that he was left in
+possession of the field of battle, and also of the spoils of victory in the
+shape of this battered hat and a most unimpeachable Christmas goose.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Which surely he restored to their owner?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear fellow, there lies the problem. It is true that ‘For Mrs.
+Henry Baker’ was printed upon a small card which was tied to the
+bird’s left leg, and it is also true that the initials ‘H.
+B.’ are legible upon the lining of this hat, but as there are some
+thousands of Bakers, and some hundreds of Henry Bakers in this city of ours, it
+is not easy to restore lost property to any one of them.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What, then, did Peterson do?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He brought round both hat and goose to me on Christmas morning, knowing
+that even the smallest problems are of interest to me. The goose we retained
+until this morning, when there were signs that, in spite of the slight frost,
+it would be well that it should be eaten without unnecessary delay. Its finder
+has carried it off, therefore, to fulfil the ultimate destiny of a goose, while
+I continue to retain the hat of the unknown gentleman who lost his Christmas
+dinner.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Did he not advertise?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then, what clue could you have as to his identity?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Only as much as we can deduce.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“From his hat?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Precisely.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But you are joking. What can you gather from this old battered
+felt?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Here is my lens. You know my methods. What can you gather yourself as to
+the individuality of the man who has worn this article?”
+
+
+
+ 
+I took the tattered object in my hands and turned it over rather ruefully. It
+was a very ordinary black hat of the usual round shape, hard and much the worse
+for wear. The lining had been of red silk, but was a good deal discoloured.
+There was no maker’s name; but, as Holmes had remarked, the initials
+“H. B.” were scrawled upon one side. It was pierced in the brim for
+a hat-securer, but the elastic was missing. For the rest, it was cracked,
+exceedingly dusty, and spotted in several places, although there seemed to have
+been some attempt to hide the discoloured patches by smearing them with ink.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I can see nothing,” said I, handing it back to my friend.
+
+
+
+ 
+“On the contrary, Watson, you can see everything. You fail, however, to
+reason from what you see. You are too timid in drawing your inferences.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then, pray tell me what it is that you can infer from this hat?”
+
+
+
+ 
+He picked it up and gazed at it in the peculiar introspective fashion which was
+characteristic of him. “It is perhaps less suggestive than it might have
+been,” he remarked, “and yet there are a few inferences which are
+very distinct, and a few others which represent at least a strong balance of
+probability. That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the
+face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years,
+although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now
+than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the
+decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink,
+at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has
+ceased to love him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear Holmes!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He has, however, retained some degree of self-respect,” he
+continued, disregarding my remonstrance. “He is a man who leads a
+sedentary life, goes out little, is out of training entirely, is middle-aged,
+has grizzled hair which he has had cut within the last few days, and which he
+anoints with lime-cream. These are the more patent facts which are to be
+deduced from his hat. Also, by the way, that it is extremely improbable that he
+has gas laid on in his house.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You are certainly joking, Holmes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not in the least. Is it possible that even now, when I give you these
+results, you are unable to see how they are attained?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have no doubt that I am very stupid, but I must confess that I am
+unable to follow you. For example, how did you deduce that this man was
+intellectual?”
+
+
+
+ 
+For answer Holmes clapped the hat upon his head. It came right over the
+forehead and settled upon the bridge of his nose. “It is a question of
+cubic capacity,” said he; “a man with so large a brain must have
+something in it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The decline of his fortunes, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“This hat is three years old. These flat brims curled at the edge came in
+then. It is a hat of the very best quality. Look at the band of ribbed silk and
+the excellent lining. If this man could afford to buy so expensive a hat three
+years ago, and has had no hat since, then he has assuredly gone down in the
+world.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, that is clear enough, certainly. But how about the foresight and
+the moral retrogression?”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes laughed. “Here is the foresight,” said he putting
+his finger upon the little disc and loop of the hat-securer. “They are
+never sold upon hats. If this man ordered one, it is a sign of a certain amount
+of foresight, since he went out of his way to take this precaution against the
+wind. But since we see that he has broken the elastic and has not troubled to
+replace it, it is obvious that he has less foresight now than formerly, which
+is a distinct proof of a weakening nature. On the other hand, he has
+endeavoured to conceal some of these stains upon the felt by daubing them with
+ink, which is a sign that he has not entirely lost his self-respect.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your reasoning is certainly plausible.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The further points, that he is middle-aged, that his hair is grizzled,
+that it has been recently cut, and that he uses lime-cream, are all to be
+gathered from a close examination of the lower part of the lining. The lens
+discloses a large number of hair-ends, clean cut by the scissors of the barber.
+They all appear to be adhesive, and there is a distinct odour of lime-cream.
+This dust, you will observe, is not the gritty, grey dust of the street but the
+fluffy brown dust of the house, showing that it has been hung up indoors most
+of the time, while the marks of moisture upon the inside are proof positive
+that the wearer perspired very freely, and could therefore, hardly be in the
+best of training.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But his wife—you said that she had ceased to love him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“This hat has not been brushed for weeks. When I see you, my dear Watson,
+with a week’s accumulation of dust upon your hat, and when your wife
+allows you to go out in such a state, I shall fear that you also have been
+unfortunate enough to lose your wife’s affection.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But he might be a bachelor.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nay, he was bringing home the goose as a peace-offering to his wife.
+Remember the card upon the bird’s leg.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have an answer to everything. But how on earth do you deduce that
+the gas is not laid on in his house?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“One tallow stain, or even two, might come by chance; but when I see no
+less than five, I think that there can be little doubt that the individual must
+be brought into frequent contact with burning tallow—walks upstairs at
+night probably with his hat in one hand and a guttering candle in the other.
+Anyhow, he never got tallow-stains from a gas-jet. Are you satisfied?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, it is very ingenious,” said I, laughing; “but since,
+as you said just now, there has been no crime committed, and no harm done save
+the loss of a goose, all this seems to be rather a waste of energy.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes had opened his mouth to reply, when the door flew open, and
+Peterson, the commissionaire, rushed into the apartment with flushed cheeks and
+the face of a man who is dazed with astonishment.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The goose, Mr. Holmes! The goose, sir!” he gasped.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Eh? What of it, then? Has it returned to life and flapped off through
+the kitchen window?” Holmes twisted himself round upon the sofa to get a
+fairer view of the man’s excited face.
+
+
+
+ 
+“See here, sir! See what my wife found in its crop!” He held out
+his hand and displayed upon the centre of the palm a brilliantly scintillating
+blue stone, rather smaller than a bean in size, but of such purity and radiance
+that it twinkled like an electric point in the dark hollow of his hand.
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes sat up with a whistle. “By Jove, Peterson!” said
+he, “this is treasure trove indeed. I suppose you know what you have
+got?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A diamond, sir? A precious stone. It cuts into glass as though it were
+putty.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s more than a precious stone. It is the precious
+stone.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not the Countess of Morcar’s blue carbuncle!” I ejaculated.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Precisely so. I ought to know its size and shape, seeing that I have
+read the advertisement about it in The Times every day lately. It is
+absolutely unique, and its value can only be conjectured, but the reward
+offered of £ 1000 is certainly not within a twentieth part of the market
+price.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A thousand pounds! Great Lord of mercy!” The commissionaire
+plumped down into a chair and stared from one to the other of us.
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is the reward, and I have reason to know that there are sentimental
+considerations in the background which would induce the Countess to part with
+half her fortune if she could but recover the gem.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was lost, if I remember aright, at the Hotel Cosmopolitan,” I
+remarked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Precisely so, on December 22nd, just five days ago. John Horner, a
+plumber, was accused of having abstracted it from the lady’s jewel-case.
+The evidence against him was so strong that the case has been referred to the
+Assizes. I have some account of the matter here, I believe.” He rummaged
+amid his newspapers, glancing over the dates, until at last he smoothed one
+out, doubled it over, and read the following paragraph:
+
+
+
+ 
+“Hotel Cosmopolitan Jewel Robbery. John Horner, 26, plumber, was brought
+up upon the charge of having upon the 22nd inst., abstracted from the
+jewel-case of the Countess of Morcar the valuable gem known as the blue
+carbuncle. James Ryder, upper-attendant at the hotel, gave his evidence to the
+effect that he had shown Horner up to the dressing-room of the Countess of
+Morcar upon the day of the robbery in order that he might solder the second bar
+of the grate, which was loose. He had remained with Horner some little time,
+but had finally been called away. On returning, he found that Horner had
+disappeared, that the bureau had been forced open, and that the small morocco
+casket in which, as it afterwards transpired, the Countess was accustomed to
+keep her jewel, was lying empty upon the dressing-table. Ryder instantly gave
+the alarm, and Horner was arrested the same evening; but the stone could not be
+found either upon his person or in his rooms. Catherine Cusack, maid to the
+Countess, deposed to having heard Ryder’s cry of dismay on discovering
+the robbery, and to having rushed into the room, where she found matters as
+described by the last witness. Inspector Bradstreet, B division, gave evidence
+as to the arrest of Horner, who struggled frantically, and protested his
+innocence in the strongest terms. Evidence of a previous conviction for robbery
+having been given against the prisoner, the magistrate refused to deal
+summarily with the offence, but referred it to the Assizes. Horner, who had
+shown signs of intense emotion during the proceedings, fainted away at the
+conclusion and was carried out of court.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Hum! So much for the police-court,” said Holmes thoughtfully,
+tossing aside the paper. “The question for us now to solve is the
+sequence of events leading from a rifled jewel-case at one end to the crop of a
+goose in Tottenham Court Road at the other. You see, Watson, our little
+deductions have suddenly assumed a much more important and less innocent
+aspect. Here is the stone; the stone came from the goose, and the goose came
+from Mr. Henry Baker, the gentleman with the bad hat and all the other
+characteristics with which I have bored you. So now we must set ourselves very
+seriously to finding this gentleman and ascertaining what part he has played in
+this little mystery. To do this, we must try the simplest means first, and
+these lie undoubtedly in an advertisement in all the evening papers. If this
+fail, I shall have recourse to other methods.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What will you say?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Give me a pencil and that slip of paper. Now, then: ‘Found at the
+corner of Goodge Street, a goose and a black felt hat. Mr. Henry Baker can have
+the same by applying at 6:30 this evening at 221B, Baker Street.’ That is
+clear and concise.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very. But will he see it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, he is sure to keep an eye on the papers, since, to a poor man, the
+loss was a heavy one. He was clearly so scared by his mischance in breaking the
+window and by the approach of Peterson that he thought of nothing but flight,
+but since then he must have bitterly regretted the impulse which caused him to
+drop his bird. Then, again, the introduction of his name will cause him to see
+it, for everyone who knows him will direct his attention to it. Here you are,
+Peterson, run down to the advertising agency and have this put in the evening
+papers.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In which, sir?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, in the Globe , Star , Pall Mall , St.
+James’s Gazette , Evening News , Standard , Echo ,
+and any others that occur to you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very well, sir. And this stone?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah, yes, I shall keep the stone. Thank you. And, I say, Peterson, just
+buy a goose on your way back and leave it here with me, for we must have one to
+give to this gentleman in place of the one which your family is now
+devouring.”
+
+
+
+ 
+When the commissionaire had gone, Holmes took up the stone and held it against
+the light. “It’s a bonny thing,” said he. “Just see how
+it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every
+good stone is. They are the devil’s pet baits. In the larger and older
+jewels every facet may stand for a bloody deed. This stone is not yet twenty
+years old. It was found in the banks of the Amoy River in southern China and is
+remarkable in having every characteristic of the carbuncle, save that it is
+blue in shade instead of ruby red. In spite of its youth, it has already a
+sinister history. There have been two murders, a vitriol-throwing, a suicide,
+and several robberies brought about for the sake of this forty-grain weight of
+crystallised charcoal. Who would think that so pretty a toy would be a purveyor
+to the gallows and the prison? I’ll lock it up in my strong box now and
+drop a line to the Countess to say that we have it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do you think that this man Horner is innocent?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I cannot tell.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, then, do you imagine that this other one, Henry Baker, had
+anything to do with the matter?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is, I think, much more likely that Henry Baker is an absolutely
+innocent man, who had no idea that the bird which he was carrying was of
+considerably more value than if it were made of solid gold. That, however, I
+shall determine by a very simple test if we have an answer to our
+advertisement.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And you can do nothing until then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nothing.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In that case I shall continue my professional round. But I shall come
+back in the evening at the hour you have mentioned, for I should like to see
+the solution of so tangled a business.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very glad to see you. I dine at seven. There is a woodcock, I believe.
+By the way, in view of recent occurrences, perhaps I ought to ask Mrs. Hudson
+to examine its crop.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I had been delayed at a case, and it was a little after half-past six when I
+found myself in Baker Street once more. As I approached the house I saw a tall
+man in a Scotch bonnet with a coat which was buttoned up to his chin waiting
+outside in the bright semicircle which was thrown from the fanlight. Just as I
+arrived the door was opened, and we were shown up together to Holmes’
+room.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Mr. Henry Baker, I believe,” said he, rising from his armchair and
+greeting his visitor with the easy air of geniality which he could so readily
+assume. “Pray take this chair by the fire, Mr. Baker. It is a cold night,
+and I observe that your circulation is more adapted for summer than for winter.
+Ah, Watson, you have just come at the right time. Is that your hat, Mr.
+Baker?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, sir, that is undoubtedly my hat.”
+
+
+
+ 
+He was a large man with rounded shoulders, a massive head, and a broad,
+intelligent face, sloping down to a pointed beard of grizzled brown. A touch of
+red in nose and cheeks, with a slight tremor of his extended hand, recalled
+Holmes’ surmise as to his habits. His rusty black frock-coat was buttoned
+right up in front, with the collar turned up, and his lank wrists protruded
+from his sleeves without a sign of cuff or shirt. He spoke in a slow staccato
+fashion, choosing his words with care, and gave the impression generally of a
+man of learning and letters who had had ill-usage at the hands of fortune.
+
+
+
+ 
+“We have retained these things for some days,” said Holmes,
+“because we expected to see an advertisement from you giving your
+address. I am at a loss to know now why you did not advertise.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Our visitor gave a rather shamefaced laugh. “Shillings have not been so
+plentiful with me as they once were,” he remarked. “I had no doubt
+that the gang of roughs who assaulted me had carried off both my hat and the
+bird. I did not care to spend more money in a hopeless attempt at recovering
+them.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very naturally. By the way, about the bird, we were compelled to eat
+it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“To eat it!” Our visitor half rose from his chair in his
+excitement.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, it would have been of no use to anyone had we not done so. But I
+presume that this other goose upon the sideboard, which is about the same
+weight and perfectly fresh, will answer your purpose equally well?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, certainly, certainly,” answered Mr. Baker with a sigh of
+relief.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of course, we still have the feathers, legs, crop, and so on of your own
+bird, so if you wish—”
+
+
+
+ 
+The man burst into a hearty laugh. “They might be useful to me as relics
+of my adventure,” said he, “but beyond that I can hardly see what
+use the disjecta membra of my late acquaintance are going to be to me.
+No, sir, I think that, with your permission, I will confine my attentions to
+the excellent bird which I perceive upon the sideboard.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes glanced sharply across at me with a slight shrug of his
+shoulders.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There is your hat, then, and there your bird,” said he. “By
+the way, would it bore you to tell me where you got the other one from? I am
+somewhat of a fowl fancier, and I have seldom seen a better grown goose.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Certainly, sir,” said Baker, who had risen and tucked his newly
+gained property under his arm. “There are a few of us who frequent the
+Alpha Inn, near the Museum—we are to be found in the Museum itself during
+the day, you understand. This year our good host, Windigate by name, instituted
+a goose club, by which, on consideration of some few pence every week, we were
+each to receive a bird at Christmas. My pence were duly paid, and the rest is
+familiar to you. I am much indebted to you, sir, for a Scotch bonnet is fitted
+neither to my years nor my gravity.” With a comical pomposity of manner
+he bowed solemnly to both of us and strode off upon his way.
+
+
+
+ 
+“So much for Mr. Henry Baker,” said Holmes when he had closed the
+door behind him. “It is quite certain that he knows nothing whatever
+about the matter. Are you hungry, Watson?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not particularly.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then I suggest that we turn our dinner into a supper and follow up this
+clue while it is still hot.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“By all means.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was a bitter night, so we drew on our ulsters and wrapped cravats about our
+throats. Outside, the stars were shining coldly in a cloudless sky, and the
+breath of the passers-by blew out into smoke like so many pistol shots. Our
+footfalls rang out crisply and loudly as we swung through the doctors’
+quarter, Wimpole Street, Harley Street, and so through Wigmore Street into
+Oxford Street. In a quarter of an hour we were in Bloomsbury at the Alpha Inn,
+which is a small public-house at the corner of one of the streets which runs
+down into Holborn. Holmes pushed open the door of the private bar and ordered
+two glasses of beer from the ruddy-faced, white-aproned landlord.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your beer should be excellent if it is as good as your geese,”
+said he.
+
+
+
+ 
+“My geese!” The man seemed surprised.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes. I was speaking only half an hour ago to Mr. Henry Baker, who was a
+member of your goose club.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah! yes, I see. But you see, sir, them’s not our 
+geese.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Indeed! Whose, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, I got the two dozen from a salesman in Covent Garden.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Indeed? I know some of them. Which was it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Breckinridge is his name.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah! I don’t know him. Well, here’s your good health
+landlord, and prosperity to your house. Good-night.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now for Mr. Breckinridge,” he continued, buttoning up his coat as
+we came out into the frosty air. “Remember, Watson that though we have so
+homely a thing as a goose at one end of this chain, we have at the other a man
+who will certainly get seven years’ penal servitude unless we can
+establish his innocence. It is possible that our inquiry may but confirm his
+guilt; but, in any case, we have a line of investigation which has been missed
+by the police, and which a singular chance has placed in our hands. Let us
+follow it out to the bitter end. Faces to the south, then, and quick
+march!”
+
+
+
+ 
+We passed across Holborn, down Endell Street, and so through a zigzag of slums
+to Covent Garden Market. One of the largest stalls bore the name of
+Breckinridge upon it, and the proprietor a horsey-looking man, with a sharp
+face and trim side-whiskers was helping a boy to put up the shutters.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Good-evening. It’s a cold night,” said Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+The salesman nodded and shot a questioning glance at my companion.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Sold out of geese, I see,” continued Holmes, pointing at the bare
+slabs of marble.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Let you have five hundred to-morrow morning.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That’s no good.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, there are some on the stall with the gas-flare.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah, but I was recommended to you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Who by?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The landlord of the Alpha.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, yes; I sent him a couple of dozen.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Fine birds they were, too. Now where did you get them from?”
+
+
+
+ 
+To my surprise the question provoked a burst of anger from the salesman.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now, then, mister,” said he, with his head cocked and his arms
+akimbo, “what are you driving at? Let’s have it straight,
+now.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is straight enough. I should like to know who sold you the geese
+which you supplied to the Alpha.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well then, I shan’t tell you. So now!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, it is a matter of no importance; but I don’t know why you
+should be so warm over such a trifle.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Warm! You’d be as warm, maybe, if you were as pestered as I am.
+When I pay good money for a good article there should be an end of the
+business; but it’s ‘Where are the geese?’ and ‘Who did
+you sell the geese to?’ and ‘What will you take for the
+geese?’ One would think they were the only geese in the world, to hear
+the fuss that is made over them.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, I have no connection with any other people who have been making
+inquiries,” said Holmes carelessly. “If you won’t tell us the
+bet is off, that is all. But I’m always ready to back my opinion on a
+matter of fowls, and I have a fiver on it that the bird I ate is country
+bred.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, then, you’ve lost your fiver, for it’s town
+bred,” snapped the salesman.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s nothing of the kind.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I say it is.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I don’t believe it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“D’you think you know more about fowls than I, who have handled
+them ever since I was a nipper? I tell you, all those birds that went to the
+Alpha were town bred.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You’ll never persuade me to believe that.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Will you bet, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s merely taking your money, for I know that I am right. But
+I’ll have a sovereign on with you, just to teach you not to be
+obstinate.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The salesman chuckled grimly. “Bring me the books, Bill,” said he.
+
+
+
+ 
+The small boy brought round a small thin volume and a great greasy-backed one,
+laying them out together beneath the hanging lamp.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now then, Mr. Cocksure,” said the salesman, “I thought that
+I was out of geese, but before I finish you’ll find that there is still
+one left in my shop. You see this little book?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That’s the list of the folk from whom I buy. D’you see?
+Well, then, here on this page are the country folk, and the numbers after their
+names are where their accounts are in the big ledger. Now, then! You see this
+other page in red ink? Well, that is a list of my town suppliers. Now, look at
+that third name. Just read it out to me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Mrs. Oakshott, 117, Brixton Road—249,” read Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Quite so. Now turn that up in the ledger.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes turned to the page indicated. “Here you are, ‘Mrs. Oakshott,
+117, Brixton Road, egg and poultry supplier.’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now, then, what’s the last entry?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘December 22nd. Twenty-four geese at 7 s .
+6 d .’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Quite so. There you are. And underneath?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Sold to Mr. Windigate of the Alpha, at
+12 s .’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What have you to say now?”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes looked deeply chagrined. He drew a sovereign from his pocket
+and threw it down upon the slab, turning away with the air of a man whose
+disgust is too deep for words. A few yards off he stopped under a lamp-post and
+laughed in the hearty, noiseless fashion which was peculiar to him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“When you see a man with whiskers of that cut and the ‘Pink
+’un’ protruding out of his pocket, you can always draw him by a
+bet,” said he. “I daresay that if I had put £ 100 down in front of
+him, that man would not have given me such complete information as was drawn
+from him by the idea that he was doing me on a wager. Well, Watson, we are, I
+fancy, nearing the end of our quest, and the only point which remains to be
+determined is whether we should go on to this Mrs. Oakshott to-night, or
+whether we should reserve it for to-morrow. It is clear from what that surly
+fellow said that there are others besides ourselves who are anxious about the
+matter, and I should—”
+
+
+
+ 
+His remarks were suddenly cut short by a loud hubbub which broke out from the
+stall which we had just left. Turning round we saw a little rat-faced fellow
+standing in the centre of the circle of yellow light which was thrown by the
+swinging lamp, while Breckinridge, the salesman, framed in the door of his
+stall, was shaking his fists fiercely at the cringing figure.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’ve had enough of you and your geese,” he shouted. “I
+wish you were all at the devil together. If you come pestering me any more with
+your silly talk I’ll set the dog at you. You bring Mrs. Oakshott here and
+I’ll answer her, but what have you to do with it? Did I buy the geese off
+you?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No; but one of them was mine all the same,” whined the little man.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, then, ask Mrs. Oakshott for it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“She told me to ask you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, you can ask the King of Proosia, for all I care. I’ve had
+enough of it. Get out of this!” He rushed fiercely forward, and the
+inquirer flitted away into the darkness.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ha! this may save us a visit to Brixton Road,” whispered Holmes.
+“Come with me, and we will see what is to be made of this fellow.”
+Striding through the scattered knots of people who lounged round the flaring
+stalls, my companion speedily overtook the little man and touched him upon the
+shoulder. He sprang round, and I could see in the gas-light that every vestige
+of colour had been driven from his face.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Who are you, then? What do you want?” he asked in a quavering
+voice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You will excuse me,” said Holmes blandly, “but I could not
+help overhearing the questions which you put to the salesman just now. I think
+that I could be of assistance to you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You? Who are you? How could you know anything of the matter?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people
+don’t know.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But you can know nothing of this?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Excuse me, I know everything of it. You are endeavouring to trace some
+geese which were sold by Mrs. Oakshott, of Brixton Road, to a salesman named
+Breckinridge, by him in turn to Mr. Windigate, of the Alpha, and by him to his
+club, of which Mr. Henry Baker is a member.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, sir, you are the very man whom I have longed to meet,” cried
+the little fellow with outstretched hands and quivering fingers. “I can
+hardly explain to you how interested I am in this matter.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes hailed a four-wheeler which was passing. “In that case we
+had better discuss it in a cosy room rather than in this wind-swept
+market-place,” said he. “But pray tell me, before we go farther,
+who it is that I have the pleasure of assisting.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The man hesitated for an instant. “My name is John Robinson,” he
+answered with a sidelong glance.
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, no; the real name,” said Holmes sweetly. “It is always
+awkward doing business with an alias.”
+
+
+
+ 
+A flush sprang to the white cheeks of the stranger. “Well then,”
+said he, “my real name is James Ryder.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Precisely so. Head attendant at the Hotel Cosmopolitan. Pray step into
+the cab, and I shall soon be able to tell you everything which you would wish
+to know.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The little man stood glancing from one to the other of us with half-frightened,
+half-hopeful eyes, as one who is not sure whether he is on the verge of a
+windfall or of a catastrophe. Then he stepped into the cab, and in half an hour
+we were back in the sitting-room at Baker Street. Nothing had been said during
+our drive, but the high, thin breathing of our new companion, and the claspings
+and unclaspings of his hands, spoke of the nervous tension within him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Here we are!” said Holmes cheerily as we filed into the room.
+“The fire looks very seasonable in this weather. You look cold, Mr.
+Ryder. Pray take the basket-chair. I will just put on my slippers before we
+settle this little matter of yours. Now, then! You want to know what became of
+those geese?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Or rather, I fancy, of that goose. It was one bird, I imagine in which
+you were interested—white, with a black bar across the tail.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Ryder quivered with emotion. “Oh, sir,” he cried, “can you
+tell me where it went to?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It came here.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Here?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, and a most remarkable bird it proved. I don’t wonder that you
+should take an interest in it. It laid an egg after it was dead—the
+bonniest, brightest little blue egg that ever was seen. I have it here in my
+museum.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Our visitor staggered to his feet and clutched the mantelpiece with his right
+hand. Holmes unlocked his strong-box and held up the blue carbuncle, which
+shone out like a star, with a cold, brilliant, many-pointed radiance. Ryder
+stood glaring with a drawn face, uncertain whether to claim or to disown it.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The game’s up, Ryder,” said Holmes quietly. “Hold up,
+man, or you’ll be into the fire! Give him an arm back into his chair,
+Watson. He’s not got blood enough to go in for felony with impunity. Give
+him a dash of brandy. So! Now he looks a little more human. What a shrimp it
+is, to be sure!”
+
+
+
+ 
+For a moment he had staggered and nearly fallen, but the brandy brought a tinge
+of colour into his cheeks, and he sat staring with frightened eyes at his
+accuser.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have almost every link in my hands, and all the proofs which I could
+possibly need, so there is little which you need tell me. Still, that little
+may as well be cleared up to make the case complete. You had heard, Ryder, of
+this blue stone of the Countess of Morcar’s?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was Catherine Cusack who told me of it,” said he in a crackling
+voice.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I see—her ladyship’s waiting-maid. Well, the temptation of
+sudden wealth so easily acquired was too much for you, as it has been for
+better men before you; but you were not very scrupulous in the means you used.
+It seems to me, Ryder, that there is the making of a very pretty villain in
+you. You knew that this man Horner, the plumber, had been concerned in some
+such matter before, and that suspicion would rest the more readily upon him.
+What did you do, then? You made some small job in my lady’s
+room—you and your confederate Cusack—and you managed that he should
+be the man sent for. Then, when he had left, you rifled the jewel-case, raised
+the alarm, and had this unfortunate man arrested. You then—”
+
+
+
+ 
+Ryder threw himself down suddenly upon the rug and clutched at my
+companion’s knees. “For God’s sake, have mercy!” he
+shrieked. “Think of my father! Of my mother! It would break their hearts.
+I never went wrong before! I never will again. I swear it. I’ll swear it
+on a Bible. Oh, don’t bring it into court! For Christ’s sake,
+don’t!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Get back into your chair!” said Holmes sternly. “It is very
+well to cringe and crawl now, but you thought little enough of this poor Horner
+in the dock for a crime of which he knew nothing.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I will fly, Mr. Holmes. I will leave the country, sir. Then the charge
+against him will break down.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Hum! We will talk about that. And now let us hear a true account of the
+next act. How came the stone into the goose, and how came the goose into the
+open market? Tell us the truth, for there lies your only hope of safety.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Ryder passed his tongue over his parched lips. “I will tell you it just
+as it happened, sir,” said he. “When Horner had been arrested, it
+seemed to me that it would be best for me to get away with the stone at once,
+for I did not know at what moment the police might not take it into their heads
+to search me and my room. There was no place about the hotel where it would be
+safe. I went out, as if on some commission, and I made for my sister’s
+house. She had married a man named Oakshott, and lived in Brixton Road, where
+she fattened fowls for the market. All the way there every man I met seemed to
+me to be a policeman or a detective; and, for all that it was a cold night, the
+sweat was pouring down my face before I came to the Brixton Road. My sister
+asked me what was the matter, and why I was so pale; but I told her that I had
+been upset by the jewel robbery at the hotel. Then I went into the back yard
+and smoked a pipe and wondered what it would be best to do.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I had a friend once called Maudsley, who went to the bad, and has just
+been serving his time in Pentonville. One day he had met me, and fell into talk
+about the ways of thieves, and how they could get rid of what they stole. I
+knew that he would be true to me, for I knew one or two things about him; so I
+made up my mind to go right on to Kilburn, where he lived, and take him into my
+confidence. He would show me how to turn the stone into money. But how to get
+to him in safety? I thought of the agonies I had gone through in coming from
+the hotel. I might at any moment be seized and searched, and there would be the
+stone in my waistcoat pocket. I was leaning against the wall at the time and
+looking at the geese which were waddling about round my feet, and suddenly an
+idea came into my head which showed me how I could beat the best detective that
+ever lived.
+
+
+
+ 
+“My sister had told me some weeks before that I might have the pick of
+her geese for a Christmas present, and I knew that she was always as good as
+her word. I would take my goose now, and in it I would carry my stone to
+Kilburn. There was a little shed in the yard, and behind this I drove one of
+the birds—a fine big one, white, with a barred tail. I caught it, and
+prying its bill open, I thrust the stone down its throat as far as my finger
+could reach. The bird gave a gulp, and I felt the stone pass along its gullet
+and down into its crop. But the creature flapped and struggled, and out came my
+sister to know what was the matter. As I turned to speak to her the brute broke
+loose and fluttered off among the others.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Whatever were you doing with that bird, Jem?’ says
+she.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Well,’ said I, ‘you said you’d give me
+one for Christmas, and I was feeling which was the fattest.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Oh,’ says she, ‘we’ve set yours aside for
+you—Jem’s bird, we call it. It’s the big white one over
+yonder. There’s twenty-six of them, which makes one for you, and one for
+us, and two dozen for the market.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Thank you, Maggie,’ says I; ‘but if it is all
+the same to you, I’d rather have that one I was handling just now.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘The other is a good three pound heavier,’ said she,
+‘and we fattened it expressly for you.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Never mind. I’ll have the other, and I’ll take
+it now,’ said I.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Oh, just as you like,’ said she, a little huffed.
+‘Which is it you want, then?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘That white one with the barred tail, right in the middle of
+the flock.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Oh, very well. Kill it and take it with you.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, I did what she said, Mr. Holmes, and I carried the bird all the
+way to Kilburn. I told my pal what I had done, for he was a man that it was
+easy to tell a thing like that to. He laughed until he choked, and we got a
+knife and opened the goose. My heart turned to water, for there was no sign of
+the stone, and I knew that some terrible mistake had occurred. I left the bird,
+rushed back to my sister’s, and hurried into the back yard. There was not
+a bird to be seen there.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Where are they all, Maggie?’ I cried.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Gone to the dealer’s, Jem.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Which dealer’s?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Breckinridge, of Covent Garden.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘But was there another with a barred tail?’ I asked,
+‘the same as the one I chose?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Yes, Jem; there were two barred-tailed ones, and I could
+never tell them apart.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, then, of course I saw it all, and I ran off as hard as my feet
+would carry me to this man Breckinridge; but he had sold the lot at once, and
+not one word would he tell me as to where they had gone. You heard him
+yourselves to-night. Well, he has always answered me like that. My sister
+thinks that I am going mad. Sometimes I think that I am myself. And
+now—and now I am myself a branded thief, without ever having touched the
+wealth for which I sold my character. God help me! God help me!” He burst
+into convulsive sobbing, with his face buried in his hands.
+
+
+
+ 
+There was a long silence, broken only by his heavy breathing and by the
+measured tapping of Sherlock Holmes’ finger-tips upon the edge of the
+table. Then my friend rose and threw open the door.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Get out!” said he.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What, sir! Oh, Heaven bless you!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No more words. Get out!”
+
+
+
+ 
+And no more words were needed. There was a rush, a clatter upon the stairs, the
+bang of a door, and the crisp rattle of running footfalls from the street.
+
+
+
+ 
+“After all, Watson,” said Holmes, reaching up his hand for his clay
+pipe, “I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies. If
+Horner were in danger it would be another thing; but this fellow will not
+appear against him, and the case must collapse. I suppose that I am commuting a
+felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not
+go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him to gaol now, and you
+make him a gaol-bird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness. Chance
+has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is
+its own reward. If you will have the goodness to touch the bell, Doctor, we
+will begin another investigation, in which, also a bird will be the chief
+feature.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ VIII.
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND 
+ 
+ O n glancing over my
+notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years
+studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some
+comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he
+did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he
+refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards
+the unusual, and even the fantastic. Of all these varied cases, however, I
+cannot recall any which presented more singular features than that which was
+associated with the well-known Surrey family of the Roylotts of Stoke Moran.
+The events in question occurred in the early days of my association with
+Holmes, when we were sharing rooms as bachelors in Baker Street. It is possible
+that I might have placed them upon record before, but a promise of secrecy was
+made at the time, from which I have only been freed during the last month by
+the untimely death of the lady to whom the pledge was given. It is perhaps as
+well that the facts should now come to light, for I have reasons to know that
+there are widespread rumours as to the death of Dr. Grimesby Roylott which tend
+to make the matter even more terrible than the truth.
+
+
+
+ 
+It was early in April in the year ’83 that I woke one morning to find
+Sherlock Holmes standing, fully dressed, by the side of my bed. He was a late
+riser, as a rule, and as the clock on the mantelpiece showed me that it was
+only a quarter-past seven, I blinked up at him in some surprise, and perhaps
+just a little resentment, for I was myself regular in my habits.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very sorry to knock you up, Watson,” said he, “but
+it’s the common lot this morning. Mrs. Hudson has been knocked up, she
+retorted upon me, and I on you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What is it, then—a fire?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No; a client. It seems that a young lady has arrived in a considerable
+state of excitement, who insists upon seeing me. She is waiting now in the
+sitting-room. Now, when young ladies wander about the metropolis at this hour
+of the morning, and knock sleepy people up out of their beds, I presume that it
+is something very pressing which they have to communicate. Should it prove to
+be an interesting case, you would, I am sure, wish to follow it from the
+outset. I thought, at any rate, that I should call you and give you the
+chance.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear fellow, I would not miss it for anything.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I had no keener pleasure than in following Holmes in his professional
+investigations, and in admiring the rapid deductions, as swift as intuitions,
+and yet always founded on a logical basis with which he unravelled the problems
+which were submitted to him. I rapidly threw on my clothes and was ready in a
+few minutes to accompany my friend down to the sitting-room. A lady dressed in
+black and heavily veiled, who had been sitting in the window, rose as we
+entered.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Good-morning, madam,” said Holmes cheerily. “My name is
+Sherlock Holmes. This is my intimate friend and associate, Dr. Watson, before
+whom you can speak as freely as before myself. Ha! I am glad to see that Mrs.
+Hudson has had the good sense to light the fire. Pray draw up to it, and I
+shall order you a cup of hot coffee, for I observe that you are
+shivering.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is not cold which makes me shiver,” said the woman in a low
+voice, changing her seat as requested.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is fear, Mr. Holmes. It is terror.” She raised her veil as she
+spoke, and we could see that she was indeed in a pitiable state of agitation,
+her face all drawn and grey, with restless frightened eyes, like those of some
+hunted animal. Her features and figure were those of a woman of thirty, but her
+hair was shot with premature grey, and her expression was weary and haggard.
+Sherlock Holmes ran her over with one of his quick, all-comprehensive glances.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You must not fear,” said he soothingly, bending forward and
+patting her forearm. “We shall soon set matters right, I have no doubt.
+You have come in by train this morning, I see.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You know me, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, but I observe the second half of a return ticket in the palm of your
+left glove. You must have started early, and yet you had a good drive in a
+dog-cart, along heavy roads, before you reached the station.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The lady gave a violent start and stared in bewilderment at my companion.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There is no mystery, my dear madam,” said he, smiling. “The
+left arm of your jacket is spattered with mud in no less than seven places. The
+marks are perfectly fresh. There is no vehicle save a dog-cart which throws up
+mud in that way, and then only when you sit on the left-hand side of the
+driver.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Whatever your reasons may be, you are perfectly correct,” said
+she. “I started from home before six, reached Leatherhead at twenty past,
+and came in by the first train to Waterloo. Sir, I can stand this strain no
+longer; I shall go mad if it continues. I have no one to turn to—none,
+save only one, who cares for me, and he, poor fellow, can be of little aid. I
+have heard of you, Mr. Holmes; I have heard of you from Mrs. Farintosh, whom
+you helped in the hour of her sore need. It was from her that I had your
+address. Oh, sir, do you not think that you could help me, too, and at least
+throw a little light through the dense darkness which surrounds me? At present
+it is out of my power to reward you for your services, but in a month or six
+weeks I shall be married, with the control of my own income, and then at least
+you shall not find me ungrateful.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes turned to his desk and, unlocking it, drew out a small case-book, which
+he consulted.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Farintosh,” said he. “Ah yes, I recall the case; it was
+concerned with an opal tiara. I think it was before your time, Watson. I can
+only say, madam, that I shall be happy to devote the same care to your case as
+I did to that of your friend. As to reward, my profession is its own reward;
+but you are at liberty to defray whatever expenses I may be put to, at the time
+which suits you best. And now I beg that you will lay before us everything that
+may help us in forming an opinion upon the matter.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Alas!” replied our visitor, “the very horror of my situation
+lies in the fact that my fears are so vague, and my suspicions depend so
+entirely upon small points, which might seem trivial to another, that even he
+to whom of all others I have a right to look for help and advice looks upon all
+that I tell him about it as the fancies of a nervous woman. He does not say so,
+but I can read it from his soothing answers and averted eyes. But I have heard,
+Mr. Holmes, that you can see deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human
+heart. You may advise me how to walk amid the dangers which encompass
+me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am all attention, madam.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My name is Helen Stoner, and I am living with my stepfather, who is the
+last survivor of one of the oldest Saxon families in England, the Roylotts of
+Stoke Moran, on the western border of Surrey.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes nodded his head. “The name is familiar to me,” said he.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The family was at one time among the richest in England, and the estates
+extended over the borders into Berkshire in the north, and Hampshire in the
+west. In the last century, however, four successive heirs were of a dissolute
+and wasteful disposition, and the family ruin was eventually completed by a
+gambler in the days of the Regency. Nothing was left save a few acres of
+ground, and the two-hundred-year-old house, which is itself crushed under a
+heavy mortgage. The last squire dragged out his existence there, living the
+horrible life of an aristocratic pauper; but his only son, my stepfather,
+seeing that he must adapt himself to the new conditions, obtained an advance
+from a relative, which enabled him to take a medical degree and went out to
+Calcutta, where, by his professional skill and his force of character, he
+established a large practice. In a fit of anger, however, caused by some
+robberies which had been perpetrated in the house, he beat his native butler to
+death and narrowly escaped a capital sentence. As it was, he suffered a long
+term of imprisonment and afterwards returned to England a morose and
+disappointed man.
+
+
+
+ 
+“When Dr. Roylott was in India he married my mother, Mrs. Stoner, the
+young widow of Major-General Stoner, of the Bengal Artillery. My sister Julia
+and I were twins, and we were only two years old at the time of my
+mother’s re-marriage. She had a considerable sum of money—not less
+than £ 1000 a year—and this she bequeathed to Dr. Roylott entirely while
+we resided with him, with a provision that a certain annual sum should be
+allowed to each of us in the event of our marriage. Shortly after our return to
+England my mother died—she was killed eight years ago in a railway
+accident near Crewe. Dr. Roylott then abandoned his attempts to establish
+himself in practice in London and took us to live with him in the old ancestral
+house at Stoke Moran. The money which my mother had left was enough for all our
+wants, and there seemed to be no obstacle to our happiness.
+
+
+
+ 
+“But a terrible change came over our stepfather about this time. Instead
+of making friends and exchanging visits with our neighbours, who had at first
+been overjoyed to see a Roylott of Stoke Moran back in the old family seat, he
+shut himself up in his house and seldom came out save to indulge in ferocious
+quarrels with whoever might cross his path. Violence of temper approaching to
+mania has been hereditary in the men of the family, and in my
+stepfather’s case it had, I believe, been intensified by his long
+residence in the tropics. A series of disgraceful brawls took place, two of
+which ended in the police-court, until at last he became the terror of the
+village, and the folks would fly at his approach, for he is a man of immense
+strength, and absolutely uncontrollable in his anger.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Last week he hurled the local blacksmith over a parapet into a stream,
+and it was only by paying over all the money which I could gather together that
+I was able to avert another public exposure. He had no friends at all save the
+wandering gipsies, and he would give these vagabonds leave to encamp upon the
+few acres of bramble-covered land which represent the family estate, and would
+accept in return the hospitality of their tents, wandering away with them
+sometimes for weeks on end. He has a passion also for Indian animals, which are
+sent over to him by a correspondent, and he has at this moment a cheetah and a
+baboon, which wander freely over his grounds and are feared by the villagers
+almost as much as their master.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You can imagine from what I say that my poor sister Julia and I had no
+great pleasure in our lives. No servant would stay with us, and for a long time
+we did all the work of the house. She was but thirty at the time of her death,
+and yet her hair had already begun to whiten, even as mine has.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your sister is dead, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“She died just two years ago, and it is of her death that I wish to speak
+to you. You can understand that, living the life which I have described, we
+were little likely to see anyone of our own age and position. We had, however,
+an aunt, my mother’s maiden sister, Miss Honoria Westphail, who lives
+near Harrow, and we were occasionally allowed to pay short visits at this
+lady’s house. Julia went there at Christmas two years ago, and met there
+a half-pay major of marines, to whom she became engaged. My stepfather learned
+of the engagement when my sister returned and offered no objection to the
+marriage; but within a fortnight of the day which had been fixed for the
+wedding, the terrible event occurred which has deprived me of my only
+companion.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes had been leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed and his
+head sunk in a cushion, but he half opened his lids now and glanced across at
+his visitor.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pray be precise as to details,” said he.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is easy for me to be so, for every event of that dreadful time is
+seared into my memory. The manor-house is, as I have already said, very old,
+and only one wing is now inhabited. The bedrooms in this wing are on the ground
+floor, the sitting-rooms being in the central block of the buildings. Of these
+bedrooms the first is Dr. Roylott’s, the second my sister’s, and
+the third my own. There is no communication between them, but they all open out
+into the same corridor. Do I make myself plain?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Perfectly so.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The windows of the three rooms open out upon the lawn. That fatal night
+Dr. Roylott had gone to his room early, though we knew that he had not retired
+to rest, for my sister was troubled by the smell of the strong Indian cigars
+which it was his custom to smoke. She left her room, therefore, and came into
+mine, where she sat for some time, chatting about her approaching wedding. At
+eleven o’clock she rose to leave me, but she paused at the door and
+looked back.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Tell me, Helen,’ said she, ‘have you ever heard
+anyone whistle in the dead of the night?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Never,’ said I.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I suppose that you could not possibly whistle, yourself, in
+your sleep?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Certainly not. But why?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Because during the last few nights I have always, about
+three in the morning, heard a low, clear whistle. I am a light sleeper, and it
+has awakened me. I cannot tell where it came from—perhaps from the next
+room, perhaps from the lawn. I thought that I would just ask you whether you
+had heard it.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘No, I have not. It must be those wretched gipsies in the
+plantation.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Very likely. And yet if it were on the lawn, I wonder that
+you did not hear it also.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Ah, but I sleep more heavily than you.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Well, it is of no great consequence, at any rate.’
+She smiled back at me, closed my door, and a few moments later I heard her key
+turn in the lock.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Indeed,” said Holmes. “Was it your custom always to lock
+yourselves in at night?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Always.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And why?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I think that I mentioned to you that the Doctor kept a cheetah and a
+baboon. We had no feeling of security unless our doors were locked.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Quite so. Pray proceed with your statement.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I could not sleep that night. A vague feeling of impending misfortune
+impressed me. My sister and I, you will recollect, were twins, and you know how
+subtle are the links which bind two souls which are so closely allied. It was a
+wild night. The wind was howling outside, and the rain was beating and
+splashing against the windows. Suddenly, amid all the hubbub of the gale, there
+burst forth the wild scream of a terrified woman. I knew that it was my
+sister’s voice. I sprang from my bed, wrapped a shawl round me, and
+rushed into the corridor. As I opened my door I seemed to hear a low whistle,
+such as my sister described, and a few moments later a clanging sound, as if a
+mass of metal had fallen. As I ran down the passage, my sister’s door was
+unlocked, and revolved slowly upon its hinges. I stared at it horror-stricken,
+not knowing what was about to issue from it. By the light of the corridor-lamp
+I saw my sister appear at the opening, her face blanched with terror, her hands
+groping for help, her whole figure swaying to and fro like that of a drunkard.
+I ran to her and threw my arms round her, but at that moment her knees seemed
+to give way and she fell to the ground. She writhed as one who is in terrible
+pain, and her limbs were dreadfully convulsed. At first I thought that she had
+not recognised me, but as I bent over her she suddenly shrieked out in a voice
+which I shall never forget, ‘Oh, my God! Helen! It was the band! The
+speckled band!’ There was something else which she would fain have said,
+and she stabbed with her finger into the air in the direction of the
+Doctor’s room, but a fresh convulsion seized her and choked her words. I
+rushed out, calling loudly for my stepfather, and I met him hastening from his
+room in his dressing-gown. When he reached my sister’s side she was
+unconscious, and though he poured brandy down her throat and sent for medical
+aid from the village, all efforts were in vain, for she slowly sank and died
+without having recovered her consciousness. Such was the dreadful end of my
+beloved sister.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“One moment,” said Holmes, “are you sure about this whistle
+and metallic sound? Could you swear to it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That was what the county coroner asked me at the inquiry. It is my
+strong impression that I heard it, and yet, among the crash of the gale and the
+creaking of an old house, I may possibly have been deceived.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Was your sister dressed?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, she was in her night-dress. In her right hand was found the charred
+stump of a match, and in her left a match-box.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Showing that she had struck a light and looked about her when the alarm
+took place. That is important. And what conclusions did the coroner come
+to?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He investigated the case with great care, for Dr. Roylott’s
+conduct had long been notorious in the county, but he was unable to find any
+satisfactory cause of death. My evidence showed that the door had been fastened
+upon the inner side, and the windows were blocked by old-fashioned shutters
+with broad iron bars, which were secured every night. The walls were carefully
+sounded, and were shown to be quite solid all round, and the flooring was also
+thoroughly examined, with the same result. The chimney is wide, but is barred
+up by four large staples. It is certain, therefore, that my sister was quite
+alone when she met her end. Besides, there were no marks of any violence upon
+her.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How about poison?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The doctors examined her for it, but without success.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What do you think that this unfortunate lady died of, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is my belief that she died of pure fear and nervous shock, though
+what it was that frightened her I cannot imagine.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Were there gipsies in the plantation at the time?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, there are nearly always some there.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah, and what did you gather from this allusion to a band—a
+speckled band?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Sometimes I have thought that it was merely the wild talk of delirium,
+sometimes that it may have referred to some band of people, perhaps to these
+very gipsies in the plantation. I do not know whether the spotted handkerchiefs
+which so many of them wear over their heads might have suggested the strange
+adjective which she used.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes shook his head like a man who is far from being satisfied.
+
+
+
+ 
+“These are very deep waters,” said he; “pray go on with your
+narrative.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Two years have passed since then, and my life has been until lately
+lonelier than ever. A month ago, however, a dear friend, whom I have known for
+many years, has done me the honour to ask my hand in marriage. His name is
+Armitage—Percy Armitage—the second son of Mr. Armitage, of Crane
+Water, near Reading. My stepfather has offered no opposition to the match, and
+we are to be married in the course of the spring. Two days ago some repairs
+were started in the west wing of the building, and my bedroom wall has been
+pierced, so that I have had to move into the chamber in which my sister died,
+and to sleep in the very bed in which she slept. Imagine, then, my thrill of
+terror when last night, as I lay awake, thinking over her terrible fate, I
+suddenly heard in the silence of the night the low whistle which had been the
+herald of her own death. I sprang up and lit the lamp, but nothing was to be
+seen in the room. I was too shaken to go to bed again, however, so I dressed,
+and as soon as it was daylight I slipped down, got a dog-cart at the Crown Inn,
+which is opposite, and drove to Leatherhead, from whence I have come on this
+morning with the one object of seeing you and asking your advice.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have done wisely,” said my friend. “But have you told me
+all?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, all.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Miss Roylott, you have not. You are screening your stepfather.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why, what do you mean?”
+
+
+
+ 
+For answer Holmes pushed back the frill of black lace which fringed the hand
+that lay upon our visitor’s knee. Five little livid spots, the marks of
+four fingers and a thumb, were printed upon the white wrist.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have been cruelly used,” said Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+The lady coloured deeply and covered over her injured wrist. “He is a
+hard man,” she said, “and perhaps he hardly knows his own
+strength.”
+
+
+
+ 
+There was a long silence, during which Holmes leaned his chin upon his hands
+and stared into the crackling fire.
+
+
+
+ 
+“This is a very deep business,” he said at last. “There are a
+thousand details which I should desire to know before I decide upon our course
+of action. Yet we have not a moment to lose. If we were to come to Stoke Moran
+to-day, would it be possible for us to see over these rooms without the
+knowledge of your stepfather?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“As it happens, he spoke of coming into town to-day upon some most
+important business. It is probable that he will be away all day, and that there
+would be nothing to disturb you. We have a housekeeper now, but she is old and
+foolish, and I could easily get her out of the way.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Excellent. You are not averse to this trip, Watson?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“By no means.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then we shall both come. What are you going to do yourself?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have one or two things which I would wish to do now that I am in town.
+But I shall return by the twelve o’clock train, so as to be there in time
+for your coming.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And you may expect us early in the afternoon. I have myself some small
+business matters to attend to. Will you not wait and breakfast?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, I must go. My heart is lightened already since I have confided my
+trouble to you. I shall look forward to seeing you again this afternoon.”
+She dropped her thick black veil over her face and glided from the room.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And what do you think of it all, Watson?” asked Sherlock Holmes,
+leaning back in his chair.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It seems to me to be a most dark and sinister business.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Dark enough and sinister enough.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yet if the lady is correct in saying that the flooring and walls are
+sound, and that the door, window, and chimney are impassable, then her sister
+must have been undoubtedly alone when she met her mysterious end.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What becomes, then, of these nocturnal whistles, and what of the very
+peculiar words of the dying woman?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I cannot think.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“When you combine the ideas of whistles at night, the presence of a band
+of gipsies who are on intimate terms with this old doctor, the fact that we
+have every reason to believe that the doctor has an interest in preventing his
+stepdaughter’s marriage, the dying allusion to a band, and, finally, the
+fact that Miss Helen Stoner heard a metallic clang, which might have been
+caused by one of those metal bars that secured the shutters falling back into
+its place, I think that there is good ground to think that the mystery may be
+cleared along those lines.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But what, then, did the gipsies do?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I cannot imagine.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I see many objections to any such theory.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And so do I. It is precisely for that reason that we are going to Stoke
+Moran this day. I want to see whether the objections are fatal, or if they may
+be explained away. But what in the name of the devil!”
+
+
+
+ 
+The ejaculation had been drawn from my companion by the fact that our door had
+been suddenly dashed open, and that a huge man had framed himself in the
+aperture. His costume was a peculiar mixture of the professional and of the
+agricultural, having a black top-hat, a long frock-coat, and a pair of high
+gaiters, with a hunting-crop swinging in his hand. So tall was he that his hat
+actually brushed the cross bar of the doorway, and his breadth seemed to span
+it across from side to side. A large face, seared with a thousand wrinkles,
+burned yellow with the sun, and marked with every evil passion, was turned from
+one to the other of us, while his deep-set, bile-shot eyes, and his high, thin,
+fleshless nose, gave him somewhat the resemblance to a fierce old bird of prey.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Which of you is Holmes?” asked this apparition.
+
+
+
+ 
+“My name, sir; but you have the advantage of me,” said my companion
+quietly.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Indeed, Doctor,” said Holmes blandly. “Pray take a
+seat.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I will do nothing of the kind. My stepdaughter has been here. I have
+traced her. What has she been saying to you?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is a little cold for the time of the year,” said Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What has she been saying to you?” screamed the old man furiously.
+
+
+
+ 
+“But I have heard that the crocuses promise well,” continued my
+companion imperturbably.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ha! You put me off, do you?” said our new visitor, taking a step
+forward and shaking his hunting-crop. “I know you, you scoundrel! I have
+heard of you before. You are Holmes, the meddler.”
+
+
+
+ 
+My friend smiled.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Holmes, the busybody!”
+
+
+
+ 
+His smile broadened.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Holmes, the Scotland Yard Jack-in-office!”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes chuckled heartily. “Your conversation is most entertaining,”
+said he. “When you go out close the door, for there is a decided
+draught.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I will go when I have had my say. Don’t you dare to meddle with my
+affairs. I know that Miss Stoner has been here. I traced her! I am a dangerous
+man to fall foul of! See here.” He stepped swiftly forward, seized the
+poker, and bent it into a curve with his huge brown hands.
+
+
+
+ 
+“See that you keep yourself out of my grip,” he snarled, and
+hurling the twisted poker into the fireplace he strode out of the room.
+
+
+
+ 
+“He seems a very amiable person,” said Holmes, laughing. “I
+am not quite so bulky, but if he had remained I might have shown him that my
+grip was not much more feeble than his own.” As he spoke he picked up the
+steel poker and, with a sudden effort, straightened it out again.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Fancy his having the insolence to confound me with the official
+detective force! This incident gives zest to our investigation, however, and I
+only trust that our little friend will not suffer from her imprudence in
+allowing this brute to trace her. And now, Watson, we shall order breakfast,
+and afterwards I shall walk down to Doctors’ Commons, where I hope to get
+some data which may help us in this matter.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was nearly one o’clock when Sherlock Holmes returned from his
+excursion. He held in his hand a sheet of blue paper, scrawled over with notes
+and figures.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have seen the will of the deceased wife,” said he. “To
+determine its exact meaning I have been obliged to work out the present prices
+of the investments with which it is concerned. The total income, which at the
+time of the wife’s death was little short of £ 1,100, is now, through the
+fall in agricultural prices, not more than £ 750. Each daughter can claim an
+income of £ 250, in case of marriage. It is evident, therefore, that if both
+girls had married, this beauty would have had a mere pittance, while even one
+of them would cripple him to a very serious extent. My morning’s work has
+not been wasted, since it has proved that he has the very strongest motives for
+standing in the way of anything of the sort. And now, Watson, this is too
+serious for dawdling, especially as the old man is aware that we are
+interesting ourselves in his affairs; so if you are ready, we shall call a cab
+and drive to Waterloo. I should be very much obliged if you would slip your
+revolver into your pocket. An Eley’s No. 2 is an excellent argument with
+gentlemen who can twist steel pokers into knots. That and a tooth-brush are, I
+think, all that we need.”
+
+
+
+ 
+At Waterloo we were fortunate in catching a train for Leatherhead, where we
+hired a trap at the station inn and drove for four or five miles through the
+lovely Surrey lanes. It was a perfect day, with a bright sun and a few fleecy
+clouds in the heavens. The trees and wayside hedges were just throwing out
+their first green shoots, and the air was full of the pleasant smell of the
+moist earth. To me at least there was a strange contrast between the sweet
+promise of the spring and this sinister quest upon which we were engaged. My
+companion sat in the front of the trap, his arms folded, his hat pulled down
+over his eyes, and his chin sunk upon his breast, buried in the deepest
+thought. Suddenly, however, he started, tapped me on the shoulder, and pointed
+over the meadows.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Look there!” said he.
+
+
+
+ 
+A heavily timbered park stretched up in a gentle slope, thickening into a grove
+at the highest point. From amid the branches there jutted out the grey gables
+and high roof-tree of a very old mansion.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Stoke Moran?” said he.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, sir, that be the house of Dr. Grimesby Roylott,” remarked the
+driver.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There is some building going on there,” said Holmes; “that
+is where we are going.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There’s the village,” said the driver, pointing to a cluster
+of roofs some distance to the left; “but if you want to get to the house,
+you’ll find it shorter to get over this stile, and so by the footpath
+over the fields. There it is, where the lady is walking.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And the lady, I fancy, is Miss Stoner,” observed Holmes, shading
+his eyes. “Yes, I think we had better do as you suggest.”
+
+
+
+ 
+We got off, paid our fare, and the trap rattled back on its way to Leatherhead.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I thought it as well,” said Holmes as we climbed the stile,
+“that this fellow should think we had come here as architects, or on some
+definite business. It may stop his gossip. Good-afternoon, Miss Stoner. You see
+that we have been as good as our word.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Our client of the morning had hurried forward to meet us with a face which
+spoke her joy. “I have been waiting so eagerly for you,” she cried,
+shaking hands with us warmly. “All has turned out splendidly. Dr. Roylott
+has gone to town, and it is unlikely that he will be back before
+evening.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We have had the pleasure of making the Doctor’s
+acquaintance,” said Holmes, and in a few words he sketched out what had
+occurred. Miss Stoner turned white to the lips as she listened.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Good heavens!” she cried, “he has followed me, then.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“So it appears.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He is so cunning that I never know when I am safe from him. What will he
+say when he returns?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He must guard himself, for he may find that there is someone more
+cunning than himself upon his track. You must lock yourself up from him
+to-night. If he is violent, we shall take you away to your aunt’s at
+Harrow. Now, we must make the best use of our time, so kindly take us at once
+to the rooms which we are to examine.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The building was of grey, lichen-blotched stone, with a high central portion
+and two curving wings, like the claws of a crab, thrown out on each side. In
+one of these wings the windows were broken and blocked with wooden boards,
+while the roof was partly caved in, a picture of ruin. The central portion was
+in little better repair, but the right-hand block was comparatively modern, and
+the blinds in the windows, with the blue smoke curling up from the chimneys,
+showed that this was where the family resided. Some scaffolding had been
+erected against the end wall, and the stone-work had been broken into, but
+there were no signs of any workmen at the moment of our visit. Holmes walked
+slowly up and down the ill-trimmed lawn and examined with deep attention the
+outsides of the windows.
+
+
+
+ 
+“This, I take it, belongs to the room in which you used to sleep, the
+centre one to your sister’s, and the one next to the main building to Dr.
+Roylott’s chamber?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Exactly so. But I am now sleeping in the middle one.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pending the alterations, as I understand. By the way, there does not
+seem to be any very pressing need for repairs at that end wall.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There were none. I believe that it was an excuse to move me from my
+room.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah! that is suggestive. Now, on the other side of this narrow wing runs
+the corridor from which these three rooms open. There are windows in it, of
+course?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, but very small ones. Too narrow for anyone to pass through.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“As you both locked your doors at night, your rooms were unapproachable
+from that side. Now, would you have the kindness to go into your room and bar
+your shutters?”
+
+
+
+ 
+Miss Stoner did so, and Holmes, after a careful examination through the open
+window, endeavoured in every way to force the shutter open, but without
+success. There was no slit through which a knife could be passed to raise the
+bar. Then with his lens he tested the hinges, but they were of solid iron,
+built firmly into the massive masonry. “Hum!” said he, scratching
+his chin in some perplexity, “my theory certainly presents some
+difficulties. No one could pass these shutters if they were bolted. Well, we
+shall see if the inside throws any light upon the matter.”
+
+
+
+ 
+A small side door led into the whitewashed corridor from which the three
+bedrooms opened. Holmes refused to examine the third chamber, so we passed at
+once to the second, that in which Miss Stoner was now sleeping, and in which
+her sister had met with her fate. It was a homely little room, with a low
+ceiling and a gaping fireplace, after the fashion of old country-houses. A
+brown chest of drawers stood in one corner, a narrow white-counterpaned bed in
+another, and a dressing-table on the left-hand side of the window. These
+articles, with two small wicker-work chairs, made up all the furniture in the
+room save for a square of Wilton carpet in the centre. The boards round and the
+panelling of the walls were of brown, worm-eaten oak, so old and discoloured
+that it may have dated from the original building of the house. Holmes drew one
+of the chairs into a corner and sat silent, while his eyes travelled round and
+round and up and down, taking in every detail of the apartment.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Where does that bell communicate with?” he asked at last pointing
+to a thick bell-rope which hung down beside the bed, the tassel actually lying
+upon the pillow.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It goes to the housekeeper’s room.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It looks newer than the other things?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, it was only put there a couple of years ago.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your sister asked for it, I suppose?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, I never heard of her using it. We used always to get what we wanted
+for ourselves.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Indeed, it seemed unnecessary to put so nice a bell-pull there. You will
+excuse me for a few minutes while I satisfy myself as to this floor.” He
+threw himself down upon his face with his lens in his hand and crawled swiftly
+backward and forward, examining minutely the cracks between the boards. Then he
+did the same with the wood-work with which the chamber was panelled. Finally he
+walked over to the bed and spent some time in staring at it and in running his
+eye up and down the wall. Finally he took the bell-rope in his hand and gave it
+a brisk tug.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why, it’s a dummy,” said he.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Won’t it ring?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, it is not even attached to a wire. This is very interesting. You can
+see now that it is fastened to a hook just above where the little opening for
+the ventilator is.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How very absurd! I never noticed that before.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very strange!” muttered Holmes, pulling at the rope. “There
+are one or two very singular points about this room. For example, what a fool a
+builder must be to open a ventilator into another room, when, with the same
+trouble, he might have communicated with the outside air!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is also quite modern,” said the lady.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Done about the same time as the bell-rope?” remarked Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, there were several little changes carried out about that
+time.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“They seem to have been of a most interesting character—dummy
+bell-ropes, and ventilators which do not ventilate. With your permission, Miss
+Stoner, we shall now carry our researches into the inner apartment.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Dr. Grimesby Roylott’s chamber was larger than that of his step-daughter,
+but was as plainly furnished. A camp-bed, a small wooden shelf full of books,
+mostly of a technical character, an armchair beside the bed, a plain wooden
+chair against the wall, a round table, and a large iron safe were the principal
+things which met the eye. Holmes walked slowly round and examined each and all
+of them with the keenest interest.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What’s in here?” he asked, tapping the safe.
+
+
+
+ 
+“My stepfather’s business papers.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh! you have seen inside, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Only once, some years ago. I remember that it was full of papers.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There isn’t a cat in it, for example?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No. What a strange idea!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, look at this!” He took up a small saucer of milk which stood
+on the top of it.
+
+
+
+ 
+“No; we don’t keep a cat. But there is a cheetah and a
+baboon.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah, yes, of course! Well, a cheetah is just a big cat, and yet a saucer
+of milk does not go very far in satisfying its wants, I daresay. There is one
+point which I should wish to determine.” He squatted down in front of the
+wooden chair and examined the seat of it with the greatest attention.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you. That is quite settled,” said he, rising and putting his
+lens in his pocket. “Hullo! Here is something interesting!”
+
+
+
+ 
+The object which had caught his eye was a small dog lash hung on one corner of
+the bed. The lash, however, was curled upon itself and tied so as to make a
+loop of whipcord.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What do you make of that, Watson?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s a common enough lash. But I don’t know why it should be
+tied.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is not quite so common, is it? Ah, me! it’s a wicked world,
+and when a clever man turns his brains to crime it is the worst of all. I think
+that I have seen enough now, Miss Stoner, and with your permission we shall
+walk out upon the lawn.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I had never seen my friend’s face so grim or his brow so dark as it was
+when we turned from the scene of this investigation. We had walked several
+times up and down the lawn, neither Miss Stoner nor myself liking to break in
+upon his thoughts before he roused himself from his reverie.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is very essential, Miss Stoner,” said he, “that you
+should absolutely follow my advice in every respect.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I shall most certainly do so.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The matter is too serious for any hesitation. Your life may depend upon
+your compliance.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I assure you that I am in your hands.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In the first place, both my friend and I must spend the night in your
+room.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Both Miss Stoner and I gazed at him in astonishment.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, it must be so. Let me explain. I believe that that is the village
+inn over there?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, that is the Crown.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very good. Your windows would be visible from there?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Certainly.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You must confine yourself to your room, on pretence of a headache, when
+your stepfather comes back. Then when you hear him retire for the night, you
+must open the shutters of your window, undo the hasp, put your lamp there as a
+signal to us, and then withdraw quietly with everything which you are likely to
+want into the room which you used to occupy. I have no doubt that, in spite of
+the repairs, you could manage there for one night.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, yes, easily.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The rest you will leave in our hands.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But what will you do?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We shall spend the night in your room, and we shall investigate the
+cause of this noise which has disturbed you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I believe, Mr. Holmes, that you have already made up your mind,”
+said Miss Stoner, laying her hand upon my companion’s sleeve.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Perhaps I have.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then, for pity’s sake, tell me what was the cause of my
+sister’s death.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I should prefer to have clearer proofs before I speak.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You can at least tell me whether my own thought is correct, and if she
+died from some sudden fright.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, I do not think so. I think that there was probably some more
+tangible cause. And now, Miss Stoner, we must leave you for if Dr. Roylott
+returned and saw us our journey would be in vain. Good-bye, and be brave, for
+if you will do what I have told you, you may rest assured that we shall soon
+drive away the dangers that threaten you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes and I had no difficulty in engaging a bedroom and sitting-room
+at the Crown Inn. They were on the upper floor, and from our window we could
+command a view of the avenue gate, and of the inhabited wing of Stoke Moran
+Manor House. At dusk we saw Dr. Grimesby Roylott drive past, his huge form
+looming up beside the little figure of the lad who drove him. The boy had some
+slight difficulty in undoing the heavy iron gates, and we heard the hoarse roar
+of the Doctor’s voice and saw the fury with which he shook his clinched
+fists at him. The trap drove on, and a few minutes later we saw a sudden light
+spring up among the trees as the lamp was lit in one of the sitting-rooms.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do you know, Watson,” said Holmes as we sat together in the
+gathering darkness, “I have really some scruples as to taking you
+to-night. There is a distinct element of danger.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Can I be of assistance?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your presence might be invaluable.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then I shall certainly come.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is very kind of you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You speak of danger. You have evidently seen more in these rooms than
+was visible to me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, but I fancy that I may have deduced a little more. I imagine that
+you saw all that I did.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I saw nothing remarkable save the bell-rope, and what purpose that could
+answer I confess is more than I can imagine.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You saw the ventilator, too?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, but I do not think that it is such a very unusual thing to have a
+small opening between two rooms. It was so small that a rat could hardly pass
+through.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I knew that we should find a ventilator before ever we came to Stoke
+Moran.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear Holmes!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, yes, I did. You remember in her statement she said that her sister
+could smell Dr. Roylott’s cigar. Now, of course that suggested at once
+that there must be a communication between the two rooms. It could only be a
+small one, or it would have been remarked upon at the coroner’s inquiry.
+I deduced a ventilator.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But what harm can there be in that?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, there is at least a curious coincidence of dates. A ventilator is
+made, a cord is hung, and a lady who sleeps in the bed dies. Does not that
+strike you?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I cannot as yet see any connection.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Did you observe anything very peculiar about that bed?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was clamped to the floor. Did you ever see a bed fastened like that
+before?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I cannot say that I have.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The lady could not move her bed. It must always be in the same relative
+position to the ventilator and to the rope—or so we may call it, since it
+was clearly never meant for a bell-pull.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Holmes,” I cried, “I seem to see dimly what you are hinting
+at. We are only just in time to prevent some subtle and horrible crime.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Subtle enough and horrible enough. When a doctor does go wrong he is the
+first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge. Palmer and Pritchard
+were among the heads of their profession. This man strikes even deeper, but I
+think, Watson, that we shall be able to strike deeper still. But we shall have
+horrors enough before the night is over; for goodness’ sake let us have a
+quiet pipe and turn our minds for a few hours to something more
+cheerful.”
+
+
+
+ 
+About nine o’clock the light among the trees was extinguished, and all
+was dark in the direction of the Manor House. Two hours passed slowly away, and
+then, suddenly, just at the stroke of eleven, a single bright light shone out
+right in front of us.
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is our signal,” said Holmes, springing to his feet; “it
+comes from the middle window.”
+
+
+
+ 
+As we passed out he exchanged a few words with the landlord, explaining that we
+were going on a late visit to an acquaintance, and that it was possible that we
+might spend the night there. A moment later we were out on the dark road, a
+chill wind blowing in our faces, and one yellow light twinkling in front of us
+through the gloom to guide us on our sombre errand.
+
+
+
+ 
+There was little difficulty in entering the grounds, for unrepaired breaches
+gaped in the old park wall. Making our way among the trees, we reached the
+lawn, crossed it, and were about to enter through the window when out from a
+clump of laurel bushes there darted what seemed to be a hideous and distorted
+child, who threw itself upon the grass with writhing limbs and then ran swiftly
+across the lawn into the darkness.
+
+
+
+ 
+“My God!” I whispered; “did you see it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes was for the moment as startled as I. His hand closed like a vice upon my
+wrist in his agitation. Then he broke into a low laugh and put his lips to my
+ear.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is a nice household,” he murmured. “That is the
+baboon.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I had forgotten the strange pets which the Doctor affected. There was a
+cheetah, too; perhaps we might find it upon our shoulders at any moment. I
+confess that I felt easier in my mind when, after following Holmes’
+example and slipping off my shoes, I found myself inside the bedroom. My
+companion noiselessly closed the shutters, moved the lamp onto the table, and
+cast his eyes round the room. All was as we had seen it in the daytime. Then
+creeping up to me and making a trumpet of his hand, he whispered into my ear
+again so gently that it was all that I could do to distinguish the words:
+
+
+
+ 
+“The least sound would be fatal to our plans.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I nodded to show that I had heard.
+
+
+
+ 
+“We must sit without light. He would see it through the
+ventilator.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I nodded again.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do not go asleep; your very life may depend upon it. Have your pistol
+ready in case we should need it. I will sit on the side of the bed, and you in
+that chair.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I took out my revolver and laid it on the corner of the table.
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes had brought up a long thin cane, and this he placed upon the bed beside
+him. By it he laid the box of matches and the stump of a candle. Then he turned
+down the lamp, and we were left in darkness.
+
+
+
+ 
+How shall I ever forget that dreadful vigil? I could not hear a sound, not even
+the drawing of a breath, and yet I knew that my companion sat open-eyed, within
+a few feet of me, in the same state of nervous tension in which I was myself.
+The shutters cut off the least ray of light, and we waited in absolute
+darkness.
+
+
+
+ 
+From outside came the occasional cry of a night-bird, and once at our very
+window a long drawn catlike whine, which told us that the cheetah was indeed at
+liberty. Far away we could hear the deep tones of the parish clock, which
+boomed out every quarter of an hour. How long they seemed, those quarters!
+Twelve struck, and one and two and three, and still we sat waiting silently for
+whatever might befall.
+
+
+
+ 
+Suddenly there was the momentary gleam of a light up in the direction of the
+ventilator, which vanished immediately, but was succeeded by a strong smell of
+burning oil and heated metal. Someone in the next room had lit a dark-lantern.
+I heard a gentle sound of movement, and then all was silent once more, though
+the smell grew stronger. For half an hour I sat with straining ears. Then
+suddenly another sound became audible—a very gentle, soothing sound, like
+that of a small jet of steam escaping continually from a kettle. The instant
+that we heard it, Holmes sprang from the bed, struck a match, and lashed
+furiously with his cane at the bell-pull.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You see it, Watson?” he yelled. “You see it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+But I saw nothing. At the moment when Holmes struck the light I heard a low,
+clear whistle, but the sudden glare flashing into my weary eyes made it
+impossible for me to tell what it was at which my friend lashed so savagely. I
+could, however, see that his face was deadly pale and filled with horror and
+loathing. He had ceased to strike and was gazing up at the ventilator when
+suddenly there broke from the silence of the night the most horrible cry to
+which I have ever listened. It swelled up louder and louder, a hoarse yell of
+pain and fear and anger all mingled in the one dreadful shriek. They say that
+away down in the village, and even in the distant parsonage, that cry raised
+the sleepers from their beds. It struck cold to our hearts, and I stood gazing
+at Holmes, and he at me, until the last echoes of it had died away into the
+silence from which it rose.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What can it mean?” I gasped.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It means that it is all over,” Holmes answered. “And
+perhaps, after all, it is for the best. Take your pistol, and we will enter Dr.
+Roylott’s room.”
+
+
+
+ 
+With a grave face he lit the lamp and led the way down the corridor. Twice he
+struck at the chamber door without any reply from within. Then he turned the
+handle and entered, I at his heels, with the cocked pistol in my hand.
+
+
+
+ 
+It was a singular sight which met our eyes. On the table stood a dark-lantern
+with the shutter half open, throwing a brilliant beam of light upon the iron
+safe, the door of which was ajar. Beside this table, on the wooden chair, sat
+Dr. Grimesby Roylott clad in a long grey dressing-gown, his bare ankles
+protruding beneath, and his feet thrust into red heelless Turkish slippers.
+Across his lap lay the short stock with the long lash which we had noticed
+during the day. His chin was cocked upward and his eyes were fixed in a
+dreadful, rigid stare at the corner of the ceiling. Round his brow he had a
+peculiar yellow band, with brownish speckles, which seemed to be bound tightly
+round his head. As we entered he made neither sound nor motion.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The band! the speckled band!” whispered Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+I took a step forward. In an instant his strange headgear began to move, and
+there reared itself from among his hair the squat diamond-shaped head and
+puffed neck of a loathsome serpent.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is a swamp adder!” cried Holmes; “the deadliest snake in
+India. He has died within ten seconds of being bitten. Violence does, in truth,
+recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for
+another. Let us thrust this creature back into its den, and we can then remove
+Miss Stoner to some place of shelter and let the county police know what has
+happened.”
+
+
+
+ 
+As he spoke he drew the dog-whip swiftly from the dead man’s lap, and
+throwing the noose round the reptile’s neck he drew it from its horrid
+perch and, carrying it at arm’s length, threw it into the iron safe,
+which he closed upon it.
+
+
+
+ 
+Such are the true facts of the death of Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran.
+It is not necessary that I should prolong a narrative which has already run to
+too great a length by telling how we broke the sad news to the terrified girl,
+how we conveyed her by the morning train to the care of her good aunt at
+Harrow, of how the slow process of official inquiry came to the conclusion that
+the doctor met his fate while indiscreetly playing with a dangerous pet. The
+little which I had yet to learn of the case was told me by Sherlock Holmes as
+we travelled back next day.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I had,” said he, “come to an entirely erroneous conclusion
+which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from
+insufficient data. The presence of the gipsies, and the use of the word
+‘band,’ which was used by the poor girl, no doubt, to explain the
+appearance which she had caught a hurried glimpse of by the light of her match,
+were sufficient to put me upon an entirely wrong scent. I can only claim the
+merit that I instantly reconsidered my position when, however, it became clear
+to me that whatever danger threatened an occupant of the room could not come
+either from the window or the door. My attention was speedily drawn, as I have
+already remarked to you, to this ventilator, and to the bell-rope which hung
+down to the bed. The discovery that this was a dummy, and that the bed was
+clamped to the floor, instantly gave rise to the suspicion that the rope was
+there as a bridge for something passing through the hole and coming to the bed.
+The idea of a snake instantly occurred to me, and when I coupled it with my
+knowledge that the doctor was furnished with a supply of creatures from India,
+I felt that I was probably on the right track. The idea of using a form of
+poison which could not possibly be discovered by any chemical test was just
+such a one as would occur to a clever and ruthless man who had had an Eastern
+training. The rapidity with which such a poison would take effect would also,
+from his point of view, be an advantage. It would be a sharp-eyed coroner,
+indeed, who could distinguish the two little dark punctures which would show
+where the poison fangs had done their work. Then I thought of the whistle. Of
+course he must recall the snake before the morning light revealed it to the
+victim. He had trained it, probably by the use of the milk which we saw, to
+return to him when summoned. He would put it through this ventilator at the
+hour that he thought best, with the certainty that it would crawl down the rope
+and land on the bed. It might or might not bite the occupant, perhaps she might
+escape every night for a week, but sooner or later she must fall a victim.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I had come to these conclusions before ever I had entered his room. An
+inspection of his chair showed me that he had been in the habit of standing on
+it, which of course would be necessary in order that he should reach the
+ventilator. The sight of the safe, the saucer of milk, and the loop of whipcord
+were enough to finally dispel any doubts which may have remained. The metallic
+clang heard by Miss Stoner was obviously caused by her stepfather hastily
+closing the door of his safe upon its terrible occupant. Having once made up my
+mind, you know the steps which I took in order to put the matter to the proof.
+I heard the creature hiss as I have no doubt that you did also, and I instantly
+lit the light and attacked it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“With the result of driving it through the ventilator.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And also with the result of causing it to turn upon its master at the
+other side. Some of the blows of my cane came home and roused its snakish
+temper, so that it flew upon the first person it saw. In this way I am no doubt
+indirectly responsible for Dr. Grimesby Roylott’s death, and I cannot say
+that it is likely to weigh very heavily upon my conscience.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ IX.
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE ENGINEER’S THUMB 
+ 
+ O f all the problems
+which have been submitted to my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for solution
+during the years of our intimacy, there were only two which I was the means of
+introducing to his notice—that of Mr. Hatherley’s thumb, and that
+of Colonel Warburton’s madness. Of these the latter may have afforded a
+finer field for an acute and original observer, but the other was so strange in
+its inception and so dramatic in its details that it may be the more worthy of
+being placed upon record, even if it gave my friend fewer openings for those
+deductive methods of reasoning by which he achieved such remarkable results.
+The story has, I believe, been told more than once in the newspapers, but, like
+all such narratives, its effect is much less striking when set forth en
+bloc in a single half-column of print than when the facts slowly evolve
+before your own eyes, and the mystery clears gradually away as each new
+discovery furnishes a step which leads on to the complete truth. At the time
+the circumstances made a deep impression upon me, and the lapse of two years
+has hardly served to weaken the effect.
+
+
+
+ 
+It was in the summer of ’89, not long after my marriage, that the events
+occurred which I am now about to summarise. I had returned to civil practice
+and had finally abandoned Holmes in his Baker Street rooms, although I
+continually visited him and occasionally even persuaded him to forgo his
+Bohemian habits so far as to come and visit us. My practice had steadily
+increased, and as I happened to live at no very great distance from Paddington
+Station, I got a few patients from among the officials. One of these, whom I
+had cured of a painful and lingering disease, was never weary of advertising my
+virtues and of endeavouring to send me on every sufferer over whom he might
+have any influence.
+
+
+
+ 
+One morning, at a little before seven o’clock, I was awakened by the maid
+tapping at the door to announce that two men had come from Paddington and were
+waiting in the consulting-room. I dressed hurriedly, for I knew by experience
+that railway cases were seldom trivial, and hastened downstairs. As I
+descended, my old ally, the guard, came out of the room and closed the door
+tightly behind him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’ve got him here,” he whispered, jerking his thumb over his
+shoulder; “he’s all right.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What is it, then?” I asked, for his manner suggested that it was
+some strange creature which he had caged up in my room.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It’s a new patient,” he whispered. “I thought
+I’d bring him round myself; then he couldn’t slip away. There he
+is, all safe and sound. I must go now, Doctor; I have my dooties, just the same
+as you.” And off he went, this trusty tout, without even giving me time
+to thank him.
+
+
+
+ 
+I entered my consulting-room and found a gentleman seated by the table. He was
+quietly dressed in a suit of heather tweed with a soft cloth cap which he had
+laid down upon my books. Round one of his hands he had a handkerchief wrapped,
+which was mottled all over with bloodstains. He was young, not more than
+five-and-twenty, I should say, with a strong, masculine face; but he was
+exceedingly pale and gave me the impression of a man who was suffering from
+some strong agitation, which it took all his strength of mind to control.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am sorry to knock you up so early, Doctor,” said he, “but
+I have had a very serious accident during the night. I came in by train this
+morning, and on inquiring at Paddington as to where I might find a doctor, a
+worthy fellow very kindly escorted me here. I gave the maid a card, but I see
+that she has left it upon the side-table.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I took it up and glanced at it. “Mr. Victor Hatherley, hydraulic
+engineer, 16A, Victoria Street (3rd floor).” That was the name, style,
+and abode of my morning visitor. “I regret that I have kept you
+waiting,” said I, sitting down in my library-chair. “You are fresh
+from a night journey, I understand, which is in itself a monotonous
+occupation.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, my night could not be called monotonous,” said he, and
+laughed. He laughed very heartily, with a high, ringing note, leaning back in
+his chair and shaking his sides. All my medical instincts rose up against that
+laugh.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Stop it!” I cried; “pull yourself together!” and I
+poured out some water from a caraffe.
+
+
+
+ 
+It was useless, however. He was off in one of those hysterical outbursts which
+come upon a strong nature when some great crisis is over and gone. Presently he
+came to himself once more, very weary and pale-looking.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have been making a fool of myself,” he gasped.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not at all. Drink this.” I dashed some brandy into the water, and
+the colour began to come back to his bloodless cheeks.
+
+
+
+ 
+“That’s better!” said he. “And now, Doctor, perhaps you
+would kindly attend to my thumb, or rather to the place where my thumb used to
+be.”
+
+
+
+ 
+He unwound the handkerchief and held out his hand. It gave even my hardened
+nerves a shudder to look at it. There were four protruding fingers and a horrid
+red, spongy surface where the thumb should have been. It had been hacked or
+torn right out from the roots.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Good heavens!” I cried, “this is a terrible injury. It must
+have bled considerably.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, it did. I fainted when it was done, and I think that I must have
+been senseless for a long time. When I came to I found that it was still
+bleeding, so I tied one end of my handkerchief very tightly round the wrist and
+braced it up with a twig.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Excellent! You should have been a surgeon.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is a question of hydraulics, you see, and came within my own
+province.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“This has been done,” said I, examining the wound, “by a very
+heavy and sharp instrument.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A thing like a cleaver,” said he.
+
+
+
+ 
+“An accident, I presume?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“By no means.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What! a murderous attack?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very murderous indeed.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You horrify me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I sponged the wound, cleaned it, dressed it, and finally covered it over with
+cotton wadding and carbolised bandages. He lay back without wincing, though he
+bit his lip from time to time.
+
+
+
+ 
+“How is that?” I asked when I had finished.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Capital! Between your brandy and your bandage, I feel a new man. I was
+very weak, but I have had a good deal to go through.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Perhaps you had better not speak of the matter. It is evidently trying
+to your nerves.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, no, not now. I shall have to tell my tale to the police; but,
+between ourselves, if it were not for the convincing evidence of this wound of
+mine, I should be surprised if they believed my statement, for it is a very
+extraordinary one, and I have not much in the way of proof with which to back
+it up; and, even if they believe me, the clues which I can give them are so
+vague that it is a question whether justice will be done.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ha!” cried I, “if it is anything in the nature of a problem
+which you desire to see solved, I should strongly recommend you to come to my
+friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, before you go to the official police.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, I have heard of that fellow,” answered my visitor, “and
+I should be very glad if he would take the matter up, though of course I must
+use the official police as well. Would you give me an introduction to
+him?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’ll do better. I’ll take you round to him myself.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I should be immensely obliged to you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We’ll call a cab and go together. We shall just be in time to have
+a little breakfast with him. Do you feel equal to it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes; I shall not feel easy until I have told my story.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then my servant will call a cab, and I shall be with you in an
+instant.” I rushed upstairs, explained the matter shortly to my wife, and
+in five minutes was inside a hansom, driving with my new acquaintance to Baker
+Street.
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes was, as I expected, lounging about his sitting-room in his
+dressing-gown, reading the agony column of The Times and smoking his
+before-breakfast pipe, which was composed of all the plugs and dottles left
+from his smokes of the day before, all carefully dried and collected on the
+corner of the mantelpiece. He received us in his quietly genial fashion,
+ordered fresh rashers and eggs, and joined us in a hearty meal. When it was
+concluded he settled our new acquaintance upon the sofa, placed a pillow
+beneath his head, and laid a glass of brandy and water within his reach.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is easy to see that your experience has been no common one, Mr.
+Hatherley,” said he. “Pray, lie down there and make yourself
+absolutely at home. Tell us what you can, but stop when you are tired and keep
+up your strength with a little stimulant.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you,” said my patient, “but I have felt another man
+since the doctor bandaged me, and I think that your breakfast has completed the
+cure. I shall take up as little of your valuable time as possible, so I shall
+start at once upon my peculiar experiences.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes sat in his big armchair with the weary, heavy-lidded expression which
+veiled his keen and eager nature, while I sat opposite to him, and we listened
+in silence to the strange story which our visitor detailed to us.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You must know,” said he, “that I am an orphan and a
+bachelor, residing alone in lodgings in London. By profession I am a hydraulic
+engineer, and I have had considerable experience of my work during the seven
+years that I was apprenticed to Venner & Matheson, the well-known firm, of
+Greenwich. Two years ago, having served my time, and having also come into a
+fair sum of money through my poor father’s death, I determined to start
+in business for myself and took professional chambers in Victoria Street.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I suppose that everyone finds his first independent start in business a
+dreary experience. To me it has been exceptionally so. During two years I have
+had three consultations and one small job, and that is absolutely all that my
+profession has brought me. My gross takings amount to £ 27 10 s . Every
+day, from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, I waited in my
+little den, until at last my heart began to sink, and I came to believe that I
+should never have any practice at all.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yesterday, however, just as I was thinking of leaving the office, my
+clerk entered to say there was a gentleman waiting who wished to see me upon
+business. He brought up a card, too, with the name of ‘Colonel Lysander
+Stark’ engraved upon it. Close at his heels came the colonel himself, a
+man rather over the middle size, but of an exceeding thinness. I do not think
+that I have ever seen so thin a man. His whole face sharpened away into nose
+and chin, and the skin of his cheeks was drawn quite tense over his outstanding
+bones. Yet this emaciation seemed to be his natural habit, and due to no
+disease, for his eye was bright, his step brisk, and his bearing assured. He
+was plainly but neatly dressed, and his age, I should judge, would be nearer
+forty than thirty.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Mr. Hatherley?’ said he, with something of a German
+accent. ‘You have been recommended to me, Mr. Hatherley, as being a man
+who is not only proficient in his profession but is also discreet and capable
+of preserving a secret.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“I bowed, feeling as flattered as any young man would at such an address.
+‘May I ask who it was who gave me so good a character?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Well, perhaps it is better that I should not tell you that
+just at this moment. I have it from the same source that you are both an orphan
+and a bachelor and are residing alone in London.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘That is quite correct,’ I answered; ‘but you
+will excuse me if I say that I cannot see how all this bears upon my
+professional qualifications. I understand that it was on a professional matter
+that you wished to speak to me?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Undoubtedly so. But you will find that all I say is really
+to the point. I have a professional commission for you, but absolute secrecy is
+quite essential—absolute secrecy, you understand, and of course we may
+expect that more from a man who is alone than from one who lives in the bosom
+of his family.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘If I promise to keep a secret,’ said I, ‘you
+may absolutely depend upon my doing so.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“He looked very hard at me as I spoke, and it seemed to me that I had
+never seen so suspicious and questioning an eye.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Do you promise, then?’ said he at last.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Yes, I promise.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Absolute and complete silence before, during, and after? No
+reference to the matter at all, either in word or writing?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I have already given you my word.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Very good.’ He suddenly sprang up, and darting like
+lightning across the room he flung open the door. The passage outside was
+empty.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘That’s all right,’ said he, coming back.
+‘I know that clerks are sometimes curious as to their master’s
+affairs. Now we can talk in safety.’ He drew up his chair very close to
+mine and began to stare at me again with the same questioning and thoughtful
+look.
+
+
+
+ 
+“A feeling of repulsion, and of something akin to fear had begun to rise
+within me at the strange antics of this fleshless man. Even my dread of losing
+a client could not restrain me from showing my impatience.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I beg that you will state your business, sir,’ said
+I; ‘my time is of value.’ Heaven forgive me for that last sentence,
+but the words came to my lips.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘How would fifty guineas for a night’s work suit
+you?’ he asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Most admirably.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I say a night’s work, but an hour’s would be
+nearer the mark. I simply want your opinion about a hydraulic stamping machine
+which has got out of gear. If you show us what is wrong we shall soon set it
+right ourselves. What do you think of such a commission as that?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘The work appears to be light and the pay munificent.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Precisely so. We shall want you to come to-night by the
+last train.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Where to?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘To Eyford, in Berkshire. It is a little place near the
+borders of Oxfordshire, and within seven miles of Reading. There is a train
+from Paddington which would bring you there at about 11:15.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Very good.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I shall come down in a carriage to meet you.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘There is a drive, then?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Yes, our little place is quite out in the country. It is a
+good seven miles from Eyford Station.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Then we can hardly get there before midnight. I suppose
+there would be no chance of a train back. I should be compelled to stop the
+night.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Yes, we could easily give you a shake-down.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘That is very awkward. Could I not come at some more
+convenient hour?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘We have judged it best that you should come late. It is to
+recompense you for any inconvenience that we are paying to you, a young and
+unknown man, a fee which would buy an opinion from the very heads of your
+profession. Still, of course, if you would like to draw out of the business,
+there is plenty of time to do so.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“I thought of the fifty guineas, and of how very useful they would be to
+me. ‘Not at all,’ said I, ‘I shall be very happy to
+accommodate myself to your wishes. I should like, however, to understand a
+little more clearly what it is that you wish me to do.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Quite so. It is very natural that the pledge of secrecy
+which we have exacted from you should have aroused your curiosity. I have no
+wish to commit you to anything without your having it all laid before you. I
+suppose that we are absolutely safe from eavesdroppers?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Entirely.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Then the matter stands thus. You are probably aware that
+fuller’s-earth is a valuable product, and that it is only found in one or
+two places in England?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I have heard so.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Some little time ago I bought a small place—a very
+small place—within ten miles of Reading. I was fortunate enough to
+discover that there was a deposit of fuller’s-earth in one of my fields.
+On examining it, however, I found that this deposit was a comparatively small
+one, and that it formed a link between two very much larger ones upon the right
+and left—both of them, however, in the grounds of my neighbours. These
+good people were absolutely ignorant that their land contained that which was
+quite as valuable as a gold-mine. Naturally, it was to my interest to buy their
+land before they discovered its true value, but unfortunately I had no capital
+by which I could do this. I took a few of my friends into the secret, however,
+and they suggested that we should quietly and secretly work our own little
+deposit and that in this way we should earn the money which would enable us to
+buy the neighbouring fields. This we have now been doing for some time, and in
+order to help us in our operations we erected a hydraulic press. This press, as
+I have already explained, has got out of order, and we wish your advice upon
+the subject. We guard our secret very jealously, however, and if it once became
+known that we had hydraulic engineers coming to our little house, it would soon
+rouse inquiry, and then, if the facts came out, it would be good-bye to any
+chance of getting these fields and carrying out our plans. That is why I have
+made you promise me that you will not tell a human being that you are going to
+Eyford to-night. I hope that I make it all plain?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I quite follow you,’ said I. ‘The only point
+which I could not quite understand was what use you could make of a hydraulic
+press in excavating fuller’s-earth, which, as I understand, is dug out
+like gravel from a pit.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Ah!’ said he carelessly, ‘we have our own
+process. We compress the earth into bricks, so as to remove them without
+revealing what they are. But that is a mere detail. I have taken you fully into
+my confidence now, Mr. Hatherley, and I have shown you how I trust you.’
+He rose as he spoke. ‘I shall expect you, then, at Eyford at
+11:15.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I shall certainly be there.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘And not a word to a soul.’ He looked at me with a
+last long, questioning gaze, and then, pressing my hand in a cold, dank grasp,
+he hurried from the room.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, when I came to think it all over in cool blood I was very much
+astonished, as you may both think, at this sudden commission which had been
+intrusted to me. On the one hand, of course, I was glad, for the fee was at
+least tenfold what I should have asked had I set a price upon my own services,
+and it was possible that this order might lead to other ones. On the other
+hand, the face and manner of my patron had made an unpleasant impression upon
+me, and I could not think that his explanation of the fuller’s-earth was
+sufficient to explain the necessity for my coming at midnight, and his extreme
+anxiety lest I should tell anyone of my errand. However, I threw all fears to
+the winds, ate a hearty supper, drove to Paddington, and started off, having
+obeyed to the letter the injunction as to holding my tongue.
+
+
+
+ 
+“At Reading I had to change not only my carriage but my station. However,
+I was in time for the last train to Eyford, and I reached the little dim-lit
+station after eleven o’clock. I was the only passenger who got out there,
+and there was no one upon the platform save a single sleepy porter with a
+lantern. As I passed out through the wicket gate, however, I found my
+acquaintance of the morning waiting in the shadow upon the other side. Without
+a word he grasped my arm and hurried me into a carriage, the door of which was
+standing open. He drew up the windows on either side, tapped on the wood-work,
+and away we went as fast as the horse could go.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“One horse?” interjected Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, only one.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Did you observe the colour?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, I saw it by the side-lights when I was stepping into the carriage.
+It was a chestnut.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Tired-looking or fresh?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, fresh and glossy.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you. I am sorry to have interrupted you. Pray continue your most
+interesting statement.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Away we went then, and we drove for at least an hour. Colonel Lysander
+Stark had said that it was only seven miles, but I should think, from the rate
+that we seemed to go, and from the time that we took, that it must have been
+nearer twelve. He sat at my side in silence all the time, and I was aware, more
+than once when I glanced in his direction, that he was looking at me with great
+intensity. The country roads seem to be not very good in that part of the
+world, for we lurched and jolted terribly. I tried to look out of the windows
+to see something of where we were, but they were made of frosted glass, and I
+could make out nothing save the occasional bright blur of a passing light. Now
+and then I hazarded some remark to break the monotony of the journey, but the
+colonel answered only in monosyllables, and the conversation soon flagged. At
+last, however, the bumping of the road was exchanged for the crisp smoothness
+of a gravel-drive, and the carriage came to a stand. Colonel Lysander Stark
+sprang out, and, as I followed after him, pulled me swiftly into a porch which
+gaped in front of us. We stepped, as it were, right out of the carriage and
+into the hall, so that I failed to catch the most fleeting glance of the front
+of the house. The instant that I had crossed the threshold the door slammed
+heavily behind us, and I heard faintly the rattle of the wheels as the carriage
+drove away.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was pitch dark inside the house, and the colonel fumbled about
+looking for matches and muttering under his breath. Suddenly a door opened at
+the other end of the passage, and a long, golden bar of light shot out in our
+direction. It grew broader, and a woman appeared with a lamp in her hand, which
+she held above her head, pushing her face forward and peering at us. I could
+see that she was pretty, and from the gloss with which the light shone upon her
+dark dress I knew that it was a rich material. She spoke a few words in a
+foreign tongue in a tone as though asking a question, and when my companion
+answered in a gruff monosyllable she gave such a start that the lamp nearly
+fell from her hand. Colonel Stark went up to her, whispered something in her
+ear, and then, pushing her back into the room from whence she had come, he
+walked towards me again with the lamp in his hand.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Perhaps you will have the kindness to wait in this room for
+a few minutes,’ said he, throwing open another door. It was a quiet,
+little, plainly furnished room, with a round table in the centre, on which
+several German books were scattered. Colonel Stark laid down the lamp on the
+top of a harmonium beside the door. ‘I shall not keep you waiting an
+instant,’ said he, and vanished into the darkness.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I glanced at the books upon the table, and in spite of my ignorance of
+German I could see that two of them were treatises on science, the others being
+volumes of poetry. Then I walked across to the window, hoping that I might
+catch some glimpse of the country-side, but an oak shutter, heavily barred, was
+folded across it. It was a wonderfully silent house. There was an old clock
+ticking loudly somewhere in the passage, but otherwise everything was deadly
+still. A vague feeling of uneasiness began to steal over me. Who were these
+German people, and what were they doing living in this strange, out-of-the-way
+place? And where was the place? I was ten miles or so from Eyford, that was all
+I knew, but whether north, south, east, or west I had no idea. For that matter,
+Reading, and possibly other large towns, were within that radius, so the place
+might not be so secluded, after all. Yet it was quite certain, from the
+absolute stillness, that we were in the country. I paced up and down the room,
+humming a tune under my breath to keep up my spirits and feeling that I was
+thoroughly earning my fifty-guinea fee.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Suddenly, without any preliminary sound in the midst of the utter
+stillness, the door of my room swung slowly open. The woman was standing in the
+aperture, the darkness of the hall behind her, the yellow light from my lamp
+beating upon her eager and beautiful face. I could see at a glance that she was
+sick with fear, and the sight sent a chill to my own heart. She held up one
+shaking finger to warn me to be silent, and she shot a few whispered words of
+broken English at me, her eyes glancing back, like those of a frightened horse,
+into the gloom behind her.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I would go,’ said she, trying hard, as it seemed to
+me, to speak calmly; ‘I would go. I should not stay here. There is no
+good for you to do.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘But, madam,’ said I, ‘I have not yet done what
+I came for. I cannot possibly leave until I have seen the machine.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘It is not worth your while to wait,’ she went on.
+‘You can pass through the door; no one hinders.’ And then, seeing
+that I smiled and shook my head, she suddenly threw aside her constraint and
+made a step forward, with her hands wrung together. ‘For the love of
+Heaven!’ she whispered, ‘get away from here before it is too
+late!’
+
+
+
+ 
+“But I am somewhat headstrong by nature, and the more ready to engage in
+an affair when there is some obstacle in the way. I thought of my fifty-guinea
+fee, of my wearisome journey, and of the unpleasant night which seemed to be
+before me. Was it all to go for nothing? Why should I slink away without having
+carried out my commission, and without the payment which was my due? This woman
+might, for all I knew, be a monomaniac. With a stout bearing, therefore, though
+her manner had shaken me more than I cared to confess, I still shook my head
+and declared my intention of remaining where I was. She was about to renew her
+entreaties when a door slammed overhead, and the sound of several footsteps was
+heard upon the stairs. She listened for an instant, threw up her hands with a
+despairing gesture, and vanished as suddenly and as noiselessly as she had
+come.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The newcomers were Colonel Lysander Stark and a short thick man with a
+chinchilla beard growing out of the creases of his double chin, who was
+introduced to me as Mr. Ferguson.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘This is my secretary and manager,’ said the colonel.
+‘By the way, I was under the impression that I left this door shut just
+now. I fear that you have felt the draught.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘On the contrary,’ said I, ‘I opened the door
+myself because I felt the room to be a little close.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“He shot one of his suspicious looks at me. ‘Perhaps we had better
+proceed to business, then,’ said he. ‘Mr. Ferguson and I will take
+you up to see the machine.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I had better put my hat on, I suppose.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Oh, no, it is in the house.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘What, you dig fuller’s-earth in the house?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘No, no. This is only where we compress it. But never mind
+that. All we wish you to do is to examine the machine and to let us know what
+is wrong with it.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“We went upstairs together, the colonel first with the lamp, the fat
+manager and I behind him. It was a labyrinth of an old house, with corridors,
+passages, narrow winding staircases, and little low doors, the thresholds of
+which were hollowed out by the generations who had crossed them. There were no
+carpets and no signs of any furniture above the ground floor, while the plaster
+was peeling off the walls, and the damp was breaking through in green,
+unhealthy blotches. I tried to put on as unconcerned an air as possible, but I
+had not forgotten the warnings of the lady, even though I disregarded them, and
+I kept a keen eye upon my two companions. Ferguson appeared to be a morose and
+silent man, but I could see from the little that he said that he was at least a
+fellow-countryman.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Colonel Lysander Stark stopped at last before a low door, which he
+unlocked. Within was a small, square room, in which the three of us could
+hardly get at one time. Ferguson remained outside, and the colonel ushered me
+in.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘We are now,’ said he, ‘actually within the
+hydraulic press, and it would be a particularly unpleasant thing for us if
+anyone were to turn it on. The ceiling of this small chamber is really the end
+of the descending piston, and it comes down with the force of many tons upon
+this metal floor. There are small lateral columns of water outside which
+receive the force, and which transmit and multiply it in the manner which is
+familiar to you. The machine goes readily enough, but there is some stiffness
+in the working of it, and it has lost a little of its force. Perhaps you will
+have the goodness to look it over and to show us how we can set it
+right.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“I took the lamp from him, and I examined the machine very thoroughly. It
+was indeed a gigantic one, and capable of exercising enormous pressure. When I
+passed outside, however, and pressed down the levers which controlled it, I
+knew at once by the whishing sound that there was a slight leakage, which
+allowed a regurgitation of water through one of the side cylinders. An
+examination showed that one of the india-rubber bands which was round the head
+of a driving-rod had shrunk so as not quite to fill the socket along which it
+worked. This was clearly the cause of the loss of power, and I pointed it out
+to my companions, who followed my remarks very carefully and asked several
+practical questions as to how they should proceed to set it right. When I had
+made it clear to them, I returned to the main chamber of the machine and took a
+good look at it to satisfy my own curiosity. It was obvious at a glance that
+the story of the fuller’s-earth was the merest fabrication, for it would
+be absurd to suppose that so powerful an engine could be designed for so
+inadequate a purpose. The walls were of wood, but the floor consisted of a
+large iron trough, and when I came to examine it I could see a crust of
+metallic deposit all over it. I had stooped and was scraping at this to see
+exactly what it was when I heard a muttered exclamation in German and saw the
+cadaverous face of the colonel looking down at me.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘What are you doing there?’ he asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I felt angry at having been tricked by so elaborate a story as that
+which he had told me. ‘I was admiring your fuller’s-earth,’
+said I; ‘I think that I should be better able to advise you as to your
+machine if I knew what the exact purpose was for which it was used.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“The instant that I uttered the words I regretted the rashness of my
+speech. His face set hard, and a baleful light sprang up in his grey eyes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Very well,’ said he, ‘you shall know all about
+the machine.’ He took a step backward, slammed the little door, and
+turned the key in the lock. I rushed towards it and pulled at the handle, but
+it was quite secure, and did not give in the least to my kicks and shoves.
+‘Hullo!’ I yelled. ‘Hullo! Colonel! Let me out!’
+
+
+
+ 
+“And then suddenly in the silence I heard a sound which sent my heart
+into my mouth. It was the clank of the levers and the swish of the leaking
+cylinder. He had set the engine at work. The lamp still stood upon the floor
+where I had placed it when examining the trough. By its light I saw that the
+black ceiling was coming down upon me, slowly, jerkily, but, as none knew
+better than myself, with a force which must within a minute grind me to a
+shapeless pulp. I threw myself, screaming, against the door, and dragged with
+my nails at the lock. I implored the colonel to let me out, but the remorseless
+clanking of the levers drowned my cries. The ceiling was only a foot or two
+above my head, and with my hand upraised I could feel its hard, rough surface.
+Then it flashed through my mind that the pain of my death would depend very
+much upon the position in which I met it. If I lay on my face the weight would
+come upon my spine, and I shuddered to think of that dreadful snap. Easier the
+other way, perhaps; and yet, had I the nerve to lie and look up at that deadly
+black shadow wavering down upon me? Already I was unable to stand erect, when
+my eye caught something which brought a gush of hope back to my heart.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have said that though the floor and ceiling were of iron, the walls
+were of wood. As I gave a last hurried glance around, I saw a thin line of
+yellow light between two of the boards, which broadened and broadened as a
+small panel was pushed backward. For an instant I could hardly believe that
+here was indeed a door which led away from death. The next instant I threw
+myself through, and lay half-fainting upon the other side. The panel had closed
+again behind me, but the crash of the lamp, and a few moments afterwards the
+clang of the two slabs of metal, told me how narrow had been my escape.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was recalled to myself by a frantic plucking at my wrist, and I found
+myself lying upon the stone floor of a narrow corridor, while a woman bent over
+me and tugged at me with her left hand, while she held a candle in her right.
+It was the same good friend whose warning I had so foolishly rejected.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Come! come!’ she cried breathlessly. ‘They will
+be here in a moment. They will see that you are not there. Oh, do not waste the
+so-precious time, but come!’
+
+
+
+ 
+“This time, at least, I did not scorn her advice. I staggered to my feet
+and ran with her along the corridor and down a winding stair. The latter led to
+another broad passage, and just as we reached it we heard the sound of running
+feet and the shouting of two voices, one answering the other from the floor on
+which we were and from the one beneath. My guide stopped and looked about her
+like one who is at her wit’s end. Then she threw open a door which led
+into a bedroom, through the window of which the moon was shining brightly.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘It is your only chance,’ said she. ‘It is high,
+but it may be that you can jump it.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“As she spoke a light sprang into view at the further end of the passage,
+and I saw the lean figure of Colonel Lysander Stark rushing forward with a
+lantern in one hand and a weapon like a butcher’s cleaver in the other. I
+rushed across the bedroom, flung open the window, and looked out. How quiet and
+sweet and wholesome the garden looked in the moonlight, and it could not be
+more than thirty feet down. I clambered out upon the sill, but I hesitated to
+jump until I should have heard what passed between my saviour and the ruffian
+who pursued me. If she were ill-used, then at any risks I was determined to go
+back to her assistance. The thought had hardly flashed through my mind before
+he was at the door, pushing his way past her; but she threw her arms round him
+and tried to hold him back.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Fritz! Fritz!’ she cried in English, ‘remember
+your promise after the last time. You said it should not be again. He will be
+silent! Oh, he will be silent!’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘You are mad, Elise!’ he shouted, struggling to break
+away from her. ‘You will be the ruin of us. He has seen too much. Let me
+pass, I say!’ He dashed her to one side, and, rushing to the window, cut
+at me with his heavy weapon. I had let myself go, and was hanging by the hands
+to the sill, when his blow fell. I was conscious of a dull pain, my grip
+loosened, and I fell into the garden below.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was shaken but not hurt by the fall; so I picked myself up and rushed
+off among the bushes as hard as I could run, for I understood that I was far
+from being out of danger yet. Suddenly, however, as I ran, a deadly dizziness
+and sickness came over me. I glanced down at my hand, which was throbbing
+painfully, and then, for the first time, saw that my thumb had been cut off and
+that the blood was pouring from my wound. I endeavoured to tie my handkerchief
+round it, but there came a sudden buzzing in my ears, and next moment I fell in
+a dead faint among the rose-bushes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“How long I remained unconscious I cannot tell. It must have been a very
+long time, for the moon had sunk, and a bright morning was breaking when I came
+to myself. My clothes were all sodden with dew, and my coat-sleeve was drenched
+with blood from my wounded thumb. The smarting of it recalled in an instant all
+the particulars of my night’s adventure, and I sprang to my feet with the
+feeling that I might hardly yet be safe from my pursuers. But to my
+astonishment, when I came to look round me, neither house nor garden were to be
+seen. I had been lying in an angle of the hedge close by the high road, and just
+a little lower down was a long building, which proved, upon my approaching it,
+to be the very station at which I had arrived upon the previous night. Were it
+not for the ugly wound upon my hand, all that had passed during those dreadful
+hours might have been an evil dream.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Half dazed, I went into the station and asked about the morning train.
+There would be one to Reading in less than an hour. The same porter was on
+duty, I found, as had been there when I arrived. I inquired of him whether he
+had ever heard of Colonel Lysander Stark. The name was strange to him. Had he
+observed a carriage the night before waiting for me? No, he had not. Was there
+a police-station anywhere near? There was one about three miles off.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was too far for me to go, weak and ill as I was. I determined to wait
+until I got back to town before telling my story to the police. It was a little
+past six when I arrived, so I went first to have my wound dressed, and then the
+doctor was kind enough to bring me along here. I put the case into your hands
+and shall do exactly what you advise.”
+
+
+
+ 
+We both sat in silence for some little time after listening to this
+extraordinary narrative. Then Sherlock Holmes pulled down from the shelf one of
+the ponderous commonplace books in which he placed his cuttings.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Here is an advertisement which will interest you,” said he.
+“It appeared in all the papers about a year ago. Listen to this:
+‘Lost, on the 9th inst., Mr. Jeremiah Hayling, aged twenty-six, a
+hydraulic engineer. Left his lodgings at ten o’clock at night, and has
+not been heard of since. Was dressed in,’ etc., etc. Ha! That represents
+the last time that the colonel needed to have his machine overhauled, I
+fancy.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Good heavens!” cried my patient. “Then that explains what
+the girl said.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Undoubtedly. It is quite clear that the colonel was a cool and desperate
+man, who was absolutely determined that nothing should stand in the way of his
+little game, like those out-and-out pirates who will leave no survivor from a
+captured ship. Well, every moment now is precious, so if you feel equal to it
+we shall go down to Scotland Yard at once as a preliminary to starting for
+Eyford.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Some three hours or so afterwards we were all in the train together, bound from
+Reading to the little Berkshire village. There were Sherlock Holmes, the
+hydraulic engineer, Inspector Bradstreet, of Scotland Yard, a plain-clothes
+man, and myself. Bradstreet had spread an ordnance map of the county out upon
+the seat and was busy with his compasses drawing a circle with Eyford for its
+centre.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There you are,” said he. “That circle is drawn at a radius
+of ten miles from the village. The place we want must be somewhere near that
+line. You said ten miles, I think, sir.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was an hour’s good drive.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And you think that they brought you back all that way when you were
+unconscious?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“They must have done so. I have a confused memory, too, of having been
+lifted and conveyed somewhere.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What I cannot understand,” said I, “is why they should have
+spared you when they found you lying fainting in the garden. Perhaps the
+villain was softened by the woman’s entreaties.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I hardly think that likely. I never saw a more inexorable face in my
+life.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, we shall soon clear up all that,” said Bradstreet.
+“Well, I have drawn my circle, and I only wish I knew at what point upon
+it the folk that we are in search of are to be found.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I think I could lay my finger on it,” said Holmes quietly.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Really, now!” cried the inspector, “you have formed your
+opinion! Come, now, we shall see who agrees with you. I say it is south, for
+the country is more deserted there.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And I say east,” said my patient.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am for west,” remarked the plain-clothes man. “There are
+several quiet little villages up there.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And I am for north,” said I, “because there are no hills
+there, and our friend says that he did not notice the carriage go up
+any.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Come,” cried the inspector, laughing; “it’s a very
+pretty diversity of opinion. We have boxed the compass among us. Who do you
+give your casting vote to?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You are all wrong.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But we can’t all be.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, yes, you can. This is my point.” He placed his finger in the
+centre of the circle. “This is where we shall find them.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But the twelve-mile drive?” gasped Hatherley.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Six out and six back. Nothing simpler. You say yourself that the horse
+was fresh and glossy when you got in. How could it be that if it had gone
+twelve miles over heavy roads?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Indeed, it is a likely ruse enough,” observed Bradstreet
+thoughtfully. “Of course there can be no doubt as to the nature of this
+gang.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“None at all,” said Holmes. “They are coiners on a large
+scale, and have used the machine to form the amalgam which has taken the place
+of silver.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We have known for some time that a clever gang was at work,” said
+the inspector. “They have been turning out half-crowns by the thousand.
+We even traced them as far as Reading, but could get no farther, for they had
+covered their traces in a way that showed that they were very old hands. But
+now, thanks to this lucky chance, I think that we have got them right
+enough.”
+
+
+
+ 
+But the inspector was mistaken, for those criminals were not destined to fall
+into the hands of justice. As we rolled into Eyford Station we saw a gigantic
+column of smoke which streamed up from behind a small clump of trees in the
+neighbourhood and hung like an immense ostrich feather over the landscape.
+
+
+
+ 
+“A house on fire?” asked Bradstreet as the train steamed off again
+on its way.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, sir!” said the station-master.
+
+
+
+ 
+“When did it break out?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I hear that it was during the night, sir, but it has got worse, and the
+whole place is in a blaze.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Whose house is it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Dr. Becher’s.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Tell me,” broke in the engineer, “is Dr. Becher a German,
+very thin, with a long, sharp nose?”
+
+
+
+ 
+The station-master laughed heartily. “No, sir, Dr. Becher is an
+Englishman, and there isn’t a man in the parish who has a better-lined
+waistcoat. But he has a gentleman staying with him, a patient, as I understand,
+who is a foreigner, and he looks as if a little good Berkshire beef would do
+him no harm.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The station-master had not finished his speech before we were all hastening in
+the direction of the fire. The road topped a low hill, and there was a great
+widespread whitewashed building in front of us, spouting fire at every chink
+and window, while in the garden in front three fire-engines were vainly
+striving to keep the flames under.
+
+
+
+ 
+“That’s it!” cried Hatherley, in intense excitement.
+“There is the gravel-drive, and there are the rose-bushes where I lay.
+That second window is the one that I jumped from.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, at least,” said Holmes, “you have had your revenge
+upon them. There can be no question that it was your oil-lamp which, when it
+was crushed in the press, set fire to the wooden walls, though no doubt they
+were too excited in the chase after you to observe it at the time. Now keep
+your eyes open in this crowd for your friends of last night, though I very much
+fear that they are a good hundred miles off by now.”
+
+
+
+ 
+And Holmes’ fears came to be realised, for from that day to this no word
+has ever been heard either of the beautiful woman, the sinister German, or the
+morose Englishman. Early that morning a peasant had met a cart containing
+several people and some very bulky boxes driving rapidly in the direction of
+Reading, but there all traces of the fugitives disappeared, and even
+Holmes’ ingenuity failed ever to discover the least clue as to their
+whereabouts.
+
+
+
+ 
+The firemen had been much perturbed at the strange arrangements which they had
+found within, and still more so by discovering a newly severed human thumb upon
+a window-sill of the second floor. About sunset, however, their efforts were at
+last successful, and they subdued the flames, but not before the roof had
+fallen in, and the whole place been reduced to such absolute ruin that, save
+some twisted cylinders and iron piping, not a trace remained of the machinery
+which had cost our unfortunate acquaintance so dearly. Large masses of nickel
+and of tin were discovered stored in an out-house, but no coins were to be
+found, which may have explained the presence of those bulky boxes which have
+been already referred to.
+
+
+
+ 
+How our hydraulic engineer had been conveyed from the garden to the spot where
+he recovered his senses might have remained forever a mystery were it not for
+the soft mould, which told us a very plain tale. He had evidently been carried
+down by two persons, one of whom had remarkably small feet and the other
+unusually large ones. On the whole, it was most probable that the silent
+Englishman, being less bold or less murderous than his companion, had assisted
+the woman to bear the unconscious man out of the way of danger.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well,” said our engineer ruefully as we took our seats to return
+once more to London, “it has been a pretty business for me! I have lost
+my thumb and I have lost a fifty-guinea fee, and what have I gained?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Experience,” said Holmes, laughing. “Indirectly it may be of
+value, you know; you have only to put it into words to gain the reputation of
+being excellent company for the remainder of your existence.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ X.
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE NOBLE BACHELOR 
+ 
+ T he Lord St. Simon
+marriage, and its curious termination, have long ceased to be a subject of
+interest in those exalted circles in which the unfortunate bridegroom moves.
+Fresh scandals have eclipsed it, and their more piquant details have drawn the
+gossips away from this four-year-old drama. As I have reason to believe,
+however, that the full facts have never been revealed to the general public,
+and as my friend Sherlock Holmes had a considerable share in clearing the
+matter up, I feel that no memoir of him would be complete without some little
+sketch of this remarkable episode.
+
+
+
+ 
+It was a few weeks before my own marriage, during the days when I was still
+sharing rooms with Holmes in Baker Street, that he came home from an afternoon
+stroll to find a letter on the table waiting for him. I had remained indoors
+all day, for the weather had taken a sudden turn to rain, with high autumnal
+winds, and the jezail bullet which I had brought back in one of my limbs as a
+relic of my Afghan campaign throbbed with dull persistence. With my body in one
+easy-chair and my legs upon another, I had surrounded myself with a cloud of
+newspapers until at last, saturated with the news of the day, I tossed them all
+aside and lay listless, watching the huge crest and monogram upon the envelope
+upon the table and wondering lazily who my friend’s noble correspondent
+could be.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Here is a very fashionable epistle,” I remarked as he entered.
+“Your morning letters, if I remember right, were from a fish-monger and a
+tide-waiter.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, my correspondence has certainly the charm of variety,” he
+answered, smiling, “and the humbler are usually the more interesting.
+This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man
+either to be bored or to lie.”
+
+
+
+ 
+He broke the seal and glanced over the contents.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, come, it may prove to be something of interest, after all.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not social, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, distinctly professional.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And from a noble client?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“One of the highest in England.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear fellow, I congratulate you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I assure you, Watson, without affectation, that the status of my client
+is a matter of less moment to me than the interest of his case. It is just
+possible, however, that that also may not be wanting in this new investigation.
+You have been reading the papers diligently of late, have you not?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It looks like it,” said I ruefully, pointing to a huge bundle in
+the corner. “I have had nothing else to do.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is fortunate, for you will perhaps be able to post me up. I read
+nothing except the criminal news and the agony column. The latter is always
+instructive. But if you have followed recent events so closely you must have
+read about Lord St. Simon and his wedding?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, yes, with the deepest interest.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is well. The letter which I hold in my hand is from Lord St. Simon.
+I will read it to you, and in return you must turn over these papers and let me
+have whatever bears upon the matter. This is what he says:
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘MY DEAR MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES,—Lord Backwater tells me
+that I may place implicit reliance upon your judgment and discretion. I have
+determined, therefore, to call upon you and to consult you in reference to the
+very painful event which has occurred in connection with my wedding. Mr.
+Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, is acting already in the matter, but he assures me
+that he sees no objection to your co-operation, and that he even thinks that it
+might be of some assistance. I will call at four o’clock in the
+afternoon, and, should you have any other engagement at that time, I hope that
+you will postpone it, as this matter is of paramount importance. Yours
+faithfully,
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘ROBERT ST. SIMON.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is dated from Grosvenor Mansions, written with a quill pen, and the
+noble lord has had the misfortune to get a smear of ink upon the outer side of
+his right little finger,” remarked Holmes as he folded up the epistle.
+
+
+
+ 
+“He says four o’clock. It is three now. He will be here in an
+hour.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then I have just time, with your assistance, to get clear upon the
+subject. Turn over those papers and arrange the extracts in their order of
+time, while I take a glance as to who our client is.” He picked a
+red-covered volume from a line of books of reference beside the mantelpiece.
+“Here he is,” said he, sitting down and flattening it out upon his
+knee. “‘Lord Robert Walsingham de Vere St. Simon, second son
+of the Duke of Balmoral.’ Hum! ‘Arms: Azure, three caltrops in
+chief over a fess sable. Born in 1846.’ He’s forty-one years of
+age, which is mature for marriage. Was Under-Secretary for the colonies in a
+late administration. The Duke, his father, was at one time Secretary for
+Foreign Affairs. They inherit Plantagenet blood by direct descent, and Tudor on
+the distaff side. Ha! Well, there is nothing very instructive in all this. I
+think that I must turn to you Watson, for something more solid.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have very little difficulty in finding what I want,” said I,
+“for the facts are quite recent, and the matter struck me as remarkable.
+I feared to refer them to you, however, as I knew that you had an inquiry on
+hand and that you disliked the intrusion of other matters.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, you mean the little problem of the Grosvenor Square furniture van.
+That is quite cleared up now—though, indeed, it was obvious from the
+first. Pray give me the results of your newspaper selections.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Here is the first notice which I can find. It is in the personal column
+of the Morning Post , and dates, as you see, some weeks back: ‘A
+marriage has been arranged,’ it says, ‘and will, if rumour is
+correct, very shortly take place, between Lord Robert St. Simon, second son of
+the Duke of Balmoral, and Miss Hatty Doran, the only daughter of Aloysius
+Doran. Esq., of San Francisco, Cal., U.S.A.’ That is all.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Terse and to the point,” remarked Holmes, stretching his long,
+thin legs towards the fire.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There was a paragraph amplifying this in one of the society papers of
+the same week. Ah, here it is: ‘There will soon be a call for protection
+in the marriage market, for the present free-trade principle appears to tell
+heavily against our home product. One by one the management of the noble houses
+of Great Britain is passing into the hands of our fair cousins from across the
+Atlantic. An important addition has been made during the last week to the list
+of the prizes which have been borne away by these charming invaders. Lord St.
+Simon, who has shown himself for over twenty years proof against the little
+god’s arrows, has now definitely announced his approaching marriage with
+Miss Hatty Doran, the fascinating daughter of a California millionaire. Miss
+Doran, whose graceful figure and striking face attracted much attention at the
+Westbury House festivities, is an only child, and it is currently reported that
+her dowry will run to considerably over the six figures, with expectancies for
+the future. As it is an open secret that the Duke of Balmoral has been
+compelled to sell his pictures within the last few years, and as Lord St. Simon
+has no property of his own save the small estate of Birchmoor, it is obvious
+that the Californian heiress is not the only gainer by an alliance which will
+enable her to make the easy and common transition from a Republican lady to a
+British peeress.’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Anything else?” asked Holmes, yawning.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, yes; plenty. Then there is another note in the Morning Post 
+to say that the marriage would be an absolutely quiet one, that it would be at
+St. George’s, Hanover Square, that only half a dozen intimate friends
+would be invited, and that the party would return to the furnished house at
+Lancaster Gate which has been taken by Mr. Aloysius Doran. Two days
+later—that is, on Wednesday last—there is a curt announcement that
+the wedding had taken place, and that the honeymoon would be passed at Lord
+Backwater’s place, near Petersfield. Those are all the notices which
+appeared before the disappearance of the bride.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Before the what?” asked Holmes with a start.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The vanishing of the lady.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“When did she vanish, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“At the wedding breakfast.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Indeed. This is more interesting than it promised to be; quite dramatic,
+in fact.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes; it struck me as being a little out of the common.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“They often vanish before the ceremony, and occasionally during the
+honeymoon; but I cannot call to mind anything quite so prompt as this. Pray let
+me have the details.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I warn you that they are very incomplete.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Perhaps we may make them less so.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Such as they are, they are set forth in a single article of a morning
+paper of yesterday, which I will read to you. It is headed, ‘Singular
+Occurrence at a Fashionable Wedding’:
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘The family of Lord Robert St. Simon has been thrown into
+the greatest consternation by the strange and painful episodes which have taken
+place in connection with his wedding. The ceremony, as shortly announced in the
+papers of yesterday, occurred on the previous morning; but it is only now that
+it has been possible to confirm the strange rumours which have been so
+persistently floating about. In spite of the attempts of the friends to hush
+the matter up, so much public attention has now been drawn to it that no good
+purpose can be served by affecting to disregard what is a common subject for
+conversation.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘The ceremony, which was performed at St. George’s,
+Hanover Square, was a very quiet one, no one being present save the father of
+the bride, Mr. Aloysius Doran, the Duchess of Balmoral, Lord Backwater, Lord
+Eustace and Lady Clara St. Simon (the younger brother and sister of the
+bridegroom), and Lady Alicia Whittington. The whole party proceeded afterwards
+to the house of Mr. Aloysius Doran, at Lancaster Gate, where breakfast had been
+prepared. It appears that some little trouble was caused by a woman, whose name
+has not been ascertained, who endeavoured to force her way into the house after
+the bridal party, alleging that she had some claim upon Lord St. Simon. It was
+only after a painful and prolonged scene that she was ejected by the butler and
+the footman. The bride, who had fortunately entered the house before this
+unpleasant interruption, had sat down to breakfast with the rest, when she
+complained of a sudden indisposition and retired to her room. Her prolonged
+absence having caused some comment, her father followed her, but learned from
+her maid that she had only come up to her chamber for an instant, caught up an
+ulster and bonnet, and hurried down to the passage. One of the footmen declared
+that he had seen a lady leave the house thus apparelled, but had refused to
+credit that it was his mistress, believing her to be with the company. On
+ascertaining that his daughter had disappeared, Mr. Aloysius Doran, in
+conjunction with the bridegroom, instantly put themselves in communication with
+the police, and very energetic inquiries are being made, which will probably
+result in a speedy clearing up of this very singular business. Up to a late
+hour last night, however, nothing had transpired as to the whereabouts of the
+missing lady. There are rumours of foul play in the matter, and it is said that
+the police have caused the arrest of the woman who had caused the original
+disturbance, in the belief that, from jealousy or some other motive, she may
+have been concerned in the strange disappearance of the
+bride.’”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And is that all?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Only one little item in another of the morning papers, but it is a
+suggestive one.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And it is—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That Miss Flora Millar, the lady who had caused the disturbance, has
+actually been arrested. It appears that she was formerly a danseuse at
+the Allegro, and that she has known the bridegroom for some years. There are no
+further particulars, and the whole case is in your hands now—so far as it
+has been set forth in the public press.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And an exceedingly interesting case it appears to be. I would not have
+missed it for worlds. But there is a ring at the bell, Watson, and as the clock
+makes it a few minutes after four, I have no doubt that this will prove to be
+our noble client. Do not dream of going, Watson, for I very much prefer having
+a witness, if only as a check to my own memory.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Lord Robert St. Simon,” announced our page-boy, throwing open the
+door. A gentleman entered, with a pleasant, cultured face, high-nosed and pale,
+with something perhaps of petulance about the mouth, and with the steady,
+well-opened eye of a man whose pleasant lot it had ever been to command and to
+be obeyed. His manner was brisk, and yet his general appearance gave an undue
+impression of age, for he had a slight forward stoop and a little bend of the
+knees as he walked. His hair, too, as he swept off his very curly-brimmed hat,
+was grizzled round the edges and thin upon the top. As to his dress, it was
+careful to the verge of foppishness, with high collar, black frock-coat, white
+waistcoat, yellow gloves, patent-leather shoes, and light-coloured gaiters. He
+advanced slowly into the room, turning his head from left to right, and
+swinging in his right hand the cord which held his golden eyeglasses.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Good-day, Lord St. Simon,” said Holmes, rising and bowing.
+“Pray take the basket-chair. This is my friend and colleague, Dr. Watson.
+Draw up a little to the fire, and we will talk this matter over.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A most painful matter to me, as you can most readily imagine, Mr.
+Holmes. I have been cut to the quick. I understand that you have already
+managed several delicate cases of this sort, sir, though I presume that they
+were hardly from the same class of society.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, I am descending.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I beg pardon.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My last client of the sort was a king.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, really! I had no idea. And which king?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The King of Scandinavia.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What! Had he lost his wife?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You can understand,” said Holmes suavely, “that I extend to
+the affairs of my other clients the same secrecy which I promise to you in
+yours.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Of course! Very right! very right! I’m sure I beg pardon. As to my
+own case, I am ready to give you any information which may assist you in
+forming an opinion.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you. I have already learned all that is in the public prints,
+nothing more. I presume that I may take it as correct—this article, for
+example, as to the disappearance of the bride.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Lord St. Simon glanced over it. “Yes, it is correct, as far as it
+goes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But it needs a great deal of supplementing before anyone could offer an
+opinion. I think that I may arrive at my facts most directly by questioning
+you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pray do so.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“When did you first meet Miss Hatty Doran?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In San Francisco, a year ago.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You were travelling in the States?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Did you become engaged then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But you were on a friendly footing?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was amused by her society, and she could see that I was amused.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Her father is very rich?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He is said to be the richest man on the Pacific slope.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And how did he make his money?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In mining. He had nothing a few years ago. Then he struck gold, invested
+it, and came up by leaps and bounds.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now, what is your own impression as to the young lady’s—your
+wife’s character?”
+
+
+
+ 
+The nobleman swung his glasses a little faster and stared down into the fire.
+“You see, Mr. Holmes,” said he, “my wife was twenty before
+her father became a rich man. During that time she ran free in a mining camp
+and wandered through woods or mountains, so that her education has come from
+Nature rather than from the schoolmaster. She is what we call in England a
+tomboy, with a strong nature, wild and free, unfettered by any sort of
+traditions. She is impetuous—volcanic, I was about to say. She is swift
+in making up her mind and fearless in carrying out her resolutions. On the
+other hand, I would not have given her the name which I have the honour to
+bear”—he gave a little stately cough—“had I not thought
+her to be at bottom a noble woman. I believe that she is capable of heroic
+self-sacrifice and that anything dishonourable would be repugnant to
+her.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Have you her photograph?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I brought this with me.” He opened a locket and showed us the full
+face of a very lovely woman. It was not a photograph but an ivory miniature,
+and the artist had brought out the full effect of the lustrous black hair, the
+large dark eyes, and the exquisite mouth. Holmes gazed long and earnestly at
+it. Then he closed the locket and handed it back to Lord St. Simon.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The young lady came to London, then, and you renewed your
+acquaintance?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, her father brought her over for this last London season. I met her
+several times, became engaged to her, and have now married her.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“She brought, I understand, a considerable dowry?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A fair dowry. Not more than is usual in my family.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And this, of course, remains to you, since the marriage is a fait
+accompli ?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I really have made no inquiries on the subject.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very naturally not. Did you see Miss Doran on the day before the
+wedding?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Was she in good spirits?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Never better. She kept talking of what we should do in our future
+lives.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Indeed! That is very interesting. And on the morning of the
+wedding?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“She was as bright as possible—at least until after the
+ceremony.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And did you observe any change in her then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, to tell the truth, I saw then the first signs that I had ever seen
+that her temper was just a little sharp. The incident however, was too trivial
+to relate and can have no possible bearing upon the case.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pray let us have it, for all that.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, it is childish. She dropped her bouquet as we went towards the
+vestry. She was passing the front pew at the time, and it fell over into the
+pew. There was a moment’s delay, but the gentleman in the pew handed it
+up to her again, and it did not appear to be the worse for the fall. Yet when I
+spoke to her of the matter, she answered me abruptly; and in the carriage, on
+our way home, she seemed absurdly agitated over this trifling cause.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Indeed! You say that there was a gentleman in the pew. Some of the
+general public were present, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, yes. It is impossible to exclude them when the church is
+open.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“This gentleman was not one of your wife’s friends?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, no; I call him a gentleman by courtesy, but he was quite a
+common-looking person. I hardly noticed his appearance. But really I think that
+we are wandering rather far from the point.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Lady St. Simon, then, returned from the wedding in a less cheerful frame
+of mind than she had gone to it. What did she do on re-entering her
+father’s house?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I saw her in conversation with her maid.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And who is her maid?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Alice is her name. She is an American and came from California with
+her.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A confidential servant?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A little too much so. It seemed to me that her mistress allowed her to
+take great liberties. Still, of course, in America they look upon these things
+in a different way.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How long did she speak to this Alice?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, a few minutes. I had something else to think of.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You did not overhear what they said?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Lady St. Simon said something about ‘jumping a claim.’ She
+was accustomed to use slang of the kind. I have no idea what she meant.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“American slang is very expressive sometimes. And what did your wife do
+when she finished speaking to her maid?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“She walked into the breakfast-room.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“On your arm?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, alone. She was very independent in little matters like that. Then,
+after we had sat down for ten minutes or so, she rose hurriedly, muttered some
+words of apology, and left the room. She never came back.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But this maid, Alice, as I understand, deposes that she went to her
+room, covered her bride’s dress with a long ulster, put on a bonnet, and
+went out.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Quite so. And she was afterwards seen walking into Hyde Park in company
+with Flora Millar, a woman who is now in custody, and who had already made a
+disturbance at Mr. Doran’s house that morning.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah, yes. I should like a few particulars as to this young lady, and your
+relations to her.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Lord St. Simon shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows. “We have
+been on a friendly footing for some years—I may say on a very 
+friendly footing. She used to be at the Allegro. I have not treated her
+ungenerously, and she had no just cause of complaint against me, but you know
+what women are, Mr. Holmes. Flora was a dear little thing, but exceedingly
+hot-headed and devotedly attached to me. She wrote me dreadful letters when she
+heard that I was about to be married, and, to tell the truth, the reason why I
+had the marriage celebrated so quietly was that I feared lest there might be a
+scandal in the church. She came to Mr. Doran’s door just after we
+returned, and she endeavoured to push her way in, uttering very abusive
+expressions towards my wife, and even threatening her, but I had foreseen the
+possibility of something of the sort, and I had two police fellows there in
+private clothes, who soon pushed her out again. She was quiet when she saw that
+there was no good in making a row.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Did your wife hear all this?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, thank goodness, she did not.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And she was seen walking with this very woman afterwards?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes. That is what Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, looks upon as so
+serious. It is thought that Flora decoyed my wife out and laid some terrible
+trap for her.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, it is a possible supposition.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You think so, too?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I did not say a probable one. But you do not yourself look upon this as
+likely?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I do not think Flora would hurt a fly.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Still, jealousy is a strange transformer of characters. Pray what is
+your own theory as to what took place?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, really, I came to seek a theory, not to propound one. I have given
+you all the facts. Since you ask me, however, I may say that it has occurred to
+me as possible that the excitement of this affair, the consciousness that she
+had made so immense a social stride, had the effect of causing some little
+nervous disturbance in my wife.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In short, that she had become suddenly deranged?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, really, when I consider that she has turned her back—I will
+not say upon me, but upon so much that many have aspired to without
+success—I can hardly explain it in any other fashion.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, certainly that is also a conceivable hypothesis,” said
+Holmes, smiling. “And now, Lord St. Simon, I think that I have nearly all
+my data. May I ask whether you were seated at the breakfast-table so that you
+could see out of the window?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We could see the other side of the road and the Park.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Quite so. Then I do not think that I need to detain you longer. I shall
+communicate with you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Should you be fortunate enough to solve this problem,” said our
+client, rising.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have solved it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Eh? What was that?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I say that I have solved it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Where, then, is my wife?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is a detail which I shall speedily supply.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Lord St. Simon shook his head. “I am afraid that it will take wiser heads
+than yours or mine,” he remarked, and bowing in a stately, old-fashioned
+manner he departed.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is very good of Lord St. Simon to honour my head by putting it on a
+level with his own,” said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. “I think that
+I shall have a whisky and soda and a cigar after all this cross-questioning. I
+had formed my conclusions as to the case before our client came into the
+room.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear Holmes!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have notes of several similar cases, though none, as I remarked
+before, which were quite as prompt. My whole examination served to turn my
+conjecture into a certainty. Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very
+convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau’s
+example.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But I have heard all that you have heard.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Without, however, the knowledge of pre-existing cases which serves me so
+well. There was a parallel instance in Aberdeen some years back, and something
+on very much the same lines at Munich the year after the Franco-Prussian War.
+It is one of these cases—but, hullo, here is Lestrade! Good-afternoon,
+Lestrade! You will find an extra tumbler upon the sideboard, and there are
+cigars in the box.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The official detective was attired in a pea-jacket and cravat, which gave him a
+decidedly nautical appearance, and he carried a black canvas bag in his hand.
+With a short greeting he seated himself and lit the cigar which had been
+offered to him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What’s up, then?” asked Holmes with a twinkle in his eye.
+“You look dissatisfied.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And I feel dissatisfied. It is this infernal St. Simon marriage case. I
+can make neither head nor tail of the business.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Really! You surprise me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Who ever heard of such a mixed affair? Every clue seems to slip through
+my fingers. I have been at work upon it all day.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And very wet it seems to have made you,” said Holmes laying his
+hand upon the arm of the pea-jacket.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, I have been dragging the Serpentine.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In Heaven’s name, what for?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In search of the body of Lady St. Simon.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes leaned back in his chair and laughed heartily.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Have you dragged the basin of Trafalgar Square fountain?” he
+asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why? What do you mean?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Because you have just as good a chance of finding this lady in the one
+as in the other.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Lestrade shot an angry glance at my companion. “I suppose you know all
+about it,” he snarled.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, I have only just heard the facts, but my mind is made up.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, indeed! Then you think that the Serpentine plays no part in the
+matter?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I think it very unlikely.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then perhaps you will kindly explain how it is that we found this in
+it?” He opened his bag as he spoke, and tumbled onto the floor a
+wedding-dress of watered silk, a pair of white satin shoes and a bride’s
+wreath and veil, all discoloured and soaked in water. “There,” said
+he, putting a new wedding-ring upon the top of the pile. “There is a
+little nut for you to crack, Master Holmes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, indeed!” said my friend, blowing blue rings into the air.
+“You dragged them from the Serpentine?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No. They were found floating near the margin by a park-keeper. They have
+been identified as her clothes, and it seemed to me that if the clothes were
+there the body would not be far off.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“By the same brilliant reasoning, every man’s body is to be found
+in the neighbourhood of his wardrobe. And pray what did you hope to arrive at
+through this?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“At some evidence implicating Flora Millar in the disappearance.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am afraid that you will find it difficult.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Are you, indeed, now?” cried Lestrade with some bitterness.
+“I am afraid, Holmes, that you are not very practical with your
+deductions and your inferences. You have made two blunders in as many minutes.
+This dress does implicate Miss Flora Millar.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And how?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“In the dress is a pocket. In the pocket is a card-case. In the card-case
+is a note. And here is the very note.” He slapped it down upon the table
+in front of him. “Listen to this: ‘You will see me when all is
+ready. Come at once. F. H. M.’ Now my theory all along has been that Lady
+St. Simon was decoyed away by Flora Millar, and that she, with confederates, no
+doubt, was responsible for her disappearance. Here, signed with her initials,
+is the very note which was no doubt quietly slipped into her hand at the door
+and which lured her within their reach.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very good, Lestrade,” said Holmes, laughing. “You really are
+very fine indeed. Let me see it.” He took up the paper in a listless way,
+but his attention instantly became riveted, and he gave a little cry of
+satisfaction. “This is indeed important,” said he.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ha! you find it so?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Extremely so. I congratulate you warmly.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Lestrade rose in his triumph and bent his head to look. “Why,” he
+shrieked, “you’re looking at the wrong side!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“On the contrary, this is the right side.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The right side? You’re mad! Here is the note written in pencil
+over here.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And over here is what appears to be the fragment of a hotel bill, which
+interests me deeply.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There’s nothing in it. I looked at it before,” said
+Lestrade. “‘Oct. 4th, rooms 8 s ., breakfast 2 s .
+6 d ., cocktail 1 s ., lunch 2 s . 6 d ., glass sherry,
+8 d .’ I see nothing in that.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very likely not. It is most important, all the same. As to the note, it
+is important also, or at least the initials are, so I congratulate you
+again.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I’ve wasted time enough,” said Lestrade, rising. “I
+believe in hard work and not in sitting by the fire spinning fine theories.
+Good-day, Mr. Holmes, and we shall see which gets to the bottom of the matter
+first.” He gathered up the garments, thrust them into the bag, and made
+for the door.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Just one hint to you, Lestrade,” drawled Holmes before his rival
+vanished; “I will tell you the true solution of the matter. Lady St.
+Simon is a myth. There is not, and there never has been, any such
+person.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Lestrade looked sadly at my companion. Then he turned to me, tapped his
+forehead three times, shook his head solemnly, and hurried away.
+
+
+
+ 
+He had hardly shut the door behind him when Holmes rose to put on his overcoat.
+“There is something in what the fellow says about outdoor work,” he
+remarked, “so I think, Watson, that I must leave you to your papers for a
+little.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was after five o’clock when Sherlock Holmes left me, but I had no time
+to be lonely, for within an hour there arrived a confectioner’s man with
+a very large flat box. This he unpacked with the help of a youth whom he had
+brought with him, and presently, to my very great astonishment, a quite
+epicurean little cold supper began to be laid out upon our humble lodging-house
+mahogany. There were a couple of brace of cold woodcock, a pheasant, a pâté
+de foie gras pie with a group of ancient and cobwebby bottles. Having laid
+out all these luxuries, my two visitors vanished away, like the genii of the
+Arabian Nights, with no explanation save that the things had been paid for and
+were ordered to this address.
+
+
+
+ 
+Just before nine o’clock Sherlock Holmes stepped briskly into the room.
+His features were gravely set, but there was a light in his eye which made me
+think that he had not been disappointed in his conclusions.
+
+
+
+ 
+“They have laid the supper, then,” he said, rubbing his hands.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You seem to expect company. They have laid for five.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, I fancy we may have some company dropping in,” said he.
+“I am surprised that Lord St. Simon has not already arrived. Ha! I fancy
+that I hear his step now upon the stairs.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was indeed our visitor of the afternoon who came bustling in, dangling his
+glasses more vigorously than ever, and with a very perturbed expression upon
+his aristocratic features.
+
+
+
+ 
+“My messenger reached you, then?” asked Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, and I confess that the contents startled me beyond measure. Have
+you good authority for what you say?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The best possible.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Lord St. Simon sank into a chair and passed his hand over his forehead.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What will the Duke say,” he murmured, “when he hears that
+one of the family has been subjected to such humiliation?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is the purest accident. I cannot allow that there is any
+humiliation.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah, you look on these things from another standpoint.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I fail to see that anyone is to blame. I can hardly see how the lady
+could have acted otherwise, though her abrupt method of doing it was
+undoubtedly to be regretted. Having no mother, she had no one to advise her at
+such a crisis.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was a slight, sir, a public slight,” said Lord St. Simon,
+tapping his fingers upon the table.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You must make allowance for this poor girl, placed in so unprecedented a
+position.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I will make no allowance. I am very angry indeed, and I have been
+shamefully used.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I think that I heard a ring,” said Holmes. “Yes, there are
+steps on the landing. If I cannot persuade you to take a lenient view of the
+matter, Lord St. Simon, I have brought an advocate here who may be more
+successful.” He opened the door and ushered in a lady and gentleman.
+“Lord St. Simon,” said he “allow me to introduce you to Mr.
+and Mrs. Francis Hay Moulton. The lady, I think, you have already met.”
+
+
+
+ 
+At the sight of these newcomers our client had sprung from his seat and stood
+very erect, with his eyes cast down and his hand thrust into the breast of his
+frock-coat, a picture of offended dignity. The lady had taken a quick step
+forward and had held out her hand to him, but he still refused to raise his
+eyes. It was as well for his resolution, perhaps, for her pleading face was one
+which it was hard to resist.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You’re angry, Robert,” said she. “Well, I guess you
+have every cause to be.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pray make no apology to me,” said Lord St. Simon bitterly.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, yes, I know that I have treated you real bad and that I should have
+spoken to you before I went; but I was kind of rattled, and from the time when
+I saw Frank here again I just didn’t know what I was doing or saying. I
+only wonder I didn’t fall down and do a faint right there before the
+altar.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Perhaps, Mrs. Moulton, you would like my friend and me to leave the room
+while you explain this matter?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“If I may give an opinion,” remarked the strange gentleman,
+“we’ve had just a little too much secrecy over this business
+already. For my part, I should like all Europe and America to hear the rights
+of it.” He was a small, wiry, sunburnt man, clean-shaven, with a sharp
+face and alert manner.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then I’ll tell our story right away,” said the lady.
+“Frank here and I met in ’84, in McQuire’s camp, near the
+Rockies, where Pa was working a claim. We were engaged to each other, Frank and
+I; but then one day father struck a rich pocket and made a pile, while poor
+Frank here had a claim that petered out and came to nothing. The richer Pa grew
+the poorer was Frank; so at last Pa wouldn’t hear of our engagement
+lasting any longer, and he took me away to ’Frisco. Frank wouldn’t
+throw up his hand, though; so he followed me there, and he saw me without Pa
+knowing anything about it. It would only have made him mad to know, so we just
+fixed it all up for ourselves. Frank said that he would go and make his pile,
+too, and never come back to claim me until he had as much as Pa. So then I
+promised to wait for him to the end of time and pledged myself not to marry
+anyone else while he lived. ‘Why shouldn’t we be married right
+away, then,’ said he, ‘and then I will feel sure of you; and I
+won’t claim to be your husband until I come back?’ Well, we talked
+it over, and he had fixed it all up so nicely, with a clergyman all ready in
+waiting, that we just did it right there; and then Frank went off to seek his
+fortune, and I went back to Pa.
+
+
+
+ 
+“The next I heard of Frank was that he was in Montana, and then he went
+prospecting in Arizona, and then I heard of him from New Mexico. After that
+came a long newspaper story about how a miners’ camp had been attacked by
+Apache Indians, and there was my Frank’s name among the killed. I fainted
+dead away, and I was very sick for months after. Pa thought I had a decline and
+took me to half the doctors in ’Frisco. Not a word of news came for a
+year and more, so that I never doubted that Frank was really dead. Then Lord
+St. Simon came to ’Frisco, and we came to London, and a marriage was
+arranged, and Pa was very pleased, but I felt all the time that no man on this
+earth would ever take the place in my heart that had been given to my poor
+Frank.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Still, if I had married Lord St. Simon, of course I’d have done my
+duty by him. We can’t command our love, but we can our actions. I went to
+the altar with him with the intention to make him just as good a wife as it was
+in me to be. But you may imagine what I felt when, just as I came to the altar
+rails, I glanced back and saw Frank standing and looking at me out of the first
+pew. I thought it was his ghost at first; but when I looked again there he was
+still, with a kind of question in his eyes, as if to ask me whether I were glad
+or sorry to see him. I wonder I didn’t drop. I know that everything was
+turning round, and the words of the clergyman were just like the buzz of a bee
+in my ear. I didn’t know what to do. Should I stop the service and make a
+scene in the church? I glanced at him again, and he seemed to know what I was
+thinking, for he raised his finger to his lips to tell me to be still. Then I
+saw him scribble on a piece of paper, and I knew that he was writing me a note.
+As I passed his pew on the way out I dropped my bouquet over to him, and he
+slipped the note into my hand when he returned me the flowers. It was only a
+line asking me to join him when he made the sign to me to do so. Of course I
+never doubted for a moment that my first duty was now to him, and I determined
+to do just whatever he might direct.
+
+
+
+ 
+“When I got back I told my maid, who had known him in California, and had
+always been his friend. I ordered her to say nothing, but to get a few things
+packed and my ulster ready. I know I ought to have spoken to Lord St. Simon,
+but it was dreadful hard before his mother and all those great people. I just
+made up my mind to run away and explain afterwards. I hadn’t been at the
+table ten minutes before I saw Frank out of the window at the other side of the
+road. He beckoned to me and then began walking into the Park. I slipped out,
+put on my things, and followed him. Some woman came talking something or other
+about Lord St. Simon to me—seemed to me from the little I heard as if he
+had a little secret of his own before marriage also—but I managed to get
+away from her and soon overtook Frank. We got into a cab together, and away we
+drove to some lodgings he had taken in Gordon Square, and that was my true
+wedding after all those years of waiting. Frank had been a prisoner among the
+Apaches, had escaped, came on to ’Frisco, found that I had given him up
+for dead and had gone to England, followed me there, and had come upon me at
+last on the very morning of my second wedding.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I saw it in a paper,” explained the American. “It gave the
+name and the church but not where the lady lived.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then we had a talk as to what we should do, and Frank was all for
+openness, but I was so ashamed of it all that I felt as if I should like to
+vanish away and never see any of them again—just sending a line to Pa,
+perhaps, to show him that I was alive. It was awful to me to think of all those
+lords and ladies sitting round that breakfast-table and waiting for me to come
+back. So Frank took my wedding-clothes and things and made a bundle of them, so
+that I should not be traced, and dropped them away somewhere where no one could
+find them. It is likely that we should have gone on to Paris to-morrow, only
+that this good gentleman, Mr. Holmes, came round to us this evening, though how
+he found us is more than I can think, and he showed us very clearly and kindly
+that I was wrong and that Frank was right, and that we should be putting
+ourselves in the wrong if we were so secret. Then he offered to give us a
+chance of talking to Lord St. Simon alone, and so we came right away round to
+his rooms at once. Now, Robert, you have heard it all, and I am very sorry if I
+have given you pain, and I hope that you do not think very meanly of me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Lord St. Simon had by no means relaxed his rigid attitude, but had listened
+with a frowning brow and a compressed lip to this long narrative.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Excuse me,” he said, “but it is not my custom to discuss my
+most intimate personal affairs in this public manner.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then you won’t forgive me? You won’t shake hands before I
+go?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, certainly, if it would give you any pleasure.” He put out his
+hand and coldly grasped that which she extended to him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I had hoped,” suggested Holmes, “that you would have joined
+us in a friendly supper.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I think that there you ask a little too much,” responded his
+Lordship. “I may be forced to acquiesce in these recent developments, but
+I can hardly be expected to make merry over them. I think that with your
+permission I will now wish you all a very good-night.” He included us all
+in a sweeping bow and stalked out of the room.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then I trust that you at least will honour me with your company,”
+said Sherlock Holmes. “It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr.
+Moulton, for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the
+blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from
+being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall
+be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The case has been an interesting one,” remarked Holmes when our
+visitors had left us, “because it serves to show very clearly how simple
+the explanation may be of an affair which at first sight seems to be almost
+inexplicable. Nothing could be more natural than the sequence of events as
+narrated by this lady, and nothing stranger than the result when viewed, for
+instance, by Mr. Lestrade of Scotland Yard.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You were not yourself at fault at all, then?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“From the first, two facts were very obvious to me, the one that the lady
+had been quite willing to undergo the wedding ceremony, the other that she had
+repented of it within a few minutes of returning home. Obviously something had
+occurred during the morning, then, to cause her to change her mind. What could
+that something be? She could not have spoken to anyone when she was out, for
+she had been in the company of the bridegroom. Had she seen someone, then? If
+she had, it must be someone from America because she had spent so short a time
+in this country that she could hardly have allowed anyone to acquire so deep an
+influence over her that the mere sight of him would induce her to change her
+plans so completely. You see we have already arrived, by a process of
+exclusion, at the idea that she might have seen an American. Then who could
+this American be, and why should he possess so much influence over her? It
+might be a lover; it might be a husband. Her young womanhood had, I knew, been
+spent in rough scenes and under strange conditions. So far I had got before I
+ever heard Lord St. Simon’s narrative. When he told us of a man in a pew,
+of the change in the bride’s manner, of so transparent a device for
+obtaining a note as the dropping of a bouquet, of her resort to her
+confidential maid, and of her very significant allusion to
+claim-jumping—which in miners’ parlance means taking possession of
+that which another person has a prior claim to—the whole situation became
+absolutely clear. She had gone off with a man, and the man was either a lover
+or was a previous husband—the chances being in favour of the
+latter.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And how in the world did you find them?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It might have been difficult, but friend Lestrade held information in
+his hands the value of which he did not himself know. The initials were, of
+course, of the highest importance, but more valuable still was it to know that
+within a week he had settled his bill at one of the most select London
+hotels.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How did you deduce the select?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“By the select prices. Eight shillings for a bed and eightpence for a
+glass of sherry pointed to one of the most expensive hotels. There are not many
+in London which charge at that rate. In the second one which I visited in
+Northumberland Avenue, I learned by an inspection of the book that Francis H.
+Moulton, an American gentleman, had left only the day before, and on looking
+over the entries against him, I came upon the very items which I had seen in
+the duplicate bill. His letters were to be forwarded to 226 Gordon Square; so
+thither I travelled, and being fortunate enough to find the loving couple at
+home, I ventured to give them some paternal advice and to point out to them
+that it would be better in every way that they should make their position a
+little clearer both to the general public and to Lord St. Simon in particular.
+I invited them to meet him here, and, as you see, I made him keep the
+appointment.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But with no very good result,” I remarked. “His conduct was
+certainly not very gracious.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah, Watson,” said Holmes, smiling, “perhaps you would not be
+very gracious either, if, after all the trouble of wooing and wedding, you
+found yourself deprived in an instant of wife and of fortune. I think that we
+may judge Lord St. Simon very mercifully and thank our stars that we are never
+likely to find ourselves in the same position. Draw your chair up and hand me
+my violin, for the only problem we have still to solve is how to while away
+these bleak autumnal evenings.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ XI.
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE BERYL CORONET 
+ 
+ “H olmes,”
+said I as I stood one morning in our bow-window looking down the street,
+“here is a madman coming along. It seems rather sad that his relatives
+should allow him to come out alone.”
+
+
+
+ 
+My friend rose lazily from his armchair and stood with his hands in the pockets
+of his dressing-gown, looking over my shoulder. It was a bright, crisp February
+morning, and the snow of the day before still lay deep upon the ground,
+shimmering brightly in the wintry sun. Down the centre of Baker Street it had
+been ploughed into a brown crumbly band by the traffic, but at either side and
+on the heaped-up edges of the footpaths it still lay as white as when it fell.
+The grey pavement had been cleaned and scraped, but was still dangerously
+slippery, so that there were fewer passengers than usual. Indeed, from the
+direction of the Metropolitan Station no one was coming save the single
+gentleman whose eccentric conduct had drawn my attention.
+
+
+
+ 
+He was a man of about fifty, tall, portly, and imposing, with a massive,
+strongly marked face and a commanding figure. He was dressed in a sombre yet
+rich style, in black frock-coat, shining hat, neat brown gaiters, and well-cut
+pearl-grey trousers. Yet his actions were in absurd contrast to the dignity of
+his dress and features, for he was running hard, with occasional little
+springs, such as a weary man gives who is little accustomed to set any tax upon
+his legs. As he ran he jerked his hands up and down, waggled his head, and
+writhed his face into the most extraordinary contortions.
+
+
+
+ 
+“What on earth can be the matter with him?” I asked. “He is
+looking up at the numbers of the houses.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I believe that he is coming here,” said Holmes, rubbing his hands.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Here?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes; I rather think he is coming to consult me professionally. I think
+that I recognise the symptoms. Ha! did I not tell you?” As he spoke, the
+man, puffing and blowing, rushed at our door and pulled at our bell until the
+whole house resounded with the clanging.
+
+
+
+ 
+A few moments later he was in our room, still puffing, still gesticulating, but
+with so fixed a look of grief and despair in his eyes that our smiles were
+turned in an instant to horror and pity. For a while he could not get his words
+out, but swayed his body and plucked at his hair like one who has been driven
+to the extreme limits of his reason. Then, suddenly springing to his feet, he
+beat his head against the wall with such force that we both rushed upon him and
+tore him away to the centre of the room. Sherlock Holmes pushed him down into
+the easy-chair and, sitting beside him, patted his hand and chatted with him in
+the easy, soothing tones which he knew so well how to employ.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have come to me to tell your story, have you not?” said he.
+“You are fatigued with your haste. Pray wait until you have recovered
+yourself, and then I shall be most happy to look into any little problem which
+you may submit to me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The man sat for a minute or more with a heaving chest, fighting against his
+emotion. Then he passed his handkerchief over his brow, set his lips tight, and
+turned his face towards us.
+
+
+
+ 
+“No doubt you think me mad?” said he.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I see that you have had some great trouble,” responded Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+“God knows I have!—a trouble which is enough to unseat my reason,
+so sudden and so terrible is it. Public disgrace I might have faced, although I
+am a man whose character has never yet borne a stain. Private affliction also
+is the lot of every man; but the two coming together, and in so frightful a
+form, have been enough to shake my very soul. Besides, it is not I alone. The
+very noblest in the land may suffer unless some way be found out of this
+horrible affair.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pray compose yourself, sir,” said Holmes, “and let me have a
+clear account of who you are and what it is that has befallen you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My name,” answered our visitor, “is probably familiar to
+your ears. I am Alexander Holder, of the banking firm of Holder &
+Stevenson, of Threadneedle Street.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The name was indeed well known to us as belonging to the senior partner in the
+second largest private banking concern in the City of London. What could have
+happened, then, to bring one of the foremost citizens of London to this most
+pitiable pass? We waited, all curiosity, until with another effort he braced
+himself to tell his story.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I feel that time is of value,” said he; “that is why I
+hastened here when the police inspector suggested that I should secure your
+co-operation. I came to Baker Street by the Underground and hurried from there
+on foot, for the cabs go slowly through this snow. That is why I was so out of
+breath, for I am a man who takes very little exercise. I feel better now, and I
+will put the facts before you as shortly and yet as clearly as I can.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is, of course, well known to you that in a successful banking
+business as much depends upon our being able to find remunerative investments
+for our funds as upon our increasing our connection and the number of our
+depositors. One of our most lucrative means of laying out money is in the shape
+of loans, where the security is unimpeachable. We have done a good deal in this
+direction during the last few years, and there are many noble families to whom
+we have advanced large sums upon the security of their pictures, libraries, or
+plate.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yesterday morning I was seated in my office at the bank when a card was
+brought in to me by one of the clerks. I started when I saw the name, for it
+was that of none other than—well, perhaps even to you I had better say no
+more than that it was a name which is a household word all over the
+earth—one of the highest, noblest, most exalted names in England. I was
+overwhelmed by the honour and attempted, when he entered, to say so, but he
+plunged at once into business with the air of a man who wishes to hurry quickly
+through a disagreeable task.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Mr. Holder,’ said he, ‘I have been informed
+that you are in the habit of advancing money.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘The firm does so when the security is good.’ I
+answered.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘It is absolutely essential to me,’ said he, ‘that I
+should have £ 50,000 at once. I could, of course, borrow so trifling a sum ten
+times over from my friends, but I much prefer to make it a matter of business
+and to carry out that business myself. In my position you can readily
+understand that it is unwise to place one’s self under obligations.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘For how long, may I ask, do you want this sum?’ I
+asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Next Monday I have a large sum due to me, and I shall then
+most certainly repay what you advance, with whatever interest you think it
+right to charge. But it is very essential to me that the money should be paid
+at once.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I should be happy to advance it without further parley from
+my own private purse,’ said I, ‘were it not that the strain would
+be rather more than it could bear. If, on the other hand, I am to do it in the
+name of the firm, then in justice to my partner I must insist that, even in
+your case, every businesslike precaution should be taken.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I should much prefer to have it so,’ said he, raising
+up a square, black morocco case which he had laid beside his chair. ‘You
+have doubtless heard of the Beryl Coronet?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘One of the most precious public possessions of the
+empire,’ said I.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Precisely.’ He opened the case, and there, imbedded
+in soft, flesh-coloured velvet, lay the magnificent piece of jewellery which he
+had named. ‘There are thirty-nine enormous beryls,’ said he,
+‘and the price of the gold chasing is incalculable. The lowest estimate
+would put the worth of the coronet at double the sum which I have asked. I am
+prepared to leave it with you as my security.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“I took the precious case into my hands and looked in some perplexity
+from it to my illustrious client.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘You doubt its value?’ he asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Not at all. I only doubt—’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘The propriety of my leaving it. You may set your mind at
+rest about that. I should not dream of doing so were it not absolutely certain
+that I should be able in four days to reclaim it. It is a pure matter of form.
+Is the security sufficient?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Ample.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘You understand, Mr. Holder, that I am giving you a strong
+proof of the confidence which I have in you, founded upon all that I have heard
+of you. I rely upon you not only to be discreet and to refrain from all gossip
+upon the matter but, above all, to preserve this coronet with every possible
+precaution because I need not say that a great public scandal would be caused
+if any harm were to befall it. Any injury to it would be almost as serious as
+its complete loss, for there are no beryls in the world to match these, and it
+would be impossible to replace them. I leave it with you, however, with every
+confidence, and I shall call for it in person on Monday morning.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“Seeing that my client was anxious to leave, I said no more but, calling
+for my cashier, I ordered him to pay over fifty £ 1000 notes. When I was alone
+once more, however, with the precious case lying upon the table in front of me,
+I could not but think with some misgivings of the immense responsibility which
+it entailed upon me. There could be no doubt that, as it was a national
+possession, a horrible scandal would ensue if any misfortune should occur to
+it. I already regretted having ever consented to take charge of it. However, it
+was too late to alter the matter now, so I locked it up in my private safe and
+turned once more to my work.
+
+
+
+ 
+“When evening came I felt that it would be an imprudence to leave so
+precious a thing in the office behind me. Bankers’ safes had been forced
+before now, and why should not mine be? If so, how terrible would be the
+position in which I should find myself! I determined, therefore, that for the
+next few days I would always carry the case backward and forward with me, so
+that it might never be really out of my reach. With this intention, I called a
+cab and drove out to my house at Streatham, carrying the jewel with me. I did
+not breathe freely until I had taken it upstairs and locked it in the bureau of
+my dressing-room.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And now a word as to my household, Mr. Holmes, for I wish you to
+thoroughly understand the situation. My groom and my page sleep out of the
+house, and may be set aside altogether. I have three maid-servants who have
+been with me a number of years and whose absolute reliability is quite above
+suspicion. Another, Lucy Parr, the second waiting-maid, has only been in my
+service a few months. She came with an excellent character, however, and has
+always given me satisfaction. She is a very pretty girl and has attracted
+admirers who have occasionally hung about the place. That is the only drawback
+which we have found to her, but we believe her to be a thoroughly good girl in
+every way.
+
+
+
+ 
+“So much for the servants. My family itself is so small that it will not
+take me long to describe it. I am a widower and have an only son, Arthur. He
+has been a disappointment to me, Mr. Holmes—a grievous disappointment. I
+have no doubt that I am myself to blame. People tell me that I have spoiled
+him. Very likely I have. When my dear wife died I felt that he was all I had to
+love. I could not bear to see the smile fade even for a moment from his face. I
+have never denied him a wish. Perhaps it would have been better for both of us
+had I been sterner, but I meant it for the best.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was naturally my intention that he should succeed me in my business,
+but he was not of a business turn. He was wild, wayward, and, to speak the
+truth, I could not trust him in the handling of large sums of money. When he
+was young he became a member of an aristocratic club, and there, having
+charming manners, he was soon the intimate of a number of men with long purses
+and expensive habits. He learned to play heavily at cards and to squander money
+on the turf, until he had again and again to come to me and implore me to give
+him an advance upon his allowance, that he might settle his debts of honour. He
+tried more than once to break away from the dangerous company which he was
+keeping, but each time the influence of his friend, Sir George Burnwell, was
+enough to draw him back again.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And, indeed, I could not wonder that such a man as Sir George Burnwell
+should gain an influence over him, for he has frequently brought him to my
+house, and I have found myself that I could hardly resist the fascination of
+his manner. He is older than Arthur, a man of the world to his finger-tips, one
+who had been everywhere, seen everything, a brilliant talker, and a man of
+great personal beauty. Yet when I think of him in cold blood, far away from the
+glamour of his presence, I am convinced from his cynical speech and the look
+which I have caught in his eyes that he is one who should be deeply distrusted.
+So I think, and so, too, thinks my little Mary, who has a woman’s quick
+insight into character.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And now there is only she to be described. She is my niece; but when my
+brother died five years ago and left her alone in the world I adopted her, and
+have looked upon her ever since as my daughter. She is a sunbeam in my
+house—sweet, loving, beautiful, a wonderful manager and housekeeper, yet
+as tender and quiet and gentle as a woman could be. She is my right hand. I do
+not know what I could do without her. In only one matter has she ever gone
+against my wishes. Twice my boy has asked her to marry him, for he loves her
+devotedly, but each time she has refused him. I think that if anyone could have
+drawn him into the right path it would have been she, and that his marriage
+might have changed his whole life; but now, alas! it is too late—forever
+too late!
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now, Mr. Holmes, you know the people who live under my roof, and I shall
+continue with my miserable story.
+
+
+
+ 
+“When we were taking coffee in the drawing-room that night after dinner,
+I told Arthur and Mary my experience, and of the precious treasure which we had
+under our roof, suppressing only the name of my client. Lucy Parr, who had
+brought in the coffee, had, I am sure, left the room; but I cannot swear that
+the door was closed. Mary and Arthur were much interested and wished to see the
+famous coronet, but I thought it better not to disturb it.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Where have you put it?’ asked Arthur.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘In my own bureau.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Well, I hope to goodness the house won’t be burgled
+during the night.’ said he.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘It is locked up,’ I answered.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Oh, any old key will fit that bureau. When I was a
+youngster I have opened it myself with the key of the box-room cupboard.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“He often had a wild way of talking, so that I thought little of what he
+said. He followed me to my room, however, that night with a very grave face.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Look here, dad,’ said he with his eyes cast down,
+‘can you let me have £ 200?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘No, I cannot!’ I answered sharply. ‘I have been
+far too generous with you in money matters.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘You have been very kind,’ said he, ‘but I must
+have this money, or else I can never show my face inside the club again.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘And a very good thing, too!’ I cried.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Yes, but you would not have me leave it a dishonoured
+man,’ said he. ‘I could not bear the disgrace. I must raise the
+money in some way, and if you will not let me have it, then I must try other
+means.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was very angry, for this was the third demand during the month.
+‘You shall not have a farthing from me,’ I cried, on which he bowed
+and left the room without another word.
+
+
+
+ 
+“When he was gone I unlocked my bureau, made sure that my treasure was
+safe, and locked it again. Then I started to go round the house to see that all
+was secure—a duty which I usually leave to Mary but which I thought it
+well to perform myself that night. As I came down the stairs I saw Mary herself
+at the side window of the hall, which she closed and fastened as I approached.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Tell me, dad,’ said she, looking, I thought, a little
+disturbed, ‘did you give Lucy, the maid, leave to go out to-night?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Certainly not.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘She came in just now by the back door. I have no doubt that
+she has only been to the side gate to see someone, but I think that it is
+hardly safe and should be stopped.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘You must speak to her in the morning, or I will if you
+prefer it. Are you sure that everything is fastened?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Quite sure, dad.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Then, good-night.’ I kissed her and went up to my
+bedroom again, where I was soon asleep.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am endeavouring to tell you everything, Mr. Holmes, which may have any
+bearing upon the case, but I beg that you will question me upon any point which
+I do not make clear.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“On the contrary, your statement is singularly lucid.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I come to a part of my story now in which I should wish to be
+particularly so. I am not a very heavy sleeper, and the anxiety in my mind
+tended, no doubt, to make me even less so than usual. About two in the morning,
+then, I was awakened by some sound in the house. It had ceased ere I was wide
+awake, but it had left an impression behind it as though a window had gently
+closed somewhere. I lay listening with all my ears. Suddenly, to my horror,
+there was a distinct sound of footsteps moving softly in the next room. I
+slipped out of bed, all palpitating with fear, and peeped round the corner of
+my dressing-room door.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Arthur!’ I screamed, ‘you villain! you thief!
+How dare you touch that coronet?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“The gas was half up, as I had left it, and my unhappy boy, dressed only
+in his shirt and trousers, was standing beside the light, holding the coronet
+in his hands. He appeared to be wrenching at it, or bending it with all his
+strength. At my cry he dropped it from his grasp and turned as pale as death. I
+snatched it up and examined it. One of the gold corners, with three of the
+beryls in it, was missing.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘You blackguard!’ I shouted, beside myself with rage.
+‘You have destroyed it! You have dishonoured me forever! Where are the
+jewels which you have stolen?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Stolen!’ he cried.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Yes, thief!’ I roared, shaking him by the shoulder.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘There are none missing. There cannot be any missing,’
+said he.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘There are three missing. And you know where they are. Must
+I call you a liar as well as a thief? Did I not see you trying to tear off
+another piece?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘You have called me names enough,’ said he, ‘I
+will not stand it any longer. I shall not say another word about this business,
+since you have chosen to insult me. I will leave your house in the morning and
+make my own way in the world.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘You shall leave it in the hands of the police!’ I
+cried half-mad with grief and rage. ‘I shall have this matter probed to
+the bottom.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘You shall learn nothing from me,’ said he with a
+passion such as I should not have thought was in his nature. ‘If you
+choose to call the police, let the police find what they can.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“By this time the whole house was astir, for I had raised my voice in my
+anger. Mary was the first to rush into my room, and, at the sight of the
+coronet and of Arthur’s face, she read the whole story and, with a
+scream, fell down senseless on the ground. I sent the housemaid for the police
+and put the investigation into their hands at once. When the inspector and a
+constable entered the house, Arthur, who had stood sullenly with his arms
+folded, asked me whether it was my intention to charge him with theft. I
+answered that it had ceased to be a private matter, but had become a public
+one, since the ruined coronet was national property. I was determined that the
+law should have its way in everything.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘At least,’ said he, ‘you will not have me
+arrested at once. It would be to your advantage as well as mine if I might
+leave the house for five minutes.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘That you may get away, or perhaps that you may conceal what
+you have stolen,’ said I. And then, realising the dreadful position in
+which I was placed, I implored him to remember that not only my honour but that
+of one who was far greater than I was at stake; and that he threatened to raise
+a scandal which would convulse the nation. He might avert it all if he would
+but tell me what he had done with the three missing stones.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘You may as well face the matter,’ said I; ‘you
+have been caught in the act, and no confession could make your guilt more
+heinous. If you but make such reparation as is in your power, by telling us
+where the beryls are, all shall be forgiven and forgotten.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Keep your forgiveness for those who ask for it,’ he
+answered, turning away from me with a sneer. I saw that he was too hardened for
+any words of mine to influence him. There was but one way for it. I called in
+the inspector and gave him into custody. A search was made at once not only of
+his person but of his room and of every portion of the house where he could
+possibly have concealed the gems; but no trace of them could be found, nor
+would the wretched boy open his mouth for all our persuasions and our threats.
+This morning he was removed to a cell, and I, after going through all the
+police formalities, have hurried round to you to implore you to use your skill
+in unravelling the matter. The police have openly confessed that they can at
+present make nothing of it. You may go to any expense which you think
+necessary. I have already offered a reward of £ 1000. My God, what shall I do!
+I have lost my honour, my gems, and my son in one night. Oh, what shall I
+do!”
+
+
+
+ 
+He put a hand on either side of his head and rocked himself to and fro, droning
+to himself like a child whose grief has got beyond words.
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes sat silent for some few minutes, with his brows knitted and his
+eyes fixed upon the fire.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do you receive much company?” he asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“None save my partner with his family and an occasional friend of
+Arthur’s. Sir George Burnwell has been several times lately. No one else,
+I think.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do you go out much in society?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Arthur does. Mary and I stay at home. We neither of us care for
+it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is unusual in a young girl.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“She is of a quiet nature. Besides, she is not so very young. She is
+four-and-twenty.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“This matter, from what you say, seems to have been a shock to her
+also.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Terrible! She is even more affected than I.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have neither of you any doubt as to your son’s guilt?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How can we have when I saw him with my own eyes with the coronet in his
+hands.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I hardly consider that a conclusive proof. Was the remainder of the
+coronet at all injured?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, it was twisted.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do you not think, then, that he might have been trying to straighten
+it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“God bless you! You are doing what you can for him and for me. But it is
+too heavy a task. What was he doing there at all? If his purpose were innocent,
+why did he not say so?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Precisely. And if it were guilty, why did he not invent a lie? His
+silence appears to me to cut both ways. There are several singular points about
+the case. What did the police think of the noise which awoke you from your
+sleep?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“They considered that it might be caused by Arthur’s closing his
+bedroom door.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A likely story! As if a man bent on felony would slam his door so as to
+wake a household. What did they say, then, of the disappearance of these
+gems?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“They are still sounding the planking and probing the furniture in the
+hope of finding them.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Have they thought of looking outside the house?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, they have shown extraordinary energy. The whole garden has already
+been minutely examined.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now, my dear sir,” said Holmes, “is it not obvious to you
+now that this matter really strikes very much deeper than either you or the
+police were at first inclined to think? It appeared to you to be a simple case;
+to me it seems exceedingly complex. Consider what is involved by your theory.
+You suppose that your son came down from his bed, went, at great risk, to your
+dressing-room, opened your bureau, took out your coronet, broke off by main
+force a small portion of it, went off to some other place, concealed three gems
+out of the thirty-nine, with such skill that nobody can find them, and then
+returned with the other thirty-six into the room in which he exposed himself to
+the greatest danger of being discovered. I ask you now, is such a theory
+tenable?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But what other is there?” cried the banker with a gesture of
+despair. “If his motives were innocent, why does he not explain
+them?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is our task to find that out,” replied Holmes; “so now,
+if you please, Mr. Holder, we will set off for Streatham together, and devote
+an hour to glancing a little more closely into details.”
+
+
+
+ 
+My friend insisted upon my accompanying them in their expedition, which I was
+eager enough to do, for my curiosity and sympathy were deeply stirred by the
+story to which we had listened. I confess that the guilt of the banker’s
+son appeared to me to be as obvious as it did to his unhappy father, but still
+I had such faith in Holmes’ judgment that I felt that there must be some
+grounds for hope as long as he was dissatisfied with the accepted explanation.
+He hardly spoke a word the whole way out to the southern suburb, but sat with
+his chin upon his breast and his hat drawn over his eyes, sunk in the deepest
+thought. Our client appeared to have taken fresh heart at the little glimpse of
+hope which had been presented to him, and he even broke into a desultory chat
+with me over his business affairs. A short railway journey and a shorter walk
+brought us to Fairbank, the modest residence of the great financier.
+
+
+
+ 
+Fairbank was a good-sized square house of white stone, standing back a little
+from the road. A double carriage-sweep, with a snow-clad lawn, stretched down
+in front to two large iron gates which closed the entrance. On the right side
+was a small wooden thicket, which led into a narrow path between two neat
+hedges stretching from the road to the kitchen door, and forming the
+tradesmen’s entrance. On the left ran a lane which led to the stables,
+and was not itself within the grounds at all, being a public, though little
+used, thoroughfare. Holmes left us standing at the door and walked slowly all
+round the house, across the front, down the tradesmen’s path, and so
+round by the garden behind into the stable lane. So long was he that Mr. Holder
+and I went into the dining-room and waited by the fire until he should return.
+We were sitting there in silence when the door opened and a young lady came in.
+She was rather above the middle height, slim, with dark hair and eyes, which
+seemed the darker against the absolute pallor of her skin. I do not think that
+I have ever seen such deadly paleness in a woman’s face. Her lips, too,
+were bloodless, but her eyes were flushed with crying. As she swept silently
+into the room she impressed me with a greater sense of grief than the banker
+had done in the morning, and it was the more striking in her as she was
+evidently a woman of strong character, with immense capacity for
+self-restraint. Disregarding my presence, she went straight to her uncle and
+passed her hand over his head with a sweet womanly caress.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have given orders that Arthur should be liberated, have you not,
+dad?” she asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, no, my girl, the matter must be probed to the bottom.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But I am so sure that he is innocent. You know what woman’s
+instincts are. I know that he has done no harm and that you will be sorry for
+having acted so harshly.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why is he silent, then, if he is innocent?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Who knows? Perhaps because he was so angry that you should suspect
+him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How could I help suspecting him, when I actually saw him with the
+coronet in his hand?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, but he had only picked it up to look at it. Oh, do, do take my word
+for it that he is innocent. Let the matter drop and say no more. It is so
+dreadful to think of our dear Arthur in prison!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I shall never let it drop until the gems are found—never, Mary!
+Your affection for Arthur blinds you as to the awful consequences to me. Far
+from hushing the thing up, I have brought a gentleman down from London to
+inquire more deeply into it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“This gentleman?” she asked, facing round to me.
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, his friend. He wished us to leave him alone. He is round in the
+stable lane now.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The stable lane?” She raised her dark eyebrows. “What can he
+hope to find there? Ah! this, I suppose, is he. I trust, sir, that you will
+succeed in proving, what I feel sure is the truth, that my cousin Arthur is
+innocent of this crime.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I fully share your opinion, and I trust, with you, that we may prove
+it,” returned Holmes, going back to the mat to knock the snow from his
+shoes. “I believe I have the honour of addressing Miss Mary Holder. Might
+I ask you a question or two?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pray do, sir, if it may help to clear this horrible affair up.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You heard nothing yourself last night?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Nothing, until my uncle here began to speak loudly. I heard that, and I
+came down.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You shut up the windows and doors the night before. Did you fasten all
+the windows?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Were they all fastened this morning?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have a maid who has a sweetheart? I think that you remarked to your
+uncle last night that she had been out to see him?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, and she was the girl who waited in the drawing-room, and who may
+have heard uncle’s remarks about the coronet.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I see. You infer that she may have gone out to tell her sweetheart, and
+that the two may have planned the robbery.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But what is the good of all these vague theories,” cried the
+banker impatiently, “when I have told you that I saw Arthur with the
+coronet in his hands?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Wait a little, Mr. Holder. We must come back to that. About this girl,
+Miss Holder. You saw her return by the kitchen door, I presume?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes; when I went to see if the door was fastened for the night I met her
+slipping in. I saw the man, too, in the gloom.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do you know him?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, yes! he is the greengrocer who brings our vegetables round. His
+name is Francis Prosper.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He stood,” said Holmes, “to the left of the door—that
+is to say, farther up the path than is necessary to reach the door?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, he did.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And he is a man with a wooden leg?”
+
+
+
+ 
+Something like fear sprang up in the young lady’s expressive black eyes.
+“Why, you are like a magician,” said she. “How do you know
+that?” She smiled, but there was no answering smile in Holmes’
+thin, eager face.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I should be very glad now to go upstairs,” said he. “I shall
+probably wish to go over the outside of the house again. Perhaps I had better
+take a look at the lower windows before I go up.”
+
+
+
+ 
+He walked swiftly round from one to the other, pausing only at the large one
+which looked from the hall onto the stable lane. This he opened and made a very
+careful examination of the sill with his powerful magnifying lens. “Now
+we shall go upstairs,” said he at last.
+
+
+
+ 
+The banker’s dressing-room was a plainly furnished little chamber, with a
+grey carpet, a large bureau, and a long mirror. Holmes went to the bureau first
+and looked hard at the lock.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Which key was used to open it?” he asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“That which my son himself indicated—that of the cupboard of the
+lumber-room.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Have you it here?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is it on the dressing-table.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Sherlock Holmes took it up and opened the bureau.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is a noiseless lock,” said he. “It is no wonder that it
+did not wake you. This case, I presume, contains the coronet. We must have a
+look at it.” He opened the case, and taking out the diadem he laid it
+upon the table. It was a magnificent specimen of the jeweller’s art, and
+the thirty-six stones were the finest that I have ever seen. At one side of the
+coronet was a cracked edge, where a corner holding three gems had been torn
+away.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Now, Mr. Holder,” said Holmes, “here is the corner which
+corresponds to that which has been so unfortunately lost. Might I beg that you
+will break it off.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The banker recoiled in horror. “I should not dream of trying,” said
+he.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then I will.” Holmes suddenly bent his strength upon it, but
+without result. “I feel it give a little,” said he; “but,
+though I am exceptionally strong in the fingers, it would take me all my time
+to break it. An ordinary man could not do it. Now, what do you think would
+happen if I did break it, Mr. Holder? There would be a noise like a pistol
+shot. Do you tell me that all this happened within a few yards of your bed and
+that you heard nothing of it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I do not know what to think. It is all dark to me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But perhaps it may grow lighter as we go. What do you think, Miss
+Holder?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I confess that I still share my uncle’s perplexity.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your son had no shoes or slippers on when you saw him?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He had nothing on save only his trousers and shirt.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Thank you. We have certainly been favoured with extraordinary luck
+during this inquiry, and it will be entirely our own fault if we do not succeed
+in clearing the matter up. With your permission, Mr. Holder, I shall now
+continue my investigations outside.”
+
+
+
+ 
+He went alone, at his own request, for he explained that any unnecessary
+footmarks might make his task more difficult. For an hour or more he was at
+work, returning at last with his feet heavy with snow and his features as
+inscrutable as ever.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I think that I have seen now all that there is to see, Mr.
+Holder,” said he; “I can serve you best by returning to my
+rooms.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But the gems, Mr. Holmes. Where are they?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I cannot tell.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The banker wrung his hands. “I shall never see them again!” he
+cried. “And my son? You give me hopes?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My opinion is in no way altered.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then, for God’s sake, what was this dark business which was acted
+in my house last night?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“If you can call upon me at my Baker Street rooms to-morrow morning
+between nine and ten I shall be happy to do what I can to make it clearer. I
+understand that you give me carte blanche to act for you, provided only
+that I get back the gems, and that you place no limit on the sum I may
+draw.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I would give my fortune to have them back.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Very good. I shall look into the matter between this and then. Good-bye;
+it is just possible that I may have to come over here again before
+evening.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was obvious to me that my companion’s mind was now made up about the
+case, although what his conclusions were was more than I could even dimly
+imagine. Several times during our homeward journey I endeavoured to sound him
+upon the point, but he always glided away to some other topic, until at last I
+gave it over in despair. It was not yet three when we found ourselves in our
+rooms once more. He hurried to his chamber and was down again in a few minutes
+dressed as a common loafer. With his collar turned up, his shiny, seedy coat,
+his red cravat, and his worn boots, he was a perfect sample of the class.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I think that this should do,” said he, glancing into the glass
+above the fireplace. “I only wish that you could come with me, Watson,
+but I fear that it won’t do. I may be on the trail in this matter, or I
+may be following a will-o’-the-wisp, but I shall soon know which it is. I
+hope that I may be back in a few hours.” He cut a slice of beef from the
+joint upon the sideboard, sandwiched it between two rounds of bread, and
+thrusting this rude meal into his pocket he started off upon his expedition.
+
+
+
+ 
+I had just finished my tea when he returned, evidently in excellent spirits,
+swinging an old elastic-sided boot in his hand. He chucked it down into a
+corner and helped himself to a cup of tea.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I only looked in as I passed,” said he. “I am going right
+on.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Where to?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, to the other side of the West End. It may be some time before I get
+back. Don’t wait up for me in case I should be late.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“How are you getting on?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, so so. Nothing to complain of. I have been out to Streatham since I
+saw you last, but I did not call at the house. It is a very sweet little
+problem, and I would not have missed it for a good deal. However, I must not
+sit gossiping here, but must get these disreputable clothes off and return to
+my highly respectable self.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I could see by his manner that he had stronger reasons for satisfaction than
+his words alone would imply. His eyes twinkled, and there was even a touch of
+colour upon his sallow cheeks. He hastened upstairs, and a few minutes later I
+heard the slam of the hall door, which told me that he was off once more upon
+his congenial hunt.
+
+
+
+ 
+I waited until midnight, but there was no sign of his return, so I retired to
+my room. It was no uncommon thing for him to be away for days and nights on end
+when he was hot upon a scent, so that his lateness caused me no surprise. I do
+not know at what hour he came in, but when I came down to breakfast in the
+morning there he was with a cup of coffee in one hand and the paper in the
+other, as fresh and trim as possible.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You will excuse my beginning without you, Watson,” said he,
+“but you remember that our client has rather an early appointment this
+morning.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Why, it is after nine now,” I answered. “I should not be
+surprised if that were he. I thought I heard a ring.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was, indeed, our friend the financier. I was shocked by the change which had
+come over him, for his face which was naturally of a broad and massive mould,
+was now pinched and fallen in, while his hair seemed to me at least a shade
+whiter. He entered with a weariness and lethargy which was even more painful
+than his violence of the morning before, and he dropped heavily into the
+armchair which I pushed forward for him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I do not know what I have done to be so severely tried,” said he.
+“Only two days ago I was a happy and prosperous man, without a care in
+the world. Now I am left to a lonely and dishonoured age. One sorrow comes
+close upon the heels of another. My niece, Mary, has deserted me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Deserted you?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes. Her bed this morning had not been slept in, her room was empty, and
+a note for me lay upon the hall table. I had said to her last night, in sorrow
+and not in anger, that if she had married my boy all might have been well with
+him. Perhaps it was thoughtless of me to say so. It is to that remark that she
+refers in this note:
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘MY DEAREST UNCLE,—I feel that I have brought trouble
+upon you, and that if I had acted differently this terrible misfortune might
+never have occurred. I cannot, with this thought in my mind, ever again be
+happy under your roof, and I feel that I must leave you forever. Do not worry
+about my future, for that is provided for; and, above all, do not search for
+me, for it will be fruitless labour and an ill-service to me. In life or in
+death, I am ever your loving,
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘MARY.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“What could she mean by that note, Mr. Holmes? Do you think it points to
+suicide?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, no, nothing of the kind. It is perhaps the best possible solution. I
+trust, Mr. Holder, that you are nearing the end of your troubles.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ha! You say so! You have heard something, Mr. Holmes; you have learned
+something! Where are the gems?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You would not think £ 1000 apiece an excessive sum for
+them?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I would pay ten.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That would be unnecessary. Three thousand will cover the matter. And
+there is a little reward, I fancy. Have you your cheque-book? Here is a pen.
+Better make it out for £ 4000.”
+
+
+
+ 
+With a dazed face the banker made out the required check. Holmes walked over to
+his desk, took out a little triangular piece of gold with three gems in it, and
+threw it down upon the table.
+
+
+
+ 
+With a shriek of joy our client clutched it up.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have it!” he gasped. “I am saved! I am saved!”
+
+
+
+ 
+The reaction of joy was as passionate as his grief had been, and he hugged his
+recovered gems to his bosom.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There is one other thing you owe, Mr. Holder,” said Sherlock
+Holmes rather sternly.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Owe!” He caught up a pen. “Name the sum, and I will pay
+it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, the debt is not to me. You owe a very humble apology to that noble
+lad, your son, who has carried himself in this matter as I should be proud to
+see my own son do, should I ever chance to have one.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then it was not Arthur who took them?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I told you yesterday, and I repeat to-day, that it was not.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You are sure of it! Then let us hurry to him at once to let him know
+that the truth is known.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He knows it already. When I had cleared it all up I had an interview
+with him, and finding that he would not tell me the story, I told it to him, on
+which he had to confess that I was right and to add the very few details which
+were not yet quite clear to me. Your news of this morning, however, may open
+his lips.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“For Heaven’s sake, tell me, then, what is this extraordinary
+mystery!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I will do so, and I will show you the steps by which I reached it. And
+let me say to you, first, that which it is hardest for me to say and for you to
+hear: there has been an understanding between Sir George Burnwell and your
+niece Mary. They have now fled together.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“My Mary? Impossible!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is unfortunately more than possible; it is certain. Neither you nor
+your son knew the true character of this man when you admitted him into your
+family circle. He is one of the most dangerous men in England—a ruined
+gambler, an absolutely desperate villain, a man without heart or conscience.
+Your niece knew nothing of such men. When he breathed his vows to her, as he
+had done to a hundred before her, she flattered herself that she alone had
+touched his heart. The devil knows best what he said, but at least she became
+his tool and was in the habit of seeing him nearly every evening.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I cannot, and I will not, believe it!” cried the banker with an
+ashen face.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I will tell you, then, what occurred in your house last night. Your
+niece, when you had, as she thought, gone to your room, slipped down and talked
+to her lover through the window which leads into the stable lane. His footmarks
+had pressed right through the snow, so long had he stood there. She told him of
+the coronet. His wicked lust for gold kindled at the news, and he bent her to
+his will. I have no doubt that she loved you, but there are women in whom the
+love of a lover extinguishes all other loves, and I think that she must have
+been one. She had hardly listened to his instructions when she saw you coming
+downstairs, on which she closed the window rapidly and told you about one of
+the servants’ escapade with her wooden-legged lover, which was all
+perfectly true.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Your boy, Arthur, went to bed after his interview with you but he slept
+badly on account of his uneasiness about his club debts. In the middle of the
+night he heard a soft tread pass his door, so he rose and, looking out, was
+surprised to see his cousin walking very stealthily along the passage until she
+disappeared into your dressing-room. Petrified with astonishment, the lad
+slipped on some clothes and waited there in the dark to see what would come of
+this strange affair. Presently she emerged from the room again, and in the
+light of the passage-lamp your son saw that she carried the precious coronet in
+her hands. She passed down the stairs, and he, thrilling with horror, ran along
+and slipped behind the curtain near your door, whence he could see what passed
+in the hall beneath. He saw her stealthily open the window, hand out the
+coronet to someone in the gloom, and then closing it once more hurry back to
+her room, passing quite close to where he stood hid behind the curtain.
+
+
+
+ 
+“As long as she was on the scene he could not take any action without a
+horrible exposure of the woman whom he loved. But the instant that she was gone
+he realised how crushing a misfortune this would be for you, and how
+all-important it was to set it right. He rushed down, just as he was, in his
+bare feet, opened the window, sprang out into the snow, and ran down the lane,
+where he could see a dark figure in the moonlight. Sir George Burnwell tried to
+get away, but Arthur caught him, and there was a struggle between them, your
+lad tugging at one side of the coronet, and his opponent at the other. In the
+scuffle, your son struck Sir George and cut him over the eye. Then something
+suddenly snapped, and your son, finding that he had the coronet in his hands,
+rushed back, closed the window, ascended to your room, and had just observed
+that the coronet had been twisted in the struggle and was endeavouring to
+straighten it when you appeared upon the scene.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Is it possible?” gasped the banker.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You then roused his anger by calling him names at a moment when he felt
+that he had deserved your warmest thanks. He could not explain the true state
+of affairs without betraying one who certainly deserved little enough
+consideration at his hands. He took the more chivalrous view, however, and
+preserved her secret.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And that was why she shrieked and fainted when she saw the
+coronet,” cried Mr. Holder. “Oh, my God! what a blind fool I have
+been! And his asking to be allowed to go out for five minutes! The dear fellow
+wanted to see if the missing piece were at the scene of the struggle. How
+cruelly I have misjudged him!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“When I arrived at the house,” continued Holmes, “I at once
+went very carefully round it to observe if there were any traces in the snow
+which might help me. I knew that none had fallen since the evening before, and
+also that there had been a strong frost to preserve impressions. I passed along
+the tradesmen’s path, but found it all trampled down and
+indistinguishable. Just beyond it, however, at the far side of the kitchen
+door, a woman had stood and talked with a man, whose round impressions on one
+side showed that he had a wooden leg. I could even tell that they had been
+disturbed, for the woman had run back swiftly to the door, as was shown by the
+deep toe and light heel marks, while Wooden-leg had waited a little, and then
+had gone away. I thought at the time that this might be the maid and her
+sweetheart, of whom you had already spoken to me, and inquiry showed it was so.
+I passed round the garden without seeing anything more than random tracks,
+which I took to be the police; but when I got into the stable lane a very long
+and complex story was written in the snow in front of me.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There was a double line of tracks of a booted man, and a second double
+line which I saw with delight belonged to a man with naked feet. I was at once
+convinced from what you had told me that the latter was your son. The first had
+walked both ways, but the other had run swiftly, and as his tread was marked in
+places over the depression of the boot, it was obvious that he had passed after
+the other. I followed them up and found they led to the hall window, where
+Boots had worn all the snow away while waiting. Then I walked to the other end,
+which was a hundred yards or more down the lane. I saw where Boots had faced
+round, where the snow was cut up as though there had been a struggle, and,
+finally, where a few drops of blood had fallen, to show me that I was not
+mistaken. Boots had then run down the lane, and another little smudge of blood
+showed that it was he who had been hurt. When he came to the high road at the
+other end, I found that the pavement had been cleared, so there was an end to
+that clue.
+
+
+
+ 
+“On entering the house, however, I examined, as you remember, the sill
+and framework of the hall window with my lens, and I could at once see that
+someone had passed out. I could distinguish the outline of an instep where the
+wet foot had been placed in coming in. I was then beginning to be able to form
+an opinion as to what had occurred. A man had waited outside the window;
+someone had brought the gems; the deed had been overseen by your son; he had
+pursued the thief; had struggled with him; they had each tugged at the coronet,
+their united strength causing injuries which neither alone could have effected.
+He had returned with the prize, but had left a fragment in the grasp of his
+opponent. So far I was clear. The question now was, who was the man, and who was
+it brought him the coronet?
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible,
+whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Now, I knew that it
+was not you who had brought it down, so there only remained your niece and the
+maids. But if it were the maids, why should your son allow himself to be
+accused in their place? There could be no possible reason. As he loved his
+cousin, however, there was an excellent explanation why he should retain her
+secret—the more so as the secret was a disgraceful one. When I remembered
+that you had seen her at that window, and how she had fainted on seeing the
+coronet again, my conjecture became a certainty.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And who could it be who was her confederate? A lover evidently, for who
+else could outweigh the love and gratitude which she must feel to you? I knew
+that you went out little, and that your circle of friends was a very limited
+one. But among them was Sir George Burnwell. I had heard of him before as being
+a man of evil reputation among women. It must have been he who wore those boots
+and retained the missing gems. Even though he knew that Arthur had discovered
+him, he might still flatter himself that he was safe, for the lad could not say
+a word without compromising his own family.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, your own good sense will suggest what measures I took next. I went
+in the shape of a loafer to Sir George’s house, managed to pick up an
+acquaintance with his valet, learned that his master had cut his head the night
+before, and, finally, at the expense of six shillings, made all sure by buying
+a pair of his cast-off shoes. With these I journeyed down to Streatham and saw
+that they exactly fitted the tracks.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I saw an ill-dressed vagabond in the lane yesterday evening,” said
+Mr. Holder.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Precisely. It was I. I found that I had my man, so I came home and
+changed my clothes. It was a delicate part which I had to play then, for I saw
+that a prosecution must be avoided to avert scandal, and I knew that so astute
+a villain would see that our hands were tied in the matter. I went and saw him.
+At first, of course, he denied everything. But when I gave him every particular
+that had occurred, he tried to bluster and took down a life-preserver from the
+wall. I knew my man, however, and I clapped a pistol to his head before he
+could strike. Then he became a little more reasonable. I told him that we would
+give him a price for the stones he held—£ 1000 apiece. That brought out
+the first signs of grief that he had shown. ‘Why, dash it all!’
+said he, ‘I’ve let them go at six hundred for the three!’ I
+soon managed to get the address of the receiver who had them, on promising him
+that there would be no prosecution. Off I set to him, and after much chaffering
+I got our stones at £ 1000 apiece. Then I looked in upon your son, told him
+that all was right, and eventually got to my bed about two o’clock, after
+what I may call a really hard day’s work.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“A day which has saved England from a great public scandal,” said
+the banker, rising. “Sir, I cannot find words to thank you, but you shall
+not find me ungrateful for what you have done. Your skill has indeed exceeded
+all that I have heard of it. And now I must fly to my dear boy to apologise to
+him for the wrong which I have done him. As to what you tell me of poor Mary,
+it goes to my very heart. Not even your skill can inform me where she is
+now.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I think that we may safely say,” returned Holmes, “that she
+is wherever Sir George Burnwell is. It is equally certain, too, that whatever
+her sins are, they will soon receive a more than sufficient punishment.”
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ XII.
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE COPPER BEECHES 
+ 
+ “T o the man who
+loves art for its own sake,” remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the
+advertisement sheet of The Daily Telegraph , “it is frequently in
+its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to
+be derived. It is pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far
+grasped this truth that in these little records of our cases which you have
+been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say, occasionally to embellish,
+you have given prominence not so much to the many causes célèbres and
+sensational trials in which I have figured but rather to those incidents which
+may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those
+faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special
+province.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And yet,” said I, smiling, “I cannot quite hold myself
+absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my
+records.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have erred, perhaps,” he observed, taking up a glowing cinder
+with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to
+replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative
+mood—“you have erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life
+into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of
+placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really
+the only notable feature about the thing.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter,” I
+remarked with some coldness, for I was repelled by the egotism which I had more
+than once observed to be a strong factor in my friend’s singular
+character.
+
+
+
+ 
+“No, it is not selfishness or conceit,” said he, answering, as was
+his wont, my thoughts rather than my words. “If I claim full justice for
+my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing—a thing beyond myself.
+Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon
+the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a
+course of lectures into a series of tales.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was a cold morning of the early spring, and we sat after breakfast on either
+side of a cheery fire in the old room at Baker Street. A thick fog rolled down
+between the lines of dun-coloured houses, and the opposing windows loomed like
+dark, shapeless blurs through the heavy yellow wreaths. Our gas was lit and
+shone on the white cloth and glimmer of china and metal, for the table had not
+been cleared yet. Sherlock Holmes had been silent all the morning, dipping
+continuously into the advertisement columns of a succession of papers until at
+last, having apparently given up his search, he had emerged in no very sweet
+temper to lecture me upon my literary shortcomings.
+
+
+
+ 
+“At the same time,” he remarked after a pause, during which he had
+sat puffing at his long pipe and gazing down into the fire, “you can
+hardly be open to a charge of sensationalism, for out of these cases which you
+have been so kind as to interest yourself in, a fair proportion do not treat of
+crime, in its legal sense, at all. The small matter in which I endeavoured to
+help the King of Bohemia, the singular experience of Miss Mary Sutherland, the
+problem connected with the man with the twisted lip, and the incident of the
+noble bachelor, were all matters which are outside the pale of the law. But in
+avoiding the sensational, I fear that you may have bordered on the
+trivial.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“The end may have been so,” I answered, “but the methods I
+hold to have been novel and of interest.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public,
+who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb,
+care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction! But, indeed, if you are
+trivial, I cannot blame you, for the days of the great cases are past. Man, or
+at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own
+little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost
+lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools. I think
+that I have touched bottom at last, however. This note I had this morning marks
+my zero-point, I fancy. Read it!” He tossed a crumpled letter across to
+me.
+
+
+
+ 
+It was dated from Montague Place upon the preceding evening, and ran thus:
+
+
+
+ 
+“DEAR MR. HOLMES,—I am very anxious to consult you as to whether I
+should or should not accept a situation which has been offered to me as
+governess. I shall call at half-past ten to-morrow if I do not inconvenience
+you. Yours faithfully,
+
+
+
+ 
+“VIOLET HUNTER.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do you know the young lady?” I asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Not I.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is half-past ten now.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, and I have no doubt that is her ring.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“It may turn out to be of more interest than you think. You remember that
+the affair of the blue carbuncle, which appeared to be a mere whim at first,
+developed into a serious investigation. It may be so in this case, also.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, let us hope so. But our doubts will very soon be solved, for here,
+unless I am much mistaken, is the person in question.”
+
+
+
+ 
+As he spoke the door opened and a young lady entered the room. She was plainly
+but neatly dressed, with a bright, quick face, freckled like a plover’s
+egg, and with the brisk manner of a woman who has had her own way to make in
+the world.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You will excuse my troubling you, I am sure,” said she, as my
+companion rose to greet her, “but I have had a very strange experience,
+and as I have no parents or relations of any sort from whom I could ask advice,
+I thought that perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me what I should
+do.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pray take a seat, Miss Hunter. I shall be happy to do anything that I
+can to serve you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+I could see that Holmes was favourably impressed by the manner and speech of
+his new client. He looked her over in his searching fashion, and then composed
+himself, with his lids drooping and his finger-tips together, to listen to her
+story.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have been a governess for five years,” said she, “in the
+family of Colonel Spence Munro, but two months ago the colonel received an
+appointment at Halifax, in Nova Scotia, and took his children over to America
+with him, so that I found myself without a situation. I advertised, and I
+answered advertisements, but without success. At last the little money which I
+had saved began to run short, and I was at my wit’s end as to what I
+should do.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There is a well-known agency for governesses in the West End called
+Westaway’s, and there I used to call about once a week in order to see
+whether anything had turned up which might suit me. Westaway was the name of
+the founder of the business, but it is really managed by Miss Stoper. She sits
+in her own little office, and the ladies who are seeking employment wait in an
+anteroom, and are then shown in one by one, when she consults her ledgers and
+sees whether she has anything which would suit them.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, when I called last week I was shown into the little office as
+usual, but I found that Miss Stoper was not alone. A prodigiously stout man
+with a very smiling face and a great heavy chin which rolled down in fold upon
+fold over his throat sat at her elbow with a pair of glasses on his nose,
+looking very earnestly at the ladies who entered. As I came in he gave quite a
+jump in his chair and turned quickly to Miss Stoper.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘That will do,’ said he; ‘I could not ask for
+anything better. Capital! capital!’ He seemed quite enthusiastic and
+rubbed his hands together in the most genial fashion. He was such a
+comfortable-looking man that it was quite a pleasure to look at him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘You are looking for a situation, miss?’ he asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Yes, sir.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘As governess?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Yes, sir.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘And what salary do you ask?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I had £ 4 a month in my last place with Colonel Spence
+Munro.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Oh, tut, tut! sweating—rank sweating!’ he
+cried, throwing his fat hands out into the air like a man who is in a boiling
+passion. ‘How could anyone offer so pitiful a sum to a lady with such
+attractions and accomplishments?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘My accomplishments, sir, may be less than you
+imagine,’ said I. ‘A little French, a little German, music, and
+drawing—’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Tut, tut!’ he cried. ‘This is all quite beside
+the question. The point is, have you or have you not the bearing and deportment
+of a lady? There it is in a nutshell. If you have not, you are not fitted for
+the rearing of a child who may some day play a considerable part in the history
+of the country. But if you have, why, then, how could any gentleman ask you to
+condescend to accept anything under the three figures? Your salary with me,
+madam, would commence at £ 100 a year.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“You may imagine, Mr. Holmes, that to me, destitute as I was, such an
+offer seemed almost too good to be true. The gentleman, however, seeing perhaps
+the look of incredulity upon my face, opened a pocket-book and took out a note.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘It is also my custom,’ said he, smiling in the most
+pleasant fashion until his eyes were just two little shining slits amid the
+white creases of his face, ‘to advance to my young ladies half their
+salary beforehand, so that they may meet any little expenses of their journey
+and their wardrobe.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“It seemed to me that I had never met so fascinating and so thoughtful a
+man. As I was already in debt to my tradesmen, the advance was a great
+convenience, and yet there was something unnatural about the whole transaction
+which made me wish to know a little more before I quite committed myself.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘May I ask where you live, sir?’ said I.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Hampshire. Charming rural place. The Copper Beeches, five
+miles on the far side of Winchester. It is the most lovely country, my dear
+young lady, and the dearest old country-house.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘And my duties, sir? I should be glad to know what they
+would be.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘One child—one dear little romper just six years old.
+Oh, if you could see him killing cockroaches with a slipper! Smack! smack!
+smack! Three gone before you could wink!’ He leaned back in his chair and
+laughed his eyes into his head again.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was a little startled at the nature of the child’s amusement,
+but the father’s laughter made me think that perhaps he was joking.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘My sole duties, then,’ I asked, ‘are to take
+charge of a single child?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘No, no, not the sole, not the sole, my dear young
+lady,’ he cried. ‘Your duty would be, as I am sure your good sense
+would suggest, to obey any little commands my wife might give, provided always
+that they were such commands as a lady might with propriety obey. You see no
+difficulty, heh?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I should be happy to make myself useful.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Quite so. In dress now, for example. We are faddy people,
+you know—faddy but kind-hearted. If you were asked to wear any dress
+which we might give you, you would not object to our little whim. Heh?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘No,’ said I, considerably astonished at his words.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Or to sit here, or sit there, that would not be offensive
+to you?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Oh, no.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Or to cut your hair quite short before you come to
+us?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“I could hardly believe my ears. As you may observe, Mr. Holmes, my hair
+is somewhat luxuriant, and of a rather peculiar tint of chestnut. It has been
+considered artistic. I could not dream of sacrificing it in this offhand
+fashion.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I am afraid that that is quite impossible,’ said I.
+He had been watching me eagerly out of his small eyes, and I could see a shadow
+pass over his face as I spoke.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I am afraid that it is quite essential,’ said he.
+‘It is a little fancy of my wife’s, and ladies’ fancies, you
+know, madam, ladies’ fancies must be consulted. And so you won’t
+cut your hair?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘No, sir, I really could not,’ I answered firmly.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Ah, very well; then that quite settles the matter. It is a
+pity, because in other respects you would really have done very nicely. In that
+case, Miss Stoper, I had best inspect a few more of your young ladies.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“The manageress had sat all this while busy with her papers without a
+word to either of us, but she glanced at me now with so much annoyance upon her
+face that I could not help suspecting that she had lost a handsome commission
+through my refusal.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Do you desire your name to be kept upon the books?’
+she asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘If you please, Miss Stoper.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Well, really, it seems rather useless, since you refuse the
+most excellent offers in this fashion,’ said she sharply. ‘You can
+hardly expect us to exert ourselves to find another such opening for you.
+Good-day to you, Miss Hunter.’ She struck a gong upon the table, and I
+was shown out by the page.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, Mr. Holmes, when I got back to my lodgings and found little enough
+in the cupboard, and two or three bills upon the table, I began to ask myself
+whether I had not done a very foolish thing. After all, if these people had
+strange fads and expected obedience on the most extraordinary matters, they
+were at least ready to pay for their eccentricity. Very few governesses in
+England are getting £ 100 a year. Besides, what use was my hair to me? Many
+people are improved by wearing it short and perhaps I should be among the
+number. Next day I was inclined to think that I had made a mistake, and by the
+day after I was sure of it. I had almost overcome my pride so far as to go back
+to the agency and inquire whether the place was still open when I received this
+letter from the gentleman himself. I have it here and I will read it to you:
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘The Copper Beeches, near Winchester.
+
+“‘DEAR MISS HUNTER,—Miss Stoper has very kindly given me your
+address, and I write from here to ask you whether you have reconsidered your
+decision. My wife is very anxious that you should come, for she has been much
+attracted by my description of you. We are willing to give £ 30 a quarter, or £
+120 a year, so as to recompense you for any little inconvenience which our fads
+may cause you. They are not very exacting, after all. My wife is fond of a
+particular shade of electric blue and would like you to wear such a dress
+indoors in the morning. You need not, however, go to the expense of purchasing
+one, as we have one belonging to my dear daughter Alice (now in Philadelphia),
+which would, I should think, fit you very well. Then, as to sitting here or
+there, or amusing yourself in any manner indicated, that need cause you no
+inconvenience. As regards your hair, it is no doubt a pity, especially as I
+could not help remarking its beauty during our short interview, but I am afraid
+that I must remain firm upon this point, and I only hope that the increased
+salary may recompense you for the loss. Your duties, as far as the child is
+concerned, are very light. Now do try to come, and I shall meet you with the
+dog-cart at Winchester. Let me know your train. Yours faithfully,
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘JEPHRO RUCASTLE.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is the letter which I have just received, Mr. Holmes, and my mind
+is made up that I will accept it. I thought, however, that before taking the
+final step I should like to submit the whole matter to your
+consideration.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, Miss Hunter, if your mind is made up, that settles the
+question,” said Holmes, smiling.
+
+
+
+ 
+“But you would not advise me to refuse?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I confess that it is not the situation which I should like to see a
+sister of mine apply for.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What is the meaning of it all, Mr. Holmes?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah, I have no data. I cannot tell. Perhaps you have yourself formed some
+opinion?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, there seems to me to be only one possible solution. Mr. Rucastle
+seemed to be a very kind, good-natured man. Is it not possible that his wife is
+a lunatic, that he desires to keep the matter quiet for fear she should be
+taken to an asylum, and that he humours her fancies in every way in order to
+prevent an outbreak?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is a possible solution—in fact, as matters stand, it is the
+most probable one. But in any case it does not seem to be a nice household for
+a young lady.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But the money, Mr. Holmes, the money!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, yes, of course the pay is good—too good. That is what makes
+me uneasy. Why should they give you £ 120 a year, when they could have their
+pick for £ 40? There must be some strong reason behind.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I thought that if I told you the circumstances you would understand
+afterwards if I wanted your help. I should feel so much stronger if I felt that
+you were at the back of me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Oh, you may carry that feeling away with you. I assure you that your
+little problem promises to be the most interesting which has come my way for
+some months. There is something distinctly novel about some of the features. If
+you should find yourself in doubt or in danger—”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Danger! What danger do you foresee?”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes shook his head gravely. “It would cease to be a danger if we could
+define it,” said he. “But at any time, day or night, a telegram
+would bring me down to your help.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is enough.” She rose briskly from her chair with the anxiety
+all swept from her face. “I shall go down to Hampshire quite easy in my
+mind now. I shall write to Mr. Rucastle at once, sacrifice my poor hair
+to-night, and start for Winchester to-morrow.” With a few grateful words
+to Holmes she bade us both good-night and bustled off upon her way.
+
+
+
+ 
+“At least,” said I as we heard her quick, firm steps descending the
+stairs, “she seems to be a young lady who is very well able to take care
+of herself.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And she would need to be,” said Holmes gravely. “I am much
+mistaken if we do not hear from her before many days are past.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was not very long before my friend’s prediction was fulfilled. A
+fortnight went by, during which I frequently found my thoughts turning in her
+direction and wondering what strange side-alley of human experience this lonely
+woman had strayed into. The unusual salary, the curious conditions, the light
+duties, all pointed to something abnormal, though whether a fad or a plot, or
+whether the man were a philanthropist or a villain, it was quite beyond my
+powers to determine. As to Holmes, I observed that he sat frequently for half
+an hour on end, with knitted brows and an abstracted air, but he swept the
+matter away with a wave of his hand when I mentioned it. “Data! data!
+data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without
+clay.” And yet he would always wind up by muttering that no sister of his
+should ever have accepted such a situation.
+
+
+
+ 
+The telegram which we eventually received came late one night just as I was
+thinking of turning in and Holmes was settling down to one of those all-night
+chemical researches which he frequently indulged in, when I would leave him
+stooping over a retort and a test-tube at night and find him in the same
+position when I came down to breakfast in the morning. He opened the yellow
+envelope, and then, glancing at the message, threw it across to me.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Just look up the trains in Bradshaw,” said he, and turned back to
+his chemical studies.
+
+
+
+ 
+The summons was a brief and urgent one.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Please be at the Black Swan Hotel at Winchester at midday
+to-morrow,” it said. “Do come! I am at my wit’s end.
+
+
+
+ 
+“HUNTER.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Will you come with me?” asked Holmes, glancing up.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I should wish to.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Just look it up, then.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“There is a train at half-past nine,” said I, glancing over my
+Bradshaw. “It is due at Winchester at 11:30.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That will do very nicely. Then perhaps I had better postpone my analysis
+of the acetones, as we may need to be at our best in the morning.”
+
+
+
+ 
+By eleven o’clock the next day we were well upon our way to the old
+English capital. Holmes had been buried in the morning papers all the way down,
+but after we had passed the Hampshire border he threw them down and began to
+admire the scenery. It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with
+little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was
+shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which
+set an edge to a man’s energy. All over the countryside, away to the
+rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the
+farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried with all the enthusiasm
+of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.
+
+
+
+ 
+But Holmes shook his head gravely.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses
+of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference
+to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are
+impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to
+me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be
+committed there.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with
+these dear old homesteads?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson,
+founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not
+present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful
+countryside.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You horrify me!”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in
+the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the
+scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not
+beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole
+machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it
+going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at
+these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor
+ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish
+cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such
+places, and none the wiser. Had this lady who appeals to us for help gone to
+live in Winchester, I should never have had a fear for her. It is the five
+miles of country which makes the danger. Still, it is clear that she is not
+personally threatened.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“No. If she can come to Winchester to meet us she can get away.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Quite so. She has her freedom.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What can be the matter, then? Can you suggest no
+explanation?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have devised seven separate explanations, each of which would cover
+the facts as far as we know them. But which of these is correct can only be
+determined by the fresh information which we shall no doubt find waiting for
+us. Well, there is the tower of the cathedral, and we shall soon learn all that
+Miss Hunter has to tell.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The Black Swan is an inn of repute in the High Street, at no distance from the
+station, and there we found the young lady waiting for us. She had engaged a
+sitting-room, and our lunch awaited us upon the table.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am so delighted that you have come,” she said earnestly.
+“It is so very kind of you both; but indeed I do not know what I should
+do. Your advice will be altogether invaluable to me.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pray tell us what has happened to you.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I will do so, and I must be quick, for I have promised Mr. Rucastle to
+be back before three. I got his leave to come into town this morning, though he
+little knew for what purpose.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Let us have everything in its due order.” Holmes thrust his long
+thin legs out towards the fire and composed himself to listen.
+
+
+
+ 
+“In the first place, I may say that I have met, on the whole, with no
+actual ill-treatment from Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle. It is only fair to them to say
+that. But I cannot understand them, and I am not easy in my mind about
+them.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What can you not understand?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Their reasons for their conduct. But you shall have it all just as it
+occurred. When I came down, Mr. Rucastle met me here and drove me in his
+dog-cart to the Copper Beeches. It is, as he said, beautifully situated, but it
+is not beautiful in itself, for it is a large square block of a house,
+whitewashed, but all stained and streaked with damp and bad weather. There are
+grounds round it, woods on three sides, and on the fourth a field which slopes
+down to the Southampton high road, which curves past about a hundred yards from
+the front door. This ground in front belongs to the house, but the woods all
+round are part of Lord Southerton’s preserves. A clump of copper beeches
+immediately in front of the hall door has given its name to the place.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was driven over by my employer, who was as amiable as ever, and was
+introduced by him that evening to his wife and the child. There was no truth,
+Mr. Holmes, in the conjecture which seemed to us to be probable in your rooms
+at Baker Street. Mrs. Rucastle is not mad. I found her to be a silent,
+pale-faced woman, much younger than her husband, not more than thirty, I should
+think, while he can hardly be less than forty-five. From their conversation I
+have gathered that they have been married about seven years, that he was a
+widower, and that his only child by the first wife was the daughter who has
+gone to Philadelphia. Mr. Rucastle told me in private that the reason why she
+had left them was that she had an unreasoning aversion to her stepmother. As
+the daughter could not have been less than twenty, I can quite imagine that her
+position must have been uncomfortable with her father’s young wife.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Mrs. Rucastle seemed to me to be colourless in mind as well as in
+feature. She impressed me neither favourably nor the reverse. She was a
+nonentity. It was easy to see that she was passionately devoted both to her
+husband and to her little son. Her light grey eyes wandered continually from
+one to the other, noting every little want and forestalling it if possible. He
+was kind to her also in his bluff, boisterous fashion, and on the whole they
+seemed to be a happy couple. And yet she had some secret sorrow, this woman.
+She would often be lost in deep thought, with the saddest look upon her face.
+More than once I have surprised her in tears. I have thought sometimes that it
+was the disposition of her child which weighed upon her mind, for I have never
+met so utterly spoiled and so ill-natured a little creature. He is small for
+his age, with a head which is quite disproportionately large. His whole life
+appears to be spent in an alternation between savage fits of passion and gloomy
+intervals of sulking. Giving pain to any creature weaker than himself seems to
+be his one idea of amusement, and he shows quite remarkable talent in planning
+the capture of mice, little birds, and insects. But I would rather not talk
+about the creature, Mr. Holmes, and, indeed, he has little to do with my
+story.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am glad of all details,” remarked my friend, “whether they
+seem to you to be relevant or not.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I shall try not to miss anything of importance. The one unpleasant thing
+about the house, which struck me at once, was the appearance and conduct of the
+servants. There are only two, a man and his wife. Toller, for that is his name,
+is a rough, uncouth man, with grizzled hair and whiskers, and a perpetual smell
+of drink. Twice since I have been with them he has been quite drunk, and yet
+Mr. Rucastle seemed to take no notice of it. His wife is a very tall and strong
+woman with a sour face, as silent as Mrs. Rucastle and much less amiable. They
+are a most unpleasant couple, but fortunately I spend most of my time in the
+nursery and my own room, which are next to each other in one corner of the
+building.
+
+
+
+ 
+“For two days after my arrival at the Copper Beeches my life was very
+quiet; on the third, Mrs. Rucastle came down just after breakfast and whispered
+something to her husband.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Oh, yes,’ said he, turning to me, ‘we are very
+much obliged to you, Miss Hunter, for falling in with our whims so far as to
+cut your hair. I assure you that it has not detracted in the tiniest iota from
+your appearance. We shall now see how the electric-blue dress will become you.
+You will find it laid out upon the bed in your room, and if you would be so
+good as to put it on we should both be extremely obliged.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“The dress which I found waiting for me was of a peculiar shade of blue.
+It was of excellent material, a sort of beige, but it bore unmistakable signs
+of having been worn before. It could not have been a better fit if I had been
+measured for it. Both Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle expressed a delight at the look of
+it, which seemed quite exaggerated in its vehemence. They were waiting for me
+in the drawing-room, which is a very large room, stretching along the entire
+front of the house, with three long windows reaching down to the floor. A chair
+had been placed close to the central window, with its back turned towards it.
+In this I was asked to sit, and then Mr. Rucastle, walking up and down on the
+other side of the room, began to tell me a series of the funniest stories that
+I have ever listened to. You cannot imagine how comical he was, and I laughed
+until I was quite weary. Mrs. Rucastle, however, who has evidently no sense of
+humour, never so much as smiled, but sat with her hands in her lap, and a sad,
+anxious look upon her face. After an hour or so, Mr. Rucastle suddenly remarked
+that it was time to commence the duties of the day, and that I might change my
+dress and go to little Edward in the nursery.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Two days later this same performance was gone through under exactly
+similar circumstances. Again I changed my dress, again I sat in the window, and
+again I laughed very heartily at the funny stories of which my employer had an
+immense répertoire , and which he told inimitably. Then he handed me a
+yellow-backed novel, and moving my chair a little sideways, that my own shadow
+might not fall upon the page, he begged me to read aloud to him. I read for
+about ten minutes, beginning in the heart of a chapter, and then suddenly, in
+the middle of a sentence, he ordered me to cease and to change my dress.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You can easily imagine, Mr. Holmes, how curious I became as to what the
+meaning of this extraordinary performance could possibly be. They were always
+very careful, I observed, to turn my face away from the window, so that I
+became consumed with the desire to see what was going on behind my back. At
+first it seemed to be impossible, but I soon devised a means. My hand-mirror
+had been broken, so a happy thought seized me, and I concealed a piece of the
+glass in my handkerchief. On the next occasion, in the midst of my laughter, I
+put my handkerchief up to my eyes, and was able with a little management to see
+all that there was behind me. I confess that I was disappointed. There was
+nothing. At least that was my first impression. At the second glance, however,
+I perceived that there was a man standing in the Southampton Road, a small
+bearded man in a grey suit, who seemed to be looking in my direction. The road
+is an important highway, and there are usually people there. This man, however,
+was leaning against the railings which bordered our field and was looking
+earnestly up. I lowered my handkerchief and glanced at Mrs. Rucastle to find
+her eyes fixed upon me with a most searching gaze. She said nothing, but I am
+convinced that she had divined that I had a mirror in my hand and had seen what
+was behind me. She rose at once.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Jephro,’ said she, ‘there is an impertinent
+fellow upon the road there who stares up at Miss Hunter.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘No friend of yours, Miss Hunter?’ he asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘No, I know no one in these parts.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Dear me! How very impertinent! Kindly turn round and motion
+to him to go away.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Surely it would be better to take no notice.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘No, no, we should have him loitering here always. Kindly
+turn round and wave him away like that.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“I did as I was told, and at the same instant Mrs. Rucastle drew down the
+blind. That was a week ago, and from that time I have not sat again in the
+window, nor have I worn the blue dress, nor seen the man in the road.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Pray continue,” said Holmes. “Your narrative promises to be
+a most interesting one.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You will find it rather disconnected, I fear, and there may prove to be
+little relation between the different incidents of which I speak. On the very
+first day that I was at the Copper Beeches, Mr. Rucastle took me to a small
+outhouse which stands near the kitchen door. As we approached it I heard the
+sharp rattling of a chain, and the sound as of a large animal moving about.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Look in here!’ said Mr. Rucastle, showing me a slit
+between two planks. ‘Is he not a beauty?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“I looked through and was conscious of two glowing eyes, and of a vague
+figure huddled up in the darkness.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Don’t be frightened,’ said my employer,
+laughing at the start which I had given. ‘It’s only Carlo, my
+mastiff. I call him mine, but really old Toller, my groom, is the only man who
+can do anything with him. We feed him once a day, and not too much then, so
+that he is always as keen as mustard. Toller lets him loose every night, and
+God help the trespasser whom he lays his fangs upon. For goodness’ sake
+don’t you ever on any pretext set your foot over the threshold at night,
+for it’s as much as your life is worth.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“The warning was no idle one, for two nights later I happened to look out
+of my bedroom window about two o’clock in the morning. It was a beautiful
+moonlight night, and the lawn in front of the house was silvered over and
+almost as bright as day. I was standing, rapt in the peaceful beauty of the
+scene, when I was aware that something was moving under the shadow of the
+copper beeches. As it emerged into the moonshine I saw what it was. It was a
+giant dog, as large as a calf, tawny tinted, with hanging jowl, black muzzle,
+and huge projecting bones. It walked slowly across the lawn and vanished into
+the shadow upon the other side. That dreadful sentinel sent a chill to my heart
+which I do not think that any burglar could have done.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And now I have a very strange experience to tell you. I had, as you
+know, cut off my hair in London, and I had placed it in a great coil at the
+bottom of my trunk. One evening, after the child was in bed, I began to amuse
+myself by examining the furniture of my room and by rearranging my own little
+things. There was an old chest of drawers in the room, the two upper ones empty
+and open, the lower one locked. I had filled the first two with my linen, and
+as I had still much to pack away I was naturally annoyed at not having the use
+of the third drawer. It struck me that it might have been fastened by a mere
+oversight, so I took out my bunch of keys and tried to open it. The very first
+key fitted to perfection, and I drew the drawer open. There was only one thing
+in it, but I am sure that you would never guess what it was. It was my coil of
+hair.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I took it up and examined it. It was of the same peculiar tint, and the
+same thickness. But then the impossibility of the thing obtruded itself upon
+me. How could my hair have been locked in the drawer? With trembling hands I
+undid my trunk, turned out the contents, and drew from the bottom my own hair.
+I laid the two tresses together, and I assure you that they were identical. Was
+it not extraordinary? Puzzle as I would, I could make nothing at all of what it
+meant. I returned the strange hair to the drawer, and I said nothing of the
+matter to the Rucastles as I felt that I had put myself in the wrong by opening
+a drawer which they had locked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am naturally observant, as you may have remarked, Mr. Holmes, and I
+soon had a pretty good plan of the whole house in my head. There was one wing,
+however, which appeared not to be inhabited at all. A door which faced that
+which led into the quarters of the Tollers opened into this suite, but it was
+invariably locked. One day, however, as I ascended the stair, I met Mr.
+Rucastle coming out through this door, his keys in his hand, and a look on his
+face which made him a very different person to the round, jovial man to whom I
+was accustomed. His cheeks were red, his brow was all crinkled with anger, and
+the veins stood out at his temples with passion. He locked the door and hurried
+past me without a word or a look.
+
+
+
+ 
+“This aroused my curiosity, so when I went out for a walk in the grounds
+with my charge, I strolled round to the side from which I could see the windows
+of this part of the house. There were four of them in a row, three of which
+were simply dirty, while the fourth was shuttered up. They were evidently all
+deserted. As I strolled up and down, glancing at them occasionally, Mr.
+Rucastle came out to me, looking as merry and jovial as ever.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Ah!’ said he, ‘you must not think me rude if I
+passed you without a word, my dear young lady. I was preoccupied with business
+matters.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“I assured him that I was not offended. ‘By the way,’ said I,
+‘you seem to have quite a suite of spare rooms up there, and one of them
+has the shutters up.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“He looked surprised and, as it seemed to me, a little startled at my
+remark.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Photography is one of my hobbies,’ said he. ‘I
+have made my dark room up there. But, dear me! what an observant young lady we
+have come upon. Who would have believed it? Who would have ever believed
+it?’ He spoke in a jesting tone, but there was no jest in his eyes as he
+looked at me. I read suspicion there and annoyance, but no jest.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Well, Mr. Holmes, from the moment that I understood that there was
+something about that suite of rooms which I was not to know, I was all on fire
+to go over them. It was not mere curiosity, though I have my share of that. It
+was more a feeling of duty—a feeling that some good might come from my
+penetrating to this place. They talk of woman’s instinct; perhaps it was
+woman’s instinct which gave me that feeling. At any rate, it was there,
+and I was keenly on the lookout for any chance to pass the forbidden door.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It was only yesterday that the chance came. I may tell you that, besides
+Mr. Rucastle, both Toller and his wife find something to do in these deserted
+rooms, and I once saw him carrying a large black linen bag with him through the
+door. Recently he has been drinking hard, and yesterday evening he was very
+drunk; and when I came upstairs there was the key in the door. I have no doubt
+at all that he had left it there. Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle were both downstairs,
+and the child was with them, so that I had an admirable opportunity. I turned
+the key gently in the lock, opened the door, and slipped through.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There was a little passage in front of me, unpapered and uncarpeted,
+which turned at a right angle at the farther end. Round this corner were three
+doors in a line, the first and third of which were open. They each led into an
+empty room, dusty and cheerless, with two windows in the one and one in the
+other, so thick with dirt that the evening light glimmered dimly through them.
+The centre door was closed, and across the outside of it had been fastened one
+of the broad bars of an iron bed, padlocked at one end to a ring in the wall,
+and fastened at the other with stout cord. The door itself was locked as well,
+and the key was not there. This barricaded door corresponded clearly with the
+shuttered window outside, and yet I could see by the glimmer from beneath it
+that the room was not in darkness. Evidently there was a skylight which let in
+light from above. As I stood in the passage gazing at the sinister door and
+wondering what secret it might veil, I suddenly heard the sound of steps within
+the room and saw a shadow pass backward and forward against the little slit of
+dim light which shone out from under the door. A mad, unreasoning terror rose
+up in me at the sight, Mr. Holmes. My overstrung nerves failed me suddenly, and
+I turned and ran—ran as though some dreadful hand were behind me
+clutching at the skirt of my dress. I rushed down the passage, through the
+door, and straight into the arms of Mr. Rucastle, who was waiting outside.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘So,’ said he, smiling, ‘it was you, then. I
+thought that it must be when I saw the door open.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Oh, I am so frightened!’ I panted.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘My dear young lady! my dear young lady!’—you
+cannot think how caressing and soothing his manner was—‘and what
+has frightened you, my dear young lady?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“But his voice was just a little too coaxing. He overdid it. I was keenly
+on my guard against him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I was foolish enough to go into the empty wing,’ I
+answered. ‘But it is so lonely and eerie in this dim light that I was
+frightened and ran out again. Oh, it is so dreadfully still in there!’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Only that?’ said he, looking at me keenly.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Why, what did you think?’ I asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Why do you think that I lock this door?’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I am sure that I do not know.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘It is to keep people out who have no business there. Do you
+see?’ He was still smiling in the most amiable manner.
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘I am sure if I had known—’
+
+
+
+ 
+“‘Well, then, you know now. And if you ever put your foot
+over that threshold again’—here in an instant the smile hardened
+into a grin of rage, and he glared down at me with the face of a
+demon—‘I’ll throw you to the mastiff.’
+
+
+
+ 
+“I was so terrified that I do not know what I did. I suppose that I must
+have rushed past him into my room. I remember nothing until I found myself
+lying on my bed trembling all over. Then I thought of you, Mr. Holmes. I could
+not live there longer without some advice. I was frightened of the house, of
+the man, of the woman, of the servants, even of the child. They were all
+horrible to me. If I could only bring you down all would be well. Of course I
+might have fled from the house, but my curiosity was almost as strong as my
+fears. My mind was soon made up. I would send you a wire. I put on my hat and
+cloak, went down to the office, which is about half a mile from the house, and
+then returned, feeling very much easier. A horrible doubt came into my mind as
+I approached the door lest the dog might be loose, but I remembered that Toller
+had drunk himself into a state of insensibility that evening, and I knew that
+he was the only one in the household who had any influence with the savage
+creature, or who would venture to set him free. I slipped in in safety and lay
+awake half the night in my joy at the thought of seeing you. I had no
+difficulty in getting leave to come into Winchester this morning, but I must be
+back before three o’clock, for Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle are going on a
+visit, and will be away all the evening, so that I must look after the child.
+Now I have told you all my adventures, Mr. Holmes, and I should be very glad if
+you could tell me what it all means, and, above all, what I should do.”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes and I had listened spellbound to this extraordinary story. My friend
+rose now and paced up and down the room, his hands in his pockets, and an
+expression of the most profound gravity upon his face.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Is Toller still drunk?” he asked.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes. I heard his wife tell Mrs. Rucastle that she could do nothing with
+him.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That is well. And the Rucastles go out to-night?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Is there a cellar with a good strong lock?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, the wine-cellar.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You seem to me to have acted all through this matter like a very brave
+and sensible girl, Miss Hunter. Do you think that you could perform one more
+feat? I should not ask it of you if I did not think you a quite exceptional
+woman.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I will try. What is it?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We shall be at the Copper Beeches by seven o’clock, my friend and
+I. The Rucastles will be gone by that time, and Toller will, we hope, be
+incapable. There only remains Mrs. Toller, who might give the alarm. If you
+could send her into the cellar on some errand, and then turn the key upon her,
+you would facilitate matters immensely.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I will do it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Excellent! We shall then look thoroughly into the affair. Of course
+there is only one feasible explanation. You have been brought there to
+personate someone, and the real person is imprisoned in this chamber. That is
+obvious. As to who this prisoner is, I have no doubt that it is the daughter,
+Miss Alice Rucastle, if I remember right, who was said to have gone to America.
+You were chosen, doubtless, as resembling her in height, figure, and the colour
+of your hair. Hers had been cut off, very possibly in some illness through
+which she has passed, and so, of course, yours had to be sacrificed also. By a
+curious chance you came upon her tresses. The man in the road was undoubtedly
+some friend of hers—possibly her fiancé —and no doubt, as you
+wore the girl’s dress and were so like her, he was convinced from your
+laughter, whenever he saw you, and afterwards from your gesture, that Miss
+Rucastle was perfectly happy, and that she no longer desired his attentions.
+The dog is let loose at night to prevent him from endeavouring to communicate
+with her. So much is fairly clear. The most serious point in the case is the
+disposition of the child.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“What on earth has that to do with it?” I ejaculated.
+
+
+
+ 
+“My dear Watson, you as a medical man are continually gaining light as to
+the tendencies of a child by the study of the parents. Don’t you see that
+the converse is equally valid. I have frequently gained my first real insight
+into the character of parents by studying their children. This child’s
+disposition is abnormally cruel, merely for cruelty’s sake, and whether
+he derives this from his smiling father, as I should suspect, or from his
+mother, it bodes evil for the poor girl who is in their power.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am sure that you are right, Mr. Holmes,” cried our client.
+“A thousand things come back to me which make me certain that you have
+hit it. Oh, let us lose not an instant in bringing help to this poor
+creature.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“We must be circumspect, for we are dealing with a very cunning man. We
+can do nothing until seven o’clock. At that hour we shall be with you,
+and it will not be long before we solve the mystery.”
+
+
+
+ 
+We were as good as our word, for it was just seven when we reached the Copper
+Beeches, having put up our trap at a wayside public-house. The group of trees,
+with their dark leaves shining like burnished metal in the light of the setting
+sun, were sufficient to mark the house even had Miss Hunter not been standing
+smiling on the door-step.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Have you managed it?” asked Holmes.
+
+
+
+ 
+A loud thudding noise came from somewhere downstairs. “That is Mrs.
+Toller in the cellar,” said she. “Her husband lies snoring on the
+kitchen rug. Here are his keys, which are the duplicates of Mr.
+Rucastle’s.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have done well indeed!” cried Holmes with enthusiasm.
+“Now lead the way, and we shall soon see the end of this black
+business.”
+
+
+
+ 
+We passed up the stair, unlocked the door, followed on down a passage, and
+found ourselves in front of the barricade which Miss Hunter had described.
+Holmes cut the cord and removed the transverse bar. Then he tried the various
+keys in the lock, but without success. No sound came from within, and at the
+silence Holmes’ face clouded over.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I trust that we are not too late,” said he. “I think, Miss
+Hunter, that we had better go in without you. Now, Watson, put your shoulder to
+it, and we shall see whether we cannot make our way in.”
+
+
+
+ 
+It was an old rickety door and gave at once before our united strength.
+Together we rushed into the room. It was empty. There was no furniture save a
+little pallet bed, a small table, and a basketful of linen. The skylight above
+was open, and the prisoner gone.
+
+
+
+ 
+“There has been some villainy here,” said Holmes; “this
+beauty has guessed Miss Hunter’s intentions and has carried his victim
+off.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But how?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Through the skylight. We shall soon see how he managed it.” He
+swung himself up onto the roof. “Ah, yes,” he cried,
+“here’s the end of a long light ladder against the eaves. That is
+how he did it.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But it is impossible,” said Miss Hunter; “the ladder was not
+there when the Rucastles went away.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“He has come back and done it. I tell you that he is a clever and
+dangerous man. I should not be very much surprised if this were he whose step I
+hear now upon the stair. I think, Watson, that it would be as well for you to
+have your pistol ready.”
+
+
+
+ 
+The words were hardly out of his mouth before a man appeared at the door of the
+room, a very fat and burly man, with a heavy stick in his hand. Miss Hunter
+screamed and shrunk against the wall at the sight of him, but Sherlock Holmes
+sprang forward and confronted him.
+
+
+
+ 
+“You villain!” said he, “where’s your daughter?”
+
+
+
+ 
+The fat man cast his eyes round, and then up at the open skylight.
+
+
+
+ 
+“It is for me to ask you that,” he shrieked, “you thieves!
+Spies and thieves! I have caught you, have I? You are in my power. I’ll
+serve you!” He turned and clattered down the stairs as hard as he could
+go.
+
+
+
+ 
+“He’s gone for the dog!” cried Miss Hunter.
+
+
+
+ 
+“I have my revolver,” said I.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Better close the front door,” cried Holmes, and we all rushed down
+the stairs together. We had hardly reached the hall when we heard the baying of
+a hound, and then a scream of agony, with a horrible worrying sound which it
+was dreadful to listen to. An elderly man with a red face and shaking limbs
+came staggering out at a side door.
+
+
+
+ 
+“My God!” he cried. “Someone has loosed the dog. It’s
+not been fed for two days. Quick, quick, or it’ll be too late!”
+
+
+
+ 
+Holmes and I rushed out and round the angle of the house, with Toller hurrying
+behind us. There was the huge famished brute, its black muzzle buried in
+Rucastle’s throat, while he writhed and screamed upon the ground. Running
+up, I blew its brains out, and it fell over with its keen white teeth still
+meeting in the great creases of his neck. With much labour we separated them
+and carried him, living but horribly mangled, into the house. We laid him upon
+the drawing-room sofa, and having dispatched the sobered Toller to bear the
+news to his wife, I did what I could to relieve his pain. We were all assembled
+round him when the door opened, and a tall, gaunt woman entered the room.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Mrs. Toller!” cried Miss Hunter.
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, miss. Mr. Rucastle let me out when he came back before he went up
+to you. Ah, miss, it is a pity you didn’t let me know what you were
+planning, for I would have told you that your pains were wasted.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ha!” said Holmes, looking keenly at her. “It is clear that
+Mrs. Toller knows more about this matter than anyone else.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, sir, I do, and I am ready enough to tell what I know.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Then, pray, sit down, and let us hear it for there are several points on
+which I must confess that I am still in the dark.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I will soon make it clear to you,” said she; “and I’d
+have done so before now if I could ha’ got out from the cellar. If
+there’s police-court business over this, you’ll remember that I was
+the one that stood your friend, and that I was Miss Alice’s friend too.
+
+
+
+ 
+“She was never happy at home, Miss Alice wasn’t, from the time that
+her father married again. She was slighted like and had no say in anything, but
+it never really became bad for her until after she met Mr. Fowler at a
+friend’s house. As well as I could learn, Miss Alice had rights of her
+own by will, but she was so quiet and patient, she was, that she never said a
+word about them but just left everything in Mr. Rucastle’s hands. He knew
+he was safe with her; but when there was a chance of a husband coming forward,
+who would ask for all that the law would give him, then her father thought it
+time to put a stop on it. He wanted her to sign a paper, so that whether she
+married or not, he could use her money. When she wouldn’t do it, he kept
+on worrying her until she got brain-fever, and for six weeks was at
+death’s door. Then she got better at last, all worn to a shadow, and with
+her beautiful hair cut off; but that didn’t make no change in her young
+man, and he stuck to her as true as man could be.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Ah,” said Holmes, “I think that what you have been good
+enough to tell us makes the matter fairly clear, and that I can deduce all that
+remains. Mr. Rucastle then, I presume, took to this system of
+imprisonment?”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“And brought Miss Hunter down from London in order to get rid of the
+disagreeable persistence of Mr. Fowler.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“That was it, sir.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“But Mr. Fowler being a persevering man, as a good seaman should be,
+blockaded the house, and having met you succeeded by certain arguments,
+metallic or otherwise, in convincing you that your interests were the same as
+his.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“Mr. Fowler was a very kind-spoken, free-handed gentleman,” said
+Mrs. Toller serenely.
+
+
+
+ 
+“And in this way he managed that your good man should have no want of
+drink, and that a ladder should be ready at the moment when your master had
+gone out.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“You have it, sir, just as it happened.”
+
+
+
+ 
+“I am sure we owe you an apology, Mrs. Toller,” said Holmes,
+“for you have certainly cleared up everything which puzzled us. And here
+comes the country surgeon and Mrs. Rucastle, so I think, Watson, that we had
+best escort Miss Hunter back to Winchester, as it seems to me that our locus
+standi now is rather a questionable one.”
+
+
+
+ 
+And thus was solved the mystery of the sinister house with the copper beeches
+in front of the door. Mr. Rucastle survived, but was always a broken man, kept
+alive solely through the care of his devoted wife. They still live with their
+old servants, who probably know so much of Rucastle’s past life that he
+finds it difficult to part from them. Mr. Fowler and Miss Rucastle were
+married, by special license, in Southampton the day after their flight, and he
+is now the holder of a government appointment in the island of Mauritius. As to
+Miss Violet Hunter, my friend Holmes, rather to my disappointment, manifested
+no further interest in her when once she had ceased to be the centre of one of
+his problems, and she is now the head of a private school at Walsall, where I
+believe that she has met with considerable success.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES *** 
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diff --git a/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/txt/war_and_peace.txt b/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/txt/war_and_peace.txt
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+++ b/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/txt/war_and_peace.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,98696 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook of War and Peace 
+ 
+ This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States,
+you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
+before using this eBook. 
+
+ Title : War and Peace
+
+
+ 
+ Author : graf Leo Tolstoy
+
+
+
+ Translator : Aylmer Maude
+
+
+ Louise Maude
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Release date : April 1, 2001 [eBook #2600]
+
+ Most recently updated: June 14, 2022
+
+
+
+ Language : English
+
+
+
+ Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600 
+
+
+
+ Credits : An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger
+
+
+
+ 
+ *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WAR AND PEACE *** 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ WAR AND PEACE 
+ By Leo Tolstoy/Tolstoi 
+ 
+ Contents 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK ONE: 1805 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVIII 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK TWO: 1805 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK THREE: 1805 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK FOUR: 1806 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK FIVE: 1806 - 07 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXII 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK SIX: 1808 - 10 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVI 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK SEVEN: 1810 - 11 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK EIGHT: 1811 - 12 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXII 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK NINE: 1812 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIII 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK TEN: 1812 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXVIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXIX 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK ELEVEN: 1812 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXIV 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK TWELVE: 1812 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK THIRTEEN: 1812 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK FOURTEEN: 1812 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK FIFTEEN: 1812 - 13 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ FIRST EPILOGUE: 1813 - 20 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ SECOND EPILOGUE 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK ONE: 1805
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ “Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the
+ Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don’t tell me that this means war, if
+ you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that
+ Antichrist—I really believe he is Antichrist—I will have
+ nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my
+ ‘faithful slave,’ as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have
+ frightened you—sit down and tell me all the news.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was in July, 1805, and the speaker was the well-known Anna Pávlovna
+ Schérer, maid of honor and favorite of the Empress Márya Fëdorovna. With
+ these words she greeted Prince Vasíli Kurágin, a man of high rank and
+ importance, who was the first to arrive at her reception. Anna Pávlovna
+ had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from la
+ grippe; grippe being then a new word in St. Petersburg, used only by
+ the elite.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All her invitations without exception, written in French, and delivered by
+ a scarlet-liveried footman that morning, ran as follows:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you have nothing better to do, Count (or Prince), and if the prospect
+ of spending an evening with a poor invalid is not too terrible, I shall be
+ very charmed to see you tonight between 7 and 10—Annette Schérer.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Heavens! what a virulent attack!” replied the prince, not in the least
+ disconcerted by this reception. He had just entered, wearing an
+ embroidered court uniform, knee breeches, and shoes, and had stars on his
+ breast and a serene expression on his flat face. He spoke in that refined
+ French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but thought, and with the
+ gentle, patronizing intonation natural to a man of importance who had
+ grown old in society and at court. He went up to Anna Pávlovna, kissed her
+ hand, presenting to her his bald, scented, and shining head, and
+ complacently seated himself on the sofa.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “First of all, dear friend, tell me how you are. Set your friend’s mind at
+ rest,” said he without altering his tone, beneath the politeness and
+ affected sympathy of which indifference and even irony could be discerned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Can one be well while suffering morally? Can one be calm in times like
+ these if one has any feeling?” said Anna Pávlovna. “You are staying the
+ whole evening, I hope?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And the fete at the English ambassador’s? Today is Wednesday. I must put
+ in an appearance there,” said the prince. “My daughter is coming for me to
+ take me there.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I thought today’s fete had been canceled. I confess all these festivities
+ and fireworks are becoming wearisome.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If they had known that you wished it, the entertainment would have been
+ put off,” said the prince, who, like a wound-up clock, by force of habit
+ said things he did not even wish to be believed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t tease! Well, and what has been decided about Novosíltsev’s
+ dispatch? You know everything.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What can one say about it?” replied the prince in a cold, listless tone.
+ “What has been decided? They have decided that Buonaparte has burnt his
+ boats, and I believe that we are ready to burn ours.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli always spoke languidly, like an actor repeating a stale
+ part. Anna Pávlovna Schérer on the contrary, despite her forty years,
+ overflowed with animation and impulsiveness. To be an enthusiast had
+ become her social vocation and, sometimes even when she did not feel like
+ it, she became enthusiastic in order not to disappoint the expectations of
+ those who knew her. The subdued smile which, though it did not suit her
+ faded features, always played round her lips expressed, as in a spoiled
+ child, a continual consciousness of her charming defect, which she neither
+ wished, nor could, nor considered it necessary, to correct.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the midst of a conversation on political matters Anna Pávlovna burst
+ out:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, don’t speak to me of Austria. Perhaps I don’t understand things, but
+ Austria never has wished, and does not wish, for war. She is betraying us!
+ Russia alone must save Europe. Our gracious sovereign recognizes his high
+ vocation and will be true to it. That is the one thing I have faith in!
+ Our good and wonderful sovereign has to perform the noblest role on earth,
+ and he is so virtuous and noble that God will not forsake him. He will
+ fulfill his vocation and crush the hydra of revolution, which has become
+ more terrible than ever in the person of this murderer and villain! We
+ alone must avenge the blood of the just one.... Whom, I ask you, can we
+ rely on?... England with her commercial spirit will not and cannot
+ understand the Emperor Alexander’s loftiness of soul. She has refused to
+ evacuate Malta. She wanted to find, and still seeks, some secret motive in
+ our actions. What answer did Novosíltsev get? None. The English have not
+ understood and cannot understand the self-abnegation of our Emperor who
+ wants nothing for himself, but only desires the good of mankind. And what
+ have they promised? Nothing! And what little they have promised they will
+ not perform! Prussia has always declared that Buonaparte is invincible,
+ and that all Europe is powerless before him.... And I don’t believe a word
+ that Hardenburg says, or Haugwitz either. This famous Prussian neutrality
+ is just a trap. I have faith only in God and the lofty destiny of our
+ adored monarch. He will save Europe!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She suddenly paused, smiling at her own impetuosity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I think,” said the prince with a smile, “that if you had been sent
+ instead of our dear Wintzingerode you would have captured the King of
+ Prussia’s consent by assault. You are so eloquent. Will you give me a cup
+ of tea?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In a moment. À propos ,” she added, becoming calm again, “I am
+ expecting two very interesting men tonight, le Vicomte de Mortemart, who
+ is connected with the Montmorencys through the Rohans, one of the best
+ French families. He is one of the genuine émigrés , the good ones.
+ And also the Abbé Morio. Do you know that profound thinker? He has been
+ received by the Emperor. Had you heard?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I shall be delighted to meet them,” said the prince. “But tell me,” he
+ added with studied carelessness as if it had only just occurred to him,
+ though the question he was about to ask was the chief motive of his visit,
+ “is it true that the Dowager Empress wants Baron Funke to be appointed
+ first secretary at Vienna? The baron by all accounts is a poor creature.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli wished to obtain this post for his son, but others were
+ trying through the Dowager Empress Márya Fëdorovna to secure it for the
+ baron.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Pávlovna almost closed her eyes to indicate that neither she nor
+ anyone else had a right to criticize what the Empress desired or was
+ pleased with.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Baron Funke has been recommended to the Dowager Empress by her sister,”
+ was all she said, in a dry and mournful tone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As she named the Empress, Anna Pávlovna’s face suddenly assumed an
+ expression of profound and sincere devotion and respect mingled with
+ sadness, and this occurred every time she mentioned her illustrious
+ patroness. She added that Her Majesty had deigned to show Baron Funke beaucoup
+ d’estime , and again her face clouded over with sadness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The prince was silent and looked indifferent. But, with the womanly and
+ courtierlike quickness and tact habitual to her, Anna Pávlovna wished both
+ to rebuke him (for daring to speak as he had done of a man recommended to
+ the Empress) and at the same time to console him, so she said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now about your family. Do you know that since your daughter came out
+ everyone has been enraptured by her? They say she is amazingly beautiful.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The prince bowed to signify his respect and gratitude.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I often think,” she continued after a short pause, drawing nearer to the
+ prince and smiling amiably at him as if to show that political and social
+ topics were ended and the time had come for intimate conversation—“I
+ often think how unfairly sometimes the joys of life are distributed. Why
+ has fate given you two such splendid children? I don’t speak of Anatole,
+ your youngest. I don’t like him,” she added in a tone admitting of no
+ rejoinder and raising her eyebrows. “Two such charming children. And
+ really you appreciate them less than anyone, and so you don’t deserve to
+ have them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And she smiled her ecstatic smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I can’t help it,” said the prince. “Lavater would have said I lack the
+ bump of paternity.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t joke; I mean to have a serious talk with you. Do you know I am
+ dissatisfied with your younger son? Between ourselves” (and her face
+ assumed its melancholy expression), “he was mentioned at Her Majesty’s and
+ you were pitied....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The prince answered nothing, but she looked at him significantly, awaiting
+ a reply. He frowned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What would you have me do?” he said at last. “You know I did all a father
+ could for their education, and they have both turned out fools. Hippolyte
+ is at least a quiet fool, but Anatole is an active one. That is the only
+ difference between them.” He said this smiling in a way more natural and
+ animated than usual, so that the wrinkles round his mouth very clearly
+ revealed something unexpectedly coarse and unpleasant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And why are children born to such men as you? If you were not a father
+ there would be nothing I could reproach you with,” said Anna Pávlovna,
+ looking up pensively.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am your faithful slave and to you alone I can confess that my children
+ are the bane of my life. It is the cross I have to bear. That is how I
+ explain it to myself. It can’t be helped!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He said no more, but expressed his resignation to cruel fate by a gesture.
+ Anna Pávlovna meditated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have you never thought of marrying your prodigal son Anatole?” she asked.
+ “They say old maids have a mania for matchmaking, and though I don’t feel
+ that weakness in myself as yet, I know a little person who is very unhappy
+ with her father. She is a relation of yours, Princess Mary Bolkónskaya.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli did not reply, though, with the quickness of memory and
+ perception befitting a man of the world, he indicated by a movement of the
+ head that he was considering this information.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know,” he said at last, evidently unable to check the sad current
+ of his thoughts, “that Anatole is costing me forty thousand rubles a year?
+ And,” he went on after a pause, “what will it be in five years, if he goes
+ on like this?” Presently he added: “That’s what we fathers have to put up
+ with.... Is this princess of yours rich?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Her father is very rich and stingy. He lives in the country. He is the
+ well-known Prince Bolkónski who had to retire from the army under the late
+ Emperor, and was nicknamed ‘the King of Prussia.’ He is very clever but
+ eccentric, and a bore. The poor girl is very unhappy. She has a brother; I
+ think you know him, he married Lise Meinen lately. He is an aide-de-camp
+ of Kutúzov’s and will be here tonight.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Listen, dear Annette,” said the prince, suddenly taking Anna Pávlovna’s
+ hand and for some reason drawing it downwards. “Arrange that affair for me
+ and I shall always be your most devoted slave- slafe with an f ,
+ as a village elder of mine writes in his reports. She is rich and of good
+ family and that’s all I want.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And with the familiarity and easy grace peculiar to him, he raised the
+ maid of honor’s hand to his lips, kissed it, and swung it to and fro as he
+ lay back in his armchair, looking in another direction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Attendez,” said Anna Pávlovna, reflecting, “I’ll speak to Lise,
+ young Bolkónski’s wife, this very evening, and perhaps the thing can be
+ arranged. It shall be on your family’s behalf that I’ll start my
+ apprenticeship as old maid.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ Anna Pávlovna’s drawing room was gradually filling. The highest Petersburg
+ society was assembled there: people differing widely in age and character
+ but alike in the social circle to which they belonged. Prince Vasíli’s
+ daughter, the beautiful Hélène, came to take her father to the
+ ambassador’s entertainment; she wore a ball dress and her badge as maid of
+ honor. The youthful little Princess Bolkónskaya, known as la femme la
+ plus séduisante de Pétersbourg , * was also there. She had been married
+ during the previous winter, and being pregnant did not go to any large
+ gatherings, but only to small receptions. Prince Vasíli’s son, Hippolyte,
+ had come with Mortemart, whom he introduced. The Abbé Morio and many
+ others had also come.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+* The most fascinating woman in Petersburg.
+
+
+
+ 
+ To each new arrival Anna Pávlovna said, “You have not yet seen my aunt,”
+ or “You do not know my aunt?” and very gravely conducted him or her to a
+ little old lady, wearing large bows of ribbon in her cap, who had come
+ sailing in from another room as soon as the guests began to arrive; and
+ slowly turning her eyes from the visitor to her aunt, Anna Pávlovna
+ mentioned each one’s name and then left them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not one
+ of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them cared
+ about; Anna Pávlovna observed these greetings with mournful and solemn
+ interest and silent approval. The aunt spoke to each of them in the same
+ words, about their health and her own, and the health of Her Majesty,
+ “who, thank God, was better today.” And each visitor, though politeness
+ prevented his showing impatience, left the old woman with a sense of
+ relief at having performed a vexatious duty and did not return to her the
+ whole evening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The young Princess Bolkónskaya had brought some work in a gold-embroidered
+ velvet bag. Her pretty little upper lip, on which a delicate dark down was
+ just perceptible, was too short for her teeth, but it lifted all the more
+ sweetly, and was especially charming when she occasionally drew it down to
+ meet the lower lip. As is always the case with a thoroughly attractive
+ woman, her defect—the shortness of her upper lip and her half-open
+ mouth—seemed to be her own special and peculiar form of beauty.
+ Everyone brightened at the sight of this pretty young woman, so soon to
+ become a mother, so full of life and health, and carrying her burden so
+ lightly. Old men and dull dispirited young ones who looked at her, after
+ being in her company and talking to her a little while, felt as if they
+ too were becoming, like her, full of life and health. All who talked to
+ her, and at each word saw her bright smile and the constant gleam of her
+ white teeth, thought that they were in a specially amiable mood that day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The little princess went round the table with quick, short, swaying steps,
+ her workbag on her arm, and gaily spreading out her dress sat down on a
+ sofa near the silver samovar, as if all she was doing was a pleasure to
+ herself and to all around her. “I have brought my work,” said she in
+ French, displaying her bag and addressing all present. “Mind, Annette, I
+ hope you have not played a wicked trick on me,” she added, turning to her
+ hostess. “You wrote that it was to be quite a small reception, and just
+ see how badly I am dressed.” And she spread out her arms to show her
+ short-waisted, lace-trimmed, dainty gray dress, girdled with a broad
+ ribbon just below the breast.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ Soyez tranquille, Lise , you will always be prettier than anyone
+ else,” replied Anna Pávlovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know,” said the princess in the same tone of voice and still in
+ French, turning to a general, “my husband is deserting me? He is going to
+ get himself killed. Tell me what this wretched war is for?” she added,
+ addressing Prince Vasíli, and without waiting for an answer she turned to
+ speak to his daughter, the beautiful Hélène.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a delightful woman this little princess is!” said Prince Vasíli to
+ Anna Pávlovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One of the next arrivals was a stout, heavily built young man with
+ close-cropped hair, spectacles, the light-colored breeches fashionable at
+ that time, a very high ruffle, and a brown dress coat. This stout young
+ man was an illegitimate son of Count Bezúkhov, a well-known grandee of
+ Catherine’s time who now lay dying in Moscow. The young man had not yet
+ entered either the military or civil service, as he had only just returned
+ from abroad where he had been educated, and this was his first appearance
+ in society. Anna Pávlovna greeted him with the nod she accorded to the
+ lowest hierarchy in her drawing room. But in spite of this lowest-grade
+ greeting, a look of anxiety and fear, as at the sight of something too
+ large and unsuited to the place, came over her face when she saw Pierre
+ enter. Though he was certainly rather bigger than the other men in the
+ room, her anxiety could only have reference to the clever though shy, but
+ observant and natural, expression which distinguished him from everyone
+ else in that drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is very good of you, Monsieur Pierre, to come and visit a poor
+ invalid,” said Anna Pávlovna, exchanging an alarmed glance with her aunt
+ as she conducted him to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre murmured something unintelligible, and continued to look round as
+ if in search of something. On his way to the aunt he bowed to the little
+ princess with a pleased smile, as to an intimate acquaintance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Pávlovna’s alarm was justified, for Pierre turned away from the aunt
+ without waiting to hear her speech about Her Majesty’s health. Anna
+ Pávlovna in dismay detained him with the words: “Do you know the Abbé
+ Morio? He is a most interesting man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I have heard of his scheme for perpetual peace, and it is very
+ interesting but hardly feasible.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You think so?” rejoined Anna Pávlovna in order to say something and get
+ away to attend to her duties as hostess. But Pierre now committed a
+ reverse act of impoliteness. First he had left a lady before she had
+ finished speaking to him, and now he continued to speak to another who
+ wished to get away. With his head bent, and his big feet spread apart, he
+ began explaining his reasons for thinking the abbé’s plan chimerical.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We will talk of it later,” said Anna Pávlovna with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And having got rid of this young man who did not know how to behave, she
+ resumed her duties as hostess and continued to listen and watch, ready to
+ help at any point where the conversation might happen to flag. As the
+ foreman of a spinning mill, when he has set the hands to work, goes round
+ and notices here a spindle that has stopped or there one that creaks or
+ makes more noise than it should, and hastens to check the machine or set
+ it in proper motion, so Anna Pávlovna moved about her drawing room,
+ approaching now a silent, now a too-noisy group, and by a word or slight
+ rearrangement kept the conversational machine in steady, proper, and
+ regular motion. But amid these cares her anxiety about Pierre was evident.
+ She kept an anxious watch on him when he approached the group round
+ Mortemart to listen to what was being said there, and again when he passed
+ to another group whose center was the abbé.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre had been educated abroad, and this reception at Anna Pávlovna’s was
+ the first he had attended in Russia. He knew that all the intellectual
+ lights of Petersburg were gathered there and, like a child in a toyshop,
+ did not know which way to look, afraid of missing any clever conversation
+ that was to be heard. Seeing the self-confident and refined expression on
+ the faces of those present he was always expecting to hear something very
+ profound. At last he came up to Morio. Here the conversation seemed
+ interesting and he stood waiting for an opportunity to express his own
+ views, as young people are fond of doing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ Anna Pávlovna’s reception was in full swing. The spindles hummed steadily
+ and ceaselessly on all sides. With the exception of the aunt, beside whom
+ sat only one elderly lady, who with her thin careworn face was rather out
+ of place in this brilliant society, the whole company had settled into
+ three groups. One, chiefly masculine, had formed round the abbé. Another,
+ of young people, was grouped round the beautiful Princess Hélène, Prince
+ Vasíli’s daughter, and the little Princess Bolkónskaya, very pretty and
+ rosy, though rather too plump for her age. The third group was gathered
+ round Mortemart and Anna Pávlovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The vicomte was a nice-looking young man with soft features and polished
+ manners, who evidently considered himself a celebrity but out of
+ politeness modestly placed himself at the disposal of the circle in which
+ he found himself. Anna Pávlovna was obviously serving him up as a treat to
+ her guests. As a clever maître d’hôtel serves up as a specially choice
+ delicacy a piece of meat that no one who had seen it in the kitchen would
+ have cared to eat, so Anna Pávlovna served up to her guests, first the
+ vicomte and then the abbé, as peculiarly choice morsels. The group about
+ Mortemart immediately began discussing the murder of the Duc d’Enghien.
+ The vicomte said that the Duc d’Enghien had perished by his own
+ magnanimity, and that there were particular reasons for Buonaparte’s
+ hatred of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, yes! Do tell us all about it, Vicomte,” said Anna Pávlovna, with a
+ pleasant feeling that there was something à la Louis XV in the
+ sound of that sentence: “Contez nous çela, Vicomte.” 
+
+
+
+ 
+ The vicomte bowed and smiled courteously in token of his willingness to
+ comply. Anna Pávlovna arranged a group round him, inviting everyone to
+ listen to his tale.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The vicomte knew the duc personally,” whispered Anna Pávlovna to one of
+ the guests. “The vicomte is a wonderful raconteur,” said she to another.
+ “How evidently he belongs to the best society,” said she to a third; and
+ the vicomte was served up to the company in the choicest and most
+ advantageous style, like a well-garnished joint of roast beef on a hot
+ dish.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The vicomte wished to begin his story and gave a subtle smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come over here, Hélène, dear,” said Anna Pávlovna to the beautiful young
+ princess who was sitting some way off, the center of another group.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess smiled. She rose with the same unchanging smile with which
+ she had first entered the room—the smile of a perfectly beautiful
+ woman. With a slight rustle of her white dress trimmed with moss and ivy,
+ with a gleam of white shoulders, glossy hair, and sparkling diamonds, she
+ passed between the men who made way for her, not looking at any of them
+ but smiling on all, as if graciously allowing each the privilege of
+ admiring her beautiful figure and shapely shoulders, back, and bosom—which
+ in the fashion of those days were very much exposed—and she seemed
+ to bring the glamour of a ballroom with her as she moved toward Anna
+ Pávlovna. Hélène was so lovely that not only did she not show any trace of
+ coquetry, but on the contrary she even appeared shy of her unquestionable
+ and all too victorious beauty. She seemed to wish, but to be unable, to
+ diminish its effect.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How lovely!” said everyone who saw her; and the vicomte lifted his
+ shoulders and dropped his eyes as if startled by something extraordinary
+ when she took her seat opposite and beamed upon him also with her
+ unchanging smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Madame, I doubt my ability before such an audience,” said he, smilingly
+ inclining his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess rested her bare round arm on a little table and considered a
+ reply unnecessary. She smilingly waited. All the time the story was being
+ told she sat upright, glancing now at her beautiful round arm, altered in
+ shape by its pressure on the table, now at her still more beautiful bosom,
+ on which she readjusted a diamond necklace. From time to time she smoothed
+ the folds of her dress, and whenever the story produced an effect she
+ glanced at Anna Pávlovna, at once adopted just the expression she saw on
+ the maid of honor’s face, and again relapsed into her radiant smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The little princess had also left the tea table and followed Hélène.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wait a moment, I’ll get my work.... Now then, what are you thinking of?”
+ she went on, turning to Prince Hippolyte. “Fetch me my workbag.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was a general movement as the princess, smiling and talking merrily
+ to everyone at once, sat down and gaily arranged herself in her seat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now I am all right,” she said, and asking the vicomte to begin, she took
+ up her work.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Hippolyte, having brought the workbag, joined the circle and moving
+ a chair close to hers seated himself beside her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Le charmant Hippolyte was surprising by his extraordinary
+ resemblance to his beautiful sister, but yet more by the fact that in
+ spite of this resemblance he was exceedingly ugly. His features were like
+ his sister’s, but while in her case everything was lit up by a joyous,
+ self-satisfied, youthful, and constant smile of animation, and by the
+ wonderful classic beauty of her figure, his face on the contrary was
+ dulled by imbecility and a constant expression of sullen self-confidence,
+ while his body was thin and weak. His eyes, nose, and mouth all seemed
+ puckered into a vacant, wearied grimace, and his arms and legs always fell
+ into unnatural positions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s not going to be a ghost story?” said he, sitting down beside the
+ princess and hastily adjusting his lorgnette, as if without this
+ instrument he could not begin to speak.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why no, my dear fellow,” said the astonished narrator, shrugging his
+ shoulders.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Because I hate ghost stories,” said Prince Hippolyte in a tone which
+ showed that he only understood the meaning of his words after he had
+ uttered them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He spoke with such self-confidence that his hearers could not be sure
+ whether what he said was very witty or very stupid. He was dressed in a
+ dark-green dress coat, knee breeches of the color of cuisse de nymphe
+ effrayée , as he called it, shoes, and silk stockings.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The vicomte told his tale very neatly. It was an anecdote, then current,
+ to the effect that the Duc d’Enghien had gone secretly to Paris to visit
+ Mademoiselle George; that at her house he came upon Bonaparte, who also
+ enjoyed the famous actress’ favors, and that in his presence Napoleon
+ happened to fall into one of the fainting fits to which he was subject,
+ and was thus at the duc’s mercy. The latter spared him, and this
+ magnanimity Bonaparte subsequently repaid by death.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The story was very pretty and interesting, especially at the point where
+ the rivals suddenly recognized one another; and the ladies looked
+ agitated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Charming!” said Anna Pávlovna with an inquiring glance at the little
+ princess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Charming!” whispered the little princess, sticking the needle into her
+ work as if to testify that the interest and fascination of the story
+ prevented her from going on with it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The vicomte appreciated this silent praise and smiling gratefully prepared
+ to continue, but just then Anna Pávlovna, who had kept a watchful eye on
+ the young man who so alarmed her, noticed that he was talking too loudly
+ and vehemently with the abbé, so she hurried to the rescue. Pierre had
+ managed to start a conversation with the abbé about the balance of power,
+ and the latter, evidently interested by the young man’s simple-minded
+ eagerness, was explaining his pet theory. Both were talking and listening
+ too eagerly and too naturally, which was why Anna Pávlovna disapproved.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The means are ... the balance of power in Europe and the rights of the
+ people,” the abbé was saying. “It is only necessary for one powerful
+ nation like Russia—barbaric as she is said to be—to place
+ herself disinterestedly at the head of an alliance having for its object
+ the maintenance of the balance of power of Europe, and it would save the
+ world!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But how are you to get that balance?” Pierre was beginning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment Anna Pávlovna came up and, looking severely at Pierre,
+ asked the Italian how he stood Russian climate. The Italian’s face
+ instantly changed and assumed an offensively affected, sugary expression,
+ evidently habitual to him when conversing with women.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am so enchanted by the brilliancy of the wit and culture of the
+ society, more especially of the feminine society, in which I have had the
+ honor of being received, that I have not yet had time to think of the
+ climate,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not letting the abbé and Pierre escape, Anna Pávlovna, the more
+ conveniently to keep them under observation, brought them into the larger
+ circle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ Just then another visitor entered the drawing room: Prince Andrew
+ Bolkónski, the little princess’ husband. He was a very handsome young man,
+ of medium height, with firm, clearcut features. Everything about him, from
+ his weary, bored expression to his quiet, measured step, offered a most
+ striking contrast to his quiet, little wife. It was evident that he not
+ only knew everyone in the drawing room, but had found them to be so
+ tiresome that it wearied him to look at or listen to them. And among all
+ these faces that he found so tedious, none seemed to bore him so much as
+ that of his pretty wife. He turned away from her with a grimace that
+ distorted his handsome face, kissed Anna Pávlovna’s hand, and screwing up
+ his eyes scanned the whole company.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are off to the war, Prince?” said Anna Pávlovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “General Kutúzov,” said Bolkónski, speaking French and stressing the last
+ syllable of the general’s name like a Frenchman, “has been pleased to take
+ me as an aide-de-camp....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And Lise, your wife?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She will go to the country.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Are you not ashamed to deprive us of your charming wife?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “André,” said his wife, addressing her husband in the same
+ coquettish manner in which she spoke to other men, “the vicomte has been
+ telling us such a tale about Mademoiselle George and Buonaparte!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew screwed up his eyes and turned away. Pierre, who from the
+ moment Prince Andrew entered the room had watched him with glad,
+ affectionate eyes, now came up and took his arm. Before he looked round
+ Prince Andrew frowned again, expressing his annoyance with whoever was
+ touching his arm, but when he saw Pierre’s beaming face he gave him an
+ unexpectedly kind and pleasant smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now!... So you, too, are in the great world?” said he to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I knew you would be here,” replied Pierre. “I will come to supper with
+ you. May I?” he added in a low voice so as not to disturb the vicomte who
+ was continuing his story.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, impossible!” said Prince Andrew, laughing and pressing Pierre’s hand
+ to show that there was no need to ask the question. He wished to say
+ something more, but at that moment Prince Vasíli and his daughter got up
+ to go and the two young men rose to let them pass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You must excuse me, dear Vicomte,” said Prince Vasíli to the Frenchman,
+ holding him down by the sleeve in a friendly way to prevent his rising.
+ “This unfortunate fete at the ambassador’s deprives me of a pleasure, and
+ obliges me to interrupt you. I am very sorry to leave your enchanting
+ party,” said he, turning to Anna Pávlovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His daughter, Princess Hélène, passed between the chairs, lightly holding
+ up the folds of her dress, and the smile shone still more radiantly on her
+ beautiful face. Pierre gazed at her with rapturous, almost frightened,
+ eyes as she passed him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very lovely,” said Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In passing Prince Vasíli seized Pierre’s hand and said to Anna Pávlovna:
+ “Educate this bear for me! He has been staying with me a whole month and
+ this is the first time I have seen him in society. Nothing is so necessary
+ for a young man as the society of clever women.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Pávlovna smiled and promised to take Pierre in hand. She knew his
+ father to be a connection of Prince Vasíli’s. The elderly lady who had
+ been sitting with the old aunt rose hurriedly and overtook Prince Vasíli
+ in the anteroom. All the affectation of interest she had assumed had left
+ her kindly and tear-worn face and it now expressed only anxiety and fear.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How about my son Borís, Prince?” said she, hurrying after him into the
+ anteroom. “I can’t remain any longer in Petersburg. Tell me what news I
+ may take back to my poor boy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Although Prince Vasíli listened reluctantly and not very politely to the
+ elderly lady, even betraying some impatience, she gave him an ingratiating
+ and appealing smile, and took his hand that he might not go away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What would it cost you to say a word to the Emperor, and then he would be
+ transferred to the Guards at once?” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Believe me, Princess, I am ready to do all I can,” answered Prince
+ Vasíli, “but it is difficult for me to ask the Emperor. I should advise
+ you to appeal to Rumyántsev through Prince Golítsyn. That would be the
+ best way.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The elderly lady was a Princess Drubetskáya, belonging to one of the best
+ families in Russia, but she was poor, and having long been out of society
+ had lost her former influential connections. She had now come to
+ Petersburg to procure an appointment in the Guards for her only son. It
+ was, in fact, solely to meet Prince Vasíli that she had obtained an
+ invitation to Anna Pávlovna’s reception and had sat listening to the
+ vicomte’s story. Prince Vasíli’s words frightened her, an embittered look
+ clouded her once handsome face, but only for a moment; then she smiled
+ again and clutched Prince Vasíli’s arm more tightly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Listen to me, Prince,” said she. “I have never yet asked you for anything
+ and I never will again, nor have I ever reminded you of my father’s
+ friendship for you; but now I entreat you for God’s sake to do this for my
+ son—and I shall always regard you as a benefactor,” she added
+ hurriedly. “No, don’t be angry, but promise! I have asked Golítsyn and he
+ has refused. Be the kindhearted man you always were,” she said, trying to
+ smile though tears were in her eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Papa, we shall be late,” said Princess Hélène, turning her beautiful head
+ and looking over her classically molded shoulder as she stood waiting by
+ the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Influence in society, however, is a capital which has to be economized if
+ it is to last. Prince Vasíli knew this, and having once realized that if
+ he asked on behalf of all who begged of him, he would soon be unable to
+ ask for himself, he became chary of using his influence. But in Princess
+ Drubetskáya’s case he felt, after her second appeal, something like qualms
+ of conscience. She had reminded him of what was quite true; he had been
+ indebted to her father for the first steps in his career. Moreover, he
+ could see by her manners that she was one of those women—mostly
+ mothers—who, having once made up their minds, will not rest until
+ they have gained their end, and are prepared if necessary to go on
+ insisting day after day and hour after hour, and even to make scenes. This
+ last consideration moved him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear Anna Mikháylovna,” said he with his usual familiarity and
+ weariness of tone, “it is almost impossible for me to do what you ask; but
+ to prove my devotion to you and how I respect your father’s memory, I will
+ do the impossible—your son shall be transferred to the Guards. Here
+ is my hand on it. Are you satisfied?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear benefactor! This is what I expected from you—I knew your
+ kindness!” He turned to go.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wait—just a word! When he has been transferred to the Guards...”
+ she faltered. “You are on good terms with Michael Ilariónovich Kutúzov ...
+ recommend Borís to him as adjutant! Then I shall be at rest, and then...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I won’t promise that. You don’t know how Kutúzov is pestered since
+ his appointment as Commander in Chief. He told me himself that all the
+ Moscow ladies have conspired to give him all their sons as adjutants.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, but do promise! I won’t let you go! My dear benefactor...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Papa,” said his beautiful daughter in the same tone as before, “we shall
+ be late.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, au revoir! Good-by! You hear her?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then tomorrow you will speak to the Emperor?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Certainly; but about Kutúzov, I don’t promise.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do promise, do promise, Vasíli!” cried Anna Mikháylovna as he went, with
+ the smile of a coquettish girl, which at one time probably came naturally
+ to her, but was now very ill-suited to her careworn face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Apparently she had forgotten her age and by force of habit employed all
+ the old feminine arts. But as soon as the prince had gone her face resumed
+ its former cold, artificial expression. She returned to the group where
+ the vicomte was still talking, and again pretended to listen, while
+ waiting till it would be time to leave. Her task was accomplished.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ “And what do you think of this latest comedy, the coronation at Milan?”
+ asked Anna Pávlovna, “and of the comedy of the people of Genoa and Lucca
+ laying their petitions before Monsieur Buonaparte, and Monsieur Buonaparte
+ sitting on a throne and granting the petitions of the nations? Adorable!
+ It is enough to make one’s head whirl! It is as if the whole world had
+ gone crazy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew looked Anna Pávlovna straight in the face with a sarcastic
+ smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Dieu me la donne, gare à qui la touche!’’ * They say he was very
+ fine when he said that,” he remarked, repeating the words in Italian: “‘Dio
+ mi l’ha dato. Guai a chi la tocchi!’’ 
+
+
+
+ 
+ * God has given it to me, let him who touches it beware!
+
+
+
+ 
+ “I hope this will prove the last drop that will make the glass run over,”
+ Anna Pávlovna continued. “The sovereigns will not be able to endure this
+ man who is a menace to everything.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The sovereigns? I do not speak of Russia,” said the vicomte, polite but
+ hopeless: “The sovereigns, madame... What have they done for Louis XVII,
+ for the Queen, or for Madame Elizabeth? Nothing!” and he became more
+ animated. “And believe me, they are reaping the reward of their betrayal
+ of the Bourbon cause. The sovereigns! Why, they are sending ambassadors to
+ compliment the usurper.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And sighing disdainfully, he again changed his position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Hippolyte, who had been gazing at the vicomte for some time through
+ his lorgnette, suddenly turned completely round toward the little
+ princess, and having asked for a needle began tracing the Condé coat of
+ arms on the table. He explained this to her with as much gravity as if she
+ had asked him to do it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bâton de gueules, engrêlé de gueules d’azur—maison Condé,” 
+ said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess listened, smiling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If Buonaparte remains on the throne of France a year longer,” the vicomte
+ continued, with the air of a man who, in a matter with which he is better
+ acquainted than anyone else, does not listen to others but follows the
+ current of his own thoughts, “things will have gone too far. By intrigues,
+ violence, exile, and executions, French society—I mean good French
+ society—will have been forever destroyed, and then....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands. Pierre wished to make
+ a remark, for the conversation interested him, but Anna Pávlovna, who had
+ him under observation, interrupted:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Emperor Alexander,” said she, with the melancholy which always
+ accompanied any reference of hers to the Imperial family, “has declared
+ that he will leave it to the French people themselves to choose their own
+ form of government; and I believe that once free from the usurper, the
+ whole nation will certainly throw itself into the arms of its rightful
+ king,” she concluded, trying to be amiable to the royalist emigrant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is doubtful,” said Prince Andrew. “Monsieur le Vicomte quite rightly
+ supposes that matters have already gone too far. I think it will be
+ difficult to return to the old regime.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “From what I have heard,” said Pierre, blushing and breaking into the
+ conversation, “almost all the aristocracy has already gone over to
+ Bonaparte’s side.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is the Buonapartists who say that,” replied the vicomte without
+ looking at Pierre. “At the present time it is difficult to know the real
+ state of French public opinion.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bonaparte has said so,” remarked Prince Andrew with a sarcastic smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was evident that he did not like the vicomte and was aiming his remarks
+ at him, though without looking at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘I showed them the path to glory, but they did not follow it,’” Prince
+ Andrew continued after a short silence, again quoting Napoleon’s words.
+ “‘I opened my antechambers and they crowded in.’ I do not know how far he
+ was justified in saying so.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not in the least,” replied the vicomte. “After the murder of the duc even
+ the most partial ceased to regard him as a hero. If to some people,” he
+ went on, turning to Anna Pávlovna, “he ever was a hero, after the murder
+ of the duc there was one martyr more in heaven and one hero less on
+ earth.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before Anna Pávlovna and the others had time to smile their appreciation
+ of the vicomte’s epigram, Pierre again broke into the conversation, and
+ though Anna Pávlovna felt sure he would say something inappropriate, she
+ was unable to stop him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The execution of the Duc d’Enghien,” declared Monsieur Pierre, “was a
+ political necessity, and it seems to me that Napoleon showed greatness of
+ soul by not fearing to take on himself the whole responsibility of that
+ deed.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dieu! Mon Dieu!” muttered Anna Pávlovna in a terrified whisper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What, Monsieur Pierre... Do you consider that assassination shows
+ greatness of soul?” said the little princess, smiling and drawing her work
+ nearer to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! Oh!” exclaimed several voices.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Capital!” said Prince Hippolyte in English, and began slapping his knee
+ with the palm of his hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The vicomte merely shrugged his shoulders. Pierre looked solemnly at his
+ audience over his spectacles and continued.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I say so,” he continued desperately, “because the Bourbons fled from the
+ Revolution leaving the people to anarchy, and Napoleon alone understood
+ the Revolution and quelled it, and so for the general good, he could not
+ stop short for the sake of one man’s life.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Won’t you come over to the other table?” suggested Anna Pávlovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Pierre continued his speech without heeding her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No,” cried he, becoming more and more eager, “Napoleon is great because
+ he rose superior to the Revolution, suppressed its abuses, preserved all
+ that was good in it—equality of citizenship and freedom of speech
+ and of the press—and only for that reason did he obtain power.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, if having obtained power, without availing himself of it to commit
+ murder he had restored it to the rightful king, I should have called him a
+ great man,” remarked the vicomte.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He could not do that. The people only gave him power that he might rid
+ them of the Bourbons and because they saw that he was a great man. The
+ Revolution was a grand thing!” continued Monsieur Pierre, betraying by
+ this desperate and provocative proposition his extreme youth and his wish
+ to express all that was in his mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What? Revolution and regicide a grand thing?... Well, after that... But
+ won’t you come to this other table?” repeated Anna Pávlovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Rousseau’s Contrat Social ,” said the vicomte with a tolerant
+ smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am not speaking of regicide, I am speaking about ideas.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes: ideas of robbery, murder, and regicide,” again interjected an
+ ironical voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Those were extremes, no doubt, but they are not what is most important.
+ What is important are the rights of man, emancipation from prejudices, and
+ equality of citizenship, and all these ideas Napoleon has retained in full
+ force.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Liberty and equality,” said the vicomte contemptuously, as if at last
+ deciding seriously to prove to this youth how foolish his words were,
+ “high-sounding words which have long been discredited. Who does not love
+ liberty and equality? Even our Saviour preached liberty and equality. Have
+ people since the Revolution become happier? On the contrary. We wanted
+ liberty, but Buonaparte has destroyed it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew kept looking with an amused smile from Pierre to the vicomte
+ and from the vicomte to their hostess. In the first moment of Pierre’s
+ outburst Anna Pávlovna, despite her social experience, was horror-struck.
+ But when she saw that Pierre’s sacrilegious words had not exasperated the
+ vicomte, and had convinced herself that it was impossible to stop him, she
+ rallied her forces and joined the vicomte in a vigorous attack on the
+ orator.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But, my dear Monsieur Pierre,” said she, “how do you explain the fact of
+ a great man executing a duc—or even an ordinary man who—is
+ innocent and untried?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I should like,” said the vicomte, “to ask how monsieur explains the 18th
+ Brumaire; was not that an imposture? It was a swindle, and not at all like
+ the conduct of a great man!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And the prisoners he killed in Africa? That was horrible!” said the
+ little princess, shrugging her shoulders.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s a low fellow, say what you will,” remarked Prince Hippolyte.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre, not knowing whom to answer, looked at them all and smiled. His
+ smile was unlike the half-smile of other people. When he smiled, his
+ grave, even rather gloomy, look was instantaneously replaced by another—a
+ childlike, kindly, even rather silly look, which seemed to ask
+ forgiveness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The vicomte who was meeting him for the first time saw clearly that this
+ young Jacobin was not so terrible as his words suggested. All were silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How do you expect him to answer you all at once?” said Prince Andrew.
+ “Besides, in the actions of a statesman one has to distinguish between his
+ acts as a private person, as a general, and as an emperor. So it seems to
+ me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, of course!” Pierre chimed in, pleased at the arrival of this
+ reinforcement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One must admit,” continued Prince Andrew, “that Napoleon as a man was
+ great on the bridge of Arcola, and in the hospital at Jaffa where he gave
+ his hand to the plague-stricken; but ... but there are other acts which it
+ is difficult to justify.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew, who had evidently wished to tone down the awkwardness of
+ Pierre’s remarks, rose and made a sign to his wife that it was time to go.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly Prince Hippolyte started up making signs to everyone to attend,
+ and asking them all to be seated began:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was told a charming Moscow story today and must treat you to it. Excuse
+ me, Vicomte—I must tell it in Russian or the point will be lost....”
+ And Prince Hippolyte began to tell his story in such Russian as a
+ Frenchman would speak after spending about a year in Russia. Everyone
+ waited, so emphatically and eagerly did he demand their attention to his
+ story.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There is in Moscow a lady, une dame , and she is very stingy. She
+ must have two footmen behind her carriage, and very big ones. That was her
+ taste. And she had a lady’s maid, also big. She said....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Here Prince Hippolyte paused, evidently collecting his ideas with
+ difficulty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She said.... Oh yes! She said, ‘Girl,’ to the maid, ‘put on a livery, get
+ up behind the carriage, and come with me while I make some calls.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Here Prince Hippolyte spluttered and burst out laughing long before his
+ audience, which produced an effect unfavorable to the narrator. Several
+ persons, among them the elderly lady and Anna Pávlovna, did however smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She went. Suddenly there was a great wind. The girl lost her hat and her
+ long hair came down....” Here he could contain himself no longer and went
+ on, between gasps of laughter: “And the whole world knew....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And so the anecdote ended. Though it was unintelligible why he had told
+ it, or why it had to be told in Russian, still Anna Pávlovna and the
+ others appreciated Prince Hippolyte’s social tact in so agreeably ending
+ Pierre’s unpleasant and unamiable outburst. After the anecdote the
+ conversation broke up into insignificant small talk about the last and
+ next balls, about theatricals, and who would meet whom, and when and
+ where.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ Having thanked Anna Pávlovna for her charming soiree, the guests began to
+ take their leave.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was ungainly. Stout, about the average height, broad, with huge red
+ hands; he did not know, as the saying is, how to enter a drawing room and
+ still less how to leave one; that is, how to say something particularly
+ agreeable before going away. Besides this he was absent-minded. When he
+ rose to go, he took up instead of his own, the general’s three-cornered
+ hat, and held it, pulling at the plume, till the general asked him to
+ restore it. All his absent-mindedness and inability to enter a room and
+ converse in it was, however, redeemed by his kindly, simple, and modest
+ expression. Anna Pávlovna turned toward him and, with a Christian mildness
+ that expressed forgiveness of his indiscretion, nodded and said: “I hope
+ to see you again, but I also hope you will change your opinions, my dear
+ Monsieur Pierre.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When she said this, he did not reply and only bowed, but again everybody
+ saw his smile, which said nothing, unless perhaps, “Opinions are opinions,
+ but you see what a capital, good-natured fellow I am.” And everyone,
+ including Anna Pávlovna, felt this.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew had gone out into the hall, and, turning his shoulders to
+ the footman who was helping him on with his cloak, listened indifferently
+ to his wife’s chatter with Prince Hippolyte who had also come into the
+ hall. Prince Hippolyte stood close to the pretty, pregnant princess, and
+ stared fixedly at her through his eyeglass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go in, Annette, or you will catch cold,” said the little princess, taking
+ leave of Anna Pávlovna. “It is settled,” she added in a low voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Pávlovna had already managed to speak to Lise about the match she
+ contemplated between Anatole and the little princess’ sister-in-law.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I rely on you, my dear,” said Anna Pávlovna, also in a low tone. “Write
+ to her and let me know how her father looks at the matter. Au revoir!
+ ”—and she left the hall.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Hippolyte approached the little princess and, bending his face
+ close to her, began to whisper something.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Two footmen, the princess’ and his own, stood holding a shawl and a cloak,
+ waiting for the conversation to finish. They listened to the French
+ sentences which to them were meaningless, with an air of understanding but
+ not wishing to appear to do so. The princess as usual spoke smilingly and
+ listened with a laugh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am very glad I did not go to the ambassador’s,” said Prince Hippolyte “—so
+ dull—. It has been a delightful evening, has it not? Delightful!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They say the ball will be very good,” replied the princess, drawing up
+ her downy little lip. “All the pretty women in society will be there.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not all, for you will not be there; not all,” said Prince Hippolyte
+ smiling joyfully; and snatching the shawl from the footman, whom he even
+ pushed aside, he began wrapping it round the princess. Either from
+ awkwardness or intentionally (no one could have said which) after the
+ shawl had been adjusted he kept his arm around her for a long time, as
+ though embracing her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Still smiling, she gracefully moved away, turning and glancing at her
+ husband. Prince Andrew’s eyes were closed, so weary and sleepy did he
+ seem.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Are you ready?” he asked his wife, looking past her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Hippolyte hurriedly put on his cloak, which in the latest fashion
+ reached to his very heels, and, stumbling in it, ran out into the porch
+ following the princess, whom a footman was helping into the carriage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Princesse, au revoir,” cried he, stumbling with his tongue as well
+ as with his feet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess, picking up her dress, was taking her seat in the dark
+ carriage, her husband was adjusting his saber; Prince Hippolyte, under
+ pretense of helping, was in everyone’s way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Allow me, sir,” said Prince Andrew in Russian in a cold, disagreeable
+ tone to Prince Hippolyte who was blocking his path.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am expecting you, Pierre,” said the same voice, but gently and
+ affectionately.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The postilion started, the carriage wheels rattled. Prince Hippolyte
+ laughed spasmodically as he stood in the porch waiting for the vicomte
+ whom he had promised to take home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, mon cher ,” said the vicomte, having seated himself beside
+ Hippolyte in the carriage, “your little princess is very nice, very nice
+ indeed, quite French,” and he kissed the tips of his fingers. Hippolyte
+ burst out laughing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know, you are a terrible chap for all your innocent airs,”
+ continued the vicomte. “I pity the poor husband, that little officer who
+ gives himself the airs of a monarch.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hippolyte spluttered again, and amid his laughter said, “And you were
+ saying that the Russian ladies are not equal to the French? One has to
+ know how to deal with them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre reaching the house first went into Prince Andrew’s study like one
+ quite at home, and from habit immediately lay down on the sofa, took from
+ the shelf the first book that came to his hand (it was Caesar’s Commentaries ),
+ and resting on his elbow, began reading it in the middle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What have you done to Mlle Schérer? She will be quite ill now,” said
+ Prince Andrew, as he entered the study, rubbing his small white hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre turned his whole body, making the sofa creak. He lifted his eager
+ face to Prince Andrew, smiled, and waved his hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That abbé is very interesting but he does not see the thing in the right
+ light.... In my opinion perpetual peace is possible but—I do not
+ know how to express it ... not by a balance of political power....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was evident that Prince Andrew was not interested in such abstract
+ conversation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One can’t everywhere say all one thinks, mon cher . Well, have you
+ at last decided on anything? Are you going to be a guardsman or a
+ diplomatist?” asked Prince Andrew after a momentary silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre sat up on the sofa, with his legs tucked under him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Really, I don’t yet know. I don’t like either the one or the other.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you must decide on something! Your father expects it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre at the age of ten had been sent abroad with an abbé as tutor, and
+ had remained away till he was twenty. When he returned to Moscow his
+ father dismissed the abbé and said to the young man, “Now go to
+ Petersburg, look round, and choose your profession. I will agree to
+ anything. Here is a letter to Prince Vasíli, and here is money. Write to
+ me all about it, and I will help you in everything.” Pierre had already
+ been choosing a career for three months, and had not decided on anything.
+ It was about this choice that Prince Andrew was speaking. Pierre rubbed
+ his forehead.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But he must be a Freemason,” said he, referring to the abbé whom he had
+ met that evening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is all nonsense.” Prince Andrew again interrupted him, “let us talk
+ business. Have you been to the Horse Guards?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I have not; but this is what I have been thinking and wanted to tell
+ you. There is a war now against Napoleon. If it were a war for freedom I
+ could understand it and should be the first to enter the army; but to help
+ England and Austria against the greatest man in the world is not right.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew only shrugged his shoulders at Pierre’s childish words. He
+ put on the air of one who finds it impossible to reply to such nonsense,
+ but it would in fact have been difficult to give any other answer than the
+ one Prince Andrew gave to this naïve question.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars,”
+ he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And that would be splendid,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew smiled ironically.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very likely it would be splendid, but it will never come about....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, why are you going to the war?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What for? I don’t know. I must. Besides that I am going....” He paused.
+ “I am going because the life I am leading here does not suit me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ The rustle of a woman’s dress was heard in the next room. Prince Andrew
+ shook himself as if waking up, and his face assumed the look it had had in
+ Anna Pávlovna’s drawing room. Pierre removed his feet from the sofa. The
+ princess came in. She had changed her gown for a house dress as fresh and
+ elegant as the other. Prince Andrew rose and politely placed a chair for
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How is it,” she began, as usual in French, settling down briskly and
+ fussily in the easy chair, “how is it Annette never got married? How
+ stupid you men all are not to have married her! Excuse me for saying so,
+ but you have no sense about women. What an argumentative fellow you are,
+ Monsieur Pierre!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I am still arguing with your husband. I can’t understand why he wants
+ to go to the war,” replied Pierre, addressing the princess with none of
+ the embarrassment so commonly shown by young men in their intercourse with
+ young women.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess started. Evidently Pierre’s words touched her to the quick.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, that is just what I tell him!” said she. “I don’t understand it; I
+ don’t in the least understand why men can’t live without wars. How is it
+ that we women don’t want anything of the kind, don’t need it? Now you
+ shall judge between us. I always tell him: Here he is Uncle’s
+ aide-de-camp, a most brilliant position. He is so well known, so much
+ appreciated by everyone. The other day at the Apráksins’ I heard a lady
+ asking, ‘Is that the famous Prince Andrew?’ I did indeed.” She laughed.
+ “He is so well received everywhere. He might easily become aide-de-camp to
+ the Emperor. You know the Emperor spoke to him most graciously. Annette
+ and I were speaking of how to arrange it. What do you think?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked at his friend and, noticing that he did not like the
+ conversation, gave no reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When are you starting?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, don’t speak of his going, don’t! I won’t hear it spoken of,” said the
+ princess in the same petulantly playful tone in which she had spoken to
+ Hippolyte in the drawing room and which was so plainly ill-suited to the
+ family circle of which Pierre was almost a member. “Today when I
+ remembered that all these delightful associations must be broken off ...
+ and then you know, André...” (she looked significantly at her husband)
+ “I’m afraid, I’m afraid!” she whispered, and a shudder ran down her back.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her husband looked at her as if surprised to notice that someone besides
+ Pierre and himself was in the room, and addressed her in a tone of frigid
+ politeness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it you are afraid of, Lise? I don’t understand,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There, what egotists men all are: all, all egotists! Just for a whim of
+ his own, goodness only knows why, he leaves me and locks me up alone in
+ the country.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “With my father and sister, remember,” said Prince Andrew gently.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Alone all the same, without my friends.... And he expects me not
+ to be afraid.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her tone was now querulous and her lip drawn up, giving her not a joyful,
+ but an animal, squirrel-like expression. She paused as if she felt it
+ indecorous to speak of her pregnancy before Pierre, though the gist of the
+ matter lay in that.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I still can’t understand what you are afraid of,” said Prince Andrew
+ slowly, not taking his eyes off his wife.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess blushed, and raised her arms with a gesture of despair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Andrew, I must say you have changed. Oh, how you have....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your doctor tells you to go to bed earlier,” said Prince Andrew. “You had
+ better go.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess said nothing, but suddenly her short downy lip quivered.
+ Prince Andrew rose, shrugged his shoulders, and walked about the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked over his spectacles with naïve surprise, now at him and now
+ at her, moved as if about to rise too, but changed his mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why should I mind Monsieur Pierre being here?” exclaimed the little
+ princess suddenly, her pretty face all at once distorted by a tearful
+ grimace. “I have long wanted to ask you, Andrew, why you have changed so
+ to me? What have I done to you? You are going to the war and have no pity
+ for me. Why is it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lise!” was all Prince Andrew said. But that one word expressed an
+ entreaty, a threat, and above all conviction that she would herself regret
+ her words. But she went on hurriedly:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You treat me like an invalid or a child. I see it all! Did you behave
+ like that six months ago?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lise, I beg you to desist,” said Prince Andrew still more emphatically.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre, who had been growing more and more agitated as he listened to all
+ this, rose and approached the princess. He seemed unable to bear the sight
+ of tears and was ready to cry himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Calm yourself, Princess! It seems so to you because.... I assure you I
+ myself have experienced ... and so ... because ... No, excuse me! An
+ outsider is out of place here.... No, don’t distress yourself....
+ Good-by!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew caught him by the hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, wait, Pierre! The princess is too kind to wish to deprive me of the
+ pleasure of spending the evening with you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, he thinks only of himself,” muttered the princess without restraining
+ her angry tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lise!” said Prince Andrew dryly, raising his voice to the pitch which
+ indicates that patience is exhausted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly the angry, squirrel-like expression of the princess’ pretty face
+ changed into a winning and piteous look of fear. Her beautiful eyes
+ glanced askance at her husband’s face, and her own assumed the timid,
+ deprecating expression of a dog when it rapidly but feebly wags its
+ drooping tail.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!” she muttered, and lifting her dress with one
+ hand she went up to her husband and kissed him on the forehead.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good night, Lise,” said he, rising and courteously kissing her hand as he
+ would have done to a stranger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ The friends were silent. Neither cared to begin talking. Pierre
+ continually glanced at Prince Andrew; Prince Andrew rubbed his forehead
+ with his small hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let us go and have supper,” he said with a sigh, going to the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They entered the elegant, newly decorated, and luxurious dining room.
+ Everything from the table napkins to the silver, china, and glass bore
+ that imprint of newness found in the households of the newly married.
+ Halfway through supper Prince Andrew leaned his elbows on the table and,
+ with a look of nervous agitation such as Pierre had never before seen on
+ his face, began to talk—as one who has long had something on his
+ mind and suddenly determines to speak out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Never, never marry, my dear fellow! That’s my advice: never marry till
+ you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of, and
+ until you have ceased to love the woman of your choice and have seen her
+ plainly as she is, or else you will make a cruel and irrevocable mistake.
+ Marry when you are old and good for nothing—or all that is good and
+ noble in you will be lost. It will all be wasted on trifles. Yes! Yes!
+ Yes! Don’t look at me with such surprise. If you marry expecting anything
+ from yourself in the future, you will feel at every step that for you all
+ is ended, all is closed except the drawing room, where you will be ranged
+ side by side with a court lackey and an idiot!... But what’s the good?...”
+ and he waved his arm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre took off his spectacles, which made his face seem different and the
+ good-natured expression still more apparent, and gazed at his friend in
+ amazement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My wife,” continued Prince Andrew, “is an excellent woman, one of those
+ rare women with whom a man’s honor is safe; but, O God, what would I not
+ give now to be unmarried! You are the first and only one to whom I mention
+ this, because I like you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he said this Prince Andrew was less than ever like that Bolkónski who
+ had lolled in Anna Pávlovna’s easy chairs and with half-closed eyes had
+ uttered French phrases between his teeth. Every muscle of his thin face
+ was now quivering with nervous excitement; his eyes, in which the fire of
+ life had seemed extinguished, now flashed with brilliant light. It was
+ evident that the more lifeless he seemed at ordinary times, the more
+ impassioned he became in these moments of almost morbid irritation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You don’t understand why I say this,” he continued, “but it is the whole
+ story of life. You talk of Bonaparte and his career,” said he (though
+ Pierre had not mentioned Bonaparte), “but Bonaparte when he worked went
+ step by step toward his goal. He was free, he had nothing but his aim to
+ consider, and he reached it. But tie yourself up with a woman and, like a
+ chained convict, you lose all freedom! And all you have of hope and
+ strength merely weighs you down and torments you with regret. Drawing
+ rooms, gossip, balls, vanity, and triviality—these are the enchanted
+ circle I cannot escape from. I am now going to the war, the greatest war
+ there ever was, and I know nothing and am fit for nothing. I am very
+ amiable and have a caustic wit,” continued Prince Andrew, “and at Anna
+ Pávlovna’s they listen to me. And that stupid set without whom my wife
+ cannot exist, and those women.... If you only knew what those society
+ women are, and women in general! My father is right. Selfish, vain,
+ stupid, trivial in everything—that’s what women are when you see
+ them in their true colors! When you meet them in society it seems as if
+ there were something in them, but there’s nothing, nothing, nothing! No,
+ don’t marry, my dear fellow; don’t marry!” concluded Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It seems funny to me,” said Pierre, “that you, you should consider
+ yourself incapable and your life a spoiled life. You have everything
+ before you, everything. And you....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not finish his sentence, but his tone showed how highly he thought
+ of his friend and how much he expected of him in the future.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How can he talk like that?” thought Pierre. He considered his friend a
+ model of perfection because Prince Andrew possessed in the highest degree
+ just the very qualities Pierre lacked, and which might be best described
+ as strength of will. Pierre was always astonished at Prince Andrew’s calm
+ manner of treating everybody, his extraordinary memory, his extensive
+ reading (he had read everything, knew everything, and had an opinion about
+ everything), but above all at his capacity for work and study. And if
+ Pierre was often struck by Andrew’s lack of capacity for philosophical
+ meditation (to which he himself was particularly addicted), he regarded
+ even this not as a defect but as a sign of strength.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Even in the best, most friendly and simplest relations of life, praise and
+ commendation are essential, just as grease is necessary to wheels that
+ they may run smoothly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My part is played out,” said Prince Andrew. “What’s the use of talking
+ about me? Let us talk about you,” he added after a silence, smiling at his
+ reassuring thoughts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That smile was immediately reflected on Pierre’s face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what is there to say about me?” said Pierre, his face relaxing into a
+ careless, merry smile. “What am I? An illegitimate son!” He suddenly
+ blushed crimson, and it was plain that he had made a great effort to say
+ this. “Without a name and without means... And it really...” But he did
+ not say what “it really” was. “For the present I am free and am all right.
+ Only I haven’t the least idea what I am to do; I wanted to consult you
+ seriously.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew looked kindly at him, yet his glance—friendly and
+ affectionate as it was—expressed a sense of his own superiority.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am fond of you, especially as you are the one live man among our whole
+ set. Yes, you’re all right! Choose what you will; it’s all the same.
+ You’ll be all right anywhere. But look here: give up visiting those
+ Kurágins and leading that sort of life. It suits you so badly—all
+ this debauchery, dissipation, and the rest of it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What would you have, my dear fellow?” answered Pierre, shrugging his
+ shoulders. “Women, my dear fellow; women!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t understand it,” replied Prince Andrew. “Women who are comme il
+ faut , that’s a different matter; but the Kurágins’ set of women,
+ ‘women and wine’ I don’t understand!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was staying at Prince Vasíli Kurágin’s and sharing the dissipated
+ life of his son Anatole, the son whom they were planning to reform by
+ marrying him to Prince Andrew’s sister.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know?” said Pierre, as if suddenly struck by a happy thought,
+ “seriously, I have long been thinking of it.... Leading such a life I
+ can’t decide or think properly about anything. One’s head aches, and one
+ spends all one’s money. He asked me for tonight, but I won’t go.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You give me your word of honor not to go?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On my honor!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ It was past one o’clock when Pierre left his friend. It was a cloudless,
+ northern, summer night. Pierre took an open cab intending to drive
+ straight home. But the nearer he drew to the house the more he felt the
+ impossibility of going to sleep on such a night. It was light enough to
+ see a long way in the deserted street and it seemed more like morning or
+ evening than night. On the way Pierre remembered that Anatole Kurágin was
+ expecting the usual set for cards that evening, after which there was
+ generally a drinking bout, finishing with visits of a kind Pierre was very
+ fond of.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I should like to go to Kurágin’s,” thought he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But he immediately recalled his promise to Prince Andrew not to go there.
+ Then, as happens to people of weak character, he desired so passionately
+ once more to enjoy that dissipation he was so accustomed to that he
+ decided to go. The thought immediately occurred to him that his promise to
+ Prince Andrew was of no account, because before he gave it he had already
+ promised Prince Anatole to come to his gathering; “besides,” thought he,
+ “all such ‘words of honor’ are conventional things with no definite
+ meaning, especially if one considers that by tomorrow one may be dead, or
+ something so extraordinary may happen to one that honor and dishonor will
+ be all the same!” Pierre often indulged in reflections of this sort,
+ nullifying all his decisions and intentions. He went to Kurágin’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Reaching the large house near the Horse Guards’ barracks, in which Anatole
+ lived, Pierre entered the lighted porch, ascended the stairs, and went in
+ at the open door. There was no one in the anteroom; empty bottles, cloaks,
+ and overshoes were lying about; there was a smell of alcohol, and sounds
+ of voices and shouting in the distance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Cards and supper were over, but the visitors had not yet dispersed. Pierre
+ threw off his cloak and entered the first room, in which were the remains
+ of supper. A footman, thinking no one saw him, was drinking on the sly
+ what was left in the glasses. From the third room came sounds of laughter,
+ the shouting of familiar voices, the growling of a bear, and general
+ commotion. Some eight or nine young men were crowding anxiously round an
+ open window. Three others were romping with a young bear, one pulling him
+ by the chain and trying to set him at the others.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I bet a hundred on Stevens!” shouted one.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mind, no holding on!” cried another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I bet on Dólokhov!” cried a third. “Kurágin, you part our hands.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There, leave Bruin alone; here’s a bet on.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At one draught, or he loses!” shouted a fourth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Jacob, bring a bottle!” shouted the host, a tall, handsome fellow who
+ stood in the midst of the group, without a coat, and with his fine linen
+ shirt unfastened in front. “Wait a bit, you fellows.... Here is Pétya!
+ Good man!” cried he, addressing Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Another voice, from a man of medium height with clear blue eyes,
+ particularly striking among all these drunken voices by its sober ring,
+ cried from the window: “Come here; part the bets!” This was Dólokhov, an
+ officer of the Semënov regiment, a notorious gambler and duelist, who was
+ living with Anatole. Pierre smiled, looking about him merrily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t understand. What’s it all about?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wait a bit, he is not drunk yet! A bottle here,” said Anatole,
+ and taking a glass from the table he went up to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “First of all you must drink!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre drank one glass after another, looking from under his brows at the
+ tipsy guests who were again crowding round the window, and listening to
+ their chatter. Anatole kept on refilling Pierre’s glass while explaining
+ that Dólokhov was betting with Stevens, an English naval officer, that he
+ would drink a bottle of rum sitting on the outer ledge of the third floor
+ window with his legs hanging out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go on, you must drink it all,” said Anatole, giving Pierre the last
+ glass, “or I won’t let you go!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I won’t,” said Pierre, pushing Anatole aside, and he went up to the
+ window.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov was holding the Englishman’s hand and clearly and distinctly
+ repeating the terms of the bet, addressing himself particularly to Anatole
+ and Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov was of medium height, with curly hair and light-blue eyes. He was
+ about twenty-five. Like all infantry officers he wore no mustache, so that
+ his mouth, the most striking feature of his face, was clearly seen. The
+ lines of that mouth were remarkably finely curved. The middle of the upper
+ lip formed a sharp wedge and closed firmly on the firm lower one, and
+ something like two distinct smiles played continually round the two
+ corners of the mouth; this, together with the resolute, insolent
+ intelligence of his eyes, produced an effect which made it impossible not
+ to notice his face. Dólokhov was a man of small means and no connections.
+ Yet, though Anatole spent tens of thousands of rubles, Dólokhov lived with
+ him and had placed himself on such a footing that all who knew them,
+ including Anatole himself, respected him more than they did Anatole.
+ Dólokhov could play all games and nearly always won. However much he
+ drank, he never lost his clearheadedness. Both Kurágin and Dólokhov were
+ at that time notorious among the rakes and scapegraces of Petersburg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The bottle of rum was brought. The window frame which prevented anyone
+ from sitting on the outer sill was being forced out by two footmen, who
+ were evidently flurried and intimidated by the directions and shouts of
+ the gentlemen around.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole with his swaggering air strode up to the window. He wanted to
+ smash something. Pushing away the footmen he tugged at the frame, but
+ could not move it. He smashed a pane.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You have a try, Hercules,” said he, turning to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre seized the crossbeam, tugged, and wrenched the oak frame out with a
+ crash.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Take it right out, or they’ll think I’m holding on,” said Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is the Englishman bragging?... Eh? Is it all right?” said Anatole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “First-rate,” said Pierre, looking at Dólokhov, who with a bottle of rum
+ in his hand was approaching the window, from which the light of the sky,
+ the dawn merging with the afterglow of sunset, was visible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov, the bottle of rum still in his hand, jumped onto the window
+ sill. “Listen!” cried he, standing there and addressing those in the room.
+ All were silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I bet fifty imperials”—he spoke French that the Englishman might
+ understand him, but he did not speak it very well—“I bet fifty
+ imperials ... or do you wish to make it a hundred?” added he, addressing
+ the Englishman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, fifty,” replied the latter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right. Fifty imperials ... that I will drink a whole bottle of rum
+ without taking it from my mouth, sitting outside the window on this spot”
+ (he stooped and pointed to the sloping ledge outside the window) “and
+ without holding on to anything. Is that right?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Quite right,” said the Englishman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole turned to the Englishman and taking him by one of the buttons of
+ his coat and looking down at him—the Englishman was short—began
+ repeating the terms of the wager to him in English.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wait!” cried Dólokhov, hammering with the bottle on the window sill to
+ attract attention. “Wait a bit, Kurágin. Listen! If anyone else does the
+ same, I will pay him a hundred imperials. Do you understand?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Englishman nodded, but gave no indication whether he intended to
+ accept this challenge or not. Anatole did not release him, and though he
+ kept nodding to show that he understood, Anatole went on translating
+ Dólokhov’s words into English. A thin young lad, an hussar of the Life
+ Guards, who had been losing that evening, climbed on the window sill,
+ leaned over, and looked down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! Oh! Oh!” he muttered, looking down from the window at the stones of
+ the pavement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Shut up!” cried Dólokhov, pushing him away from the window. The lad
+ jumped awkwardly back into the room, tripping over his spurs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Placing the bottle on the window sill where he could reach it easily,
+ Dólokhov climbed carefully and slowly through the window and lowered his
+ legs. Pressing against both sides of the window, he adjusted himself on
+ his seat, lowered his hands, moved a little to the right and then to the
+ left, and took up the bottle. Anatole brought two candles and placed them
+ on the window sill, though it was already quite light. Dólokhov’s back in
+ his white shirt, and his curly head, were lit up from both sides. Everyone
+ crowded to the window, the Englishman in front. Pierre stood smiling but
+ silent. One man, older than the others present, suddenly pushed forward
+ with a scared and angry look and wanted to seize hold of Dólokhov’s shirt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I say, this is folly! He’ll be killed,” said this more sensible man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole stopped him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t touch him! You’ll startle him and then he’ll be killed. Eh?... What
+ then?... Eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov turned round and, again holding on with both hands, arranged
+ himself on his seat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If anyone comes meddling again,” said he, emitting the words separately
+ through his thin compressed lips, “I will throw him down there. Now then!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Saying this he again turned round, dropped his hands, took the bottle and
+ lifted it to his lips, threw back his head, and raised his free hand to
+ balance himself. One of the footmen who had stooped to pick up some broken
+ glass remained in that position without taking his eyes from the window
+ and from Dólokhov’s back. Anatole stood erect with staring eyes. The
+ Englishman looked on sideways, pursing up his lips. The man who had wished
+ to stop the affair ran to a corner of the room and threw himself on a sofa
+ with his face to the wall. Pierre hid his face, from which a faint smile
+ forgot to fade though his features now expressed horror and fear. All were
+ still. Pierre took his hands from his eyes. Dólokhov still sat in the same
+ position, only his head was thrown further back till his curly hair
+ touched his shirt collar, and the hand holding the bottle was lifted
+ higher and higher and trembled with the effort. The bottle was emptying
+ perceptibly and rising still higher and his head tilting yet further back.
+ “Why is it so long?” thought Pierre. It seemed to him that more than half
+ an hour had elapsed. Suddenly Dólokhov made a backward movement with his
+ spine, and his arm trembled nervously; this was sufficient to cause his
+ whole body to slip as he sat on the sloping ledge. As he began slipping
+ down, his head and arm wavered still more with the strain. One hand moved
+ as if to clutch the window sill, but refrained from touching it. Pierre
+ again covered his eyes and thought he would never open them again.
+ Suddenly he was aware of a stir all around. He looked up: Dólokhov was
+ standing on the window sill, with a pale but radiant face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s empty.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He threw the bottle to the Englishman, who caught it neatly. Dólokhov
+ jumped down. He smelt strongly of rum.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well done!... Fine fellow!... There’s a bet for you!... Devil take you!”
+ came from different sides.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Englishman took out his purse and began counting out the money.
+ Dólokhov stood frowning and did not speak. Pierre jumped upon the window
+ sill.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gentlemen, who wishes to bet with me? I’ll do the same thing!” he
+ suddenly cried. “Even without a bet, there! Tell them to bring me a
+ bottle. I’ll do it.... Bring a bottle!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let him do it, let him do it,” said Dólokhov, smiling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What next? Have you gone mad?... No one would let you!... Why, you go
+ giddy even on a staircase,” exclaimed several voices.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll drink it! Let’s have a bottle of rum!” shouted Pierre, banging the
+ table with a determined and drunken gesture and preparing to climb out of
+ the window.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They seized him by his arms; but he was so strong that everyone who
+ touched him was sent flying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, you’ll never manage him that way,” said Anatole. “Wait a bit and I’ll
+ get round him.... Listen! I’ll take your bet tomorrow, but now we are all
+ going to ——’s.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come on then,” cried Pierre. “Come on!... And we’ll take Bruin with us.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And he caught the bear, took it in his arms, lifted it from the ground,
+ and began dancing round the room with it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli kept the promise he had given to Princess Drubetskáya who
+ had spoken to him on behalf of her only son Borís on the evening of Anna
+ Pávlovna’s soiree. The matter was mentioned to the Emperor, an exception
+ made, and Borís transferred into the regiment of Semënov Guards with the
+ rank of cornet. He received, however, no appointment to Kutúzov’s staff
+ despite all Anna Mikháylovna’s endeavors and entreaties. Soon after Anna
+ Pávlovna’s reception Anna Mikháylovna returned to Moscow and went straight
+ to her rich relations, the Rostóvs, with whom she stayed when in the town
+ and where her darling Bóry, who had only just entered a regiment of the
+ line and was being at once transferred to the Guards as a cornet, had been
+ educated from childhood and lived for years at a time. The Guards had
+ already left Petersburg on the tenth of August, and her son, who had
+ remained in Moscow for his equipment, was to join them on the march to
+ Radzivílov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was St. Natalia’s day and the name day of two of the Rostóvs—the
+ mother and the youngest daughter—both named Nataly. Ever since the
+ morning, carriages with six horses had been coming and going continually,
+ bringing visitors to the Countess Rostóva’s big house on the Povarskáya,
+ so well known to all Moscow. The countess herself and her handsome eldest
+ daughter were in the drawing room with the visitors who came to
+ congratulate, and who constantly succeeded one another in relays.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess was a woman of about forty-five, with a thin Oriental type of
+ face, evidently worn out with childbearing—she had had twelve. A
+ languor of motion and speech, resulting from weakness, gave her a
+ distinguished air which inspired respect. Princess Anna Mikháylovna
+ Drubetskáya, who as a member of the household was also seated in the
+ drawing room, helped to receive and entertain the visitors. The young
+ people were in one of the inner rooms, not considering it necessary to
+ take part in receiving the visitors. The count met the guests and saw them
+ off, inviting them all to dinner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am very, very grateful to you, mon cher ,” or “ma chère” —he
+ called everyone without exception and without the slightest variation in
+ his tone, “my dear,” whether they were above or below him in rank—“I
+ thank you for myself and for our two dear ones whose name day we are
+ keeping. But mind you come to dinner or I shall be offended, ma chère! 
+ On behalf of the whole family I beg you to come, mon cher! ” These
+ words he repeated to everyone without exception or variation, and with the
+ same expression on his full, cheerful, clean-shaven face, the same firm
+ pressure of the hand and the same quick, repeated bows. As soon as he had
+ seen a visitor off he returned to one of those who were still in the
+ drawing room, drew a chair toward him or her, and jauntily spreading out
+ his legs and putting his hands on his knees with the air of a man who
+ enjoys life and knows how to live, he swayed to and fro with dignity,
+ offered surmises about the weather, or touched on questions of health,
+ sometimes in Russian and sometimes in very bad but self-confident French;
+ then again, like a man weary but unflinching in the fulfillment of duty,
+ he rose to see some visitors off and, stroking his scanty gray hairs over
+ his bald patch, also asked them to dinner. Sometimes on his way back from
+ the anteroom he would pass through the conservatory and pantry into the
+ large marble dining hall, where tables were being set out for eighty
+ people; and looking at the footmen, who were bringing in silver and china,
+ moving tables, and unfolding damask table linen, he would call Dmítri
+ Vasílevich, a man of good family and the manager of all his affairs, and
+ while looking with pleasure at the enormous table would say: “Well,
+ Dmítri, you’ll see that things are all as they should be? That’s right!
+ The great thing is the serving, that’s it.” And with a complacent sigh he
+ would return to the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Márya Lvóvna Karágina and her daughter!” announced the countess’ gigantic
+ footman in his bass voice, entering the drawing room. The countess
+ reflected a moment and took a pinch from a gold snuffbox with her
+ husband’s portrait on it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’m quite worn out by these callers. However, I’ll see her and no more.
+ She is so affected. Ask her in,” she said to the footman in a sad voice,
+ as if saying: “Very well, finish me off.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A tall, stout, and proud-looking woman, with a round-faced smiling
+ daughter, entered the drawing room, their dresses rustling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear Countess, what an age... She has been laid up, poor child ... at the
+ Razumóvski’s ball ... and Countess Apráksina ... I was so delighted...”
+ came the sounds of animated feminine voices, interrupting one another and
+ mingling with the rustling of dresses and the scraping of chairs. Then one
+ of those conversations began which last out until, at the first pause, the
+ guests rise with a rustle of dresses and say, “I am so delighted...
+ Mamma’s health... and Countess Apráksina...” and then, again rustling,
+ pass into the anteroom, put on cloaks or mantles, and drive away. The
+ conversation was on the chief topic of the day: the illness of the wealthy
+ and celebrated beau of Catherine’s day, Count Bezúkhov, and about his
+ illegitimate son Pierre, the one who had behaved so improperly at Anna
+ Pávlovna’s reception.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am so sorry for the poor count,” said the visitor. “He is in such bad
+ health, and now this vexation about his son is enough to kill him!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is that?” asked the countess as if she did not know what the visitor
+ alluded to, though she had already heard about the cause of Count
+ Bezúkhov’s distress some fifteen times.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s what comes of a modern education,” exclaimed the visitor. “It
+ seems that while he was abroad this young man was allowed to do as he
+ liked, now in Petersburg I hear he has been doing such terrible things
+ that he has been expelled by the police.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You don’t say so!” replied the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He chose his friends badly,” interposed Anna Mikháylovna. “Prince
+ Vasíli’s son, he, and a certain Dólokhov have, it is said, been up to
+ heaven only knows what! And they have had to suffer for it. Dólokhov has
+ been degraded to the ranks and Bezúkhov’s son sent back to Moscow. Anatole
+ Kurágin’s father managed somehow to get his son’s affair hushed up, but
+ even he was ordered out of Petersburg.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what have they been up to?” asked the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They are regular brigands, especially Dólokhov,” replied the visitor. “He
+ is a son of Márya Ivánovna Dólokhova, such a worthy woman, but there, just
+ fancy! Those three got hold of a bear somewhere, put it in a carriage, and
+ set off with it to visit some actresses! The police tried to interfere,
+ and what did the young men do? They tied a policeman and the bear back to
+ back and put the bear into the Moyka Canal. And there was the bear
+ swimming about with the policeman on his back!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a nice figure the policeman must have cut, my dear!” shouted the
+ count, dying with laughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, how dreadful! How can you laugh at it, Count?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Yet the ladies themselves could not help laughing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It was all they could do to rescue the poor man,” continued the visitor.
+ “And to think it is Cyril Vladímirovich Bezúkhov’s son who amuses himself
+ in this sensible manner! And he was said to be so well educated and
+ clever. This is all that his foreign education has done for him! I hope
+ that here in Moscow no one will receive him, in spite of his money. They
+ wanted to introduce him to me, but I quite declined: I have my daughters
+ to consider.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why do you say this young man is so rich?” asked the countess, turning
+ away from the girls, who at once assumed an air of inattention. “His
+ children are all illegitimate. I think Pierre also is illegitimate.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The visitor made a gesture with her hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I should think he has a score of them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Anna Mikháylovna intervened in the conversation, evidently
+ wishing to show her connections and knowledge of what went on in society.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The fact of the matter is,” said she significantly, and also in a half
+ whisper, “everyone knows Count Cyril’s reputation.... He has lost count of
+ his children, but this Pierre was his favorite.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How handsome the old man still was only a year ago!” remarked the
+ countess. “I have never seen a handsomer man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is very much altered now,” said Anna Mikháylovna. “Well, as I was
+ saying, Prince Vasíli is the next heir through his wife, but the count is
+ very fond of Pierre, looked after his education, and wrote to the Emperor
+ about him; so that in the case of his death—and he is so ill that he
+ may die at any moment, and Dr. Lorrain has come from Petersburg—no
+ one knows who will inherit his immense fortune, Pierre or Prince Vasíli.
+ Forty thousand serfs and millions of rubles! I know it all very well for
+ Prince Vasíli told me himself. Besides, Cyril Vladímirovich is my mother’s
+ second cousin. He’s also my Bóry’s godfather,” she added, as if she
+ attached no importance at all to the fact.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Prince Vasíli arrived in Moscow yesterday. I hear he has come on some
+ inspection business,” remarked the visitor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, but between ourselves,” said the princess, “that is a pretext. The
+ fact is he has come to see Count Cyril Vladímirovich, hearing how ill he
+ is.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But do you know, my dear, that was a capital joke,” said the count; and
+ seeing that the elder visitor was not listening, he turned to the young
+ ladies. “I can just imagine what a funny figure that policeman cut!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And as he waved his arms to impersonate the policeman, his portly form
+ again shook with a deep ringing laugh, the laugh of one who always eats
+ well and, in particular, drinks well. “So do come and dine with us!” he
+ said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ Silence ensued. The countess looked at her callers, smiling affably, but
+ not concealing the fact that she would not be distressed if they now rose
+ and took their leave. The visitor’s daughter was already smoothing down
+ her dress with an inquiring look at her mother, when suddenly from the
+ next room were heard the footsteps of boys and girls running to the door
+ and the noise of a chair falling over, and a girl of thirteen, hiding
+ something in the folds of her short muslin frock, darted in and stopped
+ short in the middle of the room. It was evident that she had not intended
+ her flight to bring her so far. Behind her in the doorway appeared a
+ student with a crimson coat collar, an officer of the Guards, a girl of
+ fifteen, and a plump rosy-faced boy in a short jacket.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count jumped up and, swaying from side to side, spread his arms wide
+ and threw them round the little girl who had run in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, here she is!” he exclaimed laughing. “My pet, whose name day it is.
+ My dear pet!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ Ma chère , there is a time for everything,” said the countess with
+ feigned severity. “You spoil her, Ilyá,” she added, turning to her
+ husband.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How do you do, my dear? I wish you many happy returns of your name day,”
+ said the visitor. “What a charming child,” she added, addressing the
+ mother.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This black-eyed, wide-mouthed girl, not pretty but full of life—with
+ childish bare shoulders which after her run heaved and shook her bodice,
+ with black curls tossed backward, thin bare arms, little legs in
+ lace-frilled drawers, and feet in low slippers—was just at that
+ charming age when a girl is no longer a child, though the child is not yet
+ a young woman. Escaping from her father she ran to hide her flushed face
+ in the lace of her mother’s mantilla—not paying the least attention
+ to her severe remark—and began to laugh. She laughed, and in
+ fragmentary sentences tried to explain about a doll which she produced
+ from the folds of her frock.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you see?... My doll... Mimi... You see...” was all Natásha managed to
+ utter (to her everything seemed funny). She leaned against her mother and
+ burst into such a loud, ringing fit of laughter that even the prim visitor
+ could not help joining in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then, go away and take your monstrosity with you,” said the mother,
+ pushing away her daughter with pretended sternness, and turning to the
+ visitor she added: “She is my youngest girl.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha, raising her face for a moment from her mother’s mantilla, glanced
+ up at her through tears of laughter, and again hid her face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The visitor, compelled to look on at this family scene, thought it
+ necessary to take some part in it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tell me, my dear,” said she to Natásha, “is Mimi a relation of yours? A
+ daughter, I suppose?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha did not like the visitor’s tone of condescension to childish
+ things. She did not reply, but looked at her seriously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile the younger generation: Borís, the officer, Anna Mikháylovna’s
+ son; Nicholas, the undergraduate, the count’s eldest son; Sónya, the
+ count’s fifteen-year-old niece, and little Pétya, his youngest boy, had
+ all settled down in the drawing room and were obviously trying to restrain
+ within the bounds of decorum the excitement and mirth that shone in all
+ their faces. Evidently in the back rooms, from which they had dashed out
+ so impetuously, the conversation had been more amusing than the drawing
+ room talk of society scandals, the weather, and Countess Apráksina. Now
+ and then they glanced at one another, hardly able to suppress their
+ laughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The two young men, the student and the officer, friends from childhood,
+ were of the same age and both handsome fellows, though not alike. Borís
+ was tall and fair, and his calm and handsome face had regular, delicate
+ features. Nicholas was short with curly hair and an open expression. Dark
+ hairs were already showing on his upper lip, and his whole face expressed
+ impetuosity and enthusiasm. Nicholas blushed when he entered the drawing
+ room. He evidently tried to find something to say, but failed. Borís on
+ the contrary at once found his footing, and related quietly and humorously
+ how he had known that doll Mimi when she was still quite a young lady,
+ before her nose was broken; how she had aged during the five years he had
+ known her, and how her head had cracked right across the skull. Having
+ said this he glanced at Natásha. She turned away from him and glanced at
+ her younger brother, who was screwing up his eyes and shaking with
+ suppressed laughter, and unable to control herself any longer, she jumped
+ up and rushed from the room as fast as her nimble little feet would carry
+ her. Borís did not laugh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You were meaning to go out, weren’t you, Mamma? Do you want the
+ carriage?” he asked his mother with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, go and tell them to get it ready,” she answered, returning his
+ smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís quietly left the room and went in search of Natásha. The plump boy
+ ran after them angrily, as if vexed that their program had been disturbed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ The only young people remaining in the drawing room, not counting the
+ young lady visitor and the countess’ eldest daughter (who was four years
+ older than her sister and behaved already like a grown-up person), were
+ Nicholas and Sónya, the niece. Sónya was a slender little brunette with a
+ tender look in her eyes which were veiled by long lashes, thick black
+ plaits coiling twice round her head, and a tawny tint in her complexion
+ and especially in the color of her slender but graceful and muscular arms
+ and neck. By the grace of her movements, by the softness and flexibility
+ of her small limbs, and by a certain coyness and reserve of manner, she
+ reminded one of a pretty, half-grown kitten which promises to become a
+ beautiful little cat. She evidently considered it proper to show an
+ interest in the general conversation by smiling, but in spite of herself
+ her eyes under their thick long lashes watched her cousin who was going to
+ join the army, with such passionate girlish adoration that her smile could
+ not for a single instant impose upon anyone, and it was clear that the
+ kitten had settled down only to spring up with more energy and again play
+ with her cousin as soon as they too could, like Natásha and Borís, escape
+ from the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah yes, my dear,” said the count, addressing the visitor and pointing to
+ Nicholas, “his friend Borís has become an officer, and so for friendship’s
+ sake he is leaving the university and me, his old father, and entering the
+ military service, my dear. And there was a place and everything waiting
+ for him in the Archives Department! Isn’t that friendship?” remarked the
+ count in an inquiring tone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But they say that war has been declared,” replied the visitor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They’ve been saying so a long while,” said the count, “and they’ll say so
+ again and again, and that will be the end of it. My dear, there’s
+ friendship for you,” he repeated. “He’s joining the hussars.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The visitor, not knowing what to say, shook her head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s not at all from friendship,” declared Nicholas, flaring up and
+ turning away as if from a shameful aspersion. “It is not from friendship
+ at all; I simply feel that the army is my vocation.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He glanced at his cousin and the young lady visitor; and they were both
+ regarding him with a smile of approbation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Schubert, the colonel of the Pávlograd Hussars, is dining with us today.
+ He has been here on leave and is taking Nicholas back with him. It can’t
+ be helped!” said the count, shrugging his shoulders and speaking playfully
+ of a matter that evidently distressed him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have already told you, Papa,” said his son, “that if you don’t wish to
+ let me go, I’ll stay. But I know I am no use anywhere except in the army;
+ I am not a diplomat or a government clerk.—I don’t know how to hide
+ what I feel.” As he spoke he kept glancing with the flirtatiousness of a
+ handsome youth at Sónya and the young lady visitor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The little kitten, feasting her eyes on him, seemed ready at any moment to
+ start her gambols again and display her kittenish nature.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right, all right!” said the old count. “He always flares up! This
+ Buonaparte has turned all their heads; they all think of how he rose from
+ an ensign and became Emperor. Well, well, God grant it,” he added, not
+ noticing his visitor’s sarcastic smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The elders began talking about Bonaparte. Julie Karágina turned to young
+ Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a pity you weren’t at the Arkhárovs’ on Thursday. It was so dull
+ without you,” said she, giving him a tender smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The young man, flattered, sat down nearer to her with a coquettish smile,
+ and engaged the smiling Julie in a confidential conversation without at
+ all noticing that his involuntary smile had stabbed the heart of Sónya,
+ who blushed and smiled unnaturally. In the midst of his talk he glanced
+ round at her. She gave him a passionately angry glance, and hardly able to
+ restrain her tears and maintain the artificial smile on her lips, she got
+ up and left the room. All Nicholas’ animation vanished. He waited for the
+ first pause in the conversation, and then with a distressed face left the
+ room to find Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How plainly all these young people wear their hearts on their sleeves!”
+ said Anna Mikháylovna, pointing to Nicholas as he went out. “Cousinage—dangereux
+ voisinage,” * she added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Cousinhood is a dangerous neighborhood.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” said the countess when the brightness these young people had
+ brought into the room had vanished; and as if answering a question no one
+ had put but which was always in her mind, “and how much suffering, how
+ much anxiety one has had to go through that we might rejoice in them now!
+ And yet really the anxiety is greater now than the joy. One is always,
+ always anxious! Especially just at this age, so dangerous both for girls
+ and boys.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It all depends on the bringing up,” remarked the visitor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, you’re quite right,” continued the countess. “Till now I have
+ always, thank God, been my children’s friend and had their full
+ confidence,” said she, repeating the mistake of so many parents who
+ imagine that their children have no secrets from them. “I know I shall
+ always be my daughters’ first confidante, and that if Nicholas, with his
+ impulsive nature, does get into mischief (a boy can’t help it), he will
+ all the same never be like those Petersburg young men.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, they are splendid, splendid youngsters,” chimed in the count, who
+ always solved questions that seemed to him perplexing by deciding that
+ everything was splendid. “Just fancy: wants to be an hussar. What’s one to
+ do, my dear?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a charming creature your younger girl is,” said the visitor; “a
+ little volcano!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, a regular volcano,” said the count. “Takes after me! And what a
+ voice she has; though she’s my daughter, I tell the truth when I say
+ she’ll be a singer, a second Salomoni! We have engaged an Italian to give
+ her lessons.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Isn’t she too young? I have heard that it harms the voice to train it at
+ that age.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh no, not at all too young!” replied the count. “Why, our mothers used
+ to be married at twelve or thirteen.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And she’s in love with Borís already. Just fancy!” said the countess with
+ a gentle smile, looking at Borís and went on, evidently concerned with a
+ thought that always occupied her: “Now you see if I were to be severe with
+ her and to forbid it ... goodness knows what they might be up to on the
+ sly” (she meant that they would be kissing), “but as it is, I know every
+ word she utters. She will come running to me of her own accord in the
+ evening and tell me everything. Perhaps I spoil her, but really that seems
+ the best plan. With her elder sister I was stricter.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I was brought up quite differently,” remarked the handsome elder
+ daughter, Countess Véra, with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the smile did not enhance Véra’s beauty as smiles generally do; on the
+ contrary it gave her an unnatural, and therefore unpleasant, expression.
+ Véra was good-looking, not at all stupid, quick at learning, was
+ well brought up, and had a pleasant voice; what she said was true and
+ appropriate, yet, strange to say, everyone—the visitors and countess
+ alike—turned to look at her as if wondering why she had said it, and
+ they all felt awkward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “People are always too clever with their eldest children and try to make
+ something exceptional of them,” said the visitor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s the good of denying it, my dear? Our dear countess was too clever
+ with Véra,” said the count. “Well, what of that? She’s turned out
+ splendidly all the same,” he added, winking at Véra.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The guests got up and took their leave, promising to return to dinner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What manners! I thought they would never go,” said the countess, when she
+ had seen her guests out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ When Natásha ran out of the drawing room she only went as far as the
+ conservatory. There she paused and stood listening to the conversation in
+ the drawing room, waiting for Borís to come out. She was already growing
+ impatient, and stamped her foot, ready to cry at his not coming at once,
+ when she heard the young man’s discreet steps approaching neither quickly
+ nor slowly. At this Natásha dashed swiftly among the flower tubs and hid
+ there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís paused in the middle of the room, looked round, brushed a little
+ dust from the sleeve of his uniform, and going up to a mirror examined his
+ handsome face. Natásha, very still, peered out from her ambush, waiting to
+ see what he would do. He stood a little while before the glass, smiled,
+ and walked toward the other door. Natásha was about to call him but
+ changed her mind. “Let him look for me,” thought she. Hardly had Borís
+ gone than Sónya, flushed, in tears, and muttering angrily, came in at the
+ other door. Natásha checked her first impulse to run out to her, and
+ remained in her hiding place, watching—as under an invisible cap—to
+ see what went on in the world. She was experiencing a new and peculiar
+ pleasure. Sónya, muttering to herself, kept looking round toward the
+ drawing room door. It opened and Nicholas came in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya, what is the matter with you? How can you?” said he, running up to
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s nothing, nothing; leave me alone!” sobbed Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, I know what it is.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, if you do, so much the better, and you can go back to her!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Só-o-onya! Look here! How can you torture me and yourself like that, for
+ a mere fancy?” said Nicholas taking her hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya did not pull it away, and left off crying. Natásha, not stirring and
+ scarcely breathing, watched from her ambush with sparkling eyes. “What
+ will happen now?” thought she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya! What is anyone in the world to me? You alone are everything!” said
+ Nicholas. “And I will prove it to you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t like you to talk like that.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, then, I won’t; only forgive me, Sónya!” He drew her to him and
+ kissed her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, how nice,” thought Natásha; and when Sónya and Nicholas had gone out
+ of the conservatory she followed and called Borís to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Borís, come here,” said she with a sly and significant look. “I have
+ something to tell you. Here, here!” and she led him into the conservatory
+ to the place among the tubs where she had been hiding.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís followed her, smiling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is the something? ” asked he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She grew confused, glanced round, and, seeing the doll she had thrown down
+ on one of the tubs, picked it up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Kiss the doll,” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís looked attentively and kindly at her eager face, but did not reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t you want to? Well, then, come here,” said she, and went further in
+ among the plants and threw down the doll. “Closer, closer!” she whispered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She caught the young officer by his cuffs, and a look of solemnity and
+ fear appeared on her flushed face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And me? Would you like to kiss me?” she whispered almost inaudibly,
+ glancing up at him from under her brows, smiling, and almost crying from
+ excitement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís blushed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How funny you are!” he said, bending down to her and blushing still more,
+ but he waited and did nothing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly she jumped up onto a tub to be higher than he, embraced him so
+ that both her slender bare arms clasped him above his neck, and, tossing
+ back her hair, kissed him full on the lips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then she slipped down among the flowerpots on the other side of the tubs
+ and stood, hanging her head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha,” he said, “you know that I love you, but....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are in love with me?” Natásha broke in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I am, but please don’t let us do like that.... In another four years
+ ... then I will ask for your hand.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha considered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,” she counted on her slender little
+ fingers. “All right! Then it’s settled?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A smile of joy and satisfaction lit up her eager face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Settled!” replied Borís.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Forever?” said the little girl. “Till death itself?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She took his arm and with a happy face went with him into the adjoining
+ sitting room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV
+ 
+ 
+ After receiving her visitors, the countess was so tired that she gave
+ orders to admit no more, but the porter was told to be sure to invite to
+ dinner all who came “to congratulate.” The countess wished to have a
+ tête-à-tête talk with the friend of her childhood, Princess Anna
+ Mikháylovna, whom she had not seen properly since she returned from
+ Petersburg. Anna Mikháylovna, with her tear-worn but pleasant face, drew
+ her chair nearer to that of the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “With you I will be quite frank,” said Anna Mikháylovna. “There are not
+ many left of us old friends! That’s why I so value your friendship.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Mikháylovna looked at Véra and paused. The countess pressed her
+ friend’s hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Véra,” she said to her eldest daughter who was evidently not a favorite,
+ “how is it you have so little tact? Don’t you see you are not wanted here?
+ Go to the other girls, or...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The handsome Véra smiled contemptuously but did not seem at all hurt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you had told me sooner, Mamma, I would have gone,” she replied as she
+ rose to go to her own room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But as she passed the sitting room she noticed two couples sitting, one
+ pair at each window. She stopped and smiled scornfully. Sónya was sitting
+ close to Nicholas who was copying out some verses for her, the first he
+ had ever written. Borís and Natásha were at the other window and ceased
+ talking when Véra entered. Sónya and Natásha looked at Véra with guilty,
+ happy faces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was pleasant and touching to see these little girls in love; but
+ apparently the sight of them roused no pleasant feeling in Véra.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How often have I asked you not to take my things?” she said. “You have a
+ room of your own,” and she took the inkstand from Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In a minute, in a minute,” he said, dipping his pen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You always manage to do things at the wrong time,” continued Véra. “You
+ came rushing into the drawing room so that everyone felt ashamed of you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though what she said was quite just, perhaps for that very reason no one
+ replied, and the four simply looked at one another. She lingered in the
+ room with the inkstand in her hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And at your age what secrets can there be between Natásha and Borís, or
+ between you two? It’s all nonsense!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, Véra, what does it matter to you?” said Natásha in defense, speaking
+ very gently.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She seemed that day to be more than ever kind and affectionate to
+ everyone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very silly,” said Véra. “I am ashamed of you. Secrets indeed!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All have secrets of their own,” answered Natásha, getting warmer. “We
+ don’t interfere with you and Berg.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I should think not,” said Véra, “because there can never be anything
+ wrong in my behavior. But I’ll just tell Mamma how you are behaving with
+ Borís.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natálya Ilyníchna behaves very well to me,” remarked Borís. “I have
+ nothing to complain of.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t, Borís! You are such a diplomat that it is really tiresome,” said
+ Natásha in a mortified voice that trembled slightly. (She used the word
+ “diplomat,” which was just then much in vogue among the children, in the
+ special sense they attached to it.) “Why does she bother me?” And she
+ added, turning to Véra, “You’ll never understand it, because you’ve never
+ loved anyone. You have no heart! You are a Madame de Genlis and nothing
+ more” (this nickname, bestowed on Véra by Nicholas, was considered very
+ stinging), “and your greatest pleasure is to be unpleasant to people! Go
+ and flirt with Berg as much as you please,” she finished quickly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I shall at any rate not run after a young man before visitors...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, now you’ve done what you wanted,” put in Nicholas—“said
+ unpleasant things to everyone and upset them. Let’s go to the nursery.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All four, like a flock of scared birds, got up and left the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The unpleasant things were said to me,” remarked Véra, “I said none to
+ anyone.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Madame de Genlis! Madame de Genlis!” shouted laughing voices through the
+ door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The handsome Véra, who produced such an irritating and unpleasant effect
+ on everyone, smiled and, evidently unmoved by what had been said to her,
+ went to the looking glass and arranged her hair and scarf. Looking at her
+ own handsome face she seemed to become still colder and calmer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ In the drawing room the conversation was still going on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my dear,” said the countess, “my life is not all roses either. Don’t
+ I know that at the rate we are living our means won’t last long? It’s all
+ the Club and his easygoing nature. Even in the country do we get any rest?
+ Theatricals, hunting, and heaven knows what besides! But don’t let’s talk
+ about me; tell me how you managed everything. I often wonder at you,
+ Annette—how at your age you can rush off alone in a carriage to
+ Moscow, to Petersburg, to those ministers and great people, and know how
+ to deal with them all! It’s quite astonishing. How did you get things
+ settled? I couldn’t possibly do it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my love,” answered Anna Mikháylovna, “God grant you never know what
+ it is to be left a widow without means and with a son you love to
+ distraction! One learns many things then,” she added with a certain pride.
+ “That lawsuit taught me much. When I want to see one of those big people I
+ write a note: ‘Princess So-and-So desires an interview with So and-So,’
+ and then I take a cab and go myself two, three, or four times—till I
+ get what I want. I don’t mind what they think of me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, and to whom did you apply about Bóry?” asked the countess. “You see
+ yours is already an officer in the Guards, while my Nicholas is going as a
+ cadet. There’s no one to interest himself for him. To whom did you apply?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To Prince Vasíli. He was so kind. He at once agreed to everything, and
+ put the matter before the Emperor,” said Princess Anna Mikháylovna
+ enthusiastically, quite forgetting all the humiliation she had endured to
+ gain her end.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Has Prince Vasíli aged much?” asked the countess. “I have not seen him
+ since we acted together at the Rumyántsovs’ theatricals. I expect he has
+ forgotten me. He paid me attentions in those days,” said the countess,
+ with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is just the same as ever,” replied Anna Mikháylovna, “overflowing with
+ amiability. His position has not turned his head at all. He said to me, ‘I
+ am sorry I can do so little for you, dear Princess. I am at your command.’
+ Yes, he is a fine fellow and a very kind relation. But, Nataly, you know
+ my love for my son: I would do anything for his happiness! And my affairs
+ are in such a bad way that my position is now a terrible one,” continued
+ Anna Mikháylovna, sadly, dropping her voice. “My wretched lawsuit takes
+ all I have and makes no progress. Would you believe it, I have literally
+ not a penny and don’t know how to equip Borís.” She took out her
+ handkerchief and began to cry. “I need five hundred rubles, and have only
+ one twenty-five-ruble note. I am in such a state.... My only hope now is
+ in Count Cyril Vladímirovich Bezúkhov. If he will not assist his godson—you
+ know he is Bóry’s godfather—and allow him something for his
+ maintenance, all my trouble will have been thrown away.... I shall not be
+ able to equip him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess’ eyes filled with tears and she pondered in silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I often think, though, perhaps it’s a sin,” said the princess, “that here
+ lives Count Cyril Vladímirovich Bezúkhov so rich, all alone... that
+ tremendous fortune... and what is his life worth? It’s a burden to him,
+ and Bóry’s life is only just beginning....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Surely he will leave something to Borís,” said the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Heaven only knows, my dear! These rich grandees are so selfish. Still, I
+ will take Borís and go to see him at once, and I shall speak to him
+ straight out. Let people think what they will of me, it’s really all the
+ same to me when my son’s fate is at stake.” The princess rose. “It’s now
+ two o’clock and you dine at four. There will just be time.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And like a practical Petersburg lady who knows how to make the most of
+ time, Anna Mikháylovna sent someone to call her son, and went into the
+ anteroom with him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good-by, my dear,” said she to the countess who saw her to the door, and
+ added in a whisper so that her son should not hear, “Wish me good luck.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Are you going to Count Cyril Vladímirovich, my dear?” said the count
+ coming out from the dining hall into the anteroom, and he added: “If he is
+ better, ask Pierre to dine with us. He has been to the house, you know,
+ and danced with the children. Be sure to invite him, my dear. We will see
+ how Tarás distinguishes himself today. He says Count Orlóv never gave such
+ a dinner as ours will be!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV
+ 
+ 
+ “My dear Borís,” said Princess Anna Mikháylovna to her son as Countess
+ Rostóva’s carriage in which they were seated drove over the straw covered
+ street and turned into the wide courtyard of Count Cyril Vladímirovich
+ Bezúkhov’s house. “My dear Borís,” said the mother, drawing her hand from
+ beneath her old mantle and laying it timidly and tenderly on her son’s
+ arm, “be affectionate and attentive to him. Count Cyril Vladímirovich is
+ your godfather after all, and your future depends on him. Remember that, my
+ dear, and be nice to him, as you so well know how to be.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If only I knew that anything besides humiliation would come of it...”
+ answered her son coldly. “But I have promised and will do it for your
+ sake.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Although the hall porter saw someone’s carriage standing at the entrance,
+ after scrutinizing the mother and son (who without asking to be announced
+ had passed straight through the glass porch between the rows of statues in
+ niches) and looking significantly at the lady’s old cloak, he asked
+ whether they wanted the count or the princesses, and, hearing that they
+ wished to see the count, said his excellency was worse today, and that his
+ excellency was not receiving anyone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We may as well go back,” said the son in French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear!” exclaimed his mother imploringly, again laying her hand on his
+ arm as if that touch might soothe or rouse him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís said no more, but looked inquiringly at his mother without taking
+ off his cloak.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My friend,” said Anna Mikháylovna in gentle tones, addressing the hall
+ porter, “I know Count Cyril Vladímirovich is very ill... that’s why I have
+ come... I am a relation. I shall not disturb him, my friend... I only need
+ see Prince Vasíli Sergéevich: he is staying here, is he not? Please
+ announce me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The hall porter sullenly pulled a bell that rang upstairs, and turned
+ away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Princess Drubetskáya to see Prince Vasíli Sergéevich,” he called to a
+ footman dressed in knee breeches, shoes, and a swallow-tail coat, who ran
+ downstairs and looked over from the halfway landing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The mother smoothed the folds of her dyed silk dress before a large
+ Venetian mirror in the wall, and in her trodden-down shoes briskly
+ ascended the carpeted stairs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear,” she said to her son, once more stimulating him by a touch, “you
+ promised me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The son, lowering his eyes, followed her quietly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They entered the large hall, from which one of the doors led to the
+ apartments assigned to Prince Vasíli.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just as the mother and son, having reached the middle of the hall, were
+ about to ask their way of an elderly footman who had sprung up as they
+ entered, the bronze handle of one of the doors turned and Prince Vasíli
+ came out—wearing a velvet coat with a single star on his breast, as
+ was his custom when at home—taking leave of a good-looking,
+ dark-haired man. This was the celebrated Petersburg doctor, Lorrain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then it is certain?” said the prince.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Prince, humanum est errare , * but...” replied the doctor,
+ swallowing his r ’s, and pronouncing the Latin words with a French
+ accent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * To err is human.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Very well, very well...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Seeing Anna Mikháylovna and her son, Prince Vasíli dismissed the doctor
+ with a bow and approached them silently and with a look of inquiry. The
+ son noticed that an expression of profound sorrow suddenly clouded his
+ mother’s face, and he smiled slightly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, Prince! In what sad circumstances we meet again! And how is our dear
+ invalid?” said she, as though unaware of the cold offensive look fixed on
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli stared at her and at Borís questioningly and perplexed.
+ Borís bowed politely. Prince Vasíli without acknowledging the bow turned
+ to Anna Mikháylovna, answering her query by a movement of the head and
+ lips indicating very little hope for the patient.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is it possible?” exclaimed Anna Mikháylovna. “Oh, how awful! It is
+ terrible to think.... This is my son,” she added, indicating Borís. “He
+ wanted to thank you himself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís bowed again politely.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Believe me, Prince, a mother’s heart will never forget what you have done
+ for us.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am glad I was able to do you a service, my dear Anna Mikháylovna,” said
+ Prince Vasíli, arranging his lace frill, and in tone and manner, here in
+ Moscow to Anna Mikháylovna whom he had placed under an obligation,
+ assuming an air of much greater importance than he had done in Petersburg
+ at Anna Schérer’s reception.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Try to serve well and show yourself worthy,” added he, addressing Borís
+ with severity. “I am glad.... Are you here on leave?” he went on in his
+ usual tone of indifference.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am awaiting orders to join my new regiment, your excellency,” replied
+ Borís, betraying neither annoyance at the prince’s brusque manner nor a
+ desire to enter into conversation, but speaking so quietly and
+ respectfully that the prince gave him a searching glance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Are you living with your mother?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am living at Countess Rostóva’s,” replied Borís, again adding, “your
+ excellency.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is, with Ilyá Rostóv who married Nataly Shinshiná,” said Anna
+ Mikháylovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know, I know,” answered Prince Vasíli in his monotonous voice. “I never
+ could understand how Nataly made up her mind to marry that unlicked bear!
+ A perfectly absurd and stupid fellow, and a gambler too, I am told.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But a very kind man, Prince,” said Anna Mikháylovna with a pathetic
+ smile, as though she too knew that Count Rostóv deserved this censure, but
+ asked him not to be too hard on the poor old man. “What do the doctors
+ say?” asked the princess after a pause, her worn face again expressing
+ deep sorrow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They give little hope,” replied the prince.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I should so like to thank Uncle once for all his kindness to
+ me and Borís. He is his godson,” she added, her tone suggesting that this
+ fact ought to give Prince Vasíli much satisfaction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli became thoughtful and frowned. Anna Mikháylovna saw that he
+ was afraid of finding in her a rival for Count Bezúkhov’s fortune, and
+ hastened to reassure him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If it were not for my sincere affection and devotion to Uncle ,”
+ said she, uttering the word with peculiar assurance and unconcern, “I know
+ his character: noble, upright ... but you see he has no one with him
+ except the young princesses.... They are still young....” She bent her
+ head and continued in a whisper: “Has he performed his final duty, Prince?
+ How priceless are those last moments! It can make things no worse, and it
+ is absolutely necessary to prepare him if he is so ill. We women, Prince,”
+ and she smiled tenderly, “always know how to say these things. I
+ absolutely must see him, however painful it may be for me. I am used to
+ suffering.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Evidently the prince understood her, and also understood, as he had done
+ at Anna Pávlovna’s, that it would be difficult to get rid of Anna
+ Mikháylovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Would not such a meeting be too trying for him, dear Anna Mikháylovna?”
+ said he. “Let us wait until evening. The doctors are expecting a crisis.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But one cannot delay, Prince, at such a moment! Consider that the welfare
+ of his soul is at stake. Ah, it is awful: the duties of a Christian...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A door of one of the inner rooms opened and one of the princesses, the
+ count’s niece, entered with a cold, stern face. The length of her body was
+ strikingly out of proportion to her short legs. Prince Vasíli turned to
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, how is he?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Still the same; but what can you expect, this noise...” said the
+ princess, looking at Anna Mikháylovna as at a stranger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my dear, I hardly knew you,” said Anna Mikháylovna with a happy
+ smile, ambling lightly up to the count’s niece. “I have come, and am at
+ your service to help you nurse my uncle . I imagine what you have
+ gone through,” and she sympathetically turned up her eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess gave no reply and did not even smile, but left the room as
+ Anna Mikháylovna took off her gloves and, occupying the position she had
+ conquered, settled down in an armchair, inviting Prince Vasíli to take a
+ seat beside her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Borís,” she said to her son with a smile, “I shall go in to see the
+ count, my uncle; but you, my dear, had better go to Pierre meanwhile and
+ don’t forget to give him the Rostóvs’ invitation. They ask him to dinner.
+ I suppose he won’t go?” she continued, turning to the prince.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the contrary,” replied the prince, who had plainly become depressed,
+ “I shall be only too glad if you relieve me of that young man.... Here he
+ is, and the count has not once asked for him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He shrugged his shoulders. A footman conducted Borís down one flight of
+ stairs and up another, to Pierre’s rooms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI
+ 
+ 
+ Pierre, after all, had not managed to choose a career for himself in
+ Petersburg, and had been expelled from there for riotous conduct and sent
+ to Moscow. The story told about him at Count Rostóv’s was true. Pierre had
+ taken part in tying a policeman to a bear. He had now been for some days
+ in Moscow and was staying as usual at his father’s house. Though he
+ expected that the story of his escapade would be already known in Moscow
+ and that the ladies about his father—who were never favorably
+ disposed toward him—would have used it to turn the count against
+ him, he nevertheless on the day of his arrival went to his father’s part
+ of the house. Entering the drawing room, where the princesses spent most
+ of their time, he greeted the ladies, two of whom were sitting at
+ embroidery frames while a third read aloud. It was the eldest who was
+ reading—the one who had met Anna Mikháylovna. The two younger ones
+ were embroidering: both were rosy and pretty and they differed only in
+ that one had a little mole on her lip which made her much prettier. Pierre
+ was received as if he were a corpse or a leper. The eldest princess paused
+ in her reading and silently stared at him with frightened eyes; the second
+ assumed precisely the same expression; while the youngest, the one with
+ the mole, who was of a cheerful and lively disposition, bent over her
+ frame to hide a smile probably evoked by the amusing scene she foresaw.
+ She drew her wool down through the canvas and, scarcely able to refrain
+ from laughing, stooped as if trying to make out the pattern.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How do you do, cousin?” said Pierre. “You don’t recognize me?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I recognize you only too well, too well.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How is the count? Can I see him?” asked Pierre, awkwardly as usual, but
+ unabashed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The count is suffering physically and mentally, and apparently you have
+ done your best to increase his mental sufferings.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Can I see the count?” Pierre again asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hm.... If you wish to kill him, to kill him outright, you can see him...
+ Olga, go and see whether Uncle’s beef tea is ready—it is almost
+ time,” she added, giving Pierre to understand that they were busy, and
+ busy making his father comfortable, while evidently he, Pierre, was only
+ busy causing him annoyance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Olga went out. Pierre stood looking at the sisters; then he bowed and
+ said: “Then I will go to my rooms. You will let me know when I can see
+ him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And he left the room, followed by the low but ringing laughter of the
+ sister with the mole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day Prince Vasíli had arrived and settled in the count’s house. He
+ sent for Pierre and said to him: “My dear fellow, if you are going to
+ behave here as you did in Petersburg, you will end very badly; that is all
+ I have to say to you. The count is very, very ill, and you must not see
+ him at all.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Since then Pierre had not been disturbed and had spent the whole time in
+ his rooms upstairs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Borís appeared at his door Pierre was pacing up and down his room,
+ stopping occasionally at a corner to make menacing gestures at the wall,
+ as if running a sword through an invisible foe, and glaring savagely over
+ his spectacles, and then again resuming his walk, muttering indistinct
+ words, shrugging his shoulders and gesticulating.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “England is done for,” said he, scowling and pointing his finger at
+ someone unseen. “Mr. Pitt, as a traitor to the nation and to the rights of
+ man, is sentenced to...” But before Pierre—who at that moment
+ imagined himself to be Napoleon in person and to have just effected the
+ dangerous crossing of the Straits of Dover and captured London—could
+ pronounce Pitt’s sentence, he saw a well-built and handsome young officer
+ entering his room. Pierre paused. He had left Moscow when Borís was a boy
+ of fourteen, and had quite forgotten him, but in his usual impulsive and
+ hearty way he took Borís by the hand with a friendly smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you remember me?” asked Borís quietly with a pleasant smile. “I have
+ come with my mother to see the count, but it seems he is not well.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, it seems he is ill. People are always disturbing him,” answered
+ Pierre, trying to remember who this young man was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís felt that Pierre did not recognize him but did not consider it
+ necessary to introduce himself, and without experiencing the least
+ embarrassment looked Pierre straight in the face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Count Rostóv asks you to come to dinner today,” said he, after a
+ considerable pause which made Pierre feel uncomfortable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, Count Rostóv!” exclaimed Pierre joyfully. “Then you are his son,
+ Ilyá? Only fancy, I didn’t know you at first. Do you remember how we went
+ to the Sparrow Hills with Madame Jacquot?... It’s such an age...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are mistaken,” said Borís deliberately, with a bold and slightly
+ sarcastic smile. “I am Borís, son of Princess Anna Mikháylovna
+ Drubetskáya. Rostóv, the father, is Ilyá, and his son is Nicholas. I never
+ knew any Madame Jacquot.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre shook his head and arms as if attacked by mosquitoes or bees.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh dear, what am I thinking about? I’ve mixed everything up. One has so
+ many relatives in Moscow! So you are Borís? Of course. Well, now we know
+ where we are. And what do you think of the Boulogne expedition? The
+ English will come off badly, you know, if Napoleon gets across the
+ Channel. I think the expedition is quite feasible. If only Villeneuve
+ doesn’t make a mess of things!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís knew nothing about the Boulogne expedition; he did not read the
+ papers and it was the first time he had heard Villeneuve’s name.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We here in Moscow are more occupied with dinner parties and scandal than
+ with politics,” said he in his quiet ironical tone. “I know nothing about
+ it and have not thought about it. Moscow is chiefly busy with gossip,” he
+ continued. “Just now they are talking about you and your father.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre smiled in his good-natured way as if afraid for his companion’s
+ sake that the latter might say something he would afterwards regret. But
+ Borís spoke distinctly, clearly, and dryly, looking straight into Pierre’s
+ eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Moscow has nothing else to do but gossip,” Borís went on. “Everybody is
+ wondering to whom the count will leave his fortune, though he may perhaps
+ outlive us all, as I sincerely hope he will...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, it is all very horrid,” interrupted Pierre, “very horrid.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was still afraid that this officer might inadvertently say
+ something disconcerting to himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And it must seem to you,” said Borís flushing slightly, but not changing
+ his tone or attitude, “it must seem to you that everyone is trying to get
+ something out of the rich man?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So it does,” thought Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I just wish to say, to avoid misunderstandings, that you are quite
+ mistaken if you reckon me or my mother among such people. We are very
+ poor, but for my own part at any rate, for the very reason that your
+ father is rich, I don’t regard myself as a relation of his, and neither I
+ nor my mother would ever ask or take anything from him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For a long time Pierre could not understand, but when he did, he jumped up
+ from the sofa, seized Borís under the elbow in his quick, clumsy way, and,
+ blushing far more than Borís, began to speak with a feeling of mingled
+ shame and vexation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, this is strange! Do you suppose I... who could think?... I know
+ very well...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Borís again interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am glad I have spoken out fully. Perhaps you did not like it? You must
+ excuse me,” said he, putting Pierre at ease instead of being put at ease
+ by him, “but I hope I have not offended you. I always make it a rule to
+ speak out... Well, what answer am I to take? Will you come to dinner at
+ the Rostóvs’?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Borís, having apparently relieved himself of an onerous duty and
+ extricated himself from an awkward situation and placed another in it,
+ became quite pleasant again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, but I say,” said Pierre, calming down, “you are a wonderful fellow!
+ What you have just said is good, very good. Of course you don’t know me.
+ We have not met for such a long time... not since we were children. You
+ might think that I... I understand, quite understand. I could not have
+ done it myself, I should not have had the courage, but it’s splendid. I am
+ very glad to have made your acquaintance. It’s queer,” he added after a
+ pause, “that you should have suspected me!” He began to laugh. “Well, what
+ of it! I hope we’ll get better acquainted,” and he pressed Borís’ hand.
+ “Do you know, I have not once been in to see the count. He has not sent
+ for me.... I am sorry for him as a man, but what can one do?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And so you think Napoleon will manage to get an army across?” asked Borís
+ with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre saw that Borís wished to change the subject, and being of the same
+ mind he began explaining the advantages and disadvantages of the Boulogne
+ expedition.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A footman came in to summon Borís—the princess was going. Pierre, in
+ order to make Borís’ better acquaintance, promised to come to dinner, and
+ warmly pressing his hand looked affectionately over his spectacles into
+ Borís’ eyes. After he had gone Pierre continued pacing up and down the
+ room for a long time, no longer piercing an imaginary foe with his
+ imaginary sword, but smiling at the remembrance of that pleasant,
+ intelligent, and resolute young man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As often happens in early youth, especially to one who leads a lonely
+ life, he felt an unaccountable tenderness for this young man and made up
+ his mind that they would be friends.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli saw the princess off. She held a handkerchief to her eyes
+ and her face was tearful.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is dreadful, dreadful!” she was saying, “but cost me what it may I
+ shall do my duty. I will come and spend the night. He must not be left
+ like this. Every moment is precious. I can’t think why his nieces put it
+ off. Perhaps God will help me to find a way to prepare him!... Adieu,
+ Prince! May God support you...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Adieu, ma bonne,” answered Prince Vasíli turning away from her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, he is in a dreadful state,” said the mother to her son when they were
+ in the carriage. “He hardly recognizes anybody.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t understand, Mamma—what is his attitude to Pierre?” asked
+ the son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The will will show that, my dear; our fate also depends on it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But why do you expect that he will leave us anything?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my dear! He is so rich, and we are so poor!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, that is hardly a sufficient reason, Mamma...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, Heaven! How ill he is!” exclaimed the mother.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII
+ 
+ 
+ After Anna Mikháylovna had driven off with her son to visit Count Cyril
+ Vladímirovich Bezúkhov, Countess Rostóva sat for a long time all alone
+ applying her handkerchief to her eyes. At last she rang.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is the matter with you, my dear?” she said crossly to the maid who
+ kept her waiting some minutes. “Don’t you wish to serve me? Then I’ll find
+ you another place.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess was upset by her friend’s sorrow and humiliating poverty, and
+ was therefore out of sorts, a state of mind which with her always found
+ expression in calling her maid “my dear” and speaking to her with
+ exaggerated politeness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am very sorry, ma’am,” answered the maid.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ask the count to come to me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count came waddling in to see his wife with a rather guilty look as
+ usual.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, little countess? What a sauté of game au madère we
+ are to have, my dear! I tasted it. The thousand rubles I paid for Tarás
+ were not ill-spent. He is worth it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He sat down by his wife, his elbows on his knees and his hands ruffling
+ his gray hair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are your commands, little countess?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see, my dear... What’s that mess?” she said, pointing to his
+ waistcoat. “It’s the sauté , most likely,” she added with a smile.
+ “Well, you see, Count, I want some money.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her face became sad.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, little countess!” ... and the count began bustling to get out his
+ pocketbook.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I want a great deal, Count! I want five hundred rubles,” and taking out
+ her cambric handkerchief she began wiping her husband’s waistcoat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, immediately, immediately! Hey, who’s there?” he called out in a tone
+ only used by persons who are certain that those they call will rush to
+ obey the summons. “Send Dmítri to me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dmítri, a man of good family who had been brought up in the count’s house
+ and now managed all his affairs, stepped softly into the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This is what I want, my dear fellow,” said the count to the deferential
+ young man who had entered. “Bring me...” he reflected a moment, “yes,
+ bring me seven hundred rubles, yes! But mind, don’t bring me such tattered
+ and dirty notes as last time, but nice clean ones for the countess.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, Dmítri, clean ones, please,” said the countess, sighing deeply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When would you like them, your excellency?” asked Dmítri. “Allow me to
+ inform you... But, don’t be uneasy,” he added, noticing that the count was
+ beginning to breathe heavily and quickly which was always a sign of
+ approaching anger. “I was forgetting... Do you wish it brought at once?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes; just so! Bring it. Give it to the countess.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a treasure that Dmítri is,” added the count with a smile when the
+ young man had departed. “There is never any ‘impossible’ with him. That’s
+ a thing I hate! Everything is possible.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, money, Count, money! How much sorrow it causes in the world,” said
+ the countess. “But I am in great need of this sum.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You, my little countess, are a notorious spendthrift,” said the count,
+ and having kissed his wife’s hand he went back to his study.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Anna Mikháylovna returned from Count Bezúkhov’s the money, all in
+ clean notes, was lying ready under a handkerchief on the countess’ little
+ table, and Anna Mikháylovna noticed that something was agitating her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, my dear?” asked the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, what a terrible state he is in! One would not know him, he is so ill!
+ I was only there a few moments and hardly said a word...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Annette, for heaven’s sake don’t refuse me,” the countess began, with a
+ blush that looked very strange on her thin, dignified, elderly face, and
+ she took the money from under the handkerchief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Mikháylovna instantly guessed her intention and stooped to be ready
+ to embrace the countess at the appropriate moment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This is for Borís from me, for his outfit.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Mikháylovna was already embracing her and weeping. The countess wept
+ too. They wept because they were friends, and because they were
+ kindhearted, and because they—friends from childhood—had to
+ think about such a base thing as money, and because their youth was
+ over.... But those tears were pleasant to them both.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII
+ 
+ 
+ Countess Rostóva, with her daughters and a large number of guests, was
+ already seated in the drawing room. The count took the gentlemen into his
+ study and showed them his choice collection of Turkish pipes. From time to
+ time he went out to ask: “Hasn’t she come yet?” They were
+ expecting Márya Dmítrievna Akhrosímova, known in society as le terrible
+ dragon , a lady distinguished not for wealth or rank, but for common sense and
+ frank plainness of speech. Márya Dmítrievna was known to the Imperial family as
+ well as to all Moscow and Petersburg, and both cities wondered at her,
+ laughed privately at her rudenesses, and told good stories about her,
+ while none the less all without exception respected and feared her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the count’s room, which was full of tobacco smoke, they talked of the war
+ that had been announced in a manifesto, and about the recruiting. None of
+ them had yet seen the manifesto, but they all knew it had appeared. The
+ count sat on the sofa between two guests who were smoking and talking. He
+ neither smoked nor talked, but bending his head first to one side and then
+ to the other watched the smokers with evident pleasure and listened to the
+ conversation of his two neighbors, whom he egged on against each other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One of them was a sallow, clean-shaven civilian with a thin and wrinkled
+ face, already growing old, though he was dressed like a most fashionable
+ young man. He sat with his legs up on the sofa as if quite at home and,
+ having stuck an amber mouthpiece far into his mouth, was inhaling the
+ smoke spasmodically and screwing up his eyes. This was an old bachelor,
+ Shinshín, a cousin of the countess’, a man with “a sharp tongue” as they
+ said in Moscow society. He seemed to be condescending to his companion.
+ The latter, a fresh, rosy officer of the Guards, irreproachably washed,
+ brushed, and buttoned, held his pipe in the middle of his mouth and with
+ red lips gently inhaled the smoke, letting it escape from his handsome
+ mouth in rings. This was Lieutenant Berg, an officer in the Semënov
+ regiment with whom Borís was to travel to join the army, and about whom
+ Natásha had teased her elder sister Véra, speaking of Berg as her
+ “intended.” The count sat between them and listened attentively. His
+ favorite occupation when not playing boston, a card game he was very fond
+ of, was that of listener, especially when he succeeded in setting two
+ loquacious talkers at one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, then, old chap, mon très honorable Alphonse Kárlovich,” said
+ Shinshín, laughing ironically and mixing the most ordinary Russian
+ expressions with the choicest French phrases—which was a peculiarity
+ of his speech. “ Vous comptez vous faire des rentes sur l’état ; *
+ you want to make something out of your company?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * You expect to make an income out of the government.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Peter Nikoláevich; I only want to show that in the cavalry the
+ advantages are far less than in the infantry. Just consider my own
+ position now, Peter Nikoláevich...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Berg always spoke quietly, politely, and with great precision. His
+ conversation always related entirely to himself; he would remain calm and
+ silent when the talk related to any topic that had no direct bearing on
+ himself. He could remain silent for hours without being at all put out of
+ countenance himself or making others uncomfortable, but as soon as the
+ conversation concerned himself he would begin to talk circumstantially and
+ with evident satisfaction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Consider my position, Peter Nikoláevich. Were I in the cavalry I should
+ get not more than two hundred rubles every four months, even with the rank
+ of lieutenant; but as it is I receive two hundred and thirty,” said he,
+ looking at Shinshín and the count with a joyful, pleasant smile, as if it
+ were obvious to him that his success must always be the chief desire of
+ everyone else.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Besides that, Peter Nikoláevich, by exchanging into the Guards I shall be
+ in a more prominent position,” continued Berg, “and vacancies occur much
+ more frequently in the Foot Guards. Then just think what can be done with
+ two hundred and thirty rubles! I even manage to put a little aside and to
+ send something to my father,” he went on, emitting a smoke ring.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ La balance y est ... * A German knows how to skin a flint, as the
+ proverb says,” remarked Shinshín, moving his pipe to the other side of his
+ mouth and winking at the count.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * So that squares matters.
+
+
+
+ 
+ The count burst out laughing. The other guests seeing that Shinshín was
+ talking came up to listen. Berg, oblivious of irony or indifference,
+ continued to explain how by exchanging into the Guards he had already
+ gained a step on his old comrades of the Cadet Corps; how in wartime the
+ company commander might get killed and he, as senior in the company, might
+ easily succeed to the post; how popular he was with everyone in the
+ regiment, and how satisfied his father was with him. Berg evidently
+ enjoyed narrating all this, and did not seem to suspect that others, too,
+ might have their own interests. But all he said was so prettily sedate,
+ and the naïveté of his youthful egotism was so obvious, that he disarmed
+ his hearers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, my boy, you’ll get along wherever you go—foot or horse—that
+ I’ll warrant,” said Shinshín, patting him on the shoulder and taking his
+ feet off the sofa.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Berg smiled joyously. The count, followed by his guests, went into
+ the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was just the moment before a big dinner when the assembled guests,
+ expecting the summons to zakúska , * avoid engaging in any long
+ conversation but think it necessary to move about and talk, in order to
+ show that they are not at all impatient for their food. The host and
+ hostess look toward the door, and now and then glance at one another, and
+ the visitors try to guess from these glances who, or what, they are
+ waiting for—some important relation who has not yet arrived, or a
+ dish that is not yet ready.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Hors d’oeuvres.
+
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre had come just at dinnertime and was sitting awkwardly in the middle
+ of the drawing room on the first chair he had come across, blocking the
+ way for everyone. The countess tried to make him talk, but he went on
+ naïvely looking around through his spectacles as if in search of somebody
+ and answered all her questions in monosyllables. He was in the way and was
+ the only one who did not notice the fact. Most of the guests, knowing of
+ the affair with the bear, looked with curiosity at this big, stout, quiet
+ man, wondering how such a clumsy, modest fellow could have played such a
+ prank on a policeman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You have only lately arrived?” the countess asked him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oui, madame,” replied he, looking around him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You have not yet seen my husband?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Non, madame.” He smiled quite inappropriately.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You have been in Paris recently, I believe? I suppose it’s very
+ interesting.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very interesting.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess exchanged glances with Anna Mikháylovna. The latter
+ understood that she was being asked to entertain this young man, and
+ sitting down beside him she began to speak about his father; but he
+ answered her, as he had the countess, only in monosyllables. The other
+ guests were all conversing with one another. “The Razumóvskis... It was
+ charming... You are very kind... Countess Apráksina...” was heard on all
+ sides. The countess rose and went into the ballroom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Márya Dmítrievna?” came her voice from there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Herself,” came the answer in a rough voice, and Márya Dmítrievna entered
+ the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the unmarried ladies and even the married ones except the very oldest
+ rose. Márya Dmítrievna paused at the door. Tall and stout, holding high
+ her fifty-year-old head with its gray curls, she stood surveying the
+ guests, and leisurely arranged her wide sleeves as if rolling them up.
+ Márya Dmítrievna always spoke in Russian.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Health and happiness to her whose name day we are keeping and to her
+ children,” she said, in her loud, full-toned voice which drowned all
+ others. “Well, you old sinner,” she went on, turning to the count who was
+ kissing her hand, “you’re feeling dull in Moscow, I daresay? Nowhere to
+ hunt with your dogs? But what is to be done, old man? Just see how these
+ nestlings are growing up,” and she pointed to the girls. “You must look
+ for husbands for them whether you like it or not....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well,” said she, “how’s my Cossack?” (Márya Dmítrievna always called
+ Natásha a Cossack) and she stroked the child’s arm as she came up fearless
+ and gay to kiss her hand. “I know she’s a scamp of a girl, but I like
+ her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She took a pair of pear-shaped ruby earrings from her huge reticule and,
+ having given them to the rosy Natásha, who beamed with the pleasure of her
+ saint’s-day fete, turned away at once and addressed herself to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh, eh, friend! Come here a bit,” said she, assuming a soft high tone of
+ voice. “Come here, my friend...” and she ominously tucked up her sleeves
+ still higher. Pierre approached, looking at her in a childlike way through
+ his spectacles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come nearer, come nearer, friend! I used to be the only one to tell your
+ father the truth when he was in favor, and in your case it’s my evident
+ duty.” She paused. All were silent, expectant of what was to follow, for
+ this was clearly only a prelude.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A fine lad! My word! A fine lad!... His father lies on his deathbed and
+ he amuses himself setting a policeman astride a bear! For shame, sir, for
+ shame! It would be better if you went to the war.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She turned away and gave her hand to the count, who could hardly keep from
+ laughing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, I suppose it is time we were at table?” said Márya Dmítrievna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count went in first with Márya Dmítrievna, the countess followed on
+ the arm of a colonel of hussars, a man of importance to them because
+ Nicholas was to go with him to the regiment; then came Anna Mikháylovna
+ with Shinshín. Berg gave his arm to Véra. The smiling Julie Karágina went
+ in with Nicholas. After them other couples followed, filling the whole
+ dining hall, and last of all the children, tutors, and governesses
+ followed singly. The footmen began moving about, chairs scraped, the band
+ struck up in the gallery, and the guests settled down in their places.
+ Then the strains of the count’s household band were replaced by the
+ clatter of knives and forks, the voices of visitors, and the soft steps of
+ the footmen. At one end of the table sat the countess with Márya
+ Dmítrievna on her right and Anna Mikháylovna on her left, the other lady
+ visitors were farther down. At the other end sat the count, with the
+ hussar colonel on his left and Shinshín and the other male visitors on his
+ right. Midway down the long table on one side sat the grown-up young
+ people: Véra beside Berg, and Pierre beside Borís; and on the other side,
+ the children, tutors, and governesses. From behind the crystal decanters
+ and fruit vases, the count kept glancing at his wife and her tall cap with
+ its light-blue ribbons, and busily filled his neighbors’ glasses, not
+ neglecting his own. The countess in turn, without omitting her duties as
+ hostess, threw significant glances from behind the pineapples at her
+ husband whose face and bald head seemed by their redness to contrast more
+ than usual with his gray hair. At the ladies’ end an even chatter of
+ voices was heard all the time, at the men’s end the voices sounded louder
+ and louder, especially that of the colonel of hussars who, growing more
+ and more flushed, ate and drank so much that the count held him up as a
+ pattern to the other guests. Berg with tender smiles was saying to Véra
+ that love is not an earthly but a heavenly feeling. Borís was telling his
+ new friend Pierre who the guests were and exchanging glances with Natásha,
+ who was sitting opposite. Pierre spoke little but examined the new faces,
+ and ate a great deal. Of the two soups he chose turtle with savory patties
+ and went on to the game without omitting a single dish or one of the
+ wines. These latter the butler thrust mysteriously forward, wrapped in a
+ napkin, from behind the next man’s shoulders and whispered: “Dry
+ Madeira”... “Hungarian”... or “Rhine wine” as the case might be. Of the
+ four crystal glasses engraved with the count’s monogram that stood before
+ his plate, Pierre held out one at random and drank with enjoyment, gazing
+ with ever-increasing amiability at the other guests. Natásha, who sat
+ opposite, was looking at Borís as girls of thirteen look at the boy they
+ are in love with and have just kissed for the first time. Sometimes that
+ same look fell on Pierre, and that funny lively little girl’s look made
+ him inclined to laugh without knowing why.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas sat at some distance from Sónya, beside Julie Karágina, to whom
+ he was again talking with the same involuntary smile. Sónya wore a company
+ smile but was evidently tormented by jealousy; now she turned pale, now
+ blushed and strained every nerve to overhear what Nicholas and Julie were
+ saying to one another. The governess kept looking round uneasily as if
+ preparing to resent any slight that might be put upon the children. The
+ German tutor was trying to remember all the dishes, wines, and kinds of
+ dessert, in order to send a full description of the dinner to his people
+ in Germany; and he felt greatly offended when the butler with a bottle
+ wrapped in a napkin passed him by. He frowned, trying to appear as if he
+ did not want any of that wine, but was mortified because no one would
+ understand that it was not to quench his thirst or from greediness that he
+ wanted it, but simply from a conscientious desire for knowledge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX
+ 
+ 
+ At the men’s end of the table the talk grew more and more animated. The
+ colonel told them that the declaration of war had already appeared in
+ Petersburg and that a copy, which he had himself seen, had that day been
+ forwarded by courier to the commander in chief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And why the deuce are we going to fight Bonaparte?” remarked Shinshín.
+ “He has stopped Austria’s cackle and I fear it will be our turn next.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The colonel was a stout, tall, plethoric German, evidently devoted to the
+ service and patriotically Russian. He resented Shinshín’s remark.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is for the reasson, my goot sir,” said he, speaking with a German
+ accent, “for the reasson zat ze Emperor knows zat. He declares in ze
+ manifessto zat he cannot fiew wiz indifference ze danger vreatening Russia
+ and zat ze safety and dignity of ze Empire as vell as ze sanctity of its
+ alliances ...” he spoke this last word with particular emphasis as
+ if in it lay the gist of the matter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then with the unerring official memory that characterized him he repeated
+ from the opening words of the manifesto:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ ... and the wish, which constitutes the Emperor’s sole and absolute aim—to
+ establish peace in Europe on firm foundations—has now decided him to
+ despatch part of the army abroad and to create a new condition for the
+ attainment of that purpose .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Zat, my dear sir, is vy...” he concluded, drinking a tumbler of wine with
+ dignity and looking to the count for approval.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ Connaissez-vous le Proverbe: * ‘Jerome, Jerome, do not roam, but
+ turn spindles at home!’?” said Shinshín, puckering his brows and smiling.
+ “ Cela nous convient à merveille .*(2) Suvórov now—he knew what
+ he was about; yet they beat him à plate couture ,*(3) and where are
+ we to find Suvórovs now? Je vous demande un peu ,” *(4) said he,
+ continually changing from French to Russian.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Do you know the proverb?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *(2) That suits us down to the ground.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *(3) Hollow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ *(4) I just ask you that.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Ve must vight to the last tr-r-op of our plood!” said the colonel,
+ thumping the table; “and ve must tie for our Emperor, and zen all vill pe
+ vell. And ve must discuss it as little as po-o-ossible”... he dwelt
+ particularly on the word possible ... “as po-o-ossible,” he ended,
+ again turning to the count. “Zat is how ve old hussars look at it, and
+ zere’s an end of it! And how do you, a young man and a young hussar, how
+ do you judge of it?” he added, addressing Nicholas, who when he heard that
+ the war was being discussed had turned from his partner with eyes and ears
+ intent on the colonel.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am quite of your opinion,” replied Nicholas, flaming up, turning his
+ plate round and moving his wineglasses about with as much decision and
+ desperation as though he were at that moment facing some great danger. “I
+ am convinced that we Russians must die or conquer,” he concluded,
+ conscious—as were others—after the words were uttered that his
+ remarks were too enthusiastic and emphatic for the occasion and were
+ therefore awkward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What you said just now was splendid!” said his partner Julie.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya trembled all over and blushed to her ears and behind them and down
+ to her neck and shoulders while Nicholas was speaking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre listened to the colonel’s speech and nodded approvingly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s fine,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The young man’s a real hussar!” shouted the colonel, again thumping the
+ table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are you making such a noise about over there?” Márya Dmítrievna’s
+ deep voice suddenly inquired from the other end of the table. “What are
+ you thumping the table for?” she demanded of the hussar, “and why are you
+ exciting yourself? Do you think the French are here?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am speaking ze truce,” replied the hussar with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s all about the war,” the count shouted down the table. “You know my
+ son’s going, Márya Dmítrievna? My son is going.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have four sons in the army but still I don’t fret. It is all in God’s
+ hands. You may die in your bed or God may spare you in a battle,” replied
+ Márya Dmítrievna’s deep voice, which easily carried the whole length of
+ the table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s true!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Once more the conversations concentrated, the ladies’ at the one end and
+ the men’s at the other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You won’t ask,” Natásha’s little brother was saying; “I know you won’t
+ ask!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will,” replied Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her face suddenly flushed with reckless and joyous resolution. She half
+ rose, by a glance inviting Pierre, who sat opposite, to listen to what was
+ coming, and turning to her mother:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma!” rang out the clear contralto notes of her childish voice, audible
+ the whole length of the table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it?” asked the countess, startled; but seeing by her daughter’s
+ face that it was only mischief, she shook a finger at her sternly with a
+ threatening and forbidding movement of her head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The conversation was hushed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma! What sweets are we going to have?” and Natásha’s voice sounded
+ still more firm and resolute.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess tried to frown, but could not. Márya Dmítrievna shook her fat
+ finger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cossack!” she said threateningly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Most of the guests, uncertain how to regard this sally, looked at the
+ elders.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You had better take care!” said the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma! What sweets are we going to have?” Natásha again cried boldly,
+ with saucy gaiety, confident that her prank would be taken in good part.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya and fat little Pétya doubled up with laughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see! I have asked,” whispered Natásha to her little brother
+ and to Pierre, glancing at him again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ice pudding, but you won’t get any,” said Márya Dmítrievna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha saw there was nothing to be afraid of and so she braved even Márya
+ Dmítrievna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Márya Dmítrievna! What kind of ice pudding? I don’t like ice cream.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Carrot ices.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No! What kind, Márya Dmítrievna? What kind?” she almost screamed; “I want
+ to know!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Márya Dmítrievna and the countess burst out laughing, and all the guests
+ joined in. Everyone laughed, not at Márya Dmítrievna’s answer but at the
+ incredible boldness and smartness of this little girl who had dared to
+ treat Márya Dmítrievna in this fashion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha only desisted when she had been told that there would be pineapple
+ ice. Before the ices, champagne was served round. The band again struck
+ up, the count and countess kissed, and the guests, leaving their seats,
+ went up to “congratulate” the countess, and reached across the table to
+ clink glasses with the count, with the children, and with one another.
+ Again the footmen rushed about, chairs scraped, and in the same order in
+ which they had entered but with redder faces, the guests returned to the
+ drawing room and to the count’s study.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX
+ 
+ 
+ The card tables were drawn out, sets made up for boston, and the count’s
+ visitors settled themselves, some in the two drawing rooms, some in the
+ sitting room, some in the library.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count, holding his cards fanwise, kept himself with difficulty from
+ dropping into his usual after-dinner nap, and laughed at everything. The
+ young people, at the countess’ instigation, gathered round the clavichord
+ and harp. Julie by general request played first. After she had played a
+ little air with variations on the harp, she joined the other young ladies
+ in begging Natásha and Nicholas, who were noted for their musical talent,
+ to sing something. Natásha, who was treated as though she were grown up,
+ was evidently very proud of this but at the same time felt shy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What shall we sing?” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘The Brook,’” suggested Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, then, let’s be quick. Borís, come here,” said Natásha. “But where
+ is Sónya?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She looked round and seeing that her friend was not in the room ran to
+ look for her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Running into Sónya’s room and not finding her there, Natásha ran to the
+ nursery, but Sónya was not there either. Natásha concluded that she must
+ be on the chest in the passage. The chest in the passage was the place of
+ mourning for the younger female generation in the Rostóv household. And
+ there in fact was Sónya lying face downward on Nurse’s dirty feather bed
+ on the top of the chest, crumpling her gauzy pink dress under her, hiding
+ her face with her slender fingers, and sobbing so convulsively that her
+ bare little shoulders shook. Natásha’s face, which had been so radiantly
+ happy all that saint’s day, suddenly changed: her eyes became fixed, and
+ then a shiver passed down her broad neck and the corners of her mouth
+ drooped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya! What is it? What is the matter?... Oo... Oo... Oo...!” And
+ Natásha’s large mouth widened, making her look quite ugly, and she began
+ to wail like a baby without knowing why, except that Sónya was crying.
+ Sónya tried to lift her head to answer but could not, and hid her face
+ still deeper in the bed. Natásha wept, sitting on the blue-striped feather
+ bed and hugging her friend. With an effort Sónya sat up and began wiping
+ her eyes and explaining.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nicholas is going away in a week’s time, his... papers... have come... he
+ told me himself... but still I should not cry,” and she showed a paper she
+ held in her hand—with the verses Nicholas had written, “still, I
+ should not cry, but you can’t... no one can understand... what a soul he
+ has!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And she began to cry again because he had such a noble soul.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s all very well for you... I am not envious... I love you and Borís
+ also,” she went on, gaining a little strength; “he is nice... there are no
+ difficulties in your way.... But Nicholas is my cousin... one would have
+ to... the Metropolitan himself... and even then it can’t be done. And
+ besides, if she tells Mamma” (Sónya looked upon the countess as her mother
+ and called her so) “that I am spoiling Nicholas’ career and am heartless
+ and ungrateful, while truly... God is my witness,” and she made the sign
+ of the cross, “I love her so much, and all of you, only Véra... And what
+ for? What have I done to her? I am so grateful to you that I would
+ willingly sacrifice everything, only I have nothing....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya could not continue, and again hid her face in her hands and in the
+ feather bed. Natásha began consoling her, but her face showed that she
+ understood all the gravity of her friend’s trouble.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya,” she suddenly exclaimed, as if she had guessed the true reason of
+ her friend’s sorrow, “I’m sure Véra has said something to you since
+ dinner? Hasn’t she?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, these verses Nicholas wrote himself and I copied some others, and
+ she found them on my table and said she’d show them to Mamma, and that I
+ was ungrateful, and that Mamma would never allow him to marry me, but that
+ he’ll marry Julie. You see how he’s been with her all day... Natásha, what
+ have I done to deserve it?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And again she began to sob, more bitterly than before. Natásha lifted her
+ up, hugged her, and, smiling through her tears, began comforting her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya, don’t believe her, darling! Don’t believe her! Do you remember how
+ we and Nicholas, all three of us, talked in the sitting room after supper?
+ Why, we settled how everything was to be. I don’t quite remember how, but
+ don’t you remember that it could all be arranged and how nice it all was?
+ There’s Uncle Shinshín’s brother has married his first cousin. And we are
+ only second cousins, you know. And Borís says it is quite possible. You
+ know I have told him all about it. And he is so clever and so good!” said
+ Natásha. “Don’t you cry, Sónya, dear love, darling Sónya!” and she kissed
+ her and laughed. “Véra’s spiteful; never mind her! And all will come right
+ and she won’t say anything to Mamma. Nicholas will tell her himself, and
+ he doesn’t care at all for Julie.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha kissed her on the hair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya sat up. The little kitten brightened, its eyes shone, and it seemed
+ ready to lift its tail, jump down on its soft paws, and begin playing with
+ the ball of worsted as a kitten should.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you think so?... Really? Truly?” she said, quickly smoothing her frock
+ and hair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Really, truly!” answered Natásha, pushing in a crisp lock that had
+ strayed from under her friend’s plaits.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Both laughed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, let’s go and sing ‘The Brook.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come along!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know, that fat Pierre who sat opposite me is so funny!” said
+ Natásha, stopping suddenly. “I feel so happy!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And she set off at a run along the passage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya, shaking off some down which clung to her and tucking away the
+ verses in the bosom of her dress close to her bony little chest, ran after
+ Natásha down the passage into the sitting room with flushed face and
+ light, joyous steps. At the visitors’ request the young people sang the
+ quartette, “The Brook,” with which everyone was delighted. Then Nicholas
+ sang a song he had just learned:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At nighttime in the moon’s fair glow
+
+    How sweet, as fancies wander free,
+
+ To feel that in this world there’s one
+
+    Who still is thinking but of thee!
+
+
+
+ That while her fingers touch the harp
+
+    Wafting sweet music o’er the lea,
+
+ It is for thee thus swells her heart,
+
+    Sighing its message out to thee...
+
+
+
+ A day or two, then bliss unspoilt,
+
+    But oh! till then I cannot live!...
+
+
+
+ 
+ He had not finished the last verse before the young people began to get
+ ready to dance in the large hall, and the sound of the feet and the
+ coughing of the musicians were heard from the gallery.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was sitting in the drawing room where Shinshín had engaged him, as
+ a man recently returned from abroad, in a political conversation in which
+ several others joined but which bored Pierre. When the music began Natásha
+ came in and walking straight up to Pierre said, laughing and blushing:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma told me to ask you to join the dancers.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am afraid of mixing the figures,” Pierre replied; “but if you will be
+ my teacher...” And lowering his big arm he offered it to the slender
+ little girl.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While the couples were arranging themselves and the musicians tuning up,
+ Pierre sat down with his little partner. Natásha was perfectly happy; she
+ was dancing with a grown-up man, who had been abroad . She
+ was sitting in a conspicuous place and talking to him like a grown-up
+ lady. She had a fan in her hand that one of the ladies had given her to
+ hold. Assuming quite the pose of a society woman (heaven knows when and
+ where she had learned it) she talked with her partner, fanning herself and
+ smiling over the fan.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear, dear! Just look at her!” exclaimed the countess as she crossed the
+ ballroom, pointing to Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha blushed and laughed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, really, Mamma! Why should you? What is there to be surprised at?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ In the midst of the third écossaise there was a clatter of chairs
+ being pushed back in the sitting room where the count and Márya Dmítrievna
+ had been playing cards with the majority of the more distinguished and
+ older visitors. They now, stretching themselves after sitting so long, and
+ replacing their purses and pocketbooks, entered the ballroom. First came
+ Márya Dmítrievna and the count, both with merry countenances. The count,
+ with playful ceremony somewhat in ballet style, offered his bent arm to
+ Márya Dmítrievna. He drew himself up, a smile of debonair gallantry lit up
+ his face and as soon as the last figure of the écossaise was ended,
+ he clapped his hands to the musicians and shouted up to their gallery,
+ addressing the first violin:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Semën! Do you know the Daniel Cooper? ”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This was the count’s favorite dance, which he had danced in his youth.
+ (Strictly speaking, Daniel Cooper was one figure of the anglaise .)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look at Papa!” shouted Natásha to the whole company, and quite forgetting
+ that she was dancing with a grown-up partner she bent her curly head to
+ her knees and made the whole room ring with her laughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And indeed everybody in the room looked with a smile of pleasure at the
+ jovial old gentleman, who standing beside his tall and stout partner,
+ Márya Dmítrievna, curved his arms, beat time, straightened his shoulders,
+ turned out his toes, tapped gently with his foot, and, by a smile that
+ broadened his round face more and more, prepared the onlookers for what
+ was to follow. As soon as the provocatively gay strains of Daniel
+ Cooper (somewhat resembling those of a merry peasant dance) began to
+ sound, all the doorways of the ballroom were suddenly filled by the
+ domestic serfs—the men on one side and the women on the other—who
+ with beaming faces had come to see their master making merry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just look at the master! A regular eagle he is!” loudly remarked the
+ nurse, as she stood in one of the doorways.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count danced well and knew it. But his partner could not and did not
+ want to dance well. Her enormous figure stood erect, her powerful arms
+ hanging down (she had handed her reticule to the countess), and only her
+ stern but handsome face really joined in the dance. What was expressed by
+ the whole of the count’s plump figure, in Márya Dmítrievna found
+ expression only in her more and more beaming face and quivering nose. But
+ if the count, getting more and more into the swing of it, charmed the
+ spectators by the unexpectedness of his adroit maneuvers and the agility
+ with which he capered about on his light feet, Márya Dmítrievna produced
+ no less impression by slight exertions—the least effort to move her
+ shoulders or bend her arms when turning, or stamp her foot—which
+ everyone appreciated in view of her size and habitual severity. The dance
+ grew livelier and livelier. The other couples could not attract a moment’s
+ attention to their own evolutions and did not even try to do so. All were
+ watching the count and Márya Dmítrievna. Natásha kept pulling everyone by
+ sleeve or dress, urging them to “look at Papa!” though as it was they
+ never took their eyes off the couple. In the intervals of the dance the
+ count, breathing deeply, waved and shouted to the musicians to play
+ faster. Faster, faster, and faster; lightly, more lightly, and yet more
+ lightly whirled the count, flying round Márya Dmítrievna, now on his toes,
+ now on his heels; until, turning his partner round to her seat, he
+ executed the final pas , raising his soft foot backwards, bowing his
+ perspiring head, smiling and making a wide sweep with his arm, amid a
+ thunder of applause and laughter led by Natásha. Both partners stood
+ still, breathing heavily and wiping their faces with their cambric
+ handkerchiefs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s how we used to dance in our time, ma chère ,” said the
+ count.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That was a Daniel Cooper! ” exclaimed Márya Dmítrievna,
+ tucking up her sleeves and puffing heavily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI
+ 
+ 
+ While in the Rostóvs’ ballroom the sixth anglaise was being danced,
+ to a tune in which the weary musicians blundered, and while tired footmen
+ and cooks were getting the supper, Count Bezúkhov had a sixth stroke. The
+ doctors pronounced recovery impossible. After a mute confession, communion
+ was administered to the dying man, preparations made for the sacrament of
+ unction, and in his house there was the bustle and thrill of suspense
+ usual at such moments. Outside the house, beyond the gates, a group of
+ undertakers, who hid whenever a carriage drove up, waited in expectation
+ of an important order for an expensive funeral. The Military Governor of
+ Moscow, who had been assiduous in sending aides-de-camp to inquire after
+ the count’s health, came himself that evening to bid a last farewell to
+ the celebrated grandee of Catherine’s court, Count Bezúkhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The magnificent reception room was crowded. Everyone stood up respectfully
+ when the Military Governor, having stayed about half an hour alone with
+ the dying man, passed out, slightly acknowledging their bows and trying to
+ escape as quickly as possible from the glances fixed on him by the
+ doctors, clergy, and relatives of the family. Prince Vasíli, who had grown
+ thinner and paler during the last few days, escorted him to the door,
+ repeating something to him several times in low tones.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the Military Governor had gone, Prince Vasíli sat down all alone on a
+ chair in the ballroom, crossing one leg high over the other, leaning his
+ elbow on his knee and covering his face with his hand. After sitting so
+ for a while he rose, and, looking about him with frightened eyes, went
+ with unusually hurried steps down the long corridor leading to the back of
+ the house, to the room of the eldest princess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Those who were in the dimly lit reception room spoke in nervous whispers,
+ and, whenever anyone went into or came from the dying man’s room, grew
+ silent and gazed with eyes full of curiosity or expectancy at his door,
+ which creaked slightly when opened.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The limits of human life ... are fixed and may not be o’erpassed,” said
+ an old priest to a lady who had taken a seat beside him and was listening
+ naïvely to his words.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I wonder, is it not too late to administer unction?” asked the lady,
+ adding the priest’s clerical title, as if she had no opinion of her own on
+ the subject.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, madam, it is a great sacrament,” replied the priest, passing his hand
+ over the thin grizzled strands of hair combed back across his bald head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who was that? The Military Governor himself?” was being asked at the
+ other side of the room. “How young-looking he is!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, and he is over sixty. I hear the count no longer recognizes anyone.
+ They wished to administer the sacrament of unction.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I knew someone who received that sacrament seven times.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The second princess had just come from the sickroom with her eyes red from
+ weeping and sat down beside Dr. Lorrain, who was sitting in a graceful
+ pose under a portrait of Catherine, leaning his elbow on a table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Beautiful,” said the doctor in answer to a remark about the weather. “The
+ weather is beautiful, Princess; and besides, in Moscow one feels as if one
+ were in the country.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, indeed,” replied the princess with a sigh. “So he may have something
+ to drink?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lorrain considered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Has he taken his medicine?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctor glanced at his watch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Take a glass of boiled water and put a pinch of cream of tartar,” and he
+ indicated with his delicate fingers what he meant by a pinch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dere has neffer been a gase,” a German doctor was saying to an
+ aide-de-camp, “dat one liffs after de sird stroke.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And what a well-preserved man he was!” remarked the aide-de-camp. “And
+ who will inherit his wealth?” he added in a whisper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It von’t go begging,” replied the German with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Everyone again looked toward the door, which creaked as the second
+ princess went in with the drink she had prepared according to Lorrain’s
+ instructions. The German doctor went up to Lorrain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you think he can last till morning?” asked the German, addressing
+ Lorrain in French which he pronounced badly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lorrain, pursing up his lips, waved a severely negative finger before his
+ nose.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tonight, not later,” said he in a low voice, and he moved away with a
+ decorous smile of self-satisfaction at being able clearly to understand
+ and state the patient’s condition.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile Prince Vasíli had opened the door into the princess’ room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In this room it was almost dark; only two tiny lamps were burning before
+ the icons and there was a pleasant scent of flowers and burnt pastilles.
+ The room was crowded with small pieces of furniture, whatnots, cupboards,
+ and little tables. The quilt of a high, white feather bed was just visible
+ behind a screen. A small dog began to bark.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, is it you, cousin?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She rose and smoothed her hair, which was as usual so extremely smooth
+ that it seemed to be made of one piece with her head and covered with
+ varnish.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Has anything happened?” she asked. “I am so terrified.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, there is no change. I only came to have a talk about business,
+ Catiche,” * muttered the prince, seating himself wearily on the chair she
+ had just vacated. “You have made the place warm, I must say,” he remarked.
+ “Well, sit down: let’s have a talk.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Catherine.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “I thought perhaps something had happened,” she said with her unchanging
+ stonily severe expression; and, sitting down opposite the prince, she
+ prepared to listen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I wished to get a nap, mon cousin , but I can’t.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, my dear?” said Prince Vasíli, taking her hand and bending it
+ downwards as was his habit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was plain that this “well?” referred to much that they both understood
+ without naming.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess, who had a straight, rigid body, abnormally long for her
+ legs, looked directly at Prince Vasíli with no sign of emotion in her
+ prominent gray eyes. Then she shook her head and glanced up at the icons
+ with a sigh. This might have been taken as an expression of sorrow and
+ devotion, or of weariness and hope of resting before long. Prince Vasíli
+ understood it as an expression of weariness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I?” he said; “do you think it is easier for me? I am as worn out as a
+ post horse, but still I must have a talk with you, Catiche, a very serious
+ talk.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli said no more and his cheeks began to twitch nervously, now
+ on one side, now on the other, giving his face an unpleasant expression
+ which was never to be seen on it in a drawing room. His eyes too seemed
+ strange; at one moment they looked impudently sly and at the next glanced
+ round in alarm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess, holding her little dog on her lap with her thin bony hands,
+ looked attentively into Prince Vasíli’s eyes evidently resolved not to be
+ the first to break silence, if she had to wait till morning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, you see, my dear princess and cousin, Catherine Semënovna,”
+ continued Prince Vasíli, returning to his theme, apparently not without an
+ inner struggle; “at such a moment as this one must think of everything.
+ One must think of the future, of all of you... I love you all, like
+ children of my own, as you know.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess continued to look at him without moving, and with the same
+ dull expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And then of course my family has also to be considered,” Prince Vasíli
+ went on, testily pushing away a little table without looking at her. “You
+ know, Catiche, that we—you three sisters, Mámontov, and my wife—are
+ the count’s only direct heirs. I know, I know how hard it is for you to
+ talk or think of such matters. It is no easier for me; but, my dear, I am
+ getting on for sixty and must be prepared for anything. Do you know I have
+ sent for Pierre? The count,” pointing to his portrait, “definitely
+ demanded that he should be called.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli looked questioningly at the princess, but could not make out
+ whether she was considering what he had just said or whether she was
+ simply looking at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There is one thing I constantly pray God to grant, mon cousin ,”
+ she replied, “and it is that He would be merciful to him and would allow
+ his noble soul peacefully to leave this...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, of course,” interrupted Prince Vasíli impatiently, rubbing his
+ bald head and angrily pulling back toward him the little table that he had
+ pushed away. “But... in short, the fact is... you know yourself that last
+ winter the count made a will by which he left all his property, not to us
+ his direct heirs, but to Pierre.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He has made wills enough!” quietly remarked the princess. “But he cannot
+ leave the estate to Pierre. Pierre is illegitimate.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But, my dear,” said Prince Vasíli suddenly, clutching the little table
+ and becoming more animated and talking more rapidly: “what if a letter has
+ been written to the Emperor in which the count asks for Pierre’s
+ legitimation? Do you understand that in consideration of the count’s
+ services, his request would be granted?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess smiled as people do who think they know more about the
+ subject under discussion than those they are talking with.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I can tell you more,” continued Prince Vasíli, seizing her hand, “that
+ letter was written, though it was not sent, and the Emperor knew of it.
+ The only question is, has it been destroyed or not? If not, then as soon
+ as all is over ,” and Prince Vasíli sighed to intimate what he meant
+ by the words all is over , “and the count’s papers are opened, the
+ will and letter will be delivered to the Emperor, and the petition will
+ certainly be granted. Pierre will get everything as the legitimate son.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And our share?” asked the princess smiling ironically, as if anything
+ might happen, only not that.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But, my poor Catiche, it is as clear as daylight! He will then be the
+ legal heir to everything and you won’t get anything. You must know, my
+ dear, whether the will and letter were written, and whether they have been
+ destroyed or not. And if they have somehow been overlooked, you ought to
+ know where they are, and must find them, because...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What next?” the princess interrupted, smiling sardonically and not
+ changing the expression of her eyes. “I am a woman, and you think we are
+ all stupid; but I know this: an illegitimate son cannot inherit... un
+ bâtard! ”* she added, as if supposing that this translation of the word
+ would effectively prove to Prince Vasíli the invalidity of his contention.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * A bastard.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, really, Catiche! Can’t you understand! You are so intelligent, how
+ is it you don’t see that if the count has written a letter to the Emperor
+ begging him to recognize Pierre as legitimate, it follows that Pierre will
+ not be Pierre but will become Count Bezúkhov, and will then inherit
+ everything under the will? And if the will and letter are not destroyed,
+ then you will have nothing but the consolation of having been dutiful et
+ tout ce qui s’ensuit! * That’s certain.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * And all that follows therefrom.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “I know the will was made, but I also know that it is invalid; and you, mon
+ cousin , seem to consider me a perfect fool,” said the princess with
+ the expression women assume when they suppose they are saying something
+ witty and stinging.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear Princess Catherine Semënovna,” began Prince Vasíli impatiently,
+ “I came here not to wrangle with you, but to talk about your interests as
+ with a kinswoman, a good, kind, true relation. And I tell you for the
+ tenth time that if the letter to the Emperor and the will in Pierre’s
+ favor are among the count’s papers, then, my dear girl, you and your
+ sisters are not heiresses! If you don’t believe me, then believe an
+ expert. I have just been talking to Dmítri Onúfrich” (the family
+ solicitor) “and he says the same.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At this a sudden change evidently took place in the princess’ ideas; her
+ thin lips grew white, though her eyes did not change, and her voice when
+ she began to speak passed through such transitions as she herself
+ evidently did not expect.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That would be a fine thing!” said she. “I never wanted anything and I
+ don’t now.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She pushed the little dog off her lap and smoothed her dress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And this is gratitude—this is recognition for those who have
+ sacrificed everything for his sake!” she cried. “It’s splendid! Fine! I
+ don’t want anything, Prince.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, but you are not the only one. There are your sisters...” replied
+ Prince Vasíli.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the princess did not listen to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I knew it long ago but had forgotten. I knew that I could expect
+ nothing but meanness, deceit, envy, intrigue, and ingratitude—the
+ blackest ingratitude—in this house...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you or do you not know where that will is?” insisted Prince Vasíli,
+ his cheeks twitching more than ever.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I was a fool! I still believed in people, loved them, and sacrificed
+ myself. But only the base, the vile succeed! I know who has been
+ intriguing!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess wished to rise, but the prince held her by the hand. She had
+ the air of one who has suddenly lost faith in the whole human race. She
+ gave her companion an angry glance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There is still time, my dear. You must remember, Catiche, that it was all
+ done casually in a moment of anger, of illness, and was afterwards
+ forgotten. Our duty, my dear, is to rectify his mistake, to ease his last
+ moments by not letting him commit this injustice, and not to let him die
+ feeling that he is rendering unhappy those who...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who sacrificed everything for him,” chimed in the princess, who would
+ again have risen had not the prince still held her fast, “though he never
+ could appreciate it. No, mon cousin ,” she added with a sigh, “I
+ shall always remember that in this world one must expect no reward, that
+ in this world there is neither honor nor justice. In this world one has to
+ be cunning and cruel.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now come, come! Be reasonable. I know your excellent heart.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I have a wicked heart.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know your heart,” repeated the prince. “I value your friendship and
+ wish you to have as good an opinion of me. Don’t upset yourself, and let
+ us talk sensibly while there is still time, be it a day or be it but an
+ hour.... Tell me all you know about the will, and above all where it is.
+ You must know. We will take it at once and show it to the count. He has,
+ no doubt, forgotten it and will wish to destroy it. You understand that my
+ sole desire is conscientiously to carry out his wishes; that is my only
+ reason for being here. I came simply to help him and you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now I see it all! I know who has been intriguing—I know!” cried the
+ princess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s not the point, my dear.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s that protégé of yours, that sweet Princess Drubetskáya, that Anna
+ Mikháylovna whom I would not take for a housemaid... the infamous, vile
+ woman!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do not let us lose any time...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, don’t talk to me! Last winter she wheedled herself in here and told
+ the count such vile, disgraceful things about us, especially about Sophie—I
+ can’t repeat them—that it made the count quite ill and he would not
+ see us for a whole fortnight. I know it was then he wrote this vile,
+ infamous paper, but I thought the thing was invalid.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We’ve got to it at last—why did you not tell me about it sooner?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s in the inlaid portfolio that he keeps under his pillow,” said the
+ princess, ignoring his question. “Now I know! Yes; if I have a sin, a
+ great sin, it is hatred of that vile woman!” almost shrieked the princess,
+ now quite changed. “And what does she come worming herself in here for?
+ But I will give her a piece of my mind. The time will come!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXII
+ 
+ 
+ While these conversations were going on in the reception room and the
+ princess’ room, a carriage containing Pierre (who had been sent for) and
+ Anna Mikháylovna (who found it necessary to accompany him) was driving
+ into the court of Count Bezúkhov’s house. As the wheels rolled softly over
+ the straw beneath the windows, Anna Mikháylovna, having turned with words
+ of comfort to her companion, realized that he was asleep in his corner and
+ woke him up. Rousing himself, Pierre followed Anna Mikháylovna out of the
+ carriage, and only then began to think of the interview with his dying
+ father which awaited him. He noticed that they had not come to the front
+ entrance but to the back door. While he was getting down from the carriage
+ steps two men, who looked like tradespeople, ran hurriedly from the
+ entrance and hid in the shadow of the wall. Pausing for a moment, Pierre
+ noticed several other men of the same kind hiding in the shadow of the
+ house on both sides. But neither Anna Mikháylovna nor the footman nor the
+ coachman, who could not help seeing these people, took any notice of them.
+ “It seems to be all right,” Pierre concluded, and followed Anna
+ Mikháylovna. She hurriedly ascended the narrow dimly lit stone staircase,
+ calling to Pierre, who was lagging behind, to follow. Though he did not
+ see why it was necessary for him to go to the count at all, still less why
+ he had to go by the back stairs, yet judging by Anna Mikháylovna’s air of
+ assurance and haste, Pierre concluded that it was all absolutely
+ necessary. Halfway up the stairs they were almost knocked over by some men
+ who, carrying pails, came running downstairs, their boots clattering.
+ These men pressed close to the wall to let Pierre and Anna Mikháylovna
+ pass and did not evince the least surprise at seeing them there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is this the way to the princesses’ apartments?” asked Anna Mikháylovna of
+ one of them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” replied a footman in a bold loud voice, as if anything were now
+ permissible; “the door to the left, ma’am.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Perhaps the count did not ask for me,” said Pierre when he reached the
+ landing. “I’d better go to my own room.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Mikháylovna paused and waited for him to come up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my friend!” she said, touching his arm as she had done her son’s when
+ speaking to him that afternoon, “believe me I suffer no less than you do,
+ but be a man!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But really, hadn’t I better go away?” he asked, looking kindly at her
+ over his spectacles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my dear friend! Forget the wrongs that may have been done you. Think
+ that he is your father ... perhaps in the agony of death.” She sighed. “I
+ have loved you like a son from the first. Trust yourself to me, Pierre. I
+ shall not forget your interests.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre did not understand a word, but the conviction that all this had to
+ be grew stronger, and he meekly followed Anna Mikháylovna who was already
+ opening a door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This door led into a back anteroom. An old man, a servant of the
+ princesses, sat in a corner knitting a stocking. Pierre had never been in
+ this part of the house and did not even know of the existence of these
+ rooms. Anna Mikháylovna, addressing a maid who was hurrying past with a
+ decanter on a tray as “my dear” and “my sweet,” asked about the princess’
+ health and then led Pierre along a stone passage. The first door on the
+ left led into the princesses’ apartments. The maid with the decanter in
+ her haste had not closed the door (everything in the house was done in
+ haste at that time), and Pierre and Anna Mikháylovna in passing
+ instinctively glanced into the room, where Prince Vasíli and the eldest
+ princess were sitting close together talking. Seeing them pass, Prince
+ Vasíli drew back with obvious impatience, while the princess jumped up and
+ with a gesture of desperation slammed the door with all her might.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This action was so unlike her usual composure and the fear depicted on
+ Prince Vasíli’s face so out of keeping with his dignity that Pierre
+ stopped and glanced inquiringly over his spectacles at his guide. Anna
+ Mikháylovna evinced no surprise, she only smiled faintly and sighed, as if
+ to say that this was no more than she had expected.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Be a man, my friend. I will look after your interests,” said she in reply
+ to his look, and went still faster along the passage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre could not make out what it was all about, and still less what
+ “watching over his interests” meant, but he decided that all these things
+ had to be. From the passage they went into a large, dimly lit room
+ adjoining the count’s reception room. It was one of those sumptuous but
+ cold apartments known to Pierre only from the front approach, but even in
+ this room there now stood an empty bath, and water had been spilled on the
+ carpet. They were met by a deacon with a censer and by a servant who
+ passed out on tiptoe without heeding them. They went into the reception
+ room familiar to Pierre, with two Italian windows opening into the
+ conservatory, with its large bust and full length portrait of Catherine
+ the Great. The same people were still sitting here in almost the same
+ positions as before, whispering to one another. All became silent and
+ turned to look at the pale tear-worn Anna Mikháylovna as she entered, and
+ at the big stout figure of Pierre who, hanging his head, meekly followed
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Mikháylovna’s face expressed a consciousness that the decisive moment
+ had arrived. With the air of a practical Petersburg lady she now, keeping
+ Pierre close beside her, entered the room even more boldly than that
+ afternoon. She felt that as she brought with her the person the dying man
+ wished to see, her own admission was assured. Casting a rapid glance at
+ all those in the room and noticing the count’s confessor there, she glided
+ up to him with a sort of amble, not exactly bowing yet seeming to grow
+ suddenly smaller, and respectfully received the blessing first of one and
+ then of another priest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “God be thanked that you are in time,” said she to one of the priests;
+ “all we relatives have been in such anxiety. This young man is the count’s
+ son,” she added more softly. “What a terrible moment!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having said this she went up to the doctor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear doctor,” said she, “this young man is the count’s son. Is there any
+ hope?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctor cast a rapid glance upwards and silently shrugged his
+ shoulders. Anna Mikháylovna with just the same movement raised her
+ shoulders and eyes, almost closing the latter, sighed, and moved away from
+ the doctor to Pierre. To him, in a particularly respectful and tenderly
+ sad voice, she said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Trust in His mercy!” and pointing out a small sofa for him to sit and
+ wait for her, she went silently toward the door that everyone was watching
+ and it creaked very slightly as she disappeared behind it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre, having made up his mind to obey his monitress implicitly, moved
+ toward the sofa she had indicated. As soon as Anna Mikháylovna had
+ disappeared he noticed that the eyes of all in the room turned to him with
+ something more than curiosity and sympathy. He noticed that they whispered
+ to one another, casting significant looks at him with a kind of awe and
+ even servility. A deference such as he had never before received was shown
+ him. A strange lady, the one who had been talking to the priests, rose and
+ offered him her seat; an aide-de-camp picked up and returned a glove
+ Pierre had dropped; the doctors became respectfully silent as he passed
+ by, and moved to make way for him. At first Pierre wished to take another
+ seat so as not to trouble the lady, and also to pick up the glove himself
+ and to pass round the doctors who were not even in his way; but all at
+ once he felt that this would not do, and that tonight he was a person
+ obliged to perform some sort of awful rite which everyone expected of him,
+ and that he was therefore bound to accept their services. He took the
+ glove in silence from the aide-de-camp, and sat down in the lady’s chair,
+ placing his huge hands symmetrically on his knees in the naïve attitude of
+ an Egyptian statue, and decided in his own mind that all was as it should
+ be, and that in order not to lose his head and do foolish things he must
+ not act on his own ideas tonight, but must yield himself up entirely to
+ the will of those who were guiding him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not two minutes had passed before Prince Vasíli with head erect
+ majestically entered the room. He was wearing his long coat with three
+ stars on his breast. He seemed to have grown thinner since the morning;
+ his eyes seemed larger than usual when he glanced round and noticed
+ Pierre. He went up to him, took his hand (a thing he never used to do),
+ and drew it downwards as if wishing to ascertain whether it was firmly
+ fixed on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Courage, courage, my friend! He has asked to see you. That is well!” and
+ he turned to go.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Pierre thought it necessary to ask: “How is...” and hesitated, not
+ knowing whether it would be proper to call the dying man “the count,” yet
+ ashamed to call him “father.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He had another stroke about half an hour ago. Courage, my friend...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre’s mind was in such a confused state that the word “stroke”
+ suggested to him a blow from something. He looked at Prince Vasíli in
+ perplexity, and only later grasped that a stroke was an attack of illness.
+ Prince Vasíli said something to Lorrain in passing and went through the
+ door on tiptoe. He could not walk well on tiptoe and his whole body jerked
+ at each step. The eldest princess followed him, and the priests and
+ deacons and some servants also went in at the door. Through that door was
+ heard a noise of things being moved about, and at last Anna Mikháylovna,
+ still with the same expression, pale but resolute in the discharge of
+ duty, ran out and touching Pierre lightly on the arm said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The divine mercy is inexhaustible! Unction is about to be administered.
+ Come.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre went in at the door, stepping on the soft carpet, and noticed that
+ the strange lady, the aide-de-camp, and some of the servants, all followed
+ him in, as if there were now no further need for permission to enter that
+ room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIII
+ 
+ 
+ Pierre well knew this large room divided by columns and an arch, its walls
+ hung round with Persian carpets. The part of the room behind the columns,
+ with a high silk-curtained mahogany bedstead on one side and on the other
+ an immense case containing icons, was brightly illuminated with red light
+ like a Russian church during evening service. Under the gleaming icons
+ stood a long invalid chair, and in that chair on snowy-white smooth
+ pillows, evidently freshly changed, Pierre saw—covered to the waist
+ by a bright green quilt—the familiar, majestic figure of his father,
+ Count Bezúkhov, with that gray mane of hair above his broad forehead which
+ reminded one of a lion, and the deep characteristically noble wrinkles of
+ his handsome, ruddy face. He lay just under the icons; his large thick
+ hands outside the quilt. Into the right hand, which was lying palm
+ downwards, a wax taper had been thrust between forefinger and thumb, and
+ an old servant, bending over from behind the chair, held it in position.
+ By the chair stood the priests, their long hair falling over their
+ magnificent glittering vestments, with lighted tapers in their hands,
+ slowly and solemnly conducting the service. A little behind them stood the
+ two younger princesses holding handkerchiefs to their eyes, and just in
+ front of them their eldest sister, Catiche, with a vicious and determined
+ look steadily fixed on the icons, as though declaring to all that she
+ could not answer for herself should she glance round. Anna Mikháylovna,
+ with a meek, sorrowful, and all-forgiving expression on her face, stood by
+ the door near the strange lady. Prince Vasíli in front of the door, near
+ the invalid chair, a wax taper in his left hand, was leaning his left arm
+ on the carved back of a velvet chair he had turned round for the purpose,
+ and was crossing himself with his right hand, turning his eyes upward each
+ time he touched his forehead. His face wore a calm look of piety and
+ resignation to the will of God. “If you do not understand these
+ sentiments,” he seemed to be saying, “so much the worse for you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Behind him stood the aide-de-camp, the doctors, and the menservants; the
+ men and women had separated as in church. All were silently crossing
+ themselves, and the reading of the church service, the subdued chanting of
+ deep bass voices, and in the intervals sighs and the shuffling of feet
+ were the only sounds that could be heard. Anna Mikháylovna, with an air of
+ importance that showed that she felt she quite knew what she was about,
+ went across the room to where Pierre was standing and gave him a taper. He
+ lit it and, distracted by observing those around him, began crossing
+ himself with the hand that held the taper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sophie, the rosy, laughter-loving, youngest princess with the mole,
+ watched him. She smiled, hid her face in her handkerchief, and remained
+ with it hidden for awhile; then looking up and seeing Pierre she again
+ began to laugh. She evidently felt unable to look at him without laughing,
+ but could not resist looking at him: so to be out of temptation she
+ slipped quietly behind one of the columns. In the midst of the service the
+ voices of the priests suddenly ceased, they whispered to one another, and
+ the old servant who was holding the count’s hand got up and said something
+ to the ladies. Anna Mikháylovna stepped forward and, stooping over the
+ dying man, beckoned to Lorrain from behind her back. The French doctor
+ held no taper; he was leaning against one of the columns in a respectful
+ attitude implying that he, a foreigner, in spite of all differences of
+ faith, understood the full importance of the rite now being performed and
+ even approved of it. He now approached the sick man with the noiseless
+ step of one in full vigor of life, with his delicate white fingers raised
+ from the green quilt the hand that was free, and turning sideways felt the
+ pulse and reflected a moment. The sick man was given something to drink,
+ there was a stir around him, then the people resumed their places and the
+ service continued. During this interval Pierre noticed that Prince Vasíli
+ left the chair on which he had been leaning, and—with an air which
+ intimated that he knew what he was about and if others did not understand
+ him it was so much the worse for them—did not go up to the dying
+ man, but passed by him, joined the eldest princess, and moved with her to
+ the side of the room where stood the high bedstead with its silken
+ hangings. On leaving the bed both Prince Vasíli and the princess passed
+ out by a back door, but returned to their places one after the other
+ before the service was concluded. Pierre paid no more attention to this
+ occurrence than to the rest of what went on, having made up his mind once
+ for all that what he saw happening around him that evening was in some way
+ essential.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The chanting of the service ceased, and the voice of the priest was heard
+ respectfully congratulating the dying man on having received the
+ sacrament. The dying man lay as lifeless and immovable as before. Around
+ him everyone began to stir: steps were audible and whispers, among which
+ Anna Mikháylovna’s was the most distinct.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre heard her say:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Certainly he must be moved onto the bed; here it will be impossible...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The sick man was so surrounded by doctors, princesses, and servants that
+ Pierre could no longer see the reddish-yellow face with its gray mane—which,
+ though he saw other faces as well, he had not lost sight of for a single
+ moment during the whole service. He judged by the cautious movements of
+ those who crowded round the invalid chair that they had lifted the dying
+ man and were moving him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Catch hold of my arm or you’ll drop him!” he heard one of the servants
+ say in a frightened whisper. “Catch hold from underneath. Here!” exclaimed
+ different voices; and the heavy breathing of the bearers and the shuffling
+ of their feet grew more hurried, as if the weight they were carrying were
+ too much for them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As the bearers, among whom was Anna Mikháylovna, passed the young man he
+ caught a momentary glimpse between their heads and backs of the dying
+ man’s high, stout, uncovered chest and powerful shoulders, raised by those
+ who were holding him under the armpits, and of his gray, curly, leonine
+ head. This head, with its remarkably broad brow and cheekbones, its
+ handsome, sensual mouth, and its cold, majestic expression, was not
+ disfigured by the approach of death. It was the same as Pierre remembered
+ it three months before, when the count had sent him to Petersburg. But now
+ this head was swaying helplessly with the uneven movements of the bearers,
+ and the cold listless gaze fixed itself upon nothing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After a few minutes’ bustle beside the high bedstead, those who had
+ carried the sick man dispersed. Anna Mikháylovna touched Pierre’s hand and
+ said, “Come.” Pierre went with her to the bed on which the sick man had
+ been laid in a stately pose in keeping with the ceremony just completed.
+ He lay with his head propped high on the pillows. His hands were
+ symmetrically placed on the green silk quilt, the palms downward. When
+ Pierre came up the count was gazing straight at him, but with a look the
+ significance of which could not be understood by mortal man. Either this
+ look meant nothing but that as long as one has eyes they must look
+ somewhere, or it meant too much. Pierre hesitated, not knowing what to do,
+ and glanced inquiringly at his guide. Anna Mikháylovna made a hurried sign
+ with her eyes, glancing at the sick man’s hand and moving her lips as if
+ to send it a kiss. Pierre, carefully stretching his neck so as not to
+ touch the quilt, followed her suggestion and pressed his lips to the large
+ boned, fleshy hand. Neither the hand nor a single muscle of the count’s
+ face stirred. Once more Pierre looked questioningly at Anna Mikháylovna to
+ see what he was to do next. Anna Mikháylovna with her eyes indicated a
+ chair that stood beside the bed. Pierre obediently sat down, his eyes
+ asking if he were doing right. Anna Mikháylovna nodded approvingly. Again
+ Pierre fell into the naïvely symmetrical pose of an Egyptian statue,
+ evidently distressed that his stout and clumsy body took up so much room
+ and doing his utmost to look as small as possible. He looked at the count,
+ who still gazed at the spot where Pierre’s face had been before he sat
+ down. Anna Mikháylovna indicated by her attitude her consciousness of the
+ pathetic importance of these last moments of meeting between the father
+ and son. This lasted about two minutes, which to Pierre seemed an hour.
+ Suddenly the broad muscles and lines of the count’s face began to twitch.
+ The twitching increased, the handsome mouth was drawn to one side (only
+ now did Pierre realize how near death his father was), and from that
+ distorted mouth issued an indistinct, hoarse sound. Anna Mikháylovna
+ looked attentively at the sick man’s eyes, trying to guess what he wanted;
+ she pointed first to Pierre, then to some drink, then named Prince Vasíli
+ in an inquiring whisper, then pointed to the quilt. The eyes and face of
+ the sick man showed impatience. He made an effort to look at the servant
+ who stood constantly at the head of the bed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wants to turn on the other side,” whispered the servant, and got up to
+ turn the count’s heavy body toward the wall.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre rose to help him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While the count was being turned over, one of his arms fell back
+ helplessly and he made a fruitless effort to pull it forward. Whether he
+ noticed the look of terror with which Pierre regarded that lifeless arm,
+ or whether some other thought flitted across his dying brain, at any rate
+ he glanced at the refractory arm, at Pierre’s terror-stricken face, and
+ again at the arm, and on his face a feeble, piteous smile appeared, quite
+ out of keeping with his features, that seemed to deride his own
+ helplessness. At sight of this smile Pierre felt an unexpected quivering
+ in his breast and a tickling in his nose, and tears dimmed his eyes. The
+ sick man was turned on to his side with his face to the wall. He sighed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is dozing,” said Anna Mikháylovna, observing that one of the
+ princesses was coming to take her turn at watching. “Let us go.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre went out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIV
+ 
+ 
+ There was now no one in the reception room except Prince Vasíli and the
+ eldest princess, who were sitting under the portrait of Catherine the
+ Great and talking eagerly. As soon as they saw Pierre and his companion
+ they became silent, and Pierre thought he saw the princess hide something
+ as she whispered:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I can’t bear the sight of that woman.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Catiche has had tea served in the small drawing room,” said Prince Vasíli
+ to Anna Mikháylovna. “Go and take something, my poor Anna Mikháylovna, or
+ you will not hold out.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To Pierre he said nothing, merely giving his arm a sympathetic squeeze
+ below the shoulder. Pierre went with Anna Mikháylovna into the small
+ drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There is nothing so refreshing after a sleepless night as a cup of this
+ delicious Russian tea,” Lorrain was saying with an air of restrained
+ animation as he stood sipping tea from a delicate Chinese handleless cup
+ before a table on which tea and a cold supper were laid in the small
+ circular room. Around the table all who were at Count Bezúkhov’s house
+ that night had gathered to fortify themselves. Pierre well remembered this
+ small circular drawing room with its mirrors and little tables. During
+ balls given at the house Pierre, who did not know how to dance, had liked
+ sitting in this room to watch the ladies who, as they passed through in
+ their ball dresses with diamonds and pearls on their bare shoulders,
+ looked at themselves in the brilliantly lighted mirrors which repeated
+ their reflections several times. Now this same room was dimly lighted by
+ two candles. On one small table tea things and supper dishes stood in
+ disorder, and in the middle of the night a motley throng of people sat
+ there, not merrymaking, but somberly whispering, and betraying by every
+ word and movement that they none of them forgot what was happening and
+ what was about to happen in the bedroom. Pierre did not eat anything
+ though he would very much have liked to. He looked inquiringly at his
+ monitress and saw that she was again going on tiptoe to the reception room
+ where they had left Prince Vasíli and the eldest princess. Pierre
+ concluded that this also was essential, and after a short interval
+ followed her. Anna Mikháylovna was standing beside the princess, and they
+ were both speaking in excited whispers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Permit me, Princess, to know what is necessary and what is not
+ necessary,” said the younger of the two speakers, evidently in the same
+ state of excitement as when she had slammed the door of her room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But, my dear princess,” answered Anna Mikháylovna blandly but
+ impressively, blocking the way to the bedroom and preventing the other
+ from passing, “won’t this be too much for poor Uncle at a moment when he
+ needs repose? Worldly conversation at a moment when his soul is already
+ prepared...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli was seated in an easy chair in his familiar attitude, with
+ one leg crossed high above the other. His cheeks, which were so flabby
+ that they looked heavier below, were twitching violently; but he wore the
+ air of a man little concerned in what the two ladies were saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come, my dear Anna Mikháylovna, let Catiche do as she pleases. You know
+ how fond the count is of her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t even know what is in this paper,” said the younger of the two
+ ladies, addressing Prince Vasíli and pointing to an inlaid portfolio she
+ held in her hand. “All I know is that his real will is in his writing
+ table, and this is a paper he has forgotten....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She tried to pass Anna Mikháylovna, but the latter sprang so as to bar her
+ path.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know, my dear, kind princess,” said Anna Mikháylovna, seizing the
+ portfolio so firmly that it was plain she would not let go easily. “Dear
+ princess, I beg and implore you, have some pity on him! Je vous en
+ conjure ...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess did not reply. Their efforts in the struggle for the
+ portfolio were the only sounds audible, but it was evident that if the
+ princess did speak, her words would not be flattering to Anna Mikháylovna.
+ Though the latter held on tenaciously, her voice lost none of its honeyed
+ firmness and softness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pierre, my dear, come here. I think he will not be out of place in a
+ family consultation; is it not so, Prince?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why don’t you speak, cousin?” suddenly shrieked the princess so loud that
+ those in the drawing room heard her and were startled. “Why do you remain
+ silent when heaven knows who permits herself to interfere, making a scene
+ on the very threshold of a dying man’s room? Intriguer!” she hissed
+ viciously, and tugged with all her might at the portfolio.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Anna Mikháylovna went forward a step or two to keep her hold on the
+ portfolio, and changed her grip.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli rose. “Oh!” said he with reproach and surprise, “this is
+ absurd! Come, let go I tell you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess let go.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And you too!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Anna Mikháylovna did not obey him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let go, I tell you! I will take the responsibility. I myself will go and
+ ask him, I!... does that satisfy you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But, Prince,” said Anna Mikháylovna, “after such a solemn sacrament,
+ allow him a moment’s peace! Here, Pierre, tell them your opinion,” said
+ she, turning to the young man who, having come quite close, was gazing
+ with astonishment at the angry face of the princess which had lost all
+ dignity, and at the twitching cheeks of Prince Vasíli.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Remember that you will answer for the consequences,” said Prince Vasíli
+ severely. “You don’t know what you are doing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vile woman!” shouted the princess, darting unexpectedly at Anna
+ Mikháylovna and snatching the portfolio from her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli bent his head and spread out his hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At this moment that terrible door, which Pierre had watched so long and
+ which had always opened so quietly, burst noisily open and banged against
+ the wall, and the second of the three sisters rushed out wringing her
+ hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are you doing!” she cried vehemently. “He is dying and you leave me
+ alone with him!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her sister dropped the portfolio. Anna Mikháylovna, stooping, quickly
+ caught up the object of contention and ran into the bedroom. The eldest
+ princess and Prince Vasíli, recovering themselves, followed her. A few
+ minutes later the eldest sister came out with a pale hard face, again
+ biting her underlip. At sight of Pierre her expression showed an
+ irrepressible hatred.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, now you may be glad!” said she; “this is what you have been waiting
+ for.” And bursting into tears she hid her face in her handkerchief and
+ rushed from the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli came next. He staggered to the sofa on which Pierre was
+ sitting and dropped onto it, covering his face with his hand. Pierre
+ noticed that he was pale and that his jaw quivered and shook as if in an
+ ague.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my friend!” said he, taking Pierre by the elbow; and there was in his
+ voice a sincerity and weakness Pierre had never observed in it before.
+ “How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what? I am near sixty,
+ dear friend... I too... All will end in death, all! Death is awful...” and
+ he burst into tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Mikháylovna came out last. She approached Pierre with slow, quiet
+ steps.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pierre!” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre gave her an inquiring look. She kissed the young man on his
+ forehead, wetting him with her tears. Then after a pause she said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is no more....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked at her over his spectacles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come, I will go with you. Try to weep, nothing gives such relief as
+ tears.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She led him into the dark drawing room and Pierre was glad no one could
+ see his face. Anna Mikháylovna left him, and when she returned he was fast
+ asleep with his head on his arm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the morning Anna Mikháylovna said to Pierre:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, my dear, this is a great loss for us all, not to speak of you. But
+ God will support you: you are young, and are now, I hope, in command of an
+ immense fortune. The will has not yet been opened. I know you well enough
+ to be sure that this will not turn your head, but it imposes duties on
+ you, and you must be a man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Perhaps later on I may tell you, my dear boy, that if I had not been
+ there, God only knows what would have happened! You know, Uncle promised
+ me only the day before yesterday not to forget Borís. But he had no time.
+ I hope, my dear friend, you will carry out your father’s wish?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre understood nothing of all this and coloring shyly looked in silence
+ at Princess Anna Mikháylovna. After her talk with Pierre, Anna Mikháylovna
+ returned to the Rostóvs’ and went to bed. On waking in the morning she
+ told the Rostóvs and all her acquaintances the details of Count Bezúkhov’s
+ death. She said the count had died as she would herself wish to die, that
+ his end was not only touching but edifying. As to the last meeting between
+ father and son, it was so touching that she could not think of it without
+ tears, and did not know which had behaved better during those awful
+ moments—the father who so remembered everything and everybody at
+ last and had spoken such pathetic words to the son, or Pierre, whom it had
+ been pitiful to see, so stricken was he with grief, though he tried hard
+ to hide it in order not to sadden his dying father. “It is painful, but it
+ does one good. It uplifts the soul to see such men as the old count and
+ his worthy son,” said she. Of the behavior of the eldest princess and
+ Prince Vasíli she spoke disapprovingly, but in whispers and as a great
+ secret.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXV
+ 
+ 
+ At Bald Hills, Prince Nicholas Andréevich Bolkónski’s estate, the arrival
+ of young Prince Andrew and his wife was daily expected, but this
+ expectation did not upset the regular routine of life in the old prince’s
+ household. General in Chief Prince Nicholas Andréevich (nicknamed in
+ society, “the King of Prussia”) ever since the Emperor Paul had exiled him
+ to his country estate had lived there continuously with his daughter,
+ Princess Mary, and her companion, Mademoiselle Bourienne. Though in the
+ new reign he was free to return to the capitals, he still continued to
+ live in the country, remarking that anyone who wanted to see him could
+ come the hundred miles from Moscow to Bald Hills, while he himself needed
+ no one and nothing. He used to say that there are only two sources of
+ human vice—idleness and superstition, and only two virtues—activity
+ and intelligence. He himself undertook his daughter’s education, and to
+ develop these two cardinal virtues in her gave her lessons in algebra and
+ geometry till she was twenty, and arranged her life so that her whole time
+ was occupied. He was himself always occupied: writing his memoirs, solving
+ problems in higher mathematics, turning snuffboxes on a lathe, working in
+ the garden, or superintending the building that was always going on at his
+ estate. As regularity is a prime condition facilitating activity,
+ regularity in his household was carried to the highest point of
+ exactitude. He always came to table under precisely the same conditions,
+ and not only at the same hour but at the same minute. With those about
+ him, from his daughter to his serfs, the prince was sharp and invariably
+ exacting, so that without being a hardhearted man he inspired such fear
+ and respect as few hardhearted men would have aroused. Although he was in
+ retirement and had now no influence in political affairs, every high
+ official appointed to the province in which the prince’s estate lay
+ considered it his duty to visit him and waited in the lofty antechamber
+ just as the architect, gardener, or Princess Mary did, till the prince
+ appeared punctually to the appointed hour. Everyone sitting in this
+ antechamber experienced the same feeling of respect and even fear when the
+ enormously high study door opened and showed the figure of a rather small
+ old man, with powdered wig, small withered hands, and bushy gray eyebrows
+ which, when he frowned, sometimes hid the gleam of his shrewd, youthfully
+ glittering eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the morning of the day that the young couple were to arrive, Princess
+ Mary entered the antechamber as usual at the time appointed for the
+ morning greeting, crossing herself with trepidation and repeating a silent
+ prayer. Every morning she came in like that, and every morning prayed that
+ the daily interview might pass off well.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ An old powdered manservant who was sitting in the antechamber rose quietly
+ and said in a whisper: “Please walk in.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Through the door came the regular hum of a lathe. The princess timidly
+ opened the door which moved noiselessly and easily. She paused at the
+ entrance. The prince was working at the lathe and after glancing round
+ continued his work.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The enormous study was full of things evidently in constant use. The large
+ table covered with books and plans, the tall glass-fronted bookcases with
+ keys in the locks, the high desk for writing while standing up, on which
+ lay an open exercise book, and the lathe with tools laid ready to hand and
+ shavings scattered around—all indicated continuous, varied, and
+ orderly activity. The motion of the small foot shod in a Tartar boot
+ embroidered with silver, and the firm pressure of the lean sinewy hand,
+ showed that the prince still possessed the tenacious endurance and vigor
+ of hardy old age. After a few more turns of the lathe he removed his foot
+ from the pedal, wiped his chisel, dropped it into a leather pouch attached
+ to the lathe, and, approaching the table, summoned his daughter. He never
+ gave his children a blessing, so he simply held out his bristly cheek (as
+ yet unshaven) and, regarding her tenderly and attentively, said severely:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Quite well? All right then, sit down.” He took the exercise book
+ containing lessons in geometry written by himself and drew up a chair with
+ his foot.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For tomorrow!” said he, quickly finding the page and making a scratch
+ from one paragraph to another with his hard nail.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess bent over the exercise book on the table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wait a bit, here’s a letter for you,” said the old man suddenly, taking a
+ letter addressed in a woman’s hand from a bag hanging above the table,
+ onto which he threw it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the sight of the letter red patches showed themselves on the princess’
+ face. She took it quickly and bent her head over it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “From Héloïse?” asked the prince with a cold smile that showed his still
+ sound, yellowish teeth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, it’s from Julie,” replied the princess with a timid glance and a
+ timid smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll let two more letters pass, but the third I’ll read,” said the prince
+ sternly; “I’m afraid you write much nonsense. I’ll read the third!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Read this if you like, Father,” said the princess, blushing still more
+ and holding out the letter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The third, I said the third!” cried the prince abruptly, pushing the
+ letter away, and leaning his elbows on the table he drew toward him the
+ exercise book containing geometrical figures.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, madam,” he began, stooping over the book close to his daughter and
+ placing an arm on the back of the chair on which she sat, so that she felt
+ herself surrounded on all sides by the acrid scent of old age and tobacco,
+ which she had known so long. “Now, madam, these triangles are equal;
+ please note that the angle ABC ...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess looked in a scared way at her father’s eyes glittering close
+ to her; the red patches on her face came and went, and it was plain that
+ she understood nothing and was so frightened that her fear would prevent
+ her understanding any of her father’s further explanations, however clear
+ they might be. Whether it was the teacher’s fault or the pupil’s, this
+ same thing happened every day: the princess’ eyes grew dim, she could not
+ see and could not hear anything, but was only conscious of her stern
+ father’s withered face close to her, of his breath and the smell of him,
+ and could think only of how to get away quickly to her own room to make
+ out the problem in peace. The old man was beside himself: moved the chair
+ on which he was sitting noisily backward and forward, made efforts to
+ control himself and not become vehement, but almost always did become
+ vehement, scolded, and sometimes flung the exercise book away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess gave a wrong answer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well now, isn’t she a fool!” shouted the prince, pushing the book aside
+ and turning sharply away; but rising immediately, he paced up and down,
+ lightly touched his daughter’s hair and sat down again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He drew up his chair, and continued to explain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This won’t do, Princess; it won’t do,” said he, when Princess Mary,
+ having taken and closed the exercise book with the next day’s lesson, was
+ about to leave: “Mathematics are most important, madam! I don’t want to
+ have you like our silly ladies. Get used to it and you’ll like it,” and he
+ patted her cheek. “It will drive all the nonsense out of your head.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She turned to go, but he stopped her with a gesture and took an uncut book
+ from the high desk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here is some sort of Key to the Mysteries that your Héloïse has
+ sent you. Religious! I don’t interfere with anyone’s belief... I have
+ looked at it. Take it. Well, now go. Go.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He patted her on the shoulder and himself closed the door after her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary went back to her room with the sad, scared expression that
+ rarely left her and which made her plain, sickly face yet plainer. She sat
+ down at her writing table, on which stood miniature portraits and which
+ was littered with books and papers. The princess was as untidy as her
+ father was tidy. She put down the geometry book and eagerly broke the seal
+ of her letter. It was from her most intimate friend from childhood; that
+ same Julie Karágina who had been at the Rostóvs’ name-day party.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Julie wrote in French:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dear and precious Friend, How terrible and frightful a thing is
+ separation! Though I tell myself that half my life and half my happiness
+ are wrapped up in you, and that in spite of the distance separating us our
+ hearts are united by indissoluble bonds, my heart rebels against fate and
+ in spite of the pleasures and distractions around me I cannot overcome a
+ certain secret sorrow that has been in my heart ever since we parted. Why
+ are we not together as we were last summer, in your big study, on the blue
+ sofa, the confidential sofa? Why cannot I now, as three months ago, draw
+ fresh moral strength from your look, so gentle, calm, and penetrating, a
+ look I loved so well and seem to see before me as I write?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having read thus far, Princess Mary sighed and glanced into the mirror
+ which stood on her right. It reflected a weak, ungraceful figure and thin
+ face. Her eyes, always sad, now looked with particular hopelessness at her
+ reflection in the glass. “She flatters me,” thought the princess, turning
+ away and continuing to read. But Julie did not flatter her friend, the
+ princess’ eyes—large, deep and luminous (it seemed as if at times
+ there radiated from them shafts of warm light)—were so beautiful
+ that very often in spite of the plainness of her face they gave her an
+ attraction more powerful than that of beauty. But the princess never saw
+ the beautiful expression of her own eyes—the look they had when she
+ was not thinking of herself. As with everyone, her face assumed a forced
+ unnatural expression as soon as she looked in a glass. She went on
+ reading:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All Moscow talks of nothing but war. One of my two brothers is already
+ abroad, the other is with the Guards, who are starting on their march to
+ the frontier. Our dear Emperor has left Petersburg and it is thought
+ intends to expose his precious person to the chances of war. God grant
+ that the Corsican monster who is destroying the peace of Europe may be
+ overthrown by the angel whom it has pleased the Almighty, in His goodness,
+ to give us as sovereign! To say nothing of my brothers, this war has
+ deprived me of one of the associations nearest my heart. I mean young
+ Nicholas Rostóv, who with his enthusiasm could not bear to remain inactive
+ and has left the university to join the army. I will confess to you, dear
+ Mary, that in spite of his extreme youth his departure for the army was a
+ great grief to me. This young man, of whom I spoke to you last summer, is
+ so noble-minded and full of that real youthfulness which one seldom finds
+ nowadays among our old men of twenty and, particularly, he is so frank and
+ has so much heart. He is so pure and poetic that my relations with him,
+ transient as they were, have been one of the sweetest comforts to my poor
+ heart, which has already suffered so much. Someday I will tell you about
+ our parting and all that was said then. That is still too fresh. Ah, dear
+ friend, you are happy not to know these poignant joys and sorrows. You are
+ fortunate, for the latter are generally the stronger! I know very well
+ that Count Nicholas is too young ever to be more to me than a friend, but
+ this sweet friendship, this poetic and pure intimacy, were what my heart
+ needed. But enough of this! The chief news, about which all Moscow
+ gossips, is the death of old Count Bezúkhov, and his inheritance. Fancy!
+ The three princesses have received very little, Prince Vasíli nothing, and
+ it is Monsieur Pierre who has inherited all the property and has besides
+ been recognized as legitimate; so that he is now Count Bezúkhov and
+ possessor of the finest fortune in Russia. It is rumored that Prince
+ Vasíli played a very despicable part in this affair and that he returned
+ to Petersburg quite crestfallen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I confess I understand very little about all these matters of wills and
+ inheritance; but I do know that since this young man, whom we all used to
+ know as plain Monsieur Pierre, has become Count Bezúkhov and the owner of
+ one of the largest fortunes in Russia, I am much amused to watch the
+ change in the tone and manners of the mammas burdened by marriageable
+ daughters, and of the young ladies themselves, toward him, though, between
+ you and me, he always seemed to me a poor sort of fellow. As for the past
+ two years people have amused themselves by finding husbands for me (most
+ of whom I don’t even know), the matchmaking chronicles of Moscow now speak
+ of me as the future Countess Bezúkhova. But you will understand that I
+ have no desire for the post. À propos of marriages: do you know
+ that a while ago that universal auntie Anna Mikháylovna told me,
+ under the seal of strict secrecy, of a plan of marriage for you. It is
+ neither more nor less than with Prince Vasíli’s son Anatole, whom they
+ wish to reform by marrying him to someone rich and distinguée , and
+ it is on you that his relations’ choice has fallen. I don’t know what you
+ will think of it, but I consider it my duty to let you know of it. He is
+ said to be very handsome and a terrible scapegrace. That is all I have
+ been able to find out about him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But enough of gossip. I am at the end of my second sheet of paper, and
+ Mamma has sent for me to go and dine at the Apráksins’. Read the mystical
+ book I am sending you; it has an enormous success here. Though there are
+ things in it difficult for the feeble human mind to grasp, it is an
+ admirable book which calms and elevates the soul. Adieu! Give my respects
+ to monsieur your father and my compliments to Mademoiselle Bourienne. I
+ embrace you as I love you.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ JULIE
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ P.S. Let me have news of your brother and his charming little wife.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess pondered awhile with a thoughtful smile and her luminous eyes
+ lit up so that her face was entirely transformed. Then she suddenly rose
+ and with her heavy tread went up to the table. She took a sheet of paper
+ and her hand moved rapidly over it. This is the reply she wrote, also in
+ French:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dear and precious Friend, Your letter of the 13th has given me great
+ delight. So you still love me, my romantic Julie? Separation, of which you
+ say so much that is bad, does not seem to have had its usual effect on
+ you. You complain of our separation. What then should I say, if I dared 
+ complain, I who am deprived of all who are dear to me? Ah, if we had not
+ religion to console us life would be very sad. Why do you suppose that I
+ should look severely on your affection for that young man? On such matters
+ I am only severe with myself. I understand such feelings in others, and if
+ never having felt them I cannot approve of them, neither do I condemn
+ them. Only it seems to me that Christian love, love of one’s neighbor,
+ love of one’s enemy, is worthier, sweeter, and better than the feelings
+ which the beautiful eyes of a young man can inspire in a romantic and
+ loving young girl like yourself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The news of Count Bezúkhov’s death reached us before your letter and my
+ father was much affected by it. He says the count was the last
+ representative but one of the great century, and that it is his own turn
+ now, but that he will do all he can to let his turn come as late as
+ possible. God preserve us from that terrible misfortune!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I cannot agree with you about Pierre, whom I knew as a child. He always
+ seemed to me to have an excellent heart, and that is the quality I value
+ most in people. As to his inheritance and the part played by Prince
+ Vasíli, it is very sad for both. Ah, my dear friend, our divine Saviour’s
+ words, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
+ than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, are terribly true. I pity
+ Prince Vasíli but am still more sorry for Pierre. So young, and burdened
+ with such riches—to what temptations he will be exposed! If I were
+ asked what I desire most on earth, it would be to be poorer than the
+ poorest beggar. A thousand thanks, dear friend, for the volume you have
+ sent me and which has such success in Moscow. Yet since you tell me that
+ among some good things it contains others which our weak human
+ understanding cannot grasp, it seems to me rather useless to spend time in
+ reading what is unintelligible and can therefore bear no fruit. I never
+ could understand the fondness some people have for confusing their minds
+ by dwelling on mystical books that merely awaken their doubts and excite
+ their imagination, giving them a bent for exaggeration quite contrary to
+ Christian simplicity. Let us rather read the Epistles and Gospels. Let us
+ not seek to penetrate what mysteries they contain; for how can we,
+ miserable sinners that we are, know the terrible and holy secrets of
+ Providence while we remain in this flesh which forms an impenetrable veil
+ between us and the Eternal? Let us rather confine ourselves to studying
+ those sublime rules which our divine Saviour has left for our guidance
+ here below. Let us try to conform to them and follow them, and let us be
+ persuaded that the less we let our feeble human minds roam, the better we
+ shall please God, who rejects all knowledge that does not come from Him;
+ and the less we seek to fathom what He has been pleased to conceal from
+ us, the sooner will He vouchsafe its revelation to us through His divine
+ Spirit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ My father has not spoken to me of a suitor, but has only told me that he
+ has received a letter and is expecting a visit from Prince Vasíli. In
+ regard to this project of marriage for me, I will tell you, dear sweet
+ friend, that I look on marriage as a divine institution to which we must
+ conform. However painful it may be to me, should the Almighty lay the
+ duties of wife and mother upon me I shall try to perform them as
+ faithfully as I can, without disquieting myself by examining my feelings
+ toward him whom He may give me for husband.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I have had a letter from my brother, who announces his speedy arrival at
+ Bald Hills with his wife. This pleasure will be but a brief one, however,
+ for he will leave us again to take part in this unhappy war into which we
+ have been drawn, God knows how or why. Not only where you are—at the
+ heart of affairs and of the world—is the talk all of war, even here
+ amid fieldwork and the calm of nature—which townsfolk consider
+ characteristic of the country—rumors of war are heard and painfully
+ felt. My father talks of nothing but marches and countermarches, things of
+ which I understand nothing; and the day before yesterday during my daily
+ walk through the village I witnessed a heartrending scene.... It was a
+ convoy of conscripts enrolled from our people and starting to join the
+ army. You should have seen the state of the mothers, wives, and children
+ of the men who were going and should have heard the sobs. It seems as
+ though mankind has forgotten the laws of its divine Saviour, Who preached
+ love and forgiveness of injuries—and that men attribute the greatest
+ merit to skill in killing one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Adieu, dear and kind friend; may our divine Saviour and His most Holy
+ Mother keep you in their holy and all-powerful care!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ MARY
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, you are sending off a letter, Princess? I have already dispatched
+ mine. I have written to my poor mother,” said the smiling Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne rapidly, in her pleasant mellow tones and with guttural r ’s.
+ She brought into Princess Mary’s strenuous, mournful, and gloomy world a
+ quite different atmosphere, careless, lighthearted, and self-satisfied.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Princess, I must warn you,” she added, lowering her voice and evidently
+ listening to herself with pleasure, and speaking with exaggerated grasseyement ,
+ “the prince has been scolding Michael Ivánovich. He is in a very bad
+ humor, very morose. Be prepared.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, dear friend,” replied Princess Mary, “I have asked you never to warn
+ me of the humor my father is in. I do not allow myself to judge him and
+ would not have others do so.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess glanced at her watch and, seeing that she was five minutes
+ late in starting her practice on the clavichord, went into the sitting
+ room with a look of alarm. Between twelve and two o’clock, as the day was
+ mapped out, the prince rested and the princess played the clavichord.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVI
+ 
+ 
+ The gray-haired valet was sitting drowsily listening to the snoring of the
+ prince, who was in his large study. From the far side of the house through
+ the closed doors came the sound of difficult passages—twenty times
+ repeated—of a sonata by Dussek.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just then a closed carriage and another with a hood drove up to the porch.
+ Prince Andrew got out of the carriage, helped his little wife to alight,
+ and let her pass into the house before him. Old Tíkhon, wearing a wig, put
+ his head out of the door of the antechamber, reported in a whisper that
+ the prince was sleeping, and hastily closed the door. Tíkhon knew that
+ neither the son’s arrival nor any other unusual event must be allowed to
+ disturb the appointed order of the day. Prince Andrew apparently knew this
+ as well as Tíkhon; he looked at his watch as if to ascertain whether his
+ father’s habits had changed since he was at home last, and, having assured
+ himself that they had not, he turned to his wife.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He will get up in twenty minutes. Let us go across to Mary’s room,” he
+ said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The little princess had grown stouter during this time, but her eyes and
+ her short, downy, smiling lip lifted when she began to speak just as
+ merrily and prettily as ever.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, this is a palace!” she said to her husband, looking around with the
+ expression with which people compliment their host at a ball. “Let’s come,
+ quick, quick!” And with a glance round, she smiled at Tíkhon, at her
+ husband, and at the footman who accompanied them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is that Mary practicing? Let’s go quietly and take her by surprise.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew followed her with a courteous but sad expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’ve grown older, Tíkhon,” he said in passing to the old man, who
+ kissed his hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before they reached the room from which the sounds of the clavichord came,
+ the pretty, fair-haired Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle Bourienne, rushed out
+ apparently beside herself with delight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah! what joy for the princess!” exclaimed she: “At last! I must let her
+ know.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, no, please not... You are Mademoiselle Bourienne,” said the little
+ princess, kissing her. “I know you already through my sister-in-law’s
+ friendship for you. She was not expecting us?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They went up to the door of the sitting room from which came the sound of
+ the oft-repeated passage of the sonata. Prince Andrew stopped and made a
+ grimace, as if expecting something unpleasant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The little princess entered the room. The passage broke off in the middle,
+ a cry was heard, then Princess Mary’s heavy tread and the sound of
+ kissing. When Prince Andrew went in the two princesses, who had only met
+ once before for a short time at his wedding, were in each other’s arms
+ warmly pressing their lips to whatever place they happened to touch.
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne stood near them pressing her hand to her heart,
+ with a beatific smile and obviously equally ready to cry or to laugh.
+ Prince Andrew shrugged his shoulders and frowned, as lovers of music do
+ when they hear a false note. The two women let go of one another, and
+ then, as if afraid of being too late, seized each other’s hands, kissing
+ them and pulling them away, and again began kissing each other on the
+ face, and then to Prince Andrew’s surprise both began to cry and kissed
+ again. Mademoiselle Bourienne also began to cry. Prince Andrew evidently
+ felt ill at ease, but to the two women it seemed quite natural that they
+ should cry, and apparently it never entered their heads that it could have
+ been otherwise at this meeting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah! my dear!... Ah! Mary!...” they suddenly exclaimed, and then laughed.
+ “I dreamed last night...”—“You were not expecting us?...” “Ah! Mary,
+ you have got thinner?...” “And you have grown stouter!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I knew the princess at once,” put in Mademoiselle Bourienne.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I had no idea!...” exclaimed Princess Mary. “Ah, Andrew, I did not
+ see you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew and his sister, hand in hand, kissed one another, and he
+ told her she was still the same crybaby as ever. Princess Mary had turned
+ toward her brother, and through her tears the loving, warm, gentle look of
+ her large luminous eyes, very beautiful at that moment, rested on Prince
+ Andrew’s face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The little princess talked incessantly, her short, downy upper lip
+ continually and rapidly touching her rosy nether lip when necessary and
+ drawing up again next moment when her face broke into a smile of
+ glittering teeth and sparkling eyes. She told of an accident they had had
+ on the Spásski Hill which might have been serious for her in her
+ condition, and immediately after that informed them that she had left all
+ her clothes in Petersburg and that heaven knew what she would have to
+ dress in here; and that Andrew had quite changed, and that Kitty Odýntsova
+ had married an old man, and that there was a suitor for Mary, a real one,
+ but that they would talk of that later. Princess Mary was still looking
+ silently at her brother and her beautiful eyes were full of love and
+ sadness. It was plain that she was following a train of thought
+ independent of her sister-in-law’s words. In the midst of a description of
+ the last Petersburg fete she addressed her brother:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So you are really going to the war, Andrew?” she said sighing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lise sighed too.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, and even tomorrow,” replied her brother.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is leaving me here, God knows why, when he might have had
+ promotion...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary did not listen to the end, but continuing her train of
+ thought turned to her sister-in-law with a tender glance at her figure.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is it certain?” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The face of the little princess changed. She sighed and said: “Yes, quite
+ certain. Ah! it is very dreadful...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her lip descended. She brought her face close to her sister-in-law’s and
+ unexpectedly again began to cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She needs rest,” said Prince Andrew with a frown. “Don’t you, Lise? Take
+ her to your room and I’ll go to Father. How is he? Just the same?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, just the same. Though I don’t know what your opinion will be,”
+ answered the princess joyfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And are the hours the same? And the walks in the avenues? And the lathe?”
+ asked Prince Andrew with a scarcely perceptible smile which showed that,
+ in spite of all his love and respect for his father, he was aware of his
+ weaknesses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The hours are the same, and the lathe, and also the mathematics and my
+ geometry lessons,” said Princess Mary gleefully, as if her lessons in
+ geometry were among the greatest delights of her life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the twenty minutes had elapsed and the time had come for the old
+ prince to get up, Tíkhon came to call the young prince to his father. The
+ old man made a departure from his usual routine in honor of his son’s
+ arrival: he gave orders to admit him to his apartments while he dressed
+ for dinner. The old prince always dressed in old-fashioned style, wearing
+ an antique coat and powdered hair; and when Prince Andrew entered his
+ father’s dressing room (not with the contemptuous look and manner he wore
+ in drawing rooms, but with the animated face with which he talked to
+ Pierre), the old man was sitting on a large leather-covered chair, wrapped
+ in a powdering mantle, entrusting his head to Tíkhon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah! here’s the warrior! Wants to vanquish Buonaparte?” said the old man,
+ shaking his powdered head as much as the tail, which Tíkhon was holding
+ fast to plait, would allow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You at least must tackle him properly, or else if he goes on like this
+ he’ll soon have us, too, for his subjects! How are you?” And he held out
+ his cheek.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old man was in a good temper after his nap before dinner. (He used to
+ say that a nap “after dinner was silver—before dinner, golden.”) He
+ cast happy, sidelong glances at his son from under his thick, bushy
+ eyebrows. Prince Andrew went up and kissed his father on the spot
+ indicated to him. He made no reply on his father’s favorite topic—making
+ fun of the military men of the day, and more particularly of Bonaparte.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, Father, I have come to you and brought my wife who is pregnant,”
+ said Prince Andrew, following every movement of his father’s face with an
+ eager and respectful look. “How is your health?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Only fools and rakes fall ill, my boy. You know me: I am busy from
+ morning till night and abstemious, so of course I am well.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank God,” said his son smiling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “God has nothing to do with it! Well, go on,” he continued, returning to
+ his hobby; “tell me how the Germans have taught you to fight Bonaparte by
+ this new science you call ‘strategy.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Give me time to collect my wits, Father,” said he, with a smile that
+ showed that his father’s foibles did not prevent his son from loving and
+ honoring him. “Why, I have not yet had time to settle down!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nonsense, nonsense!” cried the old man, shaking his pigtail to see
+ whether it was firmly plaited, and grasping his by the hand. “The house
+ for your wife is ready. Princess Mary will take her there and show her
+ over, and they’ll talk nineteen to the dozen. That’s their woman’s way! I
+ am glad to have her. Sit down and talk. About Mikhelson’s army I
+ understand—Tolstóy‘s too... a simultaneous expedition.... But
+ what’s the southern army to do? Prussia is neutral... I know that. What
+ about Austria?” said he, rising from his chair and pacing up and down the
+ room followed by Tíkhon, who ran after him, handing him different articles
+ of clothing. “What of Sweden? How will they cross Pomerania?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew, seeing that his father insisted, began—at first
+ reluctantly, but gradually with more and more animation, and from habit
+ changing unconsciously from Russian to French as he went on—to
+ explain the plan of operation for the coming campaign. He explained how an
+ army, ninety thousand strong, was to threaten Prussia so as to bring her
+ out of her neutrality and draw her into the war; how part of that army was
+ to join some Swedish forces at Stralsund; how two hundred and twenty
+ thousand Austrians, with a hundred thousand Russians, were to operate in
+ Italy and on the Rhine; how fifty thousand Russians and as many English
+ were to land at Naples, and how a total force of five hundred thousand men
+ was to attack the French from different sides. The old prince did not
+ evince the least interest during this explanation, but as if he were not
+ listening to it continued to dress while walking about, and three times
+ unexpectedly interrupted. Once he stopped it by shouting: “The white one,
+ the white one!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This meant that Tíkhon was not handing him the waistcoat he wanted.
+ Another time he interrupted, saying:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And will she soon be confined?” and shaking his head reproachfully said:
+ “That’s bad! Go on, go on.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The third interruption came when Prince Andrew was finishing his
+ description. The old man began to sing, in the cracked voice of old age:
+ “Malbrook s’en va-t-en guerre. Dieu sait quand reviendra.” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Marlborough is going to the wars; God knows when he’ll
+ return.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His son only smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t say it’s a plan I approve of,” said the son; “I am only telling
+ you what it is. Napoleon has also formed his plan by now, not worse than
+ this one.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, you’ve told me nothing new,” and the old man repeated, meditatively
+ and rapidly:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ Dieu sait quand reviendra . Go to the dining room.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVII
+ 
+ 
+ At the appointed hour the prince, powdered and shaven, entered the dining
+ room where his daughter-in-law, Princess Mary, and Mademoiselle Bourienne
+ were already awaiting him together with his architect, who by a strange
+ caprice of his employer’s was admitted to table though the position of
+ that insignificant individual was such as could certainly not have caused
+ him to expect that honor. The prince, who generally kept very strictly to
+ social distinctions and rarely admitted even important government
+ officials to his table, had unexpectedly selected Michael Ivánovich (who
+ always went into a corner to blow his nose on his checked handkerchief) to
+ illustrate the theory that all men are equals, and had more than once
+ impressed on his daughter that Michael Ivánovich was “not a whit worse
+ than you or I.” At dinner the prince usually spoke to the taciturn Michael
+ Ivánovich more often than to anyone else.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the dining room, which like all the rooms in the house was exceedingly
+ lofty, the members of the household and the footmen—one behind each
+ chair—stood waiting for the prince to enter. The head butler, napkin
+ on arm, was scanning the setting of the table, making signs to the
+ footmen, and anxiously glancing from the clock to the door by which the
+ prince was to enter. Prince Andrew was looking at a large gilt frame, new
+ to him, containing the genealogical tree of the Princes Bolkónski,
+ opposite which hung another such frame with a badly painted portrait
+ (evidently by the hand of the artist belonging to the estate) of a ruling
+ prince, in a crown—an alleged descendant of Rúrik and ancestor of
+ the Bolkónskis. Prince Andrew, looking again at that genealogical tree,
+ shook his head, laughing as a man laughs who looks at a portrait so
+ characteristic of the original as to be amusing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How thoroughly like him that is!” he said to Princess Mary, who had come
+ up to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary looked at her brother in surprise. She did not understand
+ what he was laughing at. Everything her father did inspired her with
+ reverence and was beyond question.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Everyone has his Achilles’ heel,” continued Prince Andrew. “Fancy, with
+ his powerful mind, indulging in such nonsense!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary could not understand the boldness of her brother’s criticism
+ and was about to reply, when the expected footsteps were heard coming from
+ the study. The prince walked in quickly and jauntily as was his wont, as
+ if intentionally contrasting the briskness of his manners with the strict
+ formality of his house. At that moment the great clock struck two and
+ another with a shrill tone joined in from the drawing room. The prince
+ stood still; his lively glittering eyes from under their thick, bushy
+ eyebrows sternly scanned all present and rested on the little princess.
+ She felt, as courtiers do when the Tsar enters, the sensation of fear and
+ respect which the old man inspired in all around him. He stroked her hair
+ and then patted her awkwardly on the back of her neck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’m glad, glad, to see you,” he said, looking attentively into her eyes,
+ and then quickly went to his place and sat down. “Sit down, sit down! Sit
+ down, Michael Ivánovich!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He indicated a place beside him to his daughter-in-law. A footman moved
+ the chair for her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ho, ho!” said the old man, casting his eyes on her rounded figure.
+ “You’ve been in a hurry. That’s bad!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He laughed in his usual dry, cold, unpleasant way, with his lips only and
+ not with his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You must walk, walk as much as possible, as much as possible,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The little princess did not, or did not wish to, hear his words. She was
+ silent and seemed confused. The prince asked her about her father, and she
+ began to smile and talk. He asked about mutual acquaintances, and she
+ became still more animated and chattered away giving him greetings from
+ various people and retelling the town gossip.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Countess Apráksina, poor thing, has lost her husband and she has cried
+ her eyes out,” she said, growing more and more lively.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As she became animated the prince looked at her more and more sternly, and
+ suddenly, as if he had studied her sufficiently and had formed a definite
+ idea of her, he turned away and addressed Michael Ivánovich.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, Michael Ivánovich, our Bonaparte will be having a bad time of it.
+ Prince Andrew” (he always spoke thus of his son) “has been telling me what
+ forces are being collected against him! While you and I never thought much
+ of him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Michael Ivánovich did not at all know when “you and I” had said such
+ things about Bonaparte, but understanding that he was wanted as a peg on
+ which to hang the prince’s favorite topic, he looked inquiringly at the
+ young prince, wondering what would follow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is a great tactician!” said the prince to his son, pointing to the
+ architect.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the conversation again turned on the war, on Bonaparte, and the
+ generals and statesmen of the day. The old prince seemed convinced not
+ only that all the men of the day were mere babies who did not know the A B
+ C of war or of politics, and that Bonaparte was an insignificant little
+ Frenchy, successful only because there were no longer any Potëmkins or
+ Suvórovs left to oppose him; but he was also convinced that there were no
+ political difficulties in Europe and no real war, but only a sort of
+ puppet show at which the men of the day were playing, pretending to do
+ something real. Prince Andrew gaily bore with his father’s ridicule of the
+ new men, and drew him on and listened to him with evident pleasure.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The past always seems good,” said he, “but did not Suvórov himself fall
+ into a trap Moreau set him, and from which he did not know how to escape?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who told you that? Who?” cried the prince. “Suvórov!” And he jerked away
+ his plate, which Tíkhon briskly caught. “Suvórov!... Consider, Prince
+ Andrew. Two... Frederick and Suvórov; Moreau!... Moreau would have been a
+ prisoner if Suvórov had had a free hand; but he had the Hofs-kriegs-wurst-schnapps-Rath 
+ on his hands. It would have puzzled the devil himself! When you get there
+ you’ll find out what those Hofs-kriegs-wurst-Raths are! Suvórov
+ couldn’t manage them so what chance has Michael Kutúzov? No, my dear boy,”
+ he continued, “you and your generals won’t get on against Buonaparte;
+ you’ll have to call in the French, so that birds of a feather may fight
+ together. The German, Pahlen, has been sent to New York in America, to
+ fetch the Frenchman, Moreau,” he said, alluding to the invitation made
+ that year to Moreau to enter the Russian service.... “Wonderful!... Were
+ the Potëmkins, Suvórovs, and Orlóvs Germans? No, lad, either you fellows
+ have all lost your wits, or I have outlived mine. May God help you, but
+ we’ll see what will happen. Buonaparte has become a great commander among
+ them! Hm!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t at all say that all the plans are good,” said Prince Andrew, “I
+ am only surprised at your opinion of Bonaparte. You may laugh as much as
+ you like, but all the same Bonaparte is a great general!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Michael Ivánovich!” cried the old prince to the architect who, busy with
+ his roast meat, hoped he had been forgotten: “Didn’t I tell you Buonaparte
+ was a great tactician? Here, he says the same thing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To be sure, your excellency,” replied the architect.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The prince again laughed his frigid laugh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Buonaparte was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has got splendid
+ soldiers. Besides he began by attacking Germans. And only idlers have
+ failed to beat the Germans. Since the world began everybody has beaten the
+ Germans. They beat no one—except one another. He made his reputation
+ fighting them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the prince began explaining all the blunders which, according to him,
+ Bonaparte had made in his campaigns and even in politics. His son made no
+ rejoinder, but it was evident that whatever arguments were presented he
+ was as little able as his father to change his opinion. He listened,
+ refraining from a reply, and involuntarily wondered how this old man,
+ living alone in the country for so many years, could know and discuss so
+ minutely and acutely all the recent European military and political
+ events.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You think I’m an old man and don’t understand the present state of
+ affairs?” concluded his father. “But it troubles me. I don’t sleep at
+ night. Come now, where has this great commander of yours shown his skill?”
+ he concluded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That would take too long to tell,” answered the son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, then go off to your Buonaparte! Mademoiselle Bourienne, here’s
+ another admirer of that powder-monkey emperor of yours,” he exclaimed in
+ excellent French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know, Prince, I am not a Bonapartist!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dieu sait quand reviendra.” hummed the prince out of tune and,
+ with a laugh still more so, he quitted the table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The little princess during the whole discussion and the rest of the dinner
+ sat silent, glancing with a frightened look now at her father-in-law and
+ now at Princess Mary. When they left the table she took her
+ sister-in-law’s arm and drew her into another room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a clever man your father is,” said she; “perhaps that is why I am
+ afraid of him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, he is so kind!” answered Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVIII
+ 
+ 
+ Prince Andrew was to leave next evening. The old prince, not altering his
+ routine, retired as usual after dinner. The little princess was in her
+ sister-in-law’s room. Prince Andrew in a traveling coat without epaulettes
+ had been packing with his valet in the rooms assigned to him. After
+ inspecting the carriage himself and seeing the trunks put in, he ordered
+ the horses to be harnessed. Only those things he always kept with him
+ remained in his room; a small box, a large canteen fitted with silver
+ plate, two Turkish pistols and a saber—a present from his father who
+ had brought it from the siege of Ochákov. All these traveling effects of
+ Prince Andrew’s were in very good order: new, clean, and in cloth covers
+ carefully tied with tapes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When starting on a journey or changing their mode of life, men capable of
+ reflection are generally in a serious frame of mind. At such moments one
+ reviews the past and plans for the future. Prince Andrew’s face looked
+ very thoughtful and tender. With his hands behind him he paced briskly
+ from corner to corner of the room, looking straight before him and
+ thoughtfully shaking his head. Did he fear going to the war, or was he sad
+ at leaving his wife?—perhaps both, but evidently he did not wish to
+ be seen in that mood, for hearing footsteps in the passage he hurriedly
+ unclasped his hands, stopped at a table as if tying the cover of the small
+ box, and assumed his usual tranquil and impenetrable expression. It was
+ the heavy tread of Princess Mary that he heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I hear you have given orders to harness,” she cried, panting (she had
+ apparently been running), “and I did so wish to have another talk with you
+ alone! God knows how long we may again be parted. You are not angry with
+ me for coming? You have changed so, Andrúsha,” she added, as if to explain
+ such a question.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She smiled as she uttered his pet name, “Andrúsha.” It was obviously
+ strange to her to think that this stern handsome man should be Andrúsha—the
+ slender mischievous boy who had been her playfellow in childhood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And where is Lise?” he asked, answering her question only by a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She was so tired that she has fallen asleep on the sofa in my room. Oh,
+ Andrew! What a treasure of a wife you have,” said she, sitting down on the
+ sofa, facing her brother. “She is quite a child: such a dear, merry child.
+ I have grown so fond of her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew was silent, but the princess noticed the ironical and
+ contemptuous look that showed itself on his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One must be indulgent to little weaknesses; who is free from them,
+ Andrew? Don’t forget that she has grown up and been educated in society,
+ and so her position now is not a rosy one. We should enter into everyone’s
+ situation. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner . * Think what it
+ must be for her, poor thing, after what she has been used to, to be parted
+ from her husband and be left alone in the country, in her condition! It’s
+ very hard.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * To understand all is to forgive all.
+
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew smiled as he looked at his sister, as we smile at those we
+ think we thoroughly understand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You live in the country and don’t think the life terrible,” he replied.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I... that’s different. Why speak of me? I don’t want any other life, and
+ can’t, for I know no other. But think, Andrew: for a young society woman
+ to be buried in the country during the best years of her life, all alone—for
+ Papa is always busy, and I... well, you know what poor resources I have
+ for entertaining a woman used to the best society. There is only
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t like your Mademoiselle Bourienne at all,” said Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No? She is very nice and kind and, above all, she’s much to be pitied.
+ She has no one, no one. To tell the truth, I don’t need her, and she’s
+ even in my way. You know I always was a savage, and now am even more so. I
+ like being alone.... Father likes her very much. She and Michael Ivánovich
+ are the two people to whom he is always gentle and kind, because he has
+ been a benefactor to them both. As Sterne says: ‘We don’t love people so
+ much for the good they have done us, as for the good we have done them.’
+ Father took her when she was homeless after losing her own father. She is
+ very good-natured, and my father likes her way of reading. She reads to
+ him in the evenings and reads splendidly.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To be quite frank, Mary, I expect Father’s character sometimes makes
+ things trying for you, doesn’t it?” Prince Andrew asked suddenly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary was first surprised and then aghast at this question.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For me? For me?... Trying for me!...” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He always was rather harsh; and now I should think he’s getting very
+ trying,” said Prince Andrew, apparently speaking lightly of their father
+ in order to puzzle or test his sister.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are good in every way, Andrew, but you have a kind of intellectual
+ pride,” said the princess, following the train of her own thoughts rather
+ than the trend of the conversation—“and that’s a great sin. How can
+ one judge Father? But even if one might, what feeling except veneration
+ could such a man as my father evoke? And I am so contented and happy with
+ him. I only wish you were all as happy as I am.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her brother shook his head incredulously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The only thing that is hard for me... I will tell you the truth,
+ Andrew... is Father’s way of treating religious subjects. I don’t
+ understand how a man of his immense intellect can fail to see what is as
+ clear as day, and can go so far astray. That is the only thing that makes
+ me unhappy. But even in this I can see lately a shade of improvement. His
+ satire has been less bitter of late, and there was a monk he received and
+ had a long talk with.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah! my dear, I am afraid you and your monk are wasting your powder,” said
+ Prince Andrew banteringly yet tenderly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah! mon ami , I only pray, and hope that God will hear me.
+ Andrew...” she said timidly after a moment’s silence, “I have a great
+ favor to ask of you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it, dear?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No—promise that you will not refuse! It will give you no trouble
+ and is nothing unworthy of you, but it will comfort me. Promise,
+ Andrúsha!...” said she, putting her hand in her reticule but not yet
+ taking out what she was holding inside it, as if what she held were the
+ subject of her request and must not be shown before the request was
+ granted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She looked timidly at her brother.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Even if it were a great deal of trouble...” answered Prince Andrew, as if
+ guessing what it was about.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Think what you please! I know you are just like Father. Think as you
+ please, but do this for my sake! Please do! Father’s father, our
+ grandfather, wore it in all his wars.” (She still did not take out what
+ she was holding in her reticule.) “So you promise?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Of course. What is it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Andrew, I bless you with this icon and you must promise me you will never
+ take it off. Do you promise?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If it does not weigh a hundredweight and won’t break my neck... To please
+ you...” said Prince Andrew. But immediately, noticing the pained
+ expression his joke had brought to his sister’s face, he repented and
+ added: “I am glad; really, dear, I am very glad.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Against your will He will save and have mercy on you and bring you to
+ Himself, for in Him alone is truth and peace,” said she in a voice
+ trembling with emotion, solemnly holding up in both hands before her
+ brother a small, oval, antique, dark-faced icon of the Saviour in a gold
+ setting, on a finely wrought silver chain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She crossed herself, kissed the icon, and handed it to Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Please, Andrew, for my sake!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rays of gentle light shone from her large, timid eyes. Those eyes lit up
+ the whole of her thin, sickly face and made it beautiful. Her brother
+ would have taken the icon, but she stopped him. Andrew understood, crossed
+ himself and kissed the icon. There was a look of tenderness, for he was
+ touched, but also a gleam of irony on his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank you, my dear.” She kissed him on the forehead and sat down again on
+ the sofa. They were silent for a while.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As I was saying to you, Andrew, be kind and generous as you always used
+ to be. Don’t judge Lise harshly,” she began. “She is so sweet, so
+ good-natured, and her position now is a very hard one.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I do not think I have complained of my wife to you, Másha, or blamed her.
+ Why do you say all this to me?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Red patches appeared on Princess Mary’s face and she was silent as if she
+ felt guilty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have said nothing to you, but you have already been talked to. And I am
+ sorry for that,” he went on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The patches grew deeper on her forehead, neck, and cheeks. She tried to
+ say something but could not. Her brother had guessed right: the little
+ princess had been crying after dinner and had spoken of her forebodings
+ about her confinement, and how she dreaded it, and had complained of her
+ fate, her father-in-law, and her husband. After crying she had fallen
+ asleep. Prince Andrew felt sorry for his sister.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Know this, Másha: I can’t reproach, have not reproached, and never shall
+ reproach my wife with anything, and I cannot reproach myself with
+ anything in regard to her; and that always will be so in whatever
+ circumstances I may be placed. But if you want to know the truth... if you
+ want to know whether I am happy? No! Is she happy? No! But why this is so
+ I don’t know...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he said this he rose, went to his sister, and, stooping, kissed her
+ forehead. His fine eyes lit up with a thoughtful, kindly, and unaccustomed
+ brightness, but he was looking not at his sister but over her head toward
+ the darkness of the open doorway.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let us go to her, I must say good-by. Or—go and wake and I’ll come
+ in a moment. Petrúshka!” he called to his valet: “Come here, take these
+ away. Put this on the seat and this to the right.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary rose and moved to the door, then stopped and said: “Andrew,
+ if you had faith you would have turned to God and asked Him to give you
+ the love you do not feel, and your prayer would have been answered.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, maybe!” said Prince Andrew. “Go, Másha; I’ll come immediately.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the way to his sister’s room, in the passage which connected one wing
+ with the other, Prince Andrew met Mademoiselle Bourienne smiling sweetly.
+ It was the third time that day that, with an ecstatic and artless smile,
+ she had met him in secluded passages.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! I thought you were in your room,” she said, for some reason blushing
+ and dropping her eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew looked sternly at her and an expression of anger suddenly
+ came over his face. He said nothing to her but looked at her forehead and
+ hair, without looking at her eyes, with such contempt that the Frenchwoman
+ blushed and went away without a word. When he reached his sister’s room
+ his wife was already awake and her merry voice, hurrying one word after
+ another, came through the open door. She was speaking as usual in French,
+ and as if after long self-restraint she wished to make up for lost time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, but imagine the old Countess Zúbova, with false curls and her mouth
+ full of false teeth, as if she were trying to cheat old age.... Ha, ha,
+ ha! Mary!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This very sentence about Countess Zúbova and this same laugh Prince Andrew
+ had already heard from his wife in the presence of others some five times.
+ He entered the room softly. The little princess, plump and rosy, was
+ sitting in an easy chair with her work in her hands, talking incessantly,
+ repeating Petersburg reminiscences and even phrases. Prince Andrew came
+ up, stroked her hair, and asked if she felt rested after their journey.
+ She answered him and continued her chatter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The coach with six horses was waiting at the porch. It was an autumn
+ night, so dark that the coachman could not see the carriage pole. Servants
+ with lanterns were bustling about in the porch. The immense house was
+ brilliant with lights shining through its lofty windows. The domestic
+ serfs were crowding in the hall, waiting to bid good-by to the young
+ prince. The members of the household were all gathered in the reception
+ hall: Michael Ivánovich, Mademoiselle Bourienne, Princess Mary, and the
+ little princess. Prince Andrew had been called to his father’s study as
+ the latter wished to say good-by to him alone. All were waiting for them
+ to come out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Prince Andrew entered the study the old man in his old-age spectacles
+ and white dressing gown, in which he received no one but his son, sat at
+ the table writing. He glanced round.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Going?” And he went on writing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ve come to say good-by.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Kiss me here,” and he touched his cheek: “Thanks, thanks!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do you thank me for?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For not dilly-dallying and not hanging to a woman’s apron strings. The
+ Service before everything. Thanks, thanks!” And he went on writing, so
+ that his quill spluttered and squeaked. “If you have anything to say, say
+ it. These two things can be done together,” he added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “About my wife... I am ashamed as it is to leave her on your hands....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why talk nonsense? Say what you want.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When her confinement is due, send to Moscow for an accoucheur ....
+ Let him be here....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old prince stopped writing and, as if not understanding, fixed his
+ stern eyes on his son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know that no one can help if nature does not do her work,” said Prince
+ Andrew, evidently confused. “I know that out of a million cases only one
+ goes wrong, but it is her fancy and mine. They have been telling her
+ things. She has had a dream and is frightened.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hm... Hm...” muttered the old prince to himself, finishing what he was
+ writing. “I’ll do it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He signed with a flourish and suddenly turning to his son began to laugh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s a bad business, eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is bad, Father?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The wife!” said the old prince, briefly and significantly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t understand!” said Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, it can’t be helped, lad,” said the prince. “They’re all like that;
+ one can’t unmarry. Don’t be afraid; I won’t tell anyone, but you know it
+ yourself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He seized his son by the hand with small bony fingers, shook it, looked
+ straight into his son’s face with keen eyes which seemed to see through
+ him, and again laughed his frigid laugh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The son sighed, thus admitting that his father had understood him. The old
+ man continued to fold and seal his letter, snatching up and throwing down
+ the wax, the seal, and the paper, with his accustomed rapidity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s to be done? She’s pretty! I will do everything. Make your mind
+ easy,” said he in abrupt sentences while sealing his letter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Andrew did not speak; he was both pleased and displeased that his father
+ understood him. The old man got up and gave the letter to his son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Listen!” said he; “don’t worry about your wife: what can be done shall
+ be. Now listen! Give this letter to Michael Ilariónovich. * I have written
+ that he should make use of you in proper places and not keep you long as
+ an adjutant: a bad position! Tell him I remember and like him. Write and
+ tell me how he receives you. If he is all right—serve him. Nicholas
+ Bolkónski’s son need not serve under anyone if he is in disfavor. Now come
+ here.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Kutúzov.
+
+
+
+ 
+ He spoke so rapidly that he did not finish half his words, but his son was
+ accustomed to understand him. He led him to the desk, raised the lid, drew
+ out a drawer, and took out an exercise book filled with his bold, tall,
+ close handwriting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I shall probably die before you. So remember, these are my memoirs; hand
+ them to the Emperor after my death. Now here is a Lombard bond and a
+ letter; it is a premium for the man who writes a history of Suvórov’s
+ wars. Send it to the Academy. Here are some jottings for you to read when
+ I am gone. You will find them useful.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Andrew did not tell his father that he would no doubt live a long time
+ yet. He felt that he must not say it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will do it all, Father,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, now, good-by!” He gave his son his hand to kiss, and embraced him.
+ “Remember this, Prince Andrew, if they kill you it will hurt me, your old
+ father...” he paused unexpectedly, and then in a querulous voice suddenly
+ shrieked: “but if I hear that you have not behaved like a son of Nicholas
+ Bolkónski, I shall be ashamed!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You need not have said that to me, Father,” said the son with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old man was silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I also wanted to ask you,” continued Prince Andrew, “if I’m killed and if
+ I have a son, do not let him be taken away from you—as I said
+ yesterday... let him grow up with you.... Please.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not let the wife have him?” said the old man, and laughed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They stood silent, facing one another. The old man’s sharp eyes were fixed
+ straight on his son’s. Something twitched in the lower part of the old
+ prince’s face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We’ve said good-by. Go!” he suddenly shouted in a loud, angry voice,
+ opening his door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it? What?” asked both princesses when they saw for a moment at
+ the door Prince Andrew and the figure of the old man in a white dressing
+ gown, spectacled and wigless, shouting in an angry voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew sighed and made no reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well!” he said, turning to his wife.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And this “Well!” sounded coldly ironic, as if he were saying: “Now go
+ through your performance.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Andrew, already!” said the little princess, turning pale and looking with
+ dismay at her husband.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He embraced her. She screamed and fell unconscious on his shoulder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He cautiously released the shoulder she leaned on, looked into her face,
+ and carefully placed her in an easy chair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Adieu, Mary,” said he gently to his sister, taking her by the hand and
+ kissing her, and then he left the room with rapid steps.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The little princess lay in the armchair, Mademoiselle Bourienne chafing
+ her temples. Princess Mary, supporting her sister-in-law, still looked
+ with her beautiful eyes full of tears at the door through which Prince
+ Andrew had gone and made the sign of the cross in his direction. From the
+ study, like pistol shots, came the frequent sound of the old man angrily
+ blowing his nose. Hardly had Prince Andrew gone when the study door opened
+ quickly and the stern figure of the old man in the white dressing gown
+ looked out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gone? That’s all right!” said he; and looking angrily at the unconscious
+ little princess, he shook his head reprovingly and slammed the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK TWO: 1805
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ In October, 1805, a Russian army was occupying the villages and towns of
+ the Archduchy of Austria, and yet other regiments freshly arriving from
+ Russia were settling near the fortress of Braunau and burdening the
+ inhabitants on whom they were quartered. Braunau was the headquarters of
+ the commander in chief, Kutúzov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On October 11, 1805, one of the infantry regiments that had just reached
+ Braunau had halted half a mile from the town, waiting to be inspected by
+ the commander in chief. Despite the un-Russian appearance of the locality
+ and surroundings—fruit gardens, stone fences, tiled roofs, and hills
+ in the distance—and despite the fact that the inhabitants (who gazed
+ with curiosity at the soldiers) were not Russians, the regiment had just
+ the appearance of any Russian regiment preparing for an inspection
+ anywhere in the heart of Russia.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the evening of the last day’s march an order had been received that the
+ commander in chief would inspect the regiment on the march. Though the
+ words of the order were not clear to the regimental commander, and the
+ question arose whether the troops were to be in marching order or not, it
+ was decided at a consultation between the battalion commanders to present
+ the regiment in parade order, on the principle that it is always better to
+ “bow too low than not bow low enough.” So the soldiers, after a
+ twenty-mile march, were kept mending and cleaning all night long without
+ closing their eyes, while the adjutants and company commanders calculated
+ and reckoned, and by morning the regiment—instead of the straggling,
+ disorderly crowd it had been on its last march the day before—presented
+ a well-ordered array of two thousand men each of whom knew his place and
+ his duty, had every button and every strap in place, and shone with
+ cleanliness. And not only externally was all in order, but had it pleased
+ the commander in chief to look under the uniforms he would have found on
+ every man a clean shirt, and in every knapsack the appointed number of
+ articles, “awl, soap, and all,” as the soldiers say. There was only one
+ circumstance concerning which no one could be at ease. It was the state of
+ the soldiers’ boots. More than half the men’s boots were in holes. But
+ this defect was not due to any fault of the regimental commander, for in
+ spite of repeated demands boots had not been issued by the Austrian
+ commissariat, and the regiment had marched some seven hundred miles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The commander of the regiment was an elderly, choleric, stout, and
+ thick-set general with grizzled eyebrows and whiskers, and wider from
+ chest to back than across the shoulders. He had on a brand-new uniform
+ showing the creases where it had been folded and thick gold epaulettes
+ which seemed to stand rather than lie down on his massive shoulders. He
+ had the air of a man happily performing one of the most solemn duties of
+ his life. He walked about in front of the line and at every step pulled
+ himself up, slightly arching his back. It was plain that the commander
+ admired his regiment, rejoiced in it, and that his whole mind was
+ engrossed by it, yet his strut seemed to indicate that, besides military
+ matters, social interests and the fair sex occupied no small part of his
+ thoughts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, Michael Mítrich, sir?” he said, addressing one of the battalion
+ commanders who smilingly pressed forward (it was plain that they both felt
+ happy). “We had our hands full last night. However, I think the regiment
+ is not a bad one, eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The battalion commander perceived the jovial irony and laughed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It would not be turned off the field even on the Tsarítsin Meadow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What?” asked the commander.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment, on the road from the town on which signalers had been
+ posted, two men appeared on horse back. They were an aide-de-camp followed
+ by a Cossack.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The aide-de-camp was sent to confirm the order which had not been clearly
+ worded the day before, namely, that the commander in chief wished to see
+ the regiment just in the state in which it had been on the march: in their
+ greatcoats, and packs, and without any preparation whatever.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A member of the Hofkriegsrath from Vienna had come to Kutúzov the day
+ before with proposals and demands for him to join up with the army of the
+ Archduke Ferdinand and Mack, and Kutúzov, not considering this junction
+ advisable, meant, among other arguments in support of his view, to show
+ the Austrian general the wretched state in which the troops arrived from
+ Russia. With this object he intended to meet the regiment; so the worse
+ the condition it was in, the better pleased the commander in chief would
+ be. Though the aide-de-camp did not know these circumstances, he
+ nevertheless delivered the definite order that the men should be in their
+ greatcoats and in marching order, and that the commander in chief would
+ otherwise be dissatisfied. On hearing this the regimental commander hung
+ his head, silently shrugged his shoulders, and spread out his arms with a
+ choleric gesture.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A fine mess we’ve made of it!” he remarked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now! Didn’t I tell you, Michael Mítrich, that if it was said ‘on
+ the march’ it meant in greatcoats?” said he reproachfully to the battalion
+ commander. “Oh, my God!” he added, stepping resolutely forward. “Company
+ commanders!” he shouted in a voice accustomed to command. “Sergeants
+ major!... How soon will he be here?” he asked the aide-de-camp with a
+ respectful politeness evidently relating to the personage he was referring
+ to.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In an hour’s time, I should say.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Shall we have time to change clothes?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know, General....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The regimental commander, going up to the line himself, ordered the
+ soldiers to change into their greatcoats. The company commanders ran off
+ to their companies, the sergeants major began bustling (the greatcoats
+ were not in very good condition), and instantly the squares that had up to
+ then been in regular order and silent began to sway and stretch and hum
+ with voices. On all sides soldiers were running to and fro, throwing up
+ their knapsacks with a jerk of their shoulders and pulling the straps over
+ their heads, unstrapping their overcoats and drawing the sleeves on with
+ upraised arms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In half an hour all was again in order, only the squares had become gray
+ instead of black. The regimental commander walked with his jerky steps to
+ the front of the regiment and examined it from a distance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Whatever is this? This!” he shouted and stood still. “Commander of the
+ third company!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Commander of the third company wanted by the general!... commander to the
+ general... third company to the commander.” The words passed along the
+ lines and an adjutant ran to look for the missing officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the eager but misrepeated words had reached their destination in a
+ cry of: “The general to the third company,” the missing officer appeared
+ from behind his company and, though he was a middle-aged man and not in
+ the habit of running, trotted awkwardly stumbling on his toes toward the
+ general. The captain’s face showed the uneasiness of a schoolboy who is
+ told to repeat a lesson he has not learned. Spots appeared on his nose,
+ the redness of which was evidently due to intemperance, and his mouth
+ twitched nervously. The general looked the captain up and down as he came
+ up panting, slackening his pace as he approached.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You will soon be dressing your men in petticoats! What is this?” shouted
+ the regimental commander, thrusting forward his jaw and pointing at a
+ soldier in the ranks of the third company in a greatcoat of bluish cloth,
+ which contrasted with the others. “What have you been after? The commander
+ in chief is expected and you leave your place? Eh? I’ll teach you to dress
+ the men in fancy coats for a parade.... Eh...?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The commander of the company, with his eyes fixed on his superior, pressed
+ two fingers more and more rigidly to his cap, as if in this pressure lay
+ his only hope of salvation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, why don’t you speak? Whom have you got there dressed up as a
+ Hungarian?” said the commander with an austere gibe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, your excellency, what? Your excellency! But what about your
+ excellency?... nobody knows.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency, it’s the officer Dólokhov, who has been reduced to the
+ ranks,” said the captain softly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well? Has he been degraded into a field marshal, or into a soldier? If a
+ soldier, he should be dressed in regulation uniform like the others.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency, you gave him leave yourself, on the march.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gave him leave? Leave? That’s just like you young men,” said the
+ regimental commander cooling down a little. “Leave indeed.... One says a
+ word to you and you... What?” he added with renewed irritation, “I beg you
+ to dress your men decently.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the commander, turning to look at the adjutant, directed his jerky
+ steps down the line. He was evidently pleased at his own display of anger
+ and walking up to the regiment wished to find a further excuse for wrath.
+ Having snapped at an officer for an unpolished badge, at another because
+ his line was not straight, he reached the third company.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “H-o-o-w are you standing? Where’s your leg? Your leg?” shouted the
+ commander with a tone of suffering in his voice, while there were still
+ five men between him and Dólokhov with his bluish-gray uniform.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov slowly straightened his bent knee, looking straight with his
+ clear, insolent eyes in the general’s face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why a blue coat? Off with it... Sergeant major! Change his coat... the
+ ras...” he did not finish.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “General, I must obey orders, but I am not bound to endure...” Dólokhov
+ hurriedly interrupted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No talking in the ranks!... No talking, no talking!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not bound to endure insults,” Dólokhov concluded in loud, ringing tones.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The eyes of the general and the soldier met. The general became silent,
+ angrily pulling down his tight scarf.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I request you to have the goodness to change your coat,” he said as he
+ turned away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ “He’s coming!” shouted the signaler at that moment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The regimental commander, flushing, ran to his horse, seized the stirrup
+ with trembling hands, threw his body across the saddle, righted himself,
+ drew his saber, and with a happy and resolute countenance, opening his
+ mouth awry, prepared to shout. The regiment fluttered like a bird preening
+ its plumage and became motionless.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Att-ention!” shouted the regimental commander in a soul-shaking voice
+ which expressed joy for himself, severity for the regiment, and welcome
+ for the approaching chief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Along the broad country road, edged on both sides by trees, came a high,
+ light blue Viennese calèche , slightly creaking on its springs and
+ drawn by six horses at a smart trot. Behind the calèche galloped
+ the suite and a convoy of Croats. Beside Kutúzov sat an Austrian general,
+ in a white uniform that looked strange among the Russian black ones. The
+ calèche stopped in front of the regiment. Kutúzov and the Austrian
+ general were talking in low voices and Kutúzov smiled slightly as treading
+ heavily he stepped down from the carriage just as if those two thousand
+ men breathlessly gazing at him and the regimental commander did not exist.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The word of command rang out, and again the regiment quivered, as with a
+ jingling sound it presented arms. Then amidst a dead silence the feeble
+ voice of the commander in chief was heard. The regiment roared, “Health to
+ your ex... len... len... lency!” and again all became silent. At first
+ Kutúzov stood still while the regiment moved; then he and the general in
+ white, accompanied by the suite, walked between the ranks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the way the regimental commander saluted the commander in chief and
+ devoured him with his eyes, drawing himself up obsequiously, and from the
+ way he walked through the ranks behind the generals, bending forward and
+ hardly able to restrain his jerky movements, and from the way he darted
+ forward at every word or gesture of the commander in chief, it was evident
+ that he performed his duty as a subordinate with even greater zeal than
+ his duty as a commander. Thanks to the strictness and assiduity of its
+ commander the regiment, in comparison with others that had reached Braunau
+ at the same time, was in splendid condition. There were only 217 sick and
+ stragglers. Everything was in good order except the boots.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov walked through the ranks, sometimes stopping to say a few friendly
+ words to officers he had known in the Turkish war, sometimes also to the
+ soldiers. Looking at their boots he several times shook his head sadly,
+ pointing them out to the Austrian general with an expression which seemed
+ to say that he was not blaming anyone, but could not help noticing what a
+ bad state of things it was. The regimental commander ran forward on each
+ such occasion, fearing to miss a single word of the commander in chief’s
+ regarding the regiment. Behind Kutúzov, at a distance that allowed every
+ softly spoken word to be heard, followed some twenty men of his suite.
+ These gentlemen talked among themselves and sometimes laughed. Nearest of
+ all to the commander in chief walked a handsome adjutant. This was Prince
+ Bolkónski. Beside him was his comrade Nesvítski, a tall staff officer,
+ extremely stout, with a kindly, smiling, handsome face and moist eyes.
+ Nesvítski could hardly keep from laughter provoked by a swarthy hussar
+ officer who walked beside him. This hussar, with a grave face and without
+ a smile or a change in the expression of his fixed eyes, watched the
+ regimental commander’s back and mimicked his every movement. Each time the
+ commander started and bent forward, the hussar started and bent forward in
+ exactly the same manner. Nesvítski laughed and nudged the others to make
+ them look at the wag.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov walked slowly and languidly past thousands of eyes which were
+ starting from their sockets to watch their chief. On reaching the third
+ company he suddenly stopped. His suite, not having expected this,
+ involuntarily came closer to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, Timókhin!” said he, recognizing the red-nosed captain who had been
+ reprimanded on account of the blue greatcoat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One would have thought it impossible for a man to stretch himself more
+ than Timókhin had done when he was reprimanded by the regimental
+ commander, but now that the commander in chief addressed him he drew
+ himself up to such an extent that it seemed he could not have sustained it
+ had the commander in chief continued to look at him, and so Kutúzov, who
+ evidently understood his case and wished him nothing but good, quickly
+ turned away, a scarcely perceptible smile flitting over his scarred and
+ puffy face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Another Ismail comrade,” said he. “A brave officer! Are you satisfied
+ with him?” he asked the regimental commander.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the latter—unconscious that he was being reflected in the hussar
+ officer as in a looking glass—started, moved forward, and answered:
+ “Highly satisfied, your excellency!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We all have our weaknesses,” said Kutúzov smiling and walking away from
+ him. “He used to have a predilection for Bacchus.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The regimental commander was afraid he might be blamed for this and did
+ not answer. The hussar at that moment noticed the face of the red-nosed
+ captain and his drawn-in stomach, and mimicked his expression and pose
+ with such exactitude that Nesvítski could not help laughing. Kutúzov
+ turned round. The officer evidently had complete control of his face, and
+ while Kutúzov was turning managed to make a grimace and then assume a most
+ serious, deferential, and innocent expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The third company was the last, and Kutúzov pondered, apparently trying to
+ recollect something. Prince Andrew stepped forward from among the suite
+ and said in French:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You told me to remind you of the officer Dólokhov, reduced to the ranks
+ in this regiment.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where is Dólokhov?” asked Kutúzov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov, who had already changed into a soldier’s gray greatcoat, did not
+ wait to be called. The shapely figure of the fair-haired soldier, with his
+ clear blue eyes, stepped forward from the ranks, went up to the commander
+ in chief, and presented arms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have you a complaint to make?” Kutúzov asked with a slight frown.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This is Dólokhov,” said Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah!” said Kutúzov. “I hope this will be a lesson to you. Do your duty.
+ The Emperor is gracious, and I shan’t forget you if you deserve well.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The clear blue eyes looked at the commander in chief just as boldly as
+ they had looked at the regimental commander, seeming by their expression
+ to tear open the veil of convention that separates a commander in chief so
+ widely from a private.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One thing I ask of your excellency,” Dólokhov said in his firm, ringing,
+ deliberate voice. “I ask an opportunity to atone for my fault and prove my
+ devotion to His Majesty the Emperor and to Russia!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov turned away. The same smile of the eyes with which he had turned
+ from Captain Timókhin again flitted over his face. He turned away with a
+ grimace as if to say that everything Dólokhov had said to him and
+ everything he could say had long been known to him, that he was weary of
+ it and it was not at all what he wanted. He turned away and went to the
+ carriage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The regiment broke up into companies, which went to their appointed
+ quarters near Braunau, where they hoped to receive boots and clothes and
+ to rest after their hard marches.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You won’t bear me a grudge, Prokhór Ignátych?” said the regimental
+ commander, overtaking the third company on its way to its quarters and
+ riding up to Captain Timókhin who was walking in front. (The regimental
+ commander’s face now that the inspection was happily over beamed with
+ irrepressible delight.) “It’s in the Emperor’s service... it can’t be
+ helped... one is sometimes a bit hasty on parade... I am the first to
+ apologize, you know me!... He was very pleased!” And he held out his hand
+ to the captain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t mention it, General, as if I’d be so bold!” replied the captain,
+ his nose growing redder as he gave a smile which showed where two front teeth
+ were missing that had been knocked out by the butt end of a gun at Ismail.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And tell Mr. Dólokhov that I won’t forget him—he may be quite easy.
+ And tell me, please—I’ve been meaning to ask—how is he
+ behaving himself, and in general...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As far as the service goes he is quite punctilious, your excellency; but
+ his character...” said Timókhin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And what about his character?” asked the regimental commander.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s different on different days,” answered the captain. “One day he is
+ sensible, well educated, and good-natured, and the next he’s a wild
+ beast.... In Poland, if you please, he nearly killed a Jew.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, well, well!” remarked the regimental commander. “Still, one must have
+ pity on a young man in misfortune. You know he has important
+ connections... Well, then, you just...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will, your excellency,” said Timókhin, showing by his smile that he
+ understood his commander’s wish.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, of course, of course!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The regimental commander sought out Dólokhov in the ranks and, reining in
+ his horse, said to him:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “After the next affair... epaulettes.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov looked round but did not say anything, nor did the mocking smile
+ on his lips change.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, that’s all right,” continued the regimental commander. “A cup of
+ vodka for the men from me,” he added so that the soldiers could hear. “I
+ thank you all! God be praised!” and he rode past that company and overtook
+ the next one.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, he’s really a good fellow, one can serve under him,” said Timókhin
+ to the subaltern beside him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In a word, a hearty one...” said the subaltern, laughing (the regimental
+ commander was nicknamed King of Hearts ).
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The cheerful mood of their officers after the inspection infected the
+ soldiers. The company marched on gaily. The soldiers’ voices could be
+ heard on every side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And they said Kutúzov was blind of one eye?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And so he is! Quite blind!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, friend, he is sharper-eyed than you are. Boots and leg bands... he
+ noticed everything...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When he looked at my feet, friend... well, thinks I...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And that other one with him, the Austrian, looked as if he were smeared
+ with chalk—as white as flour! I suppose they polish him up as they
+ do the guns.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I say, Fédeshon!... Did he say when the battles are to begin? You were
+ near him. Everybody said that Buonaparte himself was at Braunau.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Buonaparte himself!... Just listen to the fool, what he doesn’t know! The
+ Prussians are up in arms now. The Austrians, you see, are putting them
+ down. When they’ve been put down, the war with Buonaparte will begin. And
+ he says Buonaparte is in Braunau! Shows you’re a fool. You’d better listen
+ more carefully!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What devils these quartermasters are! See, the fifth company is turning
+ into the village already... they will have their buckwheat cooked before
+ we reach our quarters.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Give me a biscuit, you devil!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And did you give me tobacco yesterday? That’s just it, friend! Ah, well,
+ never mind, here you are.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They might call a halt here or we’ll have to do another four miles
+ without eating.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wasn’t it fine when those Germans gave us lifts! You just sit still and
+ are drawn along.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And here, friend, the people are quite beggarly. There they all seemed to
+ be Poles—all under the Russian crown—but here they’re all
+ regular Germans.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Singers to the front” came the captain’s order.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And from the different ranks some twenty men ran to the front. A drummer,
+ their leader, turned round facing the singers, and flourishing his arm,
+ began a long-drawn-out soldiers’ song, commencing with the words: “Morning
+ dawned, the sun was rising,” and concluding: “On then, brothers, on to
+ glory, led by Father Kámenski.” This song had been composed in the Turkish
+ campaign and now being sung in Austria, the only change being that the
+ words “Father Kámenski” were replaced by “Father Kutúzov.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having jerked out these last words as soldiers do and waved his arms as if
+ flinging something to the ground, the drummer—a lean, handsome
+ soldier of forty—looked sternly at the singers and screwed up his
+ eyes. Then having satisfied himself that all eyes were fixed on him, he
+ raised both arms as if carefully lifting some invisible but precious
+ object above his head and, holding it there for some seconds, suddenly
+ flung it down and began:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, my bower, oh, my bower...!” 
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, my bower new...!” chimed in twenty voices, and the castanet player,
+ in spite of the burden of his equipment, rushed out to the front and,
+ walking backwards before the company, jerked his shoulders and flourished
+ his castanets as if threatening someone. The soldiers, swinging their arms
+ and keeping time spontaneously, marched with long steps. Behind the
+ company the sound of wheels, the creaking of springs, and the tramp of
+ horses’ hoofs were heard. Kutúzov and his suite were returning to the
+ town. The commander in chief made a sign that the men should continue to
+ march at ease, and he and all his suite showed pleasure at the sound of
+ the singing and the sight of the dancing soldier and the gay and smartly
+ marching men. In the second file from the right flank, beside which the
+ carriage passed the company, a blue-eyed soldier involuntarily attracted
+ notice. It was Dólokhov marching with particular grace and boldness in
+ time to the song and looking at those driving past as if he pitied all who
+ were not at that moment marching with the company. The hussar cornet of
+ Kutúzov’s suite who had mimicked the regimental commander, fell back from
+ the carriage and rode up to Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hussar cornet Zherkóv had at one time, in Petersburg, belonged to the wild
+ set led by Dólokhov. Zherkóv had met Dólokhov abroad as a private and had
+ not seen fit to recognize him. But now that Kutúzov had spoken to the
+ gentleman ranker, he addressed him with the cordiality of an old friend.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear fellow, how are you?” said he through the singing, making his
+ horse keep pace with the company.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How am I?” Dólokhov answered coldly. “I am as you see.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The lively song gave a special flavor to the tone of free and easy gaiety
+ with which Zherkóv spoke, and to the intentional coldness of Dólokhov’s
+ reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And how do you get on with the officers?” inquired Zherkóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right. They are good fellows. And how have you wriggled onto the
+ staff?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was attached; I’m on duty.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Both were silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She let the hawk fly upward from her wide right sleeve,” went the song,
+ arousing an involuntary sensation of courage and cheerfulness. Their
+ conversation would probably have been different but for the effect of that
+ song.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is it true that Austrians have been beaten?” asked Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The devil only knows! They say so.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’m glad,” answered Dólokhov briefly and clearly, as the song demanded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I say, come round some evening and we’ll have a game of faro!” said
+ Zherkóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, have you too much money?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do come.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I can’t. I’ve sworn not to. I won’t drink and won’t play till I get
+ reinstated.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, that’s only till the first engagement.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We shall see.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They were again silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come if you need anything. One can at least be of use on the staff...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov smiled. “Don’t trouble. If I want anything, I won’t beg—I’ll
+ take it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, never mind; I only...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I only...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good-by.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good health...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s a long, long way.
+
+ To my native land...” 
+
+
+
+ 
+ Zherkóv touched his horse with the spurs; it pranced excitedly from foot
+ to foot uncertain with which to start, then settled down, galloped past
+ the company, and overtook the carriage, still keeping time to the song.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ On returning from the review, Kutúzov took the Austrian general into his
+ private room and, calling his adjutant, asked for some papers relating to
+ the condition of the troops on their arrival, and the letters that had
+ come from the Archduke Ferdinand, who was in command of the advanced army.
+ Prince Andrew Bolkónski came into the room with the required papers.
+ Kutúzov and the Austrian member of the Hofkriegsrath were sitting at the
+ table on which a plan was spread out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah!...” said Kutúzov glancing at Bolkónski as if by this exclamation he
+ was asking the adjutant to wait, and he went on with the conversation in
+ French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All I can say, General,” said he with a pleasant elegance of expression
+ and intonation that obliged one to listen to each deliberately spoken
+ word. It was evident that Kutúzov himself listened with pleasure to his
+ own voice. “All I can say, General, is that if the matter depended on my
+ personal wishes, the will of His Majesty the Emperor Francis would have
+ been fulfilled long ago. I should long ago have joined the archduke. And
+ believe me on my honour that to me personally it would be a pleasure to
+ hand over the supreme command of the army into the hands of a better
+ informed and more skillful general—of whom Austria has so many—and
+ to lay down all this heavy responsibility. But circumstances are sometimes
+ too strong for us, General.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Kutúzov smiled in a way that seemed to say, “You are quite at liberty
+ not to believe me and I don’t even care whether you do or not, but you
+ have no grounds for telling me so. And that is the whole point.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Austrian general looked dissatisfied, but had no option but to reply
+ in the same tone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the contrary,” he said, in a querulous and angry tone that contrasted
+ with his flattering words, “on the contrary, your excellency’s
+ participation in the common action is highly valued by His Majesty; but we
+ think the present delay is depriving the splendid Russian troops and their
+ commander of the laurels they have been accustomed to win in their
+ battles,” he concluded his evidently prearranged sentence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov bowed with the same smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But that is my conviction, and judging by the last letter with which His
+ Highness the Archduke Ferdinand has honored me, I imagine that the
+ Austrian troops, under the direction of so skillful a leader as General
+ Mack, have by now already gained a decisive victory and no longer need our
+ aid,” said Kutúzov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The general frowned. Though there was no definite news of an Austrian
+ defeat, there were many circumstances confirming the unfavorable rumors
+ that were afloat, and so Kutúzov’s suggestion of an Austrian victory
+ sounded much like irony. But Kutúzov went on blandly smiling with the same
+ expression, which seemed to say that he had a right to suppose so. And, in
+ fact, the last letter he had received from Mack’s army informed him of a
+ victory and stated strategically the position of the army was very
+ favorable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Give me that letter,” said Kutúzov turning to Prince Andrew. “Please have
+ a look at it”—and Kutúzov with an ironical smile about the corners
+ of his mouth read to the Austrian general the following passage, in
+ German, from the Archduke Ferdinand’s letter:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ We have fully concentrated forces of nearly seventy thousand men with
+ which to attack and defeat the enemy should he cross the Lech. Also, as we
+ are masters of Ulm, we cannot be deprived of the advantage of commanding
+ both sides of the Danube, so that should the enemy not cross the Lech, we
+ can cross the Danube, throw ourselves on his line of communications,
+ recross the river lower down, and frustrate his intention should he try to
+ direct his whole force against our faithful ally. We shall therefore
+ confidently await the moment when the Imperial Russian army will be fully
+ equipped, and shall then, in conjunction with it, easily find a way to
+ prepare for the enemy the fate he deserves.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov sighed deeply on finishing this paragraph and looked at the member
+ of the Hofkriegsrath mildly and attentively.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you know the wise maxim your excellency, advising one to expect the
+ worst,” said the Austrian general, evidently wishing to have done with
+ jests and to come to business. He involuntarily looked round at the
+ aide-de-camp.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Excuse me, General,” interrupted Kutúzov, also turning to Prince Andrew.
+ “Look here, my dear fellow, get from Kozlóvski all the reports from our
+ scouts. Here are two letters from Count Nostitz and here is one from His
+ Highness the Archduke Ferdinand and here are these,” he said, handing him
+ several papers, “make a neat memorandum in French out of all this, showing
+ all the news we have had of the movements of the Austrian army, and then
+ give it to his excellency.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew bowed his head in token of having understood from the first
+ not only what had been said but also what Kutúzov would have liked to tell
+ him. He gathered up the papers and with a bow to both, stepped softly over
+ the carpet and went out into the waiting room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though not much time had passed since Prince Andrew had left Russia, he
+ had changed greatly during that period. In the expression of his face, in
+ his movements, in his walk, scarcely a trace was left of his former
+ affected languor and indolence. He now looked like a man who has time to
+ think of the impression he makes on others, but is occupied with agreeable
+ and interesting work. His face expressed more satisfaction with himself
+ and those around him, his smile and glance were brighter and more
+ attractive.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov, whom he had overtaken in Poland, had received him very kindly,
+ promised not to forget him, distinguished him above the other adjutants,
+ and had taken him to Vienna and given him the more serious commissions.
+ From Vienna Kutúzov wrote to his old comrade, Prince Andrew’s father.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Your son bids fair to become an officer distinguished by his industry,
+ firmness, and expedition. I consider myself fortunate to have such a
+ subordinate by me.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On Kutúzov’s staff, among his fellow officers and in the army generally,
+ Prince Andrew had, as he had had in Petersburg society, two quite opposite
+ reputations. Some, a minority, acknowledged him to be different from
+ themselves and from everyone else, expected great things of him, listened
+ to him, admired, and imitated him, and with them Prince Andrew was natural
+ and pleasant. Others, the majority, disliked him and considered him
+ conceited, cold, and disagreeable. But among these people Prince Andrew
+ knew how to take his stand so that they respected and even feared him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Coming out of Kutúzov’s room into the waiting room with the papers in his
+ hand Prince Andrew came up to his comrade, the aide-de-camp on duty,
+ Kozlóvski, who was sitting at the window with a book.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, Prince?” asked Kozlóvski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am ordered to write a memorandum explaining why we are not advancing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And why is it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew shrugged his shoulders.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Any news from Mack?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If it were true that he has been beaten, news would have come.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Probably,” said Prince Andrew moving toward the outer door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But at that instant a tall Austrian general in a greatcoat, with the order
+ of Maria Theresa on his neck and a black bandage round his head, who had
+ evidently just arrived, entered quickly, slamming the door. Prince Andrew
+ stopped short.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Commander in Chief Kutúzov?” said the newly arrived general speaking
+ quickly with a harsh German accent, looking to both sides and advancing
+ straight toward the inner door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The commander in chief is engaged,” said Kozlóvski, going hurriedly up to
+ the unknown general and blocking his way to the door. “Whom shall I
+ announce?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The unknown general looked disdainfully down at Kozlóvski, who was rather
+ short, as if surprised that anyone should not know him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The commander in chief is engaged,” repeated Kozlóvski calmly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The general’s face clouded, his lips quivered and trembled. He took out a
+ notebook, hurriedly scribbled something in pencil, tore out the leaf, gave
+ it to Kozlóvski, stepped quickly to the window, and threw himself into a
+ chair, gazing at those in the room as if asking, “Why do they look at me?”
+ Then he lifted his head, stretched his neck as if he intended to say
+ something, but immediately, with affected indifference, began to hum to
+ himself, producing a queer sound which immediately broke off. The door of
+ the private room opened and Kutúzov appeared in the doorway. The general
+ with the bandaged head bent forward as though running away from some
+ danger, and, making long, quick strides with his thin legs, went up to
+ Kutúzov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vous voyez le malheureux Mack,” he uttered in a broken voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov’s face as he stood in the open doorway remained perfectly immobile
+ for a few moments. Then wrinkles ran over his face like a wave and his
+ forehead became smooth again, he bowed his head respectfully, closed his
+ eyes, silently let Mack enter his room before him, and closed the door
+ himself behind him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The report which had been circulated that the Austrians had been beaten
+ and that the whole army had surrendered at Ulm proved to be correct.
+ Within half an hour adjutants had been sent in various directions with
+ orders which showed that the Russian troops, who had hitherto been
+ inactive, would also soon have to meet the enemy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew was one of those rare staff officers whose chief interest
+ lay in the general progress of the war. When he saw Mack and heard the
+ details of his disaster he understood that half the campaign was lost,
+ understood all the difficulties of the Russian army’s position, and
+ vividly imagined what awaited it and the part he would have to play.
+ Involuntarily he felt a joyful agitation at the thought of the humiliation
+ of arrogant Austria and that in a week’s time he might, perhaps, see and
+ take part in the first Russian encounter with the French since Suvórov met
+ them. He feared that Bonaparte’s genius might outweigh all the courage of
+ the Russian troops, and at the same time could not admit the idea of his
+ hero being disgraced.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Excited and irritated by these thoughts Prince Andrew went toward his room
+ to write to his father, to whom he wrote every day. In the corridor he met
+ Nesvítski, with whom he shared a room, and the wag Zherkóv; they were as
+ usual laughing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why are you so glum?” asked Nesvítski noticing Prince Andrew’s pale face
+ and glittering eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There’s nothing to be gay about,” answered Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just as Prince Andrew met Nesvítski and Zherkóv, there came toward them
+ from the other end of the corridor, Strauch, an Austrian general who was on
+ Kutúzov’s staff in charge of the provisioning of the Russian army, and the
+ member of the Hofkriegsrath who had arrived the previous evening. There
+ was room enough in the wide corridor for the generals to pass the three
+ officers quite easily, but Zherkóv, pushing Nesvítski aside with his arm,
+ said in a breathless voice,
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They’re coming!... they’re coming!... Stand aside, make way, please make
+ way!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The generals were passing by, looking as if they wished to avoid
+ embarrassing attentions. On the face of the wag Zherkóv there suddenly
+ appeared a stupid smile of glee which he seemed unable to suppress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency,” said he in German, stepping forward and addressing the
+ Austrian general, “I have the honor to congratulate you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He bowed his head and scraped first with one foot and then with the other,
+ awkwardly, like a child at a dancing lesson.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The member of the Hofkriegsrath looked at him severely but, seeing the
+ seriousness of his stupid smile, could not but give him a moment’s
+ attention. He screwed up his eyes showing that he was listening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have the honor to congratulate you. General Mack has arrived, quite
+ well, only a little bruised just here,” he added, pointing with a beaming
+ smile to his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The general frowned, turned away, and went on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gott, wie naiv!” * said he angrily, after he had gone a few steps.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Good God, what simplicity!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nesvítski with a laugh threw his arms round Prince Andrew, but Bolkónski,
+ turning still paler, pushed him away with an angry look and turned to
+ Zherkóv. The nervous irritation aroused by the appearance of Mack, the
+ news of his defeat, and the thought of what lay before the Russian army
+ found vent in anger at Zherkóv’s untimely jest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you, sir, choose to make a buffoon of yourself,” he said
+ sharply, with a slight trembling of the lower jaw, “I can’t prevent
+ your doing so; but I warn you that if you dare to play the fool in my
+ presence, I will teach you to behave yourself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nesvítski and Zherkóv were so surprised by this outburst that they gazed
+ at Bolkónski silently with wide-open eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s the matter? I only congratulated them,” said Zherkóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am not jesting with you; please be silent!” cried Bolkónski, and taking
+ Nesvítski’s arm he left Zherkóv, who did not know what to say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come, what’s the matter, old fellow?” said Nesvítski trying to soothe
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s the matter?” exclaimed Prince Andrew standing still in
+ his excitement. “Don’t you understand that either we are officers
+ serving our Tsar and our country, rejoicing in the successes and grieving at the
+ misfortunes of our common cause, or we are merely lackeys who care nothing
+ for their master’s business. Quarante mille hommes massacrés et l’armée de
+ nos alliés détruite, et vous trouvez là le mot pour rire,” * he said, as
+ if strengthening his views by this French sentence. “C’est bien pour un
+ garçon de rien comme cet individu dont vous avez fait un ami, mais pas
+ pour vous, pas pour vous . *(2) Only a hobbledehoy could amuse himself in
+ this way,” he added in Russian—but pronouncing the word with a
+ French accent—having noticed that Zherkóv could still hear him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Forty thousand men massacred and the army of our allies
+ destroyed, and you find that a cause for jesting!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * (2) “It is all very well for that good-for-nothing fellow
+ of whom you have made a friend, but not for you, not for
+ you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He waited a moment to see whether the cornet would answer, but he turned
+ and went out of the corridor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ The Pávlograd Hussars were stationed two miles from Braunau. The squadron
+ in which Nicholas Rostóv served as a cadet was quartered in the German
+ village of Salzeneck. The best quarters in the village were assigned to
+ cavalry-captain Denísov, the squadron commander, known throughout the
+ whole cavalry division as Váska Denísov. Cadet Rostóv, ever since he had
+ overtaken the regiment in Poland, had lived with the squadron commander.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On October 11, the day when all was astir at headquarters over the news of
+ Mack’s defeat, the camp life of the officers of this squadron was
+ proceeding as usual. Denísov, who had been losing at cards all night, had
+ not yet come home when Rostóv rode back early in the morning from a
+ foraging expedition. Rostóv in his cadet uniform, with a jerk to his
+ horse, rode up to the porch, swung his leg over the saddle with a supple
+ youthful movement, stood for a moment in the stirrup as if loathe to part
+ from his horse, and at last sprang down and called to his orderly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, Bondarénko, dear friend!” said he to the hussar who rushed up
+ headlong to the horse. “Walk him up and down, my dear fellow,” he
+ continued, with that gay brotherly cordiality which goodhearted young
+ people show to everyone when they are happy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, your excellency,” answered the Ukrainian gaily, tossing his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mind, walk him up and down well!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Another hussar also rushed toward the horse, but Bondarénko had already
+ thrown the reins of the snaffle bridle over the horse’s head. It was
+ evident that the cadet was liberal with his tips and that it paid to serve
+ him. Rostóv patted the horse’s neck and then his flank, and lingered for a
+ moment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Splendid! What a horse he will be!” he thought with a smile, and holding
+ up his saber, his spurs jingling, he ran up the steps of the porch. His
+ landlord, who in a waistcoat and a pointed cap, pitchfork in hand, was
+ clearing manure from the cowhouse, looked out, and his face immediately
+ brightened on seeing Rostóv. “Schön gut Morgen! Schön gut Morgen!” * he
+ said winking with a merry smile, evidently pleased to greet the young man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “A very good morning! A very good morning!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Schon fleissig?” * said Rostóv with the same gay brotherly smile which
+ did not leave his eager face. “Hoch Oestreicher! Hoch Russen! Kaiser
+ Alexander hoch!” *(2) said he, quoting words often repeated by the German
+ landlord.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Busy already?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * (2) “Hurrah for the Austrians! Hurrah for the Russians!
+ Hurrah for Emperor Alexander!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The German laughed, came out of the cowshed, pulled off his cap, and
+ waving it above his head cried:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Und die ganze Welt hoch!” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “And hurrah for the whole world!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv waved his cap above his head like the German and cried laughing,
+ “Und vivat die ganze Welt!” Though neither the German cleaning his cowshed
+ nor Rostóv back with his platoon from foraging for hay had any reason for
+ rejoicing, they looked at each other with joyful delight and brotherly
+ love, wagged their heads in token of their mutual affection, and parted
+ smiling, the German returning to his cowshed and Rostóv going to the
+ cottage he occupied with Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What about your master?” he asked Lavrúshka, Denísov’s orderly, whom all
+ the regiment knew for a rogue.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hasn’t been in since the evening. Must have been losing,” answered
+ Lavrúshka. “I know by now, if he wins he comes back early to brag about
+ it, but if he stays out till morning it means he’s lost and will come back
+ in a rage. Will you have coffee?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, bring some.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ten minutes later Lavrúshka brought the coffee. “He’s coming!” said he.
+ “Now for trouble!” Rostóv looked out of the window and saw Denísov coming
+ home. Denísov was a small man with a red face, sparkling black eyes, and
+ black tousled mustache and hair. He wore an unfastened cloak, wide
+ breeches hanging down in creases, and a crumpled shako on the back of his
+ head. He came up to the porch gloomily, hanging his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lavwúska!” he shouted loudly and angrily, “take it off, blockhead!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, I am taking it off,” replied Lavrúshka’s voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, you’re up already,” said Denísov, entering the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Long ago,” answered Rostóv, “I have already been for the hay, and have
+ seen Fräulein Mathilde.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Weally! And I’ve been losing, bwother. I lost yesterday like a damned
+ fool!” cried Denísov, not pronouncing his r ’s. “Such ill luck! Such ill
+ luck. As soon as you left, it began and went on. Hullo there! Tea!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Puckering up his face though smiling, and showing his short strong teeth,
+ he began with stubby fingers of both hands to ruffle up his thick tangled
+ black hair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And what devil made me go to that wat?” (an officer nicknamed “the rat”)
+ he said, rubbing his forehead and whole face with both hands. “Just fancy,
+ he didn’t let me win a single cahd, not one cahd.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He took the lighted pipe that was offered to him, gripped it in his fist,
+ and tapped it on the floor, making the sparks fly, while he continued to
+ shout.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He lets one win the singles and collahs it as soon as one doubles it;
+ gives the singles and snatches the doubles!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He scattered the burning tobacco, smashed the pipe, and threw it away.
+ Then he remained silent for a while, and all at once looked cheerfully
+ with his glittering, black eyes at Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If at least we had some women here; but there’s nothing foh one to do but
+ dwink. If we could only get to fighting soon. Hullo, who’s there?” he
+ said, turning to the door as he heard a tread of heavy boots and the
+ clinking of spurs that came to a stop, and a respectful cough.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The squadron quartermaster!” said Lavrúshka.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov’s face puckered still more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wetched!” he muttered, throwing down a purse with some gold in it.
+ “Wostóv, deah fellow, just see how much there is left and shove the purse
+ undah the pillow,” he said, and went out to the quartermaster.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv took the money and, mechanically arranging the old and new coins in
+ separate piles, began counting them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah! Telyánin! How d’ye do? They plucked me last night,” came Denísov’s
+ voice from the next room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where? At Bykov’s, at the rat’s... I knew it,” replied a piping voice,
+ and Lieutenant Telyánin, a small officer of the same squadron, entered the
+ room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv thrust the purse under the pillow and shook the damp little hand
+ which was offered him. Telyánin for some reason had been transferred from
+ the Guards just before this campaign. He behaved very well in the regiment
+ but was not liked; Rostóv especially detested him and was unable to
+ overcome or conceal his groundless antipathy to the man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, young cavalryman, how is my Rook behaving?” he asked. (Rook was a
+ young horse Telyánin had sold to Rostóv.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The lieutenant never looked the man he was speaking to straight in the
+ face; his eyes continually wandered from one object to another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I saw you riding this morning...” he added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, he’s all right, a good horse,” answered Rostóv, though the horse for
+ which he had paid seven hundred rubbles was not worth half that sum. “He’s
+ begun to go a little lame on the left foreleg,” he added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The hoof’s cracked! That’s nothing. I’ll teach you what to do and show
+ you what kind of rivet to use.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, please do,” said Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll show you, I’ll show you! It’s not a secret. And it’s a horse you’ll
+ thank me for.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then I’ll have it brought round,” said Rostóv wishing to avoid Telyánin,
+ and he went out to give the order.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the passage Denísov, with a pipe, was squatting on the threshold facing
+ the quartermaster who was reporting to him. On seeing Rostóv, Denísov
+ screwed up his face and pointing over his shoulder with his thumb to the
+ room where Telyánin was sitting, he frowned and gave a shudder of disgust.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ugh! I don’t like that fellow,” he said, regardless of the
+ quartermaster’s presence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv shrugged his shoulders as much as to say: “Nor do I, but what’s one
+ to do?” and, having given his order, he returned to Telyánin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Telyánin was sitting in the same indolent pose in which Rostóv had left
+ him, rubbing his small white hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well there certainly are disgusting people,” thought Rostóv as he
+ entered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have you told them to bring the horse?” asked Telyánin, getting up and
+ looking carelessly about him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let us go ourselves. I only came round to ask Denísov about yesterday’s
+ order. Have you got it, Denísov?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not yet. But where are you off to?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I want to teach this young man how to shoe a horse,” said Telyánin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They went through the porch and into the stable. The lieutenant explained
+ how to rivet the hoof and went away to his own quarters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Rostóv went back there was a bottle of vodka and a sausage on the
+ table. Denísov was sitting there scratching with his pen on a sheet of
+ paper. He looked gloomily in Rostóv’s face and said: “I am witing to her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He leaned his elbows on the table with his pen in his hand and, evidently
+ glad of a chance to say quicker in words what he wanted to write, told
+ Rostóv the contents of his letter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see, my fwiend,” he said, “we sleep when we don’t love. We are
+ childwen of the dust... but one falls in love and one is a God, one is
+ pua’ as on the fihst day of cweation... Who’s that now? Send him to the
+ devil, I’m busy!” he shouted to Lavrúshka, who went up to him not in the
+ least abashed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who should it be? You yourself told him to come. It’s the quartermaster
+ for the money.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov frowned and was about to shout some reply but stopped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wetched business,” he muttered to himself. “How much is left in the
+ puhse?” he asked, turning to Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Seven new and three old imperials.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, it’s wetched! Well, what are you standing there for, you sca’cwow?
+ Call the quahtehmasteh,” he shouted to Lavrúshka.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Please, Denísov, let me lend you some: I have some, you know,” said
+ Rostóv, blushing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t like bowwowing from my own fellows, I don’t,” growled Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But if you won’t accept money from me like a comrade, you will offend me.
+ Really I have some,” Rostóv repeated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I tell you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Denísov went to the bed to get the purse from under the pillow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where have you put it, Wostóv?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Under the lower pillow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s not there.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov threw both pillows on the floor. The purse was not there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s a miwacle.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wait, haven’t you dropped it?” said Rostóv, picking up the pillows one at
+ a time and shaking them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He pulled off the quilt and shook it. The purse was not there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear me, can I have forgotten? No, I remember thinking that you kept it
+ under your head like a treasure,” said Rostóv. “I put it just here. Where
+ is it?” he asked, turning to Lavrúshka.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I haven’t been in the room. It must be where you put it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But it isn’t?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’re always like that; you thwow a thing down anywhere and forget it.
+ Feel in your pockets.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, if I hadn’t thought of it being a treasure,” said Rostóv, “but I
+ remember putting it there.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lavrúshka turned all the bedding over, looked under the bed and under the
+ table, searched everywhere, and stood still in the middle of the room.
+ Denísov silently watched Lavrúshka’s movements, and when the latter threw
+ up his arms in surprise saying it was nowhere to be found Denísov glanced
+ at Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wostóv, you’ve not been playing schoolboy twicks...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv felt Denísov’s gaze fixed on him, raised his eyes, and instantly
+ dropped them again. All the blood which had seemed congested somewhere
+ below his throat rushed to his face and eyes. He could not draw breath.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And there hasn’t been anyone in the room except the lieutenant and
+ yourselves. It must be here somewhere,” said Lavrúshka.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then, you devil’s puppet, look alive and hunt for it!” shouted
+ Denísov, suddenly, turning purple and rushing at the man with a
+ threatening gesture. “If the purse isn’t found I’ll flog you, I’ll flog
+ you all.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv, his eyes avoiding Denísov, began buttoning his coat, buckled on
+ his saber, and put on his cap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I must have that purse, I tell you,” shouted Denísov, shaking his orderly
+ by the shoulders and knocking him against the wall.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Denísov, let him alone, I know who has taken it,” said Rostóv, going
+ toward the door without raising his eyes. Denísov paused, thought a
+ moment, and, evidently understanding what Rostóv hinted at, seized his
+ arm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nonsense!” he cried, and the veins on his forehead and neck stood out
+ like cords. “You are mad, I tell you. I won’t allow it. The purse is here!
+ I’ll flay this scoundwel alive, and it will be found.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know who has taken it,” repeated Rostóv in an unsteady voice, and went
+ to the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I tell you, don’t you dahe to do it!” shouted Denísov, rushing at the
+ cadet to restrain him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Rostóv pulled away his arm and, with as much anger as though Denísov
+ were his worst enemy, firmly fixed his eyes directly on his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you understand what you’re saying?” he said in a trembling voice.
+ “There was no one else in the room except myself. So that if it is not so,
+ then...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He could not finish, and ran out of the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, may the devil take you and evewybody,” were the last words Rostóv
+ heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv went to Telyánin’s quarters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The master is not in, he’s gone to headquarters,” said Telyánin’s
+ orderly. “Has something happened?” he added, surprised at the cadet’s
+ troubled face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, nothing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’ve only just missed him,” said the orderly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The headquarters were situated two miles away from Salzeneck, and Rostóv,
+ without returning home, took a horse and rode there. There was an inn in
+ the village which the officers frequented. Rostóv rode up to it and saw
+ Telyánin’s horse at the porch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the second room of the inn the lieutenant was sitting over a dish of
+ sausages and a bottle of wine.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, you’ve come here too, young man!” he said, smiling and raising his
+ eyebrows.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” said Rostóv as if it cost him a great deal to utter the word; and
+ he sat down at the nearest table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Both were silent. There were two Germans and a Russian officer in the
+ room. No one spoke and the only sounds heard were the clatter of knives
+ and the munching of the lieutenant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Telyánin had finished his lunch he took out of his pocket a double
+ purse and, drawing its rings aside with his small, white, turned-up
+ fingers, drew out a gold imperial, and lifting his eyebrows gave it to the
+ waiter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Please be quick,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The coin was a new one. Rostóv rose and went up to Telyánin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Allow me to look at your purse,” he said in a low, almost inaudible,
+ voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With shifting eyes but eyebrows still raised, Telyánin handed him the
+ purse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, it’s a nice purse. Yes, yes,” he said, growing suddenly pale, and
+ added, “Look at it, young man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv took the purse in his hand, examined it and the money in it, and
+ looked at Telyánin. The lieutenant was looking about in his usual way and
+ suddenly seemed to grow very merry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If we get to Vienna I’ll get rid of it there but in these wretched little
+ towns there’s nowhere to spend it,” said he. “Well, let me have it, young
+ man, I’m going.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv did not speak.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And you? Are you going to have lunch too? They feed you quite decently
+ here,” continued Telyánin. “Now then, let me have it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He stretched out his hand to take hold of the purse. Rostóv let go of it.
+ Telyánin took the purse and began carelessly slipping it into the pocket
+ of his riding breeches, with his eyebrows lifted and his mouth slightly
+ open, as if to say, “Yes, yes, I am putting my purse in my pocket and
+ that’s quite simple and is no one else’s business.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, young man?” he said with a sigh, and from under his lifted brows he
+ glanced into Rostóv’s eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some flash as of an electric spark shot from Telyánin’s eyes to Rostóv’s
+ and back, and back again and again in an instant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come here,” said Rostóv, catching hold of Telyánin’s arm and almost
+ dragging him to the window. “That money is Denísov’s; you took it...” he
+ whispered just above Telyánin’s ear.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What? What? How dare you? What?” said Telyánin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But these words came like a piteous, despairing cry and an entreaty for
+ pardon. As soon as Rostóv heard them, an enormous load of doubt fell from
+ him. He was glad, and at the same instant began to pity the miserable man
+ who stood before him, but the task he had begun had to be completed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Heaven only knows what the people here may imagine,” muttered Telyánin,
+ taking up his cap and moving toward a small empty room. “We must have an
+ explanation...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know it and shall prove it,” said Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Every muscle of Telyánin’s pale, terrified face began to quiver, his eyes
+ still shifted from side to side but with a downward look not rising to
+ Rostóv’s face, and his sobs were audible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Count!... Don’t ruin a young fellow... here is this wretched money, take
+ it...” He threw it on the table. “I have an old father and mother!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv took the money, avoiding Telyánin’s eyes, and went out of the room
+ without a word. But at the door he stopped and then retraced his steps. “O
+ God,” he said with tears in his eyes, “how could you do it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Count...” said Telyánin drawing nearer to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t touch me,” said Rostóv, drawing back. “If you need it, take the
+ money,” and he threw the purse to him and ran out of the inn.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ That same evening there was an animated discussion among the squadron’s
+ officers in Denísov’s quarters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I tell you, Rostóv, that you must apologize to the colonel!” said a
+ tall, grizzly-haired staff captain, with enormous mustaches and many
+ wrinkles on his large features, to Rostóv who was crimson with excitement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The staff captain, Kírsten, had twice been reduced to the ranks for
+ affairs of honor and had twice regained his commission.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will allow no one to call me a liar!” cried Rostóv. “He told me I lied,
+ and I told him he lied. And there it rests. He may keep me on duty every
+ day, or may place me under arrest, but no one can make me apologize,
+ because if he, as commander of this regiment, thinks it beneath his
+ dignity to give me satisfaction, then...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You just wait a moment, my dear fellow, and listen,” interrupted the
+ staff captain in his deep bass, calmly stroking his long mustache. “You
+ tell the colonel in the presence of other officers that an officer has
+ stolen...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’m not to blame that the conversation began in the presence of other
+ officers. Perhaps I ought not to have spoken before them, but I am not a
+ diplomatist. That’s why I joined the hussars, thinking that here one would
+ not need finesse; and he tells me that I am lying—so let him give me
+ satisfaction...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s all right. No one thinks you a coward, but that’s not the point.
+ Ask Denísov whether it is not out of the question for a cadet to demand
+ satisfaction of his regimental commander?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov sat gloomily biting his mustache and listening to the
+ conversation, evidently with no wish to take part in it. He answered the
+ staff captain’s question by a disapproving shake of his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You speak to the colonel about this nasty business before other
+ officers,” continued the staff captain, “and Bogdánich” (the colonel was
+ called Bogdánich) “shuts you up.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He did not shut me up, he said I was telling an untruth.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, have it so, and you talked a lot of nonsense to him and must
+ apologize.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not on any account!” exclaimed Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I did not expect this of you,” said the staff captain seriously and
+ severely. “You don’t wish to apologize, but, man, it’s not only to him but
+ to the whole regiment—all of us—you’re to blame all round. The
+ case is this: you ought to have thought the matter over and taken advice;
+ but no, you go and blurt it all straight out before the officers. Now what
+ was the colonel to do? Have the officer tried and disgrace the whole
+ regiment? Disgrace the whole regiment because of one scoundrel? Is that
+ how you look at it? We don’t see it like that. And Bogdánich was a brick:
+ he told you you were saying what was not true. It’s not pleasant, but
+ what’s to be done, my dear fellow? You landed yourself in it. And now,
+ when one wants to smooth the thing over, some conceit prevents your
+ apologizing, and you wish to make the whole affair public. You are
+ offended at being put on duty a bit, but why not apologize to an old and
+ honorable officer? Whatever Bogdánich may be, anyway he is an honorable
+ and brave old colonel! You’re quick at taking offense, but you don’t mind
+ disgracing the whole regiment!” The staff captain’s voice began to
+ tremble. “You have been in the regiment next to no time, my lad, you’re
+ here today and tomorrow you’ll be appointed adjutant somewhere and can
+ snap your fingers when it is said ‘There are thieves among the Pávlograd
+ officers!’ But it’s not all the same to us! Am I not right, Denísov? It’s
+ not the same!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov remained silent and did not move, but occasionally looked with his
+ glittering black eyes at Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You value your own pride and don’t wish to apologize,” continued the
+ staff captain, “but we old fellows, who have grown up in and, God willing,
+ are going to die in the regiment, we prize the honor of the regiment, and
+ Bogdánich knows it. Oh, we do prize it, old fellow! And all this is not
+ right, it’s not right! You may take offense or not but I always stick to
+ mother truth. It’s not right!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the staff captain rose and turned away from Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s twue, devil take it!” shouted Denísov, jumping up. “Now then,
+ Wostóv, now then!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv, growing red and pale alternately, looked first at one
+ officer and then at the other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, gentlemen, no... you mustn’t think... I quite understand. You’re
+ wrong to think that of me... I... for me... for the honor of the regiment
+ I’d... Ah well, I’ll show that in action, and for me the honor of the
+ flag... Well, never mind, it’s true I’m to blame, to blame all round.
+ Well, what else do you want?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come, that’s right, Count!” cried the staff captain, turning round and
+ clapping Rostóv on the shoulder with his big hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I tell you,” shouted Denísov, “he’s a fine fellow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s better, Count,” said the staff captain, beginning to address
+ Rostóv by his title, as if in recognition of his confession. “Go and
+ apologize, your excellency. Yes, go!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gentlemen, I’ll do anything. No one shall hear a word from me,” said
+ Rostóv in an imploring voice, “but I can’t apologize, by God I can’t, do
+ what you will! How can I go and apologize like a little boy asking
+ forgiveness?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov began to laugh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’ll be worse for you. Bogdánich is vindictive and you’ll pay for your
+ obstinacy,” said Kírsten.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, on my word it’s not obstinacy! I can’t describe the feeling. I
+ can’t...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, it’s as you like,” said the staff captain. “And what has become of
+ that scoundrel?” he asked Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He has weported himself sick, he’s to be stwuck off the list tomowwow,”
+ muttered Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is an illness, there’s no other way of explaining it,” said the staff
+ captain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Illness or not, he’d better not cwoss my path. I’d kill him!” shouted
+ Denísov in a bloodthirsty tone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just then Zherkóv entered the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What brings you here?” cried the officers turning to the newcomer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We’re to go into action, gentlemen! Mack has surrendered with his whole
+ army.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s not true!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ve seen him myself!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What? Saw the real Mack? With hands and feet?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Into action! Into action! Bring him a bottle for such news! But how did
+ you come here?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ve been sent back to the regiment all on account of that devil, Mack.
+ An Austrian general complained of me. I congratulated him on Mack’s
+ arrival... What’s the matter, Rostóv? You look as if you’d just come out
+ of a hot bath.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, my dear fellow, we’re in such a stew here these last two days.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The regimental adjutant came in and confirmed the news brought by Zherkóv.
+ They were under orders to advance next day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We’re going into action, gentlemen!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, thank God! We’ve been sitting here too long!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ Kutúzov fell back toward Vienna, destroying behind him the bridges over
+ the rivers Inn (at Braunau) and Traun (near Linz). On October 23 the
+ Russian troops were crossing the river Enns. At midday the Russian baggage
+ train, the artillery, and columns of troops were defiling through the town
+ of Enns on both sides of the bridge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a warm, rainy, autumnal day. The wide expanse that opened out
+ before the heights on which the Russian batteries stood guarding the
+ bridge was at times veiled by a diaphanous curtain of slanting rain, and
+ then, suddenly spread out in the sunlight, far-distant objects could be
+ clearly seen glittering as though freshly varnished. Down below, the
+ little town could be seen with its white, red-roofed houses, its
+ cathedral, and its bridge, on both sides of which streamed jostling masses
+ of Russian troops. At the bend of the Danube, vessels, an island, and a
+ castle with a park surrounded by the waters of the confluence of the Enns
+ and the Danube became visible, and the rocky left bank of the Danube
+ covered with pine forests, with a mystic background of green treetops and
+ bluish gorges. The turrets of a convent stood out beyond a wild virgin
+ pine forest, and far away on the other side of the Enns the enemy’s horse
+ patrols could be discerned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Among the field guns on the brow of the hill the general in command of the
+ rearguard stood with a staff officer, scanning the country through his
+ fieldglass. A little behind them Nesvítski, who had been sent to the
+ rearguard by the commander in chief, was sitting on the trail of a gun
+ carriage. A Cossack who accompanied him had handed him a knapsack and a
+ flask, and Nesvítski was treating some officers to pies and real
+ doppelkümmel . The officers gladly gathered round him, some on their knees,
+ some squatting Turkish fashion on the wet grass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, the Austrian prince who built that castle was no fool. It’s a fine
+ place! Why are you not eating anything, gentlemen?” Nesvítski was saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank you very much, Prince,” answered one of the officers, pleased to be
+ talking to a staff officer of such importance. “It’s a lovely place! We
+ passed close to the park and saw two deer... and what a splendid house!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look, Prince,” said another, who would have dearly liked to take another
+ pie but felt shy, and therefore pretended to be examining the countryside—“See,
+ our infantrymen have already got there. Look there in the meadow behind
+ the village, three of them are dragging something. They’ll ransack that
+ castle,” he remarked with evident approval.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So they will,” said Nesvítski. “No, but what I should like,” added he,
+ munching a pie in his moist-lipped handsome mouth, “would be to slip in
+ over there.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He pointed with a smile to a turreted nunnery, and his eyes narrowed and
+ gleamed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That would be fine, gentlemen!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officers laughed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just to flutter the nuns a bit. They say there are Italian girls among
+ them. On my word I’d give five years of my life for it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They must be feeling dull, too,” said one of the bolder officers,
+ laughing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile the staff officer standing in front pointed out something to the
+ general, who looked through his field glass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, so it is, so it is,” said the general angrily, lowering the field
+ glass and shrugging his shoulders, “so it is! They’ll be fired on at the
+ crossing. And why are they dawdling there?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the opposite side the enemy could be seen by the naked eye, and from
+ their battery a milk-white cloud arose. Then came the distant report of a
+ shot, and our troops could be seen hurrying to the crossing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nesvítski rose, puffing, and went up to the general, smiling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Would not your excellency like a little refreshment?” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s a bad business,” said the general without answering him, “our men
+ have been wasting time.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hadn’t I better ride over, your excellency?” asked Nesvítski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, please do,” answered the general, and he repeated the order that had
+ already once been given in detail: “and tell the hussars that they are to
+ cross last and to fire the bridge as I ordered; and the inflammable
+ material on the bridge must be reinspected.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very good,” answered Nesvítski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He called the Cossack with his horse, told him to put away the knapsack
+ and flask, and swung his heavy person easily into the saddle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll really call in on the nuns,” he said to the officers who watched him
+ smilingly, and he rode off by the winding path down the hill.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then, let’s see how far it will carry, Captain. Just try!” said the
+ general, turning to an artillery officer. “Have a little fun to pass the
+ time.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Crew, to your guns!” commanded the officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In a moment the men came running gaily from their campfires and began
+ loading.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One!” came the command.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Number one jumped briskly aside. The gun rang out with a deafening
+ metallic roar, and a whistling grenade flew above the heads of our troops
+ below the hill and fell far short of the enemy, a little smoke showing the
+ spot where it burst.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The faces of officers and men brightened up at the sound. Everyone got up
+ and began watching the movements of our troops below, as plainly visible
+ as if but a stone’s throw away, and the movements of the approaching enemy
+ farther off. At the same instant the sun came fully out from behind the
+ clouds, and the clear sound of the solitary shot and the brilliance of the
+ bright sunshine merged in a single joyous and spirited impression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ Two of the enemy’s shots had already flown across the bridge, where there
+ was a crush. Halfway across stood Prince Nesvítski, who had alighted from
+ his horse and whose big body was jammed against the railings. He looked
+ back laughing to the Cossack who stood a few steps behind him holding two
+ horses by their bridles. Each time Prince Nesvítski tried to move on,
+ soldiers and carts pushed him back again and pressed him against the
+ railings, and all he could do was to smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a fine fellow you are, friend!” said the Cossack to a convoy soldier
+ with a wagon, who was pressing onto the infantrymen who were crowded
+ together close to his wheels and his horses. “What a fellow! You can’t
+ wait a moment! Don’t you see the general wants to pass?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the convoyman took no notice of the word “general” and shouted at the
+ soldiers who were blocking his way. “Hi there, boys! Keep to the left!
+ Wait a bit.” But the soldiers, crowded together shoulder to shoulder,
+ their bayonets interlocking, moved over the bridge in a dense mass.
+ Looking down over the rails Prince Nesvítski saw the rapid, noisy little
+ waves of the Enns, which rippling and eddying round the piles of the
+ bridge chased each other along. Looking on the bridge he saw equally
+ uniform living waves of soldiers, shoulder straps, covered shakos,
+ knapsacks, bayonets, long muskets, and, under the shakos, faces with broad
+ cheekbones, sunken cheeks, and listless tired expressions, and feet that
+ moved through the sticky mud that covered the planks of the bridge.
+ Sometimes through the monotonous waves of men, like a fleck of white foam
+ on the waves of the Enns, an officer, in a cloak and with a type of face
+ different from that of the men, squeezed his way along; sometimes like a
+ chip of wood whirling in the river, an hussar on foot, an orderly, or a
+ townsman was carried through the waves of infantry; and sometimes like a
+ log floating down the river, an officers’ or company’s baggage wagon,
+ piled high, leather covered, and hemmed in on all sides, moved across the
+ bridge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s as if a dam had burst,” said the Cossack hopelessly. “Are there many
+ more of you to come?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A million all but one!” replied a waggish soldier in a torn coat, with a
+ wink, and passed on followed by another, an old man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If he ” ( he meant the enemy) “begins popping at the bridge now,” said the
+ old soldier dismally to a comrade, “you’ll forget to scratch yourself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That soldier passed on, and after him came another sitting on a cart.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where the devil have the leg bands been shoved to?” said an orderly,
+ running behind the cart and fumbling in the back of it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And he also passed on with the wagon. Then came some merry soldiers who
+ had evidently been drinking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And then, old fellow, he gives him one in the teeth with the butt end of
+ his gun...” a soldier whose greatcoat was well tucked up said gaily, with
+ a wide swing of his arm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, the ham was just delicious...” answered another with a loud laugh.
+ And they, too, passed on, so that Nesvítski did not learn who had been
+ struck on the teeth, or what the ham had to do with it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bah! How they scurry. He just sends a ball and they think they’ll all be
+ killed,” a sergeant was saying angrily and reproachfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As it flies past me, Daddy, the ball I mean,” said a young soldier with
+ an enormous mouth, hardly refraining from laughing, “I felt like dying of
+ fright. I did, ‘pon my word, I got that frightened!” said he, as if
+ bragging of having been frightened.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That one also passed. Then followed a cart unlike any that had gone
+ before. It was a German cart with a pair of horses led by a German, and
+ seemed loaded with a whole houseful of effects. A fine brindled cow with a
+ large udder was attached to the cart behind. A woman with an unweaned
+ baby, an old woman, and a healthy German girl with bright red cheeks were
+ sitting on some feather beds. Evidently these fugitives were allowed to
+ pass by special permission. The eyes of all the soldiers turned toward the
+ women, and while the vehicle was passing at foot pace all the soldiers’
+ remarks related to the two young ones. Every face bore almost the same
+ smile, expressing unseemly thoughts about the women.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just see, the German sausage is making tracks, too!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sell me the missis,” said another soldier, addressing the German, who,
+ angry and frightened, strode energetically along with downcast eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “See how smart she’s made herself! Oh, the devils!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There, Fedótov, you should be quartered on them!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have seen as much before now, mate!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where are you going?” asked an infantry officer who was eating an apple,
+ also half smiling as he looked at the handsome girl.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The German closed his eyes, signifying that he did not understand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Take it if you like,” said the officer, giving the girl an apple.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The girl smiled and took it. Nesvítski like the rest of the men on the
+ bridge did not take his eyes off the women till they had passed. When they
+ had gone by, the same stream of soldiers followed, with the same kind of
+ talk, and at last all stopped. As often happens, the horses of a convoy
+ wagon became restive at the end of the bridge, and the whole crowd had to
+ wait.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And why are they stopping? There’s no proper order!” said the soldiers.
+ “Where are you shoving to? Devil take you! Can’t you wait? It’ll be worse
+ if he fires the bridge. See, here’s an officer jammed in too”—different
+ voices were saying in the crowd, as the men looked at one another, and all
+ pressed toward the exit from the bridge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Looking down at the waters of the Enns under the bridge, Nesvítski
+ suddenly heard a sound new to him, of something swiftly approaching...
+ something big, that splashed into the water.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just see where it carries to!” a soldier near by said sternly, looking
+ round at the sound.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Encouraging us to get along quicker,” said another uneasily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The crowd moved on again. Nesvítski realized that it was a cannon ball.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hey, Cossack, my horse!” he said. “Now, then, you there! get out of the
+ way! Make way!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With great difficulty he managed to get to his horse, and shouting
+ continually he moved on. The soldiers squeezed themselves to make way for
+ him, but again pressed on him so that they jammed his leg, and those
+ nearest him were not to blame for they were themselves pressed still
+ harder from behind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nesvítski, Nesvítski! you numskull!” came a hoarse voice from behind him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nesvítski looked round and saw, some fifteen paces away but separated by
+ the living mass of moving infantry, Váska Denísov, red and shaggy, with
+ his cap on the back of his black head and a cloak hanging jauntily over
+ his shoulder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tell these devils, these fiends, to let me pass!” shouted Denísov
+ evidently in a fit of rage, his coal-black eyes with their bloodshot
+ whites glittering and rolling as he waved his sheathed saber in a small
+ bare hand as red as his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, Váska!” joyfully replied Nesvítski. “What’s up with you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The squadwon can’t pass,” shouted Váska Denísov, showing his white teeth
+ fiercely and spurring his black thoroughbred Arab, which twitched its ears
+ as the bayonets touched it, and snorted, spurting white foam from his bit,
+ tramping the planks of the bridge with his hoofs, and apparently ready to
+ jump over the railings had his rider let him. “What is this? They’re like
+ sheep! Just like sheep! Out of the way!... Let us pass!... Stop there, you
+ devil with the cart! I’ll hack you with my saber!” he shouted, actually
+ drawing his saber from its scabbard and flourishing it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The soldiers crowded against one another with terrified faces, and Denísov
+ joined Nesvítski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How’s it you’re not drunk today?” said Nesvítski when the other had
+ ridden up to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They don’t even give one time to dwink!” answered Váska Denísov. “They
+ keep dwagging the wegiment to and fwo all day. If they mean to fight,
+ let’s fight. But the devil knows what this is.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a dandy you are today!” said Nesvítski, looking at Denísov’s new
+ cloak and saddlecloth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov smiled, took out of his sabretache a handkerchief that diffused a
+ smell of perfume, and put it to Nesvítski’s nose.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Of course. I’m going into action! I’ve shaved, bwushed my teeth, and
+ scented myself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The imposing figure of Nesvítski followed by his Cossack, and the
+ determination of Denísov who flourished his sword and shouted frantically,
+ had such an effect that they managed to squeeze through to the farther
+ side of the bridge and stopped the infantry. Beside the bridge Nesvítski
+ found the colonel to whom he had to deliver the order, and having done
+ this he rode back.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having cleared the way Denísov stopped at the end of the bridge.
+ Carelessly holding in his stallion that was neighing and pawing the
+ ground, eager to rejoin its fellows, he watched his squadron draw nearer.
+ Then the clang of hoofs, as of several horses galloping, resounded on the
+ planks of the bridge, and the squadron, officers in front and men four
+ abreast, spread across the bridge and began to emerge on his side of it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The infantry who had been stopped crowded near the bridge in the trampled
+ mud and gazed with that particular feeling of ill-will, estrangement, and
+ ridicule with which troops of different arms usually encounter one another
+ at the clean, smart hussars who moved past them in regular order.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Smart lads! Only fit for a fair!” said one.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What good are they? They’re led about just for show!” remarked another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t kick up the dust, you infantry!” jested an hussar whose prancing
+ horse had splashed mud over some foot soldiers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’d like to put you on a two days’ march with a knapsack! Your fine cords
+ would soon get a bit rubbed,” said an infantryman, wiping the mud off his
+ face with his sleeve. “Perched up there, you’re more like a bird than a
+ man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now, Zíkin, they ought to put you on a horse. You’d look fine,”
+ said a corporal, chaffing a thin little soldier who bent under the weight
+ of his knapsack.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Take a stick between your legs, that’ll suit you for a horse!” the hussar
+ shouted back.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ The last of the infantry hurriedly crossed the bridge, squeezing together
+ as they approached it as if passing through a funnel. At last the baggage
+ wagons had all crossed, the crush was less, and the last battalion came
+ onto the bridge. Only Denísov’s squadron of hussars remained on the
+ farther side of the bridge facing the enemy, who could be seen from the
+ hill on the opposite bank but was not yet visible from the bridge, for the
+ horizon as seen from the valley through which the river flowed was formed
+ by the rising ground only half a mile away. At the foot of the hill lay
+ wasteland over which a few groups of our Cossack scouts were moving.
+ Suddenly on the road at the top of the high ground, artillery and troops
+ in blue uniform were seen. These were the French. A group of Cossack
+ scouts retired down the hill at a trot. All the officers and men of
+ Denísov’s squadron, though they tried to talk of other things and to look
+ in other directions, thought only of what was there on the hilltop, and
+ kept constantly looking at the patches appearing on the skyline, which
+ they knew to be the enemy’s troops. The weather had cleared again since
+ noon and the sun was descending brightly upon the Danube and the dark
+ hills around it. It was calm, and at intervals the bugle calls and the
+ shouts of the enemy could be heard from the hill. There was no one now
+ between the squadron and the enemy except a few scattered skirmishers. An
+ empty space of some seven hundred yards was all that separated them. The
+ enemy ceased firing, and that stern, threatening, inaccessible, and
+ intangible line which separates two hostile armies was all the more
+ clearly felt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One step beyond that boundary line which resembles the line dividing the
+ living from the dead lies uncertainty, suffering, and death. And what is
+ there? Who is there?—there beyond that field, that tree, that roof
+ lit up by the sun? No one knows, but one wants to know. You fear and yet
+ long to cross that line, and know that sooner or later it must be crossed
+ and you will have to find out what is there, just as you will inevitably
+ have to learn what lies the other side of death. But you are strong,
+ healthy, cheerful, and excited, and are surrounded by other such excitedly
+ animated and healthy men.” So thinks, or at any rate feels, anyone who
+ comes in sight of the enemy, and that feeling gives a particular glamour
+ and glad keenness of impression to everything that takes place at such
+ moments.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the high ground where the enemy was, the smoke of a cannon rose, and a
+ ball flew whistling over the heads of the hussar squadron. The officers
+ who had been standing together rode off to their places. The hussars began
+ carefully aligning their horses. Silence fell on the whole squadron. All
+ were looking at the enemy in front and at the squadron commander, awaiting
+ the word of command. A second and a third cannon ball flew past. Evidently
+ they were firing at the hussars, but the balls with rapid rhythmic whistle
+ flew over the heads of the horsemen and fell somewhere beyond them. The
+ hussars did not look round, but at the sound of each shot, as at the word
+ of command, the whole squadron with its rows of faces so alike yet so
+ different, holding its breath while the ball flew past, rose in the
+ stirrups and sank back again. The soldiers without turning their heads
+ glanced at one another, curious to see their comrades’ impression. Every
+ face, from Denísov’s to that of the bugler, showed one common expression
+ of conflict, irritation, and excitement, around chin and mouth. The
+ quartermaster frowned, looking at the soldiers as if threatening to punish
+ them. Cadet Mirónov ducked every time a ball flew past. Rostóv on the left
+ flank, mounted on his Rook—a handsome horse despite its game leg—had
+ the happy air of a schoolboy called up before a large audience for an
+ examination in which he feels sure he will distinguish himself. He was
+ glancing at everyone with a clear, bright expression, as if asking them to
+ notice how calmly he sat under fire. But despite himself, on his face too
+ that same indication of something new and stern showed round the mouth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who’s that curtseying there? Cadet Miwónov! That’s not wight! Look at
+ me,” cried Denísov who, unable to keep still on one spot, kept turning his
+ horse in front of the squadron.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The black, hairy, snub-nosed face of Váska Denísov, and his whole short
+ sturdy figure with the sinewy hairy hand and stumpy fingers in which he
+ held the hilt of his naked saber, looked just as it usually did,
+ especially toward evening when he had emptied his second bottle; he was
+ only redder than usual. With his shaggy head thrown back like birds when
+ they drink, pressing his spurs mercilessly into the sides of his good
+ horse, Bedouin, and sitting as though falling backwards in the saddle, he
+ galloped to the other flank of the squadron and shouted in a hoarse voice
+ to the men to look to their pistols. He rode up to Kírsten. The staff
+ captain on his broad-backed, steady mare came at a walk to meet him. His
+ face with its long mustache was serious as always, only his eyes were
+ brighter than usual.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what about it?” said he to Denísov. “It won’t come to a fight.
+ You’ll see—we shall retire.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The devil only knows what they’re about!” muttered Denísov. “Ah, Wostóv,”
+ he cried noticing the cadet’s bright face, “you’ve got it at last.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And he smiled approvingly, evidently pleased with the cadet. Rostóv felt
+ perfectly happy. Just then the commander appeared on the bridge. Denísov
+ galloped up to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency! Let us attack them! I’ll dwive them off.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Attack indeed!” said the colonel in a bored voice, puckering up his face
+ as if driving off a troublesome fly. “And why are you stopping here? Don’t
+ you see the skirmishers are retreating? Lead the squadron back.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The squadron crossed the bridge and drew out of range of fire without
+ having lost a single man. The second squadron that had been in the front
+ line followed them across and the last Cossacks quitted the farther side
+ of the river.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The two Pávlograd squadrons, having crossed the bridge, retired up the
+ hill one after the other. Their colonel, Karl Bogdánich Schubert, came up
+ to Denísov’s squadron and rode at a footpace not far from Rostóv, without
+ taking any notice of him although they were now meeting for the first time
+ since their encounter concerning Telyánin. Rostóv, feeling that he was at
+ the front and in the power of a man toward whom he now admitted that he
+ had been to blame, did not lift his eyes from the colonel’s athletic back,
+ his nape covered with light hair, and his red neck. It seemed to Rostóv
+ that Bogdánich was only pretending not to notice him, and that his whole
+ aim now was to test the cadet’s courage, so he drew himself up and looked
+ around him merrily; then it seemed to him that Bogdánich rode so near in
+ order to show him his courage. Next he thought that his enemy would send
+ the squadron on a desperate attack just to punish him—Rostóv. Then
+ he imagined how, after the attack, Bogdánich would come up to him as he
+ lay wounded and would magnanimously extend the hand of reconciliation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The high-shouldered figure of Zherkóv, familiar to the Pávlograds as he
+ had but recently left their regiment, rode up to the colonel. After his
+ dismissal from headquarters Zherkóv had not remained in the regiment,
+ saying he was not such a fool as to slave at the front when he could get
+ more rewards by doing nothing on the staff, and had succeeded in attaching
+ himself as an orderly officer to Prince Bagratión. He now came to his
+ former chief with an order from the commander of the rear guard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Colonel,” he said, addressing Rostóv’s enemy with an air of gloomy
+ gravity and glancing round at his comrades, “there is an order to stop and
+ fire the bridge.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “An order to who?” asked the colonel morosely.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t myself know ‘to who,’” replied the cornet in a serious tone, “but
+ the prince told me to ‘go and tell the colonel that the hussars must
+ return quickly and fire the bridge.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Zherkóv was followed by an officer of the suite who rode up to the colonel
+ of hussars with the same order. After him the stout Nesvítski came
+ galloping up on a Cossack horse that could scarcely carry his weight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How’s this, Colonel?” he shouted as he approached. “I told you to fire
+ the bridge, and now someone has gone and blundered; they are all beside
+ themselves over there and one can’t make anything out.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The colonel deliberately stopped the regiment and turned to Nesvítski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You spoke to me of inflammable material,” said he, “but you said nothing
+ about firing it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But, my dear sir,” said Nesvítski as he drew up, taking off his cap and
+ smoothing his hair wet with perspiration with his plump hand, “wasn’t I
+ telling you to fire the bridge, when inflammable material had been put in
+ position?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am not your ‘dear sir,’ Mr. Staff Officer, and you did not tell me to
+ burn the bridge! I know the service, and it is my habit orders strictly to
+ obey. You said the bridge would be burned, but who would burn it, I could
+ not know by the holy spirit!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, that’s always the way!” said Nesvítski with a wave of the hand. “How
+ did you get here?” said he, turning to Zherkóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the same business. But you are damp! Let me wring you out!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You were saying, Mr. Staff Officer...” continued the colonel in an
+ offended tone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Colonel,” interrupted the officer of the suite, “You must be quick or the
+ enemy will bring up his guns to use grapeshot.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The colonel looked silently at the officer of the suite, at the stout
+ staff officer, and at Zherkóv, and he frowned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will the bridge fire,” he said in a solemn tone as if to announce that
+ in spite of all the unpleasantness he had to endure he would still do the
+ right thing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Striking his horse with his long muscular legs as if it were to blame for
+ everything, the colonel moved forward and ordered the second squadron,
+ that in which Rostóv was serving under Denísov, to return to the bridge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There, it’s just as I thought,” said Rostóv to himself. “He wishes to
+ test me!” His heart contracted and the blood rushed to his face. “Let him
+ see whether I am a coward!” he thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again on all the bright faces of the squadron the serious expression
+ appeared that they had worn when under fire. Rostóv watched his enemy, the
+ colonel, closely—to find in his face confirmation of his own
+ conjecture, but the colonel did not once glance at Rostóv, and looked as
+ he always did when at the front, solemn and stern. Then came the word of
+ command.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look sharp! Look sharp!” several voices repeated around him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Their sabers catching in the bridles and their spurs jingling, the hussars
+ hastily dismounted, not knowing what they were to do. The men were
+ crossing themselves. Rostóv no longer looked at the colonel, he had no
+ time. He was afraid of falling behind the hussars, so much afraid that his
+ heart stood still. His hand trembled as he gave his horse into an
+ orderly’s charge, and he felt the blood rush to his heart with a thud.
+ Denísov rode past him, leaning back and shouting something. Rostóv saw
+ nothing but the hussars running all around him, their spurs catching and
+ their sabers clattering.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stretchers!” shouted someone behind him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv did not think what this call for stretchers meant; he ran on,
+ trying only to be ahead of the others; but just at the bridge, not looking
+ at the ground, he came on some sticky, trodden mud, stumbled, and fell on
+ his hands. The others outstripped him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At boss zides, Captain,” he heard the voice of the colonel, who, having
+ ridden ahead, had pulled up his horse near the bridge, with a triumphant,
+ cheerful face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv wiping his muddy hands on his breeches looked at his enemy and was
+ about to run on, thinking that the farther he went to the front the
+ better. But Bogdánich, without looking at or recognizing Rostóv, shouted
+ to him:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who’s that running on the middle of the bridge? To the right! Come back,
+ Cadet!” he cried angrily; and turning to Denísov, who, showing off his
+ courage, had ridden on to the planks of the bridge:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why run risks, Captain? You should dismount,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, every bullet has its billet,” answered Váska Denísov, turning in his
+ saddle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile Nesvítski, Zherkóv, and the officer of the suite were standing
+ together out of range of the shots, watching, now the small group of men
+ with yellow shakos, dark-green jackets braided with cord, and blue riding
+ breeches, who were swarming near the bridge, and then at what was
+ approaching in the distance from the opposite side—the blue uniforms
+ and groups with horses, easily recognizable as artillery.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Will they burn the bridge or not? Who’ll get there first? Will they get
+ there and fire the bridge or will the French get within grapeshot range
+ and wipe them out?” These were the questions each man of the troops on the
+ high ground above the bridge involuntarily asked himself with a sinking
+ heart—watching the bridge and the hussars in the bright evening
+ light and the blue tunics advancing from the other side with their
+ bayonets and guns.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ugh. The hussars will get it hot!” said Nesvítski; “they are within
+ grapeshot range now.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He shouldn’t have taken so many men,” said the officer of the suite.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “True enough,” answered Nesvítski; “two smart fellows could have done the
+ job just as well.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, your excellency,” put in Zherkóv, his eyes fixed on the hussars, but
+ still with that naïve air that made it impossible to know whether he was
+ speaking in jest or in earnest. “Ah, your excellency! How you look at
+ things! Send two men? And who then would give us the Vladímir medal and
+ ribbon? But now, even if they do get peppered, the squadron may be
+ recommended for honors and he may get a ribbon. Our Bogdánich knows how
+ things are done.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now!” said the officer of the suite, “that’s grapeshot.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He pointed to the French guns, the limbers of which were being detached
+ and hurriedly removed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the French side, amid the groups with cannon, a cloud of smoke
+ appeared, then a second and a third almost simultaneously, and at the
+ moment when the first report was heard a fourth was seen. Then two reports
+ one after another, and a third.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! Oh!” groaned Nesvítski as if in fierce pain, seizing the officer of
+ the suite by the arm. “Look! A man has fallen! Fallen, fallen!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Two, I think.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If I were Tsar I would never go to war,” said Nesvítski, turning away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French guns were hastily reloaded. The infantry in their blue uniforms
+ advanced toward the bridge at a run. Smoke appeared again but at irregular
+ intervals, and grapeshot cracked and rattled onto the bridge. But this
+ time Nesvítski could not see what was happening there, as a dense cloud of
+ smoke arose from it. The hussars had succeeded in setting it on fire and
+ the French batteries were now firing at them, no longer to hinder them but
+ because the guns were trained and there was someone to fire at.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French had time to fire three rounds of grapeshot before the hussars
+ got back to their horses. Two were misdirected and the shot went too high,
+ but the last round fell in the midst of a group of hussars and knocked
+ three of them over.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv, absorbed by his relations with Bogdánich, had paused on the bridge
+ not knowing what to do. There was no one to hew down (as he had always
+ imagined battles to himself), nor could he help to fire the bridge because
+ he had not brought any burning straw with him like the other soldiers. He
+ stood looking about him, when suddenly he heard a rattle on the bridge as
+ if nuts were being spilt, and the hussar nearest to him fell against the
+ rails with a groan. Rostóv ran up to him with the others. Again someone
+ shouted, “Stretchers!” Four men seized the hussar and began lifting him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oooh! For Christ’s sake let me alone!” cried the wounded man, but still
+ he was lifted and laid on the stretcher.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas Rostóv turned away and, as if searching for something, gazed into
+ the distance, at the waters of the Danube, at the sky, and at the sun. How
+ beautiful the sky looked; how blue, how calm, and how deep! How bright and
+ glorious was the setting sun! With what soft glitter the waters of the
+ distant Danube shone. And fairer still were the faraway blue mountains
+ beyond the river, the nunnery, the mysterious gorges, and the pine forests
+ veiled in the mist of their summits... There was peace and happiness... “I
+ should wish for nothing else, nothing, if only I were there,” thought
+ Rostóv. “In myself alone and in that sunshine there is so much happiness;
+ but here... groans, suffering, fear, and this uncertainty and hurry...
+ There—they are shouting again, and again are all running back
+ somewhere, and I shall run with them, and it, death, is here above me and
+ around... Another instant and I shall never again see the sun, this water,
+ that gorge!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that instant the sun began to hide behind the clouds, and other
+ stretchers came into view before Rostóv. And the fear of death and of the
+ stretchers, and love of the sun and of life, all merged into one feeling
+ of sickening agitation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O Lord God! Thou who art in that heaven, save, forgive, and protect me!”
+ Rostóv whispered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The hussars ran back to the men who held their horses; their voices
+ sounded louder and calmer, the stretchers disappeared from sight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, fwiend? So you’ve smelt powdah!” shouted Váska Denísov just above
+ his ear.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s all over; but I am a coward—yes, a coward!” thought Rostóv,
+ and sighing deeply he took Rook, his horse, which stood resting one foot,
+ from the orderly and began to mount.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Was that grapeshot?” he asked Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes and no mistake!” cried Denísov. “You worked like wegular bwicks and
+ it’s nasty work! An attack’s pleasant work! Hacking away at the dogs! But
+ this sort of thing is the very devil, with them shooting at you like a
+ target.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Denísov rode up to a group that had stopped near Rostóv, composed of
+ the colonel, Nesvítski, Zherkóv, and the officer from the suite.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, it seems that no one has noticed,” thought Rostóv. And this was
+ true. No one had taken any notice, for everyone knew the sensation which
+ the cadet under fire for the first time had experienced.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here’s something for you to report,” said Zherkóv. “See if I don’t get
+ promoted to a sublieutenancy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Inform the prince that I the bridge fired!” said the colonel triumphantly
+ and gaily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And if he asks about the losses?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A trifle,” said the colonel in his bass voice: “two hussars wounded, and
+ one knocked out,” he added, unable to restrain a happy smile, and
+ pronouncing the phrase “knocked out” with ringing distinctness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ Pursued by the French army of a hundred thousand men under the command of
+ Bonaparte, encountering a population that was unfriendly to it, losing
+ confidence in its allies, suffering from shortness of supplies, and
+ compelled to act under conditions of war unlike anything that had been
+ foreseen, the Russian army of thirty-five thousand men commanded by
+ Kutúzov was hurriedly retreating along the Danube, stopping where
+ overtaken by the enemy and fighting rearguard actions only as far as
+ necessary to enable it to retreat without losing its heavy equipment.
+ There had been actions at Lambach, Amstetten, and Melk; but despite the
+ courage and endurance—acknowledged even by the enemy—with
+ which the Russians fought, the only consequence of these actions was a yet
+ more rapid retreat. Austrian troops that had escaped capture at Ulm and
+ had joined Kutúzov at Braunau now separated from the Russian army, and
+ Kutúzov was left with only his own weak and exhausted forces. The defense
+ of Vienna was no longer to be thought of. Instead of an offensive, the
+ plan of which, carefully prepared in accord with the modern science of
+ strategics, had been handed to Kutúzov when he was in Vienna by the
+ Austrian Hofkriegsrath, the sole and almost unattainable aim remaining for
+ him was to effect a junction with the forces that were advancing from
+ Russia, without losing his army as Mack had done at Ulm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the twenty-eighth of October Kutúzov with his army crossed to the left
+ bank of the Danube and took up a position for the first time with the
+ river between himself and the main body of the French. On the thirtieth he
+ attacked Mortier’s division, which was on the left bank, and broke it up.
+ In this action for the first time trophies were taken: banners, cannon,
+ and two enemy generals. For the first time, after a fortnight’s retreat,
+ the Russian troops had halted and after a fight had not only held the
+ field but had repulsed the French. Though the troops were ill-clad,
+ exhausted, and had lost a third of their number in killed, wounded, sick,
+ and stragglers; though a number of sick and wounded had been abandoned on
+ the other side of the Danube with a letter in which Kutúzov entrusted them
+ to the humanity of the enemy; and though the big hospitals and the houses
+ in Krems converted into military hospitals could no longer accommodate all
+ the sick and wounded, yet the stand made at Krems and the victory over
+ Mortier raised the spirits of the army considerably. Throughout the whole
+ army and at headquarters most joyful though erroneous rumors were rife of
+ the imaginary approach of columns from Russia, of some victory gained by
+ the Austrians, and of the retreat of the frightened Bonaparte.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew during the battle had been in attendance on the Austrian
+ General Schmidt, who was killed in the action. His horse had been wounded
+ under him and his own arm slightly grazed by a bullet. As a mark of the
+ commander in chief’s special favor he was sent with the news of this
+ victory to the Austrian court, now no longer at Vienna (which was
+ threatened by the French) but at Brünn. Despite his apparently delicate
+ build Prince Andrew could endure physical fatigue far better than many
+ very muscular men, and on the night of the battle, having arrived at Krems
+ excited but not weary, with dispatches from Dokhtúrov to Kutúzov, he was
+ sent immediately with a special dispatch to Brünn. To be so sent meant not
+ only a reward but an important step toward promotion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The night was dark but starry, the road showed black in the snow that had
+ fallen the previous day—the day of the battle. Reviewing his
+ impressions of the recent battle, picturing pleasantly to himself the
+ impression his news of a victory would create, or recalling the send-off
+ given him by the commander in chief and his fellow officers, Prince Andrew
+ was galloping along in a post chaise enjoying the feelings of a man who
+ has at length begun to attain a long-desired happiness. As soon as he
+ closed his eyes his ears seemed filled with the rattle of the wheels and
+ the sensation of victory. Then he began to imagine that the Russians were
+ running away and that he himself was killed, but he quickly roused himself
+ with a feeling of joy, as if learning afresh that this was not so but that
+ on the contrary the French had run away. He again recalled all the details
+ of the victory and his own calm courage during the battle, and feeling
+ reassured he dozed off.... The dark starry night was followed by a bright
+ cheerful morning. The snow was thawing in the sunshine, the horses
+ galloped quickly, and on both sides of the road were forests of different
+ kinds, fields, and villages.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At one of the post stations he overtook a convoy of Russian wounded. The
+ Russian officer in charge of the transport lolled back in the front cart,
+ shouting and scolding a soldier with coarse abuse. In each of the long
+ German carts six or more pale, dirty, bandaged men were being jolted over
+ the stony road. Some of them were talking (he heard Russian words), others
+ were eating bread; the more severely wounded looked silently, with the
+ languid interest of sick children, at the envoy hurrying past them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew told his driver to stop, and asked a soldier in what action
+ they had been wounded. “Day before yesterday, on the Danube,” answered the
+ soldier. Prince Andrew took out his purse and gave the soldier three gold
+ pieces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s for them all,” he said to the officer who came up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Get well soon, lads!” he continued, turning to the soldiers. “There’s
+ plenty to do still.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What news, sir?” asked the officer, evidently anxious to start a
+ conversation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good news!... Go on!” he shouted to the driver, and they galloped on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was already quite dark when Prince Andrew rattled over the paved
+ streets of Brünn and found himself surrounded by high buildings, the
+ lights of shops, houses, and street lamps, fine carriages, and all that
+ atmosphere of a large and active town which is always so attractive to a
+ soldier after camp life. Despite his rapid journey and sleepless night,
+ Prince Andrew when he drove up to the palace felt even more vigorous and
+ alert than he had done the day before. Only his eyes gleamed feverishly
+ and his thoughts followed one another with extraordinary clearness and
+ rapidity. He again vividly recalled the details of the battle, no longer
+ dim, but definite and in the concise form in which he imagined himself
+ stating them to the Emperor Francis. He vividly imagined the casual
+ questions that might be put to him and the answers he would give. He
+ expected to be at once presented to the Emperor. At the chief entrance to
+ the palace, however, an official came running out to meet him, and
+ learning that he was a special messenger led him to another entrance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To the right from the corridor, Euer Hochgeboren! There you will find the
+ adjutant on duty,” said the official. “He will conduct you to the Minister
+ of War.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The adjutant on duty, meeting Prince Andrew, asked him to wait, and went
+ in to the Minister of War. Five minutes later he returned and bowing with
+ particular courtesy ushered Prince Andrew before him along a corridor to
+ the cabinet where the Minister of War was at work. The adjutant by his
+ elaborate courtesy appeared to wish to ward off any attempt at familiarity
+ on the part of the Russian messenger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew’s joyous feeling was considerably weakened as he approached
+ the door of the minister’s room. He felt offended, and without his
+ noticing it the feeling of offense immediately turned into one of disdain
+ which was quite uncalled for. His fertile mind instantly suggested to him
+ a point of view which gave him a right to despise the adjutant and the
+ minister. “Away from the smell of powder, they probably think it easy to
+ gain victories!” he thought. His eyes narrowed disdainfully, he entered
+ the room of the Minister of War with peculiarly deliberate steps. This
+ feeling of disdain was heightened when he saw the minister seated at a
+ large table reading some papers and making pencil notes on them, and for
+ the first two or three minutes taking no notice of his arrival. A wax
+ candle stood at each side of the minister’s bent bald head with its gray
+ temples. He went on reading to the end, without raising his eyes at the
+ opening of the door and the sound of footsteps.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Take this and deliver it,” said he to his adjutant, handing him the
+ papers and still taking no notice of the special messenger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew felt that either the actions of Kutúzov’s army interested
+ the Minister of War less than any of the other matters he was concerned
+ with, or he wanted to give the Russian special messenger that impression.
+ “But that is a matter of perfect indifference to me,” he thought. The
+ minister drew the remaining papers together, arranged them evenly, and
+ then raised his head. He had an intellectual and distinctive head, but the
+ instant he turned to Prince Andrew the firm, intelligent expression on his
+ face changed in a way evidently deliberate and habitual to him. His face
+ took on the stupid artificial smile (which does not even attempt to hide
+ its artificiality) of a man who is continually receiving many petitioners
+ one after another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “From General Field Marshal Kutúzov?” he asked. “I hope it is good news?
+ There has been an encounter with Mortier? A victory? It was high time!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He took the dispatch which was addressed to him and began to read it with
+ a mournful expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, my God! My God! Schmidt!” he exclaimed in German. “What a calamity!
+ What a calamity!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having glanced through the dispatch he laid it on the table and looked at
+ Prince Andrew, evidently considering something.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah what a calamity! You say the affair was decisive? But Mortier is not
+ captured.” Again he pondered. “I am very glad you have brought good news,
+ though Schmidt’s death is a heavy price to pay for the victory. His
+ Majesty will no doubt wish to see you, but not today. I thank you! You
+ must have a rest. Be at the levee tomorrow after the parade. However, I
+ will let you know.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The stupid smile, which had left his face while he was speaking,
+ reappeared.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ Au revoir! Thank you very much. His Majesty will probably desire to see
+ you,” he added, bowing his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Prince Andrew left the palace he felt that all the interest and
+ happiness the victory had afforded him had been now left in the
+ indifferent hands of the Minister of War and the polite adjutant. The
+ whole tenor of his thoughts instantaneously changed; the battle seemed the
+ memory of a remote event long past.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ Prince Andrew stayed at Brünn with Bilíbin, a Russian acquaintance of his
+ in the diplomatic service.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my dear prince! I could not have a more welcome visitor,” said
+ Bilíbin as he came out to meet Prince Andrew. “Franz, put the prince’s
+ things in my bedroom,” said he to the servant who was ushering Bolkónski
+ in. “So you’re a messenger of victory, eh? Splendid! And I am sitting here
+ ill, as you see.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After washing and dressing, Prince Andrew came into the diplomat’s
+ luxurious study and sat down to the dinner prepared for him. Bilíbin
+ settled down comfortably beside the fire.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After his journey and the campaign during which he had been deprived of
+ all the comforts of cleanliness and all the refinements of life, Prince
+ Andrew felt a pleasant sense of repose among luxurious surroundings such
+ as he had been accustomed to from childhood. Besides it was pleasant,
+ after his reception by the Austrians, to speak if not in Russian (for they
+ were speaking French) at least with a Russian who would, he supposed,
+ share the general Russian antipathy to the Austrians which was then
+ particularly strong.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bilíbin was a man of thirty-five, a bachelor, and of the same circle as
+ Prince Andrew. They had known each other previously in Petersburg, but had
+ become more intimate when Prince Andrew was in Vienna with Kutúzov. Just
+ as Prince Andrew was a young man who gave promise of rising high in the
+ military profession, so to an even greater extent Bilíbin gave promise of
+ rising in his diplomatic career. He was still a young man but no longer a
+ young diplomat, as he had entered the service at the age of sixteen, had
+ been in Paris and Copenhagen, and now held a rather important post in
+ Vienna. Both the foreign minister and our ambassador in Vienna knew him
+ and valued him. He was not one of those many diplomats who are esteemed
+ because they have certain negative qualities, avoid doing certain things,
+ and speak French. He was one of those, who, liking work, knew how to do
+ it, and despite his indolence would sometimes spend a whole night at his
+ writing table. He worked well whatever the import of his work. It was not
+ the question “What for?” but the question “How?” that interested him. What
+ the diplomatic matter might be he did not care, but it gave him great
+ pleasure to prepare a circular, memorandum, or report, skillfully,
+ pointedly, and elegantly. Bilíbin’s services were valued not only for what
+ he wrote, but also for his skill in dealing and conversing with those in
+ the highest spheres.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bilíbin liked conversation as he liked work, only when it could be made
+ elegantly witty. In society he always awaited an opportunity to say
+ something striking and took part in a conversation only when that was
+ possible. His conversation was always sprinkled with wittily original,
+ finished phrases of general interest. These sayings were prepared in the
+ inner laboratory of his mind in a portable form as if intentionally, so
+ that insignificant society people might carry them from drawing room to
+ drawing room. And, in fact, Bilíbin’s witticisms were hawked about in the
+ Viennese drawing rooms and often had an influence on matters considered
+ important.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His thin, worn, sallow face was covered with deep wrinkles, which always
+ looked as clean and well washed as the tips of one’s fingers after a
+ Russian bath. The movement of these wrinkles formed the principal play of
+ expression on his face. Now his forehead would pucker into deep folds and
+ his eyebrows were lifted, then his eyebrows would descend and deep
+ wrinkles would crease his cheeks. His small, deep-set eyes always twinkled
+ and looked out straight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, now tell me about your exploits,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bolkónski, very modestly without once mentioning himself, described the
+ engagement and his reception by the Minister of War.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They received me and my news as one receives a dog in a game of
+ skittles,” said he in conclusion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bilíbin smiled and the wrinkles on his face disappeared.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cependant, mon cher,” he remarked, examining his nails from a
+ distance and puckering the skin above his left eye, “malgré la haute
+ estime que je professe pour the Orthodox Russian army, j’avoue que
+ votre victoire n’est pas des plus victorieuses.” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “But my dear fellow, with all my respect for the Orthodox
+ Russian army, I must say that your victory was not
+ particularly victorious.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He went on talking in this way in French, uttering only those words in
+ Russian on which he wished to put a contemptuous emphasis.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come now! You with all your forces fall on the unfortunate Mortier and
+ his one division, and even then Mortier slips through your fingers!
+ Where’s the victory?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But seriously,” said Prince Andrew, “we can at any rate say without
+ boasting that it was a little better than at Ulm...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why didn’t you capture one, just one, marshal for us?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Because not everything happens as one expects or with the smoothness of a
+ parade. We had expected, as I told you, to get at their rear by seven in
+ the morning but had not reached it by five in the afternoon.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And why didn’t you do it at seven in the morning? You ought to have been
+ there at seven in the morning,” returned Bilíbin with a smile. “You ought
+ to have been there at seven in the morning.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why did you not succeed in impressing on Bonaparte by diplomatic methods
+ that he had better leave Genoa alone?” retorted Prince Andrew in the same
+ tone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know,” interrupted Bilíbin, “you’re thinking it’s very easy to take
+ marshals, sitting on a sofa by the fire! That is true, but still why
+ didn’t you capture him? So don’t be surprised if not only the Minister of
+ War but also his Most August Majesty the Emperor and King Francis is not
+ much delighted by your victory. Even I, a poor secretary of the Russian
+ Embassy, do not feel any need in token of my joy to give my Franz a
+ thaler, or let him go with his Liebchen to the Prater... True, we have no
+ Prater here...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He looked straight at Prince Andrew and suddenly unwrinkled his forehead.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is now my turn to ask you ‘why?’ mon cher ,” said Bolkónski. “I confess
+ I do not understand: perhaps there are diplomatic subtleties here beyond
+ my feeble intelligence, but I can’t make it out. Mack loses a whole army,
+ the Archduke Ferdinand and the Archduke Karl give no signs of life and
+ make blunder after blunder. Kutúzov alone at last gains a real victory,
+ destroying the spell of the invincibility of the French, and the Minister
+ of War does not even care to hear the details.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s just it, my dear fellow. You see it’s hurrah for the Tsar, for
+ Russia, for the Orthodox Greek faith! All that is beautiful, but what do
+ we, I mean the Austrian court, care for your victories? Bring us nice news
+ of a victory by the Archduke Karl or Ferdinand (one archduke’s as good as
+ another, as you know) and even if it is only over a fire brigade of
+ Bonaparte’s, that will be another story and we’ll fire off some cannon!
+ But this sort of thing seems done on purpose to vex us. The Archduke Karl
+ does nothing, the Archduke Ferdinand disgraces himself. You abandon
+ Vienna, give up its defense—as much as to say: ‘Heaven is with us,
+ but heaven help you and your capital!’ The one general whom we all loved,
+ Schmidt, you expose to a bullet, and then you congratulate us on the
+ victory! Admit that more irritating news than yours could not have been
+ conceived. It’s as if it had been done on purpose, on purpose. Besides,
+ suppose you did gain a brilliant victory, if even the Archduke Karl gained
+ a victory, what effect would that have on the general course of events?
+ It’s too late now when Vienna is occupied by the French army!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What? Occupied? Vienna occupied?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not only occupied, but Bonaparte is at Schönbrunn, and the count, our
+ dear Count Vrbna, goes to him for orders.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the fatigues and impressions of the journey, his reception, and
+ especially after having dined, Bolkónski felt that he could not take in
+ the full significance of the words he heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Count Lichtenfels was here this morning,” Bilíbin continued, “and showed
+ me a letter in which the parade of the French in Vienna was fully
+ described: Prince Murat et tout le tremblement ... You see that your
+ victory is not a matter for great rejoicing and that you can’t be received
+ as a savior.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Really I don’t care about that, I don’t care at all,” said Prince Andrew,
+ beginning to understand that his news of the battle before Krems was
+ really of small importance in view of such events as the fall of Austria’s
+ capital. “How is it Vienna was taken? What of the bridge and its
+ celebrated bridgehead and Prince Auersperg? We heard reports that Prince
+ Auersperg was defending Vienna?” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Prince Auersperg is on this, on our side of the river, and is defending
+ us—doing it very badly, I think, but still he is defending us. But
+ Vienna is on the other side. No, the bridge has not yet been taken and I
+ hope it will not be, for it is mined and orders have been given to blow it
+ up. Otherwise we should long ago have been in the mountains of Bohemia,
+ and you and your army would have spent a bad quarter of an hour between
+ two fires.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But still this does not mean that the campaign is over,” said Prince
+ Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, I think it is. The bigwigs here think so too, but they daren’t say
+ so. It will be as I said at the beginning of the campaign, it won’t be
+ your skirmishing at Dürrenstein, or gunpowder at all, that will decide the
+ matter, but those who devised it,” said Bilíbin quoting one of his own
+ mots, releasing the wrinkles on his forehead, and pausing. “The only
+ question is what will come of the meeting between the Emperor Alexander
+ and the King of Prussia in Berlin? If Prussia joins the Allies, Austria’s
+ hand will be forced and there will be war. If not it is merely a question
+ of settling where the preliminaries of the new Campo Formio are to be
+ drawn up.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What an extraordinary genius!” Prince Andrew suddenly exclaimed,
+ clenching his small hand and striking the table with it, “and what luck
+ the man has!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Buonaparte?” said Bilíbin inquiringly, puckering up his forehead to
+ indicate that he was about to say something witty. “Buonaparte?” he
+ repeated, accentuating the u : “I think, however, now that he lays down
+ laws for Austria at Schönbrunn, il faut lui faire grâce de l’u! * I shall
+ certainly adopt an innovation and call him simply Bonaparte!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “We must let him off the u!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But joking apart,” said Prince Andrew, “do you really think the campaign
+ is over?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This is what I think. Austria has been made a fool of, and she is not
+ used to it. She will retaliate. And she has been fooled in the first place
+ because her provinces have been pillaged—they say the Holy Russian
+ army loots terribly—her army is destroyed, her capital taken, and
+ all this for the beaux yeux * of His Sardinian Majesty. And therefore—this
+ is between ourselves—I instinctively feel that we are being
+ deceived, my instinct tells me of negotiations with France and projects
+ for peace, a secret peace concluded separately.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Fine eyes.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Impossible!” cried Prince Andrew. “That would be too base.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If we live we shall see,” replied Bilíbin, his face again becoming smooth
+ as a sign that the conversation was at an end.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Prince Andrew reached the room prepared for him and lay down in a
+ clean shirt on the feather bed with its warmed and fragrant pillows, he
+ felt that the battle of which he had brought tidings was far, far away
+ from him. The alliance with Prussia, Austria’s treachery, Bonaparte’s new
+ triumph, tomorrow’s levee and parade, and the audience with the Emperor
+ Francis occupied his thoughts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He closed his eyes, and immediately a sound of cannonading, of musketry
+ and the rattling of carriage wheels seemed to fill his ears, and now again
+ drawn out in a thin line the musketeers were descending the hill, the
+ French were firing, and he felt his heart palpitating as he rode forward
+ beside Schmidt with the bullets merrily whistling all around, and he
+ experienced tenfold the joy of living, as he had not done since childhood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He woke up...
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, that all happened!” he said, and, smiling happily to himself like a
+ child, he fell into a deep, youthful slumber.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ Next day he woke late. Recalling his recent impressions, the first thought
+ that came into his mind was that today he had to be presented to the
+ Emperor Francis; he remembered the Minister of War, the polite Austrian
+ adjutant, Bilíbin, and last night’s conversation. Having dressed for his
+ attendance at court in full parade uniform, which he had not worn for a
+ long time, he went into Bilíbin’s study fresh, animated, and handsome,
+ with his hand bandaged. In the study were four gentlemen of the diplomatic
+ corps. With Prince Hippolyte Kurágin, who was a secretary to the embassy,
+ Bolkónski was already acquainted. Bilíbin introduced him to the others.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The gentlemen assembled at Bilíbin’s were young, wealthy, gay society men,
+ who here, as in Vienna, formed a special set which Bilíbin, their leader,
+ called les nôtres . * This set, consisting almost exclusively of diplomats,
+ evidently had its own interests which had nothing to do with war or
+ politics but related to high society, to certain women, and to the
+ official side of the service. These gentlemen received Prince Andrew as
+ one of themselves, an honor they did not extend to many. From politeness
+ and to start conversation, they asked him a few questions about the army
+ and the battle, and then the talk went off into merry jests and gossip.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Ours.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “But the best of it was,” said one, telling of the misfortune of a fellow
+ diplomat, “that the Chancellor told him flatly that his appointment to
+ London was a promotion and that he was so to regard it. Can you fancy the
+ figure he cut?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But the worst of it, gentlemen—I am giving Kurágin away to you—is
+ that that man suffers, and this Don Juan, wicked fellow, is taking
+ advantage of it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Hippolyte was lolling in a lounge chair with his legs over its arm.
+ He began to laugh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tell me about that!” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, you Don Juan! You serpent!” cried several voices.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You, Bolkónski, don’t know,” said Bilíbin turning to Prince Andrew, “that
+ all the atrocities of the French army (I nearly said of the Russian army)
+ are nothing compared to what this man has been doing among the women!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “La femme est la compagne de l’homme,” * announced Prince Hippolyte, and
+ began looking through a lorgnette at his elevated legs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Woman is man’s companion.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bilíbin and the rest of “ours” burst out laughing in Hippolyte’s face, and
+ Prince Andrew saw that Hippolyte, of whom—he had to admit—he
+ had almost been jealous on his wife’s account, was the butt of this set.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, I must give you a treat,” Bilíbin whispered to Bolkónski. “Kurágin is
+ exquisite when he discusses politics—you should see his gravity!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He sat down beside Hippolyte and wrinkling his forehead began talking to
+ him about politics. Prince Andrew and the others gathered round these two.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Berlin cabinet cannot express a feeling of alliance,” began Hippolyte
+ gazing round with importance at the others, “without expressing... as in
+ its last note... you understand... Besides, unless His Majesty the Emperor
+ derogates from the principle of our alliance...
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wait, I have not finished...” he said to Prince Andrew, seizing him by
+ the arm, “I believe that intervention will be stronger than
+ nonintervention. And...” he paused. “Finally one cannot impute the
+ nonreceipt of our dispatch of November 18. That is how it will end.” And
+ he released Bolkónski’s arm to indicate that he had now quite finished.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Demosthenes, I know thee by the pebble thou secretest in thy golden
+ mouth!” said Bilíbin, and the mop of hair on his head moved with
+ satisfaction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Everybody laughed, and Hippolyte louder than anyone. He was evidently
+ distressed, and breathed painfully, but could not restrain the wild
+ laughter that convulsed his usually impassive features.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well now, gentlemen,” said Bilíbin, “Bolkónski is my guest in this house
+ and in Brünn itself. I want to entertain him as far as I can, with all the
+ pleasures of life here. If we were in Vienna it would be easy, but here,
+ in this wretched Moravian hole, it is more difficult, and I beg you all to
+ help me. Brünn’s attractions must be shown him. You can undertake the
+ theater, I society, and you, Hippolyte, of course the women.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We must let him see Amelie, she’s exquisite!” said one of
+ “ours,” kissing his finger tips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In general we must turn this bloodthirsty soldier to more humane
+ interests,” said Bilíbin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I shall scarcely be able to avail myself of your hospitality, gentlemen,
+ it is already time for me to go,” replied Prince Andrew looking at his
+ watch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where to?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To the Emperor.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, au revoir , Bolkónski! Au revoir , Prince! Come back early
+ to dinner,” cried several voices. “We’ll take you in hand.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When speaking to the Emperor, try as far as you can to praise the way
+ that provisions are supplied and the routes indicated,” said Bilíbin,
+ accompanying him to the hall.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I should like to speak well of them, but as far as I know the facts, I
+ can’t,” replied Bolkónski, smiling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, talk as much as you can, anyway. He has a passion for giving
+ audiences, but he does not like talking himself and can’t do it, as you
+ will see.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ At the levee Prince Andrew stood among the Austrian officers as he had
+ been told to, and the Emperor Francis merely looked fixedly into his face
+ and just nodded to him with his long head. But after it was over, the
+ adjutant he had seen the previous day ceremoniously informed Bolkónski
+ that the Emperor desired to give him an audience. The Emperor Francis
+ received him standing in the middle of the room. Before the conversation
+ began Prince Andrew was struck by the fact that the Emperor seemed
+ confused and blushed as if not knowing what to say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tell me, when did the battle begin?” he asked hurriedly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew replied. Then followed other questions just as simple: “Was
+ Kutúzov well? When had he left Krems?” and so on. The Emperor spoke as if
+ his sole aim were to put a given number of questions—the answers to
+ these questions, as was only too evident, did not interest him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At what o’clock did the battle begin?” asked the Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I cannot inform Your Majesty at what o’clock the battle began at the
+ front, but at Dürrenstein, where I was, our attack began after five in the
+ afternoon,” replied Bolkónski growing more animated and expecting that he
+ would have a chance to give a reliable account, which he had ready in his
+ mind, of all he knew and had seen. But the Emperor smiled and interrupted
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How many miles?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “From where to where, Your Majesty?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “From Dürrenstein to Krems.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Three and a half miles, Your Majesty.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The French have abandoned the left bank?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “According to the scouts the last of them crossed on rafts during the
+ night.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is there sufficient forage in Krems?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Forage has not been supplied to the extent...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At what o’clock was General Schmidt killed?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At seven o’clock, I believe.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At seven o’clock? It’s very sad, very sad!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor thanked Prince Andrew and bowed. Prince Andrew withdrew and
+ was immediately surrounded by courtiers on all sides. Everywhere he saw
+ friendly looks and heard friendly words. Yesterday’s adjutant reproached
+ him for not having stayed at the palace, and offered him his own house.
+ The Minister of War came up and congratulated him on the Maria Theresa
+ Order of the third grade, which the Emperor was conferring on him. The
+ Empress’ chamberlain invited him to see Her Majesty. The archduchess also
+ wished to see him. He did not know whom to answer, and for a few seconds
+ collected his thoughts. Then the Russian ambassador took him by the
+ shoulder, led him to the window, and began to talk to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Contrary to Bilíbin’s forecast the news he had brought was joyfully
+ received. A thanksgiving service was arranged, Kutúzov was awarded the
+ Grand Cross of Maria Theresa, and the whole army received rewards.
+ Bolkónski was invited everywhere, and had to spend the whole morning
+ calling on the principal Austrian dignitaries. Between four and five in
+ the afternoon, having made all his calls, he was returning to Bilíbin’s
+ house thinking out a letter to his father about the battle and his visit
+ to Brünn. At the door he found a vehicle half full of luggage. Franz,
+ Bilíbin’s man, was dragging a portmanteau with some difficulty out of the
+ front door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before returning to Bilíbin’s Prince Andrew had gone to a bookshop to
+ provide himself with some books for the campaign, and had spent some time
+ in the shop.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, your excellency!” said Franz, with difficulty rolling the portmanteau
+ into the vehicle, “we are to move on still farther. The scoundrel is again
+ at our heels!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh? What?” asked Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bilíbin came out to meet him. His usually calm face showed excitement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now! Confess that this is delightful,” said he. “This affair of the
+ Thabor Bridge, at Vienna.... They have crossed without striking a blow!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew could not understand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But where do you come from not to know what every coachman in the town
+ knows?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I come from the archduchess’. I heard nothing there.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And you didn’t see that everybody is packing up?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I did not... What is it all about?” inquired Prince Andrew impatiently.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s it all about? Why, the French have crossed the bridge that
+ Auersperg was defending, and the bridge was not blown up: so Murat is now
+ rushing along the road to Brünn and will be here in a day or two.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What? Here? But why did they not blow up the bridge, if it was mined?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is what I ask you. No one, not even Bonaparte, knows why.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bolkónski shrugged his shoulders.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But if the bridge is crossed it means that the army too is lost? It will
+ be cut off,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s just it,” answered Bilíbin. “Listen! The French entered Vienna as
+ I told you. Very well. Next day, which was yesterday, those gentlemen,
+ messieurs les maréchaux , * Murat, Lannes, and Belliard, mount and ride to
+ the bridge. (Observe that all three are Gascons.) ‘Gentlemen,’ says one of
+ them, ‘you know the Thabor Bridge is mined and doubly mined and that there
+ are menacing fortifications at its head and an army of fifteen thousand
+ men has been ordered to blow up the bridge and not let us cross? But it
+ will please our sovereign the Emperor Napoleon if we take this bridge, so
+ let us three go and take it!’ ‘Yes, let’s!’ say the others. And off they
+ go and take the bridge, cross it, and now with their whole army are on
+ this side of the Danube, marching on us, you, and your lines of
+ communication.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * The marshalls.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Stop jesting,” said Prince Andrew sadly and seriously. This news grieved
+ him and yet he was pleased.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as he learned that the Russian army was in such a hopeless
+ situation it occurred to him that it was he who was destined to lead it
+ out of this position; that here was the Toulon that would lift him from
+ the ranks of obscure officers and offer him the first step to fame!
+ Listening to Bilíbin he was already imagining how on reaching the army he
+ would give an opinion at the war council which would be the only one that
+ could save the army, and how he alone would be entrusted with the
+ executing of the plan.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stop this jesting,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am not jesting,” Bilíbin went on. “Nothing is truer or sadder.
+ These gentlemen ride onto the bridge alone and wave white handkerchiefs; they
+ assure the officer on duty that they, the marshals, are on their way to
+ negotiate with Prince Auersperg. He lets them enter the tête-de-pont . *
+ They spin him a thousand gasconades, saying that the war is over, that the
+ Emperor Francis is arranging a meeting with Bonaparte, that they desire to
+ see Prince Auersperg, and so on. The officer sends for Auersperg; these
+ gentlemen embrace the officers, crack jokes, sit on the cannon, and
+ meanwhile a French battalion gets to the bridge unobserved, flings the
+ bags of incendiary material into the water, and approaches the
+ tête-de-pont . At length appears the lieutenant general, our dear Prince
+ Auersperg von Mautern himself. ‘Dearest foe! Flower of the Austrian army,
+ hero of the Turkish wars! Hostilities are ended, we can shake one another’s
+ hand.... The Emperor Napoleon burns with impatience to make Prince
+ Auersperg’s acquaintance.’ In a word, those gentlemen, Gascons indeed, so
+ bewildered him with fine words, and he is so flattered by his rapidly
+ established intimacy with the French marshals, and so dazzled by the sight
+ of Murat’s mantle and ostrich plumes, qu’il n’y voit que du feu, et oublie
+ celui qu’il devait faire faire sur l’ennemi!” *(2) In spite of the
+ animation of his speech, Bilíbin did not forget to pause after this mot to
+ give time for its due appreciation. “The French battalion rushes to the
+ bridgehead, spikes the guns, and the bridge is taken! But what is best of
+ all,” he went on, his excitement subsiding under the delightful interest
+ of his own story, “is that the sergeant in charge of the cannon which was
+ to give the signal to fire the mines and blow up the bridge, this
+ sergeant, seeing that the French troops were running onto the bridge, was
+ about to fire, but Lannes stayed his hand. The sergeant, who was evidently
+ wiser than his general, goes up to Auersperg and says: ‘Prince, you are
+ being deceived, here are the French!’ Murat, seeing that all is lost if
+ the sergeant is allowed to speak, turns to Auersperg with feigned
+ astonishment (he is a true Gascon) and says: ‘I don’t recognize the
+ world-famous Austrian discipline, if you allow a subordinate to address
+ you like that!’ It was a stroke of genius. Prince Auersperg feels his
+ dignity at stake and orders the sergeant to be arrested. Come, you must
+ own that this affair of the Thabor Bridge is delightful! It is not exactly
+ stupidity, nor rascality....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Bridgehead.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * (2) That their fire gets into his eyes and he forgets that
+ he ought to be firing at the enemy.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “It may be treachery,” said Prince Andrew, vividly imagining the gray
+ overcoats, wounds, the smoke of gunpowder, the sounds of firing, and the
+ glory that awaited him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not that either. That puts the court in too bad a light,” replied
+ Bilíbin. “It’s not treachery nor rascality nor stupidity: it is just as at
+ Ulm... it is...”—he seemed to be trying to find the right
+ expression. “C’est... c’est du Mack. Nous sommes mackés (It is... it is a
+ bit of Mack. We are Macked ),” he concluded, feeling that he had produced a
+ good epigram, a fresh one that would be repeated. His hitherto puckered
+ brow became smooth as a sign of pleasure, and with a slight smile he began
+ to examine his nails.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where are you off to?” he said suddenly to Prince Andrew who had risen
+ and was going toward his room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am going away.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where to?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To the army.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you meant to stay another two days?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But now I am off at once.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Prince Andrew after giving directions about his departure went to his
+ room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know, mon cher ,” said Bilíbin following him, “I have been thinking
+ about you. Why are you going?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And in proof of the conclusiveness of his opinion all the wrinkles
+ vanished from his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew looked inquiringly at him and gave no reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why are you going? I know you think it your duty to gallop back to the
+ army now that it is in danger. I understand that. Mon cher , it is
+ heroism!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not at all,” said Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But as you are a philosopher, be a consistent one, look at the other side
+ of the question and you will see that your duty, on the contrary, is to
+ take care of yourself. Leave it to those who are no longer fit for
+ anything else.... You have not been ordered to return and have not been
+ dismissed from here; therefore, you can stay and go with us wherever our
+ ill luck takes us. They say we are going to Olmütz, and Olmütz is a very
+ decent town. You and I will travel comfortably in my calèche .”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do stop joking, Bilíbin,” cried Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am speaking sincerely as a friend! Consider! Where and why are you
+ going, when you might remain here? You are faced by one of two things,”
+ and the skin over his left temple puckered, “either you will not reach
+ your regiment before peace is concluded, or you will share defeat and
+ disgrace with Kutúzov’s whole army.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Bilíbin unwrinkled his temple, feeling that the dilemma was insoluble.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I cannot argue about it,” replied Prince Andrew coldly, but he thought:
+ “I am going to save the army.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear fellow, you are a hero!” said Bilíbin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ That same night, having taken leave of the Minister of War, Bolkónski set
+ off to rejoin the army, not knowing where he would find it and fearing to
+ be captured by the French on the way to Krems.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In Brünn everybody attached to the court was packing up, and the heavy
+ baggage was already being dispatched to Olmütz. Near Hetzelsdorf Prince
+ Andrew struck the high road along which the Russian army was moving with
+ great haste and in the greatest disorder. The road was so obstructed with
+ carts that it was impossible to get by in a carriage. Prince Andrew took a
+ horse and a Cossack from a Cossack commander, and hungry and weary, making
+ his way past the baggage wagons, rode in search of the commander in chief
+ and of his own luggage. Very sinister reports of the position of the army
+ reached him as he went along, and the appearance of the troops in their
+ disorderly flight confirmed these rumors.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cette armée russe que l’or de l’Angleterre a transportée des extrémités
+ de l’univers, nous allons lui faire éprouver le même sort—(le sort
+ de l’armée d’Ulm).” * He remembered these words in Bonaparte’s address to
+ his army at the beginning of the campaign, and they awoke in him
+ astonishment at the genius of his hero, a feeling of wounded pride, and a
+ hope of glory. “And should there be nothing left but to die?” he thought.
+ “Well, if need be, I shall do it no worse than others.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “That Russian army which has been brought from the ends of
+ the earth by English gold, we shall cause to share the same
+ fate—(the fate of the army at Ulm).”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He looked with disdain at the endless confused mass of detachments, carts,
+ guns, artillery, and again baggage wagons and vehicles of all kinds
+ overtaking one another and blocking the muddy road, three and sometimes
+ four abreast. From all sides, behind and before, as far as ear could
+ reach, there were the rattle of wheels, the creaking of carts and gun
+ carriages, the tramp of horses, the crack of whips, shouts, the urging of
+ horses, and the swearing of soldiers, orderlies, and officers. All along
+ the sides of the road fallen horses were to be seen, some flayed, some
+ not, and broken-down carts beside which solitary soldiers sat waiting for
+ something, and again soldiers straggling from their companies, crowds of
+ whom set off to the neighboring villages, or returned from them dragging
+ sheep, fowls, hay, and bulging sacks. At each ascent or descent of the
+ road the crowds were yet denser and the din of shouting more incessant.
+ Soldiers floundering knee-deep in mud pushed the guns and wagons
+ themselves. Whips cracked, hoofs slipped, traces broke, and lungs were
+ strained with shouting. The officers directing the march rode backward and
+ forward between the carts. Their voices were but feebly heard amid the
+ uproar and one saw by their faces that they despaired of the possibility
+ of checking this disorder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here is our dear Orthodox Russian army,” thought Bolkónski, recalling
+ Bilíbin’s words.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Wishing to find out where the commander in chief was, he rode up to a
+ convoy. Directly opposite to him came a strange one-horse vehicle,
+ evidently rigged up by soldiers out of any available materials and looking
+ like something between a cart, a cabriolet, and a calèche . A soldier was
+ driving, and a woman enveloped in shawls sat behind the apron under the
+ leather hood of the vehicle. Prince Andrew rode up and was just putting
+ his question to a soldier when his attention was diverted by the desperate
+ shrieks of the woman in the vehicle. An officer in charge of transport was
+ beating the soldier who was driving the woman’s vehicle for trying to get
+ ahead of others, and the strokes of his whip fell on the apron of the
+ equipage. The woman screamed piercingly. Seeing Prince Andrew she leaned
+ out from behind the apron and, waving her thin arms from under the woolen
+ shawl, cried:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mr. Aide-de-camp! Mr. Aide-de-camp!... For heaven’s sake... Protect me!
+ What will become of us? I am the wife of the doctor of the Seventh
+ Chasseurs.... They won’t let us pass, we are left behind and have lost our
+ people...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll flatten you into a pancake!” shouted the angry officer to the
+ soldier. “Turn back with your slut!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mr. Aide-de-camp! Help me!... What does it all mean?” screamed the
+ doctor’s wife.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Kindly let this cart pass. Don’t you see it’s a woman?” said Prince
+ Andrew riding up to the officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer glanced at him, and without replying turned again to the
+ soldier. “I’ll teach you to push on!... Back!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let them pass, I tell you!” repeated Prince Andrew, compressing his lips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And who are you?” cried the officer, turning on him with tipsy rage, “who
+ are you? Are you in command here? Eh? I am commander here, not you! Go
+ back or I’ll flatten you into a pancake,” repeated he. This expression
+ evidently pleased him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That was a nice snub for the little aide-de-camp,” came a voice from
+ behind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew saw that the officer was in that state of senseless, tipsy
+ rage when a man does not know what he is saying. He saw that his
+ championship of the doctor’s wife in her queer trap might expose him to
+ what he dreaded more than anything in the world—to ridicule; but his
+ instinct urged him on. Before the officer finished his sentence Prince
+ Andrew, his face distorted with fury, rode up to him and raised his riding
+ whip.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Kind...ly let—them—pass!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer flourished his arm and hastily rode away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s all the fault of these fellows on the staff that there’s this
+ disorder,” he muttered. “Do as you like.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew without lifting his eyes rode hastily away from the doctor’s
+ wife, who was calling him her deliverer, and recalling with a sense of
+ disgust the minutest details of this humiliating scene he galloped on to
+ the village where he was told who the commander in chief was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On reaching the village he dismounted and went to the nearest house,
+ intending to rest if but for a moment, eat something, and try to sort out
+ the stinging and tormenting thoughts that confused his mind. “This is a
+ mob of scoundrels and not an army,” he was thinking as he went up to the
+ window of the first house, when a familiar voice called him by name.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He turned round. Nesvítski’s handsome face looked out of the little
+ window. Nesvítski, moving his moist lips as he chewed something, and
+ flourishing his arm, called him to enter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bolkónski! Bolkónski!... Don’t you hear? Eh? Come quick...” he shouted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Entering the house, Prince Andrew saw Nesvítski and another adjutant
+ having something to eat. They hastily turned round to him asking if he had
+ any news. On their familiar faces he read agitation and alarm. This was
+ particularly noticeable on Nesvítski’s usually laughing countenance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where is the commander in chief?” asked Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here, in that house,” answered the adjutant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, is it true that it’s peace and capitulation?” asked Nesvítski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was going to ask you. I know nothing except that it was all I could do
+ to get here.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And we, my dear boy! It’s terrible! I was wrong to laugh at Mack, we’re
+ getting it still worse,” said Nesvítski. “But sit down and have something
+ to eat.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You won’t be able to find either your baggage or anything else now,
+ Prince. And God only knows where your man Peter is,” said the other
+ adjutant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where are headquarters?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We are to spend the night in Znaim.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, I have got all I need into packs for two horses,” said Nesvítski.
+ “They’ve made up splendid packs for me—fit to cross the Bohemian
+ mountains with. It’s a bad lookout, old fellow! But what’s the matter with
+ you? You must be ill to shiver like that,” he added, noticing that Prince
+ Andrew winced as at an electric shock.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s nothing,” replied Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He had just remembered his recent encounter with the doctor’s wife and the
+ convoy officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is the commander in chief doing here?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I can’t make out at all,” said Nesvítski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, all I can make out is that everything is abominable, abominable,
+ quite abominable!” said Prince Andrew, and he went off to the house where
+ the commander in chief was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Passing by Kutúzov’s carriage and the exhausted saddle horses of his
+ suite, with their Cossacks who were talking loudly together, Prince Andrew
+ entered the passage. Kutúzov himself, he was told, was in the house with
+ Prince Bagratión and Weyrother. Weyrother was the Austrian general who had
+ succeeded Schmidt. In the passage little Kozlóvski was squatting on his
+ heels in front of a clerk. The clerk, with cuffs turned up, was hastily
+ writing at a tub turned bottom upwards. Kozlóvski’s face looked worn—he
+ too had evidently not slept all night. He glanced at Prince Andrew and did
+ not even nod to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Second line... have you written it?” he continued dictating to the clerk.
+ “The Kiev Grenadiers, Podolian...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One can’t write so fast, your honor,” said the clerk, glancing
+ angrily and disrespectfully at Kozlóvski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Through the door came the sounds of Kutúzov’s voice, excited and
+ dissatisfied, interrupted by another, an unfamiliar voice. From the sound
+ of these voices, the inattentive way Kozlóvski looked at him, the
+ disrespectful manner of the exhausted clerk, the fact that the clerk and
+ Kozlóvski were squatting on the floor by a tub so near to the commander in
+ chief, and from the noisy laughter of the Cossacks holding the horses near
+ the window, Prince Andrew felt that something important and disastrous was
+ about to happen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He turned to Kozlóvski with urgent questions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Immediately, Prince,” said Kozlóvski. “Dispositions for Bagratión.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What about capitulation?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing of the sort. Orders are issued for a battle.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew moved toward the door from whence voices were heard. Just as
+ he was going to open it the sounds ceased, the door opened, and Kutúzov
+ with his eagle nose and puffy face appeared in the doorway. Prince Andrew
+ stood right in front of Kutúzov but the expression of the commander in
+ chief’s one sound eye showed him to be so preoccupied with thoughts and
+ anxieties as to be oblivious of his presence. He looked straight at his
+ adjutant’s face without recognizing him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, have you finished?” said he to Kozlóvski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One moment, your excellency.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bagratión, a gaunt middle-aged man of medium height with a firm, impassive
+ face of Oriental type, came out after the commander in chief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have the honor to present myself,” repeated Prince Andrew rather
+ loudly, handing Kutúzov an envelope.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, from Vienna? Very good. Later, later!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov went out into the porch with Bagratión.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, good-by, Prince,” said he to Bagratión. “My blessing, and may
+ Christ be with you in your great endeavor!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His face suddenly softened and tears came into his eyes. With his left
+ hand he drew Bagratión toward him, and with his right, on which he wore a
+ ring, he made the sign of the cross over him with a gesture evidently
+ habitual, offering his puffy cheek, but Bagratión kissed him on the neck
+ instead.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Christ be with you!” Kutúzov repeated and went toward his carriage. “Get
+ in with me,” said he to Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency, I should like to be of use here. Allow me to remain with
+ Prince Bagratión’s detachment.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Get in,” said Kutúzov, and noticing that Bolkónski still delayed, he
+ added: “I need good officers myself, need them myself!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They got into the carriage and drove for a few minutes in silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There is still much, much before us,” he said, as if with an old man’s
+ penetration he understood all that was passing in Bolkónski’s mind. “If a
+ tenth part of his detachment returns I shall thank God,” he added as if
+ speaking to himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew glanced at Kutúzov’s face only a foot distant from him and
+ involuntarily noticed the carefully washed seams of the scar near his
+ temple, where an Ismail bullet had pierced his skull, and the empty eye
+ socket. “Yes, he has a right to speak so calmly of those men’s death,”
+ thought Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is why I beg to be sent to that detachment,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov did not reply. He seemed to have forgotten what he had been
+ saying, and sat plunged in thought. Five minutes later, gently swaying on
+ the soft springs of the carriage, he turned to Prince Andrew. There was
+ not a trace of agitation on his face. With delicate irony he questioned
+ Prince Andrew about the details of his interview with the Emperor, about
+ the remarks he had heard at court concerning the Krems affair, and about
+ some ladies they both knew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV
+ 
+ 
+ On November 1 Kutúzov had received, through a spy, news that the army he
+ commanded was in an almost hopeless position. The spy reported that the
+ French, after crossing the bridge at Vienna, were advancing in immense
+ force upon Kutúzov’s line of communication with the troops that were
+ arriving from Russia. If Kutúzov decided to remain at Krems, Napoleon’s
+ army of one hundred and fifty thousand men would cut him off completely
+ and surround his exhausted army of forty thousand, and he would find
+ himself in the position of Mack at Ulm. If Kutúzov decided to abandon the
+ road connecting him with the troops arriving from Russia, he would have to
+ march with no road into unknown parts of the Bohemian mountains, defending
+ himself against superior forces of the enemy and abandoning all hope of a
+ junction with Buxhöwden. If Kutúzov decided to retreat along the road from
+ Krems to Olmütz, to unite with the troops arriving from Russia, he risked
+ being forestalled on that road by the French who had crossed the Vienna
+ bridge, and encumbered by his baggage and transport, having to accept
+ battle on the march against an enemy three times as strong, who would hem
+ him in from two sides.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov chose this latter course.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French, the spy reported, having crossed the Vienna bridge, were
+ advancing by forced marches toward Znaim, which lay sixty-six miles off on
+ the line of Kutúzov’s retreat. If he reached Znaim before the French,
+ there would be great hope of saving the army; to let the French forestall
+ him at Znaim meant the exposure of his whole army to a disgrace such as
+ that of Ulm, or to utter destruction. But to forestall the French with his
+ whole army was impossible. The road for the French from Vienna to Znaim
+ was shorter and better than the road for the Russians from Krems to Znaim.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The night he received the news, Kutúzov sent Bagratión’s vanguard, four
+ thousand strong, to the right across the hills from the Krems-Znaim to the
+ Vienna-Znaim road. Bagratión was to make this march without resting, and
+ to halt facing Vienna with Znaim to his rear, and if he succeeded in
+ forestalling the French he was to delay them as long as possible. Kutúzov
+ himself with all his transport took the road to Znaim.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Marching thirty miles that stormy night across roadless hills, with his
+ hungry, ill-shod soldiers, and losing a third of his men as stragglers by
+ the way, Bagratión came out on the Vienna-Znaim road at Hollabrünn a few
+ hours ahead of the French who were approaching Hollabrünn from Vienna.
+ Kutúzov with his transport had still to march for some days before he
+ could reach Znaim. Hence Bagratión with his four thousand hungry,
+ exhausted men would have to detain for days the whole enemy army that came
+ upon him at Hollabrünn, which was clearly impossible. But a freak of fate
+ made the impossible possible. The success of the trick that had placed the
+ Vienna bridge in the hands of the French without a fight led Murat to try
+ to deceive Kutúzov in a similar way. Meeting Bagratión’s weak detachment
+ on the Znaim road he supposed it to be Kutúzov’s whole army. To be able to
+ crush it absolutely he awaited the arrival of the rest of the troops who
+ were on their way from Vienna, and with this object offered a three days’
+ truce on condition that both armies should remain in position without
+ moving. Murat declared that negotiations for peace were already
+ proceeding, and that he therefore offered this truce to avoid unnecessary
+ bloodshed. Count Nostitz, the Austrian general occupying the advanced
+ posts, believed Murat’s emissary and retired, leaving Bagratión’s
+ division exposed. Another emissary rode to the Russian line to announce the peace
+ negotiations and to offer the Russian army the three days’ truce.
+ Bagratión replied that he was not authorized either to accept or refuse a
+ truce and sent his adjutant to Kutúzov to report the offer he had
+ received.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A truce was Kutúzov’s sole chance of gaining time, giving Bagratión’s
+ exhausted troops some rest, and letting the transport and heavy convoys
+ (whose movements were concealed from the French) advance if but one stage
+ nearer Znaim. The offer of a truce gave the only, and a quite unexpected,
+ chance of saving the army. On receiving the news he immediately dispatched
+ Adjutant General Wintzingerode, who was in attendance on him, to the enemy
+ camp. Wintzingerode was not merely to agree to the truce but also to offer
+ terms of capitulation, and meanwhile Kutúzov sent his adjutants back to
+ hasten to the utmost the movements of the baggage trains of the entire
+ army along the Krems-Znaim road. Bagratión’s exhausted and hungry
+ detachment, which alone covered this movement of the transport and of the
+ whole army, had to remain stationary in face of an enemy eight times as
+ strong as itself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov’s expectations that the proposals of capitulation (which were in
+ no way binding) might give time for part of the transport to pass, and
+ also that Murat’s mistake would very soon be discovered, proved correct.
+ As soon as Bonaparte (who was at Schönbrunn, sixteen miles from
+ Hollabrünn) received Murat’s dispatch with the proposal of a truce and a
+ capitulation, he detected a ruse and wrote the following letter to Murat:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Schönbrunn, 25th Brumaire, 1805,
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ at eight o’clock in the morning
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To PRINCE MURAT,
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I cannot find words to express to you my displeasure. You command only my
+ advance guard, and have no right to arrange an armistice without my order.
+ You are causing me to lose the fruits of a campaign. Break the armistice
+ immediately and march on the enemy. Inform him that the general who signed
+ that capitulation had no right to do so, and that no one but the Emperor
+ of Russia has that right.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If, however, the Emperor of Russia ratifies that convention, I will ratify
+ it; but it is only a trick. March on, destroy the Russian army.... You are
+ in a position to seize its baggage and artillery.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Russian Emperor’s aide-de-camp is an impostor. Officers are nothing
+ when they have no powers; this one had none.... The Austrians let
+ themselves be tricked at the crossing of the Vienna bridge, you are
+ letting yourself be tricked by an aide-de-camp of the Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ NAPOLEON
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bonaparte’s adjutant rode full gallop with this menacing letter to Murat.
+ Bonaparte himself, not trusting to his generals, moved with all the Guards
+ to the field of battle, afraid of letting a ready victim escape, and
+ Bagratión’s four thousand men merrily lighted campfires, dried and warmed
+ themselves, cooked their porridge for the first time for three days, and
+ not one of them knew or imagined what was in store for him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV
+ 
+ 
+ Between three and four o’clock in the afternoon Prince Andrew, who had
+ persisted in his request to Kutúzov, arrived at Grunth and reported
+ himself to Bagratión. Bonaparte’s adjutant had not yet reached Murat’s
+ detachment and the battle had not yet begun. In Bagratión’s detachment no
+ one knew anything of the general position of affairs. They talked of peace
+ but did not believe in its possibility; others talked of a battle but also
+ disbelieved in the nearness of an engagement. Bagratión, knowing Bolkónski
+ to be a favorite and trusted adjutant, received him with distinction and
+ special marks of favor, explaining to him that there would probably be an
+ engagement that day or the next, and giving him full liberty to remain
+ with him during the battle or to join the rearguard and have an eye on the
+ order of retreat, “which is also very important.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “However, there will hardly be an engagement today,” said Bagratión
+ as if to reassure Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If he is one of the ordinary little staff dandies sent to earn a medal he
+ can get his reward just as well in the rearguard, but if he wishes to stay
+ with me, let him... he’ll be of use here if he’s a brave
+ officer,” thought Bagratión. Prince Andrew, without replying, asked the
+ prince’s permission to ride round the position to see the disposition of
+ the forces, so as to know his bearings should he be sent to execute an order.
+ The officer on duty, a handsome, elegantly dressed man with a diamond ring on his
+ forefinger, who was fond of speaking French though he spoke it badly,
+ offered to conduct Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On all sides they saw rain-soaked officers with dejected faces who seemed
+ to be seeking something, and soldiers dragging doors, benches, and fencing
+ from the village.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now, Prince! We can’t stop those fellows,” said the staff officer
+ pointing to the soldiers. “The officers don’t keep them in hand. And
+ there,” he pointed to a sutler’s tent, “they crowd in and sit. This
+ morning I turned them all out and now look, it’s full again. I must go
+ there, Prince, and scare them a bit. It won’t take a moment.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, let’s go in and I will get myself a roll and some cheese,” said
+ Prince Andrew who had not yet had time to eat anything.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why didn’t you mention it, Prince? I would have offered you something.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They dismounted and entered the tent. Several officers, with flushed and
+ weary faces, were sitting at the table eating and drinking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now what does this mean, gentlemen?” said the staff officer, in the
+ reproachful tone of a man who has repeated the same thing more than once.
+ “You know it won’t do to leave your posts like this. The prince gave
+ orders that no one should leave his post. Now you, Captain,” and he turned
+ to a thin, dirty little artillery officer who without his boots (he had
+ given them to the canteen keeper to dry), in only his stockings, rose when
+ they entered, smiling not altogether comfortably.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Captain Túshin?” he continued. “One
+ would think that as an artillery officer you would set a good example, yet
+ here you are without your boots! The alarm will be sounded and you’ll be
+ in a pretty position without your boots!” (The staff officer smiled.)
+ “Kindly return to your posts, gentlemen, all of you, all!” he added in a
+ tone of command.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew smiled involuntarily as he looked at the artillery officer
+ Túshin, who silent and smiling, shifting from one stockinged foot to the
+ other, glanced inquiringly with his large, intelligent, kindly eyes from
+ Prince Andrew to the staff officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The soldiers say it feels easier without boots,” said Captain Túshin
+ smiling shyly in his uncomfortable position, evidently wishing to adopt a
+ jocular tone. But before he had finished he felt that his jest was
+ unacceptable and had not come off. He grew confused.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Kindly return to your posts,” said the staff officer trying to preserve
+ his gravity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew glanced again at the artillery officer’s small figure. There
+ was something peculiar about it, quite unsoldierly, rather comic, but
+ extremely attractive.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The staff officer and Prince Andrew mounted their horses and rode on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having ridden beyond the village, continually meeting and overtaking
+ soldiers and officers of various regiments, they saw on their left some
+ entrenchments being thrown up, the freshly dug clay of which showed up
+ red. Several battalions of soldiers, in their shirt sleeves despite the
+ cold wind, swarmed in these earthworks like a host of white ants;
+ spadefuls of red clay were continually being thrown up from behind the
+ bank by unseen hands. Prince Andrew and the officer rode up, looked at the
+ entrenchment, and went on again. Just behind it they came upon some dozens
+ of soldiers, continually replaced by others, who ran from the
+ entrenchment. They had to hold their noses and put their horses to a trot
+ to escape from the poisoned atmosphere of these latrines.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Voilà l’agrément des camps, monsieur le prince,” * said the staff
+ officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “This is a pleasure one gets in camp, Prince.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They rode up the opposite hill. From there the French could already be
+ seen. Prince Andrew stopped and began examining the position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s our battery,” said the staff officer indicating the highest point.
+ “It’s in charge of the queer fellow we saw without his boots. You can see
+ everything from there; let’s go there, Prince.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank you very much, I will go on alone,” said Prince Andrew, wishing to
+ rid himself of this staff officer’s company, “please don’t trouble
+ yourself further.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The staff officer remained behind and Prince Andrew rode on alone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The farther forward and nearer the enemy he went, the more orderly and
+ cheerful were the troops. The greatest disorder and depression had been in
+ the baggage train he had passed that morning on the Znaim road seven miles
+ away from the French. At Grunth also some apprehension and alarm could be
+ felt, but the nearer Prince Andrew came to the French lines the more
+ confident was the appearance of our troops. The soldiers in their
+ greatcoats were ranged in lines, the sergeants major and company officers
+ were counting the men, poking the last man in each section in the ribs and
+ telling him to hold his hand up. Soldiers scattered over the whole place
+ were dragging logs and brushwood and were building shelters with merry
+ chatter and laughter; around the fires sat others, dressed and undressed,
+ drying their shirts and leg bands or mending boots or overcoats and
+ crowding round the boilers and porridge cookers. In one company dinner was
+ ready, and the soldiers were gazing eagerly at the steaming boiler,
+ waiting till the sample, which a quartermaster sergeant was carrying in a
+ wooden bowl to an officer who sat on a log before his shelter, had been
+ tasted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Another company, a lucky one for not all the companies had vodka, crowded
+ round a pockmarked, broad-shouldered sergeant major who, tilting a keg,
+ filled one after another the canteen lids held out to him. The soldiers
+ lifted the canteen lids to their lips with reverential faces, emptied
+ them, rolling the vodka in their mouths, and walked away from the sergeant
+ major with brightened expressions, licking their lips and wiping them on
+ the sleeves of their greatcoats. All their faces were as serene as if all
+ this were happening at home awaiting peaceful encampment, and not within
+ sight of the enemy before an action in which at least half of them would
+ be left on the field. After passing a chasseur regiment and in the lines
+ of the Kiev grenadiers—fine fellows busy with similar peaceful
+ affairs—near the shelter of the regimental commander, higher than
+ and different from the others, Prince Andrew came out in front of a
+ platoon of grenadiers before whom lay a naked man. Two soldiers held him
+ while two others were flourishing their switches and striking him
+ regularly on his bare back. The man shrieked unnaturally. A stout major
+ was pacing up and down the line, and regardless of the screams kept
+ repeating:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s a shame for a soldier to steal; a soldier must be honest, honorable,
+ and brave, but if he robs his fellows there is no honor in him, he’s a
+ scoundrel. Go on! Go on!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So the swishing sound of the strokes, and the desperate but unnatural
+ screams, continued.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go on, go on!” said the major.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A young officer with a bewildered and pained expression on his face
+ stepped away from the man and looked round inquiringly at the adjutant as
+ he rode by.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew, having reached the front line, rode along it. Our front
+ line and that of the enemy were far apart on the right and left flanks,
+ but in the center where the men with a flag of truce had passed that
+ morning, the lines were so near together that the men could see one
+ another’s faces and speak to one another. Besides the soldiers who formed
+ the picket line on either side, there were many curious onlookers who,
+ jesting and laughing, stared at their strange foreign enemies.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Since early morning—despite an injunction not to approach the picket
+ line—the officers had been unable to keep sight-seers away. The
+ soldiers forming the picket line, like showmen exhibiting a curiosity, no
+ longer looked at the French but paid attention to the sight-seers and grew
+ weary waiting to be relieved. Prince Andrew halted to have a look at the
+ French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look! Look there!” one soldier was saying to another, pointing to a
+ Russian musketeer who had gone up to the picket line with an officer and
+ was rapidly and excitedly talking to a French grenadier. “Hark to him
+ jabbering! Fine, isn’t it? It’s all the Frenchy can do to keep up with
+ him. There now, Sídorov!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wait a bit and listen. It’s fine!” answered Sídorov, who
+ was considered an adept at French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The soldier to whom the laughers referred was Dólokhov. Prince Andrew
+ recognized him and stopped to listen to what he was saying. Dólokhov had
+ come from the left flank where their regiment was stationed, with his
+ captain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then, go on, go on!” incited the officer, bending forward and trying
+ not to lose a word of the speech which was incomprehensible to him. “More,
+ please: more! What’s he saying?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov did not answer the captain; he had been drawn into a hot dispute
+ with the French grenadier. They were naturally talking about the campaign.
+ The Frenchman, confusing the Austrians with the Russians, was trying to
+ prove that the Russians had surrendered and had fled all the way from Ulm,
+ while Dólokhov maintained that the Russians had not surrendered but had
+ beaten the French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We have orders to drive you off here, and we shall drive you off,” said
+ Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Only take care you and your Cossacks are not all captured!” said the
+ French grenadier.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French onlookers and listeners laughed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We’ll make you dance as we did under Suvórov...,” * said Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “On vous fera danser.” 
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Qu’ est-ce qu’il chante?” * asked a Frenchman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “What’s he singing about?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s ancient history,” said another, guessing that it referred to a
+ former war. “The Emperor will teach your Suvara as he has taught the
+ others...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bonaparte...” began Dólokhov, but the Frenchman interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not Bonaparte. He is the Emperor! Sacré nom...!” cried he angrily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The devil skin your Emperor.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Dólokhov swore at him in coarse soldier’s Russian and shouldering his
+ musket walked away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let us go, Iván Lukích,” he said to the captain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, that’s the way to talk French,” said the picket soldiers. “Now,
+ Sídorov, you have a try!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sídorov, turning to the French, winked, and began to jabber meaningless
+ sounds very fast: “Kari, mala, tafa, safi, muter, Kaská,” he said, trying
+ to give an expressive intonation to his voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ho! ho! ho! Ha! ha! ha! ha! Ouh! ouh!” came peals of such healthy and
+ good-humored laughter from the soldiers that it infected the French
+ involuntarily, so much so that the only thing left to do seemed to be to
+ unload the muskets, explode the ammunition, and all return home as quickly
+ as possible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the guns remained loaded, the loopholes in blockhouses and
+ entrenchments looked out just as menacingly, and the unlimbered cannon
+ confronted one another as before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI
+ 
+ 
+ Having ridden round the whole line from right flank to left, Prince Andrew
+ made his way up to the battery from which the staff officer had told him
+ the whole field could be seen. Here he dismounted, and stopped beside the
+ farthest of the four unlimbered cannon. Before the guns an artillery
+ sentry was pacing up and down; he stood at attention when the officer
+ arrived, but at a sign resumed his measured, monotonous pacing. Behind the
+ guns were their limbers and still farther back picket ropes and
+ artillerymen’s bonfires. To the left, not far from the farthest cannon,
+ was a small, newly constructed wattle shed from which came the sound of
+ officers’ voices in eager conversation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was true that a view over nearly the whole Russian position and the
+ greater part of the enemy’s opened out from this battery. Just facing it,
+ on the crest of the opposite hill, the village of Schön Grabern could be
+ seen, and in three places to left and right the French troops amid the
+ smoke of their campfires, the greater part of whom were evidently in the
+ village itself and behind the hill. To the left from that village, amid
+ the smoke, was something resembling a battery, but it was impossible to
+ see it clearly with the naked eye. Our right flank was posted on a rather
+ steep incline which dominated the French position. Our infantry were
+ stationed there, and at the farthest point the dragoons. In the center,
+ where Túshin’s battery stood and from which Prince Andrew was surveying
+ the position, was the easiest and most direct descent and ascent to the
+ brook separating us from Schön Grabern. On the left our troops were close
+ to a copse, in which smoked the bonfires of our infantry who were felling
+ wood. The French line was wider than ours, and it was plain that they
+ could easily outflank us on both sides. Behind our position was a steep
+ and deep dip, making it difficult for artillery and cavalry to retire.
+ Prince Andrew took out his notebook and, leaning on the cannon, sketched a
+ plan of the position. He made some notes on two points, intending to
+ mention them to Bagratión. His idea was, first, to concentrate all the
+ artillery in the center, and secondly, to withdraw the cavalry to the
+ other side of the dip. Prince Andrew, being always near the commander in
+ chief, closely following the mass movements and general orders, and
+ constantly studying historical accounts of battles, involuntarily pictured
+ to himself the course of events in the forthcoming action in broad
+ outline. He imagined only important possibilities: “If the enemy attacks
+ the right flank,” he said to himself, “the Kiev grenadiers and the Podólsk
+ chasseurs must hold their position till reserves from the center come up.
+ In that case the dragoons could successfully make a flank counterattack.
+ If they attack our center we, having the center battery on this high
+ ground, shall withdraw the left flank under its cover, and retreat to the
+ dip by echelons.” So he reasoned.... All the time he had been beside the
+ gun, he had heard the voices of the officers distinctly, but as often
+ happens had not understood a word of what they were saying. Suddenly,
+ however, he was struck by a voice coming from the shed, and its tone was
+ so sincere that he could not but listen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, friend,” said a pleasant and, as it seemed to Prince Andrew, a
+ familiar voice, “what I say is that if it were possible to know what is
+ beyond death, none of us would be afraid of it. That’s so, friend.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Another, a younger voice, interrupted him: “Afraid or not, you can’t
+ escape it anyhow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All the same, one is afraid! Oh, you clever people,” said a third manly
+ voice interrupting them both. “Of course you artillery men are very wise,
+ because you can take everything along with you—vodka and snacks.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the owner of the manly voice, evidently an infantry officer, laughed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, one is afraid,” continued the first speaker, he of the familiar
+ voice. “One is afraid of the unknown, that’s what it is. Whatever we may
+ say about the soul going to the sky... we know there is no sky but only an
+ atmosphere.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The manly voice again interrupted the artillery officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, stand us some of your herb vodka, Túshin,” it said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why,” thought Prince Andrew, “that’s the captain who
+ stood up in the sutler’s hut without his boots.” He recognized the
+ agreeable, philosophizing voice with pleasure.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Some herb vodka? Certainly!” said Túshin. “But still, to
+ conceive a future life...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not finish. Just then there was a whistle in the air; nearer and
+ nearer, faster and louder, louder and faster, a cannon ball, as if it had
+ not finished saying what was necessary, thudded into the ground near the
+ shed with super human force, throwing up a mass of earth. The ground
+ seemed to groan at the terrible impact.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And immediately Túshin, with a short pipe in the corner of his mouth and
+ his kind, intelligent face rather pale, rushed out of the shed followed by
+ the owner of the manly voice, a dashing infantry officer who hurried off
+ to his company, buttoning up his coat as he ran.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII
+ 
+ 
+ Mounting his horse again Prince Andrew lingered with the battery, looking
+ at the puff from the gun that had sent the ball. His eyes ran rapidly over
+ the wide space, but he only saw that the hitherto motionless masses of the
+ French now swayed and that there really was a battery to their left. The
+ smoke above it had not yet dispersed. Two mounted Frenchmen, probably
+ adjutants, were galloping up the hill. A small but distinctly visible
+ enemy column was moving down the hill, probably to strengthen the front
+ line. The smoke of the first shot had not yet dispersed before another
+ puff appeared, followed by a report. The battle had begun! Prince Andrew
+ turned his horse and galloped back to Grunth to find Prince Bagratión. He
+ heard the cannonade behind him growing louder and more frequent. Evidently
+ our guns had begun to reply. From the bottom of the slope, where the
+ parleys had taken place, came the report of musketry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lemarrois had just arrived at a gallop with Bonaparte’s stern letter, and
+ Murat, humiliated and anxious to expiate his fault, had at once moved his
+ forces to attack the center and outflank both the Russian wings, hoping
+ before evening and before the arrival of the Emperor to crush the
+ contemptible detachment that stood before him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It has begun. Here it is!” thought Prince Andrew, feeling the blood rush
+ to his heart. “But where and how will my Toulon present itself?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Passing between the companies that had been eating porridge and drinking
+ vodka a quarter of an hour before, he saw everywhere the same rapid
+ movement of soldiers forming ranks and getting their muskets ready, and on
+ all their faces he recognized the same eagerness that filled his heart.
+ “It has begun! Here it is, dreadful but enjoyable!” was what the face of
+ each soldier and each officer seemed to say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before he had reached the embankments that were being thrown up, he saw,
+ in the light of the dull autumn evening, mounted men coming toward him.
+ The foremost, wearing a Cossack cloak and lambskin cap and riding a white
+ horse, was Prince Bagratión. Prince Andrew stopped, waiting for him to
+ come up; Prince Bagratión reined in his horse and recognizing Prince
+ Andrew nodded to him. He still looked ahead while Prince Andrew told him
+ what he had seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The feeling, “It has begun! Here it is!” was seen even on Prince
+ Bagratión’s hard brown face with its half-closed, dull, sleepy eyes.
+ Prince Andrew gazed with anxious curiosity at that impassive face and
+ wished he could tell what, if anything, this man was thinking and feeling
+ at that moment. “Is there anything at all behind that impassive face?”
+ Prince Andrew asked himself as he looked. Prince Bagratión bent his head
+ in sign of agreement with what Prince Andrew told him, and said, “Very
+ good!” in a tone that seemed to imply that everything that took place and
+ was reported to him was exactly what he had foreseen. Prince Andrew, out
+ of breath with his rapid ride, spoke quickly. Prince Bagratión, uttering
+ his words with an Oriental accent, spoke particularly slowly, as if to
+ impress the fact that there was no need to hurry. However, he put his
+ horse to a trot in the direction of Túshin’s battery. Prince Andrew
+ followed with the suite. Behind Prince Bagratión rode an officer of the
+ suite, the prince’s personal adjutant, Zherkóv, an orderly officer, the
+ staff officer on duty, riding a fine bobtailed horse, and a civilian—an
+ accountant who had asked permission to be present at the battle out of
+ curiosity. The accountant, a stout, full-faced man, looked around him with
+ a naïve smile of satisfaction and presented a strange appearance among the
+ hussars, Cossacks, and adjutants, in his camlet coat, as he jolted on his
+ horse with a convoy officer’s saddle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He wants to see a battle,” said Zherkóv to Bolkónski, pointing to the
+ accountant, “but he feels a pain in the pit of his stomach already.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, leave off!” said the accountant with a beaming but rather cunning
+ smile, as if flattered at being made the subject of Zherkóv’s joke, and
+ purposely trying to appear stupider than he really was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is very strange, mon Monsieur Prince ,” said the staff officer. (He
+ remembered that in French there is some peculiar way of addressing a
+ prince, but could not get it quite right.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By this time they were all approaching Túshin’s battery, and a ball struck
+ the ground in front of them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s that that has fallen?” asked the accountant with a naïve smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A French pancake,” answered Zherkóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So that’s what they hit with?” asked the accountant. “How awful!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He seemed to swell with satisfaction. He had hardly finished speaking when
+ they again heard an unexpectedly violent whistling which suddenly ended
+ with a thud into something soft... f-f-flop! and a Cossack, riding a
+ little to their right and behind the accountant, crashed to earth with his
+ horse. Zherkóv and the staff officer bent over their saddles and turned
+ their horses away. The accountant stopped, facing the Cossack, and
+ examined him with attentive curiosity. The Cossack was dead, but the horse
+ still struggled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Bagratión screwed up his eyes, looked round, and, seeing the cause
+ of the confusion, turned away with indifference, as if to say, “Is it
+ worth while noticing trifles?” He reined in his horse with the care of a
+ skillful rider and, slightly bending over, disengaged his saber which had
+ caught in his cloak. It was an old-fashioned saber of a kind no longer in
+ general use. Prince Andrew remembered the story of Suvórov giving his
+ saber to Bagratión in Italy, and the recollection was particularly
+ pleasant at that moment. They had reached the battery at which Prince
+ Andrew had been when he examined the battlefield.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Whose company?” asked Prince Bagratión of an artilleryman standing by the
+ ammunition wagon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He asked, “Whose company?” but he really meant, “Are you frightened here?”
+ and the artilleryman understood him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Captain Túshin’s, your excellency!” shouted the red-haired, freckled
+ gunner in a merry voice, standing to attention.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes,” muttered Bagratión as if considering something, and he rode
+ past the limbers to the farthest cannon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he approached, a ringing shot issued from it deafening him and his
+ suite, and in the smoke that suddenly surrounded the gun they could see
+ the gunners who had seized it straining to roll it quickly back to its
+ former position. A huge, broad-shouldered gunner, Number One, holding a
+ mop, his legs far apart, sprang to the wheel; while Number Two with a
+ trembling hand placed a charge in the cannon’s mouth. The short,
+ round-shouldered Captain Túshin, stumbling over the tail of the gun
+ carriage, moved forward and, not noticing the general, looked out shading
+ his eyes with his small hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lift it two lines more and it will be just right,” cried he in a feeble
+ voice to which he tried to impart a dashing note, ill-suited to his weak
+ figure. “Number Two!” he squeaked. “Fire, Medvédev!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bagratión called to him, and Túshin, raising three fingers to his cap with
+ a bashful and awkward gesture not at all like a military salute but like a
+ priest’s benediction, approached the general. Though Túshin’s guns had
+ been intended to cannonade the valley, he was firing incendiary balls at
+ the village of Schön Grabern visible just opposite, in front of which
+ large masses of French were advancing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No one had given Túshin orders where and at what to fire, but after
+ consulting his sergeant major, Zakharchénko, for whom he had great
+ respect, he had decided that it would be a good thing to set fire to the
+ village. “Very good!” said Bagratión in reply to the officer’s report, and
+ began deliberately to examine the whole battlefield extended before him.
+ The French had advanced nearest on our right. Below the height on which
+ the Kiev regiment was stationed, in the hollow where the rivulet flowed,
+ the soul-stirring rolling and crackling of musketry was heard, and much
+ farther to the right beyond the dragoons, the officer of the suite pointed
+ out to Bagratión a French column that was outflanking us. To the left the
+ horizon bounded by the adjacent wood. Prince Bagratión ordered two
+ battalions from the center to be sent to reinforce the right flank. The
+ officer of the suite ventured to remark to the prince that if these
+ battalions went away, the guns would remain without support. Prince
+ Bagratión turned to the officer and with his dull eyes looked at him in
+ silence. It seemed to Prince Andrew that the officer’s remark was just and
+ that really no answer could be made to it. But at that moment an adjutant
+ galloped up with a message from the commander of the regiment in the
+ hollow and news that immense masses of the French were coming down upon
+ them and that his regiment was in disorder and was retreating upon the
+ Kiev grenadiers. Prince Bagratión bowed his head in sign of assent and
+ approval. He rode off at a walk to the right and sent an adjutant to the
+ dragoons with orders to attack the French. But this adjutant returned half
+ an hour later with the news that the commander of the dragoons had already
+ retreated beyond the dip in the ground, as a heavy fire had been opened on
+ him and he was losing men uselessly, and so had hastened to throw some
+ sharpshooters into the wood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very good!” said Bagratión.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he was leaving the battery, firing was heard on the left also, and as
+ it was too far to the left flank for him to have time to go there himself,
+ Prince Bagratión sent Zherkóv to tell the general in command (the one who
+ had paraded his regiment before Kutúzov at Braunau) that he must retreat
+ as quickly as possible behind the hollow in the rear, as the right flank
+ would probably not be able to withstand the enemy’s attack very long.
+ About Túshin and the battalion that had been in support of his battery all
+ was forgotten. Prince Andrew listened attentively to Bagratión’s
+ colloquies with the commanding officers and the orders he gave them and,
+ to his surprise, found that no orders were really given, but that Prince
+ Bagratión tried to make it appear that everything done by necessity, by
+ accident, or by the will of subordinate commanders was done, if not by his
+ direct command, at least in accord with his intentions. Prince Andrew
+ noticed, however, that though what happened was due to chance and was
+ independent of the commander’s will, owing to the tact Bagratión showed,
+ his presence was very valuable. Officers who approached him with disturbed
+ countenances became calm; soldiers and officers greeted him gaily, grew
+ more cheerful in his presence, and were evidently anxious to display their
+ courage before him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII
+ 
+ 
+ Prince Bagratión, having reached the highest point of our right flank,
+ began riding downhill to where the roll of musketry was heard but where on
+ account of the smoke nothing could be seen. The nearer they got to the
+ hollow the less they could see but the more they felt the nearness of the
+ actual battlefield. They began to meet wounded men. One with a bleeding
+ head and no cap was being dragged along by two soldiers who supported him
+ under the arms. There was a gurgle in his throat and he was spitting
+ blood. A bullet had evidently hit him in the throat or mouth. Another was
+ walking sturdily by himself but without his musket, groaning aloud and
+ swinging his arm which had just been hurt, while blood from it was
+ streaming over his greatcoat as from a bottle. He had that moment been
+ wounded and his face showed fear rather than suffering. Crossing a road
+ they descended a steep incline and saw several men lying on the ground;
+ they also met a crowd of soldiers some of whom were unwounded. The
+ soldiers were ascending the hill breathing heavily, and despite the
+ general’s presence were talking loudly and gesticulating. In front of them
+ rows of gray cloaks were already visible through the smoke, and an officer
+ catching sight of Bagratión rushed shouting after the crowd of retreating
+ soldiers, ordering them back. Bagratión rode up to the ranks along which
+ shots crackled now here and now there, drowning the sound of voices and
+ the shouts of command. The whole air reeked with smoke. The excited faces
+ of the soldiers were blackened with it. Some were using their ramrods,
+ others putting powder on the touchpans or taking charges from their
+ pouches, while others were firing, though who they were firing at could
+ not be seen for the smoke which there was no wind to carry away. A
+ pleasant humming and whistling of bullets were often heard. “What is
+ this?” thought Prince Andrew approaching the crowd of soldiers. “It can’t
+ be an attack, for they are not moving; it can’t be a square—for they
+ are not drawn up for that.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The commander of the regiment, a thin, feeble-looking old man with a
+ pleasant smile—his eyelids drooping more than half over his old
+ eyes, giving him a mild expression, rode up to Bagratión and welcomed him
+ as a host welcomes an honored guest. He reported that his regiment had
+ been attacked by French cavalry and that, though the attack had been
+ repulsed, he had lost more than half his men. He said the attack had been
+ repulsed, employing this military term to describe what had occurred to
+ his regiment, but in reality he did not himself know what had happened
+ during that half-hour to the troops entrusted to him, and could not say
+ with certainty whether the attack had been repulsed or his regiment had
+ been broken up. All he knew was that at the commencement of the action
+ balls and shells began flying all over his regiment and hitting men and
+ that afterwards someone had shouted “Cavalry!” and our men had begun
+ firing. They were still firing, not at the cavalry which had disappeared,
+ but at French infantry who had come into the hollow and were firing at our
+ men. Prince Bagratión bowed his head as a sign that this was exactly what
+ he had desired and expected. Turning to his adjutant he ordered him to
+ bring down the two battalions of the Sixth Chasseurs whom they had just
+ passed. Prince Andrew was struck by the changed expression on Prince
+ Bagratión’s face at this moment. It expressed the concentrated and happy
+ resolution you see on the face of a man who on a hot day takes a final run
+ before plunging into the water. The dull, sleepy expression was no longer
+ there, nor the affectation of profound thought. The round, steady, hawk’s
+ eyes looked before him eagerly and rather disdainfully, not resting on
+ anything although his movements were still slow and measured.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The commander of the regiment turned to Prince Bagratión, entreating him
+ to go back as it was too dangerous to remain where they were. “Please,
+ your excellency, for God’s sake!” he kept saying, glancing for support at
+ an officer of the suite who turned away from him. “There, you see!” and he
+ drew attention to the bullets whistling, singing, and hissing continually
+ around them. He spoke in the tone of entreaty and reproach that a
+ carpenter uses to a gentleman who has picked up an ax: “We are used to it,
+ but you, sir, will blister your hands.” He spoke as if those bullets could
+ not kill him, and his half-closed eyes gave still more persuasiveness to
+ his words. The staff officer joined in the colonel’s appeals, but
+ Bagratión did not reply; he only gave an order to cease firing and
+ re-form, so as to give room for the two approaching battalions. While he
+ was speaking, the curtain of smoke that had concealed the hollow, driven
+ by a rising wind, began to move from right to left as if drawn by an
+ invisible hand, and the hill opposite, with the French moving about on it,
+ opened out before them. All eyes fastened involuntarily on this French
+ column advancing against them and winding down over the uneven ground. One
+ could already see the soldiers’ shaggy caps, distinguish the officers from
+ the men, and see the standard flapping against its staff.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They march splendidly,” remarked someone in Bagratión’s suite.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The head of the column had already descended into the hollow. The clash
+ would take place on this side of it...
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The remains of our regiment which had been in action rapidly formed up and
+ moved to the right; from behind it, dispersing the laggards, came two
+ battalions of the Sixth Chasseurs in fine order. Before they had reached
+ Bagratión, the weighty tread of the mass of men marching in step could be
+ heard. On their left flank, nearest to Bagratión, marched a company
+ commander, a fine round-faced man, with a stupid and happy expression—the
+ same man who had rushed out of the wattle shed. At that moment he was
+ clearly thinking of nothing but how dashing a fellow he would appear as he
+ passed the commander.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With the self-satisfaction of a man on parade, he stepped lightly with his
+ muscular legs as if sailing along, stretching himself to his full height
+ without the smallest effort, his ease contrasting with the heavy tread of
+ the soldiers who were keeping step with him. He carried close to his leg a
+ narrow unsheathed sword (small, curved, and not like a real weapon) and
+ looked now at the superior officers and now back at the men without losing
+ step, his whole powerful body turning flexibly. It was as if all the
+ powers of his soul were concentrated on passing the commander in the best
+ possible manner, and feeling that he was doing it well he was happy.
+ “Left... left... left...” he seemed to repeat to himself at each alternate
+ step; and in time to this, with stern but varied faces, the wall of
+ soldiers burdened with knapsacks and muskets marched in step, and each one
+ of these hundreds of soldiers seemed to be repeating to himself at each
+ alternate step, “Left... left... left...” A fat major skirted a bush,
+ puffing and falling out of step; a soldier who had fallen behind, his face
+ showing alarm at his defection, ran at a trot, panting to catch up with
+ his company. A cannon ball, cleaving the air, flew over the heads of
+ Bagratión and his suite, and fell into the column to the measure of
+ “Left... left!” “Close up!” came the company commander’s voice in jaunty
+ tones. The soldiers passed in a semicircle round something where the ball
+ had fallen, and an old trooper on the flank, a noncommissioned officer who
+ had stopped beside the dead men, ran to catch up his line and, falling
+ into step with a hop, looked back angrily, and through the ominous silence
+ and the regular tramp of feet beating the ground in unison, one seemed to
+ hear left... left... left. 
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Well done, lads!” said Prince Bagratión.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Glad to do our best, your ex’len-lency!” came a confused shout from the
+ ranks. A morose soldier marching on the left turned his eyes on Bagratión
+ as he shouted, with an expression that seemed to say: “We know that
+ ourselves!” Another, without looking round, as though fearing to relax,
+ shouted with his mouth wide open and passed on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The order was given to halt and down knapsacks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bagratión rode round the ranks that had marched past him and dismounted.
+ He gave the reins to a Cossack, took off and handed over his felt coat,
+ stretched his legs, and set his cap straight. The head of the French
+ column, with its officers leading, appeared from below the hill.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Forward, with God!” said Bagratión, in a resolute, sonorous voice,
+ turning for a moment to the front line, and slightly swinging his arms, he
+ went forward uneasily over the rough field with the awkward gait of a
+ cavalryman. Prince Andrew felt that an invisible power was leading him
+ forward, and experienced great happiness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French were already near. Prince Andrew, walking beside Bagratión,
+ could clearly distinguish their bandoliers, red epaulets, and even their
+ faces. (He distinctly saw an old French officer who, with gaitered legs
+ and turned-out toes, climbed the hill with difficulty.) Prince Bagratión
+ gave no further orders and silently continued to walk on in front of the
+ ranks. Suddenly one shot after another rang out from the French, smoke
+ appeared all along their uneven ranks, and musket shots sounded. Several
+ of our men fell, among them the round-faced officer who had marched so
+ gaily and complacently. But at the moment the first report was heard,
+ Bagratión looked round and shouted, “Hurrah!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hurrah—ah!—ah!” rang a long-drawn shout from our ranks, and
+ passing Bagratión and racing one another they rushed in an irregular but
+ joyous and eager crowd down the hill at their disordered foe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX
+ 
+ 
+ The attack of the Sixth Chasseurs secured the retreat of our right flank.
+ In the center Túshin’s forgotten battery, which had managed to set fire to
+ the Schön Grabern village, delayed the French advance. The French were
+ putting out the fire which the wind was spreading, and thus gave us time
+ to retreat. The retirement of the center to the other side of the dip in
+ the ground at the rear was hurried and noisy, but the different companies
+ did not get mixed. But our left—which consisted of the Azóv and
+ Podólsk infantry and the Pávlograd hussars—was simultaneously
+ attacked and outflanked by superior French forces under Lannes and was
+ thrown into confusion. Bagratión had sent Zherkóv to the general
+ commanding that left flank with orders to retreat immediately.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Zherkóv, not removing his hand from his cap, turned his horse about and
+ galloped off. But no sooner had he left Bagratión than his courage failed
+ him. He was seized by panic and could not go where it was dangerous.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having reached the left flank, instead of going to the front where the
+ firing was, he began to look for the general and his staff where they
+ could not possibly be, and so did not deliver the order.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The command of the left flank belonged by seniority to the commander of
+ the regiment Kutúzov had reviewed at Braunau and in which Dólokhov was
+ serving as a private. But the command of the extreme left flank had been
+ assigned to the commander of the Pávlograd regiment in which Rostóv was
+ serving, and a misunderstanding arose. The two commanders were much
+ exasperated with one another and, long after the action had begun on the
+ right flank and the French were already advancing, were engaged in
+ discussion with the sole object of offending one another. But the
+ regiments, both cavalry and infantry, were by no means ready for the
+ impending action. From privates to general they were not expecting a
+ battle and were engaged in peaceful occupations, the cavalry feeding the
+ horses and the infantry collecting wood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He higher iss dan I in rank,” said the German colonel of the hussars,
+ flushing and addressing an adjutant who had ridden up, “so let him do what
+ he vill, but I cannot sacrifice my hussars... Bugler, sount ze retreat!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But haste was becoming imperative. Cannon and musketry, mingling together,
+ thundered on the right and in the center, while the capotes of Lannes’
+ sharpshooters were already seen crossing the milldam and forming up within
+ twice the range of a musket shot. The general in command of the infantry
+ went toward his horse with jerky steps, and having mounted drew himself up
+ very straight and tall and rode to the Pávlograd commander. The commanders
+ met with polite bows but with secret malevolence in their hearts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Once again, Colonel,” said the general, “I can’t leave half my men in the
+ wood. I beg of you, I beg of you,” he repeated, “to occupy the position 
+ and prepare for an attack.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I peg of you yourself not to mix in vot is not your business!” suddenly
+ replied the irate colonel. “If you vere in the cavalry...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am not in the cavalry, Colonel, but I am a Russian general and if you
+ are not aware of the fact...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Quite avare, your excellency,” suddenly shouted the colonel, touching his
+ horse and turning purple in the face. “Vill you be so goot to come to ze
+ front and see dat zis position iss no goot? I don’t vish to destroy my men
+ for your pleasure!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You forget yourself, Colonel. I am not considering my own pleasure and I
+ won’t allow it to be said!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Taking the colonel’s outburst as a challenge to his courage, the general
+ expanded his chest and rode, frowning, beside him to the front line, as if
+ their differences would be settled there amongst the bullets. They reached
+ the front, several bullets sped over them, and they halted in silence.
+ There was nothing fresh to be seen from the line, for from where they had
+ been before it had been evident that it was impossible for cavalry to act
+ among the bushes and broken ground, as well as that the French were
+ outflanking our left. The general and colonel looked sternly and
+ significantly at one another like two fighting cocks preparing for battle,
+ each vainly trying to detect signs of cowardice in the other. Both passed
+ the examination successfully. As there was nothing to be said, and neither
+ wished to give occasion for it to be alleged that he had been the first to
+ leave the range of fire, they would have remained there for a long time
+ testing each other’s courage had it not been that just then they heard the
+ rattle of musketry and a muffled shout almost behind them in the wood. The
+ French had attacked the men collecting wood in the copse. It was no longer
+ possible for the hussars to retreat with the infantry. They were cut off
+ from the line of retreat on the left by the French. However inconvenient
+ the position, it was now necessary to attack in order to cut a way through
+ for themselves.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The squadron in which Rostóv was serving had scarcely time to mount before
+ it was halted facing the enemy. Again, as at the Enns bridge, there was
+ nothing between the squadron and the enemy, and again that terrible
+ dividing line of uncertainty and fear—resembling the line separating
+ the living from the dead—lay between them. All were conscious of
+ this unseen line, and the question whether they would cross it or not, and
+ how they would cross it, agitated them all.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The colonel rode to the front, angrily gave some reply to questions put to
+ him by the officers, and, like a man desperately insisting on having his
+ own way, gave an order. No one said anything definite, but the rumor of an
+ attack spread through the squadron. The command to form up rang out and
+ the sabers whizzed as they were drawn from their scabbards. Still no one
+ moved. The troops of the left flank, infantry and hussars alike, felt that
+ the commander did not himself know what to do, and this irresolution
+ communicated itself to the men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If only they would be quick!” thought Rostóv, feeling that at last the
+ time had come to experience the joy of an attack of which he had so often
+ heard from his fellow hussars.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fo’ward, with God, lads!” rang out Denísov’s voice. “At a twot fo’ward!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The horses’ croups began to sway in the front line. Rook pulled at the
+ reins and started of his own accord.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before him, on the right, Rostóv saw the front lines of his hussars and
+ still farther ahead a dark line which he could not see distinctly but took
+ to be the enemy. Shots could be heard, but some way off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Faster!” came the word of command, and Rostóv felt Rook’s flanks drooping
+ as he broke into a gallop.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv anticipated his horse’s movements and became more and more elated.
+ He had noticed a solitary tree ahead of him. This tree had been in the
+ middle of the line that had seemed so terrible—and now he had
+ crossed that line and not only was there nothing terrible, but everything
+ was becoming more and more happy and animated. “Oh, how I will slash at
+ him!” thought Rostóv, gripping the hilt of his saber.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hur-a-a-a-ah!” came a roar of voices. “Let anyone come my way now,”
+ thought Rostóv driving his spurs into Rook and letting him go at a full
+ gallop so that he outstripped the others. Ahead, the enemy was already
+ visible. Suddenly something like a birch broom seemed to sweep over the
+ squadron. Rostóv raised his saber, ready to strike, but at that instant
+ the trooper Nikítenko, who was galloping ahead, shot away from him, and
+ Rostóv felt as in a dream that he continued to be carried forward with
+ unnatural speed but yet stayed on the same spot. From behind him
+ Bondarchúk, an hussar he knew, jolted against him and looked angrily at
+ him. Bondarchúk’s horse swerved and galloped past.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How is it I am not moving? I have fallen, I am killed!” Rostóv asked and
+ answered at the same instant. He was alone in the middle of a field.
+ Instead of the moving horses and hussars’ backs, he saw nothing before him
+ but the motionless earth and the stubble around him. There was warm blood
+ under his arm. “No, I am wounded and the horse is killed.” Rook tried to
+ rise on his forelegs but fell back, pinning his rider’s leg. Blood was
+ flowing from his head; he struggled but could not rise. Rostóv also tried
+ to rise but fell back, his sabretache having become entangled in the
+ saddle. Where our men were, and where the French, he did not know. There
+ was no one near.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having disentangled his leg, he rose. “Where, on which side, was now the
+ line that had so sharply divided the two armies?” he asked himself and
+ could not answer. “Can something bad have happened to me?” he wondered as
+ he got up: and at that moment he felt that something superfluous was
+ hanging on his benumbed left arm. The wrist felt as if it were not his. He
+ examined his hand carefully, vainly trying to find blood on it. “Ah, here
+ are people coming,” he thought joyfully, seeing some men running toward
+ him. “They will help me!” In front came a man wearing a strange shako and
+ a blue cloak, swarthy, sunburned, and with a hooked nose. Then came two
+ more, and many more running behind. One of them said something strange,
+ not in Russian. In among the hindmost of these men wearing similar shakos
+ was a Russian hussar. He was being held by the arms and his horse was
+ being led behind him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It must be one of ours, a prisoner. Yes. Can it be that they will take me
+ too? Who are these men?” thought Rostóv, scarcely believing his eyes. “Can
+ they be French?” He looked at the approaching Frenchmen, and though but a
+ moment before he had been galloping to get at them and hack them to
+ pieces, their proximity now seemed so awful that he could not believe his
+ eyes. “Who are they? Why are they running? Can they be coming at me? And
+ why? To kill me? Me whom everyone is so fond of?” He remembered his
+ mother’s love for him, and his family’s, and his friends’, and the enemy’s
+ intention to kill him seemed impossible. “But perhaps they may do it!” For
+ more than ten seconds he stood not moving from the spot or realizing the
+ situation. The foremost Frenchman, the one with the hooked nose, was
+ already so close that the expression of his face could be seen. And the
+ excited, alien face of that man, his bayonet hanging down, holding his
+ breath, and running so lightly, frightened Rostóv. He seized his pistol
+ and, instead of firing it, flung it at the Frenchman and ran with all his
+ might toward the bushes. He did not now run with the feeling of doubt and
+ conflict with which he had trodden the Enns bridge, but with the feeling
+ of a hare fleeing from the hounds. One single sentiment, that of fear for
+ his young and happy life, possessed his whole being. Rapidly leaping the
+ furrows, he fled across the field with the impetuosity he used to show at
+ catchplay, now and then turning his good-natured, pale, young face to look
+ back. A shudder of terror went through him: “No, better not look,” he
+ thought, but having reached the bushes he glanced round once more. The
+ French had fallen behind, and just as he looked round the first man
+ changed his run to a walk and, turning, shouted something loudly to a
+ comrade farther back. Rostóv paused. “No, there’s some mistake,” thought
+ he. “They can’t have wanted to kill me.” But at the same time, his left
+ arm felt as heavy as if a seventy-pound weight were tied to it. He could
+ run no more. The Frenchman also stopped and took aim. Rostóv closed his
+ eyes and stooped down. One bullet and then another whistled past him. He
+ mustered his last remaining strength, took hold of his left hand with his
+ right, and reached the bushes. Behind these were some Russian
+ sharpshooters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX
+ 
+ 
+ The infantry regiments that had been caught unawares in the outskirts of
+ the wood ran out of it, the different companies getting mixed, and
+ retreated as a disorderly crowd. One soldier, in his fear, uttered the
+ senseless cry, “Cut off!” that is so terrible in battle, and that word
+ infected the whole crowd with a feeling of panic.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Surrounded! Cut off? We’re lost!” shouted the fugitives.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The moment he heard the firing and the cry from behind, the general
+ realized that something dreadful had happened to his regiment, and the
+ thought that he, an exemplary officer of many years’ service who had never
+ been to blame, might be held responsible at headquarters for negligence or
+ inefficiency so staggered him that, forgetting the recalcitrant cavalry
+ colonel, his own dignity as a general, and above all quite forgetting the
+ danger and all regard for self-preservation, he clutched the crupper of
+ his saddle and, spurring his horse, galloped to the regiment under a hail
+ of bullets which fell around, but fortunately missed him. His one desire
+ was to know what was happening and at any cost correct, or remedy, the
+ mistake if he had made one, so that he, an exemplary officer of twenty-two
+ years’ service, who had never been censured, should not be held to blame.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having galloped safely through the French, he reached a field behind the
+ copse across which our men, regardless of orders, were running and
+ descending the valley. That moment of moral hesitation which decides the
+ fate of battles had arrived. Would this disorderly crowd of soldiers
+ attend to the voice of their commander, or would they, disregarding him,
+ continue their flight? Despite his desperate shouts that used to seem so
+ terrible to the soldiers, despite his furious purple countenance distorted
+ out of all likeness to his former self, and the flourishing of his saber,
+ the soldiers all continued to run, talking, firing into the air, and
+ disobeying orders. The moral hesitation which decided the fate of battles
+ was evidently culminating in a panic.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The general had a fit of coughing as a result of shouting and of the
+ powder smoke and stopped in despair. Everything seemed lost. But at that
+ moment the French who were attacking, suddenly and without any apparent
+ reason, ran back and disappeared from the outskirts, and Russian
+ sharpshooters showed themselves in the copse. It was Timókhin’s company,
+ which alone had maintained its order in the wood and, having lain in
+ ambush in a ditch, now attacked the French unexpectedly. Timókhin, armed
+ only with a sword, had rushed at the enemy with such a desperate cry and
+ such mad, drunken determination that, taken by surprise, the French had
+ thrown down their muskets and run. Dólokhov, running beside Timókhin,
+ killed a Frenchman at close quarters and was the first to seize the
+ surrendering French officer by his collar. Our fugitives returned, the
+ battalions re-formed, and the French who had nearly cut our left flank in
+ half were for the moment repulsed. Our reserve units were able to join up,
+ and the fight was at an end. The regimental commander and Major Ekonómov
+ had stopped beside a bridge, letting the retreating companies pass by
+ them, when a soldier came up and took hold of the commander’s stirrup,
+ almost leaning against him. The man was wearing a bluish coat of
+ broadcloth, he had no knapsack or cap, his head was bandaged, and over his
+ shoulder a French munition pouch was slung. He had an officer’s sword in
+ his hand. The soldier was pale, his blue eyes looked impudently into the
+ commander’s face, and his lips were smiling. Though the commander was
+ occupied in giving instructions to Major Ekonómov, he could not help
+ taking notice of the soldier.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency, here are two trophies,” said Dólokhov, pointing to the
+ French sword and pouch. “I have taken an officer prisoner. I stopped the
+ company.” Dólokhov breathed heavily from weariness and spoke in abrupt
+ sentences. “The whole company can bear witness. I beg you will remember
+ this, your excellency!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right, all right,” replied the commander, and turned to Major
+ Ekonómov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Dólokhov did not go away; he untied the handkerchief around his head,
+ pulled it off, and showed the blood congealed on his hair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A bayonet wound. I remained at the front. Remember, your excellency!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Túshin’s battery had been forgotten and only at the very end of the action
+ did Prince Bagratión, still hearing the cannonade in the center, send his
+ orderly staff officer, and later Prince Andrew also, to order the battery
+ to retire as quickly as possible. When the supports attached to Túshin’s
+ battery had been moved away in the middle of the action by someone’s
+ order, the battery had continued firing and was only not captured by the
+ French because the enemy could not surmise that anyone could have the
+ effrontery to continue firing from four quite undefended guns. On the
+ contrary, the energetic action of that battery led the French to suppose
+ that here—in the center—the main Russian forces were
+ concentrated. Twice they had attempted to attack this point, but on each
+ occasion had been driven back by grapeshot from the four isolated guns on
+ the hillock.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon after Prince Bagratión had left him, Túshin had succeeded in setting
+ fire to Schön Grabern.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look at them scurrying! It’s burning! Just see the smoke! Fine! Grand!
+ Look at the smoke, the smoke!” exclaimed the artillerymen, brightening up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the guns, without waiting for orders, were being fired in the
+ direction of the conflagration. As if urging each other on, the soldiers
+ cried at each shot: “Fine! That’s good! Look at it... Grand!” The fire,
+ fanned by the breeze, was rapidly spreading. The French columns that had
+ advanced beyond the village went back; but as though in revenge for this
+ failure, the enemy placed ten guns to the right of the village and began
+ firing them at Túshin’s battery.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In their childlike glee, aroused by the fire and their luck in
+ successfully cannonading the French, our artillerymen only noticed this
+ battery when two balls, and then four more, fell among our guns, one
+ knocking over two horses and another tearing off a munition-wagon driver’s
+ leg. Their spirits once roused were, however, not diminished, but only
+ changed character. The horses were replaced by others from a reserve gun
+ carriage, the wounded were carried away, and the four guns were turned
+ against the ten-gun battery. Túshin’s companion officer had been killed at
+ the beginning of the engagement and within an hour seventeen of the forty
+ men of the guns’ crews had been disabled, but the artillerymen were still
+ as merry and lively as ever. Twice they noticed the French appearing below
+ them, and then they fired grapeshot at them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Little Túshin, moving feebly and awkwardly, kept telling his orderly to
+ “refill my pipe for that one!” and then, scattering sparks from it, ran
+ forward shading his eyes with his small hand to look at the French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Smack at ‘em, lads!” he kept saying, seizing the guns by the wheels and
+ working the screws himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Amid the smoke, deafened by the incessant reports which always made him
+ jump, Túshin not taking his pipe from his mouth ran from gun to gun, now
+ aiming, now counting the charges, now giving orders about replacing dead
+ or wounded horses and harnessing fresh ones, and shouting in his feeble
+ voice, so high pitched and irresolute. His face grew more and more
+ animated. Only when a man was killed or wounded did he frown and turn away
+ from the sight, shouting angrily at the men who, as is always the case,
+ hesitated about lifting the injured or dead. The soldiers, for the most
+ part handsome fellows and, as is always the case in an artillery company,
+ a head and shoulders taller and twice as broad as their officer—all
+ looked at their commander like children in an embarrassing situation, and
+ the expression on his face was invariably reflected on theirs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Owing to the terrible uproar and the necessity for concentration and
+ activity, Túshin did not experience the slightest unpleasant sense of
+ fear, and the thought that he might be killed or badly wounded never
+ occurred to him. On the contrary, he became more and more elated. It
+ seemed to him that it was a very long time ago, almost a day, since he had
+ first seen the enemy and fired the first shot, and that the corner of the
+ field he stood on was well-known and familiar ground. Though he thought of
+ everything, considered everything, and did everything the best of officers
+ could do in his position, he was in a state akin to feverish delirium or
+ drunkenness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the deafening sounds of his own guns around him, the whistle and thud
+ of the enemy’s cannon balls, from the flushed and perspiring faces of the
+ crew bustling round the guns, from the sight of the blood of men and
+ horses, from the little puffs of smoke on the enemy’s side (always
+ followed by a ball flying past and striking the earth, a man, a gun, a
+ horse), from the sight of all these things a fantastic world of his own
+ had taken possession of his brain and at that moment afforded him
+ pleasure. The enemy’s guns were in his fancy not guns but pipes from which
+ occasional puffs were blown by an invisible smoker.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There... he’s puffing again,” muttered Túshin to himself, as a small
+ cloud rose from the hill and was borne in a streak to the left by the
+ wind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now look out for the ball... we’ll throw it back.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do you want, your honor?” asked an artilleryman, standing close by,
+ who heard him muttering.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing... only a shell...” he answered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come along, our Matvévna!” he said to himself. “Matvévna” * was the name
+ his fancy gave to the farthest gun of the battery, which was large and of
+ an old pattern. The French swarming round their guns seemed to him like
+ ants. In that world, the handsome drunkard Number One of the second gun’s
+ crew was “uncle”; Túshin looked at him more often than at anyone else and
+ took delight in his every movement. The sound of musketry at the foot of
+ the hill, now diminishing, now increasing, seemed like someone’s
+ breathing. He listened intently to the ebb and flow of these sounds.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Daughter of Matthew.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah! Breathing again, breathing!” he muttered to himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He imagined himself as an enormously tall, powerful man who was throwing
+ cannon balls at the French with both hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then, Matvévna, dear old lady, don’t let me down!” he was saying as
+ he moved from the gun, when a strange, unfamiliar voice called above his
+ head: “Captain Túshin! Captain!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Túshin turned round in dismay. It was the staff officer who had turned him
+ out of the booth at Grunth. He was shouting in a gasping voice:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Are you mad? You have twice been ordered to retreat, and you...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why are they down on me?” thought Túshin, looking in alarm at his
+ superior.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I... don’t...” he muttered, holding up two fingers to his cap. “I...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the staff officer did not finish what he wanted to say. A cannon ball,
+ flying close to him, caused him to duck and bend over his horse. He
+ paused, and just as he was about to say something more, another ball
+ stopped him. He turned his horse and galloped off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Retire! All to retire!” he shouted from a distance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The soldiers laughed. A moment later, an adjutant arrived with the same
+ order.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was Prince Andrew. The first thing he saw on riding up to the space
+ where Túshin’s guns were stationed was an unharnessed horse with a broken
+ leg, that lay screaming piteously beside the harnessed horses. Blood was
+ gushing from its leg as from a spring. Among the limbers lay several dead
+ men. One ball after another passed over as he approached and he felt a
+ nervous shudder run down his spine. But the mere thought of being afraid
+ roused him again. “I cannot be afraid,” thought he, and dismounted slowly
+ among the guns. He delivered the order and did not leave the battery. He
+ decided to have the guns removed from their positions and withdrawn in his
+ presence. Together with Túshin, stepping across the bodies and under a
+ terrible fire from the French, he attended to the removal of the guns.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A staff officer was here a minute ago, but skipped off,” said an
+ artilleryman to Prince Andrew. “Not like your honor!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew said nothing to Túshin. They were both so busy as to seem
+ not to notice one another. When having limbered up the only two cannon
+ that remained uninjured out of the four, they began moving down the hill
+ (one shattered gun and one unicorn were left behind), Prince Andrew rode
+ up to Túshin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, till we meet again...” he said, holding out his hand to Túshin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good-by, my dear fellow,” said Túshin. “Dear soul! Good-by, my dear
+ fellow!” and for some unknown reason tears suddenly filled his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI
+ 
+ 
+ The wind had fallen and black clouds, merging with the powder smoke, hung
+ low over the field of battle on the horizon. It was growing dark and the
+ glow of two conflagrations was the more conspicuous. The cannonade was
+ dying down, but the rattle of musketry behind and on the right sounded
+ oftener and nearer. As soon as Túshin with his guns, continually driving
+ round or coming upon wounded men, was out of range of fire and had
+ descended into the dip, he was met by some of the staff, among them the
+ staff officer and Zherkóv, who had been twice sent to Túshin’s battery but
+ had never reached it. Interrupting one another, they all gave, and
+ transmitted, orders as to how to proceed, reprimanding and reproaching
+ him. Túshin gave no orders, and, silently—fearing to speak because
+ at every word he felt ready to weep without knowing why—rode behind
+ on his artillery nag. Though the orders were to abandon the wounded, many
+ of them dragged themselves after troops and begged for seats on the gun
+ carriages. The jaunty infantry officer who just before the battle had
+ rushed out of Túshin’s wattle shed was laid, with a bullet in his stomach,
+ on “Matvévna’s” carriage. At the foot of the hill, a pale hussar cadet,
+ supporting one hand with the other, came up to Túshin and asked for a
+ seat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Captain, for God’s sake! I’ve hurt my arm,” he said timidly. “For God’s
+ sake... I can’t walk. For God’s sake!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was plain that this cadet had already repeatedly asked for a lift and
+ been refused. He asked in a hesitating, piteous voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tell them to give me a seat, for God’s sake!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Give him a seat,” said Túshin. “Lay a cloak for him to sit on, lad,” he
+ said, addressing his favorite soldier. “And where is the wounded officer?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He has been set down. He died,” replied someone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Help him up. Sit down, dear fellow, sit down! Spread out the cloak,
+ Antónov.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The cadet was Rostóv. With one hand he supported the other; he was pale
+ and his jaw trembled, shivering feverishly. He was placed on “Matvévna,”
+ the gun from which they had removed the dead officer. The cloak they
+ spread under him was wet with blood which stained his breeches and arm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What, are you wounded, my lad?” said Túshin, approaching the gun on which
+ Rostóv sat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, it’s a sprain.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then what is this blood on the gun carriage?” inquired Túshin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It was the officer, your honor, stained it,” answered the artilleryman,
+ wiping away the blood with his coat sleeve, as if apologizing for the
+ state of his gun.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was all that they could do to get the guns up the rise aided by the
+ infantry, and having reached the village of Gruntersdorf they halted. It
+ had grown so dark that one could not distinguish the uniforms ten paces
+ off, and the firing had begun to subside. Suddenly, near by on the right,
+ shouting and firing were again heard. Flashes of shot gleamed in the
+ darkness. This was the last French attack and was met by soldiers who had
+ sheltered in the village houses. They all rushed out of the village again,
+ but Túshin’s guns could not move, and the artillerymen, Túshin, and the
+ cadet exchanged silent glances as they awaited their fate. The firing died
+ down and soldiers, talking eagerly, streamed out of a side street.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not hurt, Petróv?” asked one.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We’ve given it ‘em hot, mate! They won’t make another push now,” said
+ another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You couldn’t see a thing. How they shot at their own fellows! Nothing
+ could be seen. Pitch-dark, brother! Isn’t there something to drink?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French had been repulsed for the last time. And again and again in the
+ complete darkness Túshin’s guns moved forward, surrounded by the humming
+ infantry as by a frame.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the darkness, it seemed as though a gloomy unseen river was flowing
+ always in one direction, humming with whispers and talk and the sound of
+ hoofs and wheels. Amid the general rumble, the groans and voices of the
+ wounded were more distinctly heard than any other sound in the darkness of
+ the night. The gloom that enveloped the army was filled with their groans,
+ which seemed to melt into one with the darkness of the night. After a
+ while the moving mass became agitated, someone rode past on a white horse
+ followed by his suite, and said something in passing: “What did he say?
+ Where to, now? Halt, is it? Did he thank us?” came eager questions from
+ all sides. The whole moving mass began pressing closer together and a
+ report spread that they were ordered to halt: evidently those in front had
+ halted. All remained where they were in the middle of the muddy road.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Fires were lighted and the talk became more audible. Captain Túshin,
+ having given orders to his company, sent a soldier to find a dressing
+ station or a doctor for the cadet, and sat down by a bonfire the soldiers
+ had kindled on the road. Rostóv, too, dragged himself to the fire. From
+ pain, cold, and damp, a feverish shivering shook his whole body.
+ Drowsiness was irresistibly mastering him, but he kept awake by an
+ excruciating pain in his arm, for which he could find no satisfactory
+ position. He kept closing his eyes and then again looking at the fire,
+ which seemed to him dazzlingly red, and at the feeble, round-shouldered
+ figure of Túshin who was sitting cross-legged like a Turk beside him.
+ Túshin’s large, kind, intelligent eyes were fixed with sympathy and
+ commiseration on Rostóv, who saw that Túshin with his whole heart wished
+ to help him but could not.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From all sides were heard the footsteps and talk of the infantry, who were
+ walking, driving past, and settling down all around. The sound of voices,
+ the tramping feet, the horses’ hoofs moving in mud, the crackling of wood
+ fires near and afar, merged into one tremulous rumble.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was no longer, as before, a dark, unseen river flowing through the
+ gloom, but a dark sea swelling and gradually subsiding after a storm.
+ Rostóv looked at and listened listlessly to what passed before and around
+ him. An infantryman came to the fire, squatted on his heels, held his
+ hands to the blaze, and turned away his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You don’t mind your honor?” he asked Túshin. “I’ve lost my company, your
+ honor. I don’t know where... such bad luck!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With the soldier, an infantry officer with a bandaged cheek came up to the
+ bonfire, and addressing Túshin asked him to have the guns moved a trifle
+ to let a wagon go past. After he had gone, two soldiers rushed to the
+ campfire. They were quarreling and fighting desperately, each trying to
+ snatch from the other a boot they were both holding on to.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You picked it up?... I dare say! You’re very smart!” one of them shouted
+ hoarsely.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then a thin, pale soldier, his neck bandaged with a bloodstained leg band,
+ came up and in angry tones asked the artillerymen for water.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Must one die like a dog?” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Túshin told them to give the man some water. Then a cheerful soldier ran
+ up, begging a little fire for the infantry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A nice little hot torch for the infantry! Good luck to you, fellow
+ countrymen. Thanks for the fire—we’ll return it with interest,” said
+ he, carrying away into the darkness a glowing stick.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next came four soldiers, carrying something heavy on a cloak, and passed
+ by the fire. One of them stumbled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who the devil has put the logs on the road?” snarled he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s dead—why carry him?” said another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Shut up!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And they disappeared into the darkness with their load.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Still aching?” Túshin asked Rostóv in a whisper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your honor, you’re wanted by the general. He is in the hut here,” said a
+ gunner, coming up to Túshin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Coming, friend.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Túshin rose and, buttoning his greatcoat and pulling it straight, walked
+ away from the fire.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not far from the artillery campfire, in a hut that had been prepared for
+ him, Prince Bagratión sat at dinner, talking with some commanding officers
+ who had gathered at his quarters. The little old man with the half-closed
+ eyes was there greedily gnawing a mutton bone, and the general who had
+ served blamelessly for twenty-two years, flushed by a glass of vodka and
+ the dinner; and the staff officer with the signet ring, and Zherkóv,
+ uneasily glancing at them all, and Prince Andrew, pale, with compressed
+ lips and feverishly glittering eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In a corner of the hut stood a standard captured from the French, and the
+ accountant with the naïve face was feeling its texture, shaking his head
+ in perplexity—perhaps because the banner really interested him,
+ perhaps because it was hard for him, hungry as he was, to look on at a
+ dinner where there was no place for him. In the next hut there was a
+ French colonel who had been taken prisoner by our dragoons. Our officers
+ were flocking in to look at him. Prince Bagratión was thanking the
+ individual commanders and inquiring into details of the action and our
+ losses. The general whose regiment had been inspected at Braunau was
+ informing the prince that as soon as the action began he had withdrawn
+ from the wood, mustered the men who were woodcutting, and, allowing the
+ French to pass him, had made a bayonet charge with two battalions and had
+ broken up the French troops.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When I saw, your excellency, that their first battalion was disorganized,
+ I stopped in the road and thought: ‘I’ll let them come on and will meet
+ them with the fire of the whole battalion’—and that’s what I did.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The general had so wished to do this and was so sorry he had not managed
+ to do it that it seemed to him as if it had really happened. Perhaps it
+ might really have been so? Could one possibly make out amid all that
+ confusion what did or did not happen?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “By the way, your excellency, I should inform you,” he continued—remembering
+ Dólokhov’s conversation with Kutúzov and his last interview with the
+ gentleman-ranker—“that Private Dólokhov, who was reduced to the
+ ranks, took a French officer prisoner in my presence and particularly
+ distinguished himself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I saw the Pávlograd hussars attack there, your excellency,” chimed in
+ Zherkóv, looking uneasily around. He had not seen the hussars all that
+ day, but had heard about them from an infantry officer. “They broke up two
+ squares, your excellency.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Several of those present smiled at Zherkóv’s words, expecting one of his
+ usual jokes, but noticing that what he was saying redounded to the glory
+ of our arms and of the day’s work, they assumed a serious expression,
+ though many of them knew that what he was saying was a lie devoid of any
+ foundation. Prince Bagratión turned to the old colonel:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gentlemen, I thank you all; all arms have behaved heroically: infantry,
+ cavalry, and artillery. How was it that two guns were abandoned in the
+ center?” he inquired, searching with his eyes for someone. (Prince
+ Bagratión did not ask about the guns on the left flank; he knew that all
+ the guns there had been abandoned at the very beginning of the action.) “I
+ think I sent you?” he added, turning to the staff officer on duty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One was damaged,” answered the staff officer, “and the other I can’t
+ understand. I was there all the time giving orders and had only just
+ left.... It is true that it was hot there,” he added, modestly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Someone mentioned that Captain Túshin was bivouacking close to the village
+ and had already been sent for.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, but you were there?” said Prince Bagratión, addressing Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Of course, we only just missed one another,” said the staff officer, with
+ a smile to Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I had not the pleasure of seeing you,” said Prince Andrew, coldly and
+ abruptly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All were silent. Túshin appeared at the threshold and made his way timidly
+ from behind the backs of the generals. As he stepped past the generals in
+ the crowded hut, feeling embarrassed as he always was by the sight of his
+ superiors, he did not notice the staff of the banner and stumbled over it.
+ Several of those present laughed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How was it a gun was abandoned?” asked Bagratión, frowning, not so much
+ at the captain as at those who were laughing, among whom Zherkóv laughed
+ loudest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only now, when he was confronted by the stern authorities, did his guilt
+ and the disgrace of having lost two guns and yet remaining alive present
+ themselves to Túshin in all their horror. He had been so excited that he
+ had not thought about it until that moment. The officers’ laughter
+ confused him still more. He stood before Bagratión with his lower jaw
+ trembling and was hardly able to mutter: “I don’t know... your
+ excellency... I had no men... your excellency.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You might have taken some from the covering troops.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Túshin did not say that there were no covering troops, though that was
+ perfectly true. He was afraid of getting some other officer into trouble,
+ and silently fixed his eyes on Bagratión as a schoolboy who has blundered
+ looks at an examiner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The silence lasted some time. Prince Bagratión, apparently not wishing to
+ be severe, found nothing to say; the others did not venture to intervene.
+ Prince Andrew looked at Túshin from under his brows and his fingers
+ twitched nervously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency!” Prince Andrew broke the silence with his abrupt voice,
+ “you were pleased to send me to Captain Túshin’s battery. I went there and
+ found two thirds of the men and horses knocked out, two guns smashed, and
+ no supports at all.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Bagratión and Túshin looked with equal intentness at Bolkónski, who
+ spoke with suppressed agitation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And, if your excellency will allow me to express my opinion,” he
+ continued, “we owe today’s success chiefly to the action of that battery
+ and the heroic endurance of Captain Túshin and his company,” and without
+ awaiting a reply, Prince Andrew rose and left the table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Bagratión looked at Túshin, evidently reluctant to show distrust in
+ Bolkónski’s emphatic opinion yet not feeling able fully to credit it, bent
+ his head, and told Túshin that he could go. Prince Andrew went out with
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank you; you saved me, my dear fellow!” said Túshin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew gave him a look, but said nothing and went away. He felt sad
+ and depressed. It was all so strange, so unlike what he had hoped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Who are they? Why are they here? What do they want? And when will all
+ this end?” thought Rostóv, looking at the changing shadows before him. The
+ pain in his arm became more and more intense. Irresistible drowsiness
+ overpowered him, red rings danced before his eyes, and the impression of
+ those voices and faces and a sense of loneliness merged with the physical
+ pain. It was they, these soldiers—wounded and unwounded—it was
+ they who were crushing, weighing down, and twisting the sinews and
+ scorching the flesh of his sprained arm and shoulder. To rid himself of
+ them he closed his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For a moment he dozed, but in that short interval innumerable things
+ appeared to him in a dream: his mother and her large white hand, Sónya’s
+ thin little shoulders, Natásha’s eyes and laughter, Denísov with his voice
+ and mustache, and Telyánin and all that affair with Telyánin and
+ Bogdánich. That affair was the same thing as this soldier with the harsh
+ voice, and it was that affair and this soldier that were so agonizingly,
+ incessantly pulling and pressing his arm and always dragging it in one
+ direction. He tried to get away from them, but they would not for an
+ instant let his shoulder move a hair’s breadth. It would not ache—it
+ would be well—if only they did not pull it, but it was impossible to
+ get rid of them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He opened his eyes and looked up. The black canopy of night hung less than
+ a yard above the glow of the charcoal. Flakes of falling snow were
+ fluttering in that light. Túshin had not returned, the doctor had not
+ come. He was alone now, except for a soldier who was sitting naked at the
+ other side of the fire, warming his thin yellow body.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nobody wants me!” thought Rostóv. “There is no one to help me or pity me.
+ Yet I was once at home, strong, happy, and loved.” He sighed and, doing
+ so, groaned involuntarily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh, is anything hurting you?” asked the soldier, shaking his shirt out
+ over the fire, and not waiting for an answer he gave a grunt and added:
+ “What a lot of men have been crippled today—frightful!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv did not listen to the soldier. He looked at the snowflakes
+ fluttering above the fire and remembered a Russian winter at his warm,
+ bright home, his fluffy fur coat, his quickly gliding sleigh, his healthy
+ body, and all the affection and care of his family. “And why did I come
+ here?” he wondered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day the French army did not renew their attack, and the remnant of
+ Bagratión’s detachment was reunited to Kutúzov’s army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK THREE: 1805
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli was not a man who deliberately thought out his plans. Still
+ less did he think of injuring anyone for his own advantage. He was merely
+ a man of the world who had got on and to whom getting on had become a
+ habit. Schemes and devices for which he never rightly accounted to
+ himself, but which formed the whole interest of his life, were constantly
+ shaping themselves in his mind, arising from the circumstances and persons
+ he met. Of these plans he had not merely one or two in his head but
+ dozens, some only beginning to form themselves, some approaching
+ achievement, and some in course of disintegration. He did not, for
+ instance, say to himself: “This man now has influence, I must gain his
+ confidence and friendship and through him obtain a special grant.” Nor did
+ he say to himself: “Pierre is a rich man, I must entice him to marry my
+ daughter and lend me the forty thousand rubles I need.” But when he came
+ across a man of position his instinct immediately told him that this man
+ could be useful, and without any premeditation Prince Vasíli took the
+ first opportunity to gain his confidence, flatter him, become intimate
+ with him, and finally make his request.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He had Pierre at hand in Moscow and procured for him an appointment as
+ Gentleman of the Bedchamber, which at that time conferred the status of
+ Councilor of State, and insisted on the young man accompanying him to
+ Petersburg and staying at his house. With apparent absent-mindedness, yet
+ with unhesitating assurance that he was doing the right thing, Prince
+ Vasíli did everything to get Pierre to marry his daughter. Had he thought
+ out his plans beforehand he could not have been so natural and shown such
+ unaffected familiarity in intercourse with everybody both above and below
+ him in social standing. Something always drew him toward those richer and
+ more powerful than himself and he had rare skill in seizing the most
+ opportune moment for making use of people.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre, on unexpectedly becoming Count Bezúkhov and a rich man, felt
+ himself after his recent loneliness and freedom from cares so beset and
+ preoccupied that only in bed was he able to be by himself. He had to sign
+ papers, to present himself at government offices, the purpose of which was
+ not clear to him, to question his chief steward, to visit his estate near
+ Moscow, and to receive many people who formerly did not even wish to know
+ of his existence but would now have been offended and grieved had he
+ chosen not to see them. These different people—businessmen,
+ relations, and acquaintances alike—were all disposed to treat the
+ young heir in the most friendly and flattering manner: they were all
+ evidently firmly convinced of Pierre’s noble qualities. He was always
+ hearing such words as: “With your remarkable kindness,” or,
+ “With your excellent heart,” “You are yourself so honorable,
+ Count,” or, “Were he as clever as you,” and so on, till he
+ began sincerely to believe in his own exceptional kindness and extraordinary
+ intelligence, the more so as in the depth of his heart it had always seemed to
+ him that he really was very kind and intelligent. Even people who had formerly
+ been spiteful toward him and evidently unfriendly now became gentle and
+ affectionate. The angry eldest princess, with the long waist and hair plastered
+ down like a doll’s, had come into Pierre’s room after the funeral.
+ With drooping eyes and frequent blushes she told him she was very sorry about
+ their past misunderstandings and did not now feel she had a right to ask him
+ for anything, except only for permission, after the blow she had received, to
+ remain for a few weeks longer in the house she so loved and where she had
+ sacrificed so much. She could not refrain from weeping at these words.
+ Touched that this statuesque princess could so change, Pierre took her
+ hand and begged her forgiveness, without knowing what for. From that day
+ the eldest princess quite changed toward Pierre and began knitting a
+ striped scarf for him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do this for my sake, mon cher ; after all, she had to put up with a great
+ deal from the deceased,” said Prince Vasíli to him, handing him a deed to
+ sign for the princess’ benefit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli had come to the conclusion that it was necessary to throw
+ this bone—a bill for thirty thousand rubles—to the poor
+ princess that it might not occur to her to speak of his share in the
+ affair of the inlaid portfolio. Pierre signed the deed and after that the
+ princess grew still kinder. The younger sisters also became affectionate
+ to him, especially the youngest, the pretty one with the mole, who often
+ made him feel confused by her smiles and her own confusion when meeting
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It seemed so natural to Pierre that everyone should like him, and it would
+ have seemed so unnatural had anyone disliked him, that he could not but
+ believe in the sincerity of those around him. Besides, he had no time to
+ ask himself whether these people were sincere or not. He was always busy
+ and always felt in a state of mild and cheerful intoxication. He felt as
+ though he were the center of some important and general movement; that
+ something was constantly expected of him, that if he did not do it he
+ would grieve and disappoint many people, but if he did this and that, all
+ would be well; and he did what was demanded of him, but still that happy
+ result always remained in the future.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ More than anyone else, Prince Vasíli took possession of Pierre’s affairs
+ and of Pierre himself in those early days. From the death of Count
+ Bezúkhov he did not let go his hold of the lad. He had the air of a man
+ oppressed by business, weary and suffering, who yet would not, for pity’s
+ sake, leave this helpless youth who, after all, was the son of his old
+ friend and the possessor of such enormous wealth, to the caprice of fate
+ and the designs of rogues. During the few days he spent in Moscow after
+ the death of Count Bezúkhov, he would call Pierre, or go to him himself,
+ and tell him what ought to be done in a tone of weariness and assurance,
+ as if he were adding every time: “You know I am overwhelmed with business
+ and it is purely out of charity that I trouble myself about you, and you
+ also know quite well that what I propose is the only thing possible.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, my dear fellow, tomorrow we are off at last,” said Prince Vasíli
+ one day, closing his eyes and fingering Pierre’s elbow, speaking as if he
+ were saying something which had long since been agreed upon and could not
+ now be altered. “We start tomorrow and I’m giving you a place in my
+ carriage. I am very glad. All our important business here is now settled,
+ and I ought to have been off long ago. Here is something I have received
+ from the chancellor. I asked him for you, and you have been entered in the
+ diplomatic corps and made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. The diplomatic
+ career now lies open before you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Notwithstanding the tone of wearied assurance with which these words were
+ pronounced, Pierre, who had so long been considering his career, wished to
+ make some suggestion. But Prince Vasíli interrupted him in the special
+ deep cooing tone, precluding the possibility of interrupting his speech,
+ which he used in extreme cases when special persuasion was needed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ Mais, mon cher , I did this for my own sake, to satisfy my conscience, and
+ there is nothing to thank me for. No one has ever complained yet of being
+ too much loved; and besides, you are free, you could throw it up tomorrow.
+ But you will see everything for yourself when you get to Petersburg. It is
+ high time for you to get away from these terrible recollections.” Prince
+ Vasíli sighed. “Yes, yes, my boy. And my valet can go in your carriage.
+ Ah! I was nearly forgetting,” he added. “You know, mon cher , your father
+ and I had some accounts to settle, so I have received what was due from
+ the Ryazán estate and will keep it; you won’t require it. We’ll go into
+ the accounts later.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By “what was due from the Ryazán estate” Prince Vasíli meant several
+ thousand rubles quitrent received from Pierre’s peasants, which the prince
+ had retained for himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In Petersburg, as in Moscow, Pierre found the same atmosphere of
+ gentleness and affection. He could not refuse the post, or rather the rank
+ (for he did nothing), that Prince Vasíli had procured for him, and
+ acquaintances, invitations, and social occupations were so numerous that,
+ even more than in Moscow, he felt a sense of bewilderment, bustle, and
+ continual expectation of some good, always in front of him but never
+ attained.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of his former bachelor acquaintances many were no longer in Petersburg.
+ The Guards had gone to the front; Dólokhov had been reduced to the ranks;
+ Anatole was in the army somewhere in the provinces; Prince Andrew was
+ abroad; so Pierre had not the opportunity to spend his nights as he used
+ to like to spend them, or to open his mind by intimate talks with a friend
+ older than himself and whom he respected. His whole time was taken up with
+ dinners and balls and was spent chiefly at Prince Vasíli’s house in the
+ company of the stout princess, his wife, and his beautiful daughter
+ Hélène.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Like the others, Anna Pávlovna Schérer showed Pierre the change of
+ attitude toward him that had taken place in society.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Formerly in Anna Pávlovna’s presence, Pierre had always felt that what he
+ was saying was out of place, tactless and unsuitable, that remarks which
+ seemed to him clever while they formed in his mind became foolish as soon
+ as he uttered them, while on the contrary Hippolyte’s stupidest remarks
+ came out clever and apt. Now everything Pierre said was charmant . Even if
+ Anna Pávlovna did not say so, he could see that she wished to and only
+ refrained out of regard for his modesty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the beginning of the winter of 1805-6 Pierre received one of Anna
+ Pávlovna’s usual pink notes with an invitation to which was added: “You
+ will find the beautiful Hélène here, whom it is always delightful to see.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he read that sentence, Pierre felt for the first time that some link
+ which other people recognized had grown up between himself and Hélène, and
+ that thought both alarmed him, as if some obligation were being imposed on
+ him which he could not fulfill, and pleased him as an entertaining
+ supposition.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Pávlovna’s “At Home” was like the former one, only the novelty she
+ offered her guests this time was not Mortemart, but a diplomatist fresh
+ from Berlin with the very latest details of the Emperor Alexander’s visit
+ to Potsdam, and of how the two august friends had pledged themselves in an
+ indissoluble alliance to uphold the cause of justice against the enemy of
+ the human race. Anna Pávlovna received Pierre with a shade of melancholy,
+ evidently relating to the young man’s recent loss by the death of Count
+ Bezúkhov (everyone constantly considered it a duty to assure Pierre that
+ he was greatly afflicted by the death of the father he had hardly known),
+ and her melancholy was just like the august melancholy she showed at the
+ mention of her most august Majesty the Empress Márya Fëdorovna. Pierre
+ felt flattered by this. Anna Pávlovna arranged the different groups in her
+ drawing room with her habitual skill. The large group, in which were
+ Prince Vasíli and the generals, had the benefit of the diplomat. Another
+ group was at the tea table. Pierre wished to join the former, but Anna
+ Pávlovna—who was in the excited condition of a commander on a
+ battlefield to whom thousands of new and brilliant ideas occur which there
+ is hardly time to put in action—seeing Pierre, touched his sleeve
+ with her finger, saying:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wait a bit, I have something in view for you this evening.” (She glanced
+ at Hélène and smiled at her.) “My dear Hélène, be charitable to my poor
+ aunt who adores you. Go and keep her company for ten minutes. And that it
+ will not be too dull, here is the dear count who will not refuse to
+ accompany you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The beauty went to the aunt, but Anna Pávlovna detained Pierre, looking as
+ if she had to give some final necessary instructions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Isn’t she exquisite?” she said to Pierre, pointing to the stately beauty
+ as she glided away. “And how she carries herself! For so young a girl,
+ such tact, such masterly perfection of manner! It comes from her heart.
+ Happy the man who wins her! With her the least worldly of men would occupy
+ a most brilliant position in society. Don’t you think so? I only wanted to
+ know your opinion,” and Anna Pávlovna let Pierre go.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre, in reply, sincerely agreed with her as to Hélène’s perfection of
+ manner. If he ever thought of Hélène, it was just of her beauty and her
+ remarkable skill in appearing silently dignified in society.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old aunt received the two young people in her corner, but seemed
+ desirous of hiding her adoration for Hélène and inclined rather to show
+ her fear of Anna Pávlovna. She looked at her niece, as if inquiring what
+ she was to do with these people. On leaving them, Anna Pávlovna again
+ touched Pierre’s sleeve, saying: “I hope you won’t say that it is dull in
+ my house again,” and she glanced at Hélène.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hélène smiled, with a look implying that she did not admit the possibility
+ of anyone seeing her without being enchanted. The aunt coughed, swallowed,
+ and said in French that she was very pleased to see Hélène, then she
+ turned to Pierre with the same words of welcome and the same look. In the
+ middle of a dull and halting conversation, Hélène turned to Pierre with
+ the beautiful bright smile that she gave to everyone. Pierre was so used
+ to that smile, and it had so little meaning for him, that he paid no
+ attention to it. The aunt was just speaking of a collection of snuffboxes
+ that had belonged to Pierre’s father, Count Bezúkhov, and showed them her
+ own box. Princess Hélène asked to see the portrait of the aunt’s husband
+ on the box lid.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is probably the work of Vinesse,” said Pierre, mentioning a
+ celebrated miniaturist, and he leaned over the table to take the snuffbox
+ while trying to hear what was being said at the other table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He half rose, meaning to go round, but the aunt handed him the snuffbox,
+ passing it across Hélène’s back. Hélène stooped forward to make room, and
+ looked round with a smile. She was, as always at evening parties, wearing
+ a dress such as was then fashionable, cut very low at front and back. Her
+ bust, which had always seemed like marble to Pierre, was so close to him
+ that his shortsighted eyes could not but perceive the living charm of her
+ neck and shoulders, so near to his lips that he need only have bent his
+ head a little to have touched them. He was conscious of the warmth of her
+ body, the scent of perfume, and the creaking of her corset as she moved.
+ He did not see her marble beauty forming a complete whole with her dress,
+ but all the charm of her body only covered by her garments. And having
+ once seen this he could not help being aware of it, just as we cannot
+ renew an illusion we have once seen through.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So you have never noticed before how beautiful I am?” Hélène seemed to
+ say. “You had not noticed that I am a woman? Yes, I am a woman who may
+ belong to anyone—to you too,” said her glance. And at that moment
+ Pierre felt that Hélène not only could, but must, be his wife, and that it
+ could not be otherwise.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He knew this at that moment as surely as if he had been standing at the
+ altar with her. How and when this would be he did not know, he did not
+ even know if it would be a good thing (he even felt, he knew not why, that
+ it would be a bad thing), but he knew it would happen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre dropped his eyes, lifted them again, and wished once more to see
+ her as a distant beauty far removed from him, as he had seen her every day
+ until then, but he could no longer do it. He could not, any more than a
+ man who has been looking at a tuft of steppe grass through the mist and
+ taking it for a tree can again take it for a tree after he has once
+ recognized it to be a tuft of grass. She was terribly close to him. She
+ already had power over him, and between them there was no longer any
+ barrier except the barrier of his own will.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, I will leave you in your little corner,” came Anna Pávlovna’s
+ voice, “I see you are all right there.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Pierre, anxiously trying to remember whether he had done anything
+ reprehensible, looked round with a blush. It seemed to him that everyone
+ knew what had happened to him as he knew it himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A little later when he went up to the large circle, Anna Pávlovna said to
+ him: “I hear you are refitting your Petersburg house?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This was true. The architect had told him that it was necessary, and
+ Pierre, without knowing why, was having his enormous Petersburg house done
+ up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s a good thing, but don’t move from Prince Vasíli’s. It is good to
+ have a friend like the prince,” she said, smiling at Prince Vasíli. “I
+ know something about that. Don’t I? And you are still so young. You need
+ advice. Don’t be angry with me for exercising an old woman’s privilege.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She paused, as women always do, expecting something after they have
+ mentioned their age. “If you marry it will be a different thing,” she
+ continued, uniting them both in one glance. Pierre did not look at Hélène
+ nor she at him. But she was just as terribly close to him. He muttered
+ something and colored.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he got home he could not sleep for a long time for thinking of what
+ had happened. What had happened? Nothing. He had merely understood that
+ the woman he had known as a child, of whom when her beauty was mentioned
+ he had said absent-mindedly: “Yes, she’s good looking,” he had understood
+ that this woman might belong to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But she’s stupid. I have myself said she is stupid,” he thought. “There
+ is something nasty, something wrong, in the feeling she excites in me. I
+ have been told that her brother Anatole was in love with her and she with
+ him, that there was quite a scandal and that that’s why he was sent away.
+ Hippolyte is her brother... Prince Vasíli is her father... It’s bad....”
+ he reflected, but while he was thinking this (the reflection was still
+ incomplete), he caught himself smiling and was conscious that another line
+ of thought had sprung up, and while thinking of her worthlessness he was
+ also dreaming of how she would be his wife, how she would love him become
+ quite different, and how all he had thought and heard of her might be
+ false. And he again saw her not as the daughter of Prince Vasíli, but
+ visualized her whole body only veiled by its gray dress. “But no! Why did
+ this thought never occur to me before?” and again he told himself that it
+ was impossible, that there would be something unnatural, and as it seemed
+ to him dishonorable, in this marriage. He recalled her former words and
+ looks and the words and looks of those who had seen them together. He
+ recalled Anna Pávlovna’s words and looks when she spoke to him about his
+ house, recalled thousands of such hints from Prince Vasíli and others, and
+ was seized by terror lest he had already, in some way, bound himself to do
+ something that was evidently wrong and that he ought not to do. But at the
+ very time he was expressing this conviction to himself, in another part of
+ his mind her image rose in all its womanly beauty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ In November, 1805, Prince Vasíli had to go on a tour of inspection in four
+ different provinces. He had arranged this for himself so as to visit his
+ neglected estates at the same time and pick up his son Anatole where his
+ regiment was stationed, and take him to visit Prince Nicholas Bolkónski in
+ order to arrange a match for him with the daughter of that rich old man.
+ But before leaving home and undertaking these new affairs, Prince Vasíli
+ had to settle matters with Pierre, who, it is true, had latterly spent
+ whole days at home, that is, in Prince Vasíli’s house where he was
+ staying, and had been absurd, excited, and foolish in Hélène’s presence
+ (as a lover should be), but had not yet proposed to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This is all very fine, but things must be settled,” said Prince Vasíli to
+ himself, with a sorrowful sigh, one morning, feeling that Pierre who was
+ under such obligations to him (“But never mind that”) was not behaving
+ very well in this matter. “Youth, frivolity... well, God be with him,”
+ thought he, relishing his own goodness of heart, “but it must be brought
+ to a head. The day after tomorrow will be Lëlya’s name day. I will invite
+ two or three people, and if he does not understand what he ought to do
+ then it will be my affair—yes, my affair. I am her father.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Six weeks after Anna Pávlovna’s “At Home” and after the sleepless night
+ when he had decided that to marry Hélène would be a calamity and that he
+ ought to avoid her and go away, Pierre, despite that decision, had not
+ left Prince Vasíli’s and felt with terror that in people’s eyes he was
+ every day more and more connected with her, that it was impossible for him
+ to return to his former conception of her, that he could not break away
+ from her, and that though it would be a terrible thing he would have to
+ unite his fate with hers. He might perhaps have been able to free himself
+ but that Prince Vasíli (who had rarely before given receptions) now hardly
+ let a day go by without having an evening party at which Pierre had to be
+ present unless he wished to spoil the general pleasure and disappoint
+ everyone’s expectation. Prince Vasíli, in the rare moments when he was at
+ home, would take Pierre’s hand in passing and draw it downwards, or
+ absent-mindedly hold out his wrinkled, clean-shaven cheek for Pierre to
+ kiss and would say: “Till tomorrow,” or, “Be in to dinner or I shall not
+ see you,” or, “I am staying in for your sake,” and so on. And though
+ Prince Vasíli, when he stayed in (as he said) for Pierre’s sake, hardly
+ exchanged a couple of words with him, Pierre felt unable to disappoint
+ him. Every day he said to himself one and the same thing: “It is time I
+ understood her and made up my mind what she really is. Was I mistaken
+ before, or am I mistaken now? No, she is not stupid, she is an excellent
+ girl,” he sometimes said to himself “she never makes a mistake, never says
+ anything stupid. She says little, but what she does say is always clear
+ and simple, so she is not stupid. She never was abashed and is not abashed
+ now, so she cannot be a bad woman!” He had often begun to make reflections
+ or think aloud in her company, and she had always answered him either by a
+ brief but appropriate remark—showing that it did not interest her—or
+ by a silent look and smile which more palpably than anything else showed
+ Pierre her superiority. She was right in regarding all arguments as
+ nonsense in comparison with that smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She always addressed him with a radiantly confiding smile meant for him
+ alone, in which there was something more significant than in the general
+ smile that usually brightened her face. Pierre knew that everyone was
+ waiting for him to say a word and cross a certain line, and he knew that
+ sooner or later he would step across it, but an incomprehensible terror
+ seized him at the thought of that dreadful step. A thousand times during
+ that month and a half while he felt himself drawn nearer and nearer to
+ that dreadful abyss, Pierre said to himself: “What am I doing? I need
+ resolution. Can it be that I have none?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He wished to take a decision, but felt with dismay that in this matter he
+ lacked that strength of will which he had known in himself and really
+ possessed. Pierre was one of those who are only strong when they feel
+ themselves quite innocent, and since that day when he was overpowered by a
+ feeling of desire while stooping over the snuffbox at Anna Pávlovna’s, an
+ unacknowledged sense of the guilt of that desire paralyzed his will.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On Hélène’s name day, a small party of just their own people—as his
+ wife said—met for supper at Prince Vasíli’s. All these friends and
+ relations had been given to understand that the fate of the young girl
+ would be decided that evening. The visitors were seated at supper.
+ Princess Kurágina, a portly imposing woman who had once been handsome, was
+ sitting at the head of the table. On either side of her sat the more
+ important guests—an old general and his wife, and Anna Pávlovna
+ Schérer. At the other end sat the younger and less important guests, and
+ there too sat the members of the family, and Pierre and Hélène, side by
+ side. Prince Vasíli was not having any supper: he went round the table in
+ a merry mood, sitting down now by one, now by another, of the guests. To
+ each of them he made some careless and agreeable remark except to Pierre
+ and Hélène, whose presence he seemed not to notice. He enlivened the whole
+ party. The wax candles burned brightly, the silver and crystal gleamed, so
+ did the ladies’ toilets and the gold and silver of the men’s epaulets;
+ servants in scarlet liveries moved round the table, the clatter of plates,
+ knives, and glasses mingled with the animated hum of several
+ conversations. At one end of the table, the old chamberlain was heard
+ assuring an old baroness that he loved her passionately, at which she
+ laughed; at the other could be heard the story of the misfortunes of some
+ Mary Víktorovna or other. At the center of the table, Prince Vasíli
+ attracted everybody’s attention. With a facetious smile on his face, he
+ was telling the ladies about last Wednesday’s meeting of the Imperial
+ Council, at which Sergéy Kuzmích Vyazmítinov, the new military governor
+ general of Petersburg, had received and read the then famous rescript of
+ the Emperor Alexander from the army to Sergéy Kuzmích, in which the
+ Emperor said that he was receiving from all sides declarations of the
+ people’s loyalty, that the declaration from Petersburg gave him particular
+ pleasure, and that he was proud to be at the head of such a nation and
+ would endeavor to be worthy of it. This rescript began with the words:
+ “Sergéy Kuzmích, From all sides reports reach me,” etc.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, and so he never got farther than: ‘Sergéy Kuzmích’?” asked one of
+ the ladies.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Exactly, not a hair’s breadth farther,” answered Prince Vasíli, laughing,
+ “‘Sergéy Kuzmích... From all sides... From all sides... Sergéy Kuzmích...’
+ Poor Vyazmítinov could not get any farther! He began the rescript again
+ and again, but as soon as he uttered ‘Sergéy’ he sobbed, ‘Kuz-mí-ch,’ 
+ tears, and ‘From all sides’ was smothered in sobs and he could get no
+ farther. And again his handkerchief, and again: ‘Sergéy Kuzmích, From all
+ sides,’ ... and tears, till at last somebody else was asked to read it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Kuzmích... From all sides... and then tears,” someone repeated laughing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t be unkind,” cried Anna Pávlovna from her end of the table holding
+ up a threatening finger. “He is such a worthy and excellent man, our dear
+ Vyazmítinov....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Everybody laughed a great deal. At the head of the table, where the
+ honored guests sat, everyone seemed to be in high spirits and under the
+ influence of a variety of exciting sensations. Only Pierre and Hélène sat
+ silently side by side almost at the bottom of the table, a suppressed
+ smile brightening both their faces, a smile that had nothing to do with
+ Sergéy Kuzmích—a smile of bashfulness at their own feelings. But
+ much as all the rest laughed, talked, and joked, much as they enjoyed
+ their Rhine wine, sauté , and ices, and however they avoided looking at the
+ young couple, and heedless and unobservant as they seemed of them, one
+ could feel by the occasional glances they gave that the story about Sergéy
+ Kuzmích, the laughter, and the food were all a pretense, and that the
+ whole attention of that company was directed to—Pierre and Hélène.
+ Prince Vasíli mimicked the sobbing of Sergéy Kuzmích and at the same time
+ his eyes glanced toward his daughter, and while he laughed the expression
+ on his face clearly said: “Yes... it’s getting on, it will all be settled
+ today.” Anna Pávlovna threatened him on behalf of “our dear Vyazmítinov,”
+ and in her eyes, which, for an instant, glanced at Pierre, Prince Vasíli
+ read a congratulation on his future son-in-law and on his daughter’s
+ happiness. The old princess sighed sadly as she offered some wine to the
+ old lady next to her and glanced angrily at her daughter, and her sigh
+ seemed to say: “Yes, there’s nothing left for you and me but to sip sweet
+ wine, my dear, now that the time has come for these young ones to be thus
+ boldly, provocatively happy.” “And what nonsense all this is that I am
+ saying!” thought a diplomatist, glancing at the happy faces of the lovers.
+ “That’s happiness!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Into the insignificant, trifling, and artificial interests uniting that
+ society had entered the simple feeling of the attraction of a healthy and
+ handsome young man and woman for one another. And this human feeling
+ dominated everything else and soared above all their affected chatter.
+ Jests fell flat, news was not interesting, and the animation was evidently
+ forced. Not only the guests but even the footmen waiting at table seemed
+ to feel this, and they forgot their duties as they looked at the beautiful
+ Hélène with her radiant face and at the red, broad, and happy though
+ uneasy face of Pierre. It seemed as if the very light of the candles was
+ focused on those two happy faces alone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre felt that he was the center of it all, and this both pleased and
+ embarrassed him. He was like a man entirely absorbed in some occupation.
+ He did not see, hear, or understand anything clearly. Only now and then
+ detached ideas and impressions from the world of reality shot unexpectedly
+ through his mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So it is all finished!” he thought. “And how has it all happened? How
+ quickly! Now I know that not because of her alone, nor of myself alone,
+ but because of everyone, it must inevitably come about. They are all
+ expecting it , they are so sure that it will happen that I cannot, I
+ cannot, disappoint them. But how will it be? I do not know, but it will
+ certainly happen!” thought Pierre, glancing at those dazzling shoulders
+ close to his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Or he would suddenly feel ashamed of he knew not what. He felt it awkward
+ to attract everyone’s attention and to be considered a lucky man and, with
+ his plain face, to be looked on as a sort of Paris possessed of a Helen.
+ “But no doubt it always is and must be so!” he consoled himself. “And
+ besides, what have I done to bring it about? How did it begin? I traveled
+ from Moscow with Prince Vasíli. Then there was nothing. So why should I
+ not stay at his house? Then I played cards with her and picked up her
+ reticule and drove out with her. How did it begin, when did it all come
+ about?” And here he was sitting by her side as her betrothed, seeing,
+ hearing, feeling her nearness, her breathing, her movements, her beauty.
+ Then it would suddenly seem to him that it was not she but he was so
+ unusually beautiful, and that that was why they all looked so at him, and
+ flattered by this general admiration he would expand his chest, raise his
+ head, and rejoice at his good fortune. Suddenly he heard a familiar voice
+ repeating something to him a second time. But Pierre was so absorbed that
+ he did not understand what was said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am asking you when you last heard from Bolkónski,” repeated Prince
+ Vasíli a third time. “How absent-minded you are, my dear fellow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli smiled, and Pierre noticed that everyone was smiling at him
+ and Hélène. “Well, what of it, if you all know it?” thought Pierre. “What
+ of it? It’s the truth!” and he himself smiled his gentle childlike smile,
+ and Hélène smiled too.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When did you get the letter? Was it from Olmütz?” repeated Prince Vasíli,
+ who pretended to want to know this in order to settle a dispute.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How can one talk or think of such trifles?” thought Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, from Olmütz,” he answered, with a sigh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After supper Pierre with his partner followed the others into the drawing
+ room. The guests began to disperse, some without taking leave of Hélène.
+ Some, as if unwilling to distract her from an important occupation, came
+ up to her for a moment and made haste to go away, refusing to let her see
+ them off. The diplomatist preserved a mournful silence as he left the
+ drawing room. He pictured the vanity of his diplomatic career in
+ comparison with Pierre’s happiness. The old general grumbled at his wife
+ when she asked how his leg was. “Oh, the old fool,” he thought. “That
+ Princess Hélène will be beautiful still when she’s fifty.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I think I may congratulate you,” whispered Anna Pávlovna to the old
+ princess, kissing her soundly. “If I hadn’t this headache I’d have stayed
+ longer.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old princess did not reply, she was tormented by jealousy of her
+ daughter’s happiness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While the guests were taking their leave Pierre remained for a long time
+ alone with Hélène in the little drawing room where they were sitting. He
+ had often before, during the last six weeks, remained alone with her, but
+ had never spoken to her of love. Now he felt that it was inevitable, but
+ he could not make up his mind to take the final step. He felt ashamed; he
+ felt that he was occupying someone else’s place here beside Hélène. “This
+ happiness is not for you,” some inner voice whispered to him. “This
+ happiness is for those who have not in them what there is in you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But, as he had to say something, he began by asking her whether she was
+ satisfied with the party. She replied in her usual simple manner that this
+ name day of hers had been one of the pleasantest she had ever had.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some of the nearest relatives had not yet left. They were sitting in the
+ large drawing room. Prince Vasíli came up to Pierre with languid
+ footsteps. Pierre rose and said it was getting late. Prince Vasíli gave
+ him a look of stern inquiry, as though what Pierre had just said was so
+ strange that one could not take it in. But then the expression of severity
+ changed, and he drew Pierre’s hand downwards, made him sit down, and
+ smiled affectionately.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, Lëlya?” he asked, turning instantly to his daughter and addressing
+ her with the careless tone of habitual tenderness natural to parents who
+ have petted their children from babyhood, but which Prince Vasíli had only
+ acquired by imitating other parents.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And he again turned to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sergéy Kuzmích—From all sides—” he said,
+ unbuttoning the top button of his waistcoat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre smiled, but his smile showed that he knew it was not the story
+ about Sergéy Kuzmích that interested Prince Vasíli just then, and Prince
+ Vasíli saw that Pierre knew this. He suddenly muttered something and went
+ away. It seemed to Pierre that even the prince was disconcerted. The sight
+ of the discomposure of that old man of the world touched Pierre: he looked
+ at Hélène and she too seemed disconcerted, and her look seemed to say:
+ “Well, it is your own fault.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The step must be taken but I cannot, I cannot!” thought Pierre, and he
+ again began speaking about indifferent matters, about Sergéy Kuzmích,
+ asking what the point of the story was as he had not heard it properly.
+ Hélène answered with a smile that she too had missed it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Prince Vasíli returned to the drawing room, the princess, his wife,
+ was talking in low tones to the elderly lady about Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Of course, it is a very brilliant match, but happiness, my dear...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Marriages are made in heaven,” replied the elderly lady.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli passed by, seeming not to hear the ladies, and sat down on a
+ sofa in a far corner of the room. He closed his eyes and seemed to be
+ dozing. His head sank forward and then he roused himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aline,” he said to his wife, “go and see what they are about.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess went up to the door, passed by it with a dignified and
+ indifferent air, and glanced into the little drawing room. Pierre and
+ Hélène still sat talking just as before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Still the same,” she said to her husband.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli frowned, twisting his mouth, his cheeks quivered and his
+ face assumed the coarse, unpleasant expression peculiar to him. Shaking
+ himself, he rose, threw back his head, and with resolute steps went past
+ the ladies into the little drawing room. With quick steps he went joyfully
+ up to Pierre. His face was so unusually triumphant that Pierre rose in
+ alarm on seeing it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank God!” said Prince Vasíli. “My wife has told me everything!” (He put
+ one arm around Pierre and the other around his daughter.)—“My dear
+ boy... Lëlya... I am very pleased.” (His voice trembled.) “I loved your
+ father... and she will make you a good wife... God bless you!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He embraced his daughter, and then again Pierre, and kissed him with his
+ malodorous mouth. Tears actually moistened his cheeks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Princess, come here!” he shouted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old princess came in and also wept. The elderly lady was using her
+ handkerchief too. Pierre was kissed, and he kissed the beautiful Hélène’s
+ hand several times. After a while they were left alone again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All this had to be and could not be otherwise,” thought Pierre, “so it is
+ useless to ask whether it is good or bad. It is good because it’s definite
+ and one is rid of the old tormenting doubt.” Pierre held the hand of his
+ betrothed in silence, looking at her beautiful bosom as it rose and fell.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hélène!” he said aloud and paused.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Something special is always said in such cases,” he thought, but could
+ not remember what it was that people say. He looked at her face. She drew
+ nearer to him. Her face flushed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, take those off... those...” she said, pointing to his spectacles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre took them off, and his eyes, besides the strange look eyes have
+ from which spectacles have just been removed, had also a frightened and
+ inquiring look. He was about to stoop over her hand and kiss it, but with
+ a rapid, almost brutal movement of her head, she intercepted his lips and
+ met them with her own. Her face struck Pierre, by its altered,
+ unpleasantly excited expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is too late now, it’s done; besides I love her,” thought Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Je vous aime!” * he said, remembering what has to be said at such
+ moments: but his words sounded so weak that he felt ashamed of himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “I love you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Six weeks later he was married, and settled in Count Bezúkhov’s large,
+ newly furnished Petersburg house, the happy possessor, as people said, of
+ a wife who was a celebrated beauty and of millions of money.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ Old Prince Nicholas Bolkónski received a letter from Prince Vasíli in
+ November, 1805, announcing that he and his son would be paying him a
+ visit. “I am starting on a journey of inspection, and of course I shall
+ think nothing of an extra seventy miles to come and see you at the same
+ time, my honored benefactor,” wrote Prince Vasíli. “My son Anatole is
+ accompanying me on his way to the army, so I hope you will allow him
+ personally to express the deep respect that, emulating his father, he
+ feels for you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It seems that there will be no need to bring Mary out, suitors are coming
+ to us of their own accord,” incautiously remarked the little princess on
+ hearing the news.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Nicholas frowned, but said nothing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A fortnight after the letter Prince Vasíli’s servants came one evening in
+ advance of him, and he and his son arrived next day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Old Bolkónski had always had a poor opinion of Prince Vasíli’s character,
+ but more so recently, since in the new reigns of Paul and Alexander Prince
+ Vasíli had risen to high position and honors. And now, from the hints
+ contained in his letter and given by the little princess, he saw which way
+ the wind was blowing, and his low opinion changed into a feeling of
+ contemptuous ill will. He snorted whenever he mentioned him. On the day of
+ Prince Vasíli’s arrival, Prince Bolkónski was particularly discontented
+ and out of temper. Whether he was in a bad temper because Prince Vasíli
+ was coming, or whether his being in a bad temper made him specially
+ annoyed at Prince Vasíli’s visit, he was in a bad temper, and in the
+ morning Tíkhon had already advised the architect not to go to the prince
+ with his report.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you hear how he’s walking?” said Tíkhon, drawing the architect’s
+ attention to the sound of the prince’s footsteps. “Stepping flat on his
+ heels—we know what that means....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ However, at nine o’clock the prince, in his velvet coat with a sable
+ collar and cap, went out for his usual walk. It had snowed the day before
+ and the path to the hothouse, along which the prince was in the habit of
+ walking, had been swept: the marks of the broom were still visible in the
+ snow and a shovel had been left sticking in one of the soft snowbanks that
+ bordered both sides of the path. The prince went through the
+ conservatories, the serfs’ quarters, and the outbuildings, frowning and
+ silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Can a sleigh pass?” he asked his overseer, a venerable man, resembling
+ his master in manners and looks, who was accompanying him back to the
+ house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The snow is deep. I am having the avenue swept, your honor.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The prince bowed his head and went up to the porch. “God be thanked,”
+ thought the overseer, “the storm has blown over!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It would have been hard to drive up, your honor,” he added. “I heard,
+ your honor, that a minister is coming to visit your honor.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The prince turned round to the overseer and fixed his eyes on him,
+ frowning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What? A minister? What minister? Who gave orders?” he said in his shrill,
+ harsh voice. “The road is not swept for the princess my daughter, but for
+ a minister! For me, there are no ministers!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your honor, I thought...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You thought!” shouted the prince, his words coming more and more rapidly
+ and indistinctly. “You thought!... Rascals! Blackguards!... I’ll teach you
+ to think!” and lifting his stick he swung it and would have hit Alpátych,
+ the overseer, had not the latter instinctively avoided the blow.
+ “Thought... Blackguards...” shouted the prince rapidly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But although Alpátych, frightened at his own temerity in avoiding the
+ stroke, came up to the prince, bowing his bald head resignedly before him,
+ or perhaps for that very reason, the prince, though he continued to shout:
+ “Blackguards!... Throw the snow back on the road!” did not lift his stick
+ again but hurried into the house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before dinner, Princess Mary and Mademoiselle Bourienne, who knew that the
+ prince was in a bad humor, stood awaiting him; Mademoiselle Bourienne with
+ a radiant face that said: “I know nothing, I am the same as usual,” and
+ Princess Mary pale, frightened, and with downcast eyes. What she found
+ hardest to bear was to know that on such occasions she ought to behave
+ like Mademoiselle Bourienne, but could not. She thought: “If I seem not to
+ notice he will think that I do not sympathize with him; if I seem sad and
+ out of spirits myself, he will say (as he has done before) that I’m in the
+ dumps.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The prince looked at his daughter’s frightened face and snorted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fool... or dummy!” he muttered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And the other one is not here. They’ve been telling tales,” he
+ thought—referring to the little princess who was not in the dining room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where is the princess?” he asked. “Hiding?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She is not very well,” answered Mademoiselle Bourienne with a bright
+ smile, “so she won’t come down. It is natural in her state.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hm! Hm!” muttered the prince, sitting down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His plate seemed to him not quite clean, and pointing to a spot he flung
+ it away. Tíkhon caught it and handed it to a footman. The little princess
+ was not unwell, but had such an overpowering fear of the prince that,
+ hearing he was in a bad humor, she had decided not to appear.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am afraid for the baby,” she said to Mademoiselle Bourienne:
+ “Heaven knows what a fright might do.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In general at Bald Hills the little princess lived in constant fear, and
+ with a sense of antipathy to the old prince which she did not realize
+ because the fear was so much the stronger feeling. The prince reciprocated
+ this antipathy, but it was overpowered by his contempt for her. When the
+ little princess had grown accustomed to life at Bald Hills, she took a
+ special fancy to Mademoiselle Bourienne, spent whole days with her, asked
+ her to sleep in her room, and often talked with her about the old prince
+ and criticized him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So we are to have visitors, mon prince? ” remarked Mademoiselle Bourienne,
+ unfolding her white napkin with her rosy fingers. “His Excellency Prince
+ Vasíli Kurágin and his son, I understand?” she said inquiringly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hm!—his excellency is a puppy.... I got him his appointment in the
+ service,” said the prince disdainfully. “Why his son is coming I don’t
+ understand. Perhaps Princess Elizabeth and Princess Mary know. I don’t
+ want him.” (He looked at his blushing daughter.) “Are you unwell today?
+ Eh? Afraid of the ‘minister’ as that idiot Alpátych called him this
+ morning?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, mon père .”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though Mademoiselle Bourienne had been so unsuccessful in her choice of a
+ subject, she did not stop talking, but chattered about the conservatories
+ and the beauty of a flower that had just opened, and after the soup the
+ prince became more genial.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After dinner, he went to see his daughter-in-law. The little princess was
+ sitting at a small table, chattering with Másha, her maid. She grew pale
+ on seeing her father-in-law.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She was much altered. She was now plain rather than pretty. Her cheeks had
+ sunk, her lip was drawn up, and her eyes drawn down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I feel a kind of oppression,” she said in reply to the prince’s
+ question as to how she felt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you want anything?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, merci, mon père .”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, all right, all right.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He left the room and went to the waiting room where Alpátych stood with
+ bowed head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Has the snow been shoveled back?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, your excellency. Forgive me for heaven’s sake... It was only my
+ stupidity.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right, all right,” interrupted the prince, and laughing his unnatural
+ way, he stretched out his hand for Alpátych to kiss, and then proceeded to
+ his study.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli arrived that evening. He was met in the avenue by coachmen
+ and footmen, who, with loud shouts, dragged his sleighs up to one of the
+ lodges over the road purposely laden with snow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli and Anatole had separate rooms assigned to them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole, having taken off his overcoat, sat with arms akimbo before a
+ table on a corner of which he smilingly and absent-mindedly fixed his
+ large and handsome eyes. He regarded his whole life as a continual round
+ of amusement which someone for some reason had to provide for him. And he
+ looked on this visit to a churlish old man and a rich and ugly heiress in
+ the same way. All this might, he thought, turn out very well and
+ amusingly. “And why not marry her if she really has so much money? That
+ never does any harm,” thought Anatole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He shaved and scented himself with the care and elegance which had become
+ habitual to him and, his handsome head held high, entered his father’s
+ room with the good-humored and victorious air natural to him. Prince
+ Vasíli’s two valets were busy dressing him, and he looked round with much
+ animation and cheerfully nodded to his son as the latter entered, as if to
+ say: “Yes, that’s how I want you to look.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I say, Father, joking apart, is she very hideous?” Anatole asked, as if
+ continuing a conversation the subject of which had often been mentioned
+ during the journey.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Enough! What nonsense! Above all, try to be respectful and cautious with
+ the old prince.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If he starts a row I’ll go away,” said Prince Anatole. “I can’t bear
+ those old men! Eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Remember, for you everything depends on this.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the meantime, not only was it known in the maidservants’ rooms that the
+ minister and his son had arrived, but the appearance of both had been
+ minutely described. Princess Mary was sitting alone in her room, vainly
+ trying to master her agitation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why did they write, why did Lise tell me about it? It can never happen!”
+ she said, looking at herself in the glass. “How shall I enter the drawing
+ room? Even if I like him I can’t now be myself with him.” The mere thought
+ of her father’s look filled her with terror. The little princess and
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne had already received from Másha, the lady’s maid,
+ the necessary report of how handsome the minister’s son was, with his rosy
+ cheeks and dark eyebrows, and with what difficulty the father had dragged
+ his legs upstairs while the son had followed him like an eagle, three
+ steps at a time. Having received this information, the little princess and
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne, whose chattering voices had reached her from the
+ corridor, went into Princess Mary’s room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know they’ve come, Marie?” said the little princess,
+ waddling in, and sinking heavily into an armchair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She was no longer in the loose gown she generally wore in the morning, but
+ had on one of her best dresses. Her hair was carefully done and her face
+ was animated, which, however, did not conceal its sunken and faded
+ outlines. Dressed as she used to be in Petersburg society, it was still
+ more noticeable how much plainer she had become. Some unobtrusive touch
+ had been added to Mademoiselle Bourienne’s toilet which rendered her fresh
+ and pretty face yet more attractive.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What! Are you going to remain as you are, dear princess?” she began.
+ “They’ll be announcing that the gentlemen are in the drawing room and we
+ shall have to go down, and you have not smartened yourself up at all!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The little princess got up, rang for the maid, and hurriedly and merrily
+ began to devise and carry out a plan of how Princess Mary should be
+ dressed. Princess Mary’s self-esteem was wounded by the fact that the
+ arrival of a suitor agitated her, and still more so by both her
+ companions’ not having the least conception that it could be otherwise. To
+ tell them that she felt ashamed for herself and for them would be to
+ betray her agitation, while to decline their offers to dress her would
+ prolong their banter and insistence. She flushed, her beautiful eyes grew
+ dim, red blotches came on her face, and it took on the unattractive
+ martyrlike expression it so often wore, as she submitted herself to
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne and Lise. Both these women quite sincerely tried to
+ make her look pretty. She was so plain that neither of them could think of
+ her as a rival, so they began dressing her with perfect sincerity, and
+ with the naïve and firm conviction women have that dress can make a face
+ pretty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No really, my dear, this dress is not pretty,” said Lise, looking
+ sideways at Princess Mary from a little distance. “You have a maroon
+ dress, have it fetched. Really! You know the fate of your whole life may
+ be at stake. But this one is too light, it’s not becoming!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was not the dress, but the face and whole figure of Princess Mary that
+ was not pretty, but neither Mademoiselle Bourienne nor the little princess
+ felt this; they still thought that if a blue ribbon were placed in the
+ hair, the hair combed up, and the blue scarf arranged lower on the best
+ maroon dress, and so on, all would be well. They forgot that the
+ frightened face and the figure could not be altered, and that however they
+ might change the setting and adornment of that face, it would still remain
+ piteous and plain. After two or three changes to which Princess Mary
+ meekly submitted, just as her hair had been arranged on the top of her
+ head (a style that quite altered and spoiled her looks) and she had put on
+ a maroon dress with a pale-blue scarf, the little princess walked twice
+ round her, now adjusting a fold of the dress with her little hand, now
+ arranging the scarf and looking at her with her head bent first on one
+ side and then on the other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, it will not do,” she said decidedly, clasping her hands.
+ “No, Mary, really this dress does not suit you. I prefer you in your little
+ gray everyday dress. Now please, do it for my sake. Katie,” she said to the
+ maid, “bring the princess her gray dress, and you’ll see, Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne, how I shall arrange it,” she added, smiling with a foretaste of
+ artistic pleasure.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But when Katie brought the required dress, Princess Mary remained sitting
+ motionless before the glass, looking at her face, and saw in the mirror
+ her eyes full of tears and her mouth quivering, ready to burst into sobs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come, dear princess,” said Mademoiselle Bourienne, “just one
+ more little effort.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The little princess, taking the dress from the maid, came up to Princess
+ Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, now we’ll arrange something quite simple and becoming,” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The three voices, hers, Mademoiselle Bourienne’s, and Katie’s, who was
+ laughing at something, mingled in a merry sound, like the chirping of
+ birds.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, leave me alone,” said Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her voice sounded so serious and so sad that the chirping of the birds was
+ silenced at once. They looked at the beautiful, large, thoughtful eyes
+ full of tears and of thoughts, gazing shiningly and imploringly at them,
+ and understood that it was useless and even cruel to insist.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At least, change your coiffure,” said the little princess. “Didn’t I tell
+ you,” she went on, turning reproachfully to Mademoiselle Bourienne,
+ “Mary’s is a face which such a coiffure does not suit in the least. Not in
+ the least! Please change it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Leave me alone, please leave me alone! It is all quite the same to me,”
+ answered a voice struggling with tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne and the little princess had to own to themselves
+ that Princess Mary in this guise looked very plain, worse than usual, but
+ it was too late. She was looking at them with an expression they both
+ knew, an expression thoughtful and sad. This expression in Princess Mary
+ did not frighten them (she never inspired fear in anyone), but they knew
+ that when it appeared on her face, she became mute and was not to be
+ shaken in her determination.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You will change it, won’t you?” said Lise. And as Princess
+ Mary gave no answer, she left the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary was left alone. She did not comply with Lise’s request, she
+ not only left her hair as it was, but did not even look in her glass.
+ Letting her arms fall helplessly, she sat with downcast eyes and pondered.
+ A husband, a man, a strong dominant and strangely attractive being rose in
+ her imagination, and carried her into a totally different happy world of
+ his own. She fancied a child, her own —such as she had seen the day
+ before in the arms of her nurse’s daughter—at her own breast, the
+ husband standing by and gazing tenderly at her and the child. “But no, it
+ is impossible, I am too ugly,” she thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Please come to tea. The prince will be out in a moment,” came the maid’s
+ voice at the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She roused herself, and felt appalled at what she had been thinking, and
+ before going down she went into the room where the icons hung and, her
+ eyes fixed on the dark face of a large icon of the Saviour lit by a lamp,
+ she stood before it with folded hands for a few moments. A painful doubt
+ filled her soul. Could the joy of love, of earthly love for a man, be for
+ her? In her thoughts of marriage Princess Mary dreamed of happiness and of
+ children, but her strongest, most deeply hidden longing was for earthly
+ love. The more she tried to hide this feeling from others and even from
+ herself, the stronger it grew. “O God,” she said, “how am I to stifle in
+ my heart these temptations of the devil? How am I to renounce forever
+ these vile fancies, so as peacefully to fulfill Thy will?” And scarcely
+ had she put that question than God gave her the answer in her own heart.
+ “Desire nothing for thyself, seek nothing, be not anxious or envious.
+ Man’s future and thy own fate must remain hidden from thee, but live so
+ that thou mayest be ready for anything. If it be God’s will to prove thee
+ in the duties of marriage, be ready to fulfill His will.” With this
+ consoling thought (but yet with a hope for the fulfillment of her
+ forbidden earthly longing) Princess Mary sighed, and having crossed
+ herself went down, thinking neither of her gown and coiffure nor of how
+ she would go in nor of what she would say. What could all that matter in
+ comparison with the will of God, without Whose care not a hair of man’s
+ head can fall?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ When Princess Mary came down, Prince Vasíli and his son were already in
+ the drawing room, talking to the little princess and Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne. When she entered with her heavy step, treading on her heels,
+ the gentlemen and Mademoiselle Bourienne rose and the little princess,
+ indicating her to the gentlemen, said: “Voilà Marie!” Princess Mary saw
+ them all and saw them in detail. She saw Prince Vasíli’s face, serious for
+ an instant at the sight of her, but immediately smiling again, and the
+ little princess curiously noting the impression “Marie” produced on the
+ visitors. And she saw Mademoiselle Bourienne, with her ribbon and pretty
+ face, and her unusually animated look which was fixed on him , but him she
+ could not see, she only saw something large, brilliant, and handsome
+ moving toward her as she entered the room. Prince Vasíli approached first,
+ and she kissed the bold forehead that bent over her hand and answered his
+ question by saying that, on the contrary, she remembered him quite well.
+ Then Anatole came up to her. She still could not see him. She only felt a
+ soft hand taking hers firmly, and she touched with her lips a white
+ forehead, over which was beautiful light-brown hair smelling of pomade.
+ When she looked up at him she was struck by his beauty. Anatole stood with
+ his right thumb under a button of his uniform, his chest expanded and his
+ back drawn in, slightly swinging one foot, and, with his head a little
+ bent, looked with beaming face at the princess without speaking and
+ evidently not thinking about her at all. Anatole was not quick-witted, nor
+ ready or eloquent in conversation, but he had the faculty, so invaluable
+ in society, of composure and imperturbable self-possession. If a man
+ lacking in self-confidence remains dumb on a first introduction and
+ betrays a consciousness of the impropriety of such silence and an anxiety
+ to find something to say, the effect is bad. But Anatole was dumb, swung
+ his foot, and smilingly examined the princess’ hair. It was evident that
+ he could be silent in this way for a very long time. “If anyone finds this
+ silence inconvenient, let him talk, but I don’t want to,” he seemed to
+ say. Besides this, in his behavior to women Anatole had a manner which
+ particularly inspires in them curiosity, awe, and even love—a
+ supercilious consciousness of his own superiority. It was as if he said to
+ them: “I know you, I know you, but why should I bother about you? You’d be
+ only too glad, of course.” Perhaps he did not really think this when he
+ met women—even probably he did not, for in general he thought very
+ little—but his looks and manner gave that impression. The princess
+ felt this, and as if wishing to show him that she did not even dare expect
+ to interest him, she turned to his father. The conversation was general
+ and animated, thanks to Princess Lise’s voice and little downy lip that
+ lifted over her white teeth. She met Prince Vasíli with that playful
+ manner often employed by lively chatty people, and consisting in the
+ assumption that between the person they so address and themselves there
+ are some semi-private, long-established jokes and amusing reminiscences,
+ though no such reminiscences really exist—just as none existed in
+ this case. Prince Vasíli readily adopted her tone and the little princess
+ also drew Anatole, whom she hardly knew, into these amusing recollections
+ of things that had never occurred. Mademoiselle Bourienne also shared them
+ and even Princess Mary felt herself pleasantly made to share in these
+ merry reminiscences.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here at least we shall have the benefit of your company all to ourselves,
+ dear prince,” said the little princess (of course, in French) to Prince
+ Vasíli. “It’s not as at Annette’s * receptions where you
+ always ran away; you remember cette chère Annette! ”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Anna Pávlovna.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, but you won’t talk politics to me like Annette!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And our little tea table?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, yes!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why is it you were never at Annette’s?” the little princess asked
+ Anatole. “Ah, I know, I know,” she said with a sly glance, “your brother
+ Hippolyte told me about your goings on. Oh!” and she shook her finger at
+ him, “I have even heard of your doings in Paris!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And didn’t Hippolyte tell you?” asked Prince Vasíli, turning to his son
+ and seizing the little princess’ arm as if she would have run away and he
+ had just managed to catch her, “didn’t he tell you how he himself was
+ pining for the dear princess, and how she showed him the door? Oh, she is
+ a pearl among women, Princess,” he added, turning to Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Paris was mentioned, Mademoiselle Bourienne for her part seized the
+ opportunity of joining in the general current of recollections.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She took the liberty of inquiring whether it was long since Anatole had
+ left Paris and how he had liked that city. Anatole answered the
+ Frenchwoman very readily and, looking at her with a smile, talked to her
+ about her native land. When he saw the pretty little Bourienne, Anatole
+ came to the conclusion that he would not find Bald Hills dull either. “Not
+ at all bad!” he thought, examining her, “not at all bad, that little
+ companion! I hope she will bring her along with her when we’re married, la
+ petite est gentille. ” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * The little one is charming.
+
+
+
+ 
+ The old prince dressed leisurely in his study, frowning and considering
+ what he was to do. The coming of these visitors annoyed him. “What are
+ Prince Vasíli and that son of his to me? Prince Vasíli is a shallow
+ braggart and his son, no doubt, is a fine specimen,” he grumbled to
+ himself. What angered him was that the coming of these visitors revived in
+ his mind an unsettled question he always tried to stifle, one about which
+ he always deceived himself. The question was whether he could ever bring
+ himself to part from his daughter and give her to a husband. The prince
+ never directly asked himself that question, knowing beforehand that he
+ would have to answer it justly, and justice clashed not only with his
+ feelings but with the very possibility of life. Life without Princess
+ Mary, little as he seemed to value her, was unthinkable to him. “And why
+ should she marry?” he thought. “To be unhappy for certain. There’s Lise,
+ married to Andrew—a better husband one would think could hardly be
+ found nowadays—but is she contented with her lot? And who would
+ marry Marie for love? Plain and awkward! They’ll take her for her
+ connections and wealth. Are there no women living unmarried, and even the
+ happier for it?” So thought Prince Bolkónski while dressing, and yet the
+ question he was always putting off demanded an immediate answer. Prince
+ Vasíli had brought his son with the evident intention of proposing, and
+ today or tomorrow he would probably ask for an answer. His birth and
+ position in society were not bad. “Well, I’ve nothing against it,” the
+ prince said to himself, “but he must be worthy of her. And that is what we
+ shall see.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is what we shall see! That is what we shall see!” he added aloud.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He entered the drawing room with his usual alert step, glancing rapidly
+ round the company. He noticed the change in the little princess’ dress,
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne’s ribbon, Princess Mary’s unbecoming coiffure,
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne’s and Anatole’s smiles, and the loneliness of his
+ daughter amid the general conversation. “Got herself up like a fool!” he
+ thought, looking irritably at her. “She is shameless, and he ignores her!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He went straight up to Prince Vasíli.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well! How d’ye do? How d’ye do? Glad to see you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Friendship laughs at distance,” began Prince Vasíli in his usual rapid,
+ self-confident, familiar tone. “Here is my second son; please love and
+ befriend him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Bolkónski surveyed Anatole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fine young fellow! Fine young fellow!” he said. “Well, come
+ and kiss me,” and he offered his cheek.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole kissed the old man, and looked at him with curiosity and perfect
+ composure, waiting for a display of the eccentricities his father had told
+ him to expect.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Bolkónski sat down in his usual place in the corner of the sofa
+ and, drawing up an armchair for Prince Vasíli, pointed to it and began
+ questioning him about political affairs and news. He seemed to listen
+ attentively to what Prince Vasíli said, but kept glancing at Princess
+ Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And so they are writing from Potsdam already?” he said, repeating Prince
+ Vasíli’s last words. Then rising, he suddenly went up to his daughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is it for visitors you’ve got yourself up like that, eh?” said
+ he. “Fine, very fine! You have done up your hair in this new way for the
+ visitors, and before the visitors I tell you that in future you are never to
+ dare to change your way of dress without my consent.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It was my fault, mon père ,” interceded the little princess, with a blush.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You must do as you please,” said Prince Bolkónski, bowing to his
+ daughter-in-law, “but she need not make a fool of herself, she’s plain
+ enough as it is.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And he sat down again, paying no more attention to his daughter, who was
+ reduced to tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the contrary, that coiffure suits the princess very well,” said Prince
+ Vasíli.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now you, young prince, what’s your name?” said Prince Bolkónski,
+ turning to Anatole, “come here, let us talk and get acquainted.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now the fun begins,” thought Anatole, sitting down with a smile beside
+ the old prince.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, my dear boy, I hear you’ve been educated abroad, not taught to read
+ and write by the deacon, like your father and me. Now tell me, my dear
+ boy, are you serving in the Horse Guards?” asked the old man, scrutinizing
+ Anatole closely and intently.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I have been transferred to the line,” said Anatole, hardly able to
+ restrain his laughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah! That’s a good thing. So, my dear boy, you wish to serve the Tsar and
+ the country? It is wartime. Such a fine fellow must serve. Well, are you
+ off to the front?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Prince, our regiment has gone to the front, but I am attached... what
+ is it I am attached to, Papa?” said Anatole, turning to his father with a
+ laugh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A splendid soldier, splendid! ‘What am I attached to!’ Ha, ha,
+ ha!” laughed Prince Bolkónski, and Anatole laughed still louder. Suddenly
+ Prince Bolkónski frowned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You may go,” he said to Anatole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole returned smiling to the ladies.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And so you’ve had him educated abroad, Prince Vasíli, haven’t
+ you?” said the old prince to Prince Vasíli.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have done my best for him, and I can assure you the education there is
+ much better than ours.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, everything is different nowadays, everything is changed. The lad’s a
+ fine fellow, a fine fellow! Well, come with me now.” He took Prince
+ Vasíli’s arm and led him to his study. As soon as they were alone
+ together, Prince Vasíli announced his hopes and wishes to the old prince.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, do you think I shall prevent her, that I can’t part from
+ her?” said the old prince angrily. “What an idea! I’m ready
+ for it tomorrow! Only let me tell you, I want to know my son-in-law better. You
+ know my principles—everything aboveboard! I will ask her tomorrow in your
+ presence; if she is willing, then he can stay on. He can stay and I’ll
+ see.” The old prince snorted. “Let her marry, it’s all the same
+ to me!” he screamed in the same piercing tone as when parting from his son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will tell you frankly,” said Prince Vasíli in the tone of a crafty man
+ convinced of the futility of being cunning with so keen-sighted a
+ companion. “You know, you see right through people. Anatole is no genius,
+ but he is an honest, goodhearted lad; an excellent son or kinsman.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right, all right, we’ll see!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As always happens when women lead lonely lives for any length of time
+ without male society, on Anatole’s appearance all the three women of
+ Prince Bolkónski’s household felt that their life had not been real till
+ then. Their powers of reasoning, feeling, and observing immediately
+ increased tenfold, and their life, which seemed to have been passed in
+ darkness, was suddenly lit up by a new brightness, full of significance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary grew quite unconscious of her face and coiffure. The
+ handsome open face of the man who might perhaps be her husband absorbed
+ all her attention. He seemed to her kind, brave, determined, manly, and
+ magnanimous. She felt convinced of that. Thousands of dreams of a future
+ family life continually rose in her imagination. She drove them away and
+ tried to conceal them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But am I not too cold with him?” thought the princess. “I try
+ to be reserved because in the depth of my soul I feel too near to him already,
+ but then he cannot know what I think of him and may imagine that I do not
+ like him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Princess Mary tried, but could not manage, to be cordial to her new
+ guest. “Poor girl, she’s devilish ugly!” thought Anatole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne, also roused to great excitement by Anatole’s
+ arrival, thought in another way. Of course, she, a handsome young woman
+ without any definite position, without relations or even a country, did
+ not intend to devote her life to serving Prince Bolkónski, to reading
+ aloud to him and being friends with Princess Mary. Mademoiselle Bourienne
+ had long been waiting for a Russian prince who, able to appreciate at a
+ glance her superiority to the plain, badly dressed, ungainly Russian
+ princesses, would fall in love with her and carry her off; and here at
+ last was a Russian prince. Mademoiselle Bourienne knew a story, heard from
+ her aunt but finished in her own way, which she liked to repeat to
+ herself. It was the story of a girl who had been seduced, and to whom her
+ poor mother ( sa pauvre mère ) appeared, and reproached her for yielding to
+ a man without being married. Mademoiselle Bourienne was often touched to
+ tears as in imagination she told this story to him , her seducer. And now
+ he , a real Russian prince, had appeared. He would carry her away and then
+ sa pauvre mère would appear and he would marry her. So her future shaped
+ itself in Mademoiselle Bourienne’s head at the very time she was talking
+ to Anatole about Paris. It was not calculation that guided her (she did
+ not even for a moment consider what she should do), but all this had long
+ been familiar to her, and now that Anatole had appeared it just grouped
+ itself around him and she wished and tried to please him as much as
+ possible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The little princess, like an old war horse that hears the trumpet,
+ unconsciously and quite forgetting her condition, prepared for the
+ familiar gallop of coquetry, without any ulterior motive or any struggle,
+ but with naïve and lighthearted gaiety.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Although in female society Anatole usually assumed the role of a man tired
+ of being run after by women, his vanity was flattered by the spectacle of
+ his power over these three women. Besides that, he was beginning to feel
+ for the pretty and provocative Mademoiselle Bourienne that passionate
+ animal feeling which was apt to master him with great suddenness and
+ prompt him to the coarsest and most reckless actions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After tea, the company went into the sitting room and Princess Mary was
+ asked to play on the clavichord. Anatole, laughing and in high spirits,
+ came and leaned on his elbows, facing her and beside Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne. Princess Mary felt his look with a painfully joyous emotion.
+ Her favorite sonata bore her into a most intimately poetic world and the
+ look she felt upon her made that world still more poetic. But Anatole’s
+ expression, though his eyes were fixed on her, referred not to her but to
+ the movements of Mademoiselle Bourienne’s little foot, which he was then
+ touching with his own under the clavichord. Mademoiselle Bourienne was
+ also looking at Princess Mary, and in her lovely eyes there was a look of
+ fearful joy and hope that was also new to the princess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How she loves me!” thought Princess Mary. “How happy I am now,
+ and how happy I may be with such a friend and such a husband! Husband? Can it be
+ possible?” she thought, not daring to look at his face, but still feeling
+ his eyes gazing at her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the evening, after supper, when all were about to retire, Anatole
+ kissed Princess Mary’s hand. She did not know how she found the courage,
+ but she looked straight into his handsome face as it came near to her
+ shortsighted eyes. Turning from Princess Mary he went up and kissed
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne’s hand. (This was not etiquette, but then he did
+ everything so simply and with such assurance!) Mademoiselle Bourienne
+ flushed, and gave the princess a frightened look.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What delicacy!” thought the princess. “Is it possible that
+ Amélie” (Mademoiselle Bourienne) “thinks I could be jealous of her,
+ and not value her pure affection and devotion to me?” She went up to her
+ and kissed her warmly. Anatole went up to kiss the little princess’ hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No! No! No! When your father writes to tell me that you are behaving well
+ I will give you my hand to kiss. Not till then!” she said. And smilingly
+ raising a finger at him, she left the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ They all separated, but, except Anatole who fell asleep as soon as he got
+ into bed, all kept awake a long time that night.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is he really to be my husband, this stranger who is so kind—yes,
+ kind, that is the chief thing,” thought Princess Mary; and fear, which she
+ had seldom experienced, came upon her. She feared to look round, it seemed
+ to her that someone was there standing behind the screen in the dark
+ corner. And this someone was he —the devil—and he was
+ also this man with the white forehead, black eyebrows, and red lips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She rang for her maid and asked her to sleep in her room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne walked up and down the conservatory for a long time
+ that evening, vainly expecting someone, now smiling at someone, now
+ working herself up to tears with the imaginary words of her pauvre mère 
+ rebuking her for her fall.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The little princess grumbled to her maid that her bed was badly made. She
+ could not lie either on her face or on her side. Every position was
+ awkward and uncomfortable, and her burden oppressed her now more than ever
+ because Anatole’s presence had vividly recalled to her the time when she
+ was not like that and when everything was light and gay. She sat in an
+ armchair in her dressing jacket and nightcap and Katie, sleepy and
+ disheveled, beat and turned the heavy feather bed for the third time,
+ muttering to herself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I told you it was all lumps and holes!” the little princess repeated.
+ “I should be glad enough to fall asleep, so it’s not my fault!”
+ and her voice quivered like that of a child about to cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old prince did not sleep either. Tíkhon, half asleep, heard him pacing
+ angrily about and snorting. The old prince felt as though he had been
+ insulted through his daughter. The insult was the more pointed because it
+ concerned not himself but another, his daughter, whom he loved more than
+ himself. He kept telling himself that he would consider the whole matter
+ and decide what was right and how he should act, but instead of that he
+ only excited himself more and more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The first man that turns up—she forgets her father and everything
+ else, runs upstairs and does up her hair and wags her tail and is unlike
+ herself! Glad to throw her father over! And she knew I should notice it.
+ Fr... fr... fr! And don’t I see that that idiot had eyes only for
+ Bourienne—I shall have to get rid of her. And how is it she has not
+ pride enough to see it? If she has no pride for herself she might at least
+ have some for my sake! She must be shown that the blockhead thinks nothing
+ of her and looks only at Bourienne. No, she has no pride... but I’ll let
+ her see....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old prince knew that if he told his daughter she was making a mistake
+ and that Anatole meant to flirt with Mademoiselle Bourienne, Princess
+ Mary’s self-esteem would be wounded and his point (not to be parted from
+ her) would be gained, so pacifying himself with this thought, he called
+ Tíkhon and began to undress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What devil brought them here?” thought he, while Tíkhon was putting the
+ nightshirt over his dried-up old body and gray-haired chest. “I never
+ invited them. They came to disturb my life—and there is not much of
+ it left.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Devil take ‘em!” he muttered, while his head was still
+ covered by the shirt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Tíkhon knew his master’s habit of sometimes thinking aloud, and therefore
+ met with unaltered looks the angrily inquisitive expression of the face
+ that emerged from the shirt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gone to bed?” asked the prince.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Tíkhon, like all good valets, instinctively knew the direction of his
+ master’s thoughts. He guessed that the question referred to Prince Vasíli
+ and his son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They have gone to bed and put out their lights, your excellency.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No good... no good...” said the prince rapidly, and thrusting his feet
+ into his slippers and his arms into the sleeves of his dressing gown, he
+ went to the couch on which he slept.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though no words had passed between Anatole and Mademoiselle Bourienne,
+ they quite understood one another as to the first part of their romance,
+ up to the appearance of the pauvre mère ; they understood that they had
+ much to say to one another in private and so they had been seeking an
+ opportunity since morning to meet one another alone. When Princess Mary
+ went to her father’s room at the usual hour, Mademoiselle Bourienne and
+ Anatole met in the conservatory.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary went to the door of the study with special trepidation. It
+ seemed to her that not only did everybody know that her fate would be
+ decided that day, but that they also knew what she thought about it. She
+ read this in Tíkhon’s face and in that of Prince Vasíli’s valet,
+ who made her a low bow when she met him in the corridor carrying hot water.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old prince was very affectionate and careful in his treatment of his
+ daughter that morning. Princess Mary well knew this painstaking expression
+ of her father’s. His face wore that expression when his dry hands clenched
+ with vexation at her not understanding a sum in arithmetic, when rising
+ from his chair he would walk away from her, repeating in a low voice the
+ same words several times over.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He came to the point at once, treating her ceremoniously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have had a proposition made me concerning you,” he said with an
+ unnatural smile. “I expect you have guessed that Prince Vasíli has not
+ come and brought his pupil with him” (for some reason Prince Bolkónski
+ referred to Anatole as a “pupil”) “for the sake of my beautiful
+ eyes. Last night a proposition was made me on your account and, as you know my
+ principles, I refer it to you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How am I to understand you, mon père? ” said the princess,
+ growing pale and then blushing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How understand me!” cried her father angrily. “Prince Vasíli
+ finds you to his taste as a daughter-in-law and makes a proposal to you on his
+ pupil’s behalf. That’s how it’s to be understood! ‘How
+ understand it’!... And I ask you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I do not know what you think, Father,” whispered the princess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I? I? What of me? Leave me out of the question. I’m not going to get
+ married. What about you? That’s what I want to know.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess saw that her father regarded the matter with disapproval, but
+ at that moment the thought occurred to her that her fate would be decided
+ now or never. She lowered her eyes so as not to see the gaze under which
+ she felt that she could not think, but would only be able to submit from
+ habit, and she said: “I wish only to do your will, but if I had to express
+ my own desire...” She had no time to finish. The old prince interrupted
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s admirable!” he shouted. “He will take you with your dowry and take
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne into the bargain. She’ll be the wife, while you...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The prince stopped. He saw the effect these words had produced on his
+ daughter. She lowered her head and was ready to burst into tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then, now then, I’m only joking!” he said. “Remember
+ this, Princess, I hold to the principle that a maiden has a full right to choose.
+ I give you freedom. Only remember that your life’s happiness depends on your
+ decision. Never mind me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I do not know, Father!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There’s no need to talk! He receives his orders and will marry you or
+ anybody; but you are free to choose.... Go to your room, think it over,
+ and come back in an hour and tell me in his presence: yes or no. I know
+ you will pray over it. Well, pray if you like, but you had better think it
+ over. Go! Yes or no, yes or no, yes or no!” he still shouted when the
+ princess, as if lost in a fog, had already staggered out of the study.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her fate was decided and happily decided. But what her father had said
+ about Mademoiselle Bourienne was dreadful. It was untrue to be sure, but
+ still it was terrible, and she could not help thinking of it. She was
+ going straight on through the conservatory, neither seeing nor hearing
+ anything, when suddenly the well-known whispering of Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne aroused her. She raised her eyes, and two steps away saw Anatole
+ embracing the Frenchwoman and whispering something to her. With a
+ horrified expression on his handsome face, Anatole looked at Princess
+ Mary, but did not at once take his arm from the waist of Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne who had not yet seen her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who’s that? Why? Wait a moment!” Anatole’s face seemed to say. Princess
+ Mary looked at them in silence. She could not understand it. At last
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne gave a scream and ran away. Anatole bowed to
+ Princess Mary with a gay smile, as if inviting her to join in a laugh at
+ this strange incident, and then shrugging his shoulders went to the door
+ that led to his own apartments.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ An hour later, Tíkhon came to call Princess Mary to the old prince; he
+ added that Prince Vasíli was also there. When Tíkhon came to her Princess
+ Mary was sitting on the sofa in her room, holding the weeping Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne in her arms and gently stroking her hair. The princess’
+ beautiful eyes with all their former calm radiance were looking with
+ tender affection and pity at Mademoiselle Bourienne’s pretty face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Princess, I have lost your affection forever!” said Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why? I love you more than ever,” said Princess Mary, “and I will try to
+ do all I can for your happiness.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you despise me. You who are so pure can never understand being so
+ carried away by passion. Oh, only my poor mother...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I quite understand,” answered Princess Mary, with a sad smile. “Calm
+ yourself, my dear. I will go to my father,” she said, and went out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli, with one leg thrown high over the other and a snuffbox in
+ his hand, was sitting there with a smile of deep emotion on his face, as
+ if stirred to his heart’s core and himself regretting and laughing at his
+ own sensibility, when Princess Mary entered. He hurriedly took a pinch of
+ snuff.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my dear, my dear!” he began, rising and taking her by both hands.
+ Then, sighing, he added: “My son’s fate is in your hands. Decide, my dear,
+ good, gentle Marie, whom I have always loved as a daughter!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He drew back and a real tear appeared in his eye.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fr... fr...” snorted Prince Bolkónski. “The prince is making a
+ proposition to you in his pupil’s—I mean, his son’s—name. Do
+ you wish or not to be Prince Anatole Kurágin’s wife? Reply: yes or no,” he
+ shouted, “and then I shall reserve the right to state my opinion also.
+ Yes, my opinion, and only my opinion,” added Prince Bolkónski, turning to
+ Prince Vasíli and answering his imploring look. “Yes, or no?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My desire is never to leave you, Father, never to separate my life from
+ yours. I don’t wish to marry,” she answered positively, glancing at Prince
+ Vasíli and at her father with her beautiful eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Humbug! Nonsense! Humbug, humbug, humbug!” cried Prince Bolkónski,
+ frowning and taking his daughter’s hand; he did not kiss her, but only
+ bending his forehead to hers just touched it, and pressed her hand so that
+ she winced and uttered a cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli rose.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear, I must tell you that this is a moment I shall never, never
+ forget. But, my dear, will you not give us a little hope of touching this
+ heart, so kind and generous? Say ‘perhaps’... The future is so long. Say
+ ‘perhaps.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Prince, what I have said is all there is in my heart. I thank you for the
+ honor, but I shall never be your son’s wife.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, so that’s finished, my dear fellow! I am very glad to have seen
+ you. Very glad! Go back to your rooms, Princess. Go!” said the old prince.
+ “Very, very glad to have seen you,” repeated he, embracing Prince Vasíli.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My vocation is a different one,” thought Princess Mary. “My vocation is
+ to be happy with another kind of happiness, the happiness of love and
+ self-sacrifice. And cost what it may, I will arrange poor Amélie’s
+ happiness, she loves him so passionately, and so passionately repents. I
+ will do all I can to arrange the match between them. If he is not rich I
+ will give her the means; I will ask my father and Andrew. I shall be so
+ happy when she is his wife. She is so unfortunate, a stranger, alone,
+ helpless! And, oh God, how passionately she must love him if she could so
+ far forget herself! Perhaps I might have done the same!...” thought
+ Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ It was long since the Rostóvs had news of Nicholas. Not till midwinter was
+ the count at last handed a letter addressed in his son’s handwriting. On
+ receiving it, he ran on tiptoe to his study in alarm and haste, trying to
+ escape notice, closed the door, and began to read the letter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Mikháylovna, who always knew everything that passed in the house, on
+ hearing of the arrival of the letter went softly into the room and found
+ the count with it in his hand, sobbing and laughing at the same time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Mikháylovna, though her circumstances had improved, was still living
+ with the Rostóvs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear friend?” said she, in a tone of pathetic inquiry, prepared to
+ sympathize in any way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count sobbed yet more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nikólenka... a letter... wa... a... s... wounded... my darling boy... the
+ countess... promoted to be an officer... thank God... How tell the little
+ countess!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Mikháylovna sat down beside him, with her own handkerchief wiped the
+ tears from his eyes and from the letter, then having dried her own eyes
+ she comforted the count, and decided that at dinner and till teatime she
+ would prepare the countess, and after tea, with God’s help, would inform
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At dinner Anna Mikháylovna talked the whole time about the war news and
+ about Nikólenka, twice asked when the last letter had been received from
+ him, though she knew that already, and remarked that they might very
+ likely be getting a letter from him that day. Each time that these hints
+ began to make the countess anxious and she glanced uneasily at the count
+ and at Anna Mikháylovna, the latter very adroitly turned the conversation
+ to insignificant matters. Natásha, who, of the whole family, was the most
+ gifted with a capacity to feel any shades of intonation, look, and
+ expression, pricked up her ears from the beginning of the meal and was
+ certain that there was some secret between her father and Anna
+ Mikháylovna, that it had something to do with her brother, and that Anna
+ Mikháylovna was preparing them for it. Bold as she was, Natásha, who knew
+ how sensitive her mother was to anything relating to Nikólenka, did not
+ venture to ask any questions at dinner, but she was too excited to eat
+ anything and kept wriggling about on her chair regardless of her
+ governess’ remarks. After dinner, she rushed headlong after Anna
+ Mikháylovna and, dashing at her, flung herself on her neck as soon as she
+ overtook her in the sitting room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Auntie, darling, do tell me what it is!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing, my dear.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, dearest, sweet one, honey, I won’t give up—I know you know
+ something.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Mikháylovna shook her head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are a little slyboots,” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A letter from Nikólenka! I’m sure of it!” exclaimed Natásha, reading
+ confirmation in Anna Mikháylovna’s face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But for God’s sake, be careful, you know how it may affect your mamma.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will, I will, only tell me! You won’t? Then I will go and tell at
+ once.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Mikháylovna, in a few words, told her the contents of the letter, on
+ condition that she should tell no one.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, on my true word of honor,” said Natásha, crossing herself, “I won’t
+ tell anyone!” and she ran off at once to Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nikólenka... wounded... a letter,” she announced in gleeful triumph.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nicholas!” was all Sónya said, instantly turning white.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha, seeing the impression the news of her brother’s wound produced on
+ Sónya, felt for the first time the sorrowful side of the news.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She rushed to Sónya, hugged her, and began to cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A little wound, but he has been made an officer; he is well now, he wrote
+ himself,” said she through her tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now! It’s true that all you women are crybabies,” remarked Pétya,
+ pacing the room with large, resolute strides. “Now I’m very glad, very
+ glad indeed, that my brother has distinguished himself so. You are all
+ blubberers and understand nothing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha smiled through her tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You haven’t read the letter?” asked Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, but she said that it was all over and that he’s now an officer.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank God!” said Sónya, crossing herself. “But perhaps she
+ deceived you. Let us go to Mamma.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya paced the room in silence for a time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If I’d been in Nikólenka’s place I would have killed even more of those
+ Frenchmen,” he said. “What nasty brutes they are! I’d have killed so many
+ that there’d have been a heap of them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hold your tongue, Pétya, what a goose you are!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’m not a goose, but they are who cry about trifles,” said Pétya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you remember him?” Natásha suddenly asked, after a moment’s silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do I remember Nicholas? ”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Sónya, but do you remember so that you remember him perfectly,
+ remember everything?” said Natásha, with an expressive gesture, evidently
+ wishing to give her words a very definite meaning. “I remember Nikólenka
+ too, I remember him well,” she said. “But I don’t remember
+ Borís. I don’t remember him a bit.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What! You don’t remember Borís?” asked Sónya in surprise.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s not that I don’t remember—I know what he is like,
+ but not as I remember Nikólenka. Him—I just shut my eyes and remember, but
+ Borís... No!” (She shut her eyes.) “No! there’s nothing at all.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, Natásha!” said Sónya, looking ecstatically and earnestly at her
+ friend as if she did not consider her worthy to hear what she meant to say
+ and as if she were saying it to someone else, with whom joking was out of
+ the question, “I am in love with your brother once for all and, whatever
+ may happen to him or to me, shall never cease to love him as long as I
+ live.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha looked at Sónya with wondering and inquisitive eyes, and said
+ nothing. She felt that Sónya was speaking the truth, that there was such
+ love as Sónya was speaking of. But Natásha had not yet felt anything like
+ it. She believed it could be, but did not understand it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Shall you write to him?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya became thoughtful. The question of how to write to Nicholas , and
+ whether she ought to write, tormented her. Now that he was already an
+ officer and a wounded hero, would it be right to remind him of herself
+ and, as it might seem, of the obligations to her he had taken on himself?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know. I think if he writes, I will write too,” she said,
+ blushing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And you won’t feel ashamed to write to him?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I should be ashamed to write to Borís. I’m not going to.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why should you be ashamed?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, I don’t know. It’s awkward and would make me ashamed.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I know why she’d be ashamed,” said Pétya, offended by Natásha’s
+ previous remark. “It’s because she was in love with that fat one in
+ spectacles” (that was how Pétya described his namesake, the new Count
+ Bezúkhov) “and now she’s in love with that singer” (he meant Natásha’s
+ Italian singing master), “that’s why she’s ashamed!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pétya, you’re stupid!” said Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not more stupid than you, madam,” said the nine-year-old Pétya, with the
+ air of an old brigadier.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess had been prepared by Anna Mikháylovna’s hints at dinner. On
+ retiring to her own room, she sat in an armchair, her eyes fixed on a
+ miniature portrait of her son on the lid of a snuffbox, while the tears
+ kept coming into her eyes. Anna Mikháylovna, with the letter, came on
+ tiptoe to the countess’ door and paused.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t come in,” she said to the old count who was following
+ her. “Come later.” And she went in, closing the door behind her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count put his ear to the keyhole and listened.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At first he heard the sound of indifferent voices, then Anna Mikháylovna’s
+ voice alone in a long speech, then a cry, then silence, then both voices
+ together with glad intonations, and then footsteps. Anna Mikháylovna
+ opened the door. Her face wore the proud expression of a surgeon who has
+ just performed a difficult operation and admits the public to appreciate
+ his skill.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is done!” she said to the count, pointing triumphantly to the
+ countess, who sat holding in one hand the snuffbox with its portrait and
+ in the other the letter, and pressing them alternately to her lips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When she saw the count, she stretched out her arms to him, embraced his
+ bald head, over which she again looked at the letter and the portrait, and
+ in order to press them again to her lips, she slightly pushed away the
+ bald head. Véra, Natásha, Sónya, and Pétya now entered the room, and the
+ reading of the letter began. After a brief description of the campaign and
+ the two battles in which he had taken part, and his promotion, Nicholas
+ said that he kissed his father’s and mother’s hands asking for their
+ blessing, and that he kissed Véra, Natásha, and Pétya. Besides that, he
+ sent greetings to Monsieur Schelling, Madame Schoss, and his old nurse,
+ and asked them to kiss for him “dear Sónya, whom he loved and thought of
+ just the same as ever.” When she heard this Sónya blushed so that tears
+ came into her eyes and, unable to bear the looks turned upon her, ran away
+ into the dancing hall, whirled round it at full speed with her dress
+ puffed out like a balloon, and, flushed and smiling, plumped down on the
+ floor. The countess was crying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why are you crying, Mamma?” asked Véra. “From all he says
+ one should be glad and not cry.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This was quite true, but the count, the countess, and Natásha looked at
+ her reproachfully. “And who is it she takes after?” thought the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas’ letter was read over hundreds of times, and those who were
+ considered worthy to hear it had to come to the countess, for she did not
+ let it out of her hands. The tutors came, and the nurses, and Dmítri, and
+ several acquaintances, and the countess reread the letter each time with
+ fresh pleasure and each time discovered in it fresh proofs of Nikólenka’s
+ virtues. How strange, how extraordinary, how joyful it seemed, that her
+ son, the scarcely perceptible motion of whose tiny limbs she had felt
+ twenty years ago within her, that son about whom she used to have quarrels
+ with the too indulgent count, that son who had first learned to say “pear”
+ and then “granny,” that this son should now be away in a foreign land amid
+ strange surroundings, a manly warrior doing some kind of man’s work of his
+ own, without help or guidance. The universal experience of ages, showing
+ that children do grow imperceptibly from the cradle to manhood, did not
+ exist for the countess. Her son’s growth toward manhood, at each of its
+ stages, had seemed as extraordinary to her as if there had never existed
+ the millions of human beings who grew up in the same way. As twenty years
+ before, it seemed impossible that the little creature who lived somewhere
+ under her heart would ever cry, suck her breast, and begin to speak, so
+ now she could not believe that that little creature could be this strong,
+ brave man, this model son and officer that, judging by this letter, he now
+ was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a style! How charmingly he describes!” said she, reading the
+ descriptive part of the letter. “And what a soul! Not a word about
+ himself.... Not a word! About some Denísov or other, though he himself, I
+ dare say, is braver than any of them. He says nothing about his
+ sufferings. What a heart! How like him it is! And how he has remembered
+ everybody! Not forgetting anyone. I always said when he was only so high—I
+ always said....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For more than a week preparations were being made, rough drafts of letters
+ to Nicholas from all the household were written and copied out, while
+ under the supervision of the countess and the solicitude of the count,
+ money and all things necessary for the uniform and equipment of the newly
+ commissioned officer were collected. Anna Mikháylovna, practical woman
+ that she was, had even managed by favor with army authorities to secure
+ advantageous means of communication for herself and her son. She had
+ opportunities of sending her letters to the Grand Duke Constantine
+ Pávlovich, who commanded the Guards. The Rostóvs supposed that The Russian
+ Guards, Abroad , was quite a definite address, and that if a letter reached
+ the Grand Duke in command of the Guards there was no reason why it should
+ not reach the Pávlograd regiment, which was presumably somewhere in the
+ same neighborhood. And so it was decided to send the letters and money by
+ the Grand Duke’s courier to Borís and Borís was to forward them to
+ Nicholas. The letters were from the old count, the countess, Pétya, Véra,
+ Natásha, and Sónya, and finally there were six thousand rubles for his
+ outfit and various other things the old count sent to his son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ On the twelfth of November, Kutúzov’s active army, in camp before Olmütz,
+ was preparing to be reviewed next day by the two Emperors—the
+ Russian and the Austrian. The Guards, just arrived from Russia, spent the
+ night ten miles from Olmütz and next morning were to come straight to the
+ review, reaching the field at Olmütz by ten o’clock.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That day Nicholas Rostóv received a letter from Borís, telling him that
+ the Ismáylov regiment was quartered for the night ten miles from Olmütz
+ and that he wanted to see him as he had a letter and money for him. Rostóv
+ was particularly in need of money now that the troops, after their active
+ service, were stationed near Olmütz and the camp swarmed with
+ well-provisioned sutlers and Austrian Jews offering all sorts of tempting
+ wares. The Pávlograds held feast after feast, celebrating awards they had
+ received for the campaign, and made expeditions to Olmütz to visit a
+ certain Caroline the Hungarian, who had recently opened a restaurant there
+ with girls as waitresses. Rostóv, who had just celebrated his promotion to
+ a cornetcy and bought Denísov’s horse, Bedouin, was in debt all round, to
+ his comrades and the sutlers. On receiving Borís’ letter he rode with a
+ fellow officer to Olmütz, dined there, drank a bottle of wine, and then
+ set off alone to the Guards’ camp to find his old playmate. Rostóv had not
+ yet had time to get his uniform. He had on a shabby cadet jacket,
+ decorated with a soldier’s cross, equally shabby cadet’s riding breeches
+ lined with worn leather, and an officer’s saber with a sword knot. The Don
+ horse he was riding was one he had bought from a Cossack during the
+ campaign, and he wore a crumpled hussar cap stuck jauntily back on one
+ side of his head. As he rode up to the camp he thought how he would
+ impress Borís and all his comrades of the Guards by his appearance—that
+ of a fighting hussar who had been under fire.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Guards had made their whole march as if on a pleasure trip, parading
+ their cleanliness and discipline. They had come by easy stages, their
+ knapsacks conveyed on carts, and the Austrian authorities had provided
+ excellent dinners for the officers at every halting place. The regiments
+ had entered and left the town with their bands playing, and by the Grand
+ Duke’s orders the men had marched all the way in step (a practice on which
+ the Guards prided themselves), the officers on foot and at their proper
+ posts. Borís had been quartered, and had marched all the way, with Berg
+ who was already in command of a company. Berg, who had obtained his
+ captaincy during the campaign, had gained the confidence of his superiors
+ by his promptitude and accuracy and had arranged his money matters very
+ satisfactorily. Borís, during the campaign, had made the acquaintance of
+ many persons who might prove useful to him, and by a letter of
+ recommendation he had brought from Pierre had become acquainted with
+ Prince Andrew Bolkónski, through whom he hoped to obtain a post on the
+ commander in chief’s staff. Berg and Borís, having rested after
+ yesterday’s march, were sitting, clean and neatly dressed, at a round
+ table in the clean quarters allotted to them, playing chess. Berg held a
+ smoking pipe between his knees. Borís, in the accurate way characteristic
+ of him, was building a little pyramid of chessmen with his delicate white
+ fingers while awaiting Berg’s move, and watched his opponent’s face,
+ evidently thinking about the game as he always thought only of whatever he
+ was engaged on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, how are you going to get out of that?” he remarked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We’ll try to,” replied Berg, touching a pawn and then removing his hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment the door opened.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here he is at last!” shouted Rostóv. “And Berg too! Oh, you
+ petisenfans, allay cushay dormir! ” he exclaimed, imitating his Russian
+ nurse’s French, at which he and Borís used to laugh long ago.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear me, how you have changed!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís rose to meet Rostóv, but in doing so did not omit to steady and
+ replace some chessmen that were falling. He was about to embrace his
+ friend, but Nicholas avoided him. With that peculiar feeling of youth,
+ that dread of beaten tracks, and wish to express itself in a manner
+ different from that of its elders which is often insincere, Nicholas
+ wished to do something special on meeting his friend. He wanted to pinch
+ him, push him, do anything but kiss him—a thing everybody did. But
+ notwithstanding this, Borís embraced him in a quiet, friendly way and
+ kissed him three times.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They had not met for nearly half a year and, being at the age when young
+ men take their first steps on life’s road, each saw immense changes in the
+ other, quite a new reflection of the society in which they had taken those
+ first steps. Both had changed greatly since they last met and both were in
+ a hurry to show the changes that had taken place in them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, you damned dandies! Clean and fresh as if you’d been to a fete, not
+ like us sinners of the line,” cried Rostóv, with martial swagger and with
+ baritone notes in his voice, new to Borís, pointing to his own
+ mud-bespattered breeches. The German landlady, hearing Rostóv’s loud
+ voice, popped her head in at the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh, is she pretty?” he asked with a wink.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why do you shout so? You’ll frighten them!” said Borís.
+ “I did not expect you today,” he added. “I only sent you the
+ note yesterday by Bolkónski—an adjutant of Kutúzov’s, who’s a
+ friend of mine. I did not think he would get it to you so quickly.... Well, how
+ are you? Been under fire already?” asked Borís.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Without answering, Rostóv shook the soldier’s Cross of St. George fastened
+ to the cording of his uniform and, indicating a bandaged arm, glanced at
+ Berg with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As you see,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Indeed? Yes, yes!” said Borís, with a smile. “And we too have
+ had a splendid march. You know, of course, that His Imperial Highness rode with
+ our regiment all the time, so that we had every comfort and every
+ advantage. What receptions we had in Poland! What dinners and balls! I
+ can’t tell you. And the Tsarévich was very gracious to all our officers.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the two friends told each other of their doings, the one of his hussar
+ revels and life in the fighting line, the other of the pleasures and
+ advantages of service under members of the Imperial family.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, you Guards!” said Rostóv. “I say, send for some wine.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís made a grimace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you really want it,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He went to his bed, drew a purse from under the clean pillow, and sent for
+ wine.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, and I have some money and a letter to give you,” he added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv took the letter and, throwing the money on the sofa, put both arms
+ on the table and began to read. After reading a few lines, he glanced
+ angrily at Berg, then, meeting his eyes, hid his face behind the letter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, they’ve sent you a tidy sum,” said Berg, eying the heavy purse that
+ sank into the sofa. “As for us, Count, we get along on our pay. I can tell
+ you for myself...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I say, Berg, my dear fellow,” said Rostóv, “when you get a letter from
+ home and meet one of your own people whom you want to talk everything over
+ with, and I happen to be there, I’ll go at once, to be out of your way! Do
+ go somewhere, anywhere... to the devil!” he exclaimed, and immediately
+ seizing him by the shoulder and looking amiably into his face, evidently
+ wishing to soften the rudeness of his words, he added, “Don’t be hurt, my
+ dear fellow; you know I speak from my heart as to an old acquaintance.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, don’t mention it, Count! I quite understand,” said Berg, getting up
+ and speaking in a muffled and guttural voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go across to our hosts: they invited you,” added Borís.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Berg put on the cleanest of coats, without a spot or speck of dust, stood
+ before a looking glass and brushed the hair on his temples upwards, in the
+ way affected by the Emperor Alexander, and, having assured himself from
+ the way Rostóv looked at it that his coat had been noticed, left the room
+ with a pleasant smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh dear, what a beast I am!” muttered Rostóv, as he read the letter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, what a pig I am, not to have written and to have given them such a
+ fright! Oh, what a pig I am!” he repeated, flushing suddenly. “Well, have
+ you sent Gabriel for some wine? All right let’s have some!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the letter from his parents was enclosed a letter of recommendation to
+ Bagratión which the old countess at Anna Mikháylovna’s advice had obtained
+ through an acquaintance and sent to her son, asking him to take it to its
+ destination and make use of it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What nonsense! Much I need it!” said Rostóv, throwing the letter under
+ the table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why have you thrown that away?” asked Borís.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is some letter of recommendation... what the devil do I want it for!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why ‘What the devil’?” said Borís, picking it up and
+ reading the address. “This letter would be of great use to you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I want nothing, and I won’t be anyone’s adjutant.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why not?” inquired Borís.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s a lackey’s job!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are still the same dreamer, I see,” remarked Borís, shaking his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And you’re still the same diplomatist! But that’s not the
+ point... Come, how are you?” asked Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, as you see. So far everything’s all right, but I confess I should
+ much like to be an adjutant and not remain at the front.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Because when once a man starts on military service, he should try to make
+ as successful a career of it as possible.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, that’s it!” said Rostóv, evidently thinking of something else.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He looked intently and inquiringly into his friend’s eyes, evidently
+ trying in vain to find the answer to some question.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Old Gabriel brought in the wine.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Shouldn’t we now send for Berg?” asked Borís. “He would
+ drink with you. I can’t.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, send for him... and how do you get on with that German?” asked
+ Rostóv, with a contemptuous smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is a very, very nice, honest, and pleasant fellow,” answered Borís.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again Rostóv looked intently into Borís’ eyes and sighed. Berg returned,
+ and over the bottle of wine conversation between the three officers became
+ animated. The Guardsmen told Rostóv of their march and how they had been
+ made much of in Russia, Poland, and abroad. They spoke of the sayings and
+ doings of their commander, the Grand Duke, and told stories of his
+ kindness and irascibility. Berg, as usual, kept silent when the subject
+ did not relate to himself, but in connection with the stories of the Grand
+ Duke’s quick temper he related with gusto how in Galicia he had managed to
+ deal with the Grand Duke when the latter made a tour of the regiments and
+ was annoyed at the irregularity of a movement. With a pleasant smile Berg
+ related how the Grand Duke had ridden up to him in a violent passion,
+ shouting: “Arnauts!” (“Arnauts” was the Tsarévich’s
+ favorite expression when he was in a rage) and called for the company commander.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Would you believe it, Count, I was not at all alarmed, because I knew I
+ was right. Without boasting, you know, I may say that I know the Army
+ Orders by heart and know the Regulations as well as I do the Lord’s
+ Prayer. So, Count, there never is any negligence in my company, and so my
+ conscience was at ease. I came forward....” (Berg stood up and showed how
+ he presented himself, with his hand to his cap, and really it would have
+ been difficult for a face to express greater respect and self-complacency
+ than his did.) “Well, he stormed at me, as the saying is, stormed and
+ stormed and stormed! It was not a matter of life but rather of death, as
+ the saying is. ‘Albanians!’ and ‘devils!’ and ‘To Siberia!’” said Berg
+ with a sagacious smile. “I knew I was in the right so I kept silent; was
+ not that best, Count?... ‘Hey, are you dumb?’ he shouted. Still I remained
+ silent. And what do you think, Count? The next day it was not even
+ mentioned in the Orders of the Day. That’s what keeping one’s head means.
+ That’s the way, Count,” said Berg, lighting his pipe and emitting rings of
+ smoke.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, that was fine,” said Rostóv, smiling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Borís noticed that he was preparing to make fun of Berg, and
+ skillfully changed the subject. He asked him to tell them how and where he
+ got his wound. This pleased Rostóv and he began talking about it, and as
+ he went on became more and more animated. He told them of his Schön
+ Grabern affair, just as those who have taken part in a battle generally do
+ describe it, that is, as they would like it to have been, as they have
+ heard it described by others, and as sounds well, but not at all as it
+ really was. Rostóv was a truthful young man and would on no account have
+ told a deliberate lie. He began his story meaning to tell everything just
+ as it happened, but imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably he lapsed
+ into falsehood. If he had told the truth to his hearers—who like
+ himself had often heard stories of attacks and had formed a definite idea
+ of what an attack was and were expecting to hear just such a story—they
+ would either not have believed him or, still worse, would have thought
+ that Rostóv was himself to blame since what generally happens to the
+ narrators of cavalry attacks had not happened to him. He could not tell
+ them simply that everyone went at a trot and that he fell off his horse
+ and sprained his arm and then ran as hard as he could from a Frenchman
+ into the wood. Besides, to tell everything as it really happened, it would
+ have been necessary to make an effort of will to tell only what happened.
+ It is very difficult to tell the truth, and young people are rarely
+ capable of it. His hearers expected a story of how beside himself and all
+ aflame with excitement, he had flown like a storm at the square, cut his
+ way in, slashed right and left, how his saber had tasted flesh and he had
+ fallen exhausted, and so on. And so he told them all that.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the middle of his story, just as he was saying: “You cannot imagine
+ what a strange frenzy one experiences during an attack,” Prince Andrew,
+ whom Borís was expecting, entered the room. Prince Andrew, who liked to
+ help young men, was flattered by being asked for his assistance and being
+ well disposed toward Borís, who had managed to please him the day before,
+ he wished to do what the young man wanted. Having been sent with papers
+ from Kutúzov to the Tsarévich, he looked in on Borís, hoping to find him
+ alone. When he came in and saw an hussar of the line recounting his
+ military exploits (Prince Andrew could not endure that sort of man), he
+ gave Borís a pleasant smile, frowned as with half-closed eyes he looked at
+ Rostóv, bowed slightly and wearily, and sat down languidly on the sofa: he
+ felt it unpleasant to have dropped in on bad company. Rostóv flushed up on
+ noticing this, but he did not care, this was a mere stranger. Glancing,
+ however, at Borís, he saw that he too seemed ashamed of the hussar of the
+ line.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In spite of Prince Andrew’s disagreeable, ironical tone, in spite of the
+ contempt with which Rostóv, from his fighting army point of view, regarded
+ all these little adjutants on the staff of whom the newcomer was evidently
+ one, Rostóv felt confused, blushed, and became silent. Borís inquired what
+ news there might be on the staff, and what, without indiscretion, one
+ might ask about our plans.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We shall probably advance,” replied Bolkónski, evidently reluctant to say
+ more in the presence of a stranger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Berg took the opportunity to ask, with great politeness, whether, as was
+ rumored, the allowance of forage money to captains of companies would be
+ doubled. To this Prince Andrew answered with a smile that he could give no
+ opinion on such an important government order, and Berg laughed gaily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As to your business,” Prince Andrew continued, addressing Borís, “we will
+ talk of it later” (and he looked round at Rostóv). “Come to me after the
+ review and we will do what is possible.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And, having glanced round the room, Prince Andrew turned to Rostóv, whose
+ state of unconquerable childish embarrassment now changing to anger he did
+ not condescend to notice, and said: “I think you were talking of the Schön
+ Grabern affair? Were you there?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was there,” said Rostóv angrily, as if intending to insult the
+ aide-de-camp.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bolkónski noticed the hussar’s state of mind, and it amused him. With a
+ slightly contemptuous smile, he said: “Yes, there are many stories now
+ told about that affair!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, stories!” repeated Rostóv loudly, looking with eyes suddenly grown
+ furious, now at Borís, now at Bolkónski. “Yes, many stories! But our
+ stories are the stories of men who have been under the enemy’s fire! Our 
+ stories have some weight, not like the stories of those fellows on the
+ staff who get rewards without doing anything!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Of whom you imagine me to be one?” said Prince Andrew, with a quiet and
+ particularly amiable smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A strange feeling of exasperation and yet of respect for this man’s
+ self-possession mingled at that moment in Rostóv’s soul.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am not talking about you,” he said, “I don’t know you and, frankly, I
+ don’t want to. I am speaking of the staff in general.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I will tell you this,” Prince Andrew interrupted in a tone of quiet
+ authority, “you wish to insult me, and I am ready to agree with you that
+ it would be very easy to do so if you haven’t sufficient self-respect, but
+ admit that the time and place are very badly chosen. In a day or two we
+ shall all have to take part in a greater and more serious duel, and
+ besides, Drubetskóy, who says he is an old friend of yours, is not at all
+ to blame that my face has the misfortune to displease you. However,” he
+ added rising, “you know my name and where to find me, but don’t forget
+ that I do not regard either myself or you as having been at all insulted,
+ and as a man older than you, my advice is to let the matter drop. Well
+ then, on Friday after the review I shall expect you, Drubetskóy. Au
+ revoir! ” exclaimed Prince Andrew, and with a bow to them both he went out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only when Prince Andrew was gone did Rostóv think of what he ought to have
+ said. And he was still more angry at having omitted to say it. He ordered
+ his horse at once and, coldly taking leave of Borís, rode home. Should he
+ go to headquarters next day and challenge that affected adjutant, or
+ really let the matter drop, was the question that worried him all the way.
+ He thought angrily of the pleasure he would have at seeing the fright of
+ that small and frail but proud man when covered by his pistol, and then he
+ felt with surprise that of all the men he knew there was none he would so
+ much like to have for a friend as that very adjutant whom he so hated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ The day after Rostóv had been to see Borís, a review was held of the
+ Austrian and Russian troops, both those freshly arrived from Russia and
+ those who had been campaigning under Kutúzov. The two Emperors, the
+ Russian with his heir the Tsarévich, and the Austrian with the Archduke,
+ inspected the allied army of eighty thousand men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From early morning the smart clean troops were on the move, forming up on
+ the field before the fortress. Now thousands of feet and bayonets moved
+ and halted at the officers’ command, turned with banners flying, formed up
+ at intervals, and wheeled round other similar masses of infantry in
+ different uniforms; now was heard the rhythmic beat of hoofs and the
+ jingling of showy cavalry in blue, red, and green braided uniforms, with
+ smartly dressed bandsmen in front mounted on black, roan, or gray horses;
+ then again, spreading out with the brazen clatter of the polished shining
+ cannon that quivered on the gun carriages and with the smell of linstocks,
+ came the artillery which crawled between the infantry and cavalry and took
+ up its appointed position. Not only the generals in full parade uniforms,
+ with their thin or thick waists drawn in to the utmost, their red necks
+ squeezed into their stiff collars, and wearing scarves and all their
+ decorations, not only the elegant, pomaded officers, but every soldier
+ with his freshly washed and shaven face and his weapons clean and polished
+ to the utmost, and every horse groomed till its coat shone like satin and
+ every hair of its wetted mane lay smooth—felt that no small matter
+ was happening, but an important and solemn affair. Every general and every
+ soldier was conscious of his own insignificance, aware of being but a drop
+ in that ocean of men, and yet at the same time was conscious of his
+ strength as a part of that enormous whole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From early morning strenuous activities and efforts had begun and by ten
+ o’clock all had been brought into due order. The ranks were drawn up on
+ the vast field. The whole army was extended in three lines: the cavalry in
+ front, behind it the artillery, and behind that again the infantry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A space like a street was left between each two lines of troops. The three
+ parts of that army were sharply distinguished: Kutúzov’s fighting army
+ (with the Pávlograds on the right flank of the front); those recently
+ arrived from Russia, both Guards and regiments of the line; and the
+ Austrian troops. But they all stood in the same lines, under one command,
+ and in a like order.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Like wind over leaves ran an excited whisper: “They’re coming! They’re
+ coming!” Alarmed voices were heard, and a stir of final preparation swept
+ over all the troops.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the direction of Olmütz in front of them, a group was seen
+ approaching. And at that moment, though the day was still, a light gust of
+ wind blowing over the army slightly stirred the streamers on the lances
+ and the unfolded standards fluttered against their staffs. It looked as if
+ by that slight motion the army itself was expressing its joy at the
+ approach of the Emperors. One voice was heard shouting: “Eyes front!”
+ Then, like the crowing of cocks at sunrise, this was repeated by others
+ from various sides and all became silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the deathlike stillness only the tramp of horses was heard. This was
+ the Emperors’ suites. The Emperors rode up to the flank, and the trumpets
+ of the first cavalry regiment played the general march. It seemed as
+ though not the trumpeters were playing, but as if the army itself,
+ rejoicing at the Emperors’ approach, had naturally burst into music. Amid
+ these sounds, only the youthful kindly voice of the Emperor Alexander was
+ clearly heard. He gave the words of greeting, and the first regiment
+ roared “Hurrah!” so deafeningly, continuously, and joyfully that the men
+ themselves were awed by their multitude and the immensity of the power
+ they constituted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv, standing in the front lines of Kutúzov’s army which the Tsar
+ approached first, experienced the same feeling as every other man in that
+ army: a feeling of self-forgetfulness, a proud consciousness of might, and
+ a passionate attraction to him who was the cause of this triumph.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He felt that at a single word from that man all this vast mass (and he
+ himself an insignificant atom in it) would go through fire and water,
+ commit crime, die, or perform deeds of highest heroism, and so he could
+ not but tremble and his heart stand still at the imminence of that word.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!” thundered from all sides, one regiment after
+ another greeting the Tsar with the strains of the march, and then
+ “Hurrah!”... Then the general march, and again “Hurrah! Hurrah!” growing
+ ever stronger and fuller and merging into a deafening roar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Till the Tsar reached it, each regiment in its silence and immobility
+ seemed like a lifeless body, but as soon as he came up it became alive,
+ its thunder joining the roar of the whole line along which he had already
+ passed. Through the terrible and deafening roar of those voices, amid the
+ square masses of troops standing motionless as if turned to stone,
+ hundreds of riders composing the suites moved carelessly but symmetrically
+ and above all freely, and in front of them two men—the Emperors.
+ Upon them the undivided, tensely passionate attention of that whole mass
+ of men was concentrated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The handsome young Emperor Alexander, in the uniform of the Horse Guards,
+ wearing a cocked hat with its peaks front and back, with his pleasant face
+ and resonant though not loud voice, attracted everyone’s attention.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv was not far from the trumpeters, and with his keen sight had
+ recognized the Tsar and watched his approach. When he was within twenty
+ paces, and Nicholas could clearly distinguish every detail of his
+ handsome, happy young face, he experienced a feeling of tenderness and
+ ecstasy such as he had never before known. Every trait and every movement
+ of the Tsar’s seemed to him enchanting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Stopping in front of the Pávlograds, the Tsar said something in French to
+ the Austrian Emperor and smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Seeing that smile, Rostóv involuntarily smiled himself and felt a still
+ stronger flow of love for his sovereign. He longed to show that love in
+ some way and knowing that this was impossible was ready to cry. The Tsar
+ called the colonel of the regiment and said a few words to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh God, what would happen to me if the Emperor spoke to me?” thought
+ Rostóv. “I should die of happiness!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Tsar addressed the officers also: “I thank you all, gentlemen, I thank
+ you with my whole heart.” To Rostóv every word sounded like a voice from
+ heaven. How gladly would he have died at once for his Tsar!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You have earned the St. George’s standards and will be worthy of them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, to die, to die for him,” thought Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Tsar said something more which Rostóv did not hear, and the soldiers,
+ straining their lungs, shouted “Hurrah!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv too, bending over his saddle, shouted “Hurrah!” with all his might,
+ feeling that he would like to injure himself by that shout, if only to
+ express his rapture fully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Tsar stopped a few minutes in front of the hussars as if undecided.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How can the Emperor be undecided?” thought Rostóv, but then even this
+ indecision appeared to him majestic and enchanting, like everything else
+ the Tsar did.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That hesitation lasted only an instant. The Tsar’s foot, in the narrow
+ pointed boot then fashionable, touched the groin of the bobtailed bay mare
+ he rode, his hand in a white glove gathered up the reins, and he moved off
+ accompanied by an irregularly swaying sea of aides-de-camp. Farther and
+ farther he rode away, stopping at other regiments, till at last only his
+ white plumes were visible to Rostóv from amid the suites that surrounded
+ the Emperors.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Among the gentlemen of the suite, Rostóv noticed Bolkónski, sitting his
+ horse indolently and carelessly. Rostóv recalled their quarrel of
+ yesterday and the question presented itself whether he ought or ought not
+ to challenge Bolkónski. “Of course not!” he now thought. “Is it worth
+ thinking or speaking of it at such a moment? At a time of such love, such
+ rapture, and such self-sacrifice, what do any of our quarrels and affronts
+ matter? I love and forgive everybody now.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the Emperor had passed nearly all the regiments, the troops began a
+ ceremonial march past him, and Rostóv on Bedouin, recently purchased from
+ Denísov, rode past too, at the rear of his squadron—that is, alone
+ and in full view of the Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before he reached him, Rostóv, who was a splendid horseman, spurred
+ Bedouin twice and successfully put him to the showy trot in which the
+ animal went when excited. Bending his foaming muzzle to his chest, his
+ tail extended, Bedouin, as if also conscious of the Emperor’s eye upon
+ him, passed splendidly, lifting his feet with a high and graceful action,
+ as if flying through the air without touching the ground.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv himself, his legs well back and his stomach drawn in and feeling
+ himself one with his horse, rode past the Emperor with a frowning but
+ blissful face “like a vewy devil,” as Denísov expressed it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fine fellows, the Pávlograds!” remarked the Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My God, how happy I should be if he ordered me to leap into the fire this
+ instant!” thought Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the review was over, the newly arrived officers, and also Kutúzov’s,
+ collected in groups and began to talk about the awards, about the
+ Austrians and their uniforms, about their lines, about Bonaparte, and how
+ badly the latter would fare now, especially if the Essen corps arrived and
+ Prussia took our side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the talk in every group was chiefly about the Emperor Alexander. His
+ every word and movement was described with ecstasy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They all had but one wish: to advance as soon as possible against the
+ enemy under the Emperor’s command. Commanded by the Emperor himself they
+ could not fail to vanquish anyone, be it whom it might: so thought Rostóv
+ and most of the officers after the review.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All were then more confident of victory than the winning of two battles
+ would have made them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ The day after the review, Borís, in his best uniform and with his comrade
+ Berg’s best wishes for success, rode to Olmütz to see Bolkónski, wishing
+ to profit by his friendliness and obtain for himself the best post he
+ could—preferably that of adjutant to some important personage, a
+ position in the army which seemed to him most attractive. “It is all very
+ well for Rostóv, whose father sends him ten thousand rubles at a time, to
+ talk about not wishing to cringe to anybody and not be anyone’s lackey,
+ but I who have nothing but my brains have to make a career and must not
+ miss opportunities, but must avail myself of them!” he reflected.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not find Prince Andrew in Olmütz that day, but the appearance of
+ the town where the headquarters and the diplomatic corps were stationed
+ and the two Emperors were living with their suites, households, and courts
+ only strengthened his desire to belong to that higher world.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He knew no one, and despite his smart Guardsman’s uniform, all these
+ exalted personages passing in the streets in their elegant carriages with
+ their plumes, ribbons, and medals, both courtiers and military men, seemed
+ so immeasurably above him, an insignificant officer of the Guards, that
+ they not only did not wish to, but simply could not, be aware of his
+ existence. At the quarters of the commander in chief, Kutúzov, where he
+ inquired for Bolkónski, all the adjutants and even the orderlies looked at
+ him as if they wished to impress on him that a great many officers like
+ him were always coming there and that everybody was heartily sick of them.
+ In spite of this, or rather because of it, next day, November 15, after
+ dinner he again went to Olmütz and, entering the house occupied by
+ Kutúzov, asked for Bolkónski. Prince Andrew was in and Borís was shown
+ into a large hall probably formerly used for dancing, but in which five
+ beds now stood, and furniture of various kinds: a table, chairs, and a
+ clavichord. One adjutant, nearest the door, was sitting at the table in a
+ Persian dressing gown, writing. Another, the red, stout Nesvítski, lay on
+ a bed with his arms under his head, laughing with an officer who had sat
+ down beside him. A third was playing a Viennese waltz on the clavichord,
+ while a fourth, lying on the clavichord, sang the tune. Bolkónski was not
+ there. None of these gentlemen changed his position on seeing Borís. The
+ one who was writing and whom Borís addressed turned round crossly and told
+ him Bolkónski was on duty and that he should go through the door on the
+ left into the reception room if he wished to see him. Borís thanked him
+ and went to the reception room, where he found some ten officers and
+ generals.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he entered, Prince Andrew, his eyes drooping contemptuously (with
+ that peculiar expression of polite weariness which plainly says, “If it
+ were not my duty I would not talk to you for a moment”), was listening to
+ an old Russian general with decorations, who stood very erect, almost on
+ tiptoe, with a soldier’s obsequious expression on his purple face,
+ reporting something.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very well, then, be so good as to wait,” said Prince Andrew to the
+ general, in Russian, speaking with the French intonation he affected when
+ he wished to speak contemptuously, and noticing Borís, Prince Andrew,
+ paying no more heed to the general who ran after him imploring him to hear
+ something more, nodded and turned to him with a cheerful smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment Borís clearly realized what he had before surmised, that in
+ the army, besides the subordination and discipline prescribed in the
+ military code, which he and the others knew in the regiment, there was
+ another, more important, subordination, which made this tight-laced,
+ purple-faced general wait respectfully while Captain Prince Andrew, for
+ his own pleasure, chose to chat with Lieutenant Drubetskóy. More than ever
+ was Borís resolved to serve in future not according to the written code,
+ but under this unwritten law. He felt now that merely by having been
+ recommended to Prince Andrew he had already risen above the general who at
+ the front had the power to annihilate him, a lieutenant of the Guards.
+ Prince Andrew came up to him and took his hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am very sorry you did not find me in yesterday. I was fussing about
+ with Germans all day. We went with Weyrother to survey the dispositions.
+ When Germans start being accurate, there’s no end to it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís smiled, as if he understood what Prince Andrew was alluding to as
+ something generally known. But it was the first time he had heard
+ Weyrother’s name, or even the term “dispositions.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, my dear fellow, so you still want to be an adjutant? I have been
+ thinking about you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I was thinking”—for some reason Borís could not help blushing—“of
+ asking the commander in chief. He has had a letter from Prince Kurágin
+ about me. I only wanted to ask because I fear the Guards won’t be in
+ action,” he added as if in apology.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right, all right. We’ll talk it over,” replied Prince Andrew. “Only
+ let me report this gentleman’s business, and I shall be at your disposal.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While Prince Andrew went to report about the purple-faced general, that
+ gentleman—evidently not sharing Borís’ conception of the advantages
+ of the unwritten code of subordination—looked so fixedly at the
+ presumptuous lieutenant who had prevented his finishing what he had to say
+ to the adjutant that Borís felt uncomfortable. He turned away and waited
+ impatiently for Prince Andrew’s return from the commander in chief’s room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see, my dear fellow, I have been thinking about you,” said Prince
+ Andrew when they had gone into the large room where the clavichord was.
+ “It’s no use your going to the commander in chief. He would say a lot of
+ pleasant things, ask you to dinner” (“That would not be bad as regards the
+ unwritten code,” thought Borís), “but nothing more would come of it. There
+ will soon be a battalion of us aides-de-camp and adjutants! But this is
+ what we’ll do: I have a good friend, an adjutant general and an excellent
+ fellow, Prince Dolgorúkov; and though you may not know it, the fact is
+ that now Kutúzov with his staff and all of us count for nothing.
+ Everything is now centered round the Emperor. So we will go to Dolgorúkov;
+ I have to go there anyhow and I have already spoken to him about you. We
+ shall see whether he cannot attach you to himself or find a place for you
+ somewhere nearer the sun.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew always became specially keen when he had to guide a young
+ man and help him to worldly success. Under cover of obtaining help of this
+ kind for another, which from pride he would never accept for himself, he
+ kept in touch with the circle which confers success and which attracted
+ him. He very readily took up Borís’ cause and went with him to Dolgorúkov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was late in the evening when they entered the palace at Olmütz occupied
+ by the Emperors and their retinues.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That same day a council of war had been held in which all the members of
+ the Hofkriegsrath and both Emperors took part. At that council, contrary
+ to the views of the old generals Kutúzov and Prince Schwartzenberg, it had
+ been decided to advance immediately and give battle to Bonaparte. The
+ council of war was just over when Prince Andrew accompanied by Borís
+ arrived at the palace to find Dolgorúkov. Everyone at headquarters was
+ still under the spell of the day’s council, at which the party of the
+ young had triumphed. The voices of those who counseled delay and advised
+ waiting for something else before advancing had been so completely
+ silenced and their arguments confuted by such conclusive evidence of the
+ advantages of attacking that what had been discussed at the council—the
+ coming battle and the victory that would certainly result from it—no
+ longer seemed to be in the future but in the past. All the advantages were
+ on our side. Our enormous forces, undoubtedly superior to Napoleon’s, were
+ concentrated in one place, the troops inspired by the Emperors’ presence
+ were eager for action. The strategic position where the operations would
+ take place was familiar in all its details to the Austrian General
+ Weyrother: a lucky accident had ordained that the Austrian army should
+ maneuver the previous year on the very fields where the French had now to
+ be fought; the adjacent locality was known and shown in every detail on
+ the maps, and Bonaparte, evidently weakened, was undertaking nothing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dolgorúkov, one of the warmest advocates of an attack, had just returned
+ from the council, tired and exhausted but eager and proud of the victory
+ that had been gained. Prince Andrew introduced his protégé, but Prince
+ Dolgorúkov politely and firmly pressing his hand said nothing to Borís
+ and, evidently unable to suppress the thoughts which were uppermost in his
+ mind at that moment, addressed Prince Andrew in French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my dear fellow, what a battle we have gained! God grant that the one
+ that will result from it will be as victorious! However, dear fellow,” he
+ said abruptly and eagerly, “I must confess to having been unjust to the
+ Austrians and especially to Weyrother. What exactitude, what minuteness,
+ what knowledge of the locality, what foresight for every eventuality,
+ every possibility even to the smallest detail! No, my dear fellow, no
+ conditions better than our present ones could have been devised. This
+ combination of Austrian precision with Russian valor—what more could
+ be wished for?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So the attack is definitely resolved on?” asked Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And do you know, my dear fellow, it seems to me that Bonaparte has
+ decidedly lost bearings, you know that a letter was received from him
+ today for the Emperor.” Dolgorúkov smiled significantly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is that so? And what did he say?” inquired Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What can he say? Tra-di-ri-di-ra and so on... merely to gain time. I tell
+ you he is in our hands, that’s certain! But what was most amusing,” he
+ continued, with a sudden, good-natured laugh, “was that we could not think
+ how to address the reply! If not as ‘Consul’ and of course not as
+ ‘Emperor,’ it seemed to me it should be to ‘General Bonaparte.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But between not recognizing him as Emperor and calling him General
+ Bonaparte, there is a difference,” remarked Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s just it,” interrupted Dolgorúkov quickly, laughing. “You know
+ Bilíbin—he’s a very clever fellow. He suggested addressing him as
+ ‘Usurper and Enemy of Mankind.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dolgorúkov laughed merrily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Only that?” said Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All the same, it was Bilíbin who found a suitable form for the address.
+ He is a wise and clever fellow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What was it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To the Head of the French Government... Au chef du gouvernement
+ français ,” said Dolgorúkov, with grave satisfaction. “Good, wasn’t it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, but he will dislike it extremely,” said Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes, very much! My brother knows him, he’s dined with him—the
+ present Emperor—more than once in Paris, and tells me he never met a
+ more cunning or subtle diplomatist—you know, a combination of French
+ adroitness and Italian play-acting! Do you know the tale about him and
+ Count Markóv? Count Markóv was the only man who knew how to handle him.
+ You know the story of the handkerchief? It is delightful!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the talkative Dolgorúkov, turning now to Borís, now to Prince Andrew,
+ told how Bonaparte wishing to test Markóv, our ambassador, purposely
+ dropped a handkerchief in front of him and stood looking at Markóv,
+ probably expecting Markóv to pick it up for him, and how Markóv
+ immediately dropped his own beside it and picked it up without touching
+ Bonaparte’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Delightful!” said Bolkónski. “But I have come to you, Prince, as a
+ petitioner on behalf of this young man. You see...” but before Prince
+ Andrew could finish, an aide-de-camp came in to summon Dolgorúkov to the
+ Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, what a nuisance,” said Dolgorúkov, getting up hurriedly and pressing
+ the hands of Prince Andrew and Borís. “You know I should be very glad to
+ do all in my power both for you and for this dear young man.” Again he
+ pressed the hand of the latter with an expression of good-natured,
+ sincere, and animated levity. “But you see... another time!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís was excited by the thought of being so close to the higher powers as
+ he felt himself to be at that moment. He was conscious that here he was in
+ contact with the springs that set in motion the enormous movements of the
+ mass of which in his regiment he felt himself a tiny, obedient, and
+ insignificant atom. They followed Prince Dolgorúkov out into the corridor
+ and met—coming out of the door of the Emperor’s room by which
+ Dolgorúkov had entered—a short man in civilian clothes with a clever
+ face and sharply projecting jaw which, without spoiling his face, gave him
+ a peculiar vivacity and shiftiness of expression. This short man nodded to
+ Dolgorúkov as to an intimate friend and stared at Prince Andrew with cool
+ intensity, walking straight toward him and evidently expecting him to bow
+ or to step out of his way. Prince Andrew did neither: a look of animosity
+ appeared on his face and the other turned away and went down the side of
+ the corridor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who was that?” asked Borís.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is one of the most remarkable, but to me most unpleasant of men—the
+ Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince Adam Czartorýski.... It is such men as
+ he who decide the fate of nations,” added Bolkónski with a sigh he could
+ not suppress, as they passed out of the palace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day, the army began its campaign, and up to the very battle of
+ Austerlitz, Borís was unable to see either Prince Andrew or Dolgorúkov
+ again and remained for a while with the Ismáylov regiment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ At dawn on the sixteenth of November, Denísov’s squadron, in which
+ Nicholas Rostóv served and which was in Prince Bagratión’s detachment,
+ moved from the place where it had spent the night, advancing into action
+ as arranged, and after going behind other columns for about two thirds of
+ a mile was stopped on the highroad. Rostóv saw the Cossacks and then the
+ first and second squadrons of hussars and infantry battalions and
+ artillery pass by and go forward and then Generals Bagratión and
+ Dolgorúkov ride past with their adjutants. All the fear before action
+ which he had experienced as previously, all the inner struggle to conquer
+ that fear, all his dreams of distinguishing himself as a true hussar in
+ this battle, had been wasted. Their squadron remained in reserve and
+ Nicholas Rostóv spent that day in a dull and wretched mood. At nine in the
+ morning, he heard firing in front and shouts of hurrah , and saw wounded
+ being brought back (there were not many of them), and at last he saw how a
+ whole detachment of French cavalry was brought in, convoyed by a sótnya of
+ Cossacks. Evidently the affair was over and, though not big, had been a
+ successful engagement. The men and officers returning spoke of a brilliant
+ victory, of the occupation of the town of Wischau and the capture of a
+ whole French squadron. The day was bright and sunny after a sharp night
+ frost, and the cheerful glitter of that autumn day was in keeping with the
+ news of victory which was conveyed, not only by the tales of those who had
+ taken part in it, but also by the joyful expression on the faces of
+ soldiers, officers, generals, and adjutants, as they passed Rostóv going
+ or coming. And Nicholas, who had vainly suffered all the dread that
+ precedes a battle and had spent that happy day in inactivity, was all the
+ more depressed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come here, Wostóv. Let’s dwink to dwown our gwief!” shouted Denísov, who
+ had settled down by the roadside with a flask and some food.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officers gathered round Denísov’s canteen, eating and talking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There! They are bringing another!” cried one of the officers, indicating
+ a captive French dragoon who was being brought in on foot by two Cossacks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One of them was leading by the bridle a fine large French horse he had
+ taken from the prisoner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sell us that horse!” Denísov called out to the Cossacks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you like, your honor!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officers got up and stood round the Cossacks and their prisoner. The
+ French dragoon was a young Alsatian who spoke French with a German accent.
+ He was breathless with agitation, his face was red, and when he heard some
+ French spoken he at once began speaking to the officers, addressing first
+ one, then another. He said he would not have been taken, it was not his
+ fault but the corporal’s who had sent him to seize some horsecloths,
+ though he had told him the Russians were there. And at every word he
+ added: “But don’t hurt my little horse!” and stroked the animal. It was
+ plain that he did not quite grasp where he was. Now he excused himself for
+ having been taken prisoner and now, imagining himself before his own
+ officers, insisted on his soldierly discipline and zeal in the service. He
+ brought with him into our rearguard all the freshness of atmosphere of the
+ French army, which was so alien to us.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Cossacks sold the horse for two gold pieces, and Rostóv, being the
+ richest of the officers now that he had received his money, bought it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But don’t hurt my little horse!” said the Alsatian good-naturedly to
+ Rostóv when the animal was handed over to the hussar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv smilingly reassured the dragoon and gave him money.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Alley! Alley!” said the Cossack, touching the prisoner’s arm to make him
+ go on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Emperor! The Emperor!” was suddenly heard among the hussars.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All began to run and bustle, and Rostóv saw coming up the road behind him
+ several riders with white plumes in their hats. In a moment everyone was
+ in his place, waiting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv did not know or remember how he ran to his place and mounted.
+ Instantly his regret at not having been in action and his dejected mood
+ amid people of whom he was weary had gone, instantly every thought of
+ himself had vanished. He was filled with happiness at his nearness to the
+ Emperor. He felt that this nearness by itself made up to him for the day
+ he had lost. He was happy as a lover when the longed-for moment of meeting
+ arrives. Not daring to look round and without looking round, he was
+ ecstatically conscious of his approach. He felt it not only from the sound
+ of the hoofs of the approaching cavalcade, but because as he drew near
+ everything grew brighter, more joyful, more significant, and more festive
+ around him. Nearer and nearer to Rostóv came that sun shedding beams of
+ mild and majestic light around, and already he felt himself enveloped in
+ those beams, he heard his voice, that kindly, calm, and majestic voice
+ that was yet so simple! And as if in accord with Rostóv’s feeling, there
+ was a deathly stillness amid which was heard the Emperor’s voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Pávlograd hussars?” he inquired.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The reserves, sire!” replied a voice, a very human one compared to that
+ which had said: “The Pávlograd hussars?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor drew level with Rostóv and halted. Alexander’s face was even
+ more beautiful than it had been three days before at the review. It shone
+ with such gaiety and youth, such innocent youth, that it suggested the
+ liveliness of a fourteen-year-old boy, and yet it was the face of the
+ majestic Emperor. Casually, while surveying the squadron, the Emperor’s
+ eyes met Rostóv’s and rested on them for not more than two seconds.
+ Whether or no the Emperor understood what was going on in Rostóv’s soul
+ (it seemed to Rostóv that he understood everything), at any rate his
+ light-blue eyes gazed for about two seconds into Rostóv’s face. A gentle,
+ mild light poured from them. Then all at once he raised his eyebrows,
+ abruptly touched his horse with his left foot, and galloped on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The younger Emperor could not restrain his wish to be present at the
+ battle and, in spite of the remonstrances of his courtiers, at twelve
+ o’clock left the third column with which he had been and galloped toward
+ the vanguard. Before he came up with the hussars, several adjutants met
+ him with news of the successful result of the action.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This battle, which consisted in the capture of a French squadron, was
+ represented as a brilliant victory over the French, and so the Emperor and
+ the whole army, especially while the smoke hung over the battlefield,
+ believed that the French had been defeated and were retreating against
+ their will. A few minutes after the Emperor had passed, the Pávlograd
+ division was ordered to advance. In Wischau itself, a petty German town,
+ Rostóv saw the Emperor again. In the market place, where there had been
+ some rather heavy firing before the Emperor’s arrival, lay several killed
+ and wounded soldiers whom there had not been time to move. The Emperor,
+ surrounded by his suite of officers and courtiers, was riding a bobtailed
+ chestnut mare, a different one from that which he had ridden at the
+ review, and bending to one side he gracefully held a gold lorgnette to his
+ eyes and looked at a soldier who lay prone, with blood on his uncovered
+ head. The wounded soldier was so dirty, coarse, and revolting that his
+ proximity to the Emperor shocked Rostóv. Rostóv saw how the Emperor’s
+ rather round shoulders shuddered as if a cold shiver had run down them,
+ how his left foot began convulsively tapping the horse’s side with the
+ spur, and how the well-trained horse looked round unconcerned and did not
+ stir. An adjutant, dismounting, lifted the soldier under the arms to place
+ him on a stretcher that had been brought. The soldier groaned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gently, gently! Can’t you do it more gently?” said the Emperor apparently
+ suffering more than the dying soldier, and he rode away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv saw tears filling the Emperor’s eyes and heard him, as he was
+ riding away, say to Czartorýski: “What a terrible thing war is: what a
+ terrible thing! Quelle terrible chose que la guerre! ”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The troops of the vanguard were stationed before Wischau, within sight of
+ the enemy’s lines, which all day long had yielded ground to us at the
+ least firing. The Emperor’s gratitude was announced to the vanguard,
+ rewards were promised, and the men received a double ration of vodka. The
+ campfires crackled and the soldiers’ songs resounded even more merrily
+ than on the previous night. Denísov celebrated his promotion to the rank
+ of major, and Rostóv, who had already drunk enough, at the end of the
+ feast proposed the Emperor’s health. “Not ‘our Sovereign, the Emperor,’ as
+ they say at official dinners,” said he, “but the health of our Sovereign,
+ that good, enchanting, and great man! Let us drink to his health and to
+ the certain defeat of the French!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If we fought before,” he said, “not letting the French pass, as at Schön
+ Grabern, what shall we not do now when he is at the front? We will all die
+ for him gladly! Is it not so, gentlemen? Perhaps I am not saying it right,
+ I have drunk a good deal—but that is how I feel, and so do you too!
+ To the health of Alexander the First! Hurrah!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hurrah!” rang the enthusiastic voices of the officers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the old cavalry captain, Kírsten, shouted enthusiastically and no less
+ sincerely than the twenty-year-old Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the officers had emptied and smashed their glasses, Kírsten filled
+ others and, in shirt sleeves and breeches, went glass in hand to the
+ soldiers’ bonfires and with his long gray mustache, his white chest
+ showing under his open shirt, he stood in a majestic pose in the light of
+ the campfire, waving his uplifted arm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lads! here’s to our Sovereign, the Emperor, and victory over our enemies!
+ Hurrah!” he exclaimed in his dashing, old, hussar’s baritone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The hussars crowded round and responded heartily with loud shouts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Late that night, when all had separated, Denísov with his short hand
+ patted his favorite, Rostóv, on the shoulder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As there’s no one to fall in love with on campaign, he’s fallen in love
+ with the Tsar,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Denísov, don’t make fun of it!” cried Rostóv. “It is such a lofty,
+ beautiful feeling, such a...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I believe it, I believe it, fwiend, and I share and appwove...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, you don’t understand!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Rostóv got up and went wandering among the campfires, dreaming of what
+ happiness it would be to die—not in saving the Emperor’s life (he
+ did not even dare to dream of that), but simply to die before his eyes. He
+ really was in love with the Tsar and the glory of the Russian arms and the
+ hope of future triumph. And he was not the only man to experience that
+ feeling during those memorable days preceding the battle of Austerlitz:
+ nine tenths of the men in the Russian army were then in love, though less
+ ecstatically, with their Tsar and the glory of the Russian arms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ The next day the Emperor stopped at Wischau, and Villier, his physician,
+ was repeatedly summoned to see him. At headquarters and among the troops
+ near by the news spread that the Emperor was unwell. He ate nothing and
+ had slept badly that night, those around him reported. The cause of this
+ indisposition was the strong impression made on his sensitive mind by the
+ sight of the killed and wounded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At daybreak on the seventeenth, a French officer who had come with a flag
+ of truce, demanding an audience with the Russian Emperor, was brought into
+ Wischau from our outposts. This officer was Savary. The Emperor had only
+ just fallen asleep and so Savary had to wait. At midday he was admitted to
+ the Emperor, and an hour later he rode off with Prince Dolgorúkov to the
+ advanced post of the French army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was rumored that Savary had been sent to propose to Alexander a meeting
+ with Napoleon. To the joy and pride of the whole army, a personal
+ interview was refused, and instead of the Sovereign, Prince Dolgorúkov,
+ the victor at Wischau, was sent with Savary to negotiate with Napoleon if,
+ contrary to expectations, these negotiations were actuated by a real
+ desire for peace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Toward evening Dolgorúkov came back, went straight to the Tsar, and
+ remained alone with him for a long time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the eighteenth and nineteenth of November, the army advanced two days’
+ march and the enemy’s outposts after a brief interchange of shots
+ retreated. In the highest army circles from midday on the nineteenth, a
+ great, excitedly bustling activity began which lasted till the morning of
+ the twentieth, when the memorable battle of Austerlitz was fought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Till midday on the nineteenth, the activity—the eager talk, running
+ to and fro, and dispatching of adjutants—was confined to the
+ Emperor’s headquarters. But on the afternoon of that day, this activity
+ reached Kutúzov’s headquarters and the staffs of the commanders of
+ columns. By evening, the adjutants had spread it to all ends and parts of
+ the army, and in the night from the nineteenth to the twentieth, the whole
+ eighty thousand allied troops rose from their bivouacs to the hum of
+ voices, and the army swayed and started in one enormous mass six miles
+ long.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The concentrated activity which had begun at the Emperor’s headquarters in
+ the morning and had started the whole movement that followed was like the
+ first movement of the main wheel of a large tower clock. One wheel slowly
+ moved, another was set in motion, and a third, and wheels began to revolve
+ faster and faster, levers and cogwheels to work, chimes to play, figures
+ to pop out, and the hands to advance with regular motion as a result of
+ all that activity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just as in the mechanism of a clock, so in the mechanism of the military
+ machine, an impulse once given leads to the final result; and just as
+ indifferently quiescent till the moment when motion is transmitted to them
+ are the parts of the mechanism which the impulse has not yet reached.
+ Wheels creak on their axles as the cogs engage one another and the
+ revolving pulleys whirr with the rapidity of their movement, but a
+ neighboring wheel is as quiet and motionless as though it were prepared to
+ remain so for a hundred years; but the moment comes when the lever catches
+ it and obeying the impulse that wheel begins to creak and joins in the
+ common motion the result and aim of which are beyond its ken.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just as in a clock, the result of the complicated motion of innumerable
+ wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement of the hands
+ which show the time, so the result of all the complicated human activities
+ of 160,000 Russians and French—all their passions, desires, remorse,
+ humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm—was
+ only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the
+ three Emperors—that is to say, a slow movement of the hand on the
+ dial of human history.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew was on duty that day and in constant attendance on the
+ commander in chief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At six in the evening, Kutúzov went to the Emperor’s headquarters and
+ after staying but a short time with the Tsar went to see the grand marshal
+ of the court, Count Tolstóy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bolkónski took the opportunity to go in to get some details of the coming
+ action from Dolgorúkov. He felt that Kutúzov was upset and dissatisfied
+ about something and that at headquarters they were dissatisfied with him,
+ and also that at the Emperor’s headquarters everyone adopted toward him
+ the tone of men who know something others do not know: he therefore wished
+ to speak to Dolgorúkov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, how d’you do, my dear fellow?” said Dolgorúkov, who was sitting at
+ tea with Bilíbin. “The fete is for tomorrow. How is your old fellow? Out
+ of sorts?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I won’t say he is out of sorts, but I fancy he would like to be heard.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But they heard him at the council of war and will hear him when he talks
+ sense, but to temporize and wait for something now when Bonaparte fears
+ nothing so much as a general battle is impossible.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, you have seen him?” said Prince Andrew. “Well, what is Bonaparte
+ like? How did he impress you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I saw him, and am convinced that he fears nothing so much as a
+ general engagement,” repeated Dolgorúkov, evidently prizing this general
+ conclusion which he had arrived at from his interview with Napoleon. “If
+ he weren’t afraid of a battle why did he ask for that interview? Why
+ negotiate, and above all why retreat, when to retreat is so contrary to
+ his method of conducting war? Believe me, he is afraid, afraid of a
+ general battle. His hour has come! Mark my words!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But tell me, what is he like, eh?” said Prince Andrew again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is a man in a gray overcoat, very anxious that I should call him ‘Your
+ Majesty,’ but who, to his chagrin, got no title from me! That’s the sort
+ of man he is, and nothing more,” replied Dolgorúkov, looking round at
+ Bilíbin with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Despite my great respect for old Kutúzov,” he continued, “we should be a
+ nice set of fellows if we were to wait about and so give him a chance to
+ escape, or to trick us, now that we certainly have him in our hands! No,
+ we mustn’t forget Suvórov and his rule—not to put yourself in a
+ position to be attacked, but yourself to attack. Believe me in war the
+ energy of young men often shows the way better than all the experience of
+ old Cunctators.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But in what position are we going to attack him? I have been at the
+ outposts today and it is impossible to say where his chief forces are
+ situated,” said Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He wished to explain to Dolgorúkov a plan of attack he had himself formed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, that is all the same,” Dolgorúkov said quickly, and getting up he
+ spread a map on the table. “All eventualities have been foreseen. If he is
+ standing before Brünn...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Prince Dolgorúkov rapidly but indistinctly explained Weyrother’s plan
+ of a flanking movement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew began to reply and to state his own plan, which might have
+ been as good as Weyrother’s, but for the disadvantage that Weyrother’s had
+ already been approved. As soon as Prince Andrew began to demonstrate the
+ defects of the latter and the merits of his own plan, Prince Dolgorúkov
+ ceased to listen to him and gazed absent-mindedly not at the map, but at
+ Prince Andrew’s face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There will be a council of war at Kutúzov’s tonight, though; you can say
+ all this there,” remarked Dolgorúkov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will do so,” said Prince Andrew, moving away from the map.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Whatever are you bothering about, gentlemen?” said Bilíbin, who, till
+ then, had listened with an amused smile to their conversation and now was
+ evidently ready with a joke. “Whether tomorrow brings victory or defeat,
+ the glory of our Russian arms is secure. Except your Kutúzov, there is not
+ a single Russian in command of a column! The commanders are: Herr General
+ Wimpfen, le Comte de Langeron, le Prince de Lichtenstein, le Prince de
+ Hohenlohe, and finally Prishprish, and so on like all those Polish names.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Be quiet, backbiter!” said Dolgorúkov. “It is not true; there are now two
+ Russians, Milorádovich, and Dokhtúrov, and there would be a third, Count
+ Arakchéev, if his nerves were not too weak.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “However, I think General Kutúzov has come out,” said Prince Andrew. “I
+ wish you good luck and success, gentlemen!” he added and went out after
+ shaking hands with Dolgorúkov and Bilíbin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the way home, Prince Andrew could not refrain from asking Kutúzov, who
+ was sitting silently beside him, what he thought of tomorrow’s battle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov looked sternly at his adjutant and, after a pause, replied: “I
+ think the battle will be lost, and so I told Count Tolstóy and asked him
+ to tell the Emperor. What do you think he replied? ‘But, my dear general,
+ I am engaged with rice and cutlets, look after military matters yourself!’
+ Yes... That was the answer I got!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ Shortly after nine o’clock that evening, Weyrother drove with his plans to
+ Kutúzov’s quarters where the council of war was to be held. All the
+ commanders of columns were summoned to the commander in chief’s and with
+ the exception of Prince Bagratión, who declined to come, were all there at
+ the appointed time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Weyrother, who was in full control of the proposed battle, by his
+ eagerness and briskness presented a marked contrast to the dissatisfied
+ and drowsy Kutúzov, who reluctantly played the part of chairman and
+ president of the council of war. Weyrother evidently felt himself to be at
+ the head of a movement that had already become unrestrainable. He was like
+ a horse running downhill harnessed to a heavy cart. Whether he was pulling
+ it or being pushed by it he did not know, but rushed along at headlong
+ speed with no time to consider what this movement might lead to. Weyrother
+ had been twice that evening to the enemy’s picket line to reconnoiter
+ personally, and twice to the Emperors, Russian and Austrian, to report and
+ explain, and to his headquarters where he had dictated the dispositions in
+ German, and now, much exhausted, he arrived at Kutúzov’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was evidently so busy that he even forgot to be polite to the commander
+ in chief. He interrupted him, talked rapidly and indistinctly, without
+ looking at the man he was addressing, and did not reply to questions put
+ to him. He was bespattered with mud and had a pitiful, weary, and
+ distracted air, though at the same time he was haughty and self-confident.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov was occupying a nobleman’s castle of modest dimensions near
+ Ostralitz. In the large drawing room which had become the commander in
+ chief’s office were gathered Kutúzov himself, Weyrother, and the members
+ of the council of war. They were drinking tea, and only awaited Prince
+ Bagratión to begin the council. At last Bagratión’s orderly came with the
+ news that the prince could not attend. Prince Andrew came in to inform the
+ commander in chief of this and, availing himself of permission previously
+ given him by Kutúzov to be present at the council, he remained in the
+ room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Since Prince Bagratión is not coming, we may begin,” said Weyrother,
+ hurriedly rising from his seat and going up to the table on which an
+ enormous map of the environs of Brünn was spread out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov, with his uniform unbuttoned so that his fat neck bulged over his
+ collar as if escaping, was sitting almost asleep in a low chair, with his
+ podgy old hands resting symmetrically on its arms. At the sound of
+ Weyrother’s voice, he opened his one eye with an effort.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, if you please! It is already late,” said he, and nodding his
+ head he let it droop and again closed his eye.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If at first the members of the council thought that Kutúzov was pretending
+ to sleep, the sounds his nose emitted during the reading that followed
+ proved that the commander in chief at that moment was absorbed by a far
+ more serious matter than a desire to show his contempt for the
+ dispositions or anything else—he was engaged in satisfying the
+ irresistible human need for sleep. He really was asleep. Weyrother, with
+ the gesture of a man too busy to lose a moment, glanced at Kutúzov and,
+ having convinced himself that he was asleep, took up a paper and in a
+ loud, monotonous voice began to read out the dispositions for the
+ impending battle, under a heading which he also read out:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dispositions for an attack on the enemy position behind Kobelnitz and
+ Sokolnitz, November 30, 1805.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The dispositions were very complicated and difficult. They began as
+ follows:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As the enemy’s left wing rests on wooded hills and his right extends
+ along Kobelnitz and Sokolnitz behind the ponds that are there, while we,
+ on the other hand, with our left wing by far outflank his right, it is
+ advantageous to attack the enemy’s latter wing especially if we occupy the
+ villages of Sokolnitz and Kobelnitz, whereby we can both fall on his flank
+ and pursue him over the plain between Schlappanitz and the Thuerassa
+ forest, avoiding the defiles of Schlappanitz and Bellowitz which cover the
+ enemy’s front. For this object it is necessary that... The first column
+ marches... The second column marches... The third column marches...” and
+ so on, read Weyrother.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The generals seemed to listen reluctantly to the difficult dispositions.
+ The tall, fair-haired General Buxhöwden stood, leaning his back against
+ the wall, his eyes fixed on a burning candle, and seemed not to listen or
+ even to wish to be thought to listen. Exactly opposite Weyrother, with his
+ glistening wide-open eyes fixed upon him and his mustache twisted upwards,
+ sat the ruddy Milorádovich in a military pose, his elbows turned outwards,
+ his hands on his knees, and his shoulders raised. He remained stubbornly
+ silent, gazing at Weyrother’s face, and only turned away his eyes when the
+ Austrian chief of staff finished reading. Then Milorádovich looked round
+ significantly at the other generals. But one could not tell from that
+ significant look whether he agreed or disagreed and was satisfied or not
+ with the arrangements. Next to Weyrother sat Count Langeron who, with a
+ subtle smile that never left his typically southern French face during the
+ whole time of the reading, gazed at his delicate fingers which rapidly
+ twirled by its corners a gold snuffbox on which was a portrait. In the
+ middle of one of the longest sentences, he stopped the rotary motion of
+ the snuffbox, raised his head, and with inimical politeness lurking in the
+ corners of his thin lips interrupted Weyrother, wishing to say something.
+ But the Austrian general, continuing to read, frowned angrily and jerked
+ his elbows, as if to say: “You can tell me your views later, but now be so
+ good as to look at the map and listen.” Langeron lifted his eyes with an
+ expression of perplexity, turned round to Milorádovich as if seeking an
+ explanation, but meeting the latter’s impressive but meaningless gaze
+ drooped his eyes sadly and again took to twirling his snuffbox.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A geography lesson!” he muttered as if to himself, but loud enough to be
+ heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Przebyszéwski, with respectful but dignified politeness, held his hand to
+ his ear toward Weyrother, with the air of a man absorbed in attention.
+ Dohktúrov, a little man, sat opposite Weyrother, with an assiduous and
+ modest mien, and stooping over the outspread map conscientiously studied
+ the dispositions and the unfamiliar locality. He asked Weyrother several
+ times to repeat words he had not clearly heard and the difficult names of
+ villages. Weyrother complied and Dohktúrov noted them down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the reading which lasted more than an hour was over, Langeron again
+ brought his snuffbox to rest and, without looking at Weyrother or at
+ anyone in particular, began to say how difficult it was to carry out such
+ a plan in which the enemy’s position was assumed to be known, whereas it
+ was perhaps not known, since the enemy was in movement. Langeron’s
+ objections were valid but it was obvious that their chief aim was to show
+ General Weyrother—who had read his dispositions with as much
+ self-confidence as if he were addressing school children—that he had
+ to do, not with fools, but with men who could teach him something in
+ military matters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the monotonous sound of Weyrother’s voice ceased, Kutúzov opened his
+ eye as a miller wakes up when the soporific drone of the mill wheel is
+ interrupted. He listened to what Langeron said, as if remarking, “So you
+ are still at that silly business!” quickly closed his eye again, and let
+ his head sink still lower.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Langeron, trying as virulently as possible to sting Weyrother’s vanity as
+ author of the military plan, argued that Bonaparte might easily attack
+ instead of being attacked, and so render the whole of this plan perfectly
+ worthless. Weyrother met all objections with a firm and contemptuous
+ smile, evidently prepared beforehand to meet all objections be they what
+ they might.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If he could attack us, he would have done so today,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So you think he is powerless?” said Langeron.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He has forty thousand men at most,” replied Weyrother, with the smile of
+ a doctor to whom an old wife wishes to explain the treatment of a case.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In that case he is inviting his doom by awaiting our attack,” said
+ Langeron, with a subtly ironical smile, again glancing round for support
+ to Milorádovich who was near him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Milorádovich was at that moment evidently thinking of anything rather
+ than of what the generals were disputing about.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ma foi!” said he, “tomorrow we shall see all that on the battlefield.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Weyrother again gave that smile which seemed to say that to him it was
+ strange and ridiculous to meet objections from Russian generals and to
+ have to prove to them what he had not merely convinced himself of, but had
+ also convinced the sovereign Emperors of.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The enemy has quenched his fires and a continual noise is heard from his
+ camp,” said he. “What does that mean? Either he is retreating, which is
+ the only thing we need fear, or he is changing his position.” (He smiled
+ ironically.) “But even if he also took up a position in the Thuerassa, he
+ merely saves us a great deal of trouble and all our arrangements to the
+ minutest detail remain the same.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How is that?...” began Prince Andrew, who had for long been waiting an
+ opportunity to express his doubts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov here woke up, coughed heavily, and looked round at the generals.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gentlemen, the dispositions for tomorrow—or rather for today, for
+ it is past midnight—cannot now be altered,” said he. “You have heard
+ them, and we shall all do our duty. But before a battle, there is nothing
+ more important...” he paused, “than to have a good sleep.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He moved as if to rise. The generals bowed and retired. It was past
+ midnight. Prince Andrew went out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The council of war, at which Prince Andrew had not been able to express
+ his opinion as he had hoped to, left on him a vague and uneasy impression.
+ Whether Dolgorúkov and Weyrother, or Kutúzov, Langeron, and the others who
+ did not approve of the plan of attack, were right—he did not know.
+ “But was it really not possible for Kutúzov to state his views plainly to
+ the Emperor? Is it possible that on account of court and personal
+ considerations tens of thousands of lives, and my life, my life,” he
+ thought, “must be risked?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, it is very likely that I shall be killed tomorrow,” he thought. And
+ suddenly, at this thought of death, a whole series of most distant, most
+ intimate, memories rose in his imagination: he remembered his last parting
+ from his father and his wife; he remembered the days when he first loved
+ her. He thought of her pregnancy and felt sorry for her and for himself,
+ and in a nervously emotional and softened mood he went out of the hut in
+ which he was billeted with Nesvítski and began to walk up and down before
+ it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The night was foggy and through the fog the moonlight gleamed
+ mysteriously. “Yes, tomorrow, tomorrow!” he thought. “Tomorrow everything
+ may be over for me! All these memories will be no more, none of them will
+ have any meaning for me. Tomorrow perhaps, even certainly, I have a
+ presentiment that for the first time I shall have to show all I can do.”
+ And his fancy pictured the battle, its loss, the concentration of fighting
+ at one point, and the hesitation of all the commanders. And then that
+ happy moment, that Toulon for which he had so long waited, presents itself
+ to him at last. He firmly and clearly expresses his opinion to Kutúzov, to
+ Weyrother, and to the Emperors. All are struck by the justness of his
+ views, but no one undertakes to carry them out, so he takes a regiment, a
+ division—stipulates that no one is to interfere with his arrangements—leads
+ his division to the decisive point, and gains the victory alone. “But
+ death and suffering?” suggested another voice. Prince Andrew, however, did
+ not answer that voice and went on dreaming of his triumphs. The
+ dispositions for the next battle are planned by him alone. Nominally he is
+ only an adjutant on Kutúzov’s staff, but he does everything alone. The
+ next battle is won by him alone. Kutúzov is removed and he is appointed...
+ “Well and then?” asked the other voice. “If before that you are not ten
+ times wounded, killed, or betrayed, well... what then?...” “Well then,”
+ Prince Andrew answered himself, “I don’t know what will happen and don’t
+ want to know, and can’t, but if I want this—want glory, want to be
+ known to men, want to be loved by them, it is not my fault that I want it
+ and want nothing but that and live only for that. Yes, for that alone! I
+ shall never tell anyone, but, oh God! what am I to do if I love nothing
+ but fame and men’s esteem? Death, wounds, the loss of family—I fear
+ nothing. And precious and dear as many persons are to me—father,
+ sister, wife—those dearest to me—yet dreadful and unnatural as
+ it seems, I would give them all at once for a moment of glory, of triumph
+ over men, of love from men I don’t know and never shall know, for the love
+ of these men here,” he thought, as he listened to voices in Kutúzov’s
+ courtyard. The voices were those of the orderlies who were packing up; one
+ voice, probably a coachman’s, was teasing Kutúzov’s old cook whom Prince
+ Andrew knew, and who was called Tit. He was saying, “Tit, I say, Tit!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well?” returned the old man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go, Tit, thresh a bit!” said the wag.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, go to the devil!” called out a voice, drowned by the laughter of the
+ orderlies and servants.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All the same, I love and value nothing but triumph over them all, I value
+ this mystic power and glory that is floating here above me in this mist!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ That same night, Rostóv was with a platoon on skirmishing duty in front of
+ Bagratión’s detachment. His hussars were placed along the line in couples
+ and he himself rode along the line trying to master the sleepiness that
+ kept coming over him. An enormous space, with our army’s campfires dimly
+ glowing in the fog, could be seen behind him; in front of him was misty
+ darkness. Rostóv could see nothing, peer as he would into that foggy
+ distance: now something gleamed gray, now there was something black, now
+ little lights seemed to glimmer where the enemy ought to be, now he
+ fancied it was only something in his own eyes. His eyes kept closing, and
+ in his fancy appeared—now the Emperor, now Denísov, and now Moscow
+ memories—and he again hurriedly opened his eyes and saw close before
+ him the head and ears of the horse he was riding, and sometimes, when he
+ came within six paces of them, the black figures of hussars, but in the
+ distance was still the same misty darkness. “Why not?... It might easily
+ happen,” thought Rostóv, “that the Emperor will meet me and give me an
+ order as he would to any other officer; he’ll say: ‘Go and find out what’s
+ there.’ There are many stories of his getting to know an officer in just
+ such a chance way and attaching him to himself! What if he gave me a place
+ near him? Oh, how I would guard him, how I would tell him the truth, how I
+ would unmask his deceivers!” And in order to realize vividly his love
+ devotion to the sovereign, Rostóv pictured to himself an enemy or a
+ deceitful German, whom he would not only kill with pleasure but whom he
+ would slap in the face before the Emperor. Suddenly a distant shout
+ aroused him. He started and opened his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where am I? Oh yes, in the skirmishing line... pass and watchword— shaft,
+ Olmütz. What a nuisance that our squadron will be in reserve tomorrow,” he
+ thought. “I’ll ask leave to go to the front, this may be my only chance of
+ seeing the Emperor. It won’t be long now before I am off duty. I’ll take
+ another turn and when I get back I’ll go to the general and ask him.” He
+ readjusted himself in the saddle and touched up his horse to ride once
+ more round his hussars. It seemed to him that it was getting lighter. To
+ the left he saw a sloping descent lit up, and facing it a black knoll that
+ seemed as steep as a wall. On this knoll there was a white patch that
+ Rostóv could not at all make out: was it a glade in the wood lit up by the
+ moon, or some unmelted snow, or some white houses? He even thought
+ something moved on that white spot. “I expect it’s snow... that spot... a
+ spot— une tache ,” he thought. “There now... it’s not a tache ...
+ Natásha... sister, black eyes... Na... tasha... (Won’t she be surprised
+ when I tell her how I’ve seen the Emperor?) Natásha... take my
+ sabretache...”—“Keep to the right, your honor, there are bushes
+ here,” came the voice of an hussar, past whom Rostóv was riding in the act
+ of falling asleep. Rostóv lifted his head that had sunk almost to his
+ horse’s mane and pulled up beside the hussar. He was succumbing to
+ irresistible, youthful, childish drowsiness. “But what was I thinking? I
+ mustn’t forget. How shall I speak to the Emperor? No, that’s not it—that’s
+ tomorrow. Oh yes! Natásha... sabretache... saber them... Whom? The
+ hussars... Ah, the hussars with mustaches. Along the Tverskáya Street rode
+ the hussar with mustaches... I thought about him too, just opposite
+ Gúryev’s house... Old Gúryev.... Oh, but Denísov’s a fine fellow. But
+ that’s all nonsense. The chief thing is that the Emperor is here. How he
+ looked at me and wished to say something, but dared not.... No, it was I
+ who dared not. But that’s nonsense, the chief thing is not to forget the
+ important thing I was thinking of. Yes, Na-tásha, sabretache, oh, yes,
+ yes! That’s right!” And his head once more sank to his horse’s neck. All
+ at once it seemed to him that he was being fired at. “What? What? What?...
+ Cut them down! What?...” said Rostóv, waking up. At the moment he opened
+ his eyes he heard in front of him, where the enemy was, the long-drawn
+ shouts of thousands of voices. His horse and the horse of the hussar near
+ him pricked their ears at these shouts. Over there, where the shouting
+ came from, a fire flared up and went out again, then another, and all
+ along the French line on the hill fires flared up and the shouting grew
+ louder and louder. Rostóv could hear the sound of French words but could
+ not distinguish them. The din of many voices was too great; all he could
+ hear was: “ahahah!” and “rrrr!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s that? What do you make of it?” said Rostóv to the hussar beside
+ him. “That must be the enemy’s camp!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The hussar did not reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, don’t you hear it?” Rostóv asked again, after waiting for a reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who can tell, your honor?” replied the hussar reluctantly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “From the direction, it must be the enemy,” repeated Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It may be he or it may be nothing,” muttered the hussar. “It’s dark...
+ Steady!” he cried to his fidgeting horse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv’s horse was also getting restive: it pawed the frozen ground,
+ pricking its ears at the noise and looking at the lights. The shouting
+ grew still louder and merged into a general roar that only an army of
+ several thousand men could produce. The lights spread farther and farther,
+ probably along the line of the French camp. Rostóv no longer wanted to
+ sleep. The gay triumphant shouting of the enemy army had a stimulating
+ effect on him. “Vive l’Empereur! l’Empereur!” he now heard distinctly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They can’t be far off, probably just beyond the stream,” he said to the
+ hussar beside him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The hussar only sighed without replying and coughed angrily. The sound of
+ horse’s hoofs approaching at a trot along the line of hussars was heard,
+ and out of the foggy darkness the figure of a sergeant of hussars suddenly
+ appeared, looming huge as an elephant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your honor, the generals!” said the sergeant, riding up to Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv, still looking round toward the fires and the shouts, rode with the
+ sergeant to meet some mounted men who were riding along the line. One was
+ on a white horse. Prince Bagratión and Prince Dolgorúkov with their
+ adjutants had come to witness the curious phenomenon of the lights and
+ shouts in the enemy’s camp. Rostóv rode up to Bagratión, reported to him,
+ and then joined the adjutants listening to what the generals were saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Believe me,” said Prince Dolgorúkov, addressing Bagratión, “it is nothing
+ but a trick! He has retreated and ordered the rearguard to kindle fires
+ and make a noise to deceive us.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hardly,” said Bagratión. “I saw them this evening on that knoll; if they
+ had retreated they would have withdrawn from that too.... Officer!” said
+ Bagratión to Rostóv, “are the enemy’s skirmishers still there?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They were there this evening, but now I don’t know, your excellency.
+ Shall I go with some of my hussars to see?” replied Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bagratión stopped and, before replying, tried to see Rostóv’s face in the
+ mist.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, go and see,” he said, after a pause.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv spurred his horse, called to Sergeant Fédchenko and two other
+ hussars, told them to follow him, and trotted downhill in the direction
+ from which the shouting came. He felt both frightened and pleased to be
+ riding alone with three hussars into that mysterious and dangerous misty
+ distance where no one had been before him. Bagratión called to him from
+ the hill not to go beyond the stream, but Rostóv pretended not to hear him
+ and did not stop but rode on and on, continually mistaking bushes for
+ trees and gullies for men and continually discovering his mistakes. Having
+ descended the hill at a trot, he no longer saw either our own or the
+ enemy’s fires, but heard the shouting of the French more loudly and
+ distinctly. In the valley he saw before him something like a river, but
+ when he reached it he found it was a road. Having come out onto the road
+ he reined in his horse, hesitating whether to ride along it or cross it
+ and ride over the black field up the hillside. To keep to the road which
+ gleamed white in the mist would have been safer because it would be easier
+ to see people coming along it. “Follow me!” said he, crossed the road, and
+ began riding up the hill at a gallop toward the point where the French
+ pickets had been standing that evening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your honor, there he is!” cried one of the hussars behind him. And before
+ Rostóv had time to make out what the black thing was that had suddenly
+ appeared in the fog, there was a flash, followed by a report, and a bullet
+ whizzing high up in the mist with a plaintive sound passed out of hearing.
+ Another musket missed fire but flashed in the pan. Rostóv turned his horse
+ and galloped back. Four more reports followed at intervals, and the
+ bullets passed somewhere in the fog singing in different tones. Rostóv
+ reined in his horse, whose spirits had risen, like his own, at the firing,
+ and went back at a footpace. “Well, some more! Some more!” a merry voice
+ was saying in his soul. But no more shots came.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only when approaching Bagratión did Rostóv let his horse gallop again, and
+ with his hand at the salute rode up to the general.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dolgorúkov was still insisting that the French had retreated and had only
+ lit fires to deceive us.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What does that prove?” he was saying as Rostóv rode up. “They might
+ retreat and leave the pickets.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s plain that they have not all gone yet, Prince,” said Bagratión.
+ “Wait till tomorrow morning, we’ll find out everything tomorrow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The picket is still on the hill, your excellency, just where it was in
+ the evening,” reported Rostóv, stooping forward with his hand at the
+ salute and unable to repress the smile of delight induced by his ride and
+ especially by the sound of the bullets.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very good, very good,” said Bagratión. “Thank you, officer.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency,” said Rostóv, “may I ask a favor?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tomorrow our squadron is to be in reserve. May I ask to be attached to
+ the first squadron?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s your name?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Count Rostóv.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, very well, you may stay in attendance on me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Count Ilyá Rostóv’s son?” asked Dolgorúkov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Rostóv did not reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then I may reckon on it, your excellency?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will give the order.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tomorrow very likely I may be sent with some message to the Emperor,”
+ thought Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank God!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The fires and shouting in the enemy’s army were occasioned by the fact
+ that while Napoleon’s proclamation was being read to the troops the
+ Emperor himself rode round his bivouacs. The soldiers, on seeing him, lit
+ wisps of straw and ran after him, shouting, “Vive l’Empereur!” Napoleon’s
+ proclamation was as follows:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soldiers! The Russian army is advancing against you to avenge the Austrian
+ army of Ulm. They are the same battalions you broke at Hollabrünn and have
+ pursued ever since to this place. The position we occupy is a strong one,
+ and while they are marching to go round me on the right they will expose a
+ flank to me. Soldiers! I will myself direct your battalions. I will keep
+ out of fire if you with your habitual valor carry disorder and confusion
+ into the enemy’s ranks, but should victory be in doubt, even for a moment,
+ you will see your Emperor exposing himself to the first blows of the
+ enemy, for there must be no doubt of victory, especially on this day when
+ what is at stake is the honor of the French infantry, so necessary to the
+ honor of our nation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Do not break your ranks on the plea of removing the wounded! Let every man
+ be fully imbued with the thought that we must defeat these hirelings of
+ England, inspired by such hatred of our nation! This victory will conclude
+ our campaign and we can return to winter quarters, where fresh French
+ troops who are being raised in France will join us, and the peace I shall
+ conclude will be worthy of my people, of you, and of myself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ NAPOLEON
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV
+ 
+ 
+ At five in the morning it was still quite dark. The troops of the center,
+ the reserves, and Bagratión’s right flank had not yet moved, but on the
+ left flank the columns of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, which were to
+ be the first to descend the heights to attack the French right flank and
+ drive it into the Bohemian mountains according to plan, were already up
+ and astir. The smoke of the campfires, into which they were throwing
+ everything superfluous, made the eyes smart. It was cold and dark. The
+ officers were hurriedly drinking tea and breakfasting, the soldiers,
+ munching biscuit and beating a tattoo with their feet to warm themselves,
+ gathering round the fires throwing into the flames the remains of sheds,
+ chairs, tables, wheels, tubs, and everything that they did not want or
+ could not carry away with them. Austrian column guides were moving in and
+ out among the Russian troops and served as heralds of the advance. As soon
+ as an Austrian officer showed himself near a commanding officer’s
+ quarters, the regiment began to move: the soldiers ran from the fires,
+ thrust their pipes into their boots, their bags into the carts, got their
+ muskets ready, and formed rank. The officers buttoned up their coats,
+ buckled on their swords and pouches, and moved along the ranks shouting.
+ The train drivers and orderlies harnessed and packed the wagons and tied
+ on the loads. The adjutants and battalion and regimental commanders
+ mounted, crossed themselves, gave final instructions, orders, and
+ commissions to the baggage men who remained behind, and the monotonous
+ tramp of thousands of feet resounded. The column moved forward without
+ knowing where and unable, from the masses around them, the smoke and the
+ increasing fog, to see either the place they were leaving or that to which
+ they were going.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A soldier on the march is hemmed in and borne along by his regiment as
+ much as a sailor is by his ship. However far he has walked, whatever
+ strange, unknown, and dangerous places he reaches, just as a sailor is
+ always surrounded by the same decks, masts, and rigging of his ship, so
+ the soldier always has around him the same comrades, the same ranks, the
+ same sergeant major Iván Mítrich, the same company dog Jack, and the same
+ commanders. The sailor rarely cares to know the latitude in which his ship
+ is sailing, but on the day of battle—heaven knows how and whence—a
+ stern note of which all are conscious sounds in the moral atmosphere of an
+ army, announcing the approach of something decisive and solemn, and
+ awakening in the men an unusual curiosity. On the day of battle the
+ soldiers excitedly try to get beyond the interests of their regiment, they
+ listen intently, look about, and eagerly ask concerning what is going on
+ around them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The fog had grown so dense that though it was growing light they could not
+ see ten paces ahead. Bushes looked like gigantic trees and level ground
+ like cliffs and slopes. Anywhere, on any side, one might encounter an
+ enemy invisible ten paces off. But the columns advanced for a long time,
+ always in the same fog, descending and ascending hills, avoiding gardens
+ and enclosures, going over new and unknown ground, and nowhere
+ encountering the enemy. On the contrary, the soldiers became aware that in
+ front, behind, and on all sides, other Russian columns were moving in the
+ same direction. Every soldier felt glad to know that to the unknown place
+ where he was going, many more of our men were going too.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now, the Kúrskies have also gone past,” was being said in the
+ ranks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s wonderful what a lot of our troops have gathered, lads! Last night I
+ looked at the campfires and there was no end of them. A regular Moscow!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though none of the column commanders rode up to the ranks or talked to the
+ men (the commanders, as we saw at the council of war, were out of humor
+ and dissatisfied with the affair, and so did not exert themselves to cheer
+ the men but merely carried out the orders), yet the troops marched gaily,
+ as they always do when going into action, especially to an attack. But
+ when they had marched for about an hour in the dense fog, the greater part
+ of the men had to halt and an unpleasant consciousness of some dislocation
+ and blunder spread through the ranks. How such a consciousness is
+ communicated is very difficult to define, but it certainly is communicated
+ very surely, and flows rapidly, imperceptibly, and irrepressibly, as water
+ does in a creek. Had the Russian army been alone without any allies, it
+ might perhaps have been a long time before this consciousness of
+ mismanagement became a general conviction, but as it was, the disorder was
+ readily and naturally attributed to the stupid Germans, and everyone was
+ convinced that a dangerous muddle had been occasioned by the sausage
+ eaters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why have we stopped? Is the way blocked? Or have we already come up
+ against the French?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, one can’t hear them. They’d be firing if we had.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They were in a hurry enough to start us, and now here we stand in the
+ middle of a field without rhyme or reason. It’s all those damned Germans’
+ muddling! What stupid devils!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I’d send them on in front, but no fear, they’re crowding up behind.
+ And now here we stand hungry.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I say, shall we soon be clear? They say the cavalry are blocking the
+ way,” said an officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, those damned Germans! They don’t know their own country!” said
+ another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What division are you?” shouted an adjutant, riding up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Eighteenth.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then why are you here? You should have gone on long ago, now you won’t
+ get there till evening.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What stupid orders! They don’t themselves know what they are doing!” said
+ the officer and rode off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then a general rode past shouting something angrily, not in Russian.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tafa-lafa! But what he’s jabbering no one can make out,” said a soldier,
+ mimicking the general who had ridden away. “I’d shoot them, the
+ scoundrels!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We were ordered to be at the place before nine, but we haven’t got
+ halfway. Fine orders!” was being repeated on different sides.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the feeling of energy with which the troops had started began to turn
+ into vexation and anger at the stupid arrangements and at the Germans.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The cause of the confusion was that while the Austrian cavalry was moving
+ toward our left flank, the higher command found that our center was too
+ far separated from our right flank and the cavalry were all ordered to
+ turn back to the right. Several thousand cavalry crossed in front of the
+ infantry, who had to wait.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the front an altercation occurred between an Austrian guide and a
+ Russian general. The general shouted a demand that the cavalry should be
+ halted, the Austrian argued that not he, but the higher command, was to
+ blame. The troops meanwhile stood growing listless and dispirited. After
+ an hour’s delay they at last moved on, descending the hill. The fog that
+ was dispersing on the hill lay still more densely below, where they were
+ descending. In front in the fog a shot was heard and then another, at
+ first irregularly at varying intervals—trata...tat—and then
+ more and more regularly and rapidly, and the action at the Goldbach Stream
+ began.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not expecting to come on the enemy down by the stream, and having stumbled
+ on him in the fog, hearing no encouraging word from their commanders, and
+ with a consciousness of being too late spreading through the ranks, and
+ above all being unable to see anything in front or around them in the
+ thick fog, the Russians exchanged shots with the enemy lazily and advanced
+ and again halted, receiving no timely orders from the officers or
+ adjutants who wandered about in the fog in those unknown surroundings
+ unable to find their own regiments. In this way the action began for the
+ first, second, and third columns, which had gone down into the valley. The
+ fourth column, with which Kutúzov was, stood on the Pratzen Heights.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Below, where the fight was beginning, there was still thick fog; on the
+ higher ground it was clearing, but nothing could be seen of what was going
+ on in front. Whether all the enemy forces were, as we supposed, six miles
+ away, or whether they were near by in that sea of mist, no one knew till
+ after eight o’clock.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was nine o’clock in the morning. The fog lay unbroken like a sea down
+ below, but higher up at the village of Schlappanitz where Napoleon stood
+ with his marshals around him, it was quite light. Above him was a clear
+ blue sky, and the sun’s vast orb quivered like a huge hollow, crimson
+ float on the surface of that milky sea of mist. The whole French army, and
+ even Napoleon himself with his staff, were not on the far side of the
+ streams and hollows of Sokolnitz and Schlappanitz beyond which we intended
+ to take up our position and begin the action, but were on this side, so
+ close to our own forces that Napoleon with the naked eye could distinguish
+ a mounted man from one on foot. Napoleon, in the blue cloak which he had
+ worn on his Italian campaign, sat on his small gray Arab horse a little in
+ front of his marshals. He gazed silently at the hills which seemed to rise
+ out of the sea of mist and on which the Russian troops were moving in the
+ distance, and he listened to the sounds of firing in the valley. Not a
+ single muscle of his face—which in those days was still thin—moved.
+ His gleaming eyes were fixed intently on one spot. His predictions were
+ being justified. Part of the Russian force had already descended into the
+ valley toward the ponds and lakes and part were leaving these Pratzen
+ Heights which he intended to attack and regarded as the key to the
+ position. He saw over the mist that in a hollow between two hills near the
+ village of Pratzen, the Russian columns, their bayonets glittering, were
+ moving continuously in one direction toward the valley and disappearing
+ one after another into the mist. From information he had received the
+ evening before, from the sound of wheels and footsteps heard by the
+ outposts during the night, by the disorderly movement of the Russian
+ columns, and from all indications, he saw clearly that the allies believed
+ him to be far away in front of them, and that the columns moving near
+ Pratzen constituted the center of the Russian army, and that that center
+ was already sufficiently weakened to be successfully attacked. But still
+ he did not begin the engagement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Today was a great day for him—the anniversary of his coronation.
+ Before dawn he had slept for a few hours, and refreshed, vigorous, and in
+ good spirits, he mounted his horse and rode out into the field in that
+ happy mood in which everything seems possible and everything succeeds. He
+ sat motionless, looking at the heights visible above the mist, and his
+ cold face wore that special look of confident, self-complacent happiness
+ that one sees on the face of a boy happily in love. The marshals stood
+ behind him not venturing to distract his attention. He looked now at the
+ Pratzen Heights, now at the sun floating up out of the mist.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the sun had entirely emerged from the fog, and fields and mist were
+ aglow with dazzling light—as if he had only awaited this to begin
+ the action—he drew the glove from his shapely white hand, made a
+ sign with it to the marshals, and ordered the action to begin. The
+ marshals, accompanied by adjutants, galloped off in different directions,
+ and a few minutes later the chief forces of the French army moved rapidly
+ toward those Pratzen Heights which were being more and more denuded by
+ Russian troops moving down the valley to their left.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV
+ 
+ 
+ At eight o’clock Kutúzov rode to Pratzen at the head of the fourth column,
+ Milorádovich’s, the one that was to take the place of Przebyszéwski’s and
+ Langeron’s columns which had already gone down into the valley. He greeted
+ the men of the foremost regiment and gave them the order to march, thereby
+ indicating that he intended to lead that column himself. When he had
+ reached the village of Pratzen he halted. Prince Andrew was behind, among
+ the immense number forming the commander in chief’s suite. He was in a
+ state of suppressed excitement and irritation, though controlledly calm as
+ a man is at the approach of a long-awaited moment. He was firmly convinced
+ that this was the day of his Toulon, or his bridge of Arcola. How it would
+ come about he did not know, but he felt sure it would do so. The locality
+ and the position of our troops were known to him as far as they could be
+ known to anyone in our army. His own strategic plan, which obviously could
+ not now be carried out, was forgotten. Now, entering into Weyrother’s
+ plan, Prince Andrew considered possible contingencies and formed new
+ projects such as might call for his rapidity of perception and decision.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To the left down below in the mist, the musketry fire of unseen forces
+ could be heard. It was there Prince Andrew thought the fight would
+ concentrate. “There we shall encounter difficulties, and there,” thought
+ he, “I shall be sent with a brigade or division, and there, standard in
+ hand, I shall go forward and break whatever is in front of me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He could not look calmly at the standards of the passing battalions.
+ Seeing them he kept thinking, “That may be the very standard with which I
+ shall lead the army.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the morning all that was left of the night mist on the heights was a
+ hoar frost now turning to dew, but in the valleys it still lay like a
+ milk-white sea. Nothing was visible in the valley to the left into which
+ our troops had descended and from whence came the sounds of firing. Above
+ the heights was the dark clear sky, and to the right the vast orb of the
+ sun. In front, far off on the farther shore of that sea of mist, some
+ wooded hills were discernible, and it was there the enemy probably was,
+ for something could be descried. On the right the Guards were entering the
+ misty region with a sound of hoofs and wheels and now and then a gleam of
+ bayonets; to the left beyond the village similar masses of cavalry came up
+ and disappeared in the sea of mist. In front and behind moved infantry.
+ The commander in chief was standing at the end of the village letting the
+ troops pass by him. That morning Kutúzov seemed worn and irritable. The
+ infantry passing before him came to a halt without any command being
+ given, apparently obstructed by something in front.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do order them to form into battalion columns and go round the village!”
+ he said angrily to a general who had ridden up. “Don’t you understand,
+ your excellency, my dear sir, that you must not defile through narrow
+ village streets when we are marching against the enemy?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I intended to re-form them beyond the village, your excellency,” answered
+ the general.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov laughed bitterly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’ll make a fine thing of it, deploying in sight of the enemy! Very
+ fine!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The enemy is still far away, your excellency. According to the
+ dispositions...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The dispositions!” exclaimed Kutúzov bitterly. “Who told you that?...
+ Kindly do as you are ordered.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear fellow,” Nesvítski whispered to Prince Andrew, “the old man is as
+ surly as a dog.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ An Austrian officer in a white uniform with green plumes in his hat
+ galloped up to Kutúzov and asked in the Emperor’s name had the fourth
+ column advanced into action.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov turned round without answering and his eye happened to fall upon
+ Prince Andrew, who was beside him. Seeing him, Kutúzov’s malevolent and
+ caustic expression softened, as if admitting that what was being done was
+ not his adjutant’s fault, and still not answering the Austrian adjutant,
+ he addressed Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go, my dear fellow, and see whether the third division has passed the
+ village. Tell it to stop and await my orders.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hardly had Prince Andrew started than he stopped him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And ask whether sharpshooters have been posted,” he added. “What are they
+ doing? What are they doing?” he murmured to himself, still not replying to
+ the Austrian.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew galloped off to execute the order.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Overtaking the battalions that continued to advance, he stopped the third
+ division and convinced himself that there really were no sharpshooters in
+ front of our columns. The colonel at the head of the regiment was much
+ surprised at the commander in chief’s order to throw out skirmishers. He
+ had felt perfectly sure that there were other troops in front of him and
+ that the enemy must be at least six miles away. There was really nothing
+ to be seen in front except a barren descent hidden by dense mist. Having
+ given orders in the commander in chief’s name to rectify this omission,
+ Prince Andrew galloped back. Kutúzov still in the same place, his stout
+ body resting heavily in the saddle with the lassitude of age, sat yawning
+ wearily with closed eyes. The troops were no longer moving, but stood with
+ the butts of their muskets on the ground.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right, all right!” he said to Prince Andrew, and turned to a general
+ who, watch in hand, was saying it was time they started as all the
+ left-flank columns had already descended.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Plenty of time, your excellency,” muttered Kutúzov in the midst of a
+ yawn. “Plenty of time,” he repeated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just then at a distance behind Kutúzov was heard the sound of regiments
+ saluting, and this sound rapidly came nearer along the whole extended line
+ of the advancing Russian columns. Evidently the person they were greeting
+ was riding quickly. When the soldiers of the regiment in front of which
+ Kutúzov was standing began to shout, he rode a little to one side and
+ looked round with a frown. Along the road from Pratzen galloped what
+ looked like a squadron of horsemen in various uniforms. Two of them rode
+ side by side in front, at full gallop. One in a black uniform with white
+ plumes in his hat rode a bobtailed chestnut horse, the other who was in a
+ white uniform rode a black one. These were the two Emperors followed by
+ their suites. Kutúzov, affecting the manners of an old soldier at the
+ front, gave the command “Attention!” and rode up to the Emperors with a
+ salute. His whole appearance and manner were suddenly transformed. He put
+ on the air of a subordinate who obeys without reasoning. With an
+ affectation of respect which evidently struck Alexander unpleasantly, he
+ rode up and saluted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This unpleasant impression merely flitted over the young and happy face of
+ the Emperor like a cloud of haze across a clear sky and vanished. After
+ his illness he looked rather thinner that day than on the field of Olmütz
+ where Bolkónski had seen him for the first time abroad, but there was
+ still the same bewitching combination of majesty and mildness in his fine
+ gray eyes, and on his delicate lips the same capacity for varying
+ expression and the same prevalent appearance of goodhearted innocent
+ youth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the Olmütz review he had seemed more majestic; here he seemed brighter
+ and more energetic. He was slightly flushed after galloping two miles, and
+ reining in his horse he sighed restfully and looked round at the faces of
+ his suite, young and animated as his own. Czartorýski, Novosíltsev, Prince
+ Volkónsky, Strógonov, and the others, all richly dressed gay young men on
+ splendid, well-groomed, fresh, only slightly heated horses, exchanging
+ remarks and smiling, had stopped behind the Emperor. The Emperor Francis,
+ a rosy, long faced young man, sat very erect on his handsome black horse,
+ looking about him in a leisurely and preoccupied manner. He beckoned to
+ one of his white adjutants and asked some question—“Most likely he
+ is asking at what o’clock they started,” thought Prince Andrew, watching
+ his old acquaintance with a smile he could not repress as he recalled his
+ reception at Brünn. In the Emperors’ suite were the picked young orderly
+ officers of the Guard and line regiments, Russian and Austrian. Among them
+ were grooms leading the Tsar’s beautiful relay horses covered with
+ embroidered cloths.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As when a window is opened a whiff of fresh air from the fields enters a
+ stuffy room, so a whiff of youthfulness, energy, and confidence of success
+ reached Kutúzov’s cheerless staff with the galloping advent of all these
+ brilliant young men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why aren’t you beginning, Michael Ilariónovich?” said the Emperor
+ Alexander hurriedly to Kutúzov, glancing courteously at the same time at
+ the Emperor Francis.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am waiting, Your Majesty,” answered Kutúzov, bending forward
+ respectfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor, frowning slightly, bent his ear forward as if he had not
+ quite heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Waiting, Your Majesty,” repeated Kutúzov. (Prince Andrew noted that
+ Kutúzov’s upper lip twitched unnaturally as he said the word “waiting.”)
+ “Not all the columns have formed up yet, Your Majesty.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Tsar heard but obviously did not like the reply; he shrugged his
+ rather round shoulders and glanced at Novosíltsev who was near him, as if
+ complaining of Kutúzov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know, Michael Ilariónovich, we are not on the Empress’ Field where
+ a parade does not begin till all the troops are assembled,” said the Tsar
+ with another glance at the Emperor Francis, as if inviting him if not to
+ join in at least to listen to what he was saying. But the Emperor Francis
+ continued to look about him and did not listen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is just why I do not begin, sire,” said Kutúzov in a resounding
+ voice, apparently to preclude the possibility of not being heard, and
+ again something in his face twitched—“That is just why I do not
+ begin, sire, because we are not on parade and not on the Empress’
+ Field,” said he clearly and distinctly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the Emperor’s suite all exchanged rapid looks that expressed
+ dissatisfaction and reproach. “Old though he may be, he should not, he
+ certainly should not, speak like that,” their glances seemed to say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Tsar looked intently and observantly into Kutúzov’s eye waiting to
+ hear whether he would say anything more. But Kutúzov, with respectfully
+ bowed head, seemed also to be waiting. The silence lasted for about a
+ minute.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “However, if you command it, Your Majesty,” said Kutúzov, lifting his
+ head and again assuming his former tone of a dull, unreasoning, but submissive
+ general.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He touched his horse and having called Milorádovich, the commander of the
+ column, gave him the order to advance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The troops again began to move, and two battalions of the Nóvgorod and one
+ of the Ápsheron regiment went forward past the Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As this Ápsheron battalion marched by, the red-faced Milorádovich, without
+ his greatcoat, with his Orders on his breast and an enormous tuft of
+ plumes in his cocked hat worn on one side with its corners front and back,
+ galloped strenuously forward, and with a dashing salute reined in his
+ horse before the Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “God be with you, general!” said the Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ma foi, sire, nous ferons ce qui sera dans notre possibilité, sire,” * he
+ answered gaily, raising nevertheless ironic smiles among the gentlemen of
+ the Tsar’s suite by his poor French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Indeed, Sire, we shall do everything it is possible to
+ do, Sire.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Milorádovich wheeled his horse sharply and stationed himself a little
+ behind the Emperor. The Ápsheron men, excited by the Tsar’s presence,
+ passed in step before the Emperors and their suites at a bold, brisk pace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lads!” shouted Milorádovich in a loud, self-confident, and cheery voice,
+ obviously so elated by the sound of firing, by the prospect of battle, and
+ by the sight of the gallant Ápsherons, his comrades in Suvórov’s time, now
+ passing so gallantly before the Emperors, that he forgot the sovereigns’
+ presence. “Lads, it’s not the first village you’ve had to take,” cried he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Glad to do our best!” shouted the soldiers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor’s horse started at the sudden cry. This horse that had carried
+ the sovereign at reviews in Russia bore him also here on the field of
+ Austerlitz, enduring the heedless blows of his left foot and pricking its
+ ears at the sound of shots just as it had done on the Empress’ Field, not
+ understanding the significance of the firing, nor of the nearness of the
+ Emperor Francis’ black cob, nor of all that was being said, thought, and
+ felt that day by its rider.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor turned with a smile to one of his followers and made a remark
+ to him, pointing to the gallant Ápsherons.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI
+ 
+ 
+ Kutúzov accompanied by his adjutants rode at a walking pace behind the
+ carabineers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he had gone less than half a mile in the rear of the column he
+ stopped at a solitary, deserted house that had probably once been an inn,
+ where two roads parted. Both of them led downhill and troops were marching
+ along both.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The fog had begun to clear and enemy troops were already dimly visible
+ about a mile and a half off on the opposite heights. Down below, on the
+ left, the firing became more distinct. Kutúzov had stopped and was
+ speaking to an Austrian general. Prince Andrew, who was a little behind
+ looking at them, turned to an adjutant to ask him for a field glass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look, look!” said this adjutant, looking not at the troops in the
+ distance, but down the hill before him. “It’s the French!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The two generals and the adjutant took hold of the field glass, trying to
+ snatch it from one another. The expression on all their faces suddenly
+ changed to one of horror. The French were supposed to be a mile and a half
+ away, but had suddenly and unexpectedly appeared just in front of us.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s the enemy?... No!... Yes, see it is!... for certain.... But how is
+ that?” said different voices.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With the naked eye Prince Andrew saw below them to the right, not more
+ than five hundred paces from where Kutúzov was standing, a dense French
+ column coming up to meet the Ápsherons.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here it is! The decisive moment has arrived. My turn has come,” thought
+ Prince Andrew, and striking his horse he rode up to Kutúzov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Ápsherons must be stopped, your excellency,” cried he. But at that
+ very instant a cloud of smoke spread all round, firing was heard quite
+ close at hand, and a voice of naïve terror barely two steps from Prince
+ Andrew shouted, “Brothers! All’s lost!” And at this as if at a command,
+ everyone began to run.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Confused and ever-increasing crowds were running back to where five
+ minutes before the troops had passed the Emperors. Not only would it have
+ been difficult to stop that crowd, it was even impossible not to be
+ carried back with it oneself. Bolkónski only tried not to lose touch with
+ it, and looked around bewildered and unable to grasp what was happening in
+ front of him. Nesvítski with an angry face, red and unlike himself, was
+ shouting to Kutúzov that if he did not ride away at once he would
+ certainly be taken prisoner. Kutúzov remained in the same place and
+ without answering drew out a handkerchief. Blood was flowing from his
+ cheek. Prince Andrew forced his way to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are wounded?” he asked, hardly able to master the trembling of his
+ lower jaw.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The wound is not here, it is there!” said Kutúzov, pressing the
+ handkerchief to his wounded cheek and pointing to the fleeing soldiers.
+ “Stop them!” he shouted, and at the same moment, probably realizing that
+ it was impossible to stop them, spurred his horse and rode to the right.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A fresh wave of the flying mob caught him and bore him back with it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The troops were running in such a dense mass that once surrounded by them
+ it was difficult to get out again. One was shouting, “Get on! Why are you
+ hindering us?” Another in the same place turned round and fired in the
+ air; a third was striking the horse Kutúzov himself rode. Having by a
+ great effort got away to the left from that flood of men, Kutúzov, with
+ his suite diminished by more than half, rode toward a sound of artillery
+ fire near by. Having forced his way out of the crowd of fugitives, Prince
+ Andrew, trying to keep near Kutúzov, saw on the slope of the hill amid the
+ smoke a Russian battery that was still firing and Frenchmen running toward
+ it. Higher up stood some Russian infantry, neither moving forward to
+ protect the battery nor backward with the fleeing crowd. A mounted general
+ separated himself from the infantry and approached Kutúzov. Of Kutúzov’s
+ suite only four remained. They were all pale and exchanged looks in
+ silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stop those wretches!” gasped Kutúzov to the regimental commander,
+ pointing to the flying soldiers; but at that instant, as if to punish him
+ for those words, bullets flew hissing across the regiment and across
+ Kutúzov’s suite like a flock of little birds.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French had attacked the battery and, seeing Kutúzov, were firing at
+ him. After this volley the regimental commander clutched at his leg;
+ several soldiers fell, and a second lieutenant who was holding the flag
+ let it fall from his hands. It swayed and fell, but caught on the muskets
+ of the nearest soldiers. The soldiers started firing without orders.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! Oh! Oh!” groaned Kutúzov despairingly and looked around....
+ “Bolkónski!” he whispered, his voice trembling from a consciousness of the
+ feebleness of age, “Bolkónski!” he whispered, pointing to the disordered
+ battalion and at the enemy, “what’s that?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But before he had finished speaking, Prince Andrew, feeling tears of shame
+ and anger choking him, had already leapt from his horse and run to the
+ standard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Forward, lads!” he shouted in a voice piercing as a child’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here it is!” thought he, seizing the staff of the standard and hearing
+ with pleasure the whistle of bullets evidently aimed at him. Several
+ soldiers fell.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hurrah!” shouted Prince Andrew, and, scarcely able to hold up the heavy
+ standard, he ran forward with full confidence that the whole battalion
+ would follow him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And really he only ran a few steps alone. One soldier moved and then
+ another and soon the whole battalion ran forward shouting “Hurrah!” and
+ overtook him. A sergeant of the battalion ran up and took the flag that
+ was swaying from its weight in Prince Andrew’s hands, but he was
+ immediately killed. Prince Andrew again seized the standard and, dragging
+ it by the staff, ran on with the battalion. In front he saw our
+ artillerymen, some of whom were fighting, while others, having abandoned
+ their guns, were running toward him. He also saw French infantry soldiers
+ who were seizing the artillery horses and turning the guns round. Prince
+ Andrew and the battalion were already within twenty paces of the cannon.
+ He heard the whistle of bullets above him unceasingly and to right and
+ left of him soldiers continually groaned and dropped. But he did not look
+ at them: he looked only at what was going on in front of him—at the
+ battery. He now saw clearly the figure of a red-haired gunner with his
+ shako knocked awry, pulling one end of a mop while a French soldier tugged
+ at the other. He could distinctly see the distraught yet angry expression
+ on the faces of these two men, who evidently did not realize what they
+ were doing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are they about?” thought Prince Andrew as he gazed at them. “Why
+ doesn’t the red-haired gunner run away as he is unarmed? Why doesn’t the
+ Frenchman stab him? He will not get away before the Frenchman remembers
+ his bayonet and stabs him....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And really another French soldier, trailing his musket, ran up to the
+ struggling men, and the fate of the red-haired gunner, who had
+ triumphantly secured the mop and still did not realize what awaited him,
+ was about to be decided. But Prince Andrew did not see how it ended. It
+ seemed to him as though one of the soldiers near him hit him on the head
+ with the full swing of a bludgeon. It hurt a little, but the worst of it
+ was that the pain distracted him and prevented his seeing what he had been
+ looking at.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way,” thought he, and fell
+ on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of the
+ Frenchmen with the gunners ended, whether the red-haired gunner had been
+ killed or not and whether the cannon had been captured or saved. But he
+ saw nothing. Above him there was now nothing but the sky—the lofty
+ sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds gliding
+ slowly across it. “How quiet, peaceful, and solemn; not at all as I ran,”
+ thought Prince Andrew—“not as we ran, shouting and fighting, not at
+ all as the gunner and the Frenchman with frightened and angry faces
+ struggled for the mop: how differently do those clouds glide across that
+ lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And
+ how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all
+ falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that.
+ But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank
+ God!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII
+ 
+ 
+ On our right flank commanded by Bagratión, at nine o’clock the battle had
+ not yet begun. Not wishing to agree to Dolgorúkov’s demand to commence the
+ action, and wishing to avert responsibility from himself, Prince Bagratión
+ proposed to Dolgorúkov to send to inquire of the commander in chief.
+ Bagratión knew that as the distance between the two flanks was more than
+ six miles, even if the messenger were not killed (which he very likely
+ would be), and found the commander in chief (which would be very
+ difficult), he would not be able to get back before evening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bagratión cast his large, expressionless, sleepy eyes round his suite, and
+ the boyish face of Rostóv, breathless with excitement and hope, was the first
+ to catch his eye. He sent him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And if I should meet His Majesty before I meet the commander in chief,
+ your excellency?” said Rostóv, with his hand to his cap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You can give the message to His Majesty,” said Dolgorúkov, hurriedly
+ interrupting Bagratión.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On being relieved from picket duty Rostóv had managed to get a few hours’
+ sleep before morning and felt cheerful, bold, and resolute, with
+ elasticity of movement, faith in his good fortune, and generally in that
+ state of mind which makes everything seem possible, pleasant, and easy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All his wishes were being fulfilled that morning: there was to be a
+ general engagement in which he was taking part, more than that, he was
+ orderly to the bravest general, and still more, he was going with a
+ message to Kutúzov, perhaps even to the sovereign himself. The morning was
+ bright, he had a good horse under him, and his heart was full of joy and
+ happiness. On receiving the order he gave his horse the rein and galloped
+ along the line. At first he rode along the line of Bagratión’s troops,
+ which had not yet advanced into action but were standing motionless; then
+ he came to the region occupied by Uvárov’s cavalry and here he noticed a
+ stir and signs of preparation for battle; having passed Uvárov’s cavalry
+ he clearly heard the sound of cannon and musketry ahead of him. The firing
+ grew louder and louder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the fresh morning air were now heard, not two or three musket shots at
+ irregular intervals as before, followed by one or two cannon shots, but a
+ roll of volleys of musketry from the slopes of the hill before Pratzen,
+ interrupted by such frequent reports of cannon that sometimes several of
+ them were not separated from one another but merged into a general roar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He could see puffs of musketry smoke that seemed to chase one another down
+ the hillsides, and clouds of cannon smoke rolling, spreading, and mingling
+ with one another. He could also, by the gleam of bayonets visible through
+ the smoke, make out moving masses of infantry and narrow lines of
+ artillery with green caissons.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv stopped his horse for a moment on a hillock to see what was going
+ on, but strain his attention as he would he could not understand or make
+ out anything of what was happening: there in the smoke men of some sort
+ were moving about, in front and behind moved lines of troops; but why,
+ whither, and who they were, it was impossible to make out. These sights
+ and sounds had no depressing or intimidating effect on him; on the
+ contrary, they stimulated his energy and determination.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go on! Go on! Give it them!” he mentally exclaimed at these sounds, and
+ again proceeded to gallop along the line, penetrating farther and farther
+ into the region where the army was already in action.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How it will be there I don’t know, but all will be well!” thought Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After passing some Austrian troops he noticed that the next part of the
+ line (the Guards) was already in action.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So much the better! I shall see it close,” he thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was riding almost along the front line. A handful of men came galloping
+ toward him. They were our Uhlans who with disordered ranks were returning
+ from the attack. Rostóv got out of their way, involuntarily noticed that
+ one of them was bleeding, and galloped on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is no business of mine,” he thought. He had not ridden many hundred
+ yards after that before he saw to his left, across the whole width of the
+ field, an enormous mass of cavalry in brilliant white uniforms, mounted on
+ black horses, trotting straight toward him and across his path. Rostóv put
+ his horse to full gallop to get out of the way of these men, and he would
+ have got clear had they continued at the same speed, but they kept
+ increasing their pace, so that some of the horses were already galloping.
+ Rostóv heard the thud of their hoofs and the jingle of their weapons and
+ saw their horses, their figures, and even their faces, more and more
+ distinctly. They were our Horse Guards, advancing to attack the French
+ cavalry that was coming to meet them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Horse Guards were galloping, but still holding in their horses. Rostóv
+ could already see their faces and heard the command: “Charge!” shouted by
+ an officer who was urging his thoroughbred to full speed. Rostóv, fearing
+ to be crushed or swept into the attack on the French, galloped along the
+ front as hard as his horse could go, but still was not in time to avoid
+ them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The last of the Horse Guards, a huge pockmarked fellow, frowned angrily on
+ seeing Rostóv before him, with whom he would inevitably collide. This
+ Guardsman would certainly have bowled Rostóv and his Bedouin over (Rostóv
+ felt himself quite tiny and weak compared to these gigantic men and
+ horses) had it not occurred to Rostóv to flourish his whip before the eyes
+ of the Guardsman’s horse. The heavy black horse, sixteen hands high,
+ shied, throwing back its ears; but the pockmarked Guardsman drove his huge
+ spurs in violently, and the horse, flourishing its tail and extending its
+ neck, galloped on yet faster. Hardly had the Horse Guards passed Rostóv
+ before he heard them shout, “Hurrah!” and looking back saw that their
+ foremost ranks were mixed up with some foreign cavalry with red epaulets,
+ probably French. He could see nothing more, for immediately afterwards
+ cannon began firing from somewhere and smoke enveloped everything.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment, as the Horse Guards, having passed him, disappeared in the
+ smoke, Rostóv hesitated whether to gallop after them or to go where he was
+ sent. This was the brilliant charge of the Horse Guards that amazed the
+ French themselves. Rostóv was horrified to hear later that of all that
+ mass of huge and handsome men, of all those brilliant, rich youths,
+ officers and cadets, who had galloped past him on their thousand-ruble
+ horses, only eighteen were left after the charge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why should I envy them? My chance is not lost, and maybe I shall see the
+ Emperor immediately!” thought Rostóv and galloped on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he came level with the Foot Guards he noticed that about them and
+ around them cannon balls were flying, of which he was aware not so much
+ because he heard their sound as because he saw uneasiness on the soldiers’
+ faces and unnatural warlike solemnity on those of the officers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Passing behind one of the lines of a regiment of Foot Guards he heard a
+ voice calling him by name.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Rostóv!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What?” he answered, not recognizing Borís.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I say, we’ve been in the front line! Our regiment attacked!” said Borís
+ with the happy smile seen on the faces of young men who have been under
+ fire for the first time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv stopped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have you?” he said. “Well, how did it go?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We drove them back!” said Borís with animation, growing talkative. “Can
+ you imagine it?” and he began describing how the Guards, having taken up
+ their position and seeing troops before them, thought they were Austrians,
+ and all at once discovered from the cannon balls discharged by those
+ troops that they were themselves in the front line and had unexpectedly to
+ go into action. Rostóv without hearing Borís to the end spurred his horse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where are you off to?” asked Borís.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “With a message to His Majesty.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There he is!” said Borís, thinking Rostóv had said “His Highness,” and
+ pointing to the Grand Duke who with his high shoulders and frowning brows
+ stood a hundred paces away from them in his helmet and Horse Guards’
+ jacket, shouting something to a pale, white uniformed Austrian officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But that’s the Grand Duke, and I want the commander in chief or the
+ Emperor,” said Rostóv, and was about to spur his horse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Count! Count!” shouted Berg who ran up from the other side as eager as
+ Borís. “Count! I am wounded in my right hand” (and he showed his bleeding
+ hand with a handkerchief tied round it) “and I remained at the front. I
+ held my sword in my left hand, Count. All our family—the von Bergs—have
+ been knights!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He said something more, but Rostóv did not wait to hear it and rode away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having passed the Guards and traversed an empty space, Rostóv, to avoid
+ again getting in front of the first line as he had done when the Horse
+ Guards charged, followed the line of reserves, going far round the place
+ where the hottest musket fire and cannonade were heard. Suddenly he heard
+ musket fire quite close in front of him and behind our troops, where he
+ could never have expected the enemy to be.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What can it be?” he thought. “The enemy in the rear of our army?
+ Impossible!” And suddenly he was seized by a panic of fear for himself and
+ for the issue of the whole battle. “But be that what it may,” he
+ reflected, “there is no riding round it now. I must look for the commander
+ in chief here, and if all is lost it is for me to perish with the rest.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The foreboding of evil that had suddenly come over Rostóv was more and
+ more confirmed the farther he rode into the region behind the village of
+ Pratzen, which was full of troops of all kinds.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What does it mean? What is it? Whom are they firing at? Who is firing?”
+ Rostóv kept asking as he came up to Russian and Austrian soldiers running
+ in confused crowds across his path.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The devil knows! They’ve killed everybody! It’s all up now!” he was told
+ in Russian, German, and Czech by the crowd of fugitives who understood
+ what was happening as little as he did.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Kill the Germans!” shouted one.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “May the devil take them—the traitors!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Zum Henker diese Russen!” * muttered a German.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Hang these Russians!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Several wounded men passed along the road, and words of abuse, screams,
+ and groans mingled in a general hubbub, then the firing died down. Rostóv
+ learned later that Russian and Austrian soldiers had been firing at one
+ another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My God! What does it all mean?” thought he. “And here, where at any
+ moment the Emperor may see them.... But no, these must be only a handful
+ of scoundrels. It will soon be over, it can’t be that , it can’t be! Only
+ to get past them quicker, quicker!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The idea of defeat and flight could not enter Rostóv’s head. Though he saw
+ French cannon and French troops on the Pratzen Heights just where he had
+ been ordered to look for the commander in chief, he could not, did not
+ wish to, believe that .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII
+ 
+ 
+ Rostóv had been ordered to look for Kutúzov and the Emperor near the
+ village of Pratzen. But neither they nor a single commanding officer were
+ there, only disorganized crowds of troops of various kinds. He urged on
+ his already weary horse to get quickly past these crowds, but the farther
+ he went the more disorganized they were. The highroad on which he had come
+ out was thronged with calèches , carriages of all sorts, and Russian and
+ Austrian soldiers of all arms, some wounded and some not. This whole mass
+ droned and jostled in confusion under the dismal influence of cannon balls
+ flying from the French batteries stationed on the Pratzen Heights.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where is the Emperor? Where is Kutúzov?” Rostóv kept asking everyone he
+ could stop, but got no answer from anyone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At last seizing a soldier by his collar he forced him to answer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh, brother! They’ve all bolted long ago!” said the soldier, laughing for
+ some reason and shaking himself free.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having left that soldier who was evidently drunk, Rostóv stopped the horse
+ of a batman or groom of some important personage and began to question
+ him. The man announced that the Tsar had been driven in a carriage at full
+ speed about an hour before along that very road and that he was
+ dangerously wounded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It can’t be!” said Rostóv. “It must have been someone else.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I saw him myself,” replied the man with a self-confident smile of
+ derision. “I ought to know the Emperor by now, after the times I’ve seen
+ him in Petersburg. I saw him just as I see you.... There he sat in the
+ carriage as pale as anything. How they made the four black horses fly!
+ Gracious me, they did rattle past! It’s time I knew the Imperial horses
+ and Ilyá Iványch. I don’t think Ilyá drives anyone except the Tsar!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv let go of the horse and was about to ride on, when a wounded
+ officer passing by addressed him:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who is it you want?” he asked. “The commander in chief? He was
+ killed by a cannon ball—struck in the breast before our regiment.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not killed—wounded!” another officer corrected him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who? Kutúzov?” asked Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not Kutúzov, but what’s his name—well, never mind... there are not
+ many left alive. Go that way, to that village, all the commanders are
+ there,” said the officer, pointing to the village of Hosjeradek, and he
+ walked on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv rode on at a footpace not knowing why or to whom he was now going.
+ The Emperor was wounded, the battle lost. It was impossible to doubt it
+ now. Rostóv rode in the direction pointed out to him, in which he saw
+ turrets and a church. What need to hurry? What was he now to say to the
+ Tsar or to Kutúzov, even if they were alive and unwounded?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Take this road, your honor, that way you will be killed at once!” a
+ soldier shouted to him. “They’d kill you there!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, what are you talking about?” said another. “Where is he to go? That
+ way is nearer.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv considered, and then went in the direction where they said he would
+ be killed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s all the same now. If the Emperor is wounded, am I to try to save
+ myself?” he thought. He rode on to the region where the greatest number of
+ men had perished in fleeing from Pratzen. The French had not yet occupied
+ that region, and the Russians—the uninjured and slightly wounded—had
+ left it long ago. All about the field, like heaps of manure on well-kept
+ plowland, lay from ten to fifteen dead and wounded to each couple of
+ acres. The wounded crept together in twos and threes and one could hear
+ their distressing screams and groans, sometimes feigned—or so it
+ seemed to Rostóv. He put his horse to a trot to avoid seeing all these
+ suffering men, and he felt afraid—afraid not for his life, but for
+ the courage he needed and which he knew would not stand the sight of these
+ unfortunates.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French, who had ceased firing at this field strewn with dead and
+ wounded where there was no one left to fire at, on seeing an adjutant
+ riding over it trained a gun on him and fired several shots. The sensation
+ of those terrible whistling sounds and of the corpses around him merged in
+ Rostóv’s mind into a single feeling of terror and pity for himself. He
+ remembered his mother’s last letter. “What would she feel,” thought he,
+ “if she saw me here now on this field with the cannon aimed at me?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the village of Hosjeradek there were Russian troops retiring from the
+ field of battle, who though still in some confusion were less disordered.
+ The French cannon did not reach there and the musketry fire sounded far
+ away. Here everyone clearly saw and said that the battle was lost. No one
+ whom Rostóv asked could tell him where the Emperor or Kutúzov was. Some
+ said the report that the Emperor was wounded was correct, others that it
+ was not, and explained the false rumor that had spread by the fact that
+ the Emperor’s carriage had really galloped from the field of battle with
+ the pale and terrified Ober-Hofmarschal Count Tolstóy, who had ridden out
+ to the battlefield with others in the Emperor’s suite. One officer told
+ Rostóv that he had seen someone from headquarters behind the village to
+ the left, and thither Rostóv rode, not hoping to find anyone but merely to
+ ease his conscience. When he had ridden about two miles and had passed the
+ last of the Russian troops, he saw, near a kitchen garden with a ditch
+ round it, two men on horseback facing the ditch. One with a white plume in
+ his hat seemed familiar to Rostóv; the other on a beautiful chestnut horse
+ (which Rostóv fancied he had seen before) rode up to the ditch, struck his
+ horse with his spurs, and giving it the rein leaped lightly over. Only a
+ little earth crumbled from the bank under the horse’s hind hoofs. Turning
+ the horse sharply, he again jumped the ditch, and deferentially addressed
+ the horseman with the white plumes, evidently suggesting that he should do
+ the same. The rider, whose figure seemed familiar to Rostóv and
+ involuntarily riveted his attention, made a gesture of refusal with his
+ head and hand and by that gesture Rostóv instantly recognized his lamented
+ and adored monarch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But it can’t be he, alone in the midst of this empty field!” thought
+ Rostóv. At that moment Alexander turned his head and Rostóv saw the
+ beloved features that were so deeply engraved on his memory. The Emperor
+ was pale, his cheeks sunken and his eyes hollow, but the charm, the
+ mildness of his features, was all the greater. Rostóv was happy in the
+ assurance that the rumors about the Emperor being wounded were false. He
+ was happy to be seeing him. He knew that he might and even ought to go
+ straight to him and give the message Dolgorúkov had ordered him to
+ deliver.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But as a youth in love trembles, is unnerved, and dares not utter the
+ thoughts he has dreamed of for nights, but looks around for help or a
+ chance of delay and flight when the longed-for moment comes and he is
+ alone with her , so Rostóv, now that he had attained what he had longed for
+ more than anything else in the world, did not know how to approach the
+ Emperor, and a thousand reasons occurred to him why it would be
+ inconvenient, unseemly, and impossible to do so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What! It is as if I were glad of a chance to take advantage of his being
+ alone and despondent! A strange face may seem unpleasant or painful to him
+ at this moment of sorrow; besides, what can I say to him now, when my
+ heart fails me and my mouth feels dry at the mere sight of him?” Not one
+ of the innumerable speeches addressed to the Emperor that he had composed
+ in his imagination could he now recall. Those speeches were intended for
+ quite other conditions, they were for the most part to be spoken at a
+ moment of victory and triumph, generally when he was dying of wounds and
+ the sovereign had thanked him for heroic deeds, and while dying he
+ expressed the love his actions had proved.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Besides how can I ask the Emperor for his instructions for the right
+ flank now that it is nearly four o’clock and the battle is lost? No,
+ certainly I must not approach him, I must not intrude on his reflections.
+ Better die a thousand times than risk receiving an unkind look or bad
+ opinion from him,” Rostóv decided; and sorrowfully and with a heart full
+ despair he rode away, continually looking back at the Tsar, who still
+ remained in the same attitude of indecision.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While Rostóv was thus arguing with himself and riding sadly away, Captain
+ von Toll chanced to ride to the same spot, and seeing the Emperor at once
+ rode up to him, offered his services, and assisted him to cross the ditch
+ on foot. The Emperor, wishing to rest and feeling unwell, sat down under
+ an apple tree and von Toll remained beside him. Rostóv from a distance saw
+ with envy and remorse how von Toll spoke long and warmly to the Emperor
+ and how the Emperor, evidently weeping, covered his eyes with his hand and
+ pressed von Toll’s hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I might have been in his place!” thought Rostóv, and hardly
+ restraining his tears of pity for the Emperor, he rode on in utter
+ despair, not knowing where to or why he was now riding.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His despair was all the greater from feeling that his own weakness was the
+ cause of his grief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He might... not only might but should, have gone up to the sovereign. It
+ was a unique chance to show his devotion to the Emperor and he had not
+ made use of it.... “What have I done?” thought he. And he turned round and
+ galloped back to the place where he had seen the Emperor, but there was no
+ one beyond the ditch now. Only some carts and carriages were passing by.
+ From one of the drivers he learned that Kutúzov’s staff were not far off,
+ in the village the vehicles were going to. Rostóv followed them. In front
+ of him walked Kutúzov’s groom leading horses in horsecloths. Then came a
+ cart, and behind that walked an old, bandy-legged domestic serf in a
+ peaked cap and sheepskin coat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tit! I say, Tit!” said the groom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What?” answered the old man absent-mindedly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go, Tit! Thresh a bit!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, you fool!” said the old man, spitting angrily. Some time passed in
+ silence, and then the same joke was repeated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Before five in the evening the battle had been lost at all points. More
+ than a hundred cannon were already in the hands of the French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Przebyszéwski and his corps had laid down their arms. Other columns after
+ losing half their men were retreating in disorderly confused masses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The remains of Langeron’s and Dokhtúrov’s mingled forces were crowding
+ around the dams and banks of the ponds near the village of Augesd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After five o’clock it was only at the Augesd Dam that a hot cannonade
+ (delivered by the French alone) was still to be heard from numerous
+ batteries ranged on the slopes of the Pratzen Heights, directed at our
+ retreating forces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the rearguard, Dokhtúrov and others rallying some battalions kept up a
+ musketry fire at the French cavalry that was pursuing our troops. It was
+ growing dusk. On the narrow Augesd Dam where for so many years the old
+ miller had been accustomed to sit in his tasseled cap peacefully angling,
+ while his grandson, with shirt sleeves rolled up, handled the floundering
+ silvery fish in the watering can, on that dam over which for so many years
+ Moravians in shaggy caps and blue jackets had peacefully driven their
+ two-horse carts loaded with wheat and had returned dusty with flour
+ whitening their carts—on that narrow dam amid the wagons and the
+ cannon, under the horses’ hoofs and between the wagon wheels, men
+ disfigured by fear of death now crowded together, crushing one another,
+ dying, stepping over the dying and killing one another, only to move on a
+ few steps and be killed themselves in the same way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Every ten seconds a cannon ball flew compressing the air around, or a
+ shell burst in the midst of that dense throng, killing some and splashing
+ with blood those near them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov—now an officer—wounded in the arm, and on foot, with
+ the regimental commander on horseback and some ten men of his company,
+ represented all that was left of that whole regiment. Impelled by the
+ crowd, they had got wedged in at the approach to the dam and, jammed in on
+ all sides, had stopped because a horse in front had fallen under a cannon
+ and the crowd were dragging it out. A cannon ball killed someone behind
+ them, another fell in front and splashed Dólokhov with blood. The crowd,
+ pushing forward desperately, squeezed together, moved a few steps, and
+ again stopped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Move on a hundred yards and we are certainly saved, remain here another
+ two minutes and it is certain death,” thought each one.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov who was in the midst of the crowd forced his way to the edge of
+ the dam, throwing two soldiers off their feet, and ran onto the slippery
+ ice that covered the millpool.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Turn this way!” he shouted, jumping over the ice which creaked under him;
+ “turn this way!” he shouted to those with the gun. “It bears!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The ice bore him but it swayed and creaked, and it was plain that it would
+ give way not only under a cannon or a crowd, but very soon even under his
+ weight alone. The men looked at him and pressed to the bank, hesitating to
+ step onto the ice. The general on horseback at the entrance to the dam
+ raised his hand and opened his mouth to address Dólokhov. Suddenly a
+ cannon ball hissed so low above the crowd that everyone ducked. It flopped
+ into something moist, and the general fell from his horse in a pool of
+ blood. Nobody gave him a look or thought of raising him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Get onto the ice, over the ice! Go on! Turn! Don’t you hear? Go on!”
+ innumerable voices suddenly shouted after the ball had struck the general,
+ the men themselves not knowing what, or why, they were shouting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One of the hindmost guns that was going onto the dam turned off onto the
+ ice. Crowds of soldiers from the dam began running onto the frozen pond.
+ The ice gave way under one of the foremost soldiers, and one leg slipped
+ into the water. He tried to right himself but fell in up to his waist. The
+ nearest soldiers shrank back, the gun driver stopped his horse, but from
+ behind still came the shouts: “Onto the ice, why do you stop? Go on! Go
+ on!” And cries of horror were heard in the crowd. The soldiers near the
+ gun waved their arms and beat the horses to make them turn and move on.
+ The horses moved off the bank. The ice, that had held under those on foot,
+ collapsed in a great mass, and some forty men who were on it dashed, some
+ forward and some back, drowning one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Still the cannon balls continued regularly to whistle and flop onto the
+ ice and into the water and oftenest of all among the crowd that covered
+ the dam, the pond, and the bank.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX
+ 
+ 
+ On the Pratzen Heights, where he had fallen with the flagstaff in his
+ hand, lay Prince Andrew Bolkónski bleeding profusely and unconsciously
+ uttering a gentle, piteous, and childlike moan.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Toward evening he ceased moaning and became quite still. He did not know
+ how long his unconsciousness lasted. Suddenly he again felt that he was
+ alive and suffering from a burning, lacerating pain in his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where is it, that lofty sky that I did not know till now, but saw today?”
+ was his first thought. “And I did not know this suffering either,” he
+ thought. “Yes, I did not know anything, anything at all till now. But
+ where am I?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He listened and heard the sound of approaching horses, and voices speaking
+ French. He opened his eyes. Above him again was the same lofty sky with
+ clouds that had risen and were floating still higher, and between them
+ gleamed blue infinity. He did not turn his head and did not see those who,
+ judging by the sound of hoofs and voices, had ridden up and stopped near
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was Napoleon accompanied by two aides-de-camp. Bonaparte riding over
+ the battlefield had given final orders to strengthen the batteries firing
+ at the Augesd Dam and was looking at the killed and wounded left on the
+ field.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fine men!” remarked Napoleon, looking at a dead Russian grenadier, who,
+ with his face buried in the ground and a blackened nape, lay on his
+ stomach with an already stiffened arm flung wide.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The ammunition for the guns in position is exhausted, Your Majesty,” said
+ an adjutant who had come from the batteries that were firing at Augesd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have some brought from the reserve,” said Napoleon, and having gone on a
+ few steps he stopped before Prince Andrew, who lay on his back with the
+ flagstaff that had been dropped beside him. (The flag had already been
+ taken by the French as a trophy.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s a fine death!” said Napoleon as he gazed at Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew understood that this was said of him and that it was
+ Napoleon who said it. He heard the speaker addressed as Sire . But he heard
+ the words as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly. Not only did they
+ not interest him, but he took no notice of them and at once forgot them.
+ His head was burning, he felt himself bleeding to death, and he saw above
+ him the remote, lofty, and everlasting sky. He knew it was Napoleon—his
+ hero—but at that moment Napoleon seemed to him such a small,
+ insignificant creature compared with what was passing now between himself
+ and that lofty infinite sky with the clouds flying over it. At that moment
+ it meant nothing to him who might be standing over him, or what was said
+ of him; he was only glad that people were standing near him and only
+ wished that they would help him and bring him back to life, which seemed
+ to him so beautiful now that he had today learned to understand it so
+ differently. He collected all his strength, to stir and utter a sound. He
+ feebly moved his leg and uttered a weak, sickly groan which aroused his
+ own pity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah! He is alive,” said Napoleon. “Lift this young man up and carry him to
+ the dressing station.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having said this, Napoleon rode on to meet Marshal Lannes, who, hat in
+ hand, rode up smiling to the Emperor to congratulate him on the victory.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew remembered nothing more: he lost consciousness from the
+ terrible pain of being lifted onto the stretcher, the jolting while being
+ moved, and the probing of his wound at the dressing station. He did not
+ regain consciousness till late in the day, when with other wounded and
+ captured Russian officers he was carried to the hospital. During this
+ transfer he felt a little stronger and was able to look about him and even
+ speak.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The first words he heard on coming to his senses were those of a French
+ convoy officer, who said rapidly: “We must halt here: the Emperor will
+ pass here immediately; it will please him to see these gentlemen
+ prisoners.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There are so many prisoners today, nearly the whole Russian army, that he
+ is probably tired of them,” said another officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All the same! They say this one is the commander of all the Emperor
+ Alexander’s Guards,” said the first one, indicating a Russian officer in
+ the white uniform of the Horse Guards.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bolkónski recognized Prince Repnín whom he had met in Petersburg society.
+ Beside him stood a lad of nineteen, also a wounded officer of the Horse
+ Guards.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bonaparte, having come up at a gallop, stopped his horse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Which is the senior?” he asked, on seeing the prisoners.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They named the colonel, Prince Repnín.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are the commander of the Emperor Alexander’s regiment of Horse
+ Guards?” asked Napoleon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I commanded a squadron,” replied Repnín.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your regiment fulfilled its duty honorably,” said Napoleon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The praise of a great commander is a soldier’s highest reward,” said
+ Repnín.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I bestow it with pleasure,” said Napoleon. “And who is that young man
+ beside you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Repnín named Lieutenant Sukhtélen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After looking at him Napoleon smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s very young to come to meddle with us.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Youth is no hindrance to courage,” muttered Sukhtélen in a failing voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A splendid reply!” said Napoleon. “Young man, you will go far!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew, who had also been brought forward before the Emperor’s eyes
+ to complete the show of prisoners, could not fail to attract his
+ attention. Napoleon apparently remembered seeing him on the battlefield
+ and, addressing him, again used the epithet “young man” that was connected
+ in his memory with Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, and you, young man,” said he. “How do you feel, mon brave? ”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though five minutes before, Prince Andrew had been able to say a few words
+ to the soldiers who were carrying him, now with his eyes fixed straight on
+ Napoleon, he was silent.... So insignificant at that moment seemed to him
+ all the interests that engrossed Napoleon, so mean did his hero himself
+ with his paltry vanity and joy in victory appear, compared to the lofty,
+ equitable, and kindly sky which he had seen and understood, that he could
+ not answer him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Everything seemed so futile and insignificant in comparison with the stern
+ and solemn train of thought that weakness from loss of blood, suffering,
+ and the nearness of death aroused in him. Looking into Napoleon’s eyes
+ Prince Andrew thought of the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance
+ of life which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance
+ of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor without waiting for an answer turned away and said to one of
+ the officers as he went: “Have these gentlemen attended to and taken to my
+ bivouac; let my doctor, Larrey, examine their wounds. Au revoir , Prince
+ Repnín!” and he spurred his horse and galloped away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His face shone with self-satisfaction and pleasure.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The soldiers who had carried Prince Andrew had noticed and taken the
+ little gold icon Princess Mary had hung round her brother’s neck, but
+ seeing the favor the Emperor showed the prisoners, they now hastened to
+ return the holy image.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew did not see how and by whom it was replaced, but the little
+ icon with its thin gold chain suddenly appeared upon his chest outside his
+ uniform.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It would be good,” thought Prince Andrew, glancing at the icon his sister
+ had hung round his neck with such emotion and reverence, “it would be good
+ if everything were as clear and simple as it seems to Mary. How good it
+ would be to know where to seek for help in this life, and what to expect
+ after it beyond the grave! How happy and calm I should be if I could now
+ say: ‘Lord, have mercy on me!’... But to whom should I say that? Either to
+ a Power indefinable, incomprehensible, which I not only cannot address but
+ which I cannot even express in words—the Great All or Nothing-” said
+ he to himself, “or to that God who has been sewn into this amulet by Mary!
+ There is nothing certain, nothing at all except the unimportance of
+ everything I understand, and the greatness of something incomprehensible
+ but all-important.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The stretchers moved on. At every jolt he again felt unendurable pain; his
+ feverishness increased and he grew delirious. Visions of his father, wife,
+ sister, and future son, and the tenderness he had felt the night before
+ the battle, the figure of the insignificant little Napoleon, and above all
+ this the lofty sky, formed the chief subjects of his delirious fancies.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The quiet home life and peaceful happiness of Bald Hills presented itself
+ to him. He was already enjoying that happiness when that little Napoleon
+ had suddenly appeared with his unsympathizing look of shortsighted delight
+ at the misery of others, and doubts and torments had followed, and only
+ the heavens promised peace. Toward morning all these dreams melted and
+ merged into the chaos and darkness of unconciousness and oblivion which in
+ the opinion of Napoleon’s doctor, Larrey, was much more likely to end in
+ death than in convalescence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is a nervous, bilious subject,” said Larrey, “and will not recover.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Prince Andrew, with others fatally wounded, was left to the care of
+ the inhabitants of the district.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK FOUR: 1806
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ Early in the year 1806 Nicholas Rostóv returned home on leave. Denísov was
+ going home to Vorónezh and Rostóv persuaded him to travel with him as far
+ as Moscow and to stay with him there. Meeting a comrade at the last post
+ station but one before Moscow, Denísov had drunk three bottles of wine
+ with him and, despite the jolting ruts across the snow-covered road, did
+ not once wake up on the way to Moscow, but lay at the bottom of the sleigh
+ beside Rostóv, who grew more and more impatient the nearer they got to
+ Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How much longer? How much longer? Oh, these insufferable streets, shops,
+ bakers’ signboards, street lamps, and sleighs!” thought Rostóv, when their
+ leave permits had been passed at the town gate and they had entered
+ Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Denísov! We’re here! He’s asleep,” he added, leaning forward with his
+ whole body as if in that position he hoped to hasten the speed of the
+ sleigh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov gave no answer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There’s the corner at the crossroads, where the cabman, Zakhár, has his
+ stand, and there’s Zakhár himself and still the same horse! And here’s the
+ little shop where we used to buy gingerbread! Can’t you hurry up? Now
+ then!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Which house is it?” asked the driver.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, that one, right at the end, the big one. Don’t you see? That’s our
+ house,” said Rostóv. “Of course, it’s our house! Denísov, Denísov! We’re
+ almost there!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov raised his head, coughed, and made no answer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dmítri,” said Rostóv to his valet on the box, “those lights are in our
+ house, aren’t they?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, sir, and there’s a light in your father’s study.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then they’ve not gone to bed yet? What do you think? Mind now, don’t
+ forget to put out my new coat,” added Rostóv, fingering his new mustache.
+ “Now then, get on,” he shouted to the driver. “Do wake up, Váska!” he went
+ on, turning to Denísov, whose head was again nodding. “Come, get on! You
+ shall have three rubles for vodka—get on!” Rostóv shouted, when the
+ sleigh was only three houses from his door. It seemed to him the horses
+ were not moving at all. At last the sleigh bore to the right, drew up at
+ an entrance, and Rostóv saw overhead the old familiar cornice with a bit
+ of plaster broken off, the porch, and the post by the side of the
+ pavement. He sprang out before the sleigh stopped, and ran into the hall.
+ The house stood cold and silent, as if quite regardless of who had come to
+ it. There was no one in the hall. “Oh God! Is everyone all right?” he
+ thought, stopping for a moment with a sinking heart, and then immediately
+ starting to run along the hall and up the warped steps of the familiar
+ staircase. The well-known old door handle, which always angered the
+ countess when it was not properly cleaned, turned as loosely as ever. A
+ solitary tallow candle burned in the anteroom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Old Michael was asleep on the chest. Prokófy, the footman, who was so
+ strong that he could lift the back of the carriage from behind, sat
+ plaiting slippers out of cloth selvedges. He looked up at the opening door
+ and his expression of sleepy indifference suddenly changed to one of
+ delighted amazement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gracious heavens! The young count!” he cried, recognizing his young
+ master. “Can it be? My treasure!” and Prokófy, trembling with excitement,
+ rushed toward the drawing room door, probably in order to announce him,
+ but, changing his mind, came back and stooped to kiss the young man’s
+ shoulder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All well?” asked Rostóv, drawing away his arm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, God be thanked! Yes! They’ve just finished supper. Let me have a
+ look at you, your excellency.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is everything quite all right?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Lord be thanked, yes!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv, who had completely forgotten Denísov, not wishing anyone to
+ forestall him, threw off his fur coat and ran on tiptoe through the large
+ dark ballroom. All was the same: there were the same old card tables and
+ the same chandelier with a cover over it; but someone had already seen the
+ young master, and, before he had reached the drawing room, something flew
+ out from a side door like a tornado and began hugging and kissing him.
+ Another and yet another creature of the same kind sprang from a second
+ door and a third; more hugging, more kissing, more outcries, and tears of
+ joy. He could not distinguish which was Papa, which Natásha, and which
+ Pétya. Everyone shouted, talked, and kissed him at the same time. Only his
+ mother was not there, he noticed that.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I did not know... Nicholas... My darling!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here he is... our own... Kólya, * dear fellow... How he has changed!...
+ Where are the candles?... Tea!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Nicholas.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “And me, kiss me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dearest... and me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya, Natásha, Pétya, Anna Mikháylovna, Véra, and the old count were all
+ hugging him, and the serfs, men and maids, flocked into the room,
+ exclaiming and oh-ing and ah-ing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya, clinging to his legs, kept shouting, “And me too!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha, after she had pulled him down toward her and covered his face
+ with kisses, holding him tight by the skirt of his coat, sprang away and
+ pranced up and down in one place like a goat and shrieked piercingly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All around were loving eyes glistening with tears of joy, and all around
+ were lips seeking a kiss.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya too, all rosy red, clung to his arm and, radiant with bliss, looked
+ eagerly toward his eyes, waiting for the look for which she longed. Sónya
+ now was sixteen and she was very pretty, especially at this moment of
+ happy, rapturous excitement. She gazed at him, not taking her eyes off
+ him, and smiling and holding her breath. He gave her a grateful look, but
+ was still expectant and looking for someone. The old countess had not yet
+ come. But now steps were heard at the door, steps so rapid that they could
+ hardly be his mother’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Yet it was she, dressed in a new gown which he did not know, made since he
+ had left. All the others let him go, and he ran to her. When they met, she
+ fell on his breast, sobbing. She could not lift her face, but only pressed
+ it to the cold braiding of his hussar’s jacket. Denísov, who had come into
+ the room unnoticed by anyone, stood there and wiped his eyes at the sight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vasíli Denísov, your son’s friend,” he said, introducing himself to the
+ count, who was looking inquiringly at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are most welcome! I know, I know,” said the count, kissing and
+ embracing Denísov. “Nicholas wrote us... Natásha, Véra, look! Here is
+ Denísov!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The same happy, rapturous faces turned to the shaggy figure of Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Darling Denísov!” screamed Natásha, beside herself with rapture,
+ springing to him, putting her arms round him, and kissing him. This
+ escapade made everybody feel confused. Denísov blushed too, but smiled
+ and, taking Natásha’s hand, kissed it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov was shown to the room prepared for him, and the Rostóvs all
+ gathered round Nicholas in the sitting room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old countess, not letting go of his hand and kissing it every moment,
+ sat beside him: the rest, crowding round him, watched every movement,
+ word, or look of his, never taking their blissfully adoring eyes off him.
+ His brother and sisters struggled for the places nearest to him and
+ disputed with one another who should bring him his tea, handkerchief, and
+ pipe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv was very happy in the love they showed him; but the first moment of
+ meeting had been so beatific that his present joy seemed insufficient, and
+ he kept expecting something more, more and yet more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next morning, after the fatigues of their journey, the travelers slept
+ till ten o’clock.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the room next to their bedroom there was a confusion of sabers, satchels,
+ sabretaches, open portmanteaus, and dirty boots. Two freshly cleaned pairs
+ with spurs had just been placed by the wall. The servants were bringing in
+ jugs and basins, hot water for shaving, and their well-brushed clothes.
+ There was a masculine odor and a smell of tobacco.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hallo, Gwíska—my pipe!” came Vasíli Denísov’s husky voice. “Wostóv,
+ get up!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv, rubbing his eyes that seemed glued together, raised his disheveled
+ head from the hot pillow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, is it late?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Late! It’s nearly ten o’clock,” answered Natásha’s voice. A rustle of
+ starched petticoats and the whispering and laughter of girls’ voices came
+ from the adjoining room. The door was opened a crack and there was a
+ glimpse of something blue, of ribbons, black hair, and merry faces. It was
+ Natásha, Sónya, and Pétya, who had come to see whether they were getting
+ up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nicholas! Get up!” Natásha’s voice was again heard at the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Directly!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile, Pétya, having found and seized the sabers in the outer room,
+ with the delight boys feel at the sight of a military elder brother, and
+ forgetting that it was unbecoming for the girls to see men undressed,
+ opened the bedroom door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is this your saber?” he shouted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The girls sprang aside. Denísov hid his hairy legs under the blanket,
+ looking with a scared face at his comrade for help. The door, having let
+ Pétya in, closed again. A sound of laughter came from behind it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nicholas! Come out in your dressing gown!” said Natásha’s voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is this your saber?” asked Pétya. “Or is it yours?” he said, addressing
+ the black-mustached Denísov with servile deference.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv hurriedly put something on his feet, drew on his dressing gown, and
+ went out. Natásha had put on one spurred boot and was just getting her
+ foot into the other. Sónya, when he came in, was twirling round and was
+ about to expand her dresses into a balloon and sit down. They were dressed
+ alike, in new pale-blue frocks, and were both fresh, rosy, and bright.
+ Sónya ran away, but Natásha, taking her brother’s arm, led him into the
+ sitting room, where they began talking. They hardly gave one another time
+ to ask questions and give replies concerning a thousand little matters
+ which could not interest anyone but themselves. Natásha laughed at every
+ word he said or that she said herself, not because what they were saying
+ was amusing, but because she felt happy and was unable to control her joy
+ which expressed itself by laughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, how nice, how splendid!” she said to everything.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv felt that, under the influence of the warm rays of love, that
+ childlike smile which had not once appeared on his face since he left home
+ now for the first time after eighteen months again brightened his soul and
+ his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, but listen,” she said, “now you are quite a man, aren’t you? I’m
+ awfully glad you’re my brother.” She touched his mustache. “I want to know
+ what you men are like. Are you the same as we? No?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why did Sónya run away?” asked Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, yes! That’s a whole long story! How are you going to speak to
+ her— thou or you? ”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As may happen,” said Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, call her you , please! I’ll tell you all about it some other time. No,
+ I’ll tell you now. You know Sónya’s my dearest friend. Such a friend that
+ I burned my arm for her sake. Look here!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She pulled up her muslin sleeve and showed him a red scar on her long,
+ slender, delicate arm, high above the elbow on that part that is covered
+ even by a ball dress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I burned this to prove my love for her. I just heated a ruler in the fire
+ and pressed it there!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sitting on the sofa with the little cushions on its arms, in what used to
+ be his old schoolroom, and looking into Natásha’s wildly bright eyes,
+ Rostóv re-entered that world of home and childhood which had no meaning
+ for anyone else, but gave him some of the best joys of his life; and the
+ burning of an arm with a ruler as a proof of love did not seem to him
+ senseless, he understood and was not surprised at it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, and is that all?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We are such friends, such friends! All that ruler business was just
+ nonsense, but we are friends forever. She, if she loves anyone, does it
+ for life, but I don’t understand that, I forget quickly.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what then?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, she loves me and you like that.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha suddenly flushed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, you remember before you went away?... Well, she says you are to
+ forget all that.... She says: ‘I shall love him always, but let him be
+ free.’ Isn’t that lovely and noble! Yes, very noble? Isn’t it?” asked
+ Natásha, so seriously and excitedly that it was evident that what she was
+ now saying she had talked of before, with tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv became thoughtful.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I never go back on my word,” he said. “Besides, Sónya is so charming that
+ only a fool would renounce such happiness.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, no!” cried Natásha, “she and I have already talked it over. We knew
+ you’d say so. But it won’t do, because you see, if you say that—if
+ you consider yourself bound by your promise—it will seem as if she
+ had not meant it seriously. It makes it as if you were marrying her
+ because you must, and that wouldn’t do at all.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv saw that it had been well considered by them. Sónya had already
+ struck him by her beauty on the preceding day. Today, when he had caught a
+ glimpse of her, she seemed still more lovely. She was a charming girl of
+ sixteen, evidently passionately in love with him (he did not doubt that
+ for an instant). Why should he not love her now, and even marry her,
+ Rostóv thought, but just now there were so many other pleasures and
+ interests before him! “Yes, they have taken a wise decision,” he thought,
+ “I must remain free.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well then, that’s excellent,” said he. “We’ll talk it over later on. Oh,
+ how glad I am to have you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, and are you still true to Borís?” he continued.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, what nonsense!” cried Natásha, laughing. “I don’t think about him or
+ anyone else, and I don’t want anything of the kind.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear me! Then what are you up to now?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now?” repeated Natásha, and a happy smile lit up her face. “Have you seen
+ Duport?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not seen Duport—the famous dancer? Well then, you won’t understand.
+ That’s what I’m up to.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Curving her arms, Natásha held out her skirts as dancers do, ran back a
+ few steps, turned, cut a caper, brought her little feet sharply together,
+ and made some steps on the very tips of her toes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “See, I’m standing! See!” she said, but could not maintain herself on her
+ toes any longer. “So that’s what I’m up to! I’ll never marry anyone, but
+ will be a dancer. Only don’t tell anyone.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv laughed so loud and merrily that Denísov, in his bedroom, felt
+ envious and Natásha could not help joining in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, but don’t you think it’s nice?” she kept repeating.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nice! And so you no longer wish to marry Borís?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha flared up. “I don’t want to marry anyone. And I’ll tell him so
+ when I see him!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear me!” said Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But that’s all rubbish,” Natásha chattered on. “And is Denísov nice?” she
+ asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, indeed!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, well then, good-by: go and dress. Is he very terrible, Denísov?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why terrible?” asked Nicholas. “No, Váska is a splendid fellow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You call him Váska? That’s funny! And is he very nice?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well then, be quick. We’ll all have breakfast together.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Natásha rose and went out of the room on tiptoe, like a ballet dancer,
+ but smiling as only happy girls of fifteen can smile. When Rostóv met
+ Sónya in the drawing room, he reddened. He did not know how to behave with
+ her. The evening before, in the first happy moment of meeting, they had
+ kissed each other, but today they felt it could not be done; he felt that
+ everybody, including his mother and sisters, was looking inquiringly at
+ him and watching to see how he would behave with her. He kissed her hand
+ and addressed her not as thou but as you—Sónya . But their eyes met
+ and said thou , and exchanged tender kisses. Her looks asked him to forgive
+ her for having dared, by Natásha’s intermediacy, to remind him of his
+ promise, and then thanked him for his love. His looks thanked her for
+ offering him his freedom and told her that one way or another he would
+ never cease to love her, for that would be impossible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How strange it is,” said Véra, selecting a moment when all were silent,
+ “that Sónya and Nicholas now say you to one another and meet like
+ strangers.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Véra’s remark was correct, as her remarks always were, but, like most of
+ her observations, it made everyone feel uncomfortable, not only Sónya,
+ Nicholas, and Natásha, but even the old countess, who—dreading this
+ love affair which might hinder Nicholas from making a brilliant match—blushed
+ like a girl.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov, to Rostóv’s surprise, appeared in the drawing room with pomaded
+ hair, perfumed, and in a new uniform, looking just as smart as he made
+ himself when going into battle, and he was more amiable to the ladies and
+ gentlemen than Rostóv had ever expected to see him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ On his return to Moscow from the army, Nicholas Rostóv was welcomed by his
+ home circle as the best of sons, a hero, and their darling Nikólenka; by
+ his relations as a charming, attractive, and polite young man; by his
+ acquaintances as a handsome lieutenant of hussars, a good dancer, and one
+ of the best matches in the city.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Rostóvs knew everybody in Moscow. The old count had money enough that
+ year, as all his estates had been remortgaged, and so Nicholas, acquiring
+ a trotter of his own, very stylish riding breeches of the latest cut, such
+ as no one else yet had in Moscow, and boots of the latest fashion, with
+ extremely pointed toes and small silver spurs, passed his time very gaily.
+ After a short period of adapting himself to the old conditions of life,
+ Nicholas found it very pleasant to be at home again. He felt that he had
+ grown up and matured very much. His despair at failing in a Scripture
+ examination, his borrowing money from Gavríl to pay a sleigh driver, his
+ kissing Sónya on the sly—he now recalled all this as childishness he
+ had left immeasurably behind. Now he was a lieutenant of hussars, in a
+ jacket laced with silver, and wearing the Cross of St. George, awarded to
+ soldiers for bravery in action, and in the company of well-known, elderly,
+ and respected racing men was training a trotter of his own for a race. He
+ knew a lady on one of the boulevards whom he visited of an evening. He led
+ the mazurka at the Arkhárovs’ ball, talked about the war with Field
+ Marshal Kámenski, visited the English Club, and was on intimate terms with
+ a colonel of forty to whom Denísov had introduced him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His passion for the Emperor had cooled somewhat in Moscow. But still, as
+ he did not see him and had no opportunity of seeing him, he often spoke
+ about him and about his love for him, letting it be understood that he had
+ not told all and that there was something in his feelings for the Emperor
+ not everyone could understand, and with his whole soul he shared the
+ adoration then common in Moscow for the Emperor, who was spoken of as the
+ “angel incarnate.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During Rostóv’s short stay in Moscow, before rejoining the army, he did
+ not draw closer to Sónya, but rather drifted away from her. She was very
+ pretty and sweet, and evidently deeply in love with him, but he was at the
+ period of youth when there seems so much to do that there is no time for
+ that sort of thing and a young man fears to bind himself and prizes his
+ freedom which he needs for so many other things. When he thought of Sónya,
+ during this stay in Moscow, he said to himself, “Ah, there will be, and
+ there are, many more such girls somewhere whom I do not yet know. There
+ will be time enough to think about love when I want to, but now I have no
+ time.” Besides, it seemed to him that the society of women was rather
+ derogatory to his manhood. He went to balls and into ladies’ society with
+ an affectation of doing so against his will. The races, the English Club,
+ sprees with Denísov, and visits to a certain house—that was another
+ matter and quite the thing for a dashing young hussar!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the beginning of March, old Count Ilyá Rostóv was very busy arranging a
+ dinner in honor of Prince Bagratión at the English Club.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count walked up and down the hall in his dressing gown, giving orders
+ to the club steward and to the famous Feoktíst, the club’s head cook,
+ about asparagus, fresh cucumbers, strawberries, veal, and fish for this
+ dinner. The count had been a member and on the committee of the club from
+ the day it was founded. To him the club entrusted the arrangement of the
+ festival in honor of Bagratión, for few men knew so well how to arrange a
+ feast on an open-handed, hospitable scale, and still fewer men would be so
+ well able and willing to make up out of their own resources what might be
+ needed for the success of the fete. The club cook and the steward listened
+ to the count’s orders with pleased faces, for they knew that under no
+ other management could they so easily extract a good profit for themselves
+ from a dinner costing several thousand rubles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well then, mind and have cocks’ comb in the turtle soup, you know!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Shall we have three cold dishes then?” asked the cook.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count considered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We can’t have less—yes, three... the mayonnaise, that’s one,” said
+ he, bending down a finger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then am I to order those large sterlets?” asked the steward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, it can’t be helped if they won’t take less. Ah, dear me! I was
+ forgetting. We must have another entrée. Ah, goodness gracious!” he
+ clutched at his head. “Who is going to get me the flowers? Dmítri! Eh,
+ Dmítri! Gallop off to our Moscow estate,” he said to the factotum who
+ appeared at his call. “Hurry off and tell Maksím, the gardener, to set the
+ serfs to work. Say that everything out of the hothouses must be brought
+ here well wrapped up in felt. I must have two hundred pots here on
+ Friday.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having given several more orders, he was about to go to his “little
+ countess” to have a rest, but remembering something else of importance, he
+ returned again, called back the cook and the club steward, and again began
+ giving orders. A light footstep and the clinking of spurs were heard at
+ the door, and the young count, handsome, rosy, with a dark little
+ mustache, evidently rested and made sleeker by his easy life in Moscow,
+ entered the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my boy, my head’s in a whirl!” said the old man with a smile, as if
+ he felt a little confused before his son. “Now, if you would only help a
+ bit! I must have singers too. I shall have my own orchestra, but shouldn’t
+ we get the gypsy singers as well? You military men like that sort of
+ thing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Really, Papa, I believe Prince Bagratión worried himself less before the
+ battle of Schön Grabern than you do now,” said his son with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old count pretended to be angry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, you talk, but try it yourself!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the count turned to the cook, who, with a shrewd and respectful
+ expression, looked observantly and sympathetically at the father and son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What have the young people come to nowadays, eh, Feoktíst?” said he.
+ “Laughing at us old fellows!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s so, your excellency, all they have to do is to eat a good dinner,
+ but providing it and serving it all up, that’s not their business!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s it, that’s it!” exclaimed the count, and gaily seizing his son by
+ both hands, he cried, “Now I’ve got you, so take the sleigh and pair at
+ once, and go to Bezúkhov’s, and tell him ‘Count Ilyá has sent you to ask
+ for strawberries and fresh pineapples.’ We can’t get them from anyone
+ else. He’s not there himself, so you’ll have to go in and ask the
+ princesses; and from there go on to the Rasgulyáy—the coachman
+ Ipátka knows—and look up the gypsy Ilyúshka, the one who danced at
+ Count Orlóv’s, you remember, in a white Cossack coat, and bring him along
+ to me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And am I to bring the gypsy girls along with him?” asked Nicholas,
+ laughing. “Dear, dear!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment, with noiseless footsteps and with the businesslike,
+ preoccupied, yet meekly Christian look which never left her face, Anna
+ Mikháylovna entered the hall. Though she came upon the count in his
+ dressing gown every day, he invariably became confused and begged her to
+ excuse his costume.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No matter at all, my dear count,” she said, meekly closing her eyes. “But
+ I’ll go to Bezúkhov’s myself. Pierre has arrived, and now we shall get
+ anything we want from his hothouses. I have to see him in any case. He has
+ forwarded me a letter from Borís. Thank God, Borís is now on the staff.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count was delighted at Anna Mikháylovna’s taking upon herself one of
+ his commissions and ordered the small closed carriage for her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tell Bezúkhov to come. I’ll put his name down. Is his wife with him?” he
+ asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Mikháylovna turned up her eyes, and profound sadness was depicted on
+ her face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my dear friend, he is very unfortunate,” she said. “If what we hear
+ is true, it is dreadful. How little we dreamed of such a thing when we
+ were rejoicing at his happiness! And such a lofty angelic soul as young
+ Bezúkhov! Yes, I pity him from my heart, and shall try to give him what
+ consolation I can.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wh-what is the matter?” asked both the young and old Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Mikháylovna sighed deeply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dólokhov, Mary Ivánovna’s son,” she said in a mysterious whisper, “has
+ compromised her completely, they say. Pierre took him up, invited him to
+ his house in Petersburg, and now... she has come here and that daredevil
+ after her!” said Anna Mikháylovna, wishing to show her sympathy for
+ Pierre, but by involuntary intonations and a half smile betraying her
+ sympathy for the “daredevil,” as she called Dólokhov. “They say Pierre is
+ quite broken by his misfortune.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear, dear! But still tell him to come to the club—it will all blow
+ over. It will be a tremendous banquet.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day, the third of March, soon after one o’clock, two hundred and
+ fifty members of the English Club and fifty guests were awaiting the guest
+ of honor and hero of the Austrian campaign, Prince Bagratión, to dinner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the first arrival of the news of the battle of Austerlitz, Moscow had
+ been bewildered. At that time, the Russians were so used to victories that
+ on receiving news of the defeat some would simply not believe it, while
+ others sought some extraordinary explanation of so strange an event. In
+ the English Club, where all who were distinguished, important, and well
+ informed foregathered when the news began to arrive in December, nothing
+ was said about the war and the last battle, as though all were in a
+ conspiracy of silence. The men who set the tone in conversation—Count
+ Rostopchín, Prince Yúri Dolgorúkov, Valúev, Count Markóv, and Prince
+ Vyázemski—did not show themselves at the club, but met in private
+ houses in intimate circles, and the Moscovites who took their opinions
+ from others—Ilyá Rostóv among them—remained for a while
+ without any definite opinion on the subject of the war and without
+ leaders. The Moscovites felt that something was wrong and that to discuss
+ the bad news was difficult, and so it was best to be silent. But after a
+ while, just as a jury comes out of its room, the bigwigs who guided the
+ club’s opinion reappeared, and everybody began speaking clearly and
+ definitely. Reasons were found for the incredible, unheard-of, and
+ impossible event of a Russian defeat, everything became clear, and in all
+ corners of Moscow the same things began to be said. These reasons were the
+ treachery of the Austrians, a defective commissariat, the treachery of the
+ Pole Przebyszéwski and of the Frenchman Langeron, Kutúzov’s incapacity,
+ and (it was whispered) the youth and inexperience of the sovereign, who
+ had trusted worthless and insignificant people. But the army, the Russian
+ army, everyone declared, was extraordinary and had achieved miracles of
+ valor. The soldiers, officers, and generals were heroes. But the hero of
+ heroes was Prince Bagratión, distinguished by his Schön Grabern affair and
+ by the retreat from Austerlitz, where he alone had withdrawn his column
+ unbroken and had all day beaten back an enemy force twice as numerous as
+ his own. What also conduced to Bagratión’s being selected as Moscow’s hero
+ was the fact that he had no connections in the city and was a stranger
+ there. In his person, honor was shown to a simple fighting Russian soldier
+ without connections and intrigues, and to one who was associated by
+ memories of the Italian campaign with the name of Suvórov. Moreover,
+ paying such honor to Bagratión was the best way of expressing disapproval
+ and dislike of Kutúzov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Had there been no Bagratión, it would have been necessary to invent him,”
+ said the wit Shinshín, parodying the words of Voltaire. Kutúzov no one
+ spoke of, except some who abused him in whispers, calling him a court
+ weathercock and an old satyr.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All Moscow repeated Prince Dolgorúkov’s saying: “If you go on modeling and
+ modeling you must get smeared with clay,” suggesting consolation for our
+ defeat by the memory of former victories; and the words of Rostopchín,
+ that French soldiers have to be incited to battle by highfalutin words,
+ and Germans by logical arguments to show them that it is more dangerous to
+ run away than to advance, but that Russian soldiers only need to be
+ restrained and held back! On all sides, new and fresh anecdotes were heard
+ of individual examples of heroism shown by our officers and men at
+ Austerlitz. One had saved a standard, another had killed five Frenchmen, a
+ third had loaded five cannon singlehanded. Berg was mentioned, by those
+ who did not know him, as having, when wounded in the right hand, taken his
+ sword in the left, and gone forward. Of Bolkónski, nothing was said, and
+ only those who knew him intimately regretted that he had died so young,
+ leaving a pregnant wife with his eccentric father.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ On that third of March, all the rooms in the English Club were filled with
+ a hum of conversation, like the hum of bees swarming in springtime. The
+ members and guests of the club wandered hither and thither, sat, stood,
+ met, and separated, some in uniform and some in evening dress, and a few
+ here and there with powdered hair and in Russian kaftáns . Powdered
+ footmen, in livery with buckled shoes and smart stockings, stood at every
+ door anxiously noting visitors’ every movement in order to offer their
+ services. Most of those present were elderly, respected men with broad,
+ self-confident faces, fat fingers, and resolute gestures and voices. This
+ class of guests and members sat in certain habitual places and met in
+ certain habitual groups. A minority of those present were casual guests—chiefly
+ young men, among whom were Denísov, Rostóv, and Dólokhov—who was now
+ again an officer in the Semënov regiment. The faces of these young people,
+ especially those who were military men, bore that expression of
+ condescending respect for their elders which seems to say to the older
+ generation, “We are prepared to respect and honor you, but all the same
+ remember that the future belongs to us.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nesvítski was there as an old member of the club. Pierre, who at his
+ wife’s command had let his hair grow and abandoned his spectacles, went
+ about the rooms fashionably dressed but looking sad and dull. Here, as
+ elsewhere, he was surrounded by an atmosphere of subservience to his
+ wealth, and being in the habit of lording it over these people, he treated
+ them with absent-minded contempt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By his age he should have belonged to the younger men, but by his wealth
+ and connections he belonged to the groups of old and honored guests, and
+ so he went from one group to another. Some of the most important old men
+ were the center of groups which even strangers approached respectfully to
+ hear the voices of well-known men. The largest circles formed round Count
+ Rostopchín, Valúev, and Narýshkin. Rostopchín was describing how the
+ Russians had been overwhelmed by flying Austrians and had had to force
+ their way through them with bayonets.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Valúev was confidentially telling that Uvárov had been sent from
+ Petersburg to ascertain what Moscow was thinking about Austerlitz.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the third circle, Narýshkin was speaking of the meeting of the Austrian
+ Council of War at which Suvórov crowed like a cock in reply to the
+ nonsense talked by the Austrian generals. Shinshín, standing close by,
+ tried to make a joke, saying that Kutúzov had evidently failed to learn
+ from Suvórov even so simple a thing as the art of crowing like a cock, but
+ the elder members glanced severely at the wit, making him feel that in
+ that place and on that day, it was improper to speak so of Kutúzov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Count Ilyá Rostóv, hurried and preoccupied, went about in his soft boots
+ between the dining and drawing rooms, hastily greeting the important and
+ unimportant, all of whom he knew, as if they were all equals, while his
+ eyes occasionally sought out his fine well-set-up young son, resting on
+ him and winking joyfully at him. Young Rostóv stood at a window with
+ Dólokhov, whose acquaintance he had lately made and highly valued. The old
+ count came up to them and pressed Dólokhov’s hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Please come and visit us... you know my brave boy... been together out
+ there... both playing the hero... Ah, Vasíli Ignátovich... How d’ye do,
+ old fellow?” he said, turning to an old man who was passing, but before he
+ had finished his greeting there was a general stir, and a footman who had
+ run in announced, with a frightened face: “He’s arrived!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bells rang, the stewards rushed forward, and—like rye shaken
+ together in a shovel—the guests who had been scattered about in
+ different rooms came together and crowded in the large drawing room by the
+ door of the ballroom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bagratión appeared in the doorway of the anteroom without hat or sword,
+ which, in accord with the club custom, he had given up to the hall porter.
+ He had no lambskin cap on his head, nor had he a loaded whip over his
+ shoulder, as when Rostóv had seen him on the eve of the battle of
+ Austerlitz, but wore a tight new uniform with Russian and foreign Orders,
+ and the Star of St. George on his left breast. Evidently just before
+ coming to the dinner he had had his hair and whiskers trimmed, which
+ changed his appearance for the worse. There was something naïvely festive
+ in his air, which, in conjunction with his firm and virile features, gave
+ him a rather comical expression. Bekleshëv and Theodore Uvárov, who had
+ arrived with him, paused at the doorway to allow him, as the guest of
+ honor, to enter first. Bagratión was embarrassed, not wishing to avail
+ himself of their courtesy, and this caused some delay at the doors, but
+ after all he did at last enter first. He walked shyly and awkwardly over
+ the parquet floor of the reception room, not knowing what to do with his
+ hands; he was more accustomed to walk over a plowed field under fire, as
+ he had done at the head of the Kursk regiment at Schön Grabern—and
+ he would have found that easier. The committeemen met him at the first
+ door and, expressing their delight at seeing such a highly honored guest,
+ took possession of him as it were, without waiting for his reply,
+ surrounded him, and led him to the drawing room. It was at first
+ impossible to enter the drawing room door for the crowd of members and
+ guests jostling one another and trying to get a good look at Bagratión
+ over each other’s shoulders, as if he were some rare animal. Count Ilyá
+ Rostóv, laughing and repeating the words, “Make way, dear boy! Make way,
+ make way!” pushed through the crowd more energetically than anyone, led
+ the guests into the drawing room, and seated them on the center sofa. The
+ bigwigs, the most respected members of the club, beset the new arrivals.
+ Count Ilyá, again thrusting his way through the crowd, went out of the
+ drawing room and reappeared a minute later with another committeeman,
+ carrying a large silver salver which he presented to Prince Bagratión. On
+ the salver lay some verses composed and printed in the hero’s honor.
+ Bagratión, on seeing the salver, glanced around in dismay, as though
+ seeking help. But all eyes demanded that he should submit. Feeling himself
+ in their power, he resolutely took the salver with both hands and looked
+ sternly and reproachfully at the count who had presented it to him.
+ Someone obligingly took the dish from Bagratión (or he would, it seemed,
+ have held it till evening and have gone in to dinner with it) and drew his
+ attention to the verses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, I will read them, then!” Bagratión seemed to say, and, fixing his
+ weary eyes on the paper, began to read them with a fixed and serious
+ expression. But the author himself took the verses and began reading them
+ aloud. Bagratión bowed his head and listened:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bring glory then to Alexander’s reign
+
+ And on the throne our Titus shield.
+
+ A dreaded foe be thou, kindhearted as a man,
+
+ A Rhipheus at home, a Caesar in the field!
+
+ E’en fortunate Napoleon
+
+ Knows by experience, now, Bagratión,
+
+ And dare not Herculean Russians trouble...
+
+
+
+ 
+ But before he had finished reading, a stentorian major-domo announced that
+ dinner was ready! The door opened, and from the dining room came the
+ resounding strains of the polonaise:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Conquest’s joyful thunder waken,
+
+ Triumph, valiant Russians, now!...
+
+
+
+ 
+ and Count Rostóv, glancing angrily at the author who went on reading his
+ verses, bowed to Bagratión. Everyone rose, feeling that dinner was more
+ important than verses, and Bagratión, again preceding all the rest, went
+ in to dinner. He was seated in the place of honor between two Alexanders—Bekleshëv
+ and Narýshkin—which was a significant allusion to the name of the
+ sovereign. Three hundred persons took their seats in the dining room,
+ according to their rank and importance: the more important nearer to the
+ honored guest, as naturally as water flows deepest where the land lies
+ lowest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just before dinner, Count Ilyá Rostóv presented his son to Bagratión, who
+ recognized him and said a few words to him, disjointed and awkward, as
+ were all the words he spoke that day, and Count Ilyá looked joyfully and
+ proudly around while Bagratión spoke to his son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas Rostóv, with Denísov and his new acquaintance, Dólokhov, sat
+ almost at the middle of the table. Facing them sat Pierre, beside Prince
+ Nesvítski. Count Ilyá Rostóv with the other members of the committee sat
+ facing Bagratión and, as the very personification of Moscow hospitality,
+ did the honors to the prince.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His efforts had not been in vain. The dinner, both the Lenten and the
+ other fare, was splendid, yet he could not feel quite at ease till the end
+ of the meal. He winked at the butler, whispered directions to the footmen,
+ and awaited each expected dish with some anxiety. Everything was
+ excellent. With the second course, a gigantic sterlet (at sight of which
+ Ilyá Rostóv blushed with self-conscious pleasure), the footmen began
+ popping corks and filling the champagne glasses. After the fish, which
+ made a certain sensation, the count exchanged glances with the other
+ committeemen. “There will be many toasts, it’s time to begin,” he
+ whispered, and taking up his glass, he rose. All were silent, waiting for
+ what he would say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To the health of our Sovereign, the Emperor!” he cried, and at the same
+ moment his kindly eyes grew moist with tears of joy and enthusiasm. The
+ band immediately struck up “Conquest’s joyful thunder waken...” All rose
+ and cried “Hurrah!” Bagratión also rose and shouted “Hurrah!” in exactly
+ the same voice in which he had shouted it on the field at Schön Grabern.
+ Young Rostóv’s ecstatic voice could be heard above the three hundred
+ others. He nearly wept. “To the health of our Sovereign, the Emperor!” he
+ roared, “Hurrah!” and emptying his glass at one gulp he dashed it to the
+ floor. Many followed his example, and the loud shouting continued for a
+ long time. When the voices subsided, the footmen cleared away the broken
+ glass and everybody sat down again, smiling at the noise they had made and
+ exchanging remarks. The old count rose once more, glanced at a note lying
+ beside his plate, and proposed a toast, “To the health of the hero of our
+ last campaign, Prince Peter Ivánovich Bagratión!” and again his blue eyes
+ grew moist. “Hurrah!” cried the three hundred voices again, but instead of
+ the band a choir began singing a cantata composed by Paul Ivánovich
+ Kutúzov:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Russians! O’er all barriers on!
+
+ Courage conquest guarantees;
+
+ Have we not Bagratión?
+
+ He brings foemen to their knees,... etc.
+
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as the singing was over, another and another toast was proposed
+ and Count Ilyá Rostóv became more and more moved, more glass was smashed,
+ and the shouting grew louder. They drank to Bekleshëv, Narýshkin, Uvárov,
+ Dolgorúkov, Apráksin, Valúev, to the committee, to all the club members
+ and to all the club guests, and finally to Count Ilyá Rostóv separately,
+ as the organizer of the banquet. At that toast, the count took out his
+ handkerchief and, covering his face, wept outright.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ Pierre sat opposite Dólokhov and Nicholas Rostóv. As usual, he ate and
+ drank much, and eagerly. But those who knew him intimately noticed that
+ some great change had come over him that day. He was silent all through
+ dinner and looked about, blinking and scowling, or, with fixed eyes and a
+ look of complete absent-mindedness, kept rubbing the bridge of his nose.
+ His face was depressed and gloomy. He seemed to see and hear nothing of
+ what was going on around him and to be absorbed by some depressing and
+ unsolved problem.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The unsolved problem that tormented him was caused by hints given by the
+ princess, his cousin, at Moscow, concerning Dólokhov’s intimacy with his
+ wife, and by an anonymous letter he had received that morning, which in
+ the mean jocular way common to anonymous letters said that he saw badly
+ through his spectacles, but that his wife’s connection with Dólokhov was a
+ secret to no one but himself. Pierre absolutely disbelieved both the
+ princess’ hints and the letter, but he feared now to look at Dólokhov, who
+ was sitting opposite him. Every time he chanced to meet Dólokhov’s
+ handsome insolent eyes, Pierre felt something terrible and monstrous
+ rising in his soul and turned quickly away. Involuntarily recalling his
+ wife’s past and her relations with Dólokhov, Pierre saw clearly that what
+ was said in the letter might be true, or might at least seem to be true
+ had it not referred to his wife . He involuntarily remembered how Dólokhov,
+ who had fully recovered his former position after the campaign, had
+ returned to Petersburg and come to him. Availing himself of his friendly
+ relations with Pierre as a boon companion, Dólokhov had come straight to
+ his house, and Pierre had put him up and lent him money. Pierre recalled
+ how Hélène had smilingly expressed disapproval of Dólokhov’s living at
+ their house, and how cynically Dólokhov had praised his wife’s beauty to
+ him and from that time till they came to Moscow had not left them for a
+ day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, he is very handsome,” thought Pierre, “and I know him. It would be
+ particularly pleasant to him to dishonor my name and ridicule me, just
+ because I have exerted myself on his behalf, befriended him, and helped
+ him. I know and understand what a spice that would add to the pleasure of
+ deceiving me, if it really were true. Yes, if it were true, but I do not
+ believe it. I have no right to, and can’t, believe it.” He remembered the
+ expression Dólokhov’s face assumed in his moments of cruelty, as when
+ tying the policeman to the bear and dropping them into the water, or when
+ he challenged a man to a duel without any reason, or shot a post-boy’s
+ horse with a pistol. That expression was often on Dólokhov’s face when
+ looking at him. “Yes, he is a bully,” thought Pierre, “to kill a man means
+ nothing to him. It must seem to him that everyone is afraid of him, and
+ that must please him. He must think that I, too, am afraid of him—and
+ in fact I am afraid of him,” he thought, and again he felt something
+ terrible and monstrous rising in his soul. Dólokhov, Denísov, and Rostóv
+ were now sitting opposite Pierre and seemed very gay. Rostóv was talking
+ merrily to his two friends, one of whom was a dashing hussar and the other
+ a notorious duelist and rake, and every now and then he glanced ironically
+ at Pierre, whose preoccupied, absent-minded, and massive figure was a very
+ noticeable one at the dinner. Rostóv looked inimically at Pierre, first
+ because Pierre appeared to his hussar eyes as a rich civilian, the husband
+ of a beauty, and in a word—an old woman; and secondly because Pierre
+ in his preoccupation and absent-mindedness had not recognized Rostóv and
+ had not responded to his greeting. When the Emperor’s health was drunk,
+ Pierre, lost in thought, did not rise or lift his glass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are you about?” shouted Rostóv, looking at him in an ecstasy of
+ exasperation. “Don’t you hear it’s His Majesty the Emperor’s health?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre sighed, rose submissively, emptied his glass, and, waiting till all
+ were seated again, turned with his kindly smile to Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, I didn’t recognize you!” he said. But Rostóv was otherwise engaged;
+ he was shouting “Hurrah!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why don’t you renew the acquaintance?” said Dólokhov to Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Confound him, he’s a fool!” said Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One should make up to the husbands of pretty women,” said Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre did not catch what they were saying, but knew they were talking
+ about him. He reddened and turned away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, now to the health of handsome women!” said Dólokhov, and with a
+ serious expression, but with a smile lurking at the corners of his mouth,
+ he turned with his glass to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here’s to the health of lovely women, Peterkin—and their lovers!”
+ he added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre, with downcast eyes, drank out of his glass without looking at
+ Dólokhov or answering him. The footman, who was distributing leaflets with
+ Kutúzov’s cantata, laid one before Pierre as one of the principal guests.
+ He was just going to take it when Dólokhov, leaning across, snatched it
+ from his hand and began reading it. Pierre looked at Dólokhov and his eyes
+ dropped, the something terrible and monstrous that had tormented him all
+ dinnertime rose and took possession of him. He leaned his whole massive
+ body across the table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How dare you take it?” he shouted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hearing that cry and seeing to whom it was addressed, Nesvítski and the
+ neighbor on his right quickly turned in alarm to Bezúkhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t! Don’t! What are you about?” whispered their frightened voices.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov looked at Pierre with clear, mirthful, cruel eyes, and that smile
+ of his which seemed to say, “Ah! This is what I like!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You shan’t have it!” he said distinctly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pale, with quivering lips, Pierre snatched the copy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You...! you... scoundrel! I challenge you!” he ejaculated, and, pushing
+ back his chair, he rose from the table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the very instant he did this and uttered those words, Pierre felt that
+ the question of his wife’s guilt which had been tormenting him the whole
+ day was finally and indubitably answered in the affirmative. He hated her
+ and was forever sundered from her. Despite Denísov’s request that he would
+ take no part in the matter, Rostóv agreed to be Dólokhov’s second, and
+ after dinner he discussed the arrangements for the duel with Nesvítski,
+ Bezúkhov’s second. Pierre went home, but Rostóv with Dólokhov and Denísov
+ stayed on at the club till late, listening to the gypsies and other
+ singers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well then, till tomorrow at Sokólniki,” said Dólokhov, as he took leave
+ of Rostóv in the club porch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And do you feel quite calm?” Rostóv asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov paused.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, you see, I’ll tell you the whole secret of dueling in two words. If
+ you are going to fight a duel, and you make a will and write affectionate
+ letters to your parents, and if you think you may be killed, you are a
+ fool and are lost for certain. But go with the firm intention of killing
+ your man as quickly and surely as possible, and then all will be right, as
+ our bear huntsman at Kostromá used to tell me. ‘Everyone fears a bear,’ he
+ says, ‘but when you see one your fear’s all gone, and your only thought is
+ not to let him get away!’ And that’s how it is with me. À demain, mon
+ cher .” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Till tomorrow, my dear fellow.
+
+
+
+ 
+ Next day, at eight in the morning, Pierre and Nesvítski drove to the
+ Sokólniki forest and found Dólokhov, Denísov, and Rostóv already there.
+ Pierre had the air of a man preoccupied with considerations which had no
+ connection with the matter in hand. His haggard face was yellow. He had
+ evidently not slept that night. He looked about distractedly and screwed
+ up his eyes as if dazzled by the sun. He was entirely absorbed by two
+ considerations: his wife’s guilt, of which after his sleepless night he
+ had not the slightest doubt, and the guiltlessness of Dólokhov, who had no
+ reason to preserve the honor of a man who was nothing to him.... “I should
+ perhaps have done the same thing in his place,” thought Pierre. “It’s even
+ certain that I should have done the same, then why this duel, this murder?
+ Either I shall kill him, or he will hit me in the head, or elbow, or knee.
+ Can’t I go away from here, run away, bury myself somewhere?” passed
+ through his mind. But just at moments when such thoughts occurred to him,
+ he would ask in a particularly calm and absent-minded way, which inspired
+ the respect of the onlookers, “Will it be long? Are things ready?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When all was ready, the sabers stuck in the snow to mark the barriers, and
+ the pistols loaded, Nesvítski went up to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I should not be doing my duty, Count,” he said in timid tones, “and
+ should not justify your confidence and the honor you have done me in
+ choosing me for your second, if at this grave, this very grave, moment I
+ did not tell you the whole truth. I think there is no sufficient ground
+ for this affair, or for blood to be shed over it.... You were not right,
+ not quite in the right, you were impetuous...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes, it is horribly stupid,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then allow me to express your regrets, and I am sure your opponent will
+ accept them,” said Nesvítski (who like the others concerned in the affair,
+ and like everyone in similar cases, did not yet believe that the affair
+ had come to an actual duel). “You know, Count, it is much more honorable
+ to admit one’s mistake than to let matters become irreparable. There was
+ no insult on either side. Allow me to convey....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No! What is there to talk about?” said Pierre. “It’s all the same.... Is
+ everything ready?” he added. “Only tell me where to go and where to
+ shoot,” he said with an unnaturally gentle smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He took the pistol in his hand and began asking about the working of the
+ trigger, as he had not before held a pistol in his hand—a fact that
+ he did not wish to confess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes, like that, I know, I only forgot,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No apologies, none whatever,” said Dólokhov to Denísov (who on his side
+ had been attempting a reconciliation), and he also went up to the
+ appointed place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The spot chosen for the duel was some eighty paces from the road, where
+ the sleighs had been left, in a small clearing in the pine forest covered
+ with melting snow, the frost having begun to break up during the last few
+ days. The antagonists stood forty paces apart at the farther edge of the
+ clearing. The seconds, measuring the paces, left tracks in the deep wet
+ snow between the place where they had been standing and Nesvítski’s and
+ Dólokhov’s sabers, which were stuck into the ground ten paces apart to
+ mark the barrier. It was thawing and misty; at forty paces’ distance
+ nothing could be seen. For three minutes all had been ready, but they
+ still delayed and all were silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ “Well, begin!” said Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right,” said Pierre, still smiling in the same way. A feeling of
+ dread was in the air. It was evident that the affair so lightly begun
+ could no longer be averted but was taking its course independently of
+ men’s will.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov first went to the barrier and announced: “As the adve’sawies have
+ wefused a weconciliation, please pwoceed. Take your pistols, and at the
+ word thwee begin to advance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O-ne! T-wo! Thwee!” he shouted angrily and stepped aside.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The combatants advanced along the trodden tracks, nearer and nearer to one
+ another, beginning to see one another through the mist. They had the right
+ to fire when they liked as they approached the barrier. Dólokhov walked
+ slowly without raising his pistol, looking intently with his bright,
+ sparkling blue eyes into his antagonist’s face. His mouth wore its usual
+ semblance of a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So I can fire when I like!” said Pierre, and at the word “three,” he went
+ quickly forward, missing the trodden path and stepping into the deep snow.
+ He held the pistol in his right hand at arm’s length, apparently afraid of
+ shooting himself with it. His left hand he held carefully back, because he
+ wished to support his right hand with it and knew he must not do so.
+ Having advanced six paces and strayed off the track into the snow, Pierre
+ looked down at his feet, then quickly glanced at Dólokhov and, bending his
+ finger as he had been shown, fired. Not at all expecting so loud a report,
+ Pierre shuddered at the sound and then, smiling at his own sensations,
+ stood still. The smoke, rendered denser by the mist, prevented him from
+ seeing anything for an instant, but there was no second report as he had
+ expected. He only heard Dólokhov’s hurried steps, and his figure came in
+ view through the smoke. He was pressing one hand to his left side, while
+ the other clutched his drooping pistol. His face was pale. Rostóv ran
+ toward him and said something.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No-o-o!” muttered Dólokhov through his teeth, “no, it’s not over.” And
+ after stumbling a few staggering steps right up to the saber, he sank on
+ the snow beside it. His left hand was bloody; he wiped it on his coat and
+ supported himself with it. His frowning face was pallid and quivered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Plea...” began Dólokhov, but could not at first pronounce the word.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Please,” he uttered with an effort.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre, hardly restraining his sobs, began running toward Dólokhov and was
+ about to cross the space between the barriers, when Dólokhov cried:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To your barrier!” and Pierre, grasping what was meant, stopped by his
+ saber. Only ten paces divided them. Dólokhov lowered his head to the snow,
+ greedily bit at it, again raised his head, adjusted himself, drew in his
+ legs and sat up, seeking a firm center of gravity. He sucked and swallowed
+ the cold snow, his lips quivered but his eyes, still smiling, glittered
+ with effort and exasperation as he mustered his remaining strength. He
+ raised his pistol and aimed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sideways! Cover yourself with your pistol!” ejaculated Nesvítski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cover yourself!” even Denísov cried to his adversary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre, with a gentle smile of pity and remorse, his arms and legs
+ helplessly spread out, stood with his broad chest directly facing Dólokhov
+ and looked sorrowfully at him. Denísov, Rostóv, and Nesvítski closed their
+ eyes. At the same instant they heard a report and Dólokhov’s angry cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Missed!” shouted Dólokhov, and he lay helplessly, face downwards on the
+ snow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre clutched his temples, and turning round went into the forest,
+ trampling through the deep snow, and muttering incoherent words:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Folly... folly! Death... lies...” he repeated, puckering his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nesvítski stopped him and took him home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv and Denísov drove away with the wounded Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The latter lay silent in the sleigh with closed eyes and did not answer a
+ word to the questions addressed to him. But on entering Moscow he suddenly
+ came to and, lifting his head with an effort, took Rostóv, who was sitting
+ beside him, by the hand. Rostóv was struck by the totally altered and
+ unexpectedly rapturous and tender expression on Dólokhov’s face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well? How do you feel?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bad! But it’s not that, my friend—” said Dólokhov with a
+ gasping voice. “Where are we? In Moscow, I know. I don’t matter, but I
+ have killed her, killed... She won’t get over it! She won’t survive....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who?” asked Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My mother! My mother, my angel, my adored angel mother,” and Dólokhov
+ pressed Rostóv’s hand and burst into tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he had become a little quieter, he explained to Rostóv that he was
+ living with his mother, who, if she saw him dying, would not survive it.
+ He implored Rostóv to go on and prepare her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv went on ahead to do what was asked, and to his great surprise
+ learned that Dólokhov the brawler, Dólokhov the bully, lived in Moscow
+ with an old mother and a hunchback sister, and was the most affectionate
+ of sons and brothers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ Pierre had of late rarely seen his wife alone. Both in Petersburg and in
+ Moscow their house was always full of visitors. The night after the duel
+ he did not go to his bedroom but, as he often did, remained in his
+ father’s room, that huge room in which Count Bezúkhov had died.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He lay down on the sofa meaning to fall asleep and forget all that had
+ happened to him, but could not do so. Such a storm of feelings, thoughts,
+ and memories suddenly arose within him that he could not fall asleep, nor
+ even remain in one place, but had to jump up and pace the room with rapid
+ steps. Now he seemed to see her in the early days of their marriage, with
+ bare shoulders and a languid, passionate look on her face, and then
+ immediately he saw beside her Dólokhov’s handsome, insolent, hard, and
+ mocking face as he had seen it at the banquet, and then that same face
+ pale, quivering, and suffering, as it had been when he reeled and sank on
+ the snow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What has happened?” he asked himself. “I have killed her lover , yes,
+ killed my wife’s lover. Yes, that was it! And why? How did I come to do
+ it?”—“Because you married her,” answered an inner voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But in what was I to blame?” he asked. “In marrying her without loving
+ her; in deceiving yourself and her.” And he vividly recalled that moment
+ after supper at Prince Vasíli’s, when he spoke those words he had found so
+ difficult to utter: “I love you.” “It all comes from that! Even then I
+ felt it,” he thought. “I felt then that it was not so, that I had no right
+ to do it. And so it turns out.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He remembered his honeymoon and blushed at the recollection. Particularly
+ vivid, humiliating, and shameful was the recollection of how one day soon
+ after his marriage he came out of the bedroom into his study a little
+ before noon in his silk dressing gown and found his head steward there,
+ who, bowing respectfully, looked into his face and at his dressing gown
+ and smiled slightly, as if expressing respectful understanding of his
+ employer’s happiness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But how often I have felt proud of her, proud of her majestic beauty and
+ social tact,” thought he; “been proud of my house, in which she received
+ all Petersburg, proud of her unapproachability and beauty. So this is what
+ I was proud of! I then thought that I did not understand her. How often
+ when considering her character I have told myself that I was to blame for
+ not understanding her, for not understanding that constant composure and
+ complacency and lack of all interests or desires, and the whole secret
+ lies in the terrible truth that she is a depraved woman. Now I have spoken
+ that terrible word to myself all has become clear.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Anatole used to come to borrow money from her and used to kiss her naked
+ shoulders. She did not give him the money, but let herself be kissed. Her
+ father in jest tried to rouse her jealousy, and she replied with a calm
+ smile that she was not so stupid as to be jealous: ‘Let him do what he
+ pleases,’ she used to say of me. One day I asked her if she felt any
+ symptoms of pregnancy. She laughed contemptuously and said she was not a
+ fool to want to have children, and that she was not going to have any
+ children by me .”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then he recalled the coarseness and bluntness of her thoughts and the
+ vulgarity of the expressions that were natural to her, though she had been
+ brought up in the most aristocratic circles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’m not such a fool.... Just you try it on.... Allez-vous promener ,” *
+ she used to say. Often seeing the success she had with young and old men
+ and women Pierre could not understand why he did not love her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “You clear out of this.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I never loved her,” said he to himself; “I knew she was a depraved
+ woman,” he repeated, “but dared not admit it to myself. And now there’s
+ Dólokhov sitting in the snow with a forced smile and perhaps dying, while
+ meeting my remorse with some forced bravado!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was one of those people who, in spite of an appearance of what is
+ called weak character, do not seek a confidant in their troubles. He
+ digested his sufferings alone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is all, all her fault,” he said to himself; “but what of that? Why did
+ I bind myself to her? Why did I say ‘Je vous aime’ * to her, which was a
+ lie, and worse than a lie? I am guilty and must endure... what? A slur on
+ my name? A misfortune for life? Oh, that’s nonsense,” he thought. “The
+ slur on my name and honor—that’s all apart from myself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * I love you.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Louis XVI was executed because they said he was dishonorable and a
+ criminal,” came into Pierre’s head, “and from their point of view they
+ were right, as were those too who canonized him and died a martyr’s death
+ for his sake. Then Robespierre was beheaded for being a despot. Who is
+ right and who is wrong? No one! But if you are alive—live: tomorrow
+ you’ll die as I might have died an hour ago. And is it worth tormenting
+ oneself, when one has only a moment of life in comparison with eternity?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But at the moment when he imagined himself calmed by such reflections, she 
+ suddenly came into his mind as she was at the moments when he had most
+ strongly expressed his insincere love for her, and he felt the blood rush
+ to his heart and had again to get up and move about and break and tear
+ whatever came to his hand. “Why did I tell her that ‘Je vous aime’? ” he
+ kept repeating to himself. And when he had said it for the tenth time,
+ Molière’s words: “Mais que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?” *
+ occurred to him, and he began to laugh at himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “But what the devil was he doing in that galley?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the night he called his valet and told him to pack up to go to
+ Petersburg. He could not imagine how he could speak to her now. He
+ resolved to go away next day and leave a letter informing her of his
+ intention to part from her forever.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next morning when the valet came into the room with his coffee, Pierre was
+ lying asleep on the ottoman with an open book in his hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He woke up and looked round for a while with a startled expression, unable
+ to realize where he was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The countess told me to inquire whether your excellency was at home,”
+ said the valet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But before Pierre could decide what answer he would send, the countess
+ herself in a white satin dressing gown embroidered with silver and with
+ simply dressed hair (two immense plaits twice round her lovely head like a
+ coronet) entered the room, calm and majestic, except that there was a
+ wrathful wrinkle on her rather prominent marble brow. With her
+ imperturbable calm she did not begin to speak in front of the valet. She
+ knew of the duel and had come to speak about it. She waited till the valet
+ had set down the coffee things and left the room. Pierre looked at her
+ timidly over his spectacles, and like a hare surrounded by hounds who lays
+ back her ears and continues to crouch motionless before her enemies, he
+ tried to continue reading. But feeling this to be senseless and
+ impossible, he again glanced timidly at her. She did not sit down but
+ looked at him with a contemptuous smile, waiting for the valet to go.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what’s this now? What have you been up to now, I should like to
+ know?” she asked sternly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I? What have I...?” stammered Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So it seems you’re a hero, eh? Come now, what was this duel about? What
+ is it meant to prove? What? I ask you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre turned over heavily on the ottoman and opened his mouth, but could
+ not reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you won’t answer, I’ll tell you...” Hélène went on. “You believe
+ everything you’re told. You were told...” Hélène laughed, “that Dólokhov
+ was my lover,” she said in French with her coarse plainness of speech,
+ uttering the word amant as casually as any other word, “and you believed
+ it! Well, what have you proved? What does this duel prove? That you’re a
+ fool, que vous êtes un sot , but everybody knew that. What will be the
+ result? That I shall be the laughingstock of all Moscow, that everyone
+ will say that you, drunk and not knowing what you were about, challenged a
+ man you are jealous of without cause.” Hélène raised her voice and became
+ more and more excited, “A man who’s a better man than you in every way...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hm... Hm...!” growled Pierre, frowning without looking at her, and not
+ moving a muscle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And how could you believe he was my lover? Why? Because I like his
+ company? If you were cleverer and more agreeable, I should prefer yours.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t speak to me... I beg you,” muttered Pierre hoarsely.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why shouldn’t I speak? I can speak as I like, and I tell you plainly that
+ there are not many wives with husbands such as you who would not have
+ taken lovers ( des amants ), but I have not done so,” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre wished to say something, looked at her with eyes whose strange
+ expression she did not understand, and lay down again. He was suffering
+ physically at that moment, there was a weight on his chest and he could
+ not breathe. He knew that he must do something to put an end to this
+ suffering, but what he wanted to do was too terrible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We had better separate,” he muttered in a broken voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Separate? Very well, but only if you give me a fortune,” said Hélène.
+ “Separate! That’s a thing to frighten me with!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre leaped up from the sofa and rushed staggering toward her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll kill you!” he shouted, and seizing the marble top of a table with a
+ strength he had never before felt, he made a step toward her brandishing
+ the slab.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hélène’s face became terrible, she shrieked and sprang aside. His father’s
+ nature showed itself in Pierre. He felt the fascination and delight of
+ frenzy. He flung down the slab, broke it, and swooping down on her with
+ outstretched hands shouted, “Get out!” in such a terrible voice that the
+ whole house heard it with horror. God knows what he would have done at
+ that moment had Hélène not fled from the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ A week later Pierre gave his wife full power to control all his estates in
+ Great Russia, which formed the larger part of his property, and left for
+ Petersburg alone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ Two months had elapsed since the news of the battle of Austerlitz and the
+ loss of Prince Andrew had reached Bald Hills, and in spite of the letters
+ sent through the embassy and all the searches made, his body had not been
+ found nor was he on the list of prisoners. What was worst of all for his
+ relations was the fact that there was still a possibility of his having
+ been picked up on the battlefield by the people of the place and that he
+ might now be lying, recovering or dying, alone among strangers and unable
+ to send news of himself. The gazettes from which the old prince first
+ heard of the defeat at Austerlitz stated, as usual very briefly and
+ vaguely, that after brilliant engagements the Russians had had to retreat
+ and had made their withdrawal in perfect order. The old prince understood
+ from this official report that our army had been defeated. A week after
+ the gazette report of the battle of Austerlitz came a letter from Kutúzov
+ informing the prince of the fate that had befallen his son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your son,” wrote Kutúzov, “fell before my eyes, a standard in his hand
+ and at the head of a regiment—he fell as a hero, worthy of his
+ father and his fatherland. To the great regret of myself and of the whole
+ army it is still uncertain whether he is alive or not. I comfort myself
+ and you with the hope that your son is alive, for otherwise he would have
+ been mentioned among the officers found on the field of battle, a list of
+ whom has been sent me under flag of truce.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After receiving this news late in the evening, when he was alone in his
+ study, the old prince went for his walk as usual next morning, but he was
+ silent with his steward, the gardener, and the architect, and though he
+ looked very grim he said nothing to anyone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Princess Mary went to him at the usual hour he was working at his
+ lathe and, as usual, did not look round at her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, Princess Mary!” he said suddenly in an unnatural voice, throwing down
+ his chisel. (The wheel continued to revolve by its own impetus, and
+ Princess Mary long remembered the dying creak of that wheel, which merged
+ in her memory with what followed.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She approached him, saw his face, and something gave way within her. Her
+ eyes grew dim. By the expression of her father’s face, not sad, not
+ crushed, but angry and working unnaturally, she saw that hanging over her
+ and about to crush her was some terrible misfortune, the worst in life,
+ one she had not yet experienced, irreparable and incomprehensible—the
+ death of one she loved.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Father! Andrew!”—said the ungraceful, awkward princess with such an
+ indescribable charm of sorrow and self-forgetfulness that her father could
+ not bear her look but turned away with a sob.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bad news! He’s not among the prisoners nor among the killed! Kutúzov
+ writes...” and he screamed as piercingly as if he wished to drive the
+ princess away by that scream... “Killed!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess did not fall down or faint. She was already pale, but on
+ hearing these words her face changed and something brightened in her
+ beautiful, radiant eyes. It was as if joy—a supreme joy apart from
+ the joys and sorrows of this world—overflowed the great grief within
+ her. She forgot all fear of her father, went up to him, took his hand, and
+ drawing him down put her arm round his thin, scraggy neck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Father,” she said, “do not turn away from me, let us weep together.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Scoundrels! Blackguards!” shrieked the old man, turning his face away
+ from her. “Destroying the army, destroying the men! And why? Go, go and
+ tell Lise.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess sank helplessly into an armchair beside her father and wept.
+ She saw her brother now as he had been at the moment when he took leave of
+ her and of Lise, his look tender yet proud. She saw him tender and amused
+ as he was when he put on the little icon. “Did he believe? Had he repented
+ of his unbelief? Was he now there? There in the realms of eternal peace
+ and blessedness?” she thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Father, tell me how it happened,” she asked through her tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go! Go! Killed in battle, where the best of Russian men and Russia’s
+ glory were led to destruction. Go, Princess Mary. Go and tell Lise. I will
+ follow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Princess Mary returned from her father, the little princess sat
+ working and looked up with that curious expression of inner, happy calm
+ peculiar to pregnant women. It was evident that her eyes did not see
+ Princess Mary but were looking within... into herself... at something
+ joyful and mysterious taking place within her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mary,” she said, moving away from the embroidery frame and lying back,
+ “give me your hand.” She took her sister-in-law’s hand and held it below
+ her waist.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her eyes were smiling expectantly, her downy lip rose and remained lifted
+ in childlike happiness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary knelt down before her and hid her face in the folds of her
+ sister-in-law’s dress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There, there! Do you feel it? I feel so strange. And do you know, Mary, I
+ am going to love him very much,” said Lise, looking with bright and happy
+ eyes at her sister-in-law.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary could not lift her head, she was weeping.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is the matter, Mary?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing... only I feel sad... sad about Andrew,” she said, wiping away
+ her tears on her sister-in-law’s knee.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Several times in the course of the morning Princess Mary began trying to
+ prepare her sister-in-law, and every time began to cry. Unobservant as was
+ the little princess, these tears, the cause of which she did not
+ understand, agitated her. She said nothing but looked about uneasily as if
+ in search of something. Before dinner the old prince, of whom she was
+ always afraid, came into her room with a peculiarly restless and malign
+ expression and went out again without saying a word. She looked at
+ Princess Mary, then sat thinking for a while with that expression of
+ attention to something within her that is only seen in pregnant women, and
+ suddenly began to cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Has anything come from Andrew?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, you know it’s too soon for news. But my father is anxious and I feel
+ afraid.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So there’s nothing?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing,” answered Princess Mary, looking firmly with her radiant eyes at
+ her sister-in-law.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She had determined not to tell her and persuaded her father to hide the
+ terrible news from her till after her confinement, which was expected
+ within a few days. Princess Mary and the old prince each bore and hid
+ their grief in their own way. The old prince would not cherish any hope:
+ he made up his mind that Prince Andrew had been killed, and though he sent
+ an official to Austria to seek for traces of his son, he ordered a
+ monument from Moscow which he intended to erect in his own garden to his
+ memory, and he told everybody that his son had been killed. He tried not
+ to change his former way of life, but his strength failed him. He walked
+ less, ate less, slept less, and became weaker every day. Princess Mary
+ hoped. She prayed for her brother as living and was always awaiting news
+ of his return.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ “Dearest,” said the little princess after breakfast on the morning of the
+ nineteenth March, and her downy little lip rose from old habit, but as
+ sorrow was manifest in every smile, the sound of every word, and even
+ every footstep in that house since the terrible news had come, so now the
+ smile of the little princess—influenced by the general mood though
+ without knowing its cause—was such as to remind one still more of
+ the general sorrow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dearest, I’m afraid this morning’s fruschtique *—as Fóka the cook
+ calls it—has disagreed with me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Frühstück: breakfast.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “What is the matter with you, my darling? You look pale. Oh, you are very
+ pale!” said Princess Mary in alarm, running with her soft, ponderous steps
+ up to her sister-in-law.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency, should not Mary Bogdánovna be sent for?” said one of the
+ maids who was present. (Mary Bogdánovna was a midwife from the neighboring
+ town, who had been at Bald Hills for the last fortnight.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes,” assented Princess Mary, “perhaps that’s it. I’ll go. Courage, my
+ angel.” She kissed Lise and was about to leave the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, no, no!” And besides the pallor and the physical suffering on the
+ little princess’ face, an expression of childish fear of inevitable pain
+ showed itself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, it’s only indigestion?... Say it’s only indigestion, say so, Mary!
+ Say...” And the little princess began to cry capriciously like a suffering
+ child and to wring her little hands even with some affectation. Princess
+ Mary ran out of the room to fetch Mary Bogdánovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Oh!” she heard as she left the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The midwife was already on her way to meet her, rubbing her small, plump
+ white hands with an air of calm importance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mary Bogdánovna, I think it’s beginning!” said Princess Mary looking at
+ the midwife with wide-open eyes of alarm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, the Lord be thanked, Princess,” said Mary Bogdánovna, not hastening
+ her steps. “You young ladies should not know anything about it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But how is it the doctor from Moscow is not here yet?” said the princess.
+ (In accordance with Lise’s and Prince Andrew’s wishes they had sent in
+ good time to Moscow for a doctor and were expecting him at any moment.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No matter, Princess, don’t be alarmed,” said Mary Bogdánovna. “We’ll
+ manage very well without a doctor.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Five minutes later Princess Mary from her room heard something heavy being
+ carried by. She looked out. The men servants were carrying the large
+ leather sofa from Prince Andrew’s study into the bedroom. On their faces
+ was a quiet and solemn look.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary sat alone in her room listening to the sounds in the house,
+ now and then opening her door when someone passed and watching what was
+ going on in the passage. Some women passing with quiet steps in and out of
+ the bedroom glanced at the princess and turned away. She did not venture
+ to ask any questions, and shut the door again, now sitting down in her
+ easy chair, now taking her prayer book, now kneeling before the icon
+ stand. To her surprise and distress she found that her prayers did not
+ calm her excitement. Suddenly her door opened softly and her old nurse,
+ Praskóvya Sávishna, who hardly ever came to that room as the old prince
+ had forbidden it, appeared on the threshold with a shawl round her head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ve come to sit with you a bit, Másha,” said the nurse, “and here I’ve
+ brought the prince’s wedding candles to light before his saint, my angel,”
+ she said with a sigh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, nurse, I’m so glad!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “God is merciful, birdie.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The nurse lit the gilt candles before the icons and sat down by the door
+ with her knitting. Princess Mary took a book and began reading. Only when
+ footsteps or voices were heard did they look at one another, the princess
+ anxious and inquiring, the nurse encouraging. Everyone in the house was
+ dominated by the same feeling that Princess Mary experienced as she sat in
+ her room. But owing to the superstition that the fewer the people who know
+ of it the less a woman in travail suffers, everyone tried to pretend not
+ to know; no one spoke of it, but apart from the ordinary staid and
+ respectful good manners habitual in the prince’s household, a common
+ anxiety, a softening of the heart, and a consciousness that something
+ great and mysterious was being accomplished at that moment made itself
+ felt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was no laughter in the maids’ large hall. In the men servants’ hall
+ all sat waiting, silently and alert. In the outlying serfs’ quarters
+ torches and candles were burning and no one slept. The old prince,
+ stepping on his heels, paced up and down his study and sent Tíkhon to ask
+ Mary Bogdánovna what news.—“Say only that ‘the prince told me to
+ ask,’ and come and tell me her answer.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Inform the prince that labor has begun,” said Mary Bogdánovna, giving the
+ messenger a significant look.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Tíkhon went and told the prince.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very good!” said the prince closing the door behind him, and Tíkhon did
+ not hear the slightest sound from the study after that.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After a while he re-entered it as if to snuff the candles, and, seeing the
+ prince was lying on the sofa, looked at him, noticed his perturbed face,
+ shook his head, and going up to him silently kissed him on the shoulder
+ and left the room without snuffing the candles or saying why he had
+ entered. The most solemn mystery in the world continued its course.
+ Evening passed, night came, and the feeling of suspense and softening of
+ heart in the presence of the unfathomable did not lessen but increased. No
+ one slept.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was one of those March nights when winter seems to wish to resume its
+ sway and scatters its last snows and storms with desperate fury. A relay
+ of horses had been sent up the highroad to meet the German doctor from
+ Moscow who was expected every moment, and men on horseback with lanterns
+ were sent to the crossroads to guide him over the country road with its
+ hollows and snow-covered pools of water.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary had long since put aside her book: she sat silent, her
+ luminous eyes fixed on her nurse’s wrinkled face (every line of which she
+ knew so well), on the lock of gray hair that escaped from under the
+ kerchief, and the loose skin that hung under her chin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nurse Sávishna, knitting in hand, was telling in low tones, scarcely
+ hearing or understanding her own words, what she had told hundreds of
+ times before: how the late princess had given birth to Princess Mary in
+ Kishenëv with only a Moldavian peasant woman to help instead of a midwife.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “God is merciful, doctors are never needed,” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly a gust of wind beat violently against the casement of the window,
+ from which the double frame had been removed (by order of the prince, one
+ window frame was removed in each room as soon as the larks returned), and,
+ forcing open a loosely closed latch, set the damask curtain flapping and
+ blew out the candle with its chill, snowy draft. Princess Mary shuddered;
+ her nurse, putting down the stocking she was knitting, went to the window
+ and leaning out tried to catch the open casement. The cold wind flapped
+ the ends of her kerchief and her loose locks of gray hair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Princess, my dear, there’s someone driving up the avenue!” she said,
+ holding the casement and not closing it. “With lanterns. Most likely the
+ doctor.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, my God! thank God!” said Princess Mary. “I must go and meet him, he
+ does not know Russian.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary threw a shawl over her head and ran to meet the newcomer. As
+ she was crossing the anteroom she saw through the window a carriage with
+ lanterns, standing at the entrance. She went out on the stairs. On a
+ banister post stood a tallow candle which guttered in the draft. On the
+ landing below, Philip, the footman, stood looking scared and holding
+ another candle. Still lower, beyond the turn of the staircase, one could
+ hear the footstep of someone in thick felt boots, and a voice that seemed
+ familiar to Princess Mary was saying something.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank God!” said the voice. “And Father?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gone to bed,” replied the voice of Demyán the house steward, who was
+ downstairs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then the voice said something more, Demyán replied, and the steps in the
+ felt boots approached the unseen bend of the staircase more rapidly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s Andrew!” thought Princess Mary. “No it can’t be, that would be too
+ extraordinary,” and at the very moment she thought this, the face and
+ figure of Prince Andrew, in a fur cloak the deep collar of which covered
+ with snow, appeared on the landing where the footman stood with the
+ candle. Yes, it was he, pale, thin, with a changed and strangely softened
+ but agitated expression on his face. He came up the stairs and embraced
+ his sister.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You did not get my letter?” he asked, and not waiting for a reply—which
+ he would not have received, for the princess was unable to speak—he
+ turned back, rapidly mounted the stairs again with the doctor who had
+ entered the hall after him (they had met at the last post station), and
+ again embraced his sister.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a strange fate, Másha darling!” And having taken off his cloak and
+ felt boots, he went to the little princess’ apartment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ The little princess lay supported by pillows, with a white cap on her head
+ (the pains had just left her). Strands of her black hair lay round her
+ inflamed and perspiring cheeks, her charming rosy mouth with its downy lip
+ was open and she was smiling joyfully. Prince Andrew entered and paused
+ facing her at the foot of the sofa on which she was lying. Her glittering
+ eyes, filled with childlike fear and excitement, rested on him without
+ changing their expression. “I love you all and have done no harm to
+ anyone; why must I suffer so? Help me!” her look seemed to say. She saw
+ her husband, but did not realize the significance of his appearance before
+ her now. Prince Andrew went round the sofa and kissed her forehead.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My darling!” he said—a word he had never used to her before. “God
+ is merciful....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She looked at him inquiringly and with childlike reproach.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I expected help from you and I get none, none from you either!” said her
+ eyes. She was not surprised at his having come; she did not realize that
+ he had come. His coming had nothing to do with her sufferings or with
+ their relief. The pangs began again and Mary Bogdánovna advised Prince
+ Andrew to leave the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctor entered. Prince Andrew went out and, meeting Princess Mary,
+ again joined her. They began talking in whispers, but their talk broke off
+ at every moment. They waited and listened.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go, dear,” said Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew went again to his wife and sat waiting in the room next to
+ hers. A woman came from the bedroom with a frightened face and became
+ confused when she saw Prince Andrew. He covered his face with his hands
+ and remained so for some minutes. Piteous, helpless, animal moans came
+ through the door. Prince Andrew got up, went to the door, and tried to
+ open it. Someone was holding it shut.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You can’t come in! You can’t!” said a terrified voice from within.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He began pacing the room. The screaming ceased, and a few more seconds
+ went by. Then suddenly a terrible shriek—it could not be hers, she
+ could not scream like that—came from the bedroom. Prince Andrew ran
+ to the door; the scream ceased and he heard the wail of an infant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What have they taken a baby in there for?” thought Prince Andrew in the
+ first second. “A baby? What baby...? Why is there a baby there? Or is the
+ baby born?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then suddenly he realized the joyful significance of that wail; tears
+ choked him, and leaning his elbows on the window sill he began to cry,
+ sobbing like a child. The door opened. The doctor with his shirt sleeves
+ tucked up, without a coat, pale and with a trembling jaw, came out of the
+ room. Prince Andrew turned to him, but the doctor gave him a bewildered
+ look and passed by without a word. A woman rushed out and seeing Prince
+ Andrew stopped, hesitating on the threshold. He went into his wife’s room.
+ She was lying dead, in the same position he had seen her in five minutes
+ before and, despite the fixed eyes and the pallor of the cheeks, the same
+ expression was on her charming childlike face with its upper lip covered
+ with tiny black hair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I love you all, and have done no harm to anyone; and what have you done
+ to me?”—said her charming, pathetic, dead face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In a corner of the room something red and tiny gave a grunt and squealed
+ in Mary Bogdánovna’s trembling white hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Two hours later Prince Andrew, stepping softly, went into his father’s
+ room. The old man already knew everything. He was standing close to the
+ door and as soon as it opened his rough old arms closed like a vise round
+ his son’s neck, and without a word he began to sob like a child.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Three days later the little princess was buried, and Prince Andrew went up
+ the steps to where the coffin stood, to give her the farewell kiss. And
+ there in the coffin was the same face, though with closed eyes. “Ah, what
+ have you done to me?” it still seemed to say, and Prince Andrew felt that
+ something gave way in his soul and that he was guilty of a sin he could
+ neither remedy nor forget. He could not weep. The old man too came up and
+ kissed the waxen little hands that lay quietly crossed one on the other on
+ her breast, and to him, too, her face seemed to say: “Ah, what have you
+ done to me, and why?” And at the sight the old man turned angrily away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Another five days passed, and then the young Prince Nicholas Andréevich
+ was baptized. The wet nurse supported the coverlet with her chin, while
+ the priest with a goose feather anointed the boy’s little red and wrinkled
+ soles and palms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His grandfather, who was his godfather, trembling and afraid of dropping
+ him, carried the infant round the battered tin font and handed him over to
+ the godmother, Princess Mary. Prince Andrew sat in another room, faint
+ with fear lest the baby should be drowned in the font, and awaited the
+ termination of the ceremony. He looked up joyfully at the baby when the
+ nurse brought it to him and nodded approval when she told him that the wax
+ with the baby’s hair had not sunk in the font but had floated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ Rostóv’s share in Dólokhov’s duel with Bezúkhov was hushed up by the
+ efforts of the old count, and instead of being degraded to the ranks as he
+ expected he was appointed an adjutant to the governor general of Moscow.
+ As a result he could not go to the country with the rest of the family,
+ but was kept all summer in Moscow by his new duties. Dólokhov recovered,
+ and Rostóv became very friendly with him during his convalescence.
+ Dólokhov lay ill at his mother’s who loved him passionately and tenderly,
+ and old Mary Ivánovna, who had grown fond of Rostóv for his friendship to
+ her Fédya, often talked to him about her son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, Count,” she would say, “he is too noble and pure-souled for our
+ present, depraved world. No one now loves virtue; it seems like a reproach
+ to everyone. Now tell me, Count, was it right, was it honorable, of
+ Bezúkhov? And Fédya, with his noble spirit, loved him and even now never
+ says a word against him. Those pranks in Petersburg when they played some
+ tricks on a policeman, didn’t they do it together? And there! Bezúkhov got
+ off scotfree, while Fédya had to bear the whole burden on his shoulders.
+ Fancy what he had to go through! It’s true he has been reinstated, but how
+ could they fail to do that? I think there were not many such gallant sons
+ of the fatherland out there as he. And now—this duel! Have these
+ people no feeling, or honor? Knowing him to be an only son, to challenge
+ him and shoot so straight! It’s well God had mercy on us. And what was it
+ for? Who doesn’t have intrigues nowadays? Why, if he was so jealous, as I
+ see things he should have shown it sooner, but he lets it go on for
+ months. And then to call him out, reckoning on Fédya not fighting because
+ he owed him money! What baseness! What meanness! I know you understand
+ Fédya, my dear count; that, believe me, is why I am so fond of you. Few
+ people do understand him. He is such a lofty, heavenly soul!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov himself during his convalescence spoke to Rostóv in a way no one
+ would have expected of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know people consider me a bad man!” he said. “Let them! I don’t care a
+ straw about anyone but those I love; but those I love, I love so that I
+ would give my life for them, and the others I’d throttle if they stood in
+ my way. I have an adored, a priceless mother, and two or three friends—you
+ among them—and as for the rest I only care about them in so far as
+ they are harmful or useful. And most of them are harmful, especially the
+ women. Yes, dear boy,” he continued, “I have met loving, noble,
+ high-minded men, but I have not yet met any women—countesses or
+ cooks—who were not venal. I have not yet met that divine purity and
+ devotion I look for in women. If I found such a one I’d give my life for
+ her! But those!...” and he made a gesture of contempt. “And believe me, if
+ I still value my life it is only because I still hope to meet such a
+ divine creature, who will regenerate, purify, and elevate me. But you
+ don’t understand it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, yes, I quite understand,” answered Rostóv, who was under his new
+ friend’s influence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the autumn the Rostóvs returned to Moscow. Early in the winter Denísov
+ also came back and stayed with them. The first half of the winter of 1806,
+ which Nicholas Rostóv spent in Moscow, was one of the happiest, merriest
+ times for him and the whole family. Nicholas brought many young men to his
+ parents’ house. Véra was a handsome girl of twenty; Sónya a girl of
+ sixteen with all the charm of an opening flower; Natásha, half grown up
+ and half child, was now childishly amusing, now girlishly enchanting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that time in the Rostóvs’ house there prevailed an amorous atmosphere
+ characteristic of homes where there are very young and very charming
+ girls. Every young man who came to the house—seeing those
+ impressionable, smiling young faces (smiling probably at their own
+ happiness), feeling the eager bustle around him, and hearing the fitful
+ bursts of song and music and the inconsequent but friendly prattle of
+ young girls ready for anything and full of hope—experienced the same
+ feeling; sharing with the young folk of the Rostóvs’ household a readiness
+ to fall in love and an expectation of happiness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Among the young men introduced by Rostóv one of the first was Dólokhov,
+ whom everyone in the house liked except Natásha. She almost quarreled with
+ her brother about him. She insisted that he was a bad man, and that in the
+ duel with Bezúkhov, Pierre was right and Dólokhov wrong, and further that
+ he was disagreeable and unnatural.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There’s nothing for me to understand,” she cried out with resolute
+ self-will, “he is wicked and heartless. There now, I like your Denísov
+ though he is a rake and all that, still I like him; so you see I do
+ understand. I don’t know how to put it... with this one everything is
+ calculated, and I don’t like that. But Denísov...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, Denísov is quite different,” replied Nicholas, implying that even
+ Denísov was nothing compared to Dólokhov—“you must understand what a
+ soul there is in Dólokhov, you should see him with his mother. What a
+ heart!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, I don’t know about that, but I am uncomfortable with him. And do
+ you know he has fallen in love with Sónya?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What nonsense...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’m certain of it; you’ll see.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha’s prediction proved true. Dólokhov, who did not usually care for
+ the society of ladies, began to come often to the house, and the question
+ for whose sake he came (though no one spoke of it) was soon settled. He
+ came because of Sónya. And Sónya, though she would never have dared to say
+ so, knew it and blushed scarlet every time Dólokhov appeared.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov often dined at the Rostóvs’, never missed a performance at which
+ they were present, and went to Iogel’s balls for young people which the
+ Rostóvs always attended. He was pointedly attentive to Sónya and looked at
+ her in such a way that not only could she not bear his glances without
+ coloring, but even the old countess and Natásha blushed when they saw his
+ looks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was evident that this strange, strong man was under the irresistible
+ influence of the dark, graceful girl who loved another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv noticed something new in Dólokhov’s relations with Sónya, but he
+ did not explain to himself what these new relations were. “They’re always
+ in love with someone,” he thought of Sónya and Natásha. But he was not as
+ much at ease with Sónya and Dólokhov as before and was less frequently at
+ home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the autumn of 1806 everybody had again begun talking of the war with
+ Napoleon with even greater warmth than the year before. Orders were given
+ to raise recruits, ten men in every thousand for the regular army, and
+ besides this, nine men in every thousand for the militia. Everywhere
+ Bonaparte was anathematized and in Moscow nothing but the coming war was
+ talked of. For the Rostóv family the whole interest of these preparations
+ for war lay in the fact that Nicholas would not hear of remaining in
+ Moscow, and only awaited the termination of Denísov’s furlough after
+ Christmas to return with him to their regiment. His approaching departure
+ did not prevent his amusing himself, but rather gave zest to his
+ pleasures. He spent the greater part of his time away from home, at
+ dinners, parties, and balls.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ On the third day after Christmas Nicholas dined at home, a thing he had
+ rarely done of late. It was a grand farewell dinner, as he and Denísov
+ were leaving to join their regiment after Epiphany. About twenty people
+ were present, including Dólokhov and Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Never had love been so much in the air, and never had the amorous
+ atmosphere made itself so strongly felt in the Rostóvs’ house as at this
+ holiday time. “Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is
+ the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we
+ are interested in here,” said the spirit of the place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas, having as usual exhausted two pairs of horses, without visiting
+ all the places he meant to go to and where he had been invited, returned
+ home just before dinner. As soon as he entered he noticed and felt the
+ tension of the amorous air in the house, and also noticed a curious
+ embarrassment among some of those present. Sónya, Dólokhov, and the old
+ countess were especially disturbed, and to a lesser degree Natásha.
+ Nicholas understood that something must have happened between Sónya and
+ Dólokhov before dinner, and with the kindly sensitiveness natural to him
+ was very gentle and wary with them both at dinner. On that same evening
+ there was to be one of the balls that Iogel (the dancing master) gave for
+ his pupils during the holidays.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nicholas, will you come to Iogel’s? Please do!” said Natásha. “He asked
+ you, and Vasíli Dmítrich * is also going.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Denísov.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Where would I not go at the countess’ command!” said Denísov, who at the
+ Rostóvs’ had jocularly assumed the role of Natásha’s knight. “I’m even
+ weady to dance the pas de châle .”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If I have time,” answered Nicholas. “But I promised the Arkhárovs; they
+ have a party.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And you?” he asked Dólokhov, but as soon as he had asked the question he
+ noticed that it should not have been put.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Perhaps,” coldly and angrily replied Dólokhov, glancing at Sónya, and,
+ scowling, he gave Nicholas just such a look as he had given Pierre at the
+ club dinner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There is something up,” thought Nicholas, and he was further confirmed in
+ this conclusion by the fact that Dólokhov left immediately after dinner.
+ He called Natásha and asked her what was the matter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I was looking for you,” said Natásha running out to him. “I told you,
+ but you would not believe it,” she said triumphantly. “He has proposed to
+ Sónya!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Little as Nicholas had occupied himself with Sónya of late, something
+ seemed to give way within him at this news. Dólokhov was a suitable and in
+ some respects a brilliant match for the dowerless, orphan girl. From the
+ point of view of the old countess and of society it was out of the
+ question for her to refuse him. And therefore Nicholas’ first feeling on
+ hearing the news was one of anger with Sónya.... He tried to say, “That’s
+ capital; of course she’ll forget her childish promises and accept the
+ offer,” but before he had time to say it Natásha began again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And fancy! she refused him quite definitely!” adding, after a pause, “she
+ told him she loved another.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, my Sónya could not have done otherwise!” thought Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Much as Mamma pressed her, she refused, and I know she won’t change once
+ she has said...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And Mamma pressed her!” said Nicholas reproachfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” said Natásha. “Do you know, Nicholas—don’t be angry—but
+ I know you will not marry her. I know, heaven knows how, but I know for
+ certain that you won’t marry her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now you don’t know that at all!” said Nicholas. “But I must talk to her.
+ What a darling Sónya is!” he added with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, she is indeed a darling! I’ll send her to you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Natásha kissed her brother and ran away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A minute later Sónya came in with a frightened, guilty, and scared look.
+ Nicholas went up to her and kissed her hand. This was the first time since
+ his return that they had talked alone and about their love.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sophie,” he began, timidly at first and then more and more boldly, “if
+ you wish to refuse one who is not only a brilliant and advantageous match
+ but a splendid, noble fellow... he is my friend...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have already refused,” she said hurriedly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you are refusing for my sake, I am afraid that I...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya again interrupted. She gave him an imploring, frightened look.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nicholas, don’t tell me that!” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, but I must. It may be arrogant of me, but still it is best to say it.
+ If you refuse him on my account, I must tell you the whole truth. I love
+ you, and I think I love you more than anyone else....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is enough for me,” said Sónya, blushing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, but I have been in love a thousand times and shall fall in love
+ again, though for no one have I such a feeling of friendship, confidence,
+ and love as I have for you. Then I am young. Mamma does not wish it. In a
+ word, I make no promise. And I beg you to consider Dólokhov’s offer,” he
+ said, articulating his friend’s name with difficulty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t say that to me! I want nothing. I love you as a brother and always
+ shall, and I want nothing more.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are an angel: I am not worthy of you, but I am afraid of misleading
+ you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Nicholas again kissed her hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ Iogel’s were the most enjoyable balls in Moscow. So said the mothers as
+ they watched their young people executing their newly learned steps, and
+ so said the youths and maidens themselves as they danced till they were
+ ready to drop, and so said the grown-up young men and women who came to
+ these balls with an air of condescension and found them most enjoyable.
+ That year two marriages had come of these balls. The two pretty young
+ Princesses Gorchakóv met suitors there and were married and so further
+ increased the fame of these dances. What distinguished them from others
+ was the absence of host or hostess and the presence of the good-natured
+ Iogel, flying about like a feather and bowing according to the rules of
+ his art, as he collected the tickets from all his visitors. There was the
+ fact that only those came who wished to dance and amuse themselves as
+ girls of thirteen and fourteen do who are wearing long dresses for the
+ first time. With scarcely any exceptions they all were, or seemed to be,
+ pretty—so rapturous were their smiles and so sparkling their eyes.
+ Sometimes the best of the pupils, of whom Natásha, who was exceptionally
+ graceful, was first, even danced the pas de châle , but at this last ball
+ only the écossaise , the anglaise , and the mazurka, which was just coming
+ into fashion, were danced. Iogel had taken a ballroom in Bezúkhov’s house,
+ and the ball, as everyone said, was a great success. There were many
+ pretty girls and the Rostóv girls were among the prettiest. They were both
+ particularly happy and gay. That evening, proud of Dólokhov’s proposal,
+ her refusal, and her explanation with Nicholas, Sónya twirled about before
+ she left home so that the maid could hardly get her hair plaited, and she
+ was transparently radiant with impulsive joy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha no less proud of her first long dress and of being at a real ball
+ was even happier. They were both dressed in white muslin with pink
+ ribbons.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha fell in love the very moment she entered the ballroom. She was not
+ in love with anyone in particular, but with everyone. Whatever person she
+ happened to look at she was in love with for that moment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, how delightful it is!” she kept saying, running up to Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas and Denísov were walking up and down, looking with kindly
+ patronage at the dancers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How sweet she is—she will be a weal beauty!” said Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Countess Natásha,” answered Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And how she dances! What gwace!” he said again after a pause.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who are you talking about?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “About your sister,” ejaculated Denísov testily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear count, you were one of my best pupils—you must dance,”
+ said little Iogel coming up to Nicholas. “Look how many charming young
+ ladies—” He turned with the same request to Denísov who was also a
+ former pupil of his.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, my dear fellow, I’ll be a wallflower,” said Denísov. “Don’t you
+ wecollect what bad use I made of your lessons?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh no!” said Iogel, hastening to reassure him. “You were only
+ inattentive, but you had talent—oh yes, you had talent!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The band struck up the newly introduced mazurka. Nicholas could not
+ refuse Iogel and asked Sónya to dance. Denísov sat down by the old
+ ladies and, leaning on his saber and beating time with his foot, told
+ them something funny and kept them amused, while he watched the young
+ people dancing, Iogel with Natásha, his pride and his best pupil, were
+ the first couple. Noiselessly, skillfully stepping with his little feet
+ in low shoes, Iogel flew first across the hall with Natásha, who, though
+ shy, went on carefully executing her steps. Denísov did not take
+ his eyes off her and beat time with his saber in a way that clearly
+ indicated that if he was not dancing it was because he would not and not
+ because he could not. In the middle of a figure he beckoned to Rostóv
+ who was passing:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This is not at all the thing,” he said. “What sort of Polish mazuwka is
+ this? But she does dance splendidly.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Knowing that Denísov had a reputation even in Poland for the masterly way
+ in which he danced the mazurka, Nicholas ran up to Natásha:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go and choose Denísov. He is a real dancer, a wonder!” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When it came to Natásha’s turn to choose a partner, she rose and, tripping
+ rapidly across in her little shoes trimmed with bows, ran timidly to the
+ corner where Denísov sat. She saw that everybody was looking at her and
+ waiting. Nicholas saw that Denísov was refusing though he smiled
+ delightedly. He ran up to them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Please, Vasíli Dmítrich,” Natásha was saying, “do come!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh no, let me off, Countess,” Denísov replied.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then, Váska,” said Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They coax me as if I were Váska the cat!” said Denísov jokingly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll sing for you a whole evening,” said Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, the faiwy! She can do anything with me!” said Denísov, and he
+ unhooked his saber. He came out from behind the chairs, clasped his
+ partner’s hand firmly, threw back his head, and advanced his foot, waiting
+ for the beat. Only on horse back and in the mazurka was Denísov’s short
+ stature not noticeable and he looked the fine fellow he felt himself to
+ be. At the right beat of the music he looked sideways at his partner with
+ a merry and triumphant air, suddenly stamped with one foot, bounded from
+ the floor like a ball, and flew round the room taking his partner with
+ him. He glided silently on one foot half across the room, and seeming not
+ to notice the chairs was dashing straight at them, when suddenly, clinking
+ his spurs and spreading out his legs, he stopped short on his heels, stood
+ so a second, stamped on the spot clanking his spurs, whirled rapidly
+ round, and, striking his left heel against his right, flew round again in
+ a circle. Natásha guessed what he meant to do, and abandoning herself to
+ him followed his lead hardly knowing how. First he spun her round, holding
+ her now with his left, now with his right hand, then falling on one knee
+ he twirled her round him, and again jumping up, dashed so impetuously
+ forward that it seemed as if he would rush through the whole suite of
+ rooms without drawing breath, and then he suddenly stopped and performed
+ some new and unexpected steps. When at last, smartly whirling his partner
+ round in front of her chair, he drew up with a click of his spurs and
+ bowed to her, Natásha did not even make him a curtsy. She fixed her eyes
+ on him in amazement, smiling as if she did not recognize him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What does this mean?” she brought out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Although Iogel did not acknowledge this to be the real mazurka, everyone
+ was delighted with Denísov’s skill, he was asked again and again as a
+ partner, and the old men began smilingly to talk about Poland and the good
+ old days. Denísov, flushed after the mazurka and mopping himself with his
+ handkerchief, sat down by Natásha and did not leave her for the rest of
+ the evening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ For two days after that Rostóv did not see Dólokhov at his own or at
+ Dólokhov’s home: on the third day he received a note from him:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As I do not intend to be at your house again for reasons you know of, and
+ am going to rejoin my regiment, I am giving a farewell supper tonight to
+ my friends—come to the English Hotel.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ About ten o’clock Rostóv went to the English Hotel straight from the
+ theater, where he had been with his family and Denísov. He was at once
+ shown to the best room, which Dólokhov had taken for that evening. Some
+ twenty men were gathered round a table at which Dólokhov sat between two
+ candles. On the table was a pile of gold and paper money, and he was
+ keeping the bank. Rostóv had not seen him since his proposal and Sónya’s
+ refusal and felt uncomfortable at the thought of how they would meet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov’s clear, cold glance met Rostóv as soon as he entered the door,
+ as though he had long expected him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s a long time since we met,” he said. “Thanks for coming. I’ll just
+ finish dealing, and then Ilyúshka will come with his chorus.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I called once or twice at your house,” said Rostóv, reddening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov made no reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You may punt,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv recalled at that moment a strange conversation he had once had with
+ Dólokhov. “None but fools trust to luck in play,” Dólokhov had then said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Or are you afraid to play with me?” Dólokhov now asked as if guessing
+ Rostóv’s thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Beneath his smile Rostóv saw in him the mood he had shown at the club
+ dinner and at other times, when as if tired of everyday life he had felt a
+ need to escape from it by some strange, and usually cruel, action.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv felt ill at ease. He tried, but failed, to find some joke with
+ which to reply to Dólokhov’s words. But before he had thought of anything,
+ Dólokhov, looking straight in his face, said slowly and deliberately so
+ that everyone could hear:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you remember we had a talk about cards... ‘He’s a fool who trusts to
+ luck, one should make certain,’ and I want to try.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To try his luck or the certainty?” Rostóv asked himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, you’d better not play,” Dólokhov added, and springing a new pack of
+ cards said: “Bank, gentlemen!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Moving the money forward he prepared to deal. Rostóv sat down by his side
+ and at first did not play. Dólokhov kept glancing at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why don’t you play?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And strange to say Nicholas felt that he could not help taking up a card,
+ putting a small stake on it, and beginning to play.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have no money with me,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll trust you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv staked five rubles on a card and lost, staked again, and again
+ lost. Dólokhov “killed,” that is, beat, ten cards of Rostóv’s running.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gentlemen,” said Dólokhov after he had dealt for some time. “Please place
+ your money on the cards or I may get muddled in the reckoning.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One of the players said he hoped he might be trusted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, you might, but I am afraid of getting the accounts mixed. So I ask
+ you to put the money on your cards,” replied Dólokhov. “Don’t stint
+ yourself, we’ll settle afterwards,” he added, turning to Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The game continued; a waiter kept handing round champagne.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All Rostóv’s cards were beaten and he had eight hundred rubles scored up
+ against him. He wrote “800 rubles” on a card, but while the waiter filled
+ his glass he changed his mind and altered it to his usual stake of twenty
+ rubles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Leave it,” said Dólokhov, though he did not seem to be even looking at
+ Rostóv, “you’ll win it back all the sooner. I lose to the others but win
+ from you. Or are you afraid of me?” he asked again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv submitted. He let the eight hundred remain and laid down a seven of
+ hearts with a torn corner, which he had picked up from the floor. He well
+ remembered that seven afterwards. He laid down the seven of hearts, on
+ which with a broken bit of chalk he had written “800 rubles” in clear
+ upright figures; he emptied the glass of warm champagne that was handed
+ him, smiled at Dólokhov’s words, and with a sinking heart, waiting for a
+ seven to turn up, gazed at Dólokhov’s hands which held the pack. Much
+ depended on Rostóv’s winning or losing on that seven of hearts. On the
+ previous Sunday the old count had given his son two thousand rubles, and
+ though he always disliked speaking of money difficulties had told Nicholas
+ that this was all he could let him have till May, and asked him to be more
+ economical this time. Nicholas had replied that it would be more than
+ enough for him and that he gave his word of honor not to take anything
+ more till the spring. Now only twelve hundred rubles was left of that
+ money, so that this seven of hearts meant for him not only the loss of
+ sixteen hundred rubles, but the necessity of going back on his word. With
+ a sinking heart he watched Dólokhov’s hands and thought, “Now then, make
+ haste and let me have this card and I’ll take my cap and drive home to
+ supper with Denísov, Natásha, and Sónya, and will certainly never touch a
+ card again.” At that moment his home life, jokes with Pétya, talks with
+ Sónya, duets with Natásha, piquet with his father, and even his
+ comfortable bed in the house on the Povarskáya rose before him with such
+ vividness, clearness, and charm that it seemed as if it were all a lost
+ and unappreciated bliss, long past. He could not conceive that a stupid
+ chance, letting the seven be dealt to the right rather than to the left,
+ might deprive him of all this happiness, newly appreciated and newly
+ illumined, and plunge him into the depths of unknown and undefined misery.
+ That could not be, yet he awaited with a sinking heart the movement of
+ Dólokhov’s hands. Those broad, reddish hands, with hairy wrists visible
+ from under the shirt cuffs, laid down the pack and took up a glass and a
+ pipe that were handed him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So you are not afraid to play with me?” repeated Dólokhov, and as if
+ about to tell a good story he put down the cards, leaned back in his
+ chair, and began deliberately with a smile:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, gentlemen, I’ve been told there’s a rumor going about Moscow that
+ I’m a sharper, so I advise you to be careful.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come now, deal!” exclaimed Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, those Moscow gossips!” said Dólokhov, and he took up the cards with a
+ smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aah!” Rostóv almost screamed lifting both hands to his head. The seven he
+ needed was lying uppermost, the first card in the pack. He had lost more
+ than he could pay.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Still, don’t ruin yourself!” said Dólokhov with a side glance at Rostóv
+ as he continued to deal.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV
+ 
+ 
+ An hour and a half later most of the players were but little interested in
+ their own play.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The whole interest was concentrated on Rostóv. Instead of sixteen hundred
+ rubles he had a long column of figures scored against him, which he had
+ reckoned up to ten thousand, but that now, as he vaguely supposed, must
+ have risen to fifteen thousand. In reality it already exceeded twenty
+ thousand rubles. Dólokhov was no longer listening to stories or telling
+ them, but followed every movement of Rostóv’s hands and occasionally ran
+ his eyes over the score against him. He had decided to play until that
+ score reached forty-three thousand. He had fixed on that number because
+ forty-three was the sum of his and Sónya’s joint ages. Rostóv, leaning his
+ head on both hands, sat at the table which was scrawled over with figures,
+ wet with spilled wine, and littered with cards. One tormenting impression
+ did not leave him: that those broad-boned reddish hands with hairy wrists
+ visible from under the shirt sleeves, those hands which he loved and
+ hated, held him in their power.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Six hundred rubles, ace, a corner, a nine... winning it back’s
+ impossible... Oh, how pleasant it was at home!... The knave, double or
+ quits... it can’t be!... And why is he doing this to me?” Rostóv pondered.
+ Sometimes he staked a large sum, but Dólokhov refused to accept it and
+ fixed the stake himself. Nicholas submitted to him, and at one moment
+ prayed to God as he had done on the battlefield at the bridge over the
+ Enns, and then guessed that the card that came first to hand from the
+ crumpled heap under the table would save him, now counted the cords on his
+ coat and took a card with that number and tried staking the total of his
+ losses on it, then he looked round for aid from the other players, or
+ peered at the now cold face of Dólokhov and tried to read what was passing
+ in his mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He knows of course what this loss means to me. He can’t want my ruin.
+ Wasn’t he my friend? Wasn’t I fond of him? But it’s not his fault. What’s
+ he to do if he has such luck?... And it’s not my fault either,” he thought
+ to himself, “I have done nothing wrong. Have I killed anyone, or insulted
+ or wished harm to anyone? Why such a terrible misfortune? And when did it
+ begin? Such a little while ago I came to this table with the thought of
+ winning a hundred rubles to buy that casket for Mamma’s name day and then
+ going home. I was so happy, so free, so lighthearted! And I did not
+ realize how happy I was! When did that end and when did this new, terrible
+ state of things begin? What marked the change? I sat all the time in this
+ same place at this table, chose and placed cards, and watched those
+ broad-boned agile hands in the same way. When did it happen and what has
+ happened? I am well and strong and still the same and in the same place.
+ No, it can’t be! Surely it will all end in nothing!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was flushed and bathed in perspiration, though the room was not hot.
+ His face was terrible and piteous to see, especially from its helpless
+ efforts to seem calm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The score against him reached the fateful sum of forty-three thousand.
+ Rostóv had just prepared a card, by bending the corner of which he meant
+ to double the three thousand just put down to his score, when Dólokhov,
+ slamming down the pack of cards, put it aside and began rapidly adding up
+ the total of Rostóv’s debt, breaking the chalk as he marked the figures in
+ his clear, bold hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Supper, it’s time for supper! And here are the gypsies!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some swarthy men and women were really entering from the cold outside and
+ saying something in their gypsy accents. Nicholas understood that it was
+ all over; but he said in an indifferent tone:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, won’t you go on? I had a splendid card all ready,” as if it were
+ the fun of the game which interested him most.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s all up! I’m lost!” thought he. “Now a bullet through my brain—that’s
+ all that’s left me!” And at the same time he said in a cheerful voice:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come now, just this one more little card!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right!” said Dólokhov, having finished the addition. “All right!
+ Twenty-one rubles,” he said, pointing to the figure twenty-one by which
+ the total exceeded the round sum of forty-three thousand; and taking up a
+ pack he prepared to deal. Rostóv submissively unbent the corner of his
+ card and, instead of the six thousand he had intended, carefully wrote
+ twenty-one.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s all the same to me,” he said. “I only want to see whether you will
+ let me win this ten, or beat it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov began to deal seriously. Oh, how Rostóv detested at that moment
+ those hands with their short reddish fingers and hairy wrists, which held
+ him in their power.... The ten fell to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You owe forty-three thousand, Count,” said Dólokhov, and stretching
+ himself he rose from the table. “One does get tired sitting so long,” he
+ added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I’m tired too,” said Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov cut him short, as if to remind him that it was not for him to
+ jest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When am I to receive the money, Count?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv, flushing, drew Dólokhov into the next room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I cannot pay it all immediately. Will you take an I.O.U.?” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I say, Rostóv,” said Dólokhov clearly, smiling and looking Nicholas
+ straight in the eyes, “you know the saying, ‘Lucky in love, unlucky at
+ cards.’ Your cousin is in love with you, I know.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, it’s terrible to feel oneself so in this man’s power,” thought
+ Rostóv. He knew what a shock he would inflict on his father and mother by
+ the news of this loss, he knew what a relief it would be to escape it all,
+ and felt that Dólokhov knew that he could save him from all this shame and
+ sorrow, but wanted now to play with him as a cat does with a mouse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your cousin...” Dólokhov started to say, but Nicholas interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My cousin has nothing to do with this and it’s not necessary to mention
+ her!” he exclaimed fiercely.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then when am I to have it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tomorrow,” replied Rostóv and left the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV
+ 
+ 
+ To say “tomorrow” and keep up a dignified tone was not difficult, but to
+ go home alone, see his sisters, brother, mother, and father, confess and
+ ask for money he had no right to after giving his word of honor, was
+ terrible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At home, they had not yet gone to bed. The young people, after returning
+ from the theater, had had supper and were grouped round the clavichord. As
+ soon as Nicholas entered, he was enfolded in that poetic atmosphere of
+ love which pervaded the Rostóv household that winter and, now after
+ Dólokhov’s proposal and Iogel’s ball, seemed to have grown thicker round
+ Sónya and Natásha as the air does before a thunderstorm. Sónya and
+ Natásha, in the light-blue dresses they had worn at the theater, looking
+ pretty and conscious of it, were standing by the clavichord, happy and
+ smiling. Véra was playing chess with Shinshín in the drawing room. The old
+ countess, waiting for the return of her husband and son, sat playing
+ patience with the old gentlewoman who lived in their house. Denísov, with
+ sparkling eyes and ruffled hair, sat at the clavichord striking chords
+ with his short fingers, his legs thrown back and his eyes rolling as he
+ sang, with his small, husky, but true voice, some verses called
+ “Enchantress,” which he had composed, and to which he was trying to fit
+ music:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Enchantress, say, to my forsaken lyre
+
+ What magic power is this recalls me still?
+
+ What spark has set my inmost soul on fire,
+
+ What is this bliss that makes my fingers thrill?
+
+
+
+ 
+ He was singing in passionate tones, gazing with his sparkling black-agate
+ eyes at the frightened and happy Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Splendid! Excellent!” exclaimed Natásha. “Another verse,” she said,
+ without noticing Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Everything’s still the same with them,” thought Nicholas, glancing into
+ the drawing room, where he saw Véra and his mother with the old lady.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, and here’s Nicholas!” cried Natásha, running up to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is Papa at home?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am so glad you’ve come!” said Natásha, without answering him. “We are
+ enjoying ourselves! Vasíli Dmítrich is staying a day longer for my sake!
+ Did you know?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Papa is not back yet,” said Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nicholas, have you come? Come here, dear!” called the old countess from
+ the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas went to her, kissed her hand, and sitting down silently at her
+ table began to watch her hands arranging the cards. From the dancing room,
+ they still heard the laughter and merry voices trying to persuade Natásha
+ to sing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All wight! All wight!” shouted Denísov. “It’s no good making excuses now!
+ It’s your turn to sing the ba’cawolla—I entweat you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess glanced at her silent son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is the matter?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, nothing,” said he, as if weary of being continually asked the same
+ question. “Will Papa be back soon?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I expect so.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Everything’s the same with them. They know nothing about it! Where am I
+ to go?” thought Nicholas, and went again into the dancing room where the
+ clavichord stood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya was sitting at the clavichord, playing the prelude to Denísov’s
+ favorite barcarolle. Natásha was preparing to sing. Denísov was looking at
+ her with enraptured eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas began pacing up and down the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why do they want to make her sing? How can she sing? There’s nothing to
+ be happy about!” thought he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya struck the first chord of the prelude.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My God, I’m a ruined and dishonored man! A bullet through my brain is the
+ only thing left me—not singing!” his thoughts ran on. “Go away? But
+ where to? It’s one—let them sing!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He continued to pace the room, looking gloomily at Denísov and the girls
+ and avoiding their eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nikólenka, what is the matter?” Sónya’s eyes fixed on him seemed to ask.
+ She noticed at once that something had happened to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas turned away from her. Natásha too, with her quick instinct, had
+ instantly noticed her brother’s condition. But, though she noticed it, she
+ was herself in such high spirits at that moment, so far from sorrow,
+ sadness, or self-reproach, that she purposely deceived herself as young
+ people often do. “No, I am too happy now to spoil my enjoyment by sympathy
+ with anyone’s sorrow,” she felt, and she said to herself: “No, I must be
+ mistaken, he must be feeling happy, just as I am.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, Sónya!” she said, going to the very middle of the room, where she
+ considered the resonance was best.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having lifted her head and let her arms droop lifelessly, as ballet
+ dancers do, Natásha, rising energetically from her heels to her toes,
+ stepped to the middle of the room and stood still.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, that’s me!” she seemed to say, answering the rapt gaze with which
+ Denísov followed her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And what is she so pleased about?” thought Nicholas, looking at his
+ sister. “Why isn’t she dull and ashamed?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha took the first note, her throat swelled, her chest rose, her eyes
+ became serious. At that moment she was oblivious of her surroundings, and
+ from her smiling lips flowed sounds which anyone may produce at the same
+ intervals and hold for the same time, but which leave you cold a thousand
+ times and the thousand and first time thrill you and make you weep.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha, that winter, had for the first time begun to sing seriously,
+ mainly because Denísov so delighted in her singing. She no longer sang as
+ a child, there was no longer in her singing that comical, childish,
+ painstaking effect that had been in it before; but she did not yet sing
+ well, as all the connoisseurs who heard her said: “It is not trained, but
+ it is a beautiful voice that must be trained.” Only they generally said
+ this some time after she had finished singing. While that untrained voice,
+ with its incorrect breathing and labored transitions, was sounding, even
+ the connoisseurs said nothing, but only delighted in it and wished to hear
+ it again. In her voice there was a virginal freshness, an unconsciousness
+ of her own powers, and an as yet untrained velvety softness, which so
+ mingled with her lack of art in singing that it seemed as if nothing in
+ that voice could be altered without spoiling it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is this?” thought Nicholas, listening to her with widely opened
+ eyes. “What has happened to her? How she is singing today!” And suddenly
+ the whole world centered for him on anticipation of the next note, the
+ next phrase, and everything in the world was divided into three beats: “Oh
+ mio crudele affetto.” ... One, two, three... one, two, three... One... “Oh
+ mio crudele affetto.” ... One, two, three... One. “Oh, this senseless life
+ of ours!” thought Nicholas. “All this misery, and money, and Dólokhov, and
+ anger, and honor—it’s all nonsense... but this is real.... Now then,
+ Natásha, now then, dearest! Now then, darling! How will she take that si? 
+ She’s taken it! Thank God!” And without noticing that he was singing, to
+ strengthen the si he sung a second, a third below the high note. “Ah,
+ God! How fine! Did I really take it? How fortunate!” he thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Oh, how that chord vibrated, and how moved was something that was finest
+ in Rostóv’s soul! And this something was apart from everything else in the
+ world and above everything in the world. “What were losses, and Dólokhov,
+ and words of honor?... All nonsense! One might kill and rob and yet be
+ happy....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI
+ 
+ 
+ It was long since Rostóv had felt such enjoyment from music as he did that
+ day. But no sooner had Natásha finished her barcarolle than reality again
+ presented itself. He got up without saying a word and went downstairs to
+ his own room. A quarter of an hour later the old count came in from his
+ club, cheerful and contented. Nicholas, hearing him drive up, went to meet
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well—had a good time?” said the old count, smiling gaily and
+ proudly at his son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas tried to say “Yes,” but could not: and he nearly burst into sobs.
+ The count was lighting his pipe and did not notice his son’s condition.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, it can’t be avoided!” thought Nicholas, for the first and last time.
+ And suddenly, in the most casual tone, which made him feel ashamed of
+ himself, he said, as if merely asking his father to let him have the
+ carriage to drive to town:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Papa, I have come on a matter of business. I was nearly forgetting. I
+ need some money.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear me!” said his father, who was in a specially good humor. “I told you
+ it would not be enough. How much?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very much,” said Nicholas flushing, and with a stupid careless smile, for
+ which he was long unable to forgive himself, “I have lost a little, I mean
+ a good deal, a great deal—forty three thousand.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What! To whom?... Nonsense!” cried the count, suddenly reddening with an
+ apoplectic flush over neck and nape as old people do.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I promised to pay tomorrow,” said Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well!...” said the old count, spreading out his arms and sinking
+ helplessly on the sofa.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It can’t be helped! It happens to everyone!” said the son,
+ with a bold, free, and easy tone, while in his soul he regarded himself as a
+ worthless scoundrel whose whole life could not atone for his crime. He longed
+ to kiss his father’s hands and kneel to beg his forgiveness, but said,
+ in a careless and even rude voice, that it happens to everyone!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old count cast down his eyes on hearing his son’s words and began
+ bustlingly searching for something.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes,” he muttered, “it will be difficult, I fear, difficult to
+ raise... happens to everybody! Yes, who has not done it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And with a furtive glance at his son’s face, the count went out of the
+ room.... Nicholas had been prepared for resistance, but had not at all
+ expected this.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Papa! Pa-pa!” he called after him, sobbing, “forgive me!” And seizing his
+ father’s hand, he pressed it to his lips and burst into tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While father and son were having their explanation, the mother and
+ daughter were having one not less important. Natásha came running to her
+ mother, quite excited.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma!... Mamma!... He has made me...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Made what?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Made, made me an offer, Mamma! Mamma!” she exclaimed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess did not believe her ears. Denísov had proposed. To whom? To
+ this chit of a girl, Natásha, who not so long ago was playing with dolls
+ and who was still having lessons.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t, Natásha! What nonsense!” she said, hoping it was a joke.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nonsense, indeed! I am telling you the fact,” said Natásha indignantly.
+ “I come to ask you what to do, and you call it ‘nonsense!’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess shrugged her shoulders.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If it is true that Monsieur Denísov has made you a proposal, tell him he
+ is a fool, that’s all!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, he’s not a fool!” replied Natásha indignantly and seriously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well then, what do you want? You’re all in love nowadays. Well, if you
+ are in love, marry him!” said the countess, with a laugh of annoyance.
+ “Good luck to you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Mamma, I’m not in love with him, I suppose I’m not in love with him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well then, tell him so.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma, are you cross? Don’t be cross, dear! Is it my fault?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, but what is it, my dear? Do you want me to go and tell him?” said the
+ countess smiling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I will do it myself, only tell me what to say. It’s all very well for
+ you,” said Natásha, with a responsive smile. “You should have seen how he
+ said it! I know he did not mean to say it, but it came out accidently.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, all the same, you must refuse him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I mustn’t. I am so sorry for him! He’s so nice.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well then, accept his offer. It’s high time for you to be married,”
+ answered the countess sharply and sarcastically.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Mamma, but I’m so sorry for him. I don’t know how I’m to say it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And there’s nothing for you to say. I shall speak to him myself,” said
+ the countess, indignant that they should have dared to treat this little
+ Natásha as grown up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, not on any account! I will tell him myself, and you’ll listen at the
+ door,” and Natásha ran across the drawing room to the dancing hall, where
+ Denísov was sitting on the same chair by the clavichord with his face in
+ his hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He jumped up at the sound of her light step.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nataly,” he said, moving with rapid steps toward her, “decide my fate. It
+ is in your hands.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vasíli Dmítrich, I’m so sorry for you!... No, but you are so nice... but
+ it won’t do...not that... but as a friend, I shall always love you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov bent over her hand and she heard strange sounds she did not
+ understand. She kissed his rough curly black head. At this instant, they
+ heard the quick rustle of the countess’ dress. She came up to them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vasíli Dmítrich, I thank you for the honor,” she said, with an
+ embarrassed voice, though it sounded severe to Denísov—“but my
+ daughter is so young, and I thought that, as my son’s friend, you would
+ have addressed yourself first to me. In that case you would not have
+ obliged me to give this refusal.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Countess...” said Denísov, with downcast eyes and a guilty face. He tried
+ to say more, but faltered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha could not remain calm, seeing him in such a plight. She began to
+ sob aloud.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Countess, I have done w’ong,” Denísov went on in an unsteady voice, “but
+ believe me, I so adore your daughter and all your family that I would give
+ my life twice over...” He looked at the countess, and seeing her severe
+ face said: “Well, good-by, Countess,” and kissing her hand, he left the
+ room with quick resolute strides, without looking at Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Next day Rostóv saw Denísov off. He did not wish to stay another day in
+ Moscow. All Denísov’s Moscow friends gave him a farewell entertainment at
+ the gypsies’, with the result that he had no recollection of how he was
+ put in the sleigh or of the first three stages of his journey.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After Denísov’s departure, Rostóv spent another fortnight in Moscow,
+ without going out of the house, waiting for the money his father could not
+ at once raise, and he spent most of his time in the girls’ room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya was more tender and devoted to him than ever. It was as if she
+ wanted to show him that his losses were an achievement that made her love
+ him all the more, but Nicholas now considered himself unworthy of her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He filled the girls’ albums with verses and music, and having at last sent
+ Dólokhov the whole forty-three thousand rubles and received his receipt,
+ he left at the end of November, without taking leave of any of his
+ acquaintances, to overtake his regiment which was already in Poland.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK FIVE: 1806 - 07
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ After his interview with his wife Pierre left for Petersburg. At the
+ Torzhók post station, either there were no horses or the postmaster would
+ not supply them. Pierre was obliged to wait. Without undressing, he lay
+ down on the leather sofa in front of a round table, put his big feet in
+ their overboots on the table, and began to reflect.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Will you have the portmanteaus brought in? And a bed got ready, and tea?”
+ asked his valet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre gave no answer, for he neither heard nor saw anything. He had begun
+ to think of the last station and was still pondering on the same question—one
+ so important that he took no notice of what went on around him. Not only
+ was he indifferent as to whether he got to Petersburg earlier or later, or
+ whether he secured accommodation at this station, but compared to the
+ thoughts that now occupied him it was a matter of indifference whether he
+ remained there for a few hours or for the rest of his life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The postmaster, his wife, the valet, and a peasant woman selling Torzhók
+ embroidery came into the room offering their services. Without changing
+ his careless attitude, Pierre looked at them over his spectacles unable to
+ understand what they wanted or how they could go on living without having
+ solved the problems that so absorbed him. He had been engrossed by the
+ same thoughts ever since the day he returned from Sokólniki after the duel
+ and had spent that first agonizing, sleepless night. But now, in the
+ solitude of the journey, they seized him with special force. No matter
+ what he thought about, he always returned to these same questions which he
+ could not solve and yet could not cease to ask himself. It was as if the
+ thread of the chief screw which held his life together were stripped, so
+ that the screw could not get in or out, but went on turning uselessly in
+ the same place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The postmaster came in and began obsequiously to beg his excellency to
+ wait only two hours, when, come what might, he would let his excellency
+ have the courier horses. It was plain that he was lying and only wanted to
+ get more money from the traveler.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is this good or bad?” Pierre asked himself. “It is good for me, bad for
+ another traveler, and for himself it’s unavoidable, because he needs money
+ for food; the man said an officer had once given him a thrashing for
+ letting a private traveler have the courier horses. But the officer
+ thrashed him because he had to get on as quickly as possible. And I,”
+ continued Pierre, “shot Dólokhov because I considered myself injured, and
+ Louis XVI was executed because they considered him a criminal, and a year
+ later they executed those who executed him—also for some reason.
+ What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does
+ one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power
+ governs all?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and that not a
+ logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer was: “You’ll die
+ and all will end. You’ll die and know all, or cease asking.” But dying was
+ also dreadful.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Torzhók peddler woman, in a whining voice, went on offering her wares,
+ especially a pair of goatskin slippers. “I have hundreds of rubles I don’t
+ know what to do with, and she stands in her tattered cloak looking timidly
+ at me,” he thought. “And what does she want the money for? As if that
+ money could add a hair’s breadth to happiness or peace of mind. Can
+ anything in the world make her or me less a prey to evil and death?—death
+ which ends all and must come today or tomorrow—at any rate, in an
+ instant as compared with eternity.” And again he twisted the screw with
+ the stripped thread, and again it turned uselessly in the same place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His servant handed him a half-cut novel, in the form of letters, by Madame
+ de Souza. He began reading about the sufferings and virtuous struggles of
+ a certain Emilie de Mansfeld. “And why did she resist her seducer when she
+ loved him?” he thought. “God could not have put into her heart an impulse
+ that was against His will. My wife—as she once was—did not
+ struggle, and perhaps she was right. Nothing has been found out, nothing
+ discovered,” Pierre again said to himself. “All we can know is that we
+ know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Everything within and around him seemed confused, senseless, and
+ repellent. Yet in this very repugnance to all his circumstances Pierre
+ found a kind of tantalizing satisfaction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I make bold to ask your excellency to move a little for this gentleman,”
+ said the postmaster, entering the room followed by another traveler, also
+ detained for lack of horses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The newcomer was a short, large-boned, yellow-faced, wrinkled old man,
+ with gray bushy eyebrows overhanging bright eyes of an indefinite grayish
+ color.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre took his feet off the table, stood up, and lay down on a bed that
+ had been got ready for him, glancing now and then at the newcomer, who,
+ with a gloomy and tired face, was wearily taking off his wraps with the
+ aid of his servant, and not looking at Pierre. With a pair of felt boots
+ on his thin bony legs, and keeping on a worn, nankeen-covered, sheepskin
+ coat, the traveler sat down on the sofa, leaned back his big head with its
+ broad temples and close-cropped hair, and looked at Bezúkhov. The stern,
+ shrewd, and penetrating expression of that look struck Pierre. He felt a
+ wish to speak to the stranger, but by the time he had made up his mind to
+ ask him a question about the roads, the traveler had closed his eyes. His
+ shriveled old hands were folded and on the finger of one of them Pierre
+ noticed a large cast iron ring with a seal representing a death’s head.
+ The stranger sat without stirring, either resting or, as it seemed to
+ Pierre, sunk in profound and calm meditation. His servant was also a
+ yellow, wrinkled old man, without beard or mustache, evidently not because
+ he was shaven but because they had never grown. This active old servant
+ was unpacking the traveler’s canteen and preparing tea. He brought in a
+ boiling samovar. When everything was ready, the stranger opened his eyes,
+ moved to the table, filled a tumbler with tea for himself and one for the
+ beardless old man to whom he passed it. Pierre began to feel a sense of
+ uneasiness, and the need, even the inevitability, of entering into
+ conversation with this stranger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The servant brought back his tumbler turned upside down, * with an
+ unfinished bit of nibbled sugar, and asked if anything more would be
+ wanted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * To indicate he did not want more tea.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “No. Give me the book,” said the stranger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The servant handed him a book which Pierre took to be a devotional work,
+ and the traveler became absorbed in it. Pierre looked at him. All at once
+ the stranger closed the book, putting in a marker, and again, leaning with
+ his arms on the back of the sofa, sat in his former position with his eyes
+ shut. Pierre looked at him and had not time to turn away when the old man,
+ opening his eyes, fixed his steady and severe gaze straight on Pierre’s
+ face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre felt confused and wished to avoid that look, but the bright old
+ eyes attracted him irresistibly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ “I have the pleasure of addressing Count Bezúkhov, if I am not mistaken,”
+ said the stranger in a deliberate and loud voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked silently and inquiringly at him over his spectacles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have heard of you, my dear sir,” continued the stranger, “and of your
+ misfortune.” He seemed to emphasize the last word, as if to say—“Yes,
+ misfortune! Call it what you please, I know that what happened to you in
+ Moscow was a misfortune.”—“I regret it very much, my dear sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre flushed and, hurriedly putting his legs down from the bed, bent
+ forward toward the old man with a forced and timid smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have not referred to this out of curiosity, my dear sir, but for
+ greater reasons.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He paused, his gaze still on Pierre, and moved aside on the sofa by way of
+ inviting the other to take a seat beside him. Pierre felt reluctant to
+ enter into conversation with this old man, but, submitting to him
+ involuntarily, came up and sat down beside him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are unhappy, my dear sir,” the stranger continued. “You are young and
+ I am old. I should like to help you as far as lies in my power.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, yes!” said Pierre, with a forced smile. “I am very grateful to you.
+ Where are you traveling from?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The stranger’s face was not genial, it was even cold and severe, but in
+ spite of this, both the face and words of his new acquaintance were
+ irresistibly attractive to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But if for any reason you don’t feel inclined to talk to me,”
+ said the old man, “say so, my dear sir.” And he suddenly smiled, in
+ an unexpected and tenderly paternal way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh no, not at all! On the contrary, I am very glad to make your
+ acquaintance,” said Pierre. And again, glancing at the stranger’s hands,
+ he looked more closely at the ring, with its skull—a Masonic sign.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Allow me to ask,” he said, “are you a Mason?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I belong to the Brotherhood of the Freemasons,” said the stranger,
+ looking deeper and deeper into Pierre’s eyes. “And in their name and my
+ own I hold out a brotherly hand to you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am afraid,” said Pierre, smiling, and wavering between the confidence
+ the personality of the Freemason inspired in him and his own habit of
+ ridiculing the Masonic beliefs—“I am afraid I am very far from
+ understanding—how am I to put it?—I am afraid my way of
+ looking at the world is so opposed to yours that we shall not understand
+ one another.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know your outlook,” said the Mason, “and the view of life you mention,
+ and which you think is the result of your own mental efforts, is the one
+ held by the majority of people, and is the invariable fruit of pride,
+ indolence, and ignorance. Forgive me, my dear sir, but if I had not known
+ it I should not have addressed you. Your view of life is a regrettable
+ delusion.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just as I may suppose you to be deluded,” said Pierre, with a faint
+ smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I should never dare to say that I know the truth,” said the Mason, whose
+ words struck Pierre more and more by their precision and firmness. “No one
+ can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone with the
+ cooperation of all, by the millions of generations from our forefather
+ Adam to our own times, is that temple reared which is to be a worthy
+ dwelling place of the Great God,” he added, and closed his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I ought to tell you that I do not believe... do not believe in God,” said
+ Pierre, regretfully and with an effort, feeling it essential to speak the
+ whole truth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Mason looked intently at Pierre and smiled as a rich man with millions
+ in hand might smile at a poor fellow who told him that he, poor man, had
+ not the five rubles that would make him happy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, you do not know Him, my dear sir,” said the Mason. “You cannot know
+ Him. You do not know Him and that is why you are unhappy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, I am unhappy,” assented Pierre. “But what am I to do?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know Him not, my dear sir, and so you are very unhappy. You do not
+ know Him, but He is here, He is in me, He is in my words, He is in thee,
+ and even in those blasphemous words thou hast just uttered!” pronounced
+ the Mason in a stern and tremulous voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He paused and sighed, evidently trying to calm himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If He were not,” he said quietly, “you and I would not be speaking of
+ Him, my dear sir. Of what, of whom, are we speaking? Whom hast thou
+ denied?” he suddenly asked with exulting austerity and authority in his
+ voice. “Who invented Him, if He did not exist? Whence came thy conception
+ of the existence of such an incomprehensible Being? didst thou, and why
+ did the whole world, conceive the idea of the existence of such an
+ incomprehensible Being, a Being all-powerful, eternal, and infinite in all
+ His attributes?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He stopped and remained silent for a long time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre could not and did not wish to break this silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He exists, but to understand Him is hard,” the Mason began again, looking
+ not at Pierre but straight before him, and turning the leaves of his book
+ with his old hands which from excitement he could not keep still. “If it
+ were a man whose existence thou didst doubt I could bring him to thee,
+ could take him by the hand and show him to thee. But how can I, an
+ insignificant mortal, show His omnipotence, His infinity, and all His
+ mercy to one who is blind, or who shuts his eyes that he may not see or
+ understand Him and may not see or understand his own vileness and
+ sinfulness?” He paused again. “Who art thou? Thou dreamest that thou art
+ wise because thou couldst utter those blasphemous words,” he went on, with
+ a somber and scornful smile. “And thou art more foolish and unreasonable
+ than a little child, who, playing with the parts of a skillfully made
+ watch, dares to say that, as he does not understand its use, he does not
+ believe in the master who made it. To know Him is hard.... For ages, from
+ our forefather Adam to our own day, we labor to attain that knowledge and
+ are still infinitely far from our aim; but in our lack of understanding we
+ see only our weakness and His greatness....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre listened with swelling heart, gazing into the Mason’s face with
+ shining eyes, not interrupting or questioning him, but believing with his
+ whole soul what the stranger said. Whether he accepted the wise reasoning
+ contained in the Mason’s words, or believed as a child believes, in the
+ speaker’s tone of conviction and earnestness, or the tremor of the
+ speaker’s voice—which sometimes almost broke—or those
+ brilliant aged eyes grown old in this conviction, or the calm firmness and
+ certainty of his vocation, which radiated from his whole being (and which
+ struck Pierre especially by contrast with his own dejection and
+ hopelessness)—at any rate, Pierre longed with his whole soul to
+ believe and he did believe, and felt a joyful sense of comfort,
+ regeneration, and return to life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is not to be apprehended by reason, but by life,” said the Mason.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I do not understand,” said Pierre, feeling with dismay doubts
+ reawakening. He was afraid of any want of clearness, any weakness, in the
+ Mason’s arguments; he dreaded not to be able to believe in him. “I don’t
+ understand,” he said, “how it is that the mind of man cannot attain the
+ knowledge of which you speak.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Mason smiled with his gentle fatherly smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The highest wisdom and truth are like the purest liquid we may wish to
+ imbibe,” he said. “Can I receive that pure liquid into an impure vessel
+ and judge of its purity? Only by the inner purification of myself can I
+ retain in some degree of purity the liquid I receive.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, that is so,” said Pierre joyfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The highest wisdom is not founded on reason alone, not on those worldly
+ sciences of physics, history, chemistry, and the like, into which
+ intellectual knowledge is divided. The highest wisdom is one. The highest
+ wisdom has but one science—the science of the whole—the
+ science explaining the whole creation and man’s place in it. To receive
+ that science it is necessary to purify and renew one’s inner self, and so
+ before one can know, it is necessary to believe and to perfect one’s self.
+ And to attain this end, we have the light called conscience that God has
+ implanted in our souls.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes,” assented Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look then at thy inner self with the eyes of the spirit, and ask thyself
+ whether thou art content with thyself. What hast thou attained relying on
+ reason only? What art thou? You are young, you are rich, you are clever,
+ you are well educated. And what have you done with all these good gifts?
+ Are you content with yourself and with your life?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I hate my life,” Pierre muttered, wincing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thou hatest it. Then change it, purify thyself; and as thou art purified,
+ thou wilt gain wisdom. Look at your life, my dear sir. How have you spent
+ it? In riotous orgies and debauchery, receiving everything from society
+ and giving nothing in return. You have become the possessor of wealth. How
+ have you used it? What have you done for your neighbor? Have you ever
+ thought of your tens of thousands of slaves? Have you helped them
+ physically and morally? No! You have profited by their toil to lead a
+ profligate life. That is what you have done. Have you chosen a post in
+ which you might be of service to your neighbor? No! You have spent your
+ life in idleness. Then you married, my dear sir—took on yourself
+ responsibility for the guidance of a young woman; and what have you done?
+ You have not helped her to find the way of truth, my dear sir, but have
+ thrust her into an abyss of deceit and misery. A man offended you and you
+ shot him, and you say you do not know God and hate your life. There is
+ nothing strange in that, my dear sir!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After these words, the Mason, as if tired by his long discourse, again
+ leaned his arms on the back of the sofa and closed his eyes. Pierre looked
+ at that aged, stern, motionless, almost lifeless face and moved his lips
+ without uttering a sound. He wished to say, “Yes, a vile, idle, vicious
+ life!” but dared not break the silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Mason cleared his throat huskily, as old men do, and called his
+ servant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How about the horses?” he asked, without looking at Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The exchange horses have just come,” answered the servant. “Will you not
+ rest here?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, tell them to harness.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Can he really be going away leaving me alone without having told me all,
+ and without promising to help me?” thought Pierre, rising with downcast
+ head; and he began to pace the room, glancing occasionally at the Mason.
+ “Yes, I never thought of it, but I have led a contemptible and profligate
+ life, though I did not like it and did not want to,” thought Pierre. “But
+ this man knows the truth and, if he wished to, could disclose it to me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre wished to say this to the Mason, but did not dare to. The traveler,
+ having packed his things with his practiced hands, began fastening his
+ coat. When he had finished, he turned to Bezúkhov, and said in a tone of
+ indifferent politeness:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where are you going to now, my dear sir?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I?... I’m going to Petersburg,” answered Pierre, in a childlike,
+ hesitating voice. “I thank you. I agree with all you have said. But do not
+ suppose me to be so bad. With my whole soul I wish to be what you would
+ have me be, but I have never had help from anyone.... But it is I, above
+ all, who am to blame for everything. Help me, teach me, and perhaps I
+ may...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre could not go on. He gulped and turned away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Mason remained silent for a long time, evidently considering.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Help comes from God alone,” he said, “but such measure of help as our
+ Order can bestow it will render you, my dear sir. You are going to
+ Petersburg. Hand this to Count Willarski” (he took out his notebook and
+ wrote a few words on a large sheet of paper folded in four). “Allow me to
+ give you a piece of advice. When you reach the capital, first of all
+ devote some time to solitude and self-examination and do not resume your
+ former way of life. And now I wish you a good journey, my dear sir,” he
+ added, seeing that his servant had entered... “and success.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The traveler was Joseph Alexéevich Bazdéev, as Pierre saw from the
+ postmaster’s book. Bazdéev had been one of the best-known Freemasons and
+ Martinists, even in Novíkov’s time. For a long while after he had gone,
+ Pierre did not go to bed or order horses but paced up and down the room,
+ pondering over his vicious past, and with a rapturous sense of beginning
+ anew pictured to himself the blissful, irreproachable, virtuous future
+ that seemed to him so easy. It seemed to him that he had been vicious only
+ because he had somehow forgotten how good it is to be virtuous. Not a
+ trace of his former doubts remained in his soul. He firmly believed in the
+ possibility of the brotherhood of men united in the aim of supporting one
+ another in the path of virtue, and that is how Freemasonry presented
+ itself to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ On reaching Petersburg Pierre did not let anyone know of his arrival, he
+ went nowhere and spent whole days in reading Thomas à Kempis, whose book
+ had been sent him by someone unknown. One thing he continually realized as
+ he read that book: the joy, hitherto unknown to him, of believing in the
+ possibility of attaining perfection, and in the possibility of active
+ brotherly love among men, which Joseph Alexéevich had revealed to him. A
+ week after his arrival, the young Polish count, Willarski, whom Pierre had
+ known slightly in Petersburg society, came into his room one evening in
+ the official and ceremonious manner in which Dólokhov’s second had called
+ on him, and, having closed the door behind him and satisfied himself that
+ there was nobody else in the room, addressed Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have come to you with a message and an offer, Count,” he said without
+ sitting down. “A person of very high standing in our Brotherhood has made
+ application for you to be received into our Order before the usual term
+ and has proposed to me to be your sponsor. I consider it a sacred duty to
+ fulfill that person’s wishes. Do you wish to enter the Brotherhood of
+ Freemasons under my sponsorship?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The cold, austere tone of this man, whom he had almost always before met
+ at balls, amiably smiling in the society of the most brilliant women,
+ surprised Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I do wish it,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Willarski bowed his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One more question, Count,” he said, “which I beg you to answer in all
+ sincerity—not as a future Mason but as an honest man: have you
+ renounced your former convictions—do you believe in God?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre considered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes... yes, I believe in God,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In that case...” began Willarski, but Pierre interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I do believe in God,” he repeated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In that case we can go,” said Willarski. “My carriage is at your
+ service.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Willarski was silent throughout the drive. To Pierre’s inquiries as to
+ what he must do and how he should answer, Willarski only replied that
+ brothers more worthy than he would test him and that Pierre had only to
+ tell the truth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having entered the courtyard of a large house where the Lodge had its
+ headquarters, and having ascended a dark staircase, they entered a small
+ well-lit anteroom where they took off their cloaks without the aid of a
+ servant. From there they passed into another room. A man in strange attire
+ appeared at the door. Willarski, stepping toward him, said something to
+ him in French in an undertone and then went up to a small wardrobe in
+ which Pierre noticed garments such as he had never seen before. Having
+ taken a kerchief from the cupboard, Willarski bound Pierre’s eyes with it
+ and tied it in a knot behind, catching some hairs painfully in the knot.
+ Then he drew his face down, kissed him, and taking him by the hand led him
+ forward. The hairs tied in the knot hurt Pierre and there were lines of
+ pain on his face and a shamefaced smile. His huge figure, with arms
+ hanging down and with a puckered, though smiling face, moved after
+ Willarski with uncertain, timid steps.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having led him about ten paces, Willarski stopped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Whatever happens to you,” he said, “you must bear it all manfully if you
+ have firmly resolved to join our Brotherhood.” (Pierre nodded
+ affirmatively.) “When you hear a knock at the door, you will uncover your
+ eyes,” added Willarski. “I wish you courage and success,” and, pressing
+ Pierre’s hand, he went out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Left alone, Pierre went on smiling in the same way. Once or twice he
+ shrugged his shoulders and raised his hand to the kerchief, as if wishing
+ to take it off, but let it drop again. The five minutes spent with his
+ eyes bandaged seemed to him an hour. His arms felt numb, his legs almost
+ gave way, it seemed to him that he was tired out. He experienced a variety
+ of most complex sensations. He felt afraid of what would happen to him and
+ still more afraid of showing his fear. He felt curious to know what was
+ going to happen and what would be revealed to him; but most of all, he
+ felt joyful that the moment had come when he would at last start on that
+ path of regeneration and on the actively virtuous life of which he had
+ been dreaming since he met Joseph Alexéevich. Loud knocks were heard at
+ the door. Pierre took the bandage off his eyes and glanced around him. The
+ room was in black darkness, only a small lamp was burning inside something
+ white. Pierre went nearer and saw that the lamp stood on a black table on
+ which lay an open book. The book was the Gospel, and the white thing with
+ the lamp inside was a human skull with its cavities and teeth. After
+ reading the first words of the Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word and
+ the Word was with God,” Pierre went round the table and saw a large open
+ box filled with something. It was a coffin with bones inside. He was not
+ at all surprised by what he saw. Hoping to enter on an entirely new life
+ quite unlike the old one, he expected everything to be unusual, even more
+ unusual than what he was seeing. A skull, a coffin, the Gospel—it
+ seemed to him that he had expected all this and even more. Trying to
+ stimulate his emotions he looked around. “God, death, love, the
+ brotherhood of man,” he kept saying to himself, associating these words
+ with vague yet joyful ideas. The door opened and someone came in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By the dim light, to which Pierre had already become accustomed, he saw a
+ rather short man. Having evidently come from the light into the darkness,
+ the man paused, then moved with cautious steps toward the table and placed
+ on it his small leather-gloved hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This short man had on a white leather apron which covered his chest and
+ part of his legs; he had on a kind of necklace above which rose a high
+ white ruffle, outlining his rather long face which was lit up from below.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For what have you come hither?” asked the newcomer, turning in Pierre’s
+ direction at a slight rustle made by the latter. “Why have you, who do not
+ believe in the truth of the light and who have not seen the light, come
+ here? What do you seek from us? Wisdom, virtue, enlightenment?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the moment the door opened and the stranger came in, Pierre felt a
+ sense of awe and veneration such as he had experienced in his boyhood at
+ confession; he felt himself in the presence of one socially a complete
+ stranger, yet nearer to him through the brotherhood of man. With bated
+ breath and beating heart he moved toward the Rhetor (by which name the
+ brother who prepared a seeker for entrance into the Brotherhood was
+ known). Drawing nearer, he recognized in the Rhetor a man he knew,
+ Smolyanínov, and it mortified him to think that the newcomer was an
+ acquaintance—he wished him simply a brother and a virtuous
+ instructor. For a long time he could not utter a word, so that the Rhetor
+ had to repeat his question.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes... I... I... desire regeneration,” Pierre uttered with difficulty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very well,” said Smolyanínov, and went on at once: “Have you any idea of
+ the means by which our holy Order will help you to reach your aim?” said
+ he quietly and quickly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I... hope... for guidance... help... in regeneration,” said Pierre, with
+ a trembling voice and some difficulty in utterance due to his excitement
+ and to being unaccustomed to speak of abstract matters in Russian.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is your conception of Freemasonry?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I imagine that Freemasonry is the fraternity and equality of men who have
+ virtuous aims,” said Pierre, feeling ashamed of the inadequacy of his
+ words for the solemnity of the moment, as he spoke. “I imagine...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good!” said the Rhetor quickly, apparently satisfied with this answer.
+ “Have you sought for means of attaining your aim in religion?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I considered it erroneous and did not follow it,” said Pierre, so
+ softly that the Rhetor did not hear him and asked him what he was saying.
+ “I have been an atheist,” answered Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are seeking for truth in order to follow its laws in your life,
+ therefore you seek wisdom and virtue. Is that not so?” said the Rhetor,
+ after a moment’s pause.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes,” assented Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Rhetor cleared his throat, crossed his gloved hands on his breast, and
+ began to speak.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now I must disclose to you the chief aim of our Order,” he said, “and if
+ this aim coincides with yours, you may enter our Brotherhood with profit.
+ The first and chief object of our Order, the foundation on which it rests
+ and which no human power can destroy, is the preservation and handing on
+ to posterity of a certain important mystery... which has come down to us
+ from the remotest ages, even from the first man—a mystery on which
+ perhaps the fate of mankind depends. But since this mystery is of such a
+ nature that nobody can know or use it unless he be prepared by long and
+ diligent self-purification, not everyone can hope to attain it quickly.
+ Hence we have a secondary aim, that of preparing our members as much as
+ possible to reform their hearts, to purify and enlighten their minds, by
+ means handed on to us by tradition from those who have striven to attain
+ this mystery, and thereby to render them capable of receiving it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “By purifying and regenerating our members we try, thirdly, to improve the
+ whole human race, offering it in our members an example of piety and
+ virtue, and thereby try with all our might to combat the evil which sways
+ the world. Think this over and I will come to you again.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To combat the evil which sways the world...” Pierre repeated, and a
+ mental image of his future activity in this direction rose in his mind. He
+ imagined men such as he had himself been a fortnight ago, and he addressed
+ an edifying exhortation to them. He imagined to himself vicious and
+ unfortunate people whom he would assist by word and deed, imagined
+ oppressors whose victims he would rescue. Of the three objects mentioned
+ by the Rhetor, this last, that of improving mankind, especially appealed
+ to Pierre. The important mystery mentioned by the Rhetor, though it
+ aroused his curiosity, did not seem to him essential, and the second aim,
+ that of purifying and regenerating himself, did not much interest him
+ because at that moment he felt with delight that he was already perfectly
+ cured of his former faults and was ready for all that was good.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Half an hour later, the Rhetor returned to inform the seeker of the seven
+ virtues, corresponding to the seven steps of Solomon’s temple, which every
+ Freemason should cultivate in himself. These virtues were: 1. Discretion ,
+ the keeping of the secrets of the Order. 2. Obedience to those of higher
+ ranks in the Order. 3. Morality . 4. Love of mankind . 5. Courage .
+ 6. Generosity . 7. The love of death .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In the seventh place, try, by the frequent thought of death,” the Rhetor
+ said, “to bring yourself to regard it not as a dreaded foe, but as a
+ friend that frees the soul grown weary in the labors of virtue from this
+ distressful life, and leads it to its place of recompense and peace.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, that must be so,” thought Pierre, when after these words the Rhetor
+ went away, leaving him to solitary meditation. “It must be so, but I am
+ still so weak that I love my life, the meaning of which is only now
+ gradually opening before me.” But five of the other virtues which Pierre
+ recalled, counting them on his fingers, he felt already in his soul:
+ courage, generosity, morality, love of mankind , and especially obedience —which
+ did not even seem to him a virtue, but a joy. (He now felt so glad to be
+ free from his own lawlessness and to submit his will to those who knew the
+ indubitable truth.) He forgot what the seventh virtue was and could not
+ recall it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The third time the Rhetor came back more quickly and asked Pierre whether
+ he was still firm in his intention and determined to submit to all that
+ would be required of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am ready for everything,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I must also inform you,” said the Rhetor, “that our Order delivers its
+ teaching not in words only but also by other means, which may perhaps have
+ a stronger effect on the sincere seeker after wisdom and virtue than mere
+ words. This chamber with what you see therein should already have
+ suggested to your heart, if it is sincere, more than words could do. You
+ will perhaps also see in your further initiation a like method of
+ enlightenment. Our Order imitates the ancient societies that explained
+ their teaching by hieroglyphics. A hieroglyph,” said the Rhetor, “is an
+ emblem of something not cognizable by the senses but which possesses
+ qualities resembling those of the symbol.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre knew very well what a hieroglyph was, but dared not speak. He
+ listened to the Rhetor in silence, feeling from all he said that his
+ ordeal was about to begin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you are resolved, I must begin your initiation,” said the Rhetor
+ coming closer to Pierre. “In token of generosity I ask you to give me all
+ your valuables.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I have nothing here,” replied Pierre, supposing that he was asked to
+ give up all he possessed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What you have with you: watch, money, rings....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre quickly took out his purse and watch, but could not manage for some
+ time to get the wedding ring off his fat finger. When that had been done,
+ the Rhetor said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In token of obedience, I ask you to undress.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre took off his coat, waistcoat, and left boot according to the
+ Rhetor’s instructions. The Mason drew the shirt back from Pierre’s left
+ breast, and stooping down pulled up the left leg of his trousers to above
+ the knee. Pierre hurriedly began taking off his right boot also and was
+ going to tuck up the other trouser leg to save this stranger the trouble,
+ but the Mason told him that was not necessary and gave him a slipper for
+ his left foot. With a childlike smile of embarrassment, doubt, and
+ self-derision, which appeared on his face against his will, Pierre stood
+ with his arms hanging down and legs apart, before his brother Rhetor, and
+ awaited his further commands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And now, in token of candor, I ask you to reveal to me your chief
+ passion,” said the latter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My passion! I have had so many,” replied Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That passion which more than all others caused you to waver on the path
+ of virtue,” said the Mason.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre paused, seeking a reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wine? Gluttony? Idleness? Laziness? Irritability? Anger? Women?” He went
+ over his vices in his mind, not knowing to which of them to give the
+ pre-eminence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Women,” he said in a low, scarcely audible voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Mason did not move and for a long time said nothing after this answer.
+ At last he moved up to Pierre and, taking the kerchief that lay on the
+ table, again bound his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For the last time I say to you—turn all your attention upon
+ yourself, put a bridle on your senses, and seek blessedness, not in
+ passion but in your own heart. The source of blessedness is not without us
+ but within....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre had already long been feeling in himself that refreshing source of
+ blessedness which now flooded his heart with glad emotion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ Soon after this there came into the dark chamber to fetch Pierre, not the
+ Rhetor but Pierre’s sponsor, Willarski, whom he recognized by his voice.
+ To fresh questions as to the firmness of his resolution Pierre replied:
+ “Yes, yes, I agree,” and with a beaming, childlike smile, his fat chest
+ uncovered, stepping unevenly and timidly in one slippered and one booted
+ foot, he advanced, while Willarski held a sword to his bare chest. He was
+ conducted from that room along passages that turned backwards and forwards
+ and was at last brought to the doors of the Lodge. Willarski coughed, he
+ was answered by the Masonic knock with mallets, the doors opened before
+ them. A bass voice (Pierre was still blindfolded) questioned him as to who
+ he was, when and where he was born, and so on. Then he was again led
+ somewhere still blindfolded, and as they went along he was told allegories
+ of the toils of his pilgrimage, of holy friendship, of the Eternal
+ Architect of the universe, and of the courage with which he should endure
+ toils and dangers. During these wanderings, Pierre noticed that he was
+ spoken of now as the “Seeker,” now as the “Sufferer,” and now as the
+ “Postulant,” to the accompaniment of various knockings with mallets and
+ swords. As he was being led up to some object he noticed a hesitation and
+ uncertainty among his conductors. He heard those around him disputing in
+ whispers and one of them insisting that he should be led along a certain
+ carpet. After that they took his right hand, placed it on something, and
+ told him to hold a pair of compasses to his left breast with the other
+ hand and to repeat after someone who read aloud an oath of fidelity to the
+ laws of the Order. The candles were then extinguished and some spirit
+ lighted, as Pierre knew by the smell, and he was told that he would now
+ see the lesser light. The bandage was taken off his eyes and, by the faint
+ light of the burning spirit, Pierre, as in a dream, saw several men
+ standing before him, wearing aprons like the Rhetor’s and holding swords
+ in their hands pointed at his breast. Among them stood a man whose white
+ shirt was stained with blood. On seeing this, Pierre moved forward with
+ his breast toward the swords, meaning them to pierce it. But the swords
+ were drawn back from him and he was at once blindfolded again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now thou hast seen the lesser light,” uttered a voice. Then the candles
+ were relit and he was told that he would see the full light; the bandage
+ was again removed and more than ten voices said together: “Sic transit
+ gloria mundi.” 
+
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre gradually began to recover himself and looked about at the room and
+ at the people in it. Round a long table covered with black sat some twelve
+ men in garments like those he had already seen. Some of them Pierre had
+ met in Petersburg society. In the President’s chair sat a young man he did
+ not know, with a peculiar cross hanging from his neck. On his right sat
+ the Italian abbé whom Pierre had met at Anna Pávlovna’s two years before.
+ There were also present a very distinguished dignitary and a Swiss who had
+ formerly been tutor at the Kurágins’. All maintained a solemn silence,
+ listening to the words of the President, who held a mallet in his hand.
+ Let into the wall was a star-shaped light. At one side of the table was a
+ small carpet with various figures worked upon it, at the other was
+ something resembling an altar on which lay a Testament and a skull. Round
+ it stood seven large candlesticks like those used in churches. Two of the
+ brothers led Pierre up to the altar, placed his feet at right angles, and
+ bade him lie down, saying that he must prostrate himself at the Gates of
+ the Temple.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He must first receive the trowel,” whispered one of the brothers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, hush, please!” said another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre, perplexed, looked round with his shortsighted eyes without
+ obeying, and suddenly doubts arose in his mind. “Where am I? What am I
+ doing? Aren’t they laughing at me? Shan’t I be ashamed to remember this?”
+ But these doubts only lasted a moment. Pierre glanced at the serious faces
+ of those around, remembered all he had already gone through, and realized
+ that he could not stop halfway. He was aghast at his hesitation and,
+ trying to arouse his former devotional feeling, prostrated himself before
+ the Gates of the Temple. And really, the feeling of devotion returned to
+ him even more strongly than before. When he had lain there some time, he
+ was told to get up, and a white leather apron, such as the others wore,
+ was put on him: he was given a trowel and three pairs of gloves, and then
+ the Grand Master addressed him. He told him that he should try to do
+ nothing to stain the whiteness of that apron, which symbolized strength
+ and purity; then of the unexplained trowel, he told him to toil with it to
+ cleanse his own heart from vice, and indulgently to smooth with it the
+ heart of his neighbor. As to the first pair of gloves, a man’s, he said
+ that Pierre could not know their meaning but must keep them. The second
+ pair of man’s gloves he was to wear at the meetings, and finally of the
+ third, a pair of women’s gloves, he said: “Dear brother, these woman’s
+ gloves are intended for you too. Give them to the woman whom you shall
+ honor most of all. This gift will be a pledge of your purity of heart to
+ her whom you select to be your worthy helpmeet in Masonry.” And after a
+ pause, he added: “But beware, dear brother, that these gloves do not deck
+ hands that are unclean.” While the Grand Master said these last words it
+ seemed to Pierre that he grew embarrassed. Pierre himself grew still more
+ confused, blushed like a child till tears came to his eyes, began looking
+ about him uneasily, and an awkward pause followed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This silence was broken by one of the brethren, who led Pierre up to the
+ rug and began reading to him from a manuscript book an explanation of all
+ the figures on it: the sun, the moon, a hammer, a plumb line, a trowel, a
+ rough stone and a squared stone, a pillar, three windows, and so on. Then
+ a place was assigned to Pierre, he was shown the signs of the Lodge, told
+ the password, and at last was permitted to sit down. The Grand Master
+ began reading the statutes. They were very long, and Pierre, from joy,
+ agitation, and embarrassment, was not in a state to understand what was
+ being read. He managed to follow only the last words of the statutes and
+ these remained in his mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In our temples we recognize no other distinctions,” read the Grand
+ Master, “but those between virtue and vice. Beware of making any
+ distinctions which may infringe equality. Fly to a brother’s aid whoever
+ he may be, exhort him who goeth astray, raise him that falleth, never bear
+ malice or enmity toward thy brother. Be kindly and courteous. Kindle in
+ all hearts the flame of virtue. Share thy happiness with thy neighbor, and
+ may envy never dim the purity of that bliss. Forgive thy enemy, do not
+ avenge thyself except by doing him good. Thus fulfilling the highest law
+ thou shalt regain traces of the ancient dignity which thou hast lost.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He finished and, getting up, embraced and kissed Pierre, who, with tears
+ of joy in his eyes, looked round him, not knowing how to answer the
+ congratulations and greetings from acquaintances that met him on all
+ sides. He acknowledged no acquaintances but saw in all these men only
+ brothers, and burned with impatience to set to work with them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Grand Master rapped with his mallet. All the Masons sat down in their
+ places, and one of them read an exhortation on the necessity of humility.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Grand Master proposed that the last duty should be performed, and the
+ distinguished dignitary who bore the title of “Collector of Alms” went
+ round to all the brothers. Pierre would have liked to subscribe all he
+ had, but fearing that it might look like pride subscribed the same amount
+ as the others.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The meeting was at an end, and on reaching home Pierre felt as if he had
+ returned from a long journey on which he had spent dozens of years, had
+ become completely changed, and had quite left behind his former habits and
+ way of life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ The day after he had been received into the Lodge, Pierre was sitting at
+ home reading a book and trying to fathom the significance of the Square,
+ one side of which symbolized God, another moral things, a third physical
+ things, and the fourth a combination of these. Now and then his attention
+ wandered from the book and the Square and he formed in imagination a new
+ plan of life. On the previous evening at the Lodge, he had heard that a
+ rumor of his duel had reached the Emperor and that it would be wiser for
+ him to leave Petersburg. Pierre proposed going to his estates in the south
+ and there attending to the welfare of his serfs. He was joyfully planning
+ this new life, when Prince Vasíli suddenly entered the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear fellow, what have you been up to in Moscow? Why have you
+ quarreled with Hélène, mon cher? You are under a delusion,” said Prince
+ Vasíli, as he entered. “I know all about it, and I can tell you positively
+ that Hélène is as innocent before you as Christ was before the Jews.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was about to reply, but Prince Vasíli interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And why didn’t you simply come straight to me as to a friend? I know all
+ about it and understand it all,” he said. “You behaved as becomes a man
+ who values his honor, perhaps too hastily, but we won’t go into that. But
+ consider the position in which you are placing her and me in the eyes of
+ society, and even of the court,” he added, lowering his voice. “She is
+ living in Moscow and you are here. Remember, dear boy,” and he drew
+ Pierre’s arm downwards, “it is simply a misunderstanding. I expect you
+ feel it so yourself. Let us write her a letter at once, and she’ll come
+ here and all will be explained, or else, my dear boy, let me tell you it’s
+ quite likely you’ll have to suffer for it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli gave Pierre a significant look.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know from reliable sources that the Dowager Empress is taking a keen
+ interest in the whole affair. You know she is very gracious to Hélène.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre tried several times to speak, but, on one hand, Prince Vasíli did
+ not let him and, on the other, Pierre himself feared to begin to speak in
+ the tone of decided refusal and disagreement in which he had firmly
+ resolved to answer his father-in-law. Moreover, the words of the Masonic
+ statutes, “be kindly and courteous,” recurred to him. He blinked, went
+ red, got up and sat down again, struggling with himself to do what was for
+ him the most difficult thing in life—to say an unpleasant thing to a
+ man’s face, to say what the other, whoever he might be, did not expect. He
+ was so used to submitting to Prince Vasíli’s tone of careless
+ self-assurance that he felt he would be unable to withstand it now, but he
+ also felt that on what he said now his future depended—whether he
+ would follow the same old road, or that new path so attractively shown him
+ by the Masons, on which he firmly believed he would be reborn to a new
+ life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, dear boy,” said Prince Vasíli playfully, “say ‘yes,’ and I’ll write
+ to her myself, and we will kill the fatted calf.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But before Prince Vasíli had finished his playful speech, Pierre, without
+ looking at him, and with a kind of fury that made him like his father,
+ muttered in a whisper:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Prince, I did not ask you here. Go, please go!” And he jumped up and
+ opened the door for him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go!” he repeated, amazed at himself and glad to see the look of confusion
+ and fear that showed itself on Prince Vasíli’s face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go!” the quivering voice repeated. And Prince Vasíli had to go without
+ receiving any explanation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A week later, Pierre, having taken leave of his new friends, the Masons,
+ and leaving large sums of money with them for alms, went away to his
+ estates. His new brethren gave him letters to the Kiev and Odessa Masons
+ and promised to write to him and guide him in his new activity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ The duel between Pierre and Dólokhov was hushed up and, in spite of the
+ Emperor’s severity regarding duels at that time, neither the principals
+ nor their seconds suffered for it. But the story of the duel, confirmed by
+ Pierre’s rupture with his wife, was the talk of society. Pierre who had
+ been regarded with patronizing condescension when he was an illegitimate
+ son, and petted and extolled when he was the best match in Russia, had
+ sunk greatly in the esteem of society after his marriage—when the
+ marriageable daughters and their mothers had nothing to hope from him—especially
+ as he did not know how, and did not wish, to court society’s favor. Now he
+ alone was blamed for what had happened, he was said to be insanely jealous
+ and subject like his father to fits of bloodthirsty rage. And when after
+ Pierre’s departure Hélène returned to Petersburg, she was received by all
+ her acquaintances not only cordially, but even with a shade of deference
+ due to her misfortune. When conversation turned on her husband Hélène
+ assumed a dignified expression, which with characteristic tact she had
+ acquired though she did not understand its significance. This expression
+ suggested that she had resolved to endure her troubles uncomplainingly and
+ that her husband was a cross laid upon her by God. Prince Vasíli expressed
+ his opinion more openly. He shrugged his shoulders when Pierre was
+ mentioned and, pointing to his forehead, remarked:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A bit touched—I always said so.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I said from the first,” declared Anna Pávlovna referring to Pierre, “I
+ said at the time and before anyone else” (she insisted on her priority)
+ “that that senseless young man was spoiled by the depraved ideas of these
+ days. I said so even at the time when everybody was in raptures about him,
+ when he had just returned from abroad, and when, if you remember, he posed
+ as a sort of Marat at one of my soirees. And how has it ended? I was
+ against this marriage even then and foretold all that has happened.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Pávlovna continued to give on free evenings the same kind of soirees
+ as before—such as she alone had the gift of arranging—at which
+ was to be found “the cream of really good society, the bloom of the
+ intellectual essence of Petersburg,” as she herself put it. Besides this
+ refined selection of society Anna Pávlovna’s receptions were also
+ distinguished by the fact that she always presented some new and
+ interesting person to the visitors and that nowhere else was the state of
+ the political thermometer of legitimate Petersburg court society so dearly
+ and distinctly indicated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Toward the end of 1806, when all the sad details of Napoleon’s destruction
+ of the Prussian army at Jena and Auerstädt and the surrender of most of
+ the Prussian fortresses had been received, when our troops had already
+ entered Prussia and our second war with Napoleon was beginning, Anna
+ Pávlovna gave one of her soirees. The “cream of really good society”
+ consisted of the fascinating Hélène, forsaken by her husband, Mortemart,
+ the delightful Prince Hippolyte who had just returned from Vienna, two
+ diplomatists, the old aunt, a young man referred to in that drawing room
+ as “a man of great merit” ( un homme de beaucoup de mérite ), a newly
+ appointed maid of honor and her mother, and several other less noteworthy
+ persons.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The novelty Anna Pávlovna was setting before her guests that evening was
+ Borís Drubetskóy, who had just arrived as a special messenger from the
+ Prussian army and was aide-de-camp to a very important personage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The temperature shown by the political thermometer to the company that
+ evening was this:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Whatever the European sovereigns and commanders may do to countenance
+ Bonaparte, and to cause me , and us in general, annoyance and
+ mortification, our opinion of Bonaparte cannot alter. We shall not cease
+ to express our sincere views on that subject, and can only say to the King
+ of Prussia and others: ‘So much the worse for you. Tu l’as voulu, George
+ Dandin ,’ that’s all we have to say about it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Borís, who was to be served up to the guests, entered the drawing
+ room, almost all the company had assembled, and the conversation, guided
+ by Anna Pávlovna, was about our diplomatic relations with Austria and the
+ hope of an alliance with her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís, grown more manly and looking fresh, rosy and self-possessed,
+ entered the drawing room elegantly dressed in the uniform of an
+ aide-de-camp and was duly conducted to pay his respects to the aunt and
+ then brought back to the general circle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Pávlovna gave him her shriveled hand to kiss and introduced him to
+ several persons whom he did not know, giving him a whispered description
+ of each.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Prince Hippolyte Kurágin—charming young fellow; M. Kronq,—chargé
+ d’affaires from Copenhagen—a profound intellect,” and simply,
+ “Mr. Shítov—a man of great merit”—this of the man
+ usually so described.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thanks to Anna Mikháylovna’s efforts, his own tastes, and the
+ peculiarities of his reserved nature, Borís had managed during his service
+ to place himself very advantageously. He was aide-de-camp to a very
+ important personage, had been sent on a very important mission to Prussia,
+ and had just returned from there as a special messenger. He had become
+ thoroughly conversant with that unwritten code with which he had been so
+ pleased at Olmütz and according to which an ensign might rank incomparably
+ higher than a general, and according to which what was needed for success
+ in the service was not effort or work, or courage, or perseverance, but
+ only the knowledge of how to get on with those who can grant rewards, and
+ he was himself often surprised at the rapidity of his success and at the
+ inability of others to understand these things. In consequence of this
+ discovery his whole manner of life, all his relations with old friends,
+ all his plans for his future, were completely altered. He was not rich,
+ but would spend his last groat to be better dressed than others, and would
+ rather deprive himself of many pleasures than allow himself to be seen in
+ a shabby equipage or appear in the streets of Petersburg in an old
+ uniform. He made friends with and sought the acquaintance of only those
+ above him in position and who could therefore be of use to him. He liked
+ Petersburg and despised Moscow. The remembrance of the Rostóvs’ house and
+ of his childish love for Natásha was unpleasant to him and he had not once
+ been to see the Rostóvs since the day of his departure for the army. To be
+ in Anna Pávlovna’s drawing room he considered an important step up in the
+ service, and he at once understood his role, letting his hostess make use
+ of whatever interest he had to offer. He himself carefully scanned each
+ face, appraising the possibilities of establishing intimacy with each of
+ those present, and the advantages that might accrue. He took the seat
+ indicated to him beside the fair Hélène and listened to the general
+ conversation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vienna considers the bases of the proposed treaty so unattainable that
+ not even a continuity of most brilliant successes would secure them, and
+ she doubts the means we have of gaining them. That is the actual phrase
+ used by the Vienna cabinet,” said the Danish chargé d’affaires.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The doubt is flattering,” said “the man of profound intellect,” with a
+ subtle smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We must distinguish between the Vienna cabinet and the Emperor of
+ Austria,” said Mortemart. “The Emperor of Austria can never have thought
+ of such a thing, it is only the cabinet that says it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my dear vicomte,” put in Anna Pávlovna, “L’Urope” 
+ (for some reason she called it Urope as if that were a specially refined French
+ pronunciation which she could allow herself when conversing with a
+ Frenchman), “L’Urope ne sera jamais notre alliée sincère.” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Europe will never be our sincere ally.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After that Anna Pávlovna led up to the courage and firmness of the King of
+ Prussia, in order to draw Borís into the conversation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís listened attentively to each of the speakers, awaiting his turn, but
+ managed meanwhile to look round repeatedly at his neighbor, the beautiful
+ Hélène, whose eyes several times met those of the handsome young
+ aide-de-camp with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Speaking of the position of Prussia, Anna Pávlovna very naturally asked
+ Borís to tell them about his journey to Glogau and in what state he found
+ the Prussian army. Borís, speaking with deliberation, told them in pure,
+ correct French many interesting details about the armies and the court,
+ carefully abstaining from expressing an opinion of his own about the facts
+ he was recounting. For some time he engrossed the general attention, and
+ Anna Pávlovna felt that the novelty she had served up was received with
+ pleasure by all her visitors. The greatest attention of all to Borís’
+ narrative was shown by Hélène. She asked him several questions about his
+ journey and seemed greatly interested in the state of the Prussian army.
+ As soon as he had finished she turned to him with her usual smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You absolutely must come and see me,” she said in a tone that implied
+ that, for certain considerations he could not know of, this was absolutely
+ necessary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On Tuesday between eight and nine. It will give me great pleasure.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís promised to fulfill her wish and was about to begin a conversation
+ with her, when Anna Pávlovna called him away on the pretext that her aunt
+ wished to hear him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know her husband, of course?” said Anna Pávlovna, closing her eyes
+ and indicating Hélène with a sorrowful gesture. “Ah, she is such an
+ unfortunate and charming woman! Don’t mention him before her—please
+ don’t! It is too painful for her!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ When Borís and Anna Pávlovna returned to the others Prince Hippolyte had
+ the ear of the company.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bending forward in his armchair he said: “Le Roi de Prusse!” and having
+ said this laughed. Everyone turned toward him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Le Roi de Prusse?” Hippolyte said interrogatively, again laughing, and
+ then calmly and seriously sat back in his chair. Anna Pávlovna waited for
+ him to go on, but as he seemed quite decided to say no more she began to
+ tell of how at Potsdam the impious Bonaparte had stolen the sword of
+ Frederick the Great.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is the sword of Frederick the Great which I...” she began, but
+ Hippolyte interrupted her with the words: “Le Roi de Prusse...” 
+ and again, as soon as all turned toward him, excused himself and said no more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Pávlovna frowned. Mortemart, Hippolyte’s friend, addressed him
+ firmly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come now, what about your Roi de Prusse? ”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hippolyte laughed as if ashamed of laughing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, it’s nothing. I only wished to say...” (he wanted to repeat a joke he
+ had heard in Vienna and which he had been trying all that evening to get
+ in) “I only wished to say that we are wrong to fight pour le Roi de
+ Prusse! ”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís smiled circumspectly, so that it might be taken as ironical or
+ appreciative according to the way the joke was received. Everybody
+ laughed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your joke is too bad, it’s witty but unjust,” said Anna Pávlovna, shaking
+ her little shriveled finger at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We are not fighting pour le Roi de Prusse , but for right principles. Oh,
+ that wicked Prince Hippolyte!” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The conversation did not flag all evening and turned chiefly on the
+ political news. It became particularly animated toward the end of the
+ evening when the rewards bestowed by the Emperor were mentioned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know N— N— received a snuffbox with the portrait last
+ year?” said “the man of profound intellect.” “Why shouldn’t S— S—
+ get the same distinction?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pardon me! A snuffbox with the Emperor’s portrait is a reward but not a
+ distinction,” said the diplomatist—“a gift, rather.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There are precedents, I may mention Schwarzenberg.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s impossible,” replied another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Will you bet? The ribbon of the order is a different matter....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When everybody rose to go, Hélène who had spoken very little all the
+ evening again turned to Borís, asking him in a tone of caressing
+ significant command to come to her on Tuesday.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is of great importance to me,” she said, turning with a smile toward
+ Anna Pávlovna, and Anna Pávlovna, with the same sad smile with which she
+ spoke of her exalted patroness, supported Hélène’s wish.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It seemed as if from some words Borís had spoken that evening about the
+ Prussian army, Hélène had suddenly found it necessary to see him. She
+ seemed to promise to explain that necessity to him when he came on
+ Tuesday.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But on Tuesday evening, having come to Hélène’s splendid salon, Borís
+ received no clear explanation of why it had been necessary for him to
+ come. There were other guests and the countess talked little to him, and
+ only as he kissed her hand on taking leave said unexpectedly and in a
+ whisper, with a strangely unsmiling face: “Come to dinner tomorrow... in
+ the evening. You must come.... Come!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During that stay in Petersburg, Borís became an intimate in the countess’
+ house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ The war was flaming up and nearing the Russian frontier. Everywhere one
+ heard curses on Bonaparte, “the enemy of mankind.” Militiamen and recruits
+ were being enrolled in the villages, and from the seat of war came
+ contradictory news, false as usual and therefore variously interpreted.
+ The life of old Prince Bolkónski, Prince Andrew, and Princess Mary had
+ greatly changed since 1805.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In 1806 the old prince was made one of the eight commanders in chief then
+ appointed to supervise the enrollment decreed throughout Russia. Despite
+ the weakness of age, which had become particularly noticeable since the
+ time when he thought his son had been killed, he did not think it right to
+ refuse a duty to which he had been appointed by the Emperor himself, and
+ this fresh opportunity for action gave him new energy and strength. He was
+ continually traveling through the three provinces entrusted to him, was
+ pedantic in the fulfillment of his duties, severe to cruel with his
+ subordinates, and went into everything down to the minutest details
+ himself. Princess Mary had ceased taking lessons in mathematics from her
+ father, and when the old prince was at home went to his study with the wet
+ nurse and little Prince Nicholas (as his grandfather called him). The baby
+ Prince Nicholas lived with his wet nurse and nurse Sávishna in the late
+ princess’ rooms and Princess Mary spent most of the day in the nursery,
+ taking a mother’s place to her little nephew as best she could.
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne, too, seemed passionately fond of the boy, and
+ Princess Mary often deprived herself to give her friend the pleasure of
+ dandling the little angel —as she called her nephew—and playing
+ with him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Near the altar of the church at Bald Hills there was a chapel over the
+ tomb of the little princess, and in this chapel was a marble monument
+ brought from Italy, representing an angel with outspread wings ready to
+ fly upwards. The angel’s upper lip was slightly raised as though about to
+ smile, and once on coming out of the chapel Prince Andrew and Princess
+ Mary admitted to one another that the angel’s face reminded them strangely
+ of the little princess. But what was still stranger, though of this Prince
+ Andrew said nothing to his sister, was that in the expression the sculptor
+ had happened to give the angel’s face, Prince Andrew read the same mild
+ reproach he had read on the face of his dead wife: “Ah, why have you done
+ this to me?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon after Prince Andrew’s return the old prince made over to him a large
+ estate, Boguchárovo, about twenty-five miles from Bald Hills. Partly
+ because of the depressing memories associated with Bald Hills, partly
+ because Prince Andrew did not always feel equal to bearing with his
+ father’s peculiarities, and partly because he needed solitude, Prince
+ Andrew made use of Boguchárovo, began building and spent most of his time
+ there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the Austerlitz campaign Prince Andrew had firmly resolved not to
+ continue his military service, and when the war recommenced and everybody
+ had to serve, he took a post under his father in the recruitment so as to
+ avoid active service. The old prince and his son seemed to have changed
+ roles since the campaign of 1805. The old man, roused by activity,
+ expected the best results from the new campaign, while Prince Andrew on
+ the contrary, taking no part in the war and secretly regretting this, saw
+ only the dark side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On February 26, 1807, the old prince set off on one of his circuits.
+ Prince Andrew remained at Bald Hills as usual during his father’s absence.
+ Little Nicholas had been unwell for four days. The coachman who had driven
+ the old prince to town returned bringing papers and letters for Prince
+ Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not finding the young prince in his study the valet went with the letters
+ to Princess Mary’s apartments, but did not find him there. He was told
+ that the prince had gone to the nursery.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you please, your excellency, Pétrusha has brought some papers,” said
+ one of the nursemaids to Prince Andrew who was sitting on a child’s little
+ chair while, frowning and with trembling hands, he poured drops from a
+ medicine bottle into a wineglass half full of water.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it?” he said crossly, and, his hand shaking unintentionally, he
+ poured too many drops into the glass. He threw the mixture onto the floor
+ and asked for some more water. The maid brought it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There were in the room a child’s cot, two boxes, two armchairs, a table, a
+ child’s table, and the little chair on which Prince Andrew was sitting.
+ The curtains were drawn, and a single candle was burning on the table,
+ screened by a bound music book so that the light did not fall on the cot.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear,” said Princess Mary, addressing her brother from beside the cot
+ where she was standing, “better wait a bit... later...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, leave off, you always talk nonsense and keep putting things off—and
+ this is what comes of it!” said Prince Andrew in an exasperated whisper,
+ evidently meaning to wound his sister.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear, really... it’s better not to wake him... he’s asleep,” said the
+ princess in a tone of entreaty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew got up and went on tiptoe up to the little bed, wineglass in
+ hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Perhaps we’d really better not wake him,” he said hesitating.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As you please... really... I think so... but as you please,” said
+ Princess Mary, evidently intimidated and confused that her opinion had
+ prevailed. She drew her brother’s attention to the maid who was calling
+ him in a whisper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was the second night that neither of them had slept, watching the boy
+ who was in a high fever. These last days, mistrusting their household
+ doctor and expecting another for whom they had sent to town, they had been
+ trying first one remedy and then another. Worn out by sleeplessness and
+ anxiety they threw their burden of sorrow on one another and reproached
+ and disputed with each other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pétrusha has come with papers from your father,” whispered the maid.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew went out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Devil take them!” he muttered, and after listening to the verbal
+ instructions his father had sent and taking the correspondence and his
+ father’s letter, he returned to the nursery.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Still the same. Wait, for heaven’s sake. Karl Ivánich always says that
+ sleep is more important than anything,” whispered Princess Mary with a
+ sigh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew went up to the child and felt him. He was burning hot.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Confound you and your Karl Ivánich!” He took the glass with the drops and
+ again went up to the cot.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Andrew, don’t!” said Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But he scowled at her angrily though also with suffering in his eyes, and
+ stooped glass in hand over the infant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I wish it,” he said. “I beg you—give it him!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary shrugged her shoulders but took the glass submissively and
+ calling the nurse began giving the medicine. The child screamed hoarsely.
+ Prince Andrew winced and, clutching his head, went out and sat down on a
+ sofa in the next room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He still had all the letters in his hand. Opening them mechanically he
+ began reading. The old prince, now and then using abbreviations, wrote in
+ his large elongated hand on blue paper as follows:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Have just this moment received by special messenger very joyful news—if
+ it’s not false. Bennigsen seems to have obtained a complete victory over
+ Buonaparte at Eylau. In Petersburg everyone is rejoicing, and the rewards
+ sent to the army are innumerable. Though he is a German—I
+ congratulate him! I can’t make out what the commander at Kórchevo—a
+ certain Khandrikóv—is up to; till now the additional men and
+ provisions have not arrived. Gallop off to him at once and say I’ll have
+ his head off if everything is not here in a week. Have received another
+ letter about the Preussisch-Eylau battle from Pétenka—he took part
+ in it—and it’s all true. When mischief-makers don’t meddle even a
+ German beats Buonaparte. He is said to be fleeing in great disorder. Mind
+ you gallop off to Kórchevo without delay and carry out instructions!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew sighed and broke the seal of another envelope. It was a
+ closely written letter of two sheets from Bilíbin. He folded it up without
+ reading it and reread his father’s letter, ending with the words: “Gallop
+ off to Kórchevo and carry out instructions!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, pardon me, I won’t go now till the child is better,” thought he,
+ going to the door and looking into the nursery.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary was still standing by the cot, gently rocking the baby.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah yes, and what else did he say that’s unpleasant?” thought Prince
+ Andrew, recalling his father’s letter. “Yes, we have gained a victory over
+ Bonaparte, just when I’m not serving. Yes, yes, he’s always poking fun at
+ me.... Ah, well! Let him!” And he began reading Bilíbin’s letter which was
+ written in French. He read without understanding half of it, read only to
+ forget, if but for a moment, what he had too long been thinking of so
+ painfully to the exclusion of all else.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ Bilíbin was now at army headquarters in a diplomatic capacity, and though
+ he wrote in French and used French jests and French idioms, he described
+ the whole campaign with a fearless self-censure and self-derision
+ genuinely Russian. Bilíbin wrote that the obligation of diplomatic
+ discretion tormented him, and he was happy to have in Prince Andrew a
+ reliable correspondent to whom he could pour out the bile he had
+ accumulated at the sight of all that was being done in the army. The
+ letter was old, having been written before the battle at Preussisch-Eylau.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Since the day of our brilliant success at Austerlitz,” wrote Bilíbin, “as
+ you know, my dear prince, I never leave headquarters. I have certainly
+ acquired a taste for war, and it is just as well for me; what I have seen
+ during these last three months is incredible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I begin ab ovo . ‘The enemy of the human race,’ as you know, attacks the
+ Prussians. The Prussians are our faithful allies who have only betrayed us
+ three times in three years. We take up their cause, but it turns out that
+ ‘the enemy of the human race’ pays no heed to our fine speeches and in his
+ rude and savage way throws himself on the Prussians without giving them
+ time to finish the parade they had begun, and in two twists of the hand he
+ breaks them to smithereens and installs himself in the palace at Potsdam.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘I most ardently desire,’ writes the King of Prussia to Bonaparte, ‘that
+ Your Majesty should be received and treated in my palace in a manner
+ agreeable to yourself, and in so far as circumstances allowed, I have
+ hastened to take all steps to that end. May I have succeeded!’ The
+ Prussian generals pride themselves on being polite to the French and lay
+ down their arms at the first demand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The head of the garrison at Glogau, with ten thousand men, asks the King
+ of Prussia what he is to do if he is summoned to surrender.... All this is
+ absolutely true.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In short, hoping to settle matters by taking up a warlike attitude, it
+ turns out that we have landed ourselves in war, and what is more, in war
+ on our own frontiers, with and for the King of Prussia. We have everything
+ in perfect order, only one little thing is lacking, namely, a commander in
+ chief. As it was considered that the Austerlitz success might have been
+ more decisive had the commander in chief not been so young, all our
+ octogenarians were reviewed, and of Prozoróvski and Kámenski the latter
+ was preferred. The general comes to us, Suvórov-like, in a kibítka , and is
+ received with acclamations of joy and triumph.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the 4th, the first courier arrives from Petersburg. The mails are
+ taken to the field marshal’s room, for he likes to do everything himself.
+ I am called in to help sort the letters and take those meant for us. The
+ field marshal looks on and waits for letters addressed to him. We search,
+ but none are to be found. The field marshal grows impatient and sets to
+ work himself and finds letters from the Emperor to Count T., Prince V.,
+ and others. Then he bursts into one of his wild furies and rages at
+ everyone and everything, seizes the letters, opens them, and reads those
+ from the Emperor addressed to others. ‘Ah! So that’s the way they treat
+ me! No confidence in me! Ah, ordered to keep an eye on me! Very well then!
+ Get along with you!’ So he writes the famous order of the day to General
+ Bennigsen:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘I am wounded and cannot ride and consequently cannot command the
+ army. You have brought your army corps to Pultúsk, routed: here it is exposed,
+ and without fuel or forage, so something must be done, and, as you
+ yourself reported to Count Buxhöwden yesterday, you must think of
+ retreating to our frontier—which do today.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘From all my riding,’ he writes to the Emperor, ‘I have got a saddle sore
+ which, coming after all my previous journeys, quite prevents my riding and
+ commanding so vast an army, so I have passed on the command to the general
+ next in seniority, Count Buxhöwden, having sent him my whole staff and all
+ that belongs to it, advising him if there is a lack of bread, to move
+ farther into the interior of Prussia, for only one day’s ration of bread
+ remains, and in some regiments none at all, as reported by the division
+ commanders, Ostermann and Sedmorétzki, and all that the peasants had has
+ been eaten up. I myself will remain in hospital at Ostrolenka till I
+ recover. In regard to which I humbly submit my report, with the
+ information that if the army remains in its present bivouac another
+ fortnight there will not be a healthy man left in it by spring.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Grant leave to retire to his country seat to an old man who is already
+ in any case dishonored by being unable to fulfill the great and glorious
+ task for which he was chosen. I shall await your most gracious permission
+ here in hospital, that I may not have to play the part of a secretary 
+ rather than commander in the army. My removal from the army does not
+ produce the slightest stir—a blind man has left it. There are
+ thousands such as I in Russia.’
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The field marshal is angry with the Emperor and he punishes us all, isn’t
+ it logical?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This is the first act. Those that follow are naturally increasingly
+ interesting and entertaining. After the field marshal’s departure it
+ appears that we are within sight of the enemy and must give battle.
+ Buxhöwden is commander in chief by seniority, but General Bennigsen does
+ not quite see it; more particularly as it is he and his corps who are
+ within sight of the enemy and he wishes to profit by the opportunity to
+ fight a battle ‘on his own hand’ as the Germans say. He does so. This is
+ the battle of Pultúsk, which is considered a great victory but in my
+ opinion was nothing of the kind. We civilians, as you know, have a very
+ bad way of deciding whether a battle was won or lost. Those who retreat
+ after a battle have lost it is what we say; and according to that it is we
+ who lost the battle of Pultúsk. In short, we retreat after the battle but
+ send a courier to Petersburg with news of a victory, and General
+ Bennigsen, hoping to receive from Petersburg the post of commander in
+ chief as a reward for his victory, does not give up the command of the
+ army to General Buxhöwden. During this interregnum we begin a very
+ original and interesting series of maneuvers. Our aim is no longer, as it
+ should be, to avoid or attack the enemy, but solely to avoid General
+ Buxhöwden who by right of seniority should be our chief. So energetically
+ do we pursue this aim that after crossing an unfordable river we burn the
+ bridges to separate ourselves from our enemy, who at the moment is not
+ Bonaparte but Buxhöwden. General Buxhöwden was all but attacked and
+ captured by a superior enemy force as a result of one of these maneuvers
+ that enabled us to escape him. Buxhöwden pursues us—we scuttle. He
+ hardly crosses the river to our side before we recross to the other. At
+ last our enemy, Buxhöwden, catches us and attacks. Both generals are
+ angry, and the result is a challenge on Buxhöwden’s part and an epileptic
+ fit on Bennigsen’s. But at the critical moment the courier who carried the
+ news of our victory at Pultúsk to Petersburg returns bringing our
+ appointment as commander in chief, and our first foe, Buxhöwden, is
+ vanquished; we can now turn our thoughts to the second, Bonaparte. But as
+ it turns out, just at that moment a third enemy rises before us—namely
+ the Orthodox Russian soldiers , loudly demanding bread, meat, biscuits,
+ fodder, and whatnot! The stores are empty, the roads impassable. The
+ Orthodox begin looting, and in a way of which our last campaign can give
+ you no idea. Half the regiments form bands and scour the countryside and
+ put everything to fire and sword. The inhabitants are totally ruined, the
+ hospitals overflow with sick, and famine is everywhere. Twice the
+ marauders even attack our headquarters, and the commander in chief has to
+ ask for a battalion to disperse them. During one of these attacks they
+ carried off my empty portmanteau and my dressing gown. The Emperor
+ proposes to give all commanders of divisions the right to shoot marauders,
+ but I much fear this will oblige one half the army to shoot the other.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At first Prince Andrew read with his eyes only, but after a while, in
+ spite of himself (although he knew how far it was safe to trust Bilíbin),
+ what he had read began to interest him more and more. When he had read
+ thus far, he crumpled the letter up and threw it away. It was not what he
+ had read that vexed him, but the fact that the life out there in which he
+ had now no part could perturb him. He shut his eyes, rubbed his forehead
+ as if to rid himself of all interest in what he had read, and listened to
+ what was passing in the nursery. Suddenly he thought he heard a strange
+ noise through the door. He was seized with alarm lest something should
+ have happened to the child while he was reading the letter. He went on
+ tiptoe to the nursery door and opened it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just as he went in he saw that the nurse was hiding something from him
+ with a scared look and that Princess Mary was no longer by the cot.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear,” he heard what seemed to him her despairing whisper behind him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As often happens after long sleeplessness and long anxiety, he was seized
+ by an unreasoning panic—it occurred to him that the child was dead.
+ All that he saw and heard seemed to confirm this terror.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All is over,” he thought, and a cold sweat broke out on his forehead. He
+ went to the cot in confusion, sure that he would find it empty and that
+ the nurse had been hiding the dead baby. He drew the curtain aside and for
+ some time his frightened, restless eyes could not find the baby. At last
+ he saw him: the rosy boy had tossed about till he lay across the bed with
+ his head lower than the pillow, and was smacking his lips in his sleep and
+ breathing evenly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew was as glad to find the boy like that, as if he had already
+ lost him. He bent over him and, as his sister had taught him, tried with
+ his lips whether the child was still feverish. The soft forehead was
+ moist. Prince Andrew touched the head with his hand; even the hair was
+ wet, so profusely had the child perspired. He was not dead, but evidently
+ the crisis was over and he was convalescent. Prince Andrew longed to
+ snatch up, to squeeze, to hold to his heart, this helpless little
+ creature, but dared not do so. He stood over him, gazing at his head and
+ at the little arms and legs which showed under the blanket. He heard a
+ rustle behind him and a shadow appeared under the curtain of the cot. He
+ did not look round, but still gazing at the infant’s face listened to his
+ regular breathing. The dark shadow was Princess Mary, who had come up to
+ the cot with noiseless steps, lifted the curtain, and dropped it again
+ behind her. Prince Andrew recognized her without looking and held out his
+ hand to her. She pressed it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He has perspired,” said Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was coming to tell you so.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The child moved slightly in his sleep, smiled, and rubbed his forehead
+ against the pillow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew looked at his sister. In the dim shadow of the curtain her
+ luminous eyes shone more brightly than usual from the tears of joy that
+ were in them. She leaned over to her brother and kissed him, slightly
+ catching the curtain of the cot. Each made the other a warning gesture and
+ stood still in the dim light beneath the curtain as if not wishing to
+ leave that seclusion where they three were shut off from all the world.
+ Prince Andrew was the first to move away, ruffling his hair against the
+ muslin of the curtain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, this is the one thing left me now,” he said with a sigh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ Soon after his admission to the Masonic Brotherhood, Pierre went to the
+ Kiev province, where he had the greatest number of serfs, taking with him
+ full directions which he had written down for his own guidance as to what
+ he should do on his estates.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he reached Kiev he sent for all his stewards to the head office and
+ explained to them his intentions and wishes. He told them that steps would
+ be taken immediately to free his serfs—and that till then they were
+ not to be overburdened with labor, women while nursing their babies were
+ not to be sent to work, assistance was to be given to the serfs,
+ punishments were to be admonitory and not corporal, and hospitals,
+ asylums, and schools were to be established on all the estates. Some of
+ the stewards (there were semiliterate foremen among them) listened with
+ alarm, supposing these words to mean that the young count was displeased
+ with their management and embezzlement of money, some after their first
+ fright were amused by Pierre’s lisp and the new words they had not heard
+ before, others simply enjoyed hearing how the master talked, while the
+ cleverest among them, including the chief steward, understood from this
+ speech how they could best handle the master for their own ends.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The chief steward expressed great sympathy with Pierre’s intentions, but
+ remarked that besides these changes it would be necessary to go into the
+ general state of affairs which was far from satisfactory.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Despite Count Bezúkhov’s enormous wealth, since he had come into an income
+ which was said to amount to five hundred thousand rubles a year, Pierre
+ felt himself far poorer than when his father had made him an allowance of
+ ten thousand rubles. He had a dim perception of the following budget:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ About 80,000 went in payments on all the estates to the Land Bank, about
+ 30,000 went for the upkeep of the estate near Moscow, the town house, and
+ the allowance to the three princesses; about 15,000 was given in pensions
+ and the same amount for asylums; 150,000 alimony was sent to the countess;
+ about 70,000 went for interest on debts. The building of a new church,
+ previously begun, had cost about 10,000 in each of the last two years, and
+ he did not know how the rest, about 100,000 rubles, was spent, and almost
+ every year he was obliged to borrow. Besides this the chief steward wrote
+ every year telling him of fires and bad harvests, or of the necessity of
+ rebuilding factories and workshops. So the first task Pierre had to face
+ was one for which he had very little aptitude or inclination—practical
+ business.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He discussed estate affairs every day with his chief steward. But he felt
+ that this did not forward matters at all. He felt that these consultations
+ were detached from real affairs and did not link up with them or make them
+ move. On the one hand, the chief steward put the state of things to him in
+ the very worst light, pointing out the necessity of paying off the debts
+ and undertaking new activities with serf labor, to which Pierre did not
+ agree. On the other hand, Pierre demanded that steps should be taken to
+ liberate the serfs, which the steward met by showing the necessity of
+ first paying off the loans from the Land Bank, and the consequent
+ impossibility of a speedy emancipation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The steward did not say it was quite impossible, but suggested selling the
+ forests in the province of Kostromá, the land lower down the river, and
+ the Crimean estate, in order to make it possible: all of which operations
+ according to him were connected with such complicated measures—the
+ removal of injunctions, petitions, permits, and so on—that Pierre
+ became quite bewildered and only replied:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, do so.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre had none of the practical persistence that would have enabled him
+ to attend to the business himself and so he disliked it and only tried to
+ pretend to the steward that he was attending to it. The steward for his
+ part tried to pretend to the count that he considered these consultations
+ very valuable for the proprietor and troublesome to himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In Kiev Pierre found some people he knew, and strangers hastened to make
+ his acquaintance and joyfully welcomed the rich newcomer, the largest
+ landowner of the province. Temptations to Pierre’s greatest weakness—the
+ one to which he had confessed when admitted to the Lodge—were so
+ strong that he could not resist them. Again whole days, weeks, and months
+ of his life passed in as great a rush and were as much occupied with
+ evening parties, dinners, lunches, and balls, giving him no time for
+ reflection, as in Petersburg. Instead of the new life he had hoped to lead
+ he still lived the old life, only in new surroundings.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of the three precepts of Freemasonry Pierre realized that he did not
+ fulfill the one which enjoined every Mason to set an example of moral
+ life, and that of the seven virtues he lacked two—morality and the
+ love of death. He consoled himself with the thought that he fulfilled
+ another of the precepts—that of reforming the human race—and
+ had other virtues—love of his neighbor, and especially generosity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the spring of 1807 he decided to return to Petersburg. On the way he
+ intended to visit all his estates and see for himself how far his orders
+ had been carried out and in what state were the serfs whom God had
+ entrusted to his care and whom he intended to benefit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The chief steward, who considered the young count’s attempts almost insane—unprofitable
+ to himself, to the count, and to the serfs—made some concessions.
+ Continuing to represent the liberation of the serfs as impracticable, he
+ arranged for the erection of large buildings—schools, hospitals, and
+ asylums—on all the estates before the master arrived. Everywhere
+ preparations were made not for ceremonious welcomes (which he knew Pierre
+ would not like), but for just such gratefully religious ones, with
+ offerings of icons and the bread and salt of hospitality, as, according to
+ his understanding of his master, would touch and delude him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The southern spring, the comfortable rapid traveling in a Vienna carriage,
+ and the solitude of the road, all had a gladdening effect on Pierre. The
+ estates he had not before visited were each more picturesque than the
+ other; the serfs everywhere seemed thriving and touchingly grateful for
+ the benefits conferred on them. Everywhere were receptions, which though
+ they embarrassed Pierre awakened a joyful feeling in the depth of his
+ heart. In one place the peasants presented him with bread and salt and an
+ icon of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, asking permission, as a mark of their
+ gratitude for the benefits he had conferred on them, to build a new
+ chantry to the church at their own expense in honor of Peter and Paul, his
+ patron saints. In another place the women with infants in arms met him to
+ thank him for releasing them from hard work. On a third estate the priest,
+ bearing a cross, came to meet him surrounded by children whom, by the
+ count’s generosity, he was instructing in reading, writing, and religion.
+ On all his estates Pierre saw with his own eyes brick buildings erected or
+ in course of erection, all on one plan, for hospitals, schools, and
+ almshouses, which were soon to be opened. Everywhere he saw the stewards’
+ accounts, according to which the serfs’ manorial labor had been
+ diminished, and heard the touching thanks of deputations of serfs in their
+ full-skirted blue coats.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What Pierre did not know was that the place where they presented him with
+ bread and salt and wished to build a chantry in honor of Peter and Paul
+ was a market village where a fair was held on St. Peter’s day, and that
+ the richest peasants (who formed the deputation) had begun the chantry
+ long before, but that nine tenths of the peasants in that villages were in
+ a state of the greatest poverty. He did not know that since the nursing
+ mothers were no longer sent to work on his land, they did still harder
+ work on their own land. He did not know that the priest who met him with
+ the cross oppressed the peasants by his exactions, and that the pupils’
+ parents wept at having to let him take their children and secured their
+ release by heavy payments. He did not know that the brick buildings, built
+ to plan, were being built by serfs whose manorial labor was thus
+ increased, though lessened on paper. He did not know that where the
+ steward had shown him in the accounts that the serfs’ payments had been
+ diminished by a third, their obligatory manorial work had been increased
+ by a half. And so Pierre was delighted with his visit to his estates and
+ quite recovered the philanthropic mood in which he had left Petersburg,
+ and wrote enthusiastic letters to his “brother-instructor” as he called
+ the Grand Master.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How easy it is, how little effort it needs, to do so much good,” thought
+ Pierre, “and how little attention we pay to it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was pleased at the gratitude he received, but felt abashed at receiving
+ it. This gratitude reminded him of how much more he might do for these
+ simple, kindly people.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The chief steward, a very stupid but cunning man who saw perfectly through
+ the naïve and intelligent count and played with him as with a toy, seeing
+ the effect these prearranged receptions had on Pierre, pressed him still
+ harder with proofs of the impossibility and above all the uselessness of
+ freeing the serfs, who were quite happy as it was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre in his secret soul agreed with the steward that it would be
+ difficult to imagine happier people, and that God only knew what would
+ happen to them when they were free, but he insisted, though reluctantly,
+ on what he thought right. The steward promised to do all in his power to
+ carry out the count’s wishes, seeing clearly that not only would the count
+ never be able to find out whether all measures had been taken for the sale
+ of the land and forests and to release them from the Land Bank, but would
+ probably never even inquire and would never know that the newly erected
+ buildings were standing empty and that the serfs continued to give in
+ money and work all that other people’s serfs gave—that is to say,
+ all that could be got out of them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ Returning from his journey through South Russia in the happiest state of
+ mind, Pierre carried out an intention he had long had of visiting his
+ friend Bolkónski, whom he had not seen for two years.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Boguchárovo lay in a flat uninteresting part of the country among fields
+ and forests of fir and birch, which were partly cut down. The house lay
+ behind a newly dug pond filled with water to the brink and with banks
+ still bare of grass. It was at the end of a village that stretched along
+ the highroad in the midst of a young copse in which were a few fir trees.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The homestead consisted of a threshing floor, outhouses, stables, a
+ bathhouse, a lodge, and a large brick house with semicircular façade still
+ in course of construction. Round the house was a garden newly laid out.
+ The fences and gates were new and solid; two fire pumps and a water cart,
+ painted green, stood in a shed; the paths were straight, the bridges were
+ strong and had handrails. Everything bore an impress of tidiness and good
+ management. Some domestic serfs Pierre met, in reply to inquiries as to
+ where the prince lived, pointed out a small newly built lodge close to the
+ pond. Antón, a man who had looked after Prince Andrew in his boyhood,
+ helped Pierre out of his carriage, said that the prince was at home, and
+ showed him into a clean little anteroom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was struck by the modesty of the small though clean house after the
+ brilliant surroundings in which he had last met his friend in Petersburg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He quickly entered the small reception room with its still-unplastered
+ wooden walls redolent of pine, and would have gone farther, but Antón ran
+ ahead on tiptoe and knocked at a door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what is it?” came a sharp, unpleasant voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A visitor,” answered Antón.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ask him to wait,” and the sound was heard of a chair being pushed back.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre went with rapid steps to the door and suddenly came face to face
+ with Prince Andrew, who came out frowning and looking old. Pierre embraced
+ him and lifting his spectacles kissed his friend on the cheek and looked
+ at him closely.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, I did not expect you, I am very glad,” said Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre said nothing; he looked fixedly at his friend with surprise. He was
+ struck by the change in him. His words were kindly and there was a smile
+ on his lips and face, but his eyes were dull and lifeless and in spite of
+ his evident wish to do so he could not give them a joyous and glad
+ sparkle. Prince Andrew had grown thinner, paler, and more manly-looking,
+ but what amazed and estranged Pierre till he got used to it were his
+ inertia and a wrinkle on his brow indicating prolonged concentration on
+ some one thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As is usually the case with people meeting after a prolonged separation,
+ it was long before their conversation could settle on anything. They put
+ questions and gave brief replies about things they knew ought to be talked
+ over at length. At last the conversation gradually settled on some of the
+ topics at first lightly touched on: their past life, plans for the future,
+ Pierre’s journeys and occupations, the war, and so on. The preoccupation
+ and despondency which Pierre had noticed in his friend’s look was now
+ still more clearly expressed in the smile with which he listened to
+ Pierre, especially when he spoke with joyful animation of the past or the
+ future. It was as if Prince Andrew would have liked to sympathize with
+ what Pierre was saying, but could not. The latter began to feel that it
+ was in bad taste to speak of his enthusiasms, dreams, and hopes of
+ happiness or goodness, in Prince Andrew’s presence. He was ashamed to
+ express his new Masonic views, which had been particularly revived and
+ strengthened by his late tour. He checked himself, fearing to seem naïve,
+ yet he felt an irresistible desire to show his friend as soon as possible
+ that he was now a quite different, and better, Pierre than he had been in
+ Petersburg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I can’t tell you how much I have lived through since then. I hardly know
+ myself again.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, we have altered much, very much, since then,” said Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, and you? What are your plans?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Plans!” repeated Prince Andrew ironically. “My plans?” he said, as if
+ astonished at the word. “Well, you see, I’m building. I mean to settle
+ here altogether next year....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked silently and searchingly into Prince Andrew’s face, which
+ had grown much older.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I meant to ask...” Pierre began, but Prince Andrew interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But why talk of me?... Talk to me, yes, tell me about your
+ travels and all you have been doing on your estates.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre began describing what he had done on his estates, trying as far as
+ possible to conceal his own part in the improvements that had been made.
+ Prince Andrew several times prompted Pierre’s story of what he had been
+ doing, as though it were all an old-time story, and he listened not only
+ without interest but even as if ashamed of what Pierre was telling him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre felt uncomfortable and even depressed in his friend’s company and
+ at last became silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll tell you what, my dear fellow,” said Prince Andrew, who evidently
+ also felt depressed and constrained with his visitor, “I am only
+ bivouacking here and have just come to look round. I am going back to my
+ sister today. I will introduce you to her. But of course you know her
+ already,” he said, evidently trying to entertain a visitor with whom he
+ now found nothing in common. “We will go after dinner. And would you now
+ like to look round my place?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They went out and walked about till dinnertime, talking of the political
+ news and common acquaintances like people who do not know each other
+ intimately. Prince Andrew spoke with some animation and interest only of
+ the new homestead he was constructing and its buildings, but even here,
+ while on the scaffolding, in the midst of a talk explaining the future
+ arrangements of the house, he interrupted himself:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “However, this is not at all interesting. Let us have dinner, and then
+ we’ll set off.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At dinner, conversation turned on Pierre’s marriage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was very much surprised when I heard of it,” said Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre blushed, as he always did when it was mentioned, and said
+ hurriedly: “I will tell you some time how it all happened. But you know it
+ is all over, and forever.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Forever?” said Prince Andrew. “Nothing’s forever.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you know how it all ended, don’t you? You heard of the duel?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And so you had to go through that too!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One thing I thank God for is that I did not kill that man,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why so?” asked Prince Andrew. “To kill a vicious dog is a very good thing
+ really.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, to kill a man is bad—wrong.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why is it wrong?” urged Prince Andrew. “It is not given to man to know
+ what is right and what is wrong. Men always did and always will err, and
+ in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What does harm to another is wrong,” said Pierre, feeling with pleasure
+ that for the first time since his arrival Prince Andrew was roused, had
+ begun to talk, and wanted to express what had brought him to his present
+ state.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And who has told you what is bad for another man?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bad! Bad!” exclaimed Pierre. “We all know what is bad for ourselves.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, we know that, but the harm I am conscious of in myself is something
+ I cannot inflict on others,” said Prince Andrew, growing more and more
+ animated and evidently wishing to express his new outlook to Pierre. He
+ spoke in French. “I only know two very real evils in life: remorse and
+ illness. The only good is the absence of those evils. To live for myself
+ avoiding those two evils is my whole philosophy now.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And love of one’s neighbor, and self-sacrifice?” began Pierre. “No, I
+ can’t agree with you! To live only so as not to do evil and not to have to
+ repent is not enough. I lived like that, I lived for myself and ruined my
+ life. And only now when I am living, or at least trying” (Pierre’s modesty
+ made him correct himself) “to live for others, only now have I understood
+ all the happiness of life. No, I shall not agree with you, and you do not
+ really believe what you are saying.” Prince Andrew looked silently at
+ Pierre with an ironic smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When you see my sister, Princess Mary, you’ll get on with her,” he said.
+ “Perhaps you are right for yourself,” he added after a short pause, “but
+ everyone lives in his own way. You lived for yourself and say you nearly
+ ruined your life and only found happiness when you began living for
+ others. I experienced just the reverse. I lived for glory.—And after
+ all what is glory? The same love of others, a desire to do something for
+ them, a desire for their approval.—So I lived for others, and not
+ almost, but quite, ruined my life. And I have become calmer since I began
+ to live only for myself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what do you mean by living only for yourself?” asked Pierre, growing
+ excited. “What about your son, your sister, and your father?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But that’s just the same as myself—they are not others ,” explained
+ Prince Andrew. “The others, one’s neighbors, le prochain , as you and
+ Princess Mary call it, are the chief source of all error and evil. Le
+ prochain —your Kiev peasants to whom you want to do good.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And he looked at Pierre with a mocking, challenging expression. He
+ evidently wished to draw him on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are joking,” replied Pierre, growing more and more excited. “What
+ error or evil can there be in my wishing to do good, and even doing a
+ little—though I did very little and did it very badly? What evil can
+ there be in it if unfortunate people, our serfs, people like ourselves,
+ were growing up and dying with no idea of God and truth beyond ceremonies
+ and meaningless prayers and are now instructed in a comforting belief in
+ future life, retribution, recompense, and consolation? What evil and error
+ are there in it, if people were dying of disease without help while
+ material assistance could so easily be rendered, and I supplied them with
+ a doctor, a hospital, and an asylum for the aged? And is it not a
+ palpable, unquestionable good if a peasant, or a woman with a baby, has no
+ rest day or night and I give them rest and leisure?” said Pierre, hurrying
+ and lisping. “And I have done that though badly and to a small extent; but
+ I have done something toward it and you cannot persuade me that it was not
+ a good action, and more than that, you can’t make me believe that you do
+ not think so yourself. And the main thing is,” he continued, “that I know,
+ and know for certain, that the enjoyment of doing this good is the only
+ sure happiness in life.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, if you put it like that it’s quite a different matter,” said Prince
+ Andrew. “I build a house and lay out a garden, and you build hospitals.
+ The one and the other may serve as a pastime. But what’s right and what’s
+ good must be judged by one who knows all, but not by us. Well, you want an
+ argument,” he added, “come on then.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They rose from the table and sat down in the entrance porch which served
+ as a veranda.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come, let’s argue then,” said Prince Andrew, “You talk of schools,” he
+ went on, crooking a finger, “education and so forth; that is, you want to
+ raise him” (pointing to a peasant who passed by them taking off his cap)
+ “from his animal condition and awaken in him spiritual needs, while it
+ seems to me that animal happiness is the only happiness possible, and that
+ is just what you want to deprive him of. I envy him, but you want to make
+ him what I am, without giving him my means. Then you say, ‘lighten his
+ toil.’ But as I see it, physical labor is as essential to him, as much a
+ condition of his existence, as mental activity is to you or me. You can’t
+ help thinking. I go to bed after two in the morning, thoughts come and I
+ can’t sleep but toss about till dawn, because I think and can’t help
+ thinking, just as he can’t help plowing and mowing; if he didn’t, he would
+ go to the drink shop or fall ill. Just as I could not stand his terrible
+ physical labor but should die of it in a week, so he could not stand my
+ physical idleness, but would grow fat and die. The third thing—what
+ else was it you talked about?” and Prince Andrew crooked a third finger.
+ “Ah, yes, hospitals, medicine. He has a fit, he is dying, and you come and
+ bleed him and patch him up. He will drag about as a cripple, a burden to
+ everybody, for another ten years. It would be far easier and simpler for
+ him to die. Others are being born and there are plenty of them as it is.
+ It would be different if you grudged losing a laborer—that’s how I
+ regard him—but you want to cure him from love of him. And he does
+ not want that. And besides, what a notion that medicine ever cured anyone!
+ Killed them, yes!” said he, frowning angrily and turning away from Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew expressed his ideas so clearly and distinctly that it was
+ evident he had reflected on this subject more than once, and he spoke
+ readily and rapidly like a man who has not talked for a long time. His
+ glance became more animated as his conclusions became more hopeless.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, that is dreadful, dreadful!” said Pierre. “I don’t understand how one
+ can live with such ideas. I had such moments myself not long ago, in
+ Moscow and when traveling, but at such times I collapsed so that I don’t
+ live at all—everything seems hateful to me... myself most of all.
+ Then I don’t eat, don’t wash... and how is it with you?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why not wash? That is not cleanly,” said Prince Andrew; “on the contrary
+ one must try to make one’s life as pleasant as possible. I’m alive, that
+ is not my fault, so I must live out my life as best I can without hurting
+ others.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But with such ideas what motive have you for living? One would sit
+ without moving, undertaking nothing....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Life as it is leaves one no peace. I should be thankful to do nothing,
+ but here on the one hand the local nobility have done me the honor to
+ choose me to be their marshal; it was all I could do to get out of it.
+ They could not understand that I have not the necessary qualifications for
+ it—the kind of good-natured, fussy shallowness necessary for the
+ position. Then there’s this house, which must be built in order to have a
+ nook of one’s own in which to be quiet. And now there’s this recruiting.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why aren’t you serving in the army?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “After Austerlitz!” said Prince Andrew gloomily. “No, thank you very much!
+ I have promised myself not to serve again in the active Russian army. And
+ I won’t—not even if Bonaparte were here at Smolénsk threatening Bald
+ Hills—even then I wouldn’t serve in the Russian army! Well, as I was
+ saying,” he continued, recovering his composure, “now there’s this
+ recruiting. My father is chief in command of the Third District, and my
+ only way of avoiding active service is to serve under him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then you are serving?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He paused a little while.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And why do you serve?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, for this reason! My father is one of the most remarkable men of his
+ time. But he is growing old, and though not exactly cruel he has too
+ energetic a character. He is so accustomed to unlimited power that he is
+ terrible, and now he has this authority of a commander in chief of the
+ recruiting, granted by the Emperor. If I had been two hours late a
+ fortnight ago he would have had a paymaster’s clerk at Yúkhnovna hanged,”
+ said Prince Andrew with a smile. “So I am serving because I alone have any
+ influence with my father, and now and then can save him from actions which
+ would torment him afterwards.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, there you see!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, but it is not as you imagine,” Prince Andrew continued. “I did not,
+ and do not, in the least care about that scoundrel of a clerk who had
+ stolen some boots from the recruits; I should even have been very glad to
+ see him hanged, but I was sorry for my father—that again is for
+ myself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew grew more and more animated. His eyes glittered feverishly
+ while he tried to prove to Pierre that in his actions there was no desire
+ to do good to his neighbor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now, you wish to liberate your serfs,” he continued; “that is a
+ very good thing, but not for you—I don’t suppose you ever had anyone
+ flogged or sent to Siberia—and still less for your serfs. If they
+ are beaten, flogged, or sent to Siberia, I don’t suppose they are any the
+ worse off. In Siberia they lead the same animal life, and the stripes on
+ their bodies heal, and they are happy as before. But it is a good thing
+ for proprietors who perish morally, bring remorse upon themselves, stifle
+ this remorse and grow callous, as a result of being able to inflict
+ punishments justly and unjustly. It is those people I pity, and for their
+ sake I should like to liberate the serfs. You may not have seen, but I
+ have seen, how good men brought up in those traditions of unlimited power,
+ in time when they grow more irritable, become cruel and harsh, are
+ conscious of it, but cannot restrain themselves and grow more and more
+ miserable.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew spoke so earnestly that Pierre could not help thinking that
+ these thoughts had been suggested to Prince Andrew by his father’s case.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So that’s what I’m sorry for—human dignity, peace of mind, purity,
+ and not the serfs’ backs and foreheads, which, beat and shave as you may,
+ always remain the same backs and foreheads.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, no! A thousand times no! I shall never agree with you,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ In the evening Andrew and Pierre got into the open carriage and drove to
+ Bald Hills. Prince Andrew, glancing at Pierre, broke the silence now and
+ then with remarks which showed that he was in a good temper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pointing to the fields, he spoke of the improvements he was making in his
+ husbandry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre remained gloomily silent, answering in monosyllables and apparently
+ immersed in his own thoughts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was thinking that Prince Andrew was unhappy, had gone astray, did not
+ see the true light, and that he, Pierre, ought to aid, enlighten, and
+ raise him. But as soon as he thought of what he should say, he felt that
+ Prince Andrew with one word, one argument, would upset all his teaching,
+ and he shrank from beginning, afraid of exposing to possible ridicule what
+ to him was precious and sacred.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, but why do you think so?” Pierre suddenly began, lowering his head
+ and looking like a bull about to charge, “why do you think so? You should
+ not think so.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Think? What about?” asked Prince Andrew with surprise.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “About life, about man’s destiny. It can’t be so. I myself thought like
+ that, and do you know what saved me? Freemasonry! No, don’t smile.
+ Freemasonry is not a religious ceremonial sect, as I thought it was:
+ Freemasonry is the best expression of the best, the eternal, aspects of
+ humanity.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And he began to explain Freemasonry as he understood it to Prince Andrew.
+ He said that Freemasonry is the teaching of Christianity freed from the
+ bonds of State and Church, a teaching of equality, brotherhood, and love.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Only our holy brotherhood has the real meaning of life, all the rest is a
+ dream,” said Pierre. “Understand, my dear fellow, that outside this union
+ all is filled with deceit and falsehood and I agree with you that nothing
+ is left for an intelligent and good man but to live out his life, like
+ you, merely trying not to harm others. But make our fundamental
+ convictions your own, join our brotherhood, give yourself up to us, let
+ yourself be guided, and you will at once feel yourself, as I have felt
+ myself, a part of that vast invisible chain the beginning of which is
+ hidden in heaven,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew, looking straight in front of him, listened in silence to
+ Pierre’s words. More than once, when the noise of the wheels prevented his
+ catching what Pierre said, he asked him to repeat it, and by the peculiar
+ glow that came into Prince Andrew’s eyes and by his silence, Pierre saw
+ that his words were not in vain and that Prince Andrew would not interrupt
+ him or laugh at what he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They reached a river that had overflowed its banks and which they had to
+ cross by ferry. While the carriage and horses were being placed on it,
+ they also stepped on the raft.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew, leaning his arms on the raft railing, gazed silently at the
+ flooding waters glittering in the setting sun.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what do you think about it?” Pierre asked. “Why are you silent?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do I think about it? I am listening to you. It’s all very well....
+ You say: join our brotherhood and we will show you the aim of life, the
+ destiny of man, and the laws which govern the world. But who are we? Men.
+ How is it you know everything? Why do I alone not see what you see? You
+ see a reign of goodness and truth on earth, but I don’t see it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you believe in a future life?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A future life?” Prince Andrew repeated, but Pierre, giving him no time to
+ reply, took the repetition for a denial, the more readily as he knew
+ Prince Andrew’s former atheistic convictions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You say you can’t see a reign of goodness and truth on earth. Nor could
+ I, and it cannot be seen if one looks on our life here as the end of
+ everything. On earth , here on this earth” (Pierre pointed to the fields),
+ “there is no truth, all is false and evil; but in the universe, in the
+ whole universe there is a kingdom of truth, and we who are now the
+ children of earth are—eternally—children of the whole
+ universe. Don’t I feel in my soul that I am part of this vast harmonious
+ whole? Don’t I feel that I form one link, one step, between the lower and
+ higher beings, in this vast harmonious multitude of beings in whom the
+ Deity—the Supreme Power if you prefer the term—is manifest? If
+ I see, clearly see, that ladder leading from plant to man, why should I
+ suppose it breaks off at me and does not go farther and farther? I feel
+ that I cannot vanish, since nothing vanishes in this world, but that I
+ shall always exist and always have existed. I feel that beyond me and
+ above me there are spirits, and that in this world there is truth.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, that is Herder’s theory,” said Prince Andrew, “but it is not that
+ which can convince me, dear friend—life and death are what convince.
+ What convinces is when one sees a being dear to one, bound up with one’s
+ own life, before whom one was to blame and had hoped to make it right”
+ (Prince Andrew’s voice trembled and he turned away), “and suddenly that
+ being is seized with pain, suffers, and ceases to exist.... Why? It cannot
+ be that there is no answer. And I believe there is.... That’s what
+ convinces, that is what has convinced me,” said Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, of course,” said Pierre, “isn’t that what I’m saying?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No. All I say is that it is not argument that convinces me of the
+ necessity of a future life, but this: when you go hand in hand with
+ someone and all at once that person vanishes there, into nowhere , and you
+ yourself are left facing that abyss, and look in. And I have looked
+ in....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, that’s it then! You know that there is a there and there is a
+ Someone? There is the future life. The Someone is—God.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew did not reply. The carriage and horses had long since been
+ taken off, onto the farther bank, and reharnessed. The sun had sunk half
+ below the horizon and an evening frost was starring the puddles near the
+ ferry, but Pierre and Andrew, to the astonishment of the footmen,
+ coachmen, and ferrymen, still stood on the raft and talked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If there is a God and future life, there is truth and good, and man’s
+ highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we
+ must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on this scrap
+ of earth, but have lived and shall live forever, there, in the Whole,”
+ said Pierre, and he pointed to the sky.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew stood leaning on the railing of the raft listening to
+ Pierre, and he gazed with his eyes fixed on the red reflection of the sun
+ gleaming on the blue waters. There was perfect stillness. Pierre became
+ silent. The raft had long since stopped and only the waves of the current
+ beat softly against it below. Prince Andrew felt as if the sound of the
+ waves kept up a refrain to Pierre’s words, whispering:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is true, believe it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He sighed, and glanced with a radiant, childlike, tender look at Pierre’s
+ face, flushed and rapturous, but yet shy before his superior friend.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, if it only were so!” said Prince Andrew. “However, it is time to get
+ on,” he added, and, stepping off the raft, he looked up at the sky to
+ which Pierre had pointed, and for the first time since Austerlitz saw that
+ high, everlasting sky he had seen while lying on that battlefield; and
+ something that had long been slumbering, something that was best within
+ him, suddenly awoke, joyful and youthful, in his soul. It vanished as soon
+ as he returned to the customary conditions of his life, but he knew that
+ this feeling which he did not know how to develop existed within him. His
+ meeting with Pierre formed an epoch in Prince Andrew’s life. Though
+ outwardly he continued to live in the same old way, inwardly he began a
+ new life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ It was getting dusk when Prince Andrew and Pierre drove up to the front
+ entrance of the house at Bald Hills. As they approached the house, Prince
+ Andrew with a smile drew Pierre’s attention to a commotion going on at the
+ back porch. A woman, bent with age, with a wallet on her back, and a
+ short, long-haired, young man in a black garment had rushed back to the
+ gate on seeing the carriage driving up. Two women ran out after them, and
+ all four, looking round at the carriage, ran in dismay up the steps of the
+ back porch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Those are Mary’s ‘God’s folk,’” said Prince Andrew. “They have mistaken
+ us for my father. This is the one matter in which she disobeys him. He
+ orders these pilgrims to be driven away, but she receives them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what are ‘God’s folk’?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew had no time to answer. The servants came out to meet them,
+ and he asked where the old prince was and whether he was expected back
+ soon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old prince had gone to the town and was expected back any minute.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew led Pierre to his own apartments, which were always kept in
+ perfect order and readiness for him in his father’s house; he himself went
+ to the nursery.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let us go and see my sister,” he said to Pierre when he returned. “I have
+ not found her yet, she is hiding now, sitting with her ‘God’s folk.’ It
+ will serve her right, she will be confused, but you will see her ‘God’s
+ folk.’ It’s really very curious.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are ‘God’s folk’?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come, and you’ll see for yourself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary really was disconcerted and red patches came on her face
+ when they went in. In her snug room, with lamps burning before the icon
+ stand, a young lad with a long nose and long hair, wearing a monk’s
+ cassock, sat on the sofa beside her, behind a samovar. Near them, in an
+ armchair, sat a thin, shriveled, old woman, with a meek expression on her
+ childlike face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Andrew, why didn’t you warn me?” said the princess, with mild reproach,
+ as she stood before her pilgrims like a hen before her chickens.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Charmée de vous voir. Je suis très contente de vous voir,” * she said to
+ Pierre as he kissed her hand. She had known him as a child, and now his
+ friendship with Andrew, his misfortune with his wife, and above all his
+ kindly, simple face disposed her favorably toward him. She looked at him
+ with her beautiful radiant eyes and seemed to say, “I like you very much,
+ but please don’t laugh at my people.” After exchanging the first
+ greetings, they sat down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Delighted to see you. I am very glad to see you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, and Ivánushka is here too!” said Prince Andrew, glancing with a smile
+ at the young pilgrim.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Andrew!” said Princess Mary, imploringly. “Il faut que vous sachiez que
+ c’est une femme,” * said Prince Andrew to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Andrew, au nom de Dieu! ” *(2) Princess Mary repeated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “You must know that this is a woman.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * (2) “For heaven’s sake.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was evident that Prince Andrew’s ironical tone toward the pilgrims and
+ Princess Mary’s helpless attempts to protect them were their customary
+ long-established relations on the matter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mais, ma bonne amie,” said Prince Andrew, “vous devriez au contraire
+ m’être reconnaissante de ce que j’explique à Pierre votre intimité avec ce
+ jeune homme.” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “But, my dear, you ought on the contrary to be grateful to
+ me for explaining to Pierre your intimacy with this young
+ man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Really?” said Pierre, gazing over his spectacles with curiosity and
+ seriousness (for which Princess Mary was specially grateful to him) into
+ Ivánushka’s face, who, seeing that she was being spoken about, looked
+ round at them all with crafty eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary’s embarrassment on her people’s account was quite
+ unnecessary. They were not in the least abashed. The old woman, lowering
+ her eyes but casting side glances at the newcomers, had turned her cup
+ upside down and placed a nibbled bit of sugar beside it, and sat quietly
+ in her armchair, though hoping to be offered another cup of tea.
+ Ivánushka, sipping out of her saucer, looked with sly womanish eyes from
+ under her brows at the young men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where have you been? To Kiev?” Prince Andrew asked the old woman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have, good sir,” she answered garrulously. “Just at
+ Christmastime I was deemed worthy to partake of the holy and heavenly
+ sacrament at the shrine of the saint. And now I’m from Kolyázin, master,
+ where a great and wonderful blessing has been revealed.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And was Ivánushka with you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I go by myself, benefactor,” said Ivánushka, trying to speak in a bass
+ voice. “I only came across Pelagéya in Yúkhnovo....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pelagéya interrupted her companion; she evidently wished to tell what she
+ had seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In Kolyázin, master, a wonderful blessing has been revealed.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it? Some new relics?” asked Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Andrew, do leave off,” said Princess Mary. “Don’t tell him, Pelagéya.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No... why not, my dear, why shouldn’t I? I like him. He is kind, he is
+ one of God’s chosen, he’s a benefactor, he once gave me ten rubles, I
+ remember. When I was in Kiev, Crazy Cyril says to me (he’s one of God’s
+ own and goes barefoot summer and winter), he says, ‘Why are you not going
+ to the right place? Go to Kolyázin where a wonder-working icon of the Holy
+ Mother of God has been revealed.’ On hearing those words I said good-by to
+ the holy folk and went.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All were silent, only the pilgrim woman went on in measured tones, drawing
+ in her breath.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So I come, master, and the people say to me: ‘A great blessing has been
+ revealed, holy oil trickles from the cheeks of our blessed Mother, the
+ Holy Virgin Mother of God.’...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right, all right, you can tell us afterwards,” said Princess Mary,
+ flushing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let me ask her,” said Pierre. “Did you see it yourselves?” he inquired.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, yes, master, I was found worthy. Such a brightness on the face like
+ the light of heaven, and from the blessed Mother’s cheek it drops and
+ drops....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But, dear me, that must be a fraud!” said Pierre, naïvely, who had
+ listened attentively to the pilgrim.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, master, what are you saying?” exclaimed the horrified Pelagéya,
+ turning to Princess Mary for support.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They impose on the people,” he repeated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lord Jesus Christ!” exclaimed the pilgrim woman, crossing herself. “Oh,
+ don’t speak so, master! There was a general who did not believe, and said,
+ ‘The monks cheat,’ and as soon as he’d said it he went blind. And he
+ dreamed that the Holy Virgin Mother of the Kiev catacombs came to him and
+ said, ‘Believe in me and I will make you whole.’ So he begged: ‘Take me to
+ her, take me to her.’ It’s the real truth I’m telling you, I saw it
+ myself. So he was brought, quite blind, straight to her, and he goes up to
+ her and falls down and says, ‘Make me whole,’ says he, ‘and I’ll give thee
+ what the Tsar bestowed on me.’ I saw it myself, master, the star is fixed
+ into the icon. Well, and what do you think? He received his sight! It’s a
+ sin to speak so. God will punish you,” she said admonishingly, turning to
+ Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How did the star get into the icon?” Pierre asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And was the Holy Mother promoted to the rank of general?” said Prince
+ Andrew, with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pelagéya suddenly grew quite pale and clasped her hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, master, master, what a sin! And you who have a son!” she began, her
+ pallor suddenly turning to a vivid red. “Master, what have you said? God
+ forgive you!” And she crossed herself. “Lord forgive him! My dear, what
+ does it mean?...” she asked, turning to Princess Mary. She got up and,
+ almost crying, began to arrange her wallet. She evidently felt frightened
+ and ashamed to have accepted charity in a house where such things could be
+ said, and was at the same time sorry to have now to forgo the charity of
+ this house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, why need you do it?” said Princess Mary. “Why did you come to
+ me?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come, Pelagéya, I was joking,” said Pierre. “ Princesse, ma parole, je
+ n’ai pas voulu l’offenser. * I did not mean anything, I was only joking,”
+ he said, smiling shyly and trying to efface his offense. “It was all my
+ fault, and Andrew was only joking.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Princess, on my word, I did not wish to offend her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pelagéya stopped doubtfully, but in Pierre’s face there was such a look of
+ sincere penitence, and Prince Andrew glanced so meekly now at her and now
+ at Pierre, that she was gradually reassured.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV
+ 
+ 
+ The pilgrim woman was appeased and, being encouraged to talk, gave a long
+ account of Father Amphilochus, who led so holy a life that his hands
+ smelled of incense, and how on her last visit to Kiev some monks she knew
+ let her have the keys of the catacombs, and how she, taking some dried
+ bread with her, had spent two days in the catacombs with the saints. “I’d
+ pray awhile to one, ponder awhile, then go on to another. I’d sleep a bit
+ and then again go and kiss the relics, and there was such peace all
+ around, such blessedness, that one don’t want to come out, even into the
+ light of heaven again.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre listened to her attentively and seriously. Prince Andrew went out
+ of the room, and then, leaving “God’s folk” to finish their tea, Princess
+ Mary took Pierre into the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are very kind,” she said to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, I really did not mean to hurt her feelings. I understand them so well
+ and have the greatest respect for them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary looked at him silently and smiled affectionately.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have known you a long time, you see, and am as fond of you as of a
+ brother,” she said. “How do you find Andrew?” she added hurriedly, not
+ giving him time to reply to her affectionate words. “I am very anxious
+ about him. His health was better in the winter, but last spring his wound
+ reopened and the doctor said he ought to go away for a cure. And I am also
+ very much afraid for him spiritually. He has not a character like us women
+ who, when we suffer, can weep away our sorrows. He keeps it all within
+ him. Today he is cheerful and in good spirits, but that is the effect of
+ your visit—he is not often like that. If you could persuade him to
+ go abroad. He needs activity, and this quiet regular life is very bad for
+ him. Others don’t notice it, but I see it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Toward ten o’clock the men servants rushed to the front door, hearing the
+ bells of the old prince’s carriage approaching. Prince Andrew and Pierre
+ also went out into the porch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who’s that?” asked the old prince, noticing Pierre as he got out of the
+ carriage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah! Very glad! Kiss me,” he said, having learned who the young stranger
+ was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old prince was in a good temper and very gracious to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before supper, Prince Andrew, coming back to his father’s study, found him
+ disputing hotly with his visitor. Pierre was maintaining that a time would
+ come when there would be no more wars. The old prince disputed it
+ chaffingly, but without getting angry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Drain the blood from men’s veins and put in water instead, then there
+ will be no more war! Old women’s nonsense—old women’s nonsense!” he
+ repeated, but still he patted Pierre affectionately on the shoulder, and
+ then went up to the table where Prince Andrew, evidently not wishing to
+ join in the conversation, was looking over the papers his father had
+ brought from town. The old prince went up to him and began to talk
+ business.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The marshal, a Count Rostóv, hasn’t sent half his contingent. He came to
+ town and wanted to invite me to dinner—I gave him a pretty
+ dinner!... And there, look at this.... Well, my boy,” the old prince went
+ on, addressing his son and patting Pierre on the shoulder. “A fine fellow—your
+ friend—I like him! He stirs me up. Another says clever things and
+ one doesn’t care to listen, but this one talks rubbish yet stirs an old
+ fellow up. Well, go! Get along! Perhaps I’ll come and sit with you at
+ supper. We’ll have another dispute. Make friends with my little fool,
+ Princess Mary,” he shouted after Pierre, through the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only now, on his visit to Bald Hills, did Pierre fully realize the
+ strength and charm of his friendship with Prince Andrew. That charm was
+ not expressed so much in his relations with him as with all his family and
+ with the household. With the stern old prince and the gentle, timid
+ Princess Mary, though he had scarcely known them, Pierre at once felt like
+ an old friend. They were all fond of him already. Not only Princess Mary,
+ who had been won by his gentleness with the pilgrims, gave him her most
+ radiant looks, but even the one-year-old “Prince Nicholas” (as his
+ grandfather called him) smiled at Pierre and let himself be taken in his
+ arms, and Michael Ivánovich and Mademoiselle Bourienne looked at him with
+ pleasant smiles when he talked to the old prince.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old prince came in to supper; this was evidently on Pierre’s account.
+ And during the two days of the young man’s visit he was extremely kind to
+ him and told him to visit them again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Pierre had gone and the members of the household met together, they
+ began to express their opinions of him as people always do after a new
+ acquaintance has left, but as seldom happens, no one said anything but
+ what was good of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV
+ 
+ 
+ When returning from his leave, Rostóv felt, for the first time, how close
+ was the bond that united him to Denísov and the whole regiment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On approaching it, Rostóv felt as he had done when approaching his home in
+ Moscow. When he saw the first hussar with the unbuttoned uniform of his
+ regiment, when he recognized red-haired Deméntyev and saw the picket ropes
+ of the roan horses, when Lavrúshka gleefully shouted to his master, “The
+ count has come!” and Denísov, who had been asleep on his bed, ran all
+ disheveled out of the mud hut to embrace him, and the officers collected
+ round to greet the new arrival, Rostóv experienced the same feeling as
+ when his mother, his father, and his sister had embraced him, and tears of
+ joy choked him so that he could not speak. The regiment was also a home,
+ and as unalterably dear and precious as his parents’ house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he had reported himself to the commander of the regiment and had been
+ reassigned to his former squadron, had been on duty and had gone out
+ foraging, when he had again entered into all the little interests of the
+ regiment and felt himself deprived of liberty and bound in one narrow,
+ unchanging frame, he experienced the same sense of peace, of moral
+ support, and the same sense of being at home here in his own place, as he
+ had felt under the parental roof. But here was none of all that turmoil of
+ the world at large, where he did not know his right place and took
+ mistaken decisions; here was no Sónya with whom he ought, or ought not, to
+ have an explanation; here was no possibility of going there or not going
+ there; here there were not twenty-four hours in the day which could be
+ spent in such a variety of ways; there was not that innumerable crowd of
+ people of whom not one was nearer to him or farther from him than another;
+ there were none of those uncertain and undefined money relations with his
+ father, and nothing to recall that terrible loss to Dólokhov. Here, in the
+ regiment, all was clear and simple. The whole world was divided into two
+ unequal parts: one, our Pávlograd regiment; the other, all the rest. And
+ the rest was no concern of his. In the regiment, everything was definite:
+ who was lieutenant, who captain, who was a good fellow, who a bad one, and
+ most of all, who was a comrade. The canteenkeeper gave one credit, one’s
+ pay came every four months, there was nothing to think out or decide, you
+ had only to do nothing that was considered bad in the Pávlograd regiment
+ and, when given an order, to do what was clearly, distinctly, and
+ definitely ordered—and all would be well.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having once more entered into the definite conditions of this regimental
+ life, Rostóv felt the joy and relief a tired man feels on lying down to
+ rest. Life in the regiment, during this campaign, was all the pleasanter
+ for him, because, after his loss to Dólokhov (for which, in spite of all
+ his family’s efforts to console him, he could not forgive himself), he had
+ made up his mind to atone for his fault by serving, not as he had done
+ before, but really well, and by being a perfectly first-rate comrade and
+ officer—in a word, a splendid man altogether, a thing which seemed
+ so difficult out in the world , but so possible in the regiment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After his losses, he had determined to pay back his debt to his parents in
+ five years. He received ten thousand rubles a year, but now resolved to
+ take only two thousand and leave the rest to repay the debt to his
+ parents.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Our army, after repeated retreats and advances and battles at Pultúsk and
+ Preussisch-Eylau, was concentrated near Bartenstein. It was awaiting the
+ Emperor’s arrival and the beginning of a new campaign.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Pávlograd regiment, belonging to that part of the army which had
+ served in the 1805 campaign, had been recruiting up to strength in Russia,
+ and arrived too late to take part in the first actions of the campaign. It
+ had been neither at Pultúsk nor at Preussisch-Eylau and, when it joined
+ the army in the field in the second half of the campaign, was attached to
+ Plátov’s division.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Plátov’s division was acting independently of the main army. Several times
+ parts of the Pávlograd regiment had exchanged shots with the enemy, had
+ taken prisoners, and once had even captured Marshal Oudinot’s carriages.
+ In April the Pávlograds were stationed immovably for some weeks near a
+ totally ruined and deserted German village.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A thaw had set in, it was muddy and cold, the ice on the river broke, and
+ the roads became impassable. For days neither provisions for the men nor
+ fodder for the horses had been issued. As no transports could arrive, the
+ men dispersed about the abandoned and deserted villages, searching for
+ potatoes, but found few even of these.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Everything had been eaten up and the inhabitants had all fled—if any
+ remained, they were worse than beggars and nothing more could be taken
+ from them; even the soldiers, usually pitiless enough, instead of taking
+ anything from them, often gave them the last of their rations.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Pávlograd regiment had had only two men wounded in action, but had
+ lost nearly half its men from hunger and sickness. In the hospitals, death
+ was so certain that soldiers suffering from fever, or the swelling that
+ came from bad food, preferred to remain on duty, and hardly able to drag
+ their legs went to the front rather than to the hospitals. When spring
+ came on, the soldiers found a plant just showing out of the ground that
+ looked like asparagus, which, for some reason, they called “Máshka’s sweet
+ root.” It was very bitter, but they wandered about the fields seeking it
+ and dug it out with their sabers and ate it, though they were ordered not
+ to do so, as it was a noxious plant. That spring a new disease broke out
+ among the soldiers, a swelling of the arms, legs, and face, which the
+ doctors attributed to eating this root. But in spite of all this, the
+ soldiers of Denísov’s squadron fed chiefly on “Máshka’s sweet root,”
+ because it was the second week that the last of the biscuits were being
+ doled out at the rate of half a pound a man and the last potatoes received
+ had sprouted and frozen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The horses also had been fed for a fortnight on straw from the thatched
+ roofs and had become terribly thin, though still covered with tufts of
+ felty winter hair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Despite this destitution, the soldiers and officers went on living just as
+ usual. Despite their pale swollen faces and tattered uniforms, the hussars
+ formed line for roll call, kept things in order, groomed their horses,
+ polished their arms, brought in straw from the thatched roofs in place of
+ fodder, and sat down to dine round the caldrons from which they rose up
+ hungry, joking about their nasty food and their hunger. As usual, in their
+ spare time, they lit bonfires, steamed themselves before them naked;
+ smoked, picked out and baked sprouting rotten potatoes, told and listened
+ to stories of Potëmkin’s and Suvórov’s campaigns, or to legends of Alësha
+ the Sly, or the priest’s laborer Mikólka.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officers, as usual, lived in twos and threes in the roofless,
+ half-ruined houses. The seniors tried to collect straw and potatoes and,
+ in general, food for the men. The younger ones occupied themselves as
+ before, some playing cards (there was plenty of money, though there was no
+ food), some with more innocent games, such as quoits and skittles. The
+ general trend of the campaign was rarely spoken of, partly because nothing
+ certain was known about it, partly because there was a vague feeling that
+ in the main it was going badly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv lived, as before, with Denísov, and since their furlough they had
+ become more friendly than ever. Denísov never spoke of Rostóv’s family,
+ but by the tender friendship his commander showed him, Rostóv felt that
+ the elder hussar’s luckless love for Natásha played a part in
+ strengthening their friendship. Denísov evidently tried to expose Rostóv
+ to danger as seldom as possible, and after an action greeted his safe
+ return with evident joy. On one of his foraging expeditions, in a deserted
+ and ruined village to which he had come in search of provisions, Rostóv
+ found a family consisting of an old Pole and his daughter with an infant
+ in arms. They were half clad, hungry, too weak to get away on foot and had
+ no means of obtaining a conveyance. Rostóv brought them to his quarters,
+ placed them in his own lodging, and kept them for some weeks while the old
+ man was recovering. One of his comrades, talking of women, began chaffing
+ Rostóv, saying that he was more wily than any of them and that it would
+ not be a bad thing if he introduced to them the pretty Polish girl he had
+ saved. Rostóv took the joke as an insult, flared up, and said such
+ unpleasant things to the officer that it was all Denísov could do to
+ prevent a duel. When the officer had gone away, Denísov, who did not
+ himself know what Rostóv’s relations with the Polish girl might be, began
+ to upbraid him for his quickness of temper, and Rostóv replied:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Say what you like.... She is like a sister to me, and I can’t tell you
+ how it offended me... because... well, for that reason....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov patted him on the shoulder and began rapidly pacing the room
+ without looking at Rostóv, as was his way at moments of deep feeling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, what a mad bweed you Wostóvs are!” he muttered, and Rostóv noticed
+ tears in his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI
+ 
+ 
+ In April the troops were enlivened by news of the Emperor’s arrival, but
+ Rostóv had no chance of being present at the review he held at
+ Bartenstein, as the Pávlograds were at the outposts far beyond that place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They were bivouacking. Denísov and Rostóv were living in an earth hut, dug
+ out for them by the soldiers and roofed with branches and turf. The hut
+ was made in the following manner, which had then come into vogue. A trench
+ was dug three and a half feet wide, four feet eight inches deep, and eight
+ feet long. At one end of the trench, steps were cut out and these formed
+ the entrance and vestibule. The trench itself was the room, in which the
+ lucky ones, such as the squadron commander, had a board, lying on piles at
+ the end opposite the entrance, to serve as a table. On each side of the
+ trench, the earth was cut out to a breadth of about two and a half feet,
+ and this did duty for bedsteads and couches. The roof was so constructed
+ that one could stand up in the middle of the trench and could even sit up
+ on the beds if one drew close to the table. Denísov, who was living
+ luxuriously because the soldiers of his squadron liked him, had also a
+ board in the roof at the farther end, with a piece of (broken but mended)
+ glass in it for a window. When it was very cold, embers from the soldiers’
+ campfire were placed on a bent sheet of iron on the steps in the
+ “reception room”—as Denísov called that part of the hut—and it
+ was then so warm that the officers, of whom there were always some with
+ Denísov and Rostóv, sat in their shirt sleeves.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In April, Rostóv was on orderly duty. One morning, between seven and
+ eight, returning after a sleepless night, he sent for embers, changed his
+ rain-soaked underclothes, said his prayers, drank tea, got warm, then
+ tidied up the things on the table and in his own corner, and, his face
+ glowing from exposure to the wind and with nothing on but his shirt, lay
+ down on his back, putting his arms under his head. He was pleasantly
+ considering the probability of being promoted in a few days for his last
+ reconnoitering expedition, and was awaiting Denísov, who had gone out
+ somewhere and with whom he wanted a talk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly he heard Denísov shouting in a vibrating voice behind the hut,
+ evidently much excited. Rostóv moved to the window to see whom he was
+ speaking to, and saw the quartermaster, Topchéenko.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I ordered you not to let them eat that Máshka woot stuff!” Denísov was
+ shouting. “And I saw with my own eyes how Lazarchúk bwought some fwom the
+ fields.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have given the order again and again, your honor, but they don’t obey,”
+ answered the quartermaster.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv lay down again on his bed and thought complacently: “Let him fuss
+ and bustle now, my job’s done and I’m lying down—capitally!” He
+ could hear that Lavrúshka—that sly, bold orderly of Denísov’s—was
+ talking, as well as the quartermaster. Lavrúshka was saying something
+ about loaded wagons, biscuits, and oxen he had seen when he had gone out
+ for provisions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then Denísov’s voice was heard shouting farther and farther away. “Saddle!
+ Second platoon!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where are they off to now?” thought Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Five minutes later, Denísov came into the hut, climbed with muddy boots on
+ the bed, lit his pipe, furiously scattered his things about, took his
+ leaded whip, buckled on his saber, and went out again. In answer to
+ Rostóv’s inquiry where he was going, he answered vaguely and crossly that
+ he had some business.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let God and our gweat monarch judge me afterwards!” said Denísov going
+ out, and Rostóv heard the hoofs of several horses splashing through the
+ mud. He did not even trouble to find out where Denísov had gone. Having
+ got warm in his corner, he fell asleep and did not leave the hut till
+ toward evening. Denísov had not yet returned. The weather had cleared up,
+ and near the next hut two officers and a cadet were playing sváyka ,
+ laughing as they threw their missiles which buried themselves in the soft
+ mud. Rostóv joined them. In the middle of the game, the officers saw some
+ wagons approaching with fifteen hussars on their skinny horses behind
+ them. The wagons escorted by the hussars drew up to the picket ropes and a
+ crowd of hussars surrounded them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now, Denísov has been worrying,” said Rostóv, “and here are the
+ provisions.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So they are!” said the officers. “Won’t the soldiers be glad!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A little behind the hussars came Denísov, accompanied by two infantry
+ officers with whom he was talking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv went to meet them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I warn you, Captain,” one of the officers, a short thin man, evidently
+ very angry, was saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Haven’t I told you I won’t give them up?” replied Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You will answer for it, Captain. It is mutiny—seizing the transport
+ of one’s own army. Our men have had nothing to eat for two days.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And mine have had nothing for two weeks,” said Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is robbery! You’ll answer for it, sir!” said the infantry officer,
+ raising his voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, what are you pestewing me for?” cried Denísov, suddenly losing his
+ temper. “I shall answer for it and not you, and you’d better not buzz
+ about here till you get hurt. Be off! Go!” he shouted at the officers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very well, then!” shouted the little officer, undaunted and not riding
+ away. “If you are determined to rob, I’ll...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go to the devil! quick ma’ch, while you’re safe and sound!” and Denísov
+ turned his horse on the officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very well, very well!” muttered the officer, threateningly, and turning
+ his horse he trotted away, jolting in his saddle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A dog astwide a fence! A weal dog astwide a fence!” shouted Denísov after
+ him (the most insulting expression a cavalryman can address to a mounted
+ infantryman) and riding up to Rostóv, he burst out laughing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ve taken twansports from the infantwy by force!” he said. “After all,
+ can’t let our men starve.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The wagons that had reached the hussars had been consigned to an infantry
+ regiment, but learning from Lavrúshka that the transport was unescorted,
+ Denísov with his hussars had seized it by force. The soldiers had biscuits
+ dealt out to them freely, and they even shared them with the other
+ squadrons.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The next day the regimental commander sent for Denísov, and holding his
+ fingers spread out before his eyes said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This is how I look at this affair: I know nothing about it and won’t
+ begin proceedings, but I advise you to ride over to the staff and settle
+ the business there in the commissariat department and if possible sign a
+ receipt for such and such stores received. If not, as the demand was
+ booked against an infantry regiment, there will be a row and the affair
+ may end badly.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the regimental commander’s, Denísov rode straight to the staff with a
+ sincere desire to act on this advice. In the evening he came back to his
+ dugout in a state such as Rostóv had never yet seen him in. Denísov could
+ not speak and gasped for breath. When Rostóv asked what was the matter, he
+ only uttered some incoherent oaths and threats in a hoarse, feeble voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alarmed at Denísov’s condition, Rostóv suggested that he should undress,
+ drink some water, and send for the doctor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Twy me for wobbewy... oh! Some more water... Let them twy me, but I’ll
+ always thwash scoundwels... and I’ll tell the Empewo’... Ice...” he
+ muttered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The regimental doctor, when he came, said it was absolutely necessary to
+ bleed Denísov. A deep saucer of black blood was taken from his hairy arm
+ and only then was he able to relate what had happened to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I get there,” began Denísov. “‘Now then, where’s your chief’s quarters?’
+ They were pointed out. ‘Please to wait.’ ‘I’ve widden twenty miles and
+ have duties to attend to and no time to wait. Announce me.’ Vewy well, so
+ out comes their head chief—also took it into his head to lecture me:
+ ‘It’s wobbewy!’—‘Wobbewy,’ I say, ‘is not done by man who seizes
+ pwovisions to feed his soldiers, but by him who takes them to fill his own
+ pockets!’ ‘Will you please be silent?’ ‘Vewy good!’ Then he says: ‘Go and
+ give a weceipt to the commissioner, but your affair will be passed on to
+ headquarters.’ I go to the commissioner. I enter, and at the table... who
+ do you think? No, but wait a bit!... Who is it that’s starving us?”
+ shouted Denísov, hitting the table with the fist of his newly bled arm so
+ violently that the table nearly broke down and the tumblers on it jumped
+ about. “Telyánin! ‘What? So it’s you who’s starving us to death! Is it?
+ Take this and this!’ and I hit him so pat, stwaight on his snout... ‘Ah,
+ what a... what a...!’ and I sta’ted fwashing him... Well, I’ve had a bit
+ of fun I can tell you!” cried Denísov, gleeful and yet angry, his white
+ teeth showing under his black mustache. “I’d have killed him if they
+ hadn’t taken him away!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what are you shouting for? Calm yourself,” said Rostóv. “You’ve set
+ your arm bleeding afresh. Wait, we must tie it up again.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov was bandaged up again and put to bed. Next day he woke calm and
+ cheerful.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But at noon the adjutant of the regiment came into Rostóv’s and Denísov’s
+ dugout with a grave and serious face and regretfully showed them a paper
+ addressed to Major Denísov from the regimental commander in which
+ inquiries were made about yesterday’s occurrence. The adjutant told them
+ that the affair was likely to take a very bad turn: that a court-martial
+ had been appointed, and that in view of the severity with which marauding
+ and insubordination were now regarded, degradation to the ranks would be
+ the best that could be hoped for.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The case, as represented by the offended parties, was that, after seizing
+ the transports, Major Denísov, being drunk, went to the chief
+ quartermaster and without any provocation called him a thief, threatened
+ to strike him, and on being led out had rushed into the office and given
+ two officials a thrashing, and dislocated the arm of one of them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In answer to Rostóv’s renewed questions, Denísov said, laughing, that he
+ thought he remembered that some other fellow had got mixed up in it, but
+ that it was all nonsense and rubbish, and he did not in the least fear any
+ kind of trial, and that if those scoundrels dared attack him he would give
+ them an answer that they would not easily forget.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov spoke contemptuously of the whole matter, but Rostóv knew him too
+ well not to detect that (while hiding it from others) at heart he feared a
+ court-martial and was worried over the affair, which was evidently taking
+ a bad turn. Every day, letters of inquiry and notices from the court
+ arrived, and on the first of May, Denísov was ordered to hand the squadron
+ over to the next in seniority and appear before the staff of his division
+ to explain his violence at the commissariat office. On the previous day
+ Plátov reconnoitered with two Cossack regiments and two squadrons of
+ hussars. Denísov, as was his wont, rode out in front of the outposts,
+ parading his courage. A bullet fired by a French sharpshooter hit him in
+ the fleshy part of his leg. Perhaps at another time Denísov would not have
+ left the regiment for so slight a wound, but now he took advantage of it
+ to excuse himself from appearing at the staff and went into hospital.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII
+ 
+ 
+ In June the battle of Friedland was fought, in which the Pávlograds did
+ not take part, and after that an armistice was proclaimed. Rostóv, who
+ felt his friend’s absence very much, having no news of him since he left
+ and feeling very anxious about his wound and the progress of his affairs,
+ took advantage of the armistice to get leave to visit Denísov in hospital.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The hospital was in a small Prussian town that had been twice devastated
+ by Russian and French troops. Because it was summer, when it is so
+ beautiful out in the fields, the little town presented a particularly
+ dismal appearance with its broken roofs and fences, its foul streets,
+ tattered inhabitants, and the sick and drunken soldiers wandering about.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The hospital was in a brick building with some of the window frames and
+ panes broken and a courtyard surrounded by the remains of a wooden fence
+ that had been pulled to pieces. Several bandaged soldiers, with pale
+ swollen faces, were sitting or walking about in the sunshine in the yard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Directly Rostóv entered the door he was enveloped by a smell of
+ putrefaction and hospital air. On the stairs he met a Russian army doctor
+ smoking a cigar. The doctor was followed by a Russian assistant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I can’t tear myself to pieces,” the doctor was saying. “Come to Makár
+ Alexéevich in the evening. I shall be there.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The assistant asked some further questions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, do the best you can! Isn’t it all the same?” The doctor noticed
+ Rostóv coming upstairs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do you want, sir?” said the doctor. “What do you want? The bullets
+ having spared you, do you want to try typhus? This is a pesthouse, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How so?” asked Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Typhus, sir. It’s death to go in. Only we two, Makéev and I” (he pointed
+ to the assistant), “keep on here. Some five of us doctors have died in
+ this place.... When a new one comes he is done for in a week,” said the
+ doctor with evident satisfaction. “Prussian doctors have been invited
+ here, but our allies don’t like it at all.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv explained that he wanted to see Major Denísov of the hussars, who
+ was wounded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know. I can’t tell you, sir. Only think! I am alone in charge of
+ three hospitals with more than four hundred patients! It’s well that the
+ charitable Prussian ladies send us two pounds of coffee and some lint each
+ month or we should be lost!” he laughed. “Four hundred, sir, and they’re
+ always sending me fresh ones. There are four hundred? Eh?” he asked,
+ turning to the assistant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The assistant looked fagged out. He was evidently vexed and impatient for
+ the talkative doctor to go.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Major Denísov,” Rostóv said again. “He was wounded at Molliten.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dead, I fancy. Eh, Makéev?” queried the doctor, in a tone of
+ indifference.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The assistant, however, did not confirm the doctor’s words.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is he tall and with reddish hair?” asked the doctor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv described Denísov’s appearance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There was one like that,” said the doctor, as if pleased. “That one is
+ dead, I fancy. However, I’ll look up our list. We had a list. Have you got
+ it, Makéev?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Makár Alexéevich has the list,” answered the assistant. “But if you’ll
+ step into the officers’ wards you’ll see for yourself,” he added, turning
+ to Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, you’d better not go, sir,” said the doctor, “or you may have to stay
+ here yourself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Rostóv bowed himself away from the doctor and asked the assistant to
+ show him the way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Only don’t blame me!” the doctor shouted up after him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv and the assistant went into the dark corridor. The smell was so
+ strong there that Rostóv held his nose and had to pause and collect his
+ strength before he could go on. A door opened to the right, and an
+ emaciated sallow man on crutches, barefoot and in underclothing, limped
+ out and, leaning against the doorpost, looked with glittering envious eyes
+ at those who were passing. Glancing in at the door, Rostóv saw that the
+ sick and wounded were lying on the floor on straw and overcoats.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “May I go in and look?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is there to see?” said the assistant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But, just because the assistant evidently did not want him to go in,
+ Rostóv entered the soldiers’ ward. The foul air, to which he had already
+ begun to get used in the corridor, was still stronger here. It was a
+ little different, more pungent, and one felt that this was where it
+ originated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the long room, brightly lit up by the sun through the large windows,
+ the sick and wounded lay in two rows with their heads to the walls, and
+ leaving a passage in the middle. Most of them were unconscious and paid no
+ attention to the newcomers. Those who were conscious raised themselves or
+ lifted their thin yellow faces, and all looked intently at Rostóv with the
+ same expression of hope, of relief, reproach, and envy of another’s
+ health. Rostóv went to the middle of the room and looking through the open
+ doors into the two adjoining rooms saw the same thing there. He stood
+ still, looking silently around. He had not at all expected such a sight.
+ Just before him, almost across the middle of the passage on the bare
+ floor, lay a sick man, probably a Cossack to judge by the cut of his hair.
+ The man lay on his back, his huge arms and legs outstretched. His face was
+ purple, his eyes were rolled back so that only the whites were seen, and
+ on his bare legs and arms which were still red, the veins stood out like
+ cords. He was knocking the back of his head against the floor, hoarsely
+ uttering some word which he kept repeating. Rostóv listened and made out
+ the word. It was “drink, drink, a drink!” Rostóv glanced round, looking
+ for someone who would put this man back in his place and bring him water.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who looks after the sick here?” he asked the assistant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just then a commissariat soldier, a hospital orderly, came in from the
+ next room, marching stiffly, and drew up in front of Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good day, your honor!” he shouted, rolling his eyes at Rostóv and
+ evidently mistaking him for one of the hospital authorities.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Get him to his place and give him some water,” said Rostóv, pointing to
+ the Cossack.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, your honor,” the soldier replied complacently, and rolling his eyes
+ more than ever he drew himself up still straighter, but did not move.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, it’s impossible to do anything here,” thought Rostóv, lowering his
+ eyes, and he was going out, but became aware of an intense look fixed on
+ him on his right, and he turned. Close to the corner, on an overcoat, sat
+ an old, unshaven, gray-bearded soldier as thin as a skeleton, with a stern
+ sallow face and eyes intently fixed on Rostóv. The man’s neighbor on one
+ side whispered something to him, pointing at Rostóv, who noticed that the
+ old man wanted to speak to him. He drew nearer and saw that the old man
+ had only one leg bent under him, the other had been amputated above the
+ knee. His neighbor on the other side, who lay motionless some distance
+ from him with his head thrown back, was a young soldier with a snub nose.
+ His pale waxen face was still freckled and his eyes were rolled back.
+ Rostóv looked at the young soldier and a cold chill ran down his back.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, this one seems...” he began, turning to the assistant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And how we’ve been begging, your honor,” said the old soldier, his jaw
+ quivering. “He’s been dead since morning. After all we’re men, not dogs.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll send someone at once. He shall be taken away—taken away at
+ once,” said the assistant hurriedly. “Let us go, your honor.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, let us go,” said Rostóv hastily, and lowering his eyes and
+ shrinking, he tried to pass unnoticed between the rows of reproachful
+ envious eyes that were fixed upon him, and went out of the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII
+ 
+ 
+ Going along the corridor, the assistant led Rostóv to the officers’ wards,
+ consisting of three rooms, the doors of which stood open. There were beds
+ in these rooms and the sick and wounded officers were lying or sitting on
+ them. Some were walking about the rooms in hospital dressing gowns. The
+ first person Rostóv met in the officers’ ward was a thin little man with
+ one arm, who was walking about the first room in a nightcap and hospital
+ dressing gown, with a pipe between his teeth. Rostóv looked at him, trying
+ to remember where he had seen him before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “See where we’ve met again!” said the little man. “Túshin, Túshin, don’t
+ you remember, who gave you a lift at Schön Grabern? And I’ve had a bit cut
+ off, you see...” he went on with a smile, pointing to the empty sleeve of
+ his dressing gown. “Looking for Vasíli Dmítrich Denísov? My neighbor,” he
+ added, when he heard who Rostóv wanted. “Here, here,” and Túshin led him
+ into the next room, from whence came sounds of several laughing voices.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How can they laugh, or even live at all here?” thought Rostóv, still
+ aware of that smell of decomposing flesh that had been so strong in the
+ soldiers’ ward, and still seeming to see fixed on him those envious looks
+ which had followed him out from both sides, and the face of that young
+ soldier with eyes rolled back.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov lay asleep on his bed with his head under the blanket, though it
+ was nearly noon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, Wostóv? How are you, how are you?” he called out, still in the same
+ voice as in the regiment, but Rostóv noticed sadly that under this
+ habitual ease and animation some new, sinister, hidden feeling showed
+ itself in the expression of Denísov’s face and the intonations of his
+ voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His wound, though a slight one, had not yet healed even now, six weeks
+ after he had been hit. His face had the same swollen pallor as the faces
+ of the other hospital patients, but it was not this that struck Rostóv.
+ What struck him was that Denísov did not seem glad to see him, and smiled
+ at him unnaturally. He did not ask about the regiment, nor about the
+ general state of affairs, and when Rostóv spoke of these matters did not
+ listen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv even noticed that Denísov did not like to be reminded of the
+ regiment, or in general of that other free life which was going on outside
+ the hospital. He seemed to try to forget that old life and was only
+ interested in the affair with the commissariat officers. On Rostóv’s
+ inquiry as to how the matter stood, he at once produced from under his
+ pillow a paper he had received from the commission and the rough draft of
+ his answer to it. He became animated when he began reading his paper and
+ specially drew Rostóv’s attention to the stinging rejoinders he made to
+ his enemies. His hospital companions, who had gathered round Rostóv—a
+ fresh arrival from the world outside—gradually began to disperse as
+ soon as Denísov began reading his answer. Rostóv noticed by their faces
+ that all those gentlemen had already heard that story more than once and
+ were tired of it. Only the man who had the next bed, a stout Uhlan,
+ continued to sit on his bed, gloomily frowning and smoking a pipe, and
+ little one-armed Túshin still listened, shaking his head disapprovingly.
+ In the middle of the reading, the Uhlan interrupted Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what I say is,” he said, turning to Rostóv, “it would be best simply
+ to petition the Emperor for pardon. They say great rewards will now be
+ distributed, and surely a pardon would be granted....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Me petition the Empewo’!” exclaimed Denísov, in a voice to which he tried
+ hard to give the old energy and fire, but which sounded like an expression
+ of irritable impotence. “What for? If I were a wobber I would ask mercy,
+ but I’m being court-martialed for bwinging wobbers to book. Let them twy
+ me, I’m not afwaid of anyone. I’ve served the Tsar and my countwy
+ honowably and have not stolen! And am I to be degwaded?... Listen, I’m
+ w’iting to them stwaight. This is what I say: ‘If I had wobbed the
+ Tweasuwy...’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s certainly well written,” said Túshin, “but that’s not the point,
+ Vasíli Dmítrich,” and he also turned to Rostóv. “One has to submit, and
+ Vasíli Dmítrich doesn’t want to. You know the auditor told you it was a
+ bad business.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, let it be bad,” said Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The auditor wrote out a petition for you,” continued Túshin, “and you
+ ought to sign it and ask this gentleman to take it. No doubt he”
+ (indicating Rostóv) “has connections on the staff. You won’t find a better
+ opportunity.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Haven’t I said I’m not going to gwovel?” Denísov interrupted him, went on
+ reading his paper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv had not the courage to persuade Denísov, though he instinctively
+ felt that the way advised by Túshin and the other officers was the safest,
+ and though he would have been glad to be of service to Denísov. He knew
+ his stubborn will and straightforward hasty temper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the reading of Denísov’s virulent reply, which took more than an
+ hour, was over, Rostóv said nothing, and he spent the rest of the day in a
+ most dejected state of mind amid Denísov’s hospital comrades, who had
+ gathered round him, telling them what he knew and listening to their
+ stories. Denísov was moodily silent all the evening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Late in the evening, when Rostóv was about to leave, he asked Denísov
+ whether he had no commission for him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, wait a bit,” said Denísov, glancing round at the officers, and
+ taking his papers from under his pillow he went to the window, where he
+ had an inkpot, and sat down to write.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It seems it’s no use knocking one’s head against a wall!” he said, coming
+ from the window and giving Rostóv a large envelope. In it was the petition
+ to the Emperor drawn up by the auditor, in which Denísov, without alluding
+ to the offenses of the commissariat officials, simply asked for pardon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hand it in. It seems...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not finish, but gave a painfully unnatural smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX
+ 
+ 
+ Having returned to the regiment and told the commander the state of
+ Denísov’s affairs, Rostóv rode to Tilsit with the letter to the Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the thirteenth of June the French and Russian Emperors arrived in
+ Tilsit. Borís Drubetskóy had asked the important personage on whom he was
+ in attendance, to include him in the suite appointed for the stay at
+ Tilsit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I should like to see the great man,” he said, alluding to Napoleon, whom
+ hitherto he, like everyone else, had always called Buonaparte.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are speaking of Buonaparte?” asked the general, smiling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís looked at his general inquiringly and immediately saw that he was
+ being tested.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am speaking, Prince, of the Emperor Napoleon,” he replied. The general
+ patted him on the shoulder, with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You will go far,” he said, and took him to Tilsit with him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís was among the few present at the Niemen on the day the two Emperors
+ met. He saw the raft, decorated with monograms, saw Napoleon pass before
+ the French Guards on the farther bank of the river, saw the pensive face
+ of the Emperor Alexander as he sat in silence in a tavern on the bank of
+ the Niemen awaiting Napoleon’s arrival, saw both Emperors get into boats,
+ and saw how Napoleon—reaching the raft first—stepped quickly
+ forward to meet Alexander and held out his hand to him, and how they both
+ retired into the pavilion. Since he had begun to move in the highest
+ circles Borís had made it his habit to watch attentively all that went on
+ around him and to note it down. At the time of the meeting at Tilsit he
+ asked the names of those who had come with Napoleon and about the uniforms
+ they wore, and listened attentively to words spoken by important
+ personages. At the moment the Emperors went into the pavilion he looked at
+ his watch, and did not forget to look at it again when Alexander came out.
+ The interview had lasted an hour and fifty-three minutes. He noted this
+ down that same evening, among other facts he felt to be of historic
+ importance. As the Emperor’s suite was a very small one, it was a matter
+ of great importance, for a man who valued his success in the service, to
+ be at Tilsit on the occasion of this interview between the two Emperors,
+ and having succeeded in this, Borís felt that henceforth his position was
+ fully assured. He had not only become known, but people had grown
+ accustomed to him and accepted him. Twice he had executed commissions to
+ the Emperor himself, so that the latter knew his face, and all those at
+ court, far from cold-shouldering him as at first when they considered him
+ a newcomer, would now have been surprised had he been absent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís lodged with another adjutant, the Polish Count Zhilínski. Zhilínski,
+ a Pole brought up in Paris, was rich, and passionately fond of the French,
+ and almost every day of the stay at Tilsit, French officers of the Guard
+ and from French headquarters were dining and lunching with him and Borís.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the evening of the twenty-fourth of June, Count Zhilínski arranged a
+ supper for his French friends. The guest of honor was an aide-de-camp of
+ Napoleon’s, there were also several French officers of the Guard, and a
+ page of Napoleon’s, a young lad of an old aristocratic French family. That
+ same day, Rostóv, profiting by the darkness to avoid being recognized in
+ civilian dress, came to Tilsit and went to the lodging occupied by Borís
+ and Zhilínski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv, in common with the whole army from which he came, was far from
+ having experienced the change of feeling toward Napoleon and the French—who
+ from being foes had suddenly become friends—that had taken place at
+ headquarters and in Borís. In the army, Bonaparte and the French were
+ still regarded with mingled feelings of anger, contempt, and fear. Only
+ recently, talking with one of Plátov’s Cossack officers, Rostóv had argued
+ that if Napoleon were taken prisoner he would be treated not as a
+ sovereign, but as a criminal. Quite lately, happening to meet a wounded
+ French colonel on the road, Rostóv had maintained with heat that peace was
+ impossible between a legitimate sovereign and the criminal Bonaparte.
+ Rostóv was therefore unpleasantly struck by the presence of French
+ officers in Borís’ lodging, dressed in uniforms he had been accustomed to
+ see from quite a different point of view from the outposts of the flank.
+ As soon as he noticed a French officer, who thrust his head out of the
+ door, that warlike feeling of hostility which he always experienced at the
+ sight of the enemy suddenly seized him. He stopped at the threshold and
+ asked in Russian whether Drubetskóy lived there. Borís, hearing a strange
+ voice in the anteroom, came out to meet him. An expression of annoyance
+ showed itself for a moment on his face on first recognizing Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, it’s you? Very glad, very glad to see you,” he said, however, coming
+ toward him with a smile. But Rostóv had noticed his first impulse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ve come at a bad time I think. I should not have come, but I have
+ business,” he said coldly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I only wonder how you managed to get away from your regiment. Dans un
+ moment je suis à vous ,” * he said, answering someone who called him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “In a minute I shall be at your disposal.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I see I’m intruding,” Rostóv repeated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The look of annoyance had already disappeared from Borís’ face: having
+ evidently reflected and decided how to act, he very quietly took both
+ Rostóv’s hands and led him into the next room. His eyes, looking serenely
+ and steadily at Rostóv, seemed to be veiled by something, as if screened
+ by blue spectacles of conventionality. So it seemed to Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, come now! As if you could come at a wrong time!” said Borís, and he
+ led him into the room where the supper table was laid and introduced him
+ to his guests, explaining that he was not a civilian, but an hussar
+ officer, and an old friend of his.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Count Zhilínski— le Comte N. N.— le Capitaine S.
+ S.,” said he, naming his guests. Rostóv looked frowningly at the Frenchmen,
+ bowed reluctantly, and remained silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Zhilínski evidently did not receive this new Russian person very willingly
+ into his circle and did not speak to Rostóv. Borís did not appear to
+ notice the constraint the newcomer produced and, with the same pleasant
+ composure and the same veiled look in his eyes with which he had met
+ Rostóv, tried to enliven the conversation. One of the Frenchmen, with the
+ politeness characteristic of his countrymen, addressed the obstinately
+ taciturn Rostóv, saying that the latter had probably come to Tilsit to see
+ the Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I came on business,” replied Rostóv, briefly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv had been out of humor from the moment he noticed the look of
+ dissatisfaction on Borís’ face, and as always happens to those in a bad
+ humor, it seemed to him that everyone regarded him with aversion and that
+ he was in everybody’s way. He really was in their way, for he alone took
+ no part in the conversation which again became general. The looks the
+ visitors cast on him seemed to say: “And what is he sitting here for?” He
+ rose and went up to Borís.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Anyhow, I’m in your way,” he said in a low tone. “Come and talk over my
+ business and I’ll go away.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, no, not at all,” said Borís. “But if you are tired, come and lie down
+ in my room and have a rest.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, really...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They went into the little room where Borís slept. Rostóv, without sitting
+ down, began at once, irritably (as if Borís were to blame in some way)
+ telling him about Denísov’s affair, asking him whether, through his
+ general, he could and would intercede with the Emperor on Denísov’s behalf
+ and get Denísov’s petition handed in. When he and Borís were alone, Rostóv
+ felt for the first time that he could not look Borís in the face without a
+ sense of awkwardness. Borís, with one leg crossed over the other and
+ stroking his left hand with the slender fingers of his right, listened to
+ Rostóv as a general listens to the report of a subordinate, now looking
+ aside and now gazing straight into Rostóv’s eyes with the same veiled
+ look. Each time this happened Rostóv felt uncomfortable and cast down his
+ eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have heard of such cases and know that His Majesty is very severe in
+ such affairs. I think it would be best not to bring it before the Emperor,
+ but to apply to the commander of the corps.... But in general, I think...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So you don’t want to do anything? Well then, say so!” Rostóv almost
+ shouted, not looking Borís in the face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the contrary, I will do what I can. Only I thought...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment Zhilínski’s voice was heard calling Borís.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well then, go, go, go...” said Rostóv, and refusing supper and remaining
+ alone in the little room, he walked up and down for a long time, hearing
+ the lighthearted French conversation from the next room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX
+ 
+ 
+ Rostóv had come to Tilsit the day least suitable for a petition on
+ Denísov’s behalf. He could not himself go to the general in attendance as
+ he was in mufti and had come to Tilsit without permission to do so, and
+ Borís, even had he wished to, could not have done so on the following day.
+ On that day, June 27, the preliminaries of peace were signed. The Emperors
+ exchanged decorations: Alexander received the Cross of the Legion of Honor
+ and Napoleon the Order of St. Andrew of the First Degree, and a dinner had
+ been arranged for the evening, given by a battalion of the French Guards
+ to the Preobrazhénsk battalion. The Emperors were to be present at that
+ banquet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv felt so ill at ease and uncomfortable with Borís that, when the
+ latter looked in after supper, he pretended to be asleep, and early next
+ morning went away, avoiding Borís. In his civilian clothes and a round
+ hat, he wandered about the town, staring at the French and their uniforms
+ and at the streets and houses where the Russian and French Emperors were
+ staying. In a square he saw tables being set up and preparations made for
+ the dinner; he saw the Russian and French colors draped from side to side
+ of the streets, with huge monograms A and N . In the windows of the
+ houses also flags and bunting were displayed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Borís doesn’t want to help me and I don’t want to ask him. That’s
+ settled,” thought Nicholas. “All is over between us, but I won’t leave
+ here without having done all I can for Denísov and certainly not without
+ getting his letter to the Emperor. The Emperor!... He is here!” thought
+ Rostóv, who had unconsciously returned to the house where Alexander
+ lodged.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Saddled horses were standing before the house and the suite were
+ assembling, evidently preparing for the Emperor to come out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I may see him at any moment,” thought Rostóv. “If only I were to hand the
+ letter direct to him and tell him all... could they really arrest me for
+ my civilian clothes? Surely not! He would understand on whose side justice
+ lies. He understands everything, knows everything. Who can be more just,
+ more magnanimous than he? And even if they did arrest me for being here,
+ what would it matter?” thought he, looking at an officer who was entering
+ the house the Emperor occupied. “After all, people do go in.... It’s all
+ nonsense! I’ll go in and hand the letter to the Emperor myself so much the
+ worse for Drubetskóy who drives me to it!” And suddenly with a
+ determination he himself did not expect, Rostóv felt for the letter in his
+ pocket and went straight to the house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I won’t miss my opportunity now, as I did after Austerlitz,” he
+ thought, expecting every moment to meet the monarch, and conscious of the
+ blood that rushed to his heart at the thought. “I will fall at his feet
+ and beseech him. He will lift me up, will listen, and will even thank me.
+ ‘I am happy when I can do good, but to remedy injustice is the greatest
+ happiness,’” Rostóv fancied the sovereign saying. And passing people who
+ looked after him with curiosity, he entered the porch of the Emperor’s
+ house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A broad staircase led straight up from the entry, and to the right he saw
+ a closed door. Below, under the staircase, was a door leading to the lower
+ floor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Whom do you want?” someone inquired.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To hand in a letter, a petition, to His Majesty,” said Nicholas, with a
+ tremor in his voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A petition? This way, to the officer on duty” (he was shown the door
+ leading downstairs), “only it won’t be accepted.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On hearing this indifferent voice, Rostóv grew frightened at what he was
+ doing; the thought of meeting the Emperor at any moment was so fascinating
+ and consequently so alarming that he was ready to run away, but the
+ official who had questioned him opened the door, and Rostóv entered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A short stout man of about thirty, in white breeches and high boots and a
+ batiste shirt that he had evidently only just put on, standing in that
+ room, and his valet was buttoning on to the back of his breeches a new
+ pair of handsome silk-embroidered braces that, for some reason, attracted
+ Rostóv’s attention. This man was speaking to someone in the adjoining
+ room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A good figure and in her first bloom,” he was saying, but on seeing
+ Rostóv, he stopped short and frowned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it? A petition?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it?” asked the person in the other room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Another petitioner,” answered the man with the braces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tell him to come later. He’ll be coming out directly, we must go.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Later... later! Tomorrow. It’s too late...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv turned and was about to go, but the man in the braces stopped him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Whom have you come from? Who are you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I come from Major Denísov,” answered Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Are you an officer?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lieutenant Count Rostóv.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What audacity! Hand it in through your commander. And go along with
+ you... go,” and he continued to put on the uniform the valet handed him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv went back into the hall and noticed that in the porch there were
+ many officers and generals in full parade uniform, whom he had to pass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Cursing his temerity, his heart sinking at the thought of finding himself
+ at any moment face to face with the Emperor and being put to shame and
+ arrested in his presence, fully alive now to the impropriety of his
+ conduct and repenting of it, Rostóv, with downcast eyes, was making his
+ way out of the house through the brilliant suite when a familiar voice
+ called him and a hand detained him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are you doing here, sir, in civilian dress?” asked a deep voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a cavalry general who had obtained the Emperor’s special favor
+ during this campaign, and who had formerly commanded the division in which
+ Rostóv was serving.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv, in dismay, began justifying himself, but seeing the kindly,
+ jocular face of the general, he took him aside and in an excited voice
+ told him the whole affair, asking him to intercede for Denísov, whom the
+ general knew. Having heard Rostóv to the end, the general shook his head
+ gravely.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’m sorry, sorry for that fine fellow. Give me the letter.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hardly had Rostóv handed him the letter and finished explaining Denísov’s
+ case, when hasty steps and the jingling of spurs were heard on the stairs,
+ and the general, leaving him, went to the porch. The gentlemen of the
+ Emperor’s suite ran down the stairs and went to their horses. Hayne, the
+ same groom who had been at Austerlitz, led up the Emperor’s horse, and the
+ faint creak of a footstep Rostóv knew at once was heard on the stairs.
+ Forgetting the danger of being recognized, Rostóv went close to the porch,
+ together with some inquisitive civilians, and again, after two years, saw
+ those features he adored: that same face and same look and step, and the
+ same union of majesty and mildness.... And the feeling of enthusiasm and
+ love for his sovereign rose again in Rostóv’s soul in all its old force.
+ In the uniform of the Preobrazhénsk regiment—white chamois-leather
+ breeches and high boots—and wearing a star Rostóv did not know (it
+ was that of the Légion d’honneur ), the monarch came out into the porch,
+ putting on his gloves and carrying his hat under his arm. He stopped and
+ looked about him, brightening everything around by his glance. He spoke a
+ few words to some of the generals, and, recognizing the former commander
+ of Rostóv’s division, smiled and beckoned to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the suite drew back and Rostóv saw the general talking for some time
+ to the Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor said a few words to him and took a step toward his horse.
+ Again the crowd of members of the suite and street gazers (among whom was
+ Rostóv) moved nearer to the Emperor. Stopping beside his horse, with his
+ hand on the saddle, the Emperor turned to the cavalry general and said in
+ a loud voice, evidently wishing to be heard by all:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I cannot do it, General. I cannot, because the law is stronger than I,”
+ and he raised his foot to the stirrup.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The general bowed his head respectfully, and the monarch mounted and rode
+ down the street at a gallop. Beside himself with enthusiasm, Rostóv ran
+ after him with the crowd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI
+ 
+ 
+ The Emperor rode to the square where, facing one another, a battalion of
+ the Preobrazhénsk regiment stood on the right and a battalion of the
+ French Guards in their bearskin caps on the left.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As the Tsar rode up to one flank of the battalions, which presented arms,
+ another group of horsemen galloped up to the opposite flank, and at the
+ head of them Rostóv recognized Napoleon. It could be no one else. He came
+ at a gallop, wearing a small hat, a blue uniform open over a white vest,
+ and the St. Andrew ribbon over his shoulder. He was riding a very fine
+ thoroughbred gray Arab horse with a crimson gold-embroidered saddlecloth.
+ On approaching Alexander he raised his hat, and as he did so, Rostóv, with
+ his cavalryman’s eye, could not help noticing that Napoleon did not sit
+ well or firmly in the saddle. The battalions shouted “Hurrah!” and “Vive
+ l’Empereur!” Napoleon said something to Alexander, and both Emperors
+ dismounted and took each other’s hands. Napoleon’s face wore an unpleasant
+ and artificial smile. Alexander was saying something affable to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In spite of the trampling of the French gendarmes’ horses, which were
+ pushing back the crowd, Rostóv kept his eyes on every movement of
+ Alexander and Bonaparte. It struck him as a surprise that Alexander
+ treated Bonaparte as an equal and that the latter was quite at ease with
+ the Tsar, as if such relations with an Emperor were an everyday matter to
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alexander and Napoleon, with the long train of their suites, approached
+ the right flank of the Preobrazhénsk battalion and came straight up to the
+ crowd standing there. The crowd unexpectedly found itself so close to the
+ Emperors that Rostóv, standing in the front row, was afraid he might be
+ recognized.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sire, I ask your permission to present the Legion of Honor to the bravest
+ of your soldiers,” said a sharp, precise voice, articulating every letter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This was said by the undersized Napoleon, looking up straight into
+ Alexander’s eyes. Alexander listened attentively to what was said to him
+ and, bending his head, smiled pleasantly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To him who has borne himself most bravely in this last war,” added
+ Napoleon, accentuating each syllable, as with a composure and assurance
+ exasperating to Rostóv, he ran his eyes over the Russian ranks drawn up
+ before him, who all presented arms with their eyes fixed on their Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Will Your Majesty allow me to consult the colonel?” said Alexander and
+ took a few hasty steps toward Prince Kozlóvski, the commander of the
+ battalion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bonaparte meanwhile began taking the glove off his small white hand, tore
+ it in doing so, and threw it away. An aide-de-camp behind him rushed
+ forward and picked it up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To whom shall it be given?” the Emperor Alexander asked Kozlóvski, in
+ Russian in a low voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To whomever Your Majesty commands.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor knit his brows with dissatisfaction and, glancing back,
+ remarked:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But we must give him an answer.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kozlóvski scanned the ranks resolutely and included Rostóv in his
+ scrutiny.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Can it be me?” thought Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lázarev!” the colonel called, with a frown, and Lázarev, the first
+ soldier in the rank, stepped briskly forward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where are you off to? Stop here!” voices whispered to Lázarev who did not
+ know where to go. Lázarev stopped, casting a sidelong look at his colonel
+ in alarm. His face twitched, as often happens to soldiers called before
+ the ranks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon slightly turned his head, and put his plump little hand out
+ behind him as if to take something. The members of his suite, guessing at
+ once what he wanted, moved about and whispered as they passed something
+ from one to another, and a page—the same one Rostóv had seen the
+ previous evening at Borís’—ran forward and, bowing respectfully over
+ the outstretched hand and not keeping it waiting a moment, laid in it an
+ Order on a red ribbon. Napoleon, without looking, pressed two fingers
+ together and the badge was between them. Then he approached Lázarev (who
+ rolled his eyes and persistently gazed at his own monarch), looked round
+ at the Emperor Alexander to imply that what he was now doing was done for
+ the sake of his ally, and the small white hand holding the Order touched
+ one of Lázarev’s buttons. It was as if Napoleon knew that it was only
+ necessary for his hand to deign to touch that soldier’s breast for the
+ soldier to be forever happy, rewarded, and distinguished from everyone
+ else in the world. Napoleon merely laid the cross on Lázarev’s breast and,
+ dropping his hand, turned toward Alexander as though sure that the cross
+ would adhere there. And it really did.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Officious hands, Russian and French, immediately seized the cross and
+ fastened it to the uniform. Lázarev glanced morosely at the little man
+ with white hands who was doing something to him and, still standing
+ motionless presenting arms, looked again straight into Alexander’s eyes,
+ as if asking whether he should stand there, or go away, or do something
+ else. But receiving no orders, he remained for some time in that rigid
+ position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperors remounted and rode away. The Preobrazhénsk battalion,
+ breaking rank, mingled with the French Guards and sat down at the tables
+ prepared for them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lázarev sat in the place of honor. Russian and French officers embraced
+ him, congratulated him, and pressed his hands. Crowds of officers and
+ civilians drew near merely to see him. A rumble of Russian and French
+ voices and laughter filled the air round the tables in the square. Two
+ officers with flushed faces, looking cheerful and happy, passed by Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What d’you think of the treat? All on silver plate,” one of them was
+ saying. “Have you seen Lázarev?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tomorrow, I hear, the Preobrazhénskis will give them a dinner.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, but what luck for Lázarev! Twelve hundred francs’ pension for life.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here’s a cap, lads!” shouted a Preobrazhénsk soldier, donning a shaggy
+ French cap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s a fine thing! First-rate!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have you heard the password?” asked one Guards’ officer of another. “The
+ day before yesterday it was ‘Napoléon, France, bravoure’ ; yesterday,
+ ‘Alexandre, Russie, grandeur.’ One day our Emperor gives it and next day
+ Napoleon. Tomorrow our Emperor will send a St. George’s Cross to the
+ bravest of the French Guards. It has to be done. He must respond in kind.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís, too, with his friend Zhilínski, came to see the Preobrazhénsk
+ banquet. On his way back, he noticed Rostóv standing by the corner of a
+ house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Rostóv! How d’you do? We missed one another,” he said, and could not
+ refrain from asking what was the matter, so strangely dismal and troubled
+ was Rostóv’s face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing, nothing,” replied Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’ll call round?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I will.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv stood at that corner for a long time, watching the feast from a
+ distance. In his mind, a painful process was going on which he could not
+ bring to a conclusion. Terrible doubts rose in his soul. Now he remembered
+ Denísov with his changed expression, his submission, and the whole
+ hospital, with arms and legs torn off and its dirt and disease. So vividly
+ did he recall that hospital stench of dead flesh that he looked round to
+ see where the smell came from. Next he thought of that self-satisfied
+ Bonaparte, with his small white hand, who was now an Emperor, liked and
+ respected by Alexander. Then why those severed arms and legs and those
+ dead men?... Then again he thought of Lázarev rewarded and Denísov
+ punished and unpardoned. He caught himself harboring such strange thoughts
+ that he was frightened.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The smell of the food the Preobrazhénskis were eating and a sense of
+ hunger recalled him from these reflections; he had to get something to eat
+ before going away. He went to a hotel he had noticed that morning. There
+ he found so many people, among them officers who, like himself, had come
+ in civilian clothes, that he had difficulty in getting a dinner. Two
+ officers of his own division joined him. The conversation naturally turned
+ on the peace. The officers, his comrades, like most of the army, were
+ dissatisfied with the peace concluded after the battle of Friedland. They
+ said that had we held out a little longer Napoleon would have been done
+ for, as his troops had neither provisions nor ammunition. Nicholas ate and
+ drank (chiefly the latter) in silence. He finished a couple of bottles of
+ wine by himself. The process in his mind went on tormenting him without
+ reaching a conclusion. He feared to give way to his thoughts, yet could
+ not get rid of them. Suddenly, on one of the officers’ saying that it was
+ humiliating to look at the French, Rostóv began shouting with uncalled-for
+ wrath, and therefore much to the surprise of the officers:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How can you judge what’s best?” he cried, the blood suddenly rushing to
+ his face. “How can you judge the Emperor’s actions? What right have we to
+ argue? We cannot comprehend either the Emperor’s aims or his actions!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I never said a word about the Emperor!” said the officer, justifying
+ himself, and unable to understand Rostóv’s outburst, except on the
+ supposition that he was drunk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Rostóv did not listen to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We are not diplomatic officials, we are soldiers and nothing more,” he
+ went on. “If we are ordered to die, we must die. If we’re punished, it
+ means that we have deserved it, it’s not for us to judge. If the Emperor
+ pleases to recognize Bonaparte as Emperor and to conclude an alliance with
+ him, it means that that is the right thing to do. If once we begin judging
+ and arguing about everything, nothing sacred will be left! That way we
+ shall be saying there is no God—nothing!” shouted Nicholas, banging
+ the table—very little to the point as it seemed to his listeners,
+ but quite relevantly to the course of his own thoughts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Our business is to do our duty, to fight and not to think! That’s
+ all....” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And to drink,” said one of the officers, not wishing to quarrel.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, and to drink,” assented Nicholas. “Hullo there! Another bottle!” he
+ shouted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In 1808 the Emperor Alexander went to Erfurt for a fresh interview with
+ the Emperor Napoleon, and in the upper circles of Petersburg there was
+ much talk of the grandeur of this important meeting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXII
+ 
+ 
+ In 1809 the intimacy between “the world’s two arbiters,” as Napoleon and
+ Alexander were called, was such that when Napoleon declared war on Austria
+ a Russian corps crossed the frontier to co-operate with our old enemy
+ Bonaparte against our old ally the Emperor of Austria, and in court
+ circles the possibility of marriage between Napoleon and one of
+ Alexander’s sisters was spoken of. But besides considerations of foreign
+ policy, the attention of Russian society was at that time keenly directed
+ on the internal changes that were being undertaken in all the departments
+ of government.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Life meanwhile—real life, with its essential interests of health and
+ sickness, toil and rest, and its intellectual interests in thought,
+ science, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, and passions—went
+ on as usual, independently of and apart from political friendship or
+ enmity with Napoleon Bonaparte and from all the schemes of reconstruction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK SIX: 1808 - 10
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ Prince Andrew had spent two years continuously in the country.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the plans Pierre had attempted on his estates—and constantly
+ changing from one thing to another had never accomplished—were
+ carried out by Prince Andrew without display and without perceptible
+ difficulty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He had in the highest degree a practical tenacity which Pierre lacked, and
+ without fuss or strain on his part this set things going.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On one of his estates the three hundred serfs were liberated and became
+ free agricultural laborers—this being one of the first examples of
+ the kind in Russia. On other estates the serfs’ compulsory labor was
+ commuted for a quitrent. A trained midwife was engaged for Boguchárovo at
+ his expense, and a priest was paid to teach reading and writing to the
+ children of the peasants and household serfs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew spent half his time at Bald Hills with his father and his
+ son, who was still in the care of nurses. The other half he spent in
+ “Boguchárovo Cloister,” as his father called Prince Andrew’s estate.
+ Despite the indifference to the affairs of the world he had expressed to
+ Pierre, he diligently followed all that went on, received many books, and
+ to his surprise noticed that when he or his father had visitors from
+ Petersburg, the very vortex of life, these people lagged behind himself—who
+ never left the country—in knowledge of what was happening in home
+ and foreign affairs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Besides being occupied with his estates and reading a great variety of
+ books, Prince Andrew was at this time busy with a critical survey of our
+ last two unfortunate campaigns, and with drawing up a proposal for a
+ reform of the army rules and regulations.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the spring of 1809 he went to visit the Ryazán estates which had been
+ inherited by his son, whose guardian he was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Warmed by the spring sunshine he sat in the calèche looking at the new
+ grass, the first leaves on the birches, and the first puffs of white
+ spring clouds floating across the clear blue sky. He was not thinking of
+ anything, but looked absent-mindedly and cheerfully from side to side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They crossed the ferry where he had talked with Pierre the year before.
+ They went through the muddy village, past threshing floors and green
+ fields of winter rye, downhill where snow still lodged near the bridge,
+ uphill where the clay had been liquefied by the rain, past strips of
+ stubble land and bushes touched with green here and there, and into a
+ birch forest growing on both sides of the road. In the forest it was
+ almost hot, no wind could be felt. The birches with their sticky green
+ leaves were motionless, and lilac-colored flowers and the first blades of
+ green grass were pushing up and lifting last year’s leaves. The coarse
+ evergreen color of the small fir trees scattered here and there among the
+ birches was an unpleasant reminder of winter. On entering the forest the
+ horses began to snort and sweated visibly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Peter the footman made some remark to the coachman; the latter assented.
+ But apparently the coachman’s sympathy was not enough for Peter, and he
+ turned on the box toward his master.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How pleasant it is, your excellency!” he said with a respectful smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s pleasant, your excellency!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is he talking about?” thought Prince Andrew. “Oh, the spring,
+ I suppose,” he thought as he turned round. “Yes, really everything is
+ green already.... How early! The birches and cherry and alders too are
+ coming out.... But the oaks show no sign yet. Ah, here is one oak!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the edge of the road stood an oak. Probably ten times the age of
+ the birches that formed the forest, it was ten times as thick and twice
+ as tall as they. It was an enormous tree, its girth twice as great as a
+ man could embrace, and evidently long ago some of its branches had been
+ broken off and its bark scarred. With its huge ungainly limbs sprawling
+ unsymmetrically, and its gnarled hands and fingers, it stood an aged,
+ stern, and scornful monster among the smiling birch trees. Only the
+ dead-looking evergreen firs dotted about in the forest, and this oak, refused
+ to yield to the charm of spring or notice either the spring or the sunshine.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Spring, love, happiness!” this oak seemed to say. “Are you not weary of
+ that stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud? Always the same and
+ always a fraud? There is no spring, no sun, no happiness! Look at those
+ cramped dead firs, ever the same, and at me too, sticking out my broken
+ and barked fingers just where they have grown, whether from my back or my
+ sides: as they have grown so I stand, and I do not believe in your hopes
+ and your lies.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he passed through the forest Prince Andrew turned several times to look
+ at that oak, as if expecting something from it. Under the oak, too, were
+ flowers and grass, but it stood among them scowling, rigid, misshapen, and
+ grim as ever.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, the oak is right, a thousand times right,” thought Prince Andrew.
+ “Let others—the young—yield afresh to that fraud, but we know
+ life, our life is finished!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A whole sequence of new thoughts, hopeless but mournfully pleasant, rose
+ in his soul in connection with that tree. During this journey he, as it
+ were, considered his life afresh and arrived at his old conclusion,
+ restful in its hopelessness: that it was not for him to begin anything
+ anew—but that he must live out his life, content to do no harm, and
+ not disturbing himself or desiring anything.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ Prince Andrew had to see the Marshal of the Nobility for the district in
+ connection with the affairs of the Ryazán estate of which he was trustee.
+ This Marshal was Count Ilyá Rostóv, and in the middle of May Prince Andrew
+ went to visit him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was now hot spring weather. The whole forest was already clothed in
+ green. It was dusty and so hot that on passing near water one longed to
+ bathe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew, depressed and preoccupied with the business about which he
+ had to speak to the Marshal, was driving up the avenue in the grounds of
+ the Rostóvs’ house at Otrádnoe. He heard merry girlish cries behind some
+ trees on the right and saw a group of girls running to cross the path of
+ his calèche . Ahead of the rest and nearer to him ran a dark-haired,
+ remarkably slim, pretty girl in a yellow chintz dress, with a white
+ handkerchief on her head from under which loose locks of hair escaped. The
+ girl was shouting something but, seeing that he was a stranger, ran back
+ laughing without looking at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly, he did not know why, he felt a pang. The day was so beautiful,
+ the sun so bright, everything around so gay, but that slim pretty girl did
+ not know, or wish to know, of his existence and was contented and cheerful
+ in her own separate—probably foolish—but bright and happy
+ life. “What is she so glad about? What is she thinking of? Not of the
+ military regulations or of the arrangement of the Ryazán serfs’ quitrents.
+ Of what is she thinking? Why is she so happy?” Prince Andrew asked himself
+ with instinctive curiosity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In 1809 Count Ilyá Rostóv was living at Otrádnoe just as he had done in
+ former years, that is, entertaining almost the whole province with hunts,
+ theatricals, dinners, and music. He was glad to see Prince Andrew, as he
+ was to see any new visitor, and insisted on his staying the night.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the dull day, in the course of which he was entertained by his
+ elderly hosts and by the more important of the visitors (the old count’s
+ house was crowded on account of an approaching name day), Prince Andrew
+ repeatedly glanced at Natásha, gay and laughing among the younger members
+ of the company, and asked himself each time, “What is she thinking about?
+ Why is she so glad?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That night, alone in new surroundings, he was long unable to sleep. He
+ read awhile and then put out his candle, but relit it. It was hot in the
+ room, the inside shutters of which were closed. He was cross with the
+ stupid old man (as he called Rostóv), who had made him stay by assuring
+ him that some necessary documents had not yet arrived from town, and he
+ was vexed with himself for having stayed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He got up and went to the window to open it. As soon as he opened the
+ shutters the moonlight, as if it had long been watching for this, burst
+ into the room. He opened the casement. The night was fresh, bright, and
+ very still. Just before the window was a row of pollard trees, looking
+ black on one side and with a silvery light on the other. Beneath the trees
+ grew some kind of lush, wet, bushy vegetation with silver-lit leaves and
+ stems here and there. Farther back beyond the dark trees a roof glittered
+ with dew, to the right was a leafy tree with brilliantly white trunk and
+ branches, and above it shone the moon, nearly at its full, in a pale,
+ almost starless, spring sky. Prince Andrew leaned his elbows on the window
+ ledge and his eyes rested on that sky.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His room was on the first floor. Those in the rooms above were also awake.
+ He heard female voices overhead.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just once more,” said a girlish voice above him which Prince Andrew
+ recognized at once.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But when are you coming to bed?” replied another voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I won’t, I can’t sleep, what’s the use? Come now for the last time.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Two girlish voices sang a musical passage—the end of some song.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, how lovely! Now go to sleep, and there’s an end of it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You go to sleep, but I can’t,” said the first voice, coming nearer to the
+ window. She was evidently leaning right out, for the rustle of her dress
+ and even her breathing could be heard. Everything was stone-still, like
+ the moon and its light and the shadows. Prince Andrew, too, dared not
+ stir, for fear of betraying his unintentional presence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya! Sónya!” he again heard the first speaker. “Oh, how can you sleep?
+ Only look how glorious it is! Ah, how glorious! Do wake up, Sónya!” she
+ said almost with tears in her voice. “There never, never was such a lovely
+ night before!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya made some reluctant reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do just come and see what a moon!... Oh, how lovely! Come here....
+ Darling, sweetheart, come here! There, you see? I feel like sitting down
+ on my heels, putting my arms round my knees like this, straining tight, as
+ tight as possible, and flying away! Like this....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Take care, you’ll fall out.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He heard the sound of a scuffle and Sónya’s disapproving voice: “It’s past
+ one o’clock.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, you only spoil things for me. All right, go, go!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again all was silent, but Prince Andrew knew she was still sitting there.
+ From time to time he heard a soft rustle and at times a sigh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O God, O God! What does it mean?” she suddenly exclaimed. “To bed then,
+ if it must be!” and she slammed the casement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For her I might as well not exist!” thought Prince Andrew while he
+ listened to her voice, for some reason expecting yet fearing that she
+ might say something about him. “There she is again! As if it were on
+ purpose,” thought he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In his soul there suddenly arose such an unexpected turmoil of youthful
+ thoughts and hopes, contrary to the whole tenor of his life, that unable
+ to explain his condition to himself he lay down and fell asleep at once.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ Next morning, having taken leave of no one but the count, and not waiting
+ for the ladies to appear, Prince Andrew set off for home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was already the beginning of June when on his return journey he drove
+ into the birch forest where the gnarled old oak had made so strange and
+ memorable an impression on him. In the forest the harness bells sounded
+ yet more muffled than they had done six weeks before, for now all was
+ thick, shady, and dense, and the young firs dotted about in the forest did
+ not jar on the general beauty but, lending themselves to the mood around,
+ were delicately green with fluffy young shoots.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The whole day had been hot. Somewhere a storm was gathering, but only a
+ small cloud had scattered some raindrops lightly, sprinkling the road and
+ the sappy leaves. The left side of the forest was dark in the shade, the
+ right side glittered in the sunlight, wet and shiny and scarcely swayed by
+ the breeze. Everything was in blossom, the nightingales trilled, and their
+ voices reverberated now near, now far away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, here in this forest was that oak with which I agreed,” thought
+ Prince Andrew. “But where is it?” he again wondered, gazing at the left
+ side of the road, and without recognizing it he looked with admiration at
+ the very oak he sought. The old oak, quite transfigured, spreading out a
+ canopy of sappy dark-green foliage, stood rapt and slightly trembling in
+ the rays of the evening sun. Neither gnarled fingers nor old scars nor old
+ doubts and sorrows were any of them in evidence now. Through the hard
+ century-old bark, even where there were no twigs, leaves had sprouted such
+ as one could hardly believe the old veteran could have produced.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, it is the same oak,” thought Prince Andrew, and all at once he was
+ seized by an unreasoning springtime feeling of joy and renewal. All the
+ best moments of his life suddenly rose to his memory. Austerlitz with the
+ lofty heavens, his wife’s dead reproachful face, Pierre at the ferry, that
+ girl thrilled by the beauty of the night, and that night itself and the
+ moon, and... all this rushed suddenly to his mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, life is not over at thirty-one!” Prince Andrew suddenly decided
+ finally and decisively. “It is not enough for me to know what I have in me—everyone
+ must know it: Pierre, and that young girl who wanted to fly away into the
+ sky, everyone must know me, so that my life may not be lived for myself
+ alone while others live so apart from it, but so that it may be reflected
+ in them all, and they and I may live in harmony!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ On reaching home Prince Andrew decided to go to Petersburg that autumn and
+ found all sorts of reasons for this decision. A whole series of sensible
+ and logical considerations showing it to be essential for him to go to
+ Petersburg, and even to re-enter the service, kept springing up in his
+ mind. He could not now understand how he could ever even have doubted the
+ necessity of taking an active share in life, just as a month before he had
+ not understood how the idea of leaving the quiet country could ever enter
+ his head. It now seemed clear to him that all his experience of life must
+ be senselessly wasted unless he applied it to some kind of work and again
+ played an active part in life. He did not even remember how formerly, on
+ the strength of similar wretched logical arguments, it had seemed obvious
+ that he would be degrading himself if he now, after the lessons he had had
+ in life, allowed himself to believe in the possibility of being useful and
+ in the possibility of happiness or love. Now reason suggested quite the
+ opposite. After that journey to Ryazán he found the country dull; his
+ former pursuits no longer interested him, and often when sitting alone in
+ his study he got up, went to the mirror, and gazed a long time at his own
+ face. Then he would turn away to the portrait of his dead Lise, who with
+ hair curled à la grecque looked tenderly and gaily at him out of the gilt
+ frame. She did not now say those former terrible words to him, but looked
+ simply, merrily, and inquisitively at him. And Prince Andrew, crossing his
+ arms behind him, long paced the room, now frowning, now smiling, as he
+ reflected on those irrational, inexpressible thoughts, secret as a crime,
+ which altered his whole life and were connected with Pierre, with fame,
+ with the girl at the window, the oak, and woman’s beauty and love. And if
+ anyone came into his room at such moments he was particularly cold, stern,
+ and above all unpleasantly logical.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear,” Princess Mary entering at such a moment would say, “little
+ Nicholas can’t go out today, it’s very cold.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If it were hot,” Prince Andrew would reply at such times very dryly to
+ his sister, “he could go out in his smock, but as it is cold he must wear
+ warm clothes, which were designed for that purpose. That is what follows
+ from the fact that it is cold; and not that a child who needs fresh air
+ should remain at home,” he would add with extreme logic, as if punishing
+ someone for those secret illogical emotions that stirred within him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At such moments Princess Mary would think how intellectual work dries men
+ up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ Prince Andrew arrived in Petersburg in August, 1809. It was the time when
+ the youthful Speránski was at the zenith of his fame and his reforms were
+ being pushed forward with the greatest energy. That same August the
+ Emperor was thrown from his calèche , injured his leg, and remained three
+ weeks at Peterhof, receiving Speránski every day and no one else. At that
+ time the two famous decrees were being prepared that so agitated society—abolishing
+ court ranks and introducing examinations to qualify for the grades of
+ Collegiate Assessor and State Councilor—and not merely these but a
+ whole state constitution, intended to change the existing order of
+ government in Russia: legal, administrative, and financial, from the
+ Council of State down to the district tribunals. Now those vague liberal
+ dreams with which the Emperor Alexander had ascended the throne, and which
+ he had tried to put into effect with the aid of his associates,
+ Czartorýski, Novosíltsev, Kochubéy, and Strógonov—whom he himself in
+ jest had called his Comité de salut public —were taking shape and
+ being realized.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now all these men were replaced by Speránski on the civil side, and
+ Arakchéev on the military. Soon after his arrival Prince Andrew, as a
+ gentleman of the chamber, presented himself at court and at a levee. The
+ Emperor, though he met him twice, did not favor him with a single word. It
+ had always seemed to Prince Andrew before that he was antipathetic to the
+ Emperor and that the latter disliked his face and personality generally,
+ and in the cold, repellent glance the Emperor gave him, he now found
+ further confirmation of this surmise. The courtiers explained the
+ Emperor’s neglect of him by His Majesty’s displeasure at Bolkónski’s not
+ having served since 1805.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know myself that one cannot help one’s sympathies and antipathies,”
+ thought Prince Andrew, “so it will not do to present my proposal for the
+ reform of the army regulations to the Emperor personally, but the project
+ will speak for itself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He mentioned what he had written to an old field marshal, a friend of his
+ father’s. The field marshal made an appointment to see him, received him
+ graciously, and promised to inform the Emperor. A few days later Prince
+ Andrew received notice that he was to go to see the Minister of War, Count
+ Arakchéev.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ On the appointed day Prince Andrew entered Count Arakchéev’s waiting room
+ at nine in the morning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not know Arakchéev personally, had never seen him, and all he had
+ heard of him inspired him with but little respect for the man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is Minister of War, a man trusted by the Emperor, and I need not
+ concern myself about his personal qualities: he has been commissioned to
+ consider my project, so he alone can get it adopted,” thought Prince
+ Andrew as he waited among a number of important and unimportant people in
+ Count Arakchéev’s waiting room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During his service, chiefly as an adjutant, Prince Andrew had seen the
+ anterooms of many important men, and the different types of such rooms
+ were well known to him. Count Arakchéev’s anteroom had quite a special
+ character. The faces of the unimportant people awaiting their turn for an
+ audience showed embarrassment and servility; the faces of those of higher
+ rank expressed a common feeling of awkwardness, covered by a mask of
+ unconcern and ridicule of themselves, their situation, and the person for
+ whom they were waiting. Some walked thoughtfully up and down, others
+ whispered and laughed. Prince Andrew heard the nickname “Síla Andréevich”
+ and the words, “ Uncle will give it to us hot,” in reference to Count
+ Arakchéev. One general (an important personage), evidently feeling
+ offended at having to wait so long, sat crossing and uncrossing his legs
+ and smiling contemptuously to himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the moment the door opened one feeling alone appeared on all faces—that
+ of fear. Prince Andrew for the second time asked the adjutant on duty to
+ take in his name, but received an ironical look and was told that his turn
+ would come in due course. After some others had been shown in and out of
+ the minister’s room by the adjutant on duty, an officer who struck Prince
+ Andrew by his humiliated and frightened air was admitted at that terrible
+ door. This officer’s audience lasted a long time. Then suddenly the
+ grating sound of a harsh voice was heard from the other side of the door,
+ and the officer—with pale face and trembling lips—came out and
+ passed through the waiting room, clutching his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After this Prince Andrew was conducted to the door and the officer on duty
+ said in a whisper, “To the right, at the window.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew entered a plain tidy room and saw at the table a man of
+ forty with a long waist, a long closely cropped head, deep wrinkles,
+ scowling brows above dull greenish-hazel eyes and an overhanging red nose.
+ Arakchéev turned his head toward him without looking at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is your petition?” asked Arakchéev.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am not petitioning, your excellency,” returned Prince Andrew quietly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Arakchéev’s eyes turned toward him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sit down,” said he. “Prince Bolkónski?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am not petitioning about anything. His Majesty the Emperor has deigned
+ to send your excellency a project submitted by me...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see, my dear sir, I have read your project,” interrupted Arakchéev,
+ uttering only the first words amiably and then—again without looking
+ at Prince Andrew—relapsing gradually into a tone of grumbling
+ contempt. “You are proposing new military laws? There are many laws but no
+ one to carry out the old ones. Nowadays everybody designs laws, it is
+ easier writing than doing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I came at His Majesty the Emperor’s wish to learn from your excellency
+ how you propose to deal with the memorandum I have presented,” said Prince
+ Andrew politely.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have endorsed a resolution on your memorandum and sent it to the
+ committee. I do not approve of it,” said Arakchéev, rising and taking a
+ paper from his writing table. “Here!” and he handed it to Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Across the paper was scrawled in pencil, without capital letters,
+ misspelled, and without punctuation: “Unsoundly constructed because
+ resembles an imitation of the French military code and from the Articles
+ of War needlessly deviating.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To what committee has the memorandum been referred?” inquired Prince
+ Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To the Committee on Army Regulations, and I have recommended that your
+ honor should be appointed a member, but without a salary.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t want one.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A member without salary,” repeated Arakchéev. “I have the honor... Eh!
+ Call the next one! Who else is there?” he shouted, bowing to Prince
+ Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ While waiting for the announcement of his appointment to the committee
+ Prince Andrew looked up his former acquaintances, particularly those he
+ knew to be in power and whose aid he might need. In Petersburg he now
+ experienced the same feeling he had had on the eve of a battle, when
+ troubled by anxious curiosity and irresistibly attracted to the ruling
+ circles where the future, on which the fate of millions depended, was
+ being shaped. From the irritation of the older men, the curiosity of the
+ uninitiated, the reserve of the initiated, the hurry and preoccupation of
+ everyone, and the innumerable committees and commissions of whose
+ existence he learned every day, he felt that now, in 1809, here in
+ Petersburg a vast civil conflict was in preparation, the commander in
+ chief of which was a mysterious person he did not know, but who was
+ supposed to be a man of genius—Speránski. And this movement of
+ reconstruction of which Prince Andrew had a vague idea, and Speránski its
+ chief promoter, began to interest him so keenly that the question of the
+ army regulations quickly receded to a secondary place in his
+ consciousness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew was most favorably placed to secure good reception in the
+ highest and most diverse Petersburg circles of the day. The reforming
+ party cordially welcomed and courted him, in the first place because he
+ was reputed to be clever and very well read, and secondly because by
+ liberating his serfs he had obtained the reputation of being a liberal.
+ The party of the old and dissatisfied, who censured the innovations,
+ turned to him expecting his sympathy in their disapproval of the reforms,
+ simply because he was the son of his father. The feminine society world
+ welcomed him gladly, because he was rich, distinguished, a good match, and
+ almost a newcomer, with a halo of romance on account of his supposed death
+ and the tragic loss of his wife. Besides this the general opinion of all
+ who had known him previously was that he had greatly improved during these
+ last five years, having softened and grown more manly, lost his former
+ affectation, pride, and contemptuous irony, and acquired the serenity that
+ comes with years. People talked about him, were interested in him, and
+ wanted to meet him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The day after his interview with Count Arakchéev, Prince Andrew spent the
+ evening at Count Kochubéy’s. He told the count of his interview with Síla
+ Andréevich (Kochubéy spoke of Arakchéev by that nickname with the same
+ vague irony Prince Andrew had noticed in the Minister of War’s anteroom).
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ Mon cher , even in this case you can’t do without Michael Mikháylovich
+ Speránski. He manages everything. I’ll speak to him. He has promised to
+ come this evening.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What has Speránski to do with the army regulations?” asked Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kochubéy shook his head smilingly, as if surprised at Bolkónski’s
+ simplicity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We were talking to him about you a few days ago,” Kochubéy continued,
+ “and about your freed plowmen.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, is it you, Prince, who have freed your serfs?” said an old man of
+ Catherine’s day, turning contemptuously toward Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It was a small estate that brought in no profit,” replied Prince Andrew,
+ trying to extenuate his action so as not to irritate the old man
+ uselessly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Afraid of being late...” said the old man, looking at Kochubéy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” he continued. “Who will plow the
+ land if they are set free? It is easy to write laws, but difficult to
+ rule.... Just the same as now—I ask you, Count—who will be
+ heads of the departments when everybody has to pass examinations?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Those who pass the examinations, I suppose,” replied Kochubéy, crossing
+ his legs and glancing round.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, I have Pryánichnikov serving under me, a splendid man, a priceless
+ man, but he’s sixty. Is he to go up for examination?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, that’s a difficulty, as education is not at all general, but...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Count Kochubéy did not finish. He rose, took Prince Andrew by the arm, and
+ went to meet a tall, bald, fair man of about forty with a large open
+ forehead and a long face of unusual and peculiar whiteness, who was just
+ entering. The newcomer wore a blue swallow-tail coat with a cross
+ suspended from his neck and a star on his left breast. It was Speránski.
+ Prince Andrew recognized him at once, and felt a throb within him, as
+ happens at critical moments of life. Whether it was from respect, envy, or
+ anticipation, he did not know. Speránski’s whole figure was of a peculiar
+ type that made him easily recognizable. In the society in which Prince
+ Andrew lived he had never seen anyone who together with awkward and clumsy
+ gestures possessed such calmness and self-assurance; he had never seen so
+ resolute yet gentle an expression as that in those half-closed, rather
+ humid eyes, or so firm a smile that expressed nothing; nor had he heard
+ such a refined, smooth, soft voice; above all he had never seen such
+ delicate whiteness of face or hands—hands which were broad, but very
+ plump, soft, and white. Such whiteness and softness Prince Andrew had only
+ seen on the faces of soldiers who had been long in hospital. This was
+ Speránski, Secretary of State, reporter to the Emperor and his companion
+ at Erfurt, where he had more than once met and talked with Napoleon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Speránski did not shift his eyes from one face to another as people
+ involuntarily do on entering a large company and was in no hurry to speak.
+ He spoke slowly, with assurance that he would be listened to, and he
+ looked only at the person with whom he was conversing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew followed Speránski’s every word and movement with particular
+ attention. As happens to some people, especially to men who judge those
+ near to them severely, he always on meeting anyone new—especially
+ anyone whom, like Speránski, he knew by reputation—expected to
+ discover in him the perfection of human qualities.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Speránski told Kochubéy he was sorry he had been unable to come sooner as
+ he had been detained at the palace. He did not say that the Emperor had
+ kept him, and Prince Andrew noticed this affectation of modesty. When
+ Kochubéy introduced Prince Andrew, Speránski slowly turned his eyes to
+ Bolkónski with his customary smile and looked at him in silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am very glad to make your acquaintance. I had heard of you, as everyone
+ has,” he said after a pause.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kochubéy said a few words about the reception Arakchéev had given
+ Bolkónski. Speránski smiled more markedly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The chairman of the Committee on Army Regulations is my good friend
+ Monsieur Magnítski,” he said, fully articulating every word and syllable,
+ “and if you like I can put you in touch with him.” He paused at the full
+ stop. “I hope you will find him sympathetic and ready to co-operate in
+ promoting all that is reasonable.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A circle soon formed round Speránski, and the old man who had talked about
+ his subordinate Pryánichnikov addressed a question to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew without joining in the conversation watched every movement
+ of Speránski’s: this man, not long since an insignificant divinity
+ student, who now, Bolkónski thought, held in his hands—those plump
+ white hands—the fate of Russia. Prince Andrew was struck by the
+ extraordinarily disdainful composure with which Speránski answered the old
+ man. He appeared to address condescending words to him from an
+ immeasurable height. When the old man began to speak too loud, Speránski
+ smiled and said he could not judge of the advantage or disadvantage of
+ what pleased the sovereign.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having talked for a little while in the general circle, Speránski rose and
+ coming up to Prince Andrew took him along to the other end of the room. It
+ was clear that he thought it necessary to interest himself in Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I had no chance to talk with you, Prince, during the animated
+ conversation in which that venerable gentleman involved me,” he said with
+ a mildly contemptuous smile, as if intimating by that smile that he and
+ Prince Andrew understood the insignificance of the people with whom he had
+ just been talking. This flattered Prince Andrew. “I have known of you for
+ a long time: first from your action with regard to your serfs, a first
+ example, of which it is very desirable that there should be more
+ imitators; and secondly because you are one of those gentlemen of the
+ chamber who have not considered themselves offended by the new decree
+ concerning the ranks allotted to courtiers, which is causing so much
+ gossip and tittle-tattle.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No,” said Prince Andrew, “my father did not wish me to take advantage of
+ the privilege. I began the service from the lower grade.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your father, a man of the last century, evidently stands above our
+ contemporaries who so condemn this measure which merely re-establishes
+ natural justice.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I think, however, that these condemnations have some ground,” returned
+ Prince Andrew, trying to resist Speránski’s influence, of which he began
+ to be conscious. He did not like to agree with him in everything and felt
+ a wish to contradict. Though he usually spoke easily and well, he felt a
+ difficulty in expressing himself now while talking with Speránski. He was
+ too much absorbed in observing the famous man’s personality.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Grounds of personal ambition maybe,” Speránski put in quietly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And of state interest to some extent,” said Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do you mean?” asked Speránski quietly, lowering his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am an admirer of Montesquieu,” replied Prince Andrew, “and his idea
+ that le principe des monarchies est l’honneur me paraît incontestable.
+ Certains droits et privilèges de la noblesse me paraissent être des moyens
+ de soutenir ce sentiment. ” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “The principle of monarchies is honor seems to me
+ incontestable. Certain rights and privileges for the
+ aristocracy appear to me a means of maintaining that
+ sentiment.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The smile vanished from Speránski’s white face, which was much improved by
+ the change. Probably Prince Andrew’s thought interested him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Si vous envisagez la question sous ce point de vue,” * he began,
+ pronouncing French with evident difficulty, and speaking even slower than
+ in Russian but quite calmly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “If you regard the question from that point of view.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Speránski went on to say that honor, l’honneur , cannot be upheld by
+ privileges harmful to the service; that honor, l’honneur , is either a
+ negative concept of not doing what is blameworthy or it is a source of
+ emulation in pursuit of commendation and rewards, which recognize it. His
+ arguments were concise, simple, and clear.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “An institution upholding honor, the source of emulation, is one similar
+ to the Légion d’honneur of the great Emperor Napoleon, not harmful but
+ helpful to the success of the service, but not a class or court
+ privilege.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I do not dispute that, but it cannot be denied that court privileges have
+ attained the same end,” returned Prince Andrew. “Every courtier considers
+ himself bound to maintain his position worthily.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yet you do not care to avail yourself of the privilege, Prince,” said
+ Speránski, indicating by a smile that he wished to finish amiably an
+ argument which was embarrassing for his companion. “If you will do me the
+ honor of calling on me on Wednesday,” he added, “I will, after talking
+ with Magnítski, let you know what may interest you, and shall also have
+ the pleasure of a more detailed chat with you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Closing his eyes, he bowed à la française , without taking leave, and
+ trying to attract as little attention as possible, he left the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ During the first weeks of his stay in Petersburg Prince Andrew felt the
+ whole trend of thought he had formed during his life of seclusion quite
+ overshadowed by the trifling cares that engrossed him in that city.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On returning home in the evening he would jot down in his notebook four or
+ five necessary calls or appointments for certain hours. The mechanism of
+ life, the arrangement of the day so as to be in time everywhere, absorbed
+ the greater part of his vital energy. He did nothing, did not even think
+ or find time to think, but only talked, and talked successfully, of what
+ he had thought while in the country.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He sometimes noticed with dissatisfaction that he repeated the same remark
+ on the same day in different circles. But he was so busy for whole days
+ together that he had no time to notice that he was thinking of nothing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he had done on their first meeting at Kochubéy’s, Speránski produced a
+ strong impression on Prince Andrew on the Wednesday, when he received him
+ tête-à-tête at his own house and talked to him long and confidentially.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To Bolkónski so many people appeared contemptible and insignificant
+ creatures, and he so longed to find in someone the living ideal of that
+ perfection toward which he strove, that he readily believed that in
+ Speránski he had found this ideal of a perfectly rational and virtuous
+ man. Had Speránski sprung from the same class as himself and possessed the
+ same breeding and traditions, Bolkónski would soon have discovered his
+ weak, human, unheroic sides; but as it was, Speránski’s strange and
+ logical turn of mind inspired him with respect all the more because he did
+ not quite understand him. Moreover, Speránski, either because he
+ appreciated the other’s capacity or because he considered it necessary to
+ win him to his side, showed off his dispassionate calm reasonableness
+ before Prince Andrew and flattered him with that subtle flattery which
+ goes hand in hand with self-assurance and consists in a tacit assumption
+ that one’s companion is the only man besides oneself capable of
+ understanding the folly of the rest of mankind and the reasonableness and
+ profundity of one’s own ideas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During their long conversation on Wednesday evening, Speránski more than
+ once remarked: “We regard everything that is above the common level of
+ rooted custom...” or, with a smile: “But we want the wolves to
+ be fed and the sheep to be safe...” or: “ They cannot understand
+ this...” and all in a way that seemed to say: “ We , you and I,
+ understand what they are and who we are.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This first long conversation with Speránski only strengthened in Prince
+ Andrew the feeling he had experienced toward him at their first meeting.
+ He saw in him a remarkable, clear-thinking man of vast intellect who by
+ his energy and persistence had attained power, which he was using solely
+ for the welfare of Russia. In Prince Andrew’s eyes Speránski was the man
+ he would himself have wished to be—one who explained all the facts
+ of life reasonably, considered important only what was rational, and was
+ capable of applying the standard of reason to everything. Everything
+ seemed so simple and clear in Speránski’s exposition that Prince Andrew
+ involuntarily agreed with him about everything. If he replied and argued,
+ it was only because he wished to maintain his independence and not submit
+ to Speránski’s opinions entirely. Everything was right and everything was
+ as it should be: only one thing disconcerted Prince Andrew. This was
+ Speránski’s cold, mirrorlike look, which did not allow one to penetrate to
+ his soul, and his delicate white hands, which Prince Andrew involuntarily
+ watched as one does watch the hands of those who possess power. This
+ mirrorlike gaze and those delicate hands irritated Prince Andrew, he knew
+ not why. He was unpleasantly struck, too, by the excessive contempt for
+ others that he observed in Speránski, and by the diversity of lines of
+ argument he used to support his opinions. He made use of every kind of
+ mental device, except analogy, and passed too boldly, it seemed to Prince
+ Andrew, from one to another. Now he would take up the position of a
+ practical man and condemn dreamers; now that of a satirist, and laugh
+ ironically at his opponents; now grow severely logical, or suddenly rise
+ to the realm of metaphysics. (This last resource was one he very
+ frequently employed.) He would transfer a question to metaphysical
+ heights, pass on to definitions of space, time, and thought, and, having
+ deduced the refutation he needed, would again descend to the level of the
+ original discussion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In general the trait of Speránski’s mentality which struck Prince Andrew
+ most was his absolute and unshakable belief in the power and authority of
+ reason. It was evident that the thought could never occur to him which to
+ Prince Andrew seemed so natural, namely, that it is after all impossible
+ to express all one thinks; and that he had never felt the doubt, “Is not
+ all I think and believe nonsense?” And it was just this peculiarity of
+ Speránski’s mind that particularly attracted Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the first period of their acquaintance Bolkónski felt a passionate
+ admiration for him similar to that which he had once felt for Bonaparte.
+ The fact that Speránski was the son of a village priest, and that stupid
+ people might meanly despise him on account of his humble origin (as in
+ fact many did), caused Prince Andrew to cherish his sentiment for him the
+ more, and unconsciously to strengthen it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On that first evening Bolkónski spent with him, having mentioned the
+ Commission for the Revision of the Code of Laws, Speránski told him
+ sarcastically that the Commission had existed for a hundred and fifty
+ years, had cost millions, and had done nothing except that Rosenkampf had
+ stuck labels on the corresponding paragraphs of the different codes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And that is all the state has for the millions it has spent,” said he.
+ “We want to give the Senate new juridical powers, but we have no laws.
+ That is why it is a sin for men like you, Prince, not to serve in these
+ times!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew said that for that work an education in jurisprudence was
+ needed which he did not possess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But nobody possesses it, so what would you have? It is a vicious circle
+ from which we must break a way out.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A week later Prince Andrew was a member of the Committee on Army
+ Regulations and—what he had not at all expected—was chairman
+ of a section of the committee for the revision of the laws. At Speránski’s
+ request he took the first part of the Civil Code that was being drawn up
+ and, with the aid of the Code Napoléon and the Institutes of Justinian, he
+ worked at formulating the section on Personal Rights.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ Nearly two years before this, in 1808, Pierre on returning to Petersburg
+ after visiting his estates had involuntarily found himself in a leading
+ position among the Petersburg Freemasons. He arranged dining and funeral
+ lodge meetings, enrolled new members, and busied himself uniting various
+ lodges and acquiring authentic charters. He gave money for the erection of
+ temples and supplemented as far as he could the collection of alms, in
+ regard to which the majority of members were stingy and irregular. He
+ supported almost singlehanded a poorhouse the order had founded in
+ Petersburg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His life meanwhile continued as before, with the same infatuations and
+ dissipations. He liked to dine and drink well, and though he considered it
+ immoral and humiliating could not resist the temptations of the bachelor
+ circles in which he moved.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Amid the turmoil of his activities and distractions, however, Pierre at
+ the end of a year began to feel that the more firmly he tried to rest upon
+ it, the more Masonic ground on which he stood gave way under him. At the
+ same time he felt that the deeper the ground sank under him the closer
+ bound he involuntarily became to the order. When he had joined the
+ Freemasons he had experienced the feeling of one who confidently steps
+ onto the smooth surface of a bog. When he put his foot down it sank in. To
+ make quite sure of the firmness of the ground, he put his other foot down
+ and sank deeper still, became stuck in it, and involuntarily waded
+ knee-deep in the bog.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Joseph Alexéevich was not in Petersburg—he had of late stood aside
+ from the affairs of the Petersburg lodges, and lived almost entirely in
+ Moscow. All the members of the lodges were men Pierre knew in ordinary
+ life, and it was difficult for him to regard them merely as Brothers in
+ Freemasonry and not as Prince B. or Iván Vasílevich D., whom he knew in
+ society mostly as weak and insignificant men. Under the Masonic aprons and
+ insignia he saw the uniforms and decorations at which they aimed in
+ ordinary life. Often after collecting alms, and reckoning up twenty to
+ thirty rubles received for the most part in promises from a dozen members,
+ of whom half were as well able to pay as himself, Pierre remembered the
+ Masonic vow in which each Brother promised to devote all his belongings to
+ his neighbor, and doubts on which he tried not to dwell arose in his soul.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He divided the Brothers he knew into four categories. In the first he put
+ those who did not take an active part in the affairs of the lodges or in
+ human affairs, but were exclusively occupied with the mystical science of
+ the order: with questions of the threefold designation of God, the three
+ primordial elements—sulphur, mercury, and salt—or the meaning
+ of the square and all the various figures of the temple of Solomon. Pierre
+ respected this class of Brothers to which the elder ones chiefly belonged,
+ including, Pierre thought, Joseph Alexéevich himself, but he did not share
+ their interests. His heart was not in the mystical aspect of Freemasonry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the second category Pierre reckoned himself and others like him,
+ seeking and vacillating, who had not yet found in Freemasonry a straight
+ and comprehensible path, but hoped to do so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the third category he included those Brothers (the majority) who saw
+ nothing in Freemasonry but the external forms and ceremonies, and prized
+ the strict performance of these forms without troubling about their
+ purport or significance. Such were Willarski and even the Grand Master of
+ the principal lodge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Finally, to the fourth category also a great many Brothers belonged,
+ particularly those who had lately joined. These according to Pierre’s
+ observations were men who had no belief in anything, nor desire for
+ anything, but joined the Freemasons merely to associate with the wealthy
+ young Brothers who were influential through their connections or rank, and
+ of whom there were very many in the lodge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre began to feel dissatisfied with what he was doing. Freemasonry, at
+ any rate as he saw it here, sometimes seemed to him based merely on
+ externals. He did not think of doubting Freemasonry itself, but suspected
+ that Russian Masonry had taken a wrong path and deviated from its original
+ principles. And so toward the end of the year he went abroad to be
+ initiated into the higher secrets of the order.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the summer of 1809 Pierre returned to Petersburg. Our Freemasons knew
+ from correspondence with those abroad that Bezúkhov had obtained the
+ confidence of many highly placed persons, had been initiated into many
+ mysteries, had been raised to a higher grade, and was bringing back with
+ him much that might conduce to the advantage of the Masonic cause in
+ Russia. The Petersburg Freemasons all came to see him, tried to ingratiate
+ themselves with him, and it seemed to them all that he was preparing
+ something for them and concealing it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A solemn meeting of the lodge of the second degree was convened, at which
+ Pierre promised to communicate to the Petersburg Brothers what he had to
+ deliver to them from the highest leaders of their order. The meeting was a
+ full one. After the usual ceremonies Pierre rose and began his address.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear Brothers,” he began, blushing and stammering, with a written speech
+ in his hand, “it is not sufficient to observe our mysteries in the
+ seclusion of our lodge—we must act—act! We are drowsing, but
+ we must act.” Pierre raised his notebook and began to read.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For the dissemination of pure truth and to secure the triumph of virtue,”
+ he read, “we must cleanse men from prejudice, diffuse principles in
+ harmony with the spirit of the times, undertake the education of the
+ young, unite ourselves in indissoluble bonds with the wisest men, boldly
+ yet prudently overcome superstitions, infidelity, and folly, and form of
+ those devoted to us a body linked together by unity of purpose and
+ possessed of authority and power.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To attain this end we must secure a preponderance of virtue over vice and
+ must endeavor to secure that the honest man may, even in this world,
+ receive a lasting reward for his virtue. But in these great endeavors we
+ are gravely hampered by the political institutions of today. What is to be
+ done in these circumstances? To favor revolutions, overthrow everything,
+ repel force by force?... No! We are very far from that. Every violent
+ reform deserves censure, for it quite fails to remedy evil while men
+ remain what they are, and also because wisdom needs no violence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The whole plan of our order should be based on the idea of preparing men
+ of firmness and virtue bound together by unity of conviction—aiming
+ at the punishment of vice and folly, and patronizing talent and virtue:
+ raising worthy men from the dust and attaching them to our Brotherhood.
+ Only then will our order have the power unobtrusively to bind the hands of
+ the protectors of disorder and to control them without their being aware
+ of it. In a word, we must found a form of government holding universal
+ sway, which should be diffused over the whole world without destroying the
+ bonds of citizenship, and beside which all other governments can continue
+ in their customary course and do everything except what impedes the great
+ aim of our order, which is to obtain for virtue the victory over vice.
+ This aim was that of Christianity itself. It taught men to be wise and
+ good and for their own benefit to follow the example and instruction of
+ the best and wisest men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At that time, when everything was plunged in darkness, preaching alone
+ was of course sufficient. The novelty of Truth endowed her with special
+ strength, but now we need much more powerful methods. It is now necessary
+ that man, governed by his senses, should find in virtue a charm palpable
+ to those senses. It is impossible to eradicate the passions; but we must
+ strive to direct them to a noble aim, and it is therefore necessary that
+ everyone should be able to satisfy his passions within the limits of
+ virtue. Our order should provide means to that end.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As soon as we have a certain number of worthy men in every state, each of
+ them again training two others and all being closely united, everything
+ will be possible for our order, which has already in secret accomplished
+ much for the welfare of mankind.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This speech not only made a strong impression, but created excitement in
+ the lodge. The majority of the Brothers, seeing in it dangerous designs of
+ Illuminism, * met it with a coldness that surprised Pierre. The Grand
+ Master began answering him, and Pierre began developing his views with
+ more and more warmth. It was long since there had been so stormy a
+ meeting. Parties were formed, some accusing Pierre of Illuminism, others
+ supporting him. At that meeting he was struck for the first time by the
+ endless variety of men’s minds, which prevents a truth from ever
+ presenting itself identically to two persons. Even those members who
+ seemed to be on his side understood him in their own way with limitations
+ and alterations he could not agree to, as what he always wanted most was
+ to convey his thought to others just as he himself understood it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * The Illuminati sought to substitute republican for
+ monarchical institutions.
+
+
+
+ 
+ At the end of the meeting the Grand Master with irony and ill-will
+ reproved Bezúkhov for his vehemence and said it was not love of virtue
+ alone, but also a love of strife that had moved him in the dispute. Pierre
+ did not answer him and asked briefly whether his proposal would be
+ accepted. He was told that it would not, and without waiting for the usual
+ formalities he left the lodge and went home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ Again Pierre was overtaken by the depression he so dreaded. For three days
+ after the delivery of his speech at the lodge he lay on a sofa at home
+ receiving no one and going nowhere.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was just then that he received a letter from his wife, who implored him
+ to see her, telling him how grieved she was about him and how she wished
+ to devote her whole life to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the end of the letter she informed him that in a few days she would
+ return to Petersburg from abroad.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Following this letter one of the Masonic Brothers whom Pierre respected
+ less than the others forced his way in to see him and, turning the
+ conversation upon Pierre’s matrimonial affairs, by way of fraternal advice
+ expressed the opinion that his severity to his wife was wrong and that he
+ was neglecting one of the first rules of Freemasonry by not forgiving the
+ penitent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the same time his mother-in-law, Prince Vasíli’s wife, sent to him
+ imploring him to come if only for a few minutes to discuss a most
+ important matter. Pierre saw that there was a conspiracy against him and
+ that they wanted to reunite him with his wife, and in the mood he then
+ was, this was not even unpleasant to him. Nothing mattered to him. Nothing
+ in life seemed to him of much importance, and under the influence of the
+ depression that possessed him he valued neither his liberty nor his
+ resolution to punish his wife.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No one is right and no one is to blame; so she too is not to blame,” he
+ thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If he did not at once give his consent to a reunion with his wife, it was
+ only because in his state of depression he did not feel able to take any
+ step. Had his wife come to him, he would not have turned her away.
+ Compared to what preoccupied him, was it not a matter of indifference
+ whether he lived with his wife or not?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Without replying either to his wife or his mother-in-law, Pierre late one
+ night prepared for a journey and started for Moscow to see Joseph
+ Alexéevich. This is what he noted in his diary:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Moscow, 17th November 
+
+
+
+ 
+ I have just returned from my benefactor, and hasten to write down what I
+ have experienced. Joseph Alexéevich is living poorly and has for three
+ years been suffering from a painful disease of the bladder. No one has
+ ever heard him utter a groan or a word of complaint. From morning till
+ late at night, except when he eats his very plain food, he is working at
+ science. He received me graciously and made me sit down on the bed on
+ which he lay. I made the sign of the Knights of the East and of Jerusalem,
+ and he responded in the same manner, asking me with a mild smile what I
+ had learned and gained in the Prussian and Scottish lodges. I told him
+ everything as best I could, and told him what I had proposed to our
+ Petersburg lodge, of the bad reception I had encountered, and of my
+ rupture with the Brothers. Joseph Alexéevich, having remained silent and
+ thoughtful for a good while, told me his view of the matter, which at once
+ lit up for me my whole past and the future path I should follow. He
+ surprised me by asking whether I remembered the threefold aim of the
+ order: (1) The preservation and study of the mystery. (2) The purification
+ and reformation of oneself for its reception, and (3) The improvement of
+ the human race by striving for such purification. Which is the principal
+ aim of these three? Certainly self-reformation and self-purification. Only
+ to this aim can we always strive independently of circumstances. But at
+ the same time just this aim demands the greatest efforts of us; and so,
+ led astray by pride, losing sight of this aim, we occupy ourselves either
+ with the mystery which in our impurity we are unworthy to receive, or seek
+ the reformation of the human race while ourselves setting an example of
+ baseness and profligacy. Illuminism is not a pure doctrine, just because
+ it is attracted by social activity and puffed up by pride. On this ground
+ Joseph Alexéevich condemned my speech and my whole activity, and in the
+ depth of my soul I agreed with him. Talking of my family affairs he said
+ to me, “the chief duty of a true Mason, as I have told you, lies in
+ perfecting himself. We often think that by removing all the difficulties
+ of our life we shall more quickly reach our aim, but on the contrary, my
+ dear sir, it is only in the midst of worldly cares that we can attain our
+ three chief aims: (1) Self-knowledge—for man can only know himself
+ by comparison, (2) Self-perfecting, which can only be attained by
+ conflict, and (3) The attainment of the chief virtue—love of death.
+ Only the vicissitudes of life can show us its vanity and develop our
+ innate love of death or of rebirth to a new life.” These words are all the
+ more remarkable because, in spite of his great physical sufferings, Joseph
+ Alexéevich is never weary of life though he loves death, for which—in
+ spite of the purity and loftiness of his inner man—he does not yet
+ feel himself sufficiently prepared. My benefactor then explained to me
+ fully the meaning of the Great Square of creation and pointed out to me
+ that the numbers three and seven are the basis of everything. He advised
+ me not to avoid intercourse with the Petersburg Brothers, but to take up
+ only second-grade posts in the lodge, to try, while diverting the Brothers
+ from pride, to turn them toward the true path self-knowledge and
+ self-perfecting. Besides this he advised me for myself personally above
+ all to keep a watch over myself, and to that end he gave me a notebook,
+ the one I am now writing in and in which I will in future note down all my
+ actions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Petersburg, 23rd November 
+
+
+
+ 
+ I am again living with my wife. My mother-in-law came to me in tears and
+ said that Hélène was here and that she implored me to hear her; that she
+ was innocent and unhappy at my desertion, and much more. I knew that if I
+ once let myself see her I should not have strength to go on refusing what
+ she wanted. In my perplexity I did not know whose aid and advice to seek.
+ Had my benefactor been here he would have told me what to do. I went to my
+ room and reread Joseph Alexéevich’s letters and recalled my conversations
+ with him, and deduced from it all that I ought not to refuse a supplicant,
+ and ought to reach a helping hand to everyone—especially to one so
+ closely bound to me—and that I must bear my cross. But if I forgive
+ her for the sake of doing right, then let union with her have only a
+ spiritual aim. That is what I decided, and what I wrote to Joseph
+ Alexéevich. I told my wife that I begged her to forget the past, to
+ forgive me whatever wrong I may have done her, and that I had nothing to
+ forgive. It gave me joy to tell her this. She need not know how hard it
+ was for me to see her again. I have settled on the upper floor of this big
+ house and am experiencing a happy feeling of regeneration.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ At that time, as always happens, the highest society that met at court and
+ at the grand balls was divided into several circles, each with its own
+ particular tone. The largest of these was the French circle of the
+ Napoleonic alliance, the circle of Count Rumyántsev and Caulaincourt. In
+ this group Hélène, as soon as she had settled in Petersburg with her
+ husband, took a very prominent place. She was visited by the members of
+ the French embassy and by many belonging to that circle and noted for
+ their intellect and polished manners.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hélène had been at Erfurt during the famous meeting of the Emperors and
+ had brought from there these connections with the Napoleonic notabilities.
+ At Erfurt her success had been brilliant. Napoleon himself had noticed her
+ in the theater and said of her: “C’est un superbe animal.” *
+ Her success as a beautiful and elegant woman did not surprise Pierre, for she had
+ become even handsomer than before. What did surprise him was that during
+ these last two years his wife had succeeded in gaining the reputation “d’
+ une femme charmante, aussi spirituelle que belle.” *(2) The distinguished
+ Prince de Ligne wrote her eight-page letters. Bilíbin saved up his
+ epigrams to produce them in Countess Bezúkhova’s presence. To be received
+ in the Countess Bezúkhova’s salon was regarded as a diploma of intellect.
+ Young men read books before attending Hélène’s evenings, to have something
+ to say in her salon, and secretaries of the embassy, and even ambassadors,
+ confided diplomatic secrets to her, so that in a way Hélène was a power.
+ Pierre, who knew she was very stupid, sometimes attended, with a strange
+ feeling of perplexity and fear, her evenings and dinner parties, where
+ politics, poetry, and philosophy were discussed. At these parties his
+ feelings were like those of a conjuror who always expects his trick to be
+ found out at any moment. But whether because stupidity was just what was
+ needed to run such a salon, or because those who were deceived found
+ pleasure in the deception, at any rate it remained unexposed and Hélène
+ Bezúkhova’s reputation as a lovely and clever woman became so firmly
+ established that she could say the emptiest and stupidest things and
+ everybody would go into raptures over every word of hers and look for a
+ profound meaning in it of which she herself had no conception.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “That’s a superb animal.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * (2) “Of a charming woman, as witty as she is lovely.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was just the husband needed for a brilliant society woman. He was
+ that absent-minded crank, a grand seigneur husband who was in no one’s
+ way, and far from spoiling the high tone and general impression of the
+ drawing room, he served, by the contrast he presented to her, as an
+ advantageous background to his elegant and tactful wife. Pierre during the
+ last two years, as a result of his continual absorption in abstract
+ interests and his sincere contempt for all else, had acquired in his
+ wife’s circle, which did not interest him, that air of unconcern,
+ indifference, and benevolence toward all, which cannot be acquired
+ artificially and therefore inspires involuntary respect. He entered his
+ wife’s drawing room as one enters a theater, was acquainted with
+ everybody, equally pleased to see everyone, and equally indifferent to
+ them all. Sometimes he joined in a conversation which interested him and,
+ regardless of whether any “gentlemen of the embassy” were present or not,
+ lispingly expressed his views, which were sometimes not at all in accord
+ with the accepted tone of the moment. But the general opinion concerning
+ the queer husband of “the most distinguished woman in Petersburg” was so
+ well established that no one took his freaks seriously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Among the many young men who frequented her house every day, Borís
+ Drubetskóy, who had already achieved great success in the service, was the
+ most intimate friend of the Bezúkhov household since Hélène’s return from
+ Erfurt. Hélène spoke of him as “mon page” and treated him like a child.
+ Her smile for him was the same as for everybody, but sometimes that smile
+ made Pierre uncomfortable. Toward him Borís behaved with a particularly
+ dignified and sad deference. This shade of deference also disturbed
+ Pierre. He had suffered so painfully three years before from the
+ mortification to which his wife had subjected him that he now protected
+ himself from the danger of its repetition, first by not being a husband to
+ his wife, and secondly by not allowing himself to suspect.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, now that she has become a bluestocking she has finally renounced her
+ former infatuations,” he told himself. “There has never been an instance
+ of a bluestocking being carried away by affairs of the heart”—a
+ statement which, though gathered from an unknown source, he believed
+ implicitly. Yet strange to say Borís’ presence in his wife’s drawing room
+ (and he was almost always there) had a physical effect upon Pierre; it
+ constricted his limbs and destroyed the unconsciousness and freedom of his
+ movements.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a strange antipathy,” thought Pierre, “yet I used to like him very
+ much.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the eyes of the world Pierre was a great gentleman, the rather blind
+ and absurd husband of a distinguished wife, a clever crank who did nothing
+ but harmed nobody and was a first-rate, good-natured fellow. But a complex
+ and difficult process of internal development was taking place all this
+ time in Pierre’s soul, revealing much to him and causing him many
+ spiritual doubts and joys.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ Pierre went on with his diary, and this is what he wrote in it during that
+ time:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 24th November 
+
+
+
+ 
+ Got up at eight, read the Scriptures, then went to my duties. (By Joseph
+ Alexéevich’s advice Pierre had entered the service of the state and served
+ on one of the committees.) Returned home for dinner and dined alone—the
+ countess had many visitors I do not like. I ate and drank moderately and
+ after dinner copied out some passages for the Brothers. In the evening I
+ went down to the countess and told a funny story about B., and only
+ remembered that I ought not to have done so when everybody laughed loudly
+ at it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I am going to bed with a happy and tranquil mind. Great God, help me to
+ walk in Thy paths, (1) to conquer anger by calmness and deliberation, (2)
+ to vanquish lust by self-restraint and repulsion, (3) to withdraw from
+ worldliness, but not avoid (a) the service of the state, (b) family
+ duties, (c) relations with my friends, and the management of my affairs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 27th November 
+
+
+
+ 
+ I got up late. On waking I lay long in bed yielding to sloth. O God, help
+ and strengthen me that I may walk in Thy ways! Read the Scriptures, but
+ without proper feeling. Brother Urúsov came and we talked about worldly
+ vanities. He told me of the Emperor’s new projects. I began to criticize
+ them, but remembered my rules and my benefactor’s words—that a true
+ Freemason should be a zealous worker for the state when his aid is
+ required and a quiet onlooker when not called on to assist. My tongue is
+ my enemy. Brothers G. V. and O. visited me and we had a preliminary talk
+ about the reception of a new Brother. They laid on me the duty of Rhetor.
+ I feel myself weak and unworthy. Then our talk turned to the
+ interpretation of the seven pillars and steps of the Temple, the seven
+ sciences, the seven virtues, the seven vices, and the seven gifts of the
+ Holy Spirit. Brother O. was very eloquent. In the evening the admission
+ took place. The new decoration of the Premises contributed much to the
+ magnificence of the spectacle. It was Borís Drubetskóy who was admitted. I
+ nominated him and was the Rhetor. A strange feeling agitated me all the
+ time I was alone with him in the dark chamber. I caught myself harboring a
+ feeling of hatred toward him which I vainly tried to overcome. That is why
+ I should really like to save him from evil and lead him into the path of
+ truth, but evil thoughts of him did not leave me. It seemed to me that his
+ object in entering the Brotherhood was merely to be intimate and in favor
+ with members of our lodge. Apart from the fact that he had asked me
+ several times whether N. and S. were members of our lodge (a question to
+ which I could not reply) and that according to my observation he is
+ incapable of feeling respect for our holy order and is too preoccupied and
+ satisfied with the outer man to desire spiritual improvement, I had no
+ cause to doubt him, but he seemed to me insincere, and all the time I
+ stood alone with him in the dark temple it seemed to me that he was
+ smiling contemptuously at my words, and I wished really to stab his bare
+ breast with the sword I held to it. I could not be eloquent, nor could I
+ frankly mention my doubts to the Brothers and to the Grand Master. Great
+ Architect of Nature, help me to find the true path out of the labyrinth of
+ lies!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ After this, three pages were left blank in the diary, and then
+ the following was written:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ I have had a long and instructive talk alone with Brother V., who advised
+ me to hold fast by Brother A. Though I am unworthy, much was revealed to
+ me. Adonai is the name of the creator of the world. Elohim is the name of
+ the ruler of all. The third name is the name unutterable which means the
+ All . Talks with Brother V. strengthen, refresh, and support me in the path
+ of virtue. In his presence doubt has no place. The distinction between the
+ poor teachings of mundane science and our sacred all-embracing teaching is
+ clear to me. Human sciences dissect everything to comprehend it, and kill
+ everything to examine it. In the holy science of our order all is one, all
+ is known in its entirety and life. The Trinity—the three elements of
+ matter—are sulphur, mercury, and salt. Sulphur is of an oily and
+ fiery nature; in combination with salt by its fiery nature it arouses a
+ desire in the latter by means of which it attracts mercury, seizes it,
+ holds it, and in combination produces other bodies. Mercury is a fluid,
+ volatile, spiritual essence. Christ, the Holy Spirit, Him!...
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 3rd December 
+
+
+
+ 
+ Awoke late, read the Scriptures but was apathetic. Afterwards went and
+ paced up and down the large hall. I wished to meditate, but instead my
+ imagination pictured an occurrence of four years ago, when Dólokhov,
+ meeting me in Moscow after our duel, said he hoped I was enjoying perfect
+ peace of mind in spite of my wife’s absence. At the time I gave him no
+ answer. Now I recalled every detail of that meeting and in my mind gave
+ him the most malevolent and bitter replies. I recollected myself and drove
+ away that thought only when I found myself glowing with anger, but I did
+ not sufficiently repent. Afterwards Borís Drubetskóy came and began
+ relating various adventures. His coming vexed me from the first, and I
+ said something disagreeable to him. He replied. I flared up and said much
+ that was unpleasant and even rude to him. He became silent, and I
+ recollected myself only when it was too late. My God, I cannot get on with
+ him at all. The cause of this is my egotism. I set myself above him and so
+ become much worse than he, for he is lenient to my rudeness while I on the
+ contrary nourish contempt for him. O God, grant that in his presence I may
+ rather see my own vileness, and behave so that he too may benefit. After
+ dinner I fell asleep and as I was drowsing off I clearly heard a voice
+ saying in my left ear, “Thy day!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I dreamed that I was walking in the dark and was suddenly surrounded by
+ dogs, but I went on undismayed. Suddenly a smallish dog seized my left
+ thigh with its teeth and would not let go. I began to throttle it with my
+ hands. Scarcely had I torn it off before another, a bigger one, began
+ biting me. I lifted it up, but the higher I lifted it the bigger and
+ heavier it grew. And suddenly Brother A. came and, taking my arm, led me
+ to a building to enter which we had to pass along a narrow plank. I
+ stepped on it, but it bent and gave way and I began to clamber up a fence
+ which I could scarcely reach with my hands. After much effort I dragged
+ myself up, so that my leg hung down on one side and my body on the other.
+ I looked round and saw Brother A. standing on the fence and pointing me to
+ a broad avenue and garden, and in the garden was a large and beautiful
+ building. I woke up. O Lord, great Architect of Nature, help me to tear
+ from myself these dogs—my passions especially the last, which unites
+ in itself the strength of all the former ones, and aid me to enter that
+ temple of virtue to a vision of which I attained in my dream.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 7th December 
+
+
+
+ 
+ I dreamed that Joseph Alexéevich was sitting in my house, and that I was
+ very glad and wished to entertain him. It seemed as if I chattered
+ incessantly with other people and suddenly remembered that this could not
+ please him, and I wished to come close to him and embrace him. But as soon
+ as I drew near I saw that his face had changed and grown young, and he was
+ quietly telling me something about the teaching of our order, but so
+ softly that I could not hear it. Then it seemed that we all left the room
+ and something strange happened. We were sitting or lying on the floor. He
+ was telling me something, and I wished to show him my sensibility, and not
+ listening to what he was saying I began picturing to myself the condition
+ of my inner man and the grace of God sanctifying me. And tears came into
+ my eyes, and I was glad he noticed this. But he looked at me with vexation
+ and jumped up, breaking off his remarks. I felt abashed and asked whether
+ what he had been saying did not concern me; but he did not reply, gave me
+ a kind look, and then we suddenly found ourselves in my bedroom where
+ there is a double bed. He lay down on the edge of it and I burned with
+ longing to caress him and lie down too. And he said, “Tell me frankly what
+ is your chief temptation? Do you know it? I think you know it already.”
+ Abashed by this question, I replied that sloth was my chief temptation. He
+ shook his head incredulously; and even more abashed, I said that though I
+ was living with my wife as he advised, I was not living with her as her
+ husband. To this he replied that one should not deprive a wife of one’s
+ embraces and gave me to understand that that was my duty. But I replied
+ that I should be ashamed to do it, and suddenly everything vanished. And I
+ awoke and found in my mind the text from the Gospel: “The life was the
+ light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness
+ comprehended it not.” Joseph Alexéevich’s face had looked young and
+ bright. That day I received a letter from my benefactor in which he wrote
+ about “conjugal duties.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ 9th December 
+
+
+
+ 
+ I had a dream from which I awoke with a throbbing heart. I saw that I was
+ in Moscow in my house, in the big sitting room, and Joseph Alexéevich came
+ in from the drawing room. I seemed to know at once that the process of
+ regeneration had already taken place in him, and I rushed to meet him. I
+ embraced him and kissed his hands, and he said, “Hast thou noticed that my
+ face is different?” I looked at him, still holding him in my arms, and saw
+ that his face was young, but that he had no hair on his head and his
+ features were quite changed. And I said, “I should have known you had I
+ met you by chance,” and I thought to myself, “Am I telling the truth?” And
+ suddenly I saw him lying like a dead body; then he gradually recovered and
+ went with me into my study carrying a large book of sheets of drawing
+ paper; I said, “I drew that,” and he answered by bowing his head. I opened
+ the book, and on all the pages there were excellent drawings. And in my
+ dream I knew that these drawings represented the love adventures of the
+ soul with its beloved. And on its pages I saw a beautiful representation
+ of a maiden in transparent garments and with a transparent body, flying up
+ to the clouds. And I seemed to know that this maiden was nothing else than
+ a representation of the Song of Songs. And looking at those drawings I
+ dreamed I felt that I was doing wrong, but could not tear myself away from
+ them. Lord, help me! My God, if Thy forsaking me is Thy doing, Thy will be
+ done; but if I am myself the cause, teach me what I should do! I shall
+ perish of my debauchery if Thou utterly desertest me!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ The Rostóvs’ monetary affairs had not improved during the two years they
+ had spent in the country.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though Nicholas Rostóv had kept firmly to his resolution and was still
+ serving modestly in an obscure regiment, spending comparatively little,
+ the way of life at Otrádnoe—Mítenka’s management of affairs, in
+ particular—was such that the debts inevitably increased every year.
+ The only resource obviously presenting itself to the old count was to
+ apply for an official post, so he had come to Petersburg to look for one
+ and also, as he said, to let the lassies enjoy themselves for the last
+ time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon after their arrival in Petersburg Berg proposed to Véra and was
+ accepted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though in Moscow the Rostóvs belonged to the best society without
+ themselves giving it a thought, yet in Petersburg their circle of
+ acquaintances was a mixed and indefinite one. In Petersburg they were
+ provincials, and the very people they had entertained in Moscow without
+ inquiring to what set they belonged, here looked down on them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Rostóvs lived in the same hospitable way in Petersburg as in Moscow,
+ and the most diverse people met at their suppers. Country neighbors from
+ Otrádnoe, impoverished old squires and their daughters, Perónskaya a maid
+ of honor, Pierre Bezúkhov, and the son of their district postmaster who
+ had obtained a post in Petersburg. Among the men who very soon became
+ frequent visitors at the Rostóvs’ house in Petersburg were Borís, Pierre
+ whom the count had met in the street and dragged home with him, and Berg
+ who spent whole days at the Rostóvs’ and paid the eldest daughter,
+ Countess Véra, the attentions a young man pays when he intends to propose.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not in vain had Berg shown everybody his right hand wounded at Austerlitz
+ and held a perfectly unnecessary sword in his left. He narrated that
+ episode so persistently and with so important an air that everyone
+ believed in the merit and usefulness of his deed, and he had obtained two
+ decorations for Austerlitz.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the Finnish war he also managed to distinguish himself. He had picked
+ up the scrap of a grenade that had killed an aide-de-camp standing near
+ the commander in chief and had taken it to his commander. Just as he had
+ done after Austerlitz, he related this occurrence at such length and so
+ insistently that everyone again believed it had been necessary to do this,
+ and he received two decorations for the Finnish war also. In 1809 he was a
+ captain in the Guards, wore medals, and held some special lucrative posts
+ in Petersburg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though some skeptics smiled when told of Berg’s merits, it could not be
+ denied that he was a painstaking and brave officer, on excellent terms
+ with his superiors, and a moral young man with a brilliant career before
+ him and an assured position in society.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Four years before, meeting a German comrade in the stalls of a Moscow
+ theater, Berg had pointed out Véra Rostóva to him and had said in German,
+ “das soll mein Weib werden,” * and from that moment had made up his mind
+ to marry her. Now in Petersburg, having considered the Rostóvs’ position
+ and his own, he decided that the time had come to propose.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “That girl shall be my wife.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Berg’s proposal was at first received with a perplexity that was not
+ flattering to him. At first it seemed strange that the son of an obscure
+ Livonian gentleman should propose marriage to a Countess Rostóva; but
+ Berg’s chief characteristic was such a naïve and good natured egotism that
+ the Rostóvs involuntarily came to think it would be a good thing, since he
+ himself was so firmly convinced that it was good, indeed excellent.
+ Moreover, the Rostóvs’ affairs were seriously embarrassed, as the suitor
+ could not but know; and above all, Véra was twenty-four, had been taken
+ out everywhere, and though she was certainly good-looking and sensible, no
+ one up to now had proposed to her. So they gave their consent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see,” said Berg to his comrade, whom he called “friend” only because
+ he knew that everyone has friends, “you see, I have considered it all, and
+ should not marry if I had not thought it all out or if it were in any way
+ unsuitable. But on the contrary, my papa and mamma are now provided for—I
+ have arranged that rent for them in the Baltic Provinces—and I can
+ live in Petersburg on my pay, and with her fortune and my good management
+ we can get along nicely. I am not marrying for money—I consider that
+ dishonorable—but a wife should bring her share and a husband his. I
+ have my position in the service, she has connections and some means. In
+ our times that is worth something, isn’t it? But above all, she is a
+ handsome, estimable girl, and she loves me....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Berg blushed and smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I love her, because her character is sensible and very good. Now the
+ other sister, though they are the same family, is quite different—an
+ unpleasant character and has not the same intelligence. She is so... you
+ know?... Unpleasant... But my fiancée!... Well, you will be coming,” he
+ was going to say, “to dine,” but changed his mind and said “to take tea
+ with us,” and quickly doubling up his tongue he blew a small round ring of
+ tobacco smoke, perfectly embodying his dream of happiness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the first feeling of perplexity aroused in the parents by Berg’s
+ proposal, the holiday tone of joyousness usual at such times took
+ possession of the family, but the rejoicing was external and insincere. In
+ the family’s feeling toward this wedding a certain awkwardness and
+ constraint was evident, as if they were ashamed of not having loved Véra
+ sufficiently and of being so ready to get her off their hands. The old
+ count felt this most. He would probably have been unable to state the
+ cause of his embarrassment, but it resulted from the state of his affairs.
+ He did not know at all how much he had, what his debts amounted to, or
+ what dowry he could give Véra. When his daughters were born he had
+ assigned to each of them, for her dowry, an estate with three hundred
+ serfs; but one of these estates had already been sold, and the other was
+ mortgaged and the interest so much in arrears that it would have to be
+ sold, so that it was impossible to give it to Véra. Nor had he any money.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Berg had already been engaged a month, and only a week remained before the
+ wedding, but the count had not yet decided in his own mind the question of
+ the dowry, nor spoken to his wife about it. At one time the count thought
+ of giving her the Ryazán estate or of selling a forest, at another time of
+ borrowing money on a note of hand. A few days before the wedding Berg
+ entered the count’s study early one morning and, with a pleasant smile,
+ respectfully asked his future father-in-law to let him know what Véra’s
+ dowry would be. The count was so disconcerted by this long-foreseen
+ inquiry that without consideration he gave the first reply that came into
+ his head. “I like your being businesslike about it.... I like it. You
+ shall be satisfied....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And patting Berg on the shoulder he got up, wishing to end the
+ conversation. But Berg, smiling pleasantly, explained that if he did not
+ know for certain how much Véra would have and did not receive at least
+ part of the dowry in advance, he would have to break matters off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Because, consider, Count—if I allowed myself to marry now without
+ having definite means to maintain my wife, I should be acting badly....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The conversation ended by the count, who wished to be generous and to
+ avoid further importunity, saying that he would give a note of hand for
+ eighty thousand rubles. Berg smiled meekly, kissed the count on the
+ shoulder, and said that he was very grateful, but that it was impossible
+ for him to arrange his new life without receiving thirty thousand in ready
+ money. “Or at least twenty thousand, Count,” he added, “and then a note of
+ hand for only sixty thousand.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, all right!” said the count hurriedly. “Only excuse me, my dear
+ fellow, I’ll give you twenty thousand and a note of hand for eighty
+ thousand as well. Yes, yes! Kiss me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ Natásha was sixteen and it was the year 1809, the very year to which she
+ had counted on her fingers with Borís after they had kissed four years
+ ago. Since then she had not seen him. Before Sónya and her mother, if
+ Borís happened to be mentioned, she spoke quite freely of that episode as
+ of some childish, long-forgotten matter that was not worth mentioning. But
+ in the secret depths of her soul the question whether her engagement to
+ Borís was a jest or an important, binding promise tormented her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Since Borís left Moscow in 1805 to join the army he had not seen the
+ Rostóvs. He had been in Moscow several times, and had passed near
+ Otrádnoe, but had never been to see them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sometimes it occurred to Natásha that he did not wish to see her, and this
+ conjecture was confirmed by the sad tone in which her elders spoke of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nowadays old friends are not remembered,” the countess would say when
+ Borís was mentioned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Mikháylovna also had of late visited them less frequently, seemed to
+ hold herself with particular dignity, and always spoke rapturously and
+ gratefully of the merits of her son and the brilliant career on which he
+ had entered. When the Rostóvs came to Petersburg Borís called on them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He drove to their house in some agitation. The memory of Natásha was his
+ most poetic recollection. But he went with the firm intention of letting
+ her and her parents feel that the childish relations between himself and
+ Natásha could not be binding either on her or on him. He had a brilliant
+ position in society thanks to his intimacy with Countess Bezúkhova, a
+ brilliant position in the service thanks to the patronage of an important
+ personage whose complete confidence he enjoyed, and he was beginning to
+ make plans for marrying one of the richest heiresses in Petersburg, plans
+ which might very easily be realized. When he entered the Rostóvs’ drawing
+ room Natásha was in her own room. When she heard of his arrival she almost
+ ran into the drawing room, flushed and beaming with a more than cordial
+ smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís remembered Natásha in a short dress, with dark eyes shining from
+ under her curls and boisterous, childish laughter, as he had known her
+ four years before; and so he was taken aback when quite a different
+ Natásha entered, and his face expressed rapturous astonishment. This
+ expression on his face pleased Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, do you recognize your little madcap playmate?” asked the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís kissed Natásha’s hand and said that he was astonished at the change
+ in her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How handsome you have grown!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I should think so!” replied Natásha’s laughing eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And is Papa older?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha sat down and, without joining in Borís’ conversation with the
+ countess, silently and minutely studied her childhood’s suitor. He felt
+ the weight of that resolute and affectionate scrutiny and glanced at her
+ occasionally.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís’ uniform, spurs, tie, and the way his hair was brushed were all
+ comme il faut and in the latest fashion. This Natásha noticed at once. He
+ sat rather sideways in the armchair next to the countess, arranging with
+ his right hand the cleanest of gloves that fitted his left hand like a
+ skin, and he spoke with a particularly refined compression of his lips
+ about the amusements of the highest Petersburg society, recalling with
+ mild irony old times in Moscow and Moscow acquaintances. It was not
+ accidentally, Natásha felt, that he alluded, when speaking of the highest
+ aristocracy, to an ambassador’s ball he had attended, and to invitations
+ he had received from N.N. and S.S.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All this time Natásha sat silent, glancing up at him from under her brows.
+ This gaze disturbed and confused Borís more and more. He looked round more
+ frequently toward her, and broke off in what he was saying. He did not
+ stay more than ten minutes, then rose and took his leave. The same
+ inquisitive, challenging, and rather mocking eyes still looked at him.
+ After his first visit Borís said to himself that Natásha attracted him
+ just as much as ever, but that he must not yield to that feeling, because
+ to marry her, a girl almost without fortune, would mean ruin to his
+ career, while to renew their former relations without intending to marry
+ her would be dishonorable. Borís made up his mind to avoid meeting
+ Natásha, but despite that resolution he called again a few days later and
+ began calling often and spending whole days at the Rostóvs’. It seemed to
+ him that he ought to have an explanation with Natásha and tell her that
+ the old times must be forgotten, that in spite of everything... she could
+ not be his wife, that he had no means, and they would never let her marry
+ him. But he failed to do so and felt awkward about entering on such an
+ explanation. From day to day he became more and more entangled. It seemed
+ to her mother and Sónya that Natásha was in love with Borís as of old. She
+ sang him his favorite songs, showed him her album, making him write in it,
+ did not allow him to allude to the past, letting it be understood how
+ delightful was the present; and every day he went away in a fog, without
+ having said what he meant to, and not knowing what he was doing or why he
+ came, or how it would all end. He left off visiting Hélène and received
+ reproachful notes from her every day, and yet he continued to spend whole
+ days with the Rostóvs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ One night when the old countess, in nightcap and dressing jacket, without
+ her false curls, and with her poor little knob of hair showing under her
+ white cotton cap, knelt sighing and groaning on a rug and bowing to the
+ ground in prayer, her door creaked and Natásha, also in a dressing jacket
+ with slippers on her bare feet and her hair in curlpapers, ran in. The
+ countess—her prayerful mood dispelled—looked round and
+ frowned. She was finishing her last prayer: “Can it be that this couch
+ will be my grave?” Natásha, flushed and eager, seeing her mother in
+ prayer, suddenly checked her rush, half sat down, and unconsciously put
+ out her tongue as if chiding herself. Seeing that her mother was still
+ praying she ran on tiptoe to the bed and, rapidly slipping one little foot
+ against the other, pushed off her slippers and jumped onto the bed the
+ countess had feared might become her grave. This couch was high, with a
+ feather bed and five pillows each smaller than the one below. Natásha
+ jumped on it, sank into the feather bed, rolled over to the wall, and
+ began snuggling up the bedclothes as she settled down, raising her knees
+ to her chin, kicking out and laughing almost inaudibly, now covering
+ herself up head and all, and now peeping at her mother. The countess
+ finished her prayers and came to the bed with a stern face, but seeing
+ that Natásha’s head was covered, she smiled in her kind, weak way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then, now then!” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma, can we have a talk? Yes?” said Natásha. “Now, just one on your
+ throat and another... that’ll do!” And seizing her mother round the neck,
+ she kissed her on the throat. In her behavior to her mother Natásha seemed
+ rough, but she was so sensitive and tactful that however she clasped her
+ mother she always managed to do it without hurting her or making her feel
+ uncomfortable or displeased.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what is it tonight?” said the mother, having arranged her pillows
+ and waited until Natásha, after turning over a couple of times, had
+ settled down beside her under the quilt, spread out her arms, and assumed
+ a serious expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These visits of Natásha’s at night before the count returned from his club
+ were one of the greatest pleasures of both mother, and daughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it tonight?—But I have to tell you...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha put her hand on her mother’s mouth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “About Borís... I know,” she said seriously; “that’s what I have come
+ about. Don’t say it—I know. No, do tell me!” and she removed her
+ hand. “Tell me, Mamma! He’s nice?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha, you are sixteen. At your age I was married. You say Borís is
+ nice. He is very nice, and I love him like a son. But what then?... What
+ are you thinking about? You have quite turned his head, I can see
+ that....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As she said this the countess looked round at her daughter. Natásha was
+ lying looking steadily straight before her at one of the mahogany sphinxes
+ carved on the corners of the bedstead, so that the countess only saw her
+ daughter’s face in profile. That face struck her by its peculiarly serious
+ and concentrated expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha was listening and considering.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what then?” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You have quite turned his head, and why? What do you want of him? You
+ know you can’t marry him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why not?” said Natásha, without changing her position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Because he is young, because he is poor, because he is a relation... and
+ because you yourself don’t love him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How do you know?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know. It is not right, darling!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But if I want to...” said Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Leave off talking nonsense,” said the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But if I want to...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha, I am in earnest...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha did not let her finish. She drew the countess’ large hand to her,
+ kissed it on the back and then on the palm, then again turned it over and
+ began kissing first one knuckle, then the space between the knuckles, then
+ the next knuckle, whispering, “January, February, March, April, May.
+ Speak, Mamma, why don’t you say anything? Speak!” said she, turning to her
+ mother, who was tenderly gazing at her daughter and in that contemplation
+ seemed to have forgotten all she had wished to say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It won’t do, my love! Not everyone will understand this friendship dating
+ from your childish days, and to see him so intimate with you may injure
+ you in the eyes of other young men who visit us, and above all it torments
+ him for nothing. He may already have found a suitable and wealthy match,
+ and now he’s half crazy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Crazy?” repeated Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll tell you some things about myself. I had a cousin...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know! Cyril Matvéich... but he is old.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He was not always old. But this is what I’ll do, Natásha, I’ll have a
+ talk with Borís. He need not come so often....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why not, if he likes to?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Because I know it will end in nothing....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How can you know? No, Mamma, don’t speak to him! What nonsense!” said
+ Natásha in the tone of one being deprived of her property. “Well, I won’t
+ marry, but let him come if he enjoys it and I enjoy it.” Natásha smiled
+ and looked at her mother. “Not to marry, but just so,” she added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How so , my pet?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just so . There’s no need for me to marry him. But...
+ just so .”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just so, just so,” repeated the countess, and shaking all over, she went
+ off into a good humored, unexpected, elderly laugh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t laugh, stop!” cried Natásha. “You’re shaking the whole bed! You’re
+ awfully like me, just such another giggler.... Wait...” and she seized the
+ countess’ hands and kissed a knuckle of the little finger, saying, “June,”
+ and continued, kissing, “July, August,” on the other hand. “But, Mamma, is
+ he very much in love? What do you think? Was anybody ever so much in love
+ with you? And he’s very nice, very, very nice. Only not quite my taste—he
+ is so narrow, like the dining-room clock.... Don’t you understand? Narrow,
+ you know—gray, light gray...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What rubbish you’re talking!” said the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha continued: “Don’t you really understand? Nicholas would
+ understand.... Bezúkhov, now, is blue, dark-blue and red, and he is
+ square.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You flirt with him too,” said the countess, laughing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, he is a Freemason, I have found out. He is fine, dark-blue and
+ red.... How can I explain it to you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Little countess!” the count’s voice called from behind the door. “You’re
+ not asleep?” Natásha jumped up, snatched up her slippers, and ran barefoot
+ to her own room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a long time before she could sleep. She kept thinking that no one
+ could understand all that she understood and all there was in her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya?” she thought, glancing at that curled-up, sleeping little kitten
+ with her enormous plait of hair. “No, how could she? She’s virtuous. She
+ fell in love with Nicholas and does not wish to know anything more. Even
+ Mamma does not understand. It is wonderful how clever I am and how...
+ charming she is,” she went on, speaking of herself in the third person,
+ and imagining it was some very wise man—the wisest and best of men—who
+ was saying it of her. “There is everything, everything in her,” continued
+ this man. “She is unusually intelligent, charming... and then she is 
+ pretty, uncommonly pretty, and agile—she swims and rides
+ splendidly... and her voice! One can really say it’s a wonderful voice!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She hummed a scrap from her favorite opera by Cherubini, threw herself on
+ her bed, laughed at the pleasant thought that she would immediately fall
+ asleep, called Dunyásha the maid to put out the candle, and before
+ Dunyásha had left the room had already passed into yet another happier
+ world of dreams, where everything was as light and beautiful as in
+ reality, and even more so because it was different.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day the countess called Borís aside and had a talk with him, after
+ which he ceased coming to the Rostóvs’.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV
+ 
+ 
+ On the thirty-first of December, New Year’s Eve, 1809 - 10 an old grandee
+ of Catherine’s day was giving a ball and midnight supper. The diplomatic
+ corps and the Emperor himself were to be present.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The grandee’s well-known mansion on the English Quay glittered with
+ innumerable lights. Police were stationed at the brightly lit entrance
+ which was carpeted with red baize, and not only gendarmes but dozens of
+ police officers and even the police master himself stood at the porch.
+ Carriages kept driving away and fresh ones arriving, with red-liveried
+ footmen and footmen in plumed hats. From the carriages emerged men wearing
+ uniforms, stars, and ribbons, while ladies in satin and ermine cautiously
+ descended the carriage steps which were let down for them with a clatter,
+ and then walked hurriedly and noiselessly over the baize at the entrance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Almost every time a new carriage drove up a whisper ran through the crowd
+ and caps were doffed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Emperor?... No, a minister... prince... ambassador. Don’t you see
+ the plumes?...” was whispered among the crowd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One person, better dressed than the rest, seemed to know everyone and
+ mentioned by name the greatest dignitaries of the day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A third of the visitors had already arrived, but the Rostóvs, who were to
+ be present, were still hurrying to get dressed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There had been many discussions and preparations for this ball in the
+ Rostóv family, many fears that the invitation would not arrive, that the
+ dresses would not be ready, or that something would not be arranged as it
+ should be.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Márya Ignátevna Perónskaya, a thin and shallow maid of honor at the court
+ of the Dowager Empress, who was a friend and relation of the countess and
+ piloted the provincial Rostóvs in Petersburg high society, was to
+ accompany them to the ball.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They were to call for her at her house in the Taurida Gardens at ten
+ o’clock, but it was already five minutes to ten, and the girls were not
+ yet dressed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha was going to her first grand ball. She had got up at eight that
+ morning and had been in a fever of excitement and activity all day. All
+ her powers since morning had been concentrated on ensuring that they all—she
+ herself, Mamma, and Sónya—should be as well dressed as possible.
+ Sónya and her mother put themselves entirely in her hands. The countess
+ was to wear a claret-colored velvet dress, and the two girls white gauze
+ over pink silk slips, with roses on their bodices and their hair dressed à
+ la grecque. 
+
+
+
+ 
+ Everything essential had already been done; feet, hands, necks, and ears
+ washed, perfumed, and powdered, as befits a ball; the openwork silk
+ stockings and white satin shoes with ribbons were already on; the
+ hairdressing was almost done. Sónya was finishing dressing and so was the
+ countess, but Natásha, who had bustled about helping them all, was
+ behindhand. She was still sitting before a looking-glass with a dressing
+ jacket thrown over her slender shoulders. Sónya stood ready dressed in the
+ middle of the room and, pressing the head of a pin till it hurt her dainty
+ finger, was fixing on a last ribbon that squeaked as the pin went through
+ it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s not the way, that’s not the way, Sónya!” cried Natásha turning her
+ head and clutching with both hands at her hair which the maid who was
+ dressing it had not time to release. “That bow is not right. Come here!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya sat down and Natásha pinned the ribbon on differently.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Allow me, Miss! I can’t do it like that,” said the maid who was holding
+ Natásha’s hair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, dear! Well then, wait. That’s right, Sónya.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aren’t you ready? It is nearly ten,” came the countess’ voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Directly! Directly! And you, Mamma?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have only my cap to pin on.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t do it without me!” called Natásha. “You won’t do it right.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But it’s already ten.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They had decided to be at the ball by half-past ten, and Natásha had still
+ to get dressed and they had to call at the Taurida Gardens.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When her hair was done, Natásha, in her short petticoat from under which
+ her dancing shoes showed, and in her mother’s dressing jacket, ran up to
+ Sónya, scrutinized her, and then ran to her mother. Turning her mother’s
+ head this way and that, she fastened on the cap and, hurriedly kissing her
+ gray hair, ran back to the maids who were turning up the hem of her skirt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The cause of the delay was Natásha’s skirt, which was too long. Two maids
+ were turning up the hem and hurriedly biting off the ends of thread. A
+ third with pins in her mouth was running about between the countess and
+ Sónya, and a fourth held the whole of the gossamer garment up high on one
+ uplifted hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mávra, quicker, darling!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Give me my thimble, Miss, from there...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Whenever will you be ready?” asked the count coming to the door. “Here is
+ some scent. Perónskaya must be tired of waiting.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s ready, Miss,” said the maid, holding up the shortened gauze dress
+ with two fingers, and blowing and shaking something off it, as if by this
+ to express a consciousness of the airiness and purity of what she held.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha began putting on the dress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In a minute! In a minute! Don’t come in, Papa!” she cried to her father
+ as he opened the door—speaking from under the filmy skirt which
+ still covered her whole face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya slammed the door to. A minute later they let the count in. He was
+ wearing a blue swallow-tail coat, shoes and stockings, and was perfumed
+ and his hair pomaded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, Papa! how nice you look! Charming!” cried Natásha, as she stood in
+ the middle of the room smoothing out the folds of the gauze.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you please, Miss! allow me,” said the maid, who on her knees was
+ pulling the skirt straight and shifting the pins from one side of her
+ mouth to the other with her tongue.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Say what you like,” exclaimed Sónya, in a despairing voice as she looked
+ at Natásha, “say what you like, it’s still too long.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha stepped back to look at herself in the pier glass. The dress was 
+ too long.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Really, madam, it is not at all too long,” said Mávra, crawling on her
+ knees after her young lady.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, if it’s too long we’ll tack it up... we’ll tack it up in one
+ minute,” said the resolute Dunyásha taking a needle that was stuck on the
+ front of her little shawl and, still kneeling on the floor, set to work
+ once more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment, with soft steps, the countess came in shyly, in her cap
+ and velvet gown.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oo-oo, my beauty!” exclaimed the count, “she looks better than any of
+ you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He would have embraced her but, blushing, she stepped aside fearing to be
+ rumpled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma, your cap, more to this side,” said Natásha. “I’ll arrange it,” and
+ she rushed forward so that the maids who were tacking up her skirt could
+ not move fast enough and a piece of gauze was torn off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh goodness! What has happened? Really it was not my fault!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Never mind, I’ll run it up, it won’t show,” said Dunyásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a beauty—a very queen!” said the nurse as she came to the
+ door. “And Sónya! They are lovely!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At a quarter past ten they at last got into their carriages and started.
+ But they had still to call at the Taurida Gardens.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Perónskaya was quite ready. In spite of her age and plainness she had gone
+ through the same process as the Rostóvs, but with less flurry—for to
+ her it was a matter of routine. Her ugly old body was washed, perfumed,
+ and powdered in just the same way. She had washed behind her ears just as
+ carefully, and when she entered her drawing room in her yellow dress,
+ wearing her badge as maid of honor, her old lady’s maid was as full of
+ rapturous admiration as the Rostóvs’ servants had been.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She praised the Rostóvs’ toilets. They praised her taste and toilet, and
+ at eleven o’clock, careful of their coiffures and dresses, they settled
+ themselves in their carriages and drove off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV
+ 
+ 
+ Natásha had not had a moment free since early morning and had not once had
+ time to think of what lay before her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the damp chill air and crowded closeness of the swaying carriage, she
+ for the first time vividly imagined what was in store for her there at the
+ ball, in those brightly lighted rooms—with music, flowers, dances,
+ the Emperor, and all the brilliant young people of Petersburg. The
+ prospect was so splendid that she hardly believed it would come true, so
+ out of keeping was it with the chill darkness and closeness of the
+ carriage. She understood all that awaited her only when, after stepping
+ over the red baize at the entrance, she entered the hall, took off her fur
+ cloak, and, beside Sónya and in front of her mother, mounted the brightly
+ illuminated stairs between the flowers. Only then did she remember how she
+ must behave at a ball, and tried to assume the majestic air she considered
+ indispensable for a girl on such an occasion. But, fortunately for her,
+ she felt her eyes growing misty, she saw nothing clearly, her pulse beat a
+ hundred to the minute, and the blood throbbed at her heart. She could not
+ assume that pose, which would have made her ridiculous, and she moved on
+ almost fainting from excitement and trying with all her might to conceal
+ it. And this was the very attitude that became her best. Before and behind
+ them other visitors were entering, also talking in low tones and wearing
+ ball dresses. The mirrors on the landing reflected ladies in white,
+ pale-blue, and pink dresses, with diamonds and pearls on their bare necks
+ and arms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha looked in the mirrors and could not distinguish her reflection
+ from the others. All was blended into one brilliant procession. On
+ entering the ballroom the regular hum of voices, footsteps, and greetings
+ deafened Natásha, and the light and glitter dazzled her still more. The
+ host and hostess, who had already been standing at the door for half an
+ hour repeating the same words to the various arrivals, “Charmé de vous
+ voir,” * greeted the Rostóvs and Perónskaya in the same manner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Delighted to see you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The two girls in their white dresses, each with a rose in her black hair,
+ both curtsied in the same way, but the hostess’ eye involuntarily rested
+ longer on the slim Natásha. She looked at her and gave her alone a special
+ smile in addition to her usual smile as hostess. Looking at her she may
+ have recalled the golden, irrecoverable days of her own girlhood and her
+ own first ball. The host also followed Natásha with his eyes and asked the
+ count which was his daughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Charming!” said he, kissing the tips of his fingers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the ballroom guests stood crowding at the entrance doors awaiting the
+ Emperor. The countess took up a position in one of the front rows of that
+ crowd. Natásha heard and felt that several people were asking about her
+ and looking at her. She realized that those noticing her liked her, and
+ this observation helped to calm her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There are some like ourselves and some worse,” she thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Perónskaya was pointing out to the countess the most important people at
+ the ball.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is the Dutch ambassador, do you see? That gray-haired man,” she
+ said, indicating an old man with a profusion of silver-gray curly hair,
+ who was surrounded by ladies laughing at something he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, here she is, the Queen of Petersburg, Countess Bezúkhova,” said
+ Perónskaya, indicating Hélène who had just entered. “How lovely! She is
+ quite equal to Márya Antónovna. See how the men, young and old, pay court
+ to her. Beautiful and clever... they say Prince —— is quite mad about
+ her. But see, those two, though not good-looking, are even more run
+ after.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She pointed to a lady who was crossing the room followed by a very plain
+ daughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She is a splendid match, a millionairess,” said Perónskaya. “And look,
+ here come her suitors.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is Bezúkhova’s brother, Anatole Kurágin,” she said, indicating a
+ handsome officer of the Horse Guards who passed by them with head erect,
+ looking at something over the heads of the ladies. “He’s handsome, isn’t
+ he? I hear they will marry him to that rich girl. But your cousin,
+ Drubetskóy, is also very attentive to her. They say she has millions. Oh
+ yes, that’s the French ambassador himself!” she replied to the countess’
+ inquiry about Caulaincourt. “Looks as if he were a king! All the same, the
+ French are charming, very charming. No one more charming in society. Ah,
+ here she is! Yes, she is still the most beautiful of them all, our Márya
+ Antónovna! And how simply she is dressed! Lovely! And that stout one in
+ spectacles is the universal Freemason,” she went on, indicating Pierre.
+ “Put him beside his wife and he looks a regular buffoon!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre, swaying his stout body, advanced, making way through the crowd and
+ nodding to right and left as casually and good-naturedly as if he were
+ passing through a crowd at a fair. He pushed through, evidently looking
+ for someone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha looked joyfully at the familiar face of Pierre, “the buffoon,” as
+ Perónskaya had called him, and knew he was looking for them, and for her
+ in particular. He had promised to be at the ball and introduce partners to
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But before he reached them Pierre stopped beside a very handsome, dark man
+ of middle height, and in a white uniform, who stood by a window talking to
+ a tall man wearing stars and a ribbon. Natásha at once recognized the
+ shorter and younger man in the white uniform: it was Bolkónski, who seemed
+ to her to have grown much younger, happier, and better-looking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There’s someone else we know—Bolkónski, do you see, Mamma?” said
+ Natásha, pointing out Prince Andrew. “You remember, he stayed a night with
+ us at Otrádnoe.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, you know him?” said Perónskaya. “I can’t bear him.
+ Il fait à présent la pluie et le beau temps. * He’s too proud for
+ anything. Takes after his father. And he’s hand in glove with Speránski,
+ writing some project or other. Just look how he treats the ladies! There’s
+ one talking to him and he has turned away,” she said, pointing at him.
+ “I’d give it to him if he treated me as he does those ladies.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “He is all the rage just now.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI
+ 
+ 
+ Suddenly everybody stirred, began talking, and pressed forward and then
+ back, and between the two rows, which separated, the Emperor entered to
+ the sounds of music that had immediately struck up. Behind him walked his
+ host and hostess. He walked in rapidly, bowing to right and left as if
+ anxious to get the first moments of the reception over. The band played
+ the polonaise in vogue at that time on account of the words that had been
+ set to it, beginning: “Alexander, Elisaveta, all our hearts you ravish
+ quite...” The Emperor passed on to the drawing room, the crowd made a rush
+ for the doors, and several persons with excited faces hurried there and
+ back again. Then the crowd hastily retired from the drawing room door, at
+ which the Emperor reappeared talking to the hostess. A young man, looking
+ distraught, pounced down on the ladies, asking them to move aside. Some
+ ladies, with faces betraying complete forgetfulness of all the rules of
+ decorum, pushed forward to the detriment of their toilets. The men began
+ to choose partners and take their places for the polonaise.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Everyone moved back, and the Emperor came smiling out of the drawing room
+ leading his hostess by the hand but not keeping time to the music. The
+ host followed with Márya Antónovna Narýshkina; then came ambassadors,
+ ministers, and various generals, whom Perónskaya diligently named. More
+ than half the ladies already had partners and were taking up, or preparing
+ to take up, their positions for the polonaise. Natásha felt that she would
+ be left with her mother and Sónya among a minority of women who crowded
+ near the wall, not having been invited to dance. She stood with her
+ slender arms hanging down, her scarcely defined bosom rising and falling
+ regularly, and with bated breath and glittering, frightened eyes gazed
+ straight before her, evidently prepared for the height of joy or misery.
+ She was not concerned about the Emperor or any of those great people whom
+ Perónskaya was pointing out—she had but one thought: “Is it possible
+ no one will ask me, that I shall not be among the first to dance? Is it
+ possible that not one of all these men will notice me? They do not even
+ seem to see me, or if they do they look as if they were saying, ‘Ah, she’s
+ not the one I’m after, so it’s not worth looking at her!’ No, it’s
+ impossible,” she thought. “They must know how I long to dance, how
+ splendidly I dance, and how they would enjoy dancing with me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The strains of the polonaise, which had continued for a considerable time,
+ had begun to sound like a sad reminiscence to Natásha’s ears. She wanted
+ to cry. Perónskaya had left them. The count was at the other end of the
+ room. She and the countess and Sónya were standing by themselves as in the
+ depths of a forest amid that crowd of strangers, with no one interested in
+ them and not wanted by anyone. Prince Andrew with a lady passed by,
+ evidently not recognizing them. The handsome Anatole was smilingly talking
+ to a partner on his arm and looked at Natásha as one looks at a wall.
+ Borís passed them twice and each time turned away. Berg and his wife, who
+ were not dancing, came up to them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This family gathering seemed humiliating to Natásha—as if there were
+ nowhere else for the family to talk but here at the ball. She did not
+ listen to or look at Véra, who was telling her something about her own
+ green dress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At last the Emperor stopped beside his last partner (he had danced with
+ three) and the music ceased. A worried aide-de-camp ran up to the Rostóvs
+ requesting them to stand farther back, though as it was they were already
+ close to the wall, and from the gallery resounded the distinct, precise,
+ enticingly rhythmical strains of a waltz. The Emperor looked smilingly
+ down the room. A minute passed but no one had yet begun dancing. An
+ aide-de-camp, the Master of Ceremonies, went up to Countess Bezúkhova and
+ asked her to dance. She smilingly raised her hand and laid it on his
+ shoulder without looking at him. The aide-de-camp, an adept in his art,
+ grasping his partner firmly round her waist, with confident deliberation
+ started smoothly, gliding first round the edge of the circle, then at the
+ corner of the room he caught Hélène’s left hand and turned her, the only
+ sound audible, apart from the ever-quickening music, being the rhythmic
+ click of the spurs on his rapid, agile feet, while at every third beat his
+ partner’s velvet dress spread out and seemed to flash as she whirled
+ round. Natásha gazed at them and was ready to cry because it was not she
+ who was dancing that first turn of the waltz.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew, in the white uniform of a cavalry colonel, wearing
+ stockings and dancing shoes, stood looking animated and bright in the
+ front row of the circle not far from the Rostóvs. Baron Firhoff was
+ talking to him about the first sitting of the Council of State to be held
+ next day. Prince Andrew, as one closely connected with Speránski and
+ participating in the work of the legislative commission, could give
+ reliable information about that sitting, concerning which various rumors
+ were current. But not listening to what Firhoff was saying, he was gazing
+ now at the sovereign and now at the men intending to dance who had not yet
+ gathered courage to enter the circle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew was watching these men abashed by the Emperor’s presence,
+ and the women who were breathlessly longing to be asked to dance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre came up to him and caught him by the arm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You always dance. I have a protégée, the young Rostóva, here. Ask her,”
+ he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where is she?” asked Bolkónski. “Excuse me!” he added, turning to the
+ baron, “we will finish this conversation elsewhere—at a ball one
+ must dance.” He stepped forward in the direction Pierre indicated. The
+ despairing, dejected expression of Natásha’s face caught his eye. He
+ recognized her, guessed her feelings, saw that it was her début,
+ remembered her conversation at the window, and with an expression of
+ pleasure on his face approached Countess Rostóva.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Allow me to introduce you to my daughter,” said the countess, with
+ heightened color.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have the pleasure of being already acquainted, if the countess
+ remembers me,” said Prince Andrew with a low and courteous bow quite
+ belying Perónskaya’s remarks about his rudeness, and approaching Natásha
+ he held out his arm to grasp her waist before he had completed his
+ invitation. He asked her to waltz. That tremulous expression on Natásha’s
+ face, prepared either for despair or rapture, suddenly brightened into a
+ happy, grateful, childlike smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have long been waiting for you,” that frightened happy little girl
+ seemed to say by the smile that replaced the threatened tears, as she
+ raised her hand to Prince Andrew’s shoulder. They were the second couple
+ to enter the circle. Prince Andrew was one of the best dancers of his day
+ and Natásha danced exquisitely. Her little feet in their white satin
+ dancing shoes did their work swiftly, lightly, and independently of
+ herself, while her face beamed with ecstatic happiness. Her slender bare
+ arms and neck were not beautiful—compared to Hélène’s her shoulders
+ looked thin and her bosom undeveloped. But Hélène seemed, as it were,
+ hardened by a varnish left by the thousands of looks that had scanned her
+ person, while Natásha was like a girl exposed for the first time, who
+ would have felt very much ashamed had she not been assured that this was
+ absolutely necessary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew liked dancing, and wishing to escape as quickly as possible
+ from the political and clever talk which everyone addressed to him,
+ wishing also to break up the circle of restraint he disliked, caused by
+ the Emperor’s presence, he danced, and had chosen Natásha because Pierre
+ pointed her out to him and because she was the first pretty girl who
+ caught his eye; but scarcely had he embraced that slender supple figure
+ and felt her stirring so close to him and smiling so near him than the
+ wine of her charm rose to his head, and he felt himself revived and
+ rejuvenated when after leaving her he stood breathing deeply and watching
+ the other dancers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII
+ 
+ 
+ After Prince Andrew, Borís came up to ask Natásha for a dance, and then
+ the aide-de-camp who had opened the ball, and several other young men, so
+ that, flushed and happy, and passing on her superfluous partners to Sónya,
+ she did not cease dancing all the evening. She noticed and saw nothing of
+ what occupied everyone else. Not only did she fail to notice that the
+ Emperor talked a long time with the French ambassador, and how
+ particularly gracious he was to a certain lady, or that Prince So-and-so
+ and So-and-so did and said this and that, and that Hélène had great
+ success and was honored by the special attention of So-and-so, but she did
+ not even see the Emperor, and only noticed that he had gone because the
+ ball became livelier after his departure. For one of the merry cotillions
+ before supper Prince Andrew was again her partner. He reminded her of
+ their first encounter in the Otrádnoe avenue, and how she had been unable
+ to sleep that moonlight night, and told her how he had involuntarily
+ overheard her. Natásha blushed at that recollection and tried to excuse
+ herself, as if there had been something to be ashamed of in what Prince
+ Andrew had overheard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Like all men who have grown up in society, Prince Andrew liked meeting
+ someone there not of the conventional society stamp. And such was Natásha,
+ with her surprise, her delight, her shyness, and even her mistakes in
+ speaking French. With her he behaved with special care and tenderness,
+ sitting beside her and talking of the simplest and most unimportant
+ matters; he admired her shy grace. In the middle of the cotillion, having
+ completed one of the figures, Natásha, still out of breath, was returning
+ to her seat when another dancer chose her. She was tired and panting and
+ evidently thought of declining, but immediately put her hand gaily on the
+ man’s shoulder, smiling at Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’d be glad to sit beside you and rest: I’m tired; but you see how they
+ keep asking me, and I’m glad of it, I’m happy and I love everybody, and
+ you and I understand it all,” and much, much more was said in her smile.
+ When her partner left her Natásha ran across the room to choose two ladies
+ for the figure.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If she goes to her cousin first and then to another lady, she will be my
+ wife,” said Prince Andrew to himself quite to his own surprise, as he
+ watched her. She did go first to her cousin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What rubbish sometimes enters one’s head!” thought Prince Andrew, “but
+ what is certain is that that girl is so charming, so original, that she
+ won’t be dancing here a month before she will be married.... Such as she
+ are rare here,” he thought, as Natásha, readjusting a rose that was
+ slipping on her bodice, settled herself beside him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the cotillion was over the old count in his blue coat came up to the
+ dancers. He invited Prince Andrew to come and see them, and asked his
+ daughter whether she was enjoying herself. Natásha did not answer at once
+ but only looked up with a smile that said reproachfully: “How can you ask
+ such a question?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have never enjoyed myself so much before!” she said, and Prince Andrew
+ noticed how her thin arms rose quickly as if to embrace her father and
+ instantly dropped again. Natásha was happier than she had ever been in her
+ life. She was at that height of bliss when one becomes completely kind and
+ good and does not believe in the possibility of evil, unhappiness, or
+ sorrow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that ball Pierre for the first time felt humiliated by the position his
+ wife occupied in court circles. He was gloomy and absent-minded. A deep
+ furrow ran across his forehead, and standing by a window he stared over
+ his spectacles seeing no one.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On her way to supper Natásha passed him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre’s gloomy, unhappy look struck her. She stopped in front of him. She
+ wished to help him, to bestow on him the superabundance of her own
+ happiness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How delightful it is, Count!” said she. “Isn’t it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre smiled absent-mindedly, evidently not grasping what she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I am very glad,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How can people be dissatisfied with anything?” thought Natásha.
+ “Especially such a capital fellow as Bezúkhov!” In Natásha’s eyes all the
+ people at the ball alike were good, kind, and splendid people, loving one
+ another; none of them capable of injuring another—and so they ought
+ all to be happy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII
+ 
+ 
+ Next day Prince Andrew thought of the ball, but his mind did not dwell on
+ it long. “Yes, it was a very brilliant ball,” and then... “Yes, that
+ little Rostóva is very charming. There’s something fresh, original,
+ un-Petersburg-like about her that distinguishes her.” That was all he
+ thought about yesterday’s ball, and after his morning tea he set to work.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But either from fatigue or want of sleep he was ill-disposed for work and
+ could get nothing done. He kept criticizing his own work, as he often did,
+ and was glad when he heard someone coming.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The visitor was Bítski, who served on various committees, frequented all
+ the societies in Petersburg, and was a passionate devotee of the new ideas and
+ of Speránski, and a diligent Petersburg newsmonger—one of those men
+ who choose their opinions like their clothes according to the fashion, but
+ who for that very reason appear to be the warmest partisans. Hardly had he
+ got rid of his hat before he ran into Prince Andrew’s room with a
+ preoccupied air and at once began talking. He had just heard particulars
+ of that morning’s sitting of the Council of State opened by the Emperor,
+ and he spoke of it enthusiastically. The Emperor’s speech had been
+ extraordinary. It had been a speech such as only constitutional monarchs
+ deliver. “The Sovereign plainly said that the Council and Senate are
+ estates of the realm, he said that the government must rest not on
+ authority but on secure bases. The Emperor said that the fiscal system
+ must be reorganized and the accounts published,” recounted Bítski,
+ emphasizing certain words and opening his eyes significantly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, yes! Today’s events mark an epoch, the greatest epoch in our
+ history,” he concluded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew listened to the account of the opening of the Council of
+ State, which he had so impatiently awaited and to which he had attached
+ such importance, and was surprised that this event, now that it had taken
+ place, did not affect him, and even seemed quite insignificant. He
+ listened with quiet irony to Bítski’s enthusiastic account of it. A very
+ simple thought occurred to him: “What does it matter to me or to Bítski
+ what the Emperor was pleased to say at the Council? Can all that make me
+ any happier or better?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And this simple reflection suddenly destroyed all the interest Prince
+ Andrew had felt in the impending reforms. He was going to dine that
+ evening at Speránski’s, “with only a few friends,” as the host had said
+ when inviting him. The prospect of that dinner in the intimate home circle
+ of the man he so admired had greatly interested Prince Andrew, especially
+ as he had not yet seen Speránski in his domestic surroundings, but now he
+ felt disinclined to go to it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the appointed hour, however, he entered the modest house Speránski
+ owned in the Taurida Gardens. In the parqueted dining room of this small
+ house, remarkable for its extreme cleanliness (suggesting that of a
+ monastery), Prince Andrew, who was rather late, found the friendly
+ gathering of Speránski’s intimate acquaintances already assembled at five
+ o’clock. There were no ladies present except Speránski’s little daughter
+ (long-faced like her father) and her governess. The other guests were
+ Gervais, Magnítski, and Stolýpin. While still in the anteroom Prince
+ Andrew heard loud voices and a ringing staccato laugh—a laugh such
+ as one hears on the stage. Someone—it sounded like Speránski—was
+ distinctly ejaculating ha-ha-ha . Prince Andrew had never before heard
+ Speránski’s famous laugh, and this ringing, high-pitched laughter from a
+ statesman made a strange impression on him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He entered the dining room. The whole company were standing between two
+ windows at a small table laid with hors-d’oeuvres. Speránski, wearing a
+ gray swallow-tail coat with a star on the breast, and evidently still the
+ same waistcoat and high white stock he had worn at the meeting of the
+ Council of State, stood at the table with a beaming countenance. His
+ guests surrounded him. Magnítski, addressing himself to Speránski, was
+ relating an anecdote, and Speránski was laughing in advance at what
+ Magnítski was going to say. When Prince Andrew entered the room
+ Magnítski’s words were again crowned by laughter. Stolýpin gave a deep
+ bass guffaw as he munched a piece of bread and cheese. Gervais laughed
+ softly with a hissing chuckle, and Speránski in a high-pitched staccato
+ manner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Still laughing, Speránski held out his soft white hand to Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very pleased to see you, Prince,” he said. “One moment...” he went on,
+ turning to Magnítski and interrupting his story. “We have agreed that this
+ is a dinner for recreation, with not a word about business!” and turning
+ again to the narrator he began to laugh afresh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew looked at the laughing Speránski with astonishment, regret,
+ and disillusionment. It seemed to him that this was not Speránski but
+ someone else. Everything that had formerly appeared mysterious and
+ fascinating in Speránski suddenly became plain and unattractive.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At dinner the conversation did not cease for a moment and seemed to
+ consist of the contents of a book of funny anecdotes. Before Magnítski had
+ finished his story someone else was anxious to relate something still
+ funnier. Most of the anecdotes, if not relating to the state service,
+ related to people in the service. It seemed that in this company the
+ insignificance of those people was so definitely accepted that the only
+ possible attitude toward them was one of good humored ridicule. Speránski
+ related how at the Council that morning a deaf dignitary, when asked his
+ opinion, replied that he thought so too. Gervais gave a long account of an
+ official revision, remarkable for the stupidity of everybody concerned.
+ Stolýpin, stuttering, broke into the conversation and began excitedly
+ talking of the abuses that existed under the former order of things—threatening
+ to give a serious turn to the conversation. Magnítski starting quizzing
+ Stolýpin about his vehemence. Gervais intervened with a joke, and the talk
+ reverted to its former lively tone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Evidently Speránski liked to rest after his labors and find amusement in a
+ circle of friends, and his guests, understanding his wish, tried to
+ enliven him and amuse themselves. But their gaiety seemed to Prince Andrew
+ mirthless and tiresome. Speránski’s high-pitched voice struck him
+ unpleasantly, and the incessant laughter grated on him like a false note.
+ Prince Andrew did not laugh and feared that he would be a damper on the
+ spirits of the company, but no one took any notice of his being out of
+ harmony with the general mood. They all seemed very gay.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He tried several times to join in the conversation, but his remarks were
+ tossed aside each time like a cork thrown out of the water, and he could
+ not jest with them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was nothing wrong or unseemly in what they said, it was witty and
+ might have been funny, but it lacked just that something which is the salt
+ of mirth, and they were not even aware that such a thing existed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After dinner Speránski’s daughter and her governess rose. He patted the
+ little girl with his white hand and kissed her. And that gesture, too,
+ seemed unnatural to Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The men remained at table over their port—English fashion. In the
+ midst of a conversation that was started about Napoleon’s Spanish affairs,
+ which they all agreed in approving, Prince Andrew began to express a
+ contrary opinion. Speránski smiled and, with an evident wish to prevent
+ the conversation from taking an unpleasant course, told a story that had
+ no connection with the previous conversation. For a few moments all were
+ silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having sat some time at table, Speránski corked a bottle of wine and,
+ remarking, “Nowadays good wine rides in a carriage and pair,” passed it to
+ the servant and got up. All rose and continuing to talk loudly went into
+ the drawing room. Two letters brought by a courier were handed to
+ Speránski and he took them to his study. As soon as he had left the room
+ the general merriment stopped and the guests began to converse sensibly
+ and quietly with one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now for the recitation!” said Speránski on returning from his study. “A
+ wonderful talent!” he said to Prince Andrew, and Magnítski immediately
+ assumed a pose and began reciting some humorous verses in French which he
+ had composed about various well-known Petersburg people. He was
+ interrupted several times by applause. When the verses were finished
+ Prince Andrew went up to Speránski and took his leave.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where are you off to so early?” asked Speránski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I promised to go to a reception.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They said no more. Prince Andrew looked closely into those mirrorlike,
+ impenetrable eyes, and felt that it had been ridiculous of him to have
+ expected anything from Speránski and from any of his own activities
+ connected with him, or ever to have attributed importance to what
+ Speránski was doing. That precise, mirthless laughter rang in Prince
+ Andrew’s ears long after he had left the house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he reached home Prince Andrew began thinking of his life in
+ Petersburg during those last four months as if it were something new. He
+ recalled his exertions and solicitations, and the history of his project
+ of army reform, which had been accepted for consideration and which they
+ were trying to pass over in silence simply because another, a very poor
+ one, had already been prepared and submitted to the Emperor. He thought of
+ the meetings of a committee of which Berg was a member. He remembered how
+ carefully and at what length everything relating to form and procedure was
+ discussed at those meetings, and how sedulously and promptly all that
+ related to the gist of the business was evaded. He recalled his labors on
+ the Legal Code, and how painstakingly he had translated the articles of
+ the Roman and French codes into Russian, and he felt ashamed of himself.
+ Then he vividly pictured to himself Boguchárovo, his occupations in the
+ country, his journey to Ryazán; he remembered the peasants and Dron the
+ village elder, and mentally applying to them the Personal Rights he had
+ divided into paragraphs, he felt astonished that he could have spent so
+ much time on such useless work.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX
+ 
+ 
+ Next day Prince Andrew called at a few houses he had not visited before,
+ and among them at the Rostóvs’ with whom he had renewed acquaintance at
+ the ball. Apart from considerations of politeness which demanded the call,
+ he wanted to see that original, eager girl who had left such a pleasant
+ impression on his mind, in her own home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha was one of the first to meet him. She was wearing a dark-blue
+ house dress in which Prince Andrew thought her even prettier than in her
+ ball dress. She and all the Rostóv family welcomed him as an old friend,
+ simply and cordially. The whole family, whom he had formerly judged
+ severely, now seemed to him to consist of excellent, simple, and kindly
+ people. The old count’s hospitality and good nature, which struck one
+ especially in Petersburg as a pleasant surprise, were such that Prince
+ Andrew could not refuse to stay to dinner. “Yes,” he thought, “they are
+ capital people, who of course have not the slightest idea what a treasure
+ they possess in Natásha; but they are kindly folk and form the best
+ possible setting for this strikingly poetic, charming girl, overflowing
+ with life!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In Natásha Prince Andrew was conscious of a strange world completely alien
+ to him and brimful of joys unknown to him, a different world, that in the
+ Otrádnoe avenue and at the window that moonlight night had already begun
+ to disconcert him. Now this world disconcerted him no longer and was no
+ longer alien to him, but he himself having entered it found in it a new
+ enjoyment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After dinner Natásha, at Prince Andrew’s request, went to the clavichord
+ and began singing. Prince Andrew stood by a window talking to the ladies
+ and listened to her. In the midst of a phrase he ceased speaking and
+ suddenly felt tears choking him, a thing he had thought impossible for
+ him. He looked at Natásha as she sang, and something new and joyful
+ stirred in his soul. He felt happy and at the same time sad. He had
+ absolutely nothing to weep about yet he was ready to weep. What about? His
+ former love? The little princess? His disillusionments?... His hopes for
+ the future?... Yes and no. The chief reason was a sudden, vivid sense of
+ the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable
+ within him and that limited and material something that he, and even she,
+ was. This contrast weighed on and yet cheered him while she sang.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as Natásha had finished she went up to him and asked how he liked
+ her voice. She asked this and then became confused, feeling that she ought
+ not to have asked it. He smiled, looking at her, and said he liked her
+ singing as he liked everything she did.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew left the Rostóvs’ late in the evening. He went to bed from
+ habit, but soon realized that he could not sleep. Having lit his candle he
+ sat up in bed, then got up, then lay down again not at all troubled by his
+ sleeplessness: his soul was as fresh and joyful as if he had stepped out
+ of a stuffy room into God’s own fresh air. It did not enter his head that
+ he was in love with Natásha; he was not thinking about her, but only
+ picturing her to himself, and in consequence all life appeared in a new
+ light. “Why do I strive, why do I toil in this narrow, confined frame,
+ when life, all life with all its joys, is open to me?” said he to himself.
+ And for the first time for a very long while he began making happy plans
+ for the future. He decided that he must attend to his son’s education by
+ finding a tutor and putting the boy in his charge, then he ought to retire
+ from the service and go abroad, and see England, Switzerland and Italy. “I
+ must use my freedom while I feel so much strength and youth in me,” he
+ said to himself. “Pierre was right when he said one must believe in the
+ possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and now I do believe in it.
+ Let the dead bury their dead, but while one has life one must live and be
+ happy!” thought he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX
+ 
+ 
+ One morning Colonel Berg, whom Pierre knew as he knew everybody in Moscow
+ and Petersburg, came to see him. Berg arrived in an immaculate brand-new
+ uniform, with his hair pomaded and brushed forward over his temples as the
+ Emperor Alexander wore his hair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have just been to see the countess, your wife. Unfortunately she could
+ not grant my request, but I hope, Count, I shall be more fortunate with
+ you,” he said with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it you wish, Colonel? I am at your service.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have now quite settled in my new rooms, Count” (Berg said this with
+ perfect conviction that this information could not but be agreeable), “and
+ so I wish to arrange just a small party for my own and my wife’s friends.”
+ (He smiled still more pleasantly.) “I wished to ask the countess and you
+ to do me the honor of coming to tea and to supper.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only Countess Hélène, considering the society of such people as the Bergs
+ beneath her, could be cruel enough to refuse such an invitation. Berg
+ explained so clearly why he wanted to collect at his house a small but
+ select company, and why this would give him pleasure, and why though he
+ grudged spending money on cards or anything harmful, he was prepared to
+ run into some expense for the sake of good society—that Pierre could
+ not refuse, and promised to come.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But don’t be late, Count, if I may venture to ask; about ten minutes to
+ eight, please. We shall make up a rubber. Our general is coming. He is
+ very good to me. We shall have supper, Count. So you will do me the
+ favor.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Contrary to his habit of being late, Pierre on that day arrived at the
+ Bergs’ house, not at ten but at fifteen minutes to eight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having prepared everything necessary for the party, the Bergs were ready
+ for their guests’ arrival.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In their new, clean, and light study with its small busts and pictures and
+ new furniture sat Berg and his wife. Berg, closely buttoned up in his new
+ uniform, sat beside his wife explaining to her that one always could and
+ should be acquainted with people above one, because only then does one get
+ satisfaction from acquaintances.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You can get to know something, you can ask for something. See how I
+ managed from my first promotion.” (Berg measured his life not by years but
+ by promotions.) “My comrades are still nobodies, while I am only waiting
+ for a vacancy to command a regiment, and have the happiness to be your
+ husband.” (He rose and kissed Véra’s hand, and on the way to her
+ straightened out a turned-up corner of the carpet.) “And how have I
+ obtained all this? Chiefly by knowing how to choose my aquaintances. It
+ goes without saying that one must be conscientious and methodical.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Berg smiled with a sense of his superiority over a weak woman, and paused,
+ reflecting that this dear wife of his was after all but a weak woman who
+ could not understand all that constitutes a man’s dignity, what it was ein
+ Mann zu sein. * Véra at the same time smiling with a sense of superiority
+ over her good, conscientious husband, who all the same understood life
+ wrongly, as according to Véra all men did. Berg, judging by his wife,
+ thought all women weak and foolish. Véra, judging only by her husband and
+ generalizing from that observation, supposed that all men, though they
+ understand nothing and are conceited and selfish, ascribe common sense to
+ themselves alone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * To be a man.
+
+
+
+ 
+ Berg rose and embraced his wife carefully, so as not to crush her lace
+ fichu for which he had paid a good price, kissing her straight on the
+ lips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The only thing is, we mustn’t have children too soon,” he continued,
+ following an unconscious sequence of ideas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” answered Véra, “I don’t at all want that. We must live for
+ society.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Princess Yusúpova wore one exactly like this,” said Berg, pointing to the
+ fichu with a happy and kindly smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just then Count Bezúkhov was announced. Husband and wife glanced at one
+ another, both smiling with self-satisfaction, and each mentally claiming
+ the honor of this visit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This is what comes of knowing how to make acquaintances,” thought Berg.
+ “This is what comes of knowing how to conduct oneself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But please don’t interrupt me when I am entertaining the guests,” said
+ Véra, “because I know what interests each of them and what to say to
+ different people.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Berg smiled again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It can’t be helped: men must sometimes have masculine conversation,” said
+ he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They received Pierre in their small, new drawing room, where it was
+ impossible to sit down anywhere without disturbing its symmetry, neatness,
+ and order; so it was quite comprehensible and not strange that Berg,
+ having generously offered to disturb the symmetry of an armchair or of the
+ sofa for his dear guest, but being apparently painfully undecided on the
+ matter himself, eventually left the visitor to settle the question of
+ selection. Pierre disturbed the symmetry by moving a chair for himself,
+ and Berg and Véra immediately began their evening party, interrupting each
+ other in their efforts to entertain their guest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Véra, having decided in her own mind that Pierre ought to be entertained
+ with conversation about the French embassy, at once began accordingly.
+ Berg, having decided that masculine conversation was required, interrupted
+ his wife’s remarks and touched on the question of the war with Austria,
+ and unconsciously jumped from the general subject to personal
+ considerations as to the proposals made him to take part in the Austrian
+ campaign and the reasons why he had declined them. Though the conversation
+ was very incoherent and Véra was angry at the intrusion of the masculine
+ element, both husband and wife felt with satisfaction that, even if only
+ one guest was present, their evening had begun very well and was as like
+ as two peas to every other evening party with its talk, tea, and lighted
+ candles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before long Borís, Berg’s old comrade, arrived. There was a shade of
+ condescension and patronage in his treatment of Berg and Véra. After Borís
+ came a lady with the colonel, then the general himself, then the Rostóvs,
+ and the party became unquestionably exactly like all other evening
+ parties. Berg and Véra could not repress their smiles of satisfaction at
+ the sight of all this movement in their drawing room, at the sound of the
+ disconnected talk, the rustling of dresses, and the bowing and scraping.
+ Everything was just as everybody always has it, especially so the general,
+ who admired the apartment, patted Berg on the shoulder, and with parental
+ authority superintended the setting out of the table for boston. The
+ general sat down by Count Ilyá Rostóv, who was next to himself the most
+ important guest. The old people sat with the old, the young with the
+ young, and the hostess at the tea table, on which stood exactly the same
+ kind of cakes in a silver cake basket as the Panins had at their party.
+ Everything was just as it was everywhere else.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI
+ 
+ 
+ Pierre, as one of the principal guests, had to sit down to boston with
+ Count Rostóv, the general, and the colonel. At the card table he happened
+ to be directly facing Natásha, and was struck by a curious change that had
+ come over her since the ball. She was silent, and not only less pretty
+ than at the ball, but only redeemed from plainness by her look of gentle
+ indifference to everything around.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s the matter with her?” thought Pierre, glancing at her. She was
+ sitting by her sister at the tea table, and reluctantly, without looking
+ at him, made some reply to Borís who sat down beside her. After playing
+ out a whole suit and to his partner’s delight taking five tricks, Pierre,
+ hearing greetings and the steps of someone who had entered the room while
+ he was picking up his tricks, glanced again at Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What has happened to her?” he asked himself with still greater surprise.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew was standing before her, saying something to her with a look
+ of tender solicitude. She, having raised her head, was looking up at him,
+ flushed and evidently trying to master her rapid breathing. And the bright
+ glow of some inner fire that had been suppressed was again alight in her.
+ She was completely transformed and from a plain girl had again become what
+ she had been at the ball.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew went up to Pierre, and the latter noticed a new and youthful
+ expression in his friend’s face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre changed places several times during the game, sitting now with his
+ back to Natásha and now facing her, but during the whole of the six
+ rubbers he watched her and his friend.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Something very important is happening between them,” thought Pierre, and
+ a feeling that was both joyful and painful agitated him and made him
+ neglect the game.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After six rubbers the general got up, saying that it was no use playing
+ like that, and Pierre was released. Natásha on one side was talking with
+ Sónya and Borís, and Véra with a subtle smile was saying something to
+ Prince Andrew. Pierre went up to his friend and, asking whether they were
+ talking secrets, sat down beside them. Véra, having noticed Prince
+ Andrew’s attentions to Natásha, decided that at a party, a real evening
+ party, subtle allusions to the tender passion were absolutely necessary
+ and, seizing a moment when Prince Andrew was alone, began a conversation
+ with him about feelings in general and about her sister. With so
+ intellectual a guest as she considered Prince Andrew to be, she felt that
+ she had to employ her diplomatic tact.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Pierre went up to them he noticed that Véra was being carried away by
+ her self-satisfied talk, but that Prince Andrew seemed embarrassed, a
+ thing that rarely happened with him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do you think?” Véra was saying with an arch smile. “You are so
+ discerning, Prince, and understand people’s characters so well at a
+ glance. What do you think of Natalie? Could she be constant in her
+ attachments? Could she, like other women” (Véra meant herself), “love a
+ man once for all and remain true to him forever? That is what I consider
+ true love. What do you think, Prince?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know your sister too little,” replied Prince Andrew, with a sarcastic
+ smile under which he wished to hide his embarrassment, “to be able to
+ solve so delicate a question, and then I have noticed that the less
+ attractive a woman is the more constant she is likely to be,” he added,
+ and looked up at Pierre who was just approaching them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, that is true, Prince. In our days,” continued Véra—mentioning
+ “our days” as people of limited intelligence are fond of doing, imagining
+ that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of “our days”
+ and that human characteristics change with the times—“in our days a
+ girl has so much freedom that the pleasure of being courted often stifles
+ real feeling in her. And it must be confessed that Natalie is very
+ susceptible.” This return to the subject of Natalie caused Prince Andrew
+ to knit his brows with discomfort: he was about to rise, but Véra
+ continued with a still more subtle smile:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I think no one has been more courted than she,” she went on, “but till
+ quite lately she never cared seriously for anyone. Now you know, Count,”
+ she said to Pierre, “even our dear cousin Borís, who, between ourselves,
+ was very far gone in the land of tenderness...” (alluding to a map of love
+ much in vogue at that time).
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew frowned and remained silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are friendly with Borís, aren’t you?” asked Véra.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I know him....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I expect he has told you of his childish love for Natásha?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, there was childish love?” suddenly asked Prince Andrew, blushing
+ unexpectedly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, you know between cousins intimacy often leads to love. Le cousinage
+ est un dangereux voisinage. * Don’t you think so?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Cousinhood is a dangerous neighborhood.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, undoubtedly!” said Prince Andrew, and with sudden and unnatural
+ liveliness he began chaffing Pierre about the need to be very careful with
+ his fifty-year-old Moscow cousins, and in the midst of these jesting
+ remarks he rose, taking Pierre by the arm, and drew him aside.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well?” asked Pierre, seeing his friend’s strange animation with surprise,
+ and noticing the glance he turned on Natásha as he rose.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I must... I must have a talk with you,” said Prince Andrew. “You know
+ that pair of women’s gloves?” (He referred to the Masonic gloves given to
+ a newly initiated Brother to present to the woman he loved.) “I... but no,
+ I will talk to you later on,” and with a strange light in his eyes and
+ restlessness in his movements, Prince Andrew approached Natásha and sat
+ down beside her. Pierre saw how Prince Andrew asked her something and how
+ she flushed as she replied.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But at that moment Berg came to Pierre and began insisting that he should
+ take part in an argument between the general and the colonel on the
+ affairs in Spain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Berg was satisfied and happy. The smile of pleasure never left his face.
+ The party was very successful and quite like other parties he had seen.
+ Everything was similar: the ladies’ subtle talk, the cards, the general
+ raising his voice at the card table, and the samovar and the tea cakes;
+ only one thing was lacking that he had always seen at the evening parties
+ he wished to imitate. They had not yet had a loud conversation among the
+ men and a dispute about something important and clever. Now the general
+ had begun such a discussion and so Berg drew Pierre to it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXII
+ 
+ 
+ Next day, having been invited by the count, Prince Andrew dined with the
+ Rostóvs and spent the rest of the day there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Everyone in the house realized for whose sake Prince Andrew came, and
+ without concealing it he tried to be with Natásha all day. Not only in the
+ soul of the frightened yet happy and enraptured Natásha, but in the whole
+ house, there was a feeling of awe at something important that was bound to
+ happen. The countess looked with sad and sternly serious eyes at Prince
+ Andrew when he talked to Natásha and timidly started some artificial
+ conversation about trifles as soon as he looked her way. Sónya was afraid
+ to leave Natásha and afraid of being in the way when she was with them.
+ Natásha grew pale, in a panic of expectation, when she remained alone with
+ him for a moment. Prince Andrew surprised her by his timidity. She felt
+ that he wanted to say something to her but could not bring himself to do
+ so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the evening, when Prince Andrew had left, the countess went up to
+ Natásha and whispered: “Well, what?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma! For heaven’s sake don’t ask me anything now! One can’t talk about
+ that,” said Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But all the same that night Natásha, now agitated and now frightened, lay
+ a long time in her mother’s bed gazing straight before her. She told her
+ how he had complimented her, how he told her he was going abroad, asked
+ her where they were going to spend the summer, and then how he had asked
+ her about Borís.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But such a... such a... never happened to me before!” she said. “Only I
+ feel afraid in his presence. I am always afraid when I’m with him. What
+ does that mean? Does it mean that it’s the real thing? Yes? Mamma, are you
+ asleep?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, my love; I am frightened myself,” answered her mother. “Now go!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All the same I shan’t sleep. What silliness, to sleep! Mummy! Mummy! such
+ a thing never happened to me before,” she said, surprised and alarmed at
+ the feeling she was aware of in herself. “And could we ever have
+ thought!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It seemed to Natásha that even at the time she first saw Prince Andrew at
+ Otrádnoe she had fallen in love with him. It was as if she feared this
+ strange, unexpected happiness of meeting again the very man she had then
+ chosen (she was firmly convinced she had done so) and of finding him, as
+ it seemed, not indifferent to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And it had to happen that he should come specially to Petersburg while we
+ are here. And it had to happen that we should meet at that ball. It is
+ fate. Clearly it is fate that everything led up to this! Already then ,
+ directly I saw him I felt something peculiar.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What else did he say to you? What are those verses? Read them...” said
+ her mother, thoughtfully, referring to some verses Prince Andrew had
+ written in Natásha’s album.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma, one need not be ashamed of his being a widower?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t, Natásha! Pray to God. ‘Marriages are made in heaven,’” said her
+ mother.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Darling Mummy, how I love you! How happy I am!” cried Natásha, shedding
+ tears of joy and excitement and embracing her mother.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that very time Prince Andrew was sitting with Pierre and telling him of
+ his love for Natásha and his firm resolve to make her his wife.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That day Countess Hélène had a reception at her house. The French
+ ambassador was there, and a foreign prince of the blood who had of late
+ become a frequent visitor of hers, and many brilliant ladies and
+ gentlemen. Pierre, who had come downstairs, walked through the rooms and
+ struck everyone by his preoccupied, absent-minded, and morose air.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Since the ball he had felt the approach of a fit of nervous depression and
+ had made desperate efforts to combat it. Since the intimacy of his wife
+ with the royal prince, Pierre had unexpectedly been made a gentleman of
+ the bedchamber, and from that time he had begun to feel oppressed and
+ ashamed in court society, and dark thoughts of the vanity of all things
+ human came to him oftener than before. At the same time the feeling he had
+ noticed between his protégée Natásha and Prince Andrew accentuated his
+ gloom by the contrast between his own position and his friend’s. He tried
+ equally to avoid thinking about his wife, and about Natásha and Prince
+ Andrew; and again everything seemed to him insignificant in comparison
+ with eternity; again the question: for what? presented itself; and he
+ forced himself to work day and night at Masonic labors, hoping to drive
+ away the evil spirit that threatened him. Toward midnight, after he had
+ left the countess’ apartments, he was sitting upstairs in a shabby
+ dressing gown, copying out the original transaction of the Scottish lodge
+ of Freemasons at a table in his low room cloudy with tobacco smoke, when
+ someone came in. It was Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, it’s you!” said Pierre with a preoccupied, dissatisfied air. “And I,
+ you see, am hard at it.” He pointed to his manuscript book with that air
+ of escaping from the ills of life with which unhappy people look at their
+ work.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew, with a beaming, ecstatic expression of renewed life on his
+ face, paused in front of Pierre and, not noticing his sad look, smiled at
+ him with the egotism of joy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, dear heart,” said he, “I wanted to tell you about it yesterday and
+ I have come to do so today. I never experienced anything like it before. I
+ am in love, my friend!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly Pierre heaved a deep sigh and dumped his heavy person down on the
+ sofa beside Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “With Natásha Rostóva, yes?” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes! Who else should it be? I should never have believed it, but the
+ feeling is stronger than I. Yesterday I tormented myself and suffered, but
+ I would not exchange even that torment for anything in the world, I have
+ not lived till now. At last I live, but I can’t live without her! But can
+ she love me?... I am too old for her.... Why don’t you speak?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I? I? What did I tell you?” said Pierre suddenly, rising and beginning to
+ pace up and down the room. “I always thought it.... That girl is such a
+ treasure... she is a rare girl.... My dear friend, I entreat you, don’t
+ philosophize, don’t doubt, marry, marry, marry.... And I am sure there
+ will not be a happier man than you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what of her?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She loves you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t talk rubbish...” said Prince Andrew, smiling and looking into
+ Pierre’s eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She does, I know,” Pierre cried fiercely.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But do listen,” returned Prince Andrew, holding him by the arm. “Do you
+ know the condition I am in? I must talk about it to someone.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, go on, go on. I am very glad,” said Pierre, and his face really
+ changed, his brow became smooth, and he listened gladly to Prince Andrew.
+ Prince Andrew seemed, and really was, quite a different, quite a new man.
+ Where was his spleen, his contempt for life, his disillusionment? Pierre
+ was the only person to whom he made up his mind to speak openly; and to
+ him he told all that was in his soul. Now he boldly and lightly made plans
+ for an extended future, said he could not sacrifice his own happiness to
+ his father’s caprice, and spoke of how he would either make his father
+ consent to this marriage and love her, or would do without his consent;
+ then he marveled at the feeling that had mastered him as at something
+ strange, apart from and independent of himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I should not have believed anyone who told me that I was capable of such
+ love,” said Prince Andrew. “It is not at all the same feeling that I knew
+ in the past. The whole world is now for me divided into two halves: one
+ half is she, and there all is joy, hope, light: the other half is
+ everything where she is not, and there is all gloom and darkness....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Darkness and gloom,” reiterated Pierre: “yes, yes, I understand that.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I cannot help loving the light, it is not my fault. And I am very happy!
+ You understand me? I know you are glad for my sake.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes,” Pierre assented, looking at his friend with a touched and sad
+ expression in his eyes. The brighter Prince Andrew’s lot appeared to him,
+ the gloomier seemed his own.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIII
+ 
+ 
+ Prince Andrew needed his father’s consent to his marriage, and to obtain
+ this he started for the country next day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His father received his son’s communication with external composure, but
+ inward wrath. He could not comprehend how anyone could wish to alter his
+ life or introduce anything new into it, when his own life was already
+ ending. “If only they would let me end my days as I want to,” thought the
+ old man, “then they might do as they please.” With his son, however, he
+ employed the diplomacy he reserved for important occasions and, adopting a
+ quiet tone, discussed the whole matter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the first place the marriage was not a brilliant one as regards birth,
+ wealth, or rank. Secondly, Prince Andrew was no longer as young as he had
+ been and his health was poor (the old man laid special stress on this),
+ while she was very young. Thirdly, he had a son whom it would be a pity to
+ entrust to a chit of a girl. “Fourthly and finally,” the father said,
+ looking ironically at his son, “I beg you to put it off for a year: go
+ abroad, take a cure, look out as you wanted to for a German tutor for
+ Prince Nicholas. Then if your love or passion or obstinacy—as you
+ please—is still as great, marry! And that’s my last word on it.
+ Mind, the last...” concluded the prince, in a tone which showed that
+ nothing would make him alter his decision.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew saw clearly that the old man hoped that his feelings, or his
+ fiancée’s, would not stand a year’s test, or that he (the old prince
+ himself) would die before then, and he decided to conform to his father’s
+ wish—to propose, and postpone the wedding for a year.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Three weeks after the last evening he had spent with the Rostóvs, Prince
+ Andrew returned to Petersburg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Next day after her talk with her mother Natásha expected Bolkónski all
+ day, but he did not come. On the second and third day it was the same.
+ Pierre did not come either and Natásha, not knowing that Prince Andrew had
+ gone to see his father, could not explain his absence to herself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Three weeks passed in this way. Natásha had no desire to go out anywhere
+ and wandered from room to room like a shadow, idle and listless; she wept
+ secretly at night and did not go to her mother in the evenings. She
+ blushed continually and was irritable. It seemed to her that everybody
+ knew about her disappointment and was laughing at her and pitying her.
+ Strong as was her inward grief, this wound to her vanity intensified her
+ misery.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Once she came to her mother, tried to say something, and suddenly began to
+ cry. Her tears were those of an offended child who does not know why it is
+ being punished.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess began to soothe Natásha, who after first listening to her
+ mother’s words, suddenly interrupted her:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Leave off, Mamma! I don’t think, and don’t want to think about it! He
+ just came and then left off, left off....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her voice trembled, and she again nearly cried, but recovered and went on
+ quietly:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I don’t at all want to get married. And I am afraid of him; I have
+ now become quite calm, quite calm.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The day after this conversation Natásha put on the old dress which she
+ knew had the peculiar property of conducing to cheerfulness in the
+ mornings, and that day she returned to the old way of life which she had
+ abandoned since the ball. Having finished her morning tea she went to the
+ ballroom, which she particularly liked for its loud resonance, and began
+ singing her solfeggio. When she had finished her first exercise she stood
+ still in the middle of the room and sang a musical phrase that
+ particularly pleased her. She listened joyfully (as though she had not
+ expected it) to the charm of the notes reverberating, filling the whole
+ empty ballroom, and slowly dying away; and all at once she felt cheerful.
+ “What’s the good of making so much of it? Things are nice as it is,” she
+ said to herself, and she began walking up and down the room, not stepping
+ simply on the resounding parquet but treading with each step from the heel
+ to the toe (she had on a new and favorite pair of shoes) and listening to
+ the regular tap of the heel and creak of the toe as gladly as she had to
+ the sounds of her own voice. Passing a mirror she glanced into it. “There,
+ that’s me!” the expression of her face seemed to say as she caught sight
+ of herself. “Well, and very nice too! I need nobody.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A footman wanted to come in to clear away something in the room but she
+ would not let him, and having closed the door behind him continued her
+ walk. That morning she had returned to her favorite mood—love of,
+ and delight in, herself. “How charming that Natásha is!” she said again,
+ speaking as some third, collective, male person. “Pretty, a good voice,
+ young, and in nobody’s way if only they leave her in peace.” But however
+ much they left her in peace she could not now be at peace, and immediately
+ felt this.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the hall the porch door opened, and someone asked, “At home?” and then
+ footsteps were heard. Natásha was looking at the mirror, but did not see
+ herself. She listened to the sounds in the hall. When she saw herself, her
+ face was pale. It was he . She knew this for certain, though she hardly
+ heard his voice through the closed doors.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pale and agitated, Natásha ran into the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma! Bolkónski has come!” she said. “Mamma, it is awful, it is
+ unbearable! I don’t want... to be tormented? What am I to do?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before the countess could answer, Prince Andrew entered the room with an
+ agitated and serious face. As soon as he saw Natásha his face brightened.
+ He kissed the countess’ hand and Natásha’s, and sat down beside the sofa.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is long since we had the pleasure...” began the countess, but Prince
+ Andrew interrupted her by answering her intended question, obviously in
+ haste to say what he had to.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have not been to see you all this time because I have been at my
+ father’s. I had to talk over a very important matter with him. I only got
+ back last night,” he said glancing at Natásha; “I want to have a talk with
+ you, Countess,” he added after a moment’s pause.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess lowered her eyes, sighing deeply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am at your disposal,” she murmured.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha knew that she ought to go away, but was unable to do so: something
+ gripped her throat, and regardless of manners she stared straight at
+ Prince Andrew with wide-open eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At once? This instant!... No, it can’t be!” she thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again he glanced at her, and that glance convinced her that she was not
+ mistaken. Yes, at once, that very instant, her fate would be decided.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go, Natásha! I will call you,” said the countess in a whisper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha glanced with frightened imploring eyes at Prince Andrew and at her
+ mother and went out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have come, Countess, to ask for your daughter’s hand,” said Prince
+ Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess’ face flushed hotly, but she said nothing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your offer...” she began at last sedately. He remained silent, looking
+ into her eyes. “Your offer...” (she grew confused) “is agreeable to us,
+ and I accept your offer. I am glad. And my husband... I hope... but it
+ will depend on her....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will speak to her when I have your consent.... Do you give it to me?”
+ said Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” replied the countess. She held out her hand to him, and with a
+ mixed feeling of estrangement and tenderness pressed her lips to his
+ forehead as he stooped to kiss her hand. She wished to love him as a son,
+ but felt that to her he was a stranger and a terrifying man. “I am sure my
+ husband will consent,” said the countess, “but your father...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My father, to whom I have told my plans, has made it an express condition
+ of his consent that the wedding is not to take place for a year. And I
+ wished to tell you of that,” said Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is true that Natásha is still young, but—so long as that?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is unavoidable,” said Prince Andrew with a sigh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will send her to you,” said the countess, and left the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lord have mercy upon us!” she repeated while seeking her daughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya said that Natásha was in her bedroom. Natásha was sitting on the
+ bed, pale and dry-eyed, and was gazing at the icons and whispering
+ something as she rapidly crossed herself. Seeing her mother she jumped up
+ and flew to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, Mamma?... Well?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go, go to him. He is asking for your hand,” said the countess, coldly it
+ seemed to Natásha. “Go... go,” said the mother, sadly and reproachfully,
+ with a deep sigh, as her daughter ran away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha never remembered how she entered the drawing room. When she came
+ in and saw him she paused. “Is it possible that this stranger has now
+ become everything to me?” she asked herself, and immediately answered,
+ “Yes, everything! He alone is now dearer to me than everything in the
+ world.” Prince Andrew came up to her with downcast eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have loved you from the very first moment I saw you. May I hope?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He looked at her and was struck by the serious impassioned expression of
+ her face. Her face said: “Why ask? Why doubt what you cannot but know? Why
+ speak, when words cannot express what one feels?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She drew near to him and stopped. He took her hand and kissed it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you love me?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes!” Natásha murmured as if in vexation. Then she sighed loudly
+ and, catching her breath more and more quickly, began to sob.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it? What’s the matter?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, I am so happy!” she replied, smiled through her tears, bent over
+ closer to him, paused for an instant as if asking herself whether she
+ might, and then kissed him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew held her hands, looked into her eyes, and did not find in
+ his heart his former love for her. Something in him had suddenly changed;
+ there was no longer the former poetic and mystic charm of desire, but
+ there was pity for her feminine and childish weakness, fear at her
+ devotion and trustfulness, and an oppressive yet joyful sense of the duty
+ that now bound him to her forever. The present feeling, though not so
+ bright and poetic as the former, was stronger and more serious.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Did your mother tell you that it cannot be for a year?” asked Prince
+ Andrew, still looking into her eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is it possible that I—the ‘chit of a girl,’ as everybody
+ called me,” thought Natásha—“is it possible that I am now to be
+ the wife and the equal of this strange, dear, clever man whom even my father
+ looks up to? Can it be true? Can it be true that there can be no more playing
+ with life, that now I am grown up, that on me now lies a responsibility
+ for my every word and deed? Yes, but what did he ask me?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No,” she replied, but she had not understood his question.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Forgive me!” he said. “But you are so young, and I have already been
+ through so much in life. I am afraid for you, you do not yet know
+ yourself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha listened with concentrated attention, trying but failing to take
+ in the meaning of his words.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hard as this year which delays my happiness will be,” continued Prince
+ Andrew, “it will give you time to be sure of yourself. I ask you to make
+ me happy in a year, but you are free: our engagement shall remain a
+ secret, and should you find that you do not love me, or should you come to
+ love...” said Prince Andrew with an unnatural smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why do you say that?” Natásha interrupted him. “You know that from the
+ very day you first came to Otrádnoe I have loved you,” she cried, quite
+ convinced that she spoke the truth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In a year you will learn to know yourself....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A whole year!” Natásha repeated suddenly, only now realizing that the
+ marriage was to be postponed for a year. “But why a year? Why a year?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew began to explain to her the reasons for this delay. Natásha
+ did not hear him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And can’t it be helped?” she asked. Prince Andrew did not reply, but his
+ face expressed the impossibility of altering that decision.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s awful! Oh, it’s awful! awful!” Natásha suddenly cried, and again
+ burst into sobs. “I shall die, waiting a year: it’s impossible, it’s
+ awful!” She looked into her lover’s face and saw in it a look of
+ commiseration and perplexity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, no! I’ll do anything!” she said, suddenly checking her tears. “I am
+ so happy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The father and mother came into the room and gave the betrothed couple
+ their blessing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From that day Prince Andrew began to frequent the Rostóvs’ as Natásha’s
+ affianced lover.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIV
+ 
+ 
+ No betrothal ceremony took place and Natásha’s engagement to Bolkónski was
+ not announced; Prince Andrew insisted on that. He said that as he was
+ responsible for the delay he ought to bear the whole burden of it; that he
+ had given his word and bound himself forever, but that he did not wish to
+ bind Natásha and gave her perfect freedom. If after six months she felt
+ that she did not love him she would have full right to reject him.
+ Naturally neither Natásha nor her parents wished to hear of this, but
+ Prince Andrew was firm. He came every day to the Rostóvs’, but did not
+ behave to Natásha as an affianced lover: he did not use the familiar thou ,
+ but said you to her, and kissed only her hand. After their engagement,
+ quite different, intimate, and natural relations sprang up between them.
+ It was as if they had not known each other till now. Both liked to recall
+ how they had regarded each other when as yet they were nothing to one
+ another; they felt themselves now quite different beings: then they were
+ artificial, now natural and sincere. At first the family felt some
+ constraint in intercourse with Prince Andrew; he seemed a man from another
+ world, and for a long time Natásha trained the family to get used to him,
+ proudly assuring them all that he only appeared to be different, but was
+ really just like all of them, and that she was not afraid of him and no
+ one else ought to be. After a few days they grew accustomed to him, and
+ without restraint in his presence pursued their usual way of life, in
+ which he took his part. He could talk about rural economy with the count,
+ fashions with the countess and Natásha, and about albums and fancywork
+ with Sónya. Sometimes the household both among themselves and in his
+ presence expressed their wonder at how it had all happened, and at the
+ evident omens there had been of it: Prince Andrew’s coming to Otrádnoe and
+ their coming to Petersburg, and the likeness between Natásha and Prince
+ Andrew which her nurse had noticed on his first visit, and Andrew’s
+ encounter with Nicholas in 1805, and many other incidents betokening that
+ it had to be.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the house that poetic dullness and quiet reigned which always
+ accompanies the presence of a betrothed couple. Often when all sitting
+ together everyone kept silent. Sometimes the others would get up and go
+ away and the couple, left alone, still remained silent. They rarely spoke
+ of their future life. Prince Andrew was afraid and ashamed to speak of it.
+ Natásha shared this as she did all his feelings, which she constantly
+ divined. Once she began questioning him about his son. Prince Andrew
+ blushed, as he often did now—Natásha particularly liked it in him—and
+ said that his son would not live with them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why not?” asked Natásha in a frightened tone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I cannot take him away from his grandfather, and besides...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How I should have loved him!” said Natásha, immediately guessing his
+ thought; “but I know you wish to avoid any pretext for finding fault with
+ us.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sometimes the old count would come up, kiss Prince Andrew, and ask his
+ advice about Pétya’s education or Nicholas’ service. The old countess
+ sighed as she looked at them; Sónya was always getting frightened lest she
+ should be in the way and tried to find excuses for leaving them alone,
+ even when they did not wish it. When Prince Andrew spoke (he could tell a
+ story very well), Natásha listened to him with pride; when she spoke she
+ noticed with fear and joy that he gazed attentively and scrutinizingly at
+ her. She asked herself in perplexity: “What does he look for in me? He is
+ trying to discover something by looking at me! What if what he seeks in me
+ is not there?” Sometimes she fell into one of the mad, merry moods
+ characteristic of her, and then she particularly loved to hear and see how
+ Prince Andrew laughed. He seldom laughed, but when he did he abandoned
+ himself entirely to his laughter, and after such a laugh she always felt
+ nearer to him. Natásha would have been completely happy if the thought of
+ the separation awaiting her and drawing near had not terrified her, just
+ as the mere thought of it made him turn pale and cold.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the eve of his departure from Petersburg Prince Andrew brought with him
+ Pierre, who had not been to the Rostóvs’ once since the ball. Pierre
+ seemed disconcerted and embarrassed. He was talking to the countess, and
+ Natásha sat down beside a little chess table with Sónya, thereby inviting
+ Prince Andrew to come too. He did so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You have known Bezúkhov a long time?” he asked. “Do you like him?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, he’s a dear, but very absurd.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And as usual when speaking of Pierre, she began to tell anecdotes of his
+ absent-mindedness, some of which had even been invented about him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know I have entrusted him with our secret? I have known him from
+ childhood. He has a heart of gold. I beg you, Natalie,” Prince Andrew said
+ with sudden seriousness—“I am going away and heaven knows what may
+ happen. You may cease to... all right, I know I am not to say that. Only
+ this, then: whatever may happen to you when I am not here...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What can happen?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Whatever trouble may come,” Prince Andrew continued, “I beg you,
+ Mademoiselle Sophie, whatever may happen, to turn to him alone for advice
+ and help! He is a most absent-minded and absurd fellow, but he has a heart
+ of gold.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Neither her father, nor her mother, nor Sónya, nor Prince Andrew himself
+ could have foreseen how the separation from her lover would act on
+ Natásha. Flushed and agitated she went about the house all that day,
+ dry-eyed, occupied with most trivial matters as if not understanding what
+ awaited her. She did not even cry when, on taking leave, he kissed her
+ hand for the last time. “Don’t go!” she said in a tone that made him
+ wonder whether he really ought not to stay and which he remembered long
+ afterwards. Nor did she cry when he was gone; but for several days she sat
+ in her room dry-eyed, taking no interest in anything and only saying now
+ and then, “Oh, why did he go away?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But a fortnight after his departure, to the surprise of those around her,
+ she recovered from her mental sickness just as suddenly and became her old
+ self again, but with a change in her moral physiognomy, as a child gets up
+ after a long illness with a changed expression of face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXV
+ 
+ 
+ During that year after his son’s departure, Prince Nicholas Bolkónski’s
+ health and temper became much worse. He grew still more irritable, and it
+ was Princess Mary who generally bore the brunt of his frequent fits of
+ unprovoked anger. He seemed carefully to seek out her tender spots so as
+ to torture her mentally as harshly as possible. Princess Mary had two
+ passions and consequently two joys—her nephew, little Nicholas, and
+ religion—and these were the favorite subjects of the prince’s
+ attacks and ridicule. Whatever was spoken of he would bring round to the
+ superstitiousness of old maids, or the petting and spoiling of children.
+ “You want to make him”—little Nicholas—“into an old maid like
+ yourself! A pity! Prince Andrew wants a son and not an old maid,” he would
+ say. Or, turning to Mademoiselle Bourienne, he would ask her in Princess
+ Mary’s presence how she liked our village priests and icons and would joke
+ about them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He continually hurt Princess Mary’s feelings and tormented her, but it
+ cost her no effort to forgive him. Could he be to blame toward her, or
+ could her father, whom she knew loved her in spite of it all, be unjust?
+ And what is justice? The princess never thought of that proud word
+ “justice.” All the complex laws of man centered for her in one clear and
+ simple law—the law of love and self-sacrifice taught us by Him who
+ lovingly suffered for mankind though He Himself was God. What had she to
+ do with the justice or injustice of other people? She had to endure and
+ love, and that she did.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the winter Prince Andrew had come to Bald Hills and had been gay,
+ gentle, and more affectionate than Princess Mary had known him for a long
+ time past. She felt that something had happened to him, but he said
+ nothing to her about his love. Before he left he had a long talk with his
+ father about something, and Princess Mary noticed that before his
+ departure they were dissatisfied with one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon after Prince Andrew had gone, Princess Mary wrote to her friend Julie
+ Karágina in Petersburg, whom she had dreamed (as all girls dream) of
+ marrying to her brother, and who was at that time in mourning for her own
+ brother, killed in Turkey.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sorrow, it seems, is our common lot, my dear, tender friend Julie.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Your loss is so terrible that I can only explain it to myself as a special
+ providence of God who, loving you, wishes to try you and your excellent
+ mother. Oh, my friend! Religion, and religion alone, can—I will not
+ say comfort us—but save us from despair. Religion alone can explain
+ to us what without its help man cannot comprehend: why, for what cause,
+ kind and noble beings able to find happiness in life—not merely
+ harming no one but necessary to the happiness of others—are called
+ away to God, while cruel, useless, harmful persons, or such as are a
+ burden to themselves and to others, are left living. The first death I
+ saw, and one I shall never forget—that of my dear sister-in-law—left
+ that impression on me. Just as you ask destiny why your splendid brother
+ had to die, so I asked why that angel Lise, who not only never wronged
+ anyone, but in whose soul there were never any unkind thoughts, had to
+ die. And what do you think, dear friend? Five years have passed since
+ then, and already I, with my petty understanding, begin to see clearly why
+ she had to die, and in what way that death was but an expression of the
+ infinite goodness of the Creator, whose every action, though generally
+ incomprehensible to us, is but a manifestation of His infinite love for
+ His creatures. Perhaps, I often think, she was too angelically innocent to
+ have the strength to perform all a mother’s duties. As a young wife she
+ was irreproachable; perhaps she could not have been so as a mother. As it
+ is, not only has she left us, and particularly Prince Andrew, with the
+ purest regrets and memories, but probably she will there receive a place I
+ dare not hope for myself. But not to speak of her alone, that early and
+ terrible death has had the most beneficent influence on me and on my
+ brother in spite of all our grief. Then, at the moment of our loss, these
+ thoughts could not occur to me; I should then have dismissed them with
+ horror, but now they are very clear and certain. I write all this to you,
+ dear friend, only to convince you of the Gospel truth which has become for
+ me a principle of life: not a single hair of our heads will fall without
+ His will. And His will is governed only by infinite love for us, and so
+ whatever befalls us is for our good.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ You ask whether we shall spend next winter in Moscow. In spite of my wish
+ to see you, I do not think so and do not want to do so. You will be
+ surprised to hear that the reason for this is Buonaparte! The case is
+ this: my father’s health is growing noticeably worse, he cannot stand any
+ contradiction and is becoming irritable. This irritability is, as you
+ know, chiefly directed to political questions. He cannot endure the notion
+ that Buonaparte is negotiating on equal terms with all the sovereigns of
+ Europe and particularly with our own, the grandson of the Great Catherine!
+ As you know, I am quite indifferent to politics, but from my father’s
+ remarks and his talks with Michael Ivánovich I know all that goes on in
+ the world and especially about the honors conferred on Buonaparte, who
+ only at Bald Hills in the whole world, it seems, is not accepted as a
+ great man, still less as Emperor of France. And my father cannot stand
+ this. It seems to me that it is chiefly because of his political views
+ that my father is reluctant to speak of going to Moscow; for he foresees
+ the encounters that would result from his way of expressing his views
+ regardless of anybody. All the benefit he might derive from a course of
+ treatment he would lose as a result of the disputes about Buonaparte which
+ would be inevitable. In any case it will be decided very shortly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Our family life goes on in the old way except for my brother Andrew’s
+ absence. He, as I wrote you before, has changed very much of late. After
+ his sorrow he only this year quite recovered his spirits. He has again
+ become as I used to know him when a child: kind, affectionate, with that
+ heart of gold to which I know no equal. He has realized, it seems to me,
+ that life is not over for him. But together with this mental change he has
+ grown physically much weaker. He has become thinner and more nervous. I am
+ anxious about him and glad he is taking this trip abroad which the doctors
+ recommended long ago. I hope it will cure him. You write that in
+ Petersburg he is spoken of as one of the most active, cultivated, and
+ capable of the young men. Forgive my vanity as a relation, but I never
+ doubted it. The good he has done to everybody here, from his peasants up
+ to the gentry, is incalculable. On his arrival in Petersburg he received
+ only his due. I always wonder at the way rumors fly from Petersburg to
+ Moscow, especially such false ones as that you write about—I mean
+ the report of my brother’s betrothal to the little Rostóva. I do not think
+ my brother will ever marry again, and certainly not her; and this is why:
+ first, I know that though he rarely speaks about the wife he has lost, the
+ grief of that loss has gone too deep in his heart for him ever to decide
+ to give her a successor and our little angel a stepmother. Secondly
+ because, as far as I know, that girl is not the kind of girl who could
+ please Prince Andrew. I do not think he would choose her for a wife, and
+ frankly I do not wish it. But I am running on too long and am at the end
+ of my second sheet. Good-by, my dear friend. May God keep you in His holy
+ and mighty care. My dear friend, Mademoiselle Bourienne, sends you kisses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ MARY
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVI
+ 
+ 
+ In the middle of the summer Princess Mary received an unexpected letter
+ from Prince Andrew in Switzerland in which he gave her strange and
+ surprising news. He informed her of his engagement to Natásha Rostóva. The
+ whole letter breathed loving rapture for his betrothed and tender and
+ confiding affection for his sister. He wrote that he had never loved as he
+ did now and that only now did he understand and know what life was. He
+ asked his sister to forgive him for not having told her of his resolve
+ when he had last visited Bald Hills, though he had spoken of it to his
+ father. He had not done so for fear Princess Mary should ask her father to
+ give his consent, irritating him and having to bear the brunt of his
+ displeasure without attaining her object. “Besides,” he wrote, “the matter
+ was not then so definitely settled as it is now. My father then insisted
+ on a delay of a year and now already six months , half of that period, have
+ passed, and my resolution is firmer than ever. If the doctors did not keep
+ me here at the spas I should be back in Russia, but as it is I have to
+ postpone my return for three months. You know me and my relations with
+ Father. I want nothing from him. I have been and always shall be
+ independent; but to go against his will and arouse his anger, now that he
+ may perhaps remain with us such a short time, would destroy half my
+ happiness. I am now writing to him about the same question, and beg you to
+ choose a good moment to hand him the letter and to let me know how he
+ looks at the whole matter and whether there is hope that he may consent to
+ reduce the term by four months.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After long hesitations, doubts, and prayers, Princess Mary gave the letter
+ to her father. The next day the old prince said to her quietly:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Write and tell your brother to wait till I am dead.... It won’t be long—I
+ shall soon set him free.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess was about to reply, but her father would not let her speak
+ and, raising his voice more and more, cried:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Marry, marry, my boy!... A good family!... Clever people, eh? Rich, eh?
+ Yes, a nice stepmother little Nicholas will have! Write and tell him that
+ he may marry tomorrow if he likes. She will be little Nicholas’ stepmother
+ and I’ll marry Bourienne!... Ha, ha, ha! He mustn’t be without a
+ stepmother either! Only one thing, no more women are wanted in my house—let
+ him marry and live by himself. Perhaps you will go and live with him too?”
+ he added, turning to Princess Mary. “Go in heaven’s name! Go out into the
+ frost... the frost... the frost!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After this outburst the prince did not speak any more about the matter.
+ But repressed vexation at his son’s poor-spirited behavior found
+ expression in his treatment of his daughter. To his former pretexts for
+ irony a fresh one was now added—allusions to stepmothers and
+ amiabilities to Mademoiselle Bourienne.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why shouldn’t I marry her?” he asked his daughter. “She’ll make a
+ splendid princess!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And latterly, to her surprise and bewilderment, Princess Mary noticed that
+ her father was really associating more and more with the Frenchwoman. She
+ wrote to Prince Andrew about the reception of his letter, but comforted
+ him with hopes of reconciling their father to the idea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Little Nicholas and his education, her brother Andrew, and religion were
+ Princess Mary’s joys and consolations; but besides that, since everyone
+ must have personal hopes, Princess Mary in the profoundest depths of her
+ heart had a hidden dream and hope that supplied the chief consolation of
+ her life. This comforting dream and hope were given her by God’s folk —the
+ half-witted and other pilgrims who visited her without the prince’s
+ knowledge. The longer she lived, the more experience and observation she
+ had of life, the greater was her wonder at the short-sightedness of men
+ who seek enjoyment and happiness here on earth: toiling, suffering,
+ struggling, and harming one another, to obtain that impossible, visionary,
+ sinful happiness. Prince Andrew had loved his wife, she died, but that was
+ not enough: he wanted to bind his happiness to another woman. Her father
+ objected to this because he wanted a more distinguished and wealthier
+ match for Andrew. And they all struggled and suffered and tormented one
+ another and injured their souls, their eternal souls, for the attainment
+ of benefits which endure but for an instant. Not only do we know this
+ ourselves, but Christ, the Son of God, came down to earth and told us that
+ this life is but for a moment and is a probation; yet we cling to it and
+ think to find happiness in it. “How is it that no one realizes this?”
+ thought Princess Mary. “No one except these despised God’s folk who,
+ wallet on back, come to me by the back door, afraid of being seen by the
+ prince, not for fear of ill-usage by him but for fear of causing him to
+ sin. To leave family, home, and all the cares of worldly welfare, in order
+ without clinging to anything to wander in hempen rags from place to place
+ under an assumed name, doing no one any harm but praying for all—for
+ those who drive one away as well as for those who protect one: higher than
+ that life and truth there is no life or truth!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was one pilgrim, a quiet pockmarked little woman of fifty called
+ Theodosia, who for over thirty years had gone about barefoot and worn
+ heavy chains. Princess Mary was particularly fond of her. Once, when in a
+ room with a lamp dimly lit before the icon Theodosia was talking of her
+ life, the thought that Theodosia alone had found the true path of life
+ suddenly came to Princess Mary with such force that she resolved to become
+ a pilgrim herself. When Theodosia had gone to sleep Princess Mary thought
+ about this for a long time, and at last made up her mind that, strange as
+ it might seem, she must go on a pilgrimage. She disclosed this thought to
+ no one but to her confessor, Father Akínfi, the monk, and he approved of
+ her intention. Under guise of a present for the pilgrims, Princess Mary
+ prepared a pilgrim’s complete costume for herself: a coarse smock, bast
+ shoes, a rough coat, and a black kerchief. Often, approaching the chest of
+ drawers containing this secret treasure, Princess Mary paused, uncertain
+ whether the time had not already come to put her project into execution.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Often, listening to the pilgrims’ tales, she was so stimulated by their
+ simple speech, mechanical to them but to her so full of deep meaning, that
+ several times she was on the point of abandoning everything and running
+ away from home. In imagination she already pictured herself by Theodosia’s
+ side, dressed in coarse rags, walking with a staff, a wallet on her back,
+ along the dusty road, directing her wanderings from one saint’s shrine to
+ another, free from envy, earthly love, or desire, and reaching at last the
+ place where there is no more sorrow or sighing, but eternal joy and bliss.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I shall come to a place and pray there, and before having time to get
+ used to it or getting to love it, I shall go farther. I will go on till my
+ legs fail, and I’ll lie down and die somewhere, and shall at last reach
+ that eternal, quiet haven, where there is neither sorrow nor sighing...”
+ thought Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But afterwards, when she saw her father and especially little Koko
+ (Nicholas), her resolve weakened. She wept quietly, and felt that she was
+ a sinner who loved her father and little nephew more than God.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK SEVEN: 1810 - 11
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labor—idleness—was
+ a condition of the first man’s blessedness before the Fall. Fallen man has
+ retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only
+ because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our brows, but because
+ our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease. An inner
+ voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle. If man could find a
+ state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his duty, he
+ would have found one of the conditions of man’s primitive blessedness. And
+ such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a
+ whole class—the military. The chief attraction of military service
+ has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable
+ idleness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas Rostóv experienced this blissful condition to the full when,
+ after 1807, he continued to serve in the Pávlograd regiment, in which he
+ already commanded the squadron he had taken over from Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv had become a bluff, good-natured fellow, whom his Moscow
+ acquaintances would have considered rather bad form, but who was liked and
+ respected by his comrades, subordinates, and superiors, and was well
+ contented with his life. Of late, in 1809, he found in letters from home
+ more frequent complaints from his mother that their affairs were falling
+ into greater and greater disorder, and that it was time for him to come
+ back to gladden and comfort his old parents.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Reading these letters, Nicholas felt a dread of their wanting to take him
+ away from surroundings in which, protected from all the entanglements of
+ life, he was living so calmly and quietly. He felt that sooner or later he
+ would have to re-enter that whirlpool of life, with its embarrassments and
+ affairs to be straightened out, its accounts with stewards, quarrels, and
+ intrigues, its ties, society, and with Sónya’s love and his promise to
+ her. It was all dreadfully difficult and complicated; and he replied to
+ his mother in cold, formal letters in French, beginning: “My dear Mamma,”
+ and ending: “Your obedient son,” which said nothing of when he would
+ return. In 1810 he received letters from his parents, in which they told
+ him of Natásha’s engagement to Bolkónski, and that the wedding would be in
+ a year’s time because the old prince made difficulties. This letter
+ grieved and mortified Nicholas. In the first place he was sorry that
+ Natásha, for whom he cared more than for anyone else in the family, should
+ be lost to the home; and secondly, from his hussar point of view, he
+ regretted not to have been there to show that fellow Bolkónski that
+ connection with him was no such great honor after all, and that if he
+ loved Natásha he might dispense with permission from his dotard father.
+ For a moment he hesitated whether he should not apply for leave in order
+ to see Natásha before she was married, but then came the maneuvers, and
+ considerations about Sónya and about the confusion of their affairs, and
+ Nicholas again put it off. But in the spring of that year, he received a
+ letter from his mother, written without his father’s knowledge, and that
+ letter persuaded him to return. She wrote that if he did not come and take
+ matters in hand, their whole property would be sold by auction and they
+ would all have to go begging. The count was so weak, and trusted Mítenka
+ so much, and was so good-natured, that everybody took advantage of him and
+ things were going from bad to worse. “For God’s sake, I implore you, come
+ at once if you do not wish to make me and the whole family wretched,”
+ wrote the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This letter touched Nicholas. He had that common sense of a matter-of-fact
+ man which showed him what he ought to do.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The right thing now was, if not to retire from the service, at any rate to
+ go home on leave. Why he had to go he did not know; but after his
+ after-dinner nap he gave orders to saddle Mars, an extremely vicious gray
+ stallion that had not been ridden for a long time, and when he returned
+ with the horse all in a lather, he informed Lavrúshka (Denísov’s servant
+ who had remained with him) and his comrades who turned up in the evening
+ that he was applying for leave and was going home. Difficult and strange
+ as it was for him to reflect that he would go away without having heard
+ from the staff—and this interested him extremely—whether he
+ was promoted to a captaincy or would receive the Order of St. Anne for the
+ last maneuvers; strange as it was to think that he would go away without
+ having sold his three roans to the Polish Count Golukhovski, who was
+ bargaining for the horses Rostóv had betted he would sell for two thousand
+ rubles; incomprehensible as it seemed that the ball the hussars were
+ giving in honor of the Polish Mademoiselle Przazdziecka (out of rivalry to
+ the Uhlans who had given one in honor of their Polish Mademoiselle
+ Borzozowska) would take place without him—he knew he must go away
+ from this good, bright world to somewhere where everything was stupid and
+ confused. A week later he obtained his leave. His hussar comrades—not
+ only those of his own regiment, but the whole brigade—gave Rostóv a
+ dinner to which the subscription was fifteen rubles a head, and at which
+ there were two bands and two choirs of singers. Rostóv danced the Trepák
+ with Major Básov; the tipsy officers tossed, embraced, and dropped Rostóv;
+ the soldiers of the third squadron tossed him too, and shouted “hurrah!”
+ and then they put him in his sleigh and escorted him as far as the first
+ post station.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the first half of the journey—from Kremenchúg to Kiev—all
+ Rostóv’s thoughts, as is usual in such cases, were behind him, with the
+ squadron; but when he had gone more than halfway he began to forget his
+ three roans and Dozhoyvéyko, his quartermaster, and to wonder anxiously
+ how things would be at Otrádnoe and what he would find there. Thoughts of
+ home grew stronger the nearer he approached it—far stronger, as
+ though this feeling of his was subject to the law by which the force of
+ attraction is in inverse proportion to the square of the distance. At the
+ last post station before Otrádnoe he gave the driver a three-ruble tip,
+ and on arriving he ran breathlessly, like a boy, up the steps of his home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the rapture of meeting, and after that odd feeling of unsatisfied
+ expectation—the feeling that “everything is just the same, so why
+ did I hurry?”—Nicholas began to settle down in his old home world.
+ His father and mother were much the same, only a little older. What was
+ new in them was a certain uneasiness and occasional discord, which there
+ used not to be, and which, as Nicholas soon found out, was due to the bad
+ state of their affairs. Sónya was nearly twenty; she had stopped growing
+ prettier and promised nothing more than she was already, but that was
+ enough. She exhaled happiness and love from the time Nicholas returned,
+ and the faithful, unalterable love of this girl had a gladdening effect on
+ him. Pétya and Natásha surprised Nicholas most. Pétya was a big handsome
+ boy of thirteen, merry, witty, and mischievous, with a voice that was
+ already breaking. As for Natásha, for a long while Nicholas wondered and
+ laughed whenever he looked at her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’re not the same at all,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How? Am I uglier?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the contrary, but what dignity? A princess!” he whispered to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, yes!” cried Natásha, joyfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She told him about her romance with Prince Andrew and of his visit to
+ Otrádnoe and showed him his last letter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, are you glad?” Natásha asked. “I am so tranquil and happy now.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very glad,” answered Nicholas. “He is an excellent fellow.... And are you
+ very much in love?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How shall I put it?” replied Natásha. “I was in love with Borís, with my
+ teacher, and with Denísov, but this is quite different. I feel at peace
+ and settled. I know that no better man than he exists, and I am calm and
+ contented now. Not at all as before.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas expressed his disapproval of the postponement of the marriage for
+ a year; but Natásha attacked her brother with exasperation, proving to him
+ that it could not be otherwise, and that it would be a bad thing to enter
+ a family against the father’s will, and that she herself wished it so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You don’t at all understand,” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas was silent and agreed with her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her brother often wondered as he looked at her. She did not seem at all
+ like a girl in love and parted from her affianced husband. She was
+ even-tempered and calm and quite as cheerful as of old. This amazed
+ Nicholas and even made him regard Bolkónski’s courtship skeptically. He
+ could not believe that her fate was sealed, especially as he had not seen
+ her with Prince Andrew. It always seemed to him that there was something
+ not quite right about this intended marriage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why this delay? Why no betrothal?” he thought. Once, when he had touched
+ on this topic with his mother, he discovered, to his surprise and somewhat
+ to his satisfaction, that in the depth of her soul she too had doubts
+ about this marriage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see he writes,” said she, showing her son a letter of Prince
+ Andrew’s, with that latent grudge a mother always has in regard to a
+ daughter’s future married happiness, “he writes that he won’t come before
+ December. What can be keeping him? Illness, probably! His health is very
+ delicate. Don’t tell Natásha. And don’t attach importance to her being so
+ bright: that’s because she’s living through the last days of her girlhood,
+ but I know what she is like every time we receive a letter from him!
+ However, God grant that everything turns out well!” (She always ended with
+ these words.) “He is an excellent man!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ After reaching home Nicholas was at first serious and even dull. He was
+ worried by the impending necessity of interfering in the stupid business
+ matters for which his mother had called him home. To throw off this burden
+ as quickly as possible, on the third day after his arrival he went, angry
+ and scowling and without answering questions as to where he was going, to
+ Mítenka’s lodge and demanded an account of everything . But what an
+ account of everything might be Nicholas knew even less than the frightened
+ and bewildered Mítenka. The conversation and the examination of the accounts
+ with Mítenka did not last long. The village elder, a peasant delegate, and
+ the village clerk, who were waiting in the passage, heard with fear and
+ delight first the young count’s voice roaring and snapping and rising
+ louder and louder, and then words of abuse, dreadful words, ejaculated one
+ after the other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Robber!... Ungrateful wretch!... I’ll hack the dog to pieces! I’m not my
+ father!... Robbing us!...” and so on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then with no less fear and delight they saw how the young count, red in
+ the face and with bloodshot eyes, dragged Mítenka out by the scruff of the
+ neck and applied his foot and knee to his behind with great agility at
+ convenient moments between the words, shouting, “Be off! Never let me see
+ your face here again, you villain!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mítenka flew headlong down the six steps and ran away into the shrubbery.
+ (This shrubbery was a well-known haven of refuge for culprits at Otrádnoe.
+ Mítenka himself, returning tipsy from the town, used to hide there, and
+ many of the residents at Otrádnoe, hiding from Mítenka, knew of its
+ protective qualities.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mítenka’s wife and sisters-in-law thrust their heads and frightened faces
+ out of the door of a room where a bright samovar was boiling and where the
+ steward’s high bedstead stood with its patchwork quilt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The young count paid no heed to them, but, breathing hard, passed by with
+ resolute strides and went into the house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess, who heard at once from the maids what had happened at the
+ lodge, was calmed by the thought that now their affairs would certainly
+ improve, but on the other hand felt anxious as to the effect this
+ excitement might have on her son. She went several times to his door on
+ tiptoe and listened, as he lighted one pipe after another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day the old count called his son aside and, with an embarrassed
+ smile, said to him:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you know, my dear boy, it’s a pity you got excited! Mítenka has told
+ me all about it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I knew,” thought Nicholas, “that I should never understand anything in
+ this crazy world.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You were angry that he had not entered those 700 rubles. But they were
+ carried forward—and you did not look at the other page.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Papa, he is a blackguard and a thief! I know he is! And what I have done,
+ I have done; but, if you like, I won’t speak to him again.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, my dear boy” (the count, too, felt embarrassed. He knew he had
+ mismanaged his wife’s property and was to blame toward his children, but
+ he did not know how to remedy it). “No, I beg you to attend to the
+ business. I am old. I...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Papa. Forgive me if I have caused you unpleasantness. I understand it
+ all less than you do.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Devil take all these peasants, and money matters, and carryings forward
+ from page to page,” he thought. “I used to understand what a ‘corner’ and
+ the stakes at cards meant, but carrying forward to another page I don’t
+ understand at all,” said he to himself, and after that he did not meddle
+ in business affairs. But once the countess called her son and informed him
+ that she had a promissory note from Anna Mikháylovna for two thousand
+ rubles, and asked him what he thought of doing with it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This,” answered Nicholas. “You say it rests with me. Well, I don’t like
+ Anna Mikháylovna and I don’t like Borís, but they were our friends and
+ poor. Well then, this!” and he tore up the note, and by so doing caused
+ the old countess to weep tears of joy. After that, young Rostóv took no
+ further part in any business affairs, but devoted himself with passionate
+ enthusiasm to what was to him a new pursuit—the chase—for
+ which his father kept a large establishment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ The weather was already growing wintry and morning frosts congealed an
+ earth saturated by autumn rains. The verdure had thickened and its bright
+ green stood out sharply against the brownish strips of winter rye trodden
+ down by the cattle, and against the pale-yellow stubble of the spring
+ buckwheat. The wooded ravines and the copses, which at the end of August
+ had still been green islands amid black fields and stubble, had become
+ golden and bright-red islands amid the green winter rye. The hares had
+ already half changed their summer coats, the fox cubs were beginning to
+ scatter, and the young wolves were bigger than dogs. It was the best time
+ of the year for the chase. The hounds of that ardent young sportsman
+ Rostóv had not merely reached hard winter condition, but were so jaded
+ that at a meeting of the huntsmen it was decided to give them a three
+ days’ rest and then, on the sixteenth of September, to go on a distant
+ expedition, starting from the oak grove where there was an undisturbed
+ litter of wolf cubs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All that day the hounds remained at home. It was frosty and the air was
+ sharp, but toward evening the sky became overcast and it began to thaw. On
+ the fifteenth, when young Rostóv, in his dressing gown, looked out of the
+ window, he saw it was an unsurpassable morning for hunting: it was as if
+ the sky were melting and sinking to the earth without any wind. The only
+ motion in the air was that of the dripping, microscopic particles of
+ drizzling mist. The bare twigs in the garden were hung with transparent
+ drops which fell on the freshly fallen leaves. The earth in the kitchen
+ garden looked wet and black and glistened like poppy seed and at a short
+ distance merged into the dull, moist veil of mist. Nicholas went out into
+ the wet and muddy porch. There was a smell of decaying leaves and of dog.
+ Mílka, a black-spotted, broad-haunched bitch with prominent black eyes,
+ got up on seeing her master, stretched her hind legs, lay down like a
+ hare, and then suddenly jumped up and licked him right on his nose and
+ mustache. Another borzoi, a dog, catching sight of his master from the
+ garden path, arched his back and, rushing headlong toward the porch with
+ lifted tail, began rubbing himself against his legs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O-hoy!” came at that moment, that inimitable huntsman’s call which unites
+ the deepest bass with the shrillest tenor, and round the corner came
+ Daniel the head huntsman and head kennelman, a gray, wrinkled old man with
+ hair cut straight over his forehead, Ukrainian fashion, a long bent whip
+ in his hand, and that look of independence and scorn of everything that is
+ only seen in huntsmen. He doffed his Circassian cap to his master and
+ looked at him scornfully. This scorn was not offensive to his master.
+ Nicholas knew that this Daniel, disdainful of everybody and who considered
+ himself above them, was all the same his serf and huntsman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Daniel!” Nicholas said timidly, conscious at the sight of the weather,
+ the hounds, and the huntsman that he was being carried away by that
+ irresistible passion for sport which makes a man forget all his previous
+ resolutions, as a lover forgets in the presence of his mistress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What orders, your excellency?” said the huntsman in his deep bass, deep
+ as a proto-deacon’s and hoarse with hallooing—and two flashing black
+ eyes gazed from under his brows at his master, who was silent. “Can you
+ resist it?” those eyes seemed to be asking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s a good day, eh? For a hunt and a gallop, eh?” asked Nicholas,
+ scratching Mílka behind the ears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Daniel did not answer, but winked instead.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I sent Uvárka at dawn to listen,” his bass boomed out after a minute’s
+ pause. “He says she’s moved them into the Otrádnoe enclosure.
+ They were howling there.” (This meant that the she-wolf, about whom they both
+ knew, had moved with her cubs to the Otrádnoe copse, a small place a mile and a
+ half from the house.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We ought to go, don’t you think so?” said Nicholas. “Come to me with
+ Uvárka.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As you please.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then put off feeding them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Five minutes later Daniel and Uvárka were standing in Nicholas’ big study.
+ Though Daniel was not a big man, to see him in a room was like seeing a
+ horse or a bear on the floor among the furniture and surroundings of human
+ life. Daniel himself felt this, and as usual stood just inside the door,
+ trying to speak softly and not move, for fear of breaking something in the
+ master’s apartment, and he hastened to say all that was necessary so as to
+ get from under that ceiling, out into the open under the sky once more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having finished his inquiries and extorted from Daniel an opinion that the
+ hounds were fit (Daniel himself wished to go hunting), Nicholas ordered
+ the horses to be saddled. But just as Daniel was about to go Natásha came
+ in with rapid steps, not having done up her hair or finished dressing and
+ with her old nurse’s big shawl wrapped round her. Pétya ran in at the same
+ time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are going?” asked Natásha. “I knew you would! Sónya said you wouldn’t
+ go, but I knew that today is the sort of day when you couldn’t help
+ going.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, we are going,” replied Nicholas reluctantly, for today, as he
+ intended to hunt seriously, he did not want to take Natásha and Pétya. “We
+ are going, but only wolf hunting: it would be dull for you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know it is my greatest pleasure,” said Natásha. “It’s not fair; you
+ are going by yourself, are having the horses saddled and said nothing to
+ us about it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘No barrier bars a Russian’s path’—we’ll go!” shouted Pétya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you can’t. Mamma said you mustn’t,” said Nicholas to Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I’ll go. I shall certainly go,” said Natásha decisively. “Daniel,
+ tell them to saddle for us, and Michael must come with my dogs,” she added
+ to the huntsman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It seemed to Daniel irksome and improper to be in a room at all, but to
+ have anything to do with a young lady seemed to him impossible. He cast
+ down his eyes and hurried out as if it were none of his business, careful
+ as he went not to inflict any accidental injury on the young lady.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ The old count, who had always kept up an enormous hunting establishment
+ but had now handed it all completely over to his son’s care, being in very
+ good spirits on this fifteenth of September, prepared to go out with the
+ others.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In an hour’s time the whole hunting party was at the porch. Nicholas, with
+ a stern and serious air which showed that now was no time for attending to
+ trifles, went past Natásha and Pétya who were trying to tell him
+ something. He had a look at all the details of the hunt, sent a pack of
+ hounds and huntsmen on ahead to find the quarry, mounted his chestnut
+ Donéts, and whistling to his own leash of borzois, set off across the
+ threshing ground to a field leading to the Otrádnoe wood. The old count’s
+ horse, a sorrel gelding called Viflyánka, was led by the groom in
+ attendance on him, while the count himself was to drive in a small trap
+ straight to a spot reserved for him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They were taking fifty-four hounds, with six hunt attendants and
+ whippers-in. Besides the family, there were eight borzoi kennelmen and
+ more than forty borzois, so that, with the borzois on the leash belonging
+ to members of the family, there were about a hundred and thirty dogs and
+ twenty horsemen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Each dog knew its master and its call. Each man in the hunt knew his
+ business, his place, what he had to do. As soon as they had passed the
+ fence they all spread out evenly and quietly, without noise or talk, along
+ the road and field leading to the Otrádnoe covert.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The horses stepped over the field as over a thick carpet, now and then
+ splashing into puddles as they crossed a road. The misty sky still seemed
+ to descend evenly and imperceptibly toward the earth, the air was still,
+ warm, and silent. Occasionally the whistle of a huntsman, the snort of a
+ horse, the crack of a whip, or the whine of a straggling hound could be
+ heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When they had gone a little less than a mile, five more riders with dogs
+ appeared out of the mist, approaching the Rostóvs. In front rode a
+ fresh-looking, handsome old man with a large gray mustache.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good morning, Uncle!” said Nicholas, when the old man drew near.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s it. Come on!... I was sure of it,” began “Uncle.” (He was a
+ distant relative of the Rostóvs’, a man of small means, and their
+ neighbor.) “I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist it and it’s a good thing
+ you’re going. That’s it! Come on!” (This was “Uncle’s” favorite
+ expression.) “Take the covert at once, for my Gírchik says the Ilágins are
+ at Kornikí with their hounds. That’s it. Come on!... They’ll take the cubs
+ from under your very nose.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s where I’m going. Shall we join up our packs?” asked Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The hounds were joined into one pack, and “Uncle” and Nicholas rode on
+ side by side. Natásha, muffled up in shawls which did not hide her eager
+ face and shining eyes, galloped up to them. She was followed by Pétya who
+ always kept close to her, by Michael, a huntsman, and by a groom appointed
+ to look after her. Pétya, who was laughing, whipped and pulled at his
+ horse. Natásha sat easily and confidently on her black Arábchik and reined
+ him in without effort with a firm hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Uncle” looked round disapprovingly at Pétya and Natásha. He did not like
+ to combine frivolity with the serious business of hunting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good morning, Uncle! We are going too!” shouted Pétya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good morning, good morning! But don’t go overriding the hounds,” said
+ “Uncle” sternly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nicholas, what a fine dog Truníla is! He knew me,” said Natásha,
+ referring to her favorite hound.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In the first place, Truníla is not a ‘dog,’ but a harrier,” thought
+ Nicholas, and looked sternly at his sister, trying to make her feel the
+ distance that ought to separate them at that moment. Natásha understood
+ it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You mustn’t think we’ll be in anyone’s way, Uncle,” she said. “We’ll go
+ to our places and won’t budge.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A good thing too, little countess,” said “Uncle,” “only mind you don’t
+ fall off your horse,” he added, “because—that’s it, come on!—you’ve
+ nothing to hold on to.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The oasis of the Otrádnoe covert came in sight a few hundred yards off,
+ the huntsmen were already nearing it. Rostóv, having finally settled with
+ “Uncle” where they should set on the hounds, and having shown Natásha
+ where she was to stand—a spot where nothing could possibly run out—went
+ round above the ravine.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, nephew, you’re going for a big wolf,” said “Uncle.” “Mind and don’t
+ let her slip!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s as may happen,” answered Rostóv. “Karáy, here!” he shouted,
+ answering “Uncle’s” remark by this call to his borzoi. Karáy was a shaggy
+ old dog with a hanging jowl, famous for having tackled a big wolf unaided.
+ They all took up their places.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old count, knowing his son’s ardor in the hunt, hurried so as not to
+ be late, and the huntsmen had not yet reached their places when Count Ilyá
+ Rostóv, cheerful, flushed, and with quivering cheeks, drove up with his
+ black horses over the winter rye to the place reserved for him, where a
+ wolf might come out. Having straightened his coat and fastened on his
+ hunting knives and horn, he mounted his good, sleek, well-fed, and
+ comfortable horse, Viflyánka, which was turning gray, like himself. His
+ horses and trap were sent home. Count Ilyá Rostóv, though not at heart a
+ keen sportsman, knew the rules of the hunt well, and rode to the bushy
+ edge of the road where he was to stand, arranged his reins, settled
+ himself in the saddle, and, feeling that he was ready, looked about with a
+ smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Beside him was Simon Chekmár, his personal attendant, an old horseman now
+ somewhat stiff in the saddle. Chekmár held in leash three formidable
+ wolfhounds, who had, however, grown fat like their master and his horse.
+ Two wise old dogs lay down unleashed. Some hundred paces farther along the
+ edge of the wood stood Mítka, the count’s other groom, a daring horseman
+ and keen rider to hounds. Before the hunt, by old custom, the count had
+ drunk a silver cupful of mulled brandy, taken a snack, and washed it down
+ with half a bottle of his favorite Bordeaux.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was somewhat flushed with the wine and the drive. His eyes were rather
+ moist and glittered more than usual, and as he sat in his saddle, wrapped
+ up in his fur coat, he looked like a child taken out for an outing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The thin, hollow-cheeked Chekmár, having got everything ready, kept
+ glancing at his master with whom he had lived on the best of terms for
+ thirty years, and understanding the mood he was in expected a pleasant
+ chat. A third person rode up circumspectly through the wood (it was plain
+ that he had had a lesson) and stopped behind the count. This person was a
+ gray-bearded old man in a woman’s cloak, with a tall peaked cap on his
+ head. He was the buffoon, who went by a woman’s name, Nastásya Ivánovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, Nastásya Ivánovna!” whispered the count, winking at him. “If you
+ scare away the beast, Daniel’ll give it you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know a thing or two myself!” said Nastásya Ivánovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hush!” whispered the count and turned to Simon. “Have you seen the young
+ countess?” he asked. “Where is she?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “With young Count Peter, by the Zhárov rank grass,” answered Simon,
+ smiling. “Though she’s a lady, she’s very fond of hunting.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And you’re surprised at the way she rides, Simon, eh?” said the count.
+ “She’s as good as many a man!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Of course! It’s marvelous. So bold, so easy!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And Nicholas? Where is he? By the Lyádov upland, isn’t he?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, sir. He knows where to stand. He understands the matter so well that
+ Daniel and I are often quite astounded,” said Simon, well knowing what
+ would please his master.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Rides well, eh? And how well he looks on his horse, eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A perfect picture! How he chased a fox out of the rank grass by the
+ Zavárzinsk thicket the other day! Leaped a fearful place; what a sight
+ when they rushed from the covert... the horse worth a thousand rubles and
+ the rider beyond all price! Yes, one would have to search far to find
+ another as smart.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To search far...” repeated the count, evidently sorry Simon had not said
+ more. “To search far,” he said, turning back the skirt of his coat to get
+ at his snuffbox.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The other day when he came out from Mass in full uniform, Michael
+ Sidórych...” Simon did not finish, for on the still air he had distinctly
+ caught the music of the hunt with only two or three hounds giving tongue.
+ He bent down his head and listened, shaking a warning finger at his
+ master. “They are on the scent of the cubs...” he whispered, “straight to
+ the Lyádov uplands.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count, forgetting to smooth out the smile on his face, looked into the
+ distance straight before him, down the narrow open space, holding the
+ snuffbox in his hand but not taking any. After the cry of the hounds came
+ the deep tones of the wolf call from Daniel’s hunting horn; the pack
+ joined the first three hounds and they could be heard in full cry, with
+ that peculiar lift in the note that indicates that they are after a wolf.
+ The whippers-in no longer set on the hounds, but changed to the cry of
+ ulyulyu , and above the others rose Daniel’s voice, now a deep bass, now
+ piercingly shrill. His voice seemed to fill the whole wood and carried far
+ beyond out into the open field.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After listening a few moments in silence, the count and his attendant
+ convinced themselves that the hounds had separated into two packs: the
+ sound of the larger pack, eagerly giving tongue, began to die away in the
+ distance, the other pack rushed by the wood past the count, and it was
+ with this that Daniel’s voice was heard calling ulyulyu . The sounds of
+ both packs mingled and broke apart again, but both were becoming more
+ distant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Simon sighed and stooped to straighten the leash a young borzoi had
+ entangled; the count too sighed and, noticing the snuffbox in his hand,
+ opened it and took a pinch. “Back!” cried Simon to a borzoi that was
+ pushing forward out of the wood. The count started and dropped the
+ snuffbox. Nastásya Ivánovna dismounted to pick it up. The count and Simon
+ were looking at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then, unexpectedly, as often happens, the sound of the hunt suddenly
+ approached, as if the hounds in full cry and Daniel ulyulyuing were just
+ in front of them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count turned and saw on his right Mítka staring at him with eyes
+ starting out of his head, raising his cap and pointing before him to the
+ other side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look out!” he shouted, in a voice plainly showing that he had long
+ fretted to utter that word, and letting the borzois slip he galloped
+ toward the count.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count and Simon galloped out of the wood and saw on their left a wolf
+ which, softly swaying from side to side, was coming at a quiet lope
+ farther to the left to the very place where they were standing. The angry
+ borzois whined and getting free of the leash rushed past the horses’ feet
+ at the wolf.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The wolf paused, turned its heavy forehead toward the dogs awkwardly, like
+ a man suffering from the quinsy, and, still slightly swaying from side to
+ side, gave a couple of leaps and with a swish of its tail disappeared into
+ the skirt of the wood. At the same instant, with a cry like a wail, first
+ one hound, then another, and then another, sprang helter-skelter from the
+ wood opposite and the whole pack rushed across the field toward the very
+ spot where the wolf had disappeared. The hazel bushes parted behind the
+ hounds and Daniel’s chestnut horse appeared, dark with sweat. On its long
+ back sat Daniel, hunched forward, capless, his disheveled gray hair
+ hanging over his flushed, perspiring face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ulyulyulyu! ulyulyu!...” he cried. When he caught sight of the count his
+ eyes flashed lightning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Blast you!” he shouted, holding up his whip threateningly at the count.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’ve let the wolf go!... What sportsmen!” and as if scorning to say
+ more to the frightened and shamefaced count, he lashed the heaving flanks
+ of his sweating chestnut gelding with all the anger the count had aroused
+ and flew off after the hounds. The count, like a punished schoolboy,
+ looked round, trying by a smile to win Simon’s sympathy for his plight.
+ But Simon was no longer there. He was galloping round by the bushes while
+ the field was coming up on both sides, all trying to head the wolf, but it
+ vanished into the wood before they could do so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ Nicholas Rostóv meanwhile remained at his post, waiting for the wolf. By
+ the way the hunt approached and receded, by the cries of the dogs whose
+ notes were familiar to him, by the way the voices of the huntsmen
+ approached, receded, and rose, he realized what was happening at the
+ copse. He knew that young and old wolves were there, that the hounds had
+ separated into two packs, that somewhere a wolf was being chased, and that
+ something had gone wrong. He expected the wolf to come his way any moment.
+ He made thousands of different conjectures as to where and from what side
+ the beast would come and how he would set upon it. Hope alternated with
+ despair. Several times he addressed a prayer to God that the wolf should
+ come his way. He prayed with that passionate and shamefaced feeling with
+ which men pray at moments of great excitement arising from trivial causes.
+ “What would it be to Thee to do this for me?” he said to God. “I know Thou
+ art great, and that it is a sin to ask this of Thee, but for God’s sake do
+ let the old wolf come my way and let Karáy spring at it—in sight of
+ ‘Uncle’ who is watching from over there—and seize it by the throat
+ in a death grip!” A thousand times during that half-hour Rostóv cast eager
+ and restless glances over the edge of the wood, with the two scraggy oaks
+ rising above the aspen undergrowth and the gully with its water-worn side
+ and “Uncle’s” cap just visible above the bush on his right.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I shan’t have such luck,” thought Rostóv, “yet what wouldn’t it be
+ worth! It is not to be! Everywhere, at cards and in war, I am always
+ unlucky.” Memories of Austerlitz and of Dólokhov flashed rapidly and
+ clearly through his mind. “Only once in my life to get an old wolf, I want
+ only that!” thought he, straining eyes and ears and looking to the left
+ and then to the right and listening to the slightest variation of note in
+ the cries of the dogs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again he looked to the right and saw something running toward him across
+ the deserted field. “No, it can’t be!” thought Rostóv, taking a deep
+ breath, as a man does at the coming of something long hoped for. The
+ height of happiness was reached—and so simply, without warning, or
+ noise, or display, that Rostóv could not believe his eyes and remained in
+ doubt for over a second. The wolf ran forward and jumped heavily over a
+ gully that lay in her path. She was an old animal with a gray back and big
+ reddish belly. She ran without hurry, evidently feeling sure that no one
+ saw her. Rostóv, holding his breath, looked round at the borzois. They
+ stood or lay not seeing the wolf or understanding the situation. Old Karáy
+ had turned his head and was angrily searching for fleas, baring his yellow
+ teeth and snapping at his hind legs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ulyulyulyu!” whispered Rostóv, pouting his lips. The borzois jumped up,
+ jerking the rings of the leashes and pricking their ears. Karáy finished
+ scratching his hindquarters and, cocking his ears, got up with quivering
+ tail from which tufts of matted hair hung down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Shall I loose them or not?” Nicholas asked himself as the wolf approached
+ him coming from the copse. Suddenly the wolf’s whole physiognomy changed:
+ she shuddered, seeing what she had probably never seen before—human
+ eyes fixed upon her—and turning her head a little toward Rostóv, she
+ paused.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Back or forward? Eh, no matter, forward...” the wolf seemed to say to
+ herself, and she moved forward without again looking round and with a
+ quiet, long, easy yet resolute lope.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ulyulyu!” cried Nicholas, in a voice not his own, and of its own accord
+ his good horse darted headlong downhill, leaping over gullies to head off
+ the wolf, and the borzois passed it, running faster still. Nicholas did
+ not hear his own cry nor feel that he was galloping, nor see the borzois,
+ nor the ground over which he went: he saw only the wolf, who, increasing
+ her speed, bounded on in the same direction along the hollow. The first to
+ come into view was Mílka, with her black markings and powerful quarters,
+ gaining upon the wolf. Nearer and nearer... now she was ahead of it; but
+ the wolf turned its head to face her, and instead of putting on speed as
+ she usually did Mílka suddenly raised her tail and stiffened her forelegs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ulyulyulyulyu!” shouted Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The reddish Lyubím rushed forward from behind Mílka, sprang impetuously at
+ the wolf, and seized it by its hindquarters, but immediately jumped aside
+ in terror. The wolf crouched, gnashed her teeth, and again rose and
+ bounded forward, followed at the distance of a couple of feet by all the
+ borzois, who did not get any closer to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She’ll get away! No, it’s impossible!” thought Nicholas,
+ still shouting with a hoarse voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Karáy, ulyulyu! ...” he shouted, looking round for the old borzoi
+ who was now his only hope. Karáy, with all the strength age had left him,
+ stretched himself to the utmost and, watching the wolf, galloped heavily
+ aside to intercept it. But the quickness of the wolf’s lope and the
+ borzoi’s slower pace made it plain that Karáy had miscalculated. Nicholas
+ could already see not far in front of him the wood where the wolf would
+ certainly escape should she reach it. But, coming toward him, he saw
+ hounds and a huntsman galloping almost straight at the wolf. There was
+ still hope. A long, yellowish young borzoi, one Nicholas did not know,
+ from another leash, rushed impetuously at the wolf from in front and
+ almost knocked her over. But the wolf jumped up more quickly than anyone
+ could have expected and, gnashing her teeth, flew at the yellowish borzoi,
+ which, with a piercing yelp, fell with its head on the ground, bleeding
+ from a gash in its side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Karáy? Old fellow!...” wailed Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thanks to the delay caused by this crossing of the wolf’s path, the old
+ dog with its felted hair hanging from its thigh was within five paces of
+ it. As if aware of her danger, the wolf turned her eyes on Karáy, tucked
+ her tail yet further between her legs, and increased her speed. But here
+ Nicholas only saw that something happened to Karáy—the borzoi was
+ suddenly on the wolf, and they rolled together down into a gully just in
+ front of them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That instant, when Nicholas saw the wolf struggling in the gully with the
+ dogs, while from under them could be seen her gray hair and outstretched
+ hind leg and her frightened choking head, with her ears laid back (Karáy
+ was pinning her by the throat), was the happiest moment of his life. With
+ his hand on his saddlebow, he was ready to dismount and stab the wolf,
+ when she suddenly thrust her head up from among that mass of dogs, and
+ then her forepaws were on the edge of the gully. She clicked her teeth
+ (Karáy no longer had her by the throat), leaped with a movement of her
+ hind legs out of the gully, and having disengaged herself from the dogs,
+ with tail tucked in again, went forward. Karáy, his hair bristling, and
+ probably bruised or wounded, climbed with difficulty out of the gully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh my God! Why?” Nicholas cried in despair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Uncle’s” huntsman was galloping from the other side across the wolf’s
+ path and his borzois once more stopped the animal’s advance. She was again
+ hemmed in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas and his attendant, with “Uncle” and his huntsman, were all riding
+ round the wolf, crying “ulyulyu!” shouting and preparing to dismount each
+ moment that the wolf crouched back, and starting forward again every time
+ she shook herself and moved toward the wood where she would be safe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Already, at the beginning of this chase, Daniel, hearing the ulyulyuing,
+ had rushed out from the wood. He saw Karáy seize the wolf, and checked his
+ horse, supposing the affair to be over. But when he saw that the horsemen
+ did not dismount and that the wolf shook herself and ran for safety,
+ Daniel set his chestnut galloping, not at the wolf but straight toward the
+ wood, just as Karáy had run to cut the animal off. As a result of this, he
+ galloped up to the wolf just when she had been stopped a second time by
+ “Uncle’s” borzois.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Daniel galloped up silently, holding a naked dagger in his left hand and
+ thrashing the laboring sides of his chestnut horse with his whip as if it
+ were a flail.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas neither saw nor heard Daniel until the chestnut, breathing
+ heavily, panted past him, and he heard the fall of a body and saw Daniel
+ lying on the wolf’s back among the dogs, trying to seize her by the ears.
+ It was evident to the dogs, the hunters, and to the wolf herself that all
+ was now over. The terrified wolf pressed back her ears and tried to rise,
+ but the borzois stuck to her. Daniel rose a little, took a step, and with
+ his whole weight, as if lying down to rest, fell on the wolf, seizing her
+ by the ears. Nicholas was about to stab her, but Daniel whispered, “Don’t!
+ We’ll gag her!” and, changing his position, set his foot on the wolf’s
+ neck. A stick was thrust between her jaws and she was fastened with a
+ leash, as if bridled, her legs were bound together, and Daniel rolled her
+ over once or twice from side to side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With happy, exhausted faces, they laid the old wolf, alive, on a shying
+ and snorting horse and, accompanied by the dogs yelping at her, took her
+ to the place where they were all to meet. The hounds had killed two of the
+ cubs and the borzois three. The huntsmen assembled with their booty and
+ their stories, and all came to look at the wolf, which, with her
+ broad-browed head hanging down and the bitten stick between her jaws,
+ gazed with great glassy eyes at this crowd of dogs and men surrounding
+ her. When she was touched, she jerked her bound legs and looked wildly yet
+ simply at everybody. Old Count Rostóv also rode up and touched the wolf.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, what a formidable one!” said he. “A formidable one, eh?” he asked
+ Daniel, who was standing near.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, your excellency,” answered Daniel, quickly doffing his cap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count remembered the wolf he had let slip and his encounter with
+ Daniel.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, but you are a crusty fellow, friend!” said the count.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For sole reply Daniel gave him a shy, childlike, meek, and amiable smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ The old count went home, and Natásha and Pétya promised to return very
+ soon, but as it was still early the hunt went farther. At midday they put
+ the hounds into a ravine thickly overgrown with young trees. Nicholas
+ standing in a fallow field could see all his whips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Facing him lay a field of winter rye, there his own huntsman stood alone
+ in a hollow behind a hazel bush. The hounds had scarcely been loosed
+ before Nicholas heard one he knew, Voltórn, giving tongue at intervals;
+ other hounds joined in, now pausing and now again giving tongue. A moment
+ later he heard a cry from the wooded ravine that a fox had been found, and
+ the whole pack, joining together, rushed along the ravine toward the
+ ryefield and away from Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He saw the whips in their red caps galloping along the edge of the ravine,
+ he even saw the hounds, and was expecting a fox to show itself at any
+ moment on the ryefield opposite.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The huntsman standing in the hollow moved and loosed his borzois, and
+ Nicholas saw a queer, short-legged red fox with a fine brush going hard
+ across the field. The borzois bore down on it.... Now they drew close to
+ the fox which began to dodge between the field in sharper and sharper
+ curves, trailing its brush, when suddenly a strange white borzoi dashed in
+ followed by a black one, and everything was in confusion; the borzois
+ formed a star-shaped figure, scarcely swaying their bodies and with tails
+ turned away from the center of the group. Two huntsmen galloped up to the
+ dogs; one in a red cap, the other, a stranger, in a green coat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s this?” thought Nicholas. “Where’s that huntsman from? He is not
+ ‘Uncle’s’ man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The huntsmen got the fox, but stayed there a long time without strapping
+ it to the saddle. Their horses, bridled and with high saddles, stood near
+ them and there too the dogs were lying. The huntsmen waved their arms and
+ did something to the fox. Then from that spot came the sound of a horn,
+ with the signal agreed on in case of a fight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s Ilágin’s huntsman having a row with our Iván,” said Nicholas’
+ groom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas sent the man to call Natásha and Pétya to him, and rode at a
+ footpace to the place where the whips were getting the hounds together.
+ Several of the field galloped to the spot where the fight was going on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas dismounted, and with Natásha and Pétya, who had ridden up,
+ stopped near the hounds, waiting to see how the matter would end. Out of
+ the bushes came the huntsman who had been fighting and rode toward his
+ young master, with the fox tied to his crupper. While still at a distance
+ he took off his cap and tried to speak respectfully, but he was pale and
+ breathless and his face was angry. One of his eyes was black, but he
+ probably was not even aware of it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What has happened?” asked Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A likely thing, killing a fox our dogs had hunted! And it was my gray
+ bitch that caught it! Go to law, indeed!... He snatches at the fox! I gave
+ him one with the fox. Here it is on my saddle! Do you want a taste of
+ this?...” said the huntsman, pointing to his dagger and probably imagining
+ himself still speaking to his foe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas, not stopping to talk to the man, asked his sister and Pétya to
+ wait for him and rode to the spot where the enemy’s, Ilágin’s, hunting
+ party was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The victorious huntsman rode off to join the field, and there, surrounded
+ by inquiring sympathizers, recounted his exploits.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The facts were that Ilágin, with whom the Rostóvs had a quarrel and were
+ at law, hunted over places that belonged by custom to the Rostóvs, and had
+ now, as if purposely, sent his men to the very woods the Rostóvs were
+ hunting and let his man snatch a fox their dogs had chased.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas, though he had never seen Ilágin, with his usual absence of
+ moderation in judgment, hated him cordially from reports of his
+ arbitrariness and violence, and regarded him as his bitterest foe. He rode
+ in angry agitation toward him, firmly grasping his whip and fully prepared
+ to take the most resolute and desperate steps to punish his enemy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hardly had he passed an angle of the wood before a stout gentleman in a
+ beaver cap came riding toward him on a handsome raven-black horse,
+ accompanied by two hunt servants.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Instead of an enemy, Nicholas found in Ilágin a stately and courteous
+ gentleman who was particularly anxious to make the young count’s
+ acquaintance. Having ridden up to Nicholas, Ilágin raised his beaver cap
+ and said he much regretted what had occurred and would have the man
+ punished who had allowed himself to seize a fox hunted by someone else’s
+ borzois. He hoped to become better acquainted with the count and invited
+ him to draw his covert.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha, afraid that her brother would do something dreadful, had followed
+ him in some excitement. Seeing the enemies exchanging friendly greetings,
+ she rode up to them. Ilágin lifted his beaver cap still higher to Natásha
+ and said, with a pleasant smile, that the young countess resembled Diana
+ in her passion for the chase as well as in her beauty, of which he had
+ heard much.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To expiate his huntsman’s offense, Ilágin pressed the Rostóvs to come to
+ an upland of his about a mile away which he usually kept for himself and
+ which, he said, swarmed with hares. Nicholas agreed, and the hunt, now
+ doubled, moved on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The way to Iligin’s upland was across the fields. The hunt servants fell
+ into line. The masters rode together. “Uncle,” Rostóv, and Ilágin kept
+ stealthily glancing at one another’s dogs, trying not to be observed by
+ their companions and searching uneasily for rivals to their own borzois.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv was particularly struck by the beauty of a small, pure-bred,
+ red-spotted bitch on Ilágin’s leash, slender but with muscles like steel,
+ a delicate muzzle, and prominent black eyes. He had heard of the swiftness
+ of Ilágin’s borzois, and in that beautiful bitch saw a rival to his own
+ Mílka.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the middle of a sober conversation begun by Ilágin about the year’s
+ harvest, Nicholas pointed to the red-spotted bitch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A fine little bitch, that!” said he in a careless tone. “Is she swift?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That one? Yes, she’s a good dog, gets what she’s after,” answered Ilágin
+ indifferently, of the red-spotted bitch Erzá, for which, a year before, he
+ had given a neighbor three families of house serfs. “So in your parts,
+ too, the harvest is nothing to boast of, Count?” he went on, continuing
+ the conversation they had begun. And considering it polite to return the
+ young count’s compliment, Ilágin looked at his borzois and picked out
+ Mílka who attracted his attention by her breadth. “That black-spotted one
+ of yours is fine—well shaped!” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, she’s fast enough,” replied Nicholas, and thought: “If only a
+ full-grown hare would cross the field now I’d show you what sort of borzoi
+ she is,” and turning to his groom, he said he would give a ruble to anyone
+ who found a hare.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t understand,” continued Ilágin, “how some sportsmen can be so
+ jealous about game and dogs. For myself, I can tell you, Count, I enjoy
+ riding in company such as this... what could be better?” (he again raised
+ his cap to Natásha) “but as for counting skins and what one takes, I don’t
+ care about that.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Of course not!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Or being upset because someone else’s borzoi and not mine catches
+ something. All I care about is to enjoy seeing the chase, is it not so,
+ Count? For I consider that...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A-tu!” came the long-drawn cry of one of the borzoi whippers-in, who had
+ halted. He stood on a knoll in the stubble, holding his whip aloft, and
+ again repeated his long-drawn cry, “A-tu!” (This call and the uplifted
+ whip meant that he saw a sitting hare.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, he has found one, I think,” said Ilágin carelessly. “Yes, we must
+ ride up.... Shall we both course it?” answered Nicholas, seeing in Erzá
+ and “Uncle’s” red Rugáy two rivals he had never yet had a chance of
+ pitting against his own borzois. “And suppose they outdo my Mílka at
+ once!” he thought as he rode with “Uncle” and Ilágin toward the hare.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A full-grown one?” asked Ilágin as he approached the whip who had sighted
+ the hare—and not without agitation he looked round and whistled to
+ Erzá.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And you, Michael Nikanórovich?” he said, addressing “Uncle.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The latter was riding with a sullen expression on his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How can I join in? Why, you’ve given a village for each of your borzois!
+ That’s it, come on! Yours are worth thousands. Try yours against one
+ another, you two, and I’ll look on!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Rugáy, hey, hey!” he shouted. “Rugáyushka!” he added, involuntarily by
+ this diminutive expressing his affection and the hopes he placed on this
+ red borzoi. Natásha saw and felt the agitation the two elderly men and her
+ brother were trying to conceal, and was herself excited by it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The huntsman stood halfway up the knoll holding up his whip and the
+ gentlefolk rode up to him at a footpace; the hounds that were far off on
+ the horizon turned away from the hare, and the whips, but not the
+ gentlefolk, also moved away. All were moving slowly and sedately.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How is it pointing?” asked Nicholas, riding a hundred paces toward the
+ whip who had sighted the hare.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But before the whip could reply, the hare, scenting the frost coming next
+ morning, was unable to rest and leaped up. The pack on leash rushed
+ downhill in full cry after the hare, and from all sides the borzois that
+ were not on leash darted after the hounds and the hare. All the hunt, who
+ had been moving slowly, shouted, “Stop!” calling in the hounds, while the
+ borzoi whips, with a cry of “A-tu!” galloped across the field setting the
+ borzois on the hare. The tranquil Ilágin, Nicholas, Natásha, and “Uncle”
+ flew, reckless of where and how they went, seeing only the borzois and the
+ hare and fearing only to lose sight even for an instant of the chase. The
+ hare they had started was a strong and swift one. When he jumped up he did
+ not run at once, but pricked his ears listening to the shouting and
+ trampling that resounded from all sides at once. He took a dozen bounds,
+ not very quickly, letting the borzois gain on him, and, finally having
+ chosen his direction and realized his danger, laid back his ears and
+ rushed off headlong. He had been lying in the stubble, but in front of him
+ was the autumn sowing where the ground was soft. The two borzois of the
+ huntsman who had sighted him, having been the nearest, were the first to
+ see and pursue him, but they had not gone far before Ilágin’s red-spotted
+ Erzá passed them, got within a length, flew at the hare with terrible
+ swiftness aiming at his scut, and, thinking she had seized him, rolled
+ over like a ball. The hare arched his back and bounded off yet more
+ swiftly. From behind Erzá rushed the broad-haunched, black-spotted Mílka
+ and began rapidly gaining on the hare.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Miláshka, dear!” rose Nicholas’ triumphant cry. It looked as if Mílka
+ would immediately pounce on the hare, but she overtook him and flew past.
+ The hare had squatted. Again the beautiful Erzá reached him, but when
+ close to the hare’s scut paused as if measuring the distance, so as not to
+ make a mistake this time but seize his hind leg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Erzá, darling!” Ilágin wailed in a voice unlike his own. Erzá did not
+ hearken to his appeal. At the very moment when she would have seized her
+ prey, the hare moved and darted along the balk between the winter rye and
+ the stubble. Again Erzá and Mílka were abreast, running like a pair of
+ carriage horses, and began to overtake the hare, but it was easier for the
+ hare to run on the balk and the borzois did not overtake him so quickly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Rugáy, Rugáyushka! That’s it, come on!” came a third voice just then, and
+ “Uncle’s” red borzoi, straining and curving its back, caught up with the
+ two foremost borzois, pushed ahead of them regardless of the terrible
+ strain, put on speed close to the hare, knocked it off the balk onto the
+ ryefield, again put on speed still more viciously, sinking to his knees in
+ the muddy field, and all one could see was how, muddying his back, he
+ rolled over with the hare. A ring of borzois surrounded him. A moment
+ later everyone had drawn up round the crowd of dogs. Only the delighted
+ “Uncle” dismounted, and cut off a pad, shaking the hare for the blood to
+ drip off, and anxiously glancing round with restless eyes while his arms
+ and legs twitched. He spoke without himself knowing whom to or what about.
+ “That’s it, come on! That’s a dog!... There, it has beaten them all, the
+ thousand-ruble as well as the one-ruble borzois. That’s it, come on!” said
+ he, panting and looking wrathfully around as if he were abusing someone,
+ as if they were all his enemies and had insulted him, and only now had he
+ at last succeeded in justifying himself. “There are your thousand-ruble
+ ones.... That’s it, come on!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Rugáy, here’s a pad for you!” he said, throwing down the hare’s muddy
+ pad. “You’ve deserved it, that’s it, come on!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She’d tired herself out, she’d run it down three times by herself,” said
+ Nicholas, also not listening to anyone and regardless of whether he were
+ heard or not.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what is there in running across it like that?” said Ilágin’s groom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Once she had missed it and turned it away, any mongrel could take it,”
+ Ilágin was saying at the same time, breathless from his gallop and his
+ excitement. At the same moment Natásha, without drawing breath, screamed
+ joyously, ecstatically, and so piercingly that it set everyone’s ear
+ tingling. By that shriek she expressed what the others expressed by all
+ talking at once, and it was so strange that she must herself have been
+ ashamed of so wild a cry and everyone else would have been amazed at it at
+ any other time. “Uncle” himself twisted up the hare, threw it neatly and
+ smartly across his horse’s back as if by that gesture he meant to rebuke
+ everybody, and, with an air of not wishing to speak to anyone, mounted his
+ bay and rode off. The others all followed, dispirited and shamefaced, and
+ only much later were they able to regain their former affectation of
+ indifference. For a long time they continued to look at red Rugáy who, his
+ arched back spattered with mud and clanking the ring of his leash, walked
+ along just behind “Uncle’s” horse with the serene air of a conqueror.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, I am like any other dog as long as it’s not a question of coursing.
+ But when it is, then look out!” his appearance seemed to Nicholas to be
+ saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When, much later, “Uncle” rode up to Nicholas and began talking to him, he
+ felt flattered that, after what had happened, “Uncle” deigned to speak to
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ Toward evening Ilágin took leave of Nicholas, who found that they were so
+ far from home that he accepted “Uncle’s” offer that the hunting party
+ should spend the night in his little village of Mikháylovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And if you put up at my house that will be better still. That’s it, come
+ on!” said “Uncle.” “You see it’s damp weather, and you could rest, and the
+ little countess could be driven home in a trap.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Uncle’s” offer was accepted. A huntsman was sent to Otrádnoe for a trap,
+ while Nicholas rode with Natásha and Pétya to “Uncle’s” house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some five male domestic serfs, big and little, rushed out to the front
+ porch to meet their master. A score of women serfs, old and young, as well
+ as children, popped out from the back entrance to have a look at the
+ hunters who were arriving. The presence of Natásha—a woman, a lady,
+ and on horseback—raised the curiosity of the serfs to such a degree
+ that many of them came up to her, stared her in the face, and unabashed by
+ her presence made remarks about her as though she were some prodigy on
+ show and not a human being able to hear or understand what was said about
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Arínka! Look, she sits sideways! There she sits and her skirt dangles....
+ See, she’s got a little hunting horn!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Goodness gracious! See her knife?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Isn’t she a Tartar!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How is it you didn’t go head over heels?” asked the boldest of all,
+ addressing Natásha directly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Uncle” dismounted at the porch of his little wooden house which stood in
+ the midst of an overgrown garden and, after a glance at his retainers,
+ shouted authoritatively that the superfluous ones should take themselves
+ off and that all necessary preparations should be made to receive the
+ guests and the visitors.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The serfs all dispersed. “Uncle” lifted Natásha off her horse and taking
+ her hand led her up the rickety wooden steps of the porch. The house, with
+ its bare, unplastered log walls, was not overclean—it did not seem
+ that those living in it aimed at keeping it spotless—but neither was
+ it noticeably neglected. In the entry there was a smell of fresh apples,
+ and wolf and fox skins hung about.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Uncle” led the visitors through the anteroom into a small hall with a
+ folding table and red chairs, then into the drawing room with a round
+ birchwood table and a sofa, and finally into his private room where there
+ was a tattered sofa, a worn carpet, and portraits of Suvórov, of the
+ host’s father and mother, and of himself in military uniform. The study
+ smelt strongly of tobacco and dogs. “Uncle” asked his visitors to sit down
+ and make themselves at home, and then went out of the room. Rugáy, his
+ back still muddy, came into the room and lay down on the sofa, cleaning
+ himself with his tongue and teeth. Leading from the study was a passage in
+ which a partition with ragged curtains could be seen. From behind this
+ came women’s laughter and whispers. Natásha, Nicholas, and Pétya took off
+ their wraps and sat down on the sofa. Pétya, leaning on his elbow, fell
+ asleep at once. Natásha and Nicholas were silent. Their faces glowed, they
+ were hungry and very cheerful. They looked at one another (now that the
+ hunt was over and they were in the house, Nicholas no longer considered it
+ necessary to show his manly superiority over his sister), Natásha gave him
+ a wink, and neither refrained long from bursting into a peal of ringing
+ laughter even before they had a pretext ready to account for it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After a while “Uncle” came in, in a Cossack coat, blue trousers, and small
+ top boots. And Natásha felt that this costume, the very one she had
+ regarded with surprise and amusement at Otrádnoe, was just the right thing
+ and not at all worse than a swallow-tail or frock coat. “Uncle” too was in
+ high spirits and far from being offended by the brother’s and sister’s
+ laughter (it could never enter his head that they might be laughing at his
+ way of life) he himself joined in the merriment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s right, young countess, that’s it, come on! I never saw anyone like
+ her!” said he, offering Nicholas a pipe with a long stem and, with a
+ practiced motion of three fingers, taking down another that had been cut
+ short. “She’s ridden all day like a man, and is as fresh as ever!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon after “Uncle’s” reappearance the door was opened, evidently from the
+ sound by a barefooted girl, and a stout, rosy, good-looking woman of about
+ forty, with a double chin and full red lips, entered carrying a large
+ loaded tray. With hospitable dignity and cordiality in her glance and in
+ every motion, she looked at the visitors and, with a pleasant smile, bowed
+ respectfully. In spite of her exceptional stoutness, which caused her to
+ protrude her chest and stomach and throw back her head, this woman (who
+ was “Uncle’s” housekeeper) trod very lightly. She went to the table, set
+ down the tray, and with her plump white hands deftly took from it the
+ bottles and various hors d’oeuvres and dishes and arranged them on the
+ table. When she had finished, she stepped aside and stopped at the door
+ with a smile on her face. “Here I am. I am she! Now do you understand
+ ‘Uncle’?” her expression said to Rostóv. How could one help understanding?
+ Not only Nicholas, but even Natásha understood the meaning of his puckered
+ brow and the happy complacent smile that slightly puckered his lips when
+ Anísya Fëdorovna entered. On the tray was a bottle of herb wine, different
+ kinds of vodka, pickled mushrooms, rye cakes made with buttermilk, honey
+ in the comb, still mead and sparkling mead, apples, nuts (raw and
+ roasted), and nut-and-honey sweets. Afterwards she brought a freshly
+ roasted chicken, ham, preserves made with honey, and preserves made with
+ sugar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All this was the fruit of Anísya Fëdorovna’s housekeeping, gathered and
+ prepared by her. The smell and taste of it all had a smack of Anísya
+ Fëdorovna herself: a savor of juiciness, cleanliness, whiteness, and
+ pleasant smiles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Take this, little Lady-Countess!” she kept saying, as she offered Natásha
+ first one thing and then another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha ate of everything and thought she had never seen or eaten such
+ buttermilk cakes, such aromatic jam, such honey-and-nut sweets, or such a
+ chicken anywhere. Anísya Fëdorovna left the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After supper, over their cherry brandy, Rostóv and “Uncle” talked of past
+ and future hunts, of Rugáy and Ilágin’s dogs, while Natásha sat upright on
+ the sofa and listened with sparkling eyes. She tried several times to wake
+ Pétya that he might eat something, but he only muttered incoherent words
+ without waking up. Natásha felt so lighthearted and happy in these novel
+ surroundings that she only feared the trap would come for her too soon.
+ After a casual pause, such as often occurs when receiving friends for the
+ first time in one’s own house, “Uncle,” answering a thought that was in
+ his visitors’ minds, said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This, you see, is how I am finishing my days... Death will come. That’s
+ it, come on! Nothing will remain. Then why harm anyone?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Uncle’s” face was very significant and even handsome as he said this.
+ Involuntarily Rostóv recalled all the good he had heard about him from his
+ father and the neighbors. Throughout the whole province “Uncle” had the
+ reputation of being the most honorable and disinterested of cranks. They
+ called him in to decide family disputes, chose him as executor, confided
+ secrets to him, elected him to be a justice and to other posts; but he
+ always persistently refused public appointments, passing the autumn and
+ spring in the fields on his bay gelding, sitting at home in winter, and
+ lying in his overgrown garden in summer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why don’t you enter the service, Uncle?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I did once, but gave it up. I am not fit for it. That’s it, come on! I
+ can’t make head or tail of it. That’s for you—I haven’t brains
+ enough. Now, hunting is another matter—that’s it, come on! Open the
+ door, there!” he shouted. “Why have you shut it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The door at the end of the passage led to the huntsmen’s room, as they
+ called the room for the hunt servants.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was a rapid patter of bare feet, and an unseen hand opened the door
+ into the huntsmen’s room, from which came the clear sounds of a balaláyka
+ on which someone, who was evidently a master of the art, was playing.
+ Natásha had been listening to those strains for some time and now went out
+ into the passage to hear better.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s Mítka, my coachman.... I have got him a good balaláyka. I’m fond
+ of it,” said “Uncle.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was the custom for Mítka to play the balaláyka in the huntsmen’s room
+ when “Uncle” returned from the chase. “Uncle” was fond of such music.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How good! Really very good!” said Nicholas with some unintentional
+ superciliousness, as if ashamed to confess that the sounds pleased him
+ very much.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very good?” said Natásha reproachfully, noticing her brother’s tone. “Not
+ ‘very good’—it’s simply delicious!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just as “Uncle’s” pickled mushrooms, honey, and cherry brandy had seemed
+ to her the best in the world, so also that song, at that moment, seemed to
+ her the acme of musical delight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “More, please, more!” cried Natásha at the door as soon as the balaláyka
+ ceased. Mítka tuned up afresh, and recommenced thrumming the balaláyka to
+ the air of My Lady , with trills and variations. “Uncle” sat listening,
+ slightly smiling, with his head on one side. The air was repeated a
+ hundred times. The balaláyka was retuned several times and the same notes
+ were thrummed again, but the listeners did not grow weary of it and wished
+ to hear it again and again. Anísya Fëdorovna came in and leaned her portly
+ person against the doorpost.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You like listening?” she said to Natásha, with a smile extremely like
+ “Uncle’s.” “That’s a good player of ours,” she added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He doesn’t play that part right!” said “Uncle” suddenly, with an
+ energetic gesture. “Here he ought to burst out—that’s it, come on!—ought
+ to burst out.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you play then?” asked Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Uncle” did not answer, but smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Anísya, go and see if the strings of my guitar are all right. I haven’t
+ touched it for a long time. That’s it—come on! I’ve given it up.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anísya Fëdorovna, with her light step, willingly went to fulfill her
+ errand and brought back the guitar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Without looking at anyone, “Uncle” blew the dust off it and, tapping the
+ case with his bony fingers, tuned the guitar and settled himself in his
+ armchair. He took the guitar a little above the fingerboard, arching his
+ left elbow with a somewhat theatrical gesture, and, with a wink at Anísya
+ Fëdorovna, struck a single chord, pure and sonorous, and then quietly,
+ smoothly, and confidently began playing in very slow time, not My Lady ,
+ but the well-known song: Came a maiden down the street . The tune, played
+ with precision and in exact time, began to thrill in the hearts of
+ Nicholas and Natásha, arousing in them the same kind of sober mirth as
+ radiated from Anísya Fëdorovna’s whole being. Anísya Fëdorovna flushed,
+ and drawing her kerchief over her face went laughing out of the room.
+ “Uncle” continued to play correctly, carefully, with energetic firmness,
+ looking with a changed and inspired expression at the spot where Anísya
+ Fëdorovna had just stood. Something seemed to be laughing a little on one
+ side of his face under his gray mustaches, especially as the song grew
+ brisker and the time quicker and when, here and there, as he ran his
+ fingers over the strings, something seemed to snap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lovely, lovely! Go on, Uncle, go on!” shouted Natásha as soon as he had
+ finished. She jumped up and hugged and kissed him. “Nicholas, Nicholas!”
+ she said, turning to her brother, as if asking him: “What is it moves me
+ so?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas too was greatly pleased by “Uncle’s” playing, and “Uncle” played
+ the piece over again. Anísya Fëdorovna’s smiling face reappeared in the
+ doorway and behind hers other faces...
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Fetching water clear and sweet,
+
+ Stop, dear maiden, I entreat —
+
+
+
+ 
+ played “Uncle” once more, running his fingers skillfully over the strings,
+ and then he stopped short and jerked his shoulders.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go on, Uncle dear,” Natásha wailed in an imploring tone as if her life
+ depended on it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Uncle” rose, and it was as if there were two men in him: one of them
+ smiled seriously at the merry fellow, while the merry fellow struck a
+ naïve and precise attitude preparatory to a folk dance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then, niece!” he exclaimed, waving to Natásha the hand that had just
+ struck a chord.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha threw off the shawl from her shoulders, ran forward to face
+ “Uncle,” and setting her arms akimbo also made a motion with her shoulders
+ and struck an attitude.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Where, how, and when had this young countess, educated by an émigrée 
+ French governess, imbibed from the Russian air she breathed that spirit
+ and obtained that manner which the pas de châle * would, one would have
+ supposed, long ago have effaced? But the spirit and the movements were
+ those inimitable and unteachable Russian ones that “Uncle” had expected of
+ her. As soon as she had struck her pose, and smiled triumphantly, proudly,
+ and with sly merriment, the fear that had at first seized Nicholas and the
+ others that she might not do the right thing was at an end, and they were
+ already admiring her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * The French shawl dance.
+
+
+
+ 
+ She did the right thing with such precision, such complete precision, that
+ Anísya Fëdorovna, who had at once handed her the handkerchief she needed
+ for the dance, had tears in her eyes, though she laughed as she watched
+ this slim, graceful countess, reared in silks and velvets and so different
+ from herself, who yet was able to understand all that was in Anísya and in
+ Anísya’s father and mother and aunt, and in every Russian man and woman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, little countess; that’s it—come on!” cried “Uncle,” with a
+ joyous laugh, having finished the dance. “Well done, niece! Now a fine
+ young fellow must be found as husband for you. That’s it—come on!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s chosen already,” said Nicholas smiling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh?” said “Uncle” in surprise, looking inquiringly at Natásha, who nodded
+ her head with a happy smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And such a one!” she said. But as soon as she had said it a new train of
+ thoughts and feelings arose in her. “What did Nicholas’ smile mean when he
+ said ‘chosen already’? Is he glad of it or not? It is as if he thought my
+ Bolkónski would not approve of or understand our gaiety. But he would
+ understand it all. Where is he now?” she thought, and her face suddenly
+ became serious. But this lasted only a second. “Don’t dare to think about
+ it,” she said to herself, and sat down again smilingly beside “Uncle,”
+ begging him to play something more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Uncle” played another song and a valse; then after a pause he cleared his
+ throat and sang his favorite hunting song:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As ‘twas growing dark last night
+
+ Fell the snow so soft and light... 
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Uncle” sang as peasants sing, with full and naïve conviction that the
+ whole meaning of a song lies in the words and that the tune comes of
+ itself, and that apart from the words there is no tune, which exists only
+ to give measure to the words. As a result of this the unconsidered tune,
+ like the song of a bird, was extraordinarily good. Natásha was in
+ ecstasies over “Uncle’s” singing. She resolved to give up learning the
+ harp and to play only the guitar. She asked “Uncle” for his guitar and at
+ once found the chords of the song.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After nine o’clock two traps and three mounted men, who had been sent to
+ look for them, arrived to fetch Natásha and Pétya. The count and countess
+ did not know where they were and were very anxious, said one of the men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya was carried out like a log and laid in the larger of the two traps.
+ Natásha and Nicholas got into the other. “Uncle” wrapped Natásha up warmly
+ and took leave of her with quite a new tenderness. He accompanied them on
+ foot as far as the bridge that could not be crossed, so that they had to
+ go round by the ford, and he sent huntsmen to ride in front with lanterns.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good-by, dear niece,” his voice called out of the darkness—not the
+ voice Natásha had known previously, but the one that had sung As ‘twas
+ growing dark last night. 
+
+
+
+ 
+ In the village through which they passed there were red lights and a
+ cheerful smell of smoke.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a darling Uncle is!” said Natásha, when they had come out onto the
+ highroad.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” returned Nicholas. “You’re not cold?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No. I’m quite, quite all right. I feel so comfortable!” answered Natásha,
+ almost perplexed by her feelings. They remained silent a long while. The
+ night was dark and damp. They could not see the horses, but only heard
+ them splashing through the unseen mud.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What was passing in that receptive childlike soul that so eagerly caught
+ and assimilated all the diverse impressions of life? How did they all find
+ place in her? But she was very happy. As they were nearing home she
+ suddenly struck up the air of As ‘twas growing dark last
+ night —the tune of which she had all the way been trying to get and had
+ at last caught.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Got it?” said Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What were you thinking about just now, Nicholas?” inquired Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They were fond of asking one another that question.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I?” said Nicholas, trying to remember. “Well, you see, first I thought
+ that Rugáy, the red hound, was like Uncle, and that if he were a man he
+ would always keep Uncle near him, if not for his riding, then for his
+ manner. What a good fellow Uncle is! Don’t you think so?... Well, and
+ you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I? Wait a bit, wait.... Yes, first I thought that we are driving along
+ and imagining that we are going home, but that heaven knows where we are
+ really going in the darkness, and that we shall arrive and suddenly find
+ that we are not in Otrádnoe, but in Fairyland. And then I thought... No,
+ nothing else.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know, I expect you thought of him,” said Nicholas, smiling as Natásha
+ knew by the sound of his voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No,” said Natásha, though she had in reality been thinking about Prince
+ Andrew at the same time as of the rest, and of how he would have liked
+ “Uncle.” “And then I was saying to myself all the way, ‘How well Anísya
+ carried herself, how well!’” And Nicholas heard her spontaneous, happy,
+ ringing laughter. “And do you know,” she suddenly said, “I know that I
+ shall never again be as happy and tranquil as I am now.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Rubbish, nonsense, humbug!” exclaimed Nicholas, and he thought: “How
+ charming this Natásha of mine is! I have no other friend like her and
+ never shall have. Why should she marry? We might always drive about
+ together!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a darling this Nicholas of mine is!” thought Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, there are still lights in the drawing room!” she said, pointing to
+ the windows of the house that gleamed invitingly in the moist velvety
+ darkness of the night.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ Count Ilyá Rostóv had resigned the position of Marshal of the Nobility
+ because it involved him in too much expense, but still his affairs did not
+ improve. Natásha and Nicholas often noticed their parents conferring
+ together anxiously and privately and heard suggestions of selling the fine
+ ancestral Rostóv house and estate near Moscow. It was not necessary to
+ entertain so freely as when the count had been Marshal, and life at
+ Otrádnoe was quieter than in former years, but still the enormous house
+ and its lodges were full of people and more than twenty sat down to table
+ every day. These were all their own people who had settled down in the
+ house almost as members of the family, or persons who were, it seemed,
+ obliged to live in the count’s house. Such were Dimmler the musician and
+ his wife, Vogel the dancing master and his family, Belóva, an old maiden
+ lady, an inmate of the house, and many others such as Pétya’s tutors, the
+ girls’ former governess, and other people who simply found it preferable
+ and more advantageous to live in the count’s house than at home. They had
+ not as many visitors as before, but the old habits of life without which
+ the count and countess could not conceive of existence remained unchanged.
+ There was still the hunting establishment which Nicholas had even
+ enlarged, the same fifty horses and fifteen grooms in the stables, the
+ same expensive presents and dinner parties to the whole district on name
+ days; there were still the count’s games of whist and boston, at which—spreading
+ out his cards so that everybody could see them—he let himself be
+ plundered of hundreds of rubles every day by his neighbors, who looked
+ upon an opportunity to play a rubber with Count Rostóv as a most
+ profitable source of income.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count moved in his affairs as in a huge net, trying not to believe
+ that he was entangled but becoming more and more so at every step, and
+ feeling too feeble to break the meshes or to set to work carefully and
+ patiently to disentangle them. The countess, with her loving heart, felt
+ that her children were being ruined, that it was not the count’s fault for
+ he could not help being what he was—that (though he tried to hide
+ it) he himself suffered from the consciousness of his own and his
+ children’s ruin, and she tried to find means of remedying the position.
+ From her feminine point of view she could see only one solution, namely,
+ for Nicholas to marry a rich heiress. She felt this to be their last hope
+ and that if Nicholas refused the match she had found for him, she would
+ have to abandon the hope of ever getting matters right. This match was
+ with Julie Karágina, the daughter of excellent and virtuous parents, a
+ girl the Rostóvs had known from childhood, and who had now become a
+ wealthy heiress through the death of the last of her brothers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess had written direct to Julie’s mother in Moscow suggesting a
+ marriage between their children and had received a favorable answer from
+ her. Karágina had replied that for her part she was agreeable, and
+ everything depend on her daughter’s inclination. She invited Nicholas to
+ come to Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Several times the countess, with tears in her eyes, told her son that now
+ both her daughters were settled, her only wish was to see him married. She
+ said she could lie down in her grave peacefully if that were accomplished.
+ Then she told him that she knew of a splendid girl and tried to discover
+ what he thought about marriage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At other times she praised Julie to him and advised him to go to Moscow
+ during the holidays to amuse himself. Nicholas guessed what his mother’s
+ remarks were leading to and during one of these conversations induced her
+ to speak quite frankly. She told him that her only hope of getting their
+ affairs disentangled now lay in his marrying Julie Karágina.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But, Mamma, suppose I loved a girl who has no fortune, would you expect
+ me to sacrifice my feelings and my honor for the sake of money?” he asked
+ his mother, not realizing the cruelty of his question and only wishing to
+ show his noble-mindedness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, you have not understood me,” said his mother, not knowing how to
+ justify herself. “You have not understood me, Nikólenka. It is your
+ happiness I wish for,” she added, feeling that she was telling an untruth
+ and was becoming entangled. She began to cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma, don’t cry! Only tell me that you wish it, and you know I will give
+ my life, anything, to put you at ease,” said Nicholas. “I would sacrifice
+ anything for you—even my feelings.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the countess did not want the question put like that: she did not want
+ a sacrifice from her son, she herself wished to make a sacrifice for him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, you have not understood me, don’t let us talk about it,” she replied,
+ wiping away her tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Maybe I do love a poor girl,” said Nicholas to himself. “Am I to
+ sacrifice my feelings and my honor for money? I wonder how Mamma could
+ speak so to me. Because Sónya is poor I must not love her,” he thought,
+ “must not respond to her faithful, devoted love? Yet I should certainly be
+ happier with her than with some doll-like Julie. I can always sacrifice my
+ feelings for my family’s welfare,” he said to himself, “but I can’t coerce
+ my feelings. If I love Sónya, that feeling is for me stronger and higher
+ than all else.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas did not go to Moscow, and the countess did not renew the
+ conversation with him about marriage. She saw with sorrow, and sometimes
+ with exasperation, symptoms of a growing attachment between her son and
+ the portionless Sónya. Though she blamed herself for it, she could not
+ refrain from grumbling at and worrying Sónya, often pulling her up without
+ reason, addressing her stiffly as “my dear,” and using the formal “you”
+ instead of the intimate “thou” in speaking to her. The kindhearted
+ countess was the more vexed with Sónya because that poor, dark-eyed niece
+ of hers was so meek, so kind, so devotedly grateful to her benefactors,
+ and so faithfully, unchangingly, and unselfishly in love with Nicholas,
+ that there were no grounds for finding fault with her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas was spending the last of his leave at home. A fourth letter had
+ come from Prince Andrew, from Rome, in which he wrote that he would have
+ been on his way back to Russia long ago had not his wound unexpectedly
+ reopened in the warm climate, which obliged him to defer his return till
+ the beginning of the new year. Natásha was still as much in love with her
+ betrothed, found the same comfort in that love, and was still as ready to
+ throw herself into all the pleasures of life as before; but at the end of
+ the fourth month of their separation she began to have fits of depression
+ which she could not master. She felt sorry for herself: sorry that she was
+ being wasted all this time and of no use to anyone—while she felt
+ herself so capable of loving and being loved.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Things were not cheerful in the Rostóvs’ home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ Christmas came and except for the ceremonial Mass, the solemn and
+ wearisome Christmas congratulations from neighbors and servants, and the
+ new dresses everyone put on, there were no special festivities, though the
+ calm frost of twenty degrees Réaumur, the dazzling sunshine by day, and
+ the starlight of the winter nights seemed to call for some special
+ celebration of the season.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the third day of Christmas week, after the midday dinner, all the
+ inmates of the house dispersed to various rooms. It was the dullest time
+ of the day. Nicholas, who had been visiting some neighbors that morning,
+ was asleep on the sitting-room sofa. The old count was resting in his
+ study. Sónya sat in the drawing room at the round table, copying a design
+ for embroidery. The countess was playing patience. Nastásya Ivánovna the
+ buffoon sat with a sad face at the window with two old ladies. Natásha
+ came into the room, went up to Sónya, glanced at what she was doing, and
+ then went up to her mother and stood without speaking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why are you wandering about like an outcast?” asked her mother. “What do
+ you want?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ Him ... I want him... now, this minute! I want him! ”
+ said Natásha, with glittering eyes and no sign of a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess lifted her head and looked attentively at her daughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t look at me, Mamma! Don’t look; I shall cry directly.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sit down with me a little,” said the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma, I want him . Why should I be wasted like this, Mamma?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her voice broke, tears gushed from her eyes, and she turned quickly to
+ hide them and left the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She passed into the sitting room, stood there thinking awhile, and then
+ went into the maids’ room. There an old maidservant was grumbling at a
+ young girl who stood panting, having just run in through the cold from the
+ serfs’ quarters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stop playing—there’s a time for everything,” said the old woman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let her alone, Kondrátevna,” said Natásha. “Go, Mavrúshka, go.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having released Mavrúshka, Natásha crossed the dancing hall and went to
+ the vestibule. There an old footman and two young ones were playing cards.
+ They broke off and rose as she entered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What can I do with them?” thought Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, Nikíta, please go... where can I send him?... Yes, go to the yard and
+ fetch a fowl, please, a cock, and you, Misha, bring me some oats.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just a few oats?” said Misha, cheerfully and readily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go, go quickly,” the old man urged him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And you, Theodore, get me a piece of chalk.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On her way past the butler’s pantry she told them to set a samovar, though
+ it was not at all the time for tea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Fóka, the butler, was the most ill-tempered person in the house. Natásha
+ liked to test her power over him. He distrusted the order and asked
+ whether the samovar was really wanted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh dear, what a young lady!” said Fóka, pretending to frown at Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No one in the house sent people about or gave them as much trouble as
+ Natásha did. She could not see people unconcernedly, but had to send them
+ on some errand. She seemed to be trying whether any of them would get
+ angry or sulky with her; but the serfs fulfilled no one’s orders so
+ readily as they did hers. “What can I do, where can I go?” thought she, as
+ she went slowly along the passage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nastásya Ivánovna, what sort of children shall I have?” she asked the
+ buffoon, who was coming toward her in a woman’s jacket.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, fleas, crickets, grasshoppers,” answered the buffoon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O Lord, O Lord, it’s always the same! Oh, where am I to go? What am I to
+ do with myself?” And tapping with her heels, she ran quickly upstairs to
+ see Vogel and his wife who lived on the upper story.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Two governesses were sitting with the Vogels at a table, on which were
+ plates of raisins, walnuts, and almonds. The governesses were discussing
+ whether it was cheaper to live in Moscow or Odessa. Natásha sat down,
+ listened to their talk with a serious and thoughtful air, and then got up
+ again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The island of Madagascar,” she said, “Ma-da-gas-car,” she repeated,
+ articulating each syllable distinctly, and, not replying to Madame Schoss
+ who asked her what she was saying, she went out of the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her brother Pétya was upstairs too; with the man in attendance on him he
+ was preparing fireworks to let off that night.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pétya! Pétya!” she called to him. “Carry me downstairs.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya ran up and offered her his back. She jumped on it, putting her arms
+ round his neck, and he pranced along with her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, don’t... the island of Madagascar!” she said, and jumping off his
+ back she went downstairs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having as it were reviewed her kingdom, tested her power, and made sure
+ that everyone was submissive, but that all the same it was dull, Natásha
+ betook herself to the ballroom, picked up her guitar, sat down in a dark
+ corner behind a bookcase, and began to run her fingers over the strings in
+ the bass, picking out a passage she recalled from an opera she had heard
+ in Petersburg with Prince Andrew. What she drew from the guitar would have
+ had no meaning for other listeners, but in her imagination a whole series
+ of reminiscences arose from those sounds. She sat behind the bookcase with
+ her eyes fixed on a streak of light escaping from the pantry door and
+ listened to herself and pondered. She was in a mood for brooding on the
+ past.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya passed to the pantry with a glass in her hand. Natásha glanced at
+ her and at the crack in the pantry door, and it seemed to her that she
+ remembered the light falling through that crack once before and Sónya
+ passing with a glass in her hand. “Yes it was exactly the same,” thought
+ Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya, what is this?” she cried, twanging a thick string.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, you are there!” said Sónya with a start, and came near and listened.
+ “I don’t know. A storm?” she ventured timidly, afraid of being wrong.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There! That’s just how she started and just how she came up smiling
+ timidly when all this happened before,” thought Natásha, “and in just the
+ same way I thought there was something lacking in her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, it’s the chorus from The Water-Carrier , listen!”
+ and Natásha sang the air of the chorus so that Sónya should catch it. “Where
+ were you going?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To change the water in this glass. I am just finishing the design.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You always find something to do, but I can’t,” said Natásha. “And where’s
+ Nicholas?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Asleep, I think.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya, go and wake him,” said Natásha. “Tell him I want him to come and
+ sing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She sat awhile, wondering what the meaning of it all having happened
+ before could be, and without solving this problem, or at all regretting
+ not having done so, she again passed in fancy to the time when she was
+ with him and he was looking at her with a lover’s eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, if only he would come quicker! I am so afraid it will never be! And,
+ worst of all, I am growing old—that’s the thing! There won’t then be
+ in me what there is now. But perhaps he’ll come today, will come
+ immediately. Perhaps he has come and is sitting in the drawing room.
+ Perhaps he came yesterday and I have forgotten it.” She rose, put down the
+ guitar, and went to the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the domestic circle, tutors, governesses, and guests, were already at
+ the tea table. The servants stood round the table—but Prince Andrew
+ was not there and life was going on as before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, here she is!” said the old count, when he saw Natásha enter. “Well,
+ sit down by me.” But Natásha stayed by her mother and glanced round as if
+ looking for something.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma!” she muttered, “give him to me, give him, Mamma, quickly,
+ quickly!” and she again had difficulty in repressing her sobs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She sat down at the table and listened to the conversation between the
+ elders and Nicholas, who had also come to the table. “My God, my God! The
+ same faces, the same talk, Papa holding his cup and blowing in the same
+ way!” thought Natásha, feeling with horror a sense of repulsion rising up
+ in her for the whole household, because they were always the same.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After tea, Nicholas, Sónya, and Natásha went to the sitting room, to their
+ favorite corner where their most intimate talks always began.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ “Does it ever happen to you,” said Natásha to her brother, when they
+ settled down in the sitting room, “does it ever happen to you to feel as
+ if there were nothing more to come—nothing; that everything good is
+ past? And to feel not exactly dull, but sad?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I should think so!” he replied. “I have felt like that when everything
+ was all right and everyone was cheerful. The thought has come into my mind
+ that I was already tired of it all, and that we must all die. Once in the
+ regiment I had not gone to some merrymaking where there was music... and
+ suddenly I felt so depressed...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes, I know, I know, I know!” Natásha interrupted him. “When I was
+ quite little that used to be so with me. Do you remember when I was
+ punished once about some plums? You were all dancing, and I sat sobbing in
+ the schoolroom? I shall never forget it: I felt sad and sorry for
+ everyone, for myself, and for everyone. And I was innocent—that was
+ the chief thing,” said Natásha. “Do you remember?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I remember,” answered Nicholas. “I remember that I came to you afterwards
+ and wanted to comfort you, but do you know, I felt ashamed to. We were
+ terribly absurd. I had a funny doll then and wanted to give it to you. Do
+ you remember?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And do you remember,” Natásha asked with a pensive smile, “how once,
+ long, long ago, when we were quite little, Uncle called us into the study—that
+ was in the old house—and it was dark—we went in and suddenly
+ there stood...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A Negro,” chimed in Nicholas with a smile of delight. “Of course I
+ remember. Even now I don’t know whether there really was a Negro, or if we
+ only dreamed it or were told about him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He was gray, you remember, and had white teeth, and stood and looked at
+ us....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya, do you remember?” asked Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, I do remember something too,” Sónya answered timidly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know I have asked Papa and Mamma about that Negro,” said Natásha,
+ “and they say there was no Negro at all. But you see, you remember!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Of course I do, I remember his teeth as if I had just seen them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How strange it is! It’s as if it were a dream! I like that.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And do you remember how we rolled hard-boiled eggs in the ballroom, and
+ suddenly two old women began spinning round on the carpet? Was that real
+ or not? Do you remember what fun it was?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, and you remember how Papa in his blue overcoat fired a gun in the
+ porch?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So they went through their memories, smiling with pleasure: not the sad
+ memories of old age, but poetic, youthful ones—those impressions of
+ one’s most distant past in which dreams and realities blend—and they
+ laughed with quiet enjoyment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya, as always, did not quite keep pace with them, though they shared
+ the same reminiscences.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Much that they remembered had slipped from her mind, and what she recalled
+ did not arouse the same poetic feeling as they experienced. She simply
+ enjoyed their pleasure and tried to fit in with it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She only really took part when they recalled Sónya’s first arrival. She
+ told them how afraid she had been of Nicholas because he had on a corded
+ jacket and her nurse had told her that she, too, would be sewn up with
+ cords.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I remember their telling me that you had been born under a cabbage,”
+ said Natásha, “and I remember that I dared not disbelieve it then, but
+ knew that it was not true, and I felt so uncomfortable.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While they were talking a maid thrust her head in at the other door of the
+ sitting room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They have brought the cock, Miss,” she said in a whisper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It isn’t wanted, Pólya. Tell them to take it away,” replied Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the middle of their talk in the sitting room, Dimmler came in and went
+ up to the harp that stood there in a corner. He took off its cloth
+ covering, and the harp gave out a jarring sound.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mr. Dimmler, please play my favorite nocturne by Field,” came the old
+ countess’ voice from the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dimmler struck a chord and, turning to Natásha, Nicholas, and Sónya,
+ remarked: “How quiet you young people are!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, we’re philosophizing,” said Natásha, glancing round for a moment and
+ then continuing the conversation. They were now discussing dreams.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dimmler began to play; Natásha went on tiptoe noiselessly to the table,
+ took up a candle, carried it out, and returned, seating herself quietly in
+ her former place. It was dark in the room especially where they were
+ sitting on the sofa, but through the big windows the silvery light of the
+ full moon fell on the floor. Dimmler had finished the piece but still sat
+ softly running his fingers over the strings, evidently uncertain whether
+ to stop or to play something else.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know,” said Natásha in a whisper, moving closer to Nicholas and
+ Sónya, “that when one goes on and on recalling memories, one at last
+ begins to remember what happened before one was in the world....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is metempsychosis,” said Sónya, who had always learned well, and
+ remembered everything. “The Egyptians believed that our souls have lived
+ in animals, and will go back into animals again.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I don’t believe we ever were in animals,” said Natásha, still in a
+ whisper though the music had ceased. “But I am certain that we were angels
+ somewhere there , and have been here, and that is why we remember....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “May I join you?” said Dimmler who had come up quietly, and he sat down by
+ them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If we have been angels, why have we fallen lower?” said Nicholas. “No,
+ that can’t be!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not lower, who said we were lower?... How do I know what I was before?”
+ Natásha rejoined with conviction. “The soul is immortal—well then,
+ if I shall always live I must have lived before, lived for a whole
+ eternity.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, but it is hard for us to imagine eternity,” remarked Dimmler, who
+ had joined the young folk with a mildly condescending smile but now spoke
+ as quietly and seriously as they.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why is it hard to imagine eternity?” said Natásha. “It is now today, and
+ it will be tomorrow, and always; and there was yesterday, and the day
+ before....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha! Now it’s your turn. Sing me something,” they heard the countess
+ say. “Why are you sitting there like conspirators?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma, I don’t at all want to,” replied Natásha, but all the same she
+ rose.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ None of them, not even the middle-aged Dimmler, wanted to break off their
+ conversation and quit that corner in the sitting room, but Natásha got up
+ and Nicholas sat down at the clavichord. Standing as usual in the middle
+ of the hall and choosing the place where the resonance was best, Natásha
+ began to sing her mother’s favorite song.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She had said she did not want to sing, but it was long since she had sung,
+ and long before she again sang, as she did that evening. The count, from
+ his study where he was talking to Mítenka, heard her and, like a schoolboy
+ in a hurry to run out to play, blundered in his talk while giving orders
+ to the steward, and at last stopped, while Mítenka stood in front of him
+ also listening and smiling. Nicholas did not take his eyes off his sister
+ and drew breath in time with her. Sónya, as she listened, thought of the
+ immense difference there was between herself and her friend, and how
+ impossible it was for her to be anything like as bewitching as her cousin.
+ The old countess sat with a blissful yet sad smile and with tears in her
+ eyes, occasionally shaking her head. She thought of Natásha and of her own
+ youth, and of how there was something unnatural and dreadful in this
+ impending marriage of Natásha and Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dimmler, who had seated himself beside the countess, listened with closed
+ eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, Countess,” he said at last, “that’s a European talent, she has
+ nothing to learn—what softness, tenderness, and strength....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, how afraid I am for her, how afraid I am!” said the countess, not
+ realizing to whom she was speaking. Her maternal instinct told her that
+ Natásha had too much of something, and that because of this she would not
+ be happy. Before Natásha had finished singing, fourteen-year-old Pétya
+ rushed in delightedly, to say that some mummers had arrived.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha stopped abruptly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Idiot!” she screamed at her brother and, running to a chair, threw
+ herself on it, sobbing so violently that she could not stop for a long
+ time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s nothing, Mamma, really it’s nothing; only Pétya startled me,” she
+ said, trying to smile, but her tears still flowed and sobs still choked
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The mummers (some of the house serfs) dressed up as bears, Turks,
+ innkeepers, and ladies—frightening and funny—bringing in with
+ them the cold from outside and a feeling of gaiety, crowded, at first
+ timidly, into the anteroom, then hiding behind one another they pushed
+ into the ballroom where, shyly at first and then more and more merrily and
+ heartily, they started singing, dancing, and playing Christmas games. The
+ countess, when she had identified them and laughed at their costumes, went
+ into the drawing room. The count sat in the ballroom, smiling radiantly
+ and applauding the players. The young people had disappeared.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Half an hour later there appeared among the other mummers in the ballroom
+ an old lady in a hooped skirt—this was Nicholas. A Turkish girl was
+ Pétya. A clown was Dimmler. An hussar was Natásha, and a Circassian was
+ Sónya with burnt-cork mustache and eyebrows.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the condescending surprise, nonrecognition, and praise, from those
+ who were not themselves dressed up, the young people decided that their
+ costumes were so good that they ought to be shown elsewhere.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas, who, as the roads were in splendid condition, wanted to take
+ them all for a drive in his troyka, proposed to take with them about a
+ dozen of the serf mummers and drive to “Uncle’s.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, why disturb the old fellow?” said the countess. “Besides, you
+ wouldn’t have room to turn round there. If you must go, go to the
+ Melyukóvs’.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Melyukóva was a widow, who, with her family and their tutors and
+ governesses, lived three miles from the Rostóvs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s right, my dear,” chimed in the old count, thoroughly aroused.
+ “I’ll dress up at once and go with them. I’ll make Pashette open her
+ eyes.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the countess would not agree to his going; he had had a bad leg all
+ these last days. It was decided that the count must not go, but that if
+ Louisa Ivánovna (Madame Schoss) would go with them, the young ladies might
+ go to the Melyukóvs’, Sónya, generally so timid and shy, more urgently
+ than anyone begging Louisa Ivánovna not to refuse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya’s costume was the best of all. Her mustache and eyebrows were
+ extraordinarily becoming. Everyone told her she looked very handsome, and
+ she was in a spirited and energetic mood unusual with her. Some inner
+ voice told her that now or never her fate would be decided, and in her
+ male attire she seemed quite a different person. Louisa Ivánovna consented
+ to go, and in half an hour four troyka sleighs with large and small bells,
+ their runners squeaking and whistling over the frozen snow, drove up to
+ the porch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha was foremost in setting a merry holiday tone, which, passing from
+ one to another, grew stronger and reached its climax when they all came
+ out into the frost and got into the sleighs, talking, calling to one
+ another, laughing, and shouting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Two of the troykas were the usual household sleighs, the third was the old
+ count’s with a trotter from the Orlóv stud as shaft horse, the fourth was
+ Nicholas’ own with a short shaggy black shaft horse. Nicholas, in his old
+ lady’s dress over which he had belted his hussar overcoat, stood in the
+ middle of the sleigh, reins in hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was so light that he could see the moonlight reflected from the metal
+ harness disks and from the eyes of the horses, who looked round in alarm
+ at the noisy party under the shadow of the porch roof.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha, Sónya, Madame Schoss, and two maids got into Nicholas’ sleigh;
+ Dimmler, his wife, and Pétya, into the old count’s, and the rest of the
+ mummers seated themselves in the other two sleighs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You go ahead, Zakhár!” shouted Nicholas to his father’s coachman, wishing
+ for a chance to race past him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old count’s troyka, with Dimmler and his party, started forward,
+ squeaking on its runners as though freezing to the snow, its deep-toned
+ bell clanging. The side horses, pressing against the shafts of the middle
+ horse, sank in the snow, which was dry and glittered like sugar, and threw
+ it up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas set off, following the first sleigh; behind him the others moved
+ noisily, their runners squeaking. At first they drove at a steady trot
+ along the narrow road. While they drove past the garden the shadows of the
+ bare trees often fell across the road and hid the brilliant moonlight, but
+ as soon as they were past the fence, the snowy plain bathed in moonlight
+ and motionless spread out before them glittering like diamonds and dappled
+ with bluish shadows. Bang, bang! went the first sleigh over a cradle hole
+ in the snow of the road, and each of the other sleighs jolted in the same
+ way, and rudely breaking the frost-bound stillness, the troykas began to
+ speed along the road, one after the other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A hare’s track, a lot of tracks!” rang out Natásha’s voice through the
+ frost-bound air.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How light it is, Nicholas!” came Sónya’s voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas glanced round at Sónya, and bent down to see her face closer.
+ Quite a new, sweet face with black eyebrows and mustaches peeped up at him
+ from her sable furs—so close and yet so distant—in the
+ moonlight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That used to be Sónya,” thought he, and looked at her closer and smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it, Nicholas?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing,” said he and turned again to the horses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When they came out onto the beaten highroad—polished by sleigh
+ runners and cut up by rough-shod hoofs, the marks of which were visible in
+ the moonlight—the horses began to tug at the reins of their own
+ accord and increased their pace. The near side horse, arching his head and
+ breaking into a short canter, tugged at his traces. The shaft horse swayed
+ from side to side, moving his ears as if asking: “Isn’t it time to begin
+ now?” In front, already far ahead the deep bell of the sleigh ringing
+ farther and farther off, the black horses driven by Zakhár could be
+ clearly seen against the white snow. From that sleigh one could hear the
+ shouts, laughter, and voices of the mummers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gee up, my darlings!” shouted Nicholas, pulling the reins to one side and
+ flourishing the whip.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was only by the keener wind that met them and the jerks given by the
+ side horses who pulled harder—ever increasing their gallop—that
+ one noticed how fast the troyka was flying. Nicholas looked back. With
+ screams, squeals, and waving of whips that caused even the shaft horses to
+ gallop—the other sleighs followed. The shaft horse swung steadily
+ beneath the bow over its head, with no thought of slackening pace and
+ ready to put on speed when required.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas overtook the first sleigh. They were driving downhill and coming
+ out upon a broad trodden track across a meadow, near a river.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where are we?” thought he. “It’s the Kosóy meadow, I
+ suppose. But no—this is something new I’ve never seen before. This
+ isn’t the Kosóy meadow nor the Dëmkin hill, and heaven only knows what it is!
+ It is something new and enchanted. Well, whatever it may be...” And shouting
+ to his horses, he began to pass the first sleigh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Zakhár held back his horses and turned his face, which was already covered
+ with hoarfrost to his eyebrows.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas gave the horses the rein, and Zakhár, stretching out his arms,
+ clucked his tongue and let his horses go.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, look out, master!” he cried.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Faster still the two troykas flew side by side, and faster moved the feet
+ of the galloping side horses. Nicholas began to draw ahead. Zakhár, while
+ still keeping his arms extended, raised one hand with the reins.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No you won’t, master!” he shouted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas put all his horses to a gallop and passed Zakhár. The horses
+ showered the fine dry snow on the faces of those in the sleigh—beside
+ them sounded quick ringing bells and they caught confused glimpses of
+ swiftly moving legs and the shadows of the troyka they were passing. The
+ whistling sound of the runners on the snow and the voices of girls
+ shrieking were heard from different sides.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again checking his horses, Nicholas looked around him. They were still
+ surrounded by the magic plain bathed in moonlight and spangled with stars.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Zakhár is shouting that I should turn to the left, but why to the left?”
+ thought Nicholas. “Are we getting to the Melyukóvs’? Is this Melyukóvka?
+ Heaven only knows where we are going, and heaven knows what is happening
+ to us—but it is very strange and pleasant whatever it is.” And he
+ looked round in the sleigh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look, his mustache and eyelashes are all white!” said one of the strange,
+ pretty, unfamiliar people—the one with fine eyebrows and mustache.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I think this used to be Natásha,” thought Nicholas, “and that was Madame
+ Schoss, but perhaps it’s not, and this Circassian with the mustache I
+ don’t know, but I love her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aren’t you cold?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They did not answer but began to laugh. Dimmler from the sleigh behind
+ shouted something—probably something funny—but they could not
+ make out what he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes!” some voices answered, laughing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But here was a fairy forest with black moving shadows, and a glitter of
+ diamonds and a flight of marble steps and the silver roofs of fairy
+ buildings and the shrill yells of some animals. And if this is really
+ Melyukóvka, it is still stranger that we drove heaven knows where and have
+ come to Melyukóvka,” thought Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It really was Melyukóvka, and maids and footmen with merry faces came
+ running, out to the porch carrying candles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who is it?” asked someone in the porch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The mummers from the count’s. I know by the horses,” replied some voices.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ Pelagéya Danílovna Melyukóva, a broadly built, energetic woman wearing
+ spectacles, sat in the drawing room in a loose dress, surrounded by her
+ daughters whom she was trying to keep from feeling dull. They were quietly
+ dropping melted wax into snow and looking at the shadows the wax figures
+ would throw on the wall, when they heard the steps and voices of new
+ arrivals in the vestibule.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hussars, ladies, witches, clowns, and bears, after clearing their throats
+ and wiping the hoarfrost from their faces in the vestibule, came into the
+ ballroom where candles were hurriedly lighted. The clown—Dimmler—and
+ the lady—Nicholas—started a dance. Surrounded by the screaming
+ children the mummers, covering their faces and disguising their voices,
+ bowed to their hostess and arranged themselves about the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear me! there’s no recognizing them! And Natásha! See whom she looks
+ like! She really reminds me of somebody. But Herr Dimmler—isn’t he
+ good! I didn’t know him! And how he dances. Dear me, there’s a Circassian.
+ Really, how becoming it is to dear Sónya. And who is that? Well, you have
+ cheered us up! Nikíta and Vanya—clear away the tables! And we were
+ sitting so quietly. Ha, ha, ha!... The hussar, the hussar! Just like a
+ boy! And the legs!... I can’t look at him...” different voices were
+ saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha, the young Melyukóvs’ favorite, disappeared with them into the
+ back rooms where a cork and various dressing gowns and male garments were
+ called for and received from the footman by bare girlish arms from behind
+ the door. Ten minutes later, all the young Melyukóvs joined the mummers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pelagéya Danílovna, having given orders to clear the rooms for the
+ visitors and arranged about refreshments for the gentry and the serfs,
+ went about among the mummers without removing her spectacles, peering into
+ their faces with a suppressed smile and failing to recognize any of them.
+ It was not merely Dimmler and the Rostóvs she failed to recognize, she did
+ not even recognize her own daughters, or her late husband’s, dressing
+ gowns and uniforms, which they had put on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And who is this?” she asked her governess, peering into the face of her
+ own daughter dressed up as a Kazán-Tartar. “I suppose it is one of the
+ Rostóvs! Well, Mr. Hussar, and what regiment do you serve in?” she asked
+ Natásha. “Here, hand some fruit jelly to the Turk!” she ordered the butler
+ who was handing things round. “That’s not forbidden by his law.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sometimes, as she looked at the strange but amusing capers cut by the
+ dancers, who—having decided once for all that being disguised, no
+ one would recognize them—were not at all shy, Pelagéya Danílovna hid
+ her face in her handkerchief, and her whole stout body shook with
+ irrepressible, kindly, elderly laughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My little Sásha! Look at Sásha!” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After Russian country dances and chorus dances, Pelagéya Danílovna made
+ the serfs and gentry join in one large circle: a ring, a string, and a
+ silver ruble were fetched and they all played games together.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In an hour, all the costumes were crumpled and disordered. The corked
+ eyebrows and mustaches were smeared over the perspiring, flushed, and
+ merry faces. Pelagéya Danílovna began to recognize the mummers, admired
+ their cleverly contrived costumes, and particularly how they suited the
+ young ladies, and she thanked them all for having entertained her so well.
+ The visitors were invited to supper in the drawing room, and the serfs had
+ something served to them in the ballroom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now to tell one’s fortune in the empty bathhouse is frightening!” said an
+ old maid who lived with the Melyukóvs, during supper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why?” said the eldest Melyukóv girl.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You wouldn’t go, it takes courage....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll go,” said Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tell what happened to the young lady!” said the second Melyukóv girl.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well,” began the old maid, “a young lady once went out, took a cock, laid
+ the table for two, all properly, and sat down. After sitting a while, she
+ suddenly hears someone coming... a sleigh drives up with harness bells;
+ she hears him coming! He comes in, just in the shape of a man, like an
+ officer—comes in and sits down to table with her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah! ah!” screamed Natásha, rolling her eyes with horror.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes? And how... did he speak?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, like a man. Everything quite all right, and he began persuading her;
+ and she should have kept him talking till cockcrow, but she got
+ frightened, just got frightened and hid her face in her hands. Then he
+ caught her up. It was lucky the maids ran in just then....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, why frighten them?” said Pelagéya Danílovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma, you used to try your fate yourself...” said her daughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And how does one do it in a barn?” inquired Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, say you went to the barn now, and listened. It depends on what you
+ hear; hammering and knocking—that’s bad; but a sound of shifting
+ grain is good and one sometimes hears that, too.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma, tell us what happened to you in the barn.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pelagéya Danílovna smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, I’ve forgotten...” she replied. “But none of you would go?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I will; Pelagéya Danílovna, let me! I’ll go,” said Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, why not, if you’re not afraid?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Louisa Ivánovna, may I?” asked Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whether they were playing the ring and string game or the ruble game or
+ talking as now, Nicholas did not leave Sónya’s side, and gazed at her with
+ quite new eyes. It seemed to him that it was only today, thanks to that
+ burnt-cork mustache, that he had fully learned to know her. And really,
+ that evening, Sónya was brighter, more animated, and prettier than
+ Nicholas had ever seen her before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So that’s what she is like; what a fool I have been!” he thought gazing
+ at her sparkling eyes, and under the mustache a happy rapturous smile
+ dimpled her cheeks, a smile he had never seen before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’m not afraid of anything,” said Sónya. “May I go at once?” She got up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They told her where the barn was and how she should stand and listen, and
+ they handed her a fur cloak. She threw this over her head and shoulders
+ and glanced at Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a darling that girl is!” thought he. “And what have I been thinking
+ of till now?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya went out into the passage to go to the barn. Nicholas went hastily
+ to the front porch, saying he felt too hot. The crowd of people really had
+ made the house stuffy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Outside, there was the same cold stillness and the same moon, but even
+ brighter than before. The light was so strong and the snow sparkled with
+ so many stars that one did not wish to look up at the sky and the real
+ stars were unnoticed. The sky was black and dreary, while the earth was
+ gay.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am a fool, a fool! what have I been waiting for?” thought Nicholas, and
+ running out from the porch he went round the corner of the house and along
+ the path that led to the back porch. He knew Sónya would pass that way.
+ Halfway lay some snow-covered piles of firewood and across and along them
+ a network of shadows from the bare old lime trees fell on the snow and on
+ the path. This path led to the barn. The log walls of the barn and its
+ snow-covered roof, that looked as if hewn out of some precious stone,
+ sparkled in the moonlight. A tree in the garden snapped with the frost,
+ and then all was again perfectly silent. His bosom seemed to inhale not
+ air but the strength of eternal youth and gladness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the back porch came the sound of feet descending the steps, the
+ bottom step upon which snow had fallen gave a ringing creak and he heard
+ the voice of an old maidservant saying, “Straight, straight, along the
+ path, Miss. Only, don’t look back.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am not afraid,” answered Sónya’s voice, and along the path toward
+ Nicholas came the crunching, whistling sound of Sónya’s feet in her thin
+ shoes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya came along, wrapped in her cloak. She was only a couple of paces
+ away when she saw him, and to her too he was not the Nicholas she had
+ known and always slightly feared. He was in a woman’s dress, with tousled
+ hair and a happy smile new to Sónya. She ran rapidly toward him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Quite different and yet the same,” thought Nicholas, looking at her face
+ all lit up by the moonlight. He slipped his arms under the cloak that
+ covered her head, embraced her, pressed her to him, and kissed her on the
+ lips that wore a mustache and had a smell of burnt cork. Sónya kissed him
+ full on the lips, and disengaging her little hands pressed them to his
+ cheeks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya!... Nicholas!”... was all they said. They ran to the barn and then
+ back again, re-entering, he by the front and she by the back porch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ When they all drove back from Pelagéya Danílovna’s, Natásha, who always
+ saw and noticed everything, arranged that she and Madame Schoss should go
+ back in the sleigh with Dimmler, and Sónya with Nicholas and the maids.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the way back Nicholas drove at a steady pace instead of racing and kept
+ peering by that fantastic all-transforming light into Sónya’s face and
+ searching beneath the eyebrows and mustache for his former and his present
+ Sónya from whom he had resolved never to be parted again. He looked and
+ recognizing in her both the old and the new Sónya, and being reminded by
+ the smell of burnt cork of the sensation of her kiss, inhaled the frosty
+ air with a full breast and, looking at the ground flying beneath him and
+ at the sparkling sky, felt himself again in fairyland.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya, is it well with thee? ” he asked from time to time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes!” she replied. “And with thee? ”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When halfway home Nicholas handed the reins to the coachman and ran for a
+ moment to Natásha’s sleigh and stood on its wing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha!” he whispered in French, “do you know I have made up my mind
+ about Sónya?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have you told her?” asked Natásha, suddenly beaming all over with joy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, how strange you are with that mustache and those eyebrows!... Natásha—are
+ you glad?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am so glad, so glad! I was beginning to be vexed with you. I did not
+ tell you, but you have been treating her badly. What a heart she has,
+ Nicholas! I am horrid sometimes, but I was ashamed to be happy while Sónya
+ was not,” continued Natásha. “Now I am so glad! Well, run back to her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, wait a bit.... Oh, how funny you look!” cried Nicholas, peering into
+ her face and finding in his sister too something new, unusual, and
+ bewitchingly tender that he had not seen in her before. “Natásha, it’s
+ magical, isn’t it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” she replied. “You have done splendidly.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Had I seen her before as she is now,” thought Nicholas, “I should long
+ ago have asked her what to do and have done whatever she told me, and all
+ would have been well.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So you are glad and I have done right?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, quite right! I had a quarrel with Mamma some time ago about it. Mamma
+ said she was angling for you. How could she say such a thing! I nearly
+ stormed at Mamma. I will never let anyone say anything bad of Sónya, for
+ there is nothing but good in her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then it’s all right?” said Nicholas, again scrutinizing the expression of
+ his sister’s face to see if she was in earnest. Then he jumped down and,
+ his boots scrunching the snow, ran back to his sleigh. The same happy,
+ smiling Circassian, with mustache and beaming eyes looking up from under a
+ sable hood, was still sitting there, and that Circassian was Sónya, and
+ that Sónya was certainly his future happy and loving wife.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When they reached home and had told their mother how they had spent the
+ evening at the Melyukóvs’, the girls went to their bedroom. When they had
+ undressed, but without washing off the cork mustaches, they sat a long
+ time talking of their happiness. They talked of how they would live when
+ they were married, how their husbands would be friends, and how happy they
+ would be. On Natásha’s table stood two looking glasses which Dunyásha had
+ prepared beforehand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Only when will all that be? I am afraid never.... It would be too good!”
+ said Natásha, rising and going to the looking glasses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sit down, Natásha; perhaps you’ll see him,” said Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha lit the candles, one on each side of one of the looking glasses,
+ and sat down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I see someone with a mustache,” said Natásha, seeing her own face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You mustn’t laugh, Miss,” said Dunyásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With Sónya’s help and the maid’s, Natásha got the glass she held into the
+ right position opposite the other; her face assumed a serious expression
+ and she sat silent. She sat a long time looking at the receding line of
+ candles reflected in the glasses and expecting (from tales she had heard)
+ to see a coffin, or him , Prince Andrew, in that last dim, indistinctly
+ outlined square. But ready as she was to take the smallest speck for the
+ image of a man or of a coffin, she saw nothing. She began blinking rapidly
+ and moved away from the looking glasses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why is it others see things and I don’t?” she said. “You sit down now,
+ Sónya. You absolutely must, tonight! Do it for me.... Today I feel so
+ frightened!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya sat down before the glasses, got the right position, and began
+ looking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, Miss Sónya is sure to see something,” whispered Dunyásha; “while you
+ do nothing but laugh.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya heard this and Natásha’s whisper:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know she will. She saw something last year.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For about three minutes all were silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Of course she will!” whispered Natásha, but did not finish... suddenly
+ Sónya pushed away the glass she was holding and covered her eyes with her
+ hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, Natásha!” she cried.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Did you see? Did you? What was it?” exclaimed Natásha, holding up the
+ looking glass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya had not seen anything, she was just wanting to blink and to get up
+ when she heard Natásha say, “Of course she will!” She did not wish to
+ disappoint either Dunyásha or Natásha, but it was hard to sit still. She
+ did not herself know how or why the exclamation escaped her when she
+ covered her eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You saw him?” urged Natásha, seizing her hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes. Wait a bit... I... saw him,” Sónya could not help saying, not yet
+ knowing whom Natásha meant by him , Nicholas or Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But why shouldn’t I say I saw something? Others do see! Besides who can
+ tell whether I saw anything or not?” flashed through Sónya’s mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I saw him,” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How? Standing or lying?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I saw... At first there was nothing, then I saw him lying down.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Andrew lying? Is he ill?” asked Natásha, her frightened eyes fixed on her
+ friend.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, on the contrary, on the contrary! His face was cheerful, and he
+ turned to me.” And when saying this she herself fancied she had really
+ seen what she described.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, and then, Sónya?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “After that, I could not make out what there was; something blue and
+ red....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya! When will he come back? When shall I see him! O, God, how afraid I
+ am for him and for myself and about everything!...” Natásha began, and
+ without replying to Sónya’s words of comfort she got into bed, and long
+ after her candle was out lay open-eyed and motionless, gazing at the
+ moonlight through the frosty windowpanes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ Soon after the Christmas holidays Nicholas told his mother of his love for
+ Sónya and of his firm resolve to marry her. The countess, who had long
+ noticed what was going on between them and was expecting this declaration,
+ listened to him in silence and then told her son that he might marry whom
+ he pleased, but that neither she nor his father would give their blessing
+ to such a marriage. Nicholas, for the first time, felt that his mother was
+ displeased with him and that, despite her love for him, she would not give
+ way. Coldly, without looking at her son, she sent for her husband and,
+ when he came, tried briefly and coldly to inform him of the facts, in her
+ son’s presence, but unable to restrain herself she burst into tears of
+ vexation and left the room. The old count began irresolutely to admonish
+ Nicholas and beg him to abandon his purpose. Nicholas replied that he
+ could not go back on his word, and his father, sighing and evidently
+ disconcerted, very soon became silent and went in to the countess. In all
+ his encounters with his son, the count was always conscious of his own
+ guilt toward him for having wasted the family fortune, and so he could not
+ be angry with him for refusing to marry an heiress and choosing the
+ dowerless Sónya. On this occasion, he was only more vividly conscious of
+ the fact that if his affairs had not been in disorder, no better wife for
+ Nicholas than Sónya could have been wished for, and that no one but
+ himself with his Mítenka and his uncomfortable habits was to blame for the
+ condition of the family finances.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The father and mother did not speak of the matter to their son again, but
+ a few days later the countess sent for Sónya and, with a cruelty neither
+ of them expected, reproached her niece for trying to catch Nicholas and
+ for ingratitude. Sónya listened silently with downcast eyes to the
+ countess’ cruel words, without understanding what was required of her. She
+ was ready to sacrifice everything for her benefactors. Self-sacrifice was
+ her most cherished idea but in this case she could not see what she ought
+ to sacrifice, or for whom. She could not help loving the countess and the
+ whole Rostóv family, but neither could she help loving Nicholas and
+ knowing that his happiness depended on that love. She was silent and sad
+ and did not reply. Nicholas felt the situation to be intolerable and went
+ to have an explanation with his mother. He first implored her to forgive
+ him and Sónya and consent to their marriage, then he threatened that if
+ she molested Sónya he would at once marry her secretly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess, with a coldness her son had never seen in her before,
+ replied that he was of age, that Prince Andrew was marrying without his
+ father’s consent, and he could do the same, but that she would never
+ receive that intriguer as her daughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Exploding at the word intriguer , Nicholas, raising his voice, told his
+ mother he had never expected her to try to force him to sell his feelings,
+ but if that were so, he would say for the last time.... But he had no time
+ to utter the decisive word which the expression of his face caused his
+ mother to await with terror, and which would perhaps have forever remained
+ a cruel memory to them both. He had not time to say it, for Natásha, with
+ a pale and set face, entered the room from the door at which she had been
+ listening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nicholas, you are talking nonsense! Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet, I tell
+ you!...” she almost screamed, so as to drown his voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma darling, it’s not at all so... my poor, sweet darling,” she said to
+ her mother, who conscious that they had been on the brink of a rupture
+ gazed at her son with terror, but in the obstinacy and excitement of the
+ conflict could not and would not give way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nicholas, I’ll explain to you. Go away! Listen, Mamma darling,” said
+ Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her words were incoherent, but they attained the purpose at which she was
+ aiming.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess, sobbing heavily, hid her face on her daughter’s breast,
+ while Nicholas rose, clutching his head, and left the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha set to work to effect a reconciliation, and so far succeeded that
+ Nicholas received a promise from his mother that Sónya should not be
+ troubled, while he on his side promised not to undertake anything without
+ his parents’ knowledge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Firmly resolved, after putting his affairs in order in the regiment, to
+ retire from the army and return and marry Sónya, Nicholas, serious,
+ sorrowful, and at variance with his parents, but, as it seemed to him,
+ passionately in love, left at the beginning of January to rejoin his
+ regiment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After Nicholas had gone things in the Rostóv household were more
+ depressing than ever, and the countess fell ill from mental agitation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya was unhappy at the separation from Nicholas and still more so on
+ account of the hostile tone the countess could not help adopting toward
+ her. The count was more perturbed than ever by the condition of his
+ affairs, which called for some decisive action. Their town house and
+ estate near Moscow had inevitably to be sold, and for this they had to go
+ to Moscow. But the countess’ health obliged them to delay their departure
+ from day to day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha, who had borne the first period of separation from her betrothed
+ lightly and even cheerfully, now grew more agitated and impatient every
+ day. The thought that her best days, which she would have employed in
+ loving him, were being vainly wasted, with no advantage to anyone,
+ tormented her incessantly. His letters for the most part irritated her. It
+ hurt her to think that while she lived only in the thought of him, he was
+ living a real life, seeing new places and new people that interested him.
+ The more interesting his letters were the more vexed she felt. Her letters
+ to him, far from giving her any comfort, seemed to her a wearisome and
+ artificial obligation. She could not write, because she could not conceive
+ the possibility of expressing sincerely in a letter even a thousandth part
+ of what she expressed by voice, smile, and glance. She wrote to him
+ formal, monotonous, and dry letters, to which she attached no importance
+ herself, and in the rough copies of which the countess corrected her
+ mistakes in spelling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was still no improvement in the countess’ health, but it was
+ impossible to defer the journey to Moscow any longer. Natásha’s trousseau
+ had to be ordered and the house sold. Moreover, Prince Andrew was expected
+ in Moscow, where old Prince Bolkónski was spending the winter, and Natásha
+ felt sure he had already arrived.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So the countess remained in the country, and the count, taking Sónya and
+ Natásha with him, went to Moscow at the end of January.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK EIGHT: 1811 - 12
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ After Prince Andrew’s engagement to Natásha, Pierre without any apparent
+ cause suddenly felt it impossible to go on living as before. Firmly
+ convinced as he was of the truths revealed to him by his benefactor, and
+ happy as he had been in perfecting his inner man, to which he had devoted
+ himself with such ardor—all the zest of such a life vanished after
+ the engagement of Andrew and Natásha and the death of Joseph Alexéevich,
+ the news of which reached him almost at the same time. Only the skeleton
+ of life remained: his house, a brilliant wife who now enjoyed the favors
+ of a very important personage, acquaintance with all Petersburg, and his
+ court service with its dull formalities. And this life suddenly seemed to
+ Pierre unexpectedly loathsome. He ceased keeping a diary, avoided the
+ company of the Brothers, began going to the club again, drank a great
+ deal, and came once more in touch with the bachelor sets, leading such a
+ life that the Countess Hélène thought it necessary to speak severely to
+ him about it. Pierre felt that she was right, and to avoid compromising
+ her went away to Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In Moscow as soon as he entered his huge house in which the faded and
+ fading princesses still lived, with its enormous retinue; as soon as,
+ driving through the town, he saw the Iberian shrine with innumerable
+ tapers burning before the golden covers of the icons, the Krémlin Square
+ with its snow undisturbed by vehicles, the sleigh drivers and hovels of
+ the Sívtsev Vrazhók, those old Moscovites who desired nothing, hurried
+ nowhere, and were ending their days leisurely; when he saw those old
+ Moscow ladies, the Moscow balls, and the English Club, he felt himself at
+ home in a quiet haven. In Moscow he felt at peace, at home, warm and dirty
+ as in an old dressing gown.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Moscow society, from the old women down to the children, received Pierre
+ like a long-expected guest whose place was always ready awaiting him. For
+ Moscow society Pierre was the nicest, kindest, most intellectual,
+ merriest, and most magnanimous of cranks, a heedless, genial nobleman of
+ the old Russian type. His purse was always empty because it was open to
+ everyone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Benefit performances, poor pictures, statues, benevolent societies, gypsy
+ choirs, schools, subscription dinners, sprees, Freemasons, churches, and
+ books—no one and nothing met with a refusal from him, and had it not
+ been for two friends who had borrowed large sums from him and taken him
+ under their protection, he would have given everything away. There was
+ never a dinner or soiree at the club without him. As soon as he sank into
+ his place on the sofa after two bottles of Margaux he was surrounded, and
+ talking, disputing, and joking began. When there were quarrels, his kindly
+ smile and well-timed jests reconciled the antagonists. The Masonic dinners
+ were dull and dreary when he was not there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When after a bachelor supper he rose with his amiable and kindly smile,
+ yielding to the entreaties of the festive company to drive off somewhere
+ with them, shouts of delight and triumph arose among the young men. At
+ balls he danced if a partner was needed. Young ladies, married and
+ unmarried, liked him because without making love to any of them, he was
+ equally amiable to all, especially after supper. “Il est charmant; il n’a
+ pas de sexe,” * they said of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “He is charming; he has no sex.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was one of those retired gentlemen-in-waiting of whom there were
+ hundreds good-humoredly ending their days in Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ How horrified he would have been seven years before, when he first arrived
+ from abroad, had he been told that there was no need for him to seek or
+ plan anything, that his rut had long been shaped, eternally predetermined,
+ and that wriggle as he might, he would be what all in his position were.
+ He could not have believed it! Had he not at one time longed with all his
+ heart to establish a republic in Russia; then himself to be a Napoleon;
+ then to be a philosopher; and then a strategist and the conqueror of
+ Napoleon? Had he not seen the possibility of, and passionately desired,
+ the regeneration of the sinful human race, and his own progress to the
+ highest degree of perfection? Had he not established schools and hospitals
+ and liberated his serfs?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But instead of all that—here he was, the wealthy husband of an
+ unfaithful wife, a retired gentleman-in-waiting, fond of eating and
+ drinking and, as he unbuttoned his waistcoat, of abusing the government a
+ bit, a member of the Moscow English Club, and a universal favorite in
+ Moscow society. For a long time he could not reconcile himself to the idea
+ that he was one of those same retired Moscow gentlemen-in-waiting he had
+ so despised seven years before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sometimes he consoled himself with the thought that he was only living
+ this life temporarily; but then he was shocked by the thought of how many,
+ like himself, had entered that life and that club temporarily, with all
+ their teeth and hair, and had only left it when not a single tooth or hair
+ remained.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In moments of pride, when he thought of his position it seemed to him that
+ he was quite different and distinct from those other retired
+ gentlemen-in-waiting he had formerly despised: they were empty, stupid,
+ contented fellows, satisfied with their position, “while I am still
+ discontented and want to do something for mankind. But perhaps all these
+ comrades of mine struggled just like me and sought something new, a path
+ in life of their own, and like me were brought by force of circumstances,
+ society, and race—by that elemental force against which man is
+ powerless—to the condition I am in,” said he to himself in moments
+ of humility; and after living some time in Moscow he no longer despised,
+ but began to grow fond of, to respect, and to pity his comrades in
+ destiny, as he pitied himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre no longer suffered moments of despair, hypochondria, and disgust
+ with life, but the malady that had formerly found expression in such acute
+ attacks was driven inwards and never left him for a moment. “What for?
+ Why? What is going on in the world?” he would ask himself in perplexity
+ several times a day, involuntarily beginning to reflect anew on the
+ meaning of the phenomena of life; but knowing by experience that there
+ were no answers to these questions he made haste to turn away from them,
+ and took up a book, or hurried off to the club or to Apollón
+ Nikoláevich’s, to exchange the gossip of the town.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hélène, who has never cared for anything but her own body and is one of
+ the stupidest women in the world,” thought Pierre, “is regarded by people
+ as the acme of intelligence and refinement, and they pay homage to her.
+ Napoleon Bonaparte was despised by all as long as he was great, but now
+ that he has become a wretched comedian the Emperor Francis wants to offer
+ him his daughter in an illegal marriage. The Spaniards, through the
+ Catholic clergy, offer praise to God for their victory over the French on
+ the fourteenth of June, and the French, also through the Catholic clergy,
+ offer praise because on that same fourteenth of June they defeated the
+ Spaniards. My brother Masons swear by the blood that they are ready to
+ sacrifice everything for their neighbor, but they do not give a ruble each
+ to the collections for the poor, and they intrigue, the Astraea Lodge
+ against the Manna Seekers, and fuss about an authentic Scotch carpet and a
+ charter that nobody needs, and the meaning of which the very man who wrote
+ it does not understand. We all profess the Christian law of forgiveness of
+ injuries and love of our neighbors, the law in honor of which we have
+ built in Moscow forty times forty churches—but yesterday a deserter
+ was knouted to death and a minister of that same law of love and
+ forgiveness, a priest, gave the soldier a cross to kiss before his
+ execution.” So thought Pierre, and the whole of this general deception
+ which everyone accepts, accustomed as he was to it, astonished him each
+ time as if it were something new. “I understand the deception and
+ confusion,” he thought, “but how am I to tell them all that I see? I have
+ tried, and have always found that they too in the depths of their souls
+ understand it as I do, and only try not to see it. So it appears that it
+ must be so! But I—what is to become of me?” thought he. He had the
+ unfortunate capacity many men, especially Russians, have of seeing and
+ believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil
+ and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to take a serious part in it.
+ Every sphere of work was connected, in his eyes, with evil and deception.
+ Whatever he tried to be, whatever he engaged in, the evil and falsehood of
+ it repulsed him and blocked every path of activity. Yet he had to live and
+ to find occupation. It was too dreadful to be under the burden of these
+ insoluble problems, so he abandoned himself to any distraction in order to
+ forget them. He frequented every kind of society, drank much, bought
+ pictures, engaged in building, and above all—read.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He read, and read everything that came to hand. On coming home, while his
+ valets were still taking off his things, he picked up a book and began to
+ read. From reading he passed to sleeping, from sleeping to gossip in
+ drawing rooms of the club, from gossip to carousals and women; from
+ carousals back to gossip, reading, and wine. Drinking became more and more
+ a physical and also a moral necessity. Though the doctors warned him that
+ with his corpulence wine was dangerous for him, he drank a great deal. He
+ was only quite at ease when having poured several glasses of wine
+ mechanically into his large mouth he felt a pleasant warmth in his body,
+ an amiability toward all his fellows, and a readiness to respond
+ superficially to every idea without probing it deeply. Only after emptying
+ a bottle or two did he feel dimly that the terribly tangled skein of life
+ which previously had terrified him was not as dreadful as he had thought.
+ He was always conscious of some aspect of that skein, as with a buzzing in
+ his head after dinner or supper he chatted or listened to conversation or
+ read. But under the influence of wine he said to himself: “It doesn’t
+ matter. I’ll get it unraveled. I have a solution ready, but have no time
+ now—I’ll think it all out later on!” But the later on never came.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the morning, on an empty stomach, all the old questions appeared as
+ insoluble and terrible as ever, and Pierre hastily picked up a book, and
+ if anyone came to see him he was glad.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sometimes he remembered how he had heard that soldiers in war when
+ entrenched under the enemy’s fire, if they have nothing to do, try hard to
+ find some occupation the more easily to bear the danger. To Pierre all men
+ seemed like those soldiers, seeking refuge from life: some in ambition,
+ some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in toys, some in
+ horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine, and some in
+ governmental affairs. “Nothing is trivial, and nothing is important, it’s
+ all the same—only to save oneself from it as best one can,” thought
+ Pierre. “Only not to see it , that dreadful it! ”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ At the beginning of winter Prince Nicholas Bolkónski and his daughter
+ moved to Moscow. At that time enthusiasm for the Emperor Alexander’s
+ regime had weakened and a patriotic and anti-French tendency prevailed
+ there, and this, together with his past and his intellect and his
+ originality, at once made Prince Nicholas Bolkónski an object of
+ particular respect to the Moscovites and the center of the Moscow
+ opposition to the government.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The prince had aged very much that year. He showed marked signs of
+ senility by a tendency to fall asleep, forgetfulness of quite recent
+ events, remembrance of remote ones, and the childish vanity with which he
+ accepted the role of head of the Moscow opposition. In spite of this the
+ old man inspired in all his visitors alike a feeling of respectful
+ veneration—especially of an evening when he came in to tea in his
+ old-fashioned coat and powdered wig and, aroused by anyone, told his
+ abrupt stories of the past, or uttered yet more abrupt and scathing
+ criticisms of the present. For them all, that old-fashioned house with its
+ gigantic mirrors, pre-Revolution furniture, powdered footmen, and the
+ stern shrewd old man (himself a relic of the past century) with his gentle
+ daughter and the pretty Frenchwoman who were reverently devoted to him
+ presented a majestic and agreeable spectacle. But the visitors did not
+ reflect that besides the couple of hours during which they saw their host,
+ there were also twenty-two hours in the day during which the private and
+ intimate life of the house continued.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Latterly that private life had become very trying for Princess Mary. There
+ in Moscow she was deprived of her greatest pleasures—talks with the
+ pilgrims and the solitude which refreshed her at Bald Hills—and she
+ had none of the advantages and pleasures of city life. She did not go out
+ into society; everyone knew that her father would not let her go anywhere
+ without him, and his failing health prevented his going out himself, so
+ that she was not invited to dinners and evening parties. She had quite
+ abandoned the hope of getting married. She saw the coldness and
+ malevolence with which the old prince received and dismissed the young
+ men, possible suitors, who sometimes appeared at their house. She had no
+ friends: during this visit to Moscow she had been disappointed in the two
+ who had been nearest to her. Mademoiselle Bourienne, with whom she had
+ never been able to be quite frank, had now become unpleasant to her, and
+ for various reasons Princess Mary avoided her. Julie, with whom she had
+ corresponded for the last five years, was in Moscow, but proved to be
+ quite alien to her when they met. Just then Julie, who by the death of her
+ brothers had become one of the richest heiresses in Moscow, was in the
+ full whirl of society pleasures. She was surrounded by young men who, she
+ fancied, had suddenly learned to appreciate her worth. Julie was at that
+ stage in the life of a society woman when she feels that her last chance
+ of marrying has come and that her fate must be decided now or never. On
+ Thursdays Princess Mary remembered with a mournful smile that she now had
+ no one to write to, since Julie—whose presence gave her no pleasure
+ was here and they met every week. Like the old émigré who declined to
+ marry the lady with whom he had spent his evenings for years, she
+ regretted Julie’s presence and having no one to write to. In Moscow
+ Princess Mary had no one to talk to, no one to whom to confide her sorrow,
+ and much sorrow fell to her lot just then. The time for Prince Andrew’s
+ return and marriage was approaching, but his request to her to prepare his
+ father for it had not been carried out; in fact, it seemed as if matters
+ were quite hopeless, for at every mention of the young Countess Rostóva
+ the old prince (who apart from that was usually in a bad temper) lost
+ control of himself. Another lately added sorrow arose from the lessons she
+ gave her six year-old nephew. To her consternation she detected in herself
+ in relation to little Nicholas some symptoms of her father’s irritability.
+ However often she told herself that she must not get irritable when
+ teaching her nephew, almost every time that, pointer in hand, she sat down
+ to show him the French alphabet, she so longed to pour her own knowledge
+ quickly and easily into the child—who was already afraid that Auntie
+ might at any moment get angry—that at his slightest inattention she
+ trembled, became flustered and heated, raised her voice, and sometimes
+ pulled him by the arm and put him in the corner. Having put him in the
+ corner she would herself begin to cry over her cruel, evil nature, and
+ little Nicholas, following her example, would sob, and without permission
+ would leave his corner, come to her, pull her wet hands from her face, and
+ comfort her. But what distressed the princess most of all was her father’s
+ irritability, which was always directed against her and had of late
+ amounted to cruelty. Had he forced her to prostrate herself to the ground
+ all night, had he beaten her or made her fetch wood or water, it would
+ never have entered her mind to think her position hard; but this loving
+ despot—the more cruel because he loved her and for that reason
+ tormented himself and her—knew how not merely to hurt and humiliate
+ her deliberately, but to show her that she was always to blame for
+ everything. Of late he had exhibited a new trait that tormented Princess
+ Mary more than anything else; this was his ever-increasing intimacy with
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne. The idea that at the first moment of receiving the
+ news of his son’s intentions had occurred to him in jest—that if
+ Andrew got married he himself would marry Bourienne—had evidently
+ pleased him, and latterly he had persistently, and as it seemed to
+ Princess Mary merely to offend her, shown special endearments to the
+ companion and expressed his dissatisfaction with his daughter by
+ demonstrations of love of Bourienne.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One day in Moscow in Princess Mary’s presence (she thought her father did
+ it purposely when she was there) the old prince kissed Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne’s hand and, drawing her to him, embraced her affectionately.
+ Princess Mary flushed and ran out of the room. A few minutes later
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne came into Princess Mary’s room smiling and making
+ cheerful remarks in her agreeable voice. Princess Mary hastily wiped away
+ her tears, went resolutely up to Mademoiselle Bourienne, and evidently
+ unconscious of what she was doing began shouting in angry haste at the
+ Frenchwoman, her voice breaking: “It’s horrible, vile, inhuman, to take
+ advantage of the weakness...” She did not finish. “Leave my room,” she
+ exclaimed, and burst into sobs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day the prince did not say a word to his daughter, but she noticed
+ that at dinner he gave orders that Mademoiselle Bourienne should be served
+ first. After dinner, when the footman handed coffee and from habit began
+ with the princess, the prince suddenly grew furious, threw his stick at
+ Philip, and instantly gave instructions to have him conscripted for the
+ army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He doesn’t obey... I said it twice... and he doesn’t obey! She is the
+ first person in this house; she’s my best friend,” cried the prince. “And
+ if you allow yourself,” he screamed in a fury, addressing Princess Mary
+ for the first time, “to forget yourself again before her as you dared to
+ do yesterday, I will show you who is master in this house. Go! Don’t let
+ me set eyes on you; beg her pardon!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary asked Mademoiselle Bourienne’s pardon, and also her father’s
+ pardon for herself and for Philip the footman, who had begged for her
+ intervention.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At such moments something like a pride of sacrifice gathered in her soul.
+ And suddenly that father whom she had judged would look for his spectacles
+ in her presence, fumbling near them and not seeing them, or would forget
+ something that had just occurred, or take a false step with his failing
+ legs and turn to see if anyone had noticed his feebleness, or, worst of
+ all, at dinner when there were no visitors to excite him would suddenly
+ fall asleep, letting his napkin drop and his shaking head sink over his
+ plate. “He is old and feeble, and I dare to condemn him!” she thought at
+ such moments, with a feeling of revulsion against herself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ In 1811 there was living in Moscow a French doctor—Métivier—who
+ had rapidly become the fashion. He was enormously tall, handsome, amiable
+ as Frenchmen are, and was, as all Moscow said, an extraordinarily clever
+ doctor. He was received in the best houses not merely as a doctor, but as
+ an equal.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Nicholas had always ridiculed medicine, but latterly on
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne’s advice had allowed this doctor to visit him and
+ had grown accustomed to him. Métivier came to see the prince about twice a
+ week.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On December 6—St. Nicholas’ Day and the prince’s name day—all
+ Moscow came to the prince’s front door but he gave orders to admit no one
+ and to invite to dinner only a small number, a list of whom he gave to
+ Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Métivier, who came in the morning with his felicitations, considered it
+ proper in his quality of doctor de forcer la consigne , * as he told
+ Princess Mary, and went in to see the prince. It happened that on that
+ morning of his name day the prince was in one of his worst moods. He had
+ been going about the house all the morning finding fault with everyone and
+ pretending not to understand what was said to him and not to be understood
+ himself. Princess Mary well knew this mood of quiet absorbed
+ querulousness, which generally culminated in a burst of rage, and she went
+ about all that morning as though facing a cocked and loaded gun and
+ awaited the inevitable explosion. Until the doctor’s arrival the morning
+ had passed off safely. After admitting the doctor, Princess Mary sat down
+ with a book in the drawing room near the door through which she could hear
+ all that passed in the study.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * To force the guard.
+
+
+
+ 
+ At first she heard only Métivier’s voice, then her father’s, then both
+ voices began speaking at the same time, the door was flung open, and on
+ the threshold appeared the handsome figure of the terrified Métivier with
+ his shock of black hair, and the prince in his dressing gown and fez, his
+ face distorted with fury and the pupils of his eyes rolled downwards.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You don’t understand?” shouted the prince, “but I do!
+ French spy, slave of Buonaparte, spy, get out of my house! Be off, I tell
+ you...” and he slammed the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Métivier, shrugging his shoulders, went up to Mademoiselle Bourienne who
+ at the sound of shouting had run in from an adjoining room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The prince is not very well: bile and rush of blood to the head. Keep
+ calm, I will call again tomorrow,” said Métivier; and putting his fingers
+ to his lips he hastened away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Through the study door came the sound of slippered feet and the cry:
+ “Spies, traitors, traitors everywhere! Not a moment’s peace in my own
+ house!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After Métivier’s departure the old prince called his daughter in, and the
+ whole weight of his wrath fell on her. She was to blame that a spy had
+ been admitted. Had he not told her, yes, told her to make a list, and not
+ to admit anyone who was not on that list? Then why was that scoundrel
+ admitted? She was the cause of it all. With her, he said, he could not
+ have a moment’s peace and could not die quietly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, ma’am! We must part, we must part! Understand that, understand it! I
+ cannot endure any more,” he said, and left the room. Then, as if afraid
+ she might find some means of consolation, he returned and trying to appear
+ calm added: “And don’t imagine I have said this in a moment of anger. I am
+ calm. I have thought it over, and it will be carried out—we must
+ part; so find some place for yourself....” But he could not restrain
+ himself and with the virulence of which only one who loves is capable,
+ evidently suffering himself, he shook his fists at her and screamed:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If only some fool would marry her!” Then he slammed the door, sent for
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne, and subsided into his study.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At two o’clock the six chosen guests assembled for dinner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These guests—the famous Count Rostopchín, Prince Lopukhín with his
+ nephew, General Chatróv an old war comrade of the prince’s, and of the
+ younger generation Pierre and Borís Drubetskóy—awaited the prince in
+ the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís, who had come to Moscow on leave a few days before, had been anxious
+ to be presented to Prince Nicholas Bolkónski, and had contrived to
+ ingratiate himself so well that the old prince in his case made an
+ exception to the rule of not receiving bachelors in his house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The prince’s house did not belong to what is known as fashionable
+ society , but his little circle—though not much talked about in
+ town—was one it was more flattering to be received in than any other.
+ Borís had realized this the week before when the commander in chief in his
+ presence invited Rostopchín to dinner on St. Nicholas’ Day, and Rostopchín
+ had replied that he could not come:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On that day I always go to pay my devotions to the relics of Prince
+ Nicholas Bolkónski.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, yes, yes!” replied the commander in chief. “How is he?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The small group that assembled before dinner in the lofty old-fashioned
+ drawing room with its old furniture resembled the solemn gathering of a
+ court of justice. All were silent or talked in low tones. Prince Nicholas
+ came in serious and taciturn. Princess Mary seemed even quieter and more
+ diffident than usual. The guests were reluctant to address her, feeling
+ that she was in no mood for their conversation. Count Rostopchín alone
+ kept the conversation going, now relating the latest town news, and now
+ the latest political gossip.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lopukhín and the old general occasionally took part in the conversation.
+ Prince Bolkónski listened as a presiding judge receives a report, only now
+ and then, silently or by a brief word, showing that he took heed of what
+ was being reported to him. The tone of the conversation was such as
+ indicated that no one approved of what was being done in the political
+ world. Incidents were related evidently confirming the opinion that
+ everything was going from bad to worse, but whether telling a story or
+ giving an opinion the speaker always stopped, or was stopped, at the point
+ beyond which his criticism might touch the sovereign himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At dinner the talk turned on the latest political news: Napoleon’s seizure
+ of the Duke of Oldenburg’s territory, and the Russian Note, hostile to
+ Napoleon, which had been sent to all the European courts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bonaparte treats Europe as a pirate does a captured vessel,” said Count
+ Rostopchín, repeating a phrase he had uttered several times before. “One
+ only wonders at the long-suffering or blindness of the crowned heads. Now
+ the Pope’s turn has come and Bonaparte doesn’t scruple to depose the head
+ of the Catholic Church—yet all keep silent! Our sovereign alone has
+ protested against the seizure of the Duke of Oldenburg’s territory, and
+ even...” Count Rostopchín paused, feeling that he had reached the limit
+ beyond which censure was impossible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Other territories have been offered in exchange for the Duchy of
+ Oldenburg,” said Prince Bolkónski. “He shifts the Dukes about as I might
+ move my serfs from Bald Hills to Boguchárovo or my Ryazán estates.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Duke of Oldenburg bears his misfortunes with admirable strength of
+ character and resignation,” remarked Borís, joining in respectfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He said this because on his journey from Petersburg he had had the honor
+ of being presented to the Duke. Prince Bolkónski glanced at the young man
+ as if about to say something in reply, but changed his mind, evidently
+ considering him too young.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have read our protests about the Oldenburg affair and was surprised how
+ badly the Note was worded,” remarked Count Rostopchín in the casual tone
+ of a man dealing with a subject quite familiar to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked at Rostopchín with naïve astonishment, not understanding why
+ he should be disturbed by the bad composition of the Note.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Does it matter, Count, how the Note is worded,” he asked, “so long as its
+ substance is forcible?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear fellow, with our five hundred thousand troops it should be easy
+ to have a good style,” returned Count Rostopchín.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre now understood the count’s dissatisfaction with the wording of the
+ Note.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One would have thought quill drivers enough had sprung up,” remarked the
+ old prince. “There in Petersburg they are always writing—not notes
+ only but even new laws. My Andrew there has written a whole volume of laws
+ for Russia. Nowadays they are always writing!” and he laughed unnaturally.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was a momentary pause in the conversation; the old general cleared
+ his throat to draw attention.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Did you hear of the last event at the review in Petersburg? The figure
+ cut by the new French ambassador.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh? Yes, I heard something: he said something awkward in His Majesty’s
+ presence.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “His Majesty drew attention to the Grenadier division and to the march
+ past,” continued the general, “and it seems the ambassador took no notice
+ and allowed himself to reply that: ‘We in France pay no attention to such
+ trifles!’ The Emperor did not condescend to reply. At the next review,
+ they say, the Emperor did not once deign to address him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All were silent. On this fact relating to the Emperor personally, it was
+ impossible to pass any judgment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Impudent fellows!” said the prince. “You know Métivier? I turned him out
+ of my house this morning. He was here; they admitted him in spite of my
+ request that they should let no one in,” he went on, glancing angrily at
+ his daughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And he narrated his whole conversation with the French doctor and the
+ reasons that convinced him that Métivier was a spy. Though these reasons
+ were very insufficient and obscure, no one made any rejoinder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the roast, champagne was served. The guests rose to congratulate the
+ old prince. Princess Mary, too, went round to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He gave her a cold, angry look and offered her his wrinkled, clean-shaven
+ cheek to kiss. The whole expression of his face told her that he had not
+ forgotten the morning’s talk, that his decision remained in force, and
+ only the presence of visitors hindered his speaking of it to her now.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When they went into the drawing room where coffee was served, the old men
+ sat together.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Nicholas grew more animated and expressed his views on the
+ impending war.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He said that our wars with Bonaparte would be disastrous so long as we
+ sought alliances with the Germans and thrust ourselves into European
+ affairs, into which we had been drawn by the Peace of Tilsit. “We ought
+ not to fight either for or against Austria. Our political interests are
+ all in the East, and in regard to Bonaparte the only thing is to have an
+ armed frontier and a firm policy, and he will never dare to cross the
+ Russian frontier, as was the case in 1807!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How can we fight the French, Prince?” said Count Rostopchín. “Can we arm
+ ourselves against our teachers and divinities? Look at our youths, look at
+ our ladies! The French are our Gods: Paris is our Kingdom of Heaven.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He began speaking louder, evidently to be heard by everyone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “French dresses, French ideas, French feelings! There now, you turned
+ Métivier out by the scruff of his neck because he is a Frenchman and a
+ scoundrel, but our ladies crawl after him on their knees. I went to a
+ party last night, and there out of five ladies three were Roman Catholics
+ and had the Pope’s indulgence for doing woolwork on Sundays. And they
+ themselves sit there nearly naked, like the signboards at our Public Baths
+ if I may say so. Ah, when one looks at our young people, Prince, one would
+ like to take Peter the Great’s old cudgel out of the museum and belabor
+ them in the Russian way till all the nonsense jumps out of them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All were silent. The old prince looked at Rostopchín with a smile and
+ wagged his head approvingly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, good-by, your excellency, keep well!” said Rostopchín, getting up
+ with characteristic briskness and holding out his hand to the prince.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good-by, my dear fellow.... His words are music, I never tire of hearing
+ him!” said the old prince, keeping hold of the hand and offering his cheek
+ to be kissed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Following Rostopchín’s example the others also rose.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ Princess Mary as she sat listening to the old men’s talk and faultfinding,
+ understood nothing of what she heard; she only wondered whether the guests
+ had all observed her father’s hostile attitude toward her. She did not
+ even notice the special attentions and amiabilities shown her during
+ dinner by Borís Drubetskóy, who was visiting them for the third time
+ already.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary turned with absent-minded questioning look to Pierre, who
+ hat in hand and with a smile on his face was the last of the guests to
+ approach her after the old prince had gone out and they were left alone in
+ the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “May I stay a little longer?” he said, letting his stout body sink into an
+ armchair beside her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes,” she answered. “You noticed nothing?” her look asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was in an agreeable after-dinner mood. He looked straight before
+ him and smiled quietly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have you known that young man long, Princess?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Drubetskóy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, not long....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you like him?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, he is an agreeable young man.... Why do you ask me that?” said
+ Princess Mary, still thinking of that morning’s conversation with her
+ father.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Because I have noticed that when a young man comes on leave from
+ Petersburg to Moscow it is usually with the object of marrying an
+ heiress.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You have observed that?” said Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” returned Pierre with a smile, “and this young man now manages
+ matters so that where there is a wealthy heiress there he is too. I can
+ read him like a book. At present he is hesitating whom to lay siege to—you
+ or Mademoiselle Julie Karágina. He is very attentive to her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He visits them?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, very often. And do you know the new way of courting?” said Pierre
+ with an amused smile, evidently in that cheerful mood of good humored
+ raillery for which he so often reproached himself in his diary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No,” replied Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To please Moscow girls nowadays one has to be melancholy. He is very
+ melancholy with Mademoiselle Karágina,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Really?” asked Princess Mary, looking into Pierre’s kindly face and still
+ thinking of her own sorrow. “It would be a relief,” thought she, “if I
+ ventured to confide what I am feeling to someone. I should like to tell
+ everything to Pierre. He is kind and generous. It would be a relief. He
+ would give me advice.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Would you marry him?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, my God, Count, there are moments when I would marry anybody!” she
+ cried suddenly to her own surprise and with tears in her voice. “Ah, how
+ bitter it is to love someone near to you and to feel that...” she went on
+ in a trembling voice, “that you can do nothing for him but grieve him, and
+ to know that you cannot alter this. Then there is only one thing left—to
+ go away, but where could I go?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is wrong? What is it, Princess?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But without finishing what she was saying, Princess Mary burst into tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know what is the matter with me today. Don’t take any notice—forget
+ what I have said!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre’s gaiety vanished completely. He anxiously questioned the princess,
+ asked her to speak out fully and confide her grief to him; but she only
+ repeated that she begged him to forget what she had said, that she did not
+ remember what she had said, and that she had no trouble except the one he
+ knew of—that Prince Andrew’s marriage threatened to cause a rupture
+ between father and son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have you any news of the Rostóvs?” she asked, to change the subject. “I
+ was told they are coming soon. I am also expecting Andrew any day. I
+ should like them to meet here.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And how does he now regard the matter?” asked Pierre, referring to the
+ old prince.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary shook her head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is to be done? In a few months the year will be up. The thing is
+ impossible. I only wish I could spare my brother the first moments. I wish
+ they would come sooner. I hope to be friends with her. You have known them
+ a long time,” said Princess Mary. “Tell me honestly the whole truth: what
+ sort of girl is she, and what do you think of her?—The real truth,
+ because you know Andrew is risking so much doing this against his father’s
+ will that I should like to know....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ An undefined instinct told Pierre that these explanations, and repeated
+ requests to be told the whole truth , expressed ill-will on the princess’
+ part toward her future sister-in-law and a wish that he should disapprove
+ of Andrew’s choice; but in reply he said what he felt rather than what he
+ thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know how to answer your question,” he said, blushing without
+ knowing why. “I really don’t know what sort of girl she is; I can’t
+ analyze her at all. She is enchanting, but what makes her so I don’t know.
+ That is all one can say about her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary sighed, and the expression on her face said: “Yes, that’s
+ what I expected and feared.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is she clever?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre considered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I think not,” he said, “and yet—yes. She does not deign to be
+ clever.... Oh no, she is simply enchanting, and that is all.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary again shook her head disapprovingly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, I so long to like her! Tell her so if you see her before I do.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I hear they are expected very soon,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary told Pierre of her plan to become intimate with her future
+ sister-in-law as soon as the Rostóvs arrived and to try to accustom the
+ old prince to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ Borís had not succeeded in making a wealthy match in Petersburg, so with
+ the same object in view he came to Moscow. There he wavered between the
+ two richest heiresses, Julie and Princess Mary. Though Princess Mary
+ despite her plainness seemed to him more attractive than Julie, he,
+ without knowing why, felt awkward about paying court to her. When they had
+ last met on the old prince’s name day, she had answered at random all his
+ attempts to talk sentimentally, evidently not listening to what he was
+ saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Julie on the contrary accepted his attentions readily, though in a manner
+ peculiar to herself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She was twenty-seven. After the death of her brothers she had become very
+ wealthy. She was by now decidedly plain, but thought herself not merely as
+ good-looking as before but even far more attractive. She was confirmed in
+ this delusion by the fact that she had become a very wealthy heiress and
+ also by the fact that the older she grew the less dangerous she became to
+ men, and the more freely they could associate with her and avail
+ themselves of her suppers, soirees, and the animated company that
+ assembled at her house, without incurring any obligation. A man who would
+ have been afraid ten years before of going every day to the house when
+ there was a girl of seventeen there, for fear of compromising her and
+ committing himself, would now go boldly every day and treat her not as a
+ marriageable girl but as a sexless acquaintance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That winter the Karágins’ house was the most agreeable and hospitable in
+ Moscow. In addition to the formal evening and dinner parties, a large
+ company, chiefly of men, gathered there every day, supping at midnight and
+ staying till three in the morning. Julie never missed a ball, a promenade,
+ or a play. Her dresses were always of the latest fashion. But in spite of
+ that she seemed to be disillusioned about everything and told everyone
+ that she did not believe either in friendship or in love, or any of the
+ joys of life, and expected peace only “yonder.” She adopted the tone of
+ one who has suffered a great disappointment, like a girl who has either
+ lost the man she loved or been cruelly deceived by him. Though nothing of
+ the kind had happened to her she was regarded in that light, and had even
+ herself come to believe that she had suffered much in life. This
+ melancholy, which did not prevent her amusing herself, did not hinder the
+ young people who came to her house from passing the time pleasantly. Every
+ visitor who came to the house paid his tribute to the melancholy mood of
+ the hostess, and then amused himself with society gossip, dancing,
+ intellectual games, and bouts rimés , which were in vogue at the Karágins’.
+ Only a few of these young men, among them Borís, entered more deeply into
+ Julie’s melancholy, and with these she had prolonged conversations in
+ private on the vanity of all worldly things, and to them she showed her
+ albums filled with mournful sketches, maxims, and verses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To Borís, Julie was particularly gracious: she regretted his early
+ disillusionment with life, offered him such consolation of friendship as
+ she who had herself suffered so much could render, and showed him her
+ album. Borís sketched two trees in the album and wrote: “Rustic trees,
+ your dark branches shed gloom and melancholy upon me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On another page he drew a tomb, and wrote:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ La mort est secourable et la mort est tranquille.
+
+ Ah! contre les douleurs il n’y a pas d’autre asile. *
+
+
+
+ 
+ * Death gives relief and death is peaceful.
+
+ Ah! from suffering there is no other refuge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Julie said this was charming
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There is something so enchanting in the smile of melancholy,” she said to
+ Borís, repeating word for word a passage she had copied from a book. “It
+ is a ray of light in the darkness, a shade between sadness and despair,
+ showing the possibility of consolation.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In reply Borís wrote these lines:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Aliment de poison d’une âme trop sensible,
+
+ Toi, sans qui le bonheur me serait impossible,
+
+ Tendre mélancholie, ah, viens me consoler,
+
+ Viens calmer les tourments de ma sombre retraite,
+
+ Et mêle une douceur secrète
+
+ A ces pleurs que je sens couler. *
+
+
+
+ 
+ *Poisonous nourishment of a too sensitive soul,
+
+ Thou, without whom happiness would for me be impossible,
+
+ Tender melancholy, ah, come to console me,
+
+ Come to calm the torments of my gloomy retreat,
+
+ And mingle a secret sweetness
+
+ With these tears that I feel to be flowing.
+
+
+
+ 
+ For Borís, Julie played most doleful nocturnes on her harp. Borís read
+ Poor Liza aloud to her, and more than once interrupted the reading
+ because of the emotions that choked him. Meeting at large gatherings Julie
+ and Borís looked on one another as the only souls who understood one
+ another in a world of indifferent people.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Mikháylovna, who often visited the Karágins, while playing cards with
+ the mother made careful inquiries as to Julie’s dowry (she was to have two
+ estates in Pénza and the Nizhegórod forests). Anna Mikháylovna regarded
+ the refined sadness that united her son to the wealthy Julie with emotion,
+ and resignation to the Divine will.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are always charming and melancholy, my dear Julie,” she said to the
+ daughter. “Borís says his soul finds repose at your house. He has suffered
+ so many disappointments and is so sensitive,” said she to the mother. “Ah,
+ my dear, I can’t tell you how fond I have grown of Julie latterly,” she
+ said to her son. “But who could help loving her? She is an angelic being!
+ Ah, Borís, Borís!”—she paused. “And how I pity her mother,” she went
+ on; “today she showed me her accounts and letters from Pénza (they have
+ enormous estates there), and she, poor thing, has no one to help her, and
+ they do cheat her so!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís smiled almost imperceptibly while listening to his mother. He
+ laughed blandly at her naïve diplomacy but listened to what she had to
+ say, and sometimes questioned her carefully about the Pénza and Nizhegórod
+ estates.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Julie had long been expecting a proposal from her melancholy adorer and
+ was ready to accept it; but some secret feeling of repulsion for her, for
+ her passionate desire to get married, for her artificiality, and a feeling
+ of horror at renouncing the possibility of real love still restrained
+ Borís. His leave was expiring. He spent every day and whole days at the
+ Karágins’, and every day on thinking the matter over told himself that he
+ would propose tomorrow. But in Julie’s presence, looking at her red face
+ and chin (nearly always powdered), her moist eyes, and her expression of
+ continual readiness to pass at once from melancholy to an unnatural
+ rapture of married bliss, Borís could not utter the decisive words, though
+ in imagination he had long regarded himself as the possessor of those
+ Pénza and Nizhegórod estates and had apportioned the use of the income
+ from them. Julie saw Borís’ indecision, and sometimes the thought occurred
+ to her that she was repulsive to him, but her feminine self-deception
+ immediately supplied her with consolation, and she told herself that he
+ was only shy from love. Her melancholy, however, began to turn to
+ irritability, and not long before Borís’ departure she formed a definite
+ plan of action. Just as Borís’ leave of absence was expiring, Anatole
+ Kurágin made his appearance in Moscow, and of course in the Karágins’
+ drawing room, and Julie, suddenly abandoning her melancholy, became
+ cheerful and very attentive to Kurágin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear,” said Anna Mikháylovna to her son, “I know from a reliable
+ source that Prince Vasíli has sent his son to Moscow to get him married to
+ Julie. I am so fond of Julie that I should be sorry for her. What do you
+ think of it, my dear?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The idea of being made a fool of and of having thrown away that whole
+ month of arduous melancholy service to Julie, and of seeing all the
+ revenue from the Pénza estates which he had already mentally apportioned
+ and put to proper use fall into the hands of another, and especially into
+ the hands of that idiot Anatole, pained Borís. He drove to the Karágins’
+ with the firm intention of proposing. Julie met him in a gay, careless
+ manner, spoke casually of how she had enjoyed yesterday’s ball, and asked
+ when he was leaving. Though Borís had come intentionally to speak of his
+ love and therefore meant to be tender, he began speaking irritably of
+ feminine inconstancy, of how easily women can turn from sadness to joy,
+ and how their moods depend solely on who happens to be paying court to
+ them. Julie was offended and replied that it was true that a woman needs
+ variety, and the same thing over and over again would weary anyone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then I should advise you...” Borís began, wishing to sting her; but at
+ that instant the galling thought occurred to him that he might have to
+ leave Moscow without having accomplished his aim, and have vainly wasted
+ his efforts—which was a thing he never allowed to happen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He checked himself in the middle of the sentence, lowered his eyes to
+ avoid seeing her unpleasantly irritated and irresolute face, and said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I did not come here at all to quarrel with you. On the contrary...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He glanced at her to make sure that he might go on. Her irritability had
+ suddenly quite vanished, and her anxious, imploring eyes were fixed on him
+ with greedy expectation. “I can always arrange so as not to see her
+ often,” thought Borís. “The affair has been begun and must be finished!”
+ He blushed hotly, raised his eyes to hers, and said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know my feelings for you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was no need to say more: Julie’s face shone with triumph and
+ self-satisfaction; but she forced Borís to say all that is said on such
+ occasions—that he loved her and had never loved any other woman more
+ than her. She knew that for the Pénza estates and Nizhegórod forests she
+ could demand this, and she received what she demanded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The affianced couple, no longer alluding to trees that shed gloom and
+ melancholy upon them, planned the arrangements of a splendid house in
+ Petersburg, paid calls, and prepared everything for a brilliant wedding.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ At the end of January old Count Rostóv went to Moscow with Natásha and
+ Sónya. The countess was still unwell and unable to travel but it was
+ impossible to wait for her recovery. Prince Andrew was expected in Moscow
+ any day, the trousseau had to be ordered and the estate near Moscow had to
+ be sold, besides which the opportunity of presenting his future
+ daughter-in-law to old Prince Bolkónski while he was in Moscow could not
+ be missed. The Rostóvs’ Moscow house had not been heated that winter and,
+ as they had come only for a short time and the countess was not with them,
+ the count decided to stay with Márya Dmítrievna Akhrosímova, who had long
+ been pressing her hospitality on them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Late one evening the Rostóvs’ four sleighs drove into Márya Dmítrievna’s
+ courtyard in the old Konyúsheny street. Márya Dmítrievna lived alone. She
+ had already married off her daughter, and her sons were all in the
+ service.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She held herself as erect, told everyone her opinion as candidly, loudly,
+ and bluntly as ever, and her whole bearing seemed a reproach to others for
+ any weakness, passion, or temptation—the possibility of which she
+ did not admit. From early in the morning, wearing a dressing jacket, she
+ attended to her household affairs, and then she drove out: on holy days to
+ church and after the service to jails and prisons on affairs of which she
+ never spoke to anyone. On ordinary days, after dressing, she received
+ petitioners of various classes, of whom there were always some. Then she
+ had dinner, a substantial and appetizing meal at which there were always
+ three or four guests; after dinner she played a game of boston, and at
+ night she had the newspapers or a new book read to her while she knitted.
+ She rarely made an exception and went out to pay visits, and then only to
+ the most important persons in the town.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She had not yet gone to bed when the Rostóvs arrived and the pulley of the
+ hall door squeaked from the cold as it let in the Rostóvs and their
+ servants. Márya Dmítrievna, with her spectacles hanging down on her nose
+ and her head flung back, stood in the hall doorway looking with a stern,
+ grim face at the new arrivals. One might have thought she was angry with
+ the travelers and would immediately turn them out, had she not at the same
+ time been giving careful instructions to the servants for the
+ accommodation of the visitors and their belongings.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The count’s things? Bring them here,” she said, pointing to the
+ portmanteaus and not greeting anyone. “The young ladies’? There to the
+ left. Now what are you dawdling for?” she cried to the maids. “Get the
+ samovar ready!... You’ve grown plumper and prettier,” she remarked,
+ drawing Natásha (whose cheeks were glowing from the cold) to her by the
+ hood. “Foo! You are cold! Now take off your things, quick!” she shouted to
+ the count who was going to kiss her hand. “You’re half frozen, I’m sure!
+ Bring some rum for tea!... Bonjour , Sónya dear!” she added, turning to
+ Sónya and indicating by this French greeting her slightly contemptuous
+ though affectionate attitude toward her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When they came in to tea, having taken off their outdoor things and tidied
+ themselves up after their journey, Márya Dmítrievna kissed them all in due
+ order.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’m heartily glad you have come and are staying with me. It was high
+ time,” she said, giving Natásha a significant look. “The old man is here
+ and his son’s expected any day. You’ll have to make his acquaintance. But
+ we’ll speak of that later on,” she added, glancing at Sónya with a look
+ that showed she did not want to speak of it in her presence. “Now listen,”
+ she said to the count. “What do you want tomorrow? Whom will you send for?
+ Shinshín?” she crooked one of her fingers. “The sniveling Anna
+ Mikháylovna? That’s two. She’s here with her son. The son is getting
+ married! Then Bezúkhov, eh? He is here too, with his wife. He ran away
+ from her and she came galloping after him. He dined with me on Wednesday.
+ As for them”—and she pointed to the girls—“tomorrow I’ll take
+ them first to the Iberian shrine of the Mother of God, and then we’ll
+ drive to the Super-Rogue’s. I suppose you’ll have everything new. Don’t
+ judge by me: sleeves nowadays are this size! The other day young Princess
+ Irína Vasílevna came to see me; she was an awful sight—looked as if
+ she had put two barrels on her arms. You know not a day passes now without
+ some new fashion.... And what have you to do yourself?” she asked the
+ count sternly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One thing has come on top of another: her rags to buy, and now a
+ purchaser has turned up for the Moscow estate and for the house. If you
+ will be so kind, I’ll fix a time and go down to the estate just for a day,
+ and leave my lassies with you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right. All right. They’ll be safe with me, as safe as in Chancery!
+ I’ll take them where they must go, scold them a bit, and pet them a bit,”
+ said Márya Dmítrievna, touching her goddaughter and favorite, Natásha, on
+ the cheek with her large hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next morning Márya Dmítrievna took the young ladies to the Iberian shrine
+ of the Mother of God and to Madame Suppert-Roguet, who was so afraid of
+ Márya Dmítrievna that she always let her have costumes at a loss merely to
+ get rid of her. Márya Dmítrievna ordered almost the whole trousseau. When
+ they got home she turned everybody out of the room except Natásha, and
+ then called her pet to her armchair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, now we’ll talk. I congratulate you on your betrothed. You’ve hooked
+ a fine fellow! I am glad for your sake and I’ve known him since he was so
+ high.” She held her hand a couple of feet from the ground. Natásha blushed
+ happily. “I like him and all his family. Now listen! You know that old
+ Prince Nicholas much dislikes his son’s marrying. The old fellow’s
+ crotchety! Of course Prince Andrew is not a child and can shift without
+ him, but it’s not nice to enter a family against a father’s will. One
+ wants to do it peacefully and lovingly. You’re a clever girl and you’ll
+ know how to manage. Be kind, and use your wits. Then all will be well.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha remained silent, from shyness Márya Dmítrievna supposed, but
+ really because she disliked anyone interfering in what touched her love of
+ Prince Andrew, which seemed to her so apart from all human affairs that no
+ one could understand it. She loved and knew Prince Andrew, he loved her
+ only, and was to come one of these days and take her. She wanted nothing
+ more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see I have known him a long time and am also fond of Mary, your
+ future sister-in-law. ‘Husbands’ sisters bring up blisters,’ but this one
+ wouldn’t hurt a fly. She has asked me to bring you two together. Tomorrow
+ you’ll go with your father to see her. Be very nice and affectionate to
+ her: you’re younger than she. When he comes, he’ll find you already know
+ his sister and father and are liked by them. Am I right or not? Won’t that
+ be best?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, it will,” Natásha answered reluctantly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ Next day, by Márya Dmítrievna’s advice, Count Rostóv took Natásha to call
+ on Prince Nicholas Bolkónski. The count did not set out cheerfully on this
+ visit, at heart he felt afraid. He well remembered the last interview he
+ had had with the old prince at the time of the enrollment, when in reply
+ to an invitation to dinner he had had to listen to an angry reprimand for
+ not having provided his full quota of men. Natásha, on the other hand,
+ having put on her best gown, was in the highest spirits. “They can’t help
+ liking me,” she thought. “Everybody always has liked me, and I am so
+ willing to do anything they wish, so ready to be fond of him—for
+ being his father—and of her—for being his sister—that
+ there is no reason for them not to like me....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They drove up to the gloomy old house on the Vozdvízhenka and entered the
+ vestibule.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, the Lord have mercy on us!” said the count, half in jest, half in
+ earnest; but Natásha noticed that her father was flurried on entering the
+ anteroom and inquired timidly and softly whether the prince and princess
+ were at home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When they had been announced a perturbation was noticeable among the
+ servants. The footman who had gone to announce them was stopped by another
+ in the large hall and they whispered to one another. Then a maidservant
+ ran into the hall and hurriedly said something, mentioning the princess.
+ At last an old, cross looking footman came and announced to the Rostóvs
+ that the prince was not receiving, but that the princess begged them to
+ walk up. The first person who came to meet the visitors was Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne. She greeted the father and daughter with special politeness and
+ showed them to the princess’ room. The princess, looking excited and
+ nervous, her face flushed in patches, ran in to meet the visitors,
+ treading heavily, and vainly trying to appear cordial and at ease. From
+ the first glance Princess Mary did not like Natásha. She thought her too
+ fashionably dressed, frivolously gay and vain. She did not at all realize
+ that before having seen her future sister-in-law she was prejudiced
+ against her by involuntary envy of her beauty, youth, and happiness, as
+ well as by jealousy of her brother’s love for her. Apart from this
+ insuperable antipathy to her, Princess Mary was agitated just then because
+ on the Rostóvs’ being announced, the old prince had shouted that he did
+ not wish to see them, that Princess Mary might do so if she chose, but
+ they were not to be admitted to him. She had decided to receive them, but
+ feared lest the prince might at any moment indulge in some freak, as he
+ seemed much upset by the Rostóvs’ visit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There, my dear princess, I’ve brought you my songstress,” said the count,
+ bowing and looking round uneasily as if afraid the old prince might
+ appear. “I am so glad you should get to know one another... very sorry the
+ prince is still ailing,” and after a few more commonplace remarks he rose.
+ “If you’ll allow me to leave my Natásha in your hands for a quarter of an
+ hour, Princess, I’ll drive round to see Anna Semënovna, it’s quite near in
+ the Dogs’ Square, and then I’ll come back for her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count had devised this diplomatic ruse (as he afterwards told his
+ daughter) to give the future sisters-in-law an opportunity to talk to one
+ another freely, but another motive was to avoid the danger of encountering
+ the old prince, of whom he was afraid. He did not mention this to his
+ daughter, but Natásha noticed her father’s nervousness and anxiety and
+ felt mortified by it. She blushed for him, grew still angrier at having
+ blushed, and looked at the princess with a bold and defiant expression
+ which said that she was not afraid of anybody. The princess told the count
+ that she would be delighted, and only begged him to stay longer at Anna
+ Semënovna’s, and he departed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Despite the uneasy glances thrown at her by Princess Mary—who wished
+ to have a tête-à-tête with Natásha—Mademoiselle Bourienne remained
+ in the room and persistently talked about Moscow amusements and theaters.
+ Natásha felt offended by the hesitation she had noticed in the anteroom,
+ by her father’s nervousness, and by the unnatural manner of the princess
+ who—she thought—was making a favor of receiving her, and so
+ everything displeased her. She did not like Princess Mary, whom she
+ thought very plain, affected, and dry. Natásha suddenly shrank into
+ herself and involuntarily assumed an offhand air which alienated Princess
+ Mary still more. After five minutes of irksome, constrained conversation,
+ they heard the sound of slippered feet rapidly approaching. Princess Mary
+ looked frightened.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The door opened and the old prince, in a dressing gown and a white
+ nightcap, came in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, madam!” he began. “Madam, Countess... Countess Rostóva,
+ if I am not mistaken... I beg you to excuse me, to excuse me... I did not know,
+ madam. God is my witness, I did not know you had honored us with a visit, and I
+ came in such a costume only to see my daughter. I beg you to excuse me...
+ God is my witness, I didn’t know—” he repeated, stressing the
+ word “God” so unnaturally and so unpleasantly that Princess Mary
+ stood with downcast eyes not daring to look either at her father or at Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nor did the latter, having risen and curtsied, know what to do.
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne alone smiled agreeably.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I beg you to excuse me, excuse me! God is my witness, I did not know,”
+ muttered the old man, and after looking Natásha over from head to foot he
+ went out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne was the first to recover herself after this
+ apparition and began speaking about the prince’s indisposition. Natásha
+ and Princess Mary looked at one another in silence, and the longer they
+ did so without saying what they wanted to say, the greater grew their
+ antipathy to one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the count returned, Natásha was impolitely pleased and hastened to
+ get away: at that moment she hated the stiff, elderly princess, who could
+ place her in such an embarrassing position and had spent half an hour with
+ her without once mentioning Prince Andrew. “I couldn’t begin talking about
+ him in the presence of that Frenchwoman,” thought Natásha. The same
+ thought was meanwhile tormenting Princess Mary. She knew what she ought to
+ have said to Natásha, but she had been unable to say it because
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne was in the way, and because, without knowing why,
+ she felt it very difficult to speak of the marriage. When the count was
+ already leaving the room, Princess Mary went up hurriedly to Natásha, took
+ her by the hand, and said with a deep sigh:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wait, I must...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha glanced at her ironically without knowing why.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear Natalie,” said Princess Mary, “I want you to know that I am glad my
+ brother has found happiness....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She paused, feeling that she was not telling the truth. Natásha noticed
+ this and guessed its reason.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I think, Princess, it is not convenient to speak of that now,” she said
+ with external dignity and coldness, though she felt the tears choking her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What have I said and what have I done?” thought she, as soon as she was
+ out of the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They waited a long time for Natásha to come to dinner that day. She sat in
+ her room crying like a child, blowing her nose and sobbing. Sónya stood
+ beside her, kissing her hair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha, what is it about?” she asked. “What do they matter to you? It
+ will all pass, Natásha.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But if you only knew how offensive it was... as if I...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t talk about it, Natásha. It wasn’t your fault so why should you
+ mind? Kiss me,” said Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha raised her head and, kissing her friend on the lips, pressed her
+ wet face against her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I can’t tell you, I don’t know. No one’s to blame,” said Natásha—“It’s
+ my fault. But it all hurts terribly. Oh, why doesn’t he come?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She came in to dinner with red eyes. Márya Dmítrievna, who knew how the
+ prince had received the Rostóvs, pretended not to notice how upset Natásha
+ was and jested resolutely and loudly at table with the count and the other
+ guests.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ That evening the Rostóvs went to the Opera, for which Márya Dmítrievna had
+ taken a box.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha did not want to go, but could not refuse Márya Dmítrievna’s kind
+ offer which was intended expressly for her. When she came ready dressed
+ into the ballroom to await her father, and looking in the large mirror
+ there saw that she was pretty, very pretty, she felt even more sad, but it
+ was a sweet, tender sadness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O God, if he were here now I would not behave as I did then, but
+ differently. I would not be silly and afraid of things, I would simply
+ embrace him, cling to him, and make him look at me with those searching
+ inquiring eyes with which he has so often looked at me, and then I would
+ make him laugh as he used to laugh. And his eyes—how I see those
+ eyes!” thought Natásha. “And what do his father and sister matter to me? I
+ love him alone, him, him, with that face and those eyes, with his smile,
+ manly and yet childlike.... No, I had better not think of him; not think
+ of him but forget him, quite forget him for the present. I can’t bear this
+ waiting and I shall cry in a minute!” and she turned away from the glass,
+ making an effort not to cry. “And how can Sónya love Nicholas so calmly
+ and quietly and wait so long and so patiently?” thought she, looking at
+ Sónya, who also came in quite ready, with a fan in her hand. “No, she’s
+ altogether different. I can’t!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha at that moment felt so softened and tender that it was not enough
+ for her to love and know she was beloved, she wanted now, at once, to
+ embrace the man she loved, to speak and hear from him words of love such
+ as filled her heart. While she sat in the carriage beside her father,
+ pensively watching the lights of the street lamps flickering on the frozen
+ window, she felt still sadder and more in love, and forgot where she was
+ going and with whom. Having fallen into the line of carriages, the
+ Rostóvs’ carriage drove up to the theater, its wheels squeaking over the
+ snow. Natásha and Sónya, holding up their dresses, jumped out quickly. The
+ count got out helped by the footmen, and, passing among men and women who
+ were entering and the program sellers, they all three went along the
+ corridor to the first row of boxes. Through the closed doors the music was
+ already audible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha, your hair!...” whispered Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ An attendant deferentially and quickly slipped before the ladies and
+ opened the door of their box. The music sounded louder and through the
+ door rows of brightly lit boxes in which ladies sat with bare arms and
+ shoulders, and noisy stalls brilliant with uniforms, glittered before
+ their eyes. A lady entering the next box shot a glance of feminine envy at
+ Natásha. The curtain had not yet risen and the overture was being played.
+ Natásha, smoothing her gown, went in with Sónya and sat down, scanning the
+ brilliant tiers of boxes opposite. A sensation she had not experienced for
+ a long time—that of hundreds of eyes looking at her bare arms and
+ neck—suddenly affected her both agreeably and disagreeably and
+ called up a whole crowd of memories, desires and emotions associated with
+ that feeling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The two remarkably pretty girls, Natásha and Sónya, with Count Rostóv who
+ had not been seen in Moscow for a long time, attracted general attention.
+ Moreover, everybody knew vaguely of Natásha’s engagement to Prince Andrew,
+ and knew that the Rostóvs had lived in the country ever since, and all
+ looked with curiosity at a fiancée who was making one of the best matches
+ in Russia.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha’s looks, as everyone told her, had improved in the country, and
+ that evening thanks to her agitation she was particularly pretty. She
+ struck those who saw her by her fullness of life and beauty, combined with
+ her indifference to everything about her. Her black eyes looked at the
+ crowd without seeking anyone, and her delicate arm, bare to above the
+ elbow, lay on the velvet edge of the box, while, evidently unconsciously,
+ she opened and closed her hand in time to the music, crumpling her
+ program. “Look, there’s Alénina,” said Sónya, “with her
+ mother, isn’t it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear me, Michael Kirílovich has grown still stouter!” remarked the count.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look at our Anna Mikháylovna—what a headdress she has on!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Karágins, Julie—and Borís with them. One can see at once that
+ they’re engaged....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Drubetskóy has proposed?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes, I heard it today,” said Shinshín, coming into the Rostóvs’ box.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha looked in the direction in which her father’s eyes were turned and
+ saw Julie sitting beside her mother with a happy look on her face and a
+ string of pearls round her thick red neck—which Natásha knew was
+ covered with powder. Behind them, wearing a smile and leaning over with an
+ ear to Julie’s mouth, was Borís’ handsome smoothly brushed head. He looked
+ at the Rostóvs from under his brows and said something, smiling, to his
+ betrothed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They are talking about us, about me and him!” thought Natásha. “And he no
+ doubt is calming her jealousy of me. They needn’t trouble themselves! If
+ only they knew how little I am concerned about any of them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Behind them sat Anna Mikháylovna wearing a green headdress and with a
+ happy look of resignation to the will of God on her face. Their box was
+ pervaded by that atmosphere of an affianced couple which Natásha knew so
+ well and liked so much. She turned away and suddenly remembered all that
+ had been so humiliating in her morning’s visit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What right has he not to wish to receive me into his family? Oh, better
+ not think of it—not till he comes back!” she told herself, and began
+ looking at the faces, some strange and some familiar, in the stalls. In
+ the front, in the very center, leaning back against the orchestra rail,
+ stood Dólokhov in a Persian dress, his curly hair brushed up into a huge
+ shock. He stood in full view of the audience, well aware that he was
+ attracting everyone’s attention, yet as much at ease as though he were in
+ his own room. Around him thronged Moscow’s most brilliant young men, whom
+ he evidently dominated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count, laughing, nudged the blushing Sónya and pointed to her former
+ adorer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you recognize him?” said he. “And where has he sprung from?” he asked,
+ turning to Shinshín. “Didn’t he vanish somewhere?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He did,” replied Shinshín. “He was in the Caucasus and ran away from
+ there. They say he has been acting as minister to some ruling prince in
+ Persia, where he killed the Shah’s brother. Now all the Moscow ladies are
+ mad about him! It’s ‘Dólokhov the Persian’ that does it! We never hear a
+ word but Dólokhov is mentioned. They swear by him, they offer him to you
+ as they would a dish of choice sterlet. Dólokhov and Anatole Kurágin have
+ turned all our ladies’ heads.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A tall, beautiful woman with a mass of plaited hair and much exposed plump
+ white shoulders and neck, round which she wore a double string of large
+ pearls, entered the adjoining box rustling her heavy silk dress and took a
+ long time settling into her place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha involuntarily gazed at that neck, those shoulders, and pearls and
+ coiffure, and admired the beauty of the shoulders and the pearls. While
+ Natásha was fixing her gaze on her for the second time the lady looked
+ round and, meeting the count’s eyes, nodded to him and smiled. She was the
+ Countess Bezúkhova, Pierre’s wife, and the count, who knew everyone in
+ society, leaned over and spoke to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have you been here long, Countess?” he inquired. “I’ll call, I’ll call to
+ kiss your hand. I’m here on business and have brought my girls with me.
+ They say Semënova acts marvelously. Count Pierre never used to forget us.
+ Is he here?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, he meant to look in,” answered Hélène, and glanced attentively at
+ Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Count Rostóv resumed his seat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Handsome, isn’t she?” he whispered to Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wonderful!” answered Natásha. “She’s a woman one could easily fall in
+ love with.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just then the last chords of the overture were heard and the conductor
+ tapped with his stick. Some latecomers took their seats in the stalls, and
+ the curtain rose.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as it rose everyone in the boxes and stalls became silent, and all
+ the men, old and young, in uniform and evening dress, and all the women
+ with gems on their bare flesh, turned their whole attention with eager
+ curiosity to the stage. Natásha too began to look at it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ The floor of the stage consisted of smooth boards, at the sides was some
+ painted cardboard representing trees, and at the back was a cloth
+ stretched over boards. In the center of the stage sat some girls in red
+ bodices and white skirts. One very fat girl in a white silk dress sat
+ apart on a low bench, to the back of which a piece of green cardboard was
+ glued. They all sang something. When they had finished their song the girl
+ in white went up to the prompter’s box and a man with tight silk trousers
+ over his stout legs, and holding a plume and a dagger, went up to her and
+ began singing, waving his arms about.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ First the man in the tight trousers sang alone, then she sang, then they
+ both paused while the orchestra played and the man fingered the hand of
+ the girl in white, obviously awaiting the beat to start singing with her.
+ They sang together and everyone in the theater began clapping and
+ shouting, while the man and woman on the stage—who represented
+ lovers—began smiling, spreading out their arms, and bowing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After her life in the country, and in her present serious mood, all this
+ seemed grotesque and amazing to Natásha. She could not follow the opera
+ nor even listen to the music; she saw only the painted cardboard and the
+ queerly dressed men and women who moved, spoke, and sang so strangely in
+ that brilliant light. She knew what it was all meant to represent, but it
+ was so pretentiously false and unnatural that she first felt ashamed for
+ the actors and then amused at them. She looked at the faces of the
+ audience, seeking in them the same sense of ridicule and perplexity she
+ herself experienced, but they all seemed attentive to what was happening
+ on the stage, and expressed delight which to Natásha seemed feigned. “I
+ suppose it has to be like this!” she thought. She kept looking round in
+ turn at the rows of pomaded heads in the stalls and then at the seminude
+ women in the boxes, especially at Hélène in the next box, who—apparently
+ quite unclothed—sat with a quiet tranquil smile, not taking her eyes
+ off the stage. And feeling the bright light that flooded the whole place
+ and the warm air heated by the crowd, Natásha little by little began to
+ pass into a state of intoxication she had not experienced for a long
+ while. She did not realize who and where she was, nor what was going on
+ before her. As she looked and thought, the strangest fancies unexpectedly
+ and disconnectedly passed through her mind: the idea occurred to her of
+ jumping onto the edge of the box and singing the aria the actress was
+ singing, then she wished to touch with her fan an old gentleman sitting
+ not far from her, then to lean over to Hélène and tickle her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At a moment when all was quiet before the commencement of a song, a door
+ leading to the stalls on the side nearest the Rostóvs’ box creaked, and
+ the steps of a belated arrival were heard. “There’s Kurágin!” whispered
+ Shinshín. Countess Bezúkhova turned smiling to the newcomer, and Natásha,
+ following the direction of that look, saw an exceptionally handsome
+ adjutant approaching their box with a self-assured yet courteous bearing.
+ This was Anatole Kurágin whom she had seen and noticed long ago at the
+ ball in Petersburg. He was now in an adjutant’s uniform with one epaulet
+ and a shoulder knot. He moved with a restrained swagger which would have
+ been ridiculous had he not been so good-looking and had his handsome face
+ not worn such an expression of good-humored complacency and gaiety. Though
+ the performance was proceeding, he walked deliberately down the carpeted
+ gangway, his sword and spurs slightly jingling and his handsome perfumed
+ head held high. Having looked at Natásha he approached his sister, laid
+ his well gloved hand on the edge of her box, nodded to her, and leaning
+ forward asked a question, with a motion toward Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mais charmante!” said he, evidently referring to Natásha, who
+ did not exactly hear his words but understood them from the movement of his lips.
+ Then he took his place in the first row of the stalls and sat down beside
+ Dólokhov, nudging with his elbow in a friendly and offhand way that
+ Dólokhov whom others treated so fawningly. He winked at him gaily, smiled,
+ and rested his foot against the orchestra screen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How like the brother is to the sister,” remarked the count. “And how
+ handsome they both are!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Shinshín, lowering his voice, began to tell the count of some intrigue of
+ Kurágin’s in Moscow, and Natásha tried to overhear it just because he had
+ said she was “charmante.” 
+
+
+
+ 
+ The first act was over. In the stalls everyone began moving about, going
+ out and coming in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís came to the Rostóvs’ box, received their congratulations very
+ simply, and raising his eyebrows with an absent-minded smile conveyed to
+ Natásha and Sónya his fiancée’s invitation to her wedding, and went away.
+ Natásha with a gay, coquettish smile talked to him, and congratulated on
+ his approaching wedding that same Borís with whom she had formerly been in
+ love. In the state of intoxication she was in, everything seemed simple
+ and natural.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The scantily clad Hélène smiled at everyone in the same way, and Natásha
+ gave Borís a similar smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hélène’s box was filled and surrounded from the stalls by the most
+ distinguished and intellectual men, who seemed to vie with one another in
+ their wish to let everyone see that they knew her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the whole of that entr’acte Kurágin stood with Dólokhov in front of
+ the orchestra partition, looking at the Rostóvs’ box. Natásha knew he was
+ talking about her and this afforded her pleasure. She even turned so that
+ he should see her profile in what she thought was its most becoming
+ aspect. Before the beginning of the second act Pierre appeared in the
+ stalls. The Rostóvs had not seen him since their arrival. His face looked
+ sad, and he had grown still stouter since Natásha last saw him. He passed
+ up to the front rows, not noticing anyone. Anatole went up to him and
+ began speaking to him, looking at and indicating the Rostóvs’ box. On
+ seeing Natásha Pierre grew animated and, hastily passing between the rows,
+ came toward their box. When he got there he leaned on his elbows and,
+ smiling, talked to her for a long time. While conversing with Pierre,
+ Natásha heard a man’s voice in Countess Bezúkhova’s box and something told
+ her it was Kurágin. She turned and their eyes met. Almost smiling, he
+ gazed straight into her eyes with such an enraptured caressing look that
+ it seemed strange to be so near him, to look at him like that, to be so
+ sure he admired her, and not to be acquainted with him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the second act there was scenery representing tombstones, there was a
+ round hole in the canvas to represent the moon, shades were raised over
+ the footlights, and from horns and contrabass came deep notes while many
+ people appeared from right and left wearing black cloaks and holding
+ things like daggers in their hands. They began waving their arms. Then
+ some other people ran in and began dragging away the maiden who had been
+ in white and was now in light blue. They did not drag her away at once,
+ but sang with her for a long time and then at last dragged her off, and
+ behind the scenes something metallic was struck three times and everyone
+ knelt down and sang a prayer. All these things were repeatedly interrupted
+ by the enthusiastic shouts of the audience.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During this act every time Natásha looked toward the stalls she saw
+ Anatole Kurágin with an arm thrown across the back of his chair, staring
+ at her. She was pleased to see that he was captivated by her and it did
+ not occur to her that there was anything wrong in it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the second act was over Countess Bezúkhova rose, turned to the
+ Rostóvs’ box—her whole bosom completely exposed—beckoned the
+ old count with a gloved finger, and paying no attention to those who had
+ entered her box began talking to him with an amiable smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do make me acquainted with your charming daughters,” said she. “The whole
+ town is singing their praises and I don’t even know them!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha rose and curtsied to the splendid countess. She was so pleased by
+ praise from this brilliant beauty that she blushed with pleasure.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I want to become a Moscovite too, now,” said Hélène. “How is it you’re
+ not ashamed to bury such pearls in the country?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Countess Bezúkhova quite deserved her reputation of being a fascinating
+ woman. She could say what she did not think—especially what was
+ flattering—quite simply and naturally.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear count, you must let me look after your daughters! Though I am not
+ staying here long this time—nor are you—I will try to amuse
+ them. I have already heard much of you in Petersburg and wanted to get to
+ know you,” said she to Natásha with her stereotyped and lovely smile. “I
+ had heard about you from my page, Drubetskóy. Have you heard he is getting
+ married? And also from my husband’s friend Bolkónski, Prince Andrew
+ Bolkónski,” she went on with special emphasis, implying that she knew of
+ his relation to Natásha. To get better acquainted she asked that one of
+ the young ladies should come into her box for the rest of the performance,
+ and Natásha moved over to it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The scene of the third act represented a palace in which many candles were
+ burning and pictures of knights with short beards hung on the walls. In
+ the middle stood what were probably a king and a queen. The king waved his
+ right arm and, evidently nervous, sang something badly and sat down on a
+ crimson throne. The maiden who had been first in white and then in light
+ blue, now wore only a smock, and stood beside the throne with her hair
+ down. She sang something mournfully, addressing the queen, but the king
+ waved his arm severely, and men and women with bare legs came in from both
+ sides and began dancing all together. Then the violins played very shrilly
+ and merrily and one of the women with thick bare legs and thin arms,
+ separating from the others, went behind the wings, adjusted her bodice,
+ returned to the middle of the stage, and began jumping and striking one
+ foot rapidly against the other. In the stalls everyone clapped and shouted
+ “bravo!” Then one of the men went into a corner of the stage. The cymbals
+ and horns in the orchestra struck up more loudly, and this man with bare
+ legs jumped very high and waved his feet about very rapidly. (He was
+ Duport, who received sixty thousand rubles a year for this art.) Everybody
+ in the stalls, boxes, and galleries began clapping and shouting with all
+ their might, and the man stopped and began smiling and bowing to all
+ sides. Then other men and women danced with bare legs. Then the king again
+ shouted to the sound of music, and they all began singing. But suddenly a
+ storm came on, chromatic scales and diminished sevenths were heard in the
+ orchestra, everyone ran off, again dragging one of their number away, and
+ the curtain dropped. Once more there was a terrible noise and clatter
+ among the audience, and with rapturous faces everyone began shouting:
+ “Duport! Duport! Duport!” Natásha no longer thought this strange. She
+ looked about with pleasure, smiling joyfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Isn’t Duport delightful?” Hélène asked her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, yes,” replied Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ During the entr’acte a whiff of cold air came into Hélène’s box, the door
+ opened, and Anatole entered, stooping and trying not to brush against
+ anyone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let me introduce my brother to you,” said Hélène, her eyes shifting
+ uneasily from Natásha to Anatole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha turned her pretty little head toward the elegant young officer and
+ smiled at him over her bare shoulder. Anatole, who was as handsome at
+ close quarters as at a distance, sat down beside her and told her he had
+ long wished to have this happiness—ever since the Narýshkins’ ball
+ in fact, at which he had had the well-remembered pleasure of seeing her.
+ Kurágin was much more sensible and simple with women than among men. He
+ talked boldly and naturally, and Natásha was strangely and agreeably
+ struck by the fact that there was nothing formidable in this man about
+ whom there was so much talk, but that on the contrary his smile was most
+ naïve, cheerful, and good-natured.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kurágin asked her opinion of the performance and told her how at a
+ previous performance Semënova had fallen down on the stage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And do you know, Countess,” he said, suddenly addressing her as an old,
+ familiar acquaintance, “we are getting up a costume tournament; you ought
+ to take part in it! It will be great fun. We shall all meet at the
+ Karágins’! Please come! No! Really, eh?” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While saying this he never removed his smiling eyes from her face, her
+ neck, and her bare arms. Natásha knew for certain that he was enraptured
+ by her. This pleased her, yet his presence made her feel constrained and
+ oppressed. When she was not looking at him she felt that he was looking at
+ her shoulders, and she involuntarily caught his eye so that he should look
+ into hers rather than this. But looking into his eyes she was frightened,
+ realizing that there was not that barrier of modesty she had always felt
+ between herself and other men. She did not know how it was that within
+ five minutes she had come to feel herself terribly near to this man. When
+ she turned away she feared he might seize her from behind by her bare arm
+ and kiss her on the neck. They spoke of most ordinary things, yet she felt
+ that they were closer to one another than she had ever been to any man.
+ Natásha kept turning to Hélène and to her father, as if asking what it all
+ meant, but Hélène was engaged in conversation with a general and did not
+ answer her look, and her father’s eyes said nothing but what they always
+ said: “Having a good time? Well, I’m glad of it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During one of these moments of awkward silence when Anatole’s prominent
+ eyes were gazing calmly and fixedly at her, Natásha, to break the silence,
+ asked him how he liked Moscow. She asked the question and blushed. She
+ felt all the time that by talking to him she was doing something improper.
+ Anatole smiled as though to encourage her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At first I did not like it much, because what makes a town pleasant ce
+ sont les jolies femmes , * isn’t that so? But now I like it very much
+ indeed,” he said, looking at her significantly. “You’ll come to the
+ costume tournament, Countess? Do come!” and putting out his hand to her
+ bouquet and dropping his voice, he added, “You will be the prettiest
+ there. Do come, dear countess, and give me this flower as a pledge!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Are the pretty women.
+
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha did not understand what he was saying any more than he did
+ himself, but she felt that his incomprehensible words had an improper
+ intention. She did not know what to say and turned away as if she had not
+ heard his remark. But as soon as she had turned away she felt that he was
+ there, behind, so close behind her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How is he now? Confused? Angry? Ought I to put it right?” she asked
+ herself, and she could not refrain from turning round. She looked straight
+ into his eyes, and his nearness, self-assurance, and the good-natured
+ tenderness of his smile vanquished her. She smiled just as he was doing,
+ gazing straight into his eyes. And again she felt with horror that no
+ barrier lay between him and her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The curtain rose again. Anatole left the box, serene and gay. Natásha went
+ back to her father in the other box, now quite submissive to the world she
+ found herself in. All that was going on before her now seemed quite
+ natural, but on the other hand all her previous thoughts of her betrothed,
+ of Princess Mary, or of life in the country did not once recur to her mind
+ and were as if belonging to a remote past.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the fourth act there was some sort of devil who sang waving his arm
+ about, till the boards were withdrawn from under him and he disappeared
+ down below. That was the only part of the fourth act that Natásha saw. She
+ felt agitated and tormented, and the cause of this was Kurágin whom she
+ could not help watching. As they were leaving the theater Anatole came up
+ to them, called their carriage, and helped them in. As he was putting
+ Natásha in he pressed her arm above the elbow. Agitated and flushed she
+ turned round. He was looking at her with glittering eyes, smiling
+ tenderly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Only after she had reached home was Natásha able clearly to think over
+ what had happened to her, and suddenly remembering Prince Andrew she was
+ horrified, and at tea to which all had sat down after the opera, she gave
+ a loud exclamation, flushed, and ran out of the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O God! I am lost!” she said to herself. “How could I let him?” She sat
+ for a long time hiding her flushed face in her hands trying to realize
+ what had happened to her, but was unable either to understand what had
+ happened or what she felt. Everything seemed dark, obscure, and terrible.
+ There in that enormous, illuminated theater where the bare-legged Duport,
+ in a tinsel-decorated jacket, jumped about to the music on wet boards, and
+ young girls and old men, and the nearly naked Hélène with her proud, calm
+ smile, rapturously cried “bravo!”—there in the presence of that
+ Hélène it had all seemed clear and simple; but now, alone by herself, it
+ was incomprehensible. “What is it? What was that terror I felt of him?
+ What is this gnawing of conscience I am feeling now?” she thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only to the old countess at night in bed could Natásha have told all she
+ was feeling. She knew that Sónya with her severe and simple views would
+ either not understand it at all or would be horrified at such a
+ confession. So Natásha tried to solve what was torturing her by herself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Am I spoiled for Andrew’s love or not?” she asked herself, and with
+ soothing irony replied: “What a fool I am to ask that! What did happen to
+ me? Nothing! I have done nothing, I didn’t lead him on at all. Nobody will
+ know and I shall never see him again,” she told herself. “So it is plain
+ that nothing has happened and there is nothing to repent of, and Andrew
+ can love me still. But why ‘still?’ O God, why isn’t he here?” Natásha
+ quieted herself for a moment, but again some instinct told her that though
+ all this was true, and though nothing had happened, yet the former purity
+ of her love for Prince Andrew had perished. And again in imagination she
+ went over her whole conversation with Kurágin, and again saw the face,
+ gestures, and tender smile of that bold handsome man when he pressed her
+ arm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ Anatole Kurágin was staying in Moscow because his father had sent him away
+ from Petersburg, where he had been spending twenty thousand rubles a year
+ in cash, besides running up debts for as much more, which his creditors
+ demanded from his father.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His father announced to him that he would now pay half his debts for the
+ last time, but only on condition that he went to Moscow as adjutant to the
+ commander in chief—a post his father had procured for him—and
+ would at last try to make a good match there. He indicated to him Princess
+ Mary and Julie Karágina.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole consented and went to Moscow, where he put up at Pierre’s house.
+ Pierre received him unwillingly at first, but got used to him after a
+ while, sometimes even accompanied him on his carousals, and gave him money
+ under the guise of loans.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As Shinshín had remarked, from the time of his arrival Anatole had turned
+ the heads of the Moscow ladies, especially by the fact that he slighted
+ them and plainly preferred the gypsy girls and French actresses—with
+ the chief of whom, Mademoiselle George, he was said to be on intimate
+ relations. He had never missed a carousal at Danílov’s or other Moscow
+ revelers’, drank whole nights through, outvying everyone else, and was at
+ all the balls and parties of the best society. There was talk of his
+ intrigues with some of the ladies, and he flirted with a few of them at
+ the balls. But he did not run after the unmarried girls, especially the
+ rich heiresses who were most of them plain. There was a special reason for
+ this, as he had got married two years before—a fact known only to
+ his most intimate friends. At that time while with his regiment in Poland,
+ a Polish landowner of small means had forced him to marry his daughter.
+ Anatole had very soon abandoned his wife and, for a payment which he
+ agreed to send to his father-in-law, had arranged to be free to pass
+ himself off as a bachelor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole was always content with his position, with himself, and with
+ others. He was instinctively and thoroughly convinced that it was
+ impossible for him to live otherwise than as he did and that he had never
+ in his life done anything base. He was incapable of considering how his
+ actions might affect others or what the consequences of this or that
+ action of his might be. He was convinced that, as a duck is so made that
+ it must live in water, so God had made him such that he must spend thirty
+ thousand rubles a year and always occupy a prominent position in society.
+ He believed this so firmly that others, looking at him, were persuaded of
+ it too and did not refuse him either a leading place in society or money,
+ which he borrowed from anyone and everyone and evidently would not repay.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was not a gambler, at any rate he did not care about winning. He was
+ not vain. He did not mind what people thought of him. Still less could he
+ be accused of ambition. More than once he had vexed his father by spoiling
+ his own career, and he laughed at distinctions of all kinds. He was not
+ mean, and did not refuse anyone who asked of him. All he cared about was
+ gaiety and women, and as according to his ideas there was nothing
+ dishonorable in these tastes, and he was incapable of considering what the
+ gratification of his tastes entailed for others, he honestly considered
+ himself irreproachable, sincerely despised rogues and bad people, and with
+ a tranquil conscience carried his head high.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rakes, those male Magdalenes, have a secret feeling of innocence similar
+ to that which female Magdalenes have, based on the same hope of
+ forgiveness. “All will be forgiven her, for she loved much; and all will
+ be forgiven him, for he enjoyed much.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov, who had reappeared that year in Moscow after his exile and his
+ Persian adventures, and was leading a life of luxury, gambling, and
+ dissipation, associated with his old Petersburg comrade Kurágin and made
+ use of him for his own ends.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole was sincerely fond of Dólokhov for his cleverness and audacity.
+ Dólokhov, who needed Anatole Kurágin’s name, position, and connections as
+ a bait to draw rich young men into his gambling set, made use of him and
+ amused himself at his expense without letting the other feel it. Apart
+ from the advantage he derived from Anatole, the very process of dominating
+ another’s will was in itself a pleasure, a habit, and a necessity to
+ Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha had made a strong impression on Kurágin. At supper after the opera
+ he described to Dólokhov with the air of a connoisseur the attractions of
+ her arms, shoulders, feet, and hair and expressed his intention of making
+ love to her. Anatole had no notion and was incapable of considering what
+ might come of such love-making, as he never had any notion of the outcome
+ of any of his actions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She’s first-rate, my dear fellow, but not for us,” replied Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will tell my sister to ask her to dinner,” said Anatole. “Eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’d better wait till she’s married....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know, I adore little girls, they lose their heads at once,” pursued
+ Anatole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You have been caught once already by a ‘little girl,’” said Dólokhov who
+ knew of Kurágin’s marriage. “Take care!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, that can’t happen twice! Eh?” said Anatole, with a good-humored
+ laugh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ The day after the opera the Rostóvs went nowhere and nobody came to see
+ them. Márya Dmítrievna talked to the count about something which they
+ concealed from Natásha. Natásha guessed they were talking about the old
+ prince and planning something, and this disquieted and offended her. She
+ was expecting Prince Andrew any moment and twice that day sent a
+ manservant to the Vozdvízhenka to ascertain whether he had come. He had
+ not arrived. She suffered more now than during her first days in Moscow.
+ To her impatience and pining for him were now added the unpleasant
+ recollection of her interview with Princess Mary and the old prince, and a
+ fear and anxiety of which she did not understand the cause. She
+ continually fancied that either he would never come or that something
+ would happen to her before he came. She could no longer think of him by
+ herself calmly and continuously as she had done before. As soon as she
+ began to think of him, the recollection of the old prince, of Princess
+ Mary, of the theater, and of Kurágin mingled with her thoughts. The
+ question again presented itself whether she was not guilty, whether she
+ had not already broken faith with Prince Andrew, and again she found
+ herself recalling to the minutest detail every word, every gesture, and
+ every shade in the play of expression on the face of the man who had been
+ able to arouse in her such an incomprehensible and terrifying feeling. To
+ the family Natásha seemed livelier than usual, but she was far less
+ tranquil and happy than before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On Sunday morning Márya Dmítrievna invited her visitors to Mass at her
+ parish church—the Church of the Assumption built over the graves of
+ victims of the plague.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t like those fashionable churches,” she said, evidently priding
+ herself on her independence of thought. “God is the same everywhere. We
+ have an excellent priest, he conducts the service decently and with
+ dignity, and the deacon is the same. What holiness is there in giving
+ concerts in the choir? I don’t like it, it’s just self-indulgence!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Márya Dmítrievna liked Sundays and knew how to keep them. Her whole house
+ was scrubbed and cleaned on Saturdays; neither she nor the servants
+ worked, and they all wore holiday dress and went to church. At her table
+ there were extra dishes at dinner, and the servants had vodka and roast
+ goose or suckling pig. But in nothing in the house was the holiday so
+ noticeable as in Márya Dmítrievna’s broad, stern face, which on that day
+ wore an invariable look of solemn festivity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After Mass, when they had finished their coffee in the dining room where
+ the loose covers had been removed from the furniture, a servant announced
+ that the carriage was ready, and Márya Dmítrievna rose with a stern air.
+ She wore her holiday shawl, in which she paid calls, and announced that
+ she was going to see Prince Nicholas Bolkónski to have an explanation with
+ him about Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After she had gone, a dressmaker from Madame Suppert-Roguet waited on the
+ Rostóvs, and Natásha, very glad of this diversion, having shut herself
+ into a room adjoining the drawing room, occupied herself trying on the new
+ dresses. Just as she had put on a bodice without sleeves and only tacked
+ together, and was turning her head to see in the glass how the back
+ fitted, she heard in the drawing room the animated sounds of her father’s
+ voice and another’s—a woman’s—that made her flush. It was
+ Hélène. Natásha had not time to take off the bodice before the door opened
+ and Countess Bezúkhova, dressed in a purple velvet gown with a high
+ collar, came into the room beaming with good-humored amiable smiles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, my enchantress!” she cried to the blushing Natásha. “Charming! No,
+ this is really beyond anything, my dear count,” said she to Count Rostóv
+ who had followed her in. “How can you live in Moscow and go nowhere? No, I
+ won’t let you off! Mademoiselle George will recite at my house tonight and
+ there’ll be some people, and if you don’t bring your lovely girls—who
+ are prettier than Mademoiselle George—I won’t know you! My husband
+ is away in Tver or I would send him to fetch you. You must come. You
+ positively must! Between eight and nine.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She nodded to the dressmaker, whom she knew and who had curtsied
+ respectfully to her, and seated herself in an armchair beside the looking
+ glass, draping the folds of her velvet dress picturesquely. She did not
+ cease chattering good-naturedly and gaily, continually praising Natásha’s
+ beauty. She looked at Natásha’s dresses and praised them, as well as a new
+ dress of her own made of “metallic gauze,” which she had received from
+ Paris, and advised Natásha to have one like it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But anything suits you, my charmer!” she remarked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A smile of pleasure never left Natásha’s face. She felt happy and as if
+ she were blossoming under the praise of this dear Countess Bezúkhova who
+ had formerly seemed to her so unapproachable and important and was now so
+ kind to her. Natásha brightened up and felt almost in love with this
+ woman, who was so beautiful and so kind. Hélène for her part was sincerely
+ delighted with Natásha and wished to give her a good time. Anatole had
+ asked her to bring him and Natásha together, and she was calling on the
+ Rostóvs for that purpose. The idea of throwing her brother and Natásha
+ together amused her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though at one time, in Petersburg, she had been annoyed with Natásha for
+ drawing Borís away, she did not think of that now, and in her own way
+ heartily wished Natásha well. As she was leaving the Rostóvs she called
+ her protégée aside.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My brother dined with me yesterday—we nearly died of laughter—he
+ ate nothing and kept sighing for you, my charmer! He is madly, quite
+ madly, in love with you, my dear.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha blushed scarlet when she heard this.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How she blushes, how she blushes, my pretty!” said Hélène. “You must
+ certainly come. If you love somebody, my charmer, that is not a reason to
+ shut yourself up. Even if you are engaged, I am sure your fiancé would
+ wish you to go into society rather than be bored to death.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So she knows I am engaged, and she and her husband Pierre—that good
+ Pierre—have talked and laughed about this. So it’s all right.” And
+ again, under Hélène’s influence, what had seemed terrible now seemed
+ simple and natural. “And she is such a grande dame , so kind, and
+ evidently likes me so much. And why not enjoy myself?” thought Natásha,
+ gazing at Hélène with wide-open, wondering eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Márya Dmítrievna came back to dinner taciturn and serious, having
+ evidently suffered a defeat at the old prince’s. She was still too
+ agitated by the encounter to be able to talk of the affair calmly. In
+ answer to the count’s inquiries she replied that things were all right and
+ that she would tell about it next day. On hearing of Countess Bezúkhova’s
+ visit and the invitation for that evening, Márya Dmítrievna remarked:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t care to have anything to do with Bezúkhova and don’t advise you
+ to; however, if you’ve promised—go. It will divert your thoughts,”
+ she added, addressing Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ Count Rostóv took the girls to Countess Bezúkhova’s. There were a good
+ many people there, but nearly all strangers to Natásha. Count Rostóv was
+ displeased to see that the company consisted almost entirely of men and
+ women known for the freedom of their conduct. Mademoiselle George was
+ standing in a corner of the drawing room surrounded by young men. There
+ were several Frenchmen present, among them Métivier who from the time
+ Hélène reached Moscow had been an intimate in her house. The count decided
+ not to sit down to cards or let his girls out of his sight and to get away
+ as soon as Mademoiselle George’s performance was over.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole was at the door, evidently on the lookout for the Rostóvs.
+ Immediately after greeting the count he went up to Natásha and followed
+ her. As soon as she saw him she was seized by the same feeling she had had
+ at the opera—gratified vanity at his admiration of her and fear at
+ the absence of a moral barrier between them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hélène welcomed Natásha delightedly and was loud in admiration of her
+ beauty and her dress. Soon after their arrival Mademoiselle George went
+ out of the room to change her costume. In the drawing room people began
+ arranging the chairs and taking their seats. Anatole moved a chair for
+ Natásha and was about to sit down beside her, but the count, who never
+ lost sight of her, took the seat himself. Anatole sat down behind her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mademoiselle George, with her bare, fat, dimpled arms, and a red shawl
+ draped over one shoulder, came into the space left vacant for her, and
+ assumed an unnatural pose. Enthusiastic whispering was audible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mademoiselle George looked sternly and gloomily at the audience and began
+ reciting some French verses describing her guilty love for her son. In
+ some places she raised her voice, in others she whispered, lifting her
+ head triumphantly; sometimes she paused and uttered hoarse sounds, rolling
+ her eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Adorable! divine! delicious!” was heard from every side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha looked at the fat actress, but neither saw nor heard nor
+ understood anything of what went on before her. She only felt herself
+ again completely borne away into this strange senseless world—so
+ remote from her old world—a world in which it was impossible to know
+ what was good or bad, reasonable or senseless. Behind her sat Anatole, and
+ conscious of his proximity she experienced a frightened sense of
+ expectancy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the first monologue the whole company rose and surrounded
+ Mademoiselle George, expressing their enthusiasm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How beautiful she is!” Natásha remarked to her father who had also risen
+ and was moving through the crowd toward the actress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t think so when I look at you!” said Anatole, following Natásha. He
+ said this at a moment when she alone could hear him. “You are
+ enchanting... from the moment I saw you I have never ceased...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come, come, Natásha!” said the count, as he turned back for his daughter.
+ “How beautiful she is!” Natásha without saying anything stepped up to her
+ father and looked at him with surprised inquiring eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After giving several recitations, Mademoiselle George left, and Countess
+ Bezúkhova asked her visitors into the ballroom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count wished to go home, but Hélène entreated him not to spoil her
+ improvised ball, and the Rostóvs stayed on. Anatole asked Natásha for a
+ valse and as they danced he pressed her waist and hand and told her she
+ was bewitching and that he loved her. During the écossaise , which she also
+ danced with him, Anatole said nothing when they happened to be by
+ themselves, but merely gazed at her. Natásha lifted her frightened eyes to
+ him, but there was such confident tenderness in his affectionate look and
+ smile that she could not, whilst looking at him, say what she had to say.
+ She lowered her eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t say such things to me. I am betrothed and love another,” she said
+ rapidly.... She glanced at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole was not upset or pained by what she had said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t speak to me of that! What can I do?” said he. “I tell you I am
+ madly, madly, in love with you! Is it my fault that you are enchanting?...
+ It’s our turn to begin.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha, animated and excited, looked about her with wide-open frightened
+ eyes and seemed merrier than usual. She understood hardly anything that
+ went on that evening. They danced the écossaise and the Grossvater. 
+ Her father asked her to come home, but she begged to remain. Wherever she went
+ and whomever she was speaking to, she felt his eyes upon her. Later on she
+ recalled how she had asked her father to let her go to the dressing room
+ to rearrange her dress, that Hélène had followed her and spoken laughingly
+ of her brother’s love, and that she again met Anatole in the little
+ sitting room. Hélène had disappeared leaving them alone, and Anatole had
+ taken her hand and said in a tender voice:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I cannot come to visit you but is it possible that I shall never see you?
+ I love you madly. Can I never...?” and, blocking her path, he brought his
+ face close to hers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His large, glittering, masculine eyes were so close to hers that she saw
+ nothing but them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natalie?” he whispered inquiringly while she felt her hands being
+ painfully pressed. “Natalie?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t understand. I have nothing to say,” her eyes replied.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Burning lips were pressed to hers, and at the same instant she felt
+ herself released, and Hélène’s footsteps and the rustle of her dress were
+ heard in the room. Natásha looked round at her, and then, red and
+ trembling, threw a frightened look of inquiry at Anatole and moved toward
+ the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One word, just one, for God’s sake!” cried Anatole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She paused. She so wanted a word from him that would explain to her what
+ had happened and to which she could find no answer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natalie, just a word, only one!” he kept repeating, evidently not knowing
+ what to say and he repeated it till Hélène came up to them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hélène returned with Natásha to the drawing room. The Rostóvs went away
+ without staying for supper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After reaching home Natásha did not sleep all night. She was tormented by
+ the insoluble question whether she loved Anatole or Prince Andrew. She
+ loved Prince Andrew—she remembered distinctly how deeply she loved
+ him. But she also loved Anatole, of that there was no doubt. “Else how
+ could all this have happened?” thought she. “If, after that, I could
+ return his smile when saying good-by, if I was able to let it come to
+ that, it means that I loved him from the first. It means that he is kind,
+ noble, and splendid, and I could not help loving him. What am I to do if I
+ love him and the other one too?” she asked herself, unable to find an
+ answer to these terrible questions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV
+ 
+ 
+ Morning came with its cares and bustle. Everyone got up and began to move
+ about and talk, dressmakers came again. Márya Dmítrievna appeared, and
+ they were called to breakfast. Natásha kept looking uneasily at everybody
+ with wide-open eyes, as if wishing to intercept every glance directed
+ toward her, and tried to appear the same as usual.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After breakfast, which was her best time, Márya Dmítrievna sat down in her
+ armchair and called Natásha and the count to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, friends, I have now thought the whole matter over and this is my
+ advice,” she began. “Yesterday, as you know, I went to see Prince
+ Bolkónski. Well, I had a talk with him.... He took it into his head to
+ begin shouting, but I am not one to be shouted down. I said what I had to
+ say!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, and he?” asked the count.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He? He’s crazy... he did not want to listen. But what’s the use of
+ talking? As it is we have worn the poor girl out,” said Márya Dmítrievna.
+ “My advice to you is finish your business and go back home to Otrádnoe...
+ and wait there.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, no!” exclaimed Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, go back,” said Márya Dmítrievna, “and wait there. If your betrothed
+ comes here now—there will be no avoiding a quarrel; but alone with
+ the old man he will talk things over and then come on to you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Count Rostóv approved of this suggestion, appreciating its reasonableness.
+ If the old man came round it would be all the better to visit him in
+ Moscow or at Bald Hills later on; and if not, the wedding, against his
+ wishes, could only be arranged at Otrádnoe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is perfectly true. And I am sorry I went to see him and took her,”
+ said the old count.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, why be sorry? Being here, you had to pay your respects. But if he
+ won’t—that’s his affair,” said Márya Dmítrievna, looking for
+ something in her reticule. “Besides, the trousseau is ready, so there is
+ nothing to wait for; and what is not ready I’ll send after you. Though I
+ don’t like letting you go, it is the best way. So go, with God’s
+ blessing!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having found what she was looking for in the reticule she handed it to
+ Natásha. It was a letter from Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She has written to you. How she torments herself, poor thing! She’s
+ afraid you might think that she does not like you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But she doesn’t like me,” said Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t talk nonsense!” cried Márya Dmítrievna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I shan’t believe anyone, I know she doesn’t like me,” replied Natásha
+ boldly as she took the letter, and her face expressed a cold and angry
+ resolution that caused Márya Dmítrievna to look at her more intently and
+ to frown.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t answer like that, my good girl!” she said.
+ “What I say is true! Write an answer!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha did not reply and went to her own room to read Princess Mary’s letter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary wrote that she was in despair at the misunderstanding that
+ had occurred between them. Whatever her father’s feelings might be, she
+ begged Natásha to believe that she could not help loving her as the one
+ chosen by her brother, for whose happiness she was ready to sacrifice
+ everything.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do not think, however,” she wrote, “that my father is ill-disposed toward
+ you. He is an invalid and an old man who must be forgiven; but he is good
+ and magnanimous and will love her who makes his son happy.” Princess Mary
+ went on to ask Natásha to fix a time when she could see her again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After reading the letter Natásha sat down at the writing table to answer
+ it. “Dear Princess,” she wrote in French quickly and mechanically, and
+ then paused. What more could she write after all that had happened the
+ evening before? “Yes, yes! All that has happened, and now all is changed,”
+ she thought as she sat with the letter she had begun before her. “Must I
+ break off with him? Must I really? That’s awful...” and to escape from
+ these dreadful thoughts she went to Sónya and began sorting patterns with
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After dinner Natásha went to her room and again took up Princess Mary’s
+ letter. “Can it be that it is all over?” she thought. “Can it be that all
+ this has happened so quickly and has destroyed all that went before?” She
+ recalled her love for Prince Andrew in all its former strength, and at the
+ same time felt that she loved Kurágin. She vividly pictured herself as
+ Prince Andrew’s wife, and the scenes of happiness with him she had so
+ often repeated in her imagination, and at the same time, aglow with
+ excitement, recalled every detail of yesterday’s interview with Anatole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why could that not be as well?” she sometimes asked herself in complete
+ bewilderment. “Only so could I be completely happy; but now I have to
+ choose, and I can’t be happy without either of them. Only,” she thought,
+ “to tell Prince Andrew what has happened or to hide it from him are both
+ equally impossible. But with that one nothing is spoiled. But am I really
+ to abandon forever the joy of Prince Andrew’s love, in which I have lived
+ so long?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Please, Miss!” whispered a maid entering the room with a mysterious air.
+ “A man told me to give you this—” and she handed Natásha a letter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Only, for Christ’s sake...” the girl went on, as Natásha, without
+ thinking, mechanically broke the seal and read a love letter from Anatole,
+ of which, without taking in a word, she understood only that it was a
+ letter from him—from the man she loved. Yes, she loved him, or else
+ how could that have happened which had happened? And how could she have a
+ love letter from him in her hand?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With trembling hands Natásha held that passionate love letter which
+ Dólokhov had composed for Anatole, and as she read it she found in it an
+ echo of all that she herself imagined she was feeling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Since yesterday evening my fate has been sealed; to be loved by you or to
+ die. There is no other way for me,” the letter began. Then he went on to
+ say that he knew her parents would not give her to him—for this
+ there were secret reasons he could reveal only to her—but that if
+ she loved him she need only say the word yes , and no human power could
+ hinder their bliss. Love would conquer all. He would steal her away and
+ carry her off to the ends of the earth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes! I love him!” thought Natásha, reading the letter for the
+ twentieth time and finding some peculiarly deep meaning in each word of
+ it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That evening Márya Dmítrievna was going to the Akhárovs’ and proposed to
+ take the girls with her. Natásha, pleading a headache, remained at home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV
+ 
+ 
+ On returning late in the evening Sónya went to Natásha’s room, and to her
+ surprise found her still dressed and asleep on the sofa. Open on the
+ table, beside her lay Anatole’s letter. Sónya picked it up and read it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As she read she glanced at the sleeping Natásha, trying to find in her
+ face an explanation of what she was reading, but did not find it. Her face
+ was calm, gentle, and happy. Clutching her breast to keep herself from
+ choking, Sónya, pale and trembling with fear and agitation, sat down in an
+ armchair and burst into tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How was it I noticed nothing? How could it go so far? Can she have left
+ off loving Prince Andrew? And how could she let Kurágin go to such
+ lengths? He is a deceiver and a villain, that’s plain! What will Nicholas,
+ dear noble Nicholas, do when he hears of it? So this is the meaning of her
+ excited, resolute, unnatural look the day before yesterday, yesterday, and
+ today,” thought Sónya. “But it can’t be that she loves him! She probably
+ opened the letter without knowing who it was from. Probably she is
+ offended by it. She could not do such a thing!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya wiped away her tears and went up to Natásha, again scanning her
+ face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha!” she said, just audibly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha awoke and saw Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, you’re back?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And with the decision and tenderness that often come at the moment of
+ awakening, she embraced her friend, but noticing Sónya’s look of
+ embarrassment, her own face expressed confusion and suspicion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya, you’ve read that letter?” she demanded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” answered Sónya softly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha smiled rapturously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Sónya, I can’t any longer!” she said. “I can’t hide it from you any
+ longer. You know, we love one another! Sónya, darling, he writes...
+ Sónya...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya stared open-eyed at Natásha, unable to believe her ears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And Bolkónski?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, Sónya, if you only knew how happy I am!” cried Natásha. “You don’t
+ know what love is....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But, Natásha, can that be all over?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha looked at Sónya with wide-open eyes as if she could not grasp the
+ question.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, then, are you refusing Prince Andrew?” said Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, you don’t understand anything! Don’t talk nonsense, just listen!”
+ said Natásha, with momentary vexation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I can’t believe it,” insisted Sónya. “I don’t understand. How is it
+ you have loved a man for a whole year and suddenly... Why, you have only
+ seen him three times! Natásha, I don’t believe you, you’re joking! In
+ three days to forget everything and so...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Three days?” said Natásha. “It seems to me I’ve loved him a hundred
+ years. It seems to me that I have never loved anyone before. You can’t
+ understand it.... Sónya, wait a bit, sit here,” and Natásha embraced and
+ kissed her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I had heard that it happens like this, and you must have heard it too,
+ but it’s only now that I feel such love. It’s not the same as before. As
+ soon as I saw him I felt he was my master and I his slave, and that I
+ could not help loving him. Yes, his slave! Whatever he orders I shall do.
+ You don’t understand that. What can I do? What can I do, Sónya?” cried
+ Natásha with a happy yet frightened expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But think what you are doing,” cried Sónya. “I can’t leave it like this.
+ This secret correspondence... How could you let him go so far?” she went
+ on, with a horror and disgust she could hardly conceal.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I told you that I have no will,” Natásha replied. “Why can’t you
+ understand? I love him!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then I won’t let it come to that... I shall tell!” cried Sónya, bursting
+ into tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do you mean? For God’s sake... If you tell, you are my enemy!”
+ declared Natásha. “You want me to be miserable, you want us to be
+ separated....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When she saw Natásha’s fright, Sónya shed tears of shame and pity for her
+ friend.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what has happened between you?” she asked. “What has he said to you?
+ Why doesn’t he come to the house?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha did not answer her questions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For God’s sake, Sónya, don’t tell anyone, don’t torture me,” Natásha
+ entreated. “Remember no one ought to interfere in such matters! I have
+ confided in you....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But why this secrecy? Why doesn’t he come to the house?” asked Sónya.
+ “Why doesn’t he openly ask for your hand? You know Prince Andrew gave you
+ complete freedom—if it is really so; but I don’t believe it!
+ Natásha, have you considered what these secret reasons can be?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha looked at Sónya with astonishment. Evidently this question
+ presented itself to her mind for the first time and she did not know how
+ to answer it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know what the reasons are. But there must be reasons!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya sighed and shook her head incredulously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If there were reasons...” she began.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Natásha, guessing her doubts, interrupted her in alarm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya, one can’t doubt him! One can’t, one can’t! Don’t you understand?”
+ she cried.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Does he love you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Does he love me?” Natásha repeated with a smile of pity at her friend’s
+ lack of comprehension. “Why, you have read his letter and you have seen
+ him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But if he is dishonorable?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ He! dishonorable? If you only knew!” exclaimed Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If he is an honorable man he should either declare his intentions or
+ cease seeing you; and if you won’t do this, I will. I will write to him,
+ and I will tell Papa!” said Sónya resolutely.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I can’t live without him!” cried Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha, I don’t understand you. And what are you saying! Think of your
+ father and of Nicholas.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t want anyone, I don’t love anyone but him. How dare you say he is
+ dishonorable? Don’t you know that I love him?” screamed Natásha. “Go away,
+ Sónya! I don’t want to quarrel with you, but go, for God’s sake go! You
+ see how I am suffering!” Natásha cried angrily, in a voice of despair and
+ repressed irritation. Sónya burst into sobs and ran from the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha went to the table and without a moment’s reflection wrote that
+ answer to Princess Mary which she had been unable to write all the
+ morning. In this letter she said briefly that all their misunderstandings
+ were at an end; that availing herself of the magnanimity of Prince Andrew
+ who when he went abroad had given her her freedom, she begged Princess
+ Mary to forget everything and forgive her if she had been to blame toward
+ her, but that she could not be his wife. At that moment this all seemed
+ quite easy, simple, and clear to Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ On Friday the Rostóvs were to return to the country, but on Wednesday the
+ count went with the prospective purchaser to his estate near Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the day the count left, Sónya and Natásha were invited to a big dinner
+ party at the Karágins’, and Márya Dmítrievna took them there. At that
+ party Natásha again met Anatole, and Sónya noticed that she spoke to him,
+ trying not to be overheard, and that all through dinner she was more
+ agitated than ever. When they got home Natásha was the first to begin the
+ explanation Sónya expected.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There, Sónya, you were talking all sorts of nonsense about him,” Natásha
+ began in a mild voice such as children use when they wish to be praised.
+ “We have had an explanation today.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what happened? What did he say? Natásha, how glad I am you’re not
+ angry with me! Tell me everything—the whole truth. What did he say?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha became thoughtful.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, Sónya, if you knew him as I do! He said... He asked me what I had
+ promised Bolkónski. He was glad I was free to refuse him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya sighed sorrowfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you haven’t refused Bolkónski?” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Perhaps I have. Perhaps all is over between me and Bolkónski. Why do you
+ think so badly of me?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t think anything, only I don’t understand this...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wait a bit, Sónya, you’ll understand everything. You’ll see what a man he
+ is! Now don’t think badly of me or of him. I don’t think badly of anyone:
+ I love and pity everybody. But what am I to do?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya did not succumb to the tender tone Natásha used toward her. The more
+ emotional and ingratiating the expression of Natásha’s face became, the
+ more serious and stern grew Sónya’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha,” said she, “you asked me not to speak to you, and I haven’t
+ spoken, but now you yourself have begun. I don’t trust him, Natásha. Why
+ this secrecy?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Again, again!” interrupted Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha, I am afraid for you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Afraid of what?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am afraid you’re going to your ruin,” said Sónya resolutely, and was
+ herself horrified at what she had said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anger again showed in Natásha’s face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I’ll go to my ruin, I will, as soon as possible! It’s not your
+ business! It won’t be you, but I, who’ll suffer. Leave me alone, leave me
+ alone! I hate you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha!” moaned Sónya, aghast.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I hate you, I hate you! You’re my enemy forever!” And Natásha ran out of
+ the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha did not speak to Sónya again and avoided her. With the same
+ expression of agitated surprise and guilt she went about the house, taking
+ up now one occupation, now another, and at once abandoning them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hard as it was for Sónya, she watched her friend and did not let her out
+ of her sight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The day before the count was to return, Sónya noticed that Natásha sat by
+ the drawing room window all the morning as if expecting something and that
+ she made a sign to an officer who drove past, whom Sónya took to be
+ Anatole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya began watching her friend still more attentively and noticed that at
+ dinner and all that evening Natásha was in a strange and unnatural state.
+ She answered questions at random, began sentences she did not finish, and
+ laughed at everything.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After tea Sónya noticed a housemaid at Natásha’s door timidly waiting to
+ let her pass. She let the girl go in, and then listening at the door
+ learned that another letter had been delivered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then suddenly it became clear to Sónya that Natásha had some dreadful plan
+ for that evening. Sónya knocked at her door. Natásha did not let her in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She will run away with him!” thought Sónya. “She is capable of anything.
+ There was something particularly pathetic and resolute in her face today.
+ She cried as she said good-by to Uncle,” Sónya remembered. “Yes, that’s
+ it, she means to elope with him, but what am I to do?” thought she,
+ recalling all the signs that clearly indicated that Natásha had some
+ terrible intention. “The count is away. What am I to do? Write to Kurágin
+ demanding an explanation? But what is there to oblige him to reply? Write
+ to Pierre, as Prince Andrew asked me to in case of some misfortune?... But
+ perhaps she really has already refused Bolkónski—she sent a letter
+ to Princess Mary yesterday. And Uncle is away....” To tell Márya
+ Dmítrievna who had such faith in Natásha seemed to Sónya terrible. “Well,
+ anyway,” thought Sónya as she stood in the dark passage, “now or never I
+ must prove that I remember the family’s goodness to me and that I love
+ Nicholas. Yes! If I don’t sleep for three nights I’ll not leave this
+ passage and will hold her back by force and will and not let the family be
+ disgraced,” thought she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI
+ 
+ 
+ Anatole had lately moved to Dólokhov’s. The plan for Natalie Rostóva’s
+ abduction had been arranged and the preparations made by Dólokhov a few
+ days before, and on the day that Sónya, after listening at Natásha’s door,
+ resolved to safeguard her, it was to have been put into execution. Natásha
+ had promised to come out to Kurágin at the back porch at ten that evening.
+ Kurágin was to put her into a troyka he would have ready and to drive her
+ forty miles to the village of Kámenka, where an unfrocked priest was in
+ readiness to perform a marriage ceremony over them. At Kámenka a relay of
+ horses was to wait which would take them to the Warsaw highroad, and from
+ there they would hasten abroad with post horses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole had a passport, an order for post horses, ten thousand rubles he
+ had taken from his sister and another ten thousand borrowed with
+ Dólokhov’s help.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Two witnesses for the mock marriage—Khvóstikov, a retired petty
+ official whom Dólokhov made use of in his gambling transactions, and
+ Makárin, a retired hussar, a kindly, weak fellow who had an unbounded
+ affection for Kurágin—were sitting at tea in Dólokhov’s front room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In his large study, the walls of which were hung to the ceiling with
+ Persian rugs, bearskins, and weapons, sat Dólokhov in a traveling cloak
+ and high boots, at an open desk on which lay an abacus and some bundles of
+ paper money. Anatole, with uniform unbuttoned, walked to and fro from the
+ room where the witnesses were sitting, through the study to the room
+ behind, where his French valet and others were packing the last of his
+ things. Dólokhov was counting the money and noting something down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well,” he said, “Khvóstikov must have two thousand.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Give it to him, then,” said Anatole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Makárka” (their name for Makárin) “will go through fire and water for you
+ for nothing. So here are our accounts all settled,” said Dólokhov, showing
+ him the memorandum. “Is that right?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, of course,” returned Anatole, evidently not listening to Dólokhov
+ and looking straight before him with a smile that did not leave his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov banged down the lid of his desk and turned to Anatole with an
+ ironic smile:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know? You’d really better drop it all. There’s still time!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fool,” retorted Anatole. “Don’t talk nonsense! If you only knew... it’s
+ the devil knows what!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, really, give it up!” said Dólokhov. “I am speaking seriously. It’s no
+ joke, this plot you’ve hatched.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What, teasing again? Go to the devil! Eh?” said Anatole, making a
+ grimace. “Really it’s no time for your stupid jokes,” and he left the
+ room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov smiled contemptuously and condescendingly when Anatole had gone
+ out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You wait a bit,” he called after him. “I’m not joking, I’m talking sense.
+ Come here, come here!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole returned and looked at Dólokhov, trying to give him his attention
+ and evidently submitting to him involuntarily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now listen to me. I’m telling you this for the last time. Why should I
+ joke about it? Did I hinder you? Who arranged everything for you? Who
+ found the priest and got the passport? Who raised the money? I did it
+ all.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, thank you for it. Do you think I am not grateful?” And Anatole
+ sighed and embraced Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I helped you, but all the same I must tell you the truth; it is a
+ dangerous business, and if you think about it—a stupid business.
+ Well, you’ll carry her off—all right! Will they let it stop at that?
+ It will come out that you’re already married. Why, they’ll have you in the
+ criminal court....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, nonsense, nonsense!” Anatole ejaculated and again made a grimace.
+ “Didn’t I explain to you? What?” And Anatole, with the partiality
+ dull-witted people have for any conclusion they have reached by their own
+ reasoning, repeated the argument he had already put to Dólokhov a hundred
+ times. “Didn’t I explain to you that I have come to this conclusion: if
+ this marriage is invalid,” he went on, crooking one finger, “then I have
+ nothing to answer for; but if it is valid, no matter! Abroad no one will
+ know anything about it. Isn’t that so? And don’t talk to me, don’t,
+ don’t.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Seriously, you’d better drop it! You’ll only get yourself into a mess!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go to the devil!” cried Anatole and, clutching his hair, left the room,
+ but returned at once and dropped into an armchair in front of Dólokhov
+ with his feet turned under him. “It’s the very devil! What? Feel how it
+ beats!” He took Dólokhov’s hand and put it on his heart. “What a foot, my
+ dear fellow! What a glance! A goddess!” he added in French. “What?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov with a cold smile and a gleam in his handsome insolent eyes
+ looked at him—evidently wishing to get some more amusement out of
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well and when the money’s gone, what then?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What then? Eh?” repeated Anatole, sincerely perplexed by a thought of the
+ future. “What then?... Then, I don’t know.... But why talk nonsense!” He
+ glanced at his watch. “It’s time!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole went into the back room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then! Nearly ready? You’re dawdling!” he shouted to the servants.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov put away the money, called a footman whom he ordered to bring
+ something for them to eat and drink before the journey, and went into the
+ room where Khvóstikov and Makárin were sitting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole lay on the sofa in the study leaning on his elbow and smiling
+ pensively, while his handsome lips muttered tenderly to himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come and eat something. Have a drink!” Dólokhov shouted to him from the
+ other room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t want to,” answered Anatole continuing to smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come! Balagá is here.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole rose and went into the dining room. Balagá was a famous troyka
+ driver who had known Dólokhov and Anatole some six years and had given
+ them good service with his troykas. More than once when Anatole’s regiment
+ was stationed at Tver he had taken him from Tver in the evening, brought
+ him to Moscow by daybreak, and driven him back again the next night. More
+ than once he had enabled Dólokhov to escape when pursued. More than once
+ he had driven them through the town with gypsies and “ladykins” as he
+ called the cocottes. More than once in their service he had run over
+ pedestrians and upset vehicles in the streets of Moscow and had always
+ been protected from the consequences by “my gentlemen” as he called them.
+ He had ruined more than one horse in their service. More than once they
+ had beaten him, and more than once they had made him drunk on champagne
+ and Madeira, which he loved; and he knew more than one thing about each of
+ them which would long ago have sent an ordinary man to Siberia. They often
+ called Balagá into their orgies and made him drink and dance at the
+ gypsies’, and more than one thousand rubles of their money had passed
+ through his hands. In their service he risked his skin and his life twenty
+ times a year, and in their service had lost more horses than the money he
+ had from them would buy. But he liked them; liked that mad driving at
+ twelve miles an hour, liked upsetting a driver or running down a
+ pedestrian, and flying at full gallop through the Moscow streets. He liked
+ to hear those wild, tipsy shouts behind him: “Get on! Get on!” when it was
+ impossible to go any faster. He liked giving a painful lash on the neck to
+ some peasant who, more dead than alive, was already hurrying out of his
+ way. “Real gentlemen!” he considered them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole and Dólokhov liked Balagá too for his masterly driving and because
+ he liked the things they liked. With others Balagá bargained, charging
+ twenty-five rubles for a two hours’ drive, and rarely drove himself,
+ generally letting his young men do so. But with “his gentlemen” he always
+ drove himself and never demanded anything for his work. Only a couple of
+ times a year—when he knew from their valets that they had money in
+ hand—he would turn up of a morning quite sober and with a deep bow
+ would ask them to help him. The gentlemen always made him sit down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do help me out, Theodore Iványch, sir,” or “your excellency,” he would
+ say. “I am quite out of horses. Let me have what you can to go to the
+ fair.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Anatole and Dólokhov, when they had money, would give him a thousand
+ or a couple of thousand rubles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balagá was a fair-haired, short, and snub-nosed peasant of about
+ twenty-seven; red-faced, with a particularly red thick neck, glittering
+ little eyes, and a small beard. He wore a fine, dark-blue, silk-lined
+ cloth coat over a sheepskin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On entering the room now he crossed himself, turning toward the front
+ corner of the room, and went up to Dólokhov, holding out a small, black
+ hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Theodore Iványch!” he said, bowing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How d’you do, friend? Well, here he is!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good day, your excellency!” he said, again holding out his hand to
+ Anatole who had just come in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I say, Balagá,” said Anatole, putting his hands on the man’s shoulders,
+ “do you care for me or not? Eh? Now, do me a service.... What horses have
+ you come with? Eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As your messenger ordered, your special beasts,” replied Balagá.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, listen, Balagá! Drive all three to death but get me there in three
+ hours. Eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When they are dead, what shall I drive?” said Balagá with a wink.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mind, I’ll smash your face in! Don’t make jokes!” cried Anatole, suddenly
+ rolling his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why joke?” said the driver, laughing. “As if I’d grudge my gentlemen
+ anything! As fast as ever the horses can gallop, so fast we’ll go!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah!” said Anatole. “Well, sit down.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, sit down!” said Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll stand, Theodore Iványch.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sit down; nonsense! Have a drink!” said Anatole, and filled a large glass
+ of Madeira for him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The driver’s eyes sparkled at the sight of the wine. After refusing it for
+ manners’ sake, he drank it and wiped his mouth with a red silk
+ handkerchief he took out of his cap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And when are we to start, your excellency?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well...” Anatole looked at his watch. “We’ll start at once. Mind, Balagá!
+ You’ll get there in time? Eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That depends on our luck in starting, else why shouldn’t we be there in
+ time?” replied Balagá. “Didn’t we get you to Tver in seven hours? I think
+ you remember that, your excellency?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know, one Christmas I drove from Tver,” said Anatole, smilingly at
+ the recollection and turning to Makárin who gazed rapturously at him with
+ wide-open eyes. “Will you believe it, Makárka, it took one’s breath away,
+ the rate we flew. We came across a train of loaded sleighs and drove right
+ over two of them. Eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Those were horses!” Balagá continued the tale. “That time I’d harnessed
+ two young side horses with the bay in the shafts,” he went on, turning to
+ Dólokhov. “Will you believe it, Theodore Iványch, those animals flew forty
+ miles? I couldn’t hold them in, my hands grew numb in the sharp frost so
+ that I threw down the reins—‘Catch hold yourself, your excellency!’
+ says I, and I just tumbled on the bottom of the sleigh and sprawled there.
+ It wasn’t a case of urging them on, there was no holding them in till we
+ reached the place. The devils took us there in three hours! Only the near
+ one died of it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII
+ 
+ 
+ Anatole went out of the room and returned a few minutes later wearing a
+ fur coat girt with a silver belt, and a sable cap jauntily set on one side
+ and very becoming to his handsome face. Having looked in a mirror, and
+ standing before Dólokhov in the same pose he had assumed before it, he
+ lifted a glass of wine.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, good-by, Theodore. Thank you for everything and farewell!” said
+ Anatole. “Well, comrades and friends...” he considered for a
+ moment “... of my youth, farewell!” he said, turning to Makárin and the others.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though they were all going with him, Anatole evidently wished to make
+ something touching and solemn out of this address to his comrades. He
+ spoke slowly in a loud voice and throwing out his chest slightly swayed
+ one leg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All take glasses; you too, Balagá. Well, comrades and friends of my
+ youth, we’ve had our fling and lived and reveled. Eh? And now, when shall
+ we meet again? I am going abroad. We have had a good time—now
+ farewell, lads! To our health! Hurrah!...” he cried, and emptying his
+ glass flung it on the floor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To your health!” said Balagá who also emptied his glass, and wiped his
+ mouth with his handkerchief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Makárin embraced Anatole with tears in his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, Prince, how sorry I am to part from you!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let’s go. Let’s go!” cried Anatole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balagá was about to leave the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, stop!” said Anatole. “Shut the door; we have first to sit down.
+ That’s the way.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They shut the door and all sat down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, quick march, lads!” said Anatole, rising.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Joseph, his valet, handed him his sabretache and saber, and they all went
+ out into the vestibule.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And where’s the fur cloak?” asked Dólokhov. “Hey, Ignátka! Go to Matrëna
+ Matrévna and ask her for the sable cloak. I have heard what elopements are
+ like,” continued Dólokhov with a wink. “Why, she’ll rush out more dead
+ than alive just in the things she is wearing; if you delay at all there’ll
+ be tears and ‘Papa’ and ‘Mamma,’ and she’s frozen in a minute and must go
+ back—but you wrap the fur cloak round her first thing and carry her
+ to the sleigh.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The valet brought a woman’s fox-lined cloak.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fool, I told you the sable one! Hey, Matrëna, the sable!” he shouted so
+ that his voice rang far through the rooms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A handsome, slim, and pale-faced gypsy girl with glittering black eyes and
+ curly blue-black hair, wearing a red shawl, ran out with a sable mantle on
+ her arm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here, I don’t grudge it—take it!” she said, evidently afraid of her
+ master and yet regretful of her cloak.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov, without answering, took the cloak, threw it over Matrëna, and
+ wrapped her up in it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s the way,” said Dólokhov, “and then so!” and he turned the collar
+ up round her head, leaving only a little of the face uncovered. “And then
+ so, do you see?” and he pushed Anatole’s head forward to meet the gap left
+ by the collar, through which Matrëna’s brilliant smile was seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, good-by, Matrëna,” said Anatole, kissing her. “Ah, my revels here
+ are over. Remember me to Stëshka. There, good-by! Good-by, Matrëna, wish
+ me luck!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, Prince, may God give you great luck!” said Matrëna in her gypsy
+ accent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Two troykas were standing before the porch and two young drivers were
+ holding the horses. Balagá took his seat in the front one and holding his
+ elbows high arranged the reins deliberately. Anatole and Dólokhov got in
+ with him. Makárin, Khvóstikov, and a valet seated themselves in the other
+ sleigh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, are you ready?” asked Balagá.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go!” he cried, twisting the reins round his hands, and the troyka tore
+ down the Nikítski Boulevard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tproo! Get out of the way! Hi!... Tproo!...” The shouting of Balagá and
+ of the sturdy young fellow seated on the box was all that could be heard.
+ On the Arbát Square the troyka caught against a carriage; something
+ cracked, shouts were heard, and the troyka flew along the Arbát Street.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After taking a turn along the Podnovínski Boulevard, Balagá began to rein
+ in, and turning back drew up at the crossing of the old Konyúsheny Street.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The young fellow on the box jumped down to hold the horses and Anatole and
+ Dólokhov went along the pavement. When they reached the gate Dólokhov
+ whistled. The whistle was answered, and a maidservant ran out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come into the courtyard or you’ll be seen; she’ll come out directly,”
+ said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov stayed by the gate. Anatole followed the maid into the courtyard,
+ turned the corner, and ran up into the porch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was met by Gabriel, Márya Dmítrievna’s gigantic footman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come to the mistress, please,” said the footman in his deep bass,
+ intercepting any retreat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To what Mistress? Who are you?” asked Anatole in a breathless whisper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Kindly step in, my orders are to bring you in.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Kurágin! Come back!” shouted Dólokhov. “Betrayed! Back!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov, after Anatole entered, had remained at the wicket gate and was
+ struggling with the yard porter who was trying to lock it. With a last
+ desperate effort Dólokhov pushed the porter aside, and when Anatole ran
+ back seized him by the arm, pulled him through the wicket, and ran back
+ with him to the troyka.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII
+ 
+ 
+ Márya Dmítrievna, having found Sónya weeping in the corridor, made her
+ confess everything, and intercepting the note to Natásha she read it and
+ went into Natásha’s room with it in her hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You shameless good-for-nothing!” said she. “I won’t hear a word.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pushing back Natásha who looked at her with astonished but tearless eyes,
+ she locked her in; and having given orders to the yard porter to admit the
+ persons who would be coming that evening, but not to let them out again,
+ and having told the footman to bring them up to her, she seated herself in
+ the drawing room to await the abductors.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Gabriel came to inform her that the men who had come had run away
+ again, she rose frowning, and clasping her hands behind her paced through
+ the rooms a long time considering what she should do. Toward midnight she
+ went to Natásha’s room fingering the key in her pocket. Sónya was sitting
+ sobbing in the corridor. “Márya Dmítrievna, for God’s sake let me in to
+ her!” she pleaded, but Márya Dmítrievna unlocked the door and went in
+ without giving her an answer.... “Disgusting, abominable... In my house...
+ horrid girl, hussy! I’m only sorry for her father!” thought she, trying to
+ restrain her wrath. “Hard as it may be, I’ll tell them all to hold their
+ tongues and will hide it from the count.” She entered the room with
+ resolute steps. Natásha lying on the sofa, her head hidden in her hands,
+ and she did not stir. She was in just the same position in which Márya
+ Dmítrievna had left her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A nice girl! Very nice!” said Márya Dmítrievna. “Arranging meetings with
+ lovers in my house! It’s no use pretending: you listen when I speak to
+ you!” And Márya Dmítrievna touched her arm. “Listen when I speak! You’ve
+ disgraced yourself like the lowest of hussies. I’d treat you differently,
+ but I’m sorry for your father, so I will conceal it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha did not change her position, but her whole body heaved with
+ noiseless, convulsive sobs which choked her. Márya Dmítrievna glanced
+ round at Sónya and seated herself on the sofa beside Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s lucky for him that he escaped me; but I’ll find him!” she said in
+ her rough voice. “Do you hear what I am saying or not?” she added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She put her large hand under Natásha’s face and turned it toward her. Both
+ Márya Dmítrievna and Sónya were amazed when they saw how Natásha looked.
+ Her eyes were dry and glistening, her lips compressed, her cheeks sunken.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let me be!... What is it to me?... I shall die!” she muttered, wrenching
+ herself from Márya Dmítrievna’s hands with a vicious effort and sinking
+ down again into her former position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natalie!” said Márya Dmítrievna. “I wish for your good. Lie still, stay
+ like that then, I won’t touch you. But listen. I won’t tell you how guilty
+ you are. You know that yourself. But when your father comes back tomorrow
+ what am I to tell him? Eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again Natásha’s body shook with sobs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Suppose he finds out, and your brother, and your betrothed?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have no betrothed: I have refused him!” cried Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s all the same,” continued Márya Dmítrievna. “If they hear of this,
+ will they let it pass? He, your father, I know him... if he challenges him
+ to a duel will that be all right? Eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, let me be! Why have you interfered at all? Why? Why? Who asked you
+ to?” shouted Natásha, raising herself on the sofa and looking malignantly
+ at Márya Dmítrievna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what did you want?” cried Márya Dmítrievna, growing angry again.
+ “Were you kept under lock and key? Who hindered his coming to the house?
+ Why carry you off as if you were some gypsy singing girl?... Well, if he
+ had carried you off... do you think they wouldn’t have found him? Your
+ father, or brother, or your betrothed? And he’s a scoundrel, a wretch—that’s
+ a fact!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is better than any of you!” exclaimed Natásha getting up. “If you
+ hadn’t interfered... Oh, my God! What is it all? What is it? Sónya,
+ why?... Go away!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And she burst into sobs with the despairing vehemence with which people
+ bewail disasters they feel they have themselves occasioned. Márya
+ Dmítrievna was to speak again but Natásha cried out:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go away! Go away! You all hate and despise me!” and she threw herself
+ back on the sofa.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Márya Dmítrievna went on admonishing her for some time, enjoining on her
+ that it must all be kept from her father and assuring her that nobody
+ would know anything about it if only Natásha herself would undertake to
+ forget it all and not let anyone see that something had happened. Natásha
+ did not reply, nor did she sob any longer, but she grew cold and had a
+ shivering fit. Márya Dmítrievna put a pillow under her head, covered her
+ with two quilts, and herself brought her some lime-flower water, but
+ Natásha did not respond to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, let her sleep,” said Márya Dmítrievna as she went out of the room
+ supposing Natásha to be asleep.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Natásha was not asleep; with pale face and fixed wide-open eyes she
+ looked straight before her. All that night she did not sleep or weep and
+ did not speak to Sónya who got up and went to her several times.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day Count Rostóv returned from his estate near Moscow in time for
+ lunch as he had promised. He was in very good spirits; the affair with the
+ purchaser was going on satisfactorily, and there was nothing to keep him
+ any longer in Moscow, away from the countess whom he missed. Márya
+ Dmítrievna met him and told him that Natásha had been very unwell the day
+ before and that they had sent for the doctor, but that she was better now.
+ Natásha had not left her room that morning. With compressed and parched
+ lips and dry fixed eyes, she sat at the window, uneasily watching the
+ people who drove past and hurriedly glancing round at anyone who entered
+ the room. She was evidently expecting news of him and that he would come
+ or would write to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the count came to see her she turned anxiously round at the sound of
+ a man’s footstep, and then her face resumed its cold and malevolent
+ expression. She did not even get up to greet him. “What is the matter with
+ you, my angel? Are you ill?” asked the count.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After a moment’s silence Natásha answered: “Yes, ill.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In reply to the count’s anxious inquiries as to why she was so dejected
+ and whether anything had happened to her betrothed, she assured him that
+ nothing had happened and asked him not to worry. Márya Dmítrievna
+ confirmed Natásha’s assurances that nothing had happened. From the
+ pretense of illness, from his daughter’s distress, and by the embarrassed
+ faces of Sónya and Márya Dmítrievna, the count saw clearly that something
+ had gone wrong during his absence, but it was so terrible for him to think
+ that anything disgraceful had happened to his beloved daughter, and he so
+ prized his own cheerful tranquillity, that he avoided inquiries and tried
+ to assure himself that nothing particularly had happened; and he was only
+ dissatisfied that her indisposition delayed their return to the country.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX
+ 
+ 
+ From the day his wife arrived in Moscow Pierre had been intending to go
+ away somewhere, so as not to be near her. Soon after the Rostóvs came to
+ Moscow the effect Natásha had on him made him hasten to carry out his
+ intention. He went to Tver to see Joseph Alexéevich’s widow, who had long
+ since promised to hand over to him some papers of her deceased husband’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he returned to Moscow Pierre was handed a letter from Márya
+ Dmítrievna asking him to come and see her on a matter of great importance
+ relating to Andrew Bolkónski and his betrothed. Pierre had been avoiding
+ Natásha because it seemed to him that his feeling for her was stronger
+ than a married man’s should be for his friend’s fiancée. Yet some fate
+ constantly threw them together.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What can have happened? And what can they want with me?” thought he as he
+ dressed to go to Márya Dmítrievna’s. “If only Prince Andrew would hurry up
+ and come and marry her!” thought he on his way to the house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the Tverskóy Boulevard a familiar voice called to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pierre! Been back long?” someone shouted. Pierre raised his head. In a
+ sleigh drawn by two gray trotting-horses that were bespattering the
+ dashboard with snow, Anatole and his constant companion Makárin dashed
+ past. Anatole was sitting upright in the classic pose of military dandies,
+ the lower part of his face hidden by his beaver collar and his head
+ slightly bent. His face was fresh and rosy, his white-plumed hat, tilted
+ to one side, disclosed his curled and pomaded hair besprinkled with
+ powdery snow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, indeed, that’s a true sage,” thought Pierre. “He sees nothing beyond
+ the pleasure of the moment, nothing troubles him and so he is always
+ cheerful, satisfied, and serene. What wouldn’t I give to be like him!” he
+ thought enviously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In Márya Dmítrievna’s anteroom the footman who helped him off with his fur
+ coat said that the mistress asked him to come to her bedroom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he opened the ballroom door Pierre saw Natásha sitting at the window,
+ with a thin, pale, and spiteful face. She glanced round at him, frowned,
+ and left the room with an expression of cold dignity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What has happened?” asked Pierre, entering Márya Dmítrievna’s room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fine doings!” answered Dmítrievna. “For fifty-eight years have I lived in
+ this world and never known anything so disgraceful!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And having put him on his honor not to repeat anything she told him, Márya
+ Dmítrievna informed him that Natásha had refused Prince Andrew without her
+ parents’ knowledge and that the cause of this was Anatole Kurágin into
+ whose society Pierre’s wife had thrown her and with whom Natásha had tried
+ to elope during her father’s absence, in order to be married secretly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre raised his shoulders and listened open-mouthed to what was told
+ him, scarcely able to believe his own ears. That Prince Andrew’s deeply
+ loved affianced wife—the same Natásha Rostóva who used to be so
+ charming—should give up Bolkónski for that fool Anatole who was
+ already secretly married (as Pierre knew), and should be so in love with
+ him as to agree to run away with him, was something Pierre could not
+ conceive and could not imagine.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He could not reconcile the charming impression he had of Natásha, whom he
+ had known from a child, with this new conception of her baseness, folly,
+ and cruelty. He thought of his wife. “They are all alike!” he said to
+ himself, reflecting that he was not the only man unfortunate enough to be
+ tied to a bad woman. But still he pitied Prince Andrew to the point of
+ tears and sympathized with his wounded pride, and the more he pitied his
+ friend the more did he think with contempt and even with disgust of that
+ Natásha who had just passed him in the ballroom with such a look of cold
+ dignity. He did not know that Natásha’s soul was overflowing with despair,
+ shame, and humiliation, and that it was not her fault that her face
+ happened to assume an expression of calm dignity and severity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But how get married?” said Pierre, in answer to Márya Dmítrievna. “He
+ could not marry—he is married!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Things get worse from hour to hour!” ejaculated Márya Dmítrievna. “A nice
+ youth! What a scoundrel! And she’s expecting him—expecting him since
+ yesterday. She must be told! Then at least she won’t go on expecting him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After hearing the details of Anatole’s marriage from Pierre, and giving
+ vent to her anger against Anatole in words of abuse, Márya Dmítrievna told
+ Pierre why she had sent for him. She was afraid that the count or
+ Bolkónski, who might arrive at any moment, if they knew of this affair
+ (which she hoped to hide from them) might challenge Anatole to a duel, and
+ she therefore asked Pierre to tell his brother-in-law in her name to leave
+ Moscow and not dare to let her set eyes on him again. Pierre—only
+ now realizing the danger to the old count, Nicholas, and Prince Andrew—promised
+ to do as she wished. Having briefly and exactly explained her wishes to
+ him, she let him go to the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mind, the count knows nothing. Behave as if you know nothing either,” she
+ said. “And I will go and tell her it is no use expecting him! And stay to
+ dinner if you care to!” she called after Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre met the old count, who seemed nervous and upset. That morning
+ Natásha had told him that she had rejected Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Troubles, troubles, my dear fellow!” he said to Pierre. “What troubles
+ one has with these girls without their mother! I do so regret having come
+ here.... I will be frank with you. Have you heard she has broken off her
+ engagement without consulting anybody? It’s true this engagement never was
+ much to my liking. Of course he is an excellent man, but still, with his
+ father’s disapproval they wouldn’t have been happy, and Natásha won’t lack
+ suitors. Still, it has been going on so long, and to take such a step
+ without father’s or mother’s consent! And now she’s ill, and God knows
+ what! It’s hard, Count, hard to manage daughters in their mother’s
+ absence....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre saw that the count was much upset and tried to change the subject,
+ but the count returned to his troubles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya entered the room with an agitated face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha is not quite well; she’s in her room and would like to see you.
+ Márya Dmítrievna is with her and she too asks you to come.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, you are a great friend of Bolkónski’s, no doubt she wants to send
+ him a message,” said the count. “Oh dear! Oh dear! How happy it all was!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And clutching the spare gray locks on his temples the count left the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Márya Dmítrievna told Natásha that Anatole was married, Natásha did
+ not wish to believe it and insisted on having it confirmed by Pierre
+ himself. Sónya told Pierre this as she led him along the corridor to
+ Natásha’s room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha, pale and stern, was sitting beside Márya Dmítrievna, and her
+ eyes, glittering feverishly, met Pierre with a questioning look the moment
+ he entered. She did not smile or nod, but only gazed fixedly at him, and
+ her look asked only one thing: was he a friend, or like the others an
+ enemy in regard to Anatole? As for Pierre, he evidently did not exist for
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He knows all about it,” said Márya Dmítrievna pointing to Pierre and
+ addressing Natásha. “Let him tell you whether I have told the truth.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha looked from one to the other as a hunted and wounded animal looks
+ at the approaching dogs and sportsmen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natálya Ilyníchna,” Pierre began, dropping his eyes with a feeling of
+ pity for her and loathing for the thing he had to do, “whether it is true
+ or not should make no difference to you, because...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then it is not true that he’s married!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, it is true.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Has he been married long?” she asked. “On your honor?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre gave his word of honor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is he still here?” she asked, quickly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I have just seen him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She was evidently unable to speak and made a sign with her hands that they
+ should leave her alone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX
+ 
+ 
+ Pierre did not stay for dinner, but left the room and went away at once.
+ He drove through the town seeking Anatole Kurágin, at the thought of whom
+ now the blood rushed to his heart and he felt a difficulty in breathing.
+ He was not at the ice hills, nor at the gypsies’, nor at Komoneno’s.
+ Pierre drove to the Club. In the Club all was going on as usual. The
+ members who were assembling for dinner were sitting about in groups; they
+ greeted Pierre and spoke of the town news. The footman having greeted him,
+ knowing his habits and his acquaintances, told him there was a place left
+ for him in the small dining room and that Prince Michael Zakhárych was in
+ the library, but Paul Timoféevich had not yet arrived. One of Pierre’s
+ acquaintances, while they were talking about the weather, asked if he had
+ heard of Kurágin’s abduction of Rostóva which was talked of in the town,
+ and was it true? Pierre laughed and said it was nonsense for he had just
+ come from the Rostóvs’. He asked everyone about Anatole. One man told him
+ he had not come yet, and another that he was coming to dinner. Pierre felt
+ it strange to see this calm, indifferent crowd of people unaware of what
+ was going on in his soul. He paced through the ballroom, waited till
+ everyone had come, and as Anatole had not turned up did not stay for
+ dinner but drove home.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole, for whom Pierre was looking, dined that day with Dólokhov,
+ consulting him as to how to remedy this unfortunate affair. It seemed to
+ him essential to see Natásha. In the evening he drove to his sister’s to
+ discuss with her how to arrange a meeting. When Pierre returned home after
+ vainly hunting all over Moscow, his valet informed him that Prince Anatole
+ was with the countess. The countess’ drawing room was full of guests.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre without greeting his wife whom he had not seen since his return—at
+ that moment she was more repulsive to him than ever—entered the
+ drawing room and seeing Anatole went up to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, Pierre,” said the countess going up to her husband. “You don’t know
+ what a plight our Anatole...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She stopped, seeing in the forward thrust of her husband’s head, in his
+ glowing eyes and his resolute gait, the terrible indications of that rage
+ and strength which she knew and had herself experienced after his duel
+ with Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where you are, there is vice and evil!” said Pierre to his wife.
+ “Anatole, come with me! I must speak to you,” he added in French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole glanced round at his sister and rose submissively, ready to follow
+ Pierre. Pierre, taking him by the arm, pulled him toward himself and was
+ leading him from the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you allow yourself in my drawing room...” whispered Hélène, but Pierre
+ did not reply and went out of the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole followed him with his usual jaunty step but his face betrayed
+ anxiety.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having entered his study Pierre closed the door and addressed Anatole
+ without looking at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You promised Countess Rostóva to marry her and were about to elope with
+ her, is that so?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mon cher,” answered Anatole (their whole conversation was in French), “I
+ don’t consider myself bound to answer questions put to me in that tone.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre’s face, already pale, became distorted by fury. He seized Anatole
+ by the collar of his uniform with his big hand and shook him from side to
+ side till Anatole’s face showed a sufficient degree of terror.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When I tell you that I must talk to you!...” repeated Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come now, this is stupid. What?” said Anatole, fingering a button of his
+ collar that had been wrenched loose with a bit of the cloth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’re a scoundrel and a blackguard, and I don’t know what deprives me
+ from the pleasure of smashing your head with this!” said Pierre,
+ expressing himself so artificially because he was talking French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He took a heavy paperweight and lifted it threateningly, but at once put
+ it back in its place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Did you promise to marry her?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I... I didn’t think of it. I never promised, because...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have you any letters of hers? Any letters?” he said, moving toward
+ Anatole.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole glanced at him and immediately thrust his hand into his pocket and
+ drew out his pocketbook.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre took the letter Anatole handed him and, pushing aside a table that
+ stood in his way, threw himself on the sofa.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I shan’t be violent, don’t be afraid!” said Pierre in answer to a
+ frightened gesture of Anatole’s. “First, the letters,” said he, as if
+ repeating a lesson to himself. “Secondly,” he continued after a short
+ pause, again rising and again pacing the room, “tomorrow you must get out
+ of Moscow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But how can I?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thirdly,” Pierre continued without listening to him, “you must never
+ breathe a word of what has passed between you and Countess Rostóva. I know
+ I can’t prevent your doing so, but if you have a spark of conscience...”
+ Pierre paced the room several times in silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole sat at a table frowning and biting his lips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “After all, you must understand that besides your pleasure there is such a
+ thing as other people’s happiness and peace, and that you are ruining a
+ whole life for the sake of amusing yourself! Amuse yourself with women
+ like my wife—with them you are within your rights, for they know
+ what you want of them. They are armed against you by the same experience
+ of debauchery; but to promise a maid to marry her... to deceive, to
+ kidnap.... Don’t you understand that it is as mean as beating an old man
+ or a child?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre paused and looked at Anatole no longer with an angry but with a
+ questioning look.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know about that, eh?” said Anatole, growing more confident as
+ Pierre mastered his wrath. “I don’t know that and don’t want to,” he said,
+ not looking at Pierre and with a slight tremor of his lower jaw, “but you
+ have used such words to me—‘mean’ and so on—which as a man of
+ honor I can’t allow anyone to use.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre glanced at him with amazement, unable to understand what he wanted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Though it was tête-à-tête,” Anatole continued, “still I can’t...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is it satisfaction you want?” said Pierre ironically.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You could at least take back your words. What? If you want me to do as
+ you wish, eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I take them back, I take them back!” said Pierre, “and I ask you to
+ forgive me.” Pierre involuntarily glanced at the loose button. “And if you
+ require money for your journey...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anatole smiled. The expression of that base and cringing smile, which
+ Pierre knew so well in his wife, revolted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, vile and heartless brood!” he exclaimed, and left the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day Anatole left for Petersburg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI
+ 
+ 
+ Pierre drove to Márya Dmítrievna’s to tell her of the fulfillment of her
+ wish that Kurágin should be banished from Moscow. The whole house was in a
+ state of alarm and commotion. Natásha was very ill, having, as Márya
+ Dmítrievna told him in secret, poisoned herself the night after she had
+ been told that Anatole was married, with some arsenic she had stealthily
+ procured. After swallowing a little she had been so frightened that she
+ woke Sónya and told her what she had done. The necessary antidotes had
+ been administered in time and she was now out of danger, though still so
+ weak that it was out of the question to move her to the country, and so
+ the countess had been sent for. Pierre saw the distracted count, and
+ Sónya, who had a tear-stained face, but he could not see Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre dined at the club that day and heard on all sides gossip about the
+ attempted abduction of Rostóva. He resolutely denied these rumors,
+ assuring everyone that nothing had happened except that his brother-in-law
+ had proposed to her and been refused. It seemed to Pierre that it was his
+ duty to conceal the whole affair and re-establish Natásha’s reputation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was awaiting Prince Andrew’s return with dread and went every day to
+ the old prince’s for news of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Old Prince Bolkónski heard all the rumors current in the town from
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne and had read the note to Princess Mary in which
+ Natásha had broken off her engagement. He seemed in better spirits than
+ usual and awaited his son with great impatience.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some days after Anatole’s departure Pierre received a note from Prince
+ Andrew, informing him of his arrival and asking him to come to see him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as he reached Moscow, Prince Andrew had received from his father
+ Natásha’s note to Princess Mary breaking off her engagement (Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne had purloined it from Princess Mary and given it to the old
+ prince), and he heard from him the story of Natásha’s elopement, with
+ additions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew had arrived in the evening and Pierre came to see him next
+ morning. Pierre expected to find Prince Andrew in almost the same state as
+ Natásha and was therefore surprised on entering the drawing room to hear
+ him in the study talking in a loud animated voice about some intrigue
+ going on in Petersburg. The old prince’s voice and another now and then
+ interrupted him. Princess Mary came out to meet Pierre. She sighed,
+ looking toward the door of the room where Prince Andrew was, evidently
+ intending to express her sympathy with his sorrow, but Pierre saw by her
+ face that she was glad both at what had happened and at the way her
+ brother had taken the news of Natásha’s faithlessness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He says he expected it,” she remarked. “I know his pride will not let him
+ express his feelings, but still he has taken it better, far better, than I
+ expected. Evidently it had to be....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But is it possible that all is really ended?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary looked at him with astonishment. She did not understand how
+ he could ask such a question. Pierre went into the study. Prince Andrew,
+ greatly changed and plainly in better health, but with a fresh horizontal
+ wrinkle between his brows, stood in civilian dress facing his father and
+ Prince Meshchérski, warmly disputing and vigorously gesticulating. The
+ conversation was about Speránski—the news of whose sudden exile and
+ alleged treachery had just reached Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now he is censured and accused by all who were enthusiastic about him a
+ month ago,” Prince Andrew was saying, “and by those who were unable to
+ understand his aims. To judge a man who is in disfavor and to throw on him
+ all the blame of other men’s mistakes is very easy, but I maintain that if
+ anything good has been accomplished in this reign it was done by him, by
+ him alone.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He paused at the sight of Pierre. His face quivered and immediately
+ assumed a vindictive expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Posterity will do him justice,” he concluded, and at once turned to
+ Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, how are you? Still getting stouter?” he said with animation, but
+ the new wrinkle on his forehead deepened. “Yes, I am well,” he said in
+ answer to Pierre’s question, and smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To Pierre that smile said plainly: “I am well, but my health is now of no
+ use to anyone.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After a few words to Pierre about the awful roads from the Polish
+ frontier, about people he had met in Switzerland who knew Pierre, and
+ about M. Dessalles, whom he had brought from abroad to be his son’s tutor,
+ Prince Andrew again joined warmly in the conversation about Speránski
+ which was still going on between the two old men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If there were treason, or proofs of secret relations with Napoleon, they
+ would have been made public,” he said with warmth and haste. “I do not,
+ and never did, like Speránski personally, but I like justice!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre now recognized in his friend a need with which he was only too
+ familiar, to get excited and to have arguments about extraneous matters in
+ order to stifle thoughts that were too oppressive and too intimate. When
+ Prince Meshchérski had left, Prince Andrew took Pierre’s arm and asked him
+ into the room that had been assigned him. A bed had been made up there,
+ and some open portmanteaus and trunks stood about. Prince Andrew went to
+ one and took out a small casket, from which he drew a packet wrapped in
+ paper. He did it all silently and very quickly. He stood up and coughed.
+ His face was gloomy and his lips compressed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Forgive me for troubling you....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre saw that Prince Andrew was going to speak of Natásha, and his broad
+ face expressed pity and sympathy. This expression irritated Prince Andrew,
+ and in a determined, ringing, and unpleasant tone he continued:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have received a refusal from Countess Rostóva and have heard reports of
+ your brother-in-law having sought her hand, or something of that kind. Is
+ that true?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Both true and untrue,” Pierre began; but Prince Andrew interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here are her letters and her portrait,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He took the packet from the table and handed it to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Give this to the countess... if you see her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She is very ill,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then she is here still?” said Prince Andrew. “And Prince Kurágin?” he
+ added quickly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He left long ago. She has been at death’s door.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I much regret her illness,” said Prince Andrew; and he smiled like his
+ father, coldly, maliciously, and unpleasantly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So Monsieur Kurágin has not honored Countess Rostóva with his hand?” said
+ Prince Andrew, and he snorted several times.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He could not marry, for he was married already,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew laughed disagreeably, again reminding one of his father.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And where is your brother-in-law now, if I may ask?” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He has gone to Peters... But I don’t know,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, it doesn’t matter,” said Prince Andrew. “Tell Countess Rostóva that
+ she was and is perfectly free and that I wish her all that is good.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre took the packet. Prince Andrew, as if trying to remember whether he
+ had something more to say, or waiting to see if Pierre would say anything,
+ looked fixedly at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I say, do you remember our discussion in Petersburg?” asked Pierre,
+ “about...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” returned Prince Andrew hastily. “I said that a fallen woman should
+ be forgiven, but I didn’t say I could forgive her. I can’t.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But can this be compared...?” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew interrupted him and cried sharply: “Yes, ask her hand again,
+ be magnanimous, and so on?... Yes, that would be very noble, but I am
+ unable to follow in that gentleman’s footsteps. If you wish to be my
+ friend never speak to me of that... of all that! Well, good-by. So you’ll
+ give her the packet?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre left the room and went to the old prince and Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old man seemed livelier than usual. Princess Mary was the same as
+ always, but beneath her sympathy for her brother, Pierre noticed her
+ satisfaction that the engagement had been broken off. Looking at them
+ Pierre realized what contempt and animosity they all felt for the Rostóvs,
+ and that it was impossible in their presence even to mention the name of
+ her who could give up Prince Andrew for anyone else.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At dinner the talk turned on the war, the approach of which was becoming
+ evident. Prince Andrew talked incessantly, arguing now with his father,
+ now with the Swiss tutor Dessalles, and showing an unnatural animation,
+ the cause of which Pierre so well understood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXII
+ 
+ 
+ That same evening Pierre went to the Rostóvs’ to fulfill the commission
+ entrusted to him. Natásha was in bed, the count at the club, and Pierre,
+ after giving the letters to Sónya, went to Márya Dmítrievna who was
+ interested to know how Prince Andrew had taken the news. Ten minutes later
+ Sónya came to Márya Dmítrievna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha insists on seeing Count Peter Kirílovich,” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But how? Are we to take him up to her? The room there has not been tidied
+ up.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, she has dressed and gone into the drawing room,” said Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Márya Dmítrievna only shrugged her shoulders.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When will her mother come? She has worried me to death! Now mind, don’t
+ tell her everything!” said she to Pierre. “One hasn’t the heart to scold
+ her, she is so much to be pitied, so much to be pitied.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha was standing in the middle of the drawing room, emaciated, with a
+ pale set face, but not at all shamefaced as Pierre expected to find her.
+ When he appeared at the door she grew flurried, evidently undecided
+ whether to go to meet him or to wait till he came up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre hastened to her. He thought she would give him her hand as usual;
+ but she, stepping up to him, stopped, breathing heavily, her arms hanging
+ lifelessly just in the pose she used to stand in when she went to the
+ middle of the ballroom to sing, but with quite a different expression of
+ face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Peter Kirílovich,” she began rapidly, “Prince Bolkónski was your friend—is
+ your friend,” she corrected herself. (It seemed to her that everything
+ that had once been must now be different.) “He told me once to apply to
+ you...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre sniffed as he looked at her, but did not speak. Till then he had
+ reproached her in his heart and tried to despise her, but he now felt so
+ sorry for her that there was no room in his soul for reproach.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is here now: tell him... to for... forgive me!” She stopped and
+ breathed still more quickly, but did not shed tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes... I will tell him,” answered Pierre; “but...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not know what to say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha was evidently dismayed at the thought of what he might think she
+ had meant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I know all is over,” she said hurriedly. “No, that can never be. I’m
+ only tormented by the wrong I have done him. Tell him only that I beg him
+ to forgive, forgive, forgive me for everything....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She trembled all over and sat down on a chair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A sense of pity he had never before known overflowed Pierre’s heart.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will tell him, I will tell him everything once more,” said Pierre.
+ “But... I should like to know one thing....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Know what?” Natásha’s eyes asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I should like to know, did you love...” Pierre did not know how to refer
+ to Anatole and flushed at the thought of him—“did you love that bad
+ man?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t call him bad!” said Natásha. “But I don’t know, don’t know at
+ all....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She began to cry and a still greater sense of pity, tenderness, and love
+ welled up in Pierre. He felt the tears trickle under his spectacles and
+ hoped they would not be noticed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We won’t speak of it any more, my dear,” said Pierre, and his gentle,
+ cordial tone suddenly seemed very strange to Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We won’t speak of it, my dear—I’ll tell him everything; but one
+ thing I beg of you, consider me your friend and if you want help, advice,
+ or simply to open your heart to someone—not now, but when your mind
+ is clearer—think of me!” He took her hand and kissed it. “I shall be happy
+ if it’s in my power...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre grew confused.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t speak to me like that. I am not worth it!” exclaimed Natásha and
+ turned to leave the room, but Pierre held her hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He knew he had something more to say to her. But when he said it he was
+ amazed at his own words.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stop, stop! You have your whole life before you,” said he to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Before me? No! All is over for me,” she replied with shame and
+ self-abasement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All over?” he repeated. “If I were not myself, but the
+ handsomest, cleverest, and best man in the world, and were free, I would this
+ moment ask on my knees for your hand and your love!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For the first time for many days Natásha wept tears of gratitude and
+ tenderness, and glancing at Pierre she went out of the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre too when she had gone almost ran into the anteroom, restraining
+ tears of tenderness and joy that choked him, and without finding the
+ sleeves of his fur cloak threw it on and got into his sleigh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where to now, your excellency?” asked the coachman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where to?” Pierre asked himself. “Where can I go now? Surely
+ not to the Club or to pay calls?” All men seemed so pitiful, so poor,
+ in comparison with this feeling of tenderness and love he experienced: in
+ comparison with that softened, grateful, last look she had given him through
+ her tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Home!” said Pierre, and despite twenty-two degrees of frost Fahrenheit he
+ threw open the bearskin cloak from his broad chest and inhaled the air
+ with joy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was clear and frosty. Above the dirty, ill-lit streets, above the black
+ roofs, stretched the dark starry sky. Only looking up at the sky did
+ Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane things
+ compared with the heights to which his soul had just been raised. At the
+ entrance to the Arbát Square an immense expanse of dark starry sky
+ presented itself to his eyes. Almost in the center of it, above the
+ Prechístenka Boulevard, surrounded and sprinkled on all sides by stars but
+ distinguished from them all by its nearness to the earth, its white light,
+ and its long uplifted tail, shone the enormous and brilliant comet of 1812—the
+ comet which was said to portend all kinds of woes and the end of the
+ world. In Pierre, however, that comet with its long luminous tail aroused
+ no feeling of fear. On the contrary he gazed joyfully, his eyes moist with
+ tears, at this bright comet which, having traveled in its orbit with
+ inconceivable velocity through immeasurable space, seemed suddenly—like
+ an arrow piercing the earth—to remain fixed in a chosen spot,
+ vigorously holding its tail erect, shining and displaying its white light
+ amid countless other scintillating stars. It seemed to Pierre that this
+ comet fully responded to what was passing in his own softened and uplifted
+ soul, now blossoming into a new life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK NINE: 1812
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ From the close of the year 1811 an intensified arming and concentrating of
+ the forces of Western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces—millions
+ of men, reckoning those transporting and feeding the army—moved from
+ the west eastwards to the Russian frontier, toward which since 1811
+ Russian forces had been similarly drawn. On the twelfth of June, 1812, the
+ forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that
+ is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature.
+ Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes,
+ frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries,
+ incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the
+ annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed
+ them did not at the time regard as being crimes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? The
+ historians tell us with naïve assurance that its causes were the wrongs
+ inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of the Continental
+ System, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Alexander, the mistakes
+ of the diplomatists, and so on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Consequently, it would only have been necessary for Metternich,
+ Rumyántsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and an evening party, to have
+ taken proper pains and written a more adroit note, or for Napoleon to have
+ written to Alexander: “My respected Brother, I consent to restore the
+ duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg”—and there would have been no war.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ We can understand that the matter seemed like that to contemporaries. It
+ naturally seemed to Napoleon that the war was caused by England’s
+ intrigues (as in fact he said on the island of St. Helena). It naturally
+ seemed to members of the English Parliament that the cause of the war was
+ Napoleon’s ambition; to the Duke of Oldenburg, that the cause of the war
+ was the violence done to him; to businessmen that the cause of the war was
+ the Continental System which was ruining Europe; to the generals and old
+ soldiers that the chief reason for the war was the necessity of giving
+ them employment; to the legitimists of that day that it was the need of
+ re-establishing les bons principes , and to the diplomatists of that time
+ that it all resulted from the fact that the alliance between Russia and
+ Austria in 1809 had not been sufficiently well concealed from Napoleon,
+ and from the awkward wording of Memorandum No. 178. It is natural that
+ these and a countless and infinite quantity of other reasons, the number
+ depending on the endless diversity of points of view, presented themselves
+ to the men of that day; but to us, to posterity who view the thing that
+ happened in all its magnitude and perceive its plain and terrible meaning,
+ these causes seem insufficient. To us it is incomprehensible that millions
+ of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon
+ was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England’s policy was
+ astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what connection
+ such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence:
+ why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of
+ Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolénsk and Moscow and were killed
+ by them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away
+ by the process of research and can therefore regard the event with
+ unclouded common sense, an incalculable number of causes present
+ themselves. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them
+ we find; and each separate cause or whole series of causes appears to us
+ equally valid in itself and equally false by its insignificance compared
+ to the magnitude of the events, and by its impotence—apart from the
+ cooperation of all the other coincident causes—to occasion the
+ event. To us, the wish or objection of this or that French corporal to
+ serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon’s refusal to
+ withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the duchy of
+ Oldenburg; for had he not wished to serve, and had a second, a third, and
+ a thousandth corporal and private also refused, there would have been so
+ many less men in Napoleon’s army and the war could not have occurred.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Had Napoleon not taken offense at the demand that he should withdraw
+ beyond the Vistula, and not ordered his troops to advance, there would
+ have been no war; but had all his sergeants objected to serving a second
+ term then also there could have been no war. Nor could there have been a
+ war had there been no English intrigues and no Duke of Oldenburg, and had
+ Alexander not felt insulted, and had there not been an autocratic
+ government in Russia, or a Revolution in France and a subsequent
+ dictatorship and Empire, or all the things that produced the French
+ Revolution, and so on. Without each of these causes nothing could have
+ happened. So all these causes—myriads of causes—coincided to
+ bring it about. And so there was no one cause for that occurrence, but it
+ had to occur because it had to. Millions of men, renouncing their human
+ feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows,
+ just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to
+ the west, slaying their fellows.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the event seemed to
+ hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn
+ into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This could not be otherwise,
+ for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom the event
+ seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable
+ circumstances was needed without any one of which the event could not have
+ taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the
+ real power—the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and
+ guns—should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals,
+ and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and
+ complex causes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational
+ events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not
+ understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably,
+ the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims,
+ and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing
+ this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed
+ at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in
+ which it has not a free but a predestined significance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which
+ is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive
+ life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the
+ attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity. A deed done is
+ irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of
+ millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man
+ stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the
+ more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination and
+ inevitability of his every action.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A king is history’s slave.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses
+ every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than ever that
+ it depended on him, verser (ou ne pas verser) le sang de ses peuples *—as
+ Alexander expressed it in the last letter he wrote him—he had never
+ been so much in the grip of inevitable laws, which compelled him, while
+ thinking that he was acting on his own volition, to perform for the hive
+ life—that is to say, for history—whatever had to be performed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “To shed (or not to shed) the blood of his peoples.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The people of the west moved eastwards to slay their fellow men, and by
+ the law of coincidence thousands of minute causes fitted in and
+ co-ordinated to produce that movement and war: reproaches for the
+ nonobservance of the Continental System, the Duke of Oldenburg’s wrongs,
+ the movement of troops into Prussia—undertaken (as it seemed to
+ Napoleon) only for the purpose of securing an armed peace, the French
+ Emperor’s love and habit of war coinciding with his people’s inclinations,
+ allurement by the grandeur of the preparations, and the expenditure on
+ those preparations and the need of obtaining advantages to compensate for
+ that expenditure, the intoxicating honors he received in Dresden, the
+ diplomatic negotiations which, in the opinion of contemporaries, were
+ carried on with a sincere desire to attain peace, but which only wounded
+ the self-love of both sides, and millions of other causes that adapted
+ themselves to the event that was happening or coincided with it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its
+ attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by
+ the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because
+ the boy standing below wants to eat it?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in
+ which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who
+ finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth
+ is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the
+ apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. Equally right or
+ wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to,
+ and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says
+ that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last
+ navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock. In historic events the
+ so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels
+ they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in
+ an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of
+ history and predestined from eternity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ On the twenty-ninth of May Napoleon left Dresden, where he had spent three
+ weeks surrounded by a court that included princes, dukes, kings, and even
+ an emperor. Before leaving, Napoleon showed favor to the emperor, kings,
+ and princes who had deserved it, reprimanded the kings and princes with
+ whom he was dissatisfied, presented pearls and diamonds of his own—that
+ is, which he had taken from other kings—to the Empress of Austria,
+ and having, as his historian tells us, tenderly embraced the Empress Marie
+ Louise—who regarded him as her husband, though he had left another
+ wife in Paris—left her grieved by the parting which she seemed
+ hardly able to bear. Though the diplomatists still firmly believed in the
+ possibility of peace and worked zealously to that end, and though the
+ Emperor Napoleon himself wrote a letter to Alexander, calling him Monsieur
+ mon frère , and sincerely assured him that he did not want war and would
+ always love and honor him—yet he set off to join his army, and at
+ every station gave fresh orders to accelerate the movement of his troops
+ from west to east. He went in a traveling coach with six horses,
+ surrounded by pages, aides-de-camp, and an escort, along the road to
+ Posen, Thorn, Danzig, and Königsberg. At each of these towns thousands of
+ people met him with excitement and enthusiasm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The army was moving from west to east, and relays of six horses carried
+ him in the same direction. On the tenth of June, * coming up with the
+ army, he spent the night in apartments prepared for him on the estate of a
+ Polish count in the Vilkavisski forest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Old style.
+
+
+
+ 
+ Next day, overtaking the army, he went in a carriage to the Niemen, and,
+ changing into a Polish uniform, he drove to the riverbank in order to
+ select a place for the crossing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Seeing, on the other side, some Cossacks (les Cosaques) and the
+ wide-spreading steppes in the midst of which lay the holy city of Moscow
+ (Moscou, la ville sainte) , the capital of a realm such as the Scythia into
+ which Alexander the Great had marched—Napoleon unexpectedly, and
+ contrary alike to strategic and diplomatic considerations, ordered an
+ advance, and the next day his army began to cross the Niemen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Early in the morning of the twelfth of June he came out of his tent, which
+ was pitched that day on the steep left bank of the Niemen, and looked
+ through a spyglass at the streams of his troops pouring out of the
+ Vilkavisski forest and flowing over the three bridges thrown across the
+ river. The troops, knowing of the Emperor’s presence, were on the lookout
+ for him, and when they caught sight of a figure in an overcoat and a
+ cocked hat standing apart from his suite in front of his tent on the hill,
+ they threw up their caps and shouted: “Vive l’Empereur!” 
+ and one after another poured in a ceaseless stream out of the vast forest that had
+ concealed them and, separating, flowed on and on by the three bridges to
+ the other side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now we’ll go into action. Oh, when he takes it in hand himself, things
+ get hot... by heaven!... There he is!... Vive l’Empereur! So these are
+ the steppes of Asia! It’s a nasty country all the same. Au revoir , Beauché;
+ I’ll keep the best palace in Moscow for you! Au revoir . Good luck!... Did
+ you see the Emperor? Vive l’Empereur!... preur! —If they make me
+ Governor of India, Gérard, I’ll make you Minister of Kashmir—that’s
+ settled. Vive l’Empereur! Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah! The Cossacks—those
+ rascals—see how they run! Vive l’Empereur! There he is, do you see
+ him? I’ve seen him twice, as I see you now. The little corporal... I saw
+ him give the cross to one of the veterans.... Vive l’Empereur! ” came the
+ voices of men, old and young, of most diverse characters and social
+ positions. On the faces of all was one common expression of joy at the
+ commencement of the long-expected campaign and of rapture and devotion to
+ the man in the gray coat who was standing on the hill.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the thirteenth of June a rather small, thoroughbred Arab horse was
+ brought to Napoleon. He mounted it and rode at a gallop to one of the
+ bridges over the Niemen, deafened continually by incessant and rapturous
+ acclamations which he evidently endured only because it was impossible to
+ forbid the soldiers to express their love of him by such shouting, but the
+ shouting which accompanied him everywhere disturbed him and distracted him
+ from the military cares that had occupied him from the time he joined the
+ army. He rode across one of the swaying pontoon bridges to the farther
+ side, turned sharply to the left, and galloped in the direction of Kóvno,
+ preceded by enraptured, mounted chasseurs of the Guard who, breathless
+ with delight, galloped ahead to clear a path for him through the troops.
+ On reaching the broad river Víliya, he stopped near a regiment of Polish
+ Uhlans stationed by the river.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vivat!” shouted the Poles, ecstatically, breaking their ranks and
+ pressing against one another to see him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon looked up and down the river, dismounted, and sat down on a log
+ that lay on the bank. At a mute sign from him, a telescope was handed him
+ which he rested on the back of a happy page who had run up to him, and he
+ gazed at the opposite bank. Then he became absorbed in a map laid out on
+ the logs. Without lifting his head he said something, and two of his
+ aides-de-camp galloped off to the Polish Uhlans.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What? What did he say?” was heard in the ranks of the Polish Uhlans when
+ one of the aides-de-camp rode up to them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The order was to find a ford and to cross the river. The colonel of the
+ Polish Uhlans, a handsome old man, flushed and, fumbling in his speech
+ from excitement, asked the aide-de-camp whether he would be permitted to
+ swim the river with his Uhlans instead of seeking a ford. In evident fear
+ of refusal, like a boy asking for permission to get on a horse, he begged
+ to be allowed to swim across the river before the Emperor’s eyes. The
+ aide-de-camp replied that probably the Emperor would not be displeased at
+ this excess of zeal.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as the aide-de-camp had said this, the old mustached officer, with
+ happy face and sparkling eyes, raised his saber, shouted “Vivat!” 
+ and, commanding the Uhlans to follow him, spurred his horse and galloped into
+ the river. He gave an angry thrust to his horse, which had grown restive
+ under him, and plunged into the water, heading for the deepest part where
+ the current was swift. Hundreds of Uhlans galloped in after him. It was
+ cold and uncanny in the rapid current in the middle of the stream, and the
+ Uhlans caught hold of one another as they fell off their horses. Some of
+ the horses were drowned and some of the men; the others tried to swim on,
+ some in the saddle and some clinging to their horses’ manes. They tried to
+ make their way forward to the opposite bank and, though there was a ford
+ one third of a mile away, were proud that they were swimming and drowning
+ in this river under the eyes of the man who sat on the log and was not
+ even looking at what they were doing. When the aide-de-camp, having
+ returned and choosing an opportune moment, ventured to draw the Emperor’s
+ attention to the devotion of the Poles to his person, the little man in
+ the gray overcoat got up and, having summoned Berthier, began pacing up
+ and down the bank with him, giving him instructions and occasionally
+ glancing disapprovingly at the drowning Uhlans who distracted his
+ attention.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For him it was no new conviction that his presence in any part of the
+ world, from Africa to the steppes of Muscovy alike, was enough to dumfound
+ people and impel them to insane self-oblivion. He called for his horse and
+ rode to his quarters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some forty Uhlans were drowned in the river, though boats were sent to
+ their assistance. The majority struggled back to the bank from which they
+ had started. The colonel and some of his men got across and with
+ difficulty clambered out on the further bank. And as soon as they had got
+ out, in their soaked and streaming clothes, they shouted “Vivat!” 
+ and looked ecstatically at the spot where Napoleon had been but where he no
+ longer was and at that moment considered themselves happy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That evening, between issuing one order that the forged Russian paper
+ money prepared for use in Russia should be delivered as quickly as
+ possible and another that a Saxon should be shot, on whom a letter
+ containing information about the orders to the French army had been found,
+ Napoleon also gave instructions that the Polish colonel who had needlessly
+ plunged into the river should be enrolled in the Légion d’honneur of which
+ Napoleon was himself the head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Quos vult perdere dementat. *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Those whom (God) wishes to destroy he drives mad.
+
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ The Emperor of Russia had, meanwhile, been in Vílna for more than a month,
+ reviewing troops and holding maneuvers. Nothing was ready for the war that
+ everyone expected and to prepare for which the Emperor had come from
+ Petersburg. There was no general plan of action. The vacillation between
+ the various plans that were proposed had even increased after the Emperor
+ had been at headquarters for a month. Each of the three armies had its own
+ commander in chief, but there was no supreme commander of all the forces,
+ and the Emperor did not assume that responsibility himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The longer the Emperor remained in Vílna the less did everybody—tired
+ of waiting—prepare for the war. All the efforts of those who
+ surrounded the sovereign seemed directed merely to making him spend his
+ time pleasantly and forget that war was impending.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In June, after many balls and fetes given by the Polish magnates, by the
+ courtiers, and by the Emperor himself, it occurred to one of the Polish
+ aides-de-camp in attendance that a dinner and ball should be given for the
+ Emperor by his aides-de-camp. This idea was eagerly received. The Emperor
+ gave his consent. The aides-de-camp collected money by subscription. The
+ lady who was thought to be most pleasing to the Emperor was invited to act
+ as hostess. Count Bennigsen, being a landowner in the Vílna province,
+ offered his country house for the fete, and the thirteenth of June was
+ fixed for a ball, dinner, regatta, and fireworks at Zakret, Count
+ Bennigsen’s country seat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The very day that Napoleon issued the order to cross the Niemen, and his
+ vanguard, driving off the Cossacks, crossed the Russian frontier,
+ Alexander spent the evening at the entertainment given by his
+ aides-de-camp at Bennigsen’s country house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a gay and brilliant fete. Connoisseurs of such matters declared
+ that rarely had so many beautiful women been assembled in one place.
+ Countess Bezúkhova was present among other Russian ladies who had followed
+ the sovereign from Petersburg to Vílna and eclipsed the refined Polish
+ ladies by her massive, so-called Russian type of beauty. The Emperor
+ noticed her and honored her with a dance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís Drubetskóy, having left his wife in Moscow and being for the present
+ en garçon (as he phrased it), was also there and, though not an
+ aide-de-camp, had subscribed a large sum toward the expenses. Borís was
+ now a rich man who had risen to high honors and no longer sought patronage
+ but stood on an equal footing with the highest of those of his own age. He
+ was meeting Hélène in Vílna after not having seen her for a long time and
+ did not recall the past, but as Hélène was enjoying the favors of a very
+ important personage and Borís had only recently married, they met as good
+ friends of long standing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At midnight dancing was still going on. Hélène, not having a suitable
+ partner, herself offered to dance the mazurka with Borís. They were the
+ third couple. Borís, coolly looking at Hélène’s dazzling bare shoulders
+ which emerged from a dark, gold-embroidered, gauze gown, talked to her of
+ old acquaintances and at the same time, unaware of it himself and
+ unnoticed by others, never for an instant ceased to observe the Emperor
+ who was in the same room. The Emperor was not dancing, he stood in the
+ doorway, stopping now one pair and now another with gracious words which
+ he alone knew how to utter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As the mazurka began, Borís saw that Adjutant General Balashëv, one of
+ those in closest attendance on the Emperor, went up to him and contrary to
+ court etiquette stood near him while he was talking to a Polish lady.
+ Having finished speaking to her, the Emperor looked inquiringly at
+ Balashëv and, evidently understanding that he only acted thus because
+ there were important reasons for so doing, nodded slightly to the lady and
+ turned to him. Hardly had Balashëv begun to speak before a look of
+ amazement appeared on the Emperor’s face. He took Balashëv by the arm and
+ crossed the room with him, unconsciously clearing a path seven yards wide
+ as the people on both sides made way for him. Borís noticed Arakchéev’s
+ excited face when the sovereign went out with Balashëv. Arakchéev looked
+ at the Emperor from under his brow and, sniffing with his red nose,
+ stepped forward from the crowd as if expecting the Emperor to address him.
+ (Borís understood that Arakchéev envied Balashëv and was displeased that
+ evidently important news had reached the Emperor otherwise than through
+ himself.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the Emperor and Balashëv passed out into the illuminated garden
+ without noticing Arakchéev who, holding his sword and glancing wrathfully
+ around, followed some twenty paces behind them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the time Borís was going through the figures of the mazurka, he was
+ worried by the question of what news Balashëv had brought and how he could
+ find it out before others. In the figure in which he had to choose two
+ ladies, he whispered to Hélène that he meant to choose Countess Potocka
+ who, he thought, had gone out onto the veranda, and glided over the
+ parquet to the door opening into the garden, where, seeing Balashëv and
+ the Emperor returning to the veranda, he stood still. They were moving
+ toward the door. Borís, fluttering as if he had not had time to withdraw,
+ respectfully pressed close to the doorpost with bowed head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor, with the agitation of one who has been personally affronted,
+ was finishing with these words:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To enter Russia without declaring war! I will not make peace as long as a
+ single armed enemy remains in my country!” It seemed to Borís that it gave
+ the Emperor pleasure to utter these words. He was satisfied with the form
+ in which he had expressed his thoughts, but displeased that Borís had
+ overheard it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let no one know of it!” the Emperor added with a frown.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís understood that this was meant for him and, closing his eyes,
+ slightly bowed his head. The Emperor re-entered the ballroom and remained
+ there about another half-hour.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís was thus the first to learn the news that the French army had
+ crossed the Niemen and, thanks to this, was able to show certain important
+ personages that much that was concealed from others was usually known to
+ him, and by this means he rose higher in their estimation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ The unexpected news of the French having crossed the Niemen was
+ particularly startling after a month of unfulfilled expectations, and at a
+ ball. On first receiving the news, under the influence of indignation and
+ resentment the Emperor had found a phrase that pleased him, fully
+ expressed his feelings, and has since become famous. On returning home at
+ two o’clock that night he sent for his secretary, Shishkóv, and told him
+ to write an order to the troops and a rescript to Field Marshal Prince
+ Saltykóv, in which he insisted on the words being inserted that he would
+ not make peace so long as a single armed Frenchman remained on Russian
+ soil.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day the following letter was sent to Napoleon:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Monsieur mon frère, 
+
+
+
+ 
+ Yesterday I learned that, despite the loyalty with which I have kept my
+ engagements with Your Majesty, your troops have crossed the Russian
+ frontier, and I have this moment received from Petersburg a note, in which
+ Count Lauriston informs me, as a reason for this aggression, that Your
+ Majesty has considered yourself to be in a state of war with me from the
+ time Prince Kurákin asked for his passports. The reasons on which the Duc
+ de Bassano based his refusal to deliver them to him would never have led
+ me to suppose that that could serve as a pretext for aggression. In fact,
+ the ambassador, as he himself has declared, was never authorized to make
+ that demand, and as soon as I was informed of it I let him know how much I
+ disapproved of it and ordered him to remain at his post. If Your Majesty
+ does not intend to shed the blood of our peoples for such a
+ misunderstanding, and consents to withdraw your troops from Russian
+ territory, I will regard what has passed as not having occurred and an
+ understanding between us will be possible. In the contrary case, Your
+ Majesty, I shall see myself forced to repel an attack that nothing on my
+ part has provoked. It still depends on Your Majesty to preserve humanity
+ from the calamity of another war.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I am, etc.,
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ (signed) Alexander
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ At two in the morning of the fourteenth of June, the Emperor, having sent
+ for Balashëv and read him his letter to Napoleon, ordered him to take it
+ and hand it personally to the French Emperor. When dispatching Balashëv,
+ the Emperor repeated to him the words that he would not make peace so long
+ as a single armed enemy remained on Russian soil and told him to transmit
+ those words to Napoleon. Alexander did not insert them in his letter to
+ Napoleon, because with his characteristic tact he felt it would be
+ injudicious to use them at a moment when a last attempt at reconciliation
+ was being made, but he definitely instructed Balashëv to repeat them
+ personally to Napoleon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having set off in the small hours of the fourteenth, accompanied by a
+ bugler and two Cossacks, Balashëv reached the French outposts at the
+ village of Rykónty, on the Russian side of the Niemen, by dawn. There he
+ was stopped by French cavalry sentinels.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A French noncommissioned officer of hussars, in crimson uniform and a
+ shaggy cap, shouted to the approaching Balashëv to halt. Balashëv did not
+ do so at once, but continued to advance along the road at a walking pace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The noncommissioned officer frowned and, muttering words of abuse,
+ advanced his horse’s chest against Balashëv, put his hand to his saber,
+ and shouted rudely at the Russian general, asking: was he deaf that he did
+ not do as he was told? Balashëv mentioned who he was. The noncommissioned
+ officer began talking with his comrades about regimental matters without
+ looking at the Russian general.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After living at the seat of the highest authority and power, after
+ conversing with the Emperor less than three hours before, and in general
+ being accustomed to the respect due to his rank in the service, Balashëv
+ found it very strange here on Russian soil to encounter this hostile, and
+ still more this disrespectful, application of brute force to himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The sun was only just appearing from behind the clouds, the air was fresh
+ and dewy. A herd of cattle was being driven along the road from the
+ village, and over the fields the larks rose trilling, one after another,
+ like bubbles rising in water.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv looked around him, awaiting the arrival of an officer from the
+ village. The Russian Cossacks and bugler and the French hussars looked
+ silently at one another from time to time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A French colonel of hussars, who had evidently just left his bed, came
+ riding from the village on a handsome sleek gray horse, accompanied by two
+ hussars. The officer, the soldiers, and their horses all looked smart and
+ well kept.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was that first period of a campaign when troops are still in full trim,
+ almost like that of peacetime maneuvers, but with a shade of martial
+ swagger in their clothes, and a touch of the gaiety and spirit of
+ enterprise which always accompany the opening of a campaign.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French colonel with difficulty repressed a yawn, but was polite and
+ evidently understood Balashëv’s importance. He led him past his soldiers
+ and behind the outposts and told him that his wish to be presented to the
+ Emperor would most likely be satisfied immediately, as the Emperor’s
+ quarters were, he believed, not far off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They rode through the village of Rykónty, past tethered French hussar
+ horses, past sentinels and men who saluted their colonel and stared with
+ curiosity at a Russian uniform, and came out at the other end of the
+ village. The colonel said that the commander of the division was a mile
+ and a quarter away and would receive Balashëv and conduct him to his
+ destination.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The sun had by now risen and shone gaily on the bright verdure.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They had hardly ridden up a hill, past a tavern, before they saw a group
+ of horsemen coming toward them. In front of the group, on a black horse
+ with trappings that glittered in the sun, rode a tall man with plumes in
+ his hat and black hair curling down to his shoulders. He wore a red
+ mantle, and stretched his long legs forward in French fashion. This man
+ rode toward Balashëv at a gallop, his plumes flowing and his gems and gold
+ lace glittering in the bright June sunshine.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv was only two horses’ length from the equestrian with the
+ bracelets, plumes, necklaces, and gold embroidery, who was galloping
+ toward him with a theatrically solemn countenance, when Julner, the French
+ colonel, whispered respectfully: “The King of Naples!” It was, in fact,
+ Murat, now called “King of Naples.” Though it was quite incomprehensible
+ why he should be King of Naples, he was called so, and was himself
+ convinced that he was so, and therefore assumed a more solemn and
+ important air than formerly. He was so sure that he really was the King of
+ Naples that when, on the eve of his departure from that city, while
+ walking through the streets with his wife, some Italians called out to
+ him: “Viva il re!” * he turned to his wife with a pensive smile and said:
+ “Poor fellows, they don’t know that I am leaving them tomorrow!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Long live the king.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But though he firmly believed himself to be King of Naples and pitied the
+ grief felt by the subjects he was abandoning, latterly, after he had been
+ ordered to return to military service—and especially since his last
+ interview with Napoleon in Danzig, when his august brother-in-law had told
+ him: “I made you King that you should reign in my way, but not in yours!”—he
+ had cheerfully taken up his familiar business, and—like a well-fed
+ but not overfat horse that feels himself in harness and grows skittish
+ between the shafts—he dressed up in clothes as variegated and
+ expensive as possible, and gaily and contentedly galloped along the roads
+ of Poland, without himself knowing why or whither.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On seeing the Russian general he threw back his head, with its long hair
+ curling to his shoulders, in a majestically royal manner, and looked
+ inquiringly at the French colonel. The colonel respectfully informed His
+ Majesty of Balashëv’s mission, whose name he could not pronounce.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “De Bal-machève!” said the King (overcoming by his assurance the
+ difficulty that had presented itself to the colonel). “Charmed to make
+ your acquaintance, General!” he added, with a gesture of kingly
+ condescension.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as the King began to speak loud and fast his royal dignity
+ instantly forsook him, and without noticing it he passed into his natural
+ tone of good-natured familiarity. He laid his hand on the withers of
+ Balashëv’s horse and said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, General, it all looks like war,” as if regretting a circumstance of
+ which he was unable to judge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your Majesty,” replied Balashëv, “my master, the Emperor, does not desire
+ war and as Your Majesty sees...” said Balashëv, using the words Your
+ Majesty at every opportunity, with the affectation unavoidable in
+ frequently addressing one to whom the title was still a novelty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Murat’s face beamed with stupid satisfaction as he listened to “Monsieur
+ de Bal-machève.” But royauté oblige! * and he felt it incumbent on him, as
+ a king and an ally, to confer on state affairs with Alexander’s envoy. He
+ dismounted, took Balashëv’s arm, and moving a few steps away from his
+ suite, which waited respectfully, began to pace up and down with him,
+ trying to speak significantly. He referred to the fact that the Emperor
+ Napoleon had resented the demand that he should withdraw his troops from
+ Prussia, especially when that demand became generally known and the
+ dignity of France was thereby offended.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Royalty has its obligations.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv replied that there was “nothing offensive in the demand,
+ because...” but Murat interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then you don’t consider the Emperor Alexander the aggressor?” he asked
+ unexpectedly, with a kindly and foolish smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv told him why he considered Napoleon to be the originator of the
+ war.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, my dear general!” Murat again interrupted him, “with all my heart I
+ wish the Emperors may arrange the affair between them, and that the war
+ begun by no wish of mine may finish as quickly as possible!” said he, in
+ the tone of a servant who wants to remain good friends with another
+ despite a quarrel between their masters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And he went on to inquiries about the Grand Duke and the state of his
+ health, and to reminiscences of the gay and amusing times he had spent
+ with him in Naples. Then suddenly, as if remembering his royal dignity,
+ Murat solemnly drew himself up, assumed the pose in which he had stood at
+ his coronation, and, waving his right arm, said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I won’t detain you longer, General. I wish success to your mission,” and
+ with his embroidered red mantle, his flowing feathers, and his glittering
+ ornaments, he rejoined his suite who were respectfully awaiting him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv rode on, supposing from Murat’s words that he would very soon be
+ brought before Napoleon himself. But instead of that, at the next village
+ the sentinels of Davout’s infantry corps detained him as the pickets of
+ the vanguard had done, and an adjutant of the corps commander, who was
+ fetched, conducted him into the village to Marshal Davout.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ Davout was to Napoleon what Arakchéev was to Alexander—though not a
+ coward like Arakchéev, he was as precise, as cruel, and as unable to
+ express his devotion to his monarch except by cruelty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the organism of states such men are necessary, as wolves are necessary
+ in the organism of nature, and they always exist, always appear and hold
+ their own, however incongruous their presence and their proximity to the
+ head of the government may be. This inevitability alone can explain how
+ the cruel Arakchéev, who tore out a grenadier’s mustache with his own
+ hands, whose weak nerves rendered him unable to face danger, and who was
+ neither an educated man nor a courtier, was able to maintain his powerful
+ position with Alexander, whose own character was chivalrous, noble, and
+ gentle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv found Davout seated on a barrel in the shed of a peasant’s hut,
+ writing—he was auditing accounts. Better quarters could have been
+ found him, but Marshal Davout was one of those men who purposely put
+ themselves in most depressing conditions to have a justification for being
+ gloomy. For the same reason they are always hard at work and in a hurry.
+ “How can I think of the bright side of life when, as you see, I am sitting
+ on a barrel and working in a dirty shed?” the expression of his face
+ seemed to say. The chief pleasure and necessity of such men, when they
+ encounter anyone who shows animation, is to flaunt their own dreary,
+ persistent activity. Davout allowed himself that pleasure when Balashëv
+ was brought in. He became still more absorbed in his task when the Russian
+ general entered, and after glancing over his spectacles at Balashëv’s
+ face, which was animated by the beauty of the morning and by his talk with
+ Murat, he did not rise or even stir, but scowled still more and sneered
+ malevolently.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he noticed in Balashëv’s face the disagreeable impression this
+ reception produced, Davout raised his head and coldly asked what he
+ wanted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thinking he could have been received in such a manner only because Davout
+ did not know that he was adjutant general to the Emperor Alexander and
+ even his envoy to Napoleon, Balashëv hastened to inform him of his rank
+ and mission. Contrary to his expectation, Davout, after hearing him,
+ became still surlier and ruder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where is your dispatch?” he inquired. “Give it to me. I will send it to
+ the Emperor.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv replied that he had been ordered to hand it personally to the
+ Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your Emperor’s orders are obeyed in your army, but here,” said Davout,
+ “you must do as you’re told.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And, as if to make the Russian general still more conscious of his
+ dependence on brute force, Davout sent an adjutant to call the officer on
+ duty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv took out the packet containing the Emperor’s letter and laid it
+ on the table (made of a door with its hinges still hanging on it, laid
+ across two barrels). Davout took the packet and read the inscription.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are perfectly at liberty to treat me with respect or not,” protested
+ Balashëv, “but permit me to observe that I have the honor to be adjutant
+ general to His Majesty....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Davout glanced at him silently and plainly derived pleasure from the signs
+ of agitation and confusion which appeared on Balashëv’s face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You will be treated as is fitting,” said he and, putting the packet in
+ his pocket, left the shed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A minute later the marshal’s adjutant, de Castrès, came in and conducted
+ Balashëv to the quarters assigned him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That day he dined with the marshal, at the same board on the barrels.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day Davout rode out early and, after asking Balashëv to come to him,
+ peremptorily requested him to remain there, to move on with the baggage
+ train should orders come for it to move, and to talk to no one except
+ Monsieur de Castrès.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After four days of solitude, ennui, and consciousness of his impotence and
+ insignificance—particularly acute by contrast with the sphere of
+ power in which he had so lately moved—and after several marches with
+ the marshal’s baggage and the French army, which occupied the whole
+ district, Balashëv was brought to Vílna—now occupied by the French—through
+ the very gate by which he had left it four days previously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day the imperial gentleman-in-waiting, the Comte de Turenne, came to
+ Balashëv and informed him of the Emperor Napoleon’s wish to honor him with
+ an audience.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Four days before, sentinels of the Preobrazhénsk regiment had stood in
+ front of the house to which Balashëv was conducted, and now two French
+ grenadiers stood there in blue uniforms unfastened in front and with
+ shaggy caps on their heads, and an escort of hussars and Uhlans and a
+ brilliant suite of aides-de-camp, pages, and generals, who were waiting
+ for Napoleon to come out, were standing at the porch, round his saddle
+ horse and his Mameluke, Rustan. Napoleon received Balashëv in the very
+ house in Vílna from which Alexander had dispatched him on his mission.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ Though Balashëv was used to imperial pomp, he was amazed at the luxury and
+ magnificence of Napoleon’s court.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Comte de Turenne showed him into a big reception room where many
+ generals, gentlemen-in-waiting, and Polish magnates—several of whom
+ Balashëv had seen at the court of the Emperor of Russia—were
+ waiting. Duroc said that Napoleon would receive the Russian general before
+ going for his ride.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After some minutes, the gentleman-in-waiting who was on duty came into the
+ great reception room and, bowing politely, asked Balashëv to follow him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv went into a small reception room, one door of which led into a
+ study, the very one from which the Russian Emperor had dispatched him on
+ his mission. He stood a minute or two, waiting. He heard hurried footsteps
+ beyond the door, both halves of it were opened rapidly; all was silent and
+ then from the study the sound was heard of other steps, firm and resolute—they
+ were those of Napoleon. He had just finished dressing for his ride, and
+ wore a blue uniform, opening in front over a white waistcoat so long that
+ it covered his rotund stomach, white leather breeches tightly fitting the
+ fat thighs of his short legs, and Hessian boots. His short hair had
+ evidently just been brushed, but one lock hung down in the middle of his
+ broad forehead. His plump white neck stood out sharply above the black
+ collar of his uniform, and he smelled of Eau de Cologne. His full face,
+ rather young-looking, with its prominent chin, wore a gracious and
+ majestic expression of imperial welcome.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He entered briskly, with a jerk at every step and his head slightly thrown
+ back. His whole short corpulent figure with broad thick shoulders, and
+ chest and stomach involuntarily protruding, had that imposing and stately
+ appearance one sees in men of forty who live in comfort. It was evident,
+ too, that he was in the best of spirits that day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He nodded in answer to Balashëv’s low and respectful bow, and coming up to
+ him at once began speaking like a man who values every moment of his time
+ and does not condescend to prepare what he has to say but is sure he will
+ always say the right thing and say it well.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good day, General!” said he. “I have received the letter you brought from
+ the Emperor Alexander and am very glad to see you.” He glanced with his
+ large eyes into Balashëv’s face and immediately looked past him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was plain that Balashëv’s personality did not interest him at all.
+ Evidently only what took place within his own mind interested him. Nothing
+ outside himself had any significance for him, because everything in the
+ world, it seemed to him, depended entirely on his will.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I do not, and did not, desire war,” he continued, “but it has
+ been forced on me. Even now ” (he emphasized the word) “I am
+ ready to receive any explanations you can give me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And he began clearly and concisely to explain his reasons for
+ dissatisfaction with the Russian government. Judging by the calmly
+ moderate and amicable tone in which the French Emperor spoke, Balashëv was
+ firmly persuaded that he wished for peace and intended to enter into
+ negotiations.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Napoleon, having finished speaking, looked inquiringly at the Russian
+ envoy, Balashëv began a speech he had prepared long before: “Sire! The
+ Emperor, my master...” but the sight of the Emperor’s eyes bent on him
+ confused him. “You are flurried—compose yourself!” Napoleon seemed
+ to say, as with a scarcely perceptible smile he looked at Balashëv’s
+ uniform and sword.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv recovered himself and began to speak. He said that the Emperor
+ Alexander did not consider Kurákin’s demand for his passports a sufficient
+ cause for war; that Kurákin had acted on his own initiative and without
+ his sovereign’s assent, that the Emperor Alexander did not desire war, and
+ had no relations with England.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not yet! ” interposed Napoleon, and, as if fearing to give vent to his
+ feelings, he frowned and nodded slightly as a sign that Balashëv might
+ proceed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After saying all he had been instructed to say, Balashëv added that the
+ Emperor Alexander wished for peace, but would not enter into negotiations
+ except on condition that... Here Balashëv hesitated: he remembered the
+ words the Emperor Alexander had not written in his letter, but had
+ specially inserted in the rescript to Saltykóv and had told Balashëv to
+ repeat to Napoleon. Balashëv remembered these words, “So long as a single
+ armed foe remains on Russian soil,” but some complex feeling restrained
+ him. He could not utter them, though he wished to do so. He grew confused
+ and said: “On condition that the French army retires beyond the Niemen.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon noticed Balashëv’s embarrassment when uttering these last words;
+ his face twitched and the calf of his left leg began to quiver
+ rhythmically. Without moving from where he stood he began speaking in a
+ louder tone and more hurriedly than before. During the speech that
+ followed, Balashëv, who more than once lowered his eyes, involuntarily
+ noticed the quivering of Napoleon’s left leg which increased the more
+ Napoleon raised his voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I desire peace, no less than the Emperor Alexander,” he began. “Have I
+ not for eighteen months been doing everything to obtain it? I have waited
+ eighteen months for explanations. But in order to begin negotiations, what
+ is demanded of me?” he said, frowning and making an energetic gesture of
+ inquiry with his small white plump hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The withdrawal of your army beyond the Niemen, sire,” replied Balashëv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Niemen?” repeated Napoleon. “So now you want me to retire beyond the
+ Niemen—only the Niemen?” repeated Napoleon, looking straight at
+ Balashëv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The latter bowed his head respectfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Instead of the demand of four months earlier to withdraw from Pomerania,
+ only a withdrawal beyond the Niemen was now demanded. Napoleon turned
+ quickly and began to pace the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You say the demand now is that I am to withdraw beyond the Niemen before
+ commencing negotiations, but in just the same way two months ago the
+ demand was that I should withdraw beyond the Vistula and the Oder, and yet
+ you are willing to negotiate.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He went in silence from one corner of the room to the other and again
+ stopped in front of Balashëv. Balashëv noticed that his left leg was
+ quivering faster than before and his face seemed petrified in its stern
+ expression. This quivering of his left leg was a thing Napoleon was
+ conscious of. “The vibration of my left calf is a great sign with me,” he
+ remarked at a later date.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Such demands as to retreat beyond the Vistula and Oder may be made to a
+ Prince of Baden, but not to me!” Napoleon almost screamed, quite to his
+ own surprise. “If you gave me Petersburg and Moscow I could not accept
+ such conditions. You say I have begun this war! But who first joined his
+ army? The Emperor Alexander, not I! And you offer me negotiations when I
+ have expended millions, when you are in alliance with England, and when
+ your position is a bad one. You offer me negotiations! But what is the aim
+ of your alliance with England? What has she given you?” he continued
+ hurriedly, evidently no longer trying to show the advantages of peace and
+ discuss its possibility, but only to prove his own rectitude and power and
+ Alexander’s errors and duplicity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The commencement of his speech had obviously been made with the intention
+ of demonstrating the advantages of his position and showing that he was
+ nevertheless willing to negotiate. But he had begun talking, and the more
+ he talked the less could he control his words.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The whole purport of his remarks now was evidently to exalt himself and
+ insult Alexander—just what he had least desired at the commencement
+ of the interview.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I hear you have made peace with Turkey?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv bowed his head affirmatively.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Peace has been concluded...” he began.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Napoleon did not let him speak. He evidently wanted to do all the
+ talking himself, and continued to talk with the sort of eloquence and
+ unrestrained irritability to which spoiled people are so prone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I know you have made peace with the Turks without obtaining Moldavia
+ and Wallachia; I would have given your sovereign those provinces as I gave
+ him Finland. Yes,” he went on, “I promised and would have given the
+ Emperor Alexander Moldavia and Wallachia, and now he won’t have those
+ splendid provinces. Yet he might have united them to his empire and in a
+ single reign would have extended Russia from the Gulf of Bothnia to the
+ mouths of the Danube. Catherine the Great could not have done more,” said
+ Napoleon, growing more and more excited as he paced up and down the room,
+ repeating to Balashëv almost the very words he had used to Alexander
+ himself at Tilsit. “All that, he would have owed to my friendship. Oh,
+ what a splendid reign!” he repeated several times, then paused, drew from
+ his pocket a gold snuffbox, lifted it to his nose, and greedily sniffed at
+ it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a splendid reign the Emperor Alexander’s might have been! ”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He looked compassionately at Balashëv, and as soon as the latter tried to
+ make some rejoinder hastily interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What could he wish or look for that he would not have obtained through my
+ friendship?” demanded Napoleon, shrugging his shoulders in perplexity.
+ “But no, he has preferred to surround himself with my enemies, and with
+ whom? With Steins, Armfeldts, Bennigsens, and Wintzingerodes! Stein, a
+ traitor expelled from his own country; Armfeldt, a rake and an intriguer;
+ Wintzingerode, a fugitive French subject; Bennigsen, rather more of a
+ soldier than the others, but all the same an incompetent who was unable to
+ do anything in 1807 and who should awaken terrible memories in the Emperor
+ Alexander’s mind.... Granted that were they competent they might be made
+ use of,” continued Napoleon—hardly able to keep pace in words with
+ the rush of thoughts that incessantly sprang up, proving how right and
+ strong he was (in his perception the two were one and the same)—“but
+ they are not even that! They are neither fit for war nor peace! Barclay is
+ said to be the most capable of them all, but I cannot say so, judging by
+ his first movements. And what are they doing, all these courtiers? Pfuel
+ proposes, Armfeldt disputes, Bennigsen considers, and Barclay, called on
+ to act, does not know what to decide on, and time passes bringing no
+ result. Bagratión alone is a military man. He’s stupid, but he has
+ experience, a quick eye, and resolution.... And what role is your young
+ monarch playing in that monstrous crowd? They compromise him and throw on
+ him the responsibility for all that happens. A sovereign should not be
+ with the army unless he is a general!” said Napoleon, evidently uttering
+ these words as a direct challenge to the Emperor. He knew how Alexander
+ desired to be a military commander.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The campaign began only a week ago, and you haven’t even been able to
+ defend Vílna. You are cut in two and have been driven out of the Polish
+ provinces. Your army is grumbling.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the contrary, Your Majesty,” said Balashëv, hardly able to remember
+ what had been said to him and following these verbal fireworks with
+ difficulty, “the troops are burning with eagerness...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know everything!” Napoleon interrupted him. “I know everything. I know
+ the number of your battalions as exactly as I know my own. You have not
+ two hundred thousand men, and I have three times that number. I give you
+ my word of honor,” said Napoleon, forgetting that his word of honor could
+ carry no weight—“I give you my word of honor that I have five
+ hundred and thirty thousand men this side of the Vistula. The Turks will
+ be of no use to you; they are worth nothing and have shown it by making
+ peace with you. As for the Swedes—it is their fate to be governed by
+ mad kings. Their king was insane and they changed him for another—Bernadotte,
+ who promptly went mad—for no Swede would ally himself with Russia
+ unless he were mad.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon grinned maliciously and again raised his snuffbox to his nose.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv knew how to reply to each of Napoleon’s remarks, and would have
+ done so; he continually made the gesture of a man wishing to say
+ something, but Napoleon always interrupted him. To the alleged insanity of
+ the Swedes, Balashëv wished to reply that when Russia is on her side
+ Sweden is practically an island: but Napoleon gave an angry exclamation to
+ drown his voice. Napoleon was in that state of irritability in which a man
+ has to talk, talk, and talk, merely to convince himself that he is in the
+ right. Balashëv began to feel uncomfortable: as envoy he feared to demean
+ his dignity and felt the necessity of replying; but, as a man, he shrank
+ before the transport of groundless wrath that had evidently seized
+ Napoleon. He knew that none of the words now uttered by Napoleon had any
+ significance, and that Napoleon himself would be ashamed of them when he
+ came to his senses. Balashëv stood with downcast eyes, looking at the
+ movements of Napoleon’s stout legs and trying to avoid meeting his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what do I care about your allies?” said Napoleon. “I have allies—the
+ Poles. There are eighty thousand of them and they fight like lions. And
+ there will be two hundred thousand of them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And probably still more perturbed by the fact that he had uttered this
+ obvious falsehood, and that Balashëv still stood silently before him in
+ the same attitude of submission to fate, Napoleon abruptly turned round,
+ drew close to Balashëv’s face, and, gesticulating rapidly and
+ energetically with his white hands, almost shouted:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Know that if you stir up Prussia against me, I’ll wipe it off the map of
+ Europe!” he declared, his face pale and distorted by anger, and he struck
+ one of his small hands energetically with the other. “Yes, I will throw
+ you back beyond the Dvína and beyond the Dnieper, and will re-erect
+ against you that barrier which it was criminal and blind of Europe to
+ allow to be destroyed. Yes, that is what will happen to you. That is what
+ you have gained by alienating me!” And he walked silently several times up
+ and down the room, his fat shoulders twitching.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He put his snuffbox into his waistcoat pocket, took it out again, lifted
+ it several times to his nose, and stopped in front of Balashëv. He paused,
+ looked ironically straight into Balashëv’s eyes, and said in a quiet
+ voice:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And yet what a splendid reign your master might have had! ”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv, feeling it incumbent on him to reply, said that from the Russian
+ side things did not appear in so gloomy a light. Napoleon was silent,
+ still looking derisively at him and evidently not listening to him.
+ Balashëv said that in Russia the best results were expected from the war.
+ Napoleon nodded condescendingly, as if to say, “I know it’s your duty to
+ say that, but you don’t believe it yourself. I have convinced you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Balashëv had ended, Napoleon again took out his snuffbox, sniffed at
+ it, and stamped his foot twice on the floor as a signal. The door opened,
+ a gentleman-in-waiting, bending respectfully, handed the Emperor his hat
+ and gloves; another brought him a pocket handkerchief. Napoleon, without
+ giving them a glance, turned to Balashëv:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Assure the Emperor Alexander from me,” said he, taking his hat, “that I
+ am as devoted to him as before: I know him thoroughly and very highly
+ esteem his lofty qualities. I will detain you no longer, General; you
+ shall receive my letter to the Emperor.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Napoleon went quickly to the door. Everyone in the reception room
+ rushed forward and descended the staircase.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ After all that Napoleon had said to him—those bursts of anger and
+ the last dryly spoken words: “I will detain you no longer, General; you
+ shall receive my letter,” Balashëv felt convinced that Napoleon would not
+ wish to see him, and would even avoid another meeting with him—an
+ insulted envoy—especially as he had witnessed his unseemly anger.
+ But, to his surprise, Balashëv received, through Duroc, an invitation to
+ dine with the Emperor that day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bessières, Caulaincourt, and Berthier were present at that dinner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon met Balashëv cheerfully and amiably. He not only showed no sign
+ of constraint or self-reproach on account of his outburst that morning,
+ but, on the contrary, tried to reassure Balashëv. It was evident that he
+ had long been convinced that it was impossible for him to make a mistake,
+ and that in his perception whatever he did was right, not because it
+ harmonized with any idea of right and wrong, but because he did it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor was in very good spirits after his ride through Vílna, where
+ crowds of people had rapturously greeted and followed him. From all the
+ windows of the streets through which he rode, rugs, flags, and his
+ monogram were displayed, and the Polish ladies, welcoming him, waved their
+ handkerchiefs to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At dinner, having placed Balashëv beside him, Napoleon not only treated
+ him amiably but behaved as if Balashëv were one of his own courtiers, one
+ of those who sympathized with his plans and ought to rejoice at his
+ success. In the course of conversation he mentioned Moscow and questioned
+ Balashëv about the Russian capital, not merely as an interested traveler
+ asks about a new city he intends to visit, but as if convinced that
+ Balashëv, as a Russian, must be flattered by his curiosity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How many inhabitants are there in Moscow? How many houses? Is it true
+ that Moscow is called ‘Holy Moscow’? How many churches are there in
+ Moscow?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And receiving the reply that there were more than two hundred churches, he
+ remarked:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why such a quantity of churches?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Russians are very devout,” replied Balashëv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But a large number of monasteries and churches is always a sign of the
+ backwardness of a people,” said Napoleon, turning to Caulaincourt for
+ appreciation of this remark.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv respectfully ventured to disagree with the French Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Every country has its own character,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But nowhere in Europe is there anything like that,” said Napoleon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I beg your Majesty’s pardon,” returned Balashëv, “besides Russia there is
+ Spain, where there are also many churches and monasteries.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This reply of Balashëv’s, which hinted at the recent defeats of the French
+ in Spain, was much appreciated when he related it at Alexander’s court,
+ but it was not much appreciated at Napoleon’s dinner, where it passed
+ unnoticed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The uninterested and perplexed faces of the marshals showed that they were
+ puzzled as to what Balashëv’s tone suggested. “If there is a point we
+ don’t see it, or it is not at all witty,” their expressions seemed to say.
+ So little was his rejoinder appreciated that Napoleon did not notice it at
+ all and naïvely asked Balashëv through what towns the direct road from
+ there to Moscow passed. Balashëv, who was on the alert all through the
+ dinner, replied that just as “all roads lead to Rome,” so all roads lead
+ to Moscow: there were many roads, and “among them the road through
+ Poltáva , which Charles XII chose.” Balashëv involuntarily flushed with
+ pleasure at the aptitude of this reply, but hardly had he uttered the word
+ Poltáva before Caulaincourt began speaking of the badness of the road from
+ Petersburg to Moscow and of his Petersburg reminiscences.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After dinner they went to drink coffee in Napoleon’s study, which four
+ days previously had been that of the Emperor Alexander. Napoleon sat down,
+ toying with his Sèvres coffee cup, and motioned Balashëv to a chair beside
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon was in that well-known after-dinner mood which, more than any
+ reasoned cause, makes a man contented with himself and disposed to
+ consider everyone his friend. It seemed to him that he was surrounded by
+ men who adored him: and he felt convinced that, after his dinner, Balashëv
+ too was his friend and worshiper. Napoleon turned to him with a pleasant,
+ though slightly ironic, smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They tell me this is the room the Emperor Alexander occupied? Strange,
+ isn’t it, General?” he said, evidently not doubting that this remark would
+ be agreeable to his hearer since it went to prove his, Napoleon’s,
+ superiority to Alexander.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv made no reply and bowed his head in silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes. Four days ago in this room, Wintzingerode and Stein were
+ deliberating,” continued Napoleon with the same derisive and
+ self-confident smile. “What I can’t understand,” he went on, “is that the
+ Emperor Alexander has surrounded himself with my personal enemies. That I
+ do not... understand. Has he not thought that I may do the same?” and he
+ turned inquiringly to Balashëv, and evidently this thought turned him back
+ on to the track of his morning’s anger, which was still fresh in him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And let him know that I will do so!” said Napoleon, rising and pushing
+ his cup away with his hand. “I’ll drive all his Württemberg, Baden, and
+ Weimar relations out of Germany.... Yes. I’ll drive them out. Let him
+ prepare an asylum for them in Russia!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Balashëv bowed his head with an air indicating that he would like to make
+ his bow and leave, and only listened because he could not help hearing
+ what was said to him. Napoleon did not notice this expression; he treated
+ Balashëv not as an envoy from his enemy, but as a man now fully devoted to
+ him and who must rejoice at his former master’s humiliation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And why has the Emperor Alexander taken command of the armies? What is
+ the good of that? War is my profession, but his business is to reign and
+ not to command armies! Why has he taken on himself such a responsibility?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again Napoleon brought out his snuffbox, paced several times up and down
+ the room in silence, and then, suddenly and unexpectedly, went up to
+ Balashëv and with a slight smile, as confidently, quickly, and simply as
+ if he were doing something not merely important but pleasing to Balashëv,
+ he raised his hand to the forty-year-old Russian general’s face and,
+ taking him by the ear, pulled it gently, smiling with his lips only.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To have one’s ear pulled by the Emperor was considered the greatest honor
+ and mark of favor at the French court.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, adorer and courtier of the Emperor Alexander, why don’t you say
+ anything?” said he, as if it was ridiculous, in his presence, to be the
+ adorer and courtier of anyone but himself, Napoleon. “Are the horses ready
+ for the general?” he added, with a slight inclination of his head in reply
+ to Balashëv’s bow. “Let him have mine, he has a long way to go! ”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The letter taken by Balashëv was the last Napoleon sent to Alexander.
+ Every detail of the interview was communicated to the Russian monarch, and
+ the war began....
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ After his interview with Pierre in Moscow, Prince Andrew went to
+ Petersburg, on business as he told his family, but really to meet Anatole
+ Kurágin whom he felt it necessary to encounter. On reaching Petersburg he
+ inquired for Kurágin but the latter had already left the city. Pierre had
+ warned his brother-in-law that Prince Andrew was on his track. Anatole
+ Kurágin promptly obtained an appointment from the Minister of War and went
+ to join the army in Moldavia. While in Petersburg Prince Andrew met
+ Kutúzov, his former commander who was always well disposed toward him, and
+ Kutúzov suggested that he should accompany him to the army in Moldavia, to
+ which the old general had been appointed commander in chief. So Prince
+ Andrew, having received an appointment on the headquarters staff, left for
+ Turkey.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew did not think it proper to write and challenge Kurágin. He
+ thought that if he challenged him without some fresh cause it might
+ compromise the young Countess Rostóva and so he wanted to meet Kurágin
+ personally in order to find a fresh pretext for a duel. But he again
+ failed to meet Kurágin in Turkey, for soon after Prince Andrew arrived,
+ the latter returned to Russia. In a new country, amid new conditions,
+ Prince Andrew found life easier to bear. After his betrothed had broken
+ faith with him—which he felt the more acutely the more he tried to
+ conceal its effects—the surroundings in which he had been happy
+ became trying to him, and the freedom and independence he had once prized
+ so highly were still more so. Not only could he no longer think the
+ thoughts that had first come to him as he lay gazing at the sky on the
+ field of Austerlitz and had later enlarged upon with Pierre, and which had
+ filled his solitude at Boguchárovo and then in Switzerland and Rome, but
+ he even dreaded to recall them and the bright and boundless horizons they
+ had revealed. He was now concerned only with the nearest practical matters
+ unrelated to his past interests, and he seized on these the more eagerly
+ the more those past interests were closed to him. It was as if that lofty,
+ infinite canopy of heaven that had once towered above him had suddenly
+ turned into a low, solid vault that weighed him down, in which all was
+ clear, but nothing eternal or mysterious.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of the activities that presented themselves to him, army service was the
+ simplest and most familiar. As a general on duty on Kutúzov’s staff, he
+ applied himself to business with zeal and perseverance and surprised
+ Kutúzov by his willingness and accuracy in work. Not having found Kurágin
+ in Turkey, Prince Andrew did not think it necessary to rush back to Russia
+ after him, but all the same he knew that however long it might be before
+ he met Kurágin, despite his contempt for him and despite all the proofs he
+ deduced to convince himself that it was not worth stooping to a conflict
+ with him—he knew that when he did meet him he would not be able to
+ resist calling him out, any more than a ravenous man can help snatching at
+ food. And the consciousness that the insult was not yet avenged, that his
+ rancor was still unspent, weighed on his heart and poisoned the artificial
+ tranquillity which he managed to obtain in Turkey by means of restless,
+ plodding, and rather vainglorious and ambitious activity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the year 1812, when news of the war with Napoleon reached Bucharest—where
+ Kutúzov had been living for two months, passing his days and nights with a
+ Wallachian woman—Prince Andrew asked Kutúzov to transfer him to the
+ Western Army. Kutúzov, who was already weary of Bolkónski’s activity which
+ seemed to reproach his own idleness, very readily let him go and gave him
+ a mission to Barclay de Tolly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before joining the Western Army which was then, in May, encamped at
+ Drissa, Prince Andrew visited Bald Hills which was directly on his way,
+ being only two miles off the Smolénsk highroad. During the last three
+ years there had been so many changes in his life, he had thought, felt,
+ and seen so much (having traveled both in the east and the west), that on
+ reaching Bald Hills it struck him as strange and unexpected to find the
+ way of life there unchanged and still the same in every detail. He entered
+ through the gates with their stone pillars and drove up the avenue leading
+ to the house as if he were entering an enchanted, sleeping castle. The
+ same old stateliness, the same cleanliness, the same stillness reigned
+ there, and inside there was the same furniture, the same walls, sounds,
+ and smell, and the same timid faces, only somewhat older. Princess Mary
+ was still the same timid, plain maiden getting on in years, uselessly and
+ joylessly passing the best years of her life in fear and constant
+ suffering. Mademoiselle Bourienne was the same coquettish, self-satisfied
+ girl, enjoying every moment of her existence and full of joyous hopes for
+ the future. She had merely become more self-confident, Prince Andrew
+ thought. Dessalles, the tutor he had brought from Switzerland, was wearing
+ a coat of Russian cut and talking broken Russian to the servants, but was
+ still the same narrowly intelligent, conscientious, and pedantic
+ preceptor. The old prince had changed in appearance only by the loss of a
+ tooth, which left a noticeable gap on one side of his mouth; in character
+ he was the same as ever, only showing still more irritability and
+ skepticism as to what was happening in the world. Little Nicholas alone
+ had changed. He had grown, become rosier, had curly dark hair, and, when
+ merry and laughing, quite unconsciously lifted the upper lip of his pretty
+ little mouth just as the little princess used to do. He alone did not obey
+ the law of immutability in the enchanted, sleeping castle. But though
+ externally all remained as of old, the inner relations of all these people
+ had changed since Prince Andrew had seen them last. The household was
+ divided into two alien and hostile camps, who changed their habits for his
+ sake and only met because he was there. To the one camp belonged the old
+ prince, Mademoiselle Bourienne, and the architect; to the other Princess
+ Mary, Dessalles, little Nicholas, and all the old nurses and maids.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During his stay at Bald Hills all the family dined together, but they were
+ ill at ease and Prince Andrew felt that he was a visitor for whose sake an
+ exception was being made and that his presence made them all feel awkward.
+ Involuntarily feeling this at dinner on the first day, he was taciturn,
+ and the old prince noticing this also became morosely dumb and retired to
+ his apartments directly after dinner. In the evening, when Prince Andrew
+ went to him and, trying to rouse him, began to tell him of the young Count
+ Kámensky’s campaign, the old prince began unexpectedly to talk about
+ Princess Mary, blaming her for her superstitions and her dislike of
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne, who, he said, was the only person really attached
+ to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old prince said that if he was ill it was only because of Princess
+ Mary: that she purposely worried and irritated him, and that by indulgence
+ and silly talk she was spoiling little Prince Nicholas. The old prince
+ knew very well that he tormented his daughter and that her life was very
+ hard, but he also knew that he could not help tormenting her and that she
+ deserved it. “Why does Prince Andrew, who sees this, say nothing to me
+ about his sister? Does he think me a scoundrel, or an old fool who,
+ without any reason, keeps his own daughter at a distance and attaches this
+ Frenchwoman to himself? He doesn’t understand, so I must explain it, and
+ he must hear me out,” thought the old prince. And he began explaining why
+ he could not put up with his daughter’s unreasonable character.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you ask me,” said Prince Andrew, without looking up (he was censuring
+ his father for the first time in his life), “I did not wish to speak about
+ it, but as you ask me I will give you my frank opinion. If there is any
+ misunderstanding and discord between you and Mary, I can’t blame her for
+ it at all. I know how she loves and respects you. Since you ask me,”
+ continued Prince Andrew, becoming irritable—as he was always liable
+ to do of late—“I can only say that if there are any
+ misunderstandings they are caused by that worthless woman, who is not fit
+ to be my sister’s companion.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old man at first stared fixedly at his son, and an unnatural smile
+ disclosed the fresh gap between his teeth to which Prince Andrew could not
+ get accustomed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What companion, my dear boy? Eh? You’ve already been talking it over!
+ Eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Father, I did not want to judge,” said Prince Andrew, in a hard and
+ bitter tone, “but you challenged me, and I have said, and always shall
+ say, that Mary is not to blame, but those to blame—the one to blame—is
+ that Frenchwoman.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, he has passed judgment... passed judgement!” said the old man in a
+ low voice and, as it seemed to Prince Andrew, with some embarrassment, but
+ then he suddenly jumped up and cried: “Be off, be off! Let not a trace of
+ you remain here!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew wished to leave at once, but Princess Mary persuaded him to
+ stay another day. That day he did not see his father, who did not leave
+ his room and admitted no one but Mademoiselle Bourienne and Tíkhon, but
+ asked several times whether his son had gone. Next day, before leaving,
+ Prince Andrew went to his son’s rooms. The boy, curly-headed like his
+ mother and glowing with health, sat on his knee, and Prince Andrew began
+ telling him the story of Bluebeard, but fell into a reverie without
+ finishing the story. He thought not of this pretty child, his son whom he
+ held on his knee, but of himself. He sought in himself either remorse for
+ having angered his father or regret at leaving home for the first time in
+ his life on bad terms with him, and was horrified to find neither. What
+ meant still more to him was that he sought and did not find in himself the
+ former tenderness for his son which he had hoped to reawaken by caressing
+ the boy and taking him on his knee.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, go on!” said his son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew, without replying, put him down from his knee and went out
+ of the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as Prince Andrew had given up his daily occupations, and
+ especially on returning to the old conditions of life amid which he had
+ been happy, weariness of life overcame him with its former intensity, and
+ he hastened to escape from these memories and to find some work as soon as
+ possible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So you’ve decided to go, Andrew?” asked his sister.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank God that I can,” replied Prince Andrew. “I am very sorry you
+ can’t.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why do you say that?” replied Princess Mary. “Why do you say that, when
+ you are going to this terrible war, and he is so old? Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne says he has been asking about you....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as she began to speak of that, her lips trembled and her tears
+ began to fall. Prince Andrew turned away and began pacing the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my God! my God! When one thinks who and what—what trash—can
+ cause people misery!” he said with a malignity that alarmed Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She understood that when speaking of “trash” he referred not only to
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne, the cause of her misery, but also to the man who
+ had ruined his own happiness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Andrew! One thing I beg, I entreat of you!” she said, touching his elbow
+ and looking at him with eyes that shone through her tears. “I understand
+ you” (she looked down). “Don’t imagine that sorrow is the work of men . Men
+ are His tools.” She looked a little above Prince Andrew’s head with the
+ confident, accustomed look with which one looks at the place where a
+ familiar portrait hangs. “Sorrow is sent by Him , not by men. Men are His
+ instruments, they are not to blame. If you think someone has wronged you,
+ forget it and forgive! We have no right to punish. And then you will know
+ the happiness of forgiving.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If I were a woman I would do so, Mary. That is a woman’s virtue. But a
+ man should not and cannot forgive and forget,” he replied, and though till
+ that moment he had not been thinking of Kurágin, all his unexpended anger
+ suddenly swelled up in his heart.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If Mary is already persuading me to forgive, it means that I ought long
+ ago to have punished him,” he thought. And giving her no further reply, he
+ began thinking of the glad vindictive moment when he would meet Kurágin
+ who he knew was now in the army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary begged him to stay one day more, saying that she knew how
+ unhappy her father would be if Andrew left without being reconciled to
+ him, but Prince Andrew replied that he would probably soon be back again
+ from the army and would certainly write to his father, but that the longer
+ he stayed now the more embittered their differences would become.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good-by, Andrew! Remember that misfortunes come from God, and men are
+ never to blame,” were the last words he heard from his sister when he took
+ leave of her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then it must be so!” thought Prince Andrew as he drove out of the avenue
+ from the house at Bald Hills. “She, poor innocent creature, is left to be
+ victimized by an old man who has outlived his wits. The old man feels he
+ is guilty, but cannot change himself. My boy is growing up and rejoices in
+ life, in which like everybody else he will deceive or be deceived. And I
+ am off to the army. Why? I myself don’t know. I want to meet that man whom
+ I despise, so as to give him a chance to kill and laugh at me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These conditions of life had been the same before, but then they were all
+ connected, while now they had all tumbled to pieces. Only senseless
+ things, lacking coherence, presented themselves one after another to
+ Prince Andrew’s mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ Prince Andrew reached the general headquarters of the army at the end of
+ June. The first army, with which was the Emperor, occupied the fortified
+ camp at Drissa; the second army was retreating, trying to effect a
+ junction with the first one from which it was said to be cut off by large
+ French forces. Everyone was dissatisfied with the general course of
+ affairs in the Russian army, but no one anticipated any danger of invasion
+ of the Russian provinces, and no one thought the war would extend farther
+ than the western, the Polish, provinces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew found Barclay de Tolly, to whom he had been assigned, on the
+ bank of the Drissa. As there was not a single town or large village in the
+ vicinity of the camp, the immense number of generals and courtiers
+ accompanying the army were living in the best houses of the villages on
+ both sides of the river, over a radius of six miles. Barclay de Tolly was
+ quartered nearly three miles from the Emperor. He received Bolkónski
+ stiffly and coldly and told him in his foreign accent that he would
+ mention him to the Emperor for a decision as to his employment, but asked
+ him meanwhile to remain on his staff. Anatole Kurágin, whom Prince Andrew
+ had hoped to find with the army, was not there. He had gone to Petersburg,
+ but Prince Andrew was glad to hear this. His mind was occupied by the
+ interests of the center that was conducting a gigantic war, and he was
+ glad to be free for a while from the distraction caused by the thought of
+ Kurágin. During the first four days, while no duties were required of him,
+ Prince Andrew rode round the whole fortified camp and, by the aid of his
+ own knowledge and by talks with experts, tried to form a definite opinion
+ about it. But the question whether the camp was advantageous or
+ disadvantageous remained for him undecided. Already from his military
+ experience and what he had seen in the Austrian campaign, he had come to
+ the conclusion that in war the most deeply considered plans have no
+ significance and that all depends on the way unexpected movements of the
+ enemy—that cannot be foreseen—are met, and on how and by whom
+ the whole matter is handled. To clear up this last point for himself,
+ Prince Andrew, utilizing his position and acquaintances, tried to fathom
+ the character of the control of the army and of the men and parties
+ engaged in it, and he deduced for himself the following of the state of
+ affairs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While the Emperor had still been at Vílna, the forces had been divided
+ into three armies. First, the army under Barclay de Tolly, secondly, the
+ army under Bagratión, and thirdly, the one commanded by Tormásov. The
+ Emperor was with the first army, but not as commander in chief. In the
+ orders issued it was stated, not that the Emperor would take command, but
+ only that he would be with the army. The Emperor, moreover, had with him
+ not a commander in chief’s staff but the imperial headquarters staff. In
+ attendance on him was the head of the imperial staff, Quartermaster
+ General Prince Volkónski, as well as generals, imperial aides-de-camp,
+ diplomatic officials, and a large number of foreigners, but not the army
+ staff. Besides these, there were in attendance on the Emperor without any
+ definite appointments: Arakchéev, the ex-Minister of War; Count Bennigsen,
+ the senior general in rank; the Grand Duke Tsarévich Constantine
+ Pávlovich; Count Rumyántsev, the Chancellor; Stein, a former Prussian
+ minister; Armfeldt, a Swedish general; Pfuel, the chief author of the plan
+ of campaign; Paulucci, an adjutant general and Sardinian émigré ; Wolzogen—and
+ many others. Though these men had no military appointment in the army,
+ their position gave them influence, and often a corps commander, or even
+ the commander in chief, did not know in what capacity he was questioned by
+ Bennigsen, the Grand Duke, Arakchéev, or Prince Volkónski, or was given
+ this or that advice and did not know whether a certain order received in
+ the form of advice emanated from the man who gave it or from the Emperor
+ and whether it had to be executed or not. But this was only the external
+ condition; the essential significance of the presence of the Emperor and
+ of all these people, from a courtier’s point of view (and in an Emperor’s
+ vicinity all became courtiers), was clear to everyone. It was this: the
+ Emperor did not assume the title of commander in chief, but disposed of
+ all the armies; the men around him were his assistants. Arakchéev was a
+ faithful custodian to enforce order and acted as the sovereign’s
+ bodyguard. Bennigsen was a landlord in the Vílna province who appeared to
+ be doing the honors of the district, but was in reality a good general,
+ useful as an adviser and ready at hand to replace Barclay. The Grand Duke
+ was there because it suited him to be. The ex-Minister Stein was there
+ because his advice was useful and the Emperor Alexander held him in high
+ esteem personally. Armfeldt virulently hated Napoleon and was a general
+ full of self-confidence, a quality that always influenced Alexander.
+ Paulucci was there because he was bold and decided in speech. The
+ adjutants general were there because they always accompanied the Emperor,
+ and lastly and chiefly Pfuel was there because he had drawn up the plan of
+ campaign against Napoleon and, having induced Alexander to believe in the
+ efficacy of that plan, was directing the whole business of the war. With
+ Pfuel was Wolzogen, who expressed Pfuel’s thoughts in a more
+ comprehensible way than Pfuel himself (who was a harsh, bookish theorist,
+ self-confident to the point of despising everyone else) was able to do.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Besides these Russians and foreigners who propounded new and unexpected
+ ideas every day—especially the foreigners, who did so with a
+ boldness characteristic of people employed in a country not their own—there
+ were many secondary personages accompanying the army because their
+ principals were there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Among the opinions and voices in this immense, restless, brilliant, and
+ proud sphere, Prince Andrew noticed the following sharply defined
+ subdivisions of tendencies and parties:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The first party consisted of Pfuel and his adherents—military
+ theorists who believed in a science of war with immutable laws—laws
+ of oblique movements, outflankings, and so forth. Pfuel and his adherents
+ demanded a retirement into the depths of the country in accordance with
+ precise laws defined by a pseudo-theory of war, and they saw only
+ barbarism, ignorance, or evil intention in every deviation from that
+ theory. To this party belonged the foreign nobles, Wolzogen,
+ Wintzingerode, and others, chiefly Germans.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The second party was directly opposed to the first; one extreme, as always
+ happens, was met by representatives of the other. The members of this
+ party were those who had demanded an advance from Vílna into Poland and
+ freedom from all prearranged plans. Besides being advocates of bold
+ action, this section also represented nationalism, which made them still
+ more one-sided in the dispute. They were Russians: Bagratión, Ermólov (who
+ was beginning to come to the front), and others. At that time a famous
+ joke of Ermólov’s was being circulated, that as a great favor he had
+ petitioned the Emperor to make him a German. The men of that party,
+ remembering Suvórov, said that what one had to do was not to reason, or
+ stick pins into maps, but to fight, beat the enemy, keep him out of
+ Russia, and not let the army get discouraged.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To the third party—in which the Emperor had most confidence—belonged
+ the courtiers who tried to arrange compromises between the other two. The
+ members of this party, chiefly civilians and to whom Arakchéev belonged,
+ thought and said what men who have no convictions but wish to seem to have
+ some generally say. They said that undoubtedly war, particularly against
+ such a genius as Bonaparte (they called him Bonaparte now), needs most
+ deeply devised plans and profound scientific knowledge and in that respect
+ Pfuel was a genius, but at the same time it had to be acknowledged that
+ the theorists are often one-sided, and therefore one should not trust them
+ absolutely, but should also listen to what Pfuel’s opponents and practical
+ men of experience in warfare had to say, and then choose a middle course.
+ They insisted on the retention of the camp at Drissa, according to Pfuel’s
+ plan, but on changing the movements of the other armies. Though, by this
+ course, neither one aim nor the other could be attained, yet it seemed
+ best to the adherents of this third party.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of a fourth opinion the most conspicuous representative was the Tsarévich,
+ who could not forget his disillusionment at Austerlitz, where he had
+ ridden out at the head of the Guards, in his casque and cavalry uniform as
+ to a review, expecting to crush the French gallantly; but unexpectedly
+ finding himself in the front line had narrowly escaped amid the general
+ confusion. The men of this party had both the quality and the defect of
+ frankness in their opinions. They feared Napoleon, recognized his strength
+ and their own weakness, and frankly said so. They said: “Nothing but
+ sorrow, shame, and ruin will come of all this! We have abandoned Vílna and
+ Vítebsk and shall abandon Drissa. The only reasonable thing left to do is
+ to conclude peace as soon as possible, before we are turned out of
+ Petersburg.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This view was very general in the upper army circles and found support
+ also in Petersburg and from the chancellor, Rumyántsev, who, for other
+ reasons of state, was in favor of peace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The fifth party consisted of those who were adherents of Barclay de Tolly,
+ not so much as a man but as minister of war and commander in chief. “Be he
+ what he may” (they always began like that), “he is an honest, practical
+ man and we have nobody better. Give him real power, for war cannot be
+ conducted successfully without unity of command, and he will show what he
+ can do, as he did in Finland. If our army is well organized and strong and
+ has withdrawn to Drissa without suffering any defeats, we owe this
+ entirely to Barclay. If Barclay is now to be superseded by Bennigsen all
+ will be lost, for Bennigsen showed his incapacity already in 1807.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The sixth party, the Bennigsenites, said, on the contrary, that at any
+ rate there was no one more active and experienced than Bennigsen: “and
+ twist about as you may, you will have to come to Bennigsen eventually. Let
+ the others make mistakes now!” said they, arguing that our retirement to
+ Drissa was a most shameful reverse and an unbroken series of blunders.
+ “The more mistakes that are made the better. It will at any rate be
+ understood all the sooner that things cannot go on like this. What is
+ wanted is not some Barclay or other, but a man like Bennigsen, who made
+ his mark in 1807, and to whom Napoleon himself did justice—a man
+ whose authority would be willingly recognized, and Bennigsen is the only
+ such man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The seventh party consisted of the sort of people who are always to be
+ found, especially around young sovereigns, and of whom there were
+ particularly many round Alexander—generals and imperial
+ aides-de-camp passionately devoted to the Emperor, not merely as a monarch
+ but as a man, adoring him sincerely and disinterestedly, as Rostóv had
+ done in 1805, and who saw in him not only all the virtues but all human
+ capabilities as well. These men, though enchanted with the sovereign for
+ refusing the command of the army, yet blamed him for such excessive
+ modesty, and only desired and insisted that their adored sovereign should
+ abandon his diffidence and openly announce that he would place himself at
+ the head of the army, gather round him a commander in chief’s staff, and,
+ consulting experienced theoreticians and practical men where necessary,
+ would himself lead the troops, whose spirits would thereby be raised to
+ the highest pitch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The eighth and largest group, which in its enormous numbers was to the
+ others as ninety-nine to one, consisted of men who desired neither peace
+ nor war, neither an advance nor a defensive camp at the Drissa or anywhere
+ else, neither Barclay nor the Emperor, neither Pfuel nor Bennigsen, but
+ only the one most essential thing—as much advantage and pleasure for
+ themselves as possible. In the troubled waters of conflicting and
+ intersecting intrigues that eddied about the Emperor’s headquarters, it
+ was possible to succeed in many ways unthinkable at other times. A man who
+ simply wished to retain his lucrative post would today agree with Pfuel,
+ tomorrow with his opponent, and the day after, merely to avoid
+ responsibility or to please the Emperor, would declare that he had no
+ opinion at all on the matter. Another who wished to gain some advantage
+ would attract the Emperor’s attention by loudly advocating the very thing
+ the Emperor had hinted at the day before, and would dispute and shout at
+ the council, beating his breast and challenging those who did not agree
+ with him to duels, thereby proving that he was prepared to sacrifice
+ himself for the common good. A third, in the absence of opponents, between
+ two councils would simply solicit a special gratuity for his faithful
+ services, well knowing that at that moment people would be too busy to
+ refuse him. A fourth while seemingly overwhelmed with work would often
+ come accidentally under the Emperor’s eye. A fifth, to achieve his
+ long-cherished aim of dining with the Emperor, would stubbornly insist on
+ the correctness or falsity of some newly emerging opinion and for this
+ object would produce arguments more or less forcible and correct.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the men of this party were fishing for rubles, decorations, and
+ promotions, and in this pursuit watched only the weathercock of imperial
+ favor, and directly they noticed it turning in any direction, this whole
+ drone population of the army began blowing hard that way, so that it was
+ all the harder for the Emperor to turn it elsewhere. Amid the
+ uncertainties of the position, with the menace of serious danger giving a
+ peculiarly threatening character to everything, amid this vortex of
+ intrigue, egotism, conflict of views and feelings, and the diversity of
+ race among these people—this eighth and largest party of those
+ preoccupied with personal interests imparted great confusion and obscurity
+ to the common task. Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones,
+ without having finished their buzzing on a previous theme, flew over to
+ the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the voices of those who
+ were disputing honestly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From among all these parties, just at the time Prince Andrew reached the
+ army, another, a ninth party, was being formed and was beginning to raise
+ its voice. This was the party of the elders, reasonable men experienced
+ and capable in state affairs, who, without sharing any of those
+ conflicting opinions, were able to take a detached view of what was going
+ on at the staff at headquarters and to consider means of escape from this
+ muddle, indecision, intricacy, and weakness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The men of this party said and thought that what was wrong resulted
+ chiefly from the Emperor’s presence in the army with his military court
+ and from the consequent presence there of an indefinite, conditional, and
+ unsteady fluctuation of relations, which is in place at court but harmful
+ in an army; that a sovereign should reign but not command the army, and
+ that the only way out of the position would be for the Emperor and his
+ court to leave the army; that the mere presence of the Emperor paralyzed
+ the action of fifty thousand men required to secure his personal safety,
+ and that the worst commander in chief, if independent, would be better
+ than the very best one trammeled by the presence and authority of the
+ monarch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just at the time Prince Andrew was living unoccupied at Drissa, Shishkóv,
+ the Secretary of State and one of the chief representatives of this party,
+ wrote a letter to the Emperor which Arakchéev and Balashëv agreed to sign.
+ In this letter, availing himself of permission given him by the Emperor to
+ discuss the general course of affairs, he respectfully suggested—on
+ the plea that it was necessary for the sovereign to arouse a warlike
+ spirit in the people of the capital—that the Emperor should leave
+ the army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That arousing of the people by their sovereign and his call to them to
+ defend their country—the very incitement which was the chief cause
+ of Russia’s triumph in so far as it was produced by the Tsar’s personal
+ presence in Moscow—was suggested to the Emperor, and accepted by
+ him, as a pretext for quitting the army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ This letter had not yet been presented to the Emperor when Barclay, one
+ day at dinner, informed Bolkónski that the sovereign wished to see him
+ personally, to question him about Turkey, and that Prince Andrew was to
+ present himself at Bennigsen’s quarters at six that evening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ News was received at the Emperor’s quarters that very day of a fresh
+ movement by Napoleon which might endanger the army—news subsequently
+ found to be false. And that morning Colonel Michaud had ridden round the
+ Drissa fortifications with the Emperor and had pointed out to him that
+ this fortified camp constructed by Pfuel, and till then considered a
+ chef-d’oeuvre of tactical science which would ensure Napoleon’s
+ destruction, was an absurdity, threatening the destruction of the Russian
+ army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew arrived at Bennigsen’s quarters—a country gentleman’s
+ house of moderate size, situated on the very banks of the river. Neither
+ Bennigsen nor the Emperor was there, but Chernýshev, the Emperor’s
+ aide-de-camp, received Bolkónski and informed him that the Emperor,
+ accompanied by General Bennigsen and Marquis Paulucci, had gone a second
+ time that day to inspect the fortifications of the Drissa camp, of the
+ suitability of which serious doubts were beginning to be felt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Chernýshev was sitting at a window in the first room with a French novel
+ in his hand. This room had probably been a music room; there was still an
+ organ in it on which some rugs were piled, and in one corner stood the
+ folding bedstead of Bennigsen’s adjutant. This adjutant was also there and
+ sat dozing on the rolled-up bedding, evidently exhausted by work or by
+ feasting. Two doors led from the room, one straight on into what had been
+ the drawing room, and another, on the right, to the study. Through the
+ first door came the sound of voices conversing in German and occasionally
+ in French. In that drawing room were gathered, by the Emperor’s wish, not
+ a military council (the Emperor preferred indefiniteness), but certain
+ persons whose opinions he wished to know in view of the impending
+ difficulties. It was not a council of war, but, as it were, a council to
+ elucidate certain questions for the Emperor personally. To this
+ semicouncil had been invited the Swedish General Armfeldt, Adjutant
+ General Wolzogen, Wintzingerode (whom Napoleon had referred to as a
+ renegade French subject), Michaud, Toll, Count Stein who was not a
+ military man at all, and Pfuel himself, who, as Prince Andrew had heard,
+ was the mainspring of the whole affair. Prince Andrew had an opportunity
+ of getting a good look at him, for Pfuel arrived soon after himself and,
+ in passing through to the drawing room, stopped a minute to speak to
+ Chernýshev.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At first sight, Pfuel, in his ill-made uniform of a Russian general, which
+ fitted him badly like a fancy costume, seemed familiar to Prince Andrew,
+ though he saw him now for the first time. There was about him something of
+ Weyrother, Mack, and Schmidt, and many other German theorist-generals whom
+ Prince Andrew had seen in 1805, but he was more typical than any of them.
+ Prince Andrew had never yet seen a German theorist in whom all the
+ characteristics of those others were united to such an extent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pfuel was short and very thin but broad-boned, of coarse, robust build,
+ broad in the hips, and with prominent shoulder blades. His face was much
+ wrinkled and his eyes deep set. His hair had evidently been hastily
+ brushed smooth in front of the temples, but stuck up behind in quaint
+ little tufts. He entered the room, looking restlessly and angrily around,
+ as if afraid of everything in that large apartment. Awkwardly holding up
+ his sword, he addressed Chernýshev and asked in German where the Emperor
+ was. One could see that he wished to pass through the rooms as quickly as
+ possible, finish with the bows and greetings, and sit down to business in
+ front of a map, where he would feel at home. He nodded hurriedly in reply
+ to Chernýshev, and smiled ironically on hearing that the sovereign was
+ inspecting the fortifications that he, Pfuel, had planned in accord with
+ his theory. He muttered something to himself abruptly and in a bass voice,
+ as self-assured Germans do—it might have been “stupid fellow”... or
+ “the whole affair will be ruined,” or “something absurd will come of
+ it.”... Prince Andrew did not catch what he said and would have passed on,
+ but Chernýshev introduced him to Pfuel, remarking that Prince Andrew was
+ just back from Turkey where the war had terminated so fortunately. Pfuel
+ barely glanced—not so much at Prince Andrew as past him—and
+ said, with a laugh: “That must have been a fine tactical war”; and,
+ laughing contemptuously, went on into the room from which the sound of
+ voices was heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pfuel, always inclined to be irritably sarcastic, was particularly
+ disturbed that day, evidently by the fact that they had dared to inspect
+ and criticize his camp in his absence. From this short interview with
+ Pfuel, Prince Andrew, thanks to his Austerlitz experiences, was able to
+ form a clear conception of the man. Pfuel was one of those hopelessly and
+ immutably self-confident men, self-confident to the point of martyrdom as
+ only Germans are, because only Germans are self-confident on the basis of
+ an abstract notion—science, that is, the supposed knowledge of
+ absolute truth. A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself
+ personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and
+ women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the
+ best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always
+ knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is
+ undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable
+ and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured
+ just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he
+ does not believe that anything can be known. The German’s self-assurance
+ is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he
+ imagines that he knows the truth—science—which he himself has
+ invented but which is for him the absolute truth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pfuel was evidently of that sort. He had a science—the theory of
+ oblique movements deduced by him from the history of Frederick the Great’s
+ wars, and all he came across in the history of more recent warfare seemed
+ to him absurd and barbarous—monstrous collisions in which so many
+ blunders were committed by both sides that these wars could not be called
+ wars, they did not accord with the theory, and therefore could not serve
+ as material for science.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In 1806 Pfuel had been one of those responsible, for the plan of campaign
+ that ended in Jena and Auerstädt, but he did not see the least proof of
+ the fallibility of his theory in the disasters of that war. On the
+ contrary, the deviations made from his theory were, in his opinion, the
+ sole cause of the whole disaster, and with characteristically gleeful
+ sarcasm he would remark, “There, I said the whole affair would go to the
+ devil!” Pfuel was one of those theoreticians who so love their theory that
+ they lose sight of the theory’s object—its practical application.
+ His love of theory made him hate everything practical, and he would not
+ listen to it. He was even pleased by failures, for failures resulting from
+ deviations in practice from the theory only proved to him the accuracy of
+ his theory.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He said a few words to Prince Andrew and Chernýshev about the present war,
+ with the air of a man who knows beforehand that all will go wrong, and who
+ is not displeased that it should be so. The unbrushed tufts of hair
+ sticking up behind and the hastily brushed hair on his temples expressed
+ this most eloquently.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He passed into the next room, and the deep, querulous sounds of his voice
+ were at once heard from there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ Prince Andrew’s eyes were still following Pfuel out of the room when Count
+ Bennigsen entered hurriedly, and nodding to Bolkónski, but not pausing,
+ went into the study, giving instructions to his adjutant as he went. The
+ Emperor was following him, and Bennigsen had hastened on to make some
+ preparations and to be ready to receive the sovereign. Chernýshev and
+ Prince Andrew went out into the porch, where the Emperor, who looked
+ fatigued, was dismounting. Marquis Paulucci was talking to him with
+ particular warmth and the Emperor, with his head bent to the left, was
+ listening with a dissatisfied air. The Emperor moved forward evidently
+ wishing to end the conversation, but the flushed and excited Italian,
+ oblivious of decorum, followed him and continued to speak.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And as for the man who advised forming this camp—the Drissa camp,”
+ said Paulucci, as the Emperor mounted the steps and noticing Prince Andrew
+ scanned his unfamiliar face, “as to that person, sire...” continued
+ Paulucci, desperately, apparently unable to restrain himself, “the man who
+ advised the Drissa camp—I see no alternative but the lunatic asylum
+ or the gallows!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Without heeding the end of the Italian’s remarks, and as though not
+ hearing them, the Emperor, recognizing Bolkónski, addressed him
+ graciously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am very glad to see you! Go in there where they are meeting, and wait
+ for me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor went into the study. He was followed by Prince Peter
+ Mikháylovich Volkónski and Baron Stein, and the door closed behind them.
+ Prince Andrew, taking advantage of the Emperor’s permission, accompanied
+ Paulucci, whom he had known in Turkey, into the drawing room where the
+ council was assembled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Peter Mikháylovich Volkónski occupied the position, as it were, of
+ chief of the Emperor’s staff. He came out of the study into the drawing
+ room with some maps which he spread on a table, and put questions on which
+ he wished to hear the opinion of the gentlemen present. What had happened
+ was that news (which afterwards proved to be false) had been received
+ during the night of a movement by the French to outflank the Drissa camp.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The first to speak was General Armfeldt who, to meet the difficulty that
+ presented itself, unexpectedly proposed a perfectly new position away from
+ the Petersburg and Moscow roads. The reason for this was inexplicable
+ (unless he wished to show that he, too, could have an opinion), but he
+ urged that at this point the army should unite and there await the enemy.
+ It was plain that Armfeldt had thought out that plan long ago and now
+ expounded it not so much to answer the questions put—which, in fact,
+ his plan did not answer—as to avail himself of the opportunity to
+ air it. It was one of the millions of proposals, one as good as another,
+ that could be made as long as it was quite unknown what character the war
+ would take. Some disputed his arguments, others defended them. Young Count
+ Toll objected to the Swedish general’s views more warmly than anyone else,
+ and in the course of the dispute drew from his side pocket a well-filled
+ notebook, which he asked permission to read to them. In these voluminous
+ notes Toll suggested another scheme, totally different from Armfeldt’s or
+ Pfuel’s plan of campaign. In answer to Toll, Paulucci suggested an advance
+ and an attack, which, he urged, could alone extricate us from the present
+ uncertainty and from the trap (as he called the Drissa camp) in which we
+ were situated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During all these discussions Pfuel and his interpreter, Wolzogen (his
+ “bridge” in court relations), were silent. Pfuel only snorted
+ contemptuously and turned away, to show that he would never demean himself
+ by replying to such nonsense as he was now hearing. So when Prince
+ Volkónski, who was in the chair, called on him to give his opinion, he
+ merely said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why ask me? General Armfeldt has proposed a splendid position with an
+ exposed rear, or why not this Italian gentleman’s attack—very fine,
+ or a retreat, also good! Why ask me?” said he. “Why, you yourselves know
+ everything better than I do.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But when Volkónski said, with a frown, that it was in the Emperor’s name
+ that he asked his opinion, Pfuel rose and, suddenly growing animated,
+ began to speak:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Everything has been spoiled, everything muddled, everybody thought they
+ knew better than I did, and now you come to me! How mend matters? There is
+ nothing to mend! The principles laid down by me must be strictly adhered
+ to,” said he, drumming on the table with his bony fingers. “What is the
+ difficulty? Nonsense, childishness!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He went up to the map and speaking rapidly began proving that no
+ eventuality could alter the efficiency of the Drissa camp, that everything
+ had been foreseen, and that if the enemy were really going to outflank it,
+ the enemy would inevitably be destroyed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Paulucci, who did not know German, began questioning him in French.
+ Wolzogen came to the assistance of his chief, who spoke French badly, and
+ began translating for him, hardly able to keep pace with Pfuel, who was
+ rapidly demonstrating that not only all that had happened, but all that
+ could happen, had been foreseen in his scheme, and that if there were now
+ any difficulties the whole fault lay in the fact that his plan had not
+ been precisely executed. He kept laughing sarcastically, he demonstrated,
+ and at last contemptuously ceased to demonstrate, like a mathematician who
+ ceases to prove in various ways the accuracy of a problem that has already
+ been proved. Wolzogen took his place and continued to explain his views in
+ French, every now and then turning to Pfuel and saying, “Is it not so,
+ your excellency?” But Pfuel, like a man heated in a fight who strikes
+ those on his own side, shouted angrily at his own supporter, Wolzogen:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, of course, what more is there to explain?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Paulucci and Michaud both attacked Wolzogen simultaneously in French.
+ Armfeldt addressed Pfuel in German. Toll explained to Volkónski in
+ Russian. Prince Andrew listened and observed in silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of all these men Prince Andrew sympathized most with Pfuel, angry,
+ determined, and absurdly self-confident as he was. Of all those present,
+ evidently he alone was not seeking anything for himself, nursed no hatred
+ against anyone, and only desired that the plan, formed on a theory arrived
+ at by years of toil, should be carried out. He was ridiculous, and
+ unpleasantly sarcastic, but yet he inspired involuntary respect by his
+ boundless devotion to an idea. Besides this, the remarks of all except
+ Pfuel had one common trait that had not been noticeable at the council of
+ war in 1805: there was now a panic fear of Napoleon’s genius, which,
+ though concealed, was noticeable in every rejoinder. Everything was
+ assumed to be possible for Napoleon, they expected him from every side,
+ and invoked his terrible name to shatter each other’s proposals. Pfuel
+ alone seemed to consider Napoleon a barbarian like everyone else who
+ opposed his theory. But besides this feeling of respect, Pfuel evoked pity
+ in Prince Andrew. From the tone in which the courtiers addressed him and
+ the way Paulucci had allowed himself to speak of him to the Emperor, but
+ above all from a certain desperation in Pfuel’s own expressions, it was
+ clear that the others knew, and Pfuel himself felt, that his fall was at
+ hand. And despite his self-confidence and grumpy German sarcasm he was
+ pitiable, with his hair smoothly brushed on the temples and sticking up in
+ tufts behind. Though he concealed the fact under a show of irritation and
+ contempt, he was evidently in despair that the sole remaining chance of
+ verifying his theory by a huge experiment and proving its soundness to the
+ whole world was slipping away from him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The discussions continued a long time, and the longer they lasted the more
+ heated became the disputes, culminating in shouts and personalities, and
+ the less was it possible to arrive at any general conclusion from all that
+ had been said. Prince Andrew, listening to this polyglot talk and to these
+ surmises, plans, refutations, and shouts, felt nothing but amazement at
+ what they were saying. A thought that had long since and often occurred to
+ him during his military activities—the idea that there is not and
+ cannot be any science of war, and that therefore there can be no such
+ thing as a military genius—now appeared to him an obvious truth.
+ “What theory and science is possible about a matter the conditions and
+ circumstances of which are unknown and cannot be defined, especially when
+ the strength of the acting forces cannot be ascertained? No one was or is
+ able to foresee in what condition our or the enemy’s armies will be in a
+ day’s time, and no one can gauge the force of this or that detachment.
+ Sometimes—when there is not a coward at the front to shout, ‘We are
+ cut off!’ and start running, but a brave and jolly lad who shouts,
+ ‘Hurrah!’—a detachment of five thousand is worth thirty thousand, as
+ at Schön Grabern, while at times fifty thousand run from eight thousand,
+ as at Austerlitz. What science can there be in a matter in which, as in
+ all practical matters, nothing can be defined and everything depends on
+ innumerable conditions, the significance of which is determined at a
+ particular moment which arrives no one knows when? Armfeldt says our army
+ is cut in half, and Paulucci says we have got the French army between two
+ fires; Michaud says that the worthlessness of the Drissa camp lies in
+ having the river behind it, and Pfuel says that is what constitutes its
+ strength; Toll proposes one plan, Armfeldt another, and they are all good
+ and all bad, and the advantages of any suggestions can be seen only at the
+ moment of trial. And why do they all speak of a ‘military genius’? Is a
+ man a genius who can order bread to be brought up at the right time and
+ say who is to go to the right and who to the left? It is only because
+ military men are invested with pomp and power and crowds of sychophants
+ flatter power, attributing to it qualities of genius it does not possess.
+ The best generals I have known were, on the contrary, stupid or
+ absent-minded men. Bagratión was the best, Napoleon himself admitted that.
+ And of Bonaparte himself! I remember his limited, self-satisfied face on
+ the field of Austerlitz. Not only does a good army commander not need any
+ special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and
+ best human attributes—love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic
+ inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is
+ doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience),
+ and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be
+ humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust. It is
+ understandable that a theory of their ‘genius’ was invented for them long
+ ago because they have power! The success of a military action depends not
+ on them, but on the man in the ranks who shouts, ‘We are lost!’ or who
+ shouts, ‘Hurrah!’ And only in the ranks can one serve with assurance of
+ being useful.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So thought Prince Andrew as he listened to the talking, and he roused
+ himself only when Paulucci called him and everyone was leaving.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the review next day the Emperor asked Prince Andrew where he would like
+ to serve, and Prince Andrew lost his standing in court circles forever by
+ not asking to remain attached to the sovereign’s person, but for
+ permission to serve in the army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ Before the beginning of the campaign, Rostóv had received a letter from
+ his parents in which they told him briefly of Natásha’s illness and the
+ breaking off of her engagement to Prince Andrew (which they explained by
+ Natásha’s having rejected him) and again asked Nicholas to retire from the
+ army and return home. On receiving this letter, Nicholas did not even make
+ any attempt to get leave of absence or to retire from the army, but wrote
+ to his parents that he was sorry Natásha was ill and her engagement broken
+ off, and that he would do all he could to meet their wishes. To Sónya he
+ wrote separately.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Adored friend of my soul!” he wrote. “Nothing but honor could keep me
+ from returning to the country. But now, at the commencement of the
+ campaign, I should feel dishonored, not only in my comrades’ eyes but in
+ my own, if I preferred my own happiness to my love and duty to the
+ Fatherland. But this shall be our last separation. Believe me, directly
+ the war is over, if I am still alive and still loved by you, I will throw
+ up everything and fly to you, to press you forever to my ardent breast.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was, in fact, only the commencement of the campaign that prevented
+ Rostóv from returning home as he had promised and marrying Sónya. The
+ autumn in Otrádnoe with the hunting, and the winter with the Christmas
+ holidays and Sónya’s love, had opened out to him a vista of tranquil rural
+ joys and peace such as he had never known before, and which now allured
+ him. “A splendid wife, children, a good pack of hounds, a dozen leashes of
+ smart borzois, agriculture, neighbors, service by election...” thought he.
+ But now the campaign was beginning, and he had to remain with his
+ regiment. And since it had to be so, Nicholas Rostóv, as was natural to
+ him, felt contented with the life he led in the regiment and was able to
+ find pleasure in that life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On his return from his furlough Nicholas, having been joyfully welcomed by
+ his comrades, was sent to obtain remounts and brought back from the
+ Ukraine excellent horses which pleased him and earned him commendation
+ from his commanders. During his absence he had been promoted captain, and
+ when the regiment was put on war footing with an increase in numbers, he
+ was again allotted his old squadron.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The campaign began, the regiment was moved into Poland on double pay, new
+ officers arrived, new men and horses, and above all everybody was infected
+ with the merrily excited mood that goes with the commencement of a war,
+ and Rostóv, conscious of his advantageous position in the regiment,
+ devoted himself entirely to the pleasures and interests of military
+ service, though he knew that sooner or later he would have to relinquish
+ them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The troops retired from Vílna for various complicated reasons of state,
+ political and strategic. Each step of the retreat was accompanied by a
+ complicated interplay of interests, arguments, and passions at
+ headquarters. For the Pávlograd hussars, however, the whole of this
+ retreat during the finest period of summer and with sufficient supplies
+ was a very simple and agreeable business.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was only at headquarters that there was depression, uneasiness, and
+ intriguing; in the body of the army they did not ask themselves where they
+ were going or why. If they regretted having to retreat, it was only
+ because they had to leave billets they had grown accustomed to, or some
+ pretty young Polish lady. If the thought that things looked bad chanced to
+ enter anyone’s head, he tried to be as cheerful as befits a good soldier
+ and not to think of the general trend of affairs, but only of the task
+ nearest to hand. First they camped gaily before Vílna, making acquaintance
+ with the Polish landowners, preparing for reviews and being reviewed by
+ the Emperor and other high commanders. Then came an order to retreat to
+ Sventsyáni and destroy any provisions they could not carry away with them.
+ Sventsyáni was remembered by the hussars only as the drunken camp , a name
+ the whole army gave to their encampment there, and because many complaints
+ were made against the troops, who, taking advantage of the order to
+ collect provisions, took also horses, carriages, and carpets from the
+ Polish proprietors. Rostóv remembered Sventsyáni, because on the first day
+ of their arrival at that small town he changed his sergeant major and was
+ unable to manage all the drunken men of his squadron who, unknown to him,
+ had appropriated five barrels of old beer. From Sventsyáni they retired
+ farther and farther to Drissa, and thence again beyond Drissa, drawing
+ near to the frontier of Russia proper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the thirteenth of July the Pávlograds took part in a serious action for
+ the first time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the twelfth of July, on the eve of that action, there was a heavy storm
+ of rain and hail. In general, the summer of 1812 was remarkable for its
+ storms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The two Pávlograd squadrons were bivouacking on a field of rye, which was
+ already in ear but had been completely trodden down by cattle and horses.
+ The rain was descending in torrents, and Rostóv, with a young officer
+ named Ilyín, his protégé, was sitting in a hastily constructed shelter. An
+ officer of their regiment, with long mustaches extending onto his cheeks,
+ who after riding to the staff had been overtaken by the rain, entered
+ Rostóv’s shelter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have come from the staff, Count. Have you heard of Raévski’s exploit?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the officer gave them details of the Saltánov battle, which he had
+ heard at the staff.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv, smoking his pipe and turning his head about as the water trickled
+ down his neck, listened inattentively, with an occasional glance at Ilyín,
+ who was pressing close to him. This officer, a lad of sixteen who had
+ recently joined the regiment, was now in the same relation to Nicholas
+ that Nicholas had been to Denísov seven years before. Ilyín tried to
+ imitate Rostóv in everything and adored him as a girl might have done.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Zdrzhinski, the officer with the long mustache, spoke grandiloquently of
+ the Saltánov dam being “a Russian Thermopylae,” and of how a deed worthy
+ of antiquity had been performed by General Raévski. He recounted how
+ Raévski had led his two sons onto the dam under terrific fire and had
+ charged with them beside him. Rostóv heard the story and not only said
+ nothing to encourage Zdrzhinski’s enthusiasm but, on the contrary, looked
+ like a man ashamed of what he was hearing, though with no intention of
+ contradicting it. Since the campaigns of Austerlitz and of 1807 Rostóv
+ knew by experience that men always lie when describing military exploits,
+ as he himself had done when recounting them; besides that, he had
+ experience enough to know that nothing happens in war at all as we can
+ imagine or relate it. And so he did not like Zdrzhinski’s tale, nor did he
+ like Zdrzhinski himself who, with his mustaches extending over his cheeks,
+ bent low over the face of his hearer, as was his habit, and crowded Rostóv
+ in the narrow shanty. Rostóv looked at him in silence. “In the first
+ place, there must have been such a confusion and crowding on the dam that
+ was being attacked that if Raévski did lead his sons there, it could have
+ had no effect except perhaps on some dozen men nearest to him,” thought
+ he, “the rest could not have seen how or with whom Raévski came onto the
+ dam. And even those who did see it would not have been much stimulated by
+ it, for what had they to do with Raévski’s tender paternal feelings when
+ their own skins were in danger? And besides, the fate of the Fatherland
+ did not depend on whether they took the Saltánov dam or not, as we are
+ told was the case at Thermopylae. So why should he have made such a
+ sacrifice? And why expose his own children in the battle? I would not have
+ taken my brother Pétya there, or even Ilyín, who’s a stranger to me but a
+ nice lad, but would have tried to put them somewhere under cover,”
+ Nicholas continued to think, as he listened to Zdrzhinski. But he did not
+ express his thoughts, for in such matters, too, he had gained experience.
+ He knew that this tale redounded to the glory of our arms and so one had
+ to pretend not to doubt it. And he acted accordingly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I can’t stand this any more,” said Ilyín, noticing that Rostóv did not
+ relish Zdrzhinski’s conversation. “My stockings and shirt... and the water
+ is running on my seat! I’ll go and look for shelter. The rain seems less
+ heavy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ilyín went out and Zdrzhinski rode away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Five minutes later Ilyín, splashing through the mud, came running back to
+ the shanty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hurrah! Rostóv, come quick! I’ve found it! About two hundred yards away
+ there’s a tavern where ours have already gathered. We can at least get dry
+ there, and Mary Hendríkhovna’s there.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mary Hendríkhovna was the wife of the regimental doctor, a pretty young
+ German woman he had married in Poland. The doctor, whether from lack of
+ means or because he did not like to part from his young wife in the early
+ days of their marriage, took her about with him wherever the hussar
+ regiment went and his jealousy had become a standing joke among the hussar
+ officers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv threw his cloak over his shoulders, shouted to Lavrúshka to follow
+ with the things, and—now slipping in the mud, now splashing right
+ through it—set off with Ilyín in the lessening rain and the darkness
+ that was occasionally rent by distant lightning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Rostóv, where are you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here. What lightning!” they called to one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ In the tavern, before which stood the doctor’s covered cart, there were
+ already some five officers. Mary Hendríkhovna, a plump little blonde
+ German, in a dressing jacket and nightcap, was sitting on a broad bench in
+ the front corner. Her husband, the doctor, lay asleep behind her. Rostóv
+ and Ilyín, on entering the room, were welcomed with merry shouts and
+ laughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear me, how jolly we are!” said Rostóv laughing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And why do you stand there gaping?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What swells they are! Why, the water streams from them! Don’t make our
+ drawing room so wet.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t mess Mary Hendríkhovna’s dress!” cried other voices.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv and Ilyín hastened to find a corner where they could change into
+ dry clothes without offending Mary Hendríkhovna’s modesty. They were going
+ into a tiny recess behind a partition to change, but found it completely
+ filled by three officers who sat playing cards by the light of a solitary
+ candle on an empty box, and these officers would on no account yield their
+ position. Mary Hendríkhovna obliged them with the loan of a petticoat to
+ be used as a curtain, and behind that screen Rostóv and Ilyín, helped by
+ Lavrúshka who had brought their kits, changed their wet things for dry
+ ones.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A fire was made up in the dilapidated brick stove. A board was found,
+ fixed on two saddles and covered with a horsecloth, a small samovar was
+ produced and a cellaret and half a bottle of rum, and having asked Mary
+ Hendríkhovna to preside, they all crowded round her. One offered her a
+ clean handkerchief to wipe her charming hands, another spread a jacket
+ under her little feet to keep them from the damp, another hung his coat
+ over the window to keep out the draft, and yet another waved the flies off
+ her husband’s face, lest he should wake up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Leave him alone,” said Mary Hendríkhovna, smiling timidly and happily.
+ “He is sleeping well as it is, after a sleepless night.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, no, Mary Hendríkhovna,” replied the officer, “one must look after the
+ doctor. Perhaps he’ll take pity on me someday, when it comes to cutting
+ off a leg or an arm for me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There were only three tumblers, the water was so muddy that one could not
+ make out whether the tea was strong or weak, and the samovar held only six
+ tumblers of water, but this made it all the pleasanter to take turns in
+ order of seniority to receive one’s tumbler from Mary Hendríkhovna’s plump
+ little hands with their short and not overclean nails. All the officers
+ appeared to be, and really were, in love with her that evening. Even those
+ playing cards behind the partition soon left their game and came over to
+ the samovar, yielding to the general mood of courting Mary Hendríkhovna.
+ She, seeing herself surrounded by such brilliant and polite young men,
+ beamed with satisfaction, try as she might to hide it, and perturbed as
+ she evidently was each time her husband moved in his sleep behind her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was only one spoon, sugar was more plentiful than anything else, but
+ it took too long to dissolve, so it was decided that Mary Hendríkhovna
+ should stir the sugar for everyone in turn. Rostóv received his tumbler,
+ and adding some rum to it asked Mary Hendríkhovna to stir it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you take it without sugar?” she said, smiling all the time, as if
+ everything she said and everything the others said was very amusing and
+ had a double meaning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is not the sugar I want, but only that your little hand should stir my
+ tea.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mary Hendríkhovna assented and began looking for the spoon which someone
+ meanwhile had pounced on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Use your finger, Mary Hendríkhovna, it will be still nicer,” said Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Too hot!” she replied, blushing with pleasure.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ilyín put a few drops of rum into the bucket of water and brought it to
+ Mary Hendríkhovna, asking her to stir it with her finger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This is my cup,” said he. “Only dip your finger in it and I’ll drink it
+ all up.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When they had emptied the samovar, Rostóv took a pack of cards and
+ proposed that they should play “Kings” with Mary Hendríkhovna. They drew
+ lots to settle who should make up her set. At Rostóv’s suggestion it was
+ agreed that whoever became “King” should have the right to kiss Mary
+ Hendríkhovna’s hand, and that the “Booby” should go to refill and reheat
+ the samovar for the doctor when the latter awoke.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, but supposing Mary Hendríkhovna is ‘King’?” asked Ilyín.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As it is, she is Queen, and her word is law!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They had hardly begun to play before the doctor’s disheveled head suddenly
+ appeared from behind Mary Hendríkhovna. He had been awake for some time,
+ listening to what was being said, and evidently found nothing entertaining
+ or amusing in what was going on. His face was sad and depressed. Without
+ greeting the officers, he scratched himself and asked to be allowed to
+ pass as they were blocking the way. As soon as he had left the room all
+ the officers burst into loud laughter and Mary Hendríkhovna blushed till
+ her eyes filled with tears and thereby became still more attractive to
+ them. Returning from the yard, the doctor told his wife (who had ceased to
+ smile so happily, and looked at him in alarm, awaiting her sentence) that
+ the rain had ceased and they must go to sleep in their covered cart, or
+ everything in it would be stolen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I’ll send an orderly.... Two of them!” said Rostóv. “What an idea,
+ doctor!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll stand guard on it myself!” said Ilyín.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, gentlemen, you have had your sleep, but I have not slept for two
+ nights,” replied the doctor, and he sat down morosely beside his wife,
+ waiting for the game to end.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Seeing his gloomy face as he frowned at his wife, the officers grew still
+ merrier, and some of them could not refrain from laughter, for which they
+ hurriedly sought plausible pretexts. When he had gone, taking his wife
+ with him, and had settled down with her in their covered cart, the
+ officers lay down in the tavern, covering themselves with their wet
+ cloaks, but they did not sleep for a long time; now they exchanged
+ remarks, recalling the doctor’s uneasiness and his wife’s delight, now
+ they ran out into the porch and reported what was taking place in the
+ covered trap. Several times Rostóv, covering his head, tried to go to
+ sleep, but some remark would arouse him and conversation would be resumed,
+ to the accompaniment of unreasoning, merry, childlike laughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV
+ 
+ 
+ It was nearly three o’clock but no one was yet asleep, when the
+ quartermaster appeared with an order to move on to the little town of
+ Ostróvna. Still laughing and talking, the officers began hurriedly getting
+ ready and again boiled some muddy water in the samovar. But Rostóv went
+ off to his squadron without waiting for tea. Day was breaking, the rain
+ had ceased, and the clouds were dispersing. It felt damp and cold,
+ especially in clothes that were still moist. As they left the tavern in
+ the twilight of the dawn, Rostóv and Ilyín both glanced under the wet and
+ glistening leather hood of the doctor’s cart, from under the apron of
+ which his feet were sticking out, and in the middle of which his wife’s
+ nightcap was visible and her sleepy breathing audible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She really is a dear little thing,” said Rostóv to Ilyín, who was
+ following him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A charming woman!” said Ilyín, with all the gravity of a boy of sixteen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Half an hour later the squadron was lined up on the road. The command was
+ heard to “mount” and the soldiers crossed themselves and mounted. Rostóv
+ riding in front gave the order “Forward!” and the hussars, with clanking
+ sabers and subdued talk, their horses’ hoofs splashing in the mud, defiled
+ in fours and moved along the broad road planted with birch trees on each
+ side, following the infantry and a battery that had gone on in front.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Tattered, blue-purple clouds, reddening in the east, were scudding before
+ the wind. It was growing lighter and lighter. That curly grass which
+ always grows by country roadsides became clearly visible, still wet with
+ the night’s rain; the drooping branches of the birches, also wet, swayed
+ in the wind and flung down bright drops of water to one side. The
+ soldiers’ faces were more and more clearly visible. Rostóv, always closely
+ followed by Ilyín, rode along the side of the road between two rows of
+ birch trees.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When campaigning, Rostóv allowed himself the indulgence of riding not a
+ regimental but a Cossack horse. A judge of horses and a sportsman, he had
+ lately procured himself a large, fine, mettlesome, Donéts horse,
+ dun-colored, with light mane and tail, and when he rode it no one could
+ outgallop him. To ride this horse was a pleasure to him, and he thought of
+ the horse, of the morning, of the doctor’s wife, but not once of the
+ impending danger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Formerly, when going into action, Rostóv had felt afraid; now he had not
+ the least feeling of fear. He was fearless, not because he had grown used
+ to being under fire (one cannot grow used to danger), but because he had
+ learned how to manage his thoughts when in danger. He had grown accustomed
+ when going into action to think about anything but what would seem most
+ likely to interest him—the impending danger. During the first period
+ of his service, hard as he tried and much as he reproached himself with
+ cowardice, he had not been able to do this, but with time it had come of
+ itself. Now he rode beside Ilyín under the birch trees, occasionally
+ plucking leaves from a branch that met his hand, sometimes touching his
+ horse’s side with his foot, or, without turning round, handing a pipe he
+ had finished to an hussar riding behind him, with as calm and careless an
+ air as though he were merely out for a ride. He glanced with pity at the
+ excited face of Ilyín, who talked much and in great agitation. He knew
+ from experience the tormenting expectation of terror and death the cornet
+ was suffering and knew that only time could help him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as the sun appeared in a clear strip of sky beneath the clouds,
+ the wind fell, as if it dared not spoil the beauty of the summer morning
+ after the storm; drops still continued to fall, but vertically now, and
+ all was still. The whole sun appeared on the horizon and disappeared
+ behind a long narrow cloud that hung above it. A few minutes later it
+ reappeared brighter still from behind the top of the cloud, tearing its
+ edge. Everything grew bright and glittered. And with that light, and as if
+ in reply to it, came the sound of guns ahead of them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before Rostóv had had time to consider and determine the distance of that
+ firing, Count Ostermann-Tolstóy’s adjutant came galloping from Vítebsk
+ with orders to advance at a trot along the road.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The squadron overtook and passed the infantry and the battery—which
+ had also quickened their pace—rode down a hill, and passing through
+ an empty and deserted village again ascended. The horses began to lather
+ and the men to flush.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Halt! Dress your ranks!” the order of the regimental commander was heard
+ ahead. “Forward by the left. Walk, march!” came the order from in front.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the hussars, passing along the line of troops on the left flank of our
+ position, halted behind our Uhlans who were in the front line. To the
+ right stood our infantry in a dense column: they were the reserve. Higher
+ up the hill, on the very horizon, our guns were visible through the
+ wonderfully clear air, brightly illuminated by slanting morning sunbeams.
+ In front, beyond a hollow dale, could be seen the enemy’s columns and
+ guns. Our advanced line, already in action, could be heard briskly
+ exchanging shots with the enemy in the dale.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At these sounds, long unheard, Rostóv’s spirits rose, as at the strains of
+ the merriest music. Trap-ta-ta-tap! cracked the shots, now together, now
+ several quickly one after another. Again all was silent and then again it
+ sounded as if someone were walking on detonators and exploding them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The hussars remained in the same place for about an hour. A cannonade
+ began. Count Ostermann with his suite rode up behind the squadron, halted,
+ spoke to the commander of the regiment, and rode up the hill to the guns.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After Ostermann had gone, a command rang out to the Uhlans.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Form column! Prepare to charge!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The infantry in front of them parted into platoons to allow the cavalry to
+ pass. The Uhlans started, the streamers on their spears fluttering, and
+ trotted downhill toward the French cavalry which was seen below to the
+ left.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as the Uhlans descended the hill, the hussars were ordered up the
+ hill to support the battery. As they took the places vacated by the
+ Uhlans, bullets came from the front, whining and whistling, but fell spent
+ without taking effect.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The sounds, which he had not heard for so long, had an even more
+ pleasurable and exhilarating effect on Rostóv than the previous sounds of
+ firing. Drawing himself up, he viewed the field of battle opening out
+ before him from the hill, and with his whole soul followed the movement of
+ the Uhlans. They swooped down close to the French dragoons, something
+ confused happened there amid the smoke, and five minutes later our Uhlans
+ were galloping back, not to the place they had occupied but more to the
+ left, and among the orange-colored Uhlans on chestnut horses and behind
+ them, in a large group, blue French dragoons on gray horses could be seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV
+ 
+ 
+ Rostóv, with his keen sportsman’s eye, was one of the first to catch sight
+ of these blue French dragoons pursuing our Uhlans. Nearer and nearer in
+ disorderly crowds came the Uhlans and the French dragoons pursuing them.
+ He could already see how these men, who looked so small at the foot of the
+ hill, jostled and overtook one another, waving their arms and their sabers
+ in the air.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv gazed at what was happening before him as at a hunt. He felt
+ instinctively that if the hussars struck at the French dragoons now, the
+ latter could not withstand them, but if a charge was to be made it must be
+ done now, at that very moment, or it would be too late. He looked around.
+ A captain, standing beside him, was gazing like himself with eyes fixed on
+ the cavalry below them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Andrew Sevastyánych!” said Rostóv. “You know, we could crush them....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A fine thing too!” replied the captain, “and really...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv, without waiting to hear him out, touched his horse, galloped to
+ the front of his squadron, and before he had time to finish giving the
+ word of command, the whole squadron, sharing his feeling, was following
+ him. Rostóv himself did not know how or why he did it. He acted as he did
+ when hunting, without reflecting or considering. He saw the dragoons near
+ and that they were galloping in disorder; he knew they could not withstand
+ an attack—knew there was only that moment and that if he let it slip
+ it would not return. The bullets were whining and whistling so
+ stimulatingly around him and his horse was so eager to go that he could
+ not restrain himself. He touched his horse, gave the word of command, and
+ immediately, hearing behind him the tramp of the horses of his deployed
+ squadron, rode at full trot downhill toward the dragoons. Hardly had they
+ reached the bottom of the hill before their pace instinctively changed to
+ a gallop, which grew faster and faster as they drew nearer to our Uhlans
+ and the French dragoons who galloped after them. The dragoons were now
+ close at hand. On seeing the hussars, the foremost began to turn, while
+ those behind began to halt. With the same feeling with which he had
+ galloped across the path of a wolf, Rostóv gave rein to his Donéts horse
+ and galloped to intersect the path of the dragoons’ disordered lines. One
+ Uhlan stopped, another who was on foot flung himself to the ground to
+ avoid being knocked over, and a riderless horse fell in among the hussars.
+ Nearly all the French dragoons were galloping back. Rostóv, picking out
+ one on a gray horse, dashed after him. On the way he came upon a bush, his
+ gallant horse cleared it, and almost before he had righted himself in his
+ saddle he saw that he would immediately overtake the enemy he had
+ selected. That Frenchman, by his uniform an officer, was going at a
+ gallop, crouching on his gray horse and urging it on with his saber. In
+ another moment Rostóv’s horse dashed its breast against the hindquarters
+ of the officer’s horse, almost knocking it over, and at the same instant
+ Rostóv, without knowing why, raised his saber and struck the Frenchman
+ with it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The instant he had done this, all Rostóv’s animation vanished. The officer
+ fell, not so much from the blow—which had but slightly cut his arm
+ above the elbow—as from the shock to his horse and from fright.
+ Rostóv reined in his horse, and his eyes sought his foe to see whom he had
+ vanquished. The French dragoon officer was hopping with one foot on the
+ ground, the other being caught in the stirrup. His eyes, screwed up with
+ fear as if he every moment expected another blow, gazed up at Rostóv with
+ shrinking terror. His pale and mud-stained face—fair and young, with
+ a dimple in the chin and light-blue eyes—was not an enemy’s face at
+ all suited to a battlefield, but a most ordinary, homelike face. Before
+ Rostóv had decided what to do with him, the officer cried, “I surrender!”
+ He hurriedly but vainly tried to get his foot out of the stirrup and did
+ not remove his frightened blue eyes from Rostóv’s face. Some hussars who
+ galloped up disengaged his foot and helped him into the saddle. On all
+ sides, the hussars were busy with the dragoons; one was wounded, but
+ though his face was bleeding, he would not give up his horse; another was
+ perched up behind an hussar with his arms round him; a third was being
+ helped by an hussar to mount his horse. In front, the French infantry were
+ firing as they ran. The hussars galloped hastily back with their
+ prisoners. Rostóv galloped back with the rest, aware of an unpleasant
+ feeling of depression in his heart. Something vague and confused, which he
+ could not at all account for, had come over him with the capture of that
+ officer and the blow he had dealt him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Count Ostermann-Tolstóy met the returning hussars, sent for Rostóv,
+ thanked him, and said he would report his gallant deed to the Emperor and
+ would recommend him for a St. George’s Cross. When sent for by Count
+ Ostermann, Rostóv, remembering that he had charged without orders, felt
+ sure his commander was sending for him to punish him for breach of
+ discipline. Ostermann’s flattering words and promise of a reward should
+ therefore have struck him all the more pleasantly, but he still felt that
+ same vaguely disagreeable feeling of moral nausea. “But what on earth is
+ worrying me?” he asked himself as he rode back from the general. “Ilyín?
+ No, he’s safe. Have I disgraced myself in any way? No, that’s not it.”
+ Something else, resembling remorse, tormented him. “Yes, oh yes, that
+ French officer with the dimple. And I remember how my arm paused when I
+ raised it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv saw the prisoners being led away and galloped after them to have a
+ look at his Frenchman with the dimple on his chin. He was sitting in his
+ foreign uniform on an hussar packhorse and looked anxiously about him. The
+ sword cut on his arm could scarcely be called a wound. He glanced at
+ Rostóv with a feigned smile and waved his hand in greeting. Rostóv still
+ had the same indefinite feeling, as of shame.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All that day and the next his friends and comrades noticed that Rostóv,
+ without being dull or angry, was silent, thoughtful, and preoccupied. He
+ drank reluctantly, tried to remain alone, and kept turning something over
+ in his mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv was always thinking about that brilliant exploit of his, which to
+ his amazement had gained him the St. George’s Cross and even given him a
+ reputation for bravery, and there was something he could not at all
+ understand. “So others are even more afraid than I am!” he thought. “So
+ that’s all there is in what is called heroism! And did I do it for my
+ country’s sake? And how was he to blame, with his dimple and blue eyes?
+ And how frightened he was! He thought that I should kill him. Why should I
+ kill him? My hand trembled. And they have given me a St. George’s
+ Cross.... I can’t make it out at all.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But while Nicholas was considering these questions and still could reach
+ no clear solution of what puzzled him so, the wheel of fortune in the
+ service, as often happens, turned in his favor. After the affair at
+ Ostróvna he was brought into notice, received command of an hussar
+ battalion, and when a brave officer was needed he was chosen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI
+ 
+ 
+ On receiving news of Natásha’s illness, the countess, though not quite
+ well yet and still weak, went to Moscow with Pétya and the rest of the
+ household, and the whole family moved from Márya Dmítrievna’s house to
+ their own and settled down in town.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha’s illness was so serious that, fortunately for her and for her
+ parents, the consideration of all that had caused the illness, her conduct
+ and the breaking off of her engagement, receded into the background. She
+ was so ill that it was impossible for them to consider in how far she was
+ to blame for what had happened. She could not eat or sleep, grew visibly
+ thinner, coughed, and, as the doctors made them feel, was in danger. They
+ could not think of anything but how to help her. Doctors came to see her
+ singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German, and Latin,
+ blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all
+ the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of
+ them that they could not know the disease Natásha was suffering from, as
+ no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person
+ has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal,
+ novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine—not a disease of the
+ lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books,
+ but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the
+ maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the
+ doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his
+ charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they received
+ money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that business.
+ But, above all, that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that
+ they saw they were really useful, as in fact they were to the whole Rostóv
+ family. Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow
+ substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible,
+ as they were given in small doses), but they were useful, necessary, and
+ indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and of
+ those who loved her—and that is why there are, and always will be,
+ pseudo-healers, wise women, homeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that
+ eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something
+ should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering. They satisfied
+ the need seen in its most elementary form in a child, when it wants to
+ have a place rubbed that has been hurt. A child knocks itself and runs at
+ once to the arms of its mother or nurse to have the aching spot rubbed or
+ kissed, and it feels better when this is done. The child cannot believe
+ that the strongest and wisest of its people have no remedy for its pain,
+ and the hope of relief and the expression of its mother’s sympathy while
+ she rubs the bump comforts it. The doctors were of use to Natásha because
+ they kissed and rubbed her bump, assuring her that it would soon pass if
+ only the coachman went to the chemist’s in the Arbát and got a powder and
+ some pills in a pretty box for a ruble and seventy kopeks, and if she took
+ those powders in boiled water at intervals of precisely two hours, neither
+ more nor less.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What would Sónya and the count and countess have done, how would they have
+ looked, if nothing had been done, if there had not been those pills to
+ give by the clock, the warm drinks, the chicken cutlets, and all the other
+ details of life ordered by the doctors, the carrying out of which supplied
+ an occupation and consolation to the family circle? How would the count
+ have borne his dearly loved daughter’s illness had he not known that it
+ was costing him a thousand rubles, and that he would not grudge thousands
+ more to benefit her, or had he not known that if her illness continued he
+ would not grudge yet other thousands and would take her abroad for
+ consultations there, and had he not been able to explain the details of
+ how Métivier and Feller had not understood the symptoms, but Frise had,
+ and Múdrov had diagnosed them even better? What would the countess have
+ done had she not been able sometimes to scold the invalid for not strictly
+ obeying the doctor’s orders?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’ll never get well like that,” she would say, forgetting her
+ grief in her vexation, “if you won’t obey the doctor and take your
+ medicine at the right time! You mustn’t trifle with it, you know, or it may
+ turn to pneumonia ,” she would go on, deriving much comfort from the
+ utterance of that foreign word, incomprehensible to others as well as to herself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What would Sónya have done without the glad consciousness that she had not
+ undressed during the first three nights, in order to be ready to carry out
+ all the doctor’s injunctions with precision, and that she still kept awake
+ at night so as not to miss the proper time when the slightly harmful pills
+ in the little gilt box had to be administered? Even to Natásha herself it
+ was pleasant to see that so many sacrifices were being made for her sake,
+ and to know that she had to take medicine at certain hours, though she
+ declared that no medicine would cure her and that it was all nonsense. And
+ it was even pleasant to be able to show, by disregarding the orders, that
+ she did not believe in medical treatment and did not value her life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctor came every day, felt her pulse, looked at her tongue, and
+ regardless of her grief-stricken face joked with her. But when he had gone
+ into another room, to which the countess hurriedly followed him, he
+ assumed a grave air and thoughtfully shaking his head said that though
+ there was danger, he had hopes of the effect of this last medicine and one
+ must wait and see, that the malady was chiefly mental, but... And the
+ countess, trying to conceal the action from herself and from him, slipped
+ a gold coin into his hand and always returned to the patient with a more
+ tranquil mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The symptoms of Natásha’s illness were that she ate little, slept little,
+ coughed, and was always low-spirited. The doctors said that she could not
+ get on without medical treatment, so they kept her in the stifling
+ atmosphere of the town, and the Rostóvs did not move to the country that
+ summer of 1812.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In spite of the many pills she swallowed and the drops and powders out of
+ the little bottles and boxes of which Madame Schoss who was fond of such
+ things made a large collection, and in spite of being deprived of the
+ country life to which she was accustomed, youth prevailed. Natásha’s grief
+ began to be overlaid by the impressions of daily life, it ceased to press
+ so painfully on her heart, it gradually faded into the past, and she began
+ to recover physically.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII
+ 
+ 
+ Natásha was calmer but no happier. She not merely avoided all external
+ forms of pleasure—balls, promenades, concerts, and theaters—but
+ she never laughed without a sound of tears in her laughter. She could not
+ sing. As soon as she began to laugh, or tried to sing by herself, tears
+ choked her: tears of remorse, tears at the recollection of those pure
+ times which could never return, tears of vexation that she should so
+ uselessly have ruined her young life which might have been so happy.
+ Laughter and singing in particular seemed to her like a blasphemy, in face
+ of her sorrow. Without any need of self-restraint, no wish to coquet ever
+ entered her head. She said and felt at that time that no man was more to
+ her than Nastásya Ivánovna, the buffoon. Something stood sentinel within
+ her and forbade her every joy. Besides, she had lost all the old interests
+ of her carefree girlish life that had been so full of hope. The previous
+ autumn, the hunting, “Uncle,” and the Christmas holidays spent with
+ Nicholas at Otrádnoe were what she recalled oftenest and most painfully.
+ What would she not have given to bring back even a single day of that
+ time! But it was gone forever. Her presentiment at the time had not
+ deceived her—that that state of freedom and readiness for any
+ enjoyment would not return again. Yet it was necessary to live on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It comforted her to reflect that she was not better as she had formerly
+ imagined, but worse, much worse, than anybody else in the world. But this
+ was not enough. She knew that, and asked herself, “What next?” But there
+ was nothing to come. There was no joy in life, yet life was passing.
+ Natásha apparently tried not to be a burden or a hindrance to anyone, but
+ wanted nothing for herself. She kept away from everyone in the house and
+ felt at ease only with her brother Pétya. She liked to be with him better
+ than with the others, and when alone with him she sometimes laughed. She
+ hardly ever left the house and of those who came to see them was glad to
+ see only one person, Pierre. It would have been impossible to treat her
+ with more delicacy, greater care, and at the same time more seriously than
+ did Count Bezúkhov. Natásha unconsciously felt this delicacy and so found
+ great pleasure in his society. But she was not even grateful to him for
+ it; nothing good on Pierre’s part seemed to her to be an effort, it seemed
+ so natural for him to be kind to everyone that there was no merit in his
+ kindness. Sometimes Natásha noticed embarrassment and awkwardness on his
+ part in her presence, especially when he wanted to do something to please
+ her, or feared that something they spoke of would awaken memories
+ distressing to her. She noticed this and attributed it to his general
+ kindness and shyness, which she imagined must be the same toward everyone
+ as it was to her. After those involuntary words—that if he were free
+ he would have asked on his knees for her hand and her love—uttered
+ at a moment when she was so strongly agitated, Pierre never spoke to
+ Natásha of his feelings; and it seemed plain to her that those words,
+ which had then so comforted her, were spoken as all sorts of meaningless
+ words are spoken to comfort a crying child. It was not because Pierre was
+ a married man, but because Natásha felt very strongly with him that moral
+ barrier the absence of which she had experienced with Kurágin that it
+ never entered her head that the relations between him and herself could
+ lead to love on her part, still less on his, or even to the kind of
+ tender, self-conscious, romantic friendship between a man and a woman of
+ which she had known several instances.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before the end of the fast of St. Peter, Agraféna Ivánovna Belóva, a
+ country neighbor of the Rostóvs, came to Moscow to pay her devotions at
+ the shrines of the Moscow saints. She suggested that Natásha should fast
+ and prepare for Holy Communion, and Natásha gladly welcomed the idea.
+ Despite the doctor’s orders that she should not go out early in the
+ morning, Natásha insisted on fasting and preparing for the sacrament, not
+ as they generally prepared for it in the Rostóv family by attending three
+ services in their own house, but as Agraféna Ivánovna did, by going to
+ church every day for a week and not once missing Vespers, Matins, or Mass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess was pleased with Natásha’s zeal; after the poor results of
+ the medical treatment, in the depths of her heart she hoped that prayer
+ might help her daughter more than medicines and, though not without fear
+ and concealing it from the doctor, she agreed to Natásha’s wish and
+ entrusted her to Belóva. Agraféna Ivánovna used to come to wake Natásha at
+ three in the morning, but generally found her already awake. She was
+ afraid of being late for Matins. Hastily washing, and meekly putting on
+ her shabbiest dress and an old mantilla, Natásha, shivering in the fresh
+ air, went out into the deserted streets lit by the clear light of dawn. By
+ Agraféna Ivánovna’s advice Natásha prepared herself not in their own
+ parish, but at a church where, according to the devout Agraféna Ivánovna,
+ the priest was a man of very severe and lofty life. There were never many
+ people in the church; Natásha always stood beside Belóva in the customary
+ place before an icon of the Blessed Virgin, let into the screen before the
+ choir on the left side, and a feeling, new to her, of humility before
+ something great and incomprehensible, seized her when at that unusual
+ morning hour, gazing at the dark face of the Virgin illuminated by the
+ candles burning before it and by the morning light falling from the
+ window, she listened to the words of the service which she tried to follow
+ with understanding. When she understood them her personal feeling became
+ interwoven in the prayers with shades of its own. When she did not
+ understand, it was sweeter still to think that the wish to understand
+ everything is pride, that it is impossible to understand all, that it is
+ only necessary to believe and to commit oneself to God, whom she felt
+ guiding her soul at those moments. She crossed herself, bowed low, and
+ when she did not understand, in horror at her own vileness, simply asked
+ God to forgive her everything, everything, to have mercy upon her. The
+ prayers to which she surrendered herself most of all were those of
+ repentance. On her way home at an early hour when she met no one but
+ bricklayers going to work or men sweeping the street, and everybody within
+ the houses was still asleep, Natásha experienced a feeling new to her, a
+ sense of the possibility of correcting her faults, the possibility of a
+ new, clean life, and of happiness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the whole week she spent in this way, that feeling grew every day.
+ And the happiness of taking communion, or “communing” as Agraféna
+ Ivánovna, joyously playing with the word, called it, seemed to Natásha so
+ great that she felt she should never live till that blessed Sunday.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the happy day came, and on that memorable Sunday, when, dressed in
+ white muslin, she returned home after communion, for the first time for
+ many months she felt calm and not oppressed by the thought of the life
+ that lay before her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctor who came to see her that day ordered her to continue the
+ powders he had prescribed a fortnight previously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She must certainly go on taking them morning and evening,” said he,
+ evidently sincerely satisfied with his success. “Only, please be
+ particular about it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Be quite easy,” he continued playfully, as he adroitly took the gold coin
+ in his palm. “She will soon be singing and frolicking about. The last
+ medicine has done her a very great deal of good. She has freshened up very
+ much.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess, with a cheerful expression on her face, looked down at her
+ nails and spat a little for luck as she returned to the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII
+ 
+ 
+ At the beginning of July more and more disquieting reports about the war
+ began to spread in Moscow; people spoke of an appeal by the Emperor to the
+ people, and of his coming himself from the army to Moscow. And as up to
+ the eleventh of July no manifesto or appeal had been received, exaggerated
+ reports became current about them and about the position of Russia. It was
+ said that the Emperor was leaving the army because it was in danger, it
+ was said that Smolénsk had surrendered, that Napoleon had an army of a
+ million and only a miracle could save Russia.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the eleventh of July, which was Saturday, the manifesto was received
+ but was not yet in print, and Pierre, who was at the Rostóvs’, promised to
+ come to dinner next day, Sunday, and bring a copy of the manifesto and
+ appeal, which he would obtain from Count Rostopchín.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That Sunday, the Rostóvs went to Mass at the Razumóvskis’ private chapel
+ as usual. It was a hot July day. Even at ten o’clock, when the Rostóvs got
+ out of their carriage at the chapel, the sultry air, the shouts of
+ hawkers, the light and gay summer clothes of the crowd, the dusty leaves
+ of the trees on the boulevard, the sounds of the band and the white
+ trousers of a battalion marching to parade, the rattling of wheels on the
+ cobblestones, and the brilliant, hot sunshine were all full of that summer
+ languor, that content and discontent with the present, which is most
+ strongly felt on a bright, hot day in town. All the Moscow notabilities,
+ all the Rostóvs’ acquaintances, were at the Razumóvskis’ chapel, for, as
+ if expecting something to happen, many wealthy families who usually left
+ town for their country estates had not gone away that summer. As Natásha,
+ at her mother’s side, passed through the crowd behind a liveried footman
+ who cleared the way for them, she heard a young man speaking about her in
+ too loud a whisper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s Rostóva, the one who...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She’s much thinner, but all the same she’s pretty!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She heard, or thought she heard, the names of Kurágin and Bolkónski. But
+ she was always imagining that. It always seemed to her that everyone who
+ looked at her was thinking only of what had happened to her. With a
+ sinking heart, wretched as she always was now when she found herself in a
+ crowd, Natásha in her lilac silk dress trimmed with black lace walked—as
+ women can walk—with the more repose and stateliness the greater the
+ pain and shame in her soul. She knew for certain that she was pretty, but
+ this no longer gave her satisfaction as it used to. On the contrary it
+ tormented her more than anything else of late, and particularly so on this
+ bright, hot summer day in town. “It’s Sunday again—another week
+ past,” she thought, recalling that she had been here the Sunday before,
+ “and always the same life that is no life, and the same surroundings in
+ which it used to be so easy to live. I’m pretty, I’m young, and I know
+ that now I am good. I used to be bad, but now I know I am good,” she
+ thought, “but yet my best years are slipping by and are no good to
+ anyone.” She stood by her mother’s side and exchanged nods with
+ acquaintances near her. From habit she scrutinized the ladies’ dresses,
+ condemned the bearing of a lady standing close by who was not crossing
+ herself properly but in a cramped manner, and again she thought with
+ vexation that she was herself being judged and was judging others, and
+ suddenly, at the sound of the service, she felt horrified at her own
+ vileness, horrified that the former purity of her soul was again lost to
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A comely, fresh-looking old man was conducting the service with that mild
+ solemnity which has so elevating and soothing an effect on the souls of
+ the worshipers. The gates of the sanctuary screen were closed, the curtain
+ was slowly drawn, and from behind it a soft mysterious voice pronounced
+ some words. Tears, the cause of which she herself did not understand, made
+ Natásha’s breast heave, and a joyous but oppressive feeling agitated her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Teach me what I should do, how to live my life, how I may grow good
+ forever, forever!” she pleaded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The deacon came out onto the raised space before the altar screen and,
+ holding his thumb extended, drew his long hair from under his dalmatic
+ and, making the sign of the cross on his breast, began in a loud and
+ solemn voice to recite the words of the prayer....
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In peace let us pray unto the Lord.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As one community, without distinction of class, without enmity, united by
+ brotherly love—let us pray!” thought Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For the peace that is from above, and for the salvation of our souls.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For the world of angels and all the spirits who dwell above us,” prayed
+ Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When they prayed for the warriors, she thought of her brother and Denísov.
+ When they prayed for all traveling by land and sea, she remembered Prince
+ Andrew, prayed for him, and asked God to forgive her all the wrongs she
+ had done him. When they prayed for those who love us, she prayed for the
+ members of her own family, her father and mother and Sónya, realizing for
+ the first time how wrongly she had acted toward them, and feeling all the
+ strength of her love for them. When they prayed for those who hate us, she
+ tried to think of her enemies and people who hated her, in order to pray
+ for them. She included among her enemies the creditors and all who had
+ business dealings with her father, and always at the thought of enemies
+ and those who hated her she remembered Anatole who had done her so much
+ harm—and though he did not hate her she gladly prayed for him as for
+ an enemy. Only at prayer did she feel able to think clearly and calmly of
+ Prince Andrew and Anatole, as men for whom her feelings were as nothing
+ compared with her awe and devotion to God. When they prayed for the
+ Imperial family and the Synod, she bowed very low and made the sign of the
+ cross, saying to herself that even if she did not understand, still she
+ could not doubt, and at any rate loved the governing Synod and prayed for
+ it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he had finished the Litany the deacon crossed the stole over his
+ breast and said, “Let us commit ourselves and our whole lives to Christ
+ the Lord!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Commit ourselves to God,” Natásha inwardly repeated. “Lord God, I submit
+ myself to Thy will!” she thought. “I want nothing, wish for nothing; teach
+ me what to do and how to use my will! Take me, take me!” prayed Natásha,
+ with impatient emotion in her heart, not crossing herself but letting her
+ slender arms hang down as if expecting some invisible power at any moment
+ to take her and deliver her from herself, from her regrets, desires,
+ remorse, hopes, and sins.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess looked round several times at her daughter’s softened face
+ and shining eyes and prayed God to help her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Unexpectedly, in the middle of the service, and not in the usual order
+ Natásha knew so well, the deacon brought out a small stool, the one he
+ knelt on when praying on Trinity Sunday, and placed it before the doors of
+ the sanctuary screen. The priest came out with his purple velvet biretta
+ on his head, adjusted his hair, and knelt down with an effort. Everybody
+ followed his example and they looked at one another in surprise. Then came
+ the prayer just received from the Synod—a prayer for the deliverance
+ of Russia from hostile invasion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lord God of might, God of our salvation!” began the priest in that voice,
+ clear, not grandiloquent but mild, in which only the Slav clergy read and
+ which acts so irresistibly on a Russian heart.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lord God of might, God of our salvation! Look this day in mercy and
+ blessing on Thy humble people, and graciously hear us, spare us, and have
+ mercy upon us! This foe confounding Thy land, desiring to lay waste the
+ whole world, rises against us; these lawless men are gathered together to
+ overthrow Thy kingdom, to destroy Thy dear Jerusalem, Thy beloved Russia;
+ to defile Thy temples, to overthrow Thine altars, and to desecrate our
+ holy shrines. How long, O Lord, how long shall the wicked triumph? How
+ long shall they wield unlawful power?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lord God! Hear us when we pray to Thee; strengthen with Thy might our
+ most gracious sovereign lord, the Emperor Alexander Pávlovich; be mindful
+ of his uprightness and meekness, reward him according to his
+ righteousness, and let it preserve us, Thy chosen Israel! Bless his
+ counsels, his undertakings, and his work; strengthen his kingdom by Thine
+ almighty hand, and give him victory over his enemy, even as Thou gavest
+ Moses the victory over Amalek, Gideon over Midian, and David over Goliath.
+ Preserve his army, put a bow of brass in the hands of those who have armed
+ themselves in Thy Name, and gird their loins with strength for the fight.
+ Take up the spear and shield and arise to help us; confound and put to
+ shame those who have devised evil against us, may they be before the faces
+ of Thy faithful warriors as dust before the wind, and may Thy mighty Angel
+ confound them and put them to flight; may they be ensnared when they know
+ it not, and may the plots they have laid in secret be turned against them;
+ let them fall before Thy servants’ feet and be laid low by our hosts!
+ Lord, Thou art able to save both great and small; Thou art God, and man
+ cannot prevail against Thee!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “God of our fathers! Remember Thy bounteous mercy and loving-kindness
+ which are from of old; turn not Thy face from us, but be gracious to our
+ unworthiness, and in Thy great goodness and Thy many mercies regard not
+ our transgressions and iniquities! Create in us a clean heart and renew a
+ right spirit within us, strengthen us all in Thy faith, fortify our hope,
+ inspire us with true love one for another, arm us with unity of spirit in
+ the righteous defense of the heritage Thou gavest to us and to our
+ fathers, and let not the scepter of the wicked be exalted against the
+ destiny of those Thou hast sanctified.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O Lord our God, in whom we believe and in whom we put our trust, let us
+ not be confounded in our hope of Thy mercy, and give us a token of Thy
+ blessing, that those who hate us and our Orthodox faith may see it and be
+ put to shame and perish, and may all the nations know that Thou art the
+ Lord and we are Thy people. Show Thy mercy upon us this day, O Lord, and
+ grant us Thy salvation; make the hearts of Thy servants to rejoice in Thy
+ mercy; smite down our enemies and destroy them swiftly beneath the feet of
+ Thy faithful servants! For Thou art the defense, the succor, and the
+ victory of them that put their trust in Thee, and to Thee be all glory, to
+ Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, now and forever, world without end. Amen.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In Natásha’s receptive condition of soul this prayer affected her
+ strongly. She listened to every word about the victory of Moses over
+ Amalek, of Gideon over Midian, and of David over Goliath, and about the
+ destruction of “Thy Jerusalem,” and she prayed to God with the tenderness
+ and emotion with which her heart was overflowing, but without fully
+ understanding what she was asking of God in that prayer. She shared with
+ all her heart in the prayer for the spirit of righteousness, for the
+ strengthening of the heart by faith and hope, and its animation by love.
+ But she could not pray that her enemies might be trampled under foot when
+ but a few minutes before she had been wishing she had more of them that
+ she might pray for them. But neither could she doubt the righteousness of
+ the prayer that was being read on bended knees. She felt in her heart a
+ devout and tremulous awe at the thought of the punishment that overtakes
+ men for their sins, and especially of her own sins, and she prayed to God
+ to forgive them all, and her too, and to give them all, and her too, peace
+ and happiness. And it seemed to her that God heard her prayer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX
+ 
+ 
+ From the day when Pierre, after leaving the Rostóvs’ with Natásha’s
+ grateful look fresh in his mind, had gazed at the comet that seemed to be
+ fixed in the sky and felt that something new was appearing on his own
+ horizon—from that day the problem of the vanity and uselessness of
+ all earthly things, that had incessantly tormented him, no longer
+ presented itself. That terrible question “Why?” “Wherefore?” which had
+ come to him amid every occupation, was now replaced, not by another
+ question or by a reply to the former question, but by her image. When he
+ listened to, or himself took part in, trivial conversations, when he read
+ or heard of human baseness or folly, he was not horrified as formerly, and
+ did not ask himself why men struggled so about these things when all is so
+ transient and incomprehensible—but he remembered her as he had last
+ seen her, and all his doubts vanished—not because she had answered
+ the questions that had haunted him, but because his conception of her
+ transferred him instantly to another, a brighter, realm of spiritual
+ activity in which no one could be justified or guilty—a realm of
+ beauty and love which it was worth living for. Whatever worldly baseness
+ presented itself to him, he said to himself:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, supposing N. N. has swindled the country and the Tsar, and the
+ country and the Tsar confer honors upon him, what does that matter? She
+ smiled at me yesterday and asked me to come again, and I love her, and no
+ one will ever know it.” And his soul felt calm and peaceful.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre still went into society, drank as much and led the same idle and
+ dissipated life, because besides the hours he spent at the Rostóvs’ there
+ were other hours he had to spend somehow, and the habits and acquaintances
+ he had made in Moscow formed a current that bore him along irresistibly.
+ But latterly, when more and more disquieting reports came from the seat of
+ war and Natásha’s health began to improve and she no longer aroused in him
+ the former feeling of careful pity, an ever-increasing restlessness, which
+ he could not explain, took possession of him. He felt that the condition
+ he was in could not continue long, that a catastrophe was coming which
+ would change his whole life, and he impatiently sought everywhere for
+ signs of that approaching catastrophe. One of his brother Masons had
+ revealed to Pierre the following prophecy concerning Napoleon, drawn from
+ the Revelation of St. John.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In chapter 13, verse 18, of the Apocalypse, it is said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the
+ beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred
+ threescore and six.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And in the fifth verse of the same chapter:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and
+ blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two
+ months.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ The French alphabet, written out with the same numerical values as the
+ Hebrew, in which the first nine letters denote units and the others tens,
+ will have the following significance:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ a b c d e f g h i k
+ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
+ l m n o p q r s
+ 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
+ t u v w x y
+ 100 110 120 130 140 150
+ z
+ 160
+ 
+ 
+ Writing the words L’Empereur Napoléon in numbers, it appears that the
+ sum of them is 666, and that Napoleon was therefore the beast foretold in the
+ Apocalypse. Moreover, by applying the same system to the words
+ quarante-deux , * which was the term allowed to the beast that “spoke
+ great things and blasphemies,” the same number 666 was obtained; from which it
+ followed that the limit fixed for Napoleon’s power had come in the year
+ 1812 when the French emperor was forty-two. This prophecy pleased Pierre
+ very much and he often asked himself what would put an end to the power of
+ the beast, that is, of Napoleon, and tried by the same system of using
+ letters as numbers and adding them up, to find an answer to the question
+ that engrossed him. He wrote the words L’Empereur Alexandre, La nation
+ russe and added up their numbers, but the sums were either more or less
+ than 666. Once when making such calculations he wrote down his own name in
+ French, Comte Pierre Besouhoff, but the sum of the numbers did not come
+ right. Then he changed the spelling, substituting a z for the s and
+ adding de and the article le , still without obtaining the desired
+ result. Then it occurred to him: if the answer to the question were contained in
+ his name, his nationality would also be given in the answer. So he wrote Le
+ russe Besuhof and adding up the numbers got 671. This was only five too much,
+ and five was represented by e , the very letter elided from the article
+ le before the word Empereur . By omitting the e , though
+ incorrectly, Pierre got the answer he sought. L’russe Besuhof made
+ 666. This discovery excited him. How, or by what means, he was connected with the
+ great event foretold in the Apocalypse he did not know, but he did not doubt that
+ connection for a moment. His love for Natásha, Antichrist, Napoleon, the invasion,
+ the comet, 666, L’Empereur Napoléon , and L’russe
+ Besuhof —all this had to mature and culminate, to lift him out of that
+ spellbound, petty sphere of Moscow habits in which he felt himself held captive and
+ lead him to a great achievement and great happiness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Forty-two.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ On the eve of the Sunday when the special prayer was read, Pierre had
+ promised the Rostóvs to bring them, from Count Rostopchín whom he knew
+ well, both the appeal to the people and the news from the army. In the
+ morning, when he went to call at Rostopchín’s he met there a courier fresh
+ from the army, an acquaintance of his own, who often danced at Moscow
+ balls.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do, please, for heaven’s sake, relieve me of something!” said the
+ courier. “I have a sackful of letters to parents.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Among these letters was one from Nicholas Rostóv to his father. Pierre
+ took that letter, and Rostopchín also gave him the Emperor’s appeal to
+ Moscow, which had just been printed, the last army orders, and his own
+ most recent bulletin. Glancing through the army orders, Pierre found in
+ one of them, in the lists of killed, wounded, and rewarded, the name of
+ Nicholas Rostóv, awarded a St. George’s Cross of the Fourth Class for
+ courage shown in the Ostróvna affair, and in the same order the name of
+ Prince Andrew Bolkónski, appointed to the command of a regiment of
+ Chasseurs. Though he did not want to remind the Rostóvs of Bolkónski,
+ Pierre could not refrain from making them happy by the news of their son’s
+ having received a decoration, so he sent that printed army order and
+ Nicholas’ letter to the Rostóvs, keeping the appeal, the bulletin, and the
+ other orders to take with him when he went to dinner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His conversation with Count Rostopchín and the latter’s tone of anxious
+ hurry, the meeting with the courier who talked casually of how badly
+ things were going in the army, the rumors of the discovery of spies in
+ Moscow and of a leaflet in circulation stating that Napoleon promised to
+ be in both the Russian capitals by the autumn, and the talk of the
+ Emperor’s being expected to arrive next day—all aroused with fresh
+ force that feeling of agitation and expectation in Pierre which he had
+ been conscious of ever since the appearance of the comet, and especially
+ since the beginning of the war.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He had long been thinking of entering the army and would have done so had
+ he not been hindered, first, by his membership of the Society of
+ Freemasons to which he was bound by oath and which preached perpetual
+ peace and the abolition of war, and secondly, by the fact that when he saw
+ the great mass of Muscovites who had donned uniform and were talking
+ patriotism, he somehow felt ashamed to take the step. But the chief reason
+ for not carrying out his intention to enter the army lay in the vague idea
+ that he was L’russe Besuhof who had the number of the beast, 666; that
+ his part in the great affair of setting a limit to the power of the beast that
+ spoke great and blasphemous things had been predestined from eternity, and
+ that therefore he ought not to undertake anything, but wait for what was
+ bound to come to pass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX
+ 
+ 
+ A few intimate friends were dining with the Rostóvs that day, as usual on
+ Sundays.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre came early so as to find them alone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He had grown so stout this year that he would have been abnormal had he
+ not been so tall, so broad of limb, and so strong that he carried his bulk
+ with evident ease.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He went up the stairs, puffing and muttering something. His coachman did
+ not even ask whether he was to wait. He knew that when his master was at
+ the Rostóvs’ he stayed till midnight. The Rostóvs’ footman rushed eagerly
+ forward to help him off with his cloak and take his hat and stick. Pierre,
+ from club habit, always left both hat and stick in the anteroom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The first person he saw in the house was Natásha. Even before he saw her,
+ while taking off his cloak, he heard her. She was practicing solfa
+ exercises in the music room. He knew that she had not sung since her
+ illness, and so the sound of her voice surprised and delighted him. He
+ opened the door softly and saw her, in the lilac dress she had worn at
+ church, walking about the room singing. She had her back to him when he
+ opened the door, but when, turning quickly, she saw his broad, surprised
+ face, she blushed and came rapidly up to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I want to try to sing again,” she said, adding as if by way of excuse,
+ “it is, at least, something to do.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s capital!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How glad I am you’ve come! I am so happy today,” she said, with the old
+ animation Pierre had not seen in her for a long time. “You know Nicholas
+ has received a St. George’s Cross? I am so proud of him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes, I sent that announcement. But I don’t want to interrupt you,” he
+ added, and was about to go to the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha stopped him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Count, is it wrong of me to sing?” she said blushing, and fixing her eyes
+ inquiringly on him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No... Why should it be? On the contrary... But why do you ask me?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know myself,” Natásha answered quickly, “but I should not like to
+ do anything you disapproved of. I believe in you completely. You don’t
+ know how important you are to me, how much you’ve done for me....” She
+ spoke rapidly and did not notice how Pierre flushed at her words. “I saw
+ in that same army order that he , Bolkónski” (she whispered the name
+ hastily), “is in Russia, and in the army again. What do you think?”—she
+ was speaking hurriedly, evidently afraid her strength might fail her—“Will
+ he ever forgive me? Will he not always have a bitter feeling toward me?
+ What do you think? What do you think?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I think...” Pierre replied, “that he has nothing to forgive.... If I were
+ in his place...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By association of ideas, Pierre was at once carried back to the day when,
+ trying to comfort her, he had said that if he were not himself but the
+ best man in the world and free, he would ask on his knees for her hand;
+ and the same feeling of pity, tenderness, and love took possession of him
+ and the same words rose to his lips. But she did not give him time to say
+ them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, you... you...” she said, uttering the word you 
+ rapturously—“that’s a different thing. I know no one kinder, more
+ generous, or better than you; nobody could be! Had you not been there then, and now
+ too, I don’t know what would have become of me, because...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Tears suddenly rose in her eyes, she turned away, lifted her music before
+ her eyes, began singing again, and again began walking up and down the
+ room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just then Pétya came running in from the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya was now a handsome rosy lad of fifteen with full red lips and
+ resembled Natásha. He was preparing to enter the university, but he and
+ his friend Obolénski had lately, in secret, agreed to join the hussars.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya had come rushing out to talk to his namesake about this affair. He
+ had asked Pierre to find out whether he would be accepted in the hussars.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre walked up and down the drawing room, not listening to what Pétya
+ was saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya pulled him by the arm to attract his attention.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what about my plan? Peter Kirílych, for heaven’s sake! You are my
+ only hope,” said Pétya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes, your plan. To join the hussars? I’ll mention it, I’ll bring it
+ all up today.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, mon cher , have you got the manifesto?” asked the old count. “The
+ countess has been to Mass at the Razumóvskis’ and heard the new prayer.
+ She says it’s very fine.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I’ve got it,” said Pierre. “The Emperor is to be here tomorrow...
+ there’s to be an Extraordinary Meeting of the nobility, and they are
+ talking of a levy of ten men per thousand. Oh yes, let me congratulate
+ you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, thank God! Well, and what news from the army?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We are again retreating. They say we’re already near Smolénsk,” replied
+ Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O Lord, O Lord!” exclaimed the count. “Where is the manifesto?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Emperor’s appeal? Oh yes!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre began feeling in his pockets for the papers, but could not find
+ them. Still slapping his pockets, he kissed the hand of the countess who
+ entered the room and glanced uneasily around, evidently expecting Natásha,
+ who had left off singing but had not yet come into the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On my word, I don’t know what I’ve done with it,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There he is, always losing everything!” remarked the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha entered with a softened and agitated expression of face and sat
+ down looking silently at Pierre. As soon as she entered, Pierre’s
+ features, which had been gloomy, suddenly lighted up, and while still
+ searching for the papers he glanced at her several times.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, really! I’ll drive home, I must have left them there. I’ll
+ certainly...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you’ll be late for dinner.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! And my coachman has gone.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Sónya, who had gone to look for the papers in the anteroom, had found
+ them in Pierre’s hat, where he had carefully tucked them under the lining.
+ Pierre was about to begin reading.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, after dinner,” said the old count, evidently expecting much enjoyment
+ from that reading.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At dinner, at which champagne was drunk to the health of the new chevalier
+ of St. George, Shinshín told them the town news, of the illness of the old
+ Georgian princess, of Métivier’s disappearance from Moscow, and of how
+ some German fellow had been brought to Rostopchín and accused of being a
+ French “spyer” (so Count Rostopchín had told the story), and how
+ Rostopchín let him go and assured the people that he was “not a spire at
+ all, but only an old German ruin.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “People are being arrested...” said the count. “I’ve told the countess she
+ should not speak French so much. It’s not the time for it now.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And have you heard?” Shinshín asked. “Prince Golítsyn has engaged a
+ master to teach him Russian. It is becoming dangerous to speak French in
+ the streets.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And how about you, Count Peter Kirílych? If they call up the militia, you
+ too will have to mount a horse,” remarked the old count, addressing
+ Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre had been silent and preoccupied all through dinner, seeming not to
+ grasp what was said. He looked at the count.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes, the war,” he said. “No! What sort of warrior should I make? And
+ yet everything is so strange, so strange! I can’t make it out. I don’t
+ know, I am very far from having military tastes, but in these times no one
+ can answer for himself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After dinner the count settled himself comfortably in an easy chair and
+ with a serious face asked Sónya, who was considered an excellent reader,
+ to read the appeal.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To Moscow, our ancient Capital!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The enemy has entered the borders of Russia with immense forces. He comes
+ to despoil our beloved country.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya read painstakingly in her high-pitched voice. The count listened
+ with closed eyes, heaving abrupt sighs at certain passages.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha sat erect, gazing with a searching look now at her father and now
+ at Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre felt her eyes on him and tried not to look round. The countess
+ shook her head disapprovingly and angrily at every solemn expression in
+ the manifesto. In all these words she saw only that the danger threatening
+ her son would not soon be over. Shinshín, with a sarcastic smile on his
+ lips, was evidently preparing to make fun of anything that gave him the
+ opportunity: Sónya’s reading, any remark of the count’s, or even the
+ manifesto itself should no better pretext present itself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After reading about the dangers that threatened Russia, the hopes the
+ Emperor placed on Moscow and especially on its illustrious nobility,
+ Sónya, with a quiver in her voice due chiefly to the attention that was
+ being paid to her, read the last words:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We ourselves will not delay to appear among our people in that Capital
+ and in other parts of our realm for consultation, and for the direction of
+ all our levies, both those now barring the enemy’s path and those freshly
+ formed to defeat him wherever he may appear. May the ruin he hopes to
+ bring upon us recoil on his own head, and may Europe delivered from
+ bondage glorify the name of Russia!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, that’s it!” cried the count, opening his moist eyes and sniffing
+ repeatedly, as if a strong vinaigrette had been held to his nose; and he
+ added, “Let the Emperor but say the word and we’ll sacrifice everything
+ and begrudge nothing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before Shinshín had time to utter the joke he was ready to make on the
+ count’s patriotism, Natásha jumped up from her place and ran to her
+ father.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a darling our Papa is!” she cried, kissing him, and she again looked
+ at Pierre with the unconscious coquetry that had returned to her with her
+ better spirits.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There! Here’s a patriot for you!” said Shinshín.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not a patriot at all, but simply...” Natásha replied in an injured tone.
+ “Everything seems funny to you, but this isn’t at all a joke....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A joke indeed!” put in the count. “Let him but say the word and we’ll all
+ go.... We’re not Germans!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But did you notice, it says, ‘for consultation’?” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Never mind what it’s for....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At this moment, Pétya, to whom nobody was paying any attention, came up to
+ his father with a very flushed face and said in his breaking voice that
+ was now deep and now shrill:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, Papa, I tell you definitely, and Mamma too, it’s as you please, but
+ I say definitely that you must let me enter the army, because I can’t...
+ that’s all....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess, in dismay, looked up to heaven, clasped her hands, and
+ turned angrily to her husband.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That comes of your talking!” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the count had already recovered from his excitement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come, come!” said he. “Here’s a fine warrior! No! Nonsense! You must
+ study.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s not nonsense, Papa. Fédya Obolénski is younger than I, and he’s
+ going too. Besides, all the same I can’t study now when...” Pétya stopped
+ short, flushed till he perspired, but still got out the words, “when our
+ Fatherland is in danger.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’ll do, that’ll do—nonsense....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you said yourself that we would sacrifice everything.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pétya! Be quiet, I tell you!” cried the count, with a glance at his wife,
+ who had turned pale and was staring fixedly at her son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I tell you—Peter Kirílych here will also tell you...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nonsense, I tell you. Your mother’s milk has hardly dried on your lips
+ and you want to go into the army! There, there, I tell you,” and the count
+ moved to go out of the room, taking the papers, probably to reread them in
+ his study before having a nap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, Peter Kirílych, let’s go and have a smoke,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was agitated and undecided. Natásha’s unwontedly brilliant eyes,
+ continually glancing at him with a more than cordial look, had reduced him
+ to this condition.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I think I’ll go home.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Home? Why, you meant to spend the evening with us.... You don’t often
+ come nowadays as it is, and this girl of mine,” said the count
+ good-naturedly, pointing to Natásha, “only brightens up when you’re here.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I had forgotten... I really must go home... business...” said Pierre
+ hurriedly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, then, au revoir! ” said the count, and went out of the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why are you going? Why are you upset?” asked Natásha, and she looked
+ challengingly into Pierre’s eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Because I love you!” was what he wanted to say, but he did not say it,
+ and only blushed till the tears came, and lowered his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Because it is better for me to come less often... because... No, simply I
+ have business....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why? No, tell me!” Natásha began resolutely and suddenly stopped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They looked at each other with dismayed and embarrassed faces. He tried to
+ smile but could not: his smile expressed suffering, and he silently kissed
+ her hand and went out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre made up his mind not to go to the Rostóvs’ any more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI
+ 
+ 
+ After the definite refusal he had received, Pétya went to his room and
+ there locked himself in and wept bitterly. When he came in to tea, silent,
+ morose, and with tear-stained face, everybody pretended not to notice
+ anything.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day the Emperor arrived in Moscow, and several of the Rostóvs’
+ domestic serfs begged permission to go to have a look at him. That morning
+ Pétya was a long time dressing and arranging his hair and collar to look
+ like a grown-up man. He frowned before his looking glass, gesticulated,
+ shrugged his shoulders, and finally, without saying a word to anyone, took
+ his cap and left the house by the back door, trying to avoid notice. Pétya
+ decided to go straight to where the Emperor was and to explain frankly to
+ some gentleman-in-waiting (he imagined the Emperor to be always surrounded
+ by gentlemen-in-waiting) that he, Count Rostóv, in spite of his youth
+ wished to serve his country; that youth could be no hindrance to loyalty,
+ and that he was ready to... While dressing, Pétya had prepared many fine
+ things he meant to say to the gentleman-in-waiting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was on the very fact of being so young that Pétya counted for success
+ in reaching the Emperor—he even thought how surprised everyone would
+ be at his youthfulness—and yet in the arrangement of his collar and
+ hair and by his sedate deliberate walk he wished to appear a grown-up man.
+ But the farther he went and the more his attention was diverted by the
+ ever-increasing crowds moving toward the Krémlin, the less he remembered
+ to walk with the sedateness and deliberation of a man. As he approached
+ the Krémlin he even began to avoid being crushed and resolutely stuck out
+ his elbows in a menacing way. But within the Trinity Gateway he was so
+ pressed to the wall by people who probably were unaware of the patriotic
+ intentions with which he had come that in spite of all his determination
+ he had to give in, and stop while carriages passed in, rumbling beneath
+ the archway. Beside Pétya stood a peasant woman, a footman, two tradesmen,
+ and a discharged soldier. After standing some time in the gateway, Pétya
+ tried to move forward in front of the others without waiting for all the
+ carriages to pass, and he began resolutely working his way with his
+ elbows, but the woman just in front of him, who was the first against whom
+ he directed his efforts, angrily shouted at him:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are you shoving for, young lordling? Don’t you see we’re all
+ standing still? Then why push?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Anybody can shove,” said the footman, and also began working his elbows
+ to such effect that he pushed Pétya into a very filthy corner of the
+ gateway.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya wiped his perspiring face with his hands and pulled up the damp
+ collar which he had arranged so well at home to seem like a man’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He felt that he no longer looked presentable, and feared that if he were
+ now to approach the gentlemen-in-waiting in that plight he would not be
+ admitted to the Emperor. But it was impossible to smarten oneself up or
+ move to another place, because of the crowd. One of the generals who drove
+ past was an acquaintance of the Rostóvs’, and Pétya thought of asking his
+ help, but came to the conclusion that that would not be a manly thing to
+ do. When the carriages had all passed in, the crowd, carrying Pétya with
+ it, streamed forward into the Krémlin Square which was already full of
+ people. There were people not only in the square, but everywhere—on
+ the slopes and on the roofs. As soon as Pétya found himself in the square
+ he clearly heard the sound of bells and the joyous voices of the crowd
+ that filled the whole Krémlin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For a while the crowd was less dense, but suddenly all heads were bared,
+ and everyone rushed forward in one direction. Pétya was being pressed so
+ that he could scarcely breathe, and everybody shouted, “Hurrah! hurrah!
+ hurrah!” Pétya stood on tiptoe and pushed and pinched, but could see
+ nothing except the people about him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the faces bore the same expression of excitement and enthusiasm. A
+ tradesman’s wife standing beside Pétya sobbed, and the tears ran down her
+ cheeks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Father! Angel! Dear one!” she kept repeating, wiping away her tears with
+ her fingers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hurrah!” was heard on all sides.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For a moment the crowd stood still, but then it made another rush forward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Quite beside himself, Pétya, clinching his teeth and rolling his eyes
+ ferociously, pushed forward, elbowing his way and shouting “hurrah!” as if
+ he were prepared that instant to kill himself and everyone else, but on
+ both sides of him other people with similarly ferocious faces pushed
+ forward and everybody shouted “hurrah!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So this is what the Emperor is!” thought Pétya. “No, I can’t petition him
+ myself—that would be too bold.” But in spite of this he continued to
+ struggle desperately forward, and from between the backs of those in front
+ he caught glimpses of an open space with a strip of red cloth spread out
+ on it; but just then the crowd swayed back—the police in front were
+ pushing back those who had pressed too close to the procession: the
+ Emperor was passing from the palace to the Cathedral of the Assumption—and
+ Pétya unexpectedly received such a blow on his side and ribs and was
+ squeezed so hard that suddenly everything grew dim before his eyes and he
+ lost consciousness. When he came to himself, a man of clerical appearance
+ with a tuft of gray hair at the back of his head and wearing a shabby blue
+ cassock—probably a church clerk and chanter—was holding him
+ under the arm with one hand while warding off the pressure of the crowd
+ with the other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’ve crushed the young gentleman!” said the clerk. “What are you up to?
+ Gently!... They’ve crushed him, crushed him!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor entered the Cathedral of the Assumption. The crowd spread out
+ again more evenly, and the clerk led Pétya—pale and breathless—to
+ the Tsar-cannon. Several people were sorry for Pétya, and suddenly a crowd
+ turned toward him and pressed round him. Those who stood nearest him
+ attended to him, unbuttoned his coat, seated him on the raised platform of
+ the cannon, and reproached those others (whoever they might be) who had
+ crushed him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One might easily get killed that way! What do they mean by it? Killing
+ people! Poor dear, he’s as white as a sheet!”—various voices were
+ heard saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya soon came to himself, the color returned to his face, the pain had
+ passed, and at the cost of that temporary unpleasantness he had obtained a
+ place by the cannon from where he hoped to see the Emperor who would be
+ returning that way. Pétya no longer thought of presenting his petition. If
+ he could only see the Emperor he would be happy!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While the service was proceeding in the Cathedral of the Assumption—it
+ was a combined service of prayer on the occasion of the Emperor’s arrival
+ and of thanksgiving for the conclusion of peace with the Turks—the
+ crowd outside spread out and hawkers appeared, selling kvass, gingerbread,
+ and poppyseed sweets (of which Pétya was particularly fond), and ordinary
+ conversation could again be heard. A tradesman’s wife was showing a rent
+ in her shawl and telling how much the shawl had cost; another was saying
+ that all silk goods had now got dear. The clerk who had rescued Pétya was
+ talking to a functionary about the priests who were officiating that day
+ with the bishop. The clerk several times used the word “plenary” (of the
+ service), a word Pétya did not understand. Two young citizens were joking
+ with some serf girls who were cracking nuts. All these conversations,
+ especially the joking with the girls, were such as might have had a
+ particular charm for Pétya at his age, but they did not interest him now.
+ He sat on his elevation—the pedestal of the cannon—still
+ agitated as before by the thought of the Emperor and by his love for him.
+ The feeling of pain and fear he had experienced when he was being crushed,
+ together with that of rapture, still further intensified his sense of the
+ importance of the occasion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly the sound of a firing of cannon was heard from the embankment, to
+ celebrate the signing of peace with the Turks, and the crowd rushed
+ impetuously toward the embankment to watch the firing. Pétya too would
+ have run there, but the clerk who had taken the young gentleman under his
+ protection stopped him. The firing was still proceeding when officers,
+ generals, and gentlemen-in-waiting came running out of the cathedral, and
+ after them others in a more leisurely manner: caps were again raised, and
+ those who had run to look at the cannon ran back again. At last four men
+ in uniforms and sashes emerged from the cathedral doors. “Hurrah! hurrah!”
+ shouted the crowd again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Which is he? Which?” asked Pétya in a tearful voice, of those around him,
+ but no one answered him, everybody was too excited; and Pétya, fixing on
+ one of those four men, whom he could not clearly see for the tears of joy
+ that filled his eyes, concentrated all his enthusiasm on him—though
+ it happened not to be the Emperor—frantically shouted “Hurrah!” and
+ resolved that tomorrow, come what might, he would join the army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The crowd ran after the Emperor, followed him to the palace, and began to
+ disperse. It was already late, and Pétya had not eaten anything and was
+ drenched with perspiration, yet he did not go home but stood with that
+ diminishing, but still considerable, crowd before the palace while the
+ Emperor dined—looking in at the palace windows, expecting he knew
+ not what, and envying alike the notables he saw arriving at the entrance
+ to dine with the Emperor and the court footmen who served at table,
+ glimpses of whom could be seen through the windows.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While the Emperor was dining, Valúev, looking out of the window, said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The people are still hoping to see Your Majesty again.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The dinner was nearly over, and the Emperor, munching a biscuit, rose and
+ went out onto the balcony. The people, with Pétya among them, rushed
+ toward the balcony.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Angel! Dear one! Hurrah! Father!...” cried the crowd, and Pétya with it,
+ and again the women and men of weaker mold, Pétya among them, wept with
+ joy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A largish piece of the biscuit the Emperor was holding in his hand broke
+ off, fell on the balcony parapet, and then to the ground. A coachman in a
+ jerkin, who stood nearest, sprang forward and snatched it up. Several
+ people in the crowd rushed at the coachman. Seeing this the Emperor had a
+ plateful of biscuits brought him and began throwing them down from the
+ balcony. Pétya’s eyes grew bloodshot, and still more excited by the danger
+ of being crushed, he rushed at the biscuits. He did not know why, but he
+ had to have a biscuit from the Tsar’s hand and he felt that he must not
+ give way. He sprang forward and upset an old woman who was catching at a
+ biscuit; the old woman did not consider herself defeated though she was
+ lying on the ground—she grabbed at some biscuits but her hand did
+ not reach them. Pétya pushed her hand away with his knee, seized a
+ biscuit, and as if fearing to be too late, again shouted “Hurrah!” with a
+ voice already hoarse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor went in, and after that the greater part of the crowd began to
+ disperse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There! I said if only we waited—and so it was!” was being joyfully
+ said by various people.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Happy as Pétya was, he felt sad at having to go home knowing that all the
+ enjoyment of that day was over. He did not go straight home from the
+ Krémlin, but called on his friend Obolénski, who was fifteen and was also
+ entering the regiment. On returning home Pétya announced resolutely and
+ firmly that if he was not allowed to enter the service he would run away.
+ And next day, Count Ilyá Rostóv—though he had not yet quite yielded—went
+ to inquire how he could arrange for Pétya to serve where there would be
+ least danger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXII
+ 
+ 
+ Two days later, on the fifteenth of July, an immense number of carriages
+ were standing outside the Slobóda Palace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The great halls were full. In the first were the nobility and gentry in
+ their uniforms, in the second bearded merchants in full-skirted coats of
+ blue cloth and wearing medals. In the noblemen’s hall there was an
+ incessant movement and buzz of voices. The chief magnates sat on
+ high-backed chairs at a large table under the portrait of the Emperor, but
+ most of the gentry were strolling about the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All these nobles, whom Pierre met every day at the Club or in their own
+ houses, were in uniform—some in that of Catherine’s day, others in
+ that of Emperor Paul, others again in the new uniforms of Alexander’s time
+ or the ordinary uniform of the nobility, and the general characteristic of
+ being in uniform imparted something strange and fantastic to these diverse
+ and familiar personalities, both old and young. The old men, dim-eyed,
+ toothless, bald, sallow, and bloated, or gaunt and wrinkled, were
+ especially striking. For the most part they sat quietly in their places
+ and were silent, or, if they walked about and talked, attached themselves
+ to someone younger. On all these faces, as on the faces of the crowd Pétya
+ had seen in the Square, there was a striking contradiction: the general
+ expectation of a solemn event, and at the same time the everyday interests
+ in a boston card party, Peter the cook, Zinaída Dmítrievna’s health, and
+ so on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was there too, buttoned up since early morning in a nobleman’s
+ uniform that had become too tight for him. He was agitated; this
+ extraordinary gathering not only of nobles but also of the merchant-class— les
+ états généraux (States-General)—evoked in him a whole series of
+ ideas he had long laid aside but which were deeply graven in his soul:
+ thoughts of the Contrat Social and the French Revolution. The words that
+ had struck him in the Emperor’s appeal—that the sovereign was coming
+ to the capital for consultation with his people—strengthened this
+ idea. And imagining that in this direction something important which he
+ had long awaited was drawing near, he strolled about watching and
+ listening to conversations, but nowhere finding any confirmation of the
+ ideas that occupied him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor’s manifesto was read, evoking enthusiasm, and then all moved
+ about discussing it. Besides the ordinary topics of conversation, Pierre
+ heard questions of where the marshals of the nobility were to stand when
+ the Emperor entered, when a ball should be given in the Emperor’s honor,
+ whether they should group themselves by districts or by whole provinces...
+ and so on; but as soon as the war was touched on, or what the nobility had
+ been convened for, the talk became undecided and indefinite. Then all
+ preferred listening to speaking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A middle-aged man, handsome and virile, in the uniform of a retired naval
+ officer, was speaking in one of the rooms, and a small crowd was pressing
+ round him. Pierre went up to the circle that had formed round the speaker
+ and listened. Count Ilyá Rostóv, in a military uniform of Catherine’s
+ time, was sauntering with a pleasant smile among the crowd, with all of
+ whom he was acquainted. He too approached that group and listened with a
+ kindly smile and nods of approval, as he always did, to what the speaker
+ was saying. The retired naval man was speaking very boldly, as was evident
+ from the expression on the faces of the listeners and from the fact that
+ some people Pierre knew as the meekest and quietest of men walked away
+ disapprovingly or expressed disagreement with him. Pierre pushed his way
+ into the middle of the group, listened, and convinced himself that the man
+ was indeed a liberal, but of views quite different from his own. The naval
+ officer spoke in a particularly sonorous, musical, and aristocratic
+ baritone voice, pleasantly swallowing his r ’s and generally slurring his
+ consonants: the voice of a man calling out to his servant, “Heah! Bwing me
+ my pipe!” It was indicative of dissipation and the exercise of authority.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What if the Smolénsk people have offahd to waise militia for the Empewah?
+ Ah we to take Smolénsk as our patte’n? If the noble awistocwacy of the
+ pwovince of Moscow thinks fit, it can show its loyalty to our sov’weign
+ the Empewah in other ways. Have we fo’gotten the waising of the militia in
+ the yeah ‘seven? All that did was to enwich the pwiests’ sons and thieves
+ and wobbahs....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Count Ilyá Rostóv smiled blandly and nodded approval.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And was our militia of any use to the Empia? Not at all! It only wuined
+ our farming! Bettah have another conscwiption... o’ ou’ men will wetu’n
+ neithah soldiers no’ peasants, and we’ll get only depwavity fwom them. The
+ nobility don’t gwudge theah lives—evewy one of us will go and bwing
+ in more wecwuits, and the sov’weign” (that was the way he referred to the
+ Emperor) “need only say the word and we’ll all die fo’ him!” added the
+ orator with animation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Count Rostóv’s mouth watered with pleasure and he nudged Pierre, but
+ Pierre wanted to speak himself. He pushed forward, feeling stirred, but
+ not yet sure what stirred him or what he would say. Scarcely had he opened
+ his mouth when one of the senators, a man without a tooth in his head,
+ with a shrewd though angry expression, standing near the first speaker,
+ interrupted him. Evidently accustomed to managing debates and to
+ maintaining an argument, he began in low but distinct tones:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I imagine, sir,” said he, mumbling with his toothless mouth, “that we
+ have been summoned here not to discuss whether it’s best for the empire at
+ the present moment to adopt conscription or to call out the militia. We
+ have been summoned to reply to the appeal with which our sovereign the
+ Emperor has honored us. But to judge what is best—conscription or
+ the militia—we can leave to the supreme authority....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre suddenly saw an outlet for his excitement. He hardened his heart
+ against the senator who was introducing this set and narrow attitude into
+ the deliberations of the nobility. Pierre stepped forward and interrupted
+ him. He himself did not yet know what he would say, but he began to speak
+ eagerly, occasionally lapsing into French or expressing himself in bookish
+ Russian.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Excuse me, your excellency,” he began. (He was well acquainted with the
+ senator, but thought it necessary on this occasion to address him
+ formally.) “Though I don’t agree with the gentleman...” (he hesitated: he
+ wished to say, “Mon très honorable préopinant” —“My very honorable
+ opponent”) “with the gentleman... whom I have not the honor of knowing, I
+ suppose that the nobility have been summoned not merely to express their
+ sympathy and enthusiasm but also to consider the means by which we can
+ assist our Fatherland! I imagine,” he went on, warming to his subject,
+ “that the Emperor himself would not be satisfied to find in us merely
+ owners of serfs whom we are willing to devote to his service, and chair à
+ canon * we are ready to make of ourselves—and not to obtain from us
+ any co-co-counsel.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Food for cannon.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Many persons withdrew from the circle, noticing the senator’s sarcastic
+ smile and the freedom of Pierre’s remarks. Only Count Rostóv was pleased
+ with them as he had been pleased with those of the naval officer, the
+ senator, and in general with whatever speech he had last heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I think that before discussing these questions,” Pierre continued, “we
+ should ask the Emperor—most respectfully ask His Majesty—to
+ let us know the number of our troops and the position in which our army
+ and our forces now are, and then...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But scarcely had Pierre uttered these words before he was attacked from
+ three sides. The most vigorous attack came from an old acquaintance, a
+ boston player who had always been well disposed toward him, Stepán
+ Stepánovich Adráksin. Adráksin was in uniform, and whether as a result of
+ the uniform or from some other cause Pierre saw before him quite a
+ different man. With a sudden expression of malevolence on his aged face,
+ Adráksin shouted at Pierre:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In the first place, I tell you we have no right to question the Emperor
+ about that, and secondly, if the Russian nobility had that right, the
+ Emperor could not answer such a question. The troops are moved according to
+ the enemy’s movements and the number of men increases and decreases....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Another voice, that of a nobleman of medium height and about forty years
+ of age, whom Pierre had formerly met at the gypsies’ and knew as a bad
+ cardplayer, and who, also transformed by his uniform, came up to Pierre,
+ interrupted Adráksin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, and this is not a time for discussing,” he continued, “but for
+ acting: there is war in Russia! The enemy is advancing to destroy Russia,
+ to desecrate the tombs of our fathers, to carry off our wives and
+ children.” The nobleman smote his breast. “We will all arise, everyone of
+ us will go, for our father the Tsar!” he shouted, rolling his bloodshot
+ eyes. Several approving voices were heard in the crowd. “We are Russians
+ and will not grudge our blood in defense of our faith, the throne, and the
+ Fatherland! We must cease raving if we are sons of our Fatherland! We will
+ show Europe how Russia rises to the defense of Russia!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre wished to reply, but could not get in a word. He felt that his
+ words, apart from what meaning they conveyed, were less audible than the
+ sound of his opponent’s voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Count Rostóv at the back of the crowd was expressing approval; several
+ persons, briskly turning a shoulder to the orator at the end of a phrase,
+ said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s right, quite right! Just so!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre wished to say that he was ready to sacrifice his money, his serfs,
+ or himself, only one ought to know the state of affairs in order to be
+ able to improve it, but he was unable to speak. Many voices shouted and
+ talked at the same time, so that Count Rostóv had not time to signify his
+ approval of them all, and the group increased, dispersed, re-formed, and
+ then moved with a hum of talk into the largest hall and to the big table.
+ Not only was Pierre’s attempt to speak unsuccessful, but he was rudely
+ interrupted, pushed aside, and people turned away from him as from a
+ common enemy. This happened not because they were displeased by the
+ substance of his speech, which had even been forgotten after the many
+ subsequent speeches, but to animate it the crowd needed a tangible object
+ to love and a tangible object to hate. Pierre became the latter. Many
+ other orators spoke after the excited nobleman, and all in the same tone.
+ Many spoke eloquently and with originality.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Glínka, the editor of the Russian Messenger , who was recognized (cries of
+ “author! author!” were heard in the crowd), said that “hell must be
+ repulsed by hell,” and that he had seen a child smiling at lightning
+ flashes and thunderclaps, but “we will not be that child.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, at thunderclaps!” was repeated approvingly in the back rows of
+ the crowd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The crowd drew up to the large table, at which sat gray-haired or bald
+ seventy-year-old magnates, uniformed and besashed, almost all of whom
+ Pierre had seen in their own homes with their buffoons, or playing boston
+ at the clubs. With an incessant hum of voices the crowd advanced to the
+ table. Pressed by the throng against the high backs of the chairs, the
+ orators spoke one after another and sometimes two together. Those standing
+ behind noticed what a speaker omitted to say and hastened to supply it.
+ Others in that heat and crush racked their brains to find some thought and
+ hastened to utter it. The old magnates, whom Pierre knew, sat and turned
+ to look first at one and then at another, and their faces for the most
+ part only expressed the fact that they found it very hot. Pierre, however,
+ felt excited, and the general desire to show that they were ready to go to
+ all lengths—which found expression in the tones and looks more than
+ in the substance of the speeches—infected him too. He did not
+ renounce his opinions, but felt himself in some way to blame and wished to
+ justify himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I only said that it would be more to the purpose to make sacrifices when
+ we know what is needed!” said he, trying to be heard above the other
+ voices.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One of the old men nearest to him looked round, but his attention was
+ immediately diverted by an exclamation at the other side of the table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, Moscow will be surrendered! She will be our expiation!” shouted one
+ man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is the enemy of mankind!” cried another. “Allow me to speak....”
+ “Gentlemen, you are crushing me!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIII
+ 
+ 
+ At that moment Count Rostopchín with his protruding chin and alert eyes,
+ wearing the uniform of a general with sash over his shoulder, entered the
+ room, stepping briskly to the front of the crowd of gentry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Our sovereign the Emperor will be here in a moment,” said Rostopchín. “I
+ am straight from the palace. Seeing the position we are in, I think there
+ is little need for discussion. The Emperor has deigned to summon us and
+ the merchants. Millions will pour forth from there”—he pointed to
+ the merchants’ hall—“but our business is to supply men and not spare
+ ourselves.... That is the least we can do!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A conference took place confined to the magnates sitting at the table. The
+ whole consultation passed more than quietly. After all the preceding noise
+ the sound of their old voices saying one after another, “I agree,” or for
+ variety, “I too am of that opinion,” and so on had even a mournful effect.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The secretary was told to write down the resolution of the Moscow nobility
+ and gentry, that they would furnish ten men, fully equipped, out of every
+ thousand serfs, as the Smolénsk gentry had done. Their chairs made a
+ scraping noise as the gentlemen who had conferred rose with apparent
+ relief, and began walking up and down, arm in arm, to stretch their legs
+ and converse in couples.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Emperor! The Emperor!” a sudden cry resounded through the halls and
+ the whole throng hurried to the entrance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor entered the hall through a broad path between two lines of
+ nobles. Every face expressed respectful, awe-struck curiosity. Pierre
+ stood rather far off and could not hear all that the Emperor said. From
+ what he did hear he understood that the Emperor spoke of the danger
+ threatening the empire and of the hopes he placed on the Moscow nobility.
+ He was answered by a voice which informed him of the resolution just
+ arrived at.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gentlemen!” said the Emperor with a quivering voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was a rustling among the crowd and it again subsided, so that Pierre
+ distinctly heard the pleasantly human voice of the Emperor saying with
+ emotion:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I never doubted the devotion of the Russian nobles, but today it has
+ surpassed my expectations. I thank you in the name of the Fatherland!
+ Gentlemen, let us act! Time is most precious....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor ceased speaking, the crowd began pressing round him, and
+ rapturous exclamations were heard from all sides.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, most precious... a royal word,” said Count Rostóv, with a sob. He
+ stood at the back, and, though he had heard hardly anything, understood
+ everything in his own way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the hall of the nobility the Emperor went to that of the merchants.
+ There he remained about ten minutes. Pierre was among those who saw him
+ come out from the merchants’ hall with tears of emotion in his eyes. As
+ became known later, he had scarcely begun to address the merchants before
+ tears gushed from his eyes and he concluded in a trembling voice. When
+ Pierre saw the Emperor he was coming out accompanied by two merchants, one
+ of whom Pierre knew, a fat otkupshchík . The other was the mayor, a man
+ with a thin sallow face and narrow beard. Both were weeping. Tears filled
+ the thin man’s eyes, and the fat otkupshchík sobbed outright like a
+ child and kept repeating:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Our lives and property—take them, Your Majesty!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre’s one feeling at the moment was a desire to show that he was ready
+ to go all lengths and was prepared to sacrifice everything. He now felt
+ ashamed of his speech with its constitutional tendency and sought an
+ opportunity of effacing it. Having heard that Count Mamónov was furnishing
+ a regiment, Bezúkhov at once informed Rostopchín that he would give a
+ thousand men and their maintenance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Old Rostóv could not tell his wife of what had passed without tears, and
+ at once consented to Pétya’s request and went himself to enter his name.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day the Emperor left Moscow. The assembled nobles all took off their
+ uniforms and settled down again in their homes and clubs, and not without
+ some groans gave orders to their stewards about the enrollment, feeling
+ amazed themselves at what they had done.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK TEN: 1812
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ Napoleon began the war with Russia because he could not resist going to
+ Dresden, could not help having his head turned by the homage he received,
+ could not help donning a Polish uniform and yielding to the stimulating
+ influence of a June morning, and could not refrain from bursts of anger in
+ the presence of Kurákin and then of Balashëv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alexander refused negotiations because he felt himself to be personally
+ insulted. Barclay de Tolly tried to command the army in the best way,
+ because he wished to fulfill his duty and earn fame as a great commander.
+ Rostóv charged the French because he could not restrain his wish for a
+ gallop across a level field; and in the same way the innumerable people
+ who took part in the war acted in accord with their personal
+ characteristics, habits, circumstances, and aims. They were moved by fear
+ or vanity, rejoiced or were indignant, reasoned, imagining that they knew
+ what they were doing and did it of their own free will, but they all were
+ involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work concealed from them but
+ comprehensible to us. Such is the inevitable fate of men of action, and
+ the higher they stand in the social hierarchy the less are they free.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The actors of 1812 have long since left the stage, their personal
+ interests have vanished leaving no trace, and nothing remains of that time
+ but its historic results.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Providence compelled all these men, striving to attain personal aims, to
+ further the accomplishment of a stupendous result no one of them at all
+ expected—neither Napoleon, nor Alexander, nor still less any of
+ those who did the actual fighting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The cause of the destruction of the French army in 1812 is clear to us
+ now. No one will deny that that cause was, on the one hand, its advance
+ into the heart of Russia late in the season without any preparation for a
+ winter campaign and, on the other, the character given to the war by the
+ burning of Russian towns and the hatred of the foe this aroused among the
+ Russian people. But no one at the time foresaw (what now seems so evident)
+ that this was the only way an army of eight hundred thousand men—the
+ best in the world and led by the best general—could be destroyed in
+ conflict with a raw army of half its numerical strength, and led by
+ inexperienced commanders as the Russian army was. Not only did no one see
+ this , but on the Russian side every effort was made to hinder the only
+ thing that could save Russia, while on the French side , despite Napoleon’s
+ experience and so-called military genius, every effort was directed to
+ pushing on to Moscow at the end of the summer, that is, to doing the very
+ thing that was bound to lead to destruction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In historical works on the year 1812 French writers are very fond of
+ saying that Napoleon felt the danger of extending his line, that he sought
+ a battle and that his marshals advised him to stop at Smolénsk, and of
+ making similar statements to show that the danger of the campaign was even
+ then understood. Russian authors are still fonder of telling us that from
+ the commencement of the campaign a Scythian war plan was adopted to lure
+ Napoleon into the depths of Russia, and this plan some of them attribute
+ to Pfuel, others to a certain Frenchman, others to Toll, and others again
+ to Alexander himself—pointing to notes, projects, and letters which
+ contain hints of such a line of action. But all these hints at what
+ happened, both from the French side and the Russian, are advanced only
+ because they fit in with the event. Had that event not occurred these
+ hints would have been forgotten, as we have forgotten the thousands and
+ millions of hints and expectations to the contrary which were current then
+ but have now been forgotten because the event falsified them. There are
+ always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that however it
+ may end there will always be people to say: “I said then that it would be
+ so,” quite forgetting that amid their innumerable conjectures many were to
+ quite the contrary effect.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Conjectures as to Napoleon’s awareness of the danger of extending his
+ line, and (on the Russian side) as to luring the enemy into the depths of
+ Russia, are evidently of that kind, and only by much straining can
+ historians attribute such conceptions to Napoleon and his marshals, or
+ such plans to the Russian commanders. All the facts are in flat
+ contradiction to such conjectures. During the whole period of the war not
+ only was there no wish on the Russian side to draw the French into the
+ heart of the country, but from their first entry into Russia everything
+ was done to stop them. And not only was Napoleon not afraid to extend his
+ line, but he welcomed every step forward as a triumph and did not seek
+ battle as eagerly as in former campaigns, but very lazily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the very beginning of the war our armies were divided, and our sole aim
+ was to unite them, though uniting the armies was no advantage if we meant
+ to retire and lure the enemy into the depths of the country. Our Emperor
+ joined the army to encourage it to defend every inch of Russian soil and
+ not to retreat. The enormous Drissa camp was formed on Pfuel’s plan, and
+ there was no intention of retiring farther. The Emperor reproached the
+ commanders in chief for every step they retired. He could not bear the
+ idea of letting the enemy even reach Smolénsk, still less could he
+ contemplate the burning of Moscow, and when our armies did unite he was
+ displeased that Smolénsk was abandoned and burned without a general
+ engagement having been fought under its walls.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So thought the Emperor, and the Russian commanders and people were still
+ more provoked at the thought that our forces were retreating into the
+ depths of the country.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon having cut our armies apart advanced far into the country and
+ missed several chances of forcing an engagement. In August he was at
+ Smolénsk and thought only of how to advance farther, though as we now see
+ that advance was evidently ruinous to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The facts clearly show that Napoleon did not foresee the danger of the
+ advance on Moscow, nor did Alexander and the Russian commanders then think
+ of luring Napoleon on, but quite the contrary. The luring of Napoleon into
+ the depths of the country was not the result of any plan, for no one
+ believed it to be possible; it resulted from a most complex interplay of
+ intrigues, aims, and wishes among those who took part in the war and had
+ no perception whatever of the inevitable, or of the one way of saving
+ Russia. Everything came about fortuitously. The armies were divided at the
+ commencement of the campaign. We tried to unite them, with the evident
+ intention of giving battle and checking the enemy’s advance, and by this
+ effort to unite them while avoiding battle with a much stronger enemy, and
+ necessarily withdrawing the armies at an acute angle—we led the
+ French on to Smolénsk. But we withdrew at an acute angle not only because
+ the French advanced between our two armies; the angle became still more
+ acute and we withdrew still farther, because Barclay de Tolly was an
+ unpopular foreigner disliked by Bagratión (who would come under his
+ command), and Bagratión—being in command of the second army—tried
+ to postpone joining up and coming under Barclay’s command as long as he
+ could. Bagratión was slow in effecting the junction—though that was
+ the chief aim of all at headquarters—because, as he alleged, he
+ exposed his army to danger on this march, and it was best for him to
+ retire more to the left and more to the south, worrying the enemy from
+ flank and rear and securing from the Ukraine recruits for his army; and it
+ looks as if he planned this in order not to come under the command of the
+ detested foreigner Barclay, whose rank was inferior to his own.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor was with the army to encourage it, but his presence and
+ ignorance of what steps to take, and the enormous number of advisers and
+ plans, destroyed the first army’s energy and it retired.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The intention was to make a stand at the Drissa camp, but Paulucci, aiming
+ at becoming commander in chief, unexpectedly employed his energy to
+ influence Alexander, and Pfuel’s whole plan was abandoned and the command
+ entrusted to Barclay. But as Barclay did not inspire confidence his power
+ was limited. The armies were divided, there was no unity of command, and
+ Barclay was unpopular; but from this confusion, division, and the
+ unpopularity of the foreign commander in chief, there resulted on the one
+ hand indecision and the avoidance of a battle (which we could not have
+ refrained from had the armies been united and had someone else, instead of
+ Barclay, been in command) and on the other an ever-increasing indignation
+ against the foreigners and an increase in patriotic zeal.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At last the Emperor left the army, and as the most convenient and indeed
+ the only pretext for his departure it was decided that it was necessary
+ for him to inspire the people in the capitals and arouse the nation in
+ general to a patriotic war. And by this visit of the Emperor to Moscow the
+ strength of the Russian army was trebled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He left in order not to obstruct the commander in chief’s undivided
+ control of the army, and hoping that more decisive action would then be
+ taken, but the command of the armies became still more confused and
+ enfeebled. Bennigsen, the Tsarévich, and a swarm of adjutants general
+ remained with the army to keep the commander in chief under observation
+ and arouse his energy, and Barclay, feeling less free than ever under the
+ observation of all these “eyes of the Emperor,” became still more cautious
+ of undertaking any decisive action and avoided giving battle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Barclay stood for caution. The Tsarévich hinted at treachery and demanded
+ a general engagement. Lubomírski, Bronnítski, Wlocki, and the others of
+ that group stirred up so much trouble that Barclay, under pretext of
+ sending papers to the Emperor, dispatched these Polish adjutants general
+ to Petersburg and plunged into an open struggle with Bennigsen and the
+ Tsarévich.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At Smolénsk the armies at last reunited, much as Bagratión disliked it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bagratión drove up in a carriage to the house occupied by Barclay. Barclay
+ donned his sash and came out to meet and report to his senior officer
+ Bagratión.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Despite his seniority in rank Bagratión, in this contest of magnanimity,
+ took his orders from Barclay, but, having submitted, agreed with him less
+ than ever. By the Emperor’s orders Bagratión reported direct to him. He
+ wrote to Arakchéev, the Emperor’s confidant: “It must be as my sovereign
+ pleases, but I cannot work with the Minister (meaning Barclay). For God’s
+ sake send me somewhere else if only in command of a regiment. I cannot
+ stand it here. Headquarters are so full of Germans that a Russian cannot
+ exist and there is no sense in anything. I thought I was really serving my
+ sovereign and the Fatherland, but it turns out that I am serving Barclay.
+ I confess I do not want to.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The swarm of Bronnítskis and Wintzingerodes and their like still further
+ embittered the relations between the commanders in chief, and even less
+ unity resulted. Preparations were made to fight the French before
+ Smolénsk. A general was sent to survey the position. This general, hating
+ Barclay, rode to visit a friend of his own, a corps commander, and, having
+ spent the day with him, returned to Barclay and condemned, as unsuitable
+ from every point of view, the battleground he had not seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While disputes and intrigues were going on about the future field of
+ battle, and while we were looking for the French—having lost touch
+ with them—the French stumbled upon Nevérovski’s division and reached
+ the walls of Smolénsk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was necessary to fight an unexpected battle at Smolénsk to save our
+ lines of communication. The battle was fought and thousands were killed on
+ both sides.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Smolénsk was abandoned contrary to the wishes of the Emperor and of the
+ whole people. But Smolénsk was burned by its own inhabitants who had been
+ misled by their governor. And these ruined inhabitants, setting an example
+ to other Russians, went to Moscow thinking only of their own losses but
+ kindling hatred of the foe. Napoleon advanced farther and we retired, thus
+ arriving at the very result which caused his destruction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ The day after his son had left, Prince Nicholas sent for Princess Mary to
+ come to his study.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well? Are you satisfied now?” said he. “You’ve made me quarrel with my
+ son! Satisfied, are you? That’s all you wanted! Satisfied?... It hurts me,
+ it hurts. I’m old and weak and this is what you wanted. Well then, gloat
+ over it! Gloat over it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After that Princess Mary did not see her father for a whole week. He was
+ ill and did not leave his study.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary noticed to her surprise that during this illness the old
+ prince not only excluded her from his room, but did not admit Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne either. Tíkhon alone attended him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the end of the week the prince reappeared and resumed his former way of
+ life, devoting himself with special activity to building operations and
+ the arrangement of the gardens and completely breaking off his relations
+ with Mademoiselle Bourienne. His looks and cold tone to his daughter
+ seemed to say: “There, you see? You plotted against me, you lied to Prince
+ Andrew about my relations with that Frenchwoman and made me quarrel with
+ him, but you see I need neither her nor you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary spent half of every day with little Nicholas, watching his
+ lessons, teaching him Russian and music herself, and talking to Dessalles;
+ the rest of the day she spent over her books, with her old nurse, or with
+ “God’s folk” who sometimes came by the back door to see her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of the war Princess Mary thought as women do think about wars. She feared
+ for her brother who was in it, was horrified by and amazed at the strange
+ cruelty that impels men to kill one another, but she did not understand
+ the significance of this war, which seemed to her like all previous wars.
+ She did not realize the significance of this war, though Dessalles with
+ whom she constantly conversed was passionately interested in its progress
+ and tried to explain his own conception of it to her, and though the
+ “God’s folk” who came to see her reported, in their own way, the rumors
+ current among the people of an invasion by Antichrist, and though Julie
+ (now Princess Drubetskáya), who had resumed correspondence with her, wrote
+ patriotic letters from Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I write you in Russian, my good friend,” wrote Julie in her Frenchified
+ Russian, “because I have a detestation for all the French, and the same
+ for their language which I cannot support to hear spoken.... We in Moscow
+ are elated by enthusiasm for our adored Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My poor husband is enduring pains and hunger in Jewish taverns, but the
+ news which I have inspires me yet more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You heard probably of the heroic exploit of Raévski, embracing his two
+ sons and saying: ‘I will perish with them but we will not be shaken!’ And
+ truly though the enemy was twice stronger than we, we were unshakable. We
+ pass the time as we can, but in war as in war! The princesses Aline and
+ Sophie sit whole days with me, and we, unhappy widows of live men, make
+ beautiful conversations over our charpie , only you, my friend, are
+ missing...” and so on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The chief reason Princess Mary did not realize the full significance of
+ this war was that the old prince never spoke of it, did not recognize it,
+ and laughed at Dessalles when he mentioned it at dinner. The prince’s tone
+ was so calm and confident that Princess Mary unhesitatingly believed him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All that July the old prince was exceedingly active and even animated. He
+ planned another garden and began a new building for the domestic serfs.
+ The only thing that made Princess Mary anxious about him was that he slept
+ very little and, instead of sleeping in his study as usual, changed his
+ sleeping place every day. One day he would order his camp bed to be set up
+ in the glass gallery, another day he remained on the couch or on the
+ lounge chair in the drawing room and dozed there without undressing, while—instead
+ of Mademoiselle Bourienne—a serf boy read to him. Then again he
+ would spend a night in the dining room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On August 1, a second letter was received from Prince Andrew. In his first
+ letter which came soon after he had left home, Prince Andrew had dutifully
+ asked his father’s forgiveness for what he had allowed himself to say and
+ begged to be restored to his favor. To this letter the old prince had
+ replied affectionately, and from that time had kept the Frenchwoman at a
+ distance. Prince Andrew’s second letter, written near Vítebsk after the
+ French had occupied that town, gave a brief account of the whole campaign,
+ enclosed for them a plan he had drawn and forecasts as to the further
+ progress of the war. In this letter Prince Andrew pointed out to his
+ father the danger of staying at Bald Hills, so near the theater of war and
+ on the army’s direct line of march, and advised him to move to Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At dinner that day, on Dessalles’ mentioning that the French were said to
+ have already entered Vítebsk, the old prince remembered his son’s letter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There was a letter from Prince Andrew today,” he said to Princess Mary—“Haven’t
+ you read it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Father,” she replied in a frightened voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She could not have read the letter as she did not even know it had
+ arrived.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He writes about this war,” said the prince, with the ironic smile that
+ had become habitual to him in speaking of the present war.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That must be very interesting,” said Dessalles. “Prince Andrew is in a
+ position to know...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, very interesting!” said Mademoiselle Bourienne.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go and get it for me,” said the old prince to Mademoiselle Bourienne.
+ “You know—under the paperweight on the little table.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne jumped up eagerly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, don’t!” he exclaimed with a frown. “You go, Michael Ivánovich.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Michael Ivánovich rose and went to the study. But as soon as he had left
+ the room the old prince, looking uneasily round, threw down his napkin and
+ went himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They can’t do anything... always make some muddle,” he muttered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While he was away Princess Mary, Dessalles, Mademoiselle Bourienne, and
+ even little Nicholas exchanged looks in silence. The old prince returned
+ with quick steps, accompanied by Michael Ivánovich, bringing the letter
+ and a plan. These he put down beside him—not letting anyone read
+ them at dinner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On moving to the drawing room he handed the letter to Princess Mary and,
+ spreading out before him the plan of the new building and fixing his eyes
+ upon it, told her to read the letter aloud. When she had done so Princess
+ Mary looked inquiringly at her father. He was examining the plan,
+ evidently engrossed in his own ideas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do you think of it, Prince?” Dessalles ventured to ask.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I? I?...” said the prince as if unpleasantly awakened, and not taking his
+ eyes from the plan of the building.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very possibly the theater of war will move so near to us that...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ha ha ha! The theater of war!” said the prince. “I have said and still
+ say that the theater of war is Poland and the enemy will never get beyond
+ the Niemen.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dessalles looked in amazement at the prince, who was talking of the Niemen
+ when the enemy was already at the Dnieper, but Princess Mary, forgetting
+ the geographical position of the Niemen, thought that what her father was
+ saying was correct.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When the snow melts they’ll sink in the Polish swamps. Only they could
+ fail to see it,” the prince continued, evidently thinking of the campaign
+ of 1807 which seemed to him so recent. “Bennigsen should have advanced
+ into Prussia sooner, then things would have taken a different turn...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But, Prince,” Dessalles began timidly, “the letter mentions Vítebsk....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, the letter? Yes...” replied the prince peevishly. “Yes... yes...” His
+ face suddenly took on a morose expression. He paused. “Yes, he writes that
+ the French were beaten at... at... what river is it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dessalles dropped his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The prince says nothing about that,” he remarked gently.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Doesn’t he? But I didn’t invent it myself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No one spoke for a long time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes... yes... Well, Michael Ivánovich,” he suddenly went on, raising his
+ head and pointing to the plan of the building, “tell me how you mean to
+ alter it....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Michael Ivánovich went up to the plan, and the prince after speaking to
+ him about the building looked angrily at Princess Mary and Dessalles and
+ went to his own room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary saw Dessalles’ embarrassed and astonished look fixed on her
+ father, noticed his silence, and was struck by the fact that her father
+ had forgotten his son’s letter on the drawing room table; but she was not
+ only afraid to speak of it and ask Dessalles the reason of his confusion
+ and silence, but was afraid even to think about it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the evening Michael Ivánovich, sent by the prince, came to Princess
+ Mary for Prince Andrew’s letter which had been forgotten in the drawing
+ room. She gave it to him and, unpleasant as it was to her to do so,
+ ventured to ask him what her father was doing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Always busy,” replied Michael Ivánovich with a respectfully ironic smile
+ which caused Princess Mary to turn pale. “He’s worrying very much about
+ the new building. He has been reading a little, but now”—Michael
+ Ivánovich went on, lowering his voice—“now he’s at his desk, busy
+ with his will, I expect.” (One of the prince’s favorite occupations of
+ late had been the preparation of some papers he meant to leave at his
+ death and which he called his “will.”)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And Alpátych is being sent to Smolénsk?” asked Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, yes, he has been waiting to start for some time.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ When Michael Ivánovich returned to the study with the letter, the old
+ prince, with spectacles on and a shade over his eyes, was sitting at his
+ open bureau with screened candles, holding a paper in his outstretched
+ hand, and in a somewhat dramatic attitude was reading his manuscript—his
+ “Remarks” as he termed it—which was to be transmitted to the Emperor
+ after his death.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Michael Ivánovich went in there were tears in the prince’s eyes
+ evoked by the memory of the time when the paper he was now reading had
+ been written. He took the letter from Michael Ivánovich’s hand, put it in
+ his pocket, folded up his papers, and called in Alpátych who had long been
+ waiting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The prince had a list of things to be bought in Smolénsk and, walking up
+ and down the room past Alpátych who stood by the door, he gave his
+ instructions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “First, notepaper—do you hear? Eight quires, like this sample,
+ gilt-edged... it must be exactly like the sample. Varnish, sealing wax, as
+ in Michael Ivánovich’s list.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He paced up and down for a while and glanced at his notes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then hand to the governor in person a letter about the deed.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next, bolts for the doors of the new building were wanted and had to be of
+ a special shape the prince had himself designed, and a leather case had to
+ be ordered to keep the “will” in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The instructions to Alpátych took over two hours and still the prince did
+ not let him go. He sat down, sank into thought, closed his eyes, and dozed
+ off. Alpátych made a slight movement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, go, go! If anything more is wanted I’ll send after you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych went out. The prince again went to his bureau, glanced into it,
+ fingered his papers, closed the bureau again, and sat down at the table to
+ write to the governor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was already late when he rose after sealing the letter. He wished to
+ sleep, but he knew he would not be able to and that most depressing
+ thoughts came to him in bed. So he called Tíkhon and went through the
+ rooms with him to show him where to set up the bed for that night.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He went about looking at every corner. Every place seemed unsatisfactory,
+ but worst of all was his customary couch in the study. That couch was
+ dreadful to him, probably because of the oppressive thoughts he had had
+ when lying there. It was unsatisfactory everywhere, but the corner behind
+ the piano in the sitting room was better than other places: he had never
+ slept there yet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With the help of a footman Tíkhon brought in the bedstead and began
+ putting it up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s not right! That’s not right!” cried the prince, and himself pushed
+ it a few inches from the corner and then closer in again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, at last I’ve finished, now I’ll rest,” thought the prince, and let
+ Tíkhon undress him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Frowning with vexation at the effort necessary to divest himself of his
+ coat and trousers, the prince undressed, sat down heavily on the bed, and
+ appeared to be meditating as he looked contemptuously at his withered
+ yellow legs. He was not meditating, but only deferring the moment of
+ making the effort to lift those legs up and turn over on the bed. “Ugh,
+ how hard it is! Oh, that this toil might end and you would release me!”
+ thought he. Pressing his lips together he made that effort for the
+ twenty-thousandth time and lay down. But hardly had he done so before he
+ felt the bed rocking backwards and forwards beneath him as if it were
+ breathing heavily and jolting. This happened to him almost every night. He
+ opened his eyes as they were closing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No peace, damn them!” he muttered, angry he knew not with
+ whom. “Ah yes, there was something else important, very important,
+ that I was keeping till I should be in bed. The bolts? No, I told him
+ about them. No, it was something, something in the drawing room. Princess
+ Mary talked some nonsense. Dessalles, that fool, said something. Something
+ in my pocket—can’t remember....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tíkhon, what did we talk about at dinner?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “About Prince Michael...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Be quiet, quiet!” The prince slapped his hand on the table. “Yes, I know,
+ Prince Andrew’s letter! Princess Mary read it. Dessalles said something
+ about Vítebsk. Now I’ll read it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He had the letter taken from his pocket and the table—on which stood
+ a glass of lemonade and a spiral wax candle—moved close to the bed,
+ and putting on his spectacles he began reading. Only now in the stillness
+ of the night, reading it by the faint light under the green shade, did he
+ grasp its meaning for a moment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The French at Vítebsk, in four days’ march they may be at Smolénsk;
+ perhaps are already there! Tíkhon!” Tíkhon jumped up. “No, no, I don’t
+ want anything!” he shouted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He put the letter under the candlestick and closed his eyes. And there
+ rose before him the Danube at bright noonday: reeds, the Russian camp, and
+ himself a young general without a wrinkle on his ruddy face, vigorous and
+ alert, entering Potëmkin’s gaily colored tent, and a burning sense of
+ jealousy of “the favorite” agitated him now as strongly as it had done
+ then. He recalled all the words spoken at that first meeting with
+ Potëmkin. And he saw before him a plump, rather sallow-faced, short, stout
+ woman, the Empress Mother, with her smile and her words at her first
+ gracious reception of him, and then that same face on the catafalque, and
+ the encounter he had with Zúbov over her coffin about his right to kiss
+ her hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, quicker, quicker! To get back to that time and have done with all the
+ present! Quicker, quicker—and that they should leave me in peace!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ Bald Hills, Prince Nicholas Bolkónski’s estate, lay forty miles east from
+ Smolénsk and two miles from the main road to Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The same evening that the prince gave his instructions to Alpátych,
+ Dessalles, having asked to see Princess Mary, told her that, as the prince
+ was not very well and was taking no steps to secure his safety, though
+ from Prince Andrew’s letter it was evident that to remain at Bald Hills
+ might be dangerous, he respectfully advised her to send a letter by
+ Alpátych to the Provincial Governor at Smolénsk, asking him to let her
+ know the state of affairs and the extent of the danger to which Bald Hills
+ was exposed. Dessalles wrote this letter to the Governor for Princess
+ Mary, she signed it, and it was given to Alpátych with instructions to
+ hand it to the Governor and to come back as quickly as possible if there
+ was danger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having received all his orders Alpátych, wearing a white beaver hat—a
+ present from the prince—and carrying a stick as the prince did, went
+ out accompanied by his family. Three well-fed roans stood ready harnessed
+ to a small conveyance with a leather hood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The larger bell was muffled and the little bells on the harness stuffed
+ with paper. The prince allowed no one at Bald Hills to drive with ringing
+ bells; but on a long journey Alpátych liked to have them. His satellites—the
+ senior clerk, a countinghouse clerk, a scullery maid, a cook, two old
+ women, a little pageboy, the coachman, and various domestic serfs—were
+ seeing him off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His daughter placed chintz-covered down cushions for him to sit on and
+ behind his back. His old sister-in-law popped in a small bundle, and one
+ of the coachmen helped him into the vehicle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There! There! Women’s fuss! Women, women!” said Alpátych, puffing and
+ speaking rapidly just as the prince did, and he climbed into the trap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After giving the clerk orders about the work to be done, Alpátych, not
+ trying to imitate the prince now, lifted the hat from his bald head and
+ crossed himself three times.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If there is anything... come back, Yákov Alpátych! For Christ’s sake
+ think of us!” cried his wife, referring to the rumors of war and the
+ enemy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Women, women! Women’s fuss!” muttered Alpátych to himself and started on
+ his journey, looking round at the fields of yellow rye and the
+ still-green, thickly growing oats, and at other quite black fields just
+ being plowed a second time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he went along he looked with pleasure at the year’s splendid crop of
+ corn, scrutinized the strips of ryefield which here and there were already
+ being reaped, made his calculations as to the sowing and the harvest, and
+ asked himself whether he had not forgotten any of the prince’s orders.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having baited the horses twice on the way, he arrived at the town toward
+ evening on the fourth of August.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych kept meeting and overtaking baggage trains and troops on the
+ road. As he approached Smolénsk he heard the sounds of distant firing, but
+ these did not impress him. What struck him most was the sight of a
+ splendid field of oats in which a camp had been pitched and which was
+ being mown down by the soldiers, evidently for fodder. This fact impressed
+ Alpátych, but in thinking about his own business he soon forgot it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the interests of his life for more than thirty years had been bounded
+ by the will of the prince, and he never went beyond that limit. Everything
+ not connected with the execution of the prince’s orders did not interest
+ and did not even exist for Alpátych.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On reaching Smolénsk on the evening of the fourth of August he put up in
+ the Gáchina suburb across the Dnieper, at the inn kept by Ferapóntov,
+ where he had been in the habit of putting up for the last thirty years.
+ Some thirty years ago Ferapóntov, by Alpátych’s advice, had bought a wood
+ from the prince, had begun to trade, and now had a house, an inn, and a
+ corn dealer’s shop in that province. He was a stout, dark, red-faced
+ peasant in the forties, with thick lips, a broad knob of a nose, similar
+ knobs over his black frowning brows, and a round belly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Wearing a waistcoat over his cotton shirt, Ferapóntov was standing before
+ his shop which opened onto the street. On seeing Alpátych he went up to
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’re welcome, Yákov Alpátych. Folks are leaving the town, but you have
+ come to it,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why are they leaving the town?” asked Alpátych.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s what I say. Folks are foolish! Always afraid of the French.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Women’s fuss, women’s fuss!” said Alpátych.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just what I think, Yákov Alpátych. What I say is: orders have been given
+ not to let them in, so that must be right. And the peasants are asking
+ three rubles for carting—it isn’t Christian!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Yákov Alpátych heard without heeding. He asked for a samovar and for hay
+ for his horses, and when he had had his tea he went to bed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All night long troops were moving past the inn. Next morning Alpátych
+ donned a jacket he wore only in town and went out on business. It was a
+ sunny morning and by eight o’clock it was already hot. “A good day for
+ harvesting,” thought Alpátych.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From beyond the town firing had been heard since early morning. At eight
+ o’clock the booming of cannon was added to the sound of musketry. Many
+ people were hurrying through the streets and there were many soldiers, but
+ cabs were still driving about, tradesmen stood at their shops, and service
+ was being held in the churches as usual. Alpátych went to the shops, to
+ government offices, to the post office, and to the Governor’s. In the
+ offices and shops and at the post office everyone was talking about the
+ army and about the enemy who was already attacking the town, everybody was
+ asking what should be done, and all were trying to calm one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In front of the Governor’s house Alpátych found a large number of people,
+ Cossacks, and a traveling carriage of the Governor’s. At the porch he met
+ two of the landed gentry, one of whom he knew. This man, an ex-captain of
+ police, was saying angrily:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s no joke, you know! It’s all very well if you’re single. ‘One man
+ though undone is but one,’ as the proverb says, but with thirteen in your
+ family and all the property... They’ve brought us to utter ruin! What sort
+ of governors are they to do that? They ought to be hanged—the
+ brigands!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh come, that’s enough!” said the other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do I care? Let him hear! We’re not dogs,” said the ex-captain of
+ police, and looking round he noticed Alpátych.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, Yákov Alpátych! What have you come for?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To see the Governor by his excellency’s order,” answered Alpátych,
+ lifting his head and proudly thrusting his hand into the bosom of his coat
+ as he always did when he mentioned the prince.... “He has ordered me to
+ inquire into the position of affairs,” he added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, go and find out!” shouted the angry gentleman. “They’ve brought
+ things to such a pass that there are no carts or anything!... There it is
+ again, do you hear?” said he, pointing in the direction whence came the
+ sounds of firing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They’ve brought us all to ruin... the brigands!” he repeated, and
+ descended the porch steps.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych swayed his head and went upstairs. In the waiting room were
+ tradesmen, women, and officials, looking silently at one another. The door
+ of the Governor’s room opened and they all rose and moved forward. An
+ official ran out, said some words to a merchant, called a stout official
+ with a cross hanging on his neck to follow him, and vanished again,
+ evidently wishing to avoid the inquiring looks and questions addressed to
+ him. Alpátych moved forward and next time the official came out addressed
+ him, one hand placed in the breast of his buttoned coat, and handed him
+ two letters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To his Honor Baron Asch, from General-in-Chief Prince Bolkónski,” he
+ announced with such solemnity and significance that the official turned to
+ him and took the letters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A few minutes later the Governor received Alpátych and hurriedly said to
+ him:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Inform the prince and princess that I knew nothing: I acted on the
+ highest instructions—here...” and he handed a paper to Alpátych.
+ “Still, as the prince is unwell my advice is that they should go to
+ Moscow. I am just starting myself. Inform them...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the Governor did not finish: a dusty perspiring officer ran into the
+ room and began to say something in French. The Governor’s face expressed
+ terror.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go,” he said, nodding his head to Alpátych, and began questioning the
+ officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Eager, frightened, helpless glances were turned on Alpátych when he came
+ out of the Governor’s room. Involuntarily listening now to the firing,
+ which had drawn nearer and was increasing in strength, Alpátych hurried to
+ his inn. The paper handed to him by the Governor said this:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I assure you that the town of Smolénsk is not in the slightest danger as
+ yet and it is unlikely that it will be threatened with any. I from the one
+ side and Prince Bagratión from the other are marching to unite our forces
+ before Smolénsk, which junction will be effected on the 22nd instant, and
+ both armies with their united forces will defend our compatriots of the
+ province entrusted to your care till our efforts shall have beaten back
+ the enemies of our Fatherland, or till the last warrior in our valiant
+ ranks has perished. From this you will see that you have a perfect right
+ to reassure the inhabitants of Smolénsk, for those defended by two such
+ brave armies may feel assured of victory.” (Instructions from Barclay de
+ Tolly to Baron Asch, the civil governor of Smolénsk, 1812.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ People were anxiously roaming about the streets.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Carts piled high with household utensils, chairs, and cupboards kept
+ emerging from the gates of the yards and moving along the streets. Loaded
+ carts stood at the house next to Ferapóntov’s and women were wailing and
+ lamenting as they said good-by. A small watchdog ran round barking in
+ front of the harnessed horses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych entered the innyard at a quicker pace than usual and went
+ straight to the shed where his horses and trap were. The coachman was
+ asleep. He woke him up, told him to harness, and went into the passage.
+ From the host’s room came the sounds of a child crying, the despairing
+ sobs of a woman, and the hoarse angry shouting of Ferapóntov. The cook
+ began running hither and thither in the passage like a frightened hen,
+ just as Alpátych entered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s done her to death. Killed the mistress!... Beat her... dragged her
+ about so!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What for?” asked Alpátych.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She kept begging to go away. She’s a woman! ‘Take me away,’ says she,
+ ‘don’t let me perish with my little children! Folks,’ she says, ‘are all
+ gone, so why,’ she says, ‘don’t we go?’ And he began beating and pulling
+ her about so!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At these words Alpátych nodded as if in approval, and not wishing to hear
+ more went to the door of the room opposite the innkeeper’s, where he had
+ left his purchases.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You brute, you murderer!” screamed a thin, pale woman who, with a baby in
+ her arms and her kerchief torn from her head, burst through the door at
+ that moment and down the steps into the yard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ferapóntov came out after her, but on seeing Alpátych adjusted his
+ waistcoat, smoothed his hair, yawned, and followed Alpátych into the
+ opposite room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Going already?” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych, without answering or looking at his host, sorted his packages
+ and asked how much he owed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We’ll reckon up! Well, have you been to the Governor’s?” asked
+ Ferapóntov. “What has been decided?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych replied that the Governor had not told him anything definite.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “With our business, how can we get away?” said Ferapóntov. “We’d have to
+ pay seven rubles a cartload to Dorogobúzh and I tell them they’re not
+ Christians to ask it! Selivánov, now, did a good stroke last Thursday—sold
+ flour to the army at nine rubles a sack. Will you have some tea?” he
+ added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While the horses were being harnessed Alpátych and Ferapóntov over their
+ tea talked of the price of corn, the crops, and the good weather for
+ harvesting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, it seems to be getting quieter,” remarked Ferapóntov, finishing his
+ third cup of tea and getting up. “Ours must have got the best of it. The
+ orders were not to let them in. So we’re in force, it seems.... They say
+ the other day Matthew Iványch Plátov drove them into the river Márina and
+ drowned some eighteen thousand in one day.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych collected his parcels, handed them to the coachman who had come
+ in, and settled up with the innkeeper. The noise of wheels, hoofs, and
+ bells was heard from the gateway as a little trap passed out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was by now late in the afternoon. Half the street was in shadow, the
+ other half brightly lit by the sun. Alpátych looked out of the window and
+ went to the door. Suddenly the strange sound of a far-off whistling and
+ thud was heard, followed by a boom of cannon blending into a dull roar
+ that set the windows rattling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He went out into the street: two men were running past toward the bridge.
+ From different sides came whistling sounds and the thud of cannon balls
+ and bursting shells falling on the town. But these sounds were hardly
+ heard in comparison with the noise of the firing outside the town and
+ attracted little attention from the inhabitants. The town was being
+ bombarded by a hundred and thirty guns which Napoleon had ordered up after
+ four o’clock. The people did not at once realize the meaning of this
+ bombardment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At first the noise of the falling bombs and shells only aroused curiosity.
+ Ferapóntov’s wife, who till then had not ceased wailing under the shed,
+ became quiet and with the baby in her arms went to the gate, listening to
+ the sounds and looking in silence at the people.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The cook and a shop assistant came to the gate. With lively curiosity
+ everyone tried to get a glimpse of the projectiles as they flew over their
+ heads. Several people came round the corner talking eagerly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What force!” remarked one. “Knocked the roof and ceiling all to
+ splinters!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Routed up the earth like a pig,” said another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s grand, it bucks one up!” laughed the first. “Lucky you jumped
+ aside, or it would have wiped you out!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Others joined those men and stopped and told how cannon balls had fallen
+ on a house close to them. Meanwhile still more projectiles, now with the
+ swift sinister whistle of a cannon ball, now with the agreeable
+ intermittent whistle of a shell, flew over people’s heads incessantly, but
+ not one fell close by, they all flew over. Alpátych was getting into his
+ trap. The innkeeper stood at the gate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are you staring at?” he shouted to the cook, who in her red skirt,
+ with sleeves rolled up, swinging her bare elbows, had stepped to the
+ corner to listen to what was being said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What marvels!” she exclaimed, but hearing her master’s voice she turned
+ back, pulling down her tucked-up skirt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Once more something whistled, but this time quite close, swooping
+ downwards like a little bird; a flame flashed in the middle of the street,
+ something exploded, and the street was shrouded in smoke.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Scoundrel, what are you doing?” shouted the innkeeper, rushing to the
+ cook.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment the pitiful wailing of women was heard from different
+ sides, the frightened baby began to cry, and people crowded silently with
+ pale faces round the cook. The loudest sound in that crowd was her
+ wailing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh-h-h! Dear souls, dear kind souls! Don’t let me die! My good souls!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Five minutes later no one remained in the street. The cook, with her thigh
+ broken by a shell splinter, had been carried into the kitchen. Alpátych,
+ his coachman, Ferapóntov’s wife and children and the house porter were all
+ sitting in the cellar, listening. The roar of guns, the whistling of
+ projectiles, and the piteous moaning of the cook, which rose above the
+ other sounds, did not cease for a moment. The mistress rocked and hushed
+ her baby and when anyone came into the cellar asked in a pathetic whisper
+ what had become of her husband who had remained in the street. A shopman
+ who entered told her that her husband had gone with others to the
+ cathedral, whence they were fetching the wonder-working icon of Smolénsk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Toward dusk the cannonade began to subside. Alpátych left the cellar and
+ stopped in the doorway. The evening sky that had been so clear was clouded
+ with smoke, through which, high up, the sickle of the new moon shone
+ strangely. Now that the terrible din of the guns had ceased a hush seemed
+ to reign over the town, broken only by the rustle of footsteps, the
+ moaning, the distant cries, and the crackle of fires which seemed
+ widespread everywhere. The cook’s moans had now subsided. On two sides
+ black curling clouds of smoke rose and spread from the fires. Through the
+ streets soldiers in various uniforms walked or ran confusedly in different
+ directions like ants from a ruined ant-hill. Several of them ran into
+ Ferapóntov’s yard before Alpátych’s eyes. Alpátych went out to the gate. A
+ retreating regiment, thronging and hurrying, blocked the street.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Noticing him, an officer said: “The town is being abandoned. Get away, get
+ away!” and then, turning to the soldiers, shouted:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll teach you to run into the yards!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych went back to the house, called the coachman, and told him to set
+ off. Ferapóntov’s whole household came out too, following Alpátych and the
+ coachman. The women, who had been silent till then, suddenly began to wail
+ as they looked at the fires—the smoke and even the flames of which
+ could be seen in the failing twilight—and as if in reply the same
+ kind of lamentation was heard from other parts of the street. Inside the
+ shed Alpátych and the coachman arranged the tangled reins and traces of
+ their horses with trembling hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As Alpátych was driving out of the gate he saw some ten soldiers in
+ Ferapóntov’s open shop, talking loudly and filling their bags and
+ knapsacks with flour and sunflower seeds. Just then Ferapóntov returned
+ and entered his shop. On seeing the soldiers he was about to shout at
+ them, but suddenly stopped and, clutching at his hair, burst into sobs and
+ laughter:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Loot everything, lads! Don’t let those devils get it!” he cried, taking
+ some bags of flour himself and throwing them into the street.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some of the soldiers were frightened and ran away, others went on filling
+ their bags. On seeing Alpátych, Ferapóntov turned to him:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Russia is done for!” he cried. “Alpátych, I’ll set the place on fire
+ myself. We’re done for!...” and Ferapóntov ran into the yard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soldiers were passing in a constant stream along the street blocking it
+ completely, so that Alpátych could not pass out and had to wait.
+ Ferapóntov’s wife and children were also sitting in a cart waiting till it
+ was possible to drive out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Night had come. There were stars in the sky and the new moon shone out
+ amid the smoke that screened it. On the sloping descent to the Dnieper
+ Alpátych’s cart and that of the innkeeper’s wife, which were slowly moving
+ amid the rows of soldiers and of other vehicles, had to stop. In a side
+ street near the crossroads where the vehicles had stopped, a house and
+ some shops were on fire. This fire was already burning itself out. The
+ flames now died down and were lost in the black smoke, now suddenly flared
+ up again brightly, lighting up with strange distinctness the faces of the
+ people crowding at the crossroads. Black figures flitted about before the
+ fire, and through the incessant crackling of the flames talking and
+ shouting could be heard. Seeing that his trap would not be able to move on
+ for some time, Alpátych got down and turned into the side street to look
+ at the fire. Soldiers were continually rushing backwards and forwards near
+ it, and he saw two of them and a man in a frieze coat dragging burning
+ beams into another yard across the street, while others carried bundles of
+ hay.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych went up to a large crowd standing before a high barn which was
+ blazing briskly. The walls were all on fire and the back wall had fallen
+ in, the wooden roof was collapsing, and the rafters were alight. The crowd
+ was evidently watching for the roof to fall in, and Alpátych watched for
+ it too.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Alpátych!” a familiar voice suddenly hailed the old man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mercy on us! Your excellency!” answered Alpátych, immediately recognizing
+ the voice of his young prince.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew in his riding cloak, mounted on a black horse, was looking
+ at Alpátych from the back of the crowd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why are you here?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your... your excellency,” stammered Alpátych and broke into sobs. “Are we
+ really lost? Master!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why are you here?” Prince Andrew repeated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment the flames flared up and showed his young master’s pale
+ worn face. Alpátych told how he had been sent there and how difficult it
+ was to get away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Are we really quite lost, your excellency?” he asked again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew without replying took out a notebook and raising his knee
+ began writing in pencil on a page he tore out. He wrote to his sister:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Smolénsk is being abandoned. Bald Hills will be occupied by the enemy
+ within a week. Set off immediately for Moscow. Let me know at once when
+ you will start. Send by special messenger to Usvyázh.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having written this and given the paper to Alpátych, he told him how to
+ arrange for departure of the prince, the princess, his son, and the boy’s
+ tutor, and how and where to let him know immediately. Before he had had
+ time to finish giving these instructions, a chief of staff followed by a
+ suite galloped up to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are a colonel?” shouted the chief of staff with a German accent, in a
+ voice familiar to Prince Andrew. “Houses are set on fire in your presence
+ and you stand by! What does this mean? You will answer for it!” shouted
+ Berg, who was now assistant to the chief of staff of the commander of the
+ left flank of the infantry of the first army, a place, as Berg said, “very
+ agreeable and well en évidence .”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew looked at him and without replying went on speaking to
+ Alpátych.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So tell them that I shall await a reply till the tenth, and if by the
+ tenth I don’t receive news that they have all got away I shall have to
+ throw up everything and come myself to Bald Hills.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Prince,” said Berg, recognizing Prince Andrew, “I only spoke because I
+ have to obey orders, because I always do obey exactly.... You must please
+ excuse me,” he went on apologetically.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Something cracked in the flames. The fire died down for a moment and
+ wreaths of black smoke rolled from under the roof. There was another
+ terrible crash and something huge collapsed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ou-rou-rou!” yelled the crowd, echoing the crash of the collapsing roof
+ of the barn, the burning grain in which diffused a cakelike aroma all
+ around. The flames flared up again, lighting the animated, delighted,
+ exhausted faces of the spectators.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The man in the frieze coat raised his arms and shouted:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s fine, lads! Now it’s raging... It’s fine!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s the owner himself,” cried several voices.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well then,” continued Prince Andrew to Alpátych, “report to them as I
+ have told you”; and not replying a word to Berg who was now mute beside
+ him, he touched his horse and rode down the side street.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ From Smolénsk the troops continued to retreat, followed by the enemy. On
+ the tenth of August the regiment Prince Andrew commanded was marching
+ along the highroad past the avenue leading to Bald Hills. Heat and drought
+ had continued for more than three weeks. Each day fleecy clouds floated
+ across the sky and occasionally veiled the sun, but toward evening the sky
+ cleared again and the sun set in reddish-brown mist. Heavy night dews
+ alone refreshed the earth. The unreaped corn was scorched and shed its
+ grain. The marshes dried up. The cattle lowed from hunger, finding no food
+ on the sun-parched meadows. Only at night and in the forests while the dew
+ lasted was there any freshness. But on the road, the highroad along which
+ the troops marched, there was no such freshness even at night or when the
+ road passed through the forest; the dew was imperceptible on the sandy
+ dust churned up more than six inches deep. As soon as day dawned the march
+ began. The artillery and baggage wagons moved noiselessly through the deep
+ dust that rose to the very hubs of the wheels, and the infantry sank
+ ankle-deep in that soft, choking, hot dust that never cooled even at
+ night. Some of this dust was kneaded by the feet and wheels, while the
+ rest rose and hung like a cloud over the troops, settling in eyes, ears,
+ hair, and nostrils, and worst of all in the lungs of the men and beasts as
+ they moved along that road. The higher the sun rose the higher rose that
+ cloud of dust, and through the screen of its hot fine particles one could
+ look with naked eye at the sun, which showed like a huge crimson ball in
+ the unclouded sky. There was no wind, and the men choked in that
+ motionless atmosphere. They marched with handkerchiefs tied over their
+ noses and mouths. When they passed through a village they all rushed to
+ the wells and fought for the water and drank it down to the mud.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew was in command of a regiment, and the management of that
+ regiment, the welfare of the men and the necessity of receiving and giving
+ orders, engrossed him. The burning of Smolénsk and its abandonment made an
+ epoch in his life. A novel feeling of anger against the foe made him
+ forget his own sorrow. He was entirely devoted to the affairs of his
+ regiment and was considerate and kind to his men and officers. In the
+ regiment they called him “our prince,” were proud of him and loved him.
+ But he was kind and gentle only to those of his regiment, to Timókhin and
+ the like—people quite new to him, belonging to a different world and
+ who could not know and understand his past. As soon as he came across a
+ former acquaintance or anyone from the staff, he bristled up immediately
+ and grew spiteful, ironical, and contemptuous. Everything that reminded
+ him of his past was repugnant to him, and so in his relations with that
+ former circle he confined himself to trying to do his duty and not to be
+ unfair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In truth everything presented itself in a dark and gloomy light to Prince
+ Andrew, especially after the abandonment of Smolénsk on the sixth of
+ August (he considered that it could and should have been defended) and
+ after his sick father had had to flee to Moscow, abandoning to pillage his
+ dearly beloved Bald Hills which he had built and peopled. But despite
+ this, thanks to his regiment, Prince Andrew had something to think about
+ entirely apart from general questions. Two days previously he had received
+ news that his father, son, and sister had left for Moscow; and though
+ there was nothing for him to do at Bald Hills, Prince Andrew with a
+ characteristic desire to foment his own grief decided that he must ride
+ there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He ordered his horse to be saddled and, leaving his regiment on the march,
+ rode to his father’s estate where he had been born and spent his
+ childhood. Riding past the pond where there used always to be dozens of
+ women chattering as they rinsed their linen or beat it with wooden
+ beetles, Prince Andrew noticed that there was not a soul about and that
+ the little washing wharf, torn from its place and half submerged, was
+ floating on its side in the middle of the pond. He rode to the keeper’s
+ lodge. No one was at the stone entrance gates of the drive and the door stood
+ open. Grass had already begun to grow on the garden paths, and horses and
+ calves were straying in the English park. Prince Andrew rode up to the
+ hothouse; some of the glass panes were broken, and of the trees in tubs
+ some were overturned and others dried up. He called for Tarás the
+ gardener, but no one replied. Having gone round the corner of the hothouse
+ to the ornamental garden, he saw that the carved garden fence was broken
+ and branches of the plum trees had been torn off with the fruit. An old
+ peasant whom Prince Andrew in his childhood had often seen at the gate was
+ sitting on a green garden seat, plaiting a bast shoe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was deaf and did not hear Prince Andrew ride up. He was sitting on the
+ seat the old prince used to like to sit on, and beside him strips of bast
+ were hanging on the broken and withered branch of a magnolia.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew rode up to the house. Several limes in the old garden had
+ been cut down and a piebald mare and her foal were wandering in front of
+ the house among the rosebushes. The shutters were all closed, except at
+ one window which was open. A little serf boy, seeing Prince Andrew, ran
+ into the house. Alpátych, having sent his family away, was alone at Bald
+ Hills and was sitting indoors reading the Lives of the Saints . On hearing
+ that Prince Andrew had come, he went out with his spectacles on his nose,
+ buttoning his coat, and, hastily stepping up, without a word began weeping
+ and kissing Prince Andrew’s knee.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then, vexed at his own weakness, he turned away and began to report on the
+ position of affairs. Everything precious and valuable had been removed to
+ Boguchárovo. Seventy quarters of grain had also been carted away. The hay
+ and the spring corn, of which Alpátych said there had been a remarkable
+ crop that year, had been commandeered by the troops and mown down while
+ still green. The peasants were ruined; some of them too had gone to
+ Boguchárovo, only a few remained.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Without waiting to hear him out, Prince Andrew asked:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When did my father and sister leave?” meaning when did they leave for
+ Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych, understanding the question to refer to their departure for
+ Boguchárovo, replied that they had left on the seventh and again went into
+ details concerning the estate management, asking for instructions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Am I to let the troops have the oats, and to take a receipt for them? We
+ have still six hundred quarters left,” he inquired.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What am I to say to him?” thought Prince Andrew, looking down on the old
+ man’s bald head shining in the sun and seeing by the expression on his
+ face that the old man himself understood how untimely such questions were
+ and only asked them to allay his grief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, let them have it,” replied Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you noticed some disorder in the garden,” said Alpátych, “it was
+ impossible to prevent it. Three regiments have been here and spent the
+ night, dragoons mostly. I took down the name and rank of their commanding
+ officer, to hand in a complaint about it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, and what are you going to do? Will you stay here if the enemy
+ occupies the place?” asked Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych turned his face to Prince Andrew, looked at him, and suddenly
+ with a solemn gesture raised his arm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is my refuge! His will be done!” he exclaimed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A group of bareheaded peasants was approaching across the meadow toward
+ the prince.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, good-by!” said Prince Andrew, bending over to Alpátych. “You must
+ go away too, take away what you can and tell the serfs to go to the Ryazán
+ estate or to the one near Moscow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych clung to Prince Andrew’s leg and burst into sobs. Gently
+ disengaging himself, the prince spurred his horse and rode down the avenue
+ at a gallop.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old man was still sitting in the ornamental garden, like a fly
+ impassive on the face of a loved one who is dead, tapping the last on
+ which he was making the bast shoe, and two little girls, running out from
+ the hot house carrying in their skirts plums they had plucked from the
+ trees there, came upon Prince Andrew. On seeing the young master, the
+ elder one with frightened look clutched her younger companion by the hand
+ and hid with her behind a birch tree, not stopping to pick up some green
+ plums they had dropped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew turned away with startled haste, unwilling to let them see
+ that they had been observed. He was sorry for the pretty frightened little
+ girl, was afraid of looking at her, and yet felt an irresistible desire to
+ do so. A new sensation of comfort and relief came over him when, seeing
+ these girls, he realized the existence of other human interests entirely
+ aloof from his own and just as legitimate as those that occupied him.
+ Evidently these girls passionately desired one thing—to carry away
+ and eat those green plums without being caught—and Prince Andrew
+ shared their wish for the success of their enterprise. He could not resist
+ looking at them once more. Believing their danger past, they sprang from
+ their ambush and, chirruping something in their shrill little voices and
+ holding up their skirts, their bare little sunburned feet scampered
+ merrily and quickly across the meadow grass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew was somewhat refreshed by having ridden off the dusty
+ highroad along which the troops were moving. But not far from Bald Hills
+ he again came out on the road and overtook his regiment at its halting
+ place by the dam of a small pond. It was past one o’clock. The sun, a red
+ ball through the dust, burned and scorched his back intolerably through
+ his black coat. The dust always hung motionless above the buzz of talk
+ that came from the resting troops. There was no wind. As he crossed the
+ dam Prince Andrew smelled the ooze and freshness of the pond. He longed to
+ get into that water, however dirty it might be, and he glanced round at
+ the pool from whence came sounds of shrieks and laughter. The small,
+ muddy, green pond had risen visibly more than a foot, flooding the dam,
+ because it was full of the naked white bodies of soldiers with brick-red
+ hands, necks, and faces, who were splashing about in it. All this naked
+ white human flesh, laughing and shrieking, floundered about in that dirty
+ pool like carp stuffed into a watering can, and the suggestion of
+ merriment in that floundering mass rendered it specially pathetic.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One fair-haired young soldier of the third company, whom Prince Andrew
+ knew and who had a strap round the calf of one leg, crossed himself,
+ stepped back to get a good run, and plunged into the water; another, a
+ dark noncommissioned officer who was always shaggy, stood up to his waist
+ in the water joyfully wriggling his muscular figure and snorted with
+ satisfaction as he poured the water over his head with hands blackened to
+ the wrists. There were sounds of men slapping one another, yelling, and
+ puffing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Everywhere on the bank, on the dam, and in the pond, there was healthy,
+ white, muscular flesh. The officer, Timókhin, with his red little nose,
+ standing on the dam wiping himself with a towel, felt confused at seeing
+ the prince, but made up his mind to address him nevertheless.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s very nice, your excellency! Wouldn’t you like to?” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s dirty,” replied Prince Andrew, making a grimace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We’ll clear it out for you in a minute,” said Timókhin, and, still
+ undressed, ran off to clear the men out of the pond.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The prince wants to bathe.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What prince? Ours?” said many voices, and the men were in such haste to
+ clear out that the prince could hardly stop them. He decided that he would
+ rather wash himself with water in the barn.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Flesh, bodies, cannon fodder!” he thought, and he looked at his own naked
+ body and shuddered, not from cold but from a sense of disgust and horror
+ he did not himself understand, aroused by the sight of that immense number
+ of bodies splashing about in the dirty pond.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ On the seventh of August Prince Bagratión wrote as follows from his
+ quarters at Mikháylovna on the Smolénsk road:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dear Count Aléxis Andréevich—(He was writing to Arakchéev but knew
+ that his letter would be read by the Emperor, and therefore weighed every
+ word in it to the best of his ability.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ I expect the Minister (Barclay de Tolly) has already reported the
+ abandonment of Smolénsk to the enemy. It is pitiable and sad, and the
+ whole army is in despair that this most important place has been wantonly
+ abandoned. I, for my part, begged him personally most urgently and finally
+ wrote him, but nothing would induce him to consent. I swear to you on my
+ honor that Napoleon was in such a fix as never before and might have lost
+ half his army but could not have taken Smolénsk. Our troops fought, and
+ are fighting, as never before. With fifteen thousand men I held the enemy
+ at bay for thirty-five hours and beat him; but he would not hold out even
+ for fourteen hours. It is disgraceful, a stain on our army, and as for
+ him, he ought, it seems to me, not to live. If he reports that our losses
+ were great, it is not true; perhaps about four thousand, not more, and not
+ even that; but even were they ten thousand, that’s war! But the enemy has
+ lost masses....
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What would it have cost him to hold out for another two days? They would
+ have had to retire of their own accord, for they had no water for men or
+ horses. He gave me his word he would not retreat, but suddenly sent
+ instructions that he was retiring that night. We cannot fight in this way,
+ or we may soon bring the enemy to Moscow....
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There is a rumor that you are thinking of peace. God forbid that you
+ should make peace after all our sacrifices and such insane retreats! You
+ would set all Russia against you and everyone of us would feel ashamed to
+ wear the uniform. If it has come to this—we must fight as long as
+ Russia can and as long as there are men able to stand....
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One man ought to be in command, and not two. Your Minister may perhaps be
+ good as a Minister, but as a general he is not merely bad but execrable,
+ yet to him is entrusted the fate of our whole country.... I am really
+ frantic with vexation; forgive my writing boldly. It is clear that the man
+ who advocates the conclusion of a peace, and that the Minister should
+ command the army, does not love our sovereign and desires the ruin of us
+ all. So I write you frankly: call out the militia. For the Minister is
+ leading these visitors after him to Moscow in a most masterly way. The
+ whole army feels great suspicion of the Imperial aide-de-camp Wolzogen. He
+ is said to be more Napoleon’s man than ours, and he is always advising the
+ Minister. I am not merely civil to him but obey him like a corporal,
+ though I am his senior. This is painful, but, loving my benefactor and
+ sovereign, I submit. Only I am sorry for the Emperor that he entrusts our
+ fine army to such as he. Consider that on our retreat we have lost by
+ fatigue and left in the hospital more than fifteen thousand men, and had
+ we attacked this would not have happened. Tell me, for God’s sake, what
+ will Russia, our mother Russia, say to our being so frightened, and why
+ are we abandoning our good and gallant Fatherland to such rabble and
+ implanting feelings of hatred and shame in all our subjects? What are we
+ scared at and of whom are we afraid? I am not to blame that the Minister
+ is vacillating, a coward, dense, dilatory, and has all bad qualities. The
+ whole army bewails it and calls down curses upon him....
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ Among the innumerable categories applicable to the phenomena of human life
+ one may discriminate between those in which substance prevails and those
+ in which form prevails. To the latter—as distinguished from village,
+ country, provincial, or even Moscow life—we may allot Petersburg
+ life, and especially the life of its salons. That life of the salons is
+ unchanging. Since the year 1805 we had made peace and had again quarreled
+ with Bonaparte and had made constitutions and unmade them again, but the
+ salons of Anna Pávlovna and Hélène remained just as they had been—the
+ one seven and the other five years before. At Anna Pávlovna’s they talked
+ with perplexity of Bonaparte’s successes just as before and saw in them
+ and in the subservience shown to him by the European sovereigns a
+ malicious conspiracy, the sole object of which was to cause unpleasantness
+ and anxiety to the court circle of which Anna Pávlovna was the
+ representative. And in Hélène’s salon, which Rumyántsev himself honored
+ with his visits, regarding Hélène as a remarkably intelligent woman, they
+ talked with the same ecstasy in 1812 as in 1808 of the “great nation” and
+ the “great man,” and regretted our rupture with France, a rupture which,
+ according to them, ought to be promptly terminated by peace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of late, since the Emperor’s return from the army, there had been some
+ excitement in these conflicting salon circles and some demonstrations of
+ hostility to one another, but each camp retained its own tendency. In Anna
+ Pávlovna’s circle only those Frenchmen were admitted who were deep-rooted
+ legitimists, and patriotic views were expressed to the effect that one
+ ought not to go to the French theater and that to maintain the French
+ troupe was costing the government as much as a whole army corps. The
+ progress of the war was eagerly followed, and only the reports most
+ flattering to our army were circulated. In the French circle of Hélène and
+ Rumyántsev the reports of the cruelty of the enemy and of the war were
+ contradicted and all Napoleon’s attempts at conciliation were discussed.
+ In that circle they discountenanced those who advised hurried preparations
+ for a removal to Kazán of the court and the girls’ educational
+ establishments under the patronage of the Dowager Empress. In Hélène’s
+ circle the war in general was regarded as a series of formal
+ demonstrations which would very soon end in peace, and the view prevailed
+ expressed by Bilíbin—who now in Petersburg was quite at home in
+ Hélène’s house, which every clever man was obliged to visit—that not
+ by gunpowder but by those who invented it would matters be settled. In
+ that circle the Moscow enthusiasm—news of which had reached
+ Petersburg simultaneously with the Emperor’s return—was ridiculed
+ sarcastically and very cleverly, though with much caution.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Pávlovna’s circle on the contrary was enraptured by this enthusiasm
+ and spoke of it as Plutarch speaks of the deeds of the ancients. Prince
+ Vasíli, who still occupied his former important posts, formed a connecting
+ link between these two circles. He visited his “good friend Anna Pávlovna”
+ as well as his daughter’s “diplomatic salon,” and often in his constant
+ comings and goings between the two camps became confused and said at
+ Hélène’s what he should have said at Anna Pávlovna’s and vice versa.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon after the Emperor’s return Prince Vasíli in a conversation about the
+ war at Anna Pávlovna’s severely condemned Barclay de Tolly, but was
+ undecided as to who ought to be appointed commander in chief. One of the
+ visitors, usually spoken of as “a man of great merit,” having described
+ how he had that day seen Kutúzov, the newly chosen chief of the Petersburg
+ militia, presiding over the enrollment of recruits at the Treasury,
+ cautiously ventured to suggest that Kutúzov would be the man to satisfy
+ all requirements.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Pávlovna remarked with a melancholy smile that Kutúzov had done
+ nothing but cause the Emperor annoyance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have talked and talked at the Assembly of the Nobility,” Prince Vasíli
+ interrupted, “but they did not listen to me. I told them his election as
+ chief of the militia would not please the Emperor. They did not listen to
+ me.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s all this mania for opposition,” he went on. “And who for? It is all
+ because we want to ape the foolish enthusiasm of those Muscovites,” Prince
+ Vasíli continued, forgetting for a moment that though at Hélène’s one had
+ to ridicule the Moscow enthusiasm, at Anna Pávlovna’s one had to be
+ ecstatic about it. But he retrieved his mistake at once. “Now, is it
+ suitable that Count Kutúzov, the oldest general in Russia, should preside
+ at that tribunal? He will get nothing for his pains! How could they make a
+ man commander in chief who cannot mount a horse, who drops asleep at a
+ council, and has the very worst morals! A good reputation he made for
+ himself at Bucharest! I don’t speak of his capacity as a general, but at a
+ time like this how they appoint a decrepit, blind old man, positively
+ blind? A fine idea to have a blind general! He can’t see anything. To play
+ blindman’s buff? He can’t see at all!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No one replied to his remarks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This was quite correct on the twenty-fourth of July. But on the
+ twenty-ninth of July Kutúzov received the title of Prince. This might
+ indicate a wish to get rid of him, and therefore Prince Vasíli’s opinion
+ continued to be correct though he was not now in any hurry to express it.
+ But on the eighth of August a committee, consisting of Field Marshal
+ Saltykóv, Arakchéev, Vyazmítinov, Lopukhín, and Kochubéy met to consider
+ the progress of the war. This committee came to the conclusion that our
+ failures were due to a want of unity in the command and though the members
+ of the committee were aware of the Emperor’s dislike of Kutúzov, after a
+ short deliberation they agreed to advise his appointment as commander in
+ chief. That same day Kutúzov was appointed commander in chief with full
+ powers over the armies and over the whole region occupied by them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the ninth of August Prince Vasíli at Anna Pávlovna’s again met the “man
+ of great merit.” The latter was very attentive to Anna Pávlovna because he
+ wanted to be appointed director of one of the educational establishments
+ for young ladies. Prince Vasíli entered the room with the air of a happy
+ conqueror who has attained the object of his desires.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, have you heard the great news? Prince Kutúzov is field marshal! All
+ dissensions are at an end! I am so glad, so delighted! At last we have a
+ man!” said he, glancing sternly and significantly round at everyone in the
+ drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The “man of great merit,” despite his desire to obtain the post of
+ director, could not refrain from reminding Prince Vasíli of his former
+ opinion. Though this was impolite to Prince Vasíli in Anna Pávlovna’s
+ drawing room, and also to Anna Pávlovna herself who had received the news
+ with delight, he could not resist the temptation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But, Prince, they say he is blind!” said he, reminding Prince Vasíli of
+ his own words.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh? Nonsense! He sees well enough,” said Prince Vasíli rapidly, in a deep
+ voice and with a slight cough—the voice and cough with which he was
+ wont to dispose of all difficulties.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He sees well enough,” he added. “And what I am so pleased about,” he went
+ on, “is that our sovereign has given him full powers over all the armies
+ and the whole region—powers no commander in chief ever had before.
+ He is a second autocrat,” he concluded with a victorious smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “God grant it! God grant it!” said Anna Pávlovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The “man of great merit,” who was still a novice in court circles,
+ wishing to flatter Anna Pávlovna by defending her former position on this
+ question, observed:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is said that the Emperor was reluctant to give Kutúzov those powers.
+ They say he blushed like a girl to whom Joconde is read, when he said to
+ Kutúzov: ‘Your Emperor and the Fatherland award you this honor.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Perhaps the heart took no part in that speech,” said Anna Pávlovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, no, no!” warmly rejoined Prince Vasíli, who would not now yield
+ Kutúzov to anyone; in his opinion Kutúzov was not only admirable himself,
+ but was adored by everybody. “No, that’s impossible,” said he,
+ “for our sovereign appreciated him so highly before.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “God grant only that Prince Kutúzov assumes real power and does not allow
+ anyone to put a spoke in his wheel,” observed Anna Pávlovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Understanding at once to whom she alluded, Prince Vasíli said in a
+ whisper:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know for a fact that Kutúzov made it an absolute condition that the
+ Tsarévich should not be with the army. Do you know what he said to the
+ Emperor?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Prince Vasíli repeated the words supposed to have been spoken by
+ Kutúzov to the Emperor. “I can neither punish him if he does wrong nor
+ reward him if he does right.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, a very wise man is Prince Kutúzov! I have known him a long time!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They even say,” remarked the “man of great merit” who did not yet possess
+ courtly tact, “that his excellency made it an express condition that the
+ sovereign himself should not be with the army.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as he said this both Prince Vasíli and Anna Pávlovna turned away
+ from him and glanced sadly at one another with a sigh at his naïveté.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ While this was taking place in Petersburg the French had already passed
+ Smolénsk and were drawing nearer and nearer to Moscow. Napoleon’s
+ historian Thiers, like other of his historians, trying to justify his hero
+ says that he was drawn to the walls of Moscow against his will. He is as
+ right as other historians who look for the explanation of historic events
+ in the will of one man; he is as right as the Russian historians who
+ maintain that Napoleon was drawn to Moscow by the skill of the Russian
+ commanders. Here besides the law of retrospection, which regards all the
+ past as a preparation for events that subsequently occur, the law of
+ reciprocity comes in, confusing the whole matter. A good chessplayer
+ having lost a game is sincerely convinced that his loss resulted from a
+ mistake he made and looks for that mistake in the opening, but forgets
+ that at each stage of the game there were similar mistakes and that none
+ of his moves were perfect. He only notices the mistake to which he pays
+ attention, because his opponent took advantage of it. How much more
+ complex than this is the game of war, which occurs under certain limits of
+ time, and where it is not one will that manipulates lifeless objects, but
+ everything results from innumerable conflicts of various wills!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After Smolénsk Napoleon sought a battle beyond Dorogobúzh at Vyázma, and
+ then at Tsárevo-Zaymíshche, but it happened that owing to a conjunction of
+ innumerable circumstances the Russians could not give battle till they
+ reached Borodinó, seventy miles from Moscow. From Vyázma Napoleon ordered
+ a direct advance on Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Moscou, la capitale asiatique de ce grand empire, la ville sacrée des
+ peuples d’Alexandre, Moscou avec ses innombrables églises en forme de
+ pagodes chinoises , * this Moscow gave Napoleon’s imagination no rest. On
+ the march from Vyázma to Tsárevo-Zaymíshche he rode his light bay
+ bobtailed ambler accompanied by his Guards, his bodyguard, his pages, and
+ aides-de-camp. Berthier, his chief of staff, dropped behind to question a
+ Russian prisoner captured by the cavalry. Followed by Lelorgne d’Ideville,
+ an interpreter, he overtook Napoleon at a gallop and reined in his horse
+ with an amused expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Moscow, the Asiatic capital of this great empire, the
+ sacred city of Alexander’s people, Moscow with its
+ innumerable churches shaped like Chinese pagodas.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well?” asked Napoleon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One of Plátov’s Cossacks says that Plátov’s corps is joining up with the
+ main army and that Kutúzov has been appointed commander in chief. He is a
+ very shrewd and garrulous fellow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon smiled and told them to give the Cossack a horse and bring the
+ man to him. He wished to talk to him himself. Several adjutants galloped
+ off, and an hour later, Lavrúshka, the serf Denísov had handed over to
+ Rostóv, rode up to Napoleon in an orderly’s jacket and on a French cavalry
+ saddle, with a merry, and tipsy face. Napoleon told him to ride by his
+ side and began questioning him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are a Cossack?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, a Cossack, your Honor.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Cossack, not knowing in what company he was, for Napoleon’s plain
+ appearance had nothing about it that would reveal to an Oriental mind the
+ presence of a monarch, talked with extreme familiarity of the incidents of
+ the war,” says Thiers, narrating this episode. In reality Lavrúshka,
+ having got drunk the day before and left his master dinnerless, had been
+ whipped and sent to the village in quest of chickens, where he engaged in
+ looting till the French took him prisoner. Lavrúshka was one of those
+ coarse, bare-faced lackeys who have seen all sorts of things, consider it
+ necessary to do everything in a mean and cunning way, are ready to render
+ any sort of service to their master, and are keen at guessing their
+ master’s baser impulses, especially those prompted by vanity and
+ pettiness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Finding himself in the company of Napoleon, whose identity he had easily
+ and surely recognized, Lavrúshka was not in the least abashed but merely
+ did his utmost to gain his new master’s favor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He knew very well that this was Napoleon, but Napoleon’s presence could no
+ more intimidate him than Rostóv’s, or a sergeant major’s with the rods,
+ would have done, for he had nothing that either the sergeant major or
+ Napoleon could deprive him of.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So he rattled on, telling all the gossip he had heard among the orderlies.
+ Much of it true. But when Napoleon asked him whether the Russians thought
+ they would beat Bonaparte or not, Lavrúshka screwed up his eyes and
+ considered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In this question he saw subtle cunning, as men of his type see cunning in
+ everything, so he frowned and did not answer immediately.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s like this,” he said thoughtfully, “if there’s a battle soon, yours
+ will win. That’s right. But if three days pass, then after that, well,
+ then that same battle will not soon be over.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lelorgne d’Ideville smilingly interpreted this speech to Napoleon thus:
+ “If a battle takes place within the next three days the French will win,
+ but if later, God knows what will happen.” Napoleon did not smile, though
+ he was evidently in high good humor, and he ordered these words to be
+ repeated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lavrúshka noticed this and to entertain him further, pretending not to
+ know who Napoleon was, added:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We know that you have Bonaparte and that he has beaten everybody in the
+ world, but we are a different matter...”—without knowing why or how
+ this bit of boastful patriotism slipped out at the end.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The interpreter translated these words without the last phrase, and
+ Bonaparte smiled. “The young Cossack made his mighty interlocutor smile,”
+ says Thiers. After riding a few paces in silence, Napoleon turned to
+ Berthier and said he wished to see how the news that he was talking to the
+ Emperor himself, to that very Emperor who had written his immortally
+ victorious name on the Pyramids, would affect this enfant du Don . *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Child of the Don.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The fact was accordingly conveyed to Lavrúshka.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lavrúshka, understanding that this was done to perplex him and that
+ Napoleon expected him to be frightened, to gratify his new masters
+ promptly pretended to be astonished and awe-struck, opened his eyes wide,
+ and assumed the expression he usually put on when taken to be whipped. “As
+ soon as Napoleon’s interpreter had spoken,” says Thiers, “the Cossack,
+ seized by amazement, did not utter another word, but rode on, his eyes
+ fixed on the conqueror whose fame had reached him across the steppes of
+ the East. All his loquacity was suddenly arrested and replaced by a naïve
+ and silent feeling of admiration. Napoleon, after making the Cossack a
+ present, had him set free like a bird restored to its native fields.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon rode on, dreaming of the Moscow that so appealed to his
+ imagination, and “the bird restored to its native fields” galloped to our
+ outposts, inventing on the way all that had not taken place but that he
+ meant to relate to his comrades. What had really taken place he did not
+ wish to relate because it seemed to him not worth telling. He found the
+ Cossacks, inquired for the regiment operating with Plátov’s detachment and
+ by evening found his master, Nicholas Rostóv, quartered at Yankóvo. Rostóv
+ was just mounting to go for a ride round the neighboring villages with
+ Ilyín; he let Lavrúshka have another horse and took him along with him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ Princess Mary was not in Moscow and out of danger as Prince Andrew
+ supposed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the return of Alpátych from Smolénsk the old prince suddenly seemed
+ to awake as from a dream. He ordered the militiamen to be called up from
+ the villages and armed, and wrote a letter to the commander in chief
+ informing him that he had resolved to remain at Bald Hills to the last
+ extremity and to defend it, leaving to the commander in chief’s discretion
+ to take measures or not for the defense of Bald Hills, where one of
+ Russia’s oldest generals would be captured or killed, and he announced to
+ his household that he would remain at Bald Hills.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But while himself remaining, he gave instructions for the departure of the
+ princess and Dessalles with the little prince to Boguchárovo and thence to
+ Moscow. Princess Mary, alarmed by her father’s feverish and sleepless
+ activity after his previous apathy, could not bring herself to leave him
+ alone and for the first time in her life ventured to disobey him. She
+ refused to go away and her father’s fury broke over her in a terrible
+ storm. He repeated every injustice he had ever inflicted on her. Trying to
+ convict her, he told her she had worn him out, had caused his quarrel with
+ his son, had harbored nasty suspicions of him, making it the object of her
+ life to poison his existence, and he drove her from his study telling her
+ that if she did not go away it was all the same to him. He declared that
+ he did not wish to remember her existence and warned her not to dare to
+ let him see her. The fact that he did not, as she had feared, order her to
+ be carried away by force but only told her not to let him see her cheered
+ Princess Mary. She knew it was a proof that in the depth of his soul he
+ was glad she was remaining at home and had not gone away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The morning after little Nicholas had left, the old prince donned his full
+ uniform and prepared to visit the commander in chief. His calèche was
+ already at the door. Princess Mary saw him walk out of the house in his
+ uniform wearing all his orders and go down the garden to review his armed
+ peasants and domestic serfs. She sat by the window listening to his voice
+ which reached her from the garden. Suddenly several men came running up
+ the avenue with frightened faces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary ran out to the porch, down the flower-bordered path, and
+ into the avenue. A large crowd of militiamen and domestics were moving
+ toward her, and in their midst several men were supporting by the armpits
+ and dragging along a little old man in a uniform and decorations. She ran
+ up to him and, in the play of the sunlight that fell in small round spots
+ through the shade of the lime-tree avenue, could not be sure what change
+ there was in his face. All she could see was that his former stern and
+ determined expression had altered to one of timidity and submission. On
+ seeing his daughter he moved his helpless lips and made a hoarse sound. It
+ was impossible to make out what he wanted. He was lifted up, carried to
+ his study, and laid on the very couch he had so feared of late.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctor, who was fetched that same night, bled him and said that the
+ prince had had a seizure paralyzing his right side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was becoming more and more dangerous to remain at Bald Hills, and next
+ day they moved the prince to Boguchárovo, the doctor accompanying him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By the time they reached Boguchárovo, Dessalles and the little prince had
+ already left for Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For three weeks the old prince lay stricken by paralysis in the new house
+ Prince Andrew had built at Boguchárovo, ever in the same state, getting
+ neither better nor worse. He was unconscious and lay like a distorted
+ corpse. He muttered unceasingly, his eyebrows and lips twitching, and it
+ was impossible to tell whether he understood what was going on around him
+ or not. One thing was certain—that he was suffering and wished to
+ say something. But what it was, no one could tell: it might be some
+ caprice of a sick and half-crazy man, or it might relate to public
+ affairs, or possibly to family concerns.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctor said this restlessness did not mean anything and was due to
+ physical causes; but Princess Mary thought he wished to tell her
+ something, and the fact that her presence always increased his
+ restlessness confirmed her opinion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was evidently suffering both physically and mentally. There was no hope
+ of recovery. It was impossible for him to travel, it would not do to let
+ him die on the road. “Would it not be better if the end did come, the very
+ end?” Princess Mary sometimes thought. Night and day, hardly sleeping at
+ all, she watched him and, terrible to say, often watched him not with hope
+ of finding signs of improvement but wishing to find symptoms of the
+ approach of the end.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Strange as it was to her to acknowledge this feeling in herself, yet there
+ it was. And what seemed still more terrible to her was that since her
+ father’s illness began (perhaps even sooner, when she stayed with him
+ expecting something to happen), all the personal desires and hopes that
+ had been forgotten or sleeping within her had awakened. Thoughts that had
+ not entered her mind for years—thoughts of a life free from the fear
+ of her father, and even the possibility of love and of family happiness—floated
+ continually in her imagination like temptations of the devil. Thrust them
+ aside as she would, questions continually recurred to her as to how she
+ would order her life now, after that . These were temptations of the devil
+ and Princess Mary knew it. She knew that the sole weapon against him was
+ prayer, and she tried to pray. She assumed an attitude of prayer, looked
+ at the icons, repeated the words of a prayer, but she could not pray. She
+ felt that a different world had now taken possession of her—the life
+ of a world of strenuous and free activity, quite opposed to the spiritual
+ world in which till now she had been confined and in which her greatest
+ comfort had been prayer. She could not pray, could not weep, and worldly
+ cares took possession of her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was becoming dangerous to remain in Boguchárovo. News of the approach
+ of the French came from all sides, and in one village, ten miles from
+ Boguchárovo, a homestead had been looted by French marauders.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctor insisted on the necessity of moving the prince; the provincial
+ Marshal of the Nobility sent an official to Princess Mary to persuade her
+ to get away as quickly as possible, and the head of the rural police
+ having come to Boguchárovo urged the same thing, saying that the French
+ were only some twenty-five miles away, that French proclamations were
+ circulating in the villages, and that if the princess did not take her
+ father away before the fifteenth, he could not answer for the
+ consequences.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess decided to leave on the fifteenth. The cares of preparation
+ and giving orders, for which everyone came to her, occupied her all day.
+ She spent the night of the fourteenth as usual, without undressing, in the
+ room next to the one where the prince lay. Several times, waking up, she
+ heard his groans and muttering, the creak of his bed, and the steps of
+ Tíkhon and the doctor when they turned him over. Several times she
+ listened at the door, and it seemed to her that his mutterings were louder
+ than usual and that they turned him over oftener. She could not sleep and
+ several times went to the door and listened, wishing to enter but not
+ deciding to do so. Though he did not speak, Princess Mary saw and knew how
+ unpleasant every sign of anxiety on his account was to him. She had
+ noticed with what dissatisfaction he turned from the look she sometimes
+ involuntarily fixed on him. She knew that her going in during the night at
+ an unusual hour would irritate him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But never had she felt so grieved for him or so much afraid of losing him.
+ She recalled all her life with him and in every word and act of his found
+ an expression of his love of her. Occasionally amid these memories
+ temptations of the devil would surge into her imagination: thoughts of how
+ things would be after his death, and how her new, liberated life would be
+ ordered. But she drove these thoughts away with disgust. Toward morning he
+ became quiet and she fell asleep.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She woke late. That sincerity which often comes with waking showed her
+ clearly what chiefly concerned her about her father’s illness. On waking
+ she listened to what was going on behind the door and, hearing him groan,
+ said to herself with a sigh that things were still the same.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what could have happened? What did I want? I want his death!” she
+ cried with a feeling of loathing for herself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She washed, dressed, said her prayers, and went out to the porch. In front
+ of it stood carriages without horses and things were being packed into the
+ vehicles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a warm, gray morning. Princess Mary stopped at the porch, still
+ horrified by her spiritual baseness and trying to arrange her thoughts
+ before going to her father. The doctor came downstairs and went out to
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is a little better today,” said he. “I was looking for
+ you. One can make out something of what he is saying. His head is clearer.
+ Come in, he is asking for you....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary’s heart beat so violently at this news that she grew pale
+ and leaned against the wall to keep from falling. To see him, talk to him,
+ feel his eyes on her now that her whole soul was overflowing with those
+ dreadful, wicked temptations, was a torment of joy and terror.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come,” said the doctor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary entered her father’s room and went up to his bed. He was
+ lying on his back propped up high, and his small bony hands with their
+ knotted purple veins were lying on the quilt; his left eye gazed straight
+ before him, his right eye was awry, and his brows and lips motionless. He
+ seemed altogether so thin, small, and pathetic. His face seemed to have
+ shriveled or melted; his features had grown smaller. Princess Mary went up
+ and kissed his hand. His left hand pressed hers so that she understood
+ that he had long been waiting for her to come. He twitched her hand, and
+ his brows and lips quivered angrily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She looked at him in dismay trying to guess what he wanted of her. When
+ she changed her position so that his left eye could see her face he calmed
+ down, not taking his eyes off her for some seconds. Then his lips and
+ tongue moved, sounds came, and he began to speak, gazing timidly and
+ imploringly at her, evidently afraid that she might not understand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Straining all her faculties Princess Mary looked at him. The comic efforts
+ with which he moved his tongue made her drop her eyes and with difficulty
+ repress the sobs that rose to her throat. He said something, repeating the
+ same words several times. She could not understand them, but tried to
+ guess what he was saying and inquiringly repeated the words he uttered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mmm...ar...ate...ate...” he repeated several times.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was quite impossible to understand these sounds. The doctor thought he
+ had guessed them, and inquiringly repeated: “Mary, are you
+ afraid?” The prince shook his head, again repeated the same sounds.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My mind, my mind aches?” questioned Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He made a mumbling sound in confirmation of this, took her hand, and began
+ pressing it to different parts of his breast as if trying to find the
+ right place for it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Always thoughts... about you... thoughts...” he then uttered much more
+ clearly than he had done before, now that he was sure of being understood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary pressed her head against his hand, trying to hide her sobs
+ and tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He moved his hand over her hair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have been calling you all night...” he brought out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If only I had known...” she said through her tears. “I was afraid to come
+ in.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He pressed her hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Weren’t you asleep?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I did not sleep,” said Princess Mary, shaking her head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Unconsciously imitating her father, she now tried to express herself as he
+ did, as much as possible by signs, and her tongue too seemed to move with
+ difficulty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear one... Dearest...” Princess Mary could not quite make out what he
+ had said, but from his look it was clear that he had uttered a tender
+ caressing word such as he had never used to her before. “Why didn’t you
+ come in?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I was wishing for his death!” thought Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was silent awhile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank you... daughter dear!... for all, for all... forgive!... thank
+ you!... forgive!... thank you!...” and tears began to flow from his eyes.
+ “Call Andrew!” he said suddenly, and a childish, timid expression of doubt
+ showed itself on his face as he spoke.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He himself seemed aware that his demand was meaningless. So at least it
+ seemed to Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have a letter from him,” she replied.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He glanced at her with timid surprise.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where is he?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s with the army, Father, at Smolénsk.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He closed his eyes and remained silent a long time. Then as if in answer
+ to his doubts and to confirm the fact that now he understood and
+ remembered everything, he nodded his head and reopened his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” he said, softly and distinctly. “Russia has perished. They’ve
+ destroyed her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And he began to sob, and again tears flowed from his eyes. Princess Mary
+ could no longer restrain herself and wept while she gazed at his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again he closed his eyes. His sobs ceased, he pointed to his eyes, and
+ Tíkhon, understanding him, wiped away the tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then he again opened his eyes and said something none of them could
+ understand for a long time, till at last Tíkhon understood and repeated
+ it. Princess Mary had sought the meaning of his words in the mood in which
+ he had just been speaking. She thought he was speaking of Russia, or
+ Prince Andrew, of herself, of his grandson, or of his own death, and so
+ she could not guess his words.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Put on your white dress. I like it,” was what he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having understood this Princess Mary sobbed still louder, and the doctor
+ taking her arm led her out to the veranda, soothing her and trying to
+ persuade her to prepare for her journey. When she had left the room the
+ prince again began speaking about his son, about the war, and about the
+ Emperor, angrily twitching his brows and raising his hoarse voice, and
+ then he had a second and final stroke.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary stayed on the veranda. The day had cleared, it was hot and
+ sunny. She could understand nothing, think of nothing and feel nothing,
+ except passionate love for her father, love such as she thought she had
+ never felt till that moment. She ran out sobbing into the garden and as
+ far as the pond, along the avenues of young lime trees Prince Andrew had
+ planted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes... I... I... I wished for his death! Yes, I wanted it to end
+ quicker.... I wished to be at peace.... And what will become of me? What
+ use will peace be when he is no longer here?” Princess Mary murmured,
+ pacing the garden with hurried steps and pressing her hands to her bosom
+ which heaved with convulsive sobs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When she had completed the tour of the garden, which brought her again to
+ the house, she saw Mademoiselle Bourienne—who had remained at
+ Boguchárovo and did not wish to leave it—coming toward her with a
+ stranger. This was the Marshal of the Nobility of the district, who had
+ come personally to point out to the princess the necessity for her prompt
+ departure. Princess Mary listened without understanding him; she led him
+ to the house, offered him lunch, and sat down with him. Then, excusing
+ herself, she went to the door of the old prince’s room. The doctor came
+ out with an agitated face and said she could not enter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go away, Princess! Go away... go away!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She returned to the garden and sat down on the grass at the foot of the
+ slope by the pond, where no one could see her. She did not know how long
+ she had been there when she was aroused by the sound of a woman’s
+ footsteps running along the path. She rose and saw Dunyásha her maid, who
+ was evidently looking for her, and who stopped suddenly as if in alarm on
+ seeing her mistress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Please come, Princess... The Prince,” said Dunyásha in a breaking voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Immediately, I’m coming, I’m coming!” replied the princess hurriedly, not
+ giving Dunyásha time to finish what she was saying, and trying to avoid
+ seeing the girl she ran toward the house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Princess, it’s God’s will! You must be prepared for everything,” said the
+ Marshal, meeting her at the house door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let me alone; it’s not true!” she cried angrily to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctor tried to stop her. She pushed him aside and ran to her father’s
+ door. “Why are these people with frightened faces stopping me? I don’t
+ want any of them! And what are they doing here?” she thought. She opened
+ the door and the bright daylight in that previously darkened room startled
+ her. In the room were her nurse and other women. They all drew back from
+ the bed, making way for her. He was still lying on the bed as before, but
+ the stern expression of his quiet face made Princess Mary stop short on
+ the threshold.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, he’s not dead—it’s impossible!” she told herself and approached
+ him, and repressing the terror that seized her, she pressed her lips to
+ his cheek. But she stepped back immediately. All the force of the
+ tenderness she had been feeling for him vanished instantly and was
+ replaced by a feeling of horror at what lay there before her. “No, he is
+ no more! He is not, but here where he was is something unfamiliar and
+ hostile, some dreadful, terrifying, and repellent mystery!” And hiding her
+ face in her hands, Princess Mary sank into the arms of the doctor, who
+ held her up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ In the presence of Tíkhon and the doctor the women washed what had been
+ the prince, tied his head up with a handkerchief that the mouth should not
+ stiffen while open, and with another handkerchief tied together the legs
+ that were already spreading apart. Then they dressed him in uniform with
+ his decorations and placed his shriveled little body on a table. Heaven
+ only knows who arranged all this and when, but it all got done as if of
+ its own accord. Toward night candles were burning round his coffin, a pall
+ was spread over it, the floor was strewn with sprays of juniper, a printed
+ band was tucked in under his shriveled head, and in a corner of the room
+ sat a chanter reading the psalms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just as horses shy and snort and gather about a dead horse, so the inmates
+ of the house and strangers crowded into the drawing room round the coffin—the
+ Marshal, the village Elder, peasant women—and all with fixed and
+ frightened eyes, crossing themselves, bowed and kissed the old prince’s
+ cold and stiffened hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ Until Prince Andrew settled in Boguchárovo its owners had always been
+ absentees, and its peasants were of quite a different character from those
+ of Bald Hills. They differed from them in speech, dress, and disposition.
+ They were called steppe peasants. The old prince used to approve of them
+ for their endurance at work when they came to Bald Hills to help with the
+ harvest. or to dig ponds and ditches, but he disliked them for their
+ boorishness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew’s last stay at Boguchárovo, when he introduced hospitals and
+ schools and reduced the quitrent the peasants had to pay, had not softened
+ their disposition but had on the contrary strengthened in them the traits
+ of character the old prince called boorishness. Various obscure rumors
+ were always current among them: at one time a rumor that they would all be
+ enrolled as Cossacks; at another of a new religion to which they were all
+ to be converted; then of some proclamation of the Tsar’s and of an oath to
+ the Tsar Paul in 1797 (in connection with which it was rumored that
+ freedom had been granted them but the landowners had stopped it), then of
+ Peter Fëdorovich’s return to the throne in seven years’ time, when
+ everything would be made free and so “simple” that there would be no
+ restrictions. Rumors of the war with Bonaparte and his invasion were
+ connected in their minds with the same sort of vague notions of
+ Antichrist, the end of the world, and “pure freedom.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the vicinity of Boguchárovo were large villages belonging to the crown
+ or to owners whose serfs paid quitrent and could work where they pleased.
+ There were very few resident landlords in the neighborhood and also very
+ few domestic or literate serfs, and in the lives of the peasantry of those
+ parts the mysterious undercurrents in the life of the Russian people, the
+ causes and meaning of which are so baffling to contemporaries, were more
+ clearly and strongly noticeable than among others. One instance, which had
+ occurred some twenty years before, was a movement among the peasants to
+ emigrate to some unknown “warm rivers.” Hundreds of peasants, among them
+ the Boguchárovo folk, suddenly began selling their cattle and moving in
+ whole families toward the southeast. As birds migrate to somewhere beyond
+ the sea, so these men with their wives and children streamed to the
+ southeast, to parts where none of them had ever been. They set off in
+ caravans, bought their freedom one by one or ran away, and drove or walked
+ toward the “warm rivers.” Many of them were punished, some sent to
+ Siberia, many died of cold and hunger on the road, many returned of their
+ own accord, and the movement died down of itself just as it had sprung up,
+ without apparent reason. But such undercurrents still existed among the
+ people and gathered new forces ready to manifest themselves just as
+ strangely, unexpectedly, and at the same time simply, naturally, and
+ forcibly. Now in 1812, to anyone living in close touch with these people
+ it was apparent that these undercurrents were acting strongly and nearing
+ an eruption.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych, who had reached Boguchárovo shortly before the old prince’s
+ death, noticed an agitation among the peasants, and that contrary to what
+ was happening in the Bald Hills district, where over a radius of forty
+ miles all the peasants were moving away and leaving their villages to be
+ devastated by the Cossacks, the peasants in the steppe region round
+ Boguchárovo were, it was rumored, in touch with the French, received
+ leaflets from them that passed from hand to hand, and did not migrate. He
+ learned from domestic serfs loyal to him that the peasant Karp, who
+ possessed great influence in the village commune and had recently been
+ away driving a government transport, had returned with news that the
+ Cossacks were destroying deserted villages, but that the French did not
+ harm them. Alpátych also knew that on the previous day another peasant had
+ even brought from the village of Visloúkhovo, which was occupied by the
+ French, a proclamation by a French general that no harm would be done to
+ the inhabitants, and if they remained they would be paid for anything
+ taken from them. As proof of this the peasant had brought from Visloúkhovo
+ a hundred rubles in notes (he did not know that they were false) paid to
+ him in advance for hay.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ More important still, Alpátych learned that on the morning of the very day
+ he gave the village Elder orders to collect carts to move the princess’
+ luggage from Boguchárovo, there had been a village meeting at which it had
+ been decided not to move but to wait. Yet there was no time to waste. On
+ the fifteenth, the day of the old prince’s death, the Marshal had insisted
+ on Princess Mary’s leaving at once, as it was becoming dangerous. He had
+ told her that after the sixteenth he could not be responsible for what
+ might happen. On the evening of the day the old prince died the Marshal
+ went away, promising to return next day for the funeral. But this he was
+ unable to do, for he received tidings that the French had unexpectedly
+ advanced, and had barely time to remove his own family and valuables from
+ his estate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For some thirty years Boguchárovo had been managed by the village Elder,
+ Dron, whom the old prince called by the diminutive “Drónushka.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dron was one of those physically and mentally vigorous peasants who grow
+ big beards as soon as they are of age and go on unchanged till they are
+ sixty or seventy, without a gray hair or the loss of a tooth, as straight
+ and strong at sixty as at thirty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon after the migration to the “warm rivers,” in which he had taken part
+ like the rest, Dron was made village Elder and overseer of Boguchárovo,
+ and had since filled that post irreproachably for twenty-three years. The
+ peasants feared him more than they did their master. The masters, both the
+ old prince and the young, and the steward respected him and jestingly
+ called him “the Minister.” During the whole time of his service Dron had
+ never been drunk or ill, never after sleepless nights or the hardest tasks
+ had he shown the least fatigue, and though he could not read he had never
+ forgotten a single money account or the number of quarters of flour in any
+ of the endless cartloads he sold for the prince, nor a single shock of the
+ whole corn crop on any single acre of the Boguchárovo fields.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych, arriving from the devastated Bald Hills estate, sent for his
+ Dron on the day of the prince’s funeral and told him to have twelve horses
+ got ready for the princess’ carriages and eighteen carts for the things to
+ be removed from Boguchárovo. Though the peasants paid quitrent, Alpátych
+ thought no difficulty would be made about complying with this order, for
+ there were two hundred and thirty households at work in Boguchárovo and
+ the peasants were well to do. But on hearing the order Dron lowered his
+ eyes and remained silent. Alpátych named certain peasants he knew, from
+ whom he told him to take the carts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dron replied that the horses of these peasants were away carting. Alpátych
+ named others, but they too, according to Dron, had no horses available:
+ some horses were carting for the government, others were too weak, and
+ others had died for want of fodder. It seemed that no horses could be had
+ even for the carriages, much less for the carting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych looked intently at Dron and frowned. Just as Dron was a model
+ village Elder, so Alpátych had not managed the prince’s estates for twenty
+ years in vain. He was a model steward, possessing in the highest degree
+ the faculty of divining the needs and instincts of those he dealt with.
+ Having glanced at Dron he at once understood that his answers did not
+ express his personal views but the general mood of the Boguchárovo
+ commune, by which the Elder had already been carried away. But he also
+ knew that Dron, who had acquired property and was hated by the commune,
+ must be hesitating between the two camps: the masters’ and the serfs’. He
+ noticed this hesitation in Dron’s look and therefore frowned and moved
+ closer up to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now just listen, Drónushka,” said he. “Don’t talk nonsense to me. His
+ excellency Prince Andrew himself gave me orders to move all the people
+ away and not leave them with the enemy, and there is an order from the
+ Tsar about it too. Anyone who stays is a traitor to the Tsar. Do you
+ hear?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I hear,” Dron answered without lifting his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych was not satisfied with this reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh, Dron, it will turn out badly!” he said, shaking his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The power is in your hands,” Dron rejoined sadly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh, Dron, drop it!” Alpátych repeated, withdrawing his hand from his
+ bosom and solemnly pointing to the floor at Dron’s feet. “I can see
+ through you and three yards into the ground under you,” he continued,
+ gazing at the floor in front of Dron.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dron was disconcerted, glanced furtively at Alpátych and again lowered his
+ eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You drop this nonsense and tell the people to get ready to leave their
+ homes and go to Moscow and to get carts ready for tomorrow morning for the
+ princess’ things. And don’t go to any meeting yourself, do you hear?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dron suddenly fell on his knees.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yákov Alpátych, discharge me! Take the keys from me and discharge me, for
+ Christ’s sake!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stop that!” cried Alpátych sternly. “I see through you and three yards
+ under you,” he repeated, knowing that his skill in beekeeping, his
+ knowledge of the right time to sow the oats, and the fact that he had been
+ able to retain the old prince’s favor for twenty years had long since
+ gained him the reputation of being a wizard, and that the power of seeing
+ three yards under a man is considered an attribute of wizards.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dron got up and was about to say something, but Alpátych interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it you have got into your heads, eh?... What are you thinking of,
+ eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What am I to do with the people?” said Dron. “They’re quite beside
+ themselves; I have already told them...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘Told them,’ I dare say!” said Alpátych. “Are they drinking?” he asked
+ abruptly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Quite beside themselves, Yákov Alpátych; they’ve fetched another barrel.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, then, listen! I’ll go to the police officer, and you tell them so,
+ and that they must stop this and the carts must be got ready.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I understand.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych did not insist further. He had managed people for a long time and
+ knew that the chief way to make them obey is to show no suspicion that
+ they can possibly disobey. Having wrung a submissive “I understand” from
+ Dron, Alpátych contented himself with that, though he not only doubted but
+ felt almost certain that without the help of troops the carts would not be
+ forthcoming.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And so it was, for when evening came no carts had been provided. In the
+ village, outside the drink shop, another meeting was being held, which
+ decided that the horses should be driven out into the woods and the carts
+ should not be provided. Without saying anything of this to the princess,
+ Alpátych had his own belongings taken out of the carts which had arrived
+ from Bald Hills and had those horses got ready for the princess’
+ carriages. Meanwhile he went himself to the police authorities.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ After her father’s funeral Princess Mary shut herself up in her room and
+ did not admit anyone. A maid came to the door to say that Alpátych was
+ asking for orders about their departure. (This was before his talk with
+ Dron.) Princess Mary raised herself on the sofa on which she had been
+ lying and replied through the closed door that she did not mean to go away
+ and begged to be left in peace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The windows of the room in which she was lying looked westward. She lay on
+ the sofa with her face to the wall, fingering the buttons of the leather
+ cushion and seeing nothing but that cushion, and her confused thoughts
+ were centered on one subject—the irrevocability of death and her own
+ spiritual baseness, which she had not suspected, but which had shown
+ itself during her father’s illness. She wished to pray but did not dare
+ to, dared not in her present state of mind address herself to God. She lay
+ for a long time in that position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The sun had reached the other side of the house, and its slanting rays
+ shone into the open window, lighting up the room and part of the morocco
+ cushion at which Princess Mary was looking. The flow of her thoughts
+ suddenly stopped. Unconsciously she sat up, smoothed her hair, got up, and
+ went to the window, involuntarily inhaling the freshness of the clear but
+ windy evening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, you can well enjoy the evening now! He is gone and no one will
+ hinder you,” she said to herself, and sinking into a chair she let her
+ head fall on the window sill.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Someone spoke her name in a soft and tender voice from the garden and
+ kissed her head. She looked up. It was Mademoiselle Bourienne in a black
+ dress and weepers. She softly approached Princess Mary, sighed, kissed
+ her, and immediately began to cry. The princess looked up at her. All
+ their former disharmony and her own jealousy recurred to her mind. But she
+ remembered too how he had changed of late toward Mademoiselle Bourienne
+ and could not bear to see her, thereby showing how unjust were the
+ reproaches Princess Mary had mentally addressed to her. “Besides, is it
+ for me, for me who desired his death, to condemn anyone?” she thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary vividly pictured to herself the position of Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne, whom she had of late kept at a distance, but who yet was
+ dependent on her and living in her house. She felt sorry for her and held
+ out her hand with a glance of gentle inquiry. Mademoiselle Bourienne at
+ once began crying again and kissed that hand, speaking of the princess’
+ sorrow and making herself a partner in it. She said her only consolation
+ was the fact that the princess allowed her to share her sorrow, that all
+ the old misunderstandings should sink into nothing but this great grief;
+ that she felt herself blameless in regard to everyone, and that he , from
+ above, saw her affection and gratitude. The princess heard her, not
+ heeding her words but occasionally looking up at her and listening to the
+ sound of her voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your position is doubly terrible, dear princess,” said Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne after a pause. “I understand that you could not, and cannot,
+ think of yourself, but with my love for you I must do so.... Has Alpátych
+ been to you? Has he spoken to you of going away?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary did not answer. She did not understand who was to go or
+ where to. “Is it possible to plan or think of anything now? Is it not all
+ the same?” she thought, and did not reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know, chère Marie ,” said Mademoiselle Bourienne, “that
+ we are in danger—are surrounded by the French. It would be dangerous to move
+ now. If we go we are almost sure to be taken prisoners, and God knows...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary looked at her companion without understanding what she was
+ talking about.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, if anyone knew how little anything matters to me now,” she said. “Of
+ course I would on no account wish to go away from him.... Alpátych did say
+ something about going.... Speak to him; I can do nothing, nothing, and
+ don’t want to....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ve spoken to him. He hopes we should be in time to get away tomorrow,
+ but I think it would now be better to stay here,” said Mademoiselle
+ Bourienne. “Because, you will agree, chère Marie , to fall into the
+ hands of the soldiers or of riotous peasants would be terrible.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne took from her reticule a proclamation (not printed
+ on ordinary Russian paper) of General Rameau’s, telling people not to
+ leave their homes and that the French authorities would afford them proper
+ protection. She handed this to the princess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I think it would be best to appeal to that general,” she continued, “and
+ I am sure that all due respect would be shown you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary read the paper, and her face began to quiver with stifled
+ sobs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “From whom did you get this?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They probably recognized that I am French, by my name,” replied
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne blushing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary, with the paper in her hand, rose from the window and with a
+ pale face went out of the room and into what had been Prince Andrew’s
+ study.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dunyásha, send Alpátych, or Drónushka, or somebody to me!” she said, “and
+ tell Mademoiselle Bourienne not to come to me,” she added, hearing
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne’s voice. “We must go at once, at once!” she said,
+ appalled at the thought of being left in the hands of the French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If Prince Andrew heard that I was in the power of the French! That I, the
+ daughter of Prince Nicholas Bolkónski, asked General Rameau for protection
+ and accepted his favor!” This idea horrified her, made her shudder, blush,
+ and feel such a rush of anger and pride as she had never experienced
+ before. All that was distressing, and especially all that was humiliating,
+ in her position rose vividly to her mind. “They, the French, would settle
+ in this house: M. le Général Rameau would occupy Prince Andrew’s study and
+ amuse himself by looking through and reading his letters and papers.
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne would do the honors of Boguchárovo for him. I
+ should be given a small room as a favor, the soldiers would violate my
+ father’s newly dug grave to steal his crosses and stars, they would tell
+ me of their victories over the Russians, and would pretend to sympathize
+ with my sorrow...” thought Princess Mary, not thinking her own thoughts
+ but feeling bound to think like her father and her brother. For herself
+ she did not care where she remained or what happened to her, but she felt
+ herself the representative of her dead father and of Prince Andrew.
+ Involuntarily she thought their thoughts and felt their feelings. What
+ they would have said and what they would have done she felt bound to say
+ and do. She went into Prince Andrew’s study, trying to enter completely
+ into his ideas, and considered her position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The demands of life, which had seemed to her annihilated by her father’s
+ death, all at once rose before her with a new, previously unknown force
+ and took possession of her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Agitated and flushed she paced the room, sending now for Michael Ivánovich
+ and now for Tíkhon or Dron. Dunyásha, the nurse, and the other maids could
+ not say in how far Mademoiselle Bourienne’s statement was correct.
+ Alpátych was not at home, he had gone to the police. Neither could the
+ architect Michael Ivánovich, who on being sent for came in with sleepy
+ eyes, tell Princess Mary anything. With just the same smile of agreement
+ with which for fifteen years he had been accustomed to answer the old
+ prince without expressing views of his own, he now replied to Princess
+ Mary, so that nothing definite could be got from his answers. The old
+ valet Tíkhon, with sunken, emaciated face that bore the stamp of
+ inconsolable grief, replied: “Yes, Princess” to all Princess Mary’s
+ questions and hardly refrained from sobbing as he looked at her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At length Dron, the village Elder, entered the room and with a deep bow to
+ Princess Mary came to a halt by the doorpost.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary walked up and down the room and stopped in front of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Drónushka,” she said, regarding as a sure friend this Drónushka who
+ always used to bring a special kind of gingerbread from his visit to the
+ fair at Vyázma every year and smilingly offer it to her, “Drónushka, now
+ since our misfortune...” she began, but could not go on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We are all in God’s hands,” said he, with a sigh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They were silent for a while.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Drónushka, Alpátych has gone off somewhere and I have no one to turn to.
+ Is it true, as they tell me, that I can’t even go away?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why shouldn’t you go away, your excellency? You can go,” said Dron.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was told it would be dangerous because of the enemy. Dear friend, I can
+ do nothing. I understand nothing. I have nobody! I want to go away tonight
+ or early tomorrow morning.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dron paused. He looked askance at Princess Mary and said: “There are no
+ horses; I told Yákov Alpátych so.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why are there none?” asked the princess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s all God’s scourge,” said Dron. “What horses we had have been taken
+ for the army or have died—this is such a year! It’s not a case of
+ feeding horses—we may die of hunger ourselves! As it is, some go
+ three days without eating. We’ve nothing, we’ve been ruined.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary listened attentively to what he told her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The peasants are ruined? They have no bread?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They’re dying of hunger,” said Dron. “It’s not a case of carting.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But why didn’t you tell me, Drónushka? Isn’t it possible to help them?
+ I’ll do all I can....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To Princess Mary it was strange that now, at a moment when such sorrow was
+ filling her soul, there could be rich people and poor, and the rich could
+ refrain from helping the poor. She had heard vaguely that there was such a
+ thing as “landlord’s corn” which was sometimes given to the peasants. She
+ also knew that neither her father nor her brother would refuse to help the
+ peasants in need, she only feared to make some mistake in speaking about
+ the distribution of the grain she wished to give. She was glad such cares
+ presented themselves, enabling her without scruple to forget her own
+ grief. She began asking Dron about the peasants’ needs and what there was
+ in Boguchárovo that belonged to the landlord.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But we have grain belonging to my brother?” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The landlord’s grain is all safe,” replied Dron proudly. “Our prince did
+ not order it to be sold.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Give it to the peasants, let them have all they need; I give you leave in
+ my brother’s name,” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dron made no answer but sighed deeply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Give them that corn if there is enough of it. Distribute it all. I give
+ this order in my brother’s name; and tell them that what is ours is
+ theirs. We do not grudge them anything. Tell them so.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dron looked intently at the princess while she was speaking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Discharge me, little mother, for God’s sake! Order the keys to be taken
+ from me,” said he. “I have served twenty-three years and have done no
+ wrong. Discharge me, for God’s sake!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary did not understand what he wanted of her or why he was
+ asking to be discharged. She replied that she had never doubted his
+ devotion and that she was ready to do anything for him and for the
+ peasants.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ An hour later Dunyásha came to tell the princess that Dron had come, and
+ all the peasants had assembled at the barn by the princess’ order and
+ wished to have word with their mistress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I never told them to come,” said Princess Mary. “I only told Dron to
+ let them have the grain.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Only, for God’s sake, Princess dear, have them sent away and don’t go out
+ to them. It’s all a trick,” said Dunyásha, “and when Yákov Alpátych
+ returns let us get away... and please don’t...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is a trick?” asked Princess Mary in surprise.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know it is, only listen to me for God’s sake! Ask nurse too. They say
+ they don’t agree to leave Boguchárovo as you ordered.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’re making some mistake. I never ordered them to go away,” said
+ Princess Mary. “Call Drónushka.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dron came and confirmed Dunyásha’s words; the peasants had come by the
+ princess’ order.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I never sent for them,” declared the princess. “You must have given
+ my message wrong. I only said that you were to give them the grain.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dron only sighed in reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you order it they will go away,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, no. I’ll go out to them,” said Princess Mary, and in spite of the
+ nurse’s and Dunyásha’s protests she went out into the porch; Dron,
+ Dunyásha, the nurse, and Michael Ivánovich following her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They probably think I am offering them the grain to bribe them to remain
+ here, while I myself go away leaving them to the mercy of the French,”
+ thought Princess Mary. “I will offer them monthly rations and housing at
+ our Moscow estate. I am sure Andrew would do even more in my place,” she
+ thought as she went out in the twilight toward the crowd standing on the
+ pasture by the barn.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The men crowded closer together, stirred, and rapidly took off their hats.
+ Princess Mary lowered her eyes and, tripping over her skirt, came close up
+ to them. So many different eyes, old and young, were fixed on her, and
+ there were so many different faces, that she could not distinguish any of
+ them and, feeling that she must speak to them all at once, did not know
+ how to do it. But again the sense that she represented her father and her
+ brother gave her courage, and she boldly began her speech.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am very glad you have come,” she said without raising her eyes, and
+ feeling her heart beating quickly and violently. “Drónushka tells me that
+ the war has ruined you. That is our common misfortune, and I shall grudge
+ nothing to help you. I am myself going away because it is dangerous
+ here... the enemy is near... because... I am giving you everything, my
+ friends, and I beg you to take everything, all our grain, so that you may
+ not suffer want! And if you have been told that I am giving you the grain
+ to keep you here—that is not true. On the contrary, I ask you to go
+ with all your belongings to our estate near Moscow, and I promise you I
+ will see to it that there you shall want for nothing. You shall be given
+ food and lodging.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess stopped. Sighs were the only sound heard in the crowd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am not doing this on my own account,” she continued, “I do it in the
+ name of my dead father, who was a good master to you, and of my brother
+ and his son.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again she paused. No one broke the silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ours is a common misfortune and we will share it together. All that is
+ mine is yours,” she concluded, scanning the faces before her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All eyes were gazing at her with one and the same expression. She could
+ not fathom whether it was curiosity, devotion, gratitude, or apprehension
+ and distrust—but the expression on all the faces was identical.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We are all very thankful for your bounty, but it won’t do for us to take
+ the landlord’s grain,” said a voice at the back of the crowd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But why not?” asked the princess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No one replied and Princess Mary, looking round at the crowd, found that
+ every eye she met now was immediately dropped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But why don’t you want to take it?” she asked again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No one answered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The silence began to oppress the princess and she tried to catch someone’s
+ eye.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why don’t you speak?” she inquired of a very old man who stood just in
+ front of her leaning on his stick. “If you think something more is wanted,
+ tell me! I will do anything,” said she, catching his eye.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But as if this angered him, he bent his head quite low and muttered:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why should we agree? We don’t want the grain.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why should we give up everything? We don’t agree. Don’t agree.... We are
+ sorry for you, but we’re not willing. Go away yourself, alone...” came
+ from various sides of the crowd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And again all the faces in that crowd bore an identical expression, though
+ now it was certainly not an expression of curiosity or gratitude, but of
+ angry resolve.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you can’t have understood me,” said Princess Mary with a
+ sad smile. “Why don’t you want to go? I promise to house and feed
+ you, while here the enemy would ruin you....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But her voice was drowned by the voices of the crowd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We’re not willing. Let them ruin us! We won’t take your grain. We don’t
+ agree.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again Princess Mary tried to catch someone’s eye, but not a single eye in
+ the crowd was turned to her; evidently they were all trying to avoid her
+ look. She felt strange and awkward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes, an artful tale! Follow her into slavery! Pull down your houses
+ and go into bondage! I dare say! ‘I’ll give you grain, indeed!’ she says,”
+ voices in the crowd were heard saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With drooping head Princess Mary left the crowd and went back to the
+ house. Having repeated her order to Dron to have horses ready for her
+ departure next morning, she went to her room and remained alone with her
+ own thoughts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ For a long time that night Princess Mary sat by the open window of her
+ room hearing the sound of the peasants’ voices that reached her from the
+ village, but it was not of them she was thinking. She felt that she could
+ not understand them however much she might think about them. She thought
+ only of one thing, her sorrow, which, after the break caused by cares for
+ the present, seemed already to belong to the past. Now she could remember
+ it and weep or pray.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After sunset the wind had dropped. The night was calm and fresh. Toward
+ midnight the voices began to subside, a cock crowed, the full moon began
+ to show from behind the lime trees, a fresh white dewy mist began to rise,
+ and stillness reigned over the village and the house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pictures of the near past—her father’s illness and last moments—rose
+ one after another to her memory. With mournful pleasure she now lingered
+ over these images, repelling with horror only the last one, the picture of
+ his death, which she felt she could not contemplate even in imagination at
+ this still and mystic hour of night. And these pictures presented
+ themselves to her so clearly and in such detail that they seemed now
+ present, now past, and now future.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She vividly recalled the moment when he had his first stroke and was being
+ dragged along by his armpits through the garden at Bald Hills, muttering
+ something with his helpless tongue, twitching his gray eyebrows and
+ looking uneasily and timidly at her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Even then he wanted to tell me what he told me the day he died,” she
+ thought. “He had always thought what he said then.” And she recalled in
+ all its detail the night at Bald Hills before he had the last stroke, when
+ with a foreboding of disaster she had remained at home against his will.
+ She had not slept and had stolen downstairs on tiptoe, and going to the
+ door of the conservatory where he slept that night had listened at the
+ door. In a suffering and weary voice he was saying something to Tíkhon,
+ speaking of the Crimea and its warm nights and of the Empress. Evidently
+ he had wanted to talk. “And why didn’t he call me? Why didn’t he let me be
+ there instead of Tíkhon?” Princess Mary had thought and thought again now.
+ “Now he will never tell anyone what he had in his soul. Never will that
+ moment return for him or for me when he might have said all he longed to
+ say, and not Tíkhon but I might have heard and understood him. Why didn’t
+ I enter the room?” she thought. “Perhaps he would then have said to me
+ what he said the day he died. While talking to Tíkhon he asked about me
+ twice. He wanted to see me, and I was standing close by, outside the door.
+ It was sad and painful for him to talk to Tíkhon who did not understand
+ him. I remember how he began speaking to him about Lise as if she were
+ alive—he had forgotten she was dead—and Tíkhon reminded him
+ that she was no more, and he shouted, ‘Fool!’ He was greatly depressed.
+ From behind the door I heard how he lay down on his bed groaning and
+ loudly exclaimed, ‘My God!’ Why didn’t I go in then? What could he have
+ done to me? What could I have lost? And perhaps he would then have been
+ comforted and would have said that word to me.” And Princess Mary uttered
+ aloud the caressing word he had said to her on the day of his death.
+ “Dear-est!” she repeated, and began sobbing, with tears that relieved her
+ soul. She now saw his face before her. And not the face she had known ever
+ since she could remember and had always seen at a distance, but the timid,
+ feeble face she had seen for the first time quite closely, with all its
+ wrinkles and details, when she stooped near to his mouth to catch what he
+ said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear-est!” she repeated again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What was he thinking when he uttered that word? What is he thinking now?”
+ This question suddenly presented itself to her, and in answer she saw him
+ before her with the expression that was on his face as he lay in his
+ coffin with his chin bound up with a white handkerchief. And the horror
+ that had seized her when she touched him and convinced herself that that 
+ was not he , but something mysterious and horrible, seized her again. She
+ tried to think of something else and to pray, but could do neither. With
+ wide-open eyes she gazed at the moonlight and the shadows, expecting every
+ moment to see his dead face, and she felt that the silence brooding over
+ the house and within it held her fast.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dunyásha,” she whispered. “Dunyásha!” she screamed wildly, and tearing
+ herself out of this silence she ran to the servants’ quarters to meet her
+ old nurse and the maidservants who came running toward her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ On the seventeenth of August Rostóv and Ilyín, accompanied by Lavrúshka
+ who had just returned from captivity and by an hussar orderly, left their
+ quarters at Yankóvo, ten miles from Boguchárovo, and went for a ride—to
+ try a new horse Ilyín had bought and to find out whether there was any hay
+ to be had in the villages.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For the last three days Boguchárovo had lain between the two hostile
+ armies, so that it was as easy for the Russian rearguard to get to it as
+ for the French vanguard; Rostóv, as a careful squadron commander, wished
+ to take such provisions as remained at Boguchárovo before the French could
+ get them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv and Ilyín were in the merriest of moods. On the way to Boguchárovo,
+ a princely estate with a dwelling house and farm where they hoped to find
+ many domestic serfs and pretty girls, they questioned Lavrúshka about
+ Napoleon and laughed at his stories, and raced one another to try Ilyín’s
+ horse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv had no idea that the village he was entering was the property of
+ that very Bolkónski who had been engaged to his sister.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv and Ilyín gave rein to their horses for a last race along the
+ incline before reaching Boguchárovo, and Rostóv, outstripping Ilyín, was
+ the first to gallop into the village street.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’re first!” cried Ilyín, flushed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, always first both on the grassland and here,” answered Rostóv,
+ stroking his heated Donéts horse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I’d have won on my Frenchy, your excellency,” said Lavrúshka from
+ behind, alluding to his shabby cart horse, “only I didn’t wish to mortify
+ you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They rode at a footpace to the barn, where a large crowd of peasants was
+ standing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some of the men bared their heads, others stared at the new arrivals
+ without doffing their caps. Two tall old peasants with wrinkled faces and
+ scanty beards emerged from the tavern, smiling, staggering, and singing
+ some incoherent song, and approached the officers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fine fellows!” said Rostóv laughing. “Is there any hay here?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And how like one another,” said Ilyín.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A mo-o-st me-r-r-y co-o-m-pa...!” sang one of the peasants with a
+ blissful smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One of the men came out of the crowd and went up to Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who do you belong to?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The French,” replied Ilyín jestingly, “and here is Napoleon himself”—and
+ he pointed to Lavrúshka.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then you are Russians?” the peasant asked again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And is there a large force of you here?” said another, a short man,
+ coming up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very large,” answered Rostóv. “But why have you collected here?” he
+ added. “Is it a holiday?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The old men have met to talk over the business of the commune,” replied
+ the peasant, moving away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment, on the road leading from the big house, two women and a
+ man in a white hat were seen coming toward the officers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The one in pink is mine, so keep off!” said Ilyín on seeing Dunyásha
+ running resolutely toward him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She’ll be ours!” said Lavrúshka to Ilyín, winking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do you want, my pretty?” said Ilyín with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The princess ordered me to ask your regiment and your name.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This is Count Rostóv, squadron commander, and I am your humble servant.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Co-o-om-pa-ny!” roared the tipsy peasant with a beatific smile as he
+ looked at Ilyín talking to the girl. Following Dunyásha, Alpátych advanced
+ to Rostóv, having bared his head while still at a distance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “May I make bold to trouble your honor?” said he respectfully, but with a
+ shade of contempt for the youthfulness of this officer and with a hand
+ thrust into his bosom. “My mistress, daughter of General in Chief Prince
+ Nicholas Bolkónski who died on the fifteenth of this month, finding
+ herself in difficulties owing to the boorishness of these people”—he
+ pointed to the peasants—“asks you to come up to the house.... Won’t
+ you, please, ride on a little farther,” said Alpátych with a melancholy
+ smile, “as it is not convenient in the presence of...?” He pointed to the
+ two peasants who kept as close to him as horseflies to a horse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah!... Alpátych... Ah, Yákov Alpátych... Grand! Forgive us for Christ’s
+ sake, eh?” said the peasants, smiling joyfully at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv looked at the tipsy peasants and smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Or perhaps they amuse your honor?” remarked Alpátych with a staid air, as
+ he pointed at the old men with his free hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, there’s not much to be amused at here,” said Rostóv, and rode on a
+ little way. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I make bold to inform your honor that the rude peasants here don’t wish
+ to let the mistress leave the estate, and threaten to unharness her
+ horses, so that though everything has been packed up since morning, her
+ excellency cannot get away.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Impossible!” exclaimed Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have the honor to report to you the actual truth,” said Alpátych.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv dismounted, gave his horse to the orderly, and followed Alpátych to
+ the house, questioning him as to the state of affairs. It appeared that
+ the princess’ offer of corn to the peasants the previous day, and her talk
+ with Dron and at the meeting, had actually had so bad an effect that Dron
+ had finally given up the keys and joined the peasants and had not appeared
+ when Alpátych sent for him; and that in the morning when the princess gave
+ orders to harness for her journey, the peasants had come in a large crowd
+ to the barn and sent word that they would not let her leave the village:
+ that there was an order not to move, and that they would unharness the
+ horses. Alpátych had gone out to admonish them, but was told (it was
+ chiefly Karp who did the talking, Dron not showing himself in the crowd)
+ that they could not let the princess go, that there was an order to the
+ contrary, but that if she stayed they would serve her as before and obey
+ her in everything.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the moment when Rostóv and Ilyín were galloping along the road,
+ Princess Mary, despite the dissuasions of Alpátych, her nurse, and the
+ maids, had given orders to harness and intended to start, but when the
+ cavalrymen were espied they were taken for Frenchmen, the coachman ran
+ away, and the women in the house began to wail.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Father! Benefactor! God has sent you!” exclaimed deeply moved voices as
+ Rostóv passed through the anteroom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary was sitting helpless and bewildered in the large sitting
+ room, when Rostóv was shown in. She could not grasp who he was and why he
+ had come, or what was happening to her. When she saw his Russian face, and
+ by his walk and the first words he uttered recognized him as a man of her
+ own class, she glanced at him with her deep radiant look and began
+ speaking in a voice that faltered and trembled with emotion. This meeting
+ immediately struck Rostóv as a romantic event. “A helpless girl
+ overwhelmed with grief, left to the mercy of coarse, rioting peasants! And
+ what a strange fate sent me here! What gentleness and nobility there are
+ in her features and expression!” thought he as he looked at her and
+ listened to her timid story.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When she began to tell him that all this had happened the day after her
+ father’s funeral, her voice trembled. She turned away, and then, as if
+ fearing he might take her words as meant to move him to pity, looked at
+ him with an apprehensive glance of inquiry. There were tears in Rostóv’s
+ eyes. Princess Mary noticed this and glanced gratefully at him with that
+ radiant look which caused the plainness of her face to be forgotten.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I cannot express, Princess, how glad I am that I happened to ride here
+ and am able to show my readiness to serve you,” said Rostóv, rising. “Go
+ when you please, and I give you my word of honor that no one shall dare to
+ cause you annoyance if only you will allow me to act as your escort.” And
+ bowing respectfully, as if to a lady of royal blood, he moved toward the
+ door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv’s deferential tone seemed to indicate that though he would consider
+ himself happy to be acquainted with her, he did not wish to take advantage
+ of her misfortunes to intrude upon her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary understood this and appreciated his delicacy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am very, very grateful to you,” she said in French, “but I hope it was
+ all a misunderstanding and that no one is to blame for it.” She suddenly
+ began to cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Excuse me!” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv, knitting his brows, left the room with another low bow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV
+ 
+ 
+ “Well, is she pretty? Ah, friend—my pink one is delicious; her name
+ is Dunyásha....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But on glancing at Rostóv’s face Ilyín stopped short. He saw that his hero
+ and commander was following quite a different train of thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv glanced angrily at Ilyín and without replying strode off with rapid
+ steps to the village.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll show them; I’ll give it to them, the brigands!” said he to himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych at a gliding trot, only just managing not to run, kept up with
+ him with difficulty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What decision have you been pleased to come to?” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv stopped and, clenching his fists, suddenly and sternly turned on
+ Alpátych.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Decision? What decision? Old dotard!...” cried he. “What have you been
+ about? Eh? The peasants are rioting, and you can’t manage them? You’re a
+ traitor yourself! I know you. I’ll flay you all alive!...” And as if
+ afraid of wasting his store of anger, he left Alpátych and went rapidly
+ forward. Alpátych, mastering his offended feelings, kept pace with Rostóv
+ at a gliding gait and continued to impart his views. He said the peasants
+ were obdurate and that at the present moment it would be imprudent to
+ “overresist” them without an armed force, and would it not be better first
+ to send for the military?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll give them armed force... I’ll ‘overresist’ them!” uttered Rostóv
+ meaninglessly, breathless with irrational animal fury and the need to vent
+ it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Without considering what he would do he moved unconciously with quick,
+ resolute steps toward the crowd. And the nearer he drew to it the more
+ Alpátych felt that this unreasonable action might produce good results.
+ The peasants in the crowd were similarly impressed when they saw Rostóv’s
+ rapid, firm steps and resolute, frowning face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the hussars had come to the village and Rostóv had gone to see the
+ princess, a certain confusion and dissension had arisen among the crowd.
+ Some of the peasants said that these new arrivals were Russians and might
+ take it amiss that the mistress was being detained. Dron was of this
+ opinion, but as soon as he expressed it Karp and others attacked their
+ ex-Elder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How many years have you been fattening on the commune?” Karp shouted at
+ him. “It’s all one to you! You’ll dig up your pot of money and take it
+ away with you.... What does it matter to you whether our homes are ruined
+ or not?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We’ve been told to keep order, and that no one is to leave their homes or
+ take away a single grain, and that’s all about it!” cried another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It was your son’s turn to be conscripted, but no fear! You begrudged your
+ lump of a son,” a little old man suddenly began attacking Dron—“and
+ so they took my Vánka to be shaved for a soldier! But we all have to die.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To be sure, we all have to die. I’m not against the commune,” said Dron.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s it—not against it! You’ve filled your belly....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The two tall peasants had their say. As soon as Rostóv, followed by Ilyín,
+ Lavrúshka, and Alpátych, came up to the crowd, Karp, thrusting his fingers
+ into his belt and smiling a little, walked to the front. Dron on the
+ contrary retired to the rear and the crowd drew closer together.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who is your Elder here? Hey?” shouted Rostóv, coming up to the crowd with
+ quick steps.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Elder? What do you want with him?...” asked Karp.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But before the words were well out of his mouth, his cap flew off and a
+ fierce blow jerked his head to one side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Caps off, traitors!” shouted Rostóv in a wrathful voice. “Where’s the
+ Elder?” he cried furiously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Elder.... He wants the Elder!... Dron Zakhárych, you!” meek and
+ flustered voices here and there were heard calling and caps began to come
+ off their heads.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We don’t riot, we’re following the orders,” declared Karp, and at that
+ moment several voices began speaking together.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s as the old men have decided—there’s too many of you giving
+ orders.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Arguing? Mutiny!... Brigands! Traitors!” cried Rostóv unmeaningly in a
+ voice not his own, gripping Karp by the collar. “Bind him, bind him!” he
+ shouted, though there was no one to bind him but Lavrúshka and Alpátych.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lavrúshka, however, ran up to Karp and seized him by the arms from behind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Shall I call up our men from beyond the hill?” he called out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alpátych turned to the peasants and ordered two of them by name to come
+ and bind Karp. The men obediently came out of the crowd and began taking
+ off their belts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where’s the Elder?” demanded Rostóv in a loud voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With a pale and frowning face Dron stepped out of the crowd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Are you the Elder? Bind him, Lavrúshka!” shouted Rostóv, as if that
+ order, too, could not possibly meet with any opposition.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And in fact two more peasants began binding Dron, who took off his own
+ belt and handed it to them, as if to aid them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And you all listen to me!” said Rostóv to the peasants. “Be off to your
+ houses at once, and don’t let one of your voices be heard!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, we’ve not done any harm! We did it just out of foolishness.
+ It’s all nonsense.... I said then that it was not in order,” voices
+ were heard bickering with one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There! What did I say?” said Alpátych, coming into his own
+ again. “It’s wrong, lads!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All our stupidity, Yákov Alpátych,” came the answers, and the
+ crowd began at once to disperse through the village.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The two bound men were led off to the master’s house. The two drunken
+ peasants followed them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aye, when I look at you!...” said one of them to Karp.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How can one talk to the masters like that? What were you thinking of, you
+ fool?” added the other—“A real fool!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Two hours later the carts were standing in the courtyard of the
+ Boguchárovo house. The peasants were briskly carrying out the proprietor’s
+ goods and packing them on the carts, and Dron, liberated at Princess
+ Mary’s wish from the cupboard where he had been confined, was standing in
+ the yard directing the men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t put it in so carelessly,” said one of the peasants, a man with a
+ round smiling face, taking a casket from a housemaid. “You know it has
+ cost money! How can you chuck it in like that or shove it under the cord
+ where it’ll get rubbed? I don’t like that way of doing things. Let it all
+ be done properly, according to rule. Look here, put it under the bast
+ matting and cover it with hay—that’s the way!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh, books, books!” said another peasant, bringing out Prince Andrew’s
+ library cupboards. “Don’t catch up against it! It’s heavy, lads—solid
+ books.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, they worked all day and didn’t play!” remarked the tall,
+ round-faced peasant gravely, pointing with a significant wink at the
+ dictionaries that were on the top.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Unwilling to obtrude himself on the princess, Rostóv did not go back to
+ the house but remained in the village awaiting her departure. When her
+ carriage drove out of the house, he mounted and accompanied her eight
+ miles from Boguchárovo to where the road was occupied by our troops. At
+ the inn at Yankóvo he respectfully took leave of her, for the first time
+ permitting himself to kiss her hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How can you speak so!” he blushingly replied to Princess Mary’s
+ expressions of gratitude for her deliverance, as she termed what had
+ occurred. “Any police officer would have done as much! If we had had only
+ peasants to fight, we should not have let the enemy come so far,” said he
+ with a sense of shame and wishing to change the subject. “I am only happy
+ to have had the opportunity of making your acquaintance. Good-by,
+ Princess. I wish you happiness and consolation and hope to meet you again
+ in happier circumstances. If you don’t want to make me blush, please don’t
+ thank me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the princess, if she did not again thank him in words, thanked him
+ with the whole expression of her face, radiant with gratitude and
+ tenderness. She could not believe that there was nothing to thank him for.
+ On the contrary, it seemed to her certain that had he not been there she
+ would have perished at the hands of the mutineers and of the French, and
+ that he had exposed himself to terrible and obvious danger to save her,
+ and even more certain was it that he was a man of lofty and noble soul,
+ able to understand her position and her sorrow. His kind, honest eyes,
+ with the tears rising in them when she herself had begun to cry as she
+ spoke of her loss, did not leave her memory.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When she had taken leave of him and remained alone she suddenly felt her
+ eyes filling with tears, and then not for the first time the strange
+ question presented itself to her: did she love him?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the rest of the way to Moscow, though the princess’ position was not a
+ cheerful one, Dunyásha, who went with her in the carriage, more than once
+ noticed that her mistress leaned out of the window and smiled at something
+ with an expression of mingled joy and sorrow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, supposing I do love him?” thought Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ashamed as she was of acknowledging to herself that she had fallen in love
+ with a man who would perhaps never love her, she comforted herself with
+ the thought that no one would ever know it and that she would not be to
+ blame if, without ever speaking of it to anyone, she continued to the end
+ of her life to love the man with whom she had fallen in love for the first
+ and last time in her life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sometimes when she recalled his looks, his sympathy, and his words,
+ happiness did not appear impossible to her. It was at those moments that
+ Dunyásha noticed her smiling as she looked out of the carriage window.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Was it not fate that brought him to Boguchárovo, and at that very
+ moment?” thought Princess Mary. “And that caused his sister to refuse my
+ brother?” And in all this Princess Mary saw the hand of Providence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The impression the princess made on Rostóv was a very agreeable one. To
+ remember her gave him pleasure, and when his comrades, hearing of his
+ adventure at Boguchárovo, rallied him on having gone to look for hay and
+ having picked up one of the wealthiest heiresses in Russia, he grew angry.
+ It made him angry just because the idea of marrying the gentle Princess
+ Mary, who was attractive to him and had an enormous fortune, had against
+ his will more than once entered his head. For himself personally Nicholas
+ could not wish for a better wife: by marrying her he would make the
+ countess his mother happy, would be able to put his father’s affairs in
+ order, and would even—he felt it—ensure Princess Mary’s
+ happiness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Sónya? And his plighted word? That was why Rostóv grew angry when he
+ was rallied about Princess Bolkónskaya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV
+ 
+ 
+ On receiving command of the armies Kutúzov remembered Prince Andrew and
+ sent an order for him to report at headquarters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew arrived at Tsárevo-Zaymíshche on the very day and at the
+ very hour that Kutúzov was reviewing the troops for the first time. He
+ stopped in the village at the priest’s house in front of which stood the
+ commander in chief’s carriage, and he sat down on the bench at the gate
+ awaiting his Serene Highness, as everyone now called Kutúzov. From the
+ field beyond the village came now sounds of regimental music and now the
+ roar of many voices shouting “Hurrah!” to the new commander in chief. Two
+ orderlies, a courier and a major-domo, stood near by, some ten paces from
+ Prince Andrew, availing themselves of Kutúzov’s absence and of the fine
+ weather. A short, swarthy lieutenant colonel of hussars with thick
+ mustaches and whiskers rode up to the gate and, glancing at Prince Andrew,
+ inquired whether his Serene Highness was putting up there and whether he
+ would soon be back.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew replied that he was not on his Serene Highness’ staff but
+ was himself a new arrival. The lieutenant colonel turned to a smart
+ orderly, who, with the peculiar contempt with which a commander in chief’s
+ orderly speaks to officers, replied:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What? His Serene Highness? I expect he’ll be here soon. What do you
+ want?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The lieutenant colonel of hussars smiled beneath his mustache at the
+ orderly’s tone, dismounted, gave his horse to a dispatch runner, and
+ approached Bolkónski with a slight bow. Bolkónski made room for him on the
+ bench and the lieutenant colonel sat down beside him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’re also waiting for the commander in chief?” said he. “They say he
+ weceives evewyone, thank God!... It’s awful with those sausage eaters!
+ Ermólov had weason to ask to be pwomoted to be a German! Now p’waps
+ Wussians will get a look in. As it was, devil only knows what was
+ happening. We kept wetweating and wetweating. Did you take part in the
+ campaign?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I had the pleasure,” replied Prince Andrew, “not only of taking part in
+ the retreat but of losing in that retreat all I held dear—not to
+ mention the estate and home of my birth—my father, who died of
+ grief. I belong to the province of Smolénsk.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah? You’re Pwince Bolkónski? Vewy glad to make your acquaintance! I’m
+ Lieutenant Colonel Denísov, better known as ‘Váska,’” said Denísov,
+ pressing Prince Andrew’s hand and looking into his face with a
+ particularly kindly attention. “Yes, I heard,” said he sympathetically,
+ and after a short pause added: “Yes, it’s Scythian warfare. It’s all vewy
+ well—only not for those who get it in the neck. So you are Pwince
+ Andwew Bolkónski?” He swayed his head. “Vewy pleased, Pwince, to make your
+ acquaintance!” he repeated again, smiling sadly, and he again pressed
+ Prince Andrew’s hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew knew Denísov from what Natásha had told him of her first
+ suitor. This memory carried him sadly and sweetly back to those painful
+ feelings of which he had not thought lately, but which still found place
+ in his soul. Of late he had received so many new and very serious
+ impressions—such as the retreat from Smolénsk, his visit to Bald
+ Hills, and the recent news of his father’s death—and had experienced
+ so many emotions, that for a long time past those memories had not entered
+ his mind, and now that they did, they did not act on him with nearly their
+ former strength. For Denísov, too, the memories awakened by the name of
+ Bolkónski belonged to a distant, romantic past, when after supper and
+ after Natásha’s singing he had proposed to a little girl of fifteen
+ without realizing what he was doing. He smiled at the recollection of that
+ time and of his love for Natásha, and passed at once to what now
+ interested him passionately and exclusively. This was a plan of campaign
+ he had devised while serving at the outposts during the retreat. He had
+ proposed that plan to Barclay de Tolly and now wished to propose it to
+ Kutúzov. The plan was based on the fact that the French line of operation
+ was too extended, and it proposed that instead of, or concurrently with,
+ action on the front to bar the advance of the French, we should attack
+ their line of communication. He began explaining his plan to Prince
+ Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They can’t hold all that line. It’s impossible. I will undertake to bweak
+ thwough. Give me five hundwed men and I will bweak the line, that’s
+ certain! There’s only one way—guewilla warfare!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov rose and began gesticulating as he explained his plan to
+ Bolkónski. In the midst of his explanation shouts were heard from the
+ army, growing more incoherent and more diffused, mingling with music and
+ songs and coming from the field where the review was held. Sounds of hoofs
+ and shouts were nearing the village.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s coming! He’s coming!” shouted a Cossack standing at the gate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bolkónski and Denísov moved to the gate, at which a knot of soldiers (a
+ guard of honor) was standing, and they saw Kutúzov coming down the street
+ mounted on a rather small sorrel horse. A huge suite of generals rode
+ behind him. Barclay was riding almost beside him, and a crowd of officers
+ ran after and around them shouting, “Hurrah!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His adjutants galloped into the yard before him. Kutúzov was impatiently
+ urging on his horse, which ambled smoothly under his weight, and he raised
+ his hand to his white Horse Guard’s cap with a red band and no peak,
+ nodding his head continually. When he came up to the guard of honor, a
+ fine set of Grenadiers mostly wearing decorations, who were giving him the
+ salute, he looked at them silently and attentively for nearly a minute
+ with the steady gaze of a commander and then turned to the crowd of
+ generals and officers surrounding him. Suddenly his face assumed a subtle
+ expression, he shrugged his shoulders with an air of perplexity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And with such fine fellows to retreat and retreat! Well, good-by,
+ General,” he added, and rode into the yard past Prince Andrew and Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!” shouted those behind him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Since Prince Andrew had last seen him Kutúzov had grown still more
+ corpulent, flaccid, and fat. But the bleached eyeball, the scar, and the
+ familiar weariness of his expression were still the same. He was wearing
+ the white Horse Guard’s cap and a military overcoat with a whip hanging
+ over his shoulder by a thin strap. He sat heavily and swayed limply on his
+ brisk little horse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Whew... whew... whew!” he whistled just audibly as he rode into the yard.
+ His face expressed the relief of relaxed strain felt by a man who means to
+ rest after a ceremony. He drew his left foot out of the stirrup and,
+ lurching with his whole body and puckering his face with the effort,
+ raised it with difficulty onto the saddle, leaned on his knee, groaned,
+ and slipped down into the arms of the Cossacks and adjutants who stood
+ ready to assist him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He pulled himself together, looked round, screwing up his eyes, glanced at
+ Prince Andrew, and, evidently not recognizing him, moved with his waddling
+ gait to the porch. “Whew... whew... whew!” he whistled, and again glanced
+ at Prince Andrew. As often occurs with old men, it was only after some
+ seconds that the impression produced by Prince Andrew’s face linked itself
+ up with Kutúzov’s remembrance of his personality.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, how do you do, my dear prince? How do you do, my dear boy? Come
+ along...” said he, glancing wearily round, and he stepped onto the porch
+ which creaked under his weight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He unbuttoned his coat and sat down on a bench in the porch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And how’s your father?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I received news of his death, yesterday,” replied Prince Andrew abruptly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov looked at him with eyes wide open with dismay and then took off
+ his cap and crossed himself:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “May the kingdom of Heaven be his! God’s will be done to us all!” He
+ sighed deeply, his whole chest heaving, and was silent for a while. “I
+ loved him and respected him, and sympathize with you with all my heart.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He embraced Prince Andrew, pressing him to his fat breast, and for some
+ time did not let him go. When he released him Prince Andrew saw that
+ Kutúzov’s flabby lips were trembling and that tears were in his eyes. He
+ sighed and pressed on the bench with both hands to raise himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come! Come with me, we’ll have a talk,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But at that moment Denísov, no more intimidated by his superiors than by
+ the enemy, came with jingling spurs up the steps of the porch, despite the
+ angry whispers of the adjutants who tried to stop him. Kutúzov, his hands
+ still pressed on the seat, glanced at him glumly. Denísov, having given
+ his name, announced that he had to communicate to his Serene Highness a
+ matter of great importance for their country’s welfare. Kutúzov looked
+ wearily at him and, lifting his hands with a gesture of annoyance, folded
+ them across his stomach, repeating the words: “For our country’s welfare?
+ Well, what is it? Speak!” Denísov blushed like a girl (it was strange to
+ see the color rise in that shaggy, bibulous, time-worn face) and boldly
+ began to expound his plan of cutting the enemy’s lines of communication
+ between Smolénsk and Vyázma. Denísov came from those parts and knew the
+ country well. His plan seemed decidedly a good one, especially from the
+ strength of conviction with which he spoke. Kutúzov looked down at his own
+ legs, occasionally glancing at the door of the adjoining hut as if
+ expecting something unpleasant to emerge from it. And from that hut, while
+ Denísov was speaking, a general with a portfolio under his arm really did
+ appear.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What?” said Kutúzov, in the midst of Denísov’s explanations, “are you
+ ready so soon?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ready, your Serene Highness,” replied the general.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov swayed his head, as much as to say: “How is one man to deal with
+ it all?” and again listened to Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I give my word of honor as a Wussian officer,” said Denísov, “that I can
+ bweak Napoleon’s line of communication!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What relation are you to Intendant General Kiríl Andréevich Denísov?”
+ asked Kutúzov, interrupting him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is my uncle, your Sewene Highness.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, we were friends,” said Kutúzov cheerfully. “All right, all right,
+ friend, stay here at the staff and tomorrow we’ll have a talk.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With a nod to Denísov he turned away and put out his hand for the papers
+ Konovnítsyn had brought him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Would not your Serene Highness like to come inside?” said the general
+ on duty in a discontented voice, “the plans must be examined and several
+ papers have to be signed.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ An adjutant came out and announced that everything was in readiness
+ within. But Kutúzov evidently did not wish to enter that room till he was
+ disengaged. He made a grimace....
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, tell them to bring a small table out here, my dear boy. I’ll look
+ at them here,” said he. “Don’t go away,” he added, turning
+ to Prince Andrew, who remained in the porch and listened to the general’s report.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While this was being given, Prince Andrew heard the whisper of a woman’s
+ voice and the rustle of a silk dress behind the door. Several times on
+ glancing that way he noticed behind that door a plump, rosy, handsome
+ woman in a pink dress with a lilac silk kerchief on her head, holding a
+ dish and evidently awaiting the entrance of the commander in chief.
+ Kutúzov’s adjutant whispered to Prince Andrew that this was the wife of
+ the priest whose home it was, and that she intended to offer his Serene
+ Highness bread and salt. “Her husband has welcomed his Serene Highness
+ with the cross at the church, and she intends to welcome him in the
+ house.... She’s very pretty,” added the adjutant with a smile. At those
+ words Kutúzov looked round. He was listening to the general’s report—which
+ consisted chiefly of a criticism of the position at Tsárevo-Zaymíshche—as
+ he had listened to Denísov, and seven years previously had listened to the
+ discussion at the Austerlitz council of war. He evidently listened only
+ because he had ears which, though there was a piece of tow in one of them,
+ could not help hearing; but it was evident that nothing the general could
+ say would surprise or even interest him, that he knew all that would be
+ said beforehand, and heard it all only because he had to, as one has to
+ listen to the chanting of a service of prayer. All that Denísov had said
+ was clever and to the point. What the general was saying was even more
+ clever and to the point, but it was evident that Kutúzov despised
+ knowledge and cleverness, and knew of something else that would decide the
+ matter—something independent of cleverness and knowledge. Prince
+ Andrew watched the commander in chief’s face attentively, and the only
+ expression he could see there was one of boredom, curiosity as to the
+ meaning of the feminine whispering behind the door, and a desire to
+ observe propriety. It was evident that Kutúzov despised cleverness and
+ learning and even the patriotic feeling shown by Denísov, but despised
+ them not because of his own intellect, feelings, or knowledge—he did
+ not try to display any of these—but because of something else. He
+ despised them because of his old age and experience of life. The only
+ instruction Kutúzov gave of his own accord during that report referred to
+ looting by the Russian troops. At the end of the report the general put
+ before him for signature a paper relating to the recovery of payment from
+ army commanders for green oats mown down by the soldiers, when landowners
+ lodged petitions for compensation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After hearing the matter, Kutúzov smacked his lips together and shook his
+ head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Into the stove... into the fire with it! I tell you once for all, my dear
+ fellow,” said he, “into the fire with all such things! Let them cut the
+ crops and burn wood to their hearts’ content. I don’t order it or allow
+ it, but I don’t exact compensation either. One can’t get on without it.
+ ‘When wood is chopped the chips will fly.’” He looked at the paper again.
+ “Oh, this German precision!” he muttered, shaking his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI
+ 
+ 
+ “Well, that’s all!” said Kutúzov as he signed the last of the documents,
+ and rising heavily and smoothing out the folds in his fat white neck he
+ moved toward the door with a more cheerful expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The priest’s wife, flushing rosy red, caught up the dish she had after all
+ not managed to present at the right moment, though she had so long been
+ preparing for it, and with a low bow offered it to Kutúzov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He screwed up his eyes, smiled, lifted her chin with his hand, and said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, what a beauty! Thank you, sweetheart!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He took some gold pieces from his trouser pocket and put them on the dish
+ for her. “Well, my dear, and how are we getting on?” he asked, moving to
+ the door of the room assigned to him. The priest’s wife smiled, and with
+ dimples in her rosy cheeks followed him into the room. The adjutant came
+ out to the porch and asked Prince Andrew to lunch with him. Half an hour
+ later Prince Andrew was again called to Kutúzov. He found him reclining in
+ an armchair, still in the same unbuttoned overcoat. He had in his hand a
+ French book which he closed as Prince Andrew entered, marking the place
+ with a knife. Prince Andrew saw by the cover that it was Les Chevaliers du
+ Cygne by Madame de Genlis.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, sit down, sit down here. Let’s have a talk,” said Kutúzov. “It’s
+ sad, very sad. But remember, my dear fellow, that I am a father to you, a
+ second father....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew told Kutúzov all he knew of his father’s death, and what he
+ had seen at Bald Hills when he passed through it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What... what they have brought us to!” Kutúzov suddenly cried in an
+ agitated voice, evidently picturing vividly to himself from Prince
+ Andrew’s story the condition Russia was in. “But give me time, give me
+ time!” he said with a grim look, evidently not wishing to continue this
+ agitating conversation, and added: “I sent for you to keep you with me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I thank your Serene Highness, but I fear I am no longer fit for the
+ staff,” replied Prince Andrew with a smile which Kutúzov noticed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov glanced inquiringly at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But above all,” added Prince Andrew, “I have grown used to my regiment,
+ am fond of the officers, and I fancy the men also like me. I should be
+ sorry to leave the regiment. If I decline the honor of being with you,
+ believe me...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A shrewd, kindly, yet subtly derisive expression lit up Kutúzov’s podgy
+ face. He cut Bolkónski short.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am sorry, for I need you. But you’re right, you’re right! It’s not here
+ that men are needed. Advisers are always plentiful, but men are not. The
+ regiments would not be what they are if the would-be advisers served there
+ as you do. I remember you at Austerlitz.... I remember, yes, I remember
+ you with the standard!” said Kutúzov, and a flush of pleasure suffused
+ Prince Andrew’s face at this recollection.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Taking his hand and drawing him downwards, Kutúzov offered his cheek to be
+ kissed, and again Prince Andrew noticed tears in the old man’s eyes.
+ Though Prince Andrew knew that Kutúzov’s tears came easily, and that he
+ was particularly tender to and considerate of him from a wish to show
+ sympathy with his loss, yet this reminder of Austerlitz was both pleasant
+ and flattering to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go your way and God be with you. I know your path is the path of honor!”
+ He paused. “I missed you at Bucharest, but I needed someone to send.” And
+ changing the subject, Kutúzov began to speak of the Turkish war and the
+ peace that had been concluded. “Yes, I have been much blamed,” he said,
+ “both for that war and the peace... but everything came at the right time.
+ Tout vient à point à celui qui sait attendre. * And there were as many
+ advisers there as here...” he went on, returning to the subject of
+ “advisers” which evidently occupied him. “Ah, those advisers!” said he.
+ “If we had listened to them all we should not have made peace with Turkey
+ and should not have been through with that war. Everything in haste, but
+ more haste, less speed. Kámenski would have been lost if he had not died.
+ He stormed fortresses with thirty thousand men. It is not difficult to
+ capture a fortress but it is difficult to win a campaign. For that, not
+ storming and attacking but patience and time are wanted. Kámenski sent
+ soldiers to Rustchuk, but I only employed these two things and took more
+ fortresses than Kámenski and made them Turks eat horseflesh!” He swayed
+ his head. “And the French shall too, believe me,” he went on, growing
+ warmer and beating his chest, “I’ll make them eat horseflesh!”
+ And tears again dimmed his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But shan’t we have to accept battle?” remarked Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We shall if everybody wants it; it can’t be helped.... But believe me, my
+ dear boy, there is nothing stronger than those two: patience and time ,
+ they will do it all. But the advisers n’entendent pas de cette oreille,
+ voilà le mal. * Some want a thing—others don’t. What’s one to do?”
+ he asked, evidently expecting an answer. “Well, what do you want us to
+ do?” he repeated and his eye shone with a deep, shrewd look. “I’ll tell
+ you what to do,” he continued, as Prince Andrew still did not reply: “I
+ will tell you what to do, and what I do. Dans le doute, mon cher ,” he
+ paused, “abstiens-toi” *(2)—he articulated the French proverb
+ deliberately.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Don’t see it that way, that’s the trouble.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * (2) “When in doubt, my dear fellow, do nothing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, good-by, my dear fellow; remember that with all my heart I share
+ your sorrow, and that for you I am not a Serene Highness, nor a prince,
+ nor a commander in chief, but a father! If you want anything come straight
+ to me. Good-by, my dear boy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again he embraced and kissed Prince Andrew, but before the latter had left
+ the room Kutúzov gave a sigh of relief and went on with his unfinished
+ novel, Les Chevaliers du Cygne by Madame de Genlis.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew could not have explained how or why it was, but after that
+ interview with Kutúzov he went back to his regiment reassured as to the
+ general course of affairs and as to the man to whom it had been entrusted.
+ The more he realized the absence of all personal motive in that old man—in
+ whom there seemed to remain only the habit of passions, and in place of an
+ intellect (grouping events and drawing conclusions) only the capacity
+ calmly to contemplate the course of events—the more reassured he was
+ that everything would be as it should. “He will not bring in any plan of
+ his own. He will not devise or undertake anything,” thought Prince Andrew,
+ “but he will hear everything, remember everything, and put everything in
+ its place. He will not hinder anything useful nor allow anything harmful.
+ He understands that there is something stronger and more important than
+ his own will—the inevitable course of events, and he can see them
+ and grasp their significance, and seeing that significance can refrain
+ from meddling and renounce his personal wish directed to something else.
+ And above all,” thought Prince Andrew, “one believes in him because he’s
+ Russian, despite the novel by Genlis and the French proverbs, and because
+ his voice shook when he said: ‘What they have brought us to!’ and had a
+ sob in it when he said he would ‘make them eat horseflesh!’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On such feelings, more or less dimly shared by all, the unanimity and
+ general approval were founded with which, despite court influences, the
+ popular choice of Kutúzov as commander in chief was received.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII
+ 
+ 
+ After the Emperor had left Moscow, life flowed on there in its usual
+ course, and its course was so very usual that it was difficult to remember
+ the recent days of patriotic elation and ardor, hard to believe that
+ Russia was really in danger and that the members of the English Club were
+ also sons of the Fatherland ready to sacrifice everything for it. The one
+ thing that recalled the patriotic fervor everyone had displayed during the
+ Emperor’s stay was the call for contributions of men and money, a
+ necessity that as soon as the promises had been made assumed a legal,
+ official form and became unavoidable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With the enemy’s approach to Moscow, the Moscovites’ view of their
+ situation did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even more
+ frivolous, as always happens with people who see a great danger
+ approaching. At the approach of danger there are always two voices that
+ speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man
+ to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the
+ other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful
+ to think of the danger, since it is not in man’s power to foresee
+ everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore
+ better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what
+ is pleasant. In solitude a man generally listens to the first voice, but
+ in society to the second. So it was now with the inhabitants of Moscow. It
+ was long since people had been as gay in Moscow as that year.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostopchín’s broadsheets, headed by woodcuts of a drink shop, a potman,
+ and a Moscow burgher called Karpúshka Chigírin, “who—having been a
+ militiaman and having had rather too much at the pub—heard that
+ Napoleon wished to come to Moscow, grew angry, abused the French in very
+ bad language, came out of the drink shop, and, under the sign of the
+ eagle, began to address the assembled people,” were read and discussed,
+ together with the latest of Vasíli Lvóvich Púshkin’s bouts rimés .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the corner room at the Club, members gathered to read these
+ broadsheets, and some liked the way Karpúshka jeered at the French,
+ saying: “They will swell up with Russian cabbage, burst with our buckwheat
+ porridge, and choke themselves with cabbage soup. They are all dwarfs and
+ one peasant woman will toss three of them with a hayfork.” Others did not
+ like that tone and said it was stupid and vulgar. It was said that
+ Rostopchín had expelled all Frenchmen and even all foreigners from Moscow,
+ and that there had been some spies and agents of Napoleon among them; but
+ this was told chiefly to introduce Rostopchín’s witty remark on that
+ occasion. The foreigners were deported to Nízhni by boat, and Rostopchín
+ had said to them in French: “Rentrez en vous-mêmes; entrez dans la barque,
+ et n’en faites pas une barque de Charon.” * There was talk of all
+ the government offices having been already removed from Moscow, and to this
+ Shinshín’s witticism was added—that for that alone Moscow ought to
+ be grateful to Napoleon. It was said that Mamónov’s regiment would cost
+ him eight hundred thousand rubles, and that Bezúkhov had spent even more
+ on his, but that the best thing about Bezúkhov’s action was that he
+ himself was going to don a uniform and ride at the head of his regiment
+ without charging anything for the show.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Think it over; get into the barque, and take care not to
+ make it a barque of Charon.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You don’t spare anyone,” said Julie Drubetskáya as she collected
+ and pressed together a bunch of raveled lint with her thin, beringed fingers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Julie was preparing to leave Moscow next day and was giving a farewell
+ soiree.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ Bezúkhov est ridicule , but he is so kind and good-natured. What pleasure
+ is there to be so caustique? ”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A forfeit!” cried a young man in militia uniform whom Julie called “mon
+ chevalier,” and who was going with her to Nízhni.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In Julie’s set, as in many other circles in Moscow, it had been agreed
+ that they would speak nothing but Russian and that those who made a slip
+ and spoke French should pay fines to the Committee of Voluntary
+ Contributions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Another forfeit for a Gallicism,” said a Russian writer who was present.
+ “‘What pleasure is there to be’ is not Russian!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You spare no one,” continued Julie to the young man without heeding the
+ author’s remark.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For caustique —I am guilty and will pay, and I am prepared to pay
+ again for the pleasure of telling you the truth. For Gallicisms I won’t be
+ responsible,” she remarked, turning to the author: “I have neither the
+ money nor the time, like Prince Galítsyn, to engage a master to teach me
+ Russian!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, here he is!” she added. “ Quand on ... No, no,” she said to the militia
+ officer, “you won’t catch me. Speak of the sun and you see its rays!” and
+ she smiled amiably at Pierre. “We were just talking of you,” she said with
+ the facility in lying natural to a society woman. “We were saying that
+ your regiment would be sure to be better than Mamónov’s.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, don’t talk to me of my regiment,” replied Pierre, kissing his
+ hostess’ hand and taking a seat beside her. “I am so sick of it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You will, of course, command it yourself?” said Julie, directing a sly,
+ sarcastic glance toward the militia officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The latter in Pierre’s presence had ceased to be caustic, and his face
+ expressed perplexity as to what Julie’s smile might mean. In spite of his
+ absent-mindedness and good nature, Pierre’s personality immediately
+ checked any attempt to ridicule him to his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No,” said Pierre, with a laughing glance at his big, stout body. “I
+ should make too good a target for the French, besides I am afraid I should
+ hardly be able to climb onto a horse.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Among those whom Julie’s guests happened to choose to gossip about were
+ the Rostóvs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I hear that their affairs are in a very bad way,” said Julie. “And he is
+ so unreasonable, the count himself I mean. The Razumóvskis wanted to buy
+ his house and his estate near Moscow, but it drags on and on. He asks too
+ much.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I think the sale will come off in a few days,” said someone. “Though
+ it is madness to buy anything in Moscow now.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why?” asked Julie. “You don’t think Moscow is in danger?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then why are you leaving?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I? What a question! I am going because... well, because everyone is
+ going: and besides—I am not Joan of Arc or an Amazon.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, of course, of course! Let me have some more strips of linen.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If he manages the business properly he will be able to pay off all his
+ debts,” said the militia officer, speaking of Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A kindly old man but not up to much. And why do they stay on so long in
+ Moscow? They meant to leave for the country long ago. Natalie is quite
+ well again now, isn’t she?” Julie asked Pierre with a knowing smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They are waiting for their younger son,” Pierre replied. “He joined
+ Obolénski’s Cossacks and went to Bélaya Tsérkov where the regiment is
+ being formed. But now they have had him transferred to my regiment and are
+ expecting him every day. The count wanted to leave long ago, but the
+ countess won’t on any account leave Moscow till her son returns.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I met them the day before yesterday at the Arkhárovs’. Natalie has
+ recovered her looks and is brighter. She sang a song. How easily some
+ people get over everything!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Get over what?” inquired Pierre, looking displeased.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Julie smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know, Count, such knights as you are only found in Madame de Souza’s
+ novels.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What knights? What do you mean?” demanded Pierre, blushing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, come, my dear count! C’est la fable de tout Moscou. Je vous admire,
+ ma parole d’honneur!” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “It is the talk of all Moscow. My word, I admire you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Forfeit, forfeit!” cried the militia officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right, one can’t talk—how tiresome!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is ‘the talk of all Moscow’?” Pierre asked angrily, rising to his
+ feet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come now, Count, you know!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know anything about it,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know you were friendly with Natalie, and so... but I was always more
+ friendly with Véra—that dear Véra.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, madame!” Pierre continued in a tone of displeasure, “I have not taken
+ on myself the role of Natalie Rostóva’s knight at all, and have not been
+ to their house for nearly a month. But I cannot understand the cruelty...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Qui s’excuse s’accuse,” * said Julie, smiling and waving the lint
+ triumphantly, and to have the last word she promptly changed the subject.
+ “Do you know what I heard today? Poor Mary Bolkónskaya arrived in Moscow
+ yesterday. Do you know that she has lost her father?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Who excuses himself, accuses himself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Really? Where is she? I should like very much to see her,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I spent the evening with her yesterday. She is going to their estate near
+ Moscow either today or tomorrow morning, with her nephew.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, and how is she?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She is well, but sad. But do you know who rescued her? It is quite a
+ romance. Nicholas Rostóv! She was surrounded, and they wanted to kill her
+ and had wounded some of her people. He rushed in and saved her....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Another romance,” said the militia officer. “Really, this general flight
+ has been arranged to get all the old maids married off. Catiche is one and
+ Princess Bolkónskaya another.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know, I really believe she is un petit peu amoureuse du jeune
+ homme. ” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “A little bit in love with the young man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Forfeit, forfeit, forfeit!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But how could one say that in Russian?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII
+ 
+ 
+ When Pierre returned home he was handed two of Rostopchín’s broadsheets
+ that had been brought that day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The first declared that the report that Count Rostopchín had forbidden
+ people to leave Moscow was false; on the contrary he was glad that ladies
+ and tradesmen’s wives were leaving the city. “There will be less panic and
+ less gossip,” ran the broadsheet “but I will stake my life on it that
+ that scoundrel will not enter Moscow.” These words showed Pierre clearly for
+ the first time that the French would enter Moscow. The second broadsheet
+ stated that our headquarters were at Vyázma, that Count Wittgenstein had
+ defeated the French, but that as many of the inhabitants of Moscow wished
+ to be armed, weapons were ready for them at the arsenal: sabers, pistols,
+ and muskets which could be had at a low price. The tone of the
+ proclamation was not as jocose as in the former Chigírin talks. Pierre
+ pondered over these broadsheets. Evidently the terrible stormcloud he had
+ desired with the whole strength of his soul but which yet aroused
+ involuntary horror in him was drawing near.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Shall I join the army and enter the service, or wait?” he asked himself
+ for the hundredth time. He took a pack of cards that lay on the table and
+ began to lay them out for a game of patience.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If this patience comes out,” he said to himself after shuffling the
+ cards, holding them in his hand, and lifting his head, “if it comes out,
+ it means... what does it mean?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He had not decided what it should mean when he heard the voice of the
+ eldest princess at the door asking whether she might come in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then it will mean that I must go to the army,” said Pierre to himself.
+ “Come in, come in!” he added to the princess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only the eldest princess, the one with the stony face and long waist, was
+ still living in Pierre’s house. The two younger ones had both married.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Excuse my coming to you, cousin,” she said in a reproachful and agitated
+ voice. “You know some decision must be come to. What is going to happen?
+ Everyone has left Moscow and the people are rioting. How is it that we are
+ staying on?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the contrary, things seem satisfactory, ma cousine ,” said
+ Pierre in the bantering tone he habitually adopted toward her, always feeling
+ uncomfortable in the role of her benefactor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Satisfactory, indeed! Very satisfactory! Barbara Ivánovna told me today
+ how our troops are distinguishing themselves. It certainly does them
+ credit! And the people too are quite mutinous—they no longer obey,
+ even my maid has taken to being rude. At this rate they will soon begin
+ beating us. One can’t walk in the streets. But, above all, the French will
+ be here any day now, so what are we waiting for? I ask just one thing of
+ you, cousin,” she went on, “arrange for me to be taken to Petersburg.
+ Whatever I may be, I can’t live under Bonaparte’s rule.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, come, ma cousine! Where do you get your information from? On the
+ contrary...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I won’t submit to your Napoleon! Others may if they please.... If you
+ don’t want to do this...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I will, I’ll give the order at once.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess was apparently vexed at not having anyone to be angry with.
+ Muttering to herself, she sat down on a chair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you have been misinformed,” said Pierre. “Everything is quiet in the
+ city and there is not the slightest danger. See! I’ve just been
+ reading...” He showed her the broadsheet. “Count Rostopchín writes that he
+ will stake his life on it that the enemy will not enter Moscow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, that count of yours!” said the princess malevolently. “He is a
+ hypocrite, a rascal who has himself roused the people to riot. Didn’t he
+ write in those idiotic broadsheets that anyone, ‘whoever it might be,
+ should be dragged to the lockup by his hair’? (How silly!) ‘And honor and
+ glory to whoever captures him,’ he says. This is what his cajolery has
+ brought us to! Barbara Ivánovna told me the mob near killed her because
+ she said something in French.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, but it’s so... You take everything so to heart,” said Pierre, and
+ began laying out his cards for patience.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Although that patience did come out, Pierre did not join the army, but
+ remained in deserted Moscow ever in the same state of agitation,
+ irresolution, and alarm, yet at the same time joyfully expecting something
+ terrible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day toward evening the princess set off, and Pierre’s head steward
+ came to inform him that the money needed for the equipment of his regiment
+ could not be found without selling one of the estates. In general the head
+ steward made out to Pierre that his project of raising a regiment would
+ ruin him. Pierre listened to him, scarcely able to repress a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well then, sell it,” said he. “What’s to be done? I can’t draw back now!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The worse everything became, especially his own affairs, the better was
+ Pierre pleased and the more evident was it that the catastrophe he
+ expected was approaching. Hardly anyone he knew was left in town. Julie
+ had gone, and so had Princess Mary. Of his intimate friends only the
+ Rostóvs remained, but he did not go to see them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To distract his thoughts he drove that day to the village of Vorontsóvo to
+ see the great balloon Leppich was constructing to destroy the foe, and a
+ trial balloon that was to go up next day. The balloon was not yet ready,
+ but Pierre learned that it was being constructed by the Emperor’s desire.
+ The Emperor had written to Count Rostopchín as follows:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as Leppich is ready, get together a crew of reliable and
+ intelligent men for his car and send a courier to General Kutúzov to let
+ him know. I have informed him of the matter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Please impress upon Leppich to be very careful where he descends for the
+ first time, that he may not make a mistake and fall into the enemy’s
+ hands. It is essential for him to combine his movements with those of the
+ commander in chief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ On his way home from Vorontsóvo, as he was passing the Bolótnoe Place
+ Pierre, seeing a large crowd round the Lóbnoe Place, stopped and got out
+ of his trap. A French cook accused of being a spy was being flogged. The
+ flogging was only just over, and the executioner was releasing from the
+ flogging bench a stout man with red whiskers, in blue stockings and a
+ green jacket, who was moaning piteously. Another criminal, thin and pale,
+ stood near. Judging by their faces they were both Frenchmen. With a
+ frightened and suffering look resembling that on the thin Frenchman’s
+ face, Pierre pushed his way in through the crowd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it? Who is it? What is it for?” he kept asking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the attention of the crowd—officials, burghers, shopkeepers,
+ peasants, and women in cloaks and in pelisses—was so eagerly
+ centered on what was passing in Lóbnoe Place that no one answered him. The
+ stout man rose, frowned, shrugged his shoulders, and evidently trying to
+ appear firm began to pull on his jacket without looking about him, but
+ suddenly his lips trembled and he began to cry, in the way full-blooded
+ grown-up men cry, though angry with himself for doing so. In the crowd
+ people began talking loudly, to stifle their feelings of pity as it seemed
+ to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s cook to some prince.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh, mounseer, Russian sauce seems to be sour to a Frenchman... sets his
+ teeth on edge!” said a wrinkled clerk who was standing behind Pierre, when
+ the Frenchman began to cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The clerk glanced round, evidently hoping that his joke would be
+ appreciated. Some people began to laugh, others continued to watch in
+ dismay the executioner who was undressing the other man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre choked, his face puckered, and he turned hastily away, went back to
+ his trap muttering something to himself as he went, and took his seat. As
+ they drove along he shuddered and exclaimed several times so audibly that
+ the coachman asked him:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is your pleasure?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where are you going?” shouted Pierre to the man, who was driving to
+ Lubyánka Street.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To the Governor’s, as you ordered,” answered the coachman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fool! Idiot!” shouted Pierre, abusing his coachman—a thing he
+ rarely did. “Home, I told you! And drive faster, blockhead!” “I must get
+ away this very day,” he murmured to himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the sight of the tortured Frenchman and the crowd surrounding the
+ Lóbnoe Place, Pierre had so definitely made up his mind that he could no
+ longer remain in Moscow and would leave for the army that very day that it
+ seemed to him that either he had told the coachman this or that the man
+ ought to have known it for himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On reaching home Pierre gave orders to Evstáfey—his head coachman
+ who knew everything, could do anything, and was known to all Moscow—that
+ he would leave that night for the army at Mozháysk, and that his saddle
+ horses should be sent there. This could not all be arranged that day, so
+ on Evstáfey’s representation Pierre had to put off his departure till next
+ day to allow time for the relay horses to be sent on in advance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the twenty-fourth the weather cleared up after a spell of rain, and
+ after dinner Pierre left Moscow. When changing horses that night in
+ Perkhúshkovo, he learned that there had been a great battle that evening.
+ (This was the battle of Shevárdino.) He was told that there in
+ Perkhúshkovo the earth trembled from the firing, but nobody could answer
+ his questions as to who had won. At dawn next day Pierre was approaching
+ Mozháysk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Every house in Mozháysk had soldiers quartered in it, and at the hostel
+ where Pierre was met by his groom and coachman there was no room to be
+ had. It was full of officers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Everywhere in Mozháysk and beyond it, troops were stationed or on the
+ march. Cossacks, foot and horse soldiers, wagons, caissons, and cannon
+ were everywhere. Pierre pushed forward as fast as he could, and the
+ farther he left Moscow behind and the deeper he plunged into that sea of
+ troops the more was he overcome by restless agitation and a new and joyful
+ feeling he had not experienced before. It was a feeling akin to what he
+ had felt at the Slobóda Palace during the Emperor’s visit—a sense of
+ the necessity of undertaking something and sacrificing something. He now
+ experienced a glad consciousness that everything that constitutes men’s
+ happiness—the comforts of life, wealth, even life itself—is
+ rubbish it is pleasant to throw away, compared with something... With
+ what? Pierre could not say, and he did not try to determine for whom and
+ for what he felt such particular delight in sacrificing everything. He was
+ not occupied with the question of what to sacrifice for; the fact of
+ sacrificing in itself afforded him a new and joyous sensation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX
+ 
+ 
+ On the twenty-fourth of August the battle of the Shevárdino Redoubt was
+ fought, on the twenty-fifth not a shot was fired by either side, and on
+ the twenty-sixth the battle of Borodinó itself took place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Why and how were the battles of Shevárdino and Borodinó given and
+ accepted? Why was the battle of Borodinó fought? There was not the least
+ sense in it for either the French or the Russians. Its immediate result
+ for the Russians was, and was bound to be, that we were brought nearer to
+ the destruction of Moscow—which we feared more than anything in the
+ world; and for the French its immediate result was that they were brought
+ nearer to the destruction of their whole army—which they feared more
+ than anything in the world. What the result must be was quite obvious, and
+ yet Napoleon offered and Kutúzov accepted that battle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If the commanders had been guided by reason, it would seem that it must
+ have been obvious to Napoleon that by advancing thirteen hundred miles and
+ giving battle with a probability of losing a quarter of his army, he was
+ advancing to certain destruction, and it must have been equally clear to
+ Kutúzov that by accepting battle and risking the loss of a quarter of his
+ army he would certainly lose Moscow. For Kutúzov this was mathematically
+ clear, as it is that if when playing draughts I have one man less and go
+ on exchanging, I shall certainly lose, and therefore should not exchange.
+ When my opponent has sixteen men and I have fourteen, I am only one eighth
+ weaker than he, but when I have exchanged thirteen more men he will be
+ three times as strong as I am.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before the battle of Borodinó our strength in proportion to the French was
+ about as five to six, but after that battle it was little more than one to
+ two: previously we had a hundred thousand against a hundred and twenty
+ thousand; afterwards little more than fifty thousand against a hundred
+ thousand. Yet the shrewd and experienced Kutúzov accepted the battle,
+ while Napoleon, who was said to be a commander of genius, gave it, losing
+ a quarter of his army and lengthening his lines of communication still
+ more. If it is said that he expected to end the campaign by occupying
+ Moscow as he had ended a previous campaign by occupying Vienna, there is
+ much evidence to the contrary. Napoleon’s historians themselves tell us
+ that from Smolénsk onwards he wished to stop, knew the danger of his
+ extended position, and knew that the occupation of Moscow would not be the
+ end of the campaign, for he had seen at Smolénsk the state in which
+ Russian towns were left to him, and had not received a single reply to his
+ repeated announcements of his wish to negotiate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In giving and accepting battle at Borodinó, Kutúzov acted involuntarily
+ and irrationally. But later on, to fit what had occurred, the historians
+ provided cunningly devised evidence of the foresight and genius of the
+ generals who, of all the blind tools of history were the most enslaved and
+ involuntary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes furnish
+ the whole interest of the story, and we are still unable to accustom
+ ourselves to the fact that for our epoch histories of that kind are
+ meaningless.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the other question, how the battle of Borodinó and the preceding battle
+ of Shevárdino were fought, there also exists a definite and well-known,
+ but quite false, conception. All the historians describe the affair as
+ follows:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Russian army, they say, in its retreat from Smolénsk sought out for
+ itself the best position for a general engagement and found such a
+ position at Borodinó. 
+
+
+
+ 
+ The Russians, they say, fortified this position in advance on the left of
+ the highroad (from Moscow to Smolénsk) and almost at a right angle to it,
+ from Borodinó to Utítsa, at the very place where the battle was fought. 
+
+
+
+ 
+ In front of this position, they say, a fortified outpost was set up on the
+ Shevárdino mound to observe the enemy. On the twenty-fourth, we are told,
+ Napoleon attacked this advanced post and took it, and, on the
+ twenty-sixth, attacked the whole Russian army, which was in position on
+ the field of Borodinó. 
+
+
+
+ 
+ So the histories say, and it is all quite wrong, as anyone who cares to
+ look into the matter can easily convince himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Russians did not seek out the best position but, on the contrary,
+ during the retreat passed many positions better than Borodinó. They did
+ not stop at any one of these positions because Kutúzov did not wish to
+ occupy a position he had not himself chosen, because the popular demand
+ for a battle had not yet expressed itself strongly enough, and because
+ Milorádovich had not yet arrived with the militia, and for many other
+ reasons. The fact is that other positions they had passed were stronger,
+ and that the position at Borodinó (the one where the battle was fought),
+ far from being strong, was no more a position than any other spot one
+ might find in the Russian Empire by sticking a pin into the map at hazard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not only did the Russians not fortify the position on the field of
+ Borodinó to the left of, and at a right angle to, the highroad (that is,
+ the position on which the battle took place), but never till the
+ twenty-fifth of August, 1812, did they think that a battle might be fought
+ there. This was shown first by the fact that there were no entrenchments
+ there by the twenty fifth and that those begun on the twenty-fifth and
+ twenty-sixth were not completed, and secondly, by the position of the
+ Shevárdino Redoubt. That redoubt was quite senseless in front of the
+ position where the battle was accepted. Why was it more strongly fortified
+ than any other post? And why were all efforts exhausted and six thousand
+ men sacrificed to defend it till late at night on the twenty-fourth? A
+ Cossack patrol would have sufficed to observe the enemy. Thirdly, as proof
+ that the position on which the battle was fought had not been foreseen and
+ that the Shevárdino Redoubt was not an advanced post of that position, we
+ have the fact that up to the twenty-fifth, Barclay de Tolly and Bagratión
+ were convinced that the Shevárdino Redoubt was the left flank of the
+ position, and that Kutúzov himself in his report, written in hot haste
+ after the battle, speaks of the Shevárdino Redoubt as the left flank of
+ the position. It was much later, when reports on the battle of Borodinó
+ were written at leisure, that the incorrect and extraordinary statement
+ was invented (probably to justify the mistakes of a commander in chief who
+ had to be represented as infallible) that the Shevárdino Redoubt was an
+ advanced post—whereas in reality it was simply a fortified point on
+ the left flank—and that the battle of Borodinó was fought by us on
+ an entrenched position previously selected, whereas it was fought on a
+ quite unexpected spot which was almost unentrenched.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The case was evidently this: a position was selected along the river
+ Kolochá—which crosses the highroad not at a right angle but at an
+ acute angle—so that the left flank was at Shevárdino, the right
+ flank near the village of Nóvoe, and the center at Borodinó at the
+ confluence of the rivers Kolochá and Vóyna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To anyone who looks at the field of Borodinó without thinking of how the
+ battle was actually fought, this position, protected by the river Kolochá,
+ presents itself as obvious for an army whose object was to prevent an
+ enemy from advancing along the Smolénsk road to Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon, riding to Valúevo on the twenty-fourth, did not see (as the
+ history books say he did) the position of the Russians from Utítsa to
+ Borodinó (he could not have seen that position because it did not exist),
+ nor did he see an advanced post of the Russian army, but while pursuing
+ the Russian rearguard he came upon the left flank of the Russian position—at
+ the Shevárdino Redoubt—and unexpectedly for the Russians moved his
+ army across the Kolochá. And the Russians, not having time to begin a
+ general engagement, withdrew their left wing from the position they had
+ intended to occupy and took up a new position which had not been foreseen
+ and was not fortified. By crossing to the other side of the Kolochá to the
+ left of the highroad, Napoleon shifted the whole forthcoming battle from
+ right to left (looking from the Russian side) and transferred it to the
+ plain between Utítsa, Semënovsk, and Borodinó—a plain no more
+ advantageous as a position than any other plain in Russia—and there
+ the whole battle of the twenty-sixth of August took place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Had Napoleon not ridden out on the evening of the twenty-fourth to the
+ Kolochá, and had he not then ordered an immediate attack on the redoubt
+ but had begun the attack next morning, no one would have doubted that the
+ Shevárdino Redoubt was the left flank of our position, and the battle
+ would have taken place where we expected it. In that case we should
+ probably have defended the Shevárdino Redoubt—our left flank—still
+ more obstinately. We should have attacked Napoleon in the center or on the
+ right, and the engagement would have taken place on the twenty-fifth, in
+ the position we intended and had fortified. But as the attack on our left
+ flank took place in the evening after the retreat of our rear guard (that
+ is, immediately after the fight at Gridnëva), and as the Russian
+ commanders did not wish, or were not in time, to begin a general
+ engagement then on the evening of the twenty-fourth, the first and chief
+ action of the battle of Borodinó was already lost on the twenty-fourth,
+ and obviously led to the loss of the one fought on the twenty-sixth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the loss of the Shevárdino Redoubt, we found ourselves on the
+ morning of the twenty-fifth without a position for our left flank, and
+ were forced to bend it back and hastily entrench it where it chanced to
+ be.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not only was the Russian army on the twenty-sixth defended by weak,
+ unfinished entrenchments, but the disadvantage of that position was
+ increased by the fact that the Russian commanders—not having fully
+ realized what had happened, namely the loss of our position on the left
+ flank and the shifting of the whole field of the forthcoming battle from
+ right to left—maintained their extended position from the village of
+ Nóvoe to Utítsa, and consequently had to move their forces from right to
+ left during the battle. So it happened that throughout the whole battle
+ the Russians opposed the entire French army launched against our left
+ flank with but half as many men. (Poniatowski’s action against Utítsa, and
+ Uvárov’s on the right flank against the French, were actions distinct from
+ the main course of the battle.) So the battle of Borodinó did not take
+ place at all as (in an effort to conceal our commanders’ mistakes even at
+ the cost of diminishing the glory due to the Russian army and people) it
+ has been described. The battle of Borodinó was not fought on a chosen and
+ entrenched position with forces only slightly weaker than those of the
+ enemy, but, as a result of the loss of the Shevárdino Redoubt, the
+ Russians fought the battle of Borodinó on an open and almost unentrenched
+ position, with forces only half as numerous as the French; that is to say,
+ under conditions in which it was not merely unthinkable to fight for ten
+ hours and secure an indecisive result, but unthinkable to keep an army
+ even from complete disintegration and flight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX
+ 
+ 
+ On the morning of the twenty-fifth Pierre was leaving Mozháysk. At the
+ descent of the high steep hill, down which a winding road led out of the
+ town past the cathedral on the right, where a service was being held and
+ the bells were ringing, Pierre got out of his vehicle and proceeded on
+ foot. Behind him a cavalry regiment was coming down the hill preceded by
+ its singers. Coming up toward him was a train of carts carrying men who
+ had been wounded in the engagement the day before. The peasant drivers,
+ shouting and lashing their horses, kept crossing from side to side. The
+ carts, in each of which three or four wounded soldiers were lying or
+ sitting, jolted over the stones that had been thrown on the steep incline
+ to make it something like a road. The wounded, bandaged with rags, with
+ pale cheeks, compressed lips, and knitted brows, held on to the sides of
+ the carts as they were jolted against one another. Almost all of them
+ stared with naïve, childlike curiosity at Pierre’s white hat and green
+ swallow-tail coat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre’s coachman shouted angrily at the convoy of wounded to keep to one
+ side of the road. The cavalry regiment, as it descended the hill with its
+ singers, surrounded Pierre’s carriage and blocked the road. Pierre
+ stopped, being pressed against the side of the cutting in which the road
+ ran. The sunshine from behind the hill did not penetrate into the cutting
+ and there it was cold and damp, but above Pierre’s head was the bright
+ August sunshine and the bells sounded merrily. One of the carts with
+ wounded stopped by the side of the road close to Pierre. The driver in his
+ bast shoes ran panting up to it, placed a stone under one of its tireless
+ hind wheels, and began arranging the breech-band on his little horse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One of the wounded, an old soldier with a bandaged arm who was following
+ the cart on foot, caught hold of it with his sound hand and turned to look
+ at Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I say, fellow countryman! Will they set us down here or take us on to
+ Moscow?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was so deep in thought that he did not hear the question. He was
+ looking now at the cavalry regiment that had met the convoy of wounded,
+ now at the cart by which he was standing, in which two wounded men were
+ sitting and one was lying. One of those sitting up in the cart had
+ probably been wounded in the cheek. His whole head was wrapped in rags and
+ one cheek was swollen to the size of a baby’s head. His nose and mouth
+ were twisted to one side. This soldier was looking at the cathedral and
+ crossing himself. Another, a young lad, a fair-haired recruit as white as
+ though there was no blood in his thin face, looked at Pierre kindly, with
+ a fixed smile. The third lay prone so that his face was not visible. The
+ cavalry singers were passing close by:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ah lost, quite lost... is my head so keen,
+
+ Living in a foreign land... 
+
+
+
+ 
+ they sang their soldiers’ dance song.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As if responding to them but with a different sort of merriment, the
+ metallic sound of the bells reverberated high above and the hot rays of
+ the sun bathed the top of the opposite slope with yet another sort of
+ merriment. But beneath the slope, by the cart with the wounded near the
+ panting little nag where Pierre stood, it was damp, somber, and sad.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The soldier with the swollen cheek looked angrily at the cavalry singers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, the coxcombs!” he muttered reproachfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s not the soldiers only, but I’ve seen peasants today, too.... The
+ peasants—even they have to go,” said the soldier behind the cart,
+ addressing Pierre with a sad smile. “No distinctions made nowadays....
+ They want the whole nation to fall on them—in a word, it’s Moscow!
+ They want to make an end of it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In spite of the obscurity of the soldier’s words Pierre understood what he
+ wanted to say and nodded approval.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The road was clear again; Pierre descended the hill and drove on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He kept looking to either side of the road for familiar faces, but only
+ saw everywhere the unfamiliar faces of various military men of different
+ branches of the service, who all looked with astonishment at his white hat
+ and green tail coat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having gone nearly three miles he at last met an acquaintance and eagerly
+ addressed him. This was one of the head army doctors. He was driving
+ toward Pierre in a covered gig, sitting beside a young surgeon, and on
+ recognizing Pierre he told the Cossack who occupied the driver’s seat to
+ pull up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Count! Your excellency, how come you to be here?” asked the doctor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, you know, I wanted to see...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, there will be something to see....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre got out and talked to the doctor, explaining his intention of
+ taking part in a battle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctor advised him to apply direct to Kutúzov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why should you be God knows where out of sight, during the battle?” he
+ said, exchanging glances with his young companion. “Anyhow his Serene
+ Highness knows you and will receive you graciously. That’s what you must
+ do.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctor seemed tired and in a hurry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You think so?... Ah, I also wanted to ask you where our position is
+ exactly?” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The position?” repeated the doctor. “Well, that’s not my line. Drive past
+ Tatárinova, a lot of digging is going on there. Go up the hillock and
+ you’ll see.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Can one see from there?... If you would...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the doctor interrupted him and moved toward his gig.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I would go with you but on my honor I’m up to here”—and he pointed
+ to his throat. “I’m galloping to the commander of the corps. How do
+ matters stand?... You know, Count, there’ll be a battle tomorrow. Out of
+ an army of a hundred thousand we must expect at least twenty thousand
+ wounded, and we haven’t stretchers, or bunks, or dressers, or doctors
+ enough for six thousand. We have ten thousand carts, but we need other
+ things as well—we must manage as best we can!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The strange thought that of the thousands of men, young and old, who had
+ stared with merry surprise at his hat (perhaps the very men he had
+ noticed), twenty thousand were inevitably doomed to wounds and death
+ amazed Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They may die tomorrow; why are they thinking of anything but death?” And
+ by some latent sequence of thought the descent of the Mozháysk hill, the
+ carts with the wounded, the ringing bells, the slanting rays of the sun,
+ and the songs of the cavalrymen vividly recurred to his mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The cavalry ride to battle and meet the wounded and do not for a moment
+ think of what awaits them, but pass by, winking at the wounded. Yet from
+ among these men twenty thousand are doomed to die, and they wonder at my
+ hat! Strange!” thought Pierre, continuing his way to Tatárinova.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In front of a landowner’s house to the left of the road stood carriages,
+ wagons, and crowds of orderlies and sentinels. The commander in chief was
+ putting up there, but just when Pierre arrived he was not in and hardly
+ any of the staff were there—they had gone to the church service.
+ Pierre drove on toward Górki.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he had ascended the hill and reached the little village street, he
+ saw for the first time peasant militiamen in their white shirts and with
+ crosses on their caps, who, talking and laughing loudly, animated and
+ perspiring, were at work on a huge knoll overgrown with grass to the right
+ of the road.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some of them were digging, others were wheeling barrowloads of earth along
+ planks, while others stood about doing nothing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Two officers were standing on the knoll, directing the men. On seeing
+ these peasants, who were evidently still amused by the novelty of their
+ position as soldiers, Pierre once more thought of the wounded men at
+ Mozháysk and understood what the soldier had meant when he said: “They
+ want the whole nation to fall on them.” The sight of these bearded
+ peasants at work on the battlefield, with their queer, clumsy boots and
+ perspiring necks, and their shirts opening from the left toward the
+ middle, unfastened, exposing their sunburned collarbones, impressed Pierre
+ more strongly with the solemnity and importance of the moment than
+ anything he had yet seen or heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI
+ 
+ 
+ Pierre stepped out of his carriage and, passing the toiling militiamen,
+ ascended the knoll from which, according to the doctor, the battlefield
+ could be seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was about eleven o’clock. The sun shone somewhat to the left and behind
+ him and brightly lit up the enormous panorama which, rising like an
+ amphitheater, extended before him in the clear rarefied atmosphere.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From above on the left, bisecting that amphitheater, wound the Smolénsk
+ highroad, passing through a village with a white church some five hundred
+ paces in front of the knoll and below it. This was Borodinó. Below the
+ village the road crossed the river by a bridge and, winding down and up,
+ rose higher and higher to the village of Valúevo visible about four miles
+ away, where Napoleon was then stationed. Beyond Valúevo the road
+ disappeared into a yellowing forest on the horizon. Far in the distance in
+ that birch and fir forest to the right of the road, the cross and belfry
+ of the Kolochá Monastery gleamed in the sun. Here and there over the whole
+ of that blue expanse, to right and left of the forest and the road,
+ smoking campfires could be seen and indefinite masses of troops—ours
+ and the enemy’s. The ground to the right—along the course of the
+ Kolochá and Moskvá rivers—was broken and hilly. Between the hollows
+ the villages of Bezúbova and Zakhárino showed in the distance. On the left
+ the ground was more level; there were fields of grain, and the smoking
+ ruins of Semënovsk, which had been burned down, could be seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All that Pierre saw was so indefinite that neither the left nor the right
+ side of the field fully satisfied his expectations. Nowhere could he see
+ the battlefield he had expected to find, but only fields, meadows, troops,
+ woods, the smoke of campfires, villages, mounds, and streams; and try as
+ he would he could descry no military “position” in this place which teemed
+ with life, nor could he even distinguish our troops from the enemy’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I must ask someone who knows,” he thought, and addressed an officer who
+ was looking with curiosity at his huge unmilitary figure.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “May I ask you,” said Pierre, “what village that is in front?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Búrdino, isn’t it?” said the officer, turning to his companion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Borodinó,” the other corrected him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer, evidently glad of an opportunity for a talk, moved up to
+ Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Are those our men there?” Pierre inquired.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, and there, further on, are the French,” said the officer. “There
+ they are, there... you can see them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where? Where?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One can see them with the naked eye... Why, there!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer pointed with his hand to the smoke visible on the left beyond
+ the river, and the same stern and serious expression that Pierre had
+ noticed on many of the faces he had met came into his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, those are the French! And over there?...” Pierre pointed to a knoll
+ on the left, near which some troops could be seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Those are ours.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, ours! And there?...” Pierre pointed to another knoll in the distance
+ with a big tree on it, near a village that lay in a hollow where also some
+ campfires were smoking and something black was visible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s his again,” said the officer. (It was the Shevárdino Redoubt.) “It
+ was ours yesterday, but now it is his .”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then how about our position?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Our position?” replied the officer with a smile of satisfaction. “I can
+ tell you quite clearly, because I constructed nearly all our
+ entrenchments. There, you see? There’s our center, at Borodinó, just
+ there,” and he pointed to the village in front of them with the white
+ church. “That’s where one crosses the Kolochá. You see down there where
+ the rows of hay are lying in the hollow, there’s the bridge. That’s our
+ center. Our right flank is over there”—he pointed sharply to the
+ right, far away in the broken ground—“That’s where the Moskvá River
+ is, and we have thrown up three redoubts there, very strong ones. The left
+ flank...” here the officer paused. “Well, you see, that’s difficult to
+ explain.... Yesterday our left flank was there at Shevárdino, you see,
+ where the oak is, but now we have withdrawn our left wing—now it is
+ over there, do you see that village and the smoke? That’s Semënovsk, yes,
+ there,” he pointed to Raévski’s knoll. “But the battle will hardly be
+ there. His having moved his troops there is only a ruse; he will probably
+ pass round to the right of the Moskvá. But wherever it may be, many a man
+ will be missing tomorrow!” he remarked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ An elderly sergeant who had approached the officer while he was giving
+ these explanations had waited in silence for him to finish speaking, but
+ at this point, evidently not liking the officer’s remark, interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gabions must be sent for,” said he sternly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer appeared abashed, as though he understood that one might think
+ of how many men would be missing tomorrow but ought not to speak of it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, send number three company again,” the officer replied hurriedly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And you, are you one of the doctors?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I’ve come on my own,” answered Pierre, and he went down the hill
+ again, passing the militiamen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, those damned fellows!” muttered the officer who followed him, holding
+ his nose as he ran past the men at work.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There they are... bringing her, coming... There they are... They’ll be
+ here in a minute...” voices were suddenly heard saying; and officers,
+ soldiers, and militiamen began running forward along the road.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A church procession was coming up the hill from Borodinó. First along the
+ dusty road came the infantry in ranks, bareheaded and with arms reversed.
+ From behind them came the sound of church singing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soldiers and militiamen ran bareheaded past Pierre toward the procession.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They are bringing her, our Protectress!... The Iberian Mother of God!”
+ someone cried.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Smolénsk Mother of God,” another corrected him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The militiamen, both those who had been in the village and those who had
+ been at work on the battery, threw down their spades and ran to meet the
+ church procession. Following the battalion that marched along the dusty
+ road came priests in their vestments—one little old man in a hood
+ with attendants and singers. Behind them soldiers and officers bore a
+ large, dark-faced icon with an embossed metal cover. This was the icon
+ that had been brought from Smolénsk and had since accompanied the army.
+ Behind, before, and on both sides, crowds of militiamen with bared heads
+ walked, ran, and bowed to the ground.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the summit of the hill they stopped with the icon; the men who had been
+ holding it up by the linen bands attached to it were relieved by others,
+ the chanters relit their censers, and service began. The hot rays of the
+ sun beat down vertically and a fresh soft wind played with the hair of the
+ bared heads and with the ribbons decorating the icon. The singing did not
+ sound loud under the open sky. An immense crowd of bareheaded officers,
+ soldiers, and militiamen surrounded the icon. Behind the priest and a
+ chanter stood the notabilities on a spot reserved for them. A bald general
+ with a St. George’s Cross on his neck stood just behind the priest’s back,
+ and without crossing himself (he was evidently a German) patiently awaited
+ the end of the service, which he considered it necessary to hear to the
+ end, probably to arouse the patriotism of the Russian people. Another
+ general stood in a martial pose, crossing himself by shaking his hand in
+ front of his chest while looking about him. Standing among the crowd of
+ peasants, Pierre recognized several acquaintances among these notables,
+ but did not look at them—his whole attention was absorbed in
+ watching the serious expression on the faces of the crowd of soldiers and
+ militiamen who were all gazing eagerly at the icon. As soon as the tired
+ chanters, who were singing the service for the twentieth time that day,
+ began lazily and mechanically to sing: “Save from calamity Thy servants, O
+ Mother of God,” and the priest and deacon chimed in: “For to Thee under
+ God we all flee as to an inviolable bulwark and protection,” there again
+ kindled in all those faces the same expression of consciousness of the
+ solemnity of the impending moment that Pierre had seen on the faces at the
+ foot of the hill at Mozháysk and momentarily on many and many faces he had
+ met that morning; and heads were bowed more frequently and hair tossed
+ back, and sighs and the sound men made as they crossed themselves were
+ heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The crowd round the icon suddenly parted and pressed against Pierre.
+ Someone, a very important personage judging by the haste with which way
+ was made for him, was approaching the icon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was Kutúzov, who had been riding round the position and on his way back
+ to Tatárinova had stopped where the service was being held. Pierre
+ recognized him at once by his peculiar figure, which distinguished him
+ from everybody else.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With a long overcoat on his exceedingly stout, round-shouldered body, with
+ uncovered white head and puffy face showing the white ball of the eye he
+ had lost, Kutúzov walked with plunging, swaying gait into the crowd and
+ stopped behind the priest. He crossed himself with an accustomed movement,
+ bent till he touched the ground with his hand, and bowed his white head
+ with a deep sigh. Behind Kutúzov was Bennigsen and the suite. Despite the
+ presence of the commander in chief, who attracted the attention of all the
+ superior officers, the militiamen and soldiers continued their prayers
+ without looking at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the service was over, Kutúzov stepped up to the icon, sank heavily to
+ his knees, bowed to the ground, and for a long time tried vainly to rise,
+ but could not do so on account of his weakness and weight. His white head
+ twitched with the effort. At last he rose, kissed the icon as a child does
+ with naïvely pouting lips, and again bowed till he touched the ground with
+ his hand. The other generals followed his example, then the officers, and
+ after them with excited faces, pressing on one another, crowding, panting,
+ and pushing, scrambled the soldiers and militiamen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXII
+ 
+ 
+ Staggering amid the crush, Pierre looked about him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Count Peter Kirílovich! How did you get here?” said a voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked round. Borís Drubetskóy, brushing his knees with his hand
+ (he had probably soiled them when he, too, had knelt before the icon),
+ came up to him smiling. Borís was elegantly dressed, with a slightly
+ martial touch appropriate to a campaign. He wore a long coat and like
+ Kutúzov had a whip slung across his shoulder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile Kutúzov had reached the village and seated himself in the shade
+ of the nearest house, on a bench which one Cossack had run to fetch and
+ another had hastily covered with a rug. An immense and brilliant suite
+ surrounded him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The icon was carried further, accompanied by the throng. Pierre stopped
+ some thirty paces from Kutúzov, talking to Borís.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He explained his wish to be present at the battle and to see the position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This is what you must do,” said Borís. “I will do the honors of the camp
+ to you. You will see everything best from where Count Bennigsen will be. I
+ am in attendance on him, you know; I’ll mention it to him. But if you want
+ to ride round the position, come along with us. We are just going to the
+ left flank. Then when we get back, do spend the night with me and we’ll
+ arrange a game of cards. Of course you know Dmítri Sergéevich? Those are
+ his quarters,” and he pointed to the third house in the village of Górki.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I should like to see the right flank. They say it’s very strong,”
+ said Pierre. “I should like to start from the Moskvá River and ride round
+ the whole position.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, you can do that later, but the chief thing is the left flank.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes. But where is Prince Bolkónski’s regiment? Can you point it out
+ to me?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Prince Andrew’s? We shall pass it and I’ll take you to him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What about the left flank?” asked Pierre
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To tell you the truth, between ourselves, God only knows what state our
+ left flank is in,” said Borís confidentially lowering his voice. “It is
+ not at all what Count Bennigsen intended. He meant to fortify that knoll
+ quite differently, but...” Borís shrugged his shoulders, “his Serene
+ Highness would not have it, or someone persuaded him. You see...” but
+ Borís did not finish, for at that moment Kaysárov, Kutúzov’s adjutant,
+ came up to Pierre. “Ah, Kaysárov!” said Borís, addressing him with an
+ unembarrassed smile, “I was just trying to explain our position to the
+ count. It is amazing how his Serene Highness could so foresee the
+ intentions of the French!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You mean the left flank?” asked Kaysárov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, exactly; the left flank is now extremely strong.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though Kutúzov had dismissed all unnecessary men from the staff, Borís had
+ contrived to remain at headquarters after the changes. He had established
+ himself with Count Bennigsen, who, like all on whom Borís had been in
+ attendance, considered young Prince Drubetskóy an invaluable man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the higher command there were two sharply defined parties: Kutúzov’s
+ party and that of Bennigsen, the chief of staff. Borís belonged to the
+ latter and no one else, while showing servile respect to Kutúzov, could so
+ create an impression that the old fellow was not much good and that
+ Bennigsen managed everything. Now the decisive moment of battle had come
+ when Kutúzov would be destroyed and the power pass to Bennigsen, or even
+ if Kutúzov won the battle it would be felt that everything was done by
+ Bennigsen. In any case many great rewards would have to be given for
+ tomorrow’s action, and new men would come to the front. So Borís was full
+ of nervous vivacity all day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After Kaysárov, others whom Pierre knew came up to him, and he had not
+ time to reply to all the questions about Moscow that were showered upon
+ him, or to listen to all that was told him. The faces all expressed
+ animation and apprehension, but it seemed to Pierre that the cause of the
+ excitement shown in some of these faces lay chiefly in questions of
+ personal success; his mind, however, was occupied by the different
+ expression he saw on other faces—an expression that spoke not of
+ personal matters but of the universal questions of life and death. Kutúzov
+ noticed Pierre’s figure and the group gathered round him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Call him to me,” said Kutúzov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ An adjutant told Pierre of his Serene Highness’ wish, and Pierre went
+ toward Kutúzov’s bench. But a militiaman got there before him. It was
+ Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How did that fellow get here?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s a creature that wriggles in anywhere!” was the answer. “He has been
+ degraded, you know. Now he wants to bob up again. He’s been proposing some
+ scheme or other and has crawled into the enemy’s picket line at night....
+ He’s a brave fellow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre took off his hat and bowed respectfully to Kutúzov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I concluded that if I reported to your Serene Highness you might send me
+ away or say that you knew what I was reporting, but then I shouldn’t lose
+ anything...” Dólokhov was saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But if I were right, I should be rendering a service to my Fatherland for
+ which I am ready to die.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And should your Serene Highness require a man who will not spare his
+ skin, please think of me.... Perhaps I may prove useful to your Serene
+ Highness.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes... Yes...” Kutúzov repeated, his laughing eye narrowing more and more
+ as he looked at Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just then Borís, with his courtierlike adroitness, stepped up to Pierre’s
+ side near Kutúzov and in a most natural manner, without raising his voice,
+ said to Pierre, as though continuing an interrupted conversation:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The militia have put on clean white shirts to be ready to die. What
+ heroism, Count!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís evidently said this to Pierre in order to be overheard by his Serene
+ Highness. He knew Kutúzov’s attention would be caught by those words, and
+ so it was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are you saying about the militia?” he asked Borís.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Preparing for tomorrow, your Serene Highness—for death—they
+ have put on clean shirts.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah... a wonderful, a matchless people!” said Kutúzov; and he closed his
+ eyes and swayed his head. “A matchless people!” he repeated with a sigh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So you want to smell gunpowder?” he said to Pierre. “Yes, it’s a pleasant
+ smell. I have the honor to be one of your wife’s adorers. Is she well? My
+ quarters are at your service.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And as often happens with old people, Kutúzov began looking about
+ absent-mindedly as if forgetting all he wanted to say or do.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then, evidently remembering what he wanted, he beckoned to Andrew
+ Kaysárov, his adjutant’s brother.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Those verses... those verses of Márin’s... how do they go, eh? Those he
+ wrote about Gerákov: ‘Lectures for the corps inditing’... Recite them,
+ recite them!” said he, evidently preparing to laugh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kaysárov recited.... Kutúzov smilingly nodded his head to the rhythm of
+ the verses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Pierre had left Kutúzov, Dólokhov came up to him and took his hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am very glad to meet you here, Count,” he said aloud, regardless of the
+ presence of strangers and in a particularly resolute and solemn tone. “On
+ the eve of a day when God alone knows who of us is fated to survive, I am
+ glad of this opportunity to tell you that I regret the misunderstandings
+ that occurred between us and should wish you not to have any ill feeling
+ for me. I beg you to forgive me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked at Dólokhov with a smile, not knowing what to say to him.
+ With tears in his eyes Dólokhov embraced Pierre and kissed him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Borís said a few words to his general, and Count Bennigsen turned to
+ Pierre and proposed that he should ride with him along the line.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It will interest you,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, very much,” replied Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Half an hour later Kutúzov left for Tatárinova, and Bennigsen and his
+ suite, with Pierre among them, set out on their ride along the line.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIII
+ 
+ 
+ From Górki, Bennigsen descended the highroad to the bridge which, when
+ they had looked at it from the hill, the officer had pointed out as being
+ the center of our position and where rows of fragrant new-mown hay lay by
+ the riverside. They rode across that bridge into the village of Borodinó
+ and thence turned to the left, passing an enormous number of troops and
+ guns, and came to a high knoll where militiamen were digging. This was the
+ redoubt, as yet unnamed, which afterwards became known as the Raévski
+ Redoubt, or the Knoll Battery, but Pierre paid no special attention to it.
+ He did not know that it would become more memorable to him than any other
+ spot on the plain of Borodinó.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They then crossed the hollow to Semënovsk, where the soldiers were
+ dragging away the last logs from the huts and barns. Then they rode
+ downhill and uphill, across a ryefield trodden and beaten down as if by
+ hail, following a track freshly made by the artillery over the furrows of
+ the plowed land, and reached some flèches * which were still being dug.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * A kind of entrenchment.
+
+
+
+ 
+ At the flèches Bennigsen stopped and began looking at the Shevárdino
+ Redoubt opposite, which had been ours the day before and where several
+ horsemen could be descried. The officers said that either Napoleon or
+ Murat was there, and they all gazed eagerly at this little group of
+ horsemen. Pierre also looked at them, trying to guess which of the
+ scarcely discernible figures was Napoleon. At last those mounted men rode
+ away from the mound and disappeared.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bennigsen spoke to a general who approached him, and began explaining the
+ whole position of our troops. Pierre listened to him, straining each
+ faculty to understand the essential points of the impending battle, but
+ was mortified to feel that his mental capacity was inadequate for the
+ task. He could make nothing of it. Bennigsen stopped speaking and,
+ noticing that Pierre was listening, suddenly said to him:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t think this interests you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the contrary it’s very interesting!” replied Pierre not quite
+ truthfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the flèches they rode still farther to the left, along a road winding
+ through a thick, low-growing birch wood. In the middle of the wood a brown
+ hare with white feet sprang out and, scared by the tramp of the many
+ horses, grew so confused that it leaped along the road in front of them
+ for some time, arousing general attention and laughter, and only when
+ several voices shouted at it did it dart to one side and disappear in the
+ thicket. After going through the wood for about a mile and a half they
+ came out on a glade where troops of Túchkov’s corps were stationed to
+ defend the left flank.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Here, at the extreme left flank, Bennigsen talked a great deal and with
+ much heat, and, as it seemed to Pierre, gave orders of great military
+ importance. In front of Túchkov’s troops was some high ground not occupied
+ by troops. Bennigsen loudly criticized this mistake, saying that it was
+ madness to leave a height which commanded the country around unoccupied
+ and to place troops below it. Some of the generals expressed the same
+ opinion. One in particular declared with martial heat that they were put
+ there to be slaughtered. Bennigsen on his own authority ordered the troops
+ to occupy the high ground. This disposition on the left flank increased
+ Pierre’s doubt of his own capacity to understand military matters.
+ Listening to Bennigsen and the generals criticizing the position of the
+ troops behind the hill, he quite understood them and shared their opinion,
+ but for that very reason he could not understand how the man who put them
+ there behind the hill could have made so gross and palpable a blunder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre did not know that these troops were not, as Bennigsen supposed, put
+ there to defend the position, but were in a concealed position as an
+ ambush, that they should not be seen and might be able to strike an
+ approaching enemy unexpectedly. Bennigsen did not know this and moved the
+ troops forward according to his own ideas without mentioning the matter to
+ the commander in chief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIV
+ 
+ 
+ On that bright evening of August 25, Prince Andrew lay leaning on his
+ elbow in a broken-down shed in the village of Knyazkóvo at the further end
+ of his regiment’s encampment. Through a gap in the broken wall he could
+ see, beside the wooden fence, a row of thirty-year-old birches with their
+ lower branches lopped off, a field on which shocks of oats were standing,
+ and some bushes near which rose the smoke of campfires—the soldiers’
+ kitchens.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Narrow and burdensome and useless to anyone as his life now seemed to him,
+ Prince Andrew on the eve of battle felt agitated and irritable as he had
+ done seven years before at Austerlitz.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He had received and given the orders for next day’s battle and had nothing
+ more to do. But his thoughts—the simplest, clearest, and therefore
+ most terrible thoughts—would give him no peace. He knew that
+ tomorrow’s battle would be the most terrible of all he had taken part in,
+ and for the first time in his life the possibility of death presented
+ itself to him—not in relation to any worldly matter or with
+ reference to its effect on others, but simply in relation to himself, to
+ his own soul—vividly, plainly, terribly, and almost as a certainty.
+ And from the height of this perception all that had previously tormented
+ and preoccupied him suddenly became illumined by a cold white light
+ without shadows, without perspective, without distinction of outline. All
+ life appeared to him like magic-lantern pictures at which he had long been
+ gazing by artificial light through a glass. Now he suddenly saw those
+ badly daubed pictures in clear daylight and without a glass. “Yes, yes!
+ There they are, those false images that agitated, enraptured, and
+ tormented me,” said he to himself, passing in review the principal
+ pictures of the magic lantern of life and regarding them now in the cold
+ white daylight of his clear perception of death. “There they are, those
+ rudely painted figures that once seemed splendid and mysterious. Glory,
+ the good of society, love of a woman, the Fatherland itself—how
+ important these pictures appeared to me, with what profound meaning they
+ seemed to be filled! And it is all so simple, pale, and crude in the cold
+ white light of this morning which I feel is dawning for me.” The three
+ great sorrows of his life held his attention in particular: his love for a
+ woman, his father’s death, and the French invasion which had overrun half
+ Russia. “Love... that little girl who seemed to me brimming over with
+ mystic forces! Yes, indeed, I loved her. I made romantic plans of love and
+ happiness with her! Oh, what a boy I was!” he said aloud bitterly. “Ah me!
+ I believed in some ideal love which was to keep her faithful to me for the
+ whole year of my absence! Like the gentle dove in the fable she was to
+ pine apart from me.... But it was much simpler really.... It was all very
+ simple and horrible.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When my father built Bald Hills he thought the place was his: his land,
+ his air, his peasants. But Napoleon came and swept him aside, unconscious
+ of his existence, as he might brush a chip from his path, and his Bald
+ Hills and his whole life fell to pieces. Princess Mary says it is a trial
+ sent from above. What is the trial for, when he is not here and will never
+ return? He is not here! For whom then is the trial intended? The
+ Fatherland, the destruction of Moscow! And tomorrow I shall be killed,
+ perhaps not even by a Frenchman but by one of our own men, by a soldier
+ discharging a musket close to my ear as one of them did yesterday, and the
+ French will come and take me by head and heels and fling me into a hole
+ that I may not stink under their noses, and new conditions of life will
+ arise, which will seem quite ordinary to others and about which I shall
+ know nothing. I shall not exist....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He looked at the row of birches shining in the sunshine, with their
+ motionless green and yellow foliage and white bark. “To die... to be
+ killed tomorrow... That I should not exist... That all this should still
+ be, but no me....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the birches with their light and shade, the curly clouds, the smoke of
+ the campfires, and all that was around him changed and seemed terrible and
+ menacing. A cold shiver ran down his spine. He rose quickly, went out of
+ the shed, and began to walk about.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After he had returned, voices were heard outside the shed. “Who’s that?”
+ he cried.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The red-nosed Captain Timókhin, formerly Dólokhov’s squadron commander,
+ but now from lack of officers a battalion commander, shyly entered the
+ shed followed by an adjutant and the regimental paymaster.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew rose hastily, listened to the business they had come about,
+ gave them some further instructions, and was about to dismiss them when he
+ heard a familiar, lisping, voice behind the shed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Devil take it!” said the voice of a man stumbling over something.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew looked out of the shed and saw Pierre, who had tripped over
+ a pole on the ground and had nearly fallen, coming his way. It was
+ unpleasant to Prince Andrew to meet people of his own set in general, and
+ Pierre especially, for he reminded him of all the painful moments of his
+ last visit to Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You? What a surprise!” said he. “What brings you here? This is
+ unexpected!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he said this his eyes and face expressed more than coldness—they
+ expressed hostility, which Pierre noticed at once. He had approached the
+ shed full of animation, but on seeing Prince Andrew’s face he felt
+ constrained and ill at ease.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have come... simply... you know... come... it interests me,” said
+ Pierre, who had so often that day senselessly repeated that word
+ “interesting.” “I wish to see the battle.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes, and what do the Masonic brothers say about war? How would they
+ stop it?” said Prince Andrew sarcastically. “Well, and how’s Moscow? And
+ my people? Have they reached Moscow at last?” he asked seriously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, they have. Julie Drubetskáya told me so. I went to see them, but
+ missed them. They have gone to your estate near Moscow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXV
+ 
+ 
+ The officers were about to take leave, but Prince Andrew, apparently
+ reluctant to be left alone with his friend, asked them to stay and have
+ tea. Seats were brought in and so was the tea. The officers gazed with
+ surprise at Pierre’s huge stout figure and listened to his talk of Moscow
+ and the position of our army, round which he had ridden. Prince Andrew
+ remained silent, and his expression was so forbidding that Pierre
+ addressed his remarks chiefly to the good-natured battalion commander.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So you understand the whole position of our troops?” Prince Andrew
+ interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes—that is, how do you mean?” said Pierre. “Not being a military
+ man I can’t say I have understood it fully, but I understand the general
+ position.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, then, you know more than anyone else, be it who it may,” said
+ Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh!” said Pierre, looking over his spectacles in perplexity at Prince
+ Andrew. “Well, and what do you think of Kutúzov’s appointment?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was very glad of his appointment, that’s all I know,” replied Prince
+ Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And tell me your opinion of Barclay de Tolly. In Moscow they are saying
+ heaven knows what about him.... What do you think of him?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ask them,” replied Prince Andrew, indicating the officers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked at Timókhin with the condescendingly interrogative smile
+ with which everybody involuntarily addressed that officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We see light again, since his Serenity has been appointed, your
+ excellency,” said Timókhin timidly, and continually turning to glance at
+ his colonel.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why so?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, to mention only firewood and fodder, let me inform you. Why, when
+ we were retreating from Sventsyáni we dare not touch a stick or a wisp of
+ hay or anything. You see, we were going away, so he would get it all;
+ wasn’t it so, your excellency?” and again Timókhin turned to the prince.
+ “But we daren’t. In our regiment two officers were court-martialed for
+ that kind of thing. But when his Serenity took command everything became
+ straightforward. Now we see light....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then why was it forbidden?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Timókhin looked about in confusion, not knowing what or how to answer such
+ a question. Pierre put the same question to Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, so as not to lay waste the country we were abandoning to the enemy,”
+ said Prince Andrew with venomous irony. “It is very sound: one can’t
+ permit the land to be pillaged and accustom the troops to marauding. At
+ Smolénsk too he judged correctly that the French might outflank us, as
+ they had larger forces. But he could not understand this,” cried Prince
+ Andrew in a shrill voice that seemed to escape him involuntarily: “he
+ could not understand that there, for the first time, we were fighting for
+ Russian soil, and that there was a spirit in the men such as I had never
+ seen before, that we had held the French for two days, and that that
+ success had increased our strength tenfold. He ordered us to retreat, and
+ all our efforts and losses went for nothing. He had no thought of
+ betraying us, he tried to do the best he could, he thought out everything,
+ and that is why he is unsuitable. He is unsuitable now, just because he
+ plans out everything very thoroughly and accurately as every German has
+ to. How can I explain?... Well, say your father has a German valet, and he
+ is a splendid valet and satisfies your father’s requirements better than
+ you could, then it’s all right to let him serve. But if your father is
+ mortally sick you’ll send the valet away and attend to your father with
+ your own unpracticed, awkward hands, and will soothe him better than a
+ skilled man who is a stranger could. So it has been with Barclay. While
+ Russia was well, a foreigner could serve her and be a splendid minister;
+ but as soon as she is in danger she needs one of her own kin. But in your
+ Club they have been making him out a traitor! They slander him as a
+ traitor, and the only result will be that afterwards, ashamed of their
+ false accusations, they will make him out a hero or a genius instead of a
+ traitor, and that will be still more unjust. He is an honest and very
+ punctilious German.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And they say he’s a skillful commander,” rejoined Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t understand what is meant by ‘a skillful commander,’” replied
+ Prince Andrew ironically.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A skillful commander?” replied Pierre. “Why, one who foresees all
+ contingencies... and foresees the adversary’s intentions.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But that’s impossible,” said Prince Andrew as if it were a matter settled
+ long ago.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked at him in surprise.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And yet they say that war is like a game of chess?” he remarked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” replied Prince Andrew, “but with this little difference, that in
+ chess you may think over each move as long as you please and are not
+ limited for time, and with this difference too, that a knight is always
+ stronger than a pawn, and two pawns are always stronger than one, while in
+ war a battalion is sometimes stronger than a division and sometimes weaker
+ than a company. The relative strength of bodies of troops can never be
+ known to anyone. Believe me,” he went on, “if things depended on
+ arrangements made by the staff, I should be there making arrangements, but
+ instead of that I have the honor to serve here in the regiment with these
+ gentlemen, and I consider that on us tomorrow’s battle will depend and not
+ on those others.... Success never depends, and never will depend, on
+ position, or equipment, or even on numbers, and least of all on position.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But on what then?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the feeling that is in me and in him,” he pointed to Timókhin, “and in
+ each soldier.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew glanced at Timókhin, who looked at his commander in alarm
+ and bewilderment. In contrast to his former reticent taciturnity Prince
+ Andrew now seemed excited. He could apparently not refrain from expressing
+ the thoughts that had suddenly occurred to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A battle is won by those who firmly resolve to win it! Why did we lose
+ the battle at Austerlitz? The French losses were almost equal to ours, but
+ very early we said to ourselves that we were losing the battle, and we did
+ lose it. And we said so because we had nothing to fight for there, we
+ wanted to get away from the battlefield as soon as we could. ‘We’ve lost,
+ so let us run,’ and we ran. If we had not said that till the evening,
+ heaven knows what might not have happened. But tomorrow we shan’t say it!
+ You talk about our position, the left flank weak and the right flank too
+ extended,” he went on. “That’s all nonsense, there’s nothing of the kind.
+ But what awaits us tomorrow? A hundred million most diverse chances which
+ will be decided on the instant by the fact that our men or theirs run or
+ do not run, and that this man or that man is killed, but all that is being
+ done at present is only play. The fact is that those men with whom you
+ have ridden round the position not only do not help matters, but hinder.
+ They are only concerned with their own petty interests.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At such a moment?” said Pierre reproachfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At such a moment!” Prince Andrew repeated. “To them it is only a moment
+ affording opportunities to undermine a rival and obtain an extra cross or
+ ribbon. For me tomorrow means this: a Russian army of a hundred thousand
+ and a French army of a hundred thousand have met to fight, and the thing
+ is that these two hundred thousand men will fight and the side that fights
+ more fiercely and spares itself least will win. And if you like I will
+ tell you that whatever happens and whatever muddles those at the top may
+ make, we shall win tomorrow’s battle. Tomorrow, happen what may, we shall
+ win!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now, your excellency! That’s the truth, the real truth,” said
+ Timókhin. “Who would spare himself now? The soldiers in my battalion,
+ believe me, wouldn’t drink their vodka! ‘It’s not the day for that!’ they
+ say.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All were silent. The officers rose. Prince Andrew went out of the shed
+ with them, giving final orders to the adjutant. After they had gone Pierre
+ approached Prince Andrew and was about to start a conversation when they
+ heard the clatter of three horses’ hoofs on the road not far from the
+ shed, and looking in that direction Prince Andrew recognized Wolzogen and
+ Clausewitz accompanied by a Cossack. They rode close by continuing to
+ converse, and Prince Andrew involuntarily heard these words:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Der Krieg muss in Raum verlegt werden. Der Ansicht kann ich nicht genug
+ Preis geben,” * said one of them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “The war must be extended widely. I cannot sufficiently
+ commend that view.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, ja,” said the other, “der Zweck ist nur den Feind
+ zu schwächen, so kann man gewiss nicht den Verlust der Privat-Personen in Achtung
+ nehmen.” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Oh, yes, the only aim is to weaken the enemy, so of
+ course one cannot take into account the loss of private
+ individuals.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, no,” agreed the other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Extend widely!” said Prince Andrew with an angry snort, when they had
+ ridden past. “In that ‘extend’ were my father, son, and sister, at Bald
+ Hills. That’s all the same to him! That’s what I was saying to you—those
+ German gentlemen won’t win the battle tomorrow but will only make all the
+ mess they can, because they have nothing in their German heads but
+ theories not worth an empty eggshell and haven’t in their hearts the one
+ thing needed tomorrow—that which Timókhin has. They have yielded up
+ all Europe to him , and have now come to teach us. Fine teachers!” and
+ again his voice grew shrill.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So you think we shall win tomorrow’s battle?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes,” answered Prince Andrew absently. “One thing I would do if I
+ had the power,” he began again, “I would not take prisoners. Why take
+ prisoners? It’s chivalry! The French have destroyed my home and are on
+ their way to destroy Moscow, they have outraged and are outraging me every
+ moment. They are my enemies. In my opinion they are all criminals. And so
+ thinks Timókhin and the whole army. They should be executed! Since they
+ are my foes they cannot be my friends, whatever may have been said at
+ Tilsit.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes,” muttered Pierre, looking with shining eyes at Prince Andrew.
+ “I quite agree with you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The question that had perturbed Pierre on the Mozháysk hill and all that
+ day now seemed to him quite clear and completely solved. He now understood
+ the whole meaning and importance of this war and of the impending battle.
+ All he had seen that day, all the significant and stern expressions on the
+ faces he had seen in passing, were lit up for him by a new light. He
+ understood that latent heat (as they say in physics) of patriotism which
+ was present in all these men he had seen, and this explained to him why
+ they all prepared for death calmly, and as it were lightheartedly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not take prisoners,” Prince Andrew continued: “That by itself would quite
+ change the whole war and make it less cruel. As it is we have played at
+ war—that’s what’s vile! We play at magnanimity and all that stuff.
+ Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and sensibility
+ of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so
+ kindhearted that she can’t look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf
+ served up with sauce. They talk to us of the rules of war, of chivalry, of
+ flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on. It’s all rubbish! I
+ saw chivalry and flags of truce in 1805; they humbugged us and we
+ humbugged them. They plunder other people’s houses, issue false paper
+ money, and worst of all they kill my children and my father, and then talk
+ of rules of war and magnanimity to foes! Take no prisoners, but kill and
+ be killed! He who has come to this as I have through the same
+ sufferings...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew, who had thought it was all the same to him whether or not
+ Moscow was taken as Smolénsk had been, was suddenly checked in his speech
+ by an unexpected cramp in his throat. He paced up and down a few times in
+ silence, but his eyes glittered feverishly and his lips quivered as he
+ began speaking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only
+ when it was worth while going to certain death, as now. Then there would
+ not be war because Paul Ivánovich had offended Michael Ivánovich. And when
+ there was a war, like this one, it would be war! And then the
+ determination of the troops would be quite different. Then all these
+ Westphalians and Hessians whom Napoleon is leading would not follow him
+ into Russia, and we should not go to fight in Austria and Prussia without
+ knowing why. War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and
+ we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this
+ terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of
+ falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the
+ favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous. The military calling is the
+ most highly honored.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the
+ habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are
+ spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country’s
+ inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and
+ falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the
+ absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty,
+ debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest
+ class, respected by everyone. All the kings, except the Chinese, wear
+ military uniforms, and he who kills most people receives the highest
+ rewards.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill
+ and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having
+ killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they announce
+ a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater
+ their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?”
+ exclaimed Prince Andrew in a shrill, piercing voice. “Ah, my friend, it
+ has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to
+ understand too much. And it doesn’t do for man to taste of the tree of
+ knowledge of good and evil.... Ah, well, it’s not for long!” he added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “However, you’re sleepy, and it’s time for me to sleep. Go back to Górki!”
+ said Prince Andrew suddenly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh no!” Pierre replied, looking at Prince Andrew with frightened,
+ compassionate eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go, go! Before a battle one must have one’s sleep out,” repeated Prince
+ Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He came quickly up to Pierre and embraced and kissed him. “Good-by, be
+ off!” he shouted. “Whether we meet again or not...” and turning away
+ hurriedly he entered the shed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was already dark, and Pierre could not make out whether the expression
+ of Prince Andrew’s face was angry or tender.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For some time he stood in silence considering whether he should follow him
+ or go away. “No, he does not want it!” Pierre concluded. “And I know that
+ this is our last meeting!” He sighed deeply and rode back to Górki.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On re-entering the shed Prince Andrew lay down on a rug, but he could not
+ sleep.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He closed his eyes. One picture succeeded another in his imagination. On
+ one of them he dwelt long and joyfully. He vividly recalled an evening in
+ Petersburg. Natásha with animated and excited face was telling him how she
+ had gone to look for mushrooms the previous summer and had lost her way in
+ the big forest. She incoherently described the depths of the forest, her
+ feelings, and a talk with a beekeeper she met, and constantly interrupted
+ her story to say: “No, I can’t! I’m not telling it right; no, you don’t
+ understand,” though he encouraged her by saying that he did understand,
+ and he really had understood all she wanted to say. But Natásha was not
+ satisfied with her own words: she felt that they did not convey the
+ passionately poetic feeling she had experienced that day and wished to
+ convey. “He was such a delightful old man, and it was so dark in the
+ forest... and he had such kind... No, I can’t describe it,” she had said,
+ flushed and excited. Prince Andrew smiled now the same happy smile as then
+ when he had looked into her eyes. “I understood her,” he thought. “I not
+ only understood her, but it was just that inner, spiritual force, that
+ sincerity, that frankness of soul—that very soul of hers which
+ seemed to be fettered by her body—it was that soul I loved in her...
+ loved so strongly and happily...” and suddenly he remembered how his love
+ had ended. “ He did not need anything of that kind. He neither
+ saw nor understood anything of the sort. He only saw in her a pretty and fresh 
+ young girl, with whom he did not deign to unite his fate. And I?... and he
+ is still alive and gay!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew jumped up as if someone had burned him, and again began
+ pacing up and down in front of the shed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVI
+ 
+ 
+ On August 25, the eve of the battle of Borodinó, M. de Beausset, prefect
+ of the French Emperor’s palace, arrived at Napoleon’s quarters at Valúevo
+ with Colonel Fabvier, the former from Paris and the latter from Madrid.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Donning his court uniform, M. de Beausset ordered a box he had brought for
+ the Emperor to be carried before him and entered the first compartment of
+ Napoleon’s tent, where he began opening the box while conversing with
+ Napoleon’s aides-de-camp who surrounded him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Fabvier, not entering the tent, remained at the entrance talking to some
+ generals of his acquaintance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor Napoleon had not yet left his bedroom and was finishing his
+ toilet. Slightly snorting and grunting, he presented now his back and now
+ his plump hairy chest to the brush with which his valet was rubbing him
+ down. Another valet, with his finger over the mouth of a bottle, was
+ sprinkling Eau de Cologne on the Emperor’s pampered body with an
+ expression which seemed to say that he alone knew where and how much Eau
+ de Cologne should be sprinkled. Napoleon’s short hair was wet and matted
+ on the forehead, but his face, though puffy and yellow, expressed physical
+ satisfaction. “Go on, harder, go on!” he muttered to the valet who was
+ rubbing him, slightly twitching and grunting. An aide-de-camp, who had
+ entered the bedroom to report to the Emperor the number of prisoners taken
+ in yesterday’s action, was standing by the door after delivering his
+ message, awaiting permission to withdraw. Napoleon, frowning, looked at
+ him from under his brows.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No prisoners!” said he, repeating the aide-de-camp’s words. “They are
+ forcing us to exterminate them. So much the worse for the Russian army....
+ Go on... harder, harder!” he muttered, hunching his back and presenting
+ his fat shoulders.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right. Let Monsieur de Beausset enter, and Fabvier too,” he said,
+ nodding to the aide-de-camp.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, sire,” and the aide-de-camp disappeared through the door of the
+ tent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Two valets rapidly dressed His Majesty, and wearing the blue uniform of
+ the Guards he went with firm quick steps to the reception room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ De Beausset’s hands meanwhile were busily engaged arranging the present he
+ had brought from the Empress, on two chairs directly in front of the
+ entrance. But Napoleon had dressed and come out with such unexpected
+ rapidity that he had not time to finish arranging the surprise.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon noticed at once what they were about and guessed that they were
+ not ready. He did not wish to deprive them of the pleasure of giving him a
+ surprise, so he pretended not to see de Beausset and called Fabvier to
+ him, listening silently and with a stern frown to what Fabvier told him of
+ the heroism and devotion of his troops fighting at Salamanca, at the other
+ end of Europe, with but one thought—to be worthy of their Emperor—and
+ but one fear—to fail to please him. The result of that battle had
+ been deplorable. Napoleon made ironic remarks during Fabvier’s account, as
+ if he had not expected that matters could go otherwise in his absence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I must make up for that in Moscow,” said Napoleon. “I’ll see you later,”
+ he added, and summoned de Beausset, who by that time had prepared the
+ surprise, having placed something on the chairs and covered it with a
+ cloth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ De Beausset bowed low, with that courtly French bow which only the old
+ retainers of the Bourbons knew how to make, and approached him, presenting
+ an envelope.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon turned to him gaily and pulled his ear.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You have hurried here. I am very glad. Well, what is Paris saying?” he
+ asked, suddenly changing his former stern expression for a most cordial
+ tone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sire, all Paris regrets your absence,” replied de Beausset as was proper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But though Napoleon knew that de Beausset had to say something of this
+ kind, and though in his lucid moments he knew it was untrue, he was
+ pleased to hear it from him. Again he honored him by touching his ear.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am very sorry to have made you travel so far,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sire, I expected nothing less than to find you at the gates of Moscow,”
+ replied de Beausset.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon smiled and, lifting his head absent-mindedly, glanced to the
+ right. An aide-de-camp approached with gliding steps and offered him a
+ gold snuffbox, which he took.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, it has happened luckily for you,” he said, raising the open snuffbox
+ to his nose. “You are fond of travel, and in three days you will see
+ Moscow. You surely did not expect to see that Asiatic capital. You will
+ have a pleasant journey.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ De Beausset bowed gratefully at this regard for his taste for travel (of
+ which he had not till then been aware).
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ha, what’s this?” asked Napoleon, noticing that all the courtiers were
+ looking at something concealed under a cloth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With courtly adroitness de Beausset half turned and without turning his
+ back to the Emperor retired two steps, twitching off the cloth at the same
+ time, and said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A present to Your Majesty from the Empress.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a portrait, painted in bright colors by Gérard, of the son borne to
+ Napoleon by the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, the boy whom for some
+ reason everyone called “The King of Rome.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A very pretty curly-headed boy with a look of the Christ in the Sistine
+ Madonna was depicted playing at stick and ball. The ball represented the
+ terrestrial globe and the stick in his other hand a scepter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though it was not clear what the artist meant to express by depicting the
+ so-called King of Rome spiking the earth with a stick, the allegory
+ apparently seemed to Napoleon, as it had done to all who had seen it in
+ Paris, quite clear and very pleasing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The King of Rome!” he said, pointing to the portrait with a graceful
+ gesture. “Admirable!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With the natural capacity of an Italian for changing the expression of his
+ face at will, he drew nearer to the portrait and assumed a look of pensive
+ tenderness. He felt that what he now said and did would be historical, and
+ it seemed to him that it would now be best for him—whose grandeur
+ enabled his son to play stick and ball with the terrestrial globe—to
+ show, in contrast to that grandeur, the simplest paternal tenderness. His
+ eyes grew dim, he moved forward, glanced round at a chair (which seemed to
+ place itself under him), and sat down on it before the portrait. At a
+ single gesture from him everyone went out on tiptoe, leaving the great man
+ to himself and his emotion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having sat still for a while he touched—himself not knowing why—the
+ thick spot of paint representing the highest light in the portrait, rose,
+ and recalled de Beausset and the officer on duty. He ordered the portrait
+ to be carried outside his tent, that the Old Guard, stationed round it,
+ might not be deprived of the pleasure of seeing the King of Rome, the son
+ and heir of their adored monarch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And while he was doing M. de Beausset the honor of breakfasting with him,
+ they heard, as Napoleon had anticipated, the rapturous cries of the
+ officers and men of the Old Guard who had run up to see the portrait.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vive l’Empereur! Vive le roi de Rome! Vive l’Empereur!” 
+ came those ecstatic cries.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After breakfast Napoleon in de Beausset’s presence dictated his order of
+ the day to the army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Short and energetic!” he remarked when he had read over the proclamation
+ which he had dictated straight off without corrections. It ran:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soldiers! This is the battle you have so longed for. Victory depends on
+ you. It is essential for us; it will give us all we need: comfortable
+ quarters and a speedy return to our country. Behave as you did at
+ Austerlitz, Friedland, Vítebsk, and Smolénsk. Let our remotest posterity
+ recall your achievements this day with pride. Let it be said of each of
+ you: “He was in the great battle before Moscow!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Before Moscow!” repeated Napoleon, and inviting M. de Beausset, who was
+ so fond of travel, to accompany him on his ride, he went out of the tent
+ to where the horses stood saddled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your Majesty is too kind!” replied de Beausset to the invitation to
+ accompany the Emperor; he wanted to sleep, did not know how to ride and
+ was afraid of doing so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Napoleon nodded to the traveler, and de Beausset had to mount. When
+ Napoleon came out of the tent the shouting of the Guards before his son’s
+ portrait grew still louder. Napoleon frowned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Take him away!” he said, pointing with a gracefully majestic gesture to
+ the portrait. “It is too soon for him to see a field of battle.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ De Beausset closed his eyes, bowed his head, and sighed deeply, to
+ indicate how profoundly he valued and comprehended the Emperor’s words.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVII
+ 
+ 
+ On the twenty-fifth of August, so his historians tell us, Napoleon spent
+ the whole day on horseback inspecting the locality, considering plans
+ submitted to him by his marshals, and personally giving commands to his
+ generals.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The original line of the Russian forces along the river Kolochá had been
+ dislocated by the capture of the Shevárdino Redoubt on the twenty-fourth,
+ and part of the line—the left flank—had been drawn back. That
+ part of the line was not entrenched and in front of it the ground was more
+ open and level than elsewhere. It was evident to anyone, military or not,
+ that it was here the French should attack. It would seem that not much
+ consideration was needed to reach this conclusion, nor any particular care
+ or trouble on the part of the Emperor and his marshals, nor was there any
+ need of that special and supreme quality called genius that people are so
+ apt to ascribe to Napoleon; yet the historians who described the event
+ later and the men who then surrounded Napoleon, and he himself, thought
+ otherwise.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon rode over the plain and surveyed the locality with a profound air
+ and in silence, nodded with approval or shook his head dubiously, and
+ without communicating to the generals around him the profound course of
+ ideas which guided his decisions merely gave them his final conclusions in
+ the form of commands. Having listened to a suggestion from Davout, who was
+ now called Prince d’Eckmühl, to turn the Russian left wing, Napoleon said
+ it should not be done, without explaining why not. To a proposal made by
+ General Campan (who was to attack the flèches ) to lead his division
+ through the woods, Napoleon agreed, though the so-called Duke of Elchingen
+ (Ney) ventured to remark that a movement through the woods was dangerous
+ and might disorder the division.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having inspected the country opposite the Shevárdino Redoubt, Napoleon
+ pondered a little in silence and then indicated the spots where two
+ batteries should be set up by the morrow to act against the Russian
+ entrenchments, and the places where, in line with them, the field
+ artillery should be placed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After giving these and other commands he returned to his tent, and the
+ dispositions for the battle were written down from his dictation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These dispositions, of which the French historians write with enthusiasm
+ and other historians with profound respect, were as follows:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At dawn the two new batteries established during the night on the plain
+ occupied by the Prince d’Eckmühl will open fire on the opposing batteries
+ of the enemy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the same time the commander of the artillery of the 1st Corps, General
+ Pernetti, with thirty cannon of Campan’s division and all the howitzers of
+ Dessaix’s and Friant’s divisions, will move forward, open fire, and
+ overwhelm with shellfire the enemy’s battery, against which will operate:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 24 guns of the artillery of the Guards
+ 30 guns of Campan’s division
+
+ and 8 guns of Friant’s and Dessaix’s divisions
+ —
+
+ in all 62 guns.
+ 
+ 
+ The commander of the artillery of the 3rd Corps, General Fouché, will
+ place the howitzers of the 3rd and 8th Corps, sixteen in all, on the
+ flanks of the battery that is to bombard the entrenchment on the left,
+ which will have forty guns in all directed against it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ General Sorbier must be ready at the first order to advance with all the
+ howitzers of the Guard’s artillery against either one or other of the
+ entrenchments.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the cannonade Prince Poniatowski is to advance through the wood on
+ the village and turn the enemy’s position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ General Campan will move through the wood to seize the first
+ fortification.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the advance has begun in this manner, orders will be given in
+ accordance with the enemy’s movements.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The cannonade on the left flank will begin as soon as the guns of the
+ right wing are heard. The sharpshooters of Morand’s division and of the
+ vice-King’s division will open a heavy fire on seeing the attack commence
+ on the right wing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The vice-King will occupy the village and cross by its three bridges,
+ advancing to the same heights as Morand’s and Gibrard’s divisions, which
+ under his leadership will be directed against the redoubt and come into
+ line with the rest of the forces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All this must be done in good order ( le tout se fera avec ordre et
+ méthode ) as far as possible retaining troops in reserve.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Imperial Camp near Mozháysk,
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ September, 6, 1812.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ These dispositions, which are very obscure and confused if one allows
+ oneself to regard the arrangements without religious awe of his genius,
+ related to Napoleon’s orders to deal with four points—four different
+ orders. Not one of these was, or could be, carried out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the disposition it is said first that the batteries placed on the spot
+ chosen by Napoleon, with the guns of Pernetti and Fouché; which were to
+ come in line with them, 102 guns in all, were to open fire and shower
+ shells on the Russian flèches and redoubts. This could not be done, as
+ from the spots selected by Napoleon the projectiles did not carry to the
+ Russian works, and those 102 guns shot into the air until the nearest
+ commander, contrary to Napoleon’s instructions, moved them forward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The second order was that Poniatowski, moving to the village through the
+ wood, should turn the Russian left flank. This could not be done and was
+ not done, because Poniatowski, advancing on the village through the wood,
+ met Túchkov there barring his way, and could not and did not turn the
+ Russian position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The third order was: General Campan will move through the wood to seize
+ the first fortification . General Campan’s division did not seize the
+ first fortification but was driven back, for on emerging from the wood it had
+ to reform under grapeshot, of which Napoleon was unaware.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The fourth order was: The vice-King will occupy the village (Borodinó) and
+ cross by its three bridges, advancing to the same heights as Morand’s and
+ Gérard’s divisions (for whose movements no directions are given), which
+ under his leadership will be directed against the redoubt and come into
+ line with the rest of the forces. 
+
+
+
+ 
+ As far as one can make out, not so much from this unintelligible sentence
+ as from the attempts the vice-King made to execute the orders given him,
+ he was to advance from the left through Borodinó to the redoubt while the
+ divisions of Morand and Gérard were to advance simultaneously from the
+ front.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All this, like the other parts of the disposition, was not and could not
+ be executed. After passing through Borodinó the vice-King was driven back
+ to the Kolochá and could get no farther; while the divisions of Morand and
+ Gérard did not take the redoubt but were driven back, and the redoubt was
+ only taken at the end of the battle by the cavalry (a thing probably
+ unforeseen and not heard of by Napoleon). So not one of the orders in the
+ disposition was, or could be, executed. But in the disposition it is said
+ that, after the fight has commenced in this manner, orders will be given
+ in accordance with the enemy’s movements , and so it might be supposed that
+ all necessary arrangements would be made by Napoleon during the battle.
+ But this was not and could not be done, for during the whole battle
+ Napoleon was so far away that, as appeared later, he could not know the
+ course of the battle and not one of his orders during the fight could be
+ executed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVIII
+ 
+ 
+ Many historians say that the French did not win the battle of Borodinó
+ because Napoleon had a cold, and that if he had not had a cold the orders
+ he gave before and during the battle would have been still more full of
+ genius and Russia would have been lost and the face of the world have been
+ changed. To historians who believe that Russia was shaped by the will of
+ one man—Peter the Great—and that France from a republic became
+ an empire and French armies went to Russia at the will of one man—Napoleon—to
+ say that Russia remained a power because Napoleon had a bad cold on the
+ twenty-fourth of August may seem logical and convincing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If it had depended on Napoleon’s will to fight or not to fight the battle
+ of Borodinó, and if this or that other arrangement depended on his will,
+ then evidently a cold affecting the manifestation of his will might have
+ saved Russia, and consequently the valet who omitted to bring Napoleon his
+ waterproof boots on the twenty-fourth would have been the savior of
+ Russia. Along that line of thought such a deduction is indubitable, as
+ indubitable as the deduction Voltaire made in jest (without knowing what
+ he was jesting at) when he saw that the Massacre of St. Bartholomew was
+ due to Charles IX’s stomach being deranged. But to men who do not admit
+ that Russia was formed by the will of one man, Peter I, or that the French
+ Empire was formed and the war with Russia begun by the will of one man,
+ Napoleon, that argument seems not merely untrue and irrational, but
+ contrary to all human reality. To the question of what causes historic
+ events another answer presents itself, namely, that the course of human
+ events is predetermined from on high—depends on the coincidence of
+ the wills of all who take part in the events, and that a Napoleon’s
+ influence on the course of these events is purely external and fictitious.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Strange as at first glance it may seem to suppose that the Massacre of St.
+ Bartholomew was not due to Charles IX’s will, though he gave the order for
+ it and thought it was done as a result of that order; and strange as it
+ may seem to suppose that the slaughter of eighty thousand men at Borodinó
+ was not due to Napoleon’s will, though he ordered the commencement and
+ conduct of the battle and thought it was done because he ordered it;
+ strange as these suppositions appear, yet human dignity—which tells
+ me that each of us is, if not more at least not less a man than the great
+ Napoleon—demands the acceptance of that solution of the question,
+ and historic investigation abundantly confirms it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the battle of Borodinó Napoleon shot at no one and killed no one. That
+ was all done by the soldiers. Therefore it was not he who killed people.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French soldiers went to kill and be killed at the battle of Borodinó
+ not because of Napoleon’s orders but by their own volition. The whole army—French,
+ Italian, German, Polish, and Dutch—hungry, ragged, and weary of the
+ campaign, felt at the sight of an army blocking their road to Moscow that
+ the wine was drawn and must be drunk. Had Napoleon then forbidden them to
+ fight the Russians, they would have killed him and have proceeded to fight
+ the Russians because it was inevitable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When they heard Napoleon’s proclamation offering them, as compensation for
+ mutilation and death, the words of posterity about their having been in
+ the battle before Moscow, they cried “Vive l’Empereur!” 
+ just as they had cried “Vive l’Empereur!” at the sight of
+ the portrait of the boy piercing the terrestrial globe with a toy stick, and just
+ as they would have cried “Vive l’Empereur!” at any
+ nonsense that might be told them. There was nothing left for them to do but cry
+ “Vive l’Empereur!” and go to fight, in order to get food
+ and rest as conquerors in Moscow. So it was not because of Napoleon’s
+ commands that they killed their fellow men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And it was not Napoleon who directed the course of the battle, for none of
+ his orders were executed and during the battle he did not know what was
+ going on before him. So the way in which these people killed one another
+ was not decided by Napoleon’s will but occurred independently of him, in
+ accord with the will of hundreds of thousands of people who took part in
+ the common action. It only seemed to Napoleon that it all took place by
+ his will. And so the question whether he had or had not a cold has no more
+ historic interest than the cold of the least of the transport soldiers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Moreover, the assertion made by various writers that his cold was the
+ cause of his dispositions not being as well-planned as on former
+ occasions, and of his orders during the battle not being as good as
+ previously, is quite baseless, which again shows that Napoleon’s cold on
+ the twenty-sixth of August was unimportant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The dispositions cited above are not at all worse, but are even better,
+ than previous dispositions by which he had won victories. His
+ pseudo-orders during the battle were also no worse than formerly, but much
+ the same as usual. These dispositions and orders only seem worse than
+ previous ones because the battle of Borodinó was the first Napoleon did
+ not win. The profoundest and most excellent dispositions and orders seem
+ very bad, and every learned militarist criticizes them with looks of
+ importance, when they relate to a battle that has been lost, and the very
+ worst dispositions and orders seem very good, and serious people fill
+ whole volumes to demonstrate their merits, when they relate to a battle
+ that has been won.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The dispositions drawn up by Weyrother for the battle of Austerlitz were a
+ model of perfection for that kind of composition, but still they were
+ criticized—criticized for their very perfection, for their excessive
+ minuteness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon at the battle of Borodinó fulfilled his office as representative
+ of authority as well as, and even better than, at other battles. He did
+ nothing harmful to the progress of the battle; he inclined to the most
+ reasonable opinions, he made no confusion, did not contradict himself, did
+ not get frightened or run away from the field of battle, but with his
+ great tact and military experience carried out his role of appearing to
+ command, calmly and with dignity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIX
+ 
+ 
+ On returning from a second inspection of the lines, Napoleon remarked:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The chessmen are set up, the game will begin tomorrow!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having ordered punch and summoned de Beausset, he began to talk to him
+ about Paris and about some changes he meant to make in the Empress’
+ household, surprising the prefect by his memory of minute details relating
+ to the court.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He showed an interest in trifles, joked about de Beausset’s love of
+ travel, and chatted carelessly, as a famous, self-confident surgeon who
+ knows his job does when turning up his sleeves and putting on his apron
+ while a patient is being strapped to the operating table. “The matter is
+ in my hands and is clear and definite in my head. When the time comes to
+ set to work I shall do it as no one else could, but now I can jest, and
+ the more I jest and the calmer I am the more tranquil and confident you
+ ought to be, and the more amazed at my genius.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having finished his second glass of punch, Napoleon went to rest before
+ the serious business which, he considered, awaited him next day. He was so
+ much interested in that task that he was unable to sleep, and in spite of
+ his cold which had grown worse from the dampness of the evening, he went
+ into the large division of the tent at three o’clock in the morning,
+ loudly blowing his nose. He asked whether the Russians had not withdrawn,
+ and was told that the enemy’s fires were still in the same places. He
+ nodded approval.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The adjutant in attendance came into the tent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, Rapp, do you think we shall do good business today?” Napoleon asked
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Without doubt, sire,” replied Rapp.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon looked at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you remember, sire, what you did me the honor to say at Smolénsk?”
+ continued Rapp. “The wine is drawn and must be drunk.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon frowned and sat silent for a long time leaning his head on his
+ hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This poor army!” he suddenly remarked. “It has diminished greatly since
+ Smolénsk. Fortune is frankly a courtesan, Rapp. I have always said so and
+ I am beginning to experience it. But the Guards, Rapp, the Guards are
+ intact?” he remarked interrogatively.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, sire,” replied Rapp.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon took a lozenge, put it in his mouth, and glanced at his watch. He
+ was not sleepy and it was still not nearly morning. It was impossible to
+ give further orders for the sake of killing time, for the orders had all
+ been given and were now being executed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have the biscuits and rice been served out to the regiments of the
+ Guards?” asked Napoleon sternly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, sire.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The rice too?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rapp replied that he had given the Emperor’s order about the rice, but
+ Napoleon shook his head in dissatisfaction as if not believing that his
+ order had been executed. An attendant came in with punch. Napoleon ordered
+ another glass to be brought for Rapp, and silently sipped his own.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have neither taste nor smell,” he remarked, sniffing at his glass.
+ “This cold is tiresome. They talk about medicine—what is the good of
+ medicine when it can’t cure a cold! Corvisart gave me these lozenges but
+ they don’t help at all. What can doctors cure? One can’t cure anything.
+ Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its
+ nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will
+ do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies. Our body
+ is like a perfect watch that should go for a certain time; the watchmaker
+ cannot open it, he can only adjust it by fumbling, and that blindfold....
+ Yes, our body is just a machine for living, that is all.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And having entered on the path of definition, of which he was fond,
+ Napoleon suddenly and unexpectedly gave a new one.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know, Rapp, what military art is?” asked he. “It is the art of
+ being stronger than the enemy at a given moment. That’s all.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rapp made no reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tomorrow we shall have to deal with Kutúzov!” said Napoleon. “We shall
+ see! Do you remember at Braunau he commanded an army for three weeks and
+ did not once mount a horse to inspect his entrenchments.... We shall see!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He looked at his watch. It was still only four o’clock. He did not feel
+ sleepy. The punch was finished and there was still nothing to do. He rose,
+ walked to and fro, put on a warm overcoat and a hat, and went out of the
+ tent. The night was dark and damp, a scarcely perceptible moisture was
+ descending from above. Near by, the campfires were dimly burning among the
+ French Guards, and in the distance those of the Russian line shone through
+ the smoke. The weather was calm, and the rustle and tramp of the French
+ troops already beginning to move to take up their positions were clearly
+ audible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon walked about in front of his tent, looked at the fires and
+ listened to these sounds, and as he was passing a tall guardsman in a
+ shaggy cap, who was standing sentinel before his tent and had drawn
+ himself up like a black pillar at sight of the Emperor, Napoleon stopped
+ in front of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What year did you enter the service?” he asked with that affectation of
+ military bluntness and geniality with which he always addressed the
+ soldiers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The man answered the question.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah! One of the old ones! Has your regiment had its rice?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It has, Your Majesty.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon nodded and walked away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ At half-past five Napoleon rode to the village of Shevárdino.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was growing light, the sky was clearing, only a single cloud lay in the
+ east. The abandoned campfires were burning themselves out in the faint
+ morning light.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the right a single deep report of a cannon resounded and died away in
+ the prevailing silence. Some minutes passed. A second and a third report
+ shook the air, then a fourth and a fifth boomed solemnly near by on the
+ right.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The first shots had not yet ceased to reverberate before others rang out
+ and yet more were heard mingling with and overtaking one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon with his suite rode up to the Shevárdino Redoubt where he
+ dismounted. The game had begun.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXX
+ 
+ 
+ On returning to Górki after having seen Prince Andrew, Pierre ordered his
+ groom to get the horses ready and to call him early in the morning, and
+ then immediately fell asleep behind a partition in a corner Borís had
+ given up to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before he was thoroughly awake next morning everybody had already left the
+ hut. The panes were rattling in the little windows and his groom was
+ shaking him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency! Your excellency! Your excellency!” he kept repeating
+ pertinaciously while he shook Pierre by the shoulder without looking at
+ him, having apparently lost hope of getting him to wake up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What? Has it begun? Is it time?” Pierre asked, waking up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hear the firing,” said the groom, a discharged soldier. “All the
+ gentlemen have gone out, and his Serene Highness himself rode past long
+ ago.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre dressed hastily and ran out to the porch. Outside all was bright,
+ fresh, dewy, and cheerful. The sun, just bursting forth from behind a
+ cloud that had concealed it, was shining, with rays still half broken by
+ the clouds, over the roofs of the street opposite, on the dew-besprinkled
+ dust of the road, on the walls of the houses, on the windows, the fence,
+ and on Pierre’s horses standing before the hut. The roar of guns sounded
+ more distinct outside. An adjutant accompanied by a Cossack passed by at a
+ sharp trot.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s time, Count; it’s time!” cried the adjutant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Telling the groom to follow him with the horses, Pierre went down the
+ street to the knoll from which he had looked at the field of battle the
+ day before. A crowd of military men was assembled there, members of the
+ staff could be heard conversing in French, and Kutúzov’s gray head in a
+ white cap with a red band was visible, his gray nape sunk between his
+ shoulders. He was looking through a field glass down the highroad before
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mounting the steps to the knoll Pierre looked at the scene before him,
+ spellbound by beauty. It was the same panorama he had admired from that
+ spot the day before, but now the whole place was full of troops and
+ covered by smoke clouds from the guns, and the slanting rays of the bright
+ sun, rising slightly to the left behind Pierre, cast upon it through the
+ clear morning air penetrating streaks of rosy, golden-tinted light and
+ long dark shadows. The forest at the farthest extremity of the panorama
+ seemed carved in some precious stone of a yellowish-green color; its
+ undulating outline was silhouetted against the horizon and was pierced
+ beyond Valúevo by the Smolénsk highroad crowded with troops. Nearer at
+ hand glittered golden cornfields interspersed with copses. There were
+ troops to be seen everywhere, in front and to the right and left. All this
+ was vivid, majestic, and unexpected; but what impressed Pierre most of all
+ was the view of the battlefield itself, of Borodinó and the hollows on
+ both sides of the Kolochá.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Above the Kolochá, in Borodinó and on both sides of it, especially to the
+ left where the Vóyna flowing between its marshy banks falls into the
+ Kolochá, a mist had spread which seemed to melt, to dissolve, and to
+ become translucent when the brilliant sun appeared and magically colored
+ and outlined everything. The smoke of the guns mingled with this mist, and
+ over the whole expanse and through that mist the rays of the morning sun
+ were reflected, flashing back like lightning from the water, from the dew,
+ and from the bayonets of the troops crowded together by the riverbanks and
+ in Borodinó. A white church could be seen through the mist, and here and
+ there the roofs of huts in Borodinó as well as dense masses of soldiers,
+ or green ammunition chests and ordnance. And all this moved, or seemed to
+ move, as the smoke and mist spread out over the whole space. Just as in
+ the mist-enveloped hollow near Borodinó, so along the entire line outside
+ and above it and especially in the woods and fields to the left, in the
+ valleys and on the summits of the high ground, clouds of powder smoke
+ seemed continually to spring up out of nothing, now singly, now several at
+ a time, some translucent, others dense, which, swelling, growing, rolling,
+ and blending, extended over the whole expanse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These puffs of smoke and (strange to say) the sound of the firing produced
+ the chief beauty of the spectacle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Puff!” —suddenly a round compact cloud of smoke was seen
+ merging from violet into gray and milky white, and “boom!” came
+ the report a second later.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Puff! puff!” —and two clouds arose pushing one another
+ and blending together; and “boom, boom!” came the sounds
+ confirming what the eye had seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre glanced round at the first cloud, which he had seen as a round
+ compact ball, and in its place already were balloons of smoke floating to
+ one side, and— “puff” (with a pause)— “puff,
+ puff!” three and then four more appeared and then from each, with the
+ same interval— “boom—boom, boom!” came the fine, firm,
+ precise sounds in reply. It seemed as if those smoke clouds sometimes ran and
+ sometimes stood still while woods, fields, and glittering bayonets ran past them.
+ From the left, over fields and bushes, those large balls of smoke were continually
+ appearing followed by their solemn reports, while nearer still, in the hollows and
+ woods, there burst from the muskets small cloudlets that had no time to become balls,
+ but had their little echoes in just the same way. “Trakh-ta-ta-takh!” 
+ came the frequent crackle of musketry, but it was irregular and feeble in
+ comparison with the reports of the cannon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre wished to be there with that smoke, those shining bayonets, that
+ movement, and those sounds. He turned to look at Kutúzov and his suite, to
+ compare his impressions with those of others. They were all looking at the
+ field of battle as he was, and, as it seemed to him, with the same
+ feelings. All their faces were now shining with that latent warmth of
+ feeling Pierre had noticed the day before and had fully understood after
+ his talk with Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go, my dear fellow, go... and Christ be with you!” Kutúzov was saying to
+ a general who stood beside him, not taking his eye from the battlefield.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having received this order the general passed by Pierre on his way down
+ the knoll.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To the crossing!” said the general coldly and sternly in reply to one of
+ the staff who asked where he was going.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll go there too, I too!” thought Pierre, and followed the general.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The general mounted a horse a Cossack had brought him. Pierre went to his
+ groom who was holding his horses and, asking which was the quietest,
+ clambered onto it, seized it by the mane, and turning out his toes pressed
+ his heels against its sides and, feeling that his spectacles were slipping
+ off but unable to let go of the mane and reins, he galloped after the
+ general, causing the staff officers to smile as they watched him from the
+ knoll.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXI
+ 
+ 
+ Having descended the hill the general after whom Pierre was galloping
+ turned sharply to the left, and Pierre, losing sight of him, galloped in
+ among some ranks of infantry marching ahead of him. He tried to pass
+ either in front of them or to the right or left, but there were soldiers
+ everywhere, all with the same preoccupied expression and busy with some
+ unseen but evidently important task. They all gazed with the same
+ dissatisfied and inquiring expression at this stout man in a white hat,
+ who for some unknown reason threatened to trample them under his horse’s
+ hoofs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why ride into the middle of the battalion?” one of them shouted at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Another prodded his horse with the butt end of a musket, and Pierre,
+ bending over his saddlebow and hardly able to control his shying horse,
+ galloped ahead of the soldiers where there was a free space.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was a bridge ahead of him, where other soldiers stood firing. Pierre
+ rode up to them. Without being aware of it he had come to the bridge
+ across the Kolochá between Górki and Borodinó, which the French (having
+ occupied Borodinó) were attacking in the first phase of the battle. Pierre
+ saw that there was a bridge in front of him and that soldiers were doing
+ something on both sides of it and in the meadow, among the rows of
+ new-mown hay which he had taken no notice of amid the smoke of the
+ campfires the day before; but despite the incessant firing going on there
+ he had no idea that this was the field of battle. He did not notice the
+ sound of the bullets whistling from every side, or the projectiles that
+ flew over him, did not see the enemy on the other side of the river, and
+ for a long time did not notice the killed and wounded, though many fell
+ near him. He looked about him with a smile which did not leave his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why’s that fellow in front of the line?” shouted somebody at him again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To the left!... Keep to the right!” the men shouted to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre went to the right, and unexpectedly encountered one of Raévski’s
+ adjutants whom he knew. The adjutant looked angrily at him, evidently also
+ intending to shout at him, but on recognizing him he nodded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How have you got here?” he said, and galloped on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre, feeling out of place there, having nothing to do, and afraid of
+ getting in someone’s way again, galloped after the adjutant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s happening here? May I come with you?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One moment, one moment!” replied the adjutant, and riding up to a stout
+ colonel who was standing in the meadow, he gave him some message and then
+ addressed Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why have you come here, Count?” he asked with a smile. “Still
+ inquisitive?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes,” assented Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the adjutant turned his horse about and rode on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here it’s tolerable,” said he, “but with Bagratión on the left flank
+ they’re getting it frightfully hot.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Really?” said Pierre. “Where is that?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come along with me to our knoll. We can get a view from there and in our
+ battery it is still bearable,” said the adjutant. “Will you come?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I’ll come with you,” replied Pierre, looking round for his groom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was only now that he noticed wounded men staggering along or being
+ carried on stretchers. On that very meadow he had ridden over the day
+ before, a soldier was lying athwart the rows of scented hay, with his head
+ thrown awkwardly back and his shako off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why haven’t they carried him away?” Pierre was about to ask, but seeing
+ the stern expression of the adjutant who was also looking that way, he
+ checked himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre did not find his groom and rode along the hollow with the adjutant
+ to Raévski’s Redoubt. His horse lagged behind the adjutant’s and jolted
+ him at every step.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You don’t seem to be used to riding, Count?” remarked the adjutant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No it’s not that, but her action seems so jerky,” said Pierre in a
+ puzzled tone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why... she’s wounded!” said the adjutant. “In the off foreleg above the
+ knee. A bullet, no doubt. I congratulate you, Count, on your baptism of
+ fire!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having ridden in the smoke past the Sixth Corps, behind the artillery
+ which had been moved forward and was in action, deafening them with the
+ noise of firing, they came to a small wood. There it was cool and quiet,
+ with a scent of autumn. Pierre and the adjutant dismounted and walked up
+ the hill on foot.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is the general here?” asked the adjutant on reaching the knoll.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He was here a minute ago but has just gone that way,” someone told him,
+ pointing to the right.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The adjutant looked at Pierre as if puzzled what to do with him now.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t trouble about me,” said Pierre. “I’ll go up onto the knoll if I
+ may?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, do. You’ll see everything from there and it’s less dangerous, and
+ I’ll come for you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre went to the battery and the adjutant rode on. They did not meet
+ again, and only much later did Pierre learn that he lost an arm that day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The knoll to which Pierre ascended was that famous one afterwards known to
+ the Russians as the Knoll Battery or Raévski’s Redoubt, and to the French
+ as la grande redoute, la fatale redoute, la redoute du centre , around
+ which tens of thousands fell, and which the French regarded as the key to
+ the whole position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This redoubt consisted of a knoll, on three sides of which trenches had
+ been dug. Within the entrenchment stood ten guns that were being fired
+ through openings in the earthwork.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In line with the knoll on both sides stood other guns which also fired
+ incessantly. A little behind the guns stood infantry. When ascending that
+ knoll Pierre had no notion that this spot, on which small trenches had
+ been dug and from which a few guns were firing, was the most important
+ point of the battle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the contrary, just because he happened to be there he thought it one of
+ the least significant parts of the field.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having reached the knoll, Pierre sat down at one end of a trench
+ surrounding the battery and gazed at what was going on around him with an
+ unconsciously happy smile. Occasionally he rose and walked about the
+ battery still with that same smile, trying not to obstruct the soldiers
+ who were loading, hauling the guns, and continually running past him with
+ bags and charges. The guns of that battery were being fired continually
+ one after another with a deafening roar, enveloping the whole neighborhood
+ in powder smoke.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In contrast with the dread felt by the infantrymen placed in support, here
+ in the battery where a small number of men busy at their work were
+ separated from the rest by a trench, everyone experienced a common and as
+ it were family feeling of animation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The intrusion of Pierre’s nonmilitary figure in a white hat made an
+ unpleasant impression at first. The soldiers looked askance at him with
+ surprise and even alarm as they went past him. The senior artillery
+ officer, a tall, long-legged, pockmarked man, moved over to Pierre as if
+ to see the action of the farthest gun and looked at him with curiosity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A young round-faced officer, quite a boy still and evidently only just out
+ of the Cadet College, who was zealously commanding the two guns entrusted
+ to him, addressed Pierre sternly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sir,” he said, “permit me to ask you to stand aside. You must not be
+ here.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The soldiers shook their heads disapprovingly as they looked at Pierre.
+ But when they had convinced themselves that this man in the white hat was
+ doing no harm, but either sat quietly on the slope of the trench with a
+ shy smile or, politely making way for the soldiers, paced up and down the
+ battery under fire as calmly as if he were on a boulevard, their feeling
+ of hostile distrust gradually began to change into a kindly and bantering
+ sympathy, such as soldiers feel for their dogs, cocks, goats, and in
+ general for the animals that live with the regiment. The men soon accepted
+ Pierre into their family, adopted him, gave him a nickname (“our
+ gentleman”), and made kindly fun of him among themselves.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A shell tore up the earth two paces from Pierre and he looked around with
+ a smile as he brushed from his clothes some earth it had thrown up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And how’s it you’re not afraid, sir, really now?” a red-faced,
+ broad-shouldered soldier asked Pierre, with a grin that disclosed a set of
+ sound, white teeth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Are you afraid, then?” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What else do you expect?” answered the soldier. “She has no mercy, you
+ know! When she comes spluttering down, out go your innards. One can’t help
+ being afraid,” he said laughing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Several of the men, with bright kindly faces, stopped beside Pierre. They
+ seemed not to have expected him to talk like anybody else, and the
+ discovery that he did so delighted them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s the business of us soldiers. But in a gentleman it’s wonderful!
+ There’s a gentleman for you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To your places!” cried the young officer to the men gathered round
+ Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The young officer was evidently exercising his duties for the first or
+ second time and therefore treated both his superiors and the men with
+ great precision and formality.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The booming cannonade and the fusillade of musketry were growing more
+ intense over the whole field, especially to the left where Bagratión’s
+ flèches were, but where Pierre was the smoke of the firing made it almost
+ impossible to distinguish anything. Moreover, his whole attention was
+ engrossed by watching the family circle—separated from all else—formed
+ by the men in the battery. His first unconscious feeling of joyful
+ animation produced by the sights and sounds of the battlefield was now
+ replaced by another, especially since he had seen that soldier lying alone
+ in the hayfield. Now, seated on the slope of the trench, he observed the
+ faces of those around him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By ten o’clock some twenty men had already been carried away from the
+ battery; two guns were smashed and cannon balls fell more and more
+ frequently on the battery and spent bullets buzzed and whistled around.
+ But the men in the battery seemed not to notice this, and merry voices and
+ jokes were heard on all sides.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A live one!” shouted a man as a whistling shell approached.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not this way! To the infantry!” added another with loud laughter, seeing
+ the shell fly past and fall into the ranks of the supports.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Are you bowing to a friend, eh?” remarked another, chaffing a peasant who
+ ducked low as a cannon ball flew over.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Several soldiers gathered by the wall of the trench, looking out to see
+ what was happening in front.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They’ve withdrawn the front line, it has retired,” said they, pointing
+ over the earthwork.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mind your own business,” an old sergeant shouted at them. “If they’ve
+ retired it’s because there’s work for them to do farther back.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the sergeant, taking one of the men by the shoulders, gave him a shove
+ with his knee. This was followed by a burst of laughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To the fifth gun, wheel it up!” came shouts from one side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then, all together, like bargees!” rose the merry voices of those who
+ were moving the gun.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, she nearly knocked our gentleman’s hat off!” cried the red-faced
+ humorist, showing his teeth chaffing Pierre. “Awkward baggage!” he added
+ reproachfully to a cannon ball that struck a cannon wheel and a man’s leg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then, you foxes!” said another, laughing at some militiamen who,
+ stooping low, entered the battery to carry away the wounded man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So this gruel isn’t to your taste? Oh, you crows! You’re scared!” they
+ shouted at the militiamen who stood hesitating before the man whose leg
+ had been torn off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There, lads... oh, oh!” they mimicked the peasants, “they don’t like it
+ at all!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre noticed that after every ball that hit the redoubt, and after every
+ loss, the liveliness increased more and more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As the flames of the fire hidden within come more and more vividly and
+ rapidly from an approaching thundercloud, so, as if in opposition to what
+ was taking place, the lightning of hidden fire growing more and more
+ intense glowed in the faces of these men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre did not look out at the battlefield and was not concerned to know
+ what was happening there; he was entirely absorbed in watching this fire
+ which burned ever more brightly and which he felt was flaming up in the
+ same way in his own soul.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At ten o’clock the infantry that had been among the bushes in front of the
+ battery and along the Kámenka streamlet retreated. From the battery they
+ could be seen running back past it carrying their wounded on their
+ muskets. A general with his suite came to the battery, and after speaking
+ to the colonel gave Pierre an angry look and went away again having
+ ordered the infantry supports behind the battery to lie down, so as to be
+ less exposed to fire. After this from amid the ranks of infantry to the
+ right of the battery came the sound of a drum and shouts of command, and
+ from the battery one saw how those ranks of infantry moved forward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked over the wall of the trench and was particularly struck by a
+ pale young officer who, letting his sword hang down, was walking backwards
+ and kept glancing uneasily around.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The ranks of the infantry disappeared amid the smoke but their long-drawn
+ shout and rapid musketry firing could still be heard. A few minutes later
+ crowds of wounded men and stretcher-bearers came back from that direction.
+ Projectiles began to fall still more frequently in the battery. Several
+ men were lying about who had not been removed. Around the cannon the men
+ moved still more briskly and busily. No one any longer took notice of
+ Pierre. Once or twice he was shouted at for being in the way. The senior
+ officer moved with big, rapid strides from one gun to another with a
+ frowning face. The young officer, with his face still more flushed,
+ commanded the men more scrupulously than ever. The soldiers handed up the
+ charges, turned, loaded, and did their business with strained smartness.
+ They gave little jumps as they walked, as though they were on springs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The stormcloud had come upon them, and in every face the fire which Pierre
+ had watched kindle burned up brightly. Pierre standing beside the
+ commanding officer. The young officer, his hand to his shako, ran up to
+ his superior.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have the honor to report, sir, that only eight rounds are left. Are we
+ to continue firing?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Grapeshot!” the senior shouted, without answering the question, looking
+ over the wall of the trench.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly something happened: the young officer gave a gasp and bending
+ double sat down on the ground like a bird shot on the wing. Everything
+ became strange, confused, and misty in Pierre’s eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One cannon ball after another whistled by and struck the earthwork, a
+ soldier, or a gun. Pierre, who had not noticed these sounds before, now
+ heard nothing else. On the right of the battery soldiers shouting
+ “Hurrah!” were running not forwards but backwards, it seemed to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A cannon ball struck the very end of the earth work by which he was
+ standing, crumbling down the earth; a black ball flashed before his eyes
+ and at the same instant plumped into something. Some militiamen who were
+ entering the battery ran back.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All with grapeshot!” shouted the officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The sergeant ran up to the officer and in a frightened whisper informed
+ him (as a butler at dinner informs his master that there is no more of
+ some wine asked for) that there were no more charges.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The scoundrels! What are they doing?” shouted the officer, turning to
+ Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer’s face was red and perspiring and his eyes glittered under his
+ frowning brow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Run to the reserves and bring up the ammunition boxes!” he yelled,
+ angrily avoiding Pierre with his eyes and speaking to his men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll go,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer, without answering him, strode across to the opposite side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t fire.... Wait!” he shouted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The man who had been ordered to go for ammunition stumbled against Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh, sir, this is no place for you,” said he, and ran down the slope.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre ran after him, avoiding the spot where the young officer was
+ sitting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One cannon ball, another, and a third flew over him, falling in front,
+ beside, and behind him. Pierre ran down the slope. “Where am I going?” he
+ suddenly asked himself when he was already near the green ammunition
+ wagons. He halted irresolutely, not knowing whether to return or go on.
+ Suddenly a terrible concussion threw him backwards to the ground. At the
+ same instant he was dazzled by a great flash of flame, and immediately a
+ deafening roar, crackling, and whistling made his ears tingle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he came to himself he was sitting on the ground leaning on his hands;
+ the ammunition wagons he had been approaching no longer existed, only
+ charred green boards and rags littered the scorched grass, and a horse,
+ dangling fragments of its shaft behind it, galloped past, while another
+ horse lay, like Pierre, on the ground, uttering prolonged and piercing
+ cries.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXII
+ 
+ 
+ Beside himself with terror Pierre jumped up and ran back to the battery,
+ as to the only refuge from the horrors that surrounded him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On entering the earthwork he noticed that there were men doing something
+ there but that no shots were being fired from the battery. He had no time
+ to realize who these men were. He saw the senior officer lying on the
+ earth wall with his back turned as if he were examining something down
+ below and that one of the soldiers he had noticed before was struggling
+ forward shouting “Brothers!” and trying to free himself from some men who
+ were holding him by the arm. He also saw something else that was strange.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But he had not time to realize that the colonel had been killed, that the
+ soldier shouting “Brothers!” was a prisoner, and that another man had been
+ bayoneted in the back before his eyes, for hardly had he run into the
+ redoubt before a thin, sallow-faced, perspiring man in a blue uniform
+ rushed on him sword in hand, shouting something. Instinctively guarding
+ against the shock—for they had been running together at full speed
+ before they saw one another—Pierre put out his hands and seized the
+ man (a French officer) by the shoulder with one hand and by the throat
+ with the other. The officer, dropping his sword, seized Pierre by his
+ collar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For some seconds they gazed with frightened eyes at one another’s
+ unfamiliar faces and both were perplexed at what they had done and what
+ they were to do next. “Am I taken prisoner or have I taken him prisoner?”
+ each was thinking. But the French officer was evidently more inclined to
+ think he had been taken prisoner because Pierre’s strong hand, impelled by
+ instinctive fear, squeezed his throat ever tighter and tighter. The
+ Frenchman was about to say something, when just above their heads,
+ terrible and low, a cannon ball whistled, and it seemed to Pierre that the
+ French officer’s head had been torn off, so swiftly had he ducked it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre too bent his head and let his hands fall. Without further thought
+ as to who had taken whom prisoner, the Frenchman ran back to the battery
+ and Pierre ran down the slope stumbling over the dead and wounded who, it
+ seemed to him, caught at his feet. But before he reached the foot of the
+ knoll he was met by a dense crowd of Russian soldiers who, stumbling,
+ tripping up, and shouting, ran merrily and wildly toward the battery.
+ (This was the attack for which Ermólov claimed the credit, declaring that
+ only his courage and good luck made such a feat possible: it was the
+ attack in which he was said to have thrown some St. George’s Crosses he had
+ in his pocket into the battery for the first soldiers to take who got
+ there.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French who had occupied the battery fled, and our troops shouting
+ “Hurrah!” pursued them so far beyond the battery that it was difficult to
+ call them back.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The prisoners were brought down from the battery and among them was a
+ wounded French general, whom the officers surrounded. Crowds of wounded—some
+ known to Pierre and some unknown—Russians and French, with faces
+ distorted by suffering, walked, crawled, and were carried on stretchers
+ from the battery. Pierre again went up onto the knoll where he had spent
+ over an hour, and of that family circle which had received him as a member
+ he did not find a single one. There were many dead whom he did not know,
+ but some he recognized. The young officer still sat in the same way, bent
+ double, in a pool of blood at the edge of the earth wall. The red-faced
+ man was still twitching, but they did not carry him away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre ran down the slope once more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now they will stop it, now they will be horrified at what they have
+ done!” he thought, aimlessly going toward a crowd of stretcher bearers
+ moving from the battlefield.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But behind the veil of smoke the sun was still high, and in front and
+ especially to the left, near Semënovsk, something seemed to be seething in
+ the smoke, and the roar of cannon and musketry did not diminish, but even
+ increased to desperation like a man who, straining himself, shrieks with
+ all his remaining strength.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXIII
+ 
+ 
+ The chief action of the battle of Borodinó was fought within the seven
+ thousand feet between Borodinó and Bagratión’s flèches . Beyond that
+ space there was, on the one side, a demonstration made by the Russians with
+ Uvárov’s cavalry at midday, and on the other side, beyond Utítsa,
+ Poniatowski’s collision with Túchkov; but these two were detached and
+ feeble actions in comparison with what took place in the center of the
+ battlefield. On the field between Borodinó and the flèches , beside the
+ wood, the chief action of the day took place on an open space visible from
+ both sides and was fought in the simplest and most artless way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The battle began on both sides with a cannonade from several hundred guns.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then when the whole field was covered with smoke, two divisions, Campan’s
+ and Dessaix’s, advanced from the French right, while Murat’s troops
+ advanced on Borodinó from their left.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the Shevárdino Redoubt where Napoleon was standing the flèches were
+ two thirds of a mile away, and it was more than a mile as the crow flies
+ to Borodinó, so that Napoleon could not see what was happening there,
+ especially as the smoke mingling with the mist hid the whole locality. The
+ soldiers of Dessaix’s division advancing against the flèches could
+ only be seen till they had entered the hollow that lay between them and the
+ flèches . As soon as they had descended into that hollow, the smoke of the
+ guns and musketry on the flèches grew so dense that it covered the whole
+ approach on that side of it. Through the smoke glimpses could be caught of
+ something black—probably men—and at times the glint of
+ bayonets. But whether they were moving or stationary, whether they were
+ French or Russian, could not be discovered from the Shevárdino Redoubt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The sun had risen brightly and its slanting rays struck straight into
+ Napoleon’s face as, shading his eyes with his hand, he looked at the
+ flèches . The smoke spread out before them, and at times it looked as if
+ the smoke were moving, at times as if the troops moved. Sometimes shouts
+ were heard through the firing, but it was impossible to tell what was
+ being done there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon, standing on the knoll, looked through a field glass, and in its
+ small circlet saw smoke and men, sometimes his own and sometimes Russians,
+ but when he looked again with the naked eye, he could not tell where what
+ he had seen was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He descended the knoll and began walking up and down before it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Occasionally he stopped, listened to the firing, and gazed intently at the
+ battlefield.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But not only was it impossible to make out what was happening from where
+ he was standing down below, or from the knoll above on which some of his
+ generals had taken their stand, but even from the flèches themselves—in
+ which by this time there were now Russian and now French soldiers,
+ alternately or together, dead, wounded, alive, frightened, or maddened—even
+ at those flèches themselves it was impossible to make out what was taking
+ place. There for several hours amid incessant cannon and musketry fire,
+ now Russians were seen alone, now Frenchmen alone, now infantry, and now
+ cavalry: they appeared, fired, fell, collided, not knowing what to do with
+ one another, screamed, and ran back again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the battlefield adjutants he had sent out, and orderlies from his
+ marshals, kept galloping up to Napoleon with reports of the progress of
+ the action, but all these reports were false, both because it was
+ impossible in the heat of battle to say what was happening at any given
+ moment and because many of the adjutants did not go to the actual place of
+ conflict but reported what they had heard from others; and also because
+ while an adjutant was riding more than a mile to Napoleon circumstances
+ changed and the news he brought was already becoming false. Thus an
+ adjutant galloped up from Murat with tidings that Borodinó had been
+ occupied and the bridge over the Kolochá was in the hands of the French.
+ The adjutant asked whether Napoleon wished the troops to cross it?
+ Napoleon gave orders that the troops should form up on the farther side
+ and wait. But before that order was given—almost as soon in fact as
+ the adjutant had left Borodinó—the bridge had been retaken by the
+ Russians and burned, in the very skirmish at which Pierre had been present
+ at the beginning of the battle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ An adjutant galloped up from the flèches with a pale and frightened face
+ and reported to Napoleon that their attack had been repulsed, Campan
+ wounded, and Davout killed; yet at the very time the adjutant had been
+ told that the French had been repulsed, the flèches had in fact been
+ recaptured by other French troops, and Davout was alive and only slightly
+ bruised. On the basis of these necessarily untrustworthy reports Napoleon
+ gave his orders, which had either been executed before he gave them or
+ could not be and were not executed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The marshals and generals, who were nearer to the field of battle but,
+ like Napoleon, did not take part in the actual fighting and only
+ occasionally went within musket range, made their own arrangements without
+ asking Napoleon and issued orders where and in what direction to fire and
+ where cavalry should gallop and infantry should run. But even their
+ orders, like Napoleon’s, were seldom carried out, and then but partially.
+ For the most part things happened contrary to their orders. Soldiers
+ ordered to advance ran back on meeting grapeshot; soldiers ordered to
+ remain where they were, suddenly, seeing Russians unexpectedly before
+ them, sometimes rushed back and sometimes forward, and the cavalry dashed
+ without orders in pursuit of the flying Russians. In this way two cavalry
+ regiments galloped through the Semënovsk hollow and as soon as they
+ reached the top of the incline turned round and galloped full speed back
+ again. The infantry moved in the same way, sometimes running to quite
+ other places than those they were ordered to go to. All orders as to where
+ and when to move the guns, when to send infantry to shoot or horsemen to
+ ride down the Russian infantry—all such orders were given by the
+ officers on the spot nearest to the units concerned, without asking either
+ Ney, Davout, or Murat, much less Napoleon. They did not fear getting into
+ trouble for not fulfilling orders or for acting on their own initiative,
+ for in battle what is at stake is what is dearest to man—his own
+ life—and it sometimes seems that safety lies in running back,
+ sometimes in running forward; and these men who were right in the heat of
+ the battle acted according to the mood of the moment. In reality, however,
+ all these movements forward and backward did not improve or alter the
+ position of the troops. All their rushing and galloping at one another did
+ little harm, the harm of disablement and death was caused by the balls and
+ bullets that flew over the fields on which these men were floundering
+ about. As soon as they left the place where the balls and bullets were
+ flying about, their superiors, located in the background, re-formed them
+ and brought them under discipline and under the influence of that
+ discipline led them back to the zone of fire, where under the influence of
+ fear of death they lost their discipline and rushed about according to the
+ chance promptings of the throng.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXIV
+ 
+ 
+ Napoleon’s generals—Davout, Ney, and Murat, who were near that
+ region of fire and sometimes even entered it—repeatedly led into it
+ huge masses of well-ordered troops. But contrary to what had always
+ happened in their former battles, instead of the news they expected of the
+ enemy’s flight, these orderly masses returned thence as disorganized and
+ terrified mobs. The generals re-formed them, but their numbers constantly
+ decreased. In the middle of the day Murat sent his adjutant to Napoleon to
+ demand reinforcements.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon sat at the foot of the knoll, drinking punch, when Murat’s
+ adjutant galloped up with an assurance that the Russians would be routed
+ if His Majesty would let him have another division.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Reinforcements?” said Napoleon in a tone of stern surprise, looking at
+ the adjutant—a handsome lad with long black curls arranged like
+ Murat’s own—as though he did not understand his words.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Reinforcements!” thought Napoleon to himself. “How can they need
+ reinforcements when they already have half the army directed against a
+ weak, unentrenched Russian wing?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tell the King of Naples,” said he sternly, “that it is not noon yet, and
+ I don’t yet see my chessboard clearly. Go!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The handsome boy adjutant with the long hair sighed deeply without
+ removing his hand from his hat and galloped back to where men were being
+ slaughtered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon rose and having summoned Caulaincourt and Berthier began talking
+ to them about matters unconnected with the battle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the midst of this conversation, which was beginning to interest
+ Napoleon, Berthier’s eyes turned to look at a general with a suite, who
+ was galloping toward the knoll on a lathering horse. It was Belliard.
+ Having dismounted he went up to the Emperor with rapid strides and in a
+ loud voice began boldly demonstrating the necessity of sending
+ reinforcements. He swore on his honor that the Russians were lost if the
+ Emperor would give another division.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon shrugged his shoulders and continued to pace up and down without
+ replying. Belliard began talking loudly and eagerly to the generals of the
+ suite around him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are very fiery, Belliard,” said Napoleon, when he again came up to
+ the general. “In the heat of a battle it is easy to make a mistake. Go and
+ have another look and then come back to me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before Belliard was out of sight, a messenger from another part of the
+ battlefield galloped up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then, what do you want?” asked Napoleon in the tone of a man
+ irritated at being continually disturbed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sire, the prince...” began the adjutant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Asks for reinforcements?” said Napoleon with an angry gesture.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The adjutant bent his head affirmatively and began to report, but the
+ Emperor turned from him, took a couple of steps, stopped, came back, and
+ called Berthier.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We must give reserves,” he said, moving his arms slightly apart. “Who do
+ you think should be sent there?” he asked of Berthier (whom he
+ subsequently termed “that gosling I have made an eagle”).
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Send Claparède’s division, sire,” replied Berthier, who knew all the
+ division’s regiments, and battalions by heart.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon nodded assent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The adjutant galloped to Claparède’s division and a few minutes later the
+ Young Guards stationed behind the knoll moved forward. Napoleon gazed
+ silently in that direction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No!” he suddenly said to Berthier. “I can’t send Claparède. Send Friant’s
+ division.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though there was no advantage in sending Friant’s division instead of
+ Claparède’s, and even an obvious inconvenience and delay in stopping
+ Claparède and sending Friant now, the order was carried out exactly.
+ Napoleon did not notice that in regard to his army he was playing the part
+ of a doctor who hinders by his medicines—a role he so justly
+ understood and condemned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Friant’s division disappeared as the others had done into the smoke of the
+ battlefield. From all sides adjutants continued to arrive at a gallop and
+ as if by agreement all said the same thing. They all asked for
+ reinforcements and all said that the Russians were holding their positions
+ and maintaining a hellish fire under which the French army was melting
+ away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon sat on a campstool, wrapped in thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ M. de Beausset, the man so fond of travel, having fasted since morning,
+ came up to the Emperor and ventured respectfully to suggest lunch to His
+ Majesty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I hope I may now congratulate Your Majesty on a victory?” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon silently shook his head in negation. Assuming the negation to
+ refer only to the victory and not to the lunch, M. de Beausset ventured
+ with respectful jocularity to remark that there is no reason for not
+ having lunch when one can get it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go away...” exclaimed Napoleon suddenly and morosely, and turned aside.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A beatific smile of regret, repentance, and ecstasy beamed on M. de
+ Beausset’s face and he glided away to the other generals.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon was experiencing a feeling of depression like that of an
+ ever-lucky gambler who, after recklessly flinging money about and always
+ winning, suddenly just when he has calculated all the chances of the game,
+ finds that the more he considers his play the more surely he loses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His troops were the same, his generals the same, the same preparations had
+ been made, the same dispositions, and the same proclamation courte et
+ énergique , he himself was still the same: he knew that and knew that he
+ was now even more experienced and skillful than before. Even the enemy was
+ the same as at Austerlitz and Friedland—yet the terrible stroke of
+ his arm had supernaturally become impotent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the old methods that had been unfailingly crowned with success: the
+ concentration of batteries on one point, an attack by reserves to break
+ the enemy’s line, and a cavalry attack by “the men of iron,” all these
+ methods had already been employed, yet not only was there no victory, but
+ from all sides came the same news of generals killed and wounded, of
+ reinforcements needed, of the impossibility of driving back the Russians,
+ and of disorganization among his own troops.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Formerly, after he had given two or three orders and uttered a few
+ phrases, marshals and adjutants had come galloping up with congratulations
+ and happy faces, announcing the trophies taken, the corps of prisoners,
+ bundles of enemy eagles and standards, cannon and stores, and Murat had
+ only begged leave to loose the cavalry to gather in the baggage wagons. So
+ it had been at Lodi, Marengo, Arcola, Jena, Austerlitz, Wagram, and so on.
+ But now something strange was happening to his troops.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Despite news of the capture of the flèches , Napoleon saw that this was not
+ the same, not at all the same, as what had happened in his former battles.
+ He saw that what he was feeling was felt by all the men about him
+ experienced in the art of war. All their faces looked dejected, and they
+ all shunned one another’s eyes—only a de Beausset could fail to
+ grasp the meaning of what was happening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Napoleon with his long experience of war well knew the meaning of a
+ battle not gained by the attacking side in eight hours, after all efforts
+ had been expended. He knew that it was a lost battle and that the least
+ accident might now—with the fight balanced on such a strained center—destroy
+ him and his army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he ran his mind over the whole of this strange Russian campaign in
+ which not one battle had been won, and in which not a flag, or cannon, or
+ army corps had been captured in two months, when he looked at the
+ concealed depression on the faces around him and heard reports of the
+ Russians still holding their ground—a terrible feeling like a
+ nightmare took possession of him, and all the unlucky accidents that might
+ destroy him occurred to his mind. The Russians might fall on his left
+ wing, might break through his center, he himself might be killed by a
+ stray cannon ball. All this was possible. In former battles he had only
+ considered the possibilities of success, but now innumerable unlucky
+ chances presented themselves, and he expected them all. Yes, it was like a
+ dream in which a man fancies that a ruffian is coming to attack him, and
+ raises his arm to strike that ruffian a terrible blow which he knows
+ should annihilate him, but then feels that his arm drops powerless and
+ limp like a rag, and the horror of unavoidable destruction seizes him in
+ his helplessness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The news that the Russians were attacking the left flank of the French
+ army aroused that horror in Napoleon. He sat silently on a campstool below
+ the knoll, with head bowed and elbows on his knees. Berthier approached
+ and suggested that they should ride along the line to ascertain the
+ position of affairs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What? What do you say?” asked Napoleon. “Yes, tell them to bring me my
+ horse.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He mounted and rode toward Semënovsk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Amid the powder smoke, slowly dispersing over the whole space through
+ which Napoleon rode, horses and men were lying in pools of blood, singly
+ or in heaps. Neither Napoleon nor any of his generals had ever before seen
+ such horrors or so many slain in such a small area. The roar of guns, that
+ had not ceased for ten hours, wearied the ear and gave a peculiar
+ significance to the spectacle, as music does to tableaux vivants . Napoleon
+ rode up the high ground at Semënovsk, and through the smoke saw ranks of
+ men in uniforms of a color unfamiliar to him. They were Russians.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Russians stood in serried ranks behind Semënovsk village and its
+ knoll, and their guns boomed incessantly along their line and sent forth
+ clouds of smoke. It was no longer a battle: it was a continuous slaughter
+ which could be of no avail either to the French or the Russians. Napoleon
+ stopped his horse and again fell into the reverie from which Berthier had
+ aroused him. He could not stop what was going on before him and around him
+ and was supposed to be directed by him and to depend on him, and from its
+ lack of success this affair, for the first time, seemed to him unnecessary
+ and horrible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One of the generals rode up to Napoleon and ventured to offer to lead the
+ Old Guard into action. Ney and Berthier, standing near Napoleon, exchanged
+ looks and smiled contemptuously at this general’s senseless offer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon bowed his head and remained silent a long time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At eight hundred leagues from France, I will not have my Guard
+ destroyed!” he said, and turning his horse rode back to Shevárdino.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXV
+ 
+ 
+ On the rug-covered bench where Pierre had seen him in the morning sat
+ Kutúzov, his gray head hanging, his heavy body relaxed. He gave no orders,
+ but only assented to or dissented from what others suggested.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, do that,” he replied to various proposals. “Yes, yes: go, dear
+ boy, and have a look,” he would say to one or another of those about him;
+ or, “No, don’t, we’d better wait!” He listened to the reports that were
+ brought him and gave directions when his subordinates demanded that of
+ him; but when listening to the reports it seemed as if he were not
+ interested in the import of the words spoken, but rather in something else—in
+ the expression of face and tone of voice of those who were reporting. By
+ long years of military experience he knew, and with the wisdom of age
+ understood, that it is impossible for one man to direct hundreds of
+ thousands of others struggling with death, and he knew that the result of
+ a battle is decided not by the orders of a commander in chief, nor the
+ place where the troops are stationed, nor by the number of cannon or of
+ slaughtered men, but by that intangible force called the spirit of the
+ army, and he watched this force and guided it in as far as that was in his
+ power.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov’s general expression was one of concentrated quiet attention, and
+ his face wore a strained look as if he found it difficult to master the
+ fatigue of his old and feeble body.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At eleven o’clock they brought him news that the flèches captured by
+ the French had been retaken, but that Prince Bagratión was wounded. Kutúzov
+ groaned and swayed his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ride over to Prince Peter Ivánovich and find out about it exactly,” he
+ said to one of his adjutants, and then turned to the Duke of Württemberg
+ who was standing behind him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Will Your Highness please take command of the first army?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon after the duke’s departure—before he could possibly have
+ reached Semënovsk—his adjutant came back from him and told Kutúzov
+ that the duke asked for more troops.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov made a grimace and sent an order to Dokhtúrov to take over the
+ command of the first army, and a request to the duke—whom he said he
+ could not spare at such an important moment—to return to him. When
+ they brought him news that Murat had been taken prisoner, and the staff
+ officers congratulated him, Kutúzov smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wait a little, gentlemen,” said he. “The battle is won, and there is
+ nothing extraordinary in the capture of Murat. Still, it is better to wait
+ before we rejoice.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But he sent an adjutant to take the news round the army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Scherbínin came galloping from the left flank with news that the
+ French had captured the flèches and the village of Semënovsk, Kutúzov,
+ guessing by the sounds of the battle and by Scherbínin’s looks that the
+ news was bad, rose as if to stretch his legs and, taking Scherbínin’s arm,
+ led him aside.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go, my dear fellow,” he said to Ermólov, “and see whether something can’t
+ be done.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov was in Górki, near the center of the Russian position. The attack
+ directed by Napoleon against our left flank had been several times
+ repulsed. In the center the French had not got beyond Borodinó, and on
+ their left flank Uvárov’s cavalry had put the French to flight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Toward three o’clock the French attacks ceased. On the faces of all who
+ came from the field of battle, and of those who stood around him, Kutúzov
+ noticed an expression of extreme tension. He was satisfied with the day’s
+ success—a success exceeding his expectations, but the old man’s
+ strength was failing him. Several times his head dropped low as if it were
+ falling and he dozed off. Dinner was brought him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Adjutant General Wolzogen, the man who when riding past Prince Andrew had
+ said, “the war should be extended widely,” and whom Bagratión so detested,
+ rode up while Kutúzov was at dinner. Wolzogen had come from Barclay de
+ Tolly to report on the progress of affairs on the left flank. The
+ sagacious Barclay de Tolly, seeing crowds of wounded men running back and
+ the disordered rear of the army, weighed all the circumstances, concluded
+ that the battle was lost, and sent his favorite officer to the commander
+ in chief with that news.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov was chewing a piece of roast chicken with difficulty and glanced
+ at Wolzogen with eyes that brightened under their puckering lids.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Wolzogen, nonchalantly stretching his legs, approached Kutúzov with a
+ half-contemptuous smile on his lips, scarcely touching the peak of his
+ cap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He treated his Serene Highness with a somewhat affected nonchalance
+ intended to show that, as a highly trained military man, he left it to
+ Russians to make an idol of this useless old man, but that he knew whom he
+ was dealing with. “Der alte Herr” (as in their own set the
+ Germans called Kutúzov) “is making himself very comfortable,” thought
+ Wolzogen, and looking severely at the dishes in front of Kutúzov he began to report
+ to “the old gentleman” the position of affairs on the left flank as
+ Barclay had ordered him to and as he himself had seen and understood it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All the points of our position are in the enemy’s hands and we cannot
+ dislodge them for lack of troops, the men are running away and it is
+ impossible to stop them,” he reported.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov ceased chewing and fixed an astonished gaze on Wolzogen, as if not
+ understanding what was said to him. Wolzogen, noticing “the old
+ gentleman’s” agitation, said with a smile:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have not considered it right to conceal from your Serene Highness what
+ I have seen. The troops are in complete disorder....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You have seen? You have seen?...” Kutúzov shouted. Frowning and rising
+ quickly, he went up to Wolzogen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How... how dare you!...” he shouted, choking and making a threatening
+ gesture with his trembling arms: “How dare you, sir, say that to me? 
+ You know nothing about it. Tell General Barclay from me that his information
+ is incorrect and that the real course of the battle is better known to me,
+ the commander in chief, than to him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Wolzogen was about to make a rejoinder, but Kutúzov interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The enemy has been repulsed on the left and defeated on the right flank.
+ If you have seen amiss, sir, do not allow yourself to say what you don’t
+ know! Be so good as to ride to General Barclay and inform him of my firm
+ intention to attack the enemy tomorrow,” said Kutúzov sternly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All were silent, and the only sound audible was the heavy breathing of the
+ panting old general.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They are repulsed everywhere, for which I thank God and our brave army!
+ The enemy is beaten, and tomorrow we shall drive him from the sacred soil
+ of Russia,” said Kutúzov crossing himself, and he suddenly sobbed as his
+ eyes filled with tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Wolzogen, shrugging his shoulders and curling his lips, stepped silently
+ aside, marveling at “the old gentleman’s” conceited stupidity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, here he is, my hero!” said Kutúzov to a portly, handsome, dark-haired
+ general who was just ascending the knoll.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This was Raévski, who had spent the whole day at the most important part
+ of the field of Borodinó.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Raévski reported that the troops were firmly holding their ground and that
+ the French no longer ventured to attack.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After hearing him, Kutúzov said in French:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then you do not think, like some others , that we must retreat?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the contrary, your Highness, in indecisive actions it is always the
+ most stubborn who remain victors,” replied Raévski, “and in my opinion...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Kaysárov!” Kutúzov called to his adjutant. “Sit down and write out the
+ order of the day for tomorrow. And you,” he continued, addressing another,
+ “ride along the line and announce that tomorrow we attack.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While Kutúzov was talking to Raévski and dictating the order of the day,
+ Wolzogen returned from Barclay and said that General Barclay wished to
+ have written confirmation of the order the field marshal had given.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov, without looking at Wolzogen, gave directions for the order to be
+ written out which the former commander in chief, to avoid personal
+ responsibility, very judiciously wished to receive.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And by means of that mysterious indefinable bond which maintains
+ throughout an army one and the same temper, known as “the spirit of the
+ army,” and which constitutes the sinew of war, Kutúzov’s words, his order
+ for a battle next day, immediately became known from one end of the army
+ to the other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was far from being the same words or the same order that reached the
+ farthest links of that chain. The tales passing from mouth to mouth at
+ different ends of the army did not even resemble what Kutúzov had said,
+ but the sense of his words spread everywhere because what he said was not
+ the outcome of cunning calculations, but of a feeling that lay in the
+ commander in chief’s soul as in that of every Russian.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And on learning that tomorrow they were to attack the enemy, and hearing
+ from the highest quarters a confirmation of what they wanted to believe,
+ the exhausted, wavering men felt comforted and inspirited.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXVI
+ 
+ 
+ Prince Andrew’s regiment was among the reserves which till after one
+ o’clock were stationed inactive behind Semënovsk, under heavy artillery
+ fire. Toward two o’clock the regiment, having already lost more than two
+ hundred men, was moved forward into a trampled oatfield in the gap between
+ Semënovsk and the Knoll Battery, where thousands of men perished that day
+ and on which an intense, concentrated fire from several hundred enemy guns
+ was directed between one and two o’clock.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Without moving from that spot or firing a single shot the regiment here
+ lost another third of its men. From in front and especially from the
+ right, in the unlifting smoke the guns boomed, and out of the mysterious
+ domain of smoke that overlay the whole space in front, quick hissing
+ cannon balls and slow whistling shells flew unceasingly. At times, as if
+ to allow them a respite, a quarter of an hour passed during which the
+ cannon balls and shells all flew overhead, but sometimes several men were
+ torn from the regiment in a minute and the slain were continually being
+ dragged away and the wounded carried off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With each fresh blow less and less chance of life remained for those not
+ yet killed. The regiment stood in columns of battalion, three hundred
+ paces apart, but nevertheless the men were always in one and the same
+ mood. All alike were taciturn and morose. Talk was rarely heard in the
+ ranks, and it ceased altogether every time the thud of a successful shot
+ and the cry of “stretchers!” was heard. Most of the time, by their
+ officers’ order, the men sat on the ground. One, having taken off his
+ shako, carefully loosened the gathers of its lining and drew them tight
+ again; another, rubbing some dry clay between his palms, polished his
+ bayonet; another fingered the strap and pulled the buckle of his
+ bandolier, while another smoothed and refolded his leg bands and put his
+ boots on again. Some built little houses of the tufts in the plowed
+ ground, or plaited baskets from the straw in the cornfield. All seemed
+ fully absorbed in these pursuits. When men were killed or wounded, when
+ rows of stretchers went past, when some troops retreated, and when great
+ masses of the enemy came into view through the smoke, no one paid any
+ attention to these things. But when our artillery or cavalry advanced or
+ some of our infantry were seen to move forward, words of approval were
+ heard on all sides. But the liveliest attention was attracted by
+ occurrences quite apart from, and unconnected with, the battle. It was as
+ if the minds of these morally exhausted men found relief in everyday,
+ commonplace occurrences. A battery of artillery was passing in front of
+ the regiment. The horse of an ammunition cart put its leg over a trace.
+ “Hey, look at the trace horse!... Get her leg out! She’ll fall.... Ah,
+ they don’t see it!” came identical shouts from the ranks all along the
+ regiment. Another time, general attention was attracted by a small brown
+ dog, coming heaven knows whence, which trotted in a preoccupied manner in
+ front of the ranks with tail stiffly erect till suddenly a shell fell
+ close by, when it yelped, tucked its tail between its legs, and darted
+ aside. Yells and shrieks of laughter rose from the whole regiment. But
+ such distractions lasted only a moment, and for eight hours the men had
+ been inactive, without food, in constant fear of death, and their pale and
+ gloomy faces grew ever paler and gloomier.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew, pale and gloomy like everyone in the regiment, paced up and
+ down from the border of one patch to another, at the edge of the meadow
+ beside an oatfield, with head bowed and arms behind his back. There was
+ nothing for him to do and no orders to be given. Everything went on of
+ itself. The killed were dragged from the front, the wounded carried away,
+ and the ranks closed up. If any soldiers ran to the rear they returned
+ immediately and hastily. At first Prince Andrew, considering it his duty
+ to rouse the courage of the men and to set them an example, walked about
+ among the ranks, but he soon became convinced that this was unnecessary
+ and that there was nothing he could teach them. All the powers of his
+ soul, as of every soldier there, were unconsciously bent on avoiding the
+ contemplation of the horrors of their situation. He walked along the
+ meadow, dragging his feet, rustling the grass, and gazing at the dust that
+ covered his boots; now he took big strides trying to keep to the
+ footprints left on the meadow by the mowers, then he counted his steps,
+ calculating how often he must walk from one strip to another to walk a
+ mile, then he stripped the flowers from the wormwood that grew along a
+ boundary rut, rubbed them in his palms, and smelled their pungent, sweetly
+ bitter scent. Nothing remained of the previous day’s thoughts. He thought
+ of nothing. He listened with weary ears to the ever-recurring sounds,
+ distinguishing the whistle of flying projectiles from the booming of the
+ reports, glanced at the tiresomely familiar faces of the men of the first
+ battalion, and waited. “Here it comes... this one is coming our way
+ again!” he thought, listening to an approaching whistle in the hidden
+ region of smoke. “One, another! Again! It has hit....” He stopped and
+ looked at the ranks. “No, it has gone over. But this one has hit!” And
+ again he started trying to reach the boundary strip in sixteen paces. A
+ whizz and a thud! Five paces from him, a cannon ball tore up the dry earth
+ and disappeared. A chill ran down his back. Again he glanced at the ranks.
+ Probably many had been hit—a large crowd had gathered near the
+ second battalion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Adjutant!” he shouted. “Order them not to crowd together.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The adjutant, having obeyed this instruction, approached Prince Andrew.
+ From the other side a battalion commander rode up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look out!” came a frightened cry from a soldier and, like a bird whirring
+ in rapid flight and alighting on the ground, a shell dropped with little
+ noise within two steps of Prince Andrew and close to the battalion
+ commander’s horse. The horse first, regardless of whether it was right or
+ wrong to show fear, snorted, reared almost throwing the major, and
+ galloped aside. The horse’s terror infected the men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lie down!” cried the adjutant, throwing himself flat on the ground.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew hesitated. The smoking shell spun like a top between him and
+ the prostrate adjutant, near a wormwood plant between the field and the
+ meadow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Can this be death?” thought Prince Andrew, looking with a quite new,
+ envious glance at the grass, the wormwood, and the streamlet of smoke that
+ curled up from the rotating black ball. “I cannot, I do not wish to die. I
+ love life—I love this grass, this earth, this air....” He thought
+ this, and at the same time remembered that people were looking at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s shameful, sir!” he said to the adjutant. “What...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not finish speaking. At one and the same moment came the sound of
+ an explosion, a whistle of splinters as from a breaking window frame, a
+ suffocating smell of powder, and Prince Andrew started to one side,
+ raising his arm, and fell on his chest. Several officers ran up to him.
+ From the right side of his abdomen, blood was welling out making a large
+ stain on the grass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The militiamen with stretchers who were called up stood behind the
+ officers. Prince Andrew lay on his chest with his face in the grass,
+ breathing heavily and noisily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are you waiting for? Come along!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The peasants went up and took him by his shoulders and legs, but he moaned
+ piteously and, exchanging looks, they set him down again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pick him up, lift him, it’s all the same!” cried someone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They again took him by the shoulders and laid him on the stretcher.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, God! My God! What is it? The stomach? That means death! My God!”—voices
+ among the officers were heard saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It flew a hair’s breadth past my ear,” said the adjutant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The peasants, adjusting the stretcher to their shoulders, started
+ hurriedly along the path they had trodden down, to the dressing station.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Keep in step! Ah... those peasants!” shouted an officer, seizing by their
+ shoulders and checking the peasants, who were walking unevenly and jolting
+ the stretcher.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Get into step, Fëdor... I say, Fëdor!” said the foremost peasant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now that’s right!” said the one behind joyfully, when he had got into
+ step.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency! Eh, Prince!” said the trembling voice of Timókhin, who
+ had run up and was looking down on the stretcher.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew opened his eyes and looked up at the speaker from the
+ stretcher into which his head had sunk deep and again his eyelids drooped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ The militiamen carried Prince Andrew to the dressing station by the wood,
+ where wagons were stationed. The dressing station consisted of three tents
+ with flaps turned back, pitched at the edge of a birch wood. In the wood,
+ wagons and horses were standing. The horses were eating oats from their
+ movable troughs and sparrows flew down and pecked the grains that fell.
+ Some crows, scenting blood, flew among the birch trees cawing impatiently.
+ Around the tents, over more than five acres, bloodstained men in various
+ garbs stood, sat, or lay. Around the wounded stood crowds of soldier
+ stretcher-bearers with dismal and attentive faces, whom the officers
+ keeping order tried in vain to drive from the spot. Disregarding the
+ officers’ orders, the soldiers stood leaning against their stretchers and
+ gazing intently, as if trying to comprehend the difficult problem of what
+ was taking place before them. From the tents came now loud angry cries and
+ now plaintive groans. Occasionally dressers ran out to fetch water, or to
+ point out those who were to be brought in next. The wounded men awaiting
+ their turn outside the tents groaned, sighed, wept, screamed, swore, or
+ asked for vodka. Some were delirious. Prince Andrew’s bearers, stepping
+ over the wounded who had not yet been bandaged, took him, as a regimental
+ commander, close up to one of the tents and there stopped, awaiting
+ instructions. Prince Andrew opened his eyes and for a long time could not
+ make out what was going on around him. He remembered the meadow, the
+ wormwood, the field, the whirling black ball, and his sudden rush of
+ passionate love of life. Two steps from him, leaning against a branch and
+ talking loudly and attracting general attention, stood a tall, handsome,
+ black-haired noncommissioned officer with a bandaged head. He had been
+ wounded in the head and leg by bullets. Around him, eagerly listening to
+ his talk, a crowd of wounded and stretcher-bearers was gathered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We kicked him out from there so that he chucked everything, we grabbed
+ the King himself!” cried he, looking around him with eyes that glittered
+ with fever. “If only reserves had come up just then, lads, there wouldn’t
+ have been nothing left of him! I tell you surely....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Like all the others near the speaker, Prince Andrew looked at him with
+ shining eyes and experienced a sense of comfort. “But isn’t it all the
+ same now?” thought he. “And what will be there, and what has there been
+ here? Why was I so reluctant to part with life? There was something in
+ this life I did not and do not understand.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXVII
+ 
+ 
+ One of the doctors came out of the tent in a bloodstained apron, holding a
+ cigar between the thumb and little finger of one of his small bloodstained
+ hands, so as not to smear it. He raised his head and looked about him, but
+ above the level of the wounded men. He evidently wanted a little respite.
+ After turning his head from right to left for some time, he sighed and
+ looked down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right, immediately,” he replied to a dresser who pointed Prince
+ Andrew out to him, and he told them to carry him into the tent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Murmurs arose among the wounded who were waiting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It seems that even in the next world only the gentry are to have a
+ chance!” remarked one.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew was carried in and laid on a table that had only just been
+ cleared and which a dresser was washing down. Prince Andrew could not make
+ out distinctly what was in that tent. The pitiful groans from all sides
+ and the torturing pain in his thigh, stomach, and back distracted him. All
+ he saw about him merged into a general impression of naked, bleeding human
+ bodies that seemed to fill the whole of the low tent, as a few weeks
+ previously, on that hot August day, such bodies had filled the dirty pond
+ beside the Smolénsk road. Yes, it was the same flesh, the same chair à
+ canon , the sight of which had even then filled him with horror, as by a
+ presentiment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There were three operating tables in the tent. Two were occupied, and on
+ the third they placed Prince Andrew. For a little while he was left alone
+ and involuntarily witnessed what was taking place on the other two tables.
+ On the nearest one sat a Tartar, probably a Cossack, judging by the
+ uniform thrown down beside him. Four soldiers were holding him, and a
+ spectacled doctor was cutting into his muscular brown back.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ooh, ooh, ooh!” grunted the Tartar, and suddenly lifting up his swarthy
+ snub-nosed face with its high cheekbones, and baring his white teeth, he
+ began to wriggle and twitch his body and utter piercing, ringing, and
+ prolonged yells. On the other table, round which many people were
+ crowding, a tall well-fed man lay on his back with his head thrown back.
+ His curly hair, its color, and the shape of his head seemed strangely
+ familiar to Prince Andrew. Several dressers were pressing on his chest to
+ hold him down. One large, white, plump leg twitched rapidly all the time
+ with a feverish tremor. The man was sobbing and choking convulsively. Two
+ doctors—one of whom was pale and trembling—were silently doing
+ something to this man’s other, gory leg. When he had finished with the
+ Tartar, whom they covered with an overcoat, the spectacled doctor came up
+ to Prince Andrew, wiping his hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He glanced at Prince Andrew’s face and quickly turned away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Undress him! What are you waiting for?” he cried angrily to the dressers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His very first, remotest recollections of childhood came back to Prince
+ Andrew’s mind when the dresser with sleeves rolled up began hastily to
+ undo the buttons of his clothes and undressed him. The doctor bent down
+ over the wound, felt it, and sighed deeply. Then he made a sign to
+ someone, and the torturing pain in his abdomen caused Prince Andrew to
+ lose consciousness. When he came to himself the splintered portions of his
+ thighbone had been extracted, the torn flesh cut away, and the wound
+ bandaged. Water was being sprinkled on his face. As soon as Prince Andrew
+ opened his eyes, the doctor bent over, kissed him silently on the lips,
+ and hurried away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the sufferings he had been enduring, Prince Andrew enjoyed a
+ blissful feeling such as he had not experienced for a long time. All the
+ best and happiest moments of his life—especially his earliest
+ childhood, when he used to be undressed and put to bed, and when leaning
+ over him his nurse sang him to sleep and he, burying his head in the
+ pillow, felt happy in the mere consciousness of life—returned to his
+ memory, not merely as something past but as something present.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctors were busily engaged with the wounded man the shape of whose
+ head seemed familiar to Prince Andrew: they were lifting him up and trying
+ to quiet him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Show it to me.... Oh, ooh... Oh! Oh, ooh!” his frightened moans could be
+ heard, subdued by suffering and broken by sobs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hearing those moans Prince Andrew wanted to weep. Whether because he was
+ dying without glory, or because he was sorry to part with life, or because
+ of those memories of a childhood that could not return, or because he was
+ suffering and others were suffering and that man near him was groaning so
+ piteously—he felt like weeping childlike, kindly, and almost happy
+ tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The wounded man was shown his amputated leg stained with clotted blood and
+ with the boot still on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh! Oh, ooh!” he sobbed, like a woman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctor who had been standing beside him, preventing Prince Andrew from
+ seeing his face, moved away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My God! What is this? Why is he here?” said Prince Andrew to himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the miserable, sobbing, enfeebled man whose leg had just been
+ amputated, he recognized Anatole Kurágin. Men were supporting him in their
+ arms and offering him a glass of water, but his trembling, swollen lips
+ could not grasp its rim. Anatole was sobbing painfully. “Yes, it is he!
+ Yes, that man is somehow closely and painfully connected with me,” thought
+ Prince Andrew, not yet clearly grasping what he saw before him. “What is
+ the connection of that man with my childhood and life?” he asked himself
+ without finding an answer. And suddenly a new unexpected memory from that
+ realm of pure and loving childhood presented itself to him. He remembered
+ Natásha as he had seen her for the first time at the ball in 1810, with
+ her slender neck and arms and with a frightened happy face ready for
+ rapture, and love and tenderness for her, stronger and more vivid than
+ ever, awoke in his soul. He now remembered the connection that existed
+ between himself and this man who was dimly gazing at him through tears
+ that filled his swollen eyes. He remembered everything, and ecstatic pity
+ and love for that man overflowed his happy heart.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew could no longer restrain himself and wept tender loving
+ tears for his fellow men, for himself, and for his own and their errors.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Compassion, love of our brothers, for those who love us and for those who
+ hate us, love of our enemies; yes, that love which God preached on earth
+ and which Princess Mary taught me and I did not understand—that is
+ what made me sorry to part with life, that is what remained for me had I
+ lived. But now it is too late. I know it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXVIII
+ 
+ 
+ The terrible spectacle of the battlefield covered with dead and wounded,
+ together with the heaviness of his head and the news that some twenty
+ generals he knew personally had been killed or wounded, and the
+ consciousness of the impotence of his once mighty arm, produced an
+ unexpected impression on Napoleon who usually liked to look at the killed
+ and wounded, thereby, he considered, testing his strength of mind. This
+ day the horrible appearance of the battlefield overcame that strength of
+ mind which he thought constituted his merit and his greatness. He rode
+ hurriedly from the battlefield and returned to the Shevárdino knoll, where
+ he sat on his campstool, his sallow face swollen and heavy, his eyes dim,
+ his nose red, and his voice hoarse, involuntarily listening, with downcast
+ eyes, to the sounds of firing. With painful dejection he awaited the end
+ of this action, in which he regarded himself as a participant and which he
+ was unable to arrest. A personal, human feeling for a brief moment got the
+ better of the artificial phantasm of life he had served so long. He felt
+ in his own person the sufferings and death he had witnessed on the
+ battlefield. The heaviness of his head and chest reminded him of the
+ possibility of suffering and death for himself. At that moment he did not
+ desire Moscow, or victory, or glory (what need had he for any more
+ glory?). The one thing he wished for was rest, tranquillity, and freedom.
+ But when he had been on the Semënovsk heights the artillery commander had
+ proposed to him to bring several batteries of artillery up to those
+ heights to strengthen the fire on the Russian troops crowded in front of
+ Knyazkóvo. Napoleon had assented and had given orders that news should be
+ brought to him of the effect those batteries produced.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ An adjutant came now to inform him that the fire of two hundred guns had
+ been concentrated on the Russians, as he had ordered, but that they still
+ held their ground.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Our fire is mowing them down by rows, but still they hold on,” said the
+ adjutant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They want more!...” said Napoleon in a hoarse voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sire?” asked the adjutant who had not heard the remark.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They want more!” croaked Napoleon frowning. “Let them have it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Even before he gave that order the thing he did not desire, and for which
+ he gave the order only because he thought it was expected of him, was
+ being done. And he fell back into that artificial realm of imaginary
+ greatness, and again—as a horse walking a treadmill thinks it is
+ doing something for itself—he submissively fulfilled the cruel, sad,
+ gloomy, and inhuman role predestined for him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And not for that day and hour alone were the mind and conscience darkened
+ of this man on whom the responsibility for what was happening lay more
+ than on all the others who took part in it. Never to the end of his life
+ could he understand goodness, beauty, or truth, or the significance of his
+ actions which were too contrary to goodness and truth, too remote from
+ everything human, for him ever to be able to grasp their meaning. He could
+ not disavow his actions, belauded as they were by half the world, and so
+ he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not only on that day, as he rode over the battlefield strewn with men
+ killed and maimed (by his will as he believed), did he reckon as he looked
+ at them how many Russians there were for each Frenchman and, deceiving
+ himself, find reason for rejoicing in the calculation that there were five
+ Russians for every Frenchman. Not on that day alone did he write in a
+ letter to Paris that “the battle field was superb,” because fifty thousand
+ corpses lay there, but even on the island of St. Helena in the peaceful
+ solitude where he said he intended to devote his leisure to an account of
+ the great deeds he had done, he wrote:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Russian war should have been the most popular war of modern times: it
+ was a war of good sense, for real interests, for the tranquillity and
+ security of all; it was purely pacific and conservative.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a war for a great cause, the end of uncertainties and the beginning
+ of security. A new horizon and new labors were opening out, full of
+ well-being and prosperity for all. The European system was already
+ founded; all that remained was to organize it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Satisfied on these great points and with tranquility everywhere, I too
+ should have had my Congress and my Holy Alliance . Those ideas were
+ stolen from me. In that reunion of great sovereigns we should have discussed our
+ interests like one family, and have rendered account to the peoples as
+ clerk to master.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Europe would in this way soon have been, in fact, but one people, and
+ anyone who traveled anywhere would have found himself always in the common
+ fatherland. I should have demanded the freedom of all navigable rivers for
+ everybody, that the seas should be common to all, and that the great
+ standing armies should be reduced henceforth to mere guards for the
+ sovereigns.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On returning to France, to the bosom of the great, strong, magnificent,
+ peaceful, and glorious fatherland, I should have proclaimed her frontiers
+ immutable; all future wars purely defensive , all aggrandizement
+ antinational . I should have associated my son in the Empire; my
+ dictatorship would have been finished, and his constitutional reign would
+ have begun.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Paris would have been the capital of the world, and the French the envy of
+ the nations!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ My leisure then, and my old age, would have been devoted, in company with
+ the Empress and during the royal apprenticeship of my son, to leisurely
+ visiting, with our own horses and like a true country couple, every corner
+ of the Empire, receiving complaints, redressing wrongs, and scattering
+ public buildings and benefactions on all sides and everywhere.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon, predestined by Providence for the gloomy role of executioner of
+ the peoples, assured himself that the aim of his actions had been the
+ peoples’ welfare and that he could control the fate of millions and by the
+ employment of power confer benefactions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Of four hundred thousand who crossed the Vistula,” he wrote further of
+ the Russian war, “half were Austrians, Prussians, Saxons, Poles,
+ Bavarians, Württembergers, Mecklenburgers, Spaniards, Italians, and
+ Neapolitans. The Imperial army, strictly speaking, was one third composed
+ of Dutch, Belgians, men from the borders of the Rhine, Piedmontese, Swiss,
+ Genevese, Tuscans, Romans, inhabitants of the Thirty-second Military
+ Division, of Bremen, of Hamburg, and so on: it included scarcely a hundred
+ and forty thousand who spoke French. The Russian expedition actually cost
+ France less than fifty thousand men; the Russian army in its retreat from
+ Vílna to Moscow lost in the various battles four times more men than the
+ French army; the burning of Moscow cost the lives of a hundred thousand
+ Russians who died of cold and want in the woods; finally, in its march
+ from Moscow to the Oder the Russian army also suffered from the severity
+ of the season; so that by the time it reached Vílna it numbered only fifty
+ thousand, and at Kálisch less than eighteen thousand.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He imagined that the war with Russia came about by his will, and the
+ horrors that occurred did not stagger his soul. He boldly took the whole
+ responsibility for what happened, and his darkened mind found
+ justification in the belief that among the hundreds of thousands who
+ perished there were fewer Frenchmen than Hessians and Bavarians.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXIX
+ 
+ 
+ Several tens of thousands of the slain lay in diverse postures and various
+ uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the Davýdov family and to
+ the crown serfs—those fields and meadows where for hundreds of years
+ the peasants of Borodinó, Górki, Shevárdino, and Semënovsk had reaped
+ their harvests and pastured their cattle. At the dressing stations the
+ grass and earth were soaked with blood for a space of some three acres
+ around. Crowds of men of various arms, wounded and unwounded, with
+ frightened faces, dragged themselves back to Mozháysk from the one army
+ and back to Valúevo from the other. Other crowds, exhausted and hungry,
+ went forward led by their officers. Others held their ground and continued
+ to fire.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Over the whole field, previously so gaily beautiful with the glitter of
+ bayonets and cloudlets of smoke in the morning sun, there now spread a
+ mist of damp and smoke and a strange acid smell of saltpeter and blood.
+ Clouds gathered and drops of rain began to fall on the dead and wounded,
+ on the frightened, exhausted, and hesitating men, as if to say: “Enough,
+ men! Enough! Cease... bethink yourselves! What are you doing?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To the men of both sides alike, worn out by want of food and rest, it
+ began equally to appear doubtful whether they should continue to slaughter
+ one another; all the faces expressed hesitation, and the question arose in
+ every soul: “For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?... You may go
+ and kill whom you please, but I don’t want to do so any more!” By
+ evening this thought had ripened in every soul. At any moment these men might
+ have been seized with horror at what they were doing and might have thrown
+ up everything and run away anywhere.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But though toward the end of the battle the men felt all the horror of
+ what they were doing, though they would have been glad to leave off, some
+ incomprehensible, mysterious power continued to control them, and they
+ still brought up the charges, loaded, aimed, and applied the match, though
+ only one artilleryman survived out of every three, and though they
+ stumbled and panted with fatigue, perspiring and stained with blood and
+ powder. The cannon balls flew just as swiftly and cruelly from both sides,
+ crushing human bodies, and that terrible work which was not done by the
+ will of a man but at the will of Him who governs men and worlds continued.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anyone looking at the disorganized rear of the Russian army would have
+ said that, if only the French made one more slight effort, it would
+ disappear; and anyone looking at the rear of the French army would have
+ said that the Russians need only make one more slight effort and the
+ French would be destroyed. But neither the French nor the Russians made
+ that effort, and the flame of battle burned slowly out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Russians did not make that effort because they were not attacking the
+ French. At the beginning of the battle they stood blocking the way to
+ Moscow and they still did so at the end of the battle as at the beginning.
+ But even had the aim of the Russians been to drive the French from their
+ positions, they could not have made this last effort, for all the Russian
+ troops had been broken up, there was no part of the Russian army that had
+ not suffered in the battle, and though still holding their positions they
+ had lost ONE HALF of their army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French, with the memory of all their former victories during fifteen
+ years, with the assurance of Napoleon’s invincibility, with the
+ consciousness that they had captured part of the battlefield and had lost
+ only a quarter of their men and still had their Guards intact, twenty
+ thousand strong, might easily have made that effort. The French who had
+ attacked the Russian army in order to drive it from its position ought to
+ have made that effort, for as long as the Russians continued to block the
+ road to Moscow as before, the aim of the French had not been attained and
+ all their efforts and losses were in vain. But the French did not make
+ that effort. Some historians say that Napoleon need only have used his Old
+ Guards, who were intact, and the battle would have been won. To speak of
+ what would have happened had Napoleon sent his Guards is like talking of
+ what would happen if autumn became spring. It could not be. Napoleon did
+ not give his Guards, not because he did not want to, but because it could
+ not be done. All the generals, officers, and soldiers of the French army
+ knew it could not be done, because the flagging spirit of the troops would
+ not permit it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was not Napoleon alone who had experienced that nightmare feeling of
+ the mighty arm being stricken powerless, but all the generals and soldiers
+ of his army whether they had taken part in the battle or not, after all
+ their experience of previous battles—when after one tenth of such
+ efforts the enemy had fled—experienced a similar feeling of terror
+ before an enemy who, after losing HALF his men, stood as threateningly at
+ the end as at the beginning of the battle. The moral force of the
+ attacking French army was exhausted. Not that sort of victory which is
+ defined by the capture of pieces of material fastened to sticks, called
+ standards, and of the ground on which the troops had stood and were
+ standing, but a moral victory that convinces the enemy of the moral
+ superiority of his opponent and of his own impotence was gained by the
+ Russians at Borodinó. The French invaders, like an infuriated animal that
+ has in its onslaught received a mortal wound, felt that they were
+ perishing, but could not stop, any more than the Russian army, weaker by
+ one half, could help swerving. By impetus gained, the French army was
+ still able to roll forward to Moscow, but there, without further effort on
+ the part of the Russians, it had to perish, bleeding from the mortal wound
+ it had received at Borodinó. The direct consequence of the battle of
+ Borodinó was Napoleon’s senseless flight from Moscow, his retreat along
+ the old Smolénsk road, the destruction of the invading army of five
+ hundred thousand men, and the downfall of Napoleonic France, on which at
+ Borodinó for the first time the hand of an opponent of stronger spirit had
+ been laid.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK ELEVEN: 1812
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human mind.
+ Laws of motion of any kind become comprehensible to man only when he
+ examines arbitrarily selected elements of that motion; but at the same
+ time, a large proportion of human error comes from the arbitrary division
+ of continuous motion into discontinuous elements. There is a well-known,
+ so-called sophism of the ancients consisting in this, that Achilles could
+ never catch up with a tortoise he was following, in spite of the fact that
+ he traveled ten times as fast as the tortoise. By the time Achilles has
+ covered the distance that separated him from the tortoise, the tortoise
+ has covered one tenth of that distance ahead of him: when Achilles has
+ covered that tenth, the tortoise has covered another one hundredth, and so
+ on forever. This problem seemed to the ancients insoluble. The absurd
+ answer (that Achilles could never overtake the tortoise) resulted from
+ this: that motion was arbitrarily divided into discontinuous elements,
+ whereas the motion both of Achilles and of the tortoise was continuous.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By adopting smaller and smaller elements of motion we only approach a
+ solution of the problem, but never reach it. Only when we have admitted
+ the conception of the infinitely small, and the resulting geometrical
+ progression with a common ratio of one tenth, and have found the sum of
+ this progression to infinity, do we reach a solution of the problem.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A modern branch of mathematics having achieved the art of dealing with the
+ infinitely small can now yield solutions in other more complex problems of
+ motion which used to appear insoluble.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This modern branch of mathematics, unknown to the ancients, when dealing
+ with problems of motion admits the conception of the infinitely small, and
+ so conforms to the chief condition of motion (absolute continuity) and
+ thereby corrects the inevitable error which the human mind cannot avoid
+ when it deals with separate elements of motion instead of examining
+ continuous motion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In seeking the laws of historical movement just the same thing happens.
+ The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable arbitrary
+ human wills, is continuous.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of history.
+ But to arrive at these laws, resulting from the sum of all those human
+ wills, man’s mind postulates arbitrary and disconnected units. The first
+ method of history is to take an arbitrarily selected series of continuous
+ events and examine it apart from others, though there is and can be no
+ beginning to any event, for one event always flows uninterruptedly from
+ another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The second method is to consider the actions of some one man—a king
+ or a commander—as equivalent to the sum of many individual wills;
+ whereas the sum of individual wills is never expressed by the activity of
+ a single historic personage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Historical science in its endeavor to draw nearer to truth continually
+ takes smaller and smaller units for examination. But however small the
+ units it takes, we feel that to take any unit disconnected from others, or
+ to assume a beginning of any phenomenon, or to say that the will of many
+ men is expressed by the actions of any one historic personage, is in
+ itself false.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It needs no critical exertion to reduce utterly to dust any deductions
+ drawn from history. It is merely necessary to select some larger or
+ smaller unit as the subject of observation—as criticism has every
+ right to do, seeing that whatever unit history observes must always be
+ arbitrarily selected.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the
+ differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and
+ attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of
+ these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The first fifteen years of the nineteenth century in Europe present an
+ extraordinary movement of millions of people. Men leave their customary
+ pursuits, hasten from one side of Europe to the other, plunder and
+ slaughter one another, triumph and are plunged in despair, and for some
+ years the whole course of life is altered and presents an intensive
+ movement which first increases and then slackens. What was the cause of
+ this movement, by what laws was it governed? asks the mind of man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The historians, replying to this question, lay before us the sayings and
+ doings of a few dozen men in a building in the city of Paris, calling
+ these sayings and doings “the Revolution”; then they give a detailed
+ biography of Napoleon and of certain people favorable or hostile to him;
+ tell of the influence some of these people had on others, and say: that is
+ why this movement took place and those are its laws.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the mind of man not only refuses to believe this explanation, but
+ plainly says that this method of explanation is fallacious, because in it
+ a weaker phenomenon is taken as the cause of a stronger. The sum of human
+ wills produced the Revolution and Napoleon, and only the sum of those
+ wills first tolerated and then destroyed them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But every time there have been conquests there have been conquerors;
+ every time there has been a revolution in any state there have been great
+ men,” says history. And, indeed, human reason replies: every time
+ conquerors appear there have been wars, but this does not prove that the
+ conquerors caused the wars and that it is possible to find the laws of a
+ war in the personal activity of a single man. Whenever I look at my watch
+ and its hands point to ten, I hear the bells of the neighboring church;
+ but because the bells begin to ring when the hands of the clock reach ten,
+ I have no right to assume that the movement of the bells is caused by the
+ position of the hands of the watch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whenever I see the movement of a locomotive I hear the whistle and see the
+ valves opening and wheels turning; but I have no right to conclude that
+ the whistling and the turning of wheels are the cause of the movement of
+ the engine.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The peasants say that a cold wind blows in late spring because the oaks
+ are budding, and really every spring cold winds do blow when the oak is
+ budding. But though I do not know what causes the cold winds to blow when
+ the oak buds unfold, I cannot agree with the peasants that the unfolding
+ of the oak buds is the cause of the cold wind, for the force of the wind
+ is beyond the influence of the buds. I see only a coincidence of
+ occurrences such as happens with all the phenomena of life, and I see that
+ however much and however carefully I observe the hands of the watch, and
+ the valves and wheels of the engine, and the oak, I shall not discover the
+ cause of the bells ringing, the engine moving, or of the winds of spring.
+ To that I must entirely change my point of view and study the laws of the
+ movement of steam, of the bells, and of the wind. History must do the
+ same. And attempts in this direction have already been made.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our
+ observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study
+ the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved.
+ No one can say in how far it is possible for man to advance in this way
+ toward an understanding of the laws of history; but it is evident that
+ only along that path does the possibility of discovering the laws of
+ history lie, and that as yet not a millionth part as much mental effort
+ has been applied in this direction by historians as has been devoted to
+ describing the actions of various kings, commanders, and ministers and
+ propounding the historians’ own reflections concerning these actions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ The forces of a dozen European nations burst into Russia. The Russian army
+ and people avoided a collision till Smolénsk was reached, and again from
+ Smolénsk to Borodinó. The French army pushed on to Moscow, its goal, its
+ impetus ever increasing as it neared its aim, just as the velocity of a
+ falling body increases as it approaches the earth. Behind it were seven
+ hundred miles of hunger-stricken, hostile country; ahead were a few dozen
+ miles separating it from its goal. Every soldier in Napoleon’s army felt
+ this and the invasion moved on by its own momentum.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The more the Russian army retreated the more fiercely a spirit of hatred
+ of the enemy flared up, and while it retreated the army increased and
+ consolidated. At Borodinó a collision took place. Neither army was broken
+ up, but the Russian army retreated immediately after the collision as
+ inevitably as a ball recoils after colliding with another having a greater
+ momentum, and with equal inevitability the ball of invasion that had
+ advanced with such momentum rolled on for some distance, though the
+ collision had deprived it of all its force.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Russians retreated eighty miles—to beyond Moscow—and the
+ French reached Moscow and there came to a standstill. For five weeks after
+ that there was not a single battle. The French did not move. As a
+ bleeding, mortally wounded animal licks its wounds, they remained inert in
+ Moscow for five weeks, and then suddenly, with no fresh reason, fled back:
+ they made a dash for the Kalúga road, and (after a victory—for at
+ Málo-Yaroslávets the field of conflict again remained theirs) without
+ undertaking a single serious battle, they fled still more rapidly back to
+ Smolénsk, beyond Smolénsk, beyond the Berëzina, beyond Vílna, and farther
+ still.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the evening of the twenty-sixth of August, Kutúzov and the whole
+ Russian army were convinced that the battle of Borodinó was a victory.
+ Kutúzov reported so to the Emperor. He gave orders to prepare for a fresh
+ conflict to finish the enemy and did this not to deceive anyone, but
+ because he knew that the enemy was beaten, as everyone who had taken part
+ in the battle knew it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But all that evening and next day reports came in one after another of
+ unheard-of losses, of the loss of half the army, and a fresh battle proved
+ physically impossible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was impossible to give battle before information had been collected,
+ the wounded gathered in, the supplies of ammunition replenished, the slain
+ reckoned up, new officers appointed to replace those who had been killed,
+ and before the men had had food and sleep. And meanwhile, the very next
+ morning after the battle, the French army advanced of itself upon the
+ Russians, carried forward by the force of its own momentum now seemingly
+ increased in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from its
+ aim. Kutúzov’s wish was to attack next day, and the whole army desired to
+ do so. But to make an attack the wish to do so is not sufficient, there
+ must also be a possibility of doing it, and that possibility did not
+ exist. It was impossible not to retreat a day’s march, and then in the
+ same way it was impossible not to retreat another and a third day’s march,
+ and at last, on the first of September when the army drew near Moscow—despite
+ the strength of the feeling that had arisen in all ranks—the force
+ of circumstances compelled it to retire beyond Moscow. And the troops
+ retired one more, last, day’s march, and abandoned Moscow to the enemy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For people accustomed to think that plans of campaign and battles are made
+ by generals—as anyone of us sitting over a map in his study may
+ imagine how he would have arranged things in this or that battle—the
+ questions present themselves: Why did Kutúzov during the retreat not do
+ this or that? Why did he not take up a position before reaching Filí? Why
+ did he not retire at once by the Kalúga road, abandoning Moscow? and so
+ on. People accustomed to think in that way forget, or do not know, the
+ inevitable conditions which always limit the activities of any commander
+ in chief. The activity of a commander in chief does not at all resemble
+ the activity we imagine to ourselves when we sit at ease in our studies
+ examining some campaign on the map, with a certain number of troops on
+ this and that side in a certain known locality, and begin our plans from
+ some given moment. A commander in chief is never dealing with the
+ beginning of any event—the position from which we always contemplate
+ it. The commander in chief is always in the midst of a series of shifting
+ events and so he never can at any moment consider the whole import of an
+ event that is occurring. Moment by moment the event is imperceptibly
+ shaping itself, and at every moment of this continuous, uninterrupted
+ shaping of events the commander in chief is in the midst of a most complex
+ play of intrigues, worries, contingencies, authorities, projects,
+ counsels, threats, and deceptions and is continually obliged to reply to
+ innumerable questions addressed to him, which constantly conflict with one
+ another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Learned military authorities quite seriously tell us that Kutúzov should
+ have moved his army to the Kalúga road long before reaching Filí, and that
+ somebody actually submitted such a proposal to him. But a commander in
+ chief, especially at a difficult moment, has always before him not one
+ proposal but dozens simultaneously. And all these proposals, based on
+ strategics and tactics, contradict each other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A commander in chief’s business, it would seem, is simply to choose one of
+ these projects. But even that he cannot do. Events and time do not wait.
+ For instance, on the twenty-eighth it is suggested to him to cross to the
+ Kalúga road, but just then an adjutant gallops up from Milorádovich asking
+ whether he is to engage the French or retire. An order must be given him
+ at once, that instant. And the order to retreat carries us past the turn
+ to the Kalúga road. And after the adjutant comes the commissary general
+ asking where the stores are to be taken, and the chief of the hospitals
+ asks where the wounded are to go, and a courier from Petersburg brings a
+ letter from the sovereign which does not admit of the possibility of
+ abandoning Moscow, and the commander in chief’s rival, the man who is
+ undermining him (and there are always not merely one but several such),
+ presents a new project diametrically opposed to that of turning to the
+ Kalúga road, and the commander in chief himself needs sleep and
+ refreshment to maintain his energy and a respectable general who has been
+ overlooked in the distribution of rewards comes to complain, and the
+ inhabitants of the district pray to be defended, and an officer sent to
+ inspect the locality comes in and gives a report quite contrary to what
+ was said by the officer previously sent; and a spy, a prisoner, and a
+ general who has been on reconnaissance, all describe the position of the
+ enemy’s army differently. People accustomed to misunderstand or to forget
+ these inevitable conditions of a commander in chief’s actions describe to
+ us, for instance, the position of the army at Filí and assume that the
+ commander in chief could, on the first of September, quite freely decide
+ whether to abandon Moscow or defend it; whereas, with the Russian army
+ less than four miles from Moscow, no such question existed. When had that
+ question been settled? At Drissa and at Smolénsk and most palpably of all
+ on the twenty-fourth of August at Shevárdino and on the twenty-sixth at
+ Borodinó, and each day and hour and minute of the retreat from Borodinó to
+ Filí.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ When Ermólov, having been sent by Kutúzov to inspect the position, told
+ the field marshal that it was impossible to fight there before Moscow and
+ that they must retreat, Kutúzov looked at him in silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Give me your hand,” said he and, turning it over so as to feel the pulse,
+ added: “You are not well, my dear fellow. Think what you are saying!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov could not yet admit the possibility of retreating beyond Moscow
+ without a battle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the Poklónny Hill, four miles from the Dorogomílov gate of Moscow,
+ Kutúzov got out of his carriage and sat down on a bench by the roadside. A
+ great crowd of generals gathered round him, and Count Rostopchín, who had
+ come out from Moscow, joined them. This brilliant company separated into
+ several groups who all discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the
+ position, the state of the army, the plans suggested, the situation of
+ Moscow, and military questions generally. Though they had not been
+ summoned for the purpose, and though it was not so called, they all felt
+ that this was really a council of war. The conversations all dealt with
+ public questions. If anyone gave or asked for personal news, it was done
+ in a whisper and they immediately reverted to general matters. No jokes,
+ or laughter, or smiles even, were seen among all these men. They evidently
+ all made an effort to hold themselves at the height the situation
+ demanded. And all these groups, while talking among themselves, tried to
+ keep near the commander in chief (whose bench formed the center of the
+ gathering) and to speak so that he might overhear them. The commander in
+ chief listened to what was being said and sometimes asked them to repeat
+ their remarks, but did not himself take part in the conversations or
+ express any opinion. After hearing what was being said by one or other of
+ these groups he generally turned away with an air of disappointment, as
+ though they were not speaking of anything he wished to hear. Some
+ discussed the position that had been chosen, criticizing not the position
+ itself so much as the mental capacity of those who had chosen it. Others
+ argued that a mistake had been made earlier and that a battle should have
+ been fought two days before. Others again spoke of the battle of
+ Salamanca, which was described by Crosart, a newly arrived Frenchman in a
+ Spanish uniform. (This Frenchman and one of the German princes serving
+ with the Russian army were discussing the siege of Saragossa and
+ considering the possibility of defending Moscow in a similar manner.)
+ Count Rostopchín was telling a fourth group that he was prepared to die
+ with the city train bands under the walls of the capital, but that he
+ still could not help regretting having been left in ignorance of what was
+ happening, and that had he known it sooner things would have been
+ different.... A fifth group, displaying the profundity of their strategic
+ perceptions, discussed the direction the troops would now have to take. A
+ sixth group was talking absolute nonsense. Kutúzov’s expression grew more
+ and more preoccupied and gloomy. From all this talk he saw only one thing:
+ that to defend Moscow was a physical impossibility in the full meaning of
+ those words, that is to say, so utterly impossible that if any senseless
+ commander were to give orders to fight, confusion would result but the
+ battle would still not take place. It would not take place because the
+ commanders not merely all recognized the position to be impossible, but in
+ their conversations were only discussing what would happen after its
+ inevitable abandonment. How could the commanders lead their troops to a
+ field of battle they considered impossible to hold? The lower-grade
+ officers and even the soldiers (who too reason) also considered the
+ position impossible and therefore could not go to fight, fully convinced
+ as they were of defeat. If Bennigsen insisted on the position being
+ defended and others still discussed it, the question was no longer
+ important in itself but only as a pretext for disputes and intrigue. This
+ Kutúzov knew well.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bennigsen, who had chosen the position, warmly displayed his Russian
+ patriotism (Kutúzov could not listen to this without wincing) by insisting
+ that Moscow must be defended. His aim was as clear as daylight to Kutúzov:
+ if the defense failed, to throw the blame on Kutúzov who had brought the
+ army as far as the Sparrow Hills without giving battle; if it succeeded,
+ to claim the success as his own; or if battle were not given, to clear
+ himself of the crime of abandoning Moscow. But this intrigue did not now
+ occupy the old man’s mind. One terrible question absorbed him and to that
+ question he heard no reply from anyone. The question for him now was:
+ “Have I really allowed Napoleon to reach Moscow, and when did I do so?
+ When was it decided? Can it have been yesterday when I ordered Plátov to
+ retreat, or was it the evening before, when I had a nap and told Bennigsen
+ to issue orders? Or was it earlier still?... When, when was this terrible
+ affair decided? Moscow must be abandoned. The army must retreat and the
+ order to do so must be given.” To give that terrible order seemed to him
+ equivalent to resigning the command of the army. And not only did he love
+ power to which he was accustomed (the honours awarded to Prince
+ Prozoróvski, under whom he had served in Turkey, galled him), but he was
+ convinced that he was destined to save Russia and that that was why,
+ against the Emperor’s wish and by the will of the people, he had been
+ chosen commander in chief. He was convinced that he alone could maintain
+ command of the army in these difficult circumstances, and that in all the
+ world he alone could encounter the invincible Napoleon without fear, and
+ he was horrified at the thought of the order he had to issue. But
+ something had to be decided, and these conversations around him which were
+ assuming too free a character must be stopped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He called the most important generals to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My head, be it good or bad, must depend on itself,” said he, rising from
+ the bench, and he rode to Filí where his carriages were waiting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ The Council of War began to assemble at two in the afternoon in the better
+ and roomier part of Andrew Savostyánov’s hut. The men, women, and children
+ of the large peasant family crowded into the back room across the passage.
+ Only Malásha, Andrew’s six-year-old granddaughter whom his Serene Highness
+ had petted and to whom he had given a lump of sugar while drinking his
+ tea, remained on the top of the brick oven in the larger room. Malásha
+ looked down from the oven with shy delight at the faces, uniforms, and
+ decorations of the generals, who one after another came into the room and
+ sat down on the broad benches in the corner under the icons. “Granddad”
+ himself, as Malásha in her own mind called Kutúzov, sat apart in a dark
+ corner behind the oven. He sat, sunk deep in a folding armchair, and
+ continually cleared his throat and pulled at the collar of his coat which,
+ though it was unbuttoned, still seemed to pinch his neck. Those who
+ entered went up one by one to the field marshal; he pressed the hands of
+ some and nodded to others. His adjutant Kaysárov was about to draw back
+ the curtain of the window facing Kutúzov, but the latter moved his hand
+ angrily and Kaysárov understood that his Serene Highness did not wish his
+ face to be seen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Round the peasant’s deal table, on which lay maps, plans, pencils, and
+ papers, so many people gathered that the orderlies brought in another
+ bench and put it beside the table. Ermólov, Kaysárov, and Toll, who had
+ just arrived, sat down on this bench. In the foremost place, immediately
+ under the icons, sat Barclay de Tolly, his high forehead merging into his
+ bald crown. He had a St. George’s Cross round his neck and looked pale and
+ ill. He had been feverish for two days and was now shivering and in pain.
+ Beside him sat Uvárov, who with rapid gesticulations was giving him some
+ information, speaking in low tones as they all did. Chubby little
+ Dokhtúrov was listening attentively with eyebrows raised and arms folded
+ on his stomach. On the other side sat Count Ostermann-Tolstóy, seemingly
+ absorbed in his own thoughts. His broad head with its bold features and
+ glittering eyes was resting on his hand. Raévski, twitching forward the
+ black hair on his temples as was his habit, glanced now at Kutúzov and now
+ at the door with a look of impatience. Konovnítsyn’s firm, handsome, and
+ kindly face was lit up by a tender, sly smile. His glance met Malásha’s,
+ and the expression of his eyes caused the little girl to smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They were all waiting for Bennigsen, who on the pretext of inspecting the
+ position was finishing his savory dinner. They waited for him from four
+ till six o’clock and did not begin their deliberations all that time but
+ talked in low tones of other matters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only when Bennigsen had entered the hut did Kutúzov leave his corner and
+ draw toward the table, but not near enough for the candles that had been
+ placed there to light up his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bennigsen opened the council with the question: “Are we to abandon
+ Russia’s ancient and sacred capital without a struggle, or are we to
+ defend it?” A prolonged and general silence followed. There was a frown on
+ every face and only Kutúzov’s angry grunts and occasional cough broke the
+ silence. All eyes were gazing at him. Malásha too looked at “Granddad.”
+ She was nearest to him and saw how his face puckered; he seemed about to
+ cry, but this did not last long.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Russia’s ancient and sacred capital!” he suddenly said,
+ repeating Bennigsen’s words in an angry voice and thereby drawing attention
+ to the false note in them. “Allow me to tell you, your excellency, that that
+ question has no meaning for a Russian.” (He lurched his heavy body
+ forward.) “Such a question cannot be put; it is senseless! The question I
+ have asked these gentlemen to meet to discuss is a military one. The
+ question is that of saving Russia. Is it better to give up Moscow without
+ a battle, or by accepting battle to risk losing the army as well as
+ Moscow? That is the question on which I want your opinion,” and he sank
+ back in his chair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The discussion began. Bennigsen did not yet consider his game lost.
+ Admitting the view of Barclay and others that a defensive battle at Filí
+ was impossible, but imbued with Russian patriotism and the love of Moscow,
+ he proposed to move troops from the right to the left flank during the
+ night and attack the French right flank the following day. Opinions were
+ divided, and arguments were advanced for and against that project.
+ Ermólov, Dokhtúrov, and Raévski agreed with Bennigsen. Whether feeling it
+ necessary to make a sacrifice before abandoning the capital or guided by
+ other, personal considerations, these generals seemed not to understand
+ that this council could not alter the inevitable course of events and that
+ Moscow was in effect already abandoned. The other generals, however,
+ understood it and, leaving aside the question of Moscow, spoke of the
+ direction the army should take in its retreat. Malásha, who kept her eyes
+ fixed on what was going on before her, understood the meaning of the
+ council differently. It seemed to her that it was only a personal struggle
+ between “Granddad” and “Long-coat” as she termed Bennigsen. She saw that
+ they grew spiteful when they spoke to one another, and in her heart she
+ sided with “Granddad.” In the midst of the conversation she noticed
+ “Granddad” give Bennigsen a quick, subtle glance, and then to her joys she
+ saw that “Granddad” said something to “Long-coat” which settled him.
+ Bennigsen suddenly reddened and paced angrily up and down the room. What
+ so affected him was Kutúzov’s calm and quiet comment on the advantage or
+ disadvantage of Bennigsen’s proposal to move troops by night from the
+ right to the left flank to attack the French right wing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gentlemen,” said Kutúzov, “I cannot approve of the count’s plan. Moving
+ troops in close proximity to an enemy is always dangerous, and military
+ history supports that view. For instance...” Kutúzov seemed to reflect,
+ searching for an example, then with a clear, naïve look at Bennigsen he
+ added: “Oh yes; take the battle of Friedland, which I think the count well
+ remembers, and which was... not fully successful, only because our troops
+ were rearranged too near the enemy....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There followed a momentary pause, which seemed very long to them all.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The discussion recommenced, but pauses frequently occurred and they all
+ felt that there was no more to be said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During one of these pauses Kutúzov heaved a deep sigh as if preparing to
+ speak. They all looked at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, gentlemen, I see that it is I who will have to pay for the broken
+ crockery,” said he, and rising slowly he moved to the table. “Gentlemen, I
+ have heard your views. Some of you will not agree with me. But I,” he
+ paused, “by the authority entrusted to me by my Sovereign and country,
+ order a retreat.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After that the generals began to disperse with the solemnity and
+ circumspect silence of people who are leaving, after a funeral.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some of the generals, in low tones and in a strain very different from the
+ way they had spoken during the council, communicated something to their
+ commander in chief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Malásha, who had long been expected for supper, climbed carefully
+ backwards down from the oven, her bare little feet catching at its
+ projections, and slipping between the legs of the generals she darted out
+ of the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he had dismissed the generals Kutúzov sat a long time with his elbows
+ on the table, thinking always of the same terrible question: “When, when
+ did the abandonment of Moscow become inevitable? When was that done which
+ settled the matter? And who was to blame for it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I did not expect this,” said he to his adjutant Schneider when the latter
+ came in late that night. “I did not expect this! I did not think this
+ would happen.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You should take some rest, your Serene Highness,” replied Schneider.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But no! They shall eat horseflesh yet, like the Turks!” exclaimed Kutúzov
+ without replying, striking the table with his podgy fist. “They shall too,
+ if only...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ At that very time, in circumstances even more important than retreating
+ without a battle, namely the evacuation and burning of Moscow, Rostopchín,
+ who is usually represented as being the instigator of that event, acted in
+ an altogether different manner from Kutúzov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the battle of Borodinó the abandonment and burning of Moscow was as
+ inevitable as the retreat of the army beyond Moscow without fighting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Every Russian might have predicted it, not by reasoning but by the feeling
+ implanted in each of us and in our fathers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The same thing that took place in Moscow had happened in all the towns and
+ villages on Russian soil beginning with Smolénsk, without the
+ participation of Count Rostopchín and his broadsheets. The people awaited
+ the enemy unconcernedly, did not riot or become excited or tear anyone to
+ pieces, but faced its fate, feeling within it the strength to find what it
+ should do at that most difficult moment. And as soon as the enemy drew
+ near the wealthy classes went away abandoning their property, while the
+ poorer remained and burned and destroyed what was left.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The consciousness that this would be so and would always be so was and is
+ present in the heart of every Russian. And a consciousness of this, and a
+ foreboding that Moscow would be taken, was present in Russian Moscow
+ society in 1812. Those who had quitted Moscow already in July and at the
+ beginning of August showed that they expected this. Those who went away,
+ taking what they could and abandoning their houses and half their
+ belongings, did so from the latent patriotism which expresses itself not
+ by phrases or by giving one’s children to save the fatherland and similar
+ unnatural exploits, but unobtrusively, simply, organically, and therefore
+ in the way that always produces the most powerful results.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is disgraceful to run away from danger; only cowards are running away
+ from Moscow,” they were told. In his broadsheets Rostopchín impressed on
+ them that to leave Moscow was shameful. They were ashamed to be called
+ cowards, ashamed to leave, but still they left, knowing it had to be done.
+ Why did they go? It is impossible to suppose that Rostopchín had scared
+ them by his accounts of horrors Napoleon had committed in conquered
+ countries. The first people to go away were the rich educated people who
+ knew quite well that Vienna and Berlin had remained intact and that during
+ Napoleon’s occupation the inhabitants had spent their time pleasantly in
+ the company of the charming Frenchmen whom the Russians, and especially
+ the Russian ladies, then liked so much.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They went away because for Russians there could be no question as to
+ whether things would go well or ill under French rule in Moscow. It was
+ out of the question to be under French rule, it would be the worst thing
+ that could happen. They went away even before the battle of Borodinó and
+ still more rapidly after it, despite Rostopchín’s calls to defend Moscow
+ or the announcement of his intention to take the wonder-working icon of
+ the Iberian Mother of God and go to fight, or of the balloons that were to
+ destroy the French, and despite all the nonsense Rostopchín wrote in his
+ broadsheets. They knew that it was for the army to fight, and that if it
+ could not succeed it would not do to take young ladies and house serfs to
+ the Three Hills quarter of Moscow to fight Napoleon, and that they must go
+ away, sorry as they were to abandon their property to destruction. They
+ went away without thinking of the tremendous significance of that immense
+ and wealthy city being given over to destruction, for a great city with
+ wooden buildings was certain when abandoned by its inhabitants to be
+ burned. They went away each on his own account, and yet it was only in
+ consequence of their going away that the momentous event was accomplished
+ that will always remain the greatest glory of the Russian people. The lady
+ who, afraid of being stopped by Count Rostopchín’s orders, had already in
+ June moved with her Negroes and her women jesters from Moscow to her
+ Sarátov estate, with a vague consciousness that she was not Bonaparte’s
+ servant, was really, simply, and truly carrying out the great work which
+ saved Russia. But Count Rostopchín, who now taunted those who left Moscow
+ and now had the government offices removed; now distributed quite useless
+ weapons to the drunken rabble; now had processions displaying the icons,
+ and now forbade Father Augustin to remove icons or the relics of saints;
+ now seized all the private carts in Moscow and on one hundred and
+ thirty-six of them removed the balloon that was being constructed by
+ Leppich; now hinted that he would burn Moscow and related how he had set
+ fire to his own house; now wrote a proclamation to the French solemnly
+ upbraiding them for having destroyed his Orphanage; now claimed the glory
+ of having hinted that he would burn Moscow and now repudiated the deed;
+ now ordered the people to catch all spies and bring them to him, and now
+ reproached them for doing so; now expelled all the French residents from
+ Moscow, and now allowed Madame Aubert-Chalmé (the center of the whole
+ French colony in Moscow) to remain, but ordered the venerable old
+ postmaster Klyucharëv to be arrested and exiled for no particular offense;
+ now assembled the people at the Three Hills to fight the French and now,
+ to get rid of them, handed over to them a man to be killed and himself
+ drove away by a back gate; now declared that he would not survive the fall
+ of Moscow, and now wrote French verses in albums concerning his share in
+ the affair—this man did not understand the meaning of what was
+ happening but merely wanted to do something himself that would astonish
+ people, to perform some patriotically heroic feat; and like a child he
+ made sport of the momentous, and unavoidable event—the abandonment
+ and burning of Moscow—and tried with his puny hand now to speed and
+ now to stay the enormous, popular tide that bore him along with it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ Hélène, having returned with the court from Vílna to Petersburg, found
+ herself in a difficult position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In Petersburg she had enjoyed the special protection of a grandee who
+ occupied one of the highest posts in the Empire. In Vílna she had formed
+ an intimacy with a young foreign prince. When she returned to Petersburg
+ both the magnate and the prince were there, and both claimed their rights.
+ Hélène was faced by a new problem—how to preserve her intimacy with
+ both without offending either.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What would have seemed difficult or even impossible to another woman did
+ not cause the least embarrassment to Countess Bezúkhova, who evidently
+ deserved her reputation of being a very clever woman. Had she attempted
+ concealment, or tried to extricate herself from her awkward position by
+ cunning, she would have spoiled her case by acknowledging herself guilty.
+ But Hélène, like a really great man who can do whatever he pleases, at once
+ assumed her own position to be correct, as she sincerely believed it to
+ be, and that everyone else was to blame.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The first time the young foreigner allowed himself to reproach her, she
+ lifted her beautiful head and, half turning to him, said firmly: “That’s
+ just like a man—selfish and cruel! I expected nothing else. A woman
+ sacrifices herself for you, she suffers, and this is her reward! What
+ right have you, monseigneur, to demand an account of my attachments and
+ friendships? He is a man who has been more than a father to me!” The
+ prince was about to say something, but Hélène interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, yes,” said she, “it may be that he has other sentiments for me than
+ those of a father, but that is not a reason for me to shut my door on him.
+ I am not a man, that I should repay kindness with ingratitude! Know,
+ monseigneur, that in all that relates to my intimate feelings I render
+ account only to God and to my conscience,” she concluded, laying her hand
+ on her beautiful, fully expanded bosom and looking up to heaven.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But for heaven’s sake listen to me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Marry me, and I will be your slave!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But that’s impossible.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You won’t deign to demean yourself by marrying me, you...” said Hélène,
+ beginning to cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The prince tried to comfort her, but Hélène, as if quite distraught, said
+ through her tears that there was nothing to prevent her marrying, that
+ there were precedents (there were up to that time very few, but she
+ mentioned Napoleon and some other exalted personages), that she had never
+ been her husband’s wife, and that she had been sacrificed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But the law, religion...” said the prince, already yielding.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The law, religion... What have they been invented for if they can’t
+ arrange that?” said Hélène.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The prince was surprised that so simple an idea had not occurred to him,
+ and he applied for advice to the holy brethren of the Society of Jesus,
+ with whom he was on intimate terms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A few days later at one of those enchanting fetes which Hélène gave at her
+ country house on the Stone Island, the charming Monsieur de Jobert, a man
+ no longer young, with snow white hair and brilliant black eyes, a Jesuit à
+ robe courte * was presented to her, and in the garden by the light of the
+ illuminations and to the sound of music talked to her for a long time of
+ the love of God, of Christ, of the Sacred Heart, and of the consolations
+ the one true Catholic religion affords in this world and the next. Hélène
+ was touched, and more than once tears rose to her eyes and to those of
+ Monsieur de Jobert and their voices trembled. A dance, for which her
+ partner came to seek her, put an end to her discourse with her future
+ directeur de conscience , but the next evening Monsieur de Jobert came to
+ see Hélène when she was alone, and after that often came again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Lay member of the Society of Jesus.
+
+
+
+ 
+ One day he took the countess to a Roman Catholic church, where she knelt
+ down before the altar to which she was led. The enchanting, middle-aged
+ Frenchman laid his hands on her head and, as she herself afterward
+ described it, she felt something like a fresh breeze wafted into her soul.
+ It was explained to her that this was la grâce .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After that a long-frocked abbé was brought to her. She confessed to him,
+ and he absolved her from her sins. Next day she received a box containing
+ the Sacred Host, which was left at her house for her to partake of. A few
+ days later Hélène learned with pleasure that she had now been admitted to
+ the true Catholic Church and that in a few days the Pope himself would
+ hear of her and would send her a certain document.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All that was done around her and to her at this time, all the attention
+ devoted to her by so many clever men and expressed in such pleasant,
+ refined ways, and the state of dove-like purity she was now in (she wore
+ only white dresses and white ribbons all that time) gave her pleasure, but
+ her pleasure did not cause her for a moment to forget her aim. And as it
+ always happens in contests of cunning that a stupid person gets the better
+ of cleverer ones, Hélène—having realized that the main object of all
+ these words and all this trouble was, after converting her to Catholicism,
+ to obtain money from her for Jesuit institutions (as to which she received
+ indications)—before parting with her money insisted that the various
+ operations necessary to free her from her husband should be performed. In
+ her view the aim of every religion was merely to preserve certain
+ proprieties while affording satisfaction to human desires. And with this
+ aim, in one of her talks with her Father Confessor, she insisted on an
+ answer to the question, in how far was she bound by her marriage?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They were sitting in the twilight by a window in the drawing room. The
+ scent of flowers came in at the window. Hélène was wearing a white dress,
+ transparent over her shoulders and bosom. The abbé, a well-fed man with a
+ plump, clean-shaven chin, a pleasant firm mouth, and white hands meekly
+ folded on his knees, sat close to Hélène and, with a subtle smile on his
+ lips and a peaceful look of delight at her beauty, occasionally glanced at
+ her face as he explained his opinion on the subject. Hélène with an uneasy
+ smile looked at his curly hair and his plump, clean-shaven, blackish
+ cheeks and every moment expected the conversation to take a fresh turn.
+ But the abbé, though he evidently enjoyed the beauty of his companion, was
+ absorbed in his mastery of the matter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The course of the Father Confessor’s arguments ran as follows: “Ignorant
+ of the import of what you were undertaking, you made a vow of conjugal
+ fidelity to a man who on his part, by entering the married state without
+ faith in the religious significance of marriage, committed an act of
+ sacrilege. That marriage lacked the dual significance it should have had.
+ Yet in spite of this your vow was binding. You swerved from it. What did
+ you commit by so acting? A venial, or a mortal, sin? A venial sin, for you
+ acted without evil intention. If now you married again with the object of
+ bearing children, your sin might be forgiven. But the question is again a
+ twofold one: firstly...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But suddenly Hélène, who was getting bored, said with one of her
+ bewitching smiles: “But I think that having espoused the true religion I
+ cannot be bound by what a false religion laid upon me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The director of her conscience was astounded at having the case presented
+ to him thus with the simplicity of Columbus’ egg. He was delighted at the
+ unexpected rapidity of his pupil’s progress, but could not abandon the
+ edifice of argument he had laboriously constructed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let us understand one another, Countess,” said he with a smile, and began
+ refuting his spiritual daughter’s arguments.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ Hélène understood that the question was very simple and easy from the
+ ecclesiastical point of view, and that her directors were making
+ difficulties only because they were apprehensive as to how the matter
+ would be regarded by the secular authorities.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So she decided that it was necessary to prepare the opinion of society.
+ She provoked the jealousy of the elderly magnate and told him what she had
+ told her other suitor; that is, she put the matter so that the only way
+ for him to obtain a right over her was to marry her. The elderly magnate
+ was at first as much taken aback by this suggestion of marriage with a
+ woman whose husband was alive, as the younger man had been, but Hélène’s
+ imperturbable conviction that it was as simple and natural as marrying a
+ maiden had its effect on him too. Had Hélène herself shown the least sign
+ of hesitation, shame, or secrecy, her cause would certainly have been
+ lost; but not only did she show no signs of secrecy or shame, on the
+ contrary, with good-natured naïveté she told her intimate friends (and
+ these were all Petersburg) that both the prince and the magnate had
+ proposed to her and that she loved both and was afraid of grieving either.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A rumor immediately spread in Petersburg, not that Hélène wanted to be
+ divorced from her husband (had such a report spread many would have
+ opposed so illegal an intention) but simply that the unfortunate and
+ interesting Hélène was in doubt which of the two men she should marry. The
+ question was no longer whether this was possible, but only which was the
+ better match and how the matter would be regarded at court. There were, it
+ is true, some rigid individuals unable to rise to the height of such a
+ question, who saw in the project a desecration of the sacrament of
+ marriage, but there were not many such and they remained silent, while the
+ majority were interested in Hélène’s good fortune and in the question
+ which match would be the more advantageous. Whether it was right or wrong
+ to remarry while one had a husband living they did not discuss, for that
+ question had evidently been settled by people “wiser than you or me,” as
+ they said, and to doubt the correctness of that decision would be to risk
+ exposing one’s stupidity and incapacity to live in society.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only Márya Dmítrievna Akhrosímova, who had come to Petersburg that summer
+ to see one of her sons, allowed herself plainly to express an opinion
+ contrary to the general one. Meeting Hélène at a ball she stopped her in
+ the middle of the room and, amid general silence, said in her gruff voice:
+ “So wives of living men have started marrying again! Perhaps you think you
+ have invented a novelty? You have been forestalled, my dear! It was
+ thought of long ago. It is done in all the brothels,” and with these words
+ Márya Dmítrievna, turning up her wide sleeves with her usual threatening
+ gesture and glancing sternly round, moved across the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though people were afraid of Márya Dmítrievna she was regarded in
+ Petersburg as a buffoon, and so of what she had said they only noticed,
+ and repeated in a whisper, the one coarse word she had used, supposing the
+ whole sting of her remark to lie in that word.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli, who of late very often forgot what he had said and repeated
+ one and the same thing a hundred times, remarked to his daughter whenever
+ he chanced to see her:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hélène, I have a word to say to you,” and he would lead her aside,
+ drawing her hand downward. “I have heard of certain projects concerning...
+ you know. Well my dear child, you know how your father’s heart rejoices to
+ know that you... You have suffered so much.... But, my dear child, consult
+ only your own heart. That is all I have to say,” and concealing his
+ unvarying emotion he would press his cheek against his daughter’s and move
+ away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bilíbin, who had not lost his reputation of an exceedingly clever man, and
+ who was one of the disinterested friends so brilliant a woman as Hélène
+ always has—men friends who can never change into lovers—once
+ gave her his view of the matter at a small and intimate gathering.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Listen, Bilíbin,” said Hélène (she always called friends of that sort by
+ their surnames), and she touched his coat sleeve with her white, beringed
+ fingers. “Tell me, as you would a sister, what I ought to do. Which of the
+ two?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bilíbin wrinkled up the skin over his eyebrows and pondered, with a smile
+ on his lips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are not taking me unawares, you know,” said he. “As a true friend, I
+ have thought and thought again about your affair. You see, if you marry
+ the prince”—he meant the younger man—and he crooked one
+ finger, “you forever lose the chance of marrying the other, and you will
+ displease the court besides. (You know there is some kind of connection.)
+ But if you marry the old count you will make his last days happy, and as
+ widow of the Grand... the prince would no longer be making a mésalliance 
+ by marrying you,” and Bilíbin smoothed out his forehead.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s a true friend!” said Hélène beaming, and again touching Bilíbin’s
+ sleeve. “But I love them, you know, and don’t want to distress either of
+ them. I would give my life for the happiness of them both.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bilíbin shrugged his shoulders, as much as to say that not even he could
+ help in that difficulty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Une maîtresse-femme! * That’s what is called putting things squarely. She
+ would like to be married to all three at the same time,” thought he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * A masterly woman.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “But tell me, how will your husband look at the matter?” Bilíbin asked,
+ his reputation being so well established that he did not fear to ask so
+ naïve a question. “Will he agree?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, he loves me so!” said Hélène, who for some reason imagined that
+ Pierre too loved her. “He will do anything for me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bilíbin puckered his skin in preparation for something witty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Even divorce you?” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hélène laughed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Among those who ventured to doubt the justifiability of the proposed
+ marriage was Hélène’s mother, Princess Kurágina. She was continually
+ tormented by jealousy of her daughter, and now that jealousy concerned a
+ subject near to her own heart, she could not reconcile herself to the
+ idea. She consulted a Russian priest as to the possibility of divorce and
+ remarriage during a husband’s lifetime, and the priest told her that it
+ was impossible, and to her delight showed her a text in the Gospel which
+ (as it seemed to him) plainly forbids remarriage while the husband is
+ alive.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Armed with these arguments, which appeared to her unanswerable, she drove
+ to her daughter’s early one morning so as to find her alone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having listened to her mother’s objections, Hélène smiled blandly and
+ ironically.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But it says plainly: ‘Whosoever shall marry her that is divorced...’”
+ said the old princess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, Maman, ne dites pas de bêtises. Vous ne comprenez rien. Dans ma
+ position j’ai des devoirs,” * said Hélène changing from Russian, in which
+ language she always felt that her case did not sound quite clear, into
+ French which suited it better.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Oh, Mamma, don’t talk nonsense! You don’t understand
+ anything. In my position I have obligations.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But, my dear....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, Mamma, how is it you don’t understand that the Holy Father, who has
+ the right to grant dispensations...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just then the lady companion who lived with Hélène came in to announce
+ that His Highness was in the ballroom and wished to see her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Non, dites-lui que je ne veux pas le voir, que je suis furieuse contre
+ lui, parce qu’il m’a manqué parole.” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “No, tell him I don’t wish to see him, I am furious with
+ him for not keeping his word to me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Comtesse, à tout péché miséricorde,” * said a fair-haired young
+ man with a long face and nose, as he entered the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Countess, there is mercy for every sin.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old princess rose respectfully and curtsied. The young man who had
+ entered took no notice of her. The princess nodded to her daughter and
+ sidled out of the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, she is right,” thought the old princess, all her convictions
+ dissipated by the appearance of His Highness. “She is right, but how is it
+ that we in our irrecoverable youth did not know it? Yet it is so simple,”
+ she thought as she got into her carriage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ By the beginning of August Hélène’s affairs were clearly defined and she
+ wrote a letter to her husband—who, as she imagined, loved her very
+ much—informing him of her intention to marry N.N. and of her having
+ embraced the one true faith, and asking him to carry out all the
+ formalities necessary for a divorce, which would be explained to him by
+ the bearer of the letter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And so I pray God to have you, my friend, in His holy and powerful keeping—Your
+ friend Hélène.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This letter was brought to Pierre’s house when he was on the field of
+ Borodinó.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ Toward the end of the battle of Borodinó, Pierre, having run down from
+ Raévski’s battery a second time, made his way through a gully to Knyazkóvo
+ with a crowd of soldiers, reached the dressing station, and seeing blood
+ and hearing cries and groans hurried on, still entangled in the crowds of
+ soldiers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The one thing he now desired with his whole soul was to get away quickly
+ from the terrible sensations amid which he had lived that day and return
+ to ordinary conditions of life and sleep quietly in a room in his own bed.
+ He felt that only in the ordinary conditions of life would he be able to
+ understand himself and all he had seen and felt. But such ordinary
+ conditions of life were nowhere to be found.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though shells and bullets did not whistle over the road along which he was
+ going, still on all sides there was what there had been on the field of
+ battle. There were still the same suffering, exhausted, and sometimes
+ strangely indifferent faces, the same blood, the same soldiers’ overcoats,
+ the same sounds of firing which, though distant now, still aroused terror,
+ and besides this there were the foul air and the dust.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having gone a couple of miles along the Mozháysk road, Pierre sat down by
+ the roadside.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dusk had fallen, and the roar of guns died away. Pierre lay leaning on his
+ elbow for a long time, gazing at the shadows that moved past him in the
+ darkness. He was continually imagining that a cannon ball was flying
+ toward him with a terrific whizz, and then he shuddered and sat up. He had
+ no idea how long he had been there. In the middle of the night three
+ soldiers, having brought some firewood, settled down near him and began
+ lighting a fire.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The soldiers, who threw sidelong glances at Pierre, got the fire to burn
+ and placed an iron pot on it into which they broke some dried bread and
+ put a little dripping. The pleasant odor of greasy viands mingled with the
+ smell of smoke. Pierre sat up and sighed. The three soldiers were eating
+ and talking among themselves, taking no notice of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And who may you be?” one of them suddenly asked Pierre, evidently meaning
+ what Pierre himself had in mind, namely: “If you want to eat we’ll give
+ you some food, only let us know whether you are an honest man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I, I...” said Pierre, feeling it necessary to minimize his social
+ position as much as possible so as to be nearer to the soldiers and better
+ understood by them. “By rights I am a militia officer, but my men are not
+ here. I came to the battle and have lost them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now!” said one of the soldiers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Another shook his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Would you like a little mash?” the first soldier asked, and handed Pierre
+ a wooden spoon after licking it clean.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre sat down by the fire and began eating the mash, as they called the
+ food in the cauldron, and he thought it more delicious than any food he
+ had ever tasted. As he sat bending greedily over it, helping himself to
+ large spoonfuls and chewing one after another, his face was lit up by the
+ fire and the soldiers looked at him in silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where have you to go to? Tell us!” said one of them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To Mozháysk.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’re a gentleman, aren’t you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And what’s your name?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Peter Kirílych.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well then, Peter Kirílych, come along with us, we’ll take you there.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the total darkness the soldiers walked with Pierre to Mozháysk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By the time they got near Mozháysk and began ascending the steep hill into
+ the town, the cocks were already crowing. Pierre went on with the
+ soldiers, quite forgetting that his inn was at the bottom of the hill and
+ that he had already passed it. He would not soon have remembered this,
+ such was his state of forgetfulness, had he not halfway up the hill
+ stumbled upon his groom, who had been to look for him in the town and was
+ returning to the inn. The groom recognized Pierre in the darkness by his
+ white hat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency!” he said. “Why, we were beginning to despair! How is it
+ you are on foot? And where are you going, please?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, yes!” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The soldiers stopped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So you’ve found your folk?” said one of them. “Well, good-by, Peter
+ Kirílych—isn’t it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good-by, Peter Kirílych!” Pierre heard the other voices repeat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good-by!” he said and turned with his groom toward the inn.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I ought to give them something!” he thought, and felt in his pocket. “No,
+ better not!” said another, inner voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was not a room to be had at the inn, they were all occupied. Pierre
+ went out into the yard and, covering himself up head and all, lay down in
+ his carriage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ Scarcely had Pierre laid his head on the pillow before he felt himself
+ falling asleep, but suddenly, almost with the distinctness of reality, he
+ heard the boom, boom, boom of firing, the thud of projectiles, groans and
+ cries, and smelled blood and powder, and a feeling of horror and dread of
+ death seized him. Filled with fright he opened his eyes and lifted his
+ head from under his cloak. All was tranquil in the yard. Only someone’s
+ orderly passed through the gateway, splashing through the mud, and talked
+ to the innkeeper. Above Pierre’s head some pigeons, disturbed by the
+ movement he had made in sitting up, fluttered under the dark roof of the
+ penthouse. The whole courtyard was permeated by a strong peaceful smell of
+ stable yards, delightful to Pierre at that moment. He could see the clear
+ starry sky between the dark roofs of two penthouses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank God, there is no more of that!” he thought, covering up his head
+ again. “Oh, what a terrible thing is fear, and how shamefully I yielded to
+ it! But they... they were steady and calm all the time, to the end...”
+ thought he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They , in Pierre’s mind, were the soldiers, those who had been at the
+ battery, those who had given him food, and those who had prayed before the
+ icon. They , those strange men he had not previously known, stood out
+ clearly and sharply from everyone else.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To be a soldier, just a soldier!” thought Pierre as he fell asleep, “to
+ enter communal life completely, to be imbued by what makes them what they
+ are. But how to cast off all the superfluous, devilish burden of my outer
+ man? There was a time when I could have done it. I could have run away
+ from my father, as I wanted to. Or I might have been sent to serve as a
+ soldier after the duel with Dólokhov.” And the memory of the dinner at the
+ English Club when he had challenged Dólokhov flashed through Pierre’s
+ mind, and then he remembered his benefactor at Torzhók. And now a picture
+ of a solemn meeting of the lodge presented itself to his mind. It was
+ taking place at the English Club and someone near and dear to him sat at
+ the end of the table. “Yes, that is he! It is my benefactor. But he died!”
+ thought Pierre. “Yes, he died, and I did not know he was alive. How sorry
+ I am that he died, and how glad I am that he is alive again!” On one side
+ of the table sat Anatole, Dólokhov, Nesvítski, Denísov, and others like
+ them (in his dream the category to which these men belonged was as clearly
+ defined in his mind as the category of those he termed they ), and he heard
+ those people, Anatole and Dólokhov, shouting and singing loudly; yet
+ through their shouting the voice of his benefactor was heard speaking all
+ the time and the sound of his words was as weighty and uninterrupted as
+ the booming on the battlefield, but pleasant and comforting. Pierre did
+ not understand what his benefactor was saying, but he knew (the categories
+ of thoughts were also quite distinct in his dream) that he was talking of
+ goodness and the possibility of being what they were. And they with their
+ simple, kind, firm faces surrounded his benefactor on all sides. But
+ though they were kindly they did not look at Pierre and did not know him.
+ Wishing to speak and to attract their attention, he got up, but at that
+ moment his legs grew cold and bare.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He felt ashamed, and with one arm covered his legs from which his cloak
+ had in fact slipped. For a moment as he was rearranging his cloak Pierre
+ opened his eyes and saw the same penthouse roofs, posts, and yard, but now
+ they were all bluish, lit up, and glittering with frost or dew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is dawn,” thought Pierre. “But that’s not what I want. I want to hear
+ and understand my benefactor’s words.” Again he covered himself up with
+ his cloak, but now neither the lodge nor his benefactor was there. There
+ were only thoughts clearly expressed in words, thoughts that someone was
+ uttering or that he himself was formulating.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Afterwards when he recalled those thoughts Pierre was convinced that
+ someone outside himself had spoken them, though the impressions of that
+ day had evoked them. He had never, it seemed to him, been able to think
+ and express his thoughts like that when awake.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To endure war is the most difficult subordination of man’s freedom to the
+ law of God,” the voice had said. “Simplicity is submission to the will of
+ God; you cannot escape from Him. And they are simple. They do not talk,
+ but act. The spoken word is silver but the unspoken is golden. Man can be
+ master of nothing while he fears death, but he who does not fear it
+ possesses all. If there were no suffering, man would not know his
+ limitations, would not know himself. The hardest thing (Pierre went on
+ thinking, or hearing, in his dream) is to be able in your soul to unite
+ the meaning of all. To unite all?” he asked himself. “No, not to unite.
+ Thoughts cannot be united, but to harness all these thoughts together is
+ what we need! Yes, one must harness them, must harness them!”
+ he repeated to himself with inward rapture, feeling that these words and they alone
+ expressed what he wanted to say and solved the question that tormented
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, one must harness, it is time to harness.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Time to harness, time to harness, your excellency! Your excellency!” some
+ voice was repeating. “We must harness, it is time to harness....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was the voice of the groom, trying to wake him. The sun shone straight
+ into Pierre’s face. He glanced at the dirty innyard in the middle of which
+ soldiers were watering their lean horses at the pump while carts were
+ passing out of the gate. Pierre turned away with repugnance, and closing
+ his eyes quickly fell back on the carriage seat. “No, I don’t want that, I
+ don’t want to see and understand that. I want to understand what was
+ revealing itself to me in my dream. One second more and I should have
+ understood it all! But what am I to do? Harness, but how can I harness
+ everything?” and Pierre felt with horror that the meaning of all he had
+ seen and thought in the dream had been destroyed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The groom, the coachman, and the innkeeper told Pierre that an officer had
+ come with news that the French were already near Mozháysk and that our men
+ were leaving it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre got up and, having told them to harness and overtake him, went on
+ foot through the town.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The troops were moving on, leaving about ten thousand wounded behind them.
+ There were wounded in the yards, at the windows of the houses, and the
+ streets were crowded with them. In the streets, around carts that were to
+ take some of the wounded away, shouts, curses, and blows could be heard.
+ Pierre offered the use of his carriage, which had overtaken him, to a
+ wounded general he knew, and drove with him to Moscow. On the way Pierre
+ was told of the death of his brother-in-law Anatole and of that of Prince
+ Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ On the thirtieth of August Pierre reached Moscow. Close to the gates of
+ the city he was met by Count Rostopchín’s adjutant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We have been looking for you everywhere,” said the adjutant. “The count
+ wants to see you particularly. He asks you to come to him at once on a
+ very important matter.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Without going home, Pierre took a cab and drove to see the Moscow
+ commander in chief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Count Rostopchín had only that morning returned to town from his summer
+ villa at Sokólniki. The anteroom and reception room of his house were full
+ of officials who had been summoned or had come for orders. Vasílchikov and
+ Plátov had already seen the count and explained to him that it was
+ impossible to defend Moscow and that it would have to be surrendered.
+ Though this news was being concealed from the inhabitants, the officials—the
+ heads of the various government departments—knew that Moscow would
+ soon be in the enemy’s hands, just as Count Rostopchín himself knew it,
+ and to escape personal responsibility they had all come to the governor to
+ ask how they were to deal with their various departments.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As Pierre was entering the reception room a courier from the army came out
+ of Rostopchín’s private room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In answer to questions with which he was greeted, the courier made a
+ despairing gesture with his hand and passed through the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While waiting in the reception room Pierre with weary eyes watched the
+ various officials, old and young, military and civilian, who were there.
+ They all seemed dissatisfied and uneasy. Pierre went up to a group of men,
+ one of whom he knew. After greeting Pierre they continued their
+ conversation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If they’re sent out and brought back again later on it will do no harm,
+ but as things are now one can’t answer for anything.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you see what he writes...” said another, pointing to a printed sheet
+ he held in his hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s another matter. That’s necessary for the people,” said the first.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, it’s a fresh broadsheet.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre took it and began reading.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His Serene Highness has passed through Mozháysk in order to join up with
+ the troops moving toward him and has taken up a strong position where the
+ enemy will not soon attack him. Forty-eight guns with ammunition have been
+ sent him from here, and his Serene Highness says he will defend Moscow to
+ the last drop of blood and is even ready to fight in the streets. Do not
+ be upset, brothers, that the law courts are closed; things have to be put
+ in order, and we will deal with villains in our own way! When the time
+ comes I shall want both town and peasant lads and will raise the cry a day
+ or two beforehand, but they are not wanted yet so I hold my peace. An ax
+ will be useful, a hunting spear not bad, but a three-pronged fork will be
+ best of all: a Frenchman is no heavier than a sheaf of rye. Tomorrow after
+ dinner I shall take the Iberian icon of the Mother of God to the wounded
+ in the Catherine Hospital where we will have some water blessed. That will
+ help them to get well quicker. I, too, am well now: one of my eyes was
+ sore but now I am on the lookout with both.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But military men have told me that it is impossible to fight in the
+ town,” said Pierre, “and that the position...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, of course! That’s what we were saying,” replied the first speaker.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And what does he mean by ‘One of my eyes was sore but now I am on the
+ lookout with both’?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The count had a sty,” replied the adjutant smiling, “and was very much
+ upset when I told him people had come to ask what was the matter with him.
+ By the by, Count,” he added suddenly, addressing Pierre with a smile, “we
+ heard that you have family troubles and that the countess, your wife...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have heard nothing,” Pierre replied unconcernedly. “But what have you
+ heard?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, well, you know people often invent things. I only say what I heard.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what did you hear?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, they say,” continued the adjutant with the same smile, “that the
+ countess, your wife, is preparing to go abroad. I expect it’s
+ nonsense....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Possibly,” remarked Pierre, looking about him absent-mindedly. “And who
+ is that?” he asked, indicating a short old man in a clean blue peasant
+ overcoat, with a big snow-white beard and eyebrows and a ruddy face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He? That’s a tradesman, that is to say, he’s the restaurant keeper,
+ Vereshchágin. Perhaps you have heard of that affair with the
+ proclamation.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, so that is Vereshchágin!” said Pierre, looking at the firm, calm face
+ of the old man and seeking any indication of his being a traitor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s not he himself, that’s the father of the fellow who wrote the
+ proclamation,” said the adjutant. “The young man is in prison and I expect
+ it will go hard with him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ An old gentleman wearing a star and another official, a German wearing a
+ cross round his neck, approached the speaker.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s a complicated story, you know,” said the adjutant.
+ “That proclamation appeared about two months ago. The count was informed of
+ it. He gave orders to investigate the matter. Gabriel Ivánovich
+ here made the inquiries. The proclamation had passed through exactly
+ sixty-three hands. He asked one, ‘From whom did you get it?’ ‘From
+ so-and-so.’ He went to the next one. ‘From whom did you get it?’
+ and so on till he reached Vereshchágin, a half educated tradesman, you know,
+ ‘a pet of a trader,’” said the adjutant smiling. “They
+ asked him, ‘Who gave it you?’ And the point is that we knew whom he had
+ it from. He could only have had it from the Postmaster. But evidently they had come
+ to some understanding. He replied: ‘From no one; I made it up myself.’
+ They threatened and questioned him, but he stuck to that: ‘I made it
+ up myself.’ And so it was reported to the count, who sent for the man.
+ ‘From whom did you get the proclamation?’ ‘I wrote it myself.’
+ Well, you know the count,” said the adjutant cheerfully, with a smile of
+ pride, “he flared up dreadfully—and just think of the fellow’s
+ audacity, lying, and obstinacy!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And the count wanted him to say it was from Klyucharëv? I
+ understand!” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not at all,” rejoined the adjutant in dismay. “Klyucharëv had
+ his own sins to answer for without that and that is why he has been banished. But
+ the point is that the count was much annoyed. ‘How could you have written
+ it yourself?’ said he, and he took up the Hamburg Gazette that was
+ lying on the table. ‘Here it is! You did not write it yourself but translated
+ it, and translated it abominably, because you don’t even know French, you
+ fool.’ And what do you think? ‘No,’ said he, ‘I have not
+ read any papers, I made it up myself.’ ‘If that’s so, you’re
+ a traitor and I’ll have you tried, and you’ll be hanged! Say from whom
+ you had it.’ ‘I have seen no papers, I made it up myself.’ And
+ that was the end of it. The count had the father fetched, but the fellow stuck to
+ it. He was sent for trial and condemned to hard labor, I believe. Now the father
+ has come to intercede for him. But he’s a good-for-nothing lad! You know that
+ sort of tradesman’s son, a dandy and lady-killer. He attended some lectures
+ somewhere and imagines that the devil is no match for him. That’s the sort
+ of fellow he is. His father keeps a cookshop here by the Stone Bridge, and
+ you know there was a large icon of God Almighty painted with a scepter in
+ one hand and an orb in the other. Well, he took that icon home with him
+ for a few days and what did he do? He found some scoundrel of a
+ painter...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ In the middle of this fresh tale Pierre was summoned to the commander in
+ chief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he entered the private room Count Rostopchín, puckering his face, was
+ rubbing his forehead and eyes with his hand. A short man was saying
+ something, but when Pierre entered he stopped speaking and went out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, how do you do, great warrior?” said Rostopchín as soon as the short
+ man had left the room. “We have heard of your prowess. But that’s not the
+ point. Between ourselves, mon cher , do you belong to the Masons?”
+ he went on severely, as though there were something wrong about it which he
+ nevertheless intended to pardon. Pierre remained silent. “I am well
+ informed, my friend, but I am aware that there are Masons and I hope that
+ you are not one of those who on pretense of saving mankind wish to ruin
+ Russia.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I am a Mason,” Pierre replied.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There, you see, mon cher! I expect you know that Messrs. Speránski and
+ Magnítski have been deported to their proper place. Mr. Klyucharëv has
+ been treated in the same way, and so have others who on the plea of
+ building up the temple of Solomon have tried to destroy the temple of
+ their fatherland. You can understand that there are reasons for this and
+ that I could not have exiled the Postmaster had he not been a harmful
+ person. It has now come to my knowledge that you lent him your carriage
+ for his removal from town, and that you have even accepted papers from him
+ for safe custody. I like you and don’t wish you any harm and—as you
+ are only half my age—I advise you, as a father would, to cease all
+ communication with men of that stamp and to leave here as soon as
+ possible.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what did Klyucharëv do wrong, Count?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is for me to know, but not for you to ask,” shouted Rostopchín.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If he is accused of circulating Napoleon’s proclamation it is not proved
+ that he did so,” said Pierre without looking at Rostopchín, “and
+ Vereshchágin...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There we are!” Rostopchín shouted at Pierre louder than before, frowning
+ suddenly. “Vereshchágin is a renegade and a traitor who will be punished
+ as he deserves,” said he with the vindictive heat with which people speak
+ when recalling an insult. “But I did not summon you to discuss my actions,
+ but to give you advice—or an order if you prefer it. I beg you to
+ leave the town and break off all communication with such men as
+ Klyucharëv. And I will knock the nonsense out of anybody”—but
+ probably realizing that he was shouting at Bezúkhov who so far was not
+ guilty of anything, he added, taking Pierre’s hand in a friendly manner,
+ “We are on the eve of a public disaster and I haven’t time to be polite to
+ everybody who has business with me. My head is sometimes in a whirl. Well,
+ mon cher , what are you doing personally?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, nothing,” answered Pierre without raising his eyes or changing the
+ thoughtful expression of his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count frowned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A word of friendly advice, mon cher . Be off as soon as you can, that’s
+ all I have to tell you. Happy he who has ears to hear. Good-by, my dear
+ fellow. Oh, by the by!” he shouted through the doorway after Pierre, “is
+ it true that the countess has fallen into the clutches of the holy fathers
+ of the Society of Jesus?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre did not answer and left Rostopchín’s room more sullen and angry
+ than he had ever before shown himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he reached home it was already getting dark. Some eight people had
+ come to see him that evening: the secretary of a committee, the colonel of
+ his battalion, his steward, his major-domo, and various petitioners. They
+ all had business with Pierre and wanted decisions from him. Pierre did not
+ understand and was not interested in any of these questions and only
+ answered them in order to get rid of these people. When left alone at last
+ he opened and read his wife’s letter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ They , the soldiers at the battery, Prince Andrew killed... that old
+ man... Simplicity is submission to God. Suffering is necessary... the
+ meaning of all... one must harness... my wife is getting married... One
+ must forget and understand...” And going to his bed he threw himself on it
+ without undressing and immediately fell asleep.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he awoke next morning the major-domo came to inform him that a
+ special messenger, a police officer, had come from Count Rostopchín to
+ know whether Count Bezúkhov had left or was leaving the town.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A dozen persons who had business with Pierre were awaiting him in the
+ drawing room. Pierre dressed hurriedly and, instead of going to see them,
+ went to the back porch and out through the gate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From that time till the end of the destruction of Moscow no one of
+ Bezúkhov’s household, despite all the search they made, saw Pierre again
+ or knew where he was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ The Rostóvs remained in Moscow till the first of September, that is, till
+ the eve of the enemy’s entry into the city.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After Pétya had joined Obolénski’s regiment of Cossacks and left for
+ Bélaya Tsérkov where that regiment was forming, the countess was seized
+ with terror. The thought that both her sons were at the war, had both gone
+ from under her wing, that today or tomorrow either or both of them might
+ be killed like the three sons of one of her acquaintances, struck her that
+ summer for the first time with cruel clearness. She tried to get Nicholas
+ back and wished to go herself to join Pétya, or to get him an appointment
+ somewhere in Petersburg, but neither of these proved possible. Pétya could
+ not return unless his regiment did so or unless he was transferred to
+ another regiment on active service. Nicholas was somewhere with the army
+ and had not sent a word since his last letter, in which he had given a
+ detailed account of his meeting with Princess Mary. The countess did not
+ sleep at night, or when she did fall asleep dreamed that she saw her sons
+ lying dead. After many consultations and conversations, the count at last
+ devised means to tranquillize her. He got Pétya transferred from
+ Obolénski’s regiment to Bezúkhov’s, which was in training near Moscow.
+ Though Pétya would remain in the service, this transfer would give the
+ countess the consolation of seeing at least one of her sons under her
+ wing, and she hoped to arrange matters for her Pétya so as not to let him
+ go again, but always get him appointed to places where he could not
+ possibly take part in a battle. As long as Nicholas alone was in danger
+ the countess imagined that she loved her first-born more than all her
+ other children and even reproached herself for it; but when her youngest:
+ the scapegrace who had been bad at lessons, was always breaking things in
+ the house and making himself a nuisance to everybody, that snub-nosed
+ Pétya with his merry black eyes and fresh rosy cheeks where soft down was
+ just beginning to show—when he was thrown amid those big, dreadful,
+ cruel men who were fighting somewhere about something and apparently
+ finding pleasure in it—then his mother thought she loved him more,
+ much more, than all her other children. The nearer the time came for Pétya
+ to return, the more uneasy grew the countess. She began to think she would
+ never live to see such happiness. The presence of Sónya, of her beloved
+ Natásha, or even of her husband irritated her. “What do I want with them?
+ I want no one but Pétya,” she thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the end of August the Rostóvs received another letter from Nicholas. He
+ wrote from the province of Vorónezh where he had been sent to procure
+ remounts, but that letter did not set the countess at ease. Knowing that
+ one son was out of danger she became the more anxious about Pétya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though by the twentieth of August nearly all the Rostóvs’ acquaintances
+ had left Moscow, and though everybody tried to persuade the countess to
+ get away as quickly as possible, she would not hear of leaving before her
+ treasure, her adored Pétya, returned. On the twenty-eighth of August he
+ arrived. The passionate tenderness with which his mother received him did
+ not please the sixteen-year-old officer. Though she concealed from him her
+ intention of keeping him under her wing, Pétya guessed her designs, and
+ instinctively fearing that he might give way to emotion when with her—might
+ “become womanish” as he termed it to himself—he treated her coldly,
+ avoided her, and during his stay in Moscow attached himself exclusively to
+ Natásha for whom he had always had a particularly brotherly tenderness,
+ almost lover-like.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Owing to the count’s customary carelessness nothing was ready for their
+ departure by the twenty-eighth of August and the carts that were to come
+ from their Ryazán and Moscow estates to remove their household belongings
+ did not arrive till the thirtieth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the twenty-eighth till the thirty-first all Moscow was in a bustle
+ and commotion. Every day thousands of men wounded at Borodinó were brought
+ in by the Dorogomílov gate and taken to various parts of Moscow, and
+ thousands of carts conveyed the inhabitants and their possessions out by
+ the other gates. In spite of Rostopchín’s broadsheets, or because of them
+ or independently of them, the strangest and most contradictory rumors were
+ current in the town. Some said that no one was to be allowed to leave the
+ city, others on the contrary said that all the icons had been taken out of
+ the churches and everybody was to be ordered to leave. Some said there had
+ been another battle after Borodinó at which the French had been routed,
+ while others on the contrary reported that the Russian army had been
+ destroyed. Some talked about the Moscow militia which, preceded by the
+ clergy, would go to the Three Hills; others whispered that Augustin had
+ been forbidden to leave, that traitors had been seized, that the peasants
+ were rioting and robbing people on their way from Moscow, and so on. But
+ all this was only talk; in reality (though the Council of Filí, at which
+ it was decided to abandon Moscow, had not yet been held) both those who
+ went away and those who remained behind felt, though they did not show it,
+ that Moscow would certainly be abandoned, and that they ought to get away
+ as quickly as possible and save their belongings. It was felt that
+ everything would suddenly break up and change, but up to the first of
+ September nothing had done so. As a criminal who is being led to execution
+ knows that he must die immediately, but yet looks about him and
+ straightens the cap that is awry on his head, so Moscow involuntarily
+ continued its wonted life, though it knew that the time of its destruction
+ was near when the conditions of life to which its people were accustomed
+ to submit would be completely upset.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the three days preceding the occupation of Moscow the whole Rostóv
+ family was absorbed in various activities. The head of the family, Count
+ Ilyá Rostóv, continually drove about the city collecting the current
+ rumors from all sides and gave superficial and hasty orders at home about
+ the preparations for their departure.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess watched the things being packed, was dissatisfied with
+ everything, was constantly in pursuit of Pétya who was always running away
+ from her, and was jealous of Natásha with whom he spent all his time.
+ Sónya alone directed the practical side of matters by getting things
+ packed. But of late Sónya had been particularly sad and silent. Nicholas’
+ letter in which he mentioned Princess Mary had elicited, in her presence,
+ joyous comments from the countess, who saw an intervention of Providence
+ in this meeting of the princess and Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was never pleased at Bolkónski’s engagement to Natásha,” said the
+ countess, “but I always wanted Nicholas to marry the princess, and had a
+ presentiment that it would happen. What a good thing it would be!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya felt that this was true: that the only possibility of retrieving the
+ Rostóvs’ affairs was by Nicholas marrying a rich woman, and that the
+ princess was a good match. It was very bitter for her. But despite her
+ grief, or perhaps just because of it, she took on herself all the
+ difficult work of directing the storing and packing of their things and
+ was busy for whole days. The count and countess turned to her when they
+ had any orders to give. Pétya and Natásha on the contrary, far from
+ helping their parents, were generally a nuisance and a hindrance to
+ everyone. Almost all day long the house resounded with their running feet,
+ their cries, and their spontaneous laughter. They laughed and were gay not
+ because there was any reason to laugh, but because gaiety and mirth were
+ in their hearts and so everything that happened was a cause for gaiety and
+ laughter to them. Pétya was in high spirits because having left home a boy
+ he had returned (as everybody told him) a fine young man, because he was
+ at home, because he had left Bélaya Tsérkov where there was no hope of
+ soon taking part in a battle and had come to Moscow where there was to be
+ fighting in a few days, and chiefly because Natásha, whose lead he always
+ followed, was in high spirits. Natásha was gay because she had been sad
+ too long and now nothing reminded her of the cause of her sadness, and
+ because she was feeling well. She was also happy because she had someone
+ to adore her: the adoration of others was a lubricant the wheels of her
+ machine needed to make them run freely—and Pétya adored her. Above
+ all, they were gay because there was a war near Moscow, there would be
+ fighting at the town gates, arms were being given out, everybody was
+ escaping—going away somewhere, and in general something
+ extraordinary was happening, and that is always exciting, especially to
+ the young.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ On Saturday, the thirty-first of August, everything in the Rostóvs’ house
+ seemed topsy-turvy. All the doors were open, all the furniture was being
+ carried out or moved about, and the mirrors and pictures had been taken
+ down. There were trunks in the rooms, and hay, wrapping paper, and ropes
+ were scattered about. The peasants and house serfs carrying out the things
+ were treading heavily on the parquet floors. The yard was crowded with
+ peasant carts, some loaded high and already corded up, others still empty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The voices and footsteps of the many servants and of the peasants who had
+ come with the carts resounded as they shouted to one another in the yard
+ and in the house. The count had been out since morning. The countess had a
+ headache brought on by all the noise and turmoil and was lying down in the
+ new sitting room with a vinegar compress on her head. Pétya was not at
+ home, he had gone to visit a friend with whom he meant to obtain a
+ transfer from the militia to the active army. Sónya was in the ballroom
+ looking after the packing of the glass and china. Natásha was sitting on
+ the floor of her dismantled room with dresses, ribbons, and scarves strewn
+ all about her, gazing fixedly at the floor and holding in her hands the
+ old ball dress (already out of fashion) which she had worn at her first
+ Petersburg ball.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha was ashamed of doing nothing when everyone else was so busy, and
+ several times that morning had tried to set to work, but her heart was not
+ in it, and she could not and did not know how to do anything except with
+ all her heart and all her might. For a while she had stood beside Sónya
+ while the china was being packed and tried to help, but soon gave it up
+ and went to her room to pack her own things. At first she found it amusing
+ to give away dresses and ribbons to the maids, but when that was done and
+ what was left had still to be packed, she found it dull.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dunyásha, you pack! You will, won’t you, dear?” And when Dunyásha
+ willingly promised to do it all for her, Natásha sat down on the floor,
+ took her old ball dress, and fell into a reverie quite unrelated to what
+ ought to have occupied her thoughts now. She was roused from her reverie
+ by the talk of the maids in the next room (which was theirs) and by the
+ sound of their hurried footsteps going to the back porch. Natásha got up
+ and looked out of the window. An enormously long row of carts full of
+ wounded men had stopped in the street.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The housekeeper, the old nurse, the cooks, coachmen, maids, footmen,
+ postilions, and scullions stood at the gate, staring at the wounded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha, throwing a clean pocket handkerchief over her hair and holding an
+ end of it in each hand, went out into the street.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The former housekeeper, old Mávra Kuzmínichna, had stepped out of the
+ crowd by the gate, gone up to a cart with a hood constructed of bast mats,
+ and was speaking to a pale young officer who lay inside. Natásha moved a
+ few steps forward and stopped shyly, still holding her handkerchief, and
+ listened to what the housekeeper was saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then you have nobody in Moscow?” she was saying. “You would be more
+ comfortable somewhere in a house... in ours, for instance... the family
+ are leaving.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know if it would be allowed,” replied the officer in a weak
+ voice. “Here is our commanding officer... ask him,” and he pointed to a
+ stout major who was walking back along the street past the row of carts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha glanced with frightened eyes at the face of the wounded officer
+ and at once went to meet the major.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “May the wounded men stay in our house?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The major raised his hand to his cap with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Which one do you want, Ma’am’selle?” said he, screwing up his eyes and
+ smiling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha quietly repeated her question, and her face and whole manner were
+ so serious, though she was still holding the ends of her handkerchief,
+ that the major ceased smiling and after some reflection—as if
+ considering in how far the thing was possible—replied in the
+ affirmative.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes, why not? They may,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With a slight inclination of her head, Natásha stepped back quickly to
+ Mávra Kuzmínichna, who stood talking compassionately to the officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They may. He says they may!” whispered Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The cart in which the officer lay was turned into the Rostóvs’ yard, and
+ dozens of carts with wounded men began at the invitation of the townsfolk
+ to turn into the yards and to draw up at the entrances of the houses in
+ Povarskáya Street. Natásha was evidently pleased to be dealing with new
+ people outside the ordinary routine of her life. She and Mávra Kuzmínichna
+ tried to get as many of the wounded as possible into their yard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your Papa must be told, though,” said Mávra Kuzmínichna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Never mind, never mind, what does it matter? For one day we can move into
+ the drawing room. They can have all our half of the house.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now, young lady, you do take things into your head! Even if we put
+ them into the wing, the men’s room, or the nurse’s room, we must ask
+ permission.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, I’ll ask.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha ran into the house and went on tiptoe through the half-open door
+ into the sitting room, where there was a smell of vinegar and Hoffman’s
+ drops.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Are you asleep, Mamma?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, what sleep—?” said the countess, waking up just as
+ she was dropping into a doze.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma darling!” said Natásha, kneeling by her mother and bringing her
+ face close to her mother’s, “I am sorry, forgive me, I’ll never do it
+ again; I woke you up! Mávra Kuzmínichna has sent me: they have brought
+ some wounded here—officers. Will you let them come? They have
+ nowhere to go. I knew you’d let them come!” she said quickly all in one
+ breath.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What officers? Whom have they brought? I don’t understand anything about
+ it,” said the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha laughed, and the countess too smiled slightly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I knew you’d give permission... so I’ll tell them,” and, having kissed
+ her mother, Natásha got up and went to the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the hall she met her father, who had returned with bad news.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We’ve stayed too long!” said the count with involuntary
+ vexation. “The Club is closed and the police are leaving.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Papa, is it all right—I’ve invited some of the wounded into the
+ house?” said Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Of course it is,” he answered absently. “That’s not the point. I beg you
+ not to indulge in trifles now, but to help to pack, and tomorrow we must
+ go, go, go!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the count gave a similar order to the major-domo and the servants.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At dinner Pétya having returned home told them the news he had heard. He
+ said the people had been getting arms in the Krémlin, and that though
+ Rostopchín’s broadsheet had said that he would sound a call two or three
+ days in advance, the order had certainly already been given for everyone
+ to go armed to the Three Hills tomorrow, and that there would be a big
+ battle there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess looked with timid horror at her son’s eager, excited face as
+ he said this. She realized that if she said a word about his not going to
+ the battle (she knew he enjoyed the thought of the impending engagement)
+ he would say something about men, honor, and the fatherland—something
+ senseless, masculine, and obstinate which there would be no contradicting,
+ and her plans would be spoiled; and so, hoping to arrange to leave before
+ then and take Pétya with her as their protector and defender, she did not
+ answer him, but after dinner called the count aside and implored him with
+ tears to take her away quickly, that very night if possible. With a
+ woman’s involuntary loving cunning she, who till then had not shown any
+ alarm, said that she would die of fright if they did not leave that very
+ night. Without any pretense she was now afraid of everything.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV
+ 
+ 
+ Madame Schoss, who had been out to visit her daughter, increased the
+ countess’ fears still more by telling what she had seen at a spirit
+ dealer’s in Myasnítski Street. When returning by that street she had been
+ unable to pass because of a drunken crowd rioting in front of the shop.
+ She had taken a cab and driven home by a side street and the cabman had
+ told her that the people were breaking open the barrels at the drink
+ store, having received orders to do so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After dinner the whole Rostóv household set to work with enthusiastic
+ haste packing their belongings and preparing for their departure. The old
+ count, suddenly setting to work, kept passing from the yard to the house
+ and back again, shouting confused instructions to the hurrying people, and
+ flurrying them still more. Pétya directed things in the yard. Sónya, owing
+ to the count’s contradictory orders, lost her head and did not know what
+ to do. The servants ran noisily about the house and yard, shouting and
+ disputing. Natásha, with the ardor characteristic of all she did suddenly
+ set to work too. At first her intervention in the business of packing was
+ received skeptically. Everybody expected some prank from her and did not
+ wish to obey her; but she resolutely and passionately demanded obedience,
+ grew angry and nearly cried because they did not heed her, and at last
+ succeeded in making them believe her. Her first exploit, which cost her
+ immense effort and established her authority, was the packing of the
+ carpets. The count had valuable Gobelin tapestries and Persian carpets in
+ the house. When Natásha set to work two cases were standing open in the
+ ballroom, one almost full up with crockery, the other with carpets. There
+ was also much china standing on the tables, and still more was being
+ brought in from the storeroom. A third case was needed and servants had
+ gone to fetch it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya, wait a bit—we’ll pack everything into these,” said Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You can’t, Miss, we have tried to,” said the butler’s assistant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, wait a minute, please.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Natásha began rapidly taking out of the case dishes and plates wrapped
+ in paper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The dishes must go in here among the carpets,” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, it’s a mercy if we can get the carpets alone into three cases,” said
+ the butler’s assistant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, wait, please!” And Natásha began rapidly and deftly sorting out the
+ things. “These aren’t needed,” said she, putting aside some plates of Kiev
+ ware. “These—yes, these must go among the carpets,” she said,
+ referring to the Saxony china dishes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t, Natásha! Leave it alone! We’ll get it all packed,” urged Sónya
+ reproachfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a young lady she is!” remarked the major-domo.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Natásha would not give in. She turned everything out and began quickly
+ repacking, deciding that the inferior Russian carpets and unnecessary
+ crockery should not be taken at all. When everything had been taken out of
+ the cases, they recommenced packing, and it turned out that when the
+ cheaper things not worth taking had nearly all been rejected, the valuable
+ ones really did all go into the two cases. Only the lid of the case
+ containing the carpets would not shut down. A few more things might have
+ been taken out, but Natásha insisted on having her own way. She packed,
+ repacked, pressed, made the butler’s assistant and Pétya—whom she
+ had drawn into the business of packing—press on the lid, and made
+ desperate efforts herself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s enough, Natásha,” said Sónya. “I see you were right, but just take
+ out the top one.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I won’t!” cried Natásha, with one hand holding back the hair that hung
+ over her perspiring face, while with the other she pressed down the
+ carpets. “Now press, Pétya! Press, Vasílich, press hard!” she cried.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The carpets yielded and the lid closed; Natásha, clapping her hands,
+ screamed with delight and tears fell from her eyes. But this only lasted a
+ moment. She at once set to work afresh and they now trusted her
+ completely. The count was not angry even when they told him that Natásha
+ had countermanded an order of his, and the servants now came to her to ask
+ whether a cart was sufficiently loaded, and whether it might be corded up.
+ Thanks to Natásha’s directions the work now went on expeditiously,
+ unnecessary things were left, and the most valuable packed as compactly as
+ possible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But hard as they all worked till quite late that night, they could not get
+ everything packed. The countess had fallen asleep and the count, having
+ put off their departure till next morning, went to bed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya and Natásha slept in the sitting room without undressing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That night another wounded man was driven down the Povarskáya, and Mávra
+ Kuzmínichna, who was standing at the gate, had him brought into the
+ Rostóvs’ yard. Mávra Kuzmínichna concluded that he was a very important
+ man. He was being conveyed in a calèche with a raised hood, and was quite
+ covered by an apron. On the box beside the driver sat a venerable old
+ attendant. A doctor and two soldiers followed the carriage in a cart.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Please come in here. The masters are going away and the whole house will
+ be empty,” said the old woman to the old attendant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, perhaps,” said he with a sigh. “We don’t expect to get him home
+ alive! We have a house of our own in Moscow, but it’s a long way from
+ here, and there’s nobody living in it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do us the honor to come in, there’s plenty of everything in the master’s
+ house. Come in,” said Mávra Kuzmínichna. “Is he very ill?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The attendant made a hopeless gesture.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We don’t expect to get him home! We must ask the doctor.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the old servant got down from the box and went up to the cart.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right!” said the doctor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old servant returned to the calèche , looked into it, shook his head
+ disconsolately, told the driver to turn into the yard, and stopped beside
+ Mávra Kuzmínichna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O, Lord Jesus Christ!” she murmured.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She invited them to take the wounded man into the house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The masters won’t object...” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But they had to avoid carrying the man upstairs, and so they took him into
+ the wing and put him in the room that had been Madame Schoss’.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This wounded man was Prince Andrew Bolkónski.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV
+ 
+ 
+ Moscow’s last day had come. It was a clear bright autumn day, a Sunday.
+ The church bells everywhere were ringing for service, just as usual on
+ Sundays. Nobody seemed yet to realize what awaited the city.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only two things indicated the social condition of Moscow—the rabble,
+ that is the poor people, and the price of commodities. An enormous crowd
+ of factory hands, house serfs, and peasants, with whom some officials,
+ seminarists, and gentry were mingled, had gone early that morning to the
+ Three Hills. Having waited there for Rostopchín who did not turn up, they
+ became convinced that Moscow would be surrendered, and then dispersed all
+ about the town to the public houses and cookshops. Prices too that day
+ indicated the state of affairs. The price of weapons, of gold, of carts
+ and horses, kept rising, but the value of paper money and city articles
+ kept falling, so that by midday there were instances of carters removing
+ valuable goods, such as cloth, and receiving in payment a half of what
+ they carted, while peasant horses were fetching five hundred rubles each,
+ and furniture, mirrors, and bronzes were being given away for nothing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the Rostóvs’ staid old-fashioned house the dissolution of former
+ conditions of life was but little noticeable. As to the serfs the only
+ indication was that three out of their huge retinue disappeared during the
+ night, but nothing was stolen; and as to the value of their possessions,
+ the thirty peasant carts that had come in from their estates and which
+ many people envied proved to be extremely valuable and they were offered
+ enormous sums of money for them. Not only were huge sums offered for the
+ horses and carts, but on the previous evening and early in the morning of
+ the first of September, orderlies and servants sent by wounded officers
+ came to the Rostóvs’ and wounded men dragged themselves there from the
+ Rostóvs’ and from neighboring houses where they were accommodated,
+ entreating the servants to try to get them a lift out of Moscow. The
+ major-domo to whom these entreaties were addressed, though he was sorry
+ for the wounded, resolutely refused, saying that he dare not even mention
+ the matter to the count. Pity these wounded men as one might, it was
+ evident that if they were given one cart there would be no reason to
+ refuse another, or all the carts and one’s own carriages as well. Thirty
+ carts could not save all the wounded and in the general catastrophe one
+ could not disregard oneself and one’s own family. So thought the
+ major-domo on his master’s behalf.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On waking up that morning Count Ilyá Rostóv left his bedroom softly, so as
+ not to wake the countess who had fallen asleep only toward morning, and
+ came out to the porch in his lilac silk dressing gown. In the yard stood
+ the carts ready corded. The carriages were at the front porch. The
+ major-domo stood at the porch talking to an elderly orderly and to a pale
+ young officer with a bandaged arm. On seeing the count the major-domo made
+ a significant and stern gesture to them both to go away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, Vasílich, is everything ready?” asked the count, and stroking his
+ bald head he looked good-naturedly at the officer and the orderly and
+ nodded to them. (He liked to see new faces.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We can harness at once, your excellency.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, that’s right. As soon as the countess wakes we’ll be off, God
+ willing! What is it, gentlemen?” he added, turning to the officer. “Are
+ you staying in my house?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer came nearer and suddenly his face flushed crimson.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Count, be so good as to allow me... for God’s sake, to get into some
+ corner of one of your carts! I have nothing here with me.... I shall be
+ all right on a loaded cart....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before the officer had finished speaking the orderly made the same request
+ on behalf of his master.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, yes, yes, yes!” said the count hastily. “I shall be very pleased,
+ very pleased. Vasílich, you’ll see to it. Just unload one or two carts.
+ Well, what of it... do what’s necessary...” said the count, muttering some
+ indefinite order.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But at the same moment an expression of warm gratitude on the officer’s
+ face had already sealed the order. The count looked around him. In the
+ yard, at the gates, at the window of the wings, wounded officers and their
+ orderlies were to be seen. They were all looking at the count and moving
+ toward the porch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Please step into the gallery, your excellency,” said the major-domo.
+ “What are your orders about the pictures?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count went into the house with him, repeating his order not to refuse
+ the wounded who asked for a lift.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, never mind, some of the things can be unloaded,” he added in a
+ soft, confidential voice, as though afraid of being overheard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At nine o’clock the countess woke up, and Matrëna Timoféevna, who had been
+ her lady’s maid before her marriage and now performed a sort of chief
+ gendarme’s duty for her, came to say that Madame Schoss was much offended
+ and the young ladies’ summer dresses could not be left behind. On inquiry,
+ the countess learned that Madame Schoss was offended because her trunk had
+ been taken down from its cart, and all the loads were being uncorded and
+ the luggage taken out of the carts to make room for wounded men whom the
+ count in the simplicity of his heart had ordered that they should take
+ with them. The countess sent for her husband.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is this, my dear? I hear that the luggage is being unloaded.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know, love, I wanted to tell you... Countess dear... an officer came
+ to me to ask for a few carts for the wounded. After all, ours are things
+ that can be bought but think what being left behind means to them!...
+ Really now, in our own yard—we asked them in ourselves and there are
+ officers among them.... You know, I think, my dear... let them be taken...
+ where’s the hurry?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count spoke timidly, as he always did when talking of money matters.
+ The countess was accustomed to this tone as a precursor of news of
+ something detrimental to the children’s interests, such as the building of
+ a new gallery or conservatory, the inauguration of a private theater or an
+ orchestra. She was accustomed always to oppose anything announced in that
+ timid tone and considered it her duty to do so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She assumed her dolefully submissive manner and said to her husband:
+ “Listen to me, Count, you have managed matters so that we are getting
+ nothing for the house, and now you wish to throw away all our—all
+ the children’s property! You said yourself that we have a hundred thousand
+ rubles’ worth of things in the house. I don’t consent, my dear, I don’t!
+ Do as you please! It’s the government’s business to look after the
+ wounded; they know that. Look at the Lopukhíns opposite, they cleared out
+ everything two days ago. That’s what other people do. It’s only we who are
+ such fools. If you have no pity on me, have some for the children.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Flourishing his arms in despair the count left the room without replying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Papa, what are you doing that for?” asked Natásha, who had followed him
+ into her mother’s room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing! What business is it of yours?” muttered the count angrily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I heard,” said Natásha. “Why does Mamma object?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What business is it of yours?” cried the count.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha stepped up to the window and pondered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Papa! Here’s Berg coming to see us,” said she, looking out of the window.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI
+ 
+ 
+ Berg, the Rostóvs’ son-in-law, was already a colonel wearing the orders of
+ Vladímir and Anna, and he still filled the quiet and agreeable post of
+ assistant to the head of the staff of the assistant commander of the first
+ division of the Second Army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the first of September he had come to Moscow from the army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He had nothing to do in Moscow, but he had noticed that everyone in the
+ army was asking for leave to visit Moscow and had something to do there.
+ So he considered it necessary to ask for leave of absence for family and
+ domestic reasons.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Berg drove up to his father-in-law’s house in his spruce little trap with
+ a pair of sleek roans, exactly like those of a certain prince. He looked
+ attentively at the carts in the yard and while going up to the porch took
+ out a clean pocket handkerchief and tied a knot in it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the anteroom Berg ran with smooth though impatient steps into the
+ drawing room, where he embraced the count, kissed the hands of Natásha and
+ Sónya, and hastened to inquire after “Mamma’s” health.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Health, at a time like this?” said the count. “Come, tell us the news! Is
+ the army retreating or will there be another battle?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “God Almighty alone can decide the fate of our fatherland, Papa,” said
+ Berg. “The army is burning with a spirit of heroism and the leaders, so to
+ say, have now assembled in council. No one knows what is coming. But in
+ general I can tell you, Papa, that such a heroic spirit, the truly antique
+ valor of the Russian army, which they—which it” (he corrected
+ himself) “has shown or displayed in the battle of the twenty-sixth—there
+ are no words worthy to do it justice! I tell you, Papa” (he smote himself
+ on the breast as a general he had heard speaking had done, but Berg did it
+ a trifle late for he should have struck his breast at the words “Russian
+ army”), “I tell you frankly that we, the commanders, far from having to
+ urge the men on or anything of that kind, could hardly restrain those...
+ those... yes, those exploits of antique valor,” he went on rapidly.
+ “General Barclay de Tolly risked his life everywhere at the head of the
+ troops, I can assure you. Our corps was stationed on a hillside. You can
+ imagine!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Berg related all that he remembered of the various tales he had heard
+ those days. Natásha watched him with an intent gaze that confused him, as
+ if she were trying to find in his face the answer to some question.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Altogether such heroism as was displayed by the Russian warriors cannot
+ be imagined or adequately praised!” said Berg, glancing round at Natásha,
+ and as if anxious to conciliate her, replying to her intent look with a
+ smile. “‘Russia is not in Moscow, she lives in the hearts of her sons!’
+ Isn’t it so, Papa?” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just then the countess came in from the sitting room with a weary and
+ dissatisfied expression. Berg hurriedly jumped up, kissed her hand, asked
+ about her health, and, swaying his head from side to side to express
+ sympathy, remained standing beside her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, Mamma, I tell you sincerely that these are hard and sad times for
+ every Russian. But why are you so anxious? You have still time to get
+ away....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I can’t think what the servants are about,” said the countess, turning to
+ her husband. “I have just been told that nothing is ready yet. Somebody
+ after all must see to things. One misses Mítenka at such times. There
+ won’t be any end to it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count was about to say something, but evidently restrained himself. He
+ got up from his chair and went to the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment Berg drew out his handkerchief as if to blow his nose and,
+ seeing the knot in it, pondered, shaking his head sadly and significantly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I have a great favor to ask of you, Papa,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hm...” said the count, and stopped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was driving past Yusúpov’s house just now,” said Berg with a laugh,
+ “when the steward, a man I know, ran out and asked me whether I wouldn’t
+ buy something. I went in out of curiosity, you know, and there is a small
+ chiffonier and a dressing table. You know how dear Véra wanted a
+ chiffonier like that and how we had a dispute about it.” (At the mention
+ of the chiffonier and dressing table Berg involuntarily changed his tone
+ to one of pleasure at his admirable domestic arrangements.) “And it’s such
+ a beauty! It pulls out and has a secret English drawer, you know! And dear
+ Véra has long wanted one. I wish to give her a surprise, you see. I saw so
+ many of those peasant carts in your yard. Please let me have one, I will
+ pay the man well, and...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count frowned and coughed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ask the countess, I don’t give orders.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If it’s inconvenient, please don’t,” said Berg. “Only I so wanted it, for
+ dear Véra’s sake.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, go to the devil, all of you! To the devil, the devil, the devil...”
+ cried the old count. “My head’s in a whirl!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And he left the room. The countess began to cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, Mamma! Yes, these are very hard times!” said Berg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha left the room with her father and, as if finding it difficult to
+ reach some decision, first followed him and then ran downstairs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya was in the porch, engaged in giving out weapons to the servants who
+ were to leave Moscow. The loaded carts were still standing in the yard.
+ Two of them had been uncorded and a wounded officer was climbing into one
+ of them helped by an orderly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know what it’s about?” Pétya asked Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She understood that he meant what were their parents quarreling about. She
+ did not answer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s because Papa wanted to give up all the carts to the wounded,” said
+ Pétya. “Vasílich told me. I consider...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I consider,” Natásha suddenly almost shouted, turning her angry face to
+ Pétya, “I consider it so horrid, so abominable, so... I don’t know what.
+ Are we despicable Germans?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her throat quivered with convulsive sobs and, afraid of weakening and
+ letting the force of her anger run to waste, she turned and rushed
+ headlong up the stairs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Berg was sitting beside the countess consoling her with the respectful
+ attention of a relative. The count, pipe in hand, was pacing up and down
+ the room, when Natásha, her face distorted by anger, burst in like a
+ tempest and approached her mother with rapid steps.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s horrid! It’s abominable!” she screamed. “You can’t possibly have
+ ordered it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Berg and the countess looked at her, perplexed and frightened. The count
+ stood still at the window and listened.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma, it’s impossible: see what is going on in the yard!” she cried.
+ “They will be left!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s the matter with you? Who are ‘they’? What do you want?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, the wounded! It’s impossible, Mamma. It’s monstrous!... No, Mamma
+ darling, it’s not the thing. Please forgive me, darling.... Mamma, what
+ does it matter what we take away? Only look what is going on in the
+ yard... Mamma!... It’s impossible!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count stood by the window and listened without turning round. Suddenly
+ he sniffed and put his face closer to the window.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess glanced at her daughter, saw her face full of shame for her
+ mother, saw her agitation, and understood why her husband did not turn to
+ look at her now, and she glanced round quite disconcerted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, do as you like! Am I hindering anyone?” she said, not surrendering at
+ once.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma, darling, forgive me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the countess pushed her daughter away and went up to her husband.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear, you order what is right.... You know I don’t understand about
+ it,” said she, dropping her eyes shamefacedly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The eggs... the eggs are teaching the hen,” muttered the count through
+ tears of joy, and he embraced his wife who was glad to hide her look of
+ shame on his breast.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Papa! Mamma! May I see to it? May I?...” asked Natásha. “We will still
+ take all the most necessary things.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count nodded affirmatively, and Natásha, at the rapid pace at which
+ she used to run when playing at tag, ran through the ballroom to the
+ anteroom and downstairs into the yard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The servants gathered round Natásha, but could not believe the strange
+ order she brought them until the count himself, in his wife’s name,
+ confirmed the order to give up all the carts to the wounded and take the
+ trunks to the storerooms. When they understood that order the servants set
+ to work at this new task with pleasure and zeal. It no longer seemed
+ strange to them but on the contrary it seemed the only thing that could be
+ done, just as a quarter of an hour before it had not seemed strange to
+ anyone that the wounded should be left behind and the goods carted away
+ but that had seemed the only thing to do.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The whole household, as if to atone for not having done it sooner, set
+ eagerly to work at the new task of placing the wounded in the carts. The
+ wounded dragged themselves out of their rooms and stood with pale but
+ happy faces round the carts. The news that carts were to be had spread to
+ the neighboring houses, from which wounded men began to come into the
+ Rostóvs’ yard. Many of the wounded asked them not to unload the carts but
+ only to let them sit on the top of the things. But the work of unloading,
+ once started, could not be arrested. It seemed not to matter whether all
+ or only half the things were left behind. Cases full of china, bronzes,
+ pictures, and mirrors that had been so carefully packed the night before
+ now lay about the yard, and still they went on searching for and finding
+ possibilities of unloading this or that and letting the wounded have
+ another and yet another cart.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We can take four more men,” said the steward. “They can have my trap, or
+ else what is to become of them?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let them have my wardrobe cart,” said the countess. “Dunyásha can go with
+ me in the carriage.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They unloaded the wardrobe cart and sent it to take wounded men from a
+ house two doors off. The whole household, servants included, was bright
+ and animated. Natásha was in a state of rapturous excitement such as she
+ had not known for a long time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What could we fasten this onto?” asked the servants, trying to fix a
+ trunk on the narrow footboard behind a carriage. “We must keep at least
+ one cart.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s in it?” asked Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The count’s books.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Leave it, Vasílich will put it away. It’s not wanted.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The phaeton was full of people and there was a doubt as to where Count
+ Peter could sit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On the box. You’ll sit on the box, won’t you, Pétya?” cried Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya too was busy all this time, but the aim of her efforts was quite
+ different from Natásha’s. She was putting away the things that had to be
+ left behind and making a list of them as the countess wished, and she
+ tried to get as much taken away with them as possible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII
+ 
+ 
+ Before two o’clock in the afternoon the Rostóvs’ four carriages, packed
+ full and with the horses harnessed, stood at the front door. One by one
+ the carts with the wounded had moved out of the yard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The calèche in which Prince Andrew was being taken attracted Sónya’s
+ attention as it passed the front porch. With the help of a maid she was
+ arranging a seat for the countess in the huge high coach that stood at the
+ entrance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Whose calèche is that?” she inquired, leaning out of the carriage window.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, didn’t you know, Miss?” replied the maid. “The wounded prince: he
+ spent the night in our house and is going with us.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But who is it? What’s his name?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s our intended that was—Prince Bolkónski himself! They say he is
+ dying,” replied the maid with a sigh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya jumped out of the coach and ran to the countess. The countess, tired
+ out and already dressed in shawl and bonnet for her journey, was pacing up
+ and down the drawing room, waiting for the household to assemble for the
+ usual silent prayer with closed doors before starting. Natásha was not in
+ the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma,” said Sónya, “Prince Andrew is here, mortally wounded. He is going
+ with us.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess opened her eyes in dismay and, seizing Sónya’s arm, glanced
+ around.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha?” she murmured.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment this news had only one significance for both of them. They
+ knew their Natásha, and alarm as to what would happen if she heard this
+ news stifled all sympathy for the man they both liked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha does not know yet, but he is going with us,” said Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You say he is dying?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya nodded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess put her arms around Sónya and began to cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The ways of God are past finding out!” she thought, feeling that the
+ Almighty Hand, hitherto unseen, was becoming manifest in all that was now
+ taking place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, Mamma? Everything is ready. What’s the matter?” asked Natásha, as
+ with animated face she ran into the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing,” answered the countess. “If everything is ready let us start.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the countess bent over her reticule to hide her agitated face. Sónya
+ embraced Natásha and kissed her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha looked at her inquiringly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it? What has happened?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing... No...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is it something very bad for me? What is it?” persisted Natásha with her
+ quick intuition.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya sighed and made no reply. The count, Pétya, Madame Schoss, Mávra
+ Kuzmínichna, and Vasílich came into the drawing room and, having closed
+ the doors, they all sat down and remained for some moments silently seated
+ without looking at one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count was the first to rise, and with a loud sigh crossed himself
+ before the icon. All the others did the same. Then the count embraced
+ Mávra Kuzmínichna and Vasílich, who were to remain in Moscow, and while
+ they caught at his hand and kissed his shoulder he patted their backs
+ lightly with some vaguely affectionate and comforting words. The countess
+ went into the oratory and there Sónya found her on her knees before the
+ icons that had been left here and there hanging on the wall. (The most
+ precious ones, with which some family tradition was connected, were being
+ taken with them.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the porch and in the yard the men whom Pétya had armed with swords and
+ daggers, with trousers tucked inside their high boots and with belts and
+ girdles tightened, were taking leave of those remaining behind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As is always the case at a departure, much had been forgotten or put in
+ the wrong place, and for a long time two menservants stood one on each
+ side of the open door and the carriage steps waiting to help the countess
+ in, while maids rushed with cushions and bundles from the house to the
+ carriages, the calèche , the phaeton, and back again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They always will forget everything!” said the countess. “Don’t you know I
+ can’t sit like that?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Dunyásha, with clenched teeth, without replying but with an aggrieved
+ look on her face, hastily got into the coach to rearrange the seat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, those servants!” said the count, swaying his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Efím, the old coachman, who was the only one the countess trusted to drive
+ her, sat perched up high on the box and did not so much as glance round at
+ what was going on behind him. From thirty years’ experience he knew it
+ would be some time yet before the order, “Be off, in God’s name!” would be
+ given him: and he knew that even when it was said he would be stopped once
+ or twice more while they sent back to fetch something that had been
+ forgotten, and even after that he would again be stopped and the countess
+ herself would lean out of the window and beg him for the love of heaven to
+ drive carefully down the hill. He knew all this and therefore waited
+ calmly for what would happen, with more patience than the horses,
+ especially the near one, the chestnut Falcon, who was pawing the ground
+ and champing his bit. At last all were seated, the carriage steps were
+ folded and pulled up, the door was shut, somebody was sent for a traveling
+ case, and the countess leaned out and said what she had to say. Then Efím
+ deliberately doffed his hat and began crossing himself. The postilion and
+ all the other servants did the same. “Off, in God’s name!” said Efím,
+ putting on his hat. “Start!” The postilion started the horses, the off
+ pole horse tugged at his collar, the high springs creaked, and the body of
+ the coach swayed. The footman sprang onto the box of the moving coach
+ which jolted as it passed out of the yard onto the uneven roadway; the
+ other vehicles jolted in their turn, and the procession of carriages moved
+ up the street. In the carriages, the calèche , and the phaeton, all crossed
+ themselves as they passed the church opposite the house. Those who were to
+ remain in Moscow walked on either side of the vehicles seeing the
+ travelers off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rarely had Natásha experienced so joyful a feeling as now, sitting in the
+ carriage beside the countess and gazing at the slowly receding walls of
+ forsaken, agitated Moscow. Occasionally she leaned out of the carriage
+ window and looked back and then forward at the long train of wounded in
+ front of them. Almost at the head of the line she could see the raised
+ hood of Prince Andrew’s calèche . She did not know who was in it,
+ but each time she looked at the procession her eyes sought that calèche .
+ She knew it was right in front.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In Kúdrino, from the Nikítski, Présnya, and Podnovínsk Streets came
+ several other trains of vehicles similar to the Rostóvs’, and as they
+ passed along the Sadóvaya Street the carriages and carts formed two rows
+ abreast.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As they were going round the Súkharev water tower Natásha, who was
+ inquisitively and alertly scrutinizing the people driving or walking past,
+ suddenly cried out in joyful surprise:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear me! Mamma, Sónya, look, it’s he!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who? Who?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look! Yes, on my word, it’s Bezúkhov!” said Natásha, putting her head out
+ of the carriage and staring at a tall, stout man in a coachman’s long
+ coat, who from his manner of walking and moving was evidently a gentleman
+ in disguise, and who was passing under the arch of the Súkharev tower
+ accompanied by a small, sallow-faced, beardless old man in a frieze coat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, it really is Bezúkhov in a coachman’s coat, with a queer-looking old
+ boy. Really,” said Natásha, “look, look!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, it’s not he. How can you talk such nonsense?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma,” screamed Natásha, “I’ll stake my head it’s he! I assure you!
+ Stop, stop!” she cried to the coachman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the coachman could not stop, for from the Meshchánski Street came more
+ carts and carriages, and the Rostóvs were being shouted at to move on and
+ not block the way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In fact, however, though now much farther off than before, the Rostóvs all
+ saw Pierre—or someone extraordinarily like him—in a coachman’s
+ coat, going down the street with head bent and a serious face beside a
+ small, beardless old man who looked like a footman. That old man noticed a
+ face thrust out of the carriage window gazing at them, and respectfully
+ touching Pierre’s elbow said something to him and pointed to the carriage.
+ Pierre, evidently engrossed in thought, could not at first understand him.
+ At length when he had understood and looked in the direction the old man
+ indicated, he recognized Natásha, and following his first impulse stepped
+ instantly and rapidly toward the coach. But having taken a dozen steps he
+ seemed to remember something and stopped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha’s face, leaning out of the window, beamed with quizzical
+ kindliness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Peter Kirílovich, come here! We have recognized you! This is wonderful!”
+ she cried, holding out her hand to him. “What are you doing? Why are you
+ like this?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre took her outstretched hand and kissed it awkwardly as he walked
+ along beside her while the coach still moved on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is the matter, Count?” asked the countess in a surprised and
+ commiserating tone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What? What? Why? Don’t ask me,” said Pierre, and looked round at Natásha
+ whose radiant, happy expression—of which he was conscious without
+ looking at her—filled him with enchantment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Are you remaining in Moscow, then?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre hesitated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In Moscow?” he said in a questioning tone. “Yes, in Moscow. Good-by!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, if only I were a man! I’d certainly stay with you. How splendid!”
+ said Natásha. “Mamma, if you’ll let me, I’ll stay!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre glanced absently at Natásha and was about to say something, but the
+ countess interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You were at the battle, we heard.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I was,” Pierre answered. “There will be another battle tomorrow...”
+ he began, but Natásha interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what is the matter with you, Count? You are not like yourself....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, don’t ask me, don’t ask me! I don’t know myself. Tomorrow... But no!
+ Good-by, good-by!” he muttered. “It’s an awful time!” and dropping behind
+ the carriage he stepped onto the pavement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha continued to lean out of the window for a long time, beaming at
+ him with her kindly, slightly quizzical, happy smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII
+ 
+ 
+ For the last two days, ever since leaving home, Pierre had been living in
+ the empty house of his deceased benefactor, Bazdéev. This is how it
+ happened.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he woke up on the morning after his return to Moscow and his
+ interview with Count Rostopchín, he could not for some time make out where
+ he was and what was expected of him. When he was informed that among
+ others awaiting him in his reception room there was a Frenchman who had
+ brought a letter from his wife, the Countess Hélène, he felt suddenly
+ overcome by that sense of confusion and hopelessness to which he was apt
+ to succumb. He felt that everything was now at an end, all was in
+ confusion and crumbling to pieces, that nobody was right or wrong, the
+ future held nothing, and there was no escape from this position. Smiling
+ unnaturally and muttering to himself, he first sat down on the sofa in an
+ attitude of despair, then rose, went to the door of the reception room and
+ peeped through the crack, returned flourishing his arms, and took up a
+ book. His major-domo came in a second time to say that the Frenchman who
+ had brought the letter from the countess was very anxious to see him if
+ only for a minute, and that someone from Bazdéev’s widow had called to ask
+ Pierre to take charge of her husband’s books, as she herself was leaving
+ for the country.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, yes, in a minute; wait... or no! No, of course... go and say I will
+ come directly,” Pierre replied to the major-domo.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But as soon as the man had left the room Pierre took up his hat which was
+ lying on the table and went out of his study by the other door. There was
+ no one in the passage. He went along the whole length of this passage to
+ the stairs and, frowning and rubbing his forehead with both hands, went
+ down as far as the first landing. The hall porter was standing at the
+ front door. From the landing where Pierre stood there was a second
+ staircase leading to the back entrance. He went down that staircase and
+ out into the yard. No one had seen him. But there were some carriages
+ waiting, and as soon as Pierre stepped out of the gate the coachmen and
+ the yard porter noticed him and raised their caps to him. When he felt he
+ was being looked at he behaved like an ostrich which hides its head in a
+ bush in order not to be seen: he hung his head and quickening his pace
+ went down the street.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of all the affairs awaiting Pierre that day the sorting of Joseph
+ Bazdéev’s books and papers appeared to him the most necessary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He hired the first cab he met and told the driver to go to the Patriarch’s
+ Ponds, where the widow Bazdéev’s house was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Continually turning round to look at the rows of loaded carts that were
+ making their way from all sides out of Moscow, and balancing his bulky
+ body so as not to slip out of the ramshackle old vehicle, Pierre,
+ experiencing the joyful feeling of a boy escaping from school, began to
+ talk to his driver.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The man told him that arms were being distributed today at the Krémlin and
+ that tomorrow everyone would be sent out beyond the Three Hills gates and
+ a great battle would be fought there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having reached the Patriarch’s Ponds Pierre found the Bazdéevs’ house,
+ where he had not been for a long time past. He went up to the gate.
+ Gerásim, that sallow beardless old man Pierre had seen at Torzhók five
+ years before with Joseph Bazdéev, came out in answer to his knock.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “At home?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Owing to the present state of things Sophia Danílovna has gone to the
+ Torzhók estate with the children, your excellency.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will come in all the same, I have to look through the books,” said
+ Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Be so good as to step in. Makár Alexéevich, the brother of my late master—may
+ the kingdom of heaven be his—has remained here, but he is in a weak
+ state as you know,” said the old servant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre knew that Makár Alexéevich was Joseph Bazdéev’s half-insane brother
+ and a hard drinker.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, I know. Let us go in...” said Pierre and entered the house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A tall, bald-headed old man with a red nose, wearing a dressing gown and
+ with galoshes on his bare feet, stood in the anteroom. On seeing Pierre he
+ muttered something angrily and went away along the passage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He was a very clever man but has now grown quite feeble, as your honor
+ sees,” said Gerásim. “Will you step into the study?” Pierre nodded. “As it
+ was sealed up so it has remained, but Sophia Danílovna gave orders that if
+ anyone should come from you they were to have the books.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre went into that gloomy study which he had entered with such
+ trepidation in his benefactor’s lifetime. The room, dusty and untouched
+ since the death of Joseph Bazdéev was now even gloomier.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Gerásim opened one of the shutters and left the room on tiptoe. Pierre
+ went round the study, approached the cupboard in which the manuscripts
+ were kept, and took out what had once been one of the most important, the
+ holy of holies of the order. This was the authentic Scotch Acts with
+ Bazdéev’s notes and explanations. He sat down at the dusty writing table,
+ and, having laid the manuscripts before him, opened them out, closed them,
+ finally pushed them away, and resting his head on his hand sank into
+ meditation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Gerásim looked cautiously into the study several times and saw Pierre
+ always sitting in the same attitude.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ More than two hours passed and Gerásim took the liberty of making a slight
+ noise at the door to attract his attention, but Pierre did not hear him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is the cabman to be discharged, your honor?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes!” said Pierre, rousing himself and rising hurriedly. “Look here,”
+ he added, taking Gerásim by a button of his coat and looking down at the
+ old man with moist, shining, and ecstatic eyes, “I say, do you know that
+ there is going to be a battle tomorrow?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We heard so,” replied the man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I beg you not to tell anyone who I am, and to do what I ask you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, your excellency,” replied Gerásim. “Will you have something to eat?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, but I want something else. I want peasant clothes and a pistol,” said
+ Pierre, unexpectedly blushing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, your excellency,” said Gerásim after thinking for a moment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the rest of that day Pierre spent alone in his benefactor’s study, and
+ Gerásim heard him pacing restlessly from one corner to another and talking
+ to himself. And he spent the night on a bed made up for him there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Gerásim, being a servant who in his time had seen many strange things,
+ accepted Pierre’s taking up his residence in the house without surprise,
+ and seemed pleased to have someone to wait on. That same evening—without
+ even asking himself what they were wanted for—he procured a
+ coachman’s coat and cap for Pierre, and promised to get him the pistol
+ next day. Makár Alexéevich came twice that evening shuffling along in his
+ galoshes as far as the door and stopped and looked ingratiatingly at
+ Pierre. But as soon as Pierre turned toward him he wrapped his dressing
+ gown around him with a shamefaced and angry look and hurried away. It was
+ when Pierre (wearing the coachman’s coat which Gerásim had procured for
+ him and had disinfected by steam) was on his way with the old man to buy
+ the pistol at the Súkharev market that he met the Rostóvs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX
+ 
+ 
+ Kutúzov’s order to retreat through Moscow to the Ryazán road was issued at
+ night on the first of September.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The first troops started at once, and during the night they marched slowly
+ and steadily without hurry. At daybreak, however, those nearing the town
+ at the Dorogomílov bridge saw ahead of them masses of soldiers crowding
+ and hurrying across the bridge, ascending on the opposite side and
+ blocking the streets and alleys, while endless masses of troops were
+ bearing down on them from behind, and an unreasoning hurry and alarm
+ overcame them. They all rushed forward to the bridge, onto it, and to the
+ fords and the boats. Kutúzov himself had driven round by side streets to
+ the other side of Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By ten o’clock in the morning of the second of September, only the rear
+ guard remained in the Dorogomílov suburb, where they had ample room. The
+ main army was on the other side of Moscow or beyond it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that very time, at ten in the morning of the second of September,
+ Napoleon was standing among his troops on the Poklónny Hill looking at the
+ panorama spread out before him. From the twenty-sixth of August to the
+ second of September, that is from the battle of Borodinó to the entry of
+ the French into Moscow, during the whole of that agitating, memorable
+ week, there had been the extraordinary autumn weather that always comes as
+ a surprise, when the sun hangs low and gives more heat than in spring,
+ when everything shines so brightly in the rare clear atmosphere that the
+ eyes smart, when the lungs are strengthened and refreshed by inhaling the
+ aromatic autumn air, when even the nights are warm, and when in those dark
+ warm nights, golden stars startle and delight us continually by falling
+ from the sky.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At ten in the morning of the second of September this weather still held.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The brightness of the morning was magical. Moscow seen from the Poklónny
+ Hill lay spaciously spread out with her river, her gardens, and her
+ churches, and she seemed to be living her usual life, her cupolas
+ glittering like stars in the sunlight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The view of the strange city with its peculiar architecture, such as he
+ had never seen before, filled Napoleon with the rather envious and uneasy
+ curiosity men feel when they see an alien form of life that has no
+ knowledge of them. This city was evidently living with the full force of
+ its own life. By the indefinite signs which, even at a distance,
+ distinguish a living body from a dead one, Napoleon from the Poklónny Hill
+ perceived the throb of life in the town and felt, as it were, the
+ breathing of that great and beautiful body.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Every Russian looking at Moscow feels her to be a mother; every foreigner
+ who sees her, even if ignorant of her significance as the mother city,
+ must feel her feminine character, and Napoleon felt it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cette ville asiatique aux innombrables églises, Moscou la sainte. La
+ voilà donc enfin, cette fameuse ville! Il était temps,” * said he, and
+ dismounting he ordered a plan of Moscow to be spread out before him, and
+ summoned Lelorgne d’Ideville, the interpreter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “That Asiatic city of the innumerable churches, holy
+ Moscow! Here it is then at last, that famous city. It was
+ high time.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A town captured by the enemy is like a maid who has lost her honor,”
+ thought he (he had said so to Túchkov at Smolénsk). From that point of
+ view he gazed at the Oriental beauty he had not seen before. It seemed
+ strange to him that his long-felt wish, which had seemed unattainable, had
+ at last been realized. In the clear morning light he gazed now at the city
+ and now at the plan, considering its details, and the assurance of
+ possessing it agitated and awed him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But could it be otherwise?” he thought. “Here is this capital at my feet.
+ Where is Alexander now, and of what is he thinking? A strange, beautiful,
+ and majestic city; and a strange and majestic moment! In what light must I
+ appear to them!” thought he, thinking of his troops. “Here she is, the
+ reward for all those fainthearted men,” he reflected, glancing at those
+ near him and at the troops who were approaching and forming up. “One word
+ from me, one movement of my hand, and that ancient capital of the Tsars
+ would perish. But my clemency is always ready to descend upon the
+ vanquished. I must be magnanimous and truly great. But no, it can’t be
+ true that I am in Moscow,” he suddenly thought. “Yet here she is lying at
+ my feet, with her golden domes and crosses scintillating and twinkling in
+ the sunshine. But I shall spare her. On the ancient monuments of barbarism
+ and despotism I will inscribe great words of justice and mercy.... It is
+ just this which Alexander will feel most painfully, I know him.” (It
+ seemed to Napoleon that the chief import of what was taking place lay in
+ the personal struggle between himself and Alexander.) “From the height of
+ the Krémlin—yes, there is the Krémlin, yes—I will give them
+ just laws; I will teach them the meaning of true civilization, I will make
+ generations of boyars remember their conqueror with love. I will tell the
+ deputation that I did not, and do not, desire war, that I have waged war
+ only against the false policy of their court; that I love and respect
+ Alexander and that in Moscow I will accept terms of peace worthy of myself
+ and of my people. I do not wish to utilize the fortunes of war to
+ humiliate an honored monarch. ‘Boyars,’ I will say to them, ‘I do not
+ desire war, I desire the peace and welfare of all my subjects.’ However, I
+ know their presence will inspire me, and I shall speak to them as I always
+ do: clearly, impressively, and majestically. But can it be true that I am
+ in Moscow? Yes, there she lies.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Qu’on m’amène les boyars,” * said he to his suite.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Bring the boyars to me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A general with a brilliant suite galloped off at once to fetch the boyars.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Two hours passed. Napoleon had lunched and was again standing in the same
+ place on the Poklónny Hill awaiting the deputation. His speech to the
+ boyars had already taken definite shape in his imagination. That speech
+ was full of dignity and greatness as Napoleon understood it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was himself carried away by the tone of magnanimity he intended to
+ adopt toward Moscow. In his imagination he appointed days for assemblies
+ at the palace of the Tsars, at which Russian notables and his own would
+ mingle. He mentally appointed a governor, one who would win the hearts of
+ the people. Having learned that there were many charitable institutions in
+ Moscow he mentally decided that he would shower favors on them all. He
+ thought that, as in Africa he had to put on a burnoose and sit in a
+ mosque, so in Moscow he must be beneficent like the Tsars. And in order
+ finally to touch the hearts of the Russians—and being like all
+ Frenchmen unable to imagine anything sentimental without a reference to ma
+ chère, ma tendre, ma pauvre mère * —he decided that he would place
+ an inscription on all these establishments in large letters: “This
+ establishment is dedicated to my dear mother.” Or no, it should be simply:
+ Maison de ma Mère , *(2) he concluded. “But am I really in Moscow? Yes,
+ here it lies before me, but why is the deputation from the city so long in
+ appearing?” he wondered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “My dear, my tender, my poor mother.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * (2) “House of my Mother.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile an agitated consultation was being carried on in whispers among
+ his generals and marshals at the rear of his suite. Those sent to fetch
+ the deputation had returned with the news that Moscow was empty, that
+ everyone had left it. The faces of those who were not conferring together
+ were pale and perturbed. They were not alarmed by the fact that Moscow had
+ been abandoned by its inhabitants (grave as that fact seemed), but by the
+ question how to tell the Emperor—without putting him in the terrible
+ position of appearing ridiculous—that he had been awaiting the
+ boyars so long in vain: that there were drunken mobs left in Moscow but no
+ one else. Some said that a deputation of some sort must be scraped
+ together, others disputed that opinion and maintained that the Emperor
+ should first be carefully and skillfully prepared, and then told the
+ truth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He will have to be told, all the same,” said some gentlemen of the suite.
+ “But, gentlemen...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The position was the more awkward because the Emperor, meditating upon his
+ magnanimous plans, was pacing patiently up and down before the outspread
+ map, occasionally glancing along the road to Moscow from under his lifted
+ hand with a bright and proud smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But it’s impossible...” declared the gentlemen of the
+ suite, shrugging their shoulders but not venturing to utter the implied
+ word— le ridicule ....
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At last the Emperor, tired of futile expectation, his actor’s instinct
+ suggesting to him that the sublime moment having been too long drawn out
+ was beginning to lose its sublimity, gave a sign with his hand. A single
+ report of a signaling gun followed, and the troops, who were already
+ spread out on different sides of Moscow, moved into the city through the Tver,
+ Kalúga, and Dorogomílov gates. Faster and faster, vying with one another,
+ they moved at the double or at a trot, vanishing amid the clouds of dust
+ they raised and making the air ring with a deafening roar of mingling
+ shouts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Drawn on by the movement of his troops Napoleon rode with them as far as
+ the Dorogomílov gate, but there again stopped and, dismounting from his
+ horse, paced for a long time by the Kámmer-Kollézski rampart, awaiting the
+ deputation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX
+ 
+ 
+ Meanwhile Moscow was empty. There were still people in it, perhaps a
+ fiftieth part of its former inhabitants had remained, but it was empty. It
+ was empty in the sense that a dying queenless hive is empty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In a queenless hive no life is left though to a superficial glance it
+ seems as much alive as other hives.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The bees circle round a queenless hive in the hot beams of the midday sun
+ as gaily as around the living hives; from a distance it smells of honey
+ like the others, and bees fly in and out in the same way. But one has only
+ to observe that hive to realize that there is no longer any life in it.
+ The bees do not fly in the same way, the smell and the sound that meet the
+ beekeeper are not the same. To the beekeeper’s tap on the wall of the sick
+ hive, instead of the former instant unanimous humming of tens of thousands
+ of bees with their abdomens threateningly compressed, and producing by the
+ rapid vibration of their wings an aerial living sound, the only reply is a
+ disconnected buzzing from different parts of the deserted hive. From the
+ alighting board, instead of the former spirituous fragrant smell of honey
+ and venom, and the warm whiffs of crowded life, comes an odor of emptiness
+ and decay mingling with the smell of honey. There are no longer sentinels
+ sounding the alarm with their abdomens raised, and ready to die in defense
+ of the hive. There is no longer the measured quiet sound of throbbing
+ activity, like the sound of boiling water, but diverse discordant sounds
+ of disorder. In and out of the hive long black robber bees smeared with
+ honey fly timidly and shiftily. They do not sting, but crawl away from
+ danger. Formerly only bees laden with honey flew into the hive, and they
+ flew out empty; now they fly out laden. The beekeeper opens the lower part
+ of the hive and peers in. Instead of black, glossy bees—tamed by
+ toil, clinging to one another’s legs and drawing out the wax, with a
+ ceaseless hum of labor—that used to hang in long clusters down to
+ the floor of the hive, drowsy shriveled bees crawl about separately in
+ various directions on the floor and walls of the hive. Instead of a neatly
+ glued floor, swept by the bees with the fanning of their wings, there is a
+ floor littered with bits of wax, excrement, dying bees scarcely moving
+ their legs, and dead ones that have not been cleared away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The beekeeper opens the upper part of the hive and examines the super.
+ Instead of serried rows of bees sealing up every gap in the combs and
+ keeping the brood warm, he sees the skillful complex structures of the
+ combs, but no longer in their former state of purity. All is neglected and
+ foul. Black robber bees are swiftly and stealthily prowling about the
+ combs, and the short home bees, shriveled and listless as if they were
+ old, creep slowly about without trying to hinder the robbers, having lost
+ all motive and all sense of life. Drones, bumblebees, wasps, and
+ butterflies knock awkwardly against the walls of the hive in their flight.
+ Here and there among the cells containing dead brood and honey an angry
+ buzzing can sometimes be heard. Here and there a couple of bees, by force
+ of habit and custom cleaning out the brood cells, with efforts beyond
+ their strength laboriously drag away a dead bee or bumblebee without
+ knowing why they do it. In another corner two old bees are languidly
+ fighting, or cleaning themselves, or feeding one another, without
+ themselves knowing whether they do it with friendly or hostile intent. In
+ a third place a crowd of bees, crushing one another, attack some victim
+ and fight and smother it, and the victim, enfeebled or killed, drops from
+ above slowly and lightly as a feather, among the heap of corpses. The
+ keeper opens the two center partitions to examine the brood cells. In
+ place of the former close dark circles formed by thousands of bees sitting
+ back to back and guarding the high mystery of generation, he sees hundreds
+ of dull, listless, and sleepy shells of bees. They have almost all died
+ unawares, sitting in the sanctuary they had guarded and which is now no
+ more. They reek of decay and death. Only a few of them still move, rise,
+ and feebly fly to settle on the enemy’s hand, lacking the spirit to die
+ stinging him; the rest are dead and fall as lightly as fish scales. The
+ beekeeper closes the hive, chalks a mark on it, and when he has time tears
+ out its contents and burns it clean.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So in the same way Moscow was empty when Napoleon, weary, uneasy, and
+ morose, paced up and down in front of the Kámmer-Kollézski rampart,
+ awaiting what to his mind was a necessary, if but formal, observance of
+ the proprieties—a deputation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In various corners of Moscow there still remained a few people aimlessly
+ moving about, following their old habits and hardly aware of what they
+ were doing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When with due circumspection Napoleon was informed that Moscow was empty,
+ he looked angrily at his informant, turned away, and silently continued to
+ walk to and fro.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My carriage!” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He took his seat beside the aide-de-camp on duty and drove into the
+ suburb. “Moscow deserted!” he said to himself. “What an incredible event!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not drive into the town, but put up at an inn in the Dorogomílov
+ suburb.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The coup de théâtre had not come off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXI
+ 
+ 
+ The Russian troops were passing through Moscow from two o’clock at night
+ till two in the afternoon and bore away with them the wounded and the last
+ of the inhabitants who were leaving.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The greatest crush during the movement of the troops took place at the
+ Stone, Moskvá, and Yaúza bridges.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While the troops, dividing into two parts when passing around the Krémlin,
+ were thronging the Moskvá and the Stone bridges, a great many soldiers,
+ taking advantage of the stoppage and congestion, turned back from the
+ bridges and slipped stealthily and silently past the church of Vasíli the
+ Beatified and under the Borovítski gate, back up the hill to the Red
+ Square where some instinct told them they could easily take things not
+ belonging to them. Crowds of the kind seen at cheap sales filled all the
+ passages and alleys of the Bazaar. But there were no dealers with voices
+ of ingratiating affability inviting customers to enter; there were no
+ hawkers, nor the usual motley crowd of female purchasers—but only
+ soldiers, in uniforms and overcoats though without muskets, entering the
+ Bazaar empty-handed and silently making their way out through its passages
+ with bundles. Tradesmen and their assistants (of whom there were but few)
+ moved about among the soldiers quite bewildered. They unlocked their shops
+ and locked them up again, and themselves carried goods away with the help
+ of their assistants. On the square in front of the Bazaar were drummers
+ beating the muster call. But the roll of the drums did not make the
+ looting soldiers run in the direction of the drum as formerly, but made
+ them, on the contrary, run farther away. Among the soldiers in the shops
+ and passages some men were to be seen in gray coats, with closely shaven
+ heads. Two officers, one with a scarf over his uniform and mounted on a
+ lean, dark-gray horse, the other in an overcoat and on foot, stood at the
+ corner of Ilyínka Street, talking. A third officer galloped up to them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The general orders them all to be driven out at once, without fail. This
+ is outrageous! Half the men have dispersed.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where are you off to?... Where?...” he shouted to three infantrymen
+ without muskets who, holding up the skirts of their overcoats, were
+ slipping past him into the Bazaar passage. “Stop, you rascals!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But how are you going to stop them?” replied another officer. “There is
+ no getting them together. The army should push on before the rest bolt,
+ that’s all!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How can one push on? They are stuck there, wedged on the bridge, and
+ don’t move. Shouldn’t we put a cordon round to prevent the rest from
+ running away?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come, go in there and drive them out!” shouted the senior officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer in the scarf dismounted, called up a drummer, and went with
+ him into the arcade. Some soldiers started running away in a group. A
+ shopkeeper with red pimples on his cheeks near the nose, and a calm,
+ persistent, calculating expression on his plump face, hurriedly and
+ ostentatiously approached the officer, swinging his arms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your honor!” said he. “Be so good as to protect us! We won’t grudge
+ trifles, you are welcome to anything—we shall be delighted! Pray!...
+ I’ll fetch a piece of cloth at once for such an honorable gentleman, or
+ even two pieces with pleasure. For we feel how it is; but what’s all this—sheer
+ robbery! If you please, could not guards be placed if only to let us close
+ the shop....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Several shopkeepers crowded round the officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh, what twaddle!” said one of them, a thin, stern-looking man. “When
+ one’s head is gone one doesn’t weep for one’s hair! Take what any of you
+ like!” And flourishing his arm energetically he turned sideways to the
+ officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s all very well for you, Iván Sidórych, to talk,” said the first
+ tradesman angrily. “Please step inside, your honor!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Talk indeed!” cried the thin one. “In my three shops here I have a
+ hundred thousand rubles’ worth of goods. Can they be saved when the army
+ has gone? Eh, what people! ‘Against God’s might our hands can’t fight.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come inside, your honor!” repeated the tradesman, bowing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer stood perplexed and his face showed indecision.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s not my business!” he exclaimed, and strode on quickly down one of
+ the passages.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From one open shop came the sound of blows and vituperation, and just as
+ the officer came up to it a man in a gray coat with a shaven head was
+ flung out violently.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This man, bent double, rushed past the tradesman and the officer. The
+ officer pounced on the soldiers who were in the shops, but at that moment
+ fearful screams reached them from the huge crowd on the Moskvá bridge and
+ the officer ran out into the square.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it? What is it?” he asked, but his comrade was already galloping
+ off past Vasíli the Beatified in the direction from which the screams
+ came.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer mounted his horse and rode after him. When he reached the
+ bridge he saw two unlimbered guns, the infantry crossing the bridge,
+ several overturned carts, and frightened and laughing faces among the
+ troops. Beside the cannon a cart was standing to which two horses were
+ harnessed. Four borzois with collars were pressing close to the wheels.
+ The cart was loaded high, and at the very top, beside a child’s chair with
+ its legs in the air, sat a peasant woman uttering piercing and desperate
+ shrieks. He was told by his fellow officers that the screams of the crowd
+ and the shrieks of the woman were due to the fact that General Ermólov,
+ coming up to the crowd and learning that soldiers were dispersing among
+ the shops while crowds of civilians blocked the bridge, had ordered two
+ guns to be unlimbered and made a show of firing at the bridge. The crowd,
+ crushing one another, upsetting carts, and shouting and squeezing
+ desperately, had cleared off the bridge and the troops were now moving
+ forward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXII
+ 
+ 
+ Meanwhile, the city itself was deserted. There was hardly anyone in the
+ streets. The gates and shops were all closed, only here and there round
+ the taverns solitary shouts or drunken songs could be heard. Nobody drove
+ through the streets and footsteps were rarely heard. The Povarskáya was
+ quite still and deserted. The huge courtyard of the Rostóvs’ house was
+ littered with wisps of hay and with dung from the horses, and not a soul
+ was to be seen there. In the great drawing room of the house, which had
+ been left with all it contained, were two people. They were the yard
+ porter Ignát, and the page boy Míshka, Vasílich’s grandson who had stayed
+ in Moscow with his grandfather. Míshka had opened the clavichord and was
+ strumming on it with one finger. The yard porter, his arms akimbo, stood
+ smiling with satisfaction before the large mirror.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Isn’t it fine, eh, Uncle Ignát?” said the boy, suddenly beginning to
+ strike the keyboard with both hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Only fancy!” answered Ignát, surprised at the broadening grin on his face
+ in the mirror.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Impudence! Impudence!” they heard behind them the voice of Mávra
+ Kuzmínichna who had entered silently. “How he’s grinning, the fat mug! Is
+ that what you’re here for? Nothing’s cleared away down there and Vasílich
+ is worn out. Just you wait a bit!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ignát left off smiling, adjusted his belt, and went out of the room with
+ meekly downcast eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Aunt, I did it gently,” said the boy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll give you something gently, you monkey you!” cried Mávra Kuzmínichna,
+ raising her arm threateningly. “Go and get the samovar to boil for your
+ grandfather.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mávra Kuzmínichna flicked the dust off the clavichord and closed it, and
+ with a deep sigh left the drawing room and locked its main door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Going out into the yard she paused to consider where she should go next—to
+ drink tea in the servants’ wing with Vasílich, or into the storeroom to
+ put away what still lay about.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She heard the sound of quick footsteps in the quiet street. Someone
+ stopped at the gate, and the latch rattled as someone tried to open it.
+ Mávra Kuzmínichna went to the gate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who do you want?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The count—Count Ilyá Andréevich Rostóv.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And who are you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “An officer, I have to see him,” came the reply in a pleasant, well-bred
+ Russian voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mávra Kuzmínichna opened the gate and an officer of eighteen, with the
+ round face of a Rostóv, entered the yard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They have gone away, sir. Went away yesterday at vespertime,” said Mávra
+ Kuzmínichna cordially.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The young officer standing in the gateway, as if hesitating whether to
+ enter or not, clicked his tongue.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, how annoying!” he muttered. “I should have come yesterday.... Ah,
+ what a pity.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile, Mávra Kuzmínichna was attentively and sympathetically examining
+ the familiar Rostóv features of the young man’s face, his tattered coat
+ and trodden-down boots.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What did you want to see the count for?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh well... it can’t be helped!” said he in a tone of vexation and placed
+ his hand on the gate as if to leave.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He again paused in indecision.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see,” he suddenly said, “I am a kinsman of the count’s and he has
+ been very kind to me. As you see” (he glanced with an amused air and
+ good-natured smile at his coat and boots) “my things are worn out and I
+ have no money, so I was going to ask the count...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mávra Kuzmínichna did not let him finish.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just wait a minute, sir. One little moment,” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And as soon as the officer let go of the gate handle she turned and,
+ hurrying away on her old legs, went through the back yard to the servants’
+ quarters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While Mávra Kuzmínichna was running to her room the officer walked about
+ the yard gazing at his worn-out boots with lowered head and a faint smile
+ on his lips. “What a pity I’ve missed Uncle! What a nice old woman! Where
+ has she run off to? And how am I to find the nearest way to overtake my
+ regiment, which must by now be getting near the Rogózhski gate?” thought
+ he. Just then Mávra Kuzmínichna appeared from behind the corner of the
+ house with a frightened yet resolute look, carrying a rolled-up check
+ kerchief in her hand. While still a few steps from the officer she
+ unfolded the kerchief and took out of it a white twenty-five-ruble
+ assignat and hastily handed it to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If his excellency had been at home, as a kinsman he would of course...
+ but as it is...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Mávra Kuzmínichna grew abashed and confused. The officer did not decline,
+ but took the note quietly and thanked her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If the count had been at home...” Mávra Kuzmínichna went on
+ apologetically. “Christ be with you, sir! May God preserve you!” said she,
+ bowing as she saw him out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Swaying his head and smiling as if amused at himself, the officer ran
+ almost at a trot through the deserted streets toward the Yaúza bridge to
+ overtake his regiment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Mávra Kuzmínichna stood at the closed gate for some time with moist
+ eyes, pensively swaying her head and feeling an unexpected flow of
+ motherly tenderness and pity for the unknown young officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIII
+ 
+ 
+ From an unfinished house on the Varvárka, the ground floor of which was a
+ dramshop, came drunken shouts and songs. On benches round the tables in a
+ dirty little room sat some ten factory hands. Tipsy and perspiring, with
+ dim eyes and wide-open mouths, they were all laboriously singing some song
+ or other. They were singing discordantly, arduously, and with great
+ effort, evidently not because they wished to sing, but because they wanted
+ to show they were drunk and on a spree. One, a tall, fair-haired lad in a
+ clean blue coat, was standing over the others. His face with its fine
+ straight nose would have been handsome had it not been for his thin,
+ compressed, twitching lips and dull, gloomy, fixed eyes. Evidently
+ possessed by some idea, he stood over those who were singing, and solemnly
+ and jerkily flourished above their heads his white arm with the sleeve
+ turned up to the elbow, trying unnaturally to spread out his dirty
+ fingers. The sleeve of his coat kept slipping down and he always carefully
+ rolled it up again with his left hand, as if it were most important that
+ the sinewy white arm he was flourishing should be bare. In the midst of
+ the song cries were heard, and fighting and blows in the passage and
+ porch. The tall lad waved his arm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stop it!” he exclaimed peremptorily. “There’s a fight, lads!” And, still
+ rolling up his sleeve, he went out to the porch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The factory hands followed him. These men, who under the leadership of the
+ tall lad were drinking in the dramshop that morning, had brought the
+ publican some skins from the factory and for this had had drink served
+ them. The blacksmiths from a neighboring smithy, hearing the sounds of
+ revelry in the tavern and supposing it to have been broken into, wished to
+ force their way in too and a fight in the porch had resulted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The publican was fighting one of the smiths at the door, and when the
+ workmen came out the smith, wrenching himself free from the tavern keeper,
+ fell face downward on the pavement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Another smith tried to enter the doorway, pressing against the publican
+ with his chest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The lad with the turned-up sleeve gave the smith a blow in the face and
+ cried wildly: “They’re fighting us, lads!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment the first smith got up and, scratching his bruised face to
+ make it bleed, shouted in a tearful voice: “Police! Murder!... They’ve
+ killed a man, lads!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, gracious me, a man beaten to death—killed!...” screamed a woman
+ coming out of a gate close by.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A crowd gathered round the bloodstained smith.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Haven’t you robbed people enough—taking their last shirts?” said a
+ voice addressing the publican. “What have you killed a man for, you
+ thief?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The tall lad, standing in the porch, turned his bleared eyes from the
+ publican to the smith and back again as if considering whom he ought to
+ fight now.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Murderer!” he shouted suddenly to the publican. “Bind him, lads!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I daresay you would like to bind me!” shouted the publican, pushing away
+ the men advancing on him, and snatching his cap from his head he flung it
+ on the ground.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As if this action had some mysterious and menacing significance, the
+ workmen surrounding the publican paused in indecision.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know the law very well, mates! I’ll take the matter to the captain of
+ police. You think I won’t get to him? Robbery is not permitted to anybody
+ nowadays!” shouted the publican, picking up his cap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come along then! Come along then!” the publican and the tall young fellow
+ repeated one after the other, and they moved up the street together.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The bloodstained smith went beside them. The factory hands and others
+ followed behind, talking and shouting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the corner of the Moroséyka, opposite a large house with closed
+ shutters and bearing a bootmaker’s signboard, stood a score of thin,
+ worn-out, gloomy-faced bootmakers, wearing overalls and long tattered
+ coats.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He should pay folks off properly,” a thin workingman, with frowning brows
+ and a straggly beard, was saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But he’s sucked our blood and now he thinks he’s quit of us. He’s been
+ misleading us all the week and now that he’s brought us to this pass he’s
+ made off.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On seeing the crowd and the bloodstained man the workman ceased speaking,
+ and with eager curiosity all the bootmakers joined the moving crowd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where are all the folks going?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, to the police, of course!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I say, is it true that we have been beaten?” “And what did you think?
+ Look what folks are saying.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Questions and answers were heard. The publican, taking advantage of the
+ increased crowd, dropped behind and returned to his tavern.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The tall youth, not noticing the disappearance of his foe, waved his bare
+ arm and went on talking incessantly, attracting general attention to
+ himself. It was around him that the people chiefly crowded, expecting
+ answers from him to the questions that occupied all their minds.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He must keep order, keep the law, that’s what the government is there
+ for. Am I not right, good Christians?” said the tall youth, with a
+ scarcely perceptible smile. “He thinks there’s no government! How can one
+ do without government? Or else there would be plenty who’d rob us.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why talk nonsense?” rejoined voices in the crowd. “Will they give up
+ Moscow like this? They told you that for fun, and you believed it! Aren’t
+ there plenty of troops on the march? Let him in, indeed! That’s what the
+ government is for. You’d better listen to what people are saying,” said
+ some of the mob pointing to the tall youth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By the wall of China-Town a smaller group of people were gathered round a
+ man in a frieze coat who held a paper in his hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “An ukáse, they are reading an ukáse! Reading an ukáse!” cried voices in
+ the crowd, and the people rushed toward the reader.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The man in the frieze coat was reading the broadsheet of August 31. When
+ the crowd collected round him he seemed confused, but at the demand of the
+ tall lad who had pushed his way up to him, he began in a rather tremulous
+ voice to read the sheet from the beginning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Early tomorrow I shall go to his Serene Highness,” he read ( “Sirin
+ Highness,” said the tall fellow with a triumphant smile on his lips and a
+ frown on his brow), “to consult with him to act, and to aid the army to
+ exterminate these scoundrels. We too will take part...” the reader went
+ on, and then paused (“Do you see,” shouted the youth victoriously, “he’s
+ going to clear up the whole affair for you....”), “in destroying them, and
+ will send these visitors to the devil. I will come back to dinner, and
+ we’ll set to work. We will do, completely do, and undo these scoundrels.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The last words were read out in the midst of complete silence. The tall
+ lad hung his head gloomily. It was evident that no one had understood the
+ last part. In particular, the words “I will come back to dinner,”
+ evidently displeased both reader and audience. The people’s minds were
+ tuned to a high pitch and this was too simple and needlessly
+ comprehensible—it was what any one of them might have said and
+ therefore was what an ukáse emanating from the highest authority should
+ not say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They all stood despondent and silent. The tall youth moved his lips and
+ swayed from side to side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We should ask him... that’s he himself?”... “Yes, ask him indeed!... Why
+ not? He’ll explain”... voices in the rear of the crowd were suddenly heard
+ saying, and the general attention turned to the police superintendent’s
+ trap which drove into the square attended by two mounted dragoons.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The superintendent of police, who had gone that morning by Count
+ Rostopchín’s orders to burn the barges and had in connection with that
+ matter acquired a large sum of money which was at that moment in his
+ pocket, on seeing a crowd bearing down upon him told his coachman to stop.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What people are these?” he shouted to the men, who were moving singly and
+ timidly in the direction of his trap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What people are these?” he shouted again, receiving no answer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your honor...” replied the shopman in the frieze coat, “your honor, in
+ accord with the proclamation of his highest excellency the count, they
+ desire to serve, not sparing their lives, and it is not any kind of riot,
+ but as his highest excellence said...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The count has not left, he is here, and an order will be issued
+ concerning you,” said the superintendent of police. “Go on!” he ordered
+ his coachman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The crowd halted, pressing around those who had heard what the
+ superintendent had said, and looking at the departing trap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The superintendent of police turned round at that moment with a scared
+ look, said something to his coachman, and his horses increased their
+ speed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s a fraud, lads! Lead the way to him, himself!” shouted the tall
+ youth. “Don’t let him go, lads! Let him answer us! Keep him!” shouted
+ different people and the people dashed in pursuit of the trap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Following the superintendent of police and talking loudly the crowd went
+ in the direction of the Lubyánka Street.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now, the gentry and merchants have gone away and left us to perish.
+ Do they think we’re dogs?” voices in the crowd were heard saying more and
+ more frequently.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIV
+ 
+ 
+ On the evening of the first of September, after his interview with
+ Kutúzov, Count Rostopchín had returned to Moscow mortified and offended
+ because he had not been invited to attend the council of war, and because
+ Kutúzov had paid no attention to his offer to take part in the defense of
+ the city; amazed also at the novel outlook revealed to him at the camp,
+ which treated the tranquillity of the capital and its patriotic fervor as
+ not merely secondary but quite irrelevant and unimportant matters.
+ Distressed, offended, and surprised by all this, Rostopchín had returned
+ to Moscow. After supper he lay down on a sofa without undressing, and was
+ awakened soon after midnight by a courier bringing him a letter from
+ Kutúzov. This letter requested the count to send police officers to guide
+ the troops through the town, as the army was retreating to the Ryazán road
+ beyond Moscow. This was not news to Rostopchín. He had known that Moscow
+ would be abandoned not merely since his interview the previous day with
+ Kutúzov on the Poklónny Hill but ever since the battle of Borodinó, for
+ all the generals who came to Moscow after that battle had said unanimously
+ that it was impossible to fight another battle, and since then the
+ government property had been removed every night, and half the inhabitants
+ had left the city with Rostopchín’s own permission. Yet all the same this
+ information astonished and irritated the count, coming as it did in the
+ form of a simple note with an order from Kutúzov, and received at night,
+ breaking in on his beauty sleep.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When later on in his memoirs Count Rostopchín explained his actions at
+ this time, he repeatedly says that he was then actuated by two important
+ considerations: to maintain tranquillity in Moscow and expedite the
+ departure of the inhabitants. If one accepts this twofold aim all
+ Rostopchín’s actions appear irreproachable. “Why were the holy relics, the
+ arms, ammunition, gunpowder, and stores of corn not removed? Why were
+ thousands of inhabitants deceived into believing that Moscow would not be
+ given up—and thereby ruined?” “To preserve the tranquillity of the
+ city,” explains Count Rostopchín. “Why were bundles of useless papers from
+ the government offices, and Leppich’s balloon and other articles removed?”
+ “To leave the town empty,” explains Count Rostopchín. One need only admit
+ that public tranquillity is in danger and any action finds a
+ justification.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the horrors of the reign of terror were based only on solicitude for
+ public tranquillity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On what, then, was Count Rostopchín’s fear for the tranquillity of Moscow
+ based in 1812? What reason was there for assuming any probability of an
+ uprising in the city? The inhabitants were leaving it and the retreating
+ troops were filling it. Why should that cause the masses to riot?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Neither in Moscow nor anywhere in Russia did anything resembling an
+ insurrection ever occur when the enemy entered a town. More than ten
+ thousand people were still in Moscow on the first and second of September,
+ and except for a mob in the governor’s courtyard, assembled there at his
+ bidding, nothing happened. It is obvious that there would have been even
+ less reason to expect a disturbance among the people if after the battle
+ of Borodinó, when the surrender of Moscow became certain or at least
+ probable, Rostopchín instead of exciting the people by distributing arms
+ and broadsheets had taken steps to remove all the holy relics, the
+ gunpowder, munitions, and money, and had told the population plainly that
+ the town would be abandoned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostopchín, though he had patriotic sentiments, was a sanguine and
+ impulsive man who had always moved in the highest administrative circles
+ and had no understanding at all of the people he supposed himself to be
+ guiding. Ever since the enemy’s entry into Smolénsk he had in imagination
+ been playing the role of director of the popular feeling of “the heart of
+ Russia.” Not only did it seem to him (as to all administrators) that he
+ controlled the external actions of Moscow’s inhabitants, but he also
+ thought he controlled their mental attitude by means of his broadsheets
+ and posters, written in a coarse tone which the people despise in their
+ own class and do not understand from those in authority. Rostopchín was so
+ pleased with the fine role of leader of popular feeling, and had grown so
+ used to it, that the necessity of relinquishing that role and abandoning
+ Moscow without any heroic display took him unawares and he suddenly felt
+ the ground slip away from under his feet, so that he positively did not
+ know what to do. Though he knew it was coming, he did not till the last
+ moment wholeheartedly believe that Moscow would be abandoned, and did not
+ prepare for it. The inhabitants left against his wishes. If the government
+ offices were removed, this was only done on the demand of officials to
+ whom the count yielded reluctantly. He was absorbed in the role he had
+ created for himself. As is often the case with those gifted with an ardent
+ imagination, though he had long known that Moscow would be abandoned he
+ knew it only with his intellect, he did not believe it in his heart and
+ did not adapt himself mentally to this new position of affairs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All his painstaking and energetic activity (in how far it was useful and
+ had any effect on the people is another question) had been simply directed
+ toward arousing in the masses his own feeling of patriotic hatred of the
+ French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But when events assumed their true historical character, when expressing
+ hatred for the French in words proved insufficient, when it was not even
+ possible to express that hatred by fighting a battle, when self-confidence
+ was of no avail in relation to the one question before Moscow, when the
+ whole population streamed out of Moscow as one man, abandoning their
+ belongings and proving by that negative action all the depth of their
+ national feeling, then the role chosen by Rostopchín suddenly appeared
+ senseless. He unexpectedly felt himself ridiculous, weak, and alone, with
+ no ground to stand on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When, awakened from his sleep, he received that cold, peremptory note from
+ Kutúzov, he felt the more irritated the more he felt himself to blame. All
+ that he had been specially put in charge of, the state property which he
+ should have removed, was still in Moscow and it was no longer possible to
+ take the whole of it away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who is to blame for it? Who has let things come to such a pass?” he
+ ruminated. “Not I, of course. I had everything ready. I had Moscow firmly
+ in hand. And this is what they have let it come to! Villains! Traitors!”
+ he thought, without clearly defining who the villains and traitors were,
+ but feeling it necessary to hate those traitors whoever they might be who
+ were to blame for the false and ridiculous position in which he found
+ himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All that night Count Rostopchín issued orders, for which people came to
+ him from all parts of Moscow. Those about him had never seen the count so
+ morose and irritable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency, the Director of the Registrar’s Department has sent
+ for instructions.... From the Consistory, from the Senate, from the University,
+ from the Foundling Hospital, the Suffragan has sent... asking for
+ information.... What are your orders about the Fire Brigade? From the
+ governor of the prison... from the superintendent of the lunatic
+ asylum...” All night long such announcements were continually being
+ received by the count.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To all these inquiries he gave brief and angry replies indicating that
+ orders from him were not now needed, that the whole affair, carefully
+ prepared by him, had now been ruined by somebody, and that that somebody
+ would have to bear the whole responsibility for all that might happen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, tell that blockhead,” he said in reply to the question from the
+ Registrar’s Department, “that he should remain to guard his documents.
+ Now why are you asking silly questions about the Fire Brigade? They have
+ horses, let them be off to Vladímir, and not leave them to the French.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency, the superintendent of the lunatic asylum has come: what
+ are your commands?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My commands? Let them go away, that’s all.... And let the lunatics out
+ into the town. When lunatics command our armies God evidently means these
+ other madmen to be free.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In reply to an inquiry about the convicts in the prison, Count Rostopchín
+ shouted angrily at the governor:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you expect me to give you two battalions—which we have not got—for
+ a convoy? Release them, that’s all about it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency, there are some political prisoners, Meshkóv,
+ Vereshchágin...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vereshchágin! Hasn’t he been hanged yet?” shouted Rostopchín. “Bring him
+ to me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXV
+ 
+ 
+ Toward nine o’clock in the morning, when the troops were already moving
+ through Moscow, nobody came to the count any more for instructions. Those
+ who were able to get away were going of their own accord, those who
+ remained behind decided for themselves what they must do.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count ordered his carriage that he might drive to Sokólniki, and sat
+ in his study with folded hands, morose, sallow, and taciturn.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is
+ only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept
+ going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every
+ administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the
+ sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark,
+ holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving,
+ naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But
+ as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to
+ move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently
+ with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving
+ vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a
+ source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostopchín felt this, and it was this which exasperated him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The superintendent of police, whom the crowd had stopped, went in to see
+ him at the same time as an adjutant who informed the count that the horses
+ were harnessed. They were both pale, and the superintendent of police,
+ after reporting that he had executed the instructions he had received,
+ informed the count that an immense crowd had collected in the courtyard
+ and wished to see him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Without saying a word Rostopchín rose and walked hastily to his light,
+ luxurious drawing room, went to the balcony door, took hold of the handle,
+ let it go again, and went to the window from which he had a better view of
+ the whole crowd. The tall lad was standing in front, flourishing his arm
+ and saying something with a stern look. The blood-stained smith stood
+ beside him with a gloomy face. A drone of voices was audible through the
+ closed window.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is my carriage ready?” asked Rostopchín, stepping back from the window.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is, your excellency,” replied the adjutant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostopchín went again to the balcony door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what do they want?” he asked the superintendent of police.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your excellency, they say they have got ready, according to your orders,
+ to go against the French, and they shouted something about treachery. But
+ it is a turbulent crowd, your excellency—I hardly managed to get
+ away from it. Your excellency, I venture to suggest...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You may go. I don’t need you to tell me what to do!” exclaimed Rostopchín
+ angrily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He stood by the balcony door looking at the crowd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This is what they have done with Russia! This is what they have done with
+ me!” thought he, full of an irrepressible fury that welled up within him
+ against the someone to whom what was happening might be attributed. As
+ often happens with passionate people, he was mastered by anger but was
+ still seeking an object on which to vent it. “Here is that mob, the dregs
+ of the people,” he thought as he gazed at the crowd: “this rabble they
+ have roused by their folly! They want a victim,” he thought as he looked
+ at the tall lad flourishing his arm. And this thought occurred to him just
+ because he himself desired a victim, something on which to vent his rage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is the carriage ready?” he asked again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, your excellency. What are your orders about Vereshchágin? He is
+ waiting at the porch,” said the adjutant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah!” exclaimed Rostopchín, as if struck by an unexpected recollection.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And rapidly opening the door he went resolutely out onto the balcony. The
+ talking instantly ceased, hats and caps were doffed, and all eyes were
+ raised to the count.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good morning, lads!” said the count briskly and loudly. “Thank you for
+ coming. I’ll come out to you in a moment, but we must first settle with
+ the villain. We must punish the villain who has caused the ruin of Moscow.
+ Wait for me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the count stepped as briskly back into the room and slammed the door
+ behind him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A murmur of approbation and satisfaction ran through the crowd. “He’ll
+ settle with all the villains, you’ll see! And you said the French... He’ll
+ show you what law is!” the mob were saying as if reproving one another for
+ their lack of confidence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A few minutes later an officer came hurriedly out of the front door, gave
+ an order, and the dragoons formed up in line. The crowd moved eagerly from
+ the balcony toward the porch. Rostopchín, coming out there with quick
+ angry steps, looked hastily around as if seeking someone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where is he?” he inquired. And as he spoke he saw a young man coming
+ round the corner of the house between two dragoons. He had a long thin
+ neck, and his head, that had been half shaved, was again covered by short
+ hair. This young man was dressed in a threadbare blue cloth coat lined
+ with fox fur, that had once been smart, and dirty hempen convict trousers,
+ over which were pulled his thin, dirty, trodden-down boots. On his thin,
+ weak legs were heavy chains which hampered his irresolute movements.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah!” said Rostopchín, hurriedly turning away his eyes from the young man
+ in the fur-lined coat and pointing to the bottom step of the porch. “Put
+ him there.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The young man in his clattering chains stepped clumsily to the spot
+ indicated, holding away with one finger the coat collar which chafed his
+ neck, turned his long neck twice this way and that, sighed, and
+ submissively folded before him his thin hands, unused to work.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For several seconds while the young man was taking his place on the step
+ the silence continued. Only among the back rows of the people, who were
+ all pressing toward the one spot, could sighs, groans, and the shuffling
+ of feet be heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While waiting for the young man to take his place on the step Rostopchín
+ stood frowning and rubbing his face with his hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lads!” said he, with a metallic ring in his voice. “This man,
+ Vereshchágin, is the scoundrel by whose doing Moscow is perishing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The young man in the fur-lined coat, stooping a little, stood in a
+ submissive attitude, his fingers clasped before him. His emaciated young
+ face, disfigured by the half-shaven head, hung down hopelessly. At the
+ count’s first words he raised it slowly and looked up at him as if wishing
+ to say something or at least to meet his eye. But Rostopchín did not look
+ at him. A vein in the young man’s long thin neck swelled like a cord and
+ went blue behind the ear, and suddenly his face flushed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All eyes were fixed on him. He looked at the crowd, and rendered more
+ hopeful by the expression he read on the faces there, he smiled sadly and
+ timidly, and lowering his head shifted his feet on the step.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He has betrayed his Tsar and his country, he has gone over to Bonaparte.
+ He alone of all the Russians has disgraced the Russian name, he has caused
+ Moscow to perish,” said Rostopchín in a sharp, even voice, but suddenly he
+ glanced down at Vereshchágin who continued to stand in the same submissive
+ attitude. As if inflamed by the sight, he raised his arm and addressed the
+ people, almost shouting:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Deal with him as you think fit! I hand him over to you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The crowd remained silent and only pressed closer and closer to one
+ another. To keep one another back, to breathe in that stifling atmosphere,
+ to be unable to stir, and to await something unknown, uncomprehended, and
+ terrible, was becoming unbearable. Those standing in front, who had seen
+ and heard what had taken place before them, all stood with wide-open eyes
+ and mouths, straining with all their strength, and held back the crowd
+ that was pushing behind them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Beat him!... Let the traitor perish and not disgrace the Russian name!”
+ shouted Rostopchín. “Cut him down. I command it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hearing not so much the words as the angry tone of Rostopchín’s voice, the
+ crowd moaned and heaved forward, but again paused.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Count!” exclaimed the timid yet theatrical voice of Vereshchágin in the
+ midst of the momentary silence that ensued, “Count! One God is above us
+ both....” He lifted his head and again the thick vein in his thin neck
+ filled with blood and the color rapidly came and went in his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not finish what he wished to say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Cut him down! I command it...” shouted Rostopchín, suddenly growing pale
+ like Vereshchágin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Draw sabers!” cried the dragoon officer, drawing his own.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Another still stronger wave flowed through the crowd and reaching the
+ front ranks carried it swaying to the very steps of the porch. The tall
+ youth, with a stony look on his face, and rigid and uplifted arm, stood
+ beside Vereshchágin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Saber him!” the dragoon officer almost whispered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And one of the soldiers, his face all at once distorted with fury, struck
+ Vereshchágin on the head with the blunt side of his saber.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah!” cried Vereshchágin in meek surprise, looking round with a frightened
+ glance as if not understanding why this was done to him. A similar moan of
+ surprise and horror ran through the crowd. “O Lord!” exclaimed a sorrowful
+ voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But after the exclamation of surprise that had escaped from Vereshchágin
+ he uttered a plaintive cry of pain, and that cry was fatal. The barrier of
+ human feeling, strained to the utmost, that had held the crowd in check
+ suddenly broke. The crime had begun and must now be completed. The
+ plaintive moan of reproach was drowned by the threatening and angry roar
+ of the crowd. Like the seventh and last wave that shatters a ship, that
+ last irresistible wave burst from the rear and reached the front ranks,
+ carrying them off their feet and engulfing them all. The dragoon was about
+ to repeat his blow. Vereshchágin with a cry of horror, covering his head
+ with his hands, rushed toward the crowd. The tall youth, against whom he
+ stumbled, seized his thin neck with his hands and, yelling wildly, fell
+ with him under the feet of the pressing, struggling crowd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some beat and tore at Vereshchágin, others at the tall youth. And the
+ screams of those that were being trampled on and of those who tried to
+ rescue the tall lad only increased the fury of the crowd. It was a long
+ time before the dragoons could extricate the bleeding youth, beaten almost
+ to death. And for a long time, despite the feverish haste with which the
+ mob tried to end the work that had been begun, those who were hitting,
+ throttling, and tearing at Vereshchágin were unable to kill him, for the
+ crowd pressed from all sides, swaying as one mass with them in the center
+ and rendering it impossible for them either to kill him or let him go.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hit him with an ax, eh!... Crushed?... Traitor, he sold Christ.... Still
+ alive... tenacious... serves him right! Torture serves a thief right. Use
+ the hatchet!... What—still alive?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only when the victim ceased to struggle and his cries changed to a
+ long-drawn, measured death rattle did the crowd around his prostrate,
+ bleeding corpse begin rapidly to change places. Each one came up, glanced
+ at what had been done, and with horror, reproach, and astonishment pushed
+ back again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O Lord! The people are like wild beasts! How could he be alive?” voices
+ in the crowd could be heard saying. “Quite a young fellow too... must have
+ been a merchant’s son. What men!... and they say he’s not the right
+ one.... How not the right one?... O Lord! And there’s another has been
+ beaten too—they say he’s nearly done for.... Oh, the people...
+ Aren’t they afraid of sinning?...” said the same mob now, looking with
+ pained distress at the dead body with its long, thin, half-severed neck
+ and its livid face stained with blood and dust.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A painstaking police officer, considering the presence of a corpse in his
+ excellency’s courtyard unseemly, told the dragoons to take it away. Two
+ dragoons took it by its distorted legs and dragged it along the ground.
+ The gory, dust-stained, half-shaven head with its long neck trailed
+ twisting along the ground. The crowd shrank back from it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the moment when Vereshchágin fell and the crowd closed in with savage
+ yells and swayed about him, Rostopchín suddenly turned pale and, instead
+ of going to the back entrance where his carriage awaited him, went with
+ hurried steps and bent head, not knowing where and why, along the passage
+ leading to the rooms on the ground floor. The count’s face was white and
+ he could not control the feverish twitching of his lower jaw.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This way, your excellency... Where are you going?... This way, please...”
+ said a trembling, frightened voice behind him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Count Rostopchín was unable to reply and, turning obediently, went in the
+ direction indicated. At the back entrance stood his calèche . The distant
+ roar of the yelling crowd was audible even there. He hastily took his seat
+ and told the coachman to drive him to his country house in Sokólniki.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When they reached the Myasnítski Street and could no longer hear the
+ shouts of the mob, the count began to repent. He remembered with
+ dissatisfaction the agitation and fear he had betrayed before his
+ subordinates. “The mob is terrible—disgusting,” he said to himself
+ in French. “They are like wolves whom nothing but flesh can appease.”
+ “Count! One God is above us both!”—Vereshchágin’s words suddenly
+ recurred to him, and a disagreeable shiver ran down his back. But this was
+ only a momentary feeling and Count Rostopchín smiled disdainfully at
+ himself. “I had other duties,” thought he. “The people had to be appeased.
+ Many other victims have perished and are perishing for the public good”—and
+ he began thinking of his social duties to his family and to the city
+ entrusted to him, and of himself—not himself as Theodore Vasílyevich
+ Rostopchín (he fancied that Theodore Vasílyevich Rostopchín was
+ sacrificing himself for the public good) but himself as governor, the
+ representative of authority and of the Tsar. “Had I been simply Theodore
+ Vasílyevich my course of action would have been quite different, but it
+ was my duty to safeguard my life and dignity as commander in chief.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Lightly swaying on the flexible springs of his carriage and no longer
+ hearing the terrible sounds of the crowd, Rostopchín grew physically calm
+ and, as always happens, as soon as he became physically tranquil his mind
+ devised reasons why he should be mentally tranquil too. The thought which
+ tranquillized Rostopchín was not a new one. Since the world began and men
+ have killed one another no one has ever committed such a crime against his
+ fellow man without comforting himself with this same idea. This idea is le
+ bien public , the hypothetical welfare of other people.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To a man not swayed by passion that welfare is never certain, but he who
+ commits such a crime always knows just where that welfare lies. And
+ Rostopchín now knew it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not only did his reason not reproach him for what he had done, but he even
+ found cause for self-satisfaction in having so successfully contrived to
+ avail himself of a convenient opportunity to punish a criminal and at the
+ same time pacify the mob.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vereshchágin was tried and condemned to death,” thought Rostopchín
+ (though the Senate had only condemned Vereshchágin to hard labor), “he was
+ a traitor and a spy. I could not let him go unpunished and so I have
+ killed two birds with one stone: to appease the mob I gave them a victim
+ and at the same time punished a miscreant.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having reached his country house and begun to give orders about domestic
+ arrangements, the count grew quite tranquil.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Half an hour later he was driving with his fast horses across the
+ Sokólniki field, no longer thinking of what had occurred but considering
+ what was to come. He was driving to the Yaúza bridge where he had heard
+ that Kutúzov was. Count Rostopchín was mentally preparing the angry and
+ stinging reproaches he meant to address to Kutúzov for his deception. He
+ would make that foxy old courtier feel that the responsibility for all the
+ calamities that would follow the abandonment of the city and the ruin of
+ Russia (as Rostopchín regarded it) would fall upon his doting old head.
+ Planning beforehand what he would say to Kutúzov, Rostopchín turned
+ angrily in his calèche and gazed sternly from side to side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Sokólniki field was deserted. Only at the end of it, in front of the
+ almshouse and the lunatic asylum, could be seen some people in white and
+ others like them walking singly across the field shouting and
+ gesticulating.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One of these was running to cross the path of Count Rostopchín’s carriage,
+ and the count himself, his coachman, and his dragoons looked with vague
+ horror and curiosity at these released lunatics and especially at the one
+ running toward them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Swaying from side to side on his long, thin legs in his fluttering
+ dressing gown, this lunatic was running impetuously, his gaze fixed on
+ Rostopchín, shouting something in a hoarse voice and making signs to him
+ to stop. The lunatic’s solemn, gloomy face was thin and yellow, with its
+ beard growing in uneven tufts. His black, agate pupils with saffron-yellow
+ whites moved restlessly near the lower eyelids.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Stop! Pull up, I tell you!” he cried in a piercing voice, and again
+ shouted something breathlessly with emphatic intonations and gestures.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Coming abreast of the calèche he ran beside it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thrice have they slain me, thrice have I risen from the dead. They stoned
+ me, crucified me... I shall rise... shall rise... shall rise. They have
+ torn my body. The kingdom of God will be overthrown... Thrice will I
+ overthrow it and thrice re-establish it!” he cried, raising his voice
+ higher and higher.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Count Rostopchín suddenly grew pale as he had done when the crowd closed
+ in on Vereshchágin. He turned away. “Go fas... faster!” he cried in a
+ trembling voice to his coachman. The calèche flew over the ground as fast
+ as the horses could draw it, but for a long time Count Rostopchín still
+ heard the insane despairing screams growing fainter in the distance, while
+ his eyes saw nothing but the astonished, frightened, bloodstained face of
+ “the traitor” in the fur-lined coat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Recent as that mental picture was, Rostopchín already felt that it had cut
+ deep into his heart and drawn blood. Even now he felt clearly that the
+ gory trace of that recollection would not pass with time, but that the
+ terrible memory would, on the contrary, dwell in his heart ever more
+ cruelly and painfully to the end of his life. He seemed still to hear the
+ sound of his own words: “Cut him down! I command it....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why did I utter those words? It was by some accident I said them.... I
+ need not have said them,” he thought. “And then nothing would have
+ happened.” He saw the frightened and then infuriated face of the dragoon
+ who dealt the blow, the look of silent, timid reproach that boy in the
+ fur-lined coat had turned upon him. “But I did not do it for my own sake.
+ I was bound to act that way.... The mob, the traitor... the public
+ welfare,” thought he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Troops were still crowding at the Yaúza bridge. It was hot. Kutúzov,
+ dejected and frowning, sat on a bench by the bridge toying with his whip
+ in the sand when a calèche dashed up noisily. A man in a general’s uniform
+ with plumes in his hat went up to Kutúzov and said something in French. It
+ was Count Rostopchín. He told Kutúzov that he had come because Moscow, the
+ capital, was no more and only the army remained.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Things would have been different if your Serene Highness had not told me
+ that you would not abandon Moscow without another battle; all this would
+ not have happened,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov looked at Rostopchín as if, not grasping what was said to him, he
+ was trying to read something peculiar written at that moment on the face
+ of the man addressing him. Rostopchín grew confused and became silent.
+ Kutúzov slightly shook his head and not taking his penetrating gaze from
+ Rostopchín’s face muttered softly:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No! I shall not give up Moscow without a battle!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whether Kutúzov was thinking of something entirely different when he spoke
+ those words, or uttered them purposely, knowing them to be meaningless, at
+ any rate Rostopchín made no reply and hastily left him. And strange to
+ say, the Governor of Moscow, the proud Count Rostopchín, took up a Cossack
+ whip and went to the bridge where he began with shouts to drive on the
+ carts that blocked the way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVI
+ 
+ 
+ Toward four o’clock in the afternoon Murat’s troops were entering Moscow.
+ In front rode a detachment of Württemberg hussars and behind them rode the
+ King of Naples himself accompanied by a numerous suite.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ About the middle of the Arbát Street, near the Church of the Miraculous
+ Icon of St. Nicholas, Murat halted to await news from the advanced
+ detachment as to the condition in which they had found the citadel, le
+ Kremlin .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Around Murat gathered a group of those who had remained in Moscow. They
+ all stared in timid bewilderment at the strange, long-haired commander
+ dressed up in feathers and gold.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is that their Tsar himself? He’s not bad!” low voices could be heard
+ saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ An interpreter rode up to the group.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Take off your cap... your caps!” These words went from one to another in
+ the crowd. The interpreter addressed an old porter and asked if it was far
+ to the Krémlin. The porter, listening in perplexity to the unfamiliar
+ Polish accent and not realizing that the interpreter was speaking Russian,
+ did not understand what was being said to him and slipped behind the
+ others.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Murat approached the interpreter and told him to ask where the Russian
+ army was. One of the Russians understood what was asked and several voices
+ at once began answering the interpreter. A French officer, returning from
+ the advanced detachment, rode up to Murat and reported that the gates of
+ the citadel had been barricaded and that there was probably an ambuscade
+ there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good!” said Murat and, turning to one of the gentlemen in his suite,
+ ordered four light guns to be moved forward to fire at the gates.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The guns emerged at a trot from the column following Murat and advanced up
+ the Arbát. When they reached the end of the Vozdvízhenka Street they
+ halted and drew in the Square. Several French officers superintended the
+ placing of the guns and looked at the Krémlin through field glasses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The bells in the Krémlin were ringing for vespers, and this sound troubled
+ the French. They imagined it to be a call to arms. A few infantrymen ran
+ to the Kutáfyev Gate. Beams and wooden screens had been put there, and two
+ musket shots rang out from under the gate as soon as an officer and men
+ began to run toward it. A general who was standing by the guns shouted
+ some words of command to the officer, and the latter ran back again with
+ his men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The sound of three more shots came from the gate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One shot struck a French soldier’s foot, and from behind the screens came
+ the strange sound of a few voices shouting. Instantly as at a word of
+ command the expression of cheerful serenity on the faces of the French
+ general, officers, and men changed to one of determined concentrated
+ readiness for strife and suffering. To all of them from the marshal to the
+ least soldier, that place was not the Vozdvízhenka, Mokhaváya, or Kutáfyev
+ Street, nor the Tróitsa Gate (places familiar in Moscow), but a new
+ battlefield which would probably prove sanguinary. And all made ready for
+ that battle. The cries from the gates ceased. The guns were advanced, the
+ artillerymen blew the ash off their linstocks, and an officer gave the
+ word “Fire!” This was followed by two whistling sounds of canister shot,
+ one after another. The shot rattled against the stone of the gate and upon
+ the wooden beams and screens, and two wavering clouds of smoke rose over
+ the Square.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A few instants after the echo of the reports resounding over the
+ stone-built Krémlin had died away the French heard a strange sound above
+ their head. Thousands of crows rose above the walls and circled in the
+ air, cawing and noisily flapping their wings. Together with that sound
+ came a solitary human cry from the gateway and amid the smoke appeared the
+ figure of a bareheaded man in a peasant’s coat. He grasped a musket and
+ took aim at the French. “Fire!” repeated the officer once more, and the
+ reports of a musket and of two cannon shots were heard simultaneously. The
+ gate was again hidden by smoke.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nothing more stirred behind the screens and the French infantry soldiers
+ and officers advanced to the gate. In the gateway lay three wounded and
+ four dead. Two men in peasant coats ran away at the foot of the wall,
+ toward the Známenka.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Clear that away!” said the officer, pointing to the beams and the
+ corpses, and the French soldiers, after dispatching the wounded, threw the
+ corpses over the parapet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Who these men were nobody knew. “Clear that away!” was all that was said
+ of them, and they were thrown over the parapet and removed later on that
+ they might not stink. Thiers alone dedicates a few eloquent lines to their
+ memory: “These wretches had occupied the sacred citadel, having supplied
+ themselves with guns from the arsenal, and fired” (the wretches) “at the
+ French. Some of them were sabered and the Krémlin was purged of their
+ presence.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Murat was informed that the way had been cleared. The French entered the
+ gates and began pitching their camp in the Senate Square. Out of the
+ windows of the Senate House the soldiers threw chairs into the Square for
+ fuel and kindled fires there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Other detachments passed through the Krémlin and encamped along the
+ Moroséyka, the Lubyánka, and Pokróvka Streets. Others quartered themselves
+ along the Vozdvízhenka, the Nikólski, and the Tverskóy Streets. No masters
+ of the houses being found anywhere, the French were not billeted on the
+ inhabitants as is usual in towns but lived in it as in a camp.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though tattered, hungry, worn out, and reduced to a third of their
+ original number, the French entered Moscow in good marching order. It was
+ a weary and famished, but still a fighting and menacing army. But it
+ remained an army only until its soldiers had dispersed into their
+ different lodgings. As soon as the men of the various regiments began to
+ disperse among the wealthy and deserted houses, the army was lost forever
+ and there came into being something nondescript, neither citizens nor
+ soldiers but what are known as marauders. When five weeks later these same
+ men left Moscow, they no longer formed an army. They were a mob of
+ marauders, each carrying a quantity of articles which seemed to him
+ valuable or useful. The aim of each man when he left Moscow was no longer,
+ as it had been, to conquer, but merely to keep what he had acquired. Like
+ a monkey which puts its paw into the narrow neck of a jug, and having
+ seized a handful of nuts will not open its fist for fear of losing what it
+ holds, and therefore perishes, the French when they left Moscow had
+ inevitably to perish because they carried their loot with them, yet to
+ abandon what they had stolen was as impossible for them as it is for the
+ monkey to open its paw and let go of its nuts. Ten minutes after each
+ regiment had entered a Moscow district, not a soldier or officer was left.
+ Men in military uniforms and Hessian boots could be seen through the
+ windows, laughing and walking through the rooms. In cellars and storerooms
+ similar men were busy among the provisions, and in the yards unlocking or
+ breaking open coach house and stable doors, lighting fires in kitchens and
+ kneading and baking bread with rolled-up sleeves, and cooking; or
+ frightening, amusing, or caressing women and children. There were many
+ such men both in the shops and houses—but there was no army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Order after order was issued by the French commanders that day forbidding
+ the men to disperse about the town, sternly forbidding any violence to the
+ inhabitants or any looting, and announcing a roll call for that very
+ evening. But despite all these measures the men, who had till then
+ constituted an army, flowed all over the wealthy, deserted city with its
+ comforts and plentiful supplies. As a hungry herd of cattle keeps well
+ together when crossing a barren field, but gets out of hand and at once
+ disperses uncontrollably as soon as it reaches rich pastures, so did the
+ army disperse all over the wealthy city.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No residents were left in Moscow, and the soldiers—like water
+ percolating through sand—spread irresistibly through the city in all
+ directions from the Krémlin into which they had first marched. The
+ cavalry, on entering a merchant’s house that had been abandoned and
+ finding there stabling more than sufficient for their horses, went on, all
+ the same, to the next house which seemed to them better. Many of them
+ appropriated several houses, chalked their names on them, and quarreled
+ and even fought with other companies for them. Before they had had time to
+ secure quarters the soldiers ran out into the streets to see the city and,
+ hearing that everything had been abandoned, rushed to places where
+ valuables were to be had for the taking. The officers followed to check
+ the soldiers and were involuntarily drawn into doing the same. In Carriage
+ Row carriages had been left in the shops, and generals flocked there to
+ select calèches and coaches for themselves. The few inhabitants who had
+ remained invited commanding officers to their houses, hoping thereby to
+ secure themselves from being plundered. There were masses of wealth and
+ there seemed no end to it. All around the quarters occupied by the French
+ were other regions still unexplored and unoccupied where, they thought,
+ yet greater riches might be found. And Moscow engulfed the army ever
+ deeper and deeper. When water is spilled on dry ground both the dry ground
+ and the water disappear and mud results; and in the same way the entry of
+ the famished army into the rich and deserted city resulted in fires and
+ looting and the destruction of both the army and the wealthy city.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ The French attributed the Fire of Moscow au patriotisme féroce de
+ Rostopchíne , * the Russians to the barbarity of the French. In reality,
+ however, it was not, and could not be, possible to explain the burning of
+ Moscow by making any individual, or any group of people, responsible for
+ it. Moscow was burned because it found itself in a position in which any
+ town built of wood was bound to burn, quite apart from whether it had, or
+ had not, a hundred and thirty inferior fire engines. Deserted Moscow had
+ to burn as inevitably as a heap of shavings has to burn on which sparks
+ continually fall for several days. A town built of wood, where scarcely a
+ day passes without conflagrations when the house owners are in residence
+ and a police force is present, cannot help burning when its inhabitants
+ have left it and it is occupied by soldiers who smoke pipes, make
+ campfires of the Senate chairs in the Senate Square, and cook themselves
+ meals twice a day. In peacetime it is only necessary to billet troops in
+ the villages of any district and the number of fires in that district
+ immediately increases. How much then must the probability of fire be
+ increased in an abandoned, wooden town where foreign troops are quartered.
+ “Le patriotisme féroce de Rostopchíne” and the barbarity of the
+ French were not to blame in the matter. Moscow was set on fire by the
+ soldiers’ pipes, kitchens, and campfires, and by the carelessness of enemy
+ soldiers occupying houses they did not own. Even if there was any arson (which is
+ very doubtful, for no one had any reason to burn the houses—in any
+ case a troublesome and dangerous thing to do), arson cannot be regarded as
+ the cause, for the same thing would have happened without any
+ incendiarism.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * To Rostopchín’s ferocious patriotism.
+
+
+
+ 
+ However tempting it might be for the French to blame Rostopchín’s ferocity
+ and for Russians to blame the scoundrel Bonaparte, or later on to place an
+ heroic torch in the hands of their own people, it is impossible not to see
+ that there could be no such direct cause of the fire, for Moscow had to
+ burn as every village, factory, or house must burn which is left by its
+ owners and in which strangers are allowed to live and cook their porridge.
+ Moscow was burned by its inhabitants, it is true, but by those who had
+ abandoned it and not by those who remained in it. Moscow when occupied by
+ the enemy did not remain intact like Berlin, Vienna, and other towns,
+ simply because its inhabitants abandoned it and did not welcome the French
+ with bread and salt, nor bring them the keys of the city.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVII
+ 
+ 
+ The absorption of the French by Moscow, radiating starwise as it did, only
+ reached the quarter where Pierre was staying by the evening of the second
+ of September.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the last two days spent in solitude and unusual circumstances,
+ Pierre was in a state bordering on insanity. He was completely obsessed by
+ one persistent thought. He did not know how or when this thought had taken
+ such possession of him, but he remembered nothing of the past, understood
+ nothing of the present, and all he saw and heard appeared to him like a
+ dream.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He had left home only to escape the intricate tangle of life’s demands
+ that enmeshed him, and which in his present condition he was unable to
+ unravel. He had gone to Joseph Alexéevich’s house, on the plea of sorting
+ the deceased’s books and papers, only in search of rest from life’s
+ turmoil, for in his mind the memory of Joseph Alexéevich was connected
+ with a world of eternal, solemn, and calm thoughts, quite contrary to the
+ restless confusion into which he felt himself being drawn. He sought a
+ quiet refuge, and in Joseph Alexéevich’s study he really found it. When he
+ sat with his elbows on the dusty writing table in the deathlike stillness
+ of the study, calm and significant memories of the last few days rose one
+ after another in his imagination, particularly of the battle of Borodinó
+ and of that vague sense of his own insignificance and insincerity compared
+ with the truth, simplicity, and strength of the class of men he mentally
+ classed as they . When Gerásim roused him from his reverie the idea
+ occurred to him of taking part in the popular defense of Moscow which he
+ knew was projected. And with that object he had asked Gerásim to get him a
+ peasant’s coat and a pistol, confiding to him his intentions of remaining
+ in Joseph Alexéevich’s house and keeping his name secret. Then during the
+ first day spent in inaction and solitude (he tried several times to fix
+ his attention on the Masonic manuscripts, but was unable to do so) the
+ idea that had previously occurred to him of the cabalistic significance of
+ his name in connection with Bonaparte’s more than once vaguely presented
+ itself. But the idea that he, L’russe Besuhof , was destined to set a limit
+ to the power of the Beast was as yet only one of the fancies that often
+ passed through his mind and left no trace behind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When, having bought the coat merely with the object of taking part among
+ the people in the defense of Moscow, Pierre had met the Rostóvs and
+ Natásha had said to him: “Are you remaining in Moscow?... How splendid!”
+ the thought flashed into his mind that it really would be a good thing,
+ even if Moscow were taken, for him to remain there and do what he was
+ predestined to do.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day, with the sole idea of not sparing himself and not lagging in any
+ way behind them , Pierre went to the Three Hills gate. But when he returned
+ to the house convinced that Moscow would not be defended, he suddenly felt
+ that what before had seemed to him merely a possibility had now become
+ absolutely necessary and inevitable. He must remain in Moscow, concealing
+ his name, and must meet Napoleon and kill him, and either perish or put an
+ end to the misery of all Europe—which it seemed to him was solely
+ due to Napoleon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre knew all the details of the attempt on Bonaparte’s life in 1809 by
+ a German student in Vienna, and knew that the student had been shot. And
+ the risk to which he would expose his life by carrying out his design
+ excited him still more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Two equally strong feelings drew Pierre irresistibly to this purpose. The
+ first was a feeling of the necessity of sacrifice and suffering in view of
+ the common calamity, the same feeling that had caused him to go to
+ Mozháysk on the twenty-fifth and to make his way to the very thick of the
+ battle and had now caused him to run away from his home and, in place of
+ the luxury and comfort to which he was accustomed, to sleep on a hard sofa
+ without undressing and eat the same food as Gerásim. The other was that
+ vague and quite Russian feeling of contempt for everything conventional,
+ artificial, and human—for everything the majority of men regard as
+ the greatest good in the world. Pierre had first experienced this strange
+ and fascinating feeling at the Slobóda Palace, when he had suddenly felt
+ that wealth, power, and life—all that men so painstakingly acquire
+ and guard—if it has any worth has so only by reason of the joy with
+ which it can all be renounced.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was the feeling that induces a volunteer recruit to spend his last
+ penny on drink, and a drunken man to smash mirrors or glasses for no
+ apparent reason and knowing that it will cost him all the money he
+ possesses: the feeling which causes a man to perform actions which from an
+ ordinary point of view are insane, to test, as it were, his personal power
+ and strength, affirming the existence of a higher, nonhuman criterion of
+ life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the very day Pierre had experienced this feeling for the first time
+ at the Slobóda Palace he had been continuously under its influence, but
+ only now found full satisfaction for it. Moreover, at this moment Pierre
+ was supported in his design and prevented from renouncing it by what he
+ had already done in that direction. If he were now to leave Moscow like
+ everyone else, his flight from home, the peasant coat, the pistol, and his
+ announcement to the Rostóvs that he would remain in Moscow would all
+ become not merely meaningless but contemptible and ridiculous, and to this
+ Pierre was very sensitive.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre’s physical condition, as is always the case, corresponded to his
+ mental state. The unaccustomed coarse food, the vodka he drank during
+ those days, the absence of wine and cigars, his dirty unchanged linen, two
+ almost sleepless nights passed on a short sofa without bedding—all
+ this kept him in a state of excitement bordering on insanity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The French had already entered
+ Moscow. Pierre knew this, but instead of acting he only thought about his
+ undertaking, going over its minutest details in his mind. In his fancy he
+ did not clearly picture to himself either the striking of the blow or the
+ death of Napoleon, but with extraordinary vividness and melancholy
+ enjoyment imagined his own destruction and heroic endurance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, alone, for the sake of all, I must do it or perish!” he thought.
+ “Yes, I will approach... and then suddenly... with pistol or dagger? But
+ that is all the same! ‘It is not I but the hand of Providence that
+ punishes thee,’ I shall say,” thought he, imagining what he would say when
+ killing Napoleon. “Well then, take me and execute me!” he went on,
+ speaking to himself and bowing his head with a sad but firm expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While Pierre, standing in the middle of the room, was talking to himself
+ in this way, the study door opened and on the threshold appeared the
+ figure of Makár Alexéevich, always so timid before but now quite
+ transformed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His dressing gown was unfastened, his face red and distorted. He was
+ obviously drunk. On seeing Pierre he grew confused at first, but noticing
+ embarrassment on Pierre’s face immediately grew bold and, staggering on
+ his thin legs, advanced into the middle of the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They’re frightened,” he said confidentially in a hoarse voice. “I say I
+ won’t surrender, I say... Am I not right, sir?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He paused and then suddenly seeing the pistol on the table seized it with
+ unexpected rapidity and ran out into the corridor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Gerásim and the porter, who had followed Makár Alexéevich, stopped him in
+ the vestibule and tried to take the pistol from him. Pierre, coming out
+ into the corridor, looked with pity and repulsion at the half-crazy old
+ man. Makár Alexéevich, frowning with exertion, held on to the pistol and
+ screamed hoarsely, evidently with some heroic fancy in his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To arms! Board them! No, you shan’t get it,” he yelled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That will do, please, that will do. Have the goodness—please, sir,
+ to let go! Please, sir...” pleaded Gerásim, trying carefully to steer
+ Makár Alexéevich by the elbows back to the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who are you? Bonaparte!...” shouted Makár Alexéevich.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s not right, sir. Come to your room, please, and rest. Allow me to
+ have the pistol.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Be off, thou base slave! Touch me not! See this?” shouted Makár
+ Alexéevich, brandishing the pistol. “Board them!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Catch hold!” whispered Gerásim to the porter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They seized Makár Alexéevich by the arms and dragged him to the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The vestibule was filled with the discordant sounds of a struggle and of a
+ tipsy, hoarse voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly a fresh sound, a piercing feminine scream, reverberated from the
+ porch and the cook came running into the vestibule.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s them! Gracious heavens! O Lord, four of them, horsemen!” she cried.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Gerásim and the porter let Makár Alexéevich go, and in the now silent
+ corridor the sound of several hands knocking at the front door could be
+ heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXVIII
+ 
+ 
+ Pierre, having decided that until he had carried out his design he would
+ disclose neither his identity nor his knowledge of French, stood at the
+ half-open door of the corridor, intending to conceal himself as soon as
+ the French entered. But the French entered and still Pierre did not retire—an
+ irresistible curiosity kept him there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There were two of them. One was an officer—a tall, soldierly,
+ handsome man—the other evidently a private or an orderly, sunburned,
+ short, and thin, with sunken cheeks and a dull expression. The officer
+ walked in front, leaning on a stick and slightly limping. When he had
+ advanced a few steps he stopped, having apparently decided that these were
+ good quarters, turned round to the soldiers standing at the entrance, and
+ in a loud voice of command ordered them to put up the horses. Having done
+ that, the officer, lifting his elbow with a smart gesture, stroked his
+ mustache and lightly touched his hat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bonjour, la compagnie!” * said he gaily, smiling and looking about him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Good day, everybody!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No one gave any reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vous êtes le bourgeois?” * the officer asked Gerásim.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Are you the master here?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Gerásim gazed at the officer with an alarmed and inquiring look.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Quartier, quartier, logement!” said the officer, looking down at the
+ little man with a condescending and good-natured smile. “Les français sont
+ de bons enfants. Que diable! Voyons! Ne nous fâchons pas, mon vieux!” *
+ added he, clapping the scared and silent Gerásim on the shoulder. “Well,
+ does no one speak French in this establishment?” he asked again in French,
+ looking around and meeting Pierre’s eyes. Pierre moved away from the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Quarters, quarters, lodgings! The French are good
+ fellows. What the devil! There, don’t let us be cross, old
+ fellow!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again the officer turned to Gerásim and asked him to show him the rooms in
+ the house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Master, not here—don’t understand... me, you...” said Gerásim,
+ trying to render his words more comprehensible by contorting them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Still smiling, the French officer spread out his hands before Gerásim’s
+ nose, intimating that he did not understand him either, and moved,
+ limping, to the door at which Pierre was standing. Pierre wished to go
+ away and conceal himself, but at that moment he saw Makár Alexéevich
+ appearing at the open kitchen door with the pistol in his hand. With a
+ madman’s cunning, Makár Alexéevich eyed the Frenchman, raised his pistol,
+ and took aim.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Board them!” yelled the tipsy man, trying to press the trigger. Hearing
+ the yell the officer turned round, and at the same moment Pierre threw
+ himself on the drunkard. Just when Pierre snatched at and struck up the
+ pistol Makár Alexéevich at last got his fingers on the trigger, there was
+ a deafening report, and all were enveloped in a cloud of smoke. The
+ Frenchman turned pale and rushed to the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Forgetting his intention of concealing his knowledge of French, Pierre,
+ snatching away the pistol and throwing it down, ran up to the officer and
+ addressed him in French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are not wounded?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I think not,” answered the Frenchman, feeling himself over. “But I have
+ had a lucky escape this time,” he added, pointing to the damaged plaster
+ of the wall. “Who is that man?” said he, looking sternly at Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, I am really in despair at what has occurred,” said Pierre rapidly,
+ quite forgetting the part he had intended to play. “He is an unfortunate
+ madman who did not know what he was doing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer went up to Makár Alexéevich and took him by the collar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Makár Alexéevich was standing with parted lips, swaying, as if about to
+ fall asleep, as he leaned against the wall.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Brigand! You shall pay for this,” said the Frenchman, letting go of him.
+ “We French are merciful after victory, but we do not pardon traitors,” he
+ added, with a look of gloomy dignity and a fine energetic gesture.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre continued, in French, to persuade the officer not to hold that
+ drunken imbecile to account. The Frenchman listened in silence with the
+ same gloomy expression, but suddenly turned to Pierre with a smile. For a
+ few seconds he looked at him in silence. His handsome face assumed a
+ melodramatically gentle expression and he held out his hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You have saved my life. You are French,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For a Frenchman that deduction was indubitable. Only a Frenchman could
+ perform a great deed, and to save his life—the life of M. Ramballe,
+ captain of the 13th Light Regiment—was undoubtedly a very great
+ deed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But however indubitable that conclusion and the officer’s conviction based
+ upon it, Pierre felt it necessary to disillusion him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am Russian,” he said quickly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tut, tut, tut! Tell that to others,” said the officer, waving his finger
+ before his nose and smiling. “You shall tell me all about that presently.
+ I am delighted to meet a compatriot. Well, and what are we to do with this
+ man?” he added, addressing himself to Pierre as to a brother.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Even if Pierre were not a Frenchman, having once received that loftiest of
+ human appellations he could not renounce it, said the officer’s look and
+ tone. In reply to his last question Pierre again explained who Makár
+ Alexéevich was and how just before their arrival that drunken imbecile had
+ seized the loaded pistol which they had not had time to recover from him,
+ and begged the officer to let the deed go unpunished.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Frenchman expanded his chest and made a majestic gesture with his arm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You have saved my life! You are French. You ask his pardon? I grant it
+ you. Lead that man away!” said he quickly and energetically, and taking
+ the arm of Pierre whom he had promoted to be a Frenchman for saving his
+ life, he went with him into the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The soldiers in the yard, hearing the shot, came into the passage asking
+ what had happened, and expressed their readiness to punish the culprits,
+ but the officer sternly checked them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You will be called in when you are wanted,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The soldiers went out again, and the orderly, who had meanwhile had time
+ to visit the kitchen, came up to his officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Captain, there is soup and a leg of mutton in the kitchen,” said he.
+ “Shall I serve them up?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, and some wine,” answered the captain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXIX
+ 
+ 
+ When the French officer went into the room with Pierre the latter again
+ thought it his duty to assure him that he was not French and wished to go
+ away, but the officer would not hear of it. He was so very polite,
+ amiable, good-natured, and genuinely grateful to Pierre for saving his
+ life that Pierre had not the heart to refuse, and sat down with him in the
+ parlor—the first room they entered. To Pierre’s assurances that he
+ was not a Frenchman, the captain, evidently not understanding how anyone
+ could decline so flattering an appellation, shrugged his shoulders and
+ said that if Pierre absolutely insisted on passing for a Russian let it be
+ so, but for all that he would be forever bound to Pierre by gratitude for
+ saving his life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Had this man been endowed with the slightest capacity for perceiving the
+ feelings of others, and had he at all understood what Pierre’s feelings
+ were, the latter would probably have left him, but the man’s animated
+ obtuseness to everything other than himself disarmed Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A Frenchman or a Russian prince incognito,” said the officer, looking at
+ Pierre’s fine though dirty linen and at the ring on his finger. “I owe my
+ life to you and offer you my friendship. A Frenchman never forgets either
+ an insult or a service. I offer you my friendship. That is all I can say.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was so much good nature and nobility (in the French sense of the
+ word) in the officer’s voice, in the expression of his face and in his
+ gestures, that Pierre, unconsciously smiling in response to the
+ Frenchman’s smile, pressed the hand held out to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Captain Ramballe, of the 13th Light Regiment, Chevalier of the Legion of
+ Honor for the affair on the seventh of September,” he introduced himself,
+ a self-satisfied irrepressible smile puckering his lips under his
+ mustache. “Will you now be so good as to tell me with whom I have the
+ honor of conversing so pleasantly, instead of being in the ambulance with
+ that maniac’s bullet in my body?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre replied that he could not tell him his name and, blushing, began to
+ try to invent a name and to say something about his reason for concealing
+ it, but the Frenchman hastily interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, please!” said he. “I understand your reasons. You are an officer... a
+ superior officer perhaps. You have borne arms against us. That’s not my
+ business. I owe you my life. That is enough for me. I am quite at your
+ service. You belong to the gentry?” he concluded with a shade of inquiry
+ in his tone. Pierre bent his head. “Your baptismal name, if you please.
+ That is all I ask. Monsieur Pierre, you say.... That’s all I want to
+ know.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the mutton and an omelet had been served and a samovar and vodka
+ brought, with some wine which the French had taken from a Russian cellar
+ and brought with them, Ramballe invited Pierre to share his dinner, and
+ himself began to eat greedily and quickly like a healthy and hungry man,
+ munching his food rapidly with his strong teeth, continually smacking his
+ lips, and repeating—“Excellent! Delicious!” His face grew red and
+ was covered with perspiration. Pierre was hungry and shared the dinner
+ with pleasure. Morel, the orderly, brought some hot water in a saucepan
+ and placed a bottle of claret in it. He also brought a bottle of kvass,
+ taken from the kitchen for them to try. That beverage was already known to
+ the French and had been given a special name. They called it limonade de
+ cochon (pig’s lemonade), and Morel spoke well of the limonade de
+ cochon he had found in the kitchen. But as the captain had the wine they had
+ taken while passing through Moscow, he left the kvass to Morel and applied
+ himself to the bottle of Bordeaux. He wrapped the bottle up to its neck in
+ a table napkin and poured out wine for himself and for Pierre. The
+ satisfaction of his hunger and the wine rendered the captain still more
+ lively and he chatted incessantly all through dinner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, my dear Monsieur Pierre, I owe you a fine votive candle for saving
+ me from that maniac.... You see, I have bullets enough in my body already.
+ Here is one I got at Wagram” (he touched his side) “and a second at
+ Smolénsk”—he showed a scar on his cheek—“and this leg which as
+ you see does not want to march, I got that on the seventh at the great
+ battle of la Moskowa. Sacré Dieu! It was splendid! That deluge of fire was
+ worth seeing. It was a tough job you set us there, my word! You may be
+ proud of it! And on my honor, in spite of the cough I caught there, I
+ should be ready to begin again. I pity those who did not see it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was there,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bah, really? So much the better! You are certainly brave foes. The great
+ redoubt held out well, by my pipe!” continued the Frenchman. “And you made
+ us pay dear for it. I was at it three times—sure as I sit here.
+ Three times we reached the guns and three times we were thrown back like
+ cardboard figures. Oh, it was beautiful, Monsieur Pierre! Your grenadiers
+ were splendid, by heaven! I saw them close up their ranks six times in
+ succession and march as if on parade. Fine fellows! Our King of Naples,
+ who knows what’s what, cried ‘Bravo!’ Ha, ha! So you are one of us
+ soldiers!” he added, smiling, after a momentary pause. “So much the
+ better, so much the better, Monsieur Pierre! Terrible in battle...
+ gallant... with the fair” (he winked and smiled), “that’s what the French
+ are, Monsieur Pierre, aren’t they?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The captain was so naïvely and good-humoredly gay, so real, and so pleased
+ with himself that Pierre almost winked back as he looked merrily at him.
+ Probably the word “gallant” turned the captain’s thoughts to the state of
+ Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Apropos, tell me please, is it true that the women have all left Moscow?
+ What a queer idea! What had they to be afraid of?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Would not the French ladies leave Paris if the Russians entered it?”
+ asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ha, ha, ha!” The Frenchman emitted a merry, sanguine chuckle, patting
+ Pierre on the shoulder. “What a thing to say!” he exclaimed. “Paris?...
+ But Paris, Paris...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Paris—the capital of the world,” Pierre finished his remark for
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The captain looked at Pierre. He had a habit of stopping short in the
+ middle of his talk and gazing intently with his laughing, kindly eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, if you hadn’t told me you were Russian, I should have wagered that
+ you were Parisian! You have that... I don’t know what, that...” and having
+ uttered this compliment, he again gazed at him in silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have been in Paris. I spent years there,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes, one sees that plainly. Paris!... A man who doesn’t know Paris is
+ a savage. You can tell a Parisian two leagues off. Paris is Talma, la
+ Duchénois, Potier, the Sorbonne, the boulevards,” and noticing that his
+ conclusion was weaker than what had gone before, he added quickly: “There
+ is only one Paris in the world. You have been to Paris and have remained
+ Russian. Well, I don’t esteem you the less for it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Under the influence of the wine he had drunk, and after the days he had
+ spent alone with his depressing thoughts, Pierre involuntarily enjoyed
+ talking with this cheerful and good-natured man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To return to your ladies—I hear they are lovely. What a wretched
+ idea to go and bury themselves in the steppes when the French army is in
+ Moscow. What a chance those girls have missed! Your peasants, now—that’s
+ another thing; but you civilized people, you ought to know us better than
+ that. We took Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, Naples, Rome, Warsaw, all the
+ world’s capitals.... We are feared, but we are loved. We are nice to know.
+ And then the Emperor...” he began, but Pierre interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Emperor,” Pierre repeated, and his face suddenly became sad and
+ embarrassed, “is the Emperor...?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Emperor? He is generosity, mercy, justice, order, genius—that’s
+ what the Emperor is! It is I, Ramballe, who tell you so.... I assure you I
+ was his enemy eight years ago. My father was an emigrant count.... But
+ that man has vanquished me. He has taken hold of me. I could not resist
+ the sight of the grandeur and glory with which he has covered France. When
+ I understood what he wanted—when I saw that he was preparing a bed
+ of laurels for us, you know, I said to myself: ‘That is a monarch,’ and I
+ devoted myself to him! So there! Oh yes, mon cher , he is the greatest man
+ of the ages past or future.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is he in Moscow?” Pierre stammered with a guilty look.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Frenchman looked at his guilty face and smiled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, he will make his entry tomorrow,” he replied, and continued his talk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Their conversation was interrupted by the cries of several voices at the
+ gate and by Morel, who came to say that some Württemberg hussars had come
+ and wanted to put up their horses in the yard where the captain’s horses
+ were. This difficulty had arisen chiefly because the hussars did not
+ understand what was said to them in French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The captain had their senior sergeant called in, and in a stern voice
+ asked him to what regiment he belonged, who was his commanding officer,
+ and by what right he allowed himself to claim quarters that were already
+ occupied. The German who knew little French, answered the two first
+ questions by giving the names of his regiment and of his commanding
+ officer, but in reply to the third question which he did not understand
+ said, introducing broken French into his own German, that he was the
+ quartermaster of the regiment and his commander had ordered him to occupy
+ all the houses one after another. Pierre, who knew German, translated what
+ the German said to the captain and gave the captain’s reply to the
+ Württemberg hussar in German. When he had understood what was said to him,
+ the German submitted and took his men elsewhere. The captain went out into
+ the porch and gave some orders in a loud voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he returned to the room Pierre was sitting in the same place as
+ before, with his head in his hands. His face expressed suffering. He
+ really was suffering at that moment. When the captain went out and he was
+ left alone, suddenly he came to himself and realized the position he was
+ in. It was not that Moscow had been taken or that the happy conquerors
+ were masters in it and were patronizing him. Painful as that was it was
+ not that which tormented Pierre at the moment. He was tormented by the
+ consciousness of his own weakness. The few glasses of wine he had drunk
+ and the conversation with this good-natured man had destroyed the mood of
+ concentrated gloom in which he had spent the last few days and which was
+ essential for the execution of his design. The pistol, dagger, and peasant
+ coat were ready. Napoleon was to enter the town next day. Pierre still
+ considered that it would be a useful and worthy action to slay the
+ evildoer, but now he felt that he would not do it. He did not know why,
+ but he felt a foreboding that he would not carry out his intention. He
+ struggled against the confession of his weakness but dimly felt that he
+ could not overcome it and that his former gloomy frame of mind, concerning
+ vengeance, killing, and self-sacrifice, had been dispersed like dust by
+ contact with the first man he met.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The captain returned to the room, limping slightly and whistling a tune.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Frenchman’s chatter which had previously amused Pierre now repelled
+ him. The tune he was whistling, his gait, and the gesture with which he
+ twirled his mustache, all now seemed offensive. “I will go away
+ immediately. I won’t say another word to him,” thought Pierre. He thought
+ this, but still sat in the same place. A strange feeling of weakness tied
+ him to the spot; he wished to get up and go away, but could not do so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The captain, on the other hand, seemed very cheerful. He paced up and down
+ the room twice. His eyes shone and his mustache twitched as if he were
+ smiling to himself at some amusing thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The colonel of those Württembergers is delightful,” he suddenly said.
+ “He’s a German, but a nice fellow all the same.... But he’s a German.” He
+ sat down facing Pierre. “By the way, you know German, then?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked at him in silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is the German for ‘shelter’?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Shelter?” Pierre repeated. “The German for shelter is Unterkunft .”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How do you say it?” the captain asked quickly and doubtfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Unterkunft,” Pierre repeated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Onterkoff,” said the captain and looked at Pierre for some seconds with
+ laughing eyes. “These Germans are first-rate fools, don’t you think so,
+ Monsieur Pierre?” he concluded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, let’s have another bottle of this Moscow Bordeaux, shall we? Morel
+ will warm us up another little bottle. Morel!” he called out gaily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Morel brought candles and a bottle of wine. The captain looked at Pierre
+ by the candlelight and was evidently struck by the troubled expression on
+ his companion’s face. Ramballe, with genuine distress and sympathy in his
+ face, went up to Pierre and bent over him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There now, we’re sad,” said he, touching Pierre’s hand. “Have I upset
+ you? No, really, have you anything against me?” he asked Pierre. “Perhaps
+ it’s the state of affairs?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre did not answer, but looked cordially into the Frenchman’s eyes
+ whose expression of sympathy was pleasing to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Honestly, without speaking of what I owe you, I feel friendship for you.
+ Can I do anything for you? Dispose of me. It is for life and death. I say
+ it with my hand on my heart!” said he, striking his chest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank you,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The captain gazed intently at him as he had done when he learned that
+ “shelter” was Unterkunft in German, and his face suddenly brightened.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, in that case, I drink to our friendship!” he cried gaily, filling
+ two glasses with wine.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre took one of the glasses and emptied it. Ramballe emptied his too,
+ again pressed Pierre’s hand, and leaned his elbows on the table in a
+ pensive attitude.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, my dear friend,” he began, “such is fortune’s caprice. Who would
+ have said that I should be a soldier and a captain of dragoons in the
+ service of Bonaparte, as we used to call him? Yet here I am in Moscow with
+ him. I must tell you, mon cher ,” he continued in the sad and measured
+ tones of a man who intends to tell a long story, “that our name is one of
+ the most ancient in France.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And with a Frenchman’s easy and naïve frankness the captain told Pierre
+ the story of his ancestors, his childhood, youth, and manhood, and all
+ about his relations and his financial and family affairs, “ma pauvre mère” 
+ playing of course an important part in the story.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But all that is only life’s setting, the real thing is love—love!
+ Am I not right, Monsieur Pierre?” said he, growing animated. “Another
+ glass?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre again emptied his glass and poured himself out a third.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, women, women!” and the captain, looking with glistening eyes at
+ Pierre, began talking of love and of his love affairs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There were very many of these, as one could easily believe, looking at the
+ officer’s handsome, self-satisfied face, and noting the eager enthusiasm
+ with which he spoke of women. Though all Ramballe’s love stories had the
+ sensual character which Frenchmen regard as the special charm and poetry
+ of love, yet he told his story with such sincere conviction that he alone
+ had experienced and known all the charm of love and he described women so
+ alluringly that Pierre listened to him with curiosity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was plain that l’amour which the Frenchman was so fond of was not
+ that low and simple kind that Pierre had once felt for his wife, nor was it the
+ romantic love stimulated by himself that he experienced for Natásha.
+ (Ramballe despised both these kinds of love equally: the one he considered
+ the “love of clodhoppers” and the other the “love of
+ simpletons.”) L’amour which the Frenchman worshiped consisted
+ principally in the unnaturalness of his relation to the woman and in a combination
+ of incongruities giving the chief charm to the feeling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thus the captain touchingly recounted the story of his love for a
+ fascinating marquise of thirty-five and at the same time for a charming,
+ innocent child of seventeen, daughter of the bewitching marquise. The
+ conflict of magnanimity between the mother and the daughter, ending in the
+ mother’s sacrificing herself and offering her daughter in marriage to her
+ lover, even now agitated the captain, though it was the memory of a
+ distant past. Then he recounted an episode in which the husband played the
+ part of the lover, and he—the lover—assumed the role of the
+ husband, as well as several droll incidents from his recollections of
+ Germany, where “shelter” is called Unterkunft and where the
+ husbands eat sauerkraut and the young girls are “too blonde.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Finally, the latest episode in Poland still fresh in the captain’s memory,
+ and which he narrated with rapid gestures and glowing face, was of how he
+ had saved the life of a Pole (in general, the saving of life continually
+ occurred in the captain’s stories) and the Pole had entrusted to him his
+ enchanting wife ( parisienne de cœur ) while himself entering the French
+ service. The captain was happy, the enchanting Polish lady wished to elope
+ with him, but, prompted by magnanimity, the captain restored the wife to
+ the husband, saying as he did so: “I have saved your life, and I save your
+ honor!” Having repeated these words the captain wiped his eyes and gave
+ himself a shake, as if driving away the weakness which assailed him at
+ this touching recollection.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Listening to the captain’s tales, Pierre—as often happens late in
+ the evening and under the influence of wine—followed all that was
+ told him, understood it all, and at the same time followed a train of
+ personal memories which, he knew not why, suddenly arose in his mind.
+ While listening to these love stories his own love for Natásha
+ unexpectedly rose to his mind, and going over the pictures of that love in
+ his imagination he mentally compared them with Ramballe’s tales. Listening
+ to the story of the struggle between love and duty, Pierre saw before his
+ eyes every minutest detail of his last meeting with the object of his love
+ at the Súkharev water tower. At the time of that meeting it had not
+ produced an effect upon him—he had not even once recalled it. But
+ now it seemed to him that that meeting had had in it something very
+ important and poetic.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Peter Kirílovich, come here! We have recognized you,” he now seemed to
+ hear the words she had uttered and to see before him her eyes, her smile,
+ her traveling hood, and a stray lock of her hair... and there seemed to
+ him something pathetic and touching in all this.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having finished his tale about the enchanting Polish lady, the captain
+ asked Pierre if he had ever experienced a similar impulse to sacrifice
+ himself for love and a feeling of envy of the legitimate husband.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Challenged by this question Pierre raised his head and felt a need to
+ express the thoughts that filled his mind. He began to explain that he
+ understood love for a woman somewhat differently. He said that in all his
+ life he had loved and still loved only one woman, and that she could never
+ be his.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tiens!” said the captain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre then explained that he had loved this woman from his earliest
+ years, but that he had not dared to think of her because she was too
+ young, and because he had been an illegitimate son without a name.
+ Afterwards when he had received a name and wealth he dared not think of
+ her because he loved her too well, placing her far above everything in the
+ world, and especially therefore above himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he had reached this point, Pierre asked the captain whether he
+ understood that.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The captain made a gesture signifying that even if he did not understand
+ it he begged Pierre to continue.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Platónic love, clouds...” he muttered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whether it was the wine he had drunk, or an impulse of frankness, or the
+ thought that this man did not, and never would, know any of those who
+ played a part in his story, or whether it was all these things together,
+ something loosened Pierre’s tongue. Speaking thickly and with a faraway
+ look in his shining eyes, he told the whole story of his life: his
+ marriage, Natásha’s love for his best friend, her betrayal of him, and all
+ his own simple relations with her. Urged on by Ramballe’s questions he
+ also told what he had at first concealed—his own position and even
+ his name.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ More than anything else in Pierre’s story the captain was impressed by the
+ fact that Pierre was very rich, had two mansions in Moscow, and that he
+ had abandoned everything and not left the city, but remained there
+ concealing his name and station.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When it was late at night they went out together into the street. The
+ night was warm and light. To the left of the house on the Pokróvka a fire
+ glowed—the first of those that were beginning in Moscow. To the
+ right and high up in the sky was the sickle of the waning moon and
+ opposite to it hung that bright comet which was connected in Pierre’s
+ heart with his love. At the gate stood Gerásim, the cook, and two
+ Frenchmen. Their laughter and their mutually incomprehensible remarks in
+ two languages could be heard. They were looking at the glow seen in the
+ town.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was nothing terrible in the one small, distant fire in the immense
+ city.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Gazing at the high starry sky, at the moon, at the comet, and at the glow
+ from the fire, Pierre experienced a joyful emotion. “There now, how good
+ it is, what more does one need?” thought he. And suddenly remembering his
+ intention he grew dizzy and felt so faint that he leaned against the fence
+ to save himself from falling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Without taking leave of his new friend, Pierre left the gate with unsteady
+ steps and returning to his room lay down on the sofa and immediately fell
+ asleep.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXX
+ 
+ 
+ The glow of the first fire that began on the second of September was
+ watched from the various roads by the fugitive Muscovites and by the
+ retreating troops, with many different feelings.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Rostóv party spent the night at Mytíshchi, fourteen miles from Moscow.
+ They had started so late on the first of September, the road had been so
+ blocked by vehicles and troops, so many things had been forgotten for
+ which servants were sent back, that they had decided to spend that night
+ at a place three miles out of Moscow. The next morning they woke late and
+ were again delayed so often that they only got as far as Great Mytíshchi.
+ At ten o’clock that evening the Rostóv family and the wounded traveling
+ with them were all distributed in the yards and huts of that large
+ village. The Rostóvs’ servants and coachmen and the orderlies of the
+ wounded officers, after attending to their masters, had supper, fed the
+ horses, and came out into the porches.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In a neighboring hut lay Raévski’s adjutant with a fractured wrist. The
+ awful pain he suffered made him moan incessantly and piteously, and his
+ moaning sounded terrible in the darkness of the autumn night. He had spent
+ the first night in the same yard as the Rostóvs. The countess said she had
+ been unable to close her eyes on account of his moaning, and at Mytíshchi
+ she moved into a worse hut simply to be farther away from the wounded man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the darkness of the night one of the servants noticed, above the high
+ body of a coach standing before the porch, the small glow of another fire.
+ One glow had long been visible and everybody knew that it was Little
+ Mytíshchi burning—set on fire by Mamónov’s Cossacks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But look here, brothers, there’s another fire!” remarked an orderly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All turned their attention to the glow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But they told us Little Mytíshchi had been set on fire by Mamónov’s
+ Cossacks.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But that’s not Mytíshchi, it’s farther away.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look, it must be in Moscow!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Two of the gazers went round to the other side of the coach and sat down
+ on its steps.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s more to the left, why, Little Mytíshchi is over there, and this is
+ right on the other side.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Several men joined the first two.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “See how it’s flaring,” said one. “That’s a fire in
+ Moscow: either in the Sushchévski or the Rogózhski quarter.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No one replied to this remark and for some time they all gazed silently at
+ the spreading flames of the second fire in the distance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Old Daniel Teréntich, the count’s valet (as he was called), came up to the
+ group and shouted at Míshka.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are you staring at, you good-for-nothing?... The count will be
+ calling and there’s nobody there; go and gather the clothes together.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I only ran out to get some water,” said Míshka.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what do you think, Daniel Teréntich? Doesn’t it look as if that glow
+ were in Moscow?” remarked one of the footmen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Daniel Teréntich made no reply, and again for a long time they were all
+ silent. The glow spread, rising and falling, farther and farther still.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “God have mercy.... It’s windy and dry...” said another voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just look! See what it’s doing now. O Lord! You can even see the crows
+ flying. Lord have mercy on us sinners!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They’ll put it out, no fear!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who’s to put it out?” Daniel Teréntich, who had hitherto been silent, was
+ heard to say. His voice was calm and deliberate. “Moscow it is, brothers,”
+ said he. “Mother Moscow, the white...” his voice faltered, and he gave way
+ to an old man’s sob.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And it was as if they had all only waited for this to realize the
+ significance for them of the glow they were watching. Sighs were heard,
+ words of prayer, and the sobbing of the count’s old valet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXI
+ 
+ 
+ The valet, returning to the cottage, informed the count that Moscow was
+ burning. The count donned his dressing gown and went out to look. Sónya
+ and Madame Schoss, who had not yet undressed, went out with him. Only
+ Natásha and the countess remained in the room. Pétya was no longer with
+ the family, he had gone on with his regiment which was making for Tróitsa.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess, on hearing that Moscow was on fire, began to cry. Natásha,
+ pale, with a fixed look, was sitting on the bench under the icons just
+ where she had sat down on arriving and paid no attention to her father’s
+ words. She was listening to the ceaseless moaning of the adjutant, three
+ houses off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, how terrible,” said Sónya returning from the yard chilled and
+ frightened. “I believe the whole of Moscow will burn, there’s an awful
+ glow! Natásha, do look! You can see it from the window,” she said to her
+ cousin, evidently wishing to distract her mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Natásha looked at her as if not understanding what was said to her and
+ again fixed her eyes on the corner of the stove. She had been in this
+ condition of stupor since the morning, when Sónya, to the surprise and
+ annoyance of the countess, had for some unaccountable reason found it
+ necessary to tell Natásha of Prince Andrew’s wound and of his being with
+ their party. The countess had seldom been so angry with anyone as she was
+ with Sónya. Sónya had cried and begged to be forgiven and now, as if
+ trying to atone for her fault, paid unceasing attention to her cousin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look, Natásha, how dreadfully it is burning!” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s burning?” asked Natásha. “Oh, yes, Moscow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And as if in order not to offend Sónya and to get rid of her, she turned
+ her face to the window, looked out in such a way that it was evident that
+ she could not see anything, and again settled down in her former attitude.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you didn’t see it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, really I did,” Natásha replied in a voice that pleaded to be left in
+ peace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Both the countess and Sónya understood that, naturally, neither Moscow nor
+ the burning of Moscow nor anything else could seem of importance to
+ Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The count returned and lay down behind the partition. The countess went up
+ to her daughter and touched her head with the back of her hand as she was
+ wont to do when Natásha was ill, then touched her forehead with her lips
+ as if to feel whether she was feverish, and finally kissed her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are cold. You are trembling all over. You’d better lie down,” said
+ the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lie down? All right, I will. I’ll lie down at once,” said Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Natásha had been told that morning that Prince Andrew was seriously
+ wounded and was traveling with their party, she had at first asked many
+ questions: Where was he going? How was he wounded? Was it serious? And
+ could she see him? But after she had been told that she could not see him,
+ that he was seriously wounded but that his life was not in danger, she
+ ceased to ask questions or to speak at all, evidently disbelieving what
+ they told her, and convinced that say what she might she would still be
+ told the same. All the way she had sat motionless in a corner of the coach
+ with wide open eyes, and the expression in them which the countess knew so
+ well and feared so much, and now she sat in the same way on the bench
+ where she had seated herself on arriving. She was planning something and
+ either deciding or had already decided something in her mind. The countess
+ knew this, but what it might be she did not know, and this alarmed and
+ tormented her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha, undress, darling; lie down on my bed.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A bed had been made on a bedstead for the countess only. Madame Schoss and
+ the two girls were to sleep on some hay on the floor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Mamma, I will lie down here on the floor,” Natásha replied irritably
+ and she went to the window and opened it. Through the open window the
+ moans of the adjutant could be heard more distinctly. She put her head out
+ into the damp night air, and the countess saw her slim neck shaking with
+ sobs and throbbing against the window frame. Natásha knew it was not
+ Prince Andrew who was moaning. She knew Prince Andrew was in the same yard
+ as themselves and in a part of the hut across the passage; but this
+ dreadful incessant moaning made her sob. The countess exchanged a look
+ with Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lie down, darling; lie down, my pet,” said the countess, softly touching
+ Natásha’s shoulders. “Come, lie down.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, yes... I’ll lie down at once,” said Natásha, and began hurriedly
+ undressing, tugging at the tapes of her petticoat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When she had thrown off her dress and put on a dressing jacket, she sat
+ down with her foot under her on the bed that had been made up on the
+ floor, jerked her thin and rather short plait of hair to the front, and
+ began replaiting it. Her long, thin, practiced fingers rapidly unplaited,
+ replaited, and tied up her plait. Her head moved from side to side from
+ habit, but her eyes, feverishly wide, looked fixedly before her. When her
+ toilet for the night was finished she sank gently onto the sheet spread
+ over the hay on the side nearest the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha, you’d better lie in the middle,” said Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll stay here,” muttered Natásha. “Do lie down,” she added crossly, and
+ buried her face in the pillow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess, Madame Schoss, and Sónya undressed hastily and lay down. The
+ small lamp in front of the icons was the only light left in the room. But
+ in the yard there was a light from the fire at Little Mytíshchi a mile and
+ a half away, and through the night came the noise of people shouting at a
+ tavern Mamónov’s Cossacks had set up across the street, and the adjutant’s
+ unceasing moans could still be heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For a long time Natásha listened attentively to the sounds that reached
+ her from inside and outside the room and did not move. First she heard her
+ mother praying and sighing and the creaking of her bed under her, then
+ Madame Schoss’ familiar whistling snore and Sónya’s gentle breathing. Then
+ the countess called to Natásha. Natásha did not answer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I think she’s asleep, Mamma,” said Sónya softly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After a short silence the countess spoke again but this time no one
+ replied.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon after that Natásha heard her mother’s even breathing. Natásha did not
+ move, though her little bare foot, thrust out from under the quilt, was
+ growing cold on the bare floor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As if to celebrate a victory over everybody, a cricket chirped in a crack
+ in the wall. A cock crowed far off and another replied near by. The
+ shouting in the tavern had died down; only the moaning of the adjutant was
+ heard. Natásha sat up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya, are you asleep? Mamma?” she whispered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No one replied. Natásha rose slowly and carefully, crossed herself, and
+ stepped cautiously on the cold and dirty floor with her slim, supple, bare
+ feet. The boards of the floor creaked. Stepping cautiously from one foot
+ to the other she ran like a kitten the few steps to the door and grasped
+ the cold door handle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It seemed to her that something heavy was beating rhythmically against all
+ the walls of the room: it was her own heart, sinking with alarm and terror
+ and overflowing with love.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She opened the door and stepped across the threshold and onto the cold,
+ damp earthen floor of the passage. The cold she felt refreshed her. With
+ her bare feet she touched a sleeping man, stepped over him, and opened the
+ door into the part of the hut where Prince Andrew lay. It was dark in
+ there. In the farthest corner, on a bench beside a bed on which something
+ was lying, stood a tallow candle with a long, thick, and smoldering wick.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the moment she had been told that morning of Prince Andrew’s wound
+ and his presence there, Natásha had resolved to see him. She did not know
+ why she had to, she knew the meeting would be painful, but felt the more
+ convinced that it was necessary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All day she had lived only in hope of seeing him that night. But now that
+ the moment had come she was filled with dread of what she might see. How
+ was he maimed? What was left of him? Was he like that incessant moaning of
+ the adjutant’s? Yes, he was altogether like that. In her imagination he
+ was that terrible moaning personified. When she saw an indistinct shape in
+ the corner, and mistook his knees raised under the quilt for his
+ shoulders, she imagined a horrible body there, and stood still in terror.
+ But an irresistible impulse drew her forward. She cautiously took one step
+ and then another, and found herself in the middle of a small room
+ containing baggage. Another man—Timókhin—was lying in a corner
+ on the benches beneath the icons, and two others—the doctor and a
+ valet—lay on the floor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The valet sat up and whispered something. Timókhin, kept awake by the pain
+ in his wounded leg, gazed with wide-open eyes at this strange apparition
+ of a girl in a white chemise, dressing jacket, and nightcap. The valet’s
+ sleepy, frightened exclamation, “What do you want? What’s the matter?”
+ made Natásha approach more swiftly to what was lying in the corner.
+ Horribly unlike a man as that body looked, she must see him. She passed
+ the valet, the snuff fell from the candle wick, and she saw Prince Andrew
+ clearly with his arms outside the quilt, and such as she had always seen
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was the same as ever, but the feverish color of his face, his
+ glittering eyes rapturously turned toward her, and especially his neck,
+ delicate as a child’s, revealed by the turn-down collar of his shirt, gave
+ him a peculiarly innocent, childlike look, such as she had never seen on
+ him before. She went up to him and with a swift, flexible, youthful
+ movement dropped on her knees.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He smiled and held out his hand to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXII
+ 
+ 
+ Seven days had passed since Prince Andrew found himself in the ambulance
+ station on the field of Borodinó. His feverish state and the inflammation
+ of his bowels, which were injured, were in the doctor’s opinion sure to
+ carry him off. But on the seventh day he ate with pleasure a piece of
+ bread with some tea, and the doctor noticed that his temperature was
+ lower. He had regained consciousness that morning. The first night after
+ they left Moscow had been fairly warm and he had remained in the calèche ,
+ but at Mytíshchi the wounded man himself asked to be taken out and given
+ some tea. The pain caused by his removal into the hut had made him groan
+ aloud and again lose consciousness. When he had been placed on his camp
+ bed he lay for a long time motionless with closed eyes. Then he opened
+ them and whispered softly: “And the tea?” His remembering such a small
+ detail of everyday life astonished the doctor. He felt Prince Andrew’s
+ pulse, and to his surprise and dissatisfaction found it had improved. He
+ was dissatisfied because he knew by experience that if his patient did not
+ die now, he would do so a little later with greater suffering. Timókhin,
+ the red-nosed major of Prince Andrew’s regiment, had joined him in Moscow
+ and was being taken along with him, having been wounded in the leg at the
+ battle of Borodinó. They were accompanied by a doctor, Prince Andrew’s
+ valet, his coachman, and two orderlies.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They gave Prince Andrew some tea. He drank it eagerly, looking with
+ feverish eyes at the door in front of him as if trying to understand and
+ remember something.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t want any more. Is Timókhin here?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Timókhin crept along the bench to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am here, your excellency.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How’s your wound?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mine, sir? All right. But how about you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew again pondered as if trying to remember something.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Couldn’t one get a book?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What book?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Gospels. I haven’t one.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctor promised to procure it for him and began to ask how he was
+ feeling. Prince Andrew answered all his questions reluctantly but
+ reasonably, and then said he wanted a bolster placed under him as he was
+ uncomfortable and in great pain. The doctor and valet lifted the cloak
+ with which he was covered and, making wry faces at the noisome smell of
+ mortifying flesh that came from the wound, began examining that dreadful
+ place. The doctor was very much displeased about something and made a
+ change in the dressings, turning the wounded man over so that he groaned
+ again and grew unconscious and delirious from the agony. He kept asking
+ them to get him the book and put it under him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What trouble would it be to you?” he said. “I have not got one. Please
+ get it for me and put it under for a moment,” he pleaded in a piteous
+ voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctor went into the passage to wash his hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You fellows have no conscience,” said he to the valet who was pouring
+ water over his hands. “For just one moment I didn’t look after you... It’s
+ such pain, you know, that I wonder how he can bear it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “By the Lord Jesus Christ, I thought we had put something under him!” said
+ the valet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The first time Prince Andrew understood where he was and what was the
+ matter with him and remembered being wounded and how was when he asked to
+ be carried into the hut after his calèche had stopped at Mytíshchi. After
+ growing confused from pain while being carried into the hut he again
+ regained consciousness, and while drinking tea once more recalled all that
+ had happened to him, and above all vividly remembered the moment at the
+ ambulance station when, at the sight of the sufferings of a man he
+ disliked, those new thoughts had come to him which promised him happiness.
+ And those thoughts, though now vague and indefinite, again possessed his
+ soul. He remembered that he had now a new source of happiness and that
+ this happiness had something to do with the Gospels. That was why he asked
+ for a copy of them. The uncomfortable position in which they had put him
+ and turned him over again confused his thoughts, and when he came to
+ himself a third time it was in the complete stillness of the night.
+ Everybody near him was sleeping. A cricket chirped from across the
+ passage; someone was shouting and singing in the street; cockroaches
+ rustled on the table, on the icons, and on the walls, and a big fly
+ flopped at the head of the bed and around the candle beside him, the wick
+ of which was charred and had shaped itself like a mushroom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His mind was not in a normal state. A healthy man usually thinks of,
+ feels, and remembers innumerable things simultaneously, but has the power
+ and will to select one sequence of thoughts or events on which to fix his
+ whole attention. A healthy man can tear himself away from the deepest
+ reflections to say a civil word to someone who comes in and can then
+ return again to his own thoughts. But Prince Andrew’s mind was not in a
+ normal state in that respect. All the powers of his mind were more active
+ and clearer than ever, but they acted apart from his will. Most diverse
+ thoughts and images occupied him simultaneously. At times his brain
+ suddenly began to work with a vigor, clearness, and depth it had never
+ reached when he was in health, but suddenly in the midst of its work it
+ would turn to some unexpected idea and he had not the strength to turn it
+ back again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, a new happiness was revealed to me of which man cannot be deprived,”
+ he thought as he lay in the semidarkness of the quiet hut, gazing fixedly
+ before him with feverish wide open eyes. “A happiness lying beyond
+ material forces, outside the material influences that act on man—a
+ happiness of the soul alone, the happiness of loving. Every man can
+ understand it, but to conceive it and enjoin it was possible only for God.
+ But how did God enjoin that law? And why was the Son...?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And suddenly the sequence of these thoughts broke off, and Prince Andrew
+ heard (without knowing whether it was a delusion or reality) a soft
+ whispering voice incessantly and rhythmically repeating “piti-piti-piti,”
+ and then “titi,” and then again “piti-piti-piti,” and “ti-ti” once more.
+ At the same time he felt that above his face, above the very middle of it,
+ some strange airy structure was being erected out of slender needles or
+ splinters, to the sound of this whispered music. He felt that he had to
+ balance carefully (though it was difficult) so that this airy structure
+ should not collapse; but nevertheless it kept collapsing and again slowly
+ rising to the sound of whispered rhythmic music—“it stretches,
+ stretches, spreading out and stretching,” said Prince Andrew to himself.
+ While listening to this whispering and feeling the sensation of this
+ drawing out and the construction of this edifice of needles, he also saw
+ by glimpses a red halo round the candle, and heard the rustle of the
+ cockroaches and the buzzing of the fly that flopped against his pillow and
+ his face. Each time the fly touched his face it gave him a burning
+ sensation and yet to his surprise it did not destroy the structure, though
+ it knocked against the very region of his face where it was rising. But
+ besides this there was something else of importance. It was something
+ white by the door—the statue of a sphinx, which also oppressed him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But perhaps that’s my shirt on the table,” he thought, “and that’s my
+ legs, and that is the door, but why is it always stretching and drawing
+ itself out, and ‘piti-piti-piti’ and ‘ti-ti’ and ‘piti-piti-piti’...?
+ That’s enough, please leave off!” Prince Andrew painfully entreated
+ someone. And suddenly thoughts and feelings again swam to the surface of
+ his mind with peculiar clearness and force.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes—love,” he thought again quite clearly. “But not love which
+ loves for something, for some quality, for some purpose, or for some
+ reason, but the love which I—while dying—first experienced
+ when I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I experienced that feeling of love
+ which is the very essence of the soul and does not require an object. Now
+ again I feel that bliss. To love one’s neighbors, to love one’s enemies,
+ to love everything, to love God in all His manifestations. It is possible
+ to love someone dear to you with human love, but an enemy can only be
+ loved by divine love. That is why I experienced such joy when I felt that
+ I loved that man. What has become of him? Is he alive?...
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine
+ love cannot change. No, neither death nor anything else can destroy it. It
+ is the very essence of the soul. Yet how many people have I hated in my
+ life? And of them all, I loved and hated none as I did her.” And he
+ vividly pictured to himself Natásha, not as he had done in the past with
+ nothing but her charms which gave him delight, but for the first time
+ picturing to himself her soul. And he understood her feelings, her
+ sufferings, shame, and remorse. He now understood for the first time all
+ the cruelty of his rejection of her, the cruelty of his rupture with her.
+ “If only it were possible for me to see her once more! Just once, looking
+ into those eyes to say...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Piti-piti-piti and ti-ti and piti-piti-piti boom!” flopped the
+ fly.... And his attention was suddenly carried into another world, a world
+ of reality and delirium in which something particular was happening. In that
+ world some structure was still being erected and did not fall, something was
+ still stretching out, and the candle with its red halo was still burning,
+ and the same shirtlike sphinx lay near the door; but besides all this
+ something creaked, there was a whiff of fresh air, and a new white sphinx
+ appeared, standing at the door. And that sphinx had the pale face and
+ shining eyes of the very Natásha of whom he had just been thinking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, how oppressive this continual delirium is,” thought Prince Andrew,
+ trying to drive that face from his imagination. But the face remained
+ before him with the force of reality and drew nearer. Prince Andrew wished
+ to return to that former world of pure thought, but he could not, and
+ delirium drew him back into its domain. The soft whispering voice
+ continued its rhythmic murmur, something oppressed him and stretched out,
+ and the strange face was before him. Prince Andrew collected all his
+ strength in an effort to recover his senses, he moved a little, and
+ suddenly there was a ringing in his ears, a dimness in his eyes, and like
+ a man plunged into water he lost consciousness. When he came to himself,
+ Natásha, that same living Natásha whom of all people he most longed to
+ love with this new pure divine love that had been revealed to him, was
+ kneeling before him. He realized that it was the real living Natásha, and
+ he was not surprised but quietly happy. Natásha, motionless on her knees
+ (she was unable to stir), with frightened eyes riveted on him, was
+ restraining her sobs. Her face was pale and rigid. Only in the lower part
+ of it something quivered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew sighed with relief, smiled, and held out his hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You?” he said. “How fortunate!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With a rapid but careful movement Natásha drew nearer to him on her knees
+ and, taking his hand carefully, bent her face over it and began kissing
+ it, just touching it lightly with her lips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Forgive me!” she whispered, raising her head and glancing at him.
+ “Forgive me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I love you,” said Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Forgive...!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Forgive what?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Forgive me for what I ha-ve do-ne!” faltered Natásha in a scarcely
+ audible, broken whisper, and began kissing his hand more rapidly, just
+ touching it with her lips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I love you more, better than before,” said Prince Andrew, lifting her
+ face with his hand so as to look into her eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Those eyes, filled with happy tears, gazed at him timidly,
+ compassionately, and with joyous love. Natásha’s thin pale face, with its
+ swollen lips, was more than plain—it was dreadful. But Prince Andrew
+ did not see that, he saw her shining eyes which were beautiful. They heard
+ the sound of voices behind them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Peter the valet, who was now wide awake, had roused the doctor. Timókhin,
+ who had not slept at all because of the pain in his leg, had long been
+ watching all that was going on, carefully covering his bare body with the
+ sheet as he huddled up on his bench.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s this?” said the doctor, rising from his bed. “Please go away,
+ madam!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment a maid sent by the countess, who had noticed her daughter’s
+ absence, knocked at the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Like a somnambulist aroused from her sleep Natásha went out of the room
+ and, returning to her hut, fell sobbing on her bed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From that time, during all the rest of the Rostóvs’ journey, at every
+ halting place and wherever they spent a night, Natásha never left the
+ wounded Bolkónski, and the doctor had to admit that he had not expected
+ from a young girl either such firmness or such skill in nursing a wounded
+ man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dreadful as the countess imagined it would be should Prince Andrew die in
+ her daughter’s arms during the journey—as, judging by what the
+ doctor said, it seemed might easily happen—she could not oppose
+ Natásha. Though with the intimacy now established between the wounded man
+ and Natásha the thought occurred that should he recover their former
+ engagement would be renewed, no one—least of all Natásha and Prince
+ Andrew—spoke of this: the unsettled question of life and death,
+ which hung not only over Bolkónski but over all Russia, shut out all other
+ considerations.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXIII
+ 
+ 
+ On the third of September Pierre awoke late. His head was aching, the
+ clothes in which he had slept without undressing felt uncomfortable on his
+ body, and his mind had a dim consciousness of something shameful he had
+ done the day before. That something shameful was his yesterday’s
+ conversation with Captain Ramballe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was eleven by the clock, but it seemed peculiarly dark out of doors.
+ Pierre rose, rubbed his eyes, and seeing the pistol with an engraved stock
+ which Gerásim had replaced on the writing table, he remembered where he
+ was and what lay before him that very day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Am I not too late?” he thought. “No, probably he 
+ won’t make his entry into Moscow before noon.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre did not allow himself to reflect on what lay before him, but
+ hastened to act.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After arranging his clothes, he took the pistol and was about to go out.
+ But it then occurred to him for the first time that he certainly could not
+ carry the weapon in his hand through the streets. It was difficult to hide
+ such a big pistol even under his wide coat. He could not carry it
+ unnoticed in his belt or under his arm. Besides, it had been discharged,
+ and he had not had time to reload it. “No matter, the dagger will
+ do,” he said to himself, though when planning his design he had more than
+ once come to the conclusion that the chief mistake made by the student in 1809
+ had been to try to kill Napoleon with a dagger. But as his chief aim consisted
+ not in carrying out his design, but in proving to himself that he would not
+ abandon his intention and was doing all he could to achieve it, Pierre
+ hastily took the blunt jagged dagger in a green sheath which he had bought
+ at the Súkharev market with the pistol, and hid it under his waistcoat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having tied a girdle over his coat and pulled his cap low on his head,
+ Pierre went down the corridor, trying to avoid making a noise or meeting
+ the captain, and passed out into the street.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The conflagration, at which he had looked with so much indifference the
+ evening before, had greatly increased during the night. Moscow was on fire
+ in several places. The buildings in Carriage Row, across the river, in the
+ Bazaar and the Povarskóy, as well as the barges on the Moskvá River and
+ the timber yards by the Dorogomílov Bridge, were all ablaze.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre’s way led through side streets to the Povarskóy and from there to
+ the church of St. Nicholas on the Arbát, where he had long before decided
+ that the deed should be done. The gates of most of the houses were locked
+ and the shutters up. The streets and lanes were deserted. The air was full
+ of smoke and the smell of burning. Now and then he met Russians with
+ anxious and timid faces, and Frenchmen with an air not of the city but of
+ the camp, walking in the middle of the streets. Both the Russians and the
+ French looked at Pierre with surprise. Besides his height and stoutness,
+ and the strange morose look of suffering in his face and whole figure, the
+ Russians stared at Pierre because they could not make out to what class he
+ could belong. The French followed him with astonishment in their eyes
+ chiefly because Pierre, unlike all the other Russians who gazed at the
+ French with fear and curiosity, paid no attention to them. At the gate of
+ one house three Frenchmen, who were explaining something to some Russians
+ who did not understand them, stopped Pierre asking if he did not know
+ French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre shook his head and went on. In another side street a sentinel
+ standing beside a green caisson shouted at him, but only when the shout
+ was threateningly repeated and he heard the click of the man’s musket as
+ he raised it did Pierre understand that he had to pass on the other side
+ of the street. He heard nothing and saw nothing of what went on around
+ him. He carried his resolution within himself in terror and haste, like
+ something dreadful and alien to him, for, after the previous night’s
+ experience, he was afraid of losing it. But he was not destined to bring
+ his mood safely to his destination. And even had he not been hindered by
+ anything on the way, his intention could not now have been carried out,
+ for Napoleon had passed the Arbát more than four hours previously on his
+ way from the Dorogomílov suburb to the Krémlin, and was now sitting in a
+ very gloomy frame of mind in a royal study in the Krémlin, giving detailed
+ and exact orders as to measures to be taken immediately to extinguish the
+ fire, to prevent looting, and to reassure the inhabitants. But Pierre did
+ not know this; he was entirely absorbed in what lay before him, and was
+ tortured—as those are who obstinately undertake a task that is
+ impossible for them not because of its difficulty but because of its
+ incompatibility with their natures—by the fear of weakening at the
+ decisive moment and so losing his self-esteem.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though he heard and saw nothing around him he found his way by instinct
+ and did not go wrong in the side streets that led to the Povarskóy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As Pierre approached that street the smoke became denser and denser—he
+ even felt the heat of the fire. Occasionally curly tongues of flame rose
+ from under the roofs of the houses. He met more people in the streets and
+ they were more excited. But Pierre, though he felt that something unusual
+ was happening around him, did not realize that he was approaching the
+ fire. As he was going along a footpath across a wide-open space adjoining
+ the Povarskóy on one side and the gardens of Prince Gruzínski’s house on
+ the other, Pierre suddenly heard the desperate weeping of a woman close to
+ him. He stopped as if awakening from a dream and lifted his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By the side of the path, on the dusty dry grass, all sorts of household
+ goods lay in a heap: featherbeds, a samovar, icons, and trunks. On the
+ ground, beside the trunks, sat a thin woman no longer young, with long,
+ prominent upper teeth, and wearing a black cloak and cap. This woman,
+ swaying to and fro and muttering something, was choking with sobs. Two
+ girls of about ten and twelve, dressed in dirty short frocks and cloaks,
+ were staring at their mother with a look of stupefaction on their pale
+ frightened faces. The youngest child, a boy of about seven, who wore an
+ overcoat and an immense cap evidently not his own, was crying in his old
+ nurse’s arms. A dirty, barefooted maid was sitting on a trunk, and, having
+ undone her pale-colored plait, was pulling it straight and sniffing at her
+ singed hair. The woman’s husband, a short, round-shouldered man in the
+ undress uniform of a civilian official, with sausage-shaped whiskers and
+ showing under his square-set cap the hair smoothly brushed forward over
+ his temples, with expressionless face was moving the trunks, which were
+ placed one on another, and was dragging some garments from under them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as she saw Pierre, the woman almost threw herself at his feet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dear people, good Christians, save me, help me, dear friends... help us,
+ somebody,” she muttered between her sobs. “My girl... My daughter! My
+ youngest daughter is left behind. She’s burned! Ooh! Was it for this I
+ nursed you.... Ooh!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t, Mary Nikoláevna!” said her husband to her in a low voice,
+ evidently only to justify himself before the stranger. “Sister must have
+ taken her, or else where can she be?” he added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Monster! Villain!” shouted the woman angrily, suddenly ceasing to weep.
+ “You have no heart, you don’t feel for your own child! Another man would
+ have rescued her from the fire. But this is a monster and neither a man
+ nor a father! You, honored sir, are a noble man,” she went on, addressing
+ Pierre rapidly between her sobs. “The fire broke out alongside, and blew
+ our way, the maid called out ‘Fire!’ and we rushed to collect our things.
+ We ran out just as we were.... This is what we have brought away.... The
+ icons, and my dowry bed, all the rest is lost. We seized the children. But
+ not Katie! Ooh! O Lord!...” and again she began to sob. “My child, my dear
+ one! Burned, burned!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But where was she left?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the expression of his animated face the woman saw that this man might
+ help her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, dear sir!” she cried, seizing him by the legs. “My benefactor, set my
+ heart at ease.... Aníska, go, you horrid girl, show him the way!” she
+ cried to the maid, angrily opening her mouth and still farther exposing
+ her long teeth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Show me the way, show me, I... I’ll do it,” gasped Pierre rapidly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The dirty maidservant stepped from behind the trunk, put up her plait,
+ sighed, and went on her short, bare feet along the path. Pierre felt as if
+ he had come back to life after a heavy swoon. He held his head higher, his
+ eyes shone with the light of life, and with swift steps he followed the
+ maid, overtook her, and came out on the Povarskóy. The whole street was
+ full of clouds of black smoke. Tongues of flame here and there broke
+ through that cloud. A great number of people crowded in front of the
+ conflagration. In the middle of the street stood a French general saying
+ something to those around him. Pierre, accompanied by the maid, was
+ advancing to the spot where the general stood, but the French soldiers
+ stopped him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On ne passe pas!” * cried a voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “You can’t pass!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This way, uncle,” cried the girl. “We’ll pass through
+ the side street, by the Nikúlins’!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre turned back, giving a spring now and then to keep up with her. She
+ ran across the street, turned down a side street to the left, and, passing
+ three houses, turned into a yard on the right.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s here, close by,” said she and, running across the yard, opened a
+ gate in a wooden fence and, stopping, pointed out to him a small wooden
+ wing of the house, which was burning brightly and fiercely. One of its
+ sides had fallen in, another was on fire, and bright flames issued from
+ the openings of the windows and from under the roof.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As Pierre passed through the fence gate, he was enveloped by hot air and
+ involuntarily stopped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Which is it? Which is your house?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ooh!” wailed the girl, pointing to the wing. “That’s it, that was our
+ lodging. You’ve burned to death, our treasure, Katie, my precious little
+ missy! Ooh!” lamented Aníska, who at the sight of the fire felt that she
+ too must give expression to her feelings.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre rushed to the wing, but the heat was so great that he involuntarily
+ passed round in a curve and came upon the large house that was as yet
+ burning only at one end, just below the roof, and around which swarmed a
+ crowd of Frenchmen. At first Pierre did not realize what these men, who
+ were dragging something out, were about; but seeing before him a Frenchman
+ hitting a peasant with a blunt saber and trying to take from him a fox-fur
+ coat, he vaguely understood that looting was going on there, but he had no
+ time to dwell on that idea.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The sounds of crackling and the din of falling walls and ceilings, the
+ whistle and hiss of the flames, the excited shouts of the people, and the
+ sight of the swaying smoke, now gathering into thick black clouds and now
+ soaring up with glittering sparks, with here and there dense sheaves of
+ flame (now red and now like golden fish scales creeping along the walls),
+ and the heat and smoke and rapidity of motion, produced on Pierre the
+ usual animating effects of a conflagration. It had a peculiarly strong
+ effect on him because at the sight of the fire he felt himself suddenly
+ freed from the ideas that had weighed him down. He felt young, bright,
+ adroit, and resolute. He ran round to the other side of the lodge and was
+ about to dash into that part of it which was still standing, when just
+ above his head he heard several voices shouting and then a cracking sound
+ and the ring of something heavy falling close beside him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked up and saw at a window of the large house some Frenchmen who
+ had just thrown out the drawer of a chest, filled with metal articles.
+ Other French soldiers standing below went up to the drawer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What does this fellow want?” shouted one of them referring to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There’s a child in that house. Haven’t you seen a child?” cried Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s he talking about? Get along!” said several voices, and one of the
+ soldiers, evidently afraid that Pierre might want to take from them some
+ of the plate and bronzes that were in the drawer, moved threateningly
+ toward him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A child?” shouted a Frenchman from above. “I did hear something squealing
+ in the garden. Perhaps it’s his brat that the fellow is looking for. After
+ all, one must be human, you know....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where is it? Where?” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There! There!” shouted the Frenchman at the window, pointing to the
+ garden at the back of the house. “Wait a bit—I’m coming down.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And a minute or two later the Frenchman, a black-eyed fellow with a spot
+ on his cheek, in shirt sleeves, really did jump out of a window on the
+ ground floor, and clapping Pierre on the shoulder ran with him into the
+ garden.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hurry up, you others!” he called out to his comrades. “It’s getting hot.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When they reached a gravel path behind the house the Frenchman pulled
+ Pierre by the arm and pointed to a round, graveled space where a
+ three-year-old girl in a pink dress was lying under a seat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There is your child! Oh, a girl, so much the better!” said the Frenchman.
+ “Good-by, Fatty. We must be human, we are all mortal you know!” and the
+ Frenchman with the spot on his cheek ran back to his comrades.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Breathless with joy, Pierre ran to the little girl and was going to take
+ her in his arms. But seeing a stranger the sickly, scrofulous-looking
+ child, unattractively like her mother, began to yell and run away. Pierre,
+ however, seized her and lifted her in his arms. She screamed desperately
+ and angrily and tried with her little hands to pull Pierre’s hands away
+ and to bite them with her slobbering mouth. Pierre was seized by a sense
+ of horror and repulsion such as he had experienced when touching some
+ nasty little animal. But he made an effort not to throw the child down and
+ ran with her to the large house. It was now, however, impossible to get
+ back the way he had come; the maid, Aníska, was no longer there, and
+ Pierre with a feeling of pity and disgust pressed the wet, painfully
+ sobbing child to himself as tenderly as he could and ran with her through
+ the garden seeking another way out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XXXIV
+ 
+ 
+ Having run through different yards and side streets, Pierre got back with
+ his little burden to the Gruzínski garden at the corner of the Povarskóy.
+ He did not at first recognize the place from which he had set out to look
+ for the child, so crowded was it now with people and goods that had been
+ dragged out of the houses. Besides Russian families who had taken refuge
+ here from the fire with their belongings, there were several French
+ soldiers in a variety of clothing. Pierre took no notice of them. He
+ hurried to find the family of that civil servant in order to restore the
+ daughter to her mother and go to save someone else. Pierre felt that he
+ had still much to do and to do quickly. Glowing with the heat and from
+ running, he felt at that moment more strongly than ever the sense of
+ youth, animation, and determination that had come on him when he ran to
+ save the child. She had now become quiet and, clinging with her little
+ hands to Pierre’s coat, sat on his arm gazing about her like some little
+ wild animal. He glanced at her occasionally with a slight smile. He
+ fancied he saw something pathetically innocent in that frightened, sickly
+ little face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not find the civil servant or his wife where he had left them. He
+ walked among the crowd with rapid steps, scanning the various faces he
+ met. Involuntarily he noticed a Georgian or Armenian family consisting of
+ a very handsome old man of Oriental type, wearing a new, cloth-covered,
+ sheepskin coat and new boots, an old woman of similar type, and a young
+ woman. That very young woman seemed to Pierre the perfection of Oriental
+ beauty, with her sharply outlined, arched, black eyebrows and the
+ extraordinarily soft, bright color of her long, beautiful, expressionless
+ face. Amid the scattered property and the crowd on the open space, she, in
+ her rich satin cloak with a bright lilac shawl on her head, suggested a
+ delicate exotic plant thrown out onto the snow. She was sitting on some
+ bundles a little behind the old woman, and looked from under her long
+ lashes with motionless, large, almond-shaped eyes at the ground before
+ her. Evidently she was aware of her beauty and fearful because of it. Her
+ face struck Pierre and, hurrying along by the fence, he turned several
+ times to look at her. When he had reached the fence, still without finding
+ those he sought, he stopped and looked about him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With the child in his arms his figure was now more conspicuous than
+ before, and a group of Russians, both men and women, gathered about him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have you lost anyone, my dear fellow? You’re of the gentry yourself,
+ aren’t you? Whose child is it?” they asked him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre replied that the child belonged to a woman in a black coat who had
+ been sitting there with her other children, and he asked whether anyone
+ knew where she had gone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, that must be the Anférovs,” said an old deacon, addressing a
+ pockmarked peasant woman. “Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy!” he added in
+ his customary bass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Anférovs? No,” said the woman. “They left in the morning. That must
+ be either Mary Nikoláevna’s or the Ivánovs’!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He says ‘a woman,’ and Mary Nikoláevna is a lady,” remarked a house serf.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know her? She’s thin, with long teeth,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s Mary Nikoláevna! They went inside the garden when these wolves
+ swooped down,” said the woman, pointing to the French soldiers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O Lord, have mercy!” added the deacon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go over that way, they’re there. It’s she! She kept on lamenting and
+ crying,” continued the woman. “It’s she. Here, this way!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Pierre was not listening to the woman. He had for some seconds been
+ intently watching what was going on a few steps away. He was looking at
+ the Armenian family and at two French soldiers who had gone up to them.
+ One of these, a nimble little man, was wearing a blue coat tied round the
+ waist with a rope. He had a nightcap on his head and his feet were bare.
+ The other, whose appearance particularly struck Pierre, was a long, lank,
+ round-shouldered, fair-haired man, slow in his movements and with an
+ idiotic expression of face. He wore a woman’s loose gown of frieze, blue
+ trousers, and large torn Hessian boots. The little barefooted Frenchman in
+ the blue coat went up to the Armenians and, saying something, immediately
+ seized the old man by his legs and the old man at once began pulling off
+ his boots. The other in the frieze gown stopped in front of the beautiful
+ Armenian girl and with his hands in his pockets stood staring at her,
+ motionless and silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here, take the child!” said Pierre peremptorily and hurriedly to the
+ woman, handing the little girl to her. “Give her back to them, give her
+ back!” he almost shouted, putting the child, who began screaming, on the
+ ground, and again looking at the Frenchman and the Armenian family.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old man was already sitting barefoot. The little Frenchman had secured
+ his second boot and was slapping one boot against the other. The old man
+ was saying something in a voice broken by sobs, but Pierre caught but a
+ glimpse of this, his whole attention was directed to the Frenchman in the
+ frieze gown who meanwhile, swaying slowly from side to side, had drawn
+ nearer to the young woman and taking his hands from his pockets had seized
+ her by the neck.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The beautiful Armenian still sat motionless and in the same attitude, with
+ her long lashes drooping as if she did not see or feel what the soldier
+ was doing to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While Pierre was running the few steps that separated him from the
+ Frenchman, the tall marauder in the frieze gown was already tearing from
+ her neck the necklace the young Armenian was wearing, and the young woman,
+ clutching at her neck, screamed piercingly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let that woman alone!” exclaimed Pierre hoarsely in a furious voice,
+ seizing the soldier by his round shoulders and throwing him aside.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The soldier fell, got up, and ran away. But his comrade, throwing down the
+ boots and drawing his sword, moved threateningly toward Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Voyons, pas de bêtises!” * he cried.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Look here, no nonsense!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was in such a transport of rage that he remembered nothing and his
+ strength increased tenfold. He rushed at the barefooted Frenchman and,
+ before the latter had time to draw his sword, knocked him off his feet and
+ hammered him with his fists. Shouts of approval were heard from the crowd
+ around, and at the same moment a mounted patrol of French Uhlans appeared
+ from round the corner. The Uhlans came up at a trot to Pierre and the
+ Frenchman and surrounded them. Pierre remembered nothing of what happened
+ after that. He only remembered beating someone and being beaten and
+ finally feeling that his hands were bound and that a crowd of French
+ soldiers stood around him and were searching him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lieutenant, he has a dagger,” were the first words Pierre understood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, a weapon?” said the officer and turned to the barefooted soldier who
+ had been arrested with Pierre. “All right, you can tell all about it at
+ the court-martial.” Then he turned to Pierre. “Do you speak French?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked around him with bloodshot eyes and did not reply. His face
+ probably looked very terrible, for the officer said something in a whisper
+ and four more Uhlans left the ranks and placed themselves on both sides of
+ Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you speak French?” the officer asked again, keeping at a distance from
+ Pierre. “Call the interpreter.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A little man in Russian civilian clothes rode out from the ranks, and by
+ his clothes and manner of speaking Pierre at once knew him to be a French
+ salesman from one of the Moscow shops.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He does not look like a common man,” said the interpreter, after a
+ searching look at Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, he looks very much like an incendiary,” remarked the officer. “And
+ ask him who he is,” he added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who are you?” asked the interpreter in poor Russian. “You must answer the
+ chief.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will not tell you who I am. I am your prisoner—take me!” Pierre
+ suddenly replied in French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, ah!” muttered the officer with a frown. “Well then, march!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A crowd had collected round the Uhlans. Nearest to Pierre stood the
+ pockmarked peasant woman with the little girl, and when the patrol started
+ she moved forward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where are they taking you to, you poor dear?” said she. “And the little
+ girl, the little girl, what am I to do with her if she’s not theirs?” said
+ the woman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What does that woman want?” asked the officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was as if intoxicated. His elation increased at the sight of the
+ little girl he had saved.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What does she want?” he murmured. “She is bringing me my daughter whom I
+ have just saved from the flames,” said he. “Good-by!” And without knowing
+ how this aimless lie had escaped him, he went along with resolute and
+ triumphant steps between the French soldiers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French patrol was one of those sent out through the various streets of
+ Moscow by Durosnel’s order to put a stop to the pillage, and especially to
+ catch the incendiaries who, according to the general opinion which had
+ that day originated among the higher French officers, were the cause of
+ the conflagrations. After marching through a number of streets the patrol
+ arrested five more Russian suspects: a small shopkeeper, two seminary
+ students, a peasant, and a house serf, besides several looters. But of all
+ these various suspected characters, Pierre was considered to be the most
+ suspicious of all. When they had all been brought for the night to a large
+ house on the Zúbov Rampart that was being used as a guardhouse, Pierre was
+ placed apart under strict guard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK TWELVE: 1812
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ In Petersburg at that time a complicated struggle was being carried on
+ with greater heat than ever in the highest circles, between the parties of
+ Rumyántsev, the French, Márya Fëdorovna, the Tsarévich, and others,
+ drowned as usual by the buzzing of the court drones. But the calm,
+ luxurious life of Petersburg, concerned only about phantoms and
+ reflections of real life, went on in its old way and made it hard, except
+ by a great effort, to realize the danger and the difficult position of the
+ Russian people. There were the same receptions and balls, the same French
+ theater, the same court interests and service interests and intrigues as
+ usual. Only in the very highest circles were attempts made to keep in mind
+ the difficulties of the actual position. Stories were whispered of how
+ differently the two Empresses behaved in these difficult circumstances.
+ The Empress Márya, concerned for the welfare of the charitable and
+ educational institutions under her patronage, had given directions that
+ they should all be removed to Kazán, and the things belonging to these
+ institutions had already been packed up. The Empress Elisabeth, however,
+ when asked what instructions she would be pleased to give—with her
+ characteristic Russian patriotism had replied that she could give no
+ directions about state institutions for that was the affair of the
+ sovereign, but as far as she personally was concerned she would be the
+ last to quit Petersburg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At Anna Pávlovna’s on the twenty-sixth of August, the very day of the
+ battle of Borodinó, there was a soiree, the chief feature of which was to
+ be the reading of a letter from His Lordship the Bishop when sending the
+ Emperor an icon of the Venerable Sergius. It was regarded as a model of
+ ecclesiastical, patriotic eloquence. Prince Vasíli himself, famed for his
+ elocution, was to read it. (He used to read at the Empress’.) The art of
+ his reading was supposed to lie in rolling out the words, quite
+ independently of their meaning, in a loud and singsong voice alternating
+ between a despairing wail and a tender murmur, so that the wail fell quite
+ at random on one word and the murmur on another. This reading, as was
+ always the case at Anna Pávlovna’s soirees, had a political significance.
+ That evening she expected several important personages who had to be made
+ ashamed of their visits to the French theater and aroused to a patriotic
+ temper. A good many people had already arrived, but Anna Pávlovna, not yet
+ seeing all those whom she wanted in her drawing room, did not let the
+ reading begin but wound up the springs of a general conversation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The news of the day in Petersburg was the illness of Countess Bezúkhova.
+ She had fallen ill unexpectedly a few days previously, had missed several
+ gatherings of which she was usually the ornament, and was said to be receiving
+ no one, and instead of the celebrated Petersburg doctors who usually
+ attended her had entrusted herself to some Italian doctor who was treating
+ her in some new and unusual way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They all knew very well that the enchanting countess’ illness arose from
+ an inconvenience resulting from marrying two husbands at the same time,
+ and that the Italian’s cure consisted in removing such inconvenience; but
+ in Anna Pávlovna’s presence no one dared to think of this or even appear
+ to know it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They say the poor countess is very ill. The doctor says it is angina
+ pectoris.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Angina? Oh, that’s a terrible illness!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They say that the rivals are reconciled, thanks to the angina...” and
+ the word angina was repeated with great satisfaction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The count is pathetic, they say. He cried like a child when the doctor
+ told him the case was dangerous.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, it would be a terrible loss, she is an enchanting woman.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are speaking of the poor countess?” said Anna Pávlovna, coming up
+ just then. “I sent to ask for news, and hear that she is a little better.
+ Oh, she is certainly the most charming woman in the world,” she went on,
+ with a smile at her own enthusiasm. “We belong to different camps, but
+ that does not prevent my esteeming her as she deserves. She is very
+ unfortunate!” added Anna Pávlovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Supposing that by these words Anna Pávlovna was somewhat lifting the veil
+ from the secret of the countess’ malady, an unwary young man ventured to
+ express surprise that well-known doctors had not been called in and that
+ the countess was being attended by a charlatan who might employ dangerous
+ remedies.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your information may be better than mine,” Anna Pávlovna suddenly and
+ venomously retorted on the inexperienced young man, “but I know on good
+ authority that this doctor is a very learned and able man. He is private
+ physician to the Queen of Spain.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And having thus demolished the young man, Anna Pávlovna turned to another
+ group where Bilíbin was talking about the Austrians: having wrinkled up
+ his face he was evidently preparing to smooth it out again and utter one
+ of his mots.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I think it is delightful,” he said, referring to a diplomatic note that
+ had been sent to Vienna with some Austrian banners captured from the
+ French by Wittgenstein, “the hero of Petropol” as he was then called in
+ Petersburg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What? What’s that?” asked Anna Pávlovna, securing silence for the mot,
+ which she had heard before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Bilíbin repeated the actual words of the diplomatic dispatch, which he
+ had himself composed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Emperor returns these Austrian banners,” said Bilíbin, “friendly
+ banners gone astray and found on a wrong path,” and his brow became smooth
+ again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Charming, charming!” observed Prince Vasíli.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The path to Warsaw, perhaps,” Prince Hippolyte remarked loudly and
+ unexpectedly. Everybody looked at him, understanding what he meant. Prince
+ Hippolyte himself glanced around with amused surprise. He knew no more
+ than the others what his words meant. During his diplomatic career he had
+ more than once noticed that such utterances were received as very witty,
+ and at every opportunity he uttered in that way the first words that
+ entered his head. “It may turn out very well,” he thought, “but if not,
+ they’ll know how to arrange matters.” And really, during the awkward
+ silence that ensued, that insufficiently patriotic person entered whom
+ Anna Pávlovna had been waiting for and wished to convert, and she, smiling
+ and shaking a finger at Hippolyte, invited Prince Vasíli to the table and
+ bringing him two candles and the manuscript begged him to begin. Everyone
+ became silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Most Gracious Sovereign and Emperor!” Prince Vasíli sternly declaimed,
+ looking round at his audience as if to inquire whether anyone had anything
+ to say to the contrary. But no one said anything. “Moscow, our ancient
+ capital, the New Jerusalem, receives her Christ”—he placed a sudden
+ emphasis on the word her —“as a mother receives her zealous sons into
+ her arms, and through the gathering mists, foreseeing the brilliant glory
+ of thy rule, sings in exultation, ‘Hosanna, blessed is he that cometh!’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli pronounced these last words in a tearful voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bilíbin attentively examined his nails, and many of those present appeared
+ intimidated, as if asking in what they were to blame. Anna Pávlovna
+ whispered the next words in advance, like an old woman muttering the
+ prayer at Communion: “Let the bold and insolent Goliath...” she whispered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Vasíli continued.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let the bold and insolent Goliath from the borders of France encompass
+ the realms of Russia with death-bearing terrors; humble Faith, the sling
+ of the Russian David, shall suddenly smite his head in his bloodthirsty
+ pride. This icon of the Venerable Sergius, the servant of God and zealous
+ champion of old of our country’s weal, is offered to Your Imperial
+ Majesty. I grieve that my waning strength prevents rejoicing in the sight
+ of your most gracious presence. I raise fervent prayers to Heaven that the
+ Almighty may exalt the race of the just, and mercifully fulfill the
+ desires of Your Majesty.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What force! What a style!” was uttered in approval both of reader and of
+ author.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Animated by that address Anna Pávlovna’s guests talked for a long time of
+ the state of the fatherland and offered various conjectures as to the
+ result of the battle to be fought in a few days.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You will see,” said Anna Pávlovna, “that tomorrow, on the Emperor’s
+ birthday, we shall receive news. I have a favorable presentiment!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ Anna Pávlovna’s presentiment was in fact fulfilled. Next day during the
+ service at the palace church in honor of the Emperor’s birthday, Prince
+ Volkónski was called out of the church and received a dispatch from Prince
+ Kutúzov. It was Kutúzov’s report, written from Tatárinova on the day of
+ the battle. Kutúzov wrote that the Russians had not retreated a step, that
+ the French losses were much heavier than ours, and that he was writing in
+ haste from the field of battle before collecting full information. It
+ followed that there must have been a victory. And at once, without leaving
+ the church, thanks were rendered to the Creator for His help and for the
+ victory.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Anna Pávlovna’s presentiment was justified, and all that morning a
+ joyously festive mood reigned in the city. Everyone believed the victory
+ to have been complete, and some even spoke of Napoleon’s having been
+ captured, of his deposition, and of the choice of a new ruler for France.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It is very difficult for events to be reflected in their real strength and
+ completeness amid the conditions of court life and far from the scene of
+ action. General events involuntarily group themselves around some
+ particular incident. So now the courtiers’ pleasure was based as much on
+ the fact that the news had arrived on the Emperor’s birthday as on the
+ fact of the victory itself. It was like a successfully arranged surprise.
+ Mention was made in Kutúzov’s report of the Russian losses, among which
+ figured the names of Túchkov, Bagratión, and Kutáysov. In the Petersburg
+ world this sad side of the affair again involuntarily centered round a
+ single incident: Kutáysov’s death. Everybody knew him, the Emperor liked
+ him, and he was young and interesting. That day everyone met with the
+ words:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a wonderful coincidence! Just during the service. But what a loss
+ Kutáysov is! How sorry I am!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What did I tell about Kutúzov?” Prince Vasíli now said with a prophet’s
+ pride. “I always said he was the only man capable of defeating Napoleon.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But next day no news arrived from the army and the public mood grew
+ anxious. The courtiers suffered because of the suffering the suspense
+ occasioned the Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fancy the Emperor’s position!” said they, and instead of extolling
+ Kutúzov as they had done the day before, they condemned him as the cause
+ of the Emperor’s anxiety. That day Prince Vasíli no longer boasted of his
+ protégé Kutúzov, but remained silent when the commander in chief was
+ mentioned. Moreover, toward evening, as if everything conspired to make
+ Petersburg society anxious and uneasy, a terrible piece of news was added.
+ Countess Hélène Bezúkhova had suddenly died of that terrible malady it had
+ been so agreeable to mention. Officially, at large gatherings, everyone
+ said that Countess Bezúkhova had died of a terrible attack of angina
+ pectoris, but in intimate circles details were mentioned of how the
+ private physician of the Queen of Spain had prescribed small doses of a
+ certain drug to produce a certain effect; but Hélène, tortured by the fact
+ that the old count suspected her and that her husband to whom she had
+ written (that wretched, profligate Pierre) had not replied, had suddenly
+ taken a very large dose of the drug, and had died in agony before
+ assistance could be rendered her. It was said that Prince Vasíli and the
+ old count had turned upon the Italian, but the latter had produced such
+ letters from the unfortunate deceased that they had immediately let the
+ matter drop.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Talk in general centered round three melancholy facts: the Emperor’s lack
+ of news, the loss of Kutáysov, and the death of Hélène.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the third day after Kutúzov’s report a country gentleman arrived from
+ Moscow, and news of the surrender of Moscow to the French spread through
+ the whole town. This was terrible! What a position for the Emperor to be
+ in! Kutúzov was a traitor, and Prince Vasíli during the visits of
+ condolence paid to him on the occasion of his daughter’s death said of
+ Kutúzov, whom he had formerly praised (it was excusable for him in his
+ grief to forget what he had said), that it was impossible to expect
+ anything else from a blind and depraved old man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I only wonder that the fate of Russia could have been entrusted to such a
+ man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As long as this news remained unofficial it was possible to doubt it, but
+ the next day the following communication was received from Count
+ Rostopchín:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Kutúzov’s adjutant has brought me a letter in which he demands
+ police officers to guide the army to the Ryazán road. He writes that he is
+ regretfully abandoning Moscow. Sire! Kutúzov’s action decides the fate of
+ the capital and of your empire! Russia will shudder to learn of the
+ abandonment of the city in which her greatness is centered and in which
+ lie the ashes of your ancestors! I shall follow the army. I have had
+ everything removed, and it only remains for me to weep over the fate of my
+ fatherland.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On receiving this dispatch the Emperor sent Prince Volkónski to Kutúzov
+ with the following rescript:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Michael Ilariónovich! Since the twenty-ninth of August I have
+ received no communication from you, yet on the first of September I
+ received from the commander in chief of Moscow, via Yaroslávl, the sad
+ news that you, with the army, have decided to abandon Moscow. You can
+ yourself imagine the effect this news has had on me, and your silence
+ increases my astonishment. I am sending this by Adjutant-General Prince
+ Volkónski, to hear from you the situation of the army and the reasons that
+ have induced you to take this melancholy decision.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ Nine days after the abandonment of Moscow, a messenger from Kutúzov
+ reached Petersburg with the official announcement of that event. This
+ messenger was Michaud, a Frenchman who did not know Russian, but who was
+ quoique étranger, russe de cœur et d’âme, * as he said of himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Though a foreigner, Russian in heart and soul.
+
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor at once received this messenger in his study at the palace on
+ Stone Island. Michaud, who had never seen Moscow before the campaign and
+ who did not know Russian, yet felt deeply moved (as he wrote) when he
+ appeared before notre très gracieux souverain * with the news of the
+ burning of Moscow, dont les flammes éclairaient sa route . *(2)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Our most gracious sovereign.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * (2) Whose flames illumined his route.
+
+
+
+ 
+ Though the source of M. Michaud’s chagrin must have been different from
+ that which caused Russians to grieve, he had such a sad face when shown
+ into the Emperor’s study that the latter at once asked:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have you brought me sad news, Colonel?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very sad, sire,” replied Michaud, lowering his eyes with a sigh. “The
+ abandonment of Moscow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have they surrendered my ancient capital without a battle?” asked the
+ Emperor quickly, his face suddenly flushing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Michaud respectfully delivered the message Kutúzov had entrusted to him,
+ which was that it had been impossible to fight before Moscow, and that as
+ the only remaining choice was between losing the army as well as Moscow,
+ or losing Moscow alone, the field marshal had to choose the latter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor listened in silence, not looking at Michaud.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Has the enemy entered the city?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, sire, and Moscow is now in ashes. I left it all in flames,” replied
+ Michaud in a decided tone, but glancing at the Emperor he was frightened
+ by what he had done.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor began to breathe heavily and rapidly, his lower lip trembled,
+ and tears instantly appeared in his fine blue eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But this lasted only a moment. He suddenly frowned, as if blaming himself
+ for his weakness, and raising his head addressed Michaud in a firm voice:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I see, Colonel, from all that is happening, that Providence requires
+ great sacrifices of us... I am ready to submit myself in all things to His
+ will; but tell me, Michaud, how did you leave the army when it saw my
+ ancient capital abandoned without a battle? Did you not notice
+ discouragement?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Seeing that his most gracious ruler was calm once more, Michaud also grew
+ calm, but was not immediately ready to reply to the Emperor’s direct and
+ relevant question which required a direct answer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sire, will you allow me to speak frankly as befits a loyal soldier?” he
+ asked to gain time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Colonel, I always require it,” replied the Emperor. “Conceal nothing from
+ me, I wish to know absolutely how things are.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sire!” said Michaud with a subtle, scarcely perceptible smile on his
+ lips, having now prepared a well-phrased reply, “sire, I left the whole
+ army, from its chiefs to the lowest soldier, without exception in
+ desperate and agonized terror...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How is that?” the Emperor interrupted him, frowning sternly. “Would
+ misfortune make my Russians lose heart?... Never!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Michaud had only waited for this to bring out the phrase he had prepared.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sire,” he said, with respectful playfulness, “they are only afraid lest
+ Your Majesty, in the goodness of your heart, should allow yourself to be
+ persuaded to make peace. They are burning for the combat,” declared this
+ representative of the Russian nation, “and to prove to Your Majesty by the
+ sacrifice of their lives how devoted they are....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah!” said the Emperor reassured, and with a kindly gleam in his eyes, he
+ patted Michaud on the shoulder. “You set me at ease, Colonel.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He bent his head and was silent for some time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, then, go back to the army,” he said, drawing himself up to his full
+ height and addressing Michaud with a gracious and majestic gesture, “and
+ tell our brave men and all my good subjects wherever you go that when I
+ have not a soldier left I shall put myself at the head of my beloved
+ nobility and my good peasants and so use the last resources of my empire.
+ It still offers me more than my enemies suppose,” said the Emperor growing
+ more and more animated; “but should it ever be ordained by Divine
+ Providence,” he continued, raising to heaven his fine eyes shining with
+ emotion, “that my dynasty should cease to reign on the throne of my
+ ancestors, then after exhausting all the means at my command, I shall let
+ my beard grow to here” (he pointed halfway down his chest) “and go and eat
+ potatoes with the meanest of my peasants, rather than sign the disgrace of
+ my country and of my beloved people whose sacrifices I know how to
+ appreciate.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having uttered these words in an agitated voice the Emperor suddenly
+ turned away as if to hide from Michaud the tears that rose to his eyes,
+ and went to the further end of his study. Having stood there a few
+ moments, he strode back to Michaud and pressed his arm below the elbow
+ with a vigorous movement. The Emperor’s mild and handsome face was flushed
+ and his eyes gleamed with resolution and anger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Colonel Michaud, do not forget what I say to you here, perhaps we may
+ recall it with pleasure someday... Napoleon or I,” said the Emperor,
+ touching his breast. “We can no longer both reign together. I have learned
+ to know him, and he will not deceive me any more....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the Emperor paused, with a frown.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he heard these words and saw the expression of firm resolution in the
+ Emperor’s eyes, Michaud— quoique étranger, russe de cœur et
+ d’âme, —at that solemn moment felt himself enraptured by all that
+ he had heard (as he used afterwards to say), and gave expression to his own
+ feelings and those of the Russian people whose representative he considered
+ himself to be, in the following words:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sire!” said he, “Your Majesty is at this moment signing the glory of the
+ nation and the salvation of Europe!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With an inclination of the head the Emperor dismissed him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ It is natural for us who were not living in those days to imagine that
+ when half Russia had been conquered and the inhabitants were fleeing to
+ distant provinces, and one levy after another was being raised for the
+ defense of the fatherland, all Russians from the greatest to the least
+ were solely engaged in sacrificing themselves, saving their fatherland, or
+ weeping over its downfall. The tales and descriptions of that time without
+ exception speak only of the self-sacrifice, patriotic devotion, despair,
+ grief, and the heroism of the Russians. But it was not really so. It
+ appears so to us because we see only the general historic interest of that
+ time and do not see all the personal human interests that people had. Yet
+ in reality those personal interests of the moment so much transcend the
+ general interests that they always prevent the public interest from being
+ felt or even noticed. Most of the people at that time paid no attention to
+ the general progress of events but were guided only by their private
+ interests, and they were the very people whose activities at that period
+ were most useful.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Those who tried to understand the general course of events and to take
+ part in it by self-sacrifice and heroism were the most useless members of
+ society, they saw everything upside down, and all they did for the common
+ good turned out to be useless and foolish—like Pierre’s and
+ Mamónov’s regiments which looted Russian villages, and the lint the young
+ ladies prepared and that never reached the wounded, and so on. Even those,
+ fond of intellectual talk and of expressing their feelings, who discussed
+ Russia’s position at the time involuntarily introduced into their
+ conversation either a shade of pretense and falsehood or useless
+ condemnation and anger directed against people accused of actions no one
+ could possibly be guilty of. In historic events the rule forbidding us to
+ eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is specially applicable. Only
+ unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in an historic
+ event never understands its significance. If he tries to realize it his
+ efforts are fruitless.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The more closely a man was engaged in the events then taking place in
+ Russia the less did he realize their significance. In Petersburg and in
+ the provinces at a distance from Moscow, ladies, and gentlemen in militia
+ uniforms, wept for Russia and its ancient capital and talked of
+ self-sacrifice and so on; but in the army which retired beyond Moscow
+ there was little talk or thought of Moscow, and when they caught sight of
+ its burned ruins no one swore to be avenged on the French, but they
+ thought about their next pay, their next quarters, of Matrëshka the
+ vivandière, and like matters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As the war had caught him in the service, Nicholas Rostóv took a close and
+ prolonged part in the defense of his country, but did so casually, without
+ any aim at self-sacrifice, and he therefore looked at what was going on in
+ Russia without despair and without dismally racking his brains over it.
+ Had he been asked what he thought of the state of Russia, he would have
+ said that it was not his business to think about it, that Kutúzov and
+ others were there for that purpose, but that he had heard that the
+ regiments were to be made up to their full strength, that fighting would
+ probably go on for a long time yet, and that things being so it was quite
+ likely he might be in command of a regiment in a couple of years’ time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he looked at the matter in this way, he learned that he was being sent
+ to Vorónezh to buy remounts for his division, not only without regret at
+ being prevented from taking part in the coming battle, but with the
+ greatest pleasure—which he did not conceal and which his comrades
+ fully understood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A few days before the battle of Borodinó, Nicholas received the necessary
+ money and warrants, and having sent some hussars on in advance, he set out
+ with post horses for Vorónezh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only a man who has experienced it—that is, has passed some months
+ continuously in an atmosphere of campaigning and war—can understand
+ the delight Nicholas felt when he escaped from the region covered by the
+ army’s foraging operations, provision trains, and hospitals. When—free
+ from soldiers, wagons, and the filthy traces of a camp—he saw
+ villages with peasants and peasant women, gentlemen’s country houses,
+ fields where cattle were grazing, posthouses with stationmasters asleep in
+ them, he rejoiced as though seeing all this for the first time. What for a
+ long while specially surprised and delighted him were the women, young and
+ healthy, without a dozen officers making up to each of them; women, too,
+ who were pleased and flattered that a passing officer should joke with
+ them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the highest spirits Nicholas arrived at night at a hotel in Vorónezh,
+ ordered things he had long been deprived of in camp, and next day, very
+ clean-shaven and in a full-dress uniform he had not worn for a long time,
+ went to present himself to the authorities.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The commander of the militia was a civilian general, an old man who was
+ evidently pleased with his military designation and rank. He received
+ Nicholas brusquely (imagining this to be characteristically military) and
+ questioned him with an important air, as if considering the general
+ progress of affairs and approving and disapproving with full right to do
+ so. Nicholas was in such good spirits that this merely amused him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the commander of the militia he drove to the governor. The governor
+ was a brisk little man, very simple and affable. He indicated the stud
+ farms at which Nicholas might procure horses, recommended to him a horse
+ dealer in the town and a landowner fourteen miles out of town who had the
+ best horses, and promised to assist him in every way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are Count Ilyá Rostóv’s son? My wife was a great friend of your
+ mother’s. We are at home on Thursdays—today is Thursday, so please
+ come and see us quite informally,” said the governor, taking leave of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Immediately on leaving the governor’s, Nicholas hired post horses and,
+ taking his squadron quartermaster with him, drove at a gallop to the
+ landowner, fourteen miles away, who had the stud. Everything seemed to him
+ pleasant and easy during that first part of his stay in Vorónezh and, as
+ usually happens when a man is in a pleasant state of mind, everything went
+ well and easily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The landowner to whom Nicholas went was a bachelor, an old cavalryman, a
+ horse fancier, a sportsman, the possessor of some century-old brandy and
+ some old Hungarian wine, who had a snuggery where he smoked, and who owned
+ some splendid horses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In very few words Nicholas bought seventeen picked stallions for six
+ thousand rubles—to serve, as he said, as samples of his remounts.
+ After dining and taking rather too much of the Hungarian wine, Nicholas—having
+ exchanged kisses with the landowner, with whom he was already on the
+ friendliest terms—galloped back over abominable roads, in the
+ brightest frame of mind, continually urging on the driver so as to be in
+ time for the governor’s party.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he had changed, poured water over his head, and scented himself,
+ Nicholas arrived at the governor’s rather late, but with the phrase
+ “better late than never” on his lips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was not a ball, nor had dancing been announced, but everyone knew that
+ Catherine Petróvna would play valses and the écossaise on the clavichord
+ and that there would be dancing, and so everyone had come as to a ball.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Provincial life in 1812 went on very much as usual, but with this
+ difference, that it was livelier in the towns in consequence of the
+ arrival of many wealthy families from Moscow, and as in everything that
+ went on in Russia at that time a special recklessness was noticeable, an
+ “in for a penny, in for a pound—who cares?” spirit, and the
+ inevitable small talk, instead of turning on the weather and mutual
+ acquaintances, now turned on Moscow, the army, and Napoleon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The society gathered together at the governor’s was the best in Vorónezh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There were a great many ladies and some of Nicholas’ Moscow acquaintances,
+ but there were no men who could at all vie with the cavalier of St.
+ George, the hussar remount officer, the good-natured and well-bred Count
+ Rostóv. Among the men was an Italian prisoner, an officer of the French
+ army; and Nicholas felt that the presence of that prisoner enhanced his
+ own importance as a Russian hero. The Italian was, as it were, a war
+ trophy. Nicholas felt this, it seemed to him that everyone regarded the
+ Italian in the same light, and he treated him cordially though with
+ dignity and restraint.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as Nicholas entered in his hussar uniform, diffusing around him a
+ fragrance of perfume and wine, and had uttered the words “better late than
+ never” and heard them repeated several times by others, people clustered
+ around him; all eyes turned on him, and he felt at once that he had
+ entered into his proper position in the province—that of a universal
+ favorite: a very pleasant position, and intoxicatingly so after his long
+ privations. At posting stations, at inns, and in the landowner’s snuggery,
+ maidservants had been flattered by his notice, and here too at the
+ governor’s party there were (as it seemed to Nicholas) an inexhaustible
+ number of pretty young women, married and unmarried, impatiently awaiting
+ his notice. The women and girls flirted with him and, from the first day,
+ the people concerned themselves to get this fine young daredevil of an
+ hussar married and settled down. Among these was the governor’s wife
+ herself, who welcomed Rostóv as a near relative and called him “Nicholas.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Catherine Petróvna did actually play valses and the écossaise , and dancing
+ began in which Nicholas still further captivated the provincial society by
+ his agility. His particularly free manner of dancing even surprised them
+ all. Nicholas was himself rather surprised at the way he danced that
+ evening. He had never danced like that in Moscow and would even have
+ considered such a very free and easy manner improper and in bad form, but
+ here he felt it incumbent on him to astonish them all by something
+ unusual, something they would have to accept as the regular thing in the
+ capital though new to them in the provinces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the evening Nicholas paid attention to a blue-eyed, plump and pleasing
+ little blonde, the wife of one of the provincial officials. With the naïve
+ conviction of young men in a merry mood that other men’s wives were
+ created for them, Rostóv did not leave the lady’s side and treated her
+ husband in a friendly and conspiratorial style, as if, without speaking of
+ it, they knew how capitally Nicholas and the lady would get on together.
+ The husband, however, did not seem to share that conviction and tried to
+ behave morosely with Rostóv. But the latter’s good-natured naïveté was so
+ boundless that sometimes even he involuntarily yielded to Nicholas’ good
+ humor. Toward the end of the evening, however, as the wife’s face grew
+ more flushed and animated, the husband’s became more and more melancholy
+ and solemn, as though there were but a given amount of animation between
+ them and as the wife’s share increased the husband’s diminished.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ Nicholas sat leaning slightly forward in an armchair, bending closely over
+ the blonde lady and paying her mythological compliments with a smile that
+ never left his face. Jauntily shifting the position of his legs in their
+ tight riding breeches, diffusing an odor of perfume, and admiring his
+ partner, himself, and the fine outlines of his legs in their well-fitting
+ Hessian boots, Nicholas told the blonde lady that he wished to run away
+ with a certain lady here in Vorónezh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Which lady?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A charming lady, a divine one. Her eyes” (Nicholas looked at his partner)
+ “are blue, her mouth coral and ivory; her figure” (he glanced at her
+ shoulders) “like Diana’s....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The husband came up and sullenly asked his wife what she was talking
+ about.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, Nikíta Iványch!” cried Nicholas, rising politely, and as if wishing
+ Nikíta Iványch to share his joke, he began to tell him of his intention to
+ elope with a blonde lady.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The husband smiled gloomily, the wife gaily. The governor’s good-natured
+ wife came up with a look of disapproval.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Anna Ignátyevna wants to see you, Nicholas,” said she, pronouncing the
+ name so that Nicholas at once understood that Anna Ignátyevna was a very
+ important person. “Come, Nicholas! You know you let me call you so?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, yes, Aunt. Who is she?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Anna Ignátyevna Malvíntseva. She has heard from her niece how you rescued
+ her.... Can you guess?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I rescued such a lot of them!” said Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Her niece, Princess Bolkónskaya. She is here in Vorónezh with her aunt.
+ Oho! How you blush. Why, are...?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not a bit! Please don’t, Aunt!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very well, very well!... Oh, what a fellow you are!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The governor’s wife led him up to a tall and very stout old lady with a
+ blue headdress, who had just finished her game of cards with the most
+ important personages of the town. This was Malvíntseva, Princess Mary’s
+ aunt on her mother’s side, a rich, childless widow who always lived in
+ Vorónezh. When Rostóv approached her she was standing settling up for the
+ game. She looked at him and, screwing up her eyes sternly, continued to
+ upbraid the general who had won from her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Very pleased, mon cher ,” she then said, holding out her
+ hand to Nicholas. “Pray come and see me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After a few words about Princess Mary and her late father, whom
+ Malvíntseva had evidently not liked, and having asked what Nicholas knew
+ of Prince Andrew, who also was evidently no favorite of hers, the
+ important old lady dismissed Nicholas after repeating her invitation to
+ come to see her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas promised to come and blushed again as he bowed. At the mention of
+ Princess Mary he experienced a feeling of shyness and even of fear, which
+ he himself did not understand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he had parted from Malvíntseva Nicholas wished to return to the
+ dancing, but the governor’s little wife placed her plump hand on his
+ sleeve and, saying that she wanted to have a talk with him, led him to her
+ sitting room, from which those who were there immediately withdrew so as
+ not to be in her way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know, dear boy,” began the governor’s wife with a serious
+ expression on her kind little face, “that really would be the match for
+ you: would you like me to arrange it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Whom do you mean, Aunt?” asked Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will make a match for you with the princess. Catherine Petróvna speaks
+ of Lily, but I say, no—the princess! Do you want me to do it? I am
+ sure your mother will be grateful to me. What a charming girl she is,
+ really! And she is not at all so plain, either.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not at all,” replied Nicholas as if offended at the idea. “As befits a
+ soldier, Aunt, I don’t force myself on anyone or refuse anything,” he said
+ before he had time to consider what he was saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well then, remember, this is not a joke!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Of course not!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes,” the governor’s wife said as if talking to herself. “But, my
+ dear boy, among other things you are too attentive to the other, the
+ blonde. One is sorry for the husband, really....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh no, we are good friends with him,” said Nicholas in the simplicity of
+ his heart; it did not enter his head that a pastime so pleasant to himself
+ might not be pleasant to someone else.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what nonsense I have been saying to the governor’s wife!” thought
+ Nicholas suddenly at supper. “She will really begin to arrange a match...
+ and Sónya...?” And on taking leave of the governor’s wife, when she again
+ smilingly said to him, “Well then, remember!” he drew her aside.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But see here, to tell the truth, Aunt...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it, my dear? Come, let’s sit down here,” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas suddenly felt a desire and need to tell his most intimate
+ thoughts (which he would not have told to his mother, his sister, or his
+ friend) to this woman who was almost a stranger. When he afterwards
+ recalled that impulse to unsolicited and inexplicable frankness which had
+ very important results for him, it seemed to him—as it seems to
+ everyone in such cases—that it was merely some silly whim that
+ seized him: yet that burst of frankness, together with other trifling
+ events, had immense consequences for him and for all his family.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see, Aunt, Mamma has long wanted me to marry an heiress, but the very
+ idea of marrying for money is repugnant to me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes, I understand,” said the governor’s wife.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But Princess Bolkónskaya—that’s another matter. I will tell you the
+ truth. In the first place I like her very much, I feel drawn to her; and
+ then, after I met her under such circumstances—so strangely, the
+ idea often occurred to me: ‘This is fate.’ Especially if you remember that
+ Mamma had long been thinking of it; but I had never happened to meet her
+ before, somehow it had always happened that we did not meet. And as long
+ as my sister Natásha was engaged to her brother it was of course out of
+ the question for me to think of marrying her. And it must needs happen
+ that I should meet her just when Natásha’s engagement had been broken
+ off... and then everything... So you see... I never told this to anyone
+ and never will, only to you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The governor’s wife pressed his elbow gratefully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know Sónya, my cousin? I love her, and promised to marry her, and
+ will do so.... So you see there can be no question about—” said
+ Nicholas incoherently and blushing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dear boy, what a way to look at it! You know Sónya has nothing and you
+ yourself say your Papa’s affairs are in a very bad way. And what about
+ your mother? It would kill her, that’s one thing. And what sort of life
+ would it be for Sónya—if she’s a girl with a heart? Your mother in
+ despair, and you all ruined.... No, my dear, you and Sónya ought to
+ understand that.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas remained silent. It comforted him to hear these arguments.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All the same, Aunt, it is impossible,” he rejoined with a sigh, after a
+ short pause. “Besides, would the princess have me? And besides, she is now
+ in mourning. How can one think of it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you don’t suppose I’m going to get you married at once? There is
+ always a right way of doing things,” replied the governor’s wife.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a matchmaker you are, Aunt...” said Nicholas, kissing her plump
+ little hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ On reaching Moscow after her meeting with Rostóv, Princess Mary had found
+ her nephew there with his tutor, and a letter from Prince Andrew giving
+ her instructions how to get to her Aunt Malvíntseva at Vorónezh. That
+ feeling akin to temptation which had tormented her during her father’s
+ illness, since his death, and especially since her meeting with Rostóv was
+ smothered by arrangements for the journey, anxiety about her brother,
+ settling in a new house, meeting new people, and attending to her nephew’s
+ education. She was sad. Now, after a month passed in quiet surroundings,
+ she felt more and more deeply the loss of her father which was associated
+ in her mind with the ruin of Russia. She was agitated and incessantly
+ tortured by the thought of the dangers to which her brother, the only
+ intimate person now remaining to her, was exposed. She was worried too
+ about her nephew’s education for which she had always felt herself
+ incompetent, but in the depths of her soul she felt at peace—a peace
+ arising from consciousness of having stifled those personal dreams and
+ hopes that had been on the point of awakening within her and were related
+ to her meeting with Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The day after her party the governor’s wife came to see Malvíntseva and,
+ after discussing her plan with the aunt, remarked that though under
+ present circumstances a formal betrothal was, of course, not to be thought
+ of, all the same the young people might be brought together and could get
+ to know one another. Malvíntseva expressed approval, and the governor’s
+ wife began to speak of Rostóv in Mary’s presence, praising him and telling
+ how he had blushed when Princess Mary’s name was mentioned. But Princess
+ Mary experienced a painful rather than a joyful feeling—her mental
+ tranquillity was destroyed, and desires, doubts, self-reproach, and hopes
+ reawoke.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the two days that elapsed before Rostóv called, Princess Mary
+ continually thought of how she ought to behave to him. First she decided
+ not to come to the drawing room when he called to see her aunt—that
+ it would not be proper for her, in her deep mourning, to receive visitors;
+ then she thought this would be rude after what he had done for her; then
+ it occurred to her that her aunt and the governor’s wife had intentions
+ concerning herself and Rostóv—their looks and words at times seemed
+ to confirm this supposition—then she told herself that only she,
+ with her sinful nature, could think this of them: they could not forget
+ that situated as she was, while still wearing deep mourning, such
+ matchmaking would be an insult to her and to her father’s memory. Assuming
+ that she did go down to see him, Princess Mary imagined the words he would
+ say to her and what she would say to him, and these words sometimes seemed
+ undeservedly cold and then to mean too much. More than anything she feared
+ lest the confusion she felt might overwhelm her and betray her as soon as
+ she saw him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But when on Sunday after church the footman announced in the drawing room
+ that Count Rostóv had called, the princess showed no confusion, only a
+ slight blush suffused her cheeks and her eyes lit up with a new and
+ radiant light.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You have met him, Aunt?” said she in a calm voice, unable herself to
+ understand that she could be outwardly so calm and natural.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Rostóv entered the room, the princess dropped her eyes for an
+ instant, as if to give the visitor time to greet her aunt, and then just
+ as Nicholas turned to her she raised her head and met his look with
+ shining eyes. With a movement full of dignity and grace she half rose with
+ a smile of pleasure, held out her slender, delicate hand to him, and began
+ to speak in a voice in which for the first time new deep womanly notes
+ vibrated. Mademoiselle Bourienne, who was in the drawing room, looked at
+ Princess Mary in bewildered surprise. Herself a consummate coquette, she
+ could not have maneuvered better on meeting a man she wished to attract.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Either black is particularly becoming to her or she really has greatly
+ improved without my having noticed it. And above all, what tact and
+ grace!” thought Mademoiselle Bourienne.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Had Princess Mary been capable of reflection at that moment, she would
+ have been more surprised than Mademoiselle Bourienne at the change that
+ had taken place in herself. From the moment she recognized that dear,
+ loved face, a new life force took possession of her and compelled her to
+ speak and act apart from her own will. From the time Rostóv entered, her
+ face became suddenly transformed. It was as if a light had been kindled in
+ a carved and painted lantern and the intricate, skillful, artistic work on
+ its sides, that previously seemed dark, coarse, and meaningless, was
+ suddenly shown up in unexpected and striking beauty. For the first time
+ all that pure, spiritual, inward travail through which she had lived
+ appeared on the surface. All her inward labor, her dissatisfaction with
+ herself, her sufferings, her strivings after goodness, her meekness, love,
+ and self-sacrifice—all this now shone in those radiant eyes, in her
+ delicate smile, and in every trait of her gentle face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Rostóv saw all this as clearly as if he had known her whole life. He felt
+ that the being before him was quite different from, and better than,
+ anyone he had met before, and above all better than himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Their conversation was very simple and unimportant. They spoke of the war,
+ and like everyone else unconsciously exaggerated their sorrow about it;
+ they spoke of their last meeting—Nicholas trying to change the
+ subject—they talked of the governor’s kind wife, of Nicholas’
+ relations, and of Princess Mary’s.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She did not talk about her brother, diverting the conversation as soon as
+ her aunt mentioned Andrew. Evidently she could speak of Russia’s
+ misfortunes with a certain artificiality, but her brother was too near her
+ heart and she neither could nor would speak lightly of him. Nicholas
+ noticed this, as he noticed every shade of Princess Mary’s character with
+ an observation unusual to him, and everything confirmed his conviction
+ that she was a quite unusual and extraordinary being. Nicholas blushed and
+ was confused when people spoke to him about the princess (as she did when
+ he was mentioned) and even when he thought of her, but in her presence he
+ felt quite at ease, and said not at all what he had prepared, but what,
+ quite appropriately, occurred to him at the moment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When a pause occurred during his short visit, Nicholas, as is usual when
+ there are children, turned to Prince Andrew’s little son, caressing him
+ and asking whether he would like to be an hussar. He took the boy on his
+ knee, played with him, and looked round at Princess Mary. With a softened,
+ happy, timid look she watched the boy she loved in the arms of the man she
+ loved. Nicholas also noticed that look and, as if understanding it,
+ flushed with pleasure and began to kiss the boy with good natured
+ playfulness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As she was in mourning Princess Mary did not go out into society, and
+ Nicholas did not think it the proper thing to visit her again; but all the
+ same the governor’s wife went on with her matchmaking, passing on to
+ Nicholas the flattering things Princess Mary said of him and vice versa,
+ and insisting on his declaring himself to Princess Mary. For this purpose
+ she arranged a meeting between the young people at the bishop’s house
+ before Mass.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though Rostóv told the governor’s wife that he would not make any
+ declaration to Princess Mary, he promised to go.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As at Tilsit Rostóv had not allowed himself to doubt that what everybody
+ considered right was right, so now, after a short but sincere struggle
+ between his effort to arrange his life by his own sense of justice, and in
+ obedient submission to circumstances, he chose the latter and yielded to
+ the power he felt irresistibly carrying him he knew not where. He knew
+ that after his promise to Sónya it would be what he deemed base to declare
+ his feelings to Princess Mary. And he knew that he would never act basely.
+ But he also knew (or rather felt at the bottom of his heart) that by
+ resigning himself now to the force of circumstances and to those who were
+ guiding him, he was not only doing nothing wrong, but was doing something
+ very important—more important than anything he had ever done in his
+ life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After meeting Princess Mary, though the course of his life went on
+ externally as before, all his former amusements lost their charm for him
+ and he often thought about her. But he never thought about her as he had
+ thought of all the young ladies without exception whom he had met in
+ society, nor as he had for a long time, and at one time rapturously,
+ thought about Sónya. He had pictured each of those young ladies as almost
+ all honest-hearted young men do, that is, as a possible wife, adapting her
+ in his imagination to all the conditions of married life: a white dressing
+ gown, his wife at the tea table, his wife’s carriage, little ones, Mamma
+ and Papa, their relations to her, and so on—and these pictures of
+ the future had given him pleasure. But with Princess Mary, to whom they
+ were trying to get him engaged, he could never picture anything of future
+ married life. If he tried, his pictures seemed incongruous and false. It
+ made him afraid.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ The dreadful news of the battle of Borodinó, of our losses in killed and
+ wounded, and the still more terrible news of the loss of Moscow reached
+ Vorónezh in the middle of September. Princess Mary, having learned of her
+ brother’s wound only from the Gazette and having no definite news of
+ him, prepared (so Nicholas heard, he had not seen her again himself) to set off
+ in search of Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When he received the news of the battle of Borodinó and the abandonment of
+ Moscow, Rostóv was not seized with despair, anger, the desire for
+ vengeance, or any feeling of that kind, but everything in Vorónezh
+ suddenly seemed to him dull and tiresome, and he experienced an indefinite
+ feeling of shame and awkwardness. The conversations he heard seemed to him
+ insincere; he did not know how to judge all these affairs and felt that
+ only in the regiment would everything again become clear to him. He made
+ haste to finish buying the horses, and often became unreasonably angry
+ with his servant and squadron quartermaster.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A few days before his departure a special thanksgiving, at which Nicholas
+ was present, was held in the cathedral for the Russian victory. He stood a
+ little behind the governor and held himself with military decorum through
+ the service, meditating on a great variety of subjects. When the service
+ was over the governor’s wife beckoned him to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have you seen the princess?” she asked, indicating with a movement of her
+ head a lady standing on the opposite side, beyond the choir.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas immediately recognized Princess Mary not so much by the profile
+ he saw under her bonnet as by the feeling of solicitude, timidity, and
+ pity that immediately overcame him. Princess Mary, evidently engrossed by
+ her thoughts, was crossing herself for the last time before leaving the
+ church.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas looked at her face with surprise. It was the same face he had
+ seen before, there was the same general expression of refined, inner,
+ spiritual labor, but now it was quite differently lit up. There was a
+ pathetic expression of sorrow, prayer, and hope in it. As had occurred
+ before when she was present, Nicholas went up to her without waiting to be
+ prompted by the governor’s wife and not asking himself whether or not it
+ was right and proper to address her here in church, and told her he had
+ heard of her trouble and sympathized with his whole soul. As soon as she
+ heard his voice a vivid glow kindled in her face, lighting up both her
+ sorrow and her joy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There is one thing I wanted to tell you, Princess,” said Rostóv. “It is
+ that if your brother, Prince Andrew Nikoláevich, were not living, it would
+ have been at once announced in the Gazette , as he is a colonel.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess looked at him, not grasping what he was saying, but cheered
+ by the expression of regretful sympathy on his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I have known so many cases of a splinter wound” (the Gazette said it
+ was a shell) “either proving fatal at once or being very slight,”
+ continued Nicholas. “We must hope for the best, and I am sure...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, that would be so dread...” she began and, prevented by agitation from
+ finishing, she bent her head with a movement as graceful as everything she
+ did in his presence and, looking up at him gratefully, went out, following
+ her aunt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That evening Nicholas did not go out, but stayed at home to settle some
+ accounts with the horse dealers. When he had finished that business it was
+ already too late to go anywhere but still too early to go to bed, and for
+ a long time he paced up and down the room, reflecting on his life, a thing
+ he rarely did.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary had made an agreeable impression on him when he had met her
+ in Smolénsk province. His having encountered her in such exceptional
+ circumstances, and his mother having at one time mentioned her to him as a
+ good match, had drawn his particular attention to her. When he met her
+ again in Vorónezh the impression she made on him was not merely pleasing
+ but powerful. Nicholas had been struck by the peculiar moral beauty he
+ observed in her at this time. He was, however, preparing to go away and it
+ had not entered his head to regret that he was thus depriving himself of
+ chances of meeting her. But that day’s encounter in church had, he felt,
+ sunk deeper than was desirable for his peace of mind. That pale, sad,
+ refined face, that radiant look, those gentle graceful gestures, and
+ especially the deep and tender sorrow expressed in all her features
+ agitated him and evoked his sympathy. In men Rostóv could not bear to see
+ the expression of a higher spiritual life (that was why he did not like
+ Prince Andrew) and he referred to it contemptuously as philosophy and
+ dreaminess, but in Princess Mary that very sorrow which revealed the depth
+ of a whole spiritual world foreign to him was an irresistible attraction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She must be a wonderful woman. A real angel!” he said to himself. “Why am
+ I not free? Why was I in such a hurry with Sónya?” And he involuntarily
+ compared the two: the lack of spirituality in the one and the abundance of
+ it in the other—a spirituality he himself lacked and therefore
+ valued most highly. He tried to picture what would happen were he free.
+ How he would propose to her and how she would become his wife. But no, he
+ could not imagine that. He felt awed, and no clear picture presented
+ itself to his mind. He had long ago pictured to himself a future with
+ Sónya, and that was all clear and simple just because it had all been
+ thought out and he knew all there was in Sónya, but it was impossible to
+ picture a future with Princess Mary, because he did not understand her but
+ simply loved her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Reveries about Sónya had had something merry and playful in them, but to
+ dream of Princess Mary was always difficult and a little frightening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How she prayed!” he thought. “It was plain that her whole soul was in her
+ prayer. Yes, that was the prayer that moves mountains, and I am sure her
+ prayer will be answered. Why don’t I pray for what I want?” he suddenly
+ thought. “What do I want? To be free, released from Sónya... She was
+ right,” he thought, remembering what the governor’s wife had said:
+ “Nothing but misfortune can come of marrying Sónya. Muddles, grief for
+ Mamma... business difficulties... muddles, terrible muddles! Besides, I
+ don’t love her—not as I should. O, God! release me from this
+ dreadful, inextricable position!” he suddenly began to pray. “Yes, prayer
+ can move mountains, but one must have faith and not pray as Natásha and I
+ used to as children, that the snow might turn into sugar—and then
+ run out into the yard to see whether it had done so. No, but I am not
+ praying for trifles now,” he thought as he put his pipe down in a corner,
+ and folding his hands placed himself before the icon. Softened by memories
+ of Princess Mary he began to pray as he had not done for a long time.
+ Tears were in his eyes and in his throat when the door opened and
+ Lavrúshka came in with some papers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Blockhead! Why do you come in without being called?” cried Nicholas,
+ quickly changing his attitude.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “From the governor,” said Lavrúshka in a sleepy voice. “A courier has
+ arrived and there’s a letter for you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, all right, thanks. You can go!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas took the two letters, one of which was from his mother and the
+ other from Sónya. He recognized them by the handwriting and opened Sónya’s
+ first. He had read only a few lines when he turned pale and his eyes
+ opened wide with fear and joy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, it’s not possible!” he cried aloud.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Unable to sit still he paced up and down the room holding the letter and
+ reading it. He glanced through it, then read it again, and then again, and
+ standing still in the middle of the room he raised his shoulders,
+ stretching out his hands, with his mouth wide open and his eyes fixed.
+ What he had just been praying for with confidence that God would hear him
+ had come to pass; but Nicholas was as much astonished as if it were
+ something extraordinary and unexpected, and as if the very fact that it
+ had happened so quickly proved that it had not come from God to whom he
+ had prayed, but by some ordinary coincidence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This unexpected and, as it seemed to Nicholas, quite voluntary letter from
+ Sónya freed him from the knot that fettered him and from which there had
+ seemed no escape. She wrote that the last unfortunate events—the
+ loss of almost the whole of the Rostóvs’ Moscow property—and the
+ countess’ repeatedly expressed wish that Nicholas should marry Princess
+ Bolkónskaya, together with his silence and coldness of late, had all
+ combined to make her decide to release him from his promise and set him
+ completely free.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It would be too painful to me to think that I might be a cause of sorrow
+ or discord in the family that has been so good to me (she wrote), and my
+ love has no aim but the happiness of those I love; so, Nicholas, I beg you
+ to consider yourself free, and to be assured that, in spite of everything,
+ no one can love you more than does
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Your Sónya
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Both letters were written from Tróitsa. The other, from the countess,
+ described their last days in Moscow, their departure, the fire, and the
+ destruction of all their property. In this letter the countess also
+ mentioned that Prince Andrew was among the wounded traveling with them;
+ his state was very critical, but the doctor said there was now more hope.
+ Sónya and Natásha were nursing him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day Nicholas took his mother’s letter and went to see Princess Mary.
+ Neither he nor she said a word about what “Natásha nursing him” might
+ mean, but thanks to this letter Nicholas suddenly became almost as
+ intimate with the princess as if they were relations.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The following day he saw Princess Mary off on her journey to Yaroslávl,
+ and a few days later left to rejoin his regiment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ Sónya’s letter written from Tróitsa, which had come as an answer to
+ Nicholas’ prayer, was prompted by this: the thought of getting Nicholas
+ married to an heiress occupied the old countess’ mind more and more. She
+ knew that Sónya was the chief obstacle to this happening, and Sónya’s life
+ in the countess’ house had grown harder and harder, especially after they
+ had received a letter from Nicholas telling of his meeting with Princess
+ Mary in Boguchárovo. The countess let no occasion slip of making
+ humiliating or cruel allusions to Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But a few days before they left Moscow, moved and excited by all that was
+ going on, she called Sónya to her and, instead of reproaching and making
+ demands on her, tearfully implored her to sacrifice herself and repay all
+ that the family had done for her by breaking off her engagement with
+ Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I shall not be at peace till you promise me this.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya burst into hysterical tears and replied through her sobs that she
+ would do anything and was prepared for anything, but gave no actual
+ promise and could not bring herself to decide to do what was demanded of
+ her. She must sacrifice herself for the family that had reared and brought
+ her up. To sacrifice herself for others was Sónya’s habit. Her position in
+ the house was such that only by sacrifice could she show her worth, and
+ she was accustomed to this and loved doing it. But in all her former acts
+ of self-sacrifice she had been happily conscious that they raised her in
+ her own esteem and in that of others, and so made her more worthy of
+ Nicholas whom she loved more than anything in the world. But now they
+ wanted her to sacrifice the very thing that constituted the whole reward
+ for her self-sacrifice and the whole meaning of her life. And for the
+ first time she felt bitterness against those who had been her benefactors
+ only to torture her the more painfully; she felt jealous of Natásha who
+ had never experienced anything of this sort, had never needed to sacrifice
+ herself, but made others sacrifice themselves for her and yet was beloved
+ by everybody. And for the first time Sónya felt that out of her pure,
+ quiet love for Nicholas a passionate feeling was beginning to grow up
+ which was stronger than principle, virtue, or religion. Under the
+ influence of this feeling Sónya, whose life of dependence had taught her
+ involuntarily to be secretive, having answered the countess in vague
+ general terms, avoided talking with her and resolved to wait till she
+ should see Nicholas, not in order to set him free but on the contrary at
+ that meeting to bind him to her forever.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The bustle and terror of the Rostóvs’ last days in Moscow stifled the
+ gloomy thoughts that oppressed Sónya. She was glad to find escape from
+ them in practical activity. But when she heard of Prince Andrew’s presence
+ in their house, despite her sincere pity for him and for Natásha, she was
+ seized by a joyful and superstitious feeling that God did not intend her
+ to be separated from Nicholas. She knew that Natásha loved no one but
+ Prince Andrew and had never ceased to love him. She knew that being thrown
+ together again under such terrible circumstances they would again fall in
+ love with one another, and that Nicholas would then not be able to marry
+ Princess Mary as they would be within the prohibited degrees of affinity.
+ Despite all the terror of what had happened during those last days and
+ during the first days of their journey, this feeling that Providence was
+ intervening in her personal affairs cheered Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the Tróitsa monastery the Rostóvs first broke their journey for a whole
+ day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Three large rooms were assigned to them in the monastery hostelry, one of
+ which was occupied by Prince Andrew. The wounded man was much better that
+ day and Natásha was sitting with him. In the next room sat the count and
+ countess respectfully conversing with the prior, who was calling on them
+ as old acquaintances and benefactors of the monastery. Sónya was there
+ too, tormented by curiosity as to what Prince Andrew and Natásha were
+ talking about. She heard the sound of their voices through the door. That
+ door opened and Natásha came out, looking excited. Not noticing the monk,
+ who had risen to greet her and was drawing back the wide sleeve on his
+ right arm, she went up to Sónya and took her hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha, what are you about? Come here!” said the countess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha went up to the monk for his blessing, and he advised her to pray
+ for aid to God and His saint.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as the prior withdrew, Natásha took her friend by the hand and
+ went with her into the unoccupied room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya, will he live?” she asked. “Sónya, how happy I am, and how
+ unhappy!... Sónya, dovey, everything is as it used to be. If only he
+ lives! He cannot... because... because... of...” and Natásha burst into
+ tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes! I knew it! Thank God!” murmured Sónya. “He will live.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya was not less agitated than her friend by the latter’s fear and grief
+ and by her own personal feelings which she shared with no one. Sobbing,
+ she kissed and comforted Natásha. “If only he lives!” she thought. Having
+ wept, talked, and wiped away their tears, the two friends went together to
+ Prince Andrew’s door. Natásha opened it cautiously and glanced into the
+ room, Sónya standing beside her at the half-open door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew was lying raised high on three pillows. His pale face was
+ calm, his eyes closed, and they could see his regular breathing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O, Natásha!” Sónya suddenly almost screamed, catching her companion’s arm
+ and stepping back from the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What? What is it?” asked Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s that, that...” said Sónya, with a white face and trembling lips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha softly closed the door and went with Sónya to the window, not yet
+ understanding what the latter was telling her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You remember,” said Sónya with a solemn and frightened expression. “You
+ remember when I looked in the mirror for you... at Otrádnoe at Christmas?
+ Do you remember what I saw?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes!” cried Natásha opening her eyes wide, and vaguely recalling
+ that Sónya had told her something about Prince Andrew whom she had seen
+ lying down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You remember?” Sónya went on. “I saw it then and told everybody, you and
+ Dunyásha. I saw him lying on a bed,” said she, making a gesture with her
+ hand and a lifted finger at each detail, “and that he had his eyes closed
+ and was covered just with a pink quilt, and that his hands were folded,”
+ she concluded, convincing herself that the details she had just seen were
+ exactly what she had seen in the mirror.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She had in fact seen nothing then but had mentioned the first thing that
+ came into her head, but what she had invented then seemed to her now as
+ real as any other recollection. She not only remembered what she had then
+ said—that he turned to look at her and smiled and was covered with
+ something red—but was firmly convinced that she had then seen and
+ said that he was covered with a pink quilt and that his eyes were closed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, it really was pink!” cried Natásha, who now thought she too
+ remembered the word pink being used, and saw in this the most
+ extraordinary and mysterious part of the prediction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what does it mean?” she added meditatively.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, I don’t know, it is all so strange,” replied Sónya, clutching at her
+ head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A few minutes later Prince Andrew rang and Natásha went to him, but Sónya,
+ feeling unusually excited and touched, remained at the window thinking
+ about the strangeness of what had occurred.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ They had an opportunity that day to send letters to the army, and the
+ countess was writing to her son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sónya!” said the countess, raising her eyes from her letter as her niece
+ passed, “Sónya, won’t you write to Nicholas?” She spoke in a soft,
+ tremulous voice, and in the weary eyes that looked over her spectacles
+ Sónya read all that the countess meant to convey with these words. Those
+ eyes expressed entreaty, shame at having to ask, fear of a refusal, and
+ readiness for relentless hatred in case of such refusal.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya went up to the countess and, kneeling down, kissed her hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, Mamma, I will write,” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya was softened, excited, and touched by all that had occurred that
+ day, especially by the mysterious fulfillment she had just seen of her
+ vision. Now that she knew that the renewal of Natásha’s relations with
+ Prince Andrew would prevent Nicholas from marrying Princess Mary, she was
+ joyfully conscious of a return of that self-sacrificing spirit in which
+ she was accustomed to live and loved to live. So with a joyful
+ consciousness of performing a magnanimous deed—interrupted several
+ times by the tears that dimmed her velvety black eyes—she wrote that
+ touching letter the arrival of which had so amazed Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ The officer and soldiers who had arrested Pierre treated him with
+ hostility but yet with respect, in the guardhouse to which he was taken.
+ In their attitude toward him could still be felt both uncertainty as to
+ who he might be—perhaps a very important person—and hostility
+ as a result of their recent personal conflict with him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But when the guard was relieved next morning, Pierre felt that for the new
+ guard—both officers and men—he was not as interesting as he
+ had been to his captors; and in fact the guard of the second day did not
+ recognize in this big, stout man in a peasant coat the vigorous person who
+ had fought so desperately with the marauder and the convoy and had uttered
+ those solemn words about saving a child; they saw in him only No. 17 of
+ the captured Russians, arrested and detained for some reason by order of
+ the Higher Command. If they noticed anything remarkable about Pierre, it
+ was only his unabashed, meditative concentration and thoughtfulness, and
+ the way he spoke French, which struck them as surprisingly good. In spite
+ of this he was placed that day with the other arrested suspects, as the
+ separate room he had occupied was required by an officer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the Russians confined with Pierre were men of the lowest class and,
+ recognizing him as a gentleman, they all avoided him, more especially as
+ he spoke French. Pierre felt sad at hearing them making fun of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That evening he learned that all these prisoners (he, probably, among
+ them) were to be tried for incendiarism. On the third day he was taken
+ with the others to a house where a French general with a white mustache
+ sat with two colonels and other Frenchmen with scarves on their arms. With
+ the precision and definiteness customary in addressing prisoners, and
+ which is supposed to preclude human frailty, Pierre like the others was
+ questioned as to who he was, where he had been, with what object, and so
+ on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These questions, like questions put at trials generally, left the essence
+ of the matter aside, shut out the possibility of that essence’s being
+ revealed, and were designed only to form a channel through which the
+ judges wished the answers of the accused to flow so as to lead to the
+ desired result, namely a conviction. As soon as Pierre began to say
+ anything that did not fit in with that aim, the channel was removed and
+ the water could flow to waste. Pierre felt, moreover, what the accused
+ always feel at their trial, perplexity as to why these questions were put
+ to him. He had a feeling that it was only out of condescension or a kind
+ of civility that this device of placing a channel was employed. He knew he
+ was in these men’s power, that only by force had they brought him there,
+ that force alone gave them the right to demand answers to their questions,
+ and that the sole object of that assembly was to inculpate him. And so, as
+ they had the power and wish to inculpate him, this expedient of an inquiry
+ and trial seemed unnecessary. It was evident that any answer would lead to
+ conviction. When asked what he was doing when he was arrested, Pierre
+ replied in a rather tragic manner that he was restoring to its parents a
+ child he had saved from the flames. Why had he fought the marauder? Pierre
+ answered that he “was protecting a woman,” and that “to protect a woman
+ who was being insulted was the duty of every man; that...” They
+ interrupted him, for this was not to the point. Why was he in the yard of
+ a burning house where witnesses had seen him? He replied that he had gone
+ out to see what was happening in Moscow. Again they interrupted him: they
+ had not asked where he was going, but why he was found near the fire? Who
+ was he? they asked, repeating their first question, which he had declined
+ to answer. Again he replied that he could not answer it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Put that down, that’s bad... very bad,” sternly remarked the general with
+ the white mustache and red flushed face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ On the fourth day fires broke out on the Zúbovski rampart.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre and thirteen others were moved to the coach house of a merchant’s
+ house near the Crimean bridge. On his way through the streets Pierre felt
+ stifled by the smoke which seemed to hang over the whole city. Fires were
+ visible on all sides. He did not then realize the significance of the
+ burning of Moscow, and looked at the fires with horror.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He passed four days in the coach house near the Crimean bridge and during
+ that time learned, from the talk of the French soldiers, that all those
+ confined there were awaiting a decision which might come any day from the
+ marshal. What marshal this was, Pierre could not learn from the soldiers.
+ Evidently for them “the marshal” represented a very high and rather
+ mysterious power.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These first days, before the eighth of September when the prisoners were
+ had up for a second examination, were the hardest of all for Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ On the eighth of September an officer—a very important one judging
+ by the respect the guards showed him—entered the coach house where
+ the prisoners were. This officer, probably someone on the staff, was
+ holding a paper in his hand, and called over all the Russians there,
+ naming Pierre as “the man who does not give his name.” Glancing indolently
+ and indifferently at all the prisoners, he ordered the officer in charge
+ to have them decently dressed and tidied up before taking them to the
+ marshal. An hour later a squad of soldiers arrived and Pierre with
+ thirteen others was led to the Virgin’s Field. It was a fine day, sunny
+ after rain, and the air was unusually pure. The smoke did not hang low as
+ on the day when Pierre had been taken from the guardhouse on the Zúbovski
+ rampart, but rose through the pure air in columns. No flames were seen,
+ but columns of smoke rose on all sides, and all Moscow as far as Pierre
+ could see was one vast charred ruin. On all sides there were waste spaces
+ with only stoves and chimney stacks still standing, and here and there the
+ blackened walls of some brick houses. Pierre gazed at the ruins and did
+ not recognize districts he had known well. Here and there he could see
+ churches that had not been burned. The Krémlin, which was not destroyed,
+ gleamed white in the distance with its towers and the belfry of Iván the
+ Great. The domes of the New Convent of the Virgin glittered brightly and
+ its bells were ringing particularly clearly. These bells reminded Pierre
+ that it was Sunday and the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin. But there
+ seemed to be no one to celebrate this holiday: everywhere were blackened
+ ruins, and the few Russians to be seen were tattered and frightened people
+ who tried to hide when they saw the French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was plain that the Russian nest was ruined and destroyed, but in place
+ of the Russian order of life that had been destroyed, Pierre unconsciously
+ felt that a quite different, firm, French order had been established over
+ this ruined nest. He felt this in the looks of the soldiers who, marching
+ in regular ranks briskly and gaily, were escorting him and the other
+ criminals; he felt it in the looks of an important French official in a
+ carriage and pair driven by a soldier, whom they met on the way. He felt
+ it in the merry sounds of regimental music he heard from the left side of
+ the field, and felt and realized it especially from the list of prisoners
+ the French officer had read out when he came that morning. Pierre had been
+ taken by one set of soldiers and led first to one and then to another
+ place with dozens of other men, and it seemed that they might have
+ forgotten him, or confused him with the others. But no: the answers he had
+ given when questioned had come back to him in his designation as “the man
+ who does not give his name,” and under that appellation, which to Pierre
+ seemed terrible, they were now leading him somewhere with unhesitating
+ assurance on their faces that he and all the other prisoners were exactly
+ the ones they wanted and that they were being taken to the proper place.
+ Pierre felt himself to be an insignificant chip fallen among the wheels of
+ a machine whose action he did not understand but which was working well.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He and the other prisoners were taken to the right side of the Virgin’s
+ Field, to a large white house with an immense garden not far from the
+ convent. This was Prince Shcherbátov’s house, where Pierre had often been
+ in other days, and which, as he learned from the talk of the soldiers, was
+ now occupied by the marshal, the Duke of Eckmühl (Davout).
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They were taken to the entrance and led into the house one by one. Pierre
+ was the sixth to enter. He was conducted through a glass gallery, an
+ anteroom, and a hall, which were familiar to him, into a long low study at
+ the door of which stood an adjutant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Davout, spectacles on nose, sat bent over a table at the further end of
+ the room. Pierre went close up to him, but Davout, evidently consulting a
+ paper that lay before him, did not look up. Without raising his eyes, he
+ said in a low voice:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who are you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was silent because he was incapable of uttering a word. To him
+ Davout was not merely a French general, but a man notorious for his
+ cruelty. Looking at his cold face, as he sat like a stern schoolmaster who
+ was prepared to wait awhile for an answer, Pierre felt that every instant
+ of delay might cost him his life; but he did not know what to say. He did
+ not venture to repeat what he had said at his first examination, yet to
+ disclose his rank and position was dangerous and embarrassing. So he was
+ silent. But before he had decided what to do, Davout raised his head,
+ pushed his spectacles back on his forehead, screwed up his eyes, and
+ looked intently at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know that man,” he said in a cold, measured tone, evidently calculated
+ to frighten Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The chill that had been running down Pierre’s back now seized his head as
+ in a vise.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You cannot know me, General, I have never seen you...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is a Russian spy,” Davout interrupted, addressing another general who
+ was present, but whom Pierre had not noticed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Davout turned away. With an unexpected reverberation in his voice Pierre
+ rapidly began:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, monseigneur,” he said, suddenly remembering that Davout was a duke.
+ “No, monseigneur, you cannot have known me. I am a militia officer and
+ have not quitted Moscow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your name?” asked Davout.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bezúkhov.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What proof have I that you are not lying?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Monseigneur!” exclaimed Pierre, not in an offended but in a pleading
+ voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Davout looked up and gazed intently at him. For some seconds they looked
+ at one another, and that look saved Pierre. Apart from conditions of war
+ and law, that look established human relations between the two men. At
+ that moment an immense number of things passed dimly through both their
+ minds, and they realized that they were both children of humanity and were
+ brothers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the first glance, when Davout had only raised his head from the papers
+ where human affairs and lives were indicated by numbers, Pierre was merely
+ a circumstance, and Davout could have shot him without burdening his
+ conscience with an evil deed, but now he saw in him a human being. He
+ reflected for a moment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How can you show me that you are telling the truth?” said Davout coldly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre remembered Ramballe, and named him and his regiment and the street
+ where the house was.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are not what you say,” returned Davout.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In a trembling, faltering voice Pierre began adducing proofs of the truth
+ of his statements.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But at that moment an adjutant entered and reported something to Davout.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Davout brightened up at the news the adjutant brought, and began buttoning
+ up his uniform. It seemed that he had quite forgotten Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the adjutant reminded him of the prisoner, he jerked his head in
+ Pierre’s direction with a frown and ordered him to be led away. But where
+ they were to take him Pierre did not know: back to the coach house or to
+ the place of execution his companions had pointed out to him as they
+ crossed the Virgin’s Field.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He turned his head and saw that the adjutant was putting another question
+ to Davout.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, of course!” replied Davout, but what this “yes” meant, Pierre did
+ not know.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre could not afterwards remember how he went, whether it was far, or
+ in which direction. His faculties were quite numbed, he was stupefied, and
+ noticing nothing around him went on moving his legs as the others did till
+ they all stopped and he stopped too. The only thought in his mind at that
+ time was: who was it that had really sentenced him to death? Not the men
+ on the commission that had first examined him—not one of them wished
+ to or, evidently, could have done it. It was not Davout, who had looked at
+ him in so human a way. In another moment Davout would have realized that
+ he was doing wrong, but just then the adjutant had come in and interrupted
+ him. The adjutant, also, had evidently had no evil intent though he might
+ have refrained from coming in. Then who was executing him, killing him,
+ depriving him of life—him, Pierre, with all his memories,
+ aspirations, hopes, and thoughts? Who was doing this? And Pierre felt that
+ it was no one.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was a system—a concurrence of circumstances.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A system of some sort was killing him—Pierre—depriving him of
+ life, of everything, annihilating him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ From Prince Shcherbátov’s house the prisoners were led straight down the
+ Virgin’s Field, to the left of the nunnery, as far as a kitchen garden in
+ which a post had been set up. Beyond that post a fresh pit had been dug in
+ the ground, and near the post and the pit a large crowd stood in a
+ semicircle. The crowd consisted of a few Russians and many of Napoleon’s
+ soldiers who were not on duty—Germans, Italians, and Frenchmen, in a
+ variety of uniforms. To the right and left of the post stood rows of
+ French troops in blue uniforms with red epaulets and high boots and
+ shakos.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The prisoners were placed in a certain order, according to the list
+ (Pierre was sixth), and were led to the post. Several drums suddenly began
+ to beat on both sides of them, and at that sound Pierre felt as if part of
+ his soul had been torn away. He lost the power of thinking or
+ understanding. He could only hear and see. And he had only one wish—that
+ the frightful thing that had to happen should happen quickly. Pierre
+ looked round at his fellow prisoners and scrutinized them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The two first were convicts with shaven heads. One was tall and thin, the
+ other dark, shaggy, and sinewy, with a flat nose. The third was a domestic
+ serf, about forty-five years old, with grizzled hair and a plump,
+ well-nourished body. The fourth was a peasant, a very handsome man with a
+ broad, light-brown beard and black eyes. The fifth was a factory hand, a
+ thin, sallow-faced lad of eighteen in a loose coat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre heard the French consulting whether to shoot them separately or two
+ at a time. “In couples,” replied the officer in command in a calm voice.
+ There was a stir in the ranks of the soldiers and it was evident that they
+ were all hurrying—not as men hurry to do something they understand,
+ but as people hurry to finish a necessary but unpleasant and
+ incomprehensible task.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A French official wearing a scarf came up to the right of the row of
+ prisoners and read out the sentence in Russian and in French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then two pairs of Frenchmen approached the criminals and at the officer’s
+ command took the two convicts who stood first in the row. The convicts
+ stopped when they reached the post and, while sacks were being brought,
+ looked dumbly around as a wounded beast looks at an approaching huntsman.
+ One crossed himself continually, the other scratched his back and made a
+ movement of the lips resembling a smile. With hurried hands the soldiers
+ blindfolded them, drawing the sacks over their heads, and bound them to
+ the post.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Twelve sharpshooters with muskets stepped out of the ranks with a firm
+ regular tread and halted eight paces from the post. Pierre turned away to
+ avoid seeing what was going to happen. Suddenly a crackling, rolling noise
+ was heard which seemed to him louder than the most terrific thunder, and
+ he looked round. There was some smoke, and the Frenchmen were doing
+ something near the pit, with pale faces and trembling hands. Two more
+ prisoners were led up. In the same way and with similar looks, these two
+ glanced vainly at the onlookers with only a silent appeal for protection
+ in their eyes, evidently unable to understand or believe what was going to
+ happen to them. They could not believe it because they alone knew what
+ their life meant to them, and so they neither understood nor believed that
+ it could be taken from them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again Pierre did not wish to look and again turned away; but again the
+ sound as of a frightful explosion struck his ear, and at the same moment
+ he saw smoke, blood, and the pale, scared faces of the Frenchmen who were
+ again doing something by the post, their trembling hands impeding one
+ another. Pierre, breathing heavily, looked around as if asking what it
+ meant. The same question was expressed in all the looks that met his.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the faces of all the Russians and of the French soldiers and officers
+ without exception, he read the same dismay, horror, and conflict that were
+ in his own heart. “But who, after all, is doing this? They are all
+ suffering as I am. Who then is it? Who?” flashed for an instant through
+ his mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Sharpshooters of the 86th, forward!” shouted someone. The fifth prisoner,
+ the one next to Pierre, was led away—alone. Pierre did not
+ understand that he was saved, that he and the rest had been brought there
+ only to witness the execution. With ever-growing horror, and no sense of
+ joy or relief, he gazed at what was taking place. The fifth man was the
+ factory lad in the loose cloak. The moment they laid hands on him he
+ sprang aside in terror and clutched at Pierre. (Pierre shuddered and shook
+ himself free.) The lad was unable to walk. They dragged him along, holding
+ him up under the arms, and he screamed. When they got him to the post he
+ grew quiet, as if he suddenly understood something. Whether he understood
+ that screaming was useless or whether he thought it incredible that men
+ should kill him, at any rate he took his stand at the post, waiting to be
+ blindfolded like the others, and like a wounded animal looked around him
+ with glittering eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was no longer able to turn away and close his eyes. His curiosity
+ and agitation, like that of the whole crowd, reached the highest pitch at
+ this fifth murder. Like the others this fifth man seemed calm; he wrapped
+ his loose cloak closer and rubbed one bare foot with the other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When they began to blindfold him he himself adjusted the knot which hurt
+ the back of his head; then when they propped him against the bloodstained
+ post, he leaned back and, not being comfortable in that position,
+ straightened himself, adjusted his feet, and leaned back again more
+ comfortably. Pierre did not take his eyes from him and did not miss his
+ slightest movement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Probably a word of command was given and was followed by the reports of
+ eight muskets; but try as he would Pierre could not afterwards remember
+ having heard the slightest sound of the shots. He only saw how the workman
+ suddenly sank down on the cords that held him, how blood showed itself in
+ two places, how the ropes slackened under the weight of the hanging body,
+ and how the workman sat down, his head hanging unnaturally and one leg
+ bent under him. Pierre ran up to the post. No one hindered him. Pale,
+ frightened people were doing something around the workman. The lower jaw
+ of an old Frenchman with a thick mustache trembled as he untied the ropes.
+ The body collapsed. The soldiers dragged it awkwardly from the post and
+ began pushing it into the pit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They all plainly and certainly knew that they were criminals who must hide
+ the traces of their guilt as quickly as possible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre glanced into the pit and saw that the factory lad was lying with
+ his knees close up to his head and one shoulder higher than the other.
+ That shoulder rose and fell rhythmically and convulsively, but spadefuls
+ of earth were already being thrown over the whole body. One of the
+ soldiers, evidently suffering, shouted gruffly and angrily at Pierre to go
+ back. But Pierre did not understand him and remained near the post, and no
+ one drove him away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the pit had been filled up a command was given. Pierre was taken back
+ to his place, and the rows of troops on both sides of the post made a half
+ turn and went past it at a measured pace. The twenty-four sharpshooters
+ with discharged muskets, standing in the center of the circle, ran back to
+ their places as the companies passed by.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre gazed now with dazed eyes at these sharpshooters who ran in couples
+ out of the circle. All but one rejoined their companies. This one, a young
+ soldier, his face deadly pale, his shako pushed back, and his musket
+ resting on the ground, still stood near the pit at the spot from which he
+ had fired. He swayed like a drunken man, taking some steps forward and
+ back to save himself from falling. An old, noncommissioned officer ran out
+ of the ranks and taking him by the elbow dragged him to his company. The
+ crowd of Russians and Frenchmen began to disperse. They all went away
+ silently and with drooping heads.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That will teach them to start fires,” said one of the Frenchmen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre glanced round at the speaker and saw that it was a soldier who was
+ trying to find some relief after what had been done, but was not able to
+ do so. Without finishing what he had begun to say he made a hopeless
+ movement with his arm and went away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ After the execution Pierre was separated from the rest of the prisoners
+ and placed alone in a small, ruined, and befouled church.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Toward evening a noncommissioned officer entered with two soldiers and
+ told him that he had been pardoned and would now go to the barracks for
+ the prisoners of war. Without understanding what was said to him, Pierre
+ got up and went with the soldiers. They took him to the upper end of the
+ field, where there were some sheds built of charred planks, beams, and
+ battens, and led him into one of them. In the darkness some twenty
+ different men surrounded Pierre. He looked at them without understanding
+ who they were, why they were there, or what they wanted of him. He heard
+ what they said, but did not understand the meaning of the words and made
+ no kind of deduction from or application of them. He replied to questions
+ they put to him, but did not consider who was listening to his replies,
+ nor how they would understand them. He looked at their faces and figures,
+ but they all seemed to him equally meaningless.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the moment Pierre had witnessed those terrible murders committed by
+ men who did not wish to commit them, it was as if the mainspring of his
+ life, on which everything depended and which made everything appear alive,
+ had suddenly been wrenched out and everything had collapsed into a heap of
+ meaningless rubbish. Though he did not acknowledge it to himself, his
+ faith in the right ordering of the universe, in humanity, in his own soul,
+ and in God, had been destroyed. He had experienced this before, but never
+ so strongly as now. When similar doubts had assailed him before, they had
+ been the result of his own wrongdoing, and at the bottom of his heart he
+ had felt that relief from his despair and from those doubts was to be
+ found within himself. But now he felt that the universe had crumbled
+ before his eyes and only meaningless ruins remained, and this not by any
+ fault of his own. He felt that it was not in his power to regain faith in
+ the meaning of life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Around him in the darkness men were standing and evidently something about
+ him interested them greatly. They were telling him something and asking
+ him something. Then they led him away somewhere, and at last he found
+ himself in a corner of the shed among men who were laughing and talking on
+ all sides.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, then, mates... that very prince who ...” some voice at
+ the other end of the shed was saying, with a strong emphasis on the word who .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sitting silent and motionless on a heap of straw against the wall, Pierre
+ sometimes opened and sometimes closed his eyes. But as soon as he closed
+ them he saw before him the dreadful face of the factory lad—especially
+ dreadful because of its simplicity—and the faces of the murderers,
+ even more dreadful because of their disquiet. And he opened his eyes again
+ and stared vacantly into the darkness around him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Beside him in a stooping position sat a small man of whose presence he was
+ first made aware by a strong smell of perspiration which came from him
+ every time he moved. This man was doing something to his legs in the
+ darkness, and though Pierre could not see his face he felt that the man
+ continually glanced at him. On growing used to the darkness Pierre saw
+ that the man was taking off his leg bands, and the way he did it aroused
+ Pierre’s interest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having unwound the string that tied the band on one leg, he carefully
+ coiled it up and immediately set to work on the other leg, glancing up at
+ Pierre. While one hand hung up the first string the other was already
+ unwinding the band on the second leg. In this way, having carefully
+ removed the leg bands by deft circular motions of his arm following one
+ another uninterruptedly, the man hung the leg bands up on some pegs fixed
+ above his head. Then he took out a knife, cut something, closed the knife,
+ placed it under the head of his bed, and, seating himself comfortably,
+ clasped his arms round his lifted knees and fixed his eyes on Pierre. The
+ latter was conscious of something pleasant, comforting, and well-rounded
+ in these deft movements, in the man’s well-ordered arrangements in his
+ corner, and even in his very smell, and he looked at the man without
+ taking his eyes from him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’ve seen a lot of trouble, sir, eh?” the little man suddenly said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And there was so much kindliness and simplicity in his singsong voice that
+ Pierre tried to reply, but his jaw trembled and he felt tears rising to
+ his eyes. The little fellow, giving Pierre no time to betray his
+ confusion, instantly continued in the same pleasant tones:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh, lad, don’t fret!” said he, in the tender singsong caressing voice old
+ Russian peasant women employ. “Don’t fret, friend—‘suffer an hour,
+ live for an age!’ that’s how it is, my dear fellow. And here we live,
+ thank heaven, without offense. Among these folk, too, there are good men
+ as well as bad,” said he, and still speaking, he turned on his knees with
+ a supple movement, got up, coughed, and went off to another part of the
+ shed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh, you rascal!” Pierre heard the same kind voice saying at the other end
+ of the shed. “So you’ve come, you rascal? She remembers... Now, now,
+ that’ll do!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the soldier, pushing away a little dog that was jumping up at him,
+ returned to his place and sat down. In his hands he had something wrapped
+ in a rag.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here, eat a bit, sir,” said he, resuming his former respectful tone as he
+ unwrapped and offered Pierre some baked potatoes. “We had soup for dinner
+ and the potatoes are grand!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre had not eaten all day and the smell of the potatoes seemed
+ extremely pleasant to him. He thanked the soldier and began to eat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, are they all right?” said the soldier with a smile. “You should do
+ like this.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He took a potato, drew out his clasp knife, cut the potato into two equal
+ halves on the palm of his hand, sprinkled some salt on it from the rag,
+ and handed it to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The potatoes are grand!” he said once more. “Eat some like that!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre thought he had never eaten anything that tasted better.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, I’m all right,” said he, “but why did they shoot those poor fellows?
+ The last one was hardly twenty.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tss, tt...!” said the little man. “Ah, what a sin... what a sin!” he
+ added quickly, and as if his words were always waiting ready in his mouth
+ and flew out involuntarily he went on: “How was it, sir, that you stayed
+ in Moscow?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I didn’t think they would come so soon. I stayed accidentally,” replied
+ Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And how did they arrest you, dear lad? At your house?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I went to look at the fire, and they arrested me there, and tried me
+ as an incendiary.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where there’s law there’s injustice,” put in the little man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And have you been here long?” Pierre asked as he munched the last of the
+ potato.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I? It was last Sunday they took me, out of a hospital in Moscow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, are you a soldier then?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, we are soldiers of the Ápsheron regiment. I was dying of fever. We
+ weren’t told anything. There were some twenty of us lying there. We had no
+ idea, never guessed at all.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And do you feel sad here?” Pierre inquired.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How can one help it, lad? My name is Platón, and the surname is
+ Karatáev,” he added, evidently wishing to make it easier for Pierre to
+ address him. “They call me ‘little falcon’ in the regiment. How is one to
+ help feeling sad? Moscow—she’s the mother of cities. How can one see
+ all this and not feel sad? But ‘the maggot gnaws the cabbage, yet dies
+ first’; that’s what the old folks used to tell us,” he added rapidly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What? What did you say?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who? I?” said Karatáev. “I say things happen not as we plan but as God
+ judges,” he replied, thinking that he was repeating what he had said
+ before, and immediately continued:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, and you, have you a family estate, sir? And a house? So you have
+ abundance, then? And a housewife? And your old parents, are they still
+ living?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And though it was too dark for Pierre to see, he felt that a suppressed
+ smile of kindliness puckered the soldier’s lips as he put these questions.
+ He seemed grieved that Pierre had no parents, especially that he had no
+ mother.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A wife for counsel, a mother-in-law for welcome, but there’s none as dear
+ as one’s own mother!” said he. “Well, and have you little ones?” he went
+ on asking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again Pierre’s negative answer seemed to distress him, and he hastened to
+ add:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Never mind! You’re young folks yet, and please God may still have some.
+ The great thing is to live in harmony....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But it’s all the same now,” Pierre could not help saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, my dear fellow!” rejoined Karatáev, “never decline a prison or a
+ beggar’s sack!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He seated himself more comfortably and coughed, evidently preparing to
+ tell a long story.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, my dear fellow, I was still living at home,” he began. “We had a
+ well-to-do homestead, plenty of land, we peasants lived well and our house
+ was one to thank God for. When Father and we went out mowing there were
+ seven of us. We lived well. We were real peasants. It so happened...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Platón Karatáev told a long story of how he had gone into someone’s
+ copse to take wood, how he had been caught by the keeper, had been tried,
+ flogged, and sent to serve as a soldier.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, lad,” and a smile changed the tone of his voice, “we thought it was
+ a misfortune but it turned out a blessing! If it had not been for my sin,
+ my brother would have had to go as a soldier. But he, my younger brother,
+ had five little ones, while I, you see, only left a wife behind. We had a
+ little girl, but God took her before I went as a soldier. I come home on
+ leave and I’ll tell you how it was, I look and see that they are living
+ better than before. The yard full of cattle, the women at home, two
+ brothers away earning wages, and only Michael the youngest, at home.
+ Father, he says, ‘All my children are the same to me: it hurts the same
+ whichever finger gets bitten. But if Platón hadn’t been shaved for a
+ soldier, Michael would have had to go.’ called us all to him and, will you
+ believe it, placed us in front of the icons. ‘Michael,’ he says, ‘come
+ here and bow down to his feet; and you, young woman, you bow down too; and
+ you, grandchildren, also bow down before him! Do you understand?’ he says.
+ That’s how it is, dear fellow. Fate looks for a head. But we are always
+ judging, ‘that’s not well—that’s not right!’ Our luck is like water
+ in a dragnet: you pull at it and it bulges, but when you’ve drawn it out
+ it’s empty! That’s how it is.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Platón shifted his seat on the straw.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After a short silence he rose.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, I think you must be sleepy,” said he, and began rapidly crossing
+ himself and repeating:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lord Jesus Christ, holy Saint Nicholas, Frola and Lavra! Lord Jesus
+ Christ, holy Saint Nicholas, Frola and Lavra! Lord Jesus Christ, have
+ mercy on us and save us!” he concluded, then bowed to the ground, got up,
+ sighed, and sat down again on his heap of straw. “That’s the way. Lay me
+ down like a stone, O God, and raise me up like a loaf,” he muttered as he
+ lay down, pulling his coat over him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What prayer was that you were saying?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh?” murmured Platón, who had almost fallen asleep. “What was I saying? I
+ was praying. Don’t you pray?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I do,” said Pierre. “But what was that you said: Frola and Lavra?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, of course,” replied Platón quickly, “the horses’ saints. One must
+ pity the animals too. Eh, the rascal! Now you’ve curled up and got warm,
+ you daughter of a bitch!” said Karatáev, touching the dog that lay at his
+ feet, and again turning over he fell asleep immediately.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sounds of crying and screaming came from somewhere in the distance
+ outside, and flames were visible through the cracks of the shed, but
+ inside it was quiet and dark. For a long time Pierre did not sleep, but
+ lay with eyes open in the darkness, listening to the regular snoring of
+ Platón who lay beside him, and he felt that the world that had been
+ shattered was once more stirring in his soul with a new beauty and on new
+ and unshakable foundations.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ Twenty-three soldiers, three officers, and two officials were confined in
+ the shed in which Pierre had been placed and where he remained for four
+ weeks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Pierre remembered them afterwards they all seemed misty figures to
+ him except Platón Karatáev, who always remained in his mind a most vivid
+ and precious memory and the personification of everything Russian, kindly,
+ and round. When Pierre saw his neighbor next morning at dawn the first
+ impression of him, as of something round, was fully confirmed: Platón’s
+ whole figure—in a French overcoat girdled with a cord, a soldier’s
+ cap, and bast shoes—was round. His head was quite round, his back,
+ chest, shoulders, and even his arms, which he held as if ever ready to
+ embrace something, were rounded, his pleasant smile and his large, gentle
+ brown eyes were also round.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Platón Karatáev must have been fifty, judging by his stories of campaigns
+ he had been in, told as by an old soldier. He did not himself know his age
+ and was quite unable to determine it. But his brilliantly white, strong
+ teeth which showed in two unbroken semicircles when he laughed—as he
+ often did—were all sound and good, there was not a gray hair in his
+ beard or on his head, and his whole body gave an impression of suppleness
+ and especially of firmness and endurance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His face, despite its fine, rounded wrinkles, had an expression of
+ innocence and youth, his voice was pleasant and musical. But the chief
+ peculiarity of his speech was its directness and appositeness. It was
+ evident that he never considered what he had said or was going to say, and
+ consequently the rapidity and justice of his intonation had an
+ irresistible persuasiveness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His physical strength and agility during the first days of his
+ imprisonment were such that he seemed not to know what fatigue and
+ sickness meant. Every night before lying down, he said: “Lord, lay me down
+ as a stone and raise me up as a loaf!” and every morning on getting up, he
+ said: “I lay down and curled up, I get up and shake myself.” And indeed he
+ only had to lie down, to fall asleep like a stone, and he only had to
+ shake himself, to be ready without a moment’s delay for some work, just as
+ children are ready to play directly they awake. He could do everything,
+ not very well but not badly. He baked, cooked, sewed, planed, and mended
+ boots. He was always busy, and only at night allowed himself conversation—of
+ which he was fond—and songs. He did not sing like a trained singer
+ who knows he is listened to, but like the birds, evidently giving vent to
+ the sounds in the same way that one stretches oneself or walks about to
+ get rid of stiffness, and the sounds were always high-pitched, mournful,
+ delicate, and almost feminine, and his face at such times was very
+ serious.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having been taken prisoner and allowed his beard to grow, he seemed to
+ have thrown off all that had been forced upon him—everything
+ military and alien to himself—and had returned to his former peasant
+ habits.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A soldier on leave—a shirt outside breeches,” he would say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not like talking about his life as a soldier, though he did not
+ complain, and often mentioned that he had not been flogged once during the
+ whole of his army service. When he related anything it was generally some
+ old and evidently precious memory of his “Christian” life, as he called
+ his peasant existence. The proverbs, of which his talk was full, were for
+ the most part not the coarse and indecent saws soldiers employ, but those
+ folk sayings which taken without a context seem so insignificant, but when
+ used appositely suddenly acquire a significance of profound wisdom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He would often say the exact opposite of what he had said on a previous
+ occasion, yet both would be right. He liked to talk and he talked well,
+ adorning his speech with terms of endearment and with folk sayings which
+ Pierre thought he invented himself, but the chief charm of his talk lay in
+ the fact that the commonest events—sometimes just such as Pierre had
+ witnessed without taking notice of them—assumed in Karatáev’s a
+ character of solemn fitness. He liked to hear the folk tales one of the
+ soldiers used to tell of an evening (they were always the same), but most
+ of all he liked to hear stories of real life. He would smile joyfully when
+ listening to such stories, now and then putting in a word or asking a
+ question to make the moral beauty of what he was told clear to himself.
+ Karatáev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre understood
+ them, but loved and lived affectionately with everything life brought him
+ in contact with, particularly with man—not any particular man, but
+ those with whom he happened to be. He loved his dog, his comrades, the
+ French, and Pierre who was his neighbor, but Pierre felt that in spite of
+ Karatáev’s affectionate tenderness for him (by which he unconsciously gave
+ Pierre’s spiritual life its due) he would not have grieved for a moment at
+ parting from him. And Pierre began to feel in the same way toward
+ Karatáev.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To all the other prisoners Platón Karatáev seemed a most ordinary soldier.
+ They called him “little falcon” or “Platósha,” chaffed
+ him good-naturedly, and sent him on errands. But to Pierre he always remained
+ what he had seemed that first night: an unfathomable, rounded, eternal
+ personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Platón Karatáev knew nothing by heart except his prayers. When he began to
+ speak he seemed not to know how he would conclude.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sometimes Pierre, struck by the meaning of his words, would ask him to
+ repeat them, but Platón could never recall what he had said a moment
+ before, just as he never could repeat to Pierre the words of his favorite
+ song: native and birch tree and my heart is sick occurred in
+ it, but when spoken and not sung, no meaning could be got out of it. He did not,
+ and could not, understand the meaning of words apart from their context. Every
+ word and action of his was the manifestation of an activity unknown to
+ him, which was his life. But his life, as he regarded it, had no meaning
+ as a separate thing. It had meaning only as part of a whole of which he
+ was always conscious. His words and actions flowed from him as evenly,
+ inevitably, and spontaneously as fragrance exhales from a flower. He could
+ not understand the value or significance of any word or deed taken
+ separately.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV
+ 
+ 
+ When Princess Mary heard from Nicholas that her brother was with the
+ Rostóvs at Yaroslávl she at once prepared to go there, in spite of her
+ aunt’s efforts to dissuade her—and not merely to go herself but to
+ take her nephew with her. Whether it were difficult or easy, possible or
+ impossible, she did not ask and did not want to know: it was her duty, not
+ only to herself, to be near her brother who was perhaps dying, but to do
+ everything possible to take his son to him, and so she prepared to set
+ off. That she had not heard from Prince Andrew himself, Princess Mary
+ attributed to his being too weak to write or to his considering the long
+ journey too hard and too dangerous for her and his son.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In a few days Princess Mary was ready to start. Her equipages were the
+ huge family coach in which she had traveled to Vorónezh, a semiopen trap,
+ and a baggage cart. With her traveled Mademoiselle Bourienne, little
+ Nicholas and his tutor, her old nurse, three maids, Tíkhon, and a young
+ footman and courier her aunt had sent to accompany her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The usual route through Moscow could not be thought of, and the roundabout
+ way Princess Mary was obliged to take through Lípetsk, Ryazán, Vladímir,
+ and Shúya was very long and, as post horses were not everywhere
+ obtainable, very difficult, and near Ryazán where the French were said to
+ have shown themselves was even dangerous.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During this difficult journey Mademoiselle Bourienne, Dessalles, and
+ Princess Mary’s servants were astonished at her energy and firmness of
+ spirit. She went to bed later and rose earlier than any of them, and no
+ difficulties daunted her. Thanks to her activity and energy, which
+ infected her fellow travelers, they approached Yaroslávl by the end of the
+ second week.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The last days of her stay in Vorónezh had been the happiest of her life.
+ Her love for Rostóv no longer tormented or agitated her. It filled her
+ whole soul, had become an integral part of herself, and she no longer
+ struggled against it. Latterly she had become convinced that she loved and
+ was beloved, though she never said this definitely to herself in words.
+ She had become convinced of it at her last interview with Nicholas, when
+ he had come to tell her that her brother was with the Rostóvs. Not by a
+ single word had Nicholas alluded to the fact that Prince Andrew’s
+ relations with Natásha might, if he recovered, be renewed, but Princess
+ Mary saw by his face that he knew and thought of this.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Yet in spite of that, his relation to her—considerate, delicate, and
+ loving—not only remained unchanged, but it sometimes seemed to
+ Princess Mary that he was even glad that the family connection between
+ them allowed him to express his friendship more freely. She knew that she
+ loved for the first and only time in her life and felt that she was
+ beloved, and was happy in regard to it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But this happiness on one side of her spiritual nature did not prevent her
+ feeling grief for her brother with full force; on the contrary, that
+ spiritual tranquility on the one side made it the more possible for her to
+ give full play to her feeling for her brother. That feeling was so strong
+ at the moment of leaving Vorónezh that those who saw her off, as they
+ looked at her careworn, despairing face, felt sure she would fall ill on
+ the journey. But the very difficulties and preoccupations of the journey,
+ which she took so actively in hand, saved her for a while from her grief
+ and gave her strength.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As always happens when traveling, Princess Mary thought only of the
+ journey itself, forgetting its object. But as she approached Yaroslávl the
+ thought of what might await her there—not after many days, but that
+ very evening—again presented itself to her and her agitation
+ increased to its utmost limit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The courier who had been sent on in advance to find out where the Rostóvs
+ were staying in Yaroslávl, and in what condition Prince Andrew was, when
+ he met the big coach just entering the town gates was appalled by the
+ terrible pallor of the princess’ face that looked out at him from the
+ window.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have found out everything, your excellency: the Rostóvs are staying at
+ the merchant Brónnikov’s house, in the Square not far from here, right
+ above the Vólga,” said the courier.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary looked at him with frightened inquiry, not understanding why
+ he did not reply to what she chiefly wanted to know: how was her brother?
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne put that question for her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How is the prince?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “His excellency is staying in the same house with them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then he is alive,” thought Princess Mary, and asked in a low voice: “How
+ is he?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The servants say he is still the same.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What “still the same” might mean Princess Mary did not ask, but with an
+ unnoticed glance at little seven-year-old Nicholas, who was sitting in
+ front of her looking with pleasure at the town, she bowed her head and did
+ not raise it again till the heavy coach, rumbling, shaking and swaying,
+ came to a stop. The carriage steps clattered as they were let down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The carriage door was opened. On the left there was water—a great
+ river—and on the right a porch. There were people at the entrance:
+ servants, and a rosy girl with a large plait of black hair, smiling as it
+ seemed to Princess Mary in an unpleasantly affected way. (This was Sónya.)
+ Princess Mary ran up the steps. “This way, this way!” said the girl, with
+ the same artificial smile, and the princess found herself in the hall
+ facing an elderly woman of Oriental type, who came rapidly to meet her
+ with a look of emotion. This was the countess. She embraced Princess Mary
+ and kissed her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mon enfant!” she muttered, “je vous aime et vous
+ connais depuis longtemps.” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “My child! I love you and have known you a long time.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Despite her excitement, Princess Mary realized that this was the
+ countess and that it was necessary to say something to her. Hardly
+ knowing how she did it, she contrived to utter a few polite phrases in
+ French in the same tone as those that had been addressed to her, and
+ asked: “How is he?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The doctor says that he is not in danger,” said the countess, but as she
+ spoke she raised her eyes with a sigh, and her gesture conveyed a
+ contradiction of her words.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where is he? Can I see him—can I?” asked the princess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One moment, Princess, one moment, my dear! Is this his son?” said the
+ countess, turning to little Nicholas who was coming in with Dessalles.
+ “There will be room for everybody, this is a big house. Oh, what a lovely
+ boy!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess took Princess Mary into the drawing room, where Sónya was
+ talking to Mademoiselle Bourienne. The countess caressed the boy, and the
+ old count came in and welcomed the princess. He had changed very much
+ since Princess Mary had last seen him. Then he had been a brisk, cheerful,
+ self-assured old man; now he seemed a pitiful, bewildered person. While
+ talking to Princess Mary he continually looked round as if asking everyone
+ whether he was doing the right thing. After the destruction of Moscow and
+ of his property, thrown out of his accustomed groove he seemed to have
+ lost the sense of his own significance and to feel that there was no
+ longer a place for him in life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In spite of her one desire to see her brother as soon as possible, and her
+ vexation that at the moment when all she wanted was to see him they should
+ be trying to entertain her and pretending to admire her nephew, the
+ princess noticed all that was going on around her and felt the necessity
+ of submitting, for a time, to this new order of things which she had
+ entered. She knew it to be necessary, and though it was hard for her she
+ was not vexed with these people.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “This is my niece,” said the count, introducing Sónya—“You don’t
+ know her, Princess?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary turned to Sónya and, trying to stifle the hostile feeling
+ that arose in her toward the girl, she kissed her. But she felt oppressed
+ by the fact that the mood of everyone around her was so far from what was
+ in her own heart.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where is he?” she asked again, addressing them all.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is downstairs. Natásha is with him,” answered Sónya, flushing. “We
+ have sent to ask. I think you must be tired, Princess.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Tears of vexation showed themselves in Princess Mary’s eyes. She turned
+ away and was about to ask the countess again how to go to him, when light,
+ impetuous, and seemingly buoyant steps were heard at the door. The
+ princess looked round and saw Natásha coming in, almost running—that
+ Natásha whom she had liked so little at their meeting in Moscow long
+ since.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But hardly had the princess looked at Natásha’s face before she realized
+ that here was a real comrade in her grief, and consequently a friend. She
+ ran to meet her, embraced her, and began to cry on her shoulder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As soon as Natásha, sitting at the head of Prince Andrew’s bed, heard of
+ Princess Mary’s arrival, she softly left his room and hastened to her with
+ those swift steps that had sounded buoyant to Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was only one expression on her agitated face when she ran into the
+ drawing room—that of love—boundless love for him, for her, and
+ for all that was near to the man she loved; and of pity, suffering for
+ others, and passionate desire to give herself entirely to helping them. It
+ was plain that at that moment there was in Natásha’s heart no thought of
+ herself or of her own relations with Prince Andrew.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary, with her acute sensibility, understood all this at the
+ first glance at Natásha’s face, and wept on her shoulder with sorrowful
+ pleasure.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come, come to him, Mary,” said Natásha, leading her into the other room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary raised her head, dried her eyes, and turned to Natásha. She
+ felt that from her she would be able to understand and learn everything.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How...” she began her question but stopped short.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She felt that it was impossible to ask, or to answer, in words. Natásha’s
+ face and eyes would have to tell her all more clearly and profoundly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha was gazing at her, but seemed afraid and in doubt whether to say
+ all she knew or not; she seemed to feel that before those luminous eyes
+ which penetrated into the very depths of her heart, it was impossible not
+ to tell the whole truth which she saw. And suddenly, Natásha’s lips
+ twitched, ugly wrinkles gathered round her mouth, and covering her face
+ with her hands she burst into sobs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary understood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But she still hoped, and asked, in words she herself did not trust:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But how is his wound? What is his general condition?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You, you... will see,” was all Natásha could say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They sat a little while downstairs near his room till they had left off
+ crying and were able to go to him with calm faces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How has his whole illness gone? Is it long since he grew worse? When did
+ this happen?” Princess Mary inquired.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha told her that at first there had been danger from his feverish
+ condition and the pain he suffered, but at Tróitsa that had passed and the
+ doctor had only been afraid of gangrene. That danger had also passed. When
+ they reached Yaroslávl the wound had begun to fester (Natásha knew all
+ about such things as festering) and the doctor had said that the festering
+ might take a normal course. Then fever set in, but the doctor had said the
+ fever was not very serious.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But two days ago this suddenly happened,” said Natásha, struggling with
+ her sobs. “I don’t know why, but you will see what he is like.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is he weaker? Thinner?” asked the princess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, it’s not that, but worse. You will see. O, Mary, he is too good, he
+ cannot, cannot live, because...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV
+ 
+ 
+ When Natásha opened Prince Andrew’s door with a familiar movement and let
+ Princess Mary pass into the room before her, the princess felt the sobs in
+ her throat. Hard as she had tried to prepare herself, and now tried to
+ remain tranquil, she knew that she would be unable to look at him without
+ tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess understood what Natásha had meant by the words: “two days ago
+ this suddenly happened.” She understood those words to mean that he had
+ suddenly softened and that this softening and gentleness were signs of
+ approaching death. As she stepped to the door she already saw in
+ imagination Andrew’s face as she remembered it in childhood, a gentle,
+ mild, sympathetic face which he had rarely shown, and which therefore
+ affected her very strongly. She was sure he would speak soft, tender words
+ to her such as her father had uttered before his death, and that she would
+ not be able to bear it and would burst into sobs in his presence. Yet
+ sooner or later it had to be, and she went in. The sobs rose higher and
+ higher in her throat as she more and more clearly distinguished his form
+ and her shortsighted eyes tried to make out his features, and then she saw
+ his face and met his gaze.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was lying in a squirrel-fur dressing gown on a divan, surrounded by
+ pillows. He was thin and pale. In one thin, translucently white hand he
+ held a handkerchief, while with the other he stroked the delicate mustache
+ he had grown, moving his fingers slowly. His eyes gazed at them as they
+ entered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On seeing his face and meeting his eyes Princess Mary’s pace suddenly
+ slackened, she felt her tears dry up and her sobs ceased. She suddenly
+ felt guilty and grew timid on catching the expression of his face and
+ eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But in what am I to blame?” she asked herself. And his cold, stern look
+ replied: “Because you are alive and thinking of the living, while I...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the deep gaze that seemed to look not outwards but inwards there was an
+ almost hostile expression as he slowly regarded his sister and Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He kissed his sister, holding her hand in his as was their wont.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How are you, Mary? How did you manage to get here?” said he in a voice as
+ calm and aloof as his look.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Had he screamed in agony, that scream would not have struck such horror
+ into Princess Mary’s heart as the tone of his voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And have you brought little Nicholas?” he asked in the same slow, quiet
+ manner and with an obvious effort to remember.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How are you now?” said Princess Mary, herself surprised at what she was
+ saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That, my dear, you must ask the doctor,” he replied, and again making an
+ evident effort to be affectionate, he said with his lips only (his words
+ clearly did not correspond to his thoughts):
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Merci, chère amie, d’être venue.” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Thank you for coming, my dear.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary pressed his hand. The pressure made him wince just
+ perceptibly. He was silent, and she did not know what to say. She now
+ understood what had happened to him two days before. In his words, his
+ tone, and especially in that calm, almost antagonistic look could be felt
+ an estrangement from everything belonging to this world, terrible in one
+ who is alive. Evidently only with an effort did he understand anything
+ living; but it was obvious that he failed to understand, not because he
+ lacked the power to do so but because he understood something else—something
+ the living did not and could not understand—and which wholly
+ occupied his mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There, you see how strangely fate has brought us together,” said he,
+ breaking the silence and pointing to Natásha. “She looks after me all the
+ time.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary heard him and did not understand how he could say such a
+ thing. He, the sensitive, tender Prince Andrew, how could he say that,
+ before her whom he loved and who loved him? Had he expected to live he
+ could not have said those words in that offensively cold tone. If he had
+ not known that he was dying, how could he have failed to pity her and how
+ could he speak like that in her presence? The only explanation was that he
+ was indifferent, because something else, much more important, had been
+ revealed to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The conversation was cold and disconnected and continually broke off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mary came by way of Ryazán,” said Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew did not notice that she called his sister Mary , and only
+ after calling her so in his presence did Natásha notice it herself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Really?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They told her that all Moscow has been burned down, and that...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha stopped. It was impossible to talk. It was plain that he was
+ making an effort to listen, but could not do so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, they say it’s burned,” he said. “It’s a great pity,” and he gazed
+ straight before him, absently stroking his mustache with his fingers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And so you have met Count Nicholas, Mary?” Prince Andrew suddenly said,
+ evidently wishing to speak pleasantly to them. “He wrote here that he took
+ a great liking to you,” he went on simply and calmly, evidently unable to
+ understand all the complex significance his words had for living people.
+ “If you liked him too, it would be a good thing for you to get married,”
+ he added rather more quickly, as if pleased at having found words he had
+ long been seeking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary heard his words but they had no meaning for her, except as a
+ proof of how far away he now was from everything living.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why talk of me?” she said quietly and glanced at Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha, who felt her glance, did not look at her. All three were again
+ silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Andrew, would you like...” Princess Mary suddenly said in a trembling
+ voice, “would you like to see little Nicholas? He is always talking about
+ you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew smiled just perceptibly and for the first time, but Princess
+ Mary, who knew his face so well, saw with horror that he did not smile
+ with pleasure or affection for his son, but with quiet, gentle irony
+ because he thought she was trying what she believed to be the last means
+ of arousing him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I shall be very glad to see him. Is he quite well?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When little Nicholas was brought into Prince Andrew’s room he looked at
+ his father with frightened eyes, but did not cry, because no one else was
+ crying. Prince Andrew kissed him and evidently did not know what to say to
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Nicholas had been led away, Princess Mary again went up to her
+ brother, kissed him, and unable to restrain her tears any longer began to
+ cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He looked at her attentively.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is it about Nicholas?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary nodded her head, weeping.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mary, you know the Gosp...” but he broke off.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What did you say?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing. You mustn’t cry here,” he said, looking at her with the same
+ cold expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ When Princess Mary began to cry, he understood that she was crying at the
+ thought that little Nicholas would be left without a father. With a great
+ effort he tried to return to life and to see things from their point of
+ view.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, to them it must seem sad!” he thought. “But how simple it is.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The fowls of the air sow not, neither do they reap, yet your Father
+ feedeth them,” he said to himself and wished to say to Princess Mary; “but
+ no, they will take it their own way, they won’t understand! They can’t
+ understand that all those feelings they prize so—all our feelings,
+ all those ideas that seem so important to us, are unnecessary . We cannot
+ understand one another,” and he remained silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew’s little son was seven. He could scarcely read, and knew
+ nothing. After that day he lived through many things, gaining knowledge,
+ observation, and experience, but had he possessed all the faculties he
+ afterwards acquired, he could not have had a better or more profound
+ understanding of the meaning of the scene he had witnessed between his
+ father, Mary, and Natásha, than he had then. He understood it completely,
+ and, leaving the room without crying, went silently up to Natásha who had
+ come out with him and looked shyly at her with his beautiful, thoughtful
+ eyes, then his uplifted, rosy upper lip trembled and leaning his head
+ against her he began to cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After that he avoided Dessalles and the countess who caressed him and
+ either sat alone or came timidly to Princess Mary, or to Natásha of whom
+ he seemed even fonder than of his aunt, and clung to them quietly and
+ shyly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Princess Mary had left Prince Andrew she fully understood what
+ Natásha’s face had told her. She did not speak any more to Natásha of
+ hopes of saving his life. She took turns with her beside his sofa, and did
+ not cry any more, but prayed continually, turning in soul to that Eternal
+ and Unfathomable, whose presence above the dying man was now so evident.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI
+ 
+ 
+ Not only did Prince Andrew know he would die, but he felt that he was
+ dying and was already half dead. He was conscious of an aloofness from
+ everything earthly and a strange and joyous lightness of existence.
+ Without haste or agitation he awaited what was coming. That inexorable,
+ eternal, distant, and unknown the presence of which he had felt
+ continually all his life—was now near to him and, by the strange
+ lightness he experienced, almost comprehensible and palpable....
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Formerly he had feared the end. He had twice experienced that terribly
+ tormenting fear of death—the end—but now he no longer understood that
+ fear.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He had felt it for the first time when the shell spun like a top
+ before him, and he looked at the fallow field, the bushes, and the sky,
+ and knew that he was face to face with death. When he came to himself
+ after being wounded and the flower of eternal, unfettered love had
+ instantly unfolded itself in his soul as if freed from the bondage of
+ life that had restrained it, he no longer feared death and ceased to
+ think about it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the hours of solitude, suffering, and partial delirium he spent
+ after he was wounded, the more deeply he penetrated into the new principle
+ of eternal love revealed to him, the more he unconsciously detached
+ himself from earthly life. To love everything and everybody and always to
+ sacrifice oneself for love meant not to love anyone, not to live this
+ earthly life. And the more imbued he became with that principle of love,
+ the more he renounced life and the more completely he destroyed that
+ dreadful barrier which—in the absence of such love—stands
+ between life and death. When during those first days he remembered that he
+ would have to die, he said to himself: “Well, what of it? So much the
+ better!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But after the night in Mytíshchi when, half delirious, he had seen her for
+ whom he longed appear before him and, having pressed her hand to his lips,
+ had shed gentle, happy tears, love for a particular woman again crept
+ unobserved into his heart and once more bound him to life. And joyful and
+ agitating thoughts began to occupy his mind. Recalling the moment at the
+ ambulance station when he had seen Kurágin, he could not now regain the
+ feeling he then had, but was tormented by the question whether Kurágin was
+ alive. And he dared not inquire.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His illness pursued its normal physical course, but what Natásha referred
+ to when she said: “ This suddenly happened,” had occurred two
+ days before Princess Mary arrived. It was the last spiritual struggle between
+ life and death, in which death gained the victory. It was the unexpected
+ realization of the fact that he still valued life as presented to him in
+ the form of his love for Natásha, and a last, though ultimately
+ vanquished, attack of terror before the unknown.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was evening. As usual after dinner he was slightly feverish, and his
+ thoughts were preternaturally clear. Sónya was sitting by the table. He
+ began to doze. Suddenly a feeling of happiness seized him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, she has come!” thought he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And so it was: in Sónya’s place sat Natásha who had just come in
+ noiselessly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Since she had begun looking after him, he had always experienced this
+ physical consciousness of her nearness. She was sitting in an armchair
+ placed sideways, screening the light of the candle from him, and was
+ knitting a stocking. She had learned to knit stockings since Prince Andrew
+ had casually mentioned that no one nursed the sick so well as old nurses
+ who knit stockings, and that there is something soothing in the knitting
+ of stockings. The needles clicked lightly in her slender, rapidly moving
+ hands, and he could clearly see the thoughtful profile of her drooping
+ face. She moved, and the ball rolled off her knees. She started, glanced
+ round at him, and screening the candle with her hand stooped carefully
+ with a supple and exact movement, picked up the ball, and regained her
+ former position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He looked at her without moving and saw that she wanted to draw a deep
+ breath after stooping, but refrained from doing so and breathed
+ cautiously.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the Tróitsa monastery they had spoken of the past, and he had told her
+ that if he lived he would always thank God for his wound which had brought
+ them together again, but after that they never spoke of the future.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Can it or can it not be?” he now thought as he looked at her and listened
+ to the light click of the steel needles. “Can fate have brought me to her
+ so strangely only for me to die?... Is it possible that the truth of life
+ has been revealed to me only to show me that I have spent my life in
+ falsity? I love her more than anything in the world! But what am I to do
+ if I love her?” he thought, and he involuntarily groaned, from a habit
+ acquired during his sufferings.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On hearing that sound Natásha put down the stocking, leaned nearer to him,
+ and suddenly, noticing his shining eyes, stepped lightly up to him and
+ bent over him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are not asleep?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I have been looking at you a long time. I felt you come in. No one
+ else gives me that sense of soft tranquillity that you do... that light. I
+ want to weep for joy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha drew closer to him. Her face shone with rapturous joy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha, I love you too much! More than anything in the world.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And I!”—She turned away for an instant. “Why too much?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why too much?... Well, what do you, what do you feel in your soul, your
+ whole soul—shall I live? What do you think?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am sure of it, sure!” Natásha almost shouted, taking hold of both his
+ hands with a passionate movement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He remained silent awhile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How good it would be!” and taking her hand he kissed it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha felt happy and agitated, but at once remembered that this would
+ not do and that he had to be quiet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you have not slept,” she said, repressing her joy. “Try to sleep...
+ please!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He pressed her hand and released it, and she went back to the candle and
+ sat down again in her former position. Twice she turned and looked at him,
+ and her eyes met his beaming at her. She set herself a task on her
+ stocking and resolved not to turn round till it was finished.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon he really shut his eyes and fell asleep. He did not sleep long and
+ suddenly awoke with a start and in a cold perspiration.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he fell asleep he had still been thinking of the subject that now
+ always occupied his mind—about life and death, and chiefly about
+ death. He felt himself nearer to it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Love? What is love?” he thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I
+ understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only
+ because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die
+ means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal
+ source.” These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only
+ thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were
+ too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former
+ agitation and obscurity. He fell asleep.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He dreamed that he was lying in the room he really was in, but that he was
+ quite well and unwounded. Many various, indifferent, and insignificant
+ people appeared before him. He talked to them and discussed something
+ trivial. They were preparing to go away somewhere. Prince Andrew dimly
+ realized that all this was trivial and that he had more important cares,
+ but he continued to speak, surprising them by empty witticisms. Gradually,
+ unnoticed, all these persons began to disappear and a single question,
+ that of the closed door, superseded all else. He rose and went to the door
+ to bolt and lock it. Everything depended on whether he was, or was not, in
+ time to lock it. He went, and tried to hurry, but his legs refused to move
+ and he knew he would not be in time to lock the door though he painfully
+ strained all his powers. He was seized by an agonizing fear. And that fear
+ was the fear of death. It stood behind the door. But just when he was
+ clumsily creeping toward the door, that dreadful something on the other
+ side was already pressing against it and forcing its way in. Something not
+ human—death—was breaking in through that door, and had to be
+ kept out. He seized the door, making a final effort to hold it back—to
+ lock it was no longer possible—but his efforts were weak and clumsy
+ and the door, pushed from behind by that terror, opened and closed again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Once again it pushed from outside. His last superhuman efforts were vain
+ and both halves of the door noiselessly opened. It entered, and it was
+ death , and Prince Andrew died.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But at the instant he died, Prince Andrew remembered that he was asleep,
+ and at the very instant he died, having made an effort, he awoke.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, it was death! I died—and woke up. Yes, death is an awakening!”
+ And all at once it grew light in his soul and the veil that had till then
+ concealed the unknown was lifted from his spiritual vision. He felt as if
+ powers till then confined within him had been liberated, and that strange
+ lightness did not again leave him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When, waking in a cold perspiration, he moved on the divan, Natásha went
+ up and asked him what was the matter. He did not answer and looked at her
+ strangely, not understanding.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That was what had happened to him two days before Princess Mary’s arrival.
+ From that day, as the doctor expressed it, the wasting fever assumed a
+ malignant character, but what the doctor said did not interest Natásha,
+ she saw the terrible moral symptoms which to her were more convincing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From that day an awakening from life came to Prince Andrew together with
+ his awakening from sleep. And compared to the duration of life it did not
+ seem to him slower than an awakening from sleep compared to the duration
+ of a dream.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was nothing terrible or violent in this comparatively slow
+ awakening.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His last days and hours passed in an ordinary and simple way. Both
+ Princess Mary and Natásha, who did not leave him, felt this. They did not
+ weep or shudder and during these last days they themselves felt that they
+ were not attending on him (he was no longer there, he had left them) but
+ on what reminded them most closely of him—his body. Both felt this
+ so strongly that the outward and terrible side of death did not affect
+ them and they did not feel it necessary to foment their grief. Neither in
+ his presence nor out of it did they weep, nor did they ever talk to one
+ another about him. They felt that they could not express in words what
+ they understood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They both saw that he was sinking slowly and quietly, deeper and deeper,
+ away from them, and they both knew that this had to be so and that it was
+ right.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He confessed, and received communion: everyone came to take leave of him.
+ When they brought his son to him, he pressed his lips to the boy’s and
+ turned away, not because he felt it hard and sad (Princess Mary and
+ Natásha understood that) but simply because he thought it was all that was
+ required of him, but when they told him to bless the boy, he did what was
+ demanded and looked round as if asking whether there was anything else he
+ should do.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the last convulsions of the body, which the spirit was leaving,
+ occurred, Princess Mary and Natásha were present.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is it over?” said Princess Mary when his body had for a few minutes lain
+ motionless, growing cold before them. Natásha went up, looked at the dead
+ eyes, and hastened to close them. She closed them but did not kiss them,
+ but clung to that which reminded her most nearly of him—his body.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where has he gone? Where is he now?...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the body, washed and dressed, lay in the coffin on a table, everyone
+ came to take leave of him and they all wept.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Little Nicholas cried because his heart was rent by painful perplexity.
+ The countess and Sónya cried from pity for Natásha and because he was no
+ more. The old count cried because he felt that before long, he, too, must
+ take the same terrible step.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha and Princess Mary also wept now, but not because of their own
+ personal grief; they wept with a reverent and softening emotion which had
+ taken possession of their souls at the consciousness of the simple and
+ solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished in their presence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK THIRTEEN: 1812
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ Man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but
+ the desire to find those causes is implanted in man’s soul. And without
+ considering the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions any one of
+ which taken separately may seem to be the cause, he snatches at the first
+ approximation to a cause that seems to him intelligible and says: “This is
+ the cause!” In historical events (where the actions of men are the subject
+ of observation) the first and most primitive approximation to present
+ itself was the will of the gods and, after that, the will of those who
+ stood in the most prominent position—the heroes of history. But we
+ need only penetrate to the essence of any historic event—which lies
+ in the activity of the general mass of men who take part in it—to be
+ convinced that the will of the historic hero does not control the actions
+ of the mass but is itself continually controlled. It may seem to be a
+ matter of indifference whether we understand the meaning of historical
+ events this way or that; yet there is the same difference between a man
+ who says that the people of the West moved on the East because Napoleon
+ wished it and a man who says that this happened because it had to happen,
+ as there is between those who declared that the earth was stationary and
+ that the planets moved round it and those who admitted that they did not
+ know what upheld the earth, but knew there were laws directing its
+ movement and that of the other planets. There is, and can be, no cause of
+ an historical event except the one cause of all causes. But there are laws
+ directing events, and some of these laws are known to us while we are
+ conscious of others we cannot comprehend. The discovery of these laws is
+ only possible when we have quite abandoned the attempt to find the cause
+ in the will of some one man, just as the discovery of the laws of the
+ motion of the planets was possible only when men abandoned the conception
+ of the fixity of the earth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The historians consider that, next to the battle of Borodinó and the
+ occupation of Moscow by the enemy and its destruction by fire, the most
+ important episode of the war of 1812 was the movement of the Russian army
+ from the Ryazána to the Kalúga road and to the Tarútino camp—the
+ so-called flank march across the Krásnaya Pakhrá River. They ascribe the
+ glory of that achievement of genius to different men and dispute as to
+ whom the honor is due. Even foreign historians, including the French,
+ acknowledge the genius of the Russian commanders when they speak of that
+ flank march. But it is hard to understand why military writers, and
+ following them others, consider this flank march to be the profound
+ conception of some one man who saved Russia and destroyed Napoleon. In the
+ first place it is hard to understand where the profundity and genius of
+ this movement lay, for not much mental effort was needed to see that the
+ best position for an army when it is not being attacked is where there are
+ most provisions; and even a dull boy of thirteen could have guessed that
+ the best position for an army after its retreat from Moscow in 1812 was on
+ the Kalúga road. So it is impossible to understand by what reasoning the
+ historians reach the conclusion that this maneuver was a profound one. And
+ it is even more difficult to understand just why they think that this
+ maneuver was calculated to save Russia and destroy the French; for this
+ flank march, had it been preceded, accompanied, or followed by other
+ circumstances, might have proved ruinous to the Russians and salutary for
+ the French. If the position of the Russian army really began to improve
+ from the time of that march, it does not at all follow that the march was
+ the cause of it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That flank march might not only have failed to give any advantage to the
+ Russian army, but might in other circumstances have led to its
+ destruction. What would have happened had Moscow not burned down? If Murat
+ had not lost sight of the Russians? If Napoleon had not remained inactive?
+ If the Russian army at Krásnaya Pakhrá had given battle as Bennigsen and
+ Barclay advised? What would have happened had the French attacked the
+ Russians while they were marching beyond the Pakhrá? What would have
+ happened if on approaching Tarútino, Napoleon had attacked the Russians
+ with but a tenth of the energy he had shown when he attacked them at
+ Smolénsk? What would have happened had the French moved on Petersburg?...
+ In any of these eventualities the flank march that brought salvation might
+ have proved disastrous.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The third and most incomprehensible thing is that people studying history
+ deliberately avoid seeing that this flank march cannot be attributed to
+ any one man, that no one ever foresaw it, and that in reality, like the
+ retreat from Filí, it did not suggest itself to anyone in its entirety,
+ but resulted—moment by moment, step by step, event by event—from
+ an endless number of most diverse circumstances and was only seen in its
+ entirety when it had been accomplished and belonged to the past.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the council at Filí the prevailing thought in the minds of the Russian
+ commanders was the one naturally suggesting itself, namely, a direct
+ retreat by the Nízhni road. In proof of this there is the fact that the
+ majority of the council voted for such a retreat, and above all there is
+ the well-known conversation after the council, between the commander in
+ chief and Lanskóy, who was in charge of the commissariat department.
+ Lanskóy informed the commander in chief that the army supplies were for
+ the most part stored along the Oká in the Túla and Ryazán provinces, and
+ that if they retreated on Nízhni the army would be separated from its
+ supplies by the broad river Oká, which cannot be crossed early in winter.
+ This was the first indication of the necessity of deviating from what had
+ previously seemed the most natural course—a direct retreat on
+ Nízhni-Nóvgorod. The army turned more to the south, along the Ryazán road
+ and nearer to its supplies. Subsequently the inactivity of the French (who
+ even lost sight of the Russian army), concern for the safety of the
+ arsenal at Túla, and especially the advantages of drawing nearer to its
+ supplies caused the army to turn still further south to the Túla road.
+ Having crossed over, by a forced march, to the Túla road beyond the
+ Pakhrá, the Russian commanders intended to remain at Podólsk and had no
+ thought of the Tarútino position; but innumerable circumstances and the
+ reappearance of French troops who had for a time lost touch with the
+ Russians, and projects of giving battle, and above all the abundance of
+ provisions in Kalúga province, obliged our army to turn still more to the
+ south and to cross from the Túla to the Kalúga road and go to Tarútino,
+ which was between the roads along which those supplies lay. Just as it is
+ impossible to say when it was decided to abandon Moscow, so it is
+ impossible to say precisely when, or by whom, it was decided to move to
+ Tarútino. Only when the army had got there, as the result of innumerable
+ and varying forces, did people begin to assure themselves that they had
+ desired this movement and long ago foreseen its result.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ The famous flank movement merely consisted in this: after the advance of
+ the French had ceased, the Russian army, which had been continually
+ retreating straight back from the invaders, deviated from that direct
+ course and, not finding itself pursued, was naturally drawn toward the
+ district where supplies were abundant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If instead of imagining to ourselves commanders of genius leading the
+ Russian army, we picture that army without any leaders, it could not have
+ done anything but make a return movement toward Moscow, describing an arc
+ in the direction where most provisions were to be found and where the
+ country was richest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That movement from the Nízhni to the Ryazán, Túla, and Kalúga roads was so
+ natural that even the Russian marauders moved in that direction, and
+ demands were sent from Petersburg for Kutúzov to take his army that way.
+ At Tarútino Kutúzov received what was almost a reprimand from the Emperor
+ for having moved his army along the Ryazán road, and the Emperor’s letter
+ indicated to him the very position he had already occupied near Kalúga.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having rolled like a ball in the direction of the impetus given by the
+ whole campaign and by the battle of Borodinó, the Russian army—when
+ the strength of that impetus was exhausted and no fresh push was received—assumed
+ the position natural to it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov’s merit lay, not in any strategic maneuver of genius, as it is
+ called, but in the fact that he alone understood the significance of what
+ had happened. He alone then understood the meaning of the French army’s
+ inactivity, he alone continued to assert that the battle of Borodinó had
+ been a victory, he alone—who as commander in chief might have been
+ expected to be eager to attack—employed his whole strength to
+ restrain the Russian army from useless engagements.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The beast wounded at Borodinó was lying where the fleeing hunter had left
+ him; but whether he was still alive, whether he was strong and merely
+ lying low, the hunter did not know. Suddenly the beast was heard to moan.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The moan of that wounded beast (the French army) which betrayed its
+ calamitous condition was the sending of Lauriston to Kutúzov’s camp with
+ overtures for peace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon, with his usual assurance that whatever entered his head was
+ right, wrote to Kutúzov the first words that occurred to him, though they
+ were meaningless.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ MONSIEUR LE PRINCE KOUTOUZOV: I am sending one of my adjutants-general to
+ discuss several interesting questions with you. I beg your Highness to
+ credit what he says to you, especially when he expresses the sentiment of
+ esteem and special regard I have long entertained for your person. This
+ letter having no other object, I pray God, monsieur le prince Koutouzov,
+ to keep you in His holy and gracious protection! 
+
+
+
+ 
+ NAPOLEON
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ MOSCOW, OCTOBER 30, 1812
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov replied: “I should be cursed by posterity were I looked on as the
+ initiator of a settlement of any sort. Such is the present spirit of my
+ nation .” But he continued to exert all his powers to restrain his troops
+ from attacking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the month that the French troops were pillaging in Moscow and the
+ Russian troops were quietly encamped at Tarútino, a change had taken place
+ in the relative strength of the two armies—both in spirit and in
+ number—as a result of which the superiority had passed to the
+ Russian side. Though the condition and numbers of the French army were
+ unknown to the Russians, as soon as that change occurred the need of
+ attacking at once showed itself by countless signs. These signs were:
+ Lauriston’s mission; the abundance of provisions at Tarútino; the reports
+ coming in from all sides of the inactivity and disorder of the French; the
+ flow of recruits to our regiments; the fine weather; the long rest the
+ Russian soldiers had enjoyed, and the impatience to do what they had been
+ assembled for, which usually shows itself in an army that has been
+ resting; curiosity as to what the French army, so long lost sight of, was
+ doing; the boldness with which our outposts now scouted close up to the
+ French stationed at Tarútino; the news of easy successes gained by
+ peasants and guerrilla troops over the French, the envy aroused by this;
+ the desire for revenge that lay in the heart of every Russian as long as
+ the French were in Moscow, and (above all) a dim consciousness in every
+ soldier’s mind that the relative strength of the armies had changed and
+ that the advantage was now on our side. There was a substantial change in
+ the relative strength, and an advance had become inevitable. And at once,
+ as a clock begins to strike and chime as soon as the minute hand has
+ completed a full circle, this change was shown by an increased activity,
+ whirring, and chiming in the higher spheres.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ The Russian army was commanded by Kutúzov and his staff, and also by the
+ Emperor from Petersburg. Before the news of the abandonment of Moscow had
+ been received in Petersburg, a detailed plan of the whole campaign had
+ been drawn up and sent to Kutúzov for his guidance. Though this plan had
+ been drawn up on the supposition that Moscow was still in our hands, it
+ was approved by the staff and accepted as a basis for action. Kutúzov only
+ replied that movements arranged from a distance were always difficult to
+ execute. So fresh instructions were sent for the solution of difficulties
+ that might be encountered, as well as fresh people who were to watch
+ Kutúzov’s actions and report upon them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Besides this, the whole staff of the Russian army was now reorganized. The
+ posts left vacant by Bagratión, who had been killed, and by Barclay, who
+ had gone away in dudgeon, had to be filled. Very serious consideration was
+ given to the question whether it would be better to put A in B’s place and
+ B in D’s, or on the contrary to put D in A’s place, and so on—as if
+ anything more than A’s or B’s satisfaction depended on this.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As a result of the hostility between Kutúzov and Bennigsen, his Chief of
+ Staff, the presence of confidential representatives of the Emperor, and
+ these transfers, a more than usually complicated play of parties was going
+ on among the staff of the army. A was undermining B, D was undermining C,
+ and so on in all possible combinations and permutations. In all these
+ plottings the subject of intrigue was generally the conduct of the war,
+ which all these men believed they were directing; but this affair of the
+ war went on independently of them, as it had to go: that is, never in the
+ way people devised, but flowing always from the essential attitude of the
+ masses. Only in the highest spheres did all these schemes, crossings, and
+ interminglings appear to be a true reflection of what had to happen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Michael Ilariónovich! (wrote the Emperor on the second of October
+ in a letter that reached Kutúzov after the battle at Tarútino) Since
+ September 2 Moscow has been in the hands of the enemy. Your last reports
+ were written on the twentieth, and during all this time not only has no
+ action been taken against the enemy or for the relief of the ancient
+ capital, but according to your last report you have even retreated
+ farther. Sérpukhov is already occupied by an enemy detachment and Túla
+ with its famous arsenal, so indispensable to the army, is in danger. From
+ General Wintzingerode’s reports, I see that an enemy corps of ten thousand
+ men is moving on the Petersburg road. Another corps of several thousand
+ men is moving on Dmítrov. A third has advanced along the Vladímir road,
+ and a fourth, rather considerable detachment is stationed between Rúza and
+ Mozháysk. Napoleon himself was in Moscow as late as the twenty-fifth. In
+ view of all this information, when the enemy has scattered his forces in
+ large detachments, and with Napoleon and his Guards in Moscow, is it
+ possible that the enemy’s forces confronting you are so considerable as
+ not to allow of your taking the offensive? On the contrary, he is probably
+ pursuing you with detachments, or at most with an army corps much weaker
+ than the army entrusted to you. It would seem that, availing yourself of
+ these circumstances, you might advantageously attack a weaker one and
+ annihilate him, or at least oblige him to retreat, retaining in our hands
+ an important part of the provinces now occupied by the enemy, and thereby
+ averting danger from Túla and other towns in the interior. You will be
+ responsible if the enemy is able to direct a force of any size against
+ Petersburg to threaten this capital in which it has not been possible to
+ retain many troops; for with the army entrusted to you, and acting with
+ resolution and energy, you have ample means to avert this fresh calamity.
+ Remember that you have still to answer to our offended country for the
+ loss of Moscow. You have experienced my readiness to reward you. That
+ readiness will not weaken in me, but I and Russia have a right to expect
+ from you all the zeal, firmness, and success which your intellect,
+ military talent, and the courage of the troops you command justify us in
+ expecting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ But by the time this letter, which proved that the real relation of the
+ forces had already made itself felt in Petersburg, was dispatched, Kutúzov
+ had found himself unable any longer to restrain the army he commanded from
+ attacking and a battle had taken place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the second of October a Cossack, Shapoválov, who was out scouting,
+ killed one hare and wounded another. Following the wounded hare he made
+ his way far into the forest and came upon the left flank of Murat’s army,
+ encamped there without any precautions. The Cossack laughingly told his
+ comrades how he had almost fallen into the hands of the French. A cornet,
+ hearing the story, informed his commander.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Cossack was sent for and questioned. The Cossack officers wished to
+ take advantage of this chance to capture some horses, but one of the
+ superior officers, who was acquainted with the higher authorities,
+ reported the incident to a general on the staff. The state of things on
+ the staff had of late been exceedingly strained. Ermólov had been to see
+ Bennigsen a few days previously and had entreated him to use his influence
+ with the commander in chief to induce him to take the offensive.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If I did not know you I should think you did not want what you are asking
+ for. I need only advise anything and his Highness is sure to do the
+ opposite,” replied Bennigsen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Cossack’s report, confirmed by horse patrols who were sent out, was
+ the final proof that events had matured. The tightly coiled spring was
+ released, the clock began to whirr and the chimes to play. Despite all his
+ supposed power, his intellect, his experience, and his knowledge of men,
+ Kutúzov—having taken into consideration the Cossack’s report, a note
+ from Bennigsen who sent personal reports to the Emperor, the wishes he
+ supposed the Emperor to hold, and the fact that all the generals expressed
+ the same wish—could no longer check the inevitable movement, and
+ gave the order to do what he regarded as useless and harmful—gave
+ his approval, that is, to the accomplished fact.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ Bennigsen’s note and the Cossack’s information that the left flank of the
+ French was unguarded were merely final indications that it was necessary
+ to order an attack, and it was fixed for the fifth of October.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the morning of the fourth of October Kutúzov signed the dispositions.
+ Toll read them to Ermólov, asking him to attend to the further
+ arrangements.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right—all right. I haven’t time just now,” replied Ermólov, and
+ left the hut.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The dispositions drawn up by Toll were very good. As in the Austerlitz
+ dispositions, it was written—though not in German this time:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The First Column will march here and here,” “the Second Column will march
+ there and there,” and so on; and on paper, all these columns arrived at
+ their places at the appointed time and destroyed the enemy. Everything had
+ been admirably thought out as is usual in dispositions, and as is always
+ the case, not a single column reached its place at the appointed time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the necessary number of copies of the dispositions had been prepared,
+ an officer was summoned and sent to deliver them to Ermólov to deal with.
+ A young officer of the Horse Guards, Kutúzov’s orderly, pleased at the
+ importance of the mission entrusted to him, went to Ermólov’s quarters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Gone away,” said Ermólov’s orderly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer of the Horse Guards went to a general with whom Ermólov was
+ often to be found.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, and the general’s out too.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer, mounting his horse, rode off to someone else.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, he’s gone out.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If only they don’t make me responsible for this delay! What a nuisance it
+ is!” thought the officer, and he rode round the whole camp. One man said
+ he had seen Ermólov ride past with some other generals, others said he
+ must have returned home. The officer searched till six o’clock in the
+ evening without even stopping to eat. Ermólov was nowhere to be found and
+ no one knew where he was. The officer snatched a little food at a
+ comrade’s, and rode again to the vanguard to find Milorádovich.
+ Milorádovich too was away, but here he was told that he had gone to a ball
+ at General Kíkin’s and that Ermólov was probably there too.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But where is it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, there, over at Échkino,” said a Cossack officer, pointing to a
+ country house in the far distance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What, outside our line?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They’ve put two regiments as outposts, and they’re having such a spree
+ there, it’s awful! Two bands and three sets of singers!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer rode out beyond our lines to Échkino. While still at a
+ distance he heard as he rode the merry sounds of a soldier’s dance song
+ proceeding from the house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “In the meadows... in the meadows!” he heard, accompanied by whistling and
+ the sound of a torban , drowned every now and then by shouts. These sounds
+ made his spirits rise, but at the same time he was afraid that he would be
+ blamed for not having executed sooner the important order entrusted to
+ him. It was already past eight o’clock. He dismounted and went up into the
+ porch of a large country house which had remained intact between the
+ Russian and French forces. In the refreshment room and the hall, footmen
+ were bustling about with wine and viands. Groups of singers stood outside
+ the windows. The officer was admitted and immediately saw all the chief
+ generals of the army together, and among them Ermólov’s big imposing
+ figure. They all had their coats unbuttoned and were standing in a
+ semicircle with flushed and animated faces, laughing loudly. In the middle
+ of the room a short handsome general with a red face was dancing the
+ trepák with much spirit and agility.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ha, ha, ha! Bravo, Nicholas Iványch! Ha, ha, ha!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer felt that by arriving with important orders at such a moment
+ he was doubly to blame, and he would have preferred to wait; but one of
+ the generals espied him and, hearing what he had come about, informed
+ Ermólov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ermólov came forward with a frown on his face and, hearing what the
+ officer had to say, took the papers from him without a word.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ “You think he went off just by chance?” said a comrade, who was on the
+ staff that evening, to the officer of the Horse Guards, referring to
+ Ermólov. “It was a trick. It was done on purpose to get Konovnítsyn into
+ trouble. You’ll see what a mess there’ll be tomorrow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ Next day the decrepit Kutúzov, having given orders to be called early,
+ said his prayers, dressed, and, with an unpleasant consciousness of having
+ to direct a battle he did not approve of, got into his calèche and drove
+ from Letashóvka (a village three and a half miles from Tarútino) to the
+ place where the attacking columns were to meet. He sat in the calèche ,
+ dozing and waking up by turns, and listening for any sound of firing on
+ the right as an indication that the action had begun. But all was still
+ quiet. A damp dull autumn morning was just dawning. On approaching
+ Tarútino Kutúzov noticed cavalrymen leading their horses to water across
+ the road along which he was driving. Kutúzov looked at them searchingly,
+ stopped his carriage, and inquired what regiment they belonged to. They
+ belonged to a column that should have been far in front and in ambush long
+ before then. “It may be a mistake,” thought the old commander in chief.
+ But a little further on he saw infantry regiments with their arms piled
+ and the soldiers, only partly dressed, eating their rye porridge and
+ carrying fuel. He sent for an officer. The officer reported that no order
+ to advance had been received.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How! Not rec...” Kutúzov began, but checked himself immediately and sent
+ for a senior officer. Getting out of his calèche , he waited with drooping
+ head and breathing heavily, pacing silently up and down. When Eýkhen, the
+ officer of the general staff whom he had summoned, appeared, Kutúzov went
+ purple in the face, not because that officer was to blame for the mistake,
+ but because he was an object of sufficient importance for him to vent his
+ wrath on. Trembling and panting the old man fell into that state of fury
+ in which he sometimes used to roll on the ground, and he fell upon Eýkhen,
+ threatening him with his hands, shouting and loading him with gross abuse.
+ Another man, Captain Brózin, who happened to turn up and who was not at
+ all to blame, suffered the same fate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What sort of another blackguard are you? I’ll have you shot! Scoundrels!”
+ yelled Kutúzov in a hoarse voice, waving his arms and reeling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was suffering physically. He, the commander in chief, a Serene Highness
+ who everybody said possessed powers such as no man had ever had in Russia,
+ to be placed in this position—made the laughingstock of the whole
+ army! “I needn’t have been in such a hurry to pray about today, or have
+ kept awake thinking everything over all night,” thought he to himself.
+ “When I was a chit of an officer no one would have dared to mock me so...
+ and now!” He was in a state of physical suffering as if from corporal
+ punishment, and could not avoid expressing it by cries of anger and
+ distress. But his strength soon began to fail him, and looking about him,
+ conscious of having said much that was amiss, he again got into his
+ calèche and drove back in silence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His wrath, once expended, did not return, and blinking feebly he listened
+ to excuses and self-justifications (Ermólov did not come to see him till
+ the next day) and to the insistence of Bennigsen, Konovnítsyn, and Toll
+ that the movement that had miscarried should be executed next day. And
+ once more Kutúzov had to consent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ Next day the troops assembled in their appointed places in the evening and
+ advanced during the night. It was an autumn night with dark purple clouds,
+ but no rain. The ground was damp but not muddy, and the troops advanced
+ noiselessly, only occasionally a jingling of the artillery could be
+ faintly heard. The men were forbidden to talk out loud, to smoke their
+ pipes, or to strike a light, and they tried to prevent their horses
+ neighing. The secrecy of the undertaking heightened its charm and they
+ marched gaily. Some columns, supposing they had reached their destination,
+ halted, piled arms, and settled down on the cold ground, but the majority
+ marched all night and arrived at places where they evidently should not
+ have been.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only Count Orlóv-Denísov with his Cossacks (the least important detachment
+ of all) got to his appointed place at the right time. This detachment
+ halted at the outskirts of a forest, on the path leading from the village
+ of Stromílova to Dmítrovsk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Toward dawn, Count Orlóv-Denísov, who had dozed off, was awakened by a
+ deserter from the French army being brought to him. This was a Polish
+ sergeant of Poniatowski’s corps, who explained in Polish that he had come
+ over because he had been slighted in the service: that he ought long ago
+ to have been made an officer, that he was braver than any of them, and so
+ he had left them and wished to pay them out. He said that Murat was
+ spending the night less than a mile from where they were, and that if they
+ would let him have a convoy of a hundred men he would capture him alive.
+ Count Orlóv-Denísov consulted his fellow officers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The offer was too tempting to be refused. Everyone volunteered to go and
+ everybody advised making the attempt. After much disputing and arguing,
+ Major-General Grékov with two Cossack regiments decided to go with the
+ Polish sergeant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, remember,” said Count Orlóv-Denísov to the sergeant at parting, “if
+ you have been lying I’ll have you hanged like a dog; but if it’s true you
+ shall have a hundred gold pieces!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Without replying, the sergeant, with a resolute air, mounted and rode away
+ with Grékov whose men had quickly assembled. They disappeared into the
+ forest, and Count Orlóv-Denísov, having seen Grékov off, returned,
+ shivering from the freshness of the early dawn and excited by what he had
+ undertaken on his own responsibility, and began looking at the enemy camp,
+ now just visible in the deceptive light of dawn and the dying campfires.
+ Our columns ought to have begun to appear on an open declivity to his
+ right. He looked in that direction, but though the columns would have been
+ visible quite far off, they were not to be seen. It seemed to the count
+ that things were beginning to stir in the French camp, and his
+ keen-sighted adjutant confirmed this.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, it is really too late,” said Count Orlóv, looking at the camp.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As often happens when someone we have trusted is no longer before our
+ eyes, it suddenly seemed quite clear and obvious to him that the sergeant
+ was an impostor, that he had lied, and that the whole Russian attack would
+ be ruined by the absence of those two regiments, which he would lead away
+ heaven only knew where. How could one capture a commander in chief from
+ among such a mass of troops!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am sure that rascal was lying,” said the count.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They can still be called back,” said one of his suite, who like Count
+ Orlóv felt distrustful of the adventure when he looked at the enemy’s
+ camp.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh? Really... what do you think? Should we let them go on or not?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Will you have them fetched back?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fetch them back, fetch them back!” said Count Orlóv with sudden
+ determination, looking at his watch. “It will be too late. It is quite
+ light.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the adjutant galloped through the forest after Grékov. When Grékov
+ returned, Count Orlóv-Denísov, excited both by the abandoned attempt and
+ by vainly awaiting the infantry columns that still did not appear, as well
+ as by the proximity of the enemy, resolved to advance. All his men felt
+ the same excitement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mount!” he commanded in a whisper. The men took their places and crossed
+ themselves.... “Forward, with God’s aid!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hurrah-ah-ah!” reverberated in the forest, and the Cossack companies,
+ trailing their lances and advancing one after another as if poured out of
+ a sack, dashed gaily across the brook toward the camp.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One desperate, frightened yell from the first French soldier who saw the
+ Cossacks, and all who were in the camp, undressed and only just waking up,
+ ran off in all directions, abandoning cannons, muskets, and horses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Had the Cossacks pursued the French, without heeding what was behind and
+ around them, they would have captured Murat and everything there. That was
+ what the officers desired. But it was impossible to make the Cossacks
+ budge when once they had got booty and prisoners. None of them listened to
+ orders. Fifteen hundred prisoners and thirty-eight guns were taken on the
+ spot, besides standards and (what seemed most important to the Cossacks)
+ horses, saddles, horsecloths, and the like. All this had to be dealt with,
+ the prisoners and guns secured, the booty divided—not without some
+ shouting and even a little fighting among themselves—and it was on
+ this that the Cossacks all busied themselves.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French, not being farther pursued, began to recover themselves: they
+ formed into detachments and began firing. Orlóv-Denísov, still waiting for
+ the other columns to arrive, advanced no further.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meantime, according to the dispositions which said that “the First Column
+ will march” and so on, the infantry of the belated columns, commanded by
+ Bennigsen and directed by Toll, had started in due order and, as always
+ happens, had got somewhere, but not to their appointed places. As always
+ happens the men, starting cheerfully, began to halt; murmurs were heard,
+ there was a sense of confusion, and finally a backward movement. Adjutants
+ and generals galloped about, shouted, grew angry, quarreled, said they had
+ come quite wrong and were late, gave vent to a little abuse, and at last
+ gave it all up and went forward, simply to get somewhere. “We shall get
+ somewhere or other!” And they did indeed get somewhere, though not to
+ their right places; a few eventually even got to their right place, but
+ too late to be of any use and only in time to be fired at. Toll, who in
+ this battle played the part of Weyrother at Austerlitz, galloped
+ assiduously from place to place, finding everything upside down
+ everywhere. Thus he stumbled on Bagovút’s corps in a wood when it was
+ already broad daylight, though the corps should long before have joined
+ Orlóv-Denísov. Excited and vexed by the failure and supposing that someone
+ must be responsible for it, Toll galloped up to the commander of the corps
+ and began upbraiding him severely, saying that he ought to be shot.
+ General Bagovút, a fighting old soldier of placid temperament, being also
+ upset by all the delay, confusion, and cross-purposes, fell into a rage to
+ everybody’s surprise and quite contrary to his usual character and said
+ disagreeable things to Toll.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I prefer not to take lessons from anyone, but I can die with my men as
+ well as anybody,” he said, and advanced with a single division.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Coming out onto a field under the enemy’s fire, this brave general went
+ straight ahead, leading his men under fire, without considering in his
+ agitation whether going into action now, with a single division, would be
+ of any use or no. Danger, cannon balls, and bullets were just what he
+ needed in his angry mood. One of the first bullets killed him, and other
+ bullets killed many of his men. And his division remained under fire for
+ some time quite uselessly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ Meanwhile another column was to have attacked the French from the front,
+ but Kutúzov accompanied that column. He well knew that nothing but
+ confusion would come of this battle undertaken against his will, and as
+ far as was in his power held the troops back. He did not advance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He rode silently on his small gray horse, indolently answering suggestions
+ that they should attack.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The word attack is always on your tongue, but you don’t see
+ that we are unable to execute complicated maneuvers,” said he to
+ Milorádovich who asked permission to advance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We couldn’t take Murat prisoner this morning or get to the place in time,
+ and nothing can be done now!” he replied to someone else.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Kutúzov was informed that at the French rear—where according to
+ the reports of the Cossacks there had previously been nobody—there
+ were now two battalions of Poles, he gave a sidelong glance at Ermólov who
+ was behind him and to whom he had not spoken since the previous day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see! They are asking to attack and making plans of all kinds, but as
+ soon as one gets to business nothing is ready, and the enemy, forewarned,
+ takes measures accordingly.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ermólov screwed up his eyes and smiled faintly on hearing these words. He
+ understood that for him the storm had blown over, and that Kutúzov would
+ content himself with that hint.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s having a little fun at my expense,” said Ermólov softly, nudging
+ with his knee Raévski who was at his side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon after this, Ermólov moved up to Kutúzov and respectfully remarked:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is not too late yet, your Highness—the enemy has not gone away—if
+ you were to order an attack! If not, the Guards will not so much as see a
+ little smoke.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov did not reply, but when they reported to him that Murat’s troops
+ were in retreat he ordered an advance, though at every hundred paces he
+ halted for three quarters of an hour.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The whole battle consisted in what Orlóv-Denísov’s Cossacks had done: the
+ rest of the army merely lost some hundreds of men uselessly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In consequence of this battle Kutúzov received a diamond decoration, and
+ Bennigsen some diamonds and a hundred thousand rubles, others also
+ received pleasant recognitions corresponding to their various grades, and
+ following the battle fresh changes were made in the staff.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s how everything is done with us, all topsy-turvy!” said the Russian
+ officers and generals after the Tarútino battle, letting it be understood
+ that some fool there is doing things all wrong but that we ourselves
+ should not have done so, just as people speak today. But people who talk
+ like that either do not know what they are talking about or deliberately
+ deceive themselves. No battle—Tarútino, Borodinó, or Austerlitz—takes
+ place as those who planned it anticipated. That is an essential condition.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A countless number of free forces (for nowhere is man freer than during a
+ battle, where it is a question of life and death) influence the course
+ taken by the fight, and that course never can be known in advance and
+ never coincides with the direction of any one force.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If many simultaneously and variously directed forces act on a given body,
+ the direction of its motion cannot coincide with any one of those forces,
+ but will always be a mean—what in mechanics is represented by the
+ diagonal of a parallelogram of forces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If in the descriptions given by historians, especially French ones, we
+ find their wars and battles carried out in accordance with previously
+ formed plans, the only conclusion to be drawn is that those descriptions
+ are false.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The battle of Tarútino obviously did not attain the aim Toll had in view—to
+ lead the troops into action in the order prescribed by the dispositions;
+ nor that which Count Orlóv-Denísov may have had in view—to take
+ Murat prisoner; nor the result of immediately destroying the whole corps,
+ which Bennigsen and others may have had in view; nor the aim of the
+ officer who wished to go into action to distinguish himself; nor that of
+ the Cossack who wanted more booty than he got, and so on. But if the aim
+ of the battle was what actually resulted and what all the Russians of that
+ day desired—to drive the French out of Russia and destroy their army—it
+ is quite clear that the battle of Tarútino, just because of its
+ incongruities, was exactly what was wanted at that stage of the campaign.
+ It would be difficult and even impossible to imagine any result more
+ opportune than the actual outcome of this battle. With a minimum of effort
+ and insignificant losses, despite the greatest confusion, the most
+ important results of the whole campaign were attained: the transition from
+ retreat to advance, an exposure of the weakness of the French, and the
+ administration of that shock which Napoleon’s army had only awaited to
+ begin its flight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ Napoleon enters Moscow after the brilliant victory de la Moskowa ; there
+ can be no doubt about the victory for the battlefield remains in the hands
+ of the French. The Russians retreat and abandon their ancient capital.
+ Moscow, abounding in provisions, arms, munitions, and incalculable wealth,
+ is in Napoleon’s hands. The Russian army, only half the strength of the
+ French, does not make a single attempt to attack for a whole month.
+ Napoleon’s position is most brilliant. He can either fall on the Russian
+ army with double its strength and destroy it; negotiate an advantageous
+ peace, or in case of a refusal make a menacing move on Petersburg, or
+ even, in the case of a reverse, return to Smolénsk or Vílna; or remain in
+ Moscow; in short, no special genius would seem to be required to retain
+ the brilliant position the French held at that time. For that, only very
+ simple and easy steps were necessary: not to allow the troops to loot, to
+ prepare winter clothing—of which there was sufficient in Moscow for
+ the whole army—and methodically to collect the provisions, of which
+ (according to the French historians) there were enough in Moscow to supply
+ the whole army for six months. Yet Napoleon, that greatest of all
+ geniuses, who the historians declare had control of the army, took none of
+ these steps.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He not merely did nothing of the kind, but on the contrary he used his
+ power to select the most foolish and ruinous of all the courses open to
+ him. Of all that Napoleon might have done: wintering in Moscow, advancing
+ on Petersburg or on Nízhni-Nóvgorod, or retiring by a more northerly or
+ more southerly route (say by the road Kutúzov afterwards took), nothing
+ more stupid or disastrous can be imagined than what he actually did. He
+ remained in Moscow till October, letting the troops plunder the city;
+ then, hesitating whether to leave a garrison behind him, he quitted
+ Moscow, approached Kutúzov without joining battle, turned to the right and
+ reached Málo-Yaroslávets, again without attempting to break through and
+ take the road Kutúzov took, but retiring instead to Mozháysk along the
+ devastated Smolénsk road. Nothing more stupid than that could have been
+ devised, or more disastrous for the army, as the sequel showed. Had
+ Napoleon’s aim been to destroy his army, the most skillful strategist
+ could hardly have devised any series of actions that would so completely
+ have accomplished that purpose, independently of anything the Russian army
+ might do.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon, the man of genius, did this! But to say that he destroyed his
+ army because he wished to, or because he was very stupid, would be as
+ unjust as to say that he had brought his troops to Moscow because he
+ wished to and because he was very clever and a genius.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In both cases his personal activity, having no more force than the
+ personal activity of any soldier, merely coincided with the laws that
+ guided the event.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The historians quite falsely represent Napoleon’s faculties as having
+ weakened in Moscow, and do so only because the results did not justify his
+ actions. He employed all his ability and strength to do the best he could
+ for himself and his army, as he had done previously and as he did
+ subsequently in 1813. His activity at that time was no less astounding
+ than it was in Egypt, in Italy, in Austria, and in Prussia. We do not know
+ for certain in how far his genius was genuine in Egypt—where forty
+ centuries looked down upon his grandeur—for his great exploits there
+ are all told us by Frenchmen. We cannot accurately estimate his genius in
+ Austria or Prussia, for we have to draw our information from French or
+ German sources, and the incomprehensible surrender of whole corps without
+ fighting and of fortresses without a siege must incline Germans to
+ recognize his genius as the only explanation of the war carried on in
+ Germany. But we, thank God, have no need to recognize his genius in order
+ to hide our shame. We have paid for the right to look at the matter
+ plainly and simply, and we will not abandon that right.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His activity in Moscow was as amazing and as full of genius as elsewhere.
+ Order after order and plan after plan were issued by him from the time he
+ entered Moscow till the time he left it. The absence of citizens and of a
+ deputation, and even the burning of Moscow, did not disconcert him. He did
+ not lose sight either of the welfare of his army or of the doings of the
+ enemy, or of the welfare of the people of Russia, or of the direction of
+ affairs in Paris, or of diplomatic considerations concerning the terms of
+ the anticipated peace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ With regard to military matters, Napoleon immediately on his entry into
+ Moscow gave General Sabastiani strict orders to observe the movements of
+ the Russian army, sent army corps out along the different roads, and
+ charged Murat to find Kutúzov. Then he gave careful directions about the
+ fortification of the Krémlin, and drew up a brilliant plan for a future
+ campaign over the whole map of Russia.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With regard to diplomatic questions, Napoleon summoned Captain Yákovlev,
+ who had been robbed and was in rags and did not know how to get out of
+ Moscow, minutely explained to him his whole policy and his magnanimity,
+ and having written a letter to the Emperor Alexander in which he
+ considered it his duty to inform his Friend and Brother that Rostopchín
+ had managed affairs badly in Moscow, he dispatched Yákovlev to Petersburg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having similarly explained his views and his magnanimity to Tutólmin, he
+ dispatched that old man also to Petersburg to negotiate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With regard to legal matters, immediately after the fires he gave orders
+ to find and execute the incendiaries. And the scoundrel Rostopchín was
+ punished by an order to burn down his houses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With regard to administrative matters, Moscow was granted a constitution.
+ A municipality was established and the following announcement issued:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ INHABITANTS OF MOSCOW!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Your misfortunes are cruel, but His Majesty the Emperor and King desires
+ to arrest their course. Terrible examples have taught you how he punishes
+ disobedience and crime. Strict measures have been taken to put an end to
+ disorder and to re-establish public security. A paternal administration,
+ chosen from among yourselves, will form your municipality or city
+ government. It will take care of you, of your needs, and of your welfare.
+ Its members will be distinguished by a red ribbon worn across the
+ shoulder, and the mayor of the city will wear a white belt as well. But
+ when not on duty they will only wear a red ribbon round the left arm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The city police is established on its former footing, and better order
+ already prevails in consequence of its activity. The government has
+ appointed two commissaries general, or chiefs of police, and twenty
+ commissaries or captains of wards have been appointed to the different
+ wards of the city. You will recognize them by the white ribbon they will
+ wear on the left arm. Several churches of different denominations are
+ open, and divine service is performed in them unhindered. Your fellow
+ citizens are returning every day to their homes and orders have been given
+ that they should find in them the help and protection due to their
+ misfortunes. These are the measures the government has adopted to
+ re-establish order and relieve your condition. But to achieve this aim it
+ is necessary that you should add your efforts and should, if possible,
+ forget the misfortunes you have suffered, should entertain the hope of a
+ less cruel fate, should be certain that inevitable and ignominious death
+ awaits those who make any attempt on your persons or on what remains of
+ your property, and finally that you should not doubt that these will be
+ safeguarded, since such is the will of the greatest and most just of
+ monarchs. Soldiers and citizens, of whatever nation you may be,
+ re-establish public confidence, the source of the welfare of a state, live
+ like brothers, render mutual aid and protection one to another, unite to
+ defeat the intentions of the evil-minded, obey the military and civil
+ authorities, and your tears will soon cease to flow!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ With regard to supplies for the army, Napoleon decreed that all the troops
+ in turn should enter Moscow à la maraude * to obtain provisions for
+ themselves, so that the army might have its future provided for.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * As looters.
+
+
+
+ 
+ With regard to religion, Napoleon ordered the priests to be brought back
+ and services to be again performed in the churches.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With regard to commerce and to provisioning the army, the following was
+ placarded everywhere:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ PROCLAMATION
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ You, peaceful inhabitants of Moscow, artisans and workmen whom misfortune
+ has driven from the city, and you scattered tillers of the soil, still
+ kept out in the fields by groundless fear, listen! Tranquillity is
+ returning to this capital and order is being restored in it. Your fellow
+ countrymen are emerging boldly from their hiding places on finding that
+ they are respected. Any violence to them or to their property is promptly
+ punished. His Majesty the Emperor and King protects them, and considers no
+ one among you his enemy except those who disobey his orders. He desires to
+ end your misfortunes and restore you to your homes and families. Respond,
+ therefore, to his benevolent intentions and come to us without fear.
+ Inhabitants, return with confidence to your abodes! You will soon find
+ means of satisfying your needs. Craftsmen and industrious artisans, return
+ to your work, your houses, your shops, where the protection of guards
+ awaits you! You shall receive proper pay for your work. And lastly you
+ too, peasants, come from the forests where you are hiding in terror,
+ return to your huts without fear, in full assurance that you will find
+ protection! Markets are established in the city where peasants can bring
+ their surplus supplies and the products of the soil. The government has
+ taken the following steps to ensure freedom of sale for them: (1) From
+ today, peasants, husbandmen, and those living in the neighborhood of
+ Moscow may without any danger bring their supplies of all kinds to two
+ appointed markets, of which one is on the Mokhováya Street and the other
+ at the Provision Market. (2) Such supplies will be bought from them at
+ such prices as seller and buyer may agree on, and if a seller is unable to
+ obtain a fair price he will be free to take his goods back to his village
+ and no one may hinder him under any pretense. (3) Sunday and Wednesday of
+ each week are appointed as the chief market days and to that end a
+ sufficient number of troops will be stationed along the highroads on
+ Tuesdays and Saturdays at such distances from the town as to protect the
+ carts. (4) Similar measures will be taken that peasants with their carts
+ and horses may meet with no hindrance on their return journey. (5) Steps
+ will immediately be taken to re-establish ordinary trading.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Inhabitants of the city and villages, and you, workingmen and artisans, to
+ whatever nation you belong, you are called on to carry out the paternal
+ intentions of His Majesty the Emperor and King and to co-operate with him
+ for the public welfare! Lay your respect and confidence at his feet and do
+ not delay to unite with us!
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ With the object of raising the spirits of the troops and of the people,
+ reviews were constantly held and rewards distributed. The Emperor rode
+ through the streets to comfort the inhabitants, and, despite his
+ preoccupation with state affairs, himself visited the theaters that were
+ established by his order.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In regard to philanthropy, the greatest virtue of crowned heads, Napoleon
+ also did all in his power. He caused the words Maison de ma Mère to be
+ inscribed on the charitable institutions, thereby combining tender filial
+ affection with the majestic benevolence of a monarch. He visited the
+ Foundling Hospital and, allowing the orphans saved by him to kiss his
+ white hands, graciously conversed with Tutólmin. Then, as Thiers
+ eloquently recounts, he ordered his soldiers to be paid in forged Russian
+ money which he had prepared: “Raising the use of these means by an act
+ worthy of himself and of the French army, he let relief be distributed to
+ those who had been burned out. But as food was too precious to be given to
+ foreigners, who were for the most part enemies, Napoleon preferred to
+ supply them with money with which to purchase food from outside, and had
+ paper rubles distributed to them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With reference to army discipline, orders were continually being issued to
+ inflict severe punishment for the nonperformance of military duties and to
+ suppress robbery.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ But strange to say, all these measures, efforts, and plans—which
+ were not at all worse than others issued in similar circumstances—did
+ not affect the essence of the matter but, like the hands of a clock
+ detached from the mechanism, swung about in an arbitrary and aimless way
+ without engaging the cogwheels.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With reference to the military side—the plan of campaign—that
+ work of genius of which Thiers remarks that, “His genius never devised
+ anything more profound, more skillful, or more admirable,” and enters into
+ a polemic with M. Fain to prove that this work of genius must be referred
+ not to the fourth but to the fifteenth of October—that plan never
+ was or could be executed, for it was quite out of touch with the facts of
+ the case. The fortifying of the Krémlin, for which la Mosquée (as Napoleon
+ termed the church of Basil the Beatified) was to have been razed to the
+ ground, proved quite useless. The mining of the Krémlin only helped toward
+ fulfilling Napoleon’s wish that it should be blown up when he left Moscow—as
+ a child wants the floor on which he has hurt himself to be beaten. The
+ pursuit of the Russian army, about which Napoleon was so concerned,
+ produced an unheard-of result. The French generals lost touch with the
+ Russian army of sixty thousand men, and according to Thiers it was only
+ eventually found, like a lost pin, by the skill—and apparently the
+ genius—of Murat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With reference to diplomacy, all Napoleon’s arguments as to his
+ magnanimity and justice, both to Tutólmin and to Yákovlev (whose chief
+ concern was to obtain a greatcoat and a conveyance), proved useless;
+ Alexander did not receive these envoys and did not reply to their
+ embassage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With regard to legal matters, after the execution of the supposed
+ incendiaries the rest of Moscow burned down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With regard to administrative matters, the establishment of a municipality
+ did not stop the robberies and was only of use to certain people who
+ formed part of that municipality and under pretext of preserving order
+ looted Moscow or saved their own property from being looted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With regard to religion, as to which in Egypt matters had so easily been
+ settled by Napoleon’s visit to a mosque, no results were achieved. Two or
+ three priests who were found in Moscow did try to carry out Napoleon’s
+ wish, but one of them was slapped in the face by a French soldier while
+ conducting service, and a French official reported of another that: “The
+ priest whom I found and invited to say Mass cleaned and locked up the
+ church. That night the doors were again broken open, the padlocks smashed,
+ the books mutilated, and other disorders perpetrated.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With reference to commerce, the proclamation to industrious workmen and to
+ peasants evoked no response. There were no industrious workmen, and the
+ peasants caught the commissaries who ventured too far out of town with the
+ proclamation and killed them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As to the theaters for the entertainment of the people and the troops,
+ these did not meet with success either. The theaters set up in the Krémlin
+ and in Posnyákov’s house were closed again at once because the actors and
+ actresses were robbed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Even philanthropy did not have the desired effect. The genuine as well as
+ the false paper money which flooded Moscow lost its value. The French,
+ collecting booty, cared only for gold. Not only was the paper money
+ valueless which Napoleon so graciously distributed to the unfortunate, but
+ even silver lost its value in relation to gold.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the most amazing example of the ineffectiveness of the orders given by
+ the authorities at that time was Napoleon’s attempt to stop the looting
+ and re-establish discipline.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This is what the army authorities were reporting:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Looting continues in the city despite the decrees against it. Order is
+ not yet restored and not a single merchant is carrying on trade in a
+ lawful manner. The sutlers alone venture to trade, and they sell stolen
+ goods.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The neighborhood of my ward continues to be pillaged by soldiers of the
+ 3rd Corps who, not satisfied with taking from the unfortunate inhabitants
+ hiding in the cellars the little they have left, even have the ferocity to
+ wound them with their sabers, as I have repeatedly witnessed.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing new, except that the soldiers are robbing and pillaging—October
+ 9.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Robbery and pillaging continue. There is a band of thieves in our
+ district who ought to be arrested by a strong force—October 11.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Emperor is extremely displeased that despite the strict orders to
+ stop pillage, parties of marauding Guards are continually seen returning
+ to the Krémlin. Among the Old Guard disorder and pillage were renewed more
+ violently than ever yesterday evening, last night, and today. The Emperor
+ sees with regret that the picked soldiers appointed to guard his person,
+ who should set an example of discipline, carry disobedience to such a
+ point that they break into the cellars and stores containing army
+ supplies. Others have disgraced themselves to the extent of disobeying
+ sentinels and officers, and have abused and beaten them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Grand Marshal of the palace,” wrote the governor, “complains bitterly
+ that in spite of repeated orders, the soldiers continue to commit
+ nuisances in all the courtyards and even under the very windows of the
+ Emperor.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That army, like a herd of cattle run wild and trampling underfoot the
+ provender which might have saved it from starvation, disintegrated and
+ perished with each additional day it remained in Moscow. But it did not go
+ away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It began to run away only when suddenly seized by a panic caused by the
+ capture of transport trains on the Smolénsk road, and by the battle of
+ Tarútino. The news of that battle of Tarútino, unexpectedly received by
+ Napoleon at a review, evoked in him a desire to punish the Russians
+ (Thiers says), and he issued the order for departure which the whole army
+ was demanding.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Fleeing from Moscow the soldiers took with them everything they had
+ stolen. Napoleon, too, carried away his own personal trésor , but on seeing
+ the baggage trains that impeded the army, he was (Thiers says)
+ horror-struck. And yet with his experience of war he did not order all the
+ superfluous vehicles to be burned, as he had done with those of a certain
+ marshal when approaching Moscow. He gazed at the calèches and carriages in
+ which soldiers were riding and remarked that it was a very good thing, as
+ those vehicles could be used to carry provisions, the sick, and the
+ wounded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The plight of the whole army resembled that of a wounded animal which
+ feels it is perishing and does not know what it is doing. To study the
+ skillful tactics and aims of Napoleon and his army from the time it
+ entered Moscow till it was destroyed is like studying the dying leaps and
+ shudders of a mortally wounded animal. Very often a wounded animal,
+ hearing a rustle, rushes straight at the hunter’s gun, runs forward and
+ back again, and hastens its own end. Napoleon, under pressure from his
+ whole army, did the same thing. The rustle of the battle of Tarútino
+ frightened the beast, and it rushed forward onto the hunter’s gun, reached
+ him, turned back, and finally—like any wild beast—ran back
+ along the most disadvantageous and dangerous path, where the old scent was
+ familiar.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the whole of that period Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the
+ leader of all these movements—as the figurehead of a ship may seem
+ to a savage to guide the vessel—acted like a child who, holding a
+ couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ Early in the morning of the sixth of October Pierre went out of the shed,
+ and on returning stopped by the door to play with a little blue-gray dog,
+ with a long body and short bandy legs, that jumped about him. This little
+ dog lived in their shed, sleeping beside Karatáev at night; it sometimes
+ made excursions into the town but always returned again. Probably it had
+ never had an owner, and it still belonged to nobody and had no name. The
+ French called it Azor; the soldier who told stories called it Femgálka;
+ Karatáev and others called it Gray, or sometimes Flabby. Its lack of a
+ master, a name, or even of a breed or any definite color did not seem to
+ trouble the blue-gray dog in the least. Its furry tail stood up firm and
+ round as a plume, its bandy legs served it so well that it would often
+ gracefully lift a hind leg and run very easily and quickly on three legs,
+ as if disdaining to use all four. Everything pleased it. Now it would roll
+ on its back, yelping with delight, now bask in the sun with a thoughtful
+ air of importance, and now frolic about playing with a chip of wood or a
+ straw.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre’s attire by now consisted of a dirty torn shirt (the only remnant
+ of his former clothing), a pair of soldier’s trousers which by Karatáev’s
+ advice he tied with string round the ankles for warmth, and a peasant coat
+ and cap. Physically he had changed much during this time. He no longer
+ seemed stout, though he still had the appearance of solidity and strength
+ hereditary in his family. A beard and mustache covered the lower part of
+ his face, and a tangle of hair, infested with lice, curled round his head
+ like a cap. The look of his eyes was resolute, calm, and animatedly alert,
+ as never before. The former slackness which had shown itself even in his
+ eyes was now replaced by an energetic readiness for action and resistance.
+ His feet were bare.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre first looked down the field across which vehicles and horsemen were
+ passing that morning, then into the distance across the river, then at the
+ dog who was pretending to be in earnest about biting him, and then at his
+ bare feet which he placed with pleasure in various positions, moving his
+ dirty thick big toes. Every time he looked at his bare feet a smile of
+ animated self-satisfaction flitted across his face. The sight of them
+ reminded him of all he had experienced and learned during these weeks and
+ this recollection was pleasant to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For some days the weather had been calm and clear with slight frosts in
+ the mornings—what is called an “old wives’ summer.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the sunshine the air was warm, and that warmth was particularly
+ pleasant with the invigorating freshness of the morning frost still in the
+ air.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On everything—far and near—lay the magic crystal glitter seen
+ only at that time of autumn. The Sparrow Hills were visible in the
+ distance, with the village, the church, and the large white house. The
+ bare trees, the sand, the bricks and roofs of the houses, the green church
+ spire, and the corners of the white house in the distance, all stood out
+ in the transparent air in most delicate outline and with unnatural
+ clearness. Near by could be seen the familiar ruins of a half-burned
+ mansion occupied by the French, with lilac bushes still showing dark green
+ beside the fence. And even that ruined and befouled house—which in
+ dull weather was repulsively ugly—seemed quietly beautiful now, in
+ the clear, motionless brilliance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A French corporal, with coat unbuttoned in a homely way, a skullcap on his
+ head, and a short pipe in his mouth, came from behind a corner of the shed
+ and approached Pierre with a friendly wink.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What sunshine, Monsieur Kiril!” (Their name for Pierre.) “Eh?
+ Just like spring!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the corporal leaned against the door and offered Pierre his pipe,
+ though whenever he offered it Pierre always declined it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To be on the march in such weather...” he began.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre inquired what was being said about leaving, and the corporal told
+ him that nearly all the troops were starting and there ought to be an
+ order about the prisoners that day. Sokolóv, one of the soldiers in the
+ shed with Pierre, was dying, and Pierre told the corporal that something
+ should be done about him. The corporal replied that Pierre need not worry
+ about that as they had an ambulance and a permanent hospital and
+ arrangements would be made for the sick, and that in general everything
+ that could happen had been foreseen by the authorities.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Besides, Monsieur Kiril, you have only to say a word to the captain, you
+ know. He is a man who never forgets anything. Speak to the captain when he
+ makes his round, he will do anything for you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ (The captain of whom the corporal spoke often had long chats with Pierre
+ and showed him all sorts of favors.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘You see, St. Thomas,’ he said to me the other day. ‘Monsieur Kiril is a
+ man of education, who speaks French. He is a Russian seigneur who has had
+ misfortunes, but he is a man. He knows what’s what.... If he wants
+ anything and asks me, he won’t get a refusal. When one has studied, you
+ see, one likes education and well-bred people.’ It is for your sake I
+ mention it, Monsieur Kiril. The other day if it had not been for you that
+ affair would have ended ill.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And after chatting a while longer, the corporal went away. (The affair he
+ had alluded to had happened a few days before—a fight between the
+ prisoners and the French soldiers, in which Pierre had succeeded in
+ pacifying his comrades.) Some of the prisoners who had heard Pierre
+ talking to the corporal immediately asked what the Frenchman had said.
+ While Pierre was repeating what he had been told about the army leaving
+ Moscow, a thin, sallow, tattered French soldier came up to the door of the
+ shed. Rapidly and timidly raising his fingers to his forehead by way of
+ greeting, he asked Pierre whether the soldier Platoche to whom he had
+ given a shirt to sew was in that shed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A week before the French had had boot leather and linen issued to them,
+ which they had given out to the prisoners to make up into boots and shirts
+ for them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ready, ready, dear fellow!” said Karatáev, coming out with a neatly
+ folded shirt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Karatáev, on account of the warm weather and for convenience at work, was
+ wearing only trousers and a tattered shirt as black as soot. His hair was
+ bound round, workman fashion, with a wisp of lime-tree bast, and his round
+ face seemed rounder and pleasanter than ever.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A promise is own brother to performance! I said Friday and here it is,
+ ready,” said Platón, smiling and unfolding the shirt he had sewn.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Frenchman glanced around uneasily and then, as if overcoming his
+ hesitation, rapidly threw off his uniform and put on the shirt. He had a
+ long, greasy, flowered silk waistcoat next to his sallow, thin bare body,
+ but no shirt. He was evidently afraid the prisoners looking on would laugh
+ at him, and thrust his head into the shirt hurriedly. None of the
+ prisoners said a word.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “See, it fits well!” Platón kept repeating, pulling the shirt straight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Frenchman, having pushed his head and hands through, without raising
+ his eyes, looked down at the shirt and examined the seams.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see, dear man, this is not a sewing shop, and I had no proper tools;
+ and, as they say, one needs a tool even to kill a louse,” said Platón with
+ one of his round smiles, obviously pleased with his work.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s good, quite good, thank you,” said the Frenchman, in French, “but
+ there must be some linen left over.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It will fit better still when it sets to your body,” said Karatáev, still
+ admiring his handiwork. “You’ll be nice and comfortable....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thanks, thanks, old fellow.... But the bits left over?” said the
+ Frenchman again and smiled. He took out an assignation ruble note and gave
+ it to Karatáev. “But give me the pieces that are over.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre saw that Platón did not want to understand what the Frenchman was
+ saying, and he looked on without interfering. Karatáev thanked the
+ Frenchman for the money and went on admiring his own work. The Frenchman
+ insisted on having the pieces returned that were left over and asked
+ Pierre to translate what he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What does he want the bits for?” said Karatáev. “They’d make fine leg
+ bands for us. Well, never mind.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Karatáev, with a suddenly changed and saddened expression, took a
+ small bundle of scraps from inside his shirt and gave it to the Frenchman
+ without looking at him. “Oh dear!” muttered Karatáev and went away. The
+ Frenchman looked at the linen, considered for a moment, then looked
+ inquiringly at Pierre and, as if Pierre’s look had told him something,
+ suddenly blushed and shouted in a squeaky voice:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Platoche! Eh, Platoche! Keep them yourself!” And handing back the odd
+ bits he turned and went out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There, look at that,” said Karatáev, swaying his head. “People said they
+ were not Christians, but they too have souls. It’s what the old folk used
+ to say: ‘A sweating hand’s an open hand, a dry hand’s close.’ He’s naked,
+ but yet he’s given it back.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Karatáev smiled thoughtfully and was silent awhile looking at the pieces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But they’ll make grand leg bands, dear friend,” he said, and went back
+ into the shed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ Four weeks had passed since Pierre had been taken prisoner and though the
+ French had offered to move him from the men’s to the officers’ shed, he
+ had stayed in the shed where he was first put.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In burned and devastated Moscow Pierre experienced almost the extreme
+ limits of privation a man can endure; but thanks to his physical strength
+ and health, of which he had till then been unconscious, and thanks
+ especially to the fact that the privations came so gradually that it was
+ impossible to say when they began, he endured his position not only
+ lightly but joyfully. And just at this time he obtained the tranquillity
+ and ease of mind he had formerly striven in vain to reach. He had long
+ sought in different ways that tranquillity of mind, that inner harmony
+ which had so impressed him in the soldiers at the battle of Borodinó. He
+ had sought it in philanthropy, in Freemasonry, in the dissipations of town
+ life, in wine, in heroic feats of self-sacrifice, and in romantic love for
+ Natásha; he had sought it by reasoning—and all these quests and
+ experiments had failed him. And now without thinking about it he had found
+ that peace and inner harmony only through the horror of death, through
+ privation, and through what he recognized in Karatáev.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Those dreadful moments he had lived through at the executions had as it
+ were forever washed away from his imagination and memory the agitating
+ thoughts and feelings that had formerly seemed so important. It did not
+ now occur to him to think of Russia, or the war, or politics, or Napoleon.
+ It was plain to him that all these things were no business of his, and
+ that he was not called on to judge concerning them and therefore could not
+ do so. “Russia and summer weather are not bound together,” he thought,
+ repeating words of Karatáev’s which he found strangely consoling. His
+ intention of killing Napoleon and his calculations of the cabalistic
+ number of the beast of the Apocalypse now seemed to him meaningless and
+ even ridiculous. His anger with his wife and anxiety that his name should
+ not be smirched now seemed not merely trivial but even amusing. What
+ concern was it of his that somewhere or other that woman was leading the
+ life she preferred? What did it matter to anybody, and especially to him,
+ whether or not they found out that their prisoner’s name was Count
+ Bezúkhov?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He now often remembered his conversation with Prince Andrew and quite
+ agreed with him, though he understood Prince Andrew’s thoughts somewhat
+ differently. Prince Andrew had thought and said that happiness could only
+ be negative, but had said it with a shade of bitterness and irony as
+ though he was really saying that all desire for positive happiness is
+ implanted in us merely to torment us and never be satisfied. But Pierre
+ believed it without any mental reservation. The absence of suffering, the
+ satisfaction of one’s needs and consequent freedom in the choice of one’s
+ occupation, that is, of one’s way of life, now seemed to Pierre to be
+ indubitably man’s highest happiness. Here and now for the first time he
+ fully appreciated the enjoyment of eating when he wanted to eat, drinking
+ when he wanted to drink, sleeping when he wanted to sleep, of warmth when
+ he was cold, of talking to a fellow man when he wished to talk and to hear
+ a human voice. The satisfaction of one’s needs—good food,
+ cleanliness, and freedom—now that he was deprived of all this,
+ seemed to Pierre to constitute perfect happiness; and the choice of
+ occupation, that is, of his way of life—now that that was so
+ restricted—seemed to him such an easy matter that he forgot that a
+ superfluity of the comforts of life destroys all joy in satisfying one’s
+ needs, while great freedom in the choice of occupation—such freedom
+ as his wealth, his education, and his social position had given him in his
+ own life—is just what makes the choice of occupation insolubly
+ difficult and destroys the desire and possibility of having an occupation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All Pierre’s daydreams now turned on the time when he would be free. Yet
+ subsequently, and for the rest of his life, he thought and spoke with
+ enthusiasm of that month of captivity, of those irrecoverable, strong,
+ joyful sensations, and chiefly of the complete peace of mind and inner
+ freedom which he experienced only during those weeks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When on the first day he got up early, went out of the shed at dawn, and
+ saw the cupolas and crosses of the New Convent of the Virgin still dark at
+ first, the hoarfrost on the dusty grass, the Sparrow Hills, and the wooded
+ banks above the winding river vanishing in the purple distance, when he
+ felt the contact of the fresh air and heard the noise of the crows flying
+ from Moscow across the field, and when afterwards light gleamed from the
+ east and the sun’s rim appeared solemnly from behind a cloud, and the
+ cupolas and crosses, the hoarfrost, the distance and the river, all began
+ to sparkle in the glad light—Pierre felt a new joy and strength in
+ life such as he had never before known. And this not only stayed with him
+ during the whole of his imprisonment, but even grew in strength as the
+ hardships of his position increased.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That feeling of alertness and of readiness for anything was still further
+ strengthened in him by the high opinion his fellow prisoners formed of him
+ soon after his arrival at the shed. With his knowledge of languages, the
+ respect shown him by the French, his simplicity, his readiness to give
+ anything asked of him (he received the allowance of three rubles a week
+ made to officers); with his strength, which he showed to the soldiers by
+ pressing nails into the walls of the hut; his gentleness to his
+ companions, and his capacity for sitting still and thinking without doing
+ anything (which seemed to them incomprehensible), he appeared to them a
+ rather mysterious and superior being. The very qualities that had been a
+ hindrance, if not actually harmful, to him in the world he had lived in—his
+ strength, his disdain for the comforts of life, his absent-mindedness and
+ simplicity—here among these people gave him almost the status of a
+ hero. And Pierre felt that their opinion placed responsibilities upon him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ The French evacuation began on the night between the sixth and seventh of
+ October: kitchens and sheds were dismantled, carts loaded, and troops and
+ baggage trains started.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At seven in the morning a French convoy in marching trim, wearing shakos
+ and carrying muskets, knapsacks, and enormous sacks, stood in front of the
+ sheds, and animated French talk mingled with curses sounded all along the
+ lines.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the shed everyone was ready, dressed, belted, shod, and only awaited
+ the order to start. The sick soldier, Sokolóv, pale and thin with dark
+ shadows round his eyes, alone sat in his place barefoot and not dressed.
+ His eyes, prominent from the emaciation of his face, gazed inquiringly at
+ his comrades who were paying no attention to him, and he moaned regularly
+ and quietly. It was evidently not so much his sufferings that caused him
+ to moan (he had dysentery) as his fear and grief at being left alone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre, girt with a rope round his waist and wearing shoes Karatáev had
+ made for him from some leather a French soldier had torn off a tea chest
+ and brought to have his boots mended with, went up to the sick man and
+ squatted down beside him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know, Sokolóv, they are not all going away! They have a hospital
+ here. You may be better off than we others,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O Lord! Oh, it will be the death of me! O Lord!” moaned the man in a
+ louder voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll go and ask them again directly,” said Pierre, rising and going to
+ the door of the shed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just as Pierre reached the door, the corporal who had offered him a pipe
+ the day before came up to it with two soldiers. The corporal and soldiers
+ were in marching kit with knapsacks and shakos that had metal straps, and
+ these changed their familiar faces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The corporal came, according to orders, to shut the door. The prisoners
+ had to be counted before being let out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Corporal, what will they do with the sick man?...” Pierre began.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But even as he spoke he began to doubt whether this was the corporal he
+ knew or a stranger, so unlike himself did the corporal seem at that
+ moment. Moreover, just as Pierre was speaking a sharp rattle of drums was
+ suddenly heard from both sides. The corporal frowned at Pierre’s words
+ and, uttering some meaningless oaths, slammed the door. The shed became
+ semidark, and the sharp rattle of the drums on two sides drowned the sick
+ man’s groans.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There it is!... It again!...” said Pierre to himself, and an involuntary
+ shudder ran down his spine. In the corporal’s changed face, in the sound
+ of his voice, in the stirring and deafening noise of the drums, he
+ recognized that mysterious, callous force which compelled people against
+ their will to kill their fellow men—that force the effect of which
+ he had witnessed during the executions. To fear or to try to escape that
+ force, to address entreaties or exhortations to those who served as its
+ tools, was useless. Pierre knew this now. One had to wait and endure. He
+ did not again go to the sick man, nor turn to look at him, but stood
+ frowning by the door of the hut.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When that door was opened and the prisoners, crowding against one another
+ like a flock of sheep, squeezed into the exit, Pierre pushed his way
+ forward and approached that very captain who as the corporal had assured
+ him was ready to do anything for him. The captain was also in marching
+ kit, and on his cold face appeared that same it which Pierre had
+ recognized in the corporal’s words and in the roll of the drums.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pass on, pass on!” the captain reiterated, frowning sternly, and looking
+ at the prisoners who thronged past him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre went up to him, though he knew his attempt would be vain.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What now?” the officer asked with a cold look as if not recognizing
+ Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre told him about the sick man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’ll manage to walk, devil take him!” said the captain. “Pass on, pass
+ on!” he continued without looking at Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But he is dying,” Pierre again began.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Be so good...” shouted the captain, frowning angrily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dram-da-da-dam, dam-dam...” rattled the drums, and Pierre
+ understood that this mysterious force completely controlled these men and that
+ it was now useless to say any more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer prisoners were separated from the soldiers and told to march
+ in front. There were about thirty officers, with Pierre among them, and
+ about three hundred men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officers, who had come from the other sheds, were all strangers to
+ Pierre and much better dressed than he. They looked at him and at his
+ shoes mistrustfully, as at an alien. Not far from him walked a fat major
+ with a sallow, bloated, angry face, who was wearing a Kazán dressing gown
+ tied round with a towel, and who evidently enjoyed the respect of his
+ fellow prisoners. He kept one hand, in which he clasped his tobacco pouch,
+ inside the bosom of his dressing gown and held the stem of his pipe firmly
+ with the other. Panting and puffing, the major grumbled and growled at
+ everybody because he thought he was being pushed and that they were all
+ hurrying when they had nowhere to hurry to and were all surprised at
+ something when there was nothing to be surprised at. Another, a thin
+ little officer, was speaking to everyone, conjecturing where they were now
+ being taken and how far they would get that day. An official in felt boots
+ and wearing a commissariat uniform ran round from side to side and gazed
+ at the ruins of Moscow, loudly announcing his observations as to what had
+ been burned down and what this or that part of the city was that they
+ could see. A third officer, who by his accent was a Pole, disputed with
+ the commissariat officer, arguing that he was mistaken in his
+ identification of the different wards of Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are you disputing about?” said the major angrily. “What does it
+ matter whether it is St. Nicholas or St. Blasius? You see it’s burned
+ down, and there’s an end of it.... What are you pushing for? Isn’t the
+ road wide enough?” said he, turning to a man behind him who was not
+ pushing him at all.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, oh, oh! What have they done?” the prisoners on one side and another
+ were heard saying as they gazed on the charred ruins. “All beyond the
+ river, and Zúbova, and in the Krémlin.... Just look! There’s not half of
+ it left. Yes, I told you—the whole quarter beyond the river, and so
+ it is.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, you know it’s burned, so what’s the use of talking?” said the
+ major.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As they passed near a church in the Khamóvniki (one of the few unburned
+ quarters of Moscow) the whole mass of prisoners suddenly started to one
+ side and exclamations of horror and disgust were heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, the villains! What heathens! Yes; dead, dead, so he is... And smeared
+ with something!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre too drew near the church where the thing was that evoked these
+ exclamations, and dimly made out something leaning against the palings
+ surrounding the church. From the words of his comrades who saw better than
+ he did, he found that this was the body of a man, set upright against the
+ palings with its face smeared with soot.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go on! What the devil... Go on! Thirty thousand devils!...” the convoy
+ guards began cursing and the French soldiers, with fresh virulence, drove
+ away with their swords the crowd of prisoners who were gazing at the dead
+ man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV
+ 
+ 
+ Through the cross streets of the Khamóvniki quarter the prisoners marched,
+ followed only by their escort and the vehicles and wagons belonging to
+ that escort, but when they reached the supply stores they came among a
+ huge and closely packed train of artillery mingled with private vehicles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the bridge they all halted, waiting for those in front to get across.
+ From the bridge they had a view of endless lines of moving baggage trains
+ before and behind them. To the right, where the Kalúga road turns near
+ Neskúchny, endless rows of troops and carts stretched away into the
+ distance. These were troops of Beauharnais’ corps which had started before
+ any of the others. Behind, along the riverside and across the Stone
+ Bridge, were Ney’s troops and transport.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Davout’s troops, in whose charge were the prisoners, were crossing the
+ Crimean bridge and some were already debouching into the Kalúga road. But
+ the baggage trains stretched out so that the last of Beauharnais’ train
+ had not yet got out of Moscow and reached the Kalúga road when the
+ vanguard of Ney’s army was already emerging from the Great Ordýnka Street.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When they had crossed the Crimean bridge the prisoners moved a few steps
+ forward, halted, and again moved on, and from all sides vehicles and men
+ crowded closer and closer together. They advanced the few hundred paces
+ that separated the bridge from the Kalúga road, taking more than an hour
+ to do so, and came out upon the square where the streets of the
+ Transmoskvá ward and the Kalúga road converge, and the prisoners jammed
+ close together had to stand for some hours at that crossway. From all
+ sides, like the roar of the sea, were heard the rattle of wheels, the
+ tramp of feet, and incessant shouts of anger and abuse. Pierre stood
+ pressed against the wall of a charred house, listening to that noise which
+ mingled in his imagination with the roll of the drums.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To get a better view, several officer prisoners climbed onto the wall of
+ the half-burned house against which Pierre was leaning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What crowds! Just look at the crowds!... They’ve loaded goods even on the
+ cannon! Look there, those are furs!” they exclaimed. “Just see what the
+ blackguards have looted.... There! See what that one has behind in the
+ cart.... Why, those are settings taken from some icons, by heaven!... Oh,
+ the rascals!... See how that fellow has loaded himself up, he can hardly
+ walk! Good lord, they’ve even grabbed those chaises!... See that fellow
+ there sitting on the trunks.... Heavens! They’re fighting.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s right, hit him on the snout—on his snout! Like this, we
+ shan’t get away before evening. Look, look there.... Why, that must be
+ Napoleon’s own. See what horses! And the monograms with a crown! It’s
+ like a portable house.... That fellow’s dropped his sack and doesn’t
+ see it. Fighting again... A woman with a baby, and not bad-looking either! Yes, I
+ dare say, that’s the way they’ll let you pass.... Just look,
+ there’s no end to it. Russian wenches, by heaven, so they are! In
+ carriages—see how comfortably they’ve settled themselves!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again, as at the church in Khamóvniki, a wave of general curiosity bore
+ all the prisoners forward onto the road, and Pierre, thanks to his
+ stature, saw over the heads of the others what so attracted their
+ curiosity. In three carriages involved among the munition carts, closely
+ squeezed together, sat women with rouged faces, dressed in glaring colors,
+ who were shouting something in shrill voices.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the moment Pierre had recognized the appearance of the mysterious
+ force nothing had seemed to him strange or dreadful: neither the corpse
+ smeared with soot for fun nor these women hurrying away nor the burned
+ ruins of Moscow. All that he now witnessed scarcely made an impression on
+ him—as if his soul, making ready for a hard struggle, refused to
+ receive impressions that might weaken it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The women’s vehicles drove by. Behind them came more carts, soldiers,
+ wagons, soldiers, gun carriages, carriages, soldiers, ammunition carts,
+ more soldiers, and now and then women.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre did not see the people as individuals but saw their movement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All these people and horses seemed driven forward by some invisible power.
+ During the hour Pierre watched them they all came flowing from the
+ different streets with one and the same desire to get on quickly; they all
+ jostled one another, began to grow angry and to fight, white teeth
+ gleamed, brows frowned, ever the same words of abuse flew from side to
+ side, and all the faces bore the same swaggeringly resolute and coldly
+ cruel expression that had struck Pierre that morning on the corporal’s
+ face when the drums were beating.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was not till nearly evening that the officer commanding the escort
+ collected his men and with shouts and quarrels forced his way in among the
+ baggage trains, and the prisoners, hemmed in on all sides, emerged onto
+ the Kalúga road.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They marched very quickly, without resting, and halted only when the sun
+ began to set. The baggage carts drew up close together and the men began
+ to prepare for their night’s rest. They all appeared angry and
+ dissatisfied. For a long time, oaths, angry shouts, and fighting could be
+ heard from all sides. A carriage that followed the escort ran into one of
+ the carts and knocked a hole in it with its pole. Several soldiers ran
+ toward the cart from different sides: some beat the carriage horses on
+ their heads, turning them aside, others fought among themselves, and
+ Pierre saw that one German was badly wounded on the head by a sword.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It seemed that all these men, now that they had stopped amid fields in the
+ chill dusk of the autumn evening, experienced one and the same feeling of
+ unpleasant awakening from the hurry and eagerness to push on that had
+ seized them at the start. Once at a standstill they all seemed to
+ understand that they did not yet know where they were going, and that much
+ that was painful and difficult awaited them on this journey.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During this halt the escort treated the prisoners even worse than they had
+ done at the start. It was here that the prisoners for the first time
+ received horseflesh for their meat ration.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the officer down to the lowest soldier they showed what seemed like
+ personal spite against each of the prisoners, in unexpected contrast to
+ their former friendly relations.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This spite increased still more when, on calling over the roll of
+ prisoners, it was found that in the bustle of leaving Moscow one Russian
+ soldier, who had pretended to suffer from colic, had escaped. Pierre saw a
+ Frenchman beat a Russian soldier cruelly for straying too far from the
+ road, and heard his friend the captain reprimand and threaten to
+ court-martial a noncommissioned officer on account of the escape of the
+ Russian. To the noncommissioned officer’s excuse that the prisoner was ill
+ and could not walk, the officer replied that the order was to shoot those
+ who lagged behind. Pierre felt that that fatal force which had crushed him
+ during the executions, but which he had not felt during his imprisonment,
+ now again controlled his existence. It was terrible, but he felt that in
+ proportion to the efforts of that fatal force to crush him, there grew and
+ strengthened in his soul a power of life independent of it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He ate his supper of buckwheat soup with horseflesh and chatted with his
+ comrades.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Neither Pierre nor any of the others spoke of what they had seen in
+ Moscow, or of the roughness of their treatment by the French, or of the
+ order to shoot them which had been announced to them. As if in reaction
+ against the worsening of their position they were all particularly
+ animated and gay. They spoke of personal reminiscences, of amusing scenes
+ they had witnessed during the campaign, and avoided all talk of their
+ present situation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The sun had set long since. Bright stars shone out here and there in the
+ sky. A red glow as of a conflagration spread above the horizon from the
+ rising full moon, and that vast red ball swayed strangely in the gray
+ haze. It grew light. The evening was ending, but the night had not yet
+ come. Pierre got up and left his new companions, crossing between the
+ campfires to the other side of the road where he had been told the common
+ soldier prisoners were stationed. He wanted to talk to them. On the road
+ he was stopped by a French sentinel who ordered him back.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre turned back, not to his companions by the campfire, but to an
+ unharnessed cart where there was nobody. Tucking his legs under him and
+ dropping his head he sat down on the cold ground by the wheel of the cart
+ and remained motionless a long while sunk in thought. Suddenly he burst
+ out into a fit of his broad, good-natured laughter, so loud that men from
+ various sides turned with surprise to see what this strange and evidently
+ solitary laughter could mean.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ha-ha-ha!” laughed Pierre. And he said aloud to himself: “The soldier did
+ not let me pass. They took me and shut me up. They hold me captive. What,
+ me? Me? My immortal soul? Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha!...” and he laughed till
+ tears started to his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A man got up and came to see what this queer big fellow was laughing at
+ all by himself. Pierre stopped laughing, got up, went farther away from
+ the inquisitive man, and looked around him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The huge, endless bivouac that had previously resounded with the crackling
+ of campfires and the voices of many men had grown quiet, the red campfires
+ were growing paler and dying down. High up in the light sky hung the full
+ moon. Forests and fields beyond the camp, unseen before, were now visible
+ in the distance. And farther still, beyond those forests and fields, the
+ bright, oscillating, limitless distance lured one to itself. Pierre
+ glanced up at the sky and the twinkling stars in its faraway depths. “And
+ all that is me, all that is within me, and it is all I!” thought Pierre.
+ “And they caught all that and put it into a shed boarded up with planks!”
+ He smiled, and went and lay down to sleep beside his companions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV
+ 
+ 
+ In the early days of October another envoy came to Kutúzov with a letter
+ from Napoleon proposing peace and falsely dated from Moscow, though
+ Napoleon was already not far from Kutúzov on the old Kalúga road. Kutúzov
+ replied to this letter as he had done to the one formerly brought by
+ Lauriston, saying that there could be no question of peace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Soon after that a report was received from Dórokhov’s guerrilla detachment
+ operating to the left of Tarútino that troops of Broussier’s division had
+ been seen at Formínsk and that being separated from the rest of the French
+ army they might easily be destroyed. The soldiers and officers again
+ demanded action. Generals on the staff, excited by the memory of the easy
+ victory at Tarútino, urged Kutúzov to carry out Dórokhov’s suggestion.
+ Kutúzov did not consider any offensive necessary. The result was a
+ compromise which was inevitable: a small detachment was sent to Formínsk
+ to attack Broussier.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By a strange coincidence, this task, which turned out to be a most
+ difficult and important one, was entrusted to Dokhtúrov—that same
+ modest little Dokhtúrov whom no one had described to us as drawing up
+ plans of battles, dashing about in front of regiments, showering crosses
+ on batteries, and so on, and who was thought to be and was spoken of as
+ undecided and undiscerning—but whom we find commanding wherever the
+ position was most difficult all through the Russo-French wars from
+ Austerlitz to the year 1813. At Austerlitz he remained last at the Augezd
+ dam, rallying the regiments, saving what was possible when all were flying
+ and perishing and not a single general was left in the rear guard. Ill
+ with fever he went to Smolénsk with twenty thousand men to defend the town
+ against Napoleon’s whole army. In Smolénsk, at the Malákhov Gate, he had
+ hardly dozed off in a paroxysm of fever before he was awakened by the
+ bombardment of the town—and Smolénsk held out all day long. At the
+ battle of Borodinó, when Bagratión was killed and nine tenths of the men
+ of our left flank had fallen and the full force of the French artillery
+ fire was directed against it, the man sent there was this same irresolute
+ and undiscerning Dokhtúrov—Kutúzov hastening to rectify a mistake he
+ had made by sending someone else there first. And the quiet little
+ Dokhtúrov rode thither, and Borodinó became the greatest glory of the
+ Russian army. Many heroes have been described to us in verse and prose,
+ but of Dokhtúrov scarcely a word has been said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was Dokhtúrov again whom they sent to Formínsk and from there to
+ Málo-Yaroslávets, the place where the last battle with the French was
+ fought and where the obvious disintegration of the French army began; and
+ we are told of many geniuses and heroes of that period of the campaign,
+ but of Dokhtúrov nothing or very little is said and that dubiously. And
+ this silence about Dokhtúrov is the clearest testimony to his merit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It is natural for a man who does not understand the workings of a machine
+ to imagine that a shaving that has fallen into it by chance and is
+ interfering with its action and tossing about in it is its most important
+ part. The man who does not understand the construction of the machine
+ cannot conceive that the small connecting cogwheel which revolves quietly
+ is one of the most essential parts of the machine, and not the shaving
+ which merely harms and hinders the working.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the tenth of October when Dokhtúrov had gone halfway to Formínsk and
+ stopped at the village of Aristóvo, preparing faithfully to execute the
+ orders he had received, the whole French army having, in its convulsive
+ movement, reached Murat’s position apparently in order to give battle—suddenly
+ without any reason turned off to the left onto the new Kalúga road and
+ began to enter Formínsk, where only Broussier had been till then. At that
+ time Dokhtúrov had under his command, besides Dórokhov’s detachment, the
+ two small guerrilla detachments of Figner and Seslávin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the evening of October 11 Seslávin came to the Aristóvo headquarters
+ with a French guardsman he had captured. The prisoner said that the troops
+ that had entered Formínsk that day were the vanguard of the whole army,
+ that Napoleon was there and the whole army had left Moscow four days
+ previously. That same evening a house serf who had come from Bórovsk said
+ he had seen an immense army entering the town. Some Cossacks of
+ Dokhtúrov’s detachment reported having sighted the French Guards marching
+ along the road to Bórovsk. From all these reports it was evident that
+ where they had expected to meet a single division there was now the whole
+ French army marching from Moscow in an unexpected direction—along
+ the Kalúga road. Dokhtúrov was unwilling to undertake any action, as it
+ was not clear to him now what he ought to do. He had been ordered to
+ attack Formínsk. But only Broussier had been there at that time and now
+ the whole French army was there. Ermólov wished to act on his own
+ judgment, but Dokhtúrov insisted that he must have Kutúzov’s instructions.
+ So it was decided to send a dispatch to the staff.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For this purpose a capable officer, Bolkhovítinov, was chosen, who was to
+ explain the whole affair by word of mouth, besides delivering a written
+ report. Toward midnight Bolkhovítinov, having received the dispatch and
+ verbal instructions, galloped off to the General Staff accompanied by a
+ Cossack with spare horses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI
+ 
+ 
+ It was a warm, dark, autumn night. It had been raining for four days.
+ Having changed horses twice and galloped twenty miles in an hour and a
+ half over a sticky, muddy road, Bolkhovítinov reached Litashëvka after one
+ o’clock at night. Dismounting at a cottage on whose wattle fence hung a
+ signboard, GENERAL STAFF, and throwing down his reins, he entered a dark
+ passage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The general on duty, quick! It’s very important!” said he to someone who
+ had risen and was sniffing in the dark passage.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He has been very unwell since the evening and this is the third night he
+ has not slept,” said the orderly pleadingly in a whisper. “You should wake
+ the captain first.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But this is very important, from General Dokhtúrov,” said Bolkhovítinov,
+ entering the open door which he had found by feeling in the dark.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The orderly had gone in before him and began waking somebody.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your honor, your honor! A courier.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What? What’s that? From whom?” came a sleepy voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “From Dokhtúrov and from Alexéy Petróvich. Napoleon is at Formínsk,” said
+ Bolkhovítinov, unable to see in the dark who was speaking but guessing by
+ the voice that it was not Konovnítsyn.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The man who had wakened yawned and stretched himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t like waking him,” he said, fumbling for something. “He is very
+ ill. Perhaps this is only a rumor.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here is the dispatch,” said Bolkhovítinov. “My orders are to give it at
+ once to the general on duty.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wait a moment, I’ll light a candle. You damned rascal, where do you
+ always hide it?” said the voice of the man who was stretching himself, to
+ the orderly. (This was Shcherbínin, Konovnítsyn’s adjutant.) “I’ve found
+ it, I’ve found it!” he added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The orderly was striking a light and Shcherbínin was fumbling for
+ something on the candlestick.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, the nasty beasts!” said he with disgust.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By the light of the sparks Bolkhovítinov saw Shcherbínin’s youthful face
+ as he held the candle, and the face of another man who was still asleep.
+ This was Konovnítsyn.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the flame of the sulphur splinters kindled by the tinder burned up,
+ first blue and then red, Shcherbínin lit the tallow candle, from the
+ candlestick of which the cockroaches that had been gnawing it were running
+ away, and looked at the messenger. Bolkhovítinov was bespattered all over
+ with mud and had smeared his face by wiping it with his sleeve.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who gave the report?” inquired Shcherbínin, taking the envelope.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The news is reliable,” said Bolkhovítinov. “Prisoners, Cossacks,
+ and the scouts all say the same thing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There’s nothing to be done, we’ll have to wake him,” said Shcherbínin,
+ rising and going up to the man in the nightcap who lay covered by a
+ greatcoat. “Peter Petróvich!” said he. (Konovnítsyn did not stir.) “To the
+ General Staff!” he said with a smile, knowing that those words would be
+ sure to arouse him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And in fact the head in the nightcap was lifted at once. On Konovnítsyn’s
+ handsome, resolute face with cheeks flushed by fever, there still remained
+ for an instant a faraway dreamy expression remote from present affairs,
+ but then he suddenly started and his face assumed its habitual calm and
+ firm appearance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what is it? From whom?” he asked immediately but without hurry,
+ blinking at the light.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While listening to the officer’s report Konovnítsyn broke the seal and
+ read the dispatch. Hardly had he done so before he lowered his legs in
+ their woolen stockings to the earthen floor and began putting on his
+ boots. Then he took off his nightcap, combed his hair over his temples,
+ and donned his cap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Did you get here quickly? Let us go to his Highness.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Konovnítsyn had understood at once that the news brought was of great
+ importance and that no time must be lost. He did not consider or ask
+ himself whether the news was good or bad. That did not interest him. He
+ regarded the whole business of the war not with his intelligence or his
+ reason but by something else. There was within him a deep unexpressed
+ conviction that all would be well, but that one must not trust to this and
+ still less speak about it, but must only attend to one’s own work. And he
+ did his work, giving his whole strength to the task.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Peter Petróvich Konovnítsyn, like Dokhtúrov, seems to have been included
+ merely for propriety’s sake in the list of the so-called heroes of 1812—the
+ Barclays, Raévskis, Ermólovs, Plátovs, and Milorádoviches. Like Dokhtúrov
+ he had the reputation of being a man of very limited capacity and
+ information, and like Dokhtúrov he never made plans of battle but was
+ always found where the situation was most difficult. Since his appointment
+ as general on duty he had always slept with his door open, giving orders
+ that every messenger should be allowed to wake him up. In battle he was
+ always under fire, so that Kutúzov reproved him for it and feared to send
+ him to the front, and like Dokhtúrov he was one of those unnoticed
+ cogwheels that, without clatter or noise, constitute the most essential
+ part of the machine.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Coming out of the hut into the damp, dark night Konovnítsyn frowned—partly
+ from an increased pain in his head and partly at the unpleasant thought
+ that occurred to him, of how all that nest of influential men on the staff
+ would be stirred up by this news, especially Bennigsen, who ever since
+ Tarútino had been at daggers drawn with Kutúzov; and how they would make
+ suggestions, quarrel, issue orders, and rescind them. And this premonition
+ was disagreeable to him though he knew it could not be helped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And in fact Toll, to whom he went to communicate the news, immediately
+ began to expound his plans to a general sharing his quarters, until
+ Konovnítsyn, who listened in weary silence, reminded him that they must go
+ to see his Highness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII
+ 
+ 
+ Kutúzov like all old people did not sleep much at night. He often fell
+ asleep unexpectedly in the daytime, but at night, lying on his bed without
+ undressing, he generally remained awake thinking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So he lay now on his bed, supporting his large, heavy, scarred head on his
+ plump hand, with his one eye open, meditating and peering into the
+ darkness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Since Bennigsen, who corresponded with the Emperor and had more influence
+ than anyone else on the staff, had begun to avoid him, Kutúzov was more at
+ ease as to the possibility of himself and his troops being obliged to take
+ part in useless aggressive movements. The lesson of the Tarútino battle
+ and of the day before it, which Kutúzov remembered with pain, must, he
+ thought, have some effect on others too.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive.
+ Patience and time are my warriors, my champions,” thought Kutúzov. He knew
+ that an apple should not be plucked while it is green. It will fall of
+ itself when ripe, but if picked unripe the apple is spoiled, the tree is
+ harmed, and your teeth are set on edge. Like an experienced sportsman he
+ knew that the beast was wounded, and wounded as only the whole strength of
+ Russia could have wounded it, but whether it was mortally wounded or not
+ was still an undecided question. Now by the fact of Lauriston and
+ Barthélemi having been sent, and by the reports of the guerrillas, Kutúzov
+ was almost sure that the wound was mortal. But he needed further proofs
+ and it was necessary to wait.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They want to run to see how they have wounded it. Wait and we shall see!
+ Continual maneuvers, continual advances!” thought he. “What for? Only to
+ distinguish themselves! As if fighting were fun. They are like children
+ from whom one can’t get any sensible account of what has happened because
+ they all want to show how well they can fight. But that’s not what is
+ needed now.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And what ingenious maneuvers they all propose to me! It seems to them
+ that when they have thought of two or three contingencies” (he remembered
+ the general plan sent him from Petersburg) “they have foreseen everything.
+ But the contingencies are endless.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The undecided question as to whether the wound inflicted at Borodinó was
+ mortal or not had hung over Kutúzov’s head for a whole month. On the one
+ hand the French had occupied Moscow. On the other Kutúzov felt assured
+ with all his being that the terrible blow into which he and all the
+ Russians had put their whole strength must have been mortal. But in any
+ case proofs were needed; he had waited a whole month for them and grew
+ more impatient the longer he waited. Lying on his bed during those
+ sleepless nights he did just what he reproached those younger generals for
+ doing. He imagined all sorts of possible contingencies, just like the
+ younger men, but with this difference, that he saw thousands of
+ contingencies instead of two or three and based nothing on them. The
+ longer he thought the more contingencies presented themselves. He imagined
+ all sorts of movements of the Napoleonic army as a whole or in sections—against
+ Petersburg, or against him, or to outflank him. He thought too of the
+ possibility (which he feared most of all) that Napoleon might fight him
+ with his own weapon and remain in Moscow awaiting him. Kutúzov even
+ imagined that Napoleon’s army might turn back through Medýn and Yukhnóv,
+ but the one thing he could not foresee was what happened—the insane,
+ convulsive stampede of Napoleon’s army during its first eleven days after
+ leaving Moscow: a stampede which made possible what Kutúzov had not yet
+ even dared to think of—the complete extermination of the French.
+ Dórokhov’s report about Broussier’s division, the guerrillas’ reports of
+ distress in Napoleon’s army, rumors of preparations for leaving Moscow,
+ all confirmed the supposition that the French army was beaten and
+ preparing for flight. But these were only suppositions, which seemed
+ important to the younger men but not to Kutúzov. With his sixty years’
+ experience he knew what value to attach to rumors, knew how apt people who
+ desire anything are to group all news so that it appears to confirm what
+ they desire, and he knew how readily in such cases they omit all that
+ makes for the contrary. And the more he desired it the less he allowed
+ himself to believe it. This question absorbed all his mental powers. All
+ else was to him only life’s customary routine. To such customary routine
+ belonged his conversations with the staff, the letters he wrote from
+ Tarútino to Madame de Staël, the reading of novels, the distribution of
+ awards, his correspondence with Petersburg, and so on. But the destruction
+ of the French, which he alone foresaw, was his heart’s one desire.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the night of the eleventh of October he lay leaning on his arm and
+ thinking of that.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was a stir in the next room and he heard the steps of Toll,
+ Konovnítsyn, and Bolkhovítinov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh, who’s there? Come in, come in! What news?” the field marshal called
+ out to them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While a footman was lighting a candle, Toll communicated the substance of
+ the news.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who brought it?” asked Kutúzov with a look which, when the candle was
+ lit, struck Toll by its cold severity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There can be no doubt about it, your Highness.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Call him in, call him here.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov sat up with one leg hanging down from the bed and his big paunch
+ resting against the other which was doubled under him. He screwed up his
+ seeing eye to scrutinize the messenger more carefully, as if wishing to
+ read in his face what preoccupied his own mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tell me, tell me, friend,” said he to Bolkhovítinov in his low, aged
+ voice, as he pulled together the shirt which gaped open on his chest,
+ “come nearer—nearer. What news have you brought me? Eh? That
+ Napoleon has left Moscow? Are you sure? Eh?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bolkhovítinov gave a detailed account from the beginning of all he had
+ been told to report.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Speak quicker, quicker! Don’t torture me!” Kutúzov interrupted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Bolkhovítinov told him everything and was then silent, awaiting
+ instructions. Toll was beginning to say something but Kutúzov checked him.
+ He tried to say something, but his face suddenly puckered and wrinkled; he
+ waved his arm at Toll and turned to the opposite side of the room, to the
+ corner darkened by the icons that hung there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O Lord, my Creator, Thou has heard our prayer...” said he in a tremulous
+ voice with folded hands. “Russia is saved. I thank Thee, O Lord!” and he
+ wept.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII
+ 
+ 
+ From the time he received this news to the end of the campaign all
+ Kutúzov’s activity was directed toward restraining his troops, by
+ authority, by guile, and by entreaty, from useless attacks, maneuvers, or
+ encounters with the perishing enemy. Dokhtúrov went to Málo-Yaroslávets,
+ but Kutúzov lingered with the main army and gave orders for the evacuation
+ of Kalúga—a retreat beyond which town seemed to him quite possible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Everywhere Kutúzov retreated, but the enemy without waiting for his
+ retreat fled in the opposite direction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon’s historians describe to us his skilled maneuvers at Tarútino and
+ Málo-Yaroslávets, and make conjectures as to what would have happened had
+ Napoleon been in time to penetrate into the rich southern provinces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But not to speak of the fact that nothing prevented him from advancing
+ into those southern provinces (for the Russian army did not bar his way),
+ the historians forget that nothing could have saved his army, for then
+ already it bore within itself the germs of inevitable ruin. How could that
+ army—which had found abundant supplies in Moscow and had trampled
+ them underfoot instead of keeping them, and on arriving at Smolénsk had
+ looted provisions instead of storing them—how could that army
+ recuperate in Kalúga province, which was inhabited by Russians such as
+ those who lived in Moscow, and where fire had the same property of
+ consuming what was set ablaze?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That army could not recover anywhere. Since the battle of Borodinó and the
+ pillage of Moscow it had borne within itself, as it were, the chemical
+ elements of dissolution.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The members of what had once been an army—Napoleon himself and all
+ his soldiers—fled without knowing whither, each concerned only to
+ make his escape as quickly as possible from this position, of the
+ hopelessness of which they were all more or less vaguely conscious.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So it came about that at the council at Málo-Yaroslávets, when the
+ generals pretending to confer together expressed various opinions, all
+ mouths were closed by the opinion uttered by the simple-minded soldier
+ Mouton who, speaking last, said what they all felt: that the one thing
+ needful was to get away as quickly as possible; and no one, not even
+ Napoleon, could say anything against that truth which they all recognized.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But though they all realized that it was necessary to get away, there
+ still remained a feeling of shame at admitting that they must flee. An
+ external shock was needed to overcome that shame, and this shock came in
+ due time. It was what the French called “le hourra de l’Empereur.” 
+
+
+
+ 
+ The day after the council at Málo-Yaroslávets Napoleon rode out early in
+ the morning amid the lines of his army with his suite of marshals and an
+ escort, on the pretext of inspecting the army and the scene of the
+ previous and of the impending battle. Some Cossacks on the prowl for booty
+ fell in with the Emperor and very nearly captured him. If the Cossacks did
+ not capture Napoleon then, what saved him was the very thing that was
+ destroying the French army, the booty on which the Cossacks fell. Here as
+ at Tarútino they went after plunder, leaving the men. Disregarding
+ Napoleon they rushed after the plunder and Napoleon managed to escape.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When les enfants du Don might so easily have taken the Emperor himself in
+ the midst of his army, it was clear that there was nothing for it but to
+ fly as fast as possible along the nearest, familiar road. Napoleon with
+ his forty-year-old stomach understood that hint, not feeling his former
+ agility and boldness, and under the influence of the fright the Cossacks
+ had given him he at once agreed with Mouton and issued orders—as the
+ historians tell us—to retreat by the Smolénsk road.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That Napoleon agreed with Mouton, and that the army retreated, does not
+ prove that Napoleon caused it to retreat, but that the forces which
+ influenced the whole army and directed it along the Mozháysk (that is, the
+ Smolénsk) road acted simultaneously on him also.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX
+ 
+ 
+ A man in motion always devises an aim for that motion. To be able to go a
+ thousand miles he must imagine that something good awaits him at the end
+ of those thousand miles. One must have the prospect of a promised land to
+ have the strength to move.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The promised land for the French during their advance had been Moscow,
+ during their retreat it was their native land. But that native land was
+ too far off, and for a man going a thousand miles it is absolutely
+ necessary to set aside his final goal and to say to himself: “Today I
+ shall get to a place twenty-five miles off where I shall rest and spend
+ the night,” and during the first day’s journey that resting place eclipses
+ his ultimate goal and attracts all his hopes and desires. And the impulses
+ felt by a single person are always magnified in a crowd.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For the French retreating along the old Smolénsk road, the final goal—their
+ native land—was too remote, and their immediate goal was Smolénsk,
+ toward which all their desires and hopes, enormously intensified in the
+ mass, urged them on. It was not that they knew that much food and fresh
+ troops awaited them in Smolénsk, nor that they were told so (on the
+ contrary their superior officers, and Napoleon himself, knew that
+ provisions were scarce there), but because this alone could give them
+ strength to move on and endure their present privations. So both those who
+ knew and those who did not know deceived themselves, and pushed on to
+ Smolénsk as to a promised land.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Coming out onto the highroad the French fled with surprising energy and
+ unheard-of rapidity toward the goal they had fixed on. Besides the common
+ impulse which bound the whole crowd of French into one mass and supplied
+ them with a certain energy, there was another cause binding them together—their
+ great numbers. As with the physical law of gravity, their enormous mass
+ drew the individual human atoms to itself. In their hundreds of thousands
+ they moved like a whole nation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Each of them desired nothing more than to give himself up as a prisoner to
+ escape from all this horror and misery; but on the one hand the force of
+ this common attraction to Smolénsk, their goal, drew each of them in the
+ same direction; on the other hand an army corps could not surrender to a
+ company, and though the French availed themselves of every convenient
+ opportunity to detach themselves and to surrender on the slightest decent
+ pretext, such pretexts did not always occur. Their very numbers and their
+ crowded and swift movement deprived them of that possibility and rendered
+ it not only difficult but impossible for the Russians to stop this
+ movement, to which the French were directing all their energies. Beyond a
+ certain limit no mechanical disruption of the body could hasten the
+ process of decomposition.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A lump of snow cannot be melted instantaneously. There is a certain limit
+ of time in less than which no amount of heat can melt the snow. On the
+ contrary the greater the heat the more solidified the remaining snow
+ becomes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of the Russian commanders Kutúzov alone understood this. When the flight
+ of the French army along the Smolénsk road became well defined, what
+ Konovnítsyn had foreseen on the night of the eleventh of October began to
+ occur. The superior officers all wanted to distinguish themselves, to cut
+ off, to seize, to capture, and to overthrow the French, and all clamored
+ for action.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov alone used all his power (and such power is very limited in the
+ case of any commander in chief) to prevent an attack.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He could not tell them what we say now: “Why fight, why block the road,
+ losing our own men and inhumanly slaughtering unfortunate wretches? What
+ is the use of that, when a third of their army has melted away on the road
+ from Moscow to Vyázma without any battle?” But drawing from his aged
+ wisdom what they could understand, he told them of the golden bridge, and
+ they laughed at and slandered him, flinging themselves on, rending and
+ exulting over the dying beast.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ermólov, Milorádovich, Plátov, and others in proximity to the French near
+ Vyázma could not resist their desire to cut off and break up two French
+ corps, and by way of reporting their intention to Kutúzov they sent him a
+ blank sheet of paper in an envelope.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And try as Kutúzov might to restrain the troops, our men attacked, trying
+ to bar the road. Infantry regiments, we are told, advanced to the attack
+ with music and with drums beating, and killed and lost thousands of men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But they did not cut off or overthrow anybody and the French army, closing
+ up more firmly at the danger, continued, while steadily melting away, to
+ pursue its fatal path to Smolénsk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK FOURTEEN: 1812
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ The Battle of Borodinó, with the occupation of Moscow that followed it and
+ the flight of the French without further conflicts, is one of the most
+ instructive phenomena in history.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All historians agree that the external activity of states and nations in
+ their conflicts with one another is expressed in wars, and that as a
+ direct result of greater or less success in war the political strength of
+ states and nations increases or decreases.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Strange as may be the historical account of how some king or emperor,
+ having quarreled with another, collects an army, fights his enemy’s army,
+ gains a victory by killing three, five, or ten thousand men, and
+ subjugates a kingdom and an entire nation of several millions, all the
+ facts of history (as far as we know it) confirm the truth of the statement
+ that the greater or lesser success of one army against another is the
+ cause, or at least an essential indication, of an increase or decrease in
+ the strength of the nation—even though it is unintelligible why the
+ defeat of an army—a hundredth part of a nation—should oblige
+ that whole nation to submit. An army gains a victory, and at once the
+ rights of the conquering nation have increased to the detriment of the
+ defeated. An army has suffered defeat, and at once a people loses its
+ rights in proportion to the severity of the reverse, and if its army
+ suffers a complete defeat the nation is quite subjugated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So according to history it has been found from the most ancient times, and
+ so it is to our own day. All Napoleon’s wars serve to confirm this rule.
+ In proportion to the defeat of the Austrian army Austria loses its rights,
+ and the rights and the strength of France increase. The victories of the
+ French at Jena and Auerstädt destroy the independent existence of Prussia.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But then, in 1812, the French gain a victory near Moscow. Moscow is taken
+ and after that, with no further battles, it is not Russia that ceases to
+ exist, but the French army of six hundred thousand, and then Napoleonic
+ France itself. To strain the facts to fit the rules of history: to say
+ that the field of battle at Borodinó remained in the hands of the
+ Russians, or that after Moscow there were other battles that destroyed
+ Napoleon’s army, is impossible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the French victory at Borodinó there was no general engagement nor
+ any that were at all serious, yet the French army ceased to exist. What
+ does this mean? If it were an example taken from the history of China, we
+ might say that it was not an historic phenomenon (which is the historians’
+ usual expedient when anything does not fit their standards); if the matter
+ concerned some brief conflict in which only a small number of troops took
+ part, we might treat it as an exception; but this event occurred before
+ our fathers’ eyes, and for them it was a question of the life or death of
+ their fatherland, and it happened in the greatest of all known wars.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The period of the campaign of 1812 from the battle of Borodinó to the
+ expulsion of the French proved that the winning of a battle does not
+ produce a conquest and is not even an invariable indication of conquest;
+ it proved that the force which decides the fate of peoples lies not in the
+ conquerors, nor even in armies and battles, but in something else.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French historians, describing the condition of the French army before
+ it left Moscow, affirm that all was in order in the Grand Army, except the
+ cavalry, the artillery, and the transport—there was no forage for
+ the horses or the cattle. That was a misfortune no one could remedy, for
+ the peasants of the district burned their hay rather than let the French
+ have it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The victory gained did not bring the usual results because the peasants
+ Karp and Vlas (who after the French had evacuated Moscow drove in their
+ carts to pillage the town, and in general personally failed to manifest
+ any heroic feelings), and the whole innumerable multitude of such
+ peasants, did not bring their hay to Moscow for the high price offered
+ them, but burned it instead.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Let us imagine two men who have come out to fight a duel with rapiers
+ according to all the rules of the art of fencing. The fencing has gone on
+ for some time; suddenly one of the combatants, feeling himself wounded and
+ understanding that the matter is no joke but concerns his life, throws
+ down his rapier, and seizing the first cudgel that comes to hand begins to
+ brandish it. Then let us imagine that the combatant who so sensibly
+ employed the best and simplest means to attain his end was at the same
+ time influenced by traditions of chivalry and, desiring to conceal the
+ facts of the case, insisted that he had gained his victory with the rapier
+ according to all the rules of art. One can imagine what confusion and
+ obscurity would result from such an account of the duel.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The fencer who demanded a contest according to the rules of fencing was
+ the French army; his opponent who threw away the rapier and snatched up
+ the cudgel was the Russian people; those who try to explain the matter
+ according to the rules of fencing are the historians who have described
+ the event.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the burning of Smolénsk a war began which did not follow any
+ previous traditions of war. The burning of towns and villages, the
+ retreats after battles, the blow dealt at Borodinó and the renewed
+ retreat, the burning of Moscow, the capture of marauders, the seizure of
+ transports, and the guerrilla war were all departures from the rules.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon felt this, and from the time he took up the correct fencing
+ attitude in Moscow and instead of his opponent’s rapier saw a cudgel
+ raised above his head, he did not cease to complain to Kutúzov and to the
+ Emperor Alexander that the war was being carried on contrary to all the
+ rules—as if there were any rules for killing people. In spite of the
+ complaints of the French as to the nonobservance of the rules, in spite of
+ the fact that to some highly placed Russians it seemed rather disgraceful
+ to fight with a cudgel and they wanted to assume a pose en quarte or en
+ tierce according to all the rules, and to make an adroit thrust en prime ,
+ and so on—the cudgel of the people’s war was lifted with all its
+ menacing and majestic strength, and without consulting anyone’s tastes or
+ rules and regardless of anything else, it rose and fell with stupid
+ simplicity, but consistently, and belabored the French till the whole
+ invasion had perished.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And it is well for a people who do not—as the French did in 1813—salute
+ according to all the rules of art, and, presenting the hilt of their
+ rapier gracefully and politely, hand it to their magnanimous conqueror,
+ but at the moment of trial, without asking what rules others have adopted
+ in similar cases, simply and easily pick up the first cudgel that comes to
+ hand and strike with it till the feeling of resentment and revenge in
+ their soul yields to a feeling of contempt and compassion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ One of the most obvious and advantageous departures from the so-called
+ laws of war is the action of scattered groups against men pressed together
+ in a mass. Such action always occurs in wars that take on a national
+ character. In such actions, instead of two crowds opposing each other, the
+ men disperse, attack singly, run away when attacked by stronger forces,
+ but again attack when opportunity offers. This was done by the guerrillas
+ in Spain, by the mountain tribes in the Caucasus, and by the Russians in
+ 1812.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ People have called this kind of war “guerrilla warfare” and assume that by
+ so calling it they have explained its meaning. But such a war does not fit
+ in under any rule and is directly opposed to a well-known rule of tactics
+ which is accepted as infallible. That rule says that an attacker should
+ concentrate his forces in order to be stronger than his opponent at the
+ moment of conflict.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Guerrilla war (always successful, as history shows) directly infringes
+ that rule.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This contradiction arises from the fact that military science assumes the
+ strength of an army to be identical with its numbers. Military science
+ says that the more troops the greater the strength. Les gros bataillons
+ ont toujours raison . *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Large battalions are always victorious.
+
+
+
+ 
+ For military science to say this is like defining momentum in mechanics by
+ reference to the mass only: stating that momenta are equal or unequal to
+ each other simply because the masses involved are equal or unequal.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Momentum (quantity of motion) is the product of mass and velocity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In military affairs the strength of an army is the product of its mass and
+ some unknown x .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Military science, seeing in history innumerable instances of the fact that
+ the size of any army does not coincide with its strength and that small
+ detachments defeat larger ones, obscurely admits the existence of this
+ unknown factor and tries to discover it—now in a geometric
+ formation, now in the equipment employed, now, and most usually, in the
+ genius of the commanders. But the assignment of these various meanings to
+ the factor does not yield results which accord with the historic facts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Yet it is only necessary to abandon the false view (adopted to gratify the
+ “heroes”) of the efficacy of the directions issued in wartime by
+ commanders, in order to find this unknown quantity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That unknown quantity is the spirit of the army, that is to say, the
+ greater or lesser readiness to fight and face danger felt by all the men
+ composing an army, quite independently of whether they are, or are not,
+ fighting under the command of a genius, in two—or three-line
+ formation, with cudgels or with rifles that repeat thirty times a minute.
+ Men who want to fight will always put themselves in the most advantageous
+ conditions for fighting.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The spirit of an army is the factor which multiplied by the mass gives the
+ resulting force. To define and express the significance of this unknown
+ factor—the spirit of an army—is a problem for science.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This problem is only solvable if we cease arbitrarily to substitute for
+ the unknown x itself the conditions under which that force becomes
+ apparent—such as the commands of the general, the equipment
+ employed, and so on—mistaking these for the real significance of the
+ factor, and if we recognize this unknown quantity in its entirety as being
+ the greater or lesser desire to fight and to face danger. Only then,
+ expressing known historic facts by equations and comparing the relative
+ significance of this factor, can we hope to define the unknown.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ten men, battalions, or divisions, fighting fifteen men, battalions, or
+ divisions, conquer—that is, kill or take captive—all the
+ others, while themselves losing four, so that on the one side four and on
+ the other fifteen were lost. Consequently the four were equal to the
+ fifteen, and therefore 4 x = 15 y . Consequently x/y = 15/4.
+ This equation does not give us the value of the unknown factor but gives us a ratio
+ between two unknowns. And by bringing variously selected historic units
+ (battles, campaigns, periods of war) into such equations, a series of
+ numbers could be obtained in which certain laws should exist and might be
+ discovered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The tactical rule that an army should act in masses when attacking, and in
+ smaller groups in retreat, unconsciously confirms the truth that the
+ strength of an army depends on its spirit. To lead men forward under fire
+ more discipline (obtainable only by movement in masses) is needed than is
+ needed to resist attacks. But this rule which leaves out of account the
+ spirit of the army continually proves incorrect and is in particularly
+ striking contrast to the facts when some strong rise or fall in the spirit
+ of the troops occurs, as in all national wars.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French, retreating in 1812—though according to tactics they
+ should have separated into detachments to defend themselves—congregated
+ into a mass because the spirit of the army had so fallen that only the
+ mass held the army together. The Russians, on the contrary, ought
+ according to tactics to have attacked in mass, but in fact they split up
+ into small units, because their spirit had so risen that separate
+ individuals, without orders, dealt blows at the French without needing any
+ compulsion to induce them to expose themselves to hardships and dangers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ The so-called partisan war began with the entry of the French into
+ Smolénsk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before partisan warfare had been officially recognized by the government,
+ thousands of enemy stragglers, marauders, and foragers had been destroyed
+ by the Cossacks and the peasants, who killed them off as instinctively as
+ dogs worry a stray mad dog to death. Denís Davýdov, with his Russian
+ instinct, was the first to recognize the value of this terrible cudgel
+ which regardless of the rules of military science destroyed the French,
+ and to him belongs the credit for taking the first step toward
+ regularizing this method of warfare.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On August 24 Davýdov’s first partisan detachment was formed and then
+ others were recognized. The further the campaign progressed the more
+ numerous these detachments became.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The irregulars destroyed the great army piecemeal. They gathered the
+ fallen leaves that dropped of themselves from that withered tree—the
+ French army—and sometimes shook that tree itself. By October, when
+ the French were fleeing toward Smolénsk, there were hundreds of such
+ companies, of various sizes and characters. There were some that adopted
+ all the army methods and had infantry, artillery, staffs, and the comforts
+ of life. Others consisted solely of Cossack cavalry. There were also small
+ scratch groups of foot and horse, and groups of peasants and landowners
+ that remained unknown. A sacristan commanded one party which captured
+ several hundred prisoners in the course of a month; and there was
+ Vasílisa, the wife of a village elder, who slew hundreds of the French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The partisan warfare flamed up most fiercely in the latter days of
+ October. Its first period had passed: when the partisans themselves,
+ amazed at their own boldness, feared every minute to be surrounded and
+ captured by the French, and hid in the forests without unsaddling, hardly
+ daring to dismount and always expecting to be pursued. By the end of
+ October this kind of warfare had taken definite shape: it had become clear
+ to all what could be ventured against the French and what could not. Now
+ only the commanders of detachments with staffs, and moving according to
+ rules at a distance from the French, still regarded many things as
+ impossible. The small bands that had started their activities long before
+ and had already observed the French closely considered things possible
+ which the commanders of the big detachments did not dare to contemplate.
+ The Cossacks and peasants who crept in among the French now considered
+ everything possible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On October 22, Denísov (who was one of the irregulars) was with his group
+ at the height of the guerrilla enthusiasm. Since early morning he and his
+ party had been on the move. All day long he had been watching from the
+ forest that skirted the highroad a large French convoy of cavalry baggage
+ and Russian prisoners separated from the rest of the army, which—as
+ was learned from spies and prisoners—was moving under a strong
+ escort to Smolénsk. Besides Denísov and Dólokhov (who also led a small
+ party and moved in Denísov’s vicinity), the commanders of some large
+ divisions with staffs also knew of this convoy and, as Denísov expressed
+ it, were sharpening their teeth for it. Two of the commanders of large
+ parties—one a Pole and the other a German—sent invitations to
+ Denísov almost simultaneously, requesting him to join up with their
+ divisions to attack the convoy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, bwother, I have gwown mustaches myself,” said Denísov on reading
+ these documents, and he wrote to the German that, despite his heartfelt
+ desire to serve under so valiant and renowned a general, he had to forgo
+ that pleasure because he was already under the command of the Polish
+ general. To the Polish general he replied to the same effect, informing
+ him that he was already under the command of the German.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having arranged matters thus, Denísov and Dólokhov intended, without
+ reporting matters to the higher command, to attack and seize that convoy
+ with their own small forces. On October 22 it was moving from the village
+ of Mikúlino to that of Shámshevo. To the left of the road between Mikúlino
+ and Shámshevo there were large forests, extending in some places up to the
+ road itself though in others a mile or more back from it. Through these
+ forests Denísov and his party rode all day, sometimes keeping well back in
+ them and sometimes coming to the very edge, but never losing sight of the
+ moving French. That morning, Cossacks of Denísov’s party had seized and
+ carried off into the forest two wagons loaded with cavalry saddles, which
+ had stuck in the mud not far from Mikúlino where the forest ran close to
+ the road. Since then, and until evening, the party had watched the
+ movements of the French without attacking. It was necessary to let the
+ French reach Shámshevo quietly without alarming them and then, after
+ joining Dólokhov who was to come that evening to a consultation at a
+ watchman’s hut in the forest less than a mile from Shámshevo, to surprise
+ the French at dawn, falling like an avalanche on their heads from two
+ sides, and rout and capture them all at one blow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In their rear, more than a mile from Mikúlino where the forest came right
+ up to the road, six Cossacks were posted to report if any fresh columns of
+ French should show themselves.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Beyond Shámshevo, Dólokhov was to observe the road in the same way, to
+ find out at what distance there were other French troops. They reckoned
+ that the convoy had fifteen hundred men. Denísov had two hundred, and
+ Dólokhov might have as many more, but the disparity of numbers did not
+ deter Denísov. All that he now wanted to know was what troops these were
+ and to learn that he had to capture a “tongue”—that is, a man from
+ the enemy column. That morning’s attack on the wagons had been made so
+ hastily that the Frenchmen with the wagons had all been killed; only a
+ little drummer boy had been taken alive, and as he was a straggler he
+ could tell them nothing definite about the troops in that column.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov considered it dangerous to make a second attack for fear of
+ putting the whole column on the alert, so he sent Tíkhon Shcherbáty, a
+ peasant of his party, to Shámshevo to try and seize at least one of the
+ French quartermasters who had been sent on in advance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ It was a warm rainy autumn day. The sky and the horizon were both the
+ color of muddy water. At times a sort of mist descended, and then suddenly
+ heavy slanting rain came down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov in a felt cloak and a sheepskin cap from which the rain ran down
+ was riding a thin thoroughbred horse with sunken sides. Like his horse,
+ which turned its head and laid its ears back, he shrank from the driving
+ rain and gazed anxiously before him. His thin face with its short, thick
+ black beard looked angry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Beside Denísov rode an esaul , * Denísov’s fellow worker, also
+ in felt cloak and sheepskin cap, and riding a large sleek Don horse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * A captain of Cossacks.
+
+
+
+ 
+ Esaul Lováyski the Third was a tall man as straight as an arrow,
+ pale-faced, fair-haired, with narrow light eyes and with calm
+ self-satisfaction in his face and bearing. Though it was impossible to say
+ in what the peculiarity of the horse and rider lay, yet at first glance at
+ the esaul and Denísov one saw that the latter was wet and uncomfortable
+ and was a man mounted on a horse, while looking at the esaul one saw that
+ he was as comfortable and as much at ease as always and that he was not a
+ man who had mounted a horse, but a man who was one with his horse, a being
+ consequently possessed of twofold strength.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A little ahead of them walked a peasant guide, wet to the skin and wearing
+ a gray peasant coat and a white knitted cap.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A little behind, on a poor, small, lean Kirghíz mount with an enormous
+ tail and mane and a bleeding mouth, rode a young officer in a blue French
+ overcoat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Beside him rode an hussar, with a boy in a tattered French uniform and
+ blue cap behind him on the crupper of his horse. The boy held on to the
+ hussar with cold, red hands, and raising his eyebrows gazed about him with
+ surprise. This was the French drummer boy captured that morning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Behind them along the narrow, sodden, cut up forest road came hussars in
+ threes and fours, and then Cossacks: some in felt cloaks, some in French
+ greatcoats, and some with horsecloths over their heads. The horses, being
+ drenched by the rain, all looked black whether chestnut or bay. Their
+ necks, with their wet, close-clinging manes, looked strangely thin. Steam
+ rose from them. Clothes, saddles, reins, were all wet, slippery, and
+ sodden, like the ground and the fallen leaves that strewed the road. The
+ men sat huddled up trying not to stir, so as to warm the water that had
+ trickled to their bodies and not admit the fresh cold water that was
+ leaking in under their seats, their knees, and at the back of their necks.
+ In the midst of the outspread line of Cossacks two wagons, drawn by French
+ horses and by saddled Cossack horses that had been hitched on in front,
+ rumbled over the tree stumps and branches and splashed through the water
+ that lay in the ruts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov’s horse swerved aside to avoid a pool in the track and bumped his
+ rider’s knee against a tree.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, the devil!” exclaimed Denísov angrily, and showing his teeth he
+ struck his horse three times with his whip, splashing himself and his
+ comrades with mud.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov was out of sorts both because of the rain and also from hunger
+ (none of them had eaten anything since morning), and yet more because he
+ still had no news from Dólokhov and the man sent to capture a “tongue” had
+ not returned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There’ll hardly be another such chance to fall on a transport as today.
+ It’s too risky to attack them by oneself, and if we put it off till
+ another day one of the big guerrilla detachments will snatch the prey from
+ under our noses,” thought Denísov, continually peering forward, hoping to
+ see a messenger from Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On coming to a path in the forest along which he could see far to the
+ right, Denísov stopped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There’s someone coming,” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The esaul looked in the direction Denísov indicated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There are two, an officer and a Cossack. But it is not presupposable 
+ that it is the lieutenant colonel himself,” said the esaul , who was
+ fond of using words the Cossacks did not know.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The approaching riders having descended a decline were no longer visible,
+ but they reappeared a few minutes later. In front, at a weary gallop and
+ using his leather whip, rode an officer, disheveled and drenched, whose
+ trousers had worked up to above his knees. Behind him, standing in the
+ stirrups, trotted a Cossack. The officer, a very young lad with a broad
+ rosy face and keen merry eyes, galloped up to Denísov and handed him a
+ sodden envelope.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “From the general,” said the officer. “Please excuse its
+ not being quite dry.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov, frowning, took the envelope and opened it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There, they kept telling us: ‘It’s dangerous, it’s
+ dangerous,’” said the officer, addressing the esaul while
+ Denísov was reading the dispatch. “But Komaróv and I”—he pointed
+ to the Cossack—“were prepared. We have each of us two pistols.... But
+ what’s this?” he asked, noticing the French drummer boy. “A
+ prisoner? You’ve already been in action? May I speak to him?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wostóv! Pétya!” exclaimed Denísov, having run through the
+ dispatch. “Why didn’t you say who you were?” and turning with a
+ smile he held out his hand to the lad.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer was Pétya Rostóv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the way Pétya had been preparing himself to behave with Denísov as
+ befitted a grown-up man and an officer—without hinting at their
+ previous acquaintance. But as soon as Denísov smiled at him Pétya
+ brightened up, blushed with pleasure, forgot the official manner he had
+ been rehearsing, and began telling him how he had already been in a battle
+ near Vyázma and how a certain hussar had distinguished himself there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, I am glad to see you,” Denísov interrupted him, and his face again
+ assumed its anxious expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Michael Feoklítych,” said he to the esaul , “this is
+ again fwom that German, you know. He”—he indicated
+ Pétya—“is serving under him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Denísov told the esaul that the dispatch just delivered was a
+ repetition of the German general’s demand that he should join forces with
+ him for an attack on the transport.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If we don’t take it tomowwow, he’ll snatch it fwom under our noses,” he
+ added.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While Denísov was talking to the esaul , Pétya—abashed by Denísov’s
+ cold tone and supposing that it was due to the condition of his trousers—furtively
+ tried to pull them down under his greatcoat so that no one should notice
+ it, while maintaining as martial an air as possible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Will there be any orders, your honor?” he asked Denísov, holding his hand
+ at the salute and resuming the game of adjutant and general for which he
+ had prepared himself, “or shall I remain with your honor?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Orders?” Denísov repeated thoughtfully. “But can you stay till tomowwow?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, please... May I stay with you?” cried Pétya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But, just what did the genewal tell you? To weturn at once?” asked
+ Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya blushed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He gave me no instructions. I think I could?” he returned, inquiringly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, all wight,” said Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And turning to his men he directed a party to go on to the halting place
+ arranged near the watchman’s hut in the forest, and told the officer on
+ the Kirghíz horse (who performed the duties of an adjutant) to go and find
+ out where Dólokhov was and whether he would come that evening. Denísov
+ himself intended going with the esaul and Pétya to the edge of the forest
+ where it reached out to Shámshevo, to have a look at the part of the
+ French bivouac they were to attack next day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, old fellow,” said he to the peasant guide, “lead us to Shámshevo.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov, Pétya, and the esaul , accompanied by some Cossacks and the hussar
+ who had the prisoner, rode to the left across a ravine to the edge of the
+ forest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ The rain had stopped, and only the mist was falling and drops from the
+ trees. Denísov, the esaul , and Pétya rode silently, following the peasant
+ in the knitted cap who, stepping lightly with outturned toes and moving
+ noiselessly in his bast shoes over the roots and wet leaves, silently led
+ them to the edge of the forest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He ascended an incline, stopped, looked about him, and advanced to where
+ the screen of trees was less dense. On reaching a large oak tree that had
+ not yet shed its leaves, he stopped and beckoned mysteriously to them with
+ his hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov and Pétya rode up to him. From the spot where the peasant was
+ standing they could see the French. Immediately beyond the forest, on a
+ downward slope, lay a field of spring rye. To the right, beyond a steep
+ ravine, was a small village and a landowner’s house with a broken roof. In
+ the village, in the house, in the garden, by the well, by the pond, over
+ all the rising ground, and all along the road uphill from the bridge
+ leading to the village, not more than five hundred yards away, crowds of
+ men could be seen through the shimmering mist. Their un-Russian shouting
+ at their horses which were straining uphill with the carts, and their
+ calls to one another, could be clearly heard.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bwing the prisoner here,” said Denísov in a low voice, not taking his
+ eyes off the French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A Cossack dismounted, lifted the boy down, and took him to Denísov.
+ Pointing to the French troops, Denísov asked him what these and those of
+ them were. The boy, thrusting his cold hands into his pockets and lifting
+ his eyebrows, looked at Denísov in affright, but in spite of an evident
+ desire to say all he knew gave confused answers, merely assenting to
+ everything Denísov asked him. Denísov turned away from him frowning and
+ addressed the esaul , conveying his own conjectures to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya, rapidly turning his head, looked now at the drummer boy, now at
+ Denísov, now at the esaul , and now at the French in the village and along
+ the road, trying not to miss anything of importance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Whether Dólokhov comes or not, we must seize it, eh?” said Denísov with a
+ merry sparkle in his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is a very suitable spot,” said the esaul .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We’ll send the infantwy down by the swamps,” Denísov continued. “They’ll
+ cweep up to the garden; you’ll wide up fwom there with the Cossacks”—he
+ pointed to a spot in the forest beyond the village—“and I with my
+ hussars fwom here. And at the signal shot...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The hollow is impassable—there’s a swamp there,” said the esaul .
+ “The horses would sink. We must ride round more to the left....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While they were talking in undertones the crack of a shot sounded from the
+ low ground by the pond, a puff of white smoke appeared, then another, and
+ the sound of hundreds of seemingly merry French voices shouting together
+ came up from the slope. For a moment Denísov and the esaul drew back. They
+ were so near that they thought they were the cause of the firing and
+ shouting. But the firing and shouting did not relate to them. Down below,
+ a man wearing something red was running through the marsh. The French were
+ evidently firing and shouting at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, that’s our Tíkhon,” said the esaul .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So it is! It is!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The wascal!” said Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’ll get away!” said the esaul , screwing up his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The man whom they called Tíkhon, having run to the stream, plunged in so
+ that the water splashed in the air, and, having disappeared for an
+ instant, scrambled out on all fours, all black with the wet, and ran on.
+ The French who had been pursuing him stopped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Smart, that!” said the esaul .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a beast!” said Denísov with his former look of vexation. “What has
+ he been doing all this time?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who is he?” asked Pétya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s our plastún . I sent him to capture a ‘tongue.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, yes,” said Pétya, nodding at the first words Denísov uttered as if he
+ understood it all, though he really did not understand anything of it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Tíkhon Shcherbáty was one of the most indispensable men in their band. He
+ was a peasant from Pokróvsk, near the river Gzhat. When Denísov had come
+ to Pokróvsk at the beginning of his operations and had as usual summoned
+ the village elder and asked him what he knew about the French, the elder,
+ as though shielding himself, had replied, as all village elders did, that
+ he had neither seen nor heard anything of them. But when Denísov explained
+ that his purpose was to kill the French, and asked if no French had
+ strayed that way, the elder replied that some “more-orderers” had really
+ been at their village, but that Tíkhon Shcherbáty was the only man who
+ dealt with such matters. Denísov had Tíkhon called and, having praised him
+ for his activity, said a few words in the elder’s presence about loyalty
+ to the Tsar and the country and the hatred of the French that all sons of
+ the fatherland should cherish.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We don’t do the French any harm,” said Tíkhon, evidently frightened by
+ Denísov’s words. “We only fooled about with the lads for fun, you know! We
+ killed a score or so of ‘more-orderers,’ but we did no harm else....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day when Denísov had left Pokróvsk, having quite forgotten about this
+ peasant, it was reported to him that Tíkhon had attached himself to their
+ party and asked to be allowed to remain with it. Denísov gave orders to
+ let him do so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Tíkhon, who at first did rough work, laying campfires, fetching water,
+ flaying dead horses, and so on, soon showed a great liking and aptitude
+ for partisan warfare. At night he would go out for booty and always
+ brought back French clothing and weapons, and when told to would bring in
+ French captives also. Denísov then relieved him from drudgery and began
+ taking him with him when he went out on expeditions and had him enrolled
+ among the Cossacks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Tíkhon did not like riding, and always went on foot, never lagging behind
+ the cavalry. He was armed with a musketoon (which he carried rather as a
+ joke), a pike and an ax, which latter he used as a wolf uses its teeth,
+ with equal ease picking fleas out of its fur or crunching thick bones.
+ Tíkhon with equal accuracy would split logs with blows at arm’s length, or
+ holding the head of the ax would cut thin little pegs or carve spoons. In
+ Denísov’s party he held a peculiar and exceptional position. When anything
+ particularly difficult or nasty had to be done—to push a cart out of
+ the mud with one’s shoulders, pull a horse out of a swamp by its tail,
+ skin it, slink in among the French, or walk more than thirty miles in a
+ day—everybody pointed laughingly at Tíkhon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It won’t hurt that devil—he’s as strong as a horse!” they said of
+ him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Once a Frenchman Tíkhon was trying to capture fired a pistol at him and
+ shot him in the fleshy part of the back. That wound (which Tíkhon treated
+ only with internal and external applications of vodka) was the subject of
+ the liveliest jokes by the whole detachment—jokes in which Tíkhon
+ readily joined.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hallo, mate! Never again? Gave you a twist?” the Cossacks would banter
+ him. And Tíkhon, purposely writhing and making faces, pretended to be
+ angry and swore at the French with the funniest curses. The only effect of
+ this incident on Tíkhon was that after being wounded he seldom brought in
+ prisoners.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was the bravest and most useful man in the party. No one found more
+ opportunities for attacking, no one captured or killed more Frenchmen, and
+ consequently he was made the buffoon of all the Cossacks and hussars and
+ willingly accepted that role. Now he had been sent by Denísov overnight to
+ Shámshevo to capture a “tongue.” But whether because he had not been
+ content to take only one Frenchman or because he had slept through the
+ night, he had crept by day into some bushes right among the French and, as
+ Denísov had witnessed from above, had been detected by them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ After talking for some time with the esaul about next day’s attack, which
+ now, seeing how near they were to the French, he seemed to have definitely
+ decided on, Denísov turned his horse and rode back.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, my lad, we’ll go and get dwy,” he said to Pétya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As they approached the watchhouse Denísov stopped, peering into the
+ forest. Among the trees a man with long legs and long, swinging arms,
+ wearing a short jacket, bast shoes, and a Kazán hat, was approaching with
+ long, light steps. He had a musketoon over his shoulder and an ax stuck in
+ his girdle. When he espied Denísov he hastily threw something into the
+ bushes, removed his sodden hat by its floppy brim, and approached his
+ commander. It was Tíkhon. His wrinkled and pockmarked face and narrow
+ little eyes beamed with self-satisfied merriment. He lifted his head high
+ and gazed at Denísov as if repressing a laugh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, where did you disappear to?” inquired Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where did I disappear to? I went to get Frenchmen,” answered Tíkhon
+ boldly and hurriedly, in a husky but melodious bass voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why did you push yourself in there by daylight? You ass! Well, why
+ haven’t you taken one?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, I took one all right,” said Tíkhon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where is he?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see, I took him first thing at dawn,” Tíkhon continued, spreading out
+ his flat feet with outturned toes in their bast shoes. “I took him into
+ the forest. Then I see he’s no good and think I’ll go and fetch a likelier
+ one.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see?... What a wogue—it’s just as I thought,” said Denísov to
+ the esaul . “Why didn’t you bwing that one?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What was the good of bringing him?” Tíkhon interrupted hastily and
+ angrily—“that one wouldn’t have done for you. As if I don’t know
+ what sort you want!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a bwute you are!... Well?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I went for another one,” Tíkhon continued, “and I crept like this through
+ the wood and lay down.” (He suddenly lay down on his stomach with a supple
+ movement to show how he had done it.) “One turned up and I grabbed him,
+ like this.” (He jumped up quickly and lightly.) “‘Come along to the
+ colonel,’ I said. He starts yelling, and suddenly there were four of them.
+ They rushed at me with their little swords. So I went for them with my ax,
+ this way: ‘What are you up to?’ says I. ‘Christ be with you!’” shouted
+ Tíkhon, waving his arms with an angry scowl and throwing out his chest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, we saw from the hill how you took to your heels through the
+ puddles!” said the esaul , screwing up his glittering eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya badly wanted to laugh, but noticed that they all refrained from
+ laughing. He turned his eyes rapidly from Tíkhon’s face to the
+ esaul’s and Denísov’s, unable to make out what it all meant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t play the fool!” said Denísov, coughing angrily. “Why didn’t you
+ bwing the first one?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Tíkhon scratched his back with one hand and his head with the other, then
+ suddenly his whole face expanded into a beaming, foolish grin, disclosing
+ a gap where he had lost a tooth (that was why he was called Shcherbáty—the
+ gap-toothed). Denísov smiled, and Pétya burst into a peal of merry
+ laughter in which Tíkhon himself joined.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, but he was a regular good-for-nothing,” said Tíkhon. “The clothes on
+ him—poor stuff! How could I bring him? And so rude, your honor! Why,
+ he says: ‘I’m a general’s son myself, I won’t go!’ he says.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are a bwute!” said Denísov. “I wanted to question...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I questioned him,” said Tíkhon. “He said he didn’t know much. ‘There
+ are a lot of us,’ he says, ‘but all poor stuff—only soldiers in
+ name,’ he says. ‘Shout loud at them,’ he says, ‘and you’ll take them
+ all,’” Tíkhon concluded, looking cheerfully and resolutely into Denísov’s
+ eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll give you a hundwed sharp lashes—that’ll teach you to play the
+ fool!” said Denísov severely.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But why are you angry?” remonstrated Tíkhon, “just as if I’d never seen
+ your Frenchmen! Only wait till it gets dark and I’ll fetch you any of them
+ you want—three if you like.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, let’s go,” said Denísov, and rode all the way to the watchhouse in
+ silence and frowning angrily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Tíkhon followed behind and Pétya heard the Cossacks laughing with him and
+ at him, about some pair of boots he had thrown into the bushes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the fit of laughter that had seized him at Tíkhon’s words and smile
+ had passed and Pétya realized for a moment that this Tíkhon had killed a
+ man, he felt uneasy. He looked round at the captive drummer boy and felt a
+ pang in his heart. But this uneasiness lasted only a moment. He felt it
+ necessary to hold his head higher, to brace himself, and to question the
+ esaul with an air of importance about tomorrow’s undertaking, that he
+ might not be unworthy of the company in which he found himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The officer who had been sent to inquire met Denísov on the way with the
+ news that Dólokhov was soon coming and that all was well with him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov at once cheered up and, calling Pétya to him, said: “Well, tell me
+ about yourself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ Pétya, having left his people after their departure from Moscow, joined
+ his regiment and was soon taken as orderly by a general commanding a large
+ guerrilla detachment. From the time he received his commission, and
+ especially since he had joined the active army and taken part in the
+ battle of Vyázma, Pétya had been in a constant state of blissful
+ excitement at being grown-up and in a perpetual ecstatic hurry not to miss
+ any chance to do something really heroic. He was highly delighted with
+ what he saw and experienced in the army, but at the same time it always
+ seemed to him that the really heroic exploits were being performed just
+ where he did not happen to be. And he was always in a hurry to get where
+ he was not.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When on the twenty-first of October his general expressed a wish to send
+ somebody to Denísov’s detachment, Pétya begged so piteously to be sent
+ that the general could not refuse. But when dispatching him he recalled
+ Pétya’s mad action at the battle of Vyázma, where instead of riding by the
+ road to the place to which he had been sent, he had galloped to the
+ advanced line under the fire of the French and had there twice fired his
+ pistol. So now the general explicitly forbade his taking part in any
+ action whatever of Denísov’s. That was why Pétya had blushed and grown
+ confused when Denísov asked him whether he could stay. Before they had
+ ridden to the outskirts of the forest Pétya had considered he must carry
+ out his instructions strictly and return at once. But when he saw the
+ French and saw Tíkhon and learned that there would certainly be an attack
+ that night, he decided, with the rapidity with which young people change
+ their views, that the general, whom he had greatly respected till then,
+ was a rubbishy German, that Denísov was a hero, the esaul a hero, and
+ Tíkhon a hero too, and that it would be shameful for him to leave them at
+ a moment of difficulty.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was already growing dusk when Denísov, Pétya, and the esaul rode up to
+ the watchhouse. In the twilight saddled horses could be seen, and Cossacks
+ and hussars who had rigged up rough shelters in the glade and were
+ kindling glowing fires in a hollow of the forest where the French could
+ not see the smoke. In the passage of the small watchhouse a Cossack with
+ sleeves rolled up was chopping some mutton. In the room three officers of
+ Denísov’s band were converting a door into a tabletop. Pétya took off his
+ wet clothes, gave them to be dried, and at once began helping the officers
+ to fix up the dinner table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In ten minutes the table was ready and a napkin spread on it. On the table
+ were vodka, a flask of rum, white bread, roast mutton, and salt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sitting at table with the officers and tearing the fat savory mutton with
+ his hands, down which the grease trickled, Pétya was in an ecstatic
+ childish state of love for all men, and consequently of confidence that
+ others loved him in the same way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So then what do you think, Vasíli Dmítrich?” said he to Denísov. “It’s
+ all right my staying a day with you?” And not waiting for a reply he
+ answered his own question: “You see I was told to find out—well, I
+ am finding out.... Only do let me into the very... into the chief... I
+ don’t want a reward.... But I want...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya clenched his teeth and looked around, throwing back his head and
+ flourishing his arms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Into the vewy chief...” Denísov repeated with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Only, please let me command something, so that I may really command...”
+ Pétya went on. “What would it be to you?... Oh, you want a knife?” he
+ said, turning to an officer who wished to cut himself a piece of mutton.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And he handed him his clasp knife. The officer admired it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Please keep it. I have several like it,” said Pétya, blushing. “Heavens!
+ I was quite forgetting!” he suddenly cried. “I have some raisins, fine
+ ones; you know, seedless ones. We have a new sutler and he has such
+ capital things. I bought ten pounds. I am used to something sweet. Would
+ you like some?...” and Pétya ran out into the passage to his Cossack and
+ brought back some bags which contained about five pounds of raisins. “Have
+ some, gentlemen, have some!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You want a coffeepot, don’t you?” he asked the esaul . “I bought a capital
+ one from our sutler! He has splendid things. And he’s very honest, that’s
+ the chief thing. I’ll be sure to send it to you. Or perhaps your flints
+ are giving out, or are worn out—that happens sometimes, you know. I
+ have brought some with me, here they are”—and he showed a bag—“a
+ hundred flints. I bought them very cheap. Please take as many as you want,
+ or all if you like....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then suddenly, dismayed lest he had said too much, Pétya stopped and
+ blushed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He tried to remember whether he had not done anything else that was
+ foolish. And running over the events of the day he remembered the French
+ drummer boy. “It’s capital for us here, but what of him? Where have they
+ put him? Have they fed him? Haven’t they hurt his feelings?” he thought.
+ But having caught himself saying too much about the flints, he was now
+ afraid to speak out.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I might ask,” he thought, “but they’ll say: ‘He’s a boy himself and so he
+ pities the boy.’ I’ll show them tomorrow whether I’m a boy. Will it seem
+ odd if I ask?” Pétya thought. “Well, never mind!” and immediately,
+ blushing and looking anxiously at the officers to see if they appeared
+ ironical, he said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “May I call in that boy who was taken prisoner and give him something to
+ eat?... Perhaps...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, he’s a poor little fellow,” said Denísov, who evidently saw nothing
+ shameful in this reminder. “Call him in. His name is Vincent Bosse. Have
+ him fetched.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ll call him,” said Pétya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, call him. A poor little fellow,” Denísov repeated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya was standing at the door when Denísov said this. He slipped in
+ between the officers, came close to Denísov, and said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Let me kiss you, dear old fellow! Oh, how fine, how splendid!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And having kissed Denísov he ran out of the hut.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bosse! Vincent!” Pétya cried, stopping outside the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who do you want, sir?” asked a voice in the darkness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya replied that he wanted the French lad who had been captured that
+ day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, Vesénny?” said a Cossack.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Vincent, the boy’s name, had already been changed by the Cossacks into
+ Vesénny (vernal) and into Vesénya by the peasants and soldiers. In both
+ these adaptations the reference to spring ( vesná ) matched the impression
+ made by the young lad.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is warming himself there by the bonfire. Ho, Vesénya! Vesénya!—Vesénny!”
+ laughing voices were heard calling to one another in the darkness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s a smart lad,” said an hussar standing near Pétya. “We gave him
+ something to eat a while ago. He was awfully hungry!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The sound of bare feet splashing through the mud was heard in the
+ darkness, and the drummer boy came to the door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, c’est vous!” said Pétya. “Voulez-vous
+ manger? N’ayez pas peur, on ne vous fera pas de mal,” * he added
+ shyly and affectionately, touching the boy’s hand. “Entrez, entrez.” *(2)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Ah, it’s you! Do you want something to eat? Don’t be
+ afraid, they won’t hurt you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * (2) “Come in, come in.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Merci, monsieur,” * said the drummer boy in a trembling
+ almost childish voice, and he began scraping his dirty feet on the threshold.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Thank you, sir.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There were many things Pétya wanted to say to the drummer boy, but did not
+ dare to. He stood irresolutely beside him in the passage. Then in the
+ darkness he took the boy’s hand and pressed it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come in, come in!” he repeated in a gentle whisper. “Oh, what can I do
+ for him?” he thought, and opening the door he let the boy pass in first.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the boy had entered the hut, Pétya sat down at a distance from him,
+ considering it beneath his dignity to pay attention to him. But he
+ fingered the money in his pocket and wondered whether it would seem
+ ridiculous to give some to the drummer boy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ The arrival of Dólokhov diverted Pétya’s attention from the drummer boy,
+ to whom Denísov had had some mutton and vodka given, and whom he had had
+ dressed in a Russian coat so that he might be kept with their band and not
+ sent away with the other prisoners. Pétya had heard in the army many
+ stories of Dólokhov’s extraordinary bravery and of his cruelty to the
+ French, so from the moment he entered the hut Pétya did not take his eyes
+ from him, but braced himself up more and more and held his head high, that
+ he might not be unworthy even of such company.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov’s appearance amazed Pétya by its simplicity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov wore a Cossack coat, had a beard, had an icon of Nicholas the
+ Wonder-Worker on his breast, and his way of speaking and everything he did
+ indicated his unusual position. But Dólokhov, who in Moscow had worn a
+ Persian costume, had now the appearance of a most correct officer of the
+ Guards. He was clean-shaven and wore a Guardsman’s padded coat with an
+ Order of St. George at his buttonhole and a plain forage cap set straight
+ on his head. He took off his wet felt cloak in a corner of the room, and
+ without greeting anyone went up to Denísov and began questioning him about
+ the matter in hand. Denísov told him of the designs the large detachments
+ had on the transport, of the message Pétya had brought, and his own
+ replies to both generals. Then he told him all he knew of the French
+ detachment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s so. But we must know what troops they are and their numbers,” said
+ Dólokhov. “It will be necessary to go there. We can’t start the affair
+ without knowing for certain how many there are. I like to work accurately.
+ Here now—wouldn’t one of these gentlemen like to ride over to the
+ French camp with me? I have brought a spare uniform.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I, I... I’ll go with you!” cried Pétya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There’s no need for you to go at all,” said Denísov, addressing Dólokhov,
+ “and as for him, I won’t let him go on any account.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I like that!” exclaimed Pétya. “Why shouldn’t I go?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Because it’s useless.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, you must excuse me, because... because... I shall go, and that’s
+ all. You’ll take me, won’t you?” he said, turning to Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why not?” Dólokhov answered absently, scrutinizing the face of the French
+ drummer boy. “Have you had that youngster with you long?” he asked
+ Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He was taken today but he knows nothing. I’m keeping him with me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, and where do you put the others?” inquired Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Where? I send them away and take a weceipt for them,” shouted Denísov,
+ suddenly flushing. “And I say boldly that I have not a single man’s life
+ on my conscience. Would it be difficult for you to send thirty or thwee
+ hundwed men to town under escort, instead of staining—I speak
+ bluntly—staining the honor of a soldier?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That kind of amiable talk would be suitable from this young count of
+ sixteen,” said Dólokhov with cold irony, “but it’s time for you to drop
+ it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, I’ve not said anything! I only say that I’ll certainly go with you,”
+ said Pétya shyly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But for you and me, old fellow, it’s time to drop these amenities,”
+ continued Dólokhov, as if he found particular pleasure in speaking of this
+ subject which irritated Denísov. “Now, why have you kept this lad?” he
+ went on, swaying his head. “Because you are sorry for him! Don’t we know
+ those ‘receipts’ of yours? You send a hundred men away, and thirty get
+ there. The rest either starve or get killed. So isn’t it all the same not
+ to send them?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The esaul , screwing up his light-colored eyes, nodded approvingly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s not the point. I’m not going to discuss the matter. I do not wish
+ to take it on my conscience. You say they’ll die. All wight. Only not by
+ my fault!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov began laughing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Who has told them not to capture me these twenty times over? But if they
+ did catch me they’d string me up to an aspen tree, and with all your
+ chivalry just the same.” He paused. “However, we must get to work. Tell
+ the Cossack to fetch my kit. I have two French uniforms in it. Well, are
+ you coming with me?” he asked Pétya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I? Yes, yes, certainly!” cried Pétya, blushing almost to tears and
+ glancing at Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While Dólokhov had been disputing with Denísov what should be done with
+ prisoners, Pétya had once more felt awkward and restless; but again he had
+ no time to grasp fully what they were talking about. “If grown-up,
+ distinguished men think so, it must be necessary and right,” thought he.
+ “But above all Denísov must not dare to imagine that I’ll obey him and
+ that he can order me about. I will certainly go to the French camp with
+ Dólokhov. If he can, so can I!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And to all Denísov’s persuasions, Pétya replied that he too was accustomed
+ to do everything accurately and not just anyhow, and that he never
+ considered personal danger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “For you’ll admit that if we don’t know for sure how many of them there
+ are... hundreds of lives may depend on it, while there are only two of us.
+ Besides, I want to go very much and certainly will go, so don’t hinder
+ me,” said he. “It will only make things worse....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ Having put on French greatcoats and shakos, Pétya and Dólokhov rode to the
+ clearing from which Denísov had reconnoitered the French camp, and
+ emerging from the forest in pitch darkness they descended into the hollow.
+ On reaching the bottom, Dólokhov told the Cossacks accompanying him to
+ await him there and rode on at a quick trot along the road to the bridge.
+ Pétya, his heart in his mouth with excitement, rode by his side.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If we’re caught, I won’t be taken alive! I have a pistol,” whispered he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t talk Russian,” said Dólokhov in a hurried whisper, and at that very
+ moment they heard through the darkness the challenge: “Qui vive?” * and
+ the click of a musket.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Who goes there?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The blood rushed to Pétya’s face and he grasped his pistol.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lanciers du 6-me,” * replied Dólokhov, neither hastening nor slackening
+ his horse’s pace.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Lancers of the 6th Regiment.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The black figure of a sentinel stood on the bridge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mot d’ordre.” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Password.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov reined in his horse and advanced at a walk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Dites donc, le colonel Gérard est ici?” * he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Tell me, is Colonel Gérard here?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mot d’ordre,” repeated the sentinel, barring the way and not replying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Quand un officier fait sa ronde, les sentinelles ne demandent pas le mot
+ d’ordre...” cried Dólokhov suddenly flaring up and riding straight
+ at the sentinel. “Je vous demande si le colonel est ici.” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “When an officer is making his round, sentinels don’t ask
+ him for the password.... I am asking you if the colonel is
+ here.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And without waiting for an answer from the sentinel, who had stepped
+ aside, Dólokhov rode up the incline at a walk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Noticing the black outline of a man crossing the road, Dólokhov stopped
+ him and inquired where the commander and officers were. The man, a soldier
+ with a sack over his shoulder, stopped, came close up to Dólokhov’s horse,
+ touched it with his hand, and explained simply and in a friendly way that
+ the commander and the officers were higher up the hill to the right in the
+ courtyard of the farm, as he called the landowner’s house.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having ridden up the road, on both sides of which French talk could be
+ heard around the campfires, Dólokhov turned into the courtyard of the
+ landowner’s house. Having ridden in, he dismounted and approached a big
+ blazing campfire, around which sat several men talking noisily. Something
+ was boiling in a small cauldron at the edge of the fire and a soldier in a
+ peaked cap and blue overcoat, lit up by the fire, was kneeling beside it
+ stirring its contents with a ramrod.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, he’s a hard nut to crack,” said one of the officers who was sitting
+ in the shadow at the other side of the fire.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’ll make them get a move on, those fellows!” said another, laughing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Both fell silent, peering out through the darkness at the sound of
+ Dólokhov’s and Pétya’s steps as they advanced to the fire leading their
+ horses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bonjour, messieurs!” * said Dólokhov loudly and clearly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Good day, gentlemen.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was a stir among the officers in the shadow beyond the fire, and one
+ tall, long-necked officer, walking round the fire, came up to Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is that you, Clément?” he asked. “Where the devil...?”
+ But, noticing his mistake, he broke off short and, with a frown, greeted Dólokhov
+ as a stranger, asking what he could do for him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov said that he and his companion were trying to overtake their
+ regiment, and addressing the company in general asked whether they knew
+ anything of the 6th Regiment. None of them knew anything, and Pétya
+ thought the officers were beginning to look at him and Dólokhov with
+ hostility and suspicion. For some seconds all were silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If you were counting on the evening soup, you have come too late,” said a
+ voice from behind the fire with a repressed laugh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov replied that they were not hungry and must push on farther that
+ night.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He handed the horses over to the soldier who was stirring the pot and
+ squatted down on his heels by the fire beside the officer with the long
+ neck. That officer did not take his eyes from Dólokhov and again asked to
+ what regiment he belonged. Dólokhov, as if he had not heard the question,
+ did not reply, but lighting a short French pipe which he took from his
+ pocket began asking the officer in how far the road before them was safe
+ from Cossacks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Those brigands are everywhere,” replied an officer from behind the fire.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov remarked that the Cossacks were a danger only to stragglers such
+ as his companion and himself, “but probably they would not dare to attack
+ large detachments?” he added inquiringly. No one replied.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, now he’ll come away,” Pétya thought every moment as he stood by the
+ campfire listening to the talk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Dólokhov restarted the conversation which had dropped and began
+ putting direct questions as to how many men there were in the battalion,
+ how many battalions, and how many prisoners. Asking about the Russian
+ prisoners with that detachment, Dólokhov said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A horrid business dragging these corpses about with one! It would be
+ better to shoot such rabble,” and burst into loud laughter, so strange
+ that Pétya thought the French would immediately detect their disguise, and
+ involuntarily took a step back from the campfire.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No one replied a word to Dólokhov’s laughter, and a French officer whom
+ they could not see (he lay wrapped in a greatcoat) rose and whispered
+ something to a companion. Dólokhov got up and called to the soldier who
+ was holding their horses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Will they bring our horses or not?” thought Pétya, instinctively drawing
+ nearer to Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The horses were brought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good evening, gentlemen,” said Dólokhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya wished to say “Good night” but could not utter a word. The officers
+ were whispering together. Dólokhov was a long time mounting his horse
+ which would not stand still, then he rode out of the yard at a footpace.
+ Pétya rode beside him, longing to look round to see whether or not the
+ French were running after them, but not daring to.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Coming out onto the road Dólokhov did not ride back across the open
+ country, but through the village. At one spot he stopped and listened. “Do
+ you hear?” he asked. Pétya recognized the sound of Russian voices and saw
+ the dark figures of Russian prisoners round their campfires. When they had
+ descended to the bridge Pétya and Dólokhov rode past the sentinel, who
+ without saying a word paced morosely up and down it, then they descended
+ into the hollow where the Cossacks awaited them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well now, good-by. Tell Denísov, ‘at the first shot at daybreak,’” said
+ Dólokhov and was about to ride away, but Pétya seized hold of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Really!” he cried, “you are such a hero! Oh, how fine, how splendid! How
+ I love you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right, all right!” said Dólokhov. But Pétya did not let go of him and
+ Dólokhov saw through the gloom that Pétya was bending toward him and
+ wanted to kiss him. Dólokhov kissed him, laughed, turned his horse, and
+ vanished into the darkness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ Having returned to the watchman’s hut, Pétya found Denísov in the passage.
+ He was awaiting Pétya’s return in a state of agitation, anxiety, and
+ self-reproach for having let him go.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank God!” he exclaimed. “Yes, thank God!” he repeated,
+ listening to Pétya’s rapturous account. “But, devil take you, I
+ haven’t slept because of you! Well, thank God. Now lie down. We can still
+ get a nap before morning.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But... no,” said Pétya, “I don’t want to sleep yet. Besides I know
+ myself, if I fall asleep it’s finished. And then I am used to not sleeping
+ before a battle.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He sat awhile in the hut joyfully recalling the details of his expedition
+ and vividly picturing to himself what would happen next day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then, noticing that Denísov was asleep, he rose and went out of doors.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was still quite dark outside. The rain was over, but drops were still
+ falling from the trees. Near the watchman’s hut the black shapes of the
+ Cossacks’ shanties and of horses tethered together could be seen. Behind
+ the hut the dark shapes of the two wagons with their horses beside them
+ were discernible, and in the hollow the dying campfire gleamed red. Not
+ all the Cossacks and hussars were asleep; here and there, amid the sounds
+ of falling drops and the munching of the horses near by, could be heard
+ low voices which seemed to be whispering.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya came out, peered into the darkness, and went up to the wagons.
+ Someone was snoring under them, and around them stood saddled horses
+ munching their oats. In the dark Pétya recognized his own horse, which he
+ called “Karabákh” though it was of Ukranian breed, and went up to it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, Karabákh! We’ll do some service tomorrow,” said he, sniffing its
+ nostrils and kissing it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why aren’t you asleep, sir?” said a Cossack who was sitting under a
+ wagon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, ah... Likhachëv—isn’t that your name? Do you know I have only
+ just come back! We’ve been into the French camp.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Pétya gave the Cossack a detailed account not only of his ride but
+ also of his object, and why he considered it better to risk his life than
+ to act “just anyhow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, you should get some sleep now,” said the Cossack.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I am used to this,” said Pétya. “I say, aren’t the flints in your
+ pistols worn out? I brought some with me. Don’t you want any? You can have
+ some.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Cossack bent forward from under the wagon to get a closer look at
+ Pétya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Because I am accustomed to doing everything accurately,” said Pétya.
+ “Some fellows do things just anyhow, without preparation, and then they’re
+ sorry for it afterwards. I don’t like that.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just so,” said the Cossack.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh yes, another thing! Please, my dear fellow, will you sharpen my saber
+ for me? It’s got bl...” (Pétya feared to tell a lie, and the saber never
+ had been sharpened.) “Can you do it?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Of course I can.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Likhachëv got up, rummaged in his pack, and soon Pétya heard the warlike
+ sound of steel on whetstone. He climbed onto the wagon and sat on its
+ edge. The Cossack was sharpening the saber under the wagon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I say! Are the lads asleep?” asked Pétya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Some are, and some aren’t—like us.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, and that boy?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vesénny? Oh, he’s thrown himself down there in the passage. Fast asleep
+ after his fright. He was that glad!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After that Pétya remained silent for a long time, listening to the sounds.
+ He heard footsteps in the darkness and a black figure appeared.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are you sharpening?” asked a man coming up to the wagon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, this gentleman’s saber.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s right,” said the man, whom Pétya took to be an
+ hussar. “Was the cup left here?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There, by the wheel!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The hussar took the cup.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It must be daylight soon,” said he, yawning, and went away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya ought to have known that he was in a forest with Denísov’s guerrilla
+ band, less than a mile from the road, sitting on a wagon captured from the
+ French beside which horses were tethered, that under it Likhachëv was
+ sitting sharpening a saber for him, that the big dark blotch to the right
+ was the watchman’s hut, and the red blotch below to the left was the dying
+ embers of a campfire, that the man who had come for the cup was an hussar
+ who wanted a drink; but he neither knew nor waited to know anything of all
+ this. He was in a fairy kingdom where nothing resembled reality. The big
+ dark blotch might really be the watchman’s hut or it might be a cavern
+ leading to the very depths of the earth. Perhaps the red spot was a fire,
+ or it might be the eye of an enormous monster. Perhaps he was really
+ sitting on a wagon, but it might very well be that he was not sitting on a
+ wagon but on a terribly high tower from which, if he fell, he would have
+ to fall for a whole day or a whole month, or go on falling and never reach
+ the bottom. Perhaps it was just the Cossack, Likhachëv, who was sitting
+ under the wagon, but it might be the kindest, bravest, most wonderful,
+ most splendid man in the world, whom no one knew of. It might really have
+ been that the hussar came for water and went back into the hollow, but
+ perhaps he had simply vanished—disappeared altogether and dissolved
+ into nothingness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nothing Pétya could have seen now would have surprised him. He was in a
+ fairy kingdom where everything was possible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He looked up at the sky. And the sky was a fairy realm like the earth. It
+ was clearing, and over the tops of the trees clouds were swiftly sailing
+ as if unveiling the stars. Sometimes it looked as if the clouds were
+ passing, and a clear black sky appeared. Sometimes it seemed as if the
+ black spaces were clouds. Sometimes the sky seemed to be rising high, high
+ overhead, and then it seemed to sink so low that one could touch it with
+ one’s hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya’s eyes began to close and he swayed a little.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The trees were dripping. Quiet talking was heard. The horses neighed and
+ jostled one another. Someone snored.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ozheg-zheg, Ozheg-zheg...” hissed the saber against the whetstone, and
+ suddenly Pétya heard an harmonious orchestra playing some unknown, sweetly
+ solemn hymn. Pétya was as musical as Natásha and more so than Nicholas,
+ but had never learned music or thought about it, and so the melody that
+ unexpectedly came to his mind seemed to him particularly fresh and
+ attractive. The music became more and more audible. The melody grew and
+ passed from one instrument to another. And what was played was a fugue—though
+ Pétya had not the least conception of what a fugue is. Each instrument—now
+ resembling a violin and now a horn, but better and clearer than violin or
+ horn—played its own part, and before it had finished the melody
+ merged with another instrument that began almost the same air, and then
+ with a third and a fourth; and they all blended into one and again became
+ separate and again blended, now into solemn church music, now into
+ something dazzlingly brilliant and triumphant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh—why, that was in a dream!” Pétya said to himself, as he lurched
+ forward. “It’s in my ears. But perhaps it’s music of my own. Well, go on,
+ my music! Now!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He closed his eyes, and, from all sides as if from a distance, sounds
+ fluttered, grew into harmonies, separated, blended, and again all mingled
+ into the same sweet and solemn hymn. “Oh, this is delightful! As much as I
+ like and as I like!” said Pétya to himself. He tried to conduct that
+ enormous orchestra.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now softly, softly die away!” and the sounds obeyed him. “Now fuller,
+ more joyful. Still more and more joyful!” And from an unknown depth rose
+ increasingly triumphant sounds. “Now voices join in!” ordered Pétya. And
+ at first from afar he heard men’s voices and then women’s. The voices grew
+ in harmonious triumphant strength, and Pétya listened to their surpassing
+ beauty in awe and joy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With a solemn triumphal march there mingled a song, the drip from the
+ trees, and the hissing of the saber, “Ozheg-zheg-zheg...” 
+ and again the horses jostled one another and neighed, not disturbing the choir
+ but joining in it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya did not know how long this lasted: he enjoyed himself all the time,
+ wondered at his enjoyment and regretted that there was no one to share it.
+ He was awakened by Likhachëv’s kindly voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s ready, your honor; you can split a Frenchman in half with it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pétya woke up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s getting light, it’s really getting light!” he exclaimed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The horses that had previously been invisible could now be seen to their
+ very tails, and a watery light showed itself through the bare branches.
+ Pétya shook himself, jumped up, took a ruble from his pocket and gave it
+ to Likhachëv; then he flourished the saber, tested it, and sheathed it.
+ The Cossacks were untying their horses and tightening their saddle girths.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And here’s the commander,” said Likhachëv.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov came out of the watchman’s hut and, having called Pétya, gave
+ orders to get ready.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ The men rapidly picked out their horses in the semidarkness, tightened
+ their saddle girths, and formed companies. Denísov stood by the watchman’s
+ hut giving final orders. The infantry of the detachment passed along the
+ road and quickly disappeared amid the trees in the mist of early dawn,
+ hundreds of feet splashing through the mud. The esaul gave some orders to
+ his men. Pétya held his horse by the bridle, impatiently awaiting the
+ order to mount. His face, having been bathed in cold water, was all aglow,
+ and his eyes were particularly brilliant. Cold shivers ran down his spine
+ and his whole body pulsed rhythmically.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, is ev’wything weady?” asked Denísov. “Bwing the horses.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The horses were brought. Denísov was angry with the Cossack because the
+ saddle girths were too slack, reproved him, and mounted. Pétya put his
+ foot in the stirrup. His horse by habit made as if to nip his leg, but
+ Pétya leaped quickly into the saddle unconscious of his own weight and,
+ turning to look at the hussars starting in the darkness behind him, rode
+ up to Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vasíli Dmítrich, entrust me with some commission! Please... for God’s
+ sake...!” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov seemed to have forgotten Pétya’s very existence. He turned to
+ glance at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I ask one thing of you,” he said sternly, “to obey me and not shove
+ yourself forward anywhere.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not say another word to Pétya but rode in silence all the way. When
+ they had come to the edge of the forest it was noticeably growing light
+ over the field. Denísov talked in whispers with the esaul and the Cossacks
+ rode past Pétya and Denísov. When they had all ridden by, Denísov touched
+ his horse and rode down the hill. Slipping onto their haunches and
+ sliding, the horses descended with their riders into the ravine. Pétya
+ rode beside Denísov, the pulsation of his body constantly increasing. It
+ was getting lighter and lighter, but the mist still hid distant objects.
+ Having reached the valley, Denísov looked back and nodded to a Cossack
+ beside him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The signal!” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Cossack raised his arm and a shot rang out. In an instant the tramp of
+ horses galloping forward was heard, shouts came from various sides, and
+ then more shots.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the first sound of trampling hoofs and shouting, Pétya lashed his horse
+ and loosening his rein galloped forward, not heeding Denísov who shouted
+ at him. It seemed to Pétya that at the moment the shot was fired it
+ suddenly became as bright as noon. He galloped to the bridge. Cossacks
+ were galloping along the road in front of him. On the bridge he collided
+ with a Cossack who had fallen behind, but he galloped on. In front of him
+ soldiers, probably Frenchmen, were running from right to left across the
+ road. One of them fell in the mud under his horse’s feet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Cossacks were crowding about a hut, busy with something. From the midst of
+ that crowd terrible screams arose. Pétya galloped up, and the first thing
+ he saw was the pale face and trembling jaw of a Frenchman, clutching the
+ handle of a lance that had been aimed at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hurrah!... Lads!... ours!” shouted Pétya, and giving rein to his excited
+ horse he galloped forward along the village street.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He could hear shooting ahead of him. Cossacks, hussars, and ragged Russian
+ prisoners, who had come running from both sides of the road, were shouting
+ something loudly and incoherently. A gallant-looking Frenchman, in a blue
+ overcoat, capless, and with a frowning red face, had been defending
+ himself against the hussars. When Pétya galloped up the Frenchman had
+ already fallen. “Too late again!” flashed through Pétya’s mind and he
+ galloped on to the place from which the rapid firing could be heard. The
+ shots came from the yard of the landowner’s house he had visited the night
+ before with Dólokhov. The French were making a stand there behind a wattle
+ fence in a garden thickly overgrown with bushes and were firing at the
+ Cossacks who crowded at the gateway. Through the smoke, as he approached
+ the gate, Pétya saw Dólokhov, whose face was of a pale-greenish tint,
+ shouting to his men. “Go round! Wait for the infantry!” he exclaimed as
+ Pétya rode up to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wait?... Hurrah-ah-ah!” shouted Pétya, and without pausing a moment
+ galloped to the place whence came the sounds of firing and where the smoke
+ was thickest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A volley was heard, and some bullets whistled past, while others plashed
+ against something. The Cossacks and Dólokhov galloped after Pétya into the
+ gateway of the courtyard. In the dense wavering smoke some of the French
+ threw down their arms and ran out of the bushes to meet the Cossacks,
+ while others ran down the hill toward the pond. Pétya was galloping along
+ the courtyard, but instead of holding the reins he waved both his arms
+ about rapidly and strangely, slipping farther and farther to one side in
+ his saddle. His horse, having galloped up to a campfire that was
+ smoldering in the morning light, stopped suddenly, and Pétya fell heavily
+ on to the wet ground. The Cossacks saw that his arms and legs jerked
+ rapidly though his head was quite motionless. A bullet had pierced his
+ skull.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After speaking to the senior French officer, who came out of the house
+ with a white handkerchief tied to his sword and announced that they
+ surrendered, Dólokhov dismounted and went up to Pétya, who lay motionless
+ with outstretched arms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Done for!” he said with a frown, and went to the gate to meet Denísov who
+ was riding toward him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Killed?” cried Denísov, recognizing from a distance the unmistakably
+ lifeless attitude—very familiar to him—in which Pétya’s body
+ was lying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Done for!” repeated Dólokhov as if the utterance of these words afforded
+ him pleasure, and he went quickly up to the prisoners, who were surrounded
+ by Cossacks who had hurried up. “We won’t take them!” he called out to
+ Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov did not reply; he rode up to Pétya, dismounted, and with trembling
+ hands turned toward himself the bloodstained, mud-bespattered face which
+ had already gone white.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am used to something sweet. Raisins, fine ones... take them all!” he
+ recalled Pétya’s words. And the Cossacks looked round in surprise at the
+ sound, like the yelp of a dog, with which Denísov turned away, walked to
+ the wattle fence, and seized hold of it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Among the Russian prisoners rescued by Denísov and Dólokhov was Pierre
+ Bezúkhov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ During the whole of their march from Moscow no fresh orders had been
+ issued by the French authorities concerning the party of prisoners among
+ whom was Pierre. On the twenty-second of October that party was no longer
+ with the same troops and baggage trains with which it had left Moscow.
+ Half the wagons laden with hardtack that had traveled the first stages
+ with them had been captured by Cossacks, the other half had gone on ahead.
+ Not one of those dismounted cavalrymen who had marched in front of the
+ prisoners was left; they had all disappeared. The artillery the prisoners
+ had seen in front of them during the first days was now replaced by
+ Marshal Junot’s enormous baggage train, convoyed by Westphalians. Behind
+ the prisoners came a cavalry baggage train.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From Vyázma onwards the French army, which had till then moved in three
+ columns, went on as a single group. The symptoms of disorder that Pierre
+ had noticed at their first halting place after leaving Moscow had now
+ reached the utmost limit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The road along which they moved was bordered on both sides by dead horses;
+ ragged men who had fallen behind from various regiments continually
+ changed about, now joining the moving column, now again lagging behind it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Several times during the march false alarms had been given and the
+ soldiers of the escort had raised their muskets, fired, and run headlong,
+ crushing one another, but had afterwards reassembled and abused each other
+ for their causeless panic.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These three groups traveling together—the cavalry stores, the convoy
+ of prisoners, and Junot’s baggage train—still constituted a separate
+ and united whole, though each of the groups was rapidly melting away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of the artillery baggage train which had consisted of a hundred and twenty
+ wagons, not more than sixty now remained; the rest had been captured or
+ left behind. Some of Junot’s wagons also had been captured or abandoned.
+ Three wagons had been raided and robbed by stragglers from Davout’s corps.
+ From the talk of the Germans Pierre learned that a larger guard had been
+ allotted to that baggage train than to the prisoners, and that one of
+ their comrades, a German soldier, had been shot by the marshal’s own order
+ because a silver spoon belonging to the marshal had been found in his
+ possession.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The group of prisoners had melted away most of all. Of the three hundred
+ and thirty men who had set out from Moscow fewer than a hundred now
+ remained. The prisoners were more burdensome to the escort than even the
+ cavalry saddles or Junot’s baggage. They understood that the saddles and
+ Junot’s spoon might be of some use, but that cold and hungry soldiers
+ should have to stand and guard equally cold and hungry Russians who froze
+ and lagged behind on the road (in which case the order was to shoot them)
+ was not merely incomprehensible but revolting. And the escort, as if
+ afraid, in the grievous condition they themselves were in, of giving way
+ to the pity they felt for the prisoners and so rendering their own plight
+ still worse, treated them with particular moroseness and severity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At Dorogobúzh while the soldiers of the convoy, after locking the
+ prisoners in a stable, had gone off to pillage their own stores, several
+ of the soldier prisoners tunneled under the wall and ran away, but were
+ recaptured by the French and shot.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The arrangement adopted when they started, that the officer prisoners
+ should be kept separate from the rest, had long since been abandoned. All
+ who could walk went together, and after the third stage Pierre had
+ rejoined Karatáev and the gray-blue bandy-legged dog that had chosen
+ Karatáev for its master.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the third day after leaving Moscow Karatáev again fell ill with the
+ fever he had suffered from in the hospital in Moscow, and as he grew
+ gradually weaker Pierre kept away from him. Pierre did not know why, but
+ since Karatáev had begun to grow weaker it had cost him an effort to go
+ near him. When he did so and heard the subdued moaning with which Karatáev
+ generally lay down at the halting places, and when he smelled the odor
+ emanating from him which was now stronger than before, Pierre moved
+ farther away and did not think about him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but
+ with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness,
+ that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs,
+ and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity.
+ And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still
+ another new, consolatory truth—that nothing in this world is
+ terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be
+ happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be
+ unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their
+ limits and that those limits are very near together; that the person in a
+ bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now,
+ sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while the
+ other was warming; and that when he had put on tight dancing shoes he had
+ suffered just as he did now when he walked with bare feet that were
+ covered with sores—his footgear having long since fallen to pieces.
+ He discovered that when he had married his wife—of his own free will
+ as it had seemed to him—he had been no more free than now when they
+ locked him up at night in a stable. Of all that he himself subsequently
+ termed his sufferings, but which at the time he scarcely felt, the worst
+ was the state of his bare, raw, and scab-covered feet. (The horseflesh was
+ appetizing and nourishing, the saltpeter flavor of the gunpowder they used
+ instead of salt was even pleasant; there was no great cold, it was always
+ warm walking in the daytime, and at night there were the campfires; the
+ lice that devoured him warmed his body.) The one thing that was at first
+ hard to bear was his feet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the second day’s march Pierre, having examined his feet by the
+ campfire, thought it would be impossible to walk on them; but when
+ everybody got up he went along, limping, and, when he had warmed up,
+ walked without feeling the pain, though at night his feet were more
+ terrible to look at than before. However, he did not look at them now, but
+ thought of other things.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only now did Pierre realize the full strength of life in man and the
+ saving power he has of transferring his attention from one thing to
+ another, which is like the safety valve of a boiler that allows
+ superfluous steam to blow off when the pressure exceeds a certain limit.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not see and did not hear how they shot the prisoners who lagged
+ behind, though more than a hundred perished in that way. He did not think
+ of Karatáev who grew weaker every day and evidently would soon have to
+ share that fate. Still less did Pierre think about himself. The harder his
+ position became and the more terrible the future, the more independent of
+ that position in which he found himself were the joyful and comforting
+ thoughts, memories, and imaginings that came to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ At midday on the twenty-second of October Pierre was going uphill along
+ the muddy, slippery road, looking at his feet and at the roughness of the
+ way. Occasionally he glanced at the familiar crowd around him and then
+ again at his feet. The former and the latter were alike familiar and his
+ own. The blue-gray bandy legged dog ran merrily along the side of the
+ road, sometimes in proof of its agility and self-satisfaction lifting one
+ hind leg and hopping along on three, and then again going on all four and
+ rushing to bark at the crows that sat on the carrion. The dog was merrier
+ and sleeker than it had been in Moscow. All around lay the flesh of
+ different animals—from men to horses—in various stages of
+ decomposition; and as the wolves were kept off by the passing men the dog
+ could eat all it wanted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It had been raining since morning and had seemed as if at any moment it
+ might cease and the sky clear, but after a short break it began raining
+ harder than before. The saturated road no longer absorbed the water, which
+ ran along the ruts in streams.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre walked along, looking from side to side, counting his steps in
+ threes, and reckoning them off on his fingers. Mentally addressing the
+ rain, he repeated: “Now then, now then, go on! Pelt harder!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It seemed to him that he was thinking of nothing, but far down and deep
+ within him his soul was occupied with something important and comforting.
+ This something was a most subtle spiritual deduction from a conversation
+ with Karatáev the day before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At their yesterday’s halting place, feeling chilly by a dying campfire,
+ Pierre had got up and gone to the next one, which was burning better.
+ There Platón Karatáev was sitting covered up—head and all—with
+ his greatcoat as if it were a vestment, telling the soldiers in his
+ effective and pleasant though now feeble voice a story Pierre knew. It was
+ already past midnight, the hour when Karatáev was usually free of his
+ fever and particularly lively. When Pierre reached the fire and heard
+ Platón’s voice enfeebled by illness, and saw his pathetic face brightly
+ lit up by the blaze, he felt a painful prick at his heart. His feeling of
+ pity for this man frightened him and he wished to go away, but there was
+ no other fire, and Pierre sat down, trying not to look at Platón.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, how are you?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How am I? If we grumble at sickness, God won’t grant us death,” replied
+ Platón, and at once resumed the story he had begun.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And so, brother,” he continued, with a smile on his pale emaciated face
+ and a particularly happy light in his eyes, “you see, brother...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre had long been familiar with that story. Karatáev had told it to him
+ alone some half-dozen times and always with a specially joyful emotion.
+ But well as he knew it, Pierre now listened to that tale as to something
+ new, and the quiet rapture Karatáev evidently felt as he told it
+ communicated itself also to Pierre. The story was of an old merchant who
+ lived a good and God-fearing life with his family, and who went once to
+ the Nízhni fair with a companion—a rich merchant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having put up at an inn they both went to sleep, and next morning his
+ companion was found robbed and with his throat cut. A bloodstained knife
+ was found under the old merchant’s pillow. He was tried, knouted, and his
+ nostrils having been torn off, “all in due form” as Karatáev put it, he
+ was sent to hard labor in Siberia.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And so, brother” (it was at this point that Pierre came up), “ten years
+ or more passed by. The old man was living as a convict, submitting as he
+ should and doing no wrong. Only he prayed to God for death. Well, one
+ night the convicts were gathered just as we are, with the old man among
+ them. And they began telling what each was suffering for, and how they had
+ sinned against God. One told how he had taken a life, another had taken
+ two, a third had set a house on fire, while another had simply been a
+ vagrant and had done nothing. So they asked the old man: ‘What are you
+ being punished for, Daddy?’—‘I, my dear brothers,’ said he, ‘am
+ being punished for my own and other men’s sins. But I have not killed
+ anyone or taken anything that was not mine, but have only helped my poorer
+ brothers. I was a merchant, my dear brothers, and had much property. ‘And
+ he went on to tell them all about it in due order. ‘I don’t grieve for
+ myself,’ he says, ‘God, it seems, has chastened me. Only I am sorry for my
+ old wife and the children,’ and the old man began to weep. Now it happened
+ that in the group was the very man who had killed the other merchant.
+ ‘Where did it happen, Daddy?’ he said. ‘When, and in what month?’ He asked
+ all about it and his heart began to ache. So he comes up to the old man
+ like this, and falls down at his feet! ‘You are perishing because of me,
+ Daddy,’ he says. ‘It’s quite true, lads, that this man,’ he says, ‘is
+ being tortured innocently and for nothing! I,’ he says, ‘did that deed,
+ and I put the knife under your head while you were asleep. Forgive me,
+ Daddy,’ he says, ‘for Christ’s sake!’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Karatáev paused, smiling joyously as he gazed into the fire, and he drew
+ the logs together.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And the old man said, ‘God will forgive you, we are all sinners in His
+ sight. I suffer for my own sins,’ and he wept bitter tears. Well, and what
+ do you think, dear friends?” Karatáev continued, his face brightening more
+ and more with a rapturous smile as if what he now had to tell contained
+ the chief charm and the whole meaning of his story: “What do you think,
+ dear fellows? That murderer confessed to the authorities. ‘I have taken
+ six lives,’ he says (he was a great sinner), ‘but what I am most sorry for
+ is this old man. Don’t let him suffer because of me.’ So he confessed and
+ it was all written down and the papers sent off in due form. The place was
+ a long way off, and while they were judging, what with one thing and
+ another, filling in the papers all in due form—the authorities I
+ mean—time passed. The affair reached the Tsar. After a while the
+ Tsar’s decree came: to set the merchant free and give him a compensation
+ that had been awarded. The paper arrived and they began to look for the
+ old man. ‘Where is the old man who has been suffering innocently and in
+ vain? A paper has come from the Tsar!’ so they began looking for him,”
+ here Karatáev’s lower jaw trembled, “but God had already forgiven him—he
+ was dead! That’s how it was, dear fellows!” Karatáev concluded and sat for
+ a long time silent, gazing before him with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Pierre’s soul was dimly but joyfully filled not by the story itself
+ but by its mysterious significance: by the rapturous joy that lit up
+ Karatáev’s face as he told it, and the mystic significance of that joy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV
+ 
+ 
+ “À vos places!” * suddenly cried a voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “To your places.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A pleasant feeling of excitement and an expectation of something joyful
+ and solemn was aroused among the soldiers of the convoy and the prisoners.
+ From all sides came shouts of command, and from the left came smartly
+ dressed cavalrymen on good horses, passing the prisoners at a trot. The
+ expression on all faces showed the tension people feel at the approach of
+ those in authority. The prisoners thronged together and were pushed off
+ the road. The convoy formed up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Emperor! The Emperor! The Marshal! The Duke!” and hardly had the
+ sleek cavalry passed, before a carriage drawn by six gray horses rattled
+ by. Pierre caught a glimpse of a man in a three-cornered hat with a
+ tranquil look on his handsome, plump, white face. It was one of the
+ marshals. His eye fell on Pierre’s large and striking figure, and in the
+ expression with which he frowned and looked away Pierre thought he
+ detected sympathy and a desire to conceal that sympathy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The general in charge of the stores galloped after the carriage with a red
+ and frightened face, whipping up his skinny horse. Several officers formed
+ a group and some soldiers crowded round them. Their faces all looked
+ excited and worried.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What did he say? What did he say?” Pierre heard them ask.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While the marshal was passing, the prisoners had huddled together in a
+ crowd, and Pierre saw Karatáev whom he had not yet seen that morning. He
+ sat in his short overcoat leaning against a birch tree. On his face,
+ besides the look of joyful emotion it had worn yesterday while telling the
+ tale of the merchant who suffered innocently, there was now an expression
+ of quiet solemnity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Karatáev looked at Pierre with his kindly round eyes now filled with
+ tears, evidently wishing him to come near that he might say something to
+ him. But Pierre was not sufficiently sure of himself. He made as if he did
+ not notice that look and moved hastily away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the prisoners again went forward Pierre looked round. Karatáev was
+ still sitting at the side of the road under the birch tree and two
+ Frenchmen were talking over his head. Pierre did not look round again but
+ went limping up the hill.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From behind, where Karatáev had been sitting, came the sound of a shot.
+ Pierre heard it plainly, but at that moment he remembered that he had not
+ yet finished reckoning up how many stages still remained to Smolénsk—a
+ calculation he had begun before the marshal went by. And he again started
+ reckoning. Two French soldiers ran past Pierre, one of whom carried a
+ lowered and smoking gun. They both looked pale, and in the expression on
+ their faces—one of them glanced timidly at Pierre—there was
+ something resembling what he had seen on the face of the young soldier at
+ the execution. Pierre looked at the soldier and remembered that, two days
+ before, that man had burned his shirt while drying it at the fire and how
+ they had laughed at him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Behind him, where Karatáev had been sitting, the dog began to howl. “What
+ a stupid beast! Why is it howling?” thought Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His comrades, the prisoner soldiers walking beside him, avoided looking
+ back at the place where the shot had been fired and the dog was howling,
+ just as Pierre did, but there was a set look on all their faces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV
+ 
+ 
+ The stores, the prisoners, and the marshal’s baggage train stopped at the
+ village of Shámshevo. The men crowded together round the campfires. Pierre
+ went up to the fire, ate some roast horseflesh, lay down with his back to
+ the fire, and immediately fell asleep. He again slept as he had done at
+ Mozháysk after the battle of Borodinó.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again real events mingled with dreams and again someone, he or another,
+ gave expression to his thoughts, and even to the same thoughts that had
+ been expressed in his dream at Mozháysk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that
+ movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of
+ the divine. To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all
+ else is to love this life in one’s sufferings, in innocent sufferings.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Karatáev!” came to Pierre’s mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And suddenly he saw vividly before him a long-forgotten, kindly old man
+ who had given him geography lessons in Switzerland. “Wait a bit,” said the
+ old man, and showed Pierre a globe. This globe was alive—a vibrating
+ ball without fixed dimensions. Its whole surface consisted of drops
+ closely pressed together, and all these drops moved and changed places,
+ sometimes several of them merging into one, sometimes one dividing into
+ many. Each drop tried to spread out and occupy as much space as possible,
+ but others striving to do the same compressed it, sometimes destroyed it,
+ and sometimes merged with it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That is life,” said the old teacher.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How simple and clear it is,” thought Pierre. “How is it I did not know it
+ before?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “God is in the midst, and each drop tries to expand so as to reflect Him
+ to the greatest extent. And it grows, merges, disappears from the surface,
+ sinks to the depths, and again emerges. There now, Karatáev has spread out
+ and disappeared. Do you understand, my child?” said the teacher.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you understand, damn you?” shouted a voice, and Pierre woke up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He lifted himself and sat up. A Frenchman who had just pushed a Russian
+ soldier away was squatting by the fire, engaged in roasting a piece of
+ meat stuck on a ramrod. His sleeves were rolled up and his sinewy, hairy,
+ red hands with their short fingers deftly turned the ramrod. His brown
+ morose face with frowning brows was clearly visible by the glow of the
+ charcoal.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s all the same to him,” he muttered, turning quickly to a soldier who
+ stood behind him. “Brigand! Get away!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And twisting the ramrod he looked gloomily at Pierre, who turned away and
+ gazed into the darkness. A prisoner, the Russian soldier the Frenchman had
+ pushed away, was sitting near the fire patting something with his hand.
+ Looking more closely Pierre recognized the blue-gray dog, sitting beside
+ the soldier, wagging its tail.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, he’s come?” said Pierre. “And Plat—” he began, but did not finish.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly and simultaneously a crowd of memories awoke in his fancy—of
+ the look Platón had given him as he sat under the tree, of the shot heard
+ from that spot, of the dog’s howl, of the guilty faces of the two
+ Frenchmen as they ran past him, of the lowered and smoking gun, and of
+ Karatáev’s absence at this halt—and he was on the point of realizing
+ that Karatáev had been killed, but just at that instant, he knew not why,
+ the recollection came to his mind of a summer evening he had spent with a
+ beautiful Polish lady on the veranda of his house in Kiev. And without
+ linking up the events of the day or drawing a conclusion from them, Pierre
+ closed his eyes, seeing a vision of the country in summertime mingled with
+ memories of bathing and of the liquid, vibrating globe, and he sank into
+ water so that it closed over his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before sunrise he was awakened by shouts and loud and rapid firing. French
+ soldiers were running past him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Cossacks!” one of them shouted, and a moment later a crowd of
+ Russians surrounded Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For a long time he could not understand what was happening to him. All
+ around he heard his comrades sobbing with joy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Brothers! Dear fellows! Darlings!” old soldiers exclaimed, weeping, as
+ they embraced Cossacks and hussars.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The hussars and Cossacks crowded round the prisoners; one offered them
+ clothes, another boots, and a third bread. Pierre sobbed as he sat among
+ them and could not utter a word. He hugged the first soldier who
+ approached him, and kissed him, weeping.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dólokhov stood at the gate of the ruined house, letting a crowd of
+ disarmed Frenchmen pass by. The French, excited by all that had happened,
+ were talking loudly among themselves, but as they passed Dólokhov who
+ gently switched his boots with his whip and watched them with cold glassy
+ eyes that boded no good, they became silent. On the opposite side stood
+ Dólokhov’s Cossack, counting the prisoners and marking off each hundred
+ with a chalk line on the gate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How many?” Dólokhov asked the Cossack.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The second hundred,” replied the Cossack.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Filez, filez!” * Dólokhov kept saying, having adopted
+ this expression from the French, and when his eyes met those of the prisoners
+ they flashed with a cruel light.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Get along, get along!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov, bareheaded and with a gloomy face, walked behind some Cossacks
+ who were carrying the body of Pétya Rostóv to a hole that had been dug in
+ the garden.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI
+ 
+ 
+ After the twenty-eighth of October when the frosts began, the flight of
+ the French assumed a still more tragic character, with men freezing, or
+ roasting themselves to death at the campfires, while carriages with people
+ dressed in furs continued to drive past, carrying away the property that
+ had been stolen by the Emperor, kings, and dukes; but the process of the
+ flight and disintegration of the French army went on essentially as
+ before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From Moscow to Vyázma the French army of seventy-three thousand men not
+ reckoning the Guards (who did nothing during the whole war but pillage)
+ was reduced to thirty-six thousand, though not more than five thousand had
+ fallen in battle. From this beginning the succeeding terms of the
+ progression could be determined mathematically. The French army melted
+ away and perished at the same rate from Moscow to Vyázma, from Vyázma to
+ Smolénsk, from Smolénsk to the Berëzina, and from the Berëzina to Vílna—independently
+ of the greater or lesser intensity of the cold, the pursuit, the barring
+ of the way, or any other particular conditions. Beyond Vyázma the French
+ army instead of moving in three columns huddled together into one mass,
+ and so went on to the end. Berthier wrote to his Emperor (we know how far
+ commanding officers allow themselves to diverge from the truth in
+ describing the condition of an army) and this is what he said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ I deem it my duty to report to Your Majesty the condition of the various
+ corps I have had occasion to observe during different stages of the last
+ two or three days’ march. They are almost disbanded. Scarcely a quarter of
+ the soldiers remain with the standards of their regiments, the others go
+ off by themselves in different directions hoping to find food and escape
+ discipline. In general they regard Smolénsk as the place where they hope
+ to recover. During the last few days many of the men have been seen to
+ throw away their cartridges and their arms. In such a state of affairs,
+ whatever your ultimate plans may be, the interest of Your Majesty’s
+ service demands that the army should be rallied at Smolénsk and should
+ first of all be freed from ineffectives, such as dismounted cavalry,
+ unnecessary baggage, and artillery material that is no longer in
+ proportion to the present forces. The soldiers, who are worn out with
+ hunger and fatigue, need these supplies as well as a few days’ rest. Many
+ have died these last days on the road or at the bivouacs. This state of
+ things is continually becoming worse and makes one fear that unless a
+ prompt remedy is applied the troops will no longer be under control in
+ case of an engagement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ November 9: twenty miles from Smolénsk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ After staggering into Smolénsk which seemed to them a promised land, the
+ French, searching for food, killed one another, sacked their own stores,
+ and when everything had been plundered fled farther.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They all went without knowing whither or why they were going. Still less
+ did that genius, Napoleon, know it, for no one issued any orders to him.
+ But still he and those about him retained their old habits: wrote
+ commands, letters, reports, and orders of the day; called one another
+ sire, mon cousin, prince d’Eckmühl, roi de Naples , and so on. But
+ these orders and reports were only on paper, nothing in them was acted upon for
+ they could not be carried out, and though they entitled one another
+ Majesties, Highnesses, or Cousins, they all felt that they were miserable
+ wretches who had done much evil for which they had now to pay. And though
+ they pretended to be concerned about the army, each was thinking only of
+ himself and of how to get away quickly and save himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII
+ 
+ 
+ The movements of the Russian and French armies during the campaign from
+ Moscow back to the Niemen were like those in a game of Russian blindman’s
+ buff, in which two players are blindfolded and one of them occasionally
+ rings a little bell to inform the catcher of his whereabouts. First he
+ rings his bell fearlessly, but when he gets into a tight place he runs
+ away as quietly as he can, and often thinking to escape runs straight into
+ his opponent’s arms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At first while they were still moving along the Kalúga road, Napoleon’s
+ armies made their presence known, but later when they reached the Smolénsk
+ road they ran holding the clapper of their bell tight—and often
+ thinking they were escaping ran right into the Russians.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Owing to the rapidity of the French flight and the Russian pursuit and the
+ consequent exhaustion of the horses, the chief means of approximately
+ ascertaining the enemy’s position—by cavalry scouting—was not
+ available. Besides, as a result of the frequent and rapid change of
+ position by each army, even what information was obtained could not be
+ delivered in time. If news was received one day that the enemy had been in
+ a certain position the day before, by the third day when something could
+ have been done, that army was already two days’ march farther on and in
+ quite another position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One army fled and the other pursued. Beyond Smolénsk there were several
+ different roads available for the French, and one would have thought that
+ during their stay of four days they might have learned where the enemy
+ was, might have arranged some more advantageous plan and undertaken
+ something new. But after a four days’ halt the mob, with no maneuvers or
+ plans, again began running along the beaten track, neither to the right
+ nor to the left but along the old—the worst—road, through
+ Krásnoe and Orshá.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Expecting the enemy from behind and not in front, the French separated in
+ their flight and spread out over a distance of twenty-four hours. In front
+ of them all fled the Emperor, then the kings, then the dukes. The Russian
+ army, expecting Napoleon to take the road to the right beyond the Dnieper—which
+ was the only reasonable thing for him to do—themselves turned to the
+ right and came out onto the highroad at Krásnoe. And here as in a game of
+ blindman’s buff the French ran into our vanguard. Seeing their enemy
+ unexpectedly the French fell into confusion and stopped short from the
+ sudden fright, but then they resumed their flight, abandoning their
+ comrades who were farther behind. Then for three days separate portions of
+ the French army—first Murat’s (the vice-king’s), then Davout’s, and
+ then Ney’s—ran, as it were, the gauntlet of the Russian army. They
+ abandoned one another, abandoned all their heavy baggage, their artillery,
+ and half their men, and fled, getting past the Russians by night by making
+ semicircles to the right.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ney, who came last, had been busying himself blowing up the walls of
+ Smolénsk which were in nobody’s way, because despite the unfortunate
+ plight of the French or because of it, they wished to punish the floor
+ against which they had hurt themselves. Ney, who had had a corps of ten
+ thousand men, reached Napoleon at Orshá with only one thousand men left,
+ having abandoned all the rest and all his cannon, and having crossed the
+ Dnieper at night by stealth at a wooded spot.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From Orshá they fled farther along the road to Vílna, still playing at
+ blindman’s buff with the pursuing army. At the Berëzina they again became
+ disorganized, many were drowned and many surrendered, but those who got
+ across the river fled farther. Their supreme chief donned a fur coat and,
+ having seated himself in a sleigh, galloped on alone, abandoning his
+ companions. The others who could do so drove away too, leaving those who
+ could not to surrender or die.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII
+ 
+ 
+ This campaign consisted in a flight of the French during which they did
+ all they could to destroy themselves. From the time they turned onto the
+ Kalúga road to the day their leader fled from the army, none of the
+ movements of the crowd had any sense. So one might have thought that
+ regarding this period of the campaign the historians, who attributed the
+ actions of the mass to the will of one man, would have found it impossible
+ to make the story of the retreat fit their theory. But no! Mountains of
+ books have been written by the historians about this campaign, and
+ everywhere are described Napoleon’s arrangements, the maneuvers, and his
+ profound plans which guided the army, as well as the military genius shown
+ by his marshals.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The retreat from Málo-Yaroslávets when he had a free road into a
+ well-supplied district and the parallel road was open to him along which
+ Kutúzov afterwards pursued him—this unnecessary retreat along a
+ devastated road—is explained to us as being due to profound
+ considerations. Similarly profound considerations are given for his
+ retreat from Smolénsk to Orshá. Then his heroism at Krásnoe is described,
+ where he is reported to have been prepared to accept battle and take
+ personal command, and to have walked about with a birch stick and said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “J’ai assez fait l’empereur; il est temps de faire le
+ général,” * but nevertheless immediately ran away again, abandoning
+ to its fate the scattered fragments of the army he left behind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “I have acted the Emperor long enough; it is time to act
+ the general.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then we are told of the greatness of soul of the marshals, especially of
+ Ney—a greatness of soul consisting in this: that he made his way by
+ night around through the forest and across the Dnieper and escaped to
+ Orshá, abandoning standards, artillery, and nine tenths of his men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And lastly, the final departure of the great Emperor from his heroic army
+ is presented to us by the historians as something great and characteristic
+ of genius. Even that final running away, described in ordinary language as
+ the lowest depth of baseness which every child is taught to be ashamed of—even
+ that act finds justification in the historians’ language.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical
+ ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that
+ humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving
+ conception of “greatness.” “Greatness,” it seems, excludes the standards
+ of right and wrong. For the “great” man nothing is wrong, there is no
+ atrocity for which a “great” man can be blamed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “C’est grand!” * say the historians, and there no longer
+ exists either good or evil but only “grand” and “not
+ grand.” Grand is good, not grand is bad. Grand is the
+ characteristic, in their conception, of some special animals called
+ “heroes.” And Napoleon, escaping home in a warm fur coat and leaving to
+ perish those who were not merely his comrades but were (in his opinion) men he had
+ brought there, feels que c’est grand , *(2) and his soul is tranquil.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “It is great.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * (2) That it is great.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Du sublime (he saw something sublime in himself) au ridicule il n’y a
+ qu’un pas,” * said he. And the whole world for fifty years has been
+ repeating: “Sublime! Grand! Napoléon le Grand!” Du sublime au ridicule il
+ n’y a qu’un pas. 
+
+
+
+ 
+ * “From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And it occurs to no one that to admit a greatness not commensurable with
+ the standard of right and wrong is merely to admit one’s own nothingness
+ and immeasurable meanness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For us with the standard of good and evil given us by Christ, no human
+ actions are incommensurable. And there is no greatness where simplicity,
+ goodness, and truth are absent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX
+ 
+ 
+ What Russian, reading the account of the last part of the campaign of
+ 1812, has not experienced an uncomfortable feeling of regret,
+ dissatisfaction, and perplexity? Who has not asked himself how it is that
+ the French were not all captured or destroyed when our three armies
+ surrounded them in superior numbers, when the disordered French, hungry
+ and freezing, surrendered in crowds, and when (as the historians relate)
+ the aim of the Russians was to stop the French, to cut them off, and
+ capture them all?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ How was it that the Russian army, which when numerically weaker than the
+ French had given battle at Borodinó, did not achieve its purpose when it
+ had surrounded the French on three sides and when its aim was to capture
+ them? Can the French be so enormously superior to us that when we had
+ surrounded them with superior forces we could not beat them? How could
+ that happen?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ History (or what is called by that name) replying to these questions says
+ that this occurred because Kutúzov and Tormásov and Chichagóv, and this
+ man and that man, did not execute such and such maneuvers....
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But why did they not execute those maneuvers? And why if they were guilty
+ of not carrying out a prearranged plan were they not tried and punished?
+ But even if we admitted that Kutúzov, Chichagóv, and others were the cause
+ of the Russian failures, it is still incomprehensible why, the position of
+ the Russian army being what it was at Krásnoe and at the Berëzina (in both
+ cases we had superior forces), the French army with its marshals, kings,
+ and Emperor was not captured, if that was what the Russians aimed at.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The explanation of this strange fact given by Russian military historians
+ (to the effect that Kutúzov hindered an attack) is unfounded, for we know
+ that he could not restrain the troops from attacking at Vyázma and
+ Tarútino.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Why was the Russian army—which with inferior forces had withstood
+ the enemy in full strength at Borodinó—defeated at Krásnoe and the
+ Berëzina by the disorganized crowds of the French when it was numerically
+ superior?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If the aim of the Russians consisted in cutting off and capturing Napoleon
+ and his marshals—and that aim was not merely frustrated but all
+ attempts to attain it were most shamefully baffled—then this last
+ period of the campaign is quite rightly considered by the French to be a
+ series of victories, and quite wrongly considered victorious by Russian
+ historians.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Russian military historians in so far as they submit to claims of
+ logic must admit that conclusion, and in spite of their lyrical rhapsodies
+ about valor, devotion, and so forth, must reluctantly admit that the
+ French retreat from Moscow was a series of victories for Napoleon and
+ defeats for Kutúzov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But putting national vanity entirely aside one feels that such a
+ conclusion involves a contradiction, since the series of French victories
+ brought the French complete destruction, while the series of Russian
+ defeats led to the total destruction of their enemy and the liberation of
+ their country.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The source of this contradiction lies in the fact that the historians
+ studying the events from the letters of the sovereigns and the generals,
+ from memoirs, reports, projects, and so forth, have attributed to this
+ last period of the war of 1812 an aim that never existed, namely that of
+ cutting off and capturing Napoleon with his marshals and his army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There never was or could have been such an aim, for it would have been
+ senseless and its attainment quite impossible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It would have been senseless, first because Napoleon’s disorganized army
+ was flying from Russia with all possible speed, that is to say, was doing
+ just what every Russian desired. So what was the use of performing various
+ operations on the French who were running away as fast as they possibly
+ could?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Secondly, it would have been senseless to block the passage of men whose
+ whole energy was directed to flight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thirdly, it would have been senseless to sacrifice one’s own troops in
+ order to destroy the French army, which without external interference was
+ destroying itself at such a rate that, though its path was not blocked, it
+ could not carry across the frontier more than it actually did in December,
+ namely a hundredth part of the original army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Fourthly, it would have been senseless to wish to take captive the
+ Emperor, kings, and dukes—whose capture would have been in the
+ highest degree embarrassing for the Russians, as the most adroit
+ diplomatists of the time (Joseph de Maistre and others) recognized. Still
+ more senseless would have been the wish to capture army corps of the
+ French, when our own army had melted away to half before reaching Krásnoe
+ and a whole division would have been needed to convoy the corps of
+ prisoners, and when our men were not always getting full rations and the
+ prisoners already taken were perishing of hunger.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All the profound plans about cutting off and capturing Napoleon and his
+ army were like the plan of a market gardener who, when driving out of his
+ garden a cow that had trampled down the beds he had planted, should run to
+ the gate and hit the cow on the head. The only thing to be said in excuse
+ of that gardener would be that he was very angry. But not even that could
+ be said for those who drew up this project, for it was not they who had
+ suffered from the trampled beds.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But besides the fact that cutting off Napoleon with his army would have
+ been senseless, it was impossible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was impossible first because—as experience shows that a
+ three-mile movement of columns on a battlefield never coincides with the
+ plans—the probability of Chichagóv, Kutúzov, and Wittgenstein
+ effecting a junction on time at an appointed place was so remote as to be
+ tantamount to impossibility, as in fact thought Kutúzov, who when he
+ received the plan remarked that diversions planned over great distances do
+ not yield the desired results.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Secondly it was impossible, because to paralyze the momentum with which
+ Napoleon’s army was retiring, incomparably greater forces than the
+ Russians possessed would have been required.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thirdly it was impossible, because the military term “to cut off” has no
+ meaning. One can cut off a slice of bread, but not an army. To cut off an
+ army—to bar its road—is quite impossible, for there is always
+ plenty of room to avoid capture and there is the night when nothing can be
+ seen, as the military scientists might convince themselves by the example
+ of Krásnoe and of the Berëzina. It is only possible to capture prisoners
+ if they agree to be captured, just as it is only possible to catch a
+ swallow if it settles on one’s hand. Men can only be taken prisoners if
+ they surrender according to the rules of strategy and tactics, as the
+ Germans did. But the French troops quite rightly did not consider that
+ this suited them, since death by hunger and cold awaited them in flight or
+ captivity alike.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Fourthly and chiefly it was impossible, because never since the world
+ began has a war been fought under such conditions as those that obtained
+ in 1812, and the Russian army in its pursuit of the French strained its
+ strength to the utmost and could not have done more without destroying
+ itself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the movement of the Russian army from Tarútino to Krásnoe it lost
+ fifty thousand sick or stragglers, that is a number equal to the
+ population of a large provincial town. Half the men fell out of the army
+ without a battle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And it is of this period of the campaign—when the army lacked boots
+ and sheepskin coats, was short of provisions and without vodka, and was
+ camping out at night for months in the snow with fifteen degrees of frost,
+ when there were only seven or eight hours of daylight and the rest was
+ night in which the influence of discipline cannot be maintained, when men
+ were taken into that region of death where discipline fails, not for a few
+ hours only as in a battle, but for months, where they were every moment
+ fighting death from hunger and cold, when half the army perished in a
+ single month—it is of this period of the campaign that the
+ historians tell us how Milorádovich should have made a flank march to such
+ and such a place, Tormásov to another place, and Chichagóv should have
+ crossed (more than knee-deep in snow) to somewhere else, and how so-and-so
+ “routed” and “cut off” the French and so on and so on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Russians, half of whom died, did all that could and should have been
+ done to attain an end worthy of the nation, and they are not to blame
+ because other Russians, sitting in warm rooms, proposed that they should
+ do what was impossible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All that strange contradiction now difficult to understand between the
+ facts and the historical accounts only arises because the historians
+ dealing with the matter have written the history of the beautiful words
+ and sentiments of various generals, and not the history of the events.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To them the words of Milorádovich seem very interesting, and so do their
+ surmises and the rewards this or that general received; but the question
+ of those fifty thousand men who were left in hospitals and in graves does
+ not even interest them, for it does not come within the range of their
+ investigation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Yet one need only discard the study of the reports and general plans and
+ consider the movement of those hundreds of thousands of men who took a
+ direct part in the events, and all the questions that seemed insoluble
+ easily and simply receive an immediate and certain solution.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The aim of cutting off Napoleon and his army never existed except in the
+ imaginations of a dozen people. It could not exist because it was
+ senseless and unattainable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The people had a single aim: to free their land from invasion. That aim
+ was attained in the first place of itself, as the French ran away, and so
+ it was only necessary not to stop their flight. Secondly it was attained
+ by the guerrilla warfare which was destroying the French, and thirdly by
+ the fact that a large Russian army was following the French, ready to use
+ its strength in case their movement stopped.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Russian army had to act like a whip to a running animal. And the
+ experienced driver knew it was better to hold the whip raised as a menace
+ than to strike the running animal on the head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ BOOK FIFTEEN: 1812 - 13
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ When seeing a dying animal a man feels a sense of horror: substance
+ similar to his own is perishing before his eyes. But when it is a beloved
+ and intimate human being that is dying, besides this horror at the
+ extinction of life there is a severance, a spiritual wound, which like a
+ physical wound is sometimes fatal and sometimes heals, but always aches
+ and shrinks at any external irritating touch.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After Prince Andrew’s death Natásha and Princess Mary alike felt this.
+ Drooping in spirit and closing their eyes before the menacing cloud of
+ death that overhung them, they dared not look life in the face. They
+ carefully guarded their open wounds from any rough and painful contact.
+ Everything: a carriage passing rapidly in the street, a summons to dinner,
+ the maid’s inquiry what dress to prepare, or worse still any word of
+ insincere or feeble sympathy, seemed an insult, painfully irritated the
+ wound, interrupting that necessary quiet in which they both tried to
+ listen to the stern and dreadful choir that still resounded in their
+ imagination, and hindered their gazing into those mysterious limitless
+ vistas that for an instant had opened out before them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only when alone together were they free from such outrage and pain. They
+ spoke little even to one another, and when they did it was of very
+ unimportant matters.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Both avoided any allusion to the future. To admit the possibility of a
+ future seemed to them to insult his memory. Still more carefully did they
+ avoid anything relating to him who was dead. It seemed to them that what
+ they had lived through and experienced could not be expressed in words,
+ and that any reference to the details of his life infringed the majesty
+ and sacredness of the mystery that had been accomplished before their
+ eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Continued abstention from speech, and constant avoidance of everything
+ that might lead up to the subject—this halting on all sides at the
+ boundary of what they might not mention—brought before their minds
+ with still greater purity and clearness what they were both feeling.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
+ Princess Mary, in her position as absolute and independent arbiter of her
+ own fate and guardian and instructor of her nephew, was the first to be
+ called back to life from that realm of sorrow in which she had dwelt for
+ the first fortnight. She received letters from her relations to which she
+ had to reply; the room in which little Nicholas had been put was damp and
+ he began to cough; Alpátych came to Yaroslávl with reports on the state of
+ their affairs and with advice and suggestions that they should return to
+ Moscow to the house on the Vozdvízhenka Street, which had remained
+ uninjured and needed only slight repairs. Life did not stand still and it
+ was necessary to live. Hard as it was for Princess Mary to emerge from the
+ realm of secluded contemplation in which she had lived till then, and
+ sorry and almost ashamed as she felt to leave Natásha alone, yet the cares
+ of life demanded her attention and she involuntarily yielded to them. She
+ went through the accounts with Alpátych, conferred with Dessalles about
+ her nephew, and gave orders and made preparations for the journey to
+ Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha remained alone and, from the time Princess Mary began making
+ preparations for departure, held aloof from her too.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary asked the countess to let Natásha go with her to Moscow, and
+ both parents gladly accepted this offer, for they saw their daughter
+ losing strength every day and thought that a change of scene and the
+ advice of Moscow doctors would be good for her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am not going anywhere,” Natásha replied when this was proposed to her.
+ “Do please just leave me alone!” And she ran out of the room, with
+ difficulty refraining from tears of vexation and irritation rather than of
+ sorrow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After she felt herself deserted by Princes Mary and alone in her grief,
+ Natásha spent most of the time in her room by herself, sitting huddled up
+ feet and all in the corner of the sofa, tearing and twisting something
+ with her slender nervous fingers and gazing intently and fixedly at
+ whatever her eyes chanced to fall on. This solitude exhausted and
+ tormented her but she was in absolute need of it. As soon as anyone
+ entered she got up quickly, changed her position and expression, and
+ picked up a book or some sewing, evidently waiting impatiently for the
+ intruder to go.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She felt all the time as if she might at any moment penetrate that on
+ which—with a terrible questioning too great for her strength—her
+ spiritual gaze was fixed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One day toward the end of December Natásha, pale and thin, dressed in a
+ black woolen gown, her plaited hair negligently twisted into a knot, was
+ crouched feet and all in the corner of her sofa, nervously crumpling and
+ smoothing out the end of her sash while she looked at a corner of the
+ door.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She was gazing in the direction in which he had gone—to the other
+ side of life. And that other side of life, of which she had never before
+ thought and which had formerly seemed to her so far away and improbable,
+ was now nearer and more akin and more comprehensible than this side of
+ life, where everything was either emptiness and desolation or suffering
+ and indignity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She was gazing where she knew him to be; but she could not imagine him
+ otherwise than as he had been here. She now saw him again as he had been
+ at Mytíshchi, at Tróitsa, and at Yaroslávl.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She saw his face, heard his voice, repeated his words and her own, and
+ sometimes devised other words they might have spoken.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There he is lying back in an armchair in his velvet cloak, leaning his
+ head on his thin pale hand. His chest is dreadfully hollow and his
+ shoulders raised. His lips are firmly closed, his eyes glitter, and a
+ wrinkle comes and goes on his pale forehead. One of his legs twitches just
+ perceptibly, but rapidly. Natásha knows that he is struggling with
+ terrible pain. “What is that pain like? Why does he have that pain? What
+ does he feel? How does it hurt him?” thought Natásha. He noticed her
+ watching him, raised his eyes, and began to speak seriously:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One thing would be terrible,” said he: “to bind oneself forever to a
+ suffering man. It would be continual torture.” And he looked searchingly
+ at her. Natásha as usual answered before she had time to think what she
+ would say. She said: “This can’t go on—it won’t. You will get well—quite
+ well.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She now saw him from the commencement of that scene and relived what she
+ had then felt. She recalled his long sad and severe look at those words
+ and understood the meaning of the rebuke and despair in that protracted
+ gaze.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I agreed,” Natásha now said to herself, “that it would be dreadful if he
+ always continued to suffer. I said it then only because it would have been
+ dreadful for him, but he understood it differently. He thought it would be
+ dreadful for me. He then still wished to live and feared death. And I said
+ it so awkwardly and stupidly! I did not say what I meant. I thought quite
+ differently. Had I said what I thought, I should have said: even if he had
+ to go on dying, to die continually before my eyes, I should have been
+ happy compared with what I am now. Now there is nothing... nobody. Did he
+ know that? No, he did not and never will know it. And now it will never,
+ never be possible to put it right.” And now he again seemed to be saying
+ the same words to her, only in her imagination Natásha this time gave him
+ a different answer. She stopped him and said: “Terrible for you, but not
+ for me! You know that for me there is nothing in life but you, and to
+ suffer with you is the greatest happiness for me,” and he took her hand
+ and pressed it as he had pressed it that terrible evening four days before
+ his death. And in her imagination she said other tender and loving words
+ which she might have said then but only spoke now: “I love thee!... thee!
+ I love, love...” she said, convulsively pressing her hands and setting her
+ teeth with a desperate effort....
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She was overcome by sweet sorrow and tears were already rising in her
+ eyes; then she suddenly asked herself to whom she was saying this. Again
+ everything was shrouded in hard, dry perplexity, and again with a strained
+ frown she peered toward the world where he was. And now, now it seemed to
+ her she was penetrating the mystery.... But at the instant when it seemed
+ that the incomprehensible was revealing itself to her a loud rattle of the
+ door handle struck painfully on her ears. Dunyásha, her maid, entered the
+ room quickly and abruptly with a frightened look on her face and showing
+ no concern for her mistress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come to your Papa at once, please!” said she with a strange, excited
+ look. “A misfortune... about Peter Ilýnich... a letter,” she finished with
+ a sob.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ Besides a feeling of aloofness from everybody Natásha was feeling a
+ special estrangement from the members of her own family. All of them—her
+ father, mother, and Sónya—were so near to her, so familiar, so
+ commonplace, that all their words and feelings seemed an insult to the
+ world in which she had been living of late, and she felt not merely
+ indifferent to them but regarded them with hostility. She heard Dunyásha’s
+ words about Peter Ilýnich and a misfortune, but did not grasp them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What misfortune? What misfortune can happen to them? They just live their
+ own old, quiet, and commonplace life,” thought Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As she entered the ballroom her father was hurriedly coming out of her
+ mother’s room. His face was puckered up and wet with tears. He had
+ evidently run out of that room to give vent to the sobs that were choking
+ him. When he saw Natásha he waved his arms despairingly and burst into
+ convulsively painful sobs that distorted his soft round face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Pe... Pétya... Go, go, she... is calling...” and weeping like a child and
+ quickly shuffling on his feeble legs to a chair, he almost fell into it,
+ covering his face with his hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly an electric shock seemed to run through Natásha’s whole being.
+ Terrible anguish struck her heart, she felt a dreadful ache as if
+ something was being torn inside her and she were dying. But the pain was
+ immediately followed by a feeling of release from the oppressive
+ constraint that had prevented her taking part in life. The sight of her
+ father, the terribly wild cries of her mother that she heard through the
+ door, made her immediately forget herself and her own grief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She ran to her father, but he feebly waved his arm, pointing to her
+ mother’s door. Princess Mary, pale and with quivering chin, came out from
+ that room and taking Natásha by the arm said something to her. Natásha
+ neither saw nor heard her. She went in with rapid steps, pausing at the
+ door for an instant as if struggling with herself, and then ran to her
+ mother.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess was lying in an armchair in a strange and awkward position,
+ stretching out and beating her head against the wall. Sónya and the maids
+ were holding her arms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha! Natásha!...” cried the countess. “It’s not true... it’s not
+ true... He’s lying... Natásha!” she shrieked, pushing those around her
+ away. “Go away, all of you; it’s not true! Killed!... ha, ha, ha!... It’s
+ not true!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha put one knee on the armchair, stooped over her mother, embraced
+ her, and with unexpected strength raised her, turned her face toward
+ herself, and clung to her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mummy!... darling!... I am here, my dearest Mummy,” she kept on
+ whispering, not pausing an instant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She did not let go of her mother but struggled tenderly with her, demanded
+ a pillow and hot water, and unfastened and tore open her mother’s dress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My dearest darling... Mummy, my precious!...” she whispered incessantly,
+ kissing her head, her hands, her face, and feeling her own irrepressible
+ and streaming tears tickling her nose and cheeks.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess pressed her daughter’s hand, closed her eyes, and became
+ quiet for a moment. Suddenly she sat up with unaccustomed swiftness,
+ glanced vacantly around her, and seeing Natásha began to press her
+ daughter’s head with all her strength. Then she turned toward her
+ daughter’s face which was wincing with pain and gazed long at it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha, you love me?” she said in a soft trustful whisper. “Natásha, you
+ would not deceive me? You’ll tell me the whole truth?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha looked at her with eyes full of tears and in her look there was
+ nothing but love and an entreaty for forgiveness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My darling Mummy!” she repeated, straining all the power of her love to
+ find some way of taking on herself the excess of grief that crushed her
+ mother.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And again in a futile struggle with reality her mother, refusing to
+ believe that she could live when her beloved boy was killed in the bloom
+ of life, escaped from reality into a world of delirium.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha did not remember how that day passed nor that night, nor the next
+ day and night. She did not sleep and did not leave her mother. Her
+ persevering and patient love seemed completely to surround the countess
+ every moment, not explaining or consoling, but recalling her to life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the third night the countess kept very quiet for a few minutes, and
+ Natásha rested her head on the arm of her chair and closed her eyes, but
+ opened them again on hearing the bedstead creak. The countess was sitting
+ up in bed and speaking softly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How glad I am you have come. You are tired. Won’t you have some tea?”
+ Natásha went up to her. “You have improved in looks and grown more manly,”
+ continued the countess, taking her daughter’s hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mamma! What are you saying...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha, he is no more, no more!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And embracing her daughter, the countess began to weep for the first time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ Princess Mary postponed her departure. Sónya and the count tried to
+ replace Natásha but could not. They saw that she alone was able to
+ restrain her mother from unreasoning despair. For three weeks Natásha
+ remained constantly at her mother’s side, sleeping on a lounge chair in
+ her room, making her eat and drink, and talking to her incessantly because
+ the mere sound of her tender, caressing tones soothed her mother.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The mother’s wounded spirit could not heal. Pétya’s death had torn from
+ her half her life. When the news of Pétya’s death had come she had been a
+ fresh and vigorous woman of fifty, but a month later she left her room a
+ listless old woman taking no interest in life. But the same blow that
+ almost killed the countess, this second blow, restored Natásha to life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A spiritual wound produced by a rending of the spiritual body is like a
+ physical wound and, strange as it may seem, just as a deep wound may heal
+ and its edges join, physical and spiritual wounds alike can yet heal
+ completely only as the result of a vital force from within.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha’s wound healed in that way. She thought her life was ended, but
+ her love for her mother unexpectedly showed her that the essence of life—love—was
+ still active within her. Love awoke and so did life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Prince Andrew’s last days had bound Princess Mary and Natásha together;
+ this new sorrow brought them still closer to one another. Princess Mary
+ put off her departure, and for three weeks looked after Natásha as if she
+ had been a sick child. The last weeks passed in her mother’s bedroom had
+ strained Natásha’s physical strength.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One afternoon noticing Natásha shivering with fever, Princess Mary took
+ her to her own room and made her lie down on the bed. Natásha lay down,
+ but when Princess Mary had drawn the blinds and was going away she called
+ her back.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t want to sleep, Mary, sit by me a little.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are tired—try to sleep.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, no. Why did you bring me away? She will be asking for me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She is much better. She spoke so well today,” said Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha lay on the bed and in the semidarkness of the room scanned
+ Princess Mary’s face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is she like him?” thought Natásha. “Yes, like and yet not like. But she
+ is quite original, strange, new, and unknown. And she loves me. What is in
+ her heart? All that is good. But how? What is her mind like? What does she
+ think about me? Yes, she is splendid!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mary,” she said timidly, drawing Princess Mary’s hand to herself, “Mary,
+ you mustn’t think me wicked. No? Mary darling, how I love you! Let us be
+ quite, quite friends.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Natásha, embracing her, began kissing her face and hands, making
+ Princess Mary feel shy but happy by this demonstration of her feelings.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From that day a tender and passionate friendship such as exists only
+ between women was established between Princess Mary and Natásha. They were
+ continually kissing and saying tender things to one another and spent most
+ of their time together. When one went out the other became restless and
+ hastened to rejoin her. Together they felt more in harmony with one
+ another than either of them felt with herself when alone. A feeling
+ stronger than friendship sprang up between them; an exclusive feeling of
+ life being possible only in each other’s presence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sometimes they were silent for hours; sometimes after they were already in
+ bed they would begin talking and go on till morning. They spoke most of
+ what was long past. Princess Mary spoke of her childhood, of her mother,
+ her father, and her daydreams; and Natásha, who with a passive lack of
+ understanding had formerly turned away from that life of devotion,
+ submission, and the poetry of Christian self-sacrifice, now feeling
+ herself bound to Princess Mary by affection, learned to love her past too
+ and to understand a side of life previously incomprehensible to her. She
+ did not think of applying submission and self-abnegation to her own life,
+ for she was accustomed to seek other joys, but she understood and loved in
+ another those previously incomprehensible virtues. For Princess Mary,
+ listening to Natásha’s tales of childhood and early youth, there also
+ opened out a new and hitherto uncomprehended side of life: belief in life
+ and its enjoyment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just as before, they never mentioned him so as not to lower (as they
+ thought) their exalted feelings by words; but this silence about him had
+ the effect of making them gradually begin to forget him without being
+ conscious of it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha had grown thin and pale and physically so weak that they all
+ talked about her health, and this pleased her. But sometimes she was
+ suddenly overcome by fear not only of death but of sickness, weakness, and
+ loss of good looks, and involuntarily she examined her bare arm carefully,
+ surprised at its thinness, and in the morning noticed her drawn and, as it
+ seemed to her, piteous face in her glass. It seemed to her that things
+ must be so, and yet it was dreadfully sad.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One day she went quickly upstairs and found herself out of breath.
+ Unconsciously she immediately invented a reason for going down, and then,
+ testing her strength, ran upstairs again, observing the result.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Another time when she called Dunyásha her voice trembled, so she called
+ again—though she could hear Dunyásha coming—called her in the
+ deep chest tones in which she had been wont to sing, and listened
+ attentively to herself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She did not know and would not have believed it, but beneath the layer of
+ slime that covered her soul and seemed to her impenetrable, delicate young
+ shoots of grass were already sprouting, which taking root would so cover
+ with their living verdure the grief that weighed her down that it would
+ soon no longer be seen or noticed. The wound had begun to heal from
+ within.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the end of January Princess Mary left for Moscow, and the count
+ insisted on Natásha’s going with her to consult the doctors.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ After the encounter at Vyázma, where Kutúzov had been unable to hold back
+ his troops in their anxiety to overwhelm and cut off the enemy and so on,
+ the farther movement of the fleeing French, and of the Russians who
+ pursued them, continued as far as Krásnoe without a battle. The flight was
+ so rapid that the Russian army pursuing the French could not keep up with
+ them; cavalry and artillery horses broke down, and the information
+ received of the movements of the French was never reliable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The men in the Russian army were so worn out by this continuous marching
+ at the rate of twenty-seven miles a day that they could not go any faster.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To realize the degree of exhaustion of the Russian army it is only
+ necessary to grasp clearly the meaning of the fact that, while not losing
+ more than five thousand killed and wounded after Tarútino and less than a
+ hundred prisoners, the Russian army which left that place a hundred
+ thousand strong reached Krásnoe with only fifty thousand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The rapidity of the Russian pursuit was just as destructive to our army as
+ the flight of the French was to theirs. The only difference was that the
+ Russian army moved voluntarily, with no such threat of destruction as hung
+ over the French, and that the sick Frenchmen were left behind in enemy
+ hands while the sick Russians left behind were among their own people. The
+ chief cause of the wastage of Napoleon’s army was the rapidity of its
+ movement, and a convincing proof of this is the corresponding decrease of
+ the Russian army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov as far as was in his power, instead of trying to check the
+ movement of the French as was desired in Petersburg and by the Russian
+ army generals, directed his whole activity here, as he had done at
+ Tarútino and Vyázma, to hastening it on while easing the movement of our
+ army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But besides this, since the exhaustion and enormous diminution of the army
+ caused by the rapidity of the advance had become evident, another reason
+ for slackening the pace and delaying presented itself to Kutúzov. The aim
+ of the Russian army was to pursue the French. The road the French would
+ take was unknown, and so the closer our troops trod on their heels the
+ greater distance they had to cover. Only by following at some distance
+ could one cut across the zigzag path of the French. All the artful
+ maneuvers suggested by our generals meant fresh movements of the army and
+ a lengthening of its marches, whereas the only reasonable aim was to
+ shorten those marches. To that end Kutúzov’s activity was directed during
+ the whole campaign from Moscow to Vílna—not casually or
+ intermittently but so consistently that he never once deviated from it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov felt and knew—not by reasoning or science but with the whole
+ of his Russian being—what every Russian soldier felt: that the
+ French were beaten, that the enemy was flying and must be driven out; but
+ at the same time he like the soldiers realized all the hardship of this
+ march, the rapidity of which was unparalleled for such a time of the year.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But to the generals, especially the foreign ones in the Russian army, who
+ wished to distinguish themselves, to astonish somebody, and for some
+ reason to capture a king or a duke—it seemed that now—when any
+ battle must be horrible and senseless—was the very time to fight and
+ conquer somebody. Kutúzov merely shrugged his shoulders when one after
+ another they presented projects of maneuvers to be made with those
+ soldiers—ill-shod, insufficiently clad, and half starved—who
+ within a month and without fighting a battle had dwindled to half their
+ number, and who at the best if the flight continued would have to go a
+ greater distance than they had already traversed, before they reached the
+ frontier.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This longing to distinguish themselves, to maneuver, to overthrow, and to
+ cut off showed itself particularly whenever the Russians stumbled on the
+ French army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So it was at Krásnoe, where they expected to find one of the three French
+ columns and stumbled instead on Napoleon himself with sixteen thousand
+ men. Despite all Kutúzov’s efforts to avoid that ruinous encounter and to
+ preserve his troops, the massacre of the broken mob of French soldiers by
+ worn-out Russians continued at Krásnoe for three days.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Toll wrote a disposition: “The first column will march to so and so,” etc.
+ And as usual nothing happened in accord with the disposition. Prince
+ Eugène of Württemberg fired from a hill over the French crowds that were
+ running past, and demanded reinforcements which did not arrive. The
+ French, avoiding the Russians, dispersed and hid themselves in the forest
+ by night, making their way round as best they could, and continued their
+ flight.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Milorádovich, who said he did not want to know anything about the
+ commissariat affairs of his detachment, and could never be found when he
+ was wanted—that chevalier sans peur et sans reproche * as he styled
+ himself—who was fond of parleys with the French, sent envoys
+ demanding their surrender, wasted time, and did not do what he was ordered
+ to do.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Knight without fear and without reproach.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “I give you that column, lads,” he said, riding up to the troops and
+ pointing out the French to the cavalry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the cavalry, with spurs and sabers urging on horses that could
+ scarcely move, trotted with much effort to the column presented to them—that
+ is to say, to a crowd of Frenchmen stark with cold, frost-bitten, and
+ starving—and the column that had been presented to them threw down
+ its arms and surrendered as it had long been anxious to do.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At Krásnoe they took twenty-six thousand prisoners, several hundred
+ cannon, and a stick called a “marshal’s staff,” and disputed as to who had
+ distinguished himself and were pleased with their achievement—though
+ they much regretted not having taken Napoleon, or at least a marshal or a
+ hero of some sort, and reproached one another and especially Kutúzov for
+ having failed to do so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These men, carried away by their passions, were but blind tools of the
+ most melancholy law of necessity, but considered themselves heroes and
+ imagined that they were accomplishing a most noble and honorable deed.
+ They blamed Kutúzov and said that from the very beginning of the campaign
+ he had prevented their vanquishing Napoleon, that he thought of nothing
+ but satisfying his passions and would not advance from the Linen Factories
+ because he was comfortable there, that at Krásnoe he checked the advance
+ because on learning that Napoleon was there he had quite lost his head,
+ and that it was probable that he had an understanding with Napoleon and
+ had been bribed by him, and so on, and so on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not only did his contemporaries, carried away by their passions, talk in
+ this way, but posterity and history have acclaimed Napoleon as grand ,
+ while Kutúzov is described by foreigners as a crafty, dissolute, weak old
+ courtier, and by Russians as something indefinite—a sort of puppet
+ useful only because he had a Russian name.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ In 1812 and 1813 Kutúzov was openly accused of blundering. The Emperor was
+ dissatisfied with him. And in a history recently written by order of the
+ Highest Authorities it is said that Kutúzov was a cunning court liar,
+ frightened of the name of Napoleon, and that by his blunders at Krásnoe
+ and the Berëzina he deprived the Russian army of the glory of complete
+ victory over the French. *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * History of the year 1812. The character of Kutúzov and
+ reflections on the unsatisfactory results of the battles at
+ Krásnoe , by Bogdánovich.
+
+
+
+ 
+ Such is the fate not of great men ( grands hommes ) whom the Russian mind
+ does not acknowledge, but of those rare and always solitary individuals
+ who, discerning the will of Providence, submit their personal will to it.
+ The hatred and contempt of the crowd punish such men for discerning the
+ higher laws.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For Russian historians, strange and terrible to say, Napoleon—that
+ most insignificant tool of history who never anywhere, even in exile,
+ showed human dignity—Napoleon is the object of adulation and
+ enthusiasm; he is grand . But Kutúzov—the man who from the beginning
+ to the end of his activity in 1812, never once swerving by word or deed
+ from Borodinó to Vílna, presented an example exceptional in history of
+ self-sacrifice and a present consciousness of the future importance of
+ what was happening—Kutúzov seems to them something indefinite and
+ pitiful, and when speaking of him and of the year 1812 they always seem a
+ little ashamed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And yet it is difficult to imagine an historical character whose activity
+ was so unswervingly directed to a single aim; and it would be difficult to
+ imagine any aim more worthy or more consonant with the will of the whole
+ people. Still more difficult would it be to find an instance in history of
+ the aim of an historical personage being so completely accomplished as
+ that to which all Kutúzov’s efforts were directed in 1812.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov never talked of “forty centuries looking down from the Pyramids,”
+ of the sacrifices he offered for the fatherland, or of what he intended to
+ accomplish or had accomplished; in general he said nothing about himself,
+ adopted no pose, always appeared to be the simplest and most ordinary of
+ men, and said the simplest and most ordinary things. He wrote letters to
+ his daughters and to Madame de Staël, read novels, liked the society of
+ pretty women, jested with generals, officers, and soldiers, and never
+ contradicted those who tried to prove anything to him. When Count
+ Rostopchín at the Yaúza bridge galloped up to Kutúzov with personal
+ reproaches for having caused the destruction of Moscow, and said: “How was
+ it you promised not to abandon Moscow without a battle?” Kutúzov replied:
+ “And I shall not abandon Moscow without a battle,” though Moscow was then
+ already abandoned. When Arakchéev, coming to him from the Emperor, said
+ that Ermólov ought to be appointed chief of the artillery, Kutúzov
+ replied: “Yes, I was just saying so myself,” though a moment before he had
+ said quite the contrary. What did it matter to him—who then alone
+ amid a senseless crowd understood the whole tremendous significance of
+ what was happening—what did it matter to him whether Rostopchín
+ attributed the calamities of Moscow to him or to himself? Still less could
+ it matter to him who was appointed chief of the artillery.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not merely in these cases but continually did that old man—who by
+ experience of life had reached the conviction that thoughts and the words
+ serving as their expression are not what move people—use quite
+ meaningless words that happened to enter his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But that man, so heedless of his words, did not once during the whole time
+ of his activity utter one word inconsistent with the single aim toward
+ which he moved throughout the whole war. Obviously in spite of himself, in
+ very diverse circumstances, he repeatedly expressed his real thoughts with
+ the bitter conviction that he would not be understood. Beginning with the
+ battle of Borodinó, from which time his disagreement with those about him
+ began, he alone said that the battle of Borodinó was a victory , and
+ repeated this both verbally and in his dispatches and reports up to the
+ time of his death. He alone said that the loss of Moscow is not the loss
+ of Russia . In reply to Lauriston’s proposal of peace, he said: There can
+ be no peace, for such is the people’s will . He alone during the retreat of
+ the French said that all our maneuvers are useless, everything is being
+ accomplished of itself better than we could desire; that the enemy must be
+ offered “a golden bridge” ; that neither the Tarútino, the Vyázma, nor the
+ Krásnoe battles were necessary ; that we must keep some force to reach the
+ frontier with, and that he would not sacrifice a single Russian for ten
+ Frenchmen. 
+
+
+
+ 
+ And this courtier, as he is described to us, who lies to Arakchéev to
+ please the Emperor, he alone—incurring thereby the Emperor’s
+ displeasure—said in Vílna that to carry the war beyond the frontier
+ is useless and harmful. 
+
+
+
+ 
+ Nor do words alone prove that only he understood the meaning of the
+ events. His actions—without the smallest deviation—were all
+ directed to one and the same threefold end: (1) to brace all his strength
+ for conflict with the French, (2) to defeat them, and (3) to drive them
+ out of Russia, minimizing as far as possible the sufferings of our people
+ and of our army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This procrastinator Kutúzov, whose motto was “Patience and Time,” this
+ enemy of decisive action, gave battle at Borodinó, investing the
+ preparations for it with unparalleled solemnity. This Kutúzov who before
+ the battle of Austerlitz began said that it would be lost, he alone, in
+ contradiction to everyone else, declared till his death that Borodinó was
+ a victory, despite the assurance of generals that the battle was lost and
+ despite the fact that for an army to have to retire after winning a battle
+ was unprecedented. He alone during the whole retreat insisted that
+ battles, which were useless then, should not be fought, and that a new war
+ should not be begun nor the frontiers of Russia crossed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It is easy now to understand the significance of these events—if
+ only we abstain from attributing to the activity of the mass aims that
+ existed only in the heads of a dozen individuals—for the events and
+ results now lie before us.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But how did that old man, alone, in opposition to the general opinion, so
+ truly discern the importance of the people’s view of the events that in
+ all his activity he was never once untrue to it?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The source of that extraordinary power of penetrating the meaning of the
+ events then occuring lay in the national feeling which he possessed in
+ full purity and strength.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only the recognition of the fact that he possessed this feeling caused the
+ people in so strange a manner, contrary to the Tsar’s wish, to select him—an
+ old man in disfavor—to be their representative in the national war.
+ And only that feeling placed him on that highest human pedestal from which
+ he, the commander in chief, devoted all his powers not to slaying and
+ destroying men but to saving and showing pity on them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That simple, modest, and therefore truly great, figure could not be cast
+ in the false mold of a European hero—the supposed ruler of men—that
+ history has invented.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To a lackey no man can be great, for a lackey has his own conception of
+ greatness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ The fifth of November was the first day of what is called the battle of
+ Krásnoe. Toward evening—after much disputing and many mistakes made
+ by generals who did not go to their proper places, and after adjutants had
+ been sent about with counterorders—when it had become plain that the
+ enemy was everywhere in flight and that there could and would be no
+ battle, Kutúzov left Krásnoe and went to Dóbroe whither his headquarters
+ had that day been transferred.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The day was clear and frosty. Kutúzov rode to Dóbroe on his plump little
+ white horse, followed by an enormous suite of discontented generals who
+ whispered among themselves behind his back. All along the road groups of
+ French prisoners captured that day (there were seven thousand of them)
+ were crowding to warm themselves at campfires. Near Dóbroe an immense
+ crowd of tattered prisoners, buzzing with talk and wrapped and bandaged in
+ anything they had been able to get hold of, were standing in the road
+ beside a long row of unharnessed French guns. At the approach of the
+ commander in chief the buzz of talk ceased and all eyes were fixed on
+ Kutúzov who, wearing a white cap with a red band and a padded overcoat
+ that bulged on his round shoulders, moved slowly along the road on his
+ white horse. One of the generals was reporting to him where the guns and
+ prisoners had been captured.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov seemed preoccupied and did not listen to what the general was
+ saying. He screwed up his eyes with a dissatisfied look as he gazed
+ attentively and fixedly at these prisoners, who presented a specially
+ wretched appearance. Most of them were disfigured by frost-bitten noses
+ and cheeks, and nearly all had red, swollen and festering eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One group of the French stood close to the road, and two of them, one of
+ whom had his face covered with sores, were tearing a piece of raw flesh
+ with their hands. There was something horrible and bestial in the fleeting
+ glance they threw at the riders and in the malevolent expression with
+ which, after a glance at Kutúzov, the soldier with the sores immediately
+ turned away and went on with what he was doing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov looked long and intently at these two soldiers. He puckered his
+ face, screwed up his eyes, and pensively swayed his head. At another spot
+ he noticed a Russian soldier laughingly patting a Frenchman on the
+ shoulder, saying something to him in a friendly manner, and Kutúzov with
+ the same expression on his face again swayed his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What were you saying?” he asked the general, who continuing his report
+ directed the commander in chief’s attention to some standards captured
+ from the French and standing in front of the Preobrazhénsk regiment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, the standards!” said Kutúzov, evidently detaching himself with
+ difficulty from the thoughts that preoccupied him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He looked about him absently. Thousands of eyes were looking at him from
+ all sides awaiting a word from him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He stopped in front of the Preobrazhénsk regiment, sighed deeply, and
+ closed his eyes. One of his suite beckoned to the soldiers carrying the
+ standards to advance and surround the commander in chief with them.
+ Kutúzov was silent for a few seconds and then, submitting with evident
+ reluctance to the duty imposed by his position, raised his head and began
+ to speak. A throng of officers surrounded him. He looked attentively
+ around at the circle of officers, recognizing several of them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I thank you all!” he said, addressing the soldiers and then again the
+ officers. In the stillness around him his slowly uttered words were
+ distinctly heard. “I thank you all for your hard and faithful service. The
+ victory is complete and Russia will not forget you! Honor to you forever.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He paused and looked around.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Lower its head, lower it!” he said to a soldier who had accidentally
+ lowered the French eagle he was holding before the Preobrazhénsk
+ standards. “Lower, lower, that’s it. Hurrah lads!” he added, addressing
+ the men with a rapid movement of his chin.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hur-r-rah!” roared thousands of voices.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ While the soldiers were shouting Kutúzov leaned forward in his saddle and
+ bowed his head, and his eye lit up with a mild and apparently ironic
+ gleam.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see, brothers...” said he when the shouts had ceased... and all at
+ once his voice and the expression of his face changed. It was no longer
+ the commander in chief speaking but an ordinary old man who wanted to tell
+ his comrades something very important.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was a stir among the throng of officers and in the ranks of the
+ soldiers, who moved that they might hear better what he was going to say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see, brothers, I know it’s hard for you, but it can’t be helped! Bear
+ up; it won’t be for long now! We’ll see our visitors off and then we’ll
+ rest. The Tsar won’t forget your service. It is hard for you, but still
+ you are at home while they—you see what they have come to,” said he,
+ pointing to the prisoners. “Worse off than our poorest beggars. While they
+ were strong we didn’t spare ourselves, but now we may even pity them. They
+ are human beings too. Isn’t it so, lads?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He looked around, and in the direct, respectful, wondering gaze fixed upon
+ him he read sympathy with what he had said. His face grew brighter and
+ brighter with an old man’s mild smile, which drew the corners of his lips
+ and eyes into a cluster of wrinkles. He ceased speaking and bowed his head
+ as if in perplexity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But after all who asked them here? Serves them right, the bloody
+ bastards!” he cried, suddenly lifting his head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And flourishing his whip he rode off at a gallop for the first time during
+ the whole campaign, and left the broken ranks of the soldiers laughing
+ joyfully and shouting “Hurrah!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov’s words were hardly understood by the troops. No one could have
+ repeated the field marshal’s address, begun solemnly and then changing
+ into an old man’s simplehearted talk; but the hearty sincerity of that
+ speech, the feeling of majestic triumph combined with pity for the foe and
+ consciousness of the justice of our cause, exactly expressed by that old
+ man’s good-natured expletives, was not merely understood but lay in the
+ soul of every soldier and found expression in their joyous and
+ long-sustained shouts. Afterwards when one of the generals addressed
+ Kutúzov asking whether he wished his calèche to be sent for, Kutúzov in
+ answering unexpectedly gave a sob, being evidently greatly moved.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ When the troops reached their night’s halting place on the eighth of
+ November, the last day of the Krásnoe battles, it was already growing
+ dusk. All day it had been calm and frosty with occasional lightly falling
+ snow and toward evening it began to clear. Through the falling snow a
+ purple-black and starry sky showed itself and the frost grew keener.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ An infantry regiment which had left Tarútino three thousand strong but now
+ numbered only nine hundred was one of the first to arrive that night at
+ its halting place—a village on the highroad. The quartermasters who
+ met the regiment announced that all the huts were full of sick and dead
+ Frenchmen, cavalrymen, and members of the staff. There was only one hut
+ available for the regimental commander.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The commander rode up to his hut. The regiment passed through the village
+ and stacked its arms in front of the last huts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Like some huge many-limbed animal, the regiment began to prepare its lair
+ and its food. One part of it dispersed and waded knee-deep through the
+ snow into a birch forest to the right of the village, and immediately the
+ sound of axes and swords, the crashing of branches, and merry voices could
+ be heard from there. Another section amid the regimental wagons and horses
+ which were standing in a group was busy getting out caldrons and rye
+ biscuit, and feeding the horses. A third section scattered through the
+ village arranging quarters for the staff officers, carrying out the French
+ corpses that were in the huts, and dragging away boards, dry wood, and
+ thatch from the roofs, for the campfires, or wattle fences to serve for
+ shelter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some fifteen men with merry shouts were shaking down the high wattle wall
+ of a shed, the roof of which had already been removed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then, all together—shove!” cried the voices, and the huge
+ surface of the wall, sprinkled with snow and creaking with frost, was seen
+ swaying in the gloom of the night. The lower stakes cracked more and more
+ and at last the wall fell, and with it the men who had been pushing it.
+ Loud, coarse laughter and joyous shouts ensued.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then, catch hold in twos! Hand up the lever! That’s
+ it.... Where are you shoving to?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, all together! But wait a moment, boys... With a song!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All stood silent, and a soft, pleasant velvety voice began to sing. At the
+ end of the third verse as the last note died away, twenty voices roared
+ out at once: “Oo-oo-oo-oo! That’s it. All together! Heave away, boys!...”
+ but despite their united efforts the wattle hardly moved, and in the
+ silence that followed the heavy breathing of the men was audible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Here, you of the Sixth Company! Devils that you are! Lend a hand... will
+ you? You may want us one of these days.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some twenty men of the Sixth Company who were on their way into the
+ village joined the haulers, and the wattle wall, which was about
+ thirty-five feet long and seven feet high, moved forward along the village
+ street, swaying, pressing upon and cutting the shoulders of the gasping
+ men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Get along... Falling? What are you stopping for? There now....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Merry senseless words of abuse flowed freely.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are you up to?” suddenly came the authoritative voice of a sergeant
+ major who came upon the men who were hauling their burden. “There are
+ gentry here; the general himself is in that hut, and you foul-mouthed
+ devils, you brutes, I’ll give it to you!” shouted he, hitting the first
+ man who came in his way a swinging blow on the back. “Can’t you make less
+ noise?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The men became silent. The soldier who had been struck groaned and wiped
+ his face, which had been scratched till it bled by his falling against the
+ wattle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There, how that devil hits out! He’s made my face all bloody,” said he in
+ a frightened whisper when the sergeant major had passed on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t you like it?” said a laughing voice, and moderating their tones the
+ men moved forward.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When they were out of the village they began talking again as loud as
+ before, interlarding their talk with the same aimless expletives.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the hut which the men had passed, the chief officers had gathered and
+ were in animated talk over their tea about the events of the day and the
+ maneuvers suggested for tomorrow. It was proposed to make a flank march to
+ the left, cut off the Vice-King (Murat) and capture him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By the time the soldiers had dragged the wattle fence to its place the
+ campfires were blazing on all sides ready for cooking, the wood crackled,
+ the snow was melting, and black shadows of soldiers flitted to and fro all
+ over the occupied space where the snow had been trodden down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Axes and choppers were plied all around. Everything was done without any
+ orders being given. Stores of wood were brought for the night, shelters
+ were rigged up for the officers, caldrons were being boiled, and muskets
+ and accouterments put in order.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The wattle wall the men had brought was set up in a semicircle by the
+ Eighth Company as a shelter from the north, propped up by musket rests,
+ and a campfire was built before it. They beat the tattoo, called the roll,
+ had supper, and settled down round the fires for the night—some
+ repairing their footgear, some smoking pipes, and some stripping
+ themselves naked to steam the lice out of their shirts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ One would have thought that under the almost incredibly wretched
+ conditions the Russian soldiers were in at that time—lacking warm
+ boots and sheepskin coats, without a roof over their heads, in the snow
+ with eighteen degrees of frost, and without even full rations (the
+ commissariat did not always keep up with the troops)—they would have
+ presented a very sad and depressing spectacle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the contrary, the army had never under the best material conditions
+ presented a more cheerful and animated aspect. This was because all who
+ began to grow depressed or who lost strength were sifted out of the army
+ day by day. All the physically or morally weak had long since been left
+ behind and only the flower of the army—physically and mentally—remained.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ More men collected behind the wattle fence of the Eighth Company than
+ anywhere else. Two sergeants major were sitting with them and their
+ campfire blazed brighter than others. For leave to sit by their wattle
+ they demanded contributions of fuel.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh, Makéev! What has become of you, you son of a bitch? Are you lost or
+ have the wolves eaten you? Fetch some more wood!” shouted a red-haired and
+ red-faced man, screwing up his eyes and blinking because of the smoke but
+ not moving back from the fire. “And you, Jackdaw, go and fetch some wood!”
+ said he to another soldier.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This red-haired man was neither a sergeant nor a corporal, but being
+ robust he ordered about those weaker than himself. The soldier they called
+ “Jackdaw,” a thin little fellow with a sharp nose, rose obediently and was
+ about to go but at that instant there came into the light of the fire the
+ slender, handsome figure of a young soldier carrying a load of wood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bring it here—that’s fine!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They split up the wood, pressed it down on the fire, blew at it with their
+ mouths, and fanned it with the skirts of their greatcoats, making the
+ flames hiss and crackle. The men drew nearer and lit their pipes. The
+ handsome young soldier who had brought the wood, setting his arms akimbo,
+ began stamping his cold feet rapidly and deftly on the spot where he
+ stood.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mother! The dew is cold but clear.... It’s well that I’m a musketeer...”
+ he sang, pretending to hiccough after each syllable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look out, your soles will fly off!” shouted the red-haired man, noticing
+ that the sole of the dancer’s boot was hanging loose. “What a fellow you
+ are for dancing!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The dancer stopped, pulled off the loose piece of leather, and threw it on
+ the fire.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Right enough, friend,” said he, and, having sat down, took out of his
+ knapsack a scrap of blue French cloth, and wrapped it round his foot.
+ “It’s the steam that spoils them,” he added, stretching out his feet
+ toward the fire.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They’ll soon be issuing us new ones. They say that when we’ve
+ finished hammering them , we’re to receive double kits!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And that son of a bitch Petróv has lagged behind after all, it seems,”
+ said one sergeant major.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’ve had an eye on him this long while,” said the other.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, he’s a poor sort of soldier....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But in the Third Company they say nine men were missing yesterday.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, it’s all very well, but when a man’s feet are frozen how can he
+ walk?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Eh? Don’t talk nonsense!” said a sergeant major.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you want to be doing the same?” said an old soldier, turning
+ reproachfully to the man who had spoken of frozen feet.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, you know,” said the sharp-nosed man they called Jackdaw in a
+ squeaky and unsteady voice, raising himself at the other side of the fire,
+ “a plump man gets thin, but for a thin one it’s death. Take me, now! I’ve
+ got no strength left,” he added, with sudden resolution turning to the
+ sergeant major. “Tell them to send me to hospital; I’m aching all over;
+ anyway I shan’t be able to keep up.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’ll do, that’ll do!” replied the sergeant major quietly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The soldier said no more and the talk went on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What a lot of those Frenchies were taken today, and the fact is that not
+ one of them had what you might call real boots on,” said a soldier,
+ starting a new theme. “They were no more than make-believes.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The Cossacks have taken their boots. They were clearing the hut for the
+ colonel and carried them out. It was pitiful to see them, boys,” put in
+ the dancer. “As they turned them over one seemed still alive and, would
+ you believe it, he jabbered something in their lingo.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But they’re a clean folk, lads,” the first man went on; “he was white—as
+ white as birchbark—and some of them are such fine fellows, you might
+ think they were nobles.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what do you think? They make soldiers of all classes there.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But they don’t understand our talk at all,” said the dancer with a
+ puzzled smile. “I asked him whose subject he was, and he jabbered in his
+ own way. A queer lot!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But it’s strange, friends,” continued the man who had wondered at their
+ whiteness, “the peasants at Mozháysk were saying that when they began
+ burying the dead—where the battle was you know—well, those
+ dead had been lying there for nearly a month, and says the peasant, ‘they
+ lie as white as paper, clean, and not as much smell as a puff of powder
+ smoke.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Was it from the cold?” asked someone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’re a clever fellow! From the cold indeed! Why, it was hot. If it had
+ been from the cold, ours would not have rotted either. ‘But,’ he says, ‘go
+ up to ours and they are all rotten and maggoty. So,’ he says, ‘we tie our
+ faces up with kerchiefs and turn our heads away as we drag them off: we
+ can hardly do it. But theirs,’ he says, ‘are white as paper and not so
+ much smell as a whiff of gunpowder.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All were silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It must be from their food,” said the sergeant major. “They used to
+ gobble the same food as the gentry.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No one contradicted him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That peasant near Mozháysk where the battle was said the men were all
+ called up from ten villages around and they carted for twenty days and
+ still didn’t finish carting the dead away. And as for the wolves, he
+ says...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That was a real battle,” said an old soldier. “It’s the only one worth
+ remembering; but since that... it’s only been tormenting folk.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And do you know, Daddy, the day before yesterday we ran at them and, my
+ word, they didn’t let us get near before they just threw down their
+ muskets and went on their knees. ‘Pardon!’ they say. That’s only one case.
+ They say Plátov took ‘Poleon himself twice. But he didn’t know the right
+ charm. He catches him and catches him—no good! He turns into a bird
+ in his hands and flies away. And there’s no way of killing him either.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You’re a first-class liar, Kiselëv, when I come to look at you!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Liar, indeed! It’s the real truth.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If he fell into my hands, when I’d caught him I’d bury him in the ground
+ with an aspen stake to fix him down. What a lot of men he’s ruined!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, anyhow we’re going to end it. He won’t come here again,” remarked
+ the old soldier, yawning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The conversation flagged, and the soldiers began settling down to sleep.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Look at the stars. It’s wonderful how they shine! You would think the
+ women had spread out their linen,” said one of the men, gazing with
+ admiration at the Milky Way.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s a sign of a good harvest next year.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We shall want some more wood.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You warm your back and your belly gets frozen. That’s queer.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O Lord!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are you pushing for? Is the fire only for you? Look how he’s
+ sprawling!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the silence that ensued, the snoring of those who had fallen asleep
+ could be heard. Others turned over and warmed themselves, now and again
+ exchanging a few words. From a campfire a hundred paces off came a sound
+ of general, merry laughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Hark at them roaring there in the Fifth Company!” said one of the
+ soldiers, “and what a lot of them there are!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One of the men got up and went over to the Fifth Company.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They’re having such fun,” said he, coming back. “Two Frenchies have
+ turned up. One’s quite frozen and the other’s an awful swaggerer. He’s
+ singing songs....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, I’ll go across and have a look....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And several of the men went over to the Fifth Company.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ The Fifth company was bivouacking at the very edge of the forest. A huge
+ campfire was blazing brightly in the midst of the snow, lighting up the
+ branches of trees heavy with hoarfrost.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ About midnight they heard the sound of steps in the snow of the forest,
+ and the crackling of dry branches.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A bear, lads,” said one of the men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They all raised their heads to listen, and out of the forest into the
+ bright firelight stepped two strangely clad human figures clinging to one
+ another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These were two Frenchmen who had been hiding in the forest. They came up
+ to the fire, hoarsely uttering something in a language our soldiers did
+ not understand. One was taller than the other; he wore an officer’s hat
+ and seemed quite exhausted. On approaching the fire he had been going to
+ sit down, but fell. The other, a short sturdy soldier with a shawl tied
+ round his head, was stronger. He raised his companion and said something,
+ pointing to his mouth. The soldiers surrounded the Frenchmen, spread a
+ greatcoat on the ground for the sick man, and brought some buckwheat
+ porridge and vodka for both of them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The exhausted French officer was Ramballe and the man with his head
+ wrapped in the shawl was Morel, his orderly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Morel had drunk some vodka and finished his bowl of porridge he
+ suddenly became unnaturally merry and chattered incessantly to the
+ soldiers, who could not understand him. Ramballe refused food and resting
+ his head on his elbow lay silent beside the campfire, looking at the
+ Russian soldiers with red and vacant eyes. Occasionally he emitted a
+ long-drawn groan and then again became silent. Morel, pointing to his
+ shoulders, tried to impress on the soldiers the fact that Ramballe was an
+ officer and ought to be warmed. A Russian officer who had come up to the
+ fire sent to ask his colonel whether he would not take a French officer
+ into his hut to warm him, and when the messenger returned and said that
+ the colonel wished the officer to be brought to him, Ramballe was told to
+ go. He rose and tried to walk, but staggered and would have fallen had not
+ a soldier standing by held him up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You won’t do it again, eh?” said one of the soldiers, winking and turning
+ mockingly to Ramballe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, you fool! Why talk rubbish, lout that you are—a real peasant!”
+ came rebukes from all sides addressed to the jesting soldier.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They surrounded Ramballe, lifted him on the crossed arms of two soldiers,
+ and carried him to the hut. Ramballe put his arms around their necks while
+ they carried him and began wailing plaintively:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, you fine fellows, my kind, kind friends! These are men! Oh, my brave,
+ kind friends,” and he leaned his head against the shoulder of one of the
+ men like a child.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile Morel was sitting in the best place by the fire, surrounded by
+ the soldiers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Morel, a short sturdy Frenchman with inflamed and streaming eyes, was
+ wearing a woman’s cloak and had a shawl tied woman fashion round his head
+ over his cap. He was evidently tipsy, and was singing a French song in a
+ hoarse broken voice, with an arm thrown round the nearest soldier. The
+ soldiers simply held their sides as they watched him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now then, now then, teach us how it goes! I’ll soon pick it up. How is
+ it?” said the man—a singer and a wag—whom Morel was embracing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vive Henri Quatre! Vive ce roi valiant!” sang Morel,
+ winking. “Ce diable à quatre...” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “Long live Henry the Fourth, that valiant king! That rowdy
+ devil.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Vivarika! Vif-seruvaru! Sedyablyaka!” repeated the soldier, flourishing
+ his arm and really catching the tune.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Bravo! Ha, ha, ha!” rose their rough, joyous laughter from all sides.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Morel, wrinkling up his face, laughed too.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, go on, go on!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Qui eut le triple talent,
+
+ De boire, de battre,
+
+ Et d’être un vert galant.” *
+
+
+
+ 
+ * Who had a triple talent
+
+ For drinking, for fighting,
+
+ And for being a gallant old boy...
+
+
+
+ 
+ “It goes smoothly, too. Well, now, Zaletáev!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ke...” Zaletáev, brought out with effort: “ke-e-e-e,” he drawled,
+ laboriously pursing his lips, “le-trip-ta-la-de-bu-de-ba, e
+ de-tra-va-ga-la” he sang.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Fine! Just like the Frenchie! Oh, ho ho! Do you want some more to eat?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Give him some porridge: it takes a long time to get filled up after
+ starving.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They gave him some more porridge and Morel with a laugh set to work on his
+ third bowl. All the young soldiers smiled gaily as they watched him. The
+ older men, who thought it undignified to amuse themselves with such
+ nonsense, continued to lie at the opposite side of the fire, but one would
+ occasionally raise himself on an elbow and glance at Morel with a smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They are men too,” said one of them as he wrapped himself up in his coat.
+ “Even wormwood grows on its own root.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “O Lord, O Lord! How starry it is! Tremendous! That means a hard
+ frost....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They all grew silent. The stars, as if knowing that no one was looking at
+ them, began to disport themselves in the dark sky: now flaring up, now
+ vanishing, now trembling, they were busy whispering something gladsome and
+ mysterious to one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ The French army melted away at the uniform rate of a mathematical
+ progression; and that crossing of the Berëzina about which so much has
+ been written was only one intermediate stage in its destruction, and not
+ at all the decisive episode of the campaign. If so much has been and still
+ is written about the Berëzina, on the French side this is only because at
+ the broken bridge across that river the calamities their army had been
+ previously enduring were suddenly concentrated at one moment into a tragic
+ spectacle that remained in every memory, and on the Russian side merely
+ because in Petersburg—far from the seat of war—a plan (again
+ one of Pfuel’s) had been devised to catch Napoleon in a strategic trap at
+ the Berëzina River. Everyone assured himself that all would happen
+ according to plan, and therefore insisted that it was just the crossing of
+ the Berëzina that destroyed the French army. In reality the results of the
+ crossing were much less disastrous to the French—in guns and men
+ lost—than Krásnoe had been, as the figures show.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The sole importance of the crossing of the Berëzina lies in the fact that
+ it plainly and indubitably proved the fallacy of all the plans for cutting
+ off the enemy’s retreat and the soundness of the only possible line of
+ action—the one Kutúzov and the general mass of the army demanded—namely,
+ simply to follow the enemy up. The French crowd fled at a continually
+ increasing speed and all its energy was directed to reaching its goal. It
+ fled like a wounded animal and it was impossible to block its path. This
+ was shown not so much by the arrangements it made for crossing as by what
+ took place at the bridges. When the bridges broke down, unarmed soldiers,
+ people from Moscow and women with children who were with the French
+ transport, all—carried on by vis inertiæ —pressed forward into
+ boats and into the ice-covered water and did not surrender.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That impulse was reasonable. The condition of fugitives and of pursuers
+ was equally bad. As long as they remained with their own people each might
+ hope for help from his fellows and the definite place he held among them.
+ But those who surrendered, while remaining in the same pitiful plight,
+ would be on a lower level to claim a share in the necessities of life. The
+ French did not need to be informed of the fact that half the prisoners—with
+ whom the Russians did not know what to do—perished of cold and
+ hunger despite their captors’ desire to save them; they felt that it could
+ not be otherwise. The most compassionate Russian commanders, those
+ favorable to the French—and even the Frenchmen in the Russian
+ service—could do nothing for the prisoners. The French perished from
+ the conditions to which the Russian army was itself exposed. It was
+ impossible to take bread and clothes from our hungry and indispensable
+ soldiers to give to the French who, though not harmful, or hated, or
+ guilty, were simply unnecessary. Some Russians even did that, but they
+ were exceptions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Certain destruction lay behind the French but in front there was hope.
+ Their ships had been burned, there was no salvation save in collective
+ flight, and on that the whole strength of the French was concentrated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The farther they fled the more wretched became the plight of the remnant,
+ especially after the Berëzina, on which (in consequence of the Petersburg
+ plan) special hopes had been placed by the Russians, and the keener grew
+ the passions of the Russian commanders, who blamed one another and Kutúzov
+ most of all. Anticipation that the failure of the Petersburg Berëzina plan
+ would be attributed to Kutúzov led to dissatisfaction, contempt, and
+ ridicule, more and more strongly expressed. The ridicule and contempt were
+ of course expressed in a respectful form, making it impossible for him to
+ ask wherein he was to blame. They did not talk seriously to him; when
+ reporting to him or asking for his sanction they appeared to be fulfilling
+ a regrettable formality, but they winked behind his back and tried to
+ mislead him at every turn.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Because they could not understand him all these people assumed that it was
+ useless to talk to the old man; that he would never grasp the profundity
+ of their plans, that he would answer with his phrases (which they thought
+ were mere phrases) about a “golden bridge,” about the impossibility of
+ crossing the frontier with a crowd of tatterdemalions, and so forth. They
+ had heard all that before. And all he said—that it was necessary to
+ await provisions, or that the men had no boots—was so simple, while
+ what they proposed was so complicated and clever, that it was evident that
+ he was old and stupid and that they, though not in power, were commanders
+ of genius.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the junction with the army of the brilliant admiral and Petersburg
+ hero Wittgenstein, this mood and the gossip of the staff reached their
+ maximum. Kutúzov saw this and merely sighed and shrugged his shoulders.
+ Only once, after the affair of the Berëzina, did he get angry and write to
+ Bennigsen (who reported separately to the Emperor) the following letter:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “On account of your spells of ill health, will your excellency please be
+ so good as to set off for Kalúga on receipt of this, and there await
+ further commands and appointments from His Imperial Majesty.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But after Bennigsen’s departure, the Grand Duke Tsarévich Constantine
+ Pávlovich joined the army. He had taken part in the beginning of the
+ campaign but had subsequently been removed from the army by Kutúzov. Now
+ having come to the army, he informed Kutúzov of the Emperor’s displeasure
+ at the poor success of our forces and the slowness of their advance. The
+ Emperor intended to join the army personally in a few days’ time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old man, experienced in court as well as in military affairs—this
+ same Kutúzov who in August had been chosen commander in chief against the
+ sovereign’s wishes and who had removed the Grand Duke and heir-apparent
+ from the army—who on his own authority and contrary to the Emperor’s
+ will had decided on the abandonment of Moscow, now realized at once that
+ his day was over, that his part was played, and that the power he was
+ supposed to hold was no longer his. And he understood this not merely from
+ the attitude of the court. He saw on the one hand that the military
+ business in which he had played his part was ended and felt that his
+ mission was accomplished; and at the same time he began to be conscious of
+ the physical weariness of his aged body and of the necessity of physical
+ rest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the twenty-ninth of November Kutúzov entered Vílna—his “dear
+ Vílna” as he called it. Twice during his career Kutúzov had been governor
+ of Vílna. In that wealthy town, which had not been injured, he found old
+ friends and associations, besides the comforts of life of which he had so
+ long been deprived. And he suddenly turned from the cares of army and
+ state and, as far as the passions that seethed around him allowed,
+ immersed himself in the quiet life to which he had formerly been
+ accustomed, as if all that was taking place and all that had still to be
+ done in the realm of history did not concern him at all.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Chichagóv, one of the most zealous “cutters-off” and “breakers-up,” who
+ had first wanted to effect a diversion in Greece and then in Warsaw but
+ never wished to go where he was sent: Chichagóv, noted for the boldness
+ with which he spoke to the Emperor, and who considered Kutúzov to be under
+ an obligation to him because when he was sent to make peace with Turkey in
+ 1811 independently of Kutúzov, and found that peace had already been
+ concluded, he admitted to the Emperor that the merit of securing that
+ peace was really Kutúzov’s; this Chichagóv was the first to meet Kutúzov
+ at the castle where the latter was to stay. In undress naval uniform, with
+ a dirk, and holding his cap under his arm, he handed Kutúzov a garrison
+ report and the keys of the town. The contemptuously respectful attitude of
+ the younger men to the old man in his dotage was expressed in the highest
+ degree by the behavior of Chichagóv, who knew of the accusations that were
+ being directed against Kutúzov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When speaking to Chichagóv, Kutúzov incidentally mentioned that the
+ vehicles packed with china that had been captured from him at Borísov had
+ been recovered and would be restored to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You mean to imply that I have nothing to eat out of.... On the contrary,
+ I can supply you with everything even if you want to give dinner parties,”
+ warmly replied Chichagóv, who tried by every word he spoke to prove his
+ own rectitude and therefore imagined Kutúzov to be animated by the same
+ desire.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov, shrugging his shoulders, replied with his subtle penetrating
+ smile: “I meant merely to say what I said.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Contrary to the Emperor’s wish Kutúzov detained the greater part of the
+ army at Vílna. Those about him said that he became extraordinarily slack
+ and physically feeble during his stay in that town. He attended to army
+ affairs reluctantly, left everything to his generals, and while awaiting
+ the Emperor’s arrival led a dissipated life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having left Petersburg on the seventh of December with his suite—Count
+ Tolstóy, Prince Volkónski, Arakchéev, and others—the Emperor reached
+ Vílna on the eleventh, and in his traveling sleigh drove straight to the
+ castle. In spite of the severe frost some hundred generals and staff
+ officers in full parade uniform stood in front of the castle, as well as a
+ guard of honor of the Semënov regiment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A courier who galloped to the castle in advance, in a troyka with three
+ foam-flecked horses, shouted “Coming!” and Konovnítsyn rushed into the
+ vestibule to inform Kutúzov, who was waiting in the hall porter’s little
+ lodge.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A minute later the old man’s large stout figure in full-dress uniform, his
+ chest covered with orders and a scarf drawn round his stomach, waddled out
+ into the porch. He put on his hat with its peaks to the sides and, holding
+ his gloves in his hand and walking with an effort sideways down the steps
+ to the level of the street, took in his hand the report he had prepared
+ for the Emperor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was running to and fro and whispering; another troyka flew furiously
+ up, and then all eyes were turned on an approaching sleigh in which the
+ figures of the Emperor and Volkónski could already be descried.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the habit of fifty years all this had a physically agitating effect
+ on the old general. He carefully and hastily felt himself all over,
+ readjusted his hat, and pulling himself together drew himself up and, at
+ the very moment when the Emperor, having alighted from the sleigh, lifted
+ his eyes to him, handed him the report and began speaking in his smooth,
+ ingratiating voice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor with a rapid glance scanned Kutúzov from head to foot, frowned
+ for an instant, but immediately mastering himself went up to the old man,
+ extended his arms and embraced him. And this embrace too, owing to a
+ long-standing impression related to his innermost feelings, had its usual
+ effect on Kutúzov and he gave a sob.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor greeted the officers and the Semënov guard, and again pressing
+ the old man’s hand went with him into the castle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When alone with the field marshal the Emperor expressed his
+ dissatisfaction at the slowness of the pursuit and at the mistakes made at
+ Krásnoe and the Berëzina, and informed him of his intentions for a future
+ campaign abroad. Kutúzov made no rejoinder or remark. The same submissive,
+ expressionless look with which he had listened to the Emperor’s commands
+ on the field of Austerlitz seven years before settled on his face now.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Kutúzov came out of the study and with lowered head was crossing the
+ ballroom with his heavy waddling gait, he was arrested by someone’s voice
+ saying:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Your Serene Highness!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov raised his head and looked for a long while into the eyes of Count
+ Tolstóy, who stood before him holding a silver salver on which lay a small
+ object. Kutúzov seemed not to understand what was expected of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly he seemed to remember; a scarcely perceptible smile flashed
+ across his puffy face, and bowing low and respectfully he took the object
+ that lay on the salver. It was the Order of St. George of the First Class.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ Next day the field marshal gave a dinner and ball which the Emperor
+ honored by his presence. Kutúzov had received the Order of St. George of
+ the First Class and the Emperor showed him the highest honors, but
+ everyone knew of the imperial dissatisfaction with him. The proprieties
+ were observed and the Emperor was the first to set that example, but
+ everybody understood that the old man was blameworthy and
+ good-for-nothing. When Kutúzov, conforming to a custom of Catherine’s day,
+ ordered the standards that had been captured to be lowered at the
+ Emperor’s feet on his entering the ballroom, the Emperor made a wry face
+ and muttered something in which some people caught the words, “the old
+ comedian.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Emperor’s displeasure with Kutúzov was specially increased at Vílna by
+ the fact that Kutúzov evidently could not or would not understand the
+ importance of the coming campaign.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When on the following morning the Emperor said to the officers assembled
+ about him: “You have not only saved Russia, you have saved Europe!” they
+ all understood that the war was not ended.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov alone would not see this and openly expressed his opinion that no
+ fresh war could improve the position or add to the glory of Russia, but
+ could only spoil and lower the glorious position that Russia had gained.
+ He tried to prove to the Emperor the impossibility of levying fresh
+ troops, spoke of the hardships already endured by the people, of the
+ possibility of failure and so forth.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This being the field marshal’s frame of mind he was naturally regarded as
+ merely a hindrance and obstacle to the impending war.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To avoid unpleasant encounters with the old man, the natural method was to
+ do what had been done with him at Austerlitz and with Barclay at the
+ beginning of the Russian campaign—to transfer the authority to the
+ Emperor himself, thus cutting the ground from under the commander in
+ chief’s feet without upsetting the old man by informing him of the change.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With this object his staff was gradually reconstructed and its real
+ strength removed and transferred to the Emperor. Toll, Konovnítsyn, and
+ Ermólov received fresh appointments. Everyone spoke loudly of the field
+ marshal’s great weakness and failing health.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His health had to be bad for his place to be taken away and given to
+ another. And in fact his health was poor.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So naturally, simply, and gradually—just as he had come from Turkey
+ to the Treasury in Petersburg to recruit the militia, and then to the army
+ when he was needed there—now when his part was played out, Kutúzov’s
+ place was taken by a new and necessary performer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The war of 1812, besides its national significance dear to every Russian
+ heart, was now to assume another, a European, significance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The movement of peoples from west to east was to be succeeded by a
+ movement of peoples from east to west, and for this fresh war another
+ leader was necessary, having qualities and views differing from Kutúzov’s
+ and animated by different motives.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alexander I was as necessary for the movement of the peoples from east to
+ west and for the refixing of national frontiers as Kutúzov had been for
+ the salvation and glory of Russia.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Kutúzov did not understand what Europe, the balance of power, or Napoleon
+ meant. He could not understand it. For the representative of the Russian
+ people, after the enemy had been destroyed and Russia had been liberated
+ and raised to the summit of her glory, there was nothing left to do as a
+ Russian. Nothing remained for the representative of the national war but
+ to die, and Kutúzov died.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ As generally happens, Pierre did not feel the full effects of the physical
+ privation and strain he had suffered as prisoner until after they were
+ over. After his liberation he reached Orël, and on the third day there,
+ when preparing to go to Kiev, he fell ill and was laid up for three
+ months. He had what the doctors termed “bilious fever.” But despite the
+ fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to
+ drink, he recovered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Scarcely any impression was left on Pierre’s mind by all that happened to
+ him from the time of his rescue till his illness. He remembered only the
+ dull gray weather now rainy and now snowy, internal physical distress, and
+ pains in his feet and side. He remembered a general impression of the
+ misfortunes and sufferings of people and of being worried by the curiosity
+ of officers and generals who questioned him, he also remembered his
+ difficulty in procuring a conveyance and horses, and above all he
+ remembered his incapacity to think and feel all that time. On the day of
+ his rescue he had seen the body of Pétya Rostóv. That same day he had
+ learned that Prince Andrew, after surviving the battle of Borodinó for
+ more than a month had recently died in the Rostóvs’ house at Yaroslávl,
+ and Denísov who told him this news also mentioned Hélène’s death,
+ supposing that Pierre had heard of it long before. All this at the time
+ seemed merely strange to Pierre: he felt he could not grasp its
+ significance. Just then he was only anxious to get away as quickly as
+ possible from places where people were killing one another, to some
+ peaceful refuge where he could recover himself, rest, and think over all
+ the strange new facts he had learned; but on reaching Orël he immediately
+ fell ill. When he came to himself after his illness he saw in attendance
+ on him two of his servants, Terénty and Váska, who had come from Moscow;
+ and also his cousin the eldest princess, who had been living on his estate
+ at Eléts and hearing of his rescue and illness had come to look after him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was only gradually during his convalescence that Pierre lost the
+ impressions he had become accustomed to during the last few months and got
+ used to the idea that no one would oblige him to go anywhere tomorrow,
+ that no one would deprive him of his warm bed, and that he would be sure
+ to get his dinner, tea, and supper. But for a long time in his dreams he
+ still saw himself in the conditions of captivity. In the same way little
+ by little he came to understand the news he had been told after his
+ rescue, about the death of Prince Andrew, the death of his wife, and the
+ destruction of the French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A joyous feeling of freedom—that complete inalienable freedom
+ natural to man which he had first experienced at the first halt outside
+ Moscow—filled Pierre’s soul during his convalescence. He was
+ surprised to find that this inner freedom, which was independent of
+ external conditions, now had as it were an additional setting of external
+ liberty. He was alone in a strange town, without acquaintances. No one
+ demanded anything of him or sent him anywhere. He had all he wanted: the
+ thought of his wife which had been a continual torment to him was no
+ longer there, since she was no more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, how good! How splendid!” said he to himself when a cleanly laid table
+ was moved up to him with savory beef tea, or when he lay down for the
+ night on a soft clean bed, or when he remembered that the French had gone
+ and that his wife was no more. “Oh, how good, how splendid!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And by old habit he asked himself the question: “Well, and what then? What
+ am I going to do?” And he immediately gave himself the answer: “Well, I
+ shall live. Ah, how splendid!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The very question that had formerly tormented him, the thing he had
+ continually sought to find—the aim of life—no longer existed
+ for him now. That search for the aim of life had not merely disappeared
+ temporarily—he felt that it no longer existed for him and could not
+ present itself again. And this very absence of an aim gave him the
+ complete, joyous sense of freedom which constituted his happiness at this
+ time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He could not see an aim, for he now had faith—not faith in any kind
+ of rule, or words, or ideas, but faith in an ever-living, ever-manifest
+ God. Formerly he had sought Him in aims he set himself. That search for an
+ aim had been simply a search for God, and suddenly in his captivity he had
+ learned not by words or reasoning but by direct feeling what his nurse had
+ told him long ago: that God is here and everywhere. In his captivity he
+ had learned that in Karatáev God was greater, more infinite and
+ unfathomable than in the Architect of the Universe recognized by the
+ Freemasons. He felt like a man who after straining his eyes to see into
+ the far distance finds what he sought at his very feet. All his life he
+ had looked over the heads of the men around him, when he should have
+ merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the past he had never been able to find that great inscrutable infinite
+ something . He had only felt that it must exist somewhere and had looked
+ for it. In everything near and comprehensible he had seen only what was
+ limited, petty, commonplace, and senseless. He had equipped himself with a
+ mental telescope and looked into remote space, where petty worldliness
+ hiding itself in misty distance had seemed to him great and infinite
+ merely because it was not clearly seen. And such had European life,
+ politics, Freemasonry, philosophy, and philanthropy seemed to him. But
+ even then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted them, his mind had
+ penetrated to those distances and he had there seen the same pettiness,
+ worldliness, and senselessness. Now, however, he had learned to see the
+ great, eternal, and infinite in everything, and therefore—to see it
+ and enjoy its contemplation—he naturally threw away the telescope
+ through which he had till now gazed over men’s heads, and gladly regarded
+ the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around
+ him. And the closer he looked the more tranquil and happy he became. That
+ dreadful question, “What for?” which had formerly destroyed all his mental
+ edifices, no longer existed for him. To that question, “What for?” a
+ simple answer was now always ready in his soul: “Because there is a God,
+ that God without whose will not one hair falls from a man’s head.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ In external ways Pierre had hardly changed at all. In appearance he was
+ just what he used to be. As before he was absent-minded and seemed
+ occupied not with what was before his eyes but with something special of
+ his own. The difference between his former and present self was that
+ formerly when he did not grasp what lay before him or was said to him, he
+ had puckered his forehead painfully as if vainly seeking to distinguish
+ something at a distance. At present he still forgot what was said to him
+ and still did not see what was before his eyes, but he now looked with a
+ scarcely perceptible and seemingly ironic smile at what was before him and
+ listened to what was said, though evidently seeing and hearing something
+ quite different. Formerly he had appeared to be a kindhearted but unhappy
+ man, and so people had been inclined to avoid him. Now a smile at the joy
+ of life always played round his lips, and sympathy for others shone in
+ his eyes with a questioning look as to whether they were as contented as
+ he was, and people felt pleased by his presence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Previously he had talked a great deal, grew excited when he talked, and
+ seldom listened; now he was seldom carried away in conversation and knew
+ how to listen so that people readily told him their most intimate secrets.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess, who had never liked Pierre and had been particularly hostile
+ to him since she had felt herself under obligations to him after the old
+ count’s death, now after staying a short time in Orël—where she had
+ come intending to show Pierre that in spite of his ingratitude she
+ considered it her duty to nurse him—felt to her surprise and
+ vexation that she had become fond of him. Pierre did not in any way seek
+ her approval, he merely studied her with interest. Formerly she had felt
+ that he regarded her with indifference and irony, and so had shrunk into
+ herself as she did with others and had shown him only the combative side
+ of her nature; but now he seemed to be trying to understand the most
+ intimate places of her heart, and, mistrustfully at first but afterwards
+ gratefully, she let him see the hidden, kindly sides of her character.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The most cunning man could not have crept into her confidence more
+ successfully, evoking memories of the best times of her youth and showing
+ sympathy with them. Yet Pierre’s cunning consisted simply in finding
+ pleasure in drawing out the human qualities of the embittered, hard, and
+ (in her own way) proud princess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, he is a very, very kind man when he is not under the influence of
+ bad people but of people such as myself,” thought she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His servants too—Terénty and Váska—in their own way noticed
+ the change that had taken place in Pierre. They considered that he had
+ become much “simpler.” Terénty, when he had helped him undress and wished
+ him good night, often lingered with his master’s boots in his hands and
+ clothes over his arm, to see whether he would not start a talk. And
+ Pierre, noticing that Terénty wanted a chat, generally kept him there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, tell me... now, how did you get food?” he would ask.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Terénty would begin talking of the destruction of Moscow, and of the
+ old count, and would stand for a long time holding the clothes and
+ talking, or sometimes listening to Pierre’s stories, and then would go out
+ into the hall with a pleasant sense of intimacy with his master and
+ affection for him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The doctor who attended Pierre and visited him every day, though he
+ considered it his duty as a doctor to pose as a man whose every moment was
+ of value to suffering humanity, would sit for hours with Pierre telling
+ him his favorite anecdotes and his observations on the characters of his
+ patients in general, and especially of the ladies.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s a pleasure to talk to a man like that; he is not like our
+ provincials,” he would say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There were several prisoners from the French army in Orël, and the doctor
+ brought one of them, a young Italian, to see Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This officer began visiting Pierre, and the princess used to make fun of
+ the tenderness the Italian expressed for him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Italian seemed happy only when he could come to see Pierre, talk with
+ him, tell him about his past, his life at home, and his love, and pour out
+ to him his indignation against the French and especially against Napoleon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If all Russians are in the least like you, it is sacrilege to fight such
+ a nation,” he said to Pierre. “You, who have suffered so from the French,
+ do not even feel animosity toward them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre had evoked the passionate affection of the Italian merely by
+ evoking the best side of his nature and taking a pleasure in so doing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the last days of Pierre’s stay in Orël his old Masonic acquaintance
+ Count Willarski, who had introduced him to the lodge in 1807, came to see
+ him. Willarski was married to a Russian heiress who had a large estate in
+ Orël province, and he occupied a temporary post in the commissariat
+ department in that town.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Hearing that Bezúkhov was in Orël, Willarski, though they had never been
+ intimate, came to him with the professions of friendship and intimacy that
+ people who meet in a desert generally express for one another. Willarski
+ felt dull in Orël and was pleased to meet a man of his own circle and, as
+ he supposed, of similar interests.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But to his surprise Willarski soon noticed that Pierre had lagged much
+ behind the times, and had sunk, as he expressed it to himself, into apathy
+ and egotism.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are letting yourself go, my dear fellow,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But for all that Willarski found it pleasanter now than it had been
+ formerly to be with Pierre, and came to see him every day. To Pierre as he
+ looked at and listened to Willarski, it seemed strange to think that he
+ had been like that himself but a short time before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Willarski was a married man with a family, busy with his family affairs,
+ his wife’s affairs, and his official duties. He regarded all these
+ occupations as hindrances to life, and considered that they were all
+ contemptible because their aim was the welfare of himself and his family.
+ Military, administrative, political, and Masonic interests continually
+ absorbed his attention. And Pierre, without trying to change the other’s
+ views and without condemning him, but with the quiet, joyful, and amused
+ smile now habitual to him, was interested in this strange though very
+ familiar phenomenon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There was a new feature in Pierre’s relations with Willarski, with the
+ princess, with the doctor, and with all the people he now met, which
+ gained for him the general good will. This was his acknowledgment of the
+ impossibility of changing a man’s convictions by words, and his
+ recognition of the possibility of everyone thinking, feeling, and seeing
+ things each from his own point of view. This legitimate peculiarity of
+ each individual which used to excite and irritate Pierre now became a
+ basis of the sympathy he felt for, and the interest he took in, other
+ people. The difference, and sometimes complete contradiction, between
+ men’s opinions and their lives, and between one man and another, pleased
+ him and drew from him an amused and gentle smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In practical matters Pierre unexpectedly felt within himself a center of
+ gravity he had previously lacked. Formerly all pecuniary questions,
+ especially requests for money to which, as an extremely wealthy man, he
+ was very exposed, produced in him a state of hopeless agitation and
+ perplexity. “To give or not to give?” he had asked himself. “I have it and
+ he needs it. But someone else needs it still more. Who needs it most? And
+ perhaps they are both impostors?” In the old days he had been unable to
+ find a way out of all these surmises and had given to all who asked as
+ long as he had anything to give. Formerly he had been in a similar state
+ of perplexity with regard to every question concerning his property, when
+ one person advised one thing and another something else.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Now to his surprise he found that he no longer felt either doubt or
+ perplexity about these questions. There was now within him a judge who by
+ some rule unknown to him decided what should or should not be done.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was as indifferent as heretofore to money matters, but now he felt
+ certain of what ought and what ought not to be done. The first time he had
+ recourse to his new judge was when a French prisoner, a colonel, came to
+ him and, after talking a great deal about his exploits, concluded by
+ making what amounted to a demand that Pierre should give him four thousand
+ francs to send to his wife and children. Pierre refused without the least
+ difficulty or effort, and was afterwards surprised how simple and easy had
+ been what used to appear so insurmountably difficult. At the same time
+ that he refused the colonel’s demand he made up his mind that he must have
+ recourse to artifice when leaving Orël, to induce the Italian officer to
+ accept some money of which he was evidently in need. A further proof to
+ Pierre of his own more settled outlook on practical matters was furnished
+ by his decision with regard to his wife’s debts and to the rebuilding of
+ his houses in and near Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His head steward came to him at Orël and Pierre reckoned up with him his
+ diminished income. The burning of Moscow had cost him, according to the
+ head steward’s calculation, about two million rubles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To console Pierre for these losses the head steward gave him an estimate
+ showing that despite these losses his income would not be diminished but
+ would even be increased if he refused to pay his wife’s debts which he was
+ under no obligation to meet, and did not rebuild his Moscow house and the
+ country house on his Moscow estate, which had cost him eighty thousand
+ rubles a year and brought in nothing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, of course that’s true,” said Pierre with a cheerful smile. “I don’t
+ need all that at all. By being ruined I have become much richer.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But in January Savélich came from Moscow and gave him an account of the
+ state of things there, and spoke of the estimate an architect had made of
+ the cost of rebuilding the town and country houses, speaking of this as of
+ a settled matter. About the same time he received letters from Prince
+ Vasíli and other Petersburg acquaintances speaking of his wife’s debts.
+ And Pierre decided that the steward’s proposals which had so pleased him
+ were wrong and that he must go to Petersburg and settle his wife’s affairs
+ and must rebuild in Moscow. Why this was necessary he did not know, but he
+ knew for certain that it was necessary. His income would be reduced by
+ three fourths, but he felt it must be done.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Willarski was going to Moscow and they agreed to travel together.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the whole time of his convalescence in Orël Pierre had experienced
+ a feeling of joy, freedom, and life; but when during his journey he found
+ himself in the open world and saw hundreds of new faces, that feeling was
+ intensified. Throughout his journey he felt like a schoolboy on holiday.
+ Everyone—the stagecoach driver, the post-house overseers, the
+ peasants on the roads and in the villages—had a new significance for
+ him. The presence and remarks of Willarski who continually deplored the
+ ignorance and poverty of Russia and its backwardness compared with Europe
+ only heightened Pierre’s pleasure. Where Willarski saw deadness Pierre saw
+ an extraordinary strength and vitality—the strength which in that
+ vast space amid the snows maintained the life of this original, peculiar,
+ and unique people. He did not contradict Willarski and even seemed to
+ agree with him—an apparent agreement being the simplest way to avoid
+ discussions that could lead to nothing—and he smiled joyfully as he
+ listened to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV
+ 
+ 
+ It would be difficult to explain why and whither ants whose heap has been
+ destroyed are hurrying: some from the heap dragging bits of rubbish,
+ larvae, and corpses, others back to the heap, or why they jostle, overtake
+ one another, and fight, and it would be equally difficult to explain what
+ caused the Russians after the departure of the French to throng to the
+ place that had formerly been Moscow. But when we watch the ants round
+ their ruined heap, the tenacity, energy, and immense number of the delving
+ insects prove that despite the destruction of the heap, something
+ indestructible, which though intangible is the real strength of the
+ colony, still exists; and similarly, though in Moscow in the month of
+ October there was no government and no churches, shrines, riches, or
+ houses—it was still the Moscow it had been in August. All was
+ destroyed, except something intangible yet powerful and indestructible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The motives of those who thronged from all sides to Moscow after it had
+ been cleared of the enemy were most diverse and personal, and at first for
+ the most part savage and brutal. One motive only they all had in common: a
+ desire to get to the place that had been called Moscow, to apply their
+ activities there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Within a week Moscow already had fifteen thousand inhabitants, in a
+ fortnight twenty-five thousand, and so on. By the autumn of 1813 the
+ number, ever increasing and increasing, exceeded what it had been in 1812.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The first Russians to enter Moscow were the Cossacks of Wintzingerode’s
+ detachment, peasants from the adjacent villages, and residents who had
+ fled from Moscow and had been hiding in its vicinity. The Russians who
+ entered Moscow, finding it plundered, plundered it in their turn. They
+ continued what the French had begun. Trains of peasant carts came to
+ Moscow to carry off to the villages what had been abandoned in the ruined
+ houses and the streets. The Cossacks carried off what they could to their
+ camps, and the householders seized all they could find in other houses and
+ moved it to their own, pretending that it was their property.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the first plunderers were followed by a second and a third contingent,
+ and with increasing numbers plundering became more and more difficult and
+ assumed more definite forms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The French found Moscow abandoned but with all the organizations of
+ regular life, with diverse branches of commerce and craftsmanship, with
+ luxury, and governmental and religious institutions. These forms were
+ lifeless but still existed. There were bazaars, shops, warehouses, market
+ stalls, granaries—for the most part still stocked with goods—and
+ there were factories and workshops, palaces and wealthy houses filled with
+ luxuries, hospitals, prisons, government offices, churches, and
+ cathedrals. The longer the French remained the more these forms of town
+ life perished, until finally all was merged into one confused, lifeless
+ scene of plunder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The more the plundering by the French continued, the more both the wealth
+ of Moscow and the strength of its plunderers was destroyed. But plundering
+ by the Russians, with which the reoccupation of the city began, had an
+ opposite effect: the longer it continued and the greater the number of
+ people taking part in it the more rapidly was the wealth of the city and
+ its regular life restored.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Besides the plunderers, very various people, some drawn by curiosity, some
+ by official duties, some by self-interest—house owners, clergy,
+ officials of all kinds, tradesmen, artisans, and peasants—streamed
+ into Moscow as blood flows to the heart.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Within a week the peasants who came with empty carts to carry off plunder
+ were stopped by the authorities and made to cart the corpses out of the
+ town. Other peasants, having heard of their comrades’ discomfiture, came
+ to town bringing rye, oats, and hay, and beat down one another’s prices to
+ below what they had been in former days. Gangs of carpenters hoping for
+ high pay arrived in Moscow every day, and on all sides logs were being
+ hewn, new houses built, and old, charred ones repaired. Tradesmen began
+ trading in booths. Cookshops and taverns were opened in partially burned
+ houses. The clergy resumed the services in many churches that had not been
+ burned. Donors contributed Church property that had been stolen.
+ Government clerks set up their baize-covered tables and their pigeonholes
+ of documents in small rooms. The higher authorities and the police
+ organized the distribution of goods left behind by the French. The owners
+ of houses in which much property had been left, brought there from other
+ houses, complained of the injustice of taking everything to the Faceted
+ Palace in the Krémlin; others insisted that as the French had gathered
+ things from different houses into this or that house, it would be unfair
+ to allow its owner to keep all that was found there. They abused the
+ police and bribed them, made out estimates at ten times their value for
+ government stores that had perished in the fire, and demanded relief. And
+ Count Rostopchín wrote proclamations.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV
+ 
+ 
+ At the end of January Pierre went to Moscow and stayed in an annex of his
+ house which had not been burned. He called on Count Rostopchín and on some
+ acquaintances who were back in Moscow, and he intended to leave for
+ Petersburg two days later. Everybody was celebrating the victory,
+ everything was bubbling with life in the ruined but reviving city.
+ Everyone was pleased to see Pierre, everyone wished to meet him, and
+ everyone questioned him about what he had seen. Pierre felt particularly
+ well disposed toward them all, but was now instinctively on his guard for
+ fear of binding himself in any way. To all questions put to him—whether
+ important or quite trifling—such as: Where would he live? Was he
+ going to rebuild? When was he going to Petersburg and would he mind taking
+ a parcel for someone?—he replied: “Yes, perhaps,” or, “I think so,”
+ and so on.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He had heard that the Rostóvs were at Kostromá but the thought of Natásha
+ seldom occurred to him. If it did it was only as a pleasant memory of the
+ distant past. He felt himself not only free from social obligations but
+ also from that feeling which, it seemed to him, he had aroused in himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the third day after his arrival he heard from the Drubetskóys that
+ Princess Mary was in Moscow. The death, sufferings, and last days of
+ Prince Andrew had often occupied Pierre’s thoughts and now recurred to him
+ with fresh vividness. Having heard at dinner that Princess Mary was in
+ Moscow and living in her house—which had not been burned—in
+ Vozdvízhenka Street, he drove that same evening to see her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On his way to the house Pierre kept thinking of Prince Andrew, of their
+ friendship, of his various meetings with him, and especially of the last
+ one at Borodinó.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is it possible that he died in the bitter frame of mind he was then in?
+ Is it possible that the meaning of life was not disclosed to him before he
+ died?” thought Pierre. He recalled Karatáev and his death and
+ involuntarily began to compare these two men, so different, and yet so
+ similar in that they had both lived and both died and in the love he felt
+ for both of them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre drove up to the house of the old prince in a most serious mood. The
+ house had escaped the fire; it showed signs of damage but its general
+ aspect was unchanged. The old footman, who met Pierre with a stern face as
+ if wishing to make the visitor feel that the absence of the old prince had
+ not disturbed the order of things in the house, informed him that the
+ princess had gone to her own apartments, and that she received on Sundays.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Announce me. Perhaps she will see me,” said Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, sir,” said the man. “Please step into the portrait gallery.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A few minutes later the footman returned with Dessalles, who brought word
+ from the princess that she would be very glad to see Pierre if he would
+ excuse her want of ceremony and come upstairs to her apartment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In a rather low room lit by one candle sat the princess and with her
+ another person dressed in black. Pierre remembered that the princess
+ always had lady companions, but who they were and what they were like he
+ never knew or remembered. “This must be one of her companions,” he
+ thought, glancing at the lady in the black dress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess rose quickly to meet him and held out her hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” she said, looking at his altered face after he had kissed her hand,
+ “so this is how we meet again. He spoke of you even at the very last,” she
+ went on, turning her eyes from Pierre to her companion with a shyness that
+ surprised him for an instant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I was so glad to hear of your safety. It was the first piece of good news
+ we had received for a long time.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Again the princess glanced round at her companion with even more
+ uneasiness in her manner and was about to add something, but Pierre
+ interrupted her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Just imagine—I knew nothing about him!” said he. “I thought he had
+ been killed. All I know I heard at second hand from others. I only know
+ that he fell in with the Rostóvs.... What a strange coincidence!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre spoke rapidly and with animation. He glanced once at the
+ companion’s face, saw her attentive and kindly gaze fixed on him, and, as
+ often happens when one is talking, felt somehow that this companion in the
+ black dress was a good, kind, excellent creature who would not hinder his
+ conversing freely with Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But when he mentioned the Rostóvs, Princess Mary’s face expressed still
+ greater embarrassment. She again glanced rapidly from Pierre’s face to
+ that of the lady in the black dress and said:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you really not recognize her?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked again at the companion’s pale, delicate face with its black
+ eyes and peculiar mouth, and something near to him, long forgotten and
+ more than sweet, looked at him from those attentive eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But no, it can’t be!” he thought. “This stern, thin, pale face that looks
+ so much older! It cannot be she. It merely reminds me of her.” But at that
+ moment Princess Mary said, “Natásha!” And with difficulty, effort, and
+ stress, like the opening of a door grown rusty on its hinges, a smile
+ appeared on the face with the attentive eyes, and from that opening door
+ came a breath of fragrance which suffused Pierre with a happiness he had
+ long forgotten and of which he had not even been thinking—especially
+ at that moment. It suffused him, seized him, and enveloped him completely.
+ When she smiled doubt was no longer possible, it was Natásha and he loved
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment Pierre involuntarily betrayed to her, to Princess Mary, and
+ above all to himself, a secret of which he himself had been unaware. He
+ flushed joyfully yet with painful distress. He tried to hide his
+ agitation. But the more he tried to hide it the more clearly—clearer
+ than any words could have done—did he betray to himself, to her, and
+ to Princess Mary that he loved her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, it’s only the unexpectedness of it,” thought Pierre. But as soon as
+ he tried to continue the conversation he had begun with Princess Mary he
+ again glanced at Natásha, and a still-deeper flush suffused his face and a
+ still-stronger agitation of mingled joy and fear seized his soul. He
+ became confused in his speech and stopped in the middle of what he was
+ saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre had failed to notice Natásha because he did not at all expect to
+ see her there, but he had failed to recognize her because the change in
+ her since he last saw her was immense. She had grown thin and pale, but
+ that was not what made her unrecognizable; she was unrecognizable at the
+ moment he entered because on that face whose eyes had always shone with a
+ suppressed smile of the joy of life, now when he first entered and glanced
+ at her there was not the least shadow of a smile: only her eyes were
+ kindly attentive and sadly interrogative.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre’s confusion was not reflected by any confusion on Natásha’s part,
+ but only by the pleasure that just perceptibly lit up her whole face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI
+ 
+ 
+ “She has come to stay with me,” said Princess Mary. “The count and
+ countess will be here in a few days. The countess is in a dreadful state;
+ but it was necessary for Natásha herself to see a doctor. They insisted on
+ her coming with me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, is there a family free from sorrow now?” said Pierre, addressing
+ Natásha. “You know it happened the very day we were rescued. I saw him.
+ What a delightful boy he was!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha looked at him, and by way of answer to his words her eyes widened
+ and lit up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What can one say or think of as a consolation?” said Pierre. “Nothing!
+ Why had such a splendid boy, so full of life, to die?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, in these days it would be hard to live without faith...” remarked
+ Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, that is really true,” Pierre hastily interrupted her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why is it true?” Natásha asked, looking attentively into Pierre’s eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How can you ask why?” said Princess Mary. “The thought alone of what
+ awaits...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha without waiting for Princess Mary to finish again looked
+ inquiringly at Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And because,” Pierre continued, “only one who believes that there is a
+ God ruling us can bear a loss such as hers and... yours.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha had already opened her mouth to speak but suddenly stopped. Pierre
+ hurriedly turned away from her and again addressed Princess Mary, asking
+ about his friend’s last days.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre’s confusion had now almost vanished, but at the same time he felt
+ that his freedom had also completely gone. He felt that there was now a
+ judge of his every word and action whose judgment mattered more to him
+ than that of all the rest of the world. As he spoke now he was considering
+ what impression his words would make on Natásha. He did not purposely say
+ things to please her, but whatever he was saying he regarded from her
+ standpoint.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary—reluctantly as is usual in such cases—began
+ telling of the condition in which she had found Prince Andrew. But
+ Pierre’s face quivering with emotion, his questions and his eager restless
+ expression, gradually compelled her to go into details which she feared to
+ recall for her own sake.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, and so...?” Pierre kept saying as he leaned toward her with his
+ whole body and eagerly listened to her story. “Yes, yes... so he grew
+ tranquil and softened? With all his soul he had always sought one thing—to
+ be perfectly good—so he could not be afraid of death. The faults he
+ had—if he had any—were not of his making. So he did soften?...
+ What a happy thing that he saw you again,” he added, suddenly turning to
+ Natásha and looking at her with eyes full of tears.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha’s face twitched. She frowned and lowered her eyes for a moment.
+ She hesitated for an instant whether to speak or not.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, that was happiness,” she then said in her quiet voice with its deep
+ chest notes. “For me it certainly was happiness.” She paused. “And he...
+ he... he said he was wishing for it at the very moment I entered the
+ room....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha’s voice broke. She blushed, pressed her clasped hands on her
+ knees, and then controlling herself with an evident effort lifted her head
+ and began to speak rapidly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We knew nothing of it when we started from Moscow. I did not dare to ask
+ about him. Then suddenly Sónya told me he was traveling with us. I had no
+ idea and could not imagine what state he was in, all I wanted was to see
+ him and be with him,” she said, trembling, and breathing quickly.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And not letting them interrupt her she went on to tell what she had never
+ yet mentioned to anyone—all she had lived through during those three
+ weeks of their journey and life at Yaroslávl.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre listened to her with lips parted and eyes fixed upon her full of
+ tears. As he listened he did not think of Prince Andrew, nor of death, nor
+ of what she was telling. He listened to her and felt only pity for her,
+ for what she was suffering now while she was speaking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary, frowning in her effort to hold back her tears, sat beside
+ Natásha, and heard for the first time the story of those last days of her
+ brother’s and Natásha’s love.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Evidently Natásha needed to tell that painful yet joyful tale.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She spoke, mingling most trifling details with the intimate secrets of her
+ soul, and it seemed as if she could never finish. Several times she
+ repeated the same thing twice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Dessalles’ voice was heard outside the door asking whether little Nicholas
+ might come in to say good night.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, that’s all—everything,” said Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She got up quickly just as Nicholas entered, almost ran to the door which
+ was hidden by curtains, struck her head against it, and rushed from the
+ room with a moan either of pain or sorrow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre gazed at the door through which she had disappeared and did not
+ understand why he suddenly felt all alone in the world.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary roused him from his abstraction by drawing his attention to
+ her nephew who had entered the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment of emotional tenderness young Nicholas’ face, which
+ resembled his father’s, affected Pierre so much that when he had kissed
+ the boy he got up quickly, took out his handkerchief, and went to the
+ window. He wished to take leave of Princess Mary, but she would not let
+ him go.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Natásha and I sometimes don’t go to sleep till after two, so please
+ don’t go. I will order supper. Go downstairs, we will come immediately.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before Pierre left the room Princess Mary told him: “This is the first
+ time she has talked of him like that.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVII
+ 
+ 
+ Pierre was shown into the large, brightly lit dining room; a few minutes
+ later he heard footsteps and Princess Mary entered with Natásha. Natásha
+ was calm, though a severe and grave expression had again settled on her
+ face. They all three of them now experienced that feeling of awkwardness
+ which usually follows after a serious and heartfelt talk. It is impossible
+ to go back to the same conversation, to talk of trifles is awkward, and
+ yet the desire to speak is there and silence seems like affectation. They
+ went silently to table. The footmen drew back the chairs and pushed them
+ up again. Pierre unfolded his cold table napkin and, resolving to break
+ the silence, looked at Natásha and at Princess Mary. They had evidently
+ both formed the same resolution; the eyes of both shone with satisfaction
+ and a confession that besides sorrow life also has joy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you take vodka, Count?” asked Princess Mary, and those words suddenly
+ banished the shadows of the past. “Now tell us about yourself,” said she.
+ “One hears such improbable wonders about you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” replied Pierre with the smile of mild irony now habitual to him.
+ “They even tell me wonders I myself never dreamed of! Mary Abrámovna
+ invited me to her house and kept telling me what had happened, or ought to
+ have happened, to me. Stepán Stepánych also instructed me how I ought to
+ tell of my experiences. In general I have noticed that it is very easy to
+ be an interesting man (I am an interesting man now); people invite me out
+ and tell me all about myself.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha smiled and was on the point of speaking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “We have been told,” Princess Mary interrupted her, “that you lost two
+ millions in Moscow. Is that true?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I am three times as rich as before,” returned Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though the position was now altered by his decision to pay his wife’s
+ debts and to rebuild his houses, Pierre still maintained that he had
+ become three times as rich as before.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What I have certainly gained is freedom,” he began seriously, but did not
+ continue, noticing that this theme was too egotistic.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And are you building?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes. Savélich says I must!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Tell me, you did not know of the countess’ death when you decided to
+ remain in Moscow?” asked Princess Mary and immediately blushed, noticing
+ that her question, following his mention of freedom, ascribed to his words
+ a meaning he had perhaps not intended.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No,” answered Pierre, evidently not considering awkward the meaning
+ Princess Mary had given to his words. “I heard of it in Orël and you
+ cannot imagine how it shocked me. We were not an exemplary couple,” he
+ added quickly, glancing at Natásha and noticing on her face curiosity as
+ to how he would speak of his wife, “but her death shocked me terribly.
+ When two people quarrel they are always both in fault, and one’s own guilt
+ suddenly becomes terribly serious when the other is no longer alive. And
+ then such a death... without friends and without consolation! I am very,
+ very sorry for her,” he concluded, and was pleased to notice a look of
+ glad approval on Natásha’s face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, and so you are once more an eligible bachelor,” said Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre suddenly flushed crimson and for a long time tried not to look at
+ Natásha. When he ventured to glance her way again her face was cold,
+ stern, and he fancied even contemptuous.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And did you really see and speak to Napoleon, as we have been told?” said
+ Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre laughed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, not once! Everybody seems to imagine that being taken prisoner means
+ being Napoleon’s guest. Not only did I never see him but I heard nothing
+ about him—I was in much lower company!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Supper was over, and Pierre who at first declined to speak about his
+ captivity was gradually led on to do so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But it’s true that you remained in Moscow to kill Napoleon?” Natásha
+ asked with a slight smile. “I guessed it then when we met at the Súkharev
+ tower, do you remember?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre admitted that it was true, and from that was gradually led by
+ Princess Mary’s questions and especially by Natásha’s into giving a
+ detailed account of his adventures.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At first he spoke with the amused and mild irony now customary with him
+ toward everybody and especially toward himself, but when he came to
+ describe the horrors and sufferings he had witnessed he was unconsciously
+ carried away and began speaking with the suppressed emotion of a man
+ re-experiencing in recollection strong impressions he has lived through.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary with a gentle smile looked now at Pierre and now at Natásha.
+ In the whole narrative she saw only Pierre and his goodness. Natásha,
+ leaning on her elbow, the expression of her face constantly changing with
+ the narrative, watched Pierre with an attention that never wandered—evidently
+ herself experiencing all that he described. Not only her look, but her
+ exclamations and the brief questions she put, showed Pierre that she
+ understood just what he wished to convey. It was clear that she understood
+ not only what he said but also what he wished to, but could not, express
+ in words. The account Pierre gave of the incident with the child and the
+ woman for protecting whom he was arrested was this: “It was an awful sight—children
+ abandoned, some in the flames... One was snatched out before my eyes...
+ and there were women who had their things snatched off and their earrings
+ torn out...” he flushed and grew confused. “Then a patrol arrived and all
+ the men—all those who were not looting, that is—were arrested,
+ and I among them.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am sure you’re not telling us everything; I am sure you did
+ something...” said Natásha and pausing added, “something fine?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre continued. When he spoke of the execution he wanted to pass over
+ the horrible details, but Natásha insisted that he should not omit
+ anything.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre began to tell about Karatáev, but paused. By this time he had risen
+ from the table and was pacing the room, Natásha following him with her
+ eyes. Then he added:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, you can’t understand what I learned from that illiterate man—that
+ simple fellow.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes, go on!” said Natásha. “Where is he?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “They killed him almost before my eyes.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Pierre, his voice trembling continually, went on to tell of the last
+ days of their retreat, of Karatáev’s illness and his death.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He told of his adventures as he had never yet recalled them. He now, as it
+ were, saw a new meaning in all he had gone through. Now that he was
+ telling it all to Natásha he experienced that pleasure which a man has
+ when women listen to him—not clever women who when listening either
+ try to remember what they hear to enrich their minds and when opportunity
+ offers to retell it, or who wish to adopt it to some thought of their own
+ and promptly contribute their own clever comments prepared in their little
+ mental workshop—but the pleasure given by real women gifted with a
+ capacity to select and absorb the very best a man shows of himself.
+ Natásha without knowing it was all attention: she did not lose a word, no
+ single quiver in Pierre’s voice, no look, no twitch of a muscle in his
+ face, nor a single gesture. She caught the unfinished word in its flight
+ and took it straight into her open heart, divining the secret meaning of
+ all Pierre’s mental travail.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary understood his story and sympathized with him, but she now
+ saw something else that absorbed all her attention. She saw the
+ possibility of love and happiness between Natásha and Pierre, and the
+ first thought of this filled her heart with gladness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was three o’clock in the morning. The footmen came in with sad and
+ stern faces to change the candles, but no one noticed them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre finished his story. Natásha continued to look at him intently with
+ bright, attentive, and animated eyes, as if trying to understand something
+ more which he had perhaps left untold. Pierre in shamefaced and happy
+ confusion glanced occasionally at her, and tried to think what to say next
+ to introduce a fresh subject. Princess Mary was silent. It occurred to
+ none of them that it was three o’clock and time to go to bed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “People speak of misfortunes and sufferings,” remarked Pierre, “but if at
+ this moment I were asked: ‘Would you rather be what you were before you
+ were taken prisoner, or go through all this again?’ then for heaven’s sake
+ let me again have captivity and horseflesh! We imagine that when we are
+ thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is
+ new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is
+ much, much before us. I say this to you,” he added, turning to Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes,” she said, answering something quite different. “I too should
+ wish nothing but to relive it all from the beginning.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre looked intently at her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, and nothing more,” said Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s not true, not true!” cried Pierre. “I am not to blame for being
+ alive and wishing to live—nor you either.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Suddenly Natásha bent her head, covered her face with her hands, and began
+ to cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is it, Natásha?” said Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nothing, nothing.” She smiled at Pierre through her tears. “Good night!
+ It is time for bed.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre rose and took his leave.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary and Natásha met as usual in the bedroom. They talked of what
+ Pierre had told them. Princess Mary did not express her opinion of Pierre
+ nor did Natásha speak of him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, good night, Mary!” said Natásha. “Do you know, I am often afraid
+ that by not speaking of him” (she meant Prince Andrew) “for fear of not
+ doing justice to our feelings, we forget him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary sighed deeply and thereby acknowledged the justice of
+ Natásha’s remark, but she did not express agreement in words.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is it possible to forget?” said she.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It did me so much good to tell all about it today. It was hard and
+ painful, but good, very good!” said Natásha. “I am sure he really loved
+ him. That is why I told him... Was it all right?” she added, suddenly
+ blushing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To tell Pierre? Oh, yes. What a splendid man he is!” said Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know, Mary...” Natásha suddenly said with a mischievous smile such
+ as Princess Mary had not seen on her face for a long time, “he has somehow
+ grown so clean, smooth, and fresh—as if he had just come out of a
+ Russian bath; do you understand? Out of a moral bath. Isn’t it true?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” replied Princess Mary. “He has greatly improved.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “With a short coat and his hair cropped; just as if, well, just as if he
+ had come straight from the bath... Papa used to...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I understand why he ” (Prince Andrew) “liked no one so
+ much as him,” said Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, and yet he is quite different. They say men are friends when they
+ are quite different. That must be true. Really he is quite unlike him—in
+ everything.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, but he’s wonderful.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, good night,” said Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the same mischievous smile lingered for a long time on her face as if
+ it had been forgotten there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVIII
+ 
+ 
+ It was a long time before Pierre could fall asleep that night. He paced up
+ and down his room, now turning his thoughts on a difficult problem and
+ frowning, now suddenly shrugging his shoulders and wincing, and now
+ smiling happily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was thinking of Prince Andrew, of Natásha, and of their love, at one
+ moment jealous of her past, then reproaching himself for that feeling. It
+ was already six in the morning and he still paced up and down the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what’s to be done if it cannot be avoided? What’s to be done?
+ Evidently it has to be so,” said he to himself, and hastily undressing he
+ got into bed, happy and agitated but free from hesitation or indecision.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Strange and impossible as such happiness seems, I must do everything that
+ she and I may be man and wife,” he told himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A few days previously Pierre had decided to go to Petersburg on the
+ Friday. When he awoke on the Thursday, Savélich came to ask him about
+ packing for the journey.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What, to Petersburg? What is Petersburg? Who is there in Petersburg?” he
+ asked involuntarily, though only to himself. “Oh, yes, long ago before
+ this happened I did for some reason mean to go to Petersburg,” he
+ reflected. “Why? But perhaps I shall go. What a good fellow he is and how
+ attentive, and how he remembers everything,” he thought, looking at
+ Savélich’s old face, “and what a pleasant smile he has!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, Savélich, do you still not wish to accept your freedom?” Pierre
+ asked him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What’s the good of freedom to me, your excellency? We lived under the
+ late count—the kingdom of heaven be his!—and we have lived
+ under you too, without ever being wronged.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And your children?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The children will live just the same. With such masters one can live.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what about my heirs?” said Pierre. “Supposing I suddenly marry... it
+ might happen,” he added with an involuntary smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If I may take the liberty, your excellency, it would be a good thing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How easy he thinks it,” thought Pierre. “He doesn’t know how terrible it
+ is and how dangerous. Too soon or too late... it is terrible!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So what are your orders? Are you starting tomorrow?” asked Savélich.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I’ll put it off for a bit. I’ll tell you later. You must forgive the
+ trouble I have put you to,” said Pierre, and seeing Savélich smile, he
+ thought: “But how strange it is that he should not know that now there is
+ no Petersburg for me, and that that must be settled first of all! But
+ probably he knows it well enough and is only pretending. Shall I have a
+ talk with him and see what he thinks?” Pierre reflected. “No, another
+ time.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At breakfast Pierre told the princess, his cousin, that he had been to see
+ Princess Mary the day before and had there met—“Whom do you think?
+ Natásha Rostóva!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess seemed to see nothing more extraordinary in that than if he
+ had seen Anna Semënovna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know her?” asked Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have seen the princess,” she replied. “I heard that they were arranging
+ a match for her with young Rostóv. It would be a very good thing for the
+ Rostóvs, they are said to be utterly ruined.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No; I mean do you know Natásha Rostóva?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I heard about that affair of hers at the time. It was a great pity.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, she either doesn’t understand or is pretending,” thought Pierre.
+ “Better not say anything to her either.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The princess too had prepared provisions for Pierre’s journey.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How kind they all are,” thought Pierre. “What is surprising is that they
+ should trouble about these things now when it can no longer be of interest
+ to them. And all for me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the same day the Chief of Police came to Pierre, inviting him to send a
+ representative to the Faceted Palace to recover things that were to be
+ returned to their owners that day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And this man too,” thought Pierre, looking into the face of the Chief of
+ Police. “What a fine, good-looking officer and how kind. Fancy bothering
+ about such trifles now! And they actually say he is not honest and takes
+ bribes. What nonsense! Besides, why shouldn’t he take bribes? That’s the
+ way he was brought up, and everybody does it. But what a kind, pleasant
+ face and how he smiles as he looks at me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre went to Princess Mary’s to dinner.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As he drove through the streets past the houses that had been burned down,
+ he was surprised by the beauty of those ruins. The picturesqueness of the
+ chimney stacks and tumble-down walls of the burned-out quarters of the
+ town, stretching out and concealing one another, reminded him of the Rhine
+ and the Colosseum. The cabmen he met and their passengers, the carpenters
+ cutting the timber for new houses with axes, the women hawkers, and the
+ shopkeepers, all looked at him with cheerful beaming eyes that seemed to
+ say: “Ah, there he is! Let’s see what will come of it!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the entrance to Princess Mary’s house Pierre felt doubtful whether he
+ had really been there the night before and really seen Natásha and talked
+ to her. “Perhaps I imagined it; perhaps I shall go in and find no one
+ there.” But he had hardly entered the room before he felt her presence
+ with his whole being by the loss of his sense of freedom. She was in the
+ same black dress with soft folds and her hair was done the same way as the
+ day before, yet she was quite different. Had she been like this when he
+ entered the day before he could not for a moment have failed to recognize
+ her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She was as he had known her almost as a child and later on as Prince
+ Andrew’s fiancée. A bright questioning light shone in her eyes, and on her
+ face was a friendly and strangely roguish expression.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre dined with them and would have spent the whole evening there, but
+ Princess Mary was going to vespers and Pierre left the house with her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day he came early, dined, and stayed the whole evening. Though
+ Princess Mary and Natásha were evidently glad to see their visitor and
+ though all Pierre’s interest was now centered in that house, by the
+ evening they had talked over everything and the conversation passed from
+ one trivial topic to another and repeatedly broke off. He stayed so long
+ that Princess Mary and Natásha exchanged glances, evidently wondering when
+ he would go. Pierre noticed this but could not go. He felt uneasy and
+ embarrassed, but sat on because he simply could not get up and take his
+ leave.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary, foreseeing no end to this, rose first, and complaining of a
+ headache began to say good night.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So you are going to Petersburg tomorrow?” she asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, I am not going,” Pierre replied hastily, in a surprised tone and as
+ though offended. “Yes... no... to Petersburg? Tomorrow—but I won’t
+ say good-by yet. I will call round in case you have any commissions for
+ me,” said he, standing before Princess Mary and turning red, but not
+ taking his departure.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha gave him her hand and went out. Princess Mary on the other hand
+ instead of going away sank into an armchair, and looked sternly and
+ intently at him with her deep, radiant eyes. The weariness she had plainly
+ shown before had now quite passed off. With a deep and long-drawn sigh she
+ seemed to be prepared for a lengthy talk.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Natásha left the room Pierre’s confusion and awkwardness immediately
+ vanished and were replaced by eager excitement. He quickly moved an
+ armchair toward Princess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I wanted to tell you,” said he, answering her look as if she had
+ spoken. “Princess, help me! What am I to do? Can I hope? Princess, my dear
+ friend, listen! I know it all. I know I am not worthy of her, I know it’s
+ impossible to speak of it now. But I want to be a brother to her. No, not
+ that, I don’t, I can’t...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He paused and rubbed his face and eyes with his hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well,” he went on with an evident effort at self-control and coherence.
+ “I don’t know when I began to love her, but I have loved her and her alone
+ all my life, and I love her so that I cannot imagine life without her. I
+ cannot propose to her at present, but the thought that perhaps she might
+ someday be my wife and that I may be missing that possibility... that
+ possibility... is terrible. Tell me, can I hope? Tell me what I am to do,
+ dear princess!” he added after a pause, and touched her hand as she did
+ not reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am thinking of what you have told me,” answered Princess Mary. “This is
+ what I will say. You are right that to speak to her of love at present...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary stopped. She was going to say that to speak of love was
+ impossible, but she stopped because she had seen by the sudden change in
+ Natásha two days before that she would not only not be hurt if Pierre
+ spoke of his love, but that it was the very thing she wished for.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To speak to her now wouldn’t do,” said the princess all the same.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what am I to do?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Leave it to me,” said Princess Mary. “I know...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was looking into Princess Mary’s eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well?... Well?...” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know that she loves... will love you,” Princess Mary corrected herself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Before her words were out, Pierre had sprung up and with a frightened
+ expression seized Princess Mary’s hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What makes you think so? You think I may hope? You think...?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I think so,” said Princess Mary with a smile. “Write to her parents,
+ and leave it to me. I will tell her when I can. I wish it to happen and my
+ heart tells me it will.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, it cannot be! How happy I am! But it can’t be.... How happy I am! No,
+ it can’t be!” Pierre kept saying as he kissed Princess Mary’s hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go to Petersburg, that will be best. And I will write to you,” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To Petersburg? Go there? Very well, I’ll go. But I may come again
+ tomorrow?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Next day Pierre came to say good-by. Natásha was less animated than she
+ had been the day before; but that day as he looked at her Pierre sometimes
+ felt as if he was vanishing and that neither he nor she existed any
+ longer, that nothing existed but happiness. “Is it possible? No, it can’t
+ be,” he told himself at every look, gesture, and word that filled his soul
+ with joy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When on saying good-by he took her thin, slender hand, he could not help
+ holding it a little longer in his own.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Is it possible that this hand, that face, those eyes, all this treasure
+ of feminine charm so strange to me now, is it possible that it will one
+ day be mine forever, as familiar to me as I am to myself?... No, that’s
+ impossible!...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good-by, Count,” she said aloud. “I shall look forward very much to your
+ return,” she added in a whisper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And these simple words, her look, and the expression on her face which
+ accompanied them, formed for two months the subject of inexhaustible
+ memories, interpretations, and happy meditations for Pierre. “‘I shall
+ look forward very much to your return....’ Yes, yes, how did she say it?
+ Yes, ‘I shall look forward very much to your return.’ Oh, how happy I am!
+ What is happening to me? How happy I am!” said Pierre to himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIX
+ 
+ 
+ There was nothing in Pierre’s soul now at all like what had troubled it
+ during his courtship of Hélène.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not repeat to himself with a sickening feeling of shame the words
+ he had spoken, or say: “Oh, why did I not say that?” and,
+ “Whatever made me say ‘Je vous aime’ ?” On the
+ contrary, he now repeated in imagination every word that he or Natásha had spoken
+ and pictured every detail of her face and smile, and did not wish to diminish or
+ add anything, but only to repeat it again and again. There was now not a shadow of
+ doubt in his mind as to whether what he had undertaken was right or wrong. Only
+ one terrible doubt sometimes crossed his mind: “Wasn’t it all a dream?
+ Isn’t Princess Mary mistaken? Am I not too conceited and self-confident? I
+ believe all this—and suddenly Princess Mary will tell her, and she will be
+ sure to smile and say: ‘How strange! He must be deluding himself.
+ Doesn’t he know that he is a man, just a man, while I...? I am something
+ altogether different and higher.’”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That was the only doubt often troubling Pierre. He did not now make any
+ plans. The happiness before him appeared so inconceivable that if only he
+ could attain it, it would be the end of all things. Everything ended with
+ that.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A joyful, unexpected frenzy, of which he had thought himself incapable,
+ possessed him. The whole meaning of life—not for him alone but for
+ the whole world—seemed to him centered in his love and the
+ possibility of being loved by her. At times everybody seemed to him to be
+ occupied with one thing only—his future happiness. Sometimes it
+ seemed to him that other people were all as pleased as he was himself and
+ merely tried to hide that pleasure by pretending to be busy with other
+ interests. In every word and gesture he saw allusions to his happiness. He
+ often surprised those he met by his significantly happy looks and smiles
+ which seemed to express a secret understanding between him and them. And
+ when he realized that people might not be aware of his happiness, he
+ pitied them with his whole heart and felt a desire somehow to explain to
+ them that all that occupied them was a mere frivolous trifle unworthy of
+ attention.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When it was suggested to him that he should enter the civil service, or
+ when the war or any general political affairs were discussed on the
+ assumption that everybody’s welfare depended on this or that issue of
+ events, he would listen with a mild and pitying smile and surprise people
+ by his strange comments. But at this time he saw everybody—both
+ those who, as he imagined, understood the real meaning of life (that is,
+ what he was feeling) and those unfortunates who evidently did not
+ understand it—in the bright light of the emotion that shone within
+ himself, and at once without any effort saw in everyone he met everything
+ that was good and worthy of being loved.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When dealing with the affairs and papers of his dead wife, her memory
+ aroused in him no feeling but pity that she had not known the bliss he now
+ knew. Prince Vasíli, who having obtained a new post and some fresh
+ decorations was particularly proud at this time, seemed to him a pathetic,
+ kindly old man much to be pitied.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Often in afterlife Pierre recalled this period of blissful insanity. All
+ the views he formed of men and circumstances at this time remained true
+ for him always. He not only did not renounce them subsequently, but when
+ he was in doubt or inwardly at variance, he referred to the views he had
+ held at this time of his madness and they always proved correct.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I may have appeared strange and queer then,” he thought, “but I was not
+ so mad as I seemed. On the contrary I was then wiser and had more insight
+ than at any other time, and understood all that is worth understanding in
+ life, because... because I was happy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre’s insanity consisted in not waiting, as he used to do, to discover
+ personal attributes which he termed “good qualities” in people before
+ loving them; his heart was now overflowing with love, and by loving people
+ without cause he discovered indubitable causes for loving them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XX
+ 
+ 
+ After Pierre’s departure that first evening, when Natásha had said to
+ Princess Mary with a gaily mocking smile: “He looks just, yes, just as if
+ he had come out of a Russian bath—in a short coat and with his hair
+ cropped,” something hidden and unknown to herself, but irrepressible,
+ awoke in Natásha’s soul.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Everything: her face, walk, look, and voice, was suddenly altered. To her
+ own surprise a power of life and hope of happiness rose to the surface and
+ demanded satisfaction. From that evening she seemed to have forgotten all
+ that had happened to her. She no longer complained of her position, did
+ not say a word about the past, and no longer feared to make happy plans
+ for the future. She spoke little of Pierre, but when Princess Mary
+ mentioned him a long-extinguished light once more kindled in her eyes and
+ her lips curved with a strange smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The change that took place in Natásha at first surprised Princess Mary;
+ but when she understood its meaning it grieved her. “Can she have loved
+ my brother so little as to be able to forget him so soon?” she thought
+ when she reflected on the change. But when she was with Natásha she was
+ not vexed with her and did not reproach her. The reawakened power
+ of life that had seized Natásha was so evidently irrepressible and
+ unexpected by her that in her presence Princess Mary felt that she had
+ no right to reproach her even in her heart.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha gave herself up so fully and frankly to this new feeling
+ that she did not try to hide the fact that she was no longer sad, but
+ bright and cheerful.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Princess Mary returned to her room after her nocturnal talk with
+ Pierre, Natásha met her on the threshold.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He has spoken? Yes? He has spoken?” she repeated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And a joyful yet pathetic expression which seemed to beg forgiveness for
+ her joy settled on Natásha’s face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I wanted to listen at the door, but I knew you would tell me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Understandable and touching as the look with which Natásha gazed at her
+ seemed to Princess Mary, and sorry as she was to see her agitation, these
+ words pained her for a moment. She remembered her brother and his love.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But what’s to be done? She can’t help it,” thought the princess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And with a sad and rather stern look she told Natásha all that Pierre had
+ said. On hearing that he was going to Petersburg Natásha was astounded.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “To Petersburg!” she repeated as if unable to understand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But noticing the grieved expression on Princess Mary’s face she guessed
+ the reason of that sadness and suddenly began to cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mary,” said she, “tell me what I should do! I am afraid of being bad.
+ Whatever you tell me, I will do. Tell me....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You love him?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” whispered Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then why are you crying? I am happy for your sake,” said Princess Mary,
+ who because of those tears quite forgave Natásha’s joy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It won’t be just yet—someday. Think what fun it will be when I am
+ his wife and you marry Nicholas!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha, I have asked you not to speak of that. Let us talk about you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They were silent awhile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But why go to Petersburg?” Natásha suddenly asked, and hastily replied to
+ her own question. “But no, no, he must... Yes, Mary, He must....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ FIRST EPILOGUE: 1813 - 20
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ Seven years had passed. The storm-tossed sea of European history had
+ subsided within its shores and seemed to have become calm. But the
+ mysterious forces that move humanity (mysterious because the laws of their
+ motion are unknown to us) continued to operate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though the surface of the sea of history seemed motionless, the movement
+ of humanity went on as unceasingly as the flow of time. Various groups of
+ people formed and dissolved, the coming formation and dissolution of
+ kingdoms and displacement of peoples was in course of preparation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The sea of history was not driven spasmodically from shore to shore as
+ previously. It was seething in its depths. Historic figures were not borne
+ by the waves from one shore to another as before. They now seemed to
+ rotate on one spot. The historical figures at the head of armies, who
+ formerly reflected the movement of the masses by ordering wars, campaigns,
+ and battles, now reflected the restless movement by political and
+ diplomatic combinations, laws, and treaties.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The historians call this activity of the historical figures “the
+ reaction.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In dealing with this period they sternly condemn the historical personages
+ who, in their opinion, caused what they describe as the reaction . All the
+ well-known people of that period, from Alexander and Napoleon to Madame de
+ Staël, Photius, Schelling, Fichte, Chateaubriand, and the rest, pass
+ before their stern judgment seat and are acquitted or condemned according
+ to whether they conduced to progress or to reaction .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ According to their accounts a reaction took place at that time in Russia
+ also, and the chief culprit was Alexander I, the same man who according to
+ them was the chief cause of the liberal movement at the commencement of
+ his reign, being the savior of Russia.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There is no one in Russian literature now, from schoolboy essayist to
+ learned historian, who does not throw his little stone at Alexander for
+ things he did wrong at this period of his reign.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He ought to have acted in this way and in that way. In this case he did
+ well and in that case badly. He behaved admirably at the beginning of his
+ reign and during 1812, but acted badly by giving a constitution to Poland,
+ forming the Holy Alliance, entrusting power to Arakchéev, favoring
+ Golítsyn and mysticism, and afterwards Shishkóv and Photius. He also acted
+ badly by concerning himself with the active army and disbanding the
+ Semënov regiment.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It would take a dozen pages to enumerate all the reproaches the historians
+ address to him, based on their knowledge of what is good for humanity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What do these reproaches mean?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Do not the very actions for which the historians praise Alexander I (the
+ liberal attempts at the beginning of his reign, his struggle with
+ Napoleon, the firmness he displayed in 1812 and the campaign of 1813) flow
+ from the same sources—the circumstances of his birth, education, and
+ life—that made his personality what it was and from which the
+ actions for which they blame him (the Holy Alliance, the restoration of
+ Poland, and the reaction of 1820 and later) also flowed?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In what does the substance of those reproaches lie?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It lies in the fact that an historic character like Alexander I, standing
+ on the highest possible pinnacle of human power with the blinding light of
+ history focused upon him; a character exposed to those strongest of all
+ influences: the intrigues, flattery, and self-deception inseparable from
+ power; a character who at every moment of his life felt a responsibility
+ for all that was happening in Europe; and not a fictitious but a live
+ character who like every man had his personal habits, passions, and
+ impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth—that this character—though
+ not lacking in virtue (the historians do not accuse him of that)—had
+ not the same conception of the welfare of humanity fifty years ago as a
+ present-day professor who from his youth upwards has been occupied with
+ learning: that is, with books and lectures and with taking notes from
+ them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But even if we assume that fifty years ago Alexander I was mistaken in his
+ view of what was good for the people, we must inevitably assume that the
+ historian who judges Alexander will also after the lapse of some time turn
+ out to be mistaken in his view of what is good for humanity. This
+ assumption is all the more natural and inevitable because, watching the
+ movement of history, we see that every year and with each new writer,
+ opinion as to what is good for mankind changes; so that what once seemed
+ good, ten years later seems bad, and vice versa. And what is more, we find
+ at one and the same time quite contradictory views as to what is bad and
+ what is good in history: some people regard giving a constitution to
+ Poland and forming the Holy Alliance as praiseworthy in Alexander, while
+ others regard it as blameworthy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The activity of Alexander or of Napoleon cannot be called useful or
+ harmful, for it is impossible to say for what it was useful or harmful. If
+ that activity displeases somebody, this is only because it does not agree
+ with his limited understanding of what is good. Whether the preservation
+ of my father’s house in Moscow, or the glory of the Russian arms, or the
+ prosperity of the Petersburg and other universities, or the freedom of
+ Poland or the greatness of Russia, or the balance of power in Europe, or a
+ certain kind of European culture called “progress” appear to me to be good
+ or bad, I must admit that besides these things the action of every
+ historic character has other more general purposes inaccessible to me.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But let us assume that what is called science can harmonize all
+ contradictions and possesses an unchanging standard of good and bad by
+ which to try historic characters and events; let us say that Alexander
+ could have done everything differently; let us say that with guidance from
+ those who blame him and who profess to know the ultimate aim of the
+ movement of humanity, he might have arranged matters according to the
+ program his present accusers would have given him—of nationality,
+ freedom, equality, and progress (these, I think, cover the ground). Let us
+ assume that this program was possible and had then been formulated, and
+ that Alexander had acted on it. What would then have become of the
+ activity of all those who opposed the tendency that then prevailed in the
+ government—an activity that in the opinion of the historians was
+ good and beneficent? Their activity would not have existed: there would
+ have been no life, there would have been nothing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of
+ life is destroyed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ If we assume as the historians do that great men lead humanity to the
+ attainment of certain ends—the greatness of Russia or of France, the
+ balance of power in Europe, the diffusion of the ideas of the Revolution,
+ general progress, or anything else—then it is impossible to explain
+ the facts of history without introducing the conceptions of chance and
+ genius .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If the aim of the European wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century
+ had been the aggrandizement of Russia, that aim might have been
+ accomplished without all the preceding wars and without the invasion. If
+ the aim was the aggrandizement of France, that might have been attained
+ without the Revolution and without the Empire. If the aim was the
+ dissemination of ideas, the printing press could have accomplished that
+ much better than warfare. If the aim was the progress of civilization, it
+ is easy to see that there are other ways of diffusing civilization more
+ expedient than by the destruction of wealth and of human lives.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Why did it happen in this and not in some other way?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Because it happened so! “ Chance created the situation;
+ genius utilized it,” says history.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But what is chance? What is genius? 
+
+
+
+ 
+ The words chance and genius do not denote any really existing thing and
+ therefore cannot be defined. Those words only denote a certain stage of
+ understanding of phenomena. I do not know why a certain event occurs; I
+ think that I cannot know it; so I do not try to know it and I talk about
+ chance . I see a force producing effects beyond the scope of ordinary human
+ agencies; I do not understand why this occurs and I talk of genius .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To a herd of rams, the ram the herdsman drives each evening into a special
+ enclosure to feed and that becomes twice as fat as the others must seem to
+ be a genius. And it must appear an astonishing conjunction of genius with
+ a whole series of extraordinary chances that this ram, who instead of
+ getting into the general fold every evening goes into a special enclosure
+ where there are oats—that this very ram, swelling with fat, is
+ killed for meat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the rams need only cease to suppose that all that happens to them
+ happens solely for the attainment of their sheepish aims; they need only
+ admit that what happens to them may also have purposes beyond their ken,
+ and they will at once perceive a unity and coherence in what happened to
+ the ram that was fattened. Even if they do not know for what purpose they
+ are fattened, they will at least know that all that happened to the ram
+ did not happen accidentally, and will no longer need the conceptions of
+ chance or genius .
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only by renouncing our claim to discern a purpose immediately intelligible
+ to us, and admitting the ultimate purpose to be beyond our ken, may we
+ discern the sequence of experiences in the lives of historic characters
+ and perceive the cause of the effect they produce (incommensurable with
+ ordinary human capabilities), and then the words chance and genius 
+ become superfluous.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ We need only confess that we do not know the purpose of the European
+ convulsions and that we know only the facts—that is, the murders,
+ first in France, then in Italy, in Africa, in Prussia, in Austria, in
+ Spain, and in Russia—and that the movements from the west to the
+ east and from the east to the west form the essence and purpose of these
+ events, and not only shall we have no need to see exceptional ability and
+ genius in Napoleon and Alexander, but we shall be unable to consider them
+ to be anything but like other men, and we shall not be obliged to have
+ recourse to chance for an explanation of those small events which made
+ these people what they were, but it will be clear that all those small
+ events were inevitable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By discarding a claim to knowledge of the ultimate purpose, we shall
+ clearly perceive that just as one cannot imagine a blossom or seed for any
+ single plant better suited to it than those it produces, so it is
+ impossible to imagine any two people more completely adapted down to the
+ smallest detail for the purpose they had to fulfill, than Napoleon and
+ Alexander with all their antecedents.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ The fundamental and essential significance of the European events of the
+ beginning of the nineteenth century lies in the movement of the mass of
+ the European peoples from west to east and afterwards from east to west.
+ The commencement of that movement was the movement from west to east. For
+ the peoples of the west to be able to make their warlike movement to
+ Moscow it was necessary: (1) that they should form themselves into a
+ military group of a size able to endure a collision with the warlike
+ military group of the east, (2) that they should abandon all established
+ traditions and customs, and (3) that during their military movement they
+ should have at their head a man who could justify to himself and to them
+ the deceptions, robberies, and murders which would have to be committed
+ during that movement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And beginning with the French Revolution the old inadequately large group
+ was destroyed, as well as the old habits and traditions, and step by step
+ a group was formed of larger dimensions with new customs and traditions,
+ and a man was produced who would stand at the head of the coming movement
+ and bear the responsibility for all that had to be done.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A man without convictions, without habits, without traditions, without a
+ name, and not even a Frenchman, emerges—by what seem the strangest
+ chances—from among all the seething French parties, and without
+ joining any one of them is borne forward to a prominent position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The ignorance of his colleagues, the weakness and insignificance of his
+ opponents, the frankness of his falsehoods, and the dazzling and
+ self-confident limitations of this man raise him to the head of the army.
+ The brilliant qualities of the soldiers of the army sent to Italy, his
+ opponents’ reluctance to fight, and his own childish audacity and
+ self-confidence secure him military fame. Innumerable so-called chances 
+ accompany him everywhere. The disfavor into which he falls with the rulers
+ of France turns to his advantage. His attempts to avoid his predestined
+ path are unsuccessful: he is not received into the Russian service, and
+ the appointment he seeks in Turkey comes to nothing. During the war in
+ Italy he is several times on the verge of destruction and each time is
+ saved in an unexpected manner. Owing to various diplomatic considerations
+ the Russian armies—just those which might have destroyed his
+ prestige—do not appear upon the scene till he is no longer there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On his return from Italy he finds the government in Paris in a process of
+ dissolution in which all those who are in it are inevitably wiped out and
+ destroyed. And by chance an escape from this dangerous position presents
+ itself in the form of an aimless and senseless expedition to Africa. Again
+ so-called chance accompanies him. Impregnable Malta surrenders without a
+ shot; his most reckless schemes are crowned with success. The enemy’s
+ fleet, which subsequently did not let a single boat pass, allows his
+ entire army to elude it. In Africa a whole series of outrages are
+ committed against the almost unarmed inhabitants. And the men who commit
+ these crimes, especially their leader, assure themselves that this is
+ admirable, this is glory—it resembles Caesar and Alexander the Great
+ and is therefore good.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This ideal of glory and grandeur —which consists not merely in
+ considering nothing wrong that one does but in priding oneself on every
+ crime one commits, ascribing to it an incomprehensible supernatural
+ significance—that ideal, destined to guide this man and his
+ associates, had scope for its development in Africa. Whatever he does
+ succeeds. The plague does not touch him. The cruelty of murdering
+ prisoners is not imputed to him as a fault. His childishly rash,
+ uncalled-for, and ignoble departure from Africa, leaving his comrades in
+ distress, is set down to his credit, and again the enemy’s fleet twice
+ lets him slip past. When, intoxicated by the crimes he has committed so
+ successfully, he reaches Paris, the dissolution of the republican
+ government, which a year earlier might have ruined him, has reached its
+ extreme limit, and his presence there now as a newcomer free from party
+ entanglements can only serve to exalt him—and though he himself has
+ no plan, he is quite ready for his new rôle.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He had no plan, he was afraid of everything, but the parties snatched at
+ him and demanded his participation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He alone—with his ideal of glory and grandeur developed in Italy and
+ Egypt, his insane self-adulation, his boldness in crime and frankness in
+ lying—he alone could justify what had to be done.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He is needed for the place that awaits him, and so almost apart from his
+ will and despite his indecision, his lack of a plan, and all his mistakes,
+ he is drawn into a conspiracy that aims at seizing power and the
+ conspiracy is crowned with success.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He is pushed into a meeting of the legislature. In alarm he wishes to
+ flee, considering himself lost. He pretends to fall into a swoon and says
+ senseless things that should have ruined him. But the once proud and
+ shrewd rulers of France, feeling that their part is played out, are even
+ more bewildered than he, and do not say the words they should have said to
+ destroy him and retain their power.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Chance , millions of chances , give him power, and all men as if by
+ agreement co-operate to confirm that power. Chance forms the characters of
+ the rulers of France, who submit to him; chance forms the character of
+ Paul I of Russia who recognizes his government; chance contrives a plot
+ against him which not only fails to harm him but confirms his power.
+ Chance puts the Duc d’Enghien in his hands and unexpectedly causes him to
+ kill him—thereby convincing the mob more forcibly than in any other
+ way that he had the right, since he had the might. Chance contrives that
+ though he directs all his efforts to prepare an expedition against England
+ (which would inevitably have ruined him) he never carries out that
+ intention, but unexpectedly falls upon Mack and the Austrians, who
+ surrender without a battle. Chance and genius give him the victory at
+ Austerlitz; and by chance all men, not only the French but all Europe—except
+ England which does not take part in the events about to happen—despite
+ their former horror and detestation of his crimes, now recognize his
+ authority, the title he has given himself, and his ideal of grandeur and
+ glory, which seems excellent and reasonable to them all.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As if measuring themselves and preparing for the coming movement, the
+ western forces push toward the east several times in 1805, 1806, 1807, and
+ 1809, gaining strength and growing. In 1811 the group of people that had
+ formed in France unites into one group with the peoples of Central Europe.
+ The strength of the justification of the man who stands at the head of the
+ movement grows with the increased size of the group. During the ten-year
+ preparatory period this man had formed relations with all the crowned
+ heads of Europe. The discredited rulers of the world can oppose no
+ reasonable ideal to the insensate Napoleonic ideal of glory and grandeur .
+ One after another they hasten to display their insignificance before him.
+ The King of Prussia sends his wife to seek the great man’s mercy; the
+ Emperor of Austria considers it a favor that this man receives a daughter
+ of the Caesars into his bed; the Pope, the guardian of all that the
+ nations hold sacred, utilizes religion for the aggrandizement of the great
+ man. It is not Napoleon who prepares himself for the accomplishment of his
+ role, so much as all those round him who prepare him to take on himself
+ the whole responsibility for what is happening and has to happen. There is
+ no step, no crime or petty fraud he commits, which in the mouths of those
+ around him is not at once represented as a great deed. The most suitable
+ fête the Germans can devise for him is a celebration of Jena and
+ Auerstädt. Not only is he great, but so are his ancestors, his brothers,
+ his stepsons, and his brothers-in-law. Everything is done to deprive him
+ of the remains of his reason and to prepare him for his terrible part. And
+ when he is ready so too are the forces.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The invasion pushes eastward and reaches its final goal—Moscow. That
+ city is taken; the Russian army suffers heavier losses than the opposing
+ armies had suffered in the former war from Austerlitz to Wagram. But
+ suddenly instead of those chances and that genius which hitherto had so
+ consistently led him by an uninterrupted series of successes to the
+ predestined goal, an innumerable sequence of inverse chances occur—from
+ the cold in his head at Borodinó to the sparks which set Moscow on fire,
+ and the frosts—and instead of genius , stupidity and immeasurable
+ baseness become evident.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The invaders flee, turn back, flee again, and all the chances are now not
+ for Napoleon but always against him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A countermovement is then accomplished from east to west with a remarkable
+ resemblance to the preceding movement from west to east. Attempted drives
+ from east to west—similar to the contrary movements of 1805, 1807,
+ and 1809—precede the great westward movement; there is the same
+ coalescence into a group of enormous dimensions; the same adhesion of the
+ people of Central Europe to the movement; the same hesitation midway, and
+ the same increasing rapidity as the goal is approached.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Paris, the ultimate goal, is reached. The Napoleonic government and army
+ are destroyed. Napoleon himself is no longer of any account; all his
+ actions are evidently pitiful and mean, but again an inexplicable chance 
+ occurs. The allies detest Napoleon whom they regard as the cause of their
+ sufferings. Deprived of power and authority, his crimes and his craft
+ exposed, he should have appeared to them what he appeared ten years
+ previously and one year later—an outlawed brigand. But by some
+ strange chance no one perceives this. His part is not yet ended. The man
+ who ten years before and a year later was considered an outlawed brigand
+ is sent to an island two days’ sail from France, which for some reason is
+ presented to him as his dominion, and guards are given to him and millions
+ of money are paid him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ The flood of nations begins to subside into its normal channels. The waves
+ of the great movement abate, and on the calm surface eddies are formed in
+ which float the diplomatists, who imagine that they have caused the floods
+ to abate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the smooth sea again suddenly becomes disturbed. The diplomatists
+ think that their disagreements are the cause of this fresh pressure of
+ natural forces; they anticipate war between their sovereigns; the position
+ seems to them insoluble. But the wave they feel to be rising does not come
+ from the quarter they expect. It rises again from the same point as before—Paris.
+ The last backwash of the movement from the west occurs: a backwash which
+ serves to solve the apparently insuperable diplomatic difficulties and
+ ends the military movement of that period of history.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The man who had devastated France returns to France alone, without any
+ conspiracy and without soldiers. Any guard might arrest him, but by
+ strange chance no one does so and all rapturously greet the man they
+ cursed the day before and will curse again a month later.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This man is still needed to justify the final collective act.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That act is performed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The last rôle is played. The actor is bidden to disrobe and wash off his
+ powder and paint: he will not be wanted any more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And some years pass during which he plays a pitiful comedy to himself in
+ solitude on his island, justifying his actions by intrigues and lies when
+ the justification is no longer needed, and displaying to the whole world
+ what it was that people had mistaken for strength as long as an unseen
+ hand directed his actions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The manager having brought the drama to a close and stripped the actor
+ shows him to us.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “See what you believed in! This is he! Do you now see that it was not he
+ but I who moved you?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But dazed by the force of the movement, it was long before people
+ understood this.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Still greater coherence and inevitability is seen in the life of Alexander
+ I, the man who stood at the head of the countermovement from east to west.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What was needed for him who, overshadowing others, stood at the head of
+ that movement from east to west?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What was needed was a sense of justice and a sympathy with European
+ affairs, but a remote sympathy not dulled by petty interests; a moral
+ superiority over those sovereigns of the day who co-operated with him; a
+ mild and attractive personality; and a personal grievance against
+ Napoleon. And all this was found in Alexander I; all this had been
+ prepared by innumerable so-called chances in his life: his education, his
+ early liberalism, the advisers who surrounded him, and by Austerlitz, and
+ Tilsit, and Erfurt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During the national war he was inactive because he was not needed. But as
+ soon as the necessity for a general European war presented itself he
+ appeared in his place at the given moment and, uniting the nations of
+ Europe, led them to the goal.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The goal is reached. After the final war of 1815 Alexander possesses all
+ possible power. How does he use it?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Alexander I—the pacifier of Europe, the man who from his early years
+ had striven only for his people’s welfare, the originator of the liberal
+ innovations in his fatherland—now that he seemed to possess the
+ utmost power and therefore to have the possibility of bringing about the
+ welfare of his peoples—at the time when Napoleon in exile was
+ drawing up childish and mendacious plans of how he would have made mankind
+ happy had he retained power—Alexander I, having fulfilled his
+ mission and feeling the hand of God upon him, suddenly recognizes the
+ insignificance of that supposed power, turns away from it, and gives it
+ into the hands of contemptible men whom he despises, saying only:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy Name!... I too am a man like the
+ rest of you. Let me live like a man and think of my soul and of God.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As the sun and each atom of ether is a sphere complete in itself, and yet
+ at the same time only a part of a whole too immense for man to comprehend,
+ so each individual has within himself his own aims and yet has them to
+ serve a general purpose incomprehensible to man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of
+ bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee
+ sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the
+ fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from
+ flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey.
+ Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely says
+ that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen,
+ and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee
+ flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter,
+ and sees in this the purpose of the bee’s existence. Another, observing
+ the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may
+ say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of
+ the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes
+ the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the
+ discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the
+ ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee to
+ other manifestations of life. And so it is with the purpose of historic
+ characters and nations.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ Natásha’s wedding to Bezúkhov, which took place in 1813, was the last
+ happy event in the family of the old Rostóvs. Count Ilyá Rostóv died that
+ same year and, as always happens, after the father’s death the family
+ group broke up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The events of the previous year: the burning of Moscow and the flight from
+ it, the death of Prince Andrew, Natásha’s despair, Pétya’s death, and the
+ old countess’ grief fell blow after blow on the old count’s head. He
+ seemed to be unable to understand the meaning of all these events, and
+ bowed his old head in a spiritual sense as if expecting and inviting
+ further blows which would finish him. He seemed now frightened and
+ distraught and now unnaturally animated and enterprising.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The arrangements for Natásha’s marriage occupied him for a while. He
+ ordered dinners and suppers and obviously tried to appear cheerful, but
+ his cheerfulness was not infectious as it used to be: on the contrary it
+ evoked the compassion of those who knew and liked him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Pierre and his wife had left, he grew very quiet and began to
+ complain of depression. A few days later he fell ill and took to his bed.
+ He realized from the first that he would not get up again, despite the
+ doctor’s encouragement. The countess passed a fortnight in an armchair by
+ his pillow without undressing. Every time she gave him his medicine he
+ sobbed and silently kissed her hand. On his last day, sobbing, he asked
+ her and his absent son to forgive him for having dissipated their property—that
+ being the chief fault of which he was conscious. After receiving communion
+ and unction he quietly died; and next day a throng of acquaintances who
+ came to pay their last respects to the deceased filled the house rented by
+ the Rostóvs. All these acquaintances, who had so often dined and danced at
+ his house and had so often laughed at him, now said, with a common feeling
+ of self-reproach and emotion, as if justifying themselves: “Well, whatever
+ he may have been he was a most worthy man. You don’t meet such men
+ nowadays.... And which of us has not weaknesses of his own?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was just when the count’s affairs had become so involved that it was
+ impossible to say what would happen if he lived another year that he
+ unexpectedly died.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas was with the Russian army in Paris when the news of his father’s
+ death reached him. He at once resigned his commission, and without waiting
+ for it to be accepted took leave of absence and went to Moscow. The state
+ of the count’s affairs became quite obvious a month after his death,
+ surprising everyone by the immense total of small debts the existence of
+ which no one had suspected. The debts amounted to double the value of the
+ property.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Friends and relations advised Nicholas to decline the inheritance. But he
+ regarded such a refusal as a slur on his father’s memory, which he held
+ sacred, and therefore would not hear of refusing and accepted the
+ inheritance together with the obligation to pay the debts.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The creditors who had so long been silent, restrained by a vague but
+ powerful influence exerted on them while he lived by the count’s careless
+ good nature, all proceeded to enforce their claims at once. As always
+ happens in such cases rivalry sprang up as to which should get paid first,
+ and those who like Mítenka held promissory notes given them as presents
+ now became the most exacting of the creditors. Nicholas was allowed no
+ respite and no peace, and those who had seemed to pity the old man—the
+ cause of their losses (if they were losses)—now remorselessly
+ pursued the young heir who had voluntarily undertaken the debts and was
+ obviously not guilty of contracting them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not one of the plans Nicholas tried succeeded; the estate was sold by
+ auction for half its value, and half the debts still remained unpaid.
+ Nicholas accepted thirty thousand rubles offered him by his brother-in-law
+ Bezúkhov to pay off debts he regarded as genuinely due for value received.
+ And to avoid being imprisoned for the remainder, as the creditors
+ threatened, he re-entered the government service.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He could not rejoin the army where he would have been made colonel at the
+ next vacancy, for his mother now clung to him as her one hold on life; and
+ so despite his reluctance to remain in Moscow among people who had known
+ him before, and despite his abhorrence of the civil service, he accepted a
+ post in Moscow in that service, doffed the uniform of which he was so
+ fond, and moved with his mother and Sónya to a small house on the Sívtsev
+ Vrazhók.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha and Pierre were living in Petersburg at the time and had no clear
+ idea of Nicholas’ circumstances. Having borrowed money from his
+ brother-in-law, Nicholas tried to hide his wretched condition from him.
+ His position was the more difficult because with his salary of twelve
+ hundred rubles he had not only to keep himself, his mother, and Sónya, but
+ had to shield his mother from knowledge of their poverty. The countess
+ could not conceive of life without the luxurious conditions she had been
+ used to from childhood and, unable to realize how hard it was for her son,
+ kept demanding now a carriage (which they did not keep) to send for a
+ friend, now some expensive article of food for herself, or wine for her
+ son, or money to buy a present as a surprise for Natásha or Sónya, or for
+ Nicholas himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya kept house, attended on her aunt, read to her, put up with her whims
+ and secret ill-will, and helped Nicholas to conceal their poverty from the
+ old countess. Nicholas felt himself irredeemably indebted to Sónya for all
+ she was doing for his mother and greatly admired her patience and
+ devotion, but tried to keep aloof from her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He seemed in his heart to reproach her for being too perfect, and because
+ there was nothing to reproach her with. She had all that people are valued
+ for, but little that could have made him love her. He felt that the more
+ he valued her the less he loved her. He had taken her at her word when she
+ wrote giving him his freedom and now behaved as if all that had passed
+ between them had been long forgotten and could never in any case be
+ renewed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas’ position became worse and worse. The idea of putting something
+ aside out of his salary proved a dream. Not only did he not save anything,
+ but to comply with his mother’s demands he even incurred some small debts.
+ He could see no way out of this situation. The idea of marrying some rich
+ woman, which was suggested to him by his female relations, was repugnant
+ to him. The other way out—his mother’s death—never entered his
+ head. He wished for nothing and hoped for nothing, and deep in his heart
+ experienced a gloomy and stern satisfaction in an uncomplaining endurance
+ of his position. He tried to avoid his old acquaintances with their
+ commiseration and offensive offers of assistance; he avoided all
+ distraction and recreation, and even at home did nothing but play cards
+ with his mother, pace silently up and down the room, and smoke one pipe
+ after another. He seemed carefully to cherish within himself the gloomy
+ mood which alone enabled him to endure his position.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ At the beginning of winter Princess Mary came to Moscow. From reports
+ current in town she learned how the Rostóvs were situated, and how “the
+ son has sacrificed himself for his mother,” as people were saying.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I never expected anything else of him,” said Princess Mary to herself,
+ feeling a joyous sense of her love for him. Remembering her friendly
+ relations with all the Rostóvs which had made her almost a member of the
+ family, she thought it her duty to go to see them. But remembering her
+ relations with Nicholas in Vorónezh she was shy about doing so. Making a
+ great effort she did however go to call on them a few weeks after her
+ arrival in Moscow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas was the first to meet her, as the countess’ room could only be
+ reached through his. But instead of being greeted with pleasure as she had
+ expected, at his first glance at her his face assumed a cold, stiff, proud
+ expression she had not seen on it before. He inquired about her health,
+ led the way to his mother, and having sat there for five minutes left the
+ room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the princess came out of the countess’ room Nicholas met her again,
+ and with marked solemnity and stiffness accompanied her to the anteroom.
+ To her remarks about his mother’s health he made no reply. “What’s that to
+ you? Leave me in peace,” his looks seemed to say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why does she come prowling here? What does she want? I can’t bear these
+ ladies and all these civilities!” said he aloud in Sónya’s presence,
+ evidently unable to repress his vexation, after the princess’ carriage had
+ disappeared.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, Nicholas, how can you talk like that?” cried Sónya, hardly able to
+ conceal her delight. “She is so kind and Mamma is so fond of her!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas did not reply and tried to avoid speaking of the princess any
+ more. But after her visit the old countess spoke of her several times a
+ day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She sang her praises, insisted that her son must call on her, expressed a
+ wish to see her often, but yet always became ill-humored when she began to
+ talk about her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas tried to keep silence when his mother spoke of the princess, but
+ his silence irritated her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “She is a very admirable and excellent young woman,” said she, “and you
+ must go and call on her. You would at least be seeing somebody, and I
+ think it must be dull for you only seeing us.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I don’t in the least want to, Mamma.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You used to want to, and now you don’t. Really I don’t understand you, my
+ dear. One day you are dull, and the next you refuse to see anyone.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But I never said I was dull.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, you said yourself you don’t want even to see her. She is a very
+ admirable young woman and you always liked her, but now suddenly you have
+ got some notion or other in your head. You hide everything from me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Not at all, Mamma.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If I were asking you to do something disagreeable now—but I only
+ ask you to return a call. One would think mere politeness required it....
+ Well, I have asked you, and now I won’t interfere any more since you have
+ secrets from your mother.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, then, I’ll go if you wish it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It doesn’t matter to me. I only wish it for your sake.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas sighed, bit his mustache, and laid out the cards for a patience,
+ trying to divert his mother’s attention to another topic.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The same conversation was repeated next day and the day after, and the day
+ after that.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After her visit to the Rostóvs and her unexpectedly chilly reception by
+ Nicholas, Princess Mary confessed to herself that she had been right in
+ not wishing to be the first to call.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I expected nothing else,” she told herself, calling her pride to her aid.
+ “I have nothing to do with him and I only wanted to see the old lady, who
+ was always kind to me and to whom I am under many obligations.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But she could not pacify herself with these reflections; a feeling akin to
+ remorse troubled her when she thought of her visit. Though she had firmly
+ resolved not to call on the Rostóvs again and to forget the whole matter,
+ she felt herself all the time in an awkward position. And when she asked
+ herself what distressed her, she had to admit that it was her relation to
+ Rostóv. His cold, polite manner did not express his feeling for her (she
+ knew that) but it concealed something, and until she could discover what
+ that something was, she felt that she could not be at ease.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ One day in midwinter when sitting in the schoolroom attending to her
+ nephew’s lessons, she was informed that Rostóv had called. With a firm
+ resolution not to betray herself and not show her agitation, she sent for
+ Mademoiselle Bourienne and went with her to the drawing room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Her first glance at Nicholas’ face told her that he had only come to
+ fulfill the demands of politeness, and she firmly resolved to maintain the
+ tone in which he addressed her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They spoke of the countess’ health, of their mutual friends, of the latest
+ war news, and when the ten minutes required by propriety had elapsed after
+ which a visitor may rise, Nicholas got up to say good-by.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With Mademoiselle Bourienne’s help the princess had maintained the
+ conversation very well, but at the very last moment, just when he rose,
+ she was so tired of talking of what did not interest her, and her mind was
+ so full of the question why she alone was granted so little happiness in
+ life, that in a fit of absent-mindedness she sat still, her luminous eyes
+ gazing fixedly before her, not noticing that he had risen.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas glanced at her and, wishing to appear not to notice her
+ abstraction, made some remark to Mademoiselle Bourienne and then again
+ looked at the princess. She still sat motionless with a look of suffering
+ on her gentle face. He suddenly felt sorry for her and was vaguely
+ conscious that he might be the cause of the sadness her face expressed. He
+ wished to help her and say something pleasant, but could think of nothing
+ to say.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Good-by, Princess!” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She started, flushed, and sighed deeply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, I beg your pardon,” she said as if waking up. “Are you going already,
+ Count? Well then, good-by! Oh, but the cushion for the countess!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Wait a moment, I’ll fetch it,” said Mademoiselle Bourienne, and she left
+ the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They both sat silent, with an occasional glance at one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, Princess,” said Nicholas at last with a sad smile, “it doesn’t seem
+ long ago since we first met at Boguchárovo, but how much water has flowed
+ since then! In what distress we all seemed to be then, yet I would give
+ much to bring back that time... but there’s no bringing it back.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Princess Mary gazed intently into his eyes with her own luminous ones as
+ he said this. She seemed to be trying to fathom the hidden meaning of his
+ words which would explain his feeling for her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes,” said she, “but you have no reason to regret the past, Count.
+ As I understand your present life, I think you will always recall it with
+ satisfaction, because the self-sacrifice that fills it now...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I cannot accept your praise,” he interrupted her hurriedly. “On the
+ contrary I continually reproach myself.... But this is not at all an
+ interesting or cheerful subject.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His face again resumed its former stiff and cold expression. But the
+ princess had caught a glimpse of the man she had known and loved, and it
+ was to him that she now spoke.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I thought you would allow me to tell you this,” she said. “I had come so
+ near to you... and to all your family that I thought you would not
+ consider my sympathy misplaced, but I was mistaken,” and suddenly her
+ voice trembled. “I don’t know why,” she continued, recovering herself,
+ “but you used to be different, and...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “There are a thousand reasons why ,” laying special emphasis on the why .
+ “Thank you, Princess,” he added softly. “Sometimes it is hard.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So that’s why! That’s why!” a voice whispered in Princess Mary’s soul.
+ “No, it was not only that gay, kind, and frank look, not only that
+ handsome exterior, that I loved in him. I divined his noble, resolute,
+ self-sacrificing spirit too,” she said to herself. “Yes, he is poor now
+ and I am rich.... Yes, that’s the only reason.... Yes, were it not for
+ that...” And remembering his former tenderness, and looking now at his
+ kind, sorrowful face, she suddenly understood the cause of his coldness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But why, Count, why?” she almost cried, unconsciously moving closer to
+ him. “Why? Tell me. You must tell me!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was silent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t understand your why , Count,” she continued,
+ “but it’s hard for me... I confess it. For some reason you wish to
+ deprive me of our former friendship. And that hurts me.” There were tears
+ in her eyes and in her voice. “I have had so little happiness in life that
+ every loss is hard for me to bear.... Excuse me, good-by!” and suddenly she
+ began to cry and was hurrying from the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Princess, for God’s sake!” he exclaimed, trying to stop her. “Princess!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She turned round. For a few seconds they gazed silently into one another’s
+ eyes—and what had seemed impossible and remote suddenly became
+ possible, inevitable, and very near.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ In the winter of 1813 Nicholas married Princess Mary and moved to Bald
+ Hills with his wife, his mother, and Sónya.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Within four years he had paid off all his remaining debts without selling
+ any of his wife’s property, and having received a small inheritance on the
+ death of a cousin he paid his debt to Pierre as well.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In another three years, by 1820, he had so managed his affairs that he was
+ able to buy a small estate adjoining Bald Hills and was negotiating to buy
+ back Otrádnoe—that being his pet dream.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having started farming from necessity, he soon grew so devoted to it that
+ it became his favorite and almost his sole occupation. Nicholas was a
+ plain farmer: he did not like innovations, especially the English ones
+ then coming into vogue. He laughed at theoretical treatises on estate
+ management, disliked factories, the raising of expensive products, and the
+ buying of expensive seed corn, and did not make a hobby of any particular
+ part of the work on his estate. He always had before his mind’s eye the
+ estate as a whole and not any particular part of it. The chief thing in
+ his eyes was not the nitrogen in the soil, nor the oxygen in the air, nor
+ manures, nor special plows, but that most important agent by which
+ nitrogen, oxygen, manure, and plow were made effective—the peasant
+ laborer. When Nicholas first began farming and began to understand its
+ different branches, it was the serf who especially attracted his
+ attention. The peasant seemed to him not merely a tool, but also a judge
+ of farming and an end in himself. At first he watched the serfs, trying to
+ understand their aims and what they considered good and bad, and only
+ pretended to direct them and give orders while in reality learning from
+ them their methods, their manner of speech, and their judgment of what was
+ good and bad. Only when he had understood the peasants’ tastes and
+ aspirations, had learned to talk their language, to grasp the hidden
+ meaning of their words, and felt akin to them did he begin boldly to
+ manage his serfs, that is, to perform toward them the duties demanded of
+ him. And Nicholas’ management produced very brilliant results.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Guided by some gift of insight, on taking up the management of the estates
+ he at once unerringly appointed as bailiff, village elder, and delegate,
+ the very men the serfs would themselves have chosen had they had the right
+ to choose, and these posts never changed hands. Before analyzing the
+ properties of manure, before entering into the debit and credit 
+ (as he ironically called it), he found out how many cattle the peasants had and
+ increased the number by all possible means. He kept the peasant families
+ together in the largest groups possible, not allowing the family groups to
+ divide into separate households. He was hard alike on the lazy, the
+ depraved, and the weak, and tried to get them expelled from the commune.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was as careful of the sowing and reaping of the peasants’ hay and corn
+ as of his own, and few landowners had their crops sown and harvested so
+ early and so well, or got so good a return, as did Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He disliked having anything to do with the domestic serfs—the
+ “drones” as he called them—and everyone said he spoiled them by his
+ laxity. When a decision had to be taken regarding a domestic serf,
+ especially if one had to be punished, he always felt undecided and
+ consulted everybody in the house; but when it was possible to have a
+ domestic serf conscripted instead of a land worker he did so without the
+ least hesitation. He never felt any hesitation in dealing with the
+ peasants. He knew that his every decision would be approved by them all
+ with very few exceptions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not allow himself either to be hard on or punish a man, or to make
+ things easy for or reward anyone, merely because he felt inclined to do
+ so. He could not have said by what standard he judged what he should or
+ should not do, but the standard was quite firm and definite in his own
+ mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Often, speaking with vexation of some failure or irregularity, he would
+ say: “What can one do with our Russian peasants?” and imagined that he
+ could not bear them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Yet he loved “our Russian peasants” and their way of life with his whole
+ soul, and for that very reason had understood and assimilated the one way
+ and manner of farming which produced good results.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Countess Mary was jealous of this passion of her husband’s and regretted
+ that she could not share it; but she could not understand the joys and
+ vexations he derived from that world, to her so remote and alien. She
+ could not understand why he was so particularly animated and happy when,
+ after getting up at daybreak and spending the whole morning in the fields
+ or on the threshing floor, he returned from the sowing or mowing or
+ reaping to have tea with her. She did not understand why he spoke with
+ such admiration and delight of the farming of the thrifty and well-to-do
+ peasant Matthew Ermíshin, who with his family had carted corn all night;
+ or of the fact that his (Nicholas’) sheaves were already stacked before
+ anyone else had his harvest in. She did not understand why he stepped out
+ from the window to the veranda and smiled under his mustache and winked so
+ joyfully, when warm steady rain began to fall on the dry and thirsty
+ shoots of the young oats, or why when the wind carried away a threatening
+ cloud during the hay harvest he would return from the barn, flushed,
+ sunburned, and perspiring, with a smell of wormwood and gentian in his
+ hair and, gleefully rubbing his hands, would say: “Well, one more day and
+ my grain and the peasants’ will all be under cover.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Still less did she understand why he, kindhearted and always ready to
+ anticipate her wishes, should become almost desperate when she brought him
+ a petition from some peasant men or women who had appealed to her to be
+ excused some work; why he, that kind Nicholas, should obstinately refuse
+ her, angrily asking her not to interfere in what was not her business. She
+ felt he had a world apart, which he loved passionately and which had laws
+ she had not fathomed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sometimes when, trying to understand him, she spoke of the good work he
+ was doing for his serfs, he would be vexed and reply: “Not in the least;
+ it never entered my head and I wouldn’t do that for their good!
+ That’s all poetry and old wives’ talk—all that doing good to
+ one’s neighbor! What I want is that our children should not have to go
+ begging. I must put our affairs in order while I am alive, that’s all.
+ And to do that, order and strictness are essential.... That’s all about
+ it!” said he, clenching his vigorous fist. “And fairness, of
+ course,” he added, “for if the peasant is naked and hungry and has
+ only one miserable horse, he can do no good either for himself or for me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And all Nicholas did was fruitful—probably just because he refused
+ to allow himself to think that he was doing good to others for virtue’s
+ sake. His means increased rapidly; serfs from neighboring estates came to
+ beg him to buy them, and long after his death the memory of his
+ administration was devoutly preserved among the serfs. “He was a master...
+ the peasants’ affairs first and then his own. Of course he was not to be
+ trifled with either—in a word, he was a real master!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ One matter connected with his management sometimes worried Nicholas, and
+ that was his quick temper together with his old hussar habit of making
+ free use of his fists. At first he saw nothing reprehensible in this, but
+ in the second year of his marriage his view of that form of punishment
+ suddenly changed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Once in summer he had sent for the village elder from Boguchárovo, a man
+ who had succeeded to the post when Dron died and who was accused of
+ dishonesty and various irregularities. Nicholas went out into the porch to
+ question him, and immediately after the elder had given a few replies the
+ sound of cries and blows were heard. On returning to lunch Nicholas went
+ up to his wife, who sat with her head bent low over her embroidery frame,
+ and as usual began to tell her what he had been doing that morning. Among
+ other things he spoke of the Boguchárovo elder. Countess Mary turned red
+ and then pale, but continued to sit with head bowed and lips compressed
+ and gave her husband no reply.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Such an insolent scoundrel!” he cried, growing hot again at the mere
+ recollection of him. “If he had told me he was drunk and did not see...
+ But what is the matter with you, Mary?” he suddenly asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Countess Mary raised her head and tried to speak, but hastily looked down
+ again and her lips puckered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, whatever is the matter, my dearest?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The looks of the plain Countess Mary always improved when she was in
+ tears. She never cried from pain or vexation, but always from sorrow or
+ pity, and when she wept her radiant eyes acquired an irresistible charm.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The moment Nicholas took her hand she could no longer restrain herself and
+ began to cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nicholas, I saw it... he was to blame, but why do you... Nicholas!” and
+ she covered her face with her hands.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas said nothing. He flushed crimson, left her side, and paced up and
+ down the room. He understood what she was weeping about, but could not in
+ his heart at once agree with her that what he had regarded from childhood
+ as quite an everyday event was wrong. “Is it just sentimentality, old
+ wives’ tales, or is she right?” he asked himself. Before he had solved
+ that point he glanced again at her face filled with love and pain, and he
+ suddenly realized that she was right and that he had long been sinning
+ against himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mary,” he said softly, going up to her, “it will never happen again; I
+ give you my word. Never,” he repeated in a trembling voice like a boy
+ asking for forgiveness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The tears flowed faster still from the countess’ eyes. She took his hand
+ and kissed it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nicholas, when did you break your cameo?” she asked to change the
+ subject, looking at his finger on which he wore a ring with a cameo of
+ Laocoön’s head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Today—it was the same affair. Oh, Mary, don’t remind me of it!” and
+ again he flushed. “I give you my word of honor it shan’t occur again, and
+ let this always be a reminder to me,” and he pointed to the broken ring.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After that, when in discussions with his village elders or stewards the
+ blood rushed to his face and his fists began to clench, Nicholas would
+ turn the broken ring on his finger and would drop his eyes before the man
+ who was making him angry. But he did forget himself once or twice within a
+ twelvemonth, and then he would go and confess to his wife, and would again
+ promise that this should really be the very last time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mary, you must despise me!” he would say. “I deserve it.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You should go, go away at once, if you don’t feel strong enough to
+ control yourself,” she would reply sadly, trying to comfort her husband.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Among the gentry of the province Nicholas was respected but not liked. He
+ did not concern himself with the interests of his own class, and
+ consequently some thought him proud and others thought him stupid. The
+ whole summer, from spring sowing to harvest, he was busy with the work on
+ his farm. In autumn he gave himself up to hunting with the same
+ business-like seriousness—leaving home for a month, or even two,
+ with his hunt. In winter he visited his other villages or spent his time
+ reading. The books he read were chiefly historical, and on these he spent
+ a certain sum every year. He was collecting, as he said, a serious
+ library, and he made it a rule to read through all the books he bought. He
+ would sit in his study with a grave air, reading—a task he first
+ imposed upon himself as a duty, but which afterwards became a habit
+ affording him a special kind of pleasure and a consciousness of being
+ occupied with serious matters. In winter, except for business excursions,
+ he spent most of his time at home making himself one with his family and
+ entering into all the details of his children’s relations with their
+ mother. The harmony between him and his wife grew closer and closer and he
+ daily discovered fresh spiritual treasures in her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the time of his marriage Sónya had lived in his house. Before that,
+ Nicholas had told his wife all that had passed between himself and Sónya,
+ blaming himself and commending her. He had asked Princess Mary to be
+ gentle and kind to his cousin. She thoroughly realized the wrong he had
+ done Sónya, felt herself to blame toward her, and imagined that her wealth
+ had influenced Nicholas’ choice. She could not find fault with Sónya in
+ any way and tried to be fond of her, but often felt ill-will toward her
+ which she could not overcome.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Once she had a talk with her friend Natásha about Sónya and about her own
+ injustice toward her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know,” said Natásha, “you have read the Gospels a great deal—there
+ is a passage in them that just fits Sónya.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What?” asked Countess Mary, surprised.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “‘To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be
+ taken away.’ You remember? She is one that hath not; why, I don’t know.
+ Perhaps she lacks egotism, I don’t know, but from her is taken away, and
+ everything has been taken away. Sometimes I am dreadfully sorry for her.
+ Formerly I very much wanted Nicholas to marry her, but I always had a sort
+ of presentiment that it would not come off. She is a sterile flower , you
+ know—like some strawberry blossoms. Sometimes I am sorry for her,
+ and sometimes I think she doesn’t feel it as you or I would.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though Countess Mary told Natásha that those words in the Gospel must be
+ understood differently, yet looking at Sónya she agreed with Natásha’s
+ explanation. It really seemed that Sónya did not feel her position trying,
+ and had grown quite reconciled to her lot as a sterile flower . She seemed
+ to be fond not so much of individuals as of the family as a whole. Like a
+ cat, she had attached herself not to the people but to the home. She
+ waited on the old countess, petted and spoiled the children, was always
+ ready to render the small services for which she had a gift, and all this
+ was unconsciously accepted from her with insufficient gratitude.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The country seat at Bald Hills had been rebuilt, though not on the same
+ scale as under the old prince.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The buildings, begun under straitened circumstances, were more than
+ simple. The immense house on the old stone foundations was of wood,
+ plastered only inside. It had bare deal floors and was furnished with very
+ simple hard sofas, armchairs, tables, and chairs made by their own serf
+ carpenters out of their own birchwood. The house was spacious and had
+ rooms for the house serfs and apartments for visitors. Whole families of
+ the Rostóvs’ and Bolkónskis’ relations sometimes came to Bald Hills with
+ sixteen horses and dozens of servants and stayed for months. Besides that,
+ four times a year, on the name days and birthdays of the hosts, as many as
+ a hundred visitors would gather there for a day or two. The rest of the
+ year life pursued its unbroken routine with its ordinary occupations, and
+ its breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and suppers, provided out of the produce
+ of the estate.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ It was the eve of St. Nicholas, the fifth of December, 1820. Natásha had
+ been staying at her brother’s with her husband and children since early
+ autumn. Pierre had gone to Petersburg on business of his own for three
+ weeks as he said, but had remained there nearly seven weeks and was
+ expected back every minute.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Besides the Bezúkhov family, Nicholas’ old friend the retired General
+ Vasíli Dmítrich Denísov was staying with the Rostóvs this fifth of
+ December.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the sixth, which was his name day when the house would be full of
+ visitors, Nicholas knew he would have to exchange his Tartar tunic for a
+ tail coat, and put on narrow boots with pointed toes, and drive to the new
+ church he had built, and then receive visitors who would come to
+ congratulate him, offer them refreshments, and talk about the elections of
+ the nobility; but he considered himself entitled to spend the eve of that
+ day in his usual way. He examined the bailiff’s accounts of the village in
+ Ryazán which belonged to his wife’s nephew, wrote two business letters,
+ and walked over to the granaries, cattle yards and stables before dinner.
+ Having taken precautions against the general drunkenness to be expected on
+ the morrow because it was a great saint’s day, he returned to dinner, and
+ without having time for a private talk with his wife sat down at the long
+ table laid for twenty persons, at which the whole household had assembled.
+ At that table were his mother, his mother’s old lady companion Belóva, his
+ wife, their three children with their governess and tutor, his wife’s
+ nephew with his tutor, Sónya, Denísov, Natásha, her three children, their
+ governess, and old Michael Ivánovich, the late prince’s architect, who was
+ living on in retirement at Bald Hills.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Countess Mary sat at the other end of the table. When her husband took his
+ place she concluded, from the rapid manner in which after taking up his
+ table napkin he pushed back the tumbler and wineglass standing before him,
+ that he was out of humor, as was sometimes the case when he came in to
+ dinner straight from the farm—especially before the soup. Countess
+ Mary well knew that mood of his, and when she herself was in a good frame
+ of mind quietly waited till he had had his soup and then began to talk to
+ him and make him admit that there was no cause for his ill-humor. But
+ today she quite forgot that and was hurt that he should be angry with her
+ without any reason, and she felt unhappy. She asked him where he had been.
+ He replied. She again inquired whether everything was going well on the
+ farm. Her unnatural tone made him wince unpleasantly and he replied
+ hastily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Then I’m not mistaken,” thought Countess Mary. “Why is he cross with me?”
+ She concluded from his tone that he was vexed with her and wished to end
+ the conversation. She knew her remarks sounded unnatural, but could not
+ refrain from asking some more questions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thanks to Denísov the conversation at table soon became general and
+ lively, and she did not talk to her husband. When they left the table and
+ went as usual to thank the old countess, Countess Mary held out her hand
+ and kissed her husband, and asked him why he was angry with her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You always have such strange fancies! I didn’t even think of being
+ angry,” he replied.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But the word always seemed to her to imply: “Yes, I am angry
+ but I won’t tell you why.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas and his wife lived together so happily that even Sónya and the
+ old countess, who felt jealous and would have liked them to disagree,
+ could find nothing to reproach them with; but even they had their moments
+ of antagonism. Occasionally, and it was always just after they had been
+ happiest together, they suddenly had a feeling of estrangement and
+ hostility, which occurred most frequently during Countess Mary’s
+ pregnancies, and this was such a time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, messieurs et mesdames ,” said Nicholas loudly and with apparent
+ cheerfulness (it seemed to Countess Mary that he did it on purpose to vex
+ her), “I have been on my feet since six this morning. Tomorrow I shall
+ have to suffer, so today I’ll go and rest.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And without a word to his wife he went to the little sitting room and lay
+ down on the sofa.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s always the way,” thought Countess Mary. “He talks to everyone
+ except me. I see... I see that I am repulsive to him, especially when I am
+ in this condition.” She looked down at her expanded figure and in the
+ glass at her pale, sallow, emaciated face in which her eyes now looked
+ larger than ever.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And everything annoyed her—Denísov’s shouting and laughter,
+ Natásha’s talk, and especially a quick glance Sónya gave her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sónya was always the first excuse Countess Mary found for feeling
+ irritated.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having sat awhile with her visitors without understanding anything of what
+ they were saying, she softly left the room and went to the nursery.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The children were playing at “going to Moscow” in a carriage made of
+ chairs and invited her to go with them. She sat down and played with them
+ a little, but the thought of her husband and his unreasonable crossness
+ worried her. She got up and, walking on tiptoe with difficulty, went to
+ the small sitting room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Perhaps he is not asleep; I’ll have an explanation with him,” she said to
+ herself. Little Andrew, her eldest boy, imitating his mother, followed her
+ on tiptoe. She did not notice him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mary, dear, I think he is asleep—he was so tired,” said Sónya,
+ meeting her in the large sitting room (it seemed to Countess Mary that she
+ crossed her path everywhere). “Andrew may wake him.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Countess Mary looked round, saw little Andrew following her, felt that
+ Sónya was right, and for that very reason flushed and with evident
+ difficulty refrained from saying something harsh. She made no reply, but
+ to avoid obeying Sónya beckoned to Andrew to follow her quietly and went
+ to the door. Sónya went away by another door. From the room in which
+ Nicholas was sleeping came the sound of his even breathing, every
+ slightest tone of which was familiar to his wife. As she listened to it
+ she saw before her his smooth handsome forehead, his mustache, and his
+ whole face, as she had so often seen it in the stillness of the night when
+ he slept. Nicholas suddenly moved and cleared his throat. And at that
+ moment little Andrew shouted from outside the door: “Papa! Mamma’s
+ standing here!” Countess Mary turned pale with fright and made signs to
+ the boy. He grew silent, and quiet ensued for a moment, terrible to
+ Countess Mary. She knew how Nicholas disliked being waked. Then through
+ the door she heard Nicholas clearing his throat again and stirring, and
+ his voice said crossly:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I can’t get a moment’s peace.... Mary, is that you? Why did you bring him
+ here?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I only came in to look and did not notice... forgive me....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas coughed and said no more. Countess Mary moved away from the door
+ and took the boy back to the nursery. Five minutes later little black-eyed
+ three-year-old Natásha, her father’s pet, having learned from her brother
+ that Papa was asleep and Mamma was in the sitting room, ran to her father
+ unobserved by her mother. The dark-eyed little girl boldly opened the
+ creaking door, went up to the sofa with energetic steps of her sturdy
+ little legs, and having examined the position of her father, who was
+ asleep with his back to her, rose on tiptoe and kissed the hand which lay
+ under his head. Nicholas turned with a tender smile on his face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Natásha, Natásha!” came Countess Mary’s frightened whisper from the door.
+ “Papa wants to sleep.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Mamma, he doesn’t want to sleep,” said little Natásha with
+ conviction. “He’s laughing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas lowered his legs, rose, and took his daughter in his arms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come in, Mary,” he said to his wife.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She went in and sat down by her husband.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I did not notice him following me,” she said timidly. “I just looked in.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Holding his little girl with one arm, Nicholas glanced at his wife and,
+ seeing her guilty expression, put his other arm around her and kissed her
+ hair.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “May I kiss Mamma?” he asked Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha smiled bashfully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Again!” she commanded, pointing with a peremptory gesture to the spot
+ where Nicholas had placed the kiss.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t know why you think I am cross,” said Nicholas, replying to the
+ question he knew was in his wife’s mind.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You have no idea how unhappy, how lonely, I feel when you are like that.
+ It always seems to me...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mary, don’t talk nonsense. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” he said
+ gaily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It seems to be that you can’t love me, that I am so plain... always...
+ and now... in this cond...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, how absurd you are! It is not beauty that endears, it’s love that
+ makes us see beauty. It is only Malvínas and women of that kind who are
+ loved for their beauty. But do I love my wife? I don’t love her, but... I
+ don’t know how to put it. Without you, or when something comes between us
+ like this, I seem lost and can’t do anything. Now do I love my finger? I
+ don’t love it, but just try to cut it off!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I’m not like that myself, but I understand. So you’re not angry with me?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Awfully angry!” he said, smiling and getting up. And smoothing his hair
+ he began to pace the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know, Mary, what I’ve been thinking?” he began, immediately
+ thinking aloud in his wife’s presence now that they had made it up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He did not ask if she was ready to listen to him. He did not care. A
+ thought had occurred to him and so it belonged to her also. And he told
+ her of his intention to persuade Pierre to stay with them till spring.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Countess Mary listened till he had finished, made some remark, and in her
+ turn began thinking aloud. Her thoughts were about the children.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You can see the woman in her already,” she said in French, pointing to
+ little Natásha. “You reproach us women with being illogical. Here is our
+ logic. I say: ‘Papa wants to sleep!’ but she says, ‘No, he’s laughing.’
+ And she was right,” said Countess Mary with a happy smile.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, yes.” And Nicholas, taking his little daughter in his strong hand,
+ lifted her high, placed her on his shoulder, held her by the legs, and
+ paced the room with her. There was an expression of carefree happiness on
+ the faces of both father and daughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But you know you may be unfair. You are too fond of this one,” his wife
+ whispered in French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, but what am I to do?... I try not to show...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment they heard the sound of the door pulley and footsteps in
+ the hall and anteroom, as if someone had arrived.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Somebody has come.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I am sure it is Pierre. I will go and see,” said Countess Mary and left
+ the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In her absence Nicholas allowed himself to give his little daughter a
+ gallop round the room. Out of breath, he took the laughing child quickly
+ from his shoulder and pressed her to his heart. His capers reminded him of
+ dancing, and looking at the child’s round happy little face he thought of
+ what she would be like when he was an old man, taking her into society and
+ dancing the mazurka with her as his old father had danced Daniel Cooper 
+ with his daughter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is he, it is he, Nicholas!” said Countess Mary, re-entering the room a
+ few minutes later. “Now our Natásha has come to life. You should have seen
+ her ecstasy, and how he caught it for having stayed away so long. Well,
+ come along now, quick, quick! It’s time you two were parted,” she added,
+ looking smilingly at the little girl who clung to her father.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas went out holding the child by the hand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Countess Mary remained in the sitting room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I should never, never have believed that one could be so happy,” she
+ whispered to herself. A smile lit up her face but at the same time she
+ sighed, and her deep eyes expressed a quiet sadness as though she felt,
+ through her happiness, that there is another sort of happiness
+ unattainable in this life and of which she involuntarily thought at that
+ instant.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ Natásha had married in the early spring of 1813, and in 1820 already had
+ three daughters besides a son for whom she had longed and whom she was now
+ nursing. She had grown stouter and broader, so that it was difficult to
+ recognize in this robust, motherly woman the slim, lively Natásha of
+ former days. Her features were more defined and had a calm, soft, and
+ serene expression. In her face there was none of the ever-glowing
+ animation that had formerly burned there and constituted its charm. Now
+ her face and body were often all that one saw, and her soul was not
+ visible at all. All that struck the eye was a strong, handsome, and
+ fertile woman. The old fire very rarely kindled in her face now. That
+ happened only when, as was the case that day, her husband returned home,
+ or a sick child was convalescent, or when she and Countess Mary spoke of
+ Prince Andrew (she never mentioned him to her husband, who she imagined
+ was jealous of Prince Andrew’s memory), or on the rare occasions when
+ something happened to induce her to sing, a practice she had quite
+ abandoned since her marriage. At the rare moments when the old fire did
+ kindle in her handsome, fully developed body she was even more attractive
+ than in former days.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Since their marriage Natásha and her husband had lived in Moscow, in
+ Petersburg, on their estate near Moscow, or with her mother, that is to
+ say, in Nicholas’ house. The young Countess Bezúkhova was not often seen
+ in society, and those who met her there were not pleased with her and
+ found her neither attractive nor amiable. Not that Natásha liked solitude—she
+ did not know whether she liked it or not, she even thought that she did
+ not—but with her pregnancies, her confinements, the nursing of her
+ children, and sharing every moment of her husband’s life, she had demands
+ on her time which could be satisfied only by renouncing society. All who
+ had known Natásha before her marriage wondered at the change in her as at
+ something extraordinary. Only the old countess with her maternal instinct
+ had realized that all Natásha’s outbursts had been due to her need of
+ children and a husband—as she herself had once exclaimed at Otrádnoe
+ not so much in fun as in earnest—and her mother was now surprised at
+ the surprise expressed by those who had never understood Natásha, and she
+ kept saying that she had always known that Natásha would make an exemplary
+ wife and mother.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Only she lets her love of her husband and children overflow all bounds,”
+ said the countess, “so that it even becomes absurd.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha did not follow the golden rule advocated by clever folk,
+ especially by the French, which says that a girl should not let herself go
+ when she marries, should not neglect her accomplishments, should be even
+ more careful of her appearance than when she was unmarried, and should
+ fascinate her husband as much as she did before he became her husband.
+ Natásha on the contrary had at once abandoned all her witchery, of which
+ her singing had been an unusually powerful part. She gave it up just
+ because it was so powerfully seductive. She took no pains with her manners
+ or with delicacy of speech, or with her toilet, or to show herself to her
+ husband in her most becoming attitudes, or to avoid inconveniencing him by
+ being too exacting. She acted in contradiction to all those rules. She
+ felt that the allurements instinct had formerly taught her to use would
+ now be merely ridiculous in the eyes of her husband, to whom she had from
+ the first moment given herself up entirely—that is, with her whole
+ soul, leaving no corner of it hidden from him. She felt that her unity
+ with her husband was not maintained by the poetic feelings that had
+ attracted him to her, but by something else—indefinite but firm as
+ the bond between her own body and soul.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To fluff out her curls, put on fashionable dresses, and sing romantic
+ songs to fascinate her husband would have seemed as strange as to adorn
+ herself to attract herself. To adorn herself for others might perhaps have
+ been agreeable—she did not know—but she had no time at all for
+ it. The chief reason for devoting no time either to singing, to dress, or
+ to choosing her words was that she really had no time to spare for these
+ things.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ We know that man has the faculty of becoming completely absorbed in a
+ subject however trivial it may be, and that there is no subject so trivial
+ that it will not grow to infinite proportions if one’s entire attention is
+ devoted to it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The subject which wholly engrossed Natásha’s attention was her family:
+ that is, her husband whom she had to keep so that he should belong
+ entirely to her and to the home, and the children whom she had to bear,
+ bring into the world, nurse, and bring up.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And the deeper she penetrated, not with her mind only but with her whole
+ soul, her whole being, into the subject that absorbed her, the larger did
+ that subject grow and the weaker and more inadequate did her powers
+ appear, so that she concentrated them wholly on that one thing and yet was
+ unable to accomplish all that she considered necessary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ There were then as now conversations and discussions about women’s rights,
+ the relations of husband and wife and their freedom and rights, though
+ these themes were not yet termed questions as they are now; but these
+ topics were not merely uninteresting to Natásha, she positively did not
+ understand them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These questions, then as now, existed only for those who see nothing in
+ marriage but the pleasure married people get from one another, that is,
+ only the beginnings of marriage and not its whole significance, which lies
+ in the family.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Discussions and questions of that kind, which are like the question of how
+ to get the greatest gratification from one’s dinner, did not then and do
+ not now exist for those for whom the purpose of a dinner is the
+ nourishment it affords; and the purpose of marriage is the family.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If the purpose of dinner is to nourish the body, a man who eats two
+ dinners at once may perhaps get more enjoyment but will not attain his
+ purpose, for his stomach will not digest the two dinners.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If the purpose of marriage is the family, the person who wishes to have
+ many wives or husbands may perhaps obtain much pleasure, but in that case
+ will not have a family.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If the purpose of food is nourishment and the purpose of marriage is the
+ family, the whole question resolves itself into not eating more than one
+ can digest, and not having more wives or husbands than are needed for the
+ family—that is, one wife or one husband. Natásha needed a husband. A
+ husband was given her and he gave her a family. And she not only saw no
+ need of any other or better husband, but as all the powers of her soul
+ were intent on serving that husband and family, she could not imagine and
+ saw no interest in imagining how it would be if things were different.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha did not care for society in general, but prized the more the
+ society of her relatives—Countess Mary, and her brother, her mother,
+ and Sónya. She valued the company of those to whom she could come striding
+ disheveled from the nursery in her dressing gown, and with joyful face
+ show a yellow instead of a green stain on baby’s napkin, and from whom she
+ could hear reassuring words to the effect that baby was much better.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To such an extent had Natásha let herself go that the way she dressed and
+ did her hair, her ill-chosen words, and her jealousy—she was jealous
+ of Sónya, of the governess, and of every woman, pretty or plain—were
+ habitual subjects of jest to those about her. The general opinion was that
+ Pierre was under his wife’s thumb, which was really true. From the very
+ first days of their married life Natásha had announced her demands. Pierre
+ was greatly surprised by his wife’s view, to him a perfectly novel one,
+ that every moment of his life belonged to her and to the family. His
+ wife’s demands astonished him, but they also flattered him, and he
+ submitted to them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre’s subjection consisted in the fact that he not only dared not flirt
+ with, but dared not even speak smilingly to, any other woman; did not dare
+ dine at the Club as a pastime, did not dare spend money on a whim, and did
+ not dare absent himself for any length of time, except on business—in
+ which his wife included his intellectual pursuits, which she did not in
+ the least understand but to which she attributed great importance. To make
+ up for this, at home Pierre had the right to regulate his life and that of
+ the whole family exactly as he chose. At home Natásha placed herself in
+ the position of a slave to her husband, and the whole household went on
+ tiptoe when he was occupied—that is, was reading or writing in his
+ study. Pierre had but to show a partiality for anything to get just what
+ he liked done always. He had only to express a wish and Natásha would jump
+ up and run to fulfill it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The entire household was governed according to Pierre’s supposed orders,
+ that is, by his wishes which Natásha tried to guess. Their way of life and
+ place of residence, their acquaintances and ties, Natásha’s occupations,
+ the children’s upbringing, were all selected not merely with regard to
+ Pierre’s expressed wishes, but to what Natásha from the thoughts he
+ expressed in conversation supposed his wishes to be. And she deduced the
+ essentials of his wishes quite correctly, and having once arrived at them
+ clung to them tenaciously. When Pierre himself wanted to change his mind
+ she would fight him with his own weapons.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thus in a time of trouble ever memorable to him after the birth of their
+ first child who was delicate, when they had to change the wet nurse three
+ times and Natásha fell ill from despair, Pierre one day told her of
+ Rousseau’s view, with which he quite agreed, that to have a wet nurse is
+ unnatural and harmful. When her next baby was born, despite the opposition
+ of her mother, the doctors, and even of her husband himself—who were
+ all vigorously opposed to her nursing her baby herself, a thing then
+ unheard of and considered injurious—she insisted on having her own
+ way, and after that nursed all her babies herself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It very often happened that in a moment of irritation husband and wife
+ would have a dispute, but long afterwards Pierre to his surprise and
+ delight would find in his wife’s ideas and actions the very thought
+ against which she had argued, but divested of everything superfluous that
+ in the excitement of the dispute he had added when expressing his opinion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After seven years of marriage Pierre had the joyous and firm consciousness
+ that he was not a bad man, and he felt this because he saw himself
+ reflected in his wife. He felt the good and bad within himself
+ inextricably mingled and overlapping. But only what was really good in him
+ was reflected in his wife, all that was not quite good was rejected. And
+ this was not the result of logical reasoning but was a direct and
+ mysterious reflection.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ Two months previously when Pierre was already staying with the Rostóvs he
+ had received a letter from Prince Theodore, asking him to come to
+ Petersburg to confer on some important questions that were being discussed
+ there by a society of which Pierre was one of the principal founders.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On reading that letter (she always read her husband’s letters) Natásha
+ herself suggested that he should go to Petersburg, though she would feel
+ his absence very acutely. She attributed immense importance to all her
+ husband’s intellectual and abstract interests though she did not
+ understand them, and she always dreaded being a hindrance to him in such
+ matters. To Pierre’s timid look of inquiry after reading the letter she
+ replied by asking him to go, but to fix a definite date for his return. He
+ was given four weeks’ leave of absence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Ever since that leave of absence had expired, more than a fortnight
+ before, Natásha had been in a constant state of alarm, depression, and
+ irritability.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov, now a general on the retired list and much dissatisfied with the
+ present state of affairs, had arrived during that fortnight. He looked at
+ Natásha with sorrow and surprise as at a bad likeness of a person once
+ dear. A dull, dejected look, random replies, and talk about the nursery
+ was all he saw and heard from his former enchantress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha was sad and irritable all that time, especially when her mother,
+ her brother, Sónya, or Countess Mary in their efforts to console her tried
+ to excuse Pierre and suggested reasons for his delay in returning.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It’s all nonsense, all rubbish—those discussions which lead to
+ nothing and all those idiotic societies!” Natásha declared of the very
+ affairs in the immense importance of which she firmly believed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And she would go to the nursery to nurse Pétya, her only boy. No one else
+ could tell her anything so comforting or so reasonable as this little
+ three-month-old creature when he lay at her breast and she was conscious
+ of the movement of his lips and the snuffling of his little nose. That
+ creature said: “You are angry, you are jealous, you would like to pay him
+ out, you are afraid—but here am I! And I am he...” and that was
+ unanswerable. It was more than true.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During that fortnight of anxiety Natásha resorted to the baby for comfort
+ so often, and fussed over him so much, that she overfed him and he fell
+ ill. She was terrified by his illness, and yet that was just what she
+ needed. While attending to him she bore the anxiety about her husband more
+ easily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She was nursing her boy when the sound of Pierre’s sleigh was heard at the
+ front door, and the old nurse—knowing how to please her mistress—entered
+ the room inaudibly but hurriedly and with a beaming face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Has he come?” Natásha asked quickly in a whisper, afraid to move lest she
+ should rouse the dozing baby.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s come, ma’am,” whispered the nurse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The blood rushed to Natásha’s face and her feet involuntarily moved, but
+ she could not jump up and run out. The baby again opened his eyes and
+ looked at her. “You’re here?” he seemed to be saying, and again lazily
+ smacked his lips.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Cautiously withdrawing her breast, Natásha rocked him a little, handed him
+ to the nurse, and went with rapid steps toward the door. But at the door
+ she stopped as if her conscience reproached her for having in her joy left
+ the child too soon, and she glanced round. The nurse with raised elbows
+ was lifting the infant over the rail of his cot.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Go, ma’am! Don’t worry, go!” she whispered, smiling, with the kind of
+ familiarity that grows up between a nurse and her mistress.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha ran with light footsteps to the anteroom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Denísov, who had come out of the study into the dancing room with his
+ pipe, now for the first time recognized the old Natásha. A flood of
+ brilliant, joyful light poured from her transfigured face.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He’s come!” she exclaimed as she ran past, and Denísov felt that he too
+ was delighted that Pierre, whom he did not much care for, had returned.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On reaching the vestibule Natásha saw a tall figure in a fur coat
+ unwinding his scarf. “It’s he! It’s really he! He has come!” she said to
+ herself, and rushing at him embraced him, pressed his head to her breast,
+ and then pushed him back and gazed at his ruddy, happy face, covered with
+ hoarfrost. “Yes, it is he, happy and contented....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Then all at once she remembered the tortures of suspense she had
+ experienced for the last fortnight, and the joy that had lit up her face
+ vanished; she frowned and overwhelmed Pierre with a torrent of reproaches
+ and angry words.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, it’s all very well for you. You are pleased, you’ve had a good
+ time.... But what about me? You might at least have shown consideration
+ for the children. I am nursing and my milk was spoiled.... Pétya was at
+ death’s door. But you were enjoying yourself. Yes, enjoying...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre knew he was not to blame, for he could not have come sooner; he
+ knew this outburst was unseemly and would blow over in a minute or two;
+ above all he knew that he himself was bright and happy. He wanted to smile
+ but dared not even think of doing so. He made a piteous, frightened face
+ and bent down.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I could not, on my honor. But how is Pétya?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right now. Come along! I wonder you’re not ashamed! If only you could
+ see what I was like without you, how I suffered!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You are well?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come, come!” she said, not letting go of his arm. And they went to their
+ rooms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When Nicholas and his wife came to look for Pierre he was in the nursery
+ holding his baby son, who was again awake, on his huge right palm and
+ dandling him. A blissful bright smile was fixed on the baby’s broad face
+ with its toothless open mouth. The storm was long since over and there was
+ bright, joyous sunshine on Natásha’s face as she gazed tenderly at her
+ husband and child.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And have you talked everything well over with Prince Theodore?” she
+ asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, capitally.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You see, he holds it up.” (She meant the baby’s head.) “But how he did
+ frighten me... You’ve seen the princess? Is it true she’s in love with
+ that...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, just fancy...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment Nicholas and Countess Mary came in. Pierre with the baby on
+ his hand stooped, kissed them, and replied to their inquiries. But in
+ spite of much that was interesting and had to be discussed, the baby with
+ the little cap on its unsteady head evidently absorbed all his attention.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How sweet!” said Countess Mary, looking at and playing with the baby.
+ “Now, Nicholas,” she added, turning to her husband, “I can’t understand
+ how it is you don’t see the charm of these delicious marvels.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I don’t and can’t,” replied Nicholas, looking coldly at the baby. “A lump
+ of flesh. Come along, Pierre!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And yet he’s such an affectionate father,” said Countess Mary,
+ vindicating her husband, “but only after they are a year old or so...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Now, Pierre nurses them splendidly,” said Natásha. “He says his hand is
+ just made for a baby’s seat. Just look!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Only not for this...” Pierre suddenly exclaimed with a laugh, and
+ shifting the baby he gave him to the nurse.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ As in every large household, there were at Bald Hills several perfectly
+ distinct worlds which merged into one harmonious whole, though each
+ retained its own peculiarities and made concessions to the others. Every
+ event, joyful or sad, that took place in that house was important to all
+ these worlds, but each had its own special reasons to rejoice or grieve
+ over that occurrence independently of the others.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For instance, Pierre’s return was a joyful and important event and they
+ all felt it to be so.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The servants—the most reliable judges of their masters because they
+ judge not by their conversation or expressions of feeling but by their
+ acts and way of life—were glad of Pierre’s return because they knew
+ that when he was there Count Nicholas would cease going every day to
+ attend to the estate, and would be in better spirits and temper, and also
+ because they would all receive handsome presents for the holidays.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The children and their governesses were glad of Pierre’s return because no
+ one else drew them into the social life of the household as he did. He
+ alone could play on the clavichord that écossaise (his only piece) to
+ which, as he said, all possible dances could be danced, and they felt sure
+ he had brought presents for them all.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Young Nicholas, now a slim lad of fifteen, delicate and intelligent, with
+ curly light-brown hair and beautiful eyes, was delighted because Uncle
+ Pierre as he called him was the object of his rapturous and passionate
+ affection. No one had instilled into him this love for Pierre whom he saw
+ only occasionally. Countess Mary who had brought him up had done her
+ utmost to make him love her husband as she loved him, and little Nicholas
+ did love his uncle, but loved him with just a shade of contempt. Pierre,
+ however, he adored. He did not want to be an hussar or a Knight of St.
+ George like his uncle Nicholas; he wanted to be learned, wise, and kind
+ like Pierre. In Pierre’s presence his face always shone with pleasure and
+ he flushed and was breathless when Pierre spoke to him. He did not miss a
+ single word he uttered, and would afterwards, with Dessalles or by
+ himself, recall and reconsider the meaning of everything Pierre had said.
+ Pierre’s past life and his unhappiness prior to 1812 (of which young
+ Nicholas had formed a vague poetic picture from some words he had
+ overheard), his adventures in Moscow, his captivity, Platón Karatáev (of
+ whom he had heard from Pierre), his love for Natásha (of whom the lad was
+ also particularly fond), and especially Pierre’s friendship with the
+ father whom Nicholas could not remember—all this made Pierre in his
+ eyes a hero and a saint.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From broken remarks about Natásha and his father, from the emotion with
+ which Pierre spoke of that dead father, and from the careful, reverent
+ tenderness with which Natásha spoke of him, the boy, who was only just
+ beginning to guess what love is, derived the notion that his father had
+ loved Natásha and when dying had left her to his friend. But the father
+ whom the boy did not remember appeared to him a divinity who could not be
+ pictured, and of whom he never thought without a swelling heart and tears
+ of sadness and rapture. So the boy also was happy that Pierre had arrived.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The guests welcomed Pierre because he always helped to enliven and unite
+ any company he was in.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The grown-up members of the family, not to mention his wife, were pleased
+ to have back a friend whose presence made life run more smoothly and
+ peacefully.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old ladies were pleased with the presents he brought them, and
+ especially that Natásha would now be herself again.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre felt the different outlooks of these various worlds and made haste
+ to satisfy all their expectations.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though the most absent-minded and forgetful of men, Pierre, with the aid
+ of a list his wife drew up, had now bought everything, not forgetting his
+ mother—and brother-in-law’s commissions, nor the dress material for
+ a present to Belóva, nor toys for his wife’s nephews. In the early days of
+ his marriage it had seemed strange to him that his wife should expect him
+ not to forget to procure all the things he undertook to buy, and he had
+ been taken aback by her serious annoyance when on his first trip he forgot
+ everything. But in time he grew used to this demand. Knowing that Natásha
+ asked nothing for herself, and gave him commissions for others only when
+ he himself had offered to undertake them, he now found an unexpected and
+ childlike pleasure in this purchase of presents for everyone in the house,
+ and never forgot anything. If he now incurred Natásha’s censure it was
+ only for buying too many and too expensive things. To her other defects
+ (as most people thought them, but which to Pierre were qualities) of
+ untidiness and neglect of herself, she now added stinginess.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the time that Pierre began life as a family man on a footing
+ entailing heavy expenditure, he had noticed to his surprise that he spent
+ only half as much as before, and that his affairs—which had been in
+ disorder of late, chiefly because of his first wife’s debts—had
+ begun to improve.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Life was cheaper because it was circumscribed: that most expensive luxury,
+ the kind of life that can be changed at any moment, was no longer his nor
+ did he wish for it. He felt that his way of life had now been settled once
+ for all till death and that to change it was not in his power, and so that
+ way of life proved economical.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With a merry, smiling face Pierre was sorting his purchases.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What do you think of this?” said he, unrolling a piece of stuff like a
+ shopman.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha, who was sitting opposite to him with her eldest daughter on her
+ lap, turned her sparkling eyes swiftly from her husband to the things he
+ showed her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s for Belóva? Excellent!” She felt the quality of the material. “It
+ was a ruble an arshin, I suppose?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre told her the price.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Too dear!” Natásha remarked. “How pleased the children will be and Mamma
+ too! Only you need not have bought me this,” she added, unable to suppress
+ a smile as she gazed admiringly at a gold comb set with pearls, of a kind
+ then just coming into fashion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Adèle tempted me: she kept on telling me to buy it,” returned Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When am I to wear it?” and Natásha stuck it in her coil of hair. “When I
+ take little Másha into society? Perhaps they will be fashionable again by
+ then. Well, let’s go now.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And collecting the presents they went first to the nursery and then to the
+ old countess’ rooms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess was sitting with her companion Belóva, playing grand-patience
+ as usual, when Pierre and Natásha came into the drawing room with parcels
+ under their arms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The countess was now over sixty, was quite gray, and wore a cap with a
+ frill that surrounded her face. Her face had shriveled, her upper lip had
+ sunk in, and her eyes were dim.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After the deaths of her son and husband in such rapid succession, she felt
+ herself a being accidentally forgotten in this world and left without aim
+ or object for her existence. She ate, drank, slept, or kept awake, but did
+ not live . Life gave her no new impressions. She wanted nothing from life
+ but tranquillity, and that tranquillity only death could give her. But
+ until death came she had to go on living, that is, to use her vital
+ forces. A peculiarity one sees in very young children and very old people
+ was particularly evident in her. Her life had no external aims—only
+ a need to exercise her various functions and inclinations was apparent.
+ She had to eat, sleep, think, speak, weep, work, give vent to her anger,
+ and so on, merely because she had a stomach, a brain, muscles, nerves, and
+ a liver. She did these things not under any external impulse as people in
+ the full vigor of life do, when behind the purpose for which they strive
+ that of exercising their functions remains unnoticed. She talked only
+ because she physically needed to exercise her tongue and lungs. She cried
+ as a child does, because her nose had to be cleared, and so on. What for
+ people in their full vigor is an aim was for her evidently merely a
+ pretext.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Thus in the morning—especially if she had eaten anything rich the
+ day before—she felt a need of being angry and would choose as the
+ handiest pretext Belóva’s deafness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She would begin to say something to her in a low tone from the other end
+ of the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It seems a little warmer today, my dear,” she would murmur.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And when Belóva replied: “Oh yes, they’ve come,” she would mutter angrily:
+ “O Lord! How stupid and deaf she is!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Another pretext would be her snuff, which would seem too dry or too damp
+ or not rubbed fine enough. After these fits of irritability her face would
+ grow yellow, and her maids knew by infallible symptoms when Belóva would
+ again be deaf, the snuff damp, and the countess’ face yellow. Just as she
+ needed to work off her spleen so she had sometimes to exercise her
+ still-existing faculty of thinking—and the pretext for that was a
+ game of patience. When she needed to cry, the deceased count would be the
+ pretext. When she wanted to be agitated, Nicholas and his health would be
+ the pretext, and when she felt a need to speak spitefully, the pretext
+ would be Countess Mary. When her vocal organs needed exercise, which was
+ usually toward seven o’clock when she had had an after-dinner rest in a
+ darkened room, the pretext would be the retelling of the same stories over
+ and over again to the same audience.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The old lady’s condition was understood by the whole household though no
+ one ever spoke of it, and they all made every possible effort to satisfy
+ her needs. Only by a rare glance exchanged with a sad smile between
+ Nicholas, Pierre, Natásha, and Countess Mary was the common understanding
+ of her condition expressed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But those glances expressed something more: they said that she had played
+ her part in life, that what they now saw was not her whole self, that we
+ must all become like her, and that they were glad to yield to her, to
+ restrain themselves for this once precious being formerly as full of life
+ as themselves, but now so much to be pitied. “Memento mori,” 
+ said these glances.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only the really heartless, the stupid ones of that household, and the
+ little children failed to understand this and avoided her.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIII
+ 
+ 
+ When Pierre and his wife entered the drawing room the countess was in one
+ of her customary states in which she needed the mental exertion of playing
+ patience, and so—though by force of habit she greeted him with the
+ words she always used when Pierre or her son returned after an absence:
+ “High time, my dear, high time! We were all weary of waiting for you.
+ Well, thank God!” and received her presents with another customary remark:
+ “It’s not the gift that’s precious, my dear, but that you give it to me,
+ an old woman...”—yet it was evident that she was not pleased by
+ Pierre’s arrival at that moment when it diverted her attention from the
+ unfinished game.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She finished her game of patience and only then examined the presents.
+ They consisted of a box for cards, of splendid workmanship, a bright-blue
+ Sèvres tea cup with shepherdesses depicted on it and with a lid, and a
+ gold snuffbox with the count’s portrait on the lid which Pierre had had
+ done by a miniaturist in Petersburg. The countess had long wished for such
+ a box, but as she did not want to cry just then she glanced indifferently
+ at the portrait and gave her attention chiefly to the box for cards.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Thank you, my dear, you have cheered me up,” said she as she always did.
+ “But best of all you have brought yourself back—for I never saw
+ anything like it, you ought to give your wife a scolding! What are we to
+ do with her? She is like a mad woman when you are away. Doesn’t see
+ anything, doesn’t remember anything,” she went on, repeating her usual
+ phrases. “Look, Anna Timoféevna,” she added to her companion, “see what a
+ box for cards my son has brought us!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Belóva admired the presents and was delighted with her dress material.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Though Pierre, Natásha, Nicholas, Countess Mary, and Denísov had much to
+ talk about that they could not discuss before the old countess—not
+ that anything was hidden from her, but because she had dropped so far
+ behindhand in many things that had they begun to converse in her presence
+ they would have had to answer inopportune questions and to repeat what
+ they had already told her many times: that so-and-so was dead and
+ so-and-so was married, which she would again be unable to remember—yet
+ they sat at tea round the samovar in the drawing room from habit, and
+ Pierre answered the countess’ questions as to whether Prince Vasíli had
+ aged and whether Countess Mary Alexéevna had sent greetings and still
+ thought of them, and other matters that interested no one and to which she
+ herself was indifferent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Conversation of this kind, interesting to no one yet unavoidable,
+ continued all through teatime. All the grown-up members of the family were
+ assembled near the round tea table at which Sónya presided beside the
+ samovar. The children with their tutors and governesses had had tea and
+ their voices were audible from the next room. At tea all sat in their
+ accustomed places: Nicholas beside the stove at a small table where his
+ tea was handed to him; Mílka, the old gray borzoi bitch (daughter of the
+ first Mílka), with a quite gray face and large black eyes that seemed more
+ prominent than ever, lay on the armchair beside him; Denísov, whose curly
+ hair, mustache, and whiskers had turned half gray, sat beside countess
+ Mary with his general’s tunic unbuttoned; Pierre sat between his wife and
+ the old countess. He spoke of what he knew might interest the old lady and
+ that she could understand. He told her of external social events and of
+ the people who had formed the circle of her contemporaries and had once
+ been a real, living, and distinct group, but who were now for the most
+ part scattered about the world and like herself were garnering the last
+ ears of the harvests they had sown in earlier years. But to the old
+ countess those contemporaries of hers seemed to be the only serious and
+ real society. Natásha saw by Pierre’s animation that his visit had been
+ interesting and that he had much to tell them but dare not say it before
+ the old countess. Denísov, not being a member of the family, did not
+ understand Pierre’s caution and being, as a malcontent, much interested in
+ what was occurring in Petersburg, kept urging Pierre to tell them about
+ what had happened in the Semënovsk regiment, then about Arakchéev, and
+ then about the Bible Society. Once or twice Pierre was carried away and
+ began to speak of these things, but Nicholas and Natásha always brought
+ him back to the health of Prince Iván and Countess Mary Alexéevna.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, and all this idiocy—Gossner and Tatáwinova?” Denísov asked.
+ “Is that weally still going on?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Going on?” Pierre exclaimed. “Why more than ever!
+ The Bible Society is the whole government now!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What is that, mon cher ami? ” asked the countess, who had
+ finished her tea and evidently needed a pretext for being angry
+ after her meal. “What are you saying about the government? I don’t
+ understand.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, you know, Maman ,” Nicholas interposed, knowing how to translate
+ things into his mother’s language, “Prince Alexander Golítsyn has founded
+ a society and in consequence has great influence, they say.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Arakchéev and Golítsyn,” incautiously remarked Pierre, “are now the whole
+ government! And what a government! They see treason everywhere and are
+ afraid of everything.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, and how is Prince Alexander to blame? He is a most estimable man. I
+ used to meet him at Mary Antónovna’s,” said the countess in an offended
+ tone; and still more offended that they all remained silent, she went on:
+ “Nowadays everyone finds fault. A Gospel Society! Well, and what harm is
+ there in that?” and she rose (everybody else got up too) and with a severe
+ expression sailed back to her table in the sitting room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The melancholy silence that followed was broken by the sounds of the
+ children’s voices and laughter from the next room. Evidently some jolly
+ excitement was going on there.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Finished, finished!” little Natásha’s gleeful yell rose above them all.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre exchanged glances with Countess Mary and Nicholas (Natásha he never
+ lost sight of) and smiled happily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “That’s delightful music!” said he.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It means that Anna Makárovna has finished her stocking,” said Countess
+ Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, I’ll go and see,” said Pierre, jumping up. “You know,” he added,
+ stopping at the door, “why I’m especially fond of that music? It is always
+ the first thing that tells me all is well. When I was driving here today,
+ the nearer I got to the house the more anxious I grew. As I entered the
+ anteroom I heard Andrúsha’s peals of laughter and that meant that all was
+ well.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I know! I know that feeling,” said Nicholas. “But I mustn’t go there—those
+ stockings are to be a surprise for me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre went to the children, and the shouting and laughter grew still
+ louder.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come, Anna Makárovna,” Pierre’s voice was heard saying, “come here into
+ the middle of the room and at the word of command, ‘One, two,’ and when I
+ say ‘three’... You stand here, and you in my arms—well now! One,
+ two!...” said Pierre, and a silence followed: “three!” and a rapturously
+ breathless cry of children’s voices filled the room. “Two, two!” they
+ shouted.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This meant two stockings, which by a secret process known only to herself
+ Anna Makárovna used to knit at the same time on the same needles, and
+ which, when they were ready, she always triumphantly drew, one out of the
+ other, in the children’s presence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XIV
+ 
+ 
+ Soon after this the children came in to say good night. They kissed
+ everyone, the tutors and governesses made their bows, and they went out.
+ Only young Nicholas and his tutor remained. Dessalles whispered to the boy
+ to come downstairs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, Monsieur Dessalles, I will ask my aunt to let me stay,” replied
+ Nicholas Bolkónski also in a whisper.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “ Ma tante , please let me stay,” said he, going up to his aunt.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ His face expressed entreaty, agitation, and ecstasy. Countess Mary glanced
+ at him and turned to Pierre.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When you are here he can’t tear himself away,” she said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will bring him to you directly, Monsieur Dessalles. Good night!” said
+ Pierre, giving his hand to the Swiss tutor, and he turned to young
+ Nicholas with a smile. “You and I haven’t seen anything of one another
+ yet.... How like he is growing, Mary!” he added, addressing Countess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Like my father?” asked the boy, flushing crimson and looking up at Pierre
+ with bright, ecstatic eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre nodded, and went on with what he had been saying when the children
+ had interrupted. Countess Mary sat down doing woolwork; Natásha did not
+ take her eyes off her husband. Nicholas and Denísov rose, asked for their
+ pipes, smoked, went to fetch more tea from Sónya—who sat weary but
+ resolute at the samovar—and questioned Pierre. The curly-headed,
+ delicate boy sat with shining eyes unnoticed in a corner, starting every
+ now and then and muttering something to himself, and evidently
+ experiencing a new and powerful emotion as he turned his curly head, with
+ his thin neck exposed by his turn-down collar, toward the place where
+ Pierre sat.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The conversation turned on the contemporary gossip about those in power,
+ in which most people see the chief interest of home politics. Denísov,
+ dissatisfied with the government on account of his own disappointments in
+ the service, heard with pleasure of the things done in Petersburg which
+ seemed to him stupid, and made forcible and sharp comments on what Pierre
+ told them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “One used to have to be a German—now one must dance with Tatáwinova
+ and Madame Kwüdener, and wead Ecka’tshausen and the bwethwen. Oh, they
+ should let that fine fellow Bonaparte loose—he’d knock all this
+ nonsense out of them! Fancy giving the command of the Semënov wegiment to
+ a fellow like that Schwa’tz!” he cried.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas, though free from Denísov’s readiness to find fault with
+ everything, also thought that discussion of the government was a very
+ serious and weighty matter, and the fact that A had been appointed
+ Minister of This and B Governor General of That, and that the Emperor had
+ said so-and-so and this minister so-and-so, seemed to him very important.
+ And so he thought it necessary to take an interest in these things and to
+ question Pierre. The questions put by these two kept the conversation from
+ changing its ordinary character of gossip about the higher government
+ circles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But Natásha, knowing all her husband’s ways and ideas, saw that he had
+ long been wishing but had been unable to divert the conversation to
+ another channel and express his own deeply felt idea for the sake of which
+ he had gone to Petersburg to consult with his new friend Prince Theodore,
+ and she helped him by asking how his affairs with Prince Theodore had
+ gone.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What was it about?” asked Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Always the same thing,” said Pierre, looking round at his listeners.
+ “Everybody sees that things are going so badly that they cannot be allowed
+ to go on so and that it is the duty of all decent men to counteract it as
+ far as they can.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What can decent men do?” Nicholas inquired, frowning slightly. “What can
+ be done?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, this...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Come into my study,” said Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha, who had long expected to be fetched to nurse her baby, now heard
+ the nurse calling her and went to the nursery. Countess Mary followed her.
+ The men went into the study and little Nicholas Bolkónski followed them
+ unnoticed by his uncle and sat down at the writing table in a shady corner
+ by the window.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what would you do?” asked Denísov.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Always some fantastic schemes,” said Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why this,” began Pierre, not sitting down but pacing the room, sometimes
+ stopping short, gesticulating, and lisping: “the position in Petersburg is
+ this: the Emperor does not look into anything. He has abandoned himself
+ altogether to this mysticism” (Pierre could not tolerate mysticism in
+ anyone now). “He seeks only for peace, and only these people sans foi ni
+ loi * can give it him—people who recklessly hack at and strangle
+ everything—Magnítski, Arakchéev, and tutti quanti .... You will agree
+ that if you did not look after your estates yourself but only wanted a
+ quiet life, the harsher your steward was the more readily your object
+ might be attained,” he said to Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * Without faith or law.
+
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, what does that lead up to?” said Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, everything is going to ruin! Robbery in the law courts, in the army
+ nothing but flogging, drilling, and Military Settlements; the people are
+ tortured, enlightenment is suppressed. All that is young and honest is
+ crushed! Everyone sees that this cannot go on. Everything is strained to
+ such a degree that it will certainly break,” said Pierre (as those who
+ examine the actions of any government have always said since governments
+ began). “I told them just one thing in Petersburg.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Told whom?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, you know whom,” said Pierre, with a meaning glance from under his
+ brows. “Prince Theodore and all those. To encourage culture and
+ philanthropy is all very well of course. The aim is excellent but in the
+ present circumstances something else is needed.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At that moment Nicholas noticed the presence of his nephew. His face
+ darkened and he went up to the boy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why are you here?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why? Let him be,” said Pierre, taking Nicholas by the arm and continuing.
+ “That is not enough, I told them. Something else is needed. When you stand
+ expecting the overstrained string to snap at any moment, when everyone is
+ expecting the inevitable catastrophe, as many as possible must join hands
+ as closely as they can to withstand the general calamity. Everything that
+ is young and strong is being enticed away and depraved. One is lured by
+ women, another by honors, a third by ambition or money, and they go over
+ to that camp. No independent men, such as you or I, are left. What I say
+ is widen the scope of our society, let the mot d’ordre be not
+ virtue alone but independence and action as well!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas, who had left his nephew, irritably pushed up an armchair, sat
+ down in it, and listened to Pierre, coughing discontentedly and frowning
+ more and more.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But action with what aim?” he cried. “And what position will you adopt
+ toward the government?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why, the position of assistants. The society need not be secret if the
+ government allows it. Not merely is it not hostile to government, but it
+ is a society of true conservatives—a society of gentlemen in the
+ full meaning of that word. It is only to prevent some Pugachëv or other
+ from killing my children and yours, and Arakchéev from sending me off to
+ some Military Settlement. We join hands only for the public welfare and
+ the general safety.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, but it’s a secret society and therefore a hostile and harmful one
+ which can only cause harm.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Why? Did the Tugendbund which saved Europe” (they did not then venture to
+ suggest that Russia had saved Europe) “do any harm? The Tugendbund is an
+ alliance of virtue: it is love, mutual help... it is what Christ preached
+ on the Cross.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha, who had come in during the conversation, looked joyfully at her
+ husband. It was not what he was saying that pleased her—that did not
+ even interest her, for it seemed to her that was all extremely simple and
+ that she had known it a long time (it seemed so to her because she knew
+ that it sprang from Pierre’s whole soul), but it was his animated and
+ enthusiastic appearance that made her glad.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The boy with the thin neck stretching out from the turn-down collar—whom
+ everyone had forgotten—gazed at Pierre with even greater and more
+ rapturous joy. Every word of Pierre’s burned into his heart, and with a
+ nervous movement of his fingers he unconsciously broke the sealing wax and
+ quill pens his hands came upon on his uncle’s table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “It is not at all what you suppose; but that is what the German Tugendbund
+ was, and what I am proposing.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, my fwiend! The Tugendbund is all vewy well for the sausage eaters,
+ but I don’t understand it and can’t even pwonounce it,”
+ interposed Denísov in a loud and resolute voice. “I agwee that evewything
+ here is wotten and howwible, but the Tugendbund I don’t understand.
+ If we’re not satisfied, let us have a bunt of our own.
+ That’s all wight. Je suis vot’e homme!” *
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ * “I’m your man.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre smiled, Natásha began to laugh, but Nicholas knitted his brows
+ still more and began proving to Pierre that there was no prospect of any
+ great change and that all the danger he spoke of existed only in his
+ imagination. Pierre maintained the contrary, and as his mental faculties
+ were greater and more resourceful, Nicholas felt himself cornered. This
+ made him still angrier, for he was fully convinced, not by reasoning but
+ by something within him stronger than reason, of the justice of his
+ opinion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I will tell you this,” he said, rising and trying with nervously
+ twitching fingers to prop up his pipe in a corner, but finally abandoning
+ the attempt. “I can’t prove it to you. You say that everything here is
+ rotten and that an overthrow is coming: I don’t see it. But you also say
+ that our oath of allegiance is a conditional matter, and to that I reply:
+ ‘You are my best friend, as you know, but if you formed a secret society
+ and began working against the government—be it what it may—I
+ know it is my duty to obey the government. And if Arakchéev ordered me to
+ lead a squadron against you and cut you down, I should not hesitate an
+ instant, but should do it.’ And you may argue about that as you like!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ An awkward silence followed these words. Natásha was the first to speak,
+ defending her husband and attacking her brother. Her defense was weak and
+ inapt but she attained her object. The conversation was resumed, and no
+ longer in the unpleasantly hostile tone of Nicholas’ last remark.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When they all got up to go in to supper, little Nicholas Bolkónski went up
+ to Pierre, pale and with shining, radiant eyes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Uncle Pierre, you... no... If Papa were alive... would he agree with
+ you?” he asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And Pierre suddenly realized what a special, independent, complex, and
+ powerful process of thought and feeling must have been going on in this
+ boy during that conversation, and remembering all he had said he regretted
+ that the lad should have heard him. He had, however, to give him an
+ answer.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I think so,” he said reluctantly, and left the study.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The lad looked down and seemed now for the first time to notice what he
+ had done to the things on the table. He flushed and went up to Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Uncle, forgive me, I did that... unintentionally,” he said, pointing to
+ the broken sealing wax and pens.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas started angrily.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “All right, all right,” he said, throwing the bits under the table.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And evidently suppressing his vexation with difficulty, he turned away
+ from the boy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You ought not to have been here at all,” he said.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XV
+ 
+ 
+ The conversation at supper was not about politics or societies, but turned
+ on the subject Nicholas liked best—recollections of 1812. Denísov
+ started these and Pierre was particularly agreeable and amusing about
+ them. The family separated on the most friendly terms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ After supper Nicholas, having undressed in his study and given
+ instructions to the steward who had been waiting for him, went to the
+ bedroom in his dressing gown, where he found his wife still at her table,
+ writing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What are you writing, Mary?” Nicholas asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Countess Mary blushed. She was afraid that what she was writing would not
+ be understood or approved by her husband.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ She had wanted to conceal what she was writing from him, but at the same
+ time was glad he had surprised her at it and that she would now have to
+ tell him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A diary, Nicholas,” she replied, handing him a blue exercise book filled
+ with her firm, bold writing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “A diary?” Nicholas repeated with a shade of irony, and he took up the
+ book.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It was in French.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ December 4. Today when Andrúsha (her eldest boy) woke up he did not wish
+ to dress and Mademoiselle Louise sent for me. He was naughty and
+ obstinate. I tried threats, but he only grew angrier. Then I took the
+ matter in hand: I left him alone and began with nurse’s help to get the
+ other children up, telling him that I did not love him. For a long time he
+ was silent, as if astonished, then he jumped out of bed, ran to me in his
+ shirt, and sobbed so that I could not calm him for a long time. It was
+ plain that what troubled him most was that he had grieved me. Afterwards
+ in the evening when I gave him his ticket, he again began crying piteously
+ and kissing me. One can do anything with him by tenderness.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ “What is a ‘ticket’?” Nicholas inquired.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have begun giving the elder ones marks every evening, showing how they
+ have behaved.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas looked into the radiant eyes that were gazing at him, and
+ continued to turn over the pages and read. In the diary was set down
+ everything in the children’s lives that seemed noteworthy to their mother
+ as showing their characters or suggesting general reflections on
+ educational methods. They were for the most part quite insignificant
+ trifles, but did not seem so to the mother or to the father either, now
+ that he read this diary about his children for the first time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Under the date “5” was entered:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Mítya was naughty at table. Papa said he was to have no pudding. He had
+ none, but looked so unhappily and greedily at the others while they were
+ eating! I think that punishment by depriving children of sweets only
+ develops their greediness. Must tell Nicholas this.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Nicholas put down the book and looked at his wife. The radiant eyes gazed
+ at him questioningly: would he approve or disapprove of her diary? There
+ could be no doubt not only of his approval but also of his admiration for
+ his wife.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Perhaps it need not be done so pedantically, thought Nicholas, or even
+ done at all, but this untiring, continual spiritual effort of which the
+ sole aim was the children’s moral welfare delighted him. Had Nicholas been
+ able to analyze his feelings he would have found that his steady, tender,
+ and proud love of his wife rested on his feeling of wonder at her
+ spirituality and at the lofty moral world, almost beyond his reach, in
+ which she had her being.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He was proud of her intelligence and goodness, recognized his own
+ insignificance beside her in the spiritual world, and rejoiced all the
+ more that she with such a soul not only belonged to him but was part of
+ himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I quite, quite approve, my dearest!” said he with a significant look, and
+ after a short pause he added: “And I behaved badly today. You weren’t in
+ the study. We began disputing—Pierre and I—and I lost my
+ temper. But he is impossible: such a child! I don’t know what would become
+ of him if Natásha didn’t keep him in hand.... Have you any idea why he
+ went to Petersburg? They have formed...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I know,” said Countess Mary. “Natásha told me.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, then, you know,” Nicholas went on, growing hot at the mere
+ recollection of their discussion, “he wanted to convince me that it is
+ every honest man’s duty to go against the government, and that the oath of
+ allegiance and duty... I am sorry you weren’t there. They all fell on me—Denísov
+ and Natásha... Natásha is absurd. How she rules over him! And yet there
+ need only be a discussion and she has no words of her own but only repeats
+ his sayings...” added Nicholas, yielding to that irresistible inclination
+ which tempts us to judge those nearest and dearest to us. He forgot that
+ what he was saying about Natásha could have been applied word for word to
+ himself in relation to his wife.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I have noticed that,” said Countess Mary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “When I told him that duty and the oath were above everything, he started
+ proving goodness knows what! A pity you were not there—what would
+ you have said?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “As I see it you were quite right, and I told Natásha so. Pierre says
+ everybody is suffering, tortured, and being corrupted, and that it is our
+ duty to help our neighbor. Of course he is right there,” said Countess
+ Mary, “but he forgets that we have other duties nearer to us, duties
+ indicated to us by God Himself, and that though we might expose ourselves
+ to risks we must not risk our children.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, that’s it! That’s just what I said to him,” put in Nicholas, who
+ fancied he really had said it. “But they insisted on their own view: love
+ of one’s neighbor and Christianity—and all this in the presence of
+ young Nicholas, who had gone into my study and broke all my things.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, Nicholas, do you know I am often troubled about little Nicholas,”
+ said Countess Mary. “He is such an exceptional boy. I am afraid I neglect
+ him in favor of my own: we all have children and relations while he has no
+ one. He is constantly alone with his thoughts.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well, I don’t think you need reproach yourself on his account. All that
+ the fondest mother could do for her son you have done and are doing for
+ him, and of course I am glad of it. He is a fine lad, a fine lad! This
+ evening he listened to Pierre in a sort of trance, and fancy—as we
+ were going in to supper I looked and he had broken everything on my table
+ to bits, and he told me of it himself at once! I never knew him to tell an
+ untruth. A fine lad, a fine lad!” repeated Nicholas, who at heart was not
+ fond of Nicholas Bolkónski but was always anxious to recognize that he was
+ a fine lad.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Still, I am not the same as his own mother,” said Countess Mary. “I feel
+ I am not the same and it troubles me. A wonderful boy, but I am dreadfully
+ afraid for him. It would be good for him to have companions.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Well it won’t be for long. Next summer I’ll take him to Petersburg,” said
+ Nicholas. “Yes, Pierre always was a dreamer and always will be,” he
+ continued, returning to the talk in the study which had evidently
+ disturbed him. “Well, what business is it of mine what goes on there—whether
+ Arakchéev is bad, and all that? What business was it of mine when I
+ married and was so deep in debt that I was threatened with prison, and had
+ a mother who could not see or understand it? And then there are you and
+ the children and our affairs. Is it for my own pleasure that I am at the
+ farm or in the office from morning to night? No, but I know I must work to
+ comfort my mother, to repay you, and not to leave the children such
+ beggars as I was.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Countess Mary wanted to tell him that man does not live by bread alone and
+ that he attached too much importance to these matters. But she knew she
+ must not say this and that it would be useless to do so. She only took his
+ hand and kissed it. He took this as a sign of approval and a confirmation
+ of his thoughts, and after a few minutes’ reflection continued to think
+ aloud.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “You know, Mary, today Elias Mitrofánych” (this was his overseer)
+ “came back from the Tambóv estate and told me they are already
+ offering eighty thousand rubles for the forest.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And with an eager face Nicholas began to speak of the possibility of
+ repurchasing Otrádnoe before long, and added: “Another ten years of life
+ and I shall leave the children... in an excellent position.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Countess Mary listened to her husband and understood all that he told her.
+ She knew that when he thought aloud in this way he would sometimes ask her
+ what he had been saying, and be vexed if he noticed that she had been
+ thinking about something else. But she had to force herself to attend, for
+ what he was saying did not interest her at all. She looked at him and did
+ not think, but felt, about something different. She felt a submissive
+ tender love for this man who would never understand all that she
+ understood, and this seemed to make her love for him still stronger and
+ added a touch of passionate tenderness. Besides this feeling which
+ absorbed her altogether and hindered her from following the details of her
+ husband’s plans, thoughts that had no connection with what he was saying
+ flitted through her mind. She thought of her nephew. Her husband’s account
+ of the boy’s agitation while Pierre was speaking struck her forcibly, and
+ various traits of his gentle, sensitive character recurred to her mind;
+ and while thinking of her nephew she thought also of her own children. She
+ did not compare them with him, but compared her feeling for them with her
+ feeling for him, and felt with regret that there was something lacking in
+ her feeling for young Nicholas.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Sometimes it seemed to her that this difference arose from the difference
+ in their ages, but she felt herself to blame toward him and promised in
+ her heart to do better and to accomplish the impossible—in this life
+ to love her husband, her children, little Nicholas, and all her neighbors,
+ as Christ loved mankind. Countess Mary’s soul always strove toward the
+ infinite, the eternal, and the absolute, and could therefore never be at
+ peace. A stern expression of the lofty, secret suffering of a soul
+ burdened by the body appeared on her face. Nicholas gazed at her. “O God!
+ What will become of us if she dies, as I always fear when her face is like
+ that?” thought he, and placing himself before the icon he began to say his
+ evening prayers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XVI
+ 
+ 
+ Natásha and Pierre, left alone, also began to talk as only a husband and
+ wife can talk, that is, with extraordinary clearness and rapidity,
+ understanding and expressing each other’s thoughts in ways contrary to all
+ rules of logic, without premises, deductions, or conclusions, and in a
+ quite peculiar way. Natásha was so used to this kind of talk with her
+ husband that for her it was the surest sign of something being wrong
+ between them if Pierre followed a line of logical reasoning. When he began
+ proving anything, or talking argumentatively and calmly and she, led on by
+ his example, began to do the same, she knew that they were on the verge of
+ a quarrel.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the moment they were alone and Natásha came up to him with wide-open
+ happy eyes, and quickly seizing his head pressed it to her bosom, saying:
+ “Now you are all mine, mine! You won’t escape!”—from that moment
+ this conversation began, contrary to all the laws of logic and contrary to
+ them because quite different subjects were talked about at one and the
+ same time. This simultaneous discussion of many topics did not prevent a
+ clear understanding but on the contrary was the surest sign that they
+ fully understood one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just as in a dream when all is uncertain, unreasoning, and contradictory,
+ except the feeling that guides the dream, so in this intercourse contrary
+ to all laws of reason, the words themselves were not consecutive and clear
+ but only the feeling that prompted them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha spoke to Pierre about her brother’s life and doings, of how she
+ had suffered and lacked life during his own absence, and of how she was
+ fonder than ever of Mary, and how Mary was in every way better than
+ herself. In saying this Natásha was sincere in acknowledging Mary’s
+ superiority, but at the same time by saying it she made a demand on Pierre
+ that he should, all the same, prefer her to Mary and to all other women,
+ and that now, especially after having seen many women in Petersburg, he
+ should tell her so afresh.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre, answering Natásha’s words, told her how intolerable it had been
+ for him to meet ladies at dinners and balls in Petersburg.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I have quite lost the knack of talking to ladies,” he said. “It was
+ simply dull. Besides, I was very busy.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha looked intently at him and went on:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Mary is so splendid,” she said. “How she understands children! It is as
+ if she saw straight into their souls. Yesterday, for instance, Mítya was
+ naughty...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “How like his father he is,” Pierre interjected.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha knew why he mentioned Mítya’s likeness to Nicholas: the
+ recollection of his dispute with his brother-in-law was unpleasant and he
+ wanted to know what Natásha thought of it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Nicholas has the weakness of never agreeing with anything not generally
+ accepted. But I understand that you value what opens up a fresh line,”
+ said she, repeating words Pierre had once uttered.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, the chief point is that to Nicholas ideas and discussions are an
+ amusement—almost a pastime,” said Pierre. “For instance, he is
+ collecting a library and has made it a rule not to buy a new book till he
+ has read what he had already bought—Sismondi and Rousseau and
+ Montesquieu,” he added with a smile. “You know how much I...” he began to
+ soften down what he had said; but Natásha interrupted him to show that
+ this was unnecessary.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “So you say ideas are an amusement to him....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, and for me nothing else is serious. All the time in Petersburg I saw
+ everyone as in a dream. When I am taken up by a thought, all else is mere
+ amusement.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Ah, I’m so sorry I wasn’t there when you met the children,” said Natásha.
+ “Which was most delighted? Lisa, I’m sure.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes,” Pierre replied, and went on with what was in his mind. “Nicholas
+ says we ought not to think. But I can’t help it. Besides, when I was in
+ Petersburg I felt (I can say this to you) that the whole affair would go
+ to pieces without me—everyone was pulling his own way. But I
+ succeeded in uniting them all; and then my idea is so clear and simple.
+ You see, I don’t say that we ought to oppose this and that. We may be
+ mistaken. What I say is: ‘Join hands, you who love the right, and let
+ there be but one banner—that of active virtue.’ Prince Sergéy is a
+ fine fellow and clever.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Natásha would have had no doubt as to the greatness of Pierre’s idea, but
+ one thing disconcerted her. “Can a man so important and necessary to
+ society be also my husband? How did this happen?” She wished to express
+ this doubt to him. “Now who could decide whether he is really cleverer
+ than all the others?” she asked herself, and passed in review all those
+ whom Pierre most respected. Judging by what he had said there was no one
+ he had respected so highly as Platón Karatáev.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Do you know what I am thinking about?” she asked. “About Platón Karatáev.
+ Would he have approved of you now, do you think?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre was not at all surprised at this question. He understood his wife’s
+ line of thought.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Platón Karatáev?” he repeated, and pondered, evidently sincerely trying
+ to imagine Karatáev’s opinion on the subject. “He would not have
+ understood... yet perhaps he would.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I love you awfully!” Natásha suddenly said. “Awfully, awfully!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, he would not have approved,” said Pierre, after reflection. “What he
+ would have approved of is our family life. He was always so anxious to
+ find seemliness, happiness, and peace in everything, and I should have
+ been proud to let him see us. There now—you talk of my absence, but
+ you wouldn’t believe what a special feeling I have for you after a
+ separation....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes, I should think...” Natásha began.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, it’s not that. I never leave off loving you. And one
+ couldn’t love more, but this is something special.... Yes, of
+ course—” he did not finish because their eyes meeting said the rest.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “What nonsense it is,” Natásha suddenly exclaimed, “about honeymoons, and
+ that the greatest happiness is at first! On the contrary, now is the best
+ of all. If only you did not go away! Do you remember how we quarreled? And
+ it was always my fault. Always mine. And what we quarreled about—I
+ don’t even remember!”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Always about the same thing,” said Pierre with a smile. “Jealo...”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Don’t say it! I can’t bear it!” Natásha cried, and her eyes glittered
+ coldly and vindictively. “Did you see her?” she added, after a pause.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, and if I had I shouldn’t have recognized her.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They were silent for a while.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh, do you know? While you were talking in the study I was looking at
+ you,” Natásha began, evidently anxious to disperse the cloud that had come
+ over them. “You are as like him as two peas—like the boy.” (She
+ meant her little son.) “Oh, it’s time to go to him.... The milk’s come....
+ But I’m sorry to leave you.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They were silent for a few seconds. Then suddenly turning to one another
+ at the same time they both began to speak. Pierre began with
+ self-satisfaction and enthusiasm, Natásha with a quiet, happy smile.
+ Having interrupted one another they both stopped to let the other
+ continue.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No. What did you say? Go on, go on.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No, you go on, I was talking nonsense,” said Natásha.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Pierre finished what he had begun. It was the sequel to his complacent
+ reflections on his success in Petersburg. At that moment it seemed to him
+ that he was chosen to give a new direction to the whole of Russian society
+ and to the whole world.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I only wished to say that ideas that have great results are always simple
+ ones. My whole idea is that if vicious people are united and constitute a
+ power, then honest folk must do the same. Now that’s simple enough.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Yes.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “And what were you going to say?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “I? Only nonsense.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “But all the same?”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Oh nothing, only a trifle,” said Natásha, smiling still more brightly.
+ “I only wanted to tell you about Pétya: today nurse was coming to take him
+ from me, and he laughed, shut his eyes, and clung to me. I’m sure he
+ thought he was hiding. Awfully sweet! There, now he’s crying. Well,
+ good-by!” and she left the room.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+ Meanwhile downstairs in young Nicholas Bolkónski’s bedroom a little lamp
+ was burning as usual. (The boy was afraid of the dark and they could not
+ cure him of it.) Dessalles slept propped up on four pillows and his Roman
+ nose emitted sounds of rhythmic snoring. Little Nicholas, who had just
+ waked up in a cold perspiration, sat up in bed and gazed before him with
+ wide-open eyes. He had awaked from a terrible dream. He had dreamed that
+ he and Uncle Pierre, wearing helmets such as were depicted in his
+ Plutarch, were leading a huge army. The army was made up of white slanting
+ lines that filled the air like the cobwebs that float about in autumn and
+ which Dessalles called les fils de la Vièrge . In front was Glory, which
+ was similar to those threads but rather thicker. He and Pierre were borne
+ along lightly and joyously, nearer and nearer to their goal. Suddenly the
+ threads that moved them began to slacken and become entangled and it grew
+ difficult to move. And Uncle Nicholas stood before them in a stern and
+ threatening attitude.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Have you done this?” he said, pointing to some broken sealing wax and
+ pens. “I loved you, but I have orders from Arakchéev and will kill the
+ first of you who moves forward.” Little Nicholas turned to look at Pierre
+ but Pierre was no longer there. In his place was his father—Prince
+ Andrew—and his father had neither shape nor form, but he existed,
+ and when little Nicholas perceived him he grew faint with love: he felt
+ himself powerless, limp, and formless. His father caressed and pitied him.
+ But Uncle Nicholas came nearer and nearer to them. Terror seized young
+ Nicholas and he awoke.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “My father!” he thought. (Though there were two good portraits of Prince
+ Andrew in the house, Nicholas never imagined him in human form.) “My
+ father has been with me and caressed me. He approved of me and of Uncle
+ Pierre. Whatever he may tell me, I will do it. Mucius Scaevola burned his
+ hand. Why should not the same sort of thing happen to me? I know they want
+ me to learn. And I will learn. But someday I shall have finished learning,
+ and then I will do something. I only pray God that something may happen to
+ me such as happened to Plutarch’s men, and I will act as they did. I will
+ do better. Everyone shall know me, love me, and be delighted with me!” And
+ suddenly his bosom heaved with sobs and he began to cry.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Are you ill?” he heard Dessalles’ voice asking.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “No,” answered Nicholas, and lay back on his pillow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “He is good and kind and I am fond of him!” he thought of Dessalles. “But
+ Uncle Pierre! Oh, what a wonderful man he is! And my father? Oh, Father,
+ Father! Yes, I will do something with which even he would be
+ satisfied....”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ SECOND EPILOGUE
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER I
+ 
+ 
+ History is the life of nations and of humanity. To seize and put into
+ words, to describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single
+ nation, appears impossible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The ancient historians all employed one and the same method to describe
+ and seize the apparently elusive—the life of a people. They
+ described the activity of individuals who ruled the people, and regarded
+ the activity of those men as representing the activity of the whole
+ nation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The question: how did individuals make nations act as they wished and by
+ what was the will of these individuals themselves guided? the ancients met
+ by recognizing a divinity which subjected the nations to the will of a
+ chosen man, and guided the will of that chosen man so as to accomplish
+ ends that were predestined.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For the ancients these questions were solved by a belief in the direct
+ participation of the Deity in human affairs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Modern history, in theory, rejects both these principles.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It would seem that having rejected the belief of the ancients in man’s
+ subjection to the Deity and in a predetermined aim toward which nations
+ are led, modern history should study not the manifestations of power but
+ the causes that produce it. But modern history has not done this. Having
+ in theory rejected the view held by the ancients, it still follows them in
+ practice.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Instead of men endowed with divine authority and directly guided by the
+ will of God, modern history has given us either heroes endowed with
+ extraordinary, superhuman capacities, or simply men of very various kinds,
+ from monarchs to journalists, who lead the masses. Instead of the former
+ divinely appointed aims of the Jewish, Greek, or Roman nations, which
+ ancient historians regarded as representing the progress of humanity,
+ modern history has postulated its own aims—the welfare of the
+ French, German, or English people, or, in its highest abstraction, the
+ welfare and civilization of humanity in general, by which is usually meant
+ that of the peoples occupying a small northwesterly portion of a large
+ continent.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Modern history has rejected the beliefs of the ancients without replacing
+ them by a new conception, and the logic of the situation has obliged the
+ historians, after they had apparently rejected the divine authority of the
+ kings and the “fate” of the ancients, to reach the same conclusion by
+ another road, that is, to recognize (1) nations guided by individual men,
+ and (2) the existence of a known aim to which these nations and humanity
+ at large are tending.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ At the basis of the works of all the modern historians from Gibbon to
+ Buckle, despite their seeming disagreements and the apparent novelty of
+ their outlooks, lie those two old, unavoidable assumptions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the first place the historian describes the activity of individuals who
+ in his opinion have directed humanity (one historian considers only
+ monarchs, generals, and ministers as being such men, while another
+ includes also orators, learned men, reformers, philosophers, and poets).
+ Secondly, it is assumed that the goal toward which humanity is being led
+ is known to the historians: to one of them this goal is the greatness of
+ the Roman, Spanish, or French realm; to another it is liberty, equality,
+ and a certain kind of civilization of a small corner of the world called
+ Europe.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In 1789 a ferment arises in Paris; it grows, spreads, and is expressed by
+ a movement of peoples from west to east. Several times it moves eastward
+ and collides with a countermovement from the east westward. In 1812 it
+ reaches its extreme limit, Moscow, and then, with remarkable symmetry, a
+ countermovement occurs from east to west, attracting to it, as the first
+ movement had done, the nations of middle Europe. The counter movement
+ reaches the starting point of the first movement in the west—Paris—and
+ subsides.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ During that twenty-year period an immense number of fields were left
+ untilled, houses were burned, trade changed its direction, millions of men
+ migrated, were impoverished, or were enriched, and millions of Christian
+ men professing the law of love of their fellows slew one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What does all this mean? Why did it happen? What made those people burn
+ houses and slay their fellow men? What were the causes of these events?
+ What force made men act so? These are the instinctive, plain, and most
+ legitimate questions humanity asks itself when it encounters the monuments
+ and tradition of that period.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For a reply to these questions the common sense of mankind turns to the
+ science of history, whose aim is to enable nations and humanity to know
+ themselves.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If history had retained the conception of the ancients it would have said
+ that God, to reward or punish his people, gave Napoleon power and directed
+ his will to the fulfillment of the divine ends, and that reply would have
+ been clear and complete. One might believe or disbelieve in the divine
+ significance of Napoleon, but for anyone believing in it there would have
+ been nothing unintelligible in the history of that period, nor would there
+ have been any contradictions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But modern history cannot give that reply. Science does not admit the
+ conception of the ancients as to the direct participation of the Deity in
+ human affairs, and therefore history ought to give other answers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Modern history replying to these questions says: you want to know what
+ this movement means, what caused it, and what force produced these events?
+ Then listen:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “Louis XIV was a very proud and self-confident man; he had such and such
+ mistresses and such and such ministers and he ruled France badly. His
+ descendants were weak men and they too ruled France badly. And they had
+ such and such favorites and such and such mistresses. Moreover, certain
+ men wrote some books at that time. At the end of the eighteenth century
+ there were a couple of dozen men in Paris who began to talk about all men
+ being free and equal. This caused people all over France to begin to slash
+ at and drown one another. They killed the king and many other people. At
+ that time there was in France a man of genius—Napoleon. He conquered
+ everybody everywhere—that is, he killed many people because he was a
+ great genius. And for some reason he went to kill Africans, and killed
+ them so well and was so cunning and wise that when he returned to France
+ he ordered everybody to obey him, and they all obeyed him. Having become
+ an Emperor he again went out to kill people in Italy, Austria, and
+ Prussia. And there too he killed a great many. In Russia there was an
+ Emperor, Alexander, who decided to restore order in Europe and therefore
+ fought against Napoleon. In 1807 he suddenly made friends with him, but in
+ 1811 they again quarreled and again began killing many people. Napoleon
+ led six hundred thousand men into Russia and captured Moscow; then he
+ suddenly ran away from Moscow, and the Emperor Alexander, helped by the
+ advice of Stein and others, united Europe to arm against the disturber of
+ its peace. All Napoleon’s allies suddenly became his enemies and their
+ forces advanced against the fresh forces he raised. The Allies defeated
+ Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to abdicate, and sent him to the
+ island of Elba, not depriving him of the title of Emperor and showing him
+ every respect, though five years before and one year later they all
+ regarded him as an outlaw and a brigand. Then Louis XVIII, who till then
+ had been the laughingstock both of the French and the Allies, began to
+ reign. And Napoleon, shedding tears before his Old Guards, renounced the
+ throne and went into exile. Then the skillful statesmen and diplomatists
+ (especially Talleyrand, who managed to sit down in a particular chair
+ before anyone else and thereby extended the frontiers of France) talked in
+ Vienna and by these conversations made the nations happy or unhappy.
+ Suddenly the diplomatists and monarchs nearly quarreled and were on the
+ point of again ordering their armies to kill one another, but just then
+ Napoleon arrived in France with a battalion, and the French, who had been
+ hating him, immediately all submitted to him. But the Allied monarchs were
+ angry at this and went to fight the French once more. And they defeated
+ the genius Napoleon and, suddenly recognizing him as a brigand, sent him
+ to the island of St. Helena. And the exile, separated from the beloved
+ France so dear to his heart, died a lingering death on that rock and
+ bequeathed his great deeds to posterity. But in Europe a reaction occurred
+ and the sovereigns once again all began to oppress their subjects.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It would be a mistake to think that this is ironic—a caricature of
+ the historical accounts. On the contrary it is a very mild expression of
+ the contradictory replies, not meeting the questions, which all the
+ historians give, from the compilers of memoirs and the histories of
+ separate states to the writers of general histories and the new histories
+ of the culture of that period.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The strangeness and absurdity of these replies arise from the fact that
+ modern history, like a deaf man, answers questions no one has asked.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If the purpose of history be to give a description of the movement of
+ humanity and of the peoples, the first question—in the absence of a
+ reply to which all the rest will be incomprehensible—is: what is the
+ power that moves peoples? To this, modern history laboriously replies
+ either that Napoleon was a great genius, or that Louis XIV was very proud,
+ or that certain writers wrote certain books.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All that may be so and mankind is ready to agree with it, but it is not
+ what was asked. All that would be interesting if we recognized a divine
+ power based on itself and always consistently directing its nations
+ through Napoleons, Louis-es, and writers; but we do not acknowledge such a
+ power, and therefore before speaking about Napoleons, Louis-es, and
+ authors, we ought to be shown the connection existing between these men
+ and the movement of the nations.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If instead of a divine power some other force has appeared, it should be
+ explained in what this new force consists, for the whole interest of
+ history lies precisely in that force.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ History seems to assume that this force is self-evident and known to
+ everyone. But in spite of every desire to regard it as known, anyone
+ reading many historical works cannot help doubting whether this new force,
+ so variously understood by the historians themselves, is really quite well
+ known to everybody.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER II
+ 
+ 
+ What force moves the nations?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Biographical historians and historians of separate nations understand this
+ force as a power inherent in heroes and rulers. In their narration events
+ occur solely by the will of a Napoleon, and Alexander, or in general of
+ the persons they describe. The answers given by this kind of historian to
+ the question of what force causes events to happen are satisfactory only
+ as long as there is but one historian to each event. As soon as historians
+ of different nationalities and tendencies begin to describe the same
+ event, the replies they give immediately lose all meaning, for this force
+ is understood by them all not only differently but often in quite
+ contradictory ways. One historian says that an event was produced by
+ Napoleon’s power, another that it was produced by Alexander’s, a third
+ that it was due to the power of some other person. Besides this,
+ historians of that kind contradict each other even in their statement as
+ to the force on which the authority of some particular person was based.
+ Thiers, a Bonapartist, says that Napoleon’s power was based on his virtue
+ and genius. Lanfrey, a Republican, says it was based on his trickery and
+ deception of the people. So the historians of this class, by mutually
+ destroying one another’s positions, destroy the understanding of the force
+ which produces events, and furnish no reply to history’s essential
+ question.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Writers of universal history who deal with all the nations seem to
+ recognize how erroneous is the specialist historians’ view of the force
+ which produces events. They do not recognize it as a power inherent in
+ heroes and rulers, but as the resultant of a multiplicity of variously
+ directed forces. In describing a war or the subjugation of a people, a
+ general historian looks for the cause of the event not in the power of one
+ man, but in the interaction of many persons connected with the event.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ According to this view the power of historical personages, represented as
+ the product of many forces, can no longer, it would seem, be regarded as a
+ force that itself produces events. Yet in most cases universal historians
+ still employ the conception of power as a force that itself produces
+ events, and treat it as their cause. In their exposition, an historic
+ character is first the product of his time, and his power only the
+ resultant of various forces, and then his power is itself a force
+ producing events. Gervinus, Schlosser, and others, for instance, at one
+ time prove Napoleon to be a product of the Revolution, of the ideas of
+ 1789 and so forth, and at another plainly say that the campaign of 1812
+ and other things they do not like were simply the product of Napoleon’s
+ misdirected will, and that the very ideas of 1789 were arrested in their
+ development by Napoleon’s caprice. The ideas of the Revolution and the
+ general temper of the age produced Napoleon’s power. But Napoleon’s power
+ suppressed the ideas of the Revolution and the general temper of the age.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This curious contradiction is not accidental. Not only does it occur at
+ every step, but the universal historians’ accounts are all made up of a
+ chain of such contradictions. This contradiction occurs because after
+ entering the field of analysis the universal historians stop halfway.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To find component forces equal to the composite or resultant force, the
+ sum of the components must equal the resultant. This condition is never
+ observed by the universal historians, and so to explain the resultant
+ forces they are obliged to admit, in addition to the insufficient
+ components, another unexplained force affecting the resultant action.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Specialist historians describing the campaign of 1813 or the restoration
+ of the Bourbons plainly assert that these events were produced by the will
+ of Alexander. But the universal historian Gervinus, refuting this opinion
+ of the specialist historian, tries to prove that the campaign of 1813 and
+ the restoration of the Bourbons were due to other things beside
+ Alexander’s will—such as the activity of Stein, Metternich, Madame
+ de Staël, Talleyrand, Fichte, Chateaubriand, and others. The historian
+ evidently decomposes Alexander’s power into the components: Talleyrand,
+ Chateaubriand, and the rest—but the sum of the components, that is,
+ the interactions of Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Madame de Staël, and the
+ others, evidently does not equal the resultant, namely the phenomenon of
+ millions of Frenchmen submitting to the Bourbons. That Chateaubriand,
+ Madame de Staël, and others spoke certain words to one another only
+ affected their mutual relations but does not account for the submission of
+ millions. And therefore to explain how from these relations of theirs the
+ submission of millions of people resulted—that is, how component
+ forces equal to one A gave a resultant equal to a thousand times
+ A —the historian is again obliged to fall back on power—the
+ force he had denied—and to recognize it as the resultant of the forces,
+ that is, he has to admit an unexplained force acting on the resultant. And
+ that is just what the universal historians do, and consequently they not only
+ contradict the specialist historians but contradict themselves.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Peasants having no clear idea of the cause of rain, say, according to
+ whether they want rain or fine weather: “The wind has blown the clouds
+ away,” or, “The wind has brought up the clouds.” And in the same way the
+ universal historians sometimes, when it pleases them and fits in with
+ their theory, say that power is the result of events, and sometimes, when
+ they want to prove something else, say that power produces events.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A third class of historians—the so-called historians of culture—following
+ the path laid down by the universal historians who sometimes accept
+ writers and ladies as forces producing events—again take that force
+ to be something quite different. They see it in what is called culture—in
+ mental activity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The historians of culture are quite consistent in regard to their
+ progenitors, the writers of universal histories, for if historical events
+ may be explained by the fact that certain persons treated one another in
+ such and such ways, why not explain them by the fact that such and such
+ people wrote such and such books? Of the immense number of indications
+ accompanying every vital phenomenon, these historians select the
+ indication of intellectual activity and say that this indication is the
+ cause. But despite their endeavors to prove that the cause of events lies
+ in intellectual activity, only by a great stretch can one admit that there
+ is any connection between intellectual activity and the movement of
+ peoples, and in no case can one admit that intellectual activity controls
+ people’s actions, for that view is not confirmed by such facts as the very
+ cruel murders of the French Revolution resulting from the doctrine of the
+ equality of man, or the very cruel wars and executions resulting from the
+ preaching of love.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But even admitting as correct all the cunningly devised arguments with
+ which these histories are filled—admitting that nations are governed
+ by some undefined force called an idea —history’s essential question
+ still remains unanswered, and to the former power of monarchs and to the
+ influence of advisers and other people introduced by the universal
+ historians, another, newer force—the idea —is added, the
+ connection of which with the masses needs explanation. It is possible to
+ understand that Napoleon had power and so events occurred; with some
+ effort one may even conceive that Napoleon together with other influences
+ was the cause of an event; but how a book, Le Contrat Social , had the
+ effect of making Frenchmen begin to drown one another cannot be understood
+ without an explanation of the causal nexus of this new force with the
+ event.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Undoubtedly some relation exists between all who live contemporaneously,
+ and so it is possible to find some connection between the intellectual
+ activity of men and their historical movements, just as such a connection
+ may be found between the movements of humanity and commerce, handicraft,
+ gardening, or anything else you please. But why intellectual activity is
+ considered by the historians of culture to be the cause or expression of
+ the whole historical movement is hard to understand. Only the following
+ considerations can have led the historians to such a conclusion: (1) that
+ history is written by learned men, and so it is natural and agreeable for
+ them to think that the activity of their class supplies the basis of the
+ movement of all humanity, just as a similar belief is natural and
+ agreeable to traders, agriculturists, and soldiers (if they do not express
+ it, that is merely because traders and soldiers do not write history), and
+ (2) that spiritual activity, enlightenment, civilization, culture, ideas,
+ are all indistinct, indefinite conceptions under whose banner it is very
+ easy to use words having a still less definite meaning, and which can
+ therefore be readily introduced into any theory.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But not to speak of the intrinsic quality of histories of this kind (which
+ may possibly even be of use to someone for something) the histories of
+ culture, to which all general histories tend more and more to approximate,
+ are significant from the fact that after seriously and minutely examining
+ various religious, philosophic, and political doctrines as causes of
+ events, as soon as they have to describe an actual historic event such as
+ the campaign of 1812 for instance, they involuntarily describe it as
+ resulting from an exercise of power—and say plainly that that was
+ the result of Napoleon’s will. Speaking so, the historians of culture
+ involuntarily contradict themselves, and show that the new force they have
+ devised does not account for what happens in history, and that history can
+ only be explained by introducing a power which they apparently do not
+ recognize.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER III
+ 
+ 
+ A locomotive is moving. Someone asks: “What moves it?” A peasant says the
+ devil moves it. Another man says the locomotive moves because its wheels
+ go round. A third asserts that the cause of its movement lies in the smoke
+ which the wind carries away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The peasant is irrefutable. He has devised a complete explanation. To
+ refute him someone would have to prove to him that there is no devil, or
+ another peasant would have to explain to him that it is not the devil but
+ a German, who moves the locomotive. Only then, as a result of the
+ contradiction, will they see that they are both wrong. But the man who
+ says that the movement of the wheels is the cause refutes himself, for
+ having once begun to analyze he ought to go on and explain further why the
+ wheels go round; and till he has reached the ultimate cause of the
+ movement of the locomotive in the pressure of steam in the boiler, he has
+ no right to stop in his search for the cause. The man who explains the
+ movement of the locomotive by the smoke that is carried back has noticed
+ that the wheels do not supply an explanation and has taken the first sign
+ that occurs to him and in his turn has offered that as an explanation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The only conception that can explain the movement of the locomotive is
+ that of a force commensurate with the movement observed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The only conception that can explain the movement of the peoples is that
+ of some force commensurate with the whole movement of the peoples.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Yet to supply this conception various historians take forces of different
+ kinds, all of which are incommensurate with the movement observed. Some
+ see it as a force directly inherent in heroes, as the peasant sees the
+ devil in the locomotive; others as a force resulting from several other
+ forces, like the movement of the wheels; others again as an intellectual
+ influence, like the smoke that is blown away.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So long as histories are written of separate individuals, whether Caesars,
+ Alexanders, Luthers, or Voltaires, and not the histories of all ,
+ absolutely all those who take part in an event, it is quite impossible to
+ describe the movement of humanity without the conception of a force
+ compelling men to direct their activity toward a certain end. And the only
+ such conception known to historians is that of power.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This conception is the one handle by means of which the material of
+ history, as at present expounded, can be dealt with, and anyone who breaks
+ that handle off, as Buckle did, without finding some other method of
+ treating historical material, merely deprives himself of the one possible
+ way of dealing with it. The necessity of the conception of power as an
+ explanation of historical events is best demonstrated by the universal
+ historians and historians of culture themselves, for they professedly
+ reject that conception but inevitably have recourse to it at every step.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In dealing with humanity’s inquiry, the science of history up to now is
+ like money in circulation—paper money and coin. The biographies and
+ special national histories are like paper money. They can be used and can
+ circulate and fulfill their purpose without harm to anyone and even
+ advantageously, as long as no one asks what is the security behind them.
+ You need only forget to ask how the will of heroes produces events, and
+ such histories as Thiers’ will be interesting and instructive and may
+ perhaps even possess a tinge of poetry. But just as doubts of the real
+ value of paper money arise either because, being easy to make, too much of
+ it gets made or because people try to exchange it for gold, so also doubts
+ concerning the real value of such histories arise either because too many
+ of them are written or because in his simplicity of heart someone
+ inquires: by what force did Napoleon do this?—that is, wants to
+ exchange the current paper money for the real gold of actual
+ comprehension.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The writers of universal histories and of the history of culture are like
+ people who, recognizing the defects of paper money, decide to substitute
+ for it money made of metal that has not the specific gravity of gold. It
+ may indeed make jingling coin, but will do no more than that. Paper money
+ may deceive the ignorant, but nobody is deceived by tokens of base metal
+ that have no value but merely jingle. As gold is gold only if it is
+ serviceable not merely for exchange but also for use, so universal
+ historians will be valuable only when they can reply to history’s
+ essential question: what is power? The universal historians give
+ contradictory replies to that question, while the historians of culture
+ evade it and answer something quite different. And as counters of
+ imitation gold can be used only among a group of people who agree to
+ accept them as gold, or among those who do not know the nature of gold, so
+ universal historians and historians of culture, not answering humanity’s
+ essential question, serve as currency for some purposes of their own, only
+ in universities and among the mass of readers who have a taste for what
+ they call “serious reading.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IV
+ 
+ 
+ Having abandoned the conception of the ancients as to the divine
+ subjection of the will of a nation to some chosen man and the subjection
+ of that man’s will to the Deity, history cannot without contradictions
+ take a single step till it has chosen one of two things: either a return
+ to the former belief in the direct intervention of the Deity in human
+ affairs or a definite explanation of the meaning of the force producing
+ historical events and termed “power.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A return to the first is impossible, the belief has been destroyed; and so
+ it is essential to explain what is meant by power.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Napoleon ordered an army to be raised and go to war. We are so accustomed
+ to that idea and have become so used to it that the question: why did six
+ hundred thousand men go to fight when Napoleon uttered certain words,
+ seems to us senseless. He had the power and so what he ordered was done.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This reply is quite satisfactory if we believe that the power was given
+ him by God. But as soon as we do not admit that, it becomes essential to
+ determine what is this power of one man over others.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ It cannot be the direct physical power of a strong man over a weak one—a
+ domination based on the application or threat of physical force, like the
+ power of Hercules; nor can it be based on the effect of moral force, as in
+ their simplicity some historians think who say that the leading figures in
+ history are heroes, that is, men gifted with a special strength of soul
+ and mind called genius. This power cannot be based on the predominance of
+ moral strength, for, not to mention heroes such as Napoleon about whose
+ moral qualities opinions differ widely, history shows us that neither a
+ Louis XI nor a Metternich, who ruled over millions of people, had any
+ particular moral qualities, but on the contrary were generally morally
+ weaker than any of the millions they ruled over.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If the source of power lies neither in the physical nor in the moral
+ qualities of him who possesses it, it must evidently be looked for
+ elsewhere—in the relation to the people of the man who wields the
+ power.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And that is how power is understood by the science of jurisprudence, that
+ exchange bank of history which offers to exchange history’s understanding
+ of power for true gold.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Power is the collective will of the people transferred, by expressed or
+ tacit consent, to their chosen rulers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the domain of jurisprudence, which consists of discussions of how a
+ state and power might be arranged were it possible for all that to be
+ arranged, it is all very clear; but when applied to history that
+ definition of power needs explanation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The science of jurisprudence regards the state and power as the ancients
+ regarded fire—namely, as something existing absolutely. But for
+ history, the state and power are merely phenomena, just as for modern
+ physics fire is not an element but a phenomenon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From this fundamental difference between the view held by history and that
+ held by jurisprudence, it follows that jurisprudence can tell minutely how
+ in its opinion power should be constituted and what power—existing
+ immutably outside time—is, but to history’s questions about the
+ meaning of the mutations of power in time it can answer nothing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If power be the collective will of the people transferred to their ruler,
+ was Pugachëv a representative of the will of the people? If not, then why
+ was Napoleon I? Why was Napoleon III a criminal when he was taken prisoner
+ at Boulogne, and why, later on, were those criminals whom he arrested?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Do palace revolutions—in which sometimes only two or three people
+ take part—transfer the will of the people to a new ruler? In
+ international relations, is the will of the people also transferred to
+ their conqueror? Was the will of the Confederation of the Rhine
+ transferred to Napoleon in 1806? Was the will of the Russian people
+ transferred to Napoleon in 1809, when our army in alliance with the French
+ went to fight the Austrians?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To these questions three answers are possible:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Either to assume (1) that the will of the people is always unconditionally
+ transferred to the ruler or rulers they have chosen, and that therefore
+ every emergence of a new power, every struggle against the power once
+ appointed, should be absolutely regarded as an infringement of the real
+ power; or (2) that the will of the people is transferred to the rulers
+ conditionally, under definite and known conditions, and to show that all
+ limitations, conflicts, and even destructions of power result from a
+ nonobservance by the rulers of the conditions under which their power was
+ entrusted to them; or (3) that the will of the people is delegated to the
+ rulers conditionally, but that the conditions are unknown and indefinite,
+ and that the appearance of several authorities, their struggles and their
+ falls, result solely from the greater or lesser fulfillment by the rulers
+ of these unknown conditions on which the will of the people is transferred
+ from some people to others.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And these are the three ways in which the historians do explain the
+ relation of the people to their rulers.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Some historians—those biographical and specialist historians already
+ referred to—in their simplicity failing to understand the question
+ of the meaning of power, seem to consider that the collective will of the
+ people is unconditionally transferred to historical persons, and therefore
+ when describing some single state they assume that particular power to be
+ the one absolute and real power, and that any other force opposing this is
+ not a power but a violation of power—mere violence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Their theory, suitable for primitive and peaceful periods of history, has
+ the inconvenience—in application to complex and stormy periods in
+ the life of nations during which various powers arise simultaneously and
+ struggle with one another—that a Legitimist historian will prove
+ that the National Convention, the Directory, and Bonaparte were mere
+ infringers of the true power, while a Republican and a Bonapartist will
+ prove: the one that the Convention and the other that the Empire was the
+ real power, and that all the others were violations of power. Evidently
+ the explanations furnished by these historians being mutually
+ contradictory can only satisfy young children.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Recognizing the falsity of this view of history, another set of historians
+ say that power rests on a conditional delegation of the will of the people
+ to their rulers, and that historical leaders have power only conditionally
+ on carrying out the program that the will of the people has by tacit
+ agreement prescribed to them. But what this program consists in these
+ historians do not say, or if they do they continually contradict one
+ another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Each historian, according to his view of what constitutes a nation’s
+ progress, looks for these conditions in the greatness, wealth, freedom, or
+ enlightenment of citizens of France or some other country. But not to
+ mention the historians’ contradictions as to the nature of this program—or
+ even admitting that some one general program of these conditions exists—the
+ facts of history almost always contradict that theory. If the conditions
+ under which power is entrusted consist in the wealth, freedom, and
+ enlightenment of the people, how is it that Louis XIV and Iván the
+ Terrible end their reigns tranquilly, while Louis XVI and Charles I are
+ executed by their people? To this question historians reply that Louis
+ XIV’s activity, contrary to the program, reacted on Louis XVI. But why did
+ it not react on Louis XIV or on Louis XV—why should it react just on
+ Louis XVI? And what is the time limit for such reactions? To these
+ questions there are and can be no answers. Equally little does this view
+ explain why for several centuries the collective will is not withdrawn
+ from certain rulers and their heirs, and then suddenly during a period of
+ fifty years is transferred to the Convention, to the Directory, to
+ Napoleon, to Alexander, to Louis XVIII, to Napoleon again, to Charles X,
+ to Louis Philippe, to a Republican government, and to Napoleon III. When
+ explaining these rapid transfers of the people’s will from one individual
+ to another, especially in view of international relations, conquests, and
+ alliances, the historians are obliged to admit that some of these
+ transfers are not normal delegations of the people’s will but are
+ accidents dependent on cunning, on mistakes, on craft, or on the weakness
+ of a diplomatist, a ruler, or a party leader. So that the greater part of
+ the events of history—civil wars, revolutions, and conquests—are
+ presented by these historians not as the results of free transferences of
+ the people’s will, but as results of the ill-directed will of one or more
+ individuals, that is, once again, as usurpations of power. And so these
+ historians also see and admit historical events which are exceptions to
+ the theory.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These historians resemble a botanist who, having noticed that some plants
+ grow from seeds producing two cotyledons, should insist that all that
+ grows does so by sprouting into two leaves, and that the palm, the
+ mushroom, and even the oak, which blossom into full growth and no longer
+ resemble two leaves, are deviations from the theory.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Historians of the third class assume that the will of the people is
+ transferred to historic personages conditionally, but that the conditions
+ are unknown to us. They say that historical personages have power only
+ because they fulfill the will of the people which has been delegated to
+ them.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But in that case, if the force that moves nations lies not in the historic
+ leaders but in the nations themselves, what significance have those
+ leaders?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The leaders, these historians tell us, express the will of the people: the
+ activity of the leaders represents the activity of the people.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But in that case the question arises whether all the activity of the
+ leaders serves as an expression of the people’s will or only some part of
+ it. If the whole activity of the leaders serves as the expression of the
+ people’s will, as some historians suppose, then all the details of the
+ court scandals contained in the biographies of a Napoleon or a Catherine
+ serve to express the life of the nation, which is evident nonsense; but if
+ it is only some particular side of the activity of an historical leader
+ which serves to express the people’s life, as other so-called
+ “philosophical” historians believe, then to determine which side of the
+ activity of a leader expresses the nation’s life, we have first of all to
+ know in what the nation’s life consists.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Met by this difficulty historians of that class devise some most obscure,
+ impalpable, and general abstraction which can cover all conceivable
+ occurrences, and declare this abstraction to be the aim of humanity’s
+ movement. The most usual generalizations adopted by almost all the
+ historians are: freedom, equality, enlightenment, progress, civilization,
+ and culture. Postulating some generalization as the goal of the movement
+ of humanity, the historians study the men of whom the greatest number of
+ monuments have remained: kings, ministers, generals, authors, reformers,
+ popes, and journalists, to the extent to which in their opinion these
+ persons have promoted or hindered that abstraction. But as it is in no way
+ proved that the aim of humanity does consist in freedom, equality,
+ enlightenment, or civilization, and as the connection of the people with
+ the rulers and enlighteners of humanity is only based on the arbitrary
+ assumption that the collective will of the people is always transferred to
+ the men whom we have noticed, it happens that the activity of the millions
+ who migrate, burn houses, abandon agriculture, and destroy one another
+ never is expressed in the account of the activity of some dozen people who
+ did not burn houses, practice agriculture, or slay their fellow creatures.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ History proves this at every turn. Is the ferment of the peoples of the
+ west at the end of the eighteenth century and their drive eastward
+ explained by the activity of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI, their mistresses and
+ ministers, and by the lives of Napoleon, Rousseau, Diderot, Beaumarchais,
+ and others?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Is the movement of the Russian people eastward to Kazán and Siberia
+ expressed by details of the morbid character of Iván the Terrible and by
+ his correspondence with Kúrbski?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Is the movement of the peoples at the time of the Crusades explained by
+ the life and activity of the Godfreys and the Louis-es and their ladies?
+ For us that movement of the peoples from west to east, without leaders,
+ with a crowd of vagrants, and with Peter the Hermit, remains
+ incomprehensible. And yet more incomprehensible is the cessation of that
+ movement when a rational and sacred aim for the Crusade—the
+ deliverance of Jerusalem—had been clearly defined by historic
+ leaders. Popes, kings, and knights incited the peoples to free the Holy
+ Land; but the people did not go, for the unknown cause which had
+ previously impelled them to go no longer existed. The history of the
+ Godfreys and the Minnesingers can evidently not cover the life of the
+ peoples. And the history of the Godfreys and the Minnesingers has remained
+ the history of Godfreys and Minnesingers, but the history of the life of
+ the peoples and their impulses has remained unknown.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Still less does the history of authors and reformers explain to us the
+ life of the peoples.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The history of culture explains to us the impulses and conditions of life
+ and thought of a writer or a reformer. We learn that Luther had a hot
+ temper and said such and such things; we learn that Rousseau was
+ suspicious and wrote such and such books; but we do not learn why after
+ the Reformation the peoples massacred one another, nor why during the
+ French Revolution they guillotined one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If we unite both these kinds of history, as is done by the newest
+ historians, we shall have the history of monarchs and writers, but not the
+ history of the life of the peoples.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER V
+ 
+ 
+ The life of the nations is not contained in the lives of a few men, for
+ the connection between those men and the nations has not been found. The
+ theory that this connection is based on the transference of the collective
+ will of a people to certain historical personages is an hypothesis
+ unconfirmed by the experience of history.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The theory of the transference of the collective will of the people to
+ historic persons may perhaps explain much in the domain of jurisprudence
+ and be essential for its purposes, but in its application to history, as
+ soon as revolutions, conquests, or civil wars occur—that is, as soon
+ as history begins—that theory explains nothing.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The theory seems irrefutable just because the act of transference of the
+ people’s will cannot be verified, for it never occurred.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whatever happens and whoever may stand at the head of affairs, the theory
+ can always say that such and such a person took the lead because the
+ collective will was transferred to him.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The replies this theory gives to historical questions are like the replies
+ of a man who, watching the movements of a herd of cattle and paying no
+ attention to the varying quality of the pasturage in different parts of
+ the field, or to the driving of the herdsman, should attribute the
+ direction the herd takes to what animal happens to be at its head.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “The herd goes in that direction because the animal in front leads it and
+ the collective will of all the other animals is vested in that leader.”
+ This is what historians of the first class say—those who assume the
+ unconditional transference of the people’s will.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If the animals leading the herd change, this happens because the
+ collective will of all the animals is transferred from one leader to
+ another, according to whether the animal is or is not leading them in the
+ direction selected by the whole herd.” Such is the reply historians who
+ assume that the collective will of the people is delegated to rulers under
+ conditions which they regard as known. (With this method of observation it
+ often happens that the observer, influenced by the direction he himself
+ prefers, regards those as leaders who, owing to the people’s change of
+ direction, are no longer in front, but on one side, or even in the rear.)
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ “If the animals in front are continually changing and the direction of the
+ whole herd is constantly altered, this is because in order to follow a
+ given direction the animals transfer their will to the animals that have
+ attracted our attention, and to study the movements of the herd we must
+ watch the movements of all the prominent animals moving on all sides of
+ the herd.” So say the third class of historians who regard all historical
+ persons, from monarchs to journalists, as the expression of their age.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The theory of the transference of the will of the people to historic
+ persons is merely a paraphrase—a restatement of the question in
+ other words.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ What causes historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the
+ collective will of the people transferred to one person. Under what
+ condition is the will of the people delegated to one person? On condition
+ that that person expresses the will of the whole people. That is, power is
+ power: in other words, power is a word the meaning of which we do not
+ understand.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If the realm of human knowledge were confined to abstract reasoning, then
+ having subjected to criticism the explanation of “power” that juridical
+ science gives us, humanity would conclude that power is merely a word and
+ has no real existence. But to understand phenomena man has, besides
+ abstract reasoning, experience by which he verifies his reflections. And
+ experience tells us that power is not merely a word but an actually
+ existing phenomenon.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Not to speak of the fact that no description of the collective activity of
+ men can do without the conception of power, the existence of power is
+ proved both by history and by observing contemporary events.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whenever an event occurs a man appears or men appear, by whose will the
+ event seems to have taken place. Napoleon III issues a decree and the
+ French go to Mexico. The King of Prussia and Bismarck issue decrees and an
+ army enters Bohemia. Napoleon I issues a decree and an army enters Russia.
+ Alexander I gives a command and the French submit to the Bourbons.
+ Experience shows us that whatever event occurs it is always related to the
+ will of one or of several men who have decreed it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The historians, in accord with the old habit of acknowledging divine
+ intervention in human affairs, want to see the cause of events in the
+ expression of the will of someone endowed with power, but that supposition
+ is not confirmed either by reason or by experience.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On the one side reflection shows that the expression of a man’s will—his
+ words—are only part of the general activity expressed in an event,
+ as for instance in a war or a revolution, and so without assuming an
+ incomprehensible, supernatural force—a miracle—one cannot
+ admit that words can be the immediate cause of the movements of millions
+ of men. On the other hand, even if we admitted that words could be the
+ cause of events, history shows that the expression of the will of
+ historical personages does not in most cases produce any effect, that is
+ to say, their commands are often not executed, and sometimes the very
+ opposite of what they order occurs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Without admitting divine intervention in the affairs of humanity we cannot
+ regard “power” as the cause of events.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Power, from the standpoint of experience, is merely the relation that
+ exists between the expression of someone’s will and the execution of that
+ will by others.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To explain the conditions of that relationship we must first establish a
+ conception of the expression of will, referring it to man and not to the
+ Deity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If the Deity issues a command, expresses His will, as ancient history
+ tells us, the expression of that will is independent of time and is not
+ caused by anything, for the Divinity is not controlled by an event. But
+ speaking of commands that are the expression of the will of men acting in
+ time and in relation to one another, to explain the connection of commands
+ with events we must restore: (1) the condition of all that takes place:
+ the continuity of movement in time both of the events and of the person
+ who commands, and (2) the inevitability of the connection between the
+ person commanding and those who execute his command.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VI
+ 
+ 
+ Only the expression of the will of the Deity, not dependent on time, can
+ relate to a whole series of events occurring over a period of years or
+ centuries, and only the Deity, independent of everything, can by His sole
+ will determine the direction of humanity’s movement; but man acts in time
+ and himself takes part in what occurs.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Reinstating the first condition omitted, that of time, we see that no
+ command can be executed without some preceding order having been given
+ rendering the execution of the last command possible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ No command ever appears spontaneously, or itself covers a whole series of
+ occurrences; but each command follows from another, and never refers to a
+ whole series of events but always to one moment only of an event.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When, for instance, we say that Napoleon ordered armies to go to war, we
+ combine in one simultaneous expression a whole series of consecutive
+ commands dependent one on another. Napoleon could not have commanded an
+ invasion of Russia and never did so. Today he ordered such and such papers
+ to be written to Vienna, to Berlin, and to Petersburg; tomorrow such and
+ such decrees and orders to the army, the fleet, the commissariat, and so
+ on and so on—millions of commands, which formed a whole series
+ corresponding to a series of events which brought the French armies into
+ Russia.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If throughout his reign Napoleon gave commands concerning an invasion of
+ England and expended on no other undertaking so much time and effort, and
+ yet during his whole reign never once attempted to execute that design but
+ undertook an expedition into Russia, with which country he considered it
+ desirable to be in alliance (a conviction he repeatedly expressed)—this
+ came about because his commands did not correspond to the course of events
+ in the first case, but did so correspond in the latter.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For an order to be certainly executed, it is necessary that a man should
+ order what can be executed. But to know what can and what cannot be
+ executed is impossible, not only in the case of Napoleon’s invasion of
+ Russia in which millions participated, but even in the simplest event, for
+ in either case millions of obstacles may arise to prevent its execution.
+ Every order executed is always one of an immense number unexecuted. All
+ the impossible orders inconsistent with the course of events remain
+ unexecuted. Only the possible ones get linked up with a consecutive series
+ of commands corresponding to a series of events, and are executed.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Our false conception that an event is caused by a command which precedes
+ it is due to the fact that when the event has taken place and out of
+ thousands of others those few commands which were consistent with that
+ event have been executed, we forget about the others that were not
+ executed because they could not be. Apart from that, the chief source of
+ our error in this matter is due to the fact that in the historical
+ accounts a whole series of innumerable, diverse, and petty events, such
+ for instance as all those which led the French armies to Russia, is
+ generalized into one event in accord with the result produced by that
+ series of events, and corresponding with this generalization the whole
+ series of commands is also generalized into a single expression of will.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ We say that Napoleon wished to invade Russia and invaded it. In reality in
+ all Napoleon’s activity we never find anything resembling an expression of
+ that wish, but find a series of orders, or expressions of his will, very
+ variously and indefinitely directed. Amid a long series of unexecuted
+ orders of Napoleon’s one series, for the campaign of 1812, was carried out—not
+ because those orders differed in any way from the other, unexecuted orders
+ but because they coincided with the course of events that led the French
+ army into Russia; just as in stencil work this or that figure comes out
+ not because the color was laid on from this side or in that way, but
+ because it was laid on from all sides over the figure cut in the stencil.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So that examining the relation in time of the commands to the events, we
+ find that a command can never be the cause of the event, but that a
+ certain definite dependence exists between the two.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To understand in what this dependence consists it is necessary to
+ reinstate another omitted condition of every command proceeding not from
+ the Deity but from a man, which is, that the man who gives the command
+ himself takes part in the event.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This relation of the commander to those he commands is just what is called
+ power. This relation consists in the following:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For common action people always unite in certain combinations, in which
+ regardless of the difference of the aims set for the common action, the
+ relation between those taking part in it is always the same.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Men uniting in these combinations always assume such relations toward one
+ another that the larger number take a more direct share, and the smaller
+ number a less direct share, in the collective action for which they have
+ combined.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Of all the combinations in which men unite for collective action one of
+ the most striking and definite examples is an army.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Every army is composed of lower grades of the service—the rank and
+ file—of whom there are always the greatest number; of the next
+ higher military rank—corporals and noncommissioned officers of whom
+ there are fewer, and of still-higher officers of whom there are still
+ fewer, and so on to the highest military command which is concentrated in
+ one person.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A military organization may be quite correctly compared to a cone, of
+ which the base with the largest diameter consists of the rank and file;
+ the next higher and smaller section of the cone consists of the next
+ higher grades of the army, and so on to the apex, the point of which will
+ represent the commander in chief.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The soldiers, of whom there are the most, form the lower section of the
+ cone and its base. The soldier himself does the stabbing, hacking,
+ burning, and pillaging, and always receives orders for these actions from
+ men above him; he himself never gives an order. The noncommissioned
+ officers (of whom there are fewer) perform the action itself less
+ frequently than the soldiers, but they already give commands. An officer
+ still less often acts directly himself, but commands still more
+ frequently. A general does nothing but command the troops, indicates the
+ objective, and hardly ever uses a weapon himself. The commander in chief
+ never takes direct part in the action itself, but only gives general
+ orders concerning the movement of the mass of the troops. A similar
+ relation of people to one another is seen in every combination of men for
+ common activity—in agriculture, trade, and every administration.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And so without particularly analyzing all the contiguous sections of a
+ cone and of the ranks of an army, or the ranks and positions in any
+ administrative or public business whatever from the lowest to the highest,
+ we see a law by which men, to take associated action, combine in such
+ relations that the more directly they participate in performing the action
+ the less they can command and the more numerous they are, while the less
+ their direct participation in the action itself, the more they command and
+ the fewer of them there are; rising in this way from the lowest ranks to
+ the man at the top, who takes the least direct share in the action and
+ directs his activity chiefly to commanding.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This relation of the men who command to those they command is what
+ constitutes the essence of the conception called power.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Having restored the condition of time under which all events occur, we
+ find that a command is executed only when it is related to a corresponding
+ series of events. Restoring the essential condition of relation between
+ those who command and those who execute, we find that by the very nature
+ of the case those who command take the smallest part in the action itself
+ and that their activity is exclusively directed to commanding.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VII
+ 
+ 
+ When an event is taking place people express their opinions and wishes
+ about it, and as the event results from the collective activity of many
+ people, some one of the opinions or wishes expressed is sure to be
+ fulfilled if but approximately. When one of the opinions expressed is
+ fulfilled, that opinion gets connected with the event as a command
+ preceding it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Men are hauling a log. Each of them expresses his opinion as to how and
+ where to haul it. They haul the log away, and it happens that this is done
+ as one of them said. He ordered it. There we have command and power in
+ their primary form. The man who worked most with his hands could not think
+ so much about what he was doing, or reflect on or command what would
+ result from the common activity; while the man who commanded more would
+ evidently work less with his hands on account of his greater verbal
+ activity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When some larger concourse of men direct their activity to a common aim
+ there is a yet sharper division of those who, because their activity is
+ given to directing and commanding, take less part in the direct work.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When a man works alone he always has a certain set of reflections which as
+ it seems to him directed his past activity, justify his present activity,
+ and guide him in planning his future actions. Just the same is done by a
+ concourse of people, allowing those who do not take a direct part in the
+ activity to devise considerations, justifications, and surmises concerning
+ their collective activity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For reasons known or unknown to us the French began to drown and kill one
+ another. And corresponding to the event its justification appears in
+ people’s belief that this was necessary for the welfare of France, for
+ liberty, and for equality. People ceased to kill one another, and this
+ event was accompanied by its justification in the necessity for a
+ centralization of power, resistance to Europe, and so on. Men went from
+ the west to the east killing their fellow men, and the event was
+ accompanied by phrases about the glory of France, the baseness of England,
+ and so on. History shows us that these justifications of the events have
+ no common sense and are all contradictory, as in the case of killing a man
+ as the result of recognizing his rights, and the killing of millions in
+ Russia for the humiliation of England. But these justifications have a
+ very necessary significance in their own day.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ These justifications release those who produce the events from moral
+ responsibility. These temporary aims are like the broom fixed in front of
+ a locomotive to clear the snow from the rails in front: they clear men’s
+ moral responsibilities from their path.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Without such justification there would be no reply to the simplest
+ question that presents itself when examining each historical event. How is
+ it that millions of men commit collective crimes—make war, commit
+ murder, and so on?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ With the present complex forms of political and social life in Europe can
+ any event that is not prescribed, decreed, or ordered by monarchs,
+ ministers, parliaments, or newspapers be imagined? Is there any collective
+ action which cannot find its justification in political unity, in
+ patriotism, in the balance of power, or in civilization? So that every
+ event that occurs inevitably coincides with some expressed wish and,
+ receiving a justification, presents itself as the result of the will of
+ one man or of several men.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In whatever direction a ship moves, the flow of the waves it cuts will
+ always be noticeable ahead of it. To those on board the ship the movement
+ of those waves will be the only perceptible motion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only by watching closely moment by moment the movement of that flow and
+ comparing it with the movement of the ship do we convince ourselves that
+ every bit of it is occasioned by the forward movement of the ship, and
+ that we were led into error by the fact that we ourselves were
+ imperceptibly moving.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ We see the same if we watch moment by moment the movement of historical
+ characters (that is, re-establish the inevitable condition of all that
+ occurs—the continuity of movement in time) and do not lose sight of
+ the essential connection of historical persons with the masses.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When the ship moves in one direction there is one and the same wave ahead
+ of it, when it turns frequently the wave ahead of it also turns
+ frequently. But wherever it may turn there always will be the wave
+ anticipating its movement.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whatever happens it always appears that just that event was foreseen and
+ decreed. Wherever the ship may go, the rush of water which neither directs
+ nor increases its movement foams ahead of it, and at a distance seems to
+ us not merely to move of itself but to govern the ship’s movement also.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Examining only those expressions of the will of historical persons which,
+ as commands, were related to events, historians have assumed that the
+ events depended on those commands. But examining the events themselves and
+ the connection in which the historical persons stood to the people, we
+ have found that they and their orders were dependent on events. The
+ incontestable proof of this deduction is that, however many commands were
+ issued, the event does not take place unless there are other causes for
+ it, but as soon as an event occurs—be it what it may—then out
+ of all the continually expressed wishes of different people some will
+ always be found which by their meaning and their time of utterance are
+ related as commands to the events.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Arriving at this conclusion we can reply directly and positively to these
+ two essential questions of history:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ (1) What is power?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ (2) What force produces the movement of the nations?
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ (1) Power is the relation of a given person to other individuals, in which
+ the more this person expresses opinions, predictions, and justifications
+ of the collective action that is performed, the less is his participation
+ in that action.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ (2) The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor by intellectual
+ activity, nor even by a combination of the two as historians have
+ supposed, but by the activity of all the people who participate in the
+ events, and who always combine in such a way that those taking the largest
+ direct share in the event take on themselves the least responsibility and
+ vice versa.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Morally the wielder of power appears to cause the event; physically it is
+ those who submit to the power. But as the moral activity is inconceivable
+ without the physical, the cause of the event is neither in the one nor in
+ the other but in the union of the two.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Or in other words, the conception of a cause is inapplicable to the
+ phenomena we are examining.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the last analysis we reach the circle of infinity—that final
+ limit to which in every domain of thought man’s reason arrives if it is
+ not playing with the subject. Electricity produces heat, heat produces
+ electricity. Atoms attract each other and atoms repel one another.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Speaking of the interaction of heat and electricity and of atoms, we
+ cannot say why this occurs, and we say that it is so because it is
+ inconceivable otherwise, because it must be so and that it is a law. The
+ same applies to historical events. Why war and revolution occur we do not
+ know. We only know that to produce the one or the other action, people
+ combine in a certain formation in which they all take part, and we say
+ that this is so because it is unthinkable otherwise, or in other words
+ that it is a law.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ 
+ 
+ If history dealt only with external phenomena, the establishment of this
+ simple and obvious law would suffice and we should have finished our
+ argument. But the law of history relates to man. A particle of matter
+ cannot tell us that it does not feel the law of attraction or repulsion
+ and that that law is untrue, but man, who is the subject of history, says
+ plainly: I am free and am therefore not subject to the law.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The presence of the problem of man’s free will, though unexpressed, is
+ felt at every step of history.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All seriously thinking historians have involuntarily encountered this
+ question. All the contradictions and obscurities of history and the false
+ path historical science has followed are due solely to the lack of a
+ solution of that question.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If the will of every man were free, that is, if each man could act as he
+ pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected incidents.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If in a thousand years even one man in a million could act freely, that
+ is, as he chose, it is evident that one single free act of that man’s in
+ violation of the laws governing human action would destroy the possibility
+ of the existence of any laws for the whole of humanity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If there be a single law governing the actions of men, free will cannot
+ exist, for then man’s will is subject to that law.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In this contradiction lies the problem of free will, which from most
+ ancient times has occupied the best human minds and from most ancient
+ times has been presented in its whole tremendous significance.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The problem is that regarding man as a subject of observation from
+ whatever point of view—theological, historical, ethical, or
+ philosophic—we find a general law of necessity to which he (like all
+ that exists) is subject. But regarding him from within ourselves as what
+ we are conscious of, we feel ourselves to be free.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This consciousness is a source of self-cognition quite apart from and
+ independent of reason. Through his reason man observes himself, but only
+ through consciousness does he know himself.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Apart from consciousness of self no observation or application of reason
+ is conceivable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To understand, observe, and draw conclusions, man must first of all be
+ conscious of himself as living. A man is only conscious of himself as a
+ living being by the fact that he wills, that is, is conscious of his
+ volition. But his will—which forms the essence of his life—man
+ recognizes (and can but recognize) as free.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If, observing himself, man sees that his will is always directed by one
+ and the same law (whether he observes the necessity of taking food, using
+ his brain, or anything else) he cannot recognize this never-varying
+ direction of his will otherwise than as a limitation of it. Were it not
+ free it could not be limited. A man’s will seems to him to be limited just
+ because he is not conscious of it except as free.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall.
+ Everyone understands that this illogical reply is an irrefutable
+ demonstration of freedom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That reply is the expression of a consciousness that is not subject to
+ reason.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If the consciousness of freedom were not a separate and independent source
+ of self-consciousness it would be subject to reasoning and to experience,
+ but in fact such subjection does not exist and is inconceivable.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A series of experiments and arguments proves to every man that he, as an
+ object of observation, is subject to certain laws, and man submits to them
+ and never resists the laws of gravity or impermeability once he has become
+ acquainted with them. But the same series of experiments and arguments
+ proves to him that the complete freedom of which he is conscious in
+ himself is impossible, and that his every action depends on his
+ organization, his character, and the motives acting upon him; yet man
+ never submits to the deductions of these experiments and arguments. Having
+ learned from experiment and argument that a stone falls downwards, a man
+ indubitably believes this and always expects the law that he has learned
+ to be fulfilled.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But learning just as certainly that his will is subject to laws, he does
+ not and cannot believe this.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ However often experiment and reasoning may show a man that under the same
+ conditions and with the same character he will do the same thing as
+ before, yet when under the same conditions and with the same character he
+ approaches for the thousandth time the action that always ends in the same
+ way, he feels as certainly convinced as before the experiment that he can
+ act as he pleases. Every man, savage or sage, however incontestably reason
+ and experiment may prove to him that it is impossible to imagine two
+ different courses of action in precisely the same conditions, feels that
+ without this irrational conception (which constitutes the essence of
+ freedom) he cannot imagine life. He feels that however impossible it may
+ be, it is so, for without this conception of freedom not only would he be
+ unable to understand life, but he would be unable to live for a single
+ moment.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ He could not live, because all man’s efforts, all his impulses to life,
+ are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and
+ obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and
+ disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger,
+ virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If the conception of freedom appears to reason to be a senseless
+ contradiction like the possibility of performing two actions at one and
+ the same instant of time, or of an effect without a cause, that only
+ proves that consciousness is not subject to reason.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ This unshakable, irrefutable consciousness of freedom, uncontrolled by
+ experiment or argument, recognized by all thinkers and felt by everyone
+ without exception, this consciousness without which no conception of man
+ is possible constitutes the other side of the question.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Man is the creation of an all-powerful, all-good, and all-seeing God. What
+ is sin, the conception of which arises from the consciousness of man’s
+ freedom? That is a question for theology.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The actions of men are subject to general immutable laws expressed in
+ statistics. What is man’s responsibility to society, the conception of
+ which results from the conception of freedom? That is a question for
+ jurisprudence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Man’s actions proceed from his innate character and the motives acting
+ upon him. What is conscience and the perception of right and wrong in
+ actions that follows from the consciousness of freedom? That is a question
+ for ethics.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Man in connection with the general life of humanity appears subject to
+ laws which determine that life. But the same man apart from that
+ connection appears to be free. How should the past life of nations and of
+ humanity be regarded—as the result of the free, or as the result of
+ the constrained, activity of man? That is a question for history.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only in our self-confident day of the popularization of knowledge—thanks
+ to that most powerful engine of ignorance, the diffusion of printed matter—has
+ the question of the freedom of will been put on a level on which the
+ question itself cannot exist. In our time the majority of so-called
+ advanced people—that is, the crowd of ignoramuses—have taken
+ the work of the naturalists who deal with one side of the question for a
+ solution of the whole problem.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ They say and write and print that the soul and freedom do not exist, for
+ the life of man is expressed by muscular movements and muscular movements
+ are conditioned by the activity of the nerves; the soul and free will do
+ not exist because at an unknown period of time we sprang from the apes.
+ They say this, not at all suspecting that thousands of years ago that same
+ law of necessity which with such ardor they are now trying to prove by
+ physiology and comparative zoology was not merely acknowledged by all the
+ religions and all the thinkers, but has never been denied. They do not see
+ that the role of the natural sciences in this matter is merely to serve as
+ an instrument for the illumination of one side of it. For the fact that,
+ from the point of view of observation, reason and the will are merely
+ secretions of the brain, and that man following the general law may have
+ developed from lower animals at some unknown period of time, only explains
+ from a fresh side the truth admitted thousands of years ago by all the
+ religious and philosophic theories—that from the point of view of
+ reason man is subject to the law of necessity; but it does not advance by
+ a hair’s breadth the solution of the question, which has another,
+ opposite, side, based on the consciousness of freedom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If men descended from the apes at an unknown period of time, that is as
+ comprehensible as that they were made from a handful of earth at a certain
+ period of time (in the first case the unknown quantity is the time, in the
+ second case it is the origin); and the question of how man’s consciousness
+ of freedom is to be reconciled with the law of necessity to which he is
+ subject cannot be solved by comparative physiology and zoology, for in a
+ frog, a rabbit, or an ape, we can observe only the muscular nervous
+ activity, but in man we observe consciousness as well as the muscular and
+ nervous activity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The naturalists and their followers, thinking they can solve this
+ question, are like plasterers set to plaster one side of the walls of a
+ church who, availing themselves of the absence of the chief superintendent
+ of the work, should in an access of zeal plaster over the windows, icons,
+ woodwork, and still unbuttressed walls, and should be delighted that from
+ their point of view as plasterers, everything is now so smooth and
+ regular.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER IX
+ 
+ 
+ For the solution of the question of free will or inevitability, history
+ has this advantage over other branches of knowledge in which the question
+ is dealt with, that for history this question does not refer to the
+ essence of man’s free will but its manifestation in the past and under
+ certain conditions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In regard to this question, history stands to the other sciences as
+ experimental science stands to abstract science.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The subject for history is not man’s will itself but our presentation of
+ it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And so for history, the insoluble mystery presented by the incompatibility
+ of free will and inevitability does not exist as it does for theology,
+ ethics, and philosophy. History surveys a presentation of man’s life in
+ which the union of these two contradictions has already taken place.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In actual life each historic event, each human action, is very clearly and
+ definitely understood without any sense of contradiction, although each
+ event presents itself as partly free and partly compulsory.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To solve the question of how freedom and necessity are combined and what
+ constitutes the essence of these two conceptions, the philosophy of
+ history can and should follow a path contrary to that taken by other
+ sciences. Instead of first defining the conceptions of freedom and
+ inevitability in themselves, and then ranging the phenomena of life under
+ those definitions, history should deduce a definition of the conception of
+ freedom and inevitability themselves from the immense quantity of
+ phenomena of which it is cognizant and that always appear dependent on
+ these two elements.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whatever presentation of the activity of many men or of an individual we
+ may consider, we always regard it as the result partly of man’s free will
+ and partly of the law of inevitability.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Whether we speak of the migration of the peoples and the incursions of the
+ barbarians, or of the decrees of Napoleon III, or of someone’s action an
+ hour ago in choosing one direction out of several for his walk, we are
+ unconscious of any contradiction. The degree of freedom and inevitability
+ governing the actions of these people is clearly defined for us.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Our conception of the degree of freedom often varies according to
+ differences in the point of view from which we regard the event, but every
+ human action appears to us as a certain combination of freedom and
+ inevitability. In every action we examine we see a certain measure of
+ freedom and a certain measure of inevitability. And always the more
+ freedom we see in any action the less inevitability do we perceive, and
+ the more inevitability the less freedom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The proportion of freedom to inevitability decreases and increases
+ according to the point of view from which the action is regarded, but
+ their relation is always one of inverse proportion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ A sinking man who clutches at another and drowns him; or a hungry mother
+ exhausted by feeding her baby, who steals some food; or a man trained to
+ discipline who on duty at the word of command kills a defenseless man—seem
+ less guilty, that is, less free and more subject to the law of necessity,
+ to one who knows the circumstances in which these people were placed, and
+ more free to one who does not know that the man was himself drowning, that
+ the mother was hungry, that the soldier was in the ranks, and so on.
+ Similarly a man who committed a murder twenty years ago and has since
+ lived peaceably and harmlessly in society seems less guilty and his action
+ more due to the law of inevitability, to someone who considers his action
+ after twenty years have elapsed than to one who examined it the day after
+ it was committed. And in the same way every action of an insane,
+ intoxicated, or highly excited man appears less free and more inevitable
+ to one who knows the mental condition of him who committed the action, and
+ seems more free and less inevitable to one who does not know it. In all
+ these cases the conception of freedom is increased or diminished and the
+ conception of compulsion is correspondingly decreased or increased,
+ according to the point of view from which the action is regarded. So that
+ the greater the conception of necessity the smaller the conception of
+ freedom and vice versa.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Religion, the common sense of mankind, the science of jurisprudence, and
+ history itself understand alike this relation between necessity and
+ freedom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All cases without exception in which our conception of freedom and
+ necessity is increased and diminished depend on three considerations:
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ (1) The relation to the external world of the man who commits the deeds.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ (2) His relation to time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ (3) His relation to the causes leading to the action.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The first consideration is the clearness of our perception of the man’s
+ relation to the external world and the greater or lesser clearness of our
+ understanding of the definite position occupied by the man in relation to
+ everything coexisting with him. This is what makes it evident that a
+ drowning man is less free and more subject to necessity than one standing
+ on dry ground, and that makes the actions of a man closely connected with
+ others in a thickly populated district, or of one bound by family,
+ official, or business duties, seem certainly less free and more subject to
+ necessity than those of a man living in solitude and seclusion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If we consider a man alone, apart from his relation to everything around
+ him, each action of his seems to us free. But if we see his relation to
+ anything around him, if we see his connection with anything whatever—with
+ a man who speaks to him, a book he reads, the work on which he is engaged,
+ even with the air he breathes or the light that falls on the things about
+ him—we see that each of these circumstances has an influence on him
+ and controls at least some side of his activity. And the more we perceive
+ of these influences the more our conception of his freedom diminishes and
+ the more our conception of the necessity that weighs on him increases.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The second consideration is the more or less evident time relation of the
+ man to the world and the clearness of our perception of the place the
+ man’s action occupies in time. That is the ground which makes the fall of
+ the first man, resulting in the production of the human race, appear
+ evidently less free than a man’s entry into marriage today. It is the
+ reason why the life and activity of people who lived centuries ago and are
+ connected with me in time cannot seem to me as free as the life of a
+ contemporary, the consequences of which are still unknown to me.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The degree of our conception of freedom or inevitability depends in this
+ respect on the greater or lesser lapse of time between the performance of
+ the action and our judgment of it.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ If I examine an act I performed a moment ago in approximately the same
+ circumstances as those I am in now, my action appears to me undoubtedly
+ free. But if I examine an act performed a month ago, then being in
+ different circumstances, I cannot help recognizing that if that act had
+ not been committed much that resulted from it—good, agreeable, and
+ even essential—would not have taken place. If I reflect on an action
+ still more remote, ten years ago or more, then the consequences of my
+ action are still plainer to me and I find it hard to imagine what would
+ have happened had that action not been performed. The farther I go back in
+ memory, or what is the same thing the farther I go forward in my judgment,
+ the more doubtful becomes my belief in the freedom of my action.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In history we find a very similar progress of conviction concerning the
+ part played by free will in the general affairs of humanity. A
+ contemporary event seems to us to be indubitably the doing of all the
+ known participants, but with a more remote event we already see its
+ inevitable results which prevent our considering anything else possible.
+ And the farther we go back in examining events the less arbitrary do they
+ appear.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The Austro-Prussian war appears to us undoubtedly the result of the crafty
+ conduct of Bismarck, and so on. The Napoleonic wars still seem to us,
+ though already questionably, to be the outcome of their heroes’ will. But
+ in the Crusades we already see an event occupying its definite place in
+ history and without which we cannot imagine the modern history of Europe,
+ though to the chroniclers of the Crusades that event appeared as merely
+ due to the will of certain people. In regard to the migration of the
+ peoples it does not enter anyone’s head today to suppose that the
+ renovation of the European world depended on Attila’s caprice. The farther
+ back in history the object of our observation lies, the more doubtful does
+ the free will of those concerned in the event become and the more manifest
+ the law of inevitability.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The third consideration is the degree to which we apprehend that endless
+ chain of causation inevitably demanded by reason, in which each phenomenon
+ comprehended, and therefore man’s every action, must have its definite
+ place as a result of what has gone before and as a cause of what will
+ follow.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The better we are acquainted with the physiological, psychological, and
+ historical laws deduced by observation and by which man is controlled, and
+ the more correctly we perceive the physiological, psychological, and
+ historical causes of the action, and the simpler the action we are
+ observing and the less complex the character and mind of the man in
+ question, the more subject to inevitability and the less free do our
+ actions and those of others appear.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ When we do not at all understand the cause of an action, whether a crime,
+ a good action, or even one that is simply nonmoral, we ascribe a greater
+ amount of freedom to it. In the case of a crime we most urgently demand
+ the punishment for such an act; in the case of a virtuous act we rate its
+ merit most highly. In an indifferent case we recognize in it more
+ individuality, originality, and independence. But if even one of the
+ innumerable causes of the act is known to us we recognize a certain
+ element of necessity and are less insistent on punishment for the crime,
+ or the acknowledgment of the merit of the virtuous act, or the freedom of
+ the apparently original action. That a criminal was reared among
+ malefactors mitigates his fault in our eyes. The self-sacrifice of a father or
+ mother, or self-sacrifice with the possibility of a reward, is more
+ comprehensible than gratuitous self-sacrifice, and therefore seems less
+ deserving of sympathy and less the result of free will. The founder of a
+ sect or party, or an inventor, impresses us less when we know how or by
+ what the way was prepared for his activity. If we have a large range of
+ examples, if our observation is constantly directed to seeking the
+ correlation of cause and effect in people’s actions, their actions appear
+ to us more under compulsion and less free the more correctly we connect
+ the effects with the causes. If we examined simple actions and had a vast
+ number of such actions under observation, our conception of their
+ inevitability would be still greater. The dishonest conduct of the son of
+ a dishonest father, the misconduct of a woman who had fallen into bad
+ company, a drunkard’s relapse into drunkenness, and so on are actions that
+ seem to us less free the better we understand their cause. If the man
+ whose actions we are considering is on a very low stage of mental
+ development, like a child, a madman, or a simpleton—then, knowing
+ the causes of the act and the simplicity of the character and intelligence
+ in question, we see so large an element of necessity and so little free
+ will that as soon as we know the cause prompting the action we can
+ foretell the result.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ On these three considerations alone is based the conception of
+ irresponsibility for crimes and the extenuating circumstances admitted by
+ all legislative codes. The responsibility appears greater or less
+ according to our greater or lesser knowledge of the circumstances in which
+ the man was placed whose action is being judged, and according to the
+ greater or lesser interval of time between the commission of the action
+ and its investigation, and according to the greater or lesser
+ understanding of the causes that led to the action.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER X
+ 
+ 
+ Thus our conception of free will and inevitability gradually diminishes or
+ increases according to the greater or lesser connection with the external
+ world, the greater or lesser remoteness of time, and the greater or lesser
+ dependence on the causes in relation to which we contemplate a man’s life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So that if we examine the case of a man whose connection with the external
+ world is well known, where the time between the action and its examination
+ is great, and where the causes of the action are most accessible, we get
+ the conception of a maximum of inevitability and a minimum of free will.
+ If we examine a man little dependent on external conditions, whose action
+ was performed very recently, and the causes of whose action are beyond our
+ ken, we get the conception of a minimum of inevitability and a maximum of
+ freedom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In neither case—however we may change our point of view, however
+ plain we may make to ourselves the connection between the man and the
+ external world, however inaccessible it may be to us, however long or
+ short the period of time, however intelligible or incomprehensible the
+ causes of the action may be—can we ever conceive either complete
+ freedom or complete necessity.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ (1) To whatever degree we may imagine a man to be exempt from the
+ influence of the external world, we never get a conception of freedom in
+ space. Every human action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him
+ and by his own body. I lift my arm and let it fall. My action seems to me
+ free; but asking myself whether I could raise my arm in every direction, I
+ see that I raised it in the direction in which there was least obstruction
+ to that action either from things around me or from the construction of my
+ own body. I chose one out of all the possible directions because in it
+ there were fewest obstacles. For my action to be free it was necessary
+ that it should encounter no obstacles. To conceive of a man being free we
+ must imagine him outside space, which is evidently impossible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ (2) However much we approximate the time of judgment to the time of the
+ deed, we never get a conception of freedom in time. For if I examine an
+ action committed a second ago I must still recognize it as not being free,
+ for it is irrevocably linked to the moment at which it was committed. Can
+ I lift my arm? I lift it, but ask myself: could I have abstained from
+ lifting my arm at the moment that has already passed? To convince myself
+ of this I do not lift it the next moment. But I am not now abstaining from
+ doing so at the first moment when I asked the question. Time has gone by
+ which I could not detain, the arm I then lifted is no longer the same as
+ the arm I now refrain from lifting, nor is the air in which I lifted it
+ the same that now surrounds me. The moment in which the first movement was
+ made is irrevocable, and at that moment I could make only one movement,
+ and whatever movement I made would be the only one. That I did not lift my
+ arm a moment later does not prove that I could have abstained from lifting
+ it then. And since I could make only one movement at that single moment of
+ time, it could not have been any other. To imagine it as free, it is
+ necessary to imagine it in the present, on the boundary between the past
+ and the future—that is, outside time, which is impossible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ (3) However much the difficulty of understanding the causes may be
+ increased, we never reach a conception of complete freedom, that is, an
+ absence of cause. However inaccessible to us may be the cause of the
+ expression of will in any action, our own or another’s, the first demand
+ of reason is the assumption of and search for a cause, for without a cause
+ no phenomenon is conceivable. I raise my arm to perform an action
+ independently of any cause, but my wish to perform an action without a
+ cause is the cause of my action.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But even if—imagining a man quite exempt from all influences,
+ examining only his momentary action in the present, unevoked by any cause—we
+ were to admit so infinitely small a remainder of inevitability as equaled
+ zero, we should even then not have arrived at the conception of complete
+ freedom in man, for a being uninfluenced by the external world, standing
+ outside of time and independent of cause, is no longer a man.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the same way we can never imagine the action of a man quite devoid of
+ freedom and entirely subject to the law of inevitability.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ (1) However we may increase our knowledge of the conditions of space in
+ which man is situated, that knowledge can never be complete, for the
+ number of those conditions is as infinite as the infinity of space. And
+ therefore so long as not all the conditions influencing men are defined,
+ there is no complete inevitability but a certain measure of freedom
+ remains.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ (2) However we may prolong the period of time between the action we are
+ examining and the judgment upon it, that period will be finite, while time
+ is infinite, and so in this respect too there can never be absolute
+ inevitability.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ (3) However accessible may be the chain of causation of any action, we
+ shall never know the whole chain since it is endless, and so again we
+ never reach absolute inevitability.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But besides this, even if, admitting the remaining minimum of freedom to
+ equal zero, we assumed in some given case—as for instance in that of
+ a dying man, an unborn babe, or an idiot—complete absence of
+ freedom, by so doing we should destroy the very conception of man in the
+ case we are examining, for as soon as there is no freedom there is also no
+ man. And so the conception of the action of a man subject solely to the
+ law of inevitability without any element of freedom is just as impossible
+ as the conception of a man’s completely free action.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And so to imagine the action of a man entirely subject to the law of
+ inevitability without any freedom, we must assume the knowledge of an
+ infinite number of space relations, an infinitely long
+ period of time, and an infinite series of causes.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To imagine a man perfectly free and not subject to the law of
+ inevitability, we must imagine him all alone, beyond space, beyond time, 
+ and free from dependence on cause. 
+
+
+
+ 
+ In the first case, if inevitability were possible without freedom we
+ should have reached a definition of inevitability by the laws of
+ inevitability itself, that is, a mere form without content.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the second case, if freedom were possible without inevitability we
+ should have arrived at unconditioned freedom beyond space, time, and
+ cause, which by the fact of its being unconditioned and unlimited would be
+ nothing, or mere content without form.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ We should in fact have reached those two fundamentals of which man’s whole
+ outlook on the universe is constructed—the incomprehensible essence
+ of life, and the laws defining that essence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Reason says: (1) space with all the forms of matter that give it
+ visibility is infinite, and cannot be imagined otherwise. (2) Time is
+ infinite motion without a moment of rest and is unthinkable otherwise. (3)
+ The connection between cause and effect has no beginning and can have no
+ end.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Consciousness says: (1) I alone am, and all that exists is but me,
+ consequently I include space. (2) I measure flowing time by the fixed
+ moment of the present in which alone I am conscious of myself as living,
+ consequently I am outside time. (3) I am beyond cause, for I feel myself
+ to be the cause of every manifestation of my life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Reason gives expression to the laws of inevitability. Consciousness gives
+ expression to the essence of freedom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Freedom not limited by anything is the essence of life, in man’s
+ consciousness. Inevitability without content is man’s reason in its three
+ forms.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Freedom is the thing examined. Inevitability is what examines. Freedom is
+ the content. Inevitability is the form.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only by separating the two sources of cognition, related to one another as
+ form to content, do we get the mutually exclusive and separately
+ incomprehensible conceptions of freedom and inevitability.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only by uniting them do we get a clear conception of man’s life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Apart from these two concepts which in their union mutually define one
+ another as form and content, no conception of life is possible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All that we know of the life of man is merely a certain relation of free
+ will to inevitability, that is, of consciousness to the laws of reason.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All that we know of the external world of nature is only a certain
+ relation of the forces of nature to inevitability, or of the essence of
+ life to the laws of reason.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The great natural forces lie outside us and we are not conscious of them;
+ we call those forces gravitation, inertia, electricity, animal force, and
+ so on, but we are conscious of the force of life in man and we call that
+ freedom.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ But just as the force of gravitation, incomprehensible in itself but felt
+ by every man, is understood by us only to the extent to which we know the
+ laws of inevitability to which it is subject (from the first knowledge
+ that all bodies have weight, up to Newton’s law), so too the force of free
+ will, incomprehensible in itself but of which everyone is conscious, is
+ intelligible to us only in as far as we know the laws of inevitability to
+ which it is subject (from the fact that every man dies, up to the
+ knowledge of the most complex economic and historic laws).
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All knowledge is merely a bringing of this essence of life under the laws
+ of reason.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Man’s free will differs from every other force in that man is directly
+ conscious of it, but in the eyes of reason it in no way differs from any
+ other force. The forces of gravitation, electricity, or chemical affinity
+ are only distinguished from one another in that they are differently
+ defined by reason. Just so the force of man’s free will is distinguished
+ by reason from the other forces of nature only by the definition reason
+ gives it. Freedom, apart from necessity, that is, apart from the laws of
+ reason that define it, differs in no way from gravitation, or heat, or the
+ force that makes things grow; for reason, it is only a momentary
+ undefinable sensation of life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And as the undefinable essence of the force moving the heavenly bodies,
+ the undefinable essence of the forces of heat and electricity, or of
+ chemical affinity, or of the vital force, forms the content of astronomy,
+ physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and so on, just in the same way does
+ the force of free will form the content of history. But just as the
+ subject of every science is the manifestation of this unknown essence of
+ life while that essence itself can only be the subject of metaphysics,
+ even the manifestation of the force of free will in human beings in space,
+ in time, and in dependence on cause forms the subject of history, while
+ free will itself is the subject of metaphysics.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the experimental sciences what we know we call the laws of
+ inevitability, what is unknown to us we call vital force. Vital force is
+ only an expression for the unknown remainder over and above what we know
+ of the essence of life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So also in history what is known to us we call laws of inevitability, what
+ is unknown we call free will. Free will is for history only an expression
+ for the unknown remainder of what we know about the laws of human life.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XI
+ 
+ 
+ History examines the manifestations of man’s free will in connection with
+ the external world in time and in dependence on cause, that is, it defines
+ this freedom by the laws of reason, and so history is a science only in so
+ far as this free will is defined by those laws.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The recognition of man’s free will as something capable of influencing
+ historical events, that is, as not subject to laws, is the same for
+ history as the recognition of a free force moving the heavenly bodies
+ would be for astronomy.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ That assumption would destroy the possibility of the existence of laws,
+ that is, of any science whatever. If there is even a single body moving
+ freely, then the laws of Kepler and Newton are negatived and no conception
+ of the movement of the heavenly bodies any longer exists. If any single
+ action is due to free will, then not a single historical law can exist,
+ nor any conception of historical events.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ For history, lines exist of the movement of human wills, one end of which
+ is hidden in the unknown but at the other end of which a consciousness of
+ man’s will in the present moves in space, time, and dependence on cause.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The more this field of motion spreads out before our eyes, the more
+ evident are the laws of that movement. To discover and define those laws
+ is the problem of history.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the standpoint from which the science of history now regards its
+ subject on the path it now follows, seeking the causes of events in man’s
+ free will, a scientific enunciation of those laws is impossible, for
+ however man’s free will may be restricted, as soon as we recognize it as a
+ force not subject to law, the existence of law becomes impossible.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Only by reducing this element of free will to the infinitesimal, that is,
+ by regarding it as an infinitely small quantity, can we convince ourselves
+ of the absolute inaccessibility of the causes, and then instead of seeking
+ causes, history will take the discovery of laws as its problem.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The search for these laws has long been begun and the new methods of
+ thought which history must adopt are being worked out simultaneously with
+ the self-destruction toward which—ever dissecting and dissecting the
+ causes of phenomena—the old method of history is moving.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ All human sciences have traveled along that path. Arriving at
+ infinitesimals, mathematics, the most exact of sciences, abandons the
+ process of analysis and enters on the new process of the integration of
+ unknown, infinitely small, quantities. Abandoning the conception of cause,
+ mathematics seeks law, that is, the property common to all unknown,
+ infinitely small, elements.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In another form but along the same path of reflection the other sciences
+ have proceeded. When Newton enunciated the law of gravity he did not say
+ that the sun or the earth had a property of attraction; he said that all
+ bodies from the largest to the smallest have the property of attracting
+ one another, that is, leaving aside the question of the cause of the
+ movement of the bodies, he expressed the property common to all bodies
+ from the infinitely large to the infinitely small. The same is done by the
+ natural sciences: leaving aside the question of cause, they seek for laws.
+ History stands on the same path. And if history has for its object the
+ study of the movement of the nations and of humanity and not the narration
+ of episodes in the lives of individuals, it too, setting aside the
+ conception of cause, should seek the laws common to all the inseparably
+ interconnected infinitesimal elements of free will.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ CHAPTER XII
+ 
+ 
+ From the time the law of Copernicus was discovered and proved, the mere
+ recognition of the fact that it was not the sun but the earth that moves
+ sufficed to destroy the whole cosmography of the ancients. By disproving
+ that law it might have been possible to retain the old conception of the
+ movements of the bodies, but without disproving it, it would seem
+ impossible to continue studying the Ptolemaic worlds. But even after the
+ discovery of the law of Copernicus the Ptolemaic worlds were still studied
+ for a long time.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ From the time the first person said and proved that the number of births
+ or of crimes is subject to mathematical laws, and that this or that mode
+ of government is determined by certain geographical and economic
+ conditions, and that certain relations of population to soil produce
+ migrations of peoples, the foundations on which history had been built
+ were destroyed in their essence.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ By refuting these new laws the former view of history might have been
+ retained; but without refuting them it would seem impossible to continue
+ studying historic events as the results of man’s free will. For if a
+ certain mode of government was established or certain migrations of
+ peoples took place in consequence of such and such geographic,
+ ethnographic, or economic conditions, then the free will of those
+ individuals who appear to us to have established that mode of government
+ or occasioned the migrations can no longer be regarded as the cause.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ And yet the former history continues to be studied side by side with the
+ laws of statistics, geography, political economy, comparative philology,
+ and geology, which directly contradict its assumptions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ The struggle between the old views and the new was long and stubbornly
+ fought out in physical philosophy. Theology stood on guard for the old
+ views and accused the new of violating revelation. But when truth
+ conquered, theology established itself just as firmly on the new
+ foundation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just as prolonged and stubborn is the struggle now proceeding between the
+ old and the new conception of history, and theology in the same way stands
+ on guard for the old view, and accuses the new view of subverting
+ revelation.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the one case as in the other, on both sides the struggle provokes
+ passion and stifles truth. On the one hand there is fear and regret for
+ the loss of the whole edifice constructed through the ages, on the other
+ is the passion for destruction.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ To the men who fought against the rising truths of physical philosophy, it
+ seemed that if they admitted that truth it would destroy faith in God, in
+ the creation of the firmament, and in the miracle of Joshua the son of
+ Nun. To the defenders of the laws of Copernicus and Newton, to Voltaire
+ for example, it seemed that the laws of astronomy destroyed religion, and
+ he utilized the law of gravitation as a weapon against religion.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ Just so it now seems as if we have only to admit the law of inevitability,
+ to destroy the conception of the soul, of good and evil, and all the
+ institutions of state and church that have been built up on those
+ conceptions.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ So too, like Voltaire in his time, uninvited defenders of the law of
+ inevitability today use that law as a weapon against religion, though the
+ law of inevitability in history, like the law of Copernicus in astronomy,
+ far from destroying, even strengthens the foundation on which the
+ institutions of state and church are erected.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As in the question of astronomy then, so in the question of history now,
+ the whole difference of opinion is based on the recognition or
+ nonrecognition of something absolute, serving as the measure of visible
+ phenomena. In astronomy it was the immovability of the earth, in history
+ it is the independence of personality—free will.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ As with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth
+ lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth’s fixity and of the
+ motion of the planets, so in history the difficulty of recognizing the
+ subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause lies in
+ renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one’s own
+ personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: “It is true that we do
+ not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we
+ arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel)
+ we arrive at laws,” so also in history the new view says: “It is true that
+ we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we
+ arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external
+ world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws.”
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an
+ unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in
+ the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does
+ not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WAR AND PEACE *** 
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\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/verify_archive.py b/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/verify_archive.py
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..36c966d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/wizard-work/sphinx/archive-gutenberg/verify_archive.py
@@ -0,0 +1,86 @@
+#!/usr/bin/env python3
+"""sphinx Archive-lane verifier.
+
+Reads manifest.json, recomputes SHA-256 from the bytes ACTUALLY ON DISK, and
+asserts structural properties of the archived corpus. Exit 0 only if every
+document is present, every hash matches, and the corpus is non-trivial.
+
+Usage: verify_archive.py <corpus_dir>
+"""
+import hashlib
+import json
+import os
+import sys
+
+MIN_DOCS = 6
+MIN_TOTAL_WORDS = 1_000_000
+
+
+def fail(msg):
+    print(f"FAIL: {msg}")
+    sys.exit(1)
+
+
+def main():
+    corpus = os.path.abspath(sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) > 1 else ".")
+    manifest_path = os.path.join(corpus, "manifest.json")
+    assert os.path.isfile(manifest_path), f"no manifest at {manifest_path}"
+
+    with open(manifest_path, encoding="utf-8") as f:
+        man = json.load(f)
+
+    if man.get("schema") != "sphinx-archive/1":
+        fail(f"unexpected schema {man.get('schema')!r}")
+
+    docs = man.get("documents", [])
+    if len(docs) < MIN_DOCS:
+        fail(f"only {len(docs)} documents, need >= {MIN_DOCS}")
+
+    total_words = 0
+    seen = set()
+    for d in docs:
+        slug = d["slug"]
+        if slug in seen:
+            fail(f"duplicate slug {slug}")
+        seen.add(slug)
+
+        txt_path = os.path.join(corpus, d["txt_file"])
+        raw_path = os.path.join(corpus, d["raw_file"])
+        if not os.path.isfile(txt_path):
+            fail(f"{slug}: missing txt {txt_path}")
+        if not os.path.isfile(raw_path):
+            fail(f"{slug}: missing raw {raw_path}")
+
+        on_disk = open(txt_path, "rb").read()
+        disk_sha = hashlib.sha256(on_disk).hexdigest()
+        if disk_sha != d["txt_sha256"]:
+            fail(f"{slug}: txt hash mismatch manifest={d['txt_sha256']} disk={disk_sha}")
+        if len(on_disk) != d["txt_bytes"]:
+            fail(f"{slug}: txt size mismatch manifest={d['txt_bytes']} disk={len(on_disk)}")
+
+        raw_on_disk = open(raw_path, "rb").read()
+        raw_disk_sha = hashlib.sha256(raw_on_disk).hexdigest()
+        if raw_disk_sha != d["raw_sha256"]:
+            fail(f"{slug}: raw hash mismatch")
+
+        # Structural: the archived text must actually contain its own title
+        # (case-insensitive) and be wordy enough to count as a book, not a stub.
+        text = on_disk.decode("utf-8", errors="replace")
+        if len(text.split()) != d["word_count"]:
+            fail(f"{slug}: word_count mismatch manifest={d['word_count']} disk={len(text.split())}")
+        if d["word_count"] < 20_000:
+            fail(f"{slug}: only {d['word_count']} words, looks like a stub")
+        if d["title"].split(";")[0].split(",")[0].strip().lower() not in text.lower():
+            fail(f"{slug}: title {d['title']!r} not found in archived text")
+        total_words += d["word_count"]
+
+    if total_words < MIN_TOTAL_WORDS:
+        fail(f"total_words={total_words} < {MIN_TOTAL_WORDS}")
+
+    print(f"PASS: {len(docs)} documents, {total_words} words, all hashes verified")
+    print(f"      manifest={manifest_path}")
+    sys.exit(0)
+
+
+if __name__ == "__main__":
+    main()